The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► I have a question. This is the type of thing. This is why I need to hire a staff because

00:00:04 ◼   ► if I had a staff, I wouldn't have to ask you this.

00:00:07 ◼   ► Okay.

00:00:08 ◼   ► But it's a protocol question. I want to get the protocol. You know, like when you

00:00:11 ◼   ► meet the Queen of England, there's a, it's a very complicated protocol. Well, I want

00:00:14 ◼   ► to get this protocol right now. Do I introduce you as Jeopardy champion Glenn Fleischmann

00:00:19 ◼   ► or do I introduce you as two-time Jeopardy champion Glenn Fleischmann?

00:00:23 ◼   ► I think, I think just Jeopardy champion because otherwise it's bragging.

00:00:27 ◼   ► Ah, gotcha. All right.

00:00:28 ◼   ► 'Cause it's okay to win, but then you're sort of rubbing it in someone's nose.

00:00:31 ◼   ► What's fun is I think I threaded the needle neatly, 'cause I think I was a pretty good player,

00:00:36 ◼   ► not a fantastic player, but I was between two seven-day champions, it turned out.

00:00:40 ◼   ► So I met both of them. I met the outgoing one who lost just before I did, and I met the incoming

00:00:44 ◼   ► one who won just after I did. And I think both of them would have completely cleaned my clock,

00:00:49 ◼   ► because they had superb buzzer timing and some better domain knowledge that plays in Jeopardy.

00:00:55 ◼   ► So I got very lucky, I think.

00:00:56 ◼   ► Wait, but did you beat the seven,

00:00:58 ◼   ► are you the one who knocked

00:00:59 ◼   ► the incoming seven-time champion off though?

00:01:02 ◼   ► - No, this is what was perfect.

00:01:04 ◼   ► Stephanie Yoss lost because, see I have another name,

00:01:07 ◼   ► so it's like a little family.

00:01:08 ◼   ► So she won, she comes in, we get in there,

00:01:11 ◼   ► I'm there on a Tuesday and Wednesday for taping.

00:01:12 ◼   ► So I go in Tuesday morning and they're like,

00:01:14 ◼   ► "Oh, well welcome Stephanie Yoss,

00:01:15 ◼   ► our five-time returning champion."

00:01:17 ◼   ► And we all look at each other and go, "Oh shit."

00:01:19 ◼   ► Right, like we have to deal with this person.

00:01:22 ◼   ► So she plays two games, I tape five games a day.

00:01:24 ◼   ► She plays two games.

00:01:25 ◼   ► she, the third game she plays, which was not against me, the Final Jeopardy question was

00:01:30 ◼   ► ridiculous. And even those of us in the audience, they put all the contestants in the audience

00:01:35 ◼   ► afterwards, like we would have gotten it wrong. It was asking for the country that had the largest

00:01:39 ◼   ► state that would have been like the sixth largest country in the world if it was a country.

00:01:44 ◼   ► And Stephanie wrote like Outer Mongolia, she didn't know. Someone else wrote Uttar Pradesh,

00:01:49 ◼   ► which is the correct state. The question was asking for the country. So the winner was sort

00:01:53 ◼   ► of a fluke. She won in Final Jeopardy! of India, then I beat this lovely woman named Meredith,

00:01:58 ◼   ► then I won twice. Next morning I come back and I won shows four or five that day.

00:02:01 ◼   ► Come back the next morning and I lose the first game because I'm just fried. The woman who beat

00:02:06 ◼   ► me, she wins one more game and she loses to the next seven-day champion. Keith Whitener,

00:02:11 ◼   ► very nice guy also.

00:02:12 ◼   ► Gotcha. Yeah, I imagine that it is like a typical power law distribution where everybody,

00:02:19 ◼   ► Everybody who gets on the show is good. I mean, it's, you know, the qualifying process is enough

00:02:23 ◼   ► that everybody who gets on is pretty good. Even someone who ends up not doing too well in an

00:02:28 ◼   ► episode is probably a pretty good, you know, Neighborhood Trivia champion.

00:02:33 ◼   ► They winnow a lot. So, right, the people who get there should really be able—I mean,

00:02:36 ◼   ► the game mechanics of being, you know, on a stage and sort of confronting with that,

00:02:41 ◼   ► that might get you. But yeah, everyone knows, you know, a lot of stuff. So, yeah, so I was with the

00:02:46 ◼   ► outliers are the thing. They do a lot of stuff in the game now to prevent people who win from

00:02:51 ◼   ► keeping winning by giving them better training. So giving a new contestant better training. So

00:02:56 ◼   ► we get there's more rehearsal, there's more buzzer practice and all that. And that's leveled things

00:03:00 ◼   ► out since Ken Jennings. But I was between two people who wound up being the number 14 and

00:03:05 ◼   ► number 15 all time money winners on Jeopardy. Right.

00:03:08 ◼   ► - Which is a long history.

00:03:10 ◼   ► - It's right. They used to give away a lot less money, but they didn't give away a lot of money

00:03:14 ◼   ► for a long time. So I'm not, you know, I'm like the number 220th all-time winner out of every

00:03:19 ◼   ► people. I'm happy with it. It's because they give away more money. So even in a basic game,

00:03:23 ◼   ► one more. But like, so I was between two outliers. Like these people are actually, you know, 97th,

00:03:28 ◼   ► 99th percent Jeopardy players. And I'm like 85th percent Jeopardy player or 80th percent. So I'm

00:03:34 ◼   ► like, this is okay. I want some money. I'm happy. But it was, it was funny. It was funny. And they're

00:03:38 ◼   ► both nice people too. And they'll be back for Tournament of Champions. So you gotta watch them

00:03:42 ◼   ► them kill each other. How many do you have to win five to get on tournament champions?

00:03:45 ◼   ► Three, but then there's a threshold of money and at this point someone keeps a tally of it. Looks

00:03:49 ◼   ► like you have to win at least $50,000. It was minimum three games, but at least $50,000 now

00:03:54 ◼   ► to get in given how well people have done. So it'll be a pretty fierce competition, I think.

00:04:01 ◼   ► For the all-time rankings, they should inflation adjust it. And it's,

00:04:04 ◼   ► because I think what they did is they doubled the money at some point in the last 10 years.

00:04:09 ◼   ► Yeah, they've done it twice. Art Fleming was one thing, and they came and brought the

00:04:12 ◼   ► series back. And I think it used to be like, I don't know, the top money you could win.

00:04:17 ◼   ► It was hard to win more than several thousand dollars.

00:04:18 ◼   ► But there's a baseline.

00:04:19 ◼   ► And now people routinely, yeah.

00:04:20 ◼   ► The baseline, let's just call it X, is the first round, you know, now what is it, like

00:04:27 ◼   ► 200 bucks? It used to be $100 on the Alex Trebek one. But that should just be called

00:04:31 ◼   ► X, and then whatever you win has to be a multiple of X.

00:04:35 ◼   ► I agree, because then it's right. It's sort of like movie earnings, too. Is Snow

00:04:41 ◼   ► or Sleeping Beauty or, I don't know, Fantasia? There's some movie that was—it's still

00:04:45 ◼   ► current dollars, some billions of dollars it made.

00:04:47 ◼   ► It might be Gone with the Wind, I think.

00:04:49 ◼   ► It's one of those, "Gone with the Wind! That cost me thousands of dollars in Jeopardy!"

00:04:54 ◼   ► No! It's the final Jeopardy question I missed.

00:04:57 ◼   ► I think it might be—I'm not trying to torment you here, but I do—I believe that

00:05:00 ◼   ► inflation adjusted if you just count tickets sold. Instead of counting dollars, just count

00:05:05 ◼   ► how many people put their butts in the seat to see the theater. I think it was gone with

00:05:09 ◼   ► the wind.

00:05:10 ◼   ► No, I think that's it. So you look at prices of stamps, you look at gasoline, and people

00:05:13 ◼   ► are like, "Stamps cost a ridiculous amount." It's like, "No, just for inflation, postage

00:05:17 ◼   ► is the cheapest it's been practically since Benjamin Franklin," or whatever. And gasoline

00:05:21 ◼   ► is actually, it's expensive, but it's not that expensive compared to the 1970s right

00:05:25 ◼   ► now. I just paid $3.69. So yeah, people don't like math.

00:05:29 ◼   ► Yeah. And well, the thing with the movies is that the movie industry is such a cutthroat,

00:05:33 ◼   ► I'm on top right now thing that nobody has any interest in remembering how popular Jaws

00:05:39 ◼   ► was, right? It's really just, you know, like whatever was the most popular movie of the

00:05:43 ◼   ► last six months is really all that matters and that's all anybody wants to promote. But

00:05:47 ◼   ► it's like if you look back and see that Jaws grossed $300 million or $175 million or whatever,

00:05:54 ◼   ► but then realize that first run movie tickets were like a buck fifty, it's, you know, it's

00:05:59 ◼   ► ridiculous.

00:06:00 ◼   ► I remember when I paid, I went to the first THX sound movie that I ever went to was Robocop.

00:06:06 ◼   ► They just opened a new theater in Eugene, Oregon. And I paid, oh, I don't know, it seemed like a

00:06:09 ◼   ► crazy amount. Was it $5 in 1984 or something? It seemed obscene. Or was it $4.50? And I was like,

00:06:16 ◼   ► oh my God, it was, then, you know, I just went and paid $11 in something. And I think that's actually

00:06:20 ◼   ► cheap in inflationary terms relative to what I paid for that.

00:06:23 ◼   ► I do. It's a rite of passage in the United States that eventually it's when you become

00:06:30 ◼   ► a full-fledged adult is when you're outraged by the price of a movie ticket.

00:06:34 ◼   ► That's right.

00:06:35 ◼   ► Right? And I remember being a teenager and hearing my dad complain about movie ticket prices. And I

00:06:40 ◼   ► just remember thinking, "Well, that's just proof that you're an old man. You're out of touch." Now

00:06:44 ◼   ► it's my turn.

00:06:45 ◼   ► I was trying to explain inflation to my kids, my five-year-old and eight-year-old, and they can

00:06:49 ◼   ► sort of get some of it. And I had this experience not that long ago. So the oatmeal guy does that

00:06:54 ◼   ► cartoon. He raised over $200,000 despite a douchebag who was suing him over something

00:06:58 ◼   ► that was ridiculous. And he lives in town. I said, "Oh, I talked to my Boing Boing editor."

00:07:02 ◼   ► I'm like, "Can I go cover this?" And sure. So I call a fellow who does oatmeal, a really nice guy,

00:07:07 ◼   ► and Matthew. And he's like, "Yeah, come on down." And so it's me and him and this friend of his

00:07:12 ◼   ► who's packing some heat, he's got a license, and helped him pick up the money. And his girlfriend

00:07:16 ◼   ► and his mother. His mother does all his packaging, like sends all the mugs out and the t-shirts up

00:07:22 ◼   ► from a small town in Washington. So we're in this room with like hundreds of thousands of dollars.

00:07:25 ◼   ► Like, "Hey, you want to help?" I'm like, "Sure." And so I'm handling, you know, it's like drug

00:07:29 ◼   ► money. It's like these big bundles of $20. And you don't understand how truly ridiculous money is.

00:07:34 ◼   ► - Why was it in cash?

00:07:36 ◼   ► - He wanted to take, he spelled out F-U and douchebag in cash to send to this lawyer. He

00:07:43 ◼   ► said, "I'm going to take pictures of this money that I raised that I'm sending to charity." So

00:07:46 ◼   ► So he took it all to the bank, made pictures out of it, just put it on the floor in bundles,

00:07:51 ◼   ► took pictures, and then put the money back in the bank and dispersed it to the charities.

00:07:55 ◼   ► And it was just a big FU.

00:07:58 ◼   ► But you handle cash, and the absurdity of money as a system, a very symbolic part of

00:08:03 ◼   ► our economy, is even worse when you handle large amounts of it.

00:08:07 ◼   ► It doesn't matter if it's yours or not.

00:08:08 ◼   ► You're looking at it, you're like, "What does this mean?

00:08:10 ◼   ► It's all this printed paper.

00:08:12 ◼   ► This is a huge amount of cash, and it just seems even more absurd than it already is.

00:08:18 ◼   ► You would really do, though.

00:08:19 ◼   ► I've met you several times at conferences.

00:08:22 ◼   ► You instantly come across as a very trustworthy man.

00:08:25 ◼   ► Like, I'm not surprised.

00:08:27 ◼   ► I don't think that if I had been writing that story, I don't think I would have been

00:08:30 ◼   ► invited to help count the cash.

00:08:32 ◼   ► It was very nice.

00:08:33 ◼   ► I had his friend there.

00:08:34 ◼   ► He's packing.

00:08:35 ◼   ► I'd met him before, but still, we weren't great buddies or anything.

00:08:37 ◼   ► He's a good guy.

00:08:38 ◼   ► And I was like, "This is, you know, like we're in a small room, whatever.

00:08:41 ◼   ► It's awfully nice that you trust that I'm gonna

00:08:43 ◼   ► Hundreds of thousands of dollars in my hands, right? I've had that experience

00:08:48 ◼   ► Secondhand like just not with what was in my hands, but watching other people were in casinos where?

00:08:55 ◼   ► Like I've gone by the high limit baccarat rooms and

00:09:01 ◼   ► Like it Bellagio and you can just look in and see and you see that guys are playing with yellow chips and yellow chips are

00:09:08 ◼   ► 25,000 each and they're just putting out stacks of them. I mean, I don't you know to the point where you can't even

00:09:13 ◼   ► Clearly count them, you know where it's easily 25 30 35 thousand dollars a bet and then I just think well

00:09:21 ◼   ► That's that to me is an insane. I would die would die of a heart. I like to gamble

00:09:26 ◼   ► I you know, I'm not averse to gambling but if I had

00:09:29 ◼   ► $35,000 in front of me on a play of cards, I would have a heart attack and die

00:09:35 ◼   ► Well, here's the thing. We can do a callback now, which is some there on Jeopardy! And

00:09:39 ◼   ► I'm like, "I'm going to bet everything. I'm going to come push my ships all in."

00:09:42 ◼   ► I bet $5,000. But I had this great conversation with an IBM scientist recently who had worked

00:09:48 ◼   ► on the Watson team that won at Jeopardy! in 2011. And there's all this discussion about

00:09:54 ◼   ► the natural language processing that Watson did. And they had like, dozens of scientists

00:09:58 ◼   ► worked on this for four years. I mean, IBM put millions and millions of dollars for the

00:10:02 ◼   ► the staff time in addition to tens or hundreds of millions of computer resources because

00:10:07 ◼   ► they have all these interesting things they're going to do with it now. But they thought

00:10:11 ◼   ► Jeopardy was the right challenge. It makes a big splash. It's good marketing, but it's

00:10:14 ◼   ► a great challenge, right?

00:10:15 ◼   ► So natural language processing, it was astonishing that it did as well as it did. But he was

00:10:19 ◼   ► working on the wagering side of it.

00:10:21 ◼   ► Right.

00:10:22 ◼   ► And how you—so they would take the output, like the question would come—or the clue

00:10:25 ◼   ► would come up, the subsystems that did all that would, you know, incredibly rapidly have

00:10:30 ◼   ► to process it before it rang in, it would produce a confidence score instantly and keep

00:10:34 ◼   ► refining it. I mean, it was constantly processing. And the confidence score would let it choose

00:10:39 ◼   ► whether to wager. And then it also was used to pick which the daily doubles might be under

00:10:45 ◼   ► because they placed them not—it's not even pseudo-random, they're placed traditionally

00:10:49 ◼   ► in certain places, and so you can predict them. And so by their wagering simulation

00:10:55 ◼   ► of other players to test the system

00:10:57 ◼   ► and pre-selecting where using Bayesian analysis

00:11:01 ◼   ► and other things where the daily double square might be,

00:11:04 ◼   ► they dramatically improved the odds of winning.

00:11:06 ◼   ► And so the natural language processing was very impressive,

00:11:09 ◼   ► but the wagering part was actually,

00:11:11 ◼   ► they did all these Monte Carlo simulations.

00:11:12 ◼   ► They're like, we don't believe the average Jeopardy player

00:11:15 ◼   ► will be familiar with the, what's the guy,

00:11:17 ◼   ► the John, the movie about a fellow who is mentally ill,

00:11:23 ◼   ► made the movie about the statistician, mathematician.

00:11:25 ◼   ► I like that I think of that.

00:11:26 ◼   ► I know what you mean. It was a Ron Howard movie.

00:11:29 ◼   ► Yeah, so we don't think that every Jeopardy player is going to have Monte Carlo simulations

00:11:33 ◼   ► running in their head. But all the simulation of wagering and strategy by other people,

00:11:38 ◼   ► by analyzing the archive of all the wagers and decisions people have made throughout the entire

00:11:43 ◼   ► history of Jeopardy, affected it. And they made weird bets, like on Daily Doubles,

00:11:48 ◼   ► Wats made weird bets. And I'm like, I read this paper and I said, oh, I would change my strategy.

00:11:52 ◼   ► and the scientists said, this guy, Gerald Sorrow, said he'd worked previously in backgammon and

00:11:57 ◼   ► making backgammon simulations that could win or systems that could beat human players. And he said,

00:12:04 ◼   ► in every game, like chess, backgammon, bridge, whatever, which the computers finally improve on

00:12:10 ◼   ► and can beat the masters in the games, people start playing the game differently because they

00:12:14 ◼   ► understand that the way they're playing it isn't as efficient and doesn't have the same odds of

00:12:20 ◼   ► probability of winning as the way a computer plays it without any of those constraints.

00:12:24 ◼   ► Jared "Seth" Kelsky Right. And without any sort of fear.

00:12:25 ◼   ► Pete "Seth" Kelsky Right. Or the computer says,

00:12:28 ◼   ► "I'm 97% confident of the answer, so I'm gonna wager, you know, $73,000."

00:12:31 ◼   ► There was one player, there was one human player in Jeopardy, Roger Craig, who was a number four

00:12:36 ◼   ► money winner and won the Tournament of Champions in 2011. And he would do this thing where he would

00:12:41 ◼   ► double down, double down, double down. He won $77,000 in one day. He did that thing of pushing

00:12:47 ◼   ► all the markers forward. The 77,000 is the most won by anybody on Jeopardy ever in one day. I

00:12:53 ◼   ► think Ken Jennings had a 75 grand day in one day because he would do that. He'd be like, "You've

00:12:57 ◼   ► got 37,500 dollars. What are you going to do?" And he's like, "I'm going to wager it all."

00:13:01 ◼   ► And it's like, "Oh my God, really? Really?" And he'd do it. And that's hard to do. It's real money.

00:13:06 ◼   ► Ted: And the funny thing is that actually is, I think, it's a very simple game overall,

00:13:12 ◼   ► Jeopardy! But I think that the Daily Doubles is just the right amount of, like, a wildcard. It's

00:13:20 ◼   ► like an asterisk in the game that makes it a game. And the truth is, on your first day, the day you

00:13:25 ◼   ► won, your opponent had a lead that it could have been insurmountable going into Final Jeopardy!

00:13:32 ◼   ► Could have been unbeatable, but she wagered enough on a Daily Double and lost to give you a chance.

00:13:39 ◼   ► Yeah, this is, it's a heartbreaking moment which has been preserved on YouTube. Someone's posted

00:13:44 ◼   ► about three minutes of it. And I didn't realize when playing the game until I watched it. We had

00:13:48 ◼   ► a viewing party, had a bunch of people at a sports bar and were watching and I'm like, "Oh my God,

00:13:53 ◼   ► she could have won." I had no idea because it's so fast. The average question goes by, they do

00:13:59 ◼   ► a new question every 12 seconds, I think, in some of the research shows. So, you know, you're in

00:14:03 ◼   ► there and there's a display you can look up to the left of the big board. You can see like a little

00:14:08 ◼   ► LCD display of the three player scores. You can glance up there while you're playing when you're

00:14:12 ◼   ► figuring out strategy. And so in the heat of the moment, if she'd had a minute to think about it,

00:14:17 ◼   ► she would have bet $5, which is technically the lowest daily double bet. Instead, she bet $1,200.

00:14:22 ◼   ► And that was the craziest question. The answer was dendrochronology.

00:14:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:26 ◼   ► Oh my God, the poor woman. Yeah. So she, right. So she had twice, more than twice as much as I did,

00:14:31 ◼   ► could have breezed in and won.

00:14:32 ◼   ► She went right from just over twice what you had to just under twice what you had. And the daily

00:14:37 ◼   ► double was right at the end, and so she had no chance to get another question to go back

00:14:41 ◼   ► up more than double. And so then—

00:14:42 ◼   ► Pete: Exactly. There was one more, and that was it. Didn't get the last two thousand

00:14:45 ◼   ► questions.

00:14:46 ◼   ► John: No, watching at home, I recognized it instantly, because I was really, you know,

00:14:48 ◼   ► obviously I was rooting for you.

00:14:49 ◼   ► Pete Thank you.

00:14:50 ◼   ► John Thank you. You know what I mean? You wouldn't be on the talk show if you were

00:14:52 ◼   ► one-time Jeopardy! loser Glenn's question.

00:14:54 ◼   ► Pete I know. It's like, there's nothing like, but yeah, it's that you, in the moment—

00:14:57 ◼   ► John I was real nervous, and I thought, "Oh, she's gonna do…" and then I thought,

00:15:00 ◼   ► "Oh, bet a lot," and then she did bet a lot, and I was like, "Oh, give her an impossible

00:15:03 ◼   ► question and then they gave her an impossible question. I was like, "Oh."

00:15:05 ◼   ► Pete: It was a ridiculous question. Like, this 13 letter word, you're like, "Oh, come on."

00:15:09 ◼   ► Of course, I was watching it, one of my friends who was at the viewing party,

00:15:12 ◼   ► his dad was a forester and he says, "Dendrochronology." Like, "Oh my god!"

00:15:15 ◼   ► Brian Stearns- Yeah, you never know because it's, you know, somebody knows the answer.

00:15:19 ◼   ► Pete: Free-ring science. But it's funny, and then we go into the final Jeopardy! That came in.

00:15:24 ◼   ► This is a great thing about, one of the things that playing a game show about knowledge

00:15:27 ◼   ► teaches you is there's, Bob Harris wrote this great book called Prisoner of Trebekus-Bentan

00:15:32 ◼   ► about his—he won five times back when he could only win five times. Then he came back and they

00:15:36 ◼   ► brought him on to like four tournaments because he's one of the most interesting, nicest guys.

00:15:40 ◼   ► He's got a new book coming out about micro—not micro-investing, but micro-loans. And he's been

00:15:45 ◼   ► traveling along the world meeting with people that he's loaned money to over Kiva, and it's—he

00:15:51 ◼   ► sent me an advance copy. It's really cool. He's a really neat guy, but he wrote this great book

00:15:55 ◼   ► that's kind of a memoir and kind of full of strategy about playing the game. And there's

00:15:59 ◼   ► this difference between known knowledge and inferred knowledge, and I don't think I understood

00:16:03 ◼   ► that as much until I played the game. The final question on day one, the Final Jeopardy, was about

00:16:09 ◼   ► a city, the city, Hemnitz, Germany, had a different name from 1953 to 1990. Or 1933 to, no, yeah,

00:16:17 ◼   ► 1953 to 1990. What was it? And I'm like, well, you know, and I don't know the answer. I don't know

00:16:22 ◼   ► the answer. And I know the other two players, and I sort of know what they know, what they're

00:16:25 ◼   ► playing the game. And I'm like, "I studied German for years in college." I'm like,

00:16:30 ◼   ► "I know Chemnitz is a German city. That's not a problem. I know the wall fell in 1990,

00:16:34 ◼   ► and I'm doing this Rastiosh nation. You're like, 'The Germans hated Stalin, so it's not after

00:16:39 ◼   ► Stalin. Lenin was a Russian. There's already Leningrad.'" I'm like, "It has to be Karl Marx."

00:16:43 ◼   ► But I don't know that, and the sensation of inferred knowledge is weird. And then I get the

00:16:48 ◼   ► relief, "Yeah, that's it, and you got enough money." And I'm like, "Okay."

00:16:49 ◼   ► - But did they want the city name or who it was named after?

00:16:51 ◼   ► - They wanted who it was named after. The city was named after. The city of Chemnitz.

00:16:53 ◼   ► - What was the city?

00:16:54 ◼   ► It's Karl Marxstadt, which no one remembers.

00:16:56 ◼   ► Yeah, see, I wouldn't know the name of the city, but in hindsight, my guess was Stalin,

00:17:01 ◼   ► and I thought, "You're right. This is why you're on Jeopardy! winning and I'm

00:17:04 ◼   ► at home losing." I knew—

00:17:06 ◼   ► The Germans hate Stalin.

00:17:07 ◼   ► Yeah, the inferred knowledge, I knew from the years that it had to be communist-related.

00:17:12 ◼   ► That's when—

00:17:13 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:17:14 ◼   ► That's when, you know, that the Russians took control over half of Germany after World

00:17:17 ◼   ► War II, and that's when they lost it. And so I thought, "Well, I don't know, Stalin."

00:17:23 ◼   ► that's just as far as I thought. And then you're smart enough to think, well, they hate—the Germans

00:17:28 ◼   ► hated Stalin, and, you know, maybe the Russians couldn't impose that on them. And so, of course,

00:17:33 ◼   ► you go back, you embiggen the scope and go right back to the, you know, the granddaddy of communism

00:17:38 ◼   ► and you go to Karl Marx. But you're staying there in that quantum state. You're in a Schrodinger—this

00:17:43 ◼   ► is what we called the incomparable episode, it was the Schrodinger's cat box because you're sitting

00:17:46 ◼   ► there in a state of which you don't know if you've won or lost because you don't affirmatively know

00:17:52 ◼   ► that it's accurate. You can only deduce it's accurate, so there's no way to know until

00:17:56 ◼   ► someone provides affirmative knowledge that you're correct.

00:17:58 ◼   ► I would have felt real good though if I had come up with Karl Marx. I would have been sitting

00:18:02 ◼   ► there thinking it's got to be Marx. I was happy because I was like, I got one, you know,

00:18:06 ◼   ► one chance. But yeah, it's funny. It's a funny game and people are strangely fascinated about it,

00:18:12 ◼   ► even though a lot of people, everyone told me, "Yeah, I love Jeopardy! I haven't watched it for

00:18:16 ◼   ► 10 years." Because people have cut the core, they don't do broadcast TV.

00:18:21 ◼   ► if I didn't have the viewing party, I think half the people there wouldn't have been able to watch

00:18:24 ◼   ► it at home because they don't have a form of television or access to cable or whatever.

00:18:29 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah. Have I, I forget if we talked about this online or not, but have I explained to you

00:18:34 ◼   ► my theory of, and I don't even think it's a theory, but I think it's so short. Why does

00:18:39 ◼   ► Jeopardy! come on before Wheel of Fortune, not vice versa?

00:18:42 ◼   ► Pete; In my market, it comes on after.

00:18:45 ◼   ► Pete; Oh, does it?

00:18:45 ◼   ► Pete; Just destroys your theory.

00:18:46 ◼   ► Pete; Yeah.

00:18:46 ◼   ► Pete; It varies by market. What's your theory though?

00:18:49 ◼   ► Because Wheel of Fortune makes you feel smart and Jeopardy makes you feel dumb.

00:18:53 ◼   ► Yeah, and it doesn't make you feel too dumb. They're always striking a balance there. I was

00:18:59 ◼   ► watching… The secret to Wheel of Fortune's popularity is that the optimal strategy is not

00:19:06 ◼   ► to solve the puzzle as soon as you can. It's to keep racking up money once you know the answer to

00:19:12 ◼   ► the puzzle and get a big dollar symbol and pick the T, which you know that there's three of.

00:19:17 ◼   ► of. And so, in the meantime, the audience has all of this way more time to figure out

00:19:21 ◼   ► what the puzzle is.

00:19:22 ◼   ► Darrell Bock Oh, no, you're right. That's exactly—it's

00:19:24 ◼   ► a perfect—right, because the players want to keep it going as long as they can, as long

00:19:28 ◼   ► as they have money on the board. But Jeopardy, you don't have time. It comes up. But they

00:19:32 ◼   ► play this balancing game. I was watching one night and they did a category about—because

00:19:36 ◼   ► I watched obsessively after I got the call that I was going to be on, and I went back

00:19:39 ◼   ► and read archives and so forth. And they had a category. It was all about Huguenots. And

00:19:43 ◼   ► I'm like, "Really? All about Hukonauts?" And the player's there. I mean, even Alex,

00:19:47 ◼   ► who's from Canada. Alex Trebek is like, "I think no one got any of the answers right."

00:19:53 ◼   ► And you're like, "Really about Hukonaut?" I mean, it's a little obscure. You know,

00:19:57 ◼   ► that's, you know, dendrochronology might be bad, but you've got to have stuff that

00:20:00 ◼   ► people at home feel like they could have known, even if they don't know it.

00:20:04 ◼   ► Eric Michael Rhodes All right, let me take a break here and talk

00:20:05 ◼   ► about our first sponsor. It's great. I'm so happy about both sponsors today. I'm

00:20:10 ◼   ► about all of our sponsors every week, but today in particular. Because first sponsor,

00:20:15 ◼   ► we've got Tonks back on board. Now, you know Tonks, Glenn. This is kind of amazing.

00:20:19 ◼   ► You—

00:20:19 ◼   ► Darrell Bock I just talked to Tonks. I just got a delivery

00:20:22 ◼   ► of Tonks coffee. I can even tell you about what it's like.

00:20:25 ◼   ► John Green That's me taking a sip. I'm drinking

00:20:28 ◼   ► Tonks coffee right now. Tonks is a small company, and you sign up, they send fresh beans to you from

00:20:35 ◼   ► all over the world and the coffee is just great. And here's the things they want me

00:20:42 ◼   ► to tell you. Number one, they want you to know that contrary to what you might think

00:20:45 ◼   ► going to a coffee shop and the barista makes some kind of latte and then the milk ends

00:20:51 ◼   ► up looking like the Mona Lisa and you think, well, good coffee is impossible. Guess what?

00:20:55 ◼   ► Making great coffee, like serious world-class great cup of coffee in your own kitchen is

00:21:00 ◼   ► super simple. Some of the best ways to make coffee are so simple it'll blow your mind.

00:21:04 ◼   ► Get great beans, burr grind them,

00:21:07 ◼   ► just pour hot water over it into a filter

00:21:09 ◼   ► and you've already got a great cup of coffee.

00:21:12 ◼   ► The guys from Tonks find the best coffee beans

00:21:15 ◼   ► from the top producers literally all over the world.

00:21:20 ◼   ► They nail the roast and they get them in your mailbox

00:21:22 ◼   ► at the peak of freshness.

00:21:23 ◼   ► And they send them, I love their envelopes, the packages.

00:21:27 ◼   ► I think they, everything about these guys to me is

00:21:30 ◼   ► if you set out to, this is what I'm thinking,

00:21:33 ◼   ► is if you set out to make the best coffee company

00:21:36 ◼   ► in the world, you'd come up with something like Tonk.

00:21:39 ◼   ► Maybe not the biggest, certainly not the biggest.

00:21:41 ◼   ► I don't think Tonk's is as big as Starbucks.

00:21:44 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:21:45 ◼   ► It might be close.

00:21:46 ◼   ► I'm talking the best.

00:21:47 ◼   ► If your goal is to set out to do the best coffee

00:21:50 ◼   ► in the world, you'd come up with something like Tonk's.

00:21:53 ◼   ► Grape beans, everything about them.

00:21:55 ◼   ► I love the packages that their things come in.

00:21:58 ◼   ► Just the little Ziploc seal is, I don't know.

00:22:01 ◼   ► With a lot of bags with Ziploc, I often have a hard,

00:22:03 ◼   ► it takes me like three zips to get it.

00:22:05 ◼   ► With the Tonks one, always first one.

00:22:07 ◼   ► - And it's transparent, so you can see the beans, it comes,

00:22:09 ◼   ► and you're looking at the beans,

00:22:10 ◼   ► and it's got a neat little silkscreen message

00:22:13 ◼   ► about what's in there, and a little note about it.

00:22:16 ◼   ► But I don't feel like they're fussy or fey about it.

00:22:18 ◼   ► It's like they love their coffee,

00:22:21 ◼   ► they have no attitude about the coffee.

00:22:22 ◼   ► What they're doing is they're producing

00:22:23 ◼   ► something really good.

00:22:25 ◼   ► They're not my sponsor, they're your sponsors,

00:22:26 ◼   ► I can talk about them unbiasedly.

00:22:28 ◼   ► They produce something that's really,

00:22:30 ◼   ► that's like a delicious product

00:22:32 ◼   ► that's designed to be consumed,

00:22:33 ◼   ► but they're not coffee cra,

00:22:35 ◼   ► I mean, they're crazy in the sack

00:22:36 ◼   ► that they're interested in it,

00:22:37 ◼   ► but it's not the, you need to get a $10,000 espresso machine

00:22:41 ◼   ► and spend a week in Italy learning how to do it.

00:22:43 ◼   ► It's like, you know, you can use an AeroPress.

00:22:45 ◼   ► You could use a $5 espresso machine.

00:22:46 ◼   ► You could use a $100 espresso machine.

00:22:48 ◼   ► The burr grinder, I think, is critical, though.

00:22:50 ◼   ► That's what I keep hearing, and I support that.

00:22:53 ◼   ► You want a burr grinder.

00:22:54 ◼   ► That's where you put the money,

00:22:55 ◼   ► but then after that, you make it other way.

00:22:57 ◼   ► You make it any way you want.

00:22:57 ◼   ► - Right, and you get a good one, and it'll last you forever.

00:22:59 ◼   ► But it really is not, they're not asking you to put out a huge capital outlay on fancy

00:23:03 ◼   ► equipment or time-consuming processes. And they also have tremendous customer service

00:23:09 ◼   ► and a great website where you go there and they have videos and things about, you know,

00:23:14 ◼   ► just, here's how to make a great cup of coffee.

00:23:17 ◼   ► Most of the things I like about them too is they don't want to grow too fast. That's

00:23:22 ◼   ► why I was talking to them for another soon-to-be-announced Mule Radio Syndicate podcast I'm working

00:23:28 ◼   ► Talking to them for that, so you'll hear this in December or something, my interview with

00:23:31 ◼   ► them.

00:23:32 ◼   ► And the thing is, they don't want to get big fast.

00:23:34 ◼   ► They want to get big.

00:23:35 ◼   ► That'd be great, right?

00:23:36 ◼   ► They're not unambitious, but they aren't the like, we need to have a million customers,

00:23:41 ◼   ► day one, social marketing, Facebook advertising, Twitter spam, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:23:46 ◼   ► They like growing.

00:23:47 ◼   ► They're growing well.

00:23:48 ◼   ► They're getting great word of mouth.

00:23:49 ◼   ► They're trying to scale it little by little so they don't have to deliver an inferior

00:23:54 ◼   ► product.

00:23:55 ◼   ► I love that.

00:23:56 ◼   ► in my mind that their number one priority is best coffee in the world. And everything else is second.

00:24:02 ◼   ► They want to be profitable. I'm sure they want to grow. Obviously, they want to grow. That's why

00:24:06 ◼   ► they're sponsoring the show to get more talk show listeners to just give them a shot. Here's the

00:24:12 ◼   ► last thing. A couple episodes ago, the last time they sponsored it, and I was talking about how

00:24:17 ◼   ► they're literally all over the world, but I didn't have a list off the top of my head. Here's, they

00:24:21 ◼   ► sent me this. They're in Africa. They've sourced beans from Kenya, Ethiopia. I'm drinking some

00:24:26 ◼   ► stuff from Ethiopia right now. Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania. In Central America, they've sourced

00:24:32 ◼   ► beans from Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, and in South America,

00:24:38 ◼   ► Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru. So I'm telling you, literally all over the

00:24:43 ◼   ► coffee growing world, these guys are getting the best beans. Here's how much they believe

00:24:47 ◼   ► in it. Free trial. You just sign up. Go to tonx.org. T-O-N-X dot org. Sign up. You get a free

00:24:54 ◼   ► trial. The beans will show up at your house in a couple of days, fresh sealed, and I'm telling you,

00:24:59 ◼   ► you're going to try these beans and you're going to sign up and become a regular customer.

00:25:02 ◼   ► Thanks to Tonx.

00:25:04 ◼   ► Pete: It's good. It's good. I even ate some beans raw because they look so delicious.

00:25:09 ◼   ► Ted, I do that. I definitely do.

00:25:10 ◼   ► Pete It was good.

00:25:11 ◼   ► Ted My son loves to eat a couple of coffee beans raw.

00:25:13 ◼   ► Pete That's good.

00:25:14 ◼   ► And I will also vouch. He didn't know. He has no idea that they're a sponsor of my show. I don't

00:25:19 ◼   ► even think he knows I have a show. Whenever I make coffee, I'll say, "Hey, do you want a couple of

00:25:24 ◼   ► beans?" And he'll take three or four coffee beans. And I gave him the Tonks ones, and he gave me,

00:25:28 ◼   ► after he chewed the one, he gave me the—it was like the guy in Pulp Fiction, "Hey, that was

00:25:32 ◼   ► pretty good." Like, that's good coffee. The Ethiopian ones were particularly beautiful

00:25:38 ◼   ► color to this olive color. It's funny, I've never been like a fetishist of coffee, maybe

00:25:45 ◼   ► more so for tea, but not even that. But I like something that tastes good and isn't

00:25:49 ◼   ► bitter and has kind of a richness and is interesting and coming from the town of Starbucks.

00:25:53 ◼   ► So here's the tonk story, by the way. So back in 2005, a colleague says, "Hey, there's

00:25:57 ◼   ► a coffee shop in town that just opened up and they're turning Wi-Fi off on weekends.

00:26:00 ◼   ► How crazy is that?" So New York Times, weirdly, one of the only direct assignments instead

00:26:05 ◼   ► me pitching. They call me up and say, "Can you write a story about this thing?" So sure.

00:26:08 ◼   ► So I go and I meet these owners, young idealistic owners who sold the business within a few years

00:26:12 ◼   ► because running a coffee shop is a horrible, horrible business. They wanted to have a

00:26:18 ◼   ► community place. And on the weekends with Wi-Fi on, people never talked. It was absolutely silent

00:26:22 ◼   ► as a crip. They hated it, so they turned Wi-Fi off for the weekends. So I write a story about it,

00:26:27 ◼   ► gets some really interesting play, and some other places also start turning Wi-Fi off. It's never

00:26:32 ◼   ► really a trend, but it's interesting. So the guy roasting for them is Tony Canesny, the Tonks. And

00:26:37 ◼   ► I do my first copying, I go there, he shows me how you do copying in the back and I get to taste all

00:26:42 ◼   ► this great coffee. And then the guy is, you know, he's a, I think what's the opposite of a bad

00:26:46 ◼   ► penny, he's like a good penny. He just keeps turning up wherever there's good coffee, turns

00:26:50 ◼   ► up again and again and again, and it turns out everyone in the world knows Tonks.

00:26:53 ◼   ► Pete: What is the opposite of a bad penny? I don't know.

00:26:56 ◼   ► Pete: It's a great penny. He's a shiny penny.

00:26:58 ◼   ► Pete; Right.

00:26:59 ◼   ► But a very nice guy, and he's always had the same commitment to it. And you know,

00:27:02 ◼   ► it's coffee is a great story because it spans the globe and it spans this huge stretch of

00:27:07 ◼   ► modern civilization and you can just become such a fetishist about every little blah,

00:27:12 ◼   ► you know, grain, whatever. Or you can just drink a good cup of coffee.

00:27:15 ◼   ► I like the good cup of coffee part better.

00:27:18 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah. You know, speaking of good pennies, you're sort of a good penny in that you've had a

00:27:25 ◼   ► crazy variety. You've written for an inordinate and on a regular basis and inordinately wide

00:27:32 ◼   ► variety of publications. You've just mentioned in New York Times. You're now a regular contributor

00:27:37 ◼   ► to The Economist. You have been associated with tidbits as long as I can remember. Ever

00:27:45 ◼   ► since Adam and Tanya expanded beyond just Adam and Tanya, I mean, I remember your byline

00:27:51 ◼   ► being in tidbits. I mean, how long have you been writing for tidbits?

00:27:54 ◼   ► like 1994 or something. I sent them a letter. I sent them a letter once and they ran it and I

00:27:59 ◼   ► was so excited I started writing for them after I—they lived in Seattle when I first moved out here in

00:28:04 ◼   ► '93. And—

00:28:05 ◼   ► I mean, we're talking about before the web. I mean, we're talking about when a lot of people

00:28:10 ◼   ► were probably still reading tidbits as a weekly hypercard stack.

00:28:13 ◼   ► Oh my god, those were the days. Yeah, tidbits is now—we believe it's the longest continuously

00:28:18 ◼   ► published publication on the internet because there was an Irish newsletter that stopped

00:28:22 ◼   ► publication. We think we're now the oldest one since like 1990 because there was one they've

00:28:27 ◼   ► been watching. There was one in China that fell away. So in terms of actually coming out on a

00:28:31 ◼   ► regular basis for, you know, X years, I think we are now the longest, which cracks us up.

00:28:37 ◼   ► Ted: Oh, and it's astounding, really. I mean, to think that it, you know, the upheaval that

00:28:42 ◼   ► it went through in the first decade, just in terms of format, you know, what is the format for an

00:28:47 ◼   ► internet publication?

00:28:48 ◼   ► Oh yeah, and like dealing with servers and email and then Apple, you know, essentially

00:28:52 ◼   ► almost imploding underneath it and then coming back.

00:28:56 ◼   ► And I mean the thing that's funny, so here's the best thing about Adam and Tonya Anx as

00:28:59 ◼   ► people is they do a lot of what they do to help their friends make livings and do interesting

00:29:03 ◼   ► things.

00:29:04 ◼   ► They're really like facilitators.

00:29:05 ◼   ► Like they make a great living with what they're doing.

00:29:07 ◼   ► They figure out a really good model with the ebooks and with tidbits and so forth and they're

00:29:11 ◼   ► charming people and great friends.

00:29:12 ◼   ► But they also, they spend a lot of their time making sure that other people they work with

00:29:17 ◼   ► have a good experience and can make a good living from what they do. And it's like,

00:29:21 ◼   ► they're so non-greedy about it. It's just delightful.

00:29:24 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah, it's amazing. Other publications that you have been associated with, you write for

00:29:29 ◼   ► Boing Boing?

00:29:30 ◼   ► Pete: That's right. I've been right occasionally from Ars Technica. And yeah, I got this funny

00:29:35 ◼   ► thing is I like people, it's this weird thing, I like people. And I've been, I started my career

00:29:41 ◼   ► because I was, I was actually trained as a graphic designer. First a typesetter, then a graphic

00:29:44 ◼   ► designer was the career I was going to go into, but it turned out I've always had an aptitude

00:29:49 ◼   ► for computers. So I wound up becoming this guy who's like a translator, like, "Oh, you graphic

00:29:54 ◼   ► designer, you're trying to use desktop publishing. Well, let me explain the steps to get there." And

00:29:58 ◼   ► that's just been kind of how my career goes. I mean, The Economist, I'm the guy where they're

00:30:02 ◼   ► like, "We don't understand, nobody in-house understands or cares about networking protocols.

00:30:07 ◼   ► Could Glenn write something about this?" And so I'll write something on the blog, or sometimes

00:30:11 ◼   ► I'll pitch something about a topic that's really—they're interested in it, but it's

00:30:15 ◼   ► really obscure to the staff members. They're science geeks. They have PhDs in physics and

00:30:20 ◼   ► economics and everything else, but the technology side, they're not unfamiliar with it, but

00:30:23 ◼   ► there are very few programmers in-house and so forth. So I get to be the explainer of

00:30:28 ◼   ► certain aspects of tweaky digital things there too.

00:30:31 ◼   ► Dave Asprey And your newest gig, which is,

00:30:34 ◼   ► I guess, sort of where I've been coming with this, is you—I forget your title exactly,

00:30:39 ◼   ► executive editor?

00:30:40 ◼   ► Pete: Executive editor. Yeah, Marco and I had some conversations.

00:30:42 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:30:42 ◼   ► Ted: Of the magazine, Marco Arment's Still Nascent, I think it's at issue number three,

00:30:49 ◼   ► is the current issue.

00:30:50 ◼   ► Pete; That's right. Number four is next week.

00:30:52 ◼   ► Ted; Which is just, as soon as I saw the announcement, I was like,

00:30:56 ◼   ► "Duh! Why didn't, I wish I had suggested this because this is such a perfect match and I want

00:31:01 ◼   ► to be able to take credit for making this happen. This is such a perfect fit."

00:31:06 ◼   ► that.

00:31:07 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah, it feels, it fits in the Marco's wheelhouse too, where it's like Instapaper,

00:31:10 ◼   ► it's like Instapaper except he's making the articles that you'll then read later.

00:31:14 ◼   ► Justin: You're such the perfect fit though because you, you know, you have such a variety

00:31:19 ◼   ► of interests, you know, you're not just, you know, you used to write, I think it's

00:31:23 ◼   ► past tense, I don't think you'd keep it up anymore, the Wi-Fi blog.

00:31:26 ◼   ► Pete; Oh yeah, that was interesting. I spent like a decade writing Wi-Fi networking news.

00:31:30 ◼   ► Justin; Which was a blog that was all about Wi-Fi and you think, "Well, what the hell,

00:31:34 ◼   ► is that? But it was great. It was like a decade of upheaval.

00:31:37 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah, the community Wi-Fi and then all the standards changed, all the devices and

00:31:43 ◼   ► incompatibilities, standards wars, and then city-wide Wi-Fi, municipal Wi-Fi, and 802.11n.

00:31:50 ◼   ► And then what happened is, was this very interesting thing. I think it was, I think it was

00:31:54 ◼   ► eight years, nine years into it, and suddenly all the interest in Wi-Fi disappeared because it just

00:31:58 ◼   ► started to work. And the rise in good mobile broadband, like 3G had, you know, 3G was suddenly

00:32:05 ◼   ► everywhere. 4G-ish standards, you know, HSPA+ and some of the faster 3G stuff was starting to get

00:32:11 ◼   ► out there, and LTE was on the roadmap. And suddenly people didn't need to know about

00:32:15 ◼   ► Wi-Fi anymore because they could just connect whenever they needed to. And the whole, the

00:32:19 ◼   ► traffic just fell out the bottom, and which is fine. Things have a lifetime. But I was,

00:32:23 ◼   ► I was sort of sitting there one day, I'm like, "I should stop doing this because no one's reading

00:32:27 ◼   ► it anymore. It sort of reminds me of the equivalent to Matt Howie's PVR blog,

00:32:33 ◼   ► which was wildly popular for a while. But then PVRs kind of became like indoor plumbing.

00:32:44 ◼   ► Truly fascinating and life-changing, but then you just sort of assume that it's there. It's no

00:32:53 ◼   ► no longer a big deal.

00:32:54 ◼   ► Well, there's the implosion of the gadget blogs, too. That sort of happens. I mean,

00:32:58 ◼   ► you still have, you know, The Verge is not a gadget blog. It's a general computing

00:33:02 ◼   ► thing that's more like, you know, Macworld plus, you know, some of like a HiFi stereo

00:33:07 ◼   ► publication plus a business publication. Or Gizmodo is no longer exactly a gadget thing,

00:33:13 ◼   ► and neither is Engadget. They write about all kinds of stuff. And there's 100,000

00:33:17 ◼   ► sites that used to, and some still update things that are about every little gee-jaw.

00:33:22 ◼   ► And I think, and that's sort of what happened with Wi-Fi too, is like when stuff just works

00:33:26 ◼   ► and there's a sufficient amount of it and you don't have to make the same kinds of

00:33:29 ◼   ► decisions you used to about what you're going to get, then the necessity of going

00:33:33 ◼   ► to sites—there's still people who obsessively check on every new thing that's coming out.

00:33:37 ◼   ► But I think the lifespan of those has really expired in a way that they used to capture

00:33:41 ◼   ► the attention in like 2003 to 2006, say. That's sort of passed by.

00:33:46 ◼   ► I totally—

00:33:47 ◼   ► And good.

00:33:48 ◼   ► I'm glad too.

00:33:49 ◼   ► Yeah, it's, you know, I've often said to people that, you know, for a guy who started

00:33:55 ◼   ► writing about Apple on his own site in 2002, I always thought if I did, I wouldn't pick

00:34:00 ◼   ► a name that had the word Mac in it. And, you know, that was never really on the table,

00:34:04 ◼   ► but it really, in hindsight, has turned out pretty well.

00:34:06 ◼   ► No, and I think that's the thing. I think by not—the most interesting stuff that happens

00:34:11 ◼   ► now is deliberative. And I think, you know, The Verge still publishes a lot of news, but

00:34:15 ◼   ► I think, you know, one extreme you have maybe Business Insider or even Mashable where they're

00:34:20 ◼   ► plowing out as much news as they can all the time.

00:34:22 ◼   ► Some of it's, you know, I'd say Mashable.

00:34:24 ◼   ► I like some of Mashable.

00:34:25 ◼   ► Business Insider, let's say none of it's good, but they've got a business model.

00:34:29 ◼   ► But then, you know, I've talked to Brian Lamb.

00:34:30 ◼   ► I'm going to write something for his Wirecutter site.

00:34:32 ◼   ► And he's one of the people at Gizmodo for years, really drove that frenzied pace.

00:34:37 ◼   ► And now Wirecutter is like, it's the best stuff.

00:34:39 ◼   ► Like really in-depth stuff.

00:34:41 ◼   ► And it's like he's doing nothing changes on there from day to day until he posts a

00:34:45 ◼   ► new thing.

00:34:46 ◼   ► I mentioned a couple episodes ago, I forget who was on the show here with me, but we were

00:34:49 ◼   ► talking about the Wirecutter and what a great site it is and comparing and contrast to Consumer

00:34:54 ◼   ► Reports, which is really, really problematic.

00:34:57 ◼   ► But they're trying to do the same thing, which is you need to buy a new TV.

00:35:05 ◼   ► What's the best TV to buy?

00:35:07 ◼   ► And you go to the Wirecutter and they just tell you, "Here's the best TV to buy."

00:35:10 ◼   ► it. Just get this one. Or if you're, you know, and I'll give you like three options. Like,

00:35:14 ◼   ► here's just the best big TV to buy. Here's the best one if you're on a budget. And, you know,

00:35:18 ◼   ► here's the best one if you want a small TV. That's it. And that's all they tell you to do.

00:35:23 ◼   ► And then I'll give you a link that'll explain there, you know, maybe why it's good.

00:35:27 ◼   ► But that's it. There is no like eight by seven grid of features and check pluses and A minuses.

00:35:35 ◼   ► And it's Apple-like in its simplicity. But I had coffee with Pete Rojas. He came through Seattle

00:35:42 ◼   ► a few months ago, and I'd never met him in person, but we'd had correspondents for years. And he

00:35:46 ◼   ► founded Gizmodo and then founded Engadget and then founded GDGT. I don't know how you're supposed to

00:35:52 ◼   ► say Gidget. And so you can say he's responsible for all the horror, right? But I mean, it was

00:35:59 ◼   ► different when he was involved. And each time he left, the publications transformed into something

00:36:03 ◼   ► I think too, and the whole industry changed.

00:36:05 ◼   ► But GDGT is, it's wire cutter like also.

00:36:09 ◼   ► It's here's some really good information

00:36:11 ◼   ► on a focus subject.

00:36:12 ◼   ► We're not gonna bombard you

00:36:14 ◼   ► because I think there's a limited audience.

00:36:16 ◼   ► This is what's interesting about the live blog thing still.

00:36:17 ◼   ► Like, you know, the fact that millions of people

00:36:20 ◼   ► will tune into these live blog transcripts of Apple events.

00:36:24 ◼   ► What are you gonna hear that's live that's not?

00:36:26 ◼   ► I never understand that.

00:36:27 ◼   ► Like, why can't you wait and someone writes an analysis

00:36:29 ◼   ► or you could watch it yourself when the video is posted.

00:36:32 ◼   ► But there are obviously a lot of people who are obsessed with the latest, newest, absolutely

00:36:36 ◼   ► up to the second information. And then I think a much bigger audience. It's like, just

00:36:41 ◼   ► give me the lay of the land. I don't need to read every last bit. Give me the information

00:36:44 ◼   ► so I can make evaluative decisions.

00:36:46 ◼   ► Dave: Exactly. No, I agree that. And I also think, yeah, I think it should be—and I

00:36:54 ◼   ► try to do this. I always try to keep it in mind with what I do at Daring Fireball, that

00:36:57 ◼   ► obviously there's some people who are loading the site multiple times throughout the day.

00:37:02 ◼   ► But I always have in my mind somebody who's really busy, hopefully working on something

00:37:06 ◼   ► really cool, and they're going to load it once at the end of the day just to see what

00:37:11 ◼   ► happened. And I want the site, the home page, to read and make sense and sort of give you

00:37:15 ◼   ► an overview of what you need to know. Did you miss anything today or is it just a bunch

00:37:19 ◼   ► of goofy pictures of cats or something like that?

00:37:24 ◼   ► Well, here's the thing. Do you use RSS anymore? Do you have an RSS reader?

00:37:26 ◼   ► I do. I do. But I—

00:37:28 ◼   ► How much compared to the way you did before?

00:37:30 ◼   ► Very little. Twitter has really overtaken it to a large extent. I really—there's

00:37:35 ◼   ► like a reckoning coming where I should really—I should wipe out all of my RSS subscriptions and

00:37:40 ◼   ► start over from scratch and do it in a very different way where it would be more like,

00:37:44 ◼   ► "Here's the dozen feeds that I don't—I know that I don't want to miss a thing."

00:37:48 ◼   ► And no longer the, "Here's 100 feeds and I'm going to skim what's new to see what

00:37:55 ◼   ► jumps out as breaking. Like, Twitter has really overtaken that as the—just what's going

00:38:03 ◼   ► on right now? Am I missing something that's breaking?

00:38:05 ◼   ► Alan Corey Yeah, Twitter is an aggregator. I mean, it's

00:38:09 ◼   ► crowdsourced knowledge, and on average, if you follow people—I mean, it's sort of

00:38:13 ◼   ► that funny thing. By figuring out who you follow, you only follow people who are interesting,

00:38:17 ◼   ► you unsubscribe to them or you unfollow if they stop being interesting to you or overwhelm

00:38:21 ◼   ► And so who's left are people who are likely to post things you're interested in, and you're going to see the same URL from a bunch of people, or they'll retweet it that they're interested in.

00:38:29 ◼   ► So it's like, I don't, I still have RSS, I have hundreds of things in there, but a lot of them are like places where otherwise wouldn't go and they're just obscure enough.

00:38:37 ◼   ► But I keep unsubscribing feeds in RSS because I'm like, I don't need the New York Times in my RSS. If there's an interesting article, I mean, they're going to see it when I visit the homepage at some point, or it'll show up 15 times in Twitter.

00:38:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, I totally agree.

00:38:49 ◼   ► It is, Twitter is sort of, Twitter works that way

00:38:53 ◼   ► by doing, and I think you have to do both.

00:38:55 ◼   ► You have to be willing to unfollow the people

00:38:57 ◼   ► you no longer find interesting.

00:38:59 ◼   ► You know, and don't think it's like,

00:39:02 ◼   ► I don't have a Facebook account,

00:39:04 ◼   ► but I understand though that like unfollowing

00:39:07 ◼   ► or whatever they call it, somebody on Facebook

00:39:09 ◼   ► is considered like rude.

00:39:11 ◼   ► It is something you might take personally

00:39:14 ◼   ► somebody is no longer friends with you on Facebook. Whereas to me, the follow and unfollow,

00:39:21 ◼   ► you should never take that personally on Twitter. I don't care. People unfollow me because I'm

00:39:24 ◼   ► tweeting about baseball or something like that. I don't care. That's fine. Come back in a month.

00:39:28 ◼   ► You know, I don't care.

00:39:28 ◼   ► I don't know if people have to tell you. People are like, "I'm going to unfollow you because

00:39:31 ◼   ► I don't really care if you're following me or not." I don't. So, are you a Twitter reader or

00:39:36 ◼   ► are you a Twitter scanner?

00:39:37 ◼   ► What's the difference?

00:39:39 ◼   ► Well, so people like my good friend Lex Friedman, he reads Twitter. He very carefully curates

00:39:45 ◼   ► who he follows so the volume isn't too high. And he has to mute me at times because I go

00:39:49 ◼   ► off as I do.

00:39:50 ◼   ► No, I just skim. I skim.

00:39:52 ◼   ► I'm a skimmer. Because I have like, I follow a thousand people and I dive in and out. I'll

00:39:56 ◼   ► look, I'll scan a little bit, and then I'll go back to the, pin it up to the top and forget

00:39:59 ◼   ► about it.

00:40:00 ◼   ► No, and it's, and it is also part of the brilliance of the concept of Twitter is the,

00:40:07 ◼   ► and it's just one of the great examples in my mind of how not putting a feature in is design,

00:40:13 ◼   ► and that's the lack of red/unread status. And in the early years, in 2006, 2007,

00:40:20 ◼   ► the screaming from people who were RSS addicts who wanted red/unread status for tweets was,

00:40:28 ◼   ► it was cacophonous, and Twitter didn't ignore it. They were like, "No, that's actually…"

00:40:34 ◼   ► the point is not to have read unread. You're not supposed to see all the tweets. You just take a

00:40:38 ◼   ► look at what's going on now and scroll back as, you know, a couple minutes if you want. And if

00:40:43 ◼   ► you really want to see them all, that's up to you. And you'd keep scrolling down the timeline until

00:40:47 ◼   ► you see the one that you know you saw last night. But we're not going to keep track of that for you,

00:40:51 ◼   ► because we don't want to encourage that behavior.

00:40:53 ◼   ► Pete: You run a poll sometime. I just, I've asked occasionally and formally,

00:40:57 ◼   ► and I am stunned how many people among my followers say I read Twitter. And I'm like,

00:41:02 ◼   ► But I think there's a little bit of OCD there, maybe.

00:41:06 ◼   ► That's true.

00:41:07 ◼   ► That's one reason.

00:41:08 ◼   ► And I have that to some extent.

00:41:10 ◼   ► Unread counts do make me anxious.

00:41:12 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:41:13 ◼   ► So people are like, they can't just go to the top and ignore it.

00:41:15 ◼   ► They might miss something.

00:41:16 ◼   ► I mean, the internet is all about—the internet's motto is, "You might miss something."

00:41:20 ◼   ► Right.

00:41:21 ◼   ► I do read all of my mentions.

00:41:24 ◼   ► Maybe not religiously.

00:41:25 ◼   ► I mean, there might be some days where if I'm busy or if I'm offline for most of

00:41:28 ◼   ► the day for travel or something like that, that I won't. But in general, there's a very

00:41:34 ◼   ► high chance that on a given day, any of my—I'm going to read all of my mentions. And they're

00:41:39 ◼   ► certainly far more voluminous than a typical Twitter user, but it's actually not that

00:41:43 ◼   ► hard to keep up with. Way easier than keeping up with email.

00:41:46 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think that mentions are more like someone—I mean, it's like an email replacement.

00:41:51 ◼   ► It's a 140-character email replacement. If someone bothers to do that, I feel like

00:41:54 ◼   ► I should respond to them or acknowledge it because otherwise it's rude. I mean, you've

00:41:58 ◼   ► a high asymmetry, too. That's the thing is you must get a lot of—I have interesting

00:42:02 ◼   ► conversations with people about the scale of Twitter from 1,000 followers to 10,000,

00:42:07 ◼   ► that sort of exponential thing up to people with several million. And it's fascinating

00:42:12 ◼   ► how variable the interaction can be. Some people with very few followers spend all their

00:42:16 ◼   ► time in mention land, and others with millions of followers, people are either too cowed

00:42:20 ◼   ► or they just say like, "Hey, you're great," but there's no communication.

00:42:23 ◼   ► - Right, I find it just to be super efficient

00:42:27 ◼   ► and it forces people who want to contact me

00:42:31 ◼   ► to be brief, right?

00:42:33 ◼   ► It's, and in general, if you can keep your emails

00:42:37 ◼   ► to within the general length of a tweet,

00:42:39 ◼   ► it's a lot more likely that I'm going to read it

00:42:41 ◼   ► and reply, but the interaction is so much easier

00:42:44 ◼   ► because going through email, you have to select it

00:42:48 ◼   ► and then it opens and it's just the whole thing.

00:42:52 ◼   ► you just want to bring a link to my attention, like, "Hey, I can't believe Gruber hasn't

00:42:56 ◼   ► linked to this yet. This is so obviously daring fireball material." It is way more likely

00:43:01 ◼   ► that I will see it if you tweet to me than if you email it to me. And I don't, you

00:43:07 ◼   ► know, because it's just an easier workflow. I just have to scroll through a list and eyeball

00:43:12 ◼   ► them as opposed to clicking down through a list in and out, in and out, in and out.

00:43:15 ◼   ► Well, attention is a precious commodity. I keep thinking, like, attention is the one

00:43:19 ◼   ► thing you can't get more of. You can't build more of it. You have to allot it, and

00:43:24 ◼   ► it's, you know, that's what Facebook is trying to buy our attention and sell it to

00:43:27 ◼   ► other people. And another callback, I mean, this is the idea behind Marco's, the magazine,

00:43:34 ◼   ► is that he's trying to not overwhelm people. And it's the same sort of philosophy with

00:43:38 ◼   ► Instapaper too, is that it's, you want to read it, you're going to do it later out

00:43:41 ◼   ► of the flow of your, sort of the maelstrom of all the stuff that's coming through.

00:43:46 ◼   ► And I think that's one of the guiding things behind the magazine is like interesting stuff

00:43:50 ◼   ► that you're not necessarily going to find everywhere else. And just enough, you know,

00:43:54 ◼   ► it's, I mean, the magazine is always curation, but it's just enough that it'll be interesting

00:43:57 ◼   ► enough to read every issue, but you won't feel like, "Oh, God." I mean, writing

00:44:01 ◼   ► for The Economist, that's the thing I always hear is I know plenty of people who read it,

00:44:04 ◼   ► but they think of it sometimes as homework. They have the issues piled up there. Again,

00:44:08 ◼   ► you don't have to read everything. You can throw issues into the recycling. But people

00:44:12 ◼   ► look at it as, "This is something I'm supposed to do," or they enjoy it too and

00:44:16 ◼   ► they make the time for it. But I mean, I don't have time to read The Economist every week.

00:44:20 ◼   ► I try to read a good hunk of it, but I, you know, I'm too busy.

00:44:22 ◼   ► I feel like I don't have an Economist subscription, but I do have—I do subscribe to The New

00:44:27 ◼   ► Yorker, and I feel that exact same way. Some days I come downstairs and I look in the mail

00:44:32 ◼   ► and there's a new issue with The New Yorker, and I can't believe it because it seems

00:44:36 ◼   ► like the other one just came yesterday. And I would have to say that the number one reason

00:44:41 ◼   ► I'm not a subscriber to The Economist is simply because of how agitated I am by the

00:44:45 ◼   ► gigantic pile of New Yorkers in my office.

00:44:48 ◼   ► I got The New Yorker and The Economist, and I'm not sure that's a winning strategy

00:44:51 ◼   ► for me. I should probably settle down. But you know, there's always—it's like there's

00:44:54 ◼   ► always a long feature in The New Yorker that I love. I mean, the one thing—the thing—the

00:44:59 ◼   ► reason I got into the magazine, by the way, the reason I pitched Marco on being the editor

00:45:03 ◼   ► is because—I mean, A, I knew he's a technology guy. He's also a good editor. I liked how

00:45:08 ◼   ► he edited the first two issues very much. But you know, there's this list of things

00:45:11 ◼   ► he can do and the stuff he was able to offload a whole pile of stuff on to me so we can focus

00:45:16 ◼   ► on the areas that he really likes to spend time. But the thing that appealed to me was

00:45:21 ◼   ► his view of what the magazine is, there's nothing like that right now. You can't find

00:45:29 ◼   ► a publication that wants to run articles that are of interest to people interested in technology

00:45:33 ◼   ► that aren't either about technology or are maybe about medical technology. The New Yorker

00:45:37 ◼   ► doesn't really run stories that are of interest to people who know something about technology,

00:45:42 ◼   ► even when they're about it. And so I like the idea that we're going to have things that are

00:45:46 ◼   ► have a human focus. You know, they might be about like, you know, Lex Freeman, for instance,

00:45:50 ◼   ► article on wet shaving or Dan Moore and I making tea, that there are things that if you like tech,

00:45:55 ◼   ► you're going to like to hear about things associated with it. I've got a friend who

00:45:59 ◼   ► is a letterpress guy and he's a beautiful writer and I want him to write about what that means

00:46:04 ◼   ► because people who are involved in electronics don't necessarily know the joy and interest

00:46:09 ◼   ► and sort of the tweakiness of letterpress.

00:46:11 ◼   ► Oh, I am so good at letterpress. It is unbelievable.

00:46:15 ◼   ► Not that letterpress!

00:46:16 ◼   ► What letterpress?

00:46:17 ◼   ► The inky kind of letterpress. I had to quit letterpress. I can't—my win rate was about

00:46:23 ◼   ► 5%.

00:46:24 ◼   ► Really?

00:46:25 ◼   ► I would play—now, maybe I'm playing against people too hard. Maybe I should find easier

00:46:28 ◼   ► players. Maybe all the people I know are much better wordy game stars than me.

00:46:33 ◼   ► who did you play? Who did you find difficult? We never play. I never wound up playing you.

00:46:37 ◼   ► - Everybody. Basically the Macworld editorial staff among other people and some other friends.

00:46:43 ◼   ► It's funny. I know a million words. I've had rounds where I was playing with a friend, Sarah,

00:46:47 ◼   ► and she wrote a poem out of the words we came up with because we had this great list of things,

00:46:53 ◼   ► including some very dirty ones in the middle. Love the dirty words. But I couldn't win. I just,

00:46:58 ◼   ► I don't have the strategy for it. I have the words, but I seem to like, and I played,

00:47:02 ◼   ► I don't know about 60 games and I won like five of them and I thought this is probably not my game

00:47:07 ◼   ► Maybe i'll come back to it

00:47:08 ◼   ► But it's hard to always lose a game in the early part of the game being able to find the biggest words is the best

00:47:14 ◼   ► Skill, but once you get to the middle of the game, it's it's all strategy and and you can win i'm not good at finding

00:47:20 ◼   ► Wow, that's a great word words. I'm i'm most of my words are like third grade words

00:47:26 ◼   ► But they're strategically placed

00:47:30 ◼   ► Yes, well, I've seen some of your word lists, so post it on the Twitter.

00:47:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I do.

00:47:35 ◼   ► So we know the words.

00:47:36 ◼   ► I love the letterpress.

00:47:37 ◼   ► But back to the magazine. Here's the thing. The thing that makes you such a great fit,

00:47:45 ◼   ► and it fits with this show that you're talking about doing, which is just the idea of

00:47:51 ◼   ► how disintermediated can you get and just go back to the simplest thing economically that'll work.

00:47:58 ◼   ► And look at the magazine. I mean, everybody knows that it gets a little complex here because the

00:48:03 ◼   ► name of the magazine we're talking about is The Magazine. But the magazine industry in general is

00:48:11 ◼   ► widely regarded as being in a period of upheaval and that there's, you know, it could be on the

00:48:16 ◼   ► verge of collapse and that there's, you know, there's certain big, big ones that are probably

00:48:21 ◼   ► going to do just fine just because they're, you know, The Economist and The New Yorker are

00:48:25 ◼   ► certainly right there among them because of the quality of them.

00:48:27 ◼   ► Yeah, the New Yorker has mostly been operated at a loss for most of its history. I'm not

00:48:31 ◼   ► sure if it's profitable at the moment, but it has almost always been operated at a loss,

00:48:35 ◼   ► is the fasting part. But people who run it, including Cy Newhouse now for the last X decades,

00:48:41 ◼   ► they love it so much they just keep it running.

00:48:45 ◼   ► The Economist, I would hope, just by the title is run at a profit.

00:48:48 ◼   ► It's good. I think they've doubled their circulation in the last 10 years because they

00:48:51 ◼   ► took away Time and Newsweek decided that stupid was better than smart, so they went stupid.

00:48:56 ◼   ► I mean, Time was the thing that I read as a kid where you're like, and Newsweek was a slightly

00:49:00 ◼   ► easier version of it, but it wasn't bad. And US News and World Report, I mean, that was often had

00:49:04 ◼   ► incredibly good stuff in it. And, you know, lots of publications like that. Now you point to, like,

00:49:10 ◼   ► the Atlantic and Harper's as the ex-impliers along with the New Yorker of a certain kind of style.

00:49:15 ◼   ► But for Newsweek, he's like, "What do you read in America that's…" You know, so Time and Newsweek

00:49:19 ◼   ► said the stupider the better, the more people we are without forgetting that we're news

00:49:23 ◼   ► organizations that we could. And the Economist picked up all the subscribers who wanted to

00:49:26 ◼   ► read something with words of three or more syllables in it occasionally.

00:49:30 ◼   ► Tom Bilyeu (01h00m 5s): And you know, the scope of the magazine, at least right now,

00:49:33 ◼   ► is less than the scope of those other magazines. We're talking right now so far three issues

00:49:38 ◼   ► it's about. I think it's four or five articles per issue. Articles are somewhere around a

00:49:45 ◼   ► thousand to fifteen hundred words. It seems to me, I don't know.

00:49:48 ◼   ► - That's right, and the thing is, this is where,

00:49:51 ◼   ► so this podcast I'm gonna do,

00:49:52 ◼   ► which is tentatively titled The New Disruptors,

00:49:54 ◼   ► the notion is that we've had tools to create stuff

00:49:57 ◼   ► for decades now, I was involved

00:49:58 ◼   ► in early desktop publishing, audio came after that,

00:50:02 ◼   ► all the digital tools were in there to make things,

00:50:04 ◼   ► and now you have digital tools that let you control

00:50:06 ◼   ► and make 3D objects and CNC routers,

00:50:08 ◼   ► and you can get a 3D printer in your house

00:50:11 ◼   ► for a thousand bucks or less, much less even.

00:50:13 ◼   ► So we're at the revolution where you have

00:50:15 ◼   ► all the digital tools you need to create stuff,

00:50:17 ◼   ► and the next wave is funding production,

00:50:21 ◼   ► manufacturing, distribution,

00:50:23 ◼   ► and that's where I keep seeing things

00:50:24 ◼   ► like the magazine fits in that beautifully.

00:50:26 ◼   ► It's like you still, you have to be in bed with Apple.

00:50:28 ◼   ► They're taking a 30% cut.

00:50:30 ◼   ► They're your distribution channel,

00:50:32 ◼   ► but if you have an audience,

00:50:34 ◼   ► you're not disremediated by a gatekeeper

00:50:37 ◼   ► that says you're not allowed to reach that audience.

00:50:39 ◼   ► Apple would be delighted for you

00:50:40 ◼   ► to have 10 million people paying you

00:50:43 ◼   ► so they can get 30% of it.

00:50:44 ◼   ► As in the past where news stands,

00:50:46 ◼   ► Getting a magazine on a physical newsstand,

00:50:49 ◼   ► there's a lot of organized crime connections in the past.

00:50:51 ◼   ► There's these placement fees.

00:50:53 ◼   ► The reason magazines and newsstands cost like $7

00:50:56 ◼   ► and this yearly subscription is like $20

00:50:58 ◼   ► has to do with the incredible intermediation that adds cost.

00:51:03 ◼   ► And so you take that one step further

00:51:05 ◼   ► in digital distribution where you don't have to build

00:51:07 ◼   ► the distribution platform, just the content and the medium.

00:51:10 ◼   ► It's great.

00:51:11 ◼   ► - Well, the other things too though

00:51:12 ◼   ► that saddle traditional longstanding newspapers

00:51:15 ◼   ► magazines are the incredible bureaucratic bloat of the organizations that took place over the

00:51:23 ◼   ► 20th century. I mean, I used to work at the Philadelphia Inquirer, not on the editorial

00:51:28 ◼   ► staff but in the promotions department doing graphic design work a long time ago. But I got

00:51:34 ◼   ► to know the company, and it was an interesting division of the newspaper to work in because,

00:51:40 ◼   ► Effectively, we did the house ads,

00:51:42 ◼   ► like ads for the inquirer itself,

00:51:44 ◼   ► or if the automotive sales department,

00:51:48 ◼   ► you know, the people who sell the car ads,

00:51:50 ◼   ► needed like a flyer or something

00:51:52 ◼   ► for a thing that they were doing,

00:51:54 ◼   ► we would make that for them.

00:51:55 ◼   ► So I got to know all these people throughout the company.

00:51:57 ◼   ► And it was amazing to me,

00:51:59 ◼   ► it just draw dropping how many people work there

00:52:02 ◼   ► who, not talking about the newsroom,

00:52:05 ◼   ► not talking about reporters, photographers, editors,

00:52:07 ◼   ► people who actually made what I thought of as the newspaper,

00:52:09 ◼   ► but everybody else. It was massive. And I'm sure that, you know, there's—I know, in

00:52:14 ◼   ► fact, I know that they've had a lot of layoffs and buyouts and stuff like that in the years

00:52:17 ◼   ► since I worked there. But it was just jaw-dropping how many people work there, doing things other

00:52:24 ◼   ► than what I thought of as the business of doing the newspaper.

00:52:27 ◼   ► Oh, it's crazy, but newspapers used to make like 25% profit margins year after year or

00:52:33 ◼   ► larger. And you could have—and that was—so you could have any number of executives, middle

00:52:37 ◼   ► members of the family who were too idiotic to send it to other companies,

00:52:41 ◼   ► promotions people, layers of editors, reporters. You have reporters working on features for three

00:52:46 ◼   ► years and producing 50,000 words at the end. And magazines were, I think, a little bit more

00:52:52 ◼   ► variable, but many had extremely high profit margins. There was no other place for advertisers

00:52:56 ◼   ► to go. Right. It was, that in fact was a point of contention when I was there because it was,

00:53:01 ◼   ► at the time, it was a Knight Ritter newspaper, the Enquirer, well, and the Daily News,

00:53:04 ◼   ► The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News are jointly published by a—well, I don't even

00:53:09 ◼   ► know what the company is called anymore, but it's one company that publishes two newspapers.

00:53:12 ◼   ► And they were owned by Knight Ritter. And Knight Ritter considered at the time, this is like the

00:53:19 ◼   ► mid-to-late '90s, their flagship newspaper to be the San Jose Mercury News. And it was always a

00:53:26 ◼   ► little bit of a point of contention because I think, journalistically, the Philadelphia

00:53:29 ◼   ► Inquirer had a better reputation. In the '80s, the Philadelphia Inquirer won more Pulitzer's

00:53:34 ◼   ► than the New York Times or the Washington Post. I mean, it was truly a world-class,

00:53:39 ◼   ► arguably maybe in the '80s, maybe the best newspaper in the country in the '80s.

00:53:42 ◼   ► Pete: Mm hmm. Yeah, I want to talk about the Inky.

00:53:44 ◼   ► Brian: And so, that was sort of a sore point of contention, but here's why the San Jose Mercury

00:53:49 ◼   ► News was considered the flagship of Knight

00:54:00 ◼   ► had days of 19% profit margins.

00:54:01 ◼   ► Right, but that was it. I mean, there would be like a quarter, like 1997, one of the quarters

00:54:06 ◼   ► it came in and it was 19% profit margins and it was like, "Ooh, maybe they're going

00:54:09 ◼   ► to have buyouts."

00:54:10 ◼   ► And here's the thing, and this is of course the time when you still have the unions stranglehold,

00:54:16 ◼   ► rightly or wrongly. I mean, I'm not trying to be anti-union, but it's like you had—I

00:54:21 ◼   ► was a typesetter, I was trained as a typesetter, never worked in newspapers, but I worked with

00:54:23 ◼   ► older typesetters and worked with all these people in the printing industry and they always

00:54:27 ◼   ► had the story, it's a newspaper printing plant, so it'd be the guy who was like the

00:54:30 ◼   ► linotype operator and the linotype machines that were taken out 20 years before. And he'd

00:54:34 ◼   ► been drawing the salary for 20 years. There's the guy who, you know, was the lead puller

00:54:38 ◼   ► or whatever, like all these jobs. And there's the guy, you know, and some of the plants

00:54:42 ◼   ► were so union run that there was like a big stop button and if management rolled, came

00:54:46 ◼   ► in, they would hit the stop button and stop the presses until management left. Like that

00:54:49 ◼   ► was their right. And so you had even with incredibly bloated, inefficient printing plants

00:54:54 ◼   ► that were padded with all these people who did nothing and all these extraneous employees

00:54:59 ◼   ► and union benefits and everything else. Even with that, they were getting 20 and 25 percent

00:55:03 ◼   ► profit margins.

00:55:04 ◼   ► Right. And so what I love about something like the magazine is that the magazine is,

00:55:09 ◼   ► to me—I've always seen what I do at Daring Fireball as being a reset button on that of

00:55:14 ◼   ► what would it take to set up a business that is sustainable, and the employee count is

00:55:22 ◼   ► Me and I'm a little lucky there because I have a computer science degree and I used to do web programming

00:55:27 ◼   ► And so in terms of actual and and it really isn't day to day. There's not much web nerdery

00:55:33 ◼   ► I need to do to keep it going but I did get to I in the early days

00:55:36 ◼   ► You know, I could set everything up I could move servers

00:55:38 ◼   ► I could do stuff like that by myself if there was a problem I can SSH into the server and

00:55:42 ◼   ► Clumsily fool around and see if you know what the hell's going on here

00:55:47 ◼   ► So it's a little easier to be a one-man show, or at least starting 10 years ago, with

00:55:51 ◼   ► a technical background. Today, I think it's easy with things like Tumblr and Squarespace

00:55:58 ◼   ► and the ways that you—you know, the WordPress hosting sites, WordPress.org even. It's

00:56:03 ◼   ► really easy for someone who doesn't have a technical background to do the same thing,

00:56:06 ◼   ► I think, today. It wasn't so easy 10 years ago.

00:56:08 ◼   ► Yeah, and Marco's kind of the equivalent of that with the magazine, is he's an iOS

00:56:11 ◼   ► programmer and he spent—you know, he can just make an iOS app—I mean, it's not

00:56:16 ◼   ► make. But you know, it's some amount of effort that he knows what it takes to do it and can

00:56:21 ◼   ► replicate it. And it's kind of the equivalent of like, okay, how do I set up an Apache server

00:56:25 ◼   ► in 1997?

00:56:26 ◼   ► Right, exactly. Well, and the other thing that he has, it's a nice advantage too, is

00:56:30 ◼   ► with Instapaper under his belt and with a happy, fairly large customer base, he kind

00:56:37 ◼   ► of knows what people like experience wise. You know, what do they want in an app that

00:56:44 ◼   ► going to a reading experience on these handful of devices, iPads, iPhones. What are they

00:56:51 ◼   ► going to – what works? What do they click on? What do they like? So he was able to build

00:56:56 ◼   ► that and that's a huge advantage.

00:56:59 ◼   ► But then fundamentally, just economically, it's so simple. You just hit the reset button.

00:57:05 ◼   ► Start from nothing. Okay. Now you've got a $2 subscription per month. You get two issues

00:57:12 ◼   ► per month. And with 10, 20,000 subscribers, all of a sudden, or whatever the number is,

00:57:19 ◼   ► just throwing out numbers like that, I actually don't know. But it's obviously hit a point

00:57:24 ◼   ► though where with X thousands of dollars a month, you can pay four or five writers for

00:57:31 ◼   ► an issue, a nice industry competitive amount for the articles. You can pay an editor and

00:57:38 ◼   ► you can have money left over for profit for the publication. And that's without even getting into

00:57:45 ◼   ► advertising yet. You haven't even started. And that's Apple taking 30% off the top, too,

00:57:51 ◼   ► and bully for them. And so, yeah, that's the thing. I mean, Marcos put out some numbers, but

00:57:55 ◼   ► he said after the first issue, he posted something and said, "Look, this has become a sustainable

00:57:59 ◼   ► venture." And he's paying nearly magazine rates for writing. I was surprised and pleased at what

00:58:04 ◼   ► what he wants to offer and this is my,

00:58:06 ◼   ► I gotta be, you know, candy man here this next year.

00:58:09 ◼   ► Like I'm so excited about the amount of money

00:58:12 ◼   ► I'm going to be able to pay other people for good writing

00:58:14 ◼   ► is actually more exciting to me

00:58:16 ◼   ► than whatever money I will make from working on it

00:58:17 ◼   ► because there's such a dearth of opportunities for people

00:58:20 ◼   ► to both be published and to be paid

00:58:23 ◼   ► an appropriate livable, like just even livable wage.

00:58:27 ◼   ► It's not, he's not paying a wage that means

00:58:28 ◼   ► that people can make $200,000 a year

00:58:31 ◼   ► if they wrote full time for it.

00:58:32 ◼   ► He's paying a wage that means people can actually live

00:58:34 ◼   ► a probably lower to middle class existence, which is where we've gotten in writing.

00:58:38 ◼   ► I got paid 50 cents a word by the New York Times in 1998, and then many years later,

00:58:43 ◼   ► too, although they changed it a bit. I was told by friends that the New York Times paid

00:58:46 ◼   ► 50 cents a word in 1970.

00:58:48 ◼   ► You know?

00:58:49 ◼   ► Jared: It's really not that, that's not good. Because a thousand word article is a

00:58:54 ◼   ► lot of work.

00:58:55 ◼   ► Alan: It's a lot of work.

00:58:56 ◼   ► Jared; You come away with it when you check for 500 bucks.

00:58:58 ◼   ► Alan; Yeah, so I mean, that's, this is part of the thing is like publications have evolved

00:59:02 ◼   ► to a point at which they believe,

00:59:04 ◼   ► and if you look at the management structures

00:59:05 ◼   ► and the top-heavy structures of most publications,

00:59:08 ◼   ► they believe writers are interchangeable and uninteresting.

00:59:10 ◼   ► And I mean, even if writers aren't branded,

00:59:12 ◼   ► aren't big-brand-name Malcolm Gladwell things,

00:59:15 ◼   ► and not accusing the New Yorker of this of all places,

00:59:17 ◼   ► but there's this attitude that the content

00:59:20 ◼   ► is the least important part, the packaging, reselling,

00:59:23 ◼   ► marketing, advertising around it is,

00:59:25 ◼   ► and this attitude is pervasive.

00:59:27 ◼   ► And so Marco, I think, is coming out the other way around.

00:59:28 ◼   ► It's like, if you're starting from scratch,

00:59:30 ◼   ► how would you build a publication today?

00:59:32 ◼   ► It's gonna be an iOS app.

00:59:33 ◼   ► It's the easy, smallest, or lowest hanging fruit

00:59:35 ◼   ► to reach the largest number of people

00:59:37 ◼   ► with the least amount of effort.

00:59:38 ◼   ► He's got millions of people in his audience already

00:59:40 ◼   ► who know and trust him, who know his product,

00:59:42 ◼   ► so he doesn't have to worry about the marketing side

00:59:44 ◼   ► of reaching those people.

00:59:46 ◼   ► And then he's starting it out with the idea of,

00:59:47 ◼   ► I'm gonna pay a competitive rate,

00:59:50 ◼   ► which we hope will improve over time, and see how it goes.

00:59:53 ◼   ► And so right now, it's sustainable.

00:59:54 ◼   ► We could do this forever at this rate.

00:59:55 ◼   ► - And I also think, compared to traditional magazines,

00:59:59 ◼   ► which are so heavily ad-based,

01:00:01 ◼   ► and therefore have these, you know,

01:00:03 ◼   ► and there's the whole situation with advertising

01:00:06 ◼   ► in a magazine like New Yorker or Sports Illustrated

01:00:09 ◼   ► or The Economist and, you know,

01:00:11 ◼   ► selling these back page ads and the inside front cover ads

01:00:14 ◼   ► and then filling up the back of the book

01:00:16 ◼   ► with all the little ads, it's an enormous amount of work.

01:00:20 ◼   ► Something like the magazine can start from scratch

01:00:22 ◼   ► and go with the, like, less of an advertising model,

01:00:25 ◼   ► more of a sponsorship model

01:00:27 ◼   ► and maybe just have one sponsor per episode.

01:00:30 ◼   ► and maybe leave money on the table that way,

01:00:34 ◼   ► but also not have to have a full-time ad sales staff.

01:00:38 ◼   ► You don't even have to add anybody.

01:00:39 ◼   ► - There's a funny thing that happened at--

01:00:42 ◼   ► - Like I can tell you firsthand,

01:00:43 ◼   ► if you go with the sponsorship model,

01:00:44 ◼   ► you don't need any, but you can do it yourself.

01:00:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, and that's what Tidbits has pursued,

01:00:49 ◼   ► but there's this funny thing, yes,

01:00:51 ◼   ► once you get to a certain level of scale or interest,

01:00:53 ◼   ► you can ask for a premium rate

01:00:56 ◼   ► and not have to be selling a thousand little pieces

01:00:58 ◼   ► and have somebody in charge of it.

01:01:00 ◼   ► But, you know, so Marco and I have this discussion.

01:01:02 ◼   ► I'll expose the discussion we have,

01:01:03 ◼   ► but he's talked about it publicly.

01:01:04 ◼   ► He wants it to be every other week,

01:01:06 ◼   ► and he's thought about it,

01:01:07 ◼   ► talked publicly about it perhaps being weekly.

01:01:09 ◼   ► I would agitate potentially for it going weekly

01:01:11 ◼   ► at some point, although that'll mean a lot,

01:01:14 ◼   ► different editorial schedule and so forth.

01:01:16 ◼   ► He's worried it'll be too much for people to read,

01:01:18 ◼   ► that if he's promising four or five articles

01:01:21 ◼   ► every two weeks, if we suddenly did, say,

01:01:23 ◼   ► just four articles every week,

01:01:25 ◼   ► that may be more attention than people wanna give.

01:01:27 ◼   ► So would subscriptions go up

01:01:28 ◼   ► because it's a better value, it's more articles.

01:01:31 ◼   ► Or do subscriptions go down because people are saying,

01:01:33 ◼   ► oh, now this has become a chore.

01:01:35 ◼   ► So that is even a fascinating position to be in

01:01:37 ◼   ► where you're saying we could potentially,

01:01:40 ◼   ► there's some dollar switch there

01:01:42 ◼   ► and could we double subscriptions by having more,

01:01:45 ◼   ► probably not in that ratio,

01:01:47 ◼   ► but does it become more appealing to people

01:01:49 ◼   ► if there's more content because it's more likely

01:01:51 ◼   ► they'll be interested in something in every issue.

01:01:53 ◼   ► And maybe now if they don't like the four or five articles,

01:01:57 ◼   ► they have to wait two weeks

01:01:58 ◼   ► do they resubscribe if they don't like everything or two or three in each so there's that's that's

01:02:02 ◼   ► part of it you have to be much more interesting every other week than perhaps weekly as well.

01:02:06 ◼   ► It's a tricky problem.

01:02:08 ◼   ► It is but I think it's uh you know I when Marco first ran the idea past me hey do you think this

01:02:14 ◼   ► makes sense I really you know I just thought yeah of course it just thought this is I think it's a

01:02:20 ◼   ► sure thing I think it's a question of how big of a hit is it going to be that was that was my thought

01:02:25 ◼   ► I thought it was just a great idea and a great opportunity.

01:02:28 ◼   ► And I do, I could not be more bullish on the prospects going forward of the magazine.

01:02:35 ◼   ► It's great. And now the whole challenge now is to get interesting people who want to write

01:02:38 ◼   ► deep, interesting things. And we've had some, I mean, the early response was great. And I've

01:02:42 ◼   ► been going through a lot of what I did for Mark was go through hundreds of pitches that we've gotten.

01:02:46 ◼   ► And we're trying to find more researched and reported stories because we're paying enough

01:02:50 ◼   ► to get people to go out and do that kind of thing. So we'll have personal essays, we'll have

01:02:55 ◼   ► general essays about things like wet shaving and cup of tea, I keep coming back to. And things like

01:03:00 ◼   ► Gina Trapani's great piece about in vitro fertilization and her partner is such a—

01:03:03 ◼   ► Ted

01:03:13 ◼   ► and technology, and this sort of thing that's totally universal to people, the feeling you

01:03:19 ◼   ► have when you read it. And so we're striving for some balance of those components in every

01:03:24 ◼   ► story. And so we're kind of a bunch of really fun stuff. I went to the Library of Congress's

01:03:30 ◼   ► Buried Archives in Virginia, and I'm writing an account of that, of where they keep their

01:03:34 ◼   ► audio-visual materials in vaults in Culpeper, Virginia. So that'll be fun to write.

01:03:40 ◼   ► Are you going to do it for the magazine?

01:03:41 ◼   ► Yes.

01:03:42 ◼   ► is, I pitched it before I got the editor job. I don't know.

01:03:44 ◼   ► Marc Thiessen, J.D. Here's my question for you, and this is one of the questions I have written

01:03:48 ◼   ► down here for you is, because you have this widely, like I said before, The Economist,

01:03:54 ◼   ► New Yorker, you pitch, you still write freelance for a lot of different publications. Now that

01:03:59 ◼   ► you're the editor of the magazine, how much, how hard is that going to be for you to decide

01:04:04 ◼   ► where to do your writing? Like, should I still pitch this for X publication, or should I just

01:04:09 ◼   ► do this for the magazine? Pete Lienberg

01:04:11 ◼   ► Well, I'm going to be, Mark, I was just talking about this recently, in fact, is that not about my side of it, but neither of us want to dominate, be a dominant voice in it, especially every other week.

01:04:19 ◼   ► So, you know, we're trying to, some of the writers who are early issues, we're trying to space them out too.

01:04:26 ◼   ► So I will be surprised if I write more than every four issues, if that, just because then it becomes too much, it shouldn't be a platform for me.

01:04:35 ◼   ► And Marco's written more in the early days because, you know, he's trying to set a tone and so forth,

01:04:39 ◼   ► and he'll probably be in less and less too for the same reason, when I have room for more voices.

01:04:43 ◼   ► But there is this thing, which is I did this through just a fluke. I interviewed the fellow

01:04:48 ◼   ► who's the head of the audio section at the Library of Congress, and he said, "If you're ever out and

01:04:52 ◼   ► you have time, come out to Culpeper." And I did. I didn't have an outlet for it. And the insight I

01:04:57 ◼   ► feel I got from seeing what the Library of Congress is doing with our audio and visual

01:05:02 ◼   ► history, there's not really a place that would run an article like that. Aspects of it, maybe

01:05:07 ◼   ► some technical thing about how you extract sound from wax cylinders or some, I wrote a piece a year

01:05:14 ◼   ► ago, in fact, based on some, an interview I did with this fellow about the phonogram, right? This

01:05:18 ◼   ► obscure thing that prevents audio from being used. The phonogram light, right? Lasts 200 years at

01:05:24 ◼   ► this point. Edison's first utterances on a wax cylinder are still under protection by the

01:05:29 ◼   ► phonogram write until 2067. It's this crazy thing. Everything in audio, no audio will expire

01:05:37 ◼   ► until 2067 from the audio part of the protection as opposed to the copyright of the underlying

01:05:42 ◼   ► composition or words. And it's just this historically weird thing. So I want to think

01:05:46 ◼   ► about that for The Economist. It's perfect. It's tweaky. It was for the blog and it highlights this

01:05:50 ◼   ► really odd aspect of where digital culture collides with analog culture and to some extent science.

01:05:55 ◼   ► So, but to find a place where I could write about, you know, what's the insight and impact into

01:06:00 ◼   ► seeing our cultural memory in this forum and the restrictions on us gaining access to it because

01:06:06 ◼   ► of copyright and other vagaries, there's not really an outlet that would do that. Now, The

01:06:10 ◼   ► Atlantic, there are places like The Atlantic, New Yorker, Harper's, they might run articles like

01:06:14 ◼   ► that, but it would be much bigger. This would be something I'd spend months on. The compensation

01:06:18 ◼   ► would probably be not good enough for it. I've talked to people who've written freelance for

01:06:23 ◼   ► for some of these publications.

01:06:24 ◼   ► And the experience is magnificent,

01:06:26 ◼   ► but they can't put money on the table

01:06:28 ◼   ► unless they have a contract or a staff job

01:06:31 ◼   ► to have money on the table.

01:06:32 ◼   ► They can't put food on the table,

01:06:33 ◼   ► they put money on the table,

01:06:34 ◼   ► unless they have an ongoing relationship

01:06:35 ◼   ► where they're just committed to writing some amount.

01:06:37 ◼   ► It's a tough business.

01:06:38 ◼   ► So being able to write short, interesting things,

01:06:41 ◼   ► like a thousand word range and get paid well for them

01:06:45 ◼   ► is actually sort of hard to find

01:06:47 ◼   ► unless it's either very technical

01:06:50 ◼   ► or very poorly, not getting well paid for,

01:06:52 ◼   ► getting a tiny number of cents per word.

01:06:54 ◼   ► No, I think it's very exciting, and I can't, you know—I think the fact that the magazine

01:06:59 ◼   ► is already paying competitive rates, and like you said, maybe as time goes on, maybe even

01:07:03 ◼   ► might push that forward and actually pay leading rates.

01:07:08 ◼   ► And why not? I mean, what if that drove some suggestions? What if we could get—I mean,

01:07:11 ◼   ► this is the thought experiment, and I'm not—

01:07:12 ◼   ► It's completely contrary to the way the magazine industry has gone in the last—

01:07:15 ◼   ► Yeah, and I'm not talking at a school here. I mean, this is—I tried to, you know, private

01:07:18 ◼   ► discussions are private, but this is, you know, also, this is in my head is, what if

01:07:21 ◼   ► it were that we could pay the best rate in the magazine industry, what writers would we get?

01:07:26 ◼   ► And this is not to be offensive to the writers who have been there already. We have some great

01:07:30 ◼   ► people who are terrific writers writing for us already. But what if we could get the leading—but

01:07:35 ◼   ► we would all agree. I mean, I know I'm not the leading writer in the country. I know there's

01:07:38 ◼   ► people who I would be delighted to have their words in the magazine. There's people I pick up

01:07:42 ◼   ► publications and go and buy them because there's articles by them in there. What if some of the

01:07:46 ◼   ► leading nonfiction writers in the country said, "Oh, well, I should be in the magazine." And so

01:07:50 ◼   ► we have people like me in the magazine who are very, you know, we're competent and hardworking,

01:07:54 ◼   ► we write good stuff, people like to read us, and we have people who are names because they're very,

01:07:59 ◼   ► very, very good. These are the people you idolize, you know, John Krakauer or something like that.

01:08:04 ◼   ► He demands a huge fee. What if we can pay a rate where he says, "Oh, that's great, I'll do that."

01:08:07 ◼   ► But we could pay that same fee to him, and we could say, "Pay the same fee to Dan Morin or whomever."

01:08:12 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah, no, I think it's terribly exciting. The other one last thing on the magazine before

01:08:16 ◼   ► before we let go of that is the other thing too

01:08:19 ◼   ► that it reminds me of the early days of the web

01:08:21 ◼   ► is that the magazine itself, the app,

01:08:24 ◼   ► is better than, as good or better than

01:08:28 ◼   ► all of the big name magazine apps in the store.

01:08:31 ◼   ► It is. - It's true.

01:08:31 ◼   ► - And it's totally true of the web.

01:08:33 ◼   ► And it was this incongruous thing,

01:08:36 ◼   ► and I saw it was one of the reasons that a decade ago

01:08:38 ◼   ► I saw Daring Fireball as an opportunity

01:08:40 ◼   ► is I thought I can make a better website

01:08:44 ◼   ► than these guys, these big name guys coming over

01:08:47 ◼   ► from Print Can Do, 'cause I'm gonna do something

01:08:48 ◼   ► that is clean, I'm gonna do something that is not cluttered,

01:08:51 ◼   ► I'm gonna do something that is, that looks good,

01:08:56 ◼   ► instead of looking bad.

01:08:57 ◼   ► And there are some magazines that have gotten better

01:08:59 ◼   ► over time, the New Yorker app has gotten a lot better

01:09:02 ◼   ► over time, where it's not, it's no longer published

01:09:04 ◼   ► as a series of static images, it's actual text,

01:09:07 ◼   ► and they use fonts, and they sort of have a magazine,

01:09:10 ◼   ► the magazine type layout now, where you go side to side

01:09:13 ◼   ► between articles, but an individual article scrolls down. But it used to be, and you can

01:09:18 ◼   ► still easily find big name print magazines that have apps where I get completely lost

01:09:24 ◼   ► two clicks into the thing. Where am I? How do I get back? How do I go to the next article?

01:09:30 ◼   ► I mean, easily. You just get—it's so easy to get lost, and the magazine is just simple.

01:09:36 ◼   ► Table of contents on the left, article scrolls down.

01:09:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, this is where I think you get

01:09:41 ◼   ► that benefit of maturity is that, you know,

01:09:44 ◼   ► we all have pity for the magazine publishers

01:09:45 ◼   ► in that, well, I shouldn't have pity, I guess,

01:09:47 ◼   ► is they didn't invest money figuring out how to do it right

01:09:50 ◼   ► in mobile formats for the most part

01:09:52 ◼   ► before like the iPad came along, right?

01:09:55 ◼   ► I mean, some did, some were early out,

01:09:56 ◼   ► but even doing it correctly, you know,

01:09:58 ◼   ► for decent web browsers in 2008 or 2009.

01:10:02 ◼   ► And so you're still watching, you know,

01:10:04 ◼   ► two years on the iPad, you're still watching them

01:10:06 ◼   ► fumble around to figure it out,

01:10:08 ◼   ► and you're gradually seeing the clarity

01:10:09 ◼   ► and there's a huge divergent path

01:10:10 ◼   ► between the ones that you're like,

01:10:12 ◼   ► I like the New Yorker app now, I can use it, it's good.

01:10:14 ◼   ► The Economist app started out, I think, a little rough,

01:10:16 ◼   ► not bad, but now it really has that iconic feel

01:10:19 ◼   ► of the magazine without being beholden to it.

01:10:21 ◼   ► And I actually, I'll often have read the whole issue

01:10:25 ◼   ► on the phone and then I get the print issue

01:10:26 ◼   ► and I'm like, oh, I don't need this anymore,

01:10:28 ◼   ► I just realized I read it.

01:10:29 ◼   ► But in my mind, I can hardly differentiate the experience

01:10:32 ◼   ► because the branding and the sort of ease are equal.

01:10:35 ◼   ► And yeah, I think so Marco gets the advantage

01:10:36 ◼   ► having spent years figuring out what that experience should be, and then he just applies

01:10:40 ◼   ► the lessons. You didn't have to start from scratch.

01:10:41 ◼   ► And not having to answer to any idiot, dumbass protectionist, pull your head out of your

01:10:47 ◼   ► ass guys above him so that when the magazine launched, he could actually honestly, unironically

01:10:54 ◼   ► promote as features that you can select and copy text.

01:10:57 ◼   ► That's true, though. Yes.

01:10:59 ◼   ► Right? We laugh, but that actually is a competitive advantage that the magazine has over most

01:11:05 ◼   ► magazines in newsstand is that you can swipe partial page at a time. Don't have to swipe

01:11:11 ◼   ► screen at a time. Right. Is a feature. All right. I have a couple other things I want

01:11:14 ◼   ► to talk about, but let's take a break and I want to tell you about our second sponsor.

01:11:19 ◼   ► And I am really, really impressed by this app. It's an app for the iPhone and iPad

01:11:23 ◼   ► called Griditor. G-R-I-D-D-I-T-O-R. And it's a photo editor for iPhone and iPad. And I

01:11:31 ◼   ► I talked about this on the show before,

01:11:33 ◼   ► and it's just, this is like the perfect type of thing

01:11:35 ◼   ► I'm talking about, where I have been frustrated

01:11:39 ◼   ► with the photo editing apps.

01:11:41 ◼   ► I'm talking about things like correcting exposure,

01:11:44 ◼   ► brightness, applying filters and looks, color balance,

01:11:48 ◼   ► and stuff like that to photos as you're posting

01:11:50 ◼   ► from the iPhone, and that I feel like a lot of these apps

01:11:52 ◼   ► are way too fiddly, and that they're sort of stuck UI-wise

01:11:57 ◼   ► in ways that aren't that, I don't know,

01:12:00 ◼   ► I just feel like there's something out there

01:12:01 ◼   ► that is different.

01:12:02 ◼   ► And I'll tell you what, Griditor is really, really different

01:12:05 ◼   ► and I really like the way that it goes.

01:12:06 ◼   ► The basic idea is you pick a photo to start with.

01:12:10 ◼   ► You go, just pick a photo from your camera roll

01:12:12 ◼   ► that you want to edit.

01:12:14 ◼   ► And it starts out in the middle of a grid.

01:12:17 ◼   ► And in all four directions,

01:12:18 ◼   ► there are filters and adjustments.

01:12:22 ◼   ► So for example, you might have at the top brightness

01:12:25 ◼   ► and on the right, something like a toy camera filter.

01:12:30 ◼   ► And the grid gets filled in with, if you go straight up towards brightness with a

01:12:36 ◼   ► series of thumbnails of your image getting brighter and brighter and

01:12:39 ◼   ► brighter until you get to a maximum brightness. And on the right, as the

01:12:44 ◼   ► filter, this toy camera style filter gets stronger and stronger and stronger. But

01:12:48 ◼   ► then along the diagonal you get thumbnails that are a combination of the

01:12:52 ◼   ► two. Brighter and this filter. And you can pick how strong they are. And you can

01:12:57 ◼   ► just scroll around what I guess I would call the canvas of this grid of

01:13:01 ◼   ► thumbnails and just see them and see how this works and then if you don't like

01:13:05 ◼   ► what you see you can just set a new set of filters and new sort of combination

01:13:10 ◼   ► of these things but the thing that I really like about it is that as you

01:13:13 ◼   ► explore these combinations of the things it's all visual and you don't have to

01:13:18 ◼   ► sit there and play with like how strong it's making you just see it already

01:13:22 ◼   ► already because the thumbnails are already on screen.

01:13:28 ◼   ► There's a whole bunch of photo editing apps for the iPhone that to me work with the exact

01:13:31 ◼   ► same interface.

01:13:32 ◼   ► And there's different, you know, you can, it's up to your taste how much you like them.

01:13:36 ◼   ► This one has an interface that to me is like nothing else I've seen before.

01:13:40 ◼   ► I really, really like it.

01:13:43 ◼   ► And I will emphasize that there's two different type of things you can do with the adjustments

01:13:47 ◼   ► in Gridditor.

01:13:48 ◼   ► One are basic edit controls.

01:13:50 ◼   ► are things like brightness, contrast, sharpening. And then second are the Instagram-style filters,

01:13:58 ◼   ► these vintage-type things like bleach bypass, toy camera, stuff like that. And so if you

01:14:06 ◼   ► aren't interested in that whole sort of retro filtering sort of adjustment-type thing, it's

01:14:12 ◼   ► still a great app because you have these basic things like making it brighter, darkener,

01:14:17 ◼   ► adjusting the filter going black and white.

01:14:20 ◼   ► Or the other way around, if you only are interested

01:14:24 ◼   ► in putting filters on your pictures.

01:14:26 ◼   ► It's a great collection of filters

01:14:27 ◼   ► and I really, really like the way

01:14:30 ◼   ► that you get to adjust how strong it is.

01:14:32 ◼   ► So you can just go a little tad in this direction

01:14:35 ◼   ► or you can go really, really strong in this direction

01:14:38 ◼   ► and you can see it before you finalize it.

01:14:42 ◼   ► Really, really good app.

01:14:43 ◼   ► I've been using it a lot the last two weeks

01:14:45 ◼   ► for the pictures I've been posting to Instagram.

01:14:47 ◼   ► It's really, really impressive,

01:14:50 ◼   ► and I think the developer has a lot of good ideas

01:14:54 ◼   ► going forward for how it's gonna improve

01:14:55 ◼   ► with new filters and adjustments.

01:14:57 ◼   ► So you can check it out, there's two ways to check it out.

01:14:59 ◼   ► You can go to griditor.com, G-R-I-D-D-I-T-O-R,

01:15:04 ◼   ► grid with two d's, I-T-O-R.com/the-talk-show,

01:15:09 ◼   ► or you could just go to the App Store

01:15:12 ◼   ► and search for griditor.

01:15:15 ◼   ► can tell, and this is one of those things, too, where I just love when a sponsor is clearly

01:15:21 ◼   ► a listener of the show because Tai Shimizu, the developer of the app, in the email where

01:15:29 ◼   ► we're talking about what I should talk about on the show, he said at the end, "Feel free

01:15:31 ◼   ► to mispronounce Gridditor as long as you spell it out." But I'm not quite sure how to

01:15:37 ◼   ► mispronounce it. I feel like I've gotten into this thing now where I'm expected to

01:15:40 ◼   ► mispronounce all the sponsor names, but like, "tonks." It's impossible to mispronounce

01:15:44 ◼   ► it.

01:15:45 ◼   ► tonics. I'm sorry, no, no, I'm sorry.

01:15:46 ◼   ► Jared "JT" Baum: Grid-eater? Grid-eater?

01:15:47 ◼   ► Pete L

01:15:49 ◼   ► This is, you know, this is, I think this is a-

01:15:51 ◼   ► Jared "JT" Baum; Grid-eater. Maybe grid-eater.

01:15:53 ◼   ► Pete L A daring fireball theme in general, I think, and one of the things that I think is like,

01:15:57 ◼   ► I love the fact that we now have all of these small developers, many of whom have figured out

01:16:02 ◼   ► a way to make either part or all of their living and sometimes have many employees even, but there's

01:16:07 ◼   ► still these independent shops, auteur vision, you know, the clarity of purpose. They're not answering

01:16:13 ◼   ► to other people. There's no investors. It's just they bootstrap themselves. They're

01:16:17 ◼   ► doing something that is what they want to do and coincidentally something that we all

01:16:21 ◼   ► like and want to buy. That's great. Cottage economy.

01:16:24 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Great, great app. Really, really encourage

01:16:26 ◼   ► you guys to buy it and support the show and support really, really innovative to me and

01:16:31 ◼   ► interface in photo editing for iOS. So the show's already gone long, but I want to

01:16:37 ◼   ► talk a little bit about some of the news that's gone on this week. The big news, I think,

01:16:40 ◼   ► did Steven Sinofsky get in the boot from Microsoft?

01:16:43 ◼   ► Pete: Holy cow. Well, yeah, and I think you and I exchanged some tweets about this. The

01:16:48 ◼   ► analysis I've seen in a few places was he was seen as the successor and was clearly

01:16:53 ◼   ► told he wasn't gonna be. And so he said, "All right, well, that's enough. I'm

01:16:57 ◼   ► done. If there's a glass ceiling and a bomber standing on it, so goodbye." And that would

01:17:02 ◼   ► make sense.

01:17:03 ◼   ► Ted: And I'll tell you, I met with him for the first time, and I guess the only time

01:17:09 ◼   ► that he's going to be at Microsoft. I met with him. I got a nice little 10-minute meet

01:17:13 ◼   ► at the Windows 8 event in New York two weeks ago. And I'm not going to say I have any…

01:17:21 ◼   ► Whether he had any inkling or not, I don't think I would have been able to pick up on

01:17:25 ◼   ► it anyway. But I can't help but think that he didn't, though, because I do feel, though,

01:17:31 ◼   ► that he had a lot of ideas going forward.

01:17:35 ◼   ► of the things we had talked about was that Windows 8 was designed with a more like iOS

01:17:45 ◼   ► style update schedule in mind where it's going to be a lot easier for people who have,

01:17:50 ◼   ► let's say, like a Surface to get an upgrade, you know, when if Windows 8.1 comes out or

01:17:55 ◼   ► something, I don't know, pick a version number. But it's going to be a lot more like the

01:17:58 ◼   ► way that iOS devices and Android devices, more like the mobile world where devices or

01:18:03 ◼   ► updates can get pushed to you and you can stay, you know, new features can be added

01:18:08 ◼   ► than the old PC world where it has been a bit of a grind and a lot of people don't

01:18:13 ◼   ► upgrade until they buy a new machine. And he seemed very excited about that.

01:18:17 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah, I'm wondering if it's, you know, they shipped 8 and they huddled with

01:18:22 ◼   ► the board and whatever and he said, "Okay, you know, I did this thing, we met the markets

01:18:26 ◼   ► out there, we did an incredible thing and what's next?" And was told, bombers here

01:18:32 ◼   ► we're re-upping him as CEO or you're not going to get more responsibility.

01:18:35 ◼   ► Because it was weird, you know, he didn't fail. He did a great job. I mean, for all the flaws that

01:18:40 ◼   ► we could point out with Windows 8 or Surface or strategy, you know, there's a lot of things. But

01:18:43 ◼   ► I think this is Microsoft's the best thing they've done, I don't know, since when.

01:18:48 ◼   ► Jon Streeter Well, he has two

01:18:50 ◼   ► two successes. He has two successes under his belt with Windows. And Office was always,

01:18:56 ◼   ► Office never hit those roadblocks. You know, he used to be in charge of Office and Office

01:19:01 ◼   ► continued to ship on time through that dry period, the XP years where Vista was stuck forever.

01:19:07 ◼   ► You know, when it was called Longhorn, and they actually had to give it a new name just

01:19:12 ◼   ► because Longhorn had been, just had gotten sold, you know. So Windows Vista shipped and was,

01:19:20 ◼   ► you know, widely, you know, collectively considered a bad, you know, pretty, pretty

01:19:25 ◼   ► terrible release, unpopular, not well designed. That's when he took over Windows. He had nothing

01:19:30 ◼   ► to do with Vista. He was in charge of Office then. So they said, "All right, Sinofsky's

01:19:34 ◼   ► done a good job with Office. We'll give him Windows." Windows 7 is a huge hit.

01:19:38 ◼   ► Pete: Absolutely. It's a terrific release.

01:19:40 ◼   ► Steven, it was an improvement in every way and shipped on time.

01:19:44 ◼   ► Pete; Yeah, address what ALSR, right? It's got, it had better security. I mean, Rich

01:19:47 ◼   ► Mogul said that Windows 7 had better security than of which 10.6 or 10.7, that they had

01:19:53 ◼   ► done so much more that was right. And you see that that's when all the malware people

01:19:57 ◼   ► had moved to -

01:19:58 ◼   ► Steven; Looked better.

01:19:58 ◼   ► moved to flash and third-party apps because they could no longer exploit Windows as effectively.

01:20:03 ◼   ► Jared: Looked better, worked better, solved what was their biggest technical problem,

01:20:06 ◼   ► which was the security stuff, and I can't emphasize it enough, most importantly, shipped

01:20:11 ◼   ► on time. Then, Windows 8, huge innovation in terms of the interface and the conception

01:20:18 ◼   ► of it, you know, true revolution in the interface of Windows, shipped on time.

01:20:24 ◼   ► Whether or not you agree with the choices they made, they were not muddled choices.

01:20:28 ◼   ► I mean, you could say they're muddled and they're trying to be too many fish and fowl and whatever.

01:20:31 ◼   ► But in terms of execution, they did exactly what they said, and there'll be improvements.

01:20:36 ◼   ► It's kind of a 1.0 in certain aspects.

01:20:38 ◼   ► They're doing Surface. It's an entirely new kind of product for them, what they're trying to achieve with it.

01:20:43 ◼   ► But I mean, all that aside, it's like, yeah, they did it. They managed, they did Windows 7, they did Windows 8.

01:20:47 ◼   ► Windows 8. They've got Windows Phone 8 is, I mean Windows Phone was a huge deal I think, you know,

01:20:53 ◼   ► to get that out the door and then to upgrade that. And they've made painful, they actually made Steve

01:20:57 ◼   ► Jobs like choices where they're like, although I think it was unfortunate if you're Windows Phone

01:21:02 ◼   ► 7 owner and thought you'd be able to get an upgrade to 8, they still did it. They didn't say,

01:21:06 ◼   ► because this is the problem. I knew a guy who worked in continuing engineering at Microsoft

01:21:10 ◼   ► for a number of years until several years ago, and it was in the XP to Vista days. And there was so

01:21:15 ◼   ► They had so much cruft, they had a support forever

01:21:18 ◼   ► in Windows.

01:21:19 ◼   ► One of the reasons Windows never got better

01:21:21 ◼   ► until I would say seven is that seven cut off

01:21:24 ◼   ► a lot more of the past.

01:21:25 ◼   ► That's why you have this big XP7 gap.

01:21:27 ◼   ► You can't just move, and you couldn't move everything

01:21:29 ◼   ► from XP to Vista either, but seven, they just said,

01:21:32 ◼   ► we're not supporting continuing engineering

01:21:33 ◼   ► for stuff that ran 15 years ago.

01:21:36 ◼   ► And that's the same painful choice they made

01:21:38 ◼   ► with Windows Phone 8.

01:21:39 ◼   ► Whether or not they should have engineered Phone 7

01:21:41 ◼   ► to be upgradable or not, they still made that decision.

01:21:45 ◼   ► - Definitely, and I think the other thing

01:21:48 ◼   ► that was very clear to me,

01:21:49 ◼   ► I've, you know, it only reaffirmed what my guesses were

01:21:54 ◼   ► coming into meeting him and talking to him,

01:21:55 ◼   ► but even with just 10 minutes talking to him,

01:21:57 ◼   ► he is clearly a product guy.

01:22:00 ◼   ► Like, he knows the surface,

01:22:04 ◼   ► and he knows what window it's eight is.

01:22:07 ◼   ► It is what he wants it to be,

01:22:08 ◼   ► and he really had a vision for what it would be.

01:22:13 ◼   ► He is not, absolutely was not just a totem at the top of the pole.

01:22:18 ◼   ► He drove the design of it in ways that I think were very clearly that you need somebody like

01:22:24 ◼   ► that.

01:22:25 ◼   ► You know, the auteur at the top of the enormous engineering team behind the whole thing to

01:22:31 ◼   ► drive it with a vision for where it's going.

01:22:34 ◼   ► So I would believe it was a, you know, "Okay, it's time to figure out what my next plan

01:22:38 ◼   ► is."

01:22:39 ◼   ► And they said, "Just keep doing what you're doing."

01:22:40 ◼   ► And he said, "I've been here 22 years.

01:22:42 ◼   ► I'm ready to do something else with my money and my time. Many millions and millions of

01:22:47 ◼   ► dollars he could start to do company. There's a lot of stuff that happens in Seattle that

01:22:51 ◼   ► could be interesting, and he could do something Greenfield that's not beholden to the past

01:22:54 ◼   ► and take his expertise and do that. So it could be interesting.

01:22:57 ◼   ► Well, the other thing that'll—and it just does seem oddly coincidental. A lot of people

01:23:01 ◼   ► are drawing connections to Scott Forstall at Apple.

01:23:04 ◼   ► Yes.

01:23:05 ◼   ► And for the obvious reason that he was in charge of the company's flagship OS, right?

01:23:11 ◼   ► that's both of those guys. iOS is clearly Apple's Windows, had a reputation for being

01:23:18 ◼   ► difficult to work with, had a, you know, seems like similar complaints about their management

01:23:25 ◼   ► style or collaboration across the company, and perhaps, you know, were ambitiously both

01:23:33 ◼   ► wanted to be CEO of the company.

01:23:36 ◼   ► So, yeah, I think that's it. They bump up against that, and these are people who built

01:23:39 ◼   ► huge fiefdoms and loyalties inside the company apart from, say, loyalty to the CEO or the

01:23:46 ◼   ► company's division.

01:23:47 ◼   ► Dave: And I also think there's a lot of loyalty underneath them in their divisions

01:23:51 ◼   ► to both of them. One thing that I think has sort of maybe gotten misperceived out there

01:23:56 ◼   ► with Forstall is that the sort of, "Yeah, everybody knows he was kind of difficult to

01:24:00 ◼   ► work with, so it's not totally shocking that this happened." Very surprising. The

01:24:05 ◼   ► between surprising and shocking, right? It's surprising but not shocking. But then I feel

01:24:09 ◼   ► like that's been rolled up into this nutshell of, well, Forstall was an asshole, so good

01:24:14 ◼   ► riddance. And that's not the case at all. There are people who worked under Forstall

01:24:18 ◼   ► who I've heard from who are very, very anxious and nervous because they think that maybe

01:24:23 ◼   ► Forstall was the last, that he was enough like Steve Jobs and that his ambition was

01:24:29 ◼   ► good for Apple because it made him not complacent. And one of the things I heard from so many

01:24:35 ◼   ► worked under him is yes, he was an asshole and difficult to work with across divisions,

01:24:39 ◼   ► but a lot of that he used to protect his people and the projects that they were doing. And

01:24:46 ◼   ► that the people, a lot of the people who worked under him felt like Forstall had their back.

01:24:52 ◼   ► And it's the people who were outside his team who didn't like him. So, it is absolutely

01:24:57 ◼   ► in no way like a no-brainer, "Hey, Apple's better off without Forstall." I mean, that's—

01:25:01 ◼   ► - That's what I hear as well is that he had a lot of loyalty. It was just if you want to do

01:25:05 ◼   ► something you didn't want to do if you're outside his group, then it's going to be a pain. You know,

01:25:09 ◼   ► I can't wait till from Singleton, when the talk that Michael Lop gave about, it was partly about

01:25:15 ◼   ► building teams, like someone has to be a dictator. I mean, that was part of his, I love this talk and

01:25:18 ◼   ► I can't wait till it's up online because everyone should watch this. And it's about, it's a really

01:25:23 ◼   ► beautiful talk about the importance of somebody making a decision and how a group can make the

01:25:29 ◼   ► the decision that someone has to make a decision,

01:25:31 ◼   ► how to get to a point where someone's gonna say,

01:25:32 ◼   ► this is it, as opposed to the Monty Python,

01:25:35 ◼   ► like we have a rotating executive authority

01:25:38 ◼   ► and we have a council that approves the action

01:25:40 ◼   ► of the anarchic syndicate, you know, it's like, no,

01:25:41 ◼   ► someone has to make a decision.

01:25:43 ◼   ► That's the only way good things happen

01:25:45 ◼   ► is there is a person who says that in the end.

01:25:46 ◼   ► And if that's the boss or it's someone

01:25:48 ◼   ► who's appointed in a group, whatever,

01:25:50 ◼   ► but you make that decision.

01:25:51 ◼   ► - Absolutely.

01:25:53 ◼   ► And when it comes to making those decisions,

01:25:55 ◼   ► the one thing that strikes me as a big difference

01:25:57 ◼   ► between the Microsoft and Apple situations is that you look at Microsoft and over the

01:26:01 ◼   ► last five years or so, maybe even fewer than that, but the list of top-level executives

01:26:08 ◼   ► who are in charge of product stuff who've been, you know, whether they were pushed or

01:26:12 ◼   ► whether they jumped, who knows, but who've left is pretty significant. Here's the list

01:26:16 ◼   ► I have. You've got Robbie Bach, who I forget what exactly. I think he was involved with

01:26:21 ◼   ► Xbox.

01:26:22 ◼   ► he was, uh, he was, was he, Jay Allard you're about to say, but it wasn't the,

01:26:26 ◼   ► Raleigh Buck I think was over top, Xbox and Zune I think was under his authority.

01:26:30 ◼   ► Ted

01:26:30 ◼   ► uh Jay Allard who was Xbox and designer Bach and Allard together were the guys who reputed to be

01:26:38 ◼   ► behind the courier tablet project that got scrapped at you know and it's disputed how far along it was

01:26:44 ◼   ► but that it was a couple years ago though and there's you know a potential there that those

01:26:49 ◼   ► guys could have shipped a a innovative tablet type project a couple of years ago if they had been

01:26:55 ◼   ► allowed to. Ray Ozzie out, you know, obviously was widely seen as a possible next CEO of

01:27:02 ◼   ► the company. And Steven Elop, who was forced out and now is the CEO at Nokia. And this

01:27:09 ◼   ► is not, you know, and I wish I'd written her name down. But it's Sinofsky's second

01:27:16 ◼   ► in command who's taking over Windows for now.

01:27:18 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, she sounds kick ass. I was reading about her background and her approach and

01:27:21 ◼   ► the people skill stuff that's talked about is like she could be a, she sounds like she's

01:27:27 ◼   ► going to be a really terrific replacement from where she comes from.

01:27:31 ◼   ► I've got to look this up because it's not right.

01:27:33 ◼   ► What do you think I can Google for?

01:27:36 ◼   ► Sinofsky replacement?

01:27:37 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:27:38 ◼   ► A lady replacement for Sinofsky.

01:27:40 ◼   ► Someone pointed out there's two women, I mean this is a Microsoft thing.

01:27:42 ◼   ► Microsoft's always been heavily male.

01:27:44 ◼   ► Julie Larson Green.

01:27:46 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:27:47 ◼   ► And she just, she sounds absolutely phenomenal in a very positive way.

01:27:51 ◼   ► And she is getting a lot of credit for spearheading the design of Metro, what I still can

01:27:56 ◼   ► insist on calling Metro, which is great. So, it does sound like there's not exactly,

01:28:01 ◼   ► it's not like, you know, there's a vacuum that Sinofsky's out.

01:28:04 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah, and Ray Ozzie, before Ray Ozzie left, you know, he re-architected the entire approach

01:28:08 ◼   ► to data storage and the cloud and everything Microsoft was doing. So, it sort of lost a little

01:28:14 ◼   ► bit of Azure and SkyDrive and all the things around Microsoft Live or Windows Live, whatever

01:28:20 ◼   ► they call it. I think all of that stuff either he is responsible for or moved it all together.

01:28:25 ◼   ► And I think it's hidden from most people what a transformation that is from a company

01:28:29 ◼   ► that was based on, you know, everyone has a personal computer and all the data is stored

01:28:32 ◼   ► locally situation.

01:28:33 ◼   ► Right. Absolutely. And I think that's, I absolutely think that's a big part of the

01:28:38 ◼   ► appeal of Windows 8 is that it's built from the ground up with, and Windows Phone 8, that

01:28:43 ◼   ► it's built with the ground up that you give it your live.com or whatever they call it

01:28:47 ◼   ► Now your Microsoft, you know, their equivalent of iCloud.

01:28:50 ◼   ► You give it your login and your data just syncs to the cloud.

01:28:54 ◼   ► - I kind of love that.

01:28:56 ◼   ► I mean, 'cause that's something that Apple could do.

01:28:58 ◼   ► I still have this idea that Apple is very solipsistic,

01:29:00 ◼   ► that it thinks, it talks about sharing and home sharing

01:29:03 ◼   ► and networking and whatever,

01:29:04 ◼   ► but it still thinks about one person in one computer

01:29:07 ◼   ► and one person on one computer.

01:29:09 ◼   ► And over time it's gotten better,

01:29:11 ◼   ► but the fact that they don't give you enough,

01:29:14 ◼   ► I mean, even iCloud doesn't really think about you

01:29:16 ◼   ► being in different places at different times

01:29:18 ◼   ► on different devices the way people actually do it.

01:29:20 ◼   ► It's getting there.

01:29:21 ◼   ► I think it still needs more improvement.

01:29:22 ◼   ► - It's a great way to put it, solipsistic.

01:29:24 ◼   ► That is true though, the company is,

01:29:27 ◼   ► it's in Apple's DNA.

01:29:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, home sharing for instance,

01:29:31 ◼   ► when they introduced it on iTunes,

01:29:32 ◼   ► they're like, oh this will be great.

01:29:33 ◼   ► And it's like, home sharing is a home sharing,

01:29:34 ◼   ► it's about copying stuff between machines.

01:29:36 ◼   ► Apple is always about copying, not syncing, and not sharing.

01:29:39 ◼   ► They wanna move copies of data.

01:29:41 ◼   ► I mean that's iTunes match,

01:29:42 ◼   ► and they move it, stream it, whatever.

01:29:44 ◼   ► And I can't tell you the number of people who said,

01:29:46 ◼   ► wish my iPad could have user accounts so I could have my kids stuff on it in mind. I

01:29:50 ◼   ► mean, that's not a—that wouldn't break Apple's model of how the iPad works. It

01:29:55 ◼   ► would be an enhancement. But they just want you to buy multiple iPads. That's it.

01:29:58 ◼   ► I guess. I don't know. But anyway, no offense to Julie Larson-Green, who it does seem like

01:30:02 ◼   ► is a good choice to take over at Windows, but she's moving up into the executive ranks

01:30:07 ◼   ► at Microsoft. In terms of longstanding top-level product-focused executives, they're all

01:30:13 ◼   ► out.

01:30:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:30:15 ◼   ► Whereas at Apple, it's still, even with some reasonable amount of turnover over the years,

01:30:21 ◼   ► with Bertrand leaving and Avi Tevainian before him and Rubenstein and Tony Fidell.

01:30:29 ◼   ► - There's a long list, but the funny thing is, there's a long list of people who left Apple at

01:30:32 ◼   ► a high level, but there's still a long list of people who've been there for a long time.

01:30:35 ◼   ► - Right, Johnny Ivey.

01:30:36 ◼   ► - They brought people through and up. So you have 10-year-plus veterans or 15-year veterans

01:30:41 ◼   ► or people go back to Next even having lost like seven or eight names you could list off.

01:30:45 ◼   ► Ted: Right. So, in the, you know, not to be gruesome, but let's say the hit-by-a-bus

01:30:50 ◼   ► scenario where Tim Cook needs to be replaced suddenly or surprisingly,

01:30:54 ◼   ► they have a wide range of candidates right there within the company to think about. And Microsoft

01:31:03 ◼   ► doesn't. It does seem like there's a bit of a Shakespearean, you know, that Balmer is a sort

01:31:09 ◼   ► of nervous king who, as soon as anybody rises up, they're out. Their heads come off.

01:31:16 ◼   ► Pete: I think it's true, and it's very easy to fail at Microsoft at the things you need to

01:31:19 ◼   ► succeed at, and Sinofsky did a remarkable job actually succeeding at them. It's so hard to

01:31:26 ◼   ► get anything done that requires breaking silos there, and I think Surface, I think Windows Phone

01:31:32 ◼   ► 7 and 8, Surface, even to some small extent, Zune, because it let them, they were creating a new silo

01:31:38 ◼   ► that just bypassed all the existing departments.

01:31:41 ◼   ► And in Windows 8, all these things required cooperation

01:31:45 ◼   ► and integration among people who don't want to work together.

01:31:47 ◼   ► And he made it happen.

01:31:48 ◼   ► And I mean, that's what I'm excited about

01:31:49 ◼   ► with the new Apple organization is the old sort of breakdowns

01:31:54 ◼   ► didn't make sense.

01:31:55 ◼   ► And the new thing of like services, software,

01:31:56 ◼   ► and hardware is much more sensible in terms

01:31:59 ◼   ► of what they need to get done.

01:32:00 ◼   ► Then they have to work at a high level across those groups.

01:32:02 ◼   ► But Microsoft has so many fiefdoms

01:32:04 ◼   ► that it is very, very easy to be put

01:32:06 ◼   ► in charge of a high-profile project

01:32:07 ◼   ► project and fail because you cannot break through the other high profile people who

01:32:12 ◼   ► don't want to do the thing you need to succeed.

01:32:14 ◼   ► I could not agree more, and I really think you just nailed it. And I do think that is

01:32:18 ◼   ► – and that's what I'm left at looking at the difference between Apple and Microsoft

01:32:22 ◼   ► from a structural standpoint, especially post-Forstall, is this lack of product-focused silos, right?

01:32:30 ◼   ► Where Forstall had – he owned iOS. He – you know, Forstall was iOS, and that was his fiefdom,

01:32:36 ◼   ► And it was obviously, if you look at Apple, what iOS means to Apple, it's a powerful

01:32:41 ◼   ► fiefdom.

01:32:43 ◼   ► There isn't anything like that left anymore.

01:32:45 ◼   ► And I think the idea is going forward, if Apple is going to continue to stay on top,

01:32:51 ◼   ► they need the same sort of mindset they've had for the last 15 years, which is this lack

01:32:55 ◼   ► of fear of cannibalizing themselves, right?

01:32:59 ◼   ► It doesn't matter if the iPhone makes people stop selling buying music playing iPods

01:33:06 ◼   ► Because they're just playing their music on their iPhone because they're still buying another Apple device

01:33:10 ◼   ► It doesn't matter if the iPad makes people stop buying

01:33:14 ◼   ► MacBooks or buy fewer of them because they're buying an Apple device

01:33:18 ◼   ► And so if they come up with something that makes people say I don't know stop buying iPhones or stop buying

01:33:24 ◼   ► iPads as long as it's an Apple product, it's okay, but they don't want to have powerful executives

01:33:29 ◼   ► in charge of those things who are blocking it.

01:33:32 ◼   ► - This is the first time Microsoft's been in that position

01:33:34 ◼   ► where they had the thing that could replace their cash cow,

01:33:38 ◼   ► right, because they own stuff

01:33:39 ◼   ► and the way they've even licensed

01:33:41 ◼   ► and have a stake in the success of the phone,

01:33:43 ◼   ► if people stop buying PCs, they're great.

01:33:45 ◼   ► They're like, if they sell a billion surfaces

01:33:48 ◼   ► and PC sales drop 95%, they're in great shape.

01:33:51 ◼   ► And that's the first time since ever

01:33:53 ◼   ► that's been true for Microsoft.

01:33:55 ◼   ► - So the way Apple's set up is that there shouldn't be

01:33:59 ◼   ► executives blocking that because whatever the new great thing is the hardware is going

01:34:03 ◼   ► to be designed by Johnny Ive and the software I guess now will be visually and maybe you

01:34:09 ◼   ► know it's unclear what his role software will be but you know it's going to be design

01:34:14 ◼   ► is Johnny Ive's that's what he does so it doesn't matter what product the marketing

01:34:19 ◼   ► is going to be done by Phil Schiller doesn't matter it doesn't you know Schiller doesn't

01:34:22 ◼   ► have to worry about something it's not like Phil Schiller is in charge of iPad marketing

01:34:26 ◼   ► He's in charge of all Apple marketing.

01:34:29 ◼   ► The software is gonna be engineered

01:34:31 ◼   ► by Craig Federighi's team, right?

01:34:33 ◼   ► So nobody really has a product-centric beefdom to protect

01:34:38 ◼   ► as long as it's something new from Apple.

01:34:41 ◼   ► I think it's a very interesting way to structure

01:34:44 ◼   ► the executives of the company.

01:34:47 ◼   ► It's certainly not guaranteed to work.

01:34:49 ◼   ► I mean, the big problem is you gotta come up

01:34:50 ◼   ► with these ideas in the first place.

01:34:52 ◼   ► But I think that's clearly the vision.

01:34:55 ◼   ► - Ivis, the vice president of,

01:34:58 ◼   ► or director of Bauhaus, I think,

01:34:59 ◼   ► is he's gonna be all form follows function,

01:35:01 ◼   ► whatever that means inside the company,

01:35:03 ◼   ► where he doesn't have to direct the way the hardware works,

01:35:06 ◼   ► but he's gonna be responsible for the interaction with it,

01:35:09 ◼   ► as I think he has been.

01:35:11 ◼   ► I wanna know what big Bob Mansfield comes up with.

01:35:14 ◼   ► What is his next direction?

01:35:15 ◼   ► 'Cause he is clearly like, I think Bob Mansfield,

01:35:18 ◼   ► not that he's been underrated,

01:35:19 ◼   ► but the guy is responsible for so much innovation there.

01:35:23 ◼   ► So much of the behind the scenes things,

01:35:24 ◼   ► clearly the manufacturing side and the advances in hardware, he has been key in making those

01:35:30 ◼   ► things happen that allow the company to sell the iPad at $500, it was introduced and so

01:35:35 ◼   ► forth. So I want to know what he's working on next.

01:35:36 ◼   ► Just think about what – I mean, I think Mansfield gets a huge amount of credit for

01:35:40 ◼   ► this. I believe. I'd be shocked if he didn't. But just think about what's happened to

01:35:46 ◼   ► battery design over the last 10 years. Like, it used to be something – I mean, I can't

01:35:50 ◼   ► even remember the last time that I saw a review of an Apple product where it did complain

01:35:55 ◼   ► about the unremovable battery. Like, they've finally crammed it through everybody's heads

01:35:59 ◼   ► out there that this is the way to go with battery design.

01:36:02 ◼   ► Is to—

01:36:03 ◼   ► Yeah, I see more and more—you see more and more reviews where they're complaining about

01:36:05 ◼   ► the battery life of other devices. That's flipped on its head tremendously, you know.

01:36:09 ◼   ► And other devices now have built-in batteries too, because they've gone with the shaped

01:36:12 ◼   ► lithium thing as well.

01:36:14 ◼   ► these crazy shapes that like almost spill like a liquid through every available…

01:36:20 ◼   ► Pete: It's like foam.

01:36:21 ◼   ► Ted: Every available square millimeter of space inside the device is taken up by a battery,

01:36:27 ◼   ► I think is a huge, you know, Mansfield-driven innovation. I think that the, you know,

01:36:33 ◼   ► the way that people think about battery-powered devices is hugely influenced by what he's done

01:36:40 ◼   ► over the last 10 years.

01:36:41 ◼   ► What's funny is I got the craziest comment on it. I wrote an Economist blog entry about

01:36:45 ◼   ► Skeuomorphism. And I wasn't saying Scott Forsall was fired because of it, but I said we could

01:36:49 ◼   ► see changes because he was a proponent of it and Ive is not. And a lot of people hate

01:36:54 ◼   ► some of the wares that crept in. So I wrote a piece called "Skew You," right? And there's

01:36:58 ◼   ► a crazy commenter on it who's like, "Apple does not make hardware. Apple contracts all

01:37:03 ◼   ► its hardware manufacturing. It is not responsible for it." And I'm like, "You can't even begin

01:37:07 ◼   ► to respond to it. It was just this wonderful thing. It's like, I don't think you understand

01:37:12 ◼   ► what making means anymore. Making is now, it's the fabulous chip design thing that goes back now for

01:37:19 ◼   ► decades practically, is companies that make electronics are responsible for,

01:37:24 ◼   ► it's the architectural side of it and the manufacturer is now competitive. They can

01:37:29 ◼   ► find the best firm to do it. This whole thing about Samsung, maybe they stopped working with

01:37:34 ◼   ► With Samsung, great.

01:37:34 ◼   ► There are plenty of other companies

01:37:36 ◼   ► who'd be delighted to pick up a multi-billion dollar

01:37:38 ◼   ► contract for screens and other things.

01:37:40 ◼   ► You know, it might take time to get production ramped up,

01:37:42 ◼   ► but it's out there.

01:37:44 ◼   ► - Well, and look at what Apple has done with things like

01:37:46 ◼   ► unibody aluminum construction, right?

01:37:49 ◼   ► I mean, this is something that,

01:37:50 ◼   ► there were no devices that were like this,

01:37:52 ◼   ► and now all of Apple's devices are like this,

01:37:54 ◼   ► where they start with blocks of aluminum

01:37:56 ◼   ► and drill the case out of one solid piece of aluminum.

01:38:00 ◼   ► - Love that.

01:38:01 ◼   ► - Is there anything left that Apple makes

01:38:02 ◼   ► isn't—can't be described that way?

01:38:04 ◼   ► Pete: Ah, the Mac Min… No, wait a minute. I'm sorry, the Mini, I've got one in front

01:38:08 ◼   ► of me. The Mini… Well, no, I think they do. I don't think that's actually constructed.

01:38:12 ◼   ► I'm feeling it right now. No, you're right. It's actually carved out.

01:38:14 ◼   ► Ted, Apple TV is not aluminum, right? That's plastic.

01:38:17 ◼   ► Pete Yeah, that's right. But that's about, no,

01:38:18 ◼   ► I think you're right. The airport express is plastic too.

01:38:22 ◼   ► Ted Couple of gadgets. Maybe, but I still think that the best way to think of Apple TV is not

01:38:25 ◼   ► really as a device but as like a peripheral.

01:38:27 ◼   ► Pete Yeah, absolutely. I can't wait. I want Apple

01:38:30 ◼   ► TV to add Wi-Fi and then it can be an Apple Express TV and you're all done.

01:38:34 ◼   ► You don't need that.

01:38:34 ◼   ► I guess the Mac Pro is probably not Unibody. I don't know what you'd call it.

01:38:37 ◼   ► Not yet. Well, the next one will be obviously. The next one will be...

01:38:41 ◼   ► But all the MacBooks are, the iMacs are. Now with the latest revisions to the iPhone and iPad,

01:38:48 ◼   ► they all are. And it's hugely innovative that you start with these blocks of aluminum and drill

01:38:55 ◼   ► things out of it. And it gives their products this incredible build quality and feel difference

01:39:00 ◼   ► that is unlike everybody else's. You know, like truly a blind person can really sense

01:39:07 ◼   ► a visceral aesthetic difference between Apple products and competing products.

01:39:11 ◼   ► Right. And they started down this path. I think materials science has been an overlooked

01:39:15 ◼   ► part of, I shouldn't say overlooked because you see it sort of from the outside, but I

01:39:18 ◼   ► think like even the Bondi Blue, the original translucent plastic they used that no one

01:39:22 ◼   ► else was using for computers. I think it was already in vacuum cleaners, wasn't it? There

01:39:26 ◼   ► were some famous things at the time. But I think Apple, since I've came on and since

01:39:30 ◼   ► Jobs came back, they have looked to material advances as a way to more fully express the

01:39:36 ◼   ► vision in a way that other companies have been unable to. And other companies say, "All

01:39:40 ◼   ► right. Oh, well, they're doing that. We'll do that because we can use that material too,"

01:39:43 ◼   ► as opposed to, "Why is no other firm looking for the next interesting material advances

01:39:48 ◼   ► that would give them a unique, innovative look?" I mean, Samsung, we're looking

01:39:51 ◼   ► at the profit Samsung is producing now, I want Samsung, I want Microsoft to be making

01:39:56 ◼   ► stuff that is as interesting as what Apple does with the same functionality and same

01:40:02 ◼   ► build quality. There's no excuse for them not doing it for profit or design side.

01:40:06 ◼   ► Dave: I don't think Samsung even tries, but I will give Microsoft credit with the

01:40:11 ◼   ► Surface for trying, and I think that the Surface is the closest I've seen to Apple-style

01:40:17 ◼   ► build quality. It is very nice, I think. And they also, even from a material standpoint,

01:40:22 ◼   ► I don't think it's as nice as the aluminum, but I do think that the magnesium, whatever

01:40:28 ◼   ► stuff they're using is pretty good. Pete: But don't you want, don't you want

01:40:30 ◼   ► to wake up one day and say, "Company X is doing something that is new." I mean,

01:40:35 ◼   ► that's why we all felt about the UI for Metro. It was like, "Oh my god, Microsoft has broken

01:40:39 ◼   ► the window, broken through the glass here and done something." I want the same feeling of hardware.

01:40:42 ◼   ► I want to get up one day and say, "Ah, this thing is, oh my god, what they're doing with

01:40:47 ◼   ► the technology, with the science, it's beautiful, it's functional, it's unique, and it's in advance.

01:40:52 ◼   ► And I want someone to do that that's not Apple and is not a company that sells $20,000 components

01:40:58 ◼   ► of some kind. Right. Exactly. Let me toss it—we've gone on long enough, but let me toss out

01:41:03 ◼   ► something. I have to bring it up because I've seen it on Twitter too many times because it sounds so

01:41:08 ◼   ► soap opera-y perfect is the idea that either one or both of Sinofsky or Forstall will switch teams,

01:41:15 ◼   ► and maybe Forstall will take over software at Microsoft and/or Sinofsky would end up at Apple.

01:41:20 ◼   ► - That would be hilarious. I don't know what the culture class would be like. I could imagine

01:41:23 ◼   ► Forstall going to Microsoft because they're looking for something different, innovative.

01:41:26 ◼   ► They could give him a ton of power and he could just come in and do what he wants to do,

01:41:30 ◼   ► break heads, fire people, and hire new folks and make changes. I wonder if Sinofsky

01:41:35 ◼   ► brought into Apple would be able to be slotted into a position where he would

01:41:41 ◼   ► feel like he had enough authority because of the structure.

01:41:43 ◼   ► - I don't think there's any chance

01:41:45 ◼   ► Sinofsky would wind up at Apple

01:41:46 ◼   ► because I don't think there's room for him, right?

01:41:48 ◼   ► Craig Federighi's already there in charge of software

01:41:51 ◼   ► and I think that's the only sort of position

01:41:52 ◼   ► that he would take.

01:41:54 ◼   ► I think it's more likely that he's gonna do something

01:41:57 ◼   ► like Tony Fidell who'd started Nest.

01:41:59 ◼   ► - Exactly. - And I think the same

01:42:00 ◼   ► is true for Forstall too.

01:42:02 ◼   ► He is so ambitious and he's clear,

01:42:04 ◼   ► he is so smart and so successful.

01:42:08 ◼   ► I have no doubt in my mind that we have not heard

01:42:12 ◼   ► the last of Scott Forstall.

01:42:14 ◼   ► But I would expect it to be something more like

01:42:17 ◼   ► what Fidel did with his own startup

01:42:20 ◼   ► and being the CEO and doing something outside.

01:42:23 ◼   ► I don't know, who would have thought thermostat, right?

01:42:26 ◼   ► - No, I saw that.

01:42:27 ◼   ► Well, it's like Sonos.

01:42:28 ◼   ► Sonos was, and not top level Apple people,

01:42:30 ◼   ► but some great mid-level Apple people started Sonos

01:42:33 ◼   ► and it's like the gold standard.

01:42:35 ◼   ► It's been around what, for 10, eight or 10 years now?

01:42:37 ◼   ► And Sonos is the Apple of home stereo equipment.

01:42:41 ◼   ► something out there that's under our noses

01:42:44 ◼   ► and none of us see it, but something like that.

01:42:46 ◼   ► - It's cars, because a car automotive systems

01:42:49 ◼   ► are terrible almost uniformly,

01:42:51 ◼   ► and Microsoft actually develops one of them.

01:42:53 ◼   ► There's six million systems equipped with OnStar

01:42:57 ◼   ► that are turned on right now.

01:42:58 ◼   ► I mean, I forget the number that have OnStar built in

01:43:00 ◼   ► that aren't activated.

01:43:01 ◼   ► There is room for some really tremendous work

01:43:03 ◼   ► at automotive integration in car entertainment systems

01:43:07 ◼   ► and logistics and whatever, and that's a space.

01:43:11 ◼   ► I mean, Forstall has exactly the right experience outside,

01:43:13 ◼   ► I forget the automotive side, but the making that part work

01:43:16 ◼   ► and there's a ton of money there.

01:43:18 ◼   ► - The thing I can't-- - That's my prediction.

01:43:19 ◼   ► - I couldn't see Forstall going to Microsoft either,

01:43:22 ◼   ► though, really. - Yeah.

01:43:23 ◼   ► - Unless they wanted to give him something new

01:43:25 ◼   ► that he could do from the ground up.

01:43:27 ◼   ► He's not gonna take over Windows, though,

01:43:28 ◼   ► because he already had an OS

01:43:30 ◼   ► that was exactly what he wanted it to be.

01:43:33 ◼   ► iOS, there's nothing in iOS that Forstall didn't want in it.

01:43:36 ◼   ► - Right, interesting. - It's exactly, you know,

01:43:38 ◼   ► It is the – everything including the programming language you use to make it and the framework,

01:43:43 ◼   ► which is this second generation version of the next thing that Forstall had been working

01:43:48 ◼   ► on since 1989 anyway, was all exactly what he wanted and all of it very, very different

01:43:53 ◼   ► than Windows. There's no way he's going to go in there and take over Windows because

01:43:56 ◼   ► it's –

01:43:57 ◼   ► Oh, wait, wait. John, I want to ask you something quickly though before it works for so long.

01:43:59 ◼   ► So OS X running on ARM, right? Going to happen.

01:44:02 ◼   ► Oh, def – I would be shocked if it's not already running on ARM.

01:44:06 ◼   ► - 'Cause that's a four stall theme,

01:44:08 ◼   ► but it's, I mean, right, they've gotta have it in the lab.

01:44:10 ◼   ► Of course they have it.

01:44:11 ◼   ► - Right, I wouldn't be surprised if it's the exact same lab

01:44:13 ◼   ► where it used to run on Intel.

01:44:15 ◼   ► - Exactly.

01:44:16 ◼   ► - You know, in the PowerPC days.

01:44:17 ◼   ► - iOS is on ARM, so of course, and it's, you know,

01:44:20 ◼   ► I don't know exactly how compiled and divergent

01:44:22 ◼   ► it is at the kernel level,

01:44:23 ◼   ► but one suspects that they've been running stuff

01:44:25 ◼   ► on multiple kinds of chips, including ARM,

01:44:28 ◼   ► since they released OS X, or two years or three years

01:44:32 ◼   ► before they released OS X in iOS form, one assumes.

01:44:35 ◼   ► So I heard that rumor and I was like,

01:44:38 ◼   ► that doesn't seem like a big transition at all.

01:44:40 ◼   ► I mean, it'll be hard for the programmers,

01:44:41 ◼   ► but Rosetta made that transition.

01:44:43 ◼   ► If they can do the same kind of thing,

01:44:45 ◼   ► if they can have a new Rosetta for ARM,

01:44:47 ◼   ► if it's capable, which I think it would be.

01:44:49 ◼   ► - I would be flabbergasted if they didn't have,

01:44:53 ◼   ► as an engineering principle throughout all of Mac OS X,

01:44:56 ◼   ► just hard and fast rules in place that you've,

01:45:02 ◼   ► don't put any, don't program anything

01:45:04 ◼   ► in Intel-specific in here.

01:45:05 ◼   ► if you really do need to go and do something in assembler, here's, you know, block it off

01:45:10 ◼   ► very, very neatly so that it can be duplicated, you know, in a processor agnostic fashion.

01:45:18 ◼   ► Pete: But it seems totally logical to me. I heard the rumor and I was like, well,

01:45:21 ◼   ► fine. I mean, why not? Because that uncouples it again from another point failure and they have

01:45:26 ◼   ► much more control over arm chips and manufacturing of various abilities.

01:45:31 ◼   ► And I do think it's easy to forget just how much more performance

01:45:35 ◼   ► Heavy Mac OS X is than iOS just based on you know, just based on the on the on the

01:45:41 ◼   ► The the the rules for process lifetime, you know that you can run multiple things side by side and that you your Safari tabs

01:45:51 ◼   ► Continue processing JavaScript in the background as opposed to on iOS where as soon as you leave Safari, it's all put to sleep

01:45:57 ◼   ► But think about all the stuff they've added to Mac OS X in the last two releases along

01:46:02 ◼   ► those lines of if you follow these APIs, your app might be put to sleep.

01:46:07 ◼   ► Absolutely.

01:46:08 ◼   ► Right?

01:46:09 ◼   ► And I think that, you know, I think that has performance benefits on Intel, but I think

01:46:12 ◼   ► it's very, very clearly about keeping their options open going forward.

01:46:16 ◼   ► I mean, imagine—

01:46:17 ◼   ► And there's the core thing, too, though.

01:46:18 ◼   ► I mean, there can be ARM trips.

01:46:20 ◼   ► You can have 16 core and 32 core.

01:46:22 ◼   ► ARM trips are multiple.

01:46:23 ◼   ► I mean, not that they're magic or anything, but I think Apple's done everything it can

01:46:27 ◼   ► with Grand Central or all their multi-processing, multi-threading and all that is that conceivably

01:46:33 ◼   ► you could slipstream in a supercord thing that's not eight, you know, like what's the

01:46:38 ◼   ► top now? I think the Mac Pro is eight. Is there a double quad core or something?

01:46:42 ◼   ► I think they've got a 16 too.

01:46:44 ◼   ► They're 16, but conceivably, you know, I keep reading about that's the only drop in advance

01:46:48 ◼   ► past advance.

01:46:49 ◼   ► No, but it's all about… Grand Central Dispatch is all about one thing, which is the idea

01:46:52 ◼   ► that you're going to have slower, more energy-efficient cores, but more of them,

01:46:57 ◼   ► and that that's how performance is going to increase, and how can you best take advantage

01:47:01 ◼   ► of that in a way that's friendly to developers, that doesn't make their minds explode with all the

01:47:07 ◼   ► ways that parallel programming traditionally could. No, and imagine, just imagine a MacBook

01:47:15 ◼   ► Air that's arm-based, how much thinner and lighter it could be. It could be, you know,

01:47:19 ◼   ► All of a sudden it might make our existing hairs look fat and heavy. I mean, and then

01:47:23 ◼   ► Apple's design, Apple designs inexorably go in the direction of thinner and lighter.

01:47:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't even think like imagine something that's even smaller than a Mac Mini. I mean,

01:47:37 ◼   ► I assume that for Apple that the Mac Mini actually feels big to them now. So something that was even

01:47:43 ◼   ► smaller and had all the capability, it's got a solid state, only sold with a solid state drive,

01:47:47 ◼   ► with ARM processors so it runs cooler, has Thunderbolt and USB 3, and that's it.

01:47:52 ◼   ► So…

01:47:52 ◼   ► And I would also say, too, don't count them out on the iPod front either in terms of, like, getting…

01:48:00 ◼   ► not just thinking about ARM chips that are powerful enough to run Mac OS X in any fashion,

01:48:07 ◼   ► but think, too, about ARM chips that are small enough to be on, like, a nano-type device.

01:48:12 ◼   ► Yes, yes, because they have the—it's the diversity of the ARM ecosystem that I think

01:48:17 ◼   ► is—it's not only can they bid out where it gets made. They have greater flexibility

01:48:22 ◼   ► and control and cost and sources, but that the range of ARM is so huge compared to what

01:48:28 ◼   ► Intel can offer them right now on the sort of monolithic CPU scale.

01:48:33 ◼   ► Think about like an ARM chip or a system on a chip, in Apple's perspective, where you're

01:48:37 ◼   ► thinking about a device that says like watch size like the old Nanos but therefore because

01:48:43 ◼   ► it's so small you don't need to worry about powerful graphics processing because whatever

01:48:47 ◼   ► this screen has even if it's a retina screen at that size it's not going to require significant

01:48:51 ◼   ► graphics processing. Just think about a little tiny super low power thing with the CPU of

01:48:57 ◼   ► like an A5 Bluetooth 4 and you know what kind of crazy things you could do with such a little

01:49:03 ◼   ► a little thing.

01:49:04 ◼   ► Yeah, the i-pebble. Oh, wait, someone's already made that. I did not buy a Pebble watch, but…

01:49:08 ◼   ► I did. I don't know where it is, though. When are they coming out?

01:49:11 ◼   ► Sometimes. Hey, Elevation Doc finished shipping last month, and they now have lightning adapters

01:49:15 ◼   ► and soon someday lightning connectors. So it'll all come around.

01:49:19 ◼   ► Yeah. Well, Glenn, thank you very much for being here. This is a great show.

01:49:22 ◼   ► Pleasure. So nice to talk to you.

01:49:23 ◼   ► I want to thank our sponsors again, Tonks Coffee, Best Coffee in the World, and Gridditor,

01:49:29 ◼   ► or as I like to call it, grid-a-tor, a really, really innovative and useful photo editing app

01:49:37 ◼   ► for iPhone and iPad.

01:49:38 ◼   ► [BLANK_AUDIO]