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The Talk Show

24: It’s Like Drug Money, with Glenn Fleishman

 

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.

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