The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► You haven't been on the show in a while. Last time I looked it up, it was episode 2 11.

00:00:03 ◼   ► It was the last Jedi Star Wars spectacular with with guy English and a cavalcade of other

00:00:10 ◼   ► other stars. Somehow you've gone a year and a half without being on my show. But now here

00:00:14 ◼   ► you are. And I've had the entire cast of ATP on consecutive episodes.

00:00:18 ◼   ► Well, there you go. Well, you're really afraid that like I haven't been on like, it's my

00:00:22 ◼   ► fault.

00:00:23 ◼   ► You know, I'm not the actor in that sense. I haven't been on. Is that a thing I can do?

00:00:31 ◼   ► Can I just come on? Yeah, you can always just pop on. Yeah, just keep your Skype open. Mm-hmm.

00:00:36 ◼   ► Invite yourself on. That's how that's how it works at Moltz. But I thought it was a special

00:00:40 ◼   ► special relationship as they say, how's your summer going? Pretty good. It's good. Good

00:00:45 ◼   ► summer this year. I think I saw a bunch of your pictures on Instagram. Boy, your kids are getting

00:00:50 ◼   ► big all of our kids are getting big their monsters that my daughter is I

00:00:54 ◼   ► didn't post most of the picture that but she's she's taller than everyone in the

00:00:58 ◼   ► family now practically not taller than you know no Jonas is sprouting up he's

00:01:05 ◼   ► he's has a we were I guess I forget he took jeans to Marcus Beach House but uh

00:01:12 ◼   ► he had to take jeans somewhere and it was a pair of jeans that ain't you know

00:01:16 ◼   ► in a way that that Amy knows but they were definitely a pair of jeans that he

00:01:22 ◼   ► had just worn like the last week of school and they're too short it was the

00:01:27 ◼   ► end of July yeah they do that man we've got that's a fair amount to talk about I

00:01:35 ◼   ► want to go down history lane maybe later on just talk about Mac OS in general it

00:01:44 ◼   ► It struck me today to look it up.

00:01:45 ◼   ► I seemed to remember, and my memory served me correctly, that you ended your 15-year

00:01:52 ◼   ► series of extensive Mac OS X reviews, I guess ending with OS X reviews, at 10.10, I guess

00:02:00 ◼   ► because you thought that was a nice number.

00:02:03 ◼   ► But now we're up to 10.15 this summer.

00:02:05 ◼   ► So now we will have the fifth one that you have not reviewed.

00:02:09 ◼   ► Talk about it later.

00:02:12 ◼   ► thing I wanted to talk about every once in a while I bring it up but I like to

00:02:17 ◼   ► sometimes wonder when's the last time you changed your mind not you in

00:02:22 ◼   ► particular but one has changed their mind I think it's a problem with our

00:02:25 ◼   ► species in general that we we make up our minds and and we don't we don't

00:02:31 ◼   ► change them but if you don't change your mind what's your assumption that you're

00:02:34 ◼   ► always right you've never been wrong if you're not changing your mind you're not

00:02:38 ◼   ► identifying the times that you're wrong, right?

00:02:41 ◼   ► - Well, you may have arrived at what you think

00:02:43 ◼   ► is the correct answer after a series of wrong answers,

00:02:46 ◼   ► because if you have your mind made up about something

00:02:49 ◼   ► and it's because that's the right answer,

00:02:53 ◼   ► changing it would change it to the wrong answer, so.

00:02:55 ◼   ► - Right, so just because you changed your mind

00:02:57 ◼   ► doesn't mean that you're now correct, but.

00:02:59 ◼   ► - But I get your larger point, for sure.

00:03:01 ◼   ► - I would like to revise and amend my commentary

00:03:07 ◼   ► on the Siri recorded privacy issue.

00:03:11 ◼   ► Well, you should, because you blew that one.

00:03:13 ◼   ► I totally did.

00:03:15 ◼   ► And it was bad timing, where in addition to being wrong--

00:03:20 ◼   ► I shouldn't have been wrong.

00:03:21 ◼   ► I should have thought this through better.

00:03:24 ◼   ► Then after Marco and I recorded my last episode, then,

00:03:29 ◼   ► of course, on a Friday, that's when Apple issued a statement

00:03:33 ◼   ► and sort of acknowledged the scope of what's going on,

00:03:37 ◼   ► which I thought looked pretty bad.

00:03:40 ◼   ► There were some tidbits that we didn't know about before.

00:03:43 ◼   ► I saw two articles.

00:03:44 ◼   ► I know Matthew Panzorino had one at TechCrunch,

00:03:46 ◼   ► and then Sam Byford had one for The Verge.

00:03:51 ◼   ► And I thought this was a real eye opener.

00:03:53 ◼   ► In Byford's article at The Verge,

00:03:57 ◼   ► it's like the third paragraph,

00:03:58 ◼   ► says Apple did not comment on whether,

00:04:00 ◼   ► in addition to pausing the program

00:04:02 ◼   ► where contractors listen to Siri voice recordings,

00:04:05 ◼   ► it would also stop actually saving those recordings on its servers. That's a bit weird that they're

00:04:10 ◼   ► not going to say whether or not they're—somebody at Apple knows whether they're still saving

00:04:16 ◼   ► the recordings. Currently, the company says it keeps recordings for six months before

00:04:23 ◼   ► removing identifying information from a copy that it could keep for two years or more.

00:04:29 ◼   ► Two years, holy smokes, right? Who the hell knew that this was going on?

00:04:33 ◼   ► Well, that's kind of the whole thing.

00:04:37 ◼   ► It's easy to read the letter of the law surrounding this and come up with an explanation that

00:04:44 ◼   ► makes it seem perfectly normal, but the spirit of Apple's privacy stance is in exact opposition

00:04:53 ◼   ► to this very thing.

00:04:54 ◼   ► The idea that you agree to something that you don't really read, some sort of amorphous

00:04:58 ◼   ► thing that gives Apple the right to collect a bunch of information. And then, you know,

00:05:03 ◼   ► they like the normal company, the way it works with big companies is you realize that like

00:05:10 ◼   ► they're doing way more than you thought they were. You didn't read it. And not only did

00:05:13 ◼   ► you not read it, but you can't even imagine the things they're doing based on the vague

00:05:17 ◼   ► language of this in that agreement that you didn't read. Whereas the Apple one is you

00:05:21 ◼   ► don't read it. And you what you expect is to be surprised by how good their stance on

00:05:26 ◼   ► privacy really is. Like that's always the thing. People like Apple, you know, how many people have

00:05:29 ◼   ► you heard just assume that Apple does something nefarious because everybody else does it. And you

00:05:35 ◼   ► try to convince them, no, Apple doesn't do that. Apple doesn't actually make money from advertising.

00:05:39 ◼   ► They don't actually sell your location information when you use maps to, you know, Starbucks so they

00:05:43 ◼   ► can present you with a copy. Like all these things that everyone assumes they do. The whole Apple

00:05:47 ◼   ► thing is in many cases, you will be surprised by the evil thing that Apple is not doing.

00:05:53 ◼   ► But this particular case is the opposite. It's the way the rest of the world works.

00:05:56 ◼   ► They did a thing and we're surprised by how bad it actually is.

00:06:02 ◼   ► Tom Scott Here's a statement from a guy named Steve Jobs

00:06:06 ◼   ► back in 2010 at the D8 conference. That's the, I guess it was the Wall Street Journal at the time,

00:06:12 ◼   ► but that was Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher's conference where Steve Jobs used to appear in

00:06:18 ◼   ► in those high-backed red chairs more years than not, I think. But he was talking about

00:06:25 ◼   ► privacy all the way back in 2010. And he said, "Privacy means people know what they're

00:06:29 ◼   ► signing up for in plain English and repeatedly. I believe people are smart, and some people

00:06:34 ◼   ► want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them

00:06:40 ◼   ► tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely

00:06:45 ◼   ► what you're going to do with their data. I can't think of a single thing to criticize

00:06:51 ◼   ► in that statement and it seems like it was almost spot on a description of what's wrong

00:06:58 ◼   ► with the Siri story. Because we still don't really know what's going on. We don't really

00:07:02 ◼   ► know are these recordings that are getting reviewed all from the hey dingus verbal commands?

00:07:09 ◼   ► Are some of them the ones that were manually initiated when you hold down the button? Which

00:07:14 ◼   ► devices. You had a good rant on ATP about, you know, of course they want them for debugging

00:07:22 ◼   ► purposes. How are they going, if Siri is mishearing certain commands or doing the wrong thing

00:07:26 ◼   ► in response to them, there's no way that, well, I shouldn't say there's no way, but

00:07:31 ◼   ► it's very difficult to fix it without being able to listen to the recording. But we don't

00:07:38 ◼   ► know when they get sent, what, I still don't know. I'm still not sure now that I think

00:07:42 ◼   ► about it and really go deep. I'm not sure how much of this gets processed on device

00:07:46 ◼   ► period, whether they're saving their recordings on servers or not. It's unclear to me like

00:07:51 ◼   ► how much of Siri still works when you're in airplane mode.

00:07:54 ◼   ► >> Yeah, that was a question I had on my TV and I had just assumed that the transcription

00:07:58 ◼   ► was done on device because the devices are so powerful. But Marco told me that's not

00:08:02 ◼   ► actually the case and it's sending everything over the network.

00:08:04 ◼   ► >> I don't know about everything though. I see, I don't believe that. I don't know.

00:08:08 ◼   ► >> Well, you know, the audio anyway for the purpose of transcription. Anyway, the whole

00:08:12 ◼   ► The whole point is this is entirely opaque to the user.

00:08:15 ◼   ► And the Apple experience that we all want and that we were promised is that it's actually

00:08:21 ◼   ► better than we think it is.

00:08:22 ◼   ► And in this case, it's either worse than we think it is or it's, depending on how cynical

00:08:26 ◼   ► you are, it's exactly the way we think it is.

00:08:28 ◼   ► Like, "Oh, there's another big company collecting our data and not telling us how much they're

00:08:32 ◼   ► collecting and we're surprised to see how creepy it is."

00:08:35 ◼   ► That's how every other company works.

00:08:36 ◼   ► So an Apple is supposed to be the exception and generally is the exception, which is why

00:08:40 ◼   ► the PR for this is so bad because think of what a hard time you'll now have explaining

00:08:44 ◼   ► to somebody that really Apple doesn't do it that way or no Apple can't see your messages

00:08:49 ◼   ► except in unencrypted iCloud backups. The more you have to add qualifications and the more

00:08:55 ◼   ► the person you're trying to convince comes back to you and say, "What about that time

00:08:58 ◼   ► where they saved a lot of serial recordings?" And like that's the thing that happened for

00:09:02 ◼   ► sure but in this other case Apple is actually better than the competitors. So it's this

00:09:07 ◼   ► Perception is the real problem here.

00:09:10 ◼   ► I mean, that's a secondary problem, I suppose.

00:09:12 ◼   ► The real problem is recording all of our voices

00:09:14 ◼   ► without our knowledge.

00:09:15 ◼   ► - Our mutual friend, Manton Reese,

00:09:17 ◼   ► pointed out that Amazon actually

00:09:22 ◼   ► does a pretty good job with this,

00:09:23 ◼   ► where it's pretty easy to search the web

00:09:26 ◼   ► for how do you control your Alexa stuff.

00:09:28 ◼   ► You get a FAQ.

00:09:29 ◼   ► I have it in the show notes,

00:09:30 ◼   ► so it should make it into the final show notes here

00:09:32 ◼   ► for the public.

00:09:33 ◼   ► But they have a FAQ about Alexa that's pretty,

00:09:36 ◼   ► I would say it's written in plain English, font a little small maybe, but there's a link

00:09:40 ◼   ► and they tell you how to get to a list of your recorded commands in their app and then

00:09:48 ◼   ► there's a URL you can go to on the web and as long as you're signed into your Amazon

00:09:52 ◼   ► account you can delete recordings from a date range. You can, there's a button to delete

00:09:58 ◼   ► all of the saved recordings. It's really pretty clear and then there's a toggle for whether

00:10:06 ◼   ► you want to allow your recordings to be reviewed by Amazon, and so you can opt out of it. So

00:10:12 ◼   ► that's, that would be pretty tough. I can't really think of anything to suggest there.

00:10:17 ◼   ► That seems like the way it should be.

00:10:20 ◼   ► Have you ever used those web pages, whether for Amazon or for Google, they both have similar

00:10:24 ◼   ► pages. Have you ever gone to them for your own devices?

00:10:27 ◼   ► I did. I did it today in preparation for the show, and there was a recording of my son

00:10:34 ◼   ► telling Alexa to shut the f up. So I've gone to these pages as well in the past and the

00:10:42 ◼   ► strange thing about pages like this is that the experience of going to a web page and

00:10:49 ◼   ► scrolling through like all of your past recordings and like being able to play them sort of viscerally

00:10:58 ◼   ► makes you understand the fact that things you say in your house have been transferred

00:11:03 ◼   ► to a server somewhere and are being stored there. You can read those words and understand

00:11:07 ◼   ► the agreement and it's written in plain English. Like, yeah, of course that's the way it works.

00:11:10 ◼   ► But actually seeing the web page and actually being able to scroll to three months ago and

00:11:15 ◼   ► play a thing that somebody said when you weren't in the house, you feel creepy doing it. Because

00:11:19 ◼   ► now you're basically eavesdropping on people in your own house hearing how they use devices,

00:11:23 ◼   ► especially if it was an accidental activation or something. And in many ways, I feel like

00:11:28 ◼   ► The existence of that page really hammers home exactly how invasive and creepy this

00:11:33 ◼   ► is, despite the fact that, as you noted, this is a good thing to have if they're going to

00:11:37 ◼   ► store them at all, give the user visibility, give the user control or whatever.

00:11:40 ◼   ► But I think what most people would prefer is, as soon as you've done what I asked for

00:11:46 ◼   ► you, forget it.

00:11:47 ◼   ► Don't record my information anywhere.

00:11:48 ◼   ► Delete it if you have it saved anywhere, or just don't save it in the first place.

00:11:52 ◼   ► That's what everybody wants until and unless they're having a problem or whatever, which

00:11:56 ◼   ► which gets into what I was saying in ATP,

00:11:57 ◼   ► which is at the point where you're experiencing malfunction,

00:12:00 ◼   ► that's the point where people would willingly opt in

00:12:02 ◼   ► more often than not to getting their thing recorded

00:12:06 ◼   ► just so Apple can fix it.

00:12:07 ◼   ► But every other time,

00:12:09 ◼   ► what would make people the most comfortable is

00:12:12 ◼   ► I am not recorded and stored anywhere ever

00:12:14 ◼   ► unless I explicitly ask for it.

00:12:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, and the counterexample, which I love the feature,

00:12:20 ◼   ► I forget how many handful of years old now at this point,

00:12:23 ◼   ► but the voicemail transcription feature in iOS

00:12:28 ◼   ► has a little thing where it'll say,

00:12:33 ◼   ► was this transcription useful or not useful?

00:12:38 ◼   ► And there are links, and then you can tap Useful,

00:12:41 ◼   ► and then you get a dialog box instantly,

00:12:44 ◼   ► opens up right away, which is nice.

00:12:46 ◼   ► Help improve transcriptions.

00:12:48 ◼   ► Would you like to submit this voicemail to Apple

00:12:50 ◼   ► to improve transcription accuracy?

00:12:52 ◼   ► Recordings will only be used to improve the quality of speech recognition in Apple products.

00:12:56 ◼   ► Do not submit recordings.

00:12:58 ◼   ► If you believe the speaker would be uncomfortable with you submitting the content to Apple,

00:13:03 ◼   ► cancel or submit.

00:13:04 ◼   ► Or if it's illegal in your state.

00:13:06 ◼   ► Yes, I guess they could mention that.

00:13:09 ◼   ► But I'm not sure though, if you leave a voicemail.

00:13:12 ◼   ► It's like a two-party consent thing.

00:13:14 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:13:15 ◼   ► Do they know they're being recorded?

00:13:16 ◼   ► I don't know how this works, legally speaking.

00:13:17 ◼   ► But the wording is nice, but I don't understand how the legalities work there.

00:13:23 ◼   ► Yeah, I saw you post that to the notes document and the spam voicemail that you have transcribed

00:13:30 ◼   ► there.

00:13:31 ◼   ► I've received that same voicemail.

00:13:32 ◼   ► Yeah, something about my excellent credit history and I'm eligible for blah, blah, blah.

00:13:36 ◼   ► It's like it's vaguely broken English, some kind of credit come on.

00:13:40 ◼   ► It's like, "You're going to send this mail to literally millions of people.

00:13:42 ◼   ► Can you spend 10 minutes getting the grammar right?"

00:13:45 ◼   ► still going with the trick where they have the same area code as I do and the same first

00:13:53 ◼   ► three digits as though it's, you know, as though that makes it more likely, you know,

00:13:59 ◼   ► that it's somebody I know.

00:14:00 ◼   ► Adam: Yeah. I have a brutal one. My caller ID, you know, we tend to get the same—what

00:14:05 ◼   ► I think are the same spammers calling all the time and you can see from the caller ID.

00:14:09 ◼   ► And for the longest time, caller ID of Boston College was calling. And I got to the point

00:14:14 ◼   ► after they called three days in a row where I answered it, ready to tell them to take

00:14:18 ◼   ► me off their list or go away or whatever, whatever things I could possibly do. And I

00:14:22 ◼   ► answered it and there was nobody there. Just nothing. Like I don't think they hung up,

00:14:28 ◼   ► but there was no one. It was like, hello, hello, nobody there. And so they kept calling.

00:14:31 ◼   ► They'd call every single day and I'd pick up every single time and there was nobody

00:14:35 ◼   ► there. Like this is the worst scam ever. Like you have to, you have to pick up, you have

00:14:38 ◼   ► to tell me something. How can I give you all my money if you don't say anything? Eventually

00:14:42 ◼   ► someone picked up and I told them to take me off the list or whatever. And I also started blocking

00:14:46 ◼   ► the number, which is a thing that I can do with my phone service. Actually, this is not my landline

00:14:52 ◼   ► phone. I actually have a landline. I started blocking the number. Then I realized that

00:14:56 ◼   ► they were called day after day. And every time they call, the caller ID says Boston College,

00:15:01 ◼   ► but every time they call, it's a different number. Because I bet a ton of numbers show up as Boston

00:15:06 ◼   ► College and they're just going through all, you know, they're faking their call ID through all

00:15:09 ◼   ► all these numbers. And so now I'm just resigned to the fact that every day someone will call

00:15:12 ◼   ► my house with the call, I'd Boston College, and I have to just not answer it.

00:15:16 ◼   ► What do you I can't understand the hit rate on these things. Like I don't even understand

00:15:20 ◼   ► because sometimes I'll answer because I'm bored. And I just want to take some of their

00:15:23 ◼   ► time and I feel like I'm doing a service for humanity, even though I'm probably doing myself

00:15:27 ◼   ► a disservice by by marking my number is actual number. But I get so many of these calls anyway,

00:15:33 ◼   ► it doesn't really seem plus you're lonely. Yes, exactly.

00:15:37 ◼   ► I just want to talk to somebody.

00:15:39 ◼   ► But I'll start talking to them, and it's like, I don't even know what they're trying to sell

00:15:43 ◼   ► me.

00:15:44 ◼   ► And it's like, they can't even make it clear.

00:15:45 ◼   ► Do you get the ones in Chinese?

00:15:47 ◼   ► I get a lot of calls in Chinese.

00:15:48 ◼   ► Oh, I do too.

00:15:49 ◼   ► And I'm like, you're just not getting anywhere with this.

00:15:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:15:52 ◼   ► I forget what the transcriptions look like for those.

00:15:55 ◼   ► They're usually pretty…

00:15:56 ◼   ► I think it just ops out.

00:15:57 ◼   ► I think it just on the iPhone, it's like, you know, did not transcribe or could not

00:16:00 ◼   ► transcribe.

00:16:01 ◼   ► Right.

00:16:02 ◼   ► Transcription not available.

00:16:03 ◼   ► Yeah, there you go.

00:16:04 ◼   ► Anyway, I've gone from ambivalent about this story to upset.

00:16:14 ◼   ► I would like to know exactly how this happened.

00:16:20 ◼   ► One of the weird things that you and I both know is that Apple has a privacy team.

00:16:28 ◼   ► You would think most companies today should have one, but in a way that certain things

00:16:31 ◼   ► have to go through legal.

00:16:33 ◼   ► got to send it through the legal department. When they do new features, they have a privacy

00:16:37 ◼   ► team that new features have to be run through and that these are people—I actually just

00:16:43 ◼   ► met a couple of them at WWDC—who are shockingly super smart, but also have that mindset where

00:16:50 ◼   ► they totally—it's like being a white hat hacker. They know how to think like, "Well,

00:16:57 ◼   ► how I would abuse this and close stuff up. My only theory is that Siri has such a weird

00:17:08 ◼   ► history where it started as this third-party company and then they slowly started integrating

00:17:14 ◼   ► it and it's always been partially on device, partially in the servers, and that somehow

00:17:22 ◼   ► the whole thing just sort of slipped through the cracks and that this never really got

00:17:26 ◼   ► looked at in terms of the privacy implications because it's so far over the line.

00:17:30 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer:** I mean, that could be true, but my assumption has been that

00:17:34 ◼   ► one of those things that we all don't read explicitly said that Apple's going to do this

00:17:39 ◼   ► and we all agreed to it. To my point before, it doesn't actually make it better. I think Apple

00:17:44 ◼   ► may be surprised to learn that, "Oh, that thing that we put in the agreement that nobody read

00:17:49 ◼   ► that you all agreed to, they're not going to hide behind that like so many other covers." Like,

00:17:53 ◼   ► like, well, you agreed to it or whatever, because Apple, I think, understands that it

00:17:57 ◼   ► doesn't really matter whether we click the accept thing on the thing that we didn't read.

00:18:01 ◼   ► What matters is how we feel about it as customers. And I think in this case, as in many cases,

00:18:07 ◼   ► we are all surprised at how surprised Apple is that we don't like something. Like, if

00:18:12 ◼   ► we pose this hypothetical to anybody who follows Apple or is an Apple fan, we'd say, yeah,

00:18:17 ◼   ► people aren't going to like that. But maybe with an Apple, it was like, well, everyone

00:18:20 ◼   ► agreed to this and we've been doing it for years and no one's complained so I guess it's a thing

00:18:23 ◼   ► that's okay. And the privacy team would be like, look, we outlined it in plain English and if you

00:18:28 ◼   ► had read the thing, it would say what we did and we believe in your privacy and here's what we do

00:18:31 ◼   ► and we anonymize it and we only keep it for two years and that's better than the industry standard.

00:18:36 ◼   ► Like there's a whole bunch of things that you can say to yourself inside Apple to convince yourself

00:18:39 ◼   ► that this is actually okay. Lots of the evidence out in the world can be used to support the idea

00:18:44 ◼   ► that Apple's customers are okay with this thing that's happening when in reality Apple's customers

00:18:49 ◼   ► customers, A, weren't aware that it was happening, and B, once they became aware, are not okay

00:18:52 ◼   ► with it.

00:18:53 ◼   ► Tom Bilyeu: Yeah, definitely. And I saw one theory that maybe somehow inside Apple they

00:19:00 ◼   ► chalked it up to the—like when you first set up a new device, or I guess every time

00:19:06 ◼   ► you do a major software like OS update, you go through the onboarding process and there's

00:19:13 ◼   ► a question like settings or diagnostic info or something like that. Will you help Apple

00:19:18 ◼   ► out by sending diagnostic information. And I don't have it in front of me, but I'm guessing

00:19:25 ◼   ► that there's a—well, actually, I don't know if they would have a link to the web

00:19:30 ◼   ► page where they explain more because in that onboarding process, you can't really jump

00:19:34 ◼   ► to Safari because you're not set up yet.

00:19:36 ◼   ► Tim Cynova Yeah, but think of like email it to me.

00:19:38 ◼   ► You have to say like—

00:19:39 ◼   ► Jay Haynes Yeah, or maybe.

00:19:40 ◼   ► Tim Cynova You used to be like printed out on your Mac,

00:19:41 ◼   ► but now it's like email it to me.

00:19:42 ◼   ► Jay Haynes Right. So most people just look at the high-level

00:19:45 ◼   ► diagnostics, the two-sentence summary of it, and they either hit the button that says,

00:19:50 ◼   ► "Okay, I'll send it," or they hit the little "not" button underneath that is a little

00:19:57 ◼   ► diabolically designed like, "No, you don't want this one. You want to send us the diagnostics."

00:20:01 ◼   ► But somehow they thought that that diagnostics thing—and maybe legally, maybe from a legal

00:20:05 ◼   ► sense it does, but it certainly is.

00:20:07 ◼   ► Steven: Yeah, and the thing is, I do wonder what sort of a non-tech enthusiast's conception

00:20:13 ◼   ► of diagnostics is, but I think within the tech nerd world, we're all thinking crash reports,

00:20:19 ◼   ► right? That's kind of what we're thinking. Like, yeah, if there's some problem with the program,

00:20:23 ◼   ► or if you want to know, like, how many times I launch it or how many times a feature is used,

00:20:27 ◼   ► that's what I'm opting into when I say diagnostics. But even tech nerds would be surprised. We say,

00:20:31 ◼   ► oh, and also everything you say to Siri, we have the right to send and store for two years. That

00:20:36 ◼   ► is not in our mental model of what that button means to us. Yeah. And it is funny to think about

00:20:43 ◼   ► the fact, you know, so they apparently strip your iCloud ID from these recordings after

00:20:49 ◼   ► six months, right? Yeah, that's what that that in that to me is a little, that's not

00:20:54 ◼   ► what I expected. So after six months, they strip it. But it's, it's theoretically possible

00:21:03 ◼   ► that, you know, like your example was, I think, James Earl Jones, who was your Freeman, Morgan

00:21:08 ◼   ► Freeman. Close. Well, either—

00:21:11 ◼   ► Steven: Someone with a voice that you would recognize, saying words that you would recognize

00:21:14 ◼   ► as being relevant. Morgan Freeman talking to Steven Spielberg about a new movie.

00:21:19 ◼   ► Right. You know, it's not outlandish to think that somebody could have one scooped up or it was,

00:21:27 ◼   ► you know, easily identified.

00:21:28 ◼   ► Yeah. I mean, especially if they have humans listening to this, and there's this big fleet

00:21:34 ◼   ► of humans, one of the humans is going to hear the Morgan Freeman thing and is going to recognize

00:21:38 ◼   ► Morgan Freeman's voice and this, but you know, like it's also insider trading. If you recognize

00:21:42 ◼   ► like a CEO talking about financial things like, and I know it's like, oh, the employees

00:21:47 ◼   ► agreed to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like these, this is where this stuff happens. Having

00:21:51 ◼   ► this information at all is a liability. And then having this information pass through

00:21:56 ◼   ► the hands of like your lowest paid, least well treated employees is not great.

00:22:01 ◼   ► No, it's not what you want.

00:22:06 ◼   ► Even I've been recognized by my voice.

00:22:09 ◼   ► We were at Disney World last month and we were waiting for dinner and I was ordering

00:22:13 ◼   ► a drink at the bar.

00:22:15 ◼   ► My wife noticed at first that this guy next to me just suddenly shot his head over, like

00:22:21 ◼   ► got hit by a thunderclap and he was like, "Are you John Gruber?"

00:22:25 ◼   ► That doesn't really…that happens to me at WWDC.

00:22:27 ◼   ► I'm sure it happens to you at WWDC.

00:22:28 ◼   ► It does not happen to me at Disney World.

00:22:30 ◼   ► Well, to be fair, you're Disney a lot.

00:22:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess.

00:22:33 ◼   ► It's the law of averages.

00:22:35 ◼   ► But like he even said, he said it wasn't that I recognized you, it was that I recognized

00:22:38 ◼   ► your voice.

00:22:39 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the way it works in podcasting, which is as I prefer it, I suppose, because

00:22:43 ◼   ► then you just keep your mouth shut and be anonymous.

00:22:45 ◼   ► Right.

00:22:46 ◼   ► Faces made for radio, as they say back on Car Talk.

00:22:50 ◼   ► Oh, definitely.

00:22:52 ◼   ► I guess we're done with this story, though.

00:22:56 ◼   ► Got the Alexa thing, got the permission for the voicemail.

00:22:58 ◼   ► Boy, pasting a screenshot into a note really takes up a lot of space.

00:23:02 ◼   ► Yeah, you can't even see that note on my Mac Pro here because it's running Al Cap

00:23:06 ◼   ► and I can't see shared notes.

00:23:07 ◼   ► I can see it on my iPhone.

00:23:11 ◼   ► All right, let me take a break here and thank our first sponsor.

00:23:17 ◼   ► Let's see who the lucky winner is, who gets to go first.

00:23:19 ◼   ► Why don't we talk about Away?

00:23:23 ◼   ► I love Away.

00:23:25 ◼   ► I just got done taking my away suitcase on a trip.

00:23:28 ◼   ► It's still good as new.

00:23:30 ◼   ► They make suitcases.

00:23:34 ◼   ► They're top notch, really, really great.

00:23:36 ◼   ► All of them are made from either a lightweight, durable,

00:23:40 ◼   ► German polycarbonate, which is to say a very fancy,

00:23:43 ◼   ► very nice plastic, or an aluminum alloy.

00:23:47 ◼   ► I've got the polycarbonate one, 'cause mine is so old

00:23:49 ◼   ► that they only had the carbonate ones when I got mine.

00:23:52 ◼   ► And I have no reason to replace it

00:23:55 ◼   ► because it's still as good as new.

00:23:56 ◼   ► They've considered all types of travelers

00:23:58 ◼   ► and they make their carry-on in two sizes

00:24:01 ◼   ► with an optional ejectable battery,

00:24:04 ◼   ► which I love, absolutely love.

00:24:07 ◼   ► And when they say ejectable, it is super ejectable.

00:24:09 ◼   ► You just click down on it, pops up.

00:24:11 ◼   ► That's important now because now

00:24:13 ◼   ► if you're traveling on an airplane

00:24:15 ◼   ► and they make you check your bag

00:24:17 ◼   ► rather than putting it in the overhead,

00:24:20 ◼   ► you have to remove lithium ion batteries.

00:24:22 ◼   ► Couldn't be easier.

00:24:24 ◼   ► Super great. I love having that battery right there on my suitcase.

00:24:27 ◼   ► Then all you have to do, keep a lightning cable handy. Although,

00:24:30 ◼   ► I guess you need two cables now if you want to charge an iPad,

00:24:33 ◼   ► we all need a lot of cables, but there we go. Plug it right in your suitcase.

00:24:37 ◼   ► Every single seat at the airport is now a seat with the charging port for you.

00:24:42 ◼   ► I love it.

00:24:44 ◼   ► Four 360 spinner wheels guaranteed for a smooth ride.

00:24:48 ◼   ► My wheels still absolutely fantastically smooth years old,

00:24:52 ◼   ► Lots of trips.

00:24:54 ◼   ► A really clever internal compression system

00:24:56 ◼   ► that lets you pack more,

00:24:58 ◼   ► keeps your shirts from getting all wrinkled up.

00:25:00 ◼   ► I go everywhere.

00:25:03 ◼   ► I can't remember the last time I went anywhere

00:25:05 ◼   ► without my Away Carry-On.

00:25:06 ◼   ► I really like it.

00:25:07 ◼   ► It's a great suitcase.

00:25:09 ◼   ► You can save 20 bucks off your suitcase

00:25:12 ◼   ► by going to awaytravel.com.

00:25:15 ◼   ► That's their URL, awaytravel.com/talkshow20.

00:25:20 ◼   ► talk show because this is the talk show. Twenty because you can save twenty bucks. And just

00:25:25 ◼   ► remember that promo code, talk show twenty during checkout. So go to awaytravel.com/talk

00:25:30 ◼   ► show. And my thanks to Away for continuing to support the show.

00:25:35 ◼   ► Eric Meyer I think all of our suitcases are now Away

00:25:38 ◼   ► suitcases.

00:25:39 ◼   ► Tom Bilyeu You know what? We had a funny thing when we

00:25:40 ◼   ► went to see Marco and we got off the ferry. A guy took mine and you know because he had

00:25:47 ◼   ► an Away suitcase as well.

00:25:48 ◼   ► Well, many suitcases look alike, so check your luggage tags.

00:25:51 ◼   ► Many suitcases look alike. I'm a big believer in that. And it's funny because I realized

00:25:55 ◼   ► that I don't even know how many other people have an away carry-on because I can't remember

00:26:01 ◼   ► the last time I had to gate check it. You know, because I have pretty good status on

00:26:05 ◼   ► American Airlines and I always fly on American Airlines, so I don't get like a bad boarding

00:26:11 ◼   ► group where they might take my suitcase away and stick it underneath the belly of the plane.

00:26:16 ◼   ► sticking it right over my seat so it's never really out of arm's length but

00:26:21 ◼   ► that would have been that would have been bad yeah I have all my drugs and

00:26:26 ◼   ► stuff in my suitcase hey I know you're Martin Scorsese fans you see the trailer

00:26:34 ◼   ► for the Irishman I am avoiding I mean Todd Bizira he's doing cool media

00:26:41 ◼   ► blackout for it but although he was I think he's working on the movie now so I

00:26:45 ◼   ► I don't know how that works.

00:26:46 ◼   ► Anyway, I'm mostly avoiding all trailers now.

00:26:50 ◼   ► And so if I'm interested in a movie,

00:26:53 ◼   ► I avoid the trailer because I don't want to be spoiled.

00:26:55 ◼   ► And if I'm not interested in the movie,

00:26:56 ◼   ► I avoid the trailer because why bother?

00:26:57 ◼   ► So the answer is no.

00:26:59 ◼   ► - But you're aware of the basic premise.

00:27:02 ◼   ► - I am not aware of the basic premise.

00:27:04 ◼   ► I have almost nothing about this movie

00:27:06 ◼   ► other than the director.

00:27:08 ◼   ► So I just--

00:27:08 ◼   ► - You don't even know the cast?

00:27:11 ◼   ► - De Niro maybe?

00:27:12 ◼   ► I don't think I know anything about the cast.

00:27:14 ◼   ► Can I spoil the cast?

00:27:15 ◼   ► - Sure, go for it.

00:27:16 ◼   ► - It's the whole gang is back together.

00:27:18 ◼   ► It's got De Niro, it's got Joe Pesci,

00:27:20 ◼   ► and they've added Al Pacino.

00:27:24 ◼   ► - But they're all men now, it's gonna be sad.

00:27:26 ◼   ► - Well, this is the thing.

00:27:27 ◼   ► Young Eyes, Robert De Niro.

00:27:32 ◼   ► - Oh, all right then.

00:27:34 ◼   ► - That's what I wanted to--

00:27:35 ◼   ► - That would explain Todd Vizzier's involvement,

00:27:36 ◼   ► not that he does that. - Right.

00:27:37 ◼   ► There is some serious Todd Vizzier action going on.

00:27:41 ◼   ► I will say, the trailer is excellent.

00:27:44 ◼   ► It is not very spoilery and shocker because you'd think, you know, somebody like Martin

00:27:48 ◼   ► Skars says he's going to keep control of his trailer.

00:27:50 ◼   ► Do you think the directors even of that stature have control of the trailers?

00:27:54 ◼   ► What I've heard is that no matter who you are, you get no say in your trailer.

00:27:57 ◼   ► But I don't know how true that is.

00:27:59 ◼   ► I don't know about that.

00:28:00 ◼   ► If anybody does, I would think so.

00:28:02 ◼   ► Yeah, sure.

00:28:03 ◼   ► No, you would think.

00:28:04 ◼   ► But I always think about Stephen King having control over his book covers.

00:28:08 ◼   ► Right.

00:28:09 ◼   ► And again, my vague knowledge of this is that even Stephen King has to just deal with what

00:28:14 ◼   ► publisher wants to put on the cover.

00:28:16 ◼   ► Right. Right. Right. The inside of his books is he has control over. They're very consistent,

00:28:22 ◼   ► you know. It's all set, typeset in Garamond number three.

00:28:27 ◼   ► Yeah. I mean, I suppose if you get big enough, you can insist on whatever you want to insist

00:28:30 ◼   ► on. But I think just being conditioned by years and years of being in the industry,

00:28:34 ◼   ► you could become accustomed to the idea that the director doesn't have control of the trailer

00:28:37 ◼   ► and the author doesn't have control over the cover.

00:28:39 ◼   ► Yeah, from what I saw in the trailer, the way that they've made Robert De Niro look younger

00:28:45 ◼   ► than he really is, is pretty astounding. It is outside the uncanny valley. Now, it's a trailer,

00:28:52 ◼   ► so maybe they're cherry picking the shots with dark lighting and cherry picking the best spots.

00:28:59 ◼   ► But that's pretty interesting. And I don't know how I feel about it though. In some sense,

00:29:04 ◼   ► like if we keep giving the role of a mid-forties gangster to Robert De Niro, when does our

00:29:14 ◼   ► generation get to step into these roles?

00:29:15 ◼   ► John: Right. Soon it'll just be his voice on a computer-animated figure. The worst thing

00:29:21 ◼   ► about De Niro and these other actresses is we have so much footage of them at that age.

00:29:24 ◼   ► It's not like we don't know what they look like, right? As opposed to aging Captain America,

00:29:29 ◼   ► we don't know what Chris Evans is going to look like when he's old, but we know what

00:29:32 ◼   ► what 30-, 40-year-old Robert De Niro looked like. We're very familiar.

00:29:36 ◼   ► Yeah. I'd be curious to hear, after this comes out, to pick Todd Vaziri's ear about

00:29:42 ◼   ► it and find out how much work and what source material they used to get the useful.

00:29:47 ◼   ► And exactly how much they replaced. That's the whole thing. It's always like, "Oh,

00:29:51 ◼   ► I'm going to just do a nip and a tuck." And it's like, "No, we're just going to

00:29:54 ◼   ► erase your head and replace it with our computer head."

00:29:58 ◼   ► It's a Netflix movie, which is kind of interesting. But they're doing the—I guess it's that whole

00:30:06 ◼   ► thing Spielberg was talking about back at the Oscars in March, where, you know, for whatever

00:30:12 ◼   ► reason Spielberg thinks that any movie up for Oscar consideration has to have been in a theater.

00:30:18 ◼   ► I like tradition as much as the next guy. I don't really see that as a requirement.

00:30:25 ◼   ► A movie is a movie. I like seeing a movie in a theater. I like a big screen. I like

00:30:36 ◼   ► a good loud sound system. When you go to the movies, I don't go much anymore, I got to

00:30:40 ◼   ► say. But I do like going to see a blockbuster in a movie theater. I like the way that I

00:30:45 ◼   ► I don't have to worry about waking up my wife or something because I have the volume too

00:30:49 ◼   ► loud. But if I don't put the volume up loud, then I can't hear what they're saying. But

00:30:54 ◼   ► then when the Hulk starts throwing things against the wall, all of a sudden the volume

00:30:58 ◼   ► you had set for dialogue is no longer appropriate.

00:31:02 ◼   ► Yeah. Plus, the recent year's innovation that I feel like has given a big boost to my desire

00:31:09 ◼   ► to go to movie theaters. Reserve seating everywhere. It's the best thing ever. Do you have that

00:31:14 ◼   ► at all your local theaters?

00:31:15 ◼   ► Dave Asprey I can't remember the last time I went to

00:31:17 ◼   ► a movie without reserved seating.

00:31:18 ◼   ► Jon Streeter No, I won't go to a movie without reserved

00:31:20 ◼   ► seating.

00:31:21 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Yeah, it's absolutely fantastic.

00:31:25 ◼   ► Why did it take so long?

00:31:26 ◼   ► Jon Streeter Computers, because it's like a bookkeeping

00:31:28 ◼   ► hassle.

00:31:29 ◼   ► And it's not like we didn't have the computers to do it, but someone needed to say, "Let's

00:31:33 ◼   ► try this."

00:31:34 ◼   ► Once the technology was there, it's just a matter of someone being willing to use technology.

00:31:37 ◼   ► And once the first person was willing to use it and probably saw what it did to attendance,

00:31:40 ◼   ► then it just spreads like wildfire.

00:31:42 ◼   ► That's why.

00:31:43 ◼   ► before, like, what would the logistics be of just how many

00:31:45 ◼   ► shows a day and how many seats and picking what your seats are

00:31:48 ◼   ► and, and sort of knowing when the seats taken for someone else

00:31:50 ◼   ► took it like it would cost so much money to run that without

00:31:53 ◼   ► without the web essentially.

00:31:54 ◼   ► And like a play plays have always had reserved seatings,

00:31:57 ◼   ► but a play typically, the theater only has one showroom.

00:32:03 ◼   ► It is the theater. And I think most plays are typically one show

00:32:08 ◼   ► a day, maybe two and not $7 a ticket, and not $7 a day.

00:32:13 ◼   ► whatever current movie ticket prices are. I think they're around 11 or 12 bucks, 13.

00:32:18 ◼   ► Right, so I guess it is the computerization. The other thing that's really nice about a modern

00:32:22 ◼   ► theater is the reclining seats. Oh yeah. Yeah, they're sort of like stadium seating reclining

00:32:29 ◼   ► seats. And I've even almost but not quite come around to those ones that give you the food in

00:32:34 ◼   ► the theater because my wife really likes our local theater that gives food. I never get food in the

00:32:39 ◼   ► theater. I don't want other people to get food in the theater, but I have to say that since it makes

00:32:44 ◼   ► my wife and sometimes my kids happy, I like that because it makes them more willing to go to the

00:32:47 ◼   ► movie because you can convince them, "Oh, we'll go to the one with the food and you can get, you

00:32:50 ◼   ► know, junky french fries that you like." And the second thing is they somehow manage, maybe it's

00:32:54 ◼   ► because there's a stupid 30 minutes of trails in front of everything, to get you the food before

00:32:59 ◼   ► the movie starts and not deal with anything related to the food until the movie is over.

00:33:03 ◼   ► And for the most part, people are nice about not making chewy, noisy things. The only bad thing is

00:33:08 ◼   ► it's a little bit of extra lighting so that people can see the menus, which I wish they would turn

00:33:11 ◼   ► off. So I would, I do not prefer it and would avoid it if possible. But I do like the idea

00:33:16 ◼   ► that other people in my family like it because it gets them to go to the movies.

00:33:18 ◼   ► Yeah, I totally agree. I first time I know they're the the famous chain is the Alamo

00:33:24 ◼   ► draft house. And I know that they're, I think they're out of Texas now. I think they're

00:33:28 ◼   ► spreading nationwide. But when for a couple of years when I lived up in Massachusetts,

00:33:33 ◼   ► we had a place that it was called Chunky's. And it was weird. It was like when this was

00:33:37 ◼   ► a novelty and it didn't really have theater seating. What they had were the passenger

00:33:43 ◼   ► seats from Lincoln Continentals, like mid-80s Lincoln Continentals, and they just bought

00:33:48 ◼   ► a whole bunch of passenger bucket seats from like 80s Lincolns, put them on wheels, and

00:33:55 ◼   ► then you didn't really—I have to say I didn't really like that because I want to be squared

00:33:59 ◼   ► up and I want to be in the center, but it was a way that you could kind of wheel your

00:34:02 ◼   ► seat around. It was a comfy chair.

00:34:04 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** That's weird.

00:34:05 ◼   ► **Ezra Klein** Yeah, it was definitely weird.

00:34:06 ◼   ► It was a little one.

00:34:07 ◼   ► And by modern theater standards, too, the seat out of even Lincoln Continental is way

00:34:12 ◼   ► smaller than the current gigantic recliners that they have in these theaters.

00:34:15 ◼   ► There's enough room for like two normal-sized people to sit on each one of these things.

00:34:19 ◼   ► Yeah, the old school movie theaters.

00:34:22 ◼   ► I guess that was the other thing, too, is that they've raised the prices enough and

00:34:25 ◼   ► attendance is down and they go for blockbusters.

00:34:27 ◼   ► But I guess in the old days, throughout decades ago, they were really just trying to pack

00:34:32 ◼   ► people in like sardines.

00:34:33 ◼   ► Yep.

00:34:34 ◼   ► tiny hard seats with, if you're lucky, some kind of dingy fabric on it. Rubbing elbows

00:34:41 ◼   ► with the public, literally.

00:34:42 ◼   ► Steven: Yeah. And if you rub the seat the wrong way, it kind of gave you like a…you

00:34:47 ◼   ► know, like…what would you call that? You know what I mean? It's like the velvet,

00:34:52 ◼   ► and if you rub it the right way, it feels smooth.

00:34:53 ◼   ► Adam: Single directional velvet, yeah.

00:34:55 ◼   ► Steven; Yeah. Anyway, I'm looking forward to that, although I don't know if I'll

00:35:01 ◼   ► see it in the theater. I figured I'd run it by you. See what I thought.

00:35:04 ◼   ► The Netflix thing? If it's Netflix, is it only on Netflix? Do you have the option to

00:35:07 ◼   ► see it in that theater?

00:35:08 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. So, they are going to do a "limited run," which I take to maybe New York and LA.

00:35:15 ◼   ► So, I don't know that…

00:35:17 ◼   ► New York, LA, and Philadelphia, obviously.

00:35:19 ◼   ► Yeah. I somehow doubt it. I think I'll wait for it to come out on Netflix. But I'm looking

00:35:23 ◼   ► forward to it. I think it's kind of interesting.

00:35:25 ◼   ► Are they going to do "Same Day" on Netflix?

00:35:27 ◼   ► No, I don't know. That's weird.

00:35:28 ◼   ► So, I feel like that's a super Netflix-y thing to do. Drop the whole season at once

00:35:32 ◼   ► and put it on Netflix the same day it opens in theaters.

00:35:34 ◼   ► Trenton Larkin Yeah. What do you think about Netflix's distribution of, you know, like,

00:35:38 ◼   ► here's season three of Stranger Things. Here's the whole thing. Here's eight episodes.

00:35:42 ◼   ► Michael Scott I like it. I mean, there's a place for both kinds of distribution. So I'm not in

00:35:47 ◼   ► favor of one completely replacing the other. But I like having it as an option because I, you know,

00:35:53 ◼   ► I don't, I think, because there's so much now I feel a lot less of the pressure to watch a show

00:36:00 ◼   ► that comes out immediately, otherwise I'll get spoiled by my friends because now we're

00:36:04 ◼   ► all in the same boat where it's like no one has time to binge watch Stranger Things season

00:36:09 ◼   ► three when it comes out just because it comes out because there's a million shows like that

00:36:13 ◼   ► and who has that kind of time? So we all do watch it at our leisure but I watch things in a bursty

00:36:20 ◼   ► manner sometimes it's like no episodes for several days and then I do four episodes in a day and

00:36:25 ◼   ► and I like having that available to me. It sort of lets me go my own pace.

00:36:31 ◼   ► Dave Asprey I thought about it a lot with Stranger Things

00:36:34 ◼   ► this season. I didn't do super bingey. Sometimes I just get in a real rut where I'm staying

00:36:40 ◼   ► up real late and I'll watch three or four episodes of a thing. I mostly watch one a

00:36:45 ◼   ► night, maybe two. It used to bother me because Stranger Things in particular has cliffhanger

00:36:51 ◼   ► episode endings. It just feels to me like this is supposed to make you wait a week.

00:36:56 ◼   ► You're supposed to wait a week to find out what the hell just happened.

00:36:59 ◼   ► But then I was thinking about it. You brought up Stephen King. They even call them chapters

00:37:05 ◼   ► on Stranger Things. It's no different than a novel where lots of thriller writers will

00:37:11 ◼   ► put a cliffhanger ending at the end of a chapter, and you make the decision. Do you find out

00:37:16 ◼   ► what happened or do you go to bed?

00:37:18 ◼   ► Yeah, and you know, the people making these shows are not surprised by how they're being

00:37:22 ◼   ► distributed. They can, they should be able to tailor the show so that it works in the

00:37:27 ◼   ► format that it's, that it's, you know, being presented, which is why, you know, Stranger

00:37:30 ◼   ► Things is a great example. And we've talked about this before on Twitter and with our

00:37:35 ◼   ► friend Todd, the idea of opening credits, shows that are made in an era of streaming

00:37:43 ◼   ► services where there is a potential for you to watch episode after episode have to decide

00:37:48 ◼   ► decide whether they're going to try to have a big, long, luxurious intro and then allow

00:37:54 ◼   ► people to hit the skip intro button in their streaming service of choice, or whether they're

00:37:59 ◼   ► going to try to have a really tight but entertaining intro that people will actually watch instead

00:38:04 ◼   ► of hitting the skip intro. I think season one of Stranger Things had a fairly long intro

00:38:08 ◼   ► sequence by sort of normal standards, but it was so artfully done that I watched that

00:38:14 ◼   ► intro for probably more than half of the episodes of Stranger Things because it was so good.

00:38:19 ◼   ► And so...

00:38:20 ◼   ► I watched the intro to most shows. I watched the Game of Thrones intro every week.

00:38:24 ◼   ► Not House of Cards, though. That was like 10 minutes long.

00:38:28 ◼   ► I would watch it.

00:38:29 ◼   ► Well, watch it or would you allow it to play while you, you know, pick boogers?

00:38:32 ◼   ► Yeah, like go get a beverage and pick some boogers. Yeah. Yeah, I guess now that I think

00:38:38 ◼   ► about it, I skipped sometimes.

00:38:40 ◼   ► Because that one was really long.

00:38:42 ◼   ► And things didn't grab you. The point is that it's possible to, you know, all of these television

00:38:49 ◼   ► shows, movies, whatever, should be made with the knowledge of how they're going to be viewed

00:38:53 ◼   ► and distributed. And so you can work within that framework to do very interesting things.

00:38:57 ◼   ► Dave Asprey I'm not a fan. The one thing that Netflix really bothers me is I don't like the

00:39:02 ◼   ► race at the end of the episode to quick get the remote and let the music play. You know, like one

00:39:10 ◼   ► One of the cool things, you know, lots of shows do it, but they'll pick at the end

00:39:13 ◼   ► of an episode.

00:39:14 ◼   ► Instead of having a theme song like you do at the opening credits, you play a unique

00:39:19 ◼   ► song, picked just for this episode to sort of set the mood and let yourself ease out

00:39:25 ◼   ► of the show.

00:39:26 ◼   ► And the filmmakers behind the shows carefully picked and licensed these songs.

00:39:31 ◼   ► I want to hear it.

00:39:32 ◼   ► I want to hear the music sometimes.

00:39:34 ◼   ► And with Netflix, you're…

00:39:36 ◼   ► And it's like, "Hey, Netflix, I'm dealing with an Apple TV remote here.

00:39:39 ◼   ► You gotta give me some extra time.

00:39:43 ◼   ► And the thing is, the UI of these streaming servers constitutes a form of spoilers in

00:39:47 ◼   ► many cases because if you don't see the little prompt for the next episode, you know there's

00:39:53 ◼   ► a post-credit sequence.

00:39:55 ◼   ► Or you know there's an inter-credit sequence.

00:39:58 ◼   ► That's happened to me many times where the thing doesn't pop up and I'm like, "Oh, there's

00:40:02 ◼   ► more to it."

00:40:03 ◼   ► And I would rather have experienced that organically or not at all.

00:40:06 ◼   ► I feel like the best kind of post-credits or mid-credits sequence are the kind where

00:40:11 ◼   ► you discover it on your own or you don't. If you just turned off the TV, then you don't

00:40:15 ◼   ► get to see it. But if you did leave it running, it's a pleasant surprise. That's the best

00:40:19 ◼   ► form of it. Unlike things like the Marvel movies where we've all been conditioned as

00:40:23 ◼   ► a society to sit through ten years of credits because we know there will be post-credits

00:40:27 ◼   ► sequences, possible multiple ones. TV shows, you never know. Sometimes they'll just be

00:40:30 ◼   ► one at the end of a series or end of a season, or a show will never do one and then just

00:40:34 ◼   ► do one randomly in the middle. I know a lot of people who watched, I mean, I don't, okay,

00:40:39 ◼   ► some people watch a show that I really enjoy that I don't want to spoil that did have a

00:40:43 ◼   ► sort of mid-credits post-credits sequence that lots of people just never saw. And it

00:40:48 ◼   ► really changes the entire plot of the show because it's the kind of, you know, twist

00:40:54 ◼   ► on a twist ending thing. And I've talked to people and they're like, I watched that whole

00:40:59 ◼   ► show and then I heard you talk about it and I had no idea what you're talking about. And

00:41:04 ◼   ► and then I went back and watched them. I was like, "Oh, that's perfect," because

00:41:08 ◼   ► you can watch the show and be satisfied with it when—just turn it off when the credits

00:41:12 ◼   ► start to roll. But if you kept watching, you got a little bonus.

00:41:15 ◼   ► Dave: Stranger Things, I thought season three was pretty great. I thought it was probably

00:41:19 ◼   ► my favorite season. That says a lot because I liked the first season a lot. I thought

00:41:24 ◼   ► second season was a little, "Eh." And then usually by the third season, it's

00:41:29 ◼   ► fading away. You usually don't think about that, but I thought it was great. I thought

00:41:33 ◼   ► that they—to my eyes and my recollection, they nailed mid-'80s mall culture absolutely

00:41:41 ◼   ► perfectly. I don't know how much money they spent to recreate an '80s mall, but it was

00:41:46 ◼   ► money well spent because it was perfect.

00:41:47 ◼   ► Eric Meyer Did you see that? What they used was one of

00:41:50 ◼   ► those abandoned '80s malls, like an actual abandoned '80s mall, and then they dressed

00:41:54 ◼   ► it up, which is probably the only way you could do it short of CG. So that aspect was

00:41:59 ◼   ► For me, season one is still far and away the best season of Stranger Things by like miles and miles.

00:42:04 ◼   ► Season two, I have fond memories of, but that's only the bits I can remember.

00:42:09 ◼   ► And it was weird, you know, but fine.

00:42:12 ◼   ► Season three, I felt like it was very straightforward and it felt like a little bit like they were going through the motions,

00:42:17 ◼   ► and I think they were a little bit confused about what to do with these characters.

00:42:19 ◼   ► This is the problem with having any show with kids as the stars.

00:42:22 ◼   ► They start to grow up and they get awkward and the show has to decide when to start treating

00:42:28 ◼   ► them like adults and when to keep treating them like kids.

00:42:30 ◼   ► And I feel like Stranger Things is in that awkward phase.

00:42:33 ◼   ► I enjoyed it.

00:42:34 ◼   ► I just feel like season one is just so much better.

00:42:36 ◼   ► It was just lightning in a bottle because it was the kids at the right age and it's

00:42:40 ◼   ► a show and, you know, some sort of nostalgia and throwback and homages to things that we're

00:42:46 ◼   ► familiar with just at the right time.

00:42:47 ◼   ► And it was, I was riveted for season one and season two and three, and it's just a show

00:42:51 ◼   ► that I'm watching and enjoying.

00:42:52 ◼   ► And somehow an original take on the supernatural, you know, it was something—

00:42:57 ◼   ► I'm not sure how original it is, but it's like Quentin Tarantino original, where you

00:43:01 ◼   ► see all the influences, but then they are channeled through this other creative person

00:43:05 ◼   ► and it makes them more than what they were.

00:43:06 ◼   ► Yes, that's a good way to put it.

00:43:08 ◼   ► Right.

00:43:09 ◼   ► There's nothing new under the sun making supernatural movies.

00:43:11 ◼   ► And that's what we always want, but some people are more open about it.

00:43:13 ◼   ► Like everyone is always remixing everything they've experienced into their own creations,

00:43:16 ◼   ► but sometimes what comes out is something that isn't immediately recognizable as a

00:43:20 ◼   ► combination of the source materials. But then there are people, again, like Tarantino, who

00:43:24 ◼   ► you so clearly see their influences. You clearly see what they love. And they make this new

00:43:28 ◼   ► great thing, but you can draw direct lines back to all this other stuff. It's very clear,

00:43:33 ◼   ► unlike other art where you would never know they were inspired by something until you

00:43:37 ◼   ► saw an interview with a director.

00:43:39 ◼   ► Right. Did they ever figure out, did they ever tell us what the hell happened to that

00:43:43 ◼   ► Barb?

00:43:44 ◼   ► Yeah, she's dead.

00:43:45 ◼   ► Oh, she's dead.

00:43:46 ◼   ► Well, alert.

00:43:47 ◼   ► Sorry, Barb. Let me take a break here. Thank our good friends at Eero. E-E-R-O. Eero blankets

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00:44:18 ◼   ► They're very good looking.

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00:44:26 ◼   ► If you don't want the night light, use the app.

00:44:28 ◼   ► Turn it off.

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00:44:35 ◼   ► It is so uncomplicated.

00:44:37 ◼   ► So requires no networking expertise to get a network with multiple devices that blankets

00:44:44 ◼   ► our whole home with coverage and you do it all through their app which is a really really

00:44:48 ◼   ► good app. I have the feature on I like it I don't know why but I like the I get Nick

00:44:55 ◼   ► notifications when a new device joins my network sometimes my kid will bring a friend over

00:45:00 ◼   ► and it'll say new Apple devices on the network I like knowing that really don't know why

00:45:06 ◼   ► but it's there if you want it you don't want it you can turn it off I'm talking to you

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00:45:36 ◼   ► and you get your Eero delivered with free overnight shipping, you got to use that URL

00:45:41 ◼   ► though to receive the offer. Eero.com/talkshow. Their website will help you pick just how

00:45:46 ◼   ► many devices you need based on the size of your house, how many floors you have, etc.,

00:45:52 ◼   ► etc. Couldn't be easier. My thanks to Eero for their continuing support of the show and

00:45:57 ◼   ► for the Wi-Fi I'm using right now. Let's get into it because who knows how long it's going

00:46:05 ◼   ► ago. But do you do you miss writing your OS 10 reviews, Mac OS 10 reviews?

00:46:10 ◼   ► A little bit.

00:46:15 ◼   ► What was the average, you know, like offhand, what was the average word count?

00:46:19 ◼   ► I think there was like, maybe it was it was lumpy, maybe 30k. Something like that.

00:46:26 ◼   ► It's it's closer to a they were closer to short books than long articles.

00:46:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I sold them as ebooks for the past, for the final three or four or five, I don't

00:46:39 ◼   ► even remember how many. But yeah, when I think about it, I remember the writing process.

00:46:46 ◼   ► I think about how long it would take. It's kind of like doing a legal copy where a contract

00:46:52 ◼   ► is a certain length, but every sentence has to be vetted. When you're doing technical

00:46:57 ◼   ► It's just I have sort of like school forgot my homework forgot. I was signed up for a class type of

00:47:03 ◼   ► stress dreams about

00:47:06 ◼   ► trying to imagine, you know, you've written something that's like

00:47:10 ◼   ► 20 30 40 thousand words and every single line of it is a

00:47:15 ◼   ► Like that's not an opinion is a statement of fact about a product that that isn't released yet

00:47:21 ◼   ► and that is subject to change at any time and

00:47:25 ◼   ► And that you have to publish on the day the thing is released.

00:47:29 ◼   ► And every single fact in it needs to be true of the version that they release.

00:47:33 ◼   ► I still have like stress dreams and waking sort of jolts about that.

00:47:38 ◼   ► Like it was just, it would take so long to do, to just to get through like two paragraphs of text,

00:47:47 ◼   ► because every single sentence made assertions and, and even the opinions were based on those

00:47:52 ◼   ► assertions. So you can't even leave the opinions because you're like, this thing is terrible,

00:47:56 ◼   ► and it ends up they change that thing to work a different way. Now that opinion has to be removed

00:48:00 ◼   ► or revised and you have to decide what you think about it and write a new thing about it.

00:48:03 ◼   ► I guess I don't miss that part. >> First nickety things like file paths,

00:48:07 ◼   ► and is there a tilde in front of the library or is that the root level library? And you got to get

00:48:12 ◼   ► every single bit of that. >> Much more

00:48:15 ◼   ► esoteric things than that. Like the screenshots alone because they change stuff around.

00:48:19 ◼   ► I think that's what drove you over the edge, was where the screenshots...

00:48:23 ◼   ► I mean, the screenshots towards the end, the screenshots were the part that I enjoyed the

00:48:26 ◼   ► most because I really started to just insist on...

00:48:31 ◼   ► My standards for screenshots just got higher and higher to the point where nobody reading

00:48:35 ◼   ► the article appreciated the extra level of effort I was putting into it.

00:48:38 ◼   ► Like the point of diminishing returns was like three reviews before I ended it.

00:48:42 ◼   ► I just kept going.

00:48:43 ◼   ► I wanted the screenshots to be artful.

00:48:45 ◼   ► I wanted the content to be interesting.

00:48:48 ◼   ► I wanted there never to be any blurred or blocked out things in them, but of course

00:48:52 ◼   ► I didn't want to reveal any actual personal information.

00:48:55 ◼   ► I wanted them to be composed well.

00:48:57 ◼   ► I wanted them to show multiple things in a single screenshot.

00:48:59 ◼   ► I needed them to be written to resolution.

00:49:02 ◼   ► Like it was just, it went on and on and on.

00:49:06 ◼   ► And that's, that's one of the parts that I threw myself into towards the end.

00:49:11 ◼   ► But yeah, that was a nightmare.

00:49:12 ◼   ► But no, just like even the technical stuff about exactly how something works under the

00:49:15 ◼   ► the covers and what this command does

00:49:18 ◼   ► and what technology they're using underlying this

00:49:20 ◼   ► and what this data structure looks like.

00:49:22 ◼   ► And they've changed that stuff.

00:49:24 ◼   ► And every time a new build came out,

00:49:27 ◼   ► you'd have to go through and re-vet all of your past work

00:49:30 ◼   ► and then continue writing if you were still

00:49:32 ◼   ► in the process of writing it.

00:49:33 ◼   ► It's just exhausting.

00:49:36 ◼   ► Does it bother you?

00:49:37 ◼   ► It bothers me.

00:49:38 ◼   ► I feel like they should have stuck with a name.

00:49:40 ◼   ► It bothers me that they went from Mac OS X to OS X

00:49:43 ◼   ► now to Mac OS because it makes it hard to…

00:49:47 ◼   ► Adam: To talk about it in retrospect, yeah.

00:49:50 ◼   ► Tom Bilyeu: Yeah. When it was all Mac OS X, you could say Mac OS X 10.4 and Mac OS X 10.5

00:49:57 ◼   ► and you didn't have to mix it. I think I'm actually kind of inconsistent on it. What

00:50:02 ◼   ► do I do now when I refer back to a 10-year-old version? Do I call it Mac OS X or do I use

00:50:08 ◼   ► Mac OS for consistency with the current version?

00:50:11 ◼   ► You gotta call it what it was named at the time.

00:50:13 ◼   ► Like there is the, I forget which one, I think it was Lion or whatever was the in-betweeny

00:50:16 ◼   ► one where Apple was pushing, trying to say OS X without the Mac, but they didn't really

00:50:21 ◼   ► commit to it except for like retroactively.

00:50:23 ◼   ► So there was one that was in the middle, but every other one is fairly definitively has

00:50:28 ◼   ► an a product name.

00:50:29 ◼   ► When you're referring to a specific version, it's easy to use the name that it was called

00:50:33 ◼   ► when it was released.

00:50:34 ◼   ► If you're referring to like the first 15 versions of the Mac operating system, I would go to

00:50:39 ◼   ► like the Mac operating system or some other generic term that

00:50:42 ◼   ► is descriptive but does not pin it down.

00:50:44 ◼   ► And when I speak about it, I try to do that.

00:50:48 ◼   ► But then if I need to refer to the whole group

00:50:50 ◼   ► as an actual product name, I usually go Mac OS X or OS X.

00:50:54 ◼   ► Because it still seems like in a non-marketing sense,

00:50:58 ◼   ► at a technical sense, that's still the canonical name.

00:51:01 ◼   ► Like there's some command line utilities like-- what is there?

00:51:05 ◼   ► Like sysinfo or sysversion.

00:51:07 ◼   ► There's things you can type at the command line.

00:51:09 ◼   ► that'll tell you what version of the operating system you're running, and it still calls

00:51:13 ◼   ► itself Mac OS X. There's still places where it still says that.

00:51:16 ◼   ► I'll hunt down those strings eventually. The main thing that I'm disappointed about

00:51:20 ◼   ► the naming is that I enjoy the consistency of the new naming scheme, but I hate it. I

00:51:24 ◼   ► don't like the actual naming scheme, the lowercase then going to uppercase. I find

00:51:28 ◼   ► that aesthetically unpleasing. It's almost as bad as what you do, which is making up

00:51:33 ◼   ► your own naming scheme that is like the Apple naming scheme, but changed in a way that you

00:51:37 ◼   ► find more pleasing?

00:51:38 ◼   ► Well, it's because I don't play games with the capital side.

00:51:41 ◼   ► But you do.

00:51:42 ◼   ► You're playing your own game.

00:51:43 ◼   ► You're like, "I've come up with my own naming scheme.

00:51:44 ◼   ► Good."

00:51:45 ◼   ► But I firmly believe that for the most part, you don't—one doesn't—spelling is letters,

00:51:52 ◼   ► not case.

00:51:53 ◼   ► And case is a style that you put on it.

00:51:56 ◼   ► So in the same way that I wouldn't follow their direction if they said, "We always

00:52:00 ◼   ► italicize the word Mac OS."

00:52:02 ◼   ► Always.

00:52:03 ◼   ► It's always italics.

00:52:04 ◼   ► I wouldn't italicize it.

00:52:05 ◼   ► Well, you've gone to a third level.

00:52:07 ◼   ► You've got the letters, you've got capitalization, and now you're saying, like, "Font face."

00:52:12 ◼   ► Like, that's a third level, right?

00:52:15 ◼   ► But I take your point.

00:52:16 ◼   ► You decided that the spelling is just the letters, which I think is ridiculous, and

00:52:19 ◼   ► I'm sure there are examples in English where the case is so important that it changes the

00:52:23 ◼   ► meaning of the thing.

00:52:24 ◼   ► But I'm saying, aesthetically, I actually find capital M, lowercase a c, capital O,

00:52:29 ◼   ► capital S, to be less aesthetically pleasing than the way Apple wants you to say it.

00:52:34 ◼   ► it looks like, I always love Mac space OS. I love that name. It was, you know, classic

00:52:39 ◼   ► Mac OS. It was called that later in its life. You've taken that name and squished it up

00:52:44 ◼   ► in a way that people used to do mistakenly.

00:52:45 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Right. No, my friend, Nat Irons, who's easily

00:52:50 ◼   ► top two typo reporters in Daring Fireball history, along with my friend Chris Pepper,

00:52:56 ◼   ► but dozens, dozens, probably hundreds of typos he's reported to me over the years, long-time

00:53:00 ◼   ► reader. Like, when they first switched to this, he was like, "This is driving me nuts,"

00:53:04 ◼   ► he's the type of anal-retentive, careful reader who not only notices typos when I make them,

00:53:10 ◼   ► but then immediately will text me because he knows I care and I want to hear about it.

00:53:15 ◼   ► When they first changed the name, he was like—because he's a long-time Apple user, and he was just

00:53:19 ◼   ► like, "I spent an entire decade in the '90s correcting people when they closed up MacOS.

00:53:25 ◼   ► I can't even with this."

00:53:27 ◼   ► I mean, at least it's consistent. Apple naming has had problems in recent years, so

00:53:33 ◼   ► So I applaud them for a successful attempt to attain consistency even if it is consistently

00:53:38 ◼   ► mediocre.

00:53:39 ◼   ► What do you think they're going to do with the iPhone name this year?

00:53:44 ◼   ► Think they're going to go to 11?

00:53:46 ◼   ► And it seems like they have to do something in addition to just 11.

00:53:50 ◼   ► They could do 11 and 11 max, but then what do you call the 10R model?

00:53:55 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know.

00:53:57 ◼   ► I mean, like there's with Apple being so inconsistent

00:54:01 ◼   ► with naming, you can't really look at the past

00:54:05 ◼   ► and try to predict what they're gonna do based on that.

00:54:08 ◼   ► The one thing that the past tells us is that

00:54:11 ◼   ► Apple has been willing to take the Roman numeral 10

00:54:15 ◼   ► and use it without incrementing it for a long time.

00:54:19 ◼   ► - Right. - Right.

00:54:19 ◼   ► And also what they did with the iPad

00:54:21 ◼   ► where they decided not to put a number on it,

00:54:23 ◼   ► the new iPad, that whole business, right?

00:54:25 ◼   ► So I feel like that option is on the table,

00:54:28 ◼   ► that these things end up being called the iPhone 10

00:54:30 ◼   ► and the iPhone 10s and the iPhone,

00:54:32 ◼   ► but I don't think it's a likely.

00:54:34 ◼   ► It's just, I just feel like that is a possibility,

00:54:37 ◼   ► a plausible possibility.

00:54:38 ◼   ► But honestly, at this point, almost anything is plausible.

00:54:41 ◼   ► The number 11 is certainly plausible.

00:54:43 ◼   ► A Roman numeral, an X and then an I is plausible.

00:54:46 ◼   ► Would be terrible, but it's plausible.

00:54:48 ◼   ► I mean, just think, is that beyond,

00:54:51 ◼   ► is that beyond what Apple would do?

00:54:52 ◼   ► No, it is not beyond what modern Apple would do.

00:54:54 ◼   ► Apple would totally make that name.

00:54:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, if they use Roman numerals at all,

00:54:58 ◼   ► they could use it, you never, you can't roll it out.

00:55:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, and in the end,

00:55:02 ◼   ► because they've been so inconsistent,

00:55:04 ◼   ► I think they've conditioned us not to attach,

00:55:07 ◼   ► at least condition me,

00:55:08 ◼   ► not to get too hung up on the names,

00:55:10 ◼   ► 'cause they're always gonna be a little bit of a mess,

00:55:12 ◼   ► and they're not gonna really make any sense,

00:55:14 ◼   ► and stop hoping for an inspired name.

00:55:17 ◼   ► The inspired name is iPhone,

00:55:19 ◼   ► and even that's not that inspired,

00:55:20 ◼   ► 'cause when we were all predicting,

00:55:23 ◼   ► back in the job I was working at before the iPhone came out,

00:55:25 ◼   ► we'd make our W3C predictions on a big whiteboard.

00:55:27 ◼   ► We wrote iPhone on that whiteboard for years

00:55:29 ◼   ► before the iPhone came out.

00:55:30 ◼   ► It was the obvious name for the thing.

00:55:32 ◼   ► And Apple makes, you know, it's the reverse

00:55:35 ◼   ► where you come up with a name

00:55:36 ◼   ► and it's not that the name is great,

00:55:37 ◼   ► it's that the product is great

00:55:38 ◼   ► and the greatness flows backward into the name.

00:55:41 ◼   ► iPhone is a great name.

00:55:42 ◼   ► The stuff they put after it and the letters and everything,

00:55:45 ◼   ► whatever, like we'll get used to whatever they pick.

00:55:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't know.

00:55:49 ◼   ► But I feel like they can't keep incrementing the numbers.

00:55:52 ◼   ► Are they really going to go to 13?

00:55:54 ◼   ► Yeah, what is Samsung?

00:55:55 ◼   ► Is Samsung just crossing the 10 barrier this year?

00:55:57 ◼   ► I forget.

00:55:57 ◼   ► Yeah, because they just released this week the Samsung Galaxy

00:56:05 ◼   ► Note 10.

00:56:08 ◼   ► I think it's called the Note 10.

00:56:09 ◼   ► So they're up at 10.

00:56:11 ◼   ► And they had the respect not to use a Roman numeral.

00:56:14 ◼   ► I think I talked about this on ADP,

00:56:16 ◼   ► but other companies have had what

00:56:18 ◼   ► in massively multiplayer online role-playing game parlance

00:56:23 ◼   ► is a stat crunch, where you name your product

00:56:26 ◼   ► and you keep incrementing the number

00:56:27 ◼   ► and it eventually becomes so big that it's unwieldy

00:56:30 ◼   ► and you rescale all the numbers.

00:56:32 ◼   ► The API did it for their video cards.

00:56:34 ◼   ► They were going up to like the Radeon 7,000 something,

00:56:37 ◼   ► 8,000 something, 9,000 something,

00:56:39 ◼   ► and they were pushing up against like 9,700.

00:56:41 ◼   ► And they're like, are we going to go to 10,000?

00:56:43 ◼   ► Or maybe we could call it 10K?

00:56:44 ◼   ► And they just did a stat crunch.

00:56:45 ◼   ► like, Nope, now it's the Radeon, like 100 200 300. They just reset everything back so

00:56:50 ◼   ► far that it's not confusing. You don't think what is the 9700 better than the new 9400?

00:56:56 ◼   ► It's like, if the question is, is the 9700 better than the 500? They're so far apart

00:57:00 ◼   ► that it's clear they're not in the same family. So just reset everything. I don't think Apple

00:57:04 ◼   ► will do that. But tech companies have done that multiple times in the past. And it's,

00:57:09 ◼   ► it's a corner that you paint yourself into eventually, if you just keep making the number

00:57:12 ◼   ► bigger.

00:57:13 ◼   ► So you don't even—now that you don't write these reviews, you're not—it's

00:57:17 ◼   ► not just that you're not spending your summer writing and screenshotting a 30,000K booklet

00:57:23 ◼   ► on the new operating system. You're not even running it, right? Because you can't

00:57:27 ◼   ► run it on your Mac Pro.

00:57:28 ◼   ► I took a long time off of just like—I wanted to be completely ignorant of the new Mac operating

00:57:34 ◼   ► system just because it was so relaxing, right? But now I'm more like the average tech nerd.

00:57:39 ◼   ► I have the beta installed.

00:57:41 ◼   ► I fiddle with it.

00:57:42 ◼   ► I instinctively go through sort of my normal routine

00:57:48 ◼   ► after a thing is installed.

00:57:49 ◼   ► Basically a routine that lets me look at every piece of user

00:57:52 ◼   ► interface.

00:57:52 ◼   ► Like I go through every preference pane

00:57:54 ◼   ► and every screen and every tab and every menu item

00:57:56 ◼   ► and launch every single bundle app.

00:57:58 ◼   ► It's just sort of like a thing I do to sort of go through the OS

00:58:02 ◼   ► to find out what's new and maybe look at the versions of command

00:58:05 ◼   ► line tools.

00:58:06 ◼   ► I still do that.

00:58:07 ◼   ► But then I don't take notes and I don't do it with an eye

00:58:09 ◼   ► retaining anything. And so now I'm more just like a casual, "Oh, look at this fun thing. Oh,

00:58:13 ◼   ► let's try this. Oh, let's do that." But that's about it.

00:58:16 ◼   ► What's your take on dark mode? I'm personally not a fan. I think it's

00:58:22 ◼   ► great that it exists. I think it's a lot of work for developers for a feature that

00:58:28 ◼   ► on my list of things that Apple should prioritize in the operating system is fairly low,

00:58:34 ◼   ► but I'm not going to ding them for it because it is a good thing to have. And if they're not

00:58:38 ◼   ► going to allow theming, which they're not, and Apple's the only one that can do it, they

00:58:42 ◼   ► did a really good, I feel like they did a really good job with dark mode. A very difficult

00:58:46 ◼   ► task which is make a dark mode, whichever, it's easy to say dark mode, I just want it

00:58:51 ◼   ► to be not so bright. Okay, but also I want everything to still be legible and like this

00:58:56 ◼   ► is what you're not saying, and I want to be able to tell where everything is and I want

00:58:59 ◼   ► the window layering still to work and I don't want it to be ugly and I want my applications

00:59:03 ◼   ► to be able to support it in an intelligent way. It's a big, big, much more complicated

00:59:08 ◼   ► feature than you think it is, and Apple I think did a really good job of implementing

00:59:12 ◼   ► it. And I see a lot of people using it at work. But there are a lot of other features

00:59:17 ◼   ► that I would have slotted ahead of it in terms of what Apple could have spent time on.

00:59:21 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Wildly popular at WWDC. And I want everybody

00:59:25 ◼   ► to be comfortable reading and true dark mode as we now have on iOS and Mac OS after a year

00:59:32 ◼   ► is so much nicer on the eyes than using the accessibility feature to just invert,

00:59:38 ◼   ► do just a sort of a dumb inversion where everything light goes dark. And I'm sure that that feature

00:59:46 ◼   ► isn't as simple as I'm thinking either, but aesthetically it is so much more pleasing. And

00:59:50 ◼   ► there's so many more subtle cues like with the accessibility feature. What was a drop shadow

00:59:56 ◼   ► looks like a glow because it's just inverted. Whereas with dark mode, they've done some very

01:00:02 ◼   ► clever stuff to provide hints of depth without going to a glow. But cognitively, I can't—the

01:00:11 ◼   ► only app—you know, I run BB Edit in dark mode. So BB Edit sticks out and I like writing

01:00:16 ◼   ► on a dark background in BB Edit. But that's just one app and it helps me identify that

01:00:23 ◼   ► dark window over on the left. There's my BB Edit window. Especially on iOS, trying

01:00:30 ◼   ► it on the betas over the summer, there's something cognitively that just does not work

01:00:35 ◼   ► for me in dark mode. I'm sitting there and I'm going through emails and I realize

01:00:40 ◼   ► that I don't remember any of the emails I just read.

01:00:43 ◼   ► Adam: Yeah, I think I talked about this when dark mode was first announced last year. For

01:00:50 ◼   ► me personally, culturally, I don't want my computer to work this way because of the

01:00:58 ◼   ► historical baggage. Like when I was a kid, all my first computers were a black CRT with

01:01:04 ◼   ► light text on it, whether it's monochrome green or amber or whatever. And that's how

01:01:09 ◼   ► all computers were until the Mac, which was the reverse. And the Mac was like, sheets

01:01:14 ◼   ► of paper are white and ink is black. That's the cultural context of this computer. And

01:01:20 ◼   ► it was such a clean break from computer and thing that culturally acknowledges the written

01:01:27 ◼   ► written word and drawings and everything in the way that you are familiar with it outside

01:01:31 ◼   ► the computer world. And that, I've totally imprinted on that. I want black text on a

01:01:36 ◼   ► white background whenever I see text, including in BB Edit and everywhere else. So every single

01:01:42 ◼   ► other person at work has their text editor in dark mode with the candy colored syntax

01:01:46 ◼   ► highlighted code all over it. All of my text windows are white and the text is black. Now

01:01:51 ◼   ► obviously eventually if I can't look at that because of ice grain or some other reason,

01:01:55 ◼   ► There's lots of accessibility reasons to prefer dark, but culturally, philosophically,

01:02:00 ◼   ► and emotionally, the Mac is white background with black text on it to me.

01:02:05 ◼   ► JEFFREY GROSSMANN Yeah, because part of the—we just don't

01:02:09 ◼   ► use the phrase "wizzy wig" that much anymore, and it's just—for good reason.

01:02:13 ◼   ► JIM KEOHANE Well, you don't, Mr. Markdown.

01:02:15 ◼   ► JEFFREY GROSSMANN Right.

01:02:16 ◼   ► Well, you can get "wizzy wig" in a preview window.

01:02:19 ◼   ► JIM KEOHANE That's not what "wizzy wig" means.

01:02:21 ◼   ► JEFFREY GROSSMANN I know, I know, because you're not editing.

01:02:23 ◼   ► So, how many people listen to the podcast when we say WYSIWYG know what we even mean

01:02:29 ◼   ► anymore?

01:02:30 ◼   ► I wonder.

01:02:31 ◼   ► I do wonder.

01:02:32 ◼   ► W-I-Z-Z-Y-W-I-G is what I think we're saying.

01:02:35 ◼   ► Right.

01:02:36 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe.

01:02:37 ◼   ► But part of the WYSIWYG revolution of the 1984 Mac wasn't just that when you opened

01:02:44 ◼   ► a word processor that you didn't have to input formatting codes and that you had real

01:02:52 ◼   ► fonts to pick from and if you put an image in you actually saw the image right where

01:02:57 ◼   ► it was. But it was just like you said, like it was the fact that it was a white window

01:03:01 ◼   ► with black text. So it was even more what you see is what you get because you could

01:03:05 ◼   ► you know what you saw on screen.

01:03:08 ◼   ► It was like the original Mac, right? The original Mac. There was one Mac, there was only one.

01:03:12 ◼   ► There was one printer that you could hook up to it. And if you bought that Mac and you

01:03:16 ◼   ► bought that printer and you bought Mac, right. And you wrote something in Mac, right. And

01:03:20 ◼   ► had it in your MacWrite window and then you printed it and then you took that piece of

01:03:23 ◼   ► paper and you held it up against the damn screen that you just typed it on. The idea

01:03:26 ◼   ► was what you saw is what you get. And that became increasingly less true over time as

01:03:33 ◼   ► DPI monitors changed and printers changes. But in general, that was the promise and the

01:03:38 ◼   ► dream and it was absolutely unheard of in any other context because the printer, you

01:03:44 ◼   ► know, character printers, they printed whatever the hell characters they wanted. They didn't

01:03:47 ◼   ► care what was on your screen, right? And the other ones were, you know, like a sort of

01:03:51 ◼   ► desktop publishing type system or with formatting codes or whatever. What you printed out had

01:03:56 ◼   ► no relation to the gibberish you were seeing on your screen, right? And the Mac was, you

01:04:01 ◼   ► know, what you see is actually what you get more or less. And it was amazing.

01:04:07 ◼   ► It was definitely a revolution and I don't think people picked that up. And yeah, I have

01:04:11 ◼   ► the same cultural feelings about Dark Mode 2, where it just doesn't look right to me.

01:04:18 ◼   ► What are your thoughts on the sort of increasing—I don't know if it's all sandboxing—but

01:04:25 ◼   ► the increasing number of warnings when you do "dangerous things" on macOS? I know

01:04:34 ◼   ► Jason Snell has written and talked about it quite a bit recently. I haven't listened

01:04:40 ◼   ► the most recent version of his podcast, but I know he got some feedback from Apple about it.

01:04:47 ◼   ► I don't know. I don't know what the solution is. I get why they're doing some of these things.

01:04:53 ◼   ► I really hope that they're not just tightening down hypotheticals, that they're really like,

01:05:02 ◼   ► "Hey, we know some bad things, some things that apps have been doing, and so we're doing this

01:05:07 ◼   ► this for good reason, not just because it could be. But boy, it's starting to get annoying,

01:05:14 ◼   ► in my opinion.

01:05:15 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer:** Yeah. If I was still writing reviews, first

01:05:20 ◼   ► of all, I would have experienced this more because just fiddling around as I just described

01:05:25 ◼   ► the new beta operating system, you won't run across this until you actually start using

01:05:28 ◼   ► it to do real work. Or if you know that they're making changes in this area and you will investigate

01:05:33 ◼   ► deeply and do a bunch of synthetic experiments to find out what the barriers are. This, incidentally,

01:05:39 ◼   ► would be a nightmare section to do because these are the type of policy changes that

01:05:43 ◼   ► they can make right up to the last minute. Like, the mechanisms are all there. Like,

01:05:46 ◼   ► here, we have a system for controlling this, but you can change the policy in the OS at

01:05:50 ◼   ► any point and probably already have changed the policy.

01:05:53 ◼   ► So, yeah, I see what they're going for, but I think if I had to write about this, I would

01:06:00 ◼   ► get very philosophical and say, like, the goals of safety,

01:06:07 ◼   ► predictability, and confinement are laudable.

01:06:12 ◼   ► But the best way to get the thing

01:06:15 ◼   ► that you have to the state where those goals are achieved

01:06:17 ◼   ► may not be to take the thing that you have

01:06:19 ◼   ► and just start putting tiny padlocks

01:06:22 ◼   ► on every single little door.

01:06:23 ◼   ► Like, the reason iOS has these properties

01:06:26 ◼   ► that they want to bring to the Mac

01:06:28 ◼   ► that iOS is fundamentally different in many ways.

01:06:31 ◼   ► And I don't think you can get the Mac

01:06:34 ◼   ► to that level of security by taking the Mac as it exists

01:06:37 ◼   ► and putting tiny locks all over the place.

01:06:39 ◼   ► Like technically, you probably can,

01:06:41 ◼   ► but it will be a terrible experience.

01:06:42 ◼   ► This is the reason iOS doesn't work this way.

01:06:45 ◼   ► If this is your goal, you have to look at the Mac and say,

01:06:49 ◼   ► are there parts of the system that we

01:06:51 ◼   ► need to change in radical ways to get to there?

01:06:55 ◼   ► Rather than saying, here is how the system works,

01:06:57 ◼   ► How can we start making minor modifications to slowly ratchet our way up to that level

01:07:02 ◼   ► of security?

01:07:03 ◼   ► Because that is putting the security ahead of the user experience in a mild way, but

01:07:10 ◼   ► that eventually cumulatively makes the overall experience much worse.

01:07:12 ◼   ► Right.

01:07:13 ◼   ► And it's like I want—I think bicycles should be made to be as safe as possible.

01:07:18 ◼   ► But sometimes you want to ride your bicycle dangerously fast.

01:07:22 ◼   ► And it's your bicycle, and you should be allowed to do that.

01:07:24 ◼   ► Well, that's the second thing.

01:07:25 ◼   ► I didn't even touch on that thing, which is, okay.

01:07:27 ◼   ► But what if that goal of being like iOS in terms of security is incompatible with one

01:07:32 ◼   ► of the reasons that people like Macs?

01:07:35 ◼   ► Then you've got a dilemma there, because it's like, do we just decide that that's not the

01:07:40 ◼   ► way our devices are going to work moving forward?

01:07:43 ◼   ► Or can we preserve that thing that people like about the Mac and provide that functionality,

01:07:49 ◼   ► continue to provide it in a safer way?

01:07:52 ◼   ► And the current thing is, you know, the best example of these entitlements that all these

01:07:56 ◼   ► this temporary stuff in the name.

01:07:58 ◼   ► It's like temporary, like this is fundamentally

01:08:02 ◼   ► how insert program here works.

01:08:05 ◼   ► Either programs like this are going to be allowed to exist

01:08:07 ◼   ► or they're not going to be allowed to exist.

01:08:09 ◼   ► But there's no amount of temporary indulgences

01:08:14 ◼   ► that you can give it.

01:08:15 ◼   ► Like it's just, it's like,

01:08:17 ◼   ► do you not understand the tension here?

01:08:18 ◼   ► People want to use their Macs to do this thing.

01:08:20 ◼   ► Saying you can keep doing that thing for now

01:08:24 ◼   ► is not reassuring.

01:08:25 ◼   ► What we want to hear is, we've come up

01:08:27 ◼   ► with a safer, better way for your thing

01:08:30 ◼   ► to continue doing its thing.

01:08:31 ◼   ► And they've never said that.

01:08:32 ◼   ► They're just like, we'll grandfather you in.

01:08:36 ◼   ► Here's some temporary entitlements.

01:08:37 ◼   ► They never come out and say, have you considered not

01:08:43 ◼   ► being that kind of application?

01:08:45 ◼   ► I don't know if they actually tell the people that.

01:08:47 ◼   ► Have you considered not having access to the whole file system?

01:08:50 ◼   ► It's like, I'm a disk cloning application.

01:08:52 ◼   ► Have you considered not being a disk cloning application?

01:08:55 ◼   ► It's like, do you want disk cloning applications

01:08:57 ◼   ► to exist or not?

01:08:58 ◼   ► If you do want them to exist,

01:09:00 ◼   ► that has to be on your list of requirements.

01:09:02 ◼   ► You can't just hope they go away

01:09:05 ◼   ► and give them temporary entitlements

01:09:06 ◼   ► and litter them with dialogue boxes.

01:09:09 ◼   ► There's a disconnect between any sort of

01:09:12 ◼   ► coherent future vision for the Mac

01:09:14 ◼   ► and what changes they've been making

01:09:17 ◼   ► in the operating system.

01:09:18 ◼   ► Like they're diverging.

01:09:20 ◼   ► - The one I ran into a couple months ago

01:09:22 ◼   ► was I was doing something in terminal.

01:09:24 ◼   ► And I forget where I wanted to go,

01:09:25 ◼   ► but maybe it was in one of those containers

01:09:27 ◼   ► in my home library folder.

01:09:29 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:09:30 ◼   ► I was somewhere where there are protections.

01:09:33 ◼   ► Like, I don't know, maybe in my mail folders or something.

01:09:36 ◼   ► And I'm in terminal and I typed LS

01:09:38 ◼   ► and there was like nothing.

01:09:39 ◼   ► I got no results.

01:09:40 ◼   ► I'm like, there's gotta be, I know there's stuff here.

01:09:42 ◼   ► And I like opened, like open dot just to open this current.

01:09:47 ◼   ► Isn't that what you type to get it open in a finder?

01:09:52 ◼   ► So I did that and I saw if the finder could see these files and I go back to terminal

01:09:56 ◼   ► and type LS and there's nothing.

01:09:59 ◼   ► I realized I had to grant terminal full disk access, but I didn't get – it didn't

01:10:03 ◼   ► say – there was no warning.

01:10:06 ◼   ► I just had to know it.

01:10:07 ◼   ► For some reason, like with apps like BB Edit, which I grant full disk access to so I can

01:10:14 ◼   ► open anything and super duper a disk cloning utility where you obviously – it's like

01:10:19 ◼   ► I know that I've got to grant SuperDuper full disk access.

01:10:24 ◼   ► And SuperDuper, even if it doesn't have it,

01:10:26 ◼   ► will hopefully tell me when it launches that, hey, you need to--

01:10:31 ◼   ► we can't do our thing without full disk access,

01:10:33 ◼   ► because that was like an alternate name for the app,

01:10:37 ◼   ► full disk access.

01:10:39 ◼   ► Whereas Terminal, I spent more minutes

01:10:42 ◼   ► scratching my head on this than I would like to admit,

01:10:45 ◼   ► because who would ever think that Terminal wouldn't

01:10:49 ◼   ► able to just list files wherever you are. Like, I'm in terminal.

01:10:54 ◼   ► Yeah, that's another thing that Apple has done recently. And again, I understand the reasons for

01:10:58 ◼   ► it, but it violates some sort of the mental model of a whole different sort of cultural domain,

01:11:05 ◼   ► which is system integrity protection. The Unix model has always been, if you're root, you can

01:11:09 ◼   ► do anything. System integrity protection changed that. You can be root and also not be able to do

01:11:15 ◼   ► something, it just doesn't even make any sense from the model of Unix, which is fine to have

01:11:19 ◼   ► different models and change things around, but that's getting back to one of the things

01:11:24 ◼   ► that people love about Macs, was Unix with a nice GUI on top. Some people who love Unix

01:11:28 ◼   ► love Macs, some people who love Macs love Unix, and some people who both love them.

01:11:32 ◼   ► And both of those realms are seeing changes, and to be fair, this happens in Unix outside

01:11:36 ◼   ► of the Mac as well, where Unix does change over time, but to make that kind of change,

01:11:43 ◼   ► Like this is the thing you're going to do.

01:11:44 ◼   ► It's like we want to have system integrity and protection.

01:11:46 ◼   ► We want there to be things that root can't do.

01:11:48 ◼   ► A Unix-y way to make that change, a more Unix-y way, would be to define a new super

01:11:56 ◼   ► root user that's rootier than root.

01:11:58 ◼   ► So that you would keep the model the same, but that there would be a Unix-y way to, you

01:12:02 ◼   ► know, if you sudo from mute with some flag, you can become the super duper root and you

01:12:07 ◼   ► can still do everything.

01:12:08 ◼   ► Like, in other words, change Unix,

01:12:11 ◼   ► but change it in a way that still feels like Unix.

01:12:14 ◼   ► You just added one more layer of stuff.

01:12:17 ◼   ► And system integrity and protection is like,

01:12:18 ◼   ► the answer is reboot with it off or whatever.

01:12:21 ◼   ► Like, I understand why they did it the way they did it,

01:12:22 ◼   ► because it's a security feature,

01:12:23 ◼   ► and if you could just bypass it that easily,

01:12:25 ◼   ► but entering your admin password, it just becomes like,

01:12:27 ◼   ► it all makes sense.

01:12:28 ◼   ► I'm just saying, it feels uncomfortable

01:12:32 ◼   ► to take a well-established, I keep saying culture,

01:12:35 ◼   ► but that's really what it is,

01:12:36 ◼   ► a well-established culture of a realm of computing,

01:12:40 ◼   ► and start modifying it in ways that fly

01:12:44 ◼   ► in the face of the history,

01:12:46 ◼   ► like that are not well integrated with the whole.

01:12:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, you expect pseudo-LS to always list the files

01:12:53 ◼   ► in the current system.

01:12:54 ◼   ► You don't really expect, it's not a very Unix-y thing

01:12:57 ◼   ► to say, well, go find terminal app,

01:12:59 ◼   ► or go to your system preferences and hit a plus button

01:13:02 ◼   ► and choose it from a GUI picker to grant full disk.

01:13:06 ◼   ► - Or if I can't delete a file,

01:13:07 ◼   ► change it to any VRAM setting and reboot,

01:13:09 ◼   ► and then you'll be able to delete the file.

01:13:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, that doesn't really fit either.

01:13:15 ◼   ► The other thing, so I'm torn on this,

01:13:18 ◼   ► and I know Jason and I went back and forth

01:13:21 ◼   ► on Twitter about it.

01:13:22 ◼   ► Like I kind of, there's a part of me that says

01:13:24 ◼   ► that I want like an expert mode.

01:13:26 ◼   ► I want, and maybe it's not even a checkbox

01:13:29 ◼   ► in system preferences.

01:13:30 ◼   ► Maybe it's like a thing you have to type at the command line in terminal just to sort

01:13:35 ◼   ► of show your command line bona fides.

01:13:38 ◼   ► But I kind of want to turn a lot of that stuff off.

01:13:42 ◼   ► And I kind of wish that there was an expert mode.

01:13:43 ◼   ► I get it though.

01:13:45 ◼   ► As soon as those words come out of my mouth, I immediately – the GUI designer in me is

01:13:50 ◼   ► like once you start adding an expert mode, you've lost the plot a little bit.

01:13:57 ◼   ► Right, I mean you're bargaining.

01:13:59 ◼   ► Like you're just like, I can see how this could be implemented,

01:14:01 ◼   ► and please give it to me because I don't want to be annoyed.

01:14:03 ◼   ► But I think what we all really want

01:14:05 ◼   ► is the ability to continue to do the powerful things that we

01:14:09 ◼   ► enjoy the Mac for, but also in a safer way.

01:14:12 ◼   ► Like we want-- it's not a middle path.

01:14:15 ◼   ► It is a fundamental change.

01:14:18 ◼   ► It's like, you want the Mac to be safer.

01:14:22 ◼   ► You need to figure out a way to make the Mac safer,

01:14:25 ◼   ► while also not only retaining all the power we had before,

01:14:28 ◼   ► but if anything, making it more powerful.

01:14:30 ◼   ► And that requires rethinking on a level way

01:14:33 ◼   ► above sort of adding security.

01:14:36 ◼   ► It is, as you said many years ago, Ronco spray-on security.

01:14:39 ◼   ► That's not the way security works.

01:14:41 ◼   ► You have to--

01:14:42 ◼   ► No.

01:14:43 ◼   ► That's the way bad security works.

01:14:45 ◼   ► And it's a difficult problem because you see the conflict.

01:14:49 ◼   ► Here's the way the Mac has always worked,

01:14:50 ◼   ► and here's security.

01:14:51 ◼   ► How do I get them together?

01:14:53 ◼   ► What you have to think is, well, what do people actually use the Mac for?

01:14:56 ◼   ► Like what what in what ways do they need flexibility?

01:15:01 ◼   ► And along what axes does do their workflows change and then provide

01:15:06 ◼   ► safe, secure mechanisms to continue to make those changes?

01:15:11 ◼   ► And that requires rethinking at a much greater level than they're changing.

01:15:16 ◼   ► Like it's a type of rethinking that happened between classic Mac OS and Mac OS 10.

01:15:20 ◼   ► that level of rethinking is required

01:15:22 ◼   ► to get us to an operating system that retains and enhances

01:15:26 ◼   ► the power of the Mac but has the security of iOS.

01:15:28 ◼   ► We are never going to get there by making small changes

01:15:30 ◼   ► to the existing Mac operating system.

01:15:32 ◼   ► Right, and this death by a thousand paper

01:15:34 ◼   ► cuts of authorization.

01:15:35 ◼   ► Right, right, now it's just this terrible negotiation

01:15:37 ◼   ► of who's going to be the most annoyed,

01:15:39 ◼   ► like how secure versus how much annoyance,

01:15:41 ◼   ► and that is not a trade-off you want to feel like you're making.

01:15:43 ◼   ► iOS is a good example.

01:15:44 ◼   ► Not that we want the Mac to work like iOS,

01:15:46 ◼   ► but those trade-offs didn't happen.

01:15:49 ◼   ► The fundamental design of iOS is the way it is because it was designed from the beginning

01:15:53 ◼   ► to provide that level of security.

01:15:55 ◼   ► And now they're trying to add features to it, which I feel like they're able to do more

01:16:01 ◼   ► easily, add features to a system that's already secure in these ways than to add security

01:16:05 ◼   ► because there is no expectation on it.

01:16:07 ◼   ► Everything they've given us in iOS, every new piece of functionality has been like,

01:16:10 ◼   ► we've never been able to do this before.

01:16:12 ◼   ► So it's a blessing.

01:16:13 ◼   ► It's a bonus.

01:16:14 ◼   ► We are not starting at a level of infinite power and then watching our power wane.

01:16:17 ◼   ► We are starting at a level of total constraints and then rejoicing when we can use third-party

01:16:21 ◼   ► keyboards.

01:16:22 ◼   ► Right.

01:16:23 ◼   ► And we've all—I'm not going to say—I don't want to tempt the gods, but—so for

01:16:30 ◼   ► some definition of "can't," which isn't really "can't," it's probably "shouldn't."

01:16:36 ◼   ► And to their credit, they typically don't.

01:16:39 ◼   ► It's hard to take away an automation system that people really use.

01:16:44 ◼   ► Like, at this point, so many people in the Mac OS X era are used to having scripting

01:16:52 ◼   ► languages like Perl and Python and Ruby at their fingertips.

01:16:57 ◼   ► They're used to being able to write a Bash script or do something like that.

01:17:01 ◼   ► AppleScript, I mean, does anybody really think people at Apple still love AppleScript and

01:17:06 ◼   ► it's still around?

01:17:07 ◼   ► But it is still around because there are a lot of people who really count on it.

01:17:13 ◼   ► And apps like Keyboard Maestro, one of my favorites, have long had superpowers to automate

01:17:20 ◼   ► things in your on-screen buttons and stuff like that in a way that can't be scripted

01:17:28 ◼   ► otherwise.

01:17:29 ◼   ► It would be hard to take that away, but I kind of just want to authorize all of it.

01:17:35 ◼   ► My other complaint is that I don't feel like these entitlements, the way that you

01:17:41 ◼   ► as the power user who wants to change them.

01:17:44 ◼   ► I don't think they're organized very well at all.

01:17:46 ◼   ► Like I tend to think that there should be a way

01:17:51 ◼   ► to do it by app.

01:17:53 ◼   ► So that instead of fishing all over system preferences

01:17:56 ◼   ► to find the three places where I wanna add BB Edit

01:17:59 ◼   ► as a special app and give it entitlements,

01:18:01 ◼   ► I'd rather just say, here's BB Edit

01:18:03 ◼   ► and here's the permissions I want to grant to it.

01:18:06 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Check, check, check, check.

01:18:08 ◼   ► I wanna check them all.

01:18:09 ◼   ► Yeah, the whole system is not designed very well.

01:18:14 ◼   ► From a software developer's perspective,

01:18:16 ◼   ► the nightmare of having to explain to all your users

01:18:18 ◼   ► to do with this dance, there's a lot of steps.

01:18:20 ◼   ► The steps are complicated, and they require a bunch of skills

01:18:23 ◼   ► that not every Mac user has, especially

01:18:25 ◼   ► in this day of people being raised on iPhones.

01:18:28 ◼   ► It involves using another application

01:18:30 ◼   ► with separate windows.

01:18:31 ◼   ► It involves dragging something from somewhere

01:18:33 ◼   ► into that window.

01:18:33 ◼   ► As you said, there's no way to organize by application.

01:18:36 ◼   ► I think iOS has a better model here where, for the most part, the iOS model is that if

01:18:43 ◼   ► an application wants to do a thing that it requires permission for, it prompts you and

01:18:48 ◼   ► that you can say allow or deny right from the application. It's not like this is making

01:18:54 ◼   ► you go someplace else and drag a thing or whatever. And then the second thing is that

01:18:56 ◼   ► they're adding now is these reminders which say, "Just so you know, the Facebook application

01:19:01 ◼   ► has been using your location for the past three hours and here's where it..." You know,

01:19:05 ◼   ► those dialogue boxes.

01:19:07 ◼   ► That is a great, you know, suspenders to add to the belt

01:19:11 ◼   ► to say, yeah, we know you tapped through that dialogue

01:19:14 ◼   ► and it was really easy to do.

01:19:15 ◼   ► But just a reminder, this is what this app is doing.

01:19:18 ◼   ► Those two things combined makes people aware

01:19:21 ◼   ► of what the app is doing, while also not requiring them

01:19:24 ◼   ► to do more complicated stuff.

01:19:27 ◼   ► Like there's nothing, developers of iOS applications

01:19:29 ◼   ► don't have to have like a read me file or a support site

01:19:31 ◼   ► explaining to people how to click allow.

01:19:34 ◼   ► Like it's very easy to do.

01:19:37 ◼   ► It's way too complicated to do that on the Mac.

01:19:40 ◼   ► Even I find it annoying just because it's so tedious

01:19:43 ◼   ► and time consuming.

01:19:44 ◼   ► I understand the consequences.

01:19:46 ◼   ► If it's good enough for iOS,

01:19:47 ◼   ► explain to me the consequences here.

01:19:49 ◼   ► Allow me to quickly say yes, but then to your point,

01:19:54 ◼   ► have some place where this is more visible to me.

01:19:56 ◼   ► A Mac-like way to do it would be

01:19:58 ◼   ► some kind of like activity report.

01:20:00 ◼   ► Maybe it can be in screen time for the Mac.

01:20:03 ◼   ► application to show me what they're all doing. So I can look at a report if I'm interested

01:20:07 ◼   ► and then proactively occasionally remind me that something's doing a weird thing. So I

01:20:10 ◼   ► have, you know, it's a delicate balance, but that's the line they're trying to walk with

01:20:15 ◼   ► the Mac now and with iOS for that matter. And on the Mac there, they have made it too

01:20:20 ◼   ► complicated and too annoying.

01:20:21 ◼   ► Yeah. It's occurred to me that maybe they could put some of that in the get info window

01:20:25 ◼   ► in the finder. So if you select an app and you do

01:20:28 ◼   ► Nobody knows what that window is.

01:20:30 ◼   ► I do.

01:20:31 ◼   ► Of course. I did it 10 minutes ago today, but nobody else ever looked at that window.

01:20:38 ◼   ► There's another thing. This is the Mac OS X knowledge that I think even fewer people

01:20:41 ◼   ► know. Do you know the difference between Command-I and Command-Option-I?

01:20:44 ◼   ► Command-Option-I is "show info." Command-I will open a window, and then if you select

01:20:52 ◼   ► another file, it doesn't change. But Command-Option-I will show you a floating palette, and as the

01:20:59 ◼   ► Selection changes in the finder it changes what it's showing you the info for and we are the only two people who know that

01:21:04 ◼   ► Entire world I thought I use it all the time and it's right there versus if oh windows

01:21:10 ◼   ► But it's just it's such a such a relic of classic Mac OS is still hanging out there

01:21:14 ◼   ► And then the command option is not from classic Mac OS that's a nextism. I believe that we benefited from during transition

01:21:22 ◼   ► Yeah, because next was a little bit more

01:21:24 ◼   ► Inspectory yeah, inspector in

01:21:28 ◼   ► Yeah, sort of weird that they're both there, but I remember thinking it was pretty cool

01:21:31 ◼   ► And I can't tell anybody someone Apple will find out they're both there remove one of them. I

01:21:35 ◼   ► Will say while you mention it next is an exception to my spelling rules I do spell it the way that next

01:21:43 ◼   ► Punctuation outside the quotes and you're spelling next with the capital X and T because it just it when you spell it without

01:21:53 ◼   ► Their funky capitalization. It doesn't look like the same company

01:21:57 ◼   ► It's like it doesn't read to me as the the

01:22:01 ◼   ► Former company that Apple acquired with Steve Jobs just like back was all squished together with capital M

01:22:06 ◼   ► Doesn't read like an Apple product us because there's no Apple product by that name

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01:23:53 ◼   ► What's the ATP code probably just ATP?

01:23:56 ◼   ► Yep, I think so. Yeah, you don't know you don't listen to the ads. I

01:24:02 ◼   ► Can't do it I was telling Marco when we were doing I know Marco records the ads for the ATP before you guys

01:24:10 ◼   ► Start recording and then he can just he just slots them in

01:24:15 ◼   ► But when you're—I don't listen to your live telecast. I always listen to the edited

01:24:19 ◼   ► version. When you guys do sponsor breaks, how long do they last? Just a couple seconds?

01:24:24 ◼   ► Or do you guys get up and refresh your beverages?

01:24:26 ◼   ► Adam: In the live show?

01:24:28 ◼   ► Tom Bilyeu: Yeah, like when you're recording. Let's say it's Wednesday. It's last night,

01:24:31 ◼   ► right? You guys probably did a show last night. So when you're recording and you've got

01:24:37 ◼   ► a live audience that is listening along and chatting and

01:24:41 ◼   ► IRC

01:24:43 ◼   ► What other what does Marco do for the sponsor breaks? There are no sparkle sponsor breaks can't stop won't stop

01:24:48 ◼   ► Show must keep going but there you don't even mention it right now. We're not even mentioned

01:24:52 ◼   ► We don't even know where the ads are gonna be when we're done recording and a live show. I

01:24:58 ◼   ► Have a lot of trouble doing

01:25:02 ◼   ► sponsor reads in post

01:25:04 ◼   ► It takes me like, you know, I think I did a pretty I did it

01:25:09 ◼   ► You know

01:25:09 ◼   ► I think I did a fine job with those three sponsors reads tonight one take right there straight through off the top of my head

01:25:16 ◼   ► I can't think of anything

01:25:17 ◼   ► I forgot to mention but when I do them in post because like let's say that I don't have the ad when I'm you know

01:25:23 ◼   ► It's I told you I we record tonight, but I maybe I don't have the text for one of the ads

01:25:27 ◼   ► I'll do it tomorrow. It takes me like six takes I

01:25:31 ◼   ► I feel like an idiot and and I'll like and there are times where I do it

01:25:35 ◼   ► In posts like that and I look at the running time and it's like seven minutes and I'm like what the hell I mean

01:25:42 ◼   ► I know my sponsor reads are sometimes long but seven minutes. What the hell am I doing? It's like without the pressure of

01:25:47 ◼   ► Feeling like I'm I'm wasting you John Syracuse's or whoever my guest of the the episode is like I don't want to bore you

01:25:56 ◼   ► I don't want to waste your time

01:25:58 ◼   ► So it gives me like an edge and it keeps me sharp on a sponsor read

01:26:02 ◼   ► Whereas when I'm just talking to myself in a microphone

01:26:04 ◼   ► I do a terrible job. It's just a quiet skill just like doing the ad reads in the show

01:26:10 ◼   ► It's I'm sure it's a thing you could get good at if you wanted to do it

01:26:12 ◼   ► You got good at doing the ads in the show, right?

01:26:14 ◼   ► So it's just a good question of practice

01:26:16 ◼   ► I feel like if it's something you wanted to do a change you wanted to make you could do it

01:26:19 ◼   ► but I've let you sound comfortable doing them live in the show and

01:26:22 ◼   ► It's also a very different feeling psychologically like I feel like right here

01:26:27 ◼   ► we're having a conversation and I'm not talking to myself and when I first started doing podcasts,

01:26:32 ◼   ► I definitely was self-conscious about it. It seems weird. I never really spent much time speaking

01:26:37 ◼   ► into a microphone. I thought it was very weird in the first years of it hearing my own voice

01:26:44 ◼   ► in my headphones and technically I don't even know what changed in the interim, but there was also

01:26:50 ◼   ► like in the early years doing the show with Dan Benjamin. There was also a little bit of lag

01:26:54 ◼   ► with the audio and it would drive me nuts. I couldn't finish a sentence sometimes because

01:27:00 ◼   ► I'm hearing my words from half a second ago. You get used to it, but I still find if I record the

01:27:07 ◼   ► ads like that, I have this—it's incredibly self-conscious. I'm doing something very weird

01:27:13 ◼   ► talking to myself. Well, I mean, the beauty of it is you can do six takes because who cares?

01:27:20 ◼   ► It's time consuming, but at least you are all—it's like writing, you know, during

01:27:26 ◼   ► Fireball Live versus being able to write ahead of time and then decide when it's ready

01:27:30 ◼   ► to be published.

01:27:31 ◼   ► There you go.

01:27:32 ◼   ► I hear you bought a fridge.

01:27:34 ◼   ► Oh, yes.

01:27:35 ◼   ► I did.

01:27:37 ◼   ► And you talked about it with a friend of the show, Merlin Mann, on your show.

01:27:42 ◼   ► Honest to God, like that was—

01:27:43 ◼   ► Reconcilable differences.

01:27:45 ◼   ► I did buy a fridge, and that was intended to be like, oh, I bought a fridge.

01:27:50 ◼   ► Let me just mention it for two minutes.

01:27:51 ◼   ► But it just spooled out of me and eventually became an entire show.

01:27:57 ◼   ► It was not the intention.

01:27:58 ◼   ► And it's not even really like a good story with a twist ending or anything.

01:28:03 ◼   ► It's not even a story at all.

01:28:04 ◼   ► It is just merely a recitation of the events involving the purchase

01:28:12 ◼   ► and installation of a refrigerator.

01:28:13 ◼   ► but I'm glad people enjoyed it.

01:28:15 ◼   ► Yeah, I'll put a link in Rec.

01:28:18 ◼   ► Diff's fridge show.

01:28:20 ◼   ► You must have had tons of this with your new house movement.

01:28:24 ◼   ► Yeah, and you got to like new furniture, and new kitchen,

01:28:27 ◼   ► and new-- I don't know, unless Amy just deals

01:28:29 ◼   ► with all this stuff.

01:28:30 ◼   ► But it's got to be that multiplied by 1,000, right?

01:28:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I love our fridge.

01:28:36 ◼   ► We have a really nice fridge, and I love it to death.

01:28:38 ◼   ► It's one of my favorite things I've ever owned,

01:28:40 ◼   ► and it's always got ice.

01:28:42 ◼   ► and it doesn't have a stupid thing. You stick a cup in and it shoots ice. You just open the

01:28:47 ◼   ► freezer drawer and then there's a big bucket of ice and it's always filled up and we're never out

01:28:53 ◼   ► of ice, which was in our old house where we rented and had like a typical renter's fridge. You know,

01:28:59 ◼   ► kept stuff cold, kept stuff frozen, but you know, didn't really have any features.

01:29:03 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** Do you do any of the fancy ice stuff for your fancy drinks?

01:29:08 ◼   ► No, I've got these—I'm not a believer in that. I think it's sort of a waste of

01:29:16 ◼   ► time even though—like the clear ice?

01:29:19 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. Yeah. Or weird shapes like balls or large cubes.

01:29:24 ◼   ► I have the balls, but what I have that's easier and it's the only thing I really

01:29:28 ◼   ► use are the large cubes, and they're in a—is it silicon or silicone?

01:29:33 ◼   ► Silicone.

01:29:34 ◼   ► I think it's a brand called Tuvalo.

01:29:38 ◼   ► The Tuvalo King Size Ice.

01:29:40 ◼   ► Let's see if that's right.

01:29:42 ◼   ► And it's super easy.

01:29:43 ◼   ► You just fill it up and it makes six sort of fist-size cubes of ice.

01:29:48 ◼   ► AG: Here's the question.

01:29:51 ◼   ► If you had a magic, cost-free, super-efficient butler who could give you perfectly clear

01:29:57 ◼   ► ice whenever you wanted it instantly, would you use that in your drinks?

01:30:02 ◼   ► No, I honestly don't care about clear ice. I really don't and I care about so many things and I

01:30:08 ◼   ► Like if I am making a cocktail I would like I like to have a really nice

01:30:14 ◼   ► Like if there's like a lemon slice or you know appeal I like to make that nice and neat

01:30:20 ◼   ► I like to pick my own lemons and oranges and I picked them specifically as to whether the Rhine has any any

01:30:27 ◼   ► Gross double edges. No blemishes. No blue ink

01:30:31 ◼   ► But I I don't get it. I you know, I have all sorts of weird quirks. I have been picky about my pens

01:30:37 ◼   ► I'm picky about all sorts of things. So I'm not putting anybody down who is picky about clear ice and

01:30:41 ◼   ► our friends at studio neat who make all sorts of fun stuff like the space pen and notebooks and the

01:30:50 ◼   ► Glyph which is a great product. That's a little

01:30:53 ◼   ► Tripod mount for any phone so you can snap it on your phone and put it on a tripod

01:30:59 ◼   ► They make all sorts of cool stuff including a clear ice kit, and I just could not care about their clear ice kit

01:31:05 ◼   ► Well again the kit means you have to make yourself

01:31:08 ◼   ► I was just like if you if you could get it instantly

01:31:09 ◼   ► But you don't care about it like I don't care about drinks, and I don't really drink at all

01:31:13 ◼   ► But I do think clear ice is really cool, and I mean I first of all I think it looks cool

01:31:17 ◼   ► But the second thing is if you're talking about different sizes and shapes you have a drink

01:31:22 ◼   ► Like in the summer where the ice starts to get small and you drink and some of the ice cubes come into your mouth, right?

01:31:29 ◼   ► Mm-hmm

01:31:30 ◼   ► When an ice cube has all the air pockets the sort of texture and also kind of taste of an ice cube with a bunch

01:31:36 ◼   ► Of those air pockets on your tongue is very different from an ice cube that does not have

01:31:41 ◼   ► All those air pockets in it

01:31:43 ◼   ► Like I feel like it actually changes how the drink tastes even if it's just ice water

01:31:47 ◼   ► You know the taste I'm talking about the aerated ice cube taste and I I find the clear ice

01:31:53 ◼   ► More luxurious that said I do not make clear ice and I have never made it in my entire life

01:31:58 ◼   ► Never would because it's way too much of a hassle for me to deal with and I don't even put ice in my drinks most

01:32:03 ◼   ► Of the time so it's not a thing that is a factor in my life, but I do I do find it appealing

01:32:07 ◼   ► So if I had that instant Butler, I would accept clear ice almost all the time

01:32:12 ◼   ► Yeah, well, I guess if I had the Butler, I mean who am I kidding?

01:32:16 ◼   ► What is your preference like, you know it would you rather have a clear ice cube or a non clear?

01:32:23 ◼   ► The clear ones look cooler and I feel like they taste better.

01:32:25 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Yeah, I guess if I didn't have to do any

01:32:28 ◼   ► work, I wouldn't have to. Even my pal Lee, the guy who runs Hopsing Laundry, my beloved

01:32:32 ◼   ► cocktail bar here in Philly where he fusses over everything. He does not fuss over clear

01:32:37 ◼   ► ice. He has very good ice and he's very particular that this drink gets a cube and

01:32:42 ◼   ► this drink gets a sphere and whatever, but he doesn't bother with the clear ice.

01:32:46 ◼   ► Adam Back (01:

01:32:47 ◼   ► It's still a thing. I don't see anything in the silicone thing that helps with the clearing.

01:32:52 ◼   ► No, this doesn't clear. This is just a way to make big ice cubes.

01:32:56 ◼   ► Yeah. If you're doing it commercially, unless I guess you could increase your price by a lot if

01:33:00 ◼   ► you go through the hassle, but it is quite a hassle to do.

01:33:03 ◼   ► Yeah. And it's like some of these ones, it's like they make a big thing and then it's like

01:33:07 ◼   ► the non-clear part settles to the bottom and you got to sit there and cut it in half and all this

01:33:12 ◼   ► stuff. And I've seen things on YouTube where there's like restaurants that have like $40,000

01:33:16 ◼   ► ice cube makers just to get clear ice. How did we get off on the ice? Oh, the refrigerator talk.

01:33:22 ◼   ► I'll tell you what though, as much as I like the fridge, we have a—I forget the name of the brand,

01:33:29 ◼   ► but we have a supposedly a—Osco, I forget what it is, a dishwasher.

01:33:33 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** Bosch?

01:33:34 ◼   ► **Ezra Kleinman** Ah, no, it's something else, but I don't want to besmirch them too bad,

01:33:39 ◼   ► but it's apparently a very nice dishwasher. It does get the dishes clean, I will say.

01:33:43 ◼   ► It will to get the dishes clean but man. Oh man is the interface terrible and it's got even though it's it's brand new and it's nice

01:33:50 ◼   ► It has those

01:33:51 ◼   ► Has those type of buttons that kind of click?

01:33:55 ◼   ► And I guess they're waterproof. You know what I mean that there's like a membrane sort of like microwave buttons often are

01:34:01 ◼   ► But the but your touches just don't register sometimes and you'll hit like you just press harder

01:34:07 ◼   ► Yeah, and you hit start and it makes I don't know what the symbol means it hits start and it makes it puts three little

01:34:14 ◼   ► horizontal lines up on this ground and that means go and you close the door and then nothing happens and

01:34:20 ◼   ► Then you open it up and you hit the same button and you get the same three lines and you close the door and it

01:34:25 ◼   ► kicks in

01:34:26 ◼   ► Yeah, this is I feel like is a gap and still still in this modern age

01:34:30 ◼   ► like we're all so excited when you know back in our youth when Consumer Reports came as like finally someone is going to

01:34:36 ◼   ► do reviews of things that people previously didn't review like a

01:34:40 ◼   ► Clear I'd look at dishwashers and reliability in cars and in the modern era we have things like well

01:34:45 ◼   ► There's just you know online reviews was a big revolution than things like the wire cutter

01:34:48 ◼   ► We're like I don't have time to read a bunch of rears. Just tell me which one I should buy

01:34:51 ◼   ► None of these I feel like address

01:34:53 ◼   ► This major concern that is such a factor in all of our lives, which is is this the best whatever for you?

01:35:00 ◼   ► Oh, here's how much it costs. Here's the features it has if the interface drives you insane. That is a huge factor

01:35:06 ◼   ► I don't care how reliable it is.

01:35:08 ◼   ► I don't care how much it costs.

01:35:09 ◼   ► I don't care how clear it gets.

01:35:10 ◼   ► It's just every day I have to use this interface.

01:35:12 ◼   ► If the buttons are annoying to press, let alone if the buttons are inscrutable.

01:35:15 ◼   ► And I feel like there's, you know, I'm mostly playing with the wire cut here.

01:35:18 ◼   ► There's way too little emphasis in Consumer Reports, in any kind of product reviews, in

01:35:24 ◼   ► the wire cutter of the user interface of physical products that can make or break.

01:35:30 ◼   ► Like I understand you do want to know how does it perform and you do want to know about

01:35:33 ◼   ► reliability and you do want to know about features, but in the end, even if you have

01:35:37 ◼   ► all of those, if the thing that you're describing is the case, you will not love this appliance.

01:35:43 ◼   ► This appliance will slowly drive you mad.

01:35:45 ◼   ► Darrell Bock Yeah, totally. It's dishwasher driving me

01:35:48 ◼   ► mad. The other thing that stinks, and I get it, I want to be a good citizen. Maybe it's

01:35:52 ◼   ► even legal now, I don't know, but it takes forever to clean the dishes. It does get them

01:35:56 ◼   ► very clean, but I guess as a water-saving measure, it's squirting like one tiny hot

01:36:03 ◼   ► thing at a time. I don't know why. Mine also takes a long time. And I do wonder. I assumed

01:36:08 ◼   ► it took forever because it's doing an extremely thorough job because I feel like it is doing

01:36:12 ◼   ► an extremely thorough job. But I don't know what's going on inside there. I don't know what's taking

01:36:17 ◼   ► so long. I was talking to Marco about it. Marco's convinced it's a water-saving measure. Maybe.

01:36:23 ◼   ► But it's funny because it just shows the difference. People in all sorts of industries,

01:36:32 ◼   ► People designing engineers who are designing dishwashers are thinking about water converse

01:36:36 ◼   ► at conservation now. Whereas like you just know that like when dishwashers first became

01:36:41 ◼   ► a thing like I don't know late 50s early 60s the engineers at General Electric all they

01:36:47 ◼   ► were thinking was how do we close down these dishes as fast as we can because that's a

01:36:52 ◼   ► selling feature.

01:36:53 ◼   ► That's the error when they say if we can get these dishes clean by spraying with the radiation

01:36:57 ◼   ► we'll do it. You don't care about you, your healthy environment. We just want to get dishes

01:37:02 ◼   ► clean. And then we're going to advertise the hell out of the fact that ours is faster than

01:37:05 ◼   ► the other guys. Yeah, our radiation really removes every trace of dirt. Totally, totally

01:37:11 ◼   ► sanitizes them. No life remains on these dishes when we're done with them. I had a link in

01:37:16 ◼   ► here. It looks like David Pogue is back at the New York Times. I don't know if that's

01:37:20 ◼   ► a one off thing. I haven't looked at it yet for a while. Story fly through, but I didn't

01:37:25 ◼   ► follow the link and didn't note that it was the New York Times. It's a story on Easter

01:37:29 ◼   ► eggs and just totally rip off James Thompson's presentation. Do you know what? I don't know

01:37:35 ◼   ► because I have James Thompson of, of a peak calc fame and drag thing fame. For those of

01:37:43 ◼   ► us who are a little bit older, you still use drag thing. I'm running it right now. I'm

01:37:47 ◼   ► looking at it right now, even though it's not retina, but you don't have a retina. This

01:37:50 ◼   ► is my run. It is play zone. No problem. So James Thompson was at a conference recently

01:37:55 ◼   ► and did like a 28 minute talk on the history of Easter eggs. I've got it saved up. I have seen

01:37:59 ◼   ► rave reviews of people saying that this is they knocked it out of the park knowing James. I'm

01:38:06 ◼   ► sure that he did. For those of you who don't know, peacocks, peacocks, Easter eggs are some of the

01:38:15 ◼   ► most. Well, see, I feel like those are not Easter eggs. I know that's what it's on. I feel the

01:38:21 ◼   ► The definition of Easter egg has expanded to ridiculous.

01:38:24 ◼   ► It's kind of like lunatic fringe.

01:38:26 ◼   ► Lunatic fringe was not an Easter egg in After Dark.

01:38:29 ◼   ► Right.

01:38:30 ◼   ► Lunatic fringe was a feature of After Dark.

01:38:31 ◼   ► It wasn't a hidden cool thing that you could discover.

01:38:35 ◼   ► It was totally there.

01:38:37 ◼   ► It was just a feature.

01:38:38 ◼   ► And in the same way, PCALC, which is essentially

01:38:40 ◼   ► a calculator, has a, quote unquote,

01:38:43 ◼   ► "Easter egg" where there's an entire crazy 3D game

01:38:46 ◼   ► environment in the same application.

01:38:48 ◼   ► And AR.

01:38:50 ◼   ► Yeah, and AR.

01:38:51 ◼   ► Like, yeah.

01:38:51 ◼   ► But it is not a cute, hidden little feature somewhere

01:38:55 ◼   ► that you would notice or could trigger.

01:38:56 ◼   ► Even when you have things like the breakout game in System 7

01:38:59 ◼   ► or whatever, that counts as an Easter egg

01:39:01 ◼   ► because it was hidden, like an Easter egg is hidden.

01:39:03 ◼   ► And I guess the about stuff, the PCAL stuff,

01:39:06 ◼   ► is kind of hidden in the about screen.

01:39:08 ◼   ► But at a certain point, I would love

01:39:10 ◼   ► to know a number of lines of code.

01:39:14 ◼   ► How much of PCAL is the quote unquote Easter egg,

01:39:16 ◼   ► and how much is the calculator at this point?

01:39:19 ◼   ► How much is the math engine?

01:39:20 ◼   ► or as James would call it, probably the maths engine.

01:39:23 ◼   ► With the code carried over from whatever,

01:39:25 ◼   ► he wrote it in Pascal like 20 something years ago.

01:39:28 ◼   ► I'm just curious if you have any fond memories of Easter eggs

01:39:31 ◼   ► from back in the day.

01:39:32 ◼   ► What was the-- the Finder one, was it the--

01:39:34 ◼   ► it was the Finder, and if you held down the Option key

01:39:36 ◼   ► and went to about this Mac--

01:39:38 ◼   ► No, about the Finder is--

01:39:40 ◼   ► About the Finder.

01:39:40 ◼   ► Yeah, with the little mountain range.

01:39:43 ◼   ► I did that-- here's the thing that I'm thinking

01:39:45 ◼   ► about Easter eggs the other day.

01:39:46 ◼   ► I watched James' thing as well.

01:39:49 ◼   ► That little thing where you hold down the option key when you select the "About" and it changes to

01:39:53 ◼   ► the "About the Finder" and you see the little "Sierra Nevada Mountains" in sort of this

01:39:57 ◼   ► abstract black and white artwork. I must have activated that Easter egg hundreds of times

01:40:06 ◼   ► in my life on my Mac. Why? Like, once I did it once, then I knew that it was there.

01:40:16 ◼   ► the discovery had been made. It's not like there was any interactive elements or anything. If there

01:40:22 ◼   ► was scrolling credits, you can watch them scroll, but once you've done that, that's it. And I wasn't

01:40:26 ◼   ► showing people. It's not like other people were there with me. "Hey, let me show you this cool

01:40:29 ◼   ► Easter egg that you might not know about on your Mac." Just me, by myself, I would activate that

01:40:34 ◼   ► Easter egg. And I think the reason I was doing it was like, you know, the thing that Apple says about

01:40:40 ◼   ► all their current products, but is actually true of Easter eggs. Surprise and delight. I just needed

01:40:45 ◼   ► I just like the idea that it was there, and I would just activate it and get a little

01:40:51 ◼   ► smile and have a little tiny microdose of joy.

01:40:55 ◼   ► So yeah, there's that thing that somebody did because they thought it would be fun.

01:40:59 ◼   ► And there's that graphic.

01:41:00 ◼   ► So my favorite, or one of my favorites, was QuarkXPress had one.

01:41:06 ◼   ► And I might misremember—it's been a long time since I've used QuarkXPress—but for

01:41:10 ◼   ► a number of years, I used QuarkXPress more than I used any other app.

01:41:14 ◼   ► I used it more than BB Edit even.

01:41:16 ◼   ► And I got really, really good at it.

01:41:18 ◼   ► And there was a keyboard shortcut

01:41:20 ◼   ► to delete the current element.

01:41:24 ◼   ► And it wasn't just the Delete key.

01:41:26 ◼   ► It was Command-Option-K or something like that.

01:41:29 ◼   ► And the idea was, I think, that you

01:41:33 ◼   ► could be in text editing mode, where the Delete key would

01:41:36 ◼   ► delete the last character.

01:41:38 ◼   ► But what you really want to do is you

01:41:39 ◼   ► want to delete the whole text box

01:41:41 ◼   ► that you've placed on the pasteboard.

01:41:43 ◼   ► you do Command-Option-K or something like that. But if you held down an extra key—I

01:41:48 ◼   ► forget if it was Control. I think it was Control. So you do Control-Command-Option-K, a little

01:41:54 ◼   ► alien came out from the side, marched over, and then shot the element you were deleting

01:41:59 ◼   ► with a ray gun. It would take like 20 seconds for this. I used it all the time. Late at

01:42:07 ◼   ► night at the student newspaper, you start going stir-crazy, I would make the little

01:42:12 ◼   ► Quark Express alien come out and spend 20 seconds deleting a thing that I could have

01:42:16 ◼   ► deleted completely instantaneously. But I thought that was amusing.

01:42:20 ◼   ► Tim Cynova One of the beautiful things of the modern

01:42:22 ◼   ► internet is that you can find a video of that happening, I believe, on YouTube or some other

01:42:26 ◼   ► source because I remember Googling it at some time in the past and seeing the little animation.

01:42:29 ◼   ► I never used Quark Express in real life, but yeah, it's totally one of those little Easter

01:42:34 ◼   ► eggs that, you know, was just there to be fun. And why were you activating it? Because

01:42:39 ◼   ► You were looking for a tiny microdose of surprise and delight?

01:42:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:42:44 ◼   ► I wouldn't be surprised if James mentioned it, but MailSmith had an Easter egg where

01:42:51 ◼   ► on April 1st, it would add a preference to the notification set.

01:42:55 ◼   ► MailSmith is the email client made by Barebone Software based on the text engine of BB Edit.

01:43:02 ◼   ► And on April 1st, it would add a preference, and I think it was on by default, to deliver

01:43:06 ◼   ► a 10 kilovolt electric shock with each new email.

01:43:09 ◼   ► And all it did was play a little buzz sound, which was funny.

01:43:14 ◼   ► I'm not really much for April 1st gags, but it was all right.

01:43:17 ◼   ► But I do recall that while I was there, we did get some support mail from people who

01:43:23 ◼   ► did not realize it was a joke.

01:43:25 ◼   ► I remember being impressed.

01:43:32 ◼   ► One of the other Easter eggs I was impressed by that invoked a new era of Easter eggs was

01:43:35 ◼   ► was the first 3D Easter egg that I experienced,

01:43:39 ◼   ► which was the iguana flag on the Power Macs.

01:43:42 ◼   ► - I don't remember this.

01:43:43 ◼   ► - It was a nice combination,

01:43:44 ◼   ► I think it's in James' talk,

01:43:45 ◼   ► it was a nice combination of,

01:43:47 ◼   ► so the Power Mac, the whole big thing with the Power Mac

01:43:49 ◼   ► was the Power PC, the Macintosh,

01:43:50 ◼   ► and the whole message and sort of,

01:43:54 ◼   ► you know, significance in the community

01:43:56 ◼   ► was that these are much faster than your old Macs.

01:43:59 ◼   ► They are more powerful.

01:44:00 ◼   ► They can do all sorts of neat things

01:44:02 ◼   ► that your old Mac could never do.

01:44:04 ◼   ► - Oh, right, right.

01:44:04 ◼   ► the graphing calculator. >> Yeah. And the Easter eggs followed along

01:44:09 ◼   ► with that. I think this was in firmware or something. Maybe there was some kind of key

01:44:14 ◼   ► combination. I forget how to activate it. But basically it would take over your entire

01:44:18 ◼   ► screen with a comically grainy by today's standard background image of one infinite

01:44:24 ◼   ► loop with the flags that are in front of the building. It was kind of zoomed in more. And

01:44:29 ◼   ► was a flagpole, and hanging from the flagpole was a flag. I think it had a flag with somebody's

01:44:36 ◼   ► pedaguan on it or something. And it was rendered in Quickdraw 3D, which you can recall was

01:44:40 ◼   ► Apple's attempted 3D API back in the day. Or maybe it was like Quickdraw 3D Rave, or

01:44:47 ◼   ► I don't remember the particular standard. But anyway, it was a 3D flag, again, comically

01:44:50 ◼   ► green with a comically small number of polygons on it. And it would flap in the breeze. And

01:44:56 ◼   ► This alone, it doesn't make any sense that this would be impressive, but this alone was

01:44:59 ◼   ► impressive that you'd have a big color graphic which looked "photorealistic" in the background

01:45:05 ◼   ► because it was just a photo, and then a 3D flag flapping in the breeze, which was a really

01:45:10 ◼   ► hard thing to do.

01:45:11 ◼   ► And it was demonstrating, as it flapped at like 12 frames per second or whatever, it

01:45:15 ◼   ► was demonstrating the amazing power of these new computers because you couldn't hope to

01:45:19 ◼   ► render this at all at like one frame every seven seconds on like an old Mac or worse,

01:45:24 ◼   ► right?

01:45:25 ◼   ► Right.

01:45:26 ◼   ► I don't think there was a cursor on the screen, but if you move the mouse around

01:45:29 ◼   ► You could influence the direction of the wind on the flag so you didn't actually see a cursor

01:45:34 ◼   ► But you'd notice that it was interacted that you change the direction of the wind

01:45:37 ◼   ► And by changing the direction of the wind

01:45:40 ◼   ► You know sort of making go all the way to the right and all the way to the left all the way to the right like

01:45:44 ◼   ► Back and forth whipping making the flag whip back and forth you could eventually tear the flag off of the pole

01:45:49 ◼   ► and it would like flutter down and

01:45:51 ◼   ► This was an amazing easter egg because it was like hidden inside your computer

01:45:55 ◼   ► It was 3D graphics, and it was interactive, and it was weird,

01:45:58 ◼   ► and had an iguana on it.

01:45:59 ◼   ► And it was super Apple-focused, and it demonstrated

01:46:02 ◼   ► the power of your Power Mac.

01:46:03 ◼   ► That's another one that stands out in my memory.

01:46:05 ◼   ► It's a little weird that Apple doesn't do stuff like that

01:46:07 ◼   ► anymore.

01:46:08 ◼   ► I mean, you get the feeling that Steve Jobs wasn't really

01:46:11 ◼   ► a fan of that sort of thing.

01:46:12 ◼   ► Which is weird, because if you think about Steve Jobs making

01:46:15 ◼   ► like blue boxes with Woz, he was--

01:46:16 ◼   ► and the pirate flag and everything like that,

01:46:18 ◼   ► that was totally up his alley.

01:46:21 ◼   ► But at a certain point, he turned the car on.

01:46:23 ◼   ► Yeah, he outgrew it.

01:46:24 ◼   ► Yeah, he outgrew it.

01:46:24 ◼   ► Or either outgrew it or decided that if it's not him doing it, don't do it because now

01:46:28 ◼   ► you're messing up his thing.

01:46:29 ◼   ► It's great when he's messing up AT&T's phone system.

01:46:31 ◼   ► It's not so great when you're messing up his thing.

01:46:33 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Yeah.

01:46:34 ◼   ► Because the other thing I wouldn't—I don't know if—sometimes you'd call them Easter

01:46:37 ◼   ► eggs just because they were clever.

01:46:40 ◼   ► But just an about box that did something interesting.

01:46:43 ◼   ► You'd go to about this Mac or about this app and it would—people—it was a place

01:46:50 ◼   ► for clever developers to blow off Steam.

01:46:54 ◼   ► I mean, James obviously still has it, but--

01:46:57 ◼   ► BBS still got it, too.

01:46:59 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:47:01 ◼   ► But that was thrown by the wayside.

01:47:03 ◼   ► It was the one window the developer

01:47:05 ◼   ► felt like was for them.

01:47:07 ◼   ► It was a place where you could go--

01:47:08 ◼   ► the only reason the user would go there

01:47:10 ◼   ► is to maybe get a version number.

01:47:11 ◼   ► So that's the only information you have to convey.

01:47:12 ◼   ► But every other part of that window

01:47:14 ◼   ► is it's like the place for the developer to take a bow.

01:47:17 ◼   ► And depending on how deeply you want to bow,

01:47:19 ◼   ► if you want to put in your breakout game or a 3D driving

01:47:22 ◼   ► game with an AR component, that's the place to do it.

01:47:28 ◼   ► But it's interesting that Apple sort of went away from that. I can't remember the

01:47:32 ◼   ► last time anybody found an Easter egg in Apple software, but Google still does it famously

01:47:38 ◼   ► all the time. They had Mario driving around Google Maps on Mario Day. Did you know this?

01:47:44 ◼   ► Mario Day is March 10th because it looks like Mario.

01:47:47 ◼   ► That's terrible.

01:47:48 ◼   ► Mar 10th.

01:47:49 ◼   ► the fourth. All these sort of pun-based holidays are not great.

01:47:54 ◼   ► May the fourth at least—I cringe at it. I think it's a little corny. But at least

01:48:00 ◼   ► you would say, like, when it is May fourth, you would say May the fourth. And it does

01:48:04 ◼   ► sound like May the fourth be with you. It works at a certain level where Mar Ten equals

01:48:11 ◼   ► Mario.

01:48:12 ◼   ► Yeah, it's more of a stretch.

01:48:14 ◼   ► Kind of a stretch. I'm trying to think who else does Easter eggs.

01:48:17 ◼   ► probably still Apple ones hidden in there. Like people can sneak stuff in, but it's,

01:48:21 ◼   ► uh, the thing is there's so much more software now that, uh, you know, so many more applications.

01:48:26 ◼   ► The number of applications in the app store dwarfs the number of applications ever made

01:48:30 ◼   ► for classic Mac OS by probably orders of magnitude. So if there are awesome Easter eggs out there,

01:48:35 ◼   ► maybe we just don't even know about them. I feel like at various points in the early

01:48:39 ◼   ► life of the Mac, I was at least aware of, if not had a copy of every application available

01:48:44 ◼   ► things for the computer, right? Certainly all the popular ones, right? So you could,

01:48:48 ◼   ► you could, it's like being in a small town where you know everybody, right? And then you know,

01:48:52 ◼   ► like these three have Easter eggs and everybody eventually knows about the Easter eggs and we

01:48:56 ◼   ► share it. And with like with millions of apps in the app store, that doesn't happen anymore.

01:48:59 ◼   ► There's not, there's not that sort of, it's like television, you know, when we're all watching the

01:49:04 ◼   ► same three networks in the same five shows, it's a lot easier to have a shared understanding of the

01:49:09 ◼   ► the current state of play.

01:49:11 ◼   ► You added this.

01:49:12 ◼   ► Here's a story you added to the show notes about Apple locking batteries

01:49:17 ◼   ► to iPhones.

01:49:18 ◼   ► Michael Tsai has it on his website.

01:49:20 ◼   ► I'll link to that in the show notes.

01:49:24 ◼   ► This has been growing for a while.

01:49:25 ◼   ► And I think that the gist of it now is that it's not

01:49:29 ◼   ► that you can't use a non-authorized battery replacement,

01:49:34 ◼   ► but if you put a non-authorized battery replacement into an iPhone

01:49:39 ◼   ► and presumably maybe iPads too, or if not, it might be coming. You get a permanent warning

01:49:45 ◼   ► in settings that tells you that the battery needs to be serviced, which would annoy the

01:49:51 ◼   ► hell out of me to have something like that that I can't make go away.

01:49:54 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer:** Especially if it's badge settings. I don't

01:49:55 ◼   ► think it does badge settings, but imagine if it did.

01:49:57 ◼   ► **Beserat Debebe:** Oh, that would drive me nuts.

01:50:00 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** Yeah. So this is the type of thing where now

01:50:02 ◼   ► it's a bunch of people experimenting. So it's not a rumor. It's a real thing that's happening,

01:50:07 ◼   ► it's unclear what the actual situation is. The situation could be that the logic in Apple's

01:50:14 ◼   ► operating system that tries to validate the battery with the little chip that's in there,

01:50:19 ◼   ► you know, triggers this battery needs service thing, but really it's erroneous because what

01:50:24 ◼   ► it should just be detecting is that it's not the battery needs service, it's just that

01:50:28 ◼   ► it's not matched up with the hardware and that should be expressed in a different way.

01:50:32 ◼   ► Or it could be that this is totally intended behavior and Apple's trying to stop people

01:50:35 ◼   ► from putting in other batteries. But the effect of it may end up being the same. And this

01:50:40 ◼   ► is this ongoing battle of like—

01:50:42 ◼   ► Jay Haynes And it's—you get it even if it is an authorized

01:50:45 ◼   ► part. It's just that if the service is performed by someone other than an authorized Apple

01:50:51 ◼   ► itself or an authorized Apple repair technician, there's some kind of magic incantation that

01:50:57 ◼   ► once you put the replacement part in, you do some sort of diagnostic thing that says,

01:51:02 ◼   ► "Okay, now it's authorized."

01:51:04 ◼   ► it's authorized. Yeah, but involving some sort of private key

01:51:06 ◼   ► that only Apple has or something like that. Like the thing that this is part of the larger

01:51:11 ◼   ► right to repair issue of like, should Apple, should it be legal for Apple to stop people

01:51:16 ◼   ► from start third parties for repairing them? And it reminds me a lot of the printer ink

01:51:19 ◼   ► DRM debacle of years past where printer manufacturers make all their money off this ink and so they

01:51:26 ◼   ► wanted to make it so that you couldn't use third party ink cartridges. So they put some

01:51:29 ◼   ► sort of DRM in the ink cartridges and then tried to sue the makers.

01:51:33 ◼   ► nothing about making your print output look better or come out faster or have higher fidelity.

01:51:40 ◼   ► It was simply there for pure marketing spite.

01:51:46 ◼   ► Adam: Yeah. But see, the thing is their story was similar to the Apple. They would say,

01:51:50 ◼   ► "Well, we just want people to make sure people have guaranteed compatible highest quality

01:51:56 ◼   ► ink that we can control." Who knows what you're getting from those third-party things

01:52:00 ◼   ► it might not work right or it might work right with this version, but then we open our software

01:52:04 ◼   ► and that ink doesn't work because they didn't realize they had to design it in this way

01:52:07 ◼   ► to account for some change in our printer.

01:52:09 ◼   ► So really it's the safest if you use our first.

01:52:12 ◼   ► It's exactly the same story with the Apple batteries.

01:52:15 ◼   ► Like, oh, well, third parties, we want it to be installed by an authorized dealer.

01:52:19 ◼   ► We want it to be a genuine part and that's why we put this code in there and blah, blah,

01:52:23 ◼   ► blah.

01:52:24 ◼   ► And you can, again, within the company, I can imagine people convincing themselves that

01:52:28 ◼   ► that what they're doing is in the best interest of the customer.

01:52:31 ◼   ► But back in reality, it is not in the best interest of the customer.

01:52:36 ◼   ► I feel like it was clearly established that it is better for people to be able to get

01:52:40 ◼   ► cheaper printer ink.

01:52:41 ◼   ► It's bad for a single company to have a monopoly on this because they raised the price and

01:52:45 ◼   ► because there's no competition, right?

01:52:47 ◼   ► And so it's bad if no one but Apple can successfully put an Apple battery back into an Apple phone.

01:52:54 ◼   ► And there's always going to be cases where like, oh, some third party badly installed

01:52:58 ◼   ► a battery and it blew up and it's playing on fire and killed everyone on board.

01:53:02 ◼   ► But that's just, that's part of what Apple has to deal with as a company in the world.

01:53:06 ◼   ► And I honestly, it wouldn't be that big a deal because what Apple would say is, yeah,

01:53:10 ◼   ► that's because the third party did it and they did a bad job, right?

01:53:13 ◼   ► It would be actually good for Apple to be able to explain that.

01:53:16 ◼   ► It would help people keep people away from it.

01:53:18 ◼   ► But the reality is that doesn't happen.

01:53:19 ◼   ► People just get cheaper batteries from third parties and everyone is better for it except

01:53:24 ◼   ► for apparently Apple who just can't stand the idea of that happening.

01:53:27 ◼   ► Yeah, and the other one, and I don't think that there's an issue with it at the moment,

01:53:30 ◼   ► but I know that in that third party repair scene for phones, the big one is repairing

01:53:36 ◼   ► cracked displays because their displays are made of glass and people sometimes unfortunately

01:53:44 ◼   ► drop their phone and then the glass shatters and people have different—there's different

01:53:49 ◼   ► amounts of shattering and people have different standards for what they'll put up with once

01:53:53 ◼   ► they've done it. I would probably go the authorized route. I've done it, in fact,

01:54:01 ◼   ► I think twice that I've dropped an iPhone. But I totally respect that some people, if

01:54:08 ◼   ► they could do it for half price and it still looks like a nice display, it's I guess

01:54:12 ◼   ► an Apple part. I mean, you can't really have a third-party display. They would like

01:54:16 ◼   ► to save money on it. I get it. I'm probably more on Apple's side on the right to repair

01:54:25 ◼   ► stuff than a lot of people, a lot of nerds. A lot of nerds are really upset about all

01:54:30 ◼   ► of this stuff. I get it. Your phone, you should be able to do whatever you want with it. But

01:54:36 ◼   ► I know the iFixit guys are really down on all the glue that Apple uses to put things

01:54:41 ◼   ► together.

01:54:42 ◼   ► I feel like that's a separate issue.

01:54:44 ◼   ► The issue of how repairable they are,

01:54:47 ◼   ► you can be militant about that,

01:54:49 ◼   ► or you can not be militant about it.

01:54:50 ◼   ► But it's the idea that if I'm physically able

01:54:54 ◼   ► to do a repair or replacement,

01:54:56 ◼   ► like if I'm able to do that with the tools

01:54:57 ◼   ► and skills that I have,

01:54:59 ◼   ► but then some kind of essentially DRM lockout

01:55:02 ◼   ► prevents the device from working,

01:55:05 ◼   ► from appearing to work correctly in the future

01:55:07 ◼   ► for no actual good reason other than just like,

01:55:10 ◼   ► Apple doesn't want this to happen.

01:55:12 ◼   ► That's bad.

01:55:13 ◼   ► We can't rely on Apple's benevolence to have reasonable repair prices and wait times.

01:55:16 ◼   ► We want there to be pressure.

01:55:18 ◼   ► For years and years before the iPhone, there were authorized Apple dealers.

01:55:24 ◼   ► Before there were Apple stores.

01:55:25 ◼   ► That's where you went to get Apple stuff done.

01:55:27 ◼   ► That is a well-established system for Apple having some modicum of control because to

01:55:31 ◼   ► be an authorized Apple dealer, the word authorized means Apple authorized you to do it.

01:55:35 ◼   ► I would go beyond that and say, "It should be perfectly possible to have completely unauthorized

01:55:40 ◼   ► repair centers for these things, right? As long as, you know, the backstops against all the safety

01:55:47 ◼   ► and the danger things should be legal backstops that exist for consumer perception, independent

01:55:51 ◼   ► of any individual company. Like in other words, liability for doing a bad phone repair and it

01:55:55 ◼   ► blows up a battery. We're like, that's the legal system and our laws should protect us against

01:55:59 ◼   ► that. It's not like we're saying a laissez faire if your battery blows up, tough luck. Like,

01:56:04 ◼   ► you know, that's, that's why we have laws. But beyond that, Apple shouldn't have any say. And

01:56:10 ◼   ► whether you're allowed to get your phone repaired, they can void your warranty, because again,

01:56:13 ◼   ► that's an Apple thing. That's always been the deal. Fine. You get it repaired someplace else.

01:56:16 ◼   ► It's not an authorized Apple dealer, you void your warranty, like, these are the trade offs

01:56:20 ◼   ► that need to be made. And it's not, you know, the slippery slope, like if you allow this,

01:56:23 ◼   ► it will be madness. We lived in this world for years where there was authorized Apple dealers,

01:56:27 ◼   ► no Apple stores, and also unauthorized Apple dealers, and nobody, you know, the world did

01:56:32 ◼   ► did not end. It is a perfectly viable system.

01:56:35 ◼   ► Dave Asprey You could take these things apart, put them

01:56:37 ◼   ► back together, and they just worked. It reminds me of a longstanding observation. You still

01:56:43 ◼   ► have a TiVo?

01:56:44 ◼   ► Tim Cynova I have multiple TiVos.

01:56:46 ◼   ► Dave Asprey So we're still a TiVo family, and that's

01:56:50 ◼   ► why I think you and I have talked about this on the show before. It's very hard to convey

01:56:55 ◼   ► to somebody who doesn't own a TiVo how much better TiVo fast-forwarding and skipping around

01:57:02 ◼   ► is and how you never ever have to wait for anything. It's always super fast. They've

01:57:07 ◼   ► even added better features where certain shows now get indexed where you can just hit that

01:57:12 ◼   ► – do you have the green button?

01:57:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:57:14 ◼   ► D. And it skips – it perfectly skips the commercials. But we first computerized television

01:57:22 ◼   ► or video watching, if you will, to make it better and to do amazing things like time

01:57:27 ◼   ► shifting without having to manage a bunch of VHS tapes and a much easier—I mean, people

01:57:37 ◼   ► forget it. Again, we're going to lose the younger crowd. But the blinking 12 on the

01:57:41 ◼   ► VCR was a real thing. That was a real thing where VCRs were so bad to use, had such a

01:57:49 ◼   ► terrible user interface that people didn't even bother to set the clock. And if you don't

01:57:53 ◼   ► of the clock set, you can't program anything in advance. You can't say, "Well, I'm going

01:57:58 ◼   ► on vacation and I want to tape my favorite show on Tuesday night." Well, if the clock

01:58:02 ◼   ► isn't set, good luck. People didn't use it. TiVo revolutionized this. It made it—you

01:58:08 ◼   ► had this nice little TV guide right on the screen and you'd say, "That's the show I

01:58:11 ◼   ► want," and then you'd get it. And it was great. We used computers to make watching

01:58:17 ◼   ► TV better. And now we use computers to make watching TV worse with unskippable Hulu ads

01:58:24 ◼   ► and like we went from using computers to be able to skip ads if you want to, to using

01:58:30 ◼   ► computers to make it so that you cannot skip the ads.

01:58:33 ◼   ► Yeah, well, in some respects, we also may use computers to make TV better still, as

01:58:38 ◼   ► in let's forego the entire concept of a continuous stream of shows that air at fixed

01:58:43 ◼   ► times and then having a device deal with them, streaming services, the shows just exist and

01:58:47 ◼   ► watch them when you want, so that's an improvement. But now that they have control over the venue

01:58:52 ◼   ► again, they're using that control to extract money in various ways. Although I have to

01:58:57 ◼   ► say that for the most part, first of all, my TiVo usage has been decreasing as more

01:59:03 ◼   ► and more shows are on streaming services. And second, I prefer the experience of using

01:59:10 ◼   ► a completely commercial-free streaming service that I pay for and can stream and download

01:59:15 ◼   ► any time that I want, then the experience of TiVo in all ways except for the control

01:59:21 ◼   ► factor because if I have to use it on tvOS I'm using the terrible Apple remote and if

01:59:28 ◼   ► I'm using it on an iOS device I find the playback interfaces, the sort of interface that, you

01:59:34 ◼   ► know, on the screen that you use to play the show, in all of my applications to be terrible

01:59:39 ◼   ► I want to sit down every single one of these developers and say let me explain to you the

01:59:42 ◼   ► things that people do when they're watching shows on their iPad and how terrible your

01:59:47 ◼   ► interface is at doing those things.

01:59:50 ◼   ► Like the ones that don't have like a go back 15 seconds or the –

01:59:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:59:54 ◼   ► That's just like the tip of the iceberg, right?

01:59:56 ◼   ► I could start getting into –

01:59:57 ◼   ► How do you not have those buttons?

01:59:58 ◼   ► I could start getting into obscure stuff like the idea that if when I pause your video to

02:00:03 ◼   ► like read the letter that someone is writing, if you dim the screen so much that I can't

02:00:08 ◼   ► see the stuff anymore, why do you think I'm pausing it?

02:00:10 ◼   ► Yes, I could be pausing it to go to the bathroom, but I could also be pausing it to pick something

02:00:14 ◼   ► out of a frame.

02:00:15 ◼   ► You have to give me a way to remove your HUD with a second tap, which many applications

02:00:19 ◼   ► do, but many applications do not.

02:00:20 ◼   ► You know another thing people do all the time?

02:00:22 ◼   ► They turn on the captions to tell what somebody said.

02:00:25 ◼   ► This one barrier that Apple got right, the "What did he say?"

02:00:28 ◼   ► Siri thing, which makes you feel silly, but at least the feature exists.

02:00:32 ◼   ► Go back a little bit and turn on captions.

02:00:33 ◼   ► If captions are four levels deep in a menu, that's not a good experience.

02:00:39 ◼   ► many things. And remembering playback position, I cannot express to you how important it is for

02:00:43 ◼   ► you to remember my playback position because if you do not, it's infuriating. You just got to get

02:00:48 ◼   ► these basics right. And because there are so many applications, they all have an opportunity

02:00:52 ◼   ► to screw up that interface in their own unique ways. Right. Imagine a book that you couldn't

02:00:57 ◼   ► bookmark. Or it would try to, but then it would forget. Right. And just drop you 70 pages prior

02:01:03 ◼   ► or something like that. Or keep insisting after you finish the book that you are in the middle

02:01:07 ◼   ► of chapter one. And every time you go back to the library, the book flies out of the

02:01:11 ◼   ► shelf and hits you in the forehead and says, "Hey, you want to continue reading chapter