The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► I am happy to report I'm healthy as a horse. I had my annual physical today. They don't call

00:00:06 ◼   ► them physicals anymore, you know. They call them a wellness exam. Yeah, that's because the ACA,

00:00:11 ◼   ► because the ACA will pay for wellness exams. Is that really true? I honest. Yeah. And so it's

00:00:17 ◼   ► required. But the question is, how often can you go in for a wellness exam? Are you well once a

00:00:22 ◼   ► year? Or do you need to go in multiple times? I found this out because we had a terrible health

00:00:26 ◼   ► plan last year and I went in to see the doctor and I called and said, "I'm scheduling this as

00:00:32 ◼   ► a wellness visit." And they said, "Great!" And I saw the doctor and I said, "We have a terrible

00:00:35 ◼   ► insurance plan. This has to be a wellness visit." And he said, "Oh, I totally understand. Absolutely."

00:00:40 ◼   ► Then I got a bill for like $300 because we had a terrible plan last year. And I called, you know,

00:00:45 ◼   ► through Kaiser, which is both the insurer and the health plan provider, right? The health provider.

00:00:52 ◼   ► And I wrote them and said, this was a wellness visit. And they wrote back and said, Well, you're

00:00:57 ◼   ► responsible for any services incurred during a visit, no matter what. And I said, but the doctor

00:01:06 ◼   ► even told me it was a wellness visit. I wound up having to make a stink. I wrote letters to Kaiser,

00:01:10 ◼   ► they wound up eventually assigning a fixer to me at Kaiser. And this person addressed all of my wife

00:01:16 ◼   ► in my issues because we kept having issues. A nurse made my wife cry on the phone, which is rare.

00:01:23 ◼   ► My wife is very level-headed because her wife called and the nurse said, "You have such a

00:01:28 ◼   ► terrible health plan. It's awful. You should be ashamed of yourself for having such a plan." She's

00:01:33 ◼   ► like, "It's what we can afford." And they're like, "Okay, that probably shouldn't happen."

00:01:37 ◼   ► It's like, "Yep." They're like, "We're going to have that nursing for retraining." I'm like, "Look,

00:01:40 ◼   ► I don't want to get in any trouble, but really the nurse is probably frustrated also." But like,

00:01:45 ◼   ► I think that's the state of healthcare,

00:01:46 ◼   ► is you have nurses yelling at people

00:01:49 ◼   ► for terrible health plans.

00:01:50 ◼   ► It's great.

00:01:51 ◼   ► - I was in, I'm knocking out all my doctors' appointments

00:01:54 ◼   ► this week and next.

00:01:55 ◼   ► I went to the eye doctor two days ago.

00:01:57 ◼   ► I went to my general practitioner today.

00:02:01 ◼   ► And then next week I'm going to the dentist.

00:02:03 ◼   ► So I'm doing it all.

00:02:04 ◼   ► I'm taking care of myself.

00:02:05 ◼   ► - Oh, your eyes.

00:02:06 ◼   ► Didn't you have an eye problem?

00:02:07 ◼   ► - Oh, I have terrible eye problems.

00:02:08 ◼   ► But it's a mixed bag.

00:02:10 ◼   ► It's, you know, it is.

00:02:11 ◼   ► - It's not Andy Baio's terrible eye problem, right?

00:02:14 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, yeah. I forget what the details were.

00:02:17 ◼   ► It was just like a tiny, tiny, tiny something got embedded in his eye.

00:02:21 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:02:22 ◼   ► And it wound up being this like a year-long odyssey. And I think he's fine now. I believe

00:02:27 ◼   ► he's on the other side of it. But it's just one of those things. I have friends who,

00:02:31 ◼   ► their kid had a fishbone in their throat, and they didn't know what was going on,

00:02:37 ◼   ► and no doctor could diagnose it until the kid was old enough to articulate exactly what

00:02:42 ◼   ► was going on.

00:02:43 ◼   ► Ah, geez.

00:02:44 ◼   ► say, "Oh, my throat hurts right here," they were able to find it with an endoscope

00:02:48 ◼   ► and take it out and then they were fine. You're like, "Oh my God."

00:02:52 ◼   ► Yeah. But I did hear a funny story—well, funny, funny, funny to our friends in Europe

00:02:57 ◼   ► and Canada and elsewhere. And oh yeah, that makes sense here in the United States is my

00:03:02 ◼   ► ophthalmologist is at the Will's Eye Hospital here in Philadelphia. It's seriously a world-leading

00:03:09 ◼   ► hospital. It's a hospital just for the eye. That's where I had my retinal surgery four

00:03:15 ◼   ► years ago.

00:03:16 ◼   ► Darrell Bock Oh, that's great. That's great.

00:03:17 ◼   ► Dave Asprey But anyway, their emergency room, their hospital

00:03:21 ◼   ► is on the east side of—oh, jeez, is that 8th Street or 9th Street? I'm going to say

00:03:26 ◼   ► 9th Street here in Philadelphia, like corner 9th and Walnut. They're on the east side,

00:03:30 ◼   ► but they're like at the 8th floor and up. I don't know what's on the first seven

00:03:32 ◼   ► floors. But their emergency room, the Wills Eye Emergency Room, is on the west side of

00:03:37 ◼   ► street and an older building that used to be the entire wills I hospital. Oh, gentlemen,

00:03:41 ◼   ► gentlemen who goes to my eye doctor came in and he has one good eye. He was actually in it. I mean,

00:03:48 ◼   ► this is probably a violation that she's telling me this story, but she's a doctor. She tells

00:03:54 ◼   ► stories. He's got one good identifying information. I think it's okay. He's got one. He's got one

00:04:00 ◼   ► good eye. And he's he was taking some chairs out of the trunk of his car. And well, the leg of the

00:04:05 ◼   ► the one chair poked his good eye out.

00:04:07 ◼   ► Jesus. No.

00:04:09 ◼   ► So he goes through the Louie braille. It's like,

00:04:12 ◼   ► do you ever believe the story that Louie braille was playing with an all and

00:04:15 ◼   ► poked his eye out as a child? I don't believe that.

00:04:17 ◼   ► I don't know either,

00:04:18 ◼   ► but this guy poked his eye out with the leg of his good eye with the leg of a

00:04:21 ◼   ► chair. So he does the right thing. He goes to the Will's eye emergency room.

00:04:24 ◼   ► And, uh, I'm not quite sure how, what,

00:04:28 ◼   ► what level of in or out his good eye was at the time. I mean, I'll,

00:04:31 ◼   ► I'll say this so that nobody is, is distressed.

00:04:34 ◼   ► It's all good.

00:04:35 ◼   ► He's a, you know, they got his eye back in

00:04:37 ◼   ► and they did some surgery and his good eye

00:04:39 ◼   ► is still his good eye.

00:04:40 ◼   ► He's good.

00:04:42 ◼   ► But in the meantime, he's in the emergency room.

00:04:43 ◼   ► And I believe that when your eye is only partially

00:04:46 ◼   ► in the socket, they quickly diagnose this one

00:04:49 ◼   ► as a genuine eye emergency.

00:04:50 ◼   ► And they said, "You need surgery."

00:04:53 ◼   ► Now the surgery is gonna take place across the street.

00:04:55 ◼   ► But in the meantime, for whatever reason

00:04:57 ◼   ► in the emergency room,

00:04:58 ◼   ► they'd already hooked him up to an IV.

00:05:01 ◼   ► So he's already got the IV.

00:05:03 ◼   ► this is how certain they were that you're gonna need surgery.

00:05:05 ◼   ► They will get you the IV now.

00:05:07 ◼   ► But then he's literally across ninth street

00:05:11 ◼   ► in center city Philadelphia from the hospital

00:05:13 ◼   ► where he needs to have the surgery.

00:05:14 ◼   ► So they can't just have them cross the street with an IV.

00:05:17 ◼   ► So they put them in an ambulance just to go across the street.

00:05:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, of course, right.

00:05:21 ◼   ► - $3,000.

00:05:22 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:05:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:05:23 ◼   ► - To go across the street.

00:05:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, oh my God.

00:05:26 ◼   ► - This is, I had cancer over 20 years ago

00:05:29 ◼   ► and I had chemotherapy.

00:05:32 ◼   ► some point they're giving me some drug and they're like, "If you need to go to the bathroom, you need

00:05:35 ◼   ► to tell us because you're a biohazard. So, if you need to wheel this down the hall, we have to do

00:05:42 ◼   ► like this protocol." I was like, "Okay, that's kind of scary, but sure." I think it got taken

00:05:48 ◼   ► care of. I think at some point somebody talked to me, you know, talked to this insurance company

00:05:52 ◼   ► and said, "You cannot stick this gentleman with this bill for this. We insisted upon this,

00:05:56 ◼   ► you know, he had no option, you know, we'd already, you know." And I guess, so I, you know,

00:06:00 ◼   ► it was all good. His eye's okay now, and it's back in his head. But he initially got a bill

00:06:07 ◼   ► for the hospital, for the ambulance, right? It was $3,000. And when I say across the street,

00:06:11 ◼   ► I mean, like, it just across the street, like you could kick a pebble as far as it needed to go.

00:06:18 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah, yeah, it's tricky. My in-laws have had to go to the ER recently, and they're fine,

00:06:22 ◼   ► but there are things where you have to go to the ER. My mother-in-law broke her wrist,

00:06:27 ◼   ► unintentionally fell over. And she went late enough today, she they're in a relatively small

00:06:32 ◼   ► town nearby. We've just they've just moved closer to us, like three blocks from every hospital in

00:06:37 ◼   ► Seattle, which is great. It'll help in the future. But they're like, okay, how do we get home? And

00:06:41 ◼   ► they're like, no cabulances, no taxis would take them. They had to get an ambulance to take them

00:06:46 ◼   ► home. And it was so far away. My wife can't drive at night now. And so we would have to drive a half

00:06:53 ◼   ► an hour leave the kids home alone in the middle of the night. So they took an ambulance home was the

00:06:58 ◼   ► only way they could get back to their retirement place, which is wild. That's crazy. The good news

00:07:05 ◼   ► is my eyes my eyesight I have very good eyesight for 82 year old man. That's I got the lungs of a

00:07:12 ◼   ► 70 year old and he wants them back. But my lung capacity apparently is not very good either.

00:07:16 ◼   ► Because they did this. They do this test. I don't know if they do this where you go,

00:07:22 ◼   ► but they give you this lung capacity test. You got to take it's like a plastic thing,

00:07:26 ◼   ► sort of like a big amateurs. If I go and you got to like, you got to take a deep breath,

00:07:31 ◼   ► and then you blow as much air into it as you can. And then you suck as much air into it as you can.

00:07:35 ◼   ► And it came up, I saw the computer, it was hooked up to it said, Okay, or something. I know, like,

00:07:40 ◼   ► this is good. But my, you know, the doctor is like, Have you ever smoked cigarettes? And I'm

00:07:45 ◼   ► like, No, never. I've never smelled. She's like, Are you sure? Yeah, I had to understand. It's

00:07:50 ◼   ► I'm really serious.

00:07:51 ◼   ► - Sphygmomanometer is the name of it.

00:07:54 ◼   ► I had, oh no, wait, that's a blood pressure gauge.

00:07:56 ◼   ► I'm looking up the wrong thing.

00:07:57 ◼   ► It's a spiro, spiro-metometer.

00:08:01 ◼   ► Anyway, I had the same thing.

00:08:02 ◼   ► The doctor's like, "You know, this would be great

00:08:03 ◼   ► if you were 70."

00:08:05 ◼   ► Not so good at 50.

00:08:06 ◼   ► I'm like, all right, anything I can do about it?

00:08:08 ◼   ► Like, well, spirometry, that's a spiro meter.

00:08:11 ◼   ► It's much easier.

00:08:12 ◼   ► Yeah, well, we're old, we're falling apart.

00:08:15 ◼   ► - No, but I got a good checkup overall.

00:08:17 ◼   ► I got good cholesterol.

00:08:18 ◼   ► I've got good liver enzymes, always a bit of a concern for me. Everything's good.

00:08:24 ◼   ► You'll get an eye lung in a few years. Apple's focusing on healthcare. It'll all be set.

00:08:29 ◼   ► Five years from now, lung transplants.

00:08:31 ◼   ► I'm not a… oh, I can't put up with dropping a word. What's the word when you imagine

00:08:39 ◼   ► you have every disease?

00:08:40 ◼   ► Oh, I can't think of it. Psychosomatic.

00:08:43 ◼   ► No, no, but there's a…

00:08:45 ◼   ► Oh, it's allophobic? No, no.

00:08:47 ◼   ► No, it's I can't believe we're drawing a blank on this. It's a hypochondria hypochondria, right?

00:08:53 ◼   ► Right. There's a famous Keith Richards quote, or he says, there's only one disease I'm aware

00:08:57 ◼   ► of that's deadly. And it's hypochondria. That's good. I'm not a hypochondriac. But I'm a

00:09:02 ◼   ► hypochondriac like within 48 hours of a doctor's appointment. Like, I'll go 363 days at this point,

00:09:10 ◼   ► and I'll feel fine. And I won't worry about it. But then I'll find out on two days before my

00:09:15 ◼   ► quote unquote, "wellness exam" next year, and all of a sudden I'll be like, I think I'm having a

00:09:19 ◼   ► heart attack. Oh, geez. The flip side is my friend Tessa Miller wrote this beautiful, beautiful

00:09:25 ◼   ► essay/reported piece for the New York Times a couple days ago. You probably saw it.

00:09:29 ◼   ► It's called "Five Things I Wish I'd Known Before My Chronic Illness."

00:09:31 ◼   ► I saw that. I did see that.

00:09:33 ◼   ► It's an amazing thing. She's an editor I've worked with and just an incredibly lovely human being,

00:09:38 ◼   ► and she has Crohn's disease, and she basically, if health insurance changed, she would die. There's

00:09:43 ◼   ► lot of people in that boat because the drug she needs, essentially an immune suppressant style

00:09:50 ◼   ► drug, would be unaffordable. But she wrote this beautifully and again in a reported fashion about,

00:09:57 ◼   ► you know, what's it like when you're never going to get well? And she's been posting responses

00:10:02 ◼   ► she's gotten on Instagram from people who are just so grateful that it's partly it's like,

00:10:06 ◼   ► how do you get other people to stop being a pain and suggesting terrible ideas to you because

00:10:11 ◼   ► you've tried everything or you know there's suggesting things just at work or have no

00:10:15 ◼   ► medical validity. It's a beautiful story.

00:10:17 ◼   ► Dave: Did you see the thing—I linked to it a couple weeks ago—about how vitamins

00:10:23 ◼   ► are a racket? Didn't we talk about this on Twitter?

00:10:25 ◼   ► Daishi; I think so. Yeah, I've been gradually—it's taken me over the last several years I've

00:10:30 ◼   ► gradually eliminated most vitamins from my diet that I don't consume.

00:10:33 ◼   ► Dave; So my doctor is good and my doctor—I don't sit here and tell my doctor how to

00:10:37 ◼   ► to be a doctor. I've chosen her to be my doctor because I think she's a very good doctor,

00:10:42 ◼   ► and she's both had the medical training and years of expertise and has been doing it.

00:10:50 ◼   ► And I trust her. I'm sure she stays up on things more than I do. But I've gotten on

00:10:55 ◼   ► this schedule where my annual—I keep wanting to call it a physical, but my wellness exam—although

00:11:00 ◼   ► if you think about it just in terms of being a language geek, calling it a physical isn't

00:11:03 ◼   ► really a good word either.

00:11:05 ◼   ► And I know, you know, also the science shows that we shouldn't get annual checkups to checkup. I

00:11:09 ◼   ► guess a checkup is the biggest, we're not supposed to get them. There's actually a good clinical.

00:11:13 ◼   ► Why not? Can you tell me why? Yeah, because it's unnecessary medical spending, and the interventions

00:11:19 ◼   ► are typically either feudal or unnecessary, it winds up more tests are ordered and more money

00:11:25 ◼   ► spent without any discernible improvement in outcomes. So I forget what the number is. But

00:11:30 ◼   ► they're like, basically, I think the clinical work was, you should go in when you're actually

00:11:34 ◼   ► sick or when you have something that's inexplicable and maybe every several years. But the yearly

00:11:38 ◼   ► thing is actually just, it's almost a revenue enhancer that's become so codified we expect it.

00:11:44 ◼   ► So, if someone said to you, it's like with breast mammograms, those are now seen as the research

00:11:50 ◼   ► shows that women should not be getting them annually above a certain age. It doesn't,

00:11:53 ◼   ► or below a certain age, because it doesn't increase the outcome statistically. Now,

00:11:59 ◼   ► individually, if you go in, they say yes, you have breast cancer and it's operable. That's

00:12:04 ◼   ► great, but statistically, it actually exposes women to more radiation as necessary, and probably

00:12:08 ◼   ► increases the amount of unnecessary intervention. So you're like, Oh, you know, how do you walk

00:12:12 ◼   ► back from that anyway? But so your so your annual exam probably shouldn't be an annual anyway.

00:12:17 ◼   ► Yeah. Well, anyway, I've long been on the schedule where it's it's in mid February.

00:12:21 ◼   ► And here on the East Coast, you know, we're in the middle of winter. And I tend to, you know,

00:12:27 ◼   ► stay inside. It's cold, it's dark, there's not a lot of sunlight anyway. So, you know, for years,

00:12:32 ◼   ► is my vitamin D has shown up. Yes, low and the point I'll tell you what, by the way,

00:12:36 ◼   ► Glenn, I mean, I'm not complaining. There's a lot worse things that can happen. But when

00:12:39 ◼   ► you go in, you got to go in, I got to go in at least a week before my wellness exam and

00:12:43 ◼   ► they to get my quote blood work done. And they couldn't be nicer. I've been going to

00:12:48 ◼   ► the same place. It's actually like physically connected to where my my physician is. And

00:12:53 ◼   ► and very nice woman. So I was there a week ago and I you know, I don't I don't like getting

00:12:57 ◼   ► my blood drawn. I'm a little queasy about stuff like that. I gotta say it was as painless

00:13:01 ◼   ► as it could be. It really was. But I'll tell you, they take a lot of blood.

00:13:05 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:13:06 ◼   ► Pete: Oh yeah. How many vials was it?

00:13:08 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:13:09 ◼   ► Jon: It was five big ones and two small ones.

00:13:12 ◼   ► Pete; Oh my god.

00:13:13 ◼   ► Jon; And it's a lot of blood. I think, and all I can think is, what the hell are they

00:13:16 ◼   ► doing? Why can't they, what are they doing that they need more than a drop of? Why isn't

00:13:21 ◼   ► one vial enough for all of these tests?

00:13:23 ◼   ► Pete; And you're like, why was Theranos a fraud? Why couldn't they have been, didn't,

00:13:27 ◼   ► you know, produced an actual product?

00:13:29 ◼   ► Jon; They take a lot of blood.

00:13:30 ◼   ► Pete; It is funny. They take a lot of blood.

00:13:31 ◼   ► blood for years, it's been showing up as slightly vitamin D deficient. And so I've I swore to

00:13:35 ◼   ► my doctor, I will take these vitamin D supplements every day. And I remember to do it, I keep

00:13:41 ◼   ► them right next to my coffee. And so I'll never forget to make coffee. And so my vitamins

00:13:45 ◼   ► are right there. I take these vitamin D's. But I read this story. And it's very, very

00:13:49 ◼   ► compelling. I think that that, yes, it's like a correlation, not causation thing that yes,

00:13:55 ◼   ► there are, you know, there are people with very high levels of vitamin D tend to be healthier

00:14:00 ◼   ► and have a lower risk of all sorts of things, you know, excluding heart problems and all sorts of

00:14:05 ◼   ► things. But the reason isn't because they're full of vitamin D. It's that they have vitamin D,

00:14:10 ◼   ► because they go outside all the time and live active lifestyle. Yes, yes.

00:14:14 ◼   ► Right. Like, so and that makes so much sense in the world to me. And they're like, and this over

00:14:21 ◼   ► over fear of the sun in the United States is really bad. Like, yes, getting a sunburn is

00:14:26 ◼   ► really bad for your skin, tanning, getting your, you know, skin as dark as it can get

00:14:31 ◼   ► very bad for your skin. In the long run, you can get these skin cancers, but even even

00:14:35 ◼   ► then the type of skin cancers that you tend to get from long term overexposure to the

00:14:40 ◼   ► sun are among the most treatable cancers that you can have. It's not, it's not the worst

00:14:44 ◼   ► thing in the world, but we've gotten to the point where there's a lot of supposedly health

00:14:49 ◼   ► conscious Americans who literally just avoid the sun at all costs. They just don't get

00:14:53 ◼   ► any sun, and that's actually very bad for you because that's where the vitamin D,

00:14:57 ◼   ► you know, that's supposedly good for you. And there's no clinical proof that taking a little

00:15:01 ◼   ► tiny vitamin D pill instead of going out and being active in the sun actually has any of the benefits

00:15:09 ◼   ► that the people who have their vitamin D from healthy outdoor lifestyles do. And I—

00:15:16 ◼   ► Pete: In that article you're talking about, there was one, I think a few months before,

00:15:19 ◼   ► there was more about the guy. There's like one guy who has been such a vitamin D advocate

00:15:24 ◼   ► that this doctor has overwhelmed everybody else who's like, "Whatever." And it's actually almost

00:15:30 ◼   ► entirely due to this one person's influence. It's not even like a drug industry thing or,

00:15:35 ◼   ► you know, a supplements thing. It's this one guy has had a mania about it and he's wrong.

00:15:40 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah.

00:15:40 ◼   ► Alan: You know, he's not wrong like he's in falsifying data, but his conclusions

00:15:44 ◼   ► aren't actually well supported enough. And Kaibash put on this a long time ago because,

00:15:49 ◼   ► right, it does encourage people to take vitamin D instead of going outside. And yeah, that article

00:15:55 ◼   ► was great about how like, actually, the kinds of skin cancers people get that are most, that are

00:16:00 ◼   ► worst are either genetic or they're caused by non-sun related reasons, right? So, most of those,

00:16:06 ◼   ► so yes, you can get sunburns and yes, we have the ozone depletion and there are other things that

00:16:11 ◼   ► are an issue, but spending, you know, 30 minutes in the sun or an hour in the sun without any

00:16:15 ◼   ► sunscreen for most people is probably a really good thing depending on time of year and whatever.

00:16:20 ◼   ► No, it's funny because you wonder, you're like, if the sun was that bad and even when the ozone

00:16:26 ◼   ► layer was thicker, wouldn't everyone have died of cancer in like 1940? They'd be covered in skin

00:16:30 ◼   ► cancer? Because people spent, most people spent most of their time outdoor before offices and

00:16:35 ◼   ► And even as we became an industrialized society, there are still massive amounts of time, and

00:16:41 ◼   ► the historical evidence, as people live longer lives, the historical evidence isn't there

00:16:44 ◼   ► that like people are just covered in skin cancer, so…

00:16:47 ◼   ► Jon Moffitt Yeah, and I linked to that, and then I got

00:16:49 ◼   ► some email from my good readers down in Australia who were in the midst of a… I'm not good

00:16:55 ◼   ► with Celsius. I think it was somewhere around 50 degrees Celsius, you know, it was like

00:16:58 ◼   ► 180 degrees Fahrenheit in Australia.

00:17:01 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:17:02 ◼   ► Alan Corey It is crazy. Like at the limits of human endurance,

00:17:04 ◼   ► right?

00:17:05 ◼   ► I'm wearing sunscreen.

00:17:06 ◼   ► And I'm like, I get it, I get it, I get it.

00:17:08 ◼   ► I'm not telling, please, please, what's the saying?

00:17:11 ◼   ► Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

00:17:13 ◼   ► I'm not saying sunscreen is a racket and not called for it.

00:17:16 ◼   ► Clearly where you are, you should, yeah,

00:17:18 ◼   ► you should probably put a lot of the SPF 50 on.

00:17:21 ◼   ► Like, I'm just saying, here in the US,

00:17:24 ◼   ► there's a lot of people who really have,

00:17:27 ◼   ► I'm never exposing my skin to the sun, period.

00:17:30 ◼   ► And that's probably not,

00:17:31 ◼   ► that's probably actually doing harm to them.

00:17:33 ◼   ► not. We should combine different trends and just rub peanut oil all over our faces. Just

00:17:40 ◼   ► cook our reduce reduce allergies.

00:17:45 ◼   ► How are you so ends the health aspect of the show, although the other thing I should write

00:17:48 ◼   ► as I just saw a story today, and I know it's gonna bother you because I know you're bothered

00:17:52 ◼   ► by this. But I did see that the the the Russian troll farm that's been responsible for putting

00:18:02 ◼   ► thumbs on the scale of US and UK elections in the last few years, they've conclusively have shown

00:18:09 ◼   ► that they have helped promote the anti-vaccination movement. And it's like, surprise, surprise,

00:18:16 ◼   ► you know? Because, you know, it's like, I'm aware of like the—it's up by you, right? It's up in—

00:18:20 ◼   ► Pete: I know, it's in our state. They're just an announcement this morning that's going to cost

00:18:25 ◼   ► at least a million dollars, minimum of a million dollars to deal with the measles outbreak.

00:18:29 ◼   ► break. Washington State. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's also one in Europe, though, which

00:18:33 ◼   ► I was not as aware of. And it's the same thing where it's been, you know, this, this whole

00:18:38 ◼   ► nonsense science, you know, and it's funny, because, you know, it's like, you know, you

00:18:42 ◼   ► read one story, and somebody says, you know, this vitamin D supplement, then all these

00:18:46 ◼   ► supplements are a racket. And then it's, you know, it, I could see where, you know, you

00:18:51 ◼   ► got to know who to trust and who not to trust, you know, and, and somebody else, somebody

00:18:56 ◼   ► else saying that these vaccinations cause more problems and you don't need your kids

00:18:59 ◼   ► don't need them. All of a sudden, it sounds like the same thing like, you know, vitamin

00:19:03 ◼   ► D is a racket, but vaccinations are good. Now it's all you know, nonsense, but it's

00:19:08 ◼   ► actually what's the trust Big Pharma. I mean, this is a recurring thing. It's like, I'm

00:19:11 ◼   ► alive because of Big Pharma. Well, no, I'm alive actually, because of the academic research

00:19:15 ◼   ► that was taken and paid for typically by government grants that was then commercialized by Big

00:19:20 ◼   ► Pharma, which is where a lot of some of the better drugs I mean, there's more recent stuff

00:19:24 ◼   ► that has less relevance for more people, right? So, like Vioxx was supposed to be a great new

00:19:30 ◼   ► anti-inflammatory, turned out to have all kinds of problems that were suppressed, the company

00:19:33 ◼   ► faced, you know, they ignored warning signs. It was terrible. And so, after Vioxx, how do you

00:19:39 ◼   ► trust Big Pharma? No, no, it's fine. The vaccines are okay. But there's a very simple way to test

00:19:44 ◼   ► efficacy of things is you look around the world at places in which there is no financial motivation

00:19:50 ◼   ► for a particular thing. So, there's no financial motivation for vaccination in Europe and other

00:19:56 ◼   ► places. There's no profit motive. There's no government motive. So, you look at 180 countries

00:20:01 ◼   ► or something and you say, "Are the rates of autism different? Are the side effects different?

00:20:05 ◼   ► What are the, you know, what are the outbreaks of measles?" And you can say, "Okay, so even if the

00:20:09 ◼   ► U.S., Big Pharma had some weird plot to vaccinate everybody, it was unnecessary and they were

00:20:13 ◼   ► disregarding problems, it doesn't explain why the rest of the world is doing it and it's been

00:20:18 ◼   ► efficacious and there's no side effects. As opposed to, there are other drug things where

00:20:23 ◼   ► European or other regulators are like, "We don't want this drug in the market. The U.S. allows it

00:20:27 ◼   ► in the market. There are these problems, but they're not basic things like vaccines."

00:20:31 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah. And we've had, you know, we had a thing, I remember when Jonas was young,

00:20:36 ◼   ► there was a time where he had a checkup and he was, the doctors wanted to give him, I think,

00:20:41 ◼   ► three or four vaccinations and my wife was like, "That's too much. How about two and we'll come

00:20:45 ◼   ► back." And they're like, "Okay." And I post sometimes about this anti-vaccination stuff,

00:20:51 ◼   ► and there are some people who are clearly not anti-vaxxers, but who bring up situations like

00:20:55 ◼   ► that, which my wife and I agreed on. We're like, "You know what? How about no more than two at a

00:20:59 ◼   ► time, and we'll come back in a month or six weeks or whatever and get the other one." He's had all

00:21:05 ◼   ► the vaccinations that are recommended, just maybe didn't get four of them in one day. And I probably

00:21:11 ◼   ► wouldn't have spoken up. I mean, honestly, I, you know, I say

00:21:14 ◼   ► toughen the kid up, but my wife didn't want him stuck four

00:21:17 ◼   ► times. Something like that perfectly reasonable, as long as

00:21:21 ◼   ► your kid can still say, like, at the age of eight has had all the

00:21:25 ◼   ► recommended vaccinations. You know, yeah, yeah, it's, it's

00:21:29 ◼   ► all the crazy. It is absolutely crazy as a child of the 70s. And

00:21:35 ◼   ► early 80s. You know, like, I just grew up thinking like,

00:21:40 ◼   ► "Wow, we live in an age of medical marvels. There's something called measles that used to

00:21:44 ◼   ► affect kids. I can't get it." You know? Polio brought down a president. "I can't get it!"

00:21:50 ◼   ► You know? I just—do you ever think measles would come back? Honestly, like, it just—

00:21:56 ◼   ► Alan: No, it's horrific. But it's interesting, because this is that—not to get political,

00:22:01 ◼   ► but it's the "this spans" ideology. So it has more to do with—

00:22:04 ◼   ► It's not quite left-right. It is definitely, you know, it's not—

00:22:08 ◼   ► It's a rejection of empirical evidence. It's a rejection of sort of fact, which has infected us

00:22:14 ◼   ► all over the place, is it's in a world in which it's increasingly hard to know what is really fact

00:22:20 ◼   ► based. I can understand why people start subscribing to a belief in like, I mean,

00:22:24 ◼   ► Gwyneth Peltrow is a great example where a terrific actress—Goop is a terrible thing.

00:22:30 ◼   ► a terrible influence, but in a very particular way. Like, she's actually, I think, endangering

00:22:36 ◼   ► my online friend, Dr. Jen Gunter, who has a great new book out about the vagina that

00:22:41 ◼   ► apparently people should buy. I think whether you have one or not, it's a very good book,

00:22:44 ◼   ► apparently. Can't wait to get a copy and great cover. So, she's been a leading voice, not

00:22:51 ◼   ► a genscoop, but at like, trying to demystify these things like, you know, why is a jade

00:22:56 ◼   ► egg bad to insert into your body?

00:22:58 ◼   ► Well, it's because the surface is essentially a porous surface and like, you can get infection

00:23:04 ◼   ► from it. It's not safe. So yes, people may have done it a thousand years ago, the jury's out on

00:23:08 ◼   ► that. But like today, we understand the transmission and vector of illnesses, we're going to live to be,

00:23:13 ◼   ► on average, more than 40. It's really an unhealthy thing. So if you need to do that,

00:23:18 ◼   ► maybe there's a different kind of object that would work. But you know, there's just,

00:23:21 ◼   ► there's a rejection of, I think there's a desire to try to find something more.

00:23:26 ◼   ► and sometimes that leads people into magical thinking. And I think with vaccines, the fact that

00:23:30 ◼   ► they've been so effective, we just don't look at it as a problem. And when it's not a problem,

00:23:35 ◼   ► you think you're being lied to when you're told it is one. Then you have an outbreak,

00:23:39 ◼   ► and they interview people whose kids have measles, it's like, "Yeah, well, sort of. I wish now."

00:23:43 ◼   ► The great one was somebody—I think this is real—on Twitter said, "I wish there were," you know,

00:23:47 ◼   ► said, "I didn't get my kids vaccines, and now they have, they may be exposed to measles. I wish

00:23:52 ◼   ► wish there were a way to prevent that.

00:23:54 ◼   ► Right. What is the best advice for protecting my kids?

00:23:59 ◼   ► Yeah. Oh my God.

00:24:00 ◼   ► I saw that. And people were like, "Invent a time machine. Go back and get your kids

00:24:05 ◼   ► vaccinated."

00:24:06 ◼   ► I know. And I want to laugh and I want to not laugh, because I think it's ridiculous.

00:24:12 ◼   ► Like I'm somebody who, you know, there's this—I always like this from art history, which was

00:24:16 ◼   ► these Egyptian statues, they always show these countries, you know, the pharaohs and leaders,

00:24:22 ◼   ► like, staring directly at the sun, and there was a sun-worshipping society and so forth.

00:24:26 ◼   ► This idea of like, looking straight at the truth, it's really, really hard. It might burn your eyes

00:24:30 ◼   ► out, but you gotta do it. And I feel like there's a difficulty in just accepting what's real, however

00:24:37 ◼   ► uncomfortable it is to you. And it's very easy to believe in conspiracies when in fact conspiracies

00:24:41 ◼   ► bound to rat madness. How do you differentiate between the Russians influencing the 2016 election

00:24:47 ◼   ► and Big Pharma trying to affect children with vaccines? How about this awful dreadful Sachtler

00:24:54 ◼   ► family behind the one of the opioids every day and new horror from them like they just didn't care

00:25:01 ◼   ► right. Not only did they not care then they then they then they had the brainiac idea that maybe

00:25:07 ◼   ► Maybe they could make money on the drugs people take to get off opioids.

00:25:11 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:25:12 ◼   ► It's like, you know, treatment's probably a growth business that we created, so perhaps

00:25:15 ◼   ► we could make money there too.

00:25:16 ◼   ► Right.

00:25:17 ◼   ► Talk about institutionalized, legalized corruption.

00:25:19 ◼   ► Oh my god.

00:25:20 ◼   ► Absolutely horrible.

00:25:21 ◼   ► Right.

00:25:22 ◼   ► And again, I get it where it all kind of blurs together and you just want to chalk it all

00:25:25 ◼   ► up, but some of this is important and good stuff.

00:25:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:25:29 ◼   ► And it's just—it's just maddening.

00:25:31 ◼   ► Measles.

00:25:32 ◼   ► I just cannot believe that measles—honest to god.

00:25:36 ◼   ► I mean, you just never would have thought of this.

00:25:37 ◼   ► Like, you know, when we were kids, you know, it's 1980,

00:25:40 ◼   ► I'm a seven-year-old, you think,

00:25:41 ◼   ► what are the problems gonna be on your mind

00:25:42 ◼   ► when you're 40 years from now,

00:25:44 ◼   ► when you're a middle-aged man, John?

00:25:46 ◼   ► Measles was not one of the problems, you know?

00:25:49 ◼   ► - I assumed we'd have eliminated all disease

00:25:51 ◼   ► because of vaccines.

00:25:52 ◼   ► It's actually the most,

00:25:52 ◼   ► there's two things that are most shocking to me in 2019.

00:25:56 ◼   ► One is that more diseases haven't been eliminated,

00:25:58 ◼   ► especially ones that really,

00:26:00 ◼   ► it's just a matter of a small amount of money,

00:26:01 ◼   ► and that's something like the Gates Foundation,

00:26:04 ◼   ► like river blindness and things like that,

00:26:06 ◼   ► like things that require so little money in relative terms

00:26:09 ◼   ► with such an incredible personal and productivity benefit.

00:26:14 ◼   ► And the other is, have you had an x-ray

00:26:16 ◼   ► in the last several years?

00:26:18 ◼   ► - Probably, but not--

00:26:21 ◼   ► - It's like magic now.

00:26:22 ◼   ► You remember how even like-- - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:26:23 ◼   ► - 10 years ago, they saw the film and whatever,

00:26:26 ◼   ► I had to get one, they worried I had maybe

00:26:27 ◼   ► walking pneumonia or something the other day.

00:26:29 ◼   ► So I go and there's, you know, I don't, but I walk in

00:26:31 ◼   ► and the guy's like, "Oh yeah, this is great."

00:26:33 ◼   ► I was chatting with the guys, like, "We're done."

00:26:34 ◼   ► It was like three minutes, start to finish,

00:26:37 ◼   ► and he's been able to review them, examine them,

00:26:39 ◼   ► send the file back to the doctor.

00:26:41 ◼   ► By the time I left, I already got a reading,

00:26:43 ◼   ► like, "Everything's fine."

00:26:44 ◼   ► That to me is actually the most understated miracle,

00:26:48 ◼   ► and it's a great example of all the aspects

00:26:50 ◼   ► of technology that come together.

00:26:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, they can see inside you really well now.

00:26:53 ◼   ► It's really, really amazing.

00:26:55 ◼   ► And it happens very quickly, yeah.

00:26:58 ◼   ► Amazing sensor technology.

00:27:00 ◼   ► All right, let me take a break.

00:27:03 ◼   ► Might as well, and thank our first sponsor.

00:27:05 ◼   ► They've been in the news lately.

00:27:06 ◼   ► It's our good friends at Eero.

00:27:08 ◼   ► Look, Eero does Wi-Fi so well.

00:27:12 ◼   ► Basic idea of the Eero system

00:27:16 ◼   ► is that they create a mesh network.

00:27:18 ◼   ► Basic Eero kit, I believe, comes with a base station

00:27:21 ◼   ► and two of their smaller nightlight type things.

00:27:25 ◼   ► But you can get as many as you need.

00:27:27 ◼   ► You go to their website, figure out the size of your house.

00:27:30 ◼   ► They'll recommend a kit for you

00:27:31 ◼   ► that's just perfect for your home.

00:27:33 ◼   ► Basic idea, you plug one of them in to your cable modem,

00:27:36 ◼   ► wherever your internet really comes in,

00:27:38 ◼   ► that's your main station.

00:27:39 ◼   ► And then you just plug in other ones around your house.

00:27:41 ◼   ► Maybe you have a three floor house,

00:27:42 ◼   ► you put one on every floor,

00:27:45 ◼   ► and it saturates your whole home with one network.

00:27:48 ◼   ► So it's not like, oh, now you've got three networks

00:27:50 ◼   ► and your devices have to like jump around.

00:27:53 ◼   ► And everything from your devices perspective

00:27:55 ◼   ► looks like one network,

00:27:57 ◼   ► but the three devices on the Eero side work together

00:28:00 ◼   ► to create one mesh network.

00:28:03 ◼   ► It is so much better for saturating an oddly shaped house

00:28:07 ◼   ► or a big house or a tall house with network

00:28:09 ◼   ► than trying to get one base station

00:28:12 ◼   ► somewhere in a central location

00:28:14 ◼   ► or maybe you don't even have a choice

00:28:16 ◼   ► because this is where your cable comes in.

00:28:17 ◼   ► It has to be in this one spot

00:28:18 ◼   ► at like in the one side of the house.

00:28:21 ◼   ► Trying to get one base station to saturate your whole house

00:28:23 ◼   ► with a strong wifi signal.

00:28:25 ◼   ► Mesh networks are the way to go.

00:28:27 ◼   ► Eero is great hardware, so easy to set up.

00:28:31 ◼   ► Everything goes through the Eero app,

00:28:33 ◼   ► which is just a terrific app for iOS,

00:28:35 ◼   ► works on the iPhone, works on the iPad,

00:28:38 ◼   ► and you can use it to set up all sorts of things.

00:28:40 ◼   ► You can set it up optionally if you want

00:28:42 ◼   ► to get a notification every time

00:28:44 ◼   ► a new device joins the network.

00:28:45 ◼   ► You can sign up for their Eero Plus system,

00:28:50 ◼   ► which gives you all sorts of stuff

00:28:51 ◼   ► like ad blocking, content blocking,

00:28:53 ◼   ► and ways to manage your kids' devices

00:28:56 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

00:28:57 ◼   ► All, it all sounds like, wow, that would be really hard.

00:29:01 ◼   ► You have to be like a network engineer

00:29:02 ◼   ► to get something like that working.

00:29:04 ◼   ► Not with Eero.

00:29:05 ◼   ► It is so easy and obvious to look at it

00:29:08 ◼   ► and figure out what to do on the app.

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00:29:13 ◼   ► If you hear me, it's because Glenn's hearing me speak

00:29:16 ◼   ► over an Eero network here

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00:29:24 ◼   ► And it's even easy when you do things like upgrade,

00:29:27 ◼   ► 'cause I got an ERO with the first generation hardware

00:29:29 ◼   ► years ago when they first started

00:29:30 ◼   ► 'cause they sponsored the show.

00:29:31 ◼   ► And then when they came out

00:29:32 ◼   ► with their second generation hardware,

00:29:34 ◼   ► which adds all sorts of, I forget what it does,

00:29:37 ◼   ► but it's just better signal.

00:29:39 ◼   ► Doesn't matter, it's just better.

00:29:40 ◼   ► That's what you get if you buy it now anyway.

00:29:42 ◼   ► But I wanted to figure out how hard is it gonna be

00:29:44 ◼   ► to replace like my first generation base station

00:29:47 ◼   ► with the second generation one.

00:29:48 ◼   ► Couldn't have been easier.

00:29:49 ◼   ► There's even, there's just like a big fat button in the app

00:29:51 ◼   ► that's like, oh, you wanna replace an ERO with a new ERO?

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00:30:05 ◼   ► What do you do to find out more?

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00:30:50 ◼   ► thanks to Eero for their continuing sponsorship of the show. Don't know how long that's gonna last

00:30:55 ◼   ► because the reason they've been in the news is it was announced last week that Amazon is gonna

00:30:59 ◼   ► gonna buy them. Don't know how that's gonna work out. But in the meantime, I, you know,

00:31:05 ◼   ► I recommend it. A little bit weird, a little bit sad. I wrote that it's a little sad because I

00:31:09 ◼   ► liked him as a plucky upstart in the hardware industry. And it seems like every plucky upstart

00:31:15 ◼   ► either goes bust or gets bought by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple.

00:31:19 ◼   ► David Tenenbaum Yeah, it becomes part of an ecosystem

00:31:22 ◼   ► issue. It seemed to me like they were doing pretty well on their own. They were, you know,

00:31:25 ◼   ► one of the—there's only one other real startup that's in that space, I think, that's been—that

00:31:32 ◼   ► stayed independent. I think the rest got acquired. But yeah, they wanted the part of a bigger hole,

00:31:38 ◼   ► because they'll get pushed out, or maybe they did their plotting in the future. And they said,

00:31:42 ◼   ► You know, in three years, every company that has an ecosystem is going to have a mesh system

00:31:47 ◼   ► and there's going to be no space for us in the market, so we've got to have an exit plan

00:31:49 ◼   ► or we're going to be under.

00:31:51 ◼   ► Me, I just use old tin cans, tin cans and string.

00:31:55 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:31:56 ◼   ► That's from the guy who used to run the Wi-Fi…

00:31:59 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:32:00 ◼   ► Yeah, Wi-Fi news blog.

00:32:02 ◼   ► I like Ethernet.

00:32:03 ◼   ► Ethernet is great.

00:32:04 ◼   ► I have Ethernet in my house and Wi-Fi.

00:32:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:32:07 ◼   ► Well, I'll be back to Ethernet eventually.

00:32:08 ◼   ► There's going to be some kind of vaccination apocalypse, and everything's going to have

00:32:13 ◼   ► to be wired.

00:32:14 ◼   ► Darrell Bock Well, you'll just string it.

00:32:15 ◼   ► There'll be …

00:32:16 ◼   ► Ben

00:32:16 ◼   ► - A lot of news to cover.

00:32:18 ◼   ► And some of it is even broke today.

00:32:20 ◼   ► I'll just get this one out of the way

00:32:21 ◼   ► 'cause I wrote about it before I went to the doctor

00:32:23 ◼   ► is the Wall Street Journal had a report today

00:32:25 ◼   ► that Apple is teaming up with Goldman Sachs

00:32:28 ◼   ► to do a credit card, like a MasterCard,

00:32:31 ◼   ► an Apple credit card.

00:32:32 ◼   ► And I have to say,

00:32:34 ◼   ► it leaves a bad taste to my mouth

00:32:40 ◼   ► 'cause I don't like the credit card industry.

00:32:42 ◼   ► I think that it's, I think the interest rates are too high.

00:32:47 ◼   ► I really do.

00:32:49 ◼   ► And I think it's too easy for people to get in debt.

00:32:53 ◼   ► And it's like, you know, I mean, I shoot from the hip,

00:32:58 ◼   ► but it's like I quipped on Daring Fireball.

00:33:00 ◼   ► You know, if this works out, what are they gonna do next?

00:33:02 ◼   ► Start doing payday loans at the Apple store?

00:33:04 ◼   ► And I get it that all sorts of big companies,

00:33:07 ◼   ► Disney has a credit card and any place you go on vacation

00:33:11 ◼   ► hotels have their own credit cards, every airline has their own credit cards. But to me, having your

00:33:16 ◼   ► own credit card when you're not a bank is like something industries do. Like the airlines are

00:33:21 ◼   ► the perfect example where they're long established, they're out of new ideas to make money, their

00:33:27 ◼   ► margins are getting ground down every way. I mean, when you think of the airlines,

00:33:32 ◼   ► at least in the US, do you really think of customer service oriented companies? Or do you

00:33:36 ◼   ► think of companies who are looking for a way to charge you $25 to get another bag,

00:33:41 ◼   ► you know, onto your trip.

00:33:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's like, it's always the Apple should buy

00:33:45 ◼   ► a cable company and I'm like, no, no,

00:33:46 ◼   ► what's the most hated companies in the country?

00:33:49 ◼   ► It's cable companies and it's credit card companies.

00:33:51 ◼   ► Yeah, they should definitely be involved

00:33:53 ◼   ► in both industries that people,

00:33:54 ◼   ► although you can argue there's an opportunity

00:33:56 ◼   ► to change things.

00:33:57 ◼   ► This is what I thought about Virgin America,

00:33:59 ◼   ► which is, I want to say the late lamented,

00:34:00 ◼   ► 'cause I got folded into it.

00:34:02 ◼   ► My second favorite airline is Alaska Airlines.

00:34:05 ◼   ► So that wasn't terrible for me, but it's not the same.

00:34:08 ◼   ► Virgin America, I felt like they always did everything they could do within the structure

00:34:13 ◼   ► of a terrible broken and dysfunctional system to make your experience better.

00:34:16 ◼   ► And that included, I had a Virgin America credit card and I think the annual fee was like $150,

00:34:22 ◼   ► but it let you do free refunds and exchanges on tickets, plus free bags and free food and a free

00:34:31 ◼   ► class upgrade, like micro class upgrade to premium cost coach or whatever. And I was like,

00:34:37 ◼   ► like, man, this was so in keeping with their philosophy.

00:34:40 ◼   ► It's like, yeah, yeah, we have a branded credit card

00:34:42 ◼   ► and we'll give you 1%, or what, I'll give you miles,

00:34:44 ◼   ► but what we're really gonna do is give you a better service

00:34:46 ◼   ► because you bought into us.

00:34:48 ◼   ► I was like, yeah.

00:34:49 ◼   ► - On American, which is what I fly all the time,

00:34:51 ◼   ► premium coach really just means,

00:34:53 ◼   ► well, you're closer to the front of the plane,

00:34:55 ◼   ► so you'll get off sooner.

00:34:57 ◼   ► Like, there's no-- - You don't get a dirty cup.

00:34:58 ◼   ► We'll give you a clean cup. - There's no difference

00:34:59 ◼   ► in like leg room or anything,

00:35:01 ◼   ► whereas Virgin's premium economy actually had more,

00:35:03 ◼   ► like, a little, in like an inch or two of more leg room.

00:35:06 ◼   ► It really was something.

00:35:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, they gave you free food,

00:35:09 ◼   ► and it was, ah, I missed them.

00:35:11 ◼   ► But I wonder, so does Apple,

00:35:13 ◼   ► this is always that argument,

00:35:14 ◼   ► Apple tried to do that with the cell industry.

00:35:15 ◼   ► The cell industry was the most hated industry

00:35:17 ◼   ► in the country just about,

00:35:19 ◼   ► besides credit card companies and cable operators.

00:35:21 ◼   ► And Apple came in and said,

00:35:23 ◼   ► "We're gonna do unlimited service, we're gonna do this."

00:35:24 ◼   ► They forced change.

00:35:26 ◼   ► And so the cellular industry is still kind of terrible,

00:35:29 ◼   ► but it's morphed into something that is generally bearable,

00:35:33 ◼   ► and especially when they got rid of overages

00:35:35 ◼   ► and they switched to throttling.

00:35:36 ◼   ► So, you know, you no longer can wind up

00:35:38 ◼   ► with a thousand dollar bill accidentally.

00:35:40 ◼   ► Like it has gradually gotten to that point.

00:35:43 ◼   ► And so Apple was part of the push.

00:35:44 ◼   ► If Apple had never gotten into,

00:35:46 ◼   ► well, who knows what kind of company they'd be,

00:35:47 ◼   ► if they've never released an iPhone,

00:35:49 ◼   ► what would the sell industry be like?

00:35:50 ◼   ► I'm like, do they have an opportunity

00:35:52 ◼   ► to make the credit card industry less horrible

00:35:55 ◼   ► by being involved in it?

00:35:56 ◼   ► I don't know. - No.

00:35:57 ◼   ► - Well, that would be nice if that was their,

00:35:59 ◼   ► I hope that's their attitude.

00:36:00 ◼   ► And I hope it's not to make as much money as they can.

00:36:04 ◼   ► profiting off people's debt that they shouldn't have incurred at the first place, paying interest

00:36:09 ◼   ► rates that should be, in my opinion, illegal.

00:36:12 ◼   ► Yeah, like 20. I mean, I had some balance on a card and I was like, I've got some money

00:36:17 ◼   ► on some cards at 0%. I'm like, if you're gonna give me free money, this is actually less

00:36:21 ◼   ► than the interest rate I have. And so I got, I paid off some balance and I was like, oh,

00:36:25 ◼   ► I wonder what the balance transfer deal is now. It's like, you can transfer money at

00:36:28 ◼   ► 20%.

00:36:29 ◼   ► How is that legal?

00:36:32 ◼   ► I don't, it doesn't seem right to me.

00:36:34 ◼   ► Like, I have good credit and now I can understand.

00:36:37 ◼   ► I mean, there's prime and subprime and whatever.

00:36:38 ◼   ► Like, maybe if I was bad credit risk,

00:36:40 ◼   ► I'm like, I don't think that, that's a gotcha.

00:36:44 ◼   ► That's a, we want you to accidentally not pay

00:36:47 ◼   ► and pay just 20% interest.

00:36:49 ◼   ► - I, you know, maybe I'm misremembering.

00:36:51 ◼   ► I don't know, but I did.

00:36:53 ◼   ► I ran up credit card debt that was unwise

00:36:56 ◼   ► when I was in my 20s.

00:36:59 ◼   ► And as I recall though, I was paying like

00:37:03 ◼   ► seven or eight percent interest.

00:37:05 ◼   ► And I don't know, maybe I got a student rate,

00:37:06 ◼   ► maybe that 'cause that's when I got the card, I don't know.

00:37:09 ◼   ► - No, no, they used to be lower.

00:37:10 ◼   ► They used to be like eight to 12% even when,

00:37:12 ◼   ► I mean, we're historic still, not historic,

00:37:14 ◼   ► we're at a relatively low prime rate,

00:37:16 ◼   ► relatively low interest rates overall.

00:37:18 ◼   ► And it used to be prime plus like five or seven percent.

00:37:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't know.

00:37:22 ◼   ► - And now it's like prime plus 15.

00:37:23 ◼   ► - I was paying like eight percent interest

00:37:25 ◼   ► and it was way too much.

00:37:26 ◼   ► It was everything my dad had told me not to do,

00:37:30 ◼   ► everything anybody with any sense tells a 20-year-old

00:37:33 ◼   ► in college who's finally getting credit card offers,

00:37:35 ◼   ► well, whatever you do, don't run up more

00:37:38 ◼   ► than you can pay off in a month.

00:37:40 ◼   ► And of course I did.

00:37:41 ◼   ► - I did that too.

00:37:42 ◼   ► - But now, it's like, so Amy and I are in a situation

00:37:45 ◼   ► where for years, we've literally only had one credit card.

00:37:48 ◼   ► We have an Amex, and it's the only credit card we have.

00:37:51 ◼   ► We have debit cards for the bank

00:37:53 ◼   ► and a couple other debit cards from PayPal

00:37:55 ◼   ► and I have a Square Cash card, that's debit.

00:37:59 ◼   ► I have Apple Pay card now, that's debit.

00:38:01 ◼   ► You know, it's all, I have a gazillion debit cards

00:38:03 ◼   ► and one credit card.

00:38:05 ◼   ► And we were getting a mortgage two or three years ago.

00:38:10 ◼   ► And that turns out, I thought that was good,

00:38:12 ◼   ► but it turns out that's bad.

00:38:14 ◼   ► You're supposed to have like two or three credit cards.

00:38:16 ◼   ► You're supposed to pay them all off,

00:38:18 ◼   ► but you're supposed to have more.

00:38:20 ◼   ► And then we're like, well, should we get another credit card?

00:38:22 ◼   ► And they're like, oh no, no, no.

00:38:23 ◼   ► And they're like, it's too late now.

00:38:24 ◼   ► Like whatever you do is--

00:38:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, if you cancel credit cards,

00:38:26 ◼   ► it makes your credit score worse.

00:38:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, so yeah, so it's this Kafka-esque situation

00:38:33 ◼   ► where they're like,

00:38:34 ◼   ► "You should have two or three credit cards."

00:38:35 ◼   ► So then they're like,

00:38:36 ◼   ► "Don't you have a Target card or something?"

00:38:37 ◼   ► And we're like, "No, we don't have a Target card."

00:38:39 ◼   ► You know, it turns out Target actually has

00:38:40 ◼   ► a very nice cash back thing where you get like 5% off

00:38:43 ◼   ► all your Target purchases.

00:38:44 ◼   ► I didn't know that.

00:38:45 ◼   ► So it turns out Target card is, you know,

00:38:47 ◼   ► is actually, if you shop a lot,

00:38:49 ◼   ► there's actually a good card to have.

00:38:51 ◼   ► But I just thought it was sensible to have one card,

00:38:54 ◼   ► You pay it off every month.

00:38:55 ◼   ► The AmEx we have, you have to pay off.

00:38:57 ◼   ► I don't even think we're allowed to carry a balance.

00:38:59 ◼   ► Whatever we charge, we pay off at the end of the month.

00:39:01 ◼   ► And it turns out that for your credit, that's actually bad.

00:39:04 ◼   ► You're supposed to have two or three and pay them all off.

00:39:07 ◼   ► But when you're in the process of getting a mortgage,

00:39:09 ◼   ► don't sign up for more credit cards.

00:39:11 ◼   ► That looks bad.

00:39:12 ◼   ► You're supposed to already have them.

00:39:14 ◼   ► So anyway, a couple years later, we have the mortgage,

00:39:19 ◼   ► but we're thinking if that's supposedly better

00:39:22 ◼   ► for our credit, why don't we sign up

00:39:24 ◼   ► for another credit card?

00:39:25 ◼   ► And we're looking and we're thinking,

00:39:27 ◼   ► we fly American all the time,

00:39:28 ◼   ► so maybe we'll get this American,

00:39:30 ◼   ► there's an American Airlines card,

00:39:33 ◼   ► and it gets you, it sounds expensive,

00:39:36 ◼   ► it's like a $400 a year fee,

00:39:38 ◼   ► but it gets you unlimited access to their lounges.

00:39:42 ◼   ► In combination of Philly and Orlando for going to Disney

00:39:47 ◼   ► and a couple other places where we travel,

00:39:50 ◼   ► It would probably be worth it for the lounge access alone.

00:39:53 ◼   ► And there's a couple other benefits,

00:39:55 ◼   ► like a multiplier on your miles.

00:39:58 ◼   ► So we did the math.

00:39:59 ◼   ► - Bag fees too, right?

00:40:00 ◼   ► So it's like 75 bucks for the three of you.

00:40:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, effectively it's like you get treated

00:40:05 ◼   ► like you have platinum status no matter what your status is.

00:40:07 ◼   ► - Ah, see, that's awesome.

00:40:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, it seems like a decent card.

00:40:10 ◼   ► All we plan to do with it is charge our airline tickets

00:40:16 ◼   ► for everywhere we go, henceforth, to use that. Anyway, I'm reading the fine print of this

00:40:22 ◼   ► thing and it's like the starting interest rate is like 15 percent or 14 percent or something

00:40:26 ◼   ► like that. And that's like, you know, and then it goes up from there.

00:40:29 ◼   ► But that's crazy! That is absolutely insane.

00:40:34 ◼   ► It's all gotcha. And this is the thing, is you would think there'd be space in the credit

00:40:37 ◼   ► card industry. Like, why is there not a disruptor in there at this point? There have been in

00:40:41 ◼   ► the past, you know, Discover was a whole different kind of model. There were other companies,

00:40:45 ◼   ► But right now I don't feel like there's anybody

00:40:47 ◼   ► in the credit card industry saying,

00:40:49 ◼   ► we are going to, you know, we're gonna have a high,

00:40:52 ◼   ► you have to have a credit score of, you know, whatever.

00:40:53 ◼   ► It's gonna be super high.

00:40:54 ◼   ► You have to have 700 or 650 or whatever.

00:40:57 ◼   ► So we're only gonna take people who are super high risk,

00:40:59 ◼   ► or super low risk, but we're gonna have,

00:41:02 ◼   ► we're only gonna charge, you know, prime plus five.

00:41:04 ◼   ► And so we're not gonna encourage balances,

00:41:06 ◼   ► but if you have a balance,

00:41:07 ◼   ► it's not gonna be, you know, 15 or 20%.

00:41:09 ◼   ► I mean, I have cards, I have a couple airline cards

00:41:12 ◼   ► for this exact reason.

00:41:13 ◼   ► the cheaper Alaska card because I fly that just enough. And my wife and I both got United Cards

00:41:20 ◼   ► recently because they're like, "We'll give you like 40,000 miles." We're like, you know,

00:41:24 ◼   ► we were able to go to Europe, go to London for a couple weeks last summer entirely on miles. I

00:41:29 ◼   ► cashed all the miles in. And then we both got United Cards and by next year we'll have like

00:41:34 ◼   ► a couple hundred thousand miles again between bonuses and I run all my business stuff through

00:41:38 ◼   ► through the card.

00:41:40 ◼   ► So it's this really weird scam,

00:41:43 ◼   ► but the interest rate in the United card, I think is 25%.

00:41:46 ◼   ► So we pay everything down, of course.

00:41:47 ◼   ► - Crazy. - I mean,

00:41:48 ◼   ► I feel very fortunate to be--

00:41:49 ◼   ► - But how is that even a legal interest rate?

00:41:51 ◼   ► That's usury. - I don't know.

00:41:52 ◼   ► - I mean, it's usurious.

00:41:54 ◼   ► It's really, I just can't--

00:41:56 ◼   ► - I don't know why the market,

00:41:57 ◼   ► but the market should have solved that.

00:41:58 ◼   ► There should be a disruptor in the market

00:42:00 ◼   ► that is well-funded by somebody who's a, you know,

00:42:02 ◼   ► Warren Buffett style person who's like,

00:42:04 ◼   ► "Yeah, yeah, I got billions of dollars

00:42:05 ◼   ► "and we're gonna create the uncredit card.

00:42:07 ◼   ► Why, you know, that hasn't happened.

00:42:09 ◼   ► - I think that somebody should be able to come in

00:42:12 ◼   ► and do, like you said, like a prime rate plus five,

00:42:15 ◼   ► and it shouldn't even have to require

00:42:18 ◼   ► that high of a credit card, or credit rating.

00:42:20 ◼   ► You know, like, you shouldn't even need great credit.

00:42:23 ◼   ► It should be like anything but bad credit.

00:42:25 ◼   ► You should be able to get in on that.

00:42:26 ◼   ► I can't see how that's not super profitable.

00:42:29 ◼   ► I really can't.

00:42:30 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:42:32 ◼   ► So I'm really a bit depressed reading

00:42:35 ◼   ► that Apple is getting involved in this,

00:42:36 ◼   ► because it just really, it just seems like another canary

00:42:40 ◼   ► in the coal mine of ideas that companies have

00:42:43 ◼   ► when they're out of regular ideas.

00:42:45 ◼   ► Let's sell a credit card.

00:42:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, I'll be curious, when we see what their rates are,

00:42:49 ◼   ► now it's possible it will be a ridiculously old

00:42:52 ◼   ► throwback rate because Apple's in the position

00:42:56 ◼   ► where Goldman Sachs would never offer a card

00:42:58 ◼   ► with a low rate, but Apple can say,

00:42:59 ◼   ► "Yeah, yeah, we're self-insuring the card

00:43:02 ◼   ► "with $50 billion from our store," or something like that.

00:43:05 ◼   ► - The gist of the wall and friend of the show

00:43:07 ◼   ► and occasional guest, Dan Fromer,

00:43:10 ◼   ► it runs a mailing list, Points Party,

00:43:13 ◼   ► which is all about, he's a real super nerd

00:43:16 ◼   ► on airline and credit card points.

00:43:18 ◼   ► And I'm like enough of one where like every year or so,

00:43:23 ◼   ► like I said, my wife and I were just like,

00:43:25 ◼   ► let's see if we're gonna get one more credit card,

00:43:27 ◼   ► what should we get?

00:43:28 ◼   ► And we're like, well, she get like a Visa or a MasterCard,

00:43:31 ◼   ► we can use it everywhere that doesn't take Amex.

00:43:33 ◼   ► And, you know, seems like, you know,

00:43:35 ◼   ► we'll get the most out of this American Airlines one

00:43:37 ◼   ► 'cause we fly American 'cause 95% of all the planes

00:43:41 ◼   ► that leave Philadelphia are American.

00:43:43 ◼   ► I get it, I get why people geek out on this stuff.

00:43:48 ◼   ► And the journal's story though is that Apple

00:43:51 ◼   ► is not going to chase the,

00:43:53 ◼   ► that this Apple credit card is not going to chase

00:43:56 ◼   ► the sort of rewards-oriented cards.

00:44:01 ◼   ► They're just gonna do like 2% cash back.

00:44:04 ◼   ► And I would presume, like the journal even said,

00:44:07 ◼   ► like we presume some kind of discount on Apple stuff.

00:44:11 ◼   ► Like maybe you'll get 5% cash back

00:44:12 ◼   ► every time you buy something from Apple.

00:44:14 ◼   ► - Mm-hmm.

00:44:15 ◼   ► - I can only presume they would do that.

00:44:18 ◼   ► 'Cause it seems like a no brainer

00:44:19 ◼   ► if they're going after their best customers,

00:44:22 ◼   ► that seems like one of the most likely ways

00:44:24 ◼   ► to get them involved.

00:44:27 ◼   ► but they're not gonna do anything like airline clubs,

00:44:32 ◼   ► or anything like that.

00:44:36 ◼   ► But that their other point of appeal

00:44:38 ◼   ► will be integration with the iPhone

00:44:40 ◼   ► and that you'll get Apple Watch-style circles

00:44:43 ◼   ► about your financial health or something.

00:44:46 ◼   ► - Oh, interesting.

00:44:47 ◼   ► - And that doesn't seem appealing to me, really.

00:44:49 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:44:50 ◼   ► My Amex thing has a great integration with iOS.

00:44:53 ◼   ► You install the Amex app and you sign in,

00:44:56 ◼   ► and it's the same sign in you use on their website.

00:44:59 ◼   ► And I have it set up, it gives me a notification

00:45:01 ◼   ► every time my card is charged, which is great.

00:45:04 ◼   ► I mean, I kind of trust them on fraud anyway,

00:45:06 ◼   ► but it's, you know, and it just is a nice reminder

00:45:09 ◼   ► of like monthly stuff that you have on your card.

00:45:14 ◼   ► And it's like, it's just, to me, it's a nice reminder

00:45:16 ◼   ► of hey, why am I paying $10 a month for that?

00:45:18 ◼   ► I never use that, maybe I should cancel it.

00:45:20 ◼   ► You know, and it's just one alert when the card's charged,

00:45:23 ◼   ► that's it.

00:45:25 ◼   ► and I can go into the app at any time.

00:45:26 ◼   ► They have nice integration with the Apple Wallet,

00:45:29 ◼   ► so you can use your card with Apple Pay.

00:45:31 ◼   ► And then I can go in the app and see all of my charges

00:45:35 ◼   ► and the Amex app categorizes stuff.

00:45:38 ◼   ► If I wanna see stuff like,

00:45:40 ◼   ► how much have I blown on restaurants in the last month?

00:45:42 ◼   ► Very easy, it's just like a tab.

00:45:44 ◼   ► So I can't see what Apple would do

00:45:48 ◼   ► that would be better than that.

00:45:50 ◼   ► I mean, maybe other credit cards

00:45:51 ◼   ► aren't as nice as the Amex app,

00:45:52 ◼   ► but it doesn't seem like that would be a reason

00:45:55 ◼   ► to sign up for an Apple credit card.

00:45:57 ◼   ► - No, I mean, yeah, I've got the Chase United card is,

00:46:00 ◼   ► excuse me, the Chase card is just as well integrated.

00:46:04 ◼   ► I've got an Amex, and it's there so I can compare them,

00:46:07 ◼   ► and the apps are very good.

00:46:09 ◼   ► Like, Apple's given good hooks,

00:46:10 ◼   ► and the Apple Pay works, and Wallet is great,

00:46:13 ◼   ► and I can't think what else would be a benefit

00:46:17 ◼   ► that would be a typical thing.

00:46:18 ◼   ► Like, it's one thing if you go in the Apple store

00:46:21 ◼   ► and the credit card does something fancy,

00:46:22 ◼   ► but how often is even the most avid person

00:46:25 ◼   ► in an Apple store buying something?

00:46:27 ◼   ► Not very often.

00:46:28 ◼   ► So the only advantage they can give you

00:46:30 ◼   ► is it's got Apple's name on it,

00:46:31 ◼   ► and maybe that's what, they're a lifestyle brand now.

00:46:34 ◼   ► So people just want that card with the Apple on it.

00:46:38 ◼   ► It'll do that thing where you move it,

00:46:40 ◼   ► and it glitters, just like the--

00:46:42 ◼   ► - The Apple Pay thing.

00:46:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

00:46:44 ◼   ► - If anybody doesn't know, there's a very cool feature

00:46:47 ◼   ► of the Apple Pay Cash where you can tilt your phone,

00:46:50 ◼   ► It does something with the accelerometer

00:46:53 ◼   ► to create the illusion that the on-screen card you see

00:46:58 ◼   ► has like a holographic label.

00:47:00 ◼   ► And it's more than just a cool feature,

00:47:03 ◼   ► if you think about it.

00:47:03 ◼   ► It's actually a way so that, you know,

00:47:06 ◼   ► like if you know that to look for this,

00:47:08 ◼   ► if you're worried like that, you know,

00:47:10 ◼   ► like if I'm PayPalling you 50 bucks to split a dinner tab

00:47:14 ◼   ► and you're worried that I just screenshotted it,

00:47:17 ◼   ► and I haven't really given you 50 bucks,

00:47:19 ◼   ► I've just sent you an iMessage with a screenshot

00:47:23 ◼   ► that makes it look like it,

00:47:24 ◼   ► it wouldn't have that holographic effect.

00:47:27 ◼   ► It's a way for you to say,

00:47:28 ◼   ► "Yeah, this is a legit Apple Pay cash payment."

00:47:31 ◼   ► - It's a nice touch.

00:47:33 ◼   ► My question is always,

00:47:36 ◼   ► this gets you into that Clayton Christensen thing,

00:47:38 ◼   ► is what is the job of the thing, right?

00:47:40 ◼   ► And the question is, what is the job of a credit card?

00:47:42 ◼   ► And the job of a credit card is to make,

00:47:46 ◼   ► like for the consumer, the job of a credit card

00:47:48 ◼   ► to remove friction and fuss and make something like an invisible thing. I had this conversation,

00:47:54 ◼   ► I don't know if you've had this conversation with Jonah, but at different times I have with my kids.

00:47:56 ◼   ► My younger, who's 11, was like, he's like, "What's the deal with money?" Like, he had done some dog

00:48:01 ◼   ► walking. He gave me, he gives me a $20 bill to deposit for him in his account. And he's like,

00:48:07 ◼   ► "This is super weird." I'm like, "Yes, it is." So he's gonna give me the money. I'll have the cash

00:48:11 ◼   ► bill. And then I go line, I just transfer that into, you know, his accounts LinkedIn,

00:48:16 ◼   ► because he's a minor. And he's like, "How does money work that you just transfer bits around?

00:48:21 ◼   ► Why does that make sense?" And I'm like, "It doesn't. It really doesn't." It was only a few

00:48:25 ◼   ► years ago, several years ago, that every night— Don't think about it too hard.

00:48:30 ◼   ► Yes, you think about it too hard. It's like the Monty Python sketch, the buildings

00:48:33 ◼   ► erected entirely by hypnosis. And then you're like, "Let me tell you about what's going on

00:48:38 ◼   ► in Venezuela." Oh, geez. But like— I hate to laugh. I hate to laugh at the place.

00:48:44 ◼   ► It's a terrible humanitarian crisis, but it's incredible. So, you know, there are a bunch of

00:48:47 ◼   ► pilots who were really bummed several years ago because they are making a great living. Every

00:48:52 ◼   ► night, they would fly pallets of checks from all over the country to Federal Reserve offices.

00:48:57 ◼   ► And that was their job. They're on like midnight flights and the checks would be brought in, right?

00:49:02 ◼   ► And they would fly the physical checks to the 19 Federal Reserve offices or something like that.

00:49:07 ◼   ► And I found this pilot's forum. I was researching something about the check 21 thing, which made it

00:49:11 ◼   ► do a photo based deposits of checks that we can do now, which

00:49:15 ◼   ► has, you know, gone on for years now. But when this was new, and

00:49:17 ◼   ► the pilots like this is terrible, like, like a big chunk

00:49:20 ◼   ► of my living has been these, you know, midnight flights every

00:49:23 ◼   ► week, to fly checks. So, you know, you're abstract that so we

00:49:27 ◼   ► don't even fly checks, I take a picture of a check, if I get a

00:49:30 ◼   ► check or it's bits, and so it's perfectly reasonable. So So what

00:49:33 ◼   ► is the job that an Apple credit card could do? That another

00:49:36 ◼   ► credit card can't, I can't think of a job. So I'm hoping they

00:49:38 ◼   ► So I'm hoping they have one and it's not just,

00:49:41 ◼   ► we give you 5% back on Apple purchases,

00:49:43 ◼   ► although it'll be fine, I guess.

00:49:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't know, I'm a little,

00:49:46 ◼   ► I don't know, a little stressed by it.

00:49:48 ◼   ► Can I tell you, I'll tell you this,

00:49:49 ◼   ► Dan Fromer actually turned me on to this card.

00:49:52 ◼   ► Do you have the Square Cash app?

00:49:55 ◼   ► - Yes, I do.

00:49:57 ◼   ► What's the deal?

00:49:58 ◼   ► There's some kind of special thing with that, right?

00:49:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, so I've had the Square Cash app for years,

00:50:03 ◼   ► and it's sort of, you know,

00:50:05 ◼   ► just sort of fallen into the back of my iPhone

00:50:08 ◼   ► something I don't really use. I had used it in the past for

00:50:11 ◼   ► things like, hey, here's a four of us are going out to dinner,

00:50:15 ◼   ► you I'll pick up the check, you just give me the money and then

00:50:17 ◼   ► I could square cash, you know, you whatever it takes for me to

00:50:21 ◼   ► do if it you know, usually you just put a bunch of credit cards

00:50:24 ◼   ► in and the restaurant splits it but maybe it's a restaurant that

00:50:26 ◼   ► doesn't want to do that, you know, whatever you're you owe if

00:50:29 ◼   ► you owe somebody 100 bucks for something, you square cash it to

00:50:32 ◼   ► him. But now I use Apple pay for that. But I still had this

00:50:35 ◼   ► square cash. But you what you can do in the square cash app is

00:50:38 ◼   ► say I want the card to and they send you a visa debit card. It's kind of nice. You sign

00:50:43 ◼   ► it on screen and then and then they like laser and etch your signature onto the front of

00:50:48 ◼   ► the card. It's a it's a very cool looking credit card. It's just a flat black card with

00:50:52 ◼   ► my signature. And you can draw whatever you want. It doesn't have to be your signature.

00:50:59 ◼   ► But the thing that makes this card very cool that that Dan turned me on to is they have

00:51:02 ◼   ► these things called boosts. And you go into the app and you say pick your boost and they

00:51:09 ◼   ► wrote they change over time like Shake Shack was on it for a while and we have a Shake

00:51:16 ◼   ► Shack in the neighborhood we go to. But they also have one that it's really the whole reason

00:51:21 ◼   ► I got the card. It's just $1 off any purchase at any coffee shop. Oh, that's wild. And it's

00:51:27 ◼   ► literally any coffee shop. It's not like well, here's our list of partners. It's Dunkin Donuts

00:51:31 ◼   ► and Starbucks and whatever. It's anything that's a coffee shop, even like neighborhood

00:51:35 ◼   ► ones that I think this isn't going to work here because how square gonna know this is

00:51:39 ◼   ► a coffee shop? Well, they know it. And you can go in and get like a $2 just black coffee,

00:51:45 ◼   ► and you get $1 back on every purchase. So it's like, and that's, that's what I tend

00:51:50 ◼   ► personally to drink at a coffee shop is just like a, you know, like the cheapest thing

00:51:54 ◼   ► on the menu, a black coffee. So I'm getting like a 50% cash back on my coffee purchases.

00:52:00 ◼   ► And even when I get something else, like for my wife, it's usually like the combined bill

00:52:04 ◼   ► for two beverages is like six bucks. A dollar back is 16% cash back. It's crazy. And it's

00:52:12 ◼   ► how is this possible?

00:52:13 ◼   ► John, they make it up in volume.

00:52:15 ◼   ► Exactly. That's it.

00:52:17 ◼   ► But this is Jack's well run company.

00:52:20 ◼   ► Exactly. Exactly.

00:52:21 ◼   ► And but but they're doing not for it. Square is apparently done very well. So I don't know.

00:52:25 ◼   ► I'm trying to remember where they are in the profitable. I don't know.

00:52:28 ◼   ► - Dan point, but it's by all reports Square has made,

00:52:32 ◼   ► like they've grown in a really sensible manner,

00:52:35 ◼   ► they're making good decisions.

00:52:36 ◼   ► So this is likely an incredible customer acquisition tool

00:52:41 ◼   ► that then applies in other areas.

00:52:43 ◼   ► - It got me to get the card, you know,

00:52:45 ◼   ► and I'll tell you if you--

00:52:46 ◼   ► - Well now I'm gonna get the card.

00:52:47 ◼   ► - If you're out there, if you've got the Square Cash app,

00:52:49 ◼   ► which is free, and then you can hook it up

00:52:51 ◼   ► to your bank account to load money in,

00:52:53 ◼   ► 'cause it works like a debit thing, that's free.

00:52:56 ◼   ► and to get money back out is free.

00:52:58 ◼   ► You don't pay it.

00:52:59 ◼   ► - 10% off on Whole Foods, I found his article.

00:53:01 ◼   ► And there's a whole, so did you see,

00:53:03 ◼   ► this is a side door.

00:53:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, Whole Foods is another one.

00:53:05 ◼   ► And so the catch, you think, well, what's the catch?

00:53:08 ◼   ► The catch is it's only up to like 150 bucks or something

00:53:11 ◼   ► at Whole Foods and you can easily go over that.

00:53:14 ◼   ► But even so, that's 15 bucks.

00:53:16 ◼   ► - Did you see the pictures?

00:53:18 ◼   ► We had a big snowstorm for Seattle.

00:53:20 ◼   ► It was actually a fair amount of snow.

00:53:22 ◼   ► Like we were all laughing about it originally.

00:53:24 ◼   ► And then it just kept snowing

00:53:25 ◼   ► and Seattle is hills and we don't have,

00:53:28 ◼   ► people don't have time to sell tires.

00:53:30 ◼   ► - I was talking, I have friends up there, Brent.

00:53:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, Brent Simmons and yeah.

00:53:34 ◼   ► - Gus Mueller is up there somewhere.

00:53:36 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, yeah.

00:53:37 ◼   ► So we were sort of shut down here,

00:53:39 ◼   ► but we were kind of prepared,

00:53:39 ◼   ► but you probably saw the photos.

00:53:41 ◼   ► People went in and like bought everything off the shelves.

00:53:43 ◼   ► And it wasn't like they were buying bread and milk.

00:53:45 ◼   ► They were buying like arugula and like goat cheese.

00:53:48 ◼   ► It was like, but something is left and it's edible.

00:53:51 ◼   ► - Oh my God. - Buy it.

00:53:52 ◼   ► - It was hilarious.

00:53:53 ◼   ► My wife went in and she sent me a picture

00:53:54 ◼   ► I thought, "Well, this is funny." And then I search on Twitter and there are thousands

00:53:58 ◼   ► of photos of people just laughing. They're like, "I'm at Fred Meyer." So, the one place

00:54:02 ◼   ► I went up before the storm, there's a Whole Foods near my house they just opened and they

00:54:07 ◼   ► put it in a location that apparently nobody has discovered. And so, I go there and the

00:54:10 ◼   ► place is empty all the time. The people there are perfectly nice. Before the storm, their

00:54:14 ◼   ► shelves were totally stocked. I should have bought more stuff there. But so, I have a

00:54:18 ◼   ► Whole Foods I can go to and always get in. But there's that Amazon connection too. So,

00:54:21 ◼   ► I'm gonna be paying Jack Dorsey,

00:54:23 ◼   ► I'm gonna give him money to use,

00:54:25 ◼   ► or actually I'm gonna take money from him, so that's okay.

00:54:26 ◼   ► And then we give the money to Jeff Bezos up the street.

00:54:29 ◼   ► - But if you want to get in on the sweet,

00:54:31 ◼   ► some sweet, sweet venture capital money

00:54:33 ◼   ► that is just floating around out there,

00:54:35 ◼   ► get the Square Cash debit card.

00:54:37 ◼   ► And you can switch your boost in the app whenever you want.

00:54:41 ◼   ► So you can go get a cup of coffee,

00:54:43 ◼   ► get your dollar boost on the coffee purchase,

00:54:46 ◼   ► and then head over to Whole Foods and switch,

00:54:48 ◼   ► you have to go in the app and switch the boost.

00:54:49 ◼   ► - Oh, and switch it.

00:54:50 ◼   ► You can only have one active at a time,

00:54:52 ◼   ► but there's not really a limit.

00:54:54 ◼   ► Like the limits are all very, very fair.

00:54:57 ◼   ► So like on the coffee one,

00:54:58 ◼   ► there's a 30 minute timeout before you can use it again.

00:55:01 ◼   ► - Oh, sure, sure.

00:55:02 ◼   ► - So the idea is if I were gonna buy coffee for me and you,

00:55:05 ◼   ► I couldn't just use it for mine,

00:55:07 ◼   ► then use it for yours and get $2 back.

00:55:10 ◼   ► You have to wait 30 minutes.

00:55:11 ◼   ► It's ridiculous, but you can switch immediately.

00:55:13 ◼   ► You can switch to the Chick-fil-A one

00:55:16 ◼   ► and go across the street and get a chicken sandwich

00:55:18 ◼   ► and use the boost right away.

00:55:20 ◼   ► oh my God, you just saved it.

00:55:21 ◼   ► Well, this is a great listener tip.

00:55:23 ◼   ► Saved me a bunch of money.

00:55:24 ◼   ► I don't know about the Whole Foods thing.

00:55:25 ◼   ► I'm Amazon Prime, so I go there and I scan my card,

00:55:28 ◼   ► and there's like, it starts to feel like

00:55:30 ◼   ► you're playing a video game.

00:55:31 ◼   ► You go in and there's, the shelf tags are RF-based

00:55:35 ◼   ► and automatically update.

00:55:36 ◼   ► They're like Amazon tags, now I'll use the Square card

00:55:38 ◼   ► and the Amazon, and the scan my thing,

00:55:41 ◼   ► and 2D codes, it's amazing.

00:55:43 ◼   ► - I've heard that the Amazon Whole Foods merger

00:55:46 ◼   ► hasn't gone as smoothly as Amazon anticipated.

00:55:48 ◼   ► Interesting, interesting.

00:55:50 ◼   ► - Just that the Whole Foods business

00:55:54 ◼   ► is more complicated than Amazon anticipated.

00:55:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, I can believe it.

00:55:58 ◼   ► I always wonder, this is like,

00:55:59 ◼   ► whenever anybody said Apple should go into Business X,

00:56:01 ◼   ► my reaction has always been Business X has a tiny margin,

00:56:03 ◼   ► why would they do that?

00:56:04 ◼   ► And so when Amazon, I mean,

00:56:06 ◼   ► books can have a very large margin.

00:56:07 ◼   ► Some of the businesses,

00:56:09 ◼   ► Amazon progressively entered businesses with larger margins,

00:56:12 ◼   ► which is smart.

00:56:13 ◼   ► And the Whole Foods thing is like,

00:56:14 ◼   ► the grocery business is historically,

00:56:17 ◼   ► classically a very high volume, very low margin business

00:56:21 ◼   ► and Whole Foods and a few of the other sort of fancier

00:56:23 ◼   ► chains have been able to use merchandising and other things

00:56:26 ◼   ► to crack that and crank the margin up a little bit,

00:56:30 ◼   ► but most of what you're selling is like lettuce and milk

00:56:32 ◼   ► and bread and very little is sushi and baguettes or something

00:56:36 ◼   ► or not baguettes, but croissants or notepads or something.

00:56:40 ◼   ► So I don't know, I mean, I just wonder about the synergy

00:56:43 ◼   ► of you walk into the stores and it's like,

00:56:44 ◼   ► is this when I buy an Amazon dash?

00:56:46 ◼   ► or dot, probably not. I don't know. Maybe I will. It doesn't seem like it's the perfect thing. I do

00:56:52 ◼   ► like the integration of Amazon lockers. There's that kind of thing. I don't know.

00:56:57 ◼   ► Dave: Yeah, I enjoy Amazon's growing. I mean, I'm a big customer. I mean, I'm wary of them.

00:57:03 ◼   ► I mean, we spend a fortune at Amazon all the time. We get all sorts of stuff from Amazon.

00:57:11 ◼   ► You know, and their growing physical presence is intriguing to me. They just opened a new—because

00:57:16 ◼   ► there's a couple of Whole Foods here in Philadelphia, and so they're all in the

00:57:21 ◼   ► Amazon family now—but they just opened an Amazon locker. I forget where it's—it's

00:57:27 ◼   ► sort of like on the—it's close to Penn here, but that's not too far from us. It's

00:57:32 ◼   ► close enough where it's closer than the last time I looked for where the nearest locker

00:57:36 ◼   ► was to where we live. It was like, "Ah, I'd rather wait a day and have it show up at my house than

00:57:41 ◼   ► go over there." Now it's like, "Oh, that's tempting." It's, I don't know. And it looks very nice.

00:57:48 ◼   ► It looks like a very nice clean place. It doesn't look sketchy at the least bit. But it is weird.

00:57:53 ◼   ► It's weird to see Amazon in the real world because it's a brand that I associate as not really being

00:57:58 ◼   ► real, right? It exists entirely in a browser tab.

00:58:04 ◼   ► It's yeah, it's a I don't know what the real world objective I mean, I don't know what Amazon is anymore. I don't know what they're supposed to be. Because the everything store was you know, I don't know if that was their label actually, but that's what they get called. And like, I don't I don't know what they are now. I think they're like a, like a ravening job machine or something. I don't know. I don't know. Even in Seattle, it's very confusing as to like, what, what is Amazon trying to do? Are they trying to be essentially a giant co op?

00:58:32 ◼   ► giant co-op. Who was it? Was it Matt Iglesias? Somebody had that great thing years ago. I

00:58:38 ◼   ► probably quoted this even on this podcast before that said before Amazon was making

00:58:42 ◼   ► a profit, it was like Amazon appears to be a company whose shareholders are—

00:58:46 ◼   ► It was Iglesias.

00:58:47 ◼   ► —benevolently allowing—yeah, it was great—benevolently allowing its members to take all the money as

00:58:52 ◼   ► discounts. And now they're profitable, so it's a different thing. But what is the future

00:58:57 ◼   ► the future of Amazon? Is it just, you know, they obviously believe they need to grow bigger,

00:59:03 ◼   ► and they've had setbacks. And you probably don't want to get into the jobs thing. I don't

00:59:09 ◼   ► know what they are.

00:59:10 ◼   ► Tom Bilyeu (01h00m 33s): I've read though that their profits, A, it's

00:59:12 ◼   ► managed. Like, they make the profit, it's like they just turn a spigot and it's like,

00:59:15 ◼   ► let's have this much profit, you know? And it's also the fact that Amazon Web Services

00:59:21 ◼   ► has become profitable and there's really nothing they can do about it. Like, they've kind of

00:59:27 ◼   ► got to book those profits. I guess they could just keep reducing the rates of everything

00:59:34 ◼   ► to be break-even, but it's almost like they can't turn down the profits from Amazon

00:59:39 ◼   ► Web Services. They already have industry-leading rates on a lot of these large-scale online

00:59:45 ◼   ► things. Their retail stuff is still sort of run the way it used to be. I could be wrong

00:59:49 ◼   ► on this. I'm not an Amazon expert.

00:59:51 ◼   ► No, I think that's true is that is that they consistently everybody, the big players, Google

00:59:57 ◼   ► and Amazon and a lot of the there's a lot of smaller African IBM has business services, a bunch

01:00:02 ◼   ► of people involved in that space. And they continuously everyone's continuously ratcheting

01:00:07 ◼   ► down just slightly, often not by big amounts. And so like your but you know, I do I have various

01:00:12 ◼   ► things hosted in various places, and things just get cheaper all the time or faster or better. And

01:00:17 ◼   ► it's kind of cool. It's like you get to see that improvement curve in your bill every few months.

01:00:23 ◼   ► Tom Bilyeu: Yeah. I was just talking to Krista Murgen at Panic. She's doing a—I hope that maybe,

01:00:32 ◼   ► I don't know if it'll be out before this episode, but I was talking to her about a retrospective of

01:00:36 ◼   ► a 10-year-ago thing with the gang at Panic. Anyway, it'll be fun. She's talking to a lot

01:00:43 ◼   ► lot of fun people, but we were talking about the early days of podcasting, which is not

01:00:48 ◼   ► that long ago. The biggest problem was that it was very expensive to host 100 megabyte

01:00:56 ◼   ► MP3 files. It was, "Where the hell are you going to put it?" You put it on your regular

01:01:02 ◼   ► web hosting account, and it's like, "Hey, the good news is you have a couple thousand

01:01:06 ◼   ► listeners, and the bad news is you've got a thousand dollar bandwidth bill."

01:01:11 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:01:13 ◼   ► - Marco did a bunch of figuring about like,

01:01:14 ◼   ► you know, then there was like,

01:01:15 ◼   ► do you put it on an edge server or a cloud?

01:01:18 ◼   ► - Just hosting the MP3 files.

01:01:22 ◼   ► Not even like my show length two and a half hour shows.

01:01:25 ◼   ► I mean like you could do like a tight 20 minute show

01:01:28 ◼   ► and you can like use 64 megabit per second compression

01:01:33 ◼   ► to kind of make it sound, you know,

01:01:35 ◼   ► go to the point where you can even hear it with your ears

01:01:37 ◼   ► that it sounds a little crappy

01:01:38 ◼   ► and it was just too big to host

01:01:40 ◼   ► if a couple hundred people were going to download it.

01:01:43 ◼   ► It was a real problem, whereas, you know,

01:01:45 ◼   ► we've, you know, blown past that.

01:01:48 ◼   ► That's like a distant memory.

01:01:49 ◼   ► But it wasn't that long ago.

01:01:51 ◼   ► - This is something I was just looking up,

01:01:53 ◼   ► Stewart Brand's favorite, famous formulation,

01:01:55 ◼   ► "Information Wants to be Free."

01:01:57 ◼   ► And as you know, it's like, that gets quoted,

01:01:59 ◼   ► it gets quoted inaccurately,

01:02:01 ◼   ► and it's only half of the formulation.

01:02:03 ◼   ► It was, "Information Wants to be Free,

01:02:05 ◼   ► "but Information also Wants to be Expensive."

01:02:07 ◼   ► went by free is he's like the marginal cost of providing information—this is in the 80s, he said

01:02:14 ◼   ► this—gets ever lower. And now it's essentially zero. And what he meant by expensive was there's

01:02:18 ◼   ► a value. Like the expense wasn't necessarily money, it was that information has a value

01:02:23 ◼   ► attached to it. So there's this tension between the ease of delivery and the value associated

01:02:27 ◼   ► and how that works out. You know, sometimes you charge a lot of money, it's very easy to get,

01:02:31 ◼   ► sometimes it's very expensive to get, like all these parameters. But we're now at a point where

01:02:36 ◼   ► it's, it's costs essentially nothing to deliver any individual piece of content, it's only an

01:02:41 ◼   ► aggregate that you have to start to work if you're hosting 10,000 podcasts, and they have a million

01:02:45 ◼   ► downloads each, well, then you're talking a little money, but even that money is not a crazy amount.

01:02:49 ◼   ► But if you've got, you know, a talk show scale thing, it's essentially, the bandwidth bill is

01:02:54 ◼   ► effectively free, no matter what you did. I mean, not exactly free, but it's not, it's nowhere near,

01:02:58 ◼   ► you're not gonna be spending 10s of thousands of dollars like you would just a few years ago.

01:03:01 ◼   ► No, it is amazing. Hey, before we get off the subject of credit cards, one of the things the

01:03:05 ◼   ► the Wall Street Journal article brought up at which I thought was interesting was that

01:03:11 ◼   ► that the rumor is that Apple's card is going to be a MasterCard, which is the second biggest

01:03:14 ◼   ► network in the US behind visa. And it occurred to me, I know visa has more customers, but

01:03:19 ◼   ► it occurred to me that I, I tend to think of visa and MasterCard as being interchangeable,

01:03:24 ◼   ► because off the top of my head, I couldn't think of any business that takes one but not

01:03:27 ◼   ► the other like, Amex is pretty widely taken, but it's not that hard to find a place that

01:03:32 ◼   ► take Amex. I know as somebody who carries one and that's why

01:03:35 ◼   ► you know, I'm sorry, I'll take care of take my visa debit card.

01:03:38 ◼   ► Can you think off the top of your head of an establishment

01:03:41 ◼   ► that takes visa or MasterCard but not the other?

01:03:44 ◼   ► I had this happen where I went to where was it? I can't

01:03:47 ◼   ► remember. They only took visa and at the time all I had with

01:03:52 ◼   ► me was a MasterCard. Was it Costco Amex? It wasn't? No, it

01:03:56 ◼   ► was not Costco because that's well known, right? They only do

01:03:58 ◼   ► They only do one brand at a time.

01:04:01 ◼   ► I don't know if it was when I was in London.

01:04:03 ◼   ► It was really, I was like, oh, well I can pay with,

01:04:05 ◼   ► I'm like, oh, I don't have that.

01:04:07 ◼   ► I just didn't have a Visa at that moment

01:04:09 ◼   ► in the right configuration.

01:04:10 ◼   ► It was weird.

01:04:11 ◼   ► - So Costco only takes Visa, and it's fascinating.

01:04:15 ◼   ► - They cut out an amazing,

01:04:16 ◼   ► and they had Amex for many years,

01:04:18 ◼   ► and they cut some incredible,

01:04:20 ◼   ► I mean, they get some vast amount of kickback

01:04:23 ◼   ► or proceeds or whatever.

01:04:24 ◼   ► - I'll put a link in the show notes,

01:04:26 ◼   ► but they only pay 0.4% processing fees on purchases.

01:04:31 ◼   ► That's the sweetheart deal they got from,

01:04:35 ◼   ► and I think the standard for most companies

01:04:37 ◼   ► on most credit cards is somewhere like north of 2%.

01:04:40 ◼   ► So most establishments pay like two to 2.5% processing fee

01:04:45 ◼   ► on every single charge, and they paid 0.4.

01:04:48 ◼   ► And when they had Amex, it was 0.6.

01:04:51 ◼   ► And so Visa talked them down.

01:04:53 ◼   ► They're like, "Well, if you'll switch from Amex,

01:04:54 ◼   ► will give you 0.4. And so Costco, well known company, very, very popular, devoted, devoted

01:05:03 ◼   ► fans only takes visa because they have a you can use any visa you want, but they have a

01:05:09 ◼   ► Costco visa you can sign up for and and the extra deals and they only pay 0.4% to be sound

01:05:15 ◼   ► like a purchase. It's an amazing deal because you have to be a member of Costco to shop

01:05:18 ◼   ► there. And they probably have some fascinating extra layer of fraud protection because they

01:05:23 ◼   ► such experience because they have so many deals. So, you know, you have, with the card in hand,

01:05:28 ◼   ► the odds of you being a bad customer, someone who's going to somehow have a fraudulent card

01:05:33 ◼   ► are probably extremely low. So, you're, there are, and it's also possible, I don't know this,

01:05:37 ◼   ► I think Apple was engaged in this as well, is that there's a backstop for fraud. And I think

01:05:43 ◼   ► there was something, I remember there was talk when Apple launched Apple Pay that they were going

01:05:47 ◼   ► to provide like self-insurance against a certain kind of thing in order to secure a better rate or

01:05:52 ◼   ► or offer a better rate.

01:05:53 ◼   ► And I assume Costco is in the same boat

01:05:55 ◼   ► where they're like, they have such good fraud management

01:05:58 ◼   ► that they're like, look, it's gonna be 0.4%

01:06:00 ◼   ► and if we exceed X whatever, we're gonna pay that overage,

01:06:03 ◼   ► but they don't 'cause they know they, you know.

01:06:06 ◼   ► - That was the only one I could think of

01:06:07 ◼   ► off the top of my head.

01:06:08 ◼   ► And I do recall that it was more of a problem in Europe.

01:06:11 ◼   ► I think maybe that might be, I think you're right

01:06:13 ◼   ► that in Europe, Visa might be more, you know,

01:06:15 ◼   ► part of Visa's edge over MasterCard is that they're out.

01:06:18 ◼   ► But in the US, the only thing I can think of is Costco

01:06:21 ◼   ► and that's fascinating.

01:06:22 ◼   ► All right, let's move off personal finance advice.

01:06:28 ◼   ► A couple of rumors this week from Ming-Chi Kuo,

01:06:32 ◼   ► Ming-Chi Kuo, and he decorated them with some artwork

01:06:35 ◼   ► that I presume that he made himself.

01:06:37 ◼   ► I thought the most interesting of them

01:06:41 ◼   ► was that he claims that Apple is working on

01:06:43 ◼   ► an all-new 16 or 16.5-inch MacBook Pro,

01:06:48 ◼   ► and I thought that was pretty interesting.

01:06:49 ◼   ► My wife was a huge fan of the 17-inch MacBook Pro.

01:06:52 ◼   ► Absolutely loved it and has not been happy

01:06:55 ◼   ► with any MacBook.

01:06:57 ◼   ► I mean, she's had 15-inch ever since

01:06:58 ◼   ► 'cause that's as close as she can get.

01:06:59 ◼   ► She feels they're too small.

01:07:01 ◼   ► She liked the, it's almost like an iMac-like screen

01:07:05 ◼   ► but it's a MacBook that she could move around the house.

01:07:08 ◼   ► - I have a 12-inch MacBook.

01:07:10 ◼   ► So I'm a small format person.

01:07:12 ◼   ► My kids think it's hilarious.

01:07:13 ◼   ► I got the MacBook Airs, new models.

01:07:15 ◼   ► - Yeah. - That's kind of a long,

01:07:16 ◼   ► like after, it's like, you know,

01:07:18 ◼   ► got seven-year-old computers, they're barely working, so one of them is going to be backed

01:07:21 ◼   ► up. I'm like, "Maybe it's time. We'll use some education money, upgrade them."

01:07:25 ◼   ► So they're like, "How can you type on that thing? It's so tiny." I'm like, "No,

01:07:27 ◼   ► I love my 12-inch, a little 12-inch computer."

01:07:30 ◼   ► Tom Bilyeu (01h00m 10s): I'm a small, small laptop man myself, but

01:07:33 ◼   ► I could see it. But it's interesting to me that Apple might go back to that. It seemed

01:07:36 ◼   ► … I don't know. I'm always a little suspicious of Ming-Chi Kuo's non-iOS rumors

01:07:46 ◼   ► because they seem to have a lower hit rate.

01:07:48 ◼   ► It seems like he's way more,

01:07:49 ◼   ► he's always been more juiced in to the iPhone specifically,

01:07:54 ◼   ► maybe iPad secondarily.

01:07:56 ◼   ► But I thought that was an interesting rumor.

01:07:58 ◼   ► - I can see, I mean, there is definitely an audience

01:08:02 ◼   ► for bigger laptops.

01:08:04 ◼   ► You see a lot of them on the Windows side,

01:08:06 ◼   ► often for gaming, but they're still,

01:08:08 ◼   ► and I mean, how long ago,

01:08:10 ◼   ► well, what was the 17 inch,

01:08:11 ◼   ► when there was a 17 inch MacBook Pro,

01:08:14 ◼   ► I don't remember what the actual screen display was.

01:08:18 ◼   ► - I don't remember what the resolution was,

01:08:19 ◼   ► but I remember, and I remember where I saw one

01:08:22 ◼   ► very specifically.

01:08:23 ◼   ► I had a friend who's a very talented storyboard artist,

01:08:27 ◼   ► and this is probably 10 years ago at this point,

01:08:30 ◼   ► but he did the storyboards for a lot of commercials,

01:08:33 ◼   ► and he did one for an AT&T commercial

01:08:36 ◼   ► that was going to star Martin Scorsese.

01:08:39 ◼   ► He wasn't directing the commercial, but he was the star.

01:08:42 ◼   ► And the premise of this ad was that a little girl is being put to bed by her mommy at nighttime

01:08:51 ◼   ► and daddy's away on business and the little girl misses him. And you know, and Martin

01:08:57 ◼   ► Scorsese bursts into the bedroom. He says, Oh, no, no, no, this is all this is boring.

01:09:03 ◼   ► This is all wrong. Your dad's not away in business. Yeah, he's in prison. And the mom

01:09:06 ◼   ► is like, No, he's not hot. He's in Newark. And he's like, No, he's in prison. He killed

01:09:10 ◼   ► man. And anyway, my friend did the storyboards for this Adam. And he got invited to go up.

01:09:18 ◼   ► It was shot in Brooklyn and like a real house and he was invited. You want to come see this

01:09:22 ◼   ► commercial be shot? And it was like, Yeah, of course. He got like an and one and so I

01:09:29 ◼   ► got to see it. Oh, man, that's great. Yeah, I forget where I was going with this. Oh,

01:09:33 ◼   ► remember I was going is to see the setup of a truly professional, you know, commercial this was

01:09:39 ◼   ► and it was shown wasn't too shown on TV. It was like shown I remember seeing the actual commercial

01:09:44 ◼   ► in movie theaters as one of those ads they show you before the movies start. It was the first time

01:09:49 ◼   ► anybody in history that I'm aware of was happy about seeing an advertisement before a movie that

01:09:54 ◼   ► wasn't a trailer. But I was like, I was there I saw this. But I remember specifically I was, you

01:09:59 ◼   ► know, as anybody who knows anything about how movies and commercials are shot, it's an awful

01:10:05 ◼   ► lot of work. And then very in between very short takes of actual filming. And I was fascinated by

01:10:14 ◼   ► the setup they had, it was shot in a real family's home. You know, and they they like put put like

01:10:20 ◼   ► craft paper over all the family's real belongings and tape it all up. And they have these tape

01:10:24 ◼   ► pathways like the everybody walks in between these blue lines so that we're not you know,

01:10:29 ◼   ► you know, going into rooms that we don't need to go into and we don't have to disturb their stuff.

01:10:33 ◼   ► But they had like this whole mobile production center and they use 17 inch. Maybe they were

01:10:40 ◼   ► PowerBooks at the time. Maybe they weren't even MacBook Pro. But they had like a couple of them

01:10:45 ◼   ► set up to like immediately review the footage. I mean, and you've always known intuitively that

01:10:51 ◼   ► like video, you know, video pros would use the biggest, biggest and most powerful MacBook Pros

01:10:56 ◼   ► they could get or a professional photographer wants to see if you're going to look at the

01:11:00 ◼   ► images as you're shooting, you want them on the biggest screen possible. But if you're not in a

01:11:04 ◼   ► studio, if you're you're out in the field, you know, that's going to be a portable computer,

01:11:10 ◼   ► not a desktop computer. And that's just where I remember thinking like, oh, here's who's buying

01:11:14 ◼   ► all the 17 inch MacBook Pros, because they had like a bunch of them. Oh, yeah. And I think I mean,

01:11:19 ◼   ► think that's it. It's for video. But I think that's a very

01:11:22 ◼   ► interesting point. Because I think there was there was a

01:11:24 ◼   ► point at which there were a lot more video professionals

01:11:26 ◼   ► working on, not just on max, I don't know if they're all

01:11:30 ◼   ► switched to high performance, you know, Thunderbolt three

01:11:33 ◼   ► linked GPS, I don't know what I don't know what that market is

01:11:37 ◼   ► now. But it seemed like that was a more significant segment of

01:11:40 ◼   ► the market. And it included people who wanted the

01:11:42 ◼   ► portability. It was anybody who needed that kind of power. And

01:11:46 ◼   ► the portability because there was no good I mean, monitors

01:11:49 ◼   ► monitors were super expensive and not portable. And now you could probably, I mean, there

01:11:55 ◼   ► are cases you can carry an LCD with you, or you'd have a monitor in both locations. That

01:11:59 ◼   ► would be crazy in the past because you'd spend so many extra thousands or $10,000 to

01:12:04 ◼   ► do that. But yeah, there was a more, I mean, graphic designers. I know a lot of people

01:12:09 ◼   ► had 17 inch monitor, they might have the Mac and then they'd have an external monitor,

01:12:13 ◼   ► but then they could use the 17 inch one as well when they were working away from the

01:12:18 ◼   ► office. So it but that seemed to fall away. It seemed like more people had either a desktop

01:12:22 ◼   ► computer, or the the retina display made up the difference for them plus the better brightness

01:12:28 ◼   ► and so forth. I can't help but think that if it's true that this is not going to be a replacement

01:12:33 ◼   ► for the 15 inch that this would be an addition to the line because I, you know, I understand the

01:12:39 ◼   ► simplicity of really only offering two sizes 13 inch and 15 inch and you know, now it's three

01:12:45 ◼   ► sizes because they've gone back to 12-inch, as you know. And the Mac side, I think it's one of

01:12:54 ◼   ► the things I like about being in the Apple camp is that I feel like I don't have to make too many

01:12:58 ◼   ► hard decisions, like buying a Windows laptop. It can be overwhelming. My son got a gaming PC

01:13:05 ◼   ► for Christmas, and my God, are there a lot of options. And it's really, it's difficult.

01:13:12 ◼   ► But I feel like going back and adding a 16.5-inch or 17-ish size display, I don't feel like that's

01:13:23 ◼   ► unduly confusing to the consumer who's just looking for a MacBook. You're going to know if

01:13:28 ◼   ► you want to lug that around, and most people are going to say no. Most people want something

01:13:34 ◼   ► that's going to be a lot easier to put in a backpack and lighter, and they don't really

01:13:39 ◼   ► have a need for a screen that big. But the people who do want it.

01:13:43 ◼   ► Pete: There's an interesting problem there too, is like, how do you decide what Mac you get?

01:13:48 ◼   ► And when we were going to upgrade our kids' computers, we went through that, where we're like,

01:13:54 ◼   ► the best Mac, the best Mac is like a 2014, 2015 MacBook Pro, right? That's the best Mac.

01:14:01 ◼   ► But we're trying to figure out the combination where we could get a high-quality model from that

01:14:07 ◼   ► that had an SSD, 'cause I want future-proofing

01:14:10 ◼   ► and the speed, I don't want a moving,

01:14:13 ◼   ► I don't want a rotating drive in there,

01:14:15 ◼   ► and I wanted sufficient memory so it's future-proofed also,

01:14:18 ◼   ► which means typically like 16 gigabytes.

01:14:21 ◼   ► And so finding a 2014 or 2015 MacBook Pro is an issue,

01:14:25 ◼   ► and then they're rather heavy.

01:14:28 ◼   ► The MacBook Air is not exactly the right choice, I think.

01:14:31 ◼   ► I'm sorry, the MacBook is not the right choice.

01:14:33 ◼   ► The single port and other limitations it has

01:14:35 ◼   ► hasn't been refreshed recently enough,

01:14:37 ◼   ► So it's kind of a bad thing to buy in like late 2018,

01:14:39 ◼   ► early 2019.

01:14:40 ◼   ► The MacBook Pro models, I don't like the touch bar.

01:14:43 ◼   ► I don't know if it has a future

01:14:45 ◼   ► in the way that it's been expressed.

01:14:46 ◼   ► And it's also too expensive for what it offers.

01:14:49 ◼   ► So the MacBook Air was like, all right, you know,

01:14:52 ◼   ► this isn't affordable in the sense of being cheap,

01:14:53 ◼   ► but it's like the dollar amount.

01:14:55 ◼   ► Like if this is a computer that they're gonna have

01:14:58 ◼   ► for the next seven years, which is feasible,

01:15:00 ◼   ► is this the right one?

01:15:01 ◼   ► And we figured that was probably their best use of money

01:15:04 ◼   ► was to move in that direction.

01:15:07 ◼   ► Plus the fact that AppleCare now includes,

01:15:10 ◼   ► if you buy the extended care,

01:15:11 ◼   ► includes a very small deductible if you break the screen.

01:15:15 ◼   ► So like, that's probably the,

01:15:18 ◼   ► that's the right choice for kids.

01:15:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, probably.

01:15:21 ◼   ► That's what we did.

01:15:22 ◼   ► - But the bigger one, it's like,

01:15:24 ◼   ► who wants the bigger machine?

01:15:25 ◼   ► Like, you're either gonna get your own monitor

01:15:27 ◼   ► and a Mac mini Mac and Mac Pros super annuated.

01:15:30 ◼   ► Are you gonna get an iMac?

01:15:31 ◼   ► I have an iMac that I really like,

01:15:33 ◼   ► but you know, you just don't have the many choices.

01:15:35 ◼   ► So in that specific area, a 17-inch MacBook Pro makes tons of sense, because there's

01:15:41 ◼   ► nothing that fits that exact need.

01:15:43 ◼   ► If that is kind of the size, power, and portability you need, there's no—like, a 15-inch doesn't

01:15:49 ◼   ► cut it, and there's no desktop that's, you know, there's nothing that's going

01:15:53 ◼   ► to be right in that space.

01:15:54 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:15:55 ◼   ► Which brings me to Mark Gurman, who had a report this week for Bloomberg, mostly about

01:16:03 ◼   ► the progress that Apple has made on "Marzipan," which apparently is still the code word for

01:16:08 ◼   ► the Transmogrify iOS apps to run on Mac apps, which was preannounced as a preview of future

01:16:18 ◼   ► technology for third-party developers at last year's WWDC.

01:16:22 ◼   ► And the big reveal was that, in the meantime, Apple itself has used an early version of

01:16:30 ◼   ► this technology to bring four apps to the Mac. Apple News, the Stocks app, which is

01:16:37 ◼   ► very, very similar to Apple News, because most of what's in the app, the Stocks app,

01:16:42 ◼   ► is just business news about the companies. The Home app for HomeKit automation, and then

01:16:48 ◼   ► the fourth one, I'm drawing a blank on, what's the fourth Marzipan app?

01:16:52 ◼   ► Oh, Weather.

01:16:53 ◼   ► Oh, VoiceRecorder.

01:16:55 ◼   ► Oh, right, right.

01:16:56 ◼   ► - Which is one that I still have to write.

01:16:58 ◼   ► I'm lazy and negligent.

01:17:01 ◼   ► I have a rant in me about these apps.

01:17:03 ◼   ► - Voice memos.

01:17:06 ◼   ► - Right?

01:17:06 ◼   ► Then that, it might be the worst of the bunch

01:17:08 ◼   ► in terms of being the most incongruous on the Mac.

01:17:13 ◼   ► Because one of the limitations of all of these apps

01:17:15 ◼   ► is that none of them can open more than one window.

01:17:17 ◼   ► So like if you're reading an article on Apple News

01:17:21 ◼   ► and you wanna double click it

01:17:22 ◼   ► so that you can open it in a window

01:17:24 ◼   ► 'cause you're not done with it

01:17:25 ◼   ► or you wanna refer to it later

01:17:26 ◼   ► and just keep reading new articles, you can't do that.

01:17:29 ◼   ► And you can't--

01:17:29 ◼   ► - I'm not sure there's a Mac app

01:17:31 ◼   ► that I've hated more than Apple News.

01:17:32 ◼   ► I mean, in any version of it, or in any incarnation,

01:17:35 ◼   ► I feel like Apple News has been, I don't know who,

01:17:38 ◼   ► the usual thing is, what is this app for?

01:17:41 ◼   ► It's not, it's trying to be Flipboard,

01:17:43 ◼   ► and it has none of the redeeming features of Flipboard.

01:17:46 ◼   ► - Right, it is a very bad Mac app.

01:17:49 ◼   ► I enjoyed Apple News as a service.

01:17:51 ◼   ► I like Apple News.

01:17:52 ◼   ► I have my iPhone set to send me notifications

01:17:55 ◼   ► from the New York Times and Washington Post,

01:17:58 ◼   ► both of which I subscribe to.

01:18:00 ◼   ► Actually, I subscribe to the Journal too.

01:18:02 ◼   ► I don't get many notifications,

01:18:03 ◼   ► but I get notifications from all three of those

01:18:05 ◼   ► through Apple News.

01:18:06 ◼   ► None of them overwhelm me.

01:18:07 ◼   ► Very seldom do I get one that is like,

01:18:09 ◼   ► "Come on, that's nonsense.

01:18:11 ◼   ► "Don't send me nonsense.

01:18:12 ◼   ► "Send me actual news."

01:18:13 ◼   ► I like it on my iOS devices,

01:18:16 ◼   ► and I liked it better when it didn't exist at all on the Mac.

01:18:19 ◼   ► And if I happen to have an Apple News URL from Twitter

01:18:23 ◼   ► or from an iMessage and I was on my Mac,

01:18:25 ◼   ► it would just forward me on to the article in Safari,

01:18:29 ◼   ► the same article, but instead of reading it in Apple News.

01:18:32 ◼   ► And now it goes, now that I'm upgraded to Marzipan,

01:18:34 ◼   ► it goes into Apple News and I get angry.

01:18:37 ◼   ► It's a very bad app.

01:18:38 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:18:40 ◼   ► - Apps should make you angry.

01:18:41 ◼   ► I think that's really a good feature.

01:18:43 ◼   ► - The lack of being able to open multiple windows

01:18:45 ◼   ► is most insane in the Voice Memos app.

01:18:48 ◼   ► Because why in the world would you not?

01:18:51 ◼   ► Like I get why the iPhone version doesn't let you open

01:18:54 ◼   ► multiple voice memos at once, 'cause you're on the phone

01:18:56 ◼   ► and the phone is like a one thing at a time thing.

01:19:00 ◼   ► And I kind of get it on the iPad,

01:19:03 ◼   ► because the iPad is sort of a big iPhone

01:19:05 ◼   ► and it's simplified computing experience

01:19:07 ◼   ► and it doesn't have the concept of Windows.

01:19:10 ◼   ► But the Mac, it is the most,

01:19:13 ◼   ► would be the most natural thing in the world

01:19:15 ◼   ► to open multiple of these memos at a time

01:19:18 ◼   ► into their own windows and you can't do it.

01:19:21 ◼   ► - The Mac App Store, the new one, is not Electron, right?

01:19:25 ◼   ► I mean, sorry, it's not Marzipan.

01:19:26 ◼   ► - No, no, but it's not. - But it's weird

01:19:28 ◼   ► 'cause it feels-- - It is weird.

01:19:30 ◼   ► It is the new-- - Yeah, it's its own thing.

01:19:32 ◼   ► But it will open other windows,

01:19:34 ◼   ► but only when you read articles in it, I think,

01:19:38 ◼   ► then it opens a kind of, is that another window

01:19:41 ◼   ► or is it an overlay you have to click done in?

01:19:43 ◼   ► But it is neither efficient or foul,

01:19:45 ◼   ► but it really feels Marzipan-y.

01:19:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, it has some very strange navigation

01:19:50 ◼   ► in terms of it's all in one window

01:19:51 ◼   ► and I've just opened an article.

01:19:53 ◼   ► Now, how do I go back?

01:19:54 ◼   ► Oh, I have to go up to the top right corner and hit done.

01:19:56 ◼   ► - It's a done button, yeah.

01:19:58 ◼   ► - And it disappears down to the bottom

01:20:01 ◼   ► like it was a sheet,

01:20:03 ◼   ► but it didn't look like a sheet while it was opened.

01:20:06 ◼   ► - It's an evolving concept.

01:20:08 ◼   ► It feels like a little bit,

01:20:10 ◼   ► there's a little bit too much of Apple.

01:20:13 ◼   ► I mean, look, I'm glad they released,

01:20:15 ◼   ► I mean, Mojave has a lot of excellent features in it.

01:20:18 ◼   ► There's things they use, you know, for instance, the SMS,

01:20:21 ◼   ► the automatic thing where it drops in second factors

01:20:24 ◼   ► and codes and SMS.

01:20:26 ◼   ► That's an incredible feat.

01:20:27 ◼   ► Like that's great.

01:20:28 ◼   ► That saves me time and it delights me every time.

01:20:31 ◼   ► I'm like, oh, it's just there.

01:20:32 ◼   ► I just clicked this thing.

01:20:33 ◼   ► It's fantastic, right?

01:20:35 ◼   ► So there are things to be said that are positive,

01:20:37 ◼   ► but it still feels like there's a lot of works in progress

01:20:40 ◼   ► on the Mac side, things that are, this is a good idea.

01:20:43 ◼   ► and maybe a little more work could have been done

01:20:46 ◼   ► before it was pushed out.

01:20:48 ◼   ► - Well, so Apple told us at WWDC last year

01:20:51 ◼   ► that this would be coming next year

01:20:52 ◼   ► to third-party developers in some form,

01:20:55 ◼   ► and they would have more to say about it

01:20:57 ◼   ► at a technical level at that time.

01:21:00 ◼   ► I mean, it's very strange for Apple

01:21:01 ◼   ► to announce something like that in advance.

01:21:04 ◼   ► They're not really, but I think they kind of knew

01:21:06 ◼   ► that if they planned to ship these four apps

01:21:10 ◼   ► in macOS Mojave that people were gonna figure this out

01:21:15 ◼   ► as soon as they got their hands on the beta of Mojave

01:21:17 ◼   ► and poked inside the app bundles.

01:21:19 ◼   ► They were gonna say,

01:21:20 ◼   ► "Hey, there's something weird going on here.

01:21:22 ◼   ► These things look like iOS apps in a lot of ways

01:21:25 ◼   ► and smart hackers are going to figure it out."

01:21:28 ◼   ► So they had to kind of get in front of it and say,

01:21:29 ◼   ► "Yeah, yeah, these are iOS apps."

01:21:32 ◼   ► Garmon's report was a little curious

01:21:35 ◼   ► because he said that this year's focus will be on iPad apps.

01:21:40 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:21:41 ◼   ► - And that iPhone apps would be a year later

01:21:45 ◼   ► because Apple's engineers have had a hard time

01:21:47 ◼   ► getting, figuring out how to get small screen iPhone apps

01:21:51 ◼   ► to run on the Mac.

01:21:53 ◼   ► And Steven Trout and Smith pointed out,

01:21:55 ◼   ► that's a little weird.

01:21:55 ◼   ► In some ways, it seems like it would be easier

01:21:58 ◼   ► to get iPhone apps rather than iPad apps to run

01:22:00 ◼   ► because you could just run them

01:22:02 ◼   ► in a roughly iPhone-size window on the Mac.

01:22:06 ◼   ► Like, the thing about Windows isn't just

01:22:09 ◼   ► that you can have multiple of them on screen at once,

01:22:11 ◼   ► it's that they can be any size that you want or need

01:22:14 ◼   ► or what makes sense for your app.

01:22:16 ◼   ► As I sit here and look at the little tiny Skype window

01:22:20 ◼   ► that tells me I've got a Skype recording

01:22:21 ◼   ► going on in the background, right?

01:22:23 ◼   ► It's just like a little thing floating above my windows

01:22:26 ◼   ► and it's like the size of a business card here on my screen

01:22:28 ◼   ► so it's not obstructing more than it needs to.

01:22:31 ◼   ► That's part of the flexibility

01:22:34 ◼   ► of a tiled window graphical user interface.

01:22:39 ◼   ► And that you could, if that's what you wanted,

01:22:42 ◼   ► to have an iPhone app running on your Mac,

01:22:44 ◼   ► you could do it in a little window that's that size.

01:22:47 ◼   ► And one of the reasons that iPhone apps

01:22:49 ◼   ► that haven't been adjusted to scale

01:22:52 ◼   ► and use size classes, et cetera,

01:22:54 ◼   ► to have an iPad counterpart that truly embraces

01:22:57 ◼   ► the nature of the iPad.

01:22:59 ◼   ► One of the reasons that those apps are weird on iPad

01:23:01 ◼   ► is that when you run an iPhone only app on the iPad,

01:23:05 ◼   ► because the iPad doesn't have windows that it can run in,

01:23:08 ◼   ► it just puts it in an iPhone sized thing.

01:23:11 ◼   ► - I know, I've always thought, it's so weird to do that.

01:23:13 ◼   ► I still have, there's a handful of apps like that.

01:23:15 ◼   ► Did Instagram ever come up with an iPad app?

01:23:17 ◼   ► - Instagram is exhibit A in the--

01:23:21 ◼   ► - I say that and I'm just like, that can't be right.

01:23:23 ◼   ► Like every time I think that, it's like, that can't be right.

01:23:25 ◼   ► And then I launch it on an iPad, I'm like,

01:23:27 ◼   ► what, there is, why, you know,

01:23:30 ◼   ► There's no reason or sense for it,

01:23:32 ◼   ► and they can make it really interesting,

01:23:33 ◼   ► given how much in the way Instagram's used,

01:23:36 ◼   ► they can make it really great.

01:23:37 ◼   ► - It's the most baffling thing in the world to me.

01:23:39 ◼   ► One only thing I've ever heard that anybody say

01:23:42 ◼   ► that makes any sense at all is that,

01:23:44 ◼   ► I forget the size of photos that Instagram,

01:23:48 ◼   ► like when you update your Instagram feed,

01:23:50 ◼   ► what the pixel dimensions of the photos that come down are,

01:23:54 ◼   ► but it's small enough that they wouldn't,

01:23:56 ◼   ► unless they updated it,

01:23:57 ◼   ► They wouldn't quite be naturally retina on an iPad.

01:24:01 ◼   ► - I think they've been quietly, like if you zoom,

01:24:03 ◼   ► you know, you can't tap and make pictures bigger

01:24:05 ◼   ► on Instagram, but you can pinch and zoom.

01:24:08 ◼   ► I think they actually do build more resolution in

01:24:11 ◼   ► and have for a bit, because once you were able to do that

01:24:13 ◼   ► and put different, remember when they added that feature,

01:24:16 ◼   ► that you could have different portions to the square.

01:24:19 ◼   ► I think there's more resolution under that.

01:24:20 ◼   ► And I assume that was a building block

01:24:22 ◼   ► for the next thing that has never come.

01:24:25 ◼   ► - Even if they just made an iPad app

01:24:27 ◼   ► and it had to scale the images artificially to some degree.

01:24:31 ◼   ► It would be better than what they have now.

01:24:33 ◼   ► - I don't get it.

01:24:34 ◼   ► - And photos are the one thing that looks

01:24:36 ◼   ► the bigger the better, right?

01:24:37 ◼   ► And I just, I--

01:24:40 ◼   ► - I don't get it.

01:24:41 ◼   ► - It's one of my very favorite things

01:24:42 ◼   ► about having an iPad and using an iPad

01:24:45 ◼   ► is if I go on a vacation or there's like a school event

01:24:48 ◼   ► or something and I've shot 100 photos

01:24:52 ◼   ► and I want to, let me go through my photos

01:24:54 ◼   ► and throw out the garbage and pick the winners

01:24:57 ◼   ► that I might wanna share with people.

01:24:59 ◼   ► Doing it on the iPad, I just love, I love it.

01:25:01 ◼   ► It's one of those things I love on the iPad

01:25:03 ◼   ► more than any, more than a Mac, more than an iPhone,

01:25:06 ◼   ► because it's like this perfectly intimate,

01:25:08 ◼   ► it's so big, I can see detail that I couldn't see

01:25:11 ◼   ► if I just did it on the phone.

01:25:13 ◼   ► It's like so much easier to see, oh God,

01:25:15 ◼   ► this one's no good, the one person's eyes are closed.

01:25:18 ◼   ► But you couldn't see it on the phone 'cause it's too small.

01:25:21 ◼   ► And it's just, you know, the pinch zoom

01:25:24 ◼   ► is so much more natural than doing it on the Mac.

01:25:26 ◼   ► It's so great.

01:25:28 ◼   ► Instagram on iPad would be so great.

01:25:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, the iPad has a magic window

01:25:32 ◼   ► and the iPhone is a different beast.

01:25:34 ◼   ► I've always thought it's interesting

01:25:36 ◼   ► how distinct the iPhone and the iPad are

01:25:38 ◼   ► even when you get a large iPhone or a small iPad.

01:25:41 ◼   ► They really are different animals

01:25:42 ◼   ► and people tend to lump them together, I think,

01:25:44 ◼   ► who write about the technology,

01:25:46 ◼   ► or write about it from a marketing,

01:25:48 ◼   ► technology, business standpoint

01:25:50 ◼   ► when the iPad remains, it's like it is a magic window.

01:25:53 ◼   ► And apps that don't take advantage of that

01:25:56 ◼   ► are always stunning.

01:25:57 ◼   ► But yeah, that is weird.

01:25:59 ◼   ► But I could, so yeah, so for most apps,

01:26:02 ◼   ► most sensible apps, if it's the iPad version

01:26:05 ◼   ► is what shows up in Marzipan in the first iteration

01:26:08 ◼   ► in Mac OS, then that's fine, right?

01:26:11 ◼   ► You're gonna get a decent size display.

01:26:13 ◼   ► - I don't think it's fine at all.

01:26:15 ◼   ► I think this is deeply problematic.

01:26:15 ◼   ► - No, I'm sorry, I mean, I don't mean it's good.

01:26:18 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:26:19 ◼   ► But I mean, it makes some sense

01:26:23 ◼   ► that that's the form factor you choose, right?

01:26:26 ◼   ► Don't get me wrong.

01:26:27 ◼   ► - I think there's an awful lot of problems,

01:26:29 ◼   ► and I know there's so many problems with this idea.

01:26:32 ◼   ► A, there's the existence proof of the four ones

01:26:35 ◼   ► that Apple has done so far,

01:26:36 ◼   ► and they are very bad Mac apps.

01:26:38 ◼   ► One of the ways that I've mentioned,

01:26:40 ◼   ► I keep harping on it, but it's very, very bad

01:26:42 ◼   ► that these apps are limited to one window.

01:26:44 ◼   ► And there are ways where you would naturally want

01:26:46 ◼   ► to open a second window and you can't and it feels incredibly frustrating and it's

01:26:51 ◼   ► terribly un-Mac-like. But that's an assumption that iOS developers have safely made for a

01:26:59 ◼   ► long time. It is not going to be easy to take an iPad app that assumes that there's only

01:27:03 ◼   ► one UI window at a time and that one UI window takes up the whole screen to be updated for

01:27:09 ◼   ► multiple UI windows. And this might coincide. There's been rumors that one of the, "Hey,

01:27:16 ◼   ► give some love to the iPad side of iOS would be to, at a low level in EOS, give apps a better

01:27:22 ◼   ► system-wide, this is the standard way to do it in the system frameworks to do multiple documents,

01:27:30 ◼   ► which I presume would be sort of Safari-style tabs. Safari obviously has the ability to open

01:27:36 ◼   ► multiple tabs and has had that ever since the iPad existed, because who would want to use the iPad if

01:27:43 ◼   ► if you can only have one Safari window open at a time.

01:27:45 ◼   ► So how do you do, you know, but adopting that,

01:27:51 ◼   ► even if that comes at WWDC this year,

01:27:54 ◼   ► it's going to be a lot of work for developers

01:27:56 ◼   ► just to update their iPad apps,

01:27:58 ◼   ► let alone do it in a way that makes sense on the Mac.

01:28:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I thought that your changes

01:28:01 ◼   ► to the app switcher for the iPad

01:28:03 ◼   ► were actually really great,

01:28:04 ◼   ► 'cause it's, you know, it's now it's a very native,

01:28:06 ◼   ► it makes more sense in that form factor,

01:28:08 ◼   ► the way you see apps.

01:28:09 ◼   ► And it also, it felt to me like it's a prelude

01:28:13 ◼   ► to document management in that same style.

01:28:15 ◼   ► It's providing a preferred way for you

01:28:17 ◼   ► to show multiple documents or tabs.

01:28:19 ◼   ► You know, there's the app screens,

01:28:21 ◼   ► and then if you do something else,

01:28:22 ◼   ► you get the document screen,

01:28:24 ◼   ► so it's kind of a zoom in out kind of thing.

01:28:26 ◼   ► So I mean, I don't know if that's what the UI will look like

01:28:28 ◼   ► but at least there's a,

01:28:30 ◼   ► they've changed the approach from the iPhone form factor,

01:28:33 ◼   ► so they're thinking about it differently,

01:28:35 ◼   ► but then it wasn't extended beyond that.

01:28:37 ◼   ► - My hope would be the one class of apps

01:28:39 ◼   ► that I could see this making sense.

01:28:42 ◼   ► And okay, the Mac is now better for this

01:28:45 ◼   ► than it was before would be like media consumption apps.

01:28:50 ◼   ► Like, so there's no native Netflix app for the Mac.

01:28:53 ◼   ► Like if you wanna watch Netflix on your Mac,

01:28:55 ◼   ► you've gotta go to a web browser

01:28:57 ◼   ► and you lose all sorts of things.

01:29:00 ◼   ► Like the big one is you can't do offline access.

01:29:02 ◼   ► And you know, it's a huge, you know,

01:29:05 ◼   ► if you're ever, you know,

01:29:06 ◼   ► we were talking about air travel before.

01:29:07 ◼   ► I mean, I know that, you know, they always,

01:29:12 ◼   ► Wi-Fi on an airplane is not gonna be good

01:29:14 ◼   ► for watching Netflix. (laughs)

01:29:15 ◼   ► - No, no, no, no, not unless it's,

01:29:17 ◼   ► I mean, there's those things where they cache

01:29:19 ◼   ► movies on the plane.

01:29:20 ◼   ► - Yes. - But that's a different thing.

01:29:20 ◼   ► - That's different, that's different than you,

01:29:22 ◼   ► you know, you've gotta pick from their cache of movies.

01:29:25 ◼   ► And even then, it's, in my experience, it's kinda sketchy.

01:29:28 ◼   ► So the fact that an iPad can, you can say,

01:29:31 ◼   ► hey, give me all 10 episodes of this show,

01:29:34 ◼   ► I'm gonna watch it on the plane,

01:29:35 ◼   ► and then they're just there on your iPad.

01:29:37 ◼   ► You never even have to take your iPad out of airplane mode.

01:29:39 ◼   ► You don't even have to pay for the wifi.

01:29:41 ◼   ► They're just there and you can watch them

01:29:43 ◼   ► and your Mac can't do that.

01:29:45 ◼   ► That kind of stinks and it's kind of frustrating

01:29:48 ◼   ► because the Mac in theory

01:29:50 ◼   ► is the more powerful capable computer,

01:29:52 ◼   ► but it doesn't have a Netflix app.

01:29:53 ◼   ► And so if it would be easy for Netflix

01:29:56 ◼   ► or easy-ish for them to take their iPad app

01:30:00 ◼   ► and turn it into a Mac app that has those features,

01:30:03 ◼   ► I think that would be a win for the Mac

01:30:05 ◼   ► and limiting it to single window, et cetera,

01:30:09 ◼   ► doesn't really feel like a limitation.

01:30:12 ◼   ► Like you're gonna wanna run the Netflix app full screen

01:30:14 ◼   ► probably anyway.

01:30:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, how many movies are you gonna watch at once?

01:30:17 ◼   ► - Right.

01:30:18 ◼   ► And I could probably see the same thing

01:30:20 ◼   ► for something like Overcast.

01:30:22 ◼   ► - Wait, do people watch four movies at once

01:30:24 ◼   ► like they do podcasts at double speed?

01:30:26 ◼   ► - We're gonna watch four episodes at once

01:30:28 ◼   ► while it's tiled on my screen.

01:30:30 ◼   ► - Well, I don't know.

01:30:31 ◼   ► So I can see it for those apps

01:30:33 ◼   ► And you know, there aren't,

01:30:35 ◼   ► most of those type of media consumption apps,

01:30:38 ◼   ► for lack of a better term.

01:30:39 ◼   ► I mean, I was just watching a basketball game

01:30:41 ◼   ► on ESPN last night on my iPad.

01:30:44 ◼   ► I don't, there's no ESPN Mac app.

01:30:46 ◼   ► So there's all sorts of things that--

01:30:48 ◼   ► - No, it's perfect.

01:30:49 ◼   ► And the picture in picture thing too,

01:30:50 ◼   ► it's like you obviously want it on your Mac.

01:30:52 ◼   ► I mean, I know you can do it in Safari,

01:30:54 ◼   ► but having a Netflix app or TV app or whatever,

01:30:58 ◼   ► that is, it's basically the iPad version

01:31:02 ◼   ► with macOS whatever, and that it then can be

01:31:06 ◼   ► sized on your screen.

01:31:07 ◼   ► I mean, I've got this 20-something inch,

01:31:09 ◼   ► I can't remember how many inches, iMac here,

01:31:11 ◼   ► and be able to resize it and have it in the corner

01:31:14 ◼   ► if I'm watching news in the background.

01:31:15 ◼   ► That would be great to not have it tied to Safari.

01:31:17 ◼   ► So there's a clearer case for it.

01:31:19 ◼   ► - I remember talking about this with somebody,

01:31:21 ◼   ► but it's like all these other apps, it's like, man,

01:31:23 ◼   ► it would just, I can't think of what would make,

01:31:26 ◼   ► other classes of apps, I can't see how the iPad app

01:31:30 ◼   ► running on the Mac without redoing it from scratch?

01:31:33 ◼   ► And if you were going to do that, why, you know,

01:31:35 ◼   ► where's the benefit engineering and code base wise

01:31:38 ◼   ► from just making a Mac app in the first place?

01:31:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, I've wondered if it's a nail

01:31:42 ◼   ► or a hammer looking for nail with this whole thing.

01:31:44 ◼   ► Like I understand that it would make sense

01:31:47 ◼   ► for Apple to converge and for developers

01:31:49 ◼   ► to have a smaller code base.

01:31:50 ◼   ► But you think if there were,

01:31:53 ◼   ► let's say we were talking about it

01:31:54 ◼   ► and we had a hundred examples of apps or 20 categories,

01:31:57 ◼   ► but we don't, you know?

01:31:58 ◼   ► And the ones that Apple did initially are simple ones

01:32:01 ◼   ► that are largely unused or are interesting to most people,

01:32:05 ◼   ► especially in a Mac environment.

01:32:06 ◼   ► Like why would I use the Stocks app

01:32:08 ◼   ► when I have a website I can use that does stocks, right?

01:32:10 ◼   ► And is much more sophisticated.

01:32:12 ◼   ► So it's not like, and you're, you know,

01:32:13 ◼   ► streaming media, absolutely perfect case.

01:32:16 ◼   ► And like, what is case number two?

01:32:17 ◼   ► I can't think of a thing that I use on the iPad

01:32:21 ◼   ► that I would want in a, to have an iPad version on my Mac,

01:32:26 ◼   ► even if it took on some Mac properties

01:32:28 ◼   ► that was single windowed, or even with hands, really.

01:32:31 ◼   ► - I use a couple of iPad apps

01:32:33 ◼   ► that have Mac counterparts now.

01:32:35 ◼   ► I use the app Things to manage my to-dos.

01:32:37 ◼   ► I love OmniOutliner.

01:32:40 ◼   ► The OmniGroup has a bunch of great apps.

01:32:41 ◼   ► The one that I use is OmniOutliner.

01:32:44 ◼   ► They're Mac apps for Things and for the OmniGroup.

01:32:49 ◼   ► They don't look like iPad apps running on the Mac.

01:32:55 ◼   ► They look like real Mac apps.

01:32:57 ◼   ► And conversely, their iPad apps don't look like Mac apps

01:33:00 ◼   ► running on an iPad.

01:33:02 ◼   ► They're just very different interaction models.

01:33:05 ◼   ► And I just don't see how this is a good thing

01:33:09 ◼   ► for anything other than media consumption.

01:33:11 ◼   ► - We're nine years into the iPad,

01:33:12 ◼   ► and no one has yet made a good case

01:33:14 ◼   ► for why those should be interoperable

01:33:17 ◼   ► or why they should be the same platform.

01:33:20 ◼   ► So either Apple has some really clever ideas

01:33:22 ◼   ► that they haven't told us about

01:33:23 ◼   ► and haven't occurred to people who are developers

01:33:26 ◼   ► or think about how this stuff works,

01:33:28 ◼   ► or it's just not a great idea and it's being driven

01:33:31 ◼   ► by forces that don't actually have a great advantage,

01:33:34 ◼   ► which is a shame 'cause we don't really wanna get shoehorned

01:33:38 ◼   ► into something that is not good or useful.

01:33:42 ◼   ► I mean, you could argue, there was a report out actually

01:33:47 ◼   ► as we record this, I think, from Axios

01:33:49 ◼   ► about the ARM migration that's upcoming.

01:33:52 ◼   ► - I did not see this.

01:33:54 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, Einefried posted something

01:33:56 ◼   ► just before I think we started recording.

01:33:58 ◼   ► And there's some reports that there's actually

01:34:03 ◼   ► more like a timetable about ARM-based Max.

01:34:08 ◼   ► And so in that environment,

01:34:12 ◼   ► Mars Japan and cross-platform development

01:34:14 ◼   ► maybe make sense because you're migrating

01:34:16 ◼   ► to the same platform, but I don't know.

01:34:17 ◼   ► I mean, how critical is that in a cross-compiling world?

01:34:21 ◼   ► Like I'm not a developer, so I can't talk about it.

01:34:21 ◼   ► - I really don't think, it was a bigger problem

01:34:25 ◼   ► with the earlier transitions,

01:34:27 ◼   ► especially the 68K to Ford PowerPC one,

01:34:30 ◼   ► 'cause it was so early in the industry

01:34:32 ◼   ► where writing stuff in this,

01:34:33 ◼   ► writing your most intensive algorithms

01:34:38 ◼   ► in 68K assembly code was more of a thing.

01:34:45 ◼   ► And making assumptions about whether it's a big endian

01:34:51 ◼   ► little-endian machine because you're actually dealing with these bytes on a byte-by-byte

01:34:55 ◼   ► level and you need to know the order was more of a thing. After the second time, anybody

01:34:59 ◼   ► who's been writing code that assumes that you're on an Intel processor is an idiot.

01:35:05 ◼   ► And I know people who work bigger companies, and they know that. Adobe is not going to

01:35:11 ◼   ► get caught flap-footed, you know, and like, "Oh, shit, our stuff can only run on Intel."

01:35:17 ◼   ► Like that's not going to happen. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying…

01:35:20 ◼   ► - No, but it's been, it's been extracted.

01:35:22 ◼   ► - Right, I'm not saying that like somebody

01:35:25 ◼   ► with something as complex as Photoshop

01:35:27 ◼   ► can just open it up in Xcode and click a checkbox

01:35:31 ◼   ► and spit out an ARM version of it,

01:35:35 ◼   ► but they're ready for that.

01:35:36 ◼   ► - No, but nobody has like a hand tweaked C in there,

01:35:39 ◼   ► I hope still, maybe some people do,

01:35:41 ◼   ► but not, I mean, as I'm moving forward, maybe not.

01:35:45 ◼   ► But yeah, so I mean, I don't,

01:35:46 ◼   ► so it doesn't feel to me like having ARM-based processors

01:35:49 ◼   ► is the motivation for this.

01:35:52 ◼   ► So there is some kind of, but there's clearly--

01:35:54 ◼   ► - The one thing, even if it's not assembly code,

01:35:55 ◼   ► the one thing that could bite some apps,

01:35:57 ◼   ► maybe in the scientific community,

01:35:58 ◼   ► would be if you're relying on Intel C compilers,

01:36:01 ◼   ► as opposed to the default LLVM ones,

01:36:05 ◼   ► which should be able to,

01:36:06 ◼   ► anything you've been compiling through LLVM

01:36:10 ◼   ► through, for 68K, or x86, you should be able to

01:36:14 ◼   ► just click a checkbox and spit out ARM.

01:36:17 ◼   ► But if you're relying on Intel's compilers, you might have a bit of work ahead of you.

01:36:24 ◼   ► But they're not the default in that sort of esoteric scientific commuting thing.

01:36:29 ◼   ► I don't want to teach a computer science class here.

01:36:35 ◼   ► No, but the other thing that I thought was so funny, too, about—and I didn't mention

01:36:39 ◼   ► this, but I thought I'd save it for the podcast—was that Gherman had this report

01:36:43 ◼   ► on Bloomberg, it was eight or nine paragraphs, mostly about Mars Pan. And then the very last

01:36:48 ◼   ► sentence of the report was sources that Apple say the company is considering unveiling its new Mac

01:36:53 ◼   ► Pro at WWDC. And I had two thoughts on that. The first is what I did write, which is it better be

01:37:00 ◼   ► unveiled at WWDC because it certainly doesn't look like it's coming. They said it's a 2019 thing,

01:37:05 ◼   ► but they announced this initiative in April of 2017. The whole thing where they invited me and

01:37:11 ◼   ► and Pansarino and Ina Fried, speaking of Ina, and said, "Hey, we kind of made a mistake

01:37:18 ◼   ► with the trashcan Mac Pro," although they of course didn't call it the trashcan Mac

01:37:22 ◼   ► Pro, but the phrase was that we've backed ourselves into a thermal corner and did not

01:37:27 ◼   ► anticipate the rise of GPUs as the force that they've become in terms of intensive computing

01:37:39 ◼   ► today.

01:37:40 ◼   ► like, you know, and they even told us that they said, Hey, and we've got a cool iMac Pro, or they

01:37:47 ◼   ► didn't call it that they said a pro iMac coming out. And we think this is going to be great. But

01:37:52 ◼   ► we now see that there is a need for, you know, for people who that's not even good enough for

01:37:58 ◼   ► a real Mac Pro with a modularized design. And we're working on that. And then last year, they

01:38:04 ◼   ► said, Yeah, we're still working on that. It's still a thing, but it's probably it's not a 28.

01:38:09 ◼   ► didn't even say probably. It's not a 2018 thing. It's a 2019 thing. It doesn't seem like it's

01:38:16 ◼   ► coming out anytime soon. There are rumors of a March 25th event that Apple is going to hold at

01:38:22 ◼   ► Steve Jobs Theater, which is supposedly, I don't know anything about it, but supposedly focused on

01:38:29 ◼   ► subscription content, some kind of Apple News subscription thing, possibly the unveiling of

01:38:35 ◼   ► of their original video content subscription thing.

01:38:39 ◼   ► That does not sound like an event

01:38:40 ◼   ► where you would unveil Mac Pros.

01:38:42 ◼   ► They could, they could just say this.

01:38:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, they don't usually in spring,

01:38:46 ◼   ► they'll do laptops some years, right?

01:38:49 ◼   ► Not every year, sometimes it's speed boosts.

01:38:51 ◼   ► - But if they have one event in March 25th,

01:38:54 ◼   ► I don't think there's gonna be another event

01:38:55 ◼   ► until WWDC in June, and that's a very--

01:38:59 ◼   ► - That's the right one.

01:38:59 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the one to announce a Mac Pro at too.

01:39:01 ◼   ► It is weird.

01:39:03 ◼   ► I mean, you know, people, this gets us back

01:39:05 ◼   ► to that whole thing about like, you know,

01:39:07 ◼   ► is the company, can Apple execute well?

01:39:09 ◼   ► And look, I read your report card.

01:39:11 ◼   ► I read Jason Stell's summary.

01:39:13 ◼   ► I filled out a report card for Jason Stell for six colors.

01:39:15 ◼   ► And I read the summary and there, you know,

01:39:17 ◼   ► there's a lot of dissatisfaction among those of us

01:39:20 ◼   ► who are longtime users of various platforms

01:39:23 ◼   ► about Apple's consistent ability to execute.

01:39:25 ◼   ► And the Mac Pro, it's weird to me.

01:39:27 ◼   ► It's like, if you have a deep bench and a lot of money,

01:39:30 ◼   ► why can't you make this in a finite amount of time?

01:39:32 ◼   ► and they are not.

01:39:34 ◼   ► And that's been the issue that was people were concerned

01:39:36 ◼   ► about that with the Mac Mini,

01:39:37 ◼   ► which finally shipped and seems perfectly fine.

01:39:39 ◼   ► I haven't done a deep dive in it,

01:39:40 ◼   ► but it seems like a perfectly fine update.

01:39:42 ◼   ► There's something that's not right there.

01:39:46 ◼   ► - There's a sense among people who truly want,

01:39:49 ◼   ► at a personal level, the most of the people who I know

01:39:52 ◼   ► who are most looking forward to a Mac Pro are developers.

01:39:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, absolutely.

01:39:57 ◼   ► - But I know people who are in the graphics world

01:40:01 ◼   ► and Video World who are in that scheme too.

01:40:04 ◼   ► But most of them, the consensus is that the old Mac Pro

01:40:09 ◼   ► was the right idea, it's a big tower.

01:40:11 ◼   ► It's a big, big tower with lots of cooling,

01:40:13 ◼   ► and then when you open it up, there's lots of room inside

01:40:16 ◼   ► to put more stuff in.

01:40:18 ◼   ► If what you need is four video cards,

01:40:21 ◼   ► you can put four video cards in there.

01:40:23 ◼   ► If what you need is lots of storage,

01:40:25 ◼   ► you can put lots of fast storage inside the box

01:40:28 ◼   ► if that's what you want.

01:40:29 ◼   ► build a big tower that that has lots of cooling to keep everything cool. And then you're done.

01:40:34 ◼   ► And the consensus is that the trashcan Mac Pro was Apple getting too clever by far by saying you

01:40:40 ◼   ► don't need a big tower. Here's this little thing. And it is beautiful. And it looks like nothing

01:40:45 ◼   ► else any computer makers ever made as a professional workstation. And it was too clever

01:40:51 ◼   ► by far because it a lots of people I know who have one have had to replay have the video card replaced