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244: ‘Plagiarists and Fabulists’ With Glenn Fleishman

 

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.

00:29:12   I'm speaking to you right now.

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

00:29:16   over an Eero network here

00:29:18   at Daring Fireball World Headquarters.

00:29:20   It is truly a terrific product.

00:29:22   I've been using it for years.

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?

00:29:54   Here's what you do, one, two, three,

00:29:56   wait 30 seconds for it to come back online,

00:29:59   you're all set, and that's all there was to it.

00:30:02   Easy to set up, easy to manage, I really love it.

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

00:30:08   They have a special deal, by the way,

00:30:09   for daring Fireball readers.

00:30:11   You can get $100 off the Eero base unit

00:30:14   and two beacons package.

00:30:16   The beacons are the smaller ones that plug right in,

00:30:19   they're like a little nightlight,

00:30:20   that and then they literally have a nightlight

00:30:22   if you want them, you can turn that light off in the app.

00:30:25   But one base unit, two beacons package,

00:30:29   you can save 100 bucks and you get a year

00:30:32   of their Eero Plus service by going here.

00:30:35   Go to ero.com, E-E-R-O.com/the-talk-show,

00:30:40   and at checkout, just enter the same code

00:30:41   as the URL slug, the talk show,

00:30:45   and you'll save 100 bucks off their

00:30:47   one base unit, two beacons package.

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

01:40:57   at least once because even with the built in video card, it was too hot, let alone expandability

01:41:04   to faster and faster and hotter and hotter video cards as the years went by. And so I think the

01:41:09   fear that these people have is all we ever wanted is for you to make a big, fast, airy tower. That's

01:41:17   it. Just just put all of Intel's latest stuff in a big tower and call it done, which is sort of what

01:41:22   you had before. And don't get too clever. And why in the world is it taking you two hours, two years,

01:41:27   two hours, two years to do this unless they're getting too clever again by far because they're

01:41:32   Apple. Did Apple get obsessed by Thunderbolt 3 based GPU connections? Oh, I think so. Yeah.

01:41:38   I mean, because that seemed to be their answer was like, I don't know if they said that or if it was

01:41:42   hinted, but it was like, look, all these are coming down the pipe. There's 40 gigabit per second,

01:41:46   symmetrical, blah, blah. The answer is not to stick in bigger video cards, because the thermal issues

01:41:51   for, I mean, you have seen some of these cards you can get on the PC side, and they're nuts.

01:41:57   And you just want to stick four of those into a Mac. I mean, the cool, it just, it's a whole

01:42:02   different engineering project. So my, and I'm not a developer, so I don't know if this, it doesn't

01:42:08   make sense in developer side, it's for different uses, you know, like AI processing and things like

01:42:13   that. But I, or animation, but I just, it felt to me like they were like, we, you just, like,

01:42:19   Thunderbolt 3 is the answer for now.

01:42:20   And maybe we'll figure out something else later.

01:42:22   But I don't feel like that potential was realized.

01:42:25   I know you can buy Thunderbolt 3 connected GPUs,

01:42:27   but I don't feel like that actually solved

01:42:30   the problems people were trying to address.

01:42:32   - Well, anyway, to wrap up the segment,

01:42:34   the thing that I found ironic that I didn't write about,

01:42:36   but I will mention here is,

01:42:38   here's this article from Gurman talking all about

01:42:40   how they're gonna have all these ways

01:42:42   to run iPad apps on your Mac.

01:42:44   Oh, and by the way, we're gonna come out with this fancy,

01:42:46   Probably five six seven thousand dollar professional workstation. Hope you enjoy running tablet apps on it, right?

01:42:52   Like what a mixed message for one article of is here's this here's this computer that we're making because we hear you that even the iMac

01:42:58   Pro isn't pro enough for some of your needs and

01:43:01   You can run an iPad app on it. That's that's not exactly a clear message

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01:46:01   We've got more. We've got to go into the speed round, I guess. Other topics.

01:46:07   Pete: It's a busy week. Jeff Bezos is a member of us last week.

01:46:11   So what's the…

01:46:12   John "Lucky" Baum: Well, how about this? Samsung had a big event yesterday.

01:46:16   Pete Oh yeah. It's interesting to watch their coverage these days, how people write about them.

01:46:21   John "Lucky" Baum Well, and they're in a weird space, you know,

01:46:25   like where five years ago, I guess it's six years ago now, but it was right around 2013,

01:46:31   where the consensus was that Apple's in trouble. You know, Steve Jobs had been dead two years.

01:46:36   That was the peak of Apple can't do it without Steve Jobs. Samsung's eating their lunch, you know.

01:46:42   You know, it wasn't just that, quote-unquote, Android was going to do the iPhone and it was

01:46:47   Samsung in particular. Yeah, yeah. And nobody's really saying that anymore. But they're still,

01:46:53   you know, they're obviously a major player at a high level, at least in the US. I know that one

01:46:58   One of the weird things that's happened to Samsung is that they've been pretty much wiped

01:47:01   out of the Chinese market. Chinese brands like Huawei and a couple of others have taken

01:47:08   up the Android Slack inside mainland China. Samsung, I forget what their market showed.

01:47:12   They had 18 or 19% at one point inside China for smartphones, and now it's under 1%. It's

01:47:18   crazy. But they're obviously still a big player in the West. They obviously do really good

01:47:25   They can do cameras.

01:47:27   You know, it was interesting.

01:47:30   I know I watched the actual keynote online

01:47:33   and it was fascinating staging.

01:47:35   Did you look at it at all?

01:47:36   - Yeah, I saw a picture of this.

01:47:37   I saw your call out about that too.

01:47:39   And I'd seen pictures and didn't understand

01:47:41   what I was looking at.

01:47:42   Then you mentioned that and went back and looked

01:47:43   and I thought it's actually was my pre-rections.

01:47:47   It's really sad when the takeaway from an announcement is,

01:47:50   wow, they did a really good job on the stage

01:47:51   with a very, they were very innovative on stage.

01:47:55   But yeah, it was something I'd never seen before.

01:47:57   - Yeah, the stage itself was display,

01:48:03   and then they wrapped around the ceiling above the stage.

01:48:07   So like the presenters who came out were,

01:48:10   you know, sometimes they'd turn it off

01:48:11   and they'd just have like a traditional display behind them.

01:48:14   But then at certain times,

01:48:15   they'd use the floor and the ceiling too.

01:48:19   I've never seen anything quite like it.

01:48:20   It was pretty interesting.

01:48:22   But they unveiled a bunch of new high-end phones,

01:48:25   all of them at the high end.

01:48:27   And I guess I shouldn't be surprised,

01:48:30   and I don't wanna look at it

01:48:31   through too Apple-focused lens,

01:48:34   but it's very strange to me that they introduced,

01:48:38   the ones that people are supposed to buy

01:48:40   are the Galaxy S10 models, of which there's three.

01:48:45   There's the S10e, which is smaller, 5.8-inch diagonal,

01:48:50   but also it's $750, so it sort of competes

01:48:54   against the iPhone XR, but also is missing,

01:48:57   like the XR, it doesn't have as many cameras

01:49:00   as its more expensive brethren.

01:49:02   Doesn't have the cool new in-screen fingerprint sensor.

01:49:06   You have to actually touch the side button

01:49:07   to get a fingerprint sensor.

01:49:09   The S10 is 6.1 inches and has a bunch of features,

01:49:15   and then there's the S10+, which is 6.4 inches.

01:49:19   So they're the three phones that people will buy and Samsung should be hoping to get people

01:49:25   talking about. But they couldn't help themselves and also showed the Galaxy Fold, which is

01:49:32   a folding tablet that folds up to a ridiculous looking phone.

01:49:37   Alan Corey Yeah, I—who is that? It's like a Homer

01:49:41   Simpson phone. And I don't mean to be rude, it's just like—I'm sure, I mean, it

01:49:47   actually looks technically very impressive. And as I recall, journalists were not allowed to get

01:49:52   hands on time with it after the event. So the only time it's supposed to ship in April,

01:49:56   are they taking orders in April? Are they shipping?

01:49:58   I don't know. It seems fishy to me that they're not taking orders. And there's a lot of people

01:50:03   have a lot of questions about the hinge on this. Like the display is in indisputably cool,

01:50:09   you know, that the inside display.

01:50:11   Yeah, it's very interesting. And they're like, you know, last for thousands of

01:50:14   foldings and unfoldings, which I imagine is enough. It's got some very clever gears and so forth.

01:50:19   Yeah, but how durable is that hinge? How sturdy is it when it's open? How hard is it to close?

01:50:27   I mean, there's a lot of ways I can go. And the other display, the one that you see when the phone

01:50:35   is in closed mode, is ridiculous. It's only 4.8 inches on a giant device, and so it has these

01:50:42   preposterous chin and forehead. Like it's clearly intended to be used open in the full-size

01:50:51   mode and then that closed cover is there. So like if your phone buzzes, you can like

01:50:57   look at it and see what, you know, why is my phone buzzing? Oh, I see it's, you know,

01:51:01   a phone call from Glenn or, you know, I've got email from so and so.

01:51:06   But it's not like a one-line display. I mean, the cover is like a high resolution display

01:51:11   that would be just a phone on another phone. Which is a 4.6 inch phone on the front that another

01:51:18   could just be different. It's funny, I keep laughing every time I look at it. It's not

01:51:23   that it's ridiculous. I mean, you know what I also remember was the palm, remember the palm folio?

01:51:26   Pete: Yes, yeah.

01:51:27   Pete; Yeah.

01:51:28   Pete; The external device for your palm, which was like a little laptop. And I, but my sense was like,

01:51:33   well, I got a phone and then I got another thing. Do I really want the other thing or do I want that?

01:51:38   what what is my purpose? Again, I go back to the job, what's the

01:51:42   job for? But it's like, do I really want to like, is being

01:51:48   able to fold something up instead of putting it in a

01:51:50   sleeve that critical to me as a differentiating factor that's

01:51:55   worth like $1,000 premium?

01:51:56   Well, do you watch Westworld?

01:51:59   Oh, yeah.

01:52:00   Yeah. So the Westworld people have the tablets that fold, you

01:52:04   know that everybody's uses the same type type of device and

01:52:07   and you can fold it up to be phone size,

01:52:10   or you can unfold it to make it bigger.

01:52:12   But when you fold it,

01:52:14   it doesn't really get that much thicker.

01:52:16   You know, it's very, very thin.

01:52:18   You know, and obviously that's science fiction,

01:52:24   but it doesn't seem that preposterous, you know?

01:52:27   And it seems like that's what you want

01:52:29   so that when the people on Westworld are using it

01:52:31   without unfolding it to tablet size for a quick interaction,

01:52:35   it's not a preposterously thick device

01:52:38   that looks like it has a giant thick hinge.

01:52:40   It still is very thin, and that's what they can put

01:52:42   in their jacket pocket or pants pocket or something

01:52:44   so it's nice and tidy and folded up.

01:52:46   But still a very usable device as a phone size

01:52:49   held in one hand device.

01:52:51   - Yeah, it's the same, but that's 'cause the resolution

01:52:53   and intent are the same whether,

01:52:55   I mean, this is a smaller screen on the front

01:52:58   so that it's not useless when folded up,

01:53:00   and the actual product is inside.

01:53:02   the front is intended to be a little thing you use, but then so how often will you switch between it?

01:53:09   Have you seen the Expanse, that TV series? No, I have not seen that. It's just shotgun season two

01:53:14   and three, which are great. But they have the communicator there. They're different sized ones,

01:53:19   but a lot of them are a handheld thing, like a phone size thing with a clear display. And it

01:53:24   actually holographically gets bigger. So when you're holding it, stuff appears around it,

01:53:30   hovering around it at the same 2D plane. I was like, Oh, you know, I don't know how feasible like I

01:53:35   don't I mean, it's a very clever idea, but it's physically the size of a phone often. And the

01:53:40   display is just essentially effectively moves beyond the boundaries of the thing. And I'm like,

01:53:45   that feels like what Samsung's trying to do here is they're trying to give you the sense that it's

01:53:50   a single device with two kinds of resolutions, but instead it's kind of a chunky device, but it's,

01:53:55   it's just two things. Yeah, I mean, that the foldable OLED display is a real thing. It is very

01:54:02   cool. But it is clearly a demo. It's a prototype at this stage. And it's like the old Steve Jobs

01:54:08   thing that you know, you've done dozens of stories like this, where he had a very keen sense of,

01:54:13   that's not a product, that's a feature, you know, that's, that's a technology, right?

01:54:18   Just how hard is it to put an iPad in a tablet in a sleeve? Well, or your back?

01:54:25   It's not, but it wouldn't be in your pocket. It would be cool to have something that was thin

01:54:29   enough that if it was phone-sized while pocketable and unfoldable to be, or stretchable or something

01:54:37   to be bigger when you needed it. Like, I'm sure we will get that. We'll get that, you know,

01:54:42   I don't know if it's 10 years out, if it's five years out, I don't know. But we'll get

01:54:47   something like that. But this is not it. Like...

01:54:51   do respect their interest in making something that is technologically well ahead of its time.

01:54:56   They're pushing the price envelope. It's clearly got a crazy number of features in it. So it's not

01:55:03   they're not skimping on this. This isn't a bad product. Like, oh, my God, everything is horrible.

01:55:10   Look, it's terrible. It's more like I'm mystified about it. But I can't say it lacks ambition. And

01:55:16   that's neat. I mean, I know they're a multi billion dollar company, and they shouldn't be doing things

01:55:20   that are so risky, they can lose the farm on it. But after the events the last few years, and

01:55:26   various executives being indicted, and some sent to prison and then released and all this other

01:55:30   stuff going on, the fire, you know, their phones bursting to flames, maybe they need to do

01:55:35   something that is over the top. Maybe it's not successful. But it's interesting. It's

01:55:40   provocative. We'll see if there's a market for it. So I do have that to say, which I think is

01:55:44   pretty positive.

01:55:44   I think I'm intrigued that the starting price is nineteen hundred and eighty dollars, you know

01:55:49   I don't know how far that goes that they're a little sketchy on details, especially for something that supposedly slip shipping in April

01:55:55   but I really do think that that's interesting and

01:55:58   you know, I

01:56:00   wrote before the iPhone 10 came out when there were rumors that it was going to be more expensive that I would like to see

01:56:05   Apple make a fifteen hundred dollar iPhone and see what they could come up with like I

01:56:11   dispute the notion that the highest price iPhone should be priced for everybody and that it should never go above

01:56:18   600 700 dollars like it was 10 years ago

01:56:22   because I feel like phones have become too important to people that they've they've grown in importance and

01:56:28   You know, we've had $2,000 laptops for years. I mean used to be, you know laptops for five six thousand dollars

01:56:36   And there's I know a lot of people personally who their most used most important computing device is their phone

01:56:42   So why not have one that cost fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars and and justifies it on technical grounds?

01:56:49   Sure, you know if that's your most important device

01:56:52   So, you know, it's interesting to see somebody jump so far ahead of Apple in terms of highest starting price for a smartphone

01:56:59   But I don't I don't see this as being I mean who knows I could be surprised

01:57:05   and maybe it'll come out and be well reviewed, but it looks awfully thick and they seem to go

01:57:10   to great lengths to disguise it in closed form and seems very awkward in closed form.

01:57:16   Pete: Yeah, and they're holding it when you, all the photos, I was trying, I saw you'd

01:57:19   commented how thick it was. I looked at a lot of photos of this thing and every picture appears

01:57:24   to be so they can show it in as 2D, plainer, relative to the camera as possible. And I don't

01:57:30   blame him for it. But you know, and there is an obsession with

01:57:33   thin like if this thing, again, this is I love the idea that a

01:57:37   company is exploring something at the edge of what's possible.

01:57:40   That doesn't look like a technological failure. We'll

01:57:43   find out when it hits the market if it actually succeeds, but

01:57:46   they're trying something so far on the edge, the question will

01:57:50   be, will the potential audience for this be big enough to be

01:57:53   worthwhile? And if so, does the thickness matter for the first

01:57:56   release? I mean, we remember the first iPad, it was kind of

01:57:59   I look at a, I have an iPad, I don't know which version,

01:58:02   iPad two, we still have that works.

01:58:04   And it seems absurd to me.

01:58:07   It's so big and thick and weird.

01:58:08   I'm like, oh my God, this is what we used to have.

01:58:11   And that's seven years old, eight years old now.

01:58:13   So maybe this is the first version

01:58:15   and it has enough utility that it drives

01:58:18   a new market segment.

01:58:19   Samsung gets people to pay 2,000 to $2,500

01:58:23   or more for this thing.

01:58:24   And it sparks a huge investment in drawings

01:58:28   to make foldable displays, and their next one is, you know, 30 percent thinner in a

01:58:33   year. But I mean, this is—it's not an absurd idea like some other ideas in the past

01:58:40   have been absurd. It's an interesting idea maybe too early.

01:58:43   I think it's a very interesting idea that has a lot of future, but I feel like this

01:58:47   particular implementation borders on the absurd and might—when we find out more—

01:58:53   I can hear that, yeah.

01:58:54   It might. And I just question their... To me, it's a lack of corporate institutional discipline to be

01:59:05   able to say, "We could build this now. We have this. They've created this foldable OLED technology

01:59:11   that you can fold up and when unfolded has no ugly crease or seam in the middle." That is cool.

01:59:18   There's no doubt that that is cool technology. But it just seems to me like the fact that they have

01:59:22   this technology, they just couldn't stand not putting it into a product, whether it's ready

01:59:27   to be a product or not. Whereas the discipline, and I think something that Apple historically has

01:59:32   done very well, is to have that discipline and say, "Okay, this is cool technology, but this

01:59:38   isn't a good product yet." So we wait and we keep our mouths shut and go back to work and turn it

01:59:43   into a good product. I also don't want to overemphasize this, but we shouldn't underemphasize

01:59:48   that Samsung is—I was alluding to it before—they've gone through, you know, an amazing amount of

01:59:55   criminal accusations. There are trials to come. The—who was it? One of the—is the

02:00:00   CEO, was it put in jail?

02:00:02   Soterios Johnson Yep.

02:00:03   Alan Corey And then released on a suspended sentence. So,

02:00:05   like the company, it's actually shocking that it's not in more disarray because so

02:00:09   many of the executives have been swept up into this and it's had to take their attention.

02:00:12   So there is a little bit of it when you say, you know, have they been exercising corporate

02:00:16   I'm like, I don't even know how they function,

02:00:19   given all the rest of what's going on.

02:00:20   So they are shipping new devices

02:00:22   and they were able to move on from the burst into flame thing

02:00:26   which is really difficult to recover from.

02:00:28   - Yeah, yeah.

02:00:30   Which happened with phones that they put

02:00:32   really, really big batteries in

02:00:34   and it was a disaster for the company.

02:00:37   They seem to have confidence in that now

02:00:39   'cause a lot of these phones,

02:00:41   one thing that they'll brag about that Apple never mentions

02:00:44   is the mega amp hours of the batteries.

02:00:46   And some of these phones that they announced yesterday have like 4,000, I swear like 4,000

02:00:51   4600 I think one is 4600 mega amperes.

02:00:56   So they seem to they seem to have recovered from the burst in the flame.

02:00:59   They seem to have a confidence.

02:01:00   You can't squeeze it.

02:01:01   That was the problem.

02:01:02   You can't you can put a big battery in it.

02:01:04   You just can't cram it in so that it's sealed.

02:01:07   It's under pressure.

02:01:08   The other phone they announced yesterday and this one is even it's crazily enough even

02:01:12   even more vaporware-ish than the foldable one is the S10 5G. Which again, why would

02:01:21   you announce that now? Well, clearly because they want to be able to scream, "We were first."

02:01:25   We were the first 5G flagship phone. I didn't even pick this up in the data. I read this this

02:01:33   morning that they haven't even said what it'll cost. They've said it'll come to Verizon first

02:01:39   in the US and they had Verizon CEO come out and wearing a t-shirt which I thought was

02:01:44   weird. I'm trying to do the T-Mobile CEO thing I guess. Yeah, he came out and but no price and

02:01:52   no date. They didn't haven't even really said that it's going to come out in 2019. First half of 2019

02:02:00   is the promise but yeah, you know, you know, let's see if it actually comes out. And that's another

02:02:04   - It's not a contract.

02:02:06   - And the funny thing is that the guy for Samsung

02:02:08   who introduced it, I don't remember his name,

02:02:10   but he was something VP of product marketing.

02:02:14   He said something to the effect of,

02:02:16   he was going through the history of cellular networks

02:02:20   where there was the original data network

02:02:22   and we had text messaging and we had 2G,

02:02:24   which made email and other stuff possible.

02:02:27   And then 3G was a breakthrough that really kind of made

02:02:30   doing the web on mobile devices was possible.

02:02:34   And then we had 4G, which made everything blah, blah, blah.

02:02:38   And he said, every step of the way,

02:02:39   the first generation of phones

02:02:40   that supported these networks

02:02:41   were too big and thick and heavy.

02:02:43   Well, this is the end of that.

02:02:46   But then the next thing he says is, here's the S10 5G,

02:02:50   and it has a 6.8-inch screen.

02:02:53   It's almost as big diagonally as the foldable one

02:02:58   when it's unfolded.

02:02:59   It's so much bigger than the other S10 phones.

02:03:03   So he's just said, how can you introduce it

02:03:07   by saying every time the first phones

02:03:10   to support a new networking technology were too big?

02:03:13   Here's a seven inch phone.

02:03:15   - Well, but too big is always code for too thick.

02:03:19   - Right, so maybe it's not thick.

02:03:21   I don't know, but it seems ridiculous.

02:03:23   - I don't know, all I see is, again,

02:03:24   of seeing it in a plain view.

02:03:27   It's perpendicular to the plane of viewing,

02:03:30   so I can only see how wide it is.

02:03:32   I missed it, it's 4,500 milliampere hours in the 5G S10,

02:03:37   the 4,100 milliampere hours in the S10+, which is great.

02:03:41   That's tons of power.

02:03:43   But then you ask for 4,500, do you need that

02:03:45   in order to support the 5G chips?

02:03:47   I don't know.

02:03:48   This is the other thing, is cellular networks

02:03:50   have gotten ridiculously more power sensitive

02:03:55   or power efficient for, as the data rates have gone up,

02:04:00   they become much more efficient relative to throughput.

02:04:02   So that issue usually is backed off.

02:04:05   - I, it just seems maddening to me.

02:04:08   And if I had been at Samsung

02:04:09   and worked on the S10 regular models,

02:04:13   I would be so mad to see them debut

02:04:16   alongside this 5G model,

02:04:19   which you can't really promote 5G

02:04:22   without implicitly slagging 4G, right?

02:04:28   4G doesn't, you know, I still get maintained.

02:04:30   4G doesn't exist because when 4G was first,

02:04:33   or when LTE was first announced,

02:04:35   and then 4G sort of got lumped into it being LTE,

02:04:38   the data rates were supposed to be like

02:04:40   100 megabits per second to a gigabit per second downstream.

02:04:43   We still don't have those networks.

02:04:45   There's some around the world that have them.

02:04:47   So our 4G networks, 4G LTE are really,

02:04:50   they just, you know, what they do is they redefine

02:04:52   the name to fit whatever got built,

02:04:55   and remember that got done early.

02:04:57   So the 5G networks, nobody knows why they want 5G.

02:05:01   - No, it's a carrier thing, right?

02:05:03   It's a total carrier thing.

02:05:04   And they're already playing games with it.

02:05:06   Is it AT&T who's already trying to get the 5G label

02:05:11   on existing phones?

02:05:13   - Yeah, it's gonna show up as if it were,

02:05:15   it's like gonna have a little extra thing.

02:05:17   And I mean, it's sadly, everything's been marketing.

02:05:20   I mean, 3G was a distinctly different technology.

02:05:22   There was 2G and sort of 2 1/2G and 3G,

02:05:26   And then what they were calling 4G

02:05:27   was more like three and a half G.

02:05:29   It was like an advancement of 3G technology.

02:05:31   4G did have a, there's a fundamental change.

02:05:35   4G is the evolution to an all IP phone network.

02:05:38   So there is a fundamental change in it.

02:05:40   That's how you get voiceover,

02:05:41   a high definition voice was a voiceover LTE calling

02:05:46   and things like that.

02:05:47   So there's a fundamental evolution

02:05:49   in the underpinnings of the network.

02:05:50   It is a better network.

02:05:51   It's more efficient.

02:05:52   It's higher throughput.

02:05:53   You get better coverage.

02:05:54   It supports more in different kinds of frequencies.

02:05:57   There's better OFDM sub-channelization,

02:05:59   like all these technical bits

02:06:01   that mean you can get better performance

02:06:03   and the carriers can roll at higher and higher speeds

02:06:05   and they can use more in different frequencies.

02:06:08   So you have the base bands and the phones are ridiculous

02:06:10   in the number of frequency ranges they support

02:06:13   within one country or worldwide.

02:06:15   All that's great, but the 5G thing is like,

02:06:17   ours is 1G faster.

02:06:18   I mean, Trump tweeted today, you saw this, right?

02:06:20   - No, I did not.

02:06:21   I was at the doctor, remember?

02:06:22   needed to be the first to deploy 5G and even 6G networks.

02:06:26   (laughing)

02:06:27   I'm not making this up. - Of course he did.

02:06:29   Of course he did.

02:06:29   That's the way his mind works immediately.

02:06:32   He has no idea, he has no friggin' idea

02:06:34   what any of this means, and of course--

02:06:35   - But he's the best marketing person, right?

02:06:37   He's like, "5G is clearly one better."

02:06:39   - Right, and 6G, (laughing)

02:06:42   like we're so far away from widespread deployment of it.

02:06:45   Of course he wants 6 or 7G.

02:06:47   - But isn't that great?

02:06:48   I mean, it is like a parody to you.

02:06:49   I want 5G and even 6G technology in the United States

02:06:52   as soon as possible, it is far more powerful,

02:06:54   faster and smarter than the current standard.

02:06:56   American companies must step up their efforts

02:06:58   or get left behind.

02:07:00   - I just ran the speed test app here on my phone.

02:07:02   I turned off wifi just to see what am I getting.

02:07:04   I get pretty good Verizon service here in Philadelphia.

02:07:07   I got just tested at 72.6 megabits per second down.

02:07:11   - Oh, that's amazing. - 5.5 up.

02:07:13   But usually, yeah, I'm in the basement as I record this.

02:07:16   25-- - Oh, that's great.

02:07:17   I mean, the networks have gradually gotten faster

02:07:19   getting to it, but it's like even at the 100 megabits

02:07:21   second. The target was one gigabit per second if you were standing still basically. 100 megabits

02:07:27   per second if you're driving 60 miles an hour. Yeah. And, you know, the other thing and the one

02:07:32   thing that Apple never seems to lose sight of is that it's the holistic experience, the whole

02:07:39   experience of using the phone that matters the most. And of course, faster networking is better

02:07:44   than slow networking. It controlled for all other variables, of course. And slower, you know, faster

02:07:51   ping times are better than slower ping times. Of course, latency is not good. But battery life is an

02:07:57   issue. Coverage, cellular coverage is an issue. And what happens as you hand off from tower?

02:08:02   It's the whole day long, weeks long, year or two year or three year long experience of using a

02:08:09   phone that matters the most. And the 5G stuff is, come on. It's such a carrier. It's just the

02:08:17   carrier's obsession with, well, that is their thing, and they would love for the most important

02:08:22   thing in Jane Consumer, who's in the market for a new phone, to be most worried about the network

02:08:30   as opposed to the device. All they ever talk about is how great the network is. And you know what?

02:08:37   All people want is for the goddamn phone to work and be fast, and that's it.

02:08:41   Yeah, and I have gigabit internet at home. I've had it for a few years now.

02:08:43   - Oh, and to have a bill that is,

02:08:46   like your $50 phone bill should be $50, not $75.

02:08:50   - Oh yeah, yeah.

02:08:51   But yeah, I have a side gigabit internet

02:08:54   and I've had it for years.

02:08:56   And the thing you experience

02:08:57   when you have a super fast network,

02:09:00   and often they'll do speed tests,

02:09:01   it'll be six or 700 megabits per second up and down.

02:09:04   So it's really, they're not live.

02:09:06   It's actually sort of gigabit.

02:09:08   But the thing is,

02:09:09   the internet doesn't really run at gigabit speeds.

02:09:11   Very few things can transfer anywhere near that fast.

02:09:14   So there's a point at which really,

02:09:16   what the carriers are saying

02:09:20   when they say 5G is so important,

02:09:22   it's the next thing is they're saying,

02:09:23   what they should be saying, I think,

02:09:25   and I'm not a marketing person,

02:09:26   is you're gonna be able to get high definition

02:09:29   streaming video wherever you are, whenever you want,

02:09:31   and it's gonna be part of your plan.

02:09:33   You know, in your 5G plan.

02:09:35   You're gonna be able to download any file, anything,

02:09:38   Download a high definition movie to your phone

02:09:43   in five minutes.

02:09:45   That's what 5G promises.

02:09:47   That's something that people could act upon

02:09:49   and it's something that tells you something.

02:09:52   The saying 5G is faster, it's because they don't know,

02:09:54   they can't promise anything.

02:09:55   For them, there's great network improvements

02:09:57   they'll get out of it and that's terrific,

02:09:59   but it certainly doesn't translate into that.

02:10:02   My great grandmother apparently used to say something

02:10:04   along the lines of, you know, essentially,

02:10:08   so how rich do you need to be?

02:10:09   Are you gonna eat five meals a day?

02:10:10   (laughing)

02:10:12   And that's what I feel about with 5G.

02:10:13   It's like, how fast do you really need it?

02:10:15   If I only need, if I had consistent three or 4G speeds,

02:10:19   it'd be great, I don't need 5G.

02:10:20   - Right, and there's so many things,

02:10:21   and I know 5G is meant to address this,

02:10:23   and each subsequent level of cellular networking technology

02:10:27   has gotten better at it, but for example,

02:10:30   one thing that would be more meaningful to me,

02:10:33   way more meaningful, may more frequently,

02:10:34   is when I'm in some place very crowded.

02:10:36   I mean, I live in Center City, Philly,

02:10:37   so it's already pretty dense,

02:10:39   but Manhattan is usually pretty dreadful

02:10:41   for cell phone coverage,

02:10:43   or you go to Disney World or something like that.

02:10:46   Being able to get the same speeds that I normally get,

02:10:49   but get it when I'm amidst thousands of people,

02:10:51   or at a concert or a sporting event, right?

02:10:54   I go to see the Sixers or the Yankees

02:10:56   or something like that,

02:10:57   and there's 50,000 people in Yankee Stadium,

02:11:00   and they're all taking pictures of the same thing

02:11:03   and trying to upload them or text them at the same time.

02:11:06   If I got the same speed I normally got,

02:11:08   but it worked better when 25,000 other people

02:11:11   were using their phones at the same time,

02:11:12   that's a meaningful upgrade.

02:11:14   But it's-- - Yeah, and 5G will.

02:11:16   I mean, 5G, 802.11ax, the new WiFi standard

02:11:20   that's starting to sort of roll out a tiny bit, I think,

02:11:23   that is all about how do you get a bazillion mobile devices

02:11:27   to talk efficiently and better use

02:11:29   all the spectrum that's available.

02:11:31   And 5G has a lot of similar principles.

02:11:34   There's tons of devices we need to make sure

02:11:37   we can handle the load of micro cells,

02:11:40   break it all out and just deal with the capacity.

02:11:43   'Cause what you're describing,

02:11:44   I mean, Yankee Stadium is not unique anymore.

02:11:46   Like there's Yankee stadiums in every part of the country

02:11:49   every day during commutes or in downtowns or wherever.

02:11:52   So it's a fundamental problem.

02:11:54   And again, I think if they said 5G is gonna be incredible

02:11:57   because you could be, you know, they show somebody,

02:11:59   they have John Gruber close tight up,

02:12:01   or tight shot on John Gruber.

02:12:02   They pull back, John is in a stadium.

02:12:04   And he's uploading 4K video,

02:12:06   and then you see everyone else is uploading 4K video,

02:12:08   and it's like 5G, that's what it offers.

02:12:11   That's a great ad, right?

02:12:12   I think, I'm not an ad person.

02:12:14   But that tells people something that frustrates them today

02:12:18   that they'll be able to do.

02:12:20   - Well, I'm not, when do you,

02:12:22   there's the Apple-related note on 5G is that

02:12:26   it apparently is caught up in their ongoing legal squabble

02:12:31   with Qualcomm.

02:12:32   - Oh yeah, yeah.

02:12:33   where Qualcomm is like the leader

02:12:36   or the only source for 5G stuff.

02:12:39   But I don't think, Apple has been,

02:12:44   the original iPhone shipped when quote unquote,

02:12:47   most smartphones were already on 3G and it wasn't 3G

02:12:51   and it was like the number one knock against it

02:12:54   and it was fine.

02:12:55   And the other phones went to LTE or quote unquote 4G,

02:12:59   whatever the marketing wanted to call it.

02:13:02   and the iPhone was at least a year late to that,

02:13:04   you know, when the gadget sites had on daily basis

02:13:08   had 4G phones.

02:13:10   I think even if Apple's relationship with Qualcomm

02:13:13   was hunky-dory, I really doubt that this year's phone

02:13:17   would be, iPhones would be 5G.

02:13:20   It's just the nature of Apple to, you know,

02:13:23   to not get on board quickly for scaling reasons, you know,

02:13:28   because they don't, you know, they,

02:13:31   It's not like they're gonna ship a weirdo iPhone 5G

02:13:35   in small quantities like Samsung's doing with the S10.

02:13:38   They're gonna do it for all of the flagships

02:13:40   or they're gonna wait.

02:13:41   And the power efficiency thing is real,

02:13:44   that the early versions are not going to be

02:13:47   as power efficient as subsequent ones,

02:13:49   and Apple tends to wait for the subsequent ones.

02:13:51   - Well, it'll be super power efficient

02:13:53   'cause there won't be any 5G cell base stations out there,

02:13:56   so it'll all be 4G using the previous power efficiency.

02:13:59   But no, but I agree.

02:14:00   I think Apple tends to wait for the networks to mature

02:14:03   to a point that it makes sense for them

02:14:06   to promote it as a technology,

02:14:07   because otherwise their customers are unhappy

02:14:10   that they're not seeing promised speeds

02:14:12   and 5G icons of their phone, which makes sense,

02:14:16   'cause why release a 3G phone

02:14:18   if the phone only says 2G on it all the time?

02:14:19   - Yep.

02:14:20   All right, let me take a break here

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02:14:58   And they looked at her like, what?

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02:16:17   Really, it's worth buying one just to open the box.

02:16:21   It's a lot of fun.

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02:17:52   I have to tell you, terms and conditions apply.

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02:17:58   Oh, what else?

02:18:01   This is the real speed zone.

02:18:02   We got a bunch of little things to talk about.

02:18:04   You've got this in the show notes.

02:18:05   I don't know what you're talking about, to be honest,

02:18:07   is Twitter's new threaded approach.

02:18:09   - Oh, have you not seen this yet?

02:18:11   - No.

02:18:12   - Jack Dorsey,

02:18:14   Twitter's flooded with Nazis and fascists and abuse.

02:18:19   And he's like, "What if, what if we removed likes?"

02:18:23   - Is that what they're doing?

02:18:25   - That heart really bothers me, he says.

02:18:27   What if we got rid of that?

02:18:28   That would probably solve problems.

02:18:29   What if we threaded and nested conversations

02:18:33   so it's easier to follow a conversation?

02:18:34   That would produce more understanding among people

02:18:37   and less harassment and abuse.

02:18:39   So yeah, they're trying stuff and I haven't seen it yet.

02:18:41   I've seen some screen captures,

02:18:43   but some people are apparently getting this rolled out

02:18:45   in some early testing, or if you click a link,

02:18:47   I think it may show up as an option.

02:18:49   I almost never used Twitter's own software.

02:18:51   I just use Tweetbot for everything.

02:18:53   So I'm like in bizarro Twitter universe

02:18:56   where this stuff doesn't exist.

02:18:58   - Yeah, it's funny.

02:18:59   I have switched to, I use Tweetbot on my phone,

02:19:03   but I use Twitter on my Mac

02:19:05   because I find it a better workflow.

02:19:08   And there's some things you can see in Twitter.

02:19:09   There's some interesting statistics and things.

02:19:12   Yeah, in certain interactions,

02:19:14   I've discovered Tweetbot won't show me some replies

02:19:16   and Twitter will.

02:19:18   So I go back and forth.

02:19:19   - Yeah, I shouldn't say I never use it.

02:19:21   There's magic powers that I get as a blue checkbox person.

02:19:27   - Oh yeah.

02:19:28   - There's certain features.

02:19:31   I have to say in my defense, I never asked for it.

02:19:34   I got my blue checkbox as a verified Twitter user

02:19:37   in the aftermath of the Matt Honan hacking years ago.

02:19:42   - You were very early though,

02:19:43   and you had a bunch of users early on.

02:19:45   So they kind of went through

02:19:46   verified people who'd write and were subject to it.

02:19:49   It seemed like, you know, yeah, I was at risk of being targeted in the way Matt Honan was,

02:19:55   you know, probably true. I mean, yeah, I think, I think Matt and my Twitter history and our

02:20:03   background and the number of I'm sure algorithmically it was like, yeah, this guy's,

02:20:07   this guy's a target. But, but anyway, I get, I get notifications that other people can't get. It's

02:20:14   It's like a level of notifications of tweets I might find interesting.

02:20:21   I can't turn on every time somebody likes my tweet because I'd get too many.

02:20:24   I have too many followers.

02:20:26   But I have the option of only seeing it for people who I follow.

02:20:29   I forget.

02:20:30   There's a great—some of those are—I have a blue checkmark, so I see some of those,

02:20:33   and some, though, they've now rolled out to everybody that used to be exclusive.

02:20:38   So I have, you can say, don't show me, like, people who haven't confirmed a phone number

02:20:44   or people who haven't changed their default avatar.

02:20:46   There's a few of those.

02:20:47   I found when, back when Eric Trump responded angrily to me about something and my Twitter

02:20:53   was – yeah, I know, this is – my kids are still – this is how I impressed my children.

02:20:57   They were very happy about that.

02:21:00   And my tweet mentions were trash fire and tweet bot, which can't use Twitter filtering.

02:21:04   It can only accept the raw API timeline.

02:21:07   I went into twitter.com and I turned on a couple of those boxes so I was like, "Don't

02:21:12   show me notifications from people who haven't changed their default avatar."

02:21:17   And all of a sudden, like, there were thousands of people tweeting at me for like two days

02:21:21   solid and I saw like two of them.

02:21:24   Because everybody else was, and I also had low quality filter enabled.

02:21:28   So the thing is, most people who engage in abuse and whatever have not done the basics

02:21:32   or they follow very few people, or they only tweet at people who don't follow them, and

02:21:38   Twitter will read those signals.

02:21:39   So if you check the right checkboxes and you use a Twitter client, you wind up with a lot

02:21:43   less noise.

02:21:44   So most of the time, Tweetbot is great.

02:21:46   It's just when there's a flood of response.

02:21:49   I tweeted something the other day about Seattle.

02:21:51   The Seattle Times runs this regular feature, "X restaurants open and X closed."

02:21:56   The other day they had a headline like, "43 restaurants open in Seattle, 19 are closing,"

02:22:00   I tweeted the 43 saying the hellhole that Seattle has become or the, you know, the devastating

02:22:05   nightmare we live in with the high minimum wage we passed.

02:22:08   The people found that funny.

02:22:09   So I got thousands of retweets of it and whatever.

02:22:12   And all of a sudden, like, oh, and I wound up having again to use Twitter because I couldn't

02:22:15   cope with the flood of stuff coming in.

02:22:17   And then I got back to tweet.

02:22:18   I got one like that in the last year where there was one of these incidents with gun

02:22:24   violence and oh, yeah.

02:22:25   I tweeted impetuously something to the effect of to somebody. It was like an ad, it was

02:22:32   a reply or something, and I just wrote something about we're going to take away your guns.

02:22:37   I don't know. That's not even my politics. I actually don't support taking away lawful

02:22:42   gun ownership. But somebody, I've never even figured out who retweeted it, but somebody

02:22:48   with a large number of conservative followers retweeted it. And my Twitter mentions were

02:22:54   garbage for, like, and I thought, you know what, I shouldn't have tweeted that. I actually,

02:22:58   and I was like, this is what I get. I actually felt like, this is my punishment. I can't

02:23:02   use Twitter.

02:23:03   Right.

02:23:04   You know, it's like, and, but like 72 hours later, it was still like three whole days

02:23:07   later, it was still a fire hose of garbage.

02:23:11   I know exactly who retweeted you.

02:23:15   Really?

02:23:16   And I'm not going to say their name. Yep. Because they do this, they actually have a

02:23:19   They're a prominent conservative who used to be somewhat reasonable.

02:23:23   And there are plenty of reasonable conservatives.

02:23:25   I have friends who are conservatives. I'm not playing some kind of political thing.

02:23:29   There are people who exist to be trolls who happen to be conservatives, just like there are liberals.

02:23:33   This guy went from an interesting thinker to a troll.

02:23:37   And he can be very cruel and nasty.

02:23:39   I had to block him because I would tweet something very anodyne or very normal, and he would retweet it with comment.

02:23:45   And I would get dogpiled.

02:23:47   turn his fanatics, yeah.

02:23:48   So I know exactly, but he's also got a little bit of an intersection with the Mac world,

02:23:53   so I think, or has an interest in it, so he follows people like you and me. That's as

02:23:57   opposed to, there's a fellow who I'd say is like the exact opposite, is Brad DeLong,

02:24:01   who's a well-known economist, a very thoughtful person, does not engage in trollery, but he's

02:24:05   like the inverse of this other guy. It's also very—

02:24:08   I follow Brad DeLong.

02:24:09   —Mac-interested.

02:24:10   Yeah, also Brad DeLong, long time during Fireball Reader, actually.

02:24:13   Yeah, I've been listening to great guy. I've read his stuff for years and years and years.

02:24:17   Tom: And the other thing that I run into, and I think even like in that gun thing,

02:24:23   people think it's me, is they conflate me with Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who is the

02:24:30   quote unquote "architect of Obamacare." But he generally goes by Jonathan, and I realize that

02:24:37   a lot of people don't realize that JOHN is almost never a Jonathan, you know. It's something that we

02:24:43   John's know, like Moltz and I will go on at length about it. If you're a JOHN, there's only,

02:24:48   I've only met like a handful of JOHNs who are actually Jonathan's. JON is the diminutive form

02:24:55   of Jonathan. And that's who the Gruber, who's the Obama architect is. But when that whole thing

02:25:00   erupted five, six, seven years ago about him saying something pretty stupid on stage, the way

02:25:08   it came out of his mouth that people were—you had to kind of—I forget what he said, but it

02:25:16   kind of insinuated that people are too stupid to understand what was good for them about Obamacare.

02:25:20   Oh my god. But he's not on Twitter. And so a lot of people would guess, "Well, maybe @Gruber is

02:25:27   this guy." And they'd see it of somebody with a lot of followers. His name is John Gruber. And

02:25:33   "Oh my God, did I get a lot of those. Oh my God." I used to write back to those people though,

02:25:38   sometimes I would just have fun with them and just say like ridiculous, like unto the guys. And I

02:25:45   almost feel bad because I was, I never claimed to be the other John Gruber, but I would just

02:25:52   write back to them and say ridiculous things like, "This is really just the first step. We're going

02:25:56   to have everybody get their healthcare at the post office."

02:26:02   and there's just something ridiculous like that.

02:26:06   Like once we can get everybody on Medicare for All,

02:26:08   we'll just put all the doctors in the post office

02:26:10   and we'll save money, you know,

02:26:11   we'll save tremendous amounts of money at the federal level.

02:26:14   - Oh my God.

02:26:15   - It was a lot of fun, but I have to,

02:26:19   I try to avoid that now.

02:26:20   Anyway, getting rid of the hearts on Twitter,

02:26:23   that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

02:26:24   - Yes.

02:26:25   - You know what we were talking about Square earlier,

02:26:28   Jack Dorsey's other company,

02:26:29   And he did a bunch of interviews a month ago.

02:26:31   I forget why, but you know, he was making the media rounds.

02:26:36   He did a really good interview on the Bill Simmons Podcast.

02:26:38   You probably don't listen 'cause it's mostly

02:26:40   a sports podcast, but Bill Simmons did a tremendous job

02:26:43   interviewing Jack Dorsey.

02:26:45   I'll put this in the show notes.

02:26:46   It's not sports-related at all.

02:26:48   I guess they touch a little bit on like NBA Twitter,

02:26:51   meaning the subset of Twitter that's, you know,

02:26:55   likes to talk about the NBA.

02:26:57   Jack Dorsey is a big Golden State Warriors fan.

02:27:00   - Ah, okay.

02:27:01   - But one of the things that came up

02:27:02   was the difference between Square and Twitter.

02:27:06   And he said this in a couple of interviews,

02:27:08   not just with Bill Simmons,

02:27:09   but he said something to the effect of,

02:27:12   we have to be super careful about everything we do at Square

02:27:15   because it's money and people will get upset

02:27:18   if we handle this wrong.

02:27:19   (laughing)

02:27:20   And so many people had came,

02:27:22   and I mean, I can't take credit for it,

02:27:24   but everybody who listened to this had the same thought

02:27:26   of, "Oh my God, what if you did treat Twitter

02:27:30   that way though?"

02:27:31   And just, you know, like, you know,

02:27:35   what if you were as careful about what you allowed

02:27:38   to happen on Twitter as you were on Square?

02:27:41   Like if we, what, if we charged a penny a tweet,

02:27:44   you'd suddenly get rid of the Nazis and the...

02:27:47   - This is what leads to regulation is industries

02:27:50   accidentally confess that because they're not regulated,

02:27:53   that they do anything they want and people are like,

02:27:55   - Oh, well I'm really not in favor of regulation,

02:27:58   but now that you said that.

02:27:59   - Yeah, we don't do any experiments at Square,

02:28:02   you know, like this whole, like,

02:28:03   well what if we let Nazis have, you know, a platform?

02:28:07   Oh.

02:28:08   - Yeah, I have to highlight this thing.

02:28:10   There's a thing that Pinterest did.

02:28:11   Pinterest has been actually trying to create,

02:28:14   like, more sensible communities in a way

02:28:17   that YouTube and others are not, and Twitter are not.

02:28:20   And what they said is, I saw this formulated just today,

02:28:24   was there's freedom of speech, not freedom of reach. So, yes, there's a bunch of forums

02:28:29   in which you should be allowed to say whatever you want, but you're not given the right

02:28:36   to a platform, especially a privately owned one. So, there's people trying to suppress

02:28:41   your ability to speak in public fora and that's unconstitutional and there's issues about whether

02:28:46   it's hate speech and inciting violence and all that, but it's like there is no right on Pinterest

02:28:51   to have access to Pinterest's audience, right? So, I think Pinterest now, like,

02:28:56   we came up with the anti-vax stuff. It's not that you can't pin anti-vax things and you're on board,

02:29:00   but you can't promote them in the way that you can in other platforms now.

02:29:04   Yeah. I knew you were—I saw the same thing and hadn't read it, but I knew that it was gonna,

02:29:09   you know, tie back into a topic we talked about earlier in the show. It was an anti-vaccination

02:29:14   thing and that they've taken concrete steps to keep that anti-vaccination. Honestly, I feel

02:29:21   feel safe describing it as disinformation from spreading at the scale that stuff can

02:29:26   spread on Pinterest because they realize it is collectively not—it's against the interest

02:29:32   of society at large.

02:29:33   I just read a story, too. Somebody dug it up. It was like on the 50th anniversary of

02:29:40   Jonas Salk's polio vaccine getting approved. They just talked about how it was like another

02:29:47   VJ day or VE day, it was like a day when people went out in the streets to celebrate and party

02:29:57   like it was New Year's Eve because it was, you know, and I don't know anybody, I realized

02:30:02   that our generation, like me and you, I don't know anybody who had polio of my peers, but

02:30:07   my family, like my grandparents did, my mom's dad had a brother who I think died from polio.

02:30:16   I mean, I don't know anybody. I mean, it was, you know, it, it, it was crazy, you know,

02:30:21   I mean, your kids could get measles and maybe they die and it was nothing you could do about

02:30:25   it because they were going to get it, you know, and then all of a sudden, yeah. And

02:30:29   then, you know, this terrible disease that even if you survived it, you know, would,

02:30:33   could leave you, you know, severely handicapped for life. You know, we, you know, we've got

02:30:38   a thing, we can just give this to every kid and they'll never get it. And the science

02:30:42   backs it up. The largest clinical study at the time that anybody had ever conducted,

02:30:47   and it was conclusive that this is going to work. It was great. And I just can't imagine

02:30:53   so many of the people who are of that generation because of their age are gone now. But if

02:30:58   you could just listen, they could just come back here and slap some sense into people.

02:31:03   [laughter]

02:31:04   Alan Corey I think you could—there's a great book I

02:31:07   read a couple years ago called Get Well Soon by Jen Wright. She's @JenAshleyWright on

02:31:11   incredibly funny and wonderful person. And the book is A Hilarious Account of History's Worst

02:31:17   Plagues. It's written in a very friendly and delightful manner. And she recounts all of it.

02:31:22   It's really, it's very interesting. It's much more approachable because it's not this deadly,

02:31:26   either a dry or horrifying thing. She has kind of a little bit of a doo doo doo doo tone about it,

02:31:32   which lets you get through it. But it is, it gives you some insight into what the scope of things we

02:31:38   we used to go through, and then terrifying things like the 1918 flu that killed so many

02:31:45   people and we still don't know exactly why or if it would recur in that form and whether

02:31:49   we have any way to protect against it. But it's I think it's a great, I don't know,

02:31:53   I really, I really enjoyed reading about plagues. But it just lets you see the scope of what's

02:32:00   happened across human history and what we've managed to avoid for, you know, 60 something

02:32:04   years, 70 something years for the most part.

02:32:06   All right, the lightning round continues. Okay, the big hack Bloomberg's

02:32:11   Blockbuster story from I think it was October and maybe I remember

02:32:15   I keep doing the thing where every time I mention a report from Bloomberg or Businessweek

02:32:22   I put an asterisk in right away and then include a boiler now boilerplate footnote

02:32:27   remarking that

02:32:30   Bloomberg has

02:32:31   Since since that's published offered no evidence backing up their story bit yet have not retracted the story

02:32:37   Which to me is an untenable position?

02:32:41   They either need to retract it or show further evidence that no we were right all along and everybody else

02:32:46   Who's tried to back this up and hasn't found any evidence of it whatsoever of any of the crap that we said happened happened and that

02:32:52   You know, I

02:32:56   Don't get it

02:32:57   I had more conversations with people after that story came out and and since when it comes up

02:33:01   you know, usually like off the conversation with other journalists, we're just chatting or you know, sometimes publicly on Twitter, sometimes privately, and we're all just like, I don't I don't understand it because Bloomberg has high journalistic standards. I don't suspect them or any of the reporters of engaging in in a fraud or fabulous. And yet, this is a ridiculous story. And no reporter has managed to match it. And there's no way that Bloomberg had the only access to

02:33:31   to the large number of people. And after the story came out, some sources, as you know, even said, this isn't exactly what was going on. So it does feel like the story is wrong, and they don't understand it's wrong. And I can't believe they don't understand it's wrong. It seems like they dug themselves into such a pit and they got such pushback both from the companies profiled and other journalists and experts in the field that they just didn't know what to do about it. The thing I'll say this is closest to is the Guardian wrote a story

02:34:00   is it two years ago, about WhatsApp,

02:34:03   and they talked about a--

02:34:04   - I remember this.

02:34:05   - Yeah, a technical flaw, and at the end,

02:34:07   I think like 150 computers or security experts

02:34:10   wrote a letter to the Guardian urging them to retract it,

02:34:12   and I still think it took them six months

02:34:15   to essentially rewrite the story.

02:34:17   I'm not even sure they fully retracted it.

02:34:18   It was just, it was in error.

02:34:21   I mean, it wasn't totally wrong,

02:34:22   but the way in which they described the scope

02:34:25   of the problem was totally inaccurate,

02:34:27   and it was shocking, given the Guardian's normal

02:34:30   So I don't understand. There's something so wrong here. I'm sure. So what I'm could guarantee you,

02:34:36   John, is there are people researching the Bloomberg side of the story, not at Bloomberg,

02:34:40   who are going to write a remarkable 10,000 word story that is going to explain how,

02:34:45   what Bloomberg did wrong here.

02:34:46   Yeah, it's, it has to come out eventually, but I like to keep reminding people of it because

02:34:51   it is, it's too long. And, and I really do feel like Bloomberg's goal is let's just hope everybody

02:34:58   let's just hope everybody forgets about this

02:35:00   'cause we don't wanna bring this up again.

02:35:02   - It's the worst, and of course, you know,

02:35:05   we both cover Apple and write and like Apple stuff.

02:35:07   So it sounds like this is, I never,

02:35:08   I always like to say I'm not defending Apple here.

02:35:10   Apple defended itself very well,

02:35:12   or Amazon or the other companies affected by it.

02:35:15   But it's more like I haven't seen a story

02:35:19   that had as many credible people involved in it

02:35:22   that is so obviously wrong as this one.

02:35:25   And I don't even remember the last one.

02:35:27   that's if one ever approached this scope. I mean, there's Plagiarists and Fabulous, but they were

02:35:33   writing about stuff that wasn't very important. The Theranos story is the closest one, but it's

02:35:38   the flip side. It's like what Theranos was doing was as bad as what, almost as bad as what Bloomberg

02:35:46   was reporting on, but Theranos was true. Everything that the most true reporter came out was.

02:35:52   The other downside to this is the the boy who cried wolf aspect where the basic kernel of their story that the Chinese state

02:35:59   Was manipulating their access to the Chinese supply chain

02:36:04   Yeah, you get stuff in all sounds plausible and very worrisome given the world's

02:36:10   reliance on the Chinese supply chain and

02:36:13   you know, there's a lot of

02:36:16   seemingly credible reports that Huawei in particular is really just a state-owned front and

02:36:21   Not just you know, like the u.s. Has banned Huawei phones from being sold on military bases

02:36:27   So they're you know, you can't you know, and they really don't have much of a presence in the u.s. Consumer market

02:36:32   Huawei also makes and speaking of 5g they make yeah cellular networking technology including 5g stuff and that you know

02:36:41   The u.s. Is taking steps to say well we you know

02:36:45   legally, we're going to say we don't want their stuff forming the backbone of the US

02:36:50   5G network because we literally don't trust it.

02:36:52   But as our countries around the world, so the US is saying that and as our countries

02:36:55   across Europe and elsewhere as well.

02:36:57   Right. And yet, you know, having this story out there of, hey, the Chinese state intelligence

02:37:06   services manipulating the supply chain. Oh, that was BS. Everybody says that was, you

02:37:11   Bloomberg ran a story about it. It was BS. I'm sure this next one is BS.

02:37:14   You know, like, yeah, yeah, there's like, it feels like disinformation. It's not,

02:37:17   it's just something went terribly wrong. And I do believe we will, we will find out. And I believe

02:37:22   it's taken this long to find out because people are cracking sources inside Bloomberg and trying

02:37:27   to figure out some of the external sources. And I expect we will get a big story in a Vanity Fair

02:37:33   or New Yorker magazine or something like that. Not New Yorker, New York magazine.

02:37:38   Yeah, and basically the one thing I know, I don't have good sources at Amazon, but I have sources

02:37:42   at Apple. And basically, you know, they did Apple's vehement defense was not a surprise to Bloomberg.

02:37:52   You know, that they, and the only surprise really was that Apple did not expect them to publish the

02:37:56   story when they did, because they knew they were working on it. They had been asked for comment,

02:38:00   they had been presented with, "Hey, we're going to say X, Y, and Z. What do you have to say about

02:38:05   it. And they had done, you know, they did, after the story came out, they redoubled into

02:38:10   let's do it all over again. And make sure that not there's not a just a truth to this because my God,

02:38:15   look at what they've wrote. But you know, they gave the adamant defense to Bloomberg, and so

02:38:20   did Amazon before it was published and Amazon and Bloomberg's more or less was Oh, of course,

02:38:26   Apple and Amazon are going to say that. And they really, really disregarded the plain strenuousness

02:38:33   of their denials under the guise of—

02:38:35   Yeah, publicly traded companies making statements that extreme, especially with Tim Cook saying it,

02:38:43   he could go to jail for that if he were lying. It's not like he can say it and brush it off,

02:38:48   and executives have. It would be seen as manipulation of the stock price, and it could

02:38:53   be forced out as CEO and barred from serving in publicly held companies, things like that.

02:38:57   All right, another one. Here's a story you wrote, published on December 31st,

02:39:02   And criminally, criminally, I still haven't linked to it from during Fireball. This has fallen under

02:39:07   the guise of something that happens at during Fireball, where I either link to something when

02:39:11   it's hot off the presses, or I file it away and think I'm going to link to that when I'm when I

02:39:16   need something. And I've had that with this one in my back pocket. Now this is criminal because it's

02:39:21   here we are. It's February 21st. Well, yes, came out at a funny time. I forgot about that. Well,

02:39:25   it was New Year's Eve, which isn't exactly great. But it's the old guard of Mac Indie apps has

02:39:29   thrived for more than 25 years. And you wrote this feature for Macworld on, uh, the ones I remember

02:39:35   running were BB Edit from bare bones and PCalc from, uh, James Thompson at a TST, no, TLA, TLA.

02:39:44   Who else was in the story? Oh, Fetch, right?

02:39:49   Fetch. And then also Lemke software's, uh, Thor's, Twiston's Lemke's, uh, graphic converter.

02:39:54   Graphic converter.

02:39:55   Yeah. I picked those for somebody. BB Edit put out a thing about, hey,

02:39:58   we have merch for our 25th anniversary." And I was like, "Oh my God." And then, of course,

02:40:02   it's more than 25 years technically and whatever. And I'm like, you know, it'd be fun to look back

02:40:07   at this because I routinely, every day, I use Graphic Converter, BB Edit, Peacock every day,

02:40:14   and some other software I think that I use that some of it has been around for more than 25 years,

02:40:19   but it's changed hands once or twice, but it's still developed. And I'm like, what are the

02:40:23   indie, like indie developers, still a handful of people. Sometimes there were a lot more people

02:40:27   in the company and then shrunk or some are very consistent all along. Like Torsken Lemke,

02:40:32   Torsken Lemke is, it's mostly him now. And he has contractors who work in the past, I think he had

02:40:39   a little more like full time-ish help. But this is software that is basically, you worked on BB Edit,

02:40:45   it's not the same piece of software. It's kind of the, the intent is the same after a quarter of

02:40:53   a century, and most of the people involved are primarily making their living for it. I should

02:40:59   say at Fetch, it's Jim, whose last name I'm going to tell you?

02:41:02   Pete: Matthews. Jim Matthews.

02:41:03   Alan: Thank you. Jim Matthews, who won on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,

02:41:06   the story of how he funded.

02:41:08   Pete; Right. He was a professor at Dartmouth?

02:41:11   Alan; Yeah, he's on staff and he wrote this on. My dad calls me and says, "You've got to turn on

02:41:15   Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." I said, "Why?" He said, "Jim Matthews is on it." And I turn it on

02:41:20   and I watch him make a very smart decision to stop because he didn't, he knew he didn't know the

02:41:25   answer and walk away with a half a million dollars. So Jim Matthews, he now works for

02:41:30   the company that makes JIRA, Atlassian. He's, but he, so Fetch has become a little more of a

02:41:38   side project. It's still developed, it's still updated, but it's no longer in the same kind of

02:41:42   active forward motion. But I would still, you know, it's still out there and there's people

02:41:45   who love it. And if you've been using it with FTP or SFTP, it doesn't support all the new

02:41:49   cloud stuff in it the way transmit does. But it is still a piece of software that is totally

02:41:54   up to date. It's ready for Mojave. And it's a big part of his life for a big chunk of his life.

02:41:59   Yeah, I, I remember using it. It was before so now I've been using I was using fetch back before

02:42:06   the there's like a standard open Apple event. I think it's the ODB editor suite. I forget what

02:42:13   ODB stands for but it's a way that you can set an FTP client like fetch or in our key or transmit

02:42:20   to say for this type of file when I double click it don't download it instead open it and

02:42:25   it opens a temp file and then when you save all you have to do to make an edit is just save the

02:42:33   file command s and then it sends the apple event back to your FTP client and then your FTP client

02:42:38   will update the version on the software I was doing that before ODB even existed because I

02:42:43   I didn't want to use. I was so appalled by using Emacs or VI in a terminal window that

02:42:50   I was editing my computer science stuff on a Unix system back in the '90s before this

02:42:56   even existed, where I would just make a local copy, save it, and then I had to do one more

02:43:02   step. I had to drag it back into the fetch window and say, "Yes, overwrite. Do you want

02:43:07   to overwrite the file, yes. And so I was editing files, you know, on a remote server in BB

02:43:13   Edit before it even existed. And I was just thinking you say transmit. I remember, I think

02:43:17   transmit came out around—

02:43:19   It's not quite, it's very, it's close. I looked it up. It's like 91.

02:43:22   No, I think transmit was like 97 or 98.

02:43:25   I'm sorry, oh, I'm sorry. I'm doing the math wrong.

02:43:26   So it'd be like 20 years.

02:43:28   Yeah. So there's, but it's really, I mean, I—

02:43:30   But I remember when, so transit at 20 years old, transmit, I'm using the original, remember

02:43:36   original name was Transit. And they ran panic, the cable and Steve ran into like a trademark

02:43:42   conflict. And they'd already built up all this goodwill around the name transit as their

02:43:48   name. And they had the truck icon already and and this great branding and they didn't

02:43:53   know what to do because they're just two kids who are getting started and, and then it like

02:43:58   the I forget who I probably cable but one of them came up with Well, what if we just

02:44:02   call it "transmit," and they realized not only is that verbally very similar—it starts with the

02:44:08   same four letters—it actually fits the branding even better. It's actually the better word over

02:44:16   the two. But anyway, I still think of "transmit" as the upstart. It's the new FTP client, right?

02:44:23   Pete: I know, yeah.

02:44:24   Pete: It's 20 years old and has been in constant development, but it's the new one.

02:44:30   - And I use, I mean, Graphic Converter is my go-to app,

02:44:33   partly because of its batch processing.

02:44:35   I had to do something the other day with a,

02:44:37   I was doing a take control book,

02:44:39   and I needed to do this thing where I was resizing it,

02:44:41   make sure it was retina, and the resolution,

02:44:43   and you know, the usual thing.

02:44:45   And I was like, "Yeah, I can write an Apple script,

02:44:46   "I can do Automator," and I'm like, "No, no, no, no, wait.

02:44:48   "I just need to do, I crack open Graphic Converter,

02:44:51   "and I do a batch thing in there,

02:44:52   "and I just am like drag and drop and click,

02:44:55   "and it's just fantastically useful."

02:44:57   I mean, it was built as a file conversion,

02:45:00   you know, it's Graphic Converter, and it supports,

02:45:02   I forget what he said, but like over 200 formats

02:45:05   or something. - Right.

02:45:06   - But it's like, yeah, I had this idea.

02:45:09   Oh, sorry, go ahead.

02:45:09   - Well, at a time when most apps support the graphic files

02:45:12   that the OS supports, you know, like Graphic Converter

02:45:16   did all the hard work of actually having the native support

02:45:19   for these formats built in, and that's why it has, you know,

02:45:22   this list of formats that's well above and beyond

02:45:25   what the system supports natively.

02:45:29   - Well, and I was having this conversation

02:45:30   with my wife about something we'll talk about in a minute,

02:45:32   which is putting something away archivally for centuries.

02:45:36   And she was like, "Will someone be able to read

02:45:38   "this movie file that you're putting on a USB stick

02:45:41   "in hundreds of years?"

02:45:42   And I said, "Yes."

02:45:44   I'm so confident 'cause I won't be here.

02:45:46   But it was partly 'cause graphic converter, right?

02:45:48   Like in 200 years, we'll be able to run graphic converter

02:45:52   and open like a 1960s image format.

02:45:55   In 200 years, there'll be somebody like Graphic Converter

02:45:59   for movie files as well.

02:46:00   Like I'm not concerned for a non DRM protected files,

02:46:03   but it is Graphic Converter that gives me the hope

02:46:06   for the future that we'll still be able to,

02:46:08   like OpenLibre, if you need to open an Apple works file

02:46:11   from version 1.0, I think OpenLibre has filters in it.

02:46:15   - Really? - Open it in a moderate.

02:46:16   Yeah, I had to do that.

02:46:17   Someone asked for advice.

02:46:18   They found a bunch of old disks.

02:46:20   I think that's the one.

02:46:22   But if it's just a straight, if it's just a conversion,

02:46:24   it's an encoding thing, there's all,

02:46:26   graphic inverter, the joy of it is

02:46:28   they don't have to change it.

02:46:30   Like he wrote some formats in the 90s

02:46:32   that will never have to be changed.

02:46:34   This has to upgrade the frameworks

02:46:36   that still work within the latest OS.

02:46:38   But anyway, and what's funny is that I got email

02:46:41   from some developers, nobody really like that in a shape,

02:46:43   but they're like, "You know, I've been around for 25 years."

02:46:45   Like Plum Amazing, PopCare, the thing that predated keycaps.

02:46:51   that's it's still being developed, same people.

02:46:55   And so I was like, you know, I can only fit so much in,

02:46:56   you're totally awesome also,

02:46:58   but I try to pick like four examples and whatever.

02:47:01   And I'm like, I could probably write one that featured,

02:47:04   that's the amazing thing to feel,

02:47:05   to say maybe there's 15 pieces of Mac software

02:47:09   developed by independent developers

02:47:11   who are still working on it.

02:47:12   Maybe sometimes part-time,

02:47:13   maybe it hasn't advanced in a while,

02:47:15   but it's still fully supported,

02:47:16   up to date 64-bit compatible or already.

02:47:20   It's really cool, I love that.

02:47:22   - You know what's funny?

02:47:23   I remember pop care,

02:47:26   but I don't know that I've ever spoken about it

02:47:28   with anybody in my life,

02:47:29   because in my mind, I've always said it, pop char.

02:47:32   Even though I knew--

02:47:33   - Oh my God, I don't know.

02:47:34   I've never said it that loud before.

02:47:35   - Even though I knew that the char stood for character,

02:47:39   I've always, I think that it wasn't Pascal

02:47:42   that used to have a char character type

02:47:44   like to hold one letter,

02:47:46   and I always thought of it as char,

02:47:48   even though I knew it stood for character,

02:47:50   just because it made it what I wanted to type.

02:47:54   I don't know. - I think we said it char

02:47:55   because if you said car, no one knew what you were saying.

02:48:00   - Right, it was unambiguous to pronounce it as char.

02:48:03   - I think I called it pop char.

02:48:04   Now that you say that, wait, pop char, pop chair.

02:48:07   - Pop char. - I don't know, it's funny.

02:48:08   I don't think I've ever said it aloud.

02:48:11   I used it back in the QuarkXPress days

02:48:13   when I was doing a lot of page layout.

02:48:14   Pop char was the most amazing thing.

02:48:17   And over time, I'd need it less

02:48:18   because I don't have a specialized need.

02:48:21   But what an incredible thing.

02:48:22   This person's done, and there's other stuff,

02:48:24   like suitcases still developed, but not by the same people.

02:48:28   It's gone through different hands.

02:48:29   And it shows how much the community is committed

02:48:33   to these developers, not how much developers

02:48:35   are committed to what they've been doing.

02:48:36   And sometimes products get Sherlocked

02:48:38   or they lose their necessity, but it's really,

02:48:42   what a great thing.

02:48:43   - Yeah, it really is.

02:48:45   Anyway, I swear I'm gonna link to it on Daring Firewall,

02:48:47   but I will also include it in the show notes.

02:48:49   And then last but not least, as we wrap up,

02:48:52   you are in the midst, I think we got about a week out.

02:48:56   - We got a week out, I know.

02:48:57   - All right, well that's good.

02:48:58   This is the time to hit, this is the time to hit it.

02:49:00   We're gonna, this episode should drop tomorrow.

02:49:02   We'll have six days left,

02:49:03   but you've got a Kickstarter going on.

02:49:06   You've done a couple, you did a Kickstarter a year ago,

02:49:09   two years ago for the Letterpress book.

02:49:12   - I've been kinda doing them little by little.

02:49:14   I've been, I've done, what have I done now?

02:49:17   done seven and five have funded my last five in a row have funded and it's not like I broke the

02:49:24   code but I did one for a letterpress book in 2017 when I had a design residency which I essentially

02:49:29   funded the cost I did an edition of that and and thank you for your participation in that so now

02:49:35   you have a copy now it is one of the nicest I mean this not just because you're a guest on my show it

02:49:39   is one of the nicest books I own it is it is an artifact and and and to me as we rocket forward

02:49:46   into an ever more digital future and I spend so much more time reading stuff on screens,

02:49:51   having an actual—that's the only word I can think of—making an actual printed book more of an

02:49:58   artifact and something that appeals to senses other than your sight, you know, just the feel

02:50:04   of it is—it's always been a nice thing and I've always been obsessed with books, obviously not to

02:50:10   your degree, but I've always been obsessed with printed books and printing technology, but it's

02:50:16   It's really one of the nicest things that I own.

02:50:19   I just--

02:50:19   - Well, thank you so much.

02:50:21   And it was, you know, it was a massive amount of effort

02:50:23   'cause I printed it on a essentially manual letterpress.

02:50:26   The inking thing was motorized.

02:50:28   And that, so 2017, I had this residency

02:50:30   and I printed the book, you know, I designed the book.

02:50:33   You, it's digitally designed, output to plastic,

02:50:37   rubbery plates that are then printed on letterpress.

02:50:39   It was this whole melding of old and new.

02:50:41   And that year I went to the Hamilton Wood Type

02:50:43   and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin,

02:50:46   on the lake for their Waze Goose, their annual confab,

02:50:50   where letterpress printers and type designers

02:50:52   from all over the world come and had this great time

02:50:56   at the end of the year, had this incredible year.

02:50:57   And then this thing came up where Monotype calls me

02:51:00   and says, you know, we're doing a revival

02:51:02   of Five Typefaces by Bertolt Volpe,

02:51:04   who is, who died in 1989,

02:51:07   who is my favorite type designer in the world.

02:51:09   - Really?

02:51:10   - And I'm like, yeah, it was just this coincidence.

02:51:11   They had no idea I had any interest.

02:51:13   Do you want to write about it?

02:51:14   Oh, and by the way, we have an exhibition we're underwriting in London of his papers

02:51:19   and the original, and I'm like, "Lynn," my wife, "Lynn, how would you feel if I went

02:51:24   to London to a type exhibition?"

02:51:25   She's like, "You go. Go." And I wound up coming up with a book idea and going to London

02:51:32   and going to the exhibition and going to two type museums there that are barely open to

02:51:38   the public. And I wrote a book called London Kerning about those museums and sort of London

02:51:42   of London type history, and that fed into this wacky thing I'm doing right now. So, in the last

02:51:48   two years, I've gone to four different type and printing museums, two in London, one in Portland,

02:51:54   Oregon, and this one in Wisconsin. And I've created this project called the Tiny Type Museum

02:51:58   and Time Capsule. This is my latest Kickstarter. And it's basically like a little museum with

02:52:04   genuine type artifacts. So, it'll have metal type and wood type, it'll have some of the molds used

02:52:11   make hot metal, you'll be able to get a linotype slug. So a

02:52:15   metal slug set on the old hot type settings, hot metal type

02:52:18   setting system used mostly by newspapers with your custom

02:52:21   text. I'm doing a small letterpress printed book that I'm

02:52:24   not putting my hand that if it raises enough money, I'll be

02:52:28   able to have that set in hot metal and printed in linotype,

02:52:31   probably in England with people I met on this last trip. And the

02:52:37   idea is that I had this thought of like, there, there are a

02:52:40   are a bunch of type museums around the world. Many of them are sort of, they're not open

02:52:43   very much or they're teetering financially. Very few are well funded. Some are funded

02:52:47   by the state in Europe or by, there's a place called Tipoteca in Italy that's funded

02:52:52   by this family of printers for generations. And they've poured an incredible amount

02:52:58   of money into this institution. I would love to go there. It's near Venice. But so this

02:53:02   is a museum that you can own and hold that has actual pieces of type and printing history

02:53:07   in it. And you get you as a as a backer of the Kickstarter, get your own personal, tiny

02:53:13   type museum. That's, that's the, that's the gimmick. Because I was thinking, I was thinking

02:53:18   I should I had this thought after going to all these museums, I'm like, you know, none

02:53:21   of them are nearby. I wish I had some resources myself. Maybe I should make a little museum

02:53:26   for myself. I'm like, no, no, no, I should make a museum for other people. And so I have

02:53:30   a friend who's a woodworker. She's taking cabinetry courses now, but she already is

02:53:34   fine woodworker and she's kind of honing all her skills. And she and I talk about this. She's also

02:53:39   a letterpress printer and she worked at Glowforge, which is the 2D laser cutter company that's here

02:53:44   in Seattle, a friend of mine founded. And so, we're talking about this and I'm like, you know,

02:53:49   you can make a box and I could do, huh! So, she's designed a prototype and she's going to make these

02:53:56   beautiful hand-joined boxes that are going to last for centuries, like a little beautiful piece

02:54:02   of woodworking with drawers. The book is going to slide into a slot in the case. We're going to hide

02:54:08   something in the case too. We're still working out the details. There will be something hidden in

02:54:11   secret in each case as well. And then there'll be two drawers. One will have sort of flat things,

02:54:16   and the other will have metal and other objects. And it's exciting. I sent an email to Eric

02:54:22   Spiekerman about it. He's like, one of the greatest designers in the world. He's like,

02:54:25   "This is very exciting. How can I help you?" I'm like, "How am I?" You know, it's like,

02:54:28   all right. I've interviewed him and I've kind of correspondents with him. He's like,

02:54:32   "Let me send you some stuff." So, I have some metal he sent me. He's like, "We could print

02:54:36   a postcard, letterpress studio in Berlin." And so, there's various people who really want to be

02:54:41   involved in it too, because it's partly a way to, I mean, the time capsule aspect is like,

02:54:48   I'm not trying to make it a conceit. It's really, each of these things will really be a

02:54:52   preservation of history. So, if you find, you know, you can use it as a teaching tool,

02:54:56   as your own thing, but even in like 100, 200, 500 years, the things inside are not going to degrade.

02:55:02   The metal will not melt. The wood is all hard-aged, seasoned stuff that's used for wood type. So,

02:55:09   and the books can be printed on your acid-free paper, everything's going to be whatever.

02:55:13   So, this thing is, I mean, I wish I'd be here in 500 years to see it, but I really am thinking

02:55:18   about it in that way, that it's like, both has present utility, but it will be a way to send,

02:55:24   You know, send a gift to the future too.

02:55:26   uh Eric Spiekerman at I don't even know where you start

02:55:30   he uh he has a new book I forget who he did it with I have it

02:55:35   does he have a new book how do I not know that?

02:55:38   didn't the with the guy who co-founded Wired magazine right?

02:55:41   oh yeah yeah he did this thing what he what I'm going to get from him as well is uh this is a

02:55:46   story I wrote for uh in uh late 2017 is when I met him is I did a skype interview about it

02:55:53   He has developed a hybrid digital letterpress approach. He calls it digital letterpress.

02:55:58   Pete: Yeah.

02:55:58   Alan: He figured out, he's invested like, 60,000 euros into adopting a machine that makes plates

02:56:05   for, mostly for package printing called flexography. And these plates, these rubbery plates,

02:56:10   are exactly the kind of thing I use for my book project as well. But he wanted to be able to

02:56:15   ingrate, basically to laser cut an entire, like, eight up printed sheet at once. So,

02:56:22   So you can print eight pages of a book at one time on a larger press.

02:56:25   And he's put all this money into it and he developed it. So is a Louis Rosetto.

02:56:29   That's it.

02:56:29   Book's called Change is Good.

02:56:31   And they did a Kickstarter and I've got a copy of it. It's amazing.

02:56:34   I do too. And I haven't read it, but I have, I have it.

02:56:37   I know. I've looked through it.

02:56:38   Is this in my giant pile of books to read?

02:56:41   So it's letterpress printed, but it's, it's, it, he's made it the most,

02:56:45   he's taken it the most easy way to go from, uh,

02:56:48   from digital into letterpress that has ever existed.

02:56:52   because you can image these big sheets at once,

02:56:55   and they printed it on an old letterpress

02:56:57   that's beautifully maintained,

02:56:59   that can print at high speed.

02:57:00   - Right, and it is the best of both worlds,

02:57:04   because digital design is better

02:57:09   than laying out metal type by hand.

02:57:12   Not better, but it is certainly faster and more flexible.

02:57:15   And nobody wants to give up the incredible efficiency

02:57:20   digital design, but on the other hand, the actual printed output of letterpress just cannot be

02:57:25   beaten. It is visceral, it's beautiful, it's everything you want it to be. So it truly is a

02:57:33   combination of, you know, you get this superior output without sacrificing the incredible

02:57:40   efficiency of the creative process doing it digitally. No, it's really, it's amazing. It

02:57:45   It could only be done in like, well, he started in 2017 or 2016 on it, and he's done books for

02:57:49   Sircampf and other publishers too. And, but so the museum I make, every museum is going to have

02:57:56   samples of printing in it. So it'll have the artifacts that are used for printing. And I've got

02:58:00   all, it's amazing. I may put a small font of type in so it'll actually have individual

02:58:05   small type characters. There's a foundry founded in 19, was it 15 in San Francisco,

02:58:11   that's still in operation. There's this couple called the Bixlers in upstate New York in

02:58:17   skinny atlays that have been running a foundry for decades. Ed Tufti's books, his original series,

02:58:23   I think of four books, were set in hot metal by the Bixlers because even though digital type

02:58:30   existed, Tufti did not like it at that time. Well, he wanted to use Bembo and Bembo was one of the

02:58:38   typefaces that its translation to digital was—I'm just stealing this all from Dean Allen's

02:58:45   great, late write-up of these great faces—but Bembo really was—its digital translation was

02:58:53   criminally bad. Because—

02:58:55   Yeah, there's better versions now. It was terrible at the time.

02:58:58   Basically, it was done in a robotic fashion where, "Here's the metal. Let's take precise

02:59:03   measurements will make a digital version that is exactly like this. And when you used it,

02:59:10   it came out way too spindly. I don't know what other adjectives. It was too thin and spindly

02:59:15   and fragile, whereas Bembo is this sturdy, sturdy text type. And it's because what they should have

02:59:22   been looking at is what did the metal Bembo look like on paper, not what did it look like.

02:59:28   Absolutely.

02:59:28   Well, not what did it look like. It's actually a great case study

02:59:32   for the way to do a digital translation, you know, right? Where in a certain sense, what they did was

02:59:38   more accurate because they were accurately modeling the shape of the letters on the metal.

02:59:43   But in practice, it was a tragedy because what actually came out of your laser printer when you

02:59:50   use the digital version of Bembo was not good. And so that's why. But in the meantime, Tufti has

02:59:58   commissioned an ET Bembo, a digital version of Bembo that actually is good.

03:00:03   Alan Corey That, yeah, right. Yeah, so he went from metal to his own version,

03:00:07   but there was this era, the prototype era, and a lot of type was redrawn for prototype,

03:00:12   which had its own parameters. So when they went to digital, they would take the large drawings for

03:00:16   prototype and just scan those. This is the whole thing, the monotype, the Bertolt Volpe face,

03:00:21   Albertus is the best known of his faces. Yeah, right, using the prisoner and a bunch of other

03:00:27   places. The version of Albertus that Monotype sold for 30 years is kind of terrible because it was

03:00:33   taken from prototype. And there's a younger designer's guy, Toshio Megari, who's become a—so

03:00:38   as a result of these books, Toshi has become a friend of mine. Volpe's youngest son, Tobi,

03:00:43   is a technology editor in Europe, and he and I are friends now. It's an amazing thing to have done

03:00:49   that London project. And so Toshi reinterpreted and redrew these five different faces, including

03:00:56   Albertus so that they were actually designed for modern typesetting and printing. And they're just,

03:01:02   I mean, he went back to the original brass patterns used by monotype to cut the metal,

03:01:11   and then to Volpe's original hand drawings done for monotype for this. And so they're not just

03:01:18   slavish to the original, but they're informed by Volpe's own hand and the interpretation.

03:01:24   Anyway, so part of what I mean, this is part of the thing is I'm going to include

03:01:27   Little bits and pieces of that whole era. So like the pre-Hot Metal era

03:01:32   includes some letterpress examples as digital letterpress with some examples from from Speakerman to include

03:01:39   Rich Keggler who runs p22 type foundry. It's got a bunch of stuff that we're gonna get from him

03:01:44   from someone from the digital era and

03:01:46   He's offered I'm going to include at least two films that it also in digital form making faces

03:01:53   about a metal type designer and graphic means that's about the

03:01:56   Phototype era. So yeah. Anyway, I want to make something that's like really

03:02:01   you want to take everything out and hold it in your hand and look at it and

03:02:05   We'll see we'll see it's getting it's getting close about two-thirds funded as we talk with a week left and that's right Xo

03:02:13   Let's go. Well, let's make it. Let's make it work and people can find out more at

03:02:18   Tiny type museum calm right? Yes. Yeah, it will redirect to the Kickstarter campaign and then after the campaign it will

03:02:25   Have its own own thing, but tiny tight museum calm. Let's make this let's get this funded

03:02:31   I I say you're gonna hit I think you're gonna make it you get it. It's as

03:02:34   Your as usual with yours though. It's gonna be right down to the wire. That's that's my trademark the the the last

03:02:41   Podcast crowdfunding and it funded with 15 seconds to go

03:02:47   last year. It was great. But the thing is, here's the deal. I've had so many amazing

03:02:51   conversations with people, design educators and designers, letterpress people and people

03:02:56   like my father, my mother was a typesetter for 50 years. It has been such a like, glorious

03:03:01   emotional experience. I'm happy when I can actually make the thing. But wow, and this

03:03:06   is what's great. And you know this from your interest and love of design and type is that

03:03:11   it's not just about the way something looks. There's this incredible emotional experience

03:03:15   around it and being part of that is always exciting to me and whenever I can get back

03:03:19   to it I just am so happy to step a little bit away from the digital side and back into

03:03:24   that kind of, or I should say from the non-aesthetic side and into the digital design and analog

03:03:29   design side.

03:03:30   Well, I'm glad you're doing it and I can't wait to see it hit.

03:03:36   Well, thank you very much.

03:03:37   Let's wrap it up.

03:03:38   Thank our sponsors for the week.

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03:04:01   50 bucks off with code talk show.

03:04:04   And tiny tight museum, Glenn's Kickstarter,

03:04:07   which is probably as you listen to this six days or less

03:04:11   before it goes up.

03:04:12   Let's make it happen.

03:04:15   Glenn, thank you for the time.

03:04:16   It's always a pleasure having you on the show.

03:04:18   Our interests overlap to a degree

03:04:20   that is almost frightening.

03:04:21   - I know, I was gonna say,

03:04:23   is "Moys and Lays" talk to you about all of this?

03:04:25   - BB Edit, old Mac apps, and letterpress typesetting.

03:04:29   - Bembo.