The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► It's like if there's any appliance I don't want to turn into a social network or advertising

00:00:06 ◼   ► platform, it's communications like a phone.

00:00:10 ◼   ► Like I don't want to know if somebody's having time for it.

00:00:12 ◼   ► This is not part of the show because talking about Skype is like, it's like a college newspaper

00:00:17 ◼   ► columnist writing about writing a college newspaper.

00:00:20 ◼   ► Dude, you have to include this in the show because here's the problem.

00:00:25 ◼   ► It's like, everybody goes around with this,

00:00:28 ◼   ► Skype works fine until it doesn't.

00:00:30 ◼   ► It's mostly fine, it's annoying,

00:00:32 ◼   ► it's weird that it has ads in it.

00:00:35 ◼   ► It's strange that I've got, there's so much cruft,

00:00:37 ◼   ► I want like five buttons to click

00:00:41 ◼   ► to connect with the people that I talk to,

00:00:42 ◼   ► and I don't want anyone else to contact me.

00:00:44 ◼   ► - That's exactly what I want.

00:00:45 ◼   ► I want like somebody to build me a front end for Skype.

00:00:48 ◼   ► - Right, right, well it's a web app,

00:00:50 ◼   ► you can probably just put it together yourself,

00:00:51 ◼   ► you're just doing markdown.

00:00:53 ◼   ► just laugh because it's the podcast is it's like I'm half writer at during

00:00:58 ◼   ► fireball half podcaster on the talk show and on half of my business the

00:01:04 ◼   ► software just randomly changes under well I have to just I don't know you can

00:01:10 ◼   ► leave this out but like I so um Skype Skype the protocol is something

00:01:14 ◼   ► basically the as soon as RSS to serve audio began it became a thing the

00:01:21 ◼   ► question became, well, how do we record these with people who aren't in the room with us?

00:01:25 ◼   ► And in the earliest, I remember this being an issue when I was on frickin Mac break weekly.

00:01:29 ◼   ► It's like, ah, everybody hates Skype. But as of 2000, whatever, five, nobody had found

00:01:36 ◼   ► anything better than Skype. And the truth is, people are out there actively trying.

00:01:39 ◼   ► Yes, I know there are websites. Yes, I know there's all these other things. But if you

00:01:43 ◼   ► ever have to talk to somebody who's not a dear friend, there's a pretty good chance

00:01:46 ◼   ► you're going to have to use Skype for your job. And this is my quote unquote job. The

00:01:52 ◼   ► thing is though, like it is you've nailed it. It's like, yeah, I guess you could use

00:01:57 ◼   ► FaceTime, you could use stuff, but like this could just go away. And I don't know what

00:02:02 ◼   ► I would like the other half of my business. I'm, I'm so utterly professional and conservative

00:02:09 ◼   ► in my tool. Like you, you're so into making, you've got, you've got a movable type from

00:02:13 ◼   ► 1977 you've got all you got your little fonts in there you know it's funny you

00:02:17 ◼   ► know you like to roll your eyes the end joke in episode 5 of season 2 of Stranger

00:02:22 ◼   ► Things they're using movable type oh I'm kidding I'm not that far in well it's

00:02:29 ◼   ► nice in 1984 so it would be tough you know I like that program but I got

00:02:35 ◼   ► issues with with the songs that they pick for things it's it's you know okay

00:02:40 ◼   ► so I had this thing happen a couple weeks ago I've talked about this on all

00:02:42 ◼   ► my shows. I'm very sorry if you've heard them. I'm just sorry in general if you've heard

00:02:45 ◼   ► my shows. But I had a thing happen where like one day I'm recording with Roderick, everything's

00:02:50 ◼   ► fine. The next day, I try to Skype with Dan and check this one out. Okay, so I can text

00:02:56 ◼   ► with anybody in Skype, multiple people in groups, everything is fine. I call them, it

00:03:01 ◼   ► doesn't ring on their end. They call me, it doesn't ring on my end. I'm trying, I am pissing

00:03:08 ◼   ► on every spark plug I can find I'm in the console like an animal. I'm trying to figure

00:03:13 ◼   ► out what is wrong. It just didn't work for two weeks and I just brought my laptop in

00:03:18 ◼   ► my MacBook adorable, which is not super fun, but it works. Try it again. Monday work fine.

00:03:25 ◼   ► Yay. That doesn't give me a feeling of hope that like a mystery me problem appeared and

00:03:31 ◼   ► then disappeared and I don't know why that that is the pain. That's not how computers

00:03:35 ◼   ► I should be I don't we just I forget we just had a problem could be a corrupted font. I don't know

00:03:41 ◼   ► It's always a corrupted

00:03:44 ◼   ► Seriously though does it give you the fear a little bit like you're a podcast big shot now like you you got to do this

00:03:51 ◼   ► For stuff sometimes you get you know one to two episodes a month out if you're having a good month you push out the program

00:03:56 ◼   ► It doesn't it kind of give you the fear it does you know I've looked you know, it's funny. It's like I do I

00:04:03 ◼   ► Don't know if this comes as a surprise to you, but I'm not really I'm not really one to

00:04:08 ◼   ► Keep good records

00:04:11 ◼   ► throughout the year

00:04:13 ◼   ► Mm-hmm, and I think traditionally in the modern and in

00:04:17 ◼   ► incarnation of this show I've averaged somewhere around 40 episodes a year, so

00:04:23 ◼   ► Ostensibly, it's weekly. It's never really been close. It's been around 40 nominally. We're not gonna be 30. This is episode

00:04:30 ◼   ► I think this is the 31st of 2017. I

00:04:33 ◼   ► I felt like things were, see, I don't know,

00:04:36 ◼   ► you're such a black box.

00:04:37 ◼   ► I don't know if you're at Disney.

00:04:38 ◼   ► I don't know what you're doing.

00:04:39 ◼   ► I noticed that sometimes, as everybody knows,

00:04:42 ◼   ► you get a little careless with your references

00:04:45 ◼   ► and I'll see some brackets that make it into the post.

00:04:49 ◼   ► And that's when everybody knows

00:04:49 ◼   ► you're probably on a lounge chair having a beverage.

00:04:52 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:04:53 ◼   ► You wouldn't do that on your Mac.

00:04:55 ◼   ► - No, I might, I might, I might,

00:04:56 ◼   ► but it's more likely to happen

00:04:58 ◼   ► while I'm doing it from the phone.

00:04:59 ◼   ► - If it doesn't harm your opsec, if you are,

00:05:02 ◼   ► you've probably talked about this before, but like as of today,

00:05:04 ◼   ► like you're somewhere remote,

00:05:06 ◼   ► you go to a Disney property with your family and you want to,

00:05:08 ◼   ► you want to post something about gene Munster. What do you,

00:05:10 ◼   ► what do you draft that in? How do you post that?

00:05:12 ◼   ► I'd usually just do it right in the movable type web app,

00:05:17 ◼   ► which I've sort of customized over the years.

00:05:19 ◼   ► On an iPhone. Wow.

00:05:22 ◼   ► And if it's longer and it used to be a problem in the earlier years of the

00:05:25 ◼   ► iPhone, where back in the days when,

00:05:29 ◼   ► when ram was tighter and remember you'd leave safari and you'd come back to safari and it

00:05:35 ◼   ► would just have to reload but yeah when it reloads when you've got a mostly edited post

00:05:41 ◼   ► in a text area field it makes you a little angry i i rarely type that doesn't happen

00:05:47 ◼   ► as you know the iphone is just sort of just sort of reached the point where it never happens

00:05:51 ◼   ► but if it's a little bit longer than that then i'll copy and paste everything and do

00:05:55 ◼   ► it in Vesper or the Notes app or something?

00:05:58 ◼   ► The most I type anything that I care about in the native app, I realize that I'm a lunatic.

00:06:06 ◼   ► But like if I'm texting somebody like with you and I message you, it's like, that's fine.

00:06:09 ◼   ► That's okay. Like that's going to be fine. But like almost everything I do, if it's something

00:06:13 ◼   ► I just need to capture really quickly, it starts in drafts. And then I have a little

00:06:18 ◼   ► script in drafts that will take the first line and add a date stamp to it and put it

00:06:22 ◼   ► in my text files folder and then I'll open it up usually in editorial and that's where

00:06:29 ◼   ► I do a lot of my jazz with markdown and stuff like that. But it's one reason the Twitter

00:06:34 ◼   ► character count thing isn't driving me completely crazy because I still write, I still draft

00:06:39 ◼   ► most things in a legitimate app that's got an actual character count in it.

00:06:42 ◼   ► Even your tweets?

00:06:43 ◼   ► Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. 100%. You can't get returns in the Twitter app.

00:06:50 ◼   ► use Twitter effort. Right. Okay. Yeah. Um, yeah, no,

00:06:55 ◼   ► I write it in drafts usually and then drafts is synced.

00:06:57 ◼   ► So it syncs with all the devices, but anyways, it's kind of boring,

00:07:00 ◼   ► but do you ever imagine Markdown would be this sturdy? No. Well,

00:07:03 ◼   ► it's a funny, it's, it's, it's funny because I was,

00:07:07 ◼   ► I really thought that I had something when it first came out, I really thought,

00:07:12 ◼   ► I was like, you know what, this is it. And, and bless his heart.

00:07:15 ◼   ► Aaron Swartz was a super excited too. And, and, uh,

00:07:20 ◼   ► And the history of that collaboration is sort of muddied because what I think I've talked

00:07:25 ◼   ► about this before. Do you want to go back? You want to go back to 2003?

00:07:29 ◼   ► I absolutely would. I mainly knew Aaron's contribution as the Python script that would

00:07:34 ◼   ► go backwards was how I mainly remember him being involved. But he was there from nearly

00:07:38 ◼   ► day one.

00:07:39 ◼   ► Right. He had

00:07:40 ◼   ► You know what I'm talking about? Like he had the dot pie that you made mark down HTML.

00:07:45 ◼   ► And I feel like he had something that would do

00:07:48 ◼   ► It would mark down and turn it or no take HTML and mark down a fight

00:07:52 ◼   ► So you could copy and paste like new source on a web page and it would ignore just skip all the garbage tags

00:07:57 ◼   ► and then just take tags like italics and

00:07:59 ◼   ► The the link yeah, just the the a H refs and turn them into real links

00:08:05 ◼   ► How far back so there was Dean Allen's textile right which was a markdown sort of thing but not that close

00:08:14 ◼   ► It was a little bit. So what was that preceded by set text? Yeah, that was there they were all there

00:08:20 ◼   ► You know there were a whole bunch of these little formats, but none of them

00:08:23 ◼   ► Really did the right thing none of them were really meant just specifically for turning it into HTML except textile was

00:08:29 ◼   ► But I didn't like it because I still had seemed to have a lot of good

00:08:33 ◼   ► Gibberish up front. Do you ever write tear off the thing that you used to write man pages?

00:08:38 ◼   ► It's no I mean only only when I was playing like with trying to learn it

00:08:43 ◼   ► I never used it for anything. The way that those things work is everything is preceded

00:08:48 ◼   ► by some kind of code. So there's like something at the beginning of every paragraph or line

00:08:53 ◼   ► to tell you what this line is. And it's tercer than writing raw HTML because that's the one

00:09:01 ◼   ► thing is when you're just writing raw HTML, it's just a lot of just a lot of the tags

00:09:07 ◼   ► are just it's just character. It's just character salad. There's so much stuff like the most

00:09:11 ◼   ► basic one is for writing legit HTML in the modern age, you need an opening and closing

00:09:16 ◼   ► paragraph tag, which I understand semantically why you need that. But that's really crufty.

00:09:21 ◼   ► Exactly. Right. Opening and closing is exactly it where you just you don't need it. So textile

00:09:26 ◼   ► got rid of a lot of that. And if you were just writing in a plain text editor and you

00:09:29 ◼   ► didn't have any kind of helper or WYSIWYG type thing, it would save you tons of characters

00:09:32 ◼   ► and your stuff was more readable. And a guy named Brad Choate, I'm not sure I've known

00:09:39 ◼   ► him for years and I don't know if he's chosen or Cho at but I think he's choked worked at

00:09:43 ◼   ► six apart and and helped make a much better textile plug-in for movable type and he had

00:09:49 ◼   ► some ideas for like improving it and he and Dean Allen you know Dean took those ideas

00:09:55 ◼   ► and then I typed in because I knew Dean and I knew Brad and I wrote to them with my ideas

00:09:59 ◼   ► and Dean and Dean everybody's got no steam wrote back and said these ideas are fantastic

00:10:08 ◼   ► fantastic but it's sort of like a different thing you should just go make

00:10:12 ◼   ► the thing

00:10:12 ◼   ► and I thought you know what you're probably right

00:10:16 ◼   ► I never a whole bunch of other formats I can't remember them all there's one

00:10:21 ◼   ► called restructured

00:10:22 ◼   ► text I think which well then there was also the abbreviated

00:10:26 ◼   ► are lowercase EST capital St

00:10:30 ◼   ► oh yeah do remember and also the the well it wasn't PHP BB but there was also

00:10:35 ◼   ► a pretty at the time a fairly common

00:10:38 ◼   ► Markdown ask markup language for using forums. Yeah, that was be widely adopted was very very it was in terrible

00:10:44 ◼   ► It was really bad. Aaron had one called ATX that never got any pickup at all

00:10:50 ◼   ► I don't know that anybody ever other than Aaron really used it

00:10:53 ◼   ► But he had a web page describing it and there are some good ideas in there and I stole from I stole from everybody

00:10:58 ◼   ► to make markdown

00:11:00 ◼   ► and

00:11:03 ◼   ► Basically, you know and the idea was because I think the first year and a half of during fireball

00:11:07 ◼   ► I was writing everything in raw HTML.

00:11:09 ◼   ► And then I started writing not so much in raw HTML,

00:11:13 ◼   ► but then I had scripts in BB Edit that would put the P tags in.

00:11:16 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:11:17 ◼   ► So I didn't have to have the P tags while I

00:11:18 ◼   ► was editing an article.

00:11:20 ◼   ► And then only at the very end, I'd put them in.

00:11:22 ◼   ► But then when I went to make a typo error, fix a typo,

00:11:25 ◼   ► at some point you have to go and once you convert to HTML,

00:11:27 ◼   ► it's stuck in HTML.

00:11:29 ◼   ► And I thought that stuck.

00:11:30 ◼   ► So I emailed a bunch of people.

00:11:32 ◼   ► And for folks who aren't familiar with this,

00:11:34 ◼   ► the sucky part is that I run into this with Squarespace,

00:11:36 ◼   ► which is a great service and I love it,

00:11:38 ◼   ► but like if I've done something to HTML,

00:11:40 ◼   ► I forget and I'll go in and I'll select something

00:11:44 ◼   ► and put two asterisks around it,

00:11:46 ◼   ► forgetting that that's not gonna get processed.

00:11:48 ◼   ► 'Cause once it's inside of an HTML,

00:11:50 ◼   ► I'm using your words,

00:11:51 ◼   ► but once it's inside an HTML container,

00:11:53 ◼   ► it won't be processed as Markdown.

00:11:54 ◼   ► - So I emailed a bunch of people

00:11:55 ◼   ► who I thought might be interested.

00:11:57 ◼   ► Once I had like a basic,

00:11:59 ◼   ► basic does half the things Markdown

00:12:01 ◼   ► actually does version working

00:12:03 ◼   ► and my basic description of where I thought going.

00:12:06 ◼   ► And I emailed a bunch of people and everybody was,

00:12:09 ◼   ► I don't know how many people, maybe 10 people.

00:12:10 ◼   ► And everybody was very nice, you know,

00:12:12 ◼   ► like that looks cool.

00:12:13 ◼   ► But I could tell that was like, that looks cool,

00:12:15 ◼   ► but I'll just keep doing what I'm doing.

00:12:16 ◼   ► I don't get it.

00:12:17 ◼   ► Except Aaron, Aaron got it immediately.

00:12:19 ◼   ► And he was like, oh my God, this is brilliant.

00:12:21 ◼   ► And so he was like, just my,

00:12:25 ◼   ► he was my only active beta tester really.

00:12:27 ◼   ► And so like for like three, four months,

00:12:29 ◼   ► I just kept adding to it.

00:12:30 ◼   ► And at that point I had it installed on my

00:12:32 ◼   ► daring fireball, a movable type installation.

00:12:36 ◼   ► And nobody knew it wasn't released as a public beta

00:12:41 ◼   ► or announced or anything,

00:12:42 ◼   ► but I'd keep adding things to it or changing things.

00:12:45 ◼   ► And there were certain changes I would make

00:12:49 ◼   ► that were like not backwards compatible.

00:12:51 ◼   ► And so like, I actually did the research the other day.

00:12:55 ◼   ► I like looked up like the first markdown post

00:12:59 ◼   ► in movable type.

00:13:01 ◼   ► the first one that was set to be marked down not raw HTML. And I think it was like October

00:13:07 ◼   ► of 2003. And I don't think I announced the public beta till March. And it hasn't changed

00:13:14 ◼   ► much since that March public beta announcement. But pretty much every single Daring Fireball

00:13:18 ◼   ► entry I wrote from October till March, every week I'd have to go back and change every

00:13:24 ◼   ► one of them to like, you know, to make, you know what I mean? Like I would make it, I'd

00:13:30 ◼   ► make a change to markdown in January and I'd have to go back to October and make sure that

00:13:35 ◼   ► I, you know, whatever syntax I used wasn't in any of those posts in October, November,

00:13:39 ◼   ► December, early January. Um, but it really made markdown way better. Like, like I don't

00:13:45 ◼   ► think if I think if I had released the version that I had when I first started using it,

00:13:49 ◼   ► it would have, it would have, nobody ever would have heard of it. Uh, well anyway, what

00:13:55 ◼   ► happened was we've released it and Aaron was super, super excited about it. And Aaron,

00:13:59 ◼   ► I guess is, you know, he was friends with everybody. He knew everybody. So he knew Corey

00:14:02 ◼   ► Doctorow personally. So he wrote to Boeing, Corey at Boeing Boeing. And Aaron didn't take

00:14:08 ◼   ► credit as a co-collab as a, uh, you know, like a co-author of markdown, but the way

00:14:13 ◼   ► he wrote his email to Corey Doctorow, I think left Corey with the impression that it was

00:14:17 ◼   ► like a joint by Aaron Schwartz and John Gruber thing. And that made its way into Wikipedia

00:14:23 ◼   ► for years and years and years where it said that it was marked down, was created by John

00:14:27 ◼   ► Gruber and Aaron Swartz, blah, blah, blah, which and then you know, the all the unfortunate,

00:14:34 ◼   ► he was more of a conciliary. Yeah, he was like, I would call it and I don't know and

00:14:38 ◼   ► okay, you know, and to my and we were friends for, you know, afterwards. I mean, to my knowledge,

00:14:43 ◼   ► he never once deliberately took credit for it. I think it all came from the initial Boeing

00:14:47 ◼   ► Boeing announcement that said John Gruber and Aaron Schwartz have released markdown.

00:14:54 ◼   ► But then it's like once Aaron killed himself, it's like, you know, what am I going to do?

00:14:59 ◼   ► I know. And I've been meaning for years. The kid, the kid, the kid did so much. I met him

00:15:02 ◼   ► when he was like probably 15. I met him when he was like 16. It was terrifying. Right.

00:15:05 ◼   ► It was terrifying. And it was, he was, he was so scary. He was so intense and so smart.

00:15:11 ◼   ► It was really, really intimidating. He was like a woodland feature. He, he was like a

00:15:15 ◼   ► dog trying to talk about math with, with its owner. Okay. You know, I got basically two

00:15:23 ◼   ► two beefs in life with you. One, I don't understand the Yankees thing. The other one is we are

00:15:28 ◼   ► now in our 13th and a half year of contention about an issue that I posted to the Markdown

00:15:35 ◼   ► discussion in March of 2004. So this would be March 15th, 2004, responding to the thread

00:15:46 ◼   ► here. This is your, so I had said Markdown treats asterisks and underscores as indicators

00:15:50 ◼   ► emphasis. Text wrap with one asterisk or another wrapped in HTML. I said, "Probably leave the

00:15:54 ◼   ► game for a syntax suggestion, but I'm having a hard time getting used to--basically, I

00:16:00 ◼   ► wanted you to go with asterisk--one asterisk on either side is emphasis and an underscore

00:16:09 ◼   ► on either side is italic." And you wrote me a very, very, very bold--

00:16:14 ◼   ► >> You wanted emphasis or you wanted to be bold? Yeah.

00:16:16 ◼   ► Yeah, sorry. Yeah bull face. Yeah. Yeah, but and you wrote me this long and very thoughtful email about the history of all of this

00:16:23 ◼   ► You talked about set text you talked about

00:16:25 ◼   ► lowercase are

00:16:28 ◼   ► Estructed

00:16:29 ◼   ► text

00:16:31 ◼   ► It's so funny. I can't believe that it's been 13 years

00:16:34 ◼   ► That's one of the few things that I put in a markdown that I actually don't like I don't like using underscores for anything

00:16:39 ◼   ► I wish it though. I still get confused in different implement

00:16:42 ◼   ► this is not your fault, but I mean, it's different in what implementation still treat it differently,

00:16:47 ◼   ► especially in like a lot of the web browser ish versions of it where it or don't get me started on

00:16:52 ◼   ► Slack and they're stupid because when I write up, I write up the show notes for reconcilable differences

00:16:57 ◼   ► and I send it to a chairman Syracuse for his anointment and it looks like such a mess in Slack and

00:17:03 ◼   ► he, you know, he knows what it's supposed to look like, but it just drives me nuts. The Slack moon man

00:17:07 ◼   ► markdown syntax makes me so furiously angry. I think Slack does exactly what you want, whereas

00:17:12 ◼   ► Slack uses asterisks for bold and single underscores for italic.

00:17:16 ◼   ► Well, right now, now you got my brain all screwed up with Markdown and the way

00:17:21 ◼   ► it works in Markdown and now all other places, it seems really screwed.

00:17:24 ◼   ► What I was thinking about doing back in the day was using underscores to be the,

00:17:28 ◼   ► to be the wrappers around links because links are, Oh my God. Oh my God.

00:17:34 ◼   ► That's like, this is like man in the high castle. I can't even imagine that.

00:17:37 ◼   ► Oh my God. What an alternate universe that would be.

00:17:41 ◼   ► I love the brackets and the parentheses. Yeah, I think I kind of do too. And if anything,

00:17:46 ◼   ► it was a good move in hindsight because that's so many people no longer underline their links.

00:17:52 ◼   ► You know what I mean? Like so many web pages don't have underlines for links anymore. I

00:17:55 ◼   ► don't. Oh, I see what you're saying. So in other words, at the beginning of the link,

00:17:58 ◼   ► you'd put an underscore at the end of the link, you'd put another underscore and then

00:18:01 ◼   ► you'd put your parentheses for the URL or the brackets to put a URL reference. Right.

00:18:07 ◼   ► But then you'd have underlined text to indicate which is the thing.

00:18:12 ◼   ► Anyway...

00:18:13 ◼   ► You're very polite.

00:18:14 ◼   ► You said the downside would be that Markdown's format would no longer be the same everywhere.

00:18:18 ◼   ► If there's just one consistent style, Markdown should work exactly the same everywhere.

00:18:20 ◼   ► True.

00:18:21 ◼   ► It's also the case that this would add an entire layer of complexity to the software

00:18:24 ◼   ► and you close with "sorry to disappoint, comma, dash, JG."

00:18:29 ◼   ► Sorry to disappoint.

00:18:32 ◼   ► I am surprised.

00:18:34 ◼   ► So anyway, in the early years of markdown, I was disappointed because it didn't seem

00:18:37 ◼   ► to go anywhere. And I thought, my God, this is so great. I'm having so much fun writing

00:18:42 ◼   ► my web posts now that this, I loved it. I didn't want to turn back once I started using

00:18:47 ◼   ► it. It seemed crazy to type, to type, especially lists, lists are the ones where I am somebody

00:18:51 ◼   ► I'm a list maker. And the idea of making a list with opening and closing tags in nested

00:18:55 ◼   ► tags just seemed mental. I know. Well, and the other thing too is I really, really hate

00:19:01 ◼   ► the WYSIWYG list makers. I don't even like the one in Apple Notes, which is one of the

00:19:05 ◼   ► best ever. But I hate like when you're in a word processor and you type a bullet and

00:19:09 ◼   ► a thing and it's like, Oh, you're making a list and I'll put you in list mode. But then

00:19:12 ◼   ► it's like, it, how do you get out of this? It's like you're, they put you in a room where

00:19:18 ◼   ► you make lists and there's only, there's no door to get out. Patreon is really, I like

00:19:24 ◼   ► the Patreon service a lot, but their, their browser editor is like his mind boggling.

00:19:29 ◼   ► It's all like what you've just selected, you get a little pop up where you click on something

00:19:34 ◼   ► to do something, right?

00:19:36 ◼   ► Kind of like you would get in notes, but you get a pop up and it's like, is this a list?

00:19:40 ◼   ► Is this, and if you've got more than one screen full of text, it won't come up.

00:19:43 ◼   ► So you have to go through and keep selecting and selecting and selecting to make a long

00:19:47 ◼   ► list.

00:19:48 ◼   ► It's better than what we have.

00:19:49 ◼   ► The secret to markdown and the thing that drove people nuts at the beginning, and it

00:19:53 ◼   ► seems like it's become popular enough now that nobody bitches about it anymore, but

00:19:57 ◼   ► the secret to it and the difference between everything that came before it is that it

00:20:04 ◼   ► trusts you, the person typing the markdown to type saying markdown. There's all sorts

00:20:11 ◼   ► of ways that you could write. There's no way that you can parse it and say this is a valid

00:20:16 ◼   ► markdown document or not. You can't. It just trusts you to be sane and don't do something

00:20:22 ◼   ► stupid.

00:20:23 ◼   ► Well, it works a damn sight better than...

00:20:26 ◼   ► I mean, I like, again, I also really like Google Docs, but when I paste something into

00:20:30 ◼   ► Google Docs, it's just bananas.

00:20:33 ◼   ► And there's no...

00:20:34 ◼   ► They took away...

00:20:35 ◼   ► They used to have this ability to go in.

00:20:36 ◼   ► I know this is dumb and nobody but me wants this.

00:20:38 ◼   ► They used to have an edit...

00:20:39 ◼   ► I think it was edit as HTML was the selection.

00:20:42 ◼   ► And it would pop it up and you would be able to go in and whatever...

00:20:45 ◼   ► I imagine that the underlying platform stuff changed where it's not exactly HTML anymore,

00:20:50 ◼   ► but it's certainly not like any front page type nonsense.

00:20:52 ◼   ► Like you can now you go in and you go like, Oh, like turn off space after paragraph,

00:20:57 ◼   ► like do all this stuff. Like,

00:20:59 ◼   ► why are there all these bullets that are blank and then space under that?

00:21:03 ◼   ► And for some reason that just bugs me. Like I'm not that tightly wound about this stuff,

00:21:06 ◼   ► but I, if I'm going to do like a, you know, honestly like a sponsor read,

00:21:09 ◼   ► I want it to be very neatly formatted.

00:21:11 ◼   ► I want to understand where the parts of it are and I don't want you to just this

00:21:14 ◼   ► salad of like bullets and letters all over the place. It's,

00:21:17 ◼   ► you know what I've been thinking about doing for years and I think I'm at the

00:21:20 ◼   ► the point where I just need to find the time to bear down and do it. But I want to go back

00:21:26 ◼   ► to my old emails from 2003, 2004 with Aaron and put them together somehow and publish

00:21:34 ◼   ► them in some way as here's how Markdown came to be.

00:21:38 ◼   ► And I've...

00:21:39 ◼   ► Oh, like a, not an oral history, but an email history of Markdown.

00:21:43 ◼   ► An email history of Markdown and the decisions that we made and stuff like that. And see

00:21:47 ◼   ► what I misremember and stuff like that. And it's just part of it is that I'm lazy and

00:21:53 ◼   ► that seems like a big enough project that it's always worth putting out. But the other

00:21:56 ◼   ► part is just the genuine, it pains me in some way to think about going back and looking

00:22:03 ◼   ► at email from somebody who's died so tragically. But anyway, and then I thought, you know,

00:22:09 ◼   ► I don't know, maybe I could put it in ebook or something like that and you know, send

00:22:13 ◼   ► the proceeds to one of Aaron's pet causes or something like that. Anyway, I think it

00:22:19 ◼   ► would be interesting. One of the things I remember specifically was, and it's just like

00:22:24 ◼   ► the ways to make italics and there's two ways to do it, which in theory I'm against. In

00:22:30 ◼   ► theory there should be one way to do it.

00:22:31 ◼   ► Unambiguous way to do it, yeah.

00:22:34 ◼   ► But the reason that it supports both was it just seemed like there were so many people

00:22:39 ◼   ► who like on, you know, who used either plain text email or on Usenet or something like

00:22:43 ◼   ► that, who thought that underscores were the equivalent of italics and just as many people

00:22:50 ◼   ► thought that asterisks were the equivalent of italics.

00:22:52 ◼   ► Right, right, right. Well, it used to be, at least for me, I used to do a lot more of

00:22:57 ◼   ► scooting back and forth, like round-tripping between Markdown and HTML for mostly because

00:23:03 ◼   ► I was probably, because I was doing blog stuff more often, you know, wherever that was, whether

00:23:07 ◼   ► was Drupal or WordPress or whatever. But I don't have much occasion to go HTML to markdown

00:23:14 ◼   ► in my day to day. What I will sometimes do is I'll drag an HTML document into NV alt,

00:23:20 ◼   ► which will then do its best to take whatever the soup of any given HTML document is and

00:23:25 ◼   ► turn it into markdown. It's usually pretty good. But I mean, that's one, it seems like

00:23:29 ◼   ► the ambiguity becomes a factor if you're in an environment where you are taking HTML into

00:23:36 ◼   ► into turning HTML into Markdown and you want to consistently always be the same thing,

00:23:41 ◼   ► maybe for some kind of regex reasons like you never want it to be this instead of that

00:23:44 ◼   ► because it would confuse the machine.

00:23:45 ◼   ► Well, the other the other one that I remember that there's there would you know, I remember

00:23:50 ◼   ► this one was Aaron's idea was that there's two ways to make headers that you could set

00:23:56 ◼   ► text or so the C text style is you write a header. See text. You're probably right. I

00:24:03 ◼   ► I think see text every everything I think is wrong pronunciation wise so let's go set text

00:24:08 ◼   ► What is it it's you underline it with with I actually forget now I never use that style

00:24:15 ◼   ► I know I think one one set of equals is one and underline or dashes is h2

00:24:22 ◼   ► Okay. Yeah, that sounds right. I always do octave. So there's the the big problem with that is that you only get to h2

00:24:31 ◼   ► The other problem is it's more typing

00:24:33 ◼   ► And it was what's harder to format to Aaron had it in his ATX where it was just the octa Thorpe's

00:24:41 ◼   ► it was just the hashtags in front and

00:24:44 ◼   ► He was like you got to put this in I'm not typing all these, you know

00:24:49 ◼   ► I just want to type two octa Thorpe's in my header and hit return return and go and I was like, alright

00:24:55 ◼   ► alright, but I also liked the brilliance of

00:24:59 ◼   ► Like I'm sitting here as the author of markdown and I had a moment where I couldn't remember if equals was h1 or - was

00:25:04 ◼   ► H1, you know or vice versa. Whereas with the octa Thorpe's there's no doubt

00:25:07 ◼   ► One of them is h1 - is h2 3 is h3 up to 6 is h6. That's brilliant

00:25:13 ◼   ► Yeah, it's absolutely brilliant

00:25:15 ◼   ► And then the other thing I remember I seem to remember discussing this with Aaron is I was like

00:25:19 ◼   ► Is it weird that the one that seems like it has more emphasis meaning six octa Thorpe's for an 8/6 is actually the lesser?

00:25:27 ◼   ► And but then what we thought was that no because it's actually more like an outline right where the deeper you go

00:25:34 ◼   ► it's almost like a level of it's like a level of indentation and it's it's gonna work and it's

00:25:39 ◼   ► You know, it's clearly the one that sticks

00:25:41 ◼   ► I I think there's a lot of people who use markdown on a daily basis who don't even know about the equals and - thing. Oh

00:25:46 ◼   ► I would bet I want to start a new document. I live mostly in h2 and h3

00:25:51 ◼   ► H1 is this hallowed thing?

00:25:53 ◼   ► I kind of rarely use when you start a new document is h1 the title of the document or

00:25:58 ◼   ► is it a top level?

00:25:59 ◼   ► I've never known what to do about that.

00:26:01 ◼   ► I always start with h2 like if I'm doing show notes in a text document I always start with

00:26:07 ◼   ► like I might have you know two octothorpe pound sign two pound signs titles and topics

00:26:13 ◼   ► two pound signs follow-up two pound sign sponsor it's and then like listener feedback two and

00:26:18 ◼   ► then for each and then I'll just like do three octothorps listener Jason question about resetting

00:26:23 ◼   ► iPhone settings. You know what I mean? That's that makes the most sense. And then there's

00:26:28 ◼   ► some that will actually like make an outline for you now. Right. I mean, aren't there some

00:26:31 ◼   ► that'll give you like a left rail or there's some I, I don't, you know, all I use is I

00:26:37 ◼   ► use the most basic stuff. It's so bad. I should, I should get sexier with this stuff, but you

00:26:41 ◼   ► know, my trick that I have a daring fireball or if you add dot T X dot T X T to any of

00:26:47 ◼   ► of my articles permalinks,

00:26:48 ◼   ► you can get the raw markdown version.

00:26:51 ◼   ► So in that, the header part is actually part of a template

00:26:55 ◼   ► that that doesn't come out.

00:26:56 ◼   ► I don't type that when I type the article,

00:26:58 ◼   ► but I use, in that format, I use the H1 tag for the,

00:27:02 ◼   ► or H1's format for the title.

00:27:05 ◼   ► - Oh, look at that.

00:27:08 ◼   ► And you're using equals.

00:27:09 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:27:10 ◼   ► - How funny. - Yeah, 'cause that's H1.

00:27:12 ◼   ► But I don't have to do that, you know what I mean?

00:27:14 ◼   ► Like I don't do that manually.

00:27:15 ◼   ► That happens automatically.

00:27:16 ◼   ► and getting the exact right number of equals,

00:27:18 ◼   ► that's some kind of complicated reg ex

00:27:21 ◼   ► in my movable type template.

00:27:23 ◼   ► - I'm intrigued by the way you do your,

00:27:27 ◼   ► what do you call it, not the anchor,

00:27:28 ◼   ► but the way you title your links.

00:27:30 ◼   ► You usually do like two characters

00:27:31 ◼   ► that are like the author of the article.

00:27:34 ◼   ► Okay, all right, that's good.

00:27:36 ◼   ► - And where do I put them?

00:27:37 ◼   ► Sometimes I put here,

00:27:38 ◼   ► here's one where I put them all at the end.

00:27:41 ◼   ► - I used to be really meticulous

00:27:42 ◼   ► about always putting at the bottom.

00:27:43 ◼   ► - Sometimes on a longer article,

00:27:44 ◼   ► I like to put it right after the block quote.

00:27:47 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

00:27:47 ◼   ► Do you usually do that kind?

00:27:49 ◼   ► You don't do much in-line, do you?

00:27:51 ◼   ► - No, not really.

00:27:52 ◼   ► You can, you know, if you browse around on a daily basis,

00:27:54 ◼   ► you could see when I do in-line and when I don't.

00:27:56 ◼   ► The shorter the post, the more likely I am to do in-line.

00:27:59 ◼   ► - Of course.

00:27:59 ◼   ► Well, one thing that's nice,

00:28:00 ◼   ► and I think this is an NVL feature,

00:28:01 ◼   ► but when I'm in NVL,

00:28:03 ◼   ► so if you've got a URL in the clipboard,

00:28:06 ◼   ► you can select some text and hit, what?

00:28:08 ◼   ► Option command V, I think.

00:28:11 ◼   ► Let me try this.

00:28:12 ◼   ► - Isn't it funny how you do it without thinking,

00:28:14 ◼   ► But now that you have to talk about it, you can't.

00:28:16 ◼   ► I know.

00:28:16 ◼   ► I know.

00:28:17 ◼   ► Yeah, Option-Command-V. So if you've got a URL in the clipboard,

00:28:21 ◼   ► you select something.

00:28:22 ◼   ► You hit Option-Command-V. It turns the word you selected--

00:28:26 ◼   ► it puts the word you selected inside of brackets,

00:28:28 ◼   ► and then puts the URL in parentheses right after it.

00:28:31 ◼   ► It's a real huge time saver.

00:28:32 ◼   ► All right, so let's just rewind here for a little bit.

00:28:35 ◼   ► All right, sexy stuff.

00:28:35 ◼   ► You want to start the show?

00:28:37 ◼   ► So you got nv-alt. Now are you syncing that?

00:28:41 ◼   ► Yes, it's very funny.

00:28:42 ◼   ► I am apparently not the only person in this condition,

00:28:44 ◼   ► but I have a Dropbox folder called Elements

00:28:47 ◼   ► because there was a time when the text editor

00:28:49 ◼   ► called Elements came out when it,

00:28:51 ◼   ► this might've preceded the days of slash apps.

00:28:53 ◼   ► - That was Justin Williams' app.

00:28:55 ◼   ► - Right, and Elements was a really good--

00:28:58 ◼   ► - Was really, really good.

00:28:59 ◼   ► This is like a 2008, 2009.

00:29:01 ◼   ► - This is after I lost my mind with SimpleNote,

00:29:05 ◼   ► dropping some data one time and I was like,

00:29:06 ◼   ► that's it, game over.

00:29:07 ◼   ► Crisis of confidence.

00:29:11 ◼   ► Yeah, Justin made that, but it was hardwired to a top level Dropbox slash elements and

00:29:16 ◼   ► to this day, all of my text files, 600 text files are still Alex Cox.

00:29:22 ◼   ► Same way.

00:29:23 ◼   ► I'm going to say that when an app that syncs data, like a notes app loses data, it is to

00:29:29 ◼   ► me at least it is like you own a store and you've caught the kid at the cashier taking

00:29:35 ◼   ► money out of the register.

00:29:36 ◼   ► It's like it's you're out, you're done.

00:29:38 ◼   ► It is in a rage like I've got the kid by the back of the jacket and it's like get the you know

00:29:43 ◼   ► You frog marching out of your general exactly

00:29:47 ◼   ► Yeah, but it still happens sometimes and I don't I lose things sometimes and

00:29:57 ◼   ► Well, no, but you know what a lot of the times though for me

00:30:00 ◼   ► It's like you suspect the kid is just taking money out of the register. I can't prove it

00:30:06 ◼   ► But like when you can prove it. It's it's like it turns me into a

00:30:10 ◼   ► Red rage and I know you know and I don't want a bad mouth simple note because I believe and and they were pretty soft

00:30:16 ◼   ► They were pretty solid like 99, but I think they are now now that they're I think they're in good hands with the

00:30:23 ◼   ► The WordPress people what's what's the parent company at WordPress?

00:30:27 ◼   ► Automatic is is took over. I don't know. Yeah, I had no idea and now I just I have a Dropbox folder that I sync with

00:30:35 ◼   ► Dropbox folder syncs all my stuff in editorial and nv-alt that's a nv-alt points at that elements folder

00:30:40 ◼   ► Editorial is using that on iOS and then for drafts

00:30:43 ◼   ► I just use I think I'm just using iCloud sync for drafts because I don't want them

00:30:47 ◼   ► I don't want those little like one-liners to get mixed in with my actual file. Yeah

00:30:51 ◼   ► What do you use? What do you what do you use? I still use Vesper, but it no no longer sinks

00:30:58 ◼   ► So Vesper I have a combination

00:31:00 ◼   ► I've got Vesper on the phone and that is for certain.

00:31:03 ◼   ► You're like one of those people that has their pet stuffed. That's, that's Lulu.

00:31:08 ◼   ► She's a good, good girl.

00:31:10 ◼   ► I, I'm, I use Apple notes extensively and ever since the,

00:31:15 ◼   ► I think it was a year ago, the year ago,

00:31:17 ◼   ► I think revision is when they switched from their goofy eye map sinking to

00:31:22 ◼   ► cloud kit and whenever that was,

00:31:26 ◼   ► it was either a year ago or two years ago it, it,

00:31:28 ◼   ► their sinking became rock solid. And I love the shared thing. Like we have a shared note

00:31:33 ◼   ► right here. I do it every week with whoever's on the show. Their shared document thing is

00:31:38 ◼   ► dynamite. It really is. I love it so much. It's so great for birthdays and Christmas

00:31:43 ◼   ► and shopping. I use Apple Notes and on my Mac that I've got. So I've got an iPhone only

00:31:49 ◼   ► notes app Vesper on my iPhone. I've got Apple Notes which sinks everywhere. But then on

00:31:54 ◼   ► On my Mac, my Macs, I have Vesper, not Vesper, Yojimbo, where I keep a lot of stuff.

00:32:00 ◼   ► Oh, of course.

00:32:01 ◼   ► Now, Yojimbo syncs and it syncs extraordinarily well, but it's a Mac only app.

00:32:06 ◼   ► It only syncs from Mac to Mac.

00:32:09 ◼   ► And somehow in my head, I know where everything is.

00:32:13 ◼   ► I know exactly which type of things I put in Vesper that I want on my phone everywhere

00:32:17 ◼   ► I go.

00:32:18 ◼   ► I know exactly what type of things I put in Yojimbo.

00:32:21 ◼   ► And I know that everything else is in Apple Notes. And every once in a while I have to

00:32:26 ◼   ► search two of them to find something. But for the most part I just have this inexplicable

00:32:31 ◼   ► intuitive way of doing it. So for example...

00:32:33 ◼   ► Do you use Siri with Apple Notes very much?

00:32:36 ◼   ► No. Like how and what way to tell her to make a new note?

00:32:39 ◼   ► Well I mean the thing that limits me and how much I use Apple Notes, and candidly I way

00:32:45 ◼   ► overthink this, but you know me I'm trying to become the voice guy. And I want to utilize

00:32:49 ◼   ► that more. So I tend to name things in Apple Notes, obviously intuitively, but the way

00:32:55 ◼   ► I would name something in NV-ALT is pretty bananas. Like I have this really silly, like

00:33:00 ◼   ► for example, here is the latest episode of Back to Work in NV-ALT and in a text file

00:33:04 ◼   ► is B2W show-notex-e350-date.md. And that means that is the format that I use for every single

00:33:14 ◼   ► show notes thing. I could find show notes for anything instantly like that, but good

00:33:17 ◼   ► luck trying to use Siri to add something that's named in such a way. So my Apple notes are

00:33:24 ◼   ► like a four year old has named them. It's like TV to watch words I do not like books.

00:33:32 ◼   ► And so the idea is I want it to be all stuffed. It's intuitive that I could say to Siri that

00:33:36 ◼   ► I'd be able to add things to a list even though I'm not using it very much like that. And

00:33:41 ◼   ► in theory, I get it. I get where Apple is going with Siri and I get how they have like

00:33:45 ◼   ► a billion active users around the world and that these are normal people. But it's like

00:33:51 ◼   ► I miss the old ways of if you've got some kind of automation utility, there's a way

00:34:00 ◼   ► to make it so that if you have a weird header format like that or a first line format like

00:34:06 ◼   ► that, there's a way that you could go in and make it. In theory, there should be a way

00:34:11 ◼   ► that you could teach Siri that when you tell her to make a note that that she could she

00:34:15 ◼   ► could do something like that for you. And I'm you got to get the incantation right.

00:34:19 ◼   ► I mean, it's a little bit like timers and reminders. Are you creating? Are you creating

00:34:22 ◼   ► a note? Are you adding to a note? Are you adding to a reminders list? Are you creating

00:34:26 ◼   ► a mind? There's all kinds of ways you I find myself having to stop a little bit and remember

00:34:30 ◼   ► to get the incantation right. You know, remind me to take out pasta in six minutes. But it's

00:34:35 ◼   ► sort of like if you like, like the goal here would be to, it would be like having a human

00:34:40 ◼   ► assistant with you. Oh, when I say this, you know, yeah. So like if I had an assistant

00:34:46 ◼   ► who was always at my side, a real human being and you know, smart, bright person and, and

00:34:53 ◼   ► I could say, Hey, make a note. I want to talk to Merlin about markdown history. And, and

00:35:01 ◼   ► if this assistant knows that I like to put every note

00:35:04 ◼   ► with some kind of like a date string at the top,

00:35:07 ◼   ► they'll do that automatically

00:35:08 ◼   ► 'cause they know I wanna do it.

00:35:10 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:35:11 ◼   ► Because I've told them that.

00:35:12 ◼   ► And I'm like, "Hey, every time I tell you to make a note,

00:35:14 ◼   ► "make the first line like this."

00:35:16 ◼   ► - And always put the date in, but put it last.

00:35:18 ◼   ► Like I don't need to see that,

00:35:19 ◼   ► but like I need to know when it was created.

00:35:20 ◼   ► - Right, 'cause I wanna scan it.

00:35:22 ◼   ► When I scan the list of them,

00:35:23 ◼   ► I wanna see the words that I'm using.

00:35:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, the first word should be something very important.

00:35:27 ◼   ► I get what you're saying.

00:35:30 ◼   ► don't don't make me have to learn how the assistant thinks.

00:35:33 ◼   ► You ever use keyboard maestro?

00:35:39 ◼   ► You know, I've played with it. I've got it. And I've played with it. In another era, if this were

00:35:45 ◼   ► 10 years ago, I would be spending half my day on that app, because it does look very powerful.

00:35:50 ◼   ► And you can do stuff like can't you like do screens like like not screens like but you can

00:35:54 ◼   ► control remotely using keyboard maestro like it sounds like it does like pretty much everything.

00:35:58 ◼   ► The remote stuff, there's something like that, but I think that he kind of got away from

00:36:03 ◼   ► that.

00:36:04 ◼   ► But it's a way to patch all kinds of stuff you don't currently like about how stuff works.

00:36:08 ◼   ► You can make it do a thing for you fairly easily.

00:36:10 ◼   ► And I've had it for years, and then I kind of didn't use it for a while, or didn't do

00:36:15 ◼   ► anything new with it for a while.

00:36:16 ◼   ► I had a couple of things that, you know, there's...

00:36:18 ◼   ► Would you say it's a little bit like workflow on iOS?

00:36:20 ◼   ► Yeah, it's the same basic idea, but way more powerful because it's on the Mac, and the

00:36:24 ◼   ► Mac just has way more stuff you can do.

00:36:26 ◼   ► So for example, actually let me do sponsor break

00:36:30 ◼   ► and I'll come back, this will be a good thing.

00:36:32 ◼   ► Then I know where we were.

00:36:34 ◼   ► Look, I'm gonna take these sponsor breaks,

00:36:36 ◼   ► everybody you gotta pay attention.

00:36:38 ◼   ► By the end of the show,

00:36:39 ◼   ► everybody you're gonna have your holiday shopping.

00:36:41 ◼   ► You're gonna be half done.

00:36:43 ◼   ► - That's a nice service, people need that, that's hard.

00:36:45 ◼   ► Holidays are tough on people.

00:36:46 ◼   ► - The first sponsor of the show is a great company,

00:36:49 ◼   ► love their products, their company called Away.

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00:36:54 ◼   ► and they are terrific gifts and they have a lifetime guarantee and a hundred day trial

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00:37:04 ◼   ► grab an away gift card if you can't make up your mind or you don't know what color the

00:37:07 ◼   ► person you want to buy this thing might want. They use high quality materials and they offer

00:37:12 ◼   ► a much lower price compared to other brands with similar quality by cutting out the middleman

00:37:17 ◼   ► and selling direct to you without the retail markup. They've got over ten colors in five

00:37:22 ◼   ► sizes. They got the carry-on. That's actually what I have. The bigger carry-on, which I'm

00:37:27 ◼   ► tempted to buy. The medium, the large, and they also have the kids carry-on for the smaller

00:37:33 ◼   ► travelers among us. All of their suitcases are made with premium German polycarbonate

00:37:38 ◼   ► that's very lightweight and bends, never breaks. Now listen to me. If you're a long-time listener

00:37:43 ◼   ► of the show, you probably remember me talking about a way before. I forget when they first

00:37:46 ◼   ► sponsored the show, but it was well over a year ago. And before they sponsored it, they

00:37:51 ◼   ► sent me this. They sent me the suitcase, the carry on nice black carry on. So I've taken

00:37:56 ◼   ► that suitcase everywhere I've gone in for over a year, maybe well over a year. I don't

00:38:03 ◼   ► know. The thing looks brand new and I, you know what I mean? It's how is that even possible?

00:38:07 ◼   ► You know what I mean? You put your overhead up in the thing and it ends up two rows behind

00:38:11 ◼   ► you because they get jostled around and everything like that. The wheels still roll great. I

00:38:15 ◼   ► mean like silent and like it like at the Philly airport, we've got some terminals where there's

00:38:20 ◼   ► a downward slope. You've got actually got to be careful because the damn thing would

00:38:23 ◼   ► will run away from you and it goes so fast. Um, the interior features a patent pending

00:38:28 ◼   ► compression system, helpful for overpackers. It's really great. They've, it's just the,

00:38:32 ◼   ► it's not complex. It's not like, what do I do with all these pieces in here? It's pretty

00:38:35 ◼   ► obvious. I put my shirts down on the right side. Then there's a thing that you can put

00:38:40 ◼   ► over the shirts after you fold them up a little bit and snap it into place and it keeps your

00:38:44 ◼   ► shirts from getting all messed up by everything else that you pack in there. Um, they have

00:38:48 ◼   ► got that whole like whole half of it is like a zipper area where you can just put loose stuff and

00:38:52 ◼   ► yes that's the zip the left panel is a zippered area where you can put all that stuff that that

00:38:57 ◼   ► that might rattle around and it never rattles around and then they have a removable washable

00:39:02 ◼   ► laundry bag that keeps dirty clothes separate from clean uh i love that thing it sounds so simple it

00:39:08 ◼   ► sounds like well i could just put any bag in my in my case the only thing that could i mean i don't

00:39:13 ◼   ► want to say it's your sponsor but the only thing that would make it better if there was some way to

00:39:16 ◼   ► to charge my I wish they would address that let me tell you the carry-ons in fact what

00:39:20 ◼   ► have a built-in battery pack it's like I don't know gazillion mega amps and it works and

00:39:26 ◼   ► it works it's got to it's not a trick it actually charges your phone like four or five times

00:39:31 ◼   ► right at least at least five times and it's got two USB ports so you can sit there at

00:39:36 ◼   ► the end and this is great because you're sitting there at the airport and there is like one

00:39:41 ◼   ► Electrical terminal at your gate 28, you know a you know a 28 you're waiting for your place and people are around

00:39:48 ◼   ► There's one electrical terminal. It's not near any seat or if it is near a seat

00:39:54 ◼   ► There's a guy there who's smugly has two things plugged into it and it's like I've been here for three eight that I hate that

00:40:00 ◼   ► guy

00:40:01 ◼   ► Or if it's over by the wall, there's like nomads sitting by a garbage can

00:40:05 ◼   ► Refuse processed off-site you're sitting there plugged in by a garbage can that's no way to call it now sitting crisscrossed

00:40:11 ◼   ► cross Chris cross Chris cross applesauce style grown adults sitting on the floor of the airport.

00:40:18 ◼   ► My phone's low. No, with away, you don't have to go fishing around to find your little portable

00:40:23 ◼   ► battery pack. You just flip open a thing on the top of your carry on, plug in your charging

00:40:28 ◼   ► cable and you can sit there and charge any device. It is fantastic and it's a brilliant

00:40:33 ◼   ► idea. And here's the thing, I've mentioned this before and people say, well then doesn't

00:40:37 ◼   ► that just mean you have to charge your suitcase all the time? And eventually you do. Yes,

00:40:41 ◼   ► But because the battery pack in the suitcase is like five times the one charge of an iPhone,

00:40:47 ◼   ► you only have to do that like once in a while. Like maybe at the end of a trip when you empty

00:40:51 ◼   ► your suitcase, just go plug it in and then it'll be ready to go for your next trip. You

00:40:55 ◼   ► know, I only charge it every several trips and it always charges my phone. I just, you

00:41:00 ◼   ► just only have to worry about it once in a while. And they have a lifetime guarantee

00:41:04 ◼   ► if anything breaks, they will fix or replace it.

00:41:06 ◼   ► I'll give you a sad testimonial. I see, I love the away, but I'm not allowed to use

00:41:10 ◼   ► anymore because my wife has totally adopted it. It is now her bag. She likes it so much.

00:41:13 ◼   ► She said, this will be mine now. And I said, very well, you take that bag and that's hers

00:41:17 ◼   ► now. And so when she has to do her business trips, she has to like head out to Washington

00:41:20 ◼   ► for one night. The poor thing. She just jams everything in that bag and takes off and she

00:41:23 ◼   ► loves it. It looks right. It looks brand new. It's completely crazy. It's, I know it's,

00:41:27 ◼   ► this is a very, very good product. It really is excellent product. And maybe you don't

00:41:31 ◼   ► want to buy somebody else a suitcase for the holidays. I don't know. I think it's not a

00:41:35 ◼   ► terrible gift, but it's the sort of thing I would like. And, and I'm often in the case

00:41:39 ◼   ► where there are relatives, my parents or something like that. And they say, what do you want

00:41:42 ◼   ► for Christmas, John? And it's like, Oh my God, this is a great answer to that question.

00:41:47 ◼   ► Somebody comes to you, dear listener, and they say, what do you want for Christmas?

00:41:50 ◼   ► And if you think it's in the budget, you could say, you know what, get me one of these. I

00:41:53 ◼   ► need a new suitcase. And I'll tell you what, and it's exactly like I always say with the

00:41:57 ◼   ► Casper folks with the mattress, life is too short to sleep on a ratty mattress. Life is

00:42:02 ◼   ► too short. I spent years before I got this thing with like a 15, 20 year old carry on

00:42:07 ◼   ► that had a like, you got the one spinning around like a fricking grocery cart.

00:42:10 ◼   ► The other one had like her in it.

00:42:12 ◼   ► It's so hard to get hair out of a wheel.

00:42:14 ◼   ► I deal with this was my daughter's backpack.

00:42:16 ◼   ► I'm in there with the tweezers and exacto knife, like some kind of an animal.

00:42:19 ◼   ► Don't live like that. Get in the way back. It's too short. So anyway, you know,

00:42:22 ◼   ► you, you owe, you owe it to yourself. It's, you know what it is, John,

00:42:25 ◼   ► when you get married, they say to you, look, you got to register. And you say,

00:42:28 ◼   ► you know what? I don't want to register. I don't want to ask people for presents.

00:42:31 ◼   ► I feel like some kind of a monster. They say, no, you don't understand.

00:42:33 ◼   ► Auntie Susie, she wants to register. She wants to get you what you want.

00:42:37 ◼   ► Why don't you do your family a favor and tell them all you want this this nice away suitcase. There you go

00:42:40 ◼   ► That's right. It's a favorite. It's a Christmas mitzvah

00:42:43 ◼   ► So where do you go to find out more go to away travel comm slash talk show away travel slash?

00:42:49 ◼   ► Todd got comm slash talk show and that promo code talk show during checkout will save you 20 bucks off any suitcase

00:42:56 ◼   ► So remember that if you're gonna tell someone to get it for you as a gift telling that too and they'll save

00:43:00 ◼   ► Save some money. So my thanks to away. It's a great product go go get one

00:43:05 ◼   ► All right, I was talking about keyboard maestro keyboard maestro this great long-standing Mac utility

00:43:10 ◼   ► now developed by stairway software, which is

00:43:13 ◼   ► Peter Peter Lewis's company

00:43:16 ◼   ► Down in

00:43:19 ◼   ► Peter Lewis, is that the Australian guy? Yeah. Oh he did. Oh god. What did he do?

00:43:24 ◼   ► Did he did the fd2 Interarkey? Yeah, which is still around which is still around but he has since sold that to a different company

00:43:31 ◼   ► Did I say that right but he had like an FTP app back in the day, right? That is correct Wow

00:43:34 ◼   ► Wow. I would say keyboard maestro, if you've never, I really recommend anybody who wants

00:43:40 ◼   ► to nerd out on their Mac, try it, but it's sort of like a cross between automator and

00:43:46 ◼   ► Apple script and quick keys. Yeah. Like the quick keys from back in the day, but you can

00:43:52 ◼   ► make these macros and can do amazing things. But the thing that you can do is you can like

00:43:55 ◼   ► make your own features in an application. And here's the one that I think of and I'm

00:43:59 ◼   ► often loathe to make these requests. So for example, I don't know why, but in Twitter,

00:44:05 ◼   ► I've got three main accounts in descending order. I've got my at Gruber at daring fireball

00:44:11 ◼   ► and at the talk show. And for whatever reason, years ago I decided that anytime I reply to

00:44:18 ◼   ► like an ad during fireball tweet, I'm going to do it from at Gruber that at me, John Gruber

00:44:24 ◼   ► is at Gruber. And when somebody writes at during fireball in my mind, somehow they're

00:44:29 ◼   ► writing at the publication. I don't know if that makes sense. I think everybody could

00:44:36 ◼   ► guess that if @daringfireball replied to you, who's writing it? But it just doesn't seem

00:44:42 ◼   ► right to me because if you added The Verge and The Verge wrote back to you, you wouldn't

00:44:47 ◼   ► know who's writing. And I don't plan on adding collaborators. But anyway.

00:44:52 ◼   ► People may ask a question to the publication, but they're receiving a response from the

00:44:55 ◼   ► publisher.

00:44:56 ◼   ► In Tweetbot, that meant that for years and years,

00:44:58 ◼   ► I would go through the @DaringFireball replies,

00:45:01 ◼   ► and I get tons of great stuff there.

00:45:03 ◼   ► I love Twitter for feedback on my work

00:45:05 ◼   ► so much better than email,

00:45:07 ◼   ► because it forces the brevity.

00:45:09 ◼   ► I don't read all my email.

00:45:11 ◼   ► I do read every single @Reply to @Gruber

00:45:14 ◼   ► at DaringFireball at the talk show.

00:45:16 ◼   ► And it doesn't feel like a chore

00:45:18 ◼   ► to be at the Twitter equivalent of inbox zero every day

00:45:23 ◼   ► with those things.

00:45:25 ◼   ► So anybody out there who's ever attempted to write to me,

00:45:27 ◼   ► I'm way more likely to see it if what you're willing to say

00:45:30 ◼   ► you're willing to do in public is a Twitter reply.

00:45:32 ◼   ► And I'm way more likely to write back.

00:45:34 ◼   ► But I'm constantly clicking on, in Tweetbot,

00:45:37 ◼   ► you reply from that during Fireball,

00:45:39 ◼   ► and then you have to click on your avatar

00:45:41 ◼   ► and then select the other account.

00:45:42 ◼   ► Like you click on the avatar

00:45:43 ◼   ► and you get a little pop-up menu.

00:45:45 ◼   ► And for years I've been doing it,

00:45:46 ◼   ► and I've been thinking I would,

00:45:47 ◼   ► maybe I should write to Tapbots and ask them for a feature

00:45:51 ◼   ► that when I reply from this account,

00:45:53 ◼   ► reply from this other account.

00:45:55 ◼   ► And the thing that never made me,

00:45:56 ◼   ► every time I think to write that request,

00:45:58 ◼   ► I think this is asking for a feature

00:46:00 ◼   ► that there's one person who's going to use, and that's me.

00:46:03 ◼   ► And that just feels, I wouldn't do that ordinarily,

00:46:07 ◼   ► but as John Gruber, the person who writes

00:46:09 ◼   ► this influential site that is nice when you get links from,

00:46:13 ◼   ► they might be more tempted to do it,

00:46:14 ◼   ► and that makes me feel awful.

00:46:16 ◼   ► And I think, I can't write this email, this is terrible.

00:46:18 ◼   ► And then I realized, like a month ago,

00:46:20 ◼   ► I realized, you know what,

00:46:21 ◼   ► I could frickin' do that with Keyboard Maestro.

00:46:24 ◼   ► And so I made like a macro that, um, um,

00:46:29 ◼   ► I type command R and it, it, in,

00:46:34 ◼   ► and the macro is only available in tweet bot, right? So keep the keyboard.

00:46:38 ◼   ► Meister will let you make like an app specific shortcut. Um,

00:46:42 ◼   ► I type command R, which was the tweet bot shortcut for replying tweet,

00:46:47 ◼   ► our keyboard maestro sees it first and keyboard maestro.

00:46:51 ◼   ► The first thing it does is it itself types the command R keystroke.

00:46:55 ◼   ► And I thought when I was making this, I was like, well,

00:46:57 ◼   ► this is going to put me in an infinite loop, right?

00:46:59 ◼   ► Because it's going to like keyboard.

00:47:01 ◼   ► Maestro is going to eat the command R again, and it's,

00:47:03 ◼   ► I'm going to have to like force quit something, but no, it just works.

00:47:06 ◼   ► Keyboard maestro is so smart that it can eat the command R that I typed then type

00:47:10 ◼   ► a virtual command R that tweet bot sees it opens the reply window.

00:47:15 ◼   ► It fakes a click on the,

00:47:19 ◼   ► the avatar and then hit like so it's not using a menu selection and using like a location

00:47:24 ◼   ► on the screen. Well, it just that's old school. That is really old school clicks at 34, 180

00:47:31 ◼   ► from the top left corner of the front window. But I didn't have to type that. I did that.

00:47:36 ◼   ► I did that by recording in keyboard maestro. You just hit record, click in the middle of

00:47:42 ◼   ► the avatar, move down when it's inside the app window. So I get it. Okay, so it's not

00:47:46 ◼   ► confused about the whole overall screen. It's just the ads. I mean, it defaults to that.

00:47:50 ◼   ► When you record it defaults to doing it within the window. Uh, and then it types the down

00:47:56 ◼   ► arrow keystroke, which would move the selection to the, which I happen to know. I just happen

00:48:02 ◼   ► to know that the ad Gruber account is at the top. Like if I wanted to switch to the second

00:48:06 ◼   ► one, it would have to type like down arrow twice and then types the return keystroke

00:48:09 ◼   ► to select the item. And then the second thought I had is, well, this is going to be so slow.

00:48:14 ◼   ► going to like annoy me. But it happens so instantaneously fast that you don't even see

00:48:18 ◼   ► it. Yeah, I 10 years ago that would have been slow right now. Exactly. I think process so

00:48:22 ◼   ► quick. So I type command or I tap on a tweet in a tweet bot. I type command are and it

00:48:28 ◼   ► doesn't matter which account I'm in. It's already it. The reply is coming from at grouper,

00:48:31 ◼   ► which is the feature I wanted and I never had to bother the tap on people to do it and

00:48:35 ◼   ► it's every bit as good as if tap as if tweet bot did it itself. Like there's no delay,

00:48:40 ◼   ► no weight it doesn't work like 90% of the time it works 100% of the time that's a good

00:48:47 ◼   ► solution that's good use for them so anyway I don't know how we got started on somehow

00:48:50 ◼   ► talking about I think I mean I don't I don't do nearly as many of those as I used to but

00:48:54 ◼   ► sounds like you've got a sounds like you have a lot of those things in drafts though like

00:48:59 ◼   ► with drafts or really yeah yeah so drafts has all kinds of like little scripts you can

00:49:04 ◼   ► add in to do stuff and I mean you can I first of all I just say I love drafts like it's

00:49:09 ◼   ► it's just that for me drafts is it's so fast and it's so easy and what

00:49:15 ◼   ► undistracting I mean it's really just there to say what do you need to type

00:49:18 ◼   ► Merlin and I type it and then it does something with it and so for me I mean

00:49:22 ◼   ► there's so much you can do with drafts that I'm not doing it's just that for me

00:49:26 ◼   ► it's I mean totally candid if editorial had a way to create a blank document I

00:49:31 ◼   ► guess you could use templates in there I don't know I just like the cleanliness

00:49:34 ◼   ► of drafts you know the thing is that this is a very kind of 43 folders type

00:49:38 ◼   ► of thing where even though like I'm not generating a lot of those things, I mean there's a reason

00:49:43 ◼   ► I'm still using TextMate 1 with all of my old commands in there because I know how that

00:49:47 ◼   ► stuff works and that's, I know that's ludicrous, I should be using Sublime Text or something

00:49:51 ◼   ► but I just haven't changed it over, it works fine, I've got macros in there that I'm still

00:49:54 ◼   ► using for different things. But no, I mean I think the key part of this is to, you know,

00:50:00 ◼   ► if there's any anti-pattern in the productivity world, it's like going out and trying to find

00:50:04 ◼   ► 50 answers to a problem that isn't a problem. Like trying to find answers to a question

00:50:09 ◼   ► that doesn't exist. But the corollary being, well, how do you develop a presence of mind

00:50:14 ◼   ► to go like, okay, this is kind of an annoying thing I'd like to fix. I don't want to bug

00:50:18 ◼   ► the developer about it. Like how could I, you know, there's just a million things where

00:50:22 ◼   ► you just develop a little more mindfulness about noticing something that could be fixed

00:50:26 ◼   ► and then adopting the tools that will let you do that in an elegant way. And I think

00:50:29 ◼   ► that's, that's a really smart way to proceed whatever platform you're using, whatever year

00:50:34 ◼   ► Here it is.

00:50:35 ◼   ► I think it's so interesting now that we're 10 years into the iPhone and it's just sort

00:50:39 ◼   ► of part of the air that we breathe on a daily basis, how we have evolved these ways to just

00:50:48 ◼   ► basically have the same shit on whatever device we're using.

00:50:53 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:50:55 ◼   ► Because it was a huge problem in the early years, right?

00:50:57 ◼   ► We had these amazing...

00:50:58 ◼   ► Everybody was blown away by the iPhone and it was fantastic.

00:51:00 ◼   ► And it was like, this is...

00:51:01 ◼   ► I'm in Star Trek here. I've got this amazing thing." Remember, you'd hook up your iPhone

00:51:09 ◼   ► to your Mac and then you'd go through iTunes and it would update your contacts between

00:51:14 ◼   ► the two.

00:51:15 ◼   ► Hey, I got a new podcast. Yeah, no, no, totally. Something in this evolution of mine to try

00:51:22 ◼   ► and not stay current to be a cool kid but just to not become all calcified is when I

00:51:27 ◼   ► look at stuff like what you can do with an iPad Pro now and I think it's it gets

00:51:31 ◼   ► kind of misframed as okay there's people over here who say they'll only ever use

00:51:35 ◼   ► a desktop forever and then there's the phrases and three cuz of the world over

00:51:39 ◼   ► here that are like our died in the wall iPad will never use anything else and

00:51:43 ◼   ► there's a giant continuum in between and I think to figure out what the right

00:51:46 ◼   ► device for you is you have to be you have testing humility about asking

00:51:50 ◼   ► yourself what you actually really need on this device and I have I mean if I'm

00:51:55 ◼   ► honest like there's so much stuff where I would go "I could never do that on the

00:51:59 ◼   ► iPad." Well you know what the iPad's got a lot of firepower now. It's not a

00:52:02 ◼   ► processing problem anymore. It's more a case now of saying like "Well, do I expect

00:52:07 ◼   ► something like Keyboard Maestro on the iPad? Well geez I could never give up

00:52:10 ◼   ► because I don't have I don't have Hazel on my iPad or whatever." And the truth is

00:52:15 ◼   ► like you know there are cases where that is absolutely true and you always like

00:52:19 ◼   ► I'll always want to do all kinds of things on my Mac over iOS device but if

00:52:24 ◼   ► If you're really honest with yourself and you kind of trace back in the stack and say

00:52:28 ◼   ► like, well, what is the actual problem that I'm trying to solve here?

00:52:30 ◼   ► What's the actual kind of work that I'm ultimately trying to produce?

00:52:33 ◼   ► Let's take away the tools for a minute and say like, this is where my job starts.

00:52:36 ◼   ► This is where my job is mostly done.

00:52:38 ◼   ► What needs to happen in between?

00:52:40 ◼   ► And for myself, I found that if I asked that question with humility and honesty, there's

00:52:44 ◼   ► not that much stuff that I can't do in some way on the iPad.

00:52:49 ◼   ► What's the thing that Snell uses?

00:52:50 ◼   ► There's that thing where you turn it on.

00:52:54 ◼   ► is that? I keep every time he mentions it and I hear it on a podcast I'm like, "Oh,

00:52:57 ◼   ► I gotta get that." I've got to use that! I've got to use that. And I always forget the

00:53:01 ◼   ► name. Yeah, and basically, it's just when you flip it, the idea is that if when you're

00:53:05 ◼   ► on your, the initial use of that is when you're on your laptop, you don't want to burn through

00:53:10 ◼   ► all your bandwidth on this and that thing. But it's perfect for Skype recording where

00:53:14 ◼   ► I would just say, Plex, Backblaze, Time Machine, like Dropbox, like pause all of those things.

00:53:23 ◼   ► let those things touch the internet while I'm doing this show. I apologize. I try to

00:53:26 ◼   ► ride that stuff. It's not an easy way to quit. There used to be an app you could get for

00:53:31 ◼   ► Time Machine. It was like Time Machine Manager. What do you back up to? You back up to a Time

00:53:37 ◼   ► Machine airport base station type thing? I used to. Because if you're just backing up

00:53:42 ◼   ► to a hard drive that's connected, that's not going to affect the network. Yeah, you know,

00:53:47 ◼   ► you're probably right. But then I checked and it was also backblaze going. And now it

00:53:52 ◼   ► is stopped. But sorry, I'm so sorry about that. So basically, I just gone on a rant

00:53:56 ◼   ► to say that my side should be clean. I basically all I was saying was that if I'm honest with

00:54:03 ◼   ► myself and think focus on the work that I'm trying to create, there's not that many cases

00:54:08 ◼   ► where it's just undoable on any given device. I just have to think about what it is I'm

00:54:12 ◼   ► actually doing instead of the tools that I'm accustomed to.

00:54:14 ◼   ► Yeah. So speaking of these devices, you're there's a thing here in the show notes. Your

00:54:20 ◼   ► Your daughter got a Chromebook.

00:54:23 ◼   ► This is so, this breaks my heart.

00:54:25 ◼   ► So they use Chromebooks at school.

00:54:26 ◼   ► It's what they do a lot of their stuff on.

00:54:29 ◼   ► So there's actually two funny stories here.

00:54:31 ◼   ► Funny story number one is, I am ready to throw my MacBook adorable into the sea because the

00:54:39 ◼   ► I've been at some something like eight months, almost a year in with this thing.

00:54:43 ◼   ► And I still can't get used to the arrow keys.

00:54:45 ◼   ► I agree up and down.

00:54:47 ◼   ► I hate it so much.

00:54:48 ◼   ► I hate the arrow keys.

00:54:49 ◼   ► I don't have one. I don't. But I it's, it's the same on a MacBook Pro now, dude. I know

00:54:53 ◼   ► the same thing when I tested the MacBook Pro last year and I realized, you know, that the

00:54:58 ◼   ► ports are an issue and the USB thing is a huge issue, you know, and, and, and I do feel

00:55:03 ◼   ► like a lot of the power users, they have legitimate gripes about Apple's decision making on this

00:55:08 ◼   ► thing. Um, but I really do feel that an awful lot of it boils down to Apple bet big on USB

00:55:14 ◼   ► And the industry did not move to USB C like you go and look for USB C peripherals and it's like crickets chirping

00:55:20 ◼   ► It's like Marco has laid this out very well if you even even if you buy in on dongle town

00:55:26 ◼   ► There's still not any way to do what you would want to do

00:55:29 ◼   ► Let's say you want to record it like he does you want to record a live podcast with the top of the line MacBook Pro

00:55:34 ◼   ► There's really no way to do that and get power at this point, right?

00:55:38 ◼   ► And you know what? I mean, you don't want to record a show without power. I mean nice

00:55:42 ◼   ► Their show runs kind of long. No, you're right that was not a MacGuffin exact

00:55:47 ◼   ► I know yeah, that was certainly the thing everybody noticed but like I the in what he call it the inverted T

00:55:52 ◼   ► Yeah pattern of arrows. I had no I because you know like you probably I'm very into

00:55:57 ◼   ► I don't know what you call it that text editing of you know command option. Yep. Yep

00:56:02 ◼   ► Shift and arrow keys and I fly through text like crazy using that. I don't know what and I feel utterly hobbled without it

00:56:10 ◼   ► It's a you know what it is. It's a USB a situation all over again

00:56:12 ◼   ► Like it seems like about 50% of the time I should hit the right arrow

00:56:16 ◼   ► Up or down and I almost always get the wrong arrow and I don't know why yeah

00:56:19 ◼   ► I at some point very early in my days in a late 80s in high school when I first got on a Macintosh and I realized

00:56:27 ◼   ► That in some app that you could you know use the shift key with the arrows to select text

00:56:33 ◼   ► You know as you do it and then if you hold the option key

00:56:36 ◼   ► it goes a word at a time, and if you use the command key,

00:56:40 ◼   ► it'll go to the beginning or end of the current line

00:56:42 ◼   ► or paragraph, and then I realized that it's exactly the same

00:56:46 ◼   ► in every good Mac app, and it was like,

00:56:49 ◼   ► ah, that's where I fell in love with the Mac.

00:56:52 ◼   ► And those--

00:56:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, why was I never taught this?

00:56:56 ◼   ► It's so mental.

00:56:57 ◼   ► - Right, and this is from an era when words,

00:57:00 ◼   ► or even on the Apple, there'd be different command key

00:57:04 ◼   ► Sequences for selecting and moving around text in every app every you know like das era or apple

00:57:10 ◼   ► I've just put I've just put the

00:57:13 ◼   ► Support Apple support doc into your show notes there you go because it's you I bet you

00:57:18 ◼   ► I'll bet you dimes of donuts almost anybody who looks at this page

00:57:21 ◼   ► You're gonna find five things on this page you didn't even know existed, and it's it once you internalize them

00:57:26 ◼   ► It's mind-blowing and one of the best things about iOS is that iOS has inherited all of these?

00:57:32 ◼   ► My iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard is a very powerful tool right now right and it's crazy and it's a big part to me

00:57:39 ◼   ► It's a big part of the way that these iPad

00:57:41 ◼   ► You know the Federico's and like Jason, you know

00:57:43 ◼   ► Jason Snell is doing it was surprising to me because you know Federico's younger and his brain hasn't he's doing a lot of typing

00:57:50 ◼   ► But I mean there are people who are editing like legit podcasts and like ferrite now

00:57:54 ◼   ► But people who prefer that over a Mac at this point

00:57:56 ◼   ► But for whatever reason on a MacBook keyboard at some point I also

00:58:02 ◼   ► internalized that that that gap above the left and right arrow keys

00:58:06 ◼   ► I can't explain why the full height left and right arrow keys

00:58:10 ◼   ► Mess me up because in theory it should only be better right there. They will make make the left and right keys half height

00:58:17 ◼   ► I'll be happy. It's you know what I'm saying like they don't all need to be big

00:58:21 ◼   ► But if you just made even just making the left is it so what it is right now the left and right key are what?

00:58:26 ◼   ► we'll call full height and then the up and down arrow keys are in between our half height and

00:58:31 ◼   ► And for whatever reason, I find it virtually impossible

00:58:34 ◼   ► to hit the left and right one,

00:58:36 ◼   ► 'cause the proximity is just weird

00:58:38 ◼   ► and I end up hitting the wrong one all the time.

00:58:39 ◼   ► - And I've just got this habit

00:58:40 ◼   ► to locate my hand on those keys by the gap

00:58:44 ◼   ► that exists when they were all half height.

00:58:46 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:58:47 ◼   ► - I'm doing it right now on this Bluetooth keyboard.

00:58:48 ◼   ► So my ring finger on my right hand

00:58:50 ◼   ► rests above the right arrow key.

00:58:52 ◼   ► I'm sorry, my ring finger.

00:58:54 ◼   ► My index finger on my right hand is on the left key.

00:58:57 ◼   ► This is basically, if my hand is not on the mouse,

00:58:59 ◼   ► this is where my hand is.

00:59:00 ◼   ► And then my middle finger is on the up arrow.

00:59:03 ◼   ► That's just, that is my posture on a keyboard.

00:59:05 ◼   ► - I don't know, I could not get used to it

00:59:08 ◼   ► when I tried those keys.

00:59:09 ◼   ► And I know that people are complaining about things

00:59:11 ◼   ► like keys getting stuck, and that's just,

00:59:13 ◼   ► that's a bug in the design of the keyboard.

00:59:15 ◼   ► You know, like Apple didn't deliberately make it

00:59:18 ◼   ► so that your E key would get stuck every once in a while.

00:59:21 ◼   ► - But if you have a sandwich near that,

00:59:22 ◼   ► you may need to replace the top half of your computer

00:59:24 ◼   ► is a thing that happens now.

00:59:25 ◼   ► - This new full height left and right arrow key

00:59:28 ◼   ► is a deliberate design decision,

00:59:30 ◼   ► and it makes me insanely angry.

00:59:32 ◼   ► - So, you know, it's cute and it weighs very little

00:59:37 ◼   ► and it's nice, but you know, I,

00:59:40 ◼   ► you wouldn't believe the hour and a half that I spent

00:59:41 ◼   ► trying to find the Mac that Marco was recommending,

00:59:44 ◼   ► the 2015 laptop.

00:59:47 ◼   ► Long story short, I've been thinking about

00:59:48 ◼   ► getting a new laptop and I said,

00:59:50 ◼   ► 'cause you know, I'm awesome dad, I'm a cool dad,

00:59:53 ◼   ► and so I'm ready to really spring this

00:59:54 ◼   ► on my 10 year old daughter and I say,

00:59:56 ◼   ► You know, in the event that Dad gets a new laptop,

01:00:01 ◼   ► there's a chance that this guy right here could be yours.

01:00:05 ◼   ► And she's just like, "Mm, I want a Chromebook."

01:00:07 ◼   ► It's like, "You want a what?

01:00:09 ◼   ► "What?

01:00:10 ◼   ► "Go wash your mouth out with soap.

01:00:12 ◼   ► "A Chromebook?

01:00:12 ◼   ► "What kind of talk is that in this house?

01:00:14 ◼   ► "'Cause everything she uses is Apple, iPad, iPhone, iPod."

01:00:19 ◼   ► You know, Amazon, yes,

01:00:20 ◼   ► but like every device that she uses is Apple,

01:00:25 ◼   ► but she loves the Chromebooks that they use at school.

01:00:27 ◼   ► And I asked her about it today.

01:00:28 ◼   ► I said, I'm gonna talk to uncle John Gruber.

01:00:29 ◼   ► Tell me what the problem is.

01:00:30 ◼   ► You know what she likes about it?

01:00:32 ◼   ► She likes that it's heavy and big and sturdy.

01:00:34 ◼   ► And she likes the large keyboard on it.

01:00:37 ◼   ► - You know what?

01:00:38 ◼   ► That's actually, that is not what I expected to hear.

01:00:43 ◼   ► I kind of get what she's, I get it though, right?

01:00:46 ◼   ► 'Cause you feel like, you know,

01:00:48 ◼   ► you know. - Well, it's whatever

01:00:52 ◼   ► you're used to, right?

01:00:53 ◼   ► I mean, that's-- - Yeah.

01:00:54 ◼   ► Her typing on a keyboard.

01:00:56 ◼   ► So in the morning when I brush her hair,

01:00:57 ◼   ► she looks at YouTube videos.

01:00:59 ◼   ► That's the extent of her using a physical keyboard at home.

01:01:02 ◼   ► - But you pick up the MacBook Adorable

01:01:03 ◼   ► and if you're used to that big, heavy, chunky, sturdy,

01:01:06 ◼   ► this feels like a sturdy piece of machinery,

01:01:09 ◼   ► the MacBook Adorable feels like a piece of glass

01:01:11 ◼   ► that you're gonna break.

01:01:12 ◼   ► - Inconsequential.

01:01:13 ◼   ► You feel like if you put your drink down wrong,

01:01:14 ◼   ► it's gonna go out the window.

01:01:15 ◼   ► - Right.

01:01:16 ◼   ► Like a strong gust of wind is gonna take it.

01:01:18 ◼   ► - Oh my God.

01:01:19 ◼   ► So we had the big carnival at school

01:01:22 ◼   ► and I swear this is not a jam up.

01:01:23 ◼   ► My wife is the co-chair of the carnival.

01:01:25 ◼   ► One of the things we did,

01:01:26 ◼   ► we bought some of the stuff to be auctioned off.

01:01:28 ◼   ► And one of the things was we donated personally,

01:01:30 ◼   ► like an Amazon dot.

01:01:32 ◼   ► And we said, "Hey, you know, people love these Chromebooks.

01:01:34 ◼   ► We should buy a Chromebook and we'll give that away.

01:01:36 ◼   ► Then we'll, you know, get paid back by the school."

01:01:39 ◼   ► And I don't know if it works like this at your kid's school,

01:01:42 ◼   ► but there's seven parents at the school who do everything.

01:01:45 ◼   ► So not only do we put on the carnival,

01:01:47 ◼   ► but then we spent the most money at the carnival.

01:01:49 ◼   ► Like we gave lots of money.

01:01:50 ◼   ► We bought like a hundred dollars in raffle tickets.

01:01:53 ◼   ► And guess what that did?

01:01:55 ◼   ► That produced a situation where we won the Chromebook

01:01:57 ◼   ► that we had bought for the carnival.

01:01:59 ◼   ► And we were like, no, no, seriously.

01:02:01 ◼   ► Oh man, we like, we were like, seriously,

01:02:03 ◼   ► this is a jam up.

01:02:04 ◼   ► Like, I'm gonna feel so bad if this is a jam up.

01:02:06 ◼   ► And they're like, no, no, no, you legit won.

01:02:07 ◼   ► Like you bought all the raffle tickets.

01:02:09 ◼   ► - It feels like you're part of the Trump family now though.

01:02:11 ◼   ► Right?

01:02:12 ◼   ► - Oh my God.

01:02:13 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:02:15 ◼   ► I got the Javanka book.

01:02:16 ◼   ► - Right, it's like you're hosting state department dinners

01:02:19 ◼   ► at the Trump National Golf Course.

01:02:21 ◼   ► We felt so wrong, so privileged, and like, we donated this and we won it, merp!

01:02:28 ◼   ► But we were assured that it was a fair contest.

01:02:30 ◼   ► The truth is we're not going to expense it.

01:02:33 ◼   ► That if we won it, we feel like, well, okay, we won't ask to be repaid for it.

01:02:38 ◼   ► But yeah, no, we won it.

01:02:39 ◼   ► We haven't set it up yet because I'm kind of going through this whole thing with my

01:02:42 ◼   ► daughter about how we need to...

01:02:46 ◼   ► If you're going to be on a computer, there's stuff we need to talk about and stuff you

01:02:50 ◼   ► you need to learn. I know you think you know it, but no, you need to really, really learn

01:02:52 ◼   ► it. Like, you're not going to like your password. And she cried when I told her that she couldn't

01:02:56 ◼   ► use her fairly secure account password that she's got, which is a one password, English

01:03:02 ◼   ► word, dice ware set of words. But like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm in the interest of the

01:03:07 ◼   ► military grade password and you're going to hate it. But you know, that's a vector, right?

01:03:13 ◼   ► So but anyway, I just thought that was funny. I want to know, we talked before about, you

01:03:16 ◼   ► your son is the bellwether. He's a little older than mine. My kid, a few years. And

01:03:21 ◼   ► so like, I feel like you get this stuff before I did. Um, she loves the crumb. What's, what

01:03:26 ◼   ► is his situation?

01:03:27 ◼   ► Jonas has no love for the Macintosh at all. He likes, he doesn't.

01:03:32 ◼   ► Oh my God. This is heartbreaking. He's your accused kid. Same way.

01:03:34 ◼   ► Yeah. And you know, Molt's kid got a gaming laptop.

01:03:38 ◼   ► Dan's son is on a PC for games right now.

01:03:40 ◼   ► And Jonas, I think if he had his druthers would have like a razor laptop or something.

01:03:45 ◼   ► Are we old? What happened? I don't know. It's like I said to you, there was something, you

01:03:50 ◼   ► know, literally it's not the, it's not us, it's the laptops that got small. Literally

01:03:53 ◼   ► it's the elegance of things like having the same text editing shortcuts and those shortcuts

01:03:58 ◼   ► being so sensible, you know, that it wasn't just that they were the same in all apps,

01:04:04 ◼   ► but that they were sensible and that there was this consistency. And I don't know, I

01:04:08 ◼   ► fell in love with the Macintosh as soon as I saw it and I wanted to totally make stuff

01:04:12 ◼   ► with it and Jonas treats his as a thing that runs games and and a thing that

01:04:18 ◼   ► runs YouTube I take the mouse I'm clicking on edit I'm clicking on copy

01:04:25 ◼   ► when you watch people do that you're like oh my goodness like this is in my

01:04:29 ◼   ► DNA at this point these key commands he does prefer he does how he does prefer

01:04:34 ◼   ► Safari over Chrome and again this isn't through my proselytizing it he just

01:04:39 ◼   ► doesn't, you know, any and he totally gets it. He believes it

01:04:44 ◼   ► and sees it that Chrome eats his battery life and that, you know,

01:04:48 ◼   ► it's like his, you know, his laptop battery life is like

01:04:51 ◼   ► everything. Right, of course. So he does prefer Safari over

01:04:57 ◼   ► Chrome. So he has some of my some of my taste. But all he

01:05:01 ◼   ► really wants is a thing that you know, and and I think he would

01:05:04 ◼   ► prefer because the thing that gets that gets him and I get it,

01:05:07 ◼   ► I get it, is that there are, as better as the Mac has gotten with games ever since they

01:05:13 ◼   ► switched to Intel, where it's easier for game developers to do both.

01:05:17 ◼   ► What's the thing?

01:05:18 ◼   ► There's that service that's like Netflix for games.

01:05:20 ◼   ► What's it called?

01:05:21 ◼   ► Like Steam?

01:05:22 ◼   ► Steam, yeah.

01:05:24 ◼   ► But there are games that come out on Steam that are only available on Windows and aren't

01:05:28 ◼   ► available on Mac, and it bothers him.

01:05:32 ◼   ► But the thing that the saving grace of that is that he's way more into the PlayStation

01:05:38 ◼   ► four than he is PC games.

01:05:39 ◼   ► But maybe that's because he has a MacBook pro.

01:05:42 ◼   ► Maybe if he had a gaming PC, he'd be more into PC gaming.

01:05:45 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:05:46 ◼   ► But the only other, the only other thing he does is, um, the only other thing he does

01:05:51 ◼   ► is watch YouTube and then when, if he has homework, it's all in Google docs.

01:05:55 ◼   ► That's cause that's what the school runs on.

01:05:56 ◼   ► And so if any, if anything, he'd be better off on a Chromebook.

01:05:59 ◼   ► Probably.

01:06:00 ◼   ► that the Google Docs stuff runs better on Chrome than anywhere else.

01:06:05 ◼   ► Well, one reason I'm resisting getting this together is I've never used a Chromebook.

01:06:08 ◼   ► I mean, I think I roughly understand how it is.

01:06:10 ◼   ► It's a device that's made to access mostly Google services, right?

01:06:13 ◼   ► Isn't that kind of idea?

01:06:14 ◼   ► Well, anything you could do in a Chrome tab, you know?

01:06:17 ◼   ► Just really imagine a MacBook that was set like, you know, how like a--

01:06:21 ◼   ► But like Docs and Sheets and all that kind of stuff,

01:06:24 ◼   ► plus the browser and all of that.

01:06:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:06:27 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:06:27 ◼   ► I've been a little bit resistant, if I'm honest.

01:06:29 ◼   ► the part of the resistance is that I feel like I need to understand how this device works. Like,

01:06:34 ◼   ► for example, they gave them Microsoft gave Dan a surface to try and like we'd really joked about

01:06:39 ◼   ► it and like, oh, these idiots at Microsoft, they were super nice. They sent Dan the surface and he

01:06:44 ◼   ► kind of loves it. Like he thought it was pretty amazing. And it been a pretty good episode about

01:06:49 ◼   ► it where he basically was saying like, I really wish a lot of this stuff would come to the iPad.

01:06:54 ◼   ► And, and, but the thing is, I'm so far out of my depth on PC stuff to begin with that,

01:07:00 ◼   ► like I'm not even sure I would feel like I have to learn how to reuse a PC environment

01:07:04 ◼   ► just to feel comfortable using it. And that's the resistance I feel with the Chromebook

01:07:07 ◼   ► where like, it might be as easy as in you just type a couple things in, but I want to

01:07:10 ◼   ► understand how it works before I give it to my kid. I mean, I guess that's probably kind

01:07:13 ◼   ► of old fashioned, but that just seems advisable. Yeah, that's, I don't know. It's a weird world.

01:07:21 ◼   ► What about the iOS stuff? She uses iPad 2 or no?

01:07:24 ◼   ► Oh God, she's so good. She's like, it's crazy. We might've talked about, yeah, I feel like

01:07:29 ◼   ► we definitely talked about this a year ago because we talked about voice stuff last time,

01:07:33 ◼   ► right?

01:07:34 ◼   ► Oh yeah, that's right.

01:07:35 ◼   ► The way I, yeah, among other things last time is that she still, she's less so, a little

01:07:40 ◼   ► less so now, but up until very recently she would always prefer to click on the microphone

01:07:45 ◼   ► speak rather than use the keyboard, which drove me bananas. And I was like, "Just use

01:07:51 ◼   ► the keyboard. It's a keyboard." But she did it. She made it work. And she's in Safari

01:07:55 ◼   ► and she wants to find out how to make, you know, slime. And like she's able to just do

01:07:59 ◼   ► that. Yeah, she's great. She's super fast with it. Mostly looking at videos to some

01:08:04 ◼   ► extent. She does Minecraft on the iPad and does, she's very into Lego worlds on the PlayStation

01:08:11 ◼   ► right now. Those are her big games right now. But no, she's an ace. She gets around really

01:08:17 ◼   ► fast. She's like they say, I guess a digital native. Like there's nothing weird to her

01:08:21 ◼   ► about this device.

01:08:22 ◼   ► I it in my gut, I feel like in broad terms, the difference is, do you want a computer

01:08:29 ◼   ► that acts like a computer? Like from like what you and I think of as computers from

01:08:34 ◼   ► back in the day, like a Commodore 64, you know, like re to get anything done, you kind

01:08:39 ◼   ► I had to understand what the hell it was actually how the thing actually works, you know what I mean? Mm-hmm

01:08:43 ◼   ► Or are you using it more like an appliance like you're just at a higher level

01:08:47 ◼   ► That's exactly the way to put it and it's not they're not they have a task

01:08:51 ◼   ► They have a task to accomplish with this they'll put up with whatever they need to to get there

01:08:55 ◼   ► But they're not there for the polished user experience that we like to think that we're there for right?

01:08:59 ◼   ► It's like oh no, and I actually you know, Syracuse and I the rectus that came out yesterday

01:09:03 ◼   ► We were talking about steam and my experience using steam for the first time and he kind of took me to school on like what?

01:09:08 ◼   ► a huge deal Steam was, of course, because it's Sir Kusa, about what a huge deal Steam

01:09:12 ◼   ► was. Finally there's these games that are now available on the Mac. But I was like,

01:09:15 ◼   ► this app is hot garbage. Those aren't real window widgets. Somebody painted it on there

01:09:19 ◼   ► with like a magic marker. This looks like malware. Why would I use this? And he's like,

01:09:24 ◼   ► you know, and I, anyway, of course we had 45 minutes of arguing about that. But that

01:09:28 ◼   ► was my thing when I first opened Steam. I was like, you've got to be kidding me. What,

01:09:31 ◼   ► do I need to also update my flash? Like this looks like the fakest malware thing I've ever

01:09:35 ◼   ► I'm back. It looks like the steam app looks like it looks like the app that Tom Cruise uses to communicate with

01:09:42 ◼   ► the Mission Impossible team

01:09:44 ◼   ► I'm definitely using a computer. Yeah, Angie. Are you getting this? Yeah, it should be like beeping and worrying on every keystroke like

01:09:52 ◼   ► Me move by hack the encryption right

01:09:56 ◼   ► Typing noises typing noises typing noises and and scrolling noises right is that you know what I mean about the window?

01:10:05 ◼   ► widgets, the red, yellow, green. It looks like somebody used a magic marker to paint

01:10:08 ◼   ► those on there. It's not even from any OS that I've seen like in five years. It looks

01:10:12 ◼   ► totally made up. I've, I've got some part of my brain that, uh, you know, like a lizard,

01:10:19 ◼   ► a lizard level part of my brain that is supposed to recognize threats. Like, you know, you're

01:10:24 ◼   ► out in the woods picking berries, you know, 2,500 years ago and something dangerous is

01:10:30 ◼   ► in your eyesight and before you even know what it is you're already you know like you

01:10:35 ◼   ► know your hair standing on edge and the adrenaline's popping that's what happened here you just

01:10:39 ◼   ► you just hear a rattle yeah that's what happens to me when i see a non-native app i know i

01:10:44 ◼   ► know i'm like i said it's iraq you said i said it looks like swing i feel like i'm using

01:10:48 ◼   ► a java app from like 15 20 years ago i'm like this it looks like looks like somebody explained

01:10:53 ◼   ► the way a mac application should look over a bad cell phone and then they fax that to

01:10:58 ◼   ► to the people to put up as the app.

01:10:59 ◼   ► - Like I haven't even looked at how Steam works,

01:11:02 ◼   ► but like I wouldn't even be surprised

01:11:03 ◼   ► if like instead of writing its data to like,

01:11:06 ◼   ► you know, library slash preferences or something like that,

01:11:09 ◼   ► that it's just writing it to a dot folder

01:11:12 ◼   ► at the top level of your home directory.

01:11:14 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:11:15 ◼   ► - Like an entourage, let's put all your mail

01:11:17 ◼   ► in this one very large document.

01:11:19 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I don't think, again,

01:11:21 ◼   ► I say that not to bitch about Steam,

01:11:23 ◼   ► it sounds like a very good service,

01:11:24 ◼   ► I'm sure gamers are very happy with it.

01:11:26 ◼   ► But it's more to say like, you know,

01:11:27 ◼   ► this really does feel like a cultural distinction.

01:11:30 ◼   ► Something I've been talking about,

01:11:32 ◼   ► I feel like we've been talking about for a while,

01:11:34 ◼   ► like one of the reasons you don't have a Mac world anymore

01:11:36 ◼   ► is because, as I believe Steve said,

01:11:38 ◼   ► there's Mac worlds going on every day

01:11:40 ◼   ► at stores all over the world.

01:11:41 ◼   ► And the thing I keep beating on is,

01:11:43 ◼   ► and people would look at me quizzically the last five years,

01:11:45 ◼   ► but I don't think people self-identify as Apple people

01:11:48 ◼   ► in a significant way like they used to.

01:11:50 ◼   ► There was a time when we really felt like the outcasts,

01:11:52 ◼   ► the outsiders, the weirdos, the cool kids

01:11:54 ◼   ► for using Apple stuff

01:11:55 ◼   ► and blowing all our money on Apple stuff.

01:11:56 ◼   ► I don't think, when I see people on Muni

01:11:59 ◼   ► quitting all their apps on their iPhone,

01:12:00 ◼   ► I don't think they self-identify as like,

01:12:02 ◼   ► oh, there might be the status of I am an iPhone user,

01:12:05 ◼   ► but I don't think they see themselves

01:12:07 ◼   ► as part of this winking hipster tiny glasses

01:12:09 ◼   ► Helvetica tradition of using the best UX device.

01:12:13 ◼   ► - Right, and that you understand

01:12:15 ◼   ► the idiomatic grammar of the UI, right?

01:12:20 ◼   ► And it's just in the same way that you can instantly,

01:12:24 ◼   ► everybody can instantly recognize a English as a second language person through the incorrect

01:12:33 ◼   ► idioms they use, right?

01:12:35 ◼   ► It's understandable, but it's not.

01:12:36 ◼   ► Yeah, you get it, but you can totally see like, and that, you know, and that people

01:12:40 ◼   ► from certain whatever language they're coming from will make the same sort of mistakes.

01:12:46 ◼   ► Like somebody who learned like my friend Lee who, you know, speaks, grew up in Vietnam.

01:12:53 ◼   ► he makes plural mistakes because there's totally different rules for when you make things plural

01:12:58 ◼   ► or there are no plurals in Vietnamese or something like, you know, that would be complicated.

01:13:04 ◼   ► But you know what I mean? But he'll often leave off the ass and it, it, it, it, it,

01:13:09 ◼   ► by a dozen egg and egg and egg and egg and egg and egg. You know what I mean? And, and

01:13:15 ◼   ► I do, I do well. And it's a, you can hear it, especially in speakers of things like

01:13:18 ◼   ► Russian, right? We're like, the Russians, for example, right? Because the sentence construction

01:13:22 ◼   ► is, you know, you'll hear backloading and front loading of certain kinds of parts of, you know,

01:13:27 ◼   ► in the way that we have this, the way that the incredibly weird and complex way that we use

01:13:32 ◼   ► adjectives, adjectives always go in a certain order for some reason in English and no one,

01:13:37 ◼   ► you feel it, but you can't like identify, but you know when somebody does it wrong.

01:13:40 ◼   ► Yes, exactly.

01:13:42 ◼   ► You know, you wouldn't say something like, um, oh, I saw an angry while I saw a brown

01:13:52 ◼   ► wild angry dog

01:13:53 ◼   ► Like there's a certain way that and there's actually a wonderful book about this about the ways that there's all these little like unconscious things

01:14:00 ◼   ► In English being way I take I take your meeting

01:14:02 ◼   ► Yeah, I was just so I don't know disappointed that's a stupid word cuz I didn't even realize I was appointed I

01:14:08 ◼   ► Adjective I just assumed that she would want to have a Mac

01:14:13 ◼   ► Do I should find this for you because as the language nerd you will really appreciate this

01:14:17 ◼   ► Yeah, here we go adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order opinion size age shape color origin material purpose

01:14:24 ◼   ► Noun so you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife

01:14:31 ◼   ► But if you mess that word order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac. It's an odd thing that every English speaker uses

01:14:38 ◼   ► That list but almost none of us could write it out and as size comes

01:14:43 ◼   ► - What is that book?

01:14:44 ◼   ► - As size comes before color,

01:14:46 ◼   ► green great dragons can't exist.

01:14:48 ◼   ► - What is that book?

01:14:50 ◼   ► - I don't know, I've got a--

01:14:53 ◼   ► - I've got an iBook.

01:14:54 ◼   ► - The Elements of Eloquence.

01:14:56 ◼   ► - That's it, it's so good and it's so well written.

01:14:59 ◼   ► Have you read it?

01:15:00 ◼   ► - No, I haven't, but I read this Guardian article

01:15:01 ◼   ► that I'm pasting into the show notes as we speak.

01:15:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, I learned about it from, I feel like, Paul Bausch

01:15:07 ◼   ► and it's a wonderful like idiom to idiom,

01:15:10 ◼   ► like he describes this certain kind of an effect

01:15:12 ◼   ► in Greek or whatever.

01:15:14 ◼   ► And then, and that leads us to this,

01:15:15 ◼   ► and boom, that's the next entry.

01:15:16 ◼   ► It's an eminently readable book.

01:15:18 ◼   ► It's so good, highly recommended.

01:15:20 ◼   ► Eloquence, what is it?

01:15:21 ◼   ► The elements of eloquence? - The elements of eloquence.

01:15:23 ◼   ► There we go, there's another gift idea for--

01:15:25 ◼   ► - That's a good idea.

01:15:26 ◼   ► - The English speaking nerd in your,

01:15:29 ◼   ► so anyway, in a way that you can know that,

01:15:31 ◼   ► I know the same thing for user interface.

01:15:33 ◼   ► I can absolutely positively in an instant tell

01:15:35 ◼   ► when an app was designed by somebody who does not,

01:15:38 ◼   ► was not a native Mac UI designer.

01:15:42 ◼   ► And in the old days, it would be like a Windows-style app.

01:15:46 ◼   ► - It could just be something like a super wordy dialog box.

01:15:50 ◼   ► You're like, "Hmm, this is your first day, isn't it?"

01:15:52 ◼   ► You don't put that many words in a dialog box.

01:15:54 ◼   ► - Or a dialog box where you see the logic of it,

01:15:58 ◼   ► but the order of which controls go where

01:16:00 ◼   ► and what size they are is like nonsensical.

01:16:03 ◼   ► - Or if it says cancel and retry. (laughs)

01:16:06 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, no, I totally know what you mean.

01:16:08 ◼   ► Yeah, my brief dalliance, just as a side note,

01:16:11 ◼   ► My brief dalliance with PC stuff was circa 2001 when I had to do some cold fusion stuff

01:16:19 ◼   ► for work and I had to learn a little bit of cold fusion.

01:16:22 ◼   ► And it was really the only sensible way to do cold fusion was on a PC.

01:16:26 ◼   ► And it was so strange.

01:16:27 ◼   ► It was just enough to drive me crazy.

01:16:29 ◼   ► It was like just enough to make me feel nuts.

01:16:31 ◼   ► We're moving between spending 30% time on the PC and the rest of my time on a Mac made

01:16:35 ◼   ► me feel nuts.

01:16:36 ◼   ► Like where stuff was on the keyboard, how the mouse worked.

01:16:38 ◼   ► I got equally bad at both when I used both.

01:16:42 ◼   ► I didn't get better at one or the other.

01:16:44 ◼   ► I kept getting worse at both as I used to.

01:16:47 ◼   ► I just pasted into the thing there.

01:16:49 ◼   ► It's a recent post from the amazing Dr. Drang where he's talking about converting fractions

01:16:56 ◼   ► to decimal values and how he used to do it in Excel but he doesn't use Excel anymore

01:17:00 ◼   ► but he pasted a screenshot from Excel.

01:17:03 ◼   ► This is the current version of Microsoft Excel on Mac.

01:17:08 ◼   ► I sent it to you in iMessage. You can see.

01:17:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, I got it. I got it.

01:17:11 ◼   ► - This dialogue box is a perfect example.

01:17:13 ◼   ► - Oh my goodness.

01:17:15 ◼   ► Oh, it's got Redmond all over it.

01:17:17 ◼   ► - I don't know how to describe it.

01:17:21 ◼   ► I'll put it in the, right now, I'm gonna make it.

01:17:24 ◼   ► I'm gonna do the thing where right now

01:17:26 ◼   ► you could just look at your iPhone

01:17:28 ◼   ► and this will be the cover art.

01:17:30 ◼   ► Now I understand this dialogue box.

01:17:32 ◼   ► I understand everything that's going on in here.

01:17:34 ◼   ► I'm not confused, right?

01:17:37 ◼   ► - No, it looks like it was designed by an engineer.

01:17:40 ◼   ► Or an engineer would look at this and go,

01:17:41 ◼   ► what's the problem?

01:17:42 ◼   ► Every option you would need is available here to select.

01:17:45 ◼   ► And it's got three levels.

01:17:47 ◼   ► It's got three levels of UI.

01:17:49 ◼   ► You go from a tab to like a selection left rail

01:17:53 ◼   ► to a sub selection, big text area,

01:17:56 ◼   ► not text area, but selection area.

01:17:58 ◼   ► It's all there.

01:18:00 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:18:00 ◼   ► - Right, and then--

01:18:01 ◼   ► - And what this says 16th, you click on this,

01:18:02 ◼   ► you go to that and that and this.

01:18:03 ◼   ► - And there's this list of items for type

01:18:05 ◼   ► it doesn't take up nearly as much space as it could or should but you can see

01:18:09 ◼   ► why the engineer who made it did it this way because look at the scroll bar there

01:18:13 ◼   ► aren't any more so if you only need ten items just make it ten high regardless

01:18:18 ◼   ► of how it looks in the oh no why did you say that oh no now I see it oh no oh no

01:18:24 ◼   ► no no it did that one didn't have to be so tall in this oh no no this is very

01:18:28 ◼   ► troubling is that because when you go to alignment font border filler protection

01:18:32 ◼   ► I don't know how to gory look at the way the words the label sample doesn't line up with the label type. Oh

01:18:39 ◼   ► That's very upsetting. It's all very upsetting. These are the sort of the padding on the sample is not good

01:18:46 ◼   ► These are the sort of things that bother me, but this is a minor thing compared to yes compared to steam

01:18:50 ◼   ► You can get this right at this

01:18:52 ◼   ► It isn't like there's like a it isn't like there's a hastily drawn like octagon with a child's handwriting on it

01:19:00 ◼   ► that says, okay, that's what Steam feels like.

01:19:02 ◼   ► - So what makes me sad,

01:19:03 ◼   ► here's the thing that makes me sad about this,

01:19:05 ◼   ► is that in the old days,

01:19:06 ◼   ► and even today you still see it here,

01:19:08 ◼   ► here's like a Windows style UI on the Mac,

01:19:10 ◼   ► and it always makes me sad.

01:19:12 ◼   ► But what I see more and more today is Mac apps

01:19:16 ◼   ► that are written by people who clearly are iOS developers

01:19:19 ◼   ► and never really, the only Mac app they ever use is Xcode.

01:19:22 ◼   ► - Oh, interesting, interesting.

01:19:23 ◼   ► - And you see these iOS style apps,

01:19:26 ◼   ► and it kills me, 'cause there's things like,

01:19:28 ◼   ► you can't copy and paste like why can't I copy and paste what are you doing here

01:19:34 ◼   ► strange that's so strange I'm just looking at the original control panel on

01:19:40 ◼   ► a Mac or that they don't like one thing like an app made by I hate this I hate

01:19:47 ◼   ► this trend with the passion of a thousand sons is these Mac apps that run

01:19:52 ◼   ► not as like a Mac app with a menu bar or you know and that you can command tab to

01:19:57 ◼   ► like the cute ones that run in their own little menu, their own little window.

01:20:01 ◼   ► They run as a little widget up in the menu bar in the top right.

01:20:06 ◼   ► Where is this? I don't know where this lives. This is in a secret room in my house that

01:20:10 ◼   ► I can't find. I have to tap on the wall to know if it's there. It's so strange.

01:20:13 ◼   ► Right, but it's because their mindset is they don't think about apps as having a menu bar

01:20:18 ◼   ► and having windows that you click through. It is just like a screen. And so they just

01:20:21 ◼   ► make like an iPhone size app and it runs. You click on a thing in the top right and

01:20:26 ◼   ► it hangs down from the menu bar and there it is. I hate it.

01:20:30 ◼   ► Bartender. Love Bartender. Hides so many things.

01:20:34 ◼   ► Do you ever hear of, there's a there's a rival app to Bartender called vanilla. So

01:20:42 ◼   ► you know how Bartender, so Bartender, there's two utilities that do this. They

01:20:46 ◼   ► let you, they're great. I recommend anybody, especially if you have a laptop

01:20:49 ◼   ► because you, yes, I hate the apps that run in the menu bar and even though I

01:20:55 ◼   ► hate them I still have so many of them that that I you need them like you know

01:21:01 ◼   ► this is how I get to Google Photos this is how I get to back blaze this is how I

01:21:06 ◼   ► get to all kinds of stuff in here do you know what I miss I forget who I was

01:21:08 ◼   ► talking about a couple episodes ago but the thing I really missed one of the

01:21:12 ◼   ► things I missed the most from classic Mac OS is the control strip remember

01:21:16 ◼   ► that oh yeah which grab ease on it that was great and it was the it was the

01:21:19 ◼   ► acquit was where things like that lived and you could they'd go away you'd click

01:21:24 ◼   ► on it, they'd come back. It was so elegant, it looked cool, right? Oh, I missed the control

01:21:30 ◼   ► strip.

01:21:31 ◼   ► It was like a little accordion pop-out thingy?

01:21:32 ◼   ► Yep, exactly.

01:21:33 ◼   ► Yeah, you know, I miss that with Windows. More like a lot of times, because I'm an animal,

01:21:38 ◼   ► I'll be listening to Overcast in the web browser on my iMac, and I'll usually just, you know,

01:21:43 ◼   ► double-click Chrome to like make it go down to the dock. And I miss that ability to like

01:21:48 ◼   ► have things kind of pop up without becoming fully on screen. Do you remember what I'm

01:21:52 ◼   ► talking about?

01:21:53 ◼   ► know exactly what you're talking about. Oh, man. Vanilla. Okay, this looks pretty good.

01:21:59 ◼   ► It's free. Yeah, I don't know why it's free. I wish that this guy would, I wish he would

01:22:03 ◼   ► charge me a couple bucks for it. Thanks, Matthew Palmer. Yeah, I'll put it in the show notes.

01:22:08 ◼   ► Did you want to tell me about anything else you like? You know what? I would love to.

01:22:12 ◼   ► That's actually a, that's actually a perfect segue. Now look, I'm telling you right now

01:22:17 ◼   ► that it's fracture. Oh, you guys know fracture. You'd know fracture, but you also know it's

01:22:22 ◼   ► It's mid November and I've been telling you, I think this is the third episode in a row

01:22:26 ◼   ► where Fracture has been a sponsor and every single time I've told you that you should

01:22:30 ◼   ► already, you should pause the podcast and go order some fracture prints for your family.

01:22:37 ◼   ► Go do it because they're fantastic gifts.

01:22:42 ◼   ► Let's circle back to that because I want to talk about that.

01:22:44 ◼   ► You'll be praised to high.

01:22:45 ◼   ► You got to get the order in you guys because by fracture elves have to get to work making

01:22:50 ◼   ► your fracture.

01:22:51 ◼   ► Right?

01:22:52 ◼   ► handmade handmade by a happy team in Gainesville Florida but from US source materials but they get

01:22:57 ◼   ► backed up at some point in early December they're going to say you know what any order after this

01:23:02 ◼   ► date is going to be too late for for Christmas or whatever other holidays you might be celebrating

01:23:08 ◼   ► do it now you'll feel so much better I'm telling you this is the last one I'm telling you right

01:23:12 ◼   ► now I'll give you a sneak peek is this your last warning well it is for the holidays I know I

01:23:17 ◼   ► I happen to know for a fact that the next episode of the show the fractures not they're not sponsoring it there

01:23:22 ◼   ► This is the third of three in a row

01:23:24 ◼   ► And I think the reason why is that by by the end of November it might be too late already

01:23:28 ◼   ► You know, I'm telling heartbreaking heartbreaking get on it now. These are such good gifts. This is the most no-brainer

01:23:34 ◼   ► No-brainer gift of all time. It's so easy to do their site. Can I take over for a second?

01:23:38 ◼   ► Yeah, their site is so fun to use. It's almost like using flicker back in the day

01:23:43 ◼   ► It just feels like magic that you take a photo it goes

01:23:45 ◼   ► Oh, it looks like you want this kind of fraction you yeah, I totally want this should I make some more?

01:23:49 ◼   ► Yeah, make some more and then send that to your mom. Sorry said hi

01:23:52 ◼   ► I've I am a terrible gift

01:23:55 ◼   ► giver and and so far as that I struggle to I struggle to buy thoughtful gifts for people like my wife who I know

01:24:02 ◼   ► Intimately and love dearly and I cannot figure out what to get I cannot and let alone

01:24:08 ◼   ► people more distant

01:24:11 ◼   ► Fracture gifts I think are the only gift I've ever given anybody where it's like actually triggered like a tearful joy

01:24:17 ◼   ► Wow, right it is it, you know think about it like I don't know

01:24:21 ◼   ► Maybe you've got like a 10 year old kid

01:24:23 ◼   ► Give your you know

01:24:25 ◼   ► The kids grandparents your parents give them a picture of the kid from I don't know five years ago or six years ago or something

01:24:30 ◼   ► Like that where there's a real easy one

01:24:32 ◼   ► Especially if your kids don't get to see that the grandparents or family members as much as you like open up your iOS device

01:24:38 ◼   ► And if you're the sort of person like me who favorites photos just go into your go into your photos and look at some favorites

01:24:43 ◼   ► And then look at them like you're the person who might receive that fracture and think about how thrilled they would be

01:24:48 ◼   ► He get that little that close-up of that sweet little face. I'm telling you this thing is a great gift idea, but you are

01:24:54 ◼   ► This is the special, you know, I don't know if you knew this Merlin. This is our Thanksgiving spectacular

01:24:59 ◼   ► Not a holiday party yet

01:25:03 ◼   ► Party, but it's run under

01:25:07 ◼   ► Thanksgiving man, thanks for having me on

01:25:09 ◼   ► So the holidays are officially started like this is the Thanksgiving episode of

01:25:14 ◼   ► Of the talk show there won't will not be another episode until after Thanksgiving. I'm telling you it might be too late

01:25:20 ◼   ► Don't just beat the holiday rush. Don't wait until December. I'm telling you their order queue fuels up

01:25:25 ◼   ► Ordering a simple like Merlin said the website is a joy. You have so many selections for size

01:25:31 ◼   ► You could get you know, get them a big one get them a small one

01:25:33 ◼   ► Everything that you need comes in the package that to hang it on a wall to prop it up on a mantle or a desk

01:25:39 ◼   ► or whatever

01:25:41 ◼   ► and the picture quality is

01:25:43 ◼   ► Fantastic and this edge to edge thing. It's no joke

01:25:46 ◼   ► It makes you it makes every other way to hang a print of a photo seem outdated

01:25:51 ◼   ► So, where do you go go to fracture dot me?

01:25:55 ◼   ► fracture dot me or fracture me calm and

01:25:59 ◼   ► and save 15% off your first fracture order with the exclusive code talk15. That's T-A-L-K-15.

01:26:07 ◼   ► And the talk comes from the talk show, I presume, and the 15 is the 15% you will save on your first

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01:26:39 ◼   ► like Merlin said, go into your favorites and just pick a bunch of them and get them printed

01:26:44 ◼   ► up. You'll be so thankful and you'll be like, "Thank God John Gruber reminded me to get

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01:26:53 ◼   ► Oh my God, they're the best.

01:26:56 ◼   ► I love ours.

01:26:59 ◼   ► You know, a year ago, I don't know what else you want to talk about.

01:27:01 ◼   ► Oh, God.

01:27:02 ◼   ► Oh, my God.

01:27:03 ◼   ► I guess we've got to do it.

01:27:06 ◼   ► A year ago, we had a holiday party in early November, the day after election day.

01:27:14 ◼   ► Was it the day after?

01:27:15 ◼   ► Did we record on Wednesday?

01:27:16 ◼   ► The morning.

01:27:17 ◼   ► The morning after.

01:27:18 ◼   ► The morning after.

01:27:19 ◼   ► You were still celebrating.

01:27:21 ◼   ► I'll never forget.

01:27:23 ◼   ► We're gonna miss a few people.

01:27:27 ◼   ► Wait, what was it?

01:27:29 ◼   ► That was your line, "We're gonna try to get everybody, but we're gonna miss a few people."

01:27:36 ◼   ► We were both in a pretty bad way, and it was very fresh and very raw, and I gotta tell

01:27:45 ◼   ► you, you know what?

01:27:46 ◼   ► I'm probably stealing your thunder here, but I feel like I've done a fair number of

01:27:52 ◼   ► Podcast programs over the years. I feel like the

01:27:54 ◼   ► Reaction that I got from that has been

01:27:59 ◼   ► Larger and more positive than probably anything I've ever done

01:28:03 ◼   ► the only thing I could compare it to and it's I don't think it's a coincidence like you and I we do have a

01:28:08 ◼   ► we have a repartoir, but the

01:28:11 ◼   ► The thing we did at South by Southwest back. Oh, that was good. Yeah, that was good, but it was you know, I think

01:28:17 ◼   ► Not trying to make it sound like heroes or something because we basically just got up here and we're like

01:28:21 ◼   ► I don't know what the hell's going on, which as it happened was what pretty much everybody

01:28:25 ◼   ► I know was thinking that day. Yeah, but really kind of mostly for a year. That's kind of

01:28:28 ◼   ► mostly what it's felt like. I still don't really know what's going on. The thing that

01:28:32 ◼   ► got me and I know you saw it because we were interacting with the same people at Twitter,

01:28:36 ◼   ► but it was right around election day or the one year anniversary, you know, a week or

01:28:39 ◼   ► so ago, about 10 days ago, where just out of the woodwork, a slew of people on Twitter

01:28:45 ◼   ► were thanking us for that episode saying that not only did it help them a year ago when

01:28:48 ◼   ► it came out to cope with the surprising election of Donald Trump as president, but that in

01:28:55 ◼   ► the intervening year they've listened to that episode multiple times or that they, on the

01:28:59 ◼   ► one year anniversary, they listened again and enjoyed it every bit as again and felt

01:29:04 ◼   ► better because of it again.

01:29:06 ◼   ► And at, you know, this is the talk show is this show is not that a sort of evergreen

01:29:12 ◼   ► listen to episodes over and over again, you know, type of show.

01:29:15 ◼   ► is sort of a "what's going on this week" type of show, for the most part. And so to

01:29:21 ◼   ► hear that about an episode that we did not plan and that I was…

01:29:26 ◼   ► Well, and also, you know, I'm really grateful to everybody for saying that. I'm super

01:29:30 ◼   ► grateful to everybody for listening because it was the word that… the only word I can

01:29:34 ◼   ► really come up with, it wasn't fun, but it was cathartic in some ways. Where it's…

01:29:41 ◼   ► It's it's yeah, I don't even know what to say. It's difficult

01:29:44 ◼   ► Well, like I'm going through right this very second

01:29:47 ◼   ► It's difficult to not be able to articulate what you're feeling to have complicated feelings to know that it's not a particularly good feeling

01:29:52 ◼   ► But it's one nice thing about having a podcast if you have if you have the means

01:29:56 ◼   ► I highly recommend it get a podcast because it is an opportunity to think out loud a little bit and you may not exactly figure

01:30:01 ◼   ► things out but you do a rough draft of what's on your mind and

01:30:04 ◼   ► That that was useful and I'm really glad I had something to fill my time that morning. Oh my god. I

01:30:10 ◼   ► Nice responses it really was and I think people get it and

01:30:14 ◼   ► And we tried to emphasize at the beginning that we're not trying to get

01:30:19 ◼   ► political on it because I think that was so upsetting about it as opposed to

01:30:24 ◼   ► Just say for example like the election and re-election of George W Bush

01:30:29 ◼   ► 15 years ago it you know what what

01:30:36 ◼   ► For example me I found that unpleasant, but it it did not feel

01:30:40 ◼   ► Like the

01:30:44 ◼   ► World had been ripped asunder right it felt like well

01:30:47 ◼   ► There are people on one side of this argument, and there are people on the other side and more people

01:30:52 ◼   ► Well at least in the 2004 election more people voted

01:30:57 ◼   ► Back to my dumb baseball analogy where I had said I felt like I it wasn't that my team lost

01:31:03 ◼   ► but I don't understand baseball. Sometimes when you lose an election, it's a painful

01:31:09 ◼   ► loss of a game, but you don't fundamentally question whether you understand how the sport

01:31:15 ◼   ► works. So I'm trying to figure out something smart to say or talk about on here, and I

01:31:20 ◼   ► don't have very much except to say that—I don't know, there's one thing I want to say

01:31:25 ◼   ► upfront, which is that I feel like I regret because it was very privileged of me to say,

01:31:31 ◼   ► but we both kind of agreed, oh,

01:31:32 ◼   ► everything's going to be fine probably.

01:31:34 ◼   ► Like we'll come out of this fine.

01:31:35 ◼   ► I hope you will allow us a little bit of happy talk

01:31:38 ◼   ► on a very difficult day to say, hey, chin up,

01:31:40 ◼   ► this is going to be fine.

01:31:42 ◼   ► But you know, the truth is it,

01:31:44 ◼   ► we could have even known then that it wasn't going to be

01:31:46 ◼   ► fine.

01:31:47 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:31:48 ◼   ► - So I, I'm gonna say apologize, I guess.

01:31:50 ◼   ► I apologize if I was coming at that

01:31:52 ◼   ► from a privileged position.

01:31:54 ◼   ► It's, it's now clear to me that everything's not,

01:31:56 ◼   ► hasn't gone fine and won't be fine.

01:31:58 ◼   ► That sucks.

01:32:00 ◼   ► The thing that's amazing for me is, oh, and then the other thing I think nested, we didn't

01:32:04 ◼   ► talk about this, but, and I, you know, we're not supposed to talk about this at all, but

01:32:09 ◼   ► I got to tell you, John, in my mind on that day, I know this is completely irrational,

01:32:15 ◼   ► but I swear to God, I thought he would, for whatever reason, for any of the many reasons

01:32:21 ◼   ► I could come up with, I really did not think that he would be president today. I did not

01:32:26 ◼   ► think he'd make even six months in there. I really, there's a part of me that thought

01:32:30 ◼   ► this is all so going off the rails. I don't think he's going to be around even in six

01:32:34 ◼   ► months, let alone in four years, which obviously I was wrong about as well. Did you have some

01:32:39 ◼   ► part of your mind that thought that though, like this is so aberrant that it's going to

01:32:42 ◼   ► have to like the way you get a little splinter and your skin eventually kind of pushes it

01:32:46 ◼   ► out of its own accord. Didn't it kind of feel like the system would try to correct this

01:32:50 ◼   ► in some way?

01:32:53 ◼   ► Part of me thought it and then part of me thought, but he's so, uh, part, I really do

01:33:01 ◼   ► believe it.

01:33:02 ◼   ► And I really think that he suffers from a severe narcissism, mental disorder, and that

01:33:08 ◼   ► it's just, that's just not a recipe for, to be taken out.

01:33:11 ◼   ► And I, you know, it really does require, uh, I don't know.

01:33:18 ◼   ► I, part of me thought it would happen, but part of me, cause I really do think that he

01:33:22 ◼   ► he is not mentally well in a very dangerous way.

01:33:25 ◼   ► I really do.

01:33:26 ◼   ► - Just to be clear, I'm not limiting this to the,

01:33:28 ◼   ► what we talked about today with impeachment

01:33:30 ◼   ► or the 25th Amendment.

01:33:31 ◼   ► I just thought there's so many grenades

01:33:33 ◼   ► rolling around in this campaign.

01:33:35 ◼   ► It just seems like it's,

01:33:37 ◼   ► there's like 50 different reasons this shouldn't be,

01:33:40 ◼   ► and it seems like the system would take care of that

01:33:41 ◼   ► one way or another.

01:33:42 ◼   ► It just seemed implausible

01:33:43 ◼   ► that he would still be in that office.

01:33:46 ◼   ► - The system just wasn't ready for it.

01:33:47 ◼   ► It really wasn't.

01:33:52 ◼   ► I think I don't know if I used this last year or not or if I've used it before but

01:33:55 ◼   ► but the way that our system works is

01:33:58 ◼   ► Like like in an official basketball game like if you go to watch an NBA game

01:34:05 ◼   ► There's a referee and the referee there act, you know, or even like even organized

01:34:08 ◼   ► recreational league and there's referees and like when I used to play rec league basketball like the

01:34:13 ◼   ► You know each team would have to bring like 15 bucks and you pay the refs, you know

01:34:17 ◼   ► And and the refs if the refs say it's a foul it's a foul and that's it and there's nothing you can do about it

01:34:22 ◼   ► Whereas the political system is more like a pickup game of basketball

01:34:25 ◼   ► where there's five guys on one team and five on another and you've got to call your own fouls and

01:34:29 ◼   ► You know it

01:34:33 ◼   ► When I grew up, it's a funny thing

01:34:35 ◼   ► Like it's just like a difference between the suburbs in the city when I grew up playing pickup basketball in the suburbs

01:34:40 ◼   ► The defense called fouls and so if if you I was guarding you and you went up for a shot

01:34:47 ◼   ► And I know that I touched your arm. It was up to me to call the foul and if I didn't

01:34:52 ◼   ► You would say oh, come on. That's a foul but too bad the game goes on but that's that would be dishonorable

01:34:58 ◼   ► Well, it would be dishonorable and I'm gonna get my comeuppance on the other end if I do it more than twice, right?

01:35:04 ◼   ► And I've you know enough if I'm habitually doing it. I'm gonna stop being invited to play because we have you know you

01:35:09 ◼   ► You know what? I mean it

01:35:12 ◼   ► And in the city when I came to Philadelphia in the early 90s to go to college in the city

01:35:19 ◼   ► The offense calls the fouls but the logic holds and if you're the type of player who every time you get your shot blocked

01:35:25 ◼   ► Whether it's a foul or not you call foul. They're gonna start they're gonna start

01:35:29 ◼   ► You know, you're gonna get your comeuppance on the other end

01:35:33 ◼   ► You know, the other team is gonna start calling fouls when they get their shots blocked, too

01:35:36 ◼   ► You know just as you know, if you're gonna do it, I'm gonna do it. It's like mutually assured destruction

01:35:41 ◼   ► like

01:35:42 ◼   ► What happens though when there's one of the teams doesn't even want to play basketball and they just and also imagine

01:35:48 ◼   ► This is something that seems unique about the position that he holds right now

01:35:54 ◼   ► Which is that there are all kinds of safeguards in place all the way up to vice president

01:35:57 ◼   ► There are there are all kinds of things in like hearings and vetting and disclosures that you have to do

01:36:02 ◼   ► about your interests in things and there are can be very

01:36:07 ◼   ► severe penalties for

01:36:11 ◼   ► All sorts of ethical issues at every level of government except for one and there is something unique

01:36:17 ◼   ► I'm not a scholar on this but it's my understanding

01:36:20 ◼   ► That there's a lot of stuff for that never even occurred to them to say

01:36:23 ◼   ► Oh, yeah

01:36:23 ◼   ► The president has to do that too because it was just always assumed would be somebody of good good conscience who was an honorable player

01:36:28 ◼   ► And I don't want to listen to just bagging on the man

01:36:32 ◼   ► But you just kind of assumed that like it's just so crazy how much the kind of stuff that he says on Twitter

01:36:40 ◼   ► That not only would nobody nobody in government even at like school board level ever say on Twitter

01:36:45 ◼   ► But the fact that he's basically admitting to things that would get so many other people in so much trouble feel so frustrating

01:36:51 ◼   ► Yeah, and then to be so kind of kind of proud of this, you know, what's your word? Kaka?

01:36:57 ◼   ► Kaka takra see Oh Kaka Kaka stock Kaka something like that. Yeah. Anyways government by the worst people

01:37:05 ◼   ► Yeah

01:37:08 ◼   ► Fantastic word and it makes it actually sues me that that word exists and comes from the ancient

01:37:14 ◼   ► Greeks because it makes me think that maybe it's not unprecedented like it's certainly unprecedented in the United States

01:37:20 ◼   ► But you know, it's like the older I get the more I realize that

01:37:23 ◼   ► You know the even 200 years ago isn't that long ago, right?

01:37:28 ◼   ► You know what? I mean? Like you can start gaining that perspective and that you know, this sort of thing

01:37:32 ◼   ► Has happened before that that's the only thing that's an unprecedented is you know?

01:37:37 ◼   ► the nuclear shame oh yeah shame the shame of the nuclear well the worst the

01:37:43 ◼   ► worst-case scenario is an awful lot worse than oh then it might have been

01:37:46 ◼   ► back in Plato's day right maniac gets gets in charge not like calling

01:37:51 ◼   ► traveling right but they're doing bad people and and they're so like to see

01:37:57 ◼   ► that incompetent that's the part that kills me and it kills me I'm kind of

01:38:00 ◼   ► glad for it I just figured I figured they were just starting with the travel

01:38:03 ◼   ► ban that was such an interesting couple weeks because it became immediately

01:38:07 ◼   ► apparent that these guys were not firing on all cylinders, that they could screw

01:38:10 ◼   ► up a wet dream if they chose to, and that the one saving grace has

01:38:16 ◼   ► been just the utter lack of control, administration, and competence

01:38:20 ◼   ► that could have made this so much worse. You know, that's

01:38:25 ◼   ► the part that's a little bit mind-blowing. It's like the thing that makes it even

01:38:28 ◼   ► more of a grenade rolling around is you're like, "Wow, he really does think he's

01:38:32 ◼   ► doing a great job at this. It's really strange." The thing that I have found over

01:38:37 ◼   ► the past year. I've not put my head in the sand and I'm paying attention to politics

01:38:42 ◼   ► as much as I ever have before, but some of my very favorite people to follow on this

01:38:47 ◼   ► are real Republicans, conservatives who have their eyes wide open and are calling this

01:38:53 ◼   ► out for what it is. Two that come to mind, and I read their columns, I think they're

01:38:57 ◼   ► great writers, and I just find myself saying, "Yes, this is David Frum, who was formerly

01:39:06 ◼   ► George W. Bush's speech writer. I mean, his conservative bona fides are that he came

01:39:10 ◼   ► up with the axis of evil line for what, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, Iraq, in the lead up

01:39:18 ◼   ► to the Iraq war. You know, I mean, it was George W. Bush's speech writer who came up

01:39:21 ◼   ► with this axis of evil sort of muscular, you know, you know, it, this is not a middle of

01:39:28 ◼   ► the road Republican, but he's totally calling this out for what it is in terms of a, their

01:39:33 ◼   ► incompetence and be the corruption, the outright corruption and the, uh, the, the just lying,

01:39:42 ◼   ► you know, the, just, just plainly lying about something that is demonstrably that you can

01:39:49 ◼   ► demonstrate is untrue, right? You know, like one of the interesting things of, uh, you know,

01:39:55 ◼   ► again, it's almost like we're smoking weed in college, but you know, the long standing debate

01:40:00 ◼   ► about who was the mid-century writer who got the the dystopian future right. Was it Huxley or was

01:40:07 ◼   ► it Orwell? And everybody was so afraid. Orwell's future seemed so much scarier, but then there were

01:40:15 ◼   ► a lot of good arguments to be made before the last five, ten years that Huxley was the one who

01:40:22 ◼   ► was more on point. And it's not one or the other, they were both brilliant, but that this

01:40:28 ◼   ► entertain the mat, you know, you don't have to lie and you don't have to oppress them just entertain them and they won't pay attention and

01:40:33 ◼   ► You know all sorts of bad things can happen

01:40:36 ◼   ► But to me the Trump administration has really woken up the Orwellian aspect of it

01:40:42 ◼   ► right, like it really literally from day one with with the the the goofy thing where there, you know, it was a sparsely attended

01:40:50 ◼   ► Inauguration it was a sparsely attended inauguration

01:40:55 ◼   ► You could look at it with your eyeballs and see. Right, photographs taken with the exact

01:41:00 ◼   ► same camera focal length from the exact same vantage point showing how much, you know,

01:41:08 ◼   ► maybe hundreds of thousands fewer people attending it. And the White House press secretary with

01:41:13 ◼   ► spit coming out of his mouth and his face red. That was his introduction. That was his

01:41:17 ◼   ► introduction. And now we know we can, it's our first sign that we're going to have to

01:41:23 ◼   ► confront an administration that's going to be defined by the pettiness of the lie they're

01:41:27 ◼   ► willing to defend. And like that's such a small, you know, you know, I don't want to

01:41:32 ◼   ► have this argument. You think I want to argue about how many people were standing in an

01:41:35 ◼   ► area? What a strange thing to be spending our time on. But the fact that he has so I,

01:41:40 ◼   ► you know me, I do not use double down because that has a special meaning. But to redouble

01:41:45 ◼   ► his efforts to prove this thing that is demonstrably untrue, even though it's completely petty

01:41:49 ◼   ► and unnecessary to everybody but him makes it an issue and now we're in that

01:41:53 ◼   ► too. Yeah that was a tough day for Sean that was a tough first day on the job.

01:41:57 ◼   ► He has his big boy suit on remember that? Yeah I do. My little turtle man.

01:42:04 ◼   ► The more he lies the smaller his head gets. I don't know but it was true. It's just

01:42:12 ◼   ► bizarre it just was the sort of thing and again I don't think that's political

01:42:16 ◼   ► You know what I mean? Like it's not political on or it's political, but it's not

01:42:19 ◼   ► Partisan, you know, it's it's not right, right left, right? You know what I mean? Like

01:42:25 ◼   ► I'm not here arguing about whether we should massively slash

01:42:29 ◼   ► Taxes on the rich which is a partisan

01:42:32 ◼   ► You know typical left-right argument or should we so many shades got so many shades to it

01:42:38 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, but also like, you know, there there are people in one's own party

01:42:43 ◼   ► one does not particularly like or want to support.

01:42:46 ◼   ► Like, you know, should the party thing

01:42:47 ◼   ► even matter that much?

01:42:48 ◼   ► I mean, like, what do the people have to say?

01:42:50 ◼   ► What are they doing?

01:42:51 ◼   ► What are they accomplishing?

01:42:51 ◼   ► You know, but if anything, we,

01:42:53 ◼   ► and I see this from the people that I follow

01:42:56 ◼   ► on Max Temkin's political US politics Twitter list,

01:42:59 ◼   ► which has become a way bigger part of my life

01:43:01 ◼   ► than I'd like to admit, is that, you know,

01:43:03 ◼   ► the thing is, you gotta just not take your eye

01:43:07 ◼   ► off the policies.

01:43:09 ◼   ► That's the problem, is that there are so many ways,

01:43:11 ◼   ► I, you know, I don't wanna say distract us,

01:43:13 ◼   ► or I'm not even making that dumb case that there's only one important thing and stop

01:43:16 ◼   ► looking at Russia because this it's all important in its way. But like, it's, it's just so easy

01:43:22 ◼   ► at this point to lose track of the policy stuff that's happening. And then as against

01:43:27 ◼   ► as you say, what do we mean politics, partisan, like, you know, and these these words that

01:43:32 ◼   ► used to seem like we all kind of understood them a year or two ago, say two years ago,

01:43:37 ◼   ► like it means so many different things now. There's so many different tribes, it's even

01:43:41 ◼   ► difficult. I mean, you know, conservative and liberal, progressive, like what are the

01:43:48 ◼   ► words even mean anymore? It's just red and tooth and claw.

01:43:52 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know. And the thing that depresses me a year in and that it's become more and

01:43:57 ◼   ► more clear, I guess not. It's not like I wasn't aware of this beforehand, but it it's become

01:44:04 ◼   ► now that he's in office and so much stuff just continues to get overlooked. It becomes

01:44:09 ◼   ► so obvious to me that there is a contingent in the US, a very sizable contingent that

01:44:14 ◼   ► largely backed Trump, who sees their number one enemy as the people on the other side

01:44:19 ◼   ► of the spectrum here in the US. That that's the enemy. And that the thing that keeps them

01:44:26 ◼   ► in favor of Trump, like the 33% who still give him a favorable rating, is that he keeps

01:44:30 ◼   ► doing things to piss off liberals. And if he's pissing off liberals, whatever it is,

01:44:35 ◼   ► good. And it to be it couldn't be more clear to me that that's

01:44:39 ◼   ► true. And I find that incredibly just, you know, distressing.

01:44:43 ◼   ► And literally, I mean, like for kids like us who grew up in the

01:44:46 ◼   ► 70s and 80s, to have them see the Russians, well, the enemy of

01:44:52 ◼   ► my enemy is my friend, and my enemy is Hillary Clinton. So

01:44:54 ◼   ► therefore, the Russians are my friend, right? Is it's

01:44:58 ◼   ► startling. It's absolutely, you know, it's not like, like they're too young to remember

01:45:07 ◼   ► who the Russians are. You know what I mean? Like, so I got into a discussion the other

01:45:11 ◼   ► day about somebody posted a thing on on Twitter, where there was a screenshot of a web app

01:45:16 ◼   ► that they were trying to run in Mozilla. And it said, your browser is not supported. Please

01:45:20 ◼   ► use this, you have to use this in Chrome. And the discussion on Twitter is more or less

01:45:26 ◼   ► How did we come around to this didn't you know like back around 2000 when everything was like it only runs in IE and

01:45:31 ◼   ► We were like like a groundswell

01:45:35 ◼   ► movement to get like the Mozilla project off the ground and then webkit after that and and to embrace web

01:45:43 ◼   ► standards that all these you know to

01:45:45 ◼   ► Get developers on board with building using web standards to build everything so that nothing would be dependent on one single browser

01:45:52 ◼   ► And it worked right it worked we have it actually worked and broke the the the lock that ie had on this and

01:46:00 ◼   ► It's like we've circled around again

01:46:03 ◼   ► And now people are building things that only work in Chrome

01:46:05 ◼   ► And I think part of I think the explanation is that they're being built by people who are too young to remember

01:46:10 ◼   ► 2000 right it's you know 22 year old developers who see these cool things that Chrome and Chrome only supports

01:46:16 ◼   ► And they're doing it because they were seven years old when when we were trying to break the ie

01:46:21 ◼   ► he had that word how do you pronounce the word h-e-g-e-m-o-n-e-y-m-o-n-y oh I'd usually say

01:46:30 ◼   ► hegemony hegemony but I'm trying to bring that married to it all right but anyway but this

01:46:35 ◼   ► Russian thing how can you forget who the Russians are I mean Vladimir Putin was literally the goddamn

01:46:42 ◼   ► KGB agent you know what I mean I don't get it except that the only way it makes sense is that

01:46:48 ◼   ► that whole enemy of the enemy enemy of my enemies my friend and Hillary Clinton

01:46:51 ◼   ► is my enemy like aren't you amazed at how many people continue to how much

01:46:57 ◼   ► like you turn out if you browse through Fox News how the news is about Hillary

01:47:00 ◼   ► Clinton's corruption and it's like dude that election literally it's over a year

01:47:04 ◼   ► ago it is over a year ago she lost yeah she lost and she didn't dispute it she

01:47:10 ◼   ► should definitely be taken out of office at this point well did you see the thing

01:47:13 ◼   ► I retweeted it the Jimmy Kimmel show this week had a man on the street thing

01:47:17 ◼   ► And I sometimes roll my eyes at those man on the street things because if you shoot enough people you're gonna find somebody

01:47:22 ◼   ► They went out and and on the streets of LA and we're asking people if they think Hillary Clinton should be impeached

01:47:28 ◼   ► Dozens and dozens of people who all said oh absolutely

01:47:34 ◼   ► Absolutely for the you know the crime she's committed and it she's and it's and they and like that

01:47:39 ◼   ► The person said so you think impeachment is an order and they're like, yeah

01:47:42 ◼   ► And they were like she should be removed from office and they were like, yes, definitely

01:47:45 ◼   ► Well, you know, there's that that old that old joke about the drunk wandering around into the street lamp

01:47:49 ◼   ► The cop comes up and says what are you doing? He says I'm looking for looking for my glasses

01:47:53 ◼   ► And he says where'd you lose him? Oh, they fell in the river yesterday. He says what are you doing here?

01:47:58 ◼   ► He's so the lights so much better over here

01:48:00 ◼   ► and you know, I think I think in some ways what you're seeing is a a

01:48:04 ◼   ► Nation of people who can't even at this point. Nobody can even anymore and each side feels like to

01:48:13 ◼   ► paraphrase will ferrell

01:48:14 ◼   ► It feels like you're taking crazy pills because you feel like you're seeing something that is so clear to you and you cannot believe that

01:48:19 ◼   ► The other side sees it

01:48:20 ◼   ► So even if even if she's not technically president and can't technically and be impeached

01:48:24 ◼   ► Isn't it obvious that she's a horrible person who needs to continue to suffer right? Right, and I think I

01:48:29 ◼   ► Haven't thought this out very well, but I feel like there's part of this is that there's a war

01:48:35 ◼   ► war a battle a

01:48:38 ◼   ► fight, there's a fight going on right now to decide who's allowed to decide what's true and

01:48:43 ◼   ► what their reasoning is for deciding that it's true. And maybe that's always been the case,

01:48:49 ◼   ► it's just that it's an open war at this point. There's no longer any disputing

01:48:54 ◼   ► that people have different ideas that are on both sides probably a little bit irrational

01:48:59 ◼   ► about how things are, why they're that way, and what that means. And when you see something like what's going on

01:49:06 ◼   ► Day to day lately it really feels like it's an attempt to redefine and this is what makes it feel. I mean I

01:49:12 ◼   ► personally I I'm very resistant to going into the whole like Orwell thing or the whole like Mao thing or any of that because it's

01:49:18 ◼   ► We should say that keep that special but on the other hand people

01:49:22 ◼   ► Choosing to as a group decide that this empirically

01:49:27 ◼   ► Provably false thing is not only true. It's importantly true

01:49:32 ◼   ► That's the you know, I'm saying like when everybody can look at this at this same blue triangle and call it a you know

01:49:39 ◼   ► A red rectangle by Fiat that that's where to me it does get a little bit scary

01:49:45 ◼   ► But also where it makes me try to look at myself and say like, you know

01:49:49 ◼   ► What are the hills that I decided to die on and didn't realize it?

01:49:51 ◼   ► But it's a battle for what for what is true and who's allowed to decide that that I think is really salient right now

01:49:58 ◼   ► Yeah, this is this is the way this is the way that we have

01:50:01 ◼   ► I'm not trying to name names or places here, but like like well, you know when you attack a confederate statue, you're attacking my dad

01:50:07 ◼   ► When you when you attack guns, you're attacking my grandfather. You're you're attacking like and whether that's true or not

01:50:14 ◼   ► I think that's very true. You and I've talked about baseball and family

01:50:17 ◼   ► there's these certain kinds of things that become and we're not even getting into the whole like don't think of an elephant thing about the

01:50:22 ◼   ► Country as a family but but things start to feel like an attack on your family

01:50:26 ◼   ► even when they're not. The fact that solar energy exists feels like an attack on your

01:50:30 ◼   ► family. That sounds silly to you and me, but to somebody else, solar energy might as well

01:50:35 ◼   ► be Hillary Clinton with her uranium. Like, you're destroying my community. This is what

01:50:40 ◼   ► this community does. You're destroying that. Not only are, well, I'm going to stop at this

01:50:45 ◼   ► point before I get myself in trouble, but the battle for not simply what we decide is

01:50:50 ◼   ► true, but who's allowed to decide that, I think is a big part of what we're dealing

01:50:55 ◼   ► with right now and it's going to get worse before it gets better. Yeah. And you mentioned

01:51:01 ◼   ► before and I kind of feel the same way where we had a sort of, we're going to, this is

01:51:06 ◼   ► f'd up and we don't know where it's going, but we're going to be okay. And I feel, I

01:51:10 ◼   ► feel just as bad as you do about that take. It felt like we were just being positive on

01:51:15 ◼   ► the day, but listening back, it didn't age well. No, it didn't mean anybody, anybody

01:51:20 ◼   ► who's whose parents just got removed from the country. Like, guess what? It didn't work

01:51:23 ◼   ► out for them. That was a real thing that happened. Yeah. Real people, you know, uh, you know,

01:51:29 ◼   ► and real people who are living in terror right now of what, uh, immigration and, uh, whatever

01:51:35 ◼   ► ice stands for. Yeah. Um, you know, I wrote on Derek fireball a couple of weeks ago that

01:51:39 ◼   ► they're literally a terrorist organization. I mean that sincerely. Well, there's certainly

01:51:43 ◼   ► using terrorist means they're, they're fighting asymmetrically. The idea of going to a hospital

01:51:46 ◼   ► or a church to try and find a child that you want to remove from the country is some very,

01:51:49 ◼   ► very dark material and doing it in a way where they they call the press they they'll call

01:51:54 ◼   ► the press to go and and you know so that the press is there to photograph and publicize

01:52:01 ◼   ► it that if you go to a hospital or the big one was you know we had a couple of hurricanes

01:52:07 ◼   ► this year that were not you know not good and there was an announcement very bad yeah

01:52:13 ◼   ► I forget if it was in Texas or Florida but one of them the sheriff made an announcement

01:52:17 ◼   ► that uh oh right now that there there'll be there'll be uh immigration officers uh at the

01:52:23 ◼   ► shelter at the shelters yeah uh again so the idea is you feel like that was in florida and then i

01:52:29 ◼   ► feel like in texas they expressly were trying to not say that if remember i think so you're right

01:52:36 ◼   ► it was a look it was on a local basis i believe right and again i i it's just incomprehensible to

01:52:42 ◼   ► me you know that that you what a shockingly inhumane and cruel thing to do like what a

01:52:49 ◼   ► position to put somebody in you know like somebody who is undocumented and maybe you know even if it's

01:52:55 ◼   ► just themselves and they're by themselves and they have to decide do i you know i don't feel safe in

01:52:59 ◼   ► my house but i feel like i might get arrested if i go to the shelter that's you know a you know a

01:53:04 ◼   ► certified reinforced hurricane proof facility with you know medical professionals and and stockpiles

01:53:10 ◼   ► of water and basic provisions. It's sick. I don't know. And again, that's not me. You know what I

01:53:18 ◼   ► mean? I don't have to worry about that. And that privilege absolutely fed me with more optimism

01:53:25 ◼   ► than I should have had. And it's not right. And I feel guilty about it. I really do.

01:53:30 ◼   ► You want to tell me about something you like?

01:53:38 ◼   ► Feel like we really brought the show. Yeah, but it's who I have

01:53:41 ◼   ► One of your sponsors, you know, John I gotta be honest with you buddy. I gotta tell you Christmas is coming up

01:53:47 ◼   ► Christmas is a hard time of year for me. I'm not a good shopper. I'm hard to shop for

01:53:52 ◼   ► Is there anything out there that can help me with this situation?

01:53:54 ◼   ► Do you know anybody with bad Wi-Fi Oh

01:53:58 ◼   ► Brother do I ever Oh

01:54:01 ◼   ► Bane of my existence you get Wi-Fi that drops out you you don't have any ability to test the speed

01:54:07 ◼   ► There's all kinds of ways doesn't doesn't cover the whole house

01:54:10 ◼   ► I've had things like extenders and amplifiers, but it hasn't felt like it

01:54:15 ◼   ► Blanketed. Let me tell you I get in a mesh like way my entire edifice in delicious Wi-Fi hot delicious steaming Wi-Fi

01:54:24 ◼   ► All right. Let me tell you about euro ee ro

01:54:27 ◼   ► now unlike a traditional router company that typically tries to

01:54:32 ◼   ► The old-style way of trying to saturate your house with Wi-Fi is to build bigger base stations and and try to pump more

01:54:39 ◼   ► Wi-Fi raised through the house from a base station

01:54:42 ◼   ► Eero

01:54:44 ◼   ► Takes a totally totally different strategy

01:54:46 ◼   ► Eero creates a mesh network where you have multiple

01:54:49 ◼   ► multiple devices that you spread throughout your house

01:54:52 ◼   ► You don't have to have a special base station one

01:54:56 ◼   ► The same one that serves as your main one you set it up

01:54:59 ◼   ► They have a little app. It's a brilliantly written simple iPhone app. You put it on your iPhone.

01:55:03 ◼   ► Please let me talk about that app.

01:55:05 ◼   ► And it just says, "Okay, this one." You give it a name. Like maybe your cable connection is in your living room.

01:55:11 ◼   ► You can just say "living room." My house, the main connection is in my office,

01:55:15 ◼   ► so it says "office." And then you connect other ones throughout your house. The app will give you instructions on

01:55:21 ◼   ► where best to place them. Like, if you can put them near the stairways so that there's fewer walls interfering,

01:55:28 ◼   ► that's even better. But the Apple guides you through it. And you carried a couple of them.

01:55:33 ◼   ► And you don't connect to the thing you have to keep in mind was you let's say you have three of

01:55:36 ◼   ► them, you have three of them in your house, you don't have three Wi Fi networks. So it's not like

01:55:41 ◼   ► you've created some kind of thing where now you have three Wi Fi networks. And depending on where

01:55:45 ◼   ► you have, you're in your house, you're connected to network A, B or C, it's just one network,

01:55:49 ◼   ► your devices only see one network, when you go to your Wi Fi menu and the menu bar, it only shows up

01:55:55 ◼   ► up as one network. But the device, this is the way the mesh network connects, it'll connect

01:55:59 ◼   ► intelligently to the one with the strongest signal. And it really just works. You don't

01:56:04 ◼   ► have to have like a networking engineering certificate to set this up. You just plug

01:56:08 ◼   ► them in, the app takes care of it. And they've got a new second generation hardware that

01:56:15 ◼   ► they came out with, I think just a couple of months ago. But the second generation hardware

01:56:20 ◼   ► has a third five gigahertz radio.

01:56:23 ◼   ► And so now it's tri-band and that makes it twice as fast

01:56:27 ◼   ► as its predecessor, the generation one Euro.

01:56:30 ◼   ► And the generation one Euro was plenty fast,

01:56:32 ◼   ► fastest wifi I've ever had in the house.

01:56:34 ◼   ► So double the speed on something that was already fast

01:56:39 ◼   ► is just terrific.

01:56:41 ◼   ► And they've added these things called Euro beacons.

01:56:44 ◼   ► So instead of having the full--

01:56:45 ◼   ► - That's the one I got, I got the beacons.

01:56:47 ◼   ► - The beacons are brilliant.

01:56:49 ◼   ► They're just little things.

01:56:50 ◼   ► You don't even have like a power cable.

01:56:52 ◼   ► They just plug into the wall like a nightlight.

01:56:56 ◼   ► And in fact, you can just,

01:56:58 ◼   ► I always imagined the meeting where they were like,

01:57:00 ◼   ► well, we could just plug it into the wall

01:57:02 ◼   ► like a nightlight.

01:57:03 ◼   ► And somebody at the table was like,

01:57:06 ◼   ► - Henderson, Henderson shoots up and he says,

01:57:07 ◼   ► "Wait a minute, what if we made it a nightlight?"

01:57:10 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Thanks, Henderson.

01:57:11 ◼   ► It totally works.

01:57:14 ◼   ► I never fall down going to the bathroom anymore.

01:57:16 ◼   ► It's really nice.

01:57:17 ◼   ► Right. So you can set it up and it can be a little nightlight.

01:57:20 ◼   ► And if you don't like that, you can use the app and say, turn on,

01:57:23 ◼   ► turn the light off. Uh, so you don't,

01:57:25 ◼   ► you don't have to use it as a nightlight, but if you want to, it's there.

01:57:29 ◼   ► Thanks to Henderson. Uh, and so you have these smaller things,

01:57:33 ◼   ► they're so inconspicuous and you can fit them anywhere because you don't have to

01:57:37 ◼   ► plug it in and run a cable.

01:57:38 ◼   ► It's like if you just have an outlet at like the side of the stairs or something

01:57:42 ◼   ► like that, it might be the perfect location.

01:57:43 ◼   ► You just plug it in and the beacons act as part of the mesh network to just saturate

01:57:50 ◼   ► your home with really strong, thorough Wi-Fi service.

01:57:57 ◼   ► It's really great and brilliant little devices.

01:57:59 ◼   ► Just go to the website and take a look at them.

01:58:02 ◼   ► Honest to God, I would call them Apple-esque in design.

01:58:05 ◼   ► They're sort of like a little white version of an Apple TV with nice round corners, very

01:58:11 ◼   ► inconspicuous really really about as nice of a if you can make a router look nice the

01:58:16 ◼   ► Eero is it can I can I say can I say a word about the app absolutely because I'm a fan

01:58:21 ◼   ► go look at your their text go look at that yeah so I'm one thing you can do that's really

01:58:26 ◼   ► really cool and there are whole other products and services that you can pick up that just

01:58:31 ◼   ► do this one thing that era already does which is it will show you every device on your network

01:58:36 ◼   ► And if you're a weirdo like me, you can go in and you can name all of your devices, whatever

01:58:42 ◼   ► you want, and you can give them emoji.

01:58:45 ◼   ► So all of my, all of my Apple or all of my TV pucks naturally have a hockey icon.

01:58:49 ◼   ► You got, you got max, you got the Amazon one, you got my Kindle Oasis is a little, is a

01:58:54 ◼   ► little book.

01:58:55 ◼   ► Okay.

01:58:56 ◼   ► That's cool enough on its own.

01:58:57 ◼   ► Now what's nice is it will show you what is on your network right now.

01:58:59 ◼   ► What has recently been on your network?

01:59:01 ◼   ► Why is this useful?

01:59:02 ◼   ► If there's something weird on there that you don't recognize, you can block it.

01:59:05 ◼   ► If you think that somebody's glomming onto your network in a weird way, you can just

01:59:08 ◼   ► block it.

01:59:09 ◼   ► And if it is currently connected to your network, it will show you at that moment how much bandwidth

01:59:14 ◼   ► that device is downloading and uploading.

01:59:17 ◼   ► It's so great.

01:59:20 ◼   ► And if you happen to have a problem, you can even look at it and it'll tell you which base

01:59:23 ◼   ► station it's connected to.

01:59:25 ◼   ► Have you done profiles yet?

01:59:26 ◼   ► I don't think so.

01:59:28 ◼   ► What's the profile?

01:59:29 ◼   ► There's a whole...

01:59:30 ◼   ► You can go out and buy products for this.

01:59:31 ◼   ► You can have profiles.

01:59:32 ◼   ► So you create a profile called, for the sake of argument,

01:59:35 ◼   ► Teenage Sun.

01:59:36 ◼   ► And the Teenage Sun profile has certain kinds of devices

01:59:40 ◼   ► on it and then certain kinds of rules

01:59:41 ◼   ► about when it's allowed to be used.

01:59:42 ◼   ► So if you've got yourself some little scamp

01:59:45 ◼   ► that likes to dash off with the Chromebook

01:59:46 ◼   ► and sit in a closet like an animal, you know what?

01:59:48 ◼   ► Maybe their wifi goes away a little bit about nine o'clock.

01:59:52 ◼   ► You can do that.

01:59:52 ◼   ► That is built in.

01:59:53 ◼   ► You can have some things, you have absolute control.

01:59:56 ◼   ► This is the MCP, that's what I'm saying.

01:59:58 ◼   ► - I really like this.

01:59:59 ◼   ► I like your emoji.

02:00:00 ◼   ► He sent this screenshot.

02:00:02 ◼   ► He's got a book, a book emoji for his Kindle.

02:00:04 ◼   ► He's got the scales of justice for the within scale.

02:00:08 ◼   ► This is really actually, I thought that I was like looking

02:00:10 ◼   ► at this entire Friday night doing this.

02:00:13 ◼   ► I was looking at it.

02:00:13 ◼   ► I was like, wow, my Euro app doesn't do this.

02:00:15 ◼   ► I didn't realize that you did the work,

02:00:17 ◼   ► but it is a great feature.

02:00:18 ◼   ► You can see all the devices on the network.

02:00:19 ◼   ► One of the other little things that I love about this.

02:00:21 ◼   ► And I know that other base stations have this feature.

02:00:24 ◼   ► I know it.

02:00:25 ◼   ► I know it's not unique to Euro,

02:00:26 ◼   ► but Euro makes it so easy to set up.

02:00:28 ◼   ► It's so easy to set up a guest network

02:00:31 ◼   ► because I'll tell you what, I'm a weirdo. You know what? I have,

02:00:33 ◼   ► even when like when friends come over,

02:00:35 ◼   ► but especially when it's just like people who are like lowercase F friends,

02:00:39 ◼   ► they want to get on the wifi. I don't like letting them on the real wifi.

02:00:42 ◼   ► Especially if they didn't bring anything, you know, if they didn't like bring,

02:00:45 ◼   ► bring beer or a casserole or something like,

02:00:47 ◼   ► why are you going to give them the password? I don't think so.

02:00:49 ◼   ► Get on the guest network.

02:00:51 ◼   ► We had somebody on the, we had somebody at the house, uh, a family,

02:00:55 ◼   ► distant family member was in and wanted to get on the wifi. Uh,

02:00:59 ◼   ► and it had an Android phone and I just thought, "Who knows what the hell is running on there?"

02:01:04 ◼   ► Like an old Android phone. It's like, "You know what? Put them on the guest network."

02:01:07 ◼   ► Isolated.

02:01:08 ◼   ► So good. This is a good product. Good product, Jon. You know what? Fantastic gift.

02:01:13 ◼   ► Exactly. So if you've got like a family member, I'm telling you, you got like your parents

02:01:17 ◼   ► have some rickety old Wi-Fi network. Buy them an Eero set up and set it up for them at Christmas.

02:01:22 ◼   ► It'll be so easy. I swear it. You'll be done in five minutes. It's so great. So like, for

02:01:26 ◼   ► For example, I'm just saying if you have an ERO already and you know how good it is, not

02:01:30 ◼   ► a bad gift idea for the people in your family who could use something like this.

02:01:35 ◼   ► And I will tell you this also with first-hand experience, if you have the first-generation

02:01:38 ◼   ► ERO, buying second-generation ERO material, you don't have to like start over from scratch.

02:01:44 ◼   ► You can just sort of add the second-generation hardware to your network and you still get

02:01:49 ◼   ► some of the better performance and stuff like that.

02:01:52 ◼   ► It's really, really great.

02:01:56 ◼   ► Where do you go to find out more? You go to ero.com and you get free overnight shipping

02:02:02 ◼   ► in the US and Canada. I'm sorry if you live elsewhere, but it's free overnight shipping

02:02:07 ◼   ► in the US and Canada at ero.com. When you enter the promo code, the talk show, so you

02:02:14 ◼   ► got to go, you got to use that promo code to get the free shipping in US or Canada.

02:02:18 ◼   ► It's ero.com. You'll find out more. They've got some great basic, the website will help

02:02:24 ◼   ► you decide just based on the size of the house or apartment you're buying for what to buy

02:02:28 ◼   ► and how many units and stuff like that. You don't need me to tell you that. So just go

02:02:32 ◼   ► to eero.com and remember that code the talk show for free shipping in the US and Canada.

02:02:37 ◼   ► There we go. Christmas child set you Merry Christmas, everybody.

02:02:43 ◼   ► Hmm.

02:02:46 ◼   ► What else do we got here? Oh, let's do something short and happy. How many more sponsors you

02:02:50 ◼   ► got?

02:02:51 ◼   ► That's it.

02:02:52 ◼   ► Well, let's do something fun and happy.

02:02:54 ◼   ► We can talk about your sandwich.

02:02:55 ◼   ► We can talk about…

02:02:56 ◼   ► You asked here.

02:02:57 ◼   ► I'll tell you this before we move off for politics.

02:02:58 ◼   ► You have an item here in our suggested ideas about PredictIt.org.

02:03:02 ◼   ► And you wrote, here's what Marlon wrote in the show notes, PredictIt.org.

02:03:05 ◼   ► Ever tried gambling on stuff like politics?

02:03:07 ◼   ► And so PredictIt.org is a site where you can put real money in there and bet on things

02:03:12 ◼   ► like who's going to win an election or something like that.

02:03:15 ◼   ► I lost a lot of money on PredictIt.org last year.

02:03:18 ◼   ► Oh, you did?

02:03:19 ◼   ► Were you listening to the Starly Kind, David Reese?