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115: ‘Turd on the Front Porch’ With Guest Ben Thompson

 

00:00:00   Where do we even start, Ben?

00:00:03   Yeah, I was actually kind of optimistic we could just avoid watch discussion.

00:00:09   Possibly. I don't know.

00:00:11   Well, then that article dropped today.

00:00:13   But it's almost like at this point, it's like I just want to come out and then let's talk about it.

00:00:20   But no, Apple via wired had to drop a sack of turd on the front porch.

00:00:28   So we're recording on Thursday, April 2nd.

00:00:31   Show's probably gonna come out tomorrow, Friday.

00:00:33   So we're still in this void between,

00:00:39   three weeks ago was this event.

00:00:43   Three weeks from now is when real people

00:00:47   will start getting to watch.

00:00:49   We're still a full week away from the watch being

00:00:51   in stores for people to look at with their own eyes.

00:00:55   Right, like right now, 99.9999% of people

00:01:00   who are interested in Apple Watch

00:01:02   have not seen one in person.

00:01:04   - Right. - Right?

00:01:05   I mean, you go out a lot of nines on that.

00:01:08   I got it. - No, totally.

00:01:09   It's only been at the two events.

00:01:12   - Right. - Well, I guess no,

00:01:13   'cause people are wearing them in public, I guess.

00:01:15   - Combined with employees, but I'm sure though,

00:01:17   and even people who glanced it on employees

00:01:20   with testing units out in the wild, you can do that,

00:01:24   I'm sure that if you say hey is that an Apple watch that they'll say yes, but then I'm sure that this

00:01:28   They've got like a standard reply. That's more or less, but I can't show it to you and said they're not allowed to like

00:01:33   That's exactly right. They're not allowed to let people examine it

00:01:35   But it's

00:01:40   Interesting like to me

00:01:41   I've and I've been talking about it the last few weeks is why in the world would Apple schedule things this way and I think

00:01:45   That the article today is part why I think that they wanted

00:01:51   They didn't want the cycle like with a regular revision where it's event

00:01:55   next week reviews

00:01:58   Two days later go buy it right like this 10-day cycle of most of their you know

00:02:05   Which called flagship products, you know new iPhones come out on an event on a?

00:02:10   Usually a Monday or Tuesday

00:02:13   Then the reviews come out a week later and

00:02:19   Then like on a Wednesday, I think usually usually Tuesday or Wednesday

00:02:24   And then Fridays are always the day where people who've pre-ordered will get theirs delivered and stores will have them and people can line up

00:02:31   It's like a you know

00:02:33   10 day cycle 11 day cycle

00:02:35   The watch is way off of that and I can only guess that it's because they want to fill that space between last month's event and

00:02:41   this month's release with a

00:02:44   Drumbeat a steady drumbeat of stuff

00:02:48   Promotional stuff, you know, good morning America TV now this and wired

00:02:53   So today what tell me what's the article we're talking about?

00:02:58   So wired dropped this article

00:03:01   entitled iPhone killer the secret history of the Apple watch

00:03:04   and

00:03:07   David Pierce

00:03:09   Wrote an article

00:03:11   Where he clearly got clearly, you know blessed by Apple PR. He talked talked to people at Apple. He spent a lot of time

00:03:17   with the Human interface designers day.

00:03:21   His name is... I can't find his name right.

00:03:23   Alan Dye.

00:03:24   Alan Dye.

00:03:25   And with any of these pieces, and this is kind of the trouble with posting them, is

00:03:36   you don't know like to what extent what is coming from Apple, what's coming from the

00:03:41   spin that PR is giving him, and then what if it's coming from Pierce.

00:03:46   But the kind of overarching theme of the article is that the real goal of the watch is to make you not need your iPhone so much.

00:03:56   And it's focused on the notifications and the idea that it will free you from your phone.

00:04:00   I would say, I'm going to interrupt and I'm going to subtly tweak that and say that it's not so much that you don't need your iPhone, but that it...

00:04:09   it because it's all coming from the phone right it all only works if you're

00:04:15   in Bluetooth range of the phone so it's more like a dashboard to your phone

00:04:23   well I think it's it's it's more like because they talked about like like

00:04:28   winch talked about in the article you talked Kevin Lynch um the idea of like

00:04:32   you can be playing with your kids and you can get a notification and you can

00:04:36   glance at it realize it's not that important you can keep doing what you're

00:04:38   You're not actually pulling out of your pocket and filling with it and all that sort of stuff,

00:04:42   which is hardly a new thesis.

00:04:44   It's interesting that this seems to be the story that Apple is choosing to tell.

00:04:50   But I mean frankly I think that – oh, and by the way, I think that they said at the

00:04:55   event that the watch will work on your home Wi-Fi network.

00:05:00   But I'm not 100% sure on that.

00:05:04   I think that that's only, but it's only, again, I cannot, I'm 100% sure, but I'm 99% sure

00:05:11   that all that means though is, I think you're correcting me, that as long as your phone

00:05:15   and your watch are on the same Wi-Fi network, even if Bluetooth is out of range.

00:05:22   That's correct.

00:05:23   So you can set your phone down like on the front door, next to the front door or next

00:05:27   to your bed and you can go around the house and your watch will still have full functionality.

00:05:32   And the idea there, and it sounds great, is that you can, you know, if you need to charge

00:05:36   your phone or whatever, you can do it and, you know, go watch TV two floors away from

00:05:41   where it's charging and you're not going to be out of touch from notifications you're

00:05:45   expecting.

00:05:46   Right, exactly.

00:05:47   That's why I just looked it up.

00:05:48   That's exactly what it is.

00:05:49   So yeah, so I think you're probably right.

00:05:53   And if you think about the other, you know, because you have to think of this not in terms

00:05:57   of the normal Apple watch but an Apple new product launch and it was the case with particularly

00:06:06   the iPhone but also the iPad that there was a big break between the introduction and the

00:06:12   actual unveiling of the device.

00:06:14   In the case of the iPhone, there was a second event as well.

00:06:16   There was …

00:06:17   Exactly, exactly. Which was a good three weeks before the phone as well. So, yeah, so I think

00:06:27   big picture you're probably right. Frankly, I think this article is a PR disaster.

00:06:35   I would not go that far, but I don't think it was good.

00:06:40   Yeah, well, I mean the killer line which is already all over Twitter and stuff is this

00:06:46   idea that Apple decided they wanted to do a watch and they had to figure out what it

00:06:51   was for which kind of confirms the worst suspicions that people had about the watch in a very

00:07:03   sort of not subtle way, a very blunt sort of way.

00:07:08   And of course, like I said, you don't know what the balance is between Apple PR and what

00:07:12   Apple employees said and what Pierce came up with.

00:07:19   Where is that line?

00:07:21   It sounds bad.

00:07:22   Where is that line?

00:07:23   I can't find it.

00:07:24   Let me find it.

00:07:25   It's pretty close to the top.

00:07:28   Maybe I don't have the phone.

00:07:29   Apple decided to make a watch and only then set out to discover what it might be good

00:07:33   for, besides displaying the time.

00:07:36   some of these terrible web pages that has like the pictures and the text growing on

00:07:39   top of it, which like theoretically looks good, but drives me up the wall.

00:07:43   Yeah, it's, you know what? I read it on my phone and it was actually really good. Like

00:07:48   the phone is much better on the phone. Yeah. I just say beer and now I'm looking at it

00:07:51   in a desktop browser and it's a disaster for reading in my opinion. Yeah. So there's, there's

00:07:56   two parts. The first one is that first one, there's a big at the top apple side and make

00:07:59   a watch and let itself discover to discover what it might be good for. Um, and then there's

00:08:03   There's another line about Johnny Ive.

00:08:05   I began dreaming about an Apple Watch just after CEO Steve Jobs death in October 2011

00:08:11   and that is basically like insinuating that I've, yeah, I've began a deep investigative

00:08:20   horology studying how reading the edition of the sonnet horology became an obsession

00:08:23   and the obsession became a product.

00:08:25   Along the way the Apple team landed upon the watch's reason to talk.

00:08:28   It came down to this and then they get the phone is ruining your life which I definitely

00:08:33   presume is is Pierce's kind of summary of it but like it doesn't matter this is

00:08:37   on Apple and they're the one that's orchestrated this and like I said the

00:08:43   problem is it's really feeding into all the worst or the most pessimistic kind

00:08:48   of conceptions about the watch yeah the line is Pierce's it's not a quote yeah

00:08:56   here's that this is just prose from Pierce Apple decided to make a watch and

00:09:00   only then set out to discover what it might be good for,

00:09:02   parentheses, besides, you know, displaying the time.

00:09:05   Which is a weird thing to put in parentheses,

00:09:11   because who says that it has to,

00:09:16   that telling the time has to be a primary function?

00:09:20   - Right, and the thing is, is like, what's funny is,

00:09:26   The next sentence actually very much fits my feeling about the watch.

00:09:32   I don't remember if it says on the podcast, I think I said it to you before.

00:09:37   The quote is, "There was a sense that technology was going to move onto the body," says Alan

00:09:42   Dye who runs Apple's human interface group.

00:09:45   "We felt like the natural place, the place that had historical relevance and significance

00:09:48   was the wrist."

00:09:52   That's my whole thesis for the watch as well.

00:09:55   It's the natural progression of technology.

00:09:59   It keeps getting smaller and keeps getting more personal and where do you go from the

00:10:03   phone?

00:10:04   The watch just seems the obvious place to go and I think the history of technology shows

00:10:11   that personal and convenience trumps anything and that actually is the reason to be bullish.

00:10:19   The problem is it's a subtle point that requires putting in kind of historical context

00:10:27   of technology and the way things move and the way things will go over time like what

00:10:34   happens when the watch has cellular radios for example.

00:10:37   And either Apple didn't do a good job of setting up that framing for Pierce or he ignored

00:10:45   it but read but the fact the matter is I actually think that's exactly right but

00:10:50   like but it doesn't sound good that's why it's a PR disaster I have to go meta

00:10:58   on the story before we talk about I think there is a lot to talk about here

00:11:03   with this feature story but I'd have to go meta first about the story as opposed

00:11:09   to the watch and the team and the decisions you know and I'm gonna get

00:11:12   this out of the way I feel like I have to clear the decks is that it's

00:11:17   complaining about the the way that it's written is petty and catty but that's

00:11:24   how we writers are and there's a part of this where I think holy shit I could

00:11:28   have done what's better job if they would have given me a full day with

00:11:31   Lynch and die and let me talk to them on the record extensively I could have done

00:11:37   a much better job and I honest that's that is that's what I as I'm reading

00:11:42   the story that's what I thought and I got to the bottom and I thought wow this

00:11:48   they picked the wrong guy to give this access to like to me this was very this

00:11:53   is a very lightweight article did you ever get one of those there's a

00:11:56   steakhouse in Philly that has these great when you get the bread before your

00:12:02   meal they're really big and it looks like holy show I could never eat that

00:12:05   that's this like muffin type bread thing and then you open it open it up and

00:12:09   there's nothing in the inside right you know it's like it's actually not a

00:12:12   a lot of bread. It's like some kind of thing that puffs up and like a, you know,

00:12:16   like more like a pastry than bread. That's what this article is like to me.

00:12:20   It's very empty. Part of it though, here's the thing that I think is part of it, is

00:12:25   look at the timing of it. It came out today. It looks like, you know, it's pretty,

00:12:29   I don't know how many, how long it is, but it sounds to me like he got this access

00:12:35   to to Lynch and Dye sometime after the event last month, but probably a couple

00:12:41   weeks ago yeah it wasn't it wasn't yesterday or at least 3500 word yeah so

00:12:47   at least or at least a week ago I mean I think it would be at least a week maybe

00:12:51   more but some you know but anyway I and who knows maybe he did but it certainly

00:12:56   doesn't sound and and and Pierce never said here's the thing Pierce never says

00:12:59   in here that he's had the watch that he himself is you know got access to one

00:13:05   and it doesn't read like a review in any way. So I'm guessing he didn't. I mean, I'm sure

00:13:12   that they had, you know, you know that he got to see demos from the watches that Lynch

00:13:17   and Dye and others were wearing and that they had demo units similar to the ones that were

00:13:21   at the event, etc. But he didn't get to he doesn't have firsthand experience of what

00:13:25   it's like to use the watch. So how do you write this story? Like, so on the one hand,

00:13:29   I think I could have done this better. But on the other hand, even if they had offered

00:13:32   it to me. I don't see how I could have accepted it unless they let me use the watch for a

00:13:36   week first so that I'd have a frame of reference. How do you talk to the two people? Maybe they're

00:13:46   the only two sources he has on the record, but Dai is the user interface point person

00:13:51   for the watch, or they say for all of Apple's human interface group, but led the team that

00:13:58   did the watch interface and Lynch was in charge of the software team that implemented the

00:14:03   designs.

00:14:05   So I don't understand how you have the best possible interview with those two unless you

00:14:13   are familiar with the product that they're talking about.

00:14:18   So I understand why Apple might want an article coming out before the pre-orders to keep the

00:14:25   hype level up but it's to me a waste of time.

00:14:28   So on the one hand, I wish that they'd pick me to write it or ask me to write it but on

00:14:32   the other hand, there's no way I would have accepted it unless I had firsthand experience

00:14:34   with the watch because I feel like I'm going in blind.

00:14:37   >> Yeah, well, that's why and you're right.

00:14:40   Saying a PR disaster is a little strong but because who knows how much it's going to break

00:14:44   through but this is why I place -- that's one of the many reasons why I place -- I think

00:14:51   this article reflects poorly on Apple's communications team.

00:14:56   And the reason is a few things.

00:14:59   One, the reason you just articulated, right?

00:15:01   Like if it is an empty, like one,

00:15:03   maybe they did pick the wrong guy.

00:15:04   I don't know, I don't know, I don't know David Pierce.

00:15:06   He has a great reputation.

00:15:07   So, you know, but you're right.

00:15:10   He was put in a difficult position

00:15:12   by having to write about something that he,

00:15:14   you're right, I agree.

00:15:15   It seems like he hasn't used.

00:15:17   to like, there's a certain art to messaging something and origin stories and things like

00:15:30   that and it might be true that Apple decided to do a watch and then figure it out but I

00:15:39   would also bet that Apple decided to do a phone and then figure out what it would do

00:15:43   as well.

00:15:44   The thing about this thing that everyone's latching onto is if you actually think about

00:15:52   it, it's not really that controversial.

00:15:57   That's how products like this are developed.

00:16:02   But that's not how you necessarily tell the story.

00:16:05   The way you told the phone story was we all hated our phones so we wanted to do something

00:16:09   better.

00:16:10   And that was the line and everyone remembers that.

00:16:13   remembers Steve Jobs saying that at the keynote.

00:16:16   And that line,

00:16:19   like there's no line like that about the watch.

00:16:25   And now the line that is, especially with this article,

00:16:30   gonna kind of become cemented,

00:16:33   particularly on the tech press,

00:16:34   is that Apple wanted to make a watch.

00:16:37   - Yeah, I think I am in complete agreement with you.

00:16:39   I don't think it's damning,

00:16:40   And I don't think it's, I don't know, whatever the app is,

00:16:44   what's the opposite of damning?

00:16:46   I don't think it's anything, it's nothing.

00:16:47   Because I think you're right, all products start like that.

00:16:50   Like, okay, let's try to make a phone

00:16:51   and see if it comes out.

00:16:53   Or really like the way Apple did it was,

00:16:55   let's try to make a phone and they made two phones, right?

00:16:57   There was the Fidel team working on the iPod OS version

00:17:02   of the phone and there was the four stall Bertrand Cerlet

00:17:08   Bertrand Serlet side trying to do the "we can seriously we can strip down OS X to something

00:17:15   that will run on this trust us" side and then it was like okay this is the one.

00:17:21   Well the thing is with the phone is the phone had a reason to exist and that was that it

00:17:26   was a phone and what's funny about the line that we're talking about is like everyone

00:17:33   pretends like I don't know why it's in parentheses you're right like the watch does have a

00:17:38   reason to exist. It's a watch. Like it tells the time. And now admittedly this is less

00:17:46   compelling because everyone needs a phone but clearly over the last several years more

00:17:51   and more people have decided they don't need watches. So I appreciate that there's more

00:17:57   of a need to create value outside of that to get people who have never worn a watch

00:18:06   to start wearing one. That said, it's not like this is Google Glass, for example, where

00:18:14   there was no pre-existing kind of thing for it to fit into. There was no framing for it

00:18:22   to fit into. It was a completely new-to-the-world thing, whereas the phone was a phone, but

00:18:28   more. And this is a watch, but more. And I think this is why Apple -- and this is almost

00:18:33   where Apple kind of got it but not quite. That's why Tim Cook, the first thing he said

00:18:37   about the phone, it keeps super accurate time, which was kind of weird. But I think that

00:18:42   was the idea, was establishing that this is a watch first and foremost. And that's why

00:18:46   it's called Apple Watch. It's not called a smartwatch. All that sort of stuff. And I

00:18:51   think you see that in here. There is a lot of the imaging about the watch faces and there's

00:18:59   about the Mickey Mouse thing in here and the SORR thing.

00:19:03   I think Apple was going for that, but there's a lack of clarity in their messaging.

00:19:17   I think Apple, the company, is doing very well, but I think this is an area they've

00:19:20   struggled with consistently since Steve Jobs passed away.

00:19:26   If you think about it, this is the one area that he really did micromanage.

00:19:30   He looked over everything and approved everything when it came to messaging and the fear about

00:19:35   micromanaging is what happens when the micromanager goes away.

00:19:38   Do the people that are left have the skills and ability to come up with stuff of their

00:19:43   own or are they just people who implement it?

00:19:46   I haven't seen super compelling evidence quite frankly in the last several years, I've written

00:19:50   about this several times that Apple really has their,

00:19:54   their messaging muscle fully developed.

00:19:56   Hold that thought. Cause I, I want to come back to that exact point. Hold that.

00:20:01   I want to go back. What's in your hands. Okay.

00:20:06   Cause I'm really bad at holding a thought.

00:20:08   Cause that's another meta point that I want to make,

00:20:15   but to go back to my admitted

00:20:19   pettiness complaining about the article and professional jealousy. I'm also, I

00:20:24   don't do that all the time. I certainly like the Ian Parker profile of

00:20:28   Johnny Ive in The New Yorker from a few, I guess it's a few months ago now, yeah

00:20:32   February 23rd, was fantastic. Absolutely tremendous, a piece for the ages. I don't

00:20:40   even know that I have a niggle about it. I guess my only niggle was that when he

00:20:43   quoted me that he didn't quote the better part of the line.

00:20:48   So I will get to your quote soon in this article. I'm not Yeah,

00:20:53   exactly. I'm not above you know, I don't every single time

00:20:57   somebody gets, you know, access to Apple. I'm not I don't think

00:21:00   wow, that should have been me this Ian Parker story for the New

00:21:02   Yorker. Fantastic. Also, I've been endless in my praise for

00:21:08   the new becoming Steve Jobs book, which I think is

00:21:11   fantastic and I recommend to everybody and I think it's I'm not gonna say it's perfect but I think it

00:21:17   is excellent truly excellent and a great complement to everything that's especially as a complement to

00:21:23   all the other books that have been written about jobs and Apple in you know last few decades so

00:21:29   it's not like I always complain about people who write about Apple you know it's not like I'm

00:21:33   constantly saying I could have done that better I could have done that better but I just think in

00:21:38   case a lot of people could have done this better. Yeah but I mean at the end

00:21:45   of the day like I mean I think the the fault for the Isaacson book falls on

00:21:52   Jobs. Yeah I do too. Well both I'd say both. Well I mean yes it does but I think

00:21:57   but like you know one one can suspect that you know why didn't Jobs pick

00:22:03   someone that knew him well and knew Apple well and new technology well. Well

00:22:07   And there's a great story in becoming Steve Jobs that Bruce Schlander tells of when he was at the Wall Street Journal

00:22:13   One and this was like in this was before he I think it was

00:22:18   Before he met Jobs the first time and why he was nervous meeting him the first time in the 80s

00:22:23   Was that he had a colleague at the Wall Street Journal who got an interview with Jobs

00:22:28   I think while he was still at Apple and he was like Jobs just interrupted the interview and said something to the effect of

00:22:34   Do you understand anything at all about this fucking stuff that we're talking about? Do you understand any of this?

00:22:39   Just called him out on it, you know

00:22:41   And a guy probably didn't and I kind of feel like if you know, I think jobs is probably a really good

00:22:47   Judge of whether people understood the stuff that they were talking about. I think it was really hard to bullshit that man

00:22:54   I think he had to know that Isaacson just didn't know what the fuck he was talking about with his work

00:22:59   Which I you know, I agree the buck stops with jobs

00:23:03   Well, that's the same thing here. I mean like

00:23:06   this is like I

00:23:08   Don't think I don't think this article

00:23:11   accomplished what Apple wanted it to accomplish and

00:23:15   And I think the buck stops stops with Apple. Yeah, so let's think back so this idea

00:23:21   Hey, let's make a watch and we don't know what it's gonna do

00:23:24   but let's just set out to do it and that like you said a lot of people are latching on to this as proof that it's

00:23:29   the whole thing was doomed in a folly.

00:23:32   That's exactly, I think that's exactly what they do with everything.

00:23:34   The key is to go back to that line from a year or two ago that "thousand no's for every yes," right?

00:23:41   Do well, do a thousand crazy things and the

00:23:44   the trick isn't in coming up with the brilliant idea from the outset, right?

00:23:51   That's, that is, that's death. If you only, if you just sit there and wait at

00:23:57   The idea stage until you have a perfect idea and it's all comes together and then go build it. That's death

00:24:03   That's the way you make crap products

00:24:06   you have to get your hands dirty get the clay and start molding the clay and start making things and

00:24:12   try it and

00:24:14   Look at it and think is this anything and then if you think it's something keep going and then even after you've spent a lot

00:24:20   Of time on it eventually you've got to say

00:24:22   Well, it was worth it. But no, we're not gonna do this and then you know you abandon it

00:24:28   Paul Paul throughout posted it posted to like a bunch of like old old

00:24:33   stuff that he had

00:24:36   today and he posted this amazing kind of like like

00:24:40   statue type thing that was like a a a

00:24:44   Concept case for Longhorn. It was like these three CDs and a glass case and it was way overdone and out of there

00:24:52   But it's funny that you mention that because that was like the classic case of pre-planning.

00:24:58   Like Microsoft, "Oh, we're going to do all this stuff.

00:25:00   We're going to redo the file system.

00:25:01   We're going to redo all user relational databases."

00:25:04   All this crazy stuff and they got so focused on this is the idea and now we're going

00:25:09   to make it happen that they spun themselves into the ground and took years to recover

00:25:16   from that.

00:25:17   No, I think you're exactly right.

00:25:20   You don't start with an idea.

00:25:21   start with a ton of ideas and whittled down.

00:25:24   So it's a three year project. And the the idea you know, the

00:25:28   people are latching on to the idea that the that the mistake

00:25:31   was made back on day one when they said let's make a watch and

00:25:34   figure out what what it could be good for. No, if if the watch is

00:25:38   a bad product, if it's if this is, you know, or even not, not

00:25:44   bad, even if it's just not great. The problem wasn't on day

00:25:47   The problem was on day 800, 700, somewhere around there,

00:25:52   maybe even 900 when they didn't just say, you know what?

00:25:55   No, this isn't good enough.

00:25:57   It's not at the beginning stage.

00:25:59   It's at that end stage.

00:26:02   It's having the discipline of, what do they say, killing your babies.

00:26:06   And even though you've invested two years in this,

00:26:08   you may have to backtrack a year.

00:26:10   And there is some of that in here.

00:26:12   There's some of that in the Wired story where they say that they've

00:26:15   you know, had to rebuild some of the software

00:26:17   from scratch three times.

00:26:18   - Yeah, I thought it was interesting.

00:26:21   They actually had the same interface as the Pebble Time.

00:26:25   - Yes, yes.

00:26:26   - Which is really interesting.

00:26:27   - That was one of the things I called out.

00:26:29   I actually called that out.

00:26:30   Let me see here.

00:26:31   Here's the quote.

00:26:32   "An early version of the software served you information

00:26:36   "in a timeline, flowing chronologically

00:26:37   "from top to bottom.

00:26:39   "That idea never made it off campus.

00:26:41   "The ideas that will ship on April 24

00:26:43   are focused on streamlining the time it takes a user to figure out whether something is worth

00:26:47   paying attention to. So yeah, it sounds, which is, and again, that drove me nuts though that

00:26:52   Pierce didn't delve more into that, into their idea, if they told him about that idea, I would

00:26:57   have loved to have heard more about it and see just how much it was like the Pebble 2.0 interface.

00:27:02   Because that's, that's the Pebble 2.0 is, what is it, up is old and down is,

00:27:09   Up is old, the middle is now, and down is the future.

00:27:13   Right.

00:27:13   And it sounds like the criticism is.

00:27:15   And now we're reading into an article that

00:27:18   was reading into whatever.

00:27:19   But was that-- that leaves everything

00:27:23   the same level of priority.

00:27:25   And so now you're just scrolling through stuff

00:27:27   that may be important, stuff that may not be.

00:27:29   And the situation here is, I think,

00:27:33   that Apple redid the interface to more surface things in the moment and then either have

00:27:40   them go away or have them or have it be more immediate and more reactive.

00:27:47   Yeah.

00:27:48   Alan Dye is actually an interesting guy.

00:27:50   I don't know him personally, but he's active and I knew of him and even though his name

00:27:58   probably isn't that well known, is somewhat controversial if you consider the whole, you

00:28:05   know, you change in UI direction from iOS 7 and Yosemite to be controversial, because

00:28:12   he led that work, you know, working directly under Ive. And it's the fact that his background

00:28:17   is graphic design.

00:28:20   Yep. I was I was thinking the exact same thing.

00:28:24   he came into Apple and Schiller's product marketing group and did things like the packaging,

00:28:31   you know, like boxes and stuff like that, and then moved to take a leadership role in

00:28:38   user interface design.

00:28:40   And the, like I said, I would call it controversy.

00:28:44   And people inside Apple, I know, you know, there are people who strongly disagree with

00:28:48   the direction.

00:28:50   I think that is the criticism of the iOS 7 aesthetic is that it looks fantastic, but

00:28:55   there's a difference between looking good in a screenshot and actually being something

00:29:00   that you interact with.

00:29:02   I think all the criticism is about the affordances, like how do you know what to do, what to press.

00:29:08   That's something that I do think is lacking and is still lacking.

00:29:13   Even though, no question, iOS 7, I would say it looked a million times better than the

00:29:17   previous version, it is harder to use.

00:29:20   Yeah, and you know, it's inside the company, like HR wise,

00:29:27   there's been turnover, like where there are. And again, I

00:29:34   don't think it's complete. It's not like all of the old human

00:29:38   interface team was let go, forced out, and they're all, you

00:29:42   know, have new jobs elsewhere. And a whole new team came in.

00:29:46   But in some ways it's, you know,

00:29:49   you know, some of the old people are still there and, you know,

00:29:52   it wasn't a complete reshuffling, but it was definitely

00:29:56   somewhat of a reshuffling, right?

00:30:00   Yup. No, I've heard the same thing.

00:30:02   You know that. And, and there's definitely some, you know, uh,

00:30:06   user interface people from the other side,

00:30:08   the old school people who have left Apple and are at, you know,

00:30:11   Google and other places now in, in the Valley, uh,

00:30:15   And Di is sort of, I forget the other name.

00:30:19   I know there's another person

00:30:20   who came from product marketing.

00:30:21   You know, and there's some resentment

00:30:25   from the people who don't think,

00:30:26   who don't agree with the direction.

00:30:28   Just as an aside.

00:30:32   Let me take a break and then we'll come back

00:30:35   to that point that I told you to keep in your hands.

00:30:37   Is that all right?

00:30:38   I think it's a good time.

00:30:39   - It was slipping through my fingers,

00:30:40   but with a reminder, I just re-grabbed it.

00:30:42   - All right, hold on.

00:30:42   Let's take a break and let's thank

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00:31:19   It really is your best photos.

00:31:21   You put them up.

00:31:22   You get some pictures of your kids or your family and stuff like that.

00:31:25   You put them up on the wall.

00:31:28   And then all of a sudden, you look at them and my God, everybody's older, right?

00:31:31   We've got a picture.

00:31:32   I just saw it the other day.

00:31:33   It was from my wife's and my wedding.

00:31:37   And God, it was a long time ago.

00:31:38   and one of her cousins was just a tiny little girl,

00:31:41   like preschool age, and now she's like a senior

00:31:44   in high school, and it's like, holy shit, look at her.

00:31:47   What a great reminder.

00:31:48   Printing photos, I can't recommend it enough.

00:31:51   Well, Fracture is a great way to do it.

00:31:54   You send them your photos, they print them directly on glass,

00:31:58   not a piece of paper stuck to glass.

00:32:00   I don't even know how they do it,

00:32:01   some kind of proprietary secret sauce.

00:32:04   They print them right on the glass,

00:32:05   just like the way that our iPhones are laminated,

00:32:09   the pixels are laminated to the glass.

00:32:11   It's a fantastic effect.

00:32:13   It really looks great.

00:32:16   And it lets you mount them in these amazingly minimal ways,

00:32:20   because there's no reason--

00:32:22   you don't need to have a border around the frame,

00:32:24   because there's no piece of paper that's secured to the glass.

00:32:27   So you can get these amazing edge-to-edge--

00:32:29   just the glass, just the picture, just the picture,

00:32:32   just sitting there.

00:32:34   Really, really amazing stuff.

00:32:36   Great prices, all sorts of sizes,

00:32:39   from really small stuff you can put on your desk

00:32:41   to really big, like 23 by 23 square,

00:32:46   I forget how big the big rectangle one,

00:32:47   something 28 inches, 27 inches, really, really big.

00:32:51   And the amazing thing about that too,

00:32:55   is it ties into, I think, Apple's campaign

00:32:57   with the iPhone 6 camera, the shot with iPhone,

00:33:00   with just how good iPhone pictures look blown up big.

00:33:05   We know that the iPhone has a good camera,

00:33:08   but it's like you still think, well, it's a phone camera,

00:33:10   so you can't blow it up real big.

00:33:11   It's like, actually you can, there's plenty of pixels.

00:33:13   You can go to 20 some inches with photos taken

00:33:16   with your iPhone and they look amazing.

00:33:18   I mean, some of the ones in the Apple store,

00:33:19   they've got blown up to like six feet and they look great.

00:33:22   So where do you go to find out more?

00:33:26   go to fractureme.com and you can sign up. Is there a code? I think there's a code but

00:33:36   I forget it. Well, I'll tell you later about the code. Go there. Go to fractureme.com and

00:33:47   get some pictures printed and my thanks to fracture. All right. What was the thought

00:33:55   that I had told you to hold in your hands.

00:33:57   So the idea is that Apple's messaging

00:34:03   hasn't been as crisp as it once was.

00:34:06   And I always hate to dip into the since Steve Jobs

00:34:14   sort of narrative.

00:34:15   But I think this is the one area where Apple does miss him.

00:34:20   And I think a reason they miss him

00:34:21   is in part because he was so deeply involved in the messaging, approving everything.

00:34:31   You cannot overstate how involved he was more than product design.

00:34:38   The problem with that is the danger of having a micromanager is while the micromanager is

00:34:43   there, presuming he's brilliant as Jobs obviously was particularly when it came to messaging,

00:34:49   get great work but once the micromanager is gone everyone underneath the micromanager has just been

00:34:55   in pure execution roles. I just got a message from headquarters. Headquarters says the code

00:35:00   for fracture it's a daring fireball all one word and when you use that you save 15 percent. So let's

00:35:06   screw it let's not fix it in editing let's let it go this will stick in your head because it came

00:35:10   mid conversation daring fireball use that code when you buy your fracture and you save 15 percent

00:35:14   their prices are already really good. Yes, and here's the big difference. It's another meta angle

00:35:20   on this story is in the jobs era. It wasn't just that he controlled the messaging from behind the

00:35:25   scenes. It was a strategy of truly severe limited access to any and all Apple employees, including

00:35:36   Jobs himself. Yep. And that's one of the things that really sticks out to me reading "Becoming

00:35:43   Steve Jobs was just how much more accessible he was personally right up

00:35:52   through coming back to Apple in 1997. That it really was a and even maybe even

00:36:02   in those first two years you know the first few years there at Apple he was

00:36:06   still a lot more accessible to again not any and all not any you know

00:36:12   Joe or Jane Charlie reporter from anybody but with hand-picked reporters

00:36:16   from you know big-name publications like the Wall Street Journal and Fortune and

00:36:21   etc he was pretty accessible and then that that got shut down really and

00:36:27   nobody they nobody got to talk to Apple executives and you certainly didn't see

00:36:31   this it is clearly a huge strategic change at Apple in terms of just how

00:36:39   many people they've made accessible to the press in the run-up to the watch.

00:36:43   Huge profile of Johnny Ive in The New Yorker which was clearly months in the

00:36:48   making. I mean maybe the better part of 2014 you know with a series of

00:36:53   interviews and trips to California. Enormous access that was granted to Ian

00:36:59   Parker and the Financial Times had a you know clearly not as detailed and as

00:37:06   lengthy as Ian Parker, but pretty pretty good interview with Johnny Ive on the record. There

00:37:11   was a Tim Cook profile by Adam Leschinsky in oh boy.

00:37:18   Fortune. I don't know.

00:37:20   I, I, I've, because they, I swear to God, by the way my brain works, it's like a hashing

00:37:27   algorithm and because they both start with F O R and their business publications, I always

00:37:31   confuse fortune.

00:37:32   It's fortune. It's fortune.

00:37:35   That was last week and I think I'm forgetting some.

00:37:40   Well, and then after the event last year, there was a bunch too.

00:37:43   He was in the Bloomberg Businessweek with that crazy cover.

00:37:48   But yeah, it's interesting.

00:37:49   I'm actually going back.

00:37:51   It's not perfect but I'm searching in Google for the time period up to the actual launch

00:37:57   of the watch or the phone, sorry, back in 2007.

00:38:01   You would think that any sort of article like this sort of wire article would be somewhere

00:38:05   at the top and I can't find anything like it.

00:38:08   The only thing I can find are the reviews that dropped a week before.

00:38:12   I don't recall, and I think I would have, I don't recall every hearing about who designed

00:38:18   the interface for the iPhone.

00:38:21   And I don't recall, I mean we knew Johnny Ive.

00:38:24   You know in in the jobs era the best that you got outside Apple was just public

00:38:31   recognition of who did what

00:38:34   Yep, Johnny

00:38:35   I would like give a speech like once a year like usually somewhere in Great Britain and like that that that was that was about

00:38:40   It and he was already talking in the the videos

00:38:44   You know, I think I think I've I've was already, you know, either being interviewed

00:38:49   It wasn't really like now he narrates them

00:38:51   But then it was like he was the you know, the talking head with the white background, you know talking about what you know

00:38:57   The you know meticulous design and you know dropping all those

00:39:00   excellently

00:39:02   impeccably pronounced adjectives

00:39:04   You know, we always know who Schiller is because Schiller is on stage

00:39:08   But you just never got behind this, you know, there's never any kind of access like this like talking them to people who designed

00:39:17   You know the look and feel of the buttons for iOS one and stuff like that

00:39:21   Right.

00:39:22   It's all you got was the story that Jobs presented on stage.

00:39:26   Right.

00:39:27   Yeah.

00:39:28   So I think there's a couple of things here.

00:39:29   So one, it was super tightly controlled which means like you're not getting a story like

00:39:36   this that I think that I suspect it came out with a spin that Apple probably wouldn't

00:39:46   prefer.

00:39:48   So that's kind of part one.

00:39:51   This is kind of the risk of being open.

00:39:53   But part two is even the people who are talking don't have a crispness in what they're saying.

00:40:01   And I know like, again, the narrative for skeptics in particular is that why does this

00:40:07   exist?

00:40:08   Again, I actually think this is what's hard about messaging.

00:40:11   I actually think what they're saying in this article is exactly right.

00:40:18   I don't believe that advancement in technology and computing happens because great people

00:40:24   force it into being.

00:40:26   I think that there's an ongoing march forward progress of technology and the great companies

00:40:35   and the great visionaries like Steve Jobs, their skill is not in birthing things per

00:40:42   se.

00:40:43   where the wave is going and catching it and being on the cutting edge of it.

00:40:49   And that's why you see again and again like there's all these examples of history of like

00:40:53   stuff being invented by multiple people at about the same time, right?

00:40:57   It's because like it's the time for something and this is my philosophy with technology.

00:41:01   My very first post is just actually like stated this and I think it's the time and exactly

00:41:07   what he said, the next place is the watch.

00:41:11   The problem is that that's not how the press writes stories. The press doesn't write

00:41:15   about the big picture contextual place in technology for this advice. That's why I

00:41:20   have a job because that's what I write about. But I write to a limited niche audience. What

00:41:25   press wants, they want the hero and they want the open and shut story and case. That's

00:41:31   why you had Steve Jobs with the iPhone being like, "We all hated our phones so we made

00:41:35   a better one. That you can latch onto that. That's not here. It consistently hasn't been

00:41:42   here. You think you first saw the iPad. Now you're seeing it now.

00:41:46   Dave Asprey I think one of the most interesting things

00:41:48   that's come out of this barrage of behind this access and quotes from Apple's leaders,

00:41:56   design leaders, I thought one of the most interesting was the Ive quote in the Financial

00:42:00   Times article, which overall wasn't a great article, wasn't really, you know, but this line

00:42:05   was great, which isn't surprising, but more, you know, I've said exactly what you're saying, but it

00:42:10   was great to hear from. We approached the phone with, from this perspective, that we all hated the

00:42:16   phones that we had, hated them, and we're approaching the watch as that we love watches. We love the

00:42:24   traditional world of mechanical watches, and we're approaching the watch with reverence for what's

00:42:29   come before us and that is a totally different approach and it's informed everything we did

00:42:33   and it's fascinating to hear that right nothing no kind of trash talk at all about

00:42:39   the traditional world of of watches yeah it is interesting but then this article doesn't go into

00:42:46   that at all it just says you know johnny i've took a deep dive into horology and i think that

00:42:51   was even a mistake because from what i understand it wasn't just that johnny i've went and had like

00:42:55   a I'm gonna go become a huge watch expert everybody who worked on the watch like they brought in

00:43:02   horological experts and it wasn't just Johnny Ive who studied up on it it was everybody who was

00:43:09   involved like the whole team more or less became world-class experts in in the history and you know

00:43:18   everything you'd want to know to be a serious you know watch expert yeah and I don't think that

00:43:24   that comes across in the story.

00:43:28   I do think, and in terms of it being outside Apple's control, I can't help but think

00:43:32   that Katie Cotton, wherever she is this morning, is enjoying her morning cup of tea or coffee

00:43:39   or whatever she drinks and is just shaking her head.

00:43:42   >> I was under the impression she started out with scotch first thing.

00:43:46   >> I don't think so.

00:43:48   >> No, yeah.

00:43:51   I think I agree.

00:43:53   And like there and the people got people.

00:43:58   People obviously especially journalists, you know, very much disliked that era of Apple

00:44:05   from a PR perspective and disliked Katie Cotton by and large.

00:44:10   But the fact the matter is Apple didn't Apple's message always got across.

00:44:17   Apple wasn't out to me because there was there was nothing else to write about.

00:44:19   The only thing they let out was exactly what they wanted to let out.

00:44:24   And again, like I said, it's almost like the problem here and the problem with this

00:44:28   article and with all these articles is they're too honest.

00:44:32   And I appreciate that and you appreciate that.

00:44:36   But kind of unfiltered honesty, and this is kind of maybe we can lead into your BOSA remark

00:44:43   Like, unfiltered honesty without... it's not a soundbite.

00:44:50   It doesn't spread.

00:44:54   Or it leaves itself open to all kinds of interpretations.

00:44:59   And you kind of see that happening in the hands of someone like Ian Parker,

00:45:06   who, remember, took 17,000 words to do it.

00:45:10   Like what was it about the link that mattered too?

00:45:13   It was all the context that was put around it, right?

00:45:15   When you put context around honesty, then it's so fulfilling and it's like you read

00:45:22   that article like eating a steak dinner or something, right?

00:45:25   But when you have honesty but without deep understanding or context, it leaves itself

00:45:34   open to interpretation which I think happened here and so you had Pierce's interpretation

00:45:38   on top of it. Two, you get unintended sound bites. I think that's exactly what happened.

00:45:45   The sound bite is Apple didn't have a plan for the watch. Again, I think if you look

00:45:49   at big picture, a watch is the natural thing to do next and it does tell time.

00:45:54   Dave Asprey And I honestly think that that's the better

00:45:56   way to approach it is, okay, let's approach it with an empty mind and anything and everything

00:46:00   goes. As opposed to, I'm telling you, the worst way to design anything is to have the

00:46:05   the whole thing in your head and then go make the thing in your head without

00:46:09   constant iteration and revisiting and feeling it as it becomes realer and

00:46:14   realer and realer. It's, it's to me,

00:46:16   one of the secrets of Apple's success in the last, um, geez,

00:46:20   what are we even up to now? 20, 20 years, 15 years. What the hell?

00:46:25   How long has it been?

00:46:25   Well, the, well, the iPod was 18 years, 14 years.

00:46:29   I'm going to say 18 years since 97.

00:46:31   That's fair. Uh,

00:46:34   is that they don't, you know, it's not like somebody goes off with a notebook, sketches a thing,

00:46:41   and draws it all up, and then somebody goes and makes it, which is I think how a lot of technology has been made ever since the outset of technology.

00:46:49   Oh, totally. I mean, I think people have this idea that Apple has this grand vision.

00:46:53   And one thing that I got a chance to really dig deep into when I was at Apple was looking

00:47:01   at how iTunes came about.

00:47:06   And what people forget about this, I might have told this story, I don't know if it

00:47:09   was to you before, but you remember in 2000 Apple had a big event where they were like,

00:47:16   what made Mac the first time around?

00:47:19   It was desktop publishing.

00:47:21   we think we know what's next and it's going to be movies and iMovie and it was the iMac and it was

00:47:27   like we are gonna like you can make home movies and this is what we're gonna be all about.

00:47:32   Yeah. And then like nine months later or nine months later or somewhat absurdly short amount

00:47:37   of time Steve Jobs gets on stage and gives a completely different vision like could not be

00:47:42   more different and that was the digital hub speech so we think the Mac's gonna be a digital hub for

00:47:46   all these devices. Yeah and I think he almost admitted that it was a mistake right because

00:47:50   it also coincided with with making CD-R drives standard because part of the

00:47:57   problem with the the prior max was that you couldn't make music discs right no

00:48:04   no I mean they implicitly admitted it was a problem I don't I mean see jobs

00:48:09   never want to stand up and say we we screw this up but I mean it was yeah he

00:48:14   had a good way of doing he had a good way of doing it without saying you know

00:48:18   He was I would say one of his greatest gifts was his way of

00:48:21   Backtracking even publicly and somehow making it not look like an admission of error, right?

00:48:28   No exactly and you hear this but you hear this is what cook always praised about jobs is how you change his mind all the

00:48:33   Time like I mean to think that Apple has a master plan and just executes it is is

00:48:39   Not just on misunderstand Apple, but it's to misunderstand how progress happens

00:48:44   Yeah, I mean again, this is back to my kind of big meta thesis like you figure out what's next you don't make what's next

00:48:51   yeah, and

00:48:53   I'm sorry go well and you have to look at what people are doing and and that era you're talking about it

00:48:57   It was a it was a dividing point between Mac and PC users

00:49:02   Not just in terms of any kind of political affiliation or tribal affiliation, whatever you want to call it

00:49:09   But just in terms of what real people were really doing and on the PC side

00:49:14   what people were doing was downloading a lot of music from Napster and

00:49:17   And then burning CDs, you know, 10 11 12 13 songs, whatever you could fit

00:49:23   Or I guess you could fit more

00:49:25   I guess you could with mp3s you could if you had an mp3 player that could read them off CD

00:49:29   but anyway, people were burning CDs with music whether it was to play them as

00:49:32   regular CDs or to play them in

00:49:36   MP3 players that could read MP3s off CDs people were doing it and Mac users weren't because they didn't have CDR drives. Yeah

00:49:43   My favorite actually one of my favorite jobs quotes comes around this time. I it's it's actually really hard to find

00:49:50   I think it's you have to either an archive off. I'll try to find it, you know in a bit

00:49:54   But basically he says like I thought we've missed it

00:49:57   Like I thought I screwed up like and it was like the most like stark admission of like jobs thing

00:50:03   admitting that he thought that he totally blew it.

00:50:06   He said they thought they were too late.

00:50:07   They thought they were too late to music.

00:50:09   They made the wrong focus.

00:50:10   They made the wrong bet by focusing on movies.

00:50:12   And what's amazing is, I mean, the company internally,

00:50:16   in that year or nine months, however long it was,

00:50:19   completely transformed.

00:50:20   Like, the iMovie guys were like top of the heap, right?

00:50:22   Within a matter of weeks, like, completely reorganized,

00:50:26   completely deprioritized.

00:50:28   iTunes was gonna be, they went out and bought SoundJam

00:50:31   And turned around and you think about Apple has this reputation, they do stuff for years

00:50:37   and stuff like that.

00:50:38   I do believe they do that today but they delivered iTunes and these new Macs in something like

00:50:44   nine months and then they hadn't even conceived of the iPod yet.

00:50:50   A month later was when Rubenstein went to Japan and visited Toshiba.

00:50:55   He was like, "Oh, we have this little hard drive.

00:50:56   We don't know what to do with it."

00:50:57   He's like, "Oh, I know what we could do with that."

00:50:59   And that was in February and they watched the iPod in September.

00:51:03   So the iPod was conceived, designed, all that in six months.

00:51:09   In 2001.

00:51:10   In 2001.

00:51:12   And that's not like…

00:51:19   Starting with a breakthrough from Toshiba.

00:51:21   It is a crazy story.

00:51:23   The basic idea there was that standard laptop hard drives were 2.5 inches and Toshiba came

00:51:28   up with a 1.8 inch hard drive. And none of the PC makers wanted it because well, and

00:51:36   it the 2.5 inch size was fine because the the laptops even the smallest one had to at

00:51:43   least the minimum size for the laptop with the keyboard and with a reasonable screen.

00:51:48   That inch didn't matter. There was nothing to do with the space saving the space saving

00:51:53   made no difference to the design of laptops and laptops were the only devices these other

00:51:58   companies had that needed smaller drives, right? You had to go to something as radically smaller

00:52:04   as like the first iPods to make to say, here's where you need something that here's where 2.5

00:52:10   inches is too too big. You needed it. And nobody else had a device in mind that that needed that.

00:52:17   No, it's a it's a wonderful example of how, you know, particularly technology like and this is why

00:52:23   This is why technology companies generally, even though you want people that have a wide

00:52:31   range of experiences and wearable arts, that sort of stuff, but that's why the technological

00:52:37   background is valued because at the end of the day, what is possible and what isn't

00:52:43   is governed by the technology.

00:52:45   That's a big part of why the iPhone succeeded whereas something like the Newton didn't.

00:52:50   The technology just wasn't there whereas the iPhone was on the edge of possible.

00:52:55   The processor was just barely fast enough.

00:52:56   They did do all kinds of tricks to make it responsive like they did.

00:53:02   The touchscreen technology was just getting cheap enough and it's understanding that

00:53:10   intersection and having the patience to watch something when it's ready.

00:53:14   Quite frankly, if you want to criticize the watch for anything, first of all, I was just

00:53:19   Just wait until it actually comes out and you can use it.

00:53:22   But two, I think if you look at the arc of personal technology, of course the next thing

00:53:32   is going to be the risk.

00:53:33   That's my opinion but I think it's pretty clear.

00:53:35   The question is when is the right time and the right time will be governed by the available

00:53:40   technology.

00:53:43   And so the criticism of the watch, if it ends up deserving criticism, is not that it shouldn't

00:53:48   exist.

00:53:49   Should it exist now or should it exist later?

00:53:52   Yeah, and I would say a great example of that is the Newton.

00:53:56   And, you know, the Newton was a great product.

00:54:02   I really, really appreciated the OS.

00:54:05   I thought it was a great design.

00:54:07   I think you could quibble about some of the details.

00:54:10   I think that the way that they made some of the apps blessed,

00:54:14   you know, the way that at the bottom of the screen,

00:54:16   there were certain apps that had a permanent location there and you couldn't change them,

00:54:20   was questionable. But it was also fixable. They could go forward in a new way. But to me,

00:54:25   though, I have talked, I talked about this a long time ago, but to me, the fundamental

00:54:29   failure of the Newton was that it came too soon, insofar as there was no wireless networking at

00:54:37   the time. And any device of that basic gist form factor needed wireless networking. And I know

00:54:44   palm had some success with palm pilots in that era. And there

00:54:48   wasn't Wi Fi or cellular networking at the time. But I

00:54:51   think if you look at palm success with the palm pilot, and

00:54:54   how many they sold it was it was a hit among us, right? I had

00:54:59   one I had a hand. I carried around for years and loved it.

00:55:03   But there was no way like, my parents were going to get one or

00:55:08   my sister, my sister was would never get one. It's, you know,

00:55:11   normal people weren't going to get one, right. And it's because

00:55:14   it didn't have wireless and because it didn't have wireless it couldn't

00:55:16   communicate and you know what people do they communicate that's the fundamental

00:55:20   gist of why the internet got popular in the 90s was people communicated with

00:55:26   each other until people could communicate with each other they had no

00:55:28   interest in in you know PCs the mass market it was only for us nerds yeah and

00:55:35   same thing with handhelds and you know that's what doomed the Newton the Newton

00:55:41   needed anything that's that you carried around in your hand and each wireless

00:55:45   networking because it needs to be a communications device now I think that

00:55:49   that it is it is the perfect example and and this is you know this gets to why

00:55:55   why Apple has focused on the communication aspect of the watch and

00:56:00   you know the drawing and the heart be on sort of stuff I mean what obviously

00:56:03   again left to wait and see how it actually works out in real life but

00:56:08   But that's why it's a tentpole feature because that's what matters to normal people.

00:56:19   I want to talk about the headline for this article.

00:56:23   It drives me crazy.

00:56:26   This is the Wired article.

00:56:28   The headline is "iPhone Killer colon the secret history of the Apple Watch."

00:56:35   None of that is true.

00:56:38   It is not an iPhone killer.

00:56:43   To me, a bad headline is like a bad first impression.

00:56:49   Everything has to recover from that.

00:56:52   So the article, the headline sets up such a false impression.

00:57:02   The watch is useless without your iPhone.

00:57:04   Literally.

00:57:05   not literally I guess there's certain functionality still works outside the

00:57:09   range of your phone but it is fundamentally designed to work as a it

00:57:16   is a companion it is supposed to make your life with your phone better that's

00:57:21   the gist of it it's not a killer and maybe someday it will be right maybe

00:57:25   someday there will be it certainly seems possible with the march of technology

00:57:30   that that within a few years whether that's three years four years five years

00:57:34   years, six years, that you know, the watch will have its own Wi Fi first, probably

00:57:38   a watch could have its own cellular and be the main device and then you would buy something

00:57:45   like an iPod touch just to be your four inch five inch screen that connects to the watch.

00:57:52   It must have Wi Fi because of the whole it works in your house even when you Yeah, but

00:57:56   it doesn't use but like you can't set it up. Let's say it's a like you never log into your

00:58:01   home Wi-Fi. It's that whole Wi-Fi back channel thing. You don't type a password into your

00:58:08   watch so that when your phone isn't there, it's on the internet and getting notifications.

00:58:14   It's only that back channel, I forget what the technical term for it is, but it's that

00:58:17   way that Wi-Fi can now have--

00:58:18   >>Steve Paulson Wi-Fi Direct, I think.

00:58:19   >>Steve Paulson Yeah, something like that. I'm saying that

00:58:23   in the future, clearly, it's a natural progression that the watch would have its own Wi-Fi and

00:58:28   and then you could leave house without your phone.

00:58:30   And if it knows the Starbucks network,

00:58:33   it can, when you get there, it'll get notifications

00:58:36   and email and stuff like that right there.

00:58:38   And then you can send text messages or iMessage,

00:58:40   at least not SMS, but you could send messages and emails

00:58:43   right from your watch without your phone present.

00:58:46   That's coming in the future, surely,

00:58:48   unless the product is so unpopular that they stop making it.

00:58:52   - Right, well, I mean, LG just watched a watch with LTE.

00:58:55   I mean, so it's like it's in the realm of possibility.

00:58:58   - Yeah, I think Samsung had,

00:59:00   didn't Samsung have one with LTE?

00:59:01   - Yeah, they launched it last year.

00:59:02   - Yeah, clearly it's possible.

00:59:03   It's just a question of when it'll be ready

00:59:05   for an Apple caliber product.

00:59:07   - Right.

00:59:08   - That headline is so bad.

00:59:09   It's not an iPhone killer, absolutely not.

00:59:12   And then the secret history of the Apple Watch,

00:59:14   boy, that is really overstating the hacks tests

00:59:17   that he got, right?

00:59:18   I mean, how much does,

00:59:21   this is not the secret history of the Apple Watch, right?

00:59:24   Like if there's a problem with the article,

00:59:26   it's that it's so incomplete about the creation story

00:59:28   of the Apple Watch.

00:59:29   There are very few details about what paths they went down

00:59:35   and backtracked on in the three years

00:59:37   that they were working on it.

00:59:38   - Yeah, no, even the one that was in here

00:59:42   that was kind of interesting about the timeline

00:59:44   wasn't really fleshed out.

00:59:46   - No, it wasn't fleshed out in any degree.

00:59:49   So, you know, who has on the, to me,

00:59:51   click baby headline from Wired.

00:59:54   Compare that to the New Yorker, which the headline is,

00:59:58   "The Shape of Things to Come--

01:00:00   How an Industrial Designer Became Apple's Greatest Product."

01:00:03   And then their title tag for the article,

01:00:05   which is a little different, is "Jonathan Ive

01:00:08   and the Future of Apple."

01:00:10   Totally fair.

01:00:11   Not clickbaity at all.

01:00:12   And the article got tons of attention.

01:00:14   It got all the attention it deserves.

01:00:15   Well, welcome to the reality of today's World Wide Web.

01:00:22   Yeah.

01:00:23   Let's take a break and then the last thing we can do

01:00:25   on the article is talk about the quote they have for me.

01:00:30   There's another area where I'll complain.

01:00:33   - We'll get to the real area while you're grumpy.

01:00:35   - Yeah.

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01:03:51   Do you want to read the part of the first paragraph? It's the first paragraph of

01:03:59   David Pierce's story. Sorry about that. I stepped out for a second. Oh, that's all right.

01:04:06   Oh, I found the quote, by the way. Fortunately, Isaacson, which the thing about the essence

01:04:13   books like half of it was just like rewriting other people's stuff. But he told Fortune

01:04:19   and as soon as it in here, "I felt like a dope," he told Fortune. "I thought we

01:04:23   had missed it. We had to work hard to catch up." Speaking about music and the fact that

01:04:29   they kind of rejiggered everything.

01:04:35   I know you share my frustration with this, like the whole mythology about Apple creating

01:04:40   these new products. Apple really hasn't created new products. They've created new

01:04:46   user interfaces but the idea of a WIMP interface was famously initially came up at Xerox. The

01:04:57   idea of an MP3 player wasn't new. The idea of a smartphone wasn't new. The idea of

01:05:01   a tablet wasn't really new. What they do though is they do it really well and part

01:05:10   of doing it really well is they do it at the right time with the right technology. Again,

01:05:17   it goes back to this fundamental myth-making nature of the press. I know this is the case

01:05:23   in all arenas. This is the case in politics, this is the case in sports. More and more

01:05:28   with sports, I'm a huge sports fan, there's more and more writing about the intricacies

01:05:33   of the game and game planning and how people run plays like that, which I love, I dig into.

01:05:39   But the sports writing that we had for years and what you still get in places like ESPN

01:05:43   and stuff like that, at least on the front page, is the mythological great man or great

01:05:48   woman overcoming adversity to win the day when that's actually a story and it's

01:05:57   not how products are made.

01:05:59   But again, like I said, it's on Apple to create the myth and it's the myth making

01:06:06   that is gone.

01:06:07   Do you want to read the first paragraph of this iPhone killer story?

01:06:13   I guess it's the second paragraph.

01:06:15   There is a paragraph marker.

01:06:16   No, it's the first.

01:06:18   Oh yeah, you're right.

01:06:19   Oh, because it's a terrible layout.

01:06:20   Yeah.

01:06:21   Yeah.

01:06:22   Kevin Lynch, I'll skip around a little bit.

01:06:25   I'll read the other parts.

01:06:27   In early 2013, Kevin Lynch accepted a job offer from Apple.

01:06:30   Funny thing about the offer, it didn't say what he would be doing.

01:06:34   It was odd that Apple even offered him a job.

01:06:36   During his eight years at Adobe, most recently as chief technology officer, he was best known

01:06:40   as the only person dumb enough to publicly fight Steve Jobs with the iPhone's lack of

01:06:43   support for flash videos, which of course he wasn't the only one, but whatever.

01:06:47   When Lynch announced his move, the reaction was immediate.

01:06:50   They want this guy?

01:06:51   Apple blogger John Gruber called Lynch, "A bozo, a bad hire."

01:06:58   New paragraph.

01:07:00   I didn't though.

01:07:01   I know it's nuanced and it's harsh but when he was hired this was actually

01:07:06   exactly two years ago Tuesday 19th of March 21 T 13 this is all in the

01:07:13   headline I'll put this in the show notes don't forget exhibit a in the case that

01:07:21   newly hired Apple VP of Technology Kevin Lynch is a bozo a bad hire the nuance

01:07:30   there is I didn't say he is a bozo a bad hire. I said there is a case to be made

01:07:36   that he is and the case to me was you know not that it was good or that it was

01:07:42   convincing but you know and I quote from the blog post that he had written at

01:07:48   Adobe three years ago talking about flash player and and so here's this is

01:07:54   these are words from Kevin Lynch so three years before so 2010 we are now in

01:07:59   a verge of delivering Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones with all but one of the top manufacturers.

01:08:05   This includes Google's Android, RIMS Blackberry, Nokia, Palm Pre, and many others across form

01:08:13   factors including not only smartphones but also tablets, netbooks, and internet connected

01:08:17   TVs. Flash in the browser provides a competitive advantage to these devices because it will

01:08:23   enable their customers to browse the whole web. So those are Lynch's words, right? That's, you know,

01:08:29   he wrote that, or at least he put his name on it. And I wrote, well, how'd that work out? Those

01:08:35   companies and platforms are now either a this is and this was two years ago, a out of business,

01:08:41   be on the verge of going out of business or C have abandoned flash player entirely.

01:08:47   And even include D that the web is kind of on on deathwatch as it is.

01:08:52   Yeah, well, at least on mobile and the watch, right?

01:08:55   So I stand by it. I'm not, you know, I, but I didn't say he was, I said there was a case to

01:09:05   be made that he was. And I know that I'm asking for nuance that the press typically doesn't give,

01:09:13   but to me, it's important. Like, it's, you know, clearly, we're going to judge Kevin Lynch on the

01:09:18   quality of Apple Watch software and you know he might prove himself that you

01:09:24   know okay you know he was dealt a bad hand at Adobe and the argument would be

01:09:29   then that he was the loyal company man and that he knew he knew damn well when

01:09:34   he wrote it that it was a bad hand and he was loyal to the company

01:09:39   but I just I don't like that I don't like having it quoted that I said he was

01:09:43   a bozo because I didn't say that and I wouldn't have because I don't feel like

01:09:46   you know, to me the nuance is important. It could be that he knew damn well that it was a pile of

01:09:54   shit and that he was just, you know, being the right, you know, doing right by the company as

01:09:59   he saw fit. I don't know if I've ever... Yes, reading it, I have to be honest. Reading it,

01:10:09   yes, you clearly said it is a case. You didn't say he was a bozo. I will say that I very much

01:10:15   remembered your post about Kevin Lynch and when I saw the quote in the article

01:10:21   a I knew you'd be annoyed but B I thought it was totally fair that's what

01:10:25   I remembered you saying so well it's not unfair I wouldn't say unfair but I feel

01:10:29   like it misses the nuance and then there's another line from his what he

01:10:34   wrote he wrote for example the recent Nexus one from Google will rock with a

01:10:38   great experience in the browser with flash player 10.1 and then I said yeah

01:10:43   it rocked so hard Google dropped Flash Player support from Android last year

01:10:48   with a link to where Google dropped Flash Player support from Android.

01:10:53   No, the interesting thing though, I completely shared your skepticism. I mean,

01:10:59   I was and remain very critical of the initial watch unveiling, again for the exact same reason,

01:11:07   because I just felt the messaging was so poor.

01:11:11   And I called out the fact that, boy, the Kevin Lynch part really bothered me.

01:11:15   I was bothered when he was hired.

01:11:17   Other people were bothered when he was hired and I linked to this post, by the way.

01:11:21   And then I said, "For me, at least, his seeming inability to focus or prioritize his

01:11:25   software demo confirmed many of those misgivings."

01:11:29   So no, I mean, there's no question that he had a ton of skepticism.

01:11:32   I will say I thought he crushed the watch event.

01:11:39   I thought his was by far the strongest part of the second watch event.

01:11:42   I thought he captured the way the watch can transform your life.

01:11:49   My case for the watch has always been – again, I take less of the Apple Watch in particular

01:11:56   and more of a where is technology going view.

01:11:59   One, I think that's the natural next place.

01:12:01   Two, I think what's interesting is the phone gave us the ability to interact with anyone

01:12:08   and anything anywhere in the world, but what the watch will give us is the chance to interact

01:12:12   with everything in our physical environment.

01:12:15   That's what Winch demoed.

01:12:16   That's more of a longer range vision because a lot of the stuff for that isn't in place

01:12:21   yet.

01:12:22   That's what he did.

01:12:25   That's why I'm bullish because I think that the watch makes sense, like a watch makes

01:12:31   sense one and two, Apple deserves the benefit of the doubt.

01:12:36   They're three for three right now and if anyone's going to nail it until they prove otherwise,

01:12:41   I'll presume they will and that's at the core.

01:12:44   That's why I'm bullish and I think Apple and Lynch in particular demonstrated that at the

01:12:49   last event but that's not coming across in these articles.

01:12:53   One thing I heard when I wrote that, and I don't think I wrote about it, I don't remember if I said

01:13:01   it on the show, but after I wrote that, this was back when he was first hired, one thing I heard

01:13:06   from, let's say, a well-placed birdie in Cupertino, who would know, a birdie with a position who would

01:13:15   know if it were true said to me that in fact Steve Jobs had personally

01:13:21   recruited now obviously he was hired if he was hired in 2013 13 two years ago

01:13:28   Steve Jobs was already dead but what I heard from one source who would know was

01:13:34   that Jobs tried to recruit him years prior I don't know exactly when probably

01:13:40   2010 or 2011. Probably 2010 thinking about it. And he turned him down specifically because he

01:13:52   thought it he owed it to Adobe to stick with them and that it would he he thought it would look that

01:13:58   Lynch thought it would really make Adobe look bad if he left for Apple in the middle of the flash

01:14:03   in the middle of this flash player stuff. And that he stuck with them out of loyalty with Adobe out

01:14:09   out of loyalty. Now I did, you know, I would if Lynch told me

01:14:13   that I would take it as fact I heard it from a secondhand

01:14:16   source. So take it with a grain of salt. I don't know if that's

01:14:19   true, or if it's been, I don't know. But I heard that.

01:14:21   I've been thinking he was with my macro media. So presumably,

01:14:25   I mean, you've solar. Um, that might have been maybe that was

01:14:29   the connection. I don't know.

01:14:29   I wonder though, because solar was there so long ago. That's

01:14:33   true. That's we're talking mid 90s. So I don't know about

01:14:36   that.

01:14:39   Here's the thing though about the loyalty angle. To me, the best thing you can say about Lynch is

01:14:42   if he believed all that stuff about Flash Player for mobile being a great thing that's going to

01:14:50   help everybody but Apple and that Apple should get on it. If he really thought in 2011, or was it

01:15:00   2010, he wrote that in 2010. If he really thought that Flash Player for mobile was a winner for

01:15:07   everybody but Apple and that Apple should get on board and do it. To me that's a

01:15:10   damming because it's it was just bad technology and it was really bad for

01:15:15   mobile you know. You know I'm I agree and you get to the like the Johnny Ive

01:15:21   article and talking about the idea that you know you're not being honest if

01:15:26   you're not like being critical. At the same time before I went to Microsoft

01:15:32   and when they first unveiled Windows 8 at all things D. This would be 2011. I thought

01:15:39   it was awful. I trashed it. I posted myself on Twitter, which unfortunately is no longer

01:15:47   there because one of my classmates was like, "Dude, you know you're going to work there,

01:15:50   right? Someone might be reading that." People who follow me through will be shocked to hear

01:15:54   this. I already got in trouble with my Twitter account previously due to Apple actually.

01:16:00   It's a long convoluted story.

01:16:02   Not when I was at Apple.

01:16:03   It was a school thing.

01:16:07   But then I went to Microsoft and I worked on Windows 8.

01:16:13   And one of the things is when you're working on it and you're recruiting and I was in charge

01:16:17   of – or not in charge – I was one of the people on the team getting developers to build

01:16:21   for Windows 8.

01:16:23   And you're kind of selling it, right?

01:16:26   And there's a certain sense of like, "I can't.

01:16:33   Maybe I should just quit if I don't believe in it."

01:16:35   But if you're fresh out of school, it's a big opportunity.

01:16:41   The team's got reorganized.

01:16:42   I was doing a job several levels above me.

01:16:44   Ton of responsibility.

01:16:45   Had a ton of impact.

01:16:46   And there's a kind of subconscious thing like, "Well, maybe I have my doubts, but

01:16:53   I'm going to put those in a cover for now and I'm going to work my ass off and do the

01:16:57   best I can," which I did.

01:16:59   I told close friends.

01:17:01   I told them about my misgivings and the issues with it, but boy, as far as it impacted my

01:17:06   day-to-day life, my professional life, I was giving it my all.

01:17:10   Sure enough, when it came out, all my initial misgivings ended up being totally spot on,

01:17:17   But I kind of look back at both humbled for sure and a little ashamed but also appreciative

01:17:25   for how you can lose sight of what is true.

01:17:31   And yeah, if you're someone like Johnny Iver, arguably Kevin Lynch in his position,

01:17:35   you have the luxury of you can step off.

01:17:38   But there are so many things in history where people kind of like just go down the wrong

01:17:42   path and man I join you in judging him but I also empathize and can sympathize

01:17:50   because I I feel bad about it I feel bad that I sucked in at the same time I can

01:17:56   appreciate why that happened to me right because and who knows what he was saying

01:18:00   inside the Adobe right I mean that's you know what he said publicly I I would not

01:18:06   want to put my name on something public that to go that all in on if I was the

01:18:12   CTO of Adobe in 2010. There's no way I would have put my name on that publicly,

01:18:17   even no matter how loyal I wanted to be to the company. And I realized that as,

01:18:20   you know, the CTO of Adobe, he couldn't say anything bad about it at the time publicly,

01:18:26   and that Adobe as a whole was going to market it and try to do it. But he had to know it was a bad

01:18:34   technology and a really bad fit for mobile devices and processors in terms of performance and just

01:18:41   where everything was going.

01:18:43   I mean, I took so much flak at the time from certain people

01:18:47   with my adamant, my absolute adamant

01:18:49   that Flash was terrible for mobile.

01:18:53   I've always thought Flash was terrible even for desktop,

01:18:55   but it was horrible.

01:18:57   And that the best thing that ever happened to the web,

01:19:00   the open web, was Apple's refusal

01:19:03   to put Flash on these devices.

01:19:05   And it single-handedly, in my opinion,

01:19:09   got video out of the proprietary

01:19:12   and terribly performing Flash Player

01:19:14   and into, you know, just, you know,

01:19:19   you know, HTML5 compatible, what, H.264 and et cetera,

01:19:24   that can be played more efficiently and openly

01:19:28   and doesn't require any sort of lock-in

01:19:31   to one particular plugin architecture.

01:19:34   It's funny, I actually kind of stumbled across this personal website via Wikipedia and it

01:19:40   has his kind of, you know, it's in paragraph form but kind of what he's done and there

01:19:45   is no mention of the word Flash.

01:19:47   Surprisingly, I talked about Adobe as at CTO at Adobe helped define Creative Cloud and

01:19:54   Adobe Marketing Cloud.

01:19:57   No Flash.

01:19:58   Earlier, this is Kevin Lynch from his website. I will put this in the show notes on if I write it down on paper

01:20:03   It'll get in

01:20:05   Earlier I was a Mac software developer

01:20:07   I helped develop the first Mac release of frame maker and then led their core technology team frame technology was also acquired

01:20:13   By Adobe prior to this I helped establish one of the first Mac software startups in 1984

01:20:18   Framemaker you ever use framemaker. Nope. Ooh great rate software really great software

01:20:25   And the fact that it, like Adobe sort of,

01:20:28   I guess it's gone now, I guess it's dead.

01:20:29   I don't think it ever made the transition to OS X.

01:20:31   I think it was, I don't think there was ever

01:20:34   a native OS X version of it.

01:20:36   And it was strategically subsumed by InDesign.

01:20:40   And InDesign was way more, the thing with Framemaker,

01:20:42   we used to, I used it at Barebones, where we had the--

01:20:44   - It was super focused, right?

01:20:46   - Yeah, it wasn't quite as designer-y as I would like.

01:20:50   And I used to live and breathe in QuarkXPress.

01:20:54   And so, I mean--

01:20:55   - Yeah, that's what I knew.

01:20:56   I used QuarkXPress.

01:20:57   - I would get frustrated by some of the ways

01:21:00   that Frame wasn't as designed.

01:21:03   Like, Quark, I could make a thing print out

01:21:06   with the exact design I wanted, down to,

01:21:09   I'm gonna say hundredth of an inch,

01:21:11   but it might've even been thousandths of an inch.

01:21:13   I mean, and it was spot on accurate.

01:21:15   And then it would just, you know,

01:21:16   it would come out of the printer exactly everything,

01:21:19   positioned exactly where I wanted it.

01:21:21   And Framemaker didn't let you position things

01:21:24   quite as precisely as Quark.

01:21:26   But the thing that Frame had was these book making features

01:21:29   where you could select, like for making,

01:21:32   here's the canonical example,

01:21:34   is to make an index for the book.

01:21:36   Is you could select text and say,

01:21:38   "I wanna make an index entry right here."

01:21:40   And you got precise control over what the entry

01:21:45   and the index would be called, where it pointed to.

01:21:48   And then as you edited the document and moved things around,

01:21:51   it just worked. - Update.

01:21:53   Right, you just did not have to worry

01:21:55   about your index connections breaking or working.

01:21:58   It was brilliant and it really, really,

01:22:00   and it's a tricky, tricky problem to solve.

01:22:03   Really, I mean, doing a good index for a book

01:22:06   is infamously difficult and expensive

01:22:09   to get someone to do it.

01:22:11   And at the time, the BB edits manual was thick.

01:22:15   I mean, it was, I don't know,

01:22:16   I was saying it was like 300 pages.

01:22:17   And had a great index.

01:22:20   And it was so easy, Framemaker made it so easy

01:22:23   to keep that index up to date as you went

01:22:26   and added new features and stuff.

01:22:28   Great, great, great app.

01:22:30   So that's a feather in his cap.

01:22:31   - Well, we all have our ups and downs.

01:22:40   Anyhow, like I said, I was hoping we were not gonna

01:22:44   have an Apple Watch an hour, an hour and a half in, so.

01:22:48   - I do, it's funny that you brought it up though,

01:22:49   'cause that's exactly where I was going

01:22:51   with the whole, you know, like with his role

01:22:55   with Flash and Mobile is on the one side,

01:22:58   he really believed that it was the, you know,

01:23:00   could be the future of Mobile,

01:23:02   which would indicate that he's a bozo.

01:23:05   I don't believe that.

01:23:07   I think that my guess is that he knew

01:23:09   exactly what the score was,

01:23:11   and he was just being loyal to Adobe.

01:23:13   That though, like you said, in and of itself is maybe not,

01:23:17   loyalty as a general thing is great,

01:23:19   But maybe in that case, it's like,

01:23:22   I was gonna go there with the Johnny Ive story

01:23:24   about Steve Jobs saying,

01:23:26   don't just say good things about it, you gotta be honest.

01:23:28   If you're not being honest,

01:23:29   you're doing a disservice to the people you're talking to.

01:23:33   And that it was a disservice to Adobe

01:23:35   to let them keep pushing Flash Forward.

01:23:38   Because it was--

01:23:40   - It's so rare though.

01:23:42   I mean, it's, especially in big companies.

01:23:45   - Right, and Adobe is doing pretty good.

01:23:47   Their last quarter, their results were pretty good.

01:23:50   And I'm happy to see that.

01:23:52   I think the industry is better with a healthy,

01:23:55   strong, successful Adobe as an independent company.

01:23:58   - Oh no, I completely agree.

01:23:59   And the way they've transitioned their products

01:24:02   to being a service basically has been really impressive.

01:24:07   No, I completely agree.

01:24:11   Actually, they just released a new app a couple hours ago.

01:24:14   I don't know if you've seen it yet.

01:24:15   Adobe Slate, a visual storytelling app for the iPad where you can basically use photos

01:24:21   and text to create a story.

01:24:26   It feels so Adobe-esque in the best possible way.

01:24:31   It's like letting you weigh stuff out, create something that looks really, really great,

01:24:36   to create your own product in a sense.

01:24:38   Adobe lets you create products in the best possible sense or when they're at their

01:24:45   best. And what's what's fascinating about this is, like,

01:24:50   who is arguably if you think about it, who is who if anyone

01:24:54   is pushing the envelope in the iPad right now? Like, there

01:24:58   there aren't many and wouldn't it be fascinating if kind of

01:25:00   like the the the two companies that arguably are producing some

01:25:05   of the most compelling iPad apps right now are Adobe and

01:25:07   Microsoft. Yeah. Like it's well, and that would like a replay.

01:25:10   All right. Yeah, it is a replay to the Mac. Right? Yep. Because

01:25:14   let's just say that 84 84 was you know the original Mac was a severely limited machine 85 86

01:25:22   87 or so is when I would say the Mac really kind of got up off the ground in terms of the performance of

01:25:30   The I don't know if they were up to this 68 0 20 yet, but it was getting close

01:25:37   You know the 68 of 20s and the 60

01:25:39   8 Oh 30s eventually

01:25:43   But other and and with other form factors where you could get bigger displays and stuff like that

01:25:49   And more RAM and then famously, you know the desktop publishing industry

01:25:54   Which was built on the Mac that didn't come from Apple Apple never had a desktop publishing app

01:25:59   I mean Apple came out with the laser rider which certainly helped but

01:26:02   you know, it was software from Adobe and Quark and

01:26:06   Who did page maker Aldis yep

01:26:11   that really made that an industry and

01:26:13   Again, Microsoft it was apps like Excel Excel started on the Mac right or at least became a hit on up started started on the Mac

01:26:20   Microsoft Word

01:26:23   was a huge Mac app

01:26:25   you know lots of great software from Microsoft for the app for for the Mac in the 80s and

01:26:32   Absolutely helped make the Mac for and obviously never got entrenched as a widespread, you know business computer

01:26:38   But in places that did have Macs, it was Microsoft software that made it plausible.

01:26:43   Yeah, that would be interesting.

01:26:46   I know this is a little controversial, but I kind of feel like Apple, to some extent,

01:26:56   the way that I feel they've limited the App Store and limited the ability to build sustainable apps,

01:27:01   in my estimation, without not having things like trials, not having things like easy upgrades,

01:27:06   grades. I kind of feel like that one there's the whole you know

01:27:13   commoditize your compliments like cheap apps is good for the platform within

01:27:16   within a certain limit. But on the other hand I think they they remembered you

01:27:22   know being in that position where it got to the point where the Microsoft and

01:27:26   Adobe apps were more important than the Mac. Right. And like Steve Jobs had to

01:27:30   like prostrate it prostrate himself said we might have to edit that out.

01:27:37   No way.

01:27:38   No way are we editing that out.

01:27:40   But it's really morbid considering the person talking about it.

01:27:45   You know like almost like literally with this massive visage of Bill Gates up on his screen

01:27:52   you know Microsoft riding into the rescue and then Adobe when they went to OS X Adobe

01:27:58   wouldn't even come over right?

01:27:59   they refuse them. Our customers aren't really there. Apple never wanted to be able to hostage

01:28:07   to app makers again. It turns out though because no one has really been able to build, especially

01:28:16   in the productivity space, a meaningful business on the iPad in particular, it turns out it's

01:28:22   the same guys that are there. It's Microsoft and it's Adobe. I just find it fascinating

01:28:27   and kind of like the history of this relationship.

01:28:31   - Yeah, they were definitely,

01:28:33   I think that with,

01:28:36   and again, I don't wanna go on a huge digression

01:28:37   about circa 1997 industry politics,

01:28:42   but it is interesting though.

01:28:45   I do think so that, you know,

01:28:46   that Adobe and Microsoft, at least especially combined,

01:28:50   held far more sway over Apple's future

01:28:53   than Apple itself did.

01:28:55   - Yep.

01:28:56   Maybe they could have gotten by with one and on board and not the other. Either way, but not both.

01:29:02   And, you know, and it certainly, you know, exemplified with the original Rhapsody

01:29:08   introduction, like with the first in, you know, the first plan that was announced post

01:29:11   next reunification, which was a very, it was much, it was more or less

01:29:18   the next step operating system without carbon. It was you're going to have to rewrite for cocoa.

01:29:26   I don't even know if they'd called it Coco yet, but more or less, you know, it was more or less

01:29:29   We're gonna you know, we're gonna do it

01:29:31   Put a new Apple style UI on the next step operating system, right? And there was no there's no carbon no carbon and

01:29:39   That went over like a lead balloon and more or less like Microsoft said we're not doing that

01:29:45   Because it would be a rewrite right and everybody knows, you know going from these existing code bases on the Mac

01:29:53   To pure next step would have been it's a complete rewrite

01:29:57   It's a all new platform and they were gonna know we're not gonna do it Adobe was like nope

01:30:01   Does that's that does not its starter and they Apple announced it, right?

01:30:05   I mean and then they had to backtrack and that's for stalls decision

01:30:08   It was for Scott for stall who really was the champion of carbon within Apple

01:30:12   which I still think is one of the most telling stories that that paints for stall is as a

01:30:21   Complex figure, you know, it's there's no way to just say I was a he was a jerk and so they fired him

01:30:27   Because if that was true, I mean and he was a guy who you know

01:30:31   I think he went to work at next right out of college

01:30:33   I mean he'd been in I mean, I think all he'd ever done in professional life was work

01:30:36   For for next and it was only platforming new and yet he was the guy spearheading

01:30:41   We need to support we need to create this carbon thing to support this legacy stuff, you know

01:30:47   Whereas the public the perception from outside Apple was that the next people came in and had no respect for the Mac stuff

01:30:53   That was already there and it couldn't be further

01:30:54   I mean there might be some people who are like that but forced all exemplifies that it you know

01:30:58   There were there was a guy who couldn't have been more pureblood next who was pushing for carbon

01:31:04   Which was what got them on board?

01:31:07   And I think it was the right decision

01:31:09   But I think jobs always resented that they had to do that right that does absolutely right

01:31:13   It's the fact that they didn't control their own destiny

01:31:16   Yeah, and that is so core to Apple now and the way they think about all their business.

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01:35:33   What else do you want to talk about?

01:35:37   What else do I want to talk about?

01:35:41   It's been a pretty busy week.

01:35:45   I thought the title thing was interesting, the music thing.

01:35:48   wrote about that. The Jay-Z streaming service. There's been

01:35:52   the Amazon button, which I love you. You were you were debating

01:35:56   if it's either if it's genius or stupid. I think it's I think

01:35:59   it's absolutely genius.

01:36:00   All right, that we've already that's a good lesson. That's

01:36:04   let's see if we can tackle some of these quickly. The Jay-Z

01:36:08   music service. I think it here's my take. I haven't read in

01:36:12   detail. It's a right it's been busy week, my high level take on

01:36:16   What's it called?

01:36:18   Title T I D a L like like the ocean tide right number one bad name because it's

01:36:24   indistinguishable audibly from title

01:36:27   Like you're you know, TI TLE bad product name this to me reeks of

01:36:33   Everybody well, I don't know that we know

01:36:39   But we're pretty close to knowing that beats audio apples beats audio is relaunching soon

01:36:45   Under I don't know if it's gonna keep the name

01:36:48   Or if it's gonna be rebranded under iTunes or Apple or something like that, you know Apple music who knows

01:36:53   But it's coming. I

01:36:56   think

01:36:58   probably at WWDC

01:37:00   And if not soon thereafter, but I think they would love to announce it at WWDC

01:37:07   Everybody knows it's coming and it just this title thing from Jay Z sounds like well, let's hurry up and announce something

01:37:15   thing beforehand.

01:37:16   Mike Santos I mean it is shipping.

01:37:20   You can sign up for it right now.

01:37:24   But I think it's just pretty much a rebrand of the service that they bought.

01:37:28   The thing that I found interesting in relation to the Apple thing was there was, well first

01:37:32   off there was some reports at the end of last year, I think originally the New York Post

01:37:35   about Jimmy Iovine and Apple trying to sign up exclusives for their service and after

01:37:41   After the title launch, there was an interview with Jay Z in Billboard where they asked him

01:37:46   specifically about competing with Iovine.

01:37:50   He said he's speaking with Billboard about bidding competitively with Iovine behind the

01:37:54   scenes of title and beach respective launches.

01:37:57   Jay Z said, "Listen, Jimmy, you're Jimmy Iovine.

01:38:01   You're an Apple, truthfully you're great.

01:38:03   You don't have to do this.

01:38:05   I don't have to lose in order for you guys to win.

01:38:06   Let's just remember that.

01:38:07   Sorry, Jay Z."

01:38:09   As long as Iovine is with Apple, Apple will absolutely be out to win and they're not

01:38:17   going to play nicely for the good of music.

01:38:19   And it's just very convenient that the good of music according to this group happens to

01:38:25   be very good for them personally and actually it happens to be good for their labels too.

01:38:32   Yeah, I'm skeptical.

01:38:34   It doesn't really change anything.

01:38:36   it doesn't change anything and if there's not going to be any meaningful

01:38:40   exclusives in particular then they're competing on the merits of the product.

01:38:44   Presumably they'll have some exclusives from Jay-Z.

01:38:47   I don't know if there's going to be others.

01:38:49   But they don't. The only exclusive they have at launch that is meaningful is Rihanna's latest single.

01:38:55   They don't really have anything else. People have reported they have Taylor Swift's back-head log,

01:39:00   but Taylor Swift's back-head log is on Beats right now. It's on RDO. It's on any service

01:39:03   that doesn't have a free tier. Her objection was always to the free tier. So no, they don't

01:39:09   have any exclusives and they won't have exclusives because to put from a label perspective and

01:39:15   frankly from an artist perspective to have an exclusive is dumb. The cost in making music

01:39:21   is upfront. It's actually recording the music. Once it's recorded, you want to get it in

01:39:26   as many channels as possible because your marginal cost is zero. So you want to sell

01:39:31   as many as possible, which means having it everywhere.

01:39:34   And so the idea of exclusive, like it just doesn't, like all the, you're having like

01:39:39   a mixture of business models and stuff like that, which means that all the left is competing

01:39:43   with on the product.

01:39:44   Well, you've got to get something in exchange.

01:39:47   Look at when Apple landed the Beatles catalog.

01:39:50   It clearly, that was in exchange for an enormous marketing campaign.

01:39:56   Yep.

01:39:57   Right?

01:39:58   I mean, Apple was running Beatles ads.

01:39:59   Apple was paying for them.

01:40:01   It was an enormous campaign to promote it.

01:40:03   You have to get something.

01:40:04   You can't just say, okay, it's an exclusive

01:40:05   and it's only on this thing.

01:40:06   You've gotta be getting, to do that,

01:40:08   you've gotta be getting something either promotional

01:40:10   or cash to make it worthwhile.

01:40:13   - Right, and the ones that control it,

01:40:16   or especially anything in the back catalog,

01:40:19   it's mostly the labels.

01:40:20   And the labels' interest is having,

01:40:24   they're fine to have a bunch of these guys

01:40:27   competing with each other.

01:40:30   I mean, that's why I'm long-term bearish on Spotify.

01:40:33   I don't like subscription services in general.

01:40:36   I think they're a great value for the consumer,

01:40:39   but I think they're a bad idea for most artists.

01:40:44   But as long as they exist,

01:40:50   I don't know, I lost my train of thought.

01:40:52   I was getting a little worked up.

01:40:54   - Well, here's my thing on Jay-Z's attitude.

01:40:56   - That's the 1/3 AM, lost the train of thought.

01:40:58   You don't have to win or we don't have to lose for you to win, blah, blah, blah.

01:41:04   Compare and contrast to video.

01:41:05   With video, Apple doesn't have their own custom content.

01:41:10   Apple doesn't have Apple-produced shows.

01:41:13   So Apple can treat Netflix and HBO Go and HBO—what's the new one?

01:41:20   HBO Now?

01:41:21   You know, and Apple doesn't have to—there is no competition with Apple.

01:41:27   guess what Apple does sell music and Apple's view on how much of the music

01:41:32   out there they should be selling is all of it. Well not just that but this if you

01:41:37   know if and when Apple launches a streaming service that's a zero-sum game

01:41:40   no one is going to be subscribed to multiple streaming services. Right yeah

01:41:43   that's another good example right because people yeah and that's another

01:41:46   difference of video where you might in fact I am both a Netflix subscriber and

01:41:51   an HBO subscriber because I want to watch both shows that are on exclusive

01:41:56   to Netflix and exclusive to HBO.

01:41:58   Right, but those are like their vertical business models.

01:42:01   They're Apple-like in a way, right?

01:42:03   They're using their exclusive content to get you to sign up for their service because you

01:42:07   can only get House of Cards on Netflix.

01:42:10   You can only get Game of Thrones on HBO.

01:42:13   Whereas when it comes to music because it's controlled by the labels and they want to

01:42:18   be everywhere, that means all the services end up having pretty much the same stuff.

01:42:25   What else was going on this week?

01:42:26   Well, along those lines actually, I thought I loved this story because it was so classic

01:42:33   Apple.

01:42:34   It's funny, I thought we were going to talk about Apple at all.

01:42:36   That's the way it goes.

01:42:38   There's a story yesterday in Recode about how Apple is going to get for their TV service,

01:42:44   they want to get the networks to pay for the streaming.

01:42:49   So basically, Apple will sign up all the networks on there and instead of the networks delivering

01:42:55   bring their content to Apple and then Apple streams to the Apple TV, they'll stream

01:43:00   individually to the Apple TV.

01:43:02   The quote here is great.

01:43:03   "Eddie Q, who has the company's media efforts and leading negotiations for the

01:43:06   streaming service, has told them that Apple feels it should concentrate on what it's

01:43:09   best at, creating consumer hardware and software, and leave other tasks like streaming infrastructure

01:43:13   for people who specialize in it."

01:43:16   This is so great on multiple levels.

01:43:19   It's great because one, it's true.

01:43:21   Honestly, I don't want Apple focusing on the streaming.

01:43:24   I don't want Chinese dubbing.

01:43:27   Two, you missed that because you were actually at the first Apple event.

01:43:29   Yeah, and the one where I couldn't make it last month was great.

01:43:33   The stream was perfect for me.

01:43:35   The only complaint I saw of others was that other people seemed to get on one that was

01:43:38   a minute or two behind.

01:43:40   Yeah, that's the case with streaming always.

01:43:43   I watch the NBA a lot, a week past, and I'm always slightly behind Twitter, which sucks

01:43:47   because something big will happen and I'll see it first.

01:43:53   But anyhow, so this Apple thing…

01:43:54   Mad Fientist Wouldn't that be a cool Twitter client feature

01:43:56   if you could tell your Twitter client to put you five minutes behind?

01:44:00   Dave Asprey It would be fantastic.

01:44:02   Oh, yeah, Twitter, we were going to talk about that I think.

01:44:06   But the other thing that's great about this is this is what Apple does again and again

01:44:14   in industry after industry is because Apple has such a dominant hold on the consumer and

01:44:20   the customer relationship, what they end up doing is they get other people to do the really

01:44:26   expensive undifferentiated commodity work for them.

01:44:31   And then Apple gets to blame them when anything goes wrong.

01:44:33   So like with the iPhone, right, what's the actual expensive part of an iPhone?

01:44:38   It's the carrier service.

01:44:40   Like the amount of money it costs to build up a network is massive.

01:44:47   But Apple doesn't do any of that.

01:44:48   They get the carriers to do it for them and when the call goes bad and you can't get

01:44:54   online, do you blame Apple?

01:44:55   No, you blame AT&T.

01:44:56   And then they leverage that into getting Verizon to take it because Verizon is losing customers

01:45:00   to AT&T.

01:45:03   And you see Apple do this again and again.

01:45:06   The banks are paying Apple for the privilege of Apple Pay.

01:45:09   Why?

01:45:10   Because the banks are fearful that people will switch banks just to get access to Apple

01:45:14   Pay.

01:45:16   Now they're going to do this with this network thing that the networks like are looking for alternative revenue streams

01:45:20   they want to get they want to be a part of the Apple thing and

01:45:23   Apple you can you can see it like Apple has them reeled in and then I was like, oh by the way

01:45:28   We're not so good at this streaming thing. Why don't you take care of that?

01:45:30   Guess what? That's that is really expensive and there's no value add

01:45:34   It's a pure commodity and Apple is gonna somehow get out of paying it. I think any interesting conversation

01:45:40   Email conversation yesterday with our friend Darth of you know

01:45:44   the greatest guy on the internet.

01:45:47   - Yes, with the greatest avatar.

01:45:50   - Yeah.

01:45:51   And he was surprised by it because his take was Apple,

01:45:57   he was surprised that Apple wouldn't wanna control that.

01:45:59   Because, and his take, and I think he's right here,

01:46:01   is that if the stream, for somebody's stream

01:46:04   on this new Apple TV is shitty,

01:46:06   people are gonna blame Apple.

01:46:08   Because we may know as insiders that Apple,

01:46:10   the way that they've architected this

01:46:11   is that you bring your own streaming technology, you know,

01:46:14   you know, you bring your own servers and streaming stuff.

01:46:18   The consumer isn't going to know that the consumer is going to know.

01:46:21   I bought the new Apple TV and I went to whatever it is.

01:46:25   I wanted to watch the NBA thing and the stream sucked. Apple TV sucks.

01:46:29   But what if every stream works except for that one?

01:46:32   Like, well, CBS is patchy, but every other stream works fine.

01:46:36   Like, right. Then who is going to get blamed? Right.

01:46:39   Maybe then even a consumer would figure out, you know, oh, I guess I should blame the NBA.

01:46:44   I mean, we had this we had this conversation on Twitter last night about about this topic.

01:46:51   And someone pointed out that if you want to take a cynical view of things, Steve Jobs managed to

01:46:58   successfully blame the iPhone 4 on people holding it wrong. So never don't. You can always ask just

01:47:05   is how far Apple can get people to admit.

01:47:09   Actually, it was our fault.

01:47:10   - Yeah.

01:47:11   Well, and the other fact, I think it's complicated.

01:47:13   The other factor is some of these companies

01:47:15   really do do streaming well.

01:47:16   Netflix streaming is pretty excellent.

01:47:19   MLB has fantastic streaming,

01:47:22   and they're so good at it

01:47:24   that they're actually white labeling it for a whole bunch.

01:47:28   I forget, yeah, I guess they're gonna do HBO, right?

01:47:31   - Yeah, they're doing HBO.

01:47:32   Yeah, they're doing a whole bunch of folks.

01:47:33   Yeah, they've built up some-- - My prediction.

01:47:34   I'll make a prediction right here, which is that,

01:47:37   and I know that HBO's like go crapped out

01:47:41   with Game of Thrones last year.

01:47:43   Now that they're backed by MLB,

01:47:45   I'm gonna make a prediction that it's gonna go well

01:47:49   because I think the MLB stuff is really, really good.

01:47:53   The only times I ever have problems

01:47:54   are when I'm pretty sure that it's my Comcast connection

01:47:57   and everything in the house seems to be pretty slow.

01:48:01   MLB, the MLB Technologies Group

01:48:04   does streaming amazingly well.

01:48:06   It's a really great group.

01:48:08   So I think they're going to do well.

01:48:10   And I think the problem for some of those, like MLB,

01:48:13   I think Apple would have a very difficult time getting MLB

01:48:16   on board with a new Apple TV if they couldn't

01:48:19   use their own streaming.

01:48:21   No, that's interesting.

01:48:21   Yeah.

01:48:22   I don't see how they would do it.

01:48:24   I think they've put such an investment into it,

01:48:26   and they trust it so completely that I

01:48:30   think they'd have a hard time getting people to do it.

01:48:32   And I think it's in the interest of these companies,

01:48:35   like Netflix and MLB, to control their own streaming

01:48:37   so that they're not tied to Apple's device.

01:48:40   That, to me, is the difference, that they're not

01:48:42   looking to lock people in.

01:48:45   The thing that struck me--

01:48:45   Another great point.

01:48:46   The other thing that struck me about it,

01:48:47   though, is that if this is it and Apple has no--

01:48:50   like, I guess what I would kind of hope to see Apple do

01:48:53   is if you want to bring your own streaming,

01:48:54   bring your own streaming.

01:48:55   If you don't, there's a different tier.

01:48:58   And maybe Apple would obviously have

01:48:59   to take a bigger cut of the revenue

01:49:01   because they'd be providing it.

01:49:02   But it would be interesting and neat to me

01:49:04   if Apple had an option where a channel could

01:49:07   use relay on Apple, rely on Apple to provide

01:49:11   all the backend infrastructure.

01:49:13   So that truly small indie channels could exist

01:49:18   for Apple TV, right?

01:49:19   Like the App Store.

01:49:20   So that three guys could start a, you know,

01:49:25   Apple TV channel and without paying, you know,

01:49:28   an arm and a leg for a massive backend for streaming the video

01:49:32   that all you need is the camera and the production stuff and you

01:49:34   send the video to Apple and Apple takes care of everything

01:49:38   else.

01:49:38   Yeah, I don't think so. And I, I mean, that's, that's, I think a

01:49:44   harder job than it than it sounds like, because I mean, how

01:49:48   many three guys in a camera are you gonna allow? Yeah, well, I

01:49:51   don't know, is it gonna be an app store? But if it's an app

01:49:53   store, right, I don't think they've built them all in, I

01:49:56   I don't think it's going to be like you turn on the app,

01:50:00   like it is now, where you turn on the new Apple TV today,

01:50:04   you get all the channels.

01:50:05   And I think there's a way you can hide the ones

01:50:07   you don't want to see, but they're all there.

01:50:09   I'm thinking of more like an app store type thing,

01:50:13   where if you wanted to get a channel, you know, like...

01:50:15   You ever seen these YouTube videos?

01:50:19   You probably have, 'cause I know you're into stuff like this.

01:50:22   There's crazy successful YouTubers who do things like,

01:50:26   There's a woman who makes a huge amount of money.

01:50:28   Nobody even knows what her name is.

01:50:31   Unboxing Disney toys.

01:50:33   All she does is unbox Disney toys.

01:50:37   - I am aware and no, I do not watch.

01:50:40   - But no, I don't think you're,

01:50:41   I wasn't saying that I think you're a subscriber

01:50:43   to her channel.

01:50:44   I'm saying it seems to me that you'd be aware

01:50:46   that she exists, that she's making a terrific living,

01:50:50   doing nothing but unboxing Disney toys.

01:50:53   - Yup, and kids love it.

01:50:54   kids love it so I'm just saying that

01:50:59   why wouldn't Apple maybe want to disrupt Google and have let her make an Apple TV

01:51:07   channel and it wouldn't show up by default everybody wouldn't get the woman

01:51:11   who unboxes Disney toys channel on their Apple TV but if you wanted it you'd go

01:51:15   to the App Store for Apple TV and get it and you could put it on your home page

01:51:19   and it wouldn't go through YouTube it would just go through Apple like it is

01:51:24   It's always interesting to think about what will the user interface look like.

01:51:27   Will you be able to – will it stay kind of like it is and if you get the bundle that

01:51:35   people are talking about Apple getting, will you be able to only have the channels/apps

01:51:40   that you want to have on there or will there be a specific TV app where – and then it

01:51:46   operates more like a traditional TV.

01:51:50   If you think about it, why would Apple want to just recreate a broken paradigm?

01:51:55   That's interesting.

01:51:56   Well, and it also ties back to something you mentioned an hour ago, which was with every

01:52:03   major platform, Apple's unveiled a new input device.

01:52:09   The remote.

01:52:10   Right.

01:52:11   Again, they didn't invent the mouse, but they made the mouse mass market.

01:52:16   They didn't invent...

01:52:17   Well, I guess that's the thing.

01:52:20   People get so hung up on the actual invention and by all means, invention is fantastic.

01:52:29   But it is just as innovative to bring something to market in a meaningful way.

01:52:34   And that's what Apple does.

01:52:35   Apple makes markets.

01:52:37   They made a market for the mouse.

01:52:39   They made a market for all these other devices.

01:52:42   Dave Asprey The click wheel, right?

01:52:43   Spinning device.

01:52:44   Jeff

01:52:44   they made the market for MP3 players and they made the market for smartphones.

01:52:47   It doesn't mean they made the smartphone, but making the market is more meaningful,

01:52:51   it's more profitable, and frankly, it's much more difficult.

01:52:55   And they made the market for touch screens.

01:52:57   I mean, and again, touch screens have existed for a long, long time, but they made the market

01:53:01   to make it a mass market technology.

01:53:03   No other product had a mass market touch screen before the iPhone.

01:53:06   And that's where everyone benefits because then the cost comes down because it gets scale.

01:53:13   So my question is do they have something like that for a new Apple TV?

01:53:16   Because the whole up down left right thing is not innovative.

01:53:20   I wouldn't be surprised if we're still stuck with up down left right select play.

01:53:23   Hopefully, God almighty, please God, not infrared, please Bluetooth, for God's sake.

01:53:30   Honestly, if it comes out with a new Apple TV and it's an infrared remote,

01:53:35   I don't know. I don't know what I would do. I was going to say I'd sell all my Apple stuff,

01:53:42   but I don't own any Apple stock. I'm gonna buy I would buy Apple stock just so I could sell it.

01:53:47   I think you're gonna sell your Apple stuff. I'm like that seems a little extreme.

01:53:53   No, I wish I owned Apple. It would make me wish I owned Apple stock so I could sell it.

01:53:57   It would it would be very upsetting, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's

01:54:02   Bluetooth remote and just up down left right select and play. But I would love it if they've

01:54:08   got something right. I'd love it if they have something that makes it better. So I don't

01:54:13   know.

01:54:14   I mean do so I mean the job is out scene and he's now at BuzzFeed you know said reported

01:54:22   that there's a new device and actually has an eight chip it has a meaningful amount of

01:54:26   storage for apps and an app store. And he pointed out that the Apple TV it says starting

01:54:33   at $69, which it also ends at $69 currently.

01:54:38   So you're buying the... there's going to be multiple Apple TVs, one of which has an app

01:54:46   store and...

01:54:47   I don't know.

01:54:48   Maybe that's starting it.

01:54:49   Maybe we're all reading way too much into the starting at $69 because I don't understand

01:54:52   if they come out with a new one, why wouldn't the world when they just get rid of the old

01:54:55   one?

01:54:56   Why would they even want to make it available if it's running an entire, you know, entirely

01:55:00   different platform?

01:55:01   Because the $69 point I think is important.

01:55:03   And this is a huge mistake that Microsoft made.

01:55:07   Microsoft wanted, like the whole reason for the Xbox, the big picture strategic reason

01:55:13   was that they wanted to own the living room.

01:55:16   And the idea was we'll start with a console and then we'll expand into all these functions

01:55:22   so that we own that screen.

01:55:24   That was the whole three screens in a cloud sort of thing.

01:55:26   The problem with that is they started in the wrong place.

01:55:28   They started in a place that meant it had to be expensive.

01:55:31   And as long as the Xbox was several hundred dollars, they were never going to crack the

01:55:37   mass market.

01:55:39   And I think that's a cautionary tale and I think Apple and all the other folks, Google

01:55:48   and Amazon and Roku, they're taking the better approach which is delivering kind of a minimum

01:55:54   viable product for a device and keeping the price low.

01:55:58   then when and if Apple brings this out,

01:56:02   and maybe Apple does wanna go up against the consoles,

01:56:05   maybe they do want to really dominate that space.

01:56:10   To do that, you're gonna have to spend some money,

01:56:15   but you don't wanna lose the accessibility

01:56:19   in having the core function of the TV

01:56:21   accessible to lots of people.

01:56:23   So I think the multiple model approach

01:56:25   actually makes a ton of sense.

01:56:27   maybe maybe I do think there's a chance that they're going there might be some

01:56:32   classic Christiansen style disruption potential there again and I know I'm not

01:56:39   a gaming expert but I think the a8 is good enough and it's you know it's not

01:56:44   gonna render as many you know polygons per frame as you know the ps4 or the

01:56:50   Xbox One. But if it's only $99, it might and it might be good enough because it

01:56:58   you know in terms of how many pixels are on a 1080 HD screen it's fewer.

01:57:05   It's not that many. Right, it's fewer than iOS devices the A8 already handles.

01:57:10   So I've actually argued both sides of this. Like I was all about the Apple TV and

01:57:15   and its potential previously.

01:57:19   And I don't, I, this is why the biggest question to me

01:57:23   about the new Apple TV is you were kind of hinting at it.

01:57:26   It's the input method.

01:57:28   - Right.

01:57:29   - I think as long as if the Apple TV

01:57:33   does not have a controller, like a proper controller,

01:57:37   the traditional consoles are going to be safe.

01:57:41   Now their growth might be capped.

01:57:43   like they're going to have trouble finding new customers, but they will, the current

01:57:49   kind of hardcore gamers will be there and it's a large enough market that the publishers

01:57:56   will stay and it will still continue to be a profitable industry.

01:58:00   What gets really interesting is if there is this mythical higher level Apple TV and it

01:58:08   has a proper controller and I think we're talking more like 199 or 179 maybe, that

01:58:13   is where like meaningful disruption becomes a possibility.

01:58:18   I don't know, the whole disruption thing, I've written about this a few times, I think

01:58:29   the core theory is really compelling and explains a lot of stuff but I've picked nuts with

01:58:36   whole modular integrated sort of stuff.

01:58:43   One thing that bothers me about that is it's kind of assumed with once a company is disrupted

01:58:50   that they're done, like they're doomed, they're going to go out of business.

01:58:53   That's actually what Christophson said.

01:58:55   I think the way it turns out though and we've seen this play out is that a company -- and

01:59:02   And this is partly because the market is just so huge now because the way it has disruption

01:59:06   is the lower guy comes in and he's capturing customers that the incumbent doesn't care

01:59:11   about and then he expands, captures more of the customers and the incumbent retreats to

01:59:14   the high end.

01:59:16   And the problem is the high end becomes so small relative to the mass market that everyone,

01:59:20   all the supporting players flee the high market and they serve the mass market and then the

01:59:25   big incumbent is doomed.

01:59:28   The problem is the market is just so huge.

01:59:31   Like you need – and we've talked this with Apple, you need to not think about things

01:59:34   in relative terms.

01:59:36   Apple has X percent of the market.

01:59:38   You need to look at absolute numbers.

01:59:39   Apple has hundreds of millions of customers, right?

01:59:42   It doesn't matter if they have 10 percent of the market or 15 percent of the market

01:59:45   if 10 percent of the market is hundreds of millions of people because hundreds of millions

01:59:48   of people is plenty to support developers and keep them on board, all that sort of stuff.

01:59:54   And this is the fundamental thing people like Henry Blodgett get wrong consistently about

01:59:58   their thesis about why the iPhone is doomed.

02:00:02   I think this is the case with, this is my thing about consoles is that as long as they're

02:00:08   dedicated, there's so many people, even in a percentage basis that's small, there's so

02:00:12   many people that play these games, it will remain a space where you can build a nice

02:00:17   business and have a nice business.

02:00:19   The problem is you're just not going to grow.

02:00:22   And I think I'm repeating myself a bit now, but I think that I'm super excited about the

02:00:29   Apple TV in particular, mainly because it could go in so many directions.

02:00:34   I'll keep you focused until we land this ship.

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02:03:11   Fireball. What else you want to talk about, Ben? Want to talk about basketball? Or should

02:03:17   we talk about maybe we should Wisconsin man final final final for I'm rooting for him.

02:03:22   That's my team in the final four. But that's that's not we better not get into that. We've

02:03:26   got real stuff to talk about. What about me? You want to do meerkat and periscope? Sure.

02:03:30   I've I told my my members that I was gonna be writing about it like three weeks ago

02:03:36   And I still haven't written. I wrote a couple of pieces about basically I said that you know

02:03:39   Meerkat is almost certainly doomed

02:03:43   Would you would you call this the the coincidental rise of the two another one of those things like you mentioned before like just in

02:03:49   the history of science, you know like going all the way back to Newton and Leibniz with calculus being you know

02:03:55   developed pretty much simultaneously separately by the two geniuses

02:04:00   Is this another one of those things where like Meerkat and Periscope more or less arrived

02:04:03   at the same time? It's just like

02:04:07   everything was in the right, everything got to the right place at the right time?

02:04:10   No, absolutely. I mean the idea of live streaming is in a new one and there's, there are services that are out there that I've

02:04:17   had some success. Like YouNow, I think is actually has, is a lot bigger than people realize. Um, but

02:04:22   the idea, having the connectivity everywhere, having LTE everywhere, like it gets really dodgy on 3G.

02:04:28   So you need LTE you need the quality cameras you need the App Store you need the Twitter, you know the Twitter graph

02:04:36   You also need I think you need data

02:04:39   packages that with sufficient

02:04:42   Gigabytes per month that people feel comfortable. Yeah, it's consuming and sharing

02:04:47   Video streaming video content like this, which is it it's it's part of your LTE

02:04:54   LTE in itself isn't enough if it's not affordable enough that people feel like they can just

02:05:00   sit there and watch people making these videos.

02:05:03   Dave Asprey Right. Exactly. Exactly. I think it's a

02:05:06   great example of the time was right for this product to emerge and it just so happened

02:05:13   to emerge within two weeks of each other.

02:05:15   Dave I described it as a science fiction scenario.

02:05:19   There's some pushback from people like that. They're like, "Oh, come on. Live streaming

02:05:22   isn't new. It's not new. So, you know, what is science fiction about this? To me, the

02:05:26   part that science fiction is the universality, the way that anybody can do it. It's all free.

02:05:36   You don't have to pay for anything other than what you've already paid for, which is your

02:05:39   iPhone and your data plan.

02:05:41   plan. To me it's the size. It's this 4.5 inch device that is doing this. The sort of equipment

02:05:52   that was needed to do just video much less. You could live stream 20 years ago. You needed

02:05:59   a big ass camera. You needed a microwave connection. You needed a van with a massive satellite

02:06:04   dish on top of it. You're doing exactly that with a piece of glass in your hand.

02:06:10   I think the thing, and I think the thing that is the most science fictiony in terms of if

02:06:14   you went back 20 years and described periscoping to somebody 20 years ago, or let alone longer,

02:06:22   but the most amazing aspect of it to me is that the device for producing and the device

02:06:30   for consuming is exact and the app, it's the same app and device for being a producer as

02:06:37   a consumer. You use your iPhone with Periscope or Meerkat to create a stream or to consume it.

02:06:46   And that to me is the magic. And it's so easy to overlook because it seems so obvious once you see

02:06:51   it in action. But that's revolutionary that the right like your TV set is not a TV studio.

02:06:58   Yeah, it is anything but it doesn't even have it. You know, it's just unrelated, right? Because

02:07:03   This gives much more of the sense of it being like a portal, right?

02:07:06   It's like you're in one side and out the other.

02:07:10   Whereas, whereas previous last streaming, it's unidirectional.

02:07:14   Like it's coming from the studio to your TV.

02:07:17   There wasn't the sense, even if, even if a mirror camera scope is one way,

02:07:21   the container is such that it's a bi-directional relationship.

02:07:26   It is crazy to me.

02:07:28   I think it's so exciting and funny that it's the same device for somebody, you know, like somebody with

02:07:35   10,000 followers, you know 10 20 30 thousand followers who gets hundreds and hundreds

02:07:41   Maybe a thousand people watching their streams

02:07:42   They're using an iPhone with

02:07:45   Periscope to send that and all the people watching it are using an iPhone with Periscope to watch it

02:07:50   It's exact same device in the exact same app

02:07:54   Yeah, I mean it's it real like I I haven't like I'm with you. I mean the first so I really

02:07:59   III was at the Apple the the watch event

02:08:03   The second one that you missed and tonight

02:08:07   I yeah

02:08:07   And I started and that was when I really started using it was I was using it in line saying outside like before the event side

02:08:13   I was saying I saw you I saw you on the stream. I saw you standing up you had a seat

02:08:18   I think you're in like the third row and I saw you standing up on your phone and I text you guys like you're on

02:08:23   the stream and you're on your phone and you're like, "I'm meerkatting."

02:08:26   Yeah.

02:08:27   It was mind-blowing.

02:08:29   You look up there and you see you had 350 people watching you.

02:08:33   There are 350 people all over the world.

02:08:37   You write a website.

02:08:38   It's already amazing.

02:08:39   You can look at your analytics and you see someone logging on from Brazil or Russia or

02:08:44   wherever it may be.

02:08:46   That's already mind-blowing enough, but the immediacy of knowing someone is sitting somewhere

02:08:52   are 6,000 miles away from me and they are seeing exactly what I'm seeing because I am

02:08:59   holding up this device. It's an incredible experience.

02:09:04   Dave Asprey The truth is though, I'm with you, I think

02:09:07   Meerkat is fucked. I think it was obvious even before Periscope came out. I'm not an

02:09:13   expert on social media. I'm a nerd and I follow this stuff. Meerkat caught my attention. I

02:09:20   I was like, oh, this is something and I see this.

02:09:22   But then Twitter immediately got word out

02:09:25   that they had purchased,

02:09:26   'cause here too, before Meerkat came out,

02:09:28   the fact that Twitter had bought Periscope

02:09:30   was not public knowledge.

02:09:32   - Right.

02:09:33   - They bought Periscope,

02:09:35   and I don't know if it's on the record

02:09:36   or if it's just rumored, but for $100 million,

02:09:38   which if it's true, I think was rivals,

02:09:42   I think it's gonna end up rivaling

02:09:45   Facebook's purchase of Instagram for $1 billion

02:09:48   as one of the great acquisitions of this decade.

02:09:51   I really do. - No, absolutely.

02:09:53   - I think if they got Periscope for 100 million,

02:09:55   it's gonna go down as a great acquisition

02:09:59   and exhibit A in the case that Dick Costello

02:10:02   is actually a pretty good CEO, I think.

02:10:05   - No, I agree.

02:10:07   The reason why Meerkat is screwed is because

02:10:10   what is so power, like what,

02:10:13   the thing about Twitter is,

02:10:16   Twitter is so many things to so many different people in so many different scenarios, right?

02:10:21   That's what makes it so great and that's what makes it so hard to use for a new user in

02:10:26   particular.

02:10:27   But for sure, one of the core values of Twitter is real time, right?

02:10:32   When something happens, you go to Twitter, you can search, you can get the reaction.

02:10:35   We talked about it just a second ago with watching a game and how annoying it is when

02:10:38   Twitter is like five seconds ahead.

02:10:40   That's how real time it is.

02:10:41   Twitter is faster than my stream of the game and it's frustrating.

02:10:48   And so both Meerkat and Twitter are - and the reason why Meerkat was a threat to Twitter

02:10:53   and why it's a good thing they had acquired Periscope was that it was unbundling one of

02:10:59   the core features of Twitter because real time in text is one thing but real time in

02:11:05   video is another thing entirely in a dramatically more powerful way.

02:11:10   So you have someone tweeting about like a fire going on or the plane crash.

02:11:15   Like I was tweeting when the plane crash happened in Taiwan a few weeks ago.

02:11:18   Built the gas explosion in New York last week.

02:11:22   Right. Yeah, no, exactly.

02:11:24   Which happened to be like the day Periscope came out.

02:11:26   So, so, so helpful.

02:11:27   That has a that that is like

02:11:32   that has to be Twitter because Twitter has Twitter has to has to own that.

02:11:37   Yeah. And yeah, that's why America had a screwed

02:11:40   because they're so fundamentally tied to what Twitter is.

02:11:43   Like Twitter already owns the real time space,

02:11:47   which means all the people that you wanna find

02:11:49   or follow in real time are already on Twitter,

02:11:52   which means you have to have access to the Twitter graph

02:11:54   to, and they now don't.

02:11:57   - So for anybody, and I know Periscope,

02:11:59   and there's, it just seems like the writing's already on,

02:12:01   we don't even need to analyze it

02:12:03   because Meerkat has really dropped precipitously

02:12:06   in the App Store rankings, and Periscope is at the top,

02:12:10   Apple is promoting it heavily

02:12:12   and I think

02:12:14   You can't beat the first party integration with Twitter, right?

02:12:19   no matter even if meerkat had been allowed to keep the

02:12:22   The access to the social graph that they had and that Twitter pulled a couple weeks ago

02:12:27   Even if they kept that they wouldn't have helped them because it's not

02:12:31   Being a third party thing built on top of Twitter is never going to be as integrated as a first party thing within Twitter

02:12:37   Second of all, the technology is clearly better on Periscope side just technologically it is much closer to live

02:12:43   And for anybody out there who hasn't used either of these apps

02:12:46   The basic just you should get Periscope. I in my opinion

02:12:51   I think you could probably skip meerkat at this point, but get Periscope get your username. I think it's really interesting

02:12:56   I'm about to I've still got notifications on I'm probably gonna turn that off soon because it's

02:13:00   Starting to they just announced they did a post yesterday saying that oops. Sorry

02:13:05   We overly which in this annoys me like you could tell from meerkat the way notifications needed to be and they still shipped it wrong

02:13:13   That worries me. But like yeah, because the problem is notifications are essential though

02:13:18   Yeah, it's like that's how you like following it on Twitter. You're always late

02:13:22   You have to get the notification and that's how you catch the live stream. Yeah, obviously periscope has has

02:13:28   It keeps the streams around for a period of time

02:13:31   But if you want to be the live it so you don't turn it off at the same time the way it's implemented now

02:13:36   It's it's overwhelming. I'm gonna I'm gonna start periscoping me talking to you right now. So it'll be very metal. Haha. That'd be great

02:13:42   That would be great

02:13:47   I've thought about people keep asking me am I gonna start periscoping while I broadcast the the show

02:13:52   I don't think so because I don't see how I could get the audio from both sides through and also I don't

02:13:58   You know, I don't know that I want to be on camera, but I maybe do it briefly

02:14:02   I'm doing talking about I'm probably I'm like wearing like whatever I was I'm here

02:14:08   I was actually temporarily like number four number five on the meerkat leaderboard. I saw that I um

02:14:13   but but then I saw while talking about periscope on the talk show with

02:14:20   Gruber so

02:14:24   meta and I'm gonna post it to Twitter if you haven't used it starting the broadcast the gist of it is is that you

02:14:30   You know

02:14:31   You get a one-way the producers video is there and you hear them you see them you see either see them or you see what?

02:14:37   They're seeing if they have the camera pointed around the other way here

02:14:39   It goes 20 20 26 people 28 people 29 people 32 people and they can come by people and then you can see their comments

02:14:47   Now they can't you know, it's obviously not audio because that would be a mess

02:14:50   Oh man, John, the hearts are flowing in. People are pleased with our stream.

02:14:57   But the latency on Meerkat was at least 30 seconds on the comments, in my experience.

02:15:06   I'm not, as somebody broadcasting, but watching. And it really made for a slightly awkward

02:15:10   experience where if the person who was on, if it was like a Q&A type thing, like, "Hey, ask me

02:15:14   anything about what you, you know.

02:15:16   - Yep, I did that.

02:15:18   I didn't realize that the lag was so bad,

02:15:21   and they're like, "Oh, no one's asking questions."

02:15:22   - Right. - It's gonna block off.

02:15:23   And then like, I'd go on Twitter,

02:15:24   and there was like five gazillion questions there.

02:15:26   - Right, and it's way behind.

02:15:28   Whereas Periscope, it seems like it's really minimal.

02:15:30   It's seconds behind.

02:15:32   And you see a question, and if it's a good question,

02:15:34   you see the person who's hosting the video.

02:15:36   - We'll test it right now.

02:15:38   Can someone type in the comments, type John.

02:15:42   Someone's asking how's oh yeah everyone okay stop stop that's enough.

02:15:53   People want to know how your eye is.

02:15:55   It's you know as steady as she goes I mean it's not.

02:15:57   This is very awkward when people listen to the podcast it's gonna be it's gonna be totally

02:16:01   out of place.

02:16:02   Yeah.

02:16:03   I'm enough.

02:16:04   People do want to know you know.

02:16:08   You know according to the doctors. It's as good as could be hoped at this point

02:16:12   My vision is not good out of the eye, but it's you know better than being blind

02:16:17   Long story short, but I it's not I'm not expected. There's no expectation that that my vision will be

02:16:24   That it's as good as it will be yet. It's you know should take months before

02:16:30   It settles in and I still have the gas still have the gas bubble in there. So it's still relatively

02:16:36   It's you know impossible to judge. Are you gonna be able to go to WDC or oh, yeah, definitely. Well, I

02:16:42   Can't say definitely but it's supposed to be

02:16:45   Six to ten weeks for the gas bubble to fully dissolve and it was February

02:16:51   24 so four weeks was March 24. So now it's five weeks

02:16:56   So it should be sometime within the month of April. I don't think I can't book travel

02:17:02   There's no way I would book a flight in April

02:17:04   I think by May I should be good and by the end of May for sure because that's way past ten weeks and it's definitely

02:17:10   Shrinking so that's you know

02:17:13   But I have to I need to go there and they need to look in my eye and verify that the gas bubble is completely

02:17:19   Gone before I can get on an airplane. I can't just think that's the wise that's a wise course of action

02:17:23   Yeah

02:17:24   Although I think that if it was there but truly tiny like the last day or two I could do it because you know

02:17:29   The whole thing is that you go on if you if I went on an airplane and the air pressure changed the gas bubble

02:17:34   would greatly increase in size. But if it was tiny, even if it greatly increased in size,

02:17:38   it would make a difference. The issue is if it's of any reasonable size, it would increase

02:17:43   big enough that it would, you know, be... Did I say this on the show? I read a book about it. I

02:17:48   read like an actual... I found like through Google, an actual textbook for retinal surgeons. It was,

02:17:54   you know, like a medical textbook that Google had indexed. So I read about this procedure that I had.

02:17:58   And it goes into great detail about this restriction that things you need to do after this is you need to emphasize to your patient that you cannot get on an airplane until you have permission until it's gone.

02:18:10   And it goes into all this detail about how it would be excruciatingly painful if you did this. And it's all this stuff about how much pain you would be in.

02:18:17   And then just one sentence at the end is that it would also likely render them blind.

02:18:21   Permanently blind.

02:18:23   And I'm like, the pain would be bad.

02:18:25   It would be terrible to be in pain for a flight,

02:18:27   but it's the permanent blindness that to me

02:18:30   is a better selling point on, hey, take this serious.

02:18:33   - Right, exactly.

02:18:35   I mean, I fortunately haven't had anything in my eye,

02:18:38   although I was warned the last time I saw the eye doctor.

02:18:40   They told me all the symptoms of a retinol tear

02:18:45   'cause I'm apparently at risk.

02:18:47   So now you have me super paranoid.

02:18:49   But I once took a flight where I didn't even know

02:18:52   before I got in the flight apparently had something in my sinuses.

02:18:55   Oh.

02:18:56   Yeah.

02:18:57   And it was excruciating.

02:19:00   Like I was like, at one point, the flight attendants finally let me lay on the floor

02:19:05   in the back of the plane.

02:19:06   Like I was, it was unbelievable.

02:19:10   And then the plane descended, I was totally fine.

02:19:12   Yeah.

02:19:13   Oh man.

02:19:14   So I can imagine that being in my eye.

02:19:16   It sounds pretty crappy.

02:19:18   So the interesting thing about Periscope and Meerkat is we got totally sidestreamed by

02:19:25   me filming.

02:19:26   Sorry about that.

02:19:27   This is a good example to not live stream your show.

02:19:33   But I think it really highlights what is valuable about Twitter the company.

02:19:41   And what's interesting is I'm not sure that the most valuable part of Twitter is

02:19:45   like the Twitter app, like the actual looking comments and stuff like that.

02:19:49   What's valuable about Twitter, what makes Twitter unique and what makes Twitter potentially

02:19:54   super valuable when it comes to advertising is it's the Twitter graph and because the

02:19:59   Twitter graph is what I'm interested in, right?

02:20:02   Facebook, it's who I know.

02:20:04   Google, it's what I'm searching for.

02:20:06   Pinterest is interesting.

02:20:07   It's kind of like what I aspire to but Twitter, like it's what I'm interested in.

02:20:11   The people that I follow, the things that I search for, the folks that I interact with,

02:20:14   You can really, if an advertiser wants to understand Ben Thompson, he just needs to

02:20:19   understand my Twitter account and he will know me better than any other service will

02:20:24   know me.

02:20:25   And what's interesting about that is the key then for Twitter is getting people to have

02:20:32   a Twitter account and to kind of build up that profile.

02:20:36   And what's funny is they belatedly have the pieces.

02:20:42   So the Twitter app is interesting in a way that helps understand me.

02:20:46   I'm not sure it's the best place to monetize.

02:20:48   It monetizes pretty well, but I think that's where they acquired a company that lets them

02:20:54   put ads in other apps and stuff like that.

02:20:58   Crap, it's escaping me.

02:21:01   But I think it's really compelling to imagine a Twitter ad network that is fueled by knowing

02:21:11   what I'm interested in. And then the ideally you would have lots of apps that the key to

02:21:17   Twitter is not Twitter the app but it's Twitter the login. And so imagine a world where you

02:21:22   had lots of apps that use the Twitter credential, use the Twitter login. So you could have both

02:21:27   Meerkat and Periscope and they would not be a part of Twitter. They would fight it out.

02:21:30   They would both log in with Twitter and they would necessarily like it with Twitter because

02:21:33   if you that's the graph that matters for a live app. And then Twitter can monetize through

02:21:39   their ad network. It's this alternative vision for Twitter that they kind of went

02:21:45   away from back in the day when they shut off all the third-party clients and they decided

02:21:50   no, we're going to own our platform and we're going to be an ad displaying platform.

02:21:55   It's like a what if. Twitter back in 2012 when they walked out all the Twitter clients,

02:22:03   they made the decision that we're going to monetize by showing ads on the Twitter

02:22:07   app. And I think in retrospect that might have been or it was probably a suboptimal

02:22:14   decision because what was valuable was not the app, it was the identity. And in some

02:22:20   respects Twitter the app is like a minimum viable product of what you can do with someone's

02:22:25   identity. But if you know what someone's interested in like you can build stuff like

02:22:29   Periscope, you can build stuff like MiraK, you can build stuff like the Twitter app,

02:22:33   can build all kinds of interesting stuff and it's too bad that didn't happen.

02:22:38   And like Twitter now kind of had to buy Periscope.

02:22:41   Yeah, I started a Periscope here.

02:22:44   I just saw it on Twitter, yeah.

02:22:46   Yeah and everybody wanted me to talk but I couldn't because you were calling.

02:22:51   Ben was going on, that's why I wasn't talking.

02:22:55   How many people are we up to here?

02:22:57   394.

02:22:58   Holy shit.

02:22:59   I don't know about these hearts.

02:23:00   I think the hearts thing is...

02:23:02   I don't know.

02:23:03   it but I think it's I don't know I think it's weird and I don't understand how the hell you

02:23:06   how do you know when you're sending hearts it's like you hold your finger down and no you just

02:23:09   touch the screen you touch the screen well how do you know which ones are yours though you don't

02:23:14   yeah and what's the I don't understand the point of it I don't understand it

02:23:17   you don't feel you don't feel loved and appreciated no I don't I don't know I feel like I feel like

02:23:28   seeing 495 people on makes me feel appreciated or something but I don't

02:23:34   know the hearts I don't get yeah and that's the other thing that's the other

02:23:38   thing that's interesting is um is the is people are saying that everybody gets a

02:23:43   color but I've got 563 people here there are not 563 colors right and how do I

02:23:50   know who's who I don't know well the other thing the other thing the the one

02:23:55   I think that's like the reservoir dogs.

02:23:57   It's like the reservoir dogs thing with Quentin Tarantino didn't want to be Mr. Brown.

02:24:01   That's like Mr. Shit.

02:24:03   There is an aspect of Paris.

02:24:05   It's the main issue you see how it plays out because right now it certainly benefits.

02:24:08   I mean you and I, you have what, you know, hundreds of, 200,000 followers, 300,000 followers.

02:24:14   I have 20,000 or something like that.

02:24:16   And so we immediately have like an audience that's like, "Oh, I'm going to be a big fan of Paris."

02:24:22   So, we immediately have an audience when we launch Periscope.

02:24:26   I ended up getting like 350 when I was just doing it.

02:24:31   What will be interesting, and you can see with the disaster thing or celebrities using

02:24:35   it for sure, what's interesting about that is I think the most interesting part is getting

02:24:41   the people to log on to watch that.

02:24:43   I'm very interested to see what use this ends up having for normal people, like people who

02:24:50   have 50 followers or 100 followers, like what ends up being compelling for them?

02:24:55   If anything, or maybe it's just going to be there's going to be observers and watchers for the most

02:25:00   part. So this is so meta. So the people who are watching on Periscope, don't hear your side. And

02:25:09   you're the whole point that Ben just made that only I can hear here in my headphones, is that

02:25:13   it's going to be interesting to see what the what the use case for this really is. Is that fair?

02:25:19   That's a fair summary. And I do think... Especially for normal people without a lot of followers.

02:25:24   Even though there's 1... There's 1,300 people watching right now, I do think that

02:25:28   the answer to that is not going to be watching one side of a podcast. I think if I could somehow

02:25:36   patch through your audio, this would be interesting. You know, 'cause some people do like listening

02:25:44   along to live episodes of shows but yeah one side is definitely not enough so hello to everybody out

02:25:51   there but I'm gonna I'm gonna end this because I don't think this is very compelling all right

02:25:57   swipe down to stop all right adios everybody thank you maybe I'll do more of these later

02:26:02   what's what's unfortunate is it was probably it's rough to watch these on your one side it's gonna

02:26:07   be really rough to listen to because we're gonna just be kind of stumbling all over the place I

02:26:12   I probably have to delete this.

02:26:13   It's probably, 'cause it probably has,

02:26:16   what do you call it?

02:26:21   Isn't there some kind of thing

02:26:22   where the location is on by default?

02:26:24   - Yeah.

02:26:26   - I think I probably, yeah.

02:26:27   - Oh, I don't know.

02:26:29   I think I have mine disabled.

02:26:30   - I don't know if I did or not.

02:26:31   How do I know?

02:26:32   - I have no idea.

02:26:34   Let me see, or let me look at my periscope

02:26:37   and see if your stream's there.

02:26:39   Did you?

02:26:42   Well, maybe not though because it seems like--

02:26:45   no, it seems like location sharing was off.

02:26:47   I just-- yeah, I think it was off.

02:26:49   I heard some-- maybe that was Meerkat, I don't know.

02:26:51   Or maybe they changed it in an update to the app.

02:26:55   But I didn't do anything.

02:26:56   I forgot to even check.

02:26:58   But now that I try to do a new broadcast,

02:26:59   the location indicator defaults to off.

02:27:02   So I think it's actually pretty good.

02:27:05   I wouldn't mind if there was a setting that let you do it

02:27:07   and it was just broad.

02:27:11   It just told you what city I was in.

02:27:13   I don't want my--

02:27:14   - Yeah, that was another update that they're gonna do,

02:27:16   is they're making the location less exact.

02:27:18   - Yeah, maybe, I don't know.

02:27:19   But anyway, I don't know.

02:27:20   Do you see my thing?

02:27:21   I don't see where it even went.

02:27:22   How do I access my videos?

02:27:24   Well, anyway, this doesn't make for a good show.

02:27:28   But I'll check it out after the show.

02:27:32   What else?

02:27:33   Anything else you wanna talk about?

02:27:35   - No, we're two and a half hours in,

02:27:37   and I think the last 30 minutes got pretty choppy, so.

02:27:41   No, that's probably pretty, that's a good way to end it.

02:27:43   All right, who do you like in the NCAA tournament?

02:27:46   - Well, with my heart or with my head?

02:27:48   - Well, give me both picks.

02:27:50   - Well, obviously Wisconsin for both.

02:27:51   - All right.

02:27:52   - No, I mean, Kentucky, it's obviously--

02:27:54   - Did you go to University of Wisconsin?

02:27:56   - Yes, I did.

02:27:57   - Wow, so it's not just that you're,

02:27:58   I knew you were there, I didn't know if you were,

02:28:00   if you were just local or if you actually went to the school.

02:28:02   Well, that's terribly exciting.

02:28:04   - Yes, and so--

02:28:05   - Do you like their chances?

02:28:07   - I think we have a decent chance.

02:28:09   I mean, I think the great thing about this team

02:28:11   is one that they made it last year. So I mean they watched Kentucky on a last second shot.

02:28:17   So like this team doesn't get frazzled like they just like Arizona like punched him in

02:28:24   the mouth in the first half of that game last week and it looked really bad. But it's one

02:28:29   of those teams you watch them and you're never worried because you know they're going to

02:28:32   like get it together and they're going to respond. And I think that's that's a good

02:28:38   thing going against this undefeated juggernaut super team that they're not going to be intimidated

02:28:44   and they have a couple guys that are real matchup problems. I think I think Kaminsky

02:28:48   the player of the year, the biggest player of the year, probably national player of the

02:28:51   year. I think he's going to struggle frankly. The Collie Stein on Kentucky is is probably

02:28:58   a perfect matchup for him. But I think you know Decker at the small forward spot definitely

02:29:05   has the potential to be a matchup issue.

02:29:07   And yeah, I think if any team can beat Kentucky,

02:29:09   it's Wisconsin.

02:29:10   I think Kentucky should be favored, but I like their chances.

02:29:12   - Yeah, what's the spread?

02:29:13   Have you looked at the spread?

02:29:15   - I haven't.

02:29:16   - I thought last week's weekend was an absolutely great

02:29:20   weekend of college basketball.

02:29:22   And there were so many crazy tight games,

02:29:24   but almost every one came down to which, to me,

02:29:26   which team kept their shit together down the stretch.

02:29:30   - Yep.

02:29:31   - I mean, poor Gonzaga, I was rooting for him.

02:29:34   I hate Duke, so I was rooting for Gonzaga, but they didn't score a point in the last six and a half minutes

02:29:38   Which is atrocious, you know, I mean that's I mean, how can you win a basketball game a tight basketball game?

02:29:43   Well, you don't score in the last six minutes

02:29:45   I mean, you know Duke plays good defense, but man that was bad and they took some bad shots

02:29:49   And I thought with Louisville who played

02:29:53   Wait who to lose you can stay yeah, Michigan State. Oh my god

02:29:58   the guys on the foul line look like they were ready to die and and they're

02:30:03   It was like the clang of the ball hitting the hoop. It was like ear splitting

02:30:07   I mean it was right horrible and then for Notre Dame then - yeah another one

02:30:11   I mean just like slicing them apart and then the last the last two minutes just like

02:30:16   Degenerating into pounding the ball at the top of the key. Um, there was a guy I forget is I don't remember their names

02:30:21   but there was a guy with like

02:30:23   In the last minute and Louisville was still in it and a guard came down and they had all the time in the world

02:30:29   Down by one and a guard forced up a bad shot and I thought Rick Pitino was I thought he was gonna have an aneurysm

02:30:36   It was like he he put up a shot

02:30:39   That was like you've only if you've only got six seconds to go, you know coast to coast

02:30:43   All right, you know wasn't maybe he could have gotten a better shot, but you can't blame him

02:30:47   You only had six shot six seconds. This was like 40 seconds to go and

02:30:51   Or maybe a minute or so, you know, but it was it was outside the you know

02:30:55   You couldn't run the shot clock all the way down

02:30:57   But you had all the time you needed to get a good shot and run and play and this guy came down and just forced

02:31:02   Up a shot and it you know, which to me is like a telltale sign of a team that cracked under pressure

02:31:06   Yeah, no, I'm sure so I don't know I think I think you're right I like Wisconsin's chances

02:31:13   I mean, let's face it Kentucky's the best team and I think that you know

02:31:15   They're gonna be tough to beat but I think Wisconsin can do it because they've got the size

02:31:20   My hope is that we either see and I hate to say this because God Almighty I hate Duke

02:31:25   But I feel like the two most interesting final matchups would be the all Big Ten matchup of Michigan State versus Wisconsin

02:31:31   Or one of the most underrated like rivalries in the country like it right

02:31:36   It's pretty intense and has been for 10 15 years now and and you know, what a what a feather in the cap to the Big Ten

02:31:43   or

02:31:45   Kentucky versus Duke and I hate I don't like either Kentucky or Duke, but I mean, let's face it

02:31:49   They're probably you know, they're they're too, you know top tier, you know, that would be the killer

02:31:54   Those would be the two killer championships to me

02:31:56   But anyway, I'm Wisconsin Duke and Wisconsin Duke did play this year actually Duke won, but it was a great game

02:32:02   So it wouldn't be a bad consolation prize

02:32:04   By the way, the Kentucky opened as a six-point favorite, but it's moved to five. Hmm. So they are five-point favorites

02:32:10   Yeah, right. Well anyway, I'll be rooting for Wisconsin. I love the underdog and

02:32:13   Either was yeah, I could I would root for either of Wisconsin or Michigan State anybody but Duke or Kentucky for God's sake

02:32:21   Ben Thompson, thank you for your time for anybody who doesn't know Ben is over in Taipei and he's on exactly 12 hours difference from

02:32:28   The East Coast us so it is to 2 20 in the morning in Taipei and Ben is a very busy man

02:32:33   running strip strip tech array

02:32:36   Very good

02:32:39   strip tech array calm

02:32:41   Which is a fantastic site and he's killing it on a daily basis with his newsletter for members

02:32:47   It is some of the best and smartest money you could ever spend to stay informed about all the stuff

02:32:54   We're talking about and more on a daily basis. I mean, I don't know how many words you're putting out a week, but it is impressive

02:33:01   Really really? I mean, I mean do you have secretly have somebody working for you?

02:33:05   No, it's it's all me. I have my my secret ability is to write

02:33:10   Really fast and hopefully mostly cogently. So yeah, it's about 10 to 11 thousand words a week

02:33:15   It's I see it's one of those things that I appreciate that's a lot. Wow, that is great though

02:33:19   I mean, I appreciate it on two levels is on one level. I appreciate just reading it and then the

02:33:24   Professional level I'm like, holy shit. He's putting out a lot of words. I better start writing more. So anyway, thanks

02:33:31   Go check go check your stuff out at strategic calm and your Twitter account is

02:33:35   Monk bent MLN KB ENT and that's definitely worth a follow as well. So my thanks to you anything else you want to plug

02:33:44   Exponent.fm. That's the podcast I do with James Olen.

02:33:49   Yes, of course. Duh. So check that out. That is also worth listening to. So if you enjoyed Ben's--

02:33:55   what's the word for your voice? I'll call it sultry. Your sultry tones, dulcet tones. The dulcet tones

02:34:03   of Ben's voice and his insight. Definitely check that out too. So my thanks to you. Go to sleep.

02:34:10   Get some sleep. Sounds good. Thanks, Ben.

02:34:14   them.