The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► I haven't washed my hands. I haven't washed my hands in 20 years.

00:00:08 ◼   ► Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I gotta jump in.

00:00:12 ◼   ► Alright, remember last episode with Jason Snell?

00:00:15 ◼   ► And I misremembered some sort of joke I made over 10 years ago about never washing my hands.

00:00:22 ◼   ► I thought it was on the podcast. It turns out it was a tweet that I wrote.

00:00:26 ◼   ► Pretty sure during the swine flu epidemic, stupid tweet, stupid joke about never washing my hands.

00:00:33 ◼   ► Yeah, real funny now. But anyway, I made the joke on Twitter.

00:00:39 ◼   ► My pal Daniel Jalkett took that tweet, wrote a beautiful little song about it.

00:00:44 ◼   ► And what I was going to do last episode is when I referenced it, grab the audio from the old song that Jalkett wrote,

00:00:51 ◼   ► splice it into the show would have been a funny little gag.

00:00:54 ◼   ► After the show I listened to the song again,

00:00:58 ◼   ► realized part of my misremembering was that the song is

00:01:02 ◼   ► chock full of f-bombs because my tweet was too.

00:01:05 ◼   ► Can't really just jump that in to a

00:01:09 ◼   ► podcast without warning. So I'm using the song as the opening

00:01:13 ◼   ► theme song to this episode, but I have to jump in

00:01:17 ◼   ► right here and warn everybody that the song is

00:01:20 ◼   ► chock full of f-bombs so skip ahead about a minute if you want to avoid them otherwise enjoy

00:01:27 ◼   ► i haven't washed my hands i haven't washed my hands 20 years and a bunch of fucking pigs

00:01:38 ◼   ► won't prompt me to end that streak

00:01:45 ◼   ► No, I haven't washed my hands.

00:01:49 ◼   ► I said I haven't washed my hands in 20 years,

00:01:52 ◼   ► and a bunch of fucking pigs won't prompt me to end that streak.

00:02:01 ◼   ► 'Cause a bunch of fucking pigs can't prompt me to do anything.

00:02:06 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

00:02:13 ◼   ► Oh, man. From the archives. What? Suddenly relevant again. What did you say to me when I told you I was

00:02:22 ◼   ► going to play that song and you said, "There's always a tweet"? Yeah, that's your version of

00:02:28 ◼   ► Trump's "There's always a tweet" for everything he does. Yeah, I totally misremembered that in so

00:02:33 ◼   ► many ways on the last episode. I thought it was on my old podcast with Dan Benjamin. I forgot that

00:02:39 ◼   ► it was a tweet. I just remembered that Jowkit did this really sweet, sweet song. It's a

00:02:44 ◼   ► beautiful little song with terribly profane lyrics and a sentiment that just doesn't even—just

00:02:52 ◼   ► doesn't hold water anymore. I'm washing my hands so often.

00:02:57 ◼   ► Yeah, I know. You can invest in moisturizer.

00:03:02 ◼   ► Yeah, but that's the advantage of having been around the internet for 10, 15 years.

00:03:07 ◼   ► And now I've got an 11-year-old song that is a perfect theme song for the show.

00:03:12 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:03:14 ◼   ► - Lucky you.

00:03:15 ◼   ► - Oh my God.

00:03:18 ◼   ► So Amy was telling me that, all right, everybody knows hand sanitizer is out of stock everywhere.

00:03:25 ◼   ► And I think it's beautiful, I think it's fun, everybody knows I enjoy an occasional drink

00:03:31 ◼   ► here and there.

00:03:32 ◼   ► enjoy the fact that distilleries, beer distilleries,

00:03:35 ◼   ► booze distilleries all around the country

00:03:38 ◼   ► are ramping up production, they're making hand sanitizer.

00:03:41 ◼   ► I think I saw that the Tito's, the Tito's Vodka people,

00:03:46 ◼   ► I forget how many, they're making like,

00:03:47 ◼   ► they plan to make like tons, tons of hand sanitizer.

00:03:50 ◼   ► Great move.

00:03:51 ◼   ► I know there's a place here in Philly,

00:03:54 ◼   ► I forget the name of it, but I know they're making it

00:03:56 ◼   ► and they don't have a license to make it

00:03:58 ◼   ► or something like that, but so they're just giving it away.

00:04:00 ◼   ► You just show up and you can just take, you know.

00:04:04 ◼   ► I do feel though, I don't know if you saw the Tito's one.

00:04:06 ◼   ► Did you see the Tito's one?

00:04:08 ◼   ► - The, I didn't, no.

00:04:10 ◼   ► - The, good on them, you know, in terms of the spirit.

00:04:14 ◼   ► The problem with the Tito's one is

00:04:17 ◼   ► they're shipping it in bottles

00:04:19 ◼   ► that look like the little Tito's airplane bottles,

00:04:21 ◼   ► you know, vodka, and it's just like little tiny words,

00:04:24 ◼   ► like it just says like Tito's

00:04:26 ◼   ► and then it says like hand signers, Todger,

00:04:28 ◼   ► and it says like, "Do not drink."

00:04:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, you know somebody's gonna end up drinking one.

00:04:33 ◼   ► - It just looks a little too much like Tito's

00:04:37 ◼   ► and a little too little like Purell.

00:04:40 ◼   ► - I mean, with all the kids at homeschool

00:04:42 ◼   ► and all of us locked up in our houses,

00:04:43 ◼   ► somebody's gonna be hitting those little bottles

00:04:45 ◼   ► sooner or later.

00:04:46 ◼   ► - All right, I'll try to remember to put a link

00:04:49 ◼   ► in the show notes to the Tito's bottle.

00:04:51 ◼   ► How you holding up?

00:04:52 ◼   ► - Oh, okay, you know, pretty good.

00:04:55 ◼   ► I work from home a lot already.

00:04:57 ◼   ► And a lot of our team is distributed. So in some ways we were sort of ready for a lot of this

00:05:01 ◼   ► We didn't have to really disrupt our

00:05:04 ◼   ► You know business life or whatever, but then you know personally, of course, I think everybody's dealing with the increased

00:05:10 ◼   ► mental cognitive load of just

00:05:13 ◼   ► viral outbreak plus

00:05:16 ◼   ► You know kids off school and trying to manage all that and single parents especially obviously you're super slammed

00:05:22 ◼   ► So yeah, hold the pokey. How about yourself? How's it over there and Billy?

00:05:26 ◼   ► - [Peter] Really?

00:05:27 ◼   ► - [Jonah] Ah, pretty good.

00:05:28 ◼   ► The three of us are temperamentally suited

00:05:33 ◼   ► to staying at home.

00:05:34 ◼   ► Jonas, I don't believe, has been out of pajamas

00:05:37 ◼   ► other than to shower.

00:05:38 ◼   ► - It's good for him. - Since school ended

00:05:42 ◼   ► over a week ago. (laughs)

00:05:45 ◼   ► I'm not sure.

00:05:46 ◼   ► And I think Amy went to the gym maybe last Monday,

00:05:50 ◼   ► and I don't believe she's left the house either.

00:05:54 ◼   ► So the two of them are actually literally housebound.

00:05:57 ◼   ► I'm on, you know, I'm leaving two or three times a week

00:06:02 ◼   ► to pick up groceries.

00:06:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, you're on foraging duty, right?

00:06:06 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:06:07 ◼   ► - You're the one who's taking the scouting role.

00:06:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, you know, we're getting deliveries.

00:06:12 ◼   ► You know, the deliveries are a crapshoot.

00:06:14 ◼   ► I mean, I can't complain.

00:06:15 ◼   ► Living in the city, I think, is pretty good,

00:06:17 ◼   ► and we've got deliveries, but it's,

00:06:22 ◼   ► You know, and there is some serious tech overlap here.

00:06:25 ◼   ► We've got a Whole Foods, a couple Whole Foods in Philly,

00:06:28 ◼   ► but we have a big new one.

00:06:30 ◼   ► I think it's maybe like a mile,

00:06:34 ◼   ► like a mile on the dot walk.

00:06:37 ◼   ► Huge, just cavernous, and it was built,

00:06:43 ◼   ► I think within a year of Amazon's acquisition.

00:06:45 ◼   ► It's really, it's gotta be one of the newest Whole Foods.

00:06:50 ◼   ► - I, you know, it, but there's different delivery services,

00:06:55 ◼   ► you know, and it's like Amazon Prime Pantry,

00:06:58 ◼   ► I believe, is now not operational.

00:07:01 ◼   ► It's like that's the thing we get the stuff like--

00:07:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, it ended up crumbling a few days ago.

00:07:06 ◼   ► I believe for, well, actually I have a friend

00:07:11 ◼   ► who lives in Philly, and he's the one who first alerted me

00:07:13 ◼   ► to the fact that they were kind of crumbling

00:07:15 ◼   ► under the weight of all the orders and everything,

00:07:17 ◼   ► and obviously lack of delivery people, et cetera.

00:07:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, and so we're still getting stuff, but it's,

00:07:24 ◼   ► and again, I do not wanna complain.

00:07:26 ◼   ► We've got food, Amy's, you know,

00:07:29 ◼   ► preparing good meals every night, we're eating well,

00:07:32 ◼   ► but it's just so, like in normal times,

00:07:34 ◼   ► you'd be infuriated, whereas in those times,

00:07:37 ◼   ► you're just happy to get anything,

00:07:38 ◼   ► but you just get like a random 50% of what you ordered.

00:07:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:07:44 ◼   ► Developing menus on the fly as you walk through

00:07:47 ◼   ► and see what's left.

00:07:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, and Amy's doing a hell of a job

00:07:50 ◼   ► where it's like big tent pole items in our plan menu

00:07:54 ◼   ► just don't show up.

00:07:55 ◼   ► And it's like, well, I'll wing it.

00:07:57 ◼   ► And it's like, hey, this is actually pretty good.

00:07:59 ◼   ► - Random protein, let's go at it.

00:08:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:08:03 ◼   ► - And then there's other things like,

00:08:04 ◼   ► so we have a supermarket chain here, real big,

00:08:07 ◼   ► always been big in Philly, is Acme.

00:08:09 ◼   ► What a great name, right?

00:08:12 ◼   ► - That is a great name.

00:08:13 ◼   ► - Should be more nation.

00:08:13 ◼   ► - That's a classic.

00:08:14 ◼   ► That's a great name.

00:08:17 ◼   ► I forget if Acme, I think Acme uses a delivery service.

00:08:22 ◼   ► It's not Acme people who deliver it,

00:08:27 ◼   ► it's some website that, I forget the name of it.

00:08:30 ◼   ► But anyway, the difference between the Whole Foods,

00:08:36 ◼   ► which comes from Amazon, and the one

00:08:40 ◼   ► with the regular supermarket with Acme,

00:08:43 ◼   ► is Acme yesterday she was on,

00:08:48 ◼   ► so this was on Tuesday,

00:08:51 ◼   ► and she got a Sunday delivery window.

00:08:53 ◼   ► So that's five days away.

00:08:56 ◼   ► I mean, again, you don't complain,

00:08:58 ◼   ► but the difference is that with the Acme one,

00:09:01 ◼   ► you've got this delivery window,

00:09:02 ◼   ► and she can add items to her order

00:09:07 ◼   ► up until Sunday morning.

00:09:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, up until they send somebody out to shop for them.

00:09:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, whereas the Whole Foods one,

00:09:13 ◼   ► it's like you put an order in and they give you a window

00:09:17 ◼   ► and whatever you ordered, you get whatever they can find

00:09:20 ◼   ► that was on that list.

00:09:21 ◼   ► - Right, right.

00:09:22 ◼   ► - Again, we've got food where nobody's going hungry.

00:09:26 ◼   ► But it's just weird what stuff is selling out now.

00:09:31 ◼   ► Like, it's like corn chips.

00:09:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, corn chips, it was so weird.

00:09:38 ◼   ► I was like, I just want some tortilla chips

00:09:39 ◼   ► so I can dip them in my salsa and take them completely out.

00:09:44 ◼   ► - We got some really good salsa.

00:09:46 ◼   ► We got really good fresh pico de gallo.

00:09:50 ◼   ► We have some corn chips, but now we're rationing them.

00:09:54 ◼   ► We're like, ah.

00:09:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, don't eat too many, don't eat too many.

00:09:57 ◼   ► - Who would've thought corn chips?

00:09:59 ◼   ► - I know, that one was one random weird one.

00:10:04 ◼   ► There's certainly some different ones.

00:10:06 ◼   ► I'm pretty lucky.

00:10:08 ◼   ► I mean, I live in a fairly, I guess you'd call it, you know, rural-ish town, right?

00:10:13 ◼   ► So there's like 500,000 people, right?

00:10:15 ◼   ► So it's not like, tiny.

00:10:17 ◼   ► But at the same time, it's a farm town, you know, I live in a farm town where the primary

00:10:22 ◼   ► economic output is either real estate because of urban sprawl or, or suburban sprawl, or

00:10:27 ◼   ► farming, right?

00:10:28 ◼   ► So all the big money's in farming and we produce in this valley, something like two thirds

00:10:35 ◼   ► of all the fruit and veg for the United States.

00:10:37 ◼   ► You know, it's actually a really ridiculous amount.

00:10:40 ◼   ► So we actually have an enormous glut of produce.

00:10:44 ◼   ► If I go, we have a local place, we have a couple chains, we have Whole Foods really

00:10:48 ◼   ► close by, we have Save Mart, which is like a Western chain, and then we have this place

00:10:58 ◼   ► called The Market, which is as big as a Save Mart, it's a normal sized grocery store,

00:11:03 ◼   ► But it is very much a locally owned version of that, which means, of course, that you're

00:11:08 ◼   ► going to find the same cast of general characters as far as foods and food groups, but the brands

00:11:15 ◼   ► are a little different.

00:11:16 ◼   ► You get all the major brands, like a pasta, you get a burria, and you get the various

00:11:20 ◼   ► pasta brands that are similar to anywhere across the US or elsewhere in the world.

00:11:25 ◼   ► But then you'll get a lot of local brands or smaller distributors who distribute to

00:11:30 ◼   ► indie chains rather than, "Oh, can you deliver a billion in units to all of our grocery stores

00:11:36 ◼   ► across the United States?" or whatever. So you just get that mix. And the one thing that you do

00:11:41 ◼   ► get there is, I went and obviously, aisles are empty and all this stuff, but this particular

00:11:48 ◼   ► store has a lot of Italian stuff. It's got a little bit of extra layer of Italian. Maybe

00:11:58 ◼   ► instead of one kind of sardines, there's like six. You know what I mean? It's one of those things

00:12:03 ◼   ► where you could tell Italian people shop here, probably older Italian people. It's got a little

00:12:09 ◼   ► bit of Italian deli mixed in with all the normal grocery stuff. So you go through and of course,

00:12:14 ◼   ► the pasta aisle is cleaned out, right? I mean, just bam. But then there's also other weird things

00:12:20 ◼   ► cleaned out. Like, the olive oil selection is super picked over and things like that. But the

00:12:28 ◼   ► But the one thing that they do have because of where we are in the Valley, which I think

00:12:31 ◼   ► is maybe different than a lot of other places, is that the vegetable section, like floor

00:12:37 ◼   ► to ceiling, absolutely packed.

00:12:39 ◼   ► And then you go to the regular grocery store and it's kind of anemic.

00:12:43 ◼   ► So anyhow, it's an interesting, I think, a regional thing where you'll go some places

00:12:47 ◼   ► and certain things are universal, like a lot of dry goods and things will get picked over,

00:12:52 ◼   ► but then a lot of other things are just regionally available.

00:12:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah.

00:12:57 ◼   ► - Have you seen what this bean thing,

00:12:59 ◼   ► everybody's buying beans?

00:13:00 ◼   ► - Oh, no, 'cause it's protein that stays good forever?

00:13:05 ◼   ► - Right, like dry beans do stay good for quite a while.

00:13:08 ◼   ► I mean, not forever, but for a while.

00:13:10 ◼   ► They are, I don't know if you consider them shelf stable,

00:13:13 ◼   ► maybe you do, I don't know, but they're pretty,

00:13:15 ◼   ► you know, you could keep 'em around for a bit.

00:13:18 ◼   ► And people are buying the crap out of beans,

00:13:20 ◼   ► and then like, I can't remember if,

00:13:22 ◼   ► maybe it was the Times or somebody did an article

00:13:24 ◼   ► where all these people are buying beans,

00:13:26 ◼   ► I don't like to generalize, but they're like, "All these millennials are buying beans,

00:13:30 ◼   ► and they don't know how to cook them?" They're like, "What do we do with beans?"

00:13:35 ◼   ► Certain people are gonna, if you're older or whatever, you remember all the bean dishes,

00:13:42 ◼   ► maybe your parents or grandparents especially used to make. It's like, "Oh, we're having

00:13:47 ◼   ► garbanzos with this," or, "We're having red beans with this." And certainly a lot of cooking, like

00:13:54 ◼   ► Indian cooking or Thai cooking will use beans a lot and stuff like that. And then of course,

00:13:59 ◼   ► Mexican cooking uses beans quite a bit. But I think a lot of people are just going, "Oh,

00:14:05 ◼   ► we need shelf stable. Just get some beans, get some beans." And they're like, "How do we do

00:14:10 ◼   ► beans? What's the method? What do you do? Do you scrape them?" And most beans require a couple of

00:14:18 ◼   ► days to do right. Like, you don't just cook beans in 10 minutes, you know what I mean?

00:14:25 ◼   ► And I mean it by raw beans, like not a pre-prepared canned bean or whatever. Anyway, I find that

00:14:30 ◼   ► hilarious. They're just like, "Ah, I'm just gonna pipe beans!" And they have no idea what

00:14:33 ◼   ► to do with them.

00:14:36 ◼   ► I recorded nine days ago with Snell, and boy, does that seem like a long time ago. I forget

00:14:42 ◼   ► if I told this. So the two nearest—there's a couple nearby places, but we have a place

00:14:47 ◼   ► called Debruno Brothers. Sounds a little bit like yours. It's small, family-owned. There's

00:14:51 ◼   ► a couple locations here in the city. As you might guess from the name, definitely an Italian slant.

00:14:57 ◼   ► It's the type of place where the deli counter has like half the deli counter is like your usual

00:15:03 ◼   ► staples. Provolone cheese, Swiss cheese, American cheese, ham, roast beef, and then the other entire

00:15:11 ◼   ► half is prosciutto.

00:15:15 ◼   ► Perfect.

00:15:16 ◼   ► Sounds lovely.

00:15:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:15:20 ◼   ► It's just like the widest variety.

00:15:21 ◼   ► Like, I can't believe there's this much prosciutto.

00:15:26 ◼   ► But it's funny.

00:15:27 ◼   ► Like, they've been--

00:15:29 ◼   ► I mean, going strong, they have been fully stocked on pasta,

00:15:37 ◼   ► like, right up to the edge of the shelf, you know?

00:15:40 ◼   ► Right.

00:15:40 ◼   ► just tons of pasta and it's like the stuff that they're out of is just weird like you were is like

00:15:45 ◼   ► i went in and thinking like hey i should just buy like you know just get like a bag of pasta and i

00:15:50 ◼   ► was like i'll probably end up with all the weird stuff you know the weird the weird the weird

00:15:55 ◼   ► pasta and it all tastes to say you know there's no such thing as bad tasting pasta but like the

00:15:59 ◼   ► weird shapes that you never buy uh you know yeah people are like what is oracetti i don't understand

00:16:09 ◼   ► - Honey, I got eight boxes of shells.

00:16:11 ◼   ► - There was a lot of lasagna, like,

00:16:14 ◼   ► the flat lasagna noodles, there was a lot of 'em.

00:16:16 ◼   ► 'Cause everybody's like, oh pasta, great, lasagna,

00:16:18 ◼   ► oh shoot, that's-- - Yeah, because that's one

00:16:21 ◼   ► that you can't just heat up a jar of sauce

00:16:23 ◼   ► or just pour some olive oil on it or something.

00:16:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, you could, but it's gonna be a little weird.

00:16:28 ◼   ► - But they're fully stocked of pasta.

00:16:31 ◼   ► It's just bizarre what they're out of.

00:16:33 ◼   ► The way that they're doing it here in the city, too,

00:16:37 ◼   ► is, and it works out great, is they are managing

00:16:42 ◼   ► the occupancy of the stores.

00:16:45 ◼   ► - Oh, interesting.

00:16:46 ◼   ► - So I think at Debrunos, I asked the guy,

00:16:50 ◼   ► he said they're limiting, trying to limit

00:16:52 ◼   ► to 25 customers at a time, and then the door,

00:16:54 ◼   ► then the line is just outside the door.

00:16:57 ◼   ► And they're doing the same thing at Trader Joe's now, too,

00:17:00 ◼   ► which was a madhouse previously.

00:17:02 ◼   ► I think I talked to Snell about this,

00:17:03 ◼   ► but it creates the illusion,

00:17:07 ◼   ► And I just wonder how many people don't know that that's what Trader Joe's is doing,

00:17:10 ◼   ► is severely limiting the number of people in the store so that it's easy to maintain

00:17:15 ◼   ► six feet of distance and there's no line at the checkouts. Whereas a week and a half ago,

00:17:20 ◼   ► it was a madhouse and you couldn't even get in the door, you know, and it was like shoulder

00:17:24 ◼   ► to shoulder inside. So I just wonder how many people are like cruising by Trader Joe's,

00:17:28 ◼   ► see that there's like 30 people outside and they're like, "Nope."

00:17:32 ◼   ► Whereas it's actually not bad at all.

00:17:35 ◼   ► It's actually better than Trader Joe's usually is

00:17:38 ◼   ► at like 5 p.m. on a regular normal time weekday.

00:17:43 ◼   ► - Right. (laughs)

00:17:44 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:17:46 ◼   ► - Well, anyway, we're holding up.

00:17:47 ◼   ► And Jonas is on spring break too,

00:17:50 ◼   ► and I think the period between when his school shut down

00:17:54 ◼   ► and spring break seemed really half-assed

00:17:56 ◼   ► on the remote schooling.

00:17:58 ◼   ► The one day he had 20 minutes of math,

00:18:01 ◼   ► five minutes of quote unquote health class and then that was it and it was like yeah back to

00:18:07 ◼   ► Animal Crossing. Exactly. I mean you know it's the same thing over here they gave like they gave our

00:18:14 ◼   ► kid a lot of my older kid she's in school and we aren't kids just in preschool so he's he's living

00:18:20 ◼   ► the life but she got a lot of home work like a home packet you know like they're like hey you

00:18:28 ◼   ► could download this digital packet or whatever to do this work." And we printed it out diligently

00:18:34 ◼   ► and put it in a binder and all that stuff. And she's like, "Nah, I don't want to do it."

00:18:37 ◼   ► We're like, on one hand, yeah, she should do it and we're making her do a little bit of it. But

00:18:44 ◼   ► on the other hand, I'm like, "I don't blame you. This grade is over for you, essentially. That was

00:18:51 ◼   ► it. You're not going to go back really into this section of your grade." You know what I mean?

00:18:57 ◼   ► I think she may come back on the other half of the semester

00:19:00 ◼   ► And into that but as far as this report card grades, right? I meant this like, you know, this this periods done for you. So

00:19:06 ◼   ► What does this matter like we're gonna do it and they're like the way we the way my wife and I thought about it

00:19:13 ◼   ► We talked about it and I guess the agreement that we came to amongst ourselves was it's good

00:19:18 ◼   ► We need to make sure that we do a selection of it so that she understands the concepts, right?

00:19:22 ◼   ► But we're not gonna I'm not gonna sit there and make her do 70 pages of you know

00:19:26 ◼   ► back to back, front and back work pages

00:19:30 ◼   ► when nobody's gonna care about them,

00:19:32 ◼   ► look at them, or wonder ever if she did them.

00:19:34 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:19:35 ◼   ► Like it's just not gonna happen.

00:19:37 ◼   ► So we just basically decided on,

00:19:39 ◼   ► hey, if we can get the concepts down

00:19:41 ◼   ► and we think she understands these concepts

00:19:43 ◼   ► that they're trying to teach her,

00:19:44 ◼   ► we're gonna be, that's good for us.

00:19:47 ◼   ► The rest of it is just trying not to go nuts.

00:19:49 ◼   ► I think most of our concentration is on that.

00:19:51 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:19:53 ◼   ► - It is hard.

00:19:54 ◼   ► All right, let me take a break.

00:19:55 ◼   ► It's a good time.

00:19:56 ◼   ► first sponsor it's perfect timing it is our good friends at yes please coffee

00:20:01 ◼   ► that's a coffee subscription service you spell it yes plz that's the gimmick yes

00:20:09 ◼   ► please and they have an amazing domain name yes please yes plz dot coffee oh my

00:20:17 ◼   ► god what could be better yes please dot coffee look they think that the best cup

00:20:24 ◼   ► coffee you ever drink should come right from your own kitchen. You don't have to miss the fact that

00:20:28 ◼   ► you can't go to a coffee shop anymore. You don't have to miss it. You can make not just pretty good

00:20:33 ◼   ► coffee. You can make great coffee. I can't cook for crap, but I can make a hell of a cup of coffee

00:20:38 ◼   ► at home. And I've been doing it with Yes Please beans. Since most of us are stuck making our own

00:20:45 ◼   ► coffee at home these days, there's never been a better time to get your beans delivered. The

00:20:50 ◼   ► The crew at Yes Please sources and roasts some of the finest stuff from all over the

00:20:54 ◼   ► world.

00:20:55 ◼   ► They change it up every week and they deliver it to your door.

00:20:58 ◼   ► Whole bean coffee delivered weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or just whenever you need it.

00:21:04 ◼   ► And you can pause or cancel anytime, no hassle.

00:21:07 ◼   ► I love these guys.

00:21:10 ◼   ► One of the co-founders, Tony Knesny, everybody knows him as Tonks.

00:21:15 ◼   ► Well, it used to be Tonks Coffee.

00:21:16 ◼   ► They used to sponsor this show way back in the day

00:21:18 ◼   ► before they got acquired by a bigger company.

00:21:21 ◼   ► And his other co-founder, Sumi Ali,

00:21:23 ◼   ► they're veterans of coffee's quote unquote

00:21:25 ◼   ► third wave scene.

00:21:26 ◼   ► They are fanatical about making great coffee.

00:21:29 ◼   ► One of the things I love about the Yes Please mixes

00:21:32 ◼   ► is it's not just like, oh, they find this one bean

00:21:34 ◼   ► from Guatemala and then that's this week's shipment.

00:21:37 ◼   ► Their stuff usually is like a cocktail

00:21:41 ◼   ► of beans from all over the place.

00:21:43 ◼   ► I know, I forget where, I should have brought the bag

00:21:45 ◼   ► with me down here to record,

00:21:46 ◼   ► but the batch I just got two days ago, yesterday,

00:21:50 ◼   ► day before, is from seven different varieties of coffee.

00:21:55 ◼   ► And these mad geniuses, they figure out how much to put in.

00:21:59 ◼   ► It's a couple from Ethiopia, two from, I think, Costa Rica.

00:22:02 ◼   ► I forget where the others are from.

00:22:04 ◼   ► Mix 'em all together in the right amount.

00:22:06 ◼   ► It is absolutely delicious.

00:22:08 ◼   ► I literally just finished my pot of coffee,

00:22:11 ◼   ► my morning pot of coffee, right as we were starting the show.

00:22:15 ◼   ► Now I'm all out right here, but I'm gonna make more

00:22:18 ◼   ► as soon as we're done recording.

00:22:19 ◼   ► I'm going through coffee like a fiend.

00:22:21 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:22:22 ◼   ► I don't know why, I have no idea why,

00:22:24 ◼   ► but I'm drinking coffee like a fiend while I'm housebound,

00:22:27 ◼   ► and having it delivered to the door is the absolute best.

00:22:31 ◼   ► These guys believe in great coffee at home,

00:22:35 ◼   ► and it's just great, and they have all sorts of,

00:22:38 ◼   ► they ship with a zine, a print zine.

00:22:42 ◼   ► It's amazing, very fun, once a month, a big issue,

00:22:44 ◼   ► and then they have a little weekly thing

00:22:47 ◼   ► that gets us an insert when you get your coffee every day

00:22:50 ◼   ► or every week, whatever you get it.

00:22:52 ◼   ► Anyway, I recommend this coffee wholeheartedly,

00:22:56 ◼   ► even if they weren't sponsoring.

00:22:57 ◼   ► They sponsored my site last week and the week before.

00:22:59 ◼   ► They're sponsoring a podcast this week.

00:23:01 ◼   ► This was actually in the works

00:23:03 ◼   ► before this whole thing went down.

00:23:05 ◼   ► It is complete serendipity that this sponsorship

00:23:08 ◼   ► coincides with the need to get stuff delivered to your house

00:23:11 ◼   ► but this is the way to do it.

00:23:12 ◼   ► I love this coffee.

00:23:13 ◼   ► If they weren't sponsoring it and you said,

00:23:15 ◼   ► "Where should I get coffee?"

00:23:16 ◼   ► I would tell you right now, go to yesplease.coffee.

00:23:19 ◼   ► Go to yesplease.coffee.

00:23:21 ◼   ► And because they are sponsoring,

00:23:23 ◼   ► they've got a promo code, fireball5.

00:23:27 ◼   ► That's F-I-R-E-B-A-L-L and then the digit five

00:23:32 ◼   ► because if you use that code at checkout,

00:23:34 ◼   ► you get $5 off your first shipment.

00:23:37 ◼   ► They have two sizes of bags that you can get every week,

00:23:41 ◼   ► every other week, whenever you want it.

00:23:42 ◼   ► I've upgraded, I just upgraded from the smaller one

00:23:45 ◼   ► to the bigger one because like I said,

00:23:46 ◼   ► I'm going through it like a fiend.

00:23:49 ◼   ► And I really recommend it wholeheartedly.

00:23:50 ◼   ► If you're at home wondering how the hell

00:23:52 ◼   ► you can get some good coffee and how to make it,

00:23:54 ◼   ► go to yesplease.coffee and remember that code, Fireball5.

00:23:57 ◼   ► Love these guys, sign up for their coffee.

00:24:00 ◼   ► And by the way, I checked with them fully operational

00:24:04 ◼   ► during this saga.

00:24:06 ◼   ► They've got a small crew, they're maintaining distance,

00:24:09 ◼   ► and they're shipping coffee out.

00:24:10 ◼   ► There's no problem with that.

00:24:12 ◼   ► I had a fear. (laughs)

00:24:15 ◼   ► I had a fear for when their sponsorship

00:24:16 ◼   ► was running last week.

00:24:17 ◼   ► I was like, "Hey, wait a second.

00:24:19 ◼   ► I should check with Tonks and make sure

00:24:21 ◼   ► they're actually sending this out before I tell everybody

00:24:26 ◼   ► how much I love their coffee and you should go sign up."

00:24:28 ◼   ► But they're fully operational,

00:24:30 ◼   ► and I just got a bag of beans the other day.

00:24:33 ◼   ► Oh man, how about Amazon?

00:24:37 ◼   ► Are you ordering stuff from Amazon?

00:24:38 ◼   ► Amazon, I realize, is doing phenomenal,

00:24:42 ◼   ► 'cause everybody has to get stuff delivered,

00:24:43 ◼   ► but there's no better sign that the world is not right

00:24:48 ◼   ► than the way that Amazon has gotten weird.

00:24:52 ◼   ► And I think in the ways that are right,

00:24:56 ◼   ► where they're prioritizing stuff

00:24:58 ◼   ► that pertains to this situation

00:25:01 ◼   ► and stuff that is not essential is getting delayed.

00:25:07 ◼   ► Like I ordered a USB adapter the other day,

00:25:12 ◼   ► and it's in stock, it's not like out of stock,

00:25:16 ◼   ► it's in stock, and its estimated delivery is April 21st.

00:25:21 ◼   ► - Right. - Which is a month.

00:25:23 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:25:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, everything you said is true.

00:25:26 ◼   ► It's like a canary in a coal mine type situation, right?

00:25:31 ◼   ► Or a leading indicator, whatever phrase

00:25:34 ◼   ► you wanna apply to it.

00:25:35 ◼   ► that everything is severely jacked up.

00:25:37 ◼   ► On a side note, by the way,

00:25:40 ◼   ► not to enhance your sponsorship,

00:25:43 ◼   ► but I do use Guess Please as well.

00:25:45 ◼   ► And I subscribed to Tonks before they went to Blue Bottle.

00:25:48 ◼   ► And then when Blue Bottle bought them,

00:25:51 ◼   ► I kept using them.

00:25:54 ◼   ► I kept, you know, I added a couple Blue Bottle blends

00:25:57 ◼   ► to my rotation, but then I got tired of Blue Bottle

00:26:00 ◼   ► and so I left.

00:26:00 ◼   ► But then when Tony launched Guess Please, I resubscribed

00:26:03 ◼   ► and I got a bag waiting for me.

00:26:04 ◼   ► and I think I have, and this is more of a personal taste

00:26:07 ◼   ► thing, definitely not a freshness thing,

00:26:09 ◼   ► I think I've disliked one of their blends

00:26:11 ◼   ► over the past year or whatever,

00:26:13 ◼   ► you know, that have been getting here however long,

00:26:15 ◼   ► 'cause I think I subscribed right away when they launched,

00:26:18 ◼   ► and I think I disliked one blend,

00:26:20 ◼   ► everything else they've been, their taste is amazing,

00:26:23 ◼   ► perfect taste, anyhow, I thought I'd mention it.

00:26:25 ◼   ► - I didn't even know that, that's complete serendipity.

00:26:27 ◼   ► The other thing I will say, and I enjoy this about

00:26:29 ◼   ► Yes Please, is there's a lot of variety week to week,

00:26:32 ◼   ► It's not the same.

00:26:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, you'll get a light South American blend one week

00:26:39 ◼   ► and then a dark African blend the next week.

00:26:42 ◼   ► Still more of that, yeah.

00:26:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it's, whereas other coffee subscription services

00:26:46 ◼   ► I've tried, especially, I thought Blue Bottle,

00:26:48 ◼   ► after the merger, sort of centralized on a Blue Bottle taste,

00:26:53 ◼   ► which wasn't bad, but it was very--

00:26:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's sort of acidic and kind of medium bright.

00:26:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly, that's how I would describe it,

00:27:01 ◼   ► medium bright.

00:27:02 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:27:03 ◼   ► Anyhow, so the Amazon thing, this idea that some things are essential and some things

00:27:09 ◼   ► not, I get it, right?

00:27:11 ◼   ► I mean, it's easy to see that, "Sure.

00:27:13 ◼   ► Okay, cool.

00:27:14 ◼   ► Right.

00:27:15 ◼   ► Somebody's ordering food stuff or medical supplies.

00:27:18 ◼   ► Let's bump those up the list."

00:27:20 ◼   ► On the surface of it, you could probably make the top 10% of those decisions very easily.

00:27:25 ◼   ► It's when it gets down into the longer tail that you start to be curious about it.

00:27:31 ◼   ► And I, you know, like a lot of other people, obviously, I've been ordering a ton of stuff

00:27:36 ◼   ► on Amazon, you know, I mean, we do order stuff on Amazon, but like, I've been doing a few

00:27:40 ◼   ► things lately, there were some areas of my house that I hadn't gotten prepped completely,

00:27:46 ◼   ► you know, like, you know, go bag stuff and, and keep around stuff for just general preparedness,

00:27:52 ◼   ► right?

00:27:53 ◼   ► And you could see all of those supplies getting really thin and the delivery times creeping

00:27:57 ◼   ► out and all that stuff.

00:27:59 ◼   ► But if you order a wide variety of stuff, it does start to become very curious.

00:28:05 ◼   ► And just the, I don't know, the journalist or tech curio person in me is really intrigued

00:28:14 ◼   ► by how they decide what exactly gets shifted.

00:28:20 ◼   ► Right? Like what? Okay, so you ordered tweezers. And okay, those are sort of medical. So those come on time. But if you order like nose hair trimmers, it's like, hey, nobody needs to turn our nose hairs right now. Calm down. Like, you'll be alright. Those don't get you know, to me, like, it's really weird. Like, you're like, where's the Okay, how do they decide? Some things, as I said, very easy, right? Like, oh, you know, we're ordering child's Tylenol, right? No, ship it out right now. Like get get it to them. It's quite possible they may have a kid and especially

00:28:50 ◼   ► if the kid has an illness or whatever, everybody's very concerned. We want to make sure that medicine

00:28:54 ◼   ► gets there as fast as possible. And same thing with other things like food and whatnot.

00:28:59 ◼   ► But then as you get in the long tail, how do you decide? Okay, nail clippers, not a big deal.

00:29:06 ◼   ► Maybe we'll shift those down the line. But then, oh, a bread-proofing basket,

00:29:12 ◼   ► does that come right away because it's related to food? Or does it get delayed because it's like,

00:29:17 ◼   ► you could make bread in the oven,

00:29:18 ◼   ► you don't need a proofing bat, you know what I mean?

00:29:20 ◼   ► It's a weird one, it's interesting.

00:29:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't know either. - Interesting computer

00:29:23 ◼   ► science question, your problem.

00:29:26 ◼   ► - And even the USB adapter that I ordered

00:29:30 ◼   ► that's coming April 21st, so at the end of the week,

00:29:33 ◼   ► I just posted, I forget even the context of it,

00:29:38 ◼   ► but I posted a link to an anchor,

00:29:41 ◼   ► a USB-A to a USB-C adapter, oh, it was in the context

00:29:45 ◼   ► of all the stuff I'm reviewing that only has,

00:29:47 ◼   ► that's right, that all, you know, we'll get to this stuff,

00:29:50 ◼   ► the MacBook Air and the new iPad Pro,

00:29:52 ◼   ► they all only have USB-C ports,

00:29:54 ◼   ► and if you need to plug anything with,

00:29:55 ◼   ► that has a hard-wired USB-A cable,

00:29:58 ◼   ► then you need an adapter.

00:29:59 ◼   ► This is my favorite adapter, I linked to it,

00:30:01 ◼   ► and then it, I don't know if it was,

00:30:03 ◼   ► I don't think it's because of me, but it's sold out.

00:30:06 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:30:09 ◼   ► And then somebody, you know, and I went looking for like,

00:30:11 ◼   ► well, what looks similar, you know,

00:30:12 ◼   ► Because one of the things you need with a USB-C to USB-A adapter is you need one that's not too wide

00:30:19 ◼   ► because the ports on the MacBooks are kind of close to each other, and I've seen some adapters

00:30:25 ◼   ► where they can be too close and then you can't use the other port.

00:30:29 ◼   ► There's one that looked like a good alternative. It was a color match for the

00:30:40 ◼   ► the different shades of aluminum that Apple has.

00:30:44 ◼   ► Looks nice and small.

00:30:45 ◼   ► It's even smaller than the Anker one.

00:30:46 ◼   ► And like I said, it's in stock, but it's not

00:30:48 ◼   ► delivering until April 21.

00:30:52 ◼   ► Again, life-saving?

00:30:53 ◼   ► No.

00:30:54 ◼   ► But work from a homing--

00:30:57 ◼   ► and of course, there's a gazillion of them.

00:30:59 ◼   ► So if you really need one to do your work,

00:31:01 ◼   ► because now you're doing Zoom or whatever for meetings,

00:31:05 ◼   ► and you have a cable that you have to convert,

00:31:07 ◼   ► because now you need this thing to actually get

00:31:10 ◼   ► your camera or your microphone or whatever hooked up,

00:31:12 ◼   ► you can find one from somebody.

00:31:15 ◼   ► But it just seems like in a sense,

00:31:17 ◼   ► that is important to people, you know what I mean?

00:31:18 ◼   ► Like getting a, you know,

00:31:20 ◼   ► being able to work from home is important.

00:31:22 ◼   ► And I realize it's not as important as having medicine.

00:31:25 ◼   ► The other thing I saw today, and of course it sold out,

00:31:29 ◼   ► of course it is, but it just hadn't occurred to me,

00:31:32 ◼   ► because knock on wood, you know, here, all three of us,

00:31:35 ◼   ► you know, no signs of any sickness or illness at all.

00:31:40 ◼   ► But I was reading this heartbreaking story.

00:31:46 ◼   ► Hopefully he's gonna be all right.

00:31:48 ◼   ► Doesn't seem, you know, he's not in hospital,

00:31:49 ◼   ► but Jessica Lustig, who's a,

00:31:51 ◼   ► like a managing editor for the New York Times Magazine,

00:31:55 ◼   ► her husband has COVID-19.

00:31:59 ◼   ► And she just wrote this,

00:32:00 ◼   ► I linked it before we started recording,

00:32:02 ◼   ► but she just has this terrific essay

00:32:04 ◼   ► for the New York Times Magazine this weekend,

00:32:06 ◼   ► just sort of a first person, what it's like

00:32:10 ◼   ► dealing with a really sick husband.

00:32:12 ◼   ► And I'm like, riveting, really good writing,

00:32:18 ◼   ► really just, wow, this is really eye-opening.

00:32:21 ◼   ► And then it's like, two-thirds down,

00:32:23 ◼   ► it's like she mentions that their friends,

00:32:25 ◼   ► like when their friends know what they're going through

00:32:27 ◼   ► and one of their friends spotted a bottle of Advil

00:32:30 ◼   ► at a thing and bought it for them and dropped it off.

00:32:34 ◼   ► because you can't get it.

00:32:35 ◼   ► And I'm like, wait, you can't get Advil and Tylenol?

00:32:38 ◼   ► And then it's like, and I asked Amy,

00:32:40 ◼   ► and she's like, oh yeah, everybody's sold out.

00:32:41 ◼   ► And I'm like, oh, shit.

00:32:43 ◼   ► And I'm like, well, of course they are.

00:32:45 ◼   ► You know, it makes sense, and that's what they tell you.

00:32:47 ◼   ► If you do come down with it, and you just have a mild case,

00:32:49 ◼   ► you're supposed to actually take some kind of mix of both.

00:32:52 ◼   ► Like, you alternate a little Tylenol, a little Advil,

00:32:54 ◼   ► keeps your fever down, helps with the aches and pains.

00:32:57 ◼   ► - Right, yeah, every couple hours, yeah.

00:32:59 ◼   ► - But you just, so of course they're sold out.

00:33:02 ◼   ► But it's like, I'm 47 years old,

00:33:05 ◼   ► and every time I've ever been in a drug store in my life,

00:33:08 ◼   ► there's 7,000 bottles of ibuprofen.

00:33:12 ◼   ► - Extra strength, 200, 400, 800, yeah, all of it.

00:33:15 ◼   ► - House brand, Tylenol brand, the other brand.

00:33:18 ◼   ► You know, cap-- - There's usually so many,

00:33:19 ◼   ► you can't decide which one to buy.

00:33:21 ◼   ► - Right, and it's like, wait, do I like capsules or caplets?

00:33:25 ◼   ► - Yeah. - You know?

00:33:26 ◼   ► - It reminds me of this special.

00:33:29 ◼   ► It was so precious, this special came at just the right time

00:33:32 ◼   ► I mean, everybody should watch it now.

00:33:33 ◼   ► I mean, Netflix was, I guess, down today,

00:33:34 ◼   ► but when Netflix comes back up,

00:33:36 ◼   ► everybody should watch this Netflix special by Ronnie Chang.

00:33:41 ◼   ► It's a comedian named Ronnie Chang who,

00:33:44 ◼   ► he was in "Crazy Rich Asians."

00:33:45 ◼   ► He plays the a-hole brother-in-law or nephew.

00:33:48 ◼   ► I can't remember what the relationship is,

00:33:50 ◼   ► but he has a Netflix standup special that's amazing.

00:33:54 ◼   ► And one of the things he talks about

00:33:56 ◼   ► in one of the sort of segments or bits that he has

00:33:59 ◼   ► how plentiful everything is in America and he says there's just so much stuff

00:34:04 ◼   ► you know in America it's like you go get takeout and they're like here have

00:34:08 ◼   ► 50 napkins have a hundred napkins so there's so many napkins everywhere right

00:34:14 ◼   ► and you know I'm not doing it justice so people should watch it but he's just

00:34:17 ◼   ► like America's just at the air the airspace over America is just Amazon

00:34:22 ◼   ► Prime boxes bumping into one another right and he talks about like the speed

00:34:28 ◼   ► of shipping on Amazon and how people have gradually acclimated and they're like, you

00:34:35 ◼   ► know, "Amazon Prime now, I want it now.

00:34:39 ◼   ► I don't want it in two weeks.

00:34:41 ◼   ► Ugh, you know, like two days?

00:34:44 ◼   ► God, I want it right now, like today, tonight.

00:34:46 ◼   ► Put it in my hand."

00:34:48 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:34:49 ◼   ► And it just, it is a very interesting thing, you know, how big of a deal everybody finds

00:34:57 ◼   ► it, which is normal. I'm not singling anybody out that notices this stuff and feels it because

00:35:03 ◼   ► it becomes a fabric of a reality so quickly, but it's just wild how quickly we are like,

00:35:08 ◼   ► "Oh, wow, Amazon can't deliver it for two weeks." And it's like, "It used to be you'd

00:35:12 ◼   ► order something." And you're like, "Oh, it's going to be shipped next month. Awesome."

00:35:17 ◼   ► Now we expect it tomorrow. And things going back to what would even be considered regularly

00:35:23 ◼   ► very quick shipping times is like, "What is happening?" You know? It's just wild how quickly

00:35:29 ◼   ► we get used to it. I ordered something, you know, back in the old days. I forget what it was. Just

00:35:38 ◼   ► some random thing. And I thought of it like really late at night. I mean like 1130 at night,

00:35:46 ◼   ► like while I was ready to like put all my devices away and just tune out and watch some TV. And I

00:35:52 ◼   ► was like, "Oh, I'll order this." And then the doorbell rang, and it was dropped off

00:35:57 ◼   ► at like nine in the morning. It was like, "Wow, is that even possible?"

00:36:01 ◼   ► **Ezra Klein laughs**

00:36:03 ◼   ► Right. Right.

00:36:04 ◼   ► **Beserat Debebe:** How is that possible?

00:36:05 ◼   ► It's wild.

00:36:06 ◼   ► **Ezra Klein:** That is, it's too... Now,

00:36:07 ◼   ► you know, well, those were the old days. I didn't know Netflix was down today.

00:36:11 ◼   ► **Beserat Debebe:** Yeah, apparently they had some large outage. I don't know if it's been

00:36:15 ◼   ► rectified as of this recording or not. My team's on it, but I got a lot of things going on, so I

00:36:20 ◼   ► I wasn't tracking that individual thing.

00:36:22 ◼   ► I did see it went down, which obviously,

00:36:24 ◼   ► on any given day, that's news,

00:36:27 ◼   ► but right now, sort of everybody's lifeline

00:36:30 ◼   ► to let me watch something to take my mind off things.

00:36:33 ◼   ► So people are paying attention.

00:36:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, I can't help but think that it was related

00:36:39 ◼   ► to the increased demand.

00:36:40 ◼   ► We watched, I think we've got the comedy special

00:36:44 ◼   ► you're talking about.

00:36:45 ◼   ► I think that's actually on my,

00:36:47 ◼   ► whatever Netflix calls it, watch list or whatever.

00:36:50 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Because the comedy specials,

00:36:53 ◼   ► I like watching movies, Amy thinks movies are too long,

00:36:56 ◼   ► late at night, lately, and so usually I wait for her

00:37:00 ◼   ► to fall asleep and then I'll watch a movie.

00:37:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, you get 20 minutes into it

00:37:04 ◼   ► and they're asleep and you're like,

00:37:05 ◼   ► "Well, I've already seen this 10 times, so you should."

00:37:07 ◼   ► - But with all of the talk shows on hiatus,

00:37:10 ◼   ► we're big Seth Meyers fans, we like The Colbert Show too,

00:37:15 ◼   ► but Seth Meyers is like our jam,

00:37:17 ◼   ► But even like John Oliver's probably off now,

00:37:20 ◼   ► and Bill Maher, I guess, is off.

00:37:25 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:37:26 ◼   ► He was, I don't know how,

00:37:29 ◼   ► unless they're gonna do it without an audience,

00:37:30 ◼   ► I don't know what they're gonna do.

00:37:32 ◼   ► So Netflix comedy specials have been our mutual,

00:37:37 ◼   ► like the overlap of the Venn diagram

00:37:39 ◼   ► of what do we wanna watch tonight on the couch.

00:37:42 ◼   ► So we were watching the Leslie Jones Netflix special

00:37:47 ◼   ► So number one, I know the strategy of it,

00:37:51 ◼   ► if we wanna go meta, I know the strategy of Netflix

00:37:55 ◼   ► throwing tons of money at comedy specials

00:38:00 ◼   ► because there's so much, even if it's a lot of money

00:38:05 ◼   ► from the comedian's perspective,

00:38:07 ◼   ► it's so little money compared to original dramas,

00:38:11 ◼   ► in terms of what Netflix pays out of pocket,

00:38:16 ◼   ► like just putting a totally Aces crew into a theater

00:38:21 ◼   ► to record a standup special is so much less expensive

00:38:24 ◼   ► than shooting 10 episodes of a top tier drama.

00:38:29 ◼   ► And they're evergreen, right?

00:38:33 ◼   ► That these comedy specials,

00:38:34 ◼   ► people watch comedy specials five years from now,

00:38:37 ◼   ► six years, 10 years from now.

00:38:39 ◼   ► If it's funny, it's funny.

00:38:40 ◼   ► And so it's great, great content.

00:38:45 ◼   ► I mean, HBO obviously originated this back in the day,

00:38:47 ◼   ► but HBO back in the day would have like, you know,

00:38:50 ◼   ► like four comedy specials a year.

00:38:53 ◼   ► Now it's like Netflix, it's like you can't even keep up.

00:38:56 ◼   ► Even to Housebound, it's hard to keep up

00:38:59 ◼   ► with all the comedy specials.

00:39:00 ◼   ► But anyway, we were watching the Leslie Jones one,

00:39:02 ◼   ► which was really good.

00:39:05 ◼   ► It kind of needed to, it's one that I would recommend

00:39:07 ◼   ► giving it more than five minutes,

00:39:09 ◼   ► 'cause you kind of have to warm up to,

00:39:12 ◼   ► I did at least, I had to kind of warm up to it

00:39:14 ◼   ► and kind of get into the vibe that she was kind of creating.

00:39:17 ◼   ► It's a little, very different,

00:39:19 ◼   ► very different in a lot of ways.

00:39:23 ◼   ► Very autobiographical and very honest

00:39:26 ◼   ► and a little bit less jokey.

00:39:28 ◼   ► But anyway, it was crapping out all the time

00:39:31 ◼   ► and we were getting like a weird error

00:39:33 ◼   ► that never happens with Netflix.

00:39:35 ◼   ► And then there were whole stretches of it

00:39:36 ◼   ► where we were getting what was either only 480p

00:39:40 ◼   ► or whatever the digital equivalent of 480p was.

00:39:44 ◼   ► I mean really, really pixely.

00:39:47 ◼   ► And I could even hear the audio was not as good.

00:39:49 ◼   ► Amy was, you know, but it's a comedy special,

00:39:51 ◼   ► so it's sort of like, you know,

00:39:53 ◼   ► I mean people used to listen to comedy records, you know,

00:39:55 ◼   ► so if there's anything where the video degrading

00:39:59 ◼   ► is still a-okay to just keep watching,

00:40:01 ◼   ► a comedy special's it.

00:40:03 ◼   ► - Right, yeah, you just kinda let it ride, right.

00:40:05 ◼   ► And they were doing that on purpose.

00:40:09 ◼   ► They were throttling, and YouTube as well,

00:40:12 ◼   ► and a lot of other major video platforms

00:40:15 ◼   ► have been intentionally throttling in order to stay up

00:40:20 ◼   ► and ease the load on broadband backbones.

00:40:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, I was really curious,

00:40:26 ◼   ► and I know that Westworld is not Game of Thrones.

00:40:29 ◼   ► Who knows what the hell would happen

00:40:30 ◼   ► if Game of Thrones was still on?

00:40:32 ◼   ► But I'm a Westworld fan,

00:40:34 ◼   ► and when I watched Sunday night,

00:40:36 ◼   ► I was like, don't crash, don't crash.

00:40:40 ◼   ► And I know that they've got great tech

00:40:41 ◼   ► they've got the BAM media from the baseball.

00:40:44 ◼   ► They used to be garbage.

00:40:48 ◼   ► I mean, back when they first started trying to digitally stream Game of Thrones, it was

00:40:53 ◼   ► just like their server just went up in a puff of smoke, and then they partnered with the

00:41:00 ◼   ► BAM media that was originated with Major League Baseball, and then Disney smartly was like,

00:41:07 ◼   ► "You guys seem to know what the hell you're doing.

00:41:09 ◼   ► We're going to buy you."

00:41:10 ◼   ► Or, no, we'll be partners, and then they're like,

00:41:12 ◼   ► "This is working great, we'll just buy you."

00:41:14 ◼   ► - Exactly, yeah.

00:41:15 ◼   ► - And I think I mentioned it was now,

00:41:16 ◼   ► but that's why Disney+ has had such a smooth launch,

00:41:20 ◼   ► is that they've got either the best

00:41:24 ◼   ► or the second best technology in the game next to Netflix.

00:41:27 ◼   ► But man, oh man, that was, talk about it.

00:41:28 ◼   ► So I can't remember the last time

00:41:30 ◼   ► Netflix had any hiccups for me.

00:41:32 ◼   ► And no surprise, you know, again,

00:41:34 ◼   ► again, you know, I'm not complaining.

00:41:36 ◼   ► It's just like with the, you know,

00:41:38 ◼   ► a four month delivery for a USB adapter.

00:41:42 ◼   ► I'm not delivering, it's magic.

00:41:43 ◼   ► I mean, imagine if this fiasco had happened 15 years ago,

00:41:47 ◼   ► what the hell would we be doing?

00:41:49 ◼   ► - Right.

00:41:50 ◼   ► - In a lot of ways, it's as bad as this is

00:41:55 ◼   ► and as tragic as it is.

00:41:58 ◼   ► I mean, people are dying.

00:41:59 ◼   ► So I laugh and we're cracking jokes about stuff,

00:42:02 ◼   ► but it's a genuine worldwide tragedy.

00:42:07 ◼   ► In some ways though, man, oh man,

00:42:10 ◼   ► if it were going to happen,

00:42:11 ◼   ► if there's going to be a global pandemic,

00:42:16 ◼   ► it's better to have come now

00:42:17 ◼   ► than before we had a lot of this infrastructure

00:42:19 ◼   ► powered by the internet,

00:42:20 ◼   ► both for entertainment and for the deliveries.

00:42:23 ◼   ► And it is better now than it would have been.

00:42:27 ◼   ► - Remember too that,

00:42:29 ◼   ► I think there is one of the writers on our site

00:42:33 ◼   ► who's very thoughtful about this stuff, Josh Kunstein,

00:42:34 ◼   ► wrote a piece about social media

00:42:37 ◼   ► and how much less performative it is at the moment.

00:42:41 ◼   ► A, people can't go anywhere,

00:42:43 ◼   ► so they can't stand in front of Niagara Falls

00:42:46 ◼   ► or in the Bahamas and take pictures of themselves

00:42:49 ◼   ► in a bikini, right?

00:42:50 ◼   ► Like they can't do that.

00:42:51 ◼   ► So it's a lot less performative at the moment.

00:42:54 ◼   ► And it turns out that there is still a backbone of that

00:42:57 ◼   ► that is about people communicating,

00:42:58 ◼   ► that is about people,

00:43:00 ◼   ► with all the caveats of the platforms themselves

00:43:03 ◼   ► having been irresponsible in many ways.

00:43:05 ◼   ► It's just right now social media is actually pretty good,

00:43:08 ◼   ► I guess, for lack of a better term.

00:43:10 ◼   ► The people in it and the content

00:43:12 ◼   ► and the communication aspects of it,

00:43:14 ◼   ► the kind of societal interaction.

00:43:17 ◼   ► And I also, I mean that is, I think,

00:43:21 ◼   ► a lot of the interpersonal interactions like that

00:43:23 ◼   ► are happening on networks like Facebook

00:43:25 ◼   ► or are happening in groups on WhatsApp

00:43:27 ◼   ► or heck, even iMessage groups

00:43:30 ◼   ► where people are sort of bolstering one another

00:43:32 ◼   ► and talking and sharing about what they're going through

00:43:34 ◼   ► and all of that.

00:43:35 ◼   ► both family and, you know, family close friend groups.

00:43:39 ◼   ► I think Twitter is an interesting case because it's not so much that you're gonna go on there and commiserate with your brother, aunts, uncles,

00:43:47 ◼   ► or close friends, but it does offer a sort of,

00:43:51 ◼   ► you know, it's, I've argued for years and years, I think I wrote my first piece about this in like 2000,

00:43:58 ◼   ► like 10 or 11 or some time back then, but it was basically that once we had a real-time channel,

00:44:05 ◼   ► of constant continuous information that was available to us.

00:44:09 ◼   ► We could never do without it again.

00:44:11 ◼   ► So even if Twitter, the company went under,

00:44:13 ◼   ► or even if they screwed up so bad

00:44:15 ◼   ► that somebody had to just step in

00:44:16 ◼   ► and do something very similar in a different way, whatever,

00:44:21 ◼   ► that particular fire hose would need to exist.

00:44:24 ◼   ► It's like an API for life, right?

00:44:27 ◼   ► Like that's what Twitter is.

00:44:28 ◼   ► It's an enormous amount of information.

00:44:31 ◼   ► Much of it, total crap.

00:44:33 ◼   ► much of it inflammatory or unhelpful,

00:44:37 ◼   ► but also a lot of it useful, informative, or neutral.

00:44:42 ◼   ► Neutral for now, but vital to one person or another.

00:44:46 ◼   ► And that kind of stream of information,

00:44:49 ◼   ► just like an API that delivers you a bunch of information

00:44:51 ◼   ► and you filter out the particular chunks of it you want,

00:44:55 ◼   ► that utility of Twitter

00:45:00 ◼   ► is kind of showing itself off right now.

00:45:02 ◼   ► because we are unable to rely,

00:45:06 ◼   ► I'm speaking of the United States in this instance,

00:45:09 ◼   ► because I do believe it's important to acknowledge globally

00:45:11 ◼   ► the situations vary widely, right?

00:45:14 ◼   ► But again, the United States right now,

00:45:15 ◼   ► we are unable to rely on a lot of the information

00:45:18 ◼   ► that's coming from our leadership

00:45:19 ◼   ► about the spread, containment, mitigation,

00:45:23 ◼   ► and treatment of the virus, right?

00:45:25 ◼   ► And the disease that results.

00:45:27 ◼   ► And Twitter offers an immediate and virulent counter

00:45:32 ◼   ► counter to misinformation or false information. Of course, there's plenty of misinformation

00:45:37 ◼   ► hosted there too. But think about it in the days when all you had was the news networks,

00:45:42 ◼   ► and hopefully you had a Cronkite or somebody who would tell you the truth or do the reporting

00:45:48 ◼   ► and be in your face about what was really going on. And then you had the official word

00:45:54 ◼   ► and that was it, right? Like maybe you'd have people locally who knew a guy who knew

00:45:58 ◼   ► a guy or you'd have an intrepid news reporter in the media who did their job and cracked

00:46:05 ◼   ► the case and showed you what was really going on. But you did not have this constant stream

00:46:09 ◼   ► of say, 10 epidemiologists in a big thread going, "Hey, here's why all the government's

00:46:17 ◼   ► information on this is BS," or, "Here's how they're twisting the information to

00:46:20 ◼   ► make it look a way that's advantageous to them." And that's sort of immediate real-time

00:46:25 ◼   ► time checks and balances situation,

00:46:27 ◼   ► while it can have its caveats,

00:46:29 ◼   ► and it can be dangerous at times,

00:46:31 ◼   ► I think is very vital at the current moment in our lives.

00:46:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's complicated, right?

00:46:37 ◼   ► I mean, that's basically, you know,

00:46:39 ◼   ► it's the story of our times, you know?

00:46:41 ◼   ► It's, and maybe, you know, it's pretentious to pretend

00:46:45 ◼   ► that things are complicated now,

00:46:47 ◼   ► and they weren't back in the '60s and '70s.

00:46:50 ◼   ► I don't wanna be glib about it,

00:46:53 ◼   ► but at least in terms of knowing what to trust,

00:46:56 ◼   ► it is complicated now,

00:46:58 ◼   ► because you didn't have choices back then, right?

00:47:00 ◼   ► I'm not saying that there weren't problems

00:47:02 ◼   ► with the fact that you got Cronkite at six o'clock

00:47:06 ◼   ► and you got your newspaper in the morning or the afternoon,

00:47:09 ◼   ► and that was it, you know?

00:47:10 ◼   ► And maybe if you were really a news junkie,

00:47:12 ◼   ► you got Time Magazine delivered every Friday, you know?

00:47:16 ◼   ► I'm not saying that there weren't problems with that.

00:47:19 ◼   ► There were, but you didn't have a choice.

00:47:21 ◼   ► There wasn't anything, what are you gonna do?

00:47:22 ◼   ► You're not gonna, what, call the Associated Press

00:47:25 ◼   ► and get an AP terminal, put it in your home?

00:47:27 ◼   ► There wasn't much you could do,

00:47:30 ◼   ► whereas now you have to be a critical reader,

00:47:35 ◼   ► and it's obviously a problem for a lot of people.

00:47:41 ◼   ► I mean, and it is bizarre

00:47:47 ◼   ► to have a President of the United States

00:47:51 ◼   ► giving out completely false information.

00:47:54 ◼   ► And this, again, not to get super political about it,

00:47:59 ◼   ► but it's undeniable.

00:48:00 ◼   ► Even if you love the guy, even if you think,

00:48:02 ◼   ► well, he made some mistakes, but he's still better

00:48:06 ◼   ► than we would have been otherwise, I still stand supported.

00:48:08 ◼   ► I don't know what's wrong with you if you think that.

00:48:10 ◼   ► But even then, you have to acknowledge

00:48:13 ◼   ► that the guy was completely wrong when March 3rd,

00:48:16 ◼   ► he was like, we'll be down to zero cases soon.

00:48:20 ◼   ► That was wrong.

00:48:22 ◼   ► I mean, there's no other way to put it.

00:48:24 ◼   ► You couldn't try, if you took him at his word,

00:48:26 ◼   ► you had the completely wrong idea of what's going on.

00:48:29 ◼   ► And now he's peddling these malaria drugs

00:48:34 ◼   ► that maybe, possibly, would be great.

00:48:36 ◼   ► Hopefully, it'd be great if he turns out,

00:48:38 ◼   ► again, if he is right, Jesus Christ,

00:48:40 ◼   ► you're never gonna hear the end from them.

00:48:42 ◼   ► But the President of the United States

00:48:44 ◼   ► should not be encouraging people to take drugs

00:48:47 ◼   ► that haven't been approved or even--

00:48:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I mean, one of them is,

00:48:53 ◼   ► one of the drugs he's describing is incredibly toxic

00:48:57 ◼   ► or taken in the wrong way without a physician's advice.

00:48:59 ◼   ► - But people have died, people have died.

00:49:01 ◼   ► - And the other one is Z-Pak,

00:49:02 ◼   ► which is like a pretty standard medicine

00:49:06 ◼   ► that's used to treat infections, you know what I mean?

00:49:08 ◼   ► So it's like a mixture of really obvious stuff

00:49:11 ◼   ► that any doctor would be like,

00:49:12 ◼   ► "Yeah, of course we're gonna give you a Z-Pak,"

00:49:14 ◼   ► you know what I mean?

00:49:15 ◼   ► and stuff that's potentially incredibly dangerous.

00:49:19 ◼   ► It's a toxic blend.

00:49:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, I saw there was some couple in the '60s

00:49:23 ◼   ► where they saw him yapping about it on Fox News.

00:49:26 ◼   ► The guy died and his wife was in critical condition

00:49:30 ◼   ► because he ordered up a bunch of it

00:49:31 ◼   ► and they, I don't know, drank a cupful of it

00:49:34 ◼   ► and, you know, wrong dose. (laughs)

00:49:38 ◼   ► I mean, I laugh, but this should not be coming

00:49:41 ◼   ► from the president.

00:49:42 ◼   ► Like, you kinda have to--

00:49:43 ◼   ► - It's a macabre sort of laughter, you know what I mean?

00:49:46 ◼   ► It's just, man, it's just something.

00:49:47 ◼   ► - But on the other hand, just a small thing,

00:49:50 ◼   ► but it's like a friend of the show, friend of everybody,

00:49:53 ◼   ► Ben Thompson, has been on this,

00:49:55 ◼   ► where Ben over in Taiwan was,

00:49:59 ◼   ► A, he had his eye on this thing very, very early.

00:50:02 ◼   ► Gotta give him credit for that.

00:50:03 ◼   ► Has no trust in the Chinese government's word on this.

00:50:06 ◼   ► Didn't believe a word they were saying.

00:50:08 ◼   ► Turns out that attitude was right.

00:50:10 ◼   ► Taiwan is really under control.

00:50:13 ◼   ► the restaurants are open, I think schools are open,

00:50:16 ◼   ► but people go out, you know what people wear?

00:50:18 ◼   ► They wear masks.

00:50:19 ◼   ► And Ben was on the thing, you know, was on team,

00:50:22 ◼   ► hey, don't be using masks unless you're sick.

00:50:26 ◼   ► Masks are really only for you.

00:50:28 ◼   ► If you think you have it to keep you from spreading it,

00:50:30 ◼   ► don't wear a mask just to keep from getting it

00:50:33 ◼   ► because now, you know, the medical professionals

00:50:36 ◼   ► can't get their hands on it.

00:50:38 ◼   ► And that was the expert line,

00:50:40 ◼   ► but it turns out that's actually not really right.

00:50:42 ◼   ► the mask, wearing a mask even when you don't have it

00:50:45 ◼   ► actually does help keep you get it,

00:50:47 ◼   ► and you can get it through your mouth

00:50:49 ◼   ► in ways that they were saying originally you couldn't.

00:50:52 ◼   ► And again, I don't have any masks in the house.

00:50:56 ◼   ► I'm not wearing masks when I go out.

00:50:57 ◼   ► I'm not encouraging it.

00:50:59 ◼   ► But the truth is there is something to it.

00:51:02 ◼   ► And that's the sort of thing that I feel like

00:51:06 ◼   ► critical reading of stuff on the Twitter

00:51:11 ◼   ► and among other places, but Twitter's certainly the one

00:51:14 ◼   ► that I'm thinking of, you can pick up on stuff like that

00:51:18 ◼   ► that you might not get just by reading the front page

00:51:20 ◼   ► of the New York Times.

00:51:22 ◼   ► - Right, yeah, you're gonna get the counter narrative

00:51:24 ◼   ► that says, hey, I actually live in this space

00:51:26 ◼   ► or I live in a region that has been masking forever,

00:51:30 ◼   ► which of course, you know, many regions in Asia do.

00:51:34 ◼   ► Masks have become a part of life,

00:51:37 ◼   ► and contrary to popular belief, are not always,

00:51:41 ◼   ► or not primarily even worn by sick people.

00:51:44 ◼   ► They're worn by people who go out in public

00:51:47 ◼   ► who are healthy, but in fact,

00:51:49 ◼   ► there are other subtleties attached to it

00:51:51 ◼   ► that only people in the region would understand.

00:51:54 ◼   ► Masking is actually seen as a sign of respect

00:51:57 ◼   ► and care for others, right?

00:51:59 ◼   ► It's one of the reasons Japan was able to flatten

00:52:02 ◼   ► its curve so harshly, is in addition to a strong culture

00:52:06 ◼   ► like, "Hey, if the government says this is important to us, okay, let's play along and let's

00:52:11 ◼   ► obey." But then they also have a strong culture of service to others, right? So where they care,

00:52:21 ◼   ► it's a communal care culture, where if somebody is inconveniencing somebody else, they would treat

00:52:28 ◼   ► that as unfathomable. They do their best to avoid it, right? And of course, the biggest thing you

00:52:35 ◼   ► could do to inconvenience or harm another individual, of course, is like transmitted

00:52:39 ◼   ► disease that could potentially kill them. And so that particular aspect of it was built into

00:52:45 ◼   ► the culture. It's not so much built in here. There is a self-deterministic attitude to the US that I

00:52:53 ◼   ► think has, that definitely slows any response to these things when it involves personal sacrifice,

00:53:00 ◼   ► as simple as staying in and not going out and doing your normal routine. We saw this was all

00:53:04 ◼   ► all the spring breakers and all of that stuff, but certainly with older folks as well who

00:53:09 ◼   ► are reluctant to acknowledge that the distancing and self-quarantining might help.

00:53:16 ◼   ► So it's just a different, you know, you see the curves, you see the charts, you see the

00:53:20 ◼   ► numbers, but then Twitter and other platforms like that give you access to people who are

00:53:24 ◼   ► living in these regions or in a particular area of expertise that can give you more depth

00:53:31 ◼   ► and understanding, which then helps you.

00:53:34 ◼   ► In some ways, just the knowledge is better.

00:53:37 ◼   ► It makes it easier to do these things.

00:53:39 ◼   ► A lot of mental health stuff going on,

00:53:41 ◼   ► and just knowledge helps a lot of times.

00:53:43 ◼   ► - Hey, speaking of masks, you just sent this to me.

00:53:45 ◼   ► Breaking news while we're recording,

00:53:47 ◼   ► Tim Cook has tweeted, "Proud to share.

00:53:51 ◼   ► "We've been able to source 10 million masks for the US

00:53:53 ◼   ► "and millions more for the hardest hit regions in Europe.

00:53:57 ◼   ► "Our ops teams are helping to find and purchase masks

00:54:00 ◼   ► from our supply chain in coordination with governments around the world. Good for Apple.

00:54:04 ◼   ► And again, you know, not to get too political about it, but it's of all the things to be short

00:54:11 ◼   ► of, man, that just seems like something. And again, it doesn't seem like we should keep a

00:54:16 ◼   ► stockpile ready for a global pandemic, but it seems like we should have switches ready to flip

00:54:24 ◼   ► with a week or two notice to get,

00:54:27 ◼   ► you know, it just doesn't seem like

00:54:29 ◼   ► we should be struggling to have masks.

00:54:31 ◼   ► The US, in particular, should not be struggling

00:54:34 ◼   ► for goddamn tests.

00:54:36 ◼   ► You know, so, and, you know, good for Apple,

00:54:41 ◼   ► good for other companies that are contributing,

00:54:43 ◼   ► but again, I just don't,

00:54:45 ◼   ► it's not right that we're relying on Apple,

00:54:50 ◼   ► a computer company, to get 10 million masks to the US.

00:54:53 ◼   ► The federal government oughta be able to do it.

00:54:55 ◼   ► It's something that's really gone off the rails.

00:54:58 ◼   ► And once we're out of this mess,

00:55:00 ◼   ► hopefully it's gonna snap us collectively

00:55:03 ◼   ► out of the complacency we've obviously developed.

00:55:06 ◼   ► I mean, one thing, it's like you could say we were lucky

00:55:09 ◼   ► that we didn't have, we in the US weren't hit hard by SARS

00:55:13 ◼   ► and a couple of other similar type viruses

00:55:17 ◼   ► over the last 20 years,

00:55:18 ◼   ► but the countries that were developed,

00:55:22 ◼   ► They were ready for this in ways that we weren't.

00:55:24 ◼   ► The one thing I read was that a whole bunch of countries

00:55:27 ◼   ► in Asia, after the SARS epidemic,

00:55:31 ◼   ► set up their hospitals with actual buildings

00:55:36 ◼   ► right next door ready for a virus outbreak

00:55:39 ◼   ► connected to the hospital,

00:55:42 ◼   ► but with entirely different entrances,

00:55:45 ◼   ► entirely different HVAC systems,

00:55:48 ◼   ► so that the next time something like this would happen

00:55:52 ◼   ► And knowing whether it was five years away

00:55:55 ◼   ► or 10 years away or 20 years away,

00:55:57 ◼   ► it was inevitable that they were ready for it

00:56:01 ◼   ► and in a way that US hospitals clearly are not

00:56:05 ◼   ► in terms of, and my heart just, we're just not ready for it.

00:56:09 ◼   ► Like somebody, right now there are people out there

00:56:13 ◼   ► in the US, especially just New York,

00:56:16 ◼   ► the Bay Area's obviously hit pretty bad,

00:56:19 ◼   ► Los Angeles, Southern California.

00:56:21 ◼   ► Boston's hit pretty bad.

00:56:25 ◼   ► Philly is really coming, Philly is very low right now,

00:56:29 ◼   ► knock on wood, but we're so close to New York,

00:56:32 ◼   ► it's kind of amazing to me the discrepancy,

00:56:36 ◼   ► given how close we are and how many people I know

00:56:38 ◼   ► on a daily basis go between New York and Philly,

00:56:41 ◼   ► that that hasn't been more of a issue by this point.

00:56:46 ◼   ► but my God, just going into the regular emergency room

00:56:51 ◼   ► in ordinary times is unpleasant.

00:56:55 ◼   ► But my God, if you're going in with symptoms for this,

00:56:58 ◼   ► it's like, it's complicated in so many ways

00:57:01 ◼   ► because just as a human being,

00:57:04 ◼   ► you know that you've got it or you think you've got it

00:57:07 ◼   ► because you've got all the symptoms,

00:57:09 ◼   ► but you don't wanna go in there and get other people sick,

00:57:11 ◼   ► somebody who just cut their hand or something like that.

00:57:14 ◼   ► just quote unquote normal reasons

00:57:19 ◼   ► to go to the emergency room.

00:57:20 ◼   ► And yet, countries in Asia are set up for this

00:57:24 ◼   ► so that if you have it or you think you have it,

00:57:26 ◼   ► you can get a test, you can get results,

00:57:28 ◼   ► you can go to a special,

00:57:30 ◼   ► you don't go in with the regular people,

00:57:33 ◼   ► somebody who dropped something on their foot

00:57:35 ◼   ► and thinks they broke a bone in their foot

00:57:37 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:57:38 ◼   ► You're not sitting there right next to somebody

00:57:40 ◼   ► who's got COVID-19.

00:57:41 ◼   ► - Right.

00:57:44 ◼   ► And at the moment, even if you look at it

00:57:46 ◼   ► from the healthcare provider's perspective,

00:57:48 ◼   ► I mean, there are already shortages of masks

00:57:51 ◼   ► for healthcare workers.

00:57:53 ◼   ► And if you get those healthcare workers sick,

00:57:55 ◼   ► we're all screwed.

00:57:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, just, right, and it's just crazy.

00:57:59 ◼   ► I mean, and you see the pictures, and again,

00:58:01 ◼   ► social media really does help bring it to bear, right?

00:58:06 ◼   ► And it's like, I saw a picture the other day

00:58:08 ◼   ► where, I don't even know where it was, doesn't matter.

00:58:11 ◼   ► I'm sure it's a situation echoed coast to coast,

00:58:14 ◼   ► but because they're so short of masks,

00:58:19 ◼   ► the hospital staff, like the nurses,

00:58:21 ◼   ► when they're done, they take off their mask

00:58:24 ◼   ► and put it in a paper bag with their name on it

00:58:27 ◼   ► so that when their next shift starts

00:58:30 ◼   ► or the break is over or whatever,

00:58:32 ◼   ► they can go take it out of the bag,

00:58:34 ◼   ► put the same mask back on.

00:58:36 ◼   ► You just don't think of that as something

00:58:40 ◼   ► that we would encounter in the modern first world, you know?

00:58:44 ◼   ► - Right, well, yeah, I mean,

00:58:46 ◼   ► there is anything that makes you question

00:58:48 ◼   ► your first world status, it's our response to this situation.

00:58:51 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Which sucks.

00:58:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, totally.

00:58:55 ◼   ► And, you know, not to get,

00:58:57 ◼   ► again, not to get political about it,

00:58:59 ◼   ► but there is something to be said for manufacturing,

00:59:02 ◼   ► you know, that there are certain things

00:59:03 ◼   ► that shouldn't be entirely outsourced out of the country,

00:59:05 ◼   ► you know, that obviously, like,

00:59:08 ◼   ► mask and ventilator production

00:59:09 ◼   ► Ought to be something that every country should be able

00:59:12 ◼   ► to ramp up production on their own.

00:59:15 ◼   ► And just because it's-- - Right.

00:59:16 ◼   ► - You know, you can't rely, you know, in an emergency,

00:59:19 ◼   ► you can't rely on getting stuff sent over

00:59:21 ◼   ► from China or Taiwan or wherever else.

00:59:24 ◼   ► - Yep, pretty wild.

00:59:28 ◼   ► - Let's take a break.

00:59:31 ◼   ► And our next sponsor, good friends at Eero, E-E-R-O.

00:59:36 ◼   ► I love Eero.

00:59:39 ◼   ► Maybe you're at home now and you haven't really worried

00:59:41 ◼   ► about your Wi-Fi that much.

00:59:43 ◼   ► It was good enough or reached the places you need,

00:59:46 ◼   ► but now you're working in a weird corner of your house

00:59:48 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:59:49 ◼   ► Well, if it's in the back of your mind,

00:59:51 ◼   ► maybe you should upgrade your Wi-Fi.

00:59:52 ◼   ► Eero is a terrific way to go.

00:59:56 ◼   ► It is a mesh network.

00:59:58 ◼   ► In other words, you set up multiple devices.

01:00:01 ◼   ► You connect a main one to where your cable modem

01:00:03 ◼   ► or whatever other, wherever your internet comes in,

01:00:06 ◼   ► hook that up.

01:00:07 ◼   ► Then throughout your house,

01:00:08 ◼   ► strategically place a few other units,

01:00:11 ◼   ► and eRA will help you, based on the square footage,

01:00:14 ◼   ► how many floors you have,

01:00:15 ◼   ► help you plot out how many you need

01:00:17 ◼   ► to really saturate your home with one solid network.

01:00:21 ◼   ► So you might have three devices to go through your house,

01:00:25 ◼   ► but from your phone's perspective

01:00:28 ◼   ► or your MacBook's perspective,

01:00:30 ◼   ► it just looks like one network, one network name,

01:00:33 ◼   ► one password, and as you move around the house,

01:00:35 ◼   ► It just silently hands off and you wind up

01:00:38 ◼   ► with a really, really good Wi-Fi connection

01:00:42 ◼   ► all through your house.

01:00:42 ◼   ► Right now, I'm talking to Matthew over in Eero Network.

01:00:46 ◼   ► Couldn't be happier.

01:00:48 ◼   ► It's really great.

01:00:49 ◼   ► We used to never get a signal.

01:00:52 ◼   ► This is my old house.

01:00:53 ◼   ► We've had Eero ever since we moved here,

01:00:54 ◼   ► but at my old house, we couldn't get a signal

01:00:56 ◼   ► in the basement, or not the basement really, the garage.

01:00:59 ◼   ► And it always sucked when you're leaving.

01:01:00 ◼   ► You're in the car, you're ready to go.

01:01:02 ◼   ► Always like, ooh, I wanted to download a podcast.

01:01:04 ◼   ► Nope, no signal.

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01:01:18 ◼   ► and it sets up in minutes.

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01:01:23 ◼   ► you plug the other ones around your house,

01:01:25 ◼   ► and they have a beautiful app that they just updated

01:01:28 ◼   ► a couple of, to an all new rewritten version

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01:01:35 ◼   ► Now it's even better, even looks better,

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01:01:41 ◼   ► this whole thing set up and running,

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01:01:45 ◼   ► just sort of walking up the stairs

01:01:47 ◼   ► to go from the bottom to the top.

01:01:49 ◼   ► It's hard to exaggerate how easy it is

01:01:52 ◼   ► to set up an Eero network in your house.

01:01:54 ◼   ► And it really is, it might be for a long time,

01:01:58 ◼   ► never been more important to have really solid,

01:02:01 ◼   ► dependable WiFi in your house.

01:02:04 ◼   ► You can get yours fixed as soon as tomorrow, maybe,

01:02:08 ◼   ► by going to ero.com/thetalkshow.

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01:02:34 ◼   ► My thanks to them for continuing to support the show.

01:02:37 ◼   ► I guess we should go on to actual stuff.

01:02:43 ◼   ► We got two products last week.

01:02:45 ◼   ► Boy, does that feel, that was a week ago,

01:02:47 ◼   ► a week ago when we found out about the new Apple products.

01:02:51 ◼   ► And I know it's the oldest, everybody keeps saying,

01:02:53 ◼   ► my God, days feel like weeks and weeks feel like months,

01:02:56 ◼   ► but I cannot believe it was seven days ago

01:02:58 ◼   ► when we got the briefings on these new Apple products,

01:03:02 ◼   ► the new MacBook Air, primarily, new MacBook Air,

01:03:06 ◼   ► new iPad Pros, and a sneak peek,

01:03:10 ◼   ► tease at the Magic Keyboard,

01:03:14 ◼   ► magical floating iPad over a keyboard that is coming in May.

01:03:19 ◼   ► I know the terms, I don't wanna,

01:03:23 ◼   ► I didn't sign anything, but as a verbal agreement,

01:03:27 ◼   ► we in the media were not supposed to talk about

01:03:31 ◼   ► the actual briefings, which were delivered,

01:03:34 ◼   ► we were allowed to say that they were by video.

01:03:36 ◼   ► And so I don't wanna violate any spirit of the agreement,

01:03:42 ◼   ► but suffice it to say, Apple recorded effectively

01:03:47 ◼   ► a little 30 minute, what might have been,

01:03:50 ◼   ► maybe not an event, but maybe would have been

01:03:52 ◼   ► like little small gathering things like in New York

01:03:55 ◼   ► or Cupertino in normal times.

01:03:59 ◼   ► slides and present, you know, here's the highlights, you know, this is sort of a typical Apple keynote,

01:04:03 ◼   ► and but instead of seeing it in person, we saw it on video. Right. I reviewed both you,

01:04:12 ◼   ► your colleague Brian reviewed the MacBook Air. Have you seen the MacBook Air? Or did you just

01:04:18 ◼   ► Yeah, they did. Yeah, they did send me one as well. I'm gonna play with it, but I haven't

01:04:24 ◼   ► really done much beyond open it up and and tinkle the keys a bit. That's about it. I'm gonna play

01:04:32 ◼   ► with it more but I haven't had a chance. I've been busy with this. Our newsroom's pretty crazy right

01:04:37 ◼   ► now as you can imagine. And so I kind of focused on the iPad but I did look at the Air and of course

01:04:42 ◼   ► the keyboard. Keyboard feels great. I mean my, I'm a huge Air fan, right? Like I love the Air. I do

01:04:51 ◼   ► like the thin factor, the thin form factor, nothing in my line of work. I mean, it used

01:04:56 ◼   ► to be in the old days I would do like a lot of on laptop video editing or photo editing,

01:05:03 ◼   ► especially when I was in a much smaller newsroom and kind of, you know, very ad hoc where everybody's

01:05:07 ◼   ► kind of doing their own stuff. But we have a video team and they're fantastic. And so

01:05:13 ◼   ► I really don't do a lot of that on my laptop. So the 13 inch MacBook Pro, which is standard

01:05:18 ◼   ► issue for what is now Verizon Media, but the standard issue at TechCrunch. That is honestly

01:05:26 ◼   ► overkill for me. I like it. I like the power. It's really nice to have it when you need it.

01:05:32 ◼   ► Somebody sends me some weird 3D thing or something I need to crunch or unpack or slice or render in

01:05:38 ◼   ► some way. Great. It's cool. It can do it. But it's not necessary for the most part. And so I've

01:05:43 ◼   ► actually been a really big fan of the Air for a lot of years now because anything that's slimmer

01:05:47 ◼   ► or smaller that makes my bag lighter that still gets the job done, which is largely

01:05:52 ◼   ► web-based these days because I use a lot of web tools, web editing tools, all that stuff.

01:05:57 ◼   ► I'm all for it. And so I've loved the Air for a very long time. I'm really a big fan.

01:06:03 ◼   ► I do love the updates to the look and feel and everything that they've done over the years.

01:06:08 ◼   ► It's gotten better. And the retina certainly was a huge watershed moment. But the keyboard on the

01:06:14 ◼   ► Air, and I know people like to wax Rapsodic about old Apple keyboards and say how much

01:06:19 ◼   ► better life used to be before the Chicklet and blah blah blah blah blah. But the old

01:06:24 ◼   ► Air keyboard was mushy as hell. Like, I don't care who you are, if you're telling me the

01:06:27 ◼   ► old Air keyboard was great, you're an idiot.

01:06:31 ◼   ► You mean from the pre-retina era.

01:06:32 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The pre-retina. I mean, I'm not talking about the Chicklet

01:06:36 ◼   ► version, I'm talking about the old, old version. It was just super, like the keys were very

01:06:40 ◼   ► unstable. The mushiness came from a couple of things, one being the keys had a lot of

01:06:44 ◼   ► lateral travel, like so you could put your finger on it and move it side to side and

01:06:48 ◼   ► it would be like ch-ch-ch, you know? And then they had—they were very unstable. So depending

01:06:53 ◼   ► on what corner of the key you hit, it would shift in a different direction, which just

01:06:56 ◼   ► led to this overall mushiness to it. Now, it was still better than the Chick-fil-A keyboard.

01:07:01 ◼   ► Right.

01:07:02 ◼   ► It was, you know, still better than the one we had on the MacBooks and stuff like that

01:07:06 ◼   ► for a while, but certainly was not the best. So for me, getting a MacBook Air with this

01:07:13 ◼   ► new keyboard, it's actually very exciting for me as far as the laptop use goes. I think

01:07:17 ◼   ► that's a really great combo. Retina on an Air form factor with a keyboard that's stable

01:07:23 ◼   ► and firm but has that full one millimeter of travel, I'm all for it. I think that's

01:07:27 ◼   ► a great package for everybody.

01:07:29 ◼   ► It's hard not to just spend all the time talking about the keyboard because it is the most

01:07:37 ◼   ► significant change.

01:07:38 ◼   ► Well, it's not the most significant change because Intel has finally gotten their act

01:07:43 ◼   ► together with chipsets that fit in that reduced lower thermal form factor.

01:07:52 ◼   ► So there's this very serious performance update with the new MacBook Airs that shipped last

01:07:57 ◼   ► week too.

01:07:58 ◼   ► And that's good.

01:07:59 ◼   ► actually good and it's especially good because you just know it I know it I'm

01:08:04 ◼   ► recording this podcast right now on a 2015 and 2015 13 inch MacBook Pro no

01:08:14 ◼   ► 2014 mid 24 I actually undersold it it is still a phenomenal machine what I did

01:08:20 ◼   ► in like September of 2014 is bought the fastest 13 inch MacBook Pro I could get

01:08:27 ◼   ► I got the biggest SSD, which was,

01:08:30 ◼   ► I think it was one terabyte,

01:08:32 ◼   ► I actually don't even remember.

01:08:34 ◼   ► 16 gigs of RAM, and the three gigahertz core i7

01:08:39 ◼   ► fastest CPU update.

01:08:41 ◼   ► Here I am, five and a half years later,

01:08:44 ◼   ► and it is still a very credible machine.

01:08:47 ◼   ► I threw the Geekbench numbers in with my review.

01:08:50 ◼   ► It's a little below the air, like on single core,

01:08:54 ◼   ► but it's in the ballpark, which,

01:08:56 ◼   ► And again, Geekbench is not, you know,

01:09:00 ◼   ► it's an arbitrary thing,

01:09:01 ◼   ► but the ballpark numbers from Geekbench always,

01:09:04 ◼   ► that's why I like including them in my reviews,

01:09:06 ◼   ► is they, however much they might not exactly measure,

01:09:11 ◼   ► say, Adobe Photoshop in particular, or some use case,

01:09:16 ◼   ► as a ballpark number, they always jibe with my feel.

01:09:21 ◼   ► This 2014 machine is still there,

01:09:23 ◼   ► Whereas the first round of Retina MacBook Airs

01:09:28 ◼   ► was just really not that fast.

01:09:31 ◼   ► And fast enough for now, but it wasn't like this,

01:09:35 ◼   ► the worry is, hey, what if you want to use it

01:09:38 ◼   ► for five or six years?

01:09:40 ◼   ► And I think that's a totally credible thing to do.

01:09:42 ◼   ► I'm a pro, and I buy a new iPhone every friggin' year

01:09:47 ◼   ► because I'm an idiot, but I like to get my Macs

01:09:49 ◼   ► up and running, get it, max 'em out,

01:09:52 ◼   ► get 'em set up just the way I want,

01:09:54 ◼   ► and then use 'em until they feel slow.

01:09:56 ◼   ► And the longer it goes, the better.

01:09:58 ◼   ► And I think that's, for the amount of money

01:10:02 ◼   ► that these things cost, upgrade a little bit here and there,

01:10:06 ◼   ► and a MacBook Air is $1300, which in today's market

01:10:11 ◼   ► for laptops is premium.

01:10:15 ◼   ► Even Apple's lowest priced MacBooks,

01:10:17 ◼   ► they're at the premium end of the market.

01:10:19 ◼   ► 1,000 and up is more than most people spend on a laptop.

01:10:22 ◼   ► They should last, and part of lasting is having a processor

01:10:26 ◼   ► and GPU performance that's still gonna be credible

01:10:30 ◼   ► four or five years from now.

01:10:31 ◼   ► I mean, God only knows how long your typical web page

01:10:34 ◼   ► is gonna take to load 2025,

01:10:37 ◼   ► but you're gonna want a beefy CPU.

01:10:40 ◼   ► So I don't wanna downplay the performance improvements

01:10:44 ◼   ► in these new MacBook Airs,

01:10:46 ◼   ► but the keyboard is what I wanna talk about.

01:10:48 ◼   ► I thought that has crossed my mind,

01:10:55 ◼   ► and I got an interesting email from a reader today,

01:10:58 ◼   ► like somebody who said,

01:10:59 ◼   ► "Hey, I've been reading you forever, at least 10 years,

01:11:02 ◼   ► "don't even remember when I started, never wrote before.

01:11:04 ◼   ► "Just wanted to say I appreciate your reviews this week."

01:11:08 ◼   ► And just said that this guy is also a keyboard obsessive,

01:11:15 ◼   ► obsesses about external keyboards,

01:11:18 ◼   ► cares about keyboards, and he's like,

01:11:20 ◼   ► "What's wrong with, why do we do this?"

01:11:21 ◼   ► And there's obviously two types of people in the world,

01:11:25 ◼   ► people who really are really, really, really,

01:11:27 ◼   ► really fussy about their keyboards

01:11:29 ◼   ► and people who don't really care.

01:11:31 ◼   ► And they just, they roll your eyes

01:11:34 ◼   ► when a keyboard nerd starts going off about,

01:11:37 ◼   ► you know, like me, this week I was talking about,

01:11:39 ◼   ► in my iPad review, I mentioned that I was using

01:11:41 ◼   ► this Bluetooth mechanical keyboard, the Keychron K2,

01:11:44 ◼   ► and complaining that not just which color mechanical switches

01:11:49 ◼   ► but that they were Gateron instead of Cherry brand

01:11:51 ◼   ► brown switches and they'd feel a little cheap.

01:11:54 ◼   ► I mean, there's a lot of people who read that

01:11:56 ◼   ► and they're rolling their eyes.

01:11:57 ◼   ► Those of us who really care, I think,

01:12:01 ◼   ► it would be nicer not to care.

01:12:04 ◼   ► It would simplify life.

01:12:07 ◼   ► - It's just truth with so many things

01:12:11 ◼   ► we obsess about over the years.

01:12:12 ◼   ► be much nicer if I just couldn't care.

01:12:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, but to me it's not surprising,

01:12:18 ◼   ► and it's because, again, other people,

01:12:22 ◼   ► everybody's different, but for me,

01:12:25 ◼   ► it's because the keyboard is the physical interface

01:12:29 ◼   ► between me and the machine.

01:12:32 ◼   ► And I've always loved that bicycle of the mind

01:12:37 ◼   ► analogy to computing.

01:12:39 ◼   ► Like, I really do feel like using computers

01:12:44 ◼   ► makes me smarter because I've got like this infinite memory.

01:12:48 ◼   ► If I put it in Apple Notes, I can remember it forever

01:12:52 ◼   ► because I just always have notes with me

01:12:54 ◼   ► and I can look it up, you know?

01:12:56 ◼   ► So like, I effectively, I have like all

01:12:59 ◼   ► of my bank account numbers memorized.

01:13:02 ◼   ► I couldn't tell it to you right now in this mic,

01:13:04 ◼   ► but I could look it up in about 20 seconds

01:13:06 ◼   ► by going to a note, right?

01:13:09 ◼   ► - Right.

01:13:09 ◼   ► thing. Like 20, 30 years ago, nobody knew what the hell their bank account numbers were, right? I know

01:13:15 ◼   ► everything. I know every phone number I need to know. You know, I can lose my credit cards,

01:13:20 ◼   ► but if I have my phone, I can call the credit card company because I have their numbers.

01:13:24 ◼   ► The keyboard is like right there at the intersection of me, a mechanical machine

01:13:36 ◼   ► made of bones and meat and teeth.

01:13:40 ◼   ► Right.

01:13:42 ◼   ► And this thing made of aluminum and silicon and glass.

01:13:47 ◼   ► Thank you for that visual, by the way.

01:13:49 ◼   ► Right. Really, we're all just sacks of meat with teeth.

01:13:53 ◼   ► Yeah, that's pretty much it. You just shove some teeth into a meat sack and you get yourself

01:13:58 ◼   ► a human being. No, I know what you mean. I know what you mean. You as a machine are interfacing

01:14:03 ◼   ► with another machine. That's the point of contact. And there's a feel to it, right? And you know this,

01:14:09 ◼   ► I mean, we've always talked about like your dad is a craftsman and there are, you know,

01:14:15 ◼   ► if I had been born in another era, maybe I'd be working with my hands making things. And there's

01:14:20 ◼   ► a, you know, it's soothing sometimes just to have something physical in your hands. You know,

01:14:28 ◼   ► right now I'm just idly playing with my Apple Pencil. I'm not writing anything, but it's just

01:14:33 ◼   ► just a nice object to have in my hands while I talk to you.

01:14:35 ◼   ► It just feels good.

01:14:37 ◼   ► It feels good to have a nice feeling keyboard.

01:14:39 ◼   ► And I am a professional writer to some,

01:14:42 ◼   ► by some measurement, I write a lot of words.

01:14:47 ◼   ► It feels good to have it feel pleasing to my fingers

01:14:51 ◼   ► to move the keys up and down.

01:14:54 ◼   ► - Right.

01:14:55 ◼   ► - But I can't, the thought that I had today,

01:14:59 ◼   ► and it never really popped into my head before,

01:15:01 ◼   ► But now that the Air has a good keyboard,

01:15:04 ◼   ► and I really do believe that it is a very good keyboard.

01:15:07 ◼   ► It doesn't quite travel as much as the older ones

01:15:09 ◼   ► before this whole butterfly fiasco,

01:15:12 ◼   ► and more travel in general is better up to a certain point.

01:15:16 ◼   ► But the stability that you're talking about is so pleasing.

01:15:20 ◼   ► And when you go to the older ones and they wiggle around,

01:15:22 ◼   ► it feels like, oh my god, these keys are gonna

01:15:24 ◼   ► just come flying off if I turn this upside down.

01:15:26 ◼   ► They wiggle so much, right?

01:15:27 ◼   ► There's, I would say overall, you can quibble about,

01:15:31 ◼   ► oh, it would be nicer if I had a little more travel

01:15:33 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:15:34 ◼   ► But it's a really good keyboard.

01:15:36 ◼   ► It's a very good laptop keyboard.

01:15:38 ◼   ► I feel that those of us who care,

01:15:42 ◼   ► you know, and at a certain point,

01:15:43 ◼   ► it seems very clear that inside Apple,

01:15:48 ◼   ► a group that doesn't care so much about feel

01:15:52 ◼   ► got to make choices on shipping that butterfly keyboard.

01:15:56 ◼   ► Right, like, I don't know any,

01:15:58 ◼   ► I know, I think Casey List says he likes

01:16:01 ◼   ► the butterfly keyboard on his 12-inch MacBook Air.

01:16:04 ◼   ► I know there are people who like it, but there are few.

01:16:07 ◼   ► It's hard to find people who say,

01:16:09 ◼   ► I really like typing on this keyboard.

01:16:12 ◼   ► They certainly are outnumbered by people who don't.

01:16:15 ◼   ► And obviously, there were people within Apple

01:16:19 ◼   ► who, in a decision-making position,

01:16:21 ◼   ► thought this is good enough to ship,

01:16:23 ◼   ► or that they actually liked it, right?

01:16:26 ◼   ► - Right.

01:16:27 ◼   ► So in a sense for those of us who didn't like the feel of it

01:16:31 ◼   ► I think that in a sense it's possible that we really got lucky that there were profound reliability problems with those keyboards

01:16:39 ◼   ► Because all I see what you're saying, right?

01:16:43 ◼   ► like if they didn't break and cost the company money and

01:16:46 ◼   ► Raise a big cry about repairability and recycling and everything else, right?

01:16:50 ◼   ► Maybe that cadre would have been like nope people get used to it

01:16:54 ◼   ► Because that's the thing. The thing that really strikes out now that we're and we're not quite

01:16:59 ◼   ► entirely in the rearview mirror because the 13-inch MacBook Pro still has the third generation butterfly keyboard and now that the air has the new

01:17:07 ◼   ► one inevitably

01:17:08 ◼   ► The new 13-inch MacBook Pro or if they go to 14-inch, you know, like the way that the 15-inch went to 16

01:17:14 ◼   ► And rumors seem to suggest that 13 is going to go to 14

01:17:18 ◼   ► Maybe not by increasing the footprint,

01:17:21 ◼   ► but just by going closer to edge to edge on the lid.

01:17:25 ◼   ► It's obviously gonna get that keyboard.

01:17:28 ◼   ► But I can't help but think,

01:17:31 ◼   ► 'cause the thing that happened is,

01:17:33 ◼   ► even the people who don't obsess over the feel of,

01:17:37 ◼   ► oh, butterfly switches versus scissor key switches,

01:17:40 ◼   ► and I like the extra 10th of a millimeter of travel,

01:17:45 ◼   ► and I like the sound of this better.

01:17:47 ◼   ► Even the people who roll their eyes at all of that, they expect when they hit the E key

01:17:52 ◼   ► to get one and only one E to appear on screen, right? When they hit—

01:17:58 ◼   ► Yeah, even the least obsessive keyboard user would like a letter to appear once or less than two.

01:18:07 ◼   ► When their thumb hits the space bar, they expect one space to appear in the text editing field

01:18:13 ◼   ► they're using and they expect the physical spacebar to pop back up. Right.

01:18:18 ◼   ► Right. So all of a sudden what happened with those butterfly keyboards is that

01:18:24 ◼   ► everybody became a keyboard fanatic. Everybody. It went from 0 to 100 for

01:18:29 ◼   ► everybody because if it don't work it don't work. Right. And I can't, you know, I

01:18:38 ◼   ► I don't know. I don't know the backstory. I have no inside juice on it, you know, as to whether

01:18:44 ◼   ► even if the reliability thing hadn't been an issue, would they have spent the effort to

01:18:50 ◼   ► engineer this new scissor key keyboard that fits in these same form factors? And they don't quite

01:18:56 ◼   ► sit in the same form factors because if you actually look at the tech specs, the new MacBook

01:19:02 ◼   ► The Airs are like one millimeter thicker

01:19:06 ◼   ► at the thick end of the wedge

01:19:08 ◼   ► than the ones that shipped in November 2018.

01:19:13 ◼   ► And that one millimeter is actually

01:19:16 ◼   ► how much more travel there is on the keys.

01:19:18 ◼   ► So it kind of corresponds to,

01:19:20 ◼   ► "Oh, if we make that thing one millimeter bigger,

01:19:24 ◼   ► "we can actually use one more millimeter

01:19:25 ◼   ► "and get a better keyboard in there."

01:19:27 ◼   ► Would they have done it anyway?

01:19:29 ◼   ► I, maybe, you know?

01:19:31 ◼   ► Maybe that they, within Apple,

01:19:34 ◼   ► that even within Apple there was a,

01:19:36 ◼   ► well, this isn't the best feeling keyboard in the world,

01:19:39 ◼   ► but it's a worthy compromise to ship these things

01:19:42 ◼   ► in thinner form factors,

01:19:45 ◼   ► and we'll keep our keyboard engineers at work

01:19:47 ◼   ► and see if we can even come up with something better,

01:19:49 ◼   ► and it took a couple years.

01:19:50 ◼   ► Who knows?

01:19:51 ◼   ► But I think it's definitely not off the table

01:19:53 ◼   ► that if the butterfly keyboards had been as reliable

01:19:58 ◼   ► as all Apple keyboards always have been

01:20:00 ◼   ► and as anybody should reasonably expect,

01:20:02 ◼   ► that we might still have them, right?

01:20:05 ◼   ► You know, and for those of us who care--

01:20:08 ◼   ► - I think that's a reasonable assumption to make,

01:20:09 ◼   ► to be honest.

01:20:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, I do too, and I was really thinking about it

01:20:12 ◼   ► from this one very thoughtful email from a longtime reader,

01:20:17 ◼   ► and the more I thought about it, the more I thought,

01:20:18 ◼   ► boy, that seems likely, because it just seems, you know,

01:20:22 ◼   ► it's, you know, for as big and as much money as Apple has,

01:20:27 ◼   ► they are careful about what they shine their attention on,

01:20:32 ◼   ► and would they have deemed fixing these,

01:20:34 ◼   ► quote unquote, fixing these keyboards that weren't broken,

01:20:37 ◼   ► that were operating completely as designed,

01:20:39 ◼   ► would they have prioritized that?

01:20:41 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:20:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think it's one of those times where

01:20:47 ◼   ► you just see, and when I say cost,

01:20:52 ◼   ► I don't wanna see the word cost here as in a negative light,

01:20:56 ◼   ► 'cause it's really a neutral term.

01:20:59 ◼   ► But you do see the cost

01:21:01 ◼   ► put on display here of Apple's policy

01:21:08 ◼   ► of making sure that their ideation and creation

01:21:13 ◼   ► of their decision-making process of creating their devices

01:21:18 ◼   ► is not unduly influenced by whatever anybody thinks

01:21:22 ◼   ► at that moment in the public.

01:21:24 ◼   ► Like there is a very distinct, you know,

01:21:28 ◼   ► auteur-driven process that Apple has

01:21:32 ◼   ► and has had a lot of success with over the years.

01:21:35 ◼   ► And so you see the cost of it here

01:21:37 ◼   ► because if you had been listening and applying the feedback

01:21:41 ◼   ► and the outcry about the look and feel of these keyboards,

01:21:46 ◼   ► you would have been working on a new one

01:21:47 ◼   ► before the reliability aspects came into play, right?

01:21:53 ◼   ► would have been seeing like, oh, it doesn't matter what we think

01:21:56 ◼   ► people actually do really dislike the feel of this

01:21:59 ◼   ► keyboard. And the people that don't care will probably like

01:22:03 ◼   ► whatever we put out. And the people that do care are the most

01:22:07 ◼   ► most voice difference and the highest, you know, sometimes the

01:22:11 ◼   ► highest impact users, you know, the people that use our product

01:22:14 ◼   ► a lot are genuinely more likely to care about, you know, the way

01:22:19 ◼   ► X or Y or Z feels, maybe we should look at the redesign and maybe we should explore, blah blah

01:22:25 ◼   ► blah. But given the timeline, it seems pretty clear that they weren't exploring it at all until

01:22:29 ◼   ► the reliability issues hit a breaking point. Yeah, one of the things I did, my son has a

01:22:36 ◼   ► MacBook Air, a retina MacBook Air. I think it's a year old, I forget, but he has some sort of

01:22:44 ◼   ► of butterfly keyboard. He's fine with it. But I had him try the the review unit and he agreed,

01:22:52 ◼   ► felt better. But the thing he noticed right away, and I don't think it's visually obvious at all,

01:22:57 ◼   ► I think the difference is so small that it's, for me at least, it's hard to see but you can feel it,

01:23:02 ◼   ► is that there's a little more space between the keys. Just a little, just a little more space

01:23:07 ◼   ► between the keys. But it makes it a lot easier just right as you put your fingers on the home row to

01:23:12 ◼   ► orient them. Just slightly bigger gaps between the keys and therefore a slight

01:23:18 ◼   ► reduction in the area and it's somehow just I don't know it's just like the key

01:23:22 ◼   ► caps are smaller yeah I think that's the way they did that key caps are smaller

01:23:27 ◼   ► so that therefore the gaps are slightly bigger but it's very hard to tell

01:23:31 ◼   ► visually I think you'd almost need you need to feel it it's easier to feel than

01:23:35 ◼   ► to see I don't they just dialed it in just right and they really took what

01:23:40 ◼   ► they had, the basic concept of the Retina MacBook Air, and just made every little thing

01:23:47 ◼   ► that really needed to be better, they made it better.

01:23:50 ◼   ► All right, let me take a break.

01:23:52 ◼   ► Thank our third and final sponsor of the show.

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01:26:09 ◼   ► the talk show

01:26:12 ◼   ► So I'm done with the MacBook Air honestly talking about my review said everything I had to say the keyboard

01:26:17 ◼   ► Fixed I love the new keyboard if anything. I actually think it feels slightly better than the 16-inch MacBook Pro

01:26:23 ◼   ► I don't know if that's a some kind of placebo effect

01:26:25 ◼   ► I think it might just be that I like the physical form factor of the air better. It just sort of feels a little I

01:26:32 ◼   ► Don't know the keyboards a little lost on the giant 16-inch thing and whereas the keyboard is like just right on the 13-inch

01:26:39 ◼   ► But if I'm wrong, it's identical, you know, it's either it either feels the same as good or better

01:26:44 ◼   ► It's as good as maybe the best keyboard apples ever shipped on a laptop in some ways

01:26:50 ◼   ► The processors fixed you've got three options now good better best. Even the good one is pretty good

01:26:56 ◼   ► Everything that was good remains good still has it has amazing sound for a MacBook Air like if you just actually play video through the speakers

01:27:04 ◼   ► And they got the price down to $9.99 $8.99 for education to get a pretty good credible machine with 256 gigs of storage

01:27:13 ◼   ► Done max done the thing about the iPad which I think could fill up any remaining time

01:27:19 ◼   ► going to spend on this is in addition to new hardware, they have totally, just like a lightning

01:27:25 ◼   ► bolt to iPadOS. In the middle of March, iPadOS 13.4 now has truly rich system-wide trackpad

01:27:34 ◼   ► support.

01:27:35 ◼   ► Yes.

01:27:36 ◼   ► What?

01:27:37 ◼   ► Out of literal nowhere.

01:27:38 ◼   ► There you go.

01:27:42 ◼   ► Somebody at 9to5Mac, somebody got a peek at some device running iOS 14 a couple weeks

01:27:47 ◼   ► ago and they're like, "Hey, it looks like they've got really serious APIs for trackpad

01:27:52 ◼   ► and mouse support in here." And everybody's like, "Ooh, that'll be exciting. Hope WWDC,

01:27:56 ◼   ► hope we learn more about it in June. Hope there is a WWDC. Can't wait to try it. Maybe

01:28:01 ◼   ► I'll run the beta over summer. Can't wait for fall at the very end." And here we are

01:28:04 ◼   ► at the end of March and it's shipping as of yesterday.

01:28:08 ◼   ► Well, yeah, and you can look at that two ways, I guess, right? You can look at it like, you know, it, well, I guess not two ways, it's two interlocking ways. One, it was quite obviously, or to support the magic keyboard, right? Like, that's why they right now, sure, it works with the, you know, with any trackpad that you can attach to the iPad, or that you can, you know, Bluetooth to it or whatever it works with.

01:28:37 ◼   ► works with third party keyboards, yada yada yada, it's

01:28:40 ◼   ► it's to support the magic keyboard, right? It's to support

01:28:42 ◼   ► this accessory that probably has a nice profit margin, but that

01:28:46 ◼   ► also seems like a really nice additional keyboard, a better

01:28:50 ◼   ► keyboard that takes all of the technology and learnings that

01:28:53 ◼   ► they've had from revamping the MacBook keyboards and makes it

01:28:56 ◼   ► available to iPad users, right? That's why this appeared.

01:29:00 ◼   ► However, it is interesting that they were able to develop it and

01:29:04 ◼   ► get it all done, and it only leaked a couple of weeks before they were literally going

01:29:08 ◼   ► to drop it.

01:29:09 ◼   ► So, normally when these leaks happen, it's like months out and somebody got a hold of

01:29:17 ◼   ► a piece of software through either a partner or a regulatory thing or whatever, and all

01:29:23 ◼   ► of a sudden we're seeing, you know, "Oh, hey, there's hints of X or hints of Y or

01:29:26 ◼   ► whatever."

01:29:27 ◼   ► And so we're like, "Oh, there's hints of this.

01:29:28 ◼   ► That'll be cool if they support it.

01:29:30 ◼   ► Oh, no, here it is.

01:29:31 ◼   ► fully realized. And not only that, it's really cool. Like it's different than anything you've

01:29:37 ◼   ► seen before. It's not just keyboard and mouse support, or it's not just cursor support.

01:29:43 ◼   ► It's a reimagined cursor. It's behavioral. It's deeply integrated. And it's probably

01:29:49 ◼   ► one of the better implementations anybody's ever done on a tablet. You know, yeah, it's

01:29:53 ◼   ► it was a nice zero to 100 moment for Apple for iOS software. I thought

01:29:58 ◼   ► And even though whispers of it did leak,

01:30:03 ◼   ► I have to say as an overall surprise,

01:30:05 ◼   ► this is one of the biggest ones

01:30:06 ◼   ► that Apple's pulled off in a while.

01:30:08 ◼   ► Because even with the hint of maybe this fall,

01:30:10 ◼   ► there's going to be some sort of quote unquote

01:30:13 ◼   ► rich trackpad mouse pointer support for the iPad,

01:30:18 ◼   ► nobody thought it was coming in 13.4.

01:30:22 ◼   ► They completely hid it.

01:30:24 ◼   ► Nobody saw the Magic Keyboard coming.

01:30:28 ◼   ► I guess the information had a story

01:30:29 ◼   ► that Apple was working on some sort of thing

01:30:32 ◼   ► with a track pad integrated with a keyboard

01:30:35 ◼   ► a couple weeks ago.

01:30:37 ◼   ► So whispers of it leaked,

01:30:39 ◼   ► but not any kind of actual description.

01:30:42 ◼   ► And what a nice surprise.

01:30:46 ◼   ► And it really is very thoughtful.

01:30:47 ◼   ► I really dig it.

01:30:49 ◼   ► I can't believe we're recording this, I think,

01:30:51 ◼   ► five days after I upgraded, five or six days,

01:30:56 ◼   ► at least as of yesterday,

01:30:57 ◼   ► when I was still writing my review.

01:30:59 ◼   ► Just five days with Trackpad support and iPad OS,

01:31:02 ◼   ► and I cannot imagine going back, cannot imagine.

01:31:05 ◼   ► I always write my reviews of new iPads on an iPad.

01:31:11 ◼   ► I know the arrow keys, sometimes I'll use command

01:31:20 ◼   ► and arrow keys to move the insertion point

01:31:23 ◼   ► at the beginning or the end of the line,

01:31:25 ◼   ► Shift key to select words and stuff, but I use the mouse a lot too. The mouse is great for precision text editing

01:31:31 ◼   ► It's one of the things that iPad

01:31:34 ◼   ► iOS you know phones in general it's a problem that I don't think

01:31:39 ◼   ► Apple has licked you and I talked about this a while back where you

01:31:43 ◼   ► When you interviewed Ken Kishenda

01:31:50 ◼   ► And we were talking about it after, you know, the discussion after it, that one of the problems

01:31:54 ◼   ► Apple just seemingly, for as great as iOS has been and as revolutionary as it's been

01:32:01 ◼   ► to people's daily lives, one of the little things that's like they never really got

01:32:05 ◼   ► right is like selecting text.

01:32:07 ◼   ► Even now.

01:32:08 ◼   ► They've worked on it.

01:32:09 ◼   ► They've tweaked it, you know.

01:32:10 ◼   ► Yeah, and even the people that worked on that whole project from the beginning, I talked

01:32:15 ◼   ► to some of the people who were essentially in charge of that software. And they were

01:32:21 ◼   ► like, you know, none of us are ever really happy. We don't really ever think we actually

01:32:25 ◼   ► nailed that, you know, that idea, that concept of insertion, text insertion, and long text

01:32:32 ◼   ► writing with various formatting and all of that stuff. I think it's probably best in

01:32:37 ◼   ► class still, but you know, with some exceptions here and there for precise implementations

01:32:42 ◼   ► of one feature or another, which I totally agree that there's some things out there where

01:32:47 ◼   ► I'm like, "Oh, man, that's cool.

01:32:48 ◼   ► I wish that was on iOS or whatever."

01:32:50 ◼   ► But overall, best in class experience, and even then, the people that executed that are

01:32:56 ◼   ► still like, "Yeah, if I need to write a long email, I'm going to use my Mac."

01:33:00 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:33:01 ◼   ► I think that that's an interesting thing.

01:33:05 ◼   ► certainly puts the idea of adding a cursor to the iPad in an interesting light.

01:33:12 ◼   ► I mentioned a while, a few weeks ago, and a couple of people wrote to me and I'm like,

01:33:20 ◼   ► "Holy crap, I had no idea that it worked like that." That there were certain decisions the

01:33:26 ◼   ► original Mac team made in 1984 that maybe don't hold up so good. Or maybe they do. But

01:33:35 ◼   ► A lot of it did.

01:33:36 ◼   ► It's absolutely astounding how much of what they came up with still holds up great.

01:33:43 ◼   ► It's the nature of the paradigm, though, that there is a sort of select a noun and then

01:33:52 ◼   ► choose an action metaphor.

01:33:55 ◼   ► And so, like I said, like the official way to open an application on the Mac is to click

01:34:02 ◼   ► on it once which selects it and then go up to the file menu and the open command and then that opens

01:34:08 ◼   ► it now nobody actually does this they double click on the thing double click is a shortcut for select

01:34:15 ◼   ► and then use the open command which is either command o or in the finder you can use command

01:34:20 ◼   ► down arrow to open a thing but those are just shortcuts to open the thing that is selected

01:34:27 ◼   ► and double-clicking it is just a shortcut.

01:34:29 ◼   ► Everybody just remembers the shortcut.

01:34:31 ◼   ► But then people who don't really understand

01:34:34 ◼   ► that that's how it works,

01:34:35 ◼   ► just that short little description,

01:34:36 ◼   ► most people don't know,

01:34:37 ◼   ► they just know you double-click and something happens,

01:34:39 ◼   ► and then you wind up with millions of people

01:34:41 ◼   ► around the world who still double-click on links

01:34:44 ◼   ► in web pages because they think double-click is,

01:34:47 ◼   ► you just have to double-click everything.

01:34:48 ◼   ► - Double-click means open, yeah.

01:34:50 ◼   ► - And double-clicking a link in a web browser

01:34:52 ◼   ► actually does open it.

01:34:53 ◼   ► you just are wasting a click that you didn't need to do.

01:34:57 ◼   ► - But there's also the circumstances

01:35:00 ◼   ► where you double click on something

01:35:01 ◼   ► and something unintentional happens

01:35:03 ◼   ► because that second click actually does a different thing.

01:35:05 ◼   ► - Right, and it's one of the reasons people thrive,

01:35:10 ◼   ► experts and non-experts alike,

01:35:13 ◼   ► but especially non-experts who don't really care

01:35:16 ◼   ► about how things work and just wanna use it.

01:35:19 ◼   ► The modern touch era introduced with the original iPhone and now spread all over the world on

01:35:28 ◼   ► Android and other devices where it's direct manipulation, you're not indirectly moving

01:35:34 ◼   ► a pointer around and then selecting a thing or double clicking a thing to open it.

01:35:39 ◼   ► You just see an icon for the app you want and your finger touches it once and it opens.

01:35:46 ◼   ► and it is, you know, you don't really have to double tap anything.

01:35:50 ◼   ► And for stuff like just launching an app or switching an app, it's all better.

01:35:53 ◼   ► But the original, like, text editing stuff with the mouse really is hard to imagine beating,

01:36:02 ◼   ► where if you single click, you know, number one, you drag your mouse into a text area and

01:36:07 ◼   ► the mouse pointer changes to the I-beam, which is nice and precise, and you can put it right between

01:36:13 ◼   ► two letters perfectly. Click it once, and the insertion point goes to where you click.

01:36:21 ◼   ► Click twice, it selects the word you're on. Click three times. And I remember when I first

01:36:26 ◼   ► learned that shortcut, which was like, "Whoa, holy crap!"

01:36:31 ◼   ► **Beserat Debebe:** Right.

01:36:32 ◼   ► **Tao DeBebe:** Click three times and selects the whole paragraph.

01:36:36 ◼   ► It is, you know, I think there were even apps, I don't know if there still are, but there

01:36:40 ◼   ► There were definitely apps at some point where you could click four times and select the

01:36:44 ◼   ► whole document.

01:36:47 ◼   ► Triple is about as much as I usually use to get the whole paragraph.

01:36:53 ◼   ► Without that, without the actual mouse pointer in there, doing some of those things is so

01:36:58 ◼   ► cumbersome on iOS.

01:37:02 ◼   ► It always has been.

01:37:03 ◼   ► Right.

01:37:04 ◼   ► A lot of the paradigms still exist, but because you're expecting something to happen right

01:37:09 ◼   ► away when you tap the screen because you've been trained that way, it feels unnatural to be tapping.

01:37:15 ◼   ► And remember too that your fingers are way less precise. So what somebody may think is a triple

01:37:20 ◼   ► click on the same target, no matter what affordances are built in to the text selection

01:37:26 ◼   ► process, if you're triple tapping and your finger is at one coordinate on the first tap

01:37:34 ◼   ► and then two different coordinates

01:37:35 ◼   ► on the second and third tap,

01:37:37 ◼   ► it can only afford so much to assume

01:37:40 ◼   ► that you're triple tapping on the same location

01:37:42 ◼   ► rather than rapidly tapping around.

01:37:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, here's one I run into all the time

01:37:46 ◼   ► 'cause I like to, I always try to give byline credit

01:37:50 ◼   ► when I link to a post.

01:37:52 ◼   ► So if Matthew Panzareno has a story at TechCrunch

01:37:57 ◼   ► and I link to it, I'll write Matthew Panzareno

01:38:00 ◼   ► writing at TechCrunch or reporting at TechCrunch

01:38:02 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:38:04 ◼   ► And for a lot of the times,

01:38:07 ◼   ► to get somebody's name spelled correctly,

01:38:10 ◼   ► I will copy and paste it from the webpage.

01:38:12 ◼   ► But if you ever try to select the author's name

01:38:16 ◼   ► in a lot of websites, it's kind of tricky

01:38:19 ◼   ► because most websites nowadays,

01:38:22 ◼   ► if you just click the author's name,

01:38:25 ◼   ► it goes to like the author bio page,

01:38:28 ◼   ► the name is a link to like the author's page.

01:38:31 ◼   ► And that makes it hard to just, I don't wanna get the link,

01:38:36 ◼   ► I don't wanna go to the link, I don't wanna copy the link,

01:38:38 ◼   ► I just wanna copy this person's surname.

01:38:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, I love the publication's a jerk

01:38:44 ◼   ► and doesn't link the author.

01:38:45 ◼   ► - Right, but it's really easy with a mouse,

01:38:48 ◼   ► even in a webpage, and it's really depending on,

01:38:52 ◼   ► and it's a weird use case, you know, it's not something,

01:38:55 ◼   ► I don't even fault the designers of webpages

01:38:58 ◼   ► and publications where it's hard to just select it

01:39:01 ◼   ► with your big fat finger, but it's hard.

01:39:04 ◼   ► And with the iPad, with the trackpad support,

01:39:06 ◼   ► now all of a sudden it's just as easy as it is on a Mac.

01:39:09 ◼   ► Boom, just select, there it is,

01:39:10 ◼   ► there's the person's last name, copy,

01:39:14 ◼   ► go back to the other thing, paste.

01:39:15 ◼   ► It's really, really good, I really enjoy it.

01:39:20 ◼   ► And I think it's so thoughtful and fun.

01:39:23 ◼   ► I like, I have everything running in the default mode.

01:39:26 ◼   ► I know that you can turn off, there's like a little,

01:39:28 ◼   ► like when you move the cursor, it doesn't just stop

01:39:31 ◼   ► when you lift your finger has a little bit of momentum

01:39:33 ◼   ► and it keeps moving.

01:39:34 ◼   ► And I've seen a couple people who are like,

01:39:40 ◼   ► "Oh, thank God you can turn it off."

01:39:42 ◼   ► I think that might be an accessibility.

01:39:44 ◼   ► Some of this stuff is just in the normal trackpad

01:39:46 ◼   ► preferences and some is in accessibility.

01:39:48 ◼   ► I can imagine why some people would be annoyed by it,

01:39:51 ◼   ► but if you haven't tried it yet and your first thought,

01:39:54 ◼   ► I would just say give it a day or two

01:39:56 ◼   ► with the default settings.

01:39:59 ◼   ► I find it to be joyful.

01:40:00 ◼   ► I think the way that it makes the mouse pointer feel alive in a way that it's never felt alive

01:40:06 ◼   ► on any platform I've ever used before, period.

01:40:12 ◼   ► I think you said in your review that it kind of, you know, feels, it feels natural in a

01:40:17 ◼   ► way that like when you, when you scroll on iOS and you get to the bottom, it doesn't

01:40:20 ◼   ► just end like you hit a wall, it bounces.

01:40:24 ◼   ► I think that was somebody else.

01:40:25 ◼   ► I didn't, I don't remember saying that, but I think it's a great observation.

01:40:27 ◼   ► I don't know if that was Craig Maud's thing or...

01:40:29 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe it was a great review. Yeah, but but I agree, you know, I think it absolutely has a feeling of like exuberance to it

01:40:37 ◼   ► Which feels great. It feels fun

01:40:39 ◼   ► It also I believe has some affordance implications in that if somebody doesn't have fine motor skill

01:40:47 ◼   ► You know ability or if they're not overly, you know familiar with a mouse and cursor

01:40:54 ◼   ► Which it's funny to think but this

01:40:58 ◼   ► Adding trackpad support support to the iPad may actually be many people's first

01:41:03 ◼   ► experience with a trackpad

01:41:05 ◼   ► I know it seems weird because you and I and of course many other people who are

01:41:11 ◼   ► listening to this podcast are going to all have used a

01:41:15 ◼   ► Laptop with trackpad support or an external trackpad on a desktop

01:41:19 ◼   ► But my daughter has never used a trackpad because she has a computer

01:41:26 ◼   ► which is an old iMac that I gave her.

01:41:29 ◼   ► And she does her schoolwork on it, she watches She-Ra on it,

01:41:33 ◼   ► does video conferences now with her teacher and all that stuff.

01:41:38 ◼   ► But I put a mouse on there very explicitly because I wanted her to get exposed to a mouse.

01:41:43 ◼   ► Because guess what? She's never used a mouse either.

01:41:45 ◼   ► And she's seven.

01:41:46 ◼   ► And sure, she's sort of at the beginning of her computer lifespan or whatever.

01:41:53 ◼   ► But in previous generations, the only option for a computer was to use a mouse, right?

01:41:58 ◼   ► That was it.

01:41:59 ◼   ► That was always your entry point.

01:42:00 ◼   ► You know, you used a mouse, or of course, previous to that, you used a keyboard because

01:42:03 ◼   ► the mouse wasn't really a thing or wasn't really required.

01:42:07 ◼   ► But you forget that this entire generation of kids and even older kids, 12 to 14 or whatever,

01:42:15 ◼   ► there's a very good chance that if you lived in a household where a phone or a tablet was

01:42:20 ◼   ► was their first computer, they may never really have used a trackpad much.

01:42:25 ◼   ► And it is interesting to me that this little momentum gives it the ability to move to a

01:42:30 ◼   ► location and then snap to it.

01:42:33 ◼   ► So it's sort of like, you know, "Hey, I know where you're headed.

01:42:37 ◼   ► Let's make sure that you get all the way there," right?

01:42:40 ◼   ► And grab this button or this action.

01:42:43 ◼   ► And of course, there are all the really cool things it does where it inhabits.

01:42:47 ◼   ► I call it possession.

01:42:48 ◼   ► it possesses an icon or a link or whatever. Sort of like the old, like a Ghostbusters-type

01:42:56 ◼   ► scenario, the Ghostbusters cartoon when, you know, a ghost like possesses somebody and

01:43:02 ◼   ► like they glow green or whatever. "Oh, there's a ghost in there!" You know what I mean?

01:43:06 ◼   ► It's like that kind of thing. It's got this little halo. So I thought about it through

01:43:10 ◼   ► that lens, which I thought was interesting. You know, what if this—that's actually

01:43:15 ◼   ► really, really helpful for people that aren't used to the muscle memory of precisely going

01:43:20 ◼   ► from one end of the screen to another and stopping on a dime, because they know exactly

01:43:24 ◼   ► what the velocity of the cursor is going to be and how to precisely do that and what that

01:43:32 ◼   ► feels like to their finger. Like if I close my eyes right now, I can probably move my

01:43:38 ◼   ► cursor from one end of the screen to the other end of the screen and stop pretty closely

01:43:44 ◼   ► to where I want to be every time, with my eyes closed, right? Simply because I've had,

01:43:48 ◼   ► you know, decades of experience manipulating things with a touchpad. But I find it interesting

01:43:54 ◼   ► that it, you know, you could have had a lot of people where this, if they get an iPad and they

01:43:59 ◼   ► get a keyboard with a touchpad on it, might be their first one, you know? It's interesting.

01:44:02 ◼   ► I think one of the things people don't

01:44:05 ◼   ► The Mac interface is not it doesn't have a lot of hover effects

01:44:12 ◼   ► One that pops to mind is that the red yellow green buttons have hover effects

01:44:19 ◼   ► So when you put the mouse pointer over the red yellow green buttons in a window

01:44:24 ◼   ► They they've always lit up in some way in the Mac OS X era

01:44:29 ◼   ► They used to be more exuberant where they actually light up now

01:44:32 ◼   ► You just get like the little X minus and fullscreen things, but it's just a little hint that hey, you're on the red button

01:44:38 ◼   ► You know it lights up, but most things don't and I think it would be annoying if they did

01:44:44 ◼   ► You know like when you're over the file, but your mouse is over the file menu in the menu bar

01:44:49 ◼   ► Nothing happens to the file menu you have to click and then it you know

01:44:53 ◼   ► Looks like it's selected and you go down

01:44:55 ◼   ► Now when you pull down on a menu you do get a hover effect as you go over the menus

01:45:00 ◼   ► To tell you which one you know if if you select new then you're gonna get it

01:45:05 ◼   ► So there are some but there's not a lot

01:45:07 ◼   ► And I don't know you know you have to really think of you have to be a little bit of a UI nerd to really

01:45:14 ◼   ► Think about the fact that with the the arrow pointer

01:45:17 ◼   ► it's it's a

01:45:19 ◼   ► You know 20 point high or 16 point high. I forget how big the hour the standard arrow thing is

01:45:25 ◼   ► 32 pixels on a retina screen

01:45:28 ◼   ► But it's really one

01:45:31 ◼   ► Magic pixel at the very tip of the arrow that one magic

01:45:36 ◼   ► Pixel at the top of the arrow is the magic pixel where whatever that pixel is over when you click is what gets clicked

01:45:45 ◼   ► The way that the the iPad cursor

01:45:48 ◼   ► from it's like the inverse of the Mac where most things have a hover effect and the ones that don't I almost feel like oh

01:45:56 ◼   ► man, I hope Apple has a list of these like I've noticed that like in the

01:45:59 ◼   ► Like right like like the alerts like if you get like an okay cancel alert the buttons don't really light up

01:46:05 ◼   ► I want them to I want those to light up too

01:46:09 ◼   ► And in apps, I've noticed apps with custom UI elements, of course, they're gonna have to implement it themselves

01:46:14 ◼   ► You know, if they've used the out-of-the-box ones that Apple provides, it gets built in.

01:46:19 ◼   ► But, you know, anybody with a custom one has to design their own.

01:46:22 ◼   ► >> But you can put the arrow pointer over a button, but if it's a little bit too high

01:46:29 ◼   ► and just the point of the arrow is above the button, even though the overall surface area

01:46:35 ◼   ► of the mouse pointer is mostly over the button, when you click, you don't get the button.

01:46:40 ◼   ► you're clicking above the button. Whereas with the iPad there's no ambiguity whatsoever. It is,

01:46:46 ◼   ► you can't miss it and you don't have to think about the implementation detail of, "Oh, it's

01:46:53 ◼   ► really the point of the arrow is the only thing that really matters and the rest of it is just

01:46:58 ◼   ► there so you can see it better." Whereas on the iPad implementation you can't miss it, you don't

01:47:03 ◼   ► even have to think about it. You're hovering over this button in the toolbar and you have this whole

01:47:08 ◼   ► big hover effect, boom, you know you're there and if you tap right there, you're going to get it.

01:47:13 ◼   ► Chris Willis,

01:47:28 ◼   ► invisible affordances to help you actually touch the thing you think you're touching.

01:47:35 ◼   ► Because most people don't understand, you know, when they touch a screen, the tip of

01:47:38 ◼   ► their finger, which may be on the button, is not what contacts the screen first. It's

01:47:43 ◼   ► the pad. You know, and that it's basically where the whirl of your fingerprint centers,

01:47:47 ◼   ► right? And so when you're touching a screen, iOS says, "Oh, okay, yeah, you mean 40 pixels

01:47:54 ◼   ► north of here, right? And you can test this, actually. It's a fun little thing. If you've

01:48:01 ◼   ► ever tried to turn your phone over and enter your passcode upside down, you understand

01:48:07 ◼   ► how much of a pitch it is? Because they know what orientation, you know, that screen doesn't

01:48:13 ◼   ► invert. Like on a screen that inverts, you're fine. It doesn't matter. They don't care.

01:48:18 ◼   ► It's software. But if you get a screen that does not invert, that is not designed to be

01:48:23 ◼   ► be used in any orientation, like the passcode screen. And then you try to interact with

01:48:28 ◼   ► it. Let's say, you know, you're somebody's like, Oh, your phone locked. Could you unlock

01:48:32 ◼   ► it for me? Like my wife does this. And she's looking through pictures and she's like, Oh,

01:48:35 ◼   ► I locked the phone. And instead of doing face ID, if I'm on stand in, let's say, on the

01:48:38 ◼   ► other side of a counter, and I reach over the top of the phone to try to enter my passcode,

01:48:42 ◼   ► I have to explicitly move my finger further south, right? Because it's moving it or further

01:48:49 ◼   ► whatever, you know what I mean?

01:48:50 ◼   ► Like towards them.

01:48:51 ◼   ► Because it undershoot it.

01:48:53 ◼   ► Because it's adjusting for what it knows

01:48:56 ◼   ► a normal human would do, which is touching a point

01:49:00 ◼   ► and that point is too far down.

01:49:02 ◼   ► From where they actually want to touch.

01:49:04 ◼   ► And there's dozens of these little affordances

01:49:06 ◼   ► in the keyboard and for icons and for scrollable lists

01:49:11 ◼   ► and all of this stuff, right?

01:49:13 ◼   ► They have a lot of experience.

01:49:15 ◼   ► And frankly, it was one of the big, big secret weapons

01:49:18 ◼   ► from the very beginning that made iOS feel so much easier

01:49:21 ◼   ► and better to use with touch than Android or other platforms

01:49:25 ◼   ► because they may have been doing some of this,

01:49:27 ◼   ► but nobody thought of it as aggressively as Apple did.

01:49:31 ◼   ► Like what's the shape of a finger?

01:49:32 ◼   ► How does it interact?

01:49:33 ◼   ► What's the heuristics involved?

01:49:35 ◼   ► And the--

01:49:37 ◼   ► - They're not measuring where you're actually touching,

01:49:39 ◼   ► they're measuring where you think you're touching.

01:49:42 ◼   ► - Right. - Which is slightly different.

01:49:44 ◼   ► - Where do you wanna do?

01:49:45 ◼   ► You know, like, okay, I know what you're doing,

01:49:47 ◼   ► but what did you actually want to do here, right?

01:49:50 ◼   ► And that I think is embodied

01:49:53 ◼   ► in the way that this cursor acts on iPad.

01:49:57 ◼   ► So I think the team did a really good job

01:49:58 ◼   ► of taking that same understanding

01:50:00 ◼   ► that there is a general like nebulous nature

01:50:05 ◼   ► to the way that this interface is set up

01:50:10 ◼   ► because it was built to honor a finger,

01:50:13 ◼   ► you know, it was built to work on a primarily touch device.

01:50:17 ◼   ► So what does a cursor look like here?

01:50:19 ◼   ► How does it act here?

01:50:20 ◼   ► And how should that be different than the way it acts on a Mac?

01:50:23 ◼   ► And I thought, I think that this is one of those scenarios where it may not get acknowledged

01:50:29 ◼   ► explicitly by a lot of people.

01:50:30 ◼   ► They may just think, "Oh, hey, cool cursor, right?

01:50:32 ◼   ► Oh, that's fun.

01:50:33 ◼   ► And that's interesting."

01:50:35 ◼   ► Which it is.

01:50:36 ◼   ► It's all of those things.

01:50:37 ◼   ► But it is also a decision.

01:50:39 ◼   ► Like that's a decision they had to make to break the paradigm of the way a cursor acted

01:50:43 ◼   ► on a computer.

01:50:45 ◼   ► because the cursor on a surface, just to give an example,

01:50:47 ◼   ► I don't want to beating up on anybody,

01:50:49 ◼   ► but the cursor on a surface acts exactly the same way

01:50:52 ◼   ► as they did on Windows.

01:50:53 ◼   ► And then once again, not a bad or good thing, it's neutral,

01:50:57 ◼   ► but it is a choice.

01:50:58 ◼   ► Like the team decided, hey, we want to keep this universal.

01:51:02 ◼   ► We want people that use Windows to feel comfortable here.

01:51:05 ◼   ► So we want the cursor to look and feel

01:51:06 ◼   ► and kind of act the same.

01:51:08 ◼   ► Great, that's fine.

01:51:08 ◼   ► That's a choice, right?

01:51:10 ◼   ► So this whole thing with the cursor on the iPad,

01:51:13 ◼   ► It wasn't just like, oh, we think this will look cool or be interesting.

01:51:16 ◼   ► It was a decision.

01:51:17 ◼   ► And then, of course, hundreds and hundreds of other decisions down the road from that,

01:51:21 ◼   ► we get what we got.

01:51:22 ◼   ► Right?

01:51:23 ◼   ► So anyhow, it's a very interesting thing.

01:51:26 ◼   ► And it's very rare that Apple introduces a new input mode.

01:51:32 ◼   ► And though this is attached to a touchpad, I do believe it should be classified as separate

01:51:40 ◼   ► from the interface that we would traditionally associate

01:51:44 ◼   ► with a trackpad on, say, a Mac.

01:51:46 ◼   ► I do believe it's a new thing, a separate thing.

01:51:48 ◼   ► It's very interesting.

01:51:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, but yet some of the things still work the same.

01:51:54 ◼   ► It made me smile the first time I thought,

01:51:57 ◼   ► well, if I hold down the Command key when I tap on a link,

01:51:59 ◼   ► will it open in a new tab automatically?

01:52:02 ◼   ► Yes, yes it does. (laughs)

01:52:04 ◼   ► And so that's the sort of thing that when I'm on the iPad

01:52:08 ◼   ► and I've got a keyboard and a trackpad in front of it,

01:52:11 ◼   ► I feel like all of a sudden I am so much more efficient

01:52:15 ◼   ► in a way that wasn't, like if I go to,

01:52:18 ◼   ► just to name one site that I go on a daily basis,

01:52:21 ◼   ► Talking Points Memo, a political site run by Josh Marshall

01:52:24 ◼   ► now and a whole staff of news people,

01:52:27 ◼   ► one of my favorite sites, and I love their editor's blog,

01:52:30 ◼   ► but their editor's blog,

01:52:31 ◼   ► even though the posts are relatively short,

01:52:34 ◼   ► the main listing, there's always a read more.

01:52:37 ◼   ► If you want to read everything, you have to read more.

01:52:39 ◼   ► So the way I read Talking Points Memo

01:52:41 ◼   ► is I'll load it up in a tab,

01:52:43 ◼   ► and when I find one I want to read more,

01:52:45 ◼   ► I'll open in a new tab, keep scrolling,

01:52:47 ◼   ► oh, I want to open that one in a new tab,

01:52:49 ◼   ► and I'll end up with like maybe three or four tabs

01:52:52 ◼   ► with the full posts.

01:52:53 ◼   ► That's a real pain on the iPad,

01:52:57 ◼   ► and it's one of those things

01:52:58 ◼   ► that's kind of gotten a little worse on the phone

01:53:03 ◼   ► without 3D Touch, because you have to kind of wait

01:53:06 ◼   ► for the contextual menu, you know, you click and hold on,

01:53:09 ◼   ► tap and hold with your finger on the link,

01:53:11 ◼   ► wait for the thing to open up, open in background, right?