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41: See You on Larry`s Island

 

00:00:00   I've been up lately. I've been working lately.

00:00:02   On what?

00:00:04   What do they call them? Coles in the fire? I was gonna guess that.

00:00:09   Is that how the saying goes? I've been butchering my idioms lately. Coles in the fire? You got a lot of Coles in the fire?

00:00:15   Well, if you have...

00:00:17   It's my understanding in smithing. I think the term is

00:00:20   You need Coles in your fire so that you can put iron irons in there.

00:00:24   I think that's blacksmithing or it could just be I don't know. What do you think? That's the blacksmith thing, right?

00:00:29   All right, but that doesn't make any sense to me though. What I'm trying to say is I'm working on multiple projects

00:00:34   But it seems to me that just putting a lot more coals in your fire doesn't necessarily imply

00:00:38   No, you're out. You're absolutely saying it wrong

00:00:40   It's irons in the fire. So it is it and at the risk of making it sound like you work for a circus

00:00:45   I think you might see a lot of balls in the air

00:00:47   Got a lot of balls in here. Yeah, maybe that's better. Yeah, we can do better

00:00:51   Really? It's a little bit more like I got a lot of balls on the ground all over the place. Oh, okay

00:00:56   That's a good one. I heard one time my friend

00:00:59   we were working at dot com right before the final implosion

00:01:04   he said there's still on the stock market he said there's still a lot of

00:01:07   grenades rolling around

00:01:08   I've always liked that one. Oh, that is a good one. Maybe you got a lot of

00:01:11   you know maybe you got some grenades rolling around

00:01:15   and maybe maybe you'll kick him out the door I don't know

00:01:18   I can always tell like a lot of people I can tell when you're posting

00:01:22   via mobile as you say

00:01:25   But no, you're posting less lately, so I assume that you had some coals.

00:01:30   I don't know what. We don't talk enough, but I assume you have coals or grenades.

00:01:36   Something.

00:01:37   Nothing you can talk about.

00:01:38   No, nothing I can talk about.

00:01:40   Good for you. I got coals.

00:01:42   Interesting that you could suss it out, though.

00:01:44   Well, you know, I'm a student. I can figure things out.

00:01:50   Yeah, yeah, you got less of the full star post lately. I figure that's, you know, an indicator.

00:01:57   But that's exciting. This is exciting. You have coals.

00:02:01   Possibly.

00:02:02   Plausible deniability.

00:02:05   Right. Well, possibly exciting. Definitely have coals. I don't know if it's exciting.

00:02:11   Wow. I hope you'll tell me more when it's time to reveal your coals.

00:02:18   You know what I can do? I can announce, because the show hasn't...

00:02:22   While we're recording, this has not been announced, but by the time this show airs,

00:02:25   it'll be announced. We're going to do a live show at the WWDC again.

00:02:29   Wow. At the event?

00:02:32   Yeah. Well, no, no. Like last year, it would be... It's not officially sanctioned. It would be

00:02:39   coincidental with WWDC. Well, I've been to a lot of your live shows during WWDC, but it's usually

00:02:45   in that one bar?

00:02:47   No, I did it the one time at the 111 Minnow last year.

00:02:52   I didn't say it was recorded.

00:02:53   It just seems like you're in that bar a lot.

00:02:55   Oh, I got you.

00:02:56   Yeah, that's right.

00:02:57   I've eaten a lot of hot wings in that place.

00:03:00   They call them sliders.

00:03:04   That's exciting now.

00:03:05   Are you in a position to say when that will be and who will be visiting with you?

00:03:09   It's going to be on Tuesday, I believe, whatever the day of the month is in June.

00:03:14   What is that? What's that gonna be a Tuesday Tuesday? Yeah Tuesday that the 11th Tuesday, June 11th

00:03:20   Tickets is you're gonna have to go to a certain thing to go on tickets

00:03:24   Actually by the time you hear this the tickets will probably be gone. Well, that's but maybe not maybe you should go check

00:03:30   You can go I'm sure that by now. There's a weird thing. I've probably announced it on I have a website called daring fireball

00:03:37   I've probably announced it there and linked to the place where you'll go to get the tickets and then you could go and

00:03:43   And I would it would be a great time last year meeting a couple hundred fans of the show

00:03:49   Well, I heard I first of all congratulations on selling out

00:03:53   I also heard that a lot of people were disappointed that they couldn't get tickets and that the website was kind of unresponsive

00:04:00   Which I understand as you said briefly was not your fault

00:04:03   For my show or for WWDC. I'm acting like it's already done

00:04:06   Well, that's awesome, do you know the venue

00:04:11   Yeah, it's a place called mezzanine SF you ever been there. I've never been there. I don't think so

00:04:16   Yeah, it should be a little bigger than last year should have more seating than last year

00:04:19   But it will still have an open bar like last year. Hmm. That's that's Wow. How great is this?

00:04:26   Let me tell you this. We have a couple sponsors for the show, but we have a like a headline like a mainline

00:04:30   Event sponsor like a big, you know big ticket sponsor. It's gonna be Microsoft's Azure

00:04:39   Web services mobile web services, so how great's that gonna be to have a bunch of WWDC nerds drinking on Bill Gates's dime, huh?

00:04:46   It's coming right out of the Gates Foundation. Yeah, you're taking algebra straight out of children's mouths

00:04:52   Yeah, or is it flute? What are the flu shots? What what what's the Gates Foundation? Did they do flu shots, right?

00:04:57   Whether it's malaria and polio, I think is new what you know, he's on polio now. I like

00:05:03   I thought we solved that.

00:05:05   You know what we did, but we didn't 100% eradicate it.

00:05:08   And that's like he's been making the rounds.

00:05:11   And you know, God bless him.

00:05:12   I really do think he's doing great work on this front.

00:05:14   But it's that he's making the case that you really have to get to 100%.

00:05:21   Like 99.9% eradication isn't good enough because 20, 30 years later, all of a sudden you get

00:05:27   these little mini outbreaks.

00:05:29   Apparently, it's heartbreaking, but it does seem like now there's more kids with polio

00:05:34   right now than there were, I don't know, since Jonas Salk invented the vaccine.

00:05:38   Well, I don't know.

00:05:43   And I guess because not all these idiots don't get their kids vaccinated and stuff like that.

00:05:49   You know what I mean?

00:05:50   We should get started.

00:05:51   Did you see that infographic?

00:05:52   Which one's that?

00:05:53   No, I don't think so.

00:05:54   We shouldn't get started.

00:05:55   I'll send it to you.

00:05:56   But there's an infographic somebody did.

00:05:57   know, infographic and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee. But it was a big bubble

00:06:02   graph to do. They did a to-do on how basically life before and after vaccines and like what

00:06:10   it's really meant. And, you know, well, we probably should, you know, this is like breastfeeding

00:06:16   and circumcision, you know?

00:06:17   I guess so, you know, but to me, it's a little bit more, you know, the side A and side B

00:06:24   you really don't hold equal weight. I don't know. The vaccine thing really gets to me.

00:06:27   Oh, I told I 100% agree with you.

00:06:33   When I was a kid, it's you know, like my grandparents, I can't say that I recall any times where

00:06:38   they sat me down and told me, you know, gave me an afternoon spiel about, you know, here's

00:06:43   what life was like. You know, when I was your age at the turn of the last century, I mean,

00:06:47   my grand, my dad's dad was born, I think, in like 1903 or something like that. But it

00:06:52   I knew enough though that having been born in like 1903 to have lived to be a grandfather

00:07:01   in like the 1970s with a bunch of grandkids and stuff, that he dodged a lot of grenades.

00:07:09   People he knew got shot up in world wars.

00:07:12   People got just walking down the street, you just pick up some polio and then next thing

00:07:17   you know, your legs don't work.

00:07:20   That's just the sort of thing that happened.

00:07:22   Well yeah, and also my grandmother was one of the many people of her three siblings,

00:07:28   one of them died from the flu epidemic when it was going around.

00:07:32   But then also you've got this craziness, I think it was polio, I was talking to my wonderful

00:07:38   mother-in-law about this, and the time when, I'm probably going to get this wrong, but

00:07:42   something along the lines of, they knew polio was a thing, they knew that it was really

00:07:45   bad news, but it was still, I think, somewhat or very unclear, like how people got it. And

00:07:51   so you would just like keep your kids in the house. I guess it was sort of maybe like the

00:07:55   early days of AIDS, like you didn't know. There's a time when people thought you got

00:07:59   AIDS from, you know, amyl nitrates. So, you know, in the early days of that stuff, it's

00:08:04   so frightening. But to your point, yeah, during the Depression, for a variety of reasons,

00:08:08   or really, gosh, any time before this era we're talking about, you just have kids die.

00:08:13   you just see the kids the kids down your street we just die and and it's you know

00:08:17   as somebody who had the opportunity our parents and grandparents had the

00:08:20   opportunity to have their kids not have to deal with that it's sort of strange

00:08:25   to look back at yeah you know and I don't you know it shouldn't be

00:08:30   political it's you know and it's the sort of thing that should have united

00:08:32   everybody but there was this you know like after World War two at the 50s and

00:08:37   the 60s there was this this just a sense that you know each time we click a

00:08:41   decade forward we're gonna make great progress and we're gonna beat things

00:08:44   like polio and and it was something to celebrate it's like hey we beat this

00:08:48   terrible thing that that's been you know crippling us for decades and it was a

00:08:54   celebration and everybody you know ran out and did it and it's like people just

00:08:58   I don't know what goes through people's minds today I don't know what they think

00:09:01   the world would be like without vaccination there's a post you a link

00:09:06   post you had, I'm gonna have to guess, in 2004 or 2008, maybe 2008, but it was...you

00:09:13   cited a statistic that's...maybe you'll remember this, something like 25% of Americans, long

00:09:20   after it had been conclusively shown to be an urban myth or whatever, that something

00:09:26   like...did you say like 25% of Americans still thought that Obama was not qualified to be

00:09:32   president, that he was like not American?

00:09:33   Oh, I don't know. It's ridiculous, the number of...

00:09:36   But it was at the time you posted that. It was at that time when it was like, "Guys,

00:09:41   there's nothing else that can be proven here to anybody who's not bananas." This is a thing.

00:09:48   But that's how it is. I mean, there are always going to be people who are... I'm always coming

00:09:57   to that book. I'm coming back to that book, Don't Think of an Elephant. There are people

00:10:01   People who have – we all do.

00:10:02   We all have a frame of reference for understanding the world.

00:10:05   There are certain people who use different kinds of information and, to be honest, gut

00:10:09   feelings about how things go, to have very emotional responses to things.

00:10:13   Again, we all have this.

00:10:18   In that instance, there's no amount of evidence that will convince people that that is incorrect

00:10:22   because it so closely comports with the frame of reference about how things really are.

00:10:29   I think something really ties in to the way, I think, television in particular legitimizes

00:10:37   anything that's on TV carries a legitimacy that isn't really warranted but somehow it

00:10:44   psychologically is.

00:10:45   And famously, I don't know if it was the Oprah show.

00:10:49   I think it might have been the Oprah show but it's the one on the vaccinations and Jenny

00:10:52   McCarthy is there and they brought out the actual scientist.

00:10:54   I can't talk you out of this.

00:10:55   I know.

00:10:56   But the guy actually made like a Carl Sagan style look. I know this stuff like a, you know,

00:11:04   a world literally one of the maybe the top minds in the world on vaccination medicine and laid it

00:11:10   out beautifully in layman's terms that there is absolutely zero scientific evidence that

00:11:17   vaccinations lead to autism. There's no evidence. And then, you know, and more than he just said

00:11:23   said that he made the case. He showed that there's no evidence and told about the studies

00:11:27   and that showed this and how the studies worked and that there's not even a dispute about

00:11:34   it in the scientific terms. This isn't even a dispute. And they turn to Jenny McCarthy

00:11:38   and she says, "Well, my son is my evidence," because her son has autism.

00:11:43   There's probably a Latin name for what she did. That sounds like a trope, a rhetorical trope.

00:11:49   Well, and you know, again, I'm not a vaccine expert, but it's my understanding.

00:11:54   But then that puts it in your mind if you're at home and you're the sort of person—

00:11:57   Because you love your kid. You love your kid, right?

00:11:59   Right.

00:11:59   But didn't they drum out? Didn't the British Medical Society or whatever drum out the guy whose spurious study

00:12:06   was the nominal

00:12:12   Fuse that set all of this off. I mean there was this one thing that came out in England that right

00:12:17   But here's what's interesting about that

00:12:19   And this is where I come back to the frame of reference thing because it applies to everything from how people think about

00:12:24   Their inbox to how people think about Apple

00:12:26   Formerly Apple computer is that people is I think people come kind of pre-loaded to any

00:12:32   any bit of cultural

00:12:37   I don't want to say cultural warfare, but any kind of cultural opposition.

00:12:42   First of all, let's just say we're all expected to pick a side about everything, whatever.

00:12:46   But there are certain people who come at that with a certain point of view who are, let's

00:12:50   just say, charitably going to cherry pick evidence to support their point of view.

00:12:55   And again, that's probably something we all do.

00:12:58   But the part of it that I think is a little bit lamentable is that it's one thing to say,

00:13:03   "Well, God said it.

00:13:04   I believe it.

00:13:05   That settles it."

00:13:06   that that I you know I don't agree with that but I can respect that but when it

00:13:11   comes to things where like we have the evidence for this but you go no no no as

00:13:14   long as you're going to throw all this quote-unquote science at me let me point

00:13:17   at this study I heard about third hand that disagrees with that so they feel

00:13:23   like I think in that instance they feel like they have more than enough basis to

00:13:28   back up their emotion they didn't start out with the data I mean how many people

00:13:31   even go out and read the abstract for something that Malcolm Gladwell is

00:13:35   crying about. Don't get me started, but...

00:13:39   It turns out reading books actually makes you stupider.

00:13:44   But I think we all do that. We all look for evidence to support our own point of view

00:13:49   and then get more and more sort of dug in about it.

00:13:52   I think I mentioned this a few weeks ago, too. There's also this weird unfortunate aspect

00:13:57   of human psychology where we... I forget the term, but it's like a loss avoidance that

00:14:04   feel it if I give you a dollar say here here's a dollar Merlin and then I toss a

00:14:15   coin and it comes up tails and I say well you lost I give me the dollar back

00:14:20   you feel worse than if I toss the coin first and it comes up tails and I say ah

00:14:28   if it had come up heads I'd have given you a dollar right it's the exact same

00:14:33   Math, right?

00:14:36   There is, you know, you've got a 50% chance of gaining a dollar in this incident, but

00:14:42   that you had it in your hand and I took it away makes you feel worse.

00:14:46   And the way it plays into the vaccination thing is there was like a poll that somebody

00:14:50   did where they like polled parents and said, I might get the numbers wrong here, but more

00:14:58   or less. Let's say there's a disease that there's a one in a thousand chance that

00:15:04   your child will get, and if your child gets it, it'll be it'll be fatal. But

00:15:10   there's a vaccine that will make sure your child doesn't get it, but if you

00:15:15   give your child the vaccine, there's a one in ten thousand chance that the

00:15:18   vaccine will kill your kid. Right. What do you do? If you're just, you know, if you

00:15:23   even just play the basic odds. I mean, if you're a kid, if your kid, this is, boy, people

00:15:30   take this apart, but you know, if your kid swallows something and you're not sure if

00:15:34   it's poison, you know, you probably call 911. But just for the sake of argument, you know,

00:15:41   what are the chances of that kid being really sick from poison versus what are the chances

00:15:45   of that kid dying in an automobile accident on the way? Like, there's risk to everything.

00:15:49   You know, do you know what I mean? It's like, you have to weigh, you have to weigh all of

00:15:53   do you weigh the risk of, you know, of flying in a plane somewhere? Or of, you know, again,

00:16:02   so many things that are, you know, and it turns out culture, so many things that are

00:16:07   good for us and then bad for us. Do you remember in the 90s when it was all about, like, avoiding

00:16:12   fat? And so you go out and buy a box of Snackwells, you know, which is basically like eating a

00:16:17   bag of flour. And it was just a green box, green of course. It was really way ahead of

00:16:22   of its time by being green.

00:16:24   It basically said on it, low fat.

00:16:25   Oh, great.

00:16:26   Well, I can eat like 90 of these.

00:16:28   Or are you--

00:16:29   John, be honest.

00:16:30   You have a microwave oven, I'm guessing, right?

00:16:32   We do.

00:16:32   Now, what's your position on plastic in the microwave?

00:16:35   Are you dealing with this?

00:16:38   I'm dealing heavily with this in my household.

00:16:42   You know what?

00:16:42   I feel like, why take a chance?

00:16:45   So we've actually--

00:16:48   I don't think we rushed out and immediately banned

00:16:52   all plastic in the microwave but we well I say we it was really Amy I don't I

00:16:57   mean what am I I don't order stuff like this but we recently ordered like new

00:17:01   all the the stuff that you put leftovers in and then put it in the fridge we got

00:17:05   this noose it's all glass now so when you take something out of the fridge and

00:17:10   you want to heat it up it's already in like a little glass thing so you don't

00:17:13   have to put plastic and you gotta clean it you know I mean when they make when

00:17:18   When they make a glass Ziploc bag, I'll start rethinking this.

00:17:22   If I can't put saran wrap on a bowl of vegetables like a gentleman, I'm not sure I want to live

00:17:27   anymore.

00:17:29   I don't really microwave a lot of stuff, though, to tell you the truth.

00:17:32   Because you're artis anal.

00:17:33   You get all local.

00:17:34   You shop at your little Whole Foods there.

00:17:35   You get everything artis anal, and then you cook it in, what, like a bamboo steamer?

00:17:39   How do you do that?

00:17:41   I don't know.

00:17:42   I really...

00:17:43   You're not involved in the preparation of a lot of meals.

00:17:45   No, I really don't know where food comes from.

00:17:48   I generally just wake up all day, drink fizzy water and coffee all day long.

00:17:54   And then at some point when the sun goes down, my blood sugar is in a desperate situation

00:18:01   and I'm ready to pass out.

00:18:03   And then my wife provides me with a hot meal.

00:18:08   And then I fall asleep.

00:18:09   God, that's so sweet.

00:18:10   I think someday when I eventually, as I'm sure you will have at some point, when we

00:18:14   eventually each have interventions in our life.

00:18:18   I think one of the things I'll be forced to confront

00:18:20   is that most of my day is built around

00:18:23   which beverage I'm having.

00:18:25   I don't even, I don't need a clock.

00:18:28   - Exactly, I might.

00:18:29   I think that's why you and I get along so.

00:18:32   - Yeah, I think--

00:18:33   - It's a lot of caffeine in the waking hours

00:18:37   and then there's a long stretch in the middle

00:18:40   filled with lots and lots of over-carbonated fizzy water.

00:18:43   Uh-huh.

00:18:44   And then in the evening there's some alcohol involved.

00:18:48   Well, yeah.

00:18:49   Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:18:50   And I think as long as you keep those—it's sort of like the food pyramid, right?

00:18:56   Or you want to try and minimize the number of fats or whatever.

00:19:01   Let's be honest.

00:19:02   You've got fats, carbohydrates—fats, carbohydrates—what's the other one?

00:19:09   In the food pyramid?

00:19:10   You've got your grains?

00:19:11   Here's what I'm trying to say.

00:19:13   As long as you can keep the alcohol

00:19:15   to less than a third of your waking hours,

00:19:18   I think even the FDA would say you're on the right track.

00:19:20   When you get to half of your day, even-- let's be honest--

00:19:23   even if it's staggered through the day,

00:19:25   you can't start with it that's a little bit of a cheat.

00:19:27   Or just don't start with a lot.

00:19:29   Like if you have an Irish coffee in the morning,

00:19:30   I don't think anybody's going to argue about that.

00:19:32   Plus you're alone.

00:19:33   Your family's out of the house, right?

00:19:34   My wife is so mad at me on St. Patrick's Day

00:19:40   because she wanted an Irish coffee.

00:19:42   And we do-- I mean, I don't think we have a gigantic liquor

00:19:47   collection in the house.

00:19:48   But it's--

00:19:49   Not at any given time.

00:19:51   Right, it's a well-stocked bar.

00:19:54   But we did not have any Irish whiskey.

00:19:58   And I said, well, you could just-- you know,

00:20:00   you can make an Irish coffee with bourbon.

00:20:01   And it was as though I told her, you know, I don't know,

00:20:05   you could make wine out of cherries or something.

00:20:09   Like the way some people are about martinis and vodka, right?

00:20:13   Right.

00:20:13   Like our friend Dan Benjamin would say that that is absolutely not a martini if it has vodka in it.

00:20:17   Right. It's a separate drink, separate cocktail.

00:20:19   And so how did you resolve that? Did you go out? Did you fool her?

00:20:22   Like what did you make a clinky noise and then just pour scotch in there? What'd you do?

00:20:26   No, I don't think I went out. Was it a Sunday this year?

00:20:31   We were out of town at the time and so we missed it.

00:20:36   It was a Sunday. It was a Sunday.

00:20:38   so you know and Pennsylvania is a no booze on Sundays town although there are

00:20:44   they've lightened it up a little bit where now there's most of the liquor

00:20:47   stores they're all state-run but most are not open at all on Sundays there is

00:20:51   at least one within walking distance but but she was like I don't know. That seems so archaic to me.

00:20:56   My wife's from Rhode Island and you know there's there's all kinds of little

00:21:01   islands of different laws in New England it's it's very weird but I mean it seems

00:21:06   strange to me that, and you know they would do this in high school, you know,

00:21:09   when she was a kid, you can't, what is it, you can't buy liquor. They had all these

00:21:13   weird, it's like little dry islands, but you could, you know, you could drive over

00:21:18   to the next town like five minutes and there's like a liquor store like right

00:21:24   by the county line or the city line or whatever. It seems, it seems so odd. See, in

00:21:29   our neighborhood, it's like a Gaelic New Year's Eve, you know, like, like, like

00:21:34   Like people who don't drink often, it's like on New Year's Eve, everybody thinks they're

00:21:39   a great drunk driver and everybody thinks they're a great drunk, right?

00:21:43   And so everybody in our neighborhood, which is very Irish in a lot of ways, people don't

00:21:49   know their limits and pretty much our entire neighborhood is puking on St. Patrick's Day,

00:21:58   which is a shame because I'm largely Irish and I think that's something you learn.

00:22:02   You know? You gotta warm up. You know? You gotta keep going to practice.

00:22:06   You know, Mariano Rivera didn't get good by just showing up. Do you know what I'm saying?

00:22:10   I hear you. I don't think he got good by drinking.

00:22:13   [laughter]

00:22:17   Is he totally out now? Is he gone? He's going out, right?

00:22:21   Yeah. Well, I guess so. I mean, I think he—

00:22:24   Did he recover from that? Or could he recover from that? Really?

00:22:27   He had a horrible, bizarre, freak knee injury last year in April.

00:22:33   He'd only shown up in nine games.

00:22:35   I don't know what you call that thing.

00:22:37   It's not the ACL. It's that neat thing you don't want to hurt.

00:22:42   It's a technical term.

00:22:43   It just completely ruptured.

00:22:45   Wasn't it at practice and he wasn't doing anything?

00:22:47   Like he was grabbing some Gatorade and turned wrong or something?

00:22:49   No. What he does, he's a pitcher.

00:22:51   But what he's always done for his whole career is before games.

00:22:55   It's called shagging flies where he's out in the outfield and a guy, you know at home plate is taking batting practice

00:23:01   Just hitting real deep, you know fly balls all the way from home plate out to the outfield wall

00:23:05   and he run, you know runs after them and catches them and

00:23:08   he was just running after a deep fly ball and just took like a funny step on the

00:23:14   There's always a warning track before the walls, you know, like the grass. Yeah, the big white line and all that right

00:23:20   Well, it's like a like a maybe like a 10-foot wide patch of dirt or clay or something around the walls

00:23:25   So if you're an outfielder running toward the wall and all you have to do is know I'm not on grass anymore

00:23:31   So I know I'm near the wall and he took one step on it

00:23:34   Just like a fluke funny step and just snapped the ligament or tendon and whatever it is in his knee

00:23:39   So he was out and I had to have that surgically repaired he's 43 years old and

00:23:47   And apparent, you know, the idea was, you know, he didn't say officially, but everybody seems to think that last year

00:23:52   he was planning to be his last year and he just didn't want to go down, you know, go out like that.

00:23:57   So he did all the work to rehab. He's back this year and he's amazing. He's 43 years old. He had a complete

00:24:04   ligament tear in his knee a year ago. And at this point he's appeared in 16 games and

00:24:10   he has 16 saves. What's his, what's his, well,

00:24:14   ERA does ERAs do you still have an ERAs were as relief pitcher does that still matter it does it's like around two which is

00:24:21   amazing

00:24:22   That's insane

00:24:24   He's there's like maybe three people in sports in the last ten years that I would sit around and watch and he's one of them

00:24:29   He posted that video. It was that you yeah, you know of course you're the only one who opposed this

00:24:34   So they track his his breaking pitch. Yeah, it's isn't that it's it's

00:24:41   It's hard to be a grown-up and then realize

00:24:43   How many things and we walk around all day, right? We we break up our day by beverage

00:24:49   We posted the internet and then we don't think that much about how really close we are to

00:24:55   Basically being ruined all the time, you know, we go out and stand by a street where cars are going by at

00:25:01   You know 40 or 60 miles an hour I get on this multi-ton train

00:25:05   That's being driven by a crazy person and I don't think about like how closely I'm to dying all the time

00:25:11   And in that instance, what could be more of like a freak accident?

00:25:14   And that guy's—I mean, admittedly, as you say, he's not a young man, but still, you know,

00:25:19   he needs every part of his body to be working to do what he does.

00:25:22   It's amazing. And it's one of those things where I know that, you know,

00:25:26   I post Yankee stuff occasionally to my website. A lot of people do that.

00:25:30   That's Death Staring Fireball? Is that what it is?

00:25:32   Yeah. But the Mariano Rivera stuff, when I do, I often get email from people who say,

00:25:37   "I don't even know the rules of baseball, but that's amazing."

00:25:39   That thing last year where the New York Times had the thing that tracked his pitches was fascinating.

00:25:45   Even our good friend Guy English who lives in Montreal said, "I don't even hardly even know the rules of baseball."

00:25:53   But he was like, "That was amazing."

00:25:55   Well, I think that sports team might have played our sports team in an important event a few years ago.

00:26:02   One of the local sports teams played the Yankee sports team and we watched it.

00:26:06   was my first exposure to that guy and I have no allegiance to anything in sports

00:26:11   apart from publicly not enjoying it but watching that guy pitch what it's like

00:26:17   what's watching like it's like Perlman or something or anything Malmsteen you're

00:26:20   just sitting there and you're going how how is this happening and I mentioned

00:26:24   this on the back to work program a couple shows ago but like the thing I

00:26:28   really admire about that guy is how steely he is how he how seemingly un

00:26:33   like he can't be unhinged. Right. If there's anything I'd... Serene. Yeah, I guess so, but like

00:26:40   he, yeah, that's a good word for it. He's imperturbable, really. You know, and you

00:26:45   know, I'm not a hippie-dippie sort of guy, but there is something almost mystical

00:26:48   about him. He has a serenity to him that is, it's inspiring, honestly. He's just

00:26:56   very different. There is something very, very different about him. Right, and he

00:27:00   he can come up there and just throw impossible pitch after impossible pitch.

00:27:05   And then finally somebody hits his impossible pitch and gets like a

00:27:09   two-run homer and then he goes straight back to throwing impossible pitches. And

00:27:13   that to me is a model. If I could add one pattern of grit to my life,

00:27:19   it would be the ability to do that instead of sitting and crying like a

00:27:22   little girl when this lightest thing goes wrong. You know what I mean?

00:27:25   If there's anything that's inspirational about sports, yeah I know

00:27:28   It's about family and blah blah, but like to me that that's the thing is to look at somebody like that

00:27:31   There's nothing they used to say about Tiger Woods who I think is a golfer they used to say

00:27:36   You know that you don't start you don't practice less when you become a pro you practice more

00:27:41   And I don't know I think that's inspiring

00:27:44   Yeah, and he's in a weird thing too is that he plays the position that you know for those who don't follow baseball

00:27:51   It's fairly easy concept is you know you're a pitcher and most you know you think of pitchers you think of the guys as the guy

00:27:56   who starts the game and you're first inning, you're the pitcher and you pitch until your arm gets tired and then other guys come in.

00:28:03   And there's like a pretty average-ish number. Like they'll start when it gets over what like 60 pitches? Like you get to a certain amount

00:28:09   and you go, "Wow, this guy's still in there and he's throwing this many pitches."

00:28:12   Yeah, like 60-70 is when you start thinking, "Let's keep an eye on him."

00:28:16   He's really on the right side of the curve at that point.

00:28:19   Right, and then 100 is generally considered, in the modern game is considered a lot. In the old days

00:28:23   they would just let guys pitch until their arms fell off.

00:28:26   And then, you know, but in general the starting pitchers are the best pitchers.

00:28:30   And then the relief pitchers are guys who are good, but really good in small doses

00:28:34   or really good in particular situations. Like this guy gets out left-handers and

00:28:39   you just bring them in

00:28:40   against the left-handed guy and then you take them out. It's a much more

00:28:43   defensive kind of pitching in some ways?

00:28:44   Yeah, situational I think is, you know,

00:28:48   in the modern game is that you bring in these guys for certain situations.

00:28:52   But then you get all the way to the end of the pitching staff

00:28:54   and almost every team has a guy that they call the closer and that's Mariano Rivera

00:28:59   and that's a guy who you only bring in when you have a lead and it's a small lead because

00:29:04   if it's a big lead you don't bother wasting him because you don't want his arm to be too

00:29:07   tired for the next day.

00:29:08   But I forget.

00:29:11   There's a stat called the save and I think the save is if you can only get a save as

00:29:16   a pitcher if the tying run comes to the on deck circle.

00:29:21   In other words, if the tying run is going to come up next, you can get a save.

00:29:26   So it's got to be, you know, two, three runs or something like that.

00:29:29   It's a stupid stat, really.

00:29:31   But in other words, though, you only come in in the ninth inning, the last inning, in

00:29:37   a game where your team has a narrow lead.

00:29:41   So every inning that the guy pitches in general, I mean, every once in a while, if he goes

00:29:45   like a week without coming in, because there wasn't a safe situation, they'll bring them

00:29:49   in because you know, they don't want them to go a week without ever throwing. But in

00:29:52   general, the closer only comes in, in a high pressure situation. And the only other case

00:29:59   where you bring a closer in would be at home in a tie game. So any game where your team

00:30:04   has a narrow lead in the last inning or or a tie in the in home game is when you come

00:30:10   in. And so it tends because as the home team, you would get one more at bat, right.

00:30:19   So it's any kind of professional sports, there's obviously a lot of pressure involved in.

00:30:23   There's thousands of fans and all this attention and stuff like that.

00:30:26   And I'm not saying that if you're a starting pitcher and it's the third inning of just

00:30:31   one of 162 games in May in the season and it's the middle of May and a long season ahead

00:30:38   of you, that the third inning of any one particular game isn't high pressure.

00:30:43   you know come on baseball's a little you know lugubrious whereas the closer is

00:30:50   always high pressure and so it tends to attract personalities like what's his

00:30:55   name out there in your town the beard oh that one crazy guy with the beard yeah I

00:31:01   don't know these national league guys but you know I mean these guys who are

00:31:03   eccentrics guys who are very very high strong you know wild characters and they

00:31:12   don't tend to last very long and it tends to be guys who can throw the ball exceedingly

00:31:16   hard and fast and then you know they burn out because it's such a high pressure situation.

00:31:21   Mariano Rivera has been doing it for 16 or 17 years which is just it's just unprecedented.

00:31:27   It's like being I don't know like like a you know like on the bomb squad or something. Well

00:31:32   especially especially today and um boy thanks for getting me into my area of expertise which is

00:31:37   sports ball but you're right into it. Thank you thank you can we get back to vaccines after this?

00:31:42   By the way, breastfeeding, terrible idea.

00:31:45   Email Sean.

00:31:49   You guys, I read a thing.

00:31:50   Turns out formula, actually formula and putting your child into a dryer, literally the dryer

00:31:55   at your home.

00:31:56   Put it in there.

00:31:57   Don't turn it on and leave a crack in it, but just give them formula.

00:32:00   They'll be fine.

00:32:03   This is apparently especially true.

00:32:04   It's true in baseball.

00:32:05   It's true in basketball, but from everything I hear is that it's extremely true in football

00:32:10   is they're getting bigger, they're getting faster, they're getting better trained.

00:32:13   And you have to be more...

00:32:17   Boy, why are we talking about this? You have to be so much more

00:32:21   really, truly athletic than... Look at Babe Ruth.

00:32:24   I mean, Babe Ruth wouldn't be able to survive a whole game of handing out peanuts today.

00:32:29   You know? He's a, you know, a slugger, as they say. Not a slugger always

00:32:34   can note

00:32:34   that you also strike out a lot, that you also... In the sense that if you hit it,

00:32:38   you're gonna hit it real far.

00:32:39   It doesn't always connote that. I think it's... But slugging average would be the amount of times that you're able to...

00:32:45   What counts as slugging? Is it always a home run?

00:32:48   No, it's the number of bases you get out of the hit. So in other words, I guess slugger hits more doubles...

00:32:52   Not just home runs, but doubles and triples.

00:32:54   But I mean, the athleticism of being a football player today, you know, the escalating...

00:33:00   ...changes in the technology and the training and all of that stuff, you know, it's...

00:33:06   I have to imagine that's also to some extent true in baseball, where as you say, you would

00:33:10   have… Ken Burns' baseball is failing me at the moment. But Christie Brinkley, what

00:33:18   was the name of that baseball player? Sure, Atkinson. What was his name?

00:33:21   Oh, Christie Turlington.

00:33:22   Turlington. That's right. You can bring on Christie Turlington or Goose Gossage or

00:33:27   Raleigh Fingers. Anyway, you could be somebody…

00:33:30   Great mustache.

00:33:31   Oh, man. He was the Roll-Aids Relief Man of the Year of memory servers. Do you remember

00:33:35   that when we were kids. Yeah, yeah, I do. It was sponsored by Roll-Aids. Christy

00:33:40   Mathewson. Ah, that was the guy. I love PBS and baseball. But, um, 1880. I don't know, I'm

00:33:46   not sure I'm going with this, except that today it seems like it must be, it always

00:33:50   seems still, I actually did hear this one time, I was waiting for a hot dog, and

00:33:53   everything I know about TV basically comes from Tumblr and where I get my hot

00:33:57   dog, and they said, somebody said something like, described one of the

00:34:02   people playing the game as being extremely athletic. And that still bothers me. But,

00:34:08   you know, athleticism, obviously, it's more than just simply being an athlete. And it

00:34:14   is so funny to even, dude, even when, I guess you two, yeah, we're not that far apart, but

00:34:19   when we were kids, you go back and you watch one of those, you know, I don't know if iTunes

00:34:22   still has this, but I used to buy those MLB like old games you could watch on iTunes.

00:34:27   You know what I mean? Like I went in and bought the Reds versus the Red Sox 75 World Series

00:34:33   game. You know, I think at one time you can go and buy the one where Reggie Jackson hits

00:34:36   40 home runs or whatever in that one game. But it's so strange to see what those people

00:34:41   look like. Do you remember Fernando Valenzuela?

00:34:44   Yep. Fernando Mania.

00:34:46   Or was it, who's the one Letterman used to make fun of? Was it Phil Nicro?

00:34:49   Oh, I don't know.

00:34:50   It was one of the Nicros. But you know, I mean, the guy looked like a bouncer. You know,

00:34:56   Valenzuela looked like a guy who would come and cut your lawn.

00:34:59   He was short, he was...

00:35:01   He was bulbous, John.

00:35:03   Pancho.

00:35:05   It's a little racist.

00:35:06   Pancho is what you're thinking of.

00:35:09   But today you see these guys and it's just the level of training that people

00:35:13   get.

00:35:13   And again, it's a lot like the Gulf Wars.

00:35:16   We can prevent so many kinds of injuries with training,

00:35:20   but that just means the injuries move to a different spot, right?

00:35:23   And, yeah, I don't know.

00:35:25   Well, that's one of the things I love about baseball, though, is that baseball is the

00:35:28   one sport where a guy like Fernando, you know, a short, fat guy can come up and all of a

00:35:34   sudden be a sensation, whereas Fernando was never going to make it into the NBA.

00:35:38   Right?

00:35:39   Right.

00:35:40   Yeah, you don't see him being like a decathlete.

00:35:46   I don't watch nearly as much basketball as I used to.

00:35:48   Basketball is the thing I've given up.

00:35:49   And that's what you've played the most of.

00:35:51   Yeah, it is.

00:35:53   the sport I actually was, had some aptitude for. I don't watch it anymore.

00:35:58   Not because I don't like it, but just I had, you know, there's only so much time.

00:36:00   And I've, you know, got work and a family.

00:36:02   Sure.

00:36:02   Now that the NBA playoffs are on, one thing I've noted, and it's what you're saying,

00:36:07   NBA players look like action figures now. Like when we were, you know, like...

00:36:14   Think about Dennis, when I first saw Dennis Rodman or Charles Barkley, like when you would first,

00:36:18   when I first thought of Charles Barkley, I just thought he was really big. But that guy was just

00:36:21   It was brawny as hell.

00:36:23   Yeah, he was just—

00:36:25   They didn't look like that.

00:36:26   Like, Wilt Chamberlain did not look like that.

00:36:29   You know what?

00:36:34   Larry Bird.

00:36:35   Sure, Larry Bird.

00:36:36   He could have been a pitcher.

00:36:37   You know that guy.

00:36:38   Right.

00:36:39   But, you know, Bird and Magic Johnson are good comparisons.

00:36:42   Obviously, they were very tall.

00:36:43   Both of them were 6'9".

00:36:44   So, I mean, that's enormously tall.

00:36:46   Is that right?

00:36:47   Larry Bird was that tall?

00:36:49   Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were both 6'9", like all of the many that they came out, you

00:36:54   know, they played each other in college, they played each other in pros, they were the exact

00:36:58   same height, 6'9", which is very, very tall.

00:37:00   But you know, you look at pictures of them from their heyday and they were kind of like

00:37:03   string bean type guys, whereas the NBA players now, they're ripped.

00:37:08   Like –

00:37:09   Has the game become more physical in that time, do you think?

00:37:14   You know, it's – I don't know.

00:37:16   I don't know and I'm not – I don't watch enough to say.

00:37:18   I think so.

00:37:19   has become a little certainly become a lot faster than it used to be I

00:37:23   definitely think so and I think that I do and I think that the guys you know to

00:37:29   keep up that they really you know I work out like non-stop in between games I

00:37:35   don't know I mean well most of what I know about again most of what I know

00:37:39   about tennis comes from watching my mother play and reading David Foster

00:37:42   Wallace but I will tell you this watching say Bjorn Borg and John

00:37:47   McEnroe in 1980 versus watching tennis today, it feels like a completely different affair.

00:37:52   There's so many aces now. There's just so much of it depends on having, and I think

00:37:56   I've given to believe this has been true for a while, it's just kind of not as fun to watch.

00:38:00   It would be like watching a hockey game where it's all about hitting the puck from the other

00:38:04   side, like the net on the other side. You're like, "Well, I kind of like the volleying."

00:38:07   You know, that's kind of what makes, that's what makes soccer, to me, one of the most

00:38:11   interesting things to watch full stop, is that it is extremely athletic. They're running

00:38:15   for whatever, 90 minutes, however long it is. And they're moving that whole time. And

00:38:21   it really is very much about teamwork.

00:38:23   And to be honest, another thing I love about basketball is almost everybody's involved

00:38:28   almost all the time. You know?

00:38:31   Yeah. Well, you know.

00:38:33   I have to ask—

00:38:34   There's more of a—you could parlay this. I mean, I can't believe we're spending

00:38:37   the whole show talking about sports. But—

00:38:38   I have a series of questions I would like to get to before we leave.

00:38:43   Alright. But we could parlay that into something about, you know, like a back-to-work type,

00:38:48   you know, collaboration type thing. Basketball is definitely a sport where if you have one

00:38:53   guy on the team who's an asshole, it doesn't matter how good the team is. You're probably

00:38:57   going to lose.

00:38:58   Yeah. Right.

00:38:59   You know, like if the team—one guy on the court who doesn't get along with the other

00:39:02   four, and the more talented team might lose.

00:39:07   If he's not on the same page, like in terms of, you know, not just knowing like which

00:39:11   kind of defense we're going to play and stuff like that. But with five people on your team,

00:39:18   you each have to be giving at least 20 percent. You've got to be thinking so many moves ahead

00:39:23   because you're going to be called upon to do—even if you don't handle the ball. At

00:39:27   least in football, everybody's got a guy to protect. But in that instance, it seems

00:39:32   like you have to be thinking so many moves ahead and so quickly and based on communicating

00:39:37   so well and knowing the patterns of what the other guys are likely to do that you're

00:39:41   you're going to be in the right place at the right time.

00:39:43   Let me do a sponsor break.

00:39:44   Yeah, yeah, that'd be great.

00:39:45   Let me tell you about--

00:39:47   now look, I famously--

00:39:48   I don't do this on purpose.

00:39:49   I really don't.

00:39:50   I don't know how to pronounce a lot of words.

00:39:52   So like, I just told you before about my upcoming live episode

00:39:55   with the Windows Azure, A-Z-U-R-E.

00:39:58   I pronounced it when they sponsored the show

00:39:59   a couple episodes ago, Azure.

00:40:01   I thought that that word, it's like a shade of blue.

00:40:04   I thought it meant--

00:40:05   for 39 years of my life, for 40, however the hell old I am,

00:40:09   I thought the word was pronounced "Azur."

00:40:11   I didn't know, but apparently it's "Azur."

00:40:14   Well, here's the thing.

00:40:16   I don't know how to pronounce--

00:40:16   - It's not "Azur"?

00:40:17   - Azur, yeah.

00:40:20   Azur, yeah.

00:40:21   I don't know, but you know.

00:40:23   Like I said, it's part of the deal that sponsors get

00:40:26   is that you get the attention of the audience

00:40:29   and you get a couple of unique pronunciations from me.

00:40:32   Here's the deal.

00:40:34   This week's first sponsor is a company called MailRoute.

00:40:37   Now it's M-A-I-L-R-O-U-T-E.

00:40:41   Now would you say mail route or mail route?

00:40:43   - Are you asking me?

00:40:45   - Yeah, okay, I'm asking you, Marlon.

00:40:47   - Okay, if I'm using it out of the context of that product,

00:40:51   I would say mail route, but I think mail route scans better.

00:40:56   - Yeah, but I don't wanna say mail route

00:40:58   because then I don't want people to go and Google it

00:41:00   and spell it R-O-O-T.

00:41:03   - Oh, it's like saying pin number.

00:41:04   Like you could just say pin.

00:41:06   John Sirkis is happy, but people may not know what you mean. You say pin number, there's

00:41:10   no ambiguity.

00:41:11   Exactly. But I'm all over the place on this because I'll say Route 66.

00:41:15   Tell me about MailRoute.

00:41:16   Well, look, MailRoute, or "route" if you prefer, but it's spelled with the "u." Look, it's

00:41:23   a super, super simple service, and it's all based on the fact that email is still the

00:41:27   number one way that everybody gets in touch with each other. We've got all the different

00:41:32   messaging and stuff like that. But look, email is still—everybody knows it. It's the thing

00:41:35   we use the most. Here's the most amazing statistic. Ninety percent of every email sent on the

00:41:42   internet is spam. And I don't know. I think for me, it's got to be more than 90 percent

00:41:47   of the email I get is spam. What MailRoute does, and it's from the team that created

00:41:51   Microsoft Forefront. These guys have a long history of great email services. You take

00:41:58   your domain, your email, your domain name. You set your MX records to point to MailRoute.

00:42:05   Your mail goes there first, goes through their filters, then it comes to your mail server.

00:42:10   Takes about a second per message.

00:42:12   So your mail is delayed by one second.

00:42:14   I mean if that bothers you then, you know, I mean stop listening to my show.

00:42:18   [Laughter]

00:42:19   Listen to my show if you think that's a problem.

00:42:21   Their spam filtering takes all the spam out and it just goes right in.

00:42:25   And it can take a domain or an email address that is inundated with spam and make it usable

00:42:31   again.

00:42:32   And it's just phenomenal.

00:42:34   you go to their website and read about and they tell you how they do it. There's no magic

00:42:38   involved, right? It's really, really smart, clever stuff. I talked about this last week.

00:42:42   I love this idea they have, this gray listing thing, which is what they do as a proper mail

00:42:48   server. If you have a good, clean mail server, you contact me. I'm a mail server. You're

00:42:53   a mail server. You contact me and you say, "I have a message for John Gruber." I can

00:42:58   say, "Hey, I'm not ready to take this message right now. Come back in a minute." And then

00:43:03   You as a proper mail server will be ready to handle that.

00:43:06   That's a normal situation in email communication.

00:43:09   And a minute later, you'll say, "Hey, I'm back.

00:43:11   I've got that message for John Gruber."

00:43:12   And I say, "Okay, here I go."

00:43:13   And I'll take it and I'll put it in the inbox for that account.

00:43:16   The thing is, is that sort of, "Hey, come back and try again in a minute.

00:43:21   I'm busy right now," thing doesn't work with all of the machines that send spam, which

00:43:25   almost all of them are, you know, they're these botnets.

00:43:30   You know, there are PCs that have been taken over by the malware and stuff like that.

00:43:35   They just blast the spam out thousands and thousands of messages a minute and never come

00:43:40   back to it, right?

00:43:41   They just have a big list of email and they blast it out.

00:43:43   So this little, this is one of the ways that mail route takes the spam out.

00:43:47   But to me, that's brilliant because it's not even getting to the point of doing the sort

00:43:52   of Bayesian analysis and looking at keywords and, you know, it has, you know, Viagra in

00:43:57   the subject and all of this sort of analysis. It's just a simple, to me, it's such a great

00:44:03   trick of getting on top of that from the outside. And it, you know, it's also the sort of thing

00:44:09   that's never going to flag a good message the wrong way. So it's a great service. They

00:44:16   match pricing on Postini or Forefront. All you have to do, if you're interested in this,

00:44:21   to check them out. It's mail route dotnet mail route dotnet not.com.net just like

00:44:28   Darren fireball dotnet. Check them out. And if you go to mail route dotnet slash

00:44:33   the talk show, it's even a little better because then they'll know you came from

00:44:36   the show. Here's your freebie. Just to not have confusion on the pronunciation.

00:44:44   there's no mail route without you.

00:44:47   I like that.

00:44:50   Mail route without you. Okay, so here's the question.

00:44:53   John Gruber.

00:44:56   What's on your mind as your potentially career ending

00:45:00   injury? Now you've already had a close call

00:45:04   about a year or two ago. You had a very close call

00:45:07   for somebody who types and doesn't want to talk into their computer through Perl

00:45:10   like John Siracusza. You've had what could

00:45:13   have almost been a career-ending injury. I'd like you to think even broader. You could

00:45:18   talk about your hand. What's a career-ending injury? What does a Mariano Rivera knee tear

00:45:25   look like for John Gruber?

00:45:31   I would say, and I'm not going to give you a note, it's your show, but it seems to me

00:45:35   that could be something that happens at Whole Foods. It could be something that happens

00:45:38   at the liquor store. You're a liberal artist. You got to go broad.

00:45:43   Yeah, well, head injury obviously comes to mind.

00:45:46   I bet there was a ton—oh, man, you don't want that.

00:45:49   No.

00:45:50   You should wear a helmet when you're right.

00:45:52   Right.

00:45:53   Head injury would obviously—I mean, I think that would—

00:45:55   I think a lot of people assume you've probably already had one.

00:45:57   Well, but maybe, you know, then, you know, I mean, it would be like one of those movies

00:46:01   where the guy gets conked on the head and gets a superpower, and then he gets conked

00:46:05   in the head again and it goes away.

00:46:06   Yes.

00:46:07   So, I mean, regardless, you know, even if my success is due to a previous head injury,

00:46:12   subsequent one might might take it away. And I would guess secondarily I think I

00:46:18   would do really poorly if I if I lost my eyesight. I think a lot of what I care

00:46:27   about and write about is what I see. Ah, if you got that I don't even want to

00:46:32   mention it but that Don Nuss disease if you got the macular degeneration. Right.

00:46:36   You know about that where you start losing your vision from the middle?

00:46:39   You know what? It's odd. I actually know a lot about it because back when I used to build websites as a freelancer, I was in charge of a website for a foundation.

00:46:51   Really?

00:46:52   For macular degeneration.

00:46:54   Oh boy, I'd like to give them some money. That scares the pants off of me, if I had pants.

00:46:58   It was actually founded by a guy who invented the Chicken McNugget.

00:47:03   Stop.

00:47:04   I swear to God, and his wife...

00:47:06   heard about that guy on NPR and he sold the idea to McDonald's right yep yep

00:47:10   but he said they had all these parts they had all these parts they didn't

00:47:13   know what to deal with right and they made nuggets and you know I mean he it

00:47:19   wasn't one of those things where he sold the idea for 15 bucks it was like he

00:47:22   sold the idea and had some like equity in it and I'll see that smart not like

00:47:25   that guy who came up with the automatic windshield wipers you know that guy got

00:47:28   the shaft the guy who invented yeah intermittent windshield yes intermittent

00:47:33   And yeah, I know exactly what you mean, right?

00:47:35   The guy, you know, it used to be you'd have two speeds, slow and fast, and this guy invented

00:47:40   the little – put a little clock on the thing, and yeah, you could say, "Wait three seconds."

00:47:45   Yeah.

00:47:46   I love that.

00:47:47   I –

00:47:48   Yeah, a guy got a sandwich out of it, like –

00:47:50   Maybe.

00:47:51   Maybe half a sandwich.

00:47:52   Lea Iacocca gave him, like, a leftover, like, tuna fish sandwich.

00:47:56   Kebaya coca.

00:47:57   Now, when you made your –

00:47:59   But anyway, the guy built a fortune on that, and his wife came down with the macular degenerate.

00:48:03   generation, and so he devoted the fortune that he'd made to trying to find a cure, find

00:48:09   help for the people.

00:48:10   But yeah, that's a tough one.

00:48:11   How cool is that?

00:48:12   That's like a James Burke thing.

00:48:13   There could be a whole Connections episode about that.

00:48:15   How we went from this chicken nugget to Don Nott's disease.

00:48:18   That's a really cool story.

00:48:19   Yeah, and it really is.

00:48:21   It is sort of like the worst way to lose your vision.

00:48:23   You lose it from the center out, and of course, the center is exactly...

00:48:28   It seems like it would be maddening.

00:48:29   As bad as it would be to start losing your peripheral vision.

00:48:32   Well, at least you could look at the thing you wanted to look at by turning your head.

00:48:36   Right.

00:48:37   Whereas macular degeneration, it's like you lose exactly what you're looking at.

00:48:39   I don't want to talk about it.

00:48:40   I don't want to talk about it anymore.

00:48:41   It's freaking me out.

00:48:42   But yeah, I think that would hurt my work.

00:48:44   You made your bones, if I may say, such as they are with the Daring Fireball site.

00:48:50   It seems to—we might have talked about this.

00:48:52   I forget.

00:48:53   You probably talked about it elsewhere.

00:48:54   But I feel like you made your reputation at a time when Apple was not—certainly not

00:48:59   Apple that they are now, but where it was, where people had every reason in the

00:49:03   world to be suspicious about whether Apple, you know, was gonna survive, whether

00:49:07   it was gonna turn into something, and then Apple, you know, got better, and you

00:49:12   were there for that. I mean, there must have, I wonder, I guess I'm wondering, was

00:49:15   there ever a time when that felt like a career-ending injury on the horizon? Like,

00:49:19   given that, you know what I mean? Like, given that you made, your career really

00:49:23   started at a time when you could provide a sane counterpoint to the people, you

00:49:28   know, who were constantly announcing the death of Apple. Did you worry when Apple

00:49:34   started getting better? I mean, it's cool because you're an Apple guy, you like

00:49:37   Apple, but did you ever worry that they get too good and you wouldn't have a job

00:49:39   anymore? No, I do, I will say though that I worry, you know, that's, I don't know

00:49:47   what's more statistically likely, some kind of in, probably an injury to me or

00:49:51   something like that, but I do worry though that if, if Apple does stop being

00:49:58   popular and suffers, you know, like if their next ten years are a decline

00:50:01   instead of the last ten years, which was this great ascent, that it would bode

00:50:06   poorly for, you know, the sponsorship and ad revenue that I use, you know, primarily

00:50:12   to earn my living. But on the other hand, I thought from the outset, I never, you

00:50:17   know, I think we've talked about this, I never really set out just to write about

00:50:20   Apple. I set out to write about whatever is on my mind, and for the last ten years

00:50:25   years, an awful lot of what's been on my mind is what Apple's up to.

00:50:29   To me, the worst thing would be if Apple got boring.

00:50:31   That's what I was going to say.

00:50:33   That was going to be my guess, because the obvious, you get bonked on the head, you get

00:50:38   a power, you get bonked on the head, it goes away.

00:50:39   That's too obvious.

00:50:40   It wouldn't just be a matter of Apple sucks, Apple's really doing great, Apple sucks again.

00:50:44   The bigger concern would be, without mentioning names, a lot of companies that I think you

00:50:48   and I have had a lot of respect for over the years simply got big and contracted and got

00:50:54   boring and got weird. And even if they just got boring, it wouldn't be fun. I mean, the

00:50:58   rumors I hear are that it's getting harder to retain practitioner and manager talent

00:51:09   at Apple just because there is a sense, not a Steve thing necessarily, but that there

00:51:13   is a sense that the most interesting problems at this point may have been solved. That's

00:51:18   just what I hear. I don't know if that's accurate or not. But at a certain point, every company

00:51:22   is going to-- if they're lucky, they get big enough

00:51:25   to where it is about scale.

00:51:27   And it is about a different kind of problem.

00:51:30   So the problem of going from iPhone-- not the problem,

00:51:33   but a company that can go from the iPhone

00:51:35   to the iPad in three years is like, wow, zing.

00:51:39   But making it easier for me to not have my Apple ID be broken

00:51:44   for two weeks is not as interesting of a headline.

00:51:47   Right.

00:51:47   But there's an awful lot of ditch digging, just not exciting work,

00:51:58   but just hard work that Apple obviously has to do over the next few years

00:52:03   just to sustain the iPhone and iPad and the stuff they already have,

00:52:07   which is not the sort of exciting stuff that the real A+ superstar

00:52:12   Mariano Rivera type engineers and designers want to be doing.

00:52:17   I mean, somebody at Apple over the next three, four, five years, not one person, but obviously

00:52:22   there's a team, is obviously just going to spend an awful lot of time just like correcting

00:52:27   the names of parks and putting the post office on the right side of the street and all the

00:52:32   map data, right?

00:52:35   It's not exciting work.

00:52:36   Like you said, somebody has got to do the work of sort of making these Apple IDs a little

00:52:43   bit more centralized so that you sign in once and everything is there, right? And

00:52:50   then you're not signing in to Game Center separately then, you know, iMessage and

00:52:56   and stuff like that. Not exciting work. And that is, in my experience,

00:53:00   having worked on a single sign-in internet for a very, very, very

00:53:06   large well-known company, it was unbelievable how much work was involved.

00:53:10   And, you know, I'm guessing at Apple this is going to be easier than a place that

00:53:13   that has such different silos as the place where we did this work.

00:53:16   But that is, whenever I want to talk to somebody and find out how much they really understand,

00:53:20   I'll say, "Have you ever worked on trying to implement even the most basic single sign-in

00:53:24   for something?"

00:53:25   Because it could hardly be… it's one of those horrible problems that could hardly

00:53:29   seem simpler to anybody else.

00:53:31   In a post-Google world, people are used to having a page with one or two or maybe three

00:53:38   fields in it, and you hit it and then a thing happens.

00:53:41   But in actuality, that is so hard.

00:53:43   If you're doing that for HR, okay, well, so you got single sign-in.

00:53:46   Well, first of all, all this information is by design in different places.

00:53:50   The stuff about your health insurance is not sitting in the same place as your, for example,

00:53:55   like when you were hired.

00:53:56   It might not be in that same thing with this, you know, updated address information.

00:54:00   Do we keep you signed into the extremely sensitive health data section as long as we keep you

00:54:04   logged into the what's happening at the picnic this weekend section?

00:54:07   Those are hard problems.

00:54:09   And then the stuff that Apple, that a lot of people, and gosh, there are so many things

00:54:12   everybody thinks Apple needs to do, but a common theme is that they still haven't

00:54:17   gotten where a lot of people would like them to be with things like web services.

00:54:20   And boy is that ever going to not seem super interesting to have a headline

00:54:25   about uptime. Justin Williams, you know Justin Williams? Yes, I was actually, yeah,

00:54:33   I was thinking of his hilarious post. I will link to it. It was all the things

00:54:39   that Apple... What is it? All the things that Apple needs to announce at WWDC.

00:54:43   Right. In three weeks.

00:54:45   No pressure.

00:54:45   Just to placate the internet. And it's a big long list, and it's really pretty good, actually.

00:54:50   It's actually good... A couple of them are a little jokey, but for the most part,

00:54:54   it's pretty serious. And obviously, they're not going to announce all of them.

00:54:57   That's it. But I mean, it's not only... But the beauty of it is, it's not just things where people

00:55:01   go, "It'd be neat if they made a blue iPhone." It's not stuff like that. It's stuff like...

00:55:07   Stuff, you hear people saying the success and longevity of this company rides on FU.

00:55:13   Right.

00:55:14   What do you have in front of you? Do you have a couple? Carpe aqua? Is that right?

00:55:18   He's a good man.

00:55:22   Everything Apple needs to introduce at WWDC to appease the internet.

00:55:27   Completely refreshed design language for iOS 7.

00:55:30   Modernized and updated system apps for iOS that match the new Ivy design language,

00:55:35   you know, etc, etc, multiple people on FaceTime calls, an update to iMessage that makes it reliable,

00:55:42   an update to iMessage that allows people to leave group chats. These are all really good features,

00:55:47   right? I mean, and it's a long list and there's a lot of...

00:55:49   But the point is, these features, you've heard a lot of people actually say.

00:55:52   Like...

00:55:52   And it's really like ditch digging. It's just... I'm not saying that there's no satisfaction in

00:55:57   doing it, but it's not exciting. You know, it's the sort of thing where it's hard to keep,

00:56:03   you know, your A+ guys working on something like that as opposed to working on

00:56:08   going off on their own and doing something new. When you were a developer,

00:56:12   I mean, I was never like a real developer, but

00:56:15   I mean, even just in making web pages, which is what I really did,

00:56:19   it was so much more interesting to me to get to make a design,

00:56:23   to do the UX. I mean, that was the fun brainy stuff.

00:56:27   And then the satisfying stuff, even all the way down to doing production graphics,

00:56:30   was always really fun for me. I really liked all of that.

00:56:32   But then something like okay, well, we're moving to this different content management system

00:56:36   And now we're gonna have to change hand change these you know variables in these things

00:56:41   We're gonna have to certainly there's a certain amount you could do in Bb

00:56:43   I would find a replace

00:56:44   But I always know for the guys who did the real developing it was never that fun

00:56:48   To have to take the code base and go make it work in this different place for example

00:56:53   This is just anecdotal

00:56:54   But did you ever experience that like it's one thing to get to write this Perl script that does a thing and then it's another

00:56:59   thing to have to go all do this like scrubbing with a toothbrush to try and

00:57:03   make this thing a little better it's not it's not absolutely well and that's why

00:57:07   I admire the developers like barebone software or the Omni group who build

00:57:15   apps and then spend years iterating and iterating and iterating and keeping them

00:57:20   up to date and keeping them relevant whereas the most exciting part is the

00:57:26   original version right? BB Edit 1.0 is the one that was the most exciting. It was actually

00:57:31   2.1 was the first public version.

00:57:35   That's all for until I got a WYSIWYG editor that is literally starting in 1995 that is

00:57:41   pretty much that's all I used to make web pages. That was it. It was just BB Edit. I

00:57:45   would use the includes when they came out.

00:57:48   Rich I think just tweeted the other day that it was the 20th anniversary of the first public

00:57:53   version of BB Edit and then he said and it's worth three days away from the

00:57:56   first public griping about the price but that think about that 20 years working

00:58:02   on an editor that is still one of the top most relevant programming text

00:58:08   editors for the Mac right I mean that I just salute that because it is it you

00:58:13   know most of those 20 years most of those 20 days in the 20 years Rich

00:58:18   Segal's been working on the app and most of those days have not been exciting

00:58:21   work. It's just hard work, you know. And same with, you know, Omni Group's another

00:58:27   great example where these guys have been working on some of these apps.

00:58:30   They sweat stuff so hard, you know, and again companies I've just done some work

00:58:35   with, again Agile Bits. The stuff that they sweat that you will hopefully never

00:58:39   notice how hard they sweated it, and you have no, I mean, not that you need to

00:58:44   because you're the user. You're the Apple fan. You're used to, you are wonderfully

00:58:48   lucky and you're fortunate to not have to notice how good this is. But it is

00:58:54   difficult work and in the case of some of these things you've certainly been

00:58:58   around when you have to do a giant teardown of something. You know like

00:59:03   where it's almost like a Western town where all you see as the viewer are the

00:59:08   fronts of these stores but sometimes you know but something like Snow Leopard.

00:59:12   Let me ask you something. So they talked about this on the accidental tech podcast.

00:59:16   the TikTok Tik thing? Is that a real term or were they making that up?

00:59:19   No, that's a real term.

00:59:22   Like every, something like roughly every other OS X release, is that right? Like has some zingers.

00:59:28   But something like Snow Leopard was very controversial in some ways,

00:59:32   because to somebody at Simpleton like me, you go like, "Okay, well, where's the publish and

00:59:37   subscribe? Where is the theming?" Obviously, you know what I mean. Like, where's the zazz in this?

00:59:43   But, you know, knowing if you go actually and read what happened, I mean, they're so

00:59:47   that they tore the guts out and changed so much stuff about that, right?

00:59:49   It's it was not a trivial thing where they were just being lazy.

00:59:52   It's just that we couldn't, as a user, we shouldn't notice how much changed about it,

00:59:57   right?

00:59:58   Right.

00:59:59   And it was a tough thing to sell, I think, because of what people expect from Apple is

01:00:04   people expect, you know, every time Apple has an event, they expect Steve Jobs pulling

01:00:11   the iPhone out of his pocket and blowing it, the world away with something that seems like

01:00:16   it's literally from five, ten years in the future.

01:00:19   And then instead, they said, "Well, we went into the guts and we cleaned out a lot of

01:00:23   the junk."

01:00:24   And we modernized the plumbing and somehow pitched it in a way that didn't have people

01:00:32   raising pitchforks.

01:00:34   I do think though that it's the exact sort of thing that they could not get away with

01:00:37   today.

01:00:39   in a couple of years, but right now at this fever pitch of sort of, you know, Apple can't

01:00:46   do anything new without Steve Jobs' doom and gloom, they couldn't do that today.

01:00:51   No, no, I think you're right, but it's, yeah. Anyway, in terms of career-ending injuries,

01:00:57   I think you will still have a very long, live career as long as you protect your head and

01:01:00   let your lady do the cooking.

01:01:02   What about you?

01:01:04   Oh, my career-ending injury? I think I've already had most of them, and that's why I

01:01:08   what I do. I mean, this isn't much of a career, Jon. But, you know, something could always

01:01:13   go wrong. I've had a pinched nerve for a while, and so that's... I think I should probably

01:01:17   go to a doctor about that, but...

01:01:19   What about your voice? See, I think I...

01:01:21   It's pretty reedy. I sound like somebody trying to throw away a clarinet.

01:01:26   But what about if you got like this Larry Page thing?

01:01:28   Oh, if I got... Oh, if I lost my instrument. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know,

01:01:33   Scott Dilbert? What's his name? Adam Dilbert? He's been diagnosing him remotely. Did you

01:01:37   know that?

01:01:38   I haven't. Yeah. Scott Dilbert, the Dilbert guy. Scott Adams. Thank you. He's pretty sure he knows

01:01:45   what Larry Page has, because he has something very similar. And it sounds... Another one,

01:01:49   it's like the vocal version of macular degeneration. It's another one of those

01:01:52   things that sounds just awful. Or like when Rush Limbaugh had the hearing thing. That's what I live

01:01:57   in fear of, is waking up one day and it's like something out of the Kafka story. I wouldn't mind

01:02:03   waking up as a roach. I mean, my office is already a pretty good environment for that. But as you

01:02:08   As you get older and your body starts working with less dependability and symmetry, you

01:02:14   do kind of wonder, "Is there going to be a day where I wake up?"

01:02:17   I don't understand how Rush Limbaugh does what he does.

01:02:21   He's legally deaf.

01:02:24   They couldn't fix that.

01:02:25   I don't think so.

01:02:26   I mean, he's not like stone cold deaf, but I think he's effectively deaf, but yet somehow

01:02:33   does a four-hour daily radio show.

01:02:36   Setting aside all the jokes that I'm tempted to make, that is actually really amazing.

01:02:41   You know what I mean?

01:02:42   To be able to continue doing that.

01:02:43   You know, it just seems to me like you would do poorly.

01:02:46   If I got the vocal cord thing, I might have to stop doing this show.

01:02:49   I take your point.

01:02:50   Yeah.

01:02:51   So if I lost my voice, like, I'd have to go back to not writing or not web developing.

01:02:55   Yeah.

01:02:56   See, that would be a hard move for me.

01:02:58   Yeah, this is pretty much all I'm good at.

01:03:02   all uncomfortable doing is uh being on three or four podcasts a day. I yeah. Can I make

01:03:07   a I'm gonna make a possibly and I don't mean this to be disparaging. No. There is uh you know.

01:03:13   No I'll take any notes you give me John for sure. Well with the Larry Page thing did you see him

01:03:16   did you see him talk the other day? No no. And I'd you know hats off to him you know he came out the

01:03:22   day before I/O with a with a post and just said look here's what's been going on with my voice

01:03:26   for the last year and and you know that he did you know that they don't know what the cause is but he

01:03:30   He lost his left, use of his left vocal cord a while back.

01:03:35   And then the same thing, a couple of years later, the same thing started happening to

01:03:38   his right vocal cord, but it's not complete, but it's left him.

01:03:41   His voice is, a couple of people have described it as froggy.

01:03:48   It's not, you know, and it makes him, so it makes him quiet and he needed like a different

01:03:52   microphone on stage, but he did well.

01:03:54   And as his stint, you know, and he was on stage, it was a very long keynote.

01:03:58   man they were up there for like over four hours but he was on for I don't

01:04:02   know like 45 minutes and his voice was to me it seemed stronger at the end than

01:04:06   when he first came out but it does remind me of the way that like in the

01:04:12   Bond James Bond movies the the Bond villain usually has some kind of very

01:04:16   unusual and distinct like physiological oh look you got a milky eye or you got a

01:04:23   scar right you got a blow felt scar or something yeah you got like a metal

01:04:28   claws for hands or something like that, you know, and I feel like it adds a sort

01:04:32   of Bond villain aspect to Larry Page is that he has a very unusual froggy voice.

01:04:39   Oh my god. Well you know the thing is... We'll just cut that part out. Yeah, you know the

01:04:45   other thing is like he's got a lot of dough. If he were to get a claw hand, I

01:04:49   think that would make be very distinctive. For example, I would know

01:04:52   that it's him versus the other guy. I don't know who's who. He's also proposing to me

01:04:58   some sort of Bond villain-esque grandiose things like he...

01:05:01   You sure you don't have to get an Eric Schmidt?

01:05:03   No Larry Page he offhandedly said look there's a you know wouldn't it be nice if technologists

01:05:09   had like their own special island where we could we could have our own laws and we could

01:05:14   try out new things that not maybe the you know the real world isn't ready for yet. You

01:05:20   know we could get rid of all these pesky regulations on medical records and stuff like that and

01:05:25   see what happens if Google could have access to everybody's medical records in this controlled

01:05:29   environment without worrying about it.

01:05:30   There's no way he said that.

01:05:31   No, I swear to God he did.

01:05:32   Oh my God.

01:05:33   I swear to God.

01:05:34   Read Matt Honan on it.

01:05:36   I have bookmarked your link to that.

01:05:37   I haven't read it yet.

01:05:38   He's saying basically in this – in this – Testopian.

01:05:41   In this utopian environment, we would finally get to do what our league of let's say developers

01:05:47   would really love to do.

01:05:48   We want to get our hands around this information and see what we can do with it.

01:05:51   Right.

01:05:52   you know when you start talking about setting up islands you know I mean you

01:05:56   know you're like Cobra Commander right oh there's no question about it

01:06:00   remember that time that Cobra Commander they like set off a nuke in the in the

01:06:05   Gulf of Mexico and it made it an island rise up and then they planted a Cobra

01:06:09   flag on it and boom they had a country it was that easy yeah it was that easy

01:06:13   because if you once you put your flag on the land then that's yours and they

01:06:17   you know you made new land I know you're not a comic fan but when you get a

01:06:20   chance Google for Magneto and Genosha because it sounds a little bit like this

01:06:24   X-Men villain who on a variety of occasions I think he started his own

01:06:28   meteor at one point he had a utopia or dystopia if you like for these things

01:06:34   and that sounds kind of like what you're talking about it sounds to me like this

01:06:37   fella is just a little bit away from like a like a purple metal hood and

01:06:41   maybe some laser beam sharks. Let's be honest John like Metal Claw

01:06:46   notwithstanding he's got the dough he's got the dough and he's got the developers

01:06:50   They could be, again in my parlance, it would be more like Hydra, or in your case like these

01:06:53   G.I. Joe fellas.

01:06:55   He could certainly have his own standing army of people wearing, Google Glass, Google Glass,

01:07:01   perfect for the soldier of the future.

01:07:04   Well, and these self-driving cars, right?

01:07:06   Put a couple of guns on those self-driving cars and you've got an army, right?

01:07:09   Oh, you've got to cut all this out.

01:07:11   I think we, you know, I'm going to think about this now because there is so much there.

01:07:16   So he's going to get all the information.

01:07:17   He's got the standing army.

01:07:18   He's got an island.

01:07:19   claw arm, we're pretty sure he may eventually have a cool synthesized voice.

01:07:23   All he needs now is he needs some kind of an affectation like, again, maybe

01:07:29   he's really into playing competitive chess or maybe he's got a bullwhip.

01:07:33   Shouldn't he have something that he could put into the electronic claw that

01:07:37   would give him, like immediately, if you had an action figure of, it's Larry Page,

01:07:40   not Sergey, Larry, right? If you had something where you could make an

01:07:44   action figure of him. He'd have your data in one hand and a whip in the other.

01:07:50   Balls. See, you'd have your balls. Is that it? What does your data look like? It's just like a

01:07:58   big glowing sphere of ones and zeros. And he has this little Igor guy come up who says, "You could

01:08:03   just go out and get to know name." Right, that would be Eric Schmidt. Let me do the second

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01:10:30   Yeah.

01:10:31   But I'm gonna be thinking about that all day. We might want to wrap back around to that in a little while.

01:10:35   I think with a little preparation we could come up with a pretty-- we could pitch. I think we could pitch that idea.

01:10:39   And the thing is, if you're a supervillain, you know you're a supervillain. And it's like in the Avengers.

01:10:44   Iron Man-- no spoilers-- but Iron Man figures out that Loki's a lot like him. Right?

01:10:49   He figures out that part of the thing with Loki is he wants to be seen doing-- he wants to be noticed.

01:10:55   So maybe it's the kind of thing where Larry Page would actually fund it himself.

01:10:59   maybe as like an infomercial for Page Island.

01:11:03   Yeah, maybe that's a better analogy than to the Bond villain, because the Bond villains always

01:11:11   have some kind of dastardly plot to take over the world. And, you know, it's something that

01:11:18   needs to be stopped. Whereas in a comic book, you got a long term, it's a saga, right? And,

01:11:24   you know, a Bond thing is going to get wrapped up in two hours and the guy's probably going to be

01:11:28   be dead. Whereas the comic book thing is going to go on for 20, 30 years and it's going to

01:11:32   cycle around. Right? Because you know what I mean? Like we're going to be talking about

01:11:35   Google 20 years from now. And Larry Page is probably still going to be the CEO.

01:11:38   Well, there's different kinds of supervillains, whether it's in Bond or whether it's in whatever.

01:11:43   And I think as with a lot of people have preferences in certain kinds of time travel timeline ideas,

01:11:48   I think in this case everybody's got different kinds of villains that they really like. You

01:11:52   got – what are some classics? You got the villain who has a grudge. Right? It could

01:11:57   somebody like, you know, "Oh, Dr. Octopus, he wants to get that Spider-Man because

01:12:02   he's so much cooler than him." I think there's always the money villain.

01:12:05   There is, now, was Goldfinger, do you think he was, he was kind of a straight up

01:12:08   money villain, right? Yeah, he, well, yeah, he wanted, yeah, he was a money villain.

01:12:12   You've got the, you got the, what about, what about the guy from No Country for

01:12:16   Old Men? He, he's, he is a, he's a revenge grudge villain, right? Yeah, he's a code of

01:12:23   honored. He's going back. He's going back after M for what she did to his jaw, right?

01:12:28   Yeah. Okay. That's great. How great was that scene when he takes that thing out?

01:12:32   Oh, that was great. I mean, my wife watched it like three times. Yeah. And then you got,

01:12:37   so you got that. And then you've got, of course, you've always got the, the anarchistic,

01:12:41   no, you've got the sociopath, psychotic kind of person who just wants to cause mayhem.

01:12:47   Kind of villain. You're a joker in the, the Dark Knight. Do you have a sense of it? No,

01:12:52   I'm not saying Larry Page is a super villain with a claw for hand, but if he were, if he were, if he were,

01:12:56   what would the nature of his villainy be? Does he, doesn't have to be evil, you know?

01:13:00   I would say, I would say he's the misguided

01:13:02   utopian.

01:13:04   That he actually, it does not, I do not believe that he is a bad person or that he has bad intentions.

01:13:11   I actually think that he truly is a utopian with the best interests of-

01:13:17   That's what Magneto is too. That's, that's super interesting.

01:13:20   at heart. But he's, but he is, I think, misguided and erroneous, and that it's a,

01:13:26   you know, you know, like if Dr. Frankenstein had good intentions. That's a good point. So if you

01:13:34   could, you could go even with the best intentions and a self-driving island and everybody wearing

01:13:39   half a pair of glasses, you know, you could create an environment. It seems like everybody would be

01:13:44   happy even if you're not allowed to live on the island like it would be better

01:13:49   like and and and what I say by that is that I would be better if I'm wrong and

01:13:53   that he gets everything he wants and it works out the way he's saying because

01:13:59   that would actually be great for everybody yeah right what I'm saying is

01:14:03   that I think what I think is that this stuff is just gonna be a disaster in

01:14:09   terms of privacy and other aspects like that and that the utopian things aren't

01:14:14   It's hard to see right now for me, it's hard to see how it turns out great, you know?

01:14:19   But, you know, as Churchill said, you know, history is written by the guys with the claw hands.

01:14:24   Yeah. We only have a minute or two, but I do think there is something weird going on.

01:14:27   I feel like, you know, and I feel like the tech stuff, it goes through great cycles,

01:14:31   and it's what makes it such an interesting thing to write about.

01:14:33   And I do feel like we're reaching this inflection point where things are dividing.

01:14:39   Dividing and and the Google Glass really as much as it right now

01:14:44   It's just a curiosity that there's only you know

01:14:46   A couple thousand pairs that have been put out in people's hands and they cost this ridiculous amount and they're not trying to sell it

01:14:51   To the mass market yet, but it's clearly one of the most divisive things that's come out in

01:14:57   Ever since I've been writing about technology, right and Nick Nick Bilton had a great piece in the New York Times today

01:15:04   He's at the Google I/o conference

01:15:06   Which and at this place he says there might be you know it seems as though there might be even a thousand people here wearing

01:15:12   Google Glass right so instead of like where people out in the valley out in San Francisco like hey

01:15:17   I actually saw a guy at the pizza joint the other day wearing Google Glass wow I saw somebody here you go to

01:15:22   Easy peed was eating alone

01:15:25   You go to Google IO, and there's a thousand people wearing it, and he you know Nick Bilton really seemed to it's a great piece

01:15:32   I'll put it in the show notes, but

01:15:34   It really seems like you know it's it's a divergence

01:15:37   You know and he had this thing where he was talking to a guy who was talking about how great the winky app is

01:15:42   Which is the actual name of the app and that's the one that takes a photo by an eye gesture like a winking right?

01:15:47   Sure

01:15:47   and

01:15:48   The guy was saying that he's addicted to it and that he wasn't wearing his glass the other day

01:15:52   And he was winking to take a picture and nothing happened

01:15:54   And he realized that his brains been wired that he just assumes that when he winks he's gonna get a home

01:16:00   And all right, really so yeah and then Bilton says and then you know, he's got real creeped out

01:16:06   And he thought well, I'm gonna I got to go to the restroom

01:16:08   I'm gonna go take a leak and I'm gonna get away from this for a little bit and he went in and it's you know

01:16:12   It's a tech conference the line to get in a men's room is long. You got to wait

01:16:15   He waits he waits and then you know

01:16:17   You're an all opens up and he goes to take a leak and he looks and the four guys next to him are all wearing

01:16:22   Glass and all sort of looking around while they're taking a leak in the urinal

01:16:28   Right and that that's something that's weird. That's anything to indicate the activity

01:16:32   Is there anything like a red or there's nothing to indicate what's happening inside the glass to somebody who's not wearing it?

01:16:39   No, no, you have no idea. Oh, man

01:16:42   Well, you know, I think you know, I think you're right if I understand what you're saying. I think you're right. It's

01:16:49   It's it's so hard to tell until the time has passed like when something important has happened

01:16:54   I mean you could think something important happened, but you know

01:16:57   Now, it seemed like a really big deal

01:17:00   when Google search came out, because as a consumer,

01:17:03   we saw how different that was, even from the, at the time,

01:17:06   amazing Alta Vista.

01:17:07   But the real story, in some ways, was advertising.

01:17:09   What made Google Google, in some ways,

01:17:11   I think we could probably agree, is advertising.

01:17:14   It was a MacGuffin in some ways.

01:17:16   The search was great.

01:17:17   And I wonder if there's a part of me that really does wonder

01:17:20   if Google Glass will be that thing.

01:17:22   But here's the thing.

01:17:24   Talk about sauce for the gander.

01:17:26   I've been roundly criticized by many of my friends

01:17:28   for how skeptical I am about lauding Apple products

01:17:32   before they've come out.

01:17:33   I think it's pretty interesting the number of people

01:17:35   I've seen-- well, and again, this is just--

01:17:38   I don't follow this stuff, as you know.

01:17:39   But in the aggregate, there are a lot of people,

01:17:42   including me, who are a little bit freaked out by Google Glass,

01:17:44   the whole notion of it.

01:17:45   And the fact that it's tied to Google, who's already

01:17:47   getting freaky.

01:17:48   But given the massive number of people

01:17:50   who've talked about that, I think

01:17:51   it's also pretty interesting that how many people are saying,

01:17:55   "Oh, but once you put them on, it's pretty cool."

01:17:59   Have you heard people say that?

01:18:01   - I have, you know, and I--

01:18:02   - This doesn't seem kind of interesting though,

01:18:04   it's like we always talk about with Apple products,

01:18:06   you can say all you want about it,

01:18:07   but until you hold it in your hand

01:18:08   and use it for a couple days, that's the aha moment.

01:18:11   So do you think we might be on the wrong side of this,

01:18:13   that we need to like go around in these?

01:18:14   - I could be, you know, definitely might be, you know,

01:18:17   and I also see too how this is the,

01:18:20   This is the Michael, what's his name, from the Wall Street movie.

01:18:26   Oh yeah.

01:18:28   This is his, you know, that big brick-sized cell phone that he had in 1986.

01:18:33   Wearing his bathrobe, walking on the beach.

01:18:35   Right, and you're supposed to be really impressed by that, that you could be out on the beach and be on a phone call,

01:18:40   and the thing is the size of, you know, it's like the size of a briefcase.

01:18:44   You know, Google Glass is that for these heads-up displays.

01:18:48   I mean, you know, I don't think there's any doubt

01:18:51   There's no doubt in my mind that it won't be you know

01:18:53   I don't know five ten years from now that you'll be able to buy a normal pair of eyeglasses

01:18:58   And our committee contacts, you know, yes. Yeah. Well, who knows I the context seems hard battery wise. I'm not quite yeah

01:19:06   You know, I'm not quite sure how you something electronic could be reduced to a contact lens at in in the near future

01:19:12   I mean, but you'll never have a computer in your pocket. Well, I'm not saying never I'm just saying that seems

01:19:18   Yeah, maybe a little bit further out in the event horizon, but so we look at it

01:19:22   It looks a little bit wonky, but but who knows what the next or third iteration of this, right?

01:19:26   I don't think people are gonna get used to Google Glass as it exists today not making you look like a complete jackass

01:19:32   I I fully acknowledge though that they'll be able to it's quickly be able to iterate and get it

01:19:38   So that it looks a lot more like a normal pair of glasses at which point

01:19:41   You know

01:19:44   Something like that, I guess is inevitable. I don't know

01:19:47   You know that

01:19:49   You know and that we're gonna have to get used to it

01:19:51   And it's just just putting your foot in the stand or and your hand up in here and saying this is creepy is

01:19:57   Irrelevant because people are gonna do it anyway. Mm-hmm

01:19:59   Don't know

01:20:03   Well, let's check back in see I can't wait to be I can't wait though to tell my habit of looking at my cell phone

01:20:08   every five minutes makes me a curmudgeon rather than

01:20:13   Like I'm the old-fashioned guy who's looking

01:20:15   Staring at your external dingus instead of just leering creepily at men in the restroom, right? John's so antisocial

01:20:23   He hardly ever watches anybody else pee right and instead of me looking at attention deficit disorder

01:20:28   I look like the guy with you know, the the monk like serenity. I

01:20:33   Gotta go. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on this was great. You're the best. I'll see you in a couple weeks

01:20:40   You know you will.

01:20:41   I'll be out in your town.

01:20:42   Yeah, and if not, I'll just see you on Larry's Island.

01:20:42   I'll be out in your town.

01:20:44   And if not, I'll just see you on Larry's Island.