The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► This is a special evening edition of the talk show, I guess, this week.

00:00:06 ◼   ► Marco Arment.

00:00:07 ◼   ► Marco will come.

00:00:08 ◼   ► Are you doing the Zeldman again?

00:00:11 ◼   ► I'm trying to.

00:00:13 ◼   ► It was so nice.

00:00:14 ◼   ► I just felt so welcome when Zeldman did that.

00:00:17 ◼   ► It sounds like you're sick.

00:00:18 ◼   ► I know.

00:00:19 ◼   ► I can't do it.

00:00:20 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:00:22 ◼   ► So I've joined your club of people who don't own any Apple shares directly.

00:00:27 ◼   ► You did own it before?

00:00:29 ◼   ► today. I owned a good amount of them. Wait, so you sold today?

00:00:32 ◼   ► I did. What?

00:00:35 ◼   ► Sounds crazy, I know. Buy high, sell low.

00:00:39 ◼   ► Well, I've been really good at knowing when to buy. I really haven't mastered the art of when

00:00:45 ◼   ► to sell yet, but over the last couple of years, I've accumulated shares based on just putting a

00:00:51 ◼   ► little bit of money into my gambling fund every month or so and just knowing when to buy. So I've

00:00:57 ◼   ► So I picked them up really cheap.

00:00:59 ◼   ► So I came out actually pretty ahead,

00:01:02 ◼   ► 'cause my average price was very low.

00:01:03 ◼   ► It was like 4.06 or something like that.

00:01:06 ◼   ► And I was waiting until earnings call day,

00:01:11 ◼   ► figuring that there would be a spike

00:01:12 ◼   ► after the holiday earnings call,

00:01:15 ◼   ► like there was last year, if I remember correctly,

00:01:17 ◼   ► that holiday earnings would be so good,

00:01:19 ◼   ► I figured there'd be a spike,

00:01:20 ◼   ► and then I'd probably sell it all,

00:01:23 ◼   ► 'cause I kinda wanna get out of owning individual stocks.

00:01:25 ◼   ► I'm not that great at it.

00:01:28 ◼   ► Like, I haven't lost any money with it overall,

00:01:31 ◼   ► but I haven't made enough to make it worth the hassle.

00:01:34 ◼   ► And I found that owning it was making it hard for me

00:01:39 ◼   ► to objectively see what's going on.

00:01:42 ◼   ► Because it adds a lot of skin in the game for me.

00:01:45 ◼   ► And I don't know if it's colored my opinion,

00:01:48 ◼   ► but I think it might have.

00:01:50 ◼   ► And so I just wanted to get out of that.

00:01:51 ◼   ► For a lot of the same reasons you said,

00:01:53 ◼   ► you don't own individual shares also.

00:01:54 ◼   ► And you have a bigger problem, of course,

00:01:56 ◼   ► of possibly being able to affect it.

00:01:58 ◼   ► I don't have that problem, but I might someday.

00:02:00 ◼   ► - That's the main thing for me.

00:02:04 ◼   ► But it's actually a good point that you make, though,

00:02:06 ◼   ► about it coloring your objectivity.

00:02:08 ◼   ► You know, or I hate that word, but you know,

00:02:10 ◼   ► that when you personally have skin in the game,

00:02:13 ◼   ► when it's your money,

00:02:14 ◼   ► there's more of an emotional attachment.

00:02:17 ◼   ► And you know, I can't honestly say

00:02:18 ◼   ► I don't have any emotional attachment

00:02:20 ◼   ► Apple's success in general, period, but not owning the stock individually certainly makes

00:02:28 ◼   ► that easier.

00:02:31 ◼   ► So I sold today at like $462, which is good because it actually went down.

00:02:37 ◼   ► Now it's at $448 already.

00:02:41 ◼   ► The reason I sold was because last night, of course, it took a huge dip after the earnings

00:02:44 ◼   ► were released and some Wall Street people were disappointed.

00:02:48 ◼   ► And I realized that this is probably

00:02:52 ◼   ► going to be, for Apple investor purposes, the best news

00:02:57 ◼   ► day for the next six months in all likelihood.

00:03:01 ◼   ► And the fact that it took that big of a dive

00:03:04 ◼   ► on what's probably going to be the best news day for a while,

00:03:09 ◼   ► that scared me.

00:03:10 ◼   ► And so I figured, you know what?

00:03:12 ◼   ► Let me get out now.

00:03:13 ◼   ► If I really want to get back in at a later date,

00:03:16 ◼   ► I'll get back in on the upswing.

00:03:18 ◼   ► I didn't want to-- I was tired of writing it down.

00:03:21 ◼   ► And because I always feel like buying individual stocks

00:03:26 ◼   ► as a casual investor is kind of a sucker's game.

00:03:28 ◼   ► The whole system-- there's all these big investors that

00:03:31 ◼   ► are so much bigger than us, and all these complexities

00:03:34 ◼   ► and derivatives and options and everything that

00:03:36 ◼   ► are just way above my head.

00:03:38 ◼   ► And I just felt kind of like a sucker playing this game.

00:03:41 ◼   ► So I wanted to get out.

00:03:43 ◼   ► I figured this was a good time.

00:03:44 ◼   ► And I figure, because what's going

00:03:46 ◼   ► to happen over the next few months of the stock price?

00:03:48 ◼   ► I don't see a lot of reasons for it to go up

00:03:50 ◼   ► if it went down for this.

00:03:52 ◼   ► So I don't know.

00:03:53 ◼   ► That being said, of course, disclaimer.

00:03:55 ◼   ► This is not financial advice, because I

00:03:56 ◼   ► don't know what I'm talking about.

00:03:57 ◼   ► But now that I got out of it, I kind of already

00:04:02 ◼   ► feel free from that burden of having to think about that

00:04:06 ◼   ► and having to babysit that asset.

00:04:08 ◼   ► And one of the things about it is, for objectivity,

00:04:14 ◼   ► for me, I don't have to now worry about what everyone else

00:04:19 ◼   ► thinks about Apple.

00:04:21 ◼   ► Because when you own the stock, you

00:04:23 ◼   ► have to worry about the public as a whole voting

00:04:26 ◼   ► for that company with confidence,

00:04:28 ◼   ► or Wall Street voting with their confidence in this company.

00:04:31 ◼   ► And we've seen time and time again--

00:04:34 ◼   ► I mean, you make this your specialty-- time and time

00:04:37 ◼   ► again seeing these odd disconnects between actual Apple prospects and products and success

00:04:44 ◼   ► and what a lot of people in the press think about it. And I'm just so tired of having

00:04:50 ◼   ► to worry about that disconnect as something that will directly affect me. So that's the

00:04:57 ◼   ► biggest reason I wanted to get out was that I realized that I can be happy owning Apple

00:05:01 ◼   ► products developing in the Apple ecosystem, being involved with Apple, choosing these

00:05:07 ◼   ► things for myself without regard to what the market as a whole thinks because they're so

00:05:12 ◼   ► often so far from what I think.

00:05:15 ◼   ► Yeah, I totally feel the same way. I don't have any regrets over not owning Apple stock.

00:05:22 ◼   ► Especially for example, I even linked to a thing today pointing out that from 2007 to

00:05:30 ◼   ► 2009 that the Apple stock took a huge dive and part of that obviously was that the whole economy was in a tailspin with the

00:05:36 ◼   ► You know financial institutions collapse, but if ever there was a time when like if the argument now

00:05:42 ◼   ► Is that the reason that Apple stock is is going down and has gone down so severely in last few months

00:05:48 ◼   ► Is that the growth is over?

00:05:50 ◼   ► Growth growth growth future growth future growth is all that matters is what the people who are saying no

00:05:55 ◼   ► No, no, no that the market is actually treating Apple right and I'm the fanboy who's you know?

00:06:00 ◼   ► Digging for an excuse to support my beloved Apple

00:06:04 ◼   ► well, then surely

00:06:07 ◼   ► 2008 2009 was the time when the stock should have been roaring because all the growth was ahead of it

00:06:14 ◼   ► Right the iPhone was out. It was obviously going to grow

00:06:17 ◼   ► It was you know anybody who had two clues about what was going on in mobile, you know could see that this thing had an unbelievably

00:06:25 ◼   ► Unbelievably tremendous future and was probably not that far off from Steve Jobs boast that it was five years ahead of the competition

00:06:32 ◼   ► right 2000 circa 2007 Android was I think everybody would agree now was dogshit. Oh, yeah

00:06:39 ◼   ► Even the people who bought it like I like back then I would go to all of Tom where's investor things

00:06:43 ◼   ► and so of course all the investors always have the brand newest phone possible and

00:06:47 ◼   ► So I remember the first time I saw the t-mobile was at the g1 the first Android phone. Yeah

00:06:53 ◼   ► Was it brown or am I black? That's the Zune

00:06:56 ◼   ► It was it was you know, the black like, you know

00:06:59 ◼   ► So I had like a banding thing and yeah

00:07:01 ◼   ► It was weird and and even even this guy who just bought it and was so happy to show it off his oh, yeah

00:07:06 ◼   ► It's a piece of trash

00:07:07 ◼   ► Even he knew that I've it must have I think it was at South by Southwest and

00:07:12 ◼   ► So it might have been I think that that that g1 came out at the end of 2008

00:07:19 ◼   ► So it was probably March 2009.

00:07:21 ◼   ► So again, I think 2008, 2009 is when if growth was really what the market valued, future

00:07:29 ◼   ► growth, then that's when that stock should have been shooting up and wasn't.

00:07:33 ◼   ► Merlin Mann had one and swore by it.

00:07:36 ◼   ► I don't know how long he's in fact –

00:07:38 ◼   ► And she won?

00:07:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I swear to God.

00:07:40 ◼   ► And I remember this distinctly.

00:07:41 ◼   ► It's South by Southwest 2009 and it's daytime.

00:07:46 ◼   ► daytime. I mean, I was probably late afternoon, probably having a cocktail. But I still remember

00:07:50 ◼   ► it was daytime because it was at the Four Seasons in Austin, and the Four Seasons has a lot of

00:07:55 ◼   ► windows. And so times that I'm there, that I've been there in the daylight, I remember it being

00:08:01 ◼   ► daytime. And it was me and Merlin and Michael Lop. And I'd never seen the G1 before. Merlin

00:08:09 ◼   ► showed it to me and it was just so awful and Michael looked at it and Michael was so repulsed

00:08:16 ◼   ► like he didn't even want to touch it. I mean he was like really like grossed out like maybe he

00:08:21 ◼   ► acted honestly. He was trying to not be... You know how like if you're as an adult, not as a kid,

00:08:27 ◼   ► but as an adult, if you go somewhere and you're served some food that you're not going to eat,

00:08:31 ◼   ► you're just going to move it around your plate and not say anything and just be polite about it,

00:08:35 ◼   ► But you know that's what Michael was like he was like moving it around his plate like but there was no way

00:08:40 ◼   ► He was gonna actually try it and Merlin was giving us this explanation for what he found appealing about it

00:08:46 ◼   ► And you know I think it has something to do with Gmail that you know maybe the Gmail app did something that ah that's the connection

00:08:51 ◼   ► You know there was some kind of way that you can make an argument that it did something pretty good

00:08:56 ◼   ► You know maybe Gmail, and I guess probably did pretty good job with your Google Calendar right out of the box even back then

00:09:02 ◼   ► but

00:09:04 ◼   ► Michael was just I didn't know what to say Michael was just like ultimately he's just like wait just but stop stop just look at it

00:09:11 ◼   ► I mean and and even Merlin who was high on the thing at the time

00:09:16 ◼   ► He was like and he might have been high on something else. I don't know but

00:09:19 ◼   ► He was like yeah, you do have a point there

00:09:22 ◼   ► Anyway, that's when the stock should have been shooting up and it wasn't it's never really been that that related to reality

00:09:28 ◼   ► It's also not based on on any kind of

00:09:33 ◼   ► of present value of the company's products and prospects.

00:09:37 ◼   ► There's so much external force on it.

00:09:43 ◼   ► As you said, that whole period when the stock was tanking

00:09:47 ◼   ► because the whole market was tanking,

00:09:49 ◼   ► there's all those external factors.

00:09:50 ◼   ► So even when the company was doing fantastically

00:09:53 ◼   ► with new products and showing tons of signs of growth,

00:09:55 ◼   ► the whole market was so bad

00:09:56 ◼   ► that the stock price sunk anyway.

00:09:58 ◼   ► And now we're seeing other problems of,

00:10:02 ◼   ► well, they might be reaching saturation in some places. They might be, they can't possibly

00:10:09 ◼   ► keep growing. They were growing a year ago because it would be more money than the world

00:10:12 ◼   ► has to invest in them. There's all sorts of external factors now that they're running

00:10:17 ◼   ► into that are being problematic for the stock price, even though the company seems like

00:10:22 ◼   ► they're in really great shape.

00:10:24 ◼   ► Dave: Right. I just want to say here, I just want to throw this out. Anybody who's listening

00:10:27 ◼   ► to this show extemporaneously in the next day or two after it comes out is going to

00:10:32 ◼   ► know the context of what we're talking about.

00:10:34 ◼   ► But the shows are always up there forever, and people listen to them.

00:10:38 ◼   ► Just for historical context, we're recording this on the evening of the 24th of January,

00:10:45 ◼   ► 2013.

00:10:46 ◼   ► And yesterday, Apple reported their results for the holiday quarter.

00:10:52 ◼   ► Their stock opened today at like $510 a share, and it closed at $450.

00:10:58 ◼   ► So the single biggest company in the world by market cap lost over 12% of its value in

00:11:07 ◼   ► a single day on an earnings report that completed a record-breaking, not for the company, but

00:11:16 ◼   ► for any company in history, the single most profitable year in history with still growing

00:11:22 ◼   ► revenue.

00:11:23 ◼   ► And really, I guess, ultimately, when it comes down to it and you go through all the numbers,

00:11:27 ◼   ► The one thing that has dropped is their profit margins, which have dropped from astronomically

00:11:34 ◼   ► high 45 to 50 percent a year ago to still remarkably high, like 36 or 37, 38 percent

00:11:46 ◼   ► for a hardware company, which is higher than software companies' margins, like Microsoft's

00:11:52 ◼   ► and Google's.

00:11:53 ◼   ► Because those margins are shrinking, their earnings, profits, whatever you want to call

00:11:59 ◼   ► it, net income is shrinking year over year for the first time since 2003, even though

00:12:05 ◼   ► we're talking about numbers like $9, $10 billion per quarter in earnings and profit.

00:12:12 ◼   ► So it is not.

00:12:13 ◼   ► It's not like, "Hey, it was entirely good news.

00:12:16 ◼   ► The growth is still there."

00:12:19 ◼   ► But the market reaction to it is absolutely ridiculous, I think.

00:12:23 ◼   ► I would love to know.

00:12:24 ◼   ► And this is the sort of thing I Googled for it

00:12:26 ◼   ► and couldn't find anything.

00:12:27 ◼   ► And I guess I'd have to--

00:12:29 ◼   ► I'm sure there's a way to figure it out.

00:12:31 ◼   ► But I'm trying to figure out if the biggest

00:12:33 ◼   ► company in the world--

00:12:35 ◼   ► whatever the biggest company in the world is.

00:12:36 ◼   ► It was Exxon before 2005.

00:12:39 ◼   ► It was General Electric.

00:12:40 ◼   ► The title passes every couple of years.

00:12:45 ◼   ► Has there ever been a company at the top of the currently

00:12:49 ◼   ► biggest market cap who's so volatile?

00:12:52 ◼   ► the stock price as Apple is?

00:12:54 ◼   ► Like 12-- - That's a good question.

00:12:56 ◼   ► - Right, like, talking about the stocks that we own.

00:12:59 ◼   ► I own like $97, I swear, it's like 97,

00:13:04 ◼   ► or it's more than, a little bit more than that now,

00:13:05 ◼   ► but of Sirius or XM, I don't know which one is it.

00:13:10 ◼   ► - Did you buy it when it was like three cents?

00:13:12 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was like, there was a time when they were like,

00:13:15 ◼   ► a couple years ago, they were like

00:13:16 ◼   ► on the cusp of going bankrupt,

00:13:18 ◼   ► and my friend Paul Kofasis and I were on,

00:13:21 ◼   ► he pointed it out to me on AIM.

00:13:22 ◼   ► It was like, hey, you know, like--

00:13:24 ◼   ► I forget which one is the company now.

00:13:26 ◼   ► Well, they merged into Sirius, so it's Sirius XM now.

00:13:28 ◼   ► I didn't know-- so it's called Sirius XM.

00:13:31 ◼   ► Yes.

00:13:31 ◼   ► They kept both names.

00:13:33 ◼   ► And they were seriously trading at like $0.03 a share

00:13:36 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:13:37 ◼   ► And I have it.

00:13:40 ◼   ► I have-- and it's one of those like,

00:13:42 ◼   ► this is how I make investments.

00:13:43 ◼   ► I have XM in the car, and it's all

00:13:47 ◼   ► we ever listen to in the car.

00:13:49 ◼   ► And I'm happy to pay whatever it is they charge me a month.

00:13:52 ◼   ► It seems like I'm getting a good value for something that I enjoy and it works very well.

00:13:56 ◼   ► So I thought, "Well, that doesn't make any sense that they would be going bankrupt.

00:14:00 ◼   ► This seems like a good deal.

00:14:01 ◼   ► It seems like every car I see nowadays has the goofy little antenna on the roof for it.

00:14:06 ◼   ► They've just bought out their competitor.

00:14:08 ◼   ► They don't have any competition.

00:14:09 ◼   ► I'm going to buy them because I don't see how this is going to go anywhere but up."

00:14:12 ◼   ► But I'm not an investor.

00:14:14 ◼   ► I don't keep a lot of money there.

00:14:15 ◼   ► My E-Trade account, I swear to God, had like $27 or something like that in it.

00:14:19 ◼   ► So I just bought as many shares as I could.

00:14:22 ◼   ► I don't know what it was.

00:14:23 ◼   ► Maybe it was like 11 cents a share.

00:14:25 ◼   ► So I bought a decent number of shares.

00:14:27 ◼   ► You probably paid 10 bucks to buy them.

00:14:29 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, I did.

00:14:30 ◼   ► I think like the $9.99 transaction fee took up a lot of it.

00:14:35 ◼   ► And lo and behold, I forget what it's trading at now.

00:14:37 ◼   ► Let me see.

00:14:38 ◼   ► It's at $3.09.

00:14:39 ◼   ► So I've made money on it, but I only started with like, I don't know, literally like $20.

00:14:45 ◼   ► I mean, it was the equivalent of like when you're in college and you know where the

00:14:51 ◼   ► Mac, the ATM machines were that let you take out $10 instead of $20 because you only have

00:14:56 ◼   ► $18 in your account.

00:14:57 ◼   ► Yeah, I lost like $9, like 33% of the trade on the transaction and got like $20 worth

00:15:04 ◼   ► of the stock and it's gone way up.

00:15:06 ◼   ► That's like the only individual stock I own.

00:15:08 ◼   ► And now you can sell it and maybe buy an iPad mini smart cover with the proceeds.

00:15:13 ◼   ► Yeah, something like that.

00:15:15 ◼   ► So a stock like that though, like a stock of a company that is selling at 11 cents a

00:15:25 ◼   ► share or something like that, well, you expect it maybe to have a day when it goes up or

00:15:28 ◼   ► down 15%, 20%, because it only takes 10 cents for it to go up 50%.

00:15:34 ◼   ► The biggest company in the world, it doesn't make any sense to me that they would either

00:15:39 ◼   ► go up or down 12% in one day based on a quarter where what they announced was really not that

00:15:47 ◼   ► far removed from what everybody was expecting.

00:15:49 ◼   ► Yeah. I mean, and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to get out of owning that stock

00:15:53 ◼   ► is because it is just so incredibly volatile. And I was just tired of the stress of – and

00:16:01 ◼   ► kind of the frustration every day of like, "What is the market thinking with this?

00:16:06 ◼   ► shouldn't be doing this, so you know, things like that. And it's just, I don't need that

00:16:10 ◼   ► in my life anymore. And I realized too, like the money I made on that over the last couple

00:16:15 ◼   ► of years since I started buying those shares, I made some money on it, but I would have

00:16:22 ◼   ► been probably better served just ignoring that completely and redirecting that effort

00:16:27 ◼   ► and time and stress capacity into another business or another podcast or a few more

00:16:33 ◼   ► blog posts or something else. Doing anything else would have been a better choice for me

00:16:39 ◼   ► than worrying about Apple stock every week.

00:16:42 ◼   ► This comes up for me a lot because I don't blame people. I really don't because I expect

00:16:47 ◼   ► that the vast majority of people who either listen to my show, they're more regulars.

00:16:51 ◼   ► But I certainly understand that people who read my website, an awful lot of them are

00:16:55 ◼   ► not regular readers. They just come there when somebody else links to something or they'll

00:16:59 ◼   ► think to check in once in a while.

00:17:01 ◼   ► Yeah, they hit and run.

00:17:03 ◼   ► And so, you know, I think a lot of people probably, if they had to guess, would think

00:17:07 ◼   ► that I do own Apple.

00:17:09 ◼   ► And so, like on weeks like this where I spend a lot of time and effort writing about the

00:17:13 ◼   ► stock, I'll get a handful of emails asking, usually almost always very politely just curious,

00:17:18 ◼   ► not accusation, not, you know, any kind of confrontation, but just curious like, "Hey,

00:17:22 ◼   ► do you own Apple stock?"

00:17:24 ◼   ► And then, you know, I don't think I have a text expander snippet, but if I do, I've

00:17:28 ◼   ► forgotten about it.

00:17:29 ◼   ► But, you know, I have a short answer that's no, I feel like I shouldn't because it's

00:17:31 ◼   ► It's a conflict of interest.

00:17:33 ◼   ► And sometimes I'll write back and I'll say, "Wow, that's good to know.

00:17:36 ◼   ► But boy, that must be frustrating for you because I'm sure you would have wanted to

00:17:39 ◼   ► buy it back when it was $72 and a share in 2008.

00:17:45 ◼   ► And man, look at that now."

00:17:48 ◼   ► And I honestly don't have that thought at all.

00:17:50 ◼   ► I am the type of person who if I were playing a casino game and I was betting black on roulette,

00:17:57 ◼   ► I don't bet roulette, but if I was betting black and I got up and left and noticed that

00:18:00 ◼   ► black with just one four in a row, I would think, "Damn it, I should have stayed there."

00:18:04 ◼   ► I don't have any kind of feeling like that with Apple because I feel like I've done very

00:18:09 ◼   ► well with Apple's success my own way, that my website has become so popular, people are

00:18:16 ◼   ► interested in it. I have no complaints about the success I've enjoyed in some sense on

00:18:23 ◼   ► Apple's back over the last 10 years. I don't need it also to be in the stock market.

00:18:28 ◼   ► Right. And if that was a risk to your credibility, then it would really not be worth it.

00:18:32 ◼   ► Exactly. No, that's a perfect point where it's actually, in some sense, it would be

00:18:37 ◼   ► worse, where I feel like being able to say, you know, being in the successful situation

00:18:44 ◼   ► I am with my website right now and being able to say, "I don't own the stock. I have

00:18:47 ◼   ► no relationship with them. They don't give me money. They don't pay for my trips to

00:18:52 ◼   ► come to their events or anything is worth more to me overall. I mean, I can't put

00:18:58 ◼   ► a price tag on that, but it's worth more to me inside my head than it would be if I

00:19:03 ◼   ► had put, I don't know, whatever number of thousand dollars I could have theoretically

00:19:07 ◼   ► put into the stock when I thought it was incredibly low.

00:19:11 ◼   ► I wonder what effect having a bad six months of the stock, what effect that it has on the

00:19:17 ◼   ► company. And I think financially, Apple's doing very well for themselves. They have

00:19:21 ◼   ► massive pile of cash. That all seems well and good, and they don't seem affected by

00:19:26 ◼   ► that. I think Tim Cook is putting on a good face for it, too. And I don't think he has

00:19:32 ◼   ► job security to worry about for a long time. But might it be a problem for retaining talent?

00:19:42 ◼   ► I wonder. That's the sort of thing where it's—and I'm a little in over my head, but I wonder

00:19:46 ◼   ► like how much Apple like are options still a thing for retaining talent at Apple?

00:19:54 ◼   ► I mean and like you know they can always reprice them like they did with jobs and that whole

00:19:57 ◼   ► problem. I assume, again I'm also way in my head with the legalities of what they can

00:20:03 ◼   ► do here but you know they can like spend more money I assume to make the options worth more

00:20:09 ◼   ► to their existing employees but I have to imagine this must hurt morale for people who

00:20:14 ◼   ► who have a meaningful number of stock options

00:20:16 ◼   ► or a meaningful amount of their compensation tied to the stock

00:20:19 ◼   ► price in some other way.

00:20:21 ◼   ► And there probably aren't a whole lot

00:20:23 ◼   ► of people who have that situation, but I don't know.

00:20:26 ◼   ► This could be a problem.

00:20:27 ◼   ► If they start losing mid-level or even upper-level VPs,

00:20:33 ◼   ► that could really be problematic.

00:20:35 ◼   ► And I feel like Apple already has-- they already

00:20:39 ◼   ► have a problem retaining talent.

00:20:40 ◼   ► Because from what I see-- granted,

00:20:44 ◼   ► this is based on no research except people I see and know and read about, but it seems

00:20:50 ◼   ► like Apple has created this awesome ecosystem, especially with iOS, somewhat with the Mac,

00:20:57 ◼   ► but mostly with iOS, this awesome software ecosystem, and they have lost a lot of good

00:21:03 ◼   ► people over the last few years who have gone out and done their own iOS startups. And that

00:21:10 ◼   ► is probably a pretty big talent retention problem alone.

00:21:14 ◼   ► And so I feel like if you add any factors to that,

00:21:17 ◼   ► if you add in things like options being worth a lot less

00:21:21 ◼   ► than they were before, that could be really bad for them.

00:21:26 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think it is a different--

00:21:28 ◼   ► I don't think Microsoft had this problem in Windows heyday.

00:21:32 ◼   ► Because obviously, the success of Windows

00:21:35 ◼   ► created an inordinate number of programming jobs,

00:21:39 ◼   ► developer jobs, but I don't think it created this sort of jobs where somebody could leave

00:21:46 ◼   ► Apple and either be guaranteed a lot of money or have the opportunity as like a founder

00:21:54 ◼   ► to make a lot of money.

00:21:56 ◼   ► It wasn't like a startup type thing.

00:21:59 ◼   ► The first real startup thing for developers was the web, not Windows.

00:22:03 ◼   ► Right, and the web, it was hard to make money on the web.

00:22:07 ◼   ► So it wasn't quite as much of a gold rush mentality of,

00:22:09 ◼   ► oh my god, I'm missing out on everything going on

00:22:12 ◼   ► on the web right now because I'm working for some big company.

00:22:15 ◼   ► Right, and it wasn't the sort of thing

00:22:17 ◼   ► that sprang completely from one company where there's this

00:22:24 ◼   ► well--

00:22:26 ◼   ► I mean, unsurprisingly, there's an enormous well

00:22:29 ◼   ► of iOS development talent in Apple,

00:22:32 ◼   ► like people who are really good iOS--

00:22:34 ◼   ► You would hope.

00:22:35 ◼   ► No, well, just thinking about the friends that--

00:22:38 ◼   ► Right.

00:22:39 ◼   ► A lot of them mutual friends, mine and yours, but friends we have who work there.

00:22:43 ◼   ► I mean, they're A-plus people.

00:22:48 ◼   ► And no surprise, I'm sure that they're probably

00:22:53 ◼   ► dealing with those recruiter pitches on a regular basis.

00:22:57 ◼   ► The other problem, too, with retaining these people

00:22:59 ◼   ► is if the growth is slowing down, then Apple

00:23:04 ◼   ► going to lose some of its reputation of being a place where the cutting edge is happening.

00:23:10 ◼   ► And that also, that dampening of that, even though I'm sure there are still a lot of

00:23:17 ◼   ► exciting things to do in Apple, even a slight dampening in that is going to also amplify

00:23:24 ◼   ► people's desire to leave and go to either something more exciting or their own startup.

00:23:29 ◼   ► Yeah, and I do think that that is part of the appeal that Apple has for top notch talent

00:23:35 ◼   ► is the sort of sense that this, that's the show. That's where the best people go. You

00:23:44 ◼   ► know, that you're not really pushing yourself if you haven't tried taking a job at Apple

00:23:49 ◼   ► yet.

00:23:50 ◼   ► Right.

00:23:51 ◼   ► And you know, that's an exaggeration. But that, spelling it out like that kind of sounds

00:23:56 ◼   ► little preposterous. But I think that that's a, I don't know what you want to call it,

00:24:00 ◼   ► an undercurrent in our industry that people get. In addition to them, to people from Apple leaving

00:24:12 ◼   ► Apple to go to startups, we do know a lot of mutual friends who've been independent and then

00:24:17 ◼   ► gone to Apple. And you understand the draw of it is not entirely financial. A lot of it is that

00:24:23 ◼   ► all of a sudden you've got an opportunity to maybe do the best work of your life. And

00:24:29 ◼   ► certainly the work that might reach the most people.

00:24:33 ◼   ► Or to just have more control over what you do. Like at Apple, you might be working on

00:24:39 ◼   ► some feature of some little used app that if you want to be a big product person and

00:24:47 ◼   ► have your own control over what you do, over like make an entire app yourself or with one

00:24:52 ◼   ► of the person. Some people on Apple can do that. Most can't, and even the ones that

00:24:57 ◼   ► do usually can't put their name on it.

00:24:58 ◼   ► Right. Well, nobody gets to put their name on it, really.

00:25:02 ◼   ► Right. I wonder, too…

00:25:03 ◼   ► Does anybody? Is there anybody at Apple who's…

00:25:04 ◼   ► …the people at the keynotes?

00:25:06 ◼   ► Yeah, but that's really only at the executive…

00:25:09 ◼   ► That's like a handful of, yeah, SVPs and stuff.

00:25:12 ◼   ► Yeah. And even then, I wonder, because, you know, like, there's a lot more executives

00:25:15 ◼   ► than those who get to go on stage.

00:25:17 ◼   ► Right.

00:25:18 ◼   ► But it's a very short list.

00:25:20 ◼   ► I wonder though, in the past, it was always easy to pick

00:25:25 ◼   ► which company was the place that, especially programmers

00:25:30 ◼   ► right out of college or people who were really good

00:25:34 ◼   ► and who would get noticed publicly and be poached

00:25:38 ◼   ► by somebody, what was the company everyone wanted

00:25:42 ◼   ► to work for?

00:25:42 ◼   ► So I think when I left college in 2004, sorry,

00:25:48 ◼   ► When I left college in 2004, that company was Google.

00:25:52 ◼   ► And it remained indisputably Google for a while,

00:25:58 ◼   ► maybe until around 2009, even maybe 2010.

00:26:02 ◼   ► And then Google started getting big and boring.

00:26:06 ◼   ► And then I think Apple was that company starting around iPhone

00:26:11 ◼   ► time, I think, or maybe even a little bit before.

00:26:14 ◼   ► Apple became that company for a lot of people.

00:26:16 ◼   ► It was never quite as prevalent in that role as Google was for so long, but it certainly was there to a large extent.

00:26:24 ◼   ► I wonder how much that is fading now, but it seems like Google is not going upwards in that direction.

00:26:32 ◼   ► Google is still going downwards of being an interesting place for cutting edge people to want to work.

00:26:37 ◼   ► So now though, I don't really see a startup.

00:26:41 ◼   ► Facebook might have briefly had a little bit of that, maybe two years ago, but I don't

00:26:46 ◼   ► really see what companies are placing that. I think maybe what's replacing that is just

00:26:50 ◼   ► doing your own startup for this era, maybe for this five-year period.

00:26:54 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so. I think Facebook's a good example where … I'm probably really unqualified

00:27:01 ◼   ► to speak about it because I've always found Facebook distasteful. I still have never signed

00:27:06 ◼   ► up for the thing.

00:27:09 ◼   ► But I don't know that anybody, let's say two years ago, three years ago, maybe when Facebook

00:27:15 ◼   ► had peak draw for talent, I think it was entirely about the anticipation of them having a big

00:27:21 ◼   ► IPO and that you could join even late in the game and make a lot of dough, not because,

00:27:27 ◼   ► boy, they're putting out the best software in the world.

00:27:30 ◼   ► Yeah, I think you're right.

00:27:32 ◼   ► Nobody really thinks about it as great software.

00:27:35 ◼   ► You know, even Microsoft, because in the '90s, it was definitely Microsoft.

00:27:40 ◼   ► You know, and Microsoft had a run on their stock throughout the '90s that was just tremendous.

00:27:47 ◼   ► I mean, it was like a phrase, Microsoft millionaires, you know, that there were teams.

00:27:52 ◼   ► Or I guess it was almost, you know, it was like a weird social thing where like you'd

00:27:59 ◼   ► be at Microsoft on a team of six people, and two of the people would be like multimillionaires

00:28:05 ◼   ► because they'd been there for three, four, five years,

00:28:07 ◼   ► and the other four people who maybe were only there two years

00:28:10 ◼   ► were nothing but their salary and options

00:28:12 ◼   ► that hadn't invested yet.

00:28:14 ◼   ► But you were surrounded by people who were like,

00:28:17 ◼   ► not just, OK, if you add up my net worth,

00:28:19 ◼   ► yes, it's a little bit over a million, I'm a millionaire.

00:28:21 ◼   ► But they were like millionaire millionaires,

00:28:23 ◼   ► and they just kept coming to work.

00:28:26 ◼   ► All because it was-- people had gotten these options,

00:28:29 ◼   ► and the stock had just gone up, up, up, up, up.

00:28:32 ◼   ► Do you ever read Microsurfs?

00:28:33 ◼   ► No, it's one of those things I always hear about and always think, "I should read that

00:28:37 ◼   ► sometime," and of course I probably never will.

00:28:39 ◼   ► It's one of those books where I'm surprised I'm not in the same situation, that it seems

00:28:43 ◼   ► like the type of book that would be on my wish I'd read it but haven't read it. But

00:28:46 ◼   ► I did read it, and it's very good. I mean…

00:28:49 ◼   ► You can spoil it if you want.

00:28:50 ◼   ► Well, you know what, I don't think I remember it quite well enough to spoil it, but it captured

00:28:57 ◼   ► that feeling, though, of, you know, you never knew who you were around who had like a net

00:29:03 ◼   ► worth of $15-20 million and was doing the exact same work as you, who was doing it for

00:29:07 ◼   ► nothing but a salary of, I don't know, $90,000 a year, which was a lot better in 1995 than

00:29:14 ◼   ► it sounds today.

00:29:16 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. And that's always kind of been problematic and a deeply rooted part of the

00:29:24 ◼   ► modern computer worker culture is a lot of times people will accept pretty mediocre salaries

00:29:32 ◼   ► on the promise of maybe striking it rich with options or something.

00:29:36 ◼   ► And in practice that happens to so few programmers

00:29:39 ◼   ► relative to how many jobs there are out there paying these terrible salaries,

00:29:42 ◼   ► promising the possibility of these things.

00:29:44 ◼   ► It's really kind of sad. It's a lot like

00:29:48 ◼   ► the celebrity or entertainment business or even professional sports

00:29:53 ◼   ► where people will tolerate pretty

00:29:55 ◼   ► rip-off conditions

00:29:58 ◼   ► for a while with the hope of making it big and most never will.

00:30:02 ◼   ► Right. Right. Like minor league baseball being a famous example.

00:30:07 ◼   ► Right? Like minor league baseball players, most of them, unless they've already,

00:30:10 ◼   ► they're so talented, like taken top in the draft and they've signed for a big bonus,

00:30:14 ◼   ► are making like hundreds of dollars a week, maybe even in a month, riding around on like

00:30:21 ◼   ► school buses, staying in college dorms, you know, all, you know, six months at a time and then going

00:30:26 ◼   ► to get in a day job for the other six months of the year.

00:30:30 ◼   ► I mean, grown men, 30-year-old grown men who still hope

00:30:33 ◼   ► to make it to the major leagues who are sleeping in college

00:30:36 ◼   ► dorms for six months.

00:30:37 ◼   ► That's got to be rough.

00:30:38 ◼   ► Oh, I think it's really rough.

00:30:41 ◼   ► Sort of what makes minor league baseball so poetic, though.

00:30:45 ◼   ► The whole Bull Durham thing.

00:30:50 ◼   ► Here, let me throw this at you.

00:30:51 ◼   ► Here's something from my notes.

00:30:52 ◼   ► And this is about the apples-- to get back to the apple stock.

00:30:57 ◼   ► And it's not just the stock.

00:30:59 ◼   ► It's to me-- and I talked about this with molts last week,

00:31:02 ◼   ► where there's different breeds of apple--

00:31:05 ◼   ► I don't know what you want to call them-- pessimists.

00:31:08 ◼   ► I don't want to say--

00:31:08 ◼   ► I don't want to use the word "hater,"

00:31:09 ◼   ► because I feel like "hater" is the opposite of "fanboy."

00:31:12 ◼   ► And it's not constructive.

00:31:14 ◼   ► But people who just--

00:31:15 ◼   ► I'm just going to say people who don't like apple,

00:31:17 ◼   ► and people, you know, or who...

00:31:24 ◼   ► They're looking for reasons to always not like Apple? Right. Because that's like the real

00:31:29 ◼   ► opposite of fanboy. The fanboy accusation is that

00:31:32 ◼   ► whoever's being accused of it will blindly

00:31:35 ◼   ► try to support

00:31:37 ◼   ► the thing that they've bought usually because

00:31:39 ◼   ► it's something that you can't

00:31:41 ◼   ► economically buy both sides of, so you've got to make a choice and then you want to defend your

00:31:45 ◼   ► choice. And so you want to support that, you know, emotionally and psychologically, some

00:31:50 ◼   ► kind of, is that, is that kind of dissonance? There's some kind of term for that, I don't

00:31:54 ◼   ► know.

00:31:55 ◼   ► Yeah, something like that.

00:31:56 ◼   ► And so I think a hater is the other end of it. It's like, it's somebody who, who, who

00:31:59 ◼   ► has decided never to support this thing or never to buy this company's products and wants

00:32:04 ◼   ► to continually justify that position to themselves.

00:32:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I, I, something like that. And I think I got sidetracked on this point last week

00:32:11 ◼   ► before I made it quite right, which is that there's entirely different breeds of people

00:32:16 ◼   ► who-- let's say people who Apple drives crazy.

00:32:18 ◼   ► I mean, and let's just say, let's take it at two extremes.

00:32:23 ◼   ► One would be, let's say, like the open source zealot with long hair and a beard and, you

00:32:32 ◼   ► know, a developer who loves Android because it's open, really sees it and thinks it's

00:32:38 ◼   ► It's just great that you can download it and really doesn't see it as a joke that you

00:32:42 ◼   ► download.

00:32:43 ◼   ► Well, but there's enough of it that's open and really, really hates the whole app store

00:32:48 ◼   ► thing and the fact that you have to jailbreak the thing to sideload apps on it and you still

00:32:54 ◼   ► can't jailbreak the iPhone 5 and blah, blah, blah.

00:32:57 ◼   ► That guy, and compare and contrast with the guy who works on Wall Street and is 57 years

00:33:04 ◼   ► old and wears a suit every day and really is more about Apple the stock, Apple the company.

00:33:14 ◼   ► Those are two people who are never going to meet, have very different reasons for not

00:33:19 ◼   ► liking the company or being pessimistic about it or predicting its demise or whatever, both

00:33:24 ◼   ► driven nuts by the company.

00:33:28 ◼   ► I feel like a lot of them, it's all come together in recent months, though, where the media

00:33:35 ◼   ► coverage I've seen of Apple in the last two months has consistently presented Apple's

00:33:41 ◼   ► smartphone sales in a way that I think makes it look as though Samsung is already outselling

00:33:49 ◼   ► them.

00:33:51 ◼   ► And it's not true at the high end, you know, with the Galaxy Note and the Galaxy Tab, right?

00:33:56 ◼   ► They say increased competition from the Galaxy Tab and that Apple's share of the smartphones

00:34:00 ◼   ► has dropped from 23% to 19% and Samsung's has gone up to 31%.

00:34:05 ◼   ► And then any I think my dad, I always think of my dad, my dad read that article, what

00:34:09 ◼   ► would he think he would say, well, this this Samsung Galaxy Tab is outselling the iPhone

00:34:14 ◼   ► by a good margin.

00:34:15 ◼   ► And that's not true.

00:34:17 ◼   ► Apple sold more iPhone fives in like the first three or two months then Apple and then Samsung

00:34:23 ◼   ► sold Galaxy Tab 3s in—I forget how much longer it's been on the market. It's not even close.

00:34:29 ◼   ► So here's what I think is going on to some extent. I think that there's a lot of writers,

00:34:36 ◼   ► analysts, bloggers, zealots, and in some sense, investors too who have been waiting and waiting

00:34:43 ◼   ► for years for Apple to fall for whatever reason, whatever their hobby horse reason of what's wrong

00:34:48 ◼   ► with Apple and why Apple's doing it wrong and why they're lucky. They've been waiting for Apple to

00:34:52 ◼   ► fall. And they've grown so impatient because it hasn't happened that they've just gone

00:34:56 ◼   ► ahead and claimed that it's happened.

00:34:58 ◼   ► Right. Or they amplify any sign that it might be happening at some point in the future.

00:35:05 ◼   ► I think there's an awful lot of them who are claiming that it's happening now. I see it

00:35:11 ◼   ► on Twitter with the reaction to my incredulousness that Apple's results yesterday would result

00:35:19 ◼   ► in a massive, massive dumping of the stock.

00:35:24 ◼   ► Again, I think the stock's actually gone lower

00:35:27 ◼   ► since the point where somebody tweeted it,

00:35:29 ◼   ► but somebody worked it out that the amount of money

00:35:31 ◼   ► that Apple's market cap dropped after hours,

00:35:35 ◼   ► just in like two hours in after-hour trading

00:35:37 ◼   ► after the results, was equal to two Nokias plus two RIMs.

00:35:42 ◼   ► - Yep, and yeah, I think it has gone down further since then.

00:35:45 ◼   ► - And it's gone down further since then.

00:35:47 ◼   ► Apple has lost the entirety of two rims and two nokias.

00:35:52 ◼   ► I think a lot of this attitude, like I wrote this thing a couple months ago for the magazine

00:35:56 ◼   ► and I just published it this week called "Anti-Apple Anger," and, you know, my theory is that a

00:36:01 ◼   ► lot of people really resent Apple. You know, like I choose not to buy Samsung phones, but

00:36:09 ◼   ► I don't really have any feelings towards Samsung. I just don't really think about them. I don't

00:36:13 ◼   ► really care about them. I'm pretty much indifferent. But a lot of people who choose not to buy

00:36:18 ◼   ► Apple stuff really get worked up about it. And I think one of the reasons why is because

00:36:25 ◼   ► Apple products say no a lot in the design choices they make and in the features they

00:36:31 ◼   ► omit and the implementations of the features they have. They say no a lot. And they say

00:36:37 ◼   ► no in an opinionated way. And kind of like, at least in people's minds, like a Steve

00:36:42 ◼   ► Steve Jobs arrogance way of like, okay, the iPhone doesn't have a keyboard, because

00:36:47 ◼   ► nobody should ever need a keyboard, that's the wrong way to do it, and if you need a

00:36:49 ◼   ► keyboard, tough luck, you're wrong. It's that kind of attitude. And so that really

00:36:55 ◼   ► turns a lot of people off. And the kind of like, well, here's what we offer, we made

00:37:02 ◼   ► the thing that we think is best, if your needs are different, you're somehow wrong or inferior,

00:37:06 ◼   ► and if you don't like it, there's the door. So it does make a lot of enemies. So that's

00:37:11 ◼   ► That's why I feel like the people who choose not to buy Apple, a lot of times they've chosen

00:37:15 ◼   ► not to buy Apple because they either want something Apple doesn't offer or they do legitimately

00:37:21 ◼   ► need something that Apple stuff can't address for them.

00:37:27 ◼   ► And that attitude has made them actually angry that Apple doesn't want their money or won't

00:37:31 ◼   ► take their business or won't make something that satisfies them.

00:37:34 ◼   ► So it generates this level of anger that seems stronger than what a lot of companies get

00:37:41 ◼   ► for just not serving a market.

00:37:44 ◼   ► And I think it does have to do with that attitude

00:37:46 ◼   ► that I think Steve Jobs showed publicly,

00:37:49 ◼   ► and that Apple has kind of now-- it's kind of become

00:37:52 ◼   ► their reputation of having this attitude,

00:37:54 ◼   ► even if people there now don't actually express it this way.

00:37:58 ◼   ► But this attitude of, well, this is all you should ever need.

00:38:03 ◼   ► And if your needs are different, then you're wrong.

00:38:07 ◼   ► Well, I like your there's the door,

00:38:08 ◼   ► because that's the other thing, is

00:38:10 ◼   ► that they don't, rather than just take the door and go buy the other company's product

00:38:15 ◼   ► and say, "Okay, I bought this one," they don't take the door, they stay and complain.

00:38:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:38:22 ◼   ► Well, and a lot of times, if you really believe, like if Apple's saying, "No one ever needs

00:38:28 ◼   ► a keyboard," and you're like, "But I like keyboards," then there's this motivation.

00:38:35 ◼   ► People say, "Wait, no, something's wrong here.

00:38:38 ◼   ► people are all sheep, you're brainwashed, you're faithful, whatever, you know, all

00:38:41 ◼   ► these terms that mean you're being irrationally devoted. You know, they want to discredit

00:38:45 ◼   ► you because like, no, that's factually wrong in my head. So obviously something's

00:38:49 ◼   ► wrong with all of you people for buying this and for saying it's so great.

00:38:52 ◼   ► I like this guy I linked to this week. He said, here's the things Apple needs to do.

00:38:58 ◼   ► And one of them is make an – or at least announce during the earnings call. They should

00:39:02 ◼   ► announce that they're going to make an iPhone with a hardware keyboard.

00:39:05 ◼   ► And he writes, "Your correspondent does not have an iPhone. I probably wouldn't own

00:39:12 ◼   ► one anyway, but I am precluded from even considering one because they do not come with a real physical

00:39:17 ◼   ► keyboard. And I absolutely must have one."

00:39:21 ◼   ► So I love this guy. I love him because he's still hung up on this 2007 complaint that

00:39:27 ◼   ► Apple needs to, not should, but needs to, make an iPhone with a hardware keyboard. And

00:39:33 ◼   ► And then I just love it.

00:39:35 ◼   ► I love the bonus points.

00:39:36 ◼   ► - To get his business.

00:39:37 ◼   ► - Well, but that he probably wouldn't own one anyway.

00:39:40 ◼   ► That they must do it because he can't buy one without one,

00:39:43 ◼   ► but he still wouldn't buy one.

00:39:45 ◼   ► That's my favorite. - Yeah, that is pretty good.

00:39:47 ◼   ► - That to me is really, really good.

00:39:50 ◼   ► I also saw, and along similar lines, I saw some,

00:39:53 ◼   ► 'cause one good way to get a lot of clicks,

00:39:55 ◼   ► and it's one of those things,

00:39:56 ◼   ► and you wrote about this recently,

00:39:58 ◼   ► but don't link to jerks.

00:40:00 ◼   ► It's a fine line between--

00:40:02 ◼   ► I did give you an exception, though. You're so loud, too. I just don't want to.

00:40:05 ◼   ► Yeah, but it's a fine line for everybody. And it is – it's a weird thing for me

00:40:09 ◼   ► because my site has gotten so popular, and I don't really – I tend – I think for

00:40:14 ◼   ► the – I think it's good that I still see it the same way I used to. And I think if

00:40:19 ◼   ► there's any sort of consistency as it's gotten more successful, it's because to

00:40:24 ◼   ► me, in my mind, it isn't that much – I don't see the people reading the site. I

00:40:29 ◼   ► I see the same screen that I saw before.

00:40:32 ◼   ► But I do know in the back of my head

00:40:34 ◼   ► that there's so many more people reading it.

00:40:35 ◼   ► So I am a little bit less likely.

00:40:37 ◼   ► And to me, one of those things that people write

00:40:40 ◼   ► just to get the clicks, just to get it,

00:40:42 ◼   ► is the I'm switching from iPhone to Android, and here's why.

00:40:47 ◼   ► You know, I loved my iPhone for years,

00:40:49 ◼   ► but now I'm switching to Android.

00:40:51 ◼   ► And there was one last week,

00:40:53 ◼   ► I think it was a guy at GigaOM,

00:40:54 ◼   ► and I almost linked to it.

00:40:57 ◼   ► I had it written up.

00:40:58 ◼   ► I very seldom write up a post or even a link and then stare at it, have it all ready to

00:41:05 ◼   ► go just like one click from publish and then scrap it.

00:41:08 ◼   ► Very, very seldom.

00:41:10 ◼   ► But I did it with this one because I just thought, "You know what?

00:41:12 ◼   ► This guy was just angling for this."

00:41:15 ◼   ► Because it wasn't even, "Here's why I did switch."

00:41:18 ◼   ► It's, "Here's why I'm going to switch," which is like…

00:41:20 ◼   ► That's even worse.

00:41:21 ◼   ► Right.

00:41:22 ◼   ► Because I really got the feeling like he wasn't going to do it anyway.

00:41:24 ◼   ► But anyway, the thing that I found was that he had – and it was only separated by one

00:41:28 ◼   ► paragraph.

00:41:29 ◼   ► It was like seventh paragraph in was that all he – a lot of his action now on his

00:41:40 ◼   ► iPhone is in these apps from Google.

00:41:42 ◼   ► And he uses, you know, the Gmail app for his email and the Google Maps for Maps instead

00:41:50 ◼   ► of Apple Maps.

00:41:52 ◼   ► And I had like two or three other examples.

00:41:54 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:41:55 ◼   ► A lot of people have been writing about that trend

00:41:57 ◼   ► lately, too, that people replacing Apple's built-in apps

00:42:00 ◼   ► with third-party apps.

00:42:01 ◼   ► And this is somehow bad for Apple.

00:42:03 ◼   ► Then in another paragraph, and in the next paragraph,

00:42:05 ◼   ► was that Apple is too closed and doesn't let you replace stuff.

00:42:11 ◼   ► Even though two paragraphs before, he

00:42:13 ◼   ► said the reason he's thinking about switching to Android

00:42:16 ◼   ► is that he's replaced all of his built-in apps.

00:42:20 ◼   ► Plus, don't a lot of people say that the Google

00:42:21 ◼   ► Google apps are actually better on iOS than they are on Android.

00:42:24 ◼   ► I've heard that a lot.

00:42:25 ◼   ► Oh, a lot of people do.

00:42:26 ◼   ► And that's something I want to write about soon on Daring Fireball.

00:42:30 ◼   ► I want to do it as if I got this in-draft follow-up to my thing last week about the

00:42:34 ◼   ► UI design trends.

00:42:38 ◼   ► And that to me, it's very notable that Google is often hailed as having these really nice

00:42:43 ◼   ► iOS apps and that are in this sort of

00:42:47 ◼   ► new, less textured

00:42:51 ◼   ► sort of plainer design style. I'm trying to avoid

00:42:55 ◼   ► a lot of rectangles. I'm trying to avoid at all. I'm really trying to avoid the word

00:42:59 ◼   ► skeuomorphic and flat. Because I think both, not

00:43:03 ◼   ► because I think they're overused, but because I think that they're both

00:43:07 ◼   ► the wrong words. And I really kind of

00:43:11 ◼   ► I wish I hadn't used that one word in the title of last week's piece, but

00:43:16 ◼   ► That'll be for my follow-up. But anyway, it is absolutely the case though without any

00:43:21 ◼   ► Argument that Google's iOS apps don't look like Android apps at all. And I think that's really interesting

00:43:28 ◼   ► because go back a previous generation and

00:43:32 ◼   ► Like by the 90s the knock against all of Microsoft's Mac apps was that they all look like the windows apps like, you know

00:43:41 ◼   ► all the Office apps look like Windows Office.

00:43:44 ◼   ► - Oh yes, and as a Windows user from the time

00:43:46 ◼   ► I hated QuickTime because it looked

00:43:48 ◼   ► like it didn't belong on Windows.

00:43:51 ◼   ► - Well, I can absolutely see the argument.

00:43:53 ◼   ► I mean, I think that's why-- - And iTunes now too.

00:43:55 ◼   ► - I think it's still even in more recent years,

00:43:58 ◼   ► I think it's clearly why Safari for Windows

00:44:00 ◼   ► never got any traction whatsoever,

00:44:02 ◼   ► whereas Chrome for Windows,

00:44:04 ◼   ► using the same rendering engine, took off like a rocket.

00:44:09 ◼   ► - I feel like, well sorry, finish that part.

00:44:11 ◼   ► Well, I just think that that's-- to me, it's fascinating

00:44:13 ◼   ► that Google has-- is doing, I think, much better UI design

00:44:16 ◼   ► work in all senses of the word, aesthetically-- in terms

00:44:22 ◼   ► of being aesthetically pleasing and in terms of usability

00:44:25 ◼   ► on iOS than on Android.

00:44:28 ◼   ► Well, and I think part of that is that the environment is--

00:44:32 ◼   ► you try to rise to the level of your environment

00:44:34 ◼   ► that you're in.

00:44:35 ◼   ► And on iOS, if they release something really hideous,

00:44:39 ◼   ► probably wouldn't do very well on iOS.

00:44:41 ◼   ► Because the standards are generally pretty high for UI stuff.

00:44:44 ◼   ► Yeah, and my understanding is I don't know a lot of people who work at Google on iOS

00:44:48 ◼   ► stuff, but I know a few.

00:44:49 ◼   ► But my sense is, though, that that's what they do, though.

00:44:52 ◼   ► If you work on iOS stuff, you're an iOS engineer at Google.

00:44:55 ◼   ► It's not just that you're on Team X and the same people writing Android apps are writing

00:45:01 ◼   ► iOS apps and they're trying to square the circle by using some sort of cross-platform

00:45:08 ◼   ► so they can write once and do it all and make them both just

00:45:14 ◼   ► web views so they can just write once and ship both.

00:45:16 ◼   ► No, they've got real iOS developers

00:45:19 ◼   ► who know and love the platform.

00:45:22 ◼   ► Right.

00:45:23 ◼   ► I think they were even advertising recently.

00:45:25 ◼   ► Wasn't there a thing where they were advertising recently

00:45:28 ◼   ► that if you're a great iOS developer,

00:45:30 ◼   ► you come work at Google and change the world

00:45:32 ◼   ► or something like that?

00:45:32 ◼   ► Oh, I don't know.

00:45:33 ◼   ► I don't know something like that.

00:45:34 ◼   ► Let me do a sponsor break.

00:45:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:45:38 ◼   ► Let's take the first break here.

00:45:40 ◼   ► And I want to thank our first sponsor.

00:45:42 ◼   ► You've probably heard of them, Squarespace.

00:45:46 ◼   ► Squarespace is doing great work.

00:45:48 ◼   ► They have a great new product.

00:45:51 ◼   ► It's a do-it-yourself website platform

00:45:53 ◼   ► that allows you to make a website or a blog

00:45:57 ◼   ► in just a few minutes.

00:45:59 ◼   ► They give you a free domain name.

00:46:02 ◼   ► They handle all the hosting.

00:46:04 ◼   ► And they have 24-hour customer support.

00:46:06 ◼   ► Let me take a break in the middle of this sponsor read.

00:46:08 ◼   ► Tell you something happened to me, John Gruber, last night.

00:46:12 ◼   ► Ready to go to bed.

00:46:13 ◼   ► It was like midnight.

00:46:13 ◼   ► I wasn't really going to go to bed.

00:46:14 ◼   ► I was going to watch a movie or something.

00:46:15 ◼   ► But I was ready to walk away from the keyboard.

00:46:17 ◼   ► And I went to check my stats just one more time

00:46:20 ◼   ► before I went to bed.

00:46:21 ◼   ► And I wouldn't load.

00:46:22 ◼   ► I thought, uh-oh.

00:46:23 ◼   ► I went to go to daringfireball.net.

00:46:25 ◼   ► And it just spun.

00:46:27 ◼   ► Wasn't completely dead, but the little progress bar

00:46:29 ◼   ► went about two inches and just stopped.

00:46:32 ◼   ► Almost never happens to me.

00:46:33 ◼   ► My website is generally really, really solid.

00:46:37 ◼   ► Long story short, I logged in.

00:46:39 ◼   ► I restarted Apache, didn't solve it.

00:46:43 ◼   ► I noticed that there were way too many Apache processes

00:46:46 ◼   ► running.

00:46:46 ◼   ► I thought maybe I was getting somebody even way more

00:46:50 ◼   ► popular than me had fireballed my site.

00:46:52 ◼   ► Well, that would be why there's so many things.

00:46:55 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:46:56 ◼   ► Couldn't figure out why there were so many Apache processes.

00:46:59 ◼   ► Couldn't figure it out.

00:47:03 ◼   ► restarted Apache didn't help restarted the whole server

00:47:06 ◼   ► didn't help

00:47:07 ◼   ► can take a guess what was it

00:47:10 ◼   ► uh... you've run mint stats on your server right i do

00:47:15 ◼   ► my guess is that all those apache uh... instances

00:47:19 ◼   ► were

00:47:20 ◼   ► a whole bunch of mint processes waiting for the connection of the database in

00:47:23 ◼   ► the database itself was what was jammed up exactamundo my god mark o'arman that's

00:47:28 ◼   ► why they pay you the big bucks

00:47:29 ◼   ► I kind of have some background in this sort of thing.

00:47:31 ◼   ► I have a second server that runs MySQL.

00:47:35 ◼   ► And MySQL does two things for me.

00:47:38 ◼   ► My movable type installation, that's

00:47:41 ◼   ► where the data store is for it.

00:47:42 ◼   ► And Mint writes to it.

00:47:45 ◼   ► And so exactly what you're saying

00:47:47 ◼   ► is happening is every time somebody would load the page,

00:47:49 ◼   ► the actual web server during Fireball was up,

00:47:51 ◼   ► but every single Apache process would then

00:47:53 ◼   ► be waiting for the MySQL server to get back to it and say, OK,

00:47:57 ◼   ► took that hit for you from Mint and then as soon as I restarted the MySQL

00:48:02 ◼   ► server everything was hunky-dory back to normal. Here's the thing, how many normal

00:48:07 ◼   ► people can do what I just did? I have it I'm not a sysadmin but I do have a

00:48:11 ◼   ► degree in computer science I did work professionally as a web developer before.

00:48:16 ◼   ► How many people at midnight on Wednesday night can troubleshoot something

00:48:21 ◼   ► like that? I wish you were around you probably could have saved me 15 minutes

00:48:23 ◼   ► And I would have restarted it sooner.

00:48:27 ◼   ► Here's the thing.

00:48:27 ◼   ► You go to Squarespace instead.

00:48:29 ◼   ► You don't have to worry about that.

00:48:30 ◼   ► They've got 24-hour support.

00:48:31 ◼   ► Their analytics are built in, probably don't

00:48:36 ◼   ► block on the MySQL server.

00:48:39 ◼   ► And they handle the hosting for you.

00:48:41 ◼   ► And did I mention that they have 24-hour customer support?

00:48:44 ◼   ► Everything on their platform, it's drag and drop, right?

00:48:46 ◼   ► So you're not sitting there-- you

00:48:47 ◼   ► don't have to sit there and write code to make your website

00:48:49 ◼   ► design your blog.

00:48:50 ◼   ► They have a tremendous front end where you can design this stuff

00:48:55 ◼   ► and put little widgets, put the elements you want

00:48:58 ◼   ► on the page in the templates where

00:49:00 ◼   ► you want them by drag and drop.

00:49:02 ◼   ► You can drag pictures straight from your desktop.

00:49:04 ◼   ► Take a picture that's on your desktop,

00:49:06 ◼   ► drag it right into the web browser

00:49:08 ◼   ► and create custom layouts, put the picture in there just

00:49:10 ◼   ► by drag and drop.

00:49:11 ◼   ► You don't have to write image tags and source

00:49:13 ◼   ► and all that stuff.

00:49:14 ◼   ► I mean, you could if you wanted to.

00:49:15 ◼   ► You can customize this stuff if you do know how to write code,

00:49:18 ◼   ► but you don't have to.

00:49:20 ◼   ► All the templates are customizable, so you don't have to just pick between their pre-existing

00:49:26 ◼   ► templates.

00:49:27 ◼   ► You can customize it, tweak it a little bit, or make your own thing right from the start

00:49:30 ◼   ► if that's what you want to do.

00:49:33 ◼   ► It's really, really great stuff.

00:49:35 ◼   ► You can switch from one template to another at any time.

00:49:39 ◼   ► You don't have to pick right at the beginning, and then you're locked in because all your

00:49:42 ◼   ► content is hard formatted in the template.

00:49:46 ◼   ► One more thing they do that I still don't even do is that all their built-in templates

00:49:51 ◼   ► scale automatically to perfectly fit iPad, iPhone, your computer, your 27-inch iMac,

00:49:57 ◼   ► whatever it is.

00:49:58 ◼   ► What do you want to call it?

00:49:59 ◼   ► Responsive design?

00:50:00 ◼   ► They've got it.

00:50:01 ◼   ► I don't even have that yet.

00:50:02 ◼   ► I'm still behind the eight ball on that.

00:50:05 ◼   ► You can pull contacts, push content from your blogs to Twitter, Facebook, stuff like that.

00:50:10 ◼   ► You can pull content from your Twitter.

00:50:12 ◼   ► You can have your tweets show up automatically on your Squarespace site.

00:50:15 ◼   ► Great, great stuff, and it's really easy.

00:50:17 ◼   ► You can learn it just by looking at it.

00:50:20 ◼   ► Here's what you do.

00:50:21 ◼   ► Go to squarespace.com/thetalkshow.

00:50:25 ◼   ► Squarespace.com/thetalkshow, then they'll know you're coming here from the show.

00:50:29 ◼   ► Start a free trial.

00:50:30 ◼   ► Don't even need a credit card.

00:50:31 ◼   ► Just start the free trial.

00:50:32 ◼   ► If you decide to purchase, if you like it, then when you go, you just enter an offer

00:50:37 ◼   ► code below the pricing thing at checkout, and the offer code is thetalkshow1.

00:50:44 ◼   ► the talk show and then the digit one and you'll get a 10% discount. squarespace.com/the talk

00:50:52 ◼   ► show. When you're ready to sign up and pay, use the offer code "the talk show one."

00:50:57 ◼   ► My thanks to Squarespace.

00:50:58 ◼   ► Tim Cynova For whatever it's worth, so I, even though

00:51:02 ◼   ► I can log into a server and figure out problems like that, last week I launched a new podcast

00:51:08 ◼   ► and I wanted to build a website for it and the last thing I wanted to do was spend a

00:51:13 ◼   ► a whole lot of time and effort making a website for a podcast

00:51:17 ◼   ► that might only have a few episodes.

00:51:19 ◼   ► And that's like the last thing you want to worry about.

00:51:21 ◼   ► So I went to Squarespace.

00:51:22 ◼   ► And they did end up sponsoring it,

00:51:25 ◼   ► so it's a little bit of a disclosure there.

00:51:27 ◼   ► But I went to host it there before I got them to sponsor it.

00:51:32 ◼   ► And because I went there because I didn't-- even though I

00:51:35 ◼   ► can do all that stuff, I don't want to mess with it

00:51:38 ◼   ► when it isn't necessary.

00:51:40 ◼   ► And it was great.

00:51:41 ◼   ► I really have no complaints.

00:51:42 ◼   ► host the entire podcast there, including the audio files. Amazingly, they allow you to

00:51:47 ◼   ► do that. I'm very happy with it.

00:51:50 ◼   ► Dave: They've built out an incredible… I don't know. I used to think of Squarespace

00:51:56 ◼   ► as like a… Not that it was bad, but in the back of my head, I thought of it as a fill-in-the-blank

00:52:02 ◼   ► template thing, where you got templates and you could fill them in, and then you'd have

00:52:05 ◼   ► a template-backed website. It is so much more than that. It's a really great system that

00:52:11 ◼   ► they built.

00:52:12 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:52:13 ◼   ► And I feel like the days of hosting your own WordPress, I think, are long over for almost

00:52:19 ◼   ► everybody.

00:52:20 ◼   ► If you have a lot of customization or special needs, maybe you might want to look into that

00:52:25 ◼   ► sort of stuff.

00:52:26 ◼   ► But the days of hosting your own blog, especially maintaining its software, I think are long

00:52:33 ◼   ► over.

00:52:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so too.

00:52:35 ◼   ► You know what I had to do last week?

00:52:36 ◼   ► And again, it is just sort of coincidental that it all happened last week.

00:52:40 ◼   ► I had to actually patch movable type because of an exploit.

00:52:45 ◼   ► I'm kind of surprised you still can patch your copy, given

00:52:48 ◼   ► how much you've modified it.

00:52:49 ◼   ► You know what, though?

00:52:52 ◼   ► It's abstracted enough where my hacks are plugins,

00:52:57 ◼   ► and they have a pretty decent plugin API that

00:53:02 ◼   ► isolates the plugin code.

00:53:03 ◼   ► And most of my really weird hacks

00:53:07 ◼   ► are outside movable type.

00:53:09 ◼   ► It is taking-- because movable type is a static site generator,

00:53:12 ◼   ► at least the way I use it-- it's taking those static files

00:53:15 ◼   ► and doing weird things with them outside movable type.

00:53:20 ◼   ► And that stuff is irrelevant.

00:53:22 ◼   ► As long as movable type still spits out valid RSS or Adam

00:53:26 ◼   ► feeds, all my hacks on top of that still work.

00:53:30 ◼   ► Are there still any people who fight

00:53:32 ◼   ► for one format over the other?

00:53:33 ◼   ► If they're like, no, Adam is superior to RSS.

00:53:36 ◼   ► No, RSS is simpler.

00:53:37 ◼   ► No, I don't think so.

00:53:38 ◼   ► So I think that that whole thing, I think we're all pretending that that didn't happen,

00:53:42 ◼   ► because it was so simple.

00:53:43 ◼   ► Like XHTML?

00:53:44 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so.

00:53:45 ◼   ► Although I'm not sure, I would be interesting to hear from someone with an aggregator which

00:53:50 ◼   ► is more popular, RSS2 or Atom.

00:53:54 ◼   ► Well, Google Reader kind of threw the balance pretty hard towards Atom, because Google Reader,

00:54:00 ◼   ► any feed that they suck in, they convert to Atom for all the output.

00:54:04 ◼   ► Hmm.

00:54:05 ◼   ► I think.

00:54:06 ◼   ► That at least was the case.

00:54:07 ◼   ► I don't know if it still, I think it still is.

00:54:08 ◼   ► I did not know that.

00:54:09 ◼   ► Although, does anybody care, though?

00:54:11 ◼   ► If they handle it for you-- and that's the sort of thing Google is so good at, that if

00:54:17 ◼   ► you are emitting RSS2, but everybody who's reading your site through Google Reader is

00:54:21 ◼   ► seeing Google's Atom translation of it, I'll bet it's very high fidelity.

00:54:26 ◼   ► I guess it doesn't really matter.

00:54:29 ◼   ► No, I guess not.

00:54:30 ◼   ► I use Atom, I think.

00:54:33 ◼   ► I'm not even 100% sure.

00:54:35 ◼   ► I actually even forget why I made that choice.

00:54:38 ◼   ► I mean, I have to actually…

00:54:39 ◼   ► I'm sure it made sense, like, in 2003 when we were all arguing about this.

00:54:44 ◼   ► There was something about the actual syntax of it that I liked better.

00:54:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm using pattern.

00:54:50 ◼   ► Well, it has some things… it has some, like, more precise definitions for certain elements,

00:54:55 ◼   ► like, you know, "publisher" and "author" and "updated," stuff like that.

00:54:58 ◼   ► Like RSS is a little bit more liberal, I think, but…

00:55:02 ◼   ► But, boy, they're really close.

00:55:04 ◼   ► It was.

00:55:05 ◼   ► Yeah, please don't email me about this.

00:55:07 ◼   ► I'm sure there's gonna be like three people who were still fighting this fight

00:55:10 ◼   ► No, you're wrong about everything. I am I'm I'm I'm embarrassed

00:55:16 ◼   ► I loathe how much time I spent to following that whole saga and how invested I got in it

00:55:22 ◼   ► It really was such a waste of the time, but I it was you know, what is it?

00:55:27 ◼   ► there's something something of small differences like I

00:55:30 ◼   ► Don't know in hindsight

00:55:32 ◼   ► I cannot think of two formats that are so much the very same thing and so similar in

00:55:38 ◼   ► the way they do it.

00:55:39 ◼   ► Because it wasn't even like a major...

00:55:41 ◼   ► Like here's something that would have been a huge difference.

00:55:43 ◼   ► Like they're both XML.

00:55:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:55:45 ◼   ► If one was XML and the other one was JSON, well, there you've got a really interesting

00:55:51 ◼   ► fundamental difference between the two.

00:55:53 ◼   ► Right.

00:55:54 ◼   ► Like if one of them was like binary or if one of them was more like Pub/Sub, like push-oriented.

00:55:58 ◼   ► Right.

00:56:01 ◼   ► But they were both XML. I think if you cut off the top couple of lines, like at the right

00:56:08 ◼   ► below that, what's it called, the...

00:56:10 ◼   ► The preamble?

00:56:11 ◼   ► Well, the one with the question marks. What's that called?

00:56:13 ◼   ► That's the XML preamble.

00:56:14 ◼   ► Right. With, you know, cut off the next two lines or something like that, I think it would

00:56:18 ◼   ► be really hard to even tell in an eyeball which one was Adam and which one was RSS2.

00:56:22 ◼   ► It was really close.

00:56:24 ◼   ► Adam would have way more namespace prefixes and colons and other document type stuff.

00:56:31 ◼   ► This is the type of thing where-- and I always

00:56:33 ◼   ► forget to do the follow-up-- but this

00:56:35 ◼   ► is the sort of thing where talk show listeners are really,

00:56:37 ◼   ► really good.

00:56:37 ◼   ► Where collectively, there's somebody out there

00:56:39 ◼   ► who remembers all the nitty-gritty details

00:56:41 ◼   ► of the differences.

00:56:42 ◼   ► I think, in hindsight, as I look at Daring Fireballs--

00:56:46 ◼   ► I still call it an RSS feed, but it's in the Atom format.

00:56:50 ◼   ► I think the reason I liked Atom more than RSS2

00:56:53 ◼   ► was the date format.

00:56:56 ◼   ► Atom used, to me, was a very sane date format.

00:56:59 ◼   ► I forget which one it is, but it's one of the ISO ones.

00:57:02 ◼   ► And it goes year, month number, day number, and then Greenwich

00:57:07 ◼   ► Mean Time, all in a string.

00:57:09 ◼   ► And I think-- I could be wrong, but I

00:57:11 ◼   ► think RSS2 used a crazy sort of more plain text date format.

00:57:17 ◼   ► I don't think that's true, but I don't really remember.

00:57:19 ◼   ► I don't want to look it up now.

00:57:20 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't want to look it up.

00:57:21 ◼   ► It's boring.

00:57:22 ◼   ► But maybe somebody can shoot me an email

00:57:23 ◼   ► if I'm wrong about that, that I thought that the date format--

00:57:26 ◼   ► and maybe it was the permalinks.

00:57:27 ◼   ► Maybe there was something about the permalinks

00:57:29 ◼   ► I thought looked better in Adam. I don't know. Somehow I got caught up in Karen.

00:57:33 ◼   ► So you have a new podcast. Let's talk about it quick.

00:57:37 ◼   ► Yeah. It's called Neutral. It's neutral.fm. And it's me, Casey Liss, and John Siracusa

00:57:45 ◼   ► basically sitting around BSing about cars.

00:57:48 ◼   ► I just noticed, and you must have done this right before we got on the air,

00:57:53 ◼   ► because I see episode two is up.

00:57:55 ◼   ► Yeah, I put it up earlier this afternoon. Yeah, episode two is up and it's... We actually...

00:58:00 ◼   ► episodes one and two were recorded back to back. The first night we were recording I

00:58:04 ◼   ► said, "All right, let's just keep going," because we were on such a roll, but we didn't

00:58:07 ◼   ► want to release a two-hour long first episode. So there's no follow-up whatsoever, which

00:58:13 ◼   ► is going to drive people crazy who are still upset at the handful of things we got wrong

00:58:17 ◼   ► in episode one. But yeah, we just did episode three last night. I'll be posting that probably

00:58:22 ◼   ► mid next week. It's a lot of fun. It's not... One of the reasons why we called it "Neutral"

00:58:28 ◼   ► is kind of to be understated. Every other car podcast, it's all about car news and horsepower

00:58:35 ◼   ► and racing and all this stuff. They all have these masculine explosive names and horsepower,

00:58:43 ◼   ► speed, rocket. We just want to... Let's call ours "Neutral" and just have it be like this

00:58:51 ◼   ► simple black and white site, this simple logo that does not contain anything on fire or

00:58:55 ◼   ► moving, and just three guys chilling out talking about casual cars. We're talking about like

00:59:02 ◼   ► Honda Accords that we've owned in the past, not the newest crazy Bugatti Veyron that was

00:59:10 ◼   ► released or anything like that. And it's just fun. It's a fun casual show. If you know a

00:59:15 ◼   ► lot about cars and you come to it expecting high-end car

00:59:21 ◼   ► discussion, you're probably going to be infuriated at how

00:59:25 ◼   ► much we not only don't talk about that, but how much we get

00:59:28 ◼   ► wrong about some of the technical details of what we do

00:59:30 ◼   ► talk about.

00:59:31 ◼   ► But it's really for casual car fans, especially people who are

00:59:36 ◼   ► already fans of us in general, just wanted to hear us chill

00:59:40 ◼   ► out and talk for a while.

00:59:41 ◼   ► That's sort of the car equivalent of the sports thing

00:59:46 ◼   ► that Montero started that I was in last year,

00:59:48 ◼   ► the American McCarver, right,

00:59:50 ◼   ► which has sort of gone ice cold.

00:59:52 ◼   ► It's sort of fizzled out.

00:59:54 ◼   ► But the basic idea was to do a sports site

00:59:56 ◼   ► for non-sports fanatics, or just casual sports fans,

01:00:01 ◼   ► which is sort of underserved, right?

01:00:04 ◼   ► Like you go, most sports sites are for people

01:00:07 ◼   ► who like eat, sleep, and you know,

01:00:09 ◼   ► and maybe that's just the natural order of things

01:00:11 ◼   ► Most tech sites are for people who are, that's their main obsession.

01:00:15 ◼   ► Seems like that's the same sort of thing, where you're really interested in cars,

01:00:20 ◼   ► but it's not your main thing. Nobody's ever going to say Marco's main thing is cars.

01:00:24 ◼   ► Because, and that's how I am. I like cars a lot, but I don't listen to any car podcasts.

01:00:29 ◼   ► I don't subscribe to any car magazines. I like cars a lot, but I don't care quite that much

01:00:37 ◼   ► to follow every single detail of the news every week and really care about all these

01:00:42 ◼   ► high-end things I'll never even see.

01:00:46 ◼   ► >> Syracuse does a lot of podcasts.

01:00:48 ◼   ► >> He does.

01:00:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:00:50 ◼   ► Hey, I'm amazed at how much he does because he has a job and a family.

01:00:54 ◼   ► Like, you know, we have families, but we don't really have real jobs, so it's a little bit

01:00:58 ◼   ► easier for us to wedge this stuff in.

01:01:00 ◼   ► I don't know how he does it.

01:01:01 ◼   ► >> I don't either.

01:01:02 ◼   ► And the other thing that I find interesting about his podcast, what's the word?

01:01:07 ◼   ► Not proclivity.

01:01:09 ◼   ► Well, I don't know.

01:01:13 ◼   ► Output.

01:01:15 ◼   ► Is that prior to getting into podcasting on a regular basis, he wrote so sporadically.

01:01:20 ◼   ► He'd write in massive, delicious feasts, but never really gave you snacks on a regular

01:01:28 ◼   ► basis.

01:01:29 ◼   ► Like, where did this time come from?

01:01:30 ◼   ► I just assumed it was the fact that he didn't have time

01:01:33 ◼   ► 'cause he had a full-time job

01:01:34 ◼   ► and that he's so meticulous and thinks things through

01:01:36 ◼   ► that it wasn't possible.

01:01:38 ◼   ► Whereas, you know, like, even when I did have a real job,

01:01:42 ◼   ► found it possible to write

01:01:44 ◼   ► Keep Daring Fireball going weekly

01:01:47 ◼   ► in between the time I had around a real job.

01:01:50 ◼   ► Whereas he seems to find, you know,

01:01:52 ◼   ► the time to do these podcasts.

01:01:54 ◼   ► That's something I find it exhausting.

01:01:56 ◼   ► I find it, not exhausting, but I find it,

01:02:00 ◼   ► I find doing one show a week to be like,

01:02:02 ◼   ► I cannot believe it's time for the show again,

01:02:04 ◼   ► because I feel like I just did last week's show yesterday.

01:02:07 ◼   ► Right.

01:02:07 ◼   ► Yeah, and doing any more than one show a week,

01:02:10 ◼   ► I don't think I can ever do that.

01:02:11 ◼   ► Right.

01:02:12 ◼   ► You know, I had my development show,

01:02:14 ◼   ► and I ended that in December.

01:02:16 ◼   ► And I wanted to do a car show.

01:02:17 ◼   ► And we've been saying this might be a limited run.

01:02:20 ◼   ► We might only do like eight episodes.

01:02:22 ◼   ► We don't really know yet.

01:02:23 ◼   ► We're going to see what happens when that time comes.

01:02:25 ◼   ► But I also thought, what if I want

01:02:28 ◼   ► to do some other topic in the future?

01:02:30 ◼   ► And I don't think I would ever run them in parallel.

01:02:32 ◼   ► The workload would just be insane.

01:02:36 ◼   ► But I mean, and one thing that helps with John Siracusa

01:02:39 ◼   ► is with his show, Hypercritical, that he also ended in December,

01:02:42 ◼   ► that, man, I love that show.

01:02:44 ◼   ► That was my favorite podcast.

01:02:46 ◼   ► When he ended Hypercritical, one of the things he said

01:02:49 ◼   ► was that he was just spending hours researching

01:02:53 ◼   ► for every show beforehand.

01:02:54 ◼   ► And when I was doing Build and Analyze,

01:02:57 ◼   ► I would research before each show for maybe 45 minutes.

01:03:00 ◼   ► And most of that was going through the feedback email

01:03:02 ◼   ► and deciding what to talk about.

01:03:03 ◼   ► I couldn't even imagine finding the time every week

01:03:06 ◼   ► to do hours of Syracuse-level research.

01:03:09 ◼   ► So knowing that he was prone to doing way more work than he

01:03:13 ◼   ► might necessarily need to for our car show,

01:03:17 ◼   ► Casey and I arranged all the topics.

01:03:19 ◼   ► And we don't tell John.

01:03:20 ◼   ► We don't tell him anything in advance of what we're doing.

01:03:23 ◼   ► We intentionally keep it from him

01:03:25 ◼   ► so that he can't overwork himself. He can't possibly go research anything. So if we say

01:03:30 ◼   ► something—especially if he says something that's technically incorrect, take it easy

01:03:35 ◼   ► on him, because we're intentionally keeping him in the dark until the very last minute.

01:03:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I had mixed feelings about the—you know, because it was—I do think it was late

01:03:44 ◼   ► in the run of Hypercritical where he kind of opened up about how much preparation he

01:03:48 ◼   ► did per episode. Not that he kept it secret before, but I don't recall him having talked

01:03:53 ◼   ► about it. And I also feel like maybe the longer they did the show and the better that Dan and John

01:04:05 ◼   ► got at doing it, the more research he did because that's what he knew made for a good episode of

01:04:11 ◼   ► Hypercritical, right? That it wasn't that it got easier and he had to do less work per show,

01:04:17 ◼   ► it was that he knew what made for a good episode and that involved a lot more, a lot of research.

01:04:22 ◼   ► But I had mixed feelings about because I felt bad on the one hand that he was doing a massive amount of work for it

01:04:27 ◼   ► But on the other hand I felt good because I thought well

01:04:29 ◼   ► Thank God that he's not just winging it and having the show come off so incredibly articulate and meticulous

01:04:35 ◼   ► right because every one of those shows was like one of his giant articles and

01:04:39 ◼   ► And it's really remarkable how polished he was able to make those shows with only a few hours of prep for each one

01:04:46 ◼   ► but I mean that was

01:04:49 ◼   ► the amount of work he put into that was insane, but the output was also amazing.

01:04:56 ◼   ► I agree with every word. One thing I've thought about with podcasts, and I don't know, maybe

01:05:01 ◼   ► there's so many podcasts, and that's great, it's a great thing, but you just can't keep

01:05:05 ◼   ► up with them, but maybe somebody's doing it. But I feel like maybe in terms of the work

01:05:10 ◼   ► and the relentlessness or the, I don't know what you want to call it, of doing it every

01:05:14 ◼   ► week, I feel like you do have to do it every week, or have some sort of schedule, because

01:05:18 ◼   ► Because without a schedule, it just doesn't work.

01:05:21 ◼   ► And weekly is a pretty natural schedule.

01:05:24 ◼   ► But I've often wondered, maybe one format to do for, let's say,

01:05:29 ◼   ► something like neutral, which isn't meant to be like any of your primary gigs,

01:05:34 ◼   ► where you guys just said, maybe it'll only be an eight-show run.

01:05:37 ◼   ► What about following the episodic TV model of having seasons,

01:05:42 ◼   ► where you do eight shows?

01:05:44 ◼   ► You'll plan it, though.

01:05:45 ◼   ► You're going to say January and February, we're

01:05:48 ◼   ► going to do eight shows, one a week for eight weeks,

01:05:52 ◼   ► and then we're going to take a break.

01:05:54 ◼   ► And then we're going to come back,

01:05:56 ◼   ► and we'll do another eight show run when we

01:05:58 ◼   ► feel like we're ready for it.

01:06:01 ◼   ► I feel like that might work in a way that we'll just

01:06:06 ◼   ► do a show whenever-- we're not going to do one every week.

01:06:09 ◼   ► Maybe we're only going to do 20 per year,

01:06:11 ◼   ► but we'll do them at random whenever we feel like randomly

01:06:14 ◼   ► can get together. I feel like that never works. It falls apart.

01:06:17 ◼   ► Right, because that becomes, "Oh, we'll do it sometime soon. We'll do it next week.

01:06:21 ◼   ► We'll do it next month." And then the show goes six months without an episode.

01:06:24 ◼   ► Right. And I also feel like it might help in the same way that it works for TV shows

01:06:29 ◼   ► to keep the audience engaged. Then you can do just a little bit of promotion up front

01:06:35 ◼   ► a week or two in advance to make sure everybody knows the show's coming back, and then people

01:06:39 ◼   ► can get into it and sort of be ready for the fact, if they're fans of it, that that'll

01:06:43 ◼   ► That'll be one of the shows they'll have queued up on their phone to listen to in the car

01:06:46 ◼   ► on the way to work for two months.

01:06:48 ◼   ► I think it might be better to just do every two weeks, just constantly, rather than take

01:06:55 ◼   ► these big breaks.

01:06:56 ◼   ► I feel like the big breaks would also have a very high chance of just extending themselves

01:07:02 ◼   ► and becoming years, and then you forget about it and then the show dissolves.

01:07:08 ◼   ► And I think as a podcast listener, I listen to podcasts all the time, in the car, washing

01:07:12 ◼   ► whatever, and I walk in the dog, listen to a lot of podcasts, but there are more podcasts

01:07:19 ◼   ► most of the time that come out every week than what I have time to listen to, and I

01:07:23 ◼   ► think that's probably true for a lot of people.

01:07:25 ◼   ► Oh, it's ridiculous for me.

01:07:28 ◼   ► And so I wouldn't mind if some of my favorite shows went to every two weeks instead, because

01:07:32 ◼   ► I'm not the kind of guy to want to skip an episode. If a show that I listen to, if it

01:07:37 ◼   ► comes out, I'm going to listen to it. And if I can't keep up with the show, I'll

01:07:42 ◼   ► just delete it. I won't listen to it. I won't subscribe to it at all, because I'd

01:07:46 ◼   ► rather not hear any of it than only listen to every other episode. And maybe that's

01:07:50 ◼   ► just because I'm weird and I'm a nerd, but that's how I work. So if there were

01:07:55 ◼   ► more shows that weren't weekly but were still regular, I'd be fine with that.

01:08:01 ◼   ► Are you a catch-up on Twitter person? You know what? Honestly, I used to be, and

01:08:06 ◼   ► It took up so much time on my data in the last few months.

01:08:09 ◼   ► Basically, ever since starting the magazine,

01:08:11 ◼   ► when my workload has increased substantially,

01:08:13 ◼   ► ever since starting the magazine,

01:08:16 ◼   ► I became a scroll to top for the main timeline person.

01:08:19 ◼   ► I still read all of my at replies,

01:08:21 ◼   ► but I can't read the main timeline anymore.

01:08:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's how I,

01:08:26 ◼   ► but I've been like that for a long time.

01:08:27 ◼   ► And I'm usually a completist,

01:08:29 ◼   ► although I don't actually read all my email.

01:08:31 ◼   ► It's like a, just like a debt in the back of my hand.

01:08:34 ◼   ► I theoretically would read it all,

01:08:36 ◼   ► but I never get around to it.

01:08:38 ◼   ► But I never do the mark as read.

01:08:39 ◼   ► I keep them marked unread.

01:08:41 ◼   ► Whereas Twitter, I've never minded the fact

01:08:44 ◼   ► that I don't see them all.

01:08:45 ◼   ► - Well, 'cause Twitter, your timeline isn't everything

01:08:48 ◼   ► that's directed at you specifically,

01:08:50 ◼   ► so you don't feel like you are offending these people

01:08:52 ◼   ► by not reading what they posted publicly to the world.

01:08:55 ◼   ► - But I feel like there's, I feel like,

01:08:59 ◼   ► and I feel like that's one of the great things

01:09:00 ◼   ► Twitter has done over the years,

01:09:02 ◼   ► resist that urge to give you like an unread count.

01:09:06 ◼   ► And that's intentional.

01:09:07 ◼   ► It is, and there was so much demand for it, especially like when Twitter was at its sort

01:09:14 ◼   ► of—at the point where it was still young and malleable, but was old enough and established

01:09:22 ◼   ► enough that it was clearly going to be a huge thing.

01:09:25 ◼   ► Like it had been around long enough that everybody knew this was going to be a big deal, but

01:09:30 ◼   ► but it was still young enough that they could have made changes like kind of switch to an

01:09:34 ◼   ► inbox model where you're expected to read everything in your timeline. Or even to have

01:09:39 ◼   ► the option. That was the thing that people would say, is just give us the option to do

01:09:43 ◼   ► it that way. And you can even, you know, I even agree that you should leave it off by

01:09:47 ◼   ► default for most people. But give me the option to have a read and unread count for tweets.

01:09:53 ◼   ► And that was back when we would like ask Twitter to change something and not be scared by what

01:09:57 ◼   ► they would actually change. Right. It's true. It is true. Back when changes were usually

01:10:02 ◼   ► a good thing. Right. But I actually agree with that, though, that mindset, though, because

01:10:06 ◼   ► I do feel that by giving the option to do it, you implicitly endorse it. You're saying

01:10:11 ◼   ► that it's a legitimate way to use it, and they're saying no. And it is sort of like

01:10:15 ◼   ► an Apple-type decision, like you said, where they're making the decision for you, this

01:10:18 ◼   ► is the best way to read Twitter, is just start with what's going on right now and scroll

01:10:24 ◼   ► down until you're bored. And don't worry about catching up if you're away for a day.

01:10:29 ◼   ► Right. Dive into the stream, wherever it happens to be, and that's it.

01:10:34 ◼   ► Right. I guess I do read all my @ replies, although I can't say if I'm on vacation

01:10:40 ◼   ► or on a conference or traveling or something that I necessarily do.

01:10:44 ◼   ► Yeah, sometimes it gets out of control. Yeah, but I don't find it that hard to do

01:10:48 ◼   ► that either. Well, it's easy, because with @ replies,

01:10:53 ◼   ► especially because you have a pretty asymmetric follow to follower account. So I think people

01:11:00 ◼   ► who reply to you on Twitter probably don't implicitly expect a response to every one

01:11:08 ◼   ► of those replies. Whereas with email, there's kind of this, for most people, there's this

01:11:12 ◼   ► implicit expectation that you're going to respond. If somebody takes the time to compose

01:11:16 ◼   ► an email to you, then you should probably respond if you don't want to be a dick. Of

01:11:21 ◼   ► And of course I just choose to be a dick to everybody and not respond because I can't.

01:11:25 ◼   ► And I've mentioned this before, but there is something too that's really, really...

01:11:29 ◼   ► It's almost like evolutionary, that it gets to what humans are good at with Twitter as

01:11:34 ◼   ► opposed to...

01:11:39 ◼   ► Even email is that you can do it all with your eyeballs because you don't have to open

01:11:44 ◼   ► a tweet to read it.

01:11:45 ◼   ► Even no matter what your email program is, and if you have one in like most of where

01:11:48 ◼   ► can just keep hitting the space bar, for example, to keep going next message, next message.

01:11:53 ◼   ► You still have to like move your eyes up to the top of the screen each time. And even

01:11:59 ◼   ► people who are being conscientious and thinking, "Well, this guy is busy," or even if you don't

01:12:03 ◼   ► even think somebody is busy, just the fact that it's harder to write a concise short

01:12:07 ◼   ► message than it is a rambling one and keep it short. Twitter's enforced brevity makes

01:12:11 ◼   ► it possible. I can just read, I don't know what I'm looking at right now on my screen,

01:12:15 ◼   ► like, I don't know, a dozen tweets at a time just by moving my eyes down. And it's so much

01:12:21 ◼   ► faster. It's like an order of magnitude faster than even the most efficient email, right?

01:12:26 ◼   ► Even if everybody's email to me was tweet length, it's so much more efficient.

01:12:31 ◼   ► Well, because tweets are constrained to that length, the clients can be designed in a way

01:12:35 ◼   ► that makes it easy to skim a whole bunch of them. Whereas email, it could be one line,

01:12:40 ◼   ► or it could be some giant newsletter with a rich layout and pictures embedded and everything.

01:12:44 ◼   ► you don't know what to expect with email.

01:12:46 ◼   ► So the clients have to have these big flexible windows

01:12:48 ◼   ► and everything, and it's just not the same at all.

01:12:52 ◼   ► Yeah, totally.

01:12:53 ◼   ► What else is going on this week?

01:12:58 ◼   ► Not much.

01:13:00 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:13:01 ◼   ► I've been busy working on various stuff,

01:13:04 ◼   ► and I've kind of been buried.

01:13:07 ◼   ► I've missed most of the news, except the Apple stock stuff,

01:13:09 ◼   ► which just annoyed me.

01:13:10 ◼   ► So now, I'm glad to be out of it now.

01:13:14 ◼   ► Here's one that I thought was pretty interesting.

01:13:19 ◼   ► And there's two points to it.

01:13:22 ◼   ► Is this email that's come out in a legal case between--

01:13:26 ◼   ► I forget who all is involved-- but the government's investigating

01:13:28 ◼   ► Apple and Google and a bunch of other companies in Silicon Valley for--

01:13:34 ◼   ► I don't know what you want to call it legally--

01:13:36 ◼   ► Like a no-hire thing?

01:13:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:13:38 ◼   ► And it's like that it's an illegal form of collusion.

01:13:40 ◼   ► That they've agreed-- they unofficially agreed.

01:13:43 ◼   ► Adobe's involved, you know that they agreed not to

01:13:45 ◼   ► poach the other company's employees and if a guy from a current employee of Apple came to let's say Google and

01:13:53 ◼   ► Applied for a job that guy was fair game because he applied but that the each company's recruiters agreed

01:14:00 ◼   ► Implicitly not to go after employees at the other companies which in itself is apparently illegal

01:14:07 ◼   ► And I you know, I think for obvious reasons, it's not

01:14:11 ◼   ► It might be good for these companies, but it's certainly not good for the individual

01:14:15 ◼   ► Engineers, you know that such a thing in California has really I think generally

01:14:20 ◼   ► Pretty good laws on the books for and you know, all these companies are in California

01:14:25 ◼   ► In California, there's no non-competes those exactly. I think it goes hand it so that was exactly the example

01:14:31 ◼   ► I was going for is that they don't have they don't enforce non-competes. They're very very liberal and towards the engineers rights workers, right?

01:14:40 ◼   ► But this the one that really caught my eye though is this one that had an email from did you see this an email?

01:14:46 ◼   ► to Ed Colligan Ed Colligan being the

01:14:49 ◼   ► Palm CEO the PC guys aren't there but not being worried about Apple entering the cell phone market a couple weeks before the iPhone was announced

01:14:58 ◼   ► Because PC guys they've spent a long time

01:15:00 ◼   ► Trying to make a good cell phone PC guys aren't gonna walk right in and

01:15:09 ◼   ► Here's the email that Steve Jobs sent to him.

01:15:11 ◼   ► Ed, this is not satisfactory to Apple.

01:15:16 ◼   ► It is not just a matter of our employees

01:15:19 ◼   ► deciding they want to join Palm.

01:15:22 ◼   ► They are being actively recruited

01:15:24 ◼   ► using knowledge supplied by John Rubenstein and Fred Anderson.

01:15:28 ◼   ► Now, aside, John Rubenstein was--

01:15:31 ◼   ► I forget what his title was at Next,

01:15:33 ◼   ► but he was one of the guys who came over from Next to Apple,

01:15:35 ◼   ► had worked with Steve Jobs for a long time,

01:15:37 ◼   ► and was the head of hardware engineering at Apple during the early iPod era,

01:15:43 ◼   ► and when they really turned around the Macs and made Macs, you know, aluminum and all sorts of

01:15:49 ◼   ► stuff. And he had been in retirement just living in like a mansion down in Mexico or something like

01:15:55 ◼   ► that, and Palm got him to come back to run that. And Fred Anderson was the former CFO at Apple,

01:16:01 ◼   ► who kind of got thrown under the bus with the that options thing that you referred to

01:16:07 ◼   ► the backdating scandal yeah uh he kind of took the fall for that options backdating thing which

01:16:13 ◼   ► keep that in mind i i'm going to bring that right back up in a minute um with john now back to jobs

01:16:19 ◼   ► email with john personally participating in the recruiting process we must do whatever we can to

01:16:26 ◼   ► stop this. I'm sure you realize the asymmetry in the financial resources of our respective

01:16:32 ◼   ► companies when you say we will both just end up paying a lot of lawyers a lot of money."

01:16:44 ◼   ► And then it goes on, and effectively Jobs threatens a patent suit if Palm doesn't agree

01:16:50 ◼   ► that Apple's going to go after Palm on patent grounds

01:16:55 ◼   ► if Palm doesn't agree to this sort of no-poach policy.

01:16:58 ◼   ► And then bad mouse a bunch of patents more or less says--

01:17:03 ◼   ► what's he say here?

01:17:03 ◼   ► I guess I should just read it.

01:17:05 ◼   ► "Just for the record, when Siemens sold their handset business to BenQ,

01:17:10 ◼   ► they didn't sell them their essential patents,

01:17:13 ◼   ► but rather just gave them a license.

01:17:15 ◼   ► The patents they did sell to BenQ are not that great.

01:17:18 ◼   ► We looked at them ourselves when they were for sale.

01:17:21 ◼   ► I guess you guys felt differently and bought them.

01:17:25 ◼   ► We are not concerned about them at all.

01:17:27 ◼   ► My advice is to take a look at our patent portfolio

01:17:30 ◼   ► before you make a final decision here, Steve.

01:17:34 ◼   ► That's fantastic.

01:17:36 ◼   ► And to me, it's just--

01:17:37 ◼   ► I loved it in the sense that it's such classic Steve Jobs.

01:17:42 ◼   ► It's your thing is shit.

01:17:45 ◼   ► Our stuff is awesome.

01:17:46 ◼   ► Just do what I want.

01:17:47 ◼   ► these patents you bought. You're dumb." That's always part of the jobs like Kung Fu or the

01:17:53 ◼   ► Jedi mind trick is to somehow convince you that you're dumb.

01:17:56 ◼   ► Tim Cynova Yep. And everything's black and white.

01:17:58 ◼   ► Eric Bischoff Right. We took a look at these. This is about

01:18:00 ◼   ► a—I guess the call again that said, "Look, we bought these patents from this Ben—I

01:18:04 ◼   ► never heard of BenQ, but who knows? They're a bunch of mobile patents. We bought them.

01:18:09 ◼   ► And the job's the same. We looked at them. We decided they're a shit. I guess you felt

01:18:14 ◼   ► differently."

01:18:15 ◼   ► And I think it's such classic jobs.

01:18:19 ◼   ► So I guess I was amused.

01:18:22 ◼   ► There's so much character in that email.

01:18:24 ◼   ► And it's just kind of--

01:18:25 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

01:18:26 ◼   ► And not to mention, I love the lawyer bit, too.

01:18:29 ◼   ► Because the POM guy had said, oh, we're

01:18:31 ◼   ► just going to spend a whole bunch of money on lawyers.

01:18:32 ◼   ► Which is usually, if you're being threatened

01:18:35 ◼   ► by legal action, the person who's being threatened

01:18:37 ◼   ► and knows that they would lose or would cost them

01:18:40 ◼   ► a whole lot of money, usually that's what they say.

01:18:43 ◼   ► Oh, let's leave the lawyers out of this.

01:18:44 ◼   ► we'll figure this out ourselves. So yeah, that's not a position of power that he was

01:18:50 ◼   ► coming from there. Oh man, that was, that, yeah, that email was fantastic.

01:18:55 ◼   ► Right. So here's Dan Lyons' take on it today over at the ReadWrite.

01:19:02 ◼   ► No more web. They dropped that, huh?

01:19:04 ◼   ► Right. They dropped that when they brought Dan Lyons. He says, he quotes this and sets

01:19:10 ◼   ► the stage and he has a picture of the email. And then he says, "Apple fan blogger John

01:19:14 ◼   ► Gruber seems to think this letter is just the coolest thing ever a quote stone cold message that shows

01:19:20 ◼   ► Quote the man did not beat around the bush

01:19:23 ◼   ► I feel like that's such typical Dan Lyons where I never said it was the coolest thing ever and he didn't put quotes around it

01:19:30 ◼   ► I didn't say it was the coolest thing ever and I didn't you know, I don't go into deep

01:19:34 ◼   ► analysis of everything I linked to

01:19:37 ◼   ► He's saying here but wait a minute

01:19:41 ◼   ► Let's look at what happened here.

01:19:42 ◼   ► Jobs, one, Jobs proposed something to Palm

01:19:44 ◼   ► that was not only wrong, but also, quote,

01:19:46 ◼   ► "likely illegal," as Colligan put it.

01:19:49 ◼   ► Two, Colligan refused to do something illegal.

01:19:51 ◼   ► Three, as punishment, Jobs threatened to drag Palm

01:19:54 ◼   ► into years of bogus patent suits.

01:19:55 ◼   ► He was perfectly willing to use, parentheses,

01:19:58 ◼   ► abuse, question mark, the legal,

01:20:00 ◼   ► the court system to hurt a rival.

01:20:03 ◼   ► And then Dan Lyon says, "And we're supposed to see Jobs

01:20:05 ◼   ► "as some kind of hero?"

01:20:07 ◼   ► I didn't say you were supposed to see him

01:20:09 ◼   ► as a hero for that.

01:20:10 ◼   ► I didn't pass any real judgment on it.

01:20:12 ◼   ► And I would say that saying that the letter,

01:20:14 ◼   ► the email was stone cold is,

01:20:17 ◼   ► whether you think Jobs is a complete asshole for it

01:20:19 ◼   ► or that it's funny or that you think

01:20:21 ◼   ► he was completely in the right to do it,

01:20:23 ◼   ► I think everybody could agree

01:20:24 ◼   ► it was a pretty stone cold email, right?

01:20:26 ◼   ► I mean, that's ice cold.

01:20:29 ◼   ► I like, that's all I wrote.

01:20:30 ◼   ► I didn't say it was cool.

01:20:32 ◼   ► You know, and in fact, if you want me to analyze it

01:20:34 ◼   ► a little bit, I would actually say that in a sense,

01:20:37 ◼   ► probably that's probably the worst of Steve Jobs in that it is I don't know

01:20:44 ◼   ► what's the word impetuous you know it's it's reckless right it is that's a

01:20:50 ◼   ► reckless thing and here's the thing about it I was emailing somebody else

01:20:55 ◼   ► about it today and they were they somebody else had emailed me a friend

01:20:58 ◼   ► had email and so what patents do you think jobs was threatening palm with and

01:21:01 ◼   ► I said you know what he probably didn't have any patents in mind he was just

01:21:04 ◼   ► making the threat, and if it ever came to it, he'd go and say, "Find some patents and

01:21:08 ◼   ► do it."

01:21:09 ◼   ► But he didn't have any patents in mind, and he clearly didn't—here's the thing—he

01:21:13 ◼   ► clearly didn't go to Apple Legal and say, "Find me some patents to go after Palm because

01:21:18 ◼   ► I want to write this email," because if he did, even if they had the patents that

01:21:22 ◼   ► they could threaten him with, if he had gone to Apple Legal, surely Apple Legal would have

01:21:26 ◼   ► said, "You can't put that in writing because sending an email like that, making a threat

01:21:30 ◼   ► like that is illegal, and you certainly don't want to put it in writing."

01:21:33 ◼   ► Right? Like, I think it's fairly clear that Steve Jobs didn't run that email by anybody.

01:21:38 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

01:21:39 ◼   ► He just wrote it.

01:21:40 ◼   ► I mean, that's why it's so amusing to people like us who follow him and his company and

01:21:46 ◼   ► this whole business is like, you know, you got to give the guy credit. He had balls.

01:21:51 ◼   ► And there are not that many people in our industry who will speak that frankly who are

01:21:55 ◼   ► in a position of power. I think his friend Larry Ellison is one. There really aren't

01:22:00 ◼   ► a whole lot more. And so I feel like, and maybe it's, I don't know if it's like an East Coast

01:22:07 ◼   ► thing, I feel like it's a cultural thing of some sort where either you love that attitude as a

01:22:14 ◼   ► spectator or it's off-putting. And we love it. Right. I certainly wouldn't have, even if he had

01:22:22 ◼   ► sent me an email and said, "John, I've read your site for a long time. Never asked your opinion

01:22:27 ◼   ► before, but here's the thing. I want to send this email to Ed Colligan. Do you think I

01:22:31 ◼   ► should? I would have had to say, "It's pretty funny, but I don't think you should send that

01:22:35 ◼   ► because I don't think you should be making legal threats like this in an email." I don't

01:22:43 ◼   ► think anybody would have said that. And I do think that in a sense that that sort of

01:22:48 ◼   ► reckless impetuousness was the worst of Steve Jobs for Apple, and it kind of made him a

01:22:53 ◼   ► little bit ill-suited to run them the larger and larger they got. And I think it's the

01:22:57 ◼   ► exact sort of thing got them into the trouble with those options being backdated. Like,

01:23:03 ◼   ► I don't think he wasn't trying to cheat the system, I think, per se. He just wanted

01:23:10 ◼   ► what he wanted. And, you know, I think in hindsight, the way that whole options thing

01:23:17 ◼   ► played out, you know, got very, very careful to really getting in big trouble. And other

01:23:21 ◼   ► people did, you know, have to get thrown under the bus.

01:23:25 ◼   ► I don't really know what, like I don't know enough about the options that they comment

01:23:28 ◼   ► on at all, because I don't know what was going on.

01:23:30 ◼   ► I don't know what the reality is of it.

01:23:31 ◼   ► Well, they effectively erased some dates on some options and said that the board had approved

01:23:36 ◼   ► the changing of these dates when the board had not approved it.

01:23:40 ◼   ► The board ended up approving this change on the dates after they changed all the dates.

01:23:45 ◼   ► Oh, okay.

01:23:46 ◼   ► You know.

01:23:47 ◼   ► I do think, though, in general, though, I think one of the things that made Steve so

01:23:51 ◼   ► so compelling to pay attention to is that he was that reckless, and that most of the

01:23:57 ◼   ► time it worked for him. He was very, very good at breaking rules just enough to be interesting

01:24:06 ◼   ► and to get ahead, but not enough to really get himself in trouble.

01:24:10 ◼   ► Right. And you can see how that mindset and that boldness would be great at the negotiating

01:24:15 ◼   ► table in a room where you're just talking to people.

01:24:18 ◼   ► Right, where nothing's being recorded.

01:24:20 ◼   ► Right. And it's not so good when you're sending emails that are in a system that can be brought

01:24:25 ◼   ► up four years later.

01:24:26 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:24:27 ◼   ► In a way that Tim Cook is never going to send that email. And I feel like it's actually

01:24:34 ◼   ► in a way that Tim Cook is – and I'm not trying to argue here that Apple is better

01:24:39 ◼   ► off that Steve Jobs is dead or that Steve Jobs isn't the CEO. But that there are trade-offs

01:24:46 ◼   ► involved and there are certain ways where I think it's clear that Tim Cook is better

01:24:50 ◼   ► as CEO, because he's not impetuous.

01:24:54 ◼   ► Right, I mean, he's more level-headed, and it's going to work for

01:24:58 ◼   ► and against Apple in the long term. Steve's craziness

01:25:02 ◼   ► really brought a lot to the company and really was

01:25:06 ◼   ► necessary to achieve a lot of what they achieved. I still can't believe, I don't know

01:25:10 ◼   ► how much Steve was involved, I have to imagine it was a lot.

01:25:14 ◼   ► I still can't believe in fairly recent, some of the later things he did,

01:25:18 ◼   ► that iTunes match is, that that worked,

01:25:21 ◼   ► that that's legal, that he actually, or somebody,

01:25:23 ◼   ► negotiated that with the record companies.

01:25:26 ◼   ► - Yeah. - I can't, that's, like,

01:25:28 ◼   ► that's the kind of thing that,

01:25:30 ◼   ► it wasn't too far before he died,

01:25:32 ◼   ► but I assume he was involved in that,

01:25:35 ◼   ► because it's the kind of crazy negotiation that,

01:25:38 ◼   ► you know, now the record companies are allowing Amazon

01:25:41 ◼   ► and Google to do very similar things,

01:25:44 ◼   ► but I think only 'cause Apple did it first,

01:25:45 ◼   ► and now they want it-- - Showed that it worked.

01:25:47 ◼   ► and they want to keep, for the same reason

01:25:49 ◼   ► that the record companies gave Amazon MP3 DRM-free stuff

01:25:52 ◼   ► first, is that they don't want Apple to be

01:25:55 ◼   ► too powerful in that industry.

01:25:57 ◼   ► They don't want to be beholden to one company.

01:26:00 ◼   ► Apple got it out of them, and then eventually they

01:26:02 ◼   ► gave it to the other companies to help keep Apple in check.

01:26:05 ◼   ► I think, I'm sure that just a book about Apple's

01:26:11 ◼   ► various negotiations over the last 10 years

01:26:13 ◼   ► with the record companies would probably be a pretty good book.

01:26:16 ◼   ► Just the record in media companies, let's say.

01:26:19 ◼   ► But the original ones-- and I'm sure they were hard, too.

01:26:25 ◼   ► Just the original ones to get the original iTunes store off

01:26:28 ◼   ► the ground, I'm sure, were fascinating and were hard.

01:26:30 ◼   ► And Jobs' single personality had a large part of it.

01:26:34 ◼   ► But clearly, that was a lot easier,

01:26:37 ◼   ► because Apple was coming at it from the perspective of,

01:26:41 ◼   ► we're just little old Apple.

01:26:43 ◼   ► iPods only work on Macs, and Macs only have 2.5% of the market share.

01:26:49 ◼   ► And they've actually-- I forget where that's come out,

01:26:53 ◼   ► but somewhere that's actually come out where

01:26:55 ◼   ► I know that that was actually part of their pitch to the record labels

01:26:59 ◼   ► was, what's the worst that could happen?

01:27:03 ◼   ► Even if this thing-- because the record company people didn't even understand

01:27:06 ◼   ► the technology involved.

01:27:07 ◼   ► And what's the worst that could happen if somehow everybody

01:27:10 ◼   ► who has this iTunes software can get access to all the music on the thing, it's still only 2.5%

01:27:16 ◼   ► of the market. It's just this tiny little sliver. But that wisely and not accidentally, nothing in

01:27:27 ◼   ► the contracts ever said that iTunes was going to be Mac only forever. It just said that. And that

01:27:34 ◼   ► all of the record people just assumed that it was, because that's all Apple ever did, is make stuff

01:27:39 ◼   ► for their own hardware devices.

01:27:42 ◼   ► And I feel like taking it back to the beginning of Apple's

01:27:47 ◼   ► success really actually being a hindrance in many ways,

01:27:52 ◼   ► now the things they've tried to negotiate now

01:27:55 ◼   ► with some of the big companies, like the TV deals for Apple TV

01:27:58 ◼   ► and why we have iTunes match for music and not for movies or TV

01:28:02 ◼   ► quite yet, well, TV sort of sometimes.

01:28:04 ◼   ► And yeah.

01:28:06 ◼   ► we're seeing now, and anything they do with TV,

01:28:09 ◼   ► I think this is really what's holding it back,

01:28:12 ◼   ► is now all these companies are afraid to give Apple

01:28:15 ◼   ► too much power because they see what Apple's capable of now

01:28:20 ◼   ► that they're big and successful.

01:28:22 ◼   ► And they don't want Apple to cut them out

01:28:26 ◼   ► or to take all the profit out of their business.

01:28:29 ◼   ► And I think, too, that it's-- and that's what I mean.

01:28:33 ◼   ► And that's exactly the point that I wanted to make, too,

01:28:36 ◼   ► that I think that a win like iTunes match two years ago,

01:28:40 ◼   ► with Apple being the Apple we know today,

01:28:42 ◼   ► the industry Goliath, is such a more surprising win

01:28:45 ◼   ► because they didn't sneak it in through the back door.

01:28:47 ◼   ► Like there's no more, hey, we're just little old Apple.

01:28:50 ◼   ► What do you care what we do?

01:28:53 ◼   ► To me too, there's also a factor

01:28:54 ◼   ► that I'm sure plays into it,

01:28:56 ◼   ► which is that Apple has a sort of mystique

01:28:59 ◼   ► that you negotiate with Apple

01:29:01 ◼   ► and no matter what you think looking at the offer,

01:29:03 ◼   ► Apple always wins, right?

01:29:05 ◼   ► So, and did you see the thing recently that was this great New Yorker profile about this

01:29:12 ◼   ► guy, this professional like stage pickpocket in Las Vegas?

01:29:16 ◼   ► No, I didn't see it.

01:29:18 ◼   ► Apollo something.

01:29:19 ◼   ► All right, hold on a second.

01:29:21 ◼   ► Let me Google this.

01:29:23 ◼   ► Apollo pickpocket.

01:29:24 ◼   ► It's a great profile of this guy, Apollo Robbins.

01:29:29 ◼   ► So he's a professional pickpocket, but he doesn't steal things from people.

01:29:31 ◼   ► He does it as like an act and he'll go and he's just amazing.

01:29:36 ◼   ► You got to Google this guy, Apollo Robbins, and see the video of the way that he works.

01:29:45 ◼   ► The article, it's by Adam Green.

01:29:46 ◼   ► It starts out so great.

01:29:48 ◼   ► I'm just going to read the opening.

01:29:49 ◼   ► It's a real long article, so I'm not spoiling it.

01:29:54 ◼   ► A few years ago at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette of the act Penn

01:29:58 ◼   ► and Teller was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a

01:30:02 ◼   ► reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Gillette, who ranks pickpockets,

01:30:08 ◼   ► says, "A few notches below hypnotists on the showbiz totem pole," that's where he ranks

01:30:14 ◼   ► them, "was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration,

01:30:19 ◼   ► ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working

01:30:25 ◼   ► in front of other magicians. He pointed out, since Gillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt,

01:30:32 ◼   ► he wouldn't have much to work with. "Come on," Gillette said. "Steal something from me."

01:30:37 ◼   ► Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Gillette to place

01:30:43 ◼   ► a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small

01:30:49 ◼   ► crowd had gathered. Gillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, and unclipped a pen from his

01:30:54 ◼   ► shirt and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His

01:31:00 ◼   ► face was pale. "Fuck you," he said and slumped into a chair. Robbins held up a thin cylindrical

01:31:10 ◼   ► object, the cartridge from Gillette's pen.

01:31:13 ◼   ► Wow.

01:31:14 ◼   ► Right? Is it? I mean, and the thing—now, here's the thing that made me think about

01:31:18 ◼   ► story is that it's the idea that if you met this guy or if you met Penn Jillette

01:31:24 ◼   ► who you know is a magician and he starts telling you that he wants you know to do

01:31:28 ◼   ► something you know he's going to get the best of you right like you know that

01:31:32 ◼   ► he's going to fool you because he's the he's the magician and he's done the trick

01:31:35 ◼   ► a thousand times right like so I I feel like when other companies negotiate with

01:31:44 ◼   ► Apple they feel like they just know that they're going to get their pockets picked

01:31:47 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. And it's probably a pretty safe assumption.

01:31:50 ◼   ► Right? And that just like a magician who's going to make it harder and harder and say

01:31:55 ◼   ► like, "Look, look, I know that you think that I'm going to cheat you out of this.

01:31:58 ◼   ► I'm going to get your thing. I'm going to take your wallet right out of your pocket.

01:32:00 ◼   ► So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to blindfold myself. Here, take this burlap

01:32:05 ◼   ► sack, put my head in the sack." It doesn't matter what you do, they're still going to

01:32:08 ◼   ► get you. No matter what terms Apple puts in.

01:32:11 ◼   ► Right, because you've got to figure, Apple's not going to enter a bad deal for them.

01:32:16 ◼   ► Right.

01:32:17 ◼   ► You know, they're obviously, you know, they've proven that they're pretty good at negotiating

01:32:21 ◼   ► deals.

01:32:22 ◼   ► The breakdown in my analogy, though, is that I think the music industry has done very well

01:32:27 ◼   ► by iTunes as well.

01:32:28 ◼   ► Now, the music industry might disagree because they want, like, all of the money, but I feel

01:32:33 ◼   ► like iTunes might have saved them from out-and-out bankruptcy or dissolution, like the entire

01:32:39 ◼   ► destruction of it.

01:32:40 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

01:32:41 ◼   ► I think you're totally right, and I also agree that they don't really see it that way.

01:32:44 ◼   ► they see, most of the public remarks we've seen and the stories we've heard from various accounts of meetings and stuff,

01:32:52 ◼   ► most of what we've seen indicates that most of the big labels do think that iTunes was a bad thing for them,

01:32:59 ◼   ► and that it took over the industry from them. And it did take over a good amount of the control.

01:33:04 ◼   ► But at the time that iTunes came out, piracy was so big, and all of the other paid services were flopping like crazy.

01:33:13 ◼   ► And so it's really hard to argue that there was a bright future without iTunes in

01:33:20 ◼   ► 2003 or whenever it came out. Right. Their plan, their plan more or less, I think, boiled down to

01:33:25 ◼   ► somehow figure out a way to stop piracy.

01:33:28 ◼   ► Right. And that they still believe that that was possible. In their minds,

01:33:32 ◼   ► they think that there was a way, somebody had it, some clever guy with a beard could have figured it out,

01:33:38 ◼   ► that there was a way to stop piracy and then things would go back to the way they were, which was beautiful.

01:33:43 ◼   ► Whereas Apple's argument, and this I'm not making, you know, this isn't my analysis,

01:33:48 ◼   ► this is explicitly how Steve Jobs pitched it on stage, was not that you're gonna beat piracy,

01:33:53 ◼   ► but that you can design something easier than piracy.

01:33:57 ◼   ► Right, you compete with it.

01:33:58 ◼   ► Right, compete with it in terms of being convenient and fast and available and accurate

01:34:04 ◼   ► so that if you type a certain song name you getting the actual song and have it come with the album art and

01:34:10 ◼   ► It's a guarantee the quality and everything

01:34:13 ◼   ► It's not going to be accidentally in Spanish or if you make it better people will pay 99 cents for it exactly

01:34:18 ◼   ► Or at least right at least enough of them will that it's better than the zero dollars that they were heading towards me

01:34:24 ◼   ► Right exactly like because they the future they were really heading to was one where one person somewhere buys the CD

01:34:31 ◼   ► And then everybody has a copy of all the music every album sells three copies

01:34:35 ◼   ► All from three people who are trying to be the first to get it uploaded yep

01:34:41 ◼   ► Alright, let me do the second sponsor second sponsor. I know you've never heard of this company. This is brand new

01:34:46 ◼   ► It's a company called talks. I don't ever heard of them

01:34:49 ◼   ► Alright they make they source

01:34:55 ◼   ► Roast and ship coffee now everybody I kid I kid because they've been a strong supporter of the talk show for the last few months

01:35:03 ◼   ► Here's the quote I want to I've been thinking about this

01:35:06 ◼   ► I'm gonna go back to this quote from Andy Warhol talking about coca-cola. There's a quote from Andy Warhol on coca-cola

01:35:13 ◼   ► What's great about this country?

01:35:15 ◼   ► Is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest?

01:35:21 ◼   ► You can be watching TV and see coca-cola and you know that the president drinks coke

01:35:26 ◼   ► Liz Taylor drinks coke and just think you can drink coke too

01:35:30 ◼   ► Coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the street corner is drinking

01:35:36 ◼   ► All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it

01:35:41 ◼   ► The president knows it the bum knows it and you know it. I love that quote. Yeah, I love it, too

01:35:46 ◼   ► And to me the way it relates to Tonks is this and it's it's this sort of

01:35:51 ◼   ► Mass market luxury items right in the old days, you know

01:35:57 ◼   ► let's go back to three four hundred years only like Kings and

01:36:00 ◼   ► and landowners could have like the best of anything and everybody else lived with like dirt floors and

01:36:05 ◼   ► One shirt that they had to like so themselves

01:36:09 ◼   ► Here's the thing you can buy the best coffee in the world and you don't have to pay

01:36:15 ◼   ► More than a reasonable amount for the coffee you'd get at the supermarket to get it. You just go to tonks org ton x org

01:36:22 ◼   ► Sign up for a free trial see for yourself

01:36:25 ◼   ► The free trial to me is key because then you don't have to take my word for you can believe it

01:36:29 ◼   ► But what you're getting is the best coffee in the world. I mean it is just phenomenal

01:36:33 ◼   ► And it's you know, you're not paying an arm and a leg for it

01:36:37 ◼   ► You're not paying you're not having to hire someone to roast coffee for you or something like that. They do all this work and

01:36:43 ◼   ► You're getting world-class stuff and you don't have to worry about it anymore

01:36:47 ◼   ► It's never in the back of your mind. You have to sit there and think I could be drinking better coffee instead

01:36:52 ◼   ► You just have it and it just shows up at your house

01:36:55 ◼   ► You don't even have to leave and and for me that this is going to be a bigger and bigger deal

01:36:58 ◼   ► It's like I swear to God it's like 13 degrees here

01:37:01 ◼   ► Yep

01:37:03 ◼   ► Not leaving the house to like go get more coffee. I

01:37:06 ◼   ► Couldn't be better just the fact that I've right downstairs in my kitchen

01:37:10 ◼   ► I've got a sealed up bag of Tonks coffee to start my day

01:37:13 ◼   ► I just can't imagine how it could be a better service.

01:37:18 ◼   ► The more I think about Tonks, the more I'm just blown away by the fact that I just can't

01:37:22 ◼   ► even imagine how it could be any better.

01:37:25 ◼   ► The other thought I have on Tonks, and it happens to me every single day that I make

01:37:29 ◼   ► Tonks coffee and sit here and work on Daring Fireball, is I'm always – I make coffee.

01:37:34 ◼   ► I make about three cups at a time.

01:37:37 ◼   ► That's about enough caffeine for me.

01:37:39 ◼   ► I'm always a little bit sad when I go to pour.

01:37:42 ◼   ► And I do this every time.

01:37:43 ◼   ► I go to pour a little more, and it ends up I'm already out of it.

01:37:46 ◼   ► And I thought I was on cup two, and I had one more.

01:37:50 ◼   ► And then I think to myself, well, I should go brew another pot.

01:37:53 ◼   ► Now, that's just way-- that's too much.

01:37:56 ◼   ► It's a little different in booze, but you can definitely have too much coffee,

01:37:58 ◼   ► and it can turn you off.

01:38:00 ◼   ► So I kind of have to-- you've got to race in it.

01:38:03 ◼   ► But it's a little sadness every day when I finish my pot of tongs.

01:38:06 ◼   ► and that's a good problem to have.

01:38:09 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

01:38:10 ◼   ► - Tonks.org, go there and sign up for the free trial.

01:38:14 ◼   ► - One thing I love about Tonks,

01:38:16 ◼   ► and I should point out, I think this week,

01:38:19 ◼   ► yeah, they sponsored my site this week, I think, right?

01:38:23 ◼   ► I don't know, I hope I don't get this wrong.

01:38:25 ◼   ► Oh yeah, yeah, it was this week, all right.

01:38:26 ◼   ► - Complete coincidence that you're the guest on the show

01:38:28 ◼   ► and we're two for two on, it's just good sponsors, really.

01:38:31 ◼   ► Honestly. - Oh yeah.

01:38:32 ◼   ► And one thing, you know, people always ask,

01:38:35 ◼   ► First of all, to preface this,

01:38:38 ◼   ► they did a fantastic interview with Glenn Fleischman

01:38:41 ◼   ► on his new podcast, The New Disruptors, which is on Mule.

01:38:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I just-- - I just linked to it

01:38:46 ◼   ► before the show.

01:38:47 ◼   ► - Glenn is making me sick, he is.

01:38:49 ◼   ► I don't know, I've always been a huge fan of Glenn's work,

01:38:53 ◼   ► but he's like on fire lately,

01:38:55 ◼   ► and he's the editor of the magazine.

01:38:58 ◼   ► He's got this new podcast.

01:39:00 ◼   ► I linked it up today,

01:39:02 ◼   ► 'cause my pal Jim Kudol's on this week's episode.

01:39:04 ◼   ► Almost linked up the Tonks episode, but I really kind of felt like well

01:39:09 ◼   ► I don't know. I didn't want to put a disclaimer in about Tonks being but it was it was a great episode. I did anyway

01:39:15 ◼   ► What one of the things I loved about it was?

01:39:18 ◼   ► That that Tony of Tonks

01:39:21 ◼   ► He talks a lot about how?

01:39:24 ◼   ► modern coffee consumer culture is really a gadget fetish of all these different coffee brewing equipment and and

01:39:31 ◼   ► the rituals and the techniques and the really nitty-gritty details of how you make it and and a lot of it matters and a lot

01:39:37 ◼   ► of it doesn't and and

01:39:39 ◼   ► I've often wanted I've thought about for years. I guess now everybody can steal my idea

01:39:45 ◼   ► I've thought about for years doing a series of posts on my site of actually actually setting up real

01:39:51 ◼   ► Blind taste tests for different things like does it matter whether you wet the error press filter before you use it?

01:39:58 ◼   ► You know, like all this stuff that I'm kind of skeptical, like whether it matters or not,

01:40:04 ◼   ► and I, you know, actually have like a real, like real tasters and a real double-blind

01:40:07 ◼   ► setup.

01:40:08 ◼   ► I'll probably never do it because that's a heck of a lot of work and setup and people.

01:40:12 ◼   ► But I really want somebody to do this because there is so much of it that's unnecessary.

01:40:19 ◼   ► I don't believe in a wedding that filters.

01:40:21 ◼   ► Neither do I. And I, you know, people will say, "Oh."

01:40:23 ◼   ► I don't understand how that could make a damn bit of difference. I really don't.

01:40:27 ◼   ► But I would love for someone to run a test like that.

01:40:29 ◼   ► If somebody ran the test that you're proposing and they said, "You know what?

01:40:33 ◼   ► It does make a difference," then I would do it.

01:40:35 ◼   ► But I don't.

01:40:36 ◼   ► Right.

01:40:37 ◼   ► Me too.

01:40:38 ◼   ► I would start.

01:40:39 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:40:40 ◼   ► But I tried it with the Chemex.

01:40:41 ◼   ► I own almost every popular method for brewing drip coffee.

01:40:44 ◼   ► I have a Chemex.

01:40:45 ◼   ► I have a vacuum pot.

01:40:46 ◼   ► Of course, I have the AeroPress and all sorts of other lesser-known ones.

01:40:51 ◼   ► And what I use every day is the AeroPress, this $25 plastic plunger thing.

01:40:57 ◼   ► And so people always ask me, "What kind of coffee?"

01:41:01 ◼   ► What kind of coffee maker should I get is kind of like asking a professional photographer

01:41:04 ◼   ► what kind of camera they have.

01:41:07 ◼   ► It matters less than you think it does.

01:41:11 ◼   ► And usually it's the wrong question.

01:41:13 ◼   ► It really is, especially since I guess they're getting better maybe, but the vast majority

01:41:18 ◼   ► of commercial coffee makers are incapable of making good coffee.

01:41:23 ◼   ► And in reality, the results from them are really quite similar usually.

01:41:26 ◼   ► Not to be snobby about it, but that there's some basic physics involved that the water

01:41:30 ◼   ► temperature just never even gets close enough to being hot enough, and so it doesn't matter

01:41:33 ◼   ► what kind of coffee you put in. It's never going to really get the most out of the coffee.

01:41:38 ◼   ► Or the problem I have with them is that I like to use a good ratio of coffee, like the

01:41:43 ◼   ► SCAA ratio. And usually that ratio, if you actually use it to make more than a few cups

01:41:49 ◼   ► of coffee in a drip pot, usually the filter basket will overflow.

01:41:54 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:41:56 ◼   ► - Which would be a real mess.

01:41:58 ◼   ► - It is.

01:41:59 ◼   ► It's happened to me a few times at relatives' houses.

01:42:01 ◼   ► That's always fun.

01:42:03 ◼   ► So whenever people ask me,

01:42:05 ◼   ► "What should I do to make good coffee?"

01:42:09 ◼   ► I used to not really have a very good answer for them.

01:42:11 ◼   ► 'Cause I used to live above a roaster.

01:42:14 ◼   ► So my answer was, "Well, I have really good coffee

01:42:16 ◼   ► "because I live above a roaster.

01:42:18 ◼   ► "You don't have this potential,

01:42:19 ◼   ► "so try to find something good."

01:42:21 ◼   ► And in most places,

01:42:23 ◼   ► The reality is most places where most people live, there isn't a good roaster nearby.

01:42:28 ◼   ► My solution now is you need three things.

01:42:31 ◼   ► You need a clicky keyboard, a SodaStream...

01:42:34 ◼   ► No, you need a burger grinder, and that can be anywhere from $60 to $200.

01:42:40 ◼   ► My preferred one is $200.

01:42:41 ◼   ► It's the Baratza Virtuoso.

01:42:43 ◼   ► It is fantastic.

01:42:45 ◼   ► But there's a few that are in the $60 range that I think...

01:42:48 ◼   ► I haven't used them.

01:42:49 ◼   ► People said they're pretty good too, so that's fine.

01:42:52 ◼   ► You get a burger grinder, you grind fine.

01:42:55 ◼   ► You get an AeroPress for $25, and you get tongs.

01:42:59 ◼   ► And that's it.

01:42:59 ◼   ► Then you're done.

01:43:00 ◼   ► Then you have great coffee.

01:43:01 ◼   ► And the grinder is a little bit expensive,

01:43:06 ◼   ► but you don't have to buy this $300 coffee maker.

01:43:10 ◼   ► There is no integrated system.

01:43:11 ◼   ► There's no cartridges of anything special.

01:43:14 ◼   ► All the cartridge machines give you stale coffee

01:43:17 ◼   ► that's pre-ground.

01:43:20 ◼   ► There's no weird gimmicks or tricks.

01:43:22 ◼   ► It's just putting good coffee into a method

01:43:24 ◼   ► that extracts the flavor decently.

01:43:26 ◼   ► And that method happens to cost $25.

01:43:28 ◼   ► And that's it.

01:43:30 ◼   ► The answer is really that simple.

01:43:32 ◼   ► - And you can do it for even cheaper.

01:43:34 ◼   ► - You can, yeah.

01:43:35 ◼   ► - Just by having fresh coffee,

01:43:38 ◼   ► starting with good coffee, and just pour,

01:43:40 ◼   ► what is it, 200 degree water over.

01:43:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, like a pour over filter cone.

01:43:44 ◼   ► You can get one of those for like 11 bucks.

01:43:47 ◼   ► And pour overs have a higher tolerance for bad grinders.

01:43:52 ◼   ► So the AeroPress, I'd say you need a fine grind.

01:43:56 ◼   ► My grinder, I had cleaned it.

01:43:58 ◼   ► And I had improperly reassembled it earlier this week.

01:44:01 ◼   ► And so for a couple days, the grind was not getting fine.

01:44:04 ◼   ► It was way too coarse.

01:44:05 ◼   ► It was stuck at the highest setting.

01:44:07 ◼   ► And what happens then when you use too coarse of a grind

01:44:10 ◼   ► with the AeroPress?

01:44:11 ◼   ► Totally changes the flavor.

01:44:12 ◼   ► It makes it weaker and almost like a little more sour,

01:44:16 ◼   ► or a little more tart, because it's missing some of the depth.

01:44:21 ◼   ► I'm probably describing it wrong.

01:44:23 ◼   ► I don't want to sound like a wine taster.

01:44:25 ◼   ► Right.

01:44:26 ◼   ► Well, there is something weird, though.

01:44:28 ◼   ► There is something weird about coffee

01:44:29 ◼   ► that's unlike anything else to me, which

01:44:31 ◼   ► is that if you make it too weak, it tastes worse.

01:44:34 ◼   ► But it tastes worse in some ways in a stronger flavored way.

01:44:40 ◼   ► Right?

01:44:40 ◼   ► Well, yeah.

01:44:41 ◼   ► And there's some of that, like sometimes the worst tasting

01:44:44 ◼   ► elements will be extracted more in badly made coffee. There's things like that that go

01:44:50 ◼   ► into it.

01:44:51 ◼   ► As opposed to, let's say, liquor, where if you just don't have a taste for, say,

01:44:56 ◼   ► bourbon straight, that watering it down might make it a lot more palatable or even enjoyable,

01:45:05 ◼   ► that coffee that's too weak, it's worse. Not because it has no taste, but because,

01:45:11 ◼   ► Like you said, it extracts the wrong tastes and not that there's actual natural sweetness

01:45:16 ◼   ► to coffee that just never gets out, et cetera.

01:45:19 ◼   ► One of my favorite tweets—I quoted it before—but one of my favorite tweets was somebody who

01:45:23 ◼   ► tweeted—talk show listener who said that he'd always taken his coffee with sugar

01:45:28 ◼   ► until he tried Tonks and then tried it without sugar and it was the first time he didn't

01:45:32 ◼   ► feel like he needed to put sugar in his coffee.

01:45:34 ◼   ► Exactly. I mean, that encapsulates it so much. Great coffee does not need anything added

01:45:40 ◼   ► to it.

01:45:41 ◼   ► Right. And I think casual people have the misconception that we go on and on about Tonks

01:45:46 ◼   ► and how great it is, and they go around the world, and that people think, "Well, my

01:45:50 ◼   ► God, that coffee is probably so strong that it has all of these." And they associate

01:45:54 ◼   ► strength with these bitter, unpleasant tastes that they think is what strong coffee is,

01:46:00 ◼   ► which is really just poorly made or over-roasted coffee or stale coffee, that those are the

01:46:08 ◼   ► tastes that are exaggerated. It's actually, I think, the opposite. It's these completely

01:46:14 ◼   ► different flavors that really come out.

01:46:15 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, definitely. Most people have never had really great coffee that could be drank

01:46:22 ◼   ► black and would still taste really good.

01:46:25 ◼   ► And people, there's this whole pile of BS

01:46:28 ◼   ► around coffee marketing in the mass market,

01:46:33 ◼   ► like in grocery stores and in convenience store chains

01:46:37 ◼   ► and everything, and there's all this marketing

01:46:40 ◼   ► that goes into making people think that, say,

01:46:44 ◼   ► Trader Joe's coffee is better than Dunkin' Donuts coffee

01:46:47 ◼   ► and Dunkin' Donuts coffee is better than 7-Eleven coffee

01:46:50 ◼   ► and all this stuff, and the reality is,

01:46:52 ◼   ► almost all the coffee that most people

01:46:54 ◼   ► have ever heard of is terrible.

01:46:56 ◼   ► - I haven't. - And it's not because

01:46:58 ◼   ► it's not because there's some grand conspiracy,

01:47:01 ◼   ► it's because it's really hard to make great coffee

01:47:04 ◼   ► at that large of a scale, and you can't make it

01:47:07 ◼   ► so it's shelf-stable for very long.

01:47:09 ◼   ► - I have a certain weak spot for Dunkin' Donuts coffee.

01:47:12 ◼   ► I wouldn't hail it as good coffee,

01:47:15 ◼   ► but I do think that it's, I don't know,

01:47:18 ◼   ► And it is also, to me, it's also very,

01:47:20 ◼   ► like McDonald's famously is supposed to be,

01:47:23 ◼   ► it's very, I don't know about their coffee,

01:47:25 ◼   ► but that McDonald's food, but at Dunkin' Donuts,

01:47:27 ◼   ► coffee always tastes exactly the same.

01:47:30 ◼   ► Doesn't matter where you are, what Dunkin' Donuts,

01:47:33 ◼   ► to me it always tastes exactly the same.

01:47:35 ◼   ► I wouldn't go out of my way to get Dunkin' Donuts,

01:47:37 ◼   ► but in a pinch where I had my choice between,

01:47:40 ◼   ► two or three chain places to buy coffee,

01:47:45 ◼   ► I would go to Dunkin' Donuts.

01:47:46 ◼   ► I mean, good coffee is a lot more like fresh produce,

01:47:51 ◼   ► in that you kind of can't make it that good without introducing

01:47:55 ◼   ► some inconsistency because you're kind of closer to the metal.

01:47:59 ◼   ► Everything's a little more fresh,

01:48:01 ◼   ► a little more small batch usually.

01:48:02 ◼   ► Coffee is more like tomatoes.

01:48:07 ◼   ► You'll have some years where tomatoes were better that year.

01:48:11 ◼   ► Coffee is the same way.

01:48:12 ◼   ► Like, coffee from certain countries in certain--

01:48:15 ◼   ► kind of like wine.

01:48:16 ◼   ► From certain countries, it's better than other countries if you have tastes that are

01:48:19 ◼   ► a certain way.

01:48:21 ◼   ► Certain years will be better than other years.

01:48:23 ◼   ► Certain farms within those countries will be a little bit better than other ones.

01:48:27 ◼   ► It's all ... There's so much that goes into it.

01:48:30 ◼   ► It's very hard to make coffee consistently the same way all the time without blending

01:48:36 ◼   ► a whole bunch of different origins together and standardizing everything and kind of removing

01:48:39 ◼   ► all the personality from it and making it just this one consistent bland product like

01:48:44 ◼   ► I like a McDonald's hamburger.

01:48:46 ◼   ► - Do you like, what about Pete's?

01:48:48 ◼   ► Can you take Pete's?

01:48:49 ◼   ► - I only ever have Pete's when I'm at WWDC.

01:48:53 ◼   ► - You go to the one at 3rd and Howard.

01:48:57 ◼   ► - Well, there's two, yeah,

01:48:59 ◼   ► there's the one across from the W,

01:49:01 ◼   ► and then there's the one down the street

01:49:02 ◼   ► from Moscone along that cross street.

01:49:04 ◼   ► - Oh, see, I don't know that one.

01:49:07 ◼   ► I know the one at 3rd and Howard

01:49:08 ◼   ► that's over there by the W in the St. Regis.

01:49:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, so that, Peet's is, in my opinion,

01:49:15 ◼   ► it's very similar to Starbucks, but better.

01:49:18 ◼   ► So it's still the same general category of store,

01:49:23 ◼   ► it still has the same challenges of,

01:49:25 ◼   ► it's still a pretty large scale operation,

01:49:28 ◼   ► no one is roasting in that store,

01:49:31 ◼   ► the people who are brewing it in that store,

01:49:33 ◼   ► the employees might not be very particularly good

01:49:35 ◼   ► at brewing it, or really care to follow

01:49:38 ◼   ► the discard timers and stuff like that.

01:49:40 ◼   ► But it's decent and I would, whenever I'm there,

01:49:45 ◼   ► usually I'll go to Pete's because around the corner

01:49:48 ◼   ► in a few blocks in the opposite direction,

01:49:51 ◼   ► there's Blue Bottle.

01:49:52 ◼   ► - Right.

01:49:53 ◼   ► - Which Blue Bottle Coffee is very good,

01:49:55 ◼   ► but there's usually like a 45 minute line at the door

01:49:57 ◼   ► whenever I have to get to a session in the morning.

01:49:59 ◼   ► - And it's gotten worse.

01:50:01 ◼   ► - Yes, it has.

01:50:02 ◼   ► - It's like word has spread.

01:50:04 ◼   ► I think that there's more people who work in that area.

01:50:06 ◼   ► Like, I don't know, maybe it's all the square people.

01:50:08 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:50:09 ◼   ► But it has gotten worse.

01:50:10 ◼   ► Yeah, so it's further away and the line is longer.

01:50:13 ◼   ► It used to be that you could go to Blue Bottle and at least it was always my luck that you

01:50:18 ◼   ► could go and you had to wait, but you had to wait like 10 minutes and it seemed well

01:50:21 ◼   ► worth it.

01:50:22 ◼   ► Because even if you wanted to said, "Screw it, I'll just walk to Pete's," Pete's

01:50:27 ◼   ► there and back was a 20-minute walk.

01:50:29 ◼   ► Whereas now, yeah, you go there and it is like the line is out and around the corner.

01:50:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:50:35 ◼   ► skip a whole session, maybe like the after-lunch session, if I decide, "Oh, I'm kind of tired,"

01:50:41 ◼   ► I'll skip after-lunch session. Then I'll take an hour and go to Blue Bottle and then come

01:50:45 ◼   ► back and just barely make it back in time. But yeah, normally I just go to Pete's because

01:50:52 ◼   ► it's not amazing, but it's good.

01:50:54 ◼   ► I saw Matt Honan. You know Matt? He writes at Wired.

01:50:58 ◼   ► I know of him. I haven't actually met him.

01:51:00 ◼   ► I saw him tweeting from CES, where he was covering from Wired.

01:51:04 ◼   ► And he brought a whole coffee apparatus with him to CES

01:51:08 ◼   ► to make it in his room, because he didn't want to drink mass market coffee.

01:51:14 ◼   ► Can't blame the guy.

01:51:15 ◼   ► No, I've never seen that before, though.

01:51:17 ◼   ► I mean, a lot of hotel rooms have those coffee makers

01:51:20 ◼   ► in the bathroom, which is always really gross.

01:51:22 ◼   ► It always kind of feels dirty.

01:51:24 ◼   ► Oh, it feels super dirty to me.

01:51:26 ◼   ► Are you putting food-making equipment in a bathroom?

01:51:29 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know.

01:51:30 ◼   ► I know, practically speaking, OK, it has a faucet.

01:51:35 ◼   ► It has a sink.

01:51:36 ◼   ► That makes sense.

01:51:37 ◼   ► But I still never feel right.

01:51:39 ◼   ► I think that the way--

01:51:41 ◼   ► I don't think that any hotel should put a coffee

01:51:43 ◼   ► maker in the hotel room.

01:51:44 ◼   ► I think if they feel that their guests want coffee

01:51:47 ◼   ► in the morning, they should have coffee in the lobby

01:51:49 ◼   ► and just give it to them.

01:51:51 ◼   ► I feel like the little coffee maker in the hotel room

01:51:53 ◼   ► is the grossest thing in modern hotels.

01:51:58 ◼   ► Although I will say the one pimping that I can do here that's relevant, it's timely,

01:52:04 ◼   ► is the hotel in Wellington for web stock that they put us up in as speakers for web stock

01:52:11 ◼   ► two years ago. What's the name of that hotel? It's the hotel that has the hippopotamus.

01:52:17 ◼   ► The hippopotamus is the bar. I think it's called the Museum Hotel. Something like that.

01:52:22 ◼   ► Let's see.

01:52:23 ◼   ► They have, in all the rooms, they have pre-ground packets of coffee, but it's from a local

01:52:28 ◼   ► roaster and they're pretty good, and they give you a Bodum French press to brew it in

01:52:33 ◼   ► and an electric kettle to boil the water with. So every morning there in Wellington, I would

01:52:40 ◼   ► make coffee in this kettle in this French press in my room, and it was the best hotel

01:52:45 ◼   ► coffee I've ever had.

01:52:46 ◼   ► All right, but that's different. It wasn't in the bathroom, though, was it?

01:52:49 ◼   ► No. We had the suites. It was like a whole kitchen. It was really nice.

01:52:52 ◼   ► Exactly. Right. That's a whole different ballgame. To me, it's not a general opposition

01:52:57 ◼   ► to making coffee in your hotel room, it's using a shitty little Mr. Coffee in the bathroom.

01:53:04 ◼   ► You just don't –

01:53:05 ◼   ► It's kind of demeaning.

01:53:06 ◼   ► I don't even like it when I see somebody bring a drink into the bathroom. It's like,

01:53:09 ◼   ► "What are you going to do with that? Are you going to drink that?" I mean, I don't

01:53:13 ◼   ► know.

01:53:14 ◼   ► Well, it's worse when you see them bring it out of the bathroom because then you know

01:53:16 ◼   ► – if they bring it in, they could plausibly leave it there.

01:53:19 ◼   ► Right. Maybe they're going to ditch it. But if it's in a glass or something like

01:53:23 ◼   ► that, I don't know. Finish it up, get rid of it, and then go to the bathroom. Don't

01:53:26 ◼   ► Right.

01:53:27 ◼   ► Glass in the bathroom.

01:53:28 ◼   ► Jimmy, Christ.

01:53:29 ◼   ► It is the – I just looked it up and now it's gone.

01:53:33 ◼   ► It's the –

01:53:34 ◼   ► Museum, right?

01:53:36 ◼   ► Museum Art Hotel.

01:53:37 ◼   ► Okay.

01:53:38 ◼   ► In Wellington.

01:53:39 ◼   ► And that is a perfect segue.

01:53:40 ◼   ► I saw on Twitter you were working on your old fashions.

01:53:45 ◼   ► I was.

01:53:47 ◼   ► Which it ties into – did you listen to the show Merlin Was On?

01:53:50 ◼   ► Merlin and I actually talked about this.

01:53:51 ◼   ► Of course.

01:53:52 ◼   ► We were at Webstock two years ago in February, and the bar-- this is the Hippopotamus Bar.

01:54:01 ◼   ► You were going to say Hippopopotamus.

01:54:02 ◼   ► This is what we all had taken to calling it.

01:54:06 ◼   ► The Hippopotamus Bar was having a special old-fashioned month where they had an entire

01:54:11 ◼   ► section-- or maybe it was the entire menu.

01:54:13 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:54:14 ◼   ► It was devoted to old-fashioned invariants on the old-fashioned cocktail.

01:54:19 ◼   ► And there was a great bartender there named Houston.

01:54:21 ◼   ► I saw it.

01:54:22 ◼   ► So you were working on your Houston-style old-fashioned?

01:54:25 ◼   ► Indeed.

01:54:26 ◼   ► I was trying to replicate it as best I can.

01:54:30 ◼   ► So what we had from Houston with the old-fashioned,

01:54:34 ◼   ► it was Buffalo Trace, which is-- in general,

01:54:36 ◼   ► Buffalo Trace is my favorite normal bourbon,

01:54:42 ◼   ► like not ultra special, not cheap, like a normal bourbon.

01:54:45 ◼   ► If you're going to have a bourbon,

01:54:46 ◼   ► especially if you're going to be making

01:54:47 ◼   ► a lot of mixed drinks with it, I highly

01:54:49 ◼   ► recommend Buffalo Trace.

01:54:50 ◼   ► Not expensive, though, either, I think,

01:54:51 ◼   ► here in Pennsylvania.

01:54:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, not too bad.