Upgrade

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00:00:08 ◼   ► From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, Episode 435.

00:00:13 ◼   ► Today's show is brought to you by ZocDoc, Trade Coffee, and ExpressVPN.

00:00:18 ◼   ► And here is your host, Jason Snell.

00:00:21 ◼   ► Thank you, Myke Hurley.

00:00:22 ◼   ► I am Jason Snell, and I am joined by our very special guest for this very special episode of Upgrade.

00:00:28 ◼   ► It's Jon Gruber sitting in for Myke Hurley.

00:00:30 ◼   ► Jon, welcome to Upgrade.

00:00:32 ◼   ► I turned the tables on you.

00:00:34 ◼   ► - It's a pleasure to be here.

00:00:35 ◼   ► I'm worried though, because I know that I do not have

00:00:38 ◼   ► the melodious voice of Myke Hurley.

00:00:40 ◼   ► I think people are in for a rough episode of Upgrade

00:00:45 ◼   ► in terms of soothing melodious tone of voice.

00:00:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, and the nice British accent,

00:00:52 ◼   ► which makes this a, you can have a multi-national show,

00:00:56 ◼   ► now it's just the, well it's East Coast, West Coast though. We still are like, you know, some variety,

00:01:03 ◼   ► a little bit of variety among the sameness of American voices. Myke is on vacation this week

00:01:10 ◼   ► and next, so I've asked some pals to drop in and join me for upgrade. And John, I've been on the

00:01:17 ◼   ► talk show a lot, but I don't think I've ever had you on upgrade, so thank you for being here. I

00:01:21 ◼   ► really do appreciate it. I can tell you for certain I've never been here, so. All right, well it's,

00:01:26 ◼   ► I heard you on another podcast and I was like, "Why have I not ever asked Jon to be on?"

00:01:32 ◼   ► So, you know, open the floodgates, I guess. Also, I don't want to be remiss here. I don't want to miss

00:01:40 ◼   ► out on officially saying, "Happy Cyber Monday" to you.

00:01:45 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:01:47 ◼   ► Yeah, I can't believe that that's still a thing. My wife was just complaining yesterday that she,

00:01:51 ◼   ► I mean she does a lot of shopping online.

00:01:53 ◼   ► So she is so angry this whole weekend

00:01:57 ◼   ► about all of these emails.

00:01:58 ◼   ► 'Cause of course every single place

00:01:59 ◼   ► you've ever bought anything from,

00:02:01 ◼   ► no matter what you've done with any check boxes

00:02:03 ◼   ► about marketing permission,

00:02:05 ◼   ► anything you've ever bought on the internet

00:02:07 ◼   ► sent you email or a text message or something

00:02:09 ◼   ► over the last three days, guaranteed.

00:02:11 ◼   ► And she's like, and it's every morning,

00:02:14 ◼   ► they're like happy extended Black Friday.

00:02:18 ◼   ► And now they're like, she said yesterday,

00:02:20 ◼   ► she was already, her inbox was just full

00:02:23 ◼   ► of welcome to Cyber Monday.

00:02:24 ◼   ► And she's like, "It's not even Monday yet."

00:02:26 ◼   ► And is that still a thing?

00:02:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, I got two thoughts here.

00:02:29 ◼   ► One is, I've been seeing a lot of Black Friday things

00:02:34 ◼   ► that started like last week

00:02:35 ◼   ► and also continued through the weekend.

00:02:37 ◼   ► And I'm like, I guess Black Friday is a season

00:02:39 ◼   ► and not a day now.

00:02:41 ◼   ► And then Cyber Monday, I mean, I guess,

00:02:44 ◼   ► are there people out there who think,

00:02:45 ◼   ► "Well, Cyber Monday, it's just a thing we say,

00:02:47 ◼   ► "and I don't really understand the origin of it."

00:02:50 ◼   ► I mean, obviously the origin was people started doing lots of online shopping at the beginning

00:02:54 ◼   ► of the holiday shopping season back in the day, but the term is so dated, right?

00:03:00 ◼   ► Because we don't really cyberspace things anymore.

00:03:04 ◼   ► It was, you know, William Gibson wrote about cyberspace and Neuromancer in like 1984.

00:03:10 ◼   ► And then eventually when the internet happened, people were like, "Oh wow, this is like,

00:03:13 ◼   ► like sci-fi novels, it's cyberspace."

00:03:16 ◼   ► But it's past.

00:03:17 ◼   ► This is like saying, "Happy AOL Instant Messenger Tuesday."

00:03:25 ◼   ► It's kind of a shame because when it was a new term or a new prefix, it did sound cool.

00:03:31 ◼   ► Cyber sounded cool.

00:03:34 ◼   ► Then we let the AOLs of the world really burn it up into being...

00:03:38 ◼   ► I guess the most recent use I can think of a new one would be the Cybertruck from Tesla,

00:03:45 ◼   ► Which is, I believe, who knows now,

00:03:48 ◼   ► it's making me second guess everything I've ever heard

00:03:52 ◼   ► about any Elon Musk company in the last few weeks.

00:03:55 ◼   ► But I just assumed it was ironic, deliberately ironic.

00:03:59 ◼   ► But anyway, the other thing about the roots of Cyber Monday

00:04:03 ◼   ► that don't add up anymore is the idea,

00:04:05 ◼   ► and I think it was true, was in the very early days,

00:04:08 ◼   ► people had very slow dial-up at home,

00:04:10 ◼   ► and perhaps much faster, probably faster,

00:04:15 ◼   ► internet at work and so they would save the online shopping for Monday at work, do their

00:04:21 ◼   ► shopping at work on Monday, the day after Thanksgiving because they had faster, much

00:04:25 ◼   ► faster bandwidth at work than home. I don't think that's true anymore, right? I mean everybody's

00:04:30 ◼   ► sort of got, nobody's web browsing or shopping is held up by the speed of their bandwidth

00:04:35 ◼   ► at home.

00:04:36 ◼   ► I'm sure some are, but you're right. It was the idea that you would go into work where

00:04:39 ◼   ► you had like internet or good internet and that was where you would, where you would

00:04:43 ◼   ► do it. Get ready, get ready, you know, Mark Zuckerberg has, has their way. This is going

00:04:46 ◼   ► to be meta Monday. It's never going to be meta Monday, you know, buzzwords, but you

00:04:52 ◼   ► never know when the buzzwords, where they'll go, right? Like nobody has any control over

00:04:56 ◼   ► it. Like some of them stick around, some of them don't stick around. They, they extend

00:04:59 ◼   ► beyond their meaning entirely. Anyway, Cyber Monday is a dumb idea, but like, happy Cyber

00:05:06 ◼   ► Monday to you. Happy, sorry, I, I, to everybody who celebrates Cyber Monday, a happy Cyber

00:05:12 ◼   ► Monday to you. Yeah, you're keeping me from shopping, Jason. I'm sorry. It's, uh, you

00:05:17 ◼   ► should have done that this morning. You're three hours ahead of me. You should have taken

00:05:19 ◼   ► care of all of your Monday cyber on Monday morning, I think. We usually start the show,

00:05:26 ◼   ► although that was actually a great way to start the show, with a Snell Talk question,

00:05:31 ◼   ► because I always want to talk about the weather, and Myke does not want to hear me talk about

00:05:35 ◼   ► the weather. And so I thought I would throw this one out there that I formulated myself,

00:05:40 ◼   ► which is just, here in the United States,

00:05:43 ◼   ► we had Thanksgiving last week.

00:05:44 ◼   ► If you ask yourself as you're listening to the show,

00:05:45 ◼   ► by the way, wow, there's not a lot of news.

00:05:47 ◼   ► It's like, hmm, Thanksgiving week in America,

00:05:49 ◼   ► there's not a lot of news.

00:05:50 ◼   ► What did you have on the Thanksgiving table this year?

00:05:53 ◼   ► You and I also have returning college students,

00:05:56 ◼   ► our youngest, I mean, both of my kids came home,

00:05:59 ◼   ► but our youngest, it's his freshman year.

00:06:00 ◼   ► Your kid is also his freshman year.

00:06:03 ◼   ► So this was, I feel like a big Thanksgiving.

00:06:06 ◼   ► What did you do for it?

00:06:09 ◼   ► - Well, we hardly saw Jonas, our son,

00:06:11 ◼   ► because he was out with high school pals all the time,

00:06:15 ◼   ► which I was expecting, 'cause I remember, I'm not,

00:06:18 ◼   ► you know, it was a long time ago for me,

00:06:20 ◼   ► but I remember what it was like.

00:06:22 ◼   ► So we hardly saw him.

00:06:23 ◼   ► We did not, we did have him all day, Thanksgiving, Thursday.

00:06:26 ◼   ► What was on the table?

00:06:28 ◼   ► Well, we, I, you know, people who pay attention

00:06:31 ◼   ► to my podcasts over the years perhaps know this,

00:06:33 ◼   ► my wife has a very unusual allergy.

00:06:35 ◼   ► My wife is allergic to all poultry.

00:06:38 ◼   ► So chicken, turkey, duck, anything like that,

00:06:43 ◼   ► like duck fat fries and something like a duck fat fry

00:06:47 ◼   ► really sets it off like something that's cooked

00:06:50 ◼   ► in the broth, the broth is sort of like concentrated.

00:06:53 ◼   ► - So there's some molecule or something that's in birds

00:06:56 ◼   ► that is what she's sensitive to.

00:06:58 ◼   ► - And it's a very severe anaphylactic allergy,

00:07:01 ◼   ► you know, like her throat swells shut

00:07:03 ◼   ► and her lips get swollen.

00:07:04 ◼   ► So anyway, turkey, not a big fan.

00:07:08 ◼   ► And it's funny because she grew up and, you know,

00:07:12 ◼   ► like on our son, it has a severe dairy allergy.

00:07:15 ◼   ► So we've, you know, we're familiar with eating

00:07:18 ◼   ► around allergies and making different dishes

00:07:20 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

00:07:21 ◼   ► But it's funny because she grew up and, you know,

00:07:24 ◼   ► eventually her family figured out that Amy is allergic,

00:07:27 ◼   ► severely allergic to turkey,

00:07:29 ◼   ► but they still kept making turkey

00:07:30 ◼   ► 'cause that's what you do on Thanksgiving.

00:07:32 ◼   ► And it really, the other thing is her allergy is so severe.

00:07:35 ◼   ► It really bothers her to have a turkey basting in the oven

00:07:39 ◼   ► in a small, tight house, and it's cold in November,

00:07:43 ◼   ► so the doors are closed and the windows are closed.

00:07:45 ◼   ► So anyway, eventually, everybody got on board with the fact,

00:07:49 ◼   ► we eat at Amy's mom's house on Thanksgiving,

00:07:52 ◼   ► that's our tradition, and at some point in the last decade

00:07:56 ◼   ► or so, we've switched to ham.

00:07:58 ◼   ► So we roast a big ham, which works out great.

00:08:03 ◼   ► Everybody loves it and nobody misses the turkey.

00:08:05 ◼   ► I actually, personally, me, I vastly prefer ham to turkey.

00:08:09 ◼   ► So we roast a big ham and all the carbs

00:08:13 ◼   ► that you could possibly imagine.

00:08:15 ◼   ► Mashed potatoes, it's very confusing.

00:08:19 ◼   ► We have both filling and stuffing.

00:08:21 ◼   ► We do not, 'cause we don't have a turkey

00:08:25 ◼   ► to stuff the stuffing in.

00:08:26 ◼   ► I know some people like to cook the stuffing in the bird.

00:08:28 ◼   ► We don't have a bird.

00:08:30 ◼   ► - Which you shouldn't do 'cause the temperature's

00:08:31 ◼   ► low enough in there that there could be

00:08:33 ◼   ► cross-contamination with the bird.

00:08:35 ◼   ► You should always do what you do,

00:08:36 ◼   ► which is bake it outside, do it outside.

00:08:38 ◼   ► - Bake it outside.

00:08:39 ◼   ► So we have filling, we have stuffing,

00:08:41 ◼   ► we pick up some stuff at a local place here in Philly,

00:08:45 ◼   ► a great, great sort of a grocer/catering place,

00:08:49 ◼   ► but they do takeout for Thanksgiving.

00:08:52 ◼   ► You can order in advance with a couple of these side dishes.

00:08:55 ◼   ► They have, what do they call it, a cauliflower gratin.

00:08:59 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

00:09:00 ◼   ► I know I've seen people bitching about cauliflower mashed potatoes and stuff, and I don't know what people think.

00:09:07 ◼   ► This is perhaps the smash hit of the last few Thanksgivings in our family.

00:09:12 ◼   ► It is sort of a creamy... You know, you still get some chunks of cauliflower that you can spear, but they're good.

00:09:19 ◼   ► Most of it is very creamy, sort of a mashed potato texture, and just all the cheese on top.

00:09:28 ◼   ► That's the secret with, with cauliflower is if you add cheese, I mean,

00:09:31 ◼   ► come on.

00:09:32 ◼   ► And then a layer of bread crumbs on top of that and the bread, it's just like,

00:09:36 ◼   ► we didn't do Mac and cheese. Sometimes we'd done Mac and cheese too,

00:09:39 ◼   ► but it's the reason you put like a coating. I'm not a chef, but I've,

00:09:42 ◼   ► I've picked this up. I've, I've surmised this.

00:09:45 ◼   ► The reason when you bake something like that,

00:09:47 ◼   ► like a cheesy gratin dish like that,

00:09:49 ◼   ► the reason you want that layer of breadcrumbs at number one,

00:09:52 ◼   ► they can get a little crispy and it, and that's fun and tasty, but it,

00:09:56 ◼   ► it absorbs some of the grease, and so it's not greasy at all. It's just smooth and good.

00:10:01 ◼   ► What else? Brussels sprouts, which again, get a bad rap. And I just read over Thanksgiving that

00:10:08 ◼   ► at some point in the 90s, scientists figured out what it was that gave Brussels sprouts a bad

00:10:14 ◼   ► flavor, and they bred it out of them. That's right. That's right. The old-fashioned genetic

00:10:19 ◼   ► engineering, where they just bred it out, and so they're not bitter anymore. Yeah, so like the

00:10:24 ◼   ► whole thing where you and I grew up and Brussels sprouts were the canonical kids movie, "Oh, what's

00:10:29 ◼   ► the worst thing the kid could possibly eat? Brussels sprouts!" And it's like, I don't know,

00:10:33 ◼   ► we never even, I never even had them. I just imagined that they were awful. But now they're

00:10:37 ◼   ► one of my favorites. They're delicious. My parents are both Midwesterners, so, you know,

00:10:42 ◼   ► our gross-out for me was the green bean casserole. It's like, mmm. But, yeah, so we don't do...

00:10:48 ◼   ► I, at one point as a kid, lobbied my parents to do a ham for Thanksgiving because I was tired of the

00:10:53 ◼   ► turkey too. But my wife doesn't eat pork, so turkey it is, and it's fine. I like do a brine,

00:11:01 ◼   ► I do the Alton Brown Good Eats, I like take a five gallon bucket from Home Depot and fill it with

00:11:06 ◼   ► a brine and dump the turkey in it and it sits there overnight. And so we did have a turkey,

00:11:11 ◼   ► and then yeah, Brussels sprouts, I'm telling you, I am a believer about Brussels sprouts. We did a

00:11:16 ◼   ► couple different, like, we did one with like balsamic and honey, and we did another one that

00:11:20 ◼   ► that had like sriracha and fish sauce and soy sauce

00:11:24 ◼   ► that was super savory and they were both great.

00:11:27 ◼   ► Mashed potatoes, what else?

00:11:30 ◼   ► My son always, when he was little,

00:11:32 ◼   ► especially the only thing he would eat is crescent rolls

00:11:35 ◼   ► at Thanksgiving dinner, so we do some of those

00:11:37 ◼   ► like Pillsbury crescent rolls for him.

00:11:40 ◼   ► There's some salads and other stuff.

00:11:41 ◼   ► We managed to, we had eight people

00:11:43 ◼   ► 'cause it was also my in-laws

00:11:45 ◼   ► and my sister-in-law and her husband.

00:11:46 ◼   ► So we made it work.

00:11:48 ◼   ► I think we actually have practiced Thanksgiving enough now at our house that we know how to do it.

00:11:52 ◼   ► Every year I always feel like kind of a fraud when I do it. I'm like, "Oh man, I don't know what I'm doing."

00:11:57 ◼   ► And this year is like, I actually upped the difficulty level in a couple of places because like,

00:12:01 ◼   ► this is boring. We know how to do this now. So it was nice.

00:12:05 ◼   ► Yeah, it's one thing I learned years and years ago, I forget where I picked it up, but somebody said

00:12:09 ◼   ► at a meal like, I think it was in the context of wine pairing, which in our family we don't really,

00:12:16 ◼   ► Nobody's fancy pants and wants to pair wine,

00:12:18 ◼   ► but they're like, don't overthink it.

00:12:19 ◼   ► And it's the silliest thing in the world

00:12:21 ◼   ► for something like Thanksgiving,

00:12:22 ◼   ► 'cause Thanksgiving is all about big, bold flavors.

00:12:25 ◼   ► So just make sure whatever wine you get

00:12:27 ◼   ► is sort of bold and flavorful,

00:12:29 ◼   ► and not like, if it uses the word delicate

00:12:33 ◼   ► in the description, don't buy that one.

00:12:35 ◼   ► And anything big and bold is going to go well with it.

00:12:38 ◼   ► And same thing with the side dishes,

00:12:39 ◼   ► where it's just like, ah,

00:12:41 ◼   ► just flavor the hell out of those Brussels sprouts.

00:12:43 ◼   ► That's what, I won't go on,

00:12:44 ◼   ► we won't make this the Brussels sprouts episode of Upgrade.

00:12:47 ◼   ► But the thing about Brussels sprouts that I think is amazing

00:12:50 ◼   ► is they'll take to any kind of flavoring, right?

00:12:52 ◼   ► You can go sort of Asian,

00:12:54 ◼   ► like I think you said with soy sauce.

00:12:56 ◼   ► Anything you think you could put on Brussels sprouts

00:13:00 ◼   ► you can do and you roast them and they get crispy

00:13:03 ◼   ► and they're fun and they're delicious.

00:13:04 ◼   ► They're very good.

00:13:05 ◼   ► - They're very good.

00:13:06 ◼   ► Well, that is turkey talk or ham talk for this episode.

00:13:11 ◼   ► It's a fun holiday.

00:13:12 ◼   ► I mean, I just, I like that there's a,

00:13:15 ◼   ► let's make a big meal and get everybody together.

00:13:17 ◼   ► It's kind of a nice tradition, so.

00:13:19 ◼   ► - I like it too, because it's like I said,

00:13:21 ◼   ► with all the carby stuff, it's like, instead of,

00:13:23 ◼   ► well, which one do we want?

00:13:24 ◼   ► It's just A-okay, we'll just make them all.

00:13:27 ◼   ► - And I made a sweet potato pie.

00:13:28 ◼   ► I love sweet potato pie and I don't have it very often,

00:13:30 ◼   ► and I have a nice recipe that I make,

00:13:32 ◼   ► so I just made myself one.

00:13:34 ◼   ► And other people ate it too, I guess, but whatever.

00:13:36 ◼   ► - We're an apple pie family here.

00:13:37 ◼   ► - All right, we had an apple cake and we had a cheesecake,

00:13:41 ◼   ► But you know, I'm team sweet potato pie all the way.

00:13:44 ◼   ► So it's like a pumpkin pie, except better in every way.

00:13:49 ◼   ► Goes great with barbecue too.

00:13:51 ◼   ► One of these years, I'm going to do a barbecue Thanksgiving

00:13:54 ◼   ► and nobody's going to be happy about it but me,

00:13:55 ◼   ► but I'm going to love it.

00:13:57 ◼   ► All right, we need to do some housekeeping,

00:14:01 ◼   ► some follow out first of all,

00:14:02 ◼   ► just to let people know out there.

00:14:05 ◼   ► If you love upgrade and wanting to get more of it,

00:14:07 ◼   ► you should be an upgrade plus subscriber.

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00:14:11 ◼   ► You get access to our members Discord at Relay FM.

00:14:14 ◼   ► It's getupgradeplus.com.

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00:14:32 ◼   ► Plans are new at the full price after the first year.

00:14:35 ◼   ► In this episode, John and I talked before the show

00:14:38 ◼   ► about all the tools that are made for us

00:14:41 ◼   ► and the ones that are not.

00:14:42 ◼   ► Little bit of keyboard talk in there too, just a tiny bit.

00:14:47 ◼   ► Also, I wanna mention that it's time to vote

00:14:49 ◼   ► in the ninth annual Upgrady's.

00:14:52 ◼   ► Go to Upgrady's.vote to send in your nominations.

00:14:56 ◼   ► That'll be open until December 12th.

00:14:58 ◼   ► That helps us a lot, reminding us of what happened this year

00:15:03 ◼   ► and letting your voice be heard in our award show

00:15:05 ◼   ► that we do at the end of the year.

00:15:07 ◼   ► I also have some follow-up.

00:15:10 ◼   ► First off, last week we talked about Apple

00:15:12 ◼   ► and the metaverse and speculated,

00:15:13 ◼   ► I think this was last week,

00:15:14 ◼   ► about like what exactly an Apple headset would look like.

00:15:17 ◼   ► And we talked about what Apple would call it

00:15:21 ◼   ► if they're not calling it the metaverse.

00:15:23 ◼   ► I said it will probably be reality-based.

00:15:26 ◼   ► I feel like it's the language equivalent of skeuomorphism

00:15:29 ◼   ► where Apple's gonna just, if it's a reality OS,

00:15:32 ◼   ► it's gonna be like things from reality.

00:15:35 ◼   ► They're not gonna wanna create a fanciful name set for it.

00:15:38 ◼   ► But anyway, lots of jokesters wrote in

00:15:40 ◼   ► to say that I missed the obvious,

00:15:41 ◼   ► which was that they could call it Eworld.

00:15:43 ◼   ► Kids, ask your parents what Eworld was, I guess.

00:15:48 ◼   ► - I never used Eworld.

00:15:52 ◼   ► That is some classic 90s Apple that I missed out on

00:15:57 ◼   ► because I don't even know why.

00:15:59 ◼   ► I guess because the whole Eworld era

00:16:01 ◼   ► was when I was at Drexel University

00:16:03 ◼   ► and I had the real internet.

00:16:04 ◼   ► And so I never saw the appeal

00:16:07 ◼   ► and I didn't have anything like,

00:16:10 ◼   ► I wasn't doing Daring Fireball,

00:16:12 ◼   ► so I didn't have any obligation.

00:16:13 ◼   ► Well, I should still, even if I don't wanna use it,

00:16:15 ◼   ► I should still check it out so I can review it

00:16:17 ◼   ► or write about it or know about it.

00:16:18 ◼   ► I just never tried.

00:16:20 ◼   ► And then it was gone.

00:16:21 ◼   ► - And then it was gone.

00:16:22 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, the story for people who don't know,

00:16:23 ◼   ► this was an online service, like Apple did their own AOL.

00:16:27 ◼   ► And it's funnier story even than that

00:16:31 ◼   ► because AOL sort of sprung out of Apple Link,

00:16:33 ◼   ► which was a previous Apple online service

00:16:35 ◼   ► that was mostly for people connected to Apple.

00:16:37 ◼   ► But then they kind of, those people went and they made AOL.

00:16:41 ◼   ► And then when Apple decided,

00:16:42 ◼   ► well, we're gonna do our own online service

00:16:45 ◼   ► for the people in the Apple sphere,

00:16:47 ◼   ► they decided to actually essentially work with AOL

00:16:51 ◼   ► and use AOL's infrastructure

00:16:53 ◼   ► to build their own separate online service called eWorld.

00:16:57 ◼   ► It went about as well as you might expect,

00:17:00 ◼   ► especially since you've never heard of it probably.

00:17:03 ◼   ► I only know about it because I worked at Mac User

00:17:06 ◼   ► at the time and we had to be there, you know?

00:17:11 ◼   ► Right, it was like Apple starting an online service.

00:17:14 ◼   ► How could we not be there?

00:17:15 ◼   ► And so we had to be there and it was cute, but it was empty.

00:17:19 ◼   ► I mean, it was empty.

00:17:20 ◼   ► It was like a better art directed AOL with nobody in it.

00:17:23 ◼   ► - It did look adorable.

00:17:25 ◼   ► And it used the metaphor of like a map,

00:17:29 ◼   ► sort of like the map you get

00:17:30 ◼   ► when you enter a theme park, right?

00:17:32 ◼   ► - Exactly. - It was like a,

00:17:35 ◼   ► slightly 3D or whatever you call that,

00:17:39 ◼   ► sort of fake 3D tilted into the horizon

00:17:43 ◼   ► and then the map would have the areas where you'd wanna go

00:17:46 ◼   ► and supposedly that was the mental model

00:17:48 ◼   ► they wanted you to have.

00:17:49 ◼   ► I think it was sort of coincident with the

00:17:55 ◼   ► General Magic PDA, which took the desktop metaphor

00:18:00 ◼   ► to extreme, the full cartoon, you're in an office

00:18:06 ◼   ► and the desk is drawn in 3D skeuomorphism, right?

00:18:10 ◼   ► That it's an actual desk and it was an actual telephone

00:18:14 ◼   ► that you clicked on to make a communications thing.

00:18:18 ◼   ► That was sort of like eWorld,

00:18:19 ◼   ► where it was a map and you'd go places.

00:18:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, and like I said, it was just kind of empty

00:18:25 ◼   ► and it was, I would say, a very 90s Apple sort of thing,

00:18:28 ◼   ► which is they spent a lot of money on a thing

00:18:30 ◼   ► that wasn't necessary and didn't work.

00:18:33 ◼   ► I do still have an Eworld mug.

00:18:34 ◼   ► It's slightly faded, but I do still have it.

00:18:36 ◼   ► It's one of my prized possessions.

00:18:38 ◼   ► Not because I love Eworld,

00:18:40 ◼   ► but because I love that Eworld is such a weird footnote.

00:18:43 ◼   ► So yeah, sure, let's bring it back with our headset.

00:18:47 ◼   ► - It's not a bad name.

00:18:48 ◼   ► It is short.

00:18:49 ◼   ► It sounds good, Eworld, you know,

00:18:53 ◼   ► like the sounds go together,

00:18:55 ◼   ► well, you know, I don't think they're going to use it.

00:18:58 ◼   ► - The E prefix seems to have moved along, right?

00:19:01 ◼   ► - Right.

00:19:02 ◼   ► - Like-- - EMAC.

00:19:03 ◼   ► We were just talking about the EMAC

00:19:05 ◼   ► when you were on the talk show, right?

00:19:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, right, the EMAC,

00:19:07 ◼   ► which was we can't afford to make a G3 iMac anymore,

00:19:12 ◼   ► we've moved on to the G4,

00:19:13 ◼   ► but everybody in education was like,

00:19:15 ◼   ► "We're not buying your expensive G4 iMac."

00:19:18 ◼   ► And they're like, "What do we do?

00:19:19 ◼   ► "What do we do?

00:19:20 ◼   ► "What do we do?"

00:19:21 ◼   ► And the answer was, "We're gonna make a G4 iMac.

00:19:22 ◼   ► we're gonna call it the EMAC, we're gonna only sell it to education except maybe

00:19:26 ◼   ► not just and they only did one of those but it showed the power I think it was

00:19:31 ◼   ► in the context of like why is there a $999 M1 MacBook Air for sale for sale or

00:19:35 ◼   ► why is there that low-end iPad still for sale even though there's a new low-end

00:19:39 ◼   ► iPad and the answer was because their education customers said they wouldn't

00:19:42 ◼   ► buy the new one because it's more expensive and that's that was why the

00:19:46 ◼   ► the EMAC existed. Same reason. A whole one-off product just for education

00:19:53 ◼   ► because they wouldn't pay more. Wild. That was probably like a G4

00:19:57 ◼   ► iMac prototype when they weren't sure they were gonna go to the flat screen

00:20:01 ◼   ► from the CRT. I mean, it's hard to believe that they just they made the whole thing

00:20:05 ◼   ► out of whole cloth just for education. It was probably like, "What if we do this for

00:20:10 ◼   ► the next iMac?" and then they're like, "No no no no no." And they're like, "Well,

00:20:14 ◼   ► Education, we'll put it in there.

00:20:16 ◼   ► That's, when I did 20 max for 2020,

00:20:19 ◼   ► one of the things, and you were on a bunch of those episodes,

00:20:22 ◼   ► one of the things that struck me while I was working on it is,

00:20:26 ◼   ► how, this is a real aside, but like,

00:20:29 ◼   ► how has history erased all of the dumb things that Steve Jobs did

00:20:33 ◼   ► when he came back to Apple?

00:20:34 ◼   ► Like, they did a lot of dumb stuff too.

00:20:36 ◼   ► We don't remember any of those failures.

00:20:38 ◼   ► People are like, "Oh, Apple's doing things that don't work quite right."

00:20:41 ◼   ► That wouldn't have happened when Steve Jobs was around.

00:20:43 ◼   ► early Steve Jobs era, they tried a lot of stuff that didn't go anywhere. And I

00:20:49 ◼   ► think that was good for them to do that because they were trying to figure out

00:20:52 ◼   ► what worked and what didn't. And the EMAC was a was kind of a product of

00:20:56 ◼   ► necessity and wasn't really part of their product grid, but they did it

00:20:59 ◼   ► because they had to. And they tried to X-Serve and that didn't work and, you

00:21:03 ◼   ► know, not everything was a hit. Dalmatian IMAX? Oh wow. Well I've told you

00:21:09 ◼   ► that story before, right, that we did a fake Dalmatian iMac

00:21:13 ◼   ► like three months before on the cover of Macworld,

00:21:15 ◼   ► and they called us in a panic

00:21:16 ◼   ► 'cause they thought we knew something.

00:21:18 ◼   ► We had no idea why they were so angry,

00:21:20 ◼   ► and then they announced the Dalmatian iMac,

00:21:21 ◼   ► and we're like, oh.

00:21:22 ◼   ► - Because it seemed like such a preposterous idea

00:21:25 ◼   ► that it would be a perfect gag for the cover.

00:21:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was a joke.

00:21:26 ◼   ► We had a cowboy lassoing it.

00:21:28 ◼   ► It was a joke.

00:21:29 ◼   ► So is "Cow Spots," but same deal, right?

00:21:33 ◼   ► - Close enough.

00:21:34 ◼   ► - One more serious bit of a follow-up

00:21:38 ◼   ► is about something Myke and I have been talking about.

00:21:40 ◼   ► And I know you've been talking about it with Ben,

00:21:42 ◼   ► not Stratechery, that is Ben.

00:21:44 ◼   ► Ben talks about it on Stratechery.

00:21:46 ◼   ► Ben's got a media empire now where he's got

00:21:48 ◼   ► a China podcast that he's not on.

00:21:50 ◼   ► On Dithering, you guys have talked about this.

00:21:52 ◼   ► I know you've talked about it on the talk show too,

00:21:55 ◼   ► Apple in China and the latest production issues.

00:21:57 ◼   ► There's a new Bloomberg story.

00:21:59 ◼   ► I already had this in our show document.

00:22:00 ◼   ► And then there was a new story this morning

00:22:02 ◼   ► from Vlad Seyvov, a name we remember from the Verge,

00:22:05 ◼   ► but he's at Bloomberg on their tech staff.

00:22:08 ◼   ► And it's a production shortfall

00:22:11 ◼   ► of close to 6 million iPhone Pro units

00:22:13 ◼   ► this quarter is expected.

00:22:14 ◼   ► This is about the shutdowns for the COVID policy

00:22:17 ◼   ► and then the people who were locked in the factory

00:22:19 ◼   ► who decided they didn't wanna be there anymore.

00:22:22 ◼   ► Apparently, there's a Reuters story

00:22:24 ◼   ► that came out late last week

00:22:26 ◼   ► that says that they hired a bunch of people

00:22:28 ◼   ► and said that they would give them bonuses

00:22:30 ◼   ► and then they didn't give them bonuses.

00:22:32 ◼   ► And so then they wanted to resign

00:22:35 ◼   ► and that apparently like 20,000 new hires

00:22:37 ◼   ► are reported to have left

00:22:39 ◼   ► and been given like severance basically to get out.

00:22:43 ◼   ► And so generally it's unclear,

00:22:46 ◼   ► there are some people are like,

00:22:47 ◼   ► this isn't gonna be that big a deal,

00:22:48 ◼   ► but I think the Bloomberg report

00:22:50 ◼   ► where it's estimated that this could be about

00:22:53 ◼   ► 6 million iPhone Pro units that they won't be able to make.

00:22:57 ◼   ► And that means that's 6 million

00:22:59 ◼   ► that will almost certainly be entirely demand

00:23:03 ◼   ► that will be unfulfilled, right?

00:23:04 ◼   ► because Apple doesn't generally spend all of its time

00:23:07 ◼   ► like making iPhones that nobody's gonna buy.

00:23:09 ◼   ► And this is in their biggest quarter of the year.

00:23:11 ◼   ► So this is a, it's a big hit

00:23:12 ◼   ► to their most important product.

00:23:14 ◼   ► - I don't know what to estimate the average selling price

00:23:16 ◼   ► of an iPhone Pro at.

00:23:18 ◼   ► If you do make it nice and easy and just say it's 1000,

00:23:22 ◼   ► then you get a nice even $6 billion in revenue.

00:23:26 ◼   ► So it's, even by Apple standards, it is significant.

00:23:31 ◼   ► I don't know what to say about this story

00:23:33 ◼   ► because I accept that it is as big a story as it can get

00:23:38 ◼   ► as relates to the internal politics of China, countrywide.

00:23:46 ◼   ► Because this is not an Apple story.

00:23:49 ◼   ► Apple is downwind of it, and Apple is obviously now deeply

00:23:53 ◼   ► and significantly affected by it.

00:23:55 ◼   ► But there are protests, as we speak, in China

00:23:59 ◼   ► that are unprecedented.

00:24:00 ◼   ► I mean, there are certainly younger people

00:24:02 ◼   ► who don't remember the late '80s

00:24:06 ◼   ► and the Tiananmen Square massacre,

00:24:09 ◼   ► it has been a long, decades since there has been

00:24:12 ◼   ► public uprising and protests in China.

00:24:16 ◼   ► It's just part of the lesson of Tiananmen Square as well,

00:24:19 ◼   ► if you're gonna protest, look out.

00:24:21 ◼   ► And it combined with the, I think,

00:24:29 ◼   ► just a totally ill-advised zero COVID policy

00:24:34 ◼   ► that Xi wants to pursue,

00:24:36 ◼   ► and this culture of never admitting that you're wrong

00:24:39 ◼   ► and never telling the boss what he doesn't wanna hear,

00:24:44 ◼   ► this sort of thing was inevitable, right?

00:24:47 ◼   ► Where locking people into dormitories,

00:24:49 ◼   ► I mean, effectively, like locking,

00:24:50 ◼   ► it's a dormitory as-- - It's like a prison.

00:24:53 ◼   ► - Like a prison, really.

00:24:54 ◼   ► And people can only take so much, right?

00:24:58 ◼   ► people are people in human nature eventually,

00:25:00 ◼   ► however patient you are and however used to the,

00:25:05 ◼   ► I would say, draconian rules and lifestyle of working there,

00:25:11 ◼   ► being locked in a dormitory for weeks at a time,

00:25:14 ◼   ► it's gonna boil over and now we're starting to see it.

00:25:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think it's a true case,

00:25:21 ◼   ► especially in authoritarian systems

00:25:24 ◼   ► where you have so much power as the government

00:25:27 ◼   ► you have a certain level of power over everybody and that goes for a while but it only goes

00:25:32 ◼   ► so far and then at some point it's like that story about right that you become bankrupt

00:25:37 ◼   ► very gradually and then all at once lots of sort of crypto examples of that recently and

00:25:45 ◼   ► maybe Elon Musk who knows but I was thinking about that here and about the protests in

00:25:50 ◼   ► Iran is like there is a point at which it's untenable that point can be depending on how

00:25:56 ◼   ► powerful your system is, it can be pretty far off. But like, ultimately, even dictators,

00:26:03 ◼   ► you need to make the people or some people comfortable enough that everybody is not going

00:26:09 ◼   ► to overthrow you. And if you fail at that, and you can put it off for a while, but I

00:26:15 ◼   ► do feel like at some point it does boil over. And I don't know if anything going on in China

00:26:20 ◼   ► or in Iran is at that point. I did see that they burned down the Ayatollah Khomeini's

00:26:24 ◼   ► like, hmm, that's not great for the government of Iran. But again,

00:26:29 ◼   ► authoritarian systems have a level of control, but I do think at some point

00:26:32 ◼   ► part of the reason that they survive is that there are there's not enough of

00:26:38 ◼   ► that anger in enough of the people and then when they reach as a boiling point

00:26:44 ◼   ► then things can happen real fast. So... And it's always the young people, you know,

00:26:48 ◼   ► it because

00:26:50 ◼   ► You know you and I are you know hardly into middle-aged and it's like you forget that how

00:26:56 ◼   ► young people have less patience and they don't have the

00:26:59 ◼   ► Settled in like the parts of their brain have an atrophied wealth well

00:27:05 ◼   ► This is just the way it is right like well we and we've got more things to lose right we've got

00:27:09 ◼   ► houses and right and jobs and things like that and and

00:27:12 ◼   ► When you have more to lose stability ends up being a priority instead of maybe change

00:27:17 ◼   ► Right, but it's, you know, it's no question it deserves to be talked about in our racket

00:27:23 ◼   ► here in the Apple ecosphere because Apple is inextricably tied to China.

00:27:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:27:29 ◼   ► I mean, there's…

00:27:30 ◼   ► And this is not the near miss that losing all Mac assembly for a month was, which was

00:27:35 ◼   ► brutal, right?

00:27:36 ◼   ► But it was the Mac and they could ride it out.

00:27:38 ◼   ► But this is the brand new iPhone Pro, their most important product, and it's going to

00:27:44 ◼   ► get hit square in their most profitable traditionally quarter of the year and it

00:27:49 ◼   ► means that there are people who want to buy an iPhone Pro for Christmas who are

00:27:53 ◼   ► not going to be able to get it or just in December but I mean I imagine that

00:27:57 ◼   ► there must be a gift element to it because or maybe there's a by the end of

00:28:01 ◼   ► the year kind of element to it as well but like it this hits them this is as

00:28:05 ◼   ► hard in terms of the product and the timing a hit as Apple I think could take

00:28:11 ◼   ► Yeah, I do too. And I wonder about that because you think if it's just a business tool and in COVID, for example, when there was a, you know, the supply chain locked up for obvious reasons, but there was also this tidal wave of demand for laptops, because all of a sudden people are working at home and need their main computer to be a laptop and if their laptop was old, and the whole factor of kids doing all their schooling at home.

00:28:41 ◼   ► and all the families where maybe there's two kids

00:28:44 ◼   ► but they share a laptop for school,

00:28:46 ◼   ► but you can't share a laptop when all day.

00:28:48 ◼   ► So all of a sudden everybody needed to buy laptops

00:28:50 ◼   ► and you couldn't buy the laptops

00:28:52 ◼   ► because they were all sold out.

00:28:53 ◼   ► But then once they became available,

00:28:55 ◼   ► even if it was the next quarter, then you buy them.

00:28:58 ◼   ► You buy them, I forget there's a term for that,

00:29:00 ◼   ► where you're gonna sell the device anyway.

00:29:04 ◼   ► - It's like deferred demand or something like that

00:29:06 ◼   ► is the idea, yeah.

00:29:07 ◼   ► - I really wonder about the holiday demand.

00:29:11 ◼   ► And it's always been a bit of a mystery to me

00:29:14 ◼   ► why the iPhone, not a total mystery,

00:29:18 ◼   ► 'cause you can think of the factors,

00:29:19 ◼   ► but what's the mix of why is the holiday quarter

00:29:22 ◼   ► so abnormal, just like it was for the iPod back in the day?

00:29:26 ◼   ► Now with the iPod, you knew it was for the holidays.

00:29:28 ◼   ► It was people getting them as a gift.

00:29:30 ◼   ► With the iPhone, because they're new

00:29:33 ◼   ► in the holiday quarter too, you get both the enthusiasts

00:29:37 ◼   ► who want to get the latest and greatest iPhone

00:29:40 ◼   ► right when it's new and the holiday mix.

00:29:43 ◼   ► But I think the iPhone is so big

00:29:46 ◼   ► that the enthusiast angle, I think,

00:29:50 ◼   ► is smaller than the holiday angle.

00:29:53 ◼   ► So I wonder if you can't get one for Christmas,

00:29:56 ◼   ► does it actually get purchased?

00:30:00 ◼   ► I don't know, like in January or February.

00:30:02 ◼   ► - I do think that there is something here

00:30:04 ◼   ► that is the genius of Apple that I've complained about

00:30:08 ◼   ► before, like how hard it is.

00:30:09 ◼   ► you know this 'cause your kid's a gamer,

00:30:11 ◼   ► like to get a game console, it's like, you know,

00:30:14 ◼   ► it's ridiculous, like you can't just roll into

00:30:17 ◼   ► the PlayStation store and say,

00:30:19 ◼   ► "I would like to buy a PS5." (laughing)

00:30:21 ◼   ► And they say, "Well, we don't have any right now,

00:30:23 ◼   ► "but we'll put you in line and you'll get it in November."

00:30:27 ◼   ► You just can't, they're like, "It's for sale."

00:30:28 ◼   ► Now it's not, it's for sale, now it's not.

00:30:30 ◼   ► It's a Target, now it's not.

00:30:32 ◼   ► It's a Walmart, now it's not.

00:30:33 ◼   ► And Apple will take your money.

00:30:36 ◼   ► I mean, I really admire them for this.

00:30:38 ◼   ► And I know that there's part of the,

00:30:40 ◼   ► maybe Sony's benefit is that everybody's hunting for it

00:30:42 ◼   ► or whatever, I don't agree with that, but okay, whatever.

00:30:45 ◼   ► I've always admired the fact that even if Apple

00:30:47 ◼   ► doesn't have it, or it's gonna take Apple a while to get it,

00:30:50 ◼   ► they will take your order, give you a date and say,

00:30:53 ◼   ► it will be here on this date.

00:30:54 ◼   ► And it will be, generally it will be there

00:30:56 ◼   ► on that date or before.

00:30:57 ◼   ► And so in a situation like this,

00:31:01 ◼   ► that is an advantage of Apple is like, well,

00:31:03 ◼   ► we can't get you an iPhone now,

00:31:05 ◼   ► but we can get you an iPhone in early January or whatever.

00:31:08 ◼   ► people still have the option of saying, "Well, that sucks. I'm not going to order this iPhone

00:31:11 ◼   ► if I'm not going to get it until January." But some percentage of the people will be like,

00:31:15 ◼   ► "That's good enough. That's fine." And they'll say, "Okay." But I do agree with you that there's

00:31:19 ◼   ► going to be a certain amount where it's like, "Oh, well, I was going to get a new iPhone and

00:31:23 ◼   ► give it as a gift or give it to myself for the holidays, and it's not really available. So now

00:31:27 ◼   ► I'm just not going to bother. I'll buy something else." And that's a lost sale or it's a deferred

00:31:32 ◼   ► sale for maybe until the next product cycle. Maybe they don't get that person back for a year.

00:31:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, I will say, I don't know what,

00:31:40 ◼   ► I haven't been tracking it,

00:31:41 ◼   ► so I don't know if it's changed or not,

00:31:43 ◼   ► but if you go to apple.com and click iPhone

00:31:45 ◼   ► on their main iPhone page,

00:31:48 ◼   ► they list the regular iPhone 14 at the top

00:31:50 ◼   ► in the 14 Pro below.

00:31:52 ◼   ► I don't know if they've changed that, I don't know.

00:31:55 ◼   ► - Get the one you can get.

00:31:57 ◼   ► - Get the one that you can get, I don't know.

00:31:58 ◼   ► - It's nice, it's right here.

00:32:00 ◼   ► It'll save you a little money and we have them.

00:32:05 ◼   ► - Well, we'll keep an eye on that.

00:32:06 ◼   ► I'm sure that you and Ben and Ben's various endeavors

00:32:11 ◼   ► and here at Upgrade will keep watching.

00:32:13 ◼   ► I, again, from an Apple business perspective,

00:32:17 ◼   ► I think is the most fascinating.

00:32:18 ◼   ► Like the fact that they had to put out that news release,

00:32:21 ◼   ► essentially saying, this is gonna be a problem.

00:32:24 ◼   ► Like legally, they needed to say, this is not,

00:32:27 ◼   ► it was after their earnings and all,

00:32:28 ◼   ► and it just happened so quickly thereafter.

00:32:30 ◼   ► And they didn't give, you know,

00:32:31 ◼   ► any actual official guidance 'cause they haven't done that

00:32:35 ◼   ► because of this, right?

00:32:36 ◼   ► Because during COVID, they're like,

00:32:38 ◼   ► there's lots of things that could affect this

00:32:40 ◼   ► that are unexpected.

00:32:41 ◼   ► And then they had to put out that statement.

00:32:43 ◼   ► There's like, well, something unexpected happened,

00:32:45 ◼   ► which is we're not gonna be able to make enough iPhones.

00:32:47 ◼   ► And it's gonna be a really interesting release

00:32:50 ◼   ► in late January, right?

00:32:51 ◼   ► When they're gonna explain exactly how bad this was.

00:32:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, so I just clicked through,

00:32:55 ◼   ► I tried to buy a iPhone 14 Pro Max,

00:32:58 ◼   ► 512 gigabytes, deep purple.

00:33:00 ◼   ► And it is order today, delivers December 28.

00:33:05 ◼   ► So literally, after Christmas and--

00:33:09 ◼   ► - Still before you go back to work

00:33:11 ◼   ► at the first of the year maybe?

00:33:13 ◼   ► Yeah, it's not great.

00:33:14 ◼   ► - Right, but it's only Cyber Monday.

00:33:17 ◼   ► - It is, it is, we're just at the beginning.

00:33:20 ◼   ► Again, happy Cyber Monday to everybody out there.

00:33:24 ◼   ► As you celebrate in your own way.

00:33:26 ◼   ► - To me it's inevitable, and to me I think

00:33:28 ◼   ► when the Tim Cook era is in the rear view mirror,

00:33:31 ◼   ► when he steps aside and somebody else takes over as CEO.

00:33:35 ◼   ► Apple's relationship with China is gonna be

00:33:37 ◼   ► such a huge part of the Tim Cook story.

00:33:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think it might've even been on Dithering

00:33:47 ◼   ► where you guys were talking about this,

00:33:48 ◼   ► but okay, this is bad for Apple

00:33:51 ◼   ► because they're gonna take this hit

00:33:53 ◼   ► and they're gonna lose $6 billion in sales-ish, let's say,

00:33:58 ◼   ► But it really feels to me like on another level,

00:34:02 ◼   ► this is great for Apple,

00:34:03 ◼   ► in the sense that Apple can point to 2022.

00:34:06 ◼   ► They can point to what happened in Shanghai with the Macs,

00:34:08 ◼   ► and they can point to the iPhone Pro here.

00:34:12 ◼   ► And they can say, this is why we need to diversify.

00:34:16 ◼   ► And it gives them a story.

00:34:19 ◼   ► Again, maybe their reason to diversify

00:34:21 ◼   ► is a bigger issue about China, right?

00:34:23 ◼   ► But it gives them a story to tell and to tell to China,

00:34:27 ◼   ► which is no, no, we love you,

00:34:28 ◼   ► but you saw what happened in 2022.

00:34:31 ◼   ► We just need to spread this thing out geographically

00:34:33 ◼   ► a little bit in case something like this happens again.

00:34:36 ◼   ► It gives them like a fig leaf

00:34:38 ◼   ► to hide behind a little bit with China,

00:34:40 ◼   ► whether China buys it or not, who knows,

00:34:41 ◼   ► but it gives them a little bit of not only a push,

00:34:44 ◼   ► but I feel like a way to not say,

00:34:47 ◼   ► well, we don't really believe in China like we used to,

00:34:50 ◼   ► we gotta get out of there.

00:34:51 ◼   ► And instead just say, oh, it's important to diversify,

00:34:54 ◼   ► which it is, right?

00:34:55 ◼   ► but now they have good examples of exactly why.

00:34:57 ◼   ► It's like we lost 6 billion in sales

00:35:00 ◼   ► because we didn't diversify iPhone production.

00:35:02 ◼   ► Hard to argue.

00:35:04 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:35:05 ◼   ► - All right, we're gonna take a break here

00:35:07 ◼   ► and do a sponsor read from Myke Hurley.

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00:36:52 ◼   ► I thought we would do some sports talk because when I'm on the talk show, we talk about sports

00:37:02 ◼   ► and people get mad at us. Like, I didn't tune in to hear you guys talk about sports. By

00:37:09 ◼   ► the way, congratulations on the great season that your Philadelphia Eagles are having.

00:37:12 ◼   ► Oh, wait a second. You live in Philadelphia, but you know, the Dallas Cowboys are doing

00:37:16 ◼   ► pretty well too, actually. Doesn't that whole division make the playoffs if the season ended

00:37:20 ◼   ► It's going okay.

00:37:22 ◼   ► - I believe so, I do.

00:37:24 ◼   ► - Pretty good, there's another division in that conference

00:37:26 ◼   ► that everybody's under 500.

00:37:27 ◼   ► But I did have that moment

00:37:30 ◼   ► where I was watching the Eagles last night

00:37:32 ◼   ► and I was like, oh, I'm talking to John tomorrow.

00:37:33 ◼   ► Oh, right, John's in Philly, but he's not.

00:37:37 ◼   ► Do you get any, do you have like,

00:37:39 ◼   ► as a division rival to the Eagles,

00:37:40 ◼   ► like do you get mad at the Eagles

00:37:43 ◼   ► or are they more like, you guys are okay, I'm from Philly.

00:37:46 ◼   ► You guys are okay, but the Cowboys are my guy

00:37:49 ◼   ► or do you hate them?

00:37:50 ◼   ► No, I don't hate anybody. I think that's it. The Yankees have the Red Sox, which is genuine.

00:37:56 ◼   ► There's no question about it that that's their arch rival. The Dallas Cowboys don't really have an arch rival because

00:38:01 ◼   ► They're the arch rival of all of their patients.

00:38:04 ◼   ► Yeah, but they're sort of above it all.

00:38:08 ◼   ► Well, it's not the Giants where they're a big rival, but I guess it depends on the era, right?

00:38:12 ◼   ► No, yeah, it depends who's good, right? It depends who's the second... who's the best team in the NFC.

00:38:18 ◼   ► - The Packers are the--

00:38:20 ◼   ► - Right, but the Washington fans,

00:38:23 ◼   ► their most hated team is Dallas too.

00:38:25 ◼   ► Everybody's-- - Right.

00:38:26 ◼   ► Well, in the '90s, as a 49er fan,

00:38:29 ◼   ► that 49ers-Dallas matchup,

00:38:32 ◼   ► I mean, there was rivalry there,

00:38:33 ◼   ► but it was a rivalry of they were the two best teams.

00:38:35 ◼   ► So natural. - Right, that was very special.

00:38:37 ◼   ► Right, and that's a thing you just don't see anymore

00:38:40 ◼   ► in the NFL where there's two truly,

00:38:42 ◼   ► I mean, the Eagles are nine and one,

00:38:44 ◼   ► so maybe they truly are great,

00:38:46 ◼   ► But the goal of the NFL to the chagrin of many fans has been, for decades, has been, what do they call it?

00:38:54 ◼   ► Parity.

00:38:54 ◼   ► Parity. Where they want everybody to be almost 500 and anybody can win every week.

00:39:01 ◼   ► Whereas in the 90s, when you're talking about with that 49er count, they were like two all-star teams.

00:39:06 ◼   ► And it was so obvious that barring catastrophic injuries to any of the stars,

00:39:12 ◼   ► that they would play in the NFC Championship,

00:39:15 ◼   ► and whoever won would then go to the Super Bowl

00:39:17 ◼   ► and coast to victory by 30 points over the Buffalo Bills.

00:39:22 ◼   ► - Or the Chargers.

00:39:23 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:39:24 ◼   ► - That was at 49ers in the 90s.

00:39:25 ◼   ► That was the one time that 49ers got through the Cowboys,

00:39:28 ◼   ► and they got to play the Chargers,

00:39:29 ◼   ► and the Chargers were like,

00:39:30 ◼   ► "We've never been to the Super Bowl before,"

00:39:33 ◼   ► and it didn't go well for them.

00:39:34 ◼   ► This is not NFL talk, though.

00:39:36 ◼   ► I actually want to talk to you about the World Cup briefly,

00:39:40 ◼   ► but I did have that moment watching the Eagles

00:39:41 ◼   ► I thought, well, Lex Friedman is very excited now, but John doesn't care because.

00:39:44 ◼   ► Well, I'll just say this. I did not watch that game yesterday.

00:39:48 ◼   ► I was watching a television, a scripted television with my wife,

00:39:52 ◼   ► but I used it as an opportunity to do live activities on my phone just to keep

00:39:56 ◼   ► track of the score. And it wound up the Eagles.

00:39:59 ◼   ► It was a Sunday night game at Eagles Packers and it was actually an outstanding

00:40:02 ◼   ► use of live activity because it was a super high scoring game. So every time,

00:40:05 ◼   ► every time I looked at my phone, it was a new score.

00:40:07 ◼   ► So you use the news app for that?

00:40:10 ◼   ► No, you know what I use is an app called sports alerts. Oh it is it is a very

00:40:16 ◼   ► unimaginably named app

00:40:18 ◼   ► But it is it's excellent and it's not the prettiest app to look at but I can I I actually hadn't heard of it until

00:40:26 ◼   ► Recently because of this live activities thing, but they've got all sports

00:40:29 ◼   ► live scores and you can tap into a game to get like the

00:40:34 ◼   ► Box score if you just want to look at like who's you know, what actually happened?

00:40:39 ◼   ► They've got everything you'd want for all sports.

00:40:41 ◼   ► And for any game, you just go to a,

00:40:44 ◼   ► you just tap into the game and then there's a menu

00:40:46 ◼   ► at the top that just says start live activity for that game.

00:40:49 ◼   ► And as soon as, you know, then you'd boom,

00:40:51 ◼   ► you've got a live activity for that game score.

00:40:53 ◼   ► And it's any sport.

00:40:55 ◼   ► - That's pretty cool.

00:40:56 ◼   ► There are some sports you can now do it

00:40:58 ◼   ► in the Apple News app.

00:40:59 ◼   ► You can like say this is a game I'm following

00:41:01 ◼   ► or a team I'm following and then,

00:41:03 ◼   ► and then it'll kick off a live activity.

00:41:05 ◼   ► I'm looking forward because we're baseball fans.

00:41:07 ◼   ► I'm really looking forward to the live activity view

00:41:10 ◼   ► for baseball.

00:41:11 ◼   ► I assume that MLB, since they always seem to jump on,

00:41:14 ◼   ► Apple's new tech will jump on live activities

00:41:17 ◼   ► for the new season.

00:41:20 ◼   ► And that'll be great.

00:41:20 ◼   ► I used live activities recently for travel.

00:41:24 ◼   ► I used Flighty on a trip that we took over a weekend

00:41:29 ◼   ► a few weeks ago to Denver and I loved it.

00:41:32 ◼   ► And then it was tracking my kids on the way in.

00:41:35 ◼   ► So we were able to see like, okay,

00:41:37 ◼   ► their plane took off and here's when it's gonna be

00:41:39 ◼   ► a little late and it was, it's pretty great.

00:41:42 ◼   ► Live activities, I think the challenge is just

00:41:45 ◼   ► that they released most of the API so late

00:41:47 ◼   ► that it's just gonna take a while for people

00:41:49 ◼   ► to get up to speed.

00:41:51 ◼   ► - Anyway, World Cup. - World Cup, why not?

00:41:54 ◼   ► So we talked, Myke and I talked about World Cup

00:41:56 ◼   ► really briefly in Snell Talk and I got some feedback

00:42:00 ◼   ► that was like, how can you not mention how bad Qatar is?

00:42:04 ◼   ► It was like, well, I think anybody who's paying attention

00:42:06 ◼   ► the World Cup knows exactly how bad Qatar is, but just to say it, FIFA and Qatar are

00:42:13 ◼   ► almost comically bad. Qatar is an authoritarian state. FIFA is a corrupt – this is post

00:42:21 ◼   ► everybody getting resigned and charged with crimes for corruption in giving the World

00:42:27 ◼   ► Cup to Qatar, but they're still corrupt. So you did some posts on Daring Fireball about

00:42:32 ◼   ► this that made me laugh. It's the "things are going great" meme, but for the World Cup,

00:42:37 ◼   ► a bunch of European soccer clubs were going to wear armbands that were anti-discrimination,

00:42:42 ◼   ► and FIFA basically said, "Anybody who wears armbands is going to get a yellow card." So

00:42:49 ◼   ► the different teams basically said, "Okay, we're not going to do it because FIFA is making

00:42:52 ◼   ► us not do it."

00:42:54 ◼   ► And I think for people who aren't sports fans, and I'm not the world's biggest soccer fan,

00:42:58 ◼   ► but I know the basic rules.

00:42:59 ◼   ► But if you're not a sports fan at all,

00:43:01 ◼   ► yellow maybe sounds mild,

00:43:03 ◼   ► but that's actually a severe penalty.

00:43:05 ◼   ► And so the blaming the teams for backing,

00:43:08 ◼   ► I don't blame the actual teams for backing out.

00:43:10 ◼   ► I blame FIFA for instituting the penalty.

00:43:13 ◼   ► But to say, oh, why not just take a yellow card

00:43:16 ◼   ► and wear the armband,

00:43:17 ◼   ► but it's like a devastating penalty

00:43:18 ◼   ► to have your captain start the game with a yellow card.

00:43:20 ◼   ► You get one more yellow,

00:43:21 ◼   ► and then you're out of the game,

00:43:23 ◼   ► and you miss the next game.

00:43:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, and you're playing a man down

00:43:25 ◼   ► for the rest of the game.

00:43:26 ◼   ► - Right, right, right.

00:43:27 ◼   ► Not, it's a huge disadvantage.

00:43:29 ◼   ► So, so the, so that happened

00:43:31 ◼   ► and I think the Netherlands had something

00:43:33 ◼   ► sewn into their shirts and they were like,

00:43:35 ◼   ► you gotta, you gotta rip that out.

00:43:36 ◼   ► You can't have that.

00:43:37 ◼   ► So it's going great.

00:43:39 ◼   ► Last week, the New York Times did a nice feature article

00:43:42 ◼   ► that it's a great overview.

00:43:43 ◼   ► I'll put it in the show notes.

00:43:44 ◼   ► A great overview of all of the graft

00:43:46 ◼   ► and then the kind of horrifying conditions

00:43:49 ◼   ► in which these stadiums were all built.

00:43:54 ◼   ► Also remember World Cup usually happens in the summertime.

00:43:56 ◼   ► They had to move it to the winter

00:43:57 ◼   ► because it's so hot in Qatar.

00:44:00 ◼   ► And I've definitely seen some soccer commentators saying

00:44:03 ◼   ► that they think the quality of the play

00:44:05 ◼   ► at the World Cup is actually poor.

00:44:06 ◼   ► Not that the players aren't great players,

00:44:08 ◼   ► but because the teams have not necessarily been able

00:44:11 ◼   ► to play together as much before the tournament

00:44:14 ◼   ► as they would have in a summer World Cup season

00:44:17 ◼   ► where the club seasons would end

00:44:19 ◼   ► and then they would get more time to practice together.

00:44:22 ◼   ► And so, and I am also not a soccer expert

00:44:25 ◼   ► and it's been fun to watch these matches

00:44:27 ◼   ► because it is this kind of international all-star

00:44:30 ◼   ► soccer tournament and it's fun to watch.

00:44:32 ◼   ► But I definitely took note that some people thought

00:44:35 ◼   ► that this is probably, by moving it to the winter,

00:44:37 ◼   ► not only are you stopping everybody's leagues for weeks,

00:44:41 ◼   ► but also that the teams aren't as cohesive.

00:44:45 ◼   ► - There's long been the similar complaint.

00:44:49 ◼   ► I don't think, it's like the Olympic,

00:44:52 ◼   ► the International Olympic Committee must love FIFA

00:44:54 ◼   ► because it makes the International Olympic Committee

00:44:57 ◼   ► look like they're on the straight and narrow

00:44:59 ◼   ► and that there's nothing to complain about

00:45:01 ◼   ► about the way, you know, oh, us, corrupt, look at FIFA.

00:45:05 ◼   ► But there's always been complaints

00:45:09 ◼   ► about being the host city for the Olympics,

00:45:11 ◼   ► winter or summer, that you end up having to build out

00:45:15 ◼   ► all of this massive infrastructure

00:45:18 ◼   ► that is only useful if you're hosting the Olympics, right?

00:45:21 ◼   ► It's like, so who needs an Olympic-sized swimming pool

00:45:25 ◼   ► with seating for thousands the rest of time, right?

00:45:30 ◼   ► Because you're not gonna get the Olympics again.

00:45:32 ◼   ► So there's all, you end up building stadiums and parking

00:45:35 ◼   ► and temporary housing in the Olympic Village

00:45:36 ◼   ► and you build all this stuff up

00:45:38 ◼   ► and it's two weeks of Olympics and then it's gone.

00:45:42 ◼   ► What do you do with it?

00:45:43 ◼   ► Qatar has taken this to just an absurd extreme

00:45:50 ◼   ► because they didn't have any soccer,

00:45:52 ◼   ► they didn't have any stadiums that were capable

00:45:55 ◼   ► of hosting a single World Cup match.

00:45:57 ◼   ► - I think they had a stadium that could be upgraded,

00:46:00 ◼   ► but they needed like seven more.

00:46:02 ◼   ► - Right, and so they just built them all from scratch

00:46:07 ◼   ► for this, and what are they gonna do with them afterwards?

00:46:12 ◼   ► It's their money, so the money isn't really the waste,

00:46:14 ◼   ► but you talk about environmental impact

00:46:18 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

00:46:19 ◼   ► It's just crazy. They built these massive modern, you know, they look very nice. They don't look temporary. They all look permanent

00:46:26 ◼   ► for a country that doesn't have any need for 100,000 seat stadiums and in addition to all of the stuff on

00:46:34 ◼   ► LGBT rights that are just awful in Qatar and

00:46:41 ◼   ► and being absurd like where people are just fans coming into the matches if you've got something rainbow colored on your shirt

00:46:47 ◼   ► It doesn't even matter what it says there's all sorts of documentation of guards telling people you can't come in with that shirt

00:46:54 ◼   ► Just because I mean I wouldn't be surprised honestly you came in with an Apple logo a classic Apple logo shirt

00:46:59 ◼   ► They'd they tell you to get out

00:47:01 ◼   ► Also some some Iran related things right same thing where they're like you've got something right for the women protesting in Iran

00:47:08 ◼   ► They're like you might take it off. You got it replace

00:47:09 ◼   ► Yeah, you got to take it off

00:47:10 ◼   ► but then the the other the whole other unrelated aspect of human rights that it's just

00:47:17 ◼   ► Absolutely shameful is the way they built these stadiums. I mean and

00:47:20 ◼   ► Reading about this is one of those things where I know I've written recently

00:47:25 ◼   ► I know a lot of people have video fatigue because so much of the internet is

00:47:30 ◼   ► broadcast and video and as I go, you know

00:47:32 ◼   ► You how do I fix my sink when it's stuck and it's all these YouTube videos like just give me an article

00:47:37 ◼   ► I want to read show me some pictures and let me figure this out. I know people have video fatigue, but

00:47:42 ◼   ► I watched some

00:47:46 ◼   ► you know journalism about the the the conditions that the migrant workers who built these stadiums lived in and

00:47:52 ◼   ► You really have to see it. It is it needs to be seen

00:47:56 ◼   ► To understand how horrible the conditions were I mean just the worst filth that you could imagine

00:48:03 ◼   ► You know one room and it's you do everything from sleep eat cook and go to the bathroom in it

00:48:09 ◼   ► You know, it's just crazy how bad the condition. I know there's people out there who are saying, you know

00:48:15 ◼   ► "Well, what about Apple's factories?" And it's like, well, yeah, I mean, this is a large

00:48:20 ◼   ► issue in general, but it sounds like this was a particularly bad situation where people

00:48:27 ◼   ► are coming from other countries, their passports were often being held by their employers so

00:48:31 ◼   ► they couldn't leave, they're essentially trapped there, they were being paid in one of the

00:48:36 ◼   ► richest countries in the world, paid almost nothing, often they had to pay thousands of

00:48:40 ◼   ► dollars that they didn't have, so they were indentured essentially in order to come and

00:48:44 ◼   ► and work it off and send money home. And some of that changed due to criticism, but I think

00:48:50 ◼   ► the stories that I've read about it and the videos I've watched about it suggest that

00:48:53 ◼   ► while Qatar has sort of reformed some of those practices, those reforms are not necessarily

00:48:59 ◼   ► as universal as they should be, and the reform doesn't actually take them to a great place.

00:49:05 ◼   ► It's just less bad than it was. I wanted to mention soccer journalist Grant Wall, who

00:49:10 ◼   ► who was a great American soccer journalist.

00:49:12 ◼   ► Yes, there is one.

00:49:14 ◼   ► He has a sub stack that I subscribe to.

00:49:17 ◼   ► He was stopped twice.

00:49:18 ◼   ► Once he was literally in like a media area

00:49:20 ◼   ► and he took a picture of a logo, a poster on the wall,

00:49:23 ◼   ► and a security guard came up to him and said,

00:49:25 ◼   ► "You can't take pictures here."

00:49:26 ◼   ► And he's like, "What do you mean?

00:49:27 ◼   ► I'm a journalist and this is a public media place."

00:49:29 ◼   ► And they're like, "You can't take pictures here.

00:49:31 ◼   ► Delete it off your phone."

00:49:32 ◼   ► And Grant Wallace response to his credit was,

00:49:34 ◼   ► "No, I'm not gonna do that."

00:49:37 ◼   ► And eventually it kind of deescalated,

00:49:38 ◼   ► But then he also wore a shirt with some rainbow colors on it to a match and got detained.

00:49:44 ◼   ► And another journalist vouched for him and they got detained.

00:49:47 ◼   ► And it was one of those things where eventually they said, "Oh, it's okay.

00:49:52 ◼   ► We apologize."

00:49:53 ◼   ► And they let them go.

00:49:54 ◼   ► But I think what he learned is that's the default security in Qatar.

00:49:59 ◼   ► And even though the Qatar government has made promises to FIFA about freedom for the people

00:50:05 ◼   ► who are visiting the country in terms of things like wearing a rainbow on their shirt. And

00:50:10 ◼   ► they've agreed to that. That either they agreed to it but wink wink, nudge nudge, or they

00:50:16 ◼   ► agreed to it but the security people on the ground are so used to cracking down on this

00:50:21 ◼   ► stuff that they just do it. And then they're like, "Oh right, World Cup, right, we let

00:50:26 ◼   ► you go for two weeks and then we'll crack down again." So it's not great. I also want

00:50:31 ◼   ► mention Gianni Infantino, by the way, just because I think, I mean, it's terrible, but

00:50:35 ◼   ► I think it's also hilarious how corrupt FIFA is. And the moment he gave a bizarre press

00:50:40 ◼   ► conference last week, the head of FIFA, where he said that you can't criticize Qatar if

00:50:46 ◼   ► your country ever committed a crime in the past, which is what a move that is. And also

00:50:53 ◼   ► he declared that he felt the pain of every marginalized group and he took it upon himself,

00:50:59 ◼   ► he was fine with it so it was okay. Like, wha-- just amazing. So if you ever wondered

00:51:04 ◼   ► sort of like, "Who's running FIFA?" This is the guy who replaced the guy, Sepp Blatter,

00:51:09 ◼   ► who basically got kicked out because of the corruption involving Qatar, but they just

00:51:14 ◼   ► replaced him with another guy.

00:51:16 ◼   ► It's like he knew he was gonna get criticized and went into the bookstore and went up to

00:51:20 ◼   ► the counter and was like, "Where are your books on whataboutism?"

00:51:24 ◼   ► I'm working on something. I'm working on a speech.

00:51:28 ◼   ► And he just picked up a couple of books on whataboutism and was like, "Yes, yes, this

00:51:32 ◼   ► is the way..."

00:51:33 ◼   ► "What about the British Empire and the slave trade?

00:51:35 ◼   ► What about slavery in America?

00:51:36 ◼   ► You can't talk about..."

00:51:37 ◼   ► "Okay..."

00:51:38 ◼   ► And the least of the issues, I mean, again, the human rights issues are preeminent.

00:51:47 ◼   ► And the fact that it's even hosted in Qatar at all without their infrastructure is absurd.

00:51:52 ◼   ► And it's just, you know, it's bribery.

00:51:54 ◼   ► I mean, this isn't even like allegations.

00:51:57 ◼   ► have been caught. So it's the least of the issues, but this this story with the

00:52:02 ◼   ► beer is so fascinating. So Budweiser for decades, I think, has been the

00:52:09 ◼   ► exclusive beer sponsor of the World Cup, and I believe it's the case, I think, that

00:52:13 ◼   ► that it's such that if you, you know, for the last many World Cups, if you go to a

00:52:18 ◼   ► match and you want to have a beer in the stands... That would be a Budweiser product, yeah.

00:52:21 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a Bud or Bud Light or something from, you know, their brewery.

00:52:26 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe Shocktop or something now they've diversified a little but it's all gonna be bud products. That's it period right and you know

00:52:32 ◼   ► They when they said hey, we're gonna host it in Qatar and they're like, well wait

00:52:35 ◼   ► We have a beer sponsorship and it's a you know fans fans from all over the world expect to you know

00:52:40 ◼   ► Enjoy a beer while they watch and Qatar was like, ah, well, you know, we'll make an exception

00:52:44 ◼   ► It's you know ordinarily that would that would not be a place where you can consume alcohol and Qatar

00:52:49 ◼   ► But we'll make an exception and they're like, okay good

00:52:52 ◼   ► That's you know, it's the same thing that they said they were going to do with you know people wearing

00:52:58 ◼   ► arm bands and supportive

00:53:01 ◼   ► LGBT rights, you know and they're like totally Darth Vader did you know? Yeah, that's right at the last minute

00:53:08 ◼   ► They just said no and we should say Qatar is not a dry country

00:53:11 ◼   ► I mean it is actually technically a dry country, but like you know what I mean? It's not a no alcohol country

00:53:16 ◼   ► They let you do have it in like restaurants and high-end bars. There's a very limited amount of public

00:53:21 ◼   ► restaurants and things that are licensed and it's very expensive where you can. It's not completely

00:53:25 ◼   ► banned in the country, but stadiums are not on that list. Right. So it gets it so that the couple

00:53:32 ◼   ► of absurdities of this is that Qatar came and said, "Okay, we're gonna, you know, that thing we said about

00:53:37 ◼   ► selling beer at the matches? Yeah, never mind. That's not true." And that was two days before the

00:53:42 ◼   ► World Cup started. And so Budweiser, they tweeted a picture of it. It looks like the Raiders of the

00:53:48 ◼   ► the Lost Ark warehouse at the end.

00:53:51 ◼   ► It's just this massive warehouse full of Budweiser beer

00:53:54 ◼   ► that they'd already shipped over there

00:53:56 ◼   ► for the World Cup matches.

00:53:57 ◼   ► And they're like, we've already got all this beer.

00:53:59 ◼   ► So Budweiser's trying to make the best of it.

00:54:01 ◼   ► They said whichever country wins the World Cup,

00:54:03 ◼   ► we'll just give all this beer.

00:54:04 ◼   ► We'll ship it to that country

00:54:05 ◼   ► and give it away to fans or something.

00:54:07 ◼   ► But the other part that is just so absurd,

00:54:11 ◼   ► it's just so ridiculous and corrupt

00:54:13 ◼   ► and just the worst of everything,

00:54:15 ◼   ► is that you actually can consume alcohol as a fan

00:54:20 ◼   ► at these World Cup matches.

00:54:22 ◼   ► It's just that you have to be in one of the luxury boxes

00:54:25 ◼   ► and they start, the seats for those boxes start at $22,000

00:54:30 ◼   ► for like one seat, one match.

00:54:35 ◼   ► So if you've got $22,000 for your seat,

00:54:38 ◼   ► let's say you wanna go with a pal or maybe your partner,

00:54:41 ◼   ► so you want two.

00:54:42 ◼   ► So if you've got, you know, $44, $45,000 for seats,

00:54:46 ◼   ► then you can get some alcohol at the match.

00:54:50 ◼   ► It's not good.

00:54:52 ◼   ► - It's, yeah.

00:54:53 ◼   ► Yeah, anyway, it's a shame

00:54:55 ◼   ► because the World Cup is such a great competition.

00:54:59 ◼   ► It's fun.

00:55:00 ◼   ► It's a, even for non, like, really into soccer people,

00:55:04 ◼   ► like, it's the best players in the world

00:55:06 ◼   ► playing for their country.

00:55:07 ◼   ► They have something, they really care about it.

00:55:10 ◼   ► It is because it's not the usual clubs.

00:55:13 ◼   ► It's everybody, you know, at the highest level altogether.

00:55:18 ◼   ► And it happens pretty quick where there are the pool play

00:55:20 ◼   ► and then there's the knockout matches.

00:55:22 ◼   ► So they go from 16 down to a champion,

00:55:24 ◼   ► happens in a few weeks.

00:55:25 ◼   ► It's like a little mini Olympics.

00:55:27 ◼   ► It's why, by the way, it's why the best players

00:55:29 ◼   ► in the world are not allowed to play in the Olympics.

00:55:31 ◼   ► It's because FIFA is like,

00:55:32 ◼   ► "Mm-mm, that's too World Cup-y for us."

00:55:35 ◼   ► So they limited to like young people

00:55:38 ◼   ► to play in the Olympics.

00:55:40 ◼   ► But so it's a great event,

00:55:42 ◼   ► even for somebody who's not super soccer crazy,

00:55:44 ◼   ► it is a great event.

00:55:46 ◼   ► And as much as I am watching matches,

00:55:50 ◼   ► but my enthusiasm for it is,

00:55:52 ◼   ► it has been drained out of it.

00:55:53 ◼   ► Because like, look, I watched the Super Bowl

00:55:55 ◼   ► and I know how corrupt the NFL is,

00:55:56 ◼   ► but this is next level.

00:55:59 ◼   ► I know, like I don't like Rob Manfred,

00:56:00 ◼   ► but I watched Major League Baseball

00:56:01 ◼   ► and I watched the World Series, right?

00:56:03 ◼   ► Like he's the commissioner of baseball.

00:56:04 ◼   ► He's kind of awful.

00:56:05 ◼   ► Like it's big business

00:56:07 ◼   ► and there's a lot of awfulness happening

00:56:08 ◼   ► in big business sports, and you try to focus on the sport,

00:56:11 ◼   ► this is so bad that it's actually kinda hard

00:56:13 ◼   ► to focus on the sport.

00:56:14 ◼   ► And we didn't even mention-- - Yeah, it really is.

00:56:15 ◼   ► - You mentioned the stadiums.

00:56:16 ◼   ► One of them is built with shipping containers.

00:56:18 ◼   ► Lauren was asking me, what are they gonna do

00:56:20 ◼   ► with these stadiums after?

00:56:21 ◼   ► And I said, well, I suspect that this is part

00:56:23 ◼   ► of a long-term plan where Qatar is gonna start paying

00:56:25 ◼   ► for exhibition matches in various sports

00:56:28 ◼   ► or for a rugby tournament or whatever.

00:56:30 ◼   ► They're gonna roll out the money,

00:56:32 ◼   ► sorta like that live golf tour.

00:56:35 ◼   ► They're gonna have money, and they're gonna say,

00:56:36 ◼   ► We want clubs and friendlies and other sports

00:56:41 ◼   ► that we'll put on in our stadiums

00:56:43 ◼   ► and we'll pay you a lot of money to do it.

00:56:45 ◼   ► And some people will do it.

00:56:47 ◼   ► And that will probably be their game plan.

00:56:49 ◼   ► And then they'll probably deconstruct.

00:56:52 ◼   ► I know that one that's temporary, they will deconstruct,

00:56:54 ◼   ► but as the rest of them,

00:56:55 ◼   ► that's my guess about what their game plan is.

00:56:57 ◼   ► Or they'll just let them sit there.

00:56:59 ◼   ► I mean, that's what happened in Brazil, right?

00:57:00 ◼   ► As they built that stadium out by the Amazon.

00:57:03 ◼   ► And they're like, it's a very small city.

00:57:06 ◼   ► We don't need a stadium this big."

00:57:07 ◼   ► And it's like, "Well, what you gonna do, World Cup?"

00:57:11 ◼   ► - Let the kids play youth soccer inside and be excited.

00:57:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's gonna be great.

00:57:16 ◼   ► The echoes alone will be, just get 10 people in there

00:57:18 ◼   ► and let the echoes bounce around.

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00:59:23 ◼   ► wanted to mention is more specifically about Apple and it's it Apple seems and

00:59:27 ◼   ► ediQ is sort of leading the charge here I think very ambitious about sports and

00:59:32 ◼   ► sports streaming and Julia Alexander and I talk about this a lot on our

00:59:36 ◼   ► downstream podcast that we do every other Tuesday people should check that

00:59:41 ◼   ► out but Apple in particular like I think they're very motivated in reaching

00:59:47 ◼   ► sports audiences because it's a way to reach audiences who maybe have not ever

00:59:51 ◼   ► launched the Apple TV app or have not, you know, experimented with their TV to

00:59:55 ◼   ► find can they open the Apple TV app or do they need to buy a box that has the

01:00:01 ◼   ► Apple TV app on it, whether it's an Apple TV or some other box. And one way you

01:00:06 ◼   ► drive people, and Amazon has found this with Thursday Night Football on Prime

01:00:10 ◼   ► Video, is you drive people by putting sports on there that they have to watch

01:00:15 ◼   ► on the TV app. And so they did their contract with the MLS for 10 years, for

01:00:21 ◼   ► American soccer. They had that Major League Baseball deal, which I read. I haven't read

01:00:28 ◼   ► anything about that. I read that they had an opt-out every year, but I assume it's going

01:00:33 ◼   ► to continue. I wonder whether it will change forms or not. And of course, they're rumored

01:00:38 ◼   ► to talk about, to be talking with the NFL about the NFL Sunday Ticket Package, which

01:00:43 ◼   ► is the only NFL package remaining available, even though it's not quite as good as the

01:00:48 ◼   ► others in a lot of ways because it's just a rebroadcast of other games with a bunch

01:00:52 ◼   ► of limitations, which may be why the deals are holding it up. And I think it's fascinating.

01:00:58 ◼   ► However, it has led to what I would say is one of the most hilarious rumors of the week,

01:01:03 ◼   ► which is a rumor that Apple's gonna buy Manchester United because sure, why not? They could...

01:01:11 ◼   ► I don't even... Yeah. I don't know how this rumor started. I don't know who thinks it

01:01:15 ◼   ► makes sense. It makes zero sense to me because strategically, why would Apple

01:01:19 ◼   ► want to buy one team? And for those who don't know Manchester United,

01:01:23 ◼   ► Manchester United is sort of like the Dallas Cowboys and the Yankees rolled

01:01:27 ◼   ► into one. They are, you know, the... if you were gonna buy one, I presume, perhaps the

01:01:33 ◼   ► most expensive... if every sports franchise in the world went on sale and

01:01:38 ◼   ► you got bids for all of them, might be the, you know, the most valuable

01:01:42 ◼   ► professional sports franchise in any sport anywhere in the world. Apple could

01:01:46 ◼   ► afford it, obviously. Apple's business is bigger than sports. But if their goal

01:01:51 ◼   ► strategically is to get streaming rights to various sports, it makes no sense to

01:01:58 ◼   ► own one team in any sport, right? Like, it wouldn't make sense for them to buy the

01:02:02 ◼   ► San Francisco Giants, you know, like, "Oh, they're our local team." Or I guess

01:02:07 ◼   ► Oakland would probably be a better deal on that one. Right, but what sense would it make for the

01:02:13 ◼   ► company that is supposedly a neutral broadcaster of these games to own one of the teams? I mean,

01:02:20 ◼   ► you could pull it off as a conglomerate, but Apple's not really a conglomerate, right?

01:02:25 ◼   ► And it's not part of the strategy, right? The direction they're going with sports is not about

01:02:34 ◼   ► "Well, maybe we should just buy some sports teams."

01:02:36 ◼   ► It's about this streaming strategy.

01:02:41 ◼   ► And yeah, it's a little bit like saying,

01:02:43 ◼   ► "Well, maybe Apple could buy Disney."

01:02:45 ◼   ► It's like, well, maybe,

01:02:47 ◼   ► but does Apple wanna have theme parks?

01:02:50 ◼   ► Does Apple wanna have broadcast TV network?

01:02:52 ◼   ► But this is just that.

01:02:56 ◼   ► This is like Apple's gonna buy Disneyland level of like,

01:02:58 ◼   ► "What? Why would that ever?"

01:03:01 ◼   ► I mean, I think what's funny about it is

01:03:03 ◼   ► Apple is now playing in this game, and so these sorts of rumors are happening. I get

01:03:08 ◼   ► it. But, you know, really the action is happening on this other side. And since you and I are

01:03:16 ◼   ► both sports fans, what do you think about Apple's ambitions in terms of streaming? Are

01:03:21 ◼   ► there aspects of it that interest you? Do you think that this is a smart strategy for

01:03:25 ◼   ► them?

01:03:26 ◼   ► I think it's such a mystery where sports goes, because I don't think anybody has cracked

01:03:30 ◼   ► the nut yet on sports streaming. I mean, the closest I famously this season, I mean, Amazon

01:03:39 ◼   ► Prime has the rights to Thursday Night Football in the NFL. And it just by honestly, mostly

01:03:47 ◼   ► bad luck. I mean, they they didn't schedule the best games on Thursday Night Football.

01:03:53 ◼   ► It was known to be sort of the B package or C package, right? Like Sunday Night Football

01:03:57 ◼   ► and Monday Night Football are the bigger prime time slots.

01:04:01 ◼   ► But this season, by rotten luck,

01:04:05 ◼   ► the Thursday night games have been awful.

01:04:07 ◼   ► Just teams that were expected to be good,

01:04:10 ◼   ► but they've had injuries or just surprisingly bad.

01:04:13 ◼   ► And they hired Al Michaels,

01:04:15 ◼   ► who's my favorite play-by-play announcer.

01:04:18 ◼   ► They hired him away from NBC,

01:04:20 ◼   ► and it seems like he sort of got squeezed out of NBC

01:04:23 ◼   ► because they wanted Myke Tirico, who's younger.

01:04:25 ◼   ► It was his time to take over the mic.

01:04:27 ◼   ► But here's this guy who's 71 or 72 years old,

01:04:30 ◼   ► near the end of his career, by far,

01:04:33 ◼   ► has been broadcasting since he was super young,

01:04:36 ◼   ► so 50 years of national memories

01:04:38 ◼   ► of Al Michaels calling games.

01:04:41 ◼   ► And he's stuck calling these awful games,

01:04:43 ◼   ► and he's kind of talking about how awful the games are,

01:04:46 ◼   ► which is really neat.

01:04:47 ◼   ► But I don't, it seems to me, though,

01:04:49 ◼   ► that nobody's really cracked the nut

01:04:51 ◼   ► of getting people to watch.

01:04:54 ◼   ► My dad is, I mean, my dad is 80, 84, close to 85.

01:04:58 ◼   ► They might as well tell him that you've gotta go up

01:05:02 ◼   ► to the space station in orbit

01:05:04 ◼   ► to watch "Thursday Night Football."

01:05:06 ◼   ► I mean, I could talk him through it.

01:05:07 ◼   ► I really could, but he has no interest.

01:05:09 ◼   ► - I talked my mom.

01:05:10 ◼   ► My mom is 82, and I talked her, 83, and, sorry, mom.

01:05:15 ◼   ► And I talked her through it,

01:05:19 ◼   ► because I had set up a Roku attached to her TV a while ago.

01:05:23 ◼   ► I am getting her an Apple TV.

01:05:24 ◼   ► Nobody tell her I'm getting her an Apple TV.

01:05:26 ◼   ► I'm gonna install that.

01:05:27 ◼   ► But I had to write, I literally had to write up a document

01:05:30 ◼   ► and print it about what buttons to push

01:05:34 ◼   ► to get to Prime Video, but she was motivated.

01:05:36 ◼   ► And I know she's done it.

01:05:38 ◼   ► She doesn't necessarily do it every week.

01:05:40 ◼   ► 'Cause like you said, the games are not necessarily great,

01:05:42 ◼   ► but if there's nothing else on

01:05:44 ◼   ► and she mostly watches sports, I did get her to get there.

01:05:48 ◼   ► And the numbers for the Prime Video Thursday Night Football

01:05:50 ◼   ► are pretty good for streaming

01:05:53 ◼   ► and for Thursday Night Football,

01:05:55 ◼   ► but I think you're right.

01:05:57 ◼   ► That doesn't necessarily mean that they've cracked it

01:06:00 ◼   ► because your dad, it's a perfect example,

01:06:02 ◼   ► it's like, well, they aren't good teams

01:06:04 ◼   ► and it might as well be in space,

01:06:06 ◼   ► and so I just don't care,

01:06:07 ◼   ► and it's gone from his mind then.

01:06:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, so I think that that is an interesting problem

01:06:13 ◼   ► to solve, and I don't think Apple is really close to it.

01:06:16 ◼   ► And I don't know what the answer is.

01:06:18 ◼   ► So that's really my interest,

01:06:20 ◼   ► And I think it's more for the general,

01:06:22 ◼   ► like the upgrade audience who's not into us

01:06:25 ◼   ► talking the sports aspect of sports.

01:06:26 ◼   ► I think it's a very interesting,

01:06:28 ◼   ► not just user interface issue once you're into Apple TV,

01:06:35 ◼   ► or the Apple TV app that's built into your TV set,

01:06:38 ◼   ► or any of the other ways you might be able to watch these,

01:06:41 ◼   ► but it truly, the broader sense of the user experience of,

01:06:46 ◼   ► well wait, what hardware do I even need?

01:06:49 ◼   ► How do I do this?

01:06:50 ◼   ► Whereas everybody knows how landline,

01:06:54 ◼   ► traditional cable TV works, right?

01:06:56 ◼   ► You have to pay, you're going to overpay

01:07:00 ◼   ► because you've almost certainly got a local monopoly

01:07:02 ◼   ► to deal with.

01:07:03 ◼   ► It's gonna be expensive, but then once you have it,

01:07:06 ◼   ► you just punch numbers into a remote control

01:07:09 ◼   ► and the game is on channel 804.

01:07:11 ◼   ► And you type 804 and hit enter and then the game is on

01:07:15 ◼   ► and that's it.

01:07:16 ◼   ► And if you have a DVR type thing, you can hit pause and pause temporarily and whatever.

01:07:23 ◼   ► But people get that, right?

01:07:26 ◼   ► There's a number and you enter the number and now you're watching the game.

01:07:31 ◼   ► And that to me is the more interesting part as they go to higher profile stuff.

01:07:36 ◼   ► So like, okay, they had Friday Night Baseball every week last summer.

01:07:40 ◼   ► And I watched a couple.

01:07:41 ◼   ► I know you did too because I know we all wanted to watch the first game or two and just sort

01:07:45 ◼   ► to get a flavor for how they're gonna do it. I just think people are confused by it. I

01:07:51 ◼   ► really do. In terms of people, like the sort of people who have no idea who you and I are,

01:07:57 ◼   ► what upgrade is, you know.

01:07:58 ◼   ► Yeah, well, and you saw it happen, like, when Aaron Judge was on the record pace, and the

01:08:04 ◼   ► Yankees had a Friday night game that might have been the record breaker, and everybody's

01:08:07 ◼   ► like freaking out in New York. And it is New York, that happens there. Why is this not

01:08:12 ◼   ► on the Yes Network and all that.

01:08:13 ◼   ► And the problem with that Friday Night Baseball package

01:08:15 ◼   ► is it was something where, unlike the MLS thing,

01:08:20 ◼   ► where everything's gonna be on the Apple platform,

01:08:22 ◼   ► this was just like random games essentially are picked

01:08:26 ◼   ► and put only on Apple TV for this baseball deal.

01:08:31 ◼   ► And it's not great 'cause you're just used to watching it

01:08:33 ◼   ► on your local cable.

01:08:34 ◼   ► And suddenly it's like, nope, not this game.

01:08:36 ◼   ► This game is an Apple game and people got mad about it.

01:08:39 ◼   ► I do think that the ultimate strategy

01:08:41 ◼   ► is as simple as the more we make things that you gotta see,

01:08:46 ◼   ► and they're only on our platform,

01:08:50 ◼   ► the more motivated people are to get on our platform.

01:08:53 ◼   ► And once they're there, right?

01:08:55 ◼   ► Once they've got it, then we can market to them,

01:08:59 ◼   ► but we gotta get them over the hump.

01:09:01 ◼   ► How do we get people who don't know what streaming is?

01:09:03 ◼   ► Every time I visit my mom, she says, "What is streaming?"

01:09:05 ◼   ► And I explain it to her, and I put it on that piece,

01:09:07 ◼   ► the piece of paper that's got the remote codes on it

01:09:10 ◼   ► also says, "What is streaming?" at the top.

01:09:11 ◼   ► And it's like this, you can read this.

01:09:13 ◼   ► I explain to you what streaming is,

01:09:14 ◼   ► a little article just for you.

01:09:16 ◼   ► That's, you gotta get those people.

01:09:19 ◼   ► And the digital natives, the younger people,

01:09:22 ◼   ► it's not a problem, right?

01:09:22 ◼   ► But there is, especially for sports,

01:09:24 ◼   ► there is a large older audience.

01:09:26 ◼   ► And again, people listening to Upgrades,

01:09:28 ◼   ► you're not in this audience,

01:09:29 ◼   ► but maybe you know people in this audience.

01:09:31 ◼   ► And I'm not even saying retirees.

01:09:32 ◼   ► I'm saying there's a lot of people,

01:09:34 ◼   ► even in their 40s and 50s, I would say,

01:09:37 ◼   ► who just don't care enough to do streaming,

01:09:42 ◼   ► or maybe they know how to do Netflix and nothing else.

01:09:46 ◼   ► And Amazon and Apple are like,

01:09:48 ◼   ► "We gotta reach these people

01:09:50 ◼   ► and we gotta get them to know we exist."

01:09:52 ◼   ► I had an old boss who was a sales guy who used to say,

01:09:54 ◼   ► "The first key to selling a product

01:09:58 ◼   ► is you have to be considered to be bought."

01:10:00 ◼   ► You have to be considered, you have to be in the ballpark.

01:10:03 ◼   ► And they're trying to do that here, right?

01:10:04 ◼   ► which is just like, please know we exist

01:10:08 ◼   ► and then learn how to get us.

01:10:10 ◼   ► And then we can talk about you watching "Ted Lasso," right?

01:10:13 ◼   ► Or renting a movie.

01:10:14 ◼   ► But we gotta get over the hump of like,

01:10:17 ◼   ► does your TV have apps on it? (laughs)

01:10:20 ◼   ► - Well, you know, you say that, but I, you know,

01:10:23 ◼   ► whenever you and I talk,

01:10:24 ◼   ► we inevitably go back to classic Apple talk.

01:10:26 ◼   ► But that was the root of Apple's problem

01:10:30 ◼   ► at the, in the nadir,

01:10:32 ◼   ► at the low point of the max market share

01:10:35 ◼   ► was that they weren't even being considered.

01:10:38 ◼   ► We're talking like right when Steve Jobs

01:10:40 ◼   ► comes back to Apple, 1996, '97 through 2000.

01:10:44 ◼   ► And I remember there were surveys.

01:10:46 ◼   ► I remember reading about it repeatedly in MDJ,

01:10:51 ◼   ► Matt Dethridge's newsletter, great newsletter.

01:10:53 ◼   ► But it was amongst people who were polled,

01:10:59 ◼   ► regular consumers who considered buying a Mac

01:11:02 ◼   ► And we're like, did you even really think about

01:11:05 ◼   ► buying a Mac instead of a Windows PC?

01:11:07 ◼   ► Apple's market share was astonishing.

01:11:09 ◼   ► I don't know, it was like, I pulled this out of my butt,

01:11:11 ◼   ► but let's say it was 40%, I don't know, 50%,

01:11:14 ◼   ► maybe even higher.

01:11:15 ◼   ► But amongst people who didn't even consider it,

01:11:19 ◼   ► most people never even considered it.

01:11:21 ◼   ► They just, they were like, I don't know,

01:11:22 ◼   ► I've heard of Apple, I've heard of the Mac,

01:11:24 ◼   ► but I don't know, I have no idea why I would want one,

01:11:26 ◼   ► never even considered it.

01:11:27 ◼   ► All I've heard is, it's not what I'm used to,

01:11:29 ◼   ► so therefore I don't think about it.

01:11:31 ◼   ► That is absolutely key to anything.

01:11:34 ◼   ► You've gotta be considered.

01:11:35 ◼   ► I do think there's, as a user interface thing for TV,

01:11:39 ◼   ► the numbered things, numbered channels is so dumb,

01:11:43 ◼   ► and it will look antiquated.

01:11:45 ◼   ► It's already starting to look antiquated, right?

01:11:48 ◼   ► That you've gotta remember, at least for me,

01:11:50 ◼   ► that our Fox channel is 805, and our ABC is 806.

01:11:55 ◼   ► I have a couple of those memorized,

01:11:57 ◼   ► but now that I'm older, I can't memorize channels

01:12:00 ◼   ► I got used to when I was a kid and they've renumbered them so many times

01:12:03 ◼   ► it but it is

01:12:06 ◼   ► Conceptually, it's one level deep of hierarchy and anybody can understand it

01:12:11 ◼   ► everything's a channel every channel has a number and that's all you need to know and you

01:12:16 ◼   ► Probably have a guide button on your remote control where you can see what's on right now

01:12:21 ◼   ► So if you don't know you just look at the guide and look for one that says

01:12:26 ◼   ► NFL football. Oh, here it is. And just up, up, up, click it. Or World Cup soccer. Oh, down, down, down, down. There it is.

01:12:33 ◼   ► It's on Fox Sports 1. But it's one level deep of hierarchy, and it's exactly the same whether it's

01:12:39 ◼   ► Fox or ABC or NBC or ESPN or whatever it is.

01:12:44 ◼   ► Everybody's got a number and all the numbers are equal in terms of how easy it is to get to them. Whereas with streaming,

01:12:51 ◼   ► it's like,

01:12:53 ◼   ► And Apple has tried to solve this their attempt to solve it is their TV app which partners have to

01:12:59 ◼   ► Participate in and of course Netflix is the most conspicuous

01:13:03 ◼   ► non-participant in the TV app

01:13:05 ◼   ► But even there it's like still like an editorial decision on Apple's part

01:13:11 ◼   ► What gets put at the top, you know, like hey what to watch or maybe it's an algorithm

01:13:16 ◼   ► I don't know, but it's weird. I

01:13:19 ◼   ► Don't think so either but there's like if you're if you can get through to it through the TV app it is still

01:13:26 ◼   ► somewhat of a game

01:13:28 ◼   ► To play how do I how do I get to this thing?

01:13:31 ◼   ► I know that I can get to it somehow and

01:13:33 ◼   ► Even if it means that I have to download a new app from the App Store like the world

01:13:38 ◼   ► Maybe I have to download the World Cup app or do I need to download the Fox Sports app for my Apple TV?

01:13:43 ◼   ► I don't know what to do, but there's some way to get to it

01:13:45 ◼   ► but I don't know what it is.

01:13:46 ◼   ► And it's like, it's already, you've already lost

01:13:49 ◼   ► compared to just type 860 enter on your remote control.

01:13:53 ◼   ► And now you're on Fox Sports 1.

01:13:55 ◼   ► - I do wonder sometimes if they're going,

01:13:59 ◼   ► if more apps or services or pieces of hardware

01:14:02 ◼   ► are going to try and emulate linear TV on,

01:14:07 ◼   ► like if I was, okay,

01:14:09 ◼   ► if I was working on cable box software

01:14:12 ◼   ► and they're like, well, we've got our next gen cable box

01:14:14 ◼   ► and it does apps and it also shows you channels.

01:14:17 ◼   ► I would be in there saying, here's what we need to do.

01:14:20 ◼   ► We need to show the apps as channels, right?

01:14:22 ◼   ► Like we need to pull out like,

01:14:24 ◼   ► and there's an app called Channels that does this,

01:14:29 ◼   ► that you can hook up to a streaming service

01:14:32 ◼   ► or to a tuner or to a cable card using hardware.

01:14:35 ◼   ► So it runs on the Mac,

01:14:36 ◼   ► it runs on a bunch of different servers

01:14:39 ◼   ► and then you can also put it on your Apple TV.

01:14:41 ◼   ► And that's what it does is it's got like a guide view

01:14:44 ◼   ► and you can make virtual channels

01:14:45 ◼   ► that are coming from streaming.

01:14:47 ◼   ► And there are also these fast channels,

01:14:48 ◼   ► which are the like free ad supported TV

01:14:50 ◼   ► that are, they have linear streams.

01:14:53 ◼   ► And a lot of the services now have added linear streams.

01:14:55 ◼   ► So like flipping around to channels

01:14:58 ◼   ► is a thing that's sort of coming back now.

01:15:00 ◼   ► We did the, everything's on demand

01:15:02 ◼   ► and now they're like, oh, but sometimes you just want

01:15:04 ◼   ► to tune into a channel and see what's on.

01:15:06 ◼   ► And I wonder whether it's the cable boxes

01:15:08 ◼   ► or whether it's gonna be other boxes that do this.

01:15:12 ◼   ► But like, I wonder if there's a way

01:15:14 ◼   ► It's yes, I know it's a little bit like selling people

01:15:16 ◼   ► the cell phone with the big numbers on it.

01:15:19 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:15:19 ◼   ► - It's like, it's super simple,

01:15:21 ◼   ► but there is something to it that's going on.

01:15:25 ◼   ► And maybe the ultimate extension of that is that it's like,

01:15:28 ◼   ► you can always launch the Netflix app,

01:15:31 ◼   ► but we also put a channel of The Crown on,

01:15:36 ◼   ► and it just shows episodes of The Crown.

01:15:41 ◼   ► How's it doing that?

01:15:42 ◼   ► actually doing it linearly. But if you click on the Crown channel, it will play an episode of the

01:15:48 ◼   ► Crown and then just keep playing. And you're watching Netflix, but you're sort of tuned into

01:15:55 ◼   ► a channel. And for some people, maybe that's the way to do it. Now, I know that in a few decades,

01:16:03 ◼   ► that won't be relevant. But if you're Apple or Amazon or anybody else, you're like, "I can't

01:16:10 ◼   ► not crack the audience of people who are not comfortable navigating a bunch of different

01:16:14 ◼   ► apps on the streaming box. And those people exist. They're not listening to this show,

01:16:18 ◼   ► but they exist. And the other weird thing about it, and it's very interesting technology-wise,

01:16:23 ◼   ► is almost everything else streaming-wise is it's non-linear. You can watch it whenever you want.

01:16:29 ◼   ► That's the whole point and the whole appeal, right? And there are, you know, oh maybe if you

01:16:35 ◼   ► have a bunch of colleagues and everybody watches Game of Thrones on Sunday night, you kind of do

01:16:39 ◼   ► want to watch Sunday night because all of your colleagues are going to be talking about it the next morning and

01:16:44 ◼   ► But you don't have to start it exactly at nine o'clock

01:16:47 ◼   ► You you can watch it a little later. You can pause you can do whatever sports are different because people want to watch them live

01:16:54 ◼   ► For the most part, but if you but you also might want to tune in halfway

01:16:58 ◼   ► And what do you want to do? You want to jump to the live part? You want to catch up whatever?

01:17:03 ◼   ► But the other aspect and again it is a it is a serious disadvantage

01:17:07 ◼   ► For all streaming if you're watching live sports and there's two games going on on two different services. How do you

01:17:13 ◼   ► Switch between them whereas on on cable TV. It's trivial

01:17:18 ◼   ► This has been a solved problem since before it even got computerized back when it was really like an analog thing

01:17:24 ◼   ► there'd you know, you'd either have like a

01:17:26 ◼   ► Dedicated button on the remote to go back to the last channel or some sometimes it's like you hit zero zero or something

01:17:33 ◼   ► like that. But there's something you can do to just quick zip between two

01:17:37 ◼   ► different channels. And they're both live as soon as they switch

01:17:42 ◼   ► instantly. There's no wait, no startup time, no spinner like, "Oh, let me catch up

01:17:48 ◼   ► on this streaming thing." Streaming makes that impossible. Like, if there's two

01:17:53 ◼   ► football games going on on two different services at the same time, there's no way

01:17:57 ◼   ► to skip between two. So, I have been... This is gonna be a piece at some point.

01:18:01 ◼   ► I had somebody Federico Viticci pointed out on

01:18:04 ◼   ► on connected last week that,

01:18:05 ◼   ► "Oh, Jason, everything he says,

01:18:07 ◼   ► he turns into a story somewhere."

01:18:09 ◼   ► It's like, yeah, man, I gotta write 40 Mac world columns

01:18:12 ◼   ► a year, it's hard to write that.

01:18:13 ◼   ► Like you got any little glimmer of a column idea,

01:18:17 ◼   ► I write it down.

01:18:18 ◼   ► I'm like, I'm gonna do that at some point somewhere.

01:18:21 ◼   ► But I've been thinking about this in context of TVOS

01:18:26 ◼   ► and the Apple TV.

01:18:26 ◼   ► It's true on other streaming boxes,

01:18:28 ◼   ► but I use the Apple TV every day.

01:18:30 ◼   ► And that's how I watch all TV now,

01:18:32 ◼   ► 'cause I cut the cord and then I have Fubo TV,

01:18:36 ◼   ► which is like YouTube TV and all these,

01:18:37 ◼   ► it's a virtual cable bundle basically in an app.

01:18:41 ◼   ► But Fubo, which has its origins as a sports app,

01:18:45 ◼   ► does, has something called multi-view,

01:18:47 ◼   ► and you can put two, three, four channels up at once,

01:18:51 ◼   ► which is great when like college football is on,

01:18:53 ◼   ► for example, 'cause you can bring in all those

01:18:55 ◼   ► different things from all those different channels

01:18:57 ◼   ► and have two up or four up and zoom in

01:19:00 ◼   ► and then zoom back and then move over

01:19:02 ◼   ► and listen to the audio for one

01:19:03 ◼   ► and then listen to the audio for the other.

01:19:05 ◼   ► It's great, I love it.

01:19:07 ◼   ► And I was thinking about how when Apple does the MLS stuff,

01:19:10 ◼   ► they're gonna have multiple games going on at once.

01:19:12 ◼   ► And with Sunday Ticket,

01:19:15 ◼   ► it's all about multiple games at once

01:19:17 ◼   ► that Apple has to be working on this interface

01:19:20 ◼   ► at a higher level in tvOS,

01:19:22 ◼   ► something like what Fubo does with Multiview.

01:19:24 ◼   ► And I think YouTube does it now too,

01:19:26 ◼   ► but like, 'cause it's great, I love it.

01:19:28 ◼   ► I used to have picture in picture in my TV,

01:19:30 ◼   ► my tube TV back in the day.

01:19:32 ◼   ► And when I upgraded, like all those features went away

01:19:35 ◼   ► 'cause you needed multiple digital tuners

01:19:36 ◼   ► and the cable box didn't do it.

01:19:38 ◼   ► And that was the end of that story for a while.

01:19:41 ◼   ► I love it.

01:19:42 ◼   ► And I'm starting to think, okay, Apple's gotta do this

01:19:45 ◼   ► because of MLS and probably because of Sunday Ticket

01:19:47 ◼   ► if they do that deal.

01:19:49 ◼   ► And what you brought up is the other part of it,

01:19:51 ◼   ► which is you need to be able to put,

01:19:53 ◼   ► so Fubo will let you put four up in one window,

01:19:57 ◼   ► which if you've got a 4K TV is four 1080p images,

01:20:00 ◼   ► it's amazing.

01:20:01 ◼   ► But it's only in Fubo, right?

01:20:07 ◼   ► And Apple has this picture in picture feature

01:20:10 ◼   ► that just doesn't work.

01:20:11 ◼   ► It just doesn't work.

01:20:12 ◼   ► Where you can put like one app in picture in picture

01:20:14 ◼   ► and then go to another app and only some apps support it

01:20:17 ◼   ► and they don't interact very well.

01:20:19 ◼   ► And the picture in picture is rudimentary.

01:20:21 ◼   ► It's like a sad version of the iPad or the Mac feature.

01:20:25 ◼   ► And this is where they gotta up their game is,

01:20:28 ◼   ► not only do I need to be able to do 4-Up for MLS

01:20:32 ◼   ► in the TV app, but what I really ought to be able to do,

01:20:35 ◼   ► we ran into this the other day where there was a game

01:20:38 ◼   ► we were watching on Fubo and there was a game

01:20:39 ◼   ► we were watching, it was in the ESPN app.

01:20:41 ◼   ► It's like, you can't do that.

01:20:43 ◼   ► And that's bad, but what's worse is exactly

01:20:45 ◼   ► what you just said, which is you also can't easily switch

01:20:48 ◼   ► between them.

01:20:49 ◼   ► Every time you do, you've gotta like,

01:20:51 ◼   ► there's a double tap and swipe and thing,

01:20:53 ◼   ► or you have to press home and go back.

01:20:55 ◼   ► There's no like press the button

01:20:56 ◼   ► to go back to the other thing.

01:20:57 ◼   ► And I feel like this is all rolled into one feature

01:21:00 ◼   ► that they need to have,

01:21:01 ◼   ► which is you need to be able to watch multiple video streams

01:21:04 ◼   ► from different apps,

01:21:05 ◼   ► and you need to be able to switch

01:21:06 ◼   ► between different video streams

01:21:08 ◼   ► without dealing with app Chrome once you've got it set up.

01:21:11 ◼   ► And it like, and I know they can't control it

01:21:14 ◼   ► on other platforms, but on tvOS, they can control it.

01:21:17 ◼   ► And that would be a winning feature

01:21:18 ◼   ► if you could flip back and forth

01:21:20 ◼   ► between the game you're streaming on this app

01:21:22 ◼   ► and the show you're streaming on this app.

01:21:24 ◼   ► and none of that nicety that is just built

01:21:26 ◼   ► into every cable box exists on these streaming platforms.

01:21:30 ◼   ► - And it really does come back to one

01:21:33 ◼   ► of my recurring themes talking about this stuff is that

01:21:35 ◼   ► at first the computerization of TV was nothing

01:21:39 ◼   ► but for our benefit, the users, right?

01:21:42 ◼   ► The original TiVo and whatever its competitor was

01:21:45 ◼   ► whose name I always forget. - Replay TV?

01:21:47 ◼   ► - Replay TV, which had the magical 30 second button.

01:21:52 ◼   ► Yeah, it was the Betamax of DVRs, for good and bad.

01:21:55 ◼   ► - But that was all possible,

01:21:57 ◼   ► because if you wanted to be a TV channel,

01:21:59 ◼   ► if you were, let's just say ESPN,

01:22:02 ◼   ► and you want to be in a cable package,

01:22:04 ◼   ► what do you give to the cable providers?

01:22:06 ◼   ► You give them a stream of video that is analog,

01:22:11 ◼   ► and you're just sending them this stream, and that's it.

01:22:15 ◼   ► You have no more control.

01:22:16 ◼   ► That's it.

01:22:17 ◼   ► It's out of your hands.

01:22:18 ◼   ► You don't get anything back.

01:22:19 ◼   ► It was not two-way.

01:22:20 ◼   ► You just send Comcast or whoever your cable provider is a signal.

01:22:25 ◼   ► Comcast sends it to the house and once it's in your house,

01:22:30 ◼   ► we were free to do whatever we wanted to with it,

01:22:33 ◼   ► which included hook it up to a computer,

01:22:36 ◼   ► which would suck in these video signals and could record them and pause them

01:22:40 ◼   ► and do all these things and there was nothing they had to opt into.

01:22:46 ◼   ► There was nothing they could do to prevent it.

01:22:47 ◼   ► And so if you wanted to, you know, famously, record your favorite shows on commercial TV,

01:22:55 ◼   ► and then skip all the commercials when you actually watch, there was nothing they could do about it.

01:23:00 ◼   ► And now it's the complete opposite, where everybody, everything's a computer signal, everything goes two ways,

01:23:06 ◼   ► you have to be signed in for everything, they've always, you know, how many...

01:23:11 ◼   ► Did you set up a new TV 4K, the new thing?

01:23:14 ◼   ► Yeah, I rained about this, I think maybe last week or the week before where I literally I spent half an hour logging into every single item because Apple doesn't do a migration of your of your logins or how to keychain on the device or anything like

01:23:25 ◼   ► over, over and over and over again, you're going to whatever the name of the app.com slash activate and enter this code and anyway, and blah, blah, blah. And you know, and they they can make their commercials unskippable because they're digital signals. And it's it's playing in their app with their software so they can make it so you can you can

01:23:44 ◼   ► can fast forward through the regular content,

01:23:45 ◼   ► but you cannot skip the ads, et cetera, et cetera.

01:23:48 ◼   ► And they can make it so that they don't participate

01:23:51 ◼   ► in a unified central layer like the TV app

01:23:54 ◼   ► so that you could skip between a college game

01:23:57 ◼   ► on the Fox Sports app or whatever that other service

01:24:00 ◼   ► you were using and a game that's on the ESPN app

01:24:03 ◼   ► and just one button skip, flip back and forth

01:24:07 ◼   ► between the two games.

01:24:08 ◼   ► You can't do it.

01:24:09 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:24:10 ◼   ► All right, we have more to talk about,

01:24:13 ◼   ► but I wanna take a break and read an ad

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01:25:38 ◼   ► That URL one more time, ZocDoc.com/upgradefm.

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01:25:47 ◼   ► Jon, I was on MacBreak Weekly last week,

01:25:53 ◼   ► and I don't even know how it happened,

01:25:56 ◼   ► but Andy and Natko and I basically grabbed the wheel

01:25:59 ◼   ► and turned us into a ditch,

01:26:00 ◼   ► and we talked about BB Edit for a long time.

01:26:05 ◼   ► And yet I'm not done talking about it

01:26:09 ◼   ► because I wanted to talk about it with you too.

01:26:11 ◼   ► I think it was mostly in the context of having respect

01:26:14 ◼   ► for how Rich Segal and Barebones have kept

01:26:17 ◼   ► that product evolving for 30 years

01:26:19 ◼   ► and relevant for 30 years.

01:26:21 ◼   ► Like the initial version was written in what,

01:26:24 ◼   ► like Pascal and was written for, you know, System 6.

01:26:29 ◼   ► And now it is built in Xcode and uses C

01:26:33 ◼   ► and uses the latest APIs from Apple.

01:26:36 ◼   ► And it has just kind of kept evolving over 30 years.

01:26:40 ◼   ► and I know you worked there for a little while,

01:26:43 ◼   ► but I just wanted to do a little BB edit check-in.

01:26:45 ◼   ► I use it every day to write almost everything I do.

01:26:49 ◼   ► How do you use it?

01:26:50 ◼   ► - Well, let me just say this.

01:26:52 ◼   ► I worked there from 2000 to 2002.

01:26:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, a long time ago.

01:26:56 ◼   ► - Moved to Massachusetts for it,

01:26:57 ◼   ► but I got there and it was very welcomed.

01:27:01 ◼   ► It was actual office at the time,

01:27:06 ◼   ► but there was a tradition every Friday,

01:27:09 ◼   ► the whole company went out to lunch.

01:27:10 ◼   ► And the first week I was there, we went out to lunch

01:27:12 ◼   ► and Rich said something about Andy being there,

01:27:15 ◼   ► was gonna join us.

01:27:16 ◼   ► And I'm like, wait, who?

01:27:18 ◼   ► Wait, no, no.

01:27:19 ◼   ► And it was like literally my first week working there,

01:27:21 ◼   ► we had lunch and Andy and Atko was there.

01:27:23 ◼   ► And I was like, oh my God, I've always wanted to meet you.

01:27:26 ◼   ► So the first time Andy and I met in person

01:27:28 ◼   ► was like the end of my first week at the job.

01:27:31 ◼   ► And I was like, this is the most exciting place to work

01:27:33 ◼   ► I've ever been.

01:27:34 ◼   ► And here we are 30 years later.

01:27:38 ◼   ► Still talking about it.

01:27:40 ◼   ► How do I use it every day?

01:27:41 ◼   ► Boy, it's, it is,

01:27:43 ◼   ► I, it's almost, the only other app I could compare to,

01:27:49 ◼   ► it's like the Finder, where it's,

01:27:52 ◼   ► I don't even think about it, right?

01:27:53 ◼   ► It's, I have, I guess the difference is

01:27:57 ◼   ► I have more complaints about the Finder,

01:27:59 ◼   ► and I don't know, I don't know who to file them with,

01:28:02 ◼   ► but I don't really even think about it.

01:28:04 ◼   ► It's just there.

01:28:05 ◼   ► It is like the ground that I mentally walk on every day.

01:28:10 ◼   ► I don't write most of my posts during fireball in it. I use Mars edit for that.

01:28:16 ◼   ► But for all of my long articles, certainly my reviews, any,

01:28:22 ◼   ► anything that you would think, Hey, this is a PR, you know,

01:28:24 ◼   ► Gruber wrote something long, you know, today a hundred percent certainty,

01:28:29 ◼   ► went through BBM at some point. It was probably written entirely in it.

01:28:33 ◼   ► So I do long form writing in Markdown.

01:28:36 ◼   ► My programming, which I don't publish as much anymore

01:28:40 ◼   ► and I keep thinking, at some point I'll actually

01:28:43 ◼   ► get around to it, but I used to.

01:28:44 ◼   ► Everybody's, the internet's mutual friend, Dr. Drang,

01:28:50 ◼   ► often just on his excellent blog,

01:28:54 ◼   ► he'll come up with some custom solution to something

01:28:57 ◼   ► and then after he's made the custom solution,

01:28:59 ◼   ► he writes it up and makes, explains how he did it.

01:29:03 ◼   ► I have all sorts of little custom things like that.

01:29:06 ◼   ► You actually know about some of them,

01:29:07 ◼   ► which I haven't shared with the world.

01:29:11 ◼   ► I've talked about it, it's not secret,

01:29:12 ◼   ► but I have like a Markdown lint,

01:29:14 ◼   ► I call it Markdown lint,

01:29:15 ◼   ► which is just more like a pre-flight checker.

01:29:18 ◼   ► Remember pre-flight for like QuarkXPress,

01:29:20 ◼   ► where you could, before you sent a QuarkXPress file back

01:29:24 ◼   ► when I was doing print work,

01:29:25 ◼   ► there were these great tools

01:29:27 ◼   ► where you'd take your Quark document

01:29:29 ◼   ► and just drag and drop it onto a utility,

01:29:32 ◼   ► and it would go through and look at like

01:29:35 ◼   ► all the fonts you referenced

01:29:38 ◼   ► and all the images in the document

01:29:41 ◼   ► and are they all high enough resolution

01:29:42 ◼   ► and it would give you like a list of warnings

01:29:44 ◼   ► like oh this doc, you know, you've scaled this image up

01:29:47 ◼   ► if you have a higher resolu, you know, blah, blah, blah.

01:29:49 ◼   ► That's what it does for Markdown for me

01:29:51 ◼   ► is before I publish an article,

01:29:52 ◼   ► it goes through and looks for Markdown typos,

01:29:56 ◼   ► you know, where I forgot like an asterisk

01:29:58 ◼   ► or forgot a closing brace

01:30:00 ◼   ► or didn't define a link or something like that.

01:30:02 ◼   ► And has, as the creator of Markdown,

01:30:08 ◼   ► it was something that was in my mind from day one.

01:30:10 ◼   ► Like I published it, I was like, this is great.

01:30:12 ◼   ► And then I started, as soon as I started

01:30:15 ◼   ► using Markdown myself, I started making Markdown mistakes.

01:30:19 ◼   ► And I thought I should write a tool

01:30:20 ◼   ► that catches these mistakes.

01:30:22 ◼   ► And you know, something like 18 years later,

01:30:24 ◼   ► I actually broke down and wrote it.

01:30:27 ◼   ► But I made that in BB Edit, you know.

01:30:30 ◼   ► - And is it Perl?

01:30:32 ◼   ► - It's Perl.

01:30:33 ◼   ► Perl is my...

01:30:35 ◼   ► I'm not a great programmer, you know.

01:30:39 ◼   ► That's just why I've made a career out of writing.

01:30:41 ◼   ► I have a degree in computer science,

01:30:43 ◼   ► and it was like, I'm just good enough a programmer

01:30:48 ◼   ► to recognize how bad of a programmer I am

01:30:51 ◼   ► in the grand scheme of things, you know.

01:30:53 ◼   ► Which is so very, you know, before I even graduated,

01:30:55 ◼   ► I was like, I cannot be a professional computer,

01:30:59 ◼   ► or I could be, but I'm never gonna go anywhere.

01:31:04 ◼   ► But Perl is the language that fits

01:31:07 ◼   ► my idiosyncratic brain the best, and I get it.

01:31:12 ◼   ► I'm never, even in the early days,

01:31:14 ◼   ► like when Perl was on the upswing in popularity,

01:31:17 ◼   ► I latched onto it very early.

01:31:20 ◼   ► I was never one of those Perl users

01:31:22 ◼   ► who was telling other people, you should use Perl,

01:31:24 ◼   ► because I was like, oh no, this is not for most people.

01:31:27 ◼   ► If you think Perl is weird because the syntax looks weird,

01:31:31 ◼   ► you're right, it is weird.

01:31:32 ◼   ► But it has, what Perl has that no other language,

01:31:37 ◼   ► with the possible exception of Ruby,

01:31:39 ◼   ► is treating regular expressions

01:31:41 ◼   ► as a first-class citizen of the language.

01:31:44 ◼   ► And that's what most of my programming is,

01:31:46 ◼   ► is manipulating text.

01:31:49 ◼   ► And I, for whatever reason, again,

01:31:52 ◼   ► I don't tell other people.

01:31:53 ◼   ► I believe in Jamie Zawinski's famous axiom of when you're faced with a problem and you think,

01:32:00 ◼   ► "I know, I'll use regular expressions," now you have two problems. I believe that that's true.

01:32:06 ◼   ► Unless you have a weird, weird mind like mine, which regular expressions, I just, it's like,

01:32:13 ◼   ► I realize how weird the syntax is. I realize how most people obviously aren't ever really

01:32:19 ◼   ► going to take to it other than at a basic level, and I just love them and I

01:32:24 ◼   ► take to them naturally, and Perl makes that possible at a fundamental level of the language

01:32:29 ◼   ► and almost everything I want to do to make little tools for myself in my own work that

01:32:35 ◼   ► I can and do right in Perl, and I do that in bbedit.

01:32:41 ◼   ► I taught myself Python last year, and it's a more modern than Perl.

01:32:47 ◼   ► It's a great language.

01:32:48 ◼   ► - You have to compile regular expressions,

01:32:50 ◼   ► which is not as great as just throwing them out there.

01:32:53 ◼   ► You have to compile them and then run them,

01:32:54 ◼   ► which I don't love because I use that a lot.

01:32:58 ◼   ► Because I love, you and I are both

01:33:01 ◼   ► big regular expressions fans.

01:33:02 ◼   ► And I wrote a bunch of articles at Macworld,

01:33:04 ◼   ► basically trying to get people to try it out.

01:33:06 ◼   ► 'Cause although they look impenetrable,

01:33:07 ◼   ► you can figure out the syntax.

01:33:09 ◼   ► And once you do, they will save you.

01:33:11 ◼   ► What I always say about regular expressions

01:33:13 ◼   ► is they will save you more time

01:33:15 ◼   ► than it will take for you to learn them.

01:33:16 ◼   ► I guarantee it.

01:33:18 ◼   ► but you do have to take the time up front to learn them.

01:33:21 ◼   ► Did you write the regular expressions chapter

01:33:24 ◼   ► in the BB Edit manual or did you only,

01:33:26 ◼   ► I always ascribe that to you,

01:33:27 ◼   ► but did you only like work on it or edit it or something?

01:33:29 ◼   ► - I can humbly take significant credit for it.

01:33:36 ◼   ► So when I was-- - It's a good intro

01:33:37 ◼   ► to regular expressions, it's very good.

01:33:39 ◼   ► - Well, so long story short on that is

01:33:42 ◼   ► before I got to bare bones, BB Edit,

01:33:45 ◼   ► they call it grep, you know, it's just a,

01:33:47 ◼   ► the same. The grep is really just a Unix tool that uses regular expressions but

01:33:52 ◼   ► what BBEdit has called grep and what most people call regular expressions

01:33:56 ◼   ► same thing but prior to BBEdit 6 point something the BBEdit used a very

01:34:04 ◼   ► rudimentary regular expression engine with which didn't support only really

01:34:11 ◼   ► the basics but that it wasn't because BBEdit was behind the state of the art

01:34:15 ◼   ► that was the state of the art.

01:34:16 ◼   ► And again, it comes back to Perl.

01:34:20 ◼   ► Perl, the programming language, actually used,

01:34:23 ◼   ► it was a guy named Henry Spencer who wrote an open,

01:34:26 ◼   ► it was so long ago, it was before they called it open source

01:34:29 ◼   ► but like wrote a public domain.

01:34:31 ◼   ► Actually, Henry Spencer wrote, I think,

01:34:33 ◼   ► three regular expression libraries.

01:34:35 ◼   ► But they all implemented very similar basic syntax, right?

01:34:39 ◼   ► Just sort of the plus, the star, the dot, you know.

01:34:43 ◼   ► But enough, 95% of what anybody does with them today

01:34:47 ◼   ► are still in that basic syntax.

01:34:49 ◼   ► But that's all BB Edit supported,

01:34:51 ◼   ► and the manual already described that very well.

01:34:55 ◼   ► When I was there,

01:34:56 ◼   ► I think it would have happened eventually anyway,

01:34:59 ◼   ► but one of the things I really pushed for

01:35:01 ◼   ► was for BB Edit to adopt the PCRE engine,

01:35:04 ◼   ► Perl-compatible regular expressions.

01:35:06 ◼   ► It actually has nothing to do with Perl,

01:35:09 ◼   ► other than it's an open-source library

01:35:12 ◼   ► that implements the regular expression syntax

01:35:15 ◼   ► that Perl itself implements in its language.

01:35:19 ◼   ► And BBEdit switched to that in the six point something era.

01:35:24 ◼   ► And my reward for getting the feature accepted

01:35:29 ◼   ► and put into BBEdit was I got to write the chapter

01:35:33 ◼   ► to document it at all.

01:35:34 ◼   ► So it's sort of, but I, of course,

01:35:37 ◼   ► once I dug into it, I enjoyed it.

01:35:39 ◼   ► but it is sort of proto-daring fireball, right?

01:35:44 ◼   ► And people say that, I see it comes up all the time

01:35:49 ◼   ► where people say, boy, regular expressions

01:35:52 ◼   ► never made sense to me until I read the chapter

01:35:54 ◼   ► in BB Edit's user manual, and it's like,

01:35:57 ◼   ► and then somebody says, you know, Gruber wrote that.

01:36:00 ◼   ► And I didn't write the whole thing.

01:36:02 ◼   ► The basics were already there, so like the,

01:36:04 ◼   ► what does the dot do, what does the plus do?

01:36:07 ◼   ► I didn't have to rewrite that.

01:36:09 ◼   ► BBEtta has always had, to me, just a user manual

01:36:14 ◼   ► that it's hard to imagine how it could be better

01:36:18 ◼   ► because it documents everything.

01:36:20 ◼   ► Everything is documented with clarity and concision.

01:36:23 ◼   ► So it was a challenge, but yes, effectively,

01:36:28 ◼   ► I wrote the last 80% of the BBEtta

01:36:31 ◼   ► regular expression chapter.

01:36:33 ◼   ► - Right, it is, by the way, I am told in our chat room

01:36:35 ◼   ► that Python has added a direct sort of,

01:36:39 ◼   ► you match using the regular expressions,

01:36:41 ◼   ► dealy, I don't know, I don't know Python that well,

01:36:46 ◼   ► but you do an re.match

01:36:47 ◼   ► and you can actually get it in a pattern,

01:36:49 ◼   ► you don't have to compile them.

01:36:50 ◼   ► And that's not how I learned,

01:36:51 ◼   ► but I learned by googling things

01:36:53 ◼   ► and probably was doing it wrong, but that's good.

01:36:55 ◼   ► So it's a little easier.

01:36:56 ◼   ► I'll keep that in mind the next time I write a Python script.

01:36:59 ◼   ► But I'll say the thing about regular expressions

01:37:02 ◼   ► is that they struggle to be explained to people.

01:37:04 ◼   ► And that's why I wrote so many articles about it

01:37:06 ◼   ► at Macworld back in the day.

01:37:08 ◼   ► And a lot of them related to BB Edit

01:37:10 ◼   ► because that was a really easy way in Text Wrangler

01:37:12 ◼   ► to get access to those regular expressions.

01:37:15 ◼   ► The definitive book on this is Mastering Regular Expressions

01:37:18 ◼   ► by Jeffrey E.F. Friedel.

01:37:21 ◼   ► It is a great book, but is so dense and intense.

01:37:26 ◼   ► And in a context of using a command line

01:37:31 ◼   ► that especially for Mac users, I would say,

01:37:34 ◼   ► Like I can't, I mean, I do recommend it.

01:37:37 ◼   ► It's a great book, but it is so, there's so much.

01:37:41 ◼   ► And the nice thing about the BB Edit chapter

01:37:43 ◼   ► is it feels very much like somebody who read that book

01:37:46 ◼   ► and then was like, okay, how do I explain this

01:37:48 ◼   ► to somebody who is not the audience

01:37:50 ◼   ► for Jeffrey Friedl's book?

01:37:52 ◼   ► So it's a good place to start.

01:37:54 ◼   ► - I would have to look at copyright dates.

01:37:55 ◼   ► I forget, I'm a huge fan of Friedl's book

01:37:57 ◼   ► and I've read both editions cover to cover

01:38:00 ◼   ► just to refresh my memory of it.

01:38:02 ◼   ► I don't remember if his first edition was already out.

01:38:05 ◼   ► It might have been, and if so,

01:38:06 ◼   ► I definitely owe him significant thanks.

01:38:09 ◼   ► And even if it was after, I still owe him thanks

01:38:11 ◼   ► because it's a wonderful resource.

01:38:12 ◼   ► I would say it's sort of like the BB Edit chapter

01:38:15 ◼   ► is like strunk and white.

01:38:16 ◼   ► It is like a pamphlet,

01:38:18 ◼   ► and Jeffrey Friedl's book is like the dictionary.

01:38:21 ◼   ► It is like, it's the OED, and it's everything,

01:38:26 ◼   ► and therefore it is a 400-page book

01:38:30 ◼   ► as opposed to H, literally just a chapter.

01:38:33 ◼   ► But yeah, I don't know what I would do without BB.

01:38:38 ◼   ► I don't know what I would do without it

01:38:40 ◼   ► because I don't have to think when I'm doing it

01:38:42 ◼   ► and I know how to customize it and add a little,

01:38:46 ◼   ► oh, here's my BB edit, John Gruber's copy of BB edit

01:38:50 ◼   ► has all these functions in the script menu

01:38:53 ◼   ► and the text filters menu that your copy of BB edit

01:38:57 ◼   ► doesn't have and probably shouldn't have.

01:39:00 ◼   ► but that I can, you know,

01:39:03 ◼   ► hey, I've been doing this same thing over and over again,

01:39:05 ◼   ► I should automate it.

01:39:06 ◼   ► I know how to automate it in BB Edit,

01:39:08 ◼   ► like the back of my hand, and it's so easy.

01:39:11 ◼   ► Honestly, I've been using it for 30 years,

01:39:18 ◼   ► 'cause I started using BB Edit

01:39:20 ◼   ► before it was even a commercial app.

01:39:22 ◼   ► It was version 2.something where I saw it

01:39:25 ◼   ► in the Drexel dorms when it was still,

01:39:29 ◼   ► just like a, there only was the free version.

01:39:32 ◼   ► I've been using, as soon as I saw it,

01:39:35 ◼   ► I was like, I've gotta get that,

01:39:36 ◼   ► got it from my local BBS or probably Usenet or something,

01:39:40 ◼   ► have been using it nonstop ever since.

01:39:42 ◼   ► I don't think I've ever lost anything in BBS ever,

01:39:45 ◼   ► even back when crashes,

01:39:48 ◼   ► because it had like automated backup features where you'd,

01:39:51 ◼   ► I honestly, maybe at the most,

01:39:54 ◼   ► I've lost like a sentence or a line or two of text.

01:39:59 ◼   ► But this, going back to the era

01:40:02 ◼   ► when your Mac might just seize up

01:40:05 ◼   ► because you browsed a webpage that made Internet Explorer

01:40:08 ◼   ► freeze up the whole system.

01:40:09 ◼   ► And it's not that the app crashed,

01:40:12 ◼   ► it's not that something crashed.

01:40:14 ◼   ► The whole thing would just lock up

01:40:16 ◼   ► and there's literally nothing you do but restart the Mac.

01:40:19 ◼   ► And when was the last time I saved my document?

01:40:21 ◼   ► Oh God, it was, it's terrifying

01:40:23 ◼   ► how much data collectively we all lost back in that era.

01:40:28 ◼   ► I never lost anything in BBEdit because BBEdit had like,

01:40:31 ◼   ► when it needed it, automated backups and it, quite frankly,

01:40:36 ◼   ► and I'm almost always running a beta version for 30 years

01:40:40 ◼   ► 'cause I got to know Rich.

01:40:41 ◼   ► I've been running beta versions or pre-beta

01:40:44 ◼   ► most of the time and it still doesn't crash.

01:40:48 ◼   ► It is a more reliable, less crashy program in beta

01:40:52 ◼   ► than most apps are in release.

01:40:55 ◼   ► But even if it's something terrible happens in BBE

01:40:58 ◼   ► and it does crash or something like that,

01:41:00 ◼   ► you start it back up and everything you had open

01:41:02 ◼   ► is open again, including your unsaved changes.

01:41:05 ◼   ► And it's like, you know, the peace of mind

01:41:09 ◼   ► that that gives me, it's the same peace of mind.

01:41:12 ◼   ► Like I feel like something I type into a BBE window

01:41:15 ◼   ► is as stable as ink on paper.

01:41:18 ◼   ► - I also have it doing all of those autosaves

01:41:20 ◼   ► in the background.

01:41:22 ◼   ► So I also know it's like Time Machine,

01:41:24 ◼   ► but not Time Machine.

01:41:25 ◼   ► If I delete something or have a version

01:41:28 ◼   ► that I wanna go back to, and that rarely happens,