Upgrade

00:00:00 ◼   ► [Music]

00:00:10 ◼   ► From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode 253. Today's show is brought to you by Squarespace,

00:00:16 ◼   ► Pingdom, and Dubai Friday. My name is Myke Hurley and I am joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Snell.

00:00:21 ◼   ► Wait a second, isn't Dubai Friday a podcast? Hi, Myke.

00:00:23 ◼   ► Yes, it is. We'll talk about that later on. It is the summer of fun and I am having my own summer right here with Mark Olamant.

00:00:29 ◼   ► Hi, Mark Olamant. Summer of fun! Oh, hi. Hi. So, Mark is our special guest today because I'm at Mark's beach house.

00:00:37 ◼   ► This is my summer of fun. Jason just got back from his own summer of fun in Hawaii, but nobody cares about any of that because we have some #SnellTalk today.

00:00:45 ◼   ► And our question is also a little bit of follow-up. It comes from Steve. Steve says, "Currently, Overcast's Smart Speed has saved me an extra 1794 hours.

00:00:55 ◼   ► Do I listen to too many podcasts?" So, a couple of weeks ago, we spoke about Smart Speed in Ask Upgrade.

00:01:01 ◼   ► And as is usual, whenever we mention Smart Speed on a show, people send in their screenshots of the amount of time that they saved.

00:01:08 ◼   ► I think Steve's is probably the highest that I saw at 1794. So, considering we have Mark Olamant with us today, I want to talk about that a little bit.

00:01:19 ◼   ► But Jason, I will ask you the question that Steve asked. Does Steve listen to too many podcasts?

00:01:22 ◼   ► You can never listen to too many podcasts. Is that the right answer, Myke? That's what I'm supposed to say, right?

00:01:27 ◼   ► That is the exact answer that I was looking for. Thank you very much. Especially if you find them at relay.fm/shows.

00:01:33 ◼   ► So, Marco, you tweeted, because I assume you saw people tagging you again after we spoke about it a couple of weeks.

00:01:41 ◼   ► Yeah, that was us. Sorry about that. We did that.

00:01:44 ◼   ► You tweeted from the Overcast account that over 1,898 years have been saved in total people hours with Smart Speed.

00:01:52 ◼   ► That's right. And that's about the same. I haven't refreshed that number today, but it's about the same.

00:01:57 ◼   ► But I can tell you my number is 367 hours, which pales in comparison to 1700 years.

00:02:06 ◼   ► But I can also tell you the highest number that Overcast knows about among active users is 6,008 hours.

00:02:14 ◼   ► That being said, the second highest is 3,970, so it's a pretty big drop off.

00:02:20 ◼   ► I will say that this listener is ranked, assuming that they have about one more hour since then,

00:02:26 ◼   ► they'll be ranked at approximately the 44th highest number among all Overcast active users.

00:02:32 ◼   ► I think that you are-- You did it, Steve. Good job. Good job.

00:02:35 ◼   ► I'm not concerned about your mentions now to the people that now want to know their rank.

00:02:40 ◼   ► I didn't ask-- We didn't ask Marco to provide this data. He did it on his own accord.

00:02:44 ◼   ► So Marco, game center integration happening with Overcast now, right?

00:02:48 ◼   ► Yeah, right. You need to let him know.

00:02:50 ◼   ► Good idea.

00:02:51 ◼   ► No million dollar idea.

00:02:53 ◼   ► I love building on reliable, well-used Apple frameworks.

00:02:56 ◼   ► What is better than that?

00:02:58 ◼   ► Actually, did you notice in iOS 13, because they added that whole ability in messages to create your basically Apple avatar,

00:03:08 ◼   ► that game center-- It's like the first change I've seen in game center in years. Game center now picks that up.

00:03:15 ◼   ► And it's like part of your game center identity. I don't know how you do things in game center,

00:03:19 ◼   ► because they removed all those features like five years ago, but it's still going.

00:03:22 ◼   ► Well, they also just got rid of the app, right?

00:03:24 ◼   ► Yeah, it used to be a game center app, which was the felt, which became the big color bubbles, and then went away.

00:03:30 ◼   ► So that was our #SnowTalk question.

00:03:32 ◼   ► If you would like to submit a question for us to open a future episode of the show, just send in a tweet with the #SnowTalk.

00:03:37 ◼   ► And just to be clear, the answer to Steve's question now is very obviously he does not listen to too many podcasts,

00:03:42 ◼   ► because he's only in like 40th place. Come on, Steve. Come on.

00:03:46 ◼   ► I mean, if you were in the top 10, maybe, but at number 44, I think you're all right.

00:03:50 ◼   ► We have some follow-up about the iPad OS beta. Beta 3 was out last week, and there were a couple of changes.

00:03:57 ◼   ► One is one we've spoken about on this show before, the mouse cursor, which is for the accessibility settings.

00:04:03 ◼   ► You can now make it nice and small, Jason. So I'm sure you're very happy about that.

00:04:07 ◼   ► Yeah, it's one of those things where that's a good accommodation for people who want the smaller cursor

00:04:14 ◼   ► that also doesn't wreck it as an accessibility feature, right?

00:04:18 ◼   ► Like, you can keep the cursor any size you want. I think giving people more options about how big they want that cursor to be is good, right?

00:04:25 ◼   ► Because people can then choose. Do you want a little one? Do you want a big one?

00:04:28 ◼   ► Sort of depends on your vision, depends on how you move the cursor around on the screen.

00:04:34 ◼   ► I'm really happy that that happened, and so quickly, too. That's awesome.

00:04:38 ◼   ► Yeah, me too. Because again, it's like we've spoken about this before, but understanding what accessibility options that that is actually solving,

00:04:47 ◼   ► and for some people, like myself, who require a better ergonomic setup, I don't require a very large mouse cursor

00:04:54 ◼   ► because it's not a visibility thing that I have. It is just a physical thing. So I'm happy to see that that change came about.

00:05:01 ◼   ► And there's also something which is interesting. Sometimes it can be difficult when using iPad applications in SplitView

00:05:06 ◼   ► to know which window is active for the keyboard, and they've now added a very subtle indicator of the active windows in SplitView,

00:05:14 ◼   ► which is that little pill that sits at the very top, like the little grabby pill that sits at the top of the SplitView window,

00:05:21 ◼   ► which allows you to kind of move them around and resize them, now flashes with the active window and also the non-active window.

00:05:29 ◼   ► The little pill is a bit more dimmer.

00:05:31 ◼   ► Yeah, this would have never happened if Johnny Ive was still at Apple. Can I be the first person to have ever said that?

00:05:36 ◼   ► Yes. You know what, Jason? I actually think that you may be, at least on the podcast, the first person to utter that phrase.

00:05:43 ◼   ► That's why I did it. No, this is good, but it's super subtle, which is not the best,

00:05:48 ◼   ► although if you compare it to the other visible pill, you can always sort of see which one is darker.

00:05:52 ◼   ► So it's better than nothing, although it does bring up a lot of other questions for me,

00:05:56 ◼   ► because now that I know for certain which app has focus, I start to ask myself,

00:06:02 ◼   ► "What's the logic of how you gain focus in one versus the other?"

00:06:06 ◼   ► And the answer seems to be you have to initiate a text editing cursor, and then it moves.

00:06:12 ◼   ► And the reason I bring this up is I saw somebody commenting about this who said,

00:06:16 ◼   ► "Well, isn't it already obvious because it's wherever the text editing cursor is?"

00:06:20 ◼   ► And that's not entirely true because one of them can be in the foreground,

00:06:25 ◼   ► and you're not editing text in either of them, and it's important for keyboard shortcuts.

00:06:30 ◼   ► That's the big one, is that I don't know whether I'm in Safari or in my text editor when I hit a keyboard shortcut on my iPad,

00:06:38 ◼   ► and I'd like to know because hitting Command-L in Safari does things I want,

00:06:43 ◼   ► and in my text editor does things I don't want, right? So it's that simple.

00:06:47 ◼   ► But what I found when I was tapping around is I really--

00:06:52 ◼   ► the only way to get Safari to listen to those keyboard shortcuts and to get that little pill to be darker

00:06:57 ◼   ► is to basically tap in the URL field and then tap out of it,

00:07:01 ◼   ► which brings us back to a classic, I think, gray-and-mike feature request, which is,

00:07:06 ◼   ► "Wouldn't it be great if there was a keyboard shortcut to change the focus?"

00:07:11 ◼   ► That would be nice. That would be a nice little feature.

00:07:14 ◼   ► The Summer of Fun was created in part because there's typically not a lot of news in the summer,

00:07:20 ◼   ► so Jason was going away, I was going away, we pre-recorded our last episode,

00:07:24 ◼   ► which came out really well with Andy and Shelley.

00:07:27 ◼   ► Then Johnny Ive quit.

00:07:31 ◼   ► I was listening to ATP last week, and there was one of those things that was,

00:07:35 ◼   ► "Hey, when did Johnny Ive quit last week? Was that a Thursday or a Friday?

00:07:39 ◼   ► When was that exactly?" And I'm sitting there thinking, "Well, I can tell you it was Thursday,

00:07:43 ◼   ► because I flew to Hawaii on Thursday."

00:07:45 ◼   ► And when I landed on Maui and turned my phone on out of airplane mode,

00:07:51 ◼   ► then I got pummeled with Johnny Ive mentions, and I thought,

00:07:55 ◼   ► "Well, I'm on vacation now." And that was it. So it was Thursday.

00:07:58 ◼   ► Literally, it happened while I was in the air over the Pacific Ocean.

00:08:03 ◼   ► So a couple of pieces of follow-up. If you're interested in some quick takes,

00:08:07 ◼   ► I was on Presentable with Jeff Veen, and we spoke about it.

00:08:10 ◼   ► Jeff was actually really interesting to talk to as somebody who is from a design background

00:08:14 ◼   ► who has managed people. It was very interesting to get Jeff's opinions on

00:08:19 ◼   ► Apple's kind of not just losing Johnny, but what seems like a kind of a change in their structure.

00:08:23 ◼   ► And then, of course, ATP this past week was also really good about it.

00:08:27 ◼   ► You guys spoke about it basically for the entire episode.

00:08:30 ◼   ► Thank you.

00:08:31 ◼   ► There are a couple of places. But Jason, I have not heard nor read any opinion from you about this.

00:08:37 ◼   ► I'm so relieved that this happened while I was on vacation, actually,

00:08:40 ◼   ► because I'm one of those people who would have a mild opinion about it,

00:08:44 ◼   ► and that's like everybody wants to hear the hot take.

00:08:47 ◼   ► My opinion, my feeling on it is mostly a feeling of like, it's like nostalgia-led.

00:08:54 ◼   ► Do you have anything like that?

00:08:56 ◼   ► I feel more emotional about it than I do concerned about it in any real way.

00:09:01 ◼   ► It's just kind of like, oh, it's a shame. That era is over now.

00:09:05 ◼   ► Johnny, I think I mentioned this on the Six Colors podcast last week,

00:09:09 ◼   ► the Members Only podcast. That's a promotion right there.

00:09:12 ◼   ► You can listen to me talk to Dan Morin every week.

00:09:14 ◼   ► The thing that really gets me about this is Johnny Ive was working at Apple.

00:09:18 ◼   ► He started working at Apple about the same time I graduated from college.

00:09:22 ◼   ► Wow.

00:09:23 ◼   ► So before I even started working at Apple-themed magazines and such, right?

00:09:29 ◼   ► Like a long time ago.

00:09:31 ◼   ► And that was in the deep, darkest, like before the Newton was announced.

00:09:37 ◼   ► Like, old Apple.

00:09:39 ◼   ► Old Apple.

00:09:41 ◼   ► He's been there a long time. I mean, that's a long time to work at any job,

00:09:44 ◼   ► and I realize that his role has changed dramatically,

00:09:46 ◼   ► and obviously after he was there for five years, Steve Jobs came back,

00:09:50 ◼   ► and they made a connection, and they went on to do some amazing things.

00:09:53 ◼   ► But that was my first thought was, he's been there forever.

00:09:57 ◼   ► I'm amazed, I mean, probably too long. Let's just say that.

00:10:01 ◼   ► In fact, I wonder, again, because it's all speculation,

00:10:04 ◼   ► because no one really knows how Apple works,

00:10:07 ◼   ► who is among the people who are pontificating about this.

00:10:10 ◼   ► It's very rare that you hear from someone who actually gets it

00:10:13 ◼   ► based on their actual real-world inside knowledge.

00:10:17 ◼   ► It's a lot of speculation, but I wonder if Steve Jobs' illness and death

00:10:24 ◼   ► actually changed Johnny's trajectory,

00:10:28 ◼   ► not only that he felt that he needed to uphold the legacy

00:10:31 ◼   ► and build Apple Park, work with the architects on that,

00:10:35 ◼   ► but also, like, not let Tim Cook down, and from a Tim Cook perspective,

00:10:40 ◼   ► also the idea that we can't lose Steve and Johnny simultaneously.

00:10:45 ◼   ► There was a good bit on ATP this week about distorting your org chart

00:10:49 ◼   ► and distorting your organization,

00:10:51 ◼   ► because there's somebody that you feel you can't lose.

00:10:54 ◼   ► And I thought that that was, as somebody who at one point managed

00:10:57 ◼   ► a group of whatever, 50 or 60 people, that's totally true.

00:11:01 ◼   ► Sometimes you get somebody who's such a key player

00:11:03 ◼   ► that you do anything to keep them,

00:11:05 ◼   ► and what you end up doing is messing up your organization,

00:11:08 ◼   ► because you're desperate to keep that person.

00:11:10 ◼   ► And then you look at the org chart, and you're like,

00:11:13 ◼   ► "This makes no sense, but we wanted to keep this person."

00:11:17 ◼   ► - It made sense at the time. - Yeah, well, and this is a good example,

00:11:21 ◼   ► where it's like, imagine the double whammy if Steve Jobs dies and Johnny Ive quits.

00:11:25 ◼   ► Like, that for Apple. Like, just even perception of Apple.

00:11:28 ◼   ► So, and the other thing that struck me, and again, ATP covered this a little bit too,

00:11:33 ◼   ► is the time delay, because I feel like when they describe what's happening now,

00:11:37 ◼   ► they're actually describing what happened a couple of years ago.

00:11:40 ◼   ► So when there was that story about Johnny's kind of a higher level presence,

00:11:44 ◼   ► where he's the chief design officer, and he's not involved day to day,

00:11:46 ◼   ► I figure he was probably not involved day to day for a year or two before that,

00:11:50 ◼   ► and they're just codifying that now and saying it publicly.

00:11:52 ◼   ► And this whole, like, "Johnny will occasionally consult on an Apple project,

00:11:57 ◼   ► but he's really not involved at all otherwise,"

00:12:00 ◼   ► that they're talking about with this new company of his,

00:12:03 ◼   ► I bet you that's basically how it's been the last two years, right?

00:12:06 ◼   ► - I feel like this is all just... - Oh, interesting.

00:12:09 ◼   ► - ...and he has been moving away. It's fine.

00:12:13 ◼   ► And the other thing that strikes me is very much like when Steve Jobs died,

00:12:17 ◼   ► which is, Apple is simultaneously this company where there are some incredibly talented people

00:12:22 ◼   ► you get to know and you're like, "Wow, that person's really incredible."

00:12:25 ◼   ► At the same time, our necessity maybe as human beings to focus on a single person,

00:12:30 ◼   ► it makes us lose track of the fact that a single person is still literally is a single person.

00:12:37 ◼   ► They only have 24 hours in the day, they've got to sleep, they've got to eat,

00:12:42 ◼   ► in Johnny's case, they've got to be taken up and down the freeway to get to Cupertino.

00:12:46 ◼   ► Like, key players matter, but other people matter too.

00:12:50 ◼   ► And I think that's the great contrast between when we think about Steve Jobs

00:12:54 ◼   ► and we think about Johnny Ive is that they are incredibly talented people who matter,

00:13:02 ◼   ► and yet they have to be surrounded by a huge number of other talented people.

00:13:07 ◼   ► And I think the mistake is when you focus entirely on the one and not on the many.

00:13:13 ◼   ► And we learned that lesson with... And Apple has changed its messaging completely

00:13:16 ◼   ► in the last six, seven, eight years where now we know you could now name 20 important people at Apple

00:13:23 ◼   ► when before you could have named four.

00:13:25 ◼   ► - And if anything too, and I went over this a little bit on ATP,

00:13:28 ◼   ► like if anything, it's actually a pretty harmful effect, I think, to have somebody above you

00:13:34 ◼   ► in the decision-making chain or the org chart who is too busy to deal with you

00:13:39 ◼   ► or too busy to address your needs or too busy to filter through your work and make calls on it.

00:13:45 ◼   ► And so like, if Johnny was indeed so busy and so remote a lot of the time,

00:13:50 ◼   ► then that holds back design because the people under him can't necessarily keep going

00:13:57 ◼   ► after certain points until they get his approval on things or until he weighs in on something.

00:14:01 ◼   ► And like, any time you have something like that where you have to wait for a manager above you

00:14:05 ◼   ► to make decisions or you have to be afraid of what decisions they might override

00:14:08 ◼   ► when they do finally come look at your stuff, it inherently impedes the work.

00:14:13 ◼   ► So I'm really happy to see that this impediment that has been there for a while

00:14:18 ◼   ► in Johnny Ive being probably a pretty severe bottleneck is now officially removed,

00:14:25 ◼   ► however it's been the last few years. He's now officially gone from the chain of command.

00:14:30 ◼   ► And the people who were formerly under him can now probably work a lot better.

00:14:35 ◼   ► It has got to be very difficult to present your work and then argue with somebody like Johnny Ive.

00:14:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:41 ◼   ► Right? Like, if you're working at Apple and he says, "No, I don't think that's a good..."

00:14:45 ◼   ► How do you argue with him? What level do you feel like, "Oh, I can tell Johnny Ive he's wrong about this"?

00:14:52 ◼   ► And that is a difficult thing in any organisation to be able to tell a superior,

00:14:58 ◼   ► like to be able to debate with him on a point. But somebody who is literally legendary, right?

00:15:03 ◼   ► Like what John was saying. John was beautiful in the things he was saying.

00:15:07 ◼   ► People typically get maybe a shot at doing one thing in their lives that they could be considered like legacy making.

00:15:15 ◼   ► Johnny's done like four of them, right? Like the things that he has designed or has had a very heavy hand in designing.

00:15:21 ◼   ► There's been so many huge things. Like he is a design legend and having to be like,

00:15:27 ◼   ► "No, I don't think we should put this button there."

00:15:29 ◼   ► It's got to be a really difficult thing to say to him sometimes. So who knows, maybe it will change stuff.

00:15:34 ◼   ► Remove one button from this and then we'll talk.

00:15:37 ◼   ► I also think I talked about distorting org charts. I wonder a little bit about distorting actual product planning as well with him.

00:15:44 ◼   ► I mean, again, I don't have any knowledge of this, but I look at something like that car project which started out as being like,

00:15:52 ◼   ► "We're going to build a car." And then they laid off a bunch of people and they apparently folded it way back to,

00:15:56 ◼   ► "Let's start with autonomous systems and go from there."

00:15:59 ◼   ► I look at that first misstep with the car and think, "Is that because Johnny wanted to design a car?"

00:16:05 ◼   ► And on one level that seems ridiculous and yet I can totally see that happening.

00:16:09 ◼   ► Where he's been involved in so many of these big projects and as you said, Myke, you get a chance to do this one time and he's had a bunch.

00:16:18 ◼   ► But hard not to think that maybe the reason you keep him, the way you keep him is to find some other thing that he can really get his hands on and get enthusiastic about.

00:16:27 ◼   ► And if you're talking about cars and Johnny's really engaged, maybe if you're Tim Cook you're like, "Let's let him..."

00:16:34 ◼   ► What if he ends up designing the car that changes the world? Because he's done it with other stuff.

00:16:38 ◼   ► Let's let him play. We've got money. We want to keep him happy. Let's let him do it.

00:16:42 ◼   ► And that ends up depending, I think what you then look at is the fact that they did kind of kill that as being the discipline part of this, which is now actually that was a bad idea.

00:16:52 ◼   ► We need to stop. And that's, to me, and this is, I know contrary to a lot of pundits, but it's like I look at Apple saying,

00:17:00 ◼   ► "Whoa, this car thing is out of hand. We're going to pair it way back and we're going to just kind of take a loss on it."

00:17:05 ◼   ► I view that as a good sign because that's Apple looking, analyzing what it's doing and saying, "No."

00:17:13 ◼   ► And that's like, I think that's discipline. I think that's a good indicator for Apple that it's still critical of its work in progress and is willing to throw something out if it's not working.

00:17:23 ◼   ► Agreed. Upstream, let's do a piece of upstream news. This is one that we knew that was going to be coming, but I think it's important.

00:17:29 ◼   ► The office is going to be leaving Netflix at the end of 2020. From 2021, it will be exclusive to NBC News Service, right?

00:17:37 ◼   ► NBC Universal Service. Apparently, Netflix offered up to $90 million to keep it for five years.

00:17:43 ◼   ► But this is kind of funny to me. NBC paid $100 million. But you say to yourself, "Hold on a minute. They own it."

00:17:50 ◼   ► Well, so this is one of those hilarious things where these companies get all pushed together by the end of it.

00:17:56 ◼   ► NBC have paid NBC Universal $100 million. They effectively move money around on a balance sheet.

00:18:02 ◼   ► Yeah, I do this. When I file my expense report with my own company, I write myself a check and then I go deposit it. It feels great.

00:18:09 ◼   ► That's what they did. I kind of like that it was like, "Well, we don't want Netflix to have this, so we will just offer more than they will offer and then we just get to keep it."

00:18:18 ◼   ► Honestly, that's above board because what usually happens in these situations is that the competitor offers $90 million and then you sell it to yourself for $10 million,

00:18:27 ◼   ► which means you don't have to pay all of the people who have a profit share or a certain kick in their contract for the value of the streaming rights.

00:18:37 ◼   ► You lowball it and then Steve Carell doesn't get his residual based on $100 million, which is the actual value, or $90 million.

00:18:46 ◼   ► He gets it based on the lowball figure. So actually, the fact that they officially set the prices above Netflix is good.

00:18:53 ◼   ► It's also possible that this was an internal company competition thing where they're like, "This is how they find out whether they really want to bank on this streaming service or not."

00:19:04 ◼   ► It's, "Are they willing to write a check to the other division of NBC Universal for this?" So it may not be entirely fake.

00:19:10 ◼   ► Yeah, I expect it was happening, but I just think the whole thing is hilarious.

00:19:13 ◼   ► But yeah, it is. They're just taking it from the front pocket, put it in the back pocket.

00:19:17 ◼   ► Because it all just ladders up to the same balance sheet at the end of the day.

00:19:20 ◼   ► Yep, it's true.

00:19:21 ◼   ► Netflix, doing Netflix service, they have pretty good on social media. They tweeted that the show will still be ad-free until 2021.

00:19:27 ◼   ► And they also used this as an opportunity to promote Space Force, which is the Steve Carell, Greg Daniels, Greg Daniels who created The Office upcoming show about,

00:19:37 ◼   ► kind of like The Office in Space is what they're trying to make.

00:19:41 ◼   ► What's the ad-free? Is that like a dig? Because NBC News Service might have ads in it?

00:19:44 ◼   ► It will have ads. There will be ads tiers and free tiers.

00:19:48 ◼   ► Like Hulu.

00:19:49 ◼   ► Like Hulu. Because, and this is why, because they have a whole sales department who is geared at network TV to selling ads.

00:19:57 ◼   ► And you wouldn't want to give them nothing to do. So you create an ad tier and then a free tier or an ad-free tier above it, like Hulu.

00:20:06 ◼   ► Well, and also like if they want to have a free plan, have they announced that? Is it going to be a free plan?

00:20:11 ◼   ► Yes, it seems like it.

00:20:12 ◼   ► No, I don't know. I mean even Hulu charges. Even Hulu charges for their ad plan. And CBF charges for their ad plan. It's just less. Yeah.

00:20:19 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah. I mean if they're going to have a free plan, it makes total sense why they would want an ad division.

00:20:25 ◼   ► But if they're just going to do a Hulu thing where you pay a little bit for ads and you pay more for fewer ads and pay even more for no ads or whatever Hulu is this year, that doesn't sound great to me.

00:20:35 ◼   ► NBC is in the weaker position of the companies doing this. So I think they're trying everything as a way to try and make them a persistent player.

00:20:45 ◼   ► Talking about The Office, this feels like a nice cross-promotional point, but somehow I manage, which is a podcast from The Incomparable, which is hosted by Tiffany Almond, which is Michael's wife. So you can go listen to that if you want to.

00:20:58 ◼   ► And Michael Sargent. Michael is also there.

00:20:59 ◼   ► And Michael Sargent, yes, of course.

00:21:00 ◼   ► He's the assistant to the regional manager.

00:21:02 ◼   ► Aren't we all. But Michael, I wanted to ask you just very quickly, how do you feel about the amount of streaming services that there are in the world right now and that feel like they're coming?

00:21:14 ◼   ► I'm probably a bad example on some level because of the joke that I haven't seen anything. Because I actually don't.

00:21:22 ◼   ► Well, this is why I wanted to ask you.

00:21:23 ◼   ► Yeah, like I don't watch everything that comes out, everything that's good. Like I hear all of you guys talking about it and I make little mental notes of series I want to watch.

00:21:33 ◼   ► But I don't usually watch most of them. Because the problem I have, I don't watch that much TV. Like I'll work most of the day and then at night I'll sit down with my wife and we'll watch, you know, a couple of shows.

00:21:46 ◼   ► And when that's all you're doing, there's not that much time in the day, there isn't that much time in the year to go through a whole lot of new content.

00:21:55 ◼   ► You can go through some. And so you tend to pick the few biggest, most popular things you've heard about.

00:22:00 ◼   ► But I think now we have the additional asterisk there of the biggest, most popular things you've heard about that are on the services you already subscribe to.

00:22:09 ◼   ► So we subscribe to Netflix, HBO, whatever, Go Now, whatever it is, you don't have HBO. So Netflix, HBO, and I think that's it currently.

00:22:20 ◼   ► I guess, oh yeah, we have Amazon Prime, whatever, but we never use it.

00:22:23 ◼   ► Everyone has that.

00:22:24 ◼   ► Yeah, because it's terrible. So the reality is we just watch whatever's on Netflix most of the time.

00:22:29 ◼   ► And we don't have enough time in our day to watch everything else.

00:22:34 ◼   ► And so I think having more streaming services, like if new stuff launches not on a service that we already have, basically not on Netflix, we're probably just not going to watch it.

00:22:44 ◼   ► And I think largely the effect that it's going to have when you have all this fragmentation of all these services, the most likely effect is mostly just going to be like audience fragmentation.

00:22:54 ◼   ► That you're not really going to have easy discovery.

00:22:57 ◼   ► Back when everybody had cable, if you heard about a show from a friend, chances are you had access to the show.

00:23:04 ◼   ► So you could go then start watching it.

00:23:06 ◼   ► But now, if you hear about a show, if it's on one of these lower tier or lower popularity services, if you don't have that service, how likely are you to go sign up for an entire new streaming service just to watch one show that your friend told you you should watch?

00:23:21 ◼   ► I think it's going to actually hurt audience discovery of new shows that way.

00:23:26 ◼   ► For sure. For sure.

00:23:27 ◼   ► When I do the TV podcast with Tim Goodman from The Hollywood Reporter every week, and he is loving this show called Perpetual Grace Limited, which is from the guy who did Patriot, which is on Amazon, which is great.

00:23:43 ◼   ► Perpetual Grace Limited is on Epix, which is literally something that nobody gets.

00:23:50 ◼   ► I felt this way with Counterpart, which was on Starz, which also almost nobody gets.

00:23:57 ◼   ► It's one of these cases where they did two seasons. It was an amazing show. It was maybe my favorite show.

00:24:03 ◼   ► Nobody saw it. It's still not on any streaming service anywhere. You can buy the episodes on iTunes, but that's it. There's a Blu-ray of the first season.

00:24:12 ◼   ► It feels to me like that's where we're headed, a world where everybody's got Netflix, Amazon Prime, maybe, Hulu, maybe not, maybe Disney.

00:24:24 ◼   ► Maybe not. But everything else is going to be super niche viewing. Maybe you flip, you hear about a good show, and you turn it on for a month and watch it and then turn it back off.

00:24:36 ◼   ► Maybe people will do some of that. But it feels like there's going to be a small set of big players, and then everything else is just going to be a rumor to you, where you're going to hear about a good show and then be like, "Where is it? I don't get that."

00:24:50 ◼   ► And then you just let it pass you by. The question is, how do you build a business on being Epix or on being Starz?

00:25:00 ◼   ► How do you spend money on original programming if nobody knows that you exist? Is that a viable business at all?

00:25:10 ◼   ► That's what I really wonder. When we talk about having more than 500 scripted TV shows being made in English right now in the United States in a year, that's a huge number.

00:25:23 ◼   ► It's by far the most ever. It's kind of hard to think that they're going to be able to keep it up for more than a couple more years before this just implodes, because in the end, you can't watch all this content.

00:25:34 ◼   ► There's no way that this amount of money is being spent speculatively in the hopes that you will get a big enough audience to stay in business when all your competitors go out of business.

00:25:45 ◼   ► But it's a house of cards, which is also a streaming show.

00:25:50 ◼   ► It's the kind of plan that works when there's a small number of these things. When there's only a small number of big streaming services, or in the previous world, when there's only a small number of hit channels on TV, you can do this kind of stuff.

00:26:04 ◼   ► And chances are, you'll find an audience and you can develop hit shows. But the mechanics of that really fall apart hard once you cross a certain threshold of, "You know what? I don't need to see popular show XYZ,

00:26:18 ◼   ► because I have 50 other amazing shows that I've heard I should watch that I haven't had time for, that are on the services I already own."

00:26:25 ◼   ► Nobody's ever heard of Patriot, so how are they going to get to Perpetual Grace Limited when they've not even seen Patriot, which is on Amazon, which almost everybody has.

00:26:32 ◼   ► Which is a service that we all actually have.

00:26:34 ◼   ► Ignore the name. The name has nothing to do with the show. The show should be called Sad Spies, which is what Jason and Tim worked out together. It is a fantastic television show.

00:26:43 ◼   ► And I've even seen some of Patriot. And the problem I have is that it's an Amazon whatever video, and I never launch Amazon whatever video.

00:26:51 ◼   ► Our default app when we turn the Apple TV on is Netflix. And this is actually, when Netflix refused to join Apple's TV app initiative, I initially thought, "Oh, that's kind of crappy of them."

00:27:02 ◼   ► But now I kind of see why. Because my home on TV is the Netflix app. Any other app, not only am I not going to it, but if I do try to go to even the HBO app that I subscribe to, it's a bad app.

00:27:16 ◼   ► It feels weird. It doesn't feel right to me. And so there's actually a lot of friction for me to watch something that's not on Netflix, which leads to me watching more things on Netflix.

00:27:24 ◼   ► These companies don't want to be sucked into somebody else's branding. Especially Netflix. Netflix is so strong that it knows that if it's not in the TV app, the TV app can't be all things to all people.

00:27:36 ◼   ► And if that's true, then what app is most likely to be all things to all people? And it's their app, so why would they ever play ball with Apple?

00:27:44 ◼   ► Right, exactly. And in a world where we have lots of streaming services, I think that world can work if the TV app succeeded in its whole channels initiative where everything was just a small button that you could push in the TV app to buy that channel.

00:28:00 ◼   ► And it would work the same way as all the other channels. But I think the opportunity for that, like that ship has sailed. I don't think we're there anymore.

00:28:08 ◼   ► And I think instead, we're just going to have these little silos like Netflix and HBO, and some of them will play ball, some of them won't. But ultimately, the TV app channels thing, that's what the new Apple TV "new" should have been five, six years ago.

00:28:24 ◼   ► But instead, we have all these siloed apps, and now we have the situation we have now where now I don't want to leave the Netflix app to watch another show because it feels wrong and weird.

00:28:32 ◼   ► All right, ready for a break?

00:28:34 ◼   ► I am, but I'm afraid of what might come next.

00:28:36 ◼   ► Okay, here we go. Here we go.

00:28:38 ◼   ► Howdy, y'all.

00:28:40 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:28:43 ◼   ► This episode of Upgrade is sponsored by the Dubai Friday program, and they've asked me, Myke Hurley, to read this important message to the Upgrade listeners.

00:28:50 ◼   ► Several months ago, in our super secret channel, Dubai Friday host Max asked me to purchase and mail him a futuristic sci-fi bicycle helmet that, as it turns out, may not be technically legal in the United States.

00:29:01 ◼   ► I purchased the sci-fi helmet for 299 euros and paid shipping on top of that to send it to Max, just because I'm nice and I'm a good friend.

00:29:09 ◼   ► After I mailed the helmet to Max, I received a message from Her Majesty's Royal Carrier Service stating that my parcel had been "identified as containing items suspected of being prohibited or dangerous."

00:29:20 ◼   ► They examined the package and then "disposed of it accordingly."

00:29:23 ◼   ► For the last several weeks, Max has been attempting to reimburse me for the cost of the sci-fi helmet and shipping.

00:29:28 ◼   ► However, I have stubbornly refused to accept these payments, instead telling Max to "buy me dinner next time I'm in Chicago," even though I know full well that neither of us can eat 299 euros worth of food in one sitting.

00:29:40 ◼   ► So now, because I have left Max with no other recourse, he has purchased this advertisement on the Upgrade program for far more than the initial 299 euro financial outlay.

00:29:49 ◼   ► So anyway, thanks to Dubai Friday for supporting Real AFM and all the great shows. Now we're even.

00:29:55 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:29:57 ◼   ► I think now you probably owe Max some dinner.

00:30:01 ◼   ► No, I already have a plan for this.

00:30:03 ◼   ► Maybe two or three helmets?

00:30:05 ◼   ► My plan is to invoice Max for the amount of money minus the bicycle helmet.

00:30:09 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:30:11 ◼   ► Look out for that invoice, Mr. Tampkin. It's coming your way.

00:30:13 ◼   ► That is awesome.

00:30:14 ◼   ► We're not even. We're never going to be.

00:30:16 ◼   ► This is never going to end.

00:30:17 ◼   ► Nope. Alright, we have Mark O'Arment with us, so we should talk about keyboards!

00:30:20 ◼   ► Yay!

00:30:22 ◼   ► A friend of the show, Ming-Chi Roger-Quo, has published a report stating.

00:30:27 ◼   ► Code name Roger, not his actual name.

00:30:29 ◼   ► Code name Roger has published a report stating that Apple is revamping its keyboard design once again, going back to scissor switches from butterfly switches.

00:30:37 ◼   ► The report states that these will have better durability, more key travel, they're going to be reinforced by glass fiber, and apparently, while still being expensive to manufacture, more expensive than a typical keyboard switch, a keyboard scissor switch,

00:30:49 ◼   ► it will be still more cost effective than the current butterfly switches.

00:30:53 ◼   ► These first will show up in a 2019 MacBook Air, followed by the MacBook Pro in 2020.

00:31:00 ◼   ► So this is just a couple of things here that's interesting.

00:31:02 ◼   ► One, let's just say, great, we all wanted to go back to scissor switches.

00:31:05 ◼   ► Oh, thank God.

00:31:06 ◼   ► Let's just do that, right? Like, because we know that they were good. Let's just do that and we'll hope that Apple have gotten that process right.

00:31:13 ◼   ► I think we can all feel pretty confident they're not going to mess this one up, right?

00:31:16 ◼   ► Like, I feel like there is so much on the line to get it correctly.

00:31:19 ◼   ► Honestly, I wouldn't necessarily assume that. I'm sure they're trying really hard to not mess it up.

00:31:24 ◼   ► But, you know, the fact is we've had the butterfly keyboard debacle going on for what about four years?

00:31:29 ◼   ► God, I can't believe it's been that long.

00:31:30 ◼   ► Yeah, look at it, since the 2015 MacBook.

00:31:32 ◼   ► And the problem is, like, they keep thinking they fixed it and it turns out they haven't.

00:31:37 ◼   ► No, I don't think they think they fixed it.

00:31:39 ◼   ► I think that every single time they're just, like, putting a Band-Aid on it.

00:31:42 ◼   ► Like, they are trying, they are, like, hobbling along with this current one, hoping that they'll do something to make it a little bit better.

00:31:48 ◼   ► Like, these percentage gains on reliability.

00:31:51 ◼   ► Maybe.

00:31:52 ◼   ► Because if they thought they were fixing it, they would just keep going down this path.

00:31:54 ◼   ► They know this is not a thing, but it takes too long. Anyway, so, but here's the thing.

00:31:58 ◼   ► 2019 MacBook Air to get it first. 2020 MacBook Pro.

00:32:01 ◼   ► Does that mean we're not going to see the MacBook Pro in 2020?

00:32:04 ◼   ► Or will they bring out a MacBook Pro with the butterfly switches first?

00:32:07 ◼   ► So, yeah, so here's the question. So, you know, the rumor had been that the alleged 16-inch MacBook Pro, which would be a new physical design, incorporating this new keyboard.

00:32:20 ◼   ► That was rumored fairly recently, I think by Mark Gurman, to be released this fall.

00:32:26 ◼   ► And it would be a little bit odd, since they did just rev, just with, you know, with minor speed bumps and a minor keyboard revision with the materials.

00:32:34 ◼   ► They did just rev the existing line of MacBook Pros, like, a month and a half ago or something.

00:32:39 ◼   ► So, you know, it's pretty recent.

00:32:41 ◼   ► So, it would be kind of odd to have a speed bump rev to the existing line and then to release the 16-inch this fall.

00:32:49 ◼   ► Unless it was really, indeed, just a 16-inch that would be positioned above the other two and the other two would still be for sale for a while.

00:32:55 ◼   ► That, so, like, that's kind of what we were assuming now until this Mingshe Quo report.

00:33:00 ◼   ► And normally I would just think this report is wrong because most of the other stuff we've seen suggests that it's coming in 2019.

00:33:07 ◼   ► But Mingshe Quo has such a good track record that I'm not sure I would necessarily bet against him.

00:33:14 ◼   ► If I am in charge of laptops at Apple, I am not putting a new keyboard in the MacBook Pro for its first run. I'm not doing that.

00:33:21 ◼   ► That well…

00:33:23 ◼   ► I wouldn't do that.

00:33:24 ◼   ► But on the other hand, the MacBook Pro is the one that needs it the most.

00:33:27 ◼   ► Because it has the highest end buyers they expect the most, you know.

00:33:30 ◼   ► Because if it's still not going to work, I don't want it in that computer.

00:33:34 ◼   ► I mean, honestly, I don't think in any of known, like, computer history, I don't think any reasonable quality brand has put out a scissor switch keyboard that was unreliable.

00:33:47 ◼   ► But, okay, what is glass fiber? Is this new?

00:33:51 ◼   ► That's a good question.

00:33:52 ◼   ► This is my concern that they're like…

00:33:53 ◼   ► Is it like fiberglass?

00:33:55 ◼   ► That's what it sounds like.

00:33:56 ◼   ► Well, and there was like… somebody was tweeting… there was a part of the presentation of the original 12-inch MacBook with the original butterfly keyboard.

00:34:03 ◼   ► Phil Schiller was going over the difference between scissor switches and these new awesome butterfly switches that they had made.

00:34:08 ◼   ► And the scissor switch, it was labeled as like the little arms that scissor down.

00:34:12 ◼   ► They were labeled as plastic.

00:34:14 ◼   ► And then the butterfly switch arms that flap down, which, by the way, as far as I know, that component has been reliable.

00:34:19 ◼   ► Those were labeled as, I believe, glass-reinforced nylon.

00:34:24 ◼   ► So that's probably what this is. It's just like glass fiber.

00:34:26 ◼   ► They're using that material for the new ones.

00:34:28 ◼   ► Yeah, so it seems like they're just using… they're using that material for the scissor rocking levers, which is fine.

00:34:35 ◼   ► Like, those parts almost never have problems.

00:34:38 ◼   ► What has problems are, you know, large things that can jam under the switches, like large crumbs or debris,

00:34:43 ◼   ► or the actual, like, button pad thing that depresses and makes contact.

00:34:48 ◼   ► Like, if that wears out in some way, that can cause problems.

00:34:51 ◼   ► But the actual, like, rocking of the scissor mechanism rarely has issues.

00:34:54 ◼   ► So that, I'm not… I don't think that's anything bad. It might even be good.

00:34:59 ◼   ► And it might give Apple, like, the… some kind of bragging rights of, oh, here's a new physical design of…

00:35:06 ◼   ► why we're not just going back to what we had before. We have something brand new that's even better.

00:35:11 ◼   ► It kind of lets them save face a little bit.

00:35:12 ◼   ► Everything we learned from doing the butterfly switches, we found this incredible material, and it's going to be reinforced.

00:35:17 ◼   ► That gets, you know, it's like a whatever.

00:35:18 ◼   ► It lets them seem like they're moving forward and not just reverting back to what was there before, you know.

00:35:22 ◼   ► I bet they don't call it scissor switches.

00:35:24 ◼   ► Well, they might.

00:35:25 ◼   ► I have some special Apple name.

00:35:27 ◼   ► Yeah, right. Blade switch.

00:35:29 ◼   ► But I got to say, like, everything that we've heard from the rumors of this keyboard sounds great.

00:35:36 ◼   ► Like, I'm almost afraid to believe them because of how great it sounds.

00:35:39 ◼   ► Like, you know, among things, like, we've heard that it has a one millimeter travel, which is, I think, about double the butterfly switches.

00:35:44 ◼   ► So, you know, one millimeter travel, the scissor switch should be way more reliable and just feel better.

00:35:51 ◼   ► And I've even heard that it's going to have inverted T arrows, possibly a hardware escape key next to the touch bar.

00:35:59 ◼   ► And one of my also little pet peeves, the margins between the keys are too narrow on the butterfly keyboard.

00:36:07 ◼   ► And it makes it hard to feel the edges of the keys, and it makes it easier to hit the wrong key by accident.

00:36:11 ◼   ► I've even heard that they have shrunk the key cap size slightly.

00:36:15 ◼   ► They are big. They're very big.

00:36:16 ◼   ► Yeah, they're too big. And they apparently have also shrunk the key cap size back down to approximately the Magic Keyboard size on the desktop keyboards.

00:36:24 ◼   ► So it basically sounds a lot like the Magic Keyboard, which would be fantastic.

00:36:30 ◼   ► Because the Magic Keyboard has, you know, the two attributes the butterfly keyboard doesn't.

00:36:34 ◼   ► It is widely agreeable and it's reliable.

00:36:36 ◼   ► So this sounds awesome. And, you know, if it takes them an extra few months.

00:36:42 ◼   ► I have also heard from one source that I heard that it's supported by 10.whatever.1.

00:36:51 ◼   ► So that would place it at like late fall, you know, or like early winter, like December maybe.

00:36:56 ◼   ► Like when do they tend to release the .1 update to Mac OS? Like November, December maybe?

00:37:00 ◼   ► So it's possible. MancuCo could be right. They could start taking orders for it in like November.

00:37:05 ◼   ► And it ships in January.

00:37:07 ◼   ► Yeah, or maybe it ships in limited quantities in December and then it ships more in volume in 2020.

00:37:11 ◼   ► But it's technically a 2020 product.

00:37:13 ◼   ► I mean, if they did that they would be able to in 2019. But still, like regardless, like that's nitpicking.

00:37:17 ◼   ► Like it's going to probably be closer to the end of the year if it is, you know, if it is coming out.

00:37:21 ◼   ► And so, you know, whether the MacBook Air is announced at the same time and maybe ships earlier, who knows?

00:37:27 ◼   ► Like it could be a detail like that. But regardless, I'm really happy they're doing this.

00:37:32 ◼   ► I'm really happy to see MancuCo reporting a lot of these details as well, which makes me think they're more reliable of a rumor.

00:37:38 ◼   ► By a lot actually.

00:37:40 ◼   ► Because now it's parts. The parts are being made.

00:37:42 ◼   ► Exactly. So that's really good.

00:37:44 ◼   ► And I think one surprise is if the Air is indeed getting this as well, which I actually have heard that, that it's coming to the Air and the Escape as well.

00:37:55 ◼   ► Curiously, I have heard nothing about these…

00:37:57 ◼   ► The Escape lives? Wait a second here.

00:38:01 ◼   ► Yeah. And I've heard nothing about this keyboard coming to a 13 inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, which is odd.

00:38:07 ◼   ► And I worry about that because that's the machine I use.

00:38:10 ◼   ► But I've heard only about 16 inch Escape and Air.

00:38:14 ◼   ► It won't be the machine you use because when they bring out the all new 16 inch wonderful MacBook Pro, you'll get that one.

00:38:19 ◼   ► And if they don't even mention the 16 inch and they just bring out a new Air with this keyboard, I'll buy it. I'll get an Air.

00:38:23 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:38:24 ◼   ► I'll be very happy with that. Because honestly, my needs don't exceed what an Air can do a lot of the time.

00:38:31 ◼   ► So I got a couple questions. First off, I have sort of written off the 13 inch Touch Bar-less MacBook Pro as a goner.

00:38:40 ◼   ► Well because it seemed like Apple has.

00:38:42 ◼   ► Because I don't know where it fits. It fits weirdly. Unless I suppose there's no 13 inch Touch Bar, in which case it fits less weirdly.

00:38:49 ◼   ► But that's still a very strange thing.

00:38:51 ◼   ► So that's fascinating. Like, is that product not dead after all?

00:38:56 ◼   ► And the other thing is, I'm fascinated by the whole conversation about the MacBook Air.

00:39:00 ◼   ► Because one of the things that I wonder about is, okay, so they have this butterfly keyboard and now they've got this new keyboard.

00:39:07 ◼   ► Now we do know that the, what, 2018 and 2019 models can get the new latest generation butterfly keyboard.

00:39:15 ◼   ► But what really jumps out at me here is the idea that Apple has a new keyboard design that's coming and they're going to be able to put it in the Air.

00:39:23 ◼   ► Because they just turned over the Air. They just redesigned the Air.

00:39:26 ◼   ► Which means, did they redesign the Air knowing that they would have certain keyboard specs that they could use for a different keyboard?

00:39:35 ◼   ► Because otherwise it seems awfully wasteful. Like, we made this product but now we need to redesign it a little bit in order to fit the new keyboard in it.

00:39:42 ◼   ► Or is that the commonality that allows those 2018 and 2019 laptops to get the current, this brand new version of the butterfly?

00:39:51 ◼   ► Is that, like, actually also the drop-in size of this new keyboard? I don't know.

00:39:58 ◼   ► That part baffles me because the Air is brand new, essentially.

00:40:03 ◼   ► And if they put a new keyboard in it, what do they have to do to get a new keyboard in this design that's only a year old?

00:40:09 ◼   ► Exactly. I mean, if anything, it'll be even more incredibly frustrating if they can very easily fit this thicker keyboard into their laptop to that major design changes.

00:40:20 ◼   ► People will be yelling, like, "Why didn't you do this sooner?"

00:40:22 ◼   ► It could be that there was a stealth design change in 2018, right?

00:40:25 ◼   ► That could be the answer here is that since they're saying, "I know you've got the old generation butterfly, but if it dies, we're going to put the new generation in even though it's an older model, an '18 model anyway."

00:40:36 ◼   ► Is that a clue? I don't know. That maybe that change that allows those things to be swappable, you know, that the new keyboard can go in that older model,

00:40:46 ◼   ► is that also the change that makes it be able to accept a new keyboard, a scissor instead of butterfly keyboard? I don't know.

00:40:55 ◼   ► But that's my conspiracy theory of the day, though. Let's just make that today's conspiracy theory.

00:41:00 ◼   ► All right, so I feel like I shouldn't say this. I feel like Marco's going to maybe jump out of the window.

00:41:07 ◼   ► We're about halfway through the beta process now. There are thereabouts.

00:41:10 ◼   ► Oh, God.

00:41:12 ◼   ► Right? We're approaching middle of July.

00:41:15 ◼   ► You know, I'm sitting next to a sliding door. It's really easy to jump out of this window.

00:41:18 ◼   ► We're about halfway through. So I kind of wanted to check in with you as a developer of a very popular application, an application that many listeners will be using right now, which is Overcast.

00:41:29 ◼   ► To listen to this show. There was a lot announced at WWDC, and I kind of want to get an idea from you as to where your focus is, what the stuff is that you're most interested on, and looking at maybe what 2019 will look like for Overcast.

00:41:43 ◼   ► So iOS 13, it has new features. They're not actually the ones that most people are talking about, but there is stuff that got into iOS 13.

00:41:53 ◼   ► What is the most appealing things there for your iPhone app? What is the stuff that you want to do for Overcast, whether it be for September or later, based upon what was announced at WWDC this year?

00:42:06 ◼   ► Well, are you asking what I want to do or what I have to do?

00:42:10 ◼   ► See, this is the thing that I keep in our show document and our planning for this.

00:42:14 ◼   ► Myke had this sort of, do you use your data or do you use sort of like marketing and public opinions? And I kept inserting a third option, which is do you also just choose what you're interested in doing?

00:42:25 ◼   ► Because that's got to be part of the temptation, right? It's like, well, nobody wants this feature, but it's really cool, and I'm kind of interested in implementing it.

00:42:32 ◼   ► And so how do you balance all of those things when you're looking at iOS 13?

00:42:35 ◼   ► I mean, the answer in truth is I don't balance those things. I work on what I want to work on.

00:42:40 ◼   ► Fair.

00:42:41 ◼   ► And sometimes it overlaps with what people care about and sometimes it doesn't. But that has served me well.

00:42:47 ◼   ► That is your way, though. And it's served okay for you so far.

00:42:51 ◼   ► Yeah. And sometimes I'll get a hit like clip sharing, where that just kind of came out of nowhere.

00:42:57 ◼   ► I heard that interview Steven did, and it kind of inspired me to finally do it.

00:43:03 ◼   ► And so I just took a couple of weeks in the middle of an otherwise busy schedule and just, you know, I want to do that feature now.

00:43:10 ◼   ► So I just did it. And nobody was really asking for it, but I did it, and it succeeded.

00:43:14 ◼   ► It got a lot of press and got a lot of attention in the app, and people started using it.

00:43:18 ◼   ► And that I think, like, I always want the freedom in my mind to just like, hey, I all of a sudden want to work on something specific.

00:43:27 ◼   ► Let me go work on it. And this can get too far. I mean, right now I have a lot of like half done things that are out there.

00:43:35 ◼   ► I have like my whole voice boost 2 engine and a lot of things associated with, yeah, which is part of that, AirPlay 2.

00:43:41 ◼   ► A lot of stuff that's kind of like half done that's blocked by either other tasks that I need to finish first or like OS problems I have to work around,

00:43:49 ◼   ► like in the case of AirPlay 2, or like bugs I have to wait for Apple to fix before I can ship things, you know, stuff like that.

00:43:55 ◼   ► So there's some of that for sure. But largely I work on what I want to work on.

00:44:00 ◼   ► And that being said, this is I think one of the reasons why the beta period is so hard for me in a year like this,

00:44:06 ◼   ► because iOS 13 breaks a lot of stuff. Like I have to change some things for iOS 13 just to make the app work without like weird UI bugs.

00:44:17 ◼   ► It's stuff you had no intention of touching.

00:44:20 ◼   ► Right. And some of these things are going to be a lot of work. And they have been.

00:44:24 ◼   ► I started doing some of them and they are a lot of work. And so I'm kind of forced to adopt Apple's schedule during the summertime to some degree,

00:44:33 ◼   ► which I have mixed success with most years. Like I almost never get done everything I want to get done by the fall.

00:44:42 ◼   ► And that is certainly true this year. I am way behind this year.

00:44:46 ◼   ► There's a bunch of stuff that I want to do that I just haven't gotten to.

00:44:52 ◼   ► And a lot of this stuff. So in broad strokes, the major areas I want to tackle are like area number one,

00:45:00 ◼   ► I need to fix incompatibilities or like broken UI or glitches with iOS 13 and watchOS.

00:45:08 ◼   ► And that is surprisingly difficult. WatchOS in particular has caused me a lot of problems,

00:45:15 ◼   ► because the watchOS beta is so rough. And to give you some idea, during beta 2, watchOS and the iPhone simply wouldn't communicate with each other.

00:45:26 ◼   ► Any message you sent between the phone and the watch just wouldn't get delivered.

00:45:30 ◼   ► So I basically couldn't do almost anything on the watch. And beta 3 just came out last week.

00:45:38 ◼   ► So the watchOS is barely usable so far. iOS 13 is also pretty rough.

00:45:46 ◼   ► And so it's hard for me to do OS compatibility updates when the OSs themselves are still in a really rough early beta state.

00:45:53 ◼   ► Can you wait?

00:45:54 ◼   ► I think I will to a large degree. So here's where I'm coming from right now.

00:46:00 ◼   ► For about the last week, I started working on other things that aren't related to iOS 13.

00:46:06 ◼   ► Just making the app better in an update that I plan to ship for iOS 12 in like a week or two.

00:46:12 ◼   ► And that has made me very happy, because I'm like moving forward again.

00:46:16 ◼   ► After a month and a half of like grinding my gears against these terrible betas, I'm finally moving forward again.

00:46:22 ◼   ► And I feel better about that. I'm doing things that my users will benefit from.

00:46:26 ◼   ► Whereas updating for iOS 13 is, you know, it's mostly stuff my users aren't even going to know that I did.

00:46:31 ◼   ► Like, you know, I've got to update this API to use this new API. They're not even going to know.

00:46:35 ◼   ► You need to do them though, right? Because otherwise the app might not work.

00:46:38 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. So what I will probably do is delay or defer my iOS 13 and watch OS 6 compatibility updates until like early August.

00:46:50 ◼   ► You know, give them a chance for a few more betas to really, you know, give Apple a chance to solidify the ground that I'm building on first.

00:46:58 ◼   ► Because until then I'm just fighting my tools and that's no fun.

00:47:02 ◼   ► Now what this means, you know, there's also all these new APIs that I can use on iOS 13.

00:47:07 ◼   ► Like, you know, dark mode is going to be easy. I already have a theming engine in Overcast.

00:47:11 ◼   ► So all I have to do is like read the system value of dark mode and apply it and probably have a setting where users can say obey the system or maintain a separate setting in Overcast.

00:47:20 ◼   ► You will hook your system into that system.

00:47:22 ◼   ► Right. And give people a setting to unhook it basically. But I think I will hook it by default.

00:47:27 ◼   ► So that's easy. That will take me a day or two at most. Shortcuts is a bigger thing.

00:47:34 ◼   ► The shortcuts system, as I'm sure you're aware, is almost completely rewritten and like now it supports parameters and everything.

00:47:42 ◼   ► And so it's much more complex than before.

00:47:45 ◼   ► And last year I thought shortcuts were going to be like a three day thing and turn into like a three week thing because it was way more complicated to implement than I expected.

00:47:54 ◼   ► And there was a lot of like bad documentation or fighting the tools, things like that.

00:47:59 ◼   ► I expect a lot more of that this year too.

00:48:01 ◼   ► So the new shortcuts system I think is going to be very challenging for me to implement quickly.

00:48:06 ◼   ► And also shortcuts can now do a lot more, which in one way is good.

00:48:10 ◼   ► You know, the parameterized shortcuts are way better than they were before.

00:48:13 ◼   ► And now there's audio specific intents that I can use for like catalog searching, which is great.

00:48:17 ◼   ► This is stuff I've been wanting. But it is going to take work.

00:48:21 ◼   ► Like Siri stuff where I could basically say, oh, hi telephone, play ATP.

00:48:26 ◼   ► I think so. I honestly haven't had any chance to play with it yet.

00:48:29 ◼   ► Should be able to do it.

00:48:30 ◼   ► Yes. In theory, that kind of thing, like basically what we all wanted last year, that I think they've added now.

00:48:35 ◼   ► But that's going to take probably two, three weeks at least to get that going.

00:48:41 ◼   ► So, you know, that's, it's just, it's hard to get all that stuff going.

00:48:45 ◼   ► And in addition to that, I have these two larger projects, an independent watch app, which I have kind of, my watch app is kind of half independent now.

00:48:57 ◼   ► Like you can play podcasts separately from the phone, but it's incredibly unreliable to transfer the files to the phone from the, or to the watch from the phone.

00:49:05 ◼   ► I'm one of your tiny percentage of people who use that feature, by the way. So thank you for that.

00:49:10 ◼   ► And yeah, that's the other problem is like it's a pretty tiny percentage of people who use this feature.

00:49:14 ◼   ► But I also, I know that part of it's a chicken and egg problem. Like part of it is fewer people use it because it sucks and it's unreliable.

00:49:20 ◼   ► And part of it is that, you know, like Apple will feature me more if I have this feature.

00:49:26 ◼   ► Like it's good for editorial promotion and everything to have this feature.

00:49:30 ◼   ► So I want more independence on the watch app. I want to have a totally independent, you know, from login to sync to everything.

00:49:36 ◼   ► You know, because I have a feeling Apple is going to be pushing that heavily in the near future.

00:49:39 ◼   ► Because of how they kind of transmitted those ideas in WBC.

00:49:44 ◼   ► So the independent watch app is big, but again, like watchOS right now, it's so unreliable I can't build against it.

00:49:49 ◼   ► Like, so I don't even want to start yet. I haven't started that process yet.

00:49:53 ◼   ► - Plus that's also Swift UI.

00:49:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, Swift UI is part of that too. And like I would want to use Swift UI a lot in the watch app, but the reality of Swift UI is also really early.

00:50:03 ◼   ► You know, like it's just like when people first built with the very first version of Swift five years ago, whenever that was.

00:50:09 ◼   ► Like it was a lot of work to be an early Swift adopter just because Swift kept changing and evolving because it was so new.

00:50:15 ◼   ► Swift UI is now doing that. Like I can jump into Swift UI now, but it's going to be a lot of work to just keep up with its changes.

00:50:21 ◼   ► And it's just really, you know, the tooling is still pretty young. It's not well documented.

00:50:26 ◼   ► There's still bugs and shortcomings and everything. And it's hard to know where to turn there.

00:50:30 ◼   ► So working with Swift UI right now is going to be actually probably a pretty slow process.

00:50:35 ◼   ► It's going to be like, it's going to have a lot of friction to it.

00:50:38 ◼   ► So, but if I do a watch app rewrite, I will want to use Swift UI. So again, more friction.

00:50:44 ◼   ► And then, so the watch app is probably not going to happen until after the OS releases.

00:50:50 ◼   ► I'm guessing I'll rewrite the watch app maybe later in the fall or early winter.

00:50:54 ◼   ► And then there's the other big thing, the catalyst app for the Mac.

00:50:58 ◼   ► This is something that I've wanted to do for a while, and I'm really happy catalyst is there.

00:51:03 ◼   ► But for me to build in catalyst, first of all, I have to be using Catalina to even, you know, develop it.

00:51:08 ◼   ► Like I have to be like operating within the Catalina environment as my development environment, which I installed it on a little partition.

00:51:14 ◼   ► But I really don't like using it. It's not my main OS. It's a beta.

00:51:19 ◼   ► And, you know, my stuff isn't all there. I'm not as efficient there. I run into friction there.

00:51:24 ◼   ► And even catalyst, because it's brand new, has a lot of weird rough edges.

00:51:29 ◼   ► You know, things like in the first beta, I haven't looked at it again since then, but in the very first beta,

00:51:34 ◼   ► I couldn't even build the app at all without removing the CarPlay entitlement from it.

00:51:39 ◼   ► Because all the tools and everything would not let me, they would reject that.

00:51:44 ◼   ► But I couldn't build like a separate one. It was a whole thing.

00:51:49 ◼   ► And then iCloud was broken between Mac versions of your app and iOS versions of your app.

00:51:51 ◼   ► They couldn't share iCloud credentials at first either. So it's just, it's very rough.

00:51:56 ◼   ► All this stuff is coming in really rough and really broken.

00:52:00 ◼   ► And so while this stuff will be great to build on in the future, I assume,

00:52:03 ◼   ► today it's really hard to build on it. And it's really inefficient.

00:52:08 ◼   ► And you end up losing a lot of time and even potentially not even being able to do what you want to do,

00:52:11 ◼   ► because it's not really fully baked yet.

00:52:17 ◼   ► So my plan for all of that stuff is to take it a lot more slowly than I initially predicted.

00:52:20 ◼   ► To go, maybe I'll do the Watch app in late fall, early winter.

00:52:25 ◼   ► Maybe I'll do the Catalyst app in winter and spring.

00:52:30 ◼   ► Once I'm actually running Catalina on my Mac normally, maybe then I'll start working on it.

00:52:33 ◼   ► And I want it to be there sooner. Like in theory, a few months ago,

00:52:38 ◼   ► when we were hearing about these things happening,

00:52:42 ◼   ► but the reality is there's just too much more to do.

00:52:44 ◼   ► Even the Catalyst app, for the Catalyst app, I want to have a three-column view.

00:52:46 ◼   ► Because I built it and I did whatever hacks were needed to build it,

00:52:51 ◼   ► so I could use it and play with it and see what was broken.

00:52:55 ◼   ► And the interface is terrible on the Mac, the way it is now,

00:52:58 ◼   ► where the left column is always switching between these two levels of the navigation hierarchy.

00:53:02 ◼   ► You have your root level, your list of podcasts and playlists,

00:53:08 ◼   ► and then the contents of the podcasts or playlists.

00:53:11 ◼   ► That really should be a three-column view.

00:53:11 ◼   ► And so I had to write a three-column view, first of all,

00:53:16 ◼   ► which itself is a good amount of work.

00:53:19 ◼   ► And then as soon as I got it running, I realized,

00:53:21 ◼   ► "Oh crap, my interface sucks in three columns.

00:53:23 ◼   ► It looks really weird. It is not made for this at all."

00:53:26 ◼   ► So again, the more work I do, I keep uncovering more work I have to do

00:53:29 ◼   ► to make it shippable to at least a minimum quality level that I want.

00:53:34 ◼   ► So this stuff is all going to be awesome,

00:53:37 ◼   ► but I have a feeling it is going to be like a year to actually get through all the stuff I want to do now

00:53:42 ◼   ► with all these new releases.

00:53:46 ◼   ► Is it not nice of Apple to give you a year's worth of work at WWDC?

00:53:48 ◼   ► Just there you go. Here is your next year, Marco. Enjoy.

00:53:52 ◼   ► I mentioned when I was on the talk show with Jon Gruber

00:53:55 ◼   ► that there was a thread that Canis, who is the developer at Wuji Juice,

00:53:58 ◼   ► who does Ferrite Recording Studio, which I love,

00:54:03 ◼   ► and it was very similar to what you just said,

00:54:04 ◼   ► which was, "Okay, everybody wants Ferrite on the Mac."

00:54:09 ◼   ► That is basically what he is saying. That is very nice.

00:54:13 ◼   ► And it was very much like, "I want to do it right.

00:54:15 ◼   ► I have got a lot of iOS 13 things I need to do in my existing app so that it works right."

00:54:18 ◼   ► Including they deprecated one of the audio APIs that he uses

00:54:23 ◼   ► that he needs to change to a newer audio API, and there is all this other stuff going on.

00:54:27 ◼   ► By the way, I use that as well.

00:54:30 ◼   ► I know.

00:54:29 ◼   ► And then he said, "And when I do the Mac app, I want it to be right and I want it to be good.

00:54:34 ◼   ► And so I am not going to work on the Mac app this summer.

00:54:40 ◼   ► You are going to need to wait because I want to do it right.

00:54:44 ◼   ► I have pride in the product that I make, and I want to have it be good when I do it."

00:54:47 ◼   ► I feel like what makes me afraid is that all of those hot Catalyst apps

00:54:58 ◼   ► that are going to ship with Catalina are going to be bad because they are going to be shovelware.

00:55:03 ◼   ► And they will be condemned by people as saying, "See, Catalyst is bad

00:55:09 ◼   ► because all it does is bring lousy, poorly translated apps to the Mac."

00:55:14 ◼   ► When the truth is maybe that a lot of the better Catalyst apps you are just not going to see on day one

00:55:19 ◼   ► because those developers are going to be more conscientious about making those apps.

00:55:25 ◼   ► Oh yeah, and part of it also is the market forces here.

00:55:30 ◼   ► It is very different for Fairer.

00:55:35 ◼   ► For what is a professional content production app, it makes a lot of sense to have that appear on the Mac.

00:55:37 ◼   ► But there isn't that much demand for most iOS apps to come to the Mac, including Overcast.

00:55:43 ◼   ► There is very little demand for Overcast on the Mac.

00:55:47 ◼   ► I wouldn't even use it most of the time.

00:55:50 ◼   ► Yeah, but Casey would get off your back finally, so that will be good.

00:55:50 ◼   ► While I want to work on this just because I think it would be cool,

00:55:55 ◼   ► the reality is I probably shouldn't spend a lot of time on it this summer.

00:55:59 ◼   ► I need to focus on what my users actually would benefit from the most.

00:56:02 ◼   ► And that is number one iPhone, number two Apple Watch.

00:56:06 ◼   ► And then iPad and Mac are very distant after that.

00:56:10 ◼   ► So ultimately the best thing I can focus on is making the iPhone app better.

00:56:13 ◼   ► And so that's what I'm doing first.

00:56:15 ◼   ► And then after that I've got to tackle the watch.

00:56:20 ◼   ► And so Catalyst is, I'm really glad it's here,

00:56:22 ◼   ► but it's going to take a lot more work than I thought,

00:56:25 ◼   ► which therefore pushes it back on my priority list significantly.

00:56:28 ◼   ► We are three people who have very strong opinions about podcasting in general.

00:56:32 ◼   ► So I want to talk a little bit about podcasting today.

00:56:37 ◼   ► But before we do, let's thank our second sponsor of this episode,

00:56:40 ◼   ► and that's our wonderful friends at Pingdom.

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00:56:53 ◼   ► We've been having some outages because of our caching provider.

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00:57:50 ◼   ► So I was doing some research for this episode,

00:57:54 ◼   ► and I came across a couple of quotes from this little website called marco.org.

00:57:58 ◼   ► The first is in October 2015 in a blog post about,

00:58:03 ◼   ► I think it was about app pricing in general.

00:58:09 ◼   ► You were talking about kind of having Overcast as free

00:58:12 ◼   ► and talking about subscriptions and stuff like that.

00:58:15 ◼   ► It's called Pragmatic Pricing.

00:58:17 ◼   ► So this is a quote,

00:58:19 ◼   ► "Podcasts are hot right now. Big money is coming.

00:58:21 ◼   ► They're coming with bad apps," you didn't say bad.

00:58:24 ◼   ► "They're coming with bad apps and fantastic business deals

00:58:24 ◼   ► to dominate the market, lock down this open medium into proprietary technology,

00:58:29 ◼   ► and build empires of middlemen to control distribution and take a cut of everyone's revenue."

00:58:33 ◼   ► In 2016, you linked to this post in another article about Stitcher being bought by Scripps, the newspaper company,

00:58:38 ◼   ► saying then, "Big money is here. I'm only getting started."

00:58:48 ◼   ► So in 2015, you knew that big money was on the way.

00:58:49 ◼   ► So venture funding, large acquisitions.

00:58:54 ◼   ► In 2016, Scripps was probably the first big one.

00:58:57 ◼   ► So when Stitcher got bought, Stitcher/Midroll got bought.

00:59:00 ◼   ► And now it feels like there are acquisitions happening all over the place.

00:59:03 ◼   ► You can look at Spotify and Anchor and Gimlet.

00:59:07 ◼   ► There are new VC-backed companies popping up left and right, companies like Luminary.

00:59:10 ◼   ► And a lot of companies now are hoping to be the Netflix for podcasting,

00:59:15 ◼   ► the something for podcasting, because to a lot of these companies, podcasts need something.

00:59:20 ◼   ► Do you think it's working? Are the plans of these companies,

00:59:24 ◼   ► companies investing millions and millions of dollars,

00:59:29 ◼   ► to try and make this medium something that it isn't right now,

00:59:32 ◼   ► or to take a part of the market that they think that they can take,

00:59:37 ◼   ► do you think it's working for them or on a trajectory to work?

00:59:40 ◼   ► I think it depends on what their goal is.

00:59:45 ◼   ► So if you have somebody like Spotify,

00:59:48 ◼   ► Spotify has an interesting motivation for podcasts,

00:59:51 ◼   ► because Spotify has to pay music royalties every time people play music on their service.

00:59:54 ◼   ► So the more time that their members are playing podcasts,

01:00:00 ◼   ► instead of commercial music,

01:00:03 ◼   ► Spotify is actually saving money there, big money over time.

01:00:04 ◼   ► The music royalties are a massive cost for them.

01:00:09 ◼   ► And don't forget also that the music libraries are essentially not differentiated.

01:00:12 ◼   ► They've got essentially the same library as Apple.

01:00:16 ◼   ► The content is the same everywhere.

01:00:19 ◼   ► They can't do exclusive music.

01:00:20 ◼   ► Really? I mean, Tidal has tried it, but basically you can't.

01:00:22 ◼   ► It will eventually be everywhere.

01:00:25 ◼   ► But podcasts can be exclusive.

01:00:27 ◼   ► All these companies have like,

01:00:28 ◼   ► "Oh, this live album was recorded in our studios."

01:00:30 ◼   ► But ultimately, none of those things are moving the dial.

01:00:31 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

01:00:36 ◼   ► I mean, so exclusives are one angle of this.

01:00:37 ◼   ► And even just having podcasts in general is the other angle.

01:00:40 ◼   ► Sure.

01:00:42 ◼   ► Either way, they're not paying music royalties.

01:00:43 ◼   ► And then when they have exclusives,

01:00:45 ◼   ► they can also use that as exclusive content leveraging

01:00:46 ◼   ► to get new subscribers or whatever.

01:00:49 ◼   ► So in both of those ways,

01:00:51 ◼   ► I think it does work if the price is right.

01:00:53 ◼   ► And I don't know Spotify's business, really.

01:00:57 ◼   ► I don't know their economics.

01:00:57 ◼   ► And by the way, I should disclose

01:01:02 ◼   ► that I made money on Spotify buying Gimlet

01:01:03 ◼   ► because I was an investor in Gimlet.

01:01:05 ◼   ► So I'm maybe slightly biased here.

01:01:06 ◼   ► I think you are, though.

01:01:08 ◼   ► You don't have anything good to say.

01:01:09 ◼   ► Not good, but you don't necessarily sit there

01:01:11 ◼   ► and be like, "Oh, this is a good idea."

01:01:14 ◼   ► No, honestly, I think it was a good idea

01:01:16 ◼   ► in the sense that I made money from it,

01:01:18 ◼   ► but I don't think it was a good idea for them.

01:01:19 ◼   ► I wasn't going to tell them not to do it.

01:01:21 ◼   ► Yeah, right.

01:01:23 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know.

01:01:24 ◼   ► Honestly, the business side of that,

01:01:23 ◼   ► I didn't really pay much attention to.

01:01:28 ◼   ► I think ultimately it's up to these companies,

01:01:30 ◼   ► what these things were worth to them.

01:01:33 ◼   ► There is value in them offering podcasts.

01:01:34 ◼   ► There is value in them having exclusive content.

01:01:37 ◼   ► But I do think similar to the earlier discussion

01:01:39 ◼   ► we had about streaming services,

01:01:42 ◼   ► I don't think it's easy to build an audience

01:01:44 ◼   ► based on exclusive podcast content

01:01:47 ◼   ► you have on one service.

01:01:49 ◼   ► It's even worse for podcasting

01:01:48 ◼   ► because everything's free.

01:01:53 ◼   ► In the land of streaming services and television,

01:01:55 ◼   ► it's not free.

01:01:58 ◼   ► You get a bunch of stuff

01:01:59 ◼   ► because you pay money to somebody, right?

01:02:01 ◼   ► You might pay money to a cable provider

01:02:03 ◼   ► and you get a bunch of channels,

01:02:05 ◼   ► you get a bunch of content.

01:02:06 ◼   ► But you don't ever think of it as free content.

01:02:07 ◼   ► Podcasting is free content.

01:02:10 ◼   ► Yeah, that's true.

01:02:11 ◼   ► And that makes a massive difference

01:02:12 ◼   ► because you are not only saying,

01:02:14 ◼   ► "Subscribe to this because you will get this

01:02:14 ◼   ► exclusive stuff," you're also saying,

01:02:19 ◼   ► "Pay, pay."

01:02:22 ◼   ► Because you're not paying.

01:02:24 ◼   ► So now you have to start paying

01:02:25 ◼   ► and then you can get access to something

01:02:27 ◼   ► in the place that you're not watching it as well.

01:02:29 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

01:02:32 ◼   ► You have to change your player and also pay.

01:02:32 ◼   ► And this is why I think,

01:02:35 ◼   ► a lot of these services try to compare it to,

01:02:37 ◼   ► "Oh, we want to be the Netflix of podcasts."

01:02:40 ◼   ► I think a more useful metaphor,

01:02:40 ◼   ► instead of trying to compare it to premium TV shows

01:02:45 ◼   ► where they are almost all paid in some way,

01:02:48 ◼   ► a more useful metaphor might be to try to compare it

01:02:50 ◼   ► to YouTube and to say,

01:02:52 ◼   ► "YouTube is full of lots of free content,

01:02:54 ◼   ► much of which is very good."

01:02:57 ◼   ► So how successful have things been

01:02:59 ◼   ► to try to lure people away from YouTube

01:03:02 ◼   ► with premium paid content?

01:03:05 ◼   ► And I think the answer is--

01:03:06 ◼   ► Or free video.

01:03:08 ◼   ► Yeah, or free, right.

01:03:05 ◼   ► And yeah, the answer is not very.

01:03:10 ◼   ► That has not really worked on YouTube

01:03:12 ◼   ► because everyone who's watching YouTube

01:03:14 ◼   ► just watches the free stuff.

01:03:16 ◼   ► If there's any wall put up to something else,

01:03:17 ◼   ► they just say no,

01:03:20 ◼   ► because there's enough amazing free stuff on YouTube,

01:03:21 ◼   ► they don't need to go elsewhere.

01:03:24 ◼   ► I think that's how podcasting is.

01:03:25 ◼   ► There's so much great free podcasting out there

01:03:27 ◼   ► that it's really hard to get people

01:03:31 ◼   ► to move into some other player

01:03:32 ◼   ► and pay some other new fee

01:03:37 ◼   ► for something they don't need to.

01:03:39 ◼   ► The only way I think it works is

01:03:41 ◼   ► when you make a deal with somebody

01:03:44 ◼   ► with an existing large audience

01:03:47 ◼   ► to move their audience into your paid service

01:03:49 ◼   ► and say, "All right, now there's a paywall,

01:03:52 ◼   ► "go here," but even that, I think--

01:03:53 ◼   ► It doesn't seem like anybody,

01:03:54 ◼   ► I can't think of anybody who's done that.

01:03:55 ◼   ► There are people that are like maybe walling off old content

01:03:57 ◼   ► and putting it there,

01:03:57 ◼   ► or they're doing a new show.

01:04:02 ◼   ► But I don't think there's been any huge name

01:04:04 ◼   ► that's gone, "All right, now you've got to pay for this,"

01:04:06 ◼   ► because we are all in the advertising-based business,

01:04:08 ◼   ► and advertising revenue is still very good.

01:04:13 ◼   ► So you would be giving up good money

01:04:15 ◼   ► for the chance at some money,

01:04:18 ◼   ► and I think that's why nobody is making this jump right now.

01:04:20 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, and even beyond the ads are,

01:04:22 ◼   ► right now ads are paying better,

01:04:27 ◼   ► but even if ads weren't quite paying as well,

01:04:28 ◼   ► strategically it would be not a good move

01:04:31 ◼   ► for a successful content producer

01:04:33 ◼   ► to take their audience and try to move everybody

01:04:35 ◼   ► over to a paywall system,

01:04:37 ◼   ► because you're gonna lose a lot of people in that process.

01:04:40 ◼   ► You're gonna lose a lot of your audience in that process

01:04:42 ◼   ► that you've built up over maybe years.

01:04:45 ◼   ► So strategically, it's audience suicide, really.

01:04:47 ◼   ► So you're going into this thing,

01:04:48 ◼   ► you're losing a bunch of your audience,

01:04:53 ◼   ► and I think the opportunity for future growth

01:04:55 ◼   ► of new audience is gonna be very limited,

01:04:58 ◼   ► because if people have to sign up for some service

01:05:00 ◼   ► to hear you or to even give your show a shot,

01:05:03 ◼   ► that we know what happens.

01:05:08 ◼   ► We've seen what happens.

01:05:10 ◼   ► No one does it, basically.

01:05:12 ◼   ► So not only do you lose a lot of your audience

01:05:14 ◼   ► in the transition, but your audience growth

01:05:14 ◼   ► will rise to zero.

01:05:19 ◼   ► So I don't know any content provider,

01:05:20 ◼   ► any podcaster who would do that,

01:05:22 ◼   ► who is making good business decisions for themselves,

01:05:24 ◼   ► and ultimately then, therefore,

01:05:27 ◼   ► I don't think listeners are gonna do it.

01:05:29 ◼   ► And I think we've seen, you have platforms like Luminary

01:05:31 ◼   ► trying this at a very large scale.

01:05:35 ◼   ► I don't think Luminary is,

01:05:38 ◼   ► I don't think they're achieving what they set out to achieve.

01:05:40 ◼   ► - I feel like I haven't heard about them

01:05:39 ◼   ► since they launched, which is probably not good.

01:05:44 ◼   ► - Right, and the fact is, you don't raise

01:05:46 ◼   ► a hundred million dollars to slowly spend it

01:05:50 ◼   ► over five years.

01:05:52 ◼   ► You raise a hundred million dollars

01:05:53 ◼   ► to spend it in 18 months,

01:05:55 ◼   ► and then raise more money with all the growth

01:05:56 ◼   ► you've had in the meantime.

01:05:57 ◼   ► And I don't see a lot of evidence

01:05:59 ◼   ► of that growth happening so far.

01:06:01 ◼   ► So while it's only been a short time,

01:06:03 ◼   ► I'll call it right here,

01:06:05 ◼   ► I seriously doubt Luminary's gonna make it.

01:06:04 ◼   ► Once they have burned through their money,

01:06:09 ◼   ► which they have presumably mostly spent already

01:06:11 ◼   ► on deals for content, as well as their massive staff,

01:06:13 ◼   ► but it's probably mostly gone to content deals,

01:06:17 ◼   ► I can't see how they're gonna raise more money

01:06:19 ◼   ► because they don't have the growth to back it up

01:06:21 ◼   ► because nobody wants to pay for content like this.

01:06:22 ◼   ► - And in the end, what you end up with is,

01:06:24 ◼   ► this group of companies that I think are doing well

01:06:27 ◼   ► are the ones that are saying,

01:06:30 ◼   ► "We can embrace the existing podcast medium

01:06:31 ◼   ► and make money, mostly through ads,

01:06:36 ◼   ► sometimes through platform,

01:06:39 ◼   ► but using the existing podcast medium that's out there

01:06:41 ◼   ► rather than creating this thing."

01:06:44 ◼   ► 'Cause you're right in saying it's like YouTube.

01:06:46 ◼   ► I was gonna say it's like the old days

01:06:48 ◼   ► where everybody got broadcast TV for free

01:06:50 ◼   ► and then there was HBO, and you're like,

01:06:52 ◼   ► "Pay for shows and movies?

01:06:54 ◼   ► That seems like a bad idea."

01:06:57 ◼   ► And then they're like,

01:06:56 ◼   ► "Oh, well, maybe I should pay for HBO."

01:07:01 ◼   ► The problem is, we don't live in a three or four TV network world

01:07:04 ◼   ► when it comes to this stuff.

01:07:10 ◼   ► It's much more the equivalent of YouTube.

01:07:11 ◼   ► We have an infinite supply of the best stuff,

01:07:13 ◼   ► as well as the stuff that is most closely tailored

01:07:16 ◼   ► to what you are personally interested in.

01:07:21 ◼   ► And that's awfully hard to compete with.

01:07:24 ◼   ► There are companies, so like you mentioned Midroll,

01:07:23 ◼   ► which our friend Lex Friedman used to work for,

01:07:28 ◼   ► and they do some original stuff,

01:07:32 ◼   ► and they do have Stitcher, which is their own podcast app,

01:07:34 ◼   ► but they sell ads.

01:07:37 ◼   ► They have big clients and they sell ads.

01:07:40 ◼   ► Lex works at Art19 now.

01:07:42 ◼   ► Similarly, it's like platform, measurement, and ad sales,

01:07:44 ◼   ► and that's what they do.

01:07:49 ◼   ► And those are building big businesses

01:07:48 ◼   ► on the existing podcast structure,

01:07:53 ◼   ► as opposed to these other companies

01:07:57 ◼   ► that are trying to take the ball and go home, steal the ball,

01:07:59 ◼   ► and go make their own game somewhere else.

01:08:04 ◼   ► Steal the ball, pop the ball, melt the ball's material down,

01:08:06 ◼   ► turn it into a paperweight.

01:08:12 ◼   ► People love paperweights.

01:08:13 ◼   ► No, we don't.

01:08:18 ◼   ► They want the ball.

01:08:20 ◼   ► Give me the ball back.

01:08:21 ◼   ► So Marco, you kind of sit in an interesting position.

01:08:24 ◼   ► The three of us kind of do, and we are content producers,

01:08:28 ◼   ► but then we also run companies

01:08:31 ◼   ► that are involved in podcasting, right?

01:08:34 ◼   ► But the difference between us, me and Jason, and you

01:08:36 ◼   ► is that you actually have an application, right?

01:08:39 ◼   ► You run one of the larger applications

01:08:44 ◼   ► that people use to listen to podcasts in.

01:08:46 ◼   ► So I wonder, do you feel, either as a podcast producer

01:08:49 ◼   ► or as the creator of a podcast platform and app,

01:08:53 ◼   ► can you see any specific trends or things

01:08:57 ◼   ► that you keep seeing pop up with a good or bad

01:09:00 ◼   ► in the industry right now that you're thinking about?

01:09:03 ◼   ► That's a good question.

01:09:06 ◼   ► I mean, I'm always concerned that one of these big VC plays

01:09:06 ◼   ► is going to mess up what we have in our world over here.

01:09:11 ◼   ► But so far, there really hasn't been a lot of evidence

01:09:14 ◼   ► of that.

01:09:18 ◼   ► Yeah, I stopped worrying about this.

01:09:18 ◼   ► Me too.

01:09:20 ◼   ► And the reason why, and I did this second one on ATP,

01:09:21 ◼   ► so I'll be brief, but the main reason why is that

01:09:24 ◼   ► I kind of compare podcasting to an old growth tree.

01:09:26 ◼   ► The ecosystem in podcasting is very strong.

01:09:29 ◼   ► There's not a lot of weaknesses that people could use

01:09:31 ◼   ► to attack us from.

01:09:36 ◼   ► The reason why YouTube was able to take over video

01:09:37 ◼   ► and Facebook was able to take over publishing text

01:09:41 ◼   ► and stuff to a large degree,

01:09:44 ◼   ► because those ecosystems were vulnerable.

01:09:46 ◼   ► They had problems.

01:09:49 ◼   ► They were weak.

01:09:50 ◼   ► When YouTube took over video,

01:09:51 ◼   ► publishing video online was really hard

01:09:53 ◼   ► and really expensive to host.

01:09:55 ◼   ► And there were all these technical challenges

01:09:56 ◼   ► that if you just did it on YouTube,

01:09:58 ◼   ► it would take care of it for you.

01:09:56 ◼   ► Publishing text online, publishing articles,

01:10:01 ◼   ► was, as Jason knows, it was a really hard business.

01:10:03 ◼   ► It still is a really hard business in a lot of ways.

01:10:05 ◼   ► And publishers became so desperate for referral traffic

01:10:07 ◼   ► from social networks, which is where everybody was going

01:10:14 ◼   ► for all their browsing behavior,

01:10:16 ◼   ► that they basically had to play ball,

01:10:17 ◼   ► and still have to play ball with places like Facebook

01:10:20 ◼   ► because that's just where all the traffic's coming from.

01:10:22 ◼   ► Podcasting does not suffer from issues like this.

01:10:23 ◼   ► Right now, podcasting is in a great place where,

01:10:29 ◼   ► usually the way some big power holder or power broker,

01:10:32 ◼   ► whatever, is able to come in and take over one of these things

01:10:38 ◼   ► is by exploiting some big weakness.

01:10:40 ◼   ► And the way YouTube exploited the ease and the hosting costs,

01:10:43 ◼   ► and Facebook exploited traffic distribution and everything.

01:10:47 ◼   ► But podcasting doesn't seem to have one of these things.

01:10:50 ◼   ► I mean, yeah, making a podcast could be easier,

01:10:49 ◼   ► but enough people have figured out how to do it

01:10:55 ◼   ► that we have this embarrassing richness of podcasting content.

01:10:59 ◼   ► If you ever do want to know, relay.fm/upgrade/200.

01:11:01 ◼   ► That's last summer, right?

01:11:07 ◼   ► Yeah, that was last summer on Fan Episode 200.

01:11:08 ◼   ► Me and Jason broke down everything.

01:11:10 ◼   ► It's one of my favorite things I've ever done

01:11:12 ◼   ► because people ask me a lot, and I just send them this link.

01:11:14 ◼   ► Any question of how can I do this,

01:11:14 ◼   ► this is the link that you get.

01:11:20 ◼   ► Yeah, and the reality is,

01:11:21 ◼   ► creating and hosting a podcast in any of the ways

01:11:23 ◼   ► that we do today with the open ecosystem that we have,

01:11:28 ◼   ► which is wonderful, if somebody were to come in

01:11:31 ◼   ► and make it easier, like Anchor, former sponsor probably, right?

01:11:34 ◼   ► So just remember there.

01:11:36 ◼   ► But now Spotify bought them along with Gimlet.

01:11:38 ◼   ► For somebody to come in and try to make a business

01:11:41 ◼   ► on making it easier, there's only so much easier

01:11:40 ◼   ► you can make it, and still have a show

01:11:45 ◼   ► that anybody wants to listen to.

01:11:47 ◼   ► You can make it easy, and Anchor do make it easier,

01:11:48 ◼   ► but it's in a very specific type of way.

01:11:51 ◼   ► They have an interesting set of tools,

01:11:54 ◼   ► like the ability to call people in

01:11:56 ◼   ► and leave messages and all that kind of stuff.

01:11:58 ◼   ► But the actual production of a podcast itself,

01:12:00 ◼   ► it's not overly complicated once you learn how to do it.

01:12:03 ◼   ► And then it's just basically like a machine

01:12:07 ◼   ► that just runs on its own, using the tools that we have.

01:12:06 ◼   ► It is something that you can learn.

01:12:11 ◼   ► It is a skill set.

01:12:14 ◼   ► It's like, for example, saying,

01:12:15 ◼   ► "We want to make Photoshop easier for everybody."

01:12:18 ◼   ► It's like, yeah, you can make a set of tools,

01:12:21 ◼   ► image editing tools, which can make some stuff more simple,

01:12:24 ◼   ► but the actual process,

01:12:27 ◼   ► the actual beginning process using Photoshop

01:12:30 ◼   ► is something you can just learn,

01:12:32 ◼   ► and it's not massively difficult once you've picked it up.

01:12:31 ◼   ► Video is way harder because the production is harder.

01:12:36 ◼   ► The actual tools that you need to produce is harder.

01:12:42 ◼   ► Setting up for video is harder than setting up for audio,

01:12:45 ◼   ► so having anything taken out of that.

01:12:49 ◼   ► But the biggest thing for YouTube, though, was the cost.

01:12:52 ◼   ► It wasn't the ease.

01:12:54 ◼   ► - And this might be different now.

01:12:56 ◼   ► - And the legal stuff when they started.

01:12:57 ◼   ► - Now, if you're doing video,

01:12:57 ◼   ► you have to be on YouTube,

01:13:02 ◼   ► just because that's where all the people are.

01:13:03 ◼   ► But right now, there isn't one of those things for podcasting.

01:13:04 ◼   ► And so for one of those things to form for podcasting,

01:13:06 ◼   ► you would need to have some massive reason

01:13:09 ◼   ► why a whole bunch of audience would move to something else,

01:13:12 ◼   ► or you'd have to have Apple go nuts

01:13:15 ◼   ► and actually start doing crazy lockdown stuff

01:13:16 ◼   ► with their player,

01:13:18 ◼   ► because they're the only ones that have enough market share

01:13:19 ◼   ► to do this kind of stuff and matter.

01:13:21 ◼   ► But I don't see either of those outcomes really happening.

01:13:22 ◼   ► What we've seen so far is,

01:13:23 ◼   ► even when somebody like Spotify came in

01:13:28 ◼   ► with a major podcast initiative,

01:13:30 ◼   ► Spotify now has a pretty strong market share.

01:13:32 ◼   ► I think it's in the order of 10%

01:13:34 ◼   ► compared to Apple having something like 60%.

01:13:36 ◼   ► And that's in a pretty short time.

01:13:39 ◼   ► But most of that was additive.

01:13:42 ◼   ► It was new listeners who weren't listening to podcasts before

01:13:44 ◼   ► now listening.

01:13:47 ◼   ► I don't think a lot of people picked up and moved away

01:13:48 ◼   ► from their podcast app to go to Spotify.

01:13:49 ◼   ► And I've heard of zero people who did that

01:13:54 ◼   ► for things like Luminary or any other new startup

01:13:57 ◼   ► that might come up.

01:13:59 ◼   ► So I think what we keep seeing over and over again,

01:14:00 ◼   ► there was the initial boom of podcast VC interest

01:14:04 ◼   ► back in the ODO days, 12 years ago, whatever that was.

01:14:09 ◼   ► And they quickly realized that it was hard to make

01:14:14 ◼   ► a lot of money with podcasting using that VC model,

01:14:15 ◼   ► and so it fizzled out and no one in VC land

01:14:20 ◼   ► touched podcasts for a decade.

01:14:23 ◼   ► I think we're gonna see a similar kind of thing happen now,

01:14:26 ◼   ► but just not quite as extreme.

01:14:29 ◼   ► I think we're seeing a big boost of investment now

01:14:31 ◼   ► in podcasting because people think they can make

01:14:34 ◼   ► a bunch of money by locking it down

01:14:35 ◼   ► and doing whatever else.

01:14:37 ◼   ► It's largely or entirely not going to work.

01:14:38 ◼   ► And so you're gonna have a few big flame outs,

01:14:41 ◼   ► most likely including Luminary and anything

01:14:41 ◼   ► that's gonna raise that much money.

01:14:46 ◼   ► You're gonna see some big flame outs

01:14:48 ◼   ► and the VC people are gonna pull back from it

01:14:50 ◼   ► and they're gonna realize this is not as easy

01:14:52 ◼   ► of an investment as we expected it to be,

01:14:54 ◼   ► or the return rate is simply too low,

01:14:56 ◼   ► and they're gonna pull away and focus on other things.

01:14:58 ◼   ► That's probably going to happen over the next year or two.

01:15:01 ◼   ► And we're gonna go back, 'cause the thing is,

01:15:04 ◼   ► in the 10 years between these two VC waves,

01:15:06 ◼   ► podcasting grew and was amazing.

01:15:08 ◼   ► It's like when all of us started listening to podcasts,

01:15:13 ◼   ► it's when all of us started podcasting.

01:15:16 ◼   ► All of the entire world that all of our listeners

01:15:19 ◼   ► and that we know as this great world of podcasting,

01:15:22 ◼   ► all developed and blossomed and succeeded in that span

01:15:26 ◼   ► where VCs were like, "You can't make money in podcasting."

01:15:30 ◼   ► Meanwhile, we were all making money in podcasting.

01:15:32 ◼   ► And so just because the big VC model might not apply

01:15:35 ◼   ► and might fail miserably and they might pull back from it,

01:15:40 ◼   ► that largely won't affect us.

01:15:42 ◼   ► Our world is largely separated from theirs.

01:15:44 ◼   ► And so I think we're just gonna go back

01:15:47 ◼   ► to one of those 10-year periods

01:15:50 ◼   ► where we don't hear a lot of big business intrusion

01:15:52 ◼   ► into podcasting, and it's fine.

01:15:56 ◼   ► And that, I think, is the best outcome for all of us,

01:15:58 ◼   ► and honestly, I think the most likely.

01:16:00 ◼   ► If I had to guess, I would say that the presence of Spotify

01:16:02 ◼   ► and doing some originals and stuff,

01:16:07 ◼   ► I think that will end up working for them,

01:16:09 ◼   ► maybe not justify their investment,

01:16:11 ◼   ► but I think as an audio platform trying to throw podcasts in there

01:16:13 ◼   ► for the reasons that you mentioned,

01:16:16 ◼   ► I think it makes sense for them to continue to do that,

01:16:18 ◼   ► although maybe not invest at anything like the level they are.

01:16:20 ◼   ► I wonder about Apple similarly being interested

01:16:24 ◼   ► in differentiating Apple's stuff somehow using their authority.

01:16:27 ◼   ► They haven't done it yet, but I think it's possible.

01:16:32 ◼   ► But I think most of the big footprint in podcasting going forward

01:16:34 ◼   ► that is successful is gonna be all the stuff that frustrates you

01:16:38 ◼   ► as a listener and as the author of Overcast,

01:16:42 ◼   ► which is it's gonna be ad tech and other things related to building layers

01:16:44 ◼   ► on top of the existing podcast market.

01:16:50 ◼   ► And that means, yes, that dynamic ad insertion will continue

01:16:52 ◼   ► and maybe be more or less bad. Who knows?

01:16:54 ◼   ► We could be optimistic and say less bad, but probably not.

01:16:59 ◼   ► And that there will be a whole realm of trying to monetize podcasts

01:17:02 ◼   ► by offering an ad-free version somewhere

01:17:06 ◼   ► where they're removing the dynamic ad search.

01:17:11 ◼   ► I mean, there are other ways to crank out a little bit more cash

01:17:13 ◼   ► that people will try to build businesses around,

01:17:17 ◼   ► and some of that will work and some of that will fail.

01:17:20 ◼   ► But it seems like applying the Netflix and streaming services model

01:17:23 ◼   ► to podcasts, I agree with you, will kind of fall apart,

01:17:28 ◼   ► especially since, as we said sort of toward the beginning of this episode,

01:17:31 ◼   ► we're probably in for a hard time for a lot of those Netflix competitors

01:17:35 ◼   ► over the next few years as they realize that there's not enough space

01:17:40 ◼   ► for them to survive. And I think it's gonna be worse with podcasting

01:17:44 ◼   ► where there's just, you know, they're not gonna make it.

01:17:48 ◼   ► But I do think that, you know, these companies that sell ads

01:17:48 ◼   ► and bring audiences to advertisers and have their stats that may or may not be real,

01:17:53 ◼   ► and have their ability to dynamically insert ads in random podcasts and stuff,

01:18:00 ◼   ► I feel like that stuff is probably gonna make it

01:18:05 ◼   ► because they're building on top of what we already have.

01:18:07 ◼   ► And it is working for them right now.

01:18:09 ◼   ► And the reason it works is because advertising on podcasts works without all of that.

01:18:13 ◼   ► So I don't know how much more useful, honestly, a lot of that stuff is.

01:18:18 ◼   ► But even without the data and without the dynamic insertion

01:18:22 ◼   ► and without the geolocating and attempted targeting of users,

01:18:26 ◼   ► the advertising stuff still works. So it kind of works regardless.

01:18:31 ◼   ► And maybe you do get a slightly better return.

01:18:34 ◼   ► But that does mean that that technology will continue

01:18:37 ◼   ► because the industry can support it.

01:18:40 ◼   ► The industry can support advertising and it can support it well.

01:18:40 ◼   ► Marco, you seem to talk a lot about this stuff, like in the stuff that you were saying.

01:18:45 ◼   ► It sounds like you're talking as a podcast producer.

01:18:48 ◼   ► How does all of this stuff affect you as the creator of Overcast?

01:18:51 ◼   ► The workings of individual podcasts largely don't affect Overcast.

01:18:55 ◼   ► Like, if a podcast uses certain tracking things on their side,

01:18:59 ◼   ► you know, like, I mean, I don't support anything dynamic in the show notes or anything,

01:19:03 ◼   ► so all they can really see for me is, like,

01:19:06 ◼   ► here's an IP address downloading this file from somebody running Overcast.

01:19:06 ◼   ► That's it. And so, you know, whatever they can do with that, that's up to them.

01:19:11 ◼   ► And so that's how you get things like location-based, dynamic ad insertion,

01:19:15 ◼   ► but it's only based on geolocation of IP addresses,

01:19:19 ◼   ► so you're seeing neighborhood-level granularity at best.

01:19:22 ◼   ► So they don't necessarily know that it's Myke Hurley,

01:19:25 ◼   ► but they know it's somebody who lives in London, right?

01:19:27 ◼   ► So you see stuff like that, and largely I can't do anything about that.

01:19:29 ◼   ► And so it kind of is outside of my world.

01:19:33 ◼   ► What does affect Overcast is any kind of, like, a macroeconomic factor.

01:19:35 ◼   ► So, you know, anything that affects the viability of shows, you know,

01:19:40 ◼   ► on their own or whatever else,

01:19:47 ◼   ► anything that affects whether or not shows should go behind their own paywalls,

01:19:48 ◼   ► whether or not any big shows do go behind their own paywalls

01:19:52 ◼   ► or behind paywall services.

01:19:55 ◼   ► But what's great about the situation that I'm in there is that

01:19:57 ◼   ► pretty much anything that a show would do that would negatively affect their ability to be played in Overcast

01:20:01 ◼   ► would also affect their ability to be played in Apple Podcasts.

01:20:06 ◼   ► And Apple Podcasts is so big that almost no show could afford to lose the support of Apple Podcasts.

01:20:10 ◼   ► So basically, just because of the way this stuff all works with, like, you know,

01:20:18 ◼   ► the RSS backend and everything being direct downloads and everything,

01:20:22 ◼   ► as long as Apple doesn't radically change that with Apple Podcasts,

01:20:25 ◼   ► which I honestly don't think they will,

01:20:26 ◼   ► I think I'm fine because I'm kind of, like, in the shadow of Apple Podcasts,

01:20:31 ◼   ► and nothing they can do to hurt me wouldn't also affect, like,

01:20:36 ◼   ► the hand that feeds them in Apple Podcasts.

01:20:41 ◼   ► If I'm right, I think all three of us next year will be celebrating our 10 years in podcasting, right?

01:20:44 ◼   ► Something like that, yeah.

01:20:51 ◼   ► Yeah, I would say it'll be 10 years for the incomparable.

01:20:52 ◼   ► I mean, we had a macro podcast back in that 2005 period Marco was talking about,

01:20:53 ◼   ► but I was never the regular host of that or anything.

01:20:58 ◼   ► So isn't that wild? 10 years.

01:21:00 ◼   ► Time flies when you're having fun.

01:21:02 ◼   ► But that's like, backs up, you know what you said about the idea of,

01:21:03 ◼   ► oh, it feels like none of these things are gonna break everything down.

01:21:07 ◼   ► And I said it doesn't bother me anymore.

01:21:12 ◼   ► It's because over the last 10 years,

01:21:14 ◼   ► I've seen lots of things that were gonna destroy everything we know and love about podcasting,

01:21:16 ◼   ► and none of them have because, as you say, the foundation is very strong.

01:21:20 ◼   ► I don't know what that foundation is like outside of technology and nerd-focused podcasting,

01:21:25 ◼   ► which is what we're in, which is the industry that it's kind of,

01:21:31 ◼   ► the industry that started 10 years ago, 15 years ago,

01:21:35 ◼   ► you know, this is the one, Wibbly at La Porte, basically, right?

01:21:39 ◼   ► We are still in that world, and it is very good for us

01:21:43 ◼   ► because we have listeners that love this stuff,

01:21:46 ◼   ► and they like their shows in particular ways, and ways that we like making them,

01:21:47 ◼   ► which is why I think we remain sheltered a lot from stuff.

01:21:52 ◼   ► But I genuinely think that that's gonna remain

01:21:55 ◼   ► because the underlying technology is so freaking nerdy, right,

01:21:58 ◼   ► that it kind of protects us quite nicely from everything.

01:22:03 ◼   ► It does, and the reality is podcasting started out as pretty much being about technology shows,

01:22:06 ◼   ► public radio shows, and then a whole bunch of very tiny, specialized interest shows.

01:22:12 ◼   ► And over time, you know, now, 12, 15 years later, whatever it's been,

01:22:17 ◼   ► we still have technology shows and public radio shows being very large.

01:22:21 ◼   ► - Especially the public radio stuff, it's still all around the top.

01:22:27 ◼   ► - That's even larger now, right?

01:22:29 ◼   ► And we've added now a significant comedy contingent.

01:22:31 ◼   ► - And murder.

01:22:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah.

01:22:36 ◼   ► Comedy, crime fiction, and business.

01:22:37 ◼   ► Business is also pretty big these days.

01:22:37 ◼   ► But basically, we still have those core pillars

01:22:42 ◼   ► of public radio and technology as the strongholds,

01:22:46 ◼   ► but everything else has also grown up around us.

01:22:49 ◼   ► So everything has gotten bigger and stronger

01:22:52 ◼   ► and more entrenched in the existing good, open ecosystem.

01:22:56 ◼   ► All categories, all demographics,

01:23:00 ◼   ► they're all really strong now in podcasting.

01:23:01 ◼   ► So I think we're really okay.

01:23:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, what I think we're saying is invest in podcasting.

01:23:07 ◼   ► I think that's what we're saying.

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01:24:43 ◼   ► Let's do some #askupgrade questions.

01:24:45 ◼   ► We put the call out to the Upgradients,

01:24:50 ◼   ► and we told them that Marco was going to be on the show.

01:24:52 ◼   ► So we have a bunch of Marco-themed #askupgrade questions.

01:24:55 ◼   ► First one comes from Robert.

01:24:59 ◼   ► What are your current favorite wireless over-ear headphones?

01:25:00 ◼   ► Oh boy.

01:25:03 ◼   ► I mean, it's kind of hard for me to answer this usefully,

01:25:05 ◼   ► because wireless over-ears are actually my least frequently used type of headphone.

01:25:08 ◼   ► I pretty much only use them when traveling on a plane.

01:25:12 ◼   ► But that being said,

01:25:17 ◼   ► they are the ones that you're actually wearing right now,

01:25:19 ◼   ► the Sony WH whatever mark 2.

01:25:21 ◼   ► The current version is the mark 3,

01:25:24 ◼   ► which is very similar to basically just swapped out the micro USB port for USB-C,

01:25:26 ◼   ► and made a couple of other minor tweaks,

01:25:30 ◼   ► but they're basically the same,

01:25:32 ◼   ► so I haven't upgraded to the newest ones.

01:25:33 ◼   ► But I have the Sony WH whatever mark 3 or mark 2,

01:25:35 ◼   ► and they're good for planes.

01:25:38 ◼   ► The only downside to them is that they only easily pair to one device at a time.

01:25:40 ◼   ► And so I kind of clumsily have to switch between my phone,

01:25:45 ◼   ► which I keep them paired to,

01:25:51 ◼   ► and my iPad or Mac on a plane,

01:25:52 ◼   ► which I use the wire to connect to,

01:25:55 ◼   ► because it's so clumsy,

01:25:58 ◼   ► but it's easier than repairing both directions all the time.

01:25:59 ◼   ► I talked about this on ATP,

01:26:03 ◼   ► and people recommended that I check out the Beats Studio,

01:26:04 ◼   ► the most recent Beats Studio,

01:26:05 ◼   ► which are powered by the W1 chip from the first generation AirPods.

01:26:10 ◼   ► So those should support easier pairing both ways between multiple Apple devices,

01:26:14 ◼   ► but I have not tried those,

01:26:19 ◼   ► and at this point I would rather wait until there's a second generation AirPods chip-based one,

01:26:20 ◼   ► but the H1 chip,

01:26:25 ◼   ► because it's so much faster and better pairing,

01:26:26 ◼   ► and avoids some audio issues.

01:26:29 ◼   ► So I'm very interested to see,

01:26:30 ◼   ► you know, there were rumors Apple might address this

01:26:32 ◼   ► and make some over-ear headphones sometime soon.

01:26:31 ◼   ► - HeadPods. - Yep, head pods, airheads,

01:26:36 ◼   ► whatever we're calling them.

01:26:38 ◼   ► So if that happens,

01:26:39 ◼   ► I'm very much looking forward to that.

01:26:40 ◼   ► I would buy those immediately,

01:26:42 ◼   ► but in the meantime,

01:26:43 ◼   ► the Sonys are pretty good.

01:26:44 ◼   ► - I actually bought, believe it or not,

01:26:45 ◼   ► those WH-1000 XM3, the new one,

01:26:47 ◼   ► and used them on my recent trip to Hawaii,

01:26:52 ◼   ► and there's a whole story about how I was having,

01:26:55 ◼   ► I was having a lot of headaches and stuff after flights,

01:26:57 ◼   ► and one of the recommendations I had was to not block,

01:27:02 ◼   ► I realized I was using my in-ear headphones on the plane,

01:27:06 ◼   ► and I thought that might actually be very bad

01:27:09 ◼   ► for my inner ear to have weird pressure dynamics happening,

01:27:11 ◼   ► but I wanted something I could use on a long flight,

01:27:14 ◼   ► and I thought noise canceling,

01:27:18 ◼   ► I heard them talk about it on ATP,

01:27:20 ◼   ► and I thought noise canceling headphones,

01:27:21 ◼   ► I've never really been into it.

01:27:23 ◼   ► I don't like over-ear headphones,

01:27:24 ◼   ► but I thought I would give it a try,

01:27:23 ◼   ► and so I bought these to use on this trip,

01:27:28 ◼   ► and they were pretty good.

01:27:30 ◼   ► I still don't love over-ear headphones.

01:27:32 ◼   ► It still kind of makes my ears feel weird and sometimes bad,

01:27:34 ◼   ► but noise canceling is great,

01:27:38 ◼   ► and I didn't have any problems with my inner ear

01:27:41 ◼   ► or anything like that,

01:27:44 ◼   ► because I think it lets the air move around

01:27:45 ◼   ► in a way that they get blocked,

01:27:48 ◼   ► like a cork in a bottle with my in-ear headphones,

01:27:49 ◼   ► and I thought they sounded pretty good.

01:27:50 ◼   ► So that's my lukewarm endorsement of those products,

01:27:55 ◼   ► but I agree.

01:28:00 ◼   ► I realized every time I wanted to switch from my iPad

01:28:01 ◼   ► to my iPhone,

01:28:04 ◼   ► I needed to go into the Bluetooth settings

01:28:05 ◼   ► and then disconnect and then reconnect.

01:28:07 ◼   ► Otherwise, it wouldn't let go of the previous Apple device,

01:28:10 ◼   ► which was a downer coming from AirPods.

01:28:14 ◼   ► I don't use any of these headphones

01:28:17 ◼   ► because I hate noise canceling.

01:28:16 ◼   ► I should clarify, I don't use a noise canceling function.

01:28:21 ◼   ► I turn it off every time.

01:28:23 ◼   ► Yeah, I currently use a wired pair of the H6,

01:28:24 ◼   ► the B&O H6.

01:28:30 ◼   ► I bought those now,

01:28:33 ◼   ► but honestly, a lot of the time I just use my AirPods.

01:28:35 ◼   ► I love the noise canceling,

01:28:37 ◼   ► but I'm literally only using it on an airplane,

01:28:38 ◼   ► and on the airplane,

01:28:41 ◼   ► I was impressed by the noise canceling

01:28:42 ◼   ► just because it was a lot quieter

01:28:43 ◼   ► and I wasn't hearing the rumble of the plane.

01:28:42 ◼   ► But I don't think I would use them in any context

01:28:47 ◼   ► other than an airplane, quite honestly.

01:28:50 ◼   ► Jon wants to know,

01:28:53 ◼   ► Marco, as far as we know,

01:28:54 ◼   ► you're dual-wording AeroPresses

01:28:55 ◼   ► for your coffee every day,

01:28:57 ◼   ► but what about espresso?

01:28:58 ◼   ► Do you own or use gear

01:28:59 ◼   ► or have any interest in the matter?

01:29:01 ◼   ► I am actually not really an espresso person.

01:29:03 ◼   ► I will drink espresso-based drinks

01:29:06 ◼   ► if they're available

01:29:09 ◼   ► and if I want them at a restaurant or something,

01:29:07 ◼   ► but I don't really drink espresso at home ever.

01:29:12 ◼   ► I'm a drip coffee fan,

01:29:15 ◼   ► and making good espresso at home

01:29:18 ◼   ► takes a heck of a machine, really.

01:29:21 ◼   ► All those machines need a lot of maintenance

01:29:24 ◼   ► and cleaning and everything,

01:29:26 ◼   ► it's just more than what I want for a drink

01:29:27 ◼   ► I don't care that much about.

01:29:29 ◼   ► The good thing is,

01:29:30 ◼   ► because I'm not really an espresso snob

01:29:31 ◼   ► the way I'm a coffee snob,

01:29:34 ◼   ► I have found that when I'm traveling,

01:29:33 ◼   ► if I try somebody else's regular drip coffee,

01:29:38 ◼   ► chances are pretty low I'm going to like it.

01:29:42 ◼   ► Especially if I'm traveling,

01:29:45 ◼   ► and there's of course the rule of hot places,

01:29:47 ◼   ► which is hot places usually tend to have

01:29:49 ◼   ► the worst drip coffee,

01:29:51 ◼   ► because nobody's really ordering it except me,

01:29:53 ◼   ► and so there's not really a lot of pressure

01:29:55 ◼   ► from their markets to have good drip coffee usually.

01:29:56 ◼   ► So if I'm traveling somewhere like Las Vegas

01:30:00 ◼   ► where it's a hot place,

01:29:59 ◼   ► I will almost exclusively drink espresso

01:30:04 ◼   ► for the main reason that A,

01:30:06 ◼   ► I don't really care so much about its quality

01:30:09 ◼   ► as I do about drip coffee,

01:30:10 ◼   ► and B, I have found that the floor

01:30:11 ◼   ► of how bad espresso can be

01:30:14 ◼   ► is higher than the floor of how bad drip coffee can be

01:30:18 ◼   ► when you're somewhere.

01:30:22 ◼   ► You can get the worst drip coffee in the world

01:30:23 ◼   ► pretty routinely at restaurants, diners,

01:30:25 ◼   ► whatever else, hotels, airplanes,

01:30:26 ◼   ► they all have terrible drip coffee available to you,

01:30:31 ◼   ► but usually a place either can't make espresso at all

01:30:34 ◼   ► or can make a minimum acceptable espresso,

01:30:37 ◼   ► and the floor of how bad that is

01:30:39 ◼   ► is significantly higher than the likely floor

01:30:41 ◼   ► you run into with drip coffee.

01:30:44 ◼   ► - I object entirely to this entire line of questioning,

01:30:46 ◼   ► why are we talking about coffee on the podcast?

01:30:48 ◼   ► - Right, because finally I can, right?

01:30:51 ◼   ► Because you will ignore it and not let me.

01:30:51 ◼   ► So I do like espresso drinks mostly,

01:30:56 ◼   ► and I do have an espresso machine at home,

01:30:59 ◼   ► which I like very much.

01:31:01 ◼   ► It is called the Barista Express.

01:31:02 ◼   ► In the UK it's called Sage, but in the US it's Breville.

01:31:05 ◼   ► It's made by Breville,

01:31:09 ◼   ► but they have a separate line in the UK

01:31:10 ◼   ► with coffee products called Sage.

01:31:12 ◼   ► I love my espresso machine.

01:31:15 ◼   ► It's very, very good, and I use it every day,

01:31:17 ◼   ► and you can go much, much, much, much more expensive

01:31:19 ◼   ► than the one that I use, but I'm very happy.

01:31:24 ◼   ► As someone who is still kind of trying to learn

01:31:28 ◼   ► how to do a lot of this stuff properly,

01:31:30 ◼   ► this one does a fantastic job for me.

01:31:32 ◼   ► I'm a big fan of it, so I recommend it.

01:31:34 ◼   ► - I thought the T-robot was expensive.

01:31:36 ◼   ► It's not even close.

01:31:38 ◼   ► - Espresso machines are very expensive, yes.

01:31:39 ◼   ► - You've got like three T-robots for this.

01:31:41 ◼   ► - And do you know what, Jason?

01:31:43 ◼   ► My espresso machine is not a robot.

01:31:45 ◼   ► - Oh!

01:31:47 ◼   ► - It's not a robot.

01:31:44 ◼   ► - The T-robot has also been told by John,

01:31:49 ◼   ► Syracuse is not a robot,

01:31:52 ◼   ► because it doesn't crawl around the house.

01:31:54 ◼   ► - The T-not a robot.

01:31:55 ◼   ► Casey, not that Casey, wants to know,

01:31:57 ◼   ► Marco, what is your favorite thing to do at the beach?

01:31:59 ◼   ► - You know, so for me, the beach simply means--

01:32:02 ◼   ► - The area which we're in.

01:32:06 ◼   ► - Living temporarily in the beach town

01:32:06 ◼   ► on the beach island, and so I include everything I do here

01:32:11 ◼   ► as part of being at quote, the beach,

01:32:16 ◼   ► even when I'm not actually on the sand

01:32:18 ◼   ► that's in front of the ocean.

01:32:20 ◼   ► And my favorite thing to do here is walk,

01:32:21 ◼   ► especially walk my dog.

01:32:25 ◼   ► It's a wonderful walking environment,

01:32:26 ◼   ► because on Fire Island there are no cars.

01:32:28 ◼   ► So you can, between all the houses,

01:32:31 ◼   ► there are just like big, wide sidewalks

01:32:33 ◼   ► that are like, you know, they're like boardwalks,

01:32:35 ◼   ► and you just kind of walk everywhere freely,

01:32:37 ◼   ► and there's not even any real hills that's mostly flat.

01:32:37 ◼   ► You walk to get groceries, you walk back and forth

01:32:42 ◼   ► to the beach and your house and everything.

01:32:44 ◼   ► It's just a very walking culture.

01:32:46 ◼   ► And I love just walking my dog.

01:32:48 ◼   ► Usually I bring in my ATP sponsor Aftershocks

01:32:50 ◼   ► bone conduction headphones.

01:32:54 ◼   ► I'll pop those in, 'cause they're super light

01:32:55 ◼   ► and they don't make me hot,

01:32:57 ◼   ► and I'll listen to podcasts like this one,

01:32:58 ◼   ► and I'll walk my dog everywhere, and it's wonderful.

01:33:00 ◼   ► It's by far my favorite thing to do.

01:33:02 ◼   ► - Jason, what is your favorite thing to do

01:33:03 ◼   ► when at the beach?

01:33:05 ◼   ► - Having spent a week on the beach,

01:33:03 ◼   ► I think, honestly, I think reading under a,

01:33:08 ◼   ► like maybe under an umbrella, but sitting on the sand.

01:33:11 ◼   ► I really do love that.

01:33:14 ◼   ► And then you just get up and you get in the water

01:33:16 ◼   ► and you bob around in the waves a little bit

01:33:19 ◼   ► and you cool off and then you go back

01:33:22 ◼   ► and you sit back down.

01:33:24 ◼   ► I really like that.

01:33:25 ◼   ► I find it very relaxing.

01:33:26 ◼   ► And I read like five books on my vacation.

01:33:28 ◼   ► I was very happy to do that.

01:33:31 ◼   ► - My favorite thing is to do nothing.

01:33:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, let's hear it for, we have an ongoing debate

01:33:34 ◼   ► in my house about whether vacations are a time

01:33:37 ◼   ► when you need to do stuff, activities at the destination

01:33:40 ◼   ► or whether you want to do nothing.

01:33:43 ◼   ► - I like activities on vacations, a beach vacation.

01:33:44 ◼   ► You go into a beach place, you do nothing.

01:33:48 ◼   ► There are no activities.

01:33:50 ◼   ► - Yes, well, this is a conflict that occasionally

01:33:51 ◼   ► my wife and I have had, and I feel bad for her

01:33:54 ◼   ► because now that I have two lazy teenagers,

01:33:57 ◼   ► it's three against one.

01:33:56 ◼   ► - I like to do things, but I like to not necessarily

01:34:01 ◼   ► have lots of plans, right?

01:34:04 ◼   ► That's why I kind of think of nothing.

01:34:06 ◼   ► So you're doing nothing.

01:34:07 ◼   ► Do you want to go do this now?

01:34:08 ◼   ► Yeah, let's go do this now.

01:34:09 ◼   ► That's what I like about this type of beach limit.

01:34:10 ◼   ► Elliot says, "Please discuss Jason's request

01:34:12 ◼   ► that Overcast support a catch-up mode for a podcast

01:34:16 ◼   ► that you should listen to from the start

01:34:19 ◼   ► with new episodes appearing in your queue automatically."

01:34:21 ◼   ► - Marco, do you get people who write to you and say,

01:34:23 ◼   ► "I want to listen to ATP, but I got to start at the beginning,"

01:34:28 ◼   ► because I actually get those for comparable, especially,

01:34:31 ◼   ► but also some other podcasts.

01:34:33 ◼   ► And these people are John Syracuse's people, I guess,

01:34:35 ◼   ► but it blows me away that people do this.

01:34:39 ◼   ► - I do get those.

01:34:42 ◼   ► - For inappropriate podcasts, like for timely podcasts.

01:34:43 ◼   ► I get it for other kinds of podcasts.

01:34:45 ◼   ► Like the Adventure Zone, I started at the beginning.

01:34:47 ◼   ► But for upgrade, you don't need to start with number one.

01:34:48 ◼   ► - An ATP, you don't need it.

01:34:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, I actually do get those sometimes,

01:34:55 ◼   ► and it shocks me as well.

01:34:57 ◼   ► But yeah, so for this kind of feature,

01:34:59 ◼   ► I have actually been laying the groundwork for this

01:35:01 ◼   ► for a long time.

01:35:03 ◼   ► Because Overcast syncs to a server-based backend,

01:35:05 ◼   ► this gives me a lot of advantages for a lot of features.

01:35:08 ◼   ► But when it comes to something like this,

01:35:11 ◼   ► where you're modifying how a feed is processed by the apps

01:35:13 ◼   ► and what's considered a new episode and what isn't

01:35:14 ◼   ► to come in, having a server backend is actually a hindrance

01:35:19 ◼   ► to this kind of development,

01:35:22 ◼   ► because it takes a lot of server work

01:35:23 ◼   ► that is harder than just doing it locally would be.

01:35:25 ◼   ► So I'm laying the groundwork for this.

01:35:28 ◼   ► I do plan to launch this feature sometime soon,

01:35:30 ◼   ► but it has been a long time coming,

01:35:32 ◼   ► and just doing database changes and backend updates

01:35:35 ◼   ► and everything to be able to even support this well at all.

01:35:38 ◼   ► So yes, I am doing it, but I have no date to announce.

01:35:40 ◼   ► - Great to hear that, fair enough.

01:35:45 ◼   ► Final question comes from Troy, pie or cake?

01:35:46 ◼   ► - Oh, easy, pie.

01:35:49 ◼   ► Pie is way better than cake.

01:35:52 ◼   ► - You did a top four about pie, didn't you?

01:35:54 ◼   ► - We did, I believe, yeah.

01:35:56 ◼   ► And we had some debate about whether cheesecake

01:35:58 ◼   ► was considered a pie or a cake.

01:36:00 ◼   ► - Oh boy.

01:36:01 ◼   ► - I'm firmly on team pie on that one.

01:36:02 ◼   ► Cake offers way more potential for visual interest,

01:36:03 ◼   ► for decoration, for layers and all sorts of fun

01:36:08 ◼   ► and visual appeal on a cake.

01:36:13 ◼   ► But ultimately pie, I think, offers not only better flavors,

01:36:16 ◼   ► but more variety of flavors.

01:36:20 ◼   ► And so ultimately I am 100% on team pie.

01:36:23 ◼   ► - I'll tell you, going through the core birthday cake,

01:36:26 ◼   ► getting years of two children as a parent

01:36:29 ◼   ► has eliminated any like that I might have possibly had for cake.

01:36:34 ◼   ► - It's pie all the way.

01:36:39 ◼   ► - If you would like to send in a question

01:36:40 ◼   ► for a future episode of the show,

01:36:41 ◼   ► just send out a tweet with the hashtag #askupgrade.

01:36:43 ◼   ► Marco, thank you so much for joining us

01:36:45 ◼   ► for today's episode.

01:36:47 ◼   ► - Thanks, it's been a pleasure.

01:36:48 ◼   ► - If you want to get Marco's work online,

01:36:49 ◼   ► he is the host of the Accidental Tech podcast, atp.fm.

01:36:51 ◼   ► And at Relay FM, Marco hosts Top Four and Under the Radar

01:36:55 ◼   ► and of course makes the wonderful application Overcast,

01:36:58 ◼   ► which if you use iOS and you've not tried out Overcast,

01:37:00 ◼   ► you should, it's free to try it out and it's wonderful.

01:37:05 ◼   ► If you would like to find Jason online,

01:37:08 ◼   ► you can find his work at sixcolors.com

01:37:10 ◼   ► and he's @jasonowentothejsnell.

01:37:12 ◼   ► I am @imike and Marco is @marcoarment.

01:37:15 ◼   ► I forgot the song, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.

01:37:20 ◼   ► Marco Arment.

01:37:24 ◼   ► That's the hardest one of the three in the song

01:37:25 ◼   ► for me to remember, because he kind of like,

01:37:25 ◼   ► Jonathan Mann breaks from the rhythm to fit all your--

01:37:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, leads in from the previous measure a little bit.

01:37:33 ◼   ► - This makes it very tricky, but I got there in the end.

01:37:36 ◼   ► If you'd like to find the show notes

01:37:38 ◼   ► for this week's episode, relays.fm/upgrades/253.

01:37:39 ◼   ► Thank you to Squarespace, Pingdom,

01:37:43 ◼   ► and Dubai Friday for sponsoring this show.

01:37:45 ◼   ► Max, it's not over.

01:37:47 ◼   ► - Hi, Max.

01:37:48 ◼   ► - We'll be back next time.

01:37:49 ◼   ► Say goodbye, everybody.

01:37:50 ◼   ► - Howdy, folks.

01:37:51 ◼   ► - Goodbye.

01:37:52 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

01:37:57 ◼   ► [ Silence ]