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Upgrade

43: Haptic Skeptic

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:08   From Relay FM, this is Upgrade episode number 43. Today's show is brought to you by MailRoute,

00:00:14   a secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam, Stamps.com, postage on demand,

00:00:21   and the New Mexico Tea Company, making excellent teas available to people all around the world.

00:00:27   My name is Myke Hurley and I am joined by the wonderful Mr. Jason Snow.

00:00:31   Hello Myke, how you doing? I am very well, sir, it is a new week.

00:00:34   We are currently about to experience a heat wave in the United

00:00:39   Kingdom, which I am horrified and terrified about.

00:00:43   What constitutes a heat wave in the United Kingdom?

00:00:46   On Wednesday it will be 93 degrees. Wow, that of course, thank you for

00:00:52   for the Fahrenheit conversion there.

00:00:55   - No, I meant Celsius.

00:00:56   - Oh, oh dear.

00:00:58   Well, you're all going to die then.

00:01:00   That's the end for the UK.

00:01:02   It was a good run.

00:01:03   - Yep.

00:01:04   - That's that 93 Fahrenheit, which is what, 33, 34?

00:01:08   - Yep. - See?

00:01:09   - Yep, we have a couple of days in the 90s this week

00:01:12   and that is gonna be a problem.

00:01:14   - That was the day of the WWDC keynote.

00:01:17   That's what the temperature was in, at least here.

00:01:20   It was close to that in San Francisco too.

00:01:21   but in my house it was, that was the hot day, it was 96.

00:01:25   And we get like three of those a year.

00:01:27   - That's gonna be an issue for us in the UK.

00:01:30   Let me tell you that. - Yeah.

00:01:31   - We are not used to that kind of heat.

00:01:33   - No, well, I mean, the Bay Area,

00:01:34   it's actually kind of like that too,

00:01:36   this part of the Bay Area anyway, where I live

00:01:38   and we're in San Francisco, north of San Francisco,

00:01:40   we don't have air conditioning, right?

00:01:42   We have nothing like that.

00:01:43   So you're kind of immobilized when it gets that hot.

00:01:46   - So I expect that Tuesday and Wednesday shows

00:01:51   I will be operating from a paddling pool most likely.

00:01:54   - Nice.

00:01:55   - No, I am genuinely concerned I'm gonna turn into liquid.

00:01:58   It's gonna be ridiculous.

00:01:59   I don't even know what I'm gonna do.

00:02:01   - I did an episode of "Total Party Kill,"

00:02:06   I wanna say last summer,

00:02:07   it might've been the summer before that, entirely outside.

00:02:11   I set up a microphone and my laptop in a chair

00:02:16   in my backyard because it was so hot that I literally,

00:02:19   I could not do it in the house.

00:02:21   And that was fine, except it went so long that it got dark.

00:02:26   People couldn't see me by the end, it was really dark.

00:02:30   But that was, and it actually sounded pretty good.

00:02:34   I gotta say that nobody was doing like lawn work

00:02:38   or there were no birds dive bombing me or anything like that.

00:02:41   But that's, yeah, it's, if you're not equipped,

00:02:44   this is the thing, it's just like when people laugh

00:02:46   at people in San Francisco for talking about it being cold.

00:02:49   because it never gets as cold here as it gets almost anywhere, but we're not

00:02:54   equipped. That's the thing, is you've got to be equipped for... if

00:02:58   it happens often you'll be equipped to deal with it, but if it doesn't happen

00:03:01   often then you're completely unable to deal and you're just, you know, it's all

00:03:07   ruined and I think that that's what will happen to you with this heat wave.

00:03:12   I have no air conditioning.

00:03:13   Right.

00:03:14   You know, so...

00:03:15   Do you have a fan?

00:03:16   I have a fan and I need to do some tests to see if I can remove the sound of the fan accurately

00:03:24   from the audio recordings. Right, well yeah, that happens a lot when we're doing podcasts with people

00:03:29   in hot or cold climates is that they either have the noise running in the background or they turn

00:03:36   it off right before the podcast and gradually get more and more uncomfortable as the podcast moves

00:03:41   along. So Kyle's, the gray in the chat room, has asked a question that I'm sure many people,

00:03:46   many American people will ask of me is, "Why? Why do I have no air conditioning?" Because it doesn't

00:03:52   get that hot here. We don't need it. We have radiators and central heating. We have no central

00:03:57   air. It's not a thing we need. We open windows most of the time and it does an absolutely fine

00:04:02   job of the, like, the 20 degrees that we usually have in the summer, you know, like 23 or something,

00:04:07   I think '24 was like a hot summer day for us.

00:04:10   - Yeah, Kyle's in Arizona where you would literally die

00:04:14   without air conditioning.

00:04:15   But you know, in the Bay Area, like I said,

00:04:16   in Marin County, we don't,

00:04:19   especially Southern Marin and in San Francisco too,

00:04:22   there's no air conditioning because when would you use it?

00:04:25   Like four days a year.

00:04:26   I talk to somebody about getting air conditioner.

00:04:28   I think about it every now and then.

00:04:29   When we were replacing our heater,

00:04:31   I talked to them about what it would cost

00:04:32   to put in an air conditioner.

00:04:33   And the answer was many thousands of dollars

00:04:36   for something we would use, you know,

00:04:39   we really use probably four days a year.

00:04:41   I do have a little tiny air conditioner on wheels

00:04:44   that I can roll around and it's got a tube

00:04:46   and you sort of like stick it in a window.

00:04:49   And we, I will roll that out

00:04:51   literally like three days a year.

00:04:52   I will roll that out because it's so miserably hot,

00:04:55   but that's it.

00:04:56   Yeah.

00:04:58   See, you're not equipped.

00:04:59   You can't deal with it.

00:05:00   I'm going to Southern California this week,

00:05:02   but it looks like it's not gonna be quite that hot.

00:05:04   'Cause it's the 4th of July is coming up,

00:05:06   which is a relevant date in America,

00:05:08   but not really anywhere else.

00:05:10   But it is a holiday, Independence Day.

00:05:13   And so my family and I are going down to Southern California

00:05:16   for the week.

00:05:19   -So, um... -USA.

00:05:21   -USA. -Indeed.

00:05:22   Whilst I would like to complain about the heat

00:05:25   for a little bit longer,

00:05:27   we're probably getting a follow-up,

00:05:28   because I have amassed a large follow-up topic here.

00:05:33   -Yeah, so we have a document that we put all our topics in,

00:05:36   And I opened this document last night

00:05:37   after playing Dungeons and Dragons for three hours

00:05:40   on the internet for your amusement.

00:05:42   And I said to myself, oh my God, what did Myke do?

00:05:46   Because there is a very large thing.

00:05:49   There's some bold type, there's some bold red type,

00:05:52   there's links.

00:05:54   You definitely got it in you at some point

00:05:57   that you wanted to talk about antitrust

00:06:02   and things that you're not qualified to talk about

00:06:05   because you're not a lawyer.

00:06:06   So yeah, let's do that.

00:06:08   - Yeah, so again, I am not a lawyer, okay?

00:06:10   So everything that I'm saying here is based upon

00:06:12   common sense, what I consider to be common sense,

00:06:15   which again, is a problem when you're thinking about law.

00:06:20   But I wanna talk about, if we go back to last week,

00:06:24   talking about Apple and Taylor Swift,

00:06:26   many people wrote in or tweeted at us or me

00:06:31   for different shows, including this one,

00:06:33   we spoke about it on Connected too, to say that they think that Apple held off from paying

00:06:37   artists or labels on the fears of claims of antitrust or anti-competitive measures from

00:06:42   either the Department of Justice or from the European Union.

00:06:49   So Apple would, basically, it seems that the argument is, and again I'm not, I don't really

00:06:56   understand this argument so I'm probably going to do a bad job of even explaining it, the

00:07:00   idea that it would be anti-competitive for Apple to not pay artists during this period,

00:07:09   or to pay art, sorry, to pay artists during this period because it would go against what

00:07:15   their competitors are doing. So Apple's competitors during their free trial periods, they don't pay

00:07:20   artists. So like if you, if there was a free trial for Spotify or whatever, you know, they don't pay

00:07:23   artists. So if Apple paid artists it would give them an advantage in some way.

00:07:29   I don't understand this argument because I think that really that doesn't affect

00:07:38   the user. I don't know if people look into it and be like, "Oh hang on a

00:07:43   minute, they're paying artists? Well I will sign up for this free trial." I don't

00:07:47   know if that is a thing that goes into people's minds. And more so than

00:07:52   this, I'm sure that Apple have someone on site at the moment from the Department

00:07:59   of Justice for these matters who I know that they're there to look off like to

00:08:04   make sure nothing's going wrong but surely they could advise as well?

00:08:09   I don't I don't know if that is something that happens where there's

00:08:15   somebody there but they have lawyers they have lots of lawyers and and they

00:08:18   they, yes, lots of lawyers, lots of in-house lawyers, lots of contract lawyers, and Apple

00:08:27   is well aware of what these issues are. And I would say that especially, I think Steve

00:08:31   Jobs was much more of a person who kind of said, "I don't care, let's just do it." I

00:08:37   think with him, not at Apple anymore. I think that they're probably a little more careful

00:08:44   about legal stuff than they've been, but I'm with you. I think the most important thing

00:08:50   when you're talking about antitrust and anti-competitive things is you're using a monopoly power in

00:08:53   one place in order to gain power in another place. Now, you know, this is the argument,

00:08:58   there's what's illegal and there's what's right. I mean, there's the argument that Amazon

00:09:02   has done a lot of things where they have pushed into categories using their money from one

00:09:06   category they pushed into other categories. But, you know, my understanding is that's

00:09:10   not illegal. What's illegal is if you're a monopoly and then you're using your monopoly

00:09:16   power to destroy other categories. And, you know, Apple is not a monopoly. And then this

00:09:22   is also, yeah, this is about, you know, it's a three-month trial. What I find funny is

00:09:28   that a lot of times people on the internet will gin up these arguments saying, "Oh, well,

00:09:31   this is probably why they didn't do it." And it often suggests to me like that the way

00:09:39   companies work is, "There might be a lawsuit, so we won't do it." And in reality, there

00:09:46   might always be a lawsuit. That's not a good enough reason. I had an impassioned argument

00:09:51   with somebody on Twitter. I don't even know what it was about because it's Twitter. It

00:09:54   was months ago. But literally his argument was, "You're opening yourself up to lawsuits."

00:09:59   It's like, you know what? Apple is open for lawsuits every single day and gets lawsuits

00:10:04   every single day. I'm sure Apple is being sued about hundreds if not thousands of things

00:10:11   at a time. You can't... Now, there are businesses that operate in a completely risk-averse manner

00:10:17   where they're like, you know, "We're not ever going to do anything that might make somebody

00:10:21   sue us." Those are generally failed businesses because they don't do anything because they're

00:10:28   terrified and part of the cost of doing business is you're gonna have to pay lawyers and you're

00:10:33   going to have to deal with people who sue you. And I'm not saying do things that are

00:10:36   wrong and let the lawyers deal with it, I'm saying people are going to sue you. If you're

00:10:40   doing what you believe is right, don't not do it because you're afraid somebody is going

00:10:45   to accuse you of something. And Apple's got a huge target on their backs, and that's just

00:10:50   how it is. So I kind of am skeptical when people say, "Oh, well, they probably didn't

00:10:56   have this major thing that they're trying to do because of some kind of legal fear."

00:11:02   a lot of skepticism I bring to it. So I have a hard, I, yeah, I have a hard time seeing

00:11:06   that. Plus I'm not, I don't see this as antitrust saying how they're funding it. They're, you

00:11:10   know, they've got a lot of money. I actually think it's more arguably anti-competitive.

00:11:15   Yeah. So they, they spend money on it. That's more anti-competitive, but in the end for

00:11:19   the consumer, it's no different. It's still, like you said, it's still free for three months

00:11:24   and you know, Spotify's got a, what, a 99 cents for three months trial. It's not that

00:11:29   So from a consumer standpoint, it's not that different.

00:11:32   I don't know.

00:11:33   I'm not an oiler either, by the way.

00:11:34   Not a lawyer.

00:11:35   Not a lawyer.

00:11:36   Gilldots in the chat room brings up an interesting point, right?

00:11:39   Let's say that it's not about the customers.

00:11:41   What if, and Gilldots says, "I would suspect that it would be more about getting artists

00:11:46   to shun the services that don't pay during the demo period."

00:11:49   I mean, sure, that is a thing.

00:11:52   But my other point on this, and I think this enforces that, is I don't imagine that the

00:11:57   the Supreme Court would be like,

00:11:59   "Oh, Taylor Swift pressured you?"

00:12:01   Well then of course it's okay.

00:12:03   Like if this is an actual issue, right,

00:12:06   of anti-competitive measures by paying artists

00:12:09   for that reason of like,

00:12:11   oh, because then it may make people move

00:12:13   their catalogs around.

00:12:15   I can't imagine that they would get off from it,

00:12:18   like they would be able to get away from these claims

00:12:23   because one artist pressured Apple.

00:12:26   Like, that doesn't seem like that would make any change legally to the position.

00:12:31   It doesn't feel like that would be enough collateral to get the lawsuit dropped, right?

00:12:36   It just doesn't seem like that they would care.

00:12:39   - No, no, what, you need a, I mean, using a big company entering a new market and spending

00:12:43   all their money to get entry into the new market is not illegal.

00:12:46   Now, it may feel unfair, especially if you're one of the people competing in that area,

00:12:49   seeing a huge competitor in and try to eat your lunch.

00:12:52   But where it gets illegal is the leverage of something else.

00:12:56   So the famous example is Microsoft using its power on the computer to try to take over

00:13:03   the internet and web browsing by saying, "We're going to use our monopoly power in operating

00:13:08   systems to make it difficult for there to be any competition for our web browser, and

00:13:12   we're going to ruin all the other web browsers, and then we're going to control the internet.

00:13:16   Waha, ha, evil laugh, Steve Ballmer."

00:13:20   And so if Apple had a monopoly power in something, which I don't think they have anywhere, but

00:13:26   you could even maybe say, like, imagine a world where Apple uses its power as the creator

00:13:33   of the iPhone to make it difficult for artists.

00:13:35   Let's say iTunes is the only paid music market, which it's not.

00:13:44   And then they started to do things like, well, we're not going to feature your stuff or we're

00:13:48   gonna remove you from the store, you know, in our con—the thing that we control and

00:13:52   ruin your for sale music market unless you play ball with us over in this new thing we're

00:13:57   doing." That, you know, that maybe there's an argument there, but that's a theoretical

00:14:01   and it's not based on reality anyway because they don't have that kind of power. So I feel

00:14:06   like what this is—what people are really saying is, "Hey, you know, aren't there complications

00:14:11   when a big company enters a market and makes it tough for the people who are already there?"

00:14:15   And I think the answer is yeah, but at least in our current regulatory system, companies

00:14:22   get a lot of leeway to just compete.

00:14:24   And yeah, that's a reason why there are so many huge companies, is because huge companies

00:14:29   with lots of money get to roll into markets and take them over.

00:14:33   That happens all the time.

00:14:35   So my other feeling on this is, let's say that all of this is true.

00:14:42   If we go back again and presume that the reason that they didn't do this was because they

00:14:47   wanted to avoid antitrust or anti-competitive measures, so let's presume that all the previous

00:14:52   statements are also false, they're incorrect, my feelings and your feelings on this.

00:15:00   There has been some reports recently that there is an investigation going on at both

00:15:07   the New York and Connecticut Attorney General's offices into collusion in the music streaming

00:15:12   business and it's heavily hinted that Apple may be a part of the investigation.

00:15:16   So I want to read a quote from a letter that was from Universal Music Group's head antitrust

00:15:21   lawyer Eric J. Stock.

00:15:23   This was what brought the investigation to the press.

00:15:26   We understand that the investigation concerns whether participants in the music industry

00:15:31   are seeking to act collusively or to restrain competition among music streaming services.

00:15:36   In particular, by working together to suppress the availability to consumers of free ad supported

00:15:42   on-demand music streaming or similar such as those offered by Spotify and

00:15:47   YouTube. So the idea and what this report was saying and people were saying

00:15:51   that this was Apple as well as maybe some others were trying to get the

00:15:57   labels together to collude to shut out companies that offered free streaming.

00:16:03   Which Apple doesn't do. And this is right in the e-book thing which is it's

00:16:07   It's collusion to make a market less friendly for consumers.

00:16:13   And that is not legal, and Apple has been bitten by that, and we can talk about how

00:16:17   Amazon is the true problem in that market, but the fact is, what Apple did was illegal

00:16:24   and has been repeatedly found to be so.

00:16:27   And so the fear here is that what may have happened, and it's unclear who would initiate

00:16:32   this, but let's take the ebook model.

00:16:35   This would be the equivalent of Apple going to all of the music companies and saying,

00:16:38   "Here's what we're going to do. We're not going to offer a free tier. Everything's going

00:16:41   to have to be paid. Take your best stuff. Lock it up behind here. Refuse all of the

00:16:46   competitors' access to that stuff on their free tiers, and we'll see what happens, and

00:16:51   we'll force everybody to pay." And I think the argument there would be that would be

00:16:54   very much like what Apple did with the e-books thing, which is, you know, if there's collusion

00:16:58   among competitors in order to make the market less friendly and more costly for consumers,

00:17:07   that's where things get illegal. That's not antitrust, that's collusion to control markets,

00:17:13   but that would be a problem. It's obvious, and this is the challenge with the e-book

00:17:17   thing too, it's obvious that the music industry wants the free tiers to go away, and that's

00:17:23   fine, they can want that, but what they can't do is collude to make that happen.

00:17:28   Yeah, see, that is anti-competitive behavior. It is. It is, because that's, yeah, that's

00:17:34   competitors working together, which is not allowed. And then the reason, main reason

00:17:39   though from my digging that I guess this could be tied to Apple, is this report came out

00:17:45   on June the 10th, June 9th, June 10th, like a day or two after Apple announced Apple Music,

00:17:52   And this is a quote from Matt Mittenthal, who is a spokesman for the New York Attorney

00:17:57   General Eric Schneiderman.

00:18:00   And the quote says, "This letter is part of an investigation of the music streaming business,

00:18:05   an industry in which competition has recently led to new and different ways for consumers

00:18:10   to listen to music."

00:18:12   So if you read into that, which some people did, the recently led to new part could be

00:18:18   Apple.

00:18:19   So many people are pointing at Apple during this, and my point is this is whilst I do

00:18:23   not know and have no way of knowing, if that is the case and they are involved, it's just

00:18:29   further proof that they kind of don't care about antitrust, if and when they want to.

00:18:35   I think this is a much more meaty issue, and I guess what I would say is the question to

00:18:41   me is, "Is this something that Apple... did Apple encourage collusion or was Apple happy

00:18:50   to be a useful figure for the music industry by saying we're not going to do a free tier?"

00:18:57   And that's very similar to the e-book thing. You know, if Apple came and said, "Hey, here's

00:19:02   what we're gonna do. We're not gonna give things away for free. We're gonna do a trial

00:19:06   and that's it, and then people will pay.

00:19:09   And that's how it's gonna be.

00:19:10   It's not wrong for the music companies to say,

00:19:15   "Oh, we like that model, we're gonna give you more stuff."

00:19:18   The problem is if it was all part of a scheme by a cabal

00:19:22   to wreck the free tier of all of the music services

00:19:27   so that everybody has to pay.

00:19:28   And that's tricky stuff.

00:19:30   I mean, this is what happens

00:19:31   when Apple gets into these waters is that this is ugly.

00:19:34   I mean, like we talked about last week, you know, these industries are ugly and the competition

00:19:41   is difficult and their business model is kind of broken, which makes it even uglier.

00:19:47   I think that a lot of this...

00:19:50   I feel like a lot of these things and these kinds of arguments are brought up as ways

00:19:58   for people that believe in Apple to tell themselves why Apple did things the way

00:20:05   that they did. Basically to not face up to the fact that what I believe in that

00:20:10   they made a decision in which they would spend the least money possible because

00:20:15   it's a business and they made the wrong decision probably the morally wrong

00:20:20   decision but they made at what they consider to be the right business

00:20:23   decision. But the thing was that business decision didn't match up with what we

00:20:27   considered to be good business, like wholesale business.

00:20:29   - Right, it made them look bad, 'cause it's true.

00:20:32   I mean, Apple's got, so look,

00:20:34   Apple's got billions and billions,

00:20:36   like more than $100 billion in cash, I think now.

00:20:39   So anything they do, we can say,

00:20:42   why did Apple need to do that?

00:20:44   They've got all that money in the bank.

00:20:46   You know, you could say that about anything.

00:20:48   Why do they charge what they charge for their products?

00:20:49   They've got money in the bank.

00:20:50   They can subsidize it all with their cash in the bank.

00:20:53   And it's not a good enough argument.

00:20:55   I mean, they are always going to be trying to make the best deal, right?

00:20:59   The best financial deal.

00:21:01   And I think the problem comes, as we said last week, that you end up being portrayed

00:21:07   as a company that is trying to get musical artists to forgo their money so that you can

00:21:15   catch up in a category, as opposed to you investing in the category because you want

00:21:21   to have your business grown there.

00:21:22   And if they can negotiate a deal where everybody gives up everything and gives them free things,

00:21:27   even though they've got hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank, then good for them.

00:21:31   That's good bargaining on one level. On another level, people will maybe not think of you

00:21:37   so kindly. And that was the trade-off there. And Taylor Swift was the one who got everybody

00:21:43   to notice sort of, yeah, this makes Apple look bad. But whoever negotiated that deal

00:21:48   with all the labels they did, that was pretty impressive because that was not a good deal

00:21:53   for the labels and the artists at all.

00:21:57   So you know, not a lawyer, I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of feedback about that, but that's

00:22:02   just my opinion. I think that they did a bad thing basically and that's kind of the long

00:22:11   and short of it. We have a bunch more follow up, but why don't we take our first sponsor

00:22:15   break at this point then we can kind of jump back in again Jason so people

00:22:19   can have their pallets cleansed what do you think?

00:22:22   Sounds good to me. Who's our first sponsor Myke?

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00:23:31   also shipped a product back for six colors, I needed to ship a product back to a company,

00:23:36   and I was able to do that very easily using Stamps.com, never had to go to the post office,

00:23:41   In fact, yeah, my mail person just came to the door

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00:24:11   and enter upgrade. Thank you so much to Stamps.com for supporting upgrade and all of Relay FM.

00:24:17   Thank you Stamps.com. So you have a follow-up topic that you would like to discuss that will

00:24:24   make you unpopular. Yeah I know well I'm already unpopular with this so I you know I don't want to

00:24:29   belabor it I feel like we got a lot of follow-up on this show but you know this is in other Taylor

00:24:35   Swift news I just want to mention I had a few people send me a link to a story from a photographer

00:24:41   who wrote basically an open letter,

00:24:44   so that immediately got me kind of rolling my eyes,

00:24:47   to Taylor Swift.

00:24:48   And basically it's about how Taylor Swift's contract

00:24:53   for freelance photographers has some very specific things

00:24:57   that you have to agree to if you want to,

00:25:00   as a freelance photographer, go to her concert,

00:25:03   take pictures of the concert,

00:25:04   and then sell those pictures to a newspaper

00:25:07   or magazine or website or whatever.

00:25:10   And I'm gonna leave aside the question of

00:25:14   what's fair and not fair for freelance photographers

00:25:16   taking pictures at a public performance by an entertainer.

00:25:20   So I feel like that's a pretty different thing

00:25:23   and there are probably fair and unfair ways

00:25:25   of dealing with that.

00:25:26   I just wanted to mention,

00:25:28   I see a lot of false equivalencies

00:25:32   in people who wanna take Taylor Swift down or punish her

00:25:35   because she spoke out against Apple.

00:25:37   Even though Apple said, "You know, you're right."

00:25:39   (laughs)

00:25:40   There are still people that I,

00:25:42   and I assume that it's mostly motivated

00:25:44   because they're pro Apple people

00:25:47   and they're mad at Taylor Swift for criticizing Apple.

00:25:52   I get a little bit of that vibe

00:25:53   from at least some of the people who are seeing this,

00:25:55   but you know what?

00:25:56   Her criticisms of what Apple did

00:25:58   are not made less valid by the fact that over here,

00:26:02   her management has an agreement

00:26:05   with freelance photographers

00:26:06   about how they can use pictures from her concert.

00:26:09   That is a really bad argument, because what you're basically saying is,

00:26:15   "She can't make claims about this because of that."

00:26:19   I think, you know, defending musicians is not the same as telling freelance photographers who are coming into her concert how they can and can't use their photos.

00:26:28   It doesn't mean that the other thing couldn't be unfair. It doesn't mean that Taylor Swift's management might not be inappropriately treating freelance photographers,

00:26:37   but that has nothing to do with this and that's a bogus argument. So I refute that

00:26:43   argument and then I actually have one person who's a very nice person I've

00:26:47   talked to a lot on Twitter and he sent me an email, very nice smart person so I

00:26:50   I don't want them to be insulted by this but at one point what this person said

00:26:56   to me is "Taylor Swift is no people's hero" and that's just a complete straw

00:27:01   man. I mean basically if if the attack is well she's not perfect and she's not

00:27:06   this incredible hero of the people. Well, actually, you know, I think we were a little more targeted

00:27:11   at that in saying she was talking about struggling and independent music artists and how this

00:27:16   situation was going to be difficult for them. And you can try to elevate her in order to

00:27:21   then beat her down, but I think that these are not strong arguments against Taylor Swift.

00:27:26   And I was a little disappointed to see the ones that I did get about this. I don't mind people

00:27:32   debating this issue but trying to change the subject and come up with side issues in order to

00:27:38   find ways to attack her seems kind of a kind of kind of dumb so anyway that frustrated me this week

00:27:45   anything else yeah if people would like to bring up um other unrelated things about Taylor Swift

00:27:55   that they don't like, don't email me about it. I bought 1989 this week, by the way, even

00:28:02   though it's streaming on Apple Music starting tomorrow as we record this. I bought a copy

00:28:08   last week. I just felt like I needed to. And then I've been listening to it, and that's

00:28:12   dangerous because it's catchy. Catchy. Yeah, I haven't yet heard it. Super catchy. Super

00:28:20   catchy. Let's see, what other follow-up? I got an interesting email from listener Matthias,

00:28:30   who says, "Spotify and other streaming services are often spoken of as a bad deal for artists,

00:28:34   but the average music buyer apparently only spends about $55 a year on any sort of music

00:28:38   recording, meaning that a single Spotify subscriber at $10 a month spends more than double the

00:28:44   average." Which I think is an interesting point, because theoretically then, if the

00:28:50   average music buyer turned into the average subscription service subscriber, they would

00:28:57   be spending more money on music, a lot more. I think my question is, who do subscription

00:29:04   services actually appeal to, one, and is that the average music buyer or is it a very different

00:29:09   music buyer? Now, the more people it appeals to who don't spend money on music at all,

00:29:14   know, people who steal music, people who pirate music, then that's money in the bank. That's

00:29:21   great, but I suspect that the people who are more likely to subscribe to a music service

00:29:26   probably are not in that 50% that spend less than $55 a year. They're probably in a band

00:29:34   that spends more money than that on music, but I don't know exactly what the profile

00:29:38   is of the average music subscriber, and that would be interesting to see. Is it people

00:29:44   who are not spending a lot of money on music right now, or is it people who are spending

00:29:48   a lot? And then on top of that I have to say, some music isn't available to stream, and

00:29:53   you've got to buy it if you want to listen to it. So you've got to throw that in there,

00:29:56   that just because you pay $10 a month for a music streaming service doesn't mean that

00:30:00   you aren't going to still be buying music, because there may be a lot of music from people

00:30:04   you like that's not on the streaming service, whether that's something like Taylor Swift

00:30:07   holding things back, and there's that whole question of will we end up in a Netflix situation

00:30:12   where the hottest new hits don't make it on?

00:30:16   Or will it be that the more obscure artists

00:30:19   don't put their stuff on

00:30:20   because they know they've got a hardcore fan base

00:30:22   that's gonna go buy it?

00:30:23   I've got a subscription service for,

00:30:26   they might be giants,

00:30:28   I paid them for a year of downloads every week.

00:30:31   That stuff's not on Apple Music, I don't think.

00:30:35   And there are a few other artists

00:30:37   that release sort of like obscure things off on the side

00:30:41   on various websites and I have no confidence

00:30:45   that that stuff's gonna be on there.

00:30:46   So it's a, I like the idea of boiling it down to,

00:30:50   let's find, you know, the average person

00:30:51   doesn't spend $10 a month and so if everybody then spent it,

00:30:56   the music industry gets more money

00:30:57   but I don't think it's that simple.

00:30:59   - Ashwin wrote in about the iPad Pro.

00:31:04   We were talking about it a bit,

00:31:06   weeks ago. - Two weeks ago.

00:31:07   - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:31:09   And Ashwin was writing in about how maybe Apple could use force touch in some way to

00:31:15   replicate the feel of pen dragging on paper.

00:31:18   So say small vibrations could replicate this feel and make a compelling writing companion.

00:31:25   I think that this would be extremely difficult to do and to do in a way that tries to completely

00:31:32   replicate the feeling.

00:31:34   Then we are far far away from that feeling being replicated.

00:31:38   What Apple can do is provide feedback, which won't feel like drawing on a piece of paper,

00:31:44   but it will feel like friction, which is more of what is needed.

00:31:50   The idea that there is something happening when you're rubbing the stylus against the

00:31:55   glass is better than just rubbing a piece of plastic on a piece of glass, because there's

00:31:59   nothing there.

00:32:00   It doesn't feel like anything.

00:32:01   And it will at least give just a nice feeling.

00:32:04   It wouldn't help at all, because it wouldn't add actual friction or anything.

00:32:07   you just have the feeling of it, is what I would expect. But my

00:32:13   feeling about this is some feedback is better than no feedback. So giving

00:32:19   something like some sort of rumbling would make sense but then again you know

00:32:23   the other part of it is can they make it as precise as to just be where the pen

00:32:28   is resting or is the whole thing gonna start shaking if the whole thing starts

00:32:31   shaking and we go back to square one again because it's just not useful

00:32:34   enough. I think that if false touch exists and the haptics exist, because you know they

00:32:39   are slightly different things, but false touch with the haptic feedback, if that exists in

00:32:43   the iPad Pro I think Apple would do something like that with the stylus, but in my opinion

00:32:49   the jury will be out on how that actually feels and one of the reasons I feel this way

00:32:53   now is I remember being completely blown away by the false touch trackpad when I first tried

00:32:58   using it and that was just in clicking around in an Apple store. I have since had a little

00:33:02   bit more time trying to use one and it drives me crazy. Like I was using

00:33:07   Steven's new MacBook Pro 15-inch to edit a bunch in San Francisco and I was left

00:33:15   feeling unhappy when trying to use something like Logic which requires lots

00:33:20   of clicking and dragging. I was left feeling very very unhappy about that

00:33:23   experience with the false touch trackpad. It just didn't work very well and a lot

00:33:30   of the time where because what I will frequently do if I'm gonna click and

00:33:33   drag on a trackpad in logic you click down with my thumb and then move with my

00:33:37   finger and it was misfiring constantly on that and I found that to be really

00:33:42   frustrating maybe I should have and could have tweaked these trackpad

00:33:46   settings in some way but the more I've used it the more I've started to see

00:33:51   that I have found like there to be some misfires and a physical trackpad

00:33:56   doesn't misfire like that. You click it, you click it, and that's it. It's clicked.

00:34:00   And that's not the way it is with the force touch. And, you know, it's like that

00:34:04   old adage, right? If it just doesn't work 10% of the time, then it's a problem.

00:34:09   It's like Siri, right? If Siri is not 100% accurate, then it's inaccurate.

00:34:15   Well, the great thing about having hardware controlled by software, so, you know,

00:34:19   instead of it being a real click, it's a software click. Great thing about that is

00:34:22   it's programmable and intelligent. The bad thing about that is if it goes wrong

00:34:26   it doesn't click. And if it's hardware, it always clicks because it's hardware

00:34:33   until it breaks and then it's broken. And yeah, having it be like, "Oh, something's

00:34:37   wrong with the software so now my trackpad doesn't click anymore" is, yeah,

00:34:42   that's not great. So are you a, reading between the lines here, are you

00:34:46   a haptic skeptic?

00:34:49   I really like it on the Apple watch and what that does. I'm just currently I am

00:34:58   just not in the opinion that my say on my current 13 inch or the current 15

00:35:04   inch that it requires the force touch trackpad. I feel like there should be

00:35:08   there could still be a click there and it could also still register the

00:35:11   pressure. They do not need to take away the clicking in my opinion. Interesting.

00:35:18   Makes sense on the MacBook Air, or what do you call it, the MacBook One.

00:35:23   MacBook.

00:35:24   Not called that, Marco.

00:35:25   Not called that.

00:35:28   It makes sense on that one in theory because they say, you know, they need the space.

00:35:32   If that's the case, then fine.

00:35:34   But I would not be happy if I, in its current guise, if it was my only option.

00:35:41   Yeah.

00:35:42   You have a piece of follow-out for us?

00:35:46   I do.

00:35:47   follow out. I do a show weekly with Tim Goodman, the TV critic at The Hollywood

00:35:53   Reporter where we talk about television. It's called TV Talk Machine. It's at the

00:35:56   incomparable.com/TVTM. And I wanted to mention it here because I think a lot of

00:36:03   our listeners are obviously interested in technology stuff and may be

00:36:07   interested in television programs. And in TVTM #40 last week, Tim, who is not a

00:36:13   a very techie person said that he really liked the USA Network show Mr. Robot, which I watched

00:36:20   over the weekend. And as somebody who knows a bit about technology and sees how painful,

00:36:28   how painfully bad some shows are at depicting technology, and there are two shows in particular

00:36:33   currently on the air on the CBS television network that do this incredibly badly, Scorpion

00:36:39   and CSI Cyber, both of which are sort of like laughably bad.

00:36:44   - The names tell you everything you need to know.

00:36:46   - In general, yeah, in generally bad

00:36:49   and also bad about their technology.

00:36:51   I haven't seen every episode of Scorpion and CSI Cyber.

00:36:53   So if somebody who's a huge fan of Scorpion comes and said,

00:36:56   "Well, actually, you know, in episode eight,

00:36:57   "they were accurate."

00:36:58   Okay, fine, whatever.

00:37:00   But what my point is, Mr. Robot, I found to be,

00:37:05   first off, I thought it was really entertaining.

00:37:07   I think it's a good show.

00:37:08   gonna keep watching it. It's a techno-thriller kind of paranoid about a

00:37:12   guy who's a security expert and hacker who is sort of brought in on a

00:37:19   potential conspiracy involving a large corporation that controls, you know, huge

00:37:25   amounts of the economy and a, you know, theoretically a group of kind of rebels

00:37:29   against it, which sounds like every, you know, techno-thriller you've ever heard

00:37:33   of, but what I'll say in its favor is the details that they use to make it seem

00:37:40   like, you know, I'm gonna hack this thing I'm in, that kind of stuff, are not

00:37:45   ridiculous. In fact, they're about as good, I think they're about as accurate as

00:37:49   they could possibly be without draining all the drama out of the show. I mean,

00:37:54   there is a moment where they go to the server farm in, you know, in

00:37:59   Washington DC, and they're actually like in the server cages, and I've been in

00:38:03   those server spaces before I went to the MLB advanced media one in New York.

00:38:09   And they kind of look like that, except they're, you know, even tighter and hotter and more

00:38:16   unpleasant to be in and louder.

00:38:19   But you know, they, it's a guy opening his laptop and doing some terminal things and

00:38:25   all that, but what you see him typing and the way they describe it to other people is

00:38:28   all kind of real-ish.

00:38:30   I never point out, I was like,

00:38:32   "Oh, geez, this is absolutely ridiculous.

00:38:34   "They're just making things up out of whole cloth."

00:38:38   And so I guess it could get worse as the episodes go by,

00:38:42   but I will say based on the first episode,

00:38:45   I feel like it is the most kind of like technically,

00:38:50   I can't say accurate,

00:38:52   but not ridiculous depiction of technology

00:38:55   that you could probably do and still call it entertainment

00:38:58   because they still wanna have like drama

00:39:00   and people typing things and running places

00:39:02   and explaining what's going on.

00:39:04   And yes, that's probably completely unrealistic,

00:39:07   but the terms they use and stuff all seemed pretty solid.

00:39:12   And so if you're looking for a techno thriller kind of show

00:39:16   that isn't going to make your head explode

00:39:19   with the badness of the technology,

00:39:21   maybe Mr. Robot is worth a look.

00:39:22   So that's my follow-up.

00:39:24   - Hmm, don't know how I got to.

00:39:26   - Yeah, nope.

00:39:28   He's just Mr. Robot, not Mr. Roboto.

00:39:32   It's just Mr. Robot.

00:39:33   And the main character, the actor who plays

00:39:35   the main character on Mr. Robot is very good,

00:39:38   very interesting character.

00:39:39   He is not Mr. Robot.

00:39:41   Christian Slater is Mr. Robot, or is he?

00:39:43   I don't know, I think he is, but I don't know.

00:39:45   I don't know who Mr. Robot is.

00:39:47   It might be Christian Slater.

00:39:48   - So should we start talking about Apple Music,

00:39:53   bearing in mind we are 24 hours away from being a couple?

00:39:57   Hello everybody who listens to this show within a day of it being posted.

00:40:02   You two are anticipating Apple Music.

00:40:04   And then hello to everybody who will be listening after Apple Music has come out.

00:40:10   It hasn't come out yet for us.

00:40:12   So I'm finding myself to be quite excited about tomorrow.

00:40:15   It is quite rare that an Apple, a new Apple service of this kind of magnitude launches.

00:40:25   And it's quite rare to have it happen kind of out of product cycle, I think.

00:40:30   Usually these things tend to go hand in hand with something else happening.

00:40:34   Also I'm very excited because I'm pretty sure that 8.4 is going to bring Apple Pay in the

00:40:38   UK.

00:40:40   By the way, I saw the Sex Pistols credit card in an ad in the window.

00:40:45   I think it's Virgin Money here that's doing it.

00:40:48   It is.

00:40:49   Yeah.

00:40:50   So that was fun to me to see.

00:40:53   So we're kind of, you know, I'm finding myself to be very excited about this.

00:40:57   I'm looking forward to checking out the service and seeing what the catalogue looks like.

00:41:02   I am more excited about Beats 1, and I want to talk about Beats 1 in a little bit.

00:41:07   But how do you feel, Jason?

00:41:09   Do you have any trepidations for the service?

00:41:10   Are you excited about it?

00:41:11   Like, what's your overall feeling right now?

00:41:14   I'm looking forward to trying it out.

00:41:16   Like I said, I've been a Beats subscriber for the last year, and have used that some,

00:41:22   although not as much as I had thought.

00:41:25   I'm interested to see how Apple has set the music app up

00:41:27   to integrate.

00:41:29   I think the nice thing about the three month trial

00:41:31   is that we're gonna get a better sense of,

00:41:34   people who have an iTunes library

00:41:37   will get a better sense of how it all fits together.

00:41:40   I'm also interested in seeing how it fits together

00:41:42   on iOS and how it works on the Mac.

00:41:45   'Cause that's a big question mark for me

00:41:50   is how is this gonna work on the Mac?

00:41:52   because Beats doesn't, I mean it's a web browser window and I would hope that

00:41:56   there's an update to iTunes that enables all of this but I don't know that for

00:42:00   sure. So yeah, I trepidation, I mean look I've got I've got nothing invested in it

00:42:08   if it's not any good it's just not any good and I you know I'll say so if it's a

00:42:13   work in progress it'll be a work in progress although I feel like Beats was

00:42:16   the work in progress and hopefully they've they've done something to push

00:42:21   it forward beyond what they already did with Beats Music. So I, you know, I'm

00:42:27   interested in the radio, which I know you're gonna talk about. I'm

00:42:32   interested in Beats 1, although I'm not a big radio person, so in the end I doubt

00:42:37   that I'll be listening to it a lot. That's mostly because when I work, as

00:42:42   I've said before, the thing is when I work I need to listen to music that I know by

00:42:45   heart, and that limits the exploration I can do to very specific times, because if

00:42:50   if I'm writing especially, I need to be listening to things that I know well. And so I can't

00:42:55   explore them and I can't really listen to the radio because it's got people talking

00:42:58   and it's got music I haven't heard before. And you know, it's great to hear new music

00:43:03   in the right context, but most of my music listening time is not for exploration because

00:43:09   I can't work that way. So I don't know, I guess I'm saying I'm excited about seeing

00:43:16   how they built it and integrated it, I may be more excited about the app and the interface

00:43:22   and things like that than I am about the exploration of the library because, you know, there are

00:43:28   streaming services now and I subscribe to one. So, you know, on that level I'm just

00:43:35   it's another one. So it's really about like what does Apple do differently here?

00:43:39   I mean the only thing that you do have

00:43:42   invested in Apple Music is the fact that Beats will stop working.

00:43:45   That's true, that's true but there are other options I mean if they ruin it

00:43:50   if they ruin it then I can use Spotify or RDR or Rhapsody or whatever

00:43:54   I have lots of other options.

00:43:56   Also the music page definitely seems to hint to the fact that iTunes will

00:44:01   be updated because it has... Yeah, it doesn't say

00:44:05   explicitly it just says the heart of Apple Music and home to a universe of

00:44:08   entertainment so I assume that that means it is gonna be there. I mean who knows?

00:44:12   I mean it doesn't say explicitly. It's just kind of just like hey. One of the

00:44:18   huge failings of Beats music is that it doesn't work you know it doesn't work on

00:44:22   the Mac except in a browser window and it's lousy. Which needs flash. Yeah.

00:44:27   Which is extremely upsetting and plus the web app is just terrible. So a couple

00:44:34   of things that we now know about the music catalog so because there are still

00:44:39   a lot of questions about the music catalog right we have no idea what's

00:44:42   gonna be in this catalog tomorrow. 1989 is gonna be there right so Taylor said

00:44:47   that 1989 is gonna be in there and then today Dr. Dre's The Chronic it's a very

00:44:53   famous album is going to be making its streaming music debut on Apple Music.

00:45:00   How'd they get Dr. Dre?

00:45:03   I know right? That guy. How did they get that guy to agree to this?

00:45:08   How did Apple and Beats get Dr. Dre to... yeah. Ah, the Chronic mic. That is one of

00:45:15   my favorite... no I can't even say what the string is. Good for people who want to listen

00:45:19   to that album. Good for them.

00:45:21   Do you want to know how they got him to agree?

00:45:23   They walked down to his cubicle and said agree.

00:45:25   With anti-competitive behavior, Jason. That's how.

00:45:29   - Oh, Taylor Swift told them to, is the answer.

00:45:33   - So as we sit here right now,

00:45:36   as I say about 24 hours before the launch,

00:45:38   I expect in the next 24 hours,

00:45:39   we're gonna see a couple more announcements like this.

00:45:42   Or at least over today and tomorrow,

00:45:46   some albums or things that are gonna find their way

00:45:50   into this catalog which we weren't expecting.

00:45:52   Like what about the Beatles?

00:45:54   - Yeah, well there was one report

00:45:57   that the Beatles were not going to be on the streaming side.

00:46:01   And that's the stuff that fascinates me the most about this

00:46:04   is how is this gonna play out in terms of

00:46:05   what is streaming and not?

00:46:07   And what does that mean for the future

00:46:10   of music streaming services where, like I said earlier,

00:46:13   are there gonna be tiers of things

00:46:14   that are just not on the services

00:46:16   because the owners of that content

00:46:20   feels like it's premium material

00:46:22   that people are gonna pay for on their own

00:46:24   and that they're not gonna just let it be part

00:46:26   of the all you can eat pass.

00:46:29   That's interesting to me.

00:46:30   And then the, will we end up seeing

00:46:35   that things are available if you pay

00:46:37   and not available on a free tier?

00:46:38   'Cause I know that's what a lot of people want.

00:46:40   I think that is what Taylor Swift said

00:46:42   that she really wanted.

00:46:43   And when she said it wasn't like a super exclusive thing

00:46:46   in putting 1989 on Apple Music,

00:46:49   I'm unclear whether that means it'll be streaming elsewhere.

00:46:52   My understanding has been that one of Taylor Swift's demands

00:46:55   was always just don't put it on the free tier,

00:47:00   just limit it to pay.

00:47:01   And Spotify has resisted that and said,

00:47:04   we don't wanna differentiate between free and paid

00:47:06   based on content.

00:47:07   And I know that there are a bunch of people

00:47:11   in the music industry who would love that,

00:47:13   who would love to be able to say,

00:47:15   and that's where we get back to potential cabals

00:47:20   and collusion is, what will that happen?

00:47:23   Will we see things that are on Apple Music

00:47:25   and not on other services, with the implication being

00:47:28   that the other services don't get them

00:47:30   because they're offering a free tier.

00:47:32   And has there been collusion,

00:47:35   or is that just good business decisions that are happening?

00:47:40   The catalog stuff fascinates me.

00:47:41   And that goes back many episodes of "Upgrade"

00:47:43   where we were talking about Netflix

00:47:45   and things going on and off Netflix.

00:47:46   And I still wonder, are we gonna end up in a place

00:47:49   where music catalogs are essentially all there,

00:47:53   at least for popular music,

00:47:54   not necessarily for other stuff like classical and soundtracks and things like that, but

00:47:57   for popular music? Or is it going to be like Netflix where all the really, really great

00:48:02   new stuff you can't get?

00:48:07   Talking about Netflix, have you seen about Netflix UK's first original?

00:48:14   No.

00:48:15   Have you heard about this? It's called The Crown and it's basically going to be telling

00:48:21   the story is going to be over multiple seasons of Queen Elizabeth and her

00:48:28   relationship with different prime ministers. And the first season has

00:48:34   Claire Foy from Wolf Hall will be playing Queen Elizabeth II, John Lythgal

00:48:41   will be playing Winston Churchill, and Matt Smith will be playing the Duke of

00:48:45   Edinburgh. Dr. Who's own Matt Smith. Indeed. Interesting, so is that going to

00:48:50   be, I assume that'll be worldwide, but it's being produced in the UK?

00:48:55   Yeah, it's just Netflix UK. It's like the UK arm of the production company, I guess.

00:49:00   Interesting.

00:49:01   Because we get all of the US stuff. We get 100% of it.

00:49:05   I talked about this somewhere. I think it might have actually been on the aforementioned

00:49:08   TV talk machine. I think we might have gotten a letter from somebody asking if Netflix would

00:49:13   use UK production at some point. And it's really smart. They've got this worldwide distribution,

00:49:19   But why not produce a show in the UK for Netflix?

00:49:23   And then the UK Netflix people would get it, but so would everybody else.

00:49:27   That's a cool idea.

00:49:28   The Crown.

00:49:29   - Yep, it's based on a play called The Audience.

00:49:33   I'm very excited about this.

00:49:36   And they're already planning for it to be multiple seasons, and they'll have different

00:49:39   actors and actresses in each season to portray the different ages that people were at.

00:49:44   - I like the idea.

00:49:46   One of the things that I was really happy to learn when I was in the UK this year is

00:49:50   that UK Netflix people love these Netflix originals because they just are there on day

00:49:56   one and so much TV gets delayed and it's, "Well, this broadcaster is going to get it

00:50:01   in your region but not for a few months."

00:50:03   And when I was visiting James Thompson up in Scotland, you know, they were talking about

00:50:09   how Daredevil was going to drop and it was just going to be there.

00:50:13   the same day it was in the US, it was gonna be in the UK, and that, you know, that's really

00:50:18   nice. That makes you, I think, that much happier as a Netflix subscriber to have, you know,

00:50:23   they just don't get around. They just drop the shows and say, "Here they are. Have them."

00:50:27   But this, you know, this, all of this stuff just further solidifies where Netflix sees

00:50:32   themselves in five years, and it's HBO.

00:50:34   Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah.

00:50:36   It's not a provider of other people's content. And it's genius. It's a genius move. You build

00:50:41   up this catalog of shows that make it worth the seven, eight, nine, ten

00:50:48   dollars a month or whatever it is. The fact that those shows are there make it

00:50:52   worth it. Original shows, some movies that have come by recent-ish-ly and

00:50:59   then like a catalog of older stuff that's floating around there but that

00:51:02   yeah that's absolutely very HBO-like. Smart. So let's take our second

00:51:10   break and then we'll talk a bit about Beats 1.

00:51:13   So this week's episode of Upgrade is also brought to you by the New Mexico Tea Company.

00:51:26   For over five years, the New Mexico Tea Company has been sourcing fantastic loose leaf tea

00:51:31   from all over the world for its customers.

00:51:34   They discover and import great teas, but they also make some themselves.

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00:51:44   They have a regular store where you can go and buy some of the tea you like or even buy

00:51:47   some equipment you may want to upgrade your tea setup with.

00:51:51   But they also have their Tea of the Month Club.

00:51:54   This is a fantastic thing to try out and it's something that I think you should take a look

00:51:57   at because each month the New Mexico Tea Company will send you a brand new tea to try out.

00:52:02   It costs 19.99 a month which will get 3 different teas that will last you around 50 cups in

00:52:09   total.

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00:52:14   you can get double the tea for just 29.99.

00:52:19   By subscribing to the tea of the month club not only will you always have excellent tea

00:52:23   at home, you will also be broadening your horizons and trying some new high grade specialty

00:52:27   teas too.

00:52:29   Now the fine folks over at the New Mexico Tea Company

00:52:32   sent both me and Jason some tea to try out.

00:52:35   And I have some right here.

00:52:37   I have been drinking and enjoying, what do we have,

00:52:40   the Lucky Summer, which is very interesting.

00:52:43   It has, is it rubos?

00:52:46   How do you say that?

00:52:48   - I don't, we'd have to ask Rene Ritchie

00:52:50   'cause that's a South African thing.

00:52:52   - We'll go with rubos, tea, peach, fruit,

00:52:55   lemongrass, spearmint, and peppermint,

00:52:57   which sounds like, I picked this one out

00:52:59   because it's the most peculiar of concoctions,

00:53:01   but it's delicious.

00:53:02   I have been enjoying it a lot.

00:53:04   And also, I mean, I've got a whole selection of things here.

00:53:08   One other tea that I've, oh, I'm absolutely in love with

00:53:11   is called the Cream Earl Grey.

00:53:13   - Oh, I had that, that was very nice.

00:53:15   - Oh my, it's very tasty.

00:53:17   - I like but don't love Earl Grey

00:53:19   and that Cream Earl Grey is really good.

00:53:21   - So I checked that this is their number one seller.

00:53:24   - Oh yeah, that's not surprising.

00:53:25   So I got some tea from New Mexico Tea Company as well.

00:53:29   They sent me some samples like they sent to you.

00:53:31   And I, and then actually WWDC week,

00:53:34   I had David Lore and Dan Morin staying with us

00:53:37   for a few days and they're both tea drinkers.

00:53:39   So we went through a lot of the teas.

00:53:41   And by the end of the week,

00:53:43   I was running out of the Canadian breakfast black tea,

00:53:47   the English breakfast black tea,

00:53:48   the Irish breakfast black tea.

00:53:50   I wanted more tea.

00:53:52   So not only did I rip through a lot of their samplers

00:53:55   that they sent me, but I actually went

00:53:57   to the New Mexico Tea Company website

00:54:00   and bought a pound of tea,

00:54:04   actually several pounds, but they come in like a pound.

00:54:08   You can get loose tea up to a pound bag.

00:54:10   And so I'm not just somebody who was sent samples,

00:54:14   but I liked it so much that I went back

00:54:16   and placed an order for more.

00:54:18   And I am fueled this morning by the English breakfast

00:54:21   from the New Mexico Tea Company. Very good.

00:54:23   - I've been enjoying it a lot.

00:54:25   I've been trying out a couple of things.

00:54:26   That cream Earl Grey is amazing.

00:54:28   It's Earl Grey with vanilla.

00:54:29   It's just, just incredible. - Yeah, it's good.

00:54:32   - 'Cause I, you know, I like coffee,

00:54:34   but I drink one coffee in the morning

00:54:35   and I don't like to drink any more coffee in the day.

00:54:37   I like to have one coffee,

00:54:38   'cause it really gives me a kick,

00:54:40   like too much that I wouldn't want to have a second.

00:54:42   But tea, whilst caffeinated,

00:54:45   doesn't really pump me up as much as coffee does.

00:54:48   So I've been enjoying like a second caffeinated beverage in a day and I've been

00:54:52   exclusively drinking goods from the New Mexico Tea Company.

00:54:55   Yes.

00:54:55   So we have an amazing offer for you.

00:54:57   If you use the code UPGRADE at checkout you will get 25% off for the first three months of your Tea of the Month Club membership.

00:55:05   So that brings the price down to $14.99 for the first three months.

00:55:08   Or if you're just looking to buy some one-off items that code is going to get you free shipping.

00:55:12   Members always get free shipping and don't forget and they want you to know this

00:55:17   that if you sign up for their TEA of the Month Club you can feel free to cancel at any time

00:55:20   to lock you into any commitments. I think that these guys have an absolutely fantastic

00:55:24   variety of tea. I want you to go and check them out. This is a really really nice thing

00:55:28   to do. It's something a little bit different and I've been enjoying it a lot. So if you

00:55:31   go to, this is the URL so it's, bear with me here because it's a mouthful to say on

00:55:35   the air. It's easy to read but it's a mouthful to say. So it's NMT, so hang on, I need to

00:55:42   I now know that I need to spell the whole thing.

00:55:45   N-M-T-E-A-C-O dot com slash upgrade.

00:55:49   So it's the NMTCO dot com slash upgrade.

00:55:52   So N-M-T-E-A-C-O dot com slash upgrade.

00:55:57   And you're gonna find everything that you like there.

00:55:59   Of course the link will be in the show notes.

00:56:00   Thank you so much to New Mexico Tea Company

00:56:02   for sponsoring this episode.

00:56:04   More importantly, thanks to all of you as well

00:56:05   that go to the site and try out their products

00:56:07   because that helps us support this show.

00:56:09   So if you enjoy what we do, go and check this stuff out.

00:56:12   Tasty, tasty tea.

00:56:14   Black tea, herbal tea, green tea, all the teas.

00:56:17   They have all the different kinds too.

00:56:18   I love the black tea,

00:56:19   but they've got all the different kinds.

00:56:20   - Would you say all the great tea?

00:56:22   - All the great tea.

00:56:23   In fact, Marco, I believe when he was here,

00:56:26   when we had our little party, had their green tea.

00:56:29   And we had a, and green tea,

00:56:32   you need to steep it a different temperature.

00:56:33   So we got up like the probe thermometer and all that.

00:56:35   And the next day Lauren said to me,

00:56:37   that's the first time I've ever seen somebody

00:56:38   use a probe thermometer to make tea.

00:56:42   I said, well, I think normally green tea people

00:56:44   like put it on a boil and then have it sit

00:56:46   for five minutes or something and then pour it or something.

00:56:48   But I don't know how to do that.

00:56:50   I don't drink green tea.

00:56:53   So yeah.

00:56:54   Nmtco.com.

00:56:57   - Yeah. - Tasty.

00:56:58   - So beats one.

00:57:00   - Can we just talk about tea some more, Myke?

00:57:03   - Sure, if you want to.

00:57:05   - We'll start the tea cast in a while.

00:57:08   Beats one.

00:57:09   So I wanted to talk with you about beats one

00:57:10   because you are one of the people who has been,

00:57:13   I think the most excited that I've talked to about Beats 1

00:57:16   because of Zane Lowe.

00:57:18   You were so excited when he was hired by Apple

00:57:21   and this is, he has been a big part apparently

00:57:25   of putting this product,

00:57:28   Beats 1 Worldwide Streaming Radio Channel together.

00:57:32   - So apparently the idea for Beats 1

00:57:34   came from the mind of Trent Reznor.

00:57:37   And he was, I think from the quotes that I've read,

00:57:40   seen it as kind of like a what if we could do this

00:57:45   and what would it be like kind of experiment.

00:57:48   Like let's try this and see if it would work

00:57:50   because his thinking was like,

00:57:52   can a radio station exist in today's music world?

00:57:57   Like can you do it because people are now used

00:58:01   to choosing so much music.

00:58:03   can a singular focused mind create a content

00:58:07   that people want to listen to, right?

00:58:09   So they obviously set out on this journey

00:58:12   and found the man for the job, Zane Lowe.

00:58:14   So I've mentioned it before, Zane Lowe,

00:58:18   I believe, yeah, he's from New Zealand,

00:58:19   and he has been in the UK for many, many years

00:58:22   working for the BBC Radio One.

00:58:25   And he has been known as one of the best

00:58:28   interviewers in music.

00:58:30   His interviews are just incredible.

00:58:32   just go onto YouTube type in Zane Lowe and maybe your favorite artist of maybe

00:58:37   the last 10 or 15 years is probably in an interview with them if there is a guarantee

00:58:41   it's gonna be fantastic and actually his first interview on Beats 1 which I'm so

00:58:46   pleased that he I did we didn't know if he was gonna be doing this but he is and

00:58:50   he's gonna be interviewing Eminem yeah I think the interview has been done

00:58:55   because they've released some photos but we'll find out what it kind of what

00:59:00   it's about and what's gonna happen there. I'm really

00:59:02   excited to see a little bit more of that and to hear a

00:59:04   little bit more of that as well. So, that's gonna be part

00:59:06   of the whole Beats One thing. Uh. See, I just, I just did

00:59:10   your little uh Google test and but it doesn't, it doesn't

00:59:12   work for me because um he's from New Zealand and so, of

00:59:16   course, Zane Lowe and Neil Finn from Crowded House have

00:59:18   have done like a billion things together and did a

00:59:20   fundraiser for the earthquake and stuff like that. So, uh

00:59:24   but you win. You win. Zane Lowe has, he's interviewed

00:59:26   everyone. Um so, I'm excited that they're gonna be doing

00:59:29   that a big place to start with M&M. I put a link to The Verge, they had a little

00:59:34   write-up about it and they embedded the video of his interview with M&M on

00:59:39   Radio One so you can kind of get a flair for what's gonna be there. But

00:59:43   what I've found out about in the last week or so that I'm most

00:59:49   excited about is the programming in general. So Beats 1 launches the same

00:59:54   basically an hour after the iOS update which is crazy that they are doing it

01:00:00   this way because everyone will want to be tuning in right to that first

01:00:05   broadcast. There's a bunch of stuff that we don't know yet like if the broadcast

01:00:08   will be available on demand or anything like that because it's not just gonna be

01:00:13   kind of Zane and Julie Adenuga and Ebro Dardan. I don't know Ebro at all.

01:00:22   I believe that he's based in... he's the guy who's gonna be based in LA, while

01:00:27   Julia Adenuga, who's been on the radio here for many years in different guys, is

01:00:31   gonna be based in London, and then Zayn is based in San Francisco, maybe

01:00:36   AirBros in New York or something, I don't know. But anyway, so as well as the three

01:00:44   of them just playing kind of what's new in music, they have tapped up a bunch of

01:00:48   musicians to have their own programming so Pharrell is gonna be having his own

01:00:54   show Dr. Dre a disclosure who are great. Oh they got Dr. Dre for Beats 1 too?

01:00:59   Yeah that guy! That guy! He's all over this service. And also the one I am the most excited about is Elton John.

01:01:08   Yep. And the show this is the one that's getting the most press it's gonna be

01:01:14   called Elton John's Rocket Hour which is just so incredible. I don't know again I

01:01:20   don't if people don't know much about Elton John they might not know why this

01:01:24   is significant other than the fact that he is a popular musician. Elton John is

01:01:28   considered to be one of the world's biggest music fans like I've read

01:01:32   reports like in interviews of him and stuff like he buys you know I've heard

01:01:36   this is probably an exaggeration because an idea like all of the singles in a

01:01:41   week just listens to them all and I've you know there there are a bunch of

01:01:44   stories of new artists especially in the UK who will say that like very early on

01:01:49   in their career they received a phone call from Elton John to for him to tell

01:01:54   them how much he liked the music this is a very frequent story in young artists

01:01:58   in the UK like so he will find you and he will give you a telephone call and

01:02:02   say how much he enjoys and we'll talk to them about their music so I and this

01:02:06   apparently Elton John's Rocket Hour is gonna feature new and classic stuff and

01:02:12   I am very excited to hear what the programming schedule is like because

01:02:16   that's one that I will never want to miss and this is exciting to me as an

01:02:21   idea to create content like this which is unmissable today and if so I would

01:02:28   like them to have a on-demand service for this stuff but in a way I kind of

01:02:35   don't want them to do it because I think it would be a lot more powerful if Apple

01:02:42   able to create something that makes people tune into something at a specific

01:02:46   hour and I even you could even get a notification right yeah I'm sure they

01:02:52   would be crazy if they didn't but just that that ideas is very romantic right

01:02:57   all of beats one is a very romantic like you know nostalgic idea but if they you

01:03:03   know if you can imagine people all sitting down at like 8 p.m. on a

01:03:08   Tuesday and tuning in to Elton John's rocket hour if that's what it's gonna be

01:03:14   for example. So isn't the idea of Beats 1 completely contrary to the idea behind

01:03:20   Apple Music in that one is completely your choice, everything on demand, and the

01:03:25   other is a stream of other people's choices that you just have to turn on

01:03:29   and listen to? Do they fit at all? Or are they opposites or are they complementary?

01:03:34   The reason I think this is because part of what is said to make Apple Music great is

01:03:39   the curation. And so if you imagine completely your choice, then in the middle you have curation

01:03:45   like Beats does with the playlists and the artists you should check out. And on the other

01:03:49   side of that is complete curation you have no choice over. So you imagine you've got

01:03:57   the two opposites. You've got completely your choice, completely not your choice,

01:04:00   and in the middle is suggested curation that you can pick from. So I think with

01:04:05   with Apple Music they are spanning all of the different ways in which you can

01:04:10   consume music. I think I'm doing a better job of explaining this than they did.

01:04:15   So you can kind of imagine at this point that what you have is any way you like to consume

01:04:20   music this can be presented to you and you can also find out about new things

01:04:24   in different ways, whether that be through listening to Beats 1 or by

01:04:28   listening to the music that is suggested to you by looking in your music library,

01:04:33   which is part human creation. Because, you know, people are putting together the

01:04:37   playlists, then there's a computer that looks at what you listen to and suggests

01:04:40   this human-created playlist to you. So I think that by doing this they're kind of

01:04:44   spanning it all. I have a couple reactions to this that I wanted to

01:04:49   mention. One is, so we have satellite radio in our minivan and

01:04:54   and the bit rate is so, it's so terrible,

01:04:57   but it's really cheap and convenient

01:05:00   when you're making a long car ride,

01:05:01   which we're actually gonna be doing several of

01:05:03   in the next couple of weeks.

01:05:04   But it is, so it, but it's, you know, it's radio,

01:05:09   it's like this, it's curated.

01:05:12   But one of the things that always strikes me about it

01:05:14   in the modern age is how having data with us wherever we go

01:05:19   is going to make something like satellite radio

01:05:22   kind of irrelevant, I feel like, because eventually you'll just be able to listen to the internet,

01:05:29   anything, anywhere, and you won't need that stuff transmitted by a satellite and there'll

01:05:32   be more choices. I think it's interesting that Beats 1 is that, and it's not the first

01:05:39   internet radio station, but it is like a major commercial radio station being launched just

01:05:44   on the internet, and I think that's interesting. The other point I wanted to make is, you mention

01:05:49   about these being events, I wonder if there'll be something like, I mean, they've already

01:05:53   lifted this concept from the BBC, I wonder if they will also lift the concept of the

01:05:57   listen again kind of thing, where for seven days certain programs or interviews are available

01:06:02   within the app for you to play back later in, but that there's a feeling like if you

01:06:07   missed it, you got a short period of time where you can listen, but then it kind of

01:06:10   goes away. Because that would be maybe a way to split the difference, where yes, we would

01:06:15   like everybody to listen live but that's not realistic so we'll give people you

01:06:18   know essentially a catch-up service for a short period of time and then it'll go

01:06:22   away I don't know I kind of have this I mean one of the reasons that I hope that

01:06:28   that they do do that is depending on how they broadcast this some shows not going

01:06:34   to be listened be listenable certain hours of different people right but

01:06:38   there is also a potential where in the idea of worldwide that they time shift a

01:06:43   a lot of these things we don't know yet.

01:06:45   Like, will it be 12 p.m. local time

01:06:49   that something is played?

01:06:51   Or will it be 12 p.m. San Francisco time,

01:06:53   whatever that time is for you around the world?

01:06:56   Yeah, I don't know if they've said

01:06:58   that it's gonna be live yet.

01:07:00   So, you know, there are a bunch of different ways

01:07:02   that this kind of stuff can be done.

01:07:03   And so, I'm, that Beats 1 is the thing

01:07:07   that I am the most excited about for this reason.

01:07:10   But I do kind of have this fantasy idea of it's,

01:07:14   let's say that Elton John's Rocket Hour

01:07:17   is at 8 p.m. Pacific time, and that's the time it is, right?

01:07:21   So I listen to it at whatever time that will be

01:07:24   on Goodly Hour in the morning or something.

01:07:26   Let's just say for example's sake.

01:07:29   And I imagine people on Twitter commenting

01:07:31   about the music that's being played.

01:07:33   Like there is just this idea to me of how nice that would be

01:07:37   if people, you know, a show, any show on Beats 1,

01:07:41   becomes popular enough that a bunch of your friends

01:07:43   listen to it as well, and you can comment about it

01:07:46   on social media in the same way that people talk

01:07:48   about TV shows in real time when they're being broadcast.

01:07:51   And I think that there would be something very nice

01:07:53   in that for music, which I'm excited about.

01:07:56   My only concern is we have a lot of celebrities here.

01:08:02   How are Apple going to make sure that these shows

01:08:06   maintained. There are a lot of people with extremely busy schedules

01:08:12   and I wonder if they've put these people in contracts or they're in goodwill

01:08:17   agreements or like how this is gonna be done because if Dre's show becomes super

01:08:22   popular but Dre has more important things to do well then again I guess

01:08:25   these days he's just an Apple executive so he can do whatever he's probably just

01:08:28   working on products and you know music streaming service deals but you get my

01:08:33   point like Pharrell for example, when Pharrell goes on a tour like does he

01:08:36   show stop like how are they gonna manage that and I'm interested to see how that

01:08:40   stuff's gonna work. Maybe although also you've got to keep in mind that radio a

01:08:45   lot of radio programming somebody comes in for you know a day and records weeks

01:08:52   worth of material because you know they don't they don't necessarily have to sit

01:08:57   there and listen to the song right they know where their songs are playing and

01:09:01   and they know when they need to talk,

01:09:03   and they record those bits,

01:09:04   and then it all gets programmed.

01:09:06   And unless Apple is going against that,

01:09:08   and they're like, "No, no,

01:09:09   "Elden John's gonna sit there for the entire hour,

01:09:10   "and he's gonna listen to the music."

01:09:12   And they could do that too.

01:09:13   You know, it's running a radio station.

01:09:15   I think presumably they've got people in place

01:09:18   who are doing the Beats 1 thing,

01:09:19   who are essentially radio station executive types,

01:09:24   in a good way, not a bad way,

01:09:25   but still that know how to do this.

01:09:27   Or maybe it's limited run,

01:09:29   they've got them for 10 weeks or and then you know Pharrell will go off but

01:09:33   somebody else will come on I will have to see it's it'll be interesting given

01:09:37   that it's worldwide and it's Apple it will have more scrutiny than a lot of

01:09:40   other you know radio stations or other kind of things would have but this is

01:09:46   you know Beats won Beats they really made a the right deal with this

01:09:51   acquisition because that that brand is so perfect for this you're very excited

01:09:55   about this aren't you? I'm really excited about this. This is the thing that I'm

01:09:59   most excited about about Apple Music because streaming is streaming. I've had

01:10:03   streaming music on my phone for years. This is something slightly different and

01:10:08   it's something that excites me. Alright I can tell. It's gonna be really sad when

01:10:15   Apple hires you away from Relay to Mastermind Beats 4. I'll take the job.

01:10:24   Okay. There aren't many jobs I would take but that's one I would consider. In case

01:10:30   Apple's listening. They're not listening. They're not listening, no. But if they were...

01:10:36   If they were. Okay so you took receipt I think like just after the show yesterday.

01:10:44   Yesterday? Last week. Last week. Last week. During the show last week. Was it actually

01:10:50   during? Well we had so many technical problems that it was actually in in the

01:10:55   in between time between yes during the show last week. So you took receipt of a

01:11:02   refurbished iPad Air 2 of which you have loaded iOS 9 on it and I'm wondering

01:11:06   how you feel? Indeed. Well it's you know it's a beta it's beta 2 it's early things don't

01:11:13   entirely work third-party apps have issues but it's been fun to play with it

01:11:20   It's been fun. I have an iPad mini, so mini two,

01:11:25   I guess technically, it's the Retina,

01:11:26   first Retina iPad mini.

01:11:28   So having the larger iPad has been interesting.

01:11:32   I like it.

01:11:32   I'm tempted to switch back to the larger iPad

01:11:35   from the smaller iPad, 'cause I do like the big screen.

01:11:38   The multitasking, the problem with the multitasking

01:11:42   and the slide over is that it only works

01:11:44   in the Apple apps right now.

01:11:45   There are no third party apps in beta that support it.

01:11:49   TestFlight, I believe, doesn't let you have iOS 9 apps

01:11:54   in TestFlight at this point, not yet anyway.

01:11:57   So I haven't been able to test that stuff out yet,

01:12:00   which is, you know, that's the stuff I really wanna do.

01:12:02   Right, you know, I wanna get Twitter-ific

01:12:04   running in SlideOver.

01:12:06   But, you know, the picture-in-picture thing

01:12:09   kinda blew me away.

01:12:10   I was playing a movie just, you know, from iTunes

01:12:13   in the corner of the screen while having the Notes app open

01:12:16   and then switching to a different app

01:12:18   and the movie just kept playing.

01:12:19   And I thought, okay, that's gonna be big.

01:12:21   'Cause I know a lot of people who work that way,

01:12:22   who they just set something running

01:12:24   and then they go about their business

01:12:27   while the video plays

01:12:28   and they kind of half pay attention to it.

01:12:30   And that's really nice.

01:12:32   So, you know, San Francisco font

01:12:34   takes some getting used to,

01:12:36   but I think is pretty.

01:12:38   The app switcher I'm really liking.

01:12:41   It's with like the stack of cards

01:12:45   instead of the boxes sort of next to each other.

01:12:48   That's pretty nice.

01:12:49   Beta one was kind of a mess,

01:12:53   but beta two actually seems to be much more stable.

01:12:57   But you know, it's a beta.

01:13:00   I've been enjoying it.

01:13:02   I downloaded an app that's a newsstand app

01:13:04   and it's not in the newsstand

01:13:05   'cause there's no newsstand.

01:13:06   That was kind of fun.

01:13:07   And yeah, the new keyboard is good.

01:13:13   the idea that you can tell whether it's upper or lowercase,

01:13:16   'cause it actually will show you if the shift key's pressed.

01:13:19   It shows you the uppercase letters,

01:13:20   the shift key's not pressed, it doesn't.

01:13:22   It shows you the lowercase letters.

01:13:23   - I like that.

01:13:24   - That's pretty nice.

01:13:25   But yeah, but for me, the huge thing

01:13:28   and the one that I can't test yet

01:13:30   because it's just too early

01:13:32   is how third-party apps are gonna run.

01:13:35   Because the third-party app ecosystem,

01:13:37   it's so important to,

01:13:39   when you're talking about productivity with an iPad,

01:13:43   that you really wanna have your favorite third party apps

01:13:46   available in split screen or slide over

01:13:49   or picture in picture, right?

01:13:50   I mean, I can't take Netflix or Major League Baseball

01:13:54   and put those in picture in picture yet either.

01:13:57   Only things that can play in Safari or in the video app.

01:14:01   So it's early days, but I'm encouraged by it.

01:14:05   These are really cool features.

01:14:07   I just, it is a trip to have like Safari

01:14:10   and the Notes app open side by side

01:14:12   and be able to scroll both of them

01:14:14   and have the keyboard slide up

01:14:17   and you end up in this weird position

01:14:19   where you have to think about where your insertion point is

01:14:23   because your insertion point is in one of the apps,

01:14:27   not the other app.

01:14:28   The keyboard covers both,

01:14:30   but you're only typing into one of them.

01:14:32   So it's a little weird,

01:14:34   but I'm not sure there's any better way to do it.

01:14:36   I wouldn't want a partial keyboard to slide up

01:14:39   over one of the apps.

01:14:40   that would be no good.

01:14:42   You want to take the full space of it.

01:14:46   So yeah, I'm getting used to it,

01:14:48   but it's been a lot of fun to try it out.

01:14:50   And I'm looking forward to the third-party apps.

01:14:53   I feel like that's the big missing piece here.

01:14:56   And that's nobody's fault.

01:14:57   I mean, the developers have to work on it.

01:14:59   Apple has to support it.

01:15:01   Getting betas of new apps on the new OS version

01:15:04   is always difficult before the OS launches,

01:15:07   But so far, so good, I would say.

01:15:10   - I am very excited about some of these things,

01:15:17   like the picture-in-picture stuff is really cool,

01:15:20   and I look forward to having that in apps like YouTube.

01:15:23   Right, I'm just gonna assume

01:15:25   they're gonna put it in there.

01:15:26   - I assume.

01:15:27   - And I also, like you, anticipating third-party applications

01:15:34   and how they work and how they will work

01:15:37   with the multitasking stuff, 'cause it is super cool,

01:15:41   but I really, really want more apps

01:15:43   to be able to use it with, you know?

01:15:45   And so I'm excited.

01:15:47   I think that this is great, like, for the iPad.

01:15:51   This is great to have this stuff.

01:15:54   There is still, you know, as you say,

01:15:55   San Francisco font kind of makes it feel

01:15:57   a little bit like bizarro land.

01:16:00   - It's just a little weird to see that,

01:16:02   because it doesn't seem quite right.

01:16:04   But, oh, and I should say the two finger cursor movement

01:16:09   thing is also pretty weird and great.

01:16:11   - Yeah, once you work out how to not select text, right?

01:16:16   - Right.

01:16:18   - And just move it around, so like you have to tap

01:16:20   and then drag to select text.

01:16:22   - Tap basically toggles between

01:16:24   selection and non-selection.

01:16:26   - Once you work that out, which took me a few minutes,

01:16:30   you're good to go.

01:16:31   See, I'm excited for this.

01:16:32   There are, you know, there's a lot more in there

01:16:37   for the iPad than there is for the iPhone.

01:16:40   But nevertheless, I'm excited to see

01:16:46   how we go in September with this.

01:16:47   And maybe there'll be more to talk about

01:16:48   between now and then.

01:16:49   But for today's episode, we should get into some Ask Upgrade,

01:16:54   and that means a message from our good friends

01:16:57   over at MailRoute.

01:16:59   Yes, Ask Upgrade this week, as usual,

01:17:02   brought to you by MailRoute.

01:17:05   Imagine a world without spam, viruses, or bounced email.

01:17:07   Who could bring you that world?

01:17:10   The answer is email nerds,

01:17:11   people who live and breathe email,

01:17:14   people who care about email more than anything else.

01:17:17   And that's the people who founded MailRoute.

01:17:19   These are the people at MailRoute.

01:17:20   They are email experts,

01:17:22   and what they've set up with MailRoute

01:17:23   is a cloud-based service that protects your server,

01:17:26   not just your mailbox, but your entire mail server

01:17:29   from the evil, evil people who send terrible email

01:17:32   through the internet.

01:17:33   The way it works is you point your MX record,

01:17:36   which is the thing in the domain name system that says,

01:17:40   send all the email to this computer.

01:17:42   And then that computer has to take everything in

01:17:45   that anyone tries to send to it.

01:17:46   You point that at mail route.

01:17:48   Mail route takes it in,

01:17:49   they use their intelligence software

01:17:51   to determine whether it's good mail or bad mail.

01:17:54   The bad mail gets put in a holding bin,

01:17:56   the good mail then gets delivered to your mail server.

01:17:59   So your mail server has much less load.

01:18:01   It's getting a lot less email.

01:18:03   It's getting a lot less connections from weird servers

01:18:06   that are trying to see if they can figure out

01:18:08   what the available email accounts are on that server.

01:18:12   That stuff doesn't happen.

01:18:13   Mail route is in the way.

01:18:14   Mail route stops them and blocks them

01:18:17   from attaching to your server.

01:18:19   So all your server gets and all your inbox gets

01:18:21   is good mail.

01:18:23   You don't have to maintain any hardware or software.

01:18:25   Mail route does the sorting and delivering for you.

01:18:28   It's easy to set up, it's super easy to set up,

01:18:30   and it is reliable.

01:18:31   I've been using it for a couple of years.

01:18:33   I found it incredibly reliable.

01:18:35   Big universities and corporations trust it.

01:18:37   It's super easy to use.

01:18:39   I get an email once a day that says,

01:18:40   here's what mail route filtered out.

01:18:42   With one click, if something was misfiltered,

01:18:45   I can deliver it and have that person whitelisted,

01:18:47   and so their mail will pass through forevermore.

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01:18:53   they've got all the tools that you need.

01:18:55   There's an API for easy account management

01:18:57   and support for all of your favorite email related buzzwords,

01:19:00   including LDAP, Active Directory, TLS, mailbagging,

01:19:04   mailbagging, outbound relay,

01:19:06   everything you would want from the people

01:19:08   who handle your mail.

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01:19:22   And all listeners to upgrade can receive 10% off

01:19:25   for the lifetime of your account, go to mailroute.net/upgrade now. That's mailroute.net/upgrade. And thank

01:19:33   you to MailRoute for sponsoring Ask Upgrade.

01:19:37   So, our first Ask Upgrade question this week comes from Jeff. Jeff says, "One of the best

01:19:44   parts of the Ask Upgrade is waiting for you, for me, and how I will say 'mailbagging' as

01:19:49   I just did. Would you like to explain it sometime?" I fear that this might have just been something

01:19:53   and it got lost along the way

01:19:55   as we've been doing this for so long.

01:19:56   - We did explain, somebody did send us a link

01:19:59   explaining what mail bagging is.

01:20:00   And it sounds like mail bagging is a system

01:20:02   where if a server is unreachable,

01:20:05   the mail is queued up in a mail bag essentially,

01:20:08   and then delivered to the server

01:20:10   once the server comes back online.

01:20:12   So the idea there would be that mail route supports this

01:20:16   so that if your server goes down,

01:20:17   mail route would be able to hold onto the mail

01:20:20   and then deliver it later.

01:20:23   But I'm not an email expert, but that's my understanding

01:20:25   about more or less what mailbagging is.

01:20:27   It's a service that lets you collect mail

01:20:30   and then send it all off in a batch

01:20:32   in order to improve reliability.

01:20:35   -And maybe more importantly, the reason that I say mailbagging

01:20:38   in a new and more and more exciting way every single week

01:20:42   is purely because the first time that MailRoute sponsored us,

01:20:46   many, many, many months ago now,

01:20:48   when Jason said mailbagging, I just laughed.

01:20:54   - Well, I think we both did,

01:20:57   'cause we didn't know what it was and it sounded funny.

01:20:59   And that is literally the only reason.

01:21:01   And we also got feedback from somebody who said

01:21:02   that they're tired of us saying mailbagging,

01:21:05   which we're not gonna stop,

01:21:06   but we promise not to explain it every week.

01:21:08   - Yep, so that's- - It's a subtle,

01:21:10   it'll be subtle.

01:21:11   - Yes, mailbagging.

01:21:12   - It's a little Easter egg for those people

01:21:14   who are kind enough to listen to our sponsors,

01:21:17   which we appreciate because Myke and I

01:21:19   support ourselves through podcasting.

01:21:22   So we appreciate you listening to our sponsors.

01:21:24   - Bartek would like to know,

01:21:26   does the new Spotlight search in El Capitan show,

01:21:30   like for example, show me my documents

01:21:32   I worked on last week, also allow search by location?

01:21:35   Jason, do you know this?

01:21:36   - I don't know this.

01:21:37   I'm looking forward to learning more about El Capitan.

01:21:39   I haven't spent a lot of time with it,

01:21:43   but I'm hoping that as we get closer

01:21:45   to the public beta release

01:21:47   that I'll have more to say about it.

01:21:48   I'm not sworn to secrecy about it right now.

01:21:51   I honestly don't know.

01:21:52   And I think one of the things about the new search features

01:21:55   is that they're evolving as the betas are evolving too.

01:21:58   It would be nice.

01:22:00   Although I have to ask Bartek,

01:22:01   do you mean searching by the location on your hard drive

01:22:04   or by the location of where the files were made?

01:22:07   'Cause that would be funny.

01:22:08   It's like what picture documents I worked on

01:22:11   when my laptop was at work.

01:22:12   I don't think those get saved, I don't think it's geotagging your file.

01:22:15   I don't know, that would be nice if you could say like in the project folder, but I'm not

01:22:20   sure it can do that.

01:22:22   I'll let you know, I've got a lot more time I need to spend with El Capitan.

01:22:27   Tim has asked, "Since you have both done scripted podcasts now, what are your methods or thoughts

01:22:32   on how to get the ideas that you have to a spoken language script?"

01:22:38   One of the best ways that I found when I was really stuck, I would just fire up Siri and

01:22:45   dictate because my thinking was, "This is eventually going to come back out of my mouth

01:22:53   again.

01:22:54   Why don't I start by saying it and then I can edit it and then refine it and then speak

01:23:00   it again?"

01:23:01   And when I was really stuck, that would really, really help me.

01:23:07   I guess what I would say is, calling it outlining is probably overstating it,

01:23:16   but what I tried to do was I was thinking of points I wanted to hit

01:23:19   and topics I wanted to cover. And since I had a bunch of interviews, what I did was I took,

01:23:25   I wrote a script with, it started as not a script,

01:23:29   it started as a collection of quotes

01:23:31   about the different topics.

01:23:33   So I knew what order I wanted to cover the topics

01:23:35   and I knew what my interviewees had said about those topics.

01:23:40   And that's where I started.

01:23:41   And I knew those topics sort of going into the interviews,

01:23:46   although some of the interviews went in directions

01:23:47   that were unexpected, but I generally knew

01:23:49   sort of what I wanted to cover.

01:23:51   I wouldn't call it an outline,

01:23:52   it's not like I sat down and had a whole big outline,

01:23:54   but I knew some issues.

01:23:56   And then I collected the interviews

01:23:58   and had them transcribed and collected like what they said

01:24:03   about the different topics together.

01:24:04   And then I actually went into a script writing program

01:24:08   and I sat there and I wrote a script.

01:24:10   And I didn't read it out.

01:24:12   I just typed it because I'm comfortable doing that

01:24:14   because I write a lot, that's what I do.

01:24:17   And that's how I did it is I ended up sort of writing

01:24:22   what I was going to say and copying and pasting

01:24:24   in the parts of what my subjects were saying

01:24:27   that I knew I wanted to use

01:24:29   and writing what I needed to to bridge that material.

01:24:32   So I would say, you know, not really an outline,

01:24:35   but having a loose structure.

01:24:37   And then for me, I was writing what I was gonna say,

01:24:40   typing it instead of reading it like Myke.

01:24:43   - The majority of the scripts that I wrote,

01:24:47   I did write the same way that you did.

01:24:49   But when I got really stuck,

01:24:51   I would go to dictation.

01:24:53   - And just talk, there's something to that.

01:24:56   I mean, I at one point thought that maybe what I should do

01:24:59   is just press record and talk and just see what happens.

01:25:04   And if anything good came out, then like go back to that

01:25:07   and play it back and write it down, which is similar.

01:25:11   - Robert asked, could Jason and Myke randomly turn off

01:25:16   Dan Morin's lights once an episode?

01:25:18   Jason?

01:25:20   Alexa, turn off the light.

01:25:21   - So yes, and finally from Jim,

01:25:26   this is my favorite ever,

01:25:28   we're having our second child today

01:25:30   and don't yet know the sex.

01:25:32   What's your guess?

01:25:33   - Jim, it's a girl.

01:25:35   - It's a girl, Jim.

01:25:36   Congratulations to Jim and partner

01:25:39   on the birth of their second child today.

01:25:41   And I hope that Jim will allow us,

01:25:43   will permit us to give some follow up next week

01:25:48   onto the sex of his child.

01:25:51   Dan Morin left our chat room like a minute before that Ask Upgrade question.

01:25:55   Maybe he knew he was warned it was coming?

01:25:58   Not by me.

01:25:59   Spies.

01:26:00   We'll see.

01:26:01   Oh well.

01:26:02   We'll see.

01:26:03   Well I'll get you next time Morin.

01:26:06   Next time.

01:26:08   Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade.

01:26:11   If you'd like to find show notes for today's episode you can point your web browser at

01:26:14   relay.fm/upgrade/43 or they will be in your podcast app of choice if they observe the

01:26:22   sanctity of show notes in the correct and proper way. If you'd like to find Jason online

01:26:26   you can do that at sixcolors.com and he is on Twitter @jsnell, J S N E double L. Do you

01:26:32   have any other social networks that you would like to promote Jason? And if you ask.

01:26:36   >> No. >> Okay.

01:26:37   >> Find me on Twitter. >> Find him on Twitter and I am @imike, I

01:26:41   and

01:27:06   and we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye Mr. Snow.

01:27:10   Goodbye everybody!

01:27:12   [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:27:16   [ Music ]