Connected

00:00:00 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:00:02 ◼   ► Hello and welcome to Connected, episode 255.

00:00:12 ◼   ► It's made possible this week by our sponsors,

00:00:14 ◼   ► Squarespace, Hover, and Care/Of.

00:00:17 ◼   ► My name is Steven Hackett and I am joined by Myke Hurley.

00:00:21 ◼   ► - Hello. - Hey, buddy.

00:00:22 ◼   ► - Hello.

00:00:25 ◼   ► - I don't have anyone else to introduce.

00:00:27 ◼   ► - No. - It's just us.

00:00:29 ◼   ► Federico's taking his annual vacation right now.

00:00:32 ◼   ► Where I think he actually, it's not like a vacation vacation, because I think he mostly

00:00:37 ◼   ► takes it so he can focus on the review I think.

00:00:40 ◼   ► I think his body is on vacation, but his brain is working.

00:00:43 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's probably what it is.

00:00:45 ◼   ► We don't hear from him very much over this period of time.

00:00:48 ◼   ► So like, we can only, we can only at this point assume that Federico Vatici is still

00:00:52 ◼   ► on this earth.

00:00:53 ◼   ► We can only assume.

00:00:54 ◼   ► I haven't heard from him in days, I think, at this point.

00:00:58 ◼   ► He sent us a picture of some jewelry yesterday, but that was it.

00:01:01 ◼   ► Which isn't that unusual really.

00:01:03 ◼   ► No, I mean that could have been anyone.

00:01:05 ◼   ► That could have been someone pretending to be him.

00:01:07 ◼   ► I'm gonna check his tweets.

00:01:08 ◼   ► Has he been tweeting?

00:01:09 ◼   ► Let me see.

00:01:10 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:01:11 ◼   ► Not really.

00:01:12 ◼   ► I mean he's been retweeting some stuff, but that could be anyone.

00:01:15 ◼   ► Honestly that could be an automation run amok.

00:01:18 ◼   ► That's probably it.

00:01:19 ◼   ► I wonder how long he could be gone for and we not realize it because shortcuts are still

00:01:25 ◼   ► running.

00:01:26 ◼   ► And we wouldn't know.

00:01:27 ◼   ► keep happening and it's like we just like oh like now we haven't heard from him but

00:01:31 ◼   ► he is doing this or he is doing that so he must still be alive he just doesn't text very

00:01:37 ◼   ► much because when during this time of year especially i feel like we just don't hear

00:01:42 ◼   ► from him because like you know he just gets really i understand that he just gets really

00:01:46 ◼   ► like focused right on on getting the work done so that's kind of all he's doing 24/7

00:01:53 ◼   ► is awake. It's not like completely 24/7 but you know what I mean. So yeah I guess the

00:01:58 ◼   ► automations could just keep running and nobody would ever know. I know. It's chilling.

00:02:02 ◼   ► Did we just write an episode of Black Mirror? Maybe. I think that's what that show is about.

00:02:07 ◼   ► I don't watch it. I don't. But I think that's what that show is about. Let's talk about art.

00:02:11 ◼   ► We spoke last time about... You should be playing some classical music right now underneath while

00:02:17 ◼   ► we talk about this part. Well that's the show intro. You can't go back to that well too often.

00:02:21 ◼   ► a different piece of music. That's a lot of work. That would take literally weeks.

00:02:26 ◼   ► Well, to play a piece of classical music underneath the audio. That is true. People

00:02:32 ◼   ► don't know how those types of shows get put together. It takes weeks. Weeks and six people

00:02:36 ◼   ► and four producers and an office in New York. I'm going to need a producer and an editor

00:02:40 ◼   ► and an assistant editor and an assistant to the editor and uh and uh. And an office in Brooklyn.

00:02:46 ◼   ► Brooklyn has the right audio environment for shows with music underneath them.

00:02:51 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:02:54 ◼   ► So, we spoke about Dr. Durang's photo of me putting Ram in Rose Orchard's Mac Mini,

00:02:59 ◼   ► and someone on the show, maybe Federico, maybe you, someone said it looked like some sort of

00:03:05 ◼   ► Renaissance painting, and Dr. Durang linked to it and said, "Yes, I took it because it reminded me

00:03:10 ◼   ► of the Last Supper. People watching Steven are like the apostles." Isn't that incredible?

00:03:16 ◼   ► I would like to ask you as a question, and I don't mean any disrespect,

00:03:19 ◼   ► but as a religious man it's a little weird how do you feel okay cool just check it just check in

00:03:25 ◼   ► like you know i mean it wouldn't bother me personally but like i just wonder how you

00:03:29 ◼   ► like being called the jesus of this situation i don't view myself as the messiah of the max but

00:03:34 ◼   ► you know maxiah wow it's gonna go register that domain however drang disagreed with feta rico's

00:03:44 ◼   ► comment or maybe Myke's comment, it's unknown, but it was definitely Myke, about the golden spiral.

00:03:50 ◼   ► So anyways, we're sorry Dr. Drang. What did he say? That he was going for a da Vinci-like

00:03:56 ◼   ► triangular construction. I really enjoy the fact that Drang thought of this whilst and before

00:04:02 ◼   ► taking the photo. It's a glimpse into how his mind works. Everything is just shapes and lines

00:04:08 ◼   ► in his brain and I guess possible failure points. Okay, Myke, we have some really long-term follow-up.

00:04:15 ◼   ► You texted me earlier today, we're talking about the show, and he said, "Hey, I want to update

00:04:18 ◼   ► people on my usage of RSS." We spoke about this, I don't know, months ago, how you were going to

00:04:24 ◼   ► resurrect RSS. That's what RSS stands for, resurrected simple syndication.

00:04:30 ◼   ► Resurrected, resurrected sometimes stupidly.

00:04:33 ◼   ► And you are using this over Twitter for news or you're going to try to do it. So anyways,

00:04:36 ◼   ► how's it going?

00:04:37 ◼   ► Well, I guess the follow up goes back maybe a little bit further than that in the sense of me moving from tweetbot to the Twitter app.

00:04:44 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:04:45 ◼   ► Right, and like, right, because the, and I said this at the time, like I wanted to try it and then I realized that a side effect of using the Twitter app is that you find yourself using Twitter differently because the Twitter app is kind of focused on that, right?

00:04:58 ◼   ► Like, it is focused on providing a different experience. It is focused on providing the experience that it wants to provide, not necessarily the one that you want, right?

00:05:07 ◼   ► right? Like and that's just that's the prerogative of twitter to do but i will say that if you want

00:05:13 ◼   ► to spend less time on twitter which i did for various reasons which i think are different to

00:05:18 ◼   ► the typical reasons i mean like typically people say like i don't want to be on twitter because

00:05:24 ◼   ► twitter is a place of nazis and blah blah blah and i'm not denying all of that but like that wasn't

00:05:29 ◼   ► where i was coming from it's just like i spent too much time using this service like it was just

00:05:34 ◼   ► a pure like my self-control problem over a service is bad problem you know what I mean?

00:05:40 ◼   ► Like I'm not saying that that's not the case and I understand why it's the case for many people

00:05:44 ◼   ► but I feel like at this point I've done a pretty good job of getting my follower list and who I

00:05:50 ◼   ► follow and what I'm seeing retweet-wise that I don't get a lot of what I don't want to see

00:05:56 ◼   ► in my timeline like I feel like I've done pretty good at that over time but really it was just like

00:06:01 ◼   ► I just wanted to reduce the amount of time that I was spending on Twitter, reducing my

00:06:05 ◼   ► reliance on it as a news source because I would get the news that I wanted, but it's

00:06:12 ◼   ► also intermixed with a bunch of stuff that I don't necessarily want, which could be like

00:06:17 ◼   ► what is the drama of the day that maybe I don't care about, or maybe it is about 30

00:06:21 ◼   ► to 50 hogs coming to hurt my children. Did you see this yesterday? It was very funny.

00:06:28 ◼   ► I did enjoy my time reading this meme.

00:06:31 ◼   ► It was very good.

00:06:32 ◼   ► It's like one of those memes that just, it had a 24 hour window and it was gone.

00:06:37 ◼   ► I feel like I missed it.

00:06:38 ◼   ► And it was completely gone.

00:06:39 ◼   ► Yeah, you missed it.

00:06:40 ◼   ► Like it was one of those things that everyone was tweeting about it.

00:06:42 ◼   ► It made no sense when you found out what it meant.

00:06:44 ◼   ► It still made no sense.

00:06:45 ◼   ► But by that point it was funny.

00:06:47 ◼   ► So you know, like, you know, that kind of stuff.

00:06:49 ◼   ► It's like, it's funny and I want to be involved in it when I want it, but I don't want to

00:06:54 ◼   ► have to see all of that stuff all the time.

00:06:58 ◼   ► Basically, I wanted to turn Twitter into recreation, right?

00:07:02 ◼   ► As opposed to becoming, being like this pivotal part of the way that I work.

00:07:08 ◼   ► And I've tried to use RSS a bunch in the past, but then the problem was, I felt like, oh,

00:07:12 ◼   ► I'm just seeing the same things in multiple places because I'm reading them and then I'm

00:07:16 ◼   ► going to Twitter and reading them because I was just doing my like, what is it called

00:07:21 ◼   ► when you, a completionist mindset of reading tweets through Tweetbot in reverse chronological

00:07:26 ◼   ► order.

00:07:27 ◼   ► So one of the things that I noticed was as I was using the Twitter app more, I was using

00:07:31 ◼   ► Twitter less. Right now screen time is putting me at like between one to two hours less a

00:07:38 ◼   ► week of using Twitter, which is great. When it was, you know, like before it wasn't like

00:07:43 ◼   ► 100 hours, it was like five or six hours and now it's down by like an hour or two on a

00:07:48 ◼   ► weekly basis, which is, I mean, that's what I wanted to see. I don't feel like I've worked

00:07:52 ◼   ► very hard. I've not set any app limits. It's just my usage patterns are changing.

00:07:57 ◼   ► And I am finding myself very frequently now just thinking, "When was the last time I looked?"

00:08:03 ◼   ► And it could be a full 24 hours. And this is just, I am happier with this because this

00:08:08 ◼   ► is more of how I want to use social media. I am using Instagram a lot more. I like Instagram

00:08:16 ◼   ► way more. It just brings me joy in my life. It just makes me happy. It doesn't mix up

00:08:21 ◼   ► a bunch of stuff that I don't necessarily want to see, which I feel like I get in Twitter

00:08:24 ◼   ► way more. And so then what I thought to myself was, right, if I'm using Twitter less and

00:08:29 ◼   ► Twitter is my main source of information that I need to do my job, then I need to have a

00:08:35 ◼   ► reliable system of information. And that's when RSS came back into my life. So I use

00:08:41 ◼   ► a service called I Know Reader. I don't know exactly why I picked that one, but I, this

00:08:47 ◼   ► This is the last time that I tried to use RSS.

00:08:49 ◼   ► Federico told me to do it, and then I had a year-long subscription, so I just chose

00:08:53 ◼   ► that one again.

00:08:55 ◼   ► And I'm using Reader 4 on all my iOS devices.

00:08:59 ◼   ► I'm just doing RSS on my iOS devices.

00:09:02 ◼   ► And that is a very good-looking application, isn't it?

00:09:06 ◼   ► It's beautiful.

00:09:07 ◼   ► It's very nice.

00:09:08 ◼   ► It's got all the features that I would want.

00:09:10 ◼   ► There's some stuff that I would want to change, but nothing so perfect that it can't be complained

00:09:14 ◼   ► about.

00:09:16 ◼   ► And yep, I think somebody said that.

00:09:18 ◼   ► I think Merlion's came up with that one.

00:09:21 ◼   ► He just wants to be remembered for one thing.

00:09:24 ◼   ► And so I've been enjoying this kind of...

00:09:30 ◼   ► So basically one of the things that I like about RSS, when thinking about it from a Twitter

00:09:34 ◼   ► mindset of, if I don't check into RSS, it is not any harder for me to get the information.

00:09:42 ◼   ► It just waits.

00:09:43 ◼   ► I know that that is like, Myke of 2004 knew that, but I feel like the last 10 years of

00:09:49 ◼   ► doing things differently, I've kind of forgotten about that core difference.

00:09:53 ◼   ► RSS, the information will just wait for me until I'm ready to check it.

00:09:57 ◼   ► So I'm very happy.

00:09:58 ◼   ► I recommend to people if they are feeling like maybe they're spending too much time

00:10:02 ◼   ► on Twitter, I don't necessarily recommend the complete cut it out of your life approach

00:10:08 ◼   ► because there is a reason that you're using it.

00:10:11 ◼   ► and a lot of it might be because you enjoy reading memes about 30 to 50 hogs, right?

00:10:15 ◼   ► Like that might just be a thing that you enjoy and if you get rid of that from your life,

00:10:18 ◼   ► your life might be worse. I don't know. So I recommend using the official Twitter app

00:10:23 ◼   ► and using their algorithm because it surfaces things for me. So I don't need to dig through

00:10:30 ◼   ► everything because it is doing an okay enough job of showing me the stuff that's popular

00:10:35 ◼   ► and important. So that's where I am right now. I'm feeling pretty good about it. I don't

00:10:39 ◼   ► have any downsides so it's probably one I'm gonna stick with for the foreseeable future.

00:10:44 ◼   ► Welcome back to RSS, some of us never left.

00:10:47 ◼   ► Do you constantly, like you still have always every single day RSS all day every day?

00:10:52 ◼   ► I've never stopped, I've moved from Google Reader into, I used something for a while

00:10:57 ◼   ► then I settled on Feedbin and I use Reader on the Mac and iPad and I use Unread on the

00:11:03 ◼   ► iPhone and it's been that way forever.

00:11:05 ◼   ► How many feeds do you subscribe to?

00:11:08 ◼   ► Ooh, that's a good question.

00:11:09 ◼   ► Let me see if I can easily ascertain that number.

00:11:12 ◼   ► I have 16.

00:11:14 ◼   ► It's definitely more than that.

00:11:16 ◼   ► And a bunch of them are like the personal blogs of friends,

00:11:19 ◼   ► so they very infrequently update.

00:11:22 ◼   ► I have like 10 feeds that update every day,

00:11:26 ◼   ► and the rest of them are like every once in a while.

00:11:30 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know if I can find a number.

00:11:32 ◼   ► Mine is probably 50.

00:11:34 ◼   ► Yeah, that seems like too much.

00:11:36 ◼   ► So a lot of them-- actually going through here,

00:11:38 ◼   ► a lot of these are dead.

00:11:40 ◼   ► There's some blogs in here that haven't

00:11:41 ◼   ► updated in a long time.

00:11:42 ◼   ► Several of them-- so I have a folder called Geek News,

00:11:49 ◼   ► and that's like Verge and Gadget.

00:11:51 ◼   ► And that one, basically I look at the top three or four

00:11:54 ◼   ► and just ditch the rest.

00:11:56 ◼   ► There's a lot of overlap.

00:11:57 ◼   ► So here was a thing for me when I was setting this up again.

00:12:00 ◼   ► I decided to pick one website in every category,

00:12:03 ◼   ► because they all report on the same news.

00:12:05 ◼   ► Because like if the Verge has a big exclusive about the Samsung Galaxy Note 10,

00:12:11 ◼   ► and Gadget's going to post about it, right?

00:12:14 ◼   ► So like I have like nine to five Mac, because they are like,

00:12:19 ◼   ► I have found them to be, they will post every piece of Apple news.

00:12:22 ◼   ► It's true.

00:12:22 ◼   ► And like, so that's the place that I want it.

00:12:24 ◼   ► And that is a, not a criticism, like that is exactly what I was looking for.

00:12:28 ◼   ► Right?

00:12:29 ◼   ► So they're kind of like all Apple news, them.

00:12:32 ◼   ► If I want all technology, it's The Verge, all of gaming, Polygon.

00:12:36 ◼   ► And then I have variety, they have variety's tech section to pick up stuff for

00:12:41 ◼   ► Upstream. Right? Like, and that's kind of like,

00:12:43 ◼   ► you're hitting across my main categories there.

00:12:45 ◼   ► Then I pick up other parts of like, I want interesting information, right?

00:12:49 ◼   ► So I'll have like Mac stories and you and Jason.

00:12:52 ◼   ► And it's not just because you guys are my friends.

00:12:55 ◼   ► Like I've read all of these people, including you, way before we were friends.

00:12:59 ◼   ► And then I'll have like, I have TechCrunch in there,

00:13:02 ◼   ► and most of the time I never,

00:13:04 ◼   ► like I just completely archive it,

00:13:06 ◼   ► but sometimes I'll pick something out of there.

00:13:08 ◼   ► That's kind of the way that I've been using it.

00:13:10 ◼   ► And then there's like a bunch of personal blogs

00:13:13 ◼   ► or individuals who have websites that I enjoy.

00:13:17 ◼   ► But like I go for like a few fire hoses,

00:13:23 ◼   ► but not like all of them like I used to, right?

00:13:26 ◼   ► Like in my previous days, I would be like,

00:13:28 ◼   ► "Oh, all right, I'm gonna go for The Verge and then Gadget and Gizmodo and all of those.

00:13:34 ◼   ► And then I'm gonna go for 9to5Mac and MacRumors and all, you know what I mean?

00:13:38 ◼   ► And I would just get all of them."

00:13:39 ◼   ► It's like, well, you're just seeing the same headline over and over and over again.

00:13:43 ◼   ► Not a criticism of any of these websites.

00:13:45 ◼   ► That is the industry.

00:13:46 ◼   ► Like, that's just how it is.

00:13:48 ◼   ► But I think as a reader, you just pick the one with the voices that you like the most

00:13:51 ◼   ► and go with it.

00:13:52 ◼   ► Yeah, you have, uh, you're gonna make me clean this out.

00:13:55 ◼   ► There's a lot of overlap here.

00:13:56 ◼   ► You gotta clean it out, man.

00:13:57 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:13:58 ◼   ► at it right now chronologically, how many headlines are the same just from different

00:14:02 ◼   ► places?

00:14:03 ◼   ► I mean, yeah, there's a lot of overlap. And so that folder in particular is really bad

00:14:06 ◼   ► about that. So that one I just sort of skim.

00:14:09 ◼   ► You know what it might be actually just so you to get an idea? Don't do it yet. Wait

00:14:12 ◼   ► until tomorrow because Samsung have their Galaxy event tonight.

00:14:15 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:16 ◼   ► Just see what that looks like. Like all of the websites just posting all of the news

00:14:21 ◼   ► about the same thing. Yeah.

00:14:23 ◼   ► So, uh...

00:14:24 ◼   ► So that's where I am.

00:14:25 ◼   ► still here. The irony is of course is that you and I own a company that is

00:14:32 ◼   ► built on top of RSS. But yeah but no one thinks of it that way. I think about that

00:14:36 ◼   ► way. Not in this sense. We don't use RSS readers. I do have the Relay FM master

00:14:42 ◼   ► feed in Feedbin. I have it in a podcast app where it's more useful. So RSS. Okay

00:14:50 ◼   ► look if you look in your podcast player right now this chapter is named

00:14:53 ◼   ► shameless promotion. Yeah it's it's August we do lots of stuff in August

00:14:57 ◼   ► you're just gonna have to live with it. There's a lot this year so let's start.

00:15:02 ◼   ► But it's a big year! It's a huge year five years we are going to

00:15:06 ◼   ► kindergarten as a podcast network. Congratulations. Item number one we are

00:15:11 ◼   ► having our live event in just a couple weeks in San Francisco there are a few

00:15:14 ◼   ► tickets left so go get a ticket but we need your help so we are going to be

00:15:18 ◼   ► playing relay FM family feud someone on Twitter said that we really missed an

00:15:24 ◼   ► opportunity to smash FM and family together so like relay from feud but I

00:15:29 ◼   ► don't know how to say it so really a family feud but it doesn't work it

00:15:34 ◼   ► sounds like you're saying something naughty you don't want that so this link

00:15:39 ◼   ► in the show notes if you are a listener you should click on it and fill it out

00:15:45 ◼   ► because the way family feud works that hosts people in the show in our case

00:15:48 ◼   ► like 15 or 17, however many relay hosts are going to be there. They have to guess

00:15:53 ◼   ► the answers of the survey. That only works if we have answers to the survey.

00:15:56 ◼   ► So we're sending this out to all of our listeners. It's going to take you like

00:15:59 ◼   ► 30 seconds to fill out. It's, it's, I don't actually, well I know it's an

00:16:04 ◼   ► example, I'm not actually playing Family Feud, but I don't want to say what's in it

00:16:06 ◼   ► because the hosts are listening. Very simple tech things. It'll take you no

00:16:09 ◼   ► time at all to knock it out. There's no right or wrong answer, it's what answer

00:16:12 ◼   ► comes to your mind. That's the way the survey works. Yes. It's like a fancy word

00:16:16 ◼   ► association. Yeah, that's good. Look at you. I've already explained it three times today on different

00:16:21 ◼   ► shows, so I'm getting good at explaining what the Family Feud's all about. So there's that.

00:16:26 ◼   ► We would love if you would fill that out. The more answers, the better. Secondly, we have our

00:16:33 ◼   ► anniversary merchandise up. The t-shirt, if you're listening to this today, it comes out August 7th,

00:16:38 ◼   ► is only available another eight days. So by the time the next Connected comes out, time will

00:16:43 ◼   ► will basically be over just about. So go check this out at Cotton Bureau. We

00:16:48 ◼   ► have a shirt. A lot of people have asked us about the art and so I want to say

00:16:53 ◼   ► two things about it. One, I love it very much. We went to our designer and said we

00:16:58 ◼   ► want something to like celebrate the feels like relay but doesn't necessarily

00:17:02 ◼   ► look like a podcast. It was one a nice design that could be anything and you

00:17:08 ◼   ► know you could see this is like a Christmas ornament. Maybe we'll do

00:17:11 ◼   ► Christmas ornaments or a, you know, neck tattoo or something.

00:17:14 ◼   ► - I'm probably gonna put it on my body at some point.

00:17:16 ◼   ► - It's really good.

00:17:17 ◼   ► So it's a star with like the little half circles around it,

00:17:22 ◼   ► so it's kind of five points, the star,

00:17:24 ◼   ► it's all kind of a conceptual conception of art.

00:17:29 ◼   ► - It's high concept podcast.

00:17:30 ◼   ► - It is.

00:17:31 ◼   ► Can you tell I spent two years in art school?

00:17:32 ◼   ► It's really paying off as I describe this.

00:17:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was really good.

00:17:36 ◼   ► I could feel the education.

00:17:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, it rolling out of me.

00:17:40 ◼   ► So go check this out, there's a t-shirt,

00:17:42 ◼   ► there's also a enamel pin with the same artwork.

00:17:46 ◼   ► My pins are out for delivery in a couple days.

00:17:48 ◼   ► The shirts will, we had this question as well,

00:17:51 ◼   ► the shirts will not be to you in time for the live show.

00:17:55 ◼   ► We wanted everything up in August

00:17:56 ◼   ► and that meant we sacrificed to having the shirts done

00:17:59 ◼   ► by the live show.

00:18:00 ◼   ► - The pins though, if you buy pins on their own,

00:18:03 ◼   ► not pins of a shirt, you will get them before the live show

00:18:06 ◼   ► if you're in the US easily.

00:18:07 ◼   ► 'Cause they're shipping out, right?

00:18:08 ◼   ► They're shipping out now.

00:18:09 ◼   ► So go check all this out.

00:18:11 ◼   ► We'd love to see these shirts and pins out in the world.

00:18:14 ◼   ► Number three, next week on connected, Myke and I will be hosting our annual relay QA.

00:18:23 ◼   ► So every week in this every year where people can ask us questions about podcasting about

00:18:27 ◼   ► the company about, you know, tech love, child rearing suit us those questions on Twitter,

00:18:33 ◼   ► you just use the hashtag relay QA.

00:18:35 ◼   ► And I have a little automation going around and putting all those in a spreadsheet for

00:18:38 ◼   ► us. The more questions the better. We go through them a few days in advance and

00:18:42 ◼   ► sort them into categories, so if you have any questions at all about Relay or

00:18:45 ◼   ► podcasting any of this stuff, we'd love to answer them on next week's Connected.

00:18:49 ◼   ► And finally, August is Relay FM membership month. We do this again to

00:18:56 ◼   ► celebrate the birthday of the network. You can go join at relay.fm/membership.

00:19:00 ◼   ► For all the members out there listening, thank you so much for your support over

00:19:04 ◼   ► the years. Like previous years, we will be publishing members-only bonus episodes of

00:19:11 ◼   ► our shows. That starts in just a couple of days, and there is some amazing stuff coming

00:19:21 ◼   ► this month and into early September. The stuff that I've gotten to listen to already is just

00:19:26 ◼   ► fantastic. And if you join to sponsor or to back a certain show, you get access to all

00:19:34 ◼   ► the bonus stuff. So you know if you already are a member of say analog and

00:19:40 ◼   ► you want to listen to the the rocket membership show you'll be able to do

00:19:43 ◼   ► that. Everything goes to everybody and if you're not a member we'd love for you to

00:19:47 ◼   ► check it out relay.fm/membership. Well you can just click the link in the

00:19:52 ◼   ► show notes and you can support this show so yes this very you can support any

00:19:57 ◼   ► show but if you want to support this show you can. We will welcome your

00:20:03 ◼   ► support and you will get very wonderful bonuses for it. There's a monthly

00:20:07 ◼   ► newsletter, there is a monthly Real AFM host crossover show, wallpapers,

00:20:12 ◼   ► discounts, all the great stuff. Discount on previously mentioned merchandise. So if you

00:20:18 ◼   ► want to get a lot of merch, like if you're looking to buy a lot of merch for

00:20:24 ◼   ► some reason, you should sign up and get the discount. Yeah like if you want to

00:20:28 ◼   ► have a family reunion in October. I want everybody, just everyone. And you want to

00:20:34 ◼   ► order 350, I don't know how big family reunions are, let's say 350 people, the big

00:20:39 ◼   ► family. It's like a big family. Big family. Big family. Maybe a high school class

00:20:44 ◼   ► reunion, let's go with that. You're having your high school class reunion and you

00:20:47 ◼   ► need 350 five-star relay shirts, you know, maybe become a member and that discount

00:20:54 ◼   ► would pay off. So I'm gonna say also, please send us a photo of your class or union and

00:21:00 ◼   ► matching relay shirts. Alright, Myke, we have a bunch of topics to talk about. I don't know

00:21:04 ◼   ► if you've heard of this company, Apple, they've done some stuff. We're gonna talk about file

00:21:09 ◼   ► maker, they're just in the news, which is not something I expected to happen this week.

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00:23:14 ◼   ► Apple card. Talk about this for a minute. Yeah. This is Apple's fancy virtual but

00:23:19 ◼   ► also titanium credit card. They are rolling out or they did roll out some

00:23:24 ◼   ► invites earlier this week. I'm unclear if that's ongoing or there was like a batch

00:23:29 ◼   ► of basically press people and it's coming out later to more people but... No,

00:23:33 ◼   ► they're doing over this month it's like people that signed up to learn more

00:23:37 ◼   ► They're gonna be kind of bringing them in in ways and but by the end of the month it will be open to anybody a couple

00:23:44 ◼   ► Of details that sort of came out in the early reporting that I wanted to mention here

00:23:49 ◼   ► We've also in the artwork of like the colors on the card and how they're sort of

00:23:54 ◼   ► Blotches of color that sort of gradient together. Mm-hmm

00:23:58 ◼   ► It turns out those come from the categories that you spend money within and so there were a couple of

00:24:04 ◼   ► tweets of like oh it's all yellow because I just used it one place for food and then you know into the hardware store and

00:24:10 ◼   ► A green one showed up and now they're slowly merging and changing over time, which I think is kind of fun

00:24:14 ◼   ► That's a nice detail that obviously physical cards can't do and I don't know

00:24:18 ◼   ► It's a little touch that I really appreciate for some reason you can order a physical physical card

00:24:23 ◼   ► It'll be mailed to you and for those out there who have had this experience with a debit or a credit card

00:24:29 ◼   ► Usually it comes with like a sticker and a phone number and you have to call the phone number and like type in the card

00:24:33 ◼   ► number and Apple is just putting an NFC sticker in the envelope so you just tap your phone

00:24:39 ◼   ► to it which is brilliant.

00:24:43 ◼   ► Super great.

00:24:44 ◼   ► And I think the integration within the Wallet app looks really good.

00:24:46 ◼   ► And they showed this before but a transaction list with information about vendors, balance

00:24:51 ◼   ► details, you can see where your money is going.

00:24:54 ◼   ► And this probably shouldn't have been a surprise but it sort of made the rounds as well that

00:24:58 ◼   ► Apple Card data cannot be shared with other money management apps.

00:25:02 ◼   ► So if you use something like Mint is very popular here in the US where you add your

00:25:07 ◼   ► debit cards and your bank accounts and stuff and you kind of get a holistic picture of

00:25:10 ◼   ► your finances.

00:25:11 ◼   ► Because most people you write, you have a credit card or two, you've got your bank account,

00:25:16 ◼   ► you got your mortgage, maybe you got a car loan or student loans, and it's hard to see

00:25:21 ◼   ► the big picture.

00:25:22 ◼   ► And so Mint is one of several solutions that sort of aggregates all this into one place.

00:25:27 ◼   ► And the Apple card is going to be separate from that.

00:25:31 ◼   ► I would not hold your breath about that changing because Apple is really preaching its privacy

00:25:38 ◼   ► story here.

00:25:39 ◼   ► This would be a problem with them if they ever come to Europe, especially the UK, because

00:25:46 ◼   ► legally you have to make this information available so people, consumers, can choose

00:25:53 ◼   ► to take their data and put it with other companies to allow for them to have better money management.

00:26:00 ◼   ► So I would be really keen to see what Apple was going to do about that.

00:26:04 ◼   ► It might be one of the reasons we never get it.

00:26:06 ◼   ► So like every bank here has to create a system, like a login system.

00:26:11 ◼   ► So for example, if I had two banks, I with one bank can use my online banking app to

00:26:17 ◼   ► basically log in and have the other bank's bank accounts displayed in the other bank's

00:26:22 ◼   ► app.

00:26:24 ◼   ► Which is like, it is the other side of data sharing, where me as the consumer gets to

00:26:31 ◼   ► choose where my data goes.

00:26:32 ◼   ► And there's other things you can do, for example, like take all of your bank account data and

00:26:36 ◼   ► upload it to a comparison website and find out where you can be saving money, like stuff

00:26:39 ◼   ► like that, right?

00:26:40 ◼   ► Like, oh, you're paying too much for this bill or that bill, and if you switch to this

00:26:44 ◼   ► company or that company, you could do it.

00:26:46 ◼   ► So it'd be interesting to see what they do there.

00:26:49 ◼   ► I didn't only don't know if this is ever going to be outside of the US, right?

00:26:53 ◼   ► Like Apple pay cash. No, what was it called? Apple,

00:26:58 ◼   ► what was the thing called where you can share,

00:27:00 ◼   ► send money to somebody because they've changed the names now I think.

00:27:02 ◼   ► Yeah. It's like if I'm going to send money to you,

00:27:04 ◼   ► I think it's Apple. I think it's Apple pay cash.

00:27:08 ◼   ► Okay. Well that, that never made its way outside of the US.

00:27:12 ◼   ► And it might be that Apple card would do that, right? Like they want,

00:27:16 ◼   ► if they want to push Apple card outside,

00:27:17 ◼   ► which I think is more of a thing that they would be willing to do,

00:27:20 ◼   ► then they would need Apple pay cash as part of it, right?

00:27:24 ◼   ► Cause it's where the rewards are, but I'm interested to see what,

00:27:28 ◼   ► if anything Apple does to try and like make itself

00:27:32 ◼   ► compliant with a lot of stuff that is required of these financial institutions

00:27:37 ◼   ► now here.

00:27:37 ◼   ► Yep. I just sent John Voorhees a dollar. It is, uh, Apple pay cash.

00:27:41 ◼   ► That was nice of you. That was nice of you. Send it back, John. But yeah, so, um,

00:27:46 ◼   ► I would very much, I'm very interested in this product.

00:27:49 ◼   ► Like, you know, and I use credit cards that have benefits to them, right?

00:27:55 ◼   ► And I actually use the benefits and that and it's really great.

00:27:59 ◼   ► But those cards cost me money to to pay.

00:28:02 ◼   ► I have to pay like fees for them every year and stuff.

00:28:04 ◼   ► You don't have to do that with the Apple card.

00:28:06 ◼   ► But I think that I would be like super willing to buy all of my Apple products on this card.

00:28:12 ◼   ► Right. Like that's what I would do with it because you get three percent cash back on

00:28:16 ◼   ► Is it 3% I think on Apple products?

00:28:18 ◼   ► It's like I buy my phone on it

00:28:20 ◼   ► and you also get cash back on subscriptions.

00:28:23 ◼   ► So if you pay for Apple Arcade,

00:28:27 ◼   ► you get 3% back every month, every time it debits.

00:28:32 ◼   ► So stuff like that where it's like, oh okay,

00:28:36 ◼   ► I would probably wanna keep a balance on that card

00:28:39 ◼   ► and top it back up.

00:28:42 ◼   ► So it's like the big credit card round robin.

00:28:45 ◼   ► Yes.

00:28:47 ◼   ► Which I mean, you guys spoke about this on upgrade. I'm kind of like Jason.

00:28:51 ◼   ► Rick, I don't really do much of that. Um,

00:28:54 ◼   ► we have a credit card that we use sometimes. Um,

00:28:57 ◼   ► but not something that I think genuinely, right?

00:29:00 ◼   ► Like if you are the type of person that does not want to have to go through the

00:29:04 ◼   ► rigmarole of using and like using all the benefits before they expire and all

00:29:09 ◼   ► that kind of stuff, like this is the perfect kind of thing.

00:29:12 ◼   ► where it's just actual cash back, not like cash back with a check or like cash back every

00:29:19 ◼   ► quarter where you have to mail something.

00:29:21 ◼   ► Like if you use this credit card, you'll get money back and you don't have to do anything

00:29:25 ◼   ► about it.

00:29:26 ◼   ► And then you can do whatever you want with that money, including paying off the balance

00:29:29 ◼   ► of the credit card, which is just like, that's a great thing to be able to do.

00:29:34 ◼   ► It's like, you know, I would, if this was available here, I would definitely, I would

00:29:37 ◼   ► definitely use it for my day to day purchases.

00:29:40 ◼   ► without a doubt, where I don't want to put like a sandwich on my American Express card.

00:29:46 ◼   ► It seems like too much aggravation, but I would do this and then I would maybe move

00:29:50 ◼   ► a lot of my purchases to something like this because it also has the cool like this is

00:29:56 ◼   ► where you're spending your money type features, which is really good to have and which a lot

00:30:00 ◼   ► of like traditional companies don't provide, but these newer banks do.

00:30:04 ◼   ► Yeah, I think Apple could go further with that. I mean, their cashback stuff, there

00:30:09 ◼   ► There are options that are better if you're a certain type of shoppers.

00:30:13 ◼   ► I think one that people will compare this to is the Amazon Prime Visa card, which I

00:30:20 ◼   ► believe is 5% back at Amazon and Whole Foods.

00:30:23 ◼   ► If you're that sort of shopper, those are very common on your statement, that could

00:30:29 ◼   ► be a better deal than this.

00:30:32 ◼   ► But I think you're right.

00:30:33 ◼   ► The Apple One will win in terms of just, hey, you get cash on your Apple Cash card and you

00:30:39 ◼   ► can spend that like any debit card or use that for Apple Pay cash to send a

00:30:42 ◼   ► dollar to somebody on a podcast so that is I think you're right that for people

00:30:47 ◼   ► who don't want to like roll their sleeves up or who don't really cleanly

00:30:51 ◼   ► fit into some other card that is clearly better this this is probably a good

00:30:57 ◼   ► default if you have an iPhone that's of course the the other thing that you've

00:31:01 ◼   ► got have an iPhone that's going to mean most people can't access it but if

00:31:06 ◼   ► If you're in that population, it seems like a reasonable option for you.

00:31:10 ◼   ► There's enough people.

00:31:11 ◼   ► Sure.

00:31:12 ◼   ► There's enough people to make a nice user base out of.

00:31:15 ◼   ► One thing I'm really intrigued about is how they deal with bad debt.

00:31:21 ◼   ► Because like, let's imagine somebody has like a $6,000 limit on their Apple card, and they

00:31:25 ◼   ► fill it up and they can't pay for it.

00:31:28 ◼   ► I wonder how they're going to deal with that, like just from a, how it will look from a

00:31:32 ◼   ► public like a PR perspective, right?

00:31:35 ◼   ► Like, will Goldman Sachs on behalf of Apple send like collection agents to your home?

00:31:43 ◼   ► Well I think I don't know if it's actually on behalf of Apple or not, but that will be

00:31:46 ◼   ► the perception, right?

00:31:49 ◼   ► This is a Goldman Sachs credit card.

00:31:51 ◼   ► That's what I mean, right?

00:31:52 ◼   ► But like Goldman Sachs are doing it for Apple, right?

00:31:56 ◼   ► And Apple have made Goldman Sachs change so many things about the way that they work,

00:32:01 ◼   ► including this data sharing agreement where Goldman Sachs is not allowed to use any of

00:32:07 ◼   ► the transaction data for anything. They can't use it for marketing, they can't sell it.

00:32:11 ◼   ► They've removed a lot of the way that credit card companies actually make their money.

00:32:15 ◼   ► So of course I understand the idea that you enter into an agreement with a company and the agreement

00:32:23 ◼   ► says you pay us back and if you don't pay us back we're going to get our money somehow. I

00:32:28 ◼   ► I understand all of that, but like I wonder what is it actually going to look like and

00:32:32 ◼   ► how soon do we start getting stories and stuff like that, if at all. I'm just intrigued about

00:32:37 ◼   ► from a PR perspective, debt is a strange thing for Apple to be in the business of, right?

00:32:44 ◼   ► Right.

00:32:45 ◼   ► They are in the business of debt now. And that is a, that's interesting. And I'm keen

00:32:52 ◼   ► to see how it resolves. When I have always thought about Apple's moving into banking,

00:32:57 ◼   ► This was not the product that I thought we'd see first. I thought that they would create

00:33:01 ◼   ► something to replace the debit account first or debit card first, not a credit card because

00:33:08 ◼   ► you're in the business of making people spend more money than they have. That's the business

00:33:14 ◼   ► that they're in now. That's what people do with credit cards. If there's anybody out

00:33:20 ◼   ► there who's young listening to this show, who's yet to have a credit card in their life,

00:33:25 ◼   ► off your credit card every month, like when you get to that point in your life.

00:33:31 ◼   ► That was a mistake that I made and I had spent many years getting myself back out of that

00:33:36 ◼   ► mistake when I was like 23.

00:33:39 ◼   ► Pay off your credit cards would be my advice to you.

00:33:42 ◼   ► But it is just like a thing where I'm intrigued to see how all that stuff starts shaking out

00:33:48 ◼   ► because they're in a very, very different business of this.

00:33:51 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:33:52 ◼   ► It's strange.

00:33:54 ◼   ► Let's talk about some Apple security stuff.

00:33:56 ◼   ► Okay.

00:33:57 ◼   ► So a couple of stories originating from Forbes.

00:34:01 ◼   ► So the first one is that Apple will be creating and somehow dispersing iPhones with special

00:34:09 ◼   ► firmware and software.

00:34:12 ◼   ► And this will allow security researchers to get into parts of iOS that you normally can't

00:34:16 ◼   ► get to without jailbreaking and even go beyond.

00:34:20 ◼   ► So including like pausing the CPU to inspect its memory, which is not something that I

00:34:26 ◼   ► know how to do, but clearly, I guess it's possible.

00:34:30 ◼   ► This is to end with the end goal of making iOS and iPad OS more secure.

00:34:35 ◼   ► So it's a this is for security researchers and people who are, you know, known trusted

00:34:42 ◼   ► individuals or organizations to Apple.

00:34:45 ◼   ► It is kind of like, in parentheses, apparently, because like, of course, these phones exist,

00:34:50 ◼   ► but I've never really thought about them.

00:34:52 ◼   ► Internal use development iPhones at Apple that can do a user can do basically anything

00:34:57 ◼   ► on there.

00:34:59 ◼   ► This won't be as open as that.

00:35:00 ◼   ► But as a step in that direction, again, with the desire and Apple's part to be, we're going

00:35:06 ◼   ► to give these to trusted people who are security researchers in the field who will have access

00:35:11 ◼   ► to them and poke around them.

00:35:12 ◼   ► if they find things, they will disclose them to us and not post about them on Twitter.

00:35:17 ◼   ► And then we could fix these security issues.

00:35:19 ◼   ► So I think the reason this is a story that this didn't really exist.

00:35:25 ◼   ► I saw one tweet and I can't find it now.

00:35:28 ◼   ► But someone's saying that this program has existed before, but this is sort of a formalizing

00:35:34 ◼   ► of it.

00:35:35 ◼   ► So I don't know if Apple had like a secret handshake with a couple of security researchers

00:35:38 ◼   ► who had more access than others, but this seems at the very least to be a more formal

00:35:43 ◼   ► approach to this sort of security research.

00:35:47 ◼   ► It seems to me that it fits really well with Apple's privacy and security stance that they've

00:35:51 ◼   ► really taken over the last couple of years.

00:35:54 ◼   ► And we've we've all said it that if Apple has I'm gonna say when because it does everything

00:35:59 ◼   ► is inevitable probably.

00:36:01 ◼   ► When Apple has a really big security or privacy breach, it will be worse for them because

00:36:07 ◼   ► of their posturing on the topic, and they want to avoid that as long as possible.

00:36:13 ◼   ► Well, yes. I mean, I would agree that there was like the whole Siri thing as an example

00:36:18 ◼   ► of that.

00:36:19 ◼   ► Yeah. Oh, definitely. Which we didn't. I feel like that fell in between connected episodes,

00:36:23 ◼   ► but not good. Not good at all. So this is in conjunction with some Mac OS news that

00:36:31 ◼   ► Apple is announcing a Mac OS bounty program. So the way this works is if you find a security

00:36:38 ◼   ► vulnerability in an Apple product, then iPhone or an iPad, running iOS, or, you know, I guess

00:36:46 ◼   ► an iPod touch, I guess they're out there to if you have an iPod touch, and you find a

00:36:49 ◼   ► security issue with it, you can contact Apple, you're very special, you can contact Apple

00:36:55 ◼   ► through these approved channels and they will offer rewards or bounties for that

00:37:02 ◼   ► information. The idea being that if you find a security vulnerability Apple will

00:37:07 ◼   ► pay to get it off the market before it becomes known and disclosed to people

00:37:12 ◼   ► who could use it for ill. So they want to incentivize people who find these things

00:37:17 ◼   ► to do the right thing in Apple's eyes. And previously this program was just

00:37:22 ◼   ► limited to iOS and this caused a big dust up several months ago that some

00:37:28 ◼   ► stuff came out maybe even longer than that now security issues came with Mac

00:37:33 ◼   ► OS and then it sort of came to light in the public that there was not a Mac OS

00:37:37 ◼   ► bounty program I don't think Apple did that purposefully even like Mac OS X has

00:37:44 ◼   ► been around a really long time and in 2001 bounty programs they were out there

00:37:49 ◼   ► maybe, but the world was different.

00:37:52 ◼   ► And now you can just write a blog post or write a tweet,

00:37:56 ◼   ► and all of a sudden every foreign power and spy agency

00:38:00 ◼   ► in the world knows about a zero day in your software.

00:38:04 ◼   ► Apple doesn't know B in that situation.

00:38:06 ◼   ► So they've brought the Mac into the bounty program, which

00:38:08 ◼   ► I think is really good, because a lot of us

00:38:11 ◼   ► have a lot of stuff on our Macs and a lot of critical data

00:38:17 ◼   ► on our Macs.

00:38:17 ◼   ► And with iCloud, all this stuff is everywhere anyways, right?

00:38:20 ◼   ► So it's not just--

00:38:21 ◼   ► I would expect you could do more damage to a Mac than an iOS

00:38:24 ◼   ► device anyway.

00:38:27 ◼   ► Right?

00:38:28 ◼   ► Like, it's much more possible for a piece of software

00:38:31 ◼   ► to dig itself in.

00:38:34 ◼   ► Yeah, absolutely.

00:38:35 ◼   ► Because the Mac is more open.

00:38:38 ◼   ► And even though they're trying to--

00:38:39 ◼   ► You can talk Catalina anyway.

00:38:41 ◼   ► Well, in Catalina, you just have to work around

00:38:43 ◼   ► all the click boxes.

00:38:45 ◼   ► Or if you're a hacker, you just give up, because it's

00:38:47 ◼   ► so annoying. Yeah, you're right. And so the Mac is more open, but it's tied to all your

00:38:53 ◼   ► iCloud stuff. So if someone has control of your Mac, they really have control of all

00:38:57 ◼   ► of your data. And that's bad, clearly. So it's good that the Mac is brought into this

00:39:02 ◼   ► and that they're taking it seriously. And I would love to know what those phones what

00:39:07 ◼   ► that entails, like how that how that works, but the world will probably never know.

00:39:11 ◼   ► I'm really intrigued to know what precautions will they take on those iPhones to stop them

00:39:15 ◼   ► showing up on eBay?

00:39:16 ◼   ► I mean, if they so I would imagine this is basically just made up, but the way I could

00:39:20 ◼   ► see it working is that you are an employee at a, you know, security research firm, or,

00:39:29 ◼   ► you know, like McAfee or like those sort of companies. Not only is the company assigned

00:39:35 ◼   ► the phone, but I would imagine that Apple would know whose phone that is right, like who is the

00:39:43 ◼   ► primary owner of that special firmware phone.

00:39:47 ◼   ► And obviously they can't stop that person

00:39:50 ◼   ► from putting that phone on eBay,

00:39:51 ◼   ► but I would guarantee you they would know what phone it is.

00:39:54 ◼   ► And I would imagine too,

00:39:56 ◼   ► that there's some sort of check-in process

00:39:57 ◼   ► if that phone is not on some sort of internal network

00:40:01 ◼   ► at these companies or plugged into a computer

00:40:03 ◼   ► that somehow authenticates it every so often

00:40:06 ◼   ► that it would lock

00:40:07 ◼   ► and that you wouldn't be able to get into it.

00:40:09 ◼   ► That's-- I would imagine that that functionality would be

00:40:13 ◼   ► built in some way or another.

00:40:14 ◼   ► But someone like you--

00:40:16 ◼   ► Yes.

00:40:17 ◼   ► --would--

00:40:18 ◼   ► Me?

00:40:19 ◼   ► Yes, you.

00:40:20 ◼   ► This is really specific.

00:40:21 ◼   ► Someone who collects--

00:40:23 ◼   ► When I finish saying what I'm going to say,

00:40:26 ◼   ► you'll know what I mean.

00:40:27 ◼   ► Someone like you would want the hardware,

00:40:30 ◼   ► whether it worked or not, though.

00:40:32 ◼   ► Like someone who'd happen to have a collection of Apple

00:40:34 ◼   ► hardware.

00:40:34 ◼   ► Yes.

00:40:35 ◼   ► Not me specifically, government.

00:40:38 ◼   ► Not me.

00:40:39 ◼   ► Not me, Apple.

00:40:40 ◼   ► Specifically, you--

00:40:40 ◼   ► Come on.

00:40:41 ◼   ► --would buy one if it was on eBay.

00:40:44 ◼   ► Well, maybe in like 20 years.

00:40:45 ◼   ► I mean, if any of these things pop up anytime soon,

00:40:48 ◼   ► they're not going to be cheap.

00:40:50 ◼   ► It's kind of the same thing in a way to like testing hardware

00:40:55 ◼   ► and like verification hardware.

00:40:56 ◼   ► Sometimes Macs show up with like red logic boards,

00:40:58 ◼   ► and that's a test machine, a development

00:41:00 ◼   ► machine within Apple.

00:41:02 ◼   ► Sometimes those things pop up, like prototyping

00:41:04 ◼   ► and that sort of thing.

00:41:05 ◼   ► Do you have anything like that?

00:41:06 ◼   ► I don't think I do.

00:41:08 ◼   ► You don't have any like weird one-offs or prototype devices or anything like that.

00:41:12 ◼   ► I know, I don't have...

00:41:13 ◼   ► Are you interested in it?

00:41:15 ◼   ► I am.

00:41:16 ◼   ► The issue is if you want like a prototype Mac hardware, even if it's 30 years old, it

00:41:20 ◼   ► is way out of my league in terms of collecting.

00:41:24 ◼   ► Yeah, that's going to the like very serious, very rich collectors, right?

00:41:29 ◼   ► Yes, not me.

00:41:30 ◼   ► I mean, yeah, I mean, one of these phones may come out, but I would imagine Apple would

00:41:33 ◼   ► have a way to kill it.

00:41:34 ◼   ► So even if someone had the phone, the secret sauce won't get out.

00:41:38 ◼   ► Because that defeats the entire purpose, right?

00:41:40 ◼   ► Someone has access to all this, like, "Oh, oh no, what have we done?"

00:41:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:41:45 ◼   ► Yeah, bounty program.

00:41:46 ◼   ► So if you're out there and if you're finding a Mac vulnerability, the bounty program does

00:41:53 ◼   ► give me the mental image of some sort of software developer or security researcher who's also

00:41:58 ◼   ► kind of like Indiana Jones.

00:42:00 ◼   ► No, I think of pirates.

00:42:02 ◼   ► Well, no, because Indiana Jones wants to do the right thing, right?

00:42:06 ◼   ► Like this should be in a museum, even though he stole it from like the tribe of people

00:42:09 ◼   ► who have worshipped it for centuries.

00:42:10 ◼   ► Like he did a bad thing to do a good thing.

00:42:13 ◼   ► It's kind of Indiana Jones deal.

00:42:14 ◼   ► It's kind of what these people are like, right?

00:42:16 ◼   ► So you find an issue and you put on your cool hat and I guess you have a bullwhip and you

00:42:21 ◼   ► swing into the Apple campus and say, "This belongs in a museum!"

00:42:27 ◼   ► And you hand them the bug and they hand you a bag of gold and you go amongst your way.

00:42:30 ◼   ► That is actually a pretty good way of describing it.

00:42:33 ◼   ► Are they black hats or white hats or gray hats?

00:42:35 ◼   ► Which is the one?

00:42:37 ◼   ► Because I know the conference is called Black Hat, right?

00:42:39 ◼   ► But Black Hat is when you do something bad, right?

00:42:41 ◼   ► I think so.

00:42:42 ◼   ► Isn't, like, White Hat when you're a hacker for good, and Black Hat you're a hacker for

00:42:48 ◼   ► evil?

00:42:49 ◼   ► I found a blog post on Norton, as in Norton Antivirus, on their blog that we'll put on

00:42:55 ◼   ► the show notes about this.

00:42:56 ◼   ► I guess they would know.

00:42:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:42:59 ◼   ► I suppose.

00:43:01 ◼   ► Thanks Norton Antivirus.

00:43:02 ◼   ► That's definitely the only time I've ever been on this website.

00:43:05 ◼   ► Norton antivirus website. Black Hat hackers usually have extensive knowledge about breaking

00:43:10 ◼   ► into computer networks. Their primary motivation is usually for personal or financial gain,

00:43:15 ◼   ► but they can also be involved in espionage, protest, or perhaps the addicted, just addicted

00:43:21 ◼   ► to the thrill of cyber crime. I love that. Wow. That is addicted to the thrill of cyber

00:43:26 ◼   ► crime. No other crime. Are you or someone you love addicted to the thrill of cyber crime?

00:43:30 ◼   ► us at Norton. We are here to help. Would you steal a purse? I'm done. White hat

00:43:43 ◼   ► hackers choose to use their powers for good rather than evil. They are also

00:43:47 ◼   ► known as ethical hackers. And then get this Myke, as in life there are gray

00:43:53 ◼   ► areas that are neither black nor white. Gray hat hackers are a blend of both

00:43:58 ◼   ► black hat and white hat activities. Wait, so the hackers are a blend of activities?

00:44:03 ◼   ► Who wrote this? Hmm. So whatever hat you're... Okay, so grey hat hackers are the

00:44:10 ◼   ► people that go in for bounty programs is what they're saying. Like, they'll look

00:44:13 ◼   ► for vulnerabilities without the owner's permission or knowledge and

00:44:18 ◼   ► then report them, sometimes requesting a fee to fix the issue. So there you go.

00:44:23 ◼   ► Okay. So it should be called the grey hat conference then. I'm glad we cleared that up.

00:44:27 ◼   ► up service we provide bounty program get get paid to hack the Mac all right we're

00:44:34 ◼   ► gonna talk about file maker so no one leave we're gonna take a quick break

00:44:37 ◼   ► talk about hover one of the show's longest running sponsors hovers been

00:44:41 ◼   ► with us a really long time so no it's literally since the beginning since the

00:44:45 ◼   ► beginning in the beginning since the dawn of time there was hover we know you

00:44:50 ◼   ► love learning about tech and hover has a lot of great tech to talk about it's a

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00:44:59 ◼   ► domain name. And often these days, your company name and domain domain name conversation are

00:45:04 ◼   ► like the same conversation it was with us I know when we were trying to name our company,

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00:45:36 ◼   ► They're not any checkboxes, you have to go uncheck, they respect your time on their site.

00:45:40 ◼   ► And they have monthly sales on popular top level domains.

00:45:44 ◼   ► It's really easy to see why hover is the popular choice for people starting businesses.

00:45:49 ◼   ► I've had domains at Hover forever, even before the show,

00:45:52 ◼   ► before Relay, they've been my domain registrar of choice.

00:45:57 ◼   ► And so many times if I want to start a project,

00:46:00 ◼   ► I kind of start, if I don't have a name solidly in mind,

00:46:04 ◼   ► I actually use their domain name finder to help me with that.

00:46:07 ◼   ► So like in naming this very podcast network,

00:46:11 ◼   ► this was an issue, trying to find a domain name

00:46:13 ◼   ► that was really short and we could use the .fm.

00:46:16 ◼   ► Hover makes all that really easy.

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00:46:44 ◼   ► Make a name for yourself with Hover.

00:46:45 ◼   ► Our thanks to Hover for their support of this show and Relay FM.

00:46:50 ◼   ► Episode 8 was the first time that Hover sponsored.

00:46:52 ◼   ► Wow.

00:46:53 ◼   ► That's a long time ago.

00:46:56 ◼   ► One of the longest running.

00:46:58 ◼   ► One of the first.

00:46:59 ◼   ► FileMaker.

00:47:00 ◼   ► Alright, here we go.

00:47:01 ◼   ► FileMaker.

00:47:02 ◼   ► FileMaker.

00:47:03 ◼   ► Federico's gonna really sad he's missing this.

00:47:06 ◼   ► Probably will be actually.

00:47:07 ◼   ► FileMaker of course is owned by Apple.

00:47:09 ◼   ► It won all of, and was for a long time, the only wholly owned subsidiary.

00:47:14 ◼   ► But now I think there are a couple and this is one of them.

00:47:17 ◼   ► FileMaker and Beats, two companies that really I think of jointly, you know, kind of the

00:47:21 ◼   ► same thing.

00:47:22 ◼   ► FileMaker, Beats.

00:47:23 ◼   ► Very.

00:47:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:47:25 ◼   ► So they're in the news this week because they are changing their name to Claris.

00:47:28 ◼   ► And you may think, "Isn't that the name of the dog cow?"

00:47:32 ◼   ► Claris, the company is with an I. Claris, the dog cow is with a U.

00:47:35 ◼   ► I can't pronounce those differently.

00:47:37 ◼   ► Claris and Claris, like, there's no difference to me.

00:47:41 ◼   ► FileMaker is now known as Claris International.

00:47:45 ◼   ► This name is historic, Myke.

00:47:47 ◼   ► And because no one can stop me,

00:47:49 ◼   ► I'm going to tell you the history of Claris today.

00:47:52 ◼   ► You excited? - Great.

00:47:53 ◼   ► - You excited?

00:47:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's like "Ungenius'd."

00:47:56 ◼   ► - It is like "Ungenius'd."

00:47:58 ◼   ► No one will die in this story,

00:47:59 ◼   ► unlike what often happens on the "Ungenius'd" topics.

00:48:03 ◼   ► So we need to roll back the clock to 1986, 1987.

00:48:07 ◼   ► The Mac's been out for three years or so.

00:48:09 ◼   ► Apple had this idea of, hey, we really

00:48:12 ◼   ► want third parties to rush into the Mac

00:48:16 ◼   ► and build software for it.

00:48:18 ◼   ► And that really didn't happen the first couple of years.

00:48:21 ◼   ► And Apple sort of bet wrong on this.

00:48:24 ◼   ► So they started with MacPaint and MacWrite,

00:48:27 ◼   ► developed internally.

00:48:28 ◼   ► And they sort of let them languish.

00:48:30 ◼   ► And they said, oh, well, third party developers

00:48:31 ◼   ► will come in.

00:48:32 ◼   ► And by the time they did it, Apple's own software

00:48:34 ◼   ► was getting pretty crufty.

00:48:37 ◼   ► And so Claris was created to build software for the Mac.

00:48:45 ◼   ► And it was going to be sort of an independent company,

00:48:48 ◼   ► but sort of monitored by Apple.

00:48:51 ◼   ► And then John Sculley ended up buying it all back.

00:48:54 ◼   ► And that's when it became this wholly owned company by Apple

00:48:59 ◼   ► in those early years.

00:49:01 ◼   ► And in 1991, they really made a name for themselves

00:49:04 ◼   ► launching Clarisworks.

00:49:06 ◼   ► And this is an early example of sort of an Office Suite.

00:49:10 ◼   ► There were others.

00:49:11 ◼   ► Lotus was there and some others.

00:49:13 ◼   ► But ClarisWorks had a word processor, a drawing program,

00:49:18 ◼   ► a painting program, spreadsheet tools, database programs,

00:49:22 ◼   ► a presentation program.

00:49:24 ◼   ► Kind of what we think of today, right?

00:49:25 ◼   ► Where you might have Word and Excel and PowerPoint or Pages

00:49:29 ◼   ► and Keynote and Numbers.

00:49:31 ◼   ► ClarisWorks was all that stuff together.

00:49:34 ◼   ► launched in 1991. Like I said, and a very un-Apple like move today, it shipped for Windows

00:49:40 ◼   ► in 1993. So you could run Claris works cross platform and share files back and forth, etc.

00:49:45 ◼   ► Which is wild to think about Apple writing Windows software in 1993. Or not Apple, but somebody

00:49:51 ◼   ► completely owned and controlled by Apple. Claris works was spun back into Apple in 1997 or so.

00:50:01 ◼   ► So the word processor and all this stuff was rebranded and updated as Apple works,

00:50:05 ◼   ► which was eventually replaced by I work. I used Apple works in high school, I have a lot of Apple

00:50:12 ◼   ► work files floating around that I converted to pages documents early on most of them were just

00:50:18 ◼   ► near text. And it was declared end of life in 2007, which was way later than I thought it was killed.

00:50:24 ◼   ► And it's stuck on snow leopard, it won't run online or higher. So rest in peace, Apple works.

00:50:30 ◼   ► works. But Claris had a lot more than just the seven or eight programs and these programs

00:50:35 ◼   ► they they weren't as well integrated as something like I work or office are today you know,

00:50:41 ◼   ► office and I work you can basically like make a spreadsheet and then have like a chart and

00:50:45 ◼   ► then you drag that into a Word document or a presentation and like it updates and all

00:50:49 ◼   ► that sort of cross app compatibility platform stuff we're used to today. Some of that was

00:50:55 ◼   ► present in Claris works, but obviously it was simpler. But they also owned a couple

00:50:59 ◼   ► of other products that were less impactful, but I think are fun to talk about in hindsight.

00:51:05 ◼   ► The first one was Claris homepage, which was a what you see is what you get website creation

00:51:11 ◼   ► tool that ran on the classic Mac OS.

00:51:14 ◼   ► It never made it to Mac OS 10.

00:51:16 ◼   ► But if you wanted to build a website and you didn't want to write HTML or just write HTML,

00:51:22 ◼   ► Claris homepage was an early example of something you could do like a very early Dreamweaver

00:51:26 ◼   ► or something.

00:51:27 ◼   ► There's also an email program, Claris emailer, emailer,

00:51:32 ◼   ► emailer, that's a weird word to say,

00:51:34 ◼   ► and a contact calendar tool named Claris Organizer.

00:51:38 ◼   ► I'll give them this, very consistent with their naming.

00:51:41 ◼   ► Let's like Apple Watch and Apple TV.

00:51:43 ◼   ► If you wanna build a website, Claris homepage.

00:51:46 ◼   ► If you need to organize some things, Claris Organizer.

00:51:49 ◼   ► Solid, solid work.

00:51:51 ◼   ► These were around in the mid to late 90s,

00:51:55 ◼   ► didn't come to OS X, sort of died in the transition.

00:51:58 ◼   ► In 1998 or so, it shed all of its products

00:52:01 ◼   ► except FileMaker and HomePage.

00:52:04 ◼   ► It changed the company name to FileMaker,

00:52:06 ◼   ► which probably put the HomePage people on watch.

00:52:09 ◼   ► And HomePage was put out to pasture in 2001.

00:52:12 ◼   ► After 2001, it basically just made FileMaker,

00:52:15 ◼   ► which if you're not familiar with it,

00:52:19 ◼   ► it's an application for creating and managing databases.

00:52:24 ◼   ► So you can have, for instance, we heard from some people who

00:52:27 ◼   ► created invoicing systems in it.

00:52:29 ◼   ► So you could have all the fields you

00:52:31 ◼   ► would need to create an invoice, and it spits a PDF out,

00:52:33 ◼   ► and then you can track it.

00:52:35 ◼   ► You can really build almost anything

00:52:37 ◼   ► you would need within its sort of relational database

00:52:45 ◼   ► programming.

00:52:46 ◼   ► It's pretty easy to program.

00:52:47 ◼   ► FileMaker is one of those things,

00:52:49 ◼   ► and I haven't used it in a long, long time.

00:52:51 ◼   ► But you can do a lot, which is basic information.

00:52:54 ◼   ► But if you want to really get into it,

00:52:56 ◼   ► you can really go deep and really customize things.

00:53:01 ◼   ► And you can load it up as a-- the FileMaker server

00:53:05 ◼   ► becomes a web server.

00:53:06 ◼   ► And you can hit it from other computers,

00:53:08 ◼   ► so you're not just stuck to your only computer.

00:53:11 ◼   ► There is a FileMaker Go app, which

00:53:16 ◼   ► was like a parallel iOS mobile product.

00:53:20 ◼   ► And it just-- if you need to build something because no one

00:53:25 ◼   ► creates the tool you need, FileMaker

00:53:27 ◼   ► is like one of those things.

00:53:28 ◼   ► And a lot of people now just build a web app,

00:53:31 ◼   ► but FileMaker has its roots in the '80s and '90s.

00:53:33 ◼   ► And a lot of people using FileMaker

00:53:35 ◼   ► have used it for a really long time.

00:53:38 ◼   ► And we're going to talk about the company's desire

00:53:40 ◼   ► to change that.

00:53:41 ◼   ► But this is kind of where they were in the 2000s.

00:53:45 ◼   ► 2007, they introduced Bento.

00:53:47 ◼   ► Do you remember this?

00:53:48 ◼   ► You were a Mac user about this time.

00:53:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, like every Mac user,

00:53:52 ◼   ► bought Bento and didn't know what to do with it.

00:53:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, so it was a database application,

00:53:56 ◼   ► and it felt like an iWork app, right?

00:54:00 ◼   ► Like it really felt like it should've just been

00:54:01 ◼   ► part of iWork and not FileMaker.

00:54:03 ◼   ► They got into hot water because version two

00:54:06 ◼   ► was the same cost as version one,

00:54:08 ◼   ► they didn't do upgrade pricing and people were very upset.

00:54:10 ◼   ► You know, Bento had a couple of versions,

00:54:11 ◼   ► three or four versions, and then sort of went away

00:54:14 ◼   ► six years later in 2013.

00:54:17 ◼   ► I think because, like you said,

00:54:19 ◼   ► no one really knew what to do with it.

00:54:21 ◼   ► And it was basically single user.

00:54:23 ◼   ► So Bento was not a thing to build invoicing

00:54:26 ◼   ► for your whole office.

00:54:27 ◼   ► It was a if you want to build some sort of database

00:54:29 ◼   ► to do personal tracking of some sort.

00:54:32 ◼   ► And I guess there just wasn't a wide enough audience for that.

00:54:36 ◼   ► I played with it and certainly didn't know what to do with it.

00:54:39 ◼   ► So that went away.

00:54:40 ◼   ► And there's no database software really at the iWork level.

00:54:44 ◼   ► FileMaker's a pro app.

00:54:47 ◼   ► There's no consumer version of it on the Mac, from Apple

00:54:50 ◼   ► at least.

00:54:50 ◼   ► So that brings us to today.

00:54:52 ◼   ► They've been trucking along with FileMaker.

00:54:54 ◼   ► They have had some leadership changes,

00:54:57 ◼   ► and now they have a new product.

00:54:59 ◼   ► And they've really gone out on a limb.

00:55:00 ◼   ► They've named it Clarus Connect.

00:55:02 ◼   ► This is what it does.

00:55:04 ◼   ► I'm going to read this.

00:55:05 ◼   ► "A tool for integrating various cloud services

00:55:08 ◼   ► and automating workflows between them."

00:55:10 ◼   ► Yeah, I've tried to do some research on this, right?

00:55:13 ◼   ► Because that is maddening.

00:55:15 ◼   ► it's maddening the way that that is written because it's like, oh, you're doing nothing

00:55:20 ◼   ► and everything? Basically, Clarus acquired a company called Stampley, which was about

00:55:30 ◼   ► trying to help you as a new developer, bring together a bunch of services that have APIs

00:55:36 ◼   ► in a way that you didn't have to do a ton of work with. So if you wanted to have like

00:55:40 ◼   ► payments, file storage, you could just use the API as all these web services and like

00:55:44 ◼   ► really easily integrate them into your product.

00:55:48 ◼   ► So what it seems like Clarus is doing

00:55:51 ◼   ► is trying to find a way to take all of these cloud services

00:55:56 ◼   ► and have them talk to your database and vice versa.

00:55:59 ◼   ► It seems like, from what they're describing--

00:56:01 ◼   ► because Stanley was described as a source--

00:56:04 ◼   ► that they're trying to build like an IFTTT

00:56:07 ◼   ► or a Zapier-like product for Enterprise for FileMaker.

00:56:12 ◼   ► And I'm sure that Claris Connect will become a center point

00:56:16 ◼   ► for a lot of the products that Claris is looking to build.

00:56:18 ◼   ► 'Cause they have a bunch of blog posts

00:56:20 ◼   ► on their company blog.

00:56:21 ◼   ► They've been posting like wild for the last three days.

00:56:24 ◼   ► They're so excited, I love them, they're the best.

00:56:26 ◼   ► And it seems like Claris is building lots of products now.

00:56:31 ◼   ► Like they are now, they have a new vision

00:56:33 ◼   ► and they're like, right,

00:56:34 ◼   ► we're gonna build a bunch of stuff.

00:56:35 ◼   ► It seemed like that they were kind of just

00:56:37 ◼   ► chugging along for a while and they had this new CEO

00:56:39 ◼   ► It's got a bunch of ideas and they're just going for it.

00:56:42 ◼   ► Like they want more users, they want to make more products.

00:56:45 ◼   ► Like they're trying to become a cloud focused company.

00:56:48 ◼   ► - Which makes sense.

00:56:49 ◼   ► I mean, if you think about how FileMaker has worked

00:56:51 ◼   ► is you have a server in your office

00:56:54 ◼   ► just serving it up to your employees.

00:56:56 ◼   ► Like they probably have information in cloud services

00:56:58 ◼   ► and you need to integrate with that to stay relevant.

00:57:02 ◼   ► And so it makes a lot of sense.

00:57:04 ◼   ► - FileMaker will die otherwise.

00:57:05 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:57:06 ◼   ► - Like because no one new is gonna use it.

00:57:08 ◼   ► People are using things like Airtable or even Google Sheets or again just building custom

00:57:14 ◼   ► apps.

00:57:15 ◼   ► And there are things that only FileMaker can do, but there's also a ton of software as

00:57:19 ◼   ► a service companies out there that can meet a lot of people's needs.

00:57:23 ◼   ► So those blog posts, by the way, are impossible to read.

00:57:27 ◼   ► It's all like businessy jargon and...

00:57:29 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:57:30 ◼   ► That's rough.

00:57:31 ◼   ► I read the blurb and I was like, "Oh, they're making Zapier."

00:57:34 ◼   ► And then I read this blog post and then when I woke up from blacking out, I realized I

00:57:39 ◼   ► had no idea what was happening.

00:57:41 ◼   ► It's pretty confusing.

00:57:42 ◼   ► I only think I know what they're doing.

00:57:44 ◼   ► They're looking to remain relevant.

00:57:46 ◼   ► They want to triple their customer base.

00:57:49 ◼   ► Currently FileMaker, the product, not the company, currently serves more than a million

00:57:55 ◼   ► end user and 50,000 different companies, they say, which is bigger than I thought it was.

00:58:01 ◼   ► We heard from most of them when you guys dissed FileMaker a couple months ago.

00:58:04 ◼   ► I do look at that and I'm like, yeah, I'm sure, but how many of these people are using

00:58:09 ◼   ► it because it's what the company uses?

00:58:12 ◼   ► And it's what the company used 20 years ago, so now they can't get away from it.

00:58:17 ◼   ► Right, not a lot of new people coming to FileMaker, like you said, but they want to change that.

00:58:21 ◼   ► Maybe now, maybe now.

00:58:22 ◼   ► Yeah, Claris Connect will make it, I guess, easier to integrate a cloud service or two

00:58:27 ◼   ► into your database.

00:58:28 ◼   ► So I wish them well because FileMaker is a well-known and beloved brand in the sort of

00:58:34 ◼   ► Mac world.

00:58:36 ◼   ► And it's also just an interesting company to talk about because Apple owns them and

00:58:40 ◼   ► they've been so quiet for so long, sort of quietly serving their customer base.

00:58:44 ◼   ► But they're looking to make some moves and this new CEO seems really exciting and I think

00:58:49 ◼   ► we're going to hear more about him moving forward.

00:58:51 ◼   ► I do really like the idea that like this news breaks and Tim Cook's like, "Wait, what?

00:58:58 ◼   ► letting them do all this yeah very good sorry good this episode of connected is

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01:00:43 ◼   ► - So Apple apparently have shipped an estimated,

01:00:46 ◼   ► this is estimated by one of the various analyst firms,

01:00:50 ◼   ► 5.7 million watches worldwide during this past quarter.

01:00:54 ◼   ► Wow.

01:00:54 ◼   ► Apple said they had a good quarter. That was one of the things that they were talking about. But

01:00:58 ◼   ► Apple have never gave any details about Apple Watch. I mean, they give no details about sales

01:01:04 ◼   ► units of anything now, but they never have given. So we don't have a baseline. There's

01:01:07 ◼   ► never been a baseline, right, to set it to, but people can work it out using algorithms,

01:01:13 ◼   ► I'm sure. Apparently, this earns them 46% market share.

01:01:18 ◼   ► I'm interested what market is that like is that all watches I don't know and its continued position

01:01:23 ◼   ► is number one smartwatch company so that's great right yeah good for apple watch rocking and rolling

01:01:29 ◼   ► what is the market share of apple watch amongst this podcast uh not very good

01:01:34 ◼   ► is it 33 or is it 66 uh I think it's closer to 33 so maybe it's 46 46 so what what you are

01:01:47 ◼   ► getting at is my use of the Apple watch because you left it behind a year ago

01:01:52 ◼   ► over a year ago May last year was the last time I wore an Apple watch with any

01:01:58 ◼   ► seriousness so my use is a little bit different than that I do not wear it

01:02:03 ◼   ► daily anymore but I do put it on to work out so going to the gym going for a bike

01:02:09 ◼   ► ride going for a walk or a run past that though I don't wear it day to day I

01:02:14 ◼   ► I don't wear it to work, even when I travel it stays at home.

01:02:19 ◼   ► This sort of happened gradually for me.

01:02:23 ◼   ► Where I've always had other watches and I've always liked those other watches.

01:02:28 ◼   ► Over time I realized that even with tweaking the notifications and basically turning almost

01:02:33 ◼   ► all of them off, I still felt like the watch was too invasive into my life.

01:02:39 ◼   ► And I feel like I stand on one side of the debate most people have about the watch where

01:02:46 ◼   ► most people look at the watch and say, Oh, it's great.

01:02:49 ◼   ► I can glance at my notifications, I can see if anything's important.

01:02:53 ◼   ► And I can ignore it or I can deal with it if I need to, but they use it as a triage

01:02:57 ◼   ► of sorts for your notifications.

01:02:59 ◼   ► I think that's how you used to use your watch.

01:03:01 ◼   ► A lot of people really like that about the Apple Watch, but over time, I grew to dislike

01:03:06 ◼   ► it more and more, where I felt like even with very pared down notifications, I didn't want

01:03:13 ◼   ► the world following me around on my wrist all the time, that if I left my phone in the

01:03:18 ◼   ► other room, or went somewhere without it, that that was okay.

01:03:24 ◼   ► The Apple Watch is interesting too, because it is about as old as Relay.

01:03:28 ◼   ► It came out, I think about the same time.

01:03:31 ◼   ► I've had one for relays, you know, for several years, because in those first several years,

01:03:38 ◼   ► I really felt like I needed to be available as much as possible because you know, we were

01:03:42 ◼   ► growing company with infrastructure issues in the beginning and had to really make our

01:03:49 ◼   ► website more robust and all of our systems more robust.

01:03:51 ◼   ► And so I felt like I always needed to be around.

01:03:54 ◼   ► And this really has become more mature.

01:03:56 ◼   ► And as my sort of day to day has changed over the last couple of years, I realized that

01:04:01 ◼   ► that wasn't really true and that if I if someone really needed me my that honestly

01:04:07 ◼   ► there's my phone is with me almost all the time anyways but I felt like the

01:04:12 ◼   ► watch more and more was a handcuff to the internet not a way to just glance at

01:04:16 ◼   ► the internet and then carry on and I don't know why I feel that way I'm not

01:04:20 ◼   ► sure what that says about my usage of the watch it's just how I feel so I'm

01:04:24 ◼   ► not projecting down to anybody not projecting anything onto the we are in a

01:04:28 ◼   ► no-judgment zone. We're in the no-judgment zone. Thank you. So that's

01:04:33 ◼   ► just kind of how I felt about it. And so as an experiment I said, you know, I'm

01:04:36 ◼   ► gonna go a week without wearing it. I'm gonna wear-- I still wear a watch, wear a

01:04:40 ◼   ► watch every day. I like having the time and date on my wrist. I still to this day

01:04:44 ◼   ► sometimes, if it's cloudy, look at my watch wondering if it's going to rain.

01:04:48 ◼   ► And you know what? This mechanical watch cannot tell me that. So I do miss having

01:04:52 ◼   ► weather on my wrist. But I said, you know, for a week I'm not gonna wear it and I'm

01:04:58 ◼   ► going to see if I feel like I'm missing out on things or if I feel like this thought I

01:05:03 ◼   ► had of like I need I feel like it's a handcuff like is that actually true or not.

01:05:08 ◼   ► And it was great.

01:05:09 ◼   ► And one week became two and two weeks became two months and I haven't won a watch consistently

01:05:15 ◼   ► a good part of this year.

01:05:17 ◼   ► And I said I still wear it for the exercise tracking.

01:05:19 ◼   ► I like Apple Health.

01:05:21 ◼   ► I like the workout tracking.

01:05:22 ◼   ► I'm not super interested in replacing the Apple Watch with something like a Fitbit for

01:05:26 ◼   ► those things.

01:05:27 ◼   ► I like the way the watch handles itself in exercise.

01:05:31 ◼   ► And most of the time too, if I'm exercising,

01:05:33 ◼   ► if I'm at the gym or especially if I'm on my bike

01:05:36 ◼   ► and someone needs to get in touch with me,

01:05:38 ◼   ► the watch is the way that happens.

01:05:40 ◼   ► And so I like the connectivity while I'm working out.

01:05:44 ◼   ► So if my wife calls me and my phone is in the locker

01:05:47 ◼   ► in the weight room, or if I'm on my bike

01:05:49 ◼   ► and someone needs to get ahold of me,

01:05:52 ◼   ► again, through my very narrow gate of notifications

01:05:55 ◼   ► and my phone is not accessible,

01:05:57 ◼   ► I can at least see that, oh, one of my parents is calling me, my brother texted me, Myke

01:06:02 ◼   ► is texting me, something, you know.

01:06:05 ◼   ► I can at least kind of be available.

01:06:07 ◼   ► And so I actually like it in those situations.

01:06:09 ◼   ► So that's why I'm keeping it.

01:06:10 ◼   ► I have a Series 4.

01:06:12 ◼   ► I'm not going to buy a Series 5 this fall, but I haven't ejected it from my life like

01:06:18 ◼   ► you have and some others have.

01:06:19 ◼   ► It still has a place.

01:06:20 ◼   ► It's just a very small and diminished role.

01:06:23 ◼   ► I've got to say, the times that I do wear it to the gym or whatever, it doesn't stay

01:06:27 ◼   ► on the whole day.

01:06:28 ◼   ► I get home, I shower, it goes back in the drawer or on the charger, whatever the case

01:06:32 ◼   ► may be.

01:06:33 ◼   ► And that's kind of where I am with it, to the point where I don't really know what's

01:06:38 ◼   ► coming in the new version of WatchOS.

01:06:40 ◼   ► I haven't paid that close attention to it.

01:06:42 ◼   ► And I just feel like, while a lot of people, it adds a lot to their lives, for whatever

01:06:48 ◼   ► reason, I don't feel that way about it.

01:06:51 ◼   ► So I am, I've joined the Club of Myke when it comes to the Apple Watch.

01:06:58 ◼   ► Oh, it's the Club of Marco.

01:06:59 ◼   ► Club of Marco.

01:07:00 ◼   ► #MarcoIsRight.

01:07:01 ◼   ► Yeah, I followed Marco, and now you followed along in my footsteps.

01:07:09 ◼   ► What you said about why it doesn't work for you is pretty much the same for me.

01:07:13 ◼   ► You know, I just figure that my phone is around whenever I want to be contacted, and if it's

01:07:20 ◼   ► it's not there or I probably don't want to be. And the watch never really allowed me

01:07:25 ◼   ► to be away from that. I was very set on the fact that I figured I needed notifications

01:07:31 ◼   ► for everything always and then stopped wearing the watch and realized I don't and I don't

01:07:35 ◼   ► want it either. It was just a thing that I didn't know would happen to me until I stopped

01:07:40 ◼   ► wearing it and I knew within a week that I didn't want to wear it anymore. Like it was

01:07:44 ◼   ► very quick where I was like oh no I don't want it anymore I have all the

01:07:50 ◼   ► notifications of my phone my phone will buzz and light up when I need it and

01:07:53 ◼   ► then when I don't want it it goes away and yeah I could do not disturb the

01:07:57 ◼   ► watch but what's the point right like for me I genuinely feel like I only have

01:08:03 ◼   ► two options I either wear the watch and have all notifications go to it that I

01:08:08 ◼   ► ever want to know about or I don't wear it like there isn't an idea of like well

01:08:13 ◼   ► why don't I just wear it and have a few things? No, because my phone can do that.

01:08:16 ◼   ► Like it's cool, right? Like for me it just doesn't work out. And then the other

01:08:21 ◼   ► thing, I really like watches. I like the way they look. I like that I can choose.

01:08:27 ◼   ► You can also change the bands, right? Like it's not like an Apple watch only thing,

01:08:31 ◼   ► right? Like I like looking at pictures of watches. I like owning watches. I enjoy

01:08:37 ◼   ► that I can put on a completely different watch from day to day depending on what

01:08:43 ◼   ► I'm wearing with an Apple watch you're always kind of wearing an Apple watch no

01:08:47 ◼   ► matter what you do to it they are very good-looking they do not look as good as

01:08:51 ◼   ► any watch that I own right like like real watches to me and my taste look

01:08:58 ◼   ► better than every Apple watch no matter what the face is right because they

01:09:02 ◼   ► still look like little computers and that's just not for me now that was why

01:09:06 ◼   ► I bought my first mechanical watch was because I didn't want to have an Apple

01:09:10 ◼   ► watching on in my wedding photos and I am so happy I made that decision because

01:09:14 ◼   ► I wouldn't have looked good it wouldn't have looked good now because it would

01:09:17 ◼   ► have been a series 3 and the series 3 looks like this ugly refrigerator

01:09:20 ◼   ► compared to the series 4 right like the series 4 is so much better looking like

01:09:26 ◼   ► it is a beautiful beautiful watch for what it is and what it is is a computer

01:09:32 ◼   ► still but in five years the series 4 will look old so you know time marches on

01:09:37 ◼   ► you should you should say what watch you're wearing at the moment because

01:09:40 ◼   ► people will want to know what what you you have moved to today I'm watching I'm

01:09:44 ◼   ► watching today I'm watching Myke today I'm wearing a watch by instrument which

01:09:50 ◼   ► is a company in the UK but I also have a Seiko that I really like and a calculator

01:09:55 ◼   ► watch so I bounce around a little bit for me the requirement is the date like

01:10:00 ◼   ► having the date and day if possible but definitely a date window and I kind of

01:10:05 ◼   ► agree with you and none of my watches are expensive really I mean watches are

01:10:09 ◼   ► like audio equipment you can spend as much money as you have. I'm playing in

01:10:13 ◼   ► the the very low end of things. For now, for now, I keep sending you watches that

01:10:20 ◼   ► I think that you'd be interested in and I think eventually... Oh I've got a bucket

01:10:23 ◼   ► list right? Eventually you'll get at least one. I've got a bucket list but you

01:10:28 ◼   ► don't have to spend, what's great about it is you don't have to spend a lot of

01:10:30 ◼   ► money to have something that looks really nice and there are so many

01:10:34 ◼   ► the options. Like like my Seiko is black and orange with a chrome body. And like, I love

01:10:40 ◼   ► black and orange. I love orange and chrome. I like black and chrome, like, or stainless

01:10:45 ◼   ► steel. But it was like the like, Oh, I love everything about how this looks. And you can

01:10:50 ◼   ► find that in the watch world. And even with the new, you know, new watch OS versions and

01:10:56 ◼   ► new watches you are limited into what Apple thinks people want and starting

01:11:05 ◼   ► with the Series 4 I was really unhappy with all the watch faces. I used the the

01:11:10 ◼   ► modular one so there's like a bunch of data on it which is fine but I didn't

01:11:15 ◼   ► like the new watch the main new watch face I thought they sort of butchered

01:11:19 ◼   ► all the old ones when they went bigger and I want something that if I'm gonna

01:11:24 ◼   ► wear on my body every day. I want to be really happy with it. And you know,

01:11:28 ◼   ► you may, people may think that's vain, I guess to a certain degree it is, but we

01:11:33 ◼   ► do that with, we do that... No, it's fashion. It is fashion, and we do that with

01:11:38 ◼   ► the rest of what we do, right? We wear our favorite podcast t-shirts, and we do all

01:11:43 ◼   ► these things because they project something about us into the world, and

01:11:49 ◼   ► when I see that whatever watch I'm wearing that day, I'm happy

01:11:53 ◼   ► that slack can't bother me on it. And I'm happy that it is

01:11:57 ◼   ► exactly what I want. And, you know, you have a question on

01:11:59 ◼   ► this doc about what could bring you back to the Apple Watch. And

01:12:03 ◼   ► I'm not sure there is anything at this point, I will continue

01:12:07 ◼   ► to wear it for fitness and exercise tracking. And that

01:12:09 ◼   ► means you know, every couple of years, I'll buy a new one for

01:12:12 ◼   ► that I use that enough to continue that investment. I'm

01:12:16 ◼   ► not going to buy five the series for series four is really good.

01:12:18 ◼   ► Like as a sidebar, the series for watches really great.

01:12:22 ◼   ► So that's gonna do me for a long time.

01:12:25 ◼   ► But that's kind of where I am.

01:12:28 ◼   ► Federico has two or three,

01:12:30 ◼   ► so I guess maybe he balances us out here,

01:12:32 ◼   ► but I've just really cooled on it

01:12:35 ◼   ► over the last several months.

01:12:37 ◼   ► - I wanted to mention, 'cause people might ask me too,

01:12:40 ◼   ► I recommend a brand called Farah.

01:12:42 ◼   ► They're a British brand.

01:12:43 ◼   ► I put them in the show notes too.

01:12:44 ◼   ► I'm very into their watches right now.

01:12:47 ◼   ► and they have a wide variance in cost from like you can get watches from them that are

01:12:54 ◼   ► 300 pounds or you can go up to like 1700 pounds and it depends. I have a quartz watch that

01:12:59 ◼   ► they make which I love just very very dearly which is called the Pendine. I like that watch

01:13:07 ◼   ► very very much. I think you've seen me wearing that one.

01:13:12 ◼   ► Yeah it's great.

01:13:13 ◼   ► It's beautiful, beautiful thing.

01:13:14 ◼   ► I am with you in that I am not really there kind of isn't anything that Apple

01:13:21 ◼   ► would be able to do to the Apple Watch, like specifically to bring me back to it.

01:13:24 ◼   ► Like I may well and I expect that I will buy another Apple Watch at some point.

01:13:29 ◼   ► Like I genuinely believe I will do that.

01:13:31 ◼   ► But it won't be a product that I wear every day.

01:13:34 ◼   ► Like it might be a product that I wear under specific circumstances.

01:13:37 ◼   ► It might be like a health tracking tool, right?

01:13:39 ◼   ► Like that you have.

01:13:40 ◼   ► But just as like, I could never imagine wearing a computer watch all the time.

01:13:48 ◼   ► I can imagine it having a use case, like how I imagine having watches in my future

01:13:54 ◼   ► that I only ever wear when I'm wearing a suit or something, right?

01:13:58 ◼   ► Like that they are very specific purposes.

01:14:02 ◼   ► And I just think that this is just, I think I genuinely think that the Apple Watch is

01:14:07 ◼   ► just more of a when it comes down to like a divisive product for people. I think it's

01:14:12 ◼   ► like you know if you are in the world today by and large you probably need a smartphone

01:14:19 ◼   ► of some kind right like it's it's become one of those things where like in the vast majority

01:14:24 ◼   ► of the world to get by you need to own a smartphone. I don't think that smartwatches are even nearly

01:14:32 ◼   ► at that level yet and I don't know if they ever will be either and so I just think that

01:14:39 ◼   ► this is much more of a like does this meet your personal needs and my personal needs

01:14:46 ◼   ► like the Apple watch does a very bad job of the low bar of what I want to watch to do

01:14:52 ◼   ► which is to always be able to show me the time which it cannot do right like I can look

01:14:58 ◼   ► down right now and see the time on my watch my Apple watch would not be able

01:15:01 ◼   ► to display that without movement and that's just a thing that that frustrates

01:15:05 ◼   ► me like it's a it's almost like a like a meme or a running joke at this point

01:15:09 ◼   ► with the Apple watch but it's just something that I genuinely want and it

01:15:15 ◼   ► doesn't do that so it fails in one very very important area and everything the

01:15:22 ◼   ► Apple watch can do my phone can do better and I tend to have my phone with

01:15:27 ◼   ► me whenever I would need to do something. So that's that. No judgment. No

01:15:33 ◼   ► judgment zone. No judgment. I was a devout user of the Apple Watch for many years

01:15:37 ◼   ► and I genuinely think what you were saying, I'd never thought of it that like

01:15:41 ◼   ► as kind of our working lives calmed down, like everything wasn't so urgent all the

01:15:47 ◼   ► time, that maybe that's why I've been able to relax it a little bit. Yeah and

01:15:53 ◼   ► And you and I have this thing too, and I think it just sort of formed over time.

01:15:58 ◼   ► We're like, we've talked about this before, but we talk about like life stuff and iMessage.

01:16:04 ◼   ► Slack is work.

01:16:06 ◼   ► And like, if something's really on fire, like this has happened a couple of times, you or

01:16:11 ◼   ► I would just call each other.

01:16:12 ◼   ► And like, I know that if you are FaceTime calling me, like something is happening, right?

01:16:19 ◼   ► And vice versa.

01:16:20 ◼   ► very, probably only a couple times over the years. If you move away from the

01:16:25 ◼   ► Apple Watch and you do work with somebody closely and the watch was part

01:16:28 ◼   ► of that, you do have to build other systems in. Especially if you use the

01:16:31 ◼   ► Apple Watch for years and years would become reliant on it. But I learned, I

01:16:35 ◼   ► think you have too, that you don't, you can make those changes and it'd be

01:16:38 ◼   ► pretty seamless if you spend some time thinking through it. I think that does it.

01:16:42 ◼   ► As an update Federico sent a gif that is just somebody saying the lies,

01:16:48 ◼   ► the lies over and over again could still be automated could be there's no way to

01:16:53 ◼   ► know that seems like a bot there's no way to know. There's no way to report him on Twitter. The Giphy bot can just

01:16:58 ◼   ► send what feels like very poignant gifs sometimes so report tweet to Twitter

01:17:04 ◼   ► if you want to find links to stuff we spoke about this week including the

01:17:09 ◼   ► survey for Relay FM Family Feud and our merchandise and membership and all the

01:17:16 ◼   ► other stuff, head on over to relay.fm slash connected slash 255. While you're

01:17:22 ◼   ► there, you can get in touch via email or of course you can do so on Twitter. You

01:17:26 ◼   ► can find Myke there as I M Y. K e Myke is the co-host of many shows here at

01:17:32 ◼   ► relay FM. So if you love his is smooth, gentle British voice, I don't know if

01:17:39 ◼   ► your voice is gentle. Say something gentle Myke. Flowers. That's pretty

01:17:45 ◼   ► If you want more of that, head on over to relay.fm/shows and you can find Myke's work

01:17:51 ◼   ► there.

01:17:52 ◼   ► Three ply toilet paper.

01:17:53 ◼   ► Are youse reading your shopping list?

01:17:56 ◼   ► Wait, you think I want to buy flowers, puppies, and toilet paper?

01:18:01 ◼   ► What kind of shopping list is that?

01:18:02 ◼   ► I mean, two of the three.

01:18:03 ◼   ► I mean, the puppies is an outlier.

01:18:04 ◼   ► That's true.

01:18:05 ◼   ► That's true.

01:18:06 ◼   ► You don't like pop down to the store and pick up a few things and surprise the dean of the

01:18:09 ◼   ► flowers sometimes?

01:18:10 ◼   ► I don't need to justify my romantic relationships with you.

01:18:15 ◼   ► Okay.

01:18:16 ◼   ► You never bring me flowers.

01:18:18 ◼   ► I know that.

01:18:20 ◼   ► You want flowers?

01:18:21 ◼   ► No, I think I'm good.

01:18:22 ◼   ► I'm going to bring you flowers now.

01:18:25 ◼   ► Okay.

01:18:26 ◼   ► Okay.

01:18:27 ◼   ► I expect them now when I pick you up from the airport.

01:18:30 ◼   ► You can follow me on Twitter @ismh and I write over at 512pixels.net.

01:18:36 ◼   ► Federico or the bot that is in Federico's Twitter account now is at Vitici, V I T I

01:18:42 ◼   ► C C I and he is the editor in chief of max stories.net. I'd like to thank our sponsors

01:18:49 ◼   ► this week, Squarespace hover and care of until next time, Myke, say goodbye.

01:18:54 ◼   ► Cheerio. Adios.