The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► Oh boy, once you start locking everything down.

00:00:04 ◼   ► Wow, can you unlock, can I ask you a question?

00:00:07 ◼   ► >> Yeah, you can ask me anything.

00:00:09 ◼   ► >> Do you, let me cut this out.

00:00:11 ◼   ► Do you unlock your Mac with your watch?

00:00:13 ◼   ► >> I do.

00:00:14 ◼   ► >> Wow.

00:00:16 ◼   ► >> But I don't wear my watch every day.

00:00:18 ◼   ► But it's one of my favorite features and it's actually one of

00:00:22 ◼   ► the main motivators for me to wear my watch because I love that feature so much.

00:00:27 ◼   ► I do. I trust it. And I find that it works amazingly.

00:00:31 ◼   ► It works, you know, over 80% of the time, which is good.

00:00:35 ◼   ► But man, switch it. It was a good excuse to finally switch over from two-step to two-factor.

00:00:42 ◼   ► Wow. That's a heck of a thing.

00:00:45 ◼   ► I did it. And I gotta tell you, I put it off for a long time. I only did it several weeks ago.

00:00:56 ◼   ► there was like an update to, I forget if it was a Mac OS update or an iOS update

00:01:02 ◼   ► where one of the features was, "Hey, you know, we came out with this unlock your

00:01:06 ◼   ► Mac feature with your watch back in October or whatever, but we made it

00:01:10 ◼   ► really fast now." And I was like, "You know what? I got to try it. I've been putting

00:01:13 ◼   ► this off, and I put it off because I didn't have the two-factor. I had two-step."

00:01:17 ◼   ► Am I saying it right? Yeah, yeah. The two-step, I mean, I didn't tell you the

00:01:22 ◼   ► spec on this, but if you're trying to determine which one you have running right now, well,

00:01:27 ◼   ► it's probably 2-step. And I think the easiest way to tell, and correct me if I'm wrong,

00:01:32 ◼   ► I'm sure people will, with 2-step, you get an SMS message with a four-digit code. With

00:01:39 ◼   ► 2-factor, you get like a more official-looking, like iOS pop-up and a six-digit code. But

00:01:48 ◼   ► Switching over is cool.

00:01:51 ◼   ► You want to not be having a holiday party when you switch over to two factor.

00:01:57 ◼   ► One night I got a MacBook Adorable and I thought, "Okay, I'll give this a spin."

00:02:01 ◼   ► And so I thought, "Oh, watch TV.

00:02:05 ◼   ► Set up two factor."

00:02:06 ◼   ► And I was trying to be that guy.

00:02:07 ◼   ► I'm trying to be like security guy.

00:02:09 ◼   ► So I don't leave iCloud.

00:02:11 ◼   ► I don't tick the button to keep me logged in when I'm on a Mac with iCloud.

00:02:15 ◼   ► I don't know why.

00:02:16 ◼   ► It's just a dumb superstition.

00:02:17 ◼   ► So if memory serves, you've got to go in.

00:02:19 ◼   ► You have to-- first, you have to shut off.

00:02:20 ◼   ► This is totally like Tom Cruise coming down the line,

00:02:23 ◼   ► like-- you land right before you hit the floor.

00:02:26 ◼   ► So you've got to log in.

00:02:28 ◼   ► And in my case, so I've got to two-factor in.

00:02:30 ◼   ► Right.

00:02:30 ◼   ► Two-step.

00:02:31 ◼   ► Two-step in.

00:02:32 ◼   ► I two-step in.

00:02:33 ◼   ► OK, not a problem.

00:02:35 ◼   ► Have some drinks?

00:02:35 ◼   ► Set up two-factor.

00:02:36 ◼   ► No problem.

00:02:37 ◼   ► So, so far, so good.

00:02:38 ◼   ► I two-step in.

00:02:40 ◼   ► And first, you've got to shut off two-step.

00:02:45 ◼   ► Like, this-- yeah, it makes sense.

00:02:46 ◼   ► First you have to shut off two-step, and then to turn on two-factor, and there might be

00:02:51 ◼   ► another two-step at that point to make sure you want to shut off two-step.

00:02:55 ◼   ► But in any case, then you get to where you have to put in three security questions and

00:03:03 ◼   ► optionally I think a phone number.

00:03:07 ◼   ► And so I'm that guy, right?

00:03:08 ◼   ► So like I don't have the box ticked.

00:03:11 ◼   ► Over here I got one password.

00:03:12 ◼   ► Oh, by the way, and I was trying to do this on an iPad.

00:03:15 ◼   ► So, initially, and so I, and then eventually I moved to the MacBook Adorable, but point

00:03:22 ◼   ► being I'm not going to put in like the name of my high school.

00:03:26 ◼   ► I'm not going to put in my favorite band or whatever.

00:03:28 ◼   ► I have my own way of doing this by using a non-conventional answer to that, but I want

00:03:34 ◼   ► to get it exactly right.

00:03:35 ◼   ► So I type all of them into 1Password and then I'm copying and pasting them.

00:03:41 ◼   ► I hate those security questions because I have a podcast,

00:03:45 ◼   ► and on a podcast, I might occasionally--

00:03:47 ◼   ► I might tell a story about my first grade teacher.

00:03:51 ◼   ► Absolutely.

00:03:53 ◼   ► I know that I've told stories about my crazy dog, Chester,

00:03:57 ◼   ► from growing up, who used to--

00:04:00 ◼   ► My name is definitely John Gruber.

00:04:02 ◼   ► My dog is Chester.

00:04:03 ◼   ► He would reset everything.

00:04:05 ◼   ► He was a great dog.

00:04:06 ◼   ► I can't help but tell stories about him.

00:04:08 ◼   ► But I mean, those questions--

00:04:09 ◼   ► I don't like those questions at all.

00:04:13 ◼   ► That stuff seems awful.

00:04:15 ◼   ► And because everybody I know who's actually been hacked

00:04:18 ◼   ► has been hacked through--

00:04:19 ◼   ► or I think so.

00:04:20 ◼   ► I think this is true that everybody I know

00:04:22 ◼   ► who's had any kind of problems with the hijinks

00:04:26 ◼   ► that these things are meant to defend against

00:04:29 ◼   ► was hacked through--

00:04:31 ◼   ► Social engineering.

00:04:32 ◼   ► Social engineering.

00:04:33 ◼   ► I was going to say social manipulation.

00:04:36 ◼   ► The Matt Honan problem.

00:04:37 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

00:04:38 ◼   ► Somebody just calls up and says, I'm John Gruber.

00:04:40 ◼   ► And oh, yeah, my first grade teacher was so-and-so.

00:04:43 ◼   ► And the dog was named Chester.

00:04:46 ◼   ► And boom, then they're in.

00:04:48 ◼   ► I had an additional problem with the switch from two-step

00:04:50 ◼   ► to two-factor with iCloud, where--

00:04:53 ◼   ► well, number-- the whole thing is a mess.

00:04:56 ◼   ► And I don't even know how I got into this situation, where

00:04:58 ◼   ► I'm one of the people who've got two iCloud things, where

00:05:02 ◼   ► I've got the one that I use--

00:05:04 ◼   ► well, two Apple IDs.

00:05:06 ◼   ► One--

00:05:06 ◼   ► Yeah, me too.

00:05:07 ◼   ► One for my stuff and one for my media.

00:05:09 ◼   ► Yeah, so when I buy stuff, it's with a different account.

00:05:15 ◼   ► And when--

00:05:15 ◼   ► That's my old-- I still have my old, I think, mac.com or me.com

00:05:19 ◼   ► address for that.

00:05:21 ◼   ► I even have a third Apple ID, which

00:05:25 ◼   ► isn't even an email address.

00:05:27 ◼   ► It's just a name, which is from Apple Developer Connection.

00:05:31 ◼   ► It was like an ADC account that I set up in 1998.

00:05:35 ◼   ► But back then, it was like they didn't use email

00:05:38 ◼   ► as your identifier.

00:05:39 ◼   ► They just let you pick a name.

00:05:40 ◼   ► And so I've still got that.

00:05:42 ◼   ► And there's certain things that if I go through ADC,

00:05:45 ◼   ► they're like, you need to upgrade this account

00:05:49 ◼   ► to an email address.

00:05:50 ◼   ► But the problem is that the two email addresses

00:05:52 ◼   ► that I most like to use with it are already Apple IDs.

00:05:56 ◼   ► So I can't use it.

00:05:57 ◼   ► Anyway, but the problem I ran into was I turn off Two-Step.

00:06:01 ◼   ► And it is weird.

00:06:02 ◼   ► It is like, first step, turn off all of your security

00:06:05 ◼   ► on your account.

00:06:07 ◼   ► Second step, go through this, and then go in,

00:06:09 ◼   ► and like on iOS, you go to like settings, iCloud,

00:06:13 ◼   ► click your name, and then there's like,

00:06:15 ◼   ► turn on two-factor authentication.

00:06:20 ◼   ► Except I would follow those steps and go there,

00:06:22 ◼   ► and there was no button that said

00:06:23 ◼   ► turn on two-factor authentication.

00:06:25 ◼   ► And then I would go on the Mac,

00:06:27 ◼   ► and on the Mac, you go to the settings or system prefs,

00:06:30 ◼   ► and there's the same type thing,

00:06:32 ◼   ► and there's a button.

00:06:33 ◼   ► And there was a button to turn on two-factor authentication.

00:06:36 ◼   ► And I would click that button, and it would spin--

00:06:38 ◼   ► not for a long time, but for like the six or seven seconds

00:06:42 ◼   ► you would think that it would take for this to phone home

00:06:45 ◼   ► to Apple, and Apple would figure out how to do this.

00:06:49 ◼   ► And then it would politely tell me

00:06:50 ◼   ► that two-factor authentication cannot be turned on

00:06:52 ◼   ► for this account.

00:06:53 ◼   ► You know how it is, though.

00:06:57 ◼   ► You're having a holiday party.

00:06:58 ◼   ► You want to increase your security.

00:07:00 ◼   ► And I'm like a terrier.

00:07:01 ◼   ► I'm like, on the one hand, I'm like, I'm going to get this done.

00:07:03 ◼   ► I know I can do this.

00:07:05 ◼   ► And then it becomes like a video game where I'm like, and just to cut to the chase here,

00:07:10 ◼   ► I'm not going to tell you how many times I tried to do this.

00:07:12 ◼   ► And each time, by the time I got the end to make it go, I was timed out on the website

00:07:19 ◼   ► because I hadn't ticked the button.

00:07:20 ◼   ► And then I'm like, okay, you know what?

00:07:21 ◼   ► That's fine.

00:07:22 ◼   ► We're going to do a speed run of this.

00:07:23 ◼   ► Let's see if I can do this and finish it without having to tick that button because now I'm

00:07:28 ◼   ► mad.

00:07:29 ◼   ► And I never could pull it off.

00:07:30 ◼   ► And then of course I think, "Okay, you're getting your hands perilously close to the

00:07:34 ◼   ► dragon's mouth at this point.

00:07:36 ◼   ► Wait till tomorrow morning, wait till the holiday party is over.

00:07:38 ◼   ► Do this in the clear light of day."

00:07:40 ◼   ► And I did tick the button and it did work.

00:07:42 ◼   ► And then of course, everything's blowing up on all the devices letting me know that all

00:07:46 ◼   ► these things are available in all these places.

00:07:48 ◼   ► But I don't know, it's just another one of those things where, far from I guess security

00:07:52 ◼   ► theater, I mean, this is such an important thing for all of us to be working on, but

00:07:58 ◼   ► that it is not super consumer friendly.

00:08:02 ◼   ► - Well, and I think Apple deserves some praise for this,

00:08:07 ◼   ► 'cause I think they're more or less doing the right thing.

00:08:09 ◼   ► And I think now that I have it working,

00:08:10 ◼   ► I do like the way that it works.

00:08:12 ◼   ► And I like the new advanced, like you said,

00:08:15 ◼   ► like it looks like, instead of just getting a text message

00:08:17 ◼   ► or an iMessage or whatever it is with a code,

00:08:19 ◼   ► you get like a real nice dialogue,

00:08:21 ◼   ► and it even has a map showing you

00:08:23 ◼   ► where the thing is trying to log on.

00:08:26 ◼   ► So they're doing the right thing.

00:08:29 ◼   ► I just think it shows how hard it is to move old systems

00:08:34 ◼   ► along to the best practices, right?

00:08:38 ◼   ► Because the Apple ID system dates back to,

00:08:42 ◼   ► I don't know, late 90s, when it was literally

00:08:45 ◼   ► just a username and a password, and that was it.

00:08:49 ◼   ► And your password--

00:08:50 ◼   ► - I don't think I got one until

00:08:52 ◼   ► whatever the original MobileMe thing was,

00:08:55 ◼   ► where you got the cards and all that stuff.

00:08:57 ◼   ► That's probably when I first got one.

00:08:59 ◼   ► You had one, Sir Quesa had one of those

00:09:01 ◼   ► just a name things also.

00:09:02 ◼   ► - I still have it.

00:09:04 ◼   ► Still have it. - Yeah, wow.

00:09:05 ◼   ► They didn't make you change it.

00:09:07 ◼   ► - Not yet.

00:09:08 ◼   ► - Huh.

00:09:08 ◼   ► - I think that they might,

00:09:10 ◼   ► I think if I were to say,

00:09:12 ◼   ► if I were to release an app in the App Store

00:09:16 ◼   ► under that account, I think I would have to update.

00:09:18 ◼   ► I'd have to update it to an email address.

00:09:20 ◼   ► I think there's a couple of things,

00:09:21 ◼   ► and maybe even if I got like a WWDC ticket, I don't know.

00:09:25 ◼   ► if I got it on account.

00:09:26 ◼   ► Something goes wrong.

00:09:28 ◼   ► And it could be like an iTunes problem.

00:09:30 ◼   ► Sometimes there'll be these weird--

00:09:33 ◼   ► sorry to go on about this.

00:09:34 ◼   ► But Sir Keeson and I have talked about this a lot

00:09:36 ◼   ► on our program, those mystery me pop-ups

00:09:37 ◼   ► that you get periodically for reauthorize with iCloud.

00:09:41 ◼   ► And you're like, why reauthorize?

00:09:42 ◼   ► What reauthorize?

00:09:43 ◼   ► What is this for?

00:09:45 ◼   ► If you got that from Google, you'd freak.

00:09:47 ◼   ► If you were just using your computer

00:09:49 ◼   ► and you got a pop-up message that

00:09:50 ◼   ► said reauthorize to Google, you'd be like, what is this?

00:09:53 ◼   ► But then you get that thing where it's like,

00:09:55 ◼   ► oh, now, you gotta go to the principal's office.

00:09:59 ◼   ► You gotta go to appleid.apple.com.

00:10:02 ◼   ► You're gonna sit on the bench,

00:10:02 ◼   ► you're gonna wait your turn, you're gonna go use,

00:10:04 ◼   ► I have not used appleid.apple.com in a while,

00:10:07 ◼   ► but every time I've used it,

00:10:09 ◼   ► I feel like I'm indie trying to get the head of the idol

00:10:12 ◼   ► when I got the bag of sand.

00:10:14 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:10:16 ◼   ► I just wanna get outta here without getting speared.

00:10:21 ◼   ► Should not have been a much bigger bag of sand.

00:10:24 ◼   ► I've thought about it. Because gold, I don't know how... I presume that the idol

00:10:28 ◼   ► was hollow to some extent, that it was not a solid...

00:10:31 ◼   ► Like a modern chocolate bunny. Yeah, I presume that the idol

00:10:35 ◼   ► was like a modern chocolate bunny made of gold, but even so,

00:10:38 ◼   ► gold is a very heavy substance, and I feel like that what they chose to do

00:10:43 ◼   ► was pick something that was cinematically roughly the same size.

00:10:48 ◼   ► sure but I feel like you know I've always it's always bothered me a little

00:10:52 ◼   ► bit that see I'm just gonna guesstimate here

00:10:55 ◼   ► and I couldn't know without holding the idol in the bag but

00:10:57 ◼   ► I'm gonna say three to six times heavier than that back of sand

00:11:01 ◼   ► yeah I'm also I'm loathe to criticize the scene because

00:11:04 ◼   ► it it famously this is Raiders of the Lost Ark is

00:11:07 ◼   ► is arguably my favorite movie of all time depending on what day you ask me

00:11:12 ◼   ► uh without question my most beloved movie of all time

00:11:15 ◼   ► And the movie, I know without question, it's the movie I've seen the most number of times.

00:11:21 ◼   ► And even saying that, and one of the reasons I love the movie is that I love every single

00:11:27 ◼   ► scene in the movie. There's not a single clunker, arguably other than the one where

00:11:31 ◼   ► Marion hits him with the mirror. I love that. It's a classic. And I mean, my kid will request

00:11:40 ◼   ► to watch it. It's still... it's really well put together.

00:11:45 ◼   ► Yeah, but that scene in particular is a standout among standouts.

00:11:49 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

00:11:50 ◼   ► Here's the reason I know. I think I've told this story before, but maybe not to you. The reason

00:11:53 ◼   ► I know that I've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark more than any other movie is that growing up,

00:11:59 ◼   ► my friend JD, who lived right down the street from me, had a VCR. And this is before

00:12:05 ◼   ► very early years of VCR technology and home video.

00:12:09 ◼   ► And you couldn't really even-- it was like before video stores

00:12:13 ◼   ► and stuff.

00:12:14 ◼   ► It was like mostly VCRs were for taping shows,

00:12:16 ◼   ► and they didn't really--

00:12:17 ◼   ► all the studios were just sort of dipping their toes into,

00:12:20 ◼   ► like, well, maybe we'll let you watch movies on these tapes.

00:12:23 ◼   ► Maybe.

00:12:24 ◼   ► But certainly not the good ones.

00:12:26 ◼   ► And somehow JD's dad got a copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark

00:12:30 ◼   ► on VHS.

00:12:31 ◼   ► Like, before there were commercial versions of it.

00:12:34 ◼   ► I mean, it was like, you know, one of the very early days of movies that fell off the back of a truck.

00:12:40 ◼   ► And it was the one and only movie he had. And we both loved it. And so every time it rained

00:12:47 ◼   ► in the summer, or like on a Saturday or Sunday, JD would call me up and he would just say,

00:12:52 ◼   ► he would say, "You want to watch Raiders?" And I'd say, "I'll be right there." And that's what

00:12:55 ◼   ► it was. It wasn't like, "Do you want to watch a movie? Do you want to come over?" He would just

00:12:59 ◼   ► call up and say, "Do you want to watch Raiders?" And I would say, "Sure." And I'd go down to his

00:13:03 ◼   ► house and we would watch Raiders of the Last Arc and it never got old.

00:13:07 ◼   ► The early days of falling off a truck to me were, I want to say, it would have been when

00:13:13 ◼   ► I was in high school, probably around the time of Return of the Jedi. HBO would show

00:13:17 ◼   ► the first Star Wars movie. And so lots of people of my age and maybe a little bit younger,

00:13:23 ◼   ► like they kind of came up watching a VHS home recorded copy. That was the early fall of

00:13:29 ◼   ► Now, the crazy thing is, I was in military school for a year, '79 to '80, and we had

00:13:35 ◼   ► a Betamax.

00:13:36 ◼   ► And the deal was, if we wanted movies, we would pitch in.

00:13:39 ◼   ► Like, if you had rich parents, they could donate it.

00:13:41 ◼   ► But you'd pitch in, because you could buy movies, but the movies were about $70 to $100.

00:13:47 ◼   ► We had a Betamax copy of M*A*S*H, we had The Omen, which was totally inappropriate, but

00:13:54 ◼   ► yeah, it was $100.

00:13:55 ◼   ► hundred bucks. If you want a copy of M*A*S*H, it was $100. I heard on another podcast, I

00:14:02 ◼   ► think, I want to say maybe The Flop House, that that was originally like they were

00:14:05 ◼   ► basically building in the cost for the idea that video stores were going to be

00:14:09 ◼   ► a thing. Mm-hmm. Yes. So yeah, that you'd buy it and then like rent it a million

00:14:13 ◼   ► times, but I don't know. That seems so ludicrous now. I remember the other

00:14:17 ◼   ► fallen-off-a-truck movie I remember, and I was pretty excited about it, was

00:14:23 ◼   ► probably his 10th birthday. My friend Joey had a sleepover. Joey's dad was a lawyer of

00:14:27 ◼   ► arguably ill repute given some of the news coverage in the local town. A lawyer who knew

00:14:35 ◼   ► people. Fake news. And so, I don't know, 10 or 11, 10-year-olds sleeping over at Joey's house. We

00:14:40 ◼   ► got pizza and Joey's dad said he had a real treat for us. And so Joey's dad says, "There's a treat

00:14:47 ◼   ► for you. It might be good. Turns out somehow the guy got a copy of Empire Strikes Back.

00:14:53 ◼   ► Oh, come on.

00:14:54 ◼   ► I swear. It's like 1983, so it was like two years after it came out. It was probably,

00:14:59 ◼   ► we'd all seen it in the theaters because that was when they'd have like next year after it came out,

00:15:03 ◼   ► they put it in theaters again. And it was not letterboxed, but it was squished.

00:15:11 ◼   ► Oh.

00:15:15 ◼   ► Like, you got to see the whole--

00:15:18 ◼   ► maybe not the whole frame, because that was super widescreen.

00:15:20 ◼   ► But you got to see more of the picture.

00:15:22 ◼   ► But everybody looked like IG-88, and IG-88 looked like a pencil.

00:15:28 ◼   ► And when the Millennium Falcon would twist--

00:15:36 ◼   ► when it would be flying one way, it would look fat.

00:15:38 ◼   ► And then it would twist to go through asteroids,

00:15:41 ◼   ► and it would turn into a piece of paper.

00:15:43 ◼   ► Similar thing still happens today. Like if you're in a hotel and you know, they've got like those giant

00:15:48 ◼   ► I don't know why this happens

00:15:48 ◼   ► They've got giant giant giant TVs and like SD stations and sometimes the settings are different from channel to channel. Yes

00:15:55 ◼   ► I'm sure Todd could tell us what the name for this is, but gets real squished up

00:15:58 ◼   ► Yeah from some kind of mystery meat aspect ratio. Yeah

00:16:01 ◼   ► So, oh my god

00:16:03 ◼   ► So still he got a copy of this movie on VHS and it was like once at first we were all we are super excited

00:16:09 ◼   ► Then everybody was like what the heck why is everything squished?

00:16:12 ◼   ► And then we kind of figured out what was going on and I was kind of super happy about it because surprise surprise

00:16:17 ◼   ► Even as a ten-year-old I was a you know a bit of a nerd about hey, just you know pan and scan sucks. I

00:16:24 ◼   ► was kind of

00:16:27 ◼   ► Once once I got like five so glad to learn the name for that because I don't think I knew it back then

00:16:32 ◼   ► I but I watch everything you remember the James Bond movies where the James Bond movies would be on you'd be like, whoa

00:16:37 ◼   ► That's that's weird. Like you never see that kind of weird thing in a movie

00:16:40 ◼   ► But yeah, totally the James Bond movies were so full of those. Yeah. So anyway, I was really excited

00:16:44 ◼   ► That's that's it was a very fond of memory. So thank you Joey's dad

00:16:48 ◼   ► Wherever you are

00:16:50 ◼   ► Nice memories. All right. Let me take a break. I got a feed. I gotta fit some of these

00:16:54 ◼   ► What I come sponsors in it's been a while since I've had an episode I don't know it's one thing that it's a long story

00:17:01 ◼   ► And I'm not gonna tell it's boring. But yeah, I got I got to thank some of these sponsors and I love them all

00:17:06 ◼   ► I love him to death. Here's the first one era

00:17:09 ◼   ► Eero is a modern system of Wi-Fi routers.

00:17:14 ◼   ► The single router model, it's nonsense.

00:17:18 ◼   ► We've moved past it.

00:17:19 ◼   ► That's 1999 technology, where you buy a box,

00:17:23 ◼   ► stick it next to your cable modem in whatever room that is,

00:17:25 ◼   ► and then hope that the signal goes through all the walls

00:17:28 ◼   ► and floors of your house.

00:17:29 ◼   ► No, the right way to do it, the modern way to do it,

00:17:32 ◼   ► is to set up a mesh network.

00:17:33 ◼   ► You buy the Eero, you get like three or four

00:17:36 ◼   ► these little pucks.

00:17:37 ◼   ► They're each the size of a Apple TV.

00:17:39 ◼   ► They're all the same.

00:17:40 ◼   ► You just pick one, whichever one,

00:17:41 ◼   ► the first one you take out of the box

00:17:43 ◼   ► is the one you hook up to the cable modem.

00:17:45 ◼   ► And that's like the master one.

00:17:46 ◼   ► And then you hook up these other ones throughout the house

00:17:49 ◼   ► and they have a helpful app that tells you

00:17:51 ◼   ► the best strategy for where to place them.

00:17:54 ◼   ► I think they even recommend, they have like a square footage

00:17:57 ◼   ► and they recommend one for every thousand square feet.

00:18:00 ◼   ► They have a beautiful app, you put it on your iPhone

00:18:02 ◼   ► and the app lets you set everything up.

00:18:05 ◼   ► just tap tap tap and then all of a sudden you've got a new wi-fi network in your house that is

00:18:11 ◼   ► a faster than whatever you've already got if you've got a couple of years old router and b

00:18:17 ◼   ► will give you a signal that's the same all through your house so like if you've got like a master

00:18:23 ◼   ► bedroom two floors up that gets a poor signal that's not a problem anymore it works great i

00:18:29 ◼   ► don't know anybody who's got one of these who doesn't think it's an upgrade over whatever it

00:18:33 ◼   ► it is they replaced it with. Is it perfect? No, nothing's perfect. But they've got great

00:18:37 ◼   ► customer service, the app is great, and they keep releasing updates that keep making it

00:18:42 ◼   ► better. It's really, really great. This is a great company. Here, it's currently rated

00:18:47 ◼   ► 4.4 stars on Amazon with a whopping 750 reviews. They offer a one-year warranty and it will

00:18:54 ◼   ► work with your existing modem and internet service. You're just replacing the router.

00:18:58 ◼   ► it. So what do you get? For $399, you get a three-pack that's $100 off. And for $299,

00:19:07 ◼   ► you get a two-pack that's $50 off. So go to Eero.com and use the code "THETALKSHOW"

00:19:17 ◼   ► the talk show, and you'll get free expedited shipping. If you order, if you listen, I don't

00:19:24 ◼   ► know when this show is going to pop out of the internet tubes, but you could get one

00:19:28 ◼   ► by the end of the week. So go ahead. If you need a new air airport, you got to do this.

00:19:32 ◼   ► You know something, John? I want to say something about Eero. I'll tell you about Eero. These

00:19:34 ◼   ► guys are not jackals. They're not jackals. This is the real deal. You put this in your

00:19:39 ◼   ► house, first of all, like you say, you pick any one of them. You can mix them up. You

00:19:42 ◼   ► can play shell game. You start with one of these. It tells you, "Oh, do the other one.

00:19:45 ◼   ► Do the other one. Now do the other one." And you know what? Parts of your house that

00:19:49 ◼   ► you thought just couldn't get the internet, you get the internet. And it's like my friend

00:19:52 ◼   ► Mike Hurley says, "Imagine that just suddenly at certain points during the day, part of

00:19:55 ◼   ► your house just didn't get electric like that's what it feels like nowadays and

00:19:58 ◼   ► this thing it works a treat and the app is just terrific not jackals it yeah

00:20:04 ◼   ► really good stuff I just love I always hated the way with the other ones the

00:20:07 ◼   ► old ones it was one of the reasons I like the Apple one everyone Apple used

00:20:11 ◼   ► to make stuff like this I remember my other brand right they used to be Apple

00:20:15 ◼   ► yeah but the other ones you used to like type in on a web browser like a magic

00:20:21 ◼   ► localhost web address and you'd get like the one hundred you go in there and you

00:20:30 ◼   ► get into your links this admin admin I used to have a list in nvalt of every

00:20:37 ◼   ► default password so no matter where I was there was a pretty good chance I get

00:20:41 ◼   ► onto somebody's wife I was good I don't want to save it for the end I want to

00:20:50 ◼   ► get this out of the way because it's important.

00:20:52 ◼   ► It's why I got you on the horn to see if you could come on the show.

00:20:56 ◼   ► Because I feel that technology press in general,

00:21:03 ◼   ► but even in our circle where--

00:21:06 ◼   ► I'd say in general, people say that the tech industry--

00:21:09 ◼   ► a lot of people mean like a 30 mile circle around San Francisco and--

00:21:16 ◼   ► Yeah, because consumer devices and your services and your Facebooks

00:21:19 ◼   ► and the thingies you use to turn on your internet lights.

00:21:21 ◼   ► - But there's all sorts of other technology

00:21:23 ◼   ► and it's advancing at quick paces

00:21:25 ◼   ► and the technology media doesn't cover it.

00:21:28 ◼   ► And here's a bit of it that I encountered this week.

00:21:31 ◼   ► I was watching some of the college basketball on the TV

00:21:35 ◼   ► and I saw a 15 second commercial from American Standard.

00:21:40 ◼   ► Are you familiar with this company?

00:21:41 ◼   ► - I am now, yeah.

00:21:42 ◼   ► - American Standard is a maker of toilets and urinals.

00:21:48 ◼   ► - You probably peed on their logo,

00:21:50 ◼   ► like when you go to a ball game.

00:21:51 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:21:52 ◼   ► They have a new technology called Vormax.

00:21:54 ◼   ► It's anti-splatter flush technology.

00:21:57 ◼   ► Now I'm gonna put this in the show notes.

00:22:00 ◼   ► I swear to God, I know it's a running joke

00:22:02 ◼   ► that I often say I'm gonna put something in the show notes.

00:22:05 ◼   ► This one's going in, and I'm gonna put it

00:22:07 ◼   ► at the top of the list of links,

00:22:09 ◼   ► even if it's not the first thing we talked about.

00:22:11 ◼   ► So what I recommend for everybody listening

00:22:13 ◼   ► is pause the show, hit pause.

00:22:16 ◼   ► in your little podcast app, go to the show notes

00:22:19 ◼   ► and hit the first thing.

00:22:19 ◼   ► It'll be very clearly labeled,

00:22:21 ◼   ► American Standard Voramax Anti-Splatter Flush Technology.

00:22:25 ◼   ► And watch this commercial.

00:22:27 ◼   ► It's 15 seconds, so it's, you know,

00:22:29 ◼   ► you'll be back here before you know it.

00:22:31 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:22:34 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:22:38 ◼   ► - I didn't realize--

00:22:40 ◼   ► - It's clean.

00:22:41 ◼   ► - You know, shame on, it's clean.

00:22:43 ◼   ► Shame on me.

00:22:44 ◼   ► I did not know what a problem this was until I watched this.

00:22:47 ◼   ► Splatter.

00:22:50 ◼   ► I saw this commercial, and the first thing I thought

00:22:53 ◼   ► was, what the hell did I just see?

00:22:56 ◼   ► And then the second thing I thought was, I got to show this to Merlin.

00:23:00 ◼   ► I've been reviewing their videos.

00:23:06 ◼   ► They have a couple funny videos like this one that are very funny.

00:23:10 ◼   ► They have some that are really straight that are actually very upsetting.

00:23:13 ◼   ► I really can't recommend cause here's the thing, John,

00:23:18 ◼   ► what a lot of people don't understand is there's a problem with splatter.

00:23:21 ◼   ► So I guess the problem with splatter is that your standard American low flow

00:23:28 ◼   ► toilet is not doing a good enough job of,

00:23:30 ◼   ► of a sluicing daddy splatter away in a way that's acceptable to mom.

00:23:34 ◼   ► It's, it's taken away. It's taking away the bulk.

00:23:38 ◼   ► The bulk, the bulk. Yeah. Right. It's just the bulk,

00:23:42 ◼   ► but misses the splatter. It's taken away the bulk. It's taken away the yellow.

00:23:46 ◼   ► Right. How many times has this happened to you? Right.

00:23:49 ◼   ► With the splatter? Yeah. No, no. I mean, I'm saying,

00:23:54 ◼   ► I'm saying it's like an infomercial now in some of the other ones,

00:23:57 ◼   ► they illustrate how effectively splatter is removed. In one case,

00:24:01 ◼   ► I think they like show you how to flush ping pong balls down your toilet,

00:24:04 ◼   ► But there's one I really do not recommend watching,

00:24:07 ◼   ► where they simulate splatter in a toilet with what I'm hoping is fudge.

00:24:13 ◼   ► Oh, no.

00:24:15 ◼   ► There's matter.

00:24:15 ◼   ► There's matter in there.

00:24:17 ◼   ► It's like an artist's palette.

00:24:18 ◼   ► And it's brown?

00:24:19 ◼   ► Oh, sure.

00:24:20 ◼   ► It's like somebody put $3 of Nutella.

00:24:22 ◼   ► It's like a flight of Nutella across the back.

00:24:25 ◼   ► And then at the bottom, you got some kind of straw matter.

00:24:27 ◼   ► I'm not sure what it is.

00:24:28 ◼   ► But boy, it just cleans it right out.

00:24:30 ◼   ► The splatter just sluices right away.

00:24:32 ◼   ► All right.

00:24:32 ◼   ► In the commercial that I'm talking about, I feel that every single aspect of this commercial is worth analyzing.

00:24:37 ◼   ► So number one, it starts with a hubbo splattering ketchup on his polo shirt.

00:24:46 ◼   ► Now he seems a bit of a doddering fool.

00:24:50 ◼   ► You're talking about it's a retiree enjoying an outdoor meal together, and he's going to put some ketchup on his wiener.

00:24:56 ◼   ► He gives it a good shake.

00:24:58 ◼   ► I feel it's one of these couples though where Hubbo is in decline and wifey is still sharp

00:25:07 ◼   ► as a tack and she's starting to get a little sick of Hubbo's shit.

00:25:12 ◼   ► Literally.

00:25:13 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

00:25:14 ◼   ► Yeah, no.

00:25:15 ◼   ► Oh no.

00:25:16 ◼   ► Oh, I see what you're saying.

00:25:18 ◼   ► Things are declining.

00:25:19 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:25:20 ◼   ► Oh God, yes.

00:25:21 ◼   ► Maybe you should cut down on the hot dogs.

00:25:23 ◼   ► So here's how I read it.

00:25:24 ◼   ► I read this story as Hubbo is in decline,

00:25:29 ◼   ► and he's splattering all over the toilet.

00:25:32 ◼   ► And the wife is so sick of this mess

00:25:35 ◼   ► that she's taken it into her own hands.

00:25:37 ◼   ► She's done a Marco, and she's done a deep dive on toilets.

00:25:41 ◼   ► This is her headphones.

00:25:42 ◼   ► Right, this is her headphones.

00:25:44 ◼   ► And she is now completely up to speed

00:25:47 ◼   ► on modern flushing technology and has replaced the toilet,

00:25:50 ◼   ► and at least in-- maybe all of them, probably.

00:25:53 ◼   ► They look well off, so she could maybe just come in

00:25:55 ◼   ► and just get all the toilets.

00:25:56 ◼   ► - Well, they can afford a toilet on their patio, so.

00:25:58 ◼   ► - Right, right, we haven't even gotten to that yet.

00:26:02 ◼   ► Like, let's put one out here

00:26:05 ◼   ► just in case he can't make it inside.

00:26:08 ◼   ► - What's the second charge for $259?

00:26:10 ◼   ► She's had it with Splatter, and she addresses the audience.

00:26:20 ◼   ► - Right.

00:26:21 ◼   ► It's illustrated with the blue material,

00:26:24 ◼   ► a pleasant blue material, which rings a bell

00:26:26 ◼   ► from some feminine hygiene product commercials

00:26:29 ◼   ► I've seen over the years. (laughs)

00:26:32 ◼   ► - Oh, right, it always absorbs blue.

00:26:34 ◼   ► - Right, there's-- - That's a good point.

00:26:35 ◼   ► - Blue is the universal, seems to be the universal color

00:26:38 ◼   ► for what are otherwise considered

00:26:41 ◼   ► unpleasant bodily emissions.

00:26:45 ◼   ► Nothing we emit is blue.

00:26:46 ◼   ► Blue does seem to be a nice color.

00:26:48 ◼   ► And so if you want to illustrate the absorbency of, say,

00:26:54 ◼   ► a tampon or a feminine napkin or a splatter on a toilet,

00:27:01 ◼   ► you use blue.

00:27:02 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:27:07 ◼   ► Sorry, I'm just scrubbing a little bit here.

00:27:11 ◼   ► They have a toilet on their deck.

00:27:14 ◼   ► Just sitting there.

00:27:16 ◼   ► It bothers me a little that it's at a tilted angle.

00:27:19 ◼   ► It's not quite squared up, aligned

00:27:20 ◼   ► with the decks of the--

00:27:22 ◼   ► the planks of the deck.

00:27:23 ◼   ► Yeah, that would drive cable crazy.

00:27:25 ◼   ► Yeah, that--

00:27:26 ◼   ► That misalignment.

00:27:27 ◼   ► Like, who installed that?

00:27:29 ◼   ► What's the deal?

00:27:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:27:32 ◼   ► You get a nice toilet like this, you know,

00:27:34 ◼   ► I think you want to invest in it in a proper--

00:27:36 ◼   ► yeah, I mean, this is--

00:27:38 ◼   ► this is a little bit like a Marquez commercial.

00:27:41 ◼   ► I think it's a little bit magically real.

00:27:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:27:44 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm not--

00:27:45 ◼   ► I realize that, I do realize, all joking aside, I realize that we're not meant to assume that

00:27:51 ◼   ► this is depicting a couple who literally put an open-air toilet on their deck.

00:27:57 ◼   ► I realize that they're taking shortcuts for the sake of brevity in that style that was

00:28:03 ◼   ► sort of maybe epitomized by...

00:28:06 ◼   ► I forget, I don't know what I'm talking about.

00:28:12 ◼   ► You know a sort of absurdist style of yes, yes

00:28:15 ◼   ► Well, even you go back to the days of the tidy bowl man tidy bowl, man

00:28:19 ◼   ► Remember the little guy little Commodore and your toilet? Yeah, he swam around in there. He lived in there

00:28:23 ◼   ► He looked pretty happy in there. Yeah, even though even though when there was weather it was not good. Whoa

00:28:30 ◼   ► That's the forecast captain

00:28:33 ◼   ► Splatter splatter

00:28:38 ◼   ► Mmm. All right. I think the commercial is notable

00:28:42 ◼   ► Even without the capper.

00:28:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:28:45 ◼   ► But the capper...

00:28:47 ◼   ► Mmm.

00:28:48 ◼   ► It's clean.

00:28:50 ◼   ► I swear I almost had a stroke when the woman's head popped out of the toilet.

00:28:54 ◼   ► Woman's head pops out of the toilet and she says, "It's clean!"

00:28:57 ◼   ► She announces, "It's clean!"

00:28:59 ◼   ► And this is a leitmotif. Now if you watch the one called "Klinger"...

00:29:02 ◼   ► Did you see "Klinger"?

00:29:03 ◼   ► No, I did not see "Klinger".

00:29:04 ◼   ► Oh, click over there on the right. Go to American Standard Vormax toilet. Go to "Klinger".

00:29:09 ◼   ► Take a minute and enjoy that one.

00:29:10 ◼   ► Alright.

00:29:11 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

00:29:20 ◼   ► All right.

00:29:21 ◼   ► Yep.

00:29:24 ◼   ► And there's a third one called Skidmarks.

00:29:26 ◼   ► Were you aware of how insufficient the flushing

00:29:34 ◼   ► technology is in your toilets in your house?

00:29:36 ◼   ► Well, when we get to the analysis phase of this,

00:29:38 ◼   ► I do have a lot of thoughts on this.

00:29:40 ◼   ► But no, I have to be honest with you.

00:29:43 ◼   ► Barring, let's say, the bathroom at a cinema or a sports event,

00:29:47 ◼   ► I do not encounter these problems as much.

00:29:51 ◼   ► And we've got a pretty low flow, old school toilet dingus.

00:29:58 ◼   ► Maybe we're just lucky.

00:29:59 ◼   ► Maybe it's the probiotics.

00:30:00 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:30:01 ◼   ► Something's working for us.

00:30:02 ◼   ► Pound sign blessed.

00:30:03 ◼   ► But there's so much to it, because part of it

00:30:08 ◼   ► also it implies not only that this guy causes splatter but he doesn't notice it

00:30:13 ◼   ► and doesn't like give a second you know backup flush. The old guy. Yeah right

00:30:19 ◼   ► Hubbo. If I if I went in and let's be honest we all ruin a bathroom sometimes

00:30:23 ◼   ► it happens it's part of being an adult if I went in there and really shamed if

00:30:27 ◼   ► I shamed the bathroom I would want to do a little bit of cleanup maybe light a

00:30:30 ◼   ► match you shoot a little bit of a little bit of glade right but I would most

00:30:34 ◼   ► definitely do a visual inspection of the bowl for a skid mark or a spotter or if you like a clinger.

00:30:42 ◼   ► Give the toilet a chance to catch its breath, refill the bowl.

00:30:45 ◼   ► Right. Give it a second chance.

00:30:48 ◼   ► Like a full flush though, you know what I mean? Like if you don't wait, you kind of get like a,

00:30:53 ◼   ► you get a wimpy flush, you know what I mean? You got to catch your breath. It's like,

00:30:56 ◼   ► the flush is like a hundred yard dash. If you want it to run another hundred yard dash,

00:31:00 ◼   ► you got to give it a chance to catch its breath. If you tell, go.

00:31:03 ◼   ► This is a chance for you to wash your hands, you could look at your phone, you could go

00:31:06 ◼   ► through somebody's medicine cabinet.

00:31:08 ◼   ► They definitely should be washing their hands.

00:31:13 ◼   ► Is this too gross, Jon?

00:31:14 ◼   ► No.

00:31:15 ◼   ► I mean, this is obvious this is a real problem.

00:31:17 ◼   ► This is, you know, yeah, I don't know.

00:31:21 ◼   ► My guess is that they started with...

00:31:25 ◼   ► Here's a complaint I do here, is the whole low flow problem of like the modern house,

00:31:30 ◼   ► You get a low flow shower that's not satisfying.

00:31:33 ◼   ► You get a toilet that requires like six flushes.

00:31:37 ◼   ► People get frustrated about that.

00:31:39 ◼   ► What's interesting about this, though,

00:31:40 ◼   ► is also if you watch their--

00:31:42 ◼   ► if one were the sort of person to watch

00:31:44 ◼   ► many videos from this company about how the toilets are made,

00:31:48 ◼   ► if you were that sort of person, you

00:31:49 ◼   ► would see they're really also playing up

00:31:51 ◼   ► how easy it is to clean.

00:31:52 ◼   ► They've done something revolutionary with the outer

00:31:54 ◼   ► rim so you don't get germs and matter on the outside.

00:31:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:32:00 ◼   ► You know?

00:32:01 ◼   ► I think one thing, though, I think that when middle class white people are

00:32:07 ◼   ► upgrading, I think the kitchens are one.

00:32:09 ◼   ► People put a lot of money into their kitchens.

00:32:11 ◼   ► And I think people really like putting money into their bathroom.

00:32:15 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:32:16 ◼   ► Don't you think?

00:32:17 ◼   ► Oh, I do, too.

00:32:17 ◼   ► I think it's a very modern way of upgrading your house.

00:32:24 ◼   ► I mean, when you and I were kids, I mean, your bathroom was--

00:32:27 ◼   ► I mean, not that they were saying--

00:32:29 ◼   ► It was simply, is it clean or is it not clean?

00:32:31 ◼   ► And that meant it was a nice bathroom

00:32:33 ◼   ► or not a nice bathroom.

00:32:34 ◼   ► And that was it.

00:32:35 ◼   ► But it was like everybody had the same sink.

00:32:37 ◼   ► It was just a white rectangle.

00:32:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, my grandparents' second, their half bath,

00:32:43 ◼   ► had a wooden toilet seat.

00:32:44 ◼   ► I'll never forget.

00:32:45 ◼   ► Harrowing.

00:32:46 ◼   ► - And the only real option was whether you got the,

00:32:51 ◼   ► you got two faucets, a hot and a cold,

00:32:56 ◼   ► or if you had the one and you kind of,

00:32:58 ◼   ► you know, steered around like a joystick

00:33:00 ◼   ► to adjust the temperature.

00:33:01 ◼   ► And that was it, you didn't have any other choices.

00:33:03 ◼   ► It all came out of the same spigot.

00:33:05 ◼   ► And now, it's, you know, people are, yeah,

00:33:07 ◼   ► people are getting deluxe toilets, European-style toilets.

00:33:10 ◼   ► - Oh, and you get a Toto on there?

00:33:12 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:33:13 ◼   ► - That's a popular thing.

00:33:14 ◼   ► - I'm not familiar, what is that?

00:33:16 ◼   ► - Oh, Toto, it's like an aftermarket bidet.

00:33:19 ◼   ► - Ah, I see. - You put it on there,

00:33:20 ◼   ► and it squirts hot water onto your downstairs?

00:33:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, that sounds good.

00:33:26 ◼   ► - It's better than it sounds.

00:33:27 ◼   ► First you scoff, and then pretty soon you're ready to give it a ring.

00:33:31 ◼   ► It's quite a thing.

00:33:33 ◼   ► Well, Kotke's been on this for years.

00:33:36 ◼   ► It might even be 10 years ago where Kotke broke the barrier of, "Let's talk about this

00:33:42 ◼   ► stuff."

00:33:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:44 ◼   ► Would you clean, let's just say, well, here's a fine example from the earlier commercial.

00:33:50 ◼   ► Let's say that a member of your family ate a hot dog with ketchup on a plate.

00:33:56 ◼   ► Would you wash that plate with a dry paper towel?

00:33:58 ◼   ► Yeah, give it a quick swipe and then just put it back in the cabinet.

00:34:01 ◼   ► Just a dry paper towel and then put that in the cabinet.

00:34:04 ◼   ► Jon, other countries think that we are monstrous.

00:34:07 ◼   ► Well…

00:34:08 ◼   ► They think that they… well, you know what?

00:34:10 ◼   ► We'll save it.

00:34:11 ◼   ► Oh, God.

00:34:12 ◼   ► It might have been a canary in a coal mine, actually.

00:34:16 ◼   ► Now that you think about it.

00:34:18 ◼   ► They might have been onto something.

00:34:20 ◼   ► I sent you to this page on the Vormax toilet technology site.

00:34:23 ◼   ► Well, they got trademarks on everything.

00:34:25 ◼   ► Yeah, so you checked out the various different models.

00:34:29 ◼   ► They got white label versions of this toilet.

00:34:31 ◼   ► You can buy at different places.

00:34:32 ◼   ► They got the Heritage.

00:34:33 ◼   ► They got the Astute, the Esteem, the Optum, and the Ultima.

00:34:38 ◼   ► They seem to all be the same toilet?

00:34:40 ◼   ► They look exactly the same to me.

00:34:43 ◼   ► But there's a different name for the one at Lowe's and a different name for the one at

00:34:46 ◼   ► Home Depot.

00:34:47 ◼   ► See, it's like buying mattresses, right?

00:34:49 ◼   ► It's a racket.

00:34:50 ◼   ► It's exactly like buying mattresses.

00:34:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:34:52 ◼   ► Mmm. Exclusively at Lowe's.

00:34:56 ◼   ► You know what? I'll bet somebody's gonna come along and disrupt the toilet industry

00:35:00 ◼   ► and I'll be selling toilets on this podcast within a year.

00:35:03 ◼   ► I think you might be onto something. You think about the disruptions in industry.

00:35:08 ◼   ► You can have silver underpants. You could get yourself an internet mattress.

00:35:13 ◼   ► Right. There's so many of these new kinds of services. You could get like a box full of socks.

00:35:18 ◼   ► Internet eyeglasses? Internet eyeglasses, huge.

00:35:21 ◼   ► But there's still a big hole, if you like, waiting to be filled with internet toilets.

00:35:29 ◼   ► So what would that be?

00:35:30 ◼   ► Now, first of all, it's got to be affordable.

00:35:32 ◼   ► It's got to come in an impossibly small box, engineered in America.

00:35:37 ◼   ► It'll be, and the toilet arrives, you can carry it up the stairs by yourself.

00:35:42 ◼   ► You slit open the package and it goes, "Phew," and the toilet comes to life.

00:35:46 ◼   ► It's probably Wi-Fi enabled.

00:35:48 ◼   ► It's got push notifications, if you know what I mean.

00:35:49 ◼   ► know what? And the Wi-Fi, you probably get it on the Wi-Fi first. And it... hmm... I was

00:35:55 ◼   ► gonna suggest... You hook it up to your ear. Oh yeah, I was gonna suggest that it have a

00:35:59 ◼   ► camera, but that's not right. Here's how I think it would, because you don't want a

00:36:02 ◼   ► camera on the toilet. I'm gonna say it comes with an app that you put on your

00:36:06 ◼   ► phone, and then it can use your phone camera, and you just point it at your old

00:36:10 ◼   ► toilet, and it it it'll do like a, "Okay, here's the water hook up and whatever,"

00:36:15 ◼   ► and then it'll just install itself. Yeah. I, you know, I wouldn't say it's not going to happen.

00:36:23 ◼   ► Because people are interested in technology. There are things in my home right now that are

00:36:28 ◼   ► unnecessarily complex, technical, technological products I could never have imagined owning,

00:36:36 ◼   ► like existing, let alone owning, ten years ago. You know? You know, and a lot of things start out

00:36:42 ◼   ► as jokes and everybody thinks it's a joke and then it becomes, you know, it becomes a real thing,

00:36:47 ◼   ► you know, like some of the gags in the Back to the Future when they went into the future,

00:36:51 ◼   ► you know, and now, you know, you've got these things, you know, like the hoverboards and whatnot.

00:36:55 ◼   ► We laugh about it but you wait and see, you wait and see if these internet toilets,

00:37:00 ◼   ► if they won't let you take one right out on the deck.

00:37:02 ◼   ► Have little wheels on it?

00:37:06 ◼   ► You can just lock, it'll detect when you sit down and then it'll lock the wheels so you're not

00:37:12 ◼   ► sliding around while you're doing your business.

00:37:15 ◼   ► Think you'd have to slide to unlock?

00:37:16 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

00:37:19 ◼   ► Because you don't want everybody just using your patio toilet.

00:37:22 ◼   ► Right.

00:37:23 ◼   ► Right?

00:37:23 ◼   ► I mean, save something for me.

00:37:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:37:26 ◼   ► It's funny.

00:37:27 ◼   ► Like, we'd mentioned, for example,

00:37:28 ◼   ► we might want to talk about voice stuff.

00:37:30 ◼   ► That voice stuff, to me, is just one example of many things

00:37:32 ◼   ► where, like--

00:37:33 ◼   ► it is funny where we are right now with voice.

00:37:36 ◼   ► And I have to admit, I'm a little bit

00:37:37 ◼   ► obsessed with voice stuff and what

00:37:39 ◼   ► what it portends for the future, for worse or mostly better,

00:37:43 ◼   ► in my opinion.

00:37:44 ◼   ► But it is very interesting to live at this time

00:37:46 ◼   ► where you can kind of have your feet in these two

00:37:47 ◼   ► different sides of the creek.

00:37:49 ◼   ► On the one hand, it is incredible what

00:37:51 ◼   ► you can do with your voice.

00:37:52 ◼   ► But it is also incredible how terrible

00:37:53 ◼   ► it is so much of the time.

00:37:55 ◼   ► We are living through a very interesting transition.

00:37:59 ◼   ► Now, something like Wi-Fi.

00:38:00 ◼   ► I was just thinking about this the other day.

00:38:01 ◼   ► Like, I'm trying to remember when I first

00:38:02 ◼   ► had exposure to Wi-Fi.

00:38:04 ◼   ► And I think-- I remember becoming a big deal around the time

00:38:08 ◼   ► I first went to the E-Tech,

00:38:09 ◼   ► the Emerging Technology Conference,

00:38:10 ◼   ► which would make that probably 2002.

00:38:13 ◼   ► And there was the no-cat guys, and it was such a big deal.

00:38:15 ◼   ► And I had like, I think an Orinoco card

00:38:17 ◼   ► from my Wall Street laptop, you know, stuck out of the side

00:38:20 ◼   ► to get the impossibly slow.

00:38:23 ◼   ► And that seemed like, it seemed like a parlor trick.

00:38:24 ◼   ► Like, why don't you just plug in ethernet, John?

00:38:28 ◼   ► Like, why don't you just plug in ethernet for this thing?

00:38:29 ◼   ► It's like, well, no, no, there's this new thing,

00:38:31 ◼   ► and you can get your internet through the air.

00:38:33 ◼   ► And my first experience with that had been on a Palm 7,

00:38:37 ◼   ► I think would be my first really connected device, I think.

00:38:41 ◼   ► I remember at Palm 7, it was huge.

00:38:43 ◼   ► It had that big ass antenna.

00:38:44 ◼   ► Yeah, I was about to say, is that

00:38:45 ◼   ► the one with the big antenna, like a cigar diameter antenna

00:38:49 ◼   ► coming out the side, or the top?

00:38:51 ◼   ► And it was-- if memory serves, it was very costly, very slow,

00:38:56 ◼   ► very limited.

00:38:57 ◼   ► It was essentially like WAP-style functionality.

00:39:01 ◼   ► But it was on your Palm Pilot.

00:39:03 ◼   ► So it seemed amazing.

00:39:04 ◼   ► It was a breakthrough, though, because laptops,

00:39:06 ◼   ► in general were a premium computing device.

00:39:09 ◼   ► They were far more expensive than the equivalent horsepower.

00:39:11 ◼   ► It was a rich man's device.

00:39:13 ◼   ► It was a rich man's device.

00:39:14 ◼   ► But really, all it was effectively

00:39:16 ◼   ► was a way to move your computing.

00:39:19 ◼   ► And the big advantage to it was that the cloud was nowhere

00:39:23 ◼   ► back then.

00:39:24 ◼   ► We didn't even have clouds.

00:39:26 ◼   ► We didn't have clouds.

00:39:27 ◼   ► So if you wanted your stuff in two different places,

00:39:31 ◼   ► like work and home or, you know, work and a road trip,

00:39:36 ◼   ► you needed to take the device with you.

00:39:39 ◼   ► But you would just move from one, like, workstation

00:39:43 ◼   ► setup desk to another where you already had things

00:39:47 ◼   ► like an ethernet jack ready to go.

00:39:50 ◼   ► Like you couldn't work anywhere.

00:39:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, I remember using apps.

00:39:53 ◼   ► It was a big deal when you first got these,

00:39:54 ◼   ► like, fairly, they were nerdy,

00:39:56 ◼   ► but it was like basically a GUI to like, R sync,

00:39:59 ◼   ► where you could like put them on the same network

00:40:01 ◼   ► and say, OK, these two folders, make sure they match.

00:40:03 ◼   ► Like, that's pretty much the extent of it.

00:40:05 ◼   ► But the idea that you could just move from the kitchen counter

00:40:11 ◼   ► to the kitchen table and no longer be

00:40:13 ◼   ► within arm's length of the wall where the ethernet port is

00:40:18 ◼   ► was ludicrous, unless you were going

00:40:20 ◼   ► to do something like just whatever

00:40:22 ◼   ► you do with the computer when it's not connected to an internet.

00:40:26 ◼   ► That seems so strange now.

00:40:29 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:40:32 ◼   ► I think the voice stuff, it is.

00:40:34 ◼   ► It's early days, but early days in a far less technical way

00:40:40 ◼   ► than the computers, the text-based computers

00:40:42 ◼   ► of our youth.

00:40:43 ◼   ► But there's an analogy there, right?

00:40:45 ◼   ► And obviously, the technology that's

00:40:47 ◼   ► involved to just have the most rudimentary yo dingus, what's

00:40:52 ◼   ► the weather, and have a thing that within however

00:40:56 ◼   ► many seconds it is to recognize the speech

00:41:00 ◼   ► and turn it into a command and then go out and get

00:41:02 ◼   ► weather data for the location that you're at.

00:41:05 ◼   ► It's obviously-- it would have taken like a TI 99 4A.

00:41:11 ◼   ► Let's say you had a perfectly working program that could do

00:41:13 ◼   ► that for that program.

00:41:14 ◼   ► It would still be running right now.

00:41:16 ◼   ► Like 37 years later, it's still not quite done yet.

00:41:22 ◼   ► So there's a total difference in terms of the,

00:41:26 ◼   ► just like, just pure bits per second of computation

00:41:31 ◼   ► that's involved to get it.

00:41:32 ◼   ► But there's some similarities in the crudeness

00:41:34 ◼   ► of how these things work.

00:41:39 ◼   ► In a way that like in a command line environment,

00:41:42 ◼   ► you've gotta know the exact right command

00:41:44 ◼   ► to delete a file, right?

00:41:46 ◼   ► If you're on DOS, you have to type del,

00:41:48 ◼   ► wasn't it del for delete, del space file name,

00:41:51 ◼   ► On Unix it was "RM". You couldn't just type "Trash this file".

00:41:55 ◼   ► You know. Right. Right. Right. And it's the same way with voice. You've got to know these,

00:41:59 ◼   ► you know, you got to say it this way. Yeah, there are, there are, especially the thing is what you,

00:42:02 ◼   ► um, such a common theme that comes up again and again are these trade-offs. They were just talking

00:42:07 ◼   ► about this on ATP, like they always do. But, you know, the kind of trade-offs where, for example,

00:42:12 ◼   ► if you want your AirPods to do more stuff, well, be careful what you ask for. Because they are,

00:42:16 ◼   ► they're very streamlined right now. They're good at this thing that they do mostly. Yeah, I mean,

00:42:21 ◼   ► And I wish—like, the Siri on AirPods is pretty slow and lame.

00:42:26 ◼   ► Yeah, it's too slow.

00:42:27 ◼   ► Like, I—yeah.

00:42:28 ◼   ► It's too slow.

00:42:29 ◼   ► I mean, and I guess we'll talk more about this, but I've been really—just to—you

00:42:33 ◼   ► know, one thing I've been doing is—and I mention this on other programs, but I've

00:42:36 ◼   ► been making myself from Friday evening through as much as possible of Saturday.

00:42:41 ◼   ► I've been trying to set myself to using voice for everything that I can in lieu of

00:42:44 ◼   ► other things.

00:42:45 ◼   ► And if I can't, yeah, go use the computer or whatever.

00:42:47 ◼   ► But try to be mindful for about one day a week of trying to figure out more stuff that

00:42:52 ◼   ► I can and possibly should do with voice.

00:42:55 ◼   ► And it has been very illuminating.

00:42:57 ◼   ► Not least of which, you learn how much stuff is really not ready yet.

00:43:01 ◼   ► But there's a surprising amount of stuff.

00:43:03 ◼   ► The MacGuffin here is that by making yourself do this and being mindful about it just for

00:43:07 ◼   ► this period of time, you remember to try stuff more.

00:43:12 ◼   ► And if you try it and it doesn't work, you might say, "Well, then what's the incantation?"

00:43:17 ◼   ► So like with, you know, as far as these trade-offs, so just to get that out of the way, that's

00:43:19 ◼   ► one reason I'm so obsessed. But with Alexa... Oh, God, sorry. With the lady in a tube, I

00:43:28 ◼   ► get an email every Friday from Amazon that's like, "Well, here's this new stuff that it

00:43:32 ◼   ► does." And it's, you know, frequently it's stuff like, "Hey, ask about cricket," or whatever.

00:43:36 ◼   ► But then other times, there is really legitimately pretty amazing stuff. To enable a lot of that,

00:43:41 ◼   ► you've got to get into skills. And once you get into skills, now you're getting more into

00:43:44 ◼   ► what you're describing as being with the command line. Because you go from just being able

00:43:48 ◼   ► to issue a raw command to basically hailing a skill inside and then knowing what the mojo

00:43:53 ◼   ► is inside of there. But honestly, it's not that difficult. This morning, I see via a

00:44:00 ◼   ► friend Joe Steele, I see now you can, if you have Prime Now available in your area, you

00:44:06 ◼   ► can order Prime Now over your lady in a tube. So like, I just talked to my tube this morning,

00:44:12 ◼   ► I said, "Hey, Tube, reorder cat litter." It said, "Okay, here's this recent thing in your order for cat litter. Is that the one you want?"

00:44:19 ◼   ► "Yeah." "Okay, that's not enough money. Do you want to add anything else to it?" "Yeah, sure, add that."

00:44:22 ◼   ► So, I don't know. I guess I just feel like in order to sort of, I hate to say keep up, but to really have some kind of a foothold in where stuff is going,

00:44:33 ◼   ► I can understand why people are reluctant to use this stuff for so, so many reasons,

00:44:37 ◼   ► but I really kind of feel like if you want to be somewhat forward-looking and modern

00:44:44 ◼   ► about what's happening, you really can't afford to totally overlook this and write

00:44:48 ◼   ► it off as silly Buck Rogers stuff.

00:44:51 ◼   ► And it's getting better at a noticeable clip, and it still is terrible.

00:45:00 ◼   ► But when something in computing is terrible,

00:45:02 ◼   ► but you can see it getting better if you just pay attention

00:45:05 ◼   ► month to month, you know it's going to get good soon.

00:45:08 ◼   ► And if you're going to miss out on all the--

00:45:10 ◼   ► it's all the interesting stuff is going to happen between now

00:45:13 ◼   ► and then.

00:45:14 ◼   ► Like once it's good and everybody takes it for granted,

00:45:16 ◼   ► it's no longer interesting.

00:45:19 ◼   ► Right, everything seems impossible or dumb

00:45:21 ◼   ► until it's something you're using every day.

00:45:22 ◼   ► And you go, well, of course.

00:45:23 ◼   ► That's always been how it is.

00:45:24 ◼   ► Right.

00:45:25 ◼   ► Did you notice last night-- I think,

00:45:26 ◼   ► were you on that thread last night where somebody mentioned

00:45:28 ◼   ► out of nowhere. Was it Michael? Yeah, I think it was Michael Heilman, our friend of the show,

00:45:33 ◼   ► Michael Heilman. Well, and he points something out that, like, is definitely, like, a known problem

00:45:38 ◼   ► that has suddenly been fixed. Other people are like, "No, it's always been this way." But in my

00:45:42 ◼   ► house, you guys, in my house, if you say, "Hey, dingus," like, five different things light up.

00:45:50 ◼   ► Right. So, if I say, "Hey, dingus," here's the thing that I say most to a dingus all the time,

00:45:55 ◼   ► "Hey, Dingus, remind me to take out the pasta in eight minutes."

00:45:58 ◼   ► And suddenly, there's all these Scottish ladies talking all at the same time,

00:46:03 ◼   ► like trying to remind me about pasta. Apparently, they just pulled an Amazon Echo,

00:46:07 ◼   ► and they seem to be using what, proximity? Because I tested it last night, and it works in a way.

00:46:14 ◼   ► It's not doing firing multiple devices anymore. It fires multiple devices, because you see a

00:46:19 ◼   ► blink on the screen. But only one says, "I got it," and handles it.

00:46:22 ◼   ► That's exactly right. So now finally my stupid watch is like slightly usable

00:46:27 ◼   ► because I'll be two rooms away from any other iOS device screaming into my watch

00:46:31 ◼   ► to please hear me. It never hears me. And in the other room, you know, you're like,

00:46:35 ◼   ► "The weather in San Francisco is like ahhhhh!"

00:46:38 ◼   ► But that's that kind of advancement. I mean, that sounds subtle, sounds dumb, but like

00:46:42 ◼   ► that kind of stuff, you're right, it's happening. Faster dictation continues to be

00:46:47 ◼   ► getting so much better. I used to never send texts that way.

00:46:51 ◼   ► I mean, once you learn the incantation of, "Hey, dingus," and tell John Gruber to kiss

00:46:56 ◼   ► my ass.

00:46:57 ◼   ► Like, once you learn the incantation of how to do that, it really does kind of just work.

00:47:01 ◼   ► I don't understand how this is working, though.

00:47:03 ◼   ► Here's one.

00:47:04 ◼   ► Chase Gallagher jumped into the Twitter thread and said, "It's not just iCloud connected.

00:47:09 ◼   ► His work phone and personal phone are not linked in any way, and only one will trigger."

00:47:14 ◼   ► I don't understand how that's working.

00:47:17 ◼   ► I guess?

00:47:18 ◼   ► Like I should try with I haven't experimented with this because this is like you said it is something that Apple obviously improved

00:47:24 ◼   ► But yeah, it's got it has to have been I'm gonna say on the outside within the last two weeks

00:47:29 ◼   ► I'm feeling like within the last few days

00:47:30 ◼   ► this is very new like I should put like like

00:47:34 ◼   ► Me and my wife's iPhones right next to each other and see how this works and how it decides which one to use

00:47:39 ◼   ► Fast you have multiple. Do you have multiple Amazon dinguses? No, just one Amazon dingus

00:47:44 ◼   ► Well, we are I have to admit a multiple dingus house and and Amazon's had this for I don't know month or more

00:47:49 ◼   ► And it really it works

00:47:51 ◼   ► unevenly

00:47:53 ◼   ► But well, yeah meaning like if I'm in earshot of three different

00:47:58 ◼   ► ladies in a tube I

00:48:00 ◼   ► Can see the ring the blue ring fires off, you know

00:48:03 ◼   ► There's a cool thing where you can see where it thinks the voice is coming from. So yes, so that thing fires off

00:48:07 ◼   ► You know, Jonas pointed that out to me and then once I only figured this out like two months ago

00:48:12 ◼   ► That it's saying, "Here's where I think the voice is. It's pointing at you."

00:48:15 ◼   ► But I could see two or three different dinguses fire off.

00:48:18 ◼   ► It's kind of uneven which one ends up doing the execution, but it doesn't—it will not execute more than one at a time.

00:48:27 ◼   ► But I don't know. This is something—again, they talked about this on ATP recently, and I was totally in Syracuse's corner of saying, like,

00:48:35 ◼   ► "It's hard to describe this until you really do start using it. It's very, very abstract until you kind of set yourself to the task of doing this."

00:48:42 ◼   ► is you become less self-conscious about it.

00:48:45 ◼   ► You try more things.

00:48:46 ◼   ► You do more stuff.

00:48:47 ◼   ► And so I'm forever just walking around adding things

00:48:50 ◼   ► to a shopping list to where now I

00:48:51 ◼   ► feel like a monster having to sit down and type that.

00:48:53 ◼   ► It feels really silly.

00:48:54 ◼   ► And I use IFTTT to sync up my Amazon lists with my reminders.

00:48:59 ◼   ► So do you do that?

00:49:00 ◼   ► No.

00:49:01 ◼   ► It's pretty cool.

00:49:02 ◼   ► You just go to IFTTT, and you basically

00:49:03 ◼   ► say, when a new item is added to my Amazon shopping list,

00:49:07 ◼   ► add that to this reminders list.

00:49:09 ◼   ► And--

00:49:10 ◼   ► When a new thing--

00:49:11 ◼   ► the iOS reminders app or not? The Apple reminders app. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's actually pretty

00:49:17 ◼   ► powerful. So that, and then if you're a super nerd, you know, you don't have to be like Federico

00:49:22 ◼   ► Vittucci level nerd, but you can also do stuff like then say like you can hook that up with,

00:49:26 ◼   ► for example, OmniFocus. So when you add something to that list, the next time you open OmniFocus,

00:49:31 ◼   ► it sucks it out of that list or, you know, Todoist or whatever you like to use. But yeah,

00:49:36 ◼   ► I don't know. I don't know. I think it's... I have this theory about this that I have yet to prove,

00:49:44 ◼   ► and I haven't given it that much thought. But somebody had written in to Back to Work to ask

00:49:48 ◼   ► us about like, "Oh God, is this the future? Is the future going to be like people in my office

00:49:52 ◼   ► talking into Excel?" And I was like, "Eh, you know, I kind of don't think it is because I kind

00:49:57 ◼   ► of feel like there's these parts to the voice thing that you don't get if all you see is

00:50:02 ◼   ► as somebody being a dingus and talking into the air.

00:50:05 ◼   ► The voice is one part.

00:50:06 ◼   ► The voice, yeah, that's the parlor trick.

00:50:08 ◼   ► But what's behind the voice, right?

00:50:10 ◼   ► It's that, I don't know what you want to call it,

00:50:13 ◼   ► the functionality, the scripting,

00:50:15 ◼   ► in some cases the AI or machine learning, whatever it is,

00:50:18 ◼   ► but that middle layer of what it does with what it heard,

00:50:20 ◼   ► if it heard it well, what it does with that,

00:50:22 ◼   ► that's maybe the important part.

00:50:24 ◼   ► And then the third part is the ubiquity.

00:50:26 ◼   ► So I mean, I have this idea that I'm kind of

00:50:29 ◼   ► bubbling around, which is that I wonder if voice

00:50:32 ◼   ► ends up historically being the least important part of that stack.

00:50:35 ◼   ► Voice is the parlor trick that's fun to use, but I think that you,

00:50:39 ◼   ► the idea of that kind of ubiquitous availability for,

00:50:44 ◼   ► do you follow where I'm going with this?

00:50:45 ◼   ► Like I don't think you're going to have to talk into Excel.

00:50:48 ◼   ► I think that there's going to be more and more bespoke remote devices that do

00:50:52 ◼   ► your bidding without you needing to know how to do RM-R.

00:50:55 ◼   ► All right, hold that thought, hold that thought.

00:50:57 ◼   ► Cause I want to keep going with this, but I want to, I got to break in here.

00:51:00 ◼   ► I told you about buying eyeglasses online.

00:51:02 ◼   ► We'll look.

00:51:02 ◼   ► Oh, come on.

00:51:03 ◼   ► Really?

00:51:03 ◼   ► It is.

00:51:04 ◼   ► It's our friend Warby Parker.

00:51:05 ◼   ► They make buying eyeglasses online easy and risk-free.

00:51:08 ◼   ► They believe glasses should be viewed as a fashion accessory,

00:51:11 ◼   ► just like a bag, shoe, necktie, hat.

00:51:14 ◼   ► I mean, how many pairs of shoes do you have?

00:51:16 ◼   ► Do you have one pair of shoes?

00:51:17 ◼   ► Why in the world would you only have one pair of glasses?

00:51:19 ◼   ► Well, the reason some people would,

00:51:20 ◼   ► because they cost hundreds of dollars.

00:51:22 ◼   ► Well, guess what?

00:51:22 ◼   ► Warby Parker's glasses start at just $95,

00:51:27 ◼   ► including the prescription lenses.

00:51:29 ◼   ► They don't give you a crazy upsell on anti glare and anti scratch.

00:51:34 ◼   ► They give you the anti glare and the anti scratch by default,

00:51:37 ◼   ► because who doesn't want them?

00:51:38 ◼   ► No upsell on that crap.

00:51:40 ◼   ► And for every pair of glasses you buy, they send a pair

00:51:44 ◼   ► to someone in need around the world.

00:51:46 ◼   ► People who've got need eyeglasses, but they're there, you know,

00:51:49 ◼   ► can't afford them. Warby Parker takes care of them.

00:51:52 ◼   ► It's a free try at home program.

00:51:57 ◼   ► You go to their website.

00:51:57 ◼   ► They've got, I don't know, at least 100 pairs of glasses,

00:52:00 ◼   ► probably more, tons of them, any style you can imagine.

00:52:05 ◼   ► You will pick up to five that you like.

00:52:07 ◼   ► They send them to you for free with like dummy lenses in them.

00:52:10 ◼   ► And you can put them on, see what

00:52:12 ◼   ► they look like on your face.

00:52:14 ◼   ► No obligation to buy.

00:52:15 ◼   ► You haven't given them any money yet.

00:52:17 ◼   ► It ships for free.

00:52:17 ◼   ► They give you the label to send it back.

00:52:19 ◼   ► If you'd like one or more of the ones, you just say, OK, here.

00:52:23 ◼   ► I like this one.

00:52:24 ◼   ► I like this one.

00:52:25 ◼   ► You give them your prescription info.

00:52:26 ◼   ► They've got like a little trick to measure like the distance between your eyes.

00:52:30 ◼   ► You hold like a standard credit card up in front of a webcam or something like that.

00:52:33 ◼   ► And they can measure and because you know, you, there's little tricks like that to get the glasses to be just right.

00:52:39 ◼   ► Cause they got to know how far apart your pupils are.

00:52:40 ◼   ► They do it right there with a camera.

00:52:42 ◼   ► You don't go to a store, you don't waste any time on stuff like that.

00:52:45 ◼   ► Totally free to try these things at home.

00:52:48 ◼   ► You pick the ones you like and they're, they started just 95 bucks and then they show up in like a couple of days.

00:52:54 ◼   ► It's a great system.

00:52:56 ◼   ► They've got sunglasses.

00:52:57 ◼   ► You can get prescription sunglasses.

00:52:59 ◼   ► They come with polarized lenses, et cetera, et cetera,

00:53:02 ◼   ► UV protection.

00:53:04 ◼   ► And remember, every single pair that you buy

00:53:07 ◼   ► includes a pair of glasses that they

00:53:10 ◼   ► distribute to people in need.

00:53:12 ◼   ► Go to warbyparker.com/the-talk-show,

00:53:16 ◼   ► warbyparker.com/the-talk-show, and you'll

00:53:20 ◼   ► know you came from the show.

00:53:22 ◼   ► Great stuff.

00:53:23 ◼   ► I think the sunglasses are a good gateway drug.

00:53:25 ◼   ► If you're not ready to let go of your artisanal small batch glasses that you bought,

00:53:30 ◼   ► your tiny little Helvetica glasses,

00:53:31 ◼   ► start with sunglasses because if you need glasses,

00:53:35 ◼   ► you could really benefit from prescription sunglasses.

00:53:37 ◼   ► These guys have gotten into retail now too.

00:53:39 ◼   ► They have a retail shop here that just opened here in Philly a couple of weeks ago,

00:53:43 ◼   ► right down the street from the Apple Store,

00:53:45 ◼   ► like the premium retail district.

00:53:49 ◼   ► I think maybe arguably,

00:53:51 ◼   ► literally within a stone's throw of the Apple Store,

00:53:53 ◼   ► there's a Warby Parker you can go into.

00:53:55 ◼   ► I've walked by, but I think I'm in.

00:53:57 ◼   ► - You think they'd ever get into toilets?

00:53:58 ◼   ► They send you four or five toilets to your house,

00:54:00 ◼   ► you try 'em out, you send back the ones you don't want?

00:54:01 ◼   ► You can't really do that? - They might.

00:54:02 ◼   ► They might.

00:54:03 ◼   ► That might be why they got the retail space,

00:54:04 ◼   ► you know what I mean?

00:54:05 ◼   ► So you can go in there and have a seat.

00:54:08 ◼   ► - Try it out for yourself.

00:54:09 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:54:10 ◼   ► - You know, like people used to,

00:54:11 ◼   ► people used to go to the Apple store to check their email.

00:54:14 ◼   ► Right? - Yeah.

00:54:14 ◼   ► - Maybe you go in there to test out the merchandise.

00:54:17 ◼   ► - Here's my theory on the voice.

00:54:19 ◼   ► Computers have conquered tasks that the interfaces

00:54:24 ◼   ► that have been available have been acceptable to,

00:54:27 ◼   ► useful for.

00:54:29 ◼   ► So we did spreadsheets and word processing first

00:54:32 ◼   ► because at the very earliest years of computing,

00:54:35 ◼   ► the only thing we really had were,

00:54:37 ◼   ► literally we only had text-based displays

00:54:39 ◼   ► and we had keyboards and those are two things

00:54:42 ◼   ► that with nothing but a text-based display and a keyboard,

00:54:46 ◼   ► they were actually way better than what came before it.

00:54:49 ◼   ► Right, that you could do things like you put all these

00:54:51 ◼   ► numbers into your spreadsheet and get an answer

00:54:54 ◼   ► for what your budget would be, and then somebody says,

00:54:57 ◼   ► well, what if instead of 10% growth,

00:54:59 ◼   ► we only have 5% growth?

00:55:01 ◼   ► What happens?

00:55:02 ◼   ► All of a sudden--

00:55:03 ◼   ► You start with an electronic analog for something

00:55:05 ◼   ► in the physical world, but with this added functionality.

00:55:08 ◼   ► What computers have always been good at is--

00:55:10 ◼   ► when they take off-- is doing things that used to be mundane

00:55:14 ◼   ► and making them-- saving us tons of time.

00:55:17 ◼   ► And you have that-- even a relatively simple spreadsheet.

00:55:20 ◼   ► In pre-spreadsheet days, if somebody said,

00:55:22 ◼   ► let's say what happens if we only have 5% growth

00:55:25 ◼   ► instead of 10% growth, but that number percolates down

00:55:28 ◼   ► to 20 different things beneath it.

00:55:30 ◼   ► It takes two seconds in a spreadsheet to make that change,

00:55:34 ◼   ► and it would take a couple of minutes of math,

00:55:36 ◼   ► error-prone, hand arithmetic, you know, previously.

00:55:40 ◼   ► Word processing, word processing let people

00:55:42 ◼   ► who were writing documents make changes

00:55:44 ◼   ► without bringing white out and making a mess of the paper.

00:55:49 ◼   ► And significant changes, like moving paragraphs around

00:55:52 ◼   ► deleting entire chunks without retyping. I would probably—I think there's a good

00:55:58 ◼   ► chance that if I had been born 50 years earlier, I still would have been a writer of some sort.

00:56:02 ◼   ► But I would have been an angry writer, because I think I always would be angry at the rewriting.

00:56:08 ◼   ► In high school, I used to have to do it. I had a typewriter in high school. I didn't have a computer.

00:56:12 ◼   ► There was a—one of the history teachers in my college was infamous for always—she's

00:56:18 ◼   ► very tough reader, very tough critic, tough teacher. And she would invariably send back

00:56:22 ◼   ► people's papers—everybody's got their paper sent back, and you had to make changes on it. And she

00:56:27 ◼   ► would, you know, mark it up, and you'd have to retype any page that had more than three corrections

00:56:31 ◼   ► on it. You would have to redo the page. So you've got to retype that page. And if that was a big

00:56:35 ◼   ► correction, guess what? You're retyping at least two pages. Yeah, because it would overflow, right?

00:56:39 ◼   ► Exactly. Yeah. I mean, and that's a radical change, if you really think about it. I know

00:56:43 ◼   ► that there's youngsters out there who've never had to do this, and you think, "Oh, that sounds bad."

00:56:46 ◼   ► But it was in practice, it was worse than you're imagining.

00:56:50 ◼   ► Because it really just felt like busywork.

00:56:52 ◼   ► And that's what computers have been good at.

00:56:54 ◼   ► But I feel like for things like Excel,

00:56:57 ◼   ► there's no need for voice for that.

00:56:58 ◼   ► The existing input methods are better.

00:57:00 ◼   ► I think the voice stuff--

00:57:01 ◼   ► Totally agree.

00:57:03 ◼   ► The voice stuff is entirely for stuff

00:57:05 ◼   ► where voice is a better interface than keyboard typing

00:57:12 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:57:15 ◼   ► Well, my response to that listener,

00:57:17 ◼   ► I did one of those turns out Malcolm Gladwell things,

00:57:19 ◼   ► because I was like, well, first of all,

00:57:21 ◼   ► I don't think that is the best way to interact.

00:57:23 ◼   ► But the bigger question, now that I got my futurist hat on,

00:57:25 ◼   ► the bigger question is how many of us

00:57:27 ◼   ► will have jobs where we use Excel in 20 years?

00:57:29 ◼   ► Like, if you're really thinking about this stuff,

00:57:32 ◼   ► not that I'm any scholar on this,

00:57:34 ◼   ► but let's think bigger than where we are now.

00:57:36 ◼   ► We've got to quit thinking about things as slight iterations

00:57:40 ◼   ► on what we're willing to admit has changed

00:57:41 ◼   ► about what we understand, and start looking instead at,

00:57:44 ◼   ► what is the trend line for this?

00:57:46 ◼   ► And where does that end up amidst all these other kinds

00:57:49 ◼   ► of things?

00:57:50 ◼   ► But so how much do you use voice day to day now?

00:57:56 ◼   ► I use it frequently, but I use it

00:57:57 ◼   ► for the same handful of things over and over and over

00:58:00 ◼   ► and over again.

00:58:01 ◼   ► Are you a dictator?

00:58:03 ◼   ► I do.

00:58:03 ◼   ► I do dictate.

00:58:05 ◼   ► So I think that should count.

00:58:07 ◼   ► So I definitely dictate like iMessages.

00:58:13 ◼   ► I absolutely do, because I can dictate faster than I can type.

00:58:17 ◼   ► And it's accurate.

00:58:18 ◼   ► If you're typing more than a sentence,

00:58:19 ◼   ► if you're typing more than two sentences,

00:58:21 ◼   ► just put a clock on it.

00:58:22 ◼   ► It'll blow your mind.

00:58:23 ◼   ► Even accounting for the time to fix small errors,

00:58:26 ◼   ► it's so much faster than typing.

00:58:28 ◼   ► And for the most part, the people who I'm texting,

00:58:32 ◼   ► it's, again, a handful of people.

00:58:34 ◼   ► It's either my wife, my son, or a close personal friend.

00:58:41 ◼   ► And if it makes a homonym error,

00:58:46 ◼   ► I often will just let it slide because I think it's funny.

00:58:50 ◼   ► If I say it's, I don't know,

00:58:52 ◼   ► that the produce selection is a real horror show,

00:58:56 ◼   ► and it comes out-- - It comes out with horror.

00:58:59 ◼   ► - Or a Horace show, or something like that.

00:59:03 ◼   ► I'll let it go. - The truth is,

00:59:04 ◼   ► like on my iPad, I've got the small iPad Pro,

00:59:08 ◼   ► And the truth is, dictation on there, especially on Wi-Fi,

00:59:13 ◼   ► for certain kinds of things, like paragraph link things--

00:59:16 ◼   ► I would challenge people to actually try this,

00:59:18 ◼   ► because here's the thing for me.

00:59:19 ◼   ► If I'm laying in bed like an animal typing with my thumbs,

00:59:22 ◼   ► I will very frequently be doing stuff like hitting the comma

00:59:24 ◼   ► and breaking this word in half for some dumb reason.

00:59:27 ◼   ► Or I meant to hit A and I hit capital.

00:59:30 ◼   ► Like there's these same three or four typing mistakes I make constantly

00:59:34 ◼   ► on devices.

00:59:35 ◼   ► And you don't get that.

00:59:36 ◼   ► Instead, you get funny homonyms.

00:59:38 ◼   ► But so dictation, do you do a lot of little tasks?

00:59:41 ◼   ► Do you do reminders?

00:59:42 ◼   ► Do you do setting meetings and stuff like that?

00:59:44 ◼   ► No, not for calendar, but I don't have a lot of meetings.

00:59:47 ◼   ► But I'll do reminders.

00:59:48 ◼   ► I'll say add such and such to my shopping list.

00:59:53 ◼   ► I feel like with iOS voice functionality,

00:59:59 ◼   ► I'm trying to avoid triggering things.

01:00:01 ◼   ► I think that's the gateway drug.

01:00:03 ◼   ► is like, hey, Dingus, remind me to bring up the laundry when

01:00:09 ◼   ► I arrive at the house in two hours.

01:00:11 ◼   ► Right.

01:00:12 ◼   ► Because there's a lot to that.

01:00:13 ◼   ► I mean, you do get a reminder.

01:00:14 ◼   ► It's on your reminder list.

01:00:15 ◼   ► That's good by itself.

01:00:17 ◼   ► It'll go off in two hours no matter what.

01:00:19 ◼   ► But if you're in the geofenced area earlier,

01:00:22 ◼   ► it goes off as well.

01:00:23 ◼   ► I don't know how many people know that.

01:00:24 ◼   ► And it's really as simple as saying that thing.

01:00:26 ◼   ► If you want to get started with your iPhone in particular,

01:00:29 ◼   ► I think that's a pretty good place to start.

01:00:31 ◼   ► great for controlling music on AirPods, I've got to say, but a good way to, you

01:00:35 ◼   ► know, get you started with what it does. Well, I think it would be if the latency were solved.

01:00:40 ◼   ► It's too much of a pause between when you double-tap the

01:00:44 ◼   ► AirPod and when the assistant kicks in. Yeah, my fantasy for the AirPods is it

01:00:51 ◼   ► gets something like a—I know this is impossible at this point—but that on one

01:00:55 ◼   ► side there's something like—I know this sounds crazy—but there's something like a

01:01:01 ◼   ► and possibly small touchpad that's, you know, like the size of, you know, half a centimeter.

01:01:07 ◼   ► Right.

01:01:08 ◼   ► But something that you could press on that you could tap or push and that has a little

01:01:12 ◼   ► bit of slide ability.

01:01:14 ◼   ► So you could, like, for example, I know that's nuts, but it would be pretty cool if you could

01:01:17 ◼   ► hit that dingus, tap it twice, you get Siri, you hit it once, for example, and if you slide

01:01:23 ◼   ► backwards or forwards, it would be volume.

01:01:25 ◼   ► Like something like that would be dynamite, but probably out of scope at that price.

01:01:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:01:30 ◼   ► I love my AirPods.

01:01:32 ◼   ► I really do.

01:01:32 ◼   ► I rave about it.

01:01:33 ◼   ► It's my favorite new Apple thing in a long time.

01:01:36 ◼   ► It's my favorite new--

01:01:37 ◼   ► - I like them so much more than I expected.

01:01:38 ◼   ► - I do too.

01:01:39 ◼   ► I expected to like them, but I actually love them.

01:01:43 ◼   ► But I fully acknowledge that part and parcel of using them

01:01:46 ◼   ► is the fact that there are certain things

01:01:47 ◼   ► that the old $10 wired,

01:01:50 ◼   ► well, I know Apple sold them for $29,

01:01:52 ◼   ► but the old, the old, the old,

01:01:53 ◼   ► included in the box wired ones were way better at.

01:01:56 ◼   ► Way better.

01:01:57 ◼   ► like double clicking to go to the next track.

01:02:02 ◼   ► And--

01:02:04 ◼   ► - But it's a little bit like we're back to the truck

01:02:05 ◼   ► and the car in some ways though,

01:02:06 ◼   ► or for that matter voice,

01:02:08 ◼   ► where like this will not make sense until you use it.

01:02:09 ◼   ► And when you use it, you will have no problem dithering

01:02:13 ◼   ► about when other headphones are a better choice.

01:02:16 ◼   ► It's not, I mean, you're not, you know,

01:02:18 ◼   ► just the wireless thing is dynamite.

01:02:20 ◼   ► If I'm just gonna do dishes

01:02:21 ◼   ► and just wanna like have a little break and do dishes

01:02:24 ◼   ► and listen to a podcast,

01:02:25 ◼   ► 'cause I mean, what's gonna happen?

01:02:26 ◼   ► I mean, the worst I have to do, I reach down,

01:02:28 ◼   ► I grab my pocket and I hit the volume on my pocket

01:02:30 ◼   ► to bring it up or down.

01:02:32 ◼   ► But if you're gonna be traveling for a long time,

01:02:35 ◼   ► well, you know, also turns out, they do,

01:02:37 ◼   ► if you include the time of the battery pack,

01:02:40 ◼   ► little Tic Tac holder,

01:02:42 ◼   ► like you get pretty good battery out of these things.

01:02:44 ◼   ► It's gonna be fun.

01:02:46 ◼   ► There's not that many occasions

01:02:47 ◼   ► when you listen to these for five hours.

01:02:48 ◼   ► - I have never run out. - No, me neither.

01:02:50 ◼   ► I don't think I've ever gotten below 80%.

01:02:51 ◼   ► - I don't know, but I've gotten close,

01:02:54 ◼   ► or not even close, but I've gotten to the point

01:02:56 ◼   ► I get like a warning or something or I don't know I somehow notice and I just

01:03:00 ◼   ► Absent-minded leads put the air pods case on in a lightning cable and it's fixed

01:03:06 ◼   ► I don't know the battery life is amazing on them and I have to say I had the

01:03:10 ◼   ► $299 Beats ones

01:03:12 ◼   ► Forget what they were called but they're the ones with the little you know

01:03:16 ◼   ► Under the chin cable and I liked them enough that they were my main headphones for I don't know eight nine months or something like that

01:03:23 ◼   ► But they were I was constantly running out of battery life on them surprise at surprise really moments

01:03:29 ◼   ► Yeah, like that case that case is brilliant. Like I hate and I love your tip your little YouTube video

01:03:33 ◼   ► I use your tip all the time for getting them out. Yeah, that's the way to do it

01:03:37 ◼   ► You should tell people is a really good. I should I'll put it in the show notes

01:03:40 ◼   ► Sure, you will have to plug in your Ethernet right after plugging it

01:03:46 ◼   ► Let me take another break here and thank what did I say? I was gonna put in the show notes my video

01:03:50 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:03:51 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, your Stanley Kubrick earbud video.

01:03:53 ◼   ► - Video, AirPod video.

01:03:55 ◼   ► All right, there it is, in the show notes.

01:03:57 ◼   ► I wanna take a break though.

01:03:58 ◼   ► I gotta thank another great sponsor.

01:03:59 ◼   ► I have their product.

01:04:01 ◼   ► I own it.

01:04:02 ◼   ► I think they sent it to me.

01:04:04 ◼   ► I don't think I paid for it.

01:04:06 ◼   ► I don't even remember, but I would buy it.

01:04:08 ◼   ► And in fact, I'm going to buy more.

01:04:10 ◼   ► It is a fantastic product.

01:04:12 ◼   ► I adore it.

01:04:14 ◼   ► It is a suitcase from a company called Away.

01:04:16 ◼   ► I've got the overhead one.

01:04:19 ◼   ► It's simply a great suitcase.

01:04:23 ◼   ► It is made with premium German polycarbonate.

01:04:27 ◼   ► It looks like you could throw it off the top of a building

01:04:30 ◼   ► and it would be fine.

01:04:31 ◼   ► It has four wheels.

01:04:32 ◼   ► The wheels are almost too good.

01:04:35 ◼   ► There's a terminal in the Philadelphia airport

01:04:37 ◼   ► where to get to the gates that I always have to go to.

01:04:40 ◼   ► For whatever reason, every time I fly,

01:04:42 ◼   ► my gate at every airport I go to in North America

01:04:45 ◼   ► is always at the end of the terminal.

01:04:47 ◼   ► I never ever, ever get one of those gates near the hub.

01:04:51 ◼   ► Always at the end.

01:04:52 ◼   ► And at Philly Terminal C, there's a downhill slope.

01:04:56 ◼   ► Like once you get past like gate C20 and it's downhill.

01:05:02 ◼   ► The wheels are so good on the away suitcase

01:05:04 ◼   ► that it like the thing wants to run away from you.

01:05:07 ◼   ► It's got four 360 degree spinner wheels.

01:05:10 ◼   ► They are super smooth, great wheels.

01:05:12 ◼   ► A TSA approved combination lock

01:05:14 ◼   ► built onto the top to prevent theft.

01:05:16 ◼   ► Is that great?

01:05:17 ◼   ► Are these TSA, you know, it's the best you can do though.

01:05:20 ◼   ► It's better than nothing, right?

01:05:21 ◼   ► It's, you know.

01:05:22 ◼   ► - It's nice that it's built in.

01:05:24 ◼   ► And I've got one of these and I love it.

01:05:25 ◼   ► It's built in so you don't have to do that thing

01:05:27 ◼   ► that I always do, which is, oh great, I've got a lock

01:05:29 ◼   ► and I lost the case.

01:05:30 ◼   ► And all of my luggage has a lock on it that I can't use.

01:05:32 ◼   ► - Exactly.

01:05:33 ◼   ► And then, you know, you just put your combination

01:05:34 ◼   ► in your one password or whatever you use

01:05:37 ◼   ► and you know, you won't forget it.

01:05:39 ◼   ► But here's the kicker.

01:05:41 ◼   ► The kicker is that they build in--

01:05:43 ◼   ► - All that by itself, by itself.

01:05:44 ◼   ► You got yourself a great suitcase.

01:05:45 ◼   ► - It's a great suitcase.

01:05:46 ◼   ► And the prices are great.

01:05:47 ◼   ► Right there, the prices are great.

01:05:49 ◼   ► But here's the thing.

01:05:50 ◼   ► They built into the top of the case a really--

01:05:55 ◼   ► I forget how many mega amps, but a big battery.

01:05:58 ◼   ► And there's two USB ports.

01:06:00 ◼   ► One of them is the five watt for a phone,

01:06:05 ◼   ► and the other one is like a 15 watt or something

01:06:07 ◼   ► like that for iPads or whatever or anything

01:06:10 ◼   ► that can charge faster.

01:06:11 ◼   ► And so all you need then to charge your phone

01:06:14 ◼   ► when you're at the airport.

01:06:15 ◼   ► You don't have to go around hunting for a seat at the airport near a socket.

01:06:21 ◼   ► Because guess what? You know they're already taken. They're taken.

01:06:24 ◼   ► Because there's like one... Most North American airports have two wall sockets in the entire airport.

01:06:30 ◼   ► Yep.

01:06:31 ◼   ► So you just make, you know, charge your suitcase.

01:06:35 ◼   ► Yeah, when you get back to your room, so you run off your suitcase, you get back to your room,

01:06:39 ◼   ► and when you go to sleep at night, you charge your suitcase like a gentleman.

01:06:41 ◼   ► It has so much power that like you could charge your suitcase before you go on your trip.

01:06:45 ◼   ► charge your phone at the airport, go somewhere on the way back, plug the USB in again, and it still

01:06:50 ◼   ► has a charge to charge up your phone while you're sitting there waiting for your flight.

01:06:53 ◼   ► I tested it and gave up after three charges of an iPhone.

01:06:57 ◼   ► Yeah, no, I mean it's got at least, I would say very safely at least two. I don't want to

01:07:03 ◼   ► oversell this because I don't have the spec in front of me, but you will definitely be able to

01:07:06 ◼   ► charge up your stuff on the road. It's a big ass battery. It's really nice.

01:07:09 ◼   ► Or like two of you could, like you and a friend or a spouse or a child, whatever.

01:07:12 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:07:12 ◼   ► I like having portable battery chargers when I travel.

01:07:15 ◼   ► But I like-- there's a balancing act with a real portable

01:07:18 ◼   ► charger where you want one that's small enough

01:07:20 ◼   ► that you put it in your pocket.

01:07:21 ◼   ► It doesn't look like you've got a Castanza wallet.

01:07:23 ◼   ► But on the other hand, the ones that are kind of slim

01:07:25 ◼   ► don't really-- they give you an extra 50% on your battery.

01:07:29 ◼   ► A suitcase, even a small overhead suitcase,

01:07:32 ◼   ► plenty of space for a battery that will charge your stuff.

01:07:34 ◼   ► It is a brilliant idea.

01:07:36 ◼   ► It is really great.

01:07:37 ◼   ► And the prices are super great.

01:07:39 ◼   ► They have great prices because they sell direct.

01:07:42 ◼   ► So here's where you go.

01:07:43 ◼   ► Go to awaytravel.com.

01:07:44 ◼   ► awaytravel.com/talkshow.

01:07:48 ◼   ► No "the," just "talk show."

01:07:50 ◼   ► And remember that promo code, "talk show," when you check out.

01:07:52 ◼   ► And guess what?

01:07:53 ◼   ► You'll save an extra $20 off your first order.

01:07:56 ◼   ► $20 right in your pocket for a great suitcase

01:07:59 ◼   ► with great stuff inside.

01:08:01 ◼   ► It's well-organized, super rugged, great wheels.

01:08:05 ◼   ► But the battery charger is the killer feature.

01:08:08 ◼   ► My thanks to AwayTravel.

01:08:11 ◼   ► Good product.

01:08:13 ◼   ► Here's the thing.

01:08:14 ◼   ► I keep saying this.

01:08:14 ◼   ► If you have a voice assistant and you hired somebody,

01:08:17 ◼   ► you hired a real live person, a kid right out of college,

01:08:23 ◼   ► to just follow you around and do stuff for you,

01:08:27 ◼   ► and you could say things like-- let's say

01:08:29 ◼   ► that the kid's name is Dingus.

01:08:30 ◼   ► You'd say, hey, Dingus, what's the score of the North Carolina

01:08:34 ◼   ► game?

01:08:35 ◼   ► And then Dingus would look it up on a phone or whatever

01:08:39 ◼   ► and then tell you the score of the game.

01:08:41 ◼   ► Well, that's already slower.

01:08:43 ◼   ► The computers are better at that sort of stuff

01:08:46 ◼   ► than having a person.

01:08:48 ◼   ► But the flip side is that the computers will make errors

01:08:52 ◼   ► that no human being-- even if you hired a drunk,

01:08:57 ◼   ► no human assistant would ever make

01:08:59 ◼   ► some of the boneheaded errors that the computer assistants

01:09:07 ◼   ► make.

01:09:07 ◼   ► So for example, I have two contacts named Amy.

01:09:12 ◼   ► One of them is my wife, and I text her probably more

01:09:15 ◼   ► than every other person in the world combined.

01:09:18 ◼   ► And then there's a PR person who works

01:09:20 ◼   ► at a technology company who I've had contact

01:09:22 ◼   ► with maybe five times in years.

01:09:25 ◼   ► And sometimes when I say, hey, Dingus, text Amy,

01:09:29 ◼   ► blah, blah, blah, usually it just knows

01:09:32 ◼   ► to send it to my wife.

01:09:33 ◼   ► But every once in a while, it'll say, which Amy?

01:09:37 ◼   ► But you really don't want to get that wrong.

01:09:40 ◼   ► No, you don't. You don't want to get it wrong.

01:09:43 ◼   ► And so I understand being careful, and I'd rather have the...

01:09:49 ◼   ► But it's just your point partly being like, "Why hasn't that figured this out yet?"

01:09:53 ◼   ► Well, it's not "Why hasn't it?" I understand that it's a hard problem to figure out.

01:09:57 ◼   ► My point, though, is more that the bar is set at the common sense of a human being.

01:10:03 ◼   ► And that's, right?

01:10:05 ◼   ► We need to judge these things by that bar of common sense.

01:10:09 ◼   ► That if I had a human assistant and said,

01:10:12 ◼   ► tell Amy I'm going to be late,

01:10:15 ◼   ► and I'll let her know soon how late I'll be,

01:10:18 ◼   ► there's a 0% chance that that assistant

01:10:20 ◼   ► isn't gonna know exactly who I'm talking about.

01:10:23 ◼   ► - That's a good point.

01:10:25 ◼   ► - Like a worst assistant I could hire,

01:10:26 ◼   ► someone who I'm like, hey, dingus,

01:10:29 ◼   ► tell yourself you're fired on Friday.

01:10:32 ◼   ► It just randomly picks the first Amy, knowing that your wife is named Amy.

01:10:35 ◼   ► It just randomly picks the first Amy it finds in the Rolodex.

01:10:38 ◼   ► Even an assistant who I'm so upset with their performance that I'm about--

01:10:42 ◼   ► I'm looking to replace them or, you know, let them go, is gonna get that right.

01:10:47 ◼   ► Right. This is not-- your point is very well taken. Just for what it's

01:10:53 ◼   ► worth practically to be well actually, Guy, two ways I get around that

01:10:59 ◼   ► are by naming relationships.

01:11:02 ◼   ► And so you could say, hey, Dingus, Amy Jane Gruber

01:11:06 ◼   ► is my wife, as you know.

01:11:07 ◼   ► Dingus knows that.

01:11:09 ◼   ► And I can say, text my wife that.

01:11:12 ◼   ► But it never comes out naturally.

01:11:14 ◼   ► I feel like part of the interaction--

01:11:16 ◼   ► I know.

01:11:16 ◼   ► Part of the interaction with these things

01:11:18 ◼   ► is that I think that they work best

01:11:22 ◼   ► or feel like they work best.

01:11:24 ◼   ► Maybe the stopwatch would tell you there's no difference.

01:11:26 ◼   ► But the cognitive load is so much less

01:11:28 ◼   ► if you don't really have to think about it in a formal,

01:11:33 ◼   ► how do I officially want to do this?

01:11:35 ◼   ► If I just say what's on the top of my head,

01:11:37 ◼   ► it always comes out as Amy.

01:11:39 ◼   ► It never comes out as my wife.

01:11:41 ◼   ► - Right, but the frustrating part, I mean--

01:11:43 ◼   ► - I would never call her my wife in a normal--

01:11:45 ◼   ► - My wife, yeah.

01:11:47 ◼   ► Yeah, I sound like Borat.

01:11:48 ◼   ► But you're like, but it's almost 80% of the way there,

01:11:50 ◼   ► and that it can do that.

01:11:51 ◼   ► The part that is frustrating to me,

01:11:53 ◼   ► and yeah, I know it's a hard problem.

01:11:54 ◼   ► It is frustrating to me, though, that,

01:11:56 ◼   ► Like for example, when it first mishears you, sometimes it will say like, "Okay, I didn't

01:12:02 ◼   ► understand that name.

01:12:03 ◼   ► Can you pronounce that for me?"

01:12:04 ◼   ► And it's like, "Wow, that's really interesting."

01:12:06 ◼   ► You suddenly get really smart sometimes, and now you want to learn how something is

01:12:09 ◼   ► pronounced.

01:12:10 ◼   ► That's really cool.

01:12:11 ◼   ► But then in other times, like if you have exactly two people with the name Amy in there,

01:12:14 ◼   ► it is amazing how much of the time it'll say which Amy do you want to send it to.

01:12:18 ◼   ► And it seems to me like by the fifth or fortieth time that has happened, it kind of seems like

01:12:23 ◼   ► it should figure out that like, "Well, it's always this one Amy."

01:12:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:12:28 ◼   ► You know?

01:12:28 ◼   ► What about-- OK, let me ask you.

01:12:33 ◼   ► I don't want to drag on.

01:12:34 ◼   ► I know I've got to do a shorty today.

01:12:35 ◼   ► But do you notice differences in how your kid uses it?

01:12:37 ◼   ► Because something I've learned from people with kids--

01:12:41 ◼   ► our kids are-- your kid's older than mine.

01:12:43 ◼   ► Mine's nine.

01:12:44 ◼   ► Yours is 13?

01:12:45 ◼   ► Yep.

01:12:46 ◼   ► God.

01:12:48 ◼   ► Sir Q says he's got kids that are actually, I think,

01:12:51 ◼   ► nine and 13.

01:12:52 ◼   ► Dictation.

01:12:53 ◼   ► This is just what my kid does.

01:12:54 ◼   ► She's real good at the iPad.

01:12:56 ◼   ► She's real good at finding stuff on Google.

01:12:58 ◼   ► She's really-- yeah, she's just great on the iPad.

01:13:01 ◼   ► But she would prefer to do everything with dictation.

01:13:04 ◼   ► She tries to do corrections to what

01:13:06 ◼   ► she mistyped with dictation.

01:13:08 ◼   ► And like Syracuse, to me, we talk about this.

01:13:10 ◼   ► It drives you bananas.

01:13:11 ◼   ► You want to tear it out of your hand,

01:13:12 ◼   ► just go type like a person with your thumbs.

01:13:14 ◼   ► But I think that's very telling that kids really

01:13:17 ◼   ► get the voice thing in a way that it feels exotic and slow

01:13:21 ◼   ► to us.

01:13:21 ◼   ► Well, it makes sense to them.

01:13:24 ◼   ► Does your kid do that?

01:13:26 ◼   ► Not so much with the iPhone, as far as I can tell.

01:13:29 ◼   ► He's mostly a tapper with the iPhone,

01:13:32 ◼   ► but doesn't really-- his text messages are incredibly short.

01:13:35 ◼   ► Often a single emoji, usually just a word or two.

01:13:39 ◼   ► But where he really takes to voice is with the Apple TV.

01:13:44 ◼   ► He had a sleepover-- he had a friend sleepover Saturday night.

01:13:48 ◼   ► And I mean, they must have spent 90 minutes just laughing

01:13:51 ◼   ► hysterically telling Apple TV to play goofy songs I've never heard of, but

01:13:57 ◼   ► they did everything by voice. It was all just hitting the mic

01:13:59 ◼   ► button and asking Apple TV and Apple Music whatever to play a bunch of goofy

01:14:06 ◼   ► songs that I wasn't familiar with, but it was like 90 minutes of uproarious

01:14:09 ◼   ► laughter all through the mic button on Apple TV. We had, I think I mentioned

01:14:15 ◼   ► this last time, we had a sleepover with seven girls, seven third grade girls. I

01:14:21 ◼   ► I don't know what we were thinking.

01:14:22 ◼   ► And the, I mean, seven, seven.

01:14:25 ◼   ► And oh boy, you want to learn a little bit about politics?

01:14:29 ◼   ► How do seven third grade girls sleep at your house?

01:14:31 ◼   ► 'Cause at first everybody's in a room

01:14:33 ◼   ► and then everybody's in different rooms

01:14:34 ◼   ► and there's crying and there's reconciliations

01:14:36 ◼   ► and it's like one big sad game of diplomacy.

01:14:38 ◼   ► Everybody's writing orders in the hallways.

01:14:41 ◼   ► But boy, the Amazon's Echo were a big fun feature.

01:14:45 ◼   ► I learned stuff from some of the kids.

01:14:48 ◼   ► Like I guess I didn't know the thing

01:14:49 ◼   ► about how you can tell it, you know, played with the song—

01:14:51 ◼   ► That's the real fourth graders of San Francisco.

01:14:54 ◼   ► [Laughter]

01:14:55 ◼   ► Right?

01:14:56 ◼   ► Right, right, right, right. Oh, God, yes. Yeah, yeah. They're like just one Cosmo short

01:15:02 ◼   ► of a fistfight.

01:15:03 ◼   ► [Laughter]

01:15:04 ◼   ► So, you learned stuff about the Alexa.

01:15:06 ◼   ► Oh, I did! I guess I knew but forgot the thing about telling it, you know, what's the song

01:15:12 ◼   ► that goes, "My mind is clear, now it lasts all too well, I can see." Like, and it'll

01:15:17 ◼   ► oh, and then it'll play like, you know, Jesus Christ Superstar or whatever. That's great.

01:15:21 ◼   ► But, you know, there, I guess I'm trying to get at, I don't mean, I'm not trying to be like,

01:15:26 ◼   ► you know, Kevin Kelly or something here. I'm not as smart as Kevin Kelly, but I'm just saying,

01:15:30 ◼   ► like, look to what these people are doing. They're not weird and dumb. Like, they're figuring this

01:15:35 ◼   ► out, and we might be the weird ones at this point. So, yeah, I don't know. But then there's still so

01:15:41 ◼   ► many holes. I mean, like, to your point, so I have to admit—

01:15:45 ◼   ► It's such early days. It's not even holes. It's such early days. The challenge...

01:15:49 ◼   ► Good. I would just say it's not holes. I think it's more like we're still in a

01:15:54 ◼   ► canyon and we've built a few plateaus. It's mostly hole, I think. Yeah, somebody I

01:16:00 ◼   ► remember first in the early days in the 80s describing windows as being like

01:16:04 ◼   ► this system where like you'd be in this in this beautiful office building on the

01:16:07 ◼   ► 13th floor of this beautiful office building only sometimes you'd open a

01:16:10 ◼   ► door and fall down a mine shaft to the ground floor.

01:16:13 ◼   ► You just get dropped into DOS out of nowhere sometimes.

01:16:16 ◼   ► You're like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, what happened?

01:16:17 ◼   ► Where'd the computer go?"

01:16:18 ◼   ► And I think that's still the case here.

01:16:21 ◼   ► So I did this other show called "Dude by Friday" where we give each other a challenge every

01:16:24 ◼   ► week.

01:16:25 ◼   ► And the challenge I gave my co-host this week was to try what I'm doing, which is try doing

01:16:28 ◼   ► this voice thing.

01:16:29 ◼   ► And we'll see how that goes.

01:16:30 ◼   ► But I've also...

01:16:31 ◼   ► The side challenge in this was to start keeping track of the stuff that drives you bananas

01:16:35 ◼   ► about using your voice.

01:16:36 ◼   ► So if you're ready to lock your keys inside the car, inside of another car, inside of

01:16:39 ◼   ► another car. My first thing I did was say, I said something along the lines of, "Hey,

01:16:43 ◼   ► Dingus, make a new note called 'bitch.'" Because I thought, "What do I want to be

01:16:48 ◼   ► able to do? I want to say, 'Hey, Dingus, add this f-ing thing doesn't work to my

01:16:53 ◼   ► bitch note.'" And of course, what happens? Siri goes, "Oh, Merlin, your language is

01:16:58 ◼   ► so saucy." I'm like, "No! Dingus!" So I had to go in and manually create a note

01:17:04 ◼   ► called "bitch" because it refused to do anything with it because it thought I was

01:17:07 ◼   ► being a saucy boy. But, you know, and of course that's the first thing on the list now, is

01:17:12 ◼   ► that, you know, that Siri chides me sometimes for how I choose to name things. But, yeah,

01:17:17 ◼   ► you're right, you're right. I mean, it is early days, but didn't mean to monopolize

01:17:21 ◼   ► your show with voice stuff.

01:17:22 ◼   ► No.

01:17:23 ◼   ► It's just, I do feel like it's pretty easy to write, once you get to the age that people

01:17:28 ◼   ► like we are, it becomes very easy to just write off huge swaths of stuff by going, like,

01:17:34 ◼   ► It's like the whole Douglas Adams thing of stuff that was created before you were 30

01:17:40 ◼   ► is dependable.

01:17:41 ◼   ► Stuff creating your 30s is cool.

01:17:44 ◼   ► Anything after that is dangerous.

01:17:45 ◼   ► I don't want to be that guy.

01:17:48 ◼   ► I don't want to be the guy—and I always thought this—I don't want to be the guy

01:17:54 ◼   ► who is now mid-40s and has really strong opinions about the way computers are, which I am, and

01:18:02 ◼   ► who dismisses the new things like the guys who dismissed the Macintosh when it came.

01:18:08 ◼   ► Like, I specifically remember— It's a toy for rich boys.

01:18:11 ◼   ► I remember very specifically reading a John C. Dvorak column from like 1985 or 86 or something

01:18:18 ◼   ► like that, where his argument against the Macintosh and why it was doomed to failure

01:18:23 ◼   ► was that real people doing real work want to kick back in their chairs and put their feet on their

01:18:30 ◼   ► desk and put their keyboard on their lap and therefore they can't use the mouse.

01:18:34 ◼   ► And that's one of those hats that with a car that says press. Yeah and that's exactly how he was

01:18:39 ◼   ► banging out the column that I was reading was with his feet on his desk in the Ziff Davis offices in

01:18:45 ◼   ► San Francisco and how in the world am I ever going to use a mouse? You know this thing is doomed. I

01:18:50 ◼   ► don't want to be that guy with voice. I really don't even though I'm frustrated with it in a lot

01:18:55 ◼   ► of ways and I see a lot of problems with it and I see people using it for things where I'm like,

01:18:59 ◼   ► like, oh my God, you could totally do that better

01:19:02 ◼   ► the old way, but I totally see that it's the new thing

01:19:04 ◼   ► that's coming.

01:19:06 ◼   ► I know we gotta go soon.

01:19:07 ◼   ► I gotta squeeze in, I gotta squeeze in another message

01:19:09 ◼   ► from a friend though, and it's--

01:19:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, please, by all means.

01:19:11 ◼   ► We're talking about something you like.

01:19:13 ◼   ► - Well, it's Fracture.

01:19:14 ◼   ► Fracture's the-- - You guys know Fracture.

01:19:16 ◼   ► - You guys know Fracture.

01:19:18 ◼   ► Let me tell you something though.

01:19:19 ◼   ► I'm recording this on March 21.

01:19:22 ◼   ► - 21.

01:19:24 ◼   ► - It's probably gonna come out on Wednesday, March 22.

01:19:26 ◼   ► Fracture, you send them your photos.

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01:21:46 ◼   ► you're gonna you're gonna be thinking about John and Merlin and you're gonna think John and Merlin did me right

01:21:50 ◼   ► Do it

01:21:54 ◼   ► Anything else you want to talk about I you know

01:21:56 ◼   ► And people probably think that we've got two or three hours left on the show, but we don't we're done

01:22:00 ◼   ► Normally we do we had to jam this one in because you're got you know what I could do what I?

01:22:05 ◼   ► I'm in a tight spot. It's you partner. I'm in a tight spot recording wise

01:22:09 ◼   ► I've got to squeeze in these shows on the rare days when there aren't

01:22:12 ◼   ► contractors upstairs banging holes in the walls that the house we're about to move out of.

01:22:17 ◼   ► So anyway, it's a long sad story and it makes it hard to do a podcast, but...

01:22:21 ◼   ► Well, we probably can't do our follow-up we'd like to do from our November episode.

01:22:29 ◼   ► No, it's too deep. Too deep.

01:22:31 ◼   ► But I don't want to bust a gut, but I would just like to say

01:22:37 ◼   ► sincerely thank you to everybody who responded to that episode. That is

01:22:42 ◼   ► maybe the most response I have ever gotten.

01:22:46 ◼   ► It's without question for me.

01:22:48 ◼   ► I mean, I'm honestly, I'm talking about like you include the talk where I cried, you include that thing

01:22:54 ◼   ► I wrote on the thing, like I...

01:22:56 ◼   ► We got so much heartfelt,

01:22:59 ◼   ► kind responses from people on a day that was very difficult for both of us and for a lot of people.

01:23:04 ◼   ► I just want to say thank you for the opportunity to do it, honestly, and thank you to everybody who continues to send nice notes about that.

01:23:10 ◼   ► I still remember that moment. How many minutes into that episode?

01:23:14 ◼   ► Well, for anybody who's not familiar, the day after the election—was it the day after? The morning. The morning after the election.

01:23:20 ◼   ► Which Merlin and I both took pretty hard.

01:23:23 ◼   ► We recorded an episode of the show about it,

01:23:27 ◼   ► but without trying—the purpose was to just sort of talk our way through this and talk anybody else who was upset through this in a way

01:23:32 ◼   ► that was, you can't quite say apolitical, but a nonpartisan.

01:23:37 ◼   ► - Not strictly partisan. - Not strictly partisan.

01:23:41 ◼   ► And at some point, a few minutes into the show,

01:23:45 ◼   ► you said, "Wait, is this a holiday party?"

01:23:49 ◼   ► It wasn't, you weren't aware at first.

01:23:53 ◼   ► - I wasn't aware, it reminded me of the holiday party

01:23:56 ◼   ► episode that you did with Dan a long time ago,

01:23:59 ◼   ► where you told the story of losing your driver's license.

01:24:02 ◼   ► And I could tell you were having a holiday party.

01:24:04 ◼   ► I was having a holiday party.

01:24:06 ◼   ► Was that a continuation of the previous night's holiday party?

01:24:09 ◼   ► Yeah, I took the election very hard the night.

01:24:14 ◼   ► Obviously, I was sober enough at one point

01:24:17 ◼   ► to make arrangements with you to do a show the next day.

01:24:22 ◼   ► I really tried to drink away that election.

01:24:25 ◼   ► And then it was maybe enough to drink where I woke up

01:24:29 ◼   ► there was still a significant portion of the fuel coursing through my veins.

01:24:34 ◼   ► I tried to scoop up everybody, but sometimes you're going to miss some people.

01:24:39 ◼   ► I might have thought to myself, if there's a Wednesday where you can have an eye opener,

01:24:43 ◼   ► maybe this is the Wednesday. That's your day. That's daddy's day.

01:24:47 ◼   ► But it did. And you were right, and all joking aside, we got a tremendous amount of wonderful,

01:24:53 ◼   ► heartfelt feedback immediately. And it lasted though, like into January. And even, it still

01:25:00 ◼   ► pops up every once in a while now where people will say, you know, I've listened to that

01:25:03 ◼   ► episode six times and I've never done that with a podcast before. And it's like, that's

01:25:07 ◼   ► crazy that you listen to it.

01:25:08 ◼   ► So many people who said like, I couldn't listen to it for a month. Because they were so, they

01:25:12 ◼   ► were having their own dark month of the soul. And they, and then they were like, I listened

01:25:17 ◼   ► to it and it, you know, it doesn't make you feel better, but it makes you feel a little

01:25:20 ◼   ► different.

01:25:21 ◼   ► Maybe a little different and and a lot of people said like did made me feel like I wasn't alone. I'm not crazy

01:25:26 ◼   ► Yeah, so anyway, this is luckily all that settled now. Everything's running like a top. It's like it's like really like a well-oiled machine

01:25:34 ◼   ► Every day every day every day

01:25:37 ◼   ► Okay, so one of the worst things I've done in the last few months is one of my friends

01:25:41 ◼   ► I do that show with Max Temkin

01:25:43 ◼   ► He he has this list of people this political US political people and reporters and I started following much to my peril

01:25:50 ◼   ► I started following this fucking list and it's just unraveled my entire life because I spent so much time there going flipper flipper flipper

01:25:57 ◼   ► And tweet bot looking at this thing is this a twitter like in other words

01:26:01 ◼   ► Yeah, if you go to max tempkin at max tempkin and look at his list

01:26:05 ◼   ► You'll see his US politics list and it's actually it's a good way. Like that's how I've learned about like

01:26:08 ◼   ► Molly Habermann and Simon Molloy and all these people that I really follow like some boy is funny. He's very funny

01:26:15 ◼   ► so anyway, but it seems like

01:26:19 ◼   ► Pretty much every Monday and a lot of most other days someone announces. This is it

01:26:24 ◼   ► And I gotta get away from this one, this is it this is the worst day that the Republican candidate has had

01:26:35 ◼   ► Set there's no

01:26:37 ◼   ► This is there's piss

01:26:40 ◼   ► No way

01:26:43 ◼   ► Done done. So

01:26:46 ◼   ► This is it and then you come back the next day and you go, you know what?

01:26:49 ◼   ► Today, he had the worst day.

01:26:53 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:26:58 ◼   ► Release the Kraken! When do we get to see the piss video? That's what I want to know!

01:27:02 ◼   ► In a lot of ways, you have to laugh. It's hard because there are some real-world consequences to the environmental policy.

01:27:14 ◼   ► Anhala Merkel, her face.

01:27:16 ◼   ► Like, really?

01:27:17 ◼   ► You're not going to shake my hand, dude?

01:27:19 ◼   ► You understand?

01:27:20 ◼   ► We're the last liberal democracy left in Europe.

01:27:23 ◼   ► There were a couple of moments.

01:27:24 ◼   ► I didn't watch the whole thing, but there were two moments.

01:27:26 ◼   ► There was the, do you want to shake hands?

01:27:29 ◼   ► And he's just looking at his feet.

01:27:31 ◼   ► And then there was the moment where

01:27:33 ◼   ► they were standing at the podiums side by side.

01:27:36 ◼   ► That was in-- the handshake that didn't happen

01:27:38 ◼   ► was in the Oval Office.

01:27:40 ◼   ► They had the press conference at the dueling podiums.

01:27:45 ◼   ► And Trump, when it was asked about his--

01:27:49 ◼   ► Question about wiretapping.

01:27:50 ◼   ► Yeah, his spurious claim that Obama had wiretapped him,

01:27:53 ◼   ► turned to her and made a joke and said,

01:27:55 ◼   ► maybe we've got something in common there,

01:27:57 ◼   ► referring to one of the most difficult moments

01:28:01 ◼   ► of the entire Obama administration when it--

01:28:03 ◼   ► I think it was at a Snowden leak, right?

01:28:06 ◼   ► that uh you know that we've been you know but she did she snapped her neck on a double take

01:28:14 ◼   ► that you could not fake right like she was it she was like good right not because she wasn't

01:28:21 ◼   ► aware of it just because it's so something that was not supposed to be talked about it was as

01:28:26 ◼   ► though so it was as though trump had brought up toilet splatter it was the look on angela

01:28:33 ◼   ► Angela Merkel's face when he brought up, "Maybe we've got something together, something familiar."

01:28:40 ◼   ► And all the German reporters, the German reporters are like in some kind of a Hans Christian Anderson

01:28:46 ◼   ► book where they're like, "Uh, why do you keep saying things that you know aren't true?" And

01:28:53 ◼   ► America's like, "Wow, that's really brave." That's very courageous.

01:28:56 ◼   ► Did you see that the reporter who asked that question, she has become like a celebrity in

01:29:03 ◼   ► Germany simply because of her. She's like a modern folk hero. Right, because she just flatly asked

01:29:08 ◼   ► him, "Mr. President, why do you continue and repeatedly say things that you know aren't true?"

01:29:13 ◼   ► You think we'll be back here in four months with the same situation? No, God-willing,

01:29:19 ◼   ► if you and I visit again here on your program, thank you for having me. Do I think Trump will

01:29:24 ◼   ► - He will still be present. - He will spitball it for me.

01:29:26 ◼   ► - Can this continue?

01:29:28 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:29:29 ◼   ► - I think one of the things that, to me,

01:29:32 ◼   ► is very obvious was that this was gonna be a disaster,

01:29:36 ◼   ► a complete disaster, but I think it was,

01:29:38 ◼   ► I also thought it's gonna be impossible to predict how,

01:29:42 ◼   ► and I think that's completely coming out.

01:29:44 ◼   ► I don't think anybody is quite called

01:29:47 ◼   ► the way that this has gone bad.

01:29:50 ◼   ► - Right, right, right. - I think there's

01:29:53 ◼   ► good chance that he doesn't make it. I think there's a good chance that he gets to a point

01:29:58 ◼   ► where he resigns. But I feel like four months from now is probably not soon enough.

01:30:05 ◼   ► Will you hand me back?

01:30:07 ◼   ► I will. I would love to have you back. What do you think? Do you think? I mean, it's a

01:30:13 ◼   ► real irresistible force meeting an irresistible force and immovable object type situation.

01:30:19 ◼   ► One part of this, one part that's always seemed plausible to me, honestly, is that

01:30:25 ◼   ► I don't think he really wanted this job. I think he wanted to win, but I don't think

01:30:28 ◼   ► he wanted the job. I mean, so it's always been plausible to me that knowing that he

01:30:32 ◼   ► is a bit of a wild card and likes his life a certain way, I mean, just, you know, first

01:30:36 ◼   ► principles, Clarice, like he does not like being in Washington. He goes frickin' golfing

01:30:41 ◼   ► every weekend in a different state. Like that's, there's, this job is not suited to his personality.

01:30:48 ◼   ► Why so many executive orders?

01:30:49 ◼   ► He likes to autograph things and be photographed.

01:30:52 ◼   ► That kind of thing he's good at.

01:30:53 ◼   ► Like he likes that.

01:30:54 ◼   ► And he likes the rallies and the stuff like that.

01:30:57 ◼   ► But I don't, I think to say he's gonna get bored,

01:31:00 ◼   ► I think would be a little dismissive,

01:31:02 ◼   ► but I don't think he likes this job.

01:31:03 ◼   ► I don't think he gets to be the kind of person

01:31:05 ◼   ► he wants to be in this job.

01:31:06 ◼   ► He wants to be liked by people,

01:31:08 ◼   ► and he wants to golf a lot.

01:31:10 ◼   ► I mean, he basically wants to be a retiree

01:31:12 ◼   ► who does a volunteer job.

01:31:14 ◼   ► He doesn't wanna do this job.

01:31:16 ◼   ► - I think if he can get to a point

01:31:18 ◼   ► where in his own worldview,

01:31:22 ◼   ► and in the worldview of the people

01:31:23 ◼   ► who still are crazy for him,

01:31:27 ◼   ► if he can declare that he's made America great again,

01:31:32 ◼   ► and it took far less time than anybody ever expected,

01:31:35 ◼   ► and then he can just walk off into the,

01:31:38 ◼   ► my job is done, America's great again,

01:31:41 ◼   ► Pencey here can clean up,

01:31:43 ◼   ► can dot the I's and cross the T's.

01:31:46 ◼   ► I think that he but I think he's guiding he'd have to you know figure out a way

01:31:52 ◼   ► that he and he and at this point he can't say that he hasn't done anything

01:31:55 ◼   ► no but the other angle is like you think about his even more common theme

01:32:00 ◼   ► nowadays it's how undermined he is yeah I by the media and by these perfidious

01:32:08 ◼   ► Republicans and like you know basically he's he's not he's he's a person who

01:32:14 ◼   ► isn't sure what to do in the absence of a clear enemy. So, you know, the other, I agree with you,

01:32:21 ◼   ► if he can MAGA to his, if he can pound sign MAGA in a way that he can claim victory, sure.

01:32:27 ◼   ► And the other thing is, though, he might be able to, like, you know, set his own personal Reichstag

01:32:33 ◼   ► fire. He might self-immolate and say like, "Oh, you know, the dishonest media and the, you know,

01:32:38 ◼   ► failing New York Times, everybody's undermined me. So, like, I could do better work, like,

01:32:43 ◼   ► like going and creating my own TV network.

01:32:45 ◼   ► And I could affect some real change in this world.

01:32:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, he needs an ally. - But we'll see.

01:32:49 ◼   ► - It is curious, he does need an enemy,

01:32:52 ◼   ► like it's very clear, and I just saw,

01:32:54 ◼   ► I didn't watch all of that,

01:32:55 ◼   ► I can't take him in large doses,

01:32:56 ◼   ► but I saw that he had a campaign rally,

01:32:58 ◼   ► and the fact that it, (laughs)

01:33:01 ◼   ► 60 days into office, he's holding campaign rallies

01:33:04 ◼   ► for an election that was--

01:33:05 ◼   ► - My daughter keeps saying he knows he won, right?

01:33:09 ◼   ► Like, I think he knows he won.

01:33:10 ◼   ► It's still all about Hillary Clinton.

01:33:12 ◼   ► - Well, the election was five months ago, almost.

01:33:15 ◼   ► And yes, and his rally a night or two ago in Kentucky,

01:33:20 ◼   ► I think it was in Louisville, was about Hillary Clinton.

01:33:23 ◼   ► And he said something to the effect of,

01:33:25 ◼   ► we're gonna protect the Second Amendment,

01:33:27 ◼   ► it's gonna be in such good hands,

01:33:29 ◼   ► and it wouldn't be if a certain someone else

01:33:32 ◼   ► had won this election.

01:33:35 ◼   ► And this election is sort of like in the present tense.

01:33:38 ◼   ► It's like, dude, that was five months ago.

01:33:40 ◼   ► Like that is Hillary Clinton's out wandering the woods.

01:33:44 ◼   ► God bless her, I love her.

01:33:47 ◼   ► But this election, this guy is crazy.

01:33:50 ◼   ► In terms of his need to have an enemy.

01:33:53 ◼   ► So I don't know.

01:33:55 ◼   ► I don't see it.

01:33:55 ◼   ► - Check back in in July.

01:33:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think so.

01:34:00 ◼   ► - I need a holiday party.

01:34:01 ◼   ► I need some Brazilian steak.

01:34:03 ◼   ► (laughing)