The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► - I'm not naming names except it was me,

00:00:03 ◼   ► but we came home from a trip to Disney World this year

00:00:07 ◼   ► and there was a fruit fly situation.

00:00:10 ◼   ► - Oh no.

00:00:12 ◼   ► - It wasn't bad.

00:00:14 ◼   ► It was not a terrible fruit fly infestation,

00:00:18 ◼   ► but it was, and it was most definitely my fault.

00:00:22 ◼   ► - We have people come and feed the cat.

00:00:26 ◼   ► So there are at least some people doing basic check

00:00:29 ◼   ► on whether there's something disastrous happening

00:00:31 ◼   ► in the house when they come in to feed the cat.

00:00:33 ◼   ► So that's good.

00:00:34 ◼   ► It's like, check on the house, feed the cat,

00:00:37 ◼   ► and also make sure that there's nothing.

00:00:38 ◼   ► Yeah, we didn't leave a banana on the counter or something.

00:00:41 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:00:43 ◼   ► - Banana would be the worst.

00:00:46 ◼   ► You'd have to move.

00:00:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't know, 'cause the banana skin is,

00:00:52 ◼   ► well, yeah, no, you may be right.

00:00:54 ◼   ► We've had other fruits that have rotted

00:00:56 ◼   ► in the fruit bowl at the bottom that were worse,

00:00:59 ◼   ► where I would walk in.

00:01:00 ◼   ► And you know, they're insidious,

00:01:02 ◼   ► 'cause you don't really notice it

00:01:04 ◼   ► if you're just in the house,

00:01:06 ◼   ► but then somebody walks in from out in the world,

00:01:09 ◼   ► out in the fresh air, and goes, "Oh no."

00:01:11 ◼   ► Where is that coming from?

00:01:12 ◼   ► And that's when you discover that there's a rotten nectarine

00:01:15 ◼   ► at the bottom of a fruit bowl.

00:01:16 ◼   ► Yeah, it's not good.

00:01:18 ◼   ► - You know, my wife found a good tip.

00:01:20 ◼   ► It's one of those, you don't have to buy anything.

00:01:23 ◼   ► It's a use stuff in your own household

00:01:25 ◼   ► to solve the problem.

00:01:27 ◼   ► There's like a woman who had a whole bunch of those tips.

00:01:30 ◼   ► - Oh, like hints from Heloise?

00:01:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, hints from Heloise, right, exactly.

00:01:33 ◼   ► I remember as a kid I didn't know how to pronounce her name.

00:01:36 ◼   ► - She was a Letterman guest, wasn't she?

00:01:38 ◼   ► She was on Letterman a few times, I think.

00:01:39 ◼   ► - I think she was.

00:01:41 ◼   ► So I don't know if this actually comes from her,

00:01:42 ◼   ► but it's one of those type of tips.

00:01:43 ◼   ► But the way to get rid of,

00:01:44 ◼   ► one way to get rid of fruit flies

00:01:46 ◼   ► is to fill a wine glass or two with,

00:01:50 ◼   ► and the tip says white wine.

00:01:51 ◼   ► I don't know if that makes a difference.

00:01:53 ◼   ► I doubt it because, but it at least lets you see them.

00:01:56 ◼   ► And then you put a little bit,

00:01:59 ◼   ► maybe like an inch of white wine in the glass,

00:02:03 ◼   ► and then on the top, just drop gently

00:02:07 ◼   ► about two drops of dish detergent.

00:02:09 ◼   ► And then the fruit flies are attracted to the wine,

00:02:13 ◼   ► but the dish detergent that floats on top

00:02:15 ◼   ► is viscous enough that they can't escape.

00:02:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, we did that. - And they get nice and drunk,

00:02:21 ◼   ► so you're killing them humanely.

00:02:23 ◼   ► - I think we did that with vinegar,

00:02:30 ◼   ► and like a plastic bag where you clip the end

00:02:33 ◼   ► of like a Ziploc bag and you put it down in the glass

00:02:36 ◼   ► with the vinegar below it and they go down

00:02:37 ◼   ► and then they can't come back out.

00:02:40 ◼   ► So that's another like homemade fruit fly trap,

00:02:42 ◼   ► but we definitely have done that.

00:02:44 ◼   ► - Anyway, we should get going.

00:02:50 ◼   ► We only have limited time and we have six hours.

00:02:54 ◼   ► - As much time as you want, yeah.

00:02:55 ◼   ► - We have six hours of topics to pack into a two-hour show.

00:02:57 ◼   ► - We do, as usual.

00:02:58 ◼   ► - Starting out, I'm gonna get some follow-up out of the way.

00:03:05 ◼   ► That's what you're supposed to do, a follow-up, right?

00:03:08 ◼   ► So a couple episodes ago, I had "Moltz" on,

00:03:11 ◼   ► and I spoke about my longstanding analogy

00:03:16 ◼   ► that I like to use for designing a good interface.

00:03:20 ◼   ► And this could be for software,

00:03:21 ◼   ► it could even be for hardware products.

00:03:23 ◼   ► But I like to think of it as the difference

00:03:25 ◼   ► between feeling like you're going uphill or downhill.

00:03:28 ◼   ► And a bad interface for something makes you feel like,

00:03:30 ◼   ► it's like you have to push uphill every step of the way.

00:03:34 ◼   ► And a good interface makes you feel

00:03:37 ◼   ► like you're going downhill.

00:03:38 ◼   ► And one of my favorite examples would be

00:03:42 ◼   ► like a fantastic house interface for entering a new date

00:03:47 ◼   ► or event where you can just start typing free form

00:03:50 ◼   ► in a field podcast with Jason, Thursday or Wednesday

00:03:55 ◼   ► at 5.30 and it'll just parse it and I'll have an event

00:04:00 ◼   ► that's named podcast with Jason.

00:04:03 ◼   ► It'll correctly interpret Wednesday as meaning

00:04:05 ◼   ► the next Wednesday and 5.30 is 5.30 p.m. instead of a.m.

00:04:10 ◼   ► because they're somehow smart enough to know

00:04:12 ◼   ► that we're not going to podcast at 5.30 AM Eastern time.

00:04:16 ◼   ► Brilliant interface.

00:04:17 ◼   ► Feels like you're going downhill.

00:04:18 ◼   ► It feels like I couldn't--

00:04:19 ◼   ► I can't imagine how it would be easier to create an event.

00:04:22 ◼   ► Whereas going uphill would be like sitting there

00:04:25 ◼   ► and having to pick from a date field,

00:04:29 ◼   ► and bring up a calendar, and pick the date,

00:04:31 ◼   ► and then enter the time manually,

00:04:33 ◼   ► and have to manually enter AM or PM,

00:04:36 ◼   ► and going through all these different fields.

00:04:38 ◼   ► Anyway, but I mentioned my frustration with that,

00:04:40 ◼   ► because, with my analogy, because going downhill also has sort of a negative connotation. If

00:04:46 ◼   ► you say, "Oh, man, Daring Fireball's really going downhill lately," most people would

00:04:50 ◼   ► interpret that as meaning it's not as good as it used to be. So, listener Justin Scott

00:04:59 ◼   ► on Twitter, thank you, Justin, he suggested that I switch to downstream and upstream,

00:05:06 ◼   ► and then you swimming downstream, swimming upstream,

00:05:09 ◼   ► and then you lose the second meaning

00:05:12 ◼   ► where downhill has a negative connotation.

00:05:15 ◼   ► So I'm gonna keep that in mind.

00:05:16 ◼   ► I've bookmarked it.

00:05:17 ◼   ► I'm gonna try to keep it in my brain

00:05:20 ◼   ► 'cause I don't need to bring it up a balance here,

00:05:21 ◼   ► but I just wanted to thank him for his clever,

00:05:24 ◼   ► can't believe I didn't think of it, suggestion.

00:05:28 ◼   ► - It's good, you just gotta think about boats

00:05:30 ◼   ► more than like walking or riding a bike or something.

00:05:32 ◼   ► - Yep, exactly.

00:05:33 ◼   ► - That's all.

00:05:34 ◼   ► Secondarily, on the last episode with Glenn Fleischman,

00:05:37 ◼   ► I went on an angry rant about the Amber Alert system

00:05:46 ◼   ► that set your phone off.

00:05:48 ◼   ► And a couple of people wrote in to say

00:05:50 ◼   ► that that was a little bit cruel or something.

00:05:52 ◼   ► And somebody pointed me, I will put this in the show notes,

00:05:55 ◼   ► that the AmberAlert.gov website

00:05:57 ◼   ► claims to have these statistics,

00:05:59 ◼   ► and they claim that 40 children have been rescued

00:06:01 ◼   ► because of wireless emergency alerts.

00:06:05 ◼   ► I don't know, I started taking a look at their report.

00:06:08 ◼   ► They have reports, but the reports only go up to 2015,

00:06:10 ◼   ► so I don't know what's going on with 2016.

00:06:12 ◼   ► I started reading it, it was just a gobbledygook.

00:06:17 ◼   ► So I'll just accept it, I'll say, okay,

00:06:20 ◼   ► I'll admit, let's just say 40 kids have been saved

00:06:22 ◼   ► who would have otherwise not been saved,

00:06:23 ◼   ► so go Amber Alerts.

00:06:28 ◼   ► Oh, the other follow-up on that is I heard that,

00:06:29 ◼   ► I posited that Apple was legally required to participate.

00:06:34 ◼   ► And a couple of people wrote in to say that,

00:06:35 ◼   ► "No, it's voluntary, but everybody does it."

00:06:37 ◼   ► - That's bad luck if you're like, "No, no,

00:06:42 ◼   ► we don't want to find missing kids."

00:06:44 ◼   ► No, you gotta put that in there.

00:06:47 ◼   ► - It's sort of implicitly mandatory

00:06:49 ◼   ► because it's sort of a bad PR, you know?

00:06:53 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:06:54 ◼   ► - What else?

00:06:57 ◼   ► We have one last bit of follow-up suggested by you.

00:06:59 ◼   ► Now this is pure coincidence.

00:07:00 ◼   ► Last time you were on the show,

00:07:02 ◼   ► which was quite a while ago, I think,

00:07:03 ◼   ► we were talking about old fashioned keyboards

00:07:07 ◼   ► and you had a new mechanical keyboard that you had ordered,

00:07:11 ◼   ► or two maybe, and you pointed out,

00:07:14 ◼   ► I will put a link to this.

00:07:16 ◼   ► I'm afraid I actually don't know

00:07:18 ◼   ► how to pronounce its surname.

00:07:19 ◼   ► I believe it's Stephen Troughton Smith?

00:07:22 ◼   ► Maybe it's Troughton Smith?

00:07:23 ◼   ► - I say Troughton, Troughton Smith, I think.

00:07:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, Troughton sounds, I guess, sounds more British.

00:07:28 ◼   ► but very good friend of the show,

00:07:29 ◼   ► or friend of the website at least, expert iOS,

00:07:34 ◼   ► I call him like a spelunker,

00:07:35 ◼   ► like he digs into the betas,

00:07:38 ◼   ► uncovered all sorts of juicy tidbits

00:07:41 ◼   ► from that HomePod iOS release,

00:07:45 ◼   ► premature release a couple weeks ago.

00:07:47 ◼   ► Anyway, he had preordered,

00:07:49 ◼   ► he'd showed me this actually privately,

00:07:51 ◼   ► at least the plans for it.

00:07:53 ◼   ► He preordered, there's a,

00:07:56 ◼   ► I forget the company, is it WASD?

00:07:58 ◼   ► I think it's WASD.

00:08:00 ◼   ► - I just say WASD, yeah.

00:08:02 ◼   ► - Do you have one of their keyboards?

00:08:04 ◼   ► - I don't, I've actually been thinking of getting one.

00:08:07 ◼   ► And then I saw Steve Trout and Smith's tweets

00:08:11 ◼   ► and oh boy, I'm gonna have to at some point.

00:08:15 ◼   ► 'Cause they let you do custom key caps.

00:08:18 ◼   ► And that is, so the one I've got is a weird Chinese keyboard

00:08:23 ◼   ► that I like a lot.

00:08:25 ◼   ► but it comes with the key caps that are on it,

00:08:29 ◼   ► and they're really generic Windows key caps.

00:08:31 ◼   ► And the advantage of the WSD is you can order it

00:08:35 ◼   ► with custom printing on whatever key cap,

00:08:38 ◼   ► like colors and printing,

00:08:40 ◼   ► when you order a keyboard from them.

00:08:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, so, Trouton Smith made his

00:08:45 ◼   ► Apple Extended Keyboard 2 style,

00:08:47 ◼   ► which is actually the style of a whole era

00:08:50 ◼   ► of Apple keyboards.

00:08:52 ◼   ► There was a pretty long era of Apple keyboards,

00:08:56 ◼   ► pretty much the entire,

00:09:00 ◼   ► like probably starting around the late '80s

00:09:02 ◼   ► and right up until the Steve Jobs,

00:09:04 ◼   ► Johnny Ive iMac.

00:09:07 ◼   ► - Like until that iMac keyboard, yeah, I think so.

00:09:10 ◼   ► - Where all of Apple's keyboards used,

00:09:13 ◼   ► I actually forget the exact thickness and weight,

00:09:16 ◼   ► but it's a universe condensed,

00:09:18 ◼   ► a version of universe condensed slanted or italic,

00:09:20 ◼   ► I forget if they call it italic or slanted,

00:09:22 ◼   ► but the font universe, very distinctive.

00:09:25 ◼   ► And it does look beautiful.

00:09:29 ◼   ► So he made a custom keyboard layout.

00:09:32 ◼   ► I think he took somebody else's and then tweaked it

00:09:34 ◼   ► and got a keyboard that truly does look,

00:09:37 ◼   ► I mean, that's remarkable.

00:09:38 ◼   ► I mean, the colors are a little,

00:09:40 ◼   ► probably not what Apple would use,

00:09:42 ◼   ► but in many ways looks like a modern version

00:09:44 ◼   ► of an Apple extended keyboard too.

00:09:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, he did a good job.

00:09:48 ◼   ► WASD lets you use Illustrator,

00:09:50 ◼   ► There's also like a free open source app that you can download that lets you set these template files up.

00:09:56 ◼   ► And so you can put in kind of any font and any symbol you want.

00:10:00 ◼   ► And if you're a Mac user, you kind of they've got some they've got like a pre formatted Apple layout, but it's not great.

00:10:07 ◼   ► That's one of the things that's prevented me from from buying from them is that I'm concerned that if I'm going to use their their service of customizing keys, I want it to be right.

00:10:17 ◼   ► and then I start to dive in and I'm like,

00:10:19 ◼   ► "No, no, no, no, no, this is going to be a whole project

00:10:21 ◼   ► like Steve Trout and Smith found out."

00:10:23 ◼   ► It's a whole serious project, even if you search the web

00:10:27 ◼   ► and find somebody who's done a particular layout

00:10:30 ◼   ► that you can use and then adapt.

00:10:31 ◼   ► But it looks great.

00:10:33 ◼   ► I wish WSD let you choose the body of the keyboard,

00:10:38 ◼   ► but all their keyboards are black,

00:10:39 ◼   ► and I think by default with black keys.

00:10:40 ◼   ► And so Steve's keyboard is black body with gray keys,

00:10:46 ◼   ► which is not ideal, but it looks great and the layout looks great. I'm not sure I would

00:10:52 ◼   ► do custom keycaps harkening back to this era. I might do something a little more modern,

00:10:57 ◼   ► but still Apple-like. You can't glance at those keys and not feel like you're in the early 90s.

00:11:05 ◼   ► My bit of feedback to him, and I don't even know if Wazd lets you do it, but I think you could do

00:11:09 ◼   ► it yourself. There must be some way you could do it yourself by popping the keys off and on.

00:11:14 ◼   ► But one of the changes that Apple made at some point

00:11:19 ◼   ► was they changed the little home row alignment nubbins.

00:11:23 ◼   ► I don't know if there's a keyboard engineering

00:11:25 ◼   ► name for them.

00:11:26 ◼   ► But everybody familiar with the modern keyboard

00:11:28 ◼   ► thinks of them as the things on the F and J key

00:11:31 ◼   ► that your index fingers feel.

00:11:33 ◼   ► And it's to help you know that you're on the right row.

00:11:36 ◼   ► But back in that era, in the Apple Extended Keyboard 2 era,

00:11:40 ◼   ► and I think dating back as long as I can remember as a kid,

00:11:45 ◼   ► all the way back through the big clacky, clacky Apple IIs,

00:11:48 ◼   ► Apple used to put them on the D and K keys

00:11:51 ◼   ► for your middle finger.

00:11:52 ◼   ► And for me, as somebody who still uses

00:11:57 ◼   ► an Apple extended keyboard on my,

00:11:58 ◼   ► or keyboard two to be precise, on my iMac,

00:12:01 ◼   ► I actually prefer, I prefer the middle finger

00:12:05 ◼   ► rather than the index finger.

00:12:06 ◼   ► And so I feel like trial and smith should have done that.

00:12:08 ◼   ► - Of course you do.

00:12:09 ◼   ► You're from Philly. Of course you prefer the middle finger.

00:12:12 ◼   ► But they, WISD lets you customize like everything.

00:12:16 ◼   ► Like you can, you can get,

00:12:17 ◼   ► you can order a key from them in a particular color.

00:12:20 ◼   ► So I'm sure that if he wanted to,

00:12:23 ◼   ► or if somebody else wanted to,

00:12:24 ◼   ► they could order that nubbin key

00:12:26 ◼   ► with the other letter printed on it.

00:12:28 ◼   ► And then you just pop them off.

00:12:30 ◼   ► I mean, they can sell you a little tool that helps,

00:12:33 ◼   ► but you just pop off the key and put on a new key.

00:12:35 ◼   ► I did a whole custom key layout thing

00:12:38 ◼   ► for my stupid keyboard that I use, the same deal.

00:12:41 ◼   ► And I use WASD's case 'cause they are the ones

00:12:44 ◼   ► that will print anything on a key.

00:12:47 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:12:50 ◼   ► - Anyway, great work, great company.

00:12:53 ◼   ► I guess I should put a link to WASD,

00:12:55 ◼   ► WASD keyboards in there too.

00:12:57 ◼   ► So what company was your keyboard from?

00:13:00 ◼   ► - Oh, it's called, I got from Josh Chipolsky.

00:13:04 ◼   ► He was pointing out these things.

00:13:06 ◼   ► It's a Leopold is the name of it.

00:13:08 ◼   ► - Oh, I advise.

00:13:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's tenkeyless or it's maybe a 60%.

00:13:13 ◼   ► Basically, it doesn't have a function key row

00:13:14 ◼   ► and it doesn't have a number pad.

00:13:16 ◼   ► And I really love it because it's small

00:13:18 ◼   ► and that means that my track pad is right next to it.

00:13:21 ◼   ► But it is weird because it's got a non-standard space bar,

00:13:24 ◼   ► which means that I can't buy keycap sets

00:13:27 ◼   ► and swap out the space bar.

00:13:30 ◼   ► I would have to start using super glue

00:13:32 ◼   ► and rubber cement and weird stuff

00:13:34 ◼   ► and I'm never going to do that.

00:13:36 ◼   ► So it is, it's pretty good.

00:13:39 ◼   ► And I'm using Cherry MX Brown mechanical switches.

00:13:43 ◼   ► The first one I got was blue and it was super clicky.

00:13:46 ◼   ► And this one's a little more kind of clacky.

00:13:49 ◼   ► I know that doesn't make any sense,

00:13:50 ◼   ► but it is like that was clicky and this is clacky

00:13:53 ◼   ► and I liked the clacky better.

00:13:55 ◼   ► So now I know like I figured out which switch I liked.

00:13:58 ◼   ► So now if I order a WASD keyboard,

00:14:00 ◼   ► I'll be like, give me the Cherry Brown

00:14:01 ◼   ► because that's the switch that I have that I like.

00:14:03 ◼   ► And I wouldn't miss, or I would be okay

00:14:06 ◼   ► with getting a function key row back,

00:14:08 ◼   ► because I've got keyboard shortcuts mapped,

00:14:10 ◼   ► but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

00:14:11 ◼   ► I just don't want it to be any wider,

00:14:13 ◼   ► 'cause the further, the more wide the keyboard is,

00:14:15 ◼   ► the further away my pointy device is,

00:14:18 ◼   ► and then I'm stretching with my right hand to get to it,

00:14:21 ◼   ► and it gives me some wrist pain.

00:14:23 ◼   ► I'm much more comfortable with everything

00:14:25 ◼   ► as close together as possible.

00:14:26 ◼   ► - Part of it, part of this reminds me of,

00:14:29 ◼   ► and I do, and there's a part of me that's a nerd

00:14:31 ◼   ► who loves to configure everything.

00:14:34 ◼   ► I do love that.

00:14:37 ◼   ► I love being able to design everything.

00:14:40 ◼   ► Like the Ray Ban website lets you design

00:14:44 ◼   ► your own sunglasses.

00:14:46 ◼   ► And so I could pick exactly, you know,

00:14:49 ◼   ► the frames that I like, I could get them.

00:14:51 ◼   ► I can pick like gold chrome, silver chrome,

00:14:55 ◼   ► or brushed chrome.

00:14:57 ◼   ► You could pick like which lens color

00:15:00 ◼   ► one for the sunglasses.

00:15:02 ◼   ► Because they're like the ones I like are like aviator style.

00:15:04 ◼   ► You can even pick what color the bit of plastic that

00:15:07 ◼   ► goes behind your ears is.

00:15:09 ◼   ► I love that.

00:15:11 ◼   ► And I really feel like I got mine just right.

00:15:15 ◼   ► And so I appreciate that.

00:15:16 ◼   ► But this choice between like cherry red and cherry brown

00:15:20 ◼   ► and et cetera, and the fact that at each one

00:15:23 ◼   ► there's like different types.

00:15:25 ◼   ► There's like another color that's

00:15:27 ◼   ► exactly like one of the other ones,

00:15:28 ◼   ► but just takes less pressure to push,

00:15:33 ◼   ► but has the same exact thing at the bottom.

00:15:38 ◼   ► The thing at the bottom is the thing

00:15:39 ◼   ► that makes them most different from each other.

00:15:41 ◼   ► I forget what the word is, but it's the way

00:15:43 ◼   ► that it actually clicks.

00:15:45 ◼   ► But then how much pressure it takes

00:15:47 ◼   ► is sort of a secondary choice.

00:15:48 ◼   ► And I'm overwhelmed by it, because I

00:15:51 ◼   ► find-- I think I like the cherry red, but maybe cherry brown.

00:15:56 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:15:57 ◼   ► And so I find that choice paralyzing.

00:16:00 ◼   ► And I appreciate the fact that with an Apple extended

00:16:02 ◼   ► keyboard too, you just got the ones that Apple liked best.

00:16:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah.

00:16:07 ◼   ► And if you didn't like it, maybe you get a different

00:16:09 ◼   ► keyboard that they like the IBM keyboards

00:16:12 ◼   ► were totally different.

00:16:13 ◼   ► And that's like Rich Segal loves the IBM keyboard, I believe.

00:16:15 ◼   ► And it feels completely different.

00:16:17 ◼   ► But back then it was, now it's an enthusiast thing

00:16:19 ◼   ► where it's like we make one keyboard

00:16:21 ◼   ► and then you choose the switches.

00:16:22 ◼   ► And they're emulating like this brand of keyboard

00:16:25 ◼   ► or that brand of keyboard.

00:16:27 ◼   ► I bought the tester, actually after we talked,

00:16:29 ◼   ► people pointed out in the last episode that I was on,

00:16:33 ◼   ► that you can get a little tester,

00:16:34 ◼   ► which is like a little block.

00:16:35 ◼   ► And I did it and it led me to the Cherry Brown,

00:16:39 ◼   ► which I'm happy about, but it's not the same.

00:16:42 ◼   ► Like it's not the same to have a little tester

00:16:45 ◼   ► where you're clicking a key,

00:16:46 ◼   ► trying to imagine how it's different from the key next to it

00:16:48 ◼   ► versus actually like typing on a keyboard.

00:16:51 ◼   ► It's not, you know, it's better than nothing,

00:16:54 ◼   ► but short of buying six keyboards,

00:16:56 ◼   ► which is totally insane.

00:16:58 ◼   ► Short of doing that, you're never

00:17:01 ◼   ► going to really know for sure.

00:17:02 ◼   ► Right.

00:17:03 ◼   ► It gives you-- the tester is actually

00:17:05 ◼   ► a fun little fidget toy.

00:17:07 ◼   ► And I know that in the intervening months,

00:17:09 ◼   ► since you were last on, fidget toys

00:17:11 ◼   ► have become like a phenomenon.

00:17:14 ◼   ► It is a very fun little-- I like to have it at my desk.

00:17:18 ◼   ► But it's exactly right.

00:17:19 ◼   ► It's like pressing one key.

00:17:21 ◼   ► It can give you a basic sense of, oh, no, no.

00:17:24 ◼   ► Definitely not that one.

00:17:26 ◼   ► But when you get to two that are kind of close,

00:17:29 ◼   ► there's no way that either one gives you

00:17:30 ◼   ► the feeling of what it's like to just write

00:17:32 ◼   ► an article using a keyboard full of the exact same switch.

00:17:35 ◼   ► And to further compound the decisions you have to make,

00:17:38 ◼   ► they also ship two kinds of little gaskets

00:17:42 ◼   ► that you can optionally add to any of these.

00:17:47 ◼   ► So there's like four levels of choice.

00:17:49 ◼   ► It's which bottom out style do you want.

00:17:53 ◼   ► Do you want the lighter touch or harder touch?

00:17:56 ◼   ► And do you want no gasket, a red gasket, or a blue gasket?

00:18:01 ◼   ► And I think the gaskets are sort of like quieters,

00:18:03 ◼   ► like dampeners.

00:18:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's exactly it.

00:18:06 ◼   ► - You know, and so you could, that's a choice.

00:18:10 ◼   ► The gaskets you can change on your own,

00:18:12 ◼   ► but it's like, you know, it's a lot, you know,

00:18:15 ◼   ► what is it, 110 keys or something like that?

00:18:16 ◼   ► Or 101 keys on a lot of these layouts?

00:18:18 ◼   ► So it's a lot of--

00:18:19 ◼   ► - It takes a while.

00:18:21 ◼   ► You can order them with the gaskets on,

00:18:22 ◼   ► but you can also do it yourself.

00:18:24 ◼   ► And it takes a while.

00:18:25 ◼   ► I've done that. It takes a while.

00:18:26 ◼   ► No, it shows you the advantage of bringing this

00:18:31 ◼   ► to a broader version of the same topic,

00:18:35 ◼   ► the advantage of what Apple does,

00:18:36 ◼   ► where, you know, when you buy an Apple product,

00:18:39 ◼   ► you are kind of putting yourself in their hands and saying,

00:18:43 ◼   ► I want you to make the right decision for me here.

00:18:46 ◼   ► And Apple is not a company that generally says,

00:18:48 ◼   ► well, you can get it in these 10 different things, right?

00:18:51 ◼   ► They 10 different SKUs.

00:18:52 ◼   ► You get it, the one that we think is the one

00:18:54 ◼   ► that most people are gonna like, and it's the best one.

00:18:56 ◼   ► And that frustrates some people.

00:18:58 ◼   ► Going to this keyboard thing,

00:18:59 ◼   ► it is the exact opposite of that.

00:19:01 ◼   ► It's like you have so much choice,

00:19:03 ◼   ► and nobody's motivated to say,

00:19:06 ◼   ► "No, no, no, this is the best one,"

00:19:08 ◼   ► because everybody's got a different opinion,

00:19:10 ◼   ► and they wanna give you all the choice,

00:19:11 ◼   ► but you become paralyzed.

00:19:13 ◼   ► And this is why I haven't bought

00:19:14 ◼   ► one of those WASD keyboards, is I have to choose,

00:19:17 ◼   ► even now that I've settled on the Switch color,

00:19:21 ◼   ► which took me a while, there are all of these other issues,

00:19:24 ◼   ► and then there's like the keyboard layout thing

00:19:26 ◼   ► on top of that.

00:19:27 ◼   ► It's like so much choice.

00:19:28 ◼   ► And with Apple, it's like, no, we sell a keyboard,

00:19:30 ◼   ► it's this one, you know, like it or lump it,

00:19:33 ◼   ► but this is the only one we make,

00:19:34 ◼   ► so this is the one you're getting.

00:19:35 ◼   ► There is something to that.

00:19:38 ◼   ► - The closest I can think Apple has come to that

00:19:40 ◼   ► would be last year with the iPhone 7.

00:19:42 ◼   ► I found it excruciating to decide

00:19:44 ◼   ► between the flat black and the jet black, right?

00:19:48 ◼   ► - That's true.

00:19:49 ◼   ► offering two blacks is very unapple-like.

00:19:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's like they couldn't decide which one.

00:19:55 ◼   ► There was an internal struggle about the two.

00:19:58 ◼   ► And so they're like, fine, whatever,

00:20:00 ◼   ► we'll ship them both and see what happens.

00:20:03 ◼   ► I wonder what happened.

00:20:05 ◼   ► - I'd be interested too.

00:20:07 ◼   ► I would be fascinated.

00:20:08 ◼   ► And it's the sort of thing that, oh my God, I don't know.

00:20:10 ◼   ► I bet so few people within the company really know.

00:20:13 ◼   ► I mean, I think like anecdotally,

00:20:15 ◼   ► you could talk to like a retail employee

00:20:18 ◼   ► and they could say, you know, somebody who sells phones

00:20:20 ◼   ► in an Apple store on a daily basis probably

00:20:23 ◼   ► might have a good sense of which one is more frequent.

00:20:26 ◼   ► But who knows how that lines up worldwide, you know,

00:20:32 ◼   ► that there might be regional differences

00:20:34 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:20:35 ◼   ► But I think you must be exactly right

00:20:37 ◼   ► that internally they couldn't decide.

00:20:39 ◼   ► And that's the reason why someone whose tastes

00:20:42 ◼   ► so largely align with Apple's institutionally like me

00:20:45 ◼   ► would have found it so hard to decide between the two.

00:20:48 ◼   ► I've always thought it's so hard.

00:20:50 ◼   ► One of the nice things of being a huge,

00:20:52 ◼   ► being a diehard Mac user,

00:20:54 ◼   ► and I've always said this is one of my,

00:20:56 ◼   ► what I love is Mac OS and using the Mac software.

00:21:01 ◼   ► And I would, if I had to choose between

00:21:03 ◼   ► like a ThinkPad running Mac OS

00:21:07 ◼   ► or a MacBook Pro running Windows

00:21:10 ◼   ► or any other system that could run,

00:21:12 ◼   ► I would choose the PC hardware running Mac OS

00:21:15 ◼   ► without even a moment's hesitation.

00:21:17 ◼   ► before you even finish the question.

00:21:20 ◼   ► I would buzz in on my Jeopardy thing and say,

00:21:22 ◼   ► give me that one.

00:21:23 ◼   ► So I always consider myself so fortunate,

00:21:28 ◼   ► as somebody who really also does care about the hardware,

00:21:31 ◼   ► that I'm not like, I don't feel that way about Windows.

00:21:33 ◼   ► If I felt that strongly as a pro Windows user,

00:21:36 ◼   ► I would find buying a new laptop excruciating.

00:21:39 ◼   ► It would take me months,

00:21:40 ◼   ► and I could, by the time I made up my decision,

00:21:42 ◼   ► then probably I'll be outdated.

00:21:44 ◼   ► I would find it so hard to decide,

00:21:46 ◼   ► because I might have a vague idea

00:21:49 ◼   ► that I want something roughly 13-inch diagonal,

00:21:52 ◼   ► you know, and I want, you know, high-end specs.

00:21:54 ◼   ► But you've got so many options

00:21:58 ◼   ► that are roughly equivalent to each other.

00:22:01 ◼   ► - I think this is one of the core reasons

00:22:04 ◼   ► why people misunderstand Apple when they write about Apple,

00:22:06 ◼   ► or even just people who don't use Apple products

00:22:08 ◼   ► and misunderstand why people like them, is this,

00:22:12 ◼   ► which is it's not a, 'cause they'll say,

00:22:14 ◼   ► but there are so many other choices."

00:22:16 ◼   ► It's like, "Yeah, but there is something to be said

00:22:19 ◼   ► for somebody with good taste."

00:22:20 ◼   ► You know, and you are relying on the taste of that entity

00:22:24 ◼   ► to make those decisions for you and say, "We've looked at it,

00:22:26 ◼   ► and this is really the one that you want,

00:22:28 ◼   ► and that's what we're selling you."

00:22:30 ◼   ► And, you know, some people -- for some people,

00:22:31 ◼   ► that's not the way they want to live their life,

00:22:33 ◼   ► and that's great, but there's a just huge amount of power

00:22:38 ◼   ► in being able to just sort of say,

00:22:40 ◼   ► "You have three choices.

00:22:41 ◼   ► We made all the other choices for you.

00:22:43 ◼   ► pick these from these three and walk away.

00:22:46 ◼   ► And that's it.

00:22:47 ◼   ► - Totally agree.

00:22:49 ◼   ► All right, so ends our followup section

00:22:50 ◼   ► and I'll take this break

00:22:52 ◼   ► and I will thank our first friend of the show.

00:22:54 ◼   ► It's our good friends at Squarespace.

00:22:56 ◼   ► Make your next move and make your next website to it

00:22:58 ◼   ► at Squarespace.

00:22:59 ◼   ► Listen, Squarespace sponsors this show all the time.

00:23:03 ◼   ► They're possibly, I think quite probably

00:23:06 ◼   ► the most frequent sponsor of the talk show in its history.

00:23:11 ◼   ► So you've heard me talk about them before

00:23:12 ◼   ► if you've listened to the show on any regular basis.

00:23:14 ◼   ► Just file this away in the back of your brain

00:23:16 ◼   ► the next time you have a project

00:23:18 ◼   ► that you need to create a new website for.

00:23:20 ◼   ► Try it at Squarespace first.

00:23:23 ◼   ► I'm telling you, I know in the back of my head

00:23:26 ◼   ► that I would think, eh, I don't know,

00:23:28 ◼   ► something where you'd actually just drag and drop

00:23:30 ◼   ► on the website, on a webpage itself to make your website.

00:23:33 ◼   ► How's that gonna be?

00:23:34 ◼   ► I'm telling you right now, there are so many websites

00:23:36 ◼   ► that you use on a daily basis that are Squarespace sites,

00:23:39 ◼   ► and you'd never know it,

00:23:40 ◼   ► because the design flexibility and the number of options you have is as infinite as if you

00:23:46 ◼   ► really were sitting there in BB Edit with a brand new empty HTML document and the world's

00:23:52 ◼   ► your oyster. Any and everything you could possibly want to design, you can design. And

00:23:57 ◼   ► the thing that would gnaw on the back of my head before I tried it is I would think, "Ah,

00:24:01 ◼   ► I'll bet it's like when you created a blogger site 10, 15 years ago and you had like three

00:24:06 ◼   ► templates to choose from and everybody's blogger site look like one of these three things.

00:24:10 ◼   ► It's not like that at all. Squarespace sites can be branded right down to the pixel from

00:24:17 ◼   ► corner to corner. I'm telling you right now that I think I mentioned it the last time

00:24:21 ◼   ► I sponsored the show. If you view source on Pixar.com, Pixar.com has the Squarespace stuff

00:24:27 ◼   ► in their metadata. They're using Squarespace for at least part of their site. It really

00:24:32 ◼   ► is that powerful, where you would want to use it with infinite resources. But if you

00:24:37 ◼   ► don't have infinite resources, if you're just somebody who's like making a website for a

00:24:41 ◼   ► friend, do it with Squarespace and you can turn the whole thing over to your completely

00:24:46 ◼   ► non-technical friend and they'll be able to take it from there. It'll just get them off

00:24:51 ◼   ► your back and you'll be done with it. Really, it's just highly recommended. I'm telling

00:24:58 ◼   ► you to check them out the next time you need a website or someone you know needs a website

00:25:01 ◼   ► and they come to you for advice, go check them out.

00:25:05 ◼   ► Go to squarespace.com/gruber,

00:25:09 ◼   ► and you use that code GRUBER,

00:25:10 ◼   ► and you get 10% off your first order.

00:25:13 ◼   ► My thanks to Squarespace.

00:25:14 ◼   ► What do you like better, Jason?

00:25:15 ◼   ► You like doing the podcast reads,

00:25:17 ◼   ► or like being the non-reader?

00:25:21 ◼   ► - Oh, you know, I can do either one.

00:25:25 ◼   ► I'm okay.

00:25:26 ◼   ► The one that drives me crazy is when it's a podcast read

00:25:28 ◼   ► that I also do, because then I like,

00:25:30 ◼   ► I can see the text in front of me.

00:25:32 ◼   ► And those are the ones where I will chuckle as,

00:25:35 ◼   ► like Marco, let's say, will be reading an ad.

00:25:38 ◼   ► And I'll notice the ways that he does it better

00:25:41 ◼   ► and the ways that I think I do it better

00:25:43 ◼   ► and like which things he omits or rewords versus what I do.

00:25:47 ◼   ► That's kind of fun when that happens.

00:25:49 ◼   ► But otherwise I don't really mind since I do both, right?

00:25:51 ◼   ► I'm on podcasts like when I do upgrade with Mike,

00:25:54 ◼   ► he does most of the spots,

00:25:55 ◼   ► but I do other podcasts where I read the ad spots.

00:25:58 ◼   ► And so I'm okay either way.

00:26:00 ◼   ► The pressure's off when you don't have to read the spot.

00:26:02 ◼   ► That is nice.

00:26:03 ◼   ► - You and Mike show is exactly what I was thinking,

00:26:07 ◼   ► 'cause I know Mike does them,

00:26:09 ◼   ► and I know that on a whole bunch of other ones,

00:26:11 ◼   ► of your 20 podcasts that you do them.

00:26:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, fair.

00:26:16 ◼   ► - I used to find, I've said this before,

00:26:18 ◼   ► I used to find it excruciating

00:26:19 ◼   ► when I first started doing the show on my own,

00:26:21 ◼   ► 'cause I knew I was bad at it,

00:26:23 ◼   ► but it's like anything,

00:26:25 ◼   ► if you don't work at it, you can get better.

00:26:28 ◼   ► And I find it's--

00:26:29 ◼   ► It's turned into the most energetic part of the show for me,

00:26:31 ◼   ► 'cause every time I do one, I just try to get fired up

00:26:33 ◼   ► and I think, "What can I do to make this interesting?"

00:26:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that's the lesson that I took from it.

00:26:40 ◼   ► Back in the early days when I started doing Ed Spots,

00:26:42 ◼   ► when the incomparable was on five by five

00:26:45 ◼   ► and I would listen to the way Dan Benjamin did those spots,

00:26:47 ◼   ► and I really was legitimately like, "Oh, I see."

00:26:52 ◼   ► You're supposed to bring energy and enthusiasm

00:26:55 ◼   ► to these Ed reads, got it, right?

00:26:56 ◼   ► And that was a really good thing to follow.

00:26:59 ◼   ► And I've tried to get better and improve that

00:27:02 ◼   ► and bring that energy to it.

00:27:03 ◼   ► And it could always be better,

00:27:06 ◼   ► but it's something that those of us

00:27:09 ◼   ► who came from the side of being a writer,

00:27:12 ◼   ► a lot of times you're actually meant to keep some remove

00:27:16 ◼   ► from that stuff.

00:27:17 ◼   ► And so then to read the ad is like,

00:27:19 ◼   ► I need to get in a different frame of mind to do this,

00:27:21 ◼   ► 'cause this is not my usual low key,

00:27:24 ◼   ► somewhat cynical kind of frame of mind.

00:27:27 ◼   ► I'm reading in the ad spot.

00:27:28 ◼   ► So yeah, I think every now and then,

00:27:31 ◼   ► Mike hands me one on upgrade

00:27:32 ◼   ► just because it's a service that's not available in the UK

00:27:35 ◼   ► and I need to talk about it.

00:27:36 ◼   ► And those are fun to do too.

00:27:38 ◼   ► - All right, most important issue of the week

00:27:40 ◼   ► by far and away is Google announced that Android,

00:27:45 ◼   ► whatever version number they're up to,

00:27:48 ◼   ► I actually don't even know,

00:27:51 ◼   ► but they're doing the thing with Android

00:27:52 ◼   ► where they give each version a candy/snack name.

00:27:56 ◼   ► Sort of like, so everybody knows it by the name

00:27:59 ◼   ► rather than the number.

00:28:00 ◼   ► Sort of like Mac OS releases where people know Sierra

00:28:05 ◼   ► and Hi Sierra and starts blurring together in your brain

00:28:08 ◼   ► whether which one's 12, 10.12 and whatever.

00:28:12 ◼   ► Anyway, the new version that's coming out imminently soon

00:28:15 ◼   ► is called Android Oreo.

00:28:17 ◼   ► And I wrote on Tearing Fireball

00:28:22 ◼   ► about my love, I took it as an opportunity.

00:28:23 ◼   ► And I mean this sincerely, I really, really wasn't,

00:28:26 ◼   ► I think people took it as me throwing shade at them.

00:28:28 ◼   ► But I really wasn't, but I liked Oreos growing up.

00:28:33 ◼   ► But back in college, I think even, in the late '90s,

00:28:36 ◼   ► I discovered Numinos from Paul Newman's snack company.

00:28:39 ◼   ► And I wrote, they're so much better to me,

00:28:45 ◼   ► it's unbelievable.

00:28:46 ◼   ► And again, I'm quite convinced, I am quite convinced

00:28:50 ◼   ► I would bet money that I could take a Pepsi challenge

00:28:52 ◼   ► and taste test a Newman over scenario.

00:28:54 ◼   ► They definitely taste different in my opinion.

00:28:58 ◼   ► And I think that a Newman no tastes more like a real cookie

00:29:01 ◼   ► where, and if you look at the ingredients,

00:29:02 ◼   ► it's made with just like flour and sugar

00:29:04 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

00:29:06 ◼   ► And there's no high fructose corn syrup.

00:29:07 ◼   ► And Oreos to me tastes a little bit,

00:29:10 ◼   ► especially the aftertaste,

00:29:11 ◼   ► it tastes a little bit like you ate some sunscreen.

00:29:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, a little more engineered.

00:29:15 ◼   ► I agree.

00:29:16 ◼   ► In my house, the great debate currently is

00:29:19 ◼   ► that my wife thinks double stuff Oreos are an abomination,

00:29:23 ◼   ► and my children think the more of that filling,

00:29:26 ◼   ► whatever it is and wherever it comes from, the better.

00:29:28 ◼   ► I'm kind of on the fence about that.

00:29:30 ◼   ► I agree with you about Numinos being good.

00:29:32 ◼   ► I actually really fell in love with the ginger-os,

00:29:37 ◼   ► which are a Numin-o, but it's like a ginger cookie instead.

00:29:41 ◼   ► And they're so good, they're so good.

00:29:43 ◼   ► - I've had those and they are very good.

00:29:45 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:29:46 ◼   ► - I had, I mean, it's the way taste buds evolve

00:29:50 ◼   ► from childhood through adulthood.

00:29:52 ◼   ► You'd enjoy sweeter things.

00:29:56 ◼   ► This is the reason why kids love candy.

00:29:58 ◼   ► When you're younger, your taste buds are geared towards it.

00:30:00 ◼   ► And it's why kids typically don't drink black coffee,

00:30:04 ◼   ► is bitter things don't taste as well

00:30:08 ◼   ► when you're a little kid.

00:30:10 ◼   ► When I was a teenager, like late junior high, man,

00:30:13 ◼   ► I just ate, I probably ate half my weight in candy every day

00:30:16 ◼   ► and like, just like the Willy Wonka Gobstoppers

00:30:19 ◼   ► and oh man, Nerds, remember Nerds?

00:30:22 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, yeah.

00:30:23 ◼   ► - Oh man, that's just like super concentrated sugar.

00:30:26 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know what the hell is Nerds,

00:30:28 ◼   ► but it's just like lemon lime flavored sugar.

00:30:33 ◼   ► I love that stuff.

00:30:34 ◼   ► So back then I did love Double Stuf Oreos

00:30:37 ◼   ► because it was just more of the sweet stuff.

00:30:39 ◼   ► I would tend to agree with your wife now though

00:30:42 ◼   ► that it's sort of an abomination.

00:30:44 ◼   ► It's way out of whack.

00:30:45 ◼   ► It's definitely out of whack.

00:30:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, I get why kids liked it, right?

00:30:50 ◼   ► That makes sense.

00:30:51 ◼   ► But yeah, you wanna keep it in balance.

00:30:54 ◼   ► But yeah, as an adult, your palate is totally different.

00:30:56 ◼   ► Whenever Halloween comes around,

00:30:58 ◼   ► we have that same thing where I have like one or two

00:31:00 ◼   ► of those candies and it's sort of like,

00:31:02 ◼   ► wow, that is so much sugar.

00:31:04 ◼   ► But my kids are happy to just keep on eating that sugar.

00:31:08 ◼   ► So it works for them.

00:31:10 ◼   ► you should try one of those sour candies

00:31:12 ◼   ► or something like that and say,

00:31:13 ◼   ► "Holy shit, I'm not gonna taste anything for a week."

00:31:15 ◼   ► And meanwhile, my son is popping them one after another.

00:31:18 ◼   ► - No, my tongue starts to hurt

00:31:21 ◼   ► after a couple of those candies,

00:31:22 ◼   ► where it's just like, it's not, no, no, it's not gonna work.

00:31:25 ◼   ► - But anyway, I bring it up

00:31:28 ◼   ► because I really do mean this sincerely,

00:31:31 ◼   ► and I know exactly what you're,

00:31:32 ◼   ► if you're out there and you hear alternate Oreo

00:31:35 ◼   ► and you think, "Ah, they suck," like the Hydrox,

00:31:38 ◼   ► I always thought Hydrox were terrible growing up.

00:31:41 ◼   ► I forget there was a brand,

00:31:42 ◼   ► I think it might've been regional,

00:31:45 ◼   ► Southeastern Pennsylvania,

00:31:46 ◼   ► Lance, I think was the name of the company.

00:31:48 ◼   ► And like our high school sold these cookies.

00:31:53 ◼   ► They were Oreo, exactly like Oreos,

00:31:55 ◼   ► black cookies sandwiching a layer of white sugar cream

00:32:00 ◼   ► or whatever that stuff is.

00:32:02 ◼   ► And they were awful.

00:32:02 ◼   ► I mean, they just tasted like the Oreos

00:32:04 ◼   ► you'd get in prison or something like that,

00:32:06 ◼   ► or the ones they had in the Soviet Union.

00:32:08 ◼   ► I mean, they just tasted like cardboard.

00:32:10 ◼   ► And so I know if you have like a bias in your head

00:32:15 ◼   ► that anything like an Oreo, but that's not an Oreo,

00:32:17 ◼   ► it is terrible.

00:32:19 ◼   ► I implore you to buy one package of Numinos.

00:32:22 ◼   ► I implore you to find them at like Whole Foods

00:32:24 ◼   ► or somewhere like that,

00:32:26 ◼   ► I'm sure you can get them on Amazon.

00:32:29 ◼   ► Just try one thing of Numinos.

00:32:30 ◼   ► I'm telling you, the whole Newman product line

00:32:33 ◼   ► is actually great.

00:32:34 ◼   ► I think they make good pretzels.

00:32:35 ◼   ► It's really high quality stuff.

00:32:38 ◼   ► It really is like a better quality Oreo.

00:32:43 ◼   ► - I think the story with the Newman,

00:32:46 ◼   ► I read a story about the whole Newman's Own business.

00:32:51 ◼   ► And I believe the way that a lot of this works

00:32:53 ◼   ► is because they sell in lower volume for higher prices.

00:32:55 ◼   ► What they, you know, kind of let the food manufacturing,

00:33:00 ◼   ► they subcontract out all the food manufacturing, right?

00:33:02 ◼   ► It's just like Trader Joe's does

00:33:03 ◼   ► and your local grocery store does.

00:33:05 ◼   ► but it lets them set their standards

00:33:08 ◼   ► a little bit differently.

00:33:09 ◼   ► And so you get something where as an Oreo

00:33:11 ◼   ► may be just engineered to have a certain amount of flavor

00:33:16 ◼   ► to make the kids happy and also costs

00:33:18 ◼   ► so that they've got their profit margins

00:33:20 ◼   ► where they want them.

00:33:21 ◼   ► The Newman's label, it's a little bit different

00:33:24 ◼   ► and that's because it doesn't get sold

00:33:27 ◼   ► in every single store in mass quantities.

00:33:30 ◼   ► And it actually reminded me of our argument

00:33:33 ◼   ► about like the high-end iPhone, the same thing,

00:33:35 ◼   ► where it's like, you know, Apple sells so many iPhones now

00:33:38 ◼   ► that to a certain point, they need any feature,

00:33:41 ◼   ► any piece of electronics they put in an iPhone,

00:33:42 ◼   ► they need to mass produce because they sell

00:33:45 ◼   ► tens of millions of iPhones in a year.

00:33:48 ◼   ► And that's kind of like an Oreo.

00:33:50 ◼   ► And the Numinos are like, I'm not going to say

00:33:53 ◼   ► it's like Andy Ruman's essential phone,

00:33:55 ◼   ► but it's a little like that.

00:33:55 ◼   ► It's like lower volume.

00:33:56 ◼   ► They can afford to be different

00:33:58 ◼   ► and charge a different price and not have to worry about it.

00:34:01 ◼   ► And I think that's a clever thing.

00:34:02 ◼   ► It may even in fact even be made in the same factory

00:34:05 ◼   ► where they make Oreos.

00:34:06 ◼   ► I don't know, they don't say, right?

00:34:08 ◼   ► They can't tell you that.

00:34:09 ◼   ► But with a different mixture of ingredients

00:34:13 ◼   ► that lets them have a different product.

00:34:15 ◼   ► - Have you ever seen, there's a website that is devoted

00:34:21 ◼   ► to backwards engineering where Trader Joe's stuff

00:34:25 ◼   ► actually is from?

00:34:26 ◼   ► Trader Joe's stuff, Trader Joe's, I think some of their stuff

00:34:29 ◼   ► is exactly what you're saying,

00:34:30 ◼   ► where they just contract somebody to make it.

00:34:31 ◼   ► but a lot of their stuff is just rebadged, identical stuff.

00:34:36 ◼   ► And so for example, the one that is the most painfully

00:34:40 ◼   ► obvious is their crinkle cut salt and pepper chips,

00:34:44 ◼   ► which are excellent, excellent potato chips,

00:34:47 ◼   ► are clearly Kettle brand salt and pepper crinkle cut chips.

00:34:51 ◼   ► - Exactly the same.

00:34:52 ◼   ► - There are, it's sort of a very distinctive chip.

00:34:55 ◼   ► It's super thick, it's kind of greasy,

00:34:58 ◼   ► but really, really good, and it is literally

00:35:00 ◼   ► exactly the same and they used to sell cattle chips

00:35:03 ◼   ► right there in the store.

00:35:04 ◼   ► There's a whole website.

00:35:07 ◼   ► There's a website that's devoted to sort of

00:35:09 ◼   ► backwards engineering exactly what everything

00:35:12 ◼   ► in Trader Joe's actually is.

00:35:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause it comes from all over the place,

00:35:17 ◼   ► but it's good, it's mostly good.

00:35:18 ◼   ► We go to Trader Joe's all the time

00:35:19 ◼   ► 'cause there's good stuff.

00:35:20 ◼   ► You learn over time which ones are the good ones

00:35:23 ◼   ► and which ones are the bad ones.

00:35:24 ◼   ► - I like Trader Joe's a lot.

00:35:25 ◼   ► We do, we have one pretty nearby

00:35:27 ◼   ► and I feel like I don't go there enough.

00:35:29 ◼   ► Every time I go there, I think I should come here

00:35:30 ◼   ► more often 'cause I actually enjoy going there.

00:35:32 ◼   ► And just by coincidence, it's like their free samples

00:35:36 ◼   ► way more often appeal to me and I guess I would like

00:35:39 ◼   ► to try a little bit of that than most stores.

00:35:41 ◼   ► Most stores, it always seems to me like they're offering you

00:35:43 ◼   ► some pretty weird stuff on the free samples.

00:35:48 ◼   ► - We went into a Walmart on this road trip we took

00:35:53 ◼   ► and for I guess good reason,

00:35:57 ◼   ► but we don't have Walmart around here

00:35:59 ◼   ► anywhere near where we live.

00:36:00 ◼   ► It's, I don't know, 30 miles away or something

00:36:03 ◼   ► goes to Walmart.

00:36:04 ◼   ► And I'd never even been to one

00:36:05 ◼   ► until I was visiting my mom in Arizona.

00:36:08 ◼   ► And that's like one of the few places they can go

00:36:11 ◼   ► where they're out in the desert there to shop.

00:36:13 ◼   ► And so we go to one on this road trip

00:36:16 ◼   ► and it was kind of a nightmare.

00:36:18 ◼   ► We're looking for groceries, we're looking for snacks,

00:36:20 ◼   ► we're looking for stuff.

00:36:21 ◼   ► And it was a little bit like sort of like the opposite

00:36:24 ◼   ► of Trader Joe's.

00:36:25 ◼   ► Like they only had the most marketed and mass available products.

00:36:33 ◼   ► And so we're like looking for a very particular kind of, we're looking for like Sun Chips

00:36:37 ◼   ► and this Walmart was like, nope, you don't have those here.

00:36:40 ◼   ► It's like, what are you?

00:36:42 ◼   ► Because they've got, it's like Walmart, they only had like Walmart brand and some Doritos

00:36:47 ◼   ► and it was weird, a huge rack, but the brands were all over the place.

00:36:50 ◼   ► And I kept thinking, this is what I always read about about Walmart, which is that they

00:36:54 ◼   ► They have, they're ruthless when it comes to

00:36:56 ◼   ► what products they stock and what suppliers they use.

00:36:59 ◼   ► And just walking into this one Walmart in Utah,

00:37:03 ◼   ► it definitely, I could tell,

00:37:05 ◼   ► like there was some stuff that was there

00:37:07 ◼   ► and the other stuff's like, nope,

00:37:08 ◼   ► we decided not to carry that.

00:37:10 ◼   ► And Walmart is powerful enough to just decree that stuff.

00:37:13 ◼   ► It was weird.

00:37:14 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a weird store.

00:37:15 ◼   ► Retail is fascinating.

00:37:17 ◼   ► - All right, the actual biggest topic,

00:37:19 ◼   ► or I don't know if we're gonna spend a lot of time on it,

00:37:21 ◼   ► but the big thing,

00:37:23 ◼   ► And the reason I specifically,

00:37:24 ◼   ► well, I thought of asking you to be on this show

00:37:26 ◼   ► is that last week I commemorated the 15th anniversary

00:37:30 ◼   ► of "Daring Fireball,"

00:37:31 ◼   ► of which I consider this podcast to be a part.

00:37:34 ◼   ► And I'm, oh my God, did I get email after that

00:37:38 ◼   ► from so many readers.

00:37:40 ◼   ► I lost count.

00:37:41 ◼   ► And I thank all of you for sending it.

00:37:42 ◼   ► I read every single one of them and replied to like two.

00:37:45 ◼   ► 'Cause if I replied to them all,

00:37:48 ◼   ► I wouldn't even have time to do the show.

00:37:50 ◼   ► But I thank you.

00:37:52 ◼   ► And I really, I have to say, I don't know,

00:37:55 ◼   ► you might have noticed 'cause you're a close reader,

00:37:57 ◼   ► but like when "Daring Fireball" turned 10,

00:37:59 ◼   ► I didn't say anything and I didn't do five.

00:38:01 ◼   ► This is the first time I've ever mentioned an anniversary

00:38:03 ◼   ► and I certainly don't do it every year,

00:38:05 ◼   ► but I didn't do it at 10 either.

00:38:06 ◼   ► And my thinking changed between 10 and 15 where 10,

00:38:12 ◼   ► I just like, for example, the other thing too

00:38:14 ◼   ► is to the best of my knowledge,

00:38:16 ◼   ► "Daring Fireball" has never won a single award.

00:38:19 ◼   ► And I just don't, I don't like that.

00:38:22 ◼   ► That's just antithetical to me.

00:38:24 ◼   ► I don't like it.

00:38:25 ◼   ► And to me, celebrating anniversaries feels like,

00:38:31 ◼   ► I don't know, like awarding myself an award or something.

00:38:34 ◼   ► There's part of my nature that is,

00:38:36 ◼   ► that finds self-congratulatory stuff to be,

00:38:39 ◼   ► I don't know, I don't like it.

00:38:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, but I think it's good.

00:38:47 ◼   ► I think it's healthy to be a little uncomfortable

00:38:48 ◼   ► about celebrating your own accomplishments

00:38:51 ◼   ► and letting other people do it.

00:38:52 ◼   ► - But this year I thought, you know what?

00:38:54 ◼   ► I'll bet readers would be happy to know.

00:38:56 ◼   ► And so why the fuck not?

00:38:58 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:39:01 ◼   ► - So I wrote about it.

00:39:02 ◼   ► But then I thought, you know,

00:39:03 ◼   ► and it was actually from my friend, Jim Kudol,

00:39:05 ◼   ► who I don't even think it was this year.

00:39:06 ◼   ► I think it was like last year,

00:39:08 ◼   ► but Jim and I were hanging out somewhere.

00:39:13 ◼   ► It was probably in Vegas and just idly,

00:39:17 ◼   ► and this is the type of thing that like occurs to Jim,

00:39:20 ◼   ► is he just said, "Do you ever just do a word count

00:39:23 ◼   ► "and figure out how many words you've written

00:39:24 ◼   ► "on Daring Fireball?"

00:39:26 ◼   ► And I said, "No."

00:39:27 ◼   ► And he said, "You should do that

00:39:29 ◼   ► "'cause I bet that's an amazing number."

00:39:31 ◼   ► And so as an excuse to actually point out the fact

00:39:36 ◼   ► that Daring Fireball had turned 14, I did it.

00:39:39 ◼   ► And I counted separately my original words

00:39:43 ◼   ► and separately words that are block quotes.

00:39:47 ◼   ► In other words, things from other people's articles

00:39:49 ◼   ► that I quote, which anybody who reads "Daring Fireball"

00:39:52 ◼   ► knows exactly what I'm talking about.

00:39:53 ◼   ► I block quote things all the time.

00:39:55 ◼   ► What was the full tally here?

00:39:57 ◼   ► So combined between my full articles and link list entries,

00:40:00 ◼   ► I've written two million, and it's just so funny

00:40:03 ◼   ► that it's this close to being over.

00:40:05 ◼   ► It's two million, as of last Friday,

00:40:08 ◼   ► 2,001,516 original words,

00:40:12 ◼   ► and 3,100,000 and change total words,

00:40:15 ◼   ► including block quotes, which is a lot of words.

00:40:18 ◼   ► And that your full columns is just over a million,

00:40:20 ◼   ► the full pieces, 1,048,000.

00:40:24 ◼   ► I did the math on this 'cause I was,

00:40:25 ◼   ► those are amazing numbers.

00:40:27 ◼   ► And then I was like, okay, what does that mean?

00:40:28 ◼   ► What's the average during Fireball Week?

00:40:30 ◼   ► And I looked it up and it's like 2,500 words a week,

00:40:33 ◼   ► every week for 15 years, gives you your combined total.

00:40:36 ◼   ► And of that, about 1,300, 1,400 is full column.

00:40:41 ◼   ► So that may be one or two kind of column length pieces

00:40:44 ◼   ► a week.

00:40:44 ◼   ► big column, but probably over time it was, you know,

00:40:49 ◼   ► two or three shorter pieces more often than not.

00:40:52 ◼   ► And then you throw in an extra thousand words

00:40:55 ◼   ► of linkless commentary, and that's your average week.

00:40:58 ◼   ► It's not, it is a huge accomplishment on one level,

00:41:02 ◼   ► and on another level it shows you that it's really

00:41:04 ◼   ► the accomplishment is being consistent at doing a good job,

00:41:09 ◼   ► not an unreasonable, like writing 2,500 words a week,

00:41:13 ◼   ► it's not unreasonable at all.

00:41:14 ◼   ► but to do it every week for 15 years

00:41:16 ◼   ► is not something that most people do.

00:41:20 ◼   ► - No, it's a tribute mostly to just keeping,

00:41:24 ◼   ► just keep putting one foot in front of another.

00:41:27 ◼   ► And then, you know, do it for 15 years

00:41:29 ◼   ► and you can go a far distance.

00:41:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's totally it.

00:41:33 ◼   ► - I seem to recall reading years ago

00:41:36 ◼   ► that a New York Times op-ed columnist,

00:41:38 ◼   ► like the regular columnists,

00:41:40 ◼   ► like Paul Krugman and Maurice, Amarene Dowd,

00:41:43 ◼   ► their columns are either 700 or 750 words more or less.

00:41:48 ◼   ► And there's a little bit of play

00:41:51 ◼   ► that they can do layout-wise with a block quote

00:41:54 ◼   ► or something to stretch or to expand,

00:41:56 ◼   ► but roughly 700 or 750 words.

00:41:59 ◼   ► And I think that they all,

00:42:00 ◼   ► I think most of them do two a week.

00:42:01 ◼   ► So that's about the same.

00:42:03 ◼   ► It's roughly 1300, 1400 words of regular columns a week

00:42:07 ◼   ► is roughly the output of being like an op-ed columnist,

00:42:10 ◼   ► which feels like it's about right.

00:42:13 ◼   ► My one-pager in Macworld all those years

00:42:16 ◼   ► was about 800 words, 780, 760.

00:42:19 ◼   ► But I always shot for 800.

00:42:21 ◼   ► And I remember thinking, David Pogue,

00:42:25 ◼   ► back when he did the back page column in Macworld,

00:42:28 ◼   ► he would write eight,

00:42:29 ◼   ► sometimes we would jump him to a column in the back.

00:42:32 ◼   ► So like 800 backward, which was terrible,

00:42:35 ◼   ► between 800 and a thousand words.

00:42:38 ◼   ► And he did that 12 times a year.

00:42:39 ◼   ► And I remember marveling at that and thinking,

00:42:41 ◼   ► "Wow, how does he come up with 12 column ideas every year?"

00:42:46 ◼   ► And you know, today I write 800 words a week for Macworld,

00:42:51 ◼   ► and then I write six color stuff,

00:42:53 ◼   ► and it's like 52 column ideas a year.

00:42:56 ◼   ► How is that even possible?

00:42:57 ◼   ► But you find a way.

00:42:59 ◼   ► But that does seem like a natural, like 800 words.

00:43:01 ◼   ► I think that's why I shoot with my Macworld columns now too,

00:43:04 ◼   ► even today, it's like, that's not bad.

00:43:06 ◼   ► That's like a thought, a pretty clear, supported thought,

00:43:10 ◼   ► and then you're out.

00:43:11 ◼   ► I feel like I'm so lucky that I've spent my entire writing career.

00:43:15 ◼   ► Well, I used to write print in college for the print newspaper.

00:43:19 ◼   ► And that was sort of constrained to the sort of--

00:43:22 ◼   ► couldn't go too long, couldn't be too short.

00:43:26 ◼   ► And so I have done it both ways, I guess I should say.

00:43:28 ◼   ► And I've written for the back page of Macworld and had that sort of--

00:43:32 ◼   ► and again, there was always a little bit of play.

00:43:34 ◼   ► It wasn't that precise.

00:43:36 ◼   ► There was a little bit--

00:43:37 ◼   ► some kind of a pull quote or something, and you could stretch it

00:43:39 ◼   ► or shrink it a little bit.

00:43:41 ◼   ► But the basic minimum and maximum were pretty narrow,

00:43:46 ◼   ► and it's harder, it's absolutely harder.

00:43:48 ◼   ► So I do marvel at like a Paul Krugman,

00:43:50 ◼   ► who two times a week, 48 weeks a year at least,

00:43:55 ◼   ► hits this exact narrow timeframe,

00:43:57 ◼   ► because so much of what I write

00:43:58 ◼   ► is either way longer than that or way shorter.

00:44:01 ◼   ► I love not having to stretch a smaller idea into bigger.

00:44:08 ◼   ► I always hated it.

00:44:10 ◼   ► And even worse, I always hated having good sentences cut

00:44:14 ◼   ► out of a long piece just because it wouldn't fit.

00:44:17 ◼   ► Like that seems crazy in hindsight now.

00:44:20 ◼   ► - First thing I ever did as an editor,

00:44:21 ◼   ► my first day on the job at Mac user back in '94,

00:44:26 ◼   ► something like that was, oh,

00:44:29 ◼   ► the regular letters column editor is out

00:44:30 ◼   ► and she's your boss.

00:44:31 ◼   ► So you need to cut this, it's 70 lines over.

00:44:35 ◼   ► And literally I had a printout of the letter section

00:44:37 ◼   ► of Mac user and had to sit there with a pencil,

00:44:40 ◼   ► lining out words to pull up a line or sentences.

00:44:45 ◼   ► And that was in print.

00:44:46 ◼   ► I mean, that is still how it's done

00:44:48 ◼   ► for those who are still doing print.

00:44:49 ◼   ► And yeah, it can be brutal.

00:44:51 ◼   ► It can also be kind of a great lesson,

00:44:53 ◼   ► like those pieces you wrote for Mac world.

00:44:56 ◼   ► I think I, most of, when you were writing those,

00:44:58 ◼   ► I think I was probably the editor on those.

00:45:00 ◼   ► And it was very much like that of like,

00:45:02 ◼   ► can I change one word to be a little bit shorter here?

00:45:05 ◼   ► And then that'll pull up a line

00:45:07 ◼   ► 'cause you were three lines over or something like that.

00:45:09 ◼   ► And the best is when you do that and send the PDF back

00:45:12 ◼   ► to the writer, you in this case,

00:45:14 ◼   ► and say, can you check this out?

00:45:16 ◼   ► And if it doesn't look like anything changed,

00:45:18 ◼   ► that's the best.

00:45:19 ◼   ► But, you know, 'cause in the end,

00:45:21 ◼   ► you don't wanna change the meaning,

00:45:22 ◼   ► you just wanna pull up those widows

00:45:26 ◼   ► that are dangling over into another line.

00:45:28 ◼   ► You wanna pull three of those up

00:45:30 ◼   ► so that you can get it, the whole column on that one,

00:45:32 ◼   ► on that one piece of paper, which is, it's a fun constraint,

00:45:35 ◼   ► But I agree with you, it is so much better

00:45:37 ◼   ► when you know you have one thing to say

00:45:39 ◼   ► and it's only gonna be two paragraphs

00:45:40 ◼   ► to just say it and move on instead of,

00:45:42 ◼   ► can I take three things that are each worth 200 words

00:45:46 ◼   ► and put them together somehow

00:45:47 ◼   ► and make 800 words out of it?

00:45:49 ◼   ► Which is, it's no good that way,

00:45:50 ◼   ► but if you're working in print,

00:45:53 ◼   ► everything has to be 800 words long

00:45:55 ◼   ► or whatever your constraint is.

00:45:56 ◼   ► - I think I've told this story before,

00:45:58 ◼   ► but I'll tell it again.

00:45:58 ◼   ► But my first regular writing for the public

00:46:02 ◼   ► was at the student newspaper at Drexel, The Triangle.

00:46:05 ◼   ► And my sophomore year, I started submitting op-ed columns,

00:46:11 ◼   ► where I tried to do sort of a Dave Barry-ish sort

00:46:15 ◼   ► of comical look, tried to be funny in op-ed columns,

00:46:21 ◼   ► as opposed to-- which I thought was so maddening,

00:46:23 ◼   ► as most of the shit on the Triangle op-ed page

00:46:26 ◼   ► was like people trying to write serious shit about Bill Clinton

00:46:30 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

00:46:31 ◼   ► And it's like, why the fuck would you want to read that

00:46:33 ◼   ► in a student newspaper?

00:46:34 ◼   ► It's like, I thought I cracked jokes

00:46:35 ◼   ► about the shitty stuff going on at this university.

00:46:38 ◼   ► And I also had this thought that,

00:46:43 ◼   ► my God, I can do better than these people.

00:46:46 ◼   ► And the way you, of course, now this is '93, I guess,

00:46:49 ◼   ► when I started, right?

00:46:50 ◼   ► Or '92, it would have been 1992.

00:46:53 ◼   ► The way you submitted a column is you,

00:46:54 ◼   ► I think it had to be in MacWrite format.

00:46:58 ◼   ► And then I think later it was either MacWrite

00:47:00 ◼   ► or they expanded to MacWrite, Claris.

00:47:04 ◼   ► What was the Claris suite called?

00:47:07 ◼   ► - Was it ClarisWorks?

00:47:07 ◼   ► - ClarisWorks, the ClarisWorks word processing suite,

00:47:10 ◼   ► which maddeningly was made by the same people as MacWrite,

00:47:14 ◼   ► but was a different document format or Microsoft Word.

00:47:17 ◼   ► And you'd just bring it in on a floppy disk,

00:47:20 ◼   ► and they'd put the floppy disk in and copy it over

00:47:22 ◼   ► and tell you they'd get back to you,

00:47:24 ◼   ► see if it got in.

00:47:26 ◼   ► I don't even remember how they got back to me

00:47:28 ◼   ► because in 1992, I had email because I was majoring

00:47:32 ◼   ► in computer science, but I don't think school-wide

00:47:35 ◼   ► there was email yet, or if there was, I don't know.

00:47:37 ◼   ► So somehow they got back to me and said,

00:47:38 ◼   ► "Okay, we're running it."

00:47:40 ◼   ► And I was very, very proud.

00:47:41 ◼   ► And I think my third column, the third one I submitted,

00:47:45 ◼   ► when it came out, and of course I read it,

00:47:49 ◼   ► every time it would, those early ones,

00:47:51 ◼   ► I'd read every single one in print, and it was amazing,

00:47:53 ◼   ► 'cause there's my writing and my name

00:47:55 ◼   ► right there on a real freakin' newspaper.

00:47:58 ◼   ► And like halfway through, one of my sentences got rewritten.

00:48:03 ◼   ► And I thought it turned what was previously

00:48:05 ◼   ► a very clever, funny sentence into one

00:48:07 ◼   ► that wasn't even funny at all.

00:48:10 ◼   ► And I was like, what the hell did I,

00:48:11 ◼   ► what, you know, did I make a grammatical error?

00:48:14 ◼   ► Like if I did, I would be damned if I knew what it was.

00:48:17 ◼   ► And so when I submitted my next one,

00:48:19 ◼   ► the guy who was the op-ed editor said,

00:48:21 ◼   ► I remember his name, Francis Wisniewski, very nice guy.

00:48:25 ◼   ► And I asked him, I said, "Hey, by the way,

00:48:28 ◼   ► "this last one I had right here."

00:48:29 ◼   ► And I said, "I originally wrote whatever the sentence was,

00:48:32 ◼   ► "and you changed it to this.

00:48:33 ◼   ► "What did I do wrong?"

00:48:34 ◼   ► And he goes, "I didn't do anything wrong.

00:48:35 ◼   ► "I just needed to move it up a line."

00:48:37 ◼   ► Like the column was one line too long.

00:48:42 ◼   ► So he edited that sentence to make it shorter enough

00:48:44 ◼   ► that the whole column gained one line.

00:48:48 ◼   ► And as soon as he said that, I thought,

00:48:50 ◼   ► "I need to become the op-ed editor."

00:48:52 ◼   ► (both laughing)

00:48:54 ◼   ► And I was like, I'm-- - Well, 'cause that's his,

00:48:56 ◼   ► his failure was that he blew your joke

00:48:58 ◼   ► in changing the line count, right?

00:49:00 ◼   ► 'Cause a good editor would keep the joke

00:49:02 ◼   ► and find another way to make it work.

00:49:04 ◼   ► - Right, and Francis, I did not steal his job.

00:49:09 ◼   ► He was not, it wasn't like his aspiration.

00:49:12 ◼   ► And in fact, I think he really, really wanted to be,

00:49:14 ◼   ► was like the business manager.

00:49:16 ◼   ► And he went on to do that and do a very good job.

00:49:18 ◼   ► So it wasn't like I stole his job.

00:49:19 ◼   ► And as you might expect, semester to semester,

00:49:21 ◼   ► there's a lot of turnover in a student newspaper.

00:49:24 ◼   ► But I literally, I took the job as op-ed editor

00:49:28 ◼   ► so that I could, and then taught myself,

00:49:31 ◼   ► learned there at the newspaper graphic design

00:49:34 ◼   ► and Quirk Express and everything.

00:49:35 ◼   ► But I did it specifically so that my columns would,

00:49:38 ◼   ► A, never get mangled like that,

00:49:43 ◼   ► and then B, ought to be honest,

00:49:45 ◼   ► to always give them the best spot on the page.

00:49:48 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:49:50 ◼   ► - Sure, of course.

00:49:51 ◼   ► That's your prerogative, quite frankly.

00:49:53 ◼   ► - Here we are 20, 20, geez, 20 some years later

00:49:56 ◼   ► and my column still gets the best spot.

00:50:00 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:50:01 ◼   ► - I'm looking by the way at something,

00:50:03 ◼   ► if this is 14 years ago,

00:50:04 ◼   ► I'm not sure if this is the first thing you wrote for me,

00:50:07 ◼   ► but one of the things in the early days of "Daring Fireball"

00:50:10 ◼   ► that I wanted to mention is I have a distinct memory

00:50:12 ◼   ► that we had you write some how-to articles about BB edit.

00:50:15 ◼   ► - Oh, I remember that. - I found one of them

00:50:16 ◼   ► that's still on the web about version control in BB edit.

00:50:18 ◼   ► It's 2000 words, how-to article,

00:50:20 ◼   ► but I think you wrote a few.

00:50:22 ◼   ► - Yes, I do.

00:50:23 ◼   ► - At least, 'cause I remember you saying to me

00:50:26 ◼   ► at some point, it may have been in this 2003 era,

00:50:29 ◼   ► where we were having you write some freelance stuff for us,

00:50:32 ◼   ► where you said, "I made more money on what I wrote

00:50:35 ◼   ► "for Macworld last year than I did for 'Daring Fireball.'"

00:50:38 ◼   ► And literally you wrote like three articles for me.

00:50:40 ◼   ► But those were the early days when you were just

00:50:42 ◼   ► getting started with "Daring Fireball."

00:50:44 ◼   ► And that was, it was funny 'cause it was really literally

00:50:47 ◼   ► like I saw your work on the web and were like,

00:50:50 ◼   ► "Oh, there's a guy who can write.

00:50:51 ◼   ► I wonder if he could write some stuff for us.

00:50:53 ◼   ► And I know you had worked on BB edit stuff before,

00:50:56 ◼   ► and so you knew that.

00:50:56 ◼   ► And so in those early days,

00:50:59 ◼   ► we threw some how-to stuff your way.

00:51:02 ◼   ► And then eventually you did those back page columns

00:51:04 ◼   ► for a while, including that one.

00:51:06 ◼   ► That's gotta kill you though, the how Apple rolls thing.

00:51:08 ◼   ► Like that's like one of the more famous things

00:51:11 ◼   ► that people quote all the time,

00:51:12 ◼   ► and you have to link to it on Mac world every time

00:51:14 ◼   ► because it's on, I think you could reprint that.

00:51:16 ◼   ► I think you have the rights to reprint that now.

00:51:18 ◼   ► - I was just gonna tell you,

00:51:20 ◼   ► I actually had plans.

00:51:22 ◼   ► I was just going to reprint it and wait for a while.

00:51:26 ◼   ► - I think you have the rights.

00:51:27 ◼   ► I think the way that the writers contract,

00:51:29 ◼   ► there was a, we redid our writers contract at some point.

00:51:32 ◼   ► And it was two freelance editors or freelance writers

00:51:37 ◼   ► who really pushed back on some of the details of it,

00:51:39 ◼   ► including Bruce Fraser, who was an expert in publishing

00:51:44 ◼   ► and pre-press and color and color management.

00:51:46 ◼   ► Great guy, passed away a few years ago.

00:51:49 ◼   ► and he made like 20 changes to the writer's contract.

00:51:53 ◼   ► But one of the things that came out of that contract

00:51:54 ◼   ► was this idea that you get rights back

00:51:58 ◼   ► or like they keep the copyright,

00:52:00 ◼   ► but you get a permanent sub-license after a period of time.

00:52:03 ◼   ► So I think, yeah, I think you could probably republish that

00:52:05 ◼   ► and stop linking to the Mac world version

00:52:07 ◼   ► and nobody would notice, probably.

00:52:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, I've actually been meaning to do that.

00:52:12 ◼   ► And I even thought it even repop into my head last week

00:52:15 ◼   ► when I did the word count,

00:52:16 ◼   ► 'cause I thought, well, should I count that?

00:52:18 ◼   ► And then I thought, well, then I'd have to find

00:52:19 ◼   ► all the other ones too.

00:52:20 ◼   ► And it seemed like I'd already given myself enough work.

00:52:23 ◼   ► So I didn't count them.

00:52:25 ◼   ► And you know what, I probably would have done it

00:52:28 ◼   ► if instead of being like a thousand words over two million,

00:52:31 ◼   ► if it had come out like 1,500 words under two million,

00:52:35 ◼   ► I would have gone and done it so that I could.

00:52:37 ◼   ► Because it's like, and nobody,

00:52:40 ◼   ► I know nobody was gonna double check my work.

00:52:42 ◼   ► So I could have just lied too and pumped it over,

00:52:45 ◼   ► but I couldn't sleep if I had done that.

00:52:47 ◼   ► So I would have somehow figured out a way

00:52:49 ◼   ► to add to the word count, and that would have been the way.

00:52:53 ◼   ► - So how'd you do the word count?

00:52:54 ◼   ► I have to ask, how'd you do the word count?

00:52:56 ◼   ► Did you do like a crazy, like custom movable type template

00:52:59 ◼   ► and just export it out and then do some greps,

00:53:02 ◼   ► do some regular expression stuff?

00:53:03 ◼   ► - No, even easier.

00:53:04 ◼   ► So in movable type, you can, what is it?

00:53:08 ◼   ► Export, I think it's export.

00:53:10 ◼   ► They have two features.

00:53:11 ◼   ► One is backup, like you backup your blog,

00:53:13 ◼   ► and somehow they say this is a complete bad.

00:53:15 ◼   ► I don't know what that is, and I did that,

00:53:16 ◼   ► took forever.

00:53:17 ◼   ► And I don't even know where they put it.

00:53:19 ◼   ► It must be in some directory on my server,

00:53:22 ◼   ► in the movable type directory, like in a zip.

00:53:24 ◼   ► And I tried the export, and I thought,

00:53:26 ◼   ► this is probably going to time out.

00:53:29 ◼   ► But the export for my regular articles didn't take too long.

00:53:33 ◼   ► And it instantly turns it into a download in your browser.

00:53:36 ◼   ► So it just downloads a dot text file.

00:53:40 ◼   ► The link list one, which has-- what did I say?

00:53:42 ◼   ► 25,000 entries?

00:53:45 ◼   ► It took a while, but it never timed out.

00:53:47 ◼   ► I never let my browser go to sleep, and I don't know.

00:53:51 ◼   ► At some point, I don't know if it was 5.10,

00:53:53 ◼   ► because I stopped paying attention,

00:53:55 ◼   ► but there was a big text file in my downloads folder.

00:53:58 ◼   ► And it's one file for each of the two blogs.

00:54:02 ◼   ► You know, my one blog in movable type is the full articles,

00:54:05 ◼   ► and the other one is the link list entries.

00:54:08 ◼   ► So I had one file for each, and it's sort of an easy

00:54:12 ◼   ► to understand format, you know, that movable type created for this.

00:54:18 ◼   ► Where there's like seven dashes to separate articles and five dashes on a line to separate

00:54:24 ◼   ► fields.

00:54:27 ◼   ► And then, you know, a little bit of grab here and there just to delete all the other fields.

00:54:32 ◼   ► And then I was left with nothing but just article text.

00:54:37 ◼   ► I will add, because this is the director's commentary of "Daring Fireball," I made the

00:54:44 ◼   ► decision, a completely arbitrary decision, that I would count my headlines as words written

00:54:50 ◼   ► for my articles, but not for link list entries, where sometimes I will write something which

00:54:57 ◼   ► I think is clever as a link list entry title, but very often I just take the headline from

00:55:04 ◼   ► the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal,

00:55:06 ◼   ► or gently rewrite the original headline

00:55:09 ◼   ► and it doesn't feel like it's fair to count them as words

00:55:13 ◼   ► or as original words, whereas my headlines I do think are.

00:55:16 ◼   ► So I deleted all the headlines,

00:55:17 ◼   ► the titles for the link list entries,

00:55:19 ◼   ► but didn't delete the titles for Daring Fireball.

00:55:22 ◼   ► And then I just wrote, I have a Perl script

00:55:24 ◼   ► that just went through and counted all the words

00:55:28 ◼   ► on lines that started with, you know,

00:55:32 ◼   ► right pointing, you know, the greater than sign,

00:55:35 ◼   ► and counted those as block quotes

00:55:42 ◼   ► and counted all other lines as words of text.

00:55:44 ◼   ► So the other thing in there,

00:55:48 ◼   ► where the counts are probably a little bit inexact,

00:55:51 ◼   ► to tell you the truth,

00:55:52 ◼   ► is that the first year and a half or so

00:55:54 ◼   ► of "Daring Fireball" entries weren't written in Markdown.

00:55:57 ◼   ► They had to, 'cause Markdown didn't exist.

00:56:00 ◼   ► And so for those, I think the block quotes

00:56:02 ◼   ► actually got counted as original words.

00:56:05 ◼   ► So I forget.

00:56:06 ◼   ► I think, I don't know.

00:56:08 ◼   ► - I think it's close enough.

00:56:10 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:56:11 ◼   ► - I did that after my first year doing six colors.

00:56:14 ◼   ► I did it.

00:56:15 ◼   ► And I think I set up like a template

00:56:18 ◼   ► that was just body text of things with my byline

00:56:21 ◼   ► since Dan and I both read on the site.

00:56:22 ◼   ► And I just did, I did it that way.

00:56:24 ◼   ► And it just spat out an HTML file

00:56:26 ◼   ► that I could grab a little bit.

00:56:28 ◼   ► but it was one file with everything?

00:56:30 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:56:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was like an archive,

00:56:32 ◼   ► but I just downloaded the same thing here,

00:56:35 ◼   ► and I can see how that would be a smart way to go,

00:56:39 ◼   ► 'cause it is just a super simple text file.

00:56:41 ◼   ► I had a bunch of people ask me,

00:56:42 ◼   ► like, "How do you think you did the word count?"

00:56:44 ◼   ► So I thought I would ask.

00:56:45 ◼   ► - Ah, that's a good question. - Nerds, you know.

00:56:47 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:56:48 ◼   ► - And then I also, the other thing I did

00:56:50 ◼   ► is I documented it in a note to myself in Yojimbo

00:56:53 ◼   ► exactly what I searched and replaced for in the file.

00:56:56 ◼   ► So the next time I do it,

00:56:57 ◼   ► I can just bring up that doc

00:56:58 ◼   ► and I don't have to spend 10 minutes tweaking grep patterns

00:57:01 ◼   ► to exactly nuke the parts I don't want.

00:57:03 ◼   ► The funny part is-

00:57:06 ◼   ► - I wanna say, go ahead.

00:57:07 ◼   ► - Well, no, you go first, I won't forget.

00:57:11 ◼   ► - All right, I just wanna say,

00:57:13 ◼   ► it's a big deal to do anything for five years,

00:57:17 ◼   ► let alone 15 years.

00:57:18 ◼   ► So to be as consistent as you've been with a site

00:57:21 ◼   ► is a big deal.

00:57:22 ◼   ► And people don't,

00:57:23 ◼   ► I think people don't give consistency enough credit.

00:57:27 ◼   ► it is a big deal to write 1,500 words or 2,500 words

00:57:31 ◼   ► every week for 15 years.

00:57:33 ◼   ► It's a huge deal.

00:57:34 ◼   ► And you do -- because as simple as it seems to put one foot

00:57:36 ◼   ► after another, it isn't over time,

00:57:40 ◼   ► because at some point you want to take a break from that.

00:57:42 ◼   ► And to keep doing it and persisting is a big deal.

00:57:46 ◼   ► I also wanted to say, personally, that the --

00:57:51 ◼   ► and this is a funny thing about the way the web works

00:57:54 ◼   ► and the way the media works, but, you know,

00:57:57 ◼   ► When I got to know you, I was the editor of a magazine with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and whatever,

00:58:01 ◼   ► and we gave you some freelance work and all of that.

00:58:03 ◼   ► But the fact is, you know, more often than not, Daring Fireball was an inspiration to me about how the way we were writing about technology was changing on the web.

00:58:14 ◼   ► And when I was unhappy in my job in the last few years I was at IDG, I have to say, you know, one of the things that I thought of was, could I do what John does?

00:58:25 ◼   ► Could I try to do that?

00:58:27 ◼   ► And nobody's, you know, we're different people

00:58:30 ◼   ► and the web is a very different place

00:58:32 ◼   ► than it was 10 years ago or 15 years ago.

00:58:35 ◼   ► But be that as it may, one of the big things in my mind

00:58:39 ◼   ► when I decided to go out on my own

00:58:41 ◼   ► rather than try to find a different job in the media

00:58:44 ◼   ► or somewhere else was I'm not gonna forgive myself

00:58:48 ◼   ► if I didn't give that a try.

00:58:50 ◼   ► And that was because I saw what you had done

00:58:53 ◼   ► and I liked it so much.

00:58:54 ◼   ► And I thought that is the thing to do.

00:58:55 ◼   ► That is the job I would like to have,

00:58:58 ◼   ► is something like what John does.

00:58:59 ◼   ► So as an inspiration to me,

00:59:02 ◼   ► not just for all your great work writing about this stuff,

00:59:04 ◼   ► but on a personal level,

00:59:06 ◼   ► as somebody who I looked at and said,

00:59:08 ◼   ► he's doing great stuff.

00:59:10 ◼   ► And I would love to be somebody who can do something

00:59:12 ◼   ► even sort of like that.

00:59:14 ◼   ► I wanna thank you.

00:59:16 ◼   ► - Well, you're very, very welcome.

00:59:17 ◼   ► And I have to, I'm very, I have to say,

00:59:21 ◼   ► proud of the number of sites that are, you know, like Six Colors, like Jim's Loop, you

00:59:30 ◼   ► know, Max Stories, 512 pixels. I mean, there are a lot of them that it's very clearly you're

00:59:34 ◼   ► the inspiration for that. Absolutely. And, you know, and it's, it's, to me, it is a non

00:59:40 ◼   ► zero sum game. So it's like, you know, like when other sites started getting more Daring

00:59:47 ◼   ► fireball-ish site started appearing, I didn't think, "Oh, you fucker, you ripped me off."

00:59:51 ◼   ► I thought, "Hey, this is cool." I did. Now, it's the difference between me and somebody...

00:59:55 ◼   ► If somebody made a site that looked like Daring Fireball, I'd be angry and I'd say something.

00:59:59 ◼   ► Somebody who makes something that follows this format, which is different than what

01:00:02 ◼   ► came before and tries to monetize it in similar ways, to me, that makes me proud. So I appreciate

01:00:11 ◼   ► your kind words about that. And it pains me. I hate taking compliments, but I'll take this

01:00:15 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:00:16 ◼   ► - The other thing that I found

01:00:19 ◼   ► in my perusal of these archives,

01:00:21 ◼   ► I remembered that I had done this,

01:00:23 ◼   ► but I had, you know, this whole thing

01:00:26 ◼   ► where I had to sort of parse the ones written

01:00:28 ◼   ► in Markdown differently than the ones written in HTML.

01:00:33 ◼   ► I, sometimes I do forget it though.

01:00:34 ◼   ► Like I know it, but when I look at it, it was weird.

01:00:37 ◼   ► So I linked to, for the anniversary,

01:00:40 ◼   ► I linked to my very first article on "Daring Fireball"

01:00:42 ◼   ► and all of the links, every single link in the article

01:00:45 ◼   ► was a 404.

01:00:46 ◼   ► It's, I would guess that over 90% of the links

01:00:50 ◼   ► from the first year or two of doing Fireball are now 404s.

01:00:53 ◼   ► And so I thought, well, I'll fix them as best I can

01:00:55 ◼   ► by painstakingly going to the internet archive

01:00:58 ◼   ► and finding an archive version of the same thing

01:01:00 ◼   ► and link to it.

01:01:01 ◼   ► And it worked for all but one.

01:01:02 ◼   ► And it makes me furious and I'm gonna call them out,

01:01:05 ◼   ► was eWEEK.

01:01:06 ◼   ► eWEEK is still, there still is an eWEEK website.

01:01:09 ◼   ► But eWEEK not only broke their own goddamn URL,

01:01:14 ◼   ► But their robots text forbids the internet archive

01:01:18 ◼   ► from archiving the article,

01:01:19 ◼   ► so I can't even point to it there.

01:01:21 ◼   ► So it's literally lost to time.

01:01:23 ◼   ► So fuck you, you weak.

01:01:25 ◼   ► But everything else, I wanted to fix the links,

01:01:28 ◼   ► including a whole bunch of links to apple.com.

01:01:31 ◼   ► And it was kind of funny finding them

01:01:33 ◼   ► and looking at that, 'cause you can link to it

01:01:34 ◼   ► and you can see the old apple.com web design from 2002.

01:01:38 ◼   ► But when I went to fix those links,

01:01:41 ◼   ► I opened it up in movable type

01:01:44 ◼   ► And I was like, what the fuck is this?

01:01:46 ◼   ► It's all these P tags all over the place.

01:01:51 ◼   ► Just a moment.

01:01:52 ◼   ► It only took me a moment to remember, yes, you

01:01:54 ◼   ► had to invent Markdown to not be writing in HTML.

01:01:58 ◼   ► But there is this brief moment where I really thought that--

01:02:00 ◼   ► I thought that it was like an SQL error or something.

01:02:04 ◼   ► Something broke in my browser, and I

01:02:06 ◼   ► was looking at something that I wasn't supposed to see.

01:02:09 ◼   ► And I realized, oh, yeah, that's how I used to have to do this.

01:02:13 ◼   ► Anyway, though, the thing that I found that I remember is I publicly announced Markdown

01:02:18 ◼   ► as a beta in March of 2004. But I had been working on it since like September or October of 2003.

01:02:30 ◼   ► And I started writing my articles on Daring Fireball using Markdown months before I announced it.

01:02:40 ◼   ► and mostly going back and forth with Aaron Swartz,

01:02:44 ◼   ► who was my muse for this.

01:02:48 ◼   ► Like there were a couple people who when I started,

01:02:50 ◼   ► I emailed them and said,

01:02:50 ◼   ► here's what I'm thinking about making.

01:02:52 ◼   ► Would you be interested in like more or less beta testing

01:02:55 ◼   ► that's giving me feedback on this?

01:02:57 ◼   ► And every, almost every, every state,

01:02:59 ◼   ► literally every person I went to,

01:03:00 ◼   ► I forget who else I went to,

01:03:01 ◼   ► but almost every other person wished me well

01:03:04 ◼   ► and didn't want to say anything, you know,

01:03:05 ◼   ► like, that's a stupid idea.

01:03:08 ◼   ► But I think they all have more or less thought,

01:03:10 ◼   ► that's a stupid idea.

01:03:11 ◼   ► I'm fine writing in HTML.

01:03:13 ◼   ► Like I don't have a problem writing in HTML,

01:03:15 ◼   ► so why in the world would I want to abstract it?

01:03:17 ◼   ► You know, except Aaron.

01:03:19 ◼   ► Aaron got it right away.

01:03:20 ◼   ► Even though he had his own thing, which was called ATX,

01:03:25 ◼   ► which was sort of, you know,

01:03:27 ◼   ► the exact same idea is marked down.

01:03:28 ◼   ► Like here's like a format you can write in

01:03:30 ◼   ► that alleviates you of the tediousness

01:03:33 ◼   ► of putting in every single HTML tag by hand

01:03:36 ◼   ► and all those, you know, littering your text with it.

01:03:39 ◼   ► And I even, you know, a liberal, and I said to him,

01:03:41 ◼   ► you know, here's the ideas I'm stealing from ATX.

01:03:43 ◼   ► But he got, he instantly got how,

01:03:48 ◼   ► even before I, you know, my first cut at the markdown,

01:03:51 ◼   ► what it would be, he instantly saw it as superior

01:03:53 ◼   ► to anything else that was out there, including ATX,

01:03:56 ◼   ► and at the time, textile, which was pretty popular.

01:03:58 ◼   ► But what would happen is every couple days

01:04:01 ◼   ► I'd do a new build and either, you know,

01:04:04 ◼   ► I changed the syntax in subtle ways.

01:04:06 ◼   ► But I started writing my articles in it well before this.

01:04:11 ◼   ► And then it's the smartest thing I think I did

01:04:14 ◼   ► in the whole thing because so much changed

01:04:16 ◼   ► after I actually had to use it.

01:04:17 ◼   ► Like my ideas for how Markdown would be good.

01:04:20 ◼   ► When the rubber met the road, some of them were bad ideas.

01:04:23 ◼   ► And then there were things that I just hadn't thought of

01:04:26 ◼   ► that I was like, one of them I remember is originally

01:04:30 ◼   ► I didn't have any syntax in Markdown for lists.

01:04:35 ◼   ► I just thought, well, of all the things

01:04:36 ◼   ► you have to enter in HTML, the OL tags and UL tags

01:04:40 ◼   ► for unordered lists is no big deal.

01:04:44 ◼   ► But then I realized, as so many other things go so much easier

01:04:47 ◼   ► to write, I was like, wouldn't it

01:04:48 ◼   ► be great if I could just put an asterisk space,

01:04:50 ◼   ► and then it would be a bullet item?

01:04:52 ◼   ► So it was through actually using it that it happened.

01:04:55 ◼   ► But that meant, though, that every time I changed the syntax

01:04:59 ◼   ► as the months went on, I had to go back and edit

01:05:03 ◼   ► every single article that I'd written for the last,

01:05:06 ◼   ► two weeks, three weeks, and all by the end,

01:05:10 ◼   ► it was like, I'd have to go back,

01:05:11 ◼   ► I'd make like a subtle change and I'd have to go back

01:05:13 ◼   ► and double check three months of articles

01:05:16 ◼   ► and change the syntax so that they wouldn't break.

01:05:19 ◼   ► So it was kind of a pain in the ass.

01:05:20 ◼   ► So anyway, I found the first article I ever wrote

01:05:24 ◼   ► and published using Markdown.

01:05:26 ◼   ► It was an article titled "Run, Panther, Run"

01:05:28 ◼   ► on the 3rd of November, 2003.

01:05:30 ◼   ► And you can verify this, there's a trick on Daring Fireball

01:05:34 ◼   ► where if you add a dot text extension to any URL,

01:05:38 ◼   ► you can see the markdown version of that article.

01:05:41 ◼   ► And so on the one previous to that article titled

01:05:45 ◼   ► Command Tab at the end of October, 2003,

01:05:47 ◼   ► it's still written in raw HTML

01:05:49 ◼   ► and then the next one's written in markdown.

01:05:52 ◼   ► I think I counted-- - You have to do dot T,

01:05:54 ◼   ► dot T-E-X-T.

01:05:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, T-E-X-T, 'cause I'm not an animal.

01:05:58 ◼   ► who's limited by a three character extension.

01:06:01 ◼   ► So anyway, I think I counted,

01:06:02 ◼   ► and by the time I published the beta,

01:06:05 ◼   ► and I think there were some subtle changes after that,

01:06:07 ◼   ► but once the beta came out,

01:06:09 ◼   ► I don't think much changed that broke older articles,

01:06:12 ◼   ► but there were 31 articles

01:06:13 ◼   ► that I'd have to check for changes.

01:06:16 ◼   ► It was quite a pain in the ass.

01:06:19 ◼   ► It's a good thing I'm a perfectionist,

01:06:22 ◼   ► because otherwise I would have,

01:06:23 ◼   ► the desire not to have to go

01:06:26 ◼   ► and tediously edit these articles would have led me

01:06:29 ◼   ► to just have shitty syntax in Markdown.

01:06:32 ◼   ► - I think it's funny that when you announced Markdown,

01:06:35 ◼   ► you got the same complaints that I always got

01:06:37 ◼   ► when I tried to explain to people why I wrote in Markdown.

01:06:40 ◼   ► It's the exact, the argument was there fully formed

01:06:43 ◼   ► at the beginning, which is why don't you just use HTML?

01:06:45 ◼   ► And there's a good answer why, which is I'm much less likely

01:06:49 ◼   ► to make a mistake using this basic syntax

01:06:52 ◼   ► and then compiling it into HTML than I am

01:06:55 ◼   ► to making sure I get all the angle brackets

01:06:57 ◼   ► and quote marks were right.

01:06:58 ◼   ► Plus it's more readable.

01:07:00 ◼   ► But from day one, that was the question about Markdown.

01:07:03 ◼   ► - You know what, to tie it with the earlier thing

01:07:05 ◼   ► in the show, to me, writing in Markdown

01:07:07 ◼   ► feels like swimming downstream

01:07:09 ◼   ► and writing raw HTML is upstream.

01:07:12 ◼   ► It's ever so slightly, it's not hard.

01:07:14 ◼   ► HTML, raw HTML, especially if you're not doing

01:07:16 ◼   ► the whole document, you're just doing the article portion

01:07:19 ◼   ► where you have P tags and A tags for the links

01:07:22 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

01:07:24 ◼   ► It's not terribly upstream, but it's subtly upstream.

01:07:28 ◼   ► And especially to me, and that's, you know,

01:07:30 ◼   ► not to turn this into a Markdown show

01:07:31 ◼   ► instead of a Daring Fireball show,

01:07:33 ◼   ► but especially for reading what you've already written.

01:07:36 ◼   ► It's so much nicer.

01:07:37 ◼   ► - I agree.

01:07:39 ◼   ► - But those, that early, I guess,

01:07:43 ◼   ► almost two years of "Riot's Timbuktu,"

01:07:45 ◼   ► boy, that feels like, that really feels like old times to me.

01:07:48 ◼   ► That's the only part that really feels old to me.

01:07:51 ◼   ► Otherwise, the weird thing about the 15-year anniversary

01:07:53 ◼   ► And how much, you know, I was 29 then, I'm 44 now.

01:07:56 ◼   ► I mean, that's, you know, what 29 is by most people's

01:07:59 ◼   ► definitions, a young man and 44 is clearly middle age.

01:08:03 ◼   ► It's a long 15 years, but it's still,

01:08:06 ◼   ► Tearing Fireball still feels new to me.

01:08:08 ◼   ► I don't, I can't explain why, but I think that's healthy.

01:08:13 ◼   ► - I think so, I think so.

01:08:15 ◼   ► My daughter is 15, right?

01:08:17 ◼   ► And I, that seems not that long ago,

01:08:20 ◼   ► and yet it also seems like forever ago.

01:08:22 ◼   ► And that's just, I get it.

01:08:25 ◼   ► I was trying to think of what I did

01:08:27 ◼   ► before I wrote in Markdown.

01:08:28 ◼   ► And I think the answer is that I just wrote in plain text

01:08:31 ◼   ► and I had a bunch of scripts that would wrap

01:08:33 ◼   ► (Dave laughs)

01:08:34 ◼   ► the paragraph tags around the plain text.

01:08:37 ◼   ► And then maybe I would just use bold and italics tags

01:08:41 ◼   ► and H refs.

01:08:43 ◼   ► I think I would just put those in,

01:08:44 ◼   ► and then I would just wrap it in paragraph tags at the end

01:08:48 ◼   ► using a script and then paste it in somewhere.

01:08:51 ◼   ► I think that's what it is.

01:08:52 ◼   ► literally exactly how Markdown started. Well, half the story of how Markdown started. That's

01:08:58 ◼   ► what I used to do for the first two years is write in something that looked sort of

01:09:02 ◼   ► like Markdown, maybe without the italics tags. For italics, I would actually put an M in

01:09:08 ◼   ► there, but no P tags. And then at some point, I'm so visually distracted by an inline AHREF

01:09:18 ◼   ► equals quote, here's a big long URL.

01:09:20 ◼   ► And inline links really distract me

01:09:23 ◼   ► when reading the raw HTML.

01:09:26 ◼   ► I had something that I could grep for to--

01:09:30 ◼   ► in the first draft, I could keep the URLs out of the text.

01:09:34 ◼   ► But then once I was like, OK, this is done,

01:09:36 ◼   ► I'd run a script or a couple of search and replace.

01:09:39 ◼   ► Then it was in HTML.

01:09:40 ◼   ► But then at that point, any subsequent edits

01:09:42 ◼   ► had to be done in the HTML.

01:09:45 ◼   ► It was like you could do it up to your first--

01:09:47 ◼   ► Right. And so the idea was, well, why not try to make something, you know, and there was already a

01:09:53 ◼   ► very popular textile plugin for movable type. You know, that would let you know, it was the same

01:09:58 ◼   ► idea as markdown where you could keep it in that format. And it would only, you know, every time

01:10:02 ◼   ► you publish, it would just spit out a version. As part, but that's exactly what I did too.

01:10:07 ◼   ► All right, let me take a break and thank our next sponsor. It's our good friends at Casper.

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01:10:24 ◼   ► Twenty people who just engineer mattresses.

01:10:29 ◼   ► And then perfected by a community of nearly half a million sleepers who've given feedback

01:10:33 ◼   ► to them and helped improve the product.

01:10:38 ◼   ► The mattress industry has forced consumers into paying notoriously high markups.

01:10:42 ◼   ► Mattresses are a huge ripoff in general.

01:10:44 ◼   ► the traditional mattresses are.

01:10:46 ◼   ► Casper's revolutionizing the mattress industry

01:10:48 ◼   ► by cutting the cost of dealing with resellers

01:10:50 ◼   ► and showrooms and all that stuff

01:10:52 ◼   ► and passing the savings directly to you.

01:10:54 ◼   ► You just go to casper.com,

01:10:56 ◼   ► you pick what size mattress you want

01:10:57 ◼   ► and they ship it direct to you.

01:10:59 ◼   ► It's so super convenient.

01:11:02 ◼   ► Now because it's foam,

01:11:05 ◼   ► it's not like a spring or something like that,

01:11:07 ◼   ► what they can do is they can vacuum pack it

01:11:09 ◼   ► and it comes in a remarkably small box for a mattress.

01:11:12 ◼   ► It might be the biggest box you get sent to you this month,

01:11:15 ◼   ► but considering that there's a whole mattress in there,

01:11:17 ◼   ► it's actually remarkably small.

01:11:19 ◼   ► And then you take it up to the bedroom

01:11:20 ◼   ► where you're gonna open it,

01:11:21 ◼   ► you follow the instructions on the box,

01:11:23 ◼   ► and then it sucks all the oxygen out of the air.

01:11:25 ◼   ► So you gotta be careful because, you know,

01:11:26 ◼   ► you might not be able to breathe.

01:11:28 ◼   ► And then, there it is, a full-size mattress.

01:11:32 ◼   ► And it is great.

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01:11:39 ◼   ► with a breathable open-cell layer

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01:11:43 ◼   ► I said this the last time they sponsored the show.

01:11:46 ◼   ► This summer we went on vacation.

01:11:49 ◼   ► A lot of times you stay in a nice hotel,

01:11:50 ◼   ► you get a really nice mattress.

01:11:52 ◼   ► My son who has a Casper mattress could not wait.

01:11:57 ◼   ► The number one reason he couldn't wait

01:11:58 ◼   ► to get home from vacation was to go back to bed

01:12:00 ◼   ► on his Casper mattress, could not wait.

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01:12:20 ◼   ► over not being able to sit on it

01:12:22 ◼   ► in a skanky mattress showroom

01:12:24 ◼   ► and sort of bounce on it and see if you like it.

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01:12:42 ◼   ► They have over 20,000 reviews and an average of 4.8 stars

01:12:46 ◼   ► based on Casper, Amazon, and Google reviews.

01:12:50 ◼   ► And I can see why.

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01:13:12 ◼   ► So thank you very much to Casper.

01:13:14 ◼   ► Love their product.

01:13:15 ◼   ► Next time you need a mattress, keep them in mind.

01:13:17 ◼   ► (sighs)

01:13:20 ◼   ► All right, I'm done talking

01:13:22 ◼   ► about Daring Fireball's anniversary.

01:13:24 ◼   ► Are you?

01:13:25 ◼   ► I mean, I thank everybody for the good words,

01:13:27 ◼   ► but let's start on the next 15.

01:13:30 ◼   ► - You covered it, yeah.

01:13:31 ◼   ► - All right, next on my list of topics

01:13:34 ◼   ► is this new feature that Apple's added to iOS 11

01:13:38 ◼   ► that people are calling like a cop mode.

01:13:40 ◼   ► But the basic idea is that there's a new feature on iOS 11

01:13:46 ◼   ► where if you quickly tap the home button five times,

01:13:49 ◼   ► it doesn't have to be super quick either.

01:13:51 ◼   ► It brings up the emergency SOS screen

01:13:54 ◼   ► where you can just slide to call 911.

01:13:58 ◼   ► And if you set up your phone with your medical information,

01:14:02 ◼   ► it can just slide to unlock that.

01:14:04 ◼   ► So for example, let's just say you've got some kind

01:14:07 ◼   ► of medical condition and you pass out

01:14:09 ◼   ► or have a seizure or something like that,

01:14:11 ◼   ► or you're in an accident and you're incapacitated.

01:14:13 ◼   ► A first responder, if they find an iPhone in your pocket,

01:14:18 ◼   ► it wants this word spreads around,

01:14:20 ◼   ► they can tap that button five times

01:14:22 ◼   ► and if there's a medical thing and it tell them

01:14:24 ◼   ► that you're allergic to penicillin like I am

01:14:26 ◼   ► or something like that, there it is right there

01:14:28 ◼   ► and they know how to get to it

01:14:29 ◼   ► and they don't have to unlock your phone.

01:14:30 ◼   ► It's a great feature.

01:14:32 ◼   ► Well, in one of the most recent betas,

01:14:33 ◼   ► I think it was like two betas ago,

01:14:35 ◼   ► Apple added a feature to this

01:14:37 ◼   ► where once you enter this SOS emergency screen

01:14:39 ◼   ► to unlock your phone after that,

01:14:43 ◼   ► you have to use the passcode, not touch ID.

01:14:47 ◼   ► So in the same way that when you power the phone off,

01:14:49 ◼   ► and this has been like this ever since touch ID came out,

01:14:51 ◼   ► and power it back on from being truly off, not just asleep,

01:14:55 ◼   ► you have to enter the passcode before touch ID can work.

01:15:00 ◼   ► Now this is really useful though for somebody,

01:15:02 ◼   ► let's just say like if you're going through customs

01:15:04 ◼   ► or something like that, and let's face it,

01:15:06 ◼   ► in today's world, it's a reasonable concern

01:15:09 ◼   ► that you might wanna engage this mode

01:15:13 ◼   ► and then you can't be required to use touch ID

01:15:18 ◼   ► or coerced into using touch ID to unlock your phone.

01:15:22 ◼   ► I think this is a great feature

01:15:25 ◼   ► and I think Apple's implemented it really, really well.

01:15:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, the idea that you can do this,

01:15:31 ◼   ► like just stick your finger in your pocket

01:15:32 ◼   ► and press the button and you've deactivated Touch ID,

01:15:36 ◼   ► essentially, until you log in.

01:15:38 ◼   ► It's not, you know, it's, first off,

01:15:40 ◼   ► this emergency ID thing is a really cool feature.

01:15:42 ◼   ► There's a version of it in now,

01:15:44 ◼   ► where if you get to the password screen,

01:15:46 ◼   ► there's an emergency button

01:15:48 ◼   ► and you can make an emergency call without logging in.

01:15:50 ◼   ► And there's also personal data there.

01:15:53 ◼   ► You enter it through the health app.

01:15:55 ◼   ► So I've got that in mind.

01:15:58 ◼   ► And the idea is first responders know that it's there

01:16:02 ◼   ► and they know how to get to it.

01:16:03 ◼   ► And I don't have a medical alert bracelet.

01:16:05 ◼   ► I used to wear one because one of my pupils

01:16:06 ◼   ► is larger than the other,

01:16:07 ◼   ► and that can lead to a misdiagnosis of a concussion

01:16:10 ◼   ► when I don't have one.

01:16:11 ◼   ► And so I've got that in my medical info in my iPhone,

01:16:15 ◼   ► just as another place where they could gather info.

01:16:19 ◼   ► And it's got like my wife's name and phone number

01:16:21 ◼   ► and some other health information about me.

01:16:24 ◼   ► And it's really useful.

01:16:25 ◼   ► but this adds this other layer of not only quick access,

01:16:28 ◼   ► but the touch ID lockout,

01:16:30 ◼   ► which everybody else was saying like, you know,

01:16:32 ◼   ► lick your finger and then touch it on the button

01:16:35 ◼   ► a few times until it fails and goes back to the password.

01:16:37 ◼   ► This is way better than that.

01:16:39 ◼   ► I should say that all these security experts will tell you

01:16:42 ◼   ► making your phone not able to open biometrically

01:16:48 ◼   ► does not, and forgive me, this sounds terrible,

01:16:50 ◼   ► but it's really accurate,

01:16:51 ◼   ► does not stop them from beating it out of you.

01:16:53 ◼   ► If it's somebody who is a, if you're in a place

01:16:58 ◼   ► with authorities who can get that out of you

01:17:01 ◼   ► by some other means, your actual password, they can do that.

01:17:05 ◼   ► But in the United States, if they're following the law,

01:17:07 ◼   ► they can't physically compel you to enter your password,

01:17:11 ◼   ► but they, legally, but they can physically compel you

01:17:14 ◼   ► to put your finger on your phone.

01:17:15 ◼   ► So that, it makes a difference, makes a difference.

01:17:18 ◼   ► - At least according to some court cases

01:17:20 ◼   ► that have already come out,

01:17:21 ◼   ► I don't think it's actually gone to the Supreme Court

01:17:23 ◼   ► and been officially decided,

01:17:24 ◼   ► but there have been court rulings

01:17:25 ◼   ► that police can force somebody to, you know,

01:17:28 ◼   ► require somebody to use their fingerprint.

01:17:31 ◼   ► And in one case, the funny part was that in the one case

01:17:33 ◼   ► where it happened, the law enforcement got the judgment

01:17:38 ◼   ► that said, yes, you can require this guy.

01:17:39 ◼   ► You can't make him tell you your passcode,

01:17:41 ◼   ► but you can make him put his finger on the thing.

01:17:43 ◼   ► And by the time they got the judgment,

01:17:45 ◼   ► the timeout period had gone

01:17:46 ◼   ► so that the phone required the passcode anyway,

01:17:49 ◼   ► which is, I enjoyed that very much.

01:17:53 ◼   ► Anyway, the other reason- - I would imagine that they

01:17:54 ◼   ► can't, I imagine they can't force your finger

01:17:57 ◼   ► onto the phone either, that you have to sort of do it

01:17:59 ◼   ► of your own free will, although there might be

01:18:01 ◼   ► a court case about that at some point too.

01:18:03 ◼   ► - Right, the other reason this is interesting

01:18:05 ◼   ► is that there are rampant rumors that at least one

01:18:08 ◼   ► of the new iPhones coming out probably next month

01:18:13 ◼   ► is going to use 3D facial recognition

01:18:17 ◼   ► as a biometric identification,

01:18:20 ◼   ► either in addition to Touch ID or instead of Touch ID.

01:18:25 ◼   ► And I'm sure you've heard the same thing too,

01:18:27 ◼   ► talking about it and writing about it

01:18:29 ◼   ► over the last few months,

01:18:30 ◼   ► is an awful lot of people who are very, very reasonably,

01:18:33 ◼   ► this is, I'm not making fun of or disagreeing at all,

01:18:35 ◼   ► but who are very, very reasonably wary

01:18:38 ◼   ► of having something where the cops,

01:18:42 ◼   ► law enforcement wouldn't even need to force you

01:18:45 ◼   ► to put your finger on the thing.

01:18:47 ◼   ► If you're being held,

01:18:49 ◼   ► they could just hold the phone in front of your face

01:18:50 ◼   ► and unlock it.

01:18:51 ◼   ► Totally reasonable concern.

01:18:53 ◼   ► It actually, I agree, it would be easier for law enforcement

01:18:57 ◼   ► to get into a phone with facial recognition than Touch ID.

01:19:02 ◼   ► And this is an interesting thing where once you anticipate

01:19:06 ◼   ► that this is going to happen,

01:19:08 ◼   ► you're literally just five quick taps away

01:19:11 ◼   ► from locking them out of that.

01:19:12 ◼   ► - I do wonder about this face ID feature

01:19:19 ◼   ► that I would think that it would be constructed in a way

01:19:24 ◼   ► where it would try very hard to get the sense

01:19:28 ◼   ► of whether you were holding your phone or not, right?

01:19:31 ◼   ► That it would be one of the fundamental things here

01:19:34 ◼   ► is somebody across the table from you

01:19:36 ◼   ► cannot pick up your phone, unlock it,

01:19:38 ◼   ► and then start looking through your email.

01:19:41 ◼   ► Somebody can't walk away with your phone

01:19:43 ◼   ► and then from across the room surreptitiously

01:19:46 ◼   ► as you're looking frantically for your phone,

01:19:47 ◼   ► hold it toward you and then get all your information out of it.

01:19:51 ◼   ► That it needs to be able to,

01:19:53 ◼   ► if it's going to have this wide-angle lens and

01:19:55 ◼   ► have an idea of where your face is,

01:19:57 ◼   ► it should actually be able to make a judgment about like,

01:20:00 ◼   ► you're not close enough for me to unlock at this point.

01:20:05 ◼   ► That has to be part of the deal.

01:20:06 ◼   ► >> Yeah, you would think so.

01:20:08 ◼   ► I would anticipate that assuming that this pans out,

01:20:11 ◼   ► this is going to be a significant segment of

01:20:13 ◼   ► the keynote address introducing the phone,

01:20:15 ◼   ► explaining how it works and the way it tries to be smart.

01:20:18 ◼   ► Just to scratch another thing off the things

01:20:24 ◼   ► I've been meaning to talk about here,

01:20:26 ◼   ► just to alleviate a nonstop stream of feedback

01:20:30 ◼   ► from listeners is skepticism from people

01:20:34 ◼   ► who hear about this feature and think,

01:20:35 ◼   ► this is going to be terrible.

01:20:37 ◼   ► I don't wanna have to hold my phone in front of my face

01:20:39 ◼   ► like I'm taking a selfie every single time

01:20:41 ◼   ► I wanna unlock the phone.

01:20:44 ◼   ► You're thinking, if you ask your concern,

01:20:46 ◼   ► you're thinking about this all wrong.

01:20:47 ◼   ► There's no way Apple would use this

01:20:49 ◼   ► if that was how it worked.

01:20:50 ◼   ► It's not like taking a picture of yourself.

01:20:52 ◼   ► I'm sure of it.

01:20:53 ◼   ► I know nothing of this.

01:20:54 ◼   ► I've heard, I have no little birdies

01:20:55 ◼   ► who've told me about this.

01:20:57 ◼   ► I just, just knowing Apple,

01:20:59 ◼   ► they wouldn't add the feature if that's how limited it was.

01:21:02 ◼   ► Surely it's something that worked

01:21:04 ◼   ► with a very wide range of view

01:21:06 ◼   ► so that it's not like taking a picture.

01:21:09 ◼   ► It may not even be a camera per se,

01:21:12 ◼   ► that it's just some sort of 3D IR sensor.

01:21:16 ◼   ► Oh, and the other thing is that,

01:21:17 ◼   ► of course it'll work in the dark.

01:21:18 ◼   ► And I think there's even rumors coming out

01:21:19 ◼   ► of the supply chain that it's an infrared system,

01:21:22 ◼   ► that it's not like you won't be able to unlock your phone

01:21:26 ◼   ► unless you turn the lights on in the middle of the night.

01:21:29 ◼   ► It's just not that sort of thing at all.

01:21:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, I am fascinated.

01:21:34 ◼   ► Look, I mean, bad products exist, bad features exist.

01:21:37 ◼   ► It absolutely is the case.

01:21:38 ◼   ► I am fascinated by,

01:21:41 ◼   ► I think it must just be human nature

01:21:42 ◼   ► that some people will hear about something

01:21:46 ◼   ► and immediately imagine the worst case scenario

01:21:49 ◼   ► and then attack that and say, "That sounds terrible."

01:21:52 ◼   ► Because I had this happen to me the other week

01:21:54 ◼   ► where I forget even what it was.

01:21:56 ◼   ► I think it was like the plot to a movie or something.

01:21:58 ◼   ► And somebody said, "Oh, well, that's gonna be terrible

01:22:00 ◼   ► because it's gonna be like this."

01:22:01 ◼   ► And I thought, "Well, you just imagined the worst thing

01:22:04 ◼   ► and then said it would be bad, but you did that,

01:22:07 ◼   ► not the people who are making the movie.

01:22:09 ◼   ► That was you and your creativity finding something bad.

01:22:12 ◼   ► Like the bar for biometric unlocking on the iPhone is so high.

01:22:17 ◼   ► This is such a core feature.

01:22:19 ◼   ► It is so not,

01:22:21 ◼   ► if you think back to the iPhone 7 Plus and the two cameras, right?

01:22:25 ◼   ► That was a, "Oh, well,

01:22:26 ◼   ► it's going to be in beta and it's not really done yet," and all of that.

01:22:30 ◼   ► That was not a core feature of the OS.

01:22:34 ◼   ► This is a core feature.

01:22:36 ◼   ► So if you are imagining a scenario

01:22:39 ◼   ► where there's gonna be a new iPhone

01:22:41 ◼   ► and the only way you're gonna be able to unlock it

01:22:42 ◼   ► is with this janky face unlock

01:22:45 ◼   ► that requires you to smile and take a selfie

01:22:48 ◼   ► and turn on the light if it's too dark and things like that.

01:22:52 ◼   ► Like if they were at that point,

01:22:54 ◼   ► they would have killed the feature.

01:22:55 ◼   ► - You have to be wearing the same pair of glasses

01:22:57 ◼   ► that you were wearing when you first set it up.

01:23:00 ◼   ► No, it cannot work like that.

01:23:01 ◼   ► It cannot work like that.

01:23:03 ◼   ► - No, they would have killed that.

01:23:04 ◼   ► And in fact, I wonder sometimes

01:23:05 ◼   ► Because I remember this rumor has floated around before.

01:23:09 ◼   ► I wonder if they have been testing this a while

01:23:12 ◼   ► and it was just not good enough.

01:23:14 ◼   ► And that only now is it good enough for them to do it.

01:23:16 ◼   ► But there's just no way

01:23:18 ◼   ► that Apple is going to ship this thing.

01:23:19 ◼   ► Now, might it have quirks, especially at first?

01:23:22 ◼   ► Sure.

01:23:23 ◼   ► But it's just, I cannot envision Apple screwing up

01:23:27 ◼   ► something as important as a biometric ID system.

01:23:30 ◼   ► Like this has got to work rock solid,

01:23:33 ◼   ► or they would never have put it in production.

01:23:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, and Touch ID is where the bar is.

01:23:39 ◼   ► And really, it's not just like Touch ID

01:23:43 ◼   ► from three or four years ago with the iPhone 5S,

01:23:45 ◼   ► it's where Touch ID is today with the iPhone 7

01:23:48 ◼   ► and iOS 10 and just how quick, you know.

01:23:51 ◼   ► I don't know, for me at least,

01:23:54 ◼   ► I can't imagine how making Touch ID faster

01:23:56 ◼   ► would improve anything, 'cause it doesn't seem to me

01:23:59 ◼   ► like it's as close to instantaneous as I desire.

01:24:02 ◼   ► - And the goal is for this to be seamless.

01:24:04 ◼   ► I have to think the reason they're doing this

01:24:06 ◼   ► is because they want the ultimate experience

01:24:09 ◼   ► of using an iPhone to be

01:24:10 ◼   ► that when you're holding your iPhone, it knows it,

01:24:13 ◼   ► and everything just works.

01:24:14 ◼   ► And when you're not, it's locked.

01:24:16 ◼   ► And how do you do that?

01:24:17 ◼   ► Well, there's technology and infrared

01:24:19 ◼   ► and who knows what else is going on behind the scenes.

01:24:22 ◼   ► But from the user's perspective,

01:24:23 ◼   ► leaving all the tech aside,

01:24:24 ◼   ► what Apple, the ultimate goal is

01:24:26 ◼   ► when you're using your phone,

01:24:28 ◼   ► it works fine and you have access to everything.

01:24:30 ◼   ► And when you're not, it's locked, right?

01:24:32 ◼   ► And if this is how they're doing that,

01:24:34 ◼   ► the goal here is that you shouldn't have to,

01:24:36 ◼   ► Touch ID is not a great burden, right?

01:24:38 ◼   ► But what they're saying is you shouldn't even need that.

01:24:41 ◼   ► All you should need to be is physically present.

01:24:43 ◼   ► And the phone will figure out, oh, you're here,

01:24:46 ◼   ► then here's all your stuff.

01:24:48 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:24:49 ◼   ► And possibly could even lock automatically

01:24:53 ◼   ► just when your face is no longer within the field of view.

01:24:57 ◼   ► I don't know, maybe, or something.

01:24:59 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:25:01 ◼   ► I don't know, there's all sorts of potential there,

01:25:02 ◼   ► but Apple knows the bar is high.

01:25:04 ◼   ► And Apple does make mistakes too, that's the other thing.

01:25:07 ◼   ► The argument here is that Apple is perfect,

01:25:09 ◼   ► never screws anything up, but I would argue

01:25:11 ◼   ► that they never screw up anything like this.

01:25:14 ◼   ► And I know that there are phones out there

01:25:17 ◼   ► that have facial scanners for identification,

01:25:21 ◼   ► and I know that every single one

01:25:22 ◼   ► that's already out there sucks in some way.

01:25:25 ◼   ► It's either foolable by a flat still picture of the person,

01:25:29 ◼   ► or it's slow or it has to be a narrow field of view

01:25:34 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:25:36 ◼   ► I know that there's a bunch out there that suck,

01:25:38 ◼   ► but Apple would, there's no way they would make one

01:25:40 ◼   ► that sucks when they already have a biometric ID,

01:25:43 ◼   ► touch ID that it doesn't suck.

01:25:44 ◼   ► - And touch ID, when it was rumored,

01:25:48 ◼   ► we heard these same stories

01:25:49 ◼   ► because there had been fingerprint readers.

01:25:51 ◼   ► Like I think Samsung had one where you kind of had to like,

01:25:53 ◼   ► move your thumb like over it slowly,

01:25:57 ◼   ► like you were swiping a credit card somewhere,

01:25:58 ◼   ► like you had to slowly slide your thumb over it

01:26:01 ◼   ► and it was a bad experience.

01:26:03 ◼   ► And then Apple did it and it was not that experience.

01:26:05 ◼   ► It was much better.

01:26:06 ◼   ► And like, yeah, I just really believe,

01:26:08 ◼   ► not that Apple doesn't make mistakes,

01:26:11 ◼   ► but that this is such a core feature

01:26:12 ◼   ► that if it was no good, the phone just wouldn't ship.

01:26:17 ◼   ► They would have a different phone without it.

01:26:19 ◼   ► - Disney World for years has had a thing

01:26:22 ◼   ► where they have, in Florida,

01:26:24 ◼   ► the Florida parks have a thing where you,

01:26:26 ◼   ► you get in the park, you have to put your finger on a thing.

01:26:29 ◼   ► You give them your ticket or scan your band or whatever,

01:26:31 ◼   ► and then you use your finger.

01:26:33 ◼   ► And the idea is it's obviously a method