0:00:00Ah Craig's good to hear your voice. Yeah, likewise. It's been a while since we talked. Yeah
0:00:06You want to this this let's just get it out of the way we got to talk about this Trump tech tech summit
0:00:16Because here's the thing. Oh, man
0:00:19You're gonna lead off with this I would have you know started my heart holiday party
0:00:27Here's the thing even as I'm not really shying away from writing about politics on daring fireball
0:00:34Even if I decided that if I had chosen differently and said, you know what? I'm not you know, whatever my feelings are
0:00:39I'm gonna make this a
0:00:41Politics free site even even in this here's it here's an intersection of of the Trump administration
0:00:48Incoming Trump administration and the stuff that I do write about that, you know, it would be criminal not to mention it
0:00:54So what happened I don't know and for anybody had their head in the sand Trump and his buddy Peter Thiel put together a
0:01:01summit of
0:01:04They invited I don't they only invited ten people. I think there were like 14 people from Trump's immediate
0:01:11family and his
0:01:14transition team in attendance and ten leaders of of the US tech industry
0:01:20Who were in attendance? I think it was Tim Cook from Apple who had a primo seat
0:01:26To away from Trump, you know the seating, you know, if you'd looked at the seating chart, it was clearly very very
0:01:31Play was thought out. Yeah, I just thought out definitely
0:01:35Yeah, I mean, you don't you don't just say oh, hey, why don't you three kids sit over here, right?
0:01:41It's like that it that into the table was like the other the kids table that you know Thanksgiving, right?
0:01:50But yeah, I mean the thing that got me was that that picture of
0:01:54Tim Cook, right? This is just the look on his face. I mean, I try not to read into pictures too much
0:02:02I mean you we've all done, you know, you know, you're watching a video or whatever and you know
0:02:06You paused and it's like the person's making that face which is like what the heck you know
0:02:10Because it you know, it doesn't fit into the the story that's going on with it. Just making some funny face, right?
0:02:15but I look at that picture of Tim Cook and
0:02:19That is the expression I think I would have if I was at that meeting
0:02:24Right, just like ashen kind of what the hell is going on here
0:02:30Somebody do you are to watch the HBO show the Larry David show curb your enthusiasm
0:02:42Because they the show for anybody doesn't watch the show usually ends
0:02:47It's a very... the show is incredibly awkward. It's about... it's nothing about... other than about creating awkward
0:02:53situations, and then a typical episode ends in a horribly awkward situation with a freeze frame,
0:02:58and then this funny music comes up.
0:03:00Yeah, that's all that was missing is that funny music.
0:03:04There's another thing, too, where I'm always hesitant to... especially coming out of a political
0:03:14election, whether it's national or local.
0:03:17There's obviously-- and it's only gotten worse,
0:03:20because I think because our politics have gotten
0:03:24so much more partisan, and the fact
0:03:26that there are so many more photographs taken,
0:03:28because digital cameras.
0:03:30If you ever watch at these press conferences,
0:03:33it really almost sounds like--
0:03:36not a war zone, but almost--
0:03:38where the pro-photographers and the journalists
0:03:42have these digital SLRs. And they just hold the shutter down, and they just keep shooting
0:03:49six to eight frames per second, every second, nonstop because the cards...
0:03:55Yeah, that's what I was saying about it's really easy these days to cherry pick an image,
0:04:00right? To find the one where Tim Cook is making that face because you've shot a thousand frames.
0:04:07And I don't think that's the case, though.
0:04:09Right.
0:04:09And so in election ads, both sides do it.
0:04:15Here's one where it's not really a partisan thing,
0:04:17but they tend to find an unflattering photo
0:04:18of the opponent to put in the ad if it's an attack ad.
0:04:22And a lot of times, I think it's very obvious
0:04:24that you can tell that it's just one of those-- everybody knows
0:04:28it when you're going through your family photos
0:04:30and you say, oh, look at that sunset.
0:04:32Here, you guys stand right there.
0:04:34I'll take a couple photos.
0:04:35and like the middle one, you know, somebody, you know,
0:04:37one of the subjects in your family just looks horrible.
0:04:40Just absolutely like--
0:04:42The classic mid-blink, right?
0:04:44Right.
0:04:45You know, it's like you look like you've been
0:04:46smoking bongs all day because your eyes are, you know,
0:04:49halfway shut and it's like--
0:04:50Right.
0:04:51Or like, you know, like the person was, you know,
0:04:54they know that you're taking a couple of photos
0:04:56and they were trying to hold their eyes open
0:04:57for the first one and then it just feels like
0:04:59there's something in there.
0:05:00So they make like a weird blink to like clear their eyes,
0:05:02hopefully before you shoot the next shutter,
0:05:04but in fact it's mid-shutter and they just look nutso.
0:05:07I don't think that's Tim Cook in this scenario.
0:05:10It looks to me like that was--
0:05:12- No.
0:05:12Like I said, that is how I would feel in that situation.
0:05:17I don't, you know, it's like, uh.
0:05:20And it's, you know, Ben Thompson made a good thing
0:05:25in his, a good point in his newsletter
0:05:28and that really struck me was that Trump is saying,
0:05:34"Oh, we want to help you all." Well, there's a flip side to that, right? What happens if he does
0:05:40not want to help you, right? He's already, what is it, last week or maybe earlier this week,
0:05:50where he put out that tweet about canceling a Lockheed order and they're stock tanked.
0:05:56Yep. And he's got some power now. And you don't want that power to affect your shareholder value.
0:06:09The week before he was complaining about an Air Force One order for, or an Air Force order for
0:06:16a new Air Force One, you know, the current Air Force One. And you know, if you're like,
0:06:24This is one of those things that I knew, but I find Air Force One to be a fascinating thing,
0:06:29as like a history geek and just someone who's a—I was about to say, I am! I'm a proud American,
0:06:36and I like certain aspects of it, and Air Force One's a cool thing. But one of the things I've
0:06:40always known is that Air Force One is not an airplane, a single airplane. I think there's
0:06:46two of them. But Air Force One is the official designation of the one that's carrying the
0:06:53president. So, right, like if the president of the United States is like sitting in the
0:06:57Oval Office, there is no Air Force One. There are two planes that could be Air Force One,
0:07:02but it becomes Air Force One when the president of the United States is on the plane, and
0:07:07then it gets that official designation. And that the two that they have right now were
0:07:12commissioned under the Reagan administration, and I believe George H. W. Bush was the first
0:07:18to fly them. So these planes have been in use for the original George Bush, Bill Clinton,
0:07:25George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, and they will be the ones that Trump gets. The new
0:07:33ones that the Air Force is looking to commission would not be ready until either the very,
0:07:39very, very tail end of an eight-year Trump administration, which, let's face it, whenever,
0:07:43you know, if we get eight years of Trump, we ain't gonna be on Earth to fly.
0:07:47Yeah, I don't want to think about that.
0:07:48Or is his successor.
0:07:50And anyway, Trump bitched about the cost of these planes,
0:07:53and Boeing's stock tanked.
0:07:59Not tanked and didn't recover, but he tweets and stocks move.
0:08:03It's a fact.
0:08:04I mean, in between the joking about it
0:08:06and the partisanship of it, I mean,
0:08:08there's just no denial that when the President of the United
0:08:10States comes out and says he'd like
0:08:13to cancel the $5 billion order for Air Force One,
0:08:17that's going to have an effect on the company.
0:08:18Yeah, I read the other day that on Bloomberg now, the Bloomberg terminals that the market uses to
0:08:25keep track of news has Trump's tweets on it now. They just feed Trump's tweets into the Bloomberg
0:08:31terminals. Because it's important to know about them immediately.
0:08:34Exactly. It moves the economy. And it's like, "What? Jesus."
0:08:42So now, uh, I let me read from this cause I actually wrote to Ben, you know,
0:08:48Ben's on the show all the time and he's a friend. Uh, and I told him, I thought
0:08:51his take was excellent. It was, I filed it under the, uh, I wish I had, uh,
0:08:57thought of it, but that exactly what you said that, that the, Hey, I'm here to help you folks
0:09:03do well. That's actually an actual quote from him. I'm here to help you folks do well. And
0:09:07we're going to be there for you. Um, yeah, it's
0:09:11It's a massive violation of economic... I'm reading from Ben's email. "Government ought to be
0:09:17setting and enforcing the rules of the game, not actively helping one of the teams." It's a recipe
0:09:23for not just corporate accuracy and the inevitable corruption that comes with it,
0:09:30parentheses, this is where I note that Trump's children attended the meeting,
0:09:34and parentheses, but the closing off of opportunity to the unknown companies that might
0:09:41challenge those large enough to be quote helped. This should be of particular concern to the
0:09:47startup ecosystem. And I can't say it any better than that. I think it's exactly right.
0:09:52That it's that's, you know, and again, you say, you know, there's there's positives and
0:09:57negatives to every system of government, but you know, part of the gist of a democratic
0:10:05nation is that the role of government, I think this is, again, I don't think this is a
0:10:13partisan viewpoint, I think it's just a statement of fact that kids learn in elementary school. The
0:10:19role of the government is to keep a fair level playing field. Yeah, it's all about fairness.
0:10:24Exactly. It's all about fairness, and that's the discussion about diversity too. It's about
0:10:32fairness. Right. You know, protecting the idea that the role of the president is to protect the
0:10:3710 biggest corporations in tech is the opposite of it because the whole point is that it's healthy
0:10:42for, for example, you know, like in, uh, if this meeting had been held in 1981, AT&T would have
0:10:48been one of the, would have been the, probably the company, right. Yeah. Um, you know, and the fact
0:10:54that they, yeah, and it goes against the competition, right. You know, you look at Apple
0:10:58Apple Maps is getting better because it's competing against Google Maps.
0:11:04And Android is getting better because it's competing against the iPhone, right?
0:11:09That competition and having that competition be fair is what makes it work, right?
0:11:15If somebody comes along and says, you know, "Well, hey, Tim Cook, you know, he's gay.
0:11:23Maybe Google's better," right?
0:11:26little or whole what did you're not competing on a fair playing field at
0:11:31that point
0:11:33and i think everybody intact would have a problem that ever been fact
0:11:36hopefully
0:11:38everybody's in the u_s_ without a problem with that
0:11:41yet that's the the road that we're heading down right now
0:11:45most uh...
0:11:47most people intact this has been noted before this meeting the most of the
0:11:51industry
0:11:54was
0:11:56on the side of Hillary Clinton in this election, for several reasons, but certainly largely
0:12:04on immigration and on social issues like gay rights and stuff like that.
0:12:16One of the people, though, I believe, the CEO of Oracle—what's her name? She's
0:12:22actually in the same picture with with yeah she looks very happy to be there
0:12:28she's very enthusiastic in her remarks before the the meeting and and then
0:12:34after the meeting it was announced that she's joining his transition team in in
0:12:38some form right and she's gonna be obviously some people there and selling
0:12:42databases but my question is it there's a large number of people and I think it
0:12:51has to be addressed who think that people like Tim Cook, Satya
0:12:59Nadella from Microsoft, Larry Page from Google,
0:13:03should not have attended this meeting.
0:13:05They should have declined the invitation on the basis
0:13:09that it was just dog and pony show,
0:13:11and it was just a photo opportunity for Trump
0:13:13and his children and his transition team
0:13:17to have these people parade in front of the media.
0:13:20I mean, there's a reason why the media was there
0:13:21and that the photographs were taken and it wasn't,
0:13:24certainly could have been held privately
0:13:25if they wanted it to, it was not.
0:13:26It was held publicly,
0:13:28certainly not for the benefit of those who were invited.
0:13:32It was only for the benefit of Trump
0:13:34and his transition team.
0:13:35I don't see how that's disputable.
0:13:37Should they have declined the invitation?
0:13:40On the basis of it being a form of protest against Trump
0:13:44and what he campaigned on and what he's trying to do.
0:13:49I think that they're playing a longer game here. Yes, it is a PR opportunity. In fact,
0:13:53you know, they used that PR opportunity to take a swipe at Twitter, right? Just the whole
0:13:59Crooked Hillary thing. And yeah, I don't think you want to, it's not a matter of agreeing
0:14:09with him at this point. I think it's pretty safe to say.
0:14:13Pete: Oracle's CEO is named Safra Katz, by the way. I want to get that out there.
0:14:18So before the meeting, Safra Katz, the one who has joined his transition team, while
0:14:23remaining at Oracle CEO, I should add, her quote was, "I plan to tell the president-elect
0:14:28that we are with him and will help in any way we can."
0:14:33And my take on during Fireball was that that sounds a lot like I'm ready to spit shine
0:14:38his shoes.
0:14:41ready to help in any way we can is, and with him, are pretty unequivocal statements of
0:14:49support which I don't think are supporting. And compare and contrast that, and I pointed
0:14:53this out on Daring Fireball, I think Tim Cook, and unsurprisingly so, was very, very precise
0:15:01in his on-the-record remarks. So what they did is they started the meeting by going around
0:15:08table and introduced themselves. And Tim Cook, all he said was, "Tim Cook, very good to be here."
0:15:13Not very glad, very good to be here. "And I look very forward to talking to the President-elect
0:15:21about the things that we can do to help you achieve some things you want." End of statement.
0:15:28He's not raising a stink. It's all polite on the surface. I'm sure in the moment,
0:15:37as it went around the table, it went on. But if you think about those words precisely, in particular,
0:15:41the difference between "we're with you and ready to help in any way we can" from Oracle versus
0:15:47"we help you achieve some things you want."
0:15:51Tim Cynova Like I said, they're playing a longer game here, right? And they've played games with
0:15:55the federal government before, right? The last year with the, you know, the whole iPhone FBI
0:16:00thing, right? They're, you know, they know that this is not just going to end, you know,
0:16:06with a snap of the fingers.
0:16:07Well, and there was also, now that there are the--
0:16:09it's inevitable, now that they are the biggest--
0:16:13at least for now, the biggest company by market cap.
0:16:16And there's only a handful of companies
0:16:18within spitting distance, Alphabet being, I think,
0:16:22number two.
0:16:24ExxonMobil looks like they might have a good eight years,
0:16:26four years at least.
0:16:27Mm-hmm.
0:16:30But now that they're big, now that they're big,
0:16:32now that they're big, though, they're obviously
0:16:35in the crosshairs of antitrust type stuff,
0:16:39which we saw with the iBooks thing,
0:16:41which I roll my eyes at because of the whole fact
0:16:44that the iBook store was never the dominant seller.
0:16:48They were.
0:16:49- Yeah, that's--
0:16:50- They were, at every point along the way,
0:16:52way smaller than Amazon.
0:16:54But I would almost point that as that was Amazon.
0:16:57It was Amazon who played the Justice Department,
0:16:59and it was Apple's sort of disinterest
0:17:03and uninvolvement in that game
0:17:07that let them be painted in that corner.
0:17:09- I think that's where they started realizing
0:17:10that Washington is a game, right?
0:17:13- Right.
0:17:13- That's--
0:17:14- Right, because it's true.
0:17:15It's beyond, you know,
0:17:17Amazon had the Justice Department's ear.
0:17:19And I'm not saying it's corrupt.
0:17:21I'm saying that it was a mistake.
0:17:23- We look at that situation purely from technical,
0:17:25a technical point of view, right?
0:17:28That, you know, we're engineers, right?
0:17:30we see who's making what money
0:17:33and what kind of money they're charging
0:17:36and how the system works.
0:17:37And that's not how Washington works at all.
0:17:42It's more emotions and politics and leverage
0:17:46and that kind of thing.
0:17:48So yeah, in fact, that's probably what this,
0:17:52they went into this meeting with,
0:17:54it's like, okay, how am I gonna survive
0:17:59what's going on here, right?
0:18:01Let's, you know, number one,
0:18:03I mean, did everybody who attended that meeting
0:18:05know who else was gonna be there?
0:18:07- I believe so, yes. - Yeah.
0:18:09And it's interesting.
0:18:12- Especially since it was such a small invitation list.
0:18:16- Yeah, I found it interesting, you know,
0:18:18of the invites, three of them were women.
0:18:21Ginny Rometty, the CEO Oracle, and Sheryl Sandberg.
0:18:27- All right.
0:18:28- Right, Zuckerberg did not attend.
0:18:29Sandberg attended as the representative of Facebook.
0:18:33Which I think is, I don't even think it was
0:18:38just to seat a woman at the table.
0:18:42I think that my understanding,
0:18:44again, I don't follow Facebook anywhere near as closely
0:18:46as I do Apple or some other companies.
0:18:48But I think it's representative of her role there.
0:18:53I think it's very fair to say that she is to Zuck
0:18:57what Cook was to Steve Jobs.
0:18:59- Yep.
0:19:00- That more than, a lot more than a typical COO,
0:19:04more of a partner.
0:19:05I've said this many times on the show, many, many times,
0:19:09but I believe it as much now as I ever did,
0:19:12that during, especially, I would say,
0:19:16like from the iPhone on especially,
0:19:18but at some point, I believe, well, maybe even before that,
0:19:23but at some point, Cook clearly had Jobs' trust,
0:19:27And I really do think that if you described Tim Cook's day
0:19:30to day activities at Apple to somebody who didn't know
0:19:33the company and you said, what position do you think
0:19:35this person has, that most people would say,
0:19:36well, that sounds like he's the CEO.
0:19:38That Steve Jobs was really more like a day to day
0:19:41head of product and Tim Cook ran the company.
0:19:45And I think Sheryl Sandberg has that same role
0:19:47where Zuckerberg can focus his time entirely on product
0:19:52and she handles all this other stuff that needs to be
0:19:56handled when you're as big and influential as Facebook.
0:19:59- And the advantage for those people who are charged
0:20:02with the innovation and developing the product
0:20:04is that they get to think about things
0:20:06that are important to them.
0:20:07And there's a lot of stuff about running a company
0:20:11that people like that don't wanna do, right?
0:20:15So they're essential in that regard, right?
0:20:18That they're the ones that keep the machine running.
0:20:23And that's probably a more appropriate person
0:20:28to send to a meeting with Trump
0:20:29than somebody who's innovative and passionate
0:20:34and potentially gonna say something
0:20:38that's damaging to the company.
0:20:40- Well, here's this.
0:20:42So I wrote this, and I don't like to trot out
0:20:45the what if Steve Jobs were still around thing too often,
0:20:48'cause I think it can be so overused.
0:20:51But I do--
0:20:52Oh, god, that would have been beautiful.
0:20:55Well--
0:20:55Well, probably not.
0:20:58I had an interesting discussion on Twitter about it.
0:21:00And I think everybody-- it was me and Matt Drance and Dr.
0:21:06Wave from Pixar, a couple other people.
0:21:10And I think we were all in complete agreement
0:21:12that if Steve Jobs-- in the alternate universe
0:21:14where Steve Jobs was still healthy
0:21:16and was still at Apple-- if he were at that meeting,
0:21:20it would have been fascinating.
0:21:21at least as soon as the press left the room.
0:21:24And then there were reports--
0:21:28I will add that there were reports
0:21:30that two of the attendees, Cook and Musk,
0:21:33got private meetings with Trump afterwards.
0:21:36So maybe the fireworks would have happened in that meeting
0:21:39if Steve Jobs had a private meeting with Trump.
0:21:42But there is absolutely no way--
0:21:46damn the torpedoes.
0:21:48there is no way Steve Jobs was kowtowing to Trump.
0:21:52No.
0:21:52And I don't think Cook kowtowed either.
0:21:54No, no, no, no.
0:21:55But I think the difference--
0:21:56I think the difference, though, is
0:21:57that Cook could bite his tongue and Steve Jobs couldn't,
0:22:01I think.
0:22:01That's what I'm saying about the passion that's
0:22:04involved with innovation, right?
0:22:06That's a much harder thing to hold back.
0:22:09Tim Cook, he's a guy who negotiates contracts and stuff.
0:22:12He knows when to shut up.
0:22:14But I think there's a good chance--
0:22:16and Dr. Wave and Durant, I think, agreed
0:22:19that even in the alternate universe
0:22:20where Steve Jobs is still at Apple,
0:22:22Cook was the one who would go to that meeting
0:22:24in the same way that Sheryl Sandberg went to.
0:22:25- Exactly, yeah, no, no doubt in my mind
0:22:27that that would happen because, you know,
0:22:29Steve Jobs was self-aware enough to know that,
0:22:32yes, he had that streak and that streak
0:22:36can be used for good, it can also be used for evil, right?
0:22:41And, you know, that's--
0:22:44Well, I think it's caution on the part of Apple.
0:22:47And then on the other hand, I also
0:22:49think it would have been a strategic way to not give Trump
0:22:53what he wanted, which is that--
0:22:55I mean, Tim Cook is well known.
0:22:57I mean, he's the biggest--
0:23:00he's very well known.
0:23:02But he is nowhere near as famous as Steve Jobs.
0:23:04Yeah.
0:23:04No way there.
0:23:04Yeah, the day before Kanye West was having a meeting with him,
0:23:07right?
0:23:08That's the level of person that he wants
0:23:10to be associated with, right?
0:23:12If you paid Gallup to go around the country and get 10,000 random people and ask them
0:23:18who Tim Cook is, I don't know what the awareness is. It's certainly higher than most people
0:23:25and most CEOs, but if you ask them who Steve Jobs is, it's practically up at like Walt
0:23:29Disney levels.
0:23:30Right. Yeah. They could describe what it looks like. Yeah. That's absolutely true.
0:23:38sending Steve Jobs would have been a way to sort of lessen Apple's involvement in the
0:23:43dog and pony show of it, whereas sending Tim Cook doesn't really do anything in that regard.
0:23:48It's a little bit of a way to give Trump the finger too, right? Just, "No, we're
0:23:52not sending our best person. We're sending our second best person."
0:23:56Bezos was there. You said Ginni Rometty from IBM. Larry Page. Google had two people. Well,
0:24:06Alphabet, whatever. Larry Page and what's his name? Schmidt, Eric Schmidt. And Microsoft
0:24:13had two, Satya Nadella and then Brad, whatever his name is, their COO. It was weird that
0:24:21Microsoft and Google got two and Apple only got one. And I wonder if that was by choice,
0:24:26if Apple had—and Cook was like, "No, we don't need another one."
0:24:31Yeah, that's what I was saying. It was interesting to know how that list of people was chosen.
0:24:39Did they sort of self-choose, or were they asked specifically?
0:24:44Like, did the companies get an invitation and they got to choose who to go, or were the invitations to people?
0:24:50Probably just to the companies, I think.
0:24:52Well, it looked like there were a fixed number of seats around that table, and that table kind of dictated how many people were going to be there.
0:25:00we're gonna be there. So, you know, maybe that's why Jack Dorsey wasn't there. There just,
0:25:05you know, wasn't another seat. You know, you don't know. I suspect not, though. It's the vindictive
0:25:11angle. Well, there's two things, though. There's a couple angles on that. One, the angle in favor of
0:25:18Dorsey being there would be that Trump has made more use of Twitter far more than he did Facebook.
0:25:23I mean, and it's—I mean, I don't even think it's close. I don't even know if he'd—you know,
0:25:28his campaign has a presence on Facebook, but personally, he's all Twitter.
0:25:32His Facebook feed is not on Bloomberg. His Twitter feed is on Bloomberg. That's the bottom line.
0:25:39But the other thing, too, is it does seem there's a case to be made—I think Gabe Rivera made it
0:25:47first. Gabe is the guy who runs the excellent tech meme news aggregator—that it seems as though the
0:25:55invitation list was sorted in order of market cap. That it was just not, you know, in terms
0:26:01of who got invited or not, it's the, you know, six or seven biggest by market cap tech companies.
0:26:07And by that measure, Twitter isn't even close because their stock is deeply depressed. I mean,
0:26:12they're not even in the ballpark if market cap. And in their remarks, in Trump's own remarks at
0:26:19at the meeting. He even mentioned that his way of bragging about the meeting was that
0:26:25he said he didn't want to talk about the—he wasn't going to mention the hundreds of
0:26:28companies that called asking for a seat at this table, and that there were ones—and
0:26:33that Peter, meaning Peter Thiel, kept saying, "No, they're too small. They're too
0:26:36small." And small meaning market cap, I think. So that was how they measured. So by
0:26:45that measure, Twitter had no chance.
0:26:46Yeah, so they weren't measuring by influence, they were measuring by money.
0:26:50But is that smart? I don't know.
0:26:52Well, that kind of goes back to Ben Thompson's point, right? You know, it's like the smaller
0:26:57companies are often the ones that are doing more interesting stuff and the stuff that affects the
0:27:01future and that drives the economy forward over the years.
0:27:05Well, and the government certainly shouldn't play a central role in determining that.
0:27:08Anyway, the other story that came out was that Twitter did not get invited because of
0:27:14a dispute from this summer that Twitter sells these things called branded emoji.
0:27:20They call branded emoji and we can, I can go on our side rant about the use of emoji
0:27:25in that context in a moment, but the gist of it is that a sponsor can buy a hashtag
0:27:31and then when people tweet that hashtag they automatically get a emoji or a little sticker,
0:27:40an illustration behind it. So for example, right now if you tweet the hashtag #RogueOne,
0:27:46you get a little Death Star image after the thing. Now I wasn't aware of this because,
0:27:53like anybody with any kind of cooth or taste, I use a third-party Twitter client
0:27:58on everywhere, oh just about everywhere, and these things are only visible in Twitter's own
0:28:04Twitter apps and this stupid-ass ugly Twitter website. So I wasn't aware of this, but apparently
0:28:10over the summer, the Trump campaign wanted to buy one for #CrookedHillary. And who even knows what
0:28:17the icon would have been? I think they said they wanted it to be a bag of money flying away or
0:28:22something like that. I don't know. And Twitter declined to accept the sponsorship. Apparently,
0:28:30Jack, maybe Jack Dorsey himself put the nicks on it. And that the Trump campaign hasn't forgotten it.
0:28:39I don't think that's it though. I'm not sure that it, I'm sure it didn't help because I think they
0:28:43are vindictive, petty people, but I don't really, I think that the market cap angle was a bigger
0:28:51one. I think, yeah, now that you mentioned that, it's probably Peter Thiel had more influence on
0:28:57who was at that table than Trump himself. It really sounded, it sounded like Trump's own
0:29:03remarks that it was really largely just, you know, there was a list of finalists and Trump
0:29:09ran them by Teal and Teal said yes, yes, no, no, no, no, yes, yes, don't.
0:29:15Or vice versa, right? Maybe Teal had the list and Trump...
0:29:17Yeah, it sounded more like it was Teal who was given the yeses and no. I mean, obviously,
0:29:23if Trump had said, "I want Twitter," it would have happened.
0:29:25Yeah. As tech people, we have a different view on all of this. You know, it's like this Russian
0:29:31hacking thing, right? It's like, you know, that to me is totally, you know, the first hint of that
0:29:38was like, oh yeah, because anybody who's run a server has seen, you know, IP addresses from,
0:29:45you know, the Eastern block pinging our servers, you know, looking for, you know, WP login pages,
0:29:52PHP, my admin, you know, it's just, it's just like, they're just, they're looking for
0:29:59weighs into what you're doing and you know that that that did you see the
0:30:05effect of the presidential election is just you know it's you know again back to the fairness
0:30:13argument you know how in the hell is that fair did you see that uh among all of the
0:30:20just like series of unfortunate events that all just happened to break the wrong way for the
0:30:27or the Clinton campaign.
0:30:28It was just one thing after another,
0:30:30and it just all broke the wrong way.
0:30:34But one of them was that when John Podesta
0:30:37got the phishing email, and it was forwarded on to somebody,
0:30:41like, "What's going on with this?"
0:30:42And the person on the staff who evaluated it
0:30:45wanted to write back, "This email is illegitimate.
0:30:48"John should change his passwords immediately."
0:30:52But instead wrote inadvertently,
0:30:55this email is legitimate, John should change his passwords immediately. And so apparently
0:31:00because it said that he used the link in the email to change his password.
0:31:04All right. And that this person who wrote, made this mistake and wrote legitimate where they
0:31:11wanted to write illegitimate. Right. Yeah. A couple of letters on the keyboard that we've all
0:31:19made the mistake with, is you know heartbroken and is apparently crushed.
0:31:27And you know the flip side of it, okay yeah they hacked the Democrats, well do you think
0:31:34they hacked the Republicans too? It's widely, that's actually, you know they haven't leaked,
0:31:41but it's actually, I mean this isn't speculation, but it's actually.
0:31:44Yeah, that to me is leverage and blackmail and all the other nasty shit. So, you know,
0:31:50this is an issue. It's clearly a non-partisan issue, right?
0:31:58Well, it should be, yes.
0:32:00Yes, it should be. And if you try to say that this is, oh, the Democrats are just, you know,
0:32:05sour grapes, it's like, oh, that's bullshit. This affects everybody, right? This is, you know,
0:32:11again, it goes back to the fairness, you know, that our government should be a level playing
0:32:16field. Yes, there are two teams, right? And they compete against each other. But if the fucking
0:32:22playing field isn't level, we got a problem. I don't want to be too histrionic about it, but
0:32:28it does fundamentally come down to whether the parties see themselves as two opposing parties
0:32:36within one nation or they view each other as their enemies. And the Democrats clearly still
0:32:44see the Republicans as their opposition and the Republicans see the Democrats as their enemy.
0:32:49And that's, again, I don't mean to be histrionic. It sounds, if you happen to be of conservative
0:32:55bent and you think that that's just me being a liberal, you can see it in the polls,
0:32:58where a poll came out today of what's your net positive or negative on the following people. And
0:33:04and they asked a survey of Republicans in the United States.
0:33:08It was like Barack Obama was a negative 64, net negative.
0:33:14Hillary Clinton was a net negative 77,
0:33:17and Vladimir Putin was negative 10.
0:33:20(laughing)
0:33:21- Right.
0:33:22- So Vladimir Putin is 54 points more popular
0:33:27among Republicans than Barack Obama.
0:33:30I mean, it's no joke or kidding or exaggeration
0:33:34that the Republican Party largely sees the Democrats as more of their enemy than they do the
0:33:41Russians, which is nuts, especially for people of our age where the Republicans were the ones
0:33:49who were the hardline realists. Oh, geez, I was just gonna say, you know, Ronald Reagan is rolling
0:33:54over in his grave. Well, as a kid and a teenager, when I first, you know, became politically aware
0:34:00and I was a news junkie, I viewed myself more as a Republican than a Democrat because I thought that
0:34:06the Republicans were the party of, you know, to put it succinctly, the party of the cold hard truth
0:34:15and that the Democrats were more of a saw what they wished for party.
0:34:20You know, and that the main issue at the time wasn't something like climate change
0:34:27or a few other things where it comes up,
0:34:31but climate change is a perfect example today,
0:34:33where one party is looking at facts
0:34:35and the other party is just believing
0:34:37what they want to be true.
0:34:38But at the time, the preeminent issue was the Cold War,
0:34:42because it was, hey, if this turns out poorly,
0:34:45we're all dead.
0:34:47- We're screwed, yeah.
0:34:48- Right, we're all dead.
0:34:49- This is a game with no winners.
0:34:52- And it seemed to me like the Republicans were the,
0:34:56I think history has shown it to be true, that the Republicans were the ones who looked at it with,
0:35:01you know, just—
0:35:03Cold hard facts, yeah.
0:35:05Right. So it's ridiculous to me that they've now become the party that's like, "Ah, Russia,
0:35:11good people!" Well, maybe they are good people, but Russian government leadership, "Ah, good people!"
0:35:17Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, that they have to, you know, it's a win-at-all-cost
0:35:26kind of situation for them, right? And the problem I have is that those costs are going up
0:35:32in ways that hurt our society and hurt our government. I mean, I'm at odds with many people
0:35:40in my family now because of this. I'm sure that's true for a lot of people. And it sucks, but, you
0:35:48know, they had to vote for their Republican person because, you know, and the fact that
0:35:55the people that are celebrating the Trump win include the Ku Klux Klan and evangelical
0:36:10Christians in the same group. I mean, what is wrong there? All right. Well, you start to get
0:36:16get the feeling that maybe the evangelical Christian base,
0:36:20maybe Christianity isn't their,
0:36:24you just start to think maybe it's not their top priority.
0:36:28- Our faith that people are inherently good, we're screwed.
0:36:35- Well, let me use that as a segue to talk about
0:36:40Harry's Razors.
0:36:42This is, now look, this show's coming out tonight,
0:36:44December 16th.
0:36:45This is a gift that you can get.
0:36:47You've got time.
0:36:48If you're listening to this show tonight on the 16th,
0:36:51you can even still get ground shipping.
0:36:53After tonight, you're gonna have to pay for air shipping.
0:36:56But you can get this as a gift for the holidays still.
0:36:59You gotta act.
0:37:00I hope you're listening to this show
0:37:01while it's hot off the press.
0:37:03Press it onto the 45 record
0:37:04or whatever you're using to listen to this show.
0:37:07But if you act quick, you can do it.
0:37:10You can go to harrys.com and get an order in.
0:37:15Now, why would this make a good gift?
0:37:17Well, one of the reasons is it's a great product.
0:37:19I've said this before.
0:37:19They make nice handles, really, really great.
0:37:22Nice blades.
0:37:23They own their own razor blade factory.
0:37:24This is how they get the prices down.
0:37:26This is how they keep the quality up.
0:37:28They're not just like buying white label razor blades
0:37:31and putting Harry's name on them.
0:37:32They own a razor blade factory over in Germany.
0:37:35They make their own.
0:37:36There's no middlemen, no distributors,
0:37:39no markup on the way to retail.
0:37:43It's just they make 'em.
0:37:44They package them, they sell them to you.
0:37:47So it's a great product.
0:37:48And they've got good shaving cream and stuff like that.
0:37:51They've got, what do they have here?
0:37:52A limited edition set.
0:37:53If you haven't heard of them before,
0:37:55you can get this set.
0:37:58It comes with a razor handle of your choice,
0:38:00shaving cream, replacement blades,
0:38:02and a nice little travel cover.
0:38:04They have something called the Winston set
0:38:06that includes an engraveable chrome handle
0:38:08if you want to add a personalized touch.
0:38:11The other reason these things make a nice gift
0:38:14is that the packaging is so nice.
0:38:16So you can wrap this up and when people open it,
0:38:18it's not like you're giving them one of these
0:38:20blister pack razor blades that you'd get at a drug store
0:38:23where it looks, you know, this looks like you've bought them
0:38:25like a nice thing.
0:38:26Like even if, you don't even know what's inside.
0:38:28It's just like this cool box.
0:38:30It's not like a blister pack where you've got to go get
0:38:32a razor blade just to open the damn thing up.
0:38:34It's a nice box with a nice lid.
0:38:36I've said before, it's the type of packaging
0:38:39that's so good that I feel bad throwing it out
0:38:41and I have to defeat my sort of natural inclination
0:38:44to be a pack rat and keep it.
0:38:45Like why in the world would I keep an empty box
0:38:47that had razor blades in it?
0:38:49Stupid, but it's so nice, it always pains me
0:38:52as I toss it into the bathroom trash can.
0:38:55It's a great, great product.
0:38:56So if you're listening tonight,
0:38:59you can still get ground shipping,
0:39:01otherwise you gotta pay for air shipping
0:39:04if you wanna get this as a gift.
0:39:06But you can go to harrys.com
0:39:08and you can use the code talk show,
0:39:09just plain talk show, know the,
0:39:11and you'll get five bucks off if you use that code
0:39:15at checkout, talk show, know the at harrys.com.
0:39:18Go there, check it out.
0:39:20If you've got anybody on your list
0:39:22who needs a last minute gift,
0:39:23you can hurry up and get that in.
0:39:25My thanks to them.
0:39:26Great product.
0:39:28All right, I'm done talking about politics.
0:39:31Let's have fun.
0:39:31- Yeah, thank you.
0:39:33- Trump stuff is no fun.
0:39:35- Well, it's no fun, but we've gotta deal with it.
0:39:38- We gotta deal with it.
0:39:38You can't put your head in the sand,
0:39:39And that's the reason why I think,
0:39:41that's the reason I think I just put it both on this topic.
0:39:44That's the reason why I think it was right
0:39:46that Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos and Satya Nadella
0:39:48and whoever else went to the meeting,
0:39:50is you can't put your head in the sand.
0:39:52You can't just put your fingers in your ears
0:39:54and go, "La la la, I don't want this guy
0:39:56"to be the president."
0:39:58You gotta look at it.
0:39:59You gotta stare it right in the eyes,
0:40:01pretending that it didn't happen.
0:40:02- Exactly, stay angry and don't let it get normalized.
0:40:06Because this is not normal.
0:40:08no matter, you know, anybody who says it's all, you know,
0:40:11it'll all play out well.
0:40:12And I was like, no, this is not gonna play out well.
0:40:15I just hope, I hope we're around in four years
0:40:17to have another election.
0:40:20Because you know, you see this shit happening
0:40:22with you know, China right now.
0:40:23It's like, oh, Jesus, this is not where we wanna go.
0:40:28It's like, for my parents' generation,
0:40:30that happened in Cuba, right?
0:40:32And people freaked out.
0:40:35Well, hey, guess what?
0:40:36It's this generation's chance
0:40:38to have that little freak out moment.
0:40:40But yeah, let's not talk about politics anymore.
0:40:42- I've got one thing that's even less fun.
0:40:44It's even less fun than Trump,
0:40:46and I have to talk about it.
0:40:48No fun at all.
0:40:49Super Mario Run came out.
0:40:50(laughing)
0:40:53- And my God, it's got an in-app purchase.
0:40:56Oh my God.
0:40:57- So Super Mario Run came out yesterday.
0:41:00Here's how it works.
0:41:02I think it was a mystery.
0:41:02I don't think it was announced how exactly,
0:41:05I think the only thing we knew was that it was gonna be a free download with a couple of levels to play for free
0:41:08And then you'd have to buy it
0:41:10So the way it works is free download you get three levels to play after that you need to buy it and it's ten bucks
0:41:16But the way that they're doing the in-app purchase is such that the ten bucks is per device
0:41:21I think I don't think I think if I had an iPad, I think I'd stuff
0:41:25I've I've heard a complaint from one of my colleagues Sean Heber
0:41:29It said that he had to buy it for himself and his three kids
0:41:34He's got three boys that want to play it and you know, it's a $40 game for him now from Nintendo's perspective
0:41:40That's the way it's always worked
0:41:42Right, if you if you have a 3ds and your kids have a 3ds and you want to play this game
0:41:49You could you know at the same time you could you'd all have to buy your own version of it now
0:41:55When it was cartridges you could like share the cartridge
0:41:58But then only one of you could play it at a time and there's no way to do that with an in-app purchase
0:42:03You can't have an in-app purchase that says your whole family can use this app
0:42:06But only one of you can use it at a time just doesn't work that way
0:42:09so from Nintendo's perspective this isn't that unusual and
0:42:13They don't sell $10 games for the 3ds
0:42:17This would be like a 40 or $50 game for the 3ds
0:42:19But on the other hand before anybody even says it and writes to me don't write to me
0:42:23I understand that even with the purchase this entire game is probably less expansive than a typical 3ds game that it's smaller
0:42:31Whatever. I can't get ten bucks is so little
0:42:33Honestly, I do get it and that there's family sharing we use it. We've got a lot of stuff on the family sharing here
0:42:40In this particular case, I can't blame it. I I want Nintendo to make money on this I do
0:42:46Yeah
0:42:49I'd love to see a lot of game developers make money
0:42:51But yeah, no argument from me that ten dollars is a per device is a premium price for an iPhone game
0:42:57But honestly, I've played this game for a day now. It's a premium game
0:43:00It is a premium game. So yeah, and and and the the problem right now though is that there are a lot of people who have been
0:43:07Indoctrinated into the you know, well, I can earn coins to get what I want, right?
0:43:13It shouldn't cost me anything and they're the ones that are complaining about, you know, just this game, right?
0:43:19It's the I mean we'd all love it as developers. We would all love it if people just paid for the thing
0:43:24Right. That's what we all want. Just just spend your money
0:43:29If you like it buy it and
0:43:32In instead we're jumping through all these hoops, you know doing you know
0:43:36things that make people look like they're not spending money because we call them coins instead of dollars and you know, that's
0:43:44It's all you know the deception and and you know kudos to the endo for just saying hey
0:43:51It's gonna cost you ten dollars
0:43:54Deal with it
0:43:56Yeah, and the three levels that they let you play before you are asked for a nickel I think are indicative of the
0:44:04The gameplay and they even show you on a there's like a complete level
0:44:10they show you that there's six worlds of four levels each and
0:44:14So you get through the first three levels of the first world before you have to pay to continue
0:44:18You both have it
0:44:19You both have a very fair
0:44:21Idea of what the game is like to play and you also have a very fair idea of how much is unlocked
0:44:27Right when you pay the ten bucks you to me it's a very fair deal and I think
0:44:34You know again, you know and if you've got you know, somebody's out there surely has three or four kids, you know
0:44:41And it's like hey, it's you know
0:44:43You're telling me it's $60 purchase for my kids and my wife and I to play this I understand that you know that that's
0:44:49it's a lot of money for an iPhone game.
0:44:52But, you know, I'd much rather have Nintendo doing this
0:44:57and having it as a fair upfront price
0:45:00than to see Nintendo succumb to the, you know,
0:45:03keep putting $2 in to buy a bag of coins to keep going,
0:45:07you know, or to get past this log jam.
0:45:10You know, this level is for all intents and purposes
0:45:13unbeatable unless you've got a thousand coins
0:45:16and you can only really have a thousand coins
0:45:17if you pay us three bucks.
0:45:20Or go watch a bunch of ads
0:45:23or whatever the hell these other games make you do.
0:45:26It's not like that.
0:45:27And to me, as somebody, I'm not a diehard gamer.
0:45:32I'm probably the opposite.
0:45:33I actually probably spend a lot less time
0:45:35playing video games than the average person my age.
0:45:39And probably for someone who's interested in technology
0:45:41and computers, I'm probably way at the bottom
0:45:43in terms of how much time I spend playing games.
0:45:46I get the impression you're probably the same as me.
0:45:49- I went through my childhood
0:45:50before Nintendo became a thing, right?
0:45:52I don't get Mario or any of the, you know,
0:45:56that whole '80s gaming thing,
0:46:01because in the '80s, I was 20 years old
0:46:03and had begun an adult life, so yeah.
0:46:07- Do you have an Atari, or were you too old for Atari?
0:46:09- Yeah, no, a friend of mine had an Atari,
0:46:11but it was just the Pong
0:46:12and all the other kinda crappy games.
0:46:15And at the same time that that was happening,
0:46:19I was also discovering computers.
0:46:21So it's like, I could write my own computer games.
0:46:23Why the hell am I sitting in front of the TV,
0:46:27fiddling with this little dial?
0:46:28It's like, oh man, I got a basic interpreter.
0:46:31This is way better.
0:46:32- Right, I understand the feeling exactly.
0:46:36Yeah, I could be making something.
0:46:38- And that's, and I'm glad it happened that way.
0:46:40It made me who I am.
0:46:43- Yeah, I have an on-off.
0:46:45I've never been a huge Nintendo fan. I never liked I didn't like the NES and in my college years
0:46:50there was the
0:46:53Not the n64 super nintendo super nintendo was the one of the early 90s early and mid 90s
0:47:01I had a sega genesis which was I thought the superior system
0:47:05uh, at least for the type of games I wanted to play like john madden football and the
0:47:09the nhl hockey game
0:47:13and uh... sages version of mario was uh... sonic the hedgehog
0:47:17uh... right now is the t_t_t_ scroller
0:47:20uh... i did have an end sixty four which i liked a lot
0:47:24uh...
0:47:25later on
0:47:26to probably the last console i really played a lot of our guest had original
0:47:29xbox to i played that sometimes how old were you and jonas as a kid
0:47:34when what
0:47:35how old were you and playing these games
0:47:37uh... sega genesis was my college years so that i'll take ninety one to ninety
0:47:41six right
0:47:43roughly, that was a 32-bit system or was it 16?
0:47:48- So you're sitting in a dorm room,
0:47:51it's a thing to party with, right?
0:47:53- Yeah, exactly, it was a big dorm room thing.
0:47:57And it's partly because the EA Sports games,
0:48:02I don't even know that they had them for Nintendo
0:48:04or Super Nintendo, and if they did, they were inferior.
0:48:07Like the Sega Genesis was better at the sports games.
0:48:12And that was what we all played each other.
0:48:13That was what we played nonstop.
0:48:16N64 was good though.
0:48:17There was this Goldeneye game.
0:48:19Anybody who had it knows exactly what I'm talking about.
0:48:21And anybody, it was a 3D shooter and you'd play,
0:48:24you could play against your roommate.
0:48:27And it was split screen.
0:48:29So you each got like, you'd split the screen.
0:48:32Because it was a four to three screen, it was,
0:48:34I forget if it was horizontal
0:48:36and you got like a real wide angle thing
0:48:39or if it was side to side.
0:48:40I think it was--
0:48:41I actually forget.
0:48:44True story.
0:48:45True story.
0:48:45I had a roommate-- my first year after college,
0:48:47I had a roommate, Don, and we played--
0:48:51we had an N64.
0:48:52And that was when the PlayStation first came out,
0:48:55the original PlayStation.
0:48:57And what we used to do was rent video games.
0:49:00You could go to-- you had to get a disc.
0:49:02So you'd go to Blockbuster, and you
0:49:03could rent a game for four days for, I don't know,
0:49:06five bucks, four bucks.
0:49:08way cheaper than buying $60 games, right?
0:49:11We didn't have the money to buy a bunch of $60 games.
0:49:13The renting thing was awesome.
0:49:15So we had an N64.
0:49:17- Basically, you binge on the game
0:49:19and you're getting the content for
0:49:2310th of the price. - So we'd go to Blockbuster
0:49:28and you'd look and like the PlayStation section
0:49:31had all of these awesome games,
0:49:33like at the time, realistic car racing games
0:49:37and shooters and all of these awesome games.
0:49:41And then the Nintendo section had like seven titles,
0:49:43and most of them were like for little kids.
0:49:46[LAUGHTER]
0:49:48But then GoldenEye came out, and GoldenEye fixed everything.
0:49:51Effectively, our N64 turned into a dedicated GoldenEye box.
0:49:56It was a good one-player game.
0:49:58It had a very long campaign where
0:50:00you played James Bond going through the GoldenEye movie
0:50:03scenario.
0:50:04really good first player, you know, one player mode. And then the two player thing was just
0:50:09unbelievably fun. Unbelievably fun. And eventually I got just every, it was one of the only games
0:50:14I ever got pretty good at. And I got ever so slightly better than Don was like, this
0:50:19is after maybe a whole year of playing. And I was always a fraction of a section a second
0:50:25quicker than him. And it got to the point where he couldn't beat, you know, we used
0:50:28to be like 50/50. And then it was, I somehow gained like I leveled up a little bit and
0:50:33He couldn't beat me and one time he threw this controller out the window and we lived on the third floor
0:50:37But it was the most satisfying victory ever right what could be more satisfying than making your friend throw his controller out the window
0:50:47Yeah, but then at that point you're pretty much done with the game, right because the guy knows he can never win again
0:50:52And you know, it's like okay. Why play?
0:50:55Yeah, but anyway, then my other experience with Nintendo is we had the Wii the one the first, you know, not the Wii
0:51:01We have the Wii U2 that we never played.
0:51:03The Wii was great.
0:51:04The one where you'd have the...
0:51:06Basically the physical games were awesome.
0:51:09Right.
0:51:10It just got people moving around. I thought that was fun.
0:51:12Right, and that was how Jonas learned to play video games.
0:51:14We had that when he was, I don't know, three or four or something like that.
0:51:19That's another one where you can throw the controller,
0:51:22but not necessarily because you meant to.
0:51:25Right.
0:51:26We have these...
0:51:27Jonas and I laugh about it because Jonas is very much into video games now
0:51:30games now and he's almost 13, is that when we first started playing, there's a great,
0:51:36great series of games, these LEGO games, where you play as a LEGO character from movies and
0:51:42you go through and, you know, like the one that we played, the first one was the LEGO
0:51:48Star Wars and it's this game and it had all six of the original Star Wars movies, meaning
0:51:54the first three from the 80s, then the prequels.
0:51:59And each one was broken up into six adventures.
0:52:03So you had 36 adventures to go through from all of the Star Wars movies.
0:52:07And you just play as two characters at the same time on screen.
0:52:09And you go through and smash things up and take the bricks
0:52:13and rebuild them into other things.
0:52:14And it was very, very-- just very fun, very, very kid-friendly,
0:52:18but very fun for me as an adult to play, too.
0:52:20But the funny thing was that when we first started playing it--
0:52:22I don't know if Jonas was three or four, probably around four, was that
0:52:26It's sort of like an isomorphic perspective
0:52:32Isometric, right? Yeah, isometric perspective the game and
0:52:36Jonas just had tremendous trouble
0:52:39Like if you had to walk on it, you had to get your character to walk on a cat walk diagonally, right?
0:52:45Not even like a tightrope, but you know
0:52:47But like a three character wide catwalk that was at a 45 degree angle
0:52:52He would just keep falling off and it's one of these games read
0:52:55You don't probably think he probably didn't have the spatial capabilities in his brain. Yeah, right, right
0:52:59That's just right being able to say to project that
0:53:03Into his mind. Yeah and and to transfer it into a movement with his thumb, right?
0:53:09Oh, right
0:53:10and it's one of these games or one of part of that part of what made it so much fun to play with a little
0:53:14kid is that you don't run out of lives and have to start the level over. Every time you die,
0:53:20you just lose some of the coins you've picked up, and it just shoots you back to, you know,
0:53:24five feet away from where you died. You just keep respawning, and all you lose are these coins.
0:53:30And when you finish the level with the most coins, it's an accomplishment. So, you know,
0:53:34finishing without dying gives you more coins, so there's an advantage to not dying,
0:53:40but you never actually have to start the level over. But there would be certain things where he
0:53:45just spatially couldn't navigate. And I think I'm a pretty patient father, but eventually it's like,
0:53:50"Just give me the controller." [laughter]
0:53:53- "Dad's gonna help you out here." - Right. And it wasn't like getting him past a boss
0:53:59villain. It was just getting him through a very narrow, hard-to-navigate little thing.
0:54:05And it's just very--
0:54:07it's very comical now when I try to play video games with him
0:54:10because it's actually the opposite.
0:54:12Yeah, I was going to say he's kicking your ass now, right?
0:54:15Because he's young, he's got good eyesight, good reflexes.
0:54:19Yeah, he's--
0:54:21What was it?
0:54:21It was a LEGO game, like LEGO Batman or something like that.
0:54:24And I was like, I'll play that with you.
0:54:26And I started playing, and it was clear
0:54:27that I was holding him back.
0:54:29Right.
0:54:31And he's not going to say anything.
0:54:32He loves you and everything.
0:54:34He's not going to hurt your feelings.
0:54:35but he's like, "Dad, just leave."
0:54:37- I was like, "Remember when you'd be the one
0:54:39holding me back?"
0:54:40And he'd be, he'd laugh.
0:54:40He had a good sense of humor about it.
0:54:42But it was very clear that I was the one holding him back.
0:54:45Anyway, I wish Nintendo the best.
0:54:48I think they're going to do very well with it.
0:54:50Complaints about the price aside.
0:54:52It does seem like they're being very aggressive
0:54:53on the trying to keep the,
0:54:55whatever countermeasures they've taken against piracy.
0:54:59It seems like they've done quite a bit.
0:55:02One of them being, and here's the one
0:55:04that's gonna affect honest people the most
0:55:06is the game does not play
0:55:08if you don't have a network connection.
0:55:10I tested it, it's very true.
0:55:12Like if you turn on airplane mode
0:55:13and try to start the game, it says,
0:55:15try to move somewhere
0:55:17where you have a better network connection.
0:55:19- Oh, that's not gonna play out well.
0:55:23I mean, as soon as somebody,
0:55:25it's like on launch day, you're not gonna notice that,
0:55:27but over time, you're gonna be wanting to play it
0:55:30in the subway, on an airplane.
0:55:33airplane right yeah well and it's funny people have even pointed out that at the
0:55:37announcement Miyamoto even said because it's totally playable one-handed that
0:55:43it's great to play in a subway now maybe and you know maybe he's thinking of I
0:55:48don't know I've never been to Tokyo but maybe Tokyo I wouldn't be surprised if
0:55:51it is one of those cities where the subways even part you'd be good a cell
0:55:55service yeah I noticed the last time up last trip to WWDC that that their cell
0:56:02service in BART now, from the airport to downtown, you pretty much have a network connection
0:56:08all the time.
0:56:09All right.
0:56:10But when this news came out that the game doesn't work without a network connection,
0:56:12a bunch of readers wrote to me and just said, "Well, my kid has an iPod Touch."
0:56:18Or the iPod Touch that an awful lot of kids have is a two- or three-year-old iPhone that
0:56:23doesn't have a SIM card.
0:56:25Just to hand me down, "Here's my—this was Dad's iPhone from two years ago.
0:56:30take the self, just take the SIM card out and you've got to, you know, hand me down iPod touch.
0:56:35Yeah, those devices.
0:56:37Yeah, and car trips. That's another, you know, you know.
0:56:40Yep, that's it. That's exactly it.
0:56:42Do you want it? And then, okay, okay, well, you have to set up a Wi-Fi hotspot just so
0:56:46the kids can play Nintendo.
0:56:47Right. Right. It's like, no thanks.
0:56:52Right. Okay, let's drain mom and dad's batteries so we can play Nintendo.
0:56:58And I saw something about the fact that the game has a lot of it doesn't seem to run on a lot of jail breaks
0:57:04uh, it seems which only makes me think that nintendo is specifically looking for signs of
0:57:11Common jail breaks and is refusing to run
0:57:14How are they gonna do that? That's a actually hard thing to do in a sandbox you've you know, yeah
0:57:20Apple might have looked the other way
0:57:23I wonder some of these things. I don't know
0:57:27I don't want to know, you know, not knowing how it works or anything, but that would be my first reaction. It's like, hmm
0:57:33Maybe there's my other question. My other question is
0:57:37It's it is iOS exclusive right now. It is apparently coming to Android eventually
0:57:42How long do you think until it comes out on Android?
0:57:44and the
0:57:46Google will probably want to use it like Apple did as a way to promote a new software release or something like that. I
0:57:54Could see it happening at the next I/O
0:57:56Or something, you know just like it played well at the iPhone 7 launch. It'll play well at some Google launch
0:58:03So I think that that would be your answer
0:58:06So maybe like six months, I don't know but is it all who's in six months? I don't know
0:58:10Yeah, who knows? I mean, it's that the half-life for games these days is pretty
0:58:15Pretty insane. It's it's like, you know Pokemon go right middle of summer. It was just everywhere
0:58:23In fact, you know, we had a deck down at the beach where you know, I go every day
0:58:26it's like there's there's one tree that everybody be standing under because that shade and
0:58:31Pokemon characters
0:58:34And it got to be kind of funny. It's like everybody walked by. Oh, yeah, that's the Pokemon spot, you know
0:58:38And and you you know, you'd talk to people there. Oh, yeah
0:58:40I'm waiting for the you know, you know the gym or whatever it is and oh my god
0:58:44I saw a thing on I saw a thing on Twitter
0:58:46I wish I had had it but it was the gist of it was somebody was like, oh my god
0:58:51I can't believe they had to put this sign up. Somebody was in like a museum or something.
0:58:55It was like a part where they were showing something really grave and serious. It was
0:58:59like relics from a concentration camp or something like that. Something really, really grave
0:59:07and serious. Like here's a bunch of artifacts from some kind of internment camp. I don't
0:59:12think it was the Holocaust, but something like that though, where a bunch of people
0:59:15were political prisoners and people died.
0:59:20And it went on a long time.
0:59:21And there was a sign up that said,
0:59:23"Please no Pokemon Go."
0:59:25- Right.
0:59:26- 'Cause you can only imagine,
0:59:28like a sign like that doesn't go up
0:59:29unless people were doing it.
0:59:31- Yeah. - You know, like somehow
0:59:32they're like-- - Yeah, they're reacting
0:59:33to something.
0:59:35- Yeah, right.
0:59:36- Well, I thought that in the middle of summer,
0:59:40one of the thoughts I had was like,
0:59:42what happens when it gets cold, right?
0:59:43all these people going out hunting for Pokemon.
0:59:45What the hell are they gonna do when it's raining
0:59:48or snowing or middle of a hurricane or whatever?
0:59:51And it's like, hmm.
0:59:54So they launched that in a really good time
0:59:57and maybe they had the expectation
1:00:01that it's gonna have six great months and then who knows?
1:00:06I think we're in the who knows right now.
1:00:09It's like maybe Mario on iOS
1:00:12is going to be the same way. I suspect not. There's a lot to be said for that brand.
1:00:18Same is true with Pokemon. It's a huge brand. A lot of nostalgia in that brand. I mean,
1:00:26that's the fact that you were talking about all your past consoles and the games you played.
1:00:34nostalgia is a powerful thing. And, you know, that's, it's interesting too that Mario is
1:00:45nostalgia that's getting passed on, right? There's a generation of kids now who are gonna grow up and
1:00:51their first encounter with Mario is gonna be, you know, on their iPhone or their iPad or their
1:00:59iPod Touch, you know, that's their beginning.
1:01:02And where's it gonna go from here?
1:01:04Who knows?
1:01:05- Yeah, the comparison, I think, is, you know,
1:01:08and it's obvious one that a thousand people have made before
1:01:11is to Mickey Mouse and the Donald Duck
1:01:15and the whole gang of characters that is so old
1:01:20that Disney literally has to keep petitioning
1:01:22the US federal government to keep extending
1:01:25the copyright expiration date
1:01:28because they're so old that they would have already passed
1:01:32into the public domain by now,
1:01:33and yet are completely relevant and popular.
1:01:36- And a good source of revenue.
1:01:39- Right, well.
1:01:40- I mean, they're usually popular for a reason, right?
1:01:45- Well, and one reason why that they've remained popular
1:01:48is that even under Walt Disney,
1:01:50I think it started with Walt,
1:01:51was don't be afraid to move them into new media.
1:01:55Just keep going up with technology.
1:01:57Don't say, well, Mickey's a movie star,
1:02:00so he's never gonna be on TV.
1:02:02No, we're gonna have a TV show
1:02:03and get everybody to watch it.
1:02:06I mean, it's one of my favorite stories,
1:02:07and it's one of the best comparisons
1:02:09between Walt Disney and Steve Jobs that I've ever seen,
1:02:12was that he was so willing to let go of the past
1:02:14and always hungry for the future,
1:02:16which was the, it goes against human nature.
1:02:19I mean, it even ties back to our discussion on Trump
1:02:22and those tech leaders,
1:02:23and Trump seeing his job as president
1:02:25as protecting the current top companies,
1:02:28as opposed to just keeping it fair
1:02:30and letting the revolution happen.
1:02:32Walt was, in the '50s when TV started to become a thing,
1:02:36the movie studios were totally disdainful of television
1:02:40and saw it as a lesser medium.
1:02:41I mean, we saw that until,
1:02:44really up until just a handful of years ago
1:02:46where being an actor in the movies
1:02:50was seen as way more serious than being an actor on TV.
1:02:53It really took until the last handful of years and shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men and Westworld,
1:03:00and Game of Thrones, where people see TV as being as good or even better than movies.
1:03:05Walt Disney, unlike all the other Hollywood studios, the way that Hollywood attacked the TV
1:03:11was by... and part of it is cool. I love CinemaScope and 70mm Prince. That's when movies switched from
1:03:19the 4.3 aspect ratio. 16 to 9 and the bigger, the bigger CinemaScope 2.1 widescreen and they built
1:03:28bigger screens that had curves and they'd start shooting in 70 millimeter. It was, "Okay, you want
1:03:33to have a little dinky, rinky-dink, you know, 19-inch black and white display with a lot of static
1:03:39on it. Well, we're gonna, you know, start shooting in color and we're gonna make it bigger." And that's
1:03:43a fine response, but it certainly didn't stop the march of progress with TV. Walt Disney, on the
1:03:47other hand was like, we'll keep making movies, but hell yeah, I want to I want to be I want
1:03:52Mickey Mouse on that TV.
1:03:53He I've always loved that quote of his where, you know, he made movies, so that he could
1:03:59make more movies, right? I know he made money. So he could Yeah, exactly. He made money on
1:04:04movies so that he could make more movies. And that's, TV was just another way for him
1:04:07to make money to make more cool things. Right. Right. And that's why I don't, you know, like,
1:04:14Nintendo I hope they do really well on on iOS because if they do they're gonna do more
1:04:18And they'll embrace don't make we don't make movies to make money. We make money to make movies. There you go
1:04:24Yes, and he met it, you know, you can roll your eyes, but he met it, right?
1:04:28Time that in is the recent announcement that Nintendo has signed a big big long-term deal with Universal to get
1:04:36Like Nintendo world into universals theme parks around the world. Sure
1:04:42Makes sense, which I am I'm looking forward to tremendously. I don't you've probably never been there but at Universal in Florida
1:04:49They have a big I don't know. I gotta be billion-dollar deal with the Harry Potter franchise, right?
1:04:54I've seen pictures of it. I've never been there. But yeah, it's and it looks great. I mean, yeah, we love nostalgia
1:05:00We were a madman fan a
1:05:04What ever wants to show mad madman Oh madman. Yeah, watch it. Yeah
1:05:10Yeah, oh, yeah, right, of course, yeah Don Draper and and that's
1:05:14That's probably where I got that from
1:05:17Nostalgia it's delicate but potent. Yeah, Teddy told me that in Greek nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound
1:05:25It's a twinge in your heart for more
1:05:28more powerful than memory alone
1:05:31That's nostalgia, yep, that's good writing
1:05:35yeah, that's the the one with the
1:05:39Kodak slide. It was like the first season, but it's the best episode.
1:05:46And you look at that Kodak thing, that was revolutionary at the time. And as kids growing
1:05:53up, we didn't have iPhotos and swiping through. We had, "Oh, let's put up the screen and
1:06:00stare at Dad's slides." And another example of a company that lost its way by protecting
1:06:08what it had rather than going to its future. They were making all their money from film,
1:06:12and they were... it's absolutely astounding when you look at how many of the foundations of digital
1:06:21photography started at Kodak, and the people that, you know, in charge at Kodak patted the engineers
1:06:27who had all these digital camera technologies ready to go, you know, and patted them on their
1:06:33in their head and said, "Nice work, boys,
1:06:34but we can't sell film."
1:06:36- Yeah, well, Polaroid.
1:06:37- We're not selling any film for digital cameras,
1:06:39so keep that in the labs.
1:06:41(laughing)
1:06:42- It didn't work out so well for them.
1:06:43- Exactly, it was actually Polaroid
1:06:45who came up with the first digital camera.
1:06:47Like, whoa, why didn't you guys follow through with that?
1:06:50- Kodak had so much of it.
1:06:51- Right, Polaroid and Kodak did so much work on it
1:06:54and never took it to market
1:06:55because it would have disrupted their own film business.
1:06:58- Well, it's- - Bottom line.
1:06:59- Xerox did the same thing, right?
1:07:01- So there's a line of companies that we remember fondly
1:07:06because they didn't do what Apple does,
1:07:10which is kill your babies.
1:07:12- Right, preaching to the choir here,
1:07:13but in 2006, the single most important product
1:07:16that Apple Computer made was their line of iPods.
1:07:21And it was very clear to anybody who looked at the iPhone
1:07:25with open eyes that, well, once you have one of these,
1:07:29you'll never buy an iPod again.
1:07:30Yep.
1:07:31Except maybe the cheap no screen one
1:07:34that you don't care about wearing in the pool, right?
1:07:37The one that doesn't actually make the company money.
1:07:39Right? Yeah.
1:07:40At the same time, I don't think we appreciated
1:07:46how important that camera was gonna be.
1:07:48No, definitely not.
1:07:50Because I mean, the first camera was like,
1:07:52eh, it's okay. It was a piece of garbage.
1:07:53Yeah, it's better than that feature phone I used to have,
1:07:57but yeah.
1:07:59No, but barely.
1:07:59- I'll still carry my DSLR around.
1:08:03Yeah, barely better, right?
1:08:05It was more convenient though.
1:08:06That was the thing that it was like, ah, right?
1:08:10And Instagram and all this other stuff took off
1:08:13because shit, it's always there.
1:08:16- I just think that the time nobody,
1:08:20maybe even Apple just didn't foresee how quickly cameras
1:08:25that could fit in the space that was available,
1:08:27theoretically, just however much space you want to devote
1:08:31into a iPhone-sized device to the camera,
1:08:35how good the image quality could be out of that camera.
1:08:37I just don't think anybody really foresaw
1:08:39what the next five years were going to be.
1:08:41That first one, it's ridiculous.
1:08:42I've said this before on the show.
1:08:44Every time it comes up, I'm like,
1:08:46"I don't think it even shot video."
1:08:47And then I'm like, "No, wait, that's not possible."
1:08:48And then I look it up and it's like,
1:08:49"Yep, didn't even shoot shitty video."
1:08:53Shot no video whatsoever.
1:08:55And now, you know, it doesn't even fit in the case anymore.
1:08:58And that's okay, right?
1:08:59You know, we've got the camera bulge
1:09:01because it's like, it's more important
1:09:04to have that good camera
1:09:05than it is to have that clean back line.
1:09:07- I'm not gonna say it's okay.
1:09:08I accept it.
1:09:09- It's a compromise, right?
1:09:11It's definitely a compromise.
1:09:13But yes, we'd all love it if that back
1:09:16was completely smooth,
1:09:17but we also love the fact that it's not.
1:09:22- I have, that's the one thing I don't know
1:09:23what to think about with the Pixel.
1:09:25have a Google Pixel.
1:09:26And so Google Pixels, Google's way around that
1:09:30was to have, they have no bump for the camera on the back,
1:09:33but the entire device is slightly wedge-shaped.
1:09:37So down at the bottom, it's thin,
1:09:40and that's the thinness they like to talk about,
1:09:42and up by the camera, it's thick.
1:09:44And there's no one point where there's a bulge.
1:09:47And it's not super, at a glance, you can't even tell,
1:09:53but in your hand, it's obvious,
1:09:54and it is sort of top heavy.
1:09:55I have mixed feelings about that.
1:09:58I do think, I don't wanna go too deep on the camera bulge,
1:10:01but now that the iPhone 7 has been in my hands for what,
1:10:05three months, October, November, December?
1:10:07Yeah, about three months.
1:10:08I do two little things that I really, really like about it.
1:10:14And I know people keep saying
1:10:15that it's the same industrial design,
1:10:17but it's only at a glance.
1:10:19The two little things that I really like,
1:10:20number one, I like that this camera bump
1:10:23is more of an honest camera bump, right?
1:10:26- Yeah, absolutely.
1:10:28I'm 100% with you there.
1:10:30It's like, it looks like a bump.
1:10:34- Right.
1:10:35- And it is a bump.
1:10:37- And they're still running those ads
1:10:38that show the hero shot of the shiny jet black iPhone 7 Plus
1:10:43where the entire central focus of the hero shot
1:10:49is the big capsule sized camera bump on the back.
1:10:53Like, you know, and it's perfectly lit and glossy
1:10:56to highlight it.
1:10:57And I just keep thinking, yeah, it's the complete opposite
1:10:59of the original iPhone 6 ads where the articles
1:11:03where Apple's product shots are hiding the bump,
1:11:06you know, where they'd show it from the side.
1:11:08- Yeah, you had to hunt for it on the Apple site
1:11:10in order to see it.
1:11:11Yeah, it was just, they just were pretending it wasn't there.
1:11:15- The other thing I really like,
1:11:16and I can't explain why I like it so much,
1:11:19is that the volume buttons are no longer
1:11:22in a channel on the side.
1:11:25They're just two buttons that stick out of the side.
1:11:28There used to be a little--
1:11:29You can feel them.
1:11:30Yeah, well, but--
1:11:31I think they're easy to locate for me, at least.
1:11:34But there was like a little channel dug in,
1:11:37and the gap between the two volume buttons
1:11:39was therefore more--
1:11:41I don't know.
1:11:42It just felt cheap to me on the iPhone 6 and 6S in a way
1:11:46that I really like the volume buttons on this better.
1:11:50But anyway, that's neither here nor there.
1:11:52- Quick question, did you get the jet black?
1:11:54- Yes, I did.
1:11:56- Do you love it?
1:11:57- I love it.
1:11:58- I mean, I love being able to carry a phone
1:12:01without a case again.
1:12:03It's just like it's sticky in my hand
1:12:05and that's all I wanted.
1:12:06I don't, you know, yeah, I got the micro abrasions.
1:12:08I hold it up here to the light.
1:12:10I can see them, but I don't spend my time
1:12:13looking at the back of the phone.
1:12:14I spend my time holding the back of the phone.
1:12:16It's just so clearly better there.
1:12:18Yeah, and I think--
1:12:19It looks awesome.
1:12:20After three months of daily use, I
1:12:23can project what it'll look like after two years.
1:12:25I mean, I'll only use it for one year.
1:12:27But I mean, what somebody who--
1:12:29a normal smart person would do and use the phone for at least
1:12:32two years, it's going to look fine.
1:12:34It's not going to look perfect, but it looks fine.
1:12:36And at a glance, it still looks nice, black, and shiny.
1:12:39But it's the feel of it.
1:12:40The feel is so much greater.
1:12:41The other thing I can happily-- you know,
1:12:42going back to the weather, that was my question in September.
1:12:46It was like in September when I first felt it,
1:12:47I was like, this definitely feels better to my touch.
1:12:50But September was a warm month for us.
1:12:54And so my hands had that, like, it was warm hands.
1:12:57Now that it's freezing cold,
1:12:58I can say it still feels better.
1:12:59Even with very, very cold hands, it's not slippery.
1:13:03Total win.
1:13:05I recommend it wholeheartedly.
1:13:06- Yeah, I mean, like I said,
1:13:09it's just so nice to be carrying a phone
1:13:11without a case anymore.
1:13:12And that was the only reason I put it
1:13:15on my five and my six is--
1:13:18- I know a lot of people like that.
1:13:19- It felt slippery, it really felt slippery.
1:13:21And I mean, I've got big hands, right?
1:13:23It's like, you know, shit falls out on me real easy.
1:13:28- It's like, it's for you holding a phone
1:13:30is like a normal person holding like a matchbook.
1:13:33It easily just slips, you know.
1:13:36- Yeah, the iPad mini is the right size.
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1:16:27- I got a question for you.
1:16:29- You can ask me anything, Craig.
1:16:31- Could they make Daring Fireball a responsive web design?
1:16:38Well, I could make during Fireball a responsive website.
1:16:40I do think all of Squarespace's default templates are responsive.
1:16:43Yeah, I bring that up because that's an important thing these days.
1:16:47And I know, I know, that's a cheap shot, but—
1:16:50No, it's not.
1:16:51It's overdue.
1:16:52It's overdue by years.
1:16:53And the fact that it's overdue by years only contributes to the inertia of not updating
1:16:59it.
1:17:00Part of it's your fault, really, as much as anybody.
1:17:02Oh, yeah, I'm sure.
1:17:03back in 2007 when I found my first launch,
1:17:11you gave me the meta tag that made Daring Fireball--
1:17:15I've had to update that since because the way those meta
1:17:18tags have worked for the viewport size.
1:17:22The curse of Daring Fireball's existing design
1:17:25is that it's one double tap away from being pretty good.
1:17:29Yeah, that's right.
1:17:31In large part, I would say at least 85%,
1:17:36maybe probably around 85% of what it would look like
1:17:41if it were responsive, just by double tapping the column.
1:17:44- Yep.
1:17:45But the thing that bugs me the most
1:17:47is when I tap on the quoted part
1:17:49and then the text around it falls out off the edges
1:17:54and it's like, ah.
1:17:56So, but yeah, you're close.
1:17:58And yeah, I do remember that Nada tagged.
1:18:01- It's your fault.
1:18:03Right, if Daring Fireball had looked completely un--
1:18:06- Do we wanna give everybody my email address
1:18:08so they can pitch to me now?
1:18:09- No.
1:18:11Well, but that's the thing,
1:18:12for a non-responsive site,
1:18:16it's about as good as it could get.
1:18:18So people complain, and when it becomes responsive,
1:18:22and it will, I'm sure people will be,
1:18:24"Thank you, this is great."
1:18:27But who knows, I'll probably get just as many complaints
1:18:29because the fonts will change at the same time.
1:18:31But it'll happen.
1:18:34But it's the fact that it's, in my opinion,
1:18:37pretty darn good as is, makes it easy to say,
1:18:40well, it never quite rises up to the,
1:18:43here's how I should spend the next two weeks.
1:18:45- I got a question for you.
1:18:47Somebody who used to have a website
1:18:49has a dark background with light text
1:18:51and somebody who got older.
1:18:54Are you having trouble reading the site these days
1:18:57with the light text on the dark background.
1:19:01- No, I still find that the color schema during Fireball
1:19:03is, from my eyes at least,
1:19:05is more readable than the opposite.
1:19:09- Yeah, that's--
1:19:10- Because it's not super high contrast,
1:19:12because it's not black. - Exactly, yeah, yeah.
1:19:14I think that's the thing.
1:19:15I mean, the icon factor used to be like black, black
1:19:19with white and orange hyperlinks.
1:19:23And it was when we retired that site,
1:19:28it was like, oh, thank God.
1:19:30'Cause you know, the contrast was killing me.
1:19:32And it's like, I was in my forties
1:19:35and it's like my eyesight started to deteriorate
1:19:37and it's like, oh, what do we do here?
1:19:39You know, I see, in fact, I see a lot of design
1:19:43that by designers who are in their twenties or early thirties
1:19:48and have great eyesight and make decisions based upon that.
1:19:53and don't realize that a large portion of their audience has not got their good eyesight.
1:20:01The curse of it is that I still love, my taste in graphic design runs towards very small print.
1:20:10And not even really online. Online it's always been frustrating for me because I couldn't make it small enough.
1:20:15That's one of the things I missed from print design is I love putting truly tiny type into designs inappropriate.
1:20:22appropriate, like little in-jokes or footnotes and stuff like that. But at a very young age,
1:20:30I've got the presbyopia where it's really, really hard for me to read it.
1:20:34Well, you've also got the display preference, too. How many people actually scroll down
1:20:40to the bottom and see display preferences there?
1:20:42I don't know. Very few. So anybody who doesn't know, if you do think that the type on Daring
1:20:46Fireball is too small, if you go to daringfireball.net/prefs, you don't even hunt for the list.
1:20:52link, but it's at the bottom of the page that says "Display Preferences."
1:20:55Actually, I think it's down to one preference.
1:20:58There used to be more.
1:20:59Yeah, it's like, "Font size, save."
1:21:03Can I tell you a story?
1:21:05There used to be a thing in here for—this is totally off topic, but it's interesting
1:21:11to me.
1:21:13I haven't wanted to write about it, but if I talk about it, maybe I can get this fixed.
1:21:17I don't know.
1:21:20There used to be a preference in here where you could set your Amazon country, and I had
1:21:25a script so that whenever I linked to an Amazon product, it would, based on that preference
1:21:30setting, put a link in with my Amazon affiliate code for that country.
1:21:36I think there were only three.
1:21:38I didn't bother going all the way around the world, but I took the top three countries
1:21:41for Daring Fireball readers, which are the US, Canada, and the UK.
1:21:47Very few people ever did it for the UK.
1:21:49At one point early on, when Daring Fireball went,
1:21:52when I went full time with it, the Amazon revenue was,
1:21:56it was one of the, it was like a multi--
1:21:58- It's good money, yeah.
1:22:01- Right, it was never ever anywhere close
1:22:03to something I depended on, but it was a little bit here,
1:22:07a little bit there, a little bit there,
1:22:08and it contributed to keeping--
1:22:11- It's not paying your rent, but it'll pay
1:22:13for a couple of good dinners every month, yeah.
1:22:16- Right, and the importance of that revenue
1:22:18as a percentage of Daring Fireballs over revenue
1:22:21slipped every year.
1:22:22And I also started feeling in recent years,
1:22:27very recent years, that it was maybe not a great idea
1:22:32for me to put Amazon links in there
1:22:34because Amazon has become more of a company
1:22:37that I write about editorially.
1:22:40Like I don't do--
1:22:41- Conflict of interest kind of thing, yeah.
1:22:44- Right, just not in a big way, but in a little way.
1:22:49Maybe it's just a little better if I don't.
1:22:52And I also thought this way when I link,
1:22:56so for years now I've just linked to Amazon
1:22:58without my code, usually.
1:23:01Every once in a while I think,
1:23:02"Yeah, what the hell, put it in."
1:23:04But whenever I put it in, I always feel like I should say,
1:23:06and sometimes I have said, "That's a promotional,"
1:23:09put in parentheses, "That's a promotional link
1:23:10"and I'll get a few percent of whatever it is
1:23:13that you buy if you click it. But I haven't. I've just gotten away from it. And my Amazon
1:23:20affiliate revenue used to be maybe, you know, like $1,000 a month. And sometimes, maybe around
1:23:25Christmas, like, it would be like, you know, like, I think the most it ever was is maybe like $3,000
1:23:31or $4,000 in a month for December because I would put like a, "Hey, here's a couple of top selling
1:23:36holiday items. And if you click any of these links, you'll, you'll, this is maybe like 10 years ago,
1:23:40eight, nine, 10 years ago.
1:23:43Anyway, long story short, about two months ago,
1:23:46I got a note from Amazon, an email,
1:23:49that said that I violated their clause
1:23:52by telling people to click on a link.
1:23:54And they've terminated my account.
1:24:00And I searched, there were no other,
1:24:02I never got a warning, I didn't ignore,
1:24:04I mean, 'cause this is very common for me,
1:24:06I have so many unread emails.
1:24:08It was one shot and done,
1:24:10I'm out of the Amazon affiliate program.
1:24:13- Yep, they want to avoid click baiting, right?
1:24:16It's like that's a--
1:24:17- But when did, I thought,
1:24:19well when the hell did I ever do that?
1:24:21And I found one article that was back in like 2004,
1:24:25maybe, when I first started using Amazon affiliates,
1:24:29and what I did there was technically against,
1:24:32and I guess against what they're saying I did,
1:24:34but it was a 2004 article,
1:24:36and not one that's like an evergreen, very popular article
1:24:41that people keep linking on.
1:24:43And I'm sure that somehow they ran some automated tool
1:24:46that uncovered that article, but it was 12 years old.
1:24:49- Or somebody didn't like something you said
1:24:52and they went looking for something to--
1:24:55- Maybe, but I don't think so.
1:24:57Amazon doesn't strike me.
1:24:58You never know though.
1:24:59- Yeah, you never know.
1:25:00But it's good that you don't rely on it, right?
1:25:04- It's also, it's great that you don't,
1:25:07you've got your sponsors and that pays for your writing
1:25:12and that's awesome.
1:25:13You're in an awesome position.
1:25:15- They could have looked and seen that
1:25:16and I would say for the last year or so,
1:25:18I've had maybe like 100 to $200 a month in revenue
1:25:21from Amazon Affiliates.
1:25:22So it's cutting off a very small portion of it.
1:25:25But I thought that the, no warning.
1:25:28- They didn't cut off everything?
1:25:29They only cut off a portion?
1:25:31- No, they cut off every,
1:25:33My, you know, Amazon affiliate tag no longer works.
1:25:37- Okay, okay, that makes sense.
1:25:39- That's it, it was completely out.
1:25:42It's the equivalent of one, you know,
1:25:44like having, like the Apple equivalent of, you know,
1:25:47like what they did to the Dash developer.
1:25:49You know, you're out, you're done.
1:25:51- With no warning.
1:25:52- And they even, I think the email even said,
1:25:55there's no, you know, there is no,
1:25:56there is no recourse, you know,
1:25:59there's no, you know, there was nothing like
1:26:00if you would like to dispute this.
1:26:05- You're out.
1:26:08- And then it ended with like, have a nice day.
1:26:09I swear to God.
1:26:10(laughing)
1:26:12- Hope you have sponsors.
1:26:14Thank you.
1:26:15- Right, so if there's anybody at Amazon
1:26:17who's listening to the show who thinks that's kind of fishy,
1:26:19write to me at Daring Fireball
1:26:21and I would love to have a communication about it.
1:26:23Not so much that I even care and want to put it back on,
1:26:25but I'd love to know more about what happened with this
1:26:28'cause it's, to me, very curious.
1:26:31And it seems like these things get publicized a lot
1:26:34when Apple does it to people,
1:26:35and I've never seen anybody complain about this
1:26:37with Amazon before, but there are other sites
1:26:40that are completely and utterly dependent
1:26:42upon their Amazon affiliate revenue.
1:26:43I mean, it's pretty much the secret to the wire cutter
1:26:46and their business model.
1:26:47- Yep, yep.
1:26:48Kotke is another case where he does the gift recommendations
1:26:53and as you know, every one of those is gonna come up
1:26:55with his old oscillate domains.
1:27:00You see that and it's like, okay, good.
1:27:01Jason, you're making some money there, awesome.
1:27:04- I don't know, I thought that was kinda odd.
1:27:06Do you see this thing, moving on,
1:27:08do you see this story about the Uber self-driving car
1:27:10that ran right back in San Francisco?
1:27:12- That's pretty funny.
1:27:13- I will put a link in the show notes.
1:27:15One thing that I thought was, wow, that's scary.
1:27:18The video was shot by a CABs dashboard cam.
1:27:22And it really did show a Volvo,
1:27:25an Uber self-driving Volvo with the whole big,
1:27:27it's very obvious because it had the self-driving rig.
1:27:30- The dingus on top, yeah.
1:27:31- Yeah, it's a real big dingus on top.
1:27:34And it just sails right through a red light,
1:27:37like three seconds after it went red.
1:27:38- And it's pretty close to a pedestrian too, right?
1:27:41You can see the person that's like,
1:27:42okay, it's two or three feet away,
1:27:45but hey, we've all been crossing the street in a city
1:27:50and have a close call and think,
1:27:53"Well, that could have been me.
1:27:54"Could have ended badly."
1:27:57- Right, and the other thing that struck me
1:27:59in terms of "That could have been me"
1:28:00is that's right at the part of San Francisco
1:28:02where we always go.
1:28:04It's like right by the W.
1:28:05- Exactly, right in front of the museum, I think it was.
1:28:08- Right, right in front of the MoMA,
1:28:10which is right around the corner from Moscone
1:28:12and is there for, like, for those of us who just--
1:28:16- Yeah, we could have been drinking for the last six hours.
1:28:18- Right.
1:28:19(laughs)
1:28:20- Who got nailed.
1:28:21- It's part of that whole South of Market Union Square area
1:28:26where people who go for Moscone related events,
1:28:30you just tend to become familiar with.
1:28:31It was right there.
1:28:33I'm not familiar with most of San Francisco,
1:28:35but it's the part of San Francisco
1:28:36I'm intimately familiar with.
1:28:37- Yeah, although--
1:28:38- I was like, holy crap.
1:28:39- Although if you're drinking at the W
1:28:40or the St. Regis or one of those places,
1:28:42you're probably not having that much to drink
1:28:44because the drinks are so expensive, but yeah.
1:28:47(laughs)
1:28:49Here's the thing that struck me. I'll put a link into the show notes with this Bloomberg
1:28:54story. Uber PR, Uber spokesman Matt Wing said in a statement, hats off to them for at least
1:29:01putting their spokesman's name in the statement, unlike Apple who almost never puts the spokesperson's
1:29:06name and just attributes to an Apple spokesperson. But anyway, this is the statement. "This
1:29:12incident was due to human error. This is why we believe so much in making the roads safer
1:29:16by building self-driving Ubers. This vehicle was not part of the pilot and was not carrying
1:29:21customers. The driver involved has been suspended while we continue to investigate." And you
1:29:26think, "Oh, so it wasn't, you know, like the driver ran a red light." But I think,
1:29:32no, I think this is the worst type of public relations statement possible, where I think
1:29:38this was very carefully calibrated word by word, where you read it and you think, "Oh,
1:29:44So it was a human error.
1:29:45It was a human driver who ran the red light.
1:29:48Whereas if you think about it, if it
1:29:50was the self-driving car that ran the red light--
1:29:54Why they know what they--
1:29:55And the driver--
1:29:56Yeah.
1:29:57This is what I think happened.
1:29:58I think this car was in self-driving mode.
1:30:01I think they were lucky.
1:30:02And there was--
1:30:03I think they're not lying.
1:30:04I think there was no passenger at the moment,
1:30:07because otherwise that would be just a blatant lie,
1:30:09because it said, quote, "was not carrying customers."
1:30:12So I think it was empty.
1:30:13But I think the self-driving car went right through.
1:30:17And when they say it was human error,
1:30:18what they mean is that the employee behind the wheel
1:30:21wasn't paying attention because it was in self-driving mode
1:30:24and didn't manually apply the brake when it was clear
1:30:27that the car was gonna sail through the red light.
1:30:29- Right.
1:30:30- That's what I think happened.
1:30:31I think it was a self-driving error.
1:30:33The self-driving car went right through the red light.
1:30:35There was a pedestrian right in front of it
1:30:37luckily, you know, seemed to hear the car coming and, you know, waited. And they're saying it's
1:30:43human error because the human behind the wheel didn't manually apply the brake. Which would be,
1:30:49I think, would be an excruciatingly hard job. I really do. If, let's say, you had to spend six
1:30:55hours in a self-driving car that was 99% accurate and be ready to hit the...
1:31:00Absolutely. It's like, you know, those videos that show the Teslas in their self-drive mode.
1:31:08I get so anxious with those, and I can't take my hand or my eyes off of the driver's hands.
1:31:15They're clearly not touching the steering wheel. It's like, "Oh my God, what's going
1:31:19to happen next?"
1:31:20Right. Like, it would be—it's easy to drive a car for six hours and not run a red light
1:31:25or hit anybody because you're driving. But to not be driving and have everything go fine,
1:31:31maybe for like five days, maybe you've done it five days in a row and nothing wrong has
1:31:35happened, but to still be at a moment's notice to hit the brakes, I think it requires a level
1:31:40of concentration that I know I personally do not have. Now I also know that you could
1:31:44probably be...
1:31:45And you're probably also monitoring other things about the system, right? Looking at
1:31:48you know, dials and switches and you know, it's like, okay...
1:31:52You could put me behind the wheel of a self-driving car for an hour and I would be completely
1:31:59paying attention because it would be like, "Holy shit, this car is driving itself."
1:32:03I'm terrified.
1:32:04I'm ready to go.
1:32:05I'd have my hands, my fingers twitching, ready to take the wheel, my foot on the brake,
1:32:12ready to go.
1:32:13For the first hour or so, I'm going to be blown away and amazed and kind of scared.
1:32:17After 20 hours, 30 hours, it becomes normal.
1:32:22It is very hard to be paying that level of attention to something that 99.9% of the time
1:32:28you don't need to be paying attention to.
1:32:30Tim Cynova Yeah.
1:32:32It's interesting to me that when you connect this piece of news with some piece of news
1:32:40from what was it, last week, week before, about the actual cost of maneuver trip is
1:32:45like 40% or 60% more than they actually charge you.
1:32:51you connect those dots, it's like Uber,
1:32:55anybody who runs a business knows that
1:32:57the cost of your employees is by far your biggest cost.
1:33:01Yeah, that's where all the money goes.
1:33:04So, them saying this is why we believe so much
1:33:09in making the road safer by building self-driving Ubers,
1:33:12that's kind of bullshit, right?
1:33:14They believe in building self-driving Ubers
1:33:16because it's gonna make their business profitable, right?
1:33:21That, oh, it costs 40 or 60% too much.
1:33:25Well, you don't have to pay a driver
1:33:27sitting behind the wheel.
1:33:29And all of a sudden the whole economic situation changes
1:33:34and you're making shitloads of money
1:33:36because you have a one-time cost for that computer
1:33:41that drives the car.
1:33:43Your upfront costs are the computer and the car.
1:33:48I think there is a, "Hey, let's save lives and switch to self-driving cars." That is
1:33:54true. There are millions of people who are killed every year by automobile accidents,
1:33:58and I truly and honestly believe that we will look back on that and our societies—and
1:34:03my personal acceptance of it. I own a car. I drive as barbarous. Hopefully sooner rather
1:34:11than later. Hopefully it'll happen really soon, maybe 10 years from now, maybe 15, maybe
1:34:1720 at the most, but I think we'll look back on it.
1:34:20And I think people who continue to insist
1:34:25on driving their own cars will start to be looked at
1:34:27as people who smoke around babies.
1:34:29I really do, because I do think that the technology,
1:34:33it's clear, it's not here yet,
1:34:34but it's clearly going to be here,
1:34:36where a system where all the cars are automated
1:34:40will reduce congestion. - And they network together.
1:34:42Yeah, they network together.
1:34:44- And the safety improvements will be dramatic.
1:34:46Absolutely dramatic.
1:34:48But I think you're exactly right that Uber's
1:34:50interest in this is very much primarily about the wages
1:34:55they have to pay to a driver in every car.
1:34:57- And a bigger issue is our society is not
1:34:59prepared for this change, right?
1:35:02When you think about, okay,
1:35:04all of our transportation infrastructure
1:35:06is gonna become automated.
1:35:07I mean, compare that to our entire
1:35:10manufacturing infrastructure becoming automated.
1:35:13You know, robots are, in production lines,
1:35:15putting people out of work. Those people that are out of work become disenfranchised. Those
1:35:21people that are disenfranchised do weird shit at the time when it's time to vote.
1:35:27It ties back in with Trumpism, where Trump's story is that a bunch of good jobs all went
1:35:32to China and that we could bring those bad jobs back to China. And it's true that obviously
1:35:37a lot of stuff is made in China or other countries in Asia. But there's a whole bunch of stuff
1:35:42if you read, I mean, and that's true,
1:35:43but it's a more complicated story than that.
1:35:45And I think it's arguable,
1:35:48and at least some people have made the argument,
1:35:50based on facts, that more manufacturing jobs in the US
1:35:53have been lost to automation than to--
1:35:56- Yep, yep.
1:35:57- Now, the fact that it's like a double whammy--
1:36:00- Right, and vocational training,
1:36:02teaching people how to work in that new environment
1:36:06is just not there.
1:36:07Right, that's what I'm saying.
1:36:08So society isn't ready for it.
1:36:11All these truck drivers that haul all our shit cross-country,
1:36:16what are they gonna do?
1:36:18- There's an awful lot of, an awful lot of people,
1:36:20let's face it, mostly men,
1:36:22but certainly a lot more women than there used to be
1:36:26who were truck drivers,
1:36:27but truck driving is a large, very common profession.
1:36:32And it is, I think, going to be one of the first
1:36:36that goes away in the world of autonomous vehicles.
1:36:39- Yep.
1:36:39And what happens then?
1:36:41- And it'll be better for all of us, right?
1:36:44It's like, you know, you think of it,
1:36:46when these vehicles are networked together, right?
1:36:49They know a lot more about each other than we do, right?
1:36:53You don't know what the intentions
1:36:55of the person driving in front of you is.
1:36:57If that's a computer in front of you,
1:36:59you can share your GPS coordinates,
1:37:01where your destination is, where you've been,
1:37:04so much gas you've got, you know,
1:37:06there's all sorts of data that can be exchanged
1:37:08between these devices.
1:37:10It's like, you know,
1:37:11it's like network computers are way more interesting
1:37:15than a single laptop sitting on your desktop, right?
1:37:19- A huge source of car accidents.
1:37:21I think often non-fatal ones, thankfully, you know,
1:37:23once, but you know, for all the fate of,
1:37:25obviously the fatalities are the worst thing, worst.
1:37:28I mean, just, you know, I don't have to emphasize why,
1:37:31but the minor ones, the fender benders on a freeway
1:37:34that maybe nobody's hurt at all,
1:37:37but can cause you to be an hour and a half late for work.
1:37:41Simply a matter of paying attention.
1:37:44- It ruins your day.
1:37:45- And I think they're the ones that'll be the easiest to avoid
1:37:49when every car involved is autonomous.
1:37:53- Yeah, well, you've seen those videos
1:37:55of the wave propagation, right?
1:37:57One person taps on their brakes,
1:38:00somebody sees the red lights, they tap on theirs,
1:38:03so on and so on and so on.
1:38:04And that wave propagates to the point
1:38:06where the wave stops, right?
1:38:09And it's all happened to all of us.
1:38:11It's like, why am I stopping the freeway, right?
1:38:13Oh, there's gotta be some accident ahead of us.
1:38:18Five minutes later, you're looking for this accident
1:38:20and it's not there, right?
1:38:22So eliminate that and everybody's life gets a little easier
1:38:26except for the people that get paid to drive.
1:38:30- Yeah.
1:38:32So there's a sci-fi, everybody knows the sci-fi future.
1:38:35the sci-fi future is very few people have to work,
1:38:37and we have robots, it's a life of leisure for everybody,
1:38:40and it's the people who live on the ship in WALL-E, right?
1:38:45Just lounge about the pool deck all day long,
1:38:50and robots bring you your food,
1:38:53and nobody has to work.
1:38:55- Kill me now.
1:38:57- Right, but there is a very painful period
1:39:01between here and there,
1:39:03because here it's expected that to be a successful person,
1:39:07you're gainfully and fully employed
1:39:08at as high a wage as possible.
1:39:12So I don't know, problem's coming.
1:39:15Let me take one last break here,
1:39:19and then afterwards we have a great thing
1:39:21to talk about, your book.
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1:42:59All right, Craig, here we go.
1:43:01The book, "Making Sense of Color Management."
1:43:07- Yeah.
1:43:08- It's an $8 book from a book apart.
1:43:10How long did it take you to write?
1:43:11- Like two years.
1:43:14It started in November, 2014.
1:43:17And you know, you blame me for the nonresponsive
1:43:21during Fireball, I blame the Safari engineers
1:43:24for this whole thing happening.
1:43:27Mountain Lion was the release at the time.
1:43:33And all of a sudden the colors in Safari
1:43:36were subtly different than the ones in Chrome.
1:43:39I was like, what the heck is going on here?
1:43:41And we have that product Xscope,
1:43:44which lets you do all sorts of screen measurements and stuff.
1:43:49a lot of designers, a lot of developers use it
1:43:51to help with their work. - It has a loop.
1:43:53Xscope has an onscreen loop that you can,
1:43:56it's a little window you can drag over another window
1:43:58and then you can have it zoom in on that window
1:44:00and show you what's underneath.
1:44:02And it could be, like at the time,
1:44:05I think what you're saying is you could drag it over Safari
1:44:08and you'd see this one color in Safari
1:44:11and then you'd look at it in Xscope
1:44:12and it would be like a slightly color shifted color.
1:44:14- Yeah, and you expect it to be hash,
1:44:19and it's like hash C36.
1:44:23I'm like, what the heck is going on here?
1:44:25And it turns out that they had implemented color management
1:44:28for their CSS colors.
1:44:30And that was like, oh, okay, I've got to fix this bug.
1:44:35And that was the start of my learning
1:44:39about color management.
1:44:40And as I learned about it, it was like,
1:44:43I should write this down, you know,
1:44:44maybe make a good blog post.
1:44:46And it's one of those topics that the more you learn about it, the more you know what
1:44:52you don't know.
1:44:54And there got to be like 10,000 words in my blog post.
1:44:57I was like, "This is not a blog post anymore."
1:45:00So I got in contact with Jeffrey Zeldman and some other people at A Book Apart, and they
1:45:07were like, "Yeah, we'd love to publish this."
1:45:11And it's only, what is it, about 75 pages?
1:45:13Yeah, I mean, that was the hard part, right?
1:45:15He's taking this really complex topic and distilling it.
1:45:19And I mean, my editor at A Book Apart was Tina Lee.
1:45:24It's just awesome because she would challenge me.
1:45:26It's like, "This is too long, right?
1:45:28I don't understand what you're saying here."
1:45:30And I really had to, you know,
1:45:32I've probably wrote the book in its entirety
1:45:36three different times.
1:45:37I, in fact, we were pretty close to being done
1:45:41and Apple announced color management in iOS 10.
1:45:44I was like, oh wait, we're not done.
1:45:48So, you know, basically two chapters, you know,
1:45:50the chapter on web browsers,
1:45:53because Safari on iOS changed significantly in that release
1:45:57and the chapter on mobile apps was completely rewritten
1:46:02and sample code and all the stuff that goes along with it
1:46:06was like, well, okay.
1:46:08But I think it came out really well in the end.
1:46:12- It affects anybody who makes anything for the screen.
1:46:15Honestly, I mean this in a sense,
1:46:17I'm not just trying to sell copies of the book,
1:46:18but whether you're a designer, a graphic designer
1:46:20who makes assets for, you know,
1:46:22graphical assets for apps and websites,
1:46:25or if you're a front-end developer on the web
1:46:27who's making stuff for, you know, HTML, CSS,
1:46:31you know, web development,
1:46:33or if you are an app developer for native apps
1:46:38for Mac or iOS, this book is for you.
1:46:43And in no way, Ed, one of the things that I love
1:46:47about the book is at no point to me does it,
1:46:50is it all that clear who the main audience is for.
1:46:54It's balanced.
1:46:55It's not like, oh, it's a book for programmers,
1:46:58but if you're a designer,
1:46:59you can still get something out of it.
1:47:00Or the other way, it's a book for designers,
1:47:02but you should read it if you're a programmer
1:47:05because you need to understand this stuff.
1:47:07It is perfectly balanced from all those perspectives.
1:47:11- I'll tell you a little story.
1:47:12We struggled with the title because initially
1:47:14we're gonna call it color management for developers.
1:47:16And then it was like, no, 'cause it's for designers too.
1:47:19And then it's like, oh, working with color
1:47:22is kind of like too vague.
1:47:24And Jason Santa Maria came up
1:47:27with making sense of color management.
1:47:28It was like, it just clicked, right?
1:47:30Because it's like, that's what it's all about, right?
1:47:32We're trying to take this black, dark art
1:47:36that everybody's kind of fiddled with some knobs
1:47:41and kind of maybe got something working
1:47:43but doesn't really understand what's going on.
1:47:45It's, and you know, when you read the book,
1:47:48you realize that making sense also applies
1:47:52to our visual sense, right?
1:47:54There's a lot of, in fact, the core of color management
1:47:57is really mathematical modeling of how our eye works,
1:48:02which to me is fascinating.
1:48:04- It's like, "Oh, wait, we've got all these devices
1:48:08that have different color profiles,
1:48:10different way of characterizing color,
1:48:11and they all kind of, they're a little different."
1:48:15But then we got this thing called an eye,
1:48:17which doesn't change.
1:48:19It doesn't, you know, yes, it's changed over, you know,
1:48:22millions of years due to evolution, but, you know,
1:48:26and at its core, I mean, that is the thing
1:48:29that doesn't change.
1:48:30So it's a little bit different.
1:48:32I mean, that is the thing that doesn't change.
1:48:34So color management all revolves around that sense of vision.
1:48:39- And in terms of being well-timed
1:48:42in terms of where we are as an industry,
1:48:44you're right, web browsers, Safari leading the way
1:48:47has color management in their browser.
1:48:49- The reason they did that is clear now, right?
1:48:51It's like they needed color management
1:48:54because they knew that they were coming out
1:48:56with these new displays, which have a wider gamut.
1:48:59- And that's the other shoe that's dropping
1:49:02is the display technology.
1:49:03Starting with the iMac 5K last year,
1:49:07which was their first product with the,
1:49:09what do they call it, a deep color gamut?
1:49:11- It's a-- - Or wide color gamut.
1:49:12- Wide color, yeah.
1:49:14- Right, this gets into the argument that you've had
1:49:16with our mutual friend Gus Mueller,
1:49:18who technically edited your book.
1:49:21Gus prefers deep color. - Deep color, yeah.
1:49:24He's right, technically it's deeper.
1:49:28you've got 16 bits instead of eight.
1:49:32So yes, it's a deeper pixel,
1:49:35but that only talks about the pixel.
1:49:38And I think the reason why Apple has started
1:49:40calling it wide colors is not only talking
1:49:42about the actual pixels,
1:49:44but it's also talking about the gamut,
1:49:45which is the thing that these displays
1:49:48can display more color.
1:49:49And it's not like retina, right?
1:49:52Retina, you looked at the display
1:49:54and it was immediately obvious.
1:49:55The thing that I'm hearing,
1:49:57fact my wife got one of these new 4k LG displays for her new MacBook Pro and it
1:50:08was like the first thing she said to me was like wow this display looks great
1:50:12right Horace Horace did who said the same thing about the the the iPad Pro
1:50:18the 9.7 inch iPad Pro the first iOS device that had a wide colors please
1:50:24There's something striking about this play. I don't know what it is, but it just it looks great
1:50:29it's and the the way that I explain it to people it's like the you know, if you'd only ever had a bass speaker
1:50:36right, you know, you've always ever listened to music on you know, a bass speaker and
1:50:41Then somebody gave you a tweeter
1:50:44You would be like wow, this sounds a lot better. You know, you basically you're getting more detail
1:50:49Right you you you become accustomed to something and that's what retina was retina gave us more pixels
1:50:55people picked up it on and immediately but then you start talking about a
1:51:00A wider range of tonal values and it's a lot harder to express that, you know
1:51:08It's like, you know, you give me more dynamic range in your music and it's like it sounds better, but you don't really know why
1:51:14Yeah, and I don't think it's any I don't think there's any trick to which which came first
1:51:19retina resolution is far more important. I would, you know, I think everybody would agree,
1:51:23I'd rather have a retina resolution without the deep gamut than to have a deep gamut display,
1:51:28but the old pre-retina resolution. It's not even close. Retina is more important. It's more
1:51:33noticeable. But the next step is clearly increasing the number of colors. That's why I think Apple
1:51:38goes with wide because I think they're describing it from the user's perspective.
1:51:42Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, it gives you a wider vision of your life. And, you know,
1:51:50the fact that the iPhone cameras now are shooting in display P3, you know, there's gonna be a lot
1:51:57more of these wide gamut images floating around, you know, the internet, right?
1:52:04Yes. Well, there already are, right? Every photo that's taken with an iPhone 7 already is.
1:52:08Exactly.
1:52:09- Yeah, and you know, actually,
1:52:12the guys at Instagram, Mike Krieger and then the crew there,
1:52:19I gave an early version of the book because I knew,
1:52:23you know, they're gonna have this problem, you know,
1:52:27the, you know, you kinda, Apple loves to have apps on stage
1:52:32when they announce something new.
1:52:33It was pretty obvious to me that the display P3 screens
1:52:36and cameras were coming to the next iPhone,
1:52:40connect the dots, okay,
1:52:41and I'll give them a copy of the book,
1:52:42and it really helped them, right?
1:52:45- When the iPad Pro got it,
1:52:47when the iPad Pro got the wide color gamut
1:52:49with the, in the 9.7 form factor in March,
1:52:52I thought it was a sure thing that the iPhone would get it.
1:52:55- Me too, and that explained, you know,
1:52:58again, back to, you know, Mountain Lion,
1:53:00the guys in Safari changing the way things work subtly,
1:53:04it all kind of fell into place that, okay,
1:53:07this is not just a Mac thing, this is an iOS thing.
1:53:12This is, you know, it turns out that the touch bar
1:53:16on the new MacBook Pros is a display P3 gamut on an old--
1:53:21- Is it really? - Yeah, on an old LED.
1:53:24- I did not know that.
1:53:25- Yeah, so it's gonna be everywhere.
1:53:27And as developers-- - I did not know that.
1:53:29That's great.
1:53:30- And as developers who are just thinking
1:53:31that a pixel is, you know, eight bits of red,
1:53:35eight bits of green, eight bits of blue,
1:53:38you're in for some prizes when that's no longer
1:53:42just eight bits, number one, and number two,
1:53:45it's characterized by an ICC color profile.
1:53:50- Right.
1:53:52- And that's the thing that I'm describing in the book.
1:53:59- Yeah, and the challenge for people working today,
1:54:02I'm not gonna say it'll be easier,
1:54:06but in a way it would be.
1:54:07Like, let's fast forward 10 years,
1:54:09and I think we can probably guess that 10 years from now,
1:54:14almost all commonly used devices
1:54:15will have the wide color displays.
1:54:19- Oh, yeah, absolutely.
1:54:21You know, it's a competitive advantage for Apple right now.
1:54:24Right? - Right.
1:54:25- They are ahead of the game, right?
1:54:28they were the head of the game with retina, right? They're ahead of the game with a lot of technology.
1:54:33This looks better is a compelling competitive advantage in almost every single field. There's
1:54:41almost no market where this looks better than the competition is not even seriously, I'm not even
1:54:47being a jerk, but even like if you're selling produce, if you have fresh fruit that looks
1:54:52better than the store across the street, it's better. It's a competitive advantage.
1:54:56Yeah, that's one of the things that pissed me off about the Google Pixel comparisons with the iPhone.
1:55:04All the comparisons I looked at were in the sRGB color space. They had to actually take the photo
1:55:10that came off of the iPhone and crapify it to compare it on their webpage.
1:55:17We talked about this and there were some of these competitions, like, "Hey, let's compare the
1:55:22the Google Pixel to the iPhone 7 in photos,
1:55:25it looks like whatever they did to reduce the color gamut,
1:55:29and some of the cases, it really washed them out.
1:55:33I mean, 'cause there's different ways to do it.
1:55:35There is no easy way to just say,
1:55:37take this image that was shot with the wide color gamut
1:55:39and just do the one true way to show it on a pre-display.
1:55:44It seemed like some of them converted it
1:55:47in a way that really washed it out.
1:55:49- Yeah, or you can, if you then decide,
1:55:52"Okay, I'm gonna just ignore the color profile,"
1:55:55you've got a different problem, right?
1:55:56You've got color shifting.
1:55:58So it's either gonna wash out or it's gonna shift.
1:56:00So you really,
1:56:03and that's why web developers
1:56:05need to start understanding this stuff, right?
1:56:07If you're gonna present this good,
1:56:09high quality photography on your webpage
1:56:12or in your mobile app or wherever,
1:56:14you need to understand what you're dealing with.
1:56:16And--
1:56:17This is why I love the book. I love the book, and you were kind enough to ask me to write the
1:56:23foreword for it, and I did, and I hope it turned out all right. But I do want to write the foreword.
1:56:29I'm very happy you did that. That made me very happy.
1:56:30The nut of the foreword, the nut of it is that what makes the book great is that you don't just
1:56:35say, "Here's what to do to make your stuff look right." You explain why. If you do this,
1:56:42This is why it will look right on all of the displays you're targeting, whereby right is the best it could possibly look according to your intentions as the designer or the photographer or whatever it is that you're displaying. Here's why. Here's what to do and why. And understanding it makes it so much easier to remember it.
1:57:03And it's also more satisfying, because that's, to me,
1:57:07the voodoo of before.
1:57:08And the eye-opener for me was that, for me,
1:57:11something that was completely opposite of what I expected
1:57:13is that sometimes, in some cases,
1:57:15you're actually better off.
1:57:16The right thing to do is not to embed a color profile.
1:57:20Right.
1:57:21Right?
1:57:22I've always done that.
1:57:23And then things don't look right.
1:57:24My daring fireball, 5A to 5A, doesn't quite look right.
1:57:30It's like, all of a sudden, the background-- why?
1:57:32And then I start flipping switches.
1:57:34And then all of a sudden I've got an exported ping
1:57:36that looks right here and there.
1:57:38Okay.
1:57:39I'm happy because now I've got this asset
1:57:42that looks to my eyes right on both Chrome and Safari.
1:57:46But because I don't know why,
1:57:48it's like I lose a little sleep at night.
1:57:50- Yeah. - Right?
1:57:50- And then you go look at it on an iPad
1:57:53or an Android device and it's wrong.
1:57:55It's like that's the classic one.
1:57:57It's like, oh, wow, how did that happen?
1:58:02So the other thing that I really love about this book,
1:58:05and I think it really shows, and you even
1:58:07spoke about working with your editor,
1:58:08is that clearly a lot of work went into what's there,
1:58:14but then a lot of work went into taking out what's not there.
1:58:17And there was an old adage in the print days,
1:58:19and I know a lot of people buy their books now as ebooks,
1:58:21and for computer books in particular, that's true.
1:58:25But in the print days, there was a real problem,
1:58:28and people who-- or at least in tech books,
1:58:31which was that, and this is true,
1:58:33I mean, I've spoken to,
1:58:35one time I met Tim O'Reilly
1:58:37and even spoke to him about it,
1:58:38but that they knew based on sales
1:58:41that based on topics, what people would do
1:58:44is they'd go into the bookstore
1:58:46and they knew they wanted to get a book on SQL
1:58:49and they did, there's 12 of them,
1:58:51so they would just buy the thickest one
1:58:52'cause they would think, well, they're all $40,
1:58:54I'll just get this one that's thicker
1:58:56and figure it's got more.
1:58:57- God, and I-- - And there's
1:58:58a real correlation.
1:58:59- I hated those books that had, you know,
1:59:01just reams and reams of source code in the book.
1:59:03It's like, oh, and you know they were doing it just
1:59:05to pad it out.
1:59:06They wanted it to be heavier.
1:59:09A really strong provable correlation
1:59:12between best-selling books by topic and topics by length.
1:59:16The longer, thicker books by topic
1:59:19were tended to be the best sellers.
1:59:21And that didn't make them the best books.
1:59:23Sometimes the best book is shorter.
1:59:25Sometimes there are some great books,
1:59:28some great technical books that are really thick.
1:59:30The programming pearl is one that I go to all the time.
1:59:33- Yeah, Donald Knuth, right?
1:59:36You know, the art of computer programming.
1:59:38That can't be a short book, right?
1:59:40- Well, it takes up a whole shelf, right?
1:59:43That's great.
1:59:44But there are other books that really should be, you know,
1:59:47the fact that this is 70 pages is because there's,
1:59:49or 75, whatever it is, there's 75 pages to say about it,
1:59:52and that's the 75 pages that are in the book,
1:59:55and it really shows.
1:59:56- It's like building a product.
1:59:57- Eight bucks, what a deal.
1:59:59It's like building a product, right?
2:00:01The parts you take away are the hardest and most important.
2:00:05- Craig, you should be really proud of this book.
2:00:08Anybody out there listening,
2:00:09if you have any sort of job that entails
2:00:13putting pixels onto screens and you want them to look right,
2:00:15I highly recommend this book.
2:00:17I really do mean it.
2:00:18I mean it from the bottom of my heart.
2:00:20I don't know that I've ever even written a forward
2:00:21to a book before.
2:00:22- Yeah.
2:00:23- But I did it not because you're my pal,
2:00:25but because the book is good.
2:00:27Frankly, I don't really like you that much.
2:00:29- Yeah, well.
2:00:29I buy you drinks every once in a while,
2:00:32so you know, that's.
2:00:33There's that.
2:00:36- A Book Apart products making sense of color management.
2:00:40- You know, don't just check out my book.
2:00:42The whole Book Apart family is great.
2:00:45- That's true.
2:00:46It's actually very true.
2:00:48- They've got that notion of shorter is better,
2:00:52and if you're looking at anything about responsive
2:00:55web design, for example, hint, hint, you know,
2:00:59they've got an awesome book on it, you know?
2:01:01- And as somebody who is personally,
2:01:04who does judge books by covers,
2:01:06I judge them by the contents too,
2:01:09but the whole thing that you can't judge a book
2:01:10by the cover, it's a bunch of bullshit.
2:01:12In my opinion, better books tend to look better.
2:01:14Their books are gorgeous,
2:01:15thanks to our friend Jason Santa Maria and their other,
2:01:18I know he's the head designer there,
2:01:20but boy, he's good with typography.
2:01:23and their books also are first-class print books.
2:01:26I know your book is an ebook only,
2:01:27but they're a publisher that treats their ebooks every bit
2:01:31as lovingly in every regard as they do their print books.
2:01:36- Yeah, it's, you know, when Jason showed me
2:01:41the first comp for the book, I was like,
2:01:44"That, this is a real thing now."
2:01:47And it got me really excited,
2:01:49just by looking at that cover, right?
2:01:51It was just--
2:01:52Was it hard?
2:01:53Here's my technical question.
2:01:54Was it hard?
2:01:55Oh, the cover's gorgeous.
2:01:56Especially the bottom left corner
2:01:59where it says Forward by John Gruber.
2:02:01I love that.
2:02:02Well, anyway, thank you very much for your time,
2:02:05for being on the show.
2:02:06Thank you even more for writing this excellent book.
2:02:09Everybody should go get a copy.
2:02:11It is absolutely terrific.
2:02:13I wanna thank our sponsors, Harry's, get a shaving kit,
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2:02:19back Blaze, back up your computer,
2:02:22and back up your family members too.
2:02:24Get it for them.