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The Talk Show

143: ‘A Squirrel Eating a Duck’ With Merlin Mann

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:22   I'm really great. I'm in a great mood.

00:00:25   You're kidding.

00:00:25   I'm in a particularly good mood.

00:00:27   I'm so glad.

00:00:29   You're not worried? You're talking about the snowpocalypse, right? Yeah, right.

00:00:33   The Joan-astrophe. Yeah, it's...

00:00:37   what do they call it? Winter Storm Jonas, which is obviously a big point of conversation here

00:00:42   at the Gruber household. Jonas is

00:00:46   a bit impressed. He's excited. He's like a hashtag on Twitter now.

00:00:51   So he's very excited about that. Your son is trending.

00:00:55   But he is

00:00:58   disappointed and slightly embarrassed by the fact that this is a big storm that

00:01:03   is coming on a Friday night, which is the worst possible time for a storm

00:01:10   to hit in terms of maybe getting a day off of school. Like it could not

00:01:14   possibly be worst time. Like there was no conversation whatsoever

00:01:22   about canceling school today in advance of the snowstorm because they're so

00:01:25   certain of when it that is not going to come until this evening that there was

00:01:29   no need to cancel school in advance. See at this point science is working against

00:01:33   children because when we were younger we did not have this kind of technology to

00:01:37   know we had a rough idea of what kind of thing would happen like in a given week

00:01:41   you know and and also I don't think there was that as much concern for like

00:01:45   makeup days like I feel like when I was a kid you'd only get into the makeup

00:01:50   days if you had like five or I don't know ten snow days and nowadays today

00:01:53   everything runs on such a tight schedule. Right, like maybe they'd go back.

00:01:57   After a bunch of snow days, they'd assign one of the school secretaries, "Hey, go

00:02:01   back and count just how many days we've had school." You know what? We should

00:02:04   probably write that down. Okay, somebody go ahead. Louise, can you go check that out for us?

00:02:08   No, I'm excited. Here's why I'm not excited, but I'm excited about this note,

00:02:13   but I'm happy. I'm in a good mood because I woke up terribly sick on

00:02:18   on Wednesday and just felt almost dead.

00:02:23   And then I felt a little better

00:02:25   but still definitely sick yesterday.

00:02:26   And today is the day where I feel,

00:02:28   I still feel I'm not like good,

00:02:30   but I'm on the upswing.

00:02:34   And to me, it's the best.

00:02:36   It's better than being at 100% health

00:02:38   is that day after you've had a bug for a couple of days

00:02:41   where you feel like, hey, I woke up feeling good today.

00:02:45   - Especially when you've had like a,

00:02:46   especially especially when you had a long cold and

00:02:50   you know maybe you just starting to get into the coughing phase or something you

00:02:52   know that kind of late end but the day you stop getting worse

00:02:55   is such a good day. The first day we were like, "Oh God, I might survive this."

00:02:59   You know you told me about that yesterday and I have to say you sound way

00:03:02   better than I expected but I was thinking like you're sick,

00:03:05   Marco's sick, Dan's had some kinda crazy

00:03:08   like stomach bug, there's so many... I was kinda just sitting there, you know when you're waking up and you get

00:03:12   paranoid

00:03:12   I was waking up and I was just thinking about like how many people I know are

00:03:15   sick right now

00:03:16   Is this a big East Coast thing? They say there's like this killer flu that is going around the East Coast.

00:03:20   Well, I want to ask you about this. I want to get your medical advice, honestly.

00:03:24   Yeah, I'd love to help.

00:03:26   Is that I think I had the flu. And Amy tells me, "No way did you have the flu, because nobody shakes the flu off in 48 hours. You obviously didn't have the flu. You had a cold."

00:03:36   But I know what a cold is like. And for me, a cold is entirely in my head and my throat.

00:03:41   It is in my nose, it's in my forehead.

00:03:44   Sometimes it's like pressure in my eyes

00:03:46   and it's always in my throat.

00:03:48   This was a whole body thing.

00:03:49   This is what happened.

00:03:50   Tuesday night, I felt perfect.

00:03:52   I felt 100% healthy.

00:03:54   Went to bed, woke up Wednesday morning

00:03:57   and I felt horrible.

00:04:00   I mean, just, I was like, I think I'm sick or something.

00:04:03   And my whole body felt like maybe I had signed up

00:04:06   for the gym the day before

00:04:07   and decided I would do everything.

00:04:10   - Oh, you had the overall body soreness and heaviness.

00:04:14   - Oh, without, I mean, real, real, I mean, like,

00:04:16   my legs hurt, I felt like I was, you know,

00:04:19   maybe I'd put on 100 pounds and my legs weren't suited

00:04:22   to carry this much weight up and down the stairs.

00:04:24   My arms hurt, everything that was, you know,

00:04:29   and muscle ache, you know, like I had gone to the gym,

00:04:32   you know, and worked out after never having lifted weights

00:04:35   in my life, and overall, every muscle in my body hurt.

00:04:38   a headache

00:04:42   a clearly I felt like I had a fever all the since that to me are not a cold

00:04:46   that like that's the flu mm-hmm I mean what are the other options I mean what

00:04:51   do they what are they calling me maybe

00:04:53   you can do differential differential diagnosis yeah

00:04:56   no I funny to say like for me I totally agree I

00:04:59   a like if something starts for me it always starts with an

00:05:02   a 0 in that up if I get a cold usually like

00:05:06   "Oh, my throat doesn't hurt exactly, but my throat feels weird."

00:05:10   That's the first thing. It's like swallowing doesn't hurt exactly, but I notice swallowing.

00:05:14   That's the first "uh-oh" red flag. But what you're describing, I had something really similar maybe

00:05:19   a month and a half ago, maybe a little longer, and I woke up and I was like, "Oh, I'm getting the flu.

00:05:26   I'm definitely getting the flu." And this was on like maybe like a Saturday or something or Friday.

00:05:30   Anyway, and then the thing was it kind of presented as being flu-like. I didn't have any of

00:05:36   of the tummy stuff, but I did feel really heavy, really tired.

00:05:44   And then it turned into what felt like, within a day, it felt like I was getting over a cold

00:05:48   within a day.

00:05:49   So I wonder if there's some kind of a new hybrid cold flu that might be out there.

00:05:52   Yeah, I think that sometimes you can get lucky and get a mild case of the flu.

00:05:56   I realize that if you really get whacked right in the bull's eye by the flu, that you're

00:06:02   down for two weeks, and that's terrible.

00:06:05   been years since I've had something like this, but this is clearly not a cold.

00:06:08   Do you really understand the difference? No, not really. I don't either. I say that,

00:06:12   or you say something, so when you self-diagnose, I love how you self-diagnose, and you go like,

00:06:16   "Oh, man, I think I'm getting a little cold." Or you go like, "Oh, man, I'm coming down with the

00:06:22   flu." Or you go like, "Eh, I probably got a 24-hour bug." I don't know what any of that actually

00:06:26   means, but I'll do it with my daughter, too, because with my daughter, I'm the house shaman.

00:06:30   Like, I'm the one who tries to predict, like, how much this is going to destroy, because, you know,

00:06:34   as soon as the kid gets sick, it's game over.

00:06:36   Everybody will get sick and it's going to be the worst.

00:06:39   And so I'll go like--

00:06:40   I'll come in with my rattles and my headdress and my beads.

00:06:43   And I'll be like, mm-hmm.

00:06:45   Eleanor will be fine by Sunday afternoon.

00:06:49   And I'll make a pronouncement.

00:06:51   It's rarely right, but then sometimes it is just weird.

00:06:53   I feel like colds and flus are changing.

00:06:55   I feel like it used to be you knew how long you

00:06:57   were going to get sick.

00:06:58   I think something has mutated and is changing.

00:07:00   It might be the water.

00:07:01   It could be meats.

00:07:03   but I think stuff is changing from when I was a kid.

00:07:04   I've always felt like it's the,

00:07:08   the difference between the two things. It's, you know, it's all nebulous to me.

00:07:14   It's a lot of the symptoms overlap, but I did, I Googled it again and you know,

00:07:17   here I am. I'm pretty well,

00:07:18   you're getting scientific about it.

00:07:20   Yeah, I Googled it. Uh, I mean,

00:07:23   there's no better way to get expert medical advice,

00:07:25   but there's like a checklist on the web MD and they're like a cold, uh,

00:07:28   you know, often comes on slowly. You know, like you said,

00:07:32   you get that heads up. You have that day where you're like, "Oh my god, I feel like there's

00:07:36   a 50% chance I'm going to be sick as shit tomorrow."

00:07:38   You feel like you're getting like 20%--no, you're getting like 8% worse every hour, like

00:07:43   fairly consistently.

00:07:44   Do you know what? I'll tell you what a big telltale sign of a cold for me is. A big telltale

00:07:48   sign, like the 24 hour advance notice. Like, "Here I am, wake up, feel fine, no suspicions,

00:07:54   no warning flags, whatever. I make some coffee, I'm reading some news, seeing what happened

00:07:59   overnight. And then I take a first sip of coffee and it

00:08:01   tastes like shit. Like terrible. Like how can anybody drink this?

00:08:05   And then I think that I and then I quick like run through did I

00:08:08   did I make it wrong? Did I not put enough beans in? And then I

00:08:12   think, Oh, shit, I'm good. Oh, you know what it is, buddy. You

00:08:15   know what it is. I'm getting sick. You're exactly you're

00:08:17   ignoring it. You're you're trying to throw yourself off the

00:08:19   scent. But that's probably as scientists, we can look at this

00:08:22   and say that's probably a little bit about scent. It's got to

00:08:24   have to do with your sense of smell. It might have to do with

00:08:27   like your throat not feeling so good, but your body is telling you, "Oh, you're gonna

00:08:30   get sick, buddy."

00:08:31   Yeah, and it's like something on my tongue, you know? And then the other thing in advance

00:08:37   is that something acidic like orange juice will start stinging the back of my throat.

00:08:42   Like I don't have a sore throat yet, but like something acidic like orange juice, it doesn't

00:08:45   go down, it isn't pleasurable as I swallow. And that to me is like, "Ooh, the next day."

00:08:52   See, and they say that's a cold, that a cold, you know, you have advanced warning, and that

00:08:55   cold seldom has a fever seldom has a headache I had a terrible fever I would I didn't take a

00:09:04   measurement of it I don't have a thermometer I would estimate my fever on on Wednesday and then

00:09:09   overnight going into tomorrow I would estimate it around 107 hmm that's pretty high well I tell you

00:09:17   what I but I think the reason I felt started feeling better yesterday I think I sweated it

00:09:21   I think I sweated this flu out of my body because I'll tell you what I woke up

00:09:25   I woke up yesterday morning, and it was like I was like a grease stain

00:09:29   Every single thing you're mentioning

00:09:32   I don't know if there's any basis in science or medicine for what you're describing

00:09:35   But I've thought all of those things when I was a little kid if you had a fever you had to stay in bed until you

00:09:40   Quote unquote sweated it out. Is that a thing? I think it is

00:09:43   I don't believe I I and I know it's different with small children with small children. You're worried. Oh, thank you. It's like 114

00:09:50   Oh, yeah, and you want to take care of that because I could you know, that's serious business

00:09:54   But I think as an adult you don't take I don't take anything to

00:09:58   Take you know, take the fever down or whatever

00:10:01   I feel like if your body wants to have a fever then let it go it, you know, you'll sweat this out

00:10:05   Let me ask you this. I think I don't speak for you

00:10:09   but I feel like anyone who has kids can agree that it's children that cause illness because

00:10:13   They're little disgusting sponges who touch everything they eat other kids boogers on a dare

00:10:17   and then they rub around on the playground and then they come home and

00:10:21   they bring that into your home. Do you have a sense, let me ask you this, this is a

00:10:25   factual question, do you know what your school's rule is for when you should or

00:10:30   should not send your kid to school? That's an excellent question. I don't. I

00:10:34   think Amy would probably know a little bit more, but it is in the modern age,

00:10:43   and you know, I mean this goes back decades, I think when you and I were kids

00:10:47   were at the pivot point of this. Clearly before our time there was a stay-at-home

00:10:53   parent in a lot of households, usually obviously the mother, and you know in

00:10:58   today's world there are you know there's not so many stay-at-home parents.

00:11:02   Also I mean like I can tell you our my my daughter is in you know enrichment

00:11:07   and aftercare until usually three or four every day but there are kids who

00:11:12   are there till dark. They're just six. Like the parents need those both parents

00:11:15   working. There is no one to take care of that kid unless someone doesn't get paid that day.

00:11:18   Right. And so I actually, I don't know the rules, but I know that a lot of kids go when they

00:11:22   probably shouldn't and probably when the parents kind of wish that they could leave them home,

00:11:25   but that it is such an enormous thing to untangle from to if you don't send the kid to school,

00:11:34   what do you do? And, you know, and a lot of times it pops up. It only pops up in the morning,

00:11:39   you know, when you wake up and it's, you know, you might have meetings, you have stuff. So I am super

00:11:44   sympathetic to that. I don't know, and I know that the school's rules for this is

00:11:48   not very... Well, I'll tell you what ours are. So, first of all, to your point, I

00:11:52   think the pendulum has swung. I think that there was a time, you

00:11:57   know, in the post, you know, Benjamin Spock era where we wanted to toughen up our

00:12:00   kids and not turn them into sissies and dancers, and so you send them to

00:12:03   school. You got to send them to school. You got to go to school. It doesn't matter how sick you are.

00:12:06   And then I think I feel like, for me in the last... I want to say, even when I

00:12:11   had a job in the 90s they made it very clear to people you know don't come to

00:12:14   work if you're sick because you'll make other people sick we never used to talk

00:12:18   about that used to just be you had to be home because you were ill but then there

00:12:21   was this sense of no let's be more you know the pendulum swings that way and

00:12:24   you say like oh no let's not make other people sick it's my understanding today

00:12:27   and I might get this wrong but I believe this is correct because I don't like

00:12:31   going to school and seeing a bunch of snot yeah freaks me out I hate those

00:12:34   kids who are just walking down the hallway and coughing I get all like

00:12:38   coward Hughes. I get all damn Benjamin when I see that. And so...

00:12:41   You know, and I hate to say it, and my kid's a bit fastidious, so

00:12:46   he is not this way, but there's a classic kid who just seems

00:12:50   completely ignorant of snot coming out of the nose. He's just used to it, and he doesn't

00:12:55   mind it.

00:12:55   You could see one, you know, the really classic pro-level snot kid

00:13:00   will have the crust around the rim,

00:13:04   and then the still kind of moist droplet, like pine tar falling.

00:13:07   And then, you know, it might take years for that one to fall, but it's there.

00:13:10   It almost looks like they're like one of those...

00:13:12   Like a stalactite.

00:13:13   Well, you know how, like, there's like two kinds of aliens in Star Wars.

00:13:17   There's the ones that look like totally, you know, like some kind of outlandish design.

00:13:21   And then there's the ones that are like mostly human, but have like a little thing different.

00:13:25   And like, it looks like, you know, maybe you're an alien who has like a crusty rock formation coming out where your nose should be.

00:13:32   [laughs]

00:13:34   Uh-huh. Here's what I think. This is what my wife said is, I think she... I might be getting this wrong,

00:13:39   but I feel like what she told me was, "You keep your kid home officially if they have a fever,

00:13:44   vomiting, and/or diarrhea. Otherwise, they're good to go. Your kid could be, like, literally have a

00:13:53   vein open, and as long as they're not vomiting and inconveniencing people, you just wheel them right in."

00:13:58   Isn't that nuts? Can you imagine that?

00:14:01   Honestly, whether it's official or not, it sounds...

00:14:05   it seems to me like that is, practically speaking,

00:14:10   the way it goes. And those are the things... The fever's the one where it's

00:14:14   like,

00:14:14   a kid with a fever is so miserable.

00:14:18   Because when you're little you feel it so much more. I hate having a fever,

00:14:23   but I remember the fevers, I still remember the ear aches and fevers of my

00:14:26   childhood title.

00:14:27   that still, in my mind, I feel like I still remember thinking,

00:14:31   maybe short of my first migraine, like this is the most excruciating thing I will ever feel,

00:14:35   is like the feeling of being out of your body

00:14:38   and yet incredibly connected to the pain in your body when you have a fever.

00:14:42   And then also like having the same dream over and over.

00:14:44   - Yeah, yeah.

00:14:45   - Let's go to school, let's do some geography today, Jon.

00:14:47   - I remember, the thing I remember about having a fever as a kid

00:14:51   was how severe the chills were.

00:14:54   And what a great name for the symptom that is. I mean, it's kind of obvious, but it sounds like a Stephen King novel.

00:15:00   And when you're a kid having the chills, for me at least, I remember it vividly, there was nothing you could do.

00:15:06   You could douse me in lighter fluid and light me on fire and it wouldn't warm me up.

00:15:11   Even though I had a fever.

00:15:13   My torso and trunk would feel like they were in a walk-in freezer.

00:15:16   And my head might feel like it was in a microwave at the same time.

00:15:19   And I could not stand anything touching my skin.

00:15:22   Right. And like you're like, "Hey, Candel, the bike is not helping me."

00:15:25   Right. And like the real life, like, you know, I think it's only like 20 degrees here in

00:15:30   Philadelphia today. It's...

00:15:31   26.

00:15:32   26 earlier.

00:15:33   Mm-hmm.

00:15:34   You go out in weather like that and it's unpleasant, but eventually your skin starts to burn. You

00:15:38   know, there's like a... I don't know. There's some kind of way that your nerves sort of

00:15:41   compensate for this and they're like, "All right, we got to just real cold. We're going

00:15:43   to, you know, even this out." When you have the chills, especially as a kid, like you

00:15:47   said it's so much more sensitive. The cold just never stops. It's the worst.

00:15:53   Well, it's like, you know, I haven't had time to Google this, so I'm just going to guess.

00:15:58   But what is that? Something's happening. Something's telling you your body is way out of whack.

00:16:03   And I think what a fever is doing is whatever it is that is causing the fever, it's trying

00:16:07   to raise your body temperature to kill that thing. Is that what it is?

00:16:10   Yeah, to sweat it out.

00:16:11   To sweat it out. That's ultimately...

00:16:13   That's what happened. I didn't fight the fever and then last, not this night, not Thursday night going into today, but Wednesday night going into Thursday, I sweated it out.

00:16:21   I woke up as a breathing grease stain.

00:16:24   So Wednesday, so it's Friday as we record this, but like let's say around, if you can remember, in your state, around lunchtime Wednesday, what was your prognosis?

00:16:34   Did you feel like, "Oh, this is going to be something I get over, or this is going to be like a two-weaker, or is this going to be, you know, what's this going to be?"

00:16:40   gonna be? I never had, I well I shouldn't say never knock on wood, but I haven't

00:16:45   been sick for like more than a handful of days in years. I am you know I have to

00:16:49   say I'm fortunate to have overall very good health. You know how to sweat it out.

00:16:53   Yeah. I but I wouldn't have guessed that I would feel as good as I do today. I

00:16:59   thought I was looking at it maybe like through the weekend type thing. Let me

00:17:03   tell you this. What a pathetic thing as an adult that like the high point of

00:17:06   your week is you don't feel sick anymore I love it let me tell you that here's not

00:17:12   like I got a free model or something or I got I get to go to Disney World here's

00:17:15   hey I don't feel as bad here's my Wednesday my Wednesday is I had no idea

00:17:19   I was getting sick I woke up and and actually I should say when I woke up I

00:17:27   didn't really even think that I was sick I just felt sore and I thought you know

00:17:31   that boy I'm really in bad shape because I'd you know run some errands or you

00:17:34   like Monday and Tuesday, walked a couple miles.

00:17:38   And my legs felt so sore.

00:17:39   I was like, that is pathetic that my legs feel so sore

00:17:42   after just normal urban walking.

00:17:46   And then I started thinking a little bit more

00:17:50   about how I felt and I was like, you know what, I'm sick.

00:17:52   And I'm like, oh, I'm hot.

00:17:53   And it's like, the heat's not on high.

00:17:55   I've got a fever.

00:17:57   And then I realized I was just parched with thirst.

00:17:59   And I was like, this isn't good.

00:18:00   And I realized, it just dawned on me very slowly.

00:18:03   like I've got the flu or something.

00:18:05   And I thought I'm parched with thirst.

00:18:07   I cannot, I just need something cold to drink.

00:18:12   But I really want, it had to be bubbly.

00:18:14   I needed fizzy water because the idea of drinking

00:18:17   still water was absolutely disgusting to me.

00:18:20   It just felt like it would,

00:18:21   I normally don't like to drink still water,

00:18:23   but at this moment, getting sick--

00:18:25   - Once you really get into fizzy water,

00:18:26   there's something slightly revolting

00:18:28   about room temperature flat water.

00:18:30   - And it's exaggerated when I'm sick.

00:18:31   In the same way that coffee doesn't taste good

00:18:33   when I'm sick, only something fizzy tastes good.

00:18:37   It's like, it's the way my tongue feels.

00:18:39   I need the bubbles to like kind of burn the sick

00:18:41   off the tongue or something.

00:18:42   So I go downstairs and all of my,

00:18:45   all of my SodaStream bottles are empty.

00:18:47   Now that's my own fault because I'm the only one

00:18:50   in the house who drinks this stuff.

00:18:51   It's not like I can't blame anybody else

00:18:53   because nobody else drinks it.

00:18:55   So I go to fill one up and I put it in the penguin

00:18:58   and I start pumping it and it makes that sick sound

00:19:00   when the canisters empty.

00:19:03   So the CO2 canisters empty.

00:19:05   Now, months ago, I had switched

00:19:08   from keeping the spare canisters under the sink

00:19:10   to keeping them down on our first floor,

00:19:12   which is sort of a basement garage level.

00:19:14   There's no living area down there,

00:19:16   but it's not really a basement

00:19:17   'cause it's sort of street level,

00:19:19   but it's ground level

00:19:20   and we have like a storeroom down there.

00:19:22   I keep them there as a courtesy to Amy

00:19:25   to not take up space under the sink

00:19:27   with my own fizzy water thing

00:19:29   that I only have to replace every couple weeks. So I go downstairs and I'm barefoot, but it's

00:19:34   only like 20 degrees outside and it's like a tile floor. And it's just so cold. I couldn't

00:19:41   take it. So I'm down on the first floor and it's a stone... I don't know. I would say

00:19:45   that the floor was around negative 30 or 40 degrees.

00:19:50   That's pretty cold.

00:19:51   And I go back to where I keep...

00:19:52   Well, that's one of the properties. Is it like a concrete? Kind of just like cement?

00:19:54   Eh, it's not concrete. It's tile. It's some kind of...

00:19:57   - [

00:20:05   and where they are. And I reached it. I got to get down on the floor to find these things.

00:20:09   And all three of the ones I have there, they're all empty already.

00:20:13   Oh, no.

00:20:14   So apparently at some point, my system is I have four... I keep four canisters of the

00:20:18   CO2. And when I have three empties, I go to the Williams-Sonoma across town and, you know,

00:20:25   swap the three old ones out for three new ones. And then I've, you know, my fourth is

00:20:28   the one that... So apparently I screwed that up whenever I swapped the last one out. But

00:20:33   And so I'm left with nothing. I've got nothing and I'm already down there on this cold floor.

00:20:37   Oh no.

00:20:38   And I've got no fizzy water, but I need something fizzy. So I had a beer.

00:20:43   Oh, good for you. And that's got the performance characteristics.

00:20:47   Yeah.

00:20:48   Yeah, it's fizzy. And so the beer doesn't freeze when it's sitting... Was it outside

00:20:54   or was it in a downstairs refrigerator?

00:20:55   No, it was in a refrigerator.

00:20:56   Your regular refrigerator, your primary refrigerator.

00:20:58   Yeah. So I had a beer and I went back to bed, but I had four flights of stairs.

00:21:00   I think any doctor's gonna tell you that's totally permissible because you're hydrating,

00:21:03   you're helping to sweat it out, and you're getting the fizziness that would prevent you

00:21:06   from being disgusted by flat water.

00:21:08   Right.

00:21:09   Mm-hmm.

00:21:10   So then I woke back up around noon.

00:21:11   Did they help you sleep at all?

00:21:14   Yeah.

00:21:15   Well, it was about an hour.

00:21:16   Then I took a shower, which is the best I felt.

00:21:19   Do you feel good when you're sick?

00:21:20   Do you feel good when you take a shower?

00:21:22   Six a day when I'm sick.

00:21:23   It's the best, right?

00:21:24   Yeah.

00:21:25   It's like some–

00:21:26   Drought, schmout.

00:21:27   I'm in there for six hours.

00:21:28   No, it's literally the only thing, and it will give me relief or make me feel like,

00:21:33   make me feel less awful for a little while, and then even for a little while after I get out,

00:21:39   I'll continue to feel like less awful. It's the only relief.

00:21:41   And if you have a cold and if you're stuffy in some way, the steam, you know,

00:21:45   it temporarily opens you up and stuff like that. It just feels good. So I felt,

00:21:48   I started feeling better again. I got dressed, put some nice clean clothes on,

00:21:52   and I was gonna go out and buy. I couldn't make it far enough away. There's no way.

00:21:58   I in my state I was going to make it far enough to get the CO2 cartridges I was going to buy

00:22:04   some Pellegrino or some Perrier or something that the you know just a block or two away

00:22:11   and so I I went to the store and we didn't have any orange juice in the house either

00:22:16   so I went to the store and the only stuff I wanted to buy I wanted to buy fizzy bottles

00:22:20   of fizzy water some orange juice and I forget what else something else oh those little cans

00:22:26   of San Pellegrino, the orange ones, you know what I mean?

00:22:29   Oh yeah, those are nice with the little wrapper on them?

00:22:32   Yeah, exactly, with the little wrapper on them. It's sort of like a cross between fizzy water and soda.

00:22:36   You know, there's... It was like the heaviest stuff you can possibly buy from a market.

00:22:42   And I realized that I... I realized exactly who I felt like, what my posture looked like,

00:22:48   and the pace that I was walking at, and my capabilities of carrying these groceries,

00:22:53   groceries is I was C Montgomery Burns.

00:22:56   Hey, you look like a question mark.

00:22:59   I didn't have the strength to keep my back straight.

00:23:04   And you're you're a tall fella. So you you bet that was pretty pronounced as you

00:23:11   walk home with a little orange sodas. Oh, that's so sad.

00:23:15   But here I am on Friday and I feel

00:23:18   you're not you're not. You got the instacart there in Philadelphia.

00:23:23   Yeah. See, I don't know how that works. Oh my God.

00:23:25   I can't believe you're not using this. And I was,

00:23:28   it would it get it to me within an hour? Uh, well in San Francisco,

00:23:32   it's usually two hours depending on how busy they are. It's two hours,

00:23:34   but sometimes they have one hour availability. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

00:23:38   And they'll bring it right out to you. But no, but uh, yeah, I just,

00:23:41   it's just to me like just the dread of even leaving the house in a situation

00:23:44   like that. This just can't do it.

00:23:47   I will add that Amy was busy at the time. She, I forget where she was,

00:23:50   but she was out of the house and and so it wasn't as though Amy was there

00:23:54   and wasn't willing to help me. I needed to help myself or remained completely

00:23:58   parched.

00:23:59   Just keep telling yourself that. I think she saw that I was getting sick and got the

00:24:03   hell out.

00:24:04   Anyway, you're right about the kids

00:24:08   as the source. I feel like if we could now, I mean we don't wanna kill all the

00:24:12   children,

00:24:12   but if we could... Not immediately, no. If we could isolate them, if we could just collect

00:24:16   all the children of the world

00:24:18   and, you know, lords of the fly them, like, let's send them to Australia, because I think

00:24:22   there's plenty of land down there. Put them all in Australia for maybe like an 18-month stretch.

00:24:26   -Mm-hmm. So some of them, obviously, will be killed by spiders?

00:24:30   -I'd-- well, I mean, that's inevitable down there. -Is that a stereotype, John?

00:24:34   -That there's spiders in Australia? -But there's giant deadly spiders?

00:24:38   -Yeah, I feel like-- yeah, I would say Australia-- most of Australia is pretty much like that room in

00:24:44   Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. That's kind of what I imagine, like not...

00:24:48   and maybe a little better lit. But yeah, yeah, absolutely.

00:24:51   Huh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you got? You got probably howler monkeys.

00:24:55   You got, you got killer wombats. Like, it's just

00:24:58   people with big knives. I don't know. It sounds like a pretty rough place.

00:25:02   I'm just picking a place that's isolated, you know. But you... but yeah.

00:25:06   If we could just eliminate children for about a year and a half.

00:25:10   Isolate children for a year. Oh, somewhere... especially somewhere dry where they could

00:25:13   sweat it out. You got a year to be sick, get it out of your system.

00:25:18   We would eradicate every contagious disease known to man, maybe other than STDs, in the

00:25:27   rest of the world.

00:25:28   Let's hope they don't discover them.

00:25:29   Right.

00:25:30   Australia, it really makes you a little wild.

00:25:33   It popped into my head that STDs might not be helped by this, but in terms of diseases

00:25:38   like colds and flus, if we could get rid of the

00:25:43   children for about a year and a half just to let these things they would just

00:25:46   die right out if we just spent one day a week during that you're scrubbing

00:25:49   everything you know well here's the thing and I'm not gonna shut up about

00:25:53   this I think the hand-washing thing makes a huge difference at my kids

00:25:56   preschool they washed hands you wash hands when you like grown-ups and kids

00:26:00   you wash hands when you arrive at school you wash hands when you leave school and

00:26:04   you go and you wash hands at every transition point throughout the day and

00:26:07   I'm not a hand-washing lunatic except that I have seen the difference and I I

00:26:12   I know what a difference it makes. It won't stop your kid from getting sick, but it makes

00:26:17   a huge difference. Because you just think about it. We go downtown, we ride public transit,

00:26:22   we go to the movies, and then my kid grabs some popcorn and sticks it in her mouth. I'm

00:26:26   like, "Are you kidding? Do you have any idea where your hand has been? Do you know how

00:26:29   much of San Francisco is on your hand right now?"

00:26:31   It's true.

00:26:33   Yeah. I mean, she sits on the floor on public transit. It's like, "Don't do that. What

00:26:38   are you doing?" "No, at her school now?" "No, no, they're real busy. They're real busy.

00:26:42   You can't wash hands all the time." And so she gets sick a lot more.

00:26:48   I realize, I see the logic of the legislation. You know, the employees must wash hands. There

00:26:55   must be a sign that states those exact words in every restaurant.

00:26:58   Yeah, I think you have to put up the sign. I don't know if you have to enforce the actual

00:27:02   hand washing.

00:27:03   But the thing that always gets me about those signs is the idea that if you're not an employee,

00:27:08   whatever you want to do yeah but conversely also you kind of love the

00:27:14   idea of somebody who works in a kitchen that has to be reminded to wash their

00:27:18   hands after taking the shit or just touching the door no I know we started

00:27:30   watching kitchen nightmares now I don't eat out anymore oh it shows terrible I

00:27:35   I don't want to watch a show like that.

00:27:37   What have you done to this avocado?

00:27:40   Who's the host of that show?

00:27:42   That Gordon Ramsay.

00:27:44   That's what I thought. Yeah. You know what?

00:27:46   Jonas and Amy like to watch that show.

00:27:48   I'd choose not to.

00:27:50   You should not. He also does Hotel Hell,

00:27:53   which is similar. It's with hotels.

00:27:55   He seems like he's a pretty smart guy.

00:27:58   It seems like, I feel like every episode,

00:28:00   he seems like a guy who probably wants to do a little less coke than he does.

00:28:03   He's very, very animated.

00:28:05   Kind of a hair trigger, but you know, it's formulaic, you know, comfort food.

00:28:11   How would we get the kids to Australia?

00:28:13   Would it be by like a ship or how would that work?

00:28:18   Well, see, my friend John Roderick and I have talked about is how useful it would be like

00:28:25   instead in lieu of like middle school, you send kids out to work in a national park for

00:28:31   like three years because just to first of all get them away from us get it out

00:28:35   of society and get them somewhere where they can really be exhausted they'd have

00:28:38   to make their own clothes from things that they find while they're working

00:28:40   during the day you know it would be kind of like what it'd be like you know

00:28:45   Hunger Games meets Lord of the Flies which is I guess already kind of Lord of

00:28:51   the Flies but yeah be good for everybody be good for them you become strong you

00:28:56   get a tan you learn how to make a bunk bed maybe what we could do instead

00:29:01   Those are all very good ideas. What we could do instead is maybe pick one of the states here in the US and make it a no children state.

00:29:10   And then we'd have subsidies so all the children who are already there...

00:29:14   Sort of like a smoking area in restaurants.

00:29:16   Exactly. Exactly what I'm thinking. But we'll do the whole state.

00:29:20   We'll have some kind of subsidy system set up so that everybody who already has children will be able to move somewhere. Nice.

00:29:28   And then we'll let's just see what happens to the remaining adults in that state how frequently they they get the colder flu and I'll

00:29:36   Bet that they don't get it at all

00:29:38   Plus they can afford to retire except for the ones and then and then we'd have to have something in place for

00:29:42   You know, what do you what do you call it when you quarantine a quarantine for anybody who?

00:29:48   Leaves and goes to like say Disney World or something like that. You'd have to oh, I see that have to pass through a zone

00:29:55   and we make sure that they haven't brought any kid germs with them.

00:29:57   Yeah.

00:29:58   Oh, that's pretty good. I think a lot of people would love that. Based on the

00:30:00   glares that we get when we eat out, I think a lot of people would be happy

00:30:03   with that state. Yeah, maybe there could be a state just

00:30:07   for people who don't want to be around kids or have

00:30:10   kids or just even know kids exist. And then there could be, well, I guess

00:30:14   technically it would be San Francisco's Noe Valley.

00:30:16   It would be a place that's dedicated just to people who are way too into

00:30:19   their kids. You know what I mean? It would be like,

00:30:22   It'll be like the first time you go to a parent's meeting for a school and you're like, "Ugh! Yikes!"

00:30:28   You're like, "I'm really glad I'm not any of the people who are here. I don't like the way anybody here is raising their kids."

00:30:36   Tyler! Tyler Marie! Tyler Marie! Have you done your Mandarin?

00:30:43   Shut up. Just shut up.

00:30:46   What percentage of children today are named Skylar?

00:30:49   Oh, you got Skylar and you got Tyler.

00:30:51   Uh...

00:30:52   I think Skylar might have been hot a while back.

00:30:55   There's a lot of Annabelas.

00:30:57   We get a lot of...

00:30:59   What do you get there?

00:31:00   I've lost track. I used to keep track.

00:31:02   That was a real thing of mine when Jonah started school,

00:31:05   and I've since lost track.

00:31:07   And the worst part is, I could really see Amy doing this.

00:31:10   The problem for me is, I start...

00:31:12   I have an explosion of laughter

00:31:15   before I even have a second to realize

00:31:17   how awful it is to laugh at a child's name. We'll just go, "Bwah!"

00:31:20   I feel so bad.

00:31:24   Anastasia helicopter. Or like, my daughter has a friend whose little sister's

00:31:29   name is Daenerys.

00:31:29   And I can't decide, it's kind of a super cool name. It's kinda pretty weird.

00:31:34   But it's cool. Like, Daenerys, that's a cool name. It's a... what is that? What's that?

00:31:37   Game of houses? House of Games? House of Cards. Yeah, exactly.

00:31:40   It's from that show. It's the Lady with the Dragons. No spoilers. That's kind of a cool name,

00:31:44   but now she's got like a Welsh name. She's got a spell to people for the rest of her life.

00:31:47   life. I don't know. You try-- you see, the thing is everybody suffers from this

00:31:51   because you try and get ahead of it. I bet this happened to you. When we picked

00:31:54   our kid's name, it was not like a super popular name, and it seemed like-- this is

00:31:59   one of those John Siracusa things where, like, you think you're doing this thing

00:32:01   outside of the culture and the evolution, and then like a year later, your kid

00:32:05   has the same name as everybody. And you're like, "How did that happen?"

00:32:08   Well, now they're naming tropicals or winter storms after after my kid.

00:32:12   That's so embarrassing. You know, if they've got like stuff like t-shirts, you

00:32:16   should buy him I'm sorry about his party that's such a bummer we you know what

00:32:26   Amy likes to do I'll tell you she's as happy as a pig on a poke today what she

00:32:29   likes to do she this is like a holiday for her is that she likes to watch when

00:32:34   there's a big snowstorm coming and they know it's coming she likes to watch the

00:32:38   local news oh yeah because the local news oh this is boy this is they've been

00:32:45   waiting all year for this day, maybe a few years for this day.

00:32:48   There's a local Philadelphia news channel, and they had a live report. She called me

00:32:55   in to see it. She re-rounded on the TiVo. She's like, "You have to see this right before

00:32:58   we started recording." They had a live report from a hardware store in Virginia that was

00:33:07   rationing shovels and salt.

00:33:13   Some people want to buy 10 shovels.

00:33:15   Yeah, exactly.

00:33:16   No, that is panic.

00:33:17   Two shovels per customer limit.

00:33:20   What if I break five of these?

00:33:24   That's really, really odd.

00:33:25   There's so many odd things about that.

00:33:27   Why Virginia?

00:33:29   Why that problem?

00:33:30   Why report it?

00:33:32   What were the stories that they rejected to decide that that was the right one to show

00:33:36   in Philadelphia?

00:33:37   I don't know.

00:33:38   I sent you the link here.

00:33:40   I'm looking at the page.

00:33:41   I don't know if this is still your old address maybe, but

00:33:43   essential link there to a forecast. So right now you got, you know, God, you got 21 to 28 Fahrenheit today.

00:33:50   Five to eight inches of snow starting in the evening. Tomorrow, there's that tomorrow's the big day, right?

00:33:56   Yeah, tomorrow's supposed to be the big day. So it's your Saturday. You get 12 to 18 inches throughout the day and windy until evening.

00:34:03   Is that right? You're gonna, you might get like a foot and a half of snow?

00:34:06   That's what they're saying and honestly,

00:34:08   What makes me think it's gonna be bad is that it's actually...

00:34:12   it's gone up. Usually they give you the worst, you know, like 48,

00:34:16   72 hours in advance. They make a terrible prediction

00:34:20   to get everybody, you know, to

00:34:23   get everybody hysterical. And then it gets closer and closer and then

00:34:27   they dial it down. This one, it was like they were talking about like

00:34:30   8 to 10 inches a day or two ago. Now they're talking...

00:34:33   Jeez, look at that. What is it?

00:34:36   It'd be what, like 17 to 23 inches total.

00:34:39   Oh, God.

00:34:40   Uh, all the things that we've benefited from with cord cutting.

00:34:45   One of my favorites is we just don't get localness anymore.

00:34:47   We don't watch it ordinarily, but when we do it, isn't it Philly culture shock?

00:34:53   Yeah, it really does.

00:34:54   And it's not so much that it's changed.

00:34:56   It's just that it's no longer seems normal to me.

00:34:59   And so that the way that they handled stories, whether that's like this or

00:35:03   whether it's just like an average day, the stuff that they decide to highlight and the

00:35:09   way that they do it really stands out.

00:35:11   And the way that I feel like in some ways it has not, the actual format and style of

00:35:18   local TV news like evening and nighttime news has not changed that much since I was a kid,

00:35:25   but it's changed enough in a couple of ways. I mean, I don't know how this started, but

00:35:29   whatever it became the tradition to have like top of the hour news, you got news, sports

00:35:32   in weather. And you always put weather... is that still the case? Isn't that still how they do it?

00:35:35   Oh yeah. And you put weather last because you want people to watch. All they're really there for is to find out

00:35:39   whether to wear a coat tomorrow or what coat to wear. But they give you just a tease in the first 30 seconds.

00:35:44   That's right. Yeah, exactly. So... There's some surprising weather news that you have got to...

00:35:49   you've got to wait for this. Every day. Every single day, 365 days a year, there is some surprising and

00:35:57   important weather related news and Kathy is going to tell you about it later in the broadcast.

00:36:02   Coming up right after Magnum PI. Are deadly fecal bacteria living on your

00:36:07   doorknob? Right. Like in the first three minutes of the broadcast, Kathy will come on

00:36:12   and all she's gonna say is, "Jim, just wait until you hear this." You're not gonna fucking believe this. Oh my god, this is... we better wait though. Let's get a couple of...

00:36:22   let's talk about this apartment fire first. Yeah, exactly. But the way I feel like it has

00:36:27   change is that as much as it felt very glossy when I was a kid in the 1970s, oh my goodness,

00:36:33   everything the motion graphics, everything, it was so much glossier now and it just really

00:36:38   seems like they've gotten it down to a science where it's extremely professional chipper

00:36:45   people reporting horrible, horrible things, like horrible dangerous things. I mean, I'm

00:36:50   far from the first person to say this, but I'm always struck when I watch it that so

00:36:54   So much more about American culture and society makes sense to me when I watch local news.

00:36:58   Because I think like, wow, if you really did watch this as your one of your primary sources

00:37:03   of information about the world, I'd be losing my mind too. I'd be like, I'd be stocking

00:37:06   up on guns and snow shovels as well. It's like you just you really feel like like people

00:37:11   like everybody is getting killed. Everybody. Everybody's getting killed or they're dying

00:37:16   from something they can't prevent.

00:37:17   I think it's why I've said this to Amy before, like most of our family lives within an hour

00:37:22   of Philadelphia, overwhelming majority of our family, and nobody ever wants to come

00:37:28   see us here.

00:37:29   And I think it's because of TV news, because they think if you travel in the city, you're

00:37:35   either going to get shot or the building you're in is going to catch fire.

00:37:38   [laughter]

00:37:39   [0:14]

00:37:40   Steve McLaughlin You're going to get one of those increasingly

00:37:44   all too common fire stabbings that they have in Philadelphia.

00:37:47   Yeah, I don't know.

00:37:49   Gosh, I hope it goes okay now.

00:37:51   who's, you know, down where Casey List is, down there in the Virginia, they're getting

00:37:55   it even worse, right? Oh yeah, that's like the epicenter. Yeah, that's the epicenter.

00:37:59   And DC, yeah, the whole, what do they call it down there, Beltway. Sure. I'll tell you

00:38:04   what, I got to point this out about the TV news before we move off it. I got it.

00:38:08   The thing that strikes me when I watch it now, and I grew up with it, and they

00:38:12   certainly did the same thing back then, but I just accepted it as that's how you

00:38:15   do TV news, is the way that the correspondence, you know, there's the

00:38:20   anchor person at the desk. Maybe there's two, maybe there's a man and a woman. But you know,

00:38:24   there's, you know, an anchor person or two at a desk in the studio who lead the broadcast and

00:38:28   introduce every story and then they go to a correspondent. And no matter what the story is,

00:38:32   no matter no matter what sense it makes, the correspondent needs to be out doors somewhere

00:38:43   in the in the TV broadcast area. And it doesn't matter what the story is, they could just be on

00:38:50   some random street corner but they have to be reporting, for example, they might be doing

00:38:54   something about

00:38:55   like a Federal Reserve report for that matter but they've got to be outside somewhere

00:38:59   like outside a Walmart in order to like

00:39:01   deliver that. And then they absolutely positively must find

00:39:06   someone walking by

00:39:08   who will stop and talk to them for 10 seconds about the story.

00:39:11   Yeah, I think

00:39:15   increasingly you've got to have at least two or three people and I think

00:39:19   I think that one way that becomes so addictive to watch is there's always something happening,

00:39:24   there's always another transition coming, there's always another thing you're looking

00:39:27   forward to happening.

00:39:29   You're teasing the next thing, you throw to the other person, the motion graphic goes

00:39:32   on.

00:39:33   When I watch CNN to me it feels like a demo reel for a motion graphic company.

00:39:37   It doesn't feel like there's really anything very substantial to learn.

00:39:40   You could get it down to three bullets, basically what half an hour of CNN does.

00:39:44   But I think the style of it is very engrossing to people.

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00:41:50   The reason I mention this, you go to this page and it will run a speed test on your connection

00:41:55   and let you know exactly how much stuff you will be able to upload per day.

00:41:59   So you get an idea how long it will actually take.

00:42:01   You won't be wondering like when will this be done.

00:42:03   They make that easy for you.

00:42:04   And if you can afford to leave that thing wide open and you don't get dinged by your provider by Cable Town,

00:42:08   that stuff will just flow straight into the cloud.

00:42:10   I think that the cable town dinged me when I was uploading that terabyte drive.

00:42:14   Did they give you the slowdown?

00:42:15   Yeah, I think they did. But it's hard for me to tell because the cable town's always dinged me.

00:42:20   Anyway, the backblaze, it works great. That's it. That's it. You just install this thing,

00:42:25   you create an account, and then your stuff is there in the cloud. And if you ever need it,

00:42:28   you can get all of your stuff put on a USB drive and they will, you know, ship it by UPS or FedEx

00:42:35   or something like that if a catastrophe hits. But most of the time when people restore stuff from

00:42:39   Backblaze, it's just like one file at a time. If you just need that one file and

00:42:42   you're away from your computer, you can use their iOS app from your phone to get

00:42:47   to any of the files that you have backed up in Backblaze, get that file and send

00:42:50   an email to whoever you want to send it to right there from your phone, right

00:42:53   there. It is such a relief. This is the thing I always emphasize with

00:42:57   Backblaze, is when you know that everything you have is backed up in some

00:43:00   other way in addition to whatever else you're doing locally in your office, you

00:43:05   know, like with super duper clones or whatever else you might be doing, to know

00:43:08   that you've got your stuff backed up in the cloud, off with somebody you can trust. It's

00:43:14   such a relief. Really is. I can't recommend them highly enough. Where do you go to find

00:43:19   out more if you haven't signed up already? Which I can't believe that there are still

00:43:23   listeners to this show who haven't, but apparently not.

00:43:24   CURTIS LENOX - Shame on them, John. Shame on them.

00:43:26   JOHN HARRISON - Shame on them. This is a sponsor who I would like to get rid of. I would like

00:43:31   to get rid of by having everybody who listens to this show sign up and use them, and then

00:43:35   And Backblaze would say, this is great.

00:43:37   We love the response.

00:43:38   But now nobody else is signing up

00:43:39   because everybody's already signed up.

00:43:41   And that would make me feel great

00:43:43   because it would make me feel good to know that everybody out

00:43:45   there, you guys are backing up to somewhere in the cloud.

00:43:48   Go here.

00:43:48   Get a no credit card required trial.

00:43:51   Go to backblaze.com/daringfireball.

00:43:55   That's all you have to do.

00:43:56   Backblaze.com/daringfireball.

00:44:01   I think years ago--

00:44:02   I think I mispronounced it.

00:44:03   I think I said years ago on Backblaze read,

00:44:07   I called them Blackbaze or something, Blackblaze,

00:44:10   and they went and registered the domain.

00:44:12   Blackbaze, Black-- hm.

00:44:15   That's interesting.

00:44:16   Let me see if they've still got it.

00:44:18   No, not Blackbaze.

00:44:19   Maybe Blackblaze.

00:44:22   Something mispronounced.

00:44:23   Sounds kind of dirty.

00:44:24   Yeah, it does.

00:44:25   A little bit.

00:44:25   Oh, yep, go to Blackblaze.

00:44:27   Go to blackblaze.com.

00:44:29   I love that.

00:44:29   Do it.

00:44:30   Go to blackblaze.com.

00:44:33   I believe that they registered it because of a mispronunciation that I did on their show.

00:44:38   Oh yeah, totally redirects. That's great. Oh my god. So my thanks to Black Blaze.

00:44:45   For doing the evil. That's the evil twin of Backblaze. It's the one that's got the

00:44:52   handlebar mustache. Yeah, otherwise identical. Jet black, a jet black handlebar mustache.

00:44:59   Now I'm looking, I googled snow on the internet and with the news section.

00:45:05   A lot of pictures of empty grocery shelves and people in line waiting to buy things.

00:45:12   Here's the thing. I've said this before in years past.

00:45:15   I understand the need to stock up on groceries. We've done it. We've already gone and we've

00:45:20   bought some staples to make sure that we've got not just food to eat but maybe actually

00:45:27   meals that we have in the house ready to prepare. Sure, and some 1.75 liter sized bottles. But it

00:45:33   still boggles my mind the way that there are certain staples that literally sell out. Like,

00:45:40   I would guarantee you that when we finish recording this show today, if I go to the

00:45:45   ACME down the street, that there's gonna be no bread. No bread. No bread. Because all the,

00:45:51   because you know, when you're really, really getting attacked by snow, you're gonna want

00:45:55   I want to have some bread.

00:45:56   (laughing)

00:45:58   Oh my God, we're out of bread.

00:46:01   - But ordinarily there's so much bread in that supermarket

00:46:04   that there's--

00:46:05   - So much bread, it's like, it's ridiculous.

00:46:08   You don't realize how big that section is

00:46:10   until it's been totally cleared out during a snowstorm.

00:46:12   - Right, and when it's cleared out,

00:46:14   you realize that all the weird bread is gone too.

00:46:17   (laughing)

00:46:19   - Yeah, all that kind of dark bread,

00:46:20   only like your older relatives like.

00:46:22   (laughing)

00:46:23   - Right.

00:46:24   so dark stuff with weird seeds that you don't know what the weird seeds yeah

00:46:29   exactly oh my goodness we make we make light but I you know this well that's

00:46:35   probably well this this won't come out until the damage is done right we should

00:46:40   probably watch our ass it might come out it'll probably come out tomorrow oh good

00:46:44   oh it could come out later today could come out later today never know no what

00:46:47   happened oh god I don't know what else do people buy they buy eggs that's

00:46:53   That's another one too, where it's good to have eggs in the house.

00:46:55   I enjoy eggs.

00:46:56   I feel like maybe there was some brochure that went around from the '50s to the '70s

00:47:01   and it's the same shit everybody buys.

00:47:02   You buy canned soup.

00:47:04   You buy bread.

00:47:06   You got to have non-perishable items.

00:47:08   You got to have things that you could make over the hot plate that you don't actually

00:47:11   own.

00:47:12   There's all the things that you would need, but you go into this lizard brain thing where

00:47:14   you just click and your brain goes into buy stuff at the grocery store mode.

00:47:19   And then, of course, it's like the stock market.

00:47:21   It's just like trading places.

00:47:22   You go in there and you see everybody freaking out and that makes you freak out.

00:47:26   I think that's exactly it.

00:47:28   It's I think that maybe you go in there and you think, "Well, I want to get bread because

00:47:31   I'm supposed to get bread."

00:47:32   "I'll just go pick up a loaf of bread.

00:47:34   Oh my God!"

00:47:35   And you see that the guy next to you is taking two loaves of bread and you think, "I better

00:47:41   get…"

00:47:42   I see you're punching some lady in the neck because she's touching your butter top.

00:47:45   Right.

00:47:46   And then all of a sudden you're buying three loaves of Wonder Bread.

00:47:49   I've never bought this before.

00:47:52   But you feel like if you don't buy these three loaves of Wonder Bread, you won't be able

00:47:55   to get it an hour from now.

00:47:57   Yeah, like it seems like you should probably buy crappier stuff than you normally buy,

00:48:01   because maybe it'll last longer.

00:48:02   Like, don't get the Progresso.

00:48:03   Like, get the generic brand suit.

00:48:05   Make that, that'll be better when you go into your theoretical bunker.

00:48:08   You know, bring that along.

00:48:09   Hey, that's probably...

00:48:10   Yeah, there's, there's shelves here that are, that have been totally wiped clean of all

00:48:13   lettuce.

00:48:14   So maybe this is a big salad event.

00:48:16   Maybe you have like a lock-in and you make some Caesar salad.

00:48:19   You guys, you don't get snow in San Francisco.

00:48:21   No, I just get a lot of weird weather but snow is snow is not something you guys have to deal with we get

00:48:27   Our climate it's our clothes not our weather. It's our climate

00:48:31   Our climate is very unconventional and the short version is as you probably know is that?

00:48:35   we have

00:48:37   because of our proximity to you know

00:48:40   What is called the Golden Gate like we San Francisco sits astride a big hole in California

00:48:45   And so basically the cold air over the ocean

00:48:47   There's a cold air over the ocean and there's the very hot air over the basin like where they grow a lot of the vegetables and

00:48:52   That causes some very strange things for one thing our air is incredibly clean because it's basically being washed every day

00:48:57   It's being moved out and in every day

00:48:59   But it also means stuff like you know

00:49:01   You might start out at a certain temperature in the morning and then it gets colder

00:49:05   Then it gets warmer for an hour from three to four and then it plummets again at night

00:49:10   And explain stuff like why we have it's cold in the wind and the in the summer. It's cold here

00:49:15   It's warm in October and then it rains for most of

00:49:19   mmm late December January February my favorite evergreen

00:49:24   WWDC joke WWDC is almost always held in June is you know hey first-timers. It's

00:49:31   It's sunny, California. Don't bother taking a jacket or jeans

00:49:34   Yeah, you know German tourists. It's it's it's just evergreen source of humor

00:49:39   They the poor bastards to go I'm coming to dos California, and it's like yeah

00:49:43   Yeah, it's going to be like 50 every day.

00:49:46   Well, they used to give out backpacks.

00:49:47   That was for attendees.

00:49:48   They'd give out backpacks or laptop bags of some sort and embroidered with WWDC and then

00:49:53   the two digits of the year.

00:49:55   And then like three or four years ago, they started giving out jackets.

00:49:57   And they've done jackets ever since.

00:50:01   And I asked somebody at Apple once, is that because so many people-- and you see people

00:50:04   wearing them.

00:50:05   Is it because so many people come and they need them?

00:50:07   And they're like, yeah, exactly.

00:50:09   That's exactly it.

00:50:10   and that people, you know, attendees come up and they say, like, I can't do the German accent, but

00:50:15   the German accent, thank you for this jacket, I'd be dead without it.

00:50:21   Donka. Yeah, you ever go up to Twin Peaks?

00:50:26   No.

00:50:26   Oh, it's really, you should do it sometime, it's pretty cool. There's not that many things I

00:50:29   recommend about San Francisco, but you drive up in, near the, somewhat near the geographical

00:50:36   center of town, basically at the end of Market Street. So, Market Street begins at the Embarcadero,

00:50:41   the Ferry Building. There's the part of Market Street you're familiar with by Moscone. And

00:50:44   then if you go all the way to the end of Market Street, essentially it mostly ends, it ends

00:50:48   at the Castro, and then you'll see this big mountain. And so anyway, you go up this big

00:50:52   hill to get to my neighborhood, and Twin Peaks are these two big mountains in the middle

00:50:56   of San Francisco. And it's where that big tower is, that robot-looking tower you see.

00:51:03   But if you go up there, man, and it's clear, you get this amazing view of the city.

00:51:08   It's really, really beautiful.

00:51:09   One of the very few actually nice things in San Francisco.

00:51:12   But of course, you go up a mountain in San Francisco, and it's like 10 to 20 degrees

00:51:17   colder than it was where you were, plus it's incredibly windy.

00:51:21   So you just see these little ladies up there just like selling sweatshirts.

00:51:24   They go up there at 8 in the morning and they just sell sweatshirts all day long.

00:51:28   Yeah, yeah, I want to see that view from the Twin Peaks.

00:51:33   I feel like I probably, maybe even a majority of the people who listen to my show have been

00:51:38   to San Francisco at least once. I mean, I feel like it's, you know, it's probably an

00:51:42   awful lot. I know that an awful lot of people who read my stuff and listen to it or, you

00:51:46   know, work out there. And, you know, if you work anywhere, even vaguely Northern California,

00:51:50   of course, you've been to San Francisco. But for you know, there's probably a lot of people

00:51:53   who, you know, just have never had reason to go. I feel like you can hear these stories

00:51:58   about how the weather in San Francisco is incredibly isolated, you know, from the area

00:52:02   around it. But you just can't...

00:52:04   Well, you walk around within two blocks, you could change, you know, basically be a different

00:52:08   climate for reasons that are very unclear.

00:52:10   Why is it cold here? I've just moved... I've just gone from Union Square down to, you know...

00:52:17   How is the wind blowing from both directions?

00:52:21   Like all of a sudden you're down by, what are they called, AT&T Park, wherever the Giants

00:52:25   play.

00:52:26   Yeah, sure, sure.

00:52:27   I know I know it's bananas, right? Yeah

00:52:30   Hope it all goes. I hope it all goes well for you, you know, god bless you

00:52:35   I hope I hope it's I hope it's it's fun now

00:52:38   Do you face I don't want to make this the whole show but I mean like do you face much in the way like of damage?

00:52:42   Like when I was in Florida and there's a hurricane coming there's all kinds of stuff

00:52:45   You got to do depend all the way from tape up the windows to like board over the windows

00:52:50   Like do you have to do any special preparation? No, you know big snow is coming. No

00:52:55   No, except stock up on bread.

00:52:57   No, you know, you know what, we as a family have it very easy and I understand, again,

00:53:04   this is just, it's just like kids getting sick.

00:53:07   If you have a job where you've got a, it's important that you be there, snowstorm is

00:53:12   an enormous pain in the ass.

00:53:14   And the fact that it's coming on a weekend could be good news for a lot of people, but

00:53:17   there's still some people who have jobs that it's essential that they be there.

00:53:21   Huge pain in the ass.

00:53:22   Well, I guess where my office is, it's right downstairs.

00:53:24   So the fact that we can easily and work-wise, you know, a snowstorm is often indistinguishable

00:53:31   from a normal day for us.

00:53:32   It's actually kind of nice.

00:53:33   You're very fortunate.

00:53:35   In any other generation, the idea of having your bedroom, your office, and your bar be

00:53:41   essentially the same room, you know, that's powerful.

00:53:45   You got everything you need right there.

00:53:47   You know what?

00:53:48   You're like your own personal food court.

00:53:49   Everything you need is right there.

00:53:50   Yeah.

00:53:51   it and sometimes it's really it's just so nice in the city to have the big snow come and have

00:53:56   very few cars on the road and it's you can go out right and before the snow turns all gray and black

00:54:02   from the cars that eventually get back on the road everything looks beautiful and it's quiet it is

00:54:08   quiet in a way that you can't believe that the city could ever be this quiet because in addition

00:54:13   to the fact that there's no or very few cars on the road the snow is like a what would you call

00:54:18   it a sound dampening soft substance it absorbs. It's hard to even describe that

00:54:23   sound but it's even when I lived in the suburbs in Ohio it's it's a very special

00:54:27   winter feeling to go outside and it's very it's very crisp it's very quiet and

00:54:31   it's very still it just feels like everything has slowed down. Yeah I

00:54:35   remember a couple years ago it's very vivid in my mind it was Michael Lop my

00:54:40   friend Michael Lop of Rans and Repose was in town for a conference of some

00:54:44   sort or somebody had paid him for a it was like a paid speaking kid I don't

00:54:47   it was a conference or a corporate thing, but he was in town. And a huge snowstorm hit.

00:54:52   One of these, you know, at least a foot of snow type things. And we went out to dinner,

00:54:56   just the two of us. And there was nobody on the street. And, you know, steakhouse was

00:55:03   open and there was only like one other table that was taken. Only like two or three waiters

00:55:07   were on shift. And we asked the waiter, you know, like, "Hey, was this like a huge painting?"

00:55:11   He asked, he was like, "I live in the city. What else am I going to do tonight? I don't

00:55:14   So it was like empty steakhouse, super quiet, great meal.

00:55:19   And I feel like it's because whoever was in the kitchen, it was like, well, what are we...

00:55:22   you know, we're only cooking like three things, might as well make it perfect.

00:55:25   Great meal. And then we just went out and just walked back

00:55:28   to his hotel and then I walked home and it was... it was like we were the only two

00:55:31   people in the whole city of Philadelphia.

00:55:33   It was amazing. It was like you can't make that up.

00:55:37   That's such a great feeling. Yeah, you know, something that

00:55:41   Syracuse and I have ended up talking about on the show that we do is I'm

00:55:45   always interested in what I would call like seam exposing events, right? And like

00:55:50   the kinds of things where you don't realize how fragile something is until

00:55:54   some complexity or difficulty is introduced and that's when the seams get

00:55:58   exposed. And that's the thing I feel bad about with a city is if you look at a

00:56:01   city like, you know, a city like Atlanta which is already so on the edge in terms

00:56:06   of, you know, I think it has something like them, you know, in the aggregate the

00:56:10   most commuted miles per day. Oh, without question. Yeah, there was a

00:56:13   New Yorker story about it a few years ago. It's ridiculous. People drive...

00:56:17   It's actually shockingly bad in its scale and the amount of time, right? I mean

00:56:21   it's pretty bad. Most people commute like an hour or something like that.

00:56:23   Yeah. Is that right? It's something like that. Something like that. But then you

00:56:26   introduce rain or, God forbid, you introduce snow to that or even the

00:56:30   smallest bit of snow. Like, they don't... there's not many accommodations that the

00:56:36   city of Atlanta can make for snow. And that's the part where it starts to feel

00:56:39   like they say, the apocalypse, you know?

00:56:41   Or you think about so many places,

00:56:42   like what happens in California when it rains a lot,

00:56:45   this happens everywhere.

00:56:46   Like the first time it rains,

00:56:47   after it hasn't rained for a long time,

00:56:48   there's all this oil and, you know, various detritus,

00:56:52   like just sitting there on the streets.

00:56:54   And so once you start, you know, zooming around on there,

00:56:57   that water basically, I don't know, I'm not a scientist,

00:56:58   but like that makes the roads very slippery.

00:57:00   Or the drains, you know, the ground can't absorb

00:57:04   all the water 'cause it's been so dry.

00:57:06   It's just, I don't know.

00:57:07   I always brace for the first big snow, the first big

00:57:11   rainstorm. Will, can we take this?

00:57:15   I was talking to Dan Fromer about it on this show

00:57:18   last time, it was a good episode. And in Vegas when it rains, the

00:57:23   cars are terrible, people don't know how to drive, and a couple of Vegas residents said

00:57:26   it's

00:57:27   you know in addition to the fact that people here don't really know how to

00:57:29   drive with wet roads,

00:57:30   it really is actually worse than typical wet roads because we get so little rain

00:57:35   that there is like a coating of oil on

00:57:37   on the tarmac. For somebody who claims to like CES,

00:57:42   wow, he really... I feel like

00:57:46   every impulse I've ever had to go to CES, I'm really glad I didn't listen.

00:57:50   That sounds so awful. You and I should go together.

00:57:54   It sounds like you're committed for next year. Do you think we should go and do some

00:57:58   reporting?

00:57:58   I think we should. I think that within a

00:58:02   couple of weeks I'll just file that away and do another show next year

00:58:05   where I say, "I'll go next year."

00:58:07   - Well, knowing your record with this,

00:58:09   I'll make you this mostly promise.

00:58:11   I'll go if you go, but I don't think you're gonna go,

00:58:13   so I'm not worried.

00:58:14   I don't wanna go.

00:58:15   Oh my goodness.

00:58:17   (laughing)

00:58:18   That description of the shuttle buses,

00:58:21   like how long it took to go somewhere in a shuttle bus.

00:58:23   Like, I walk everywhere in Las Vegas.

00:58:25   I can't imagine driving.

00:58:26   If it's anywhere on the strip, you walk there.

00:58:28   I mean, what's the worst thing that happens?

00:58:30   You get an alcoholic beverage and walk.

00:58:33   It's not hard.

00:58:34   but like, oh my God.

00:58:36   And I'll imagine all of those people who are like us being there at the same

00:58:38   time, how miserable that would be.

00:58:40   Oh yeah, that's part of it.

00:58:41   I remember one time I was in Vegas and it was just by coincidence at the end of

00:58:45   some massive convention, you know, I don't even know what it was, but it was,

00:58:49   it must've been like CES sized or close thereabouts. And, um,

00:58:54   we were like waiting for a cab somewhere and it was like taking forever and we're

00:58:59   like, ah, screw it. We'll just walk. And then it somehow came up that like, we,

00:59:03   we heard it that they said that at the Venetian,

00:59:06   that there was a three hour wait for cabs.

00:59:09   A three hour wait for cabs? Because it was the end of this massive convention

00:59:13   and everybody was leaving.

00:59:15   Yeah, but think about that. Like, who leaves for the airport three hours in advance?

00:59:19   Nobody.

00:59:20   So in other words, when they tell you it's a three hour wait to get to the

00:59:22   airport, that means you're missing your flight.

00:59:25   Oh no. And that's a thing you can't walk to.

00:59:29   No! And the thing is, that airport is not that big.

00:59:32   In other words, it doesn't have that much tolerance for needing to expand.

00:59:37   Right. But so, like, there are times when Vegas is, you know, as much as they can support

00:59:43   truly massive conventions, conferences, whatever you want to call it, there are times when

00:59:48   it still is, you know, 10 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.

00:59:53   Well, you know, it's interesting if you think about, you know, I don't know, it's an interesting

00:59:58   kind of a planned community in some ways because there seems to be even as much as Las Vegas

01:00:04   has pivoted toward more or less family friendly or more up or down scale.

01:00:10   Everybody's still mostly been marching in the same direction with Las Vegas since what,

01:00:15   the 40s, right?

01:00:17   I mean, the basic idea of what Las Vegas is for has not changed that much.

01:00:21   And I have to imagine like the infrastructure to support that, it mainly needs to grow and

01:00:26   get bigger, but does it need to change that much? You're always going to need prime rib,

01:00:30   shrimp, liquor, and chips. It's not like you're suddenly going to need like, you know, I guess

01:00:37   you get live animals occasionally. Like if a white tiger dies, you get a fresh one. But

01:00:40   like other than that, I mean, it's got to be a pretty steady supply train for making

01:00:43   that place run. And I bet it's pretty easily disruptable.

01:00:46   Part of the problem is that they have a monorail that goes up and down the strip, but it's

01:00:50   terrible. And Dan was saying on the show that at one point it was like an hour long wait

01:00:55   thinking on the monorail. But the monorail is is terribly,

01:00:59   terribly located. It's like way behind the strip. I remember the

01:01:04   first time I tried to take it was like, this is great. We'll

01:01:06   get out of these expensive cab rides, we'll take the monorail

01:01:08   down. And then it they're like these signs like monorail this

01:01:11   way and you start you go through this casino and they're like,

01:01:14   you know, keep looking for signs that say where the monorail is.

01:01:16   And it's like, Oh, yeah, keep going. Keep going. Keep going.

01:01:20   Now you're going through the employee parking lot. And it's

01:01:23   monorail this way and you're like, wait a minute,

01:01:26   the monorail. And then you still get to get there and find out it's an hour

01:01:31   wait. It's ridiculous. But really, I mean the big,

01:01:33   one of the big problems with Vegas is that they really are in desperate need of

01:01:37   some public transportation just, and it wouldn't be that complicated.

01:01:41   It really just up and down the strip. Uh, and they don't have it. I've,

01:01:45   I've often thought, what do you do if you're, you're staying at the Venetian,

01:01:48   your conference is over,

01:01:49   you have a three o'clock flight

01:01:51   and it's one in the afternoon and you think you're doing a responsible thing

01:01:54   by leaving two hours. It's not far. If you want you're in a cab. No, it's like as soon as you

01:01:58   pull out from the airport you can already see the strip. It feels very very close.

01:02:02   Like anything in a desert it's kind of difficult to tell how far away

01:02:05   something is. Yeah, traffic permitting it's usually ten or fifteen minute cab ride.

01:02:09   So it's two hours in advance and then they tell you

01:02:11   it's gonna be three hours until you get a cab. What do you do?

01:02:15   Oh my god. What do you do?

01:02:17   You know, in another time, you know, even probably 20 years ago, I would say you call up the airline and try to reschedule it and pay what used to be, I'm going to say a $75 fee, something like that.

01:02:26   It used to be that flights were more expensive, but you could do more with them. I think nowadays, almost everybody buys, I'm pulling this out of my ass, but you know, like nowadays, almost everybody buys refundable or non-refundable tickets, right?

01:02:38   Right. You always buy the least expensive thing. But like, you know, certainly back

01:02:42   when my dad was flying, back when there were three different classes on every plane, and

01:02:46   you know, they were costly, but you could do a lot more with them. I feel like even

01:02:49   20 years ago, most airlines for 75, 100 bucks, you could change your flight. I don't know

01:02:54   what you do in that case. Because it's sort of a can't get there from here situation.

01:02:58   What are you going to do? You're going to hire a local car? I mean, what are you going

01:03:00   to do?

01:03:01   Well, the local, the local, they're not local, the modern day thing, the thing that you can

01:03:05   do now is that you have a cell phone where maybe you can start stabbing your finger at

01:03:10   your airline's website and see if there's something you can do right there, right now.

01:03:14   You could just do it right now.

01:03:15   The other thing I thought you could do is if you're in that situation is take your suitcases

01:03:20   and schlep them not to the airport but maybe see if you can walk across the street to a

01:03:25   different hotel and see if you can get a cab there.

01:03:27   But my thought would be, wait, if there's a big line here, there's probably going to

01:03:31   be a big line at every hotel that is nearby because the nearby ones are the

01:03:37   same ones that the same people have been at.

01:03:39   Yeah, that's one of those things, I'm so interested in these sorts of things,

01:03:41   something that feels like a cause but is actually an effect. Like in that

01:03:45   instance, the fact that there's a lineup for cabs is not the source of the

01:03:49   problem, it's the result of the problem.

01:03:51   You know what I mean? It could just be that everybody's trying to get a cab

01:03:53   right now.

01:03:54   So let's see here. You stay at the Wynn, is that right?

01:03:58   well usually. Okay I'm just trying to look here. So yeah my god look at that!

01:04:03   So you can see like Mandalay Bay and Luxor

01:04:06   practically from the airport. Yeah.

01:04:10   It looks so close. Ooh the Mob Museum.

01:04:13   Wow.

01:04:17   Sorry I get the sneezes. You might have caught something from me here on this.

01:04:21   You know what? I wasn't going to say anything but I was feeling fine when I got on this call.

01:04:25   I even wash my hands.

01:04:28   When Las Vegas, is that what you stay at?

01:04:31   Yeah, that's where I usually stay.

01:04:32   Okay, then you got the Palazzo, the Venetian, the Mirage, Treasure Island.

01:04:36   There's the Flamingo, okay. And that's that big corner. So that's the corner of Las Vegas and

01:04:41   Flamingo

01:04:42   is that big corner. Every time my daughter took her first step at the Bellagio...

01:04:46   I think I told you that story. I don't know.

01:04:51   Yeah, I was doing a talk to the senior management

01:04:54   at the founder of Cirque du Soleil's very purple house in Las Vegas.

01:04:58   Well, I got a call from my wife that in our room at the Bellagio,

01:05:03   our exactly one-year-old daughter had taken her first step.

01:05:06   Oh, by the way, did I mention it was her first birthday?

01:05:07   Cover your nose, honey. We have to get through the casino to get to our room.

01:05:13   I feel like, depending on how our life turns out, they could either just be an amusing anecdote.

01:05:19   How many therapists will have to hear that story over the years?

01:05:23   It's either going to be a very amusing anecdote like, "Well, that's quite a story." Or it's going

01:05:30   to be, "Well, of course." It all started out as so simple. It seemed like such a joke. What else

01:05:41   is going on? Well, I could take another break and thank you. Tell me about something you like,

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01:08:54   I've heard more than one success story. Actually, Dan Medjeman was just talking about this,

01:08:59   but I've heard lots of people say this, where they've had a domain where, what, 10 years

01:09:04   ago, even 10 years ago, they were like, "You know what? This one is out there. There is

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01:09:23   where actually suddenly they've got that domain back. It's so good at getting the spam with

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01:09:32   I used to talk about some of the techniques that Melrath uses.

01:09:36   I feel like it's like, so it's not even worth it anymore. Like this,

01:09:40   it's their problem to worry about the details of how they do it, but it is,

01:09:45   it's amazing. Surgical is a good way to describe it. Yeah. Yeah. You know,

01:09:49   you don't hear about Dan Benjamin on the show as much as he used to.

01:09:51   Is that right? Yeah. On this particular show? Yeah. On the talk show.

01:09:55   You mean like for example, like when he was the cohost?

01:09:57   Exactly. Well, technically this is, this is Mark three.

01:10:02   How do you refer to it? First of all, for anybody who's listening in, it's the talk show.

01:10:06   Right.

01:10:07   Right? We should be clear about that.

01:10:09   Right.

01:10:09   I always have it.

01:10:10   Yeah, clearly Mark 3.

01:10:11   And this is Mark 3?

01:10:12   Yeah.

01:10:13   Hmm.

01:10:14   Do you ever think about the future of the talk show? What Mark 4 would look like?

01:10:17   Would you bring Jonas on, maybe?

01:10:18   Hmm.

01:10:21   It's kind of the same show.

01:10:23   The biggest change in the talk show, well obviously when you and Dan weren't doing it together anymore, was quite different.

01:10:28   But like, you know, I like, for example,

01:10:32   Lonely Sandwich loved the original version of the talk show that you two did.

01:10:35   I could never get into it.

01:10:36   I could never get into it.

01:10:37   It was when you and Dan were doing it that I really liked it.

01:10:39   But yeah, yeah.

01:10:42   What do you, like when you think about that, that must seem pretty weird.

01:10:44   That's a lot of change over time.

01:10:46   Uh, it does.

01:10:48   It's weird for me because it never,

01:10:51   it, it, it creeped up on me as a,

01:10:53   as a serious part of my, uh, I don't know.

01:10:57   we don't want to call it business income, you know, it's, you know, your job. Yeah,

01:11:02   it's part of your job. Now, it always seemed like I was a guy who wrote a website or what

01:11:05   I even at the point when like the first incarnation, I mean, what were the dates on that? The first

01:11:10   incarnation? You could still see it. What is that the talk show dotnet? So those are

01:11:20   the first... You guys had done it for a while. Wow, look at that. No, wait, 2007, huh? Yeah,

01:11:27   so that goes back to 2007. And when the hell did I start doing this shit full time? 2006?

01:11:33   So it's, you know, it was close to, it was within a year of when I started doing Daring Fireball

01:11:39   full time. I always, you know, Daring Fireball was a career and doing a podcast was, you know,

01:11:48   well something you could do on the side and something that the nature of

01:11:52   writing a blog as a full-time job that I would easily have time to

01:11:56   Fit in look at the episode lengths 34 minutes

01:12:00   29 minutes

01:12:03   37 minutes

01:12:05   36 minutes 30 minutes some of them are over an hour, but most of them are like under 45

01:12:11   Episode 8 is 19 minutes

01:12:15   28 seconds.

01:12:16   My god.

01:12:17   We spent that on white bread today.

01:12:19   A half-size episode with our predictions

01:12:21   for the upcoming Apple announcement later today.

01:12:23   Wow, wow, wow.

01:12:27   This is amazing.

01:12:30   This is a time travel.

01:12:33   You know what?

01:12:35   It just snuck up over time that it is podcasting.

01:12:38   I mean, you know this.

01:12:39   You do a couple of shows.

01:12:45   doing a podcast in 2000, even through the end of the run of this first one,

01:12:49   which was what, the last episode was 29th October

01:12:53   2009, that was ahead of the time of

01:12:57   for podcasts. There just weren't enough people. I'd say even at that point

01:13:01   still, I mean it still feels like there's an

01:13:04   article every month or so that's essentially about

01:13:08   how podcasts are finally becoming a thing,

01:13:10   you know, and it's become, I mean it's a tired bit for those of us.

01:13:14   it's even a, it's even a, a bit as a bit at this point to joke about this,

01:13:18   because it's been for five, for what feels like five years now,

01:13:21   everybody who's been doing podcasts since the mid two thousands is saying like,

01:13:25   Oh, that's great. It sounds like that's another, uh, you know,

01:13:28   it's a meta joke because it's like, once again, someone says, Oh, you know,

01:13:31   have you heard about this thing? Serial podcasts,

01:13:33   which are like this and this and this are going to really be a thing. And Oh,

01:13:37   you know, the mid roll puts out another press release.

01:13:40   So somebody does an article about it and it's, you know,

01:13:43   I don't have that much... It doesn't frustrate me that much except that it is

01:13:47   it is funny. It frustrates other people much more than it does me.

01:13:50   Because I think it is this is still so

01:13:53   very much the earliest of days. I mean this to me is like as something like

01:13:57   Ernie Kovacs was to TV.

01:13:59   Or like you may never see another Ernie Kovacs again because Ernie Kovacs could

01:14:02   only have been Ernie Kovacs at that time.

01:14:05   You know? Or for that matter I mean you think about any of those weird shows that were on the

01:14:08   forties before they really knew what TV was gonna be.

01:14:11   Think about, I mean, go back even further. What was a movie? Well,

01:14:13   a movie was a mostly a camera sitting still and filming a bunch of people

01:14:17   performing a play without sound. Right. I mean, it was, you know,

01:14:21   I don't know if he gets the appropriate amount of credit,

01:14:24   but somebody like D.W. Griffith not only had much more ambition in how you can

01:14:28   tell a story with film,

01:14:29   but what you could do with the camera as its own artifice or as its own,

01:14:33   you know, tool. And then introducing like, you know, doing more than, you know,

01:14:37   having things like closeups and then getting into things like editing.

01:14:39   Think about the dimensions of editing that we just take for granted today.

01:14:42   But there was probably what, 10 or 15 years of filmmaking that went on where people were

01:14:45   just walking around going, "I guess this is a movie."

01:14:49   So we think about those and we might have nostalgia for watching The Sneeze or The Kiss

01:14:53   or something like that, but it didn't take 15, 20 years before we go, "Oh, no, there

01:14:58   really is a vocabulary.

01:15:00   There's the 180 degree rule eventually."

01:15:02   There's all these different things of conventions of understanding how we splice time and tell

01:15:07   a story with film.

01:15:08   I still think it's really early days for podcasts.

01:15:10   It's not anything as sexy or sophisticated as film,

01:15:13   but I think it's still very early days.

01:15:15   Well, the thing I've- it's the only part of my racket that's still growing.

01:15:20   Like the website does not- any of the measurements that I can use,

01:15:25   RSS subscribers or page views or whatever,

01:15:27   it peaked a while ago.

01:15:29   I think I was talking about- I forget how I was talking about this one.

01:15:32   You were talking with Dan last week about it.

01:15:33   Yeah, about how once Google Reader went away,

01:15:37   Actually the numbers all went down and never really recovered and I don't again

01:15:41   I don't think that who knows like how much like it's not necessarily that that was the thing

01:15:46   But there was probably a zeitgeist there was a variety different things coming together to create a certain zeitgeist around that time, right?

01:15:52   And it broke including the ascendance of I have to be honest with you. I

01:15:56   Couple people on Twitter had been mentioning a talk

01:15:59   We did at South by Southwest in 2009 and it's not look back and listen to it once a year or so

01:16:03   And I'm still proud of it as something that we did

01:16:06   And I love that people still like listening to it.

01:16:09   And so that's 2009.

01:16:12   Even then, we're there talking about the rise of things like Gawker or the rise of things

01:16:17   like TechCrunch.

01:16:18   Even the TechCrunch at that point is what, four years old, five years old.

01:16:21   But you just think about at that point, Facebook was big, but Facebook was not what Facebook

01:16:26   is today.

01:16:27   No.

01:16:28   I don't even--

01:16:29   It wasn't so much--that was still the time when we were still feeling a little miffed

01:16:32   about how much people got their news from aggregation sites rather than the sources

01:16:35   that were writing them, which now today seems relatively quaint in comparison.

01:16:42   Facebook didn't even have their IPO until 2012, which seems crazy because we just talk

01:16:47   about them as like a pillar of the tech industry, you know.

01:16:51   Well, we weren't more than a few years off of MySpace, kind of being the big thing.

01:16:56   I mean, that's a throwaway line now, but at a talk I did at South by Southwest the year

01:17:02   before that, I made mention of MySpace.

01:17:05   I mentioned MySpace in the inbox zero talk from 2006.

01:17:10   So, you know, that seemed like the unvanquishable,

01:17:16   big player for a long time,

01:17:17   which now everybody looks at it and laughs,

01:17:18   but like, no, no, honestly,

01:17:20   MySpace really was the thing for a long time.

01:17:24   And it just seemed like Facebook was gonna be a,

01:17:27   have nicer typography and be, you know, whatever.

01:17:29   I'm not gonna be like a dork about it,

01:17:31   but Facebook seemed like the next MySpace.

01:17:33   It didn't seem like,

01:17:34   I'm pretty impressed with how much it has stuck around and grown in that

01:17:38   amount of time.

01:17:39   Yeah, I wouldn't have predicted it.

01:17:40   But for you, so with your, where you are with during Fireball, this is probably a

01:17:46   little bit inside baseball, but is it that has the size of your slice stayed the

01:17:53   same and the pie has gotten smaller?

01:17:56   That would be my gut.

01:17:58   I, you still seem like very influential in the same circles you were influential in

01:18:01   five years ago, but maybe it's a smaller pie.

01:18:04   Yeah, I think it's something like that.

01:18:07   And I think that if you polled people and said, "Who's influential writing about Apple?"

01:18:13   I probably do better now than I did then, but I have fewer page views per month than

01:18:18   I did then.

01:18:21   And I think it just all hits on an argument.

01:18:23   Everybody does, right?

01:18:24   And it fits very well with my career-long argument that page views are a terrible way

01:18:32   to measure anything other than how busy your version of Apache is.

01:18:38   I don't know.

01:18:40   Do people still use Apache?

01:18:41   I use Apache.

01:18:42   Imagine.

01:18:43   Apache?

01:18:44   I don't know.

01:18:45   You don't even know if Apache's out.

01:18:47   But think about something like, and again, you always got to give me a little bit of

01:18:52   a pass.

01:18:53   I don't follow all this stuff super carefully.

01:18:54   I read your site.

01:18:55   I read Six Colors.

01:18:56   I read iMore and Macworld.

01:18:58   I'm not an Apple follower.

01:19:01   I'm a user. I'm a super user, but I'm not I don't follow the business. But with that said I

01:19:06   Mean could you have guessed what four years ago that Mark Gurman?

01:19:11   Would have risen in a sentence the way that he has now that still feels like a story that's not done being told

01:19:16   Oh, yeah, definitely

01:19:18   I mean I've noticed I feel like I've noticed a change in how you talk or think about him you had didn't you have on

01:19:23   The show one time at least once maybe twice

01:19:25   I think it was twice least once but like wasn't there a time when you well put this way

01:19:29   I would lump all of those idiots into the same group of like who cares? Why are you talking about rumor stuff?

01:19:35   but he has been

01:19:37   It seems to me unique in his ability to get to the right sources that he is true

01:19:43   He is he does know about stuff before other people and he finds a way to make it into a story in a way that

01:19:49   A lot of other folks haven't where it doesn't really just feel like a blown-up forum site about rumors. You know what I mean?

01:19:54   Yeah, I think he's he's changed that particular game a little bit. Oh, definitely

01:19:58   So I've had him on twice. I had him on last June. He seems like a pretty smart guy.

01:20:03   And then I had him when this show, this incarnation of the show was

01:20:06   hosted over at Mule. He was on episode 79 in 2014. Yeah, you know, and I, he's the

01:20:18   most successful rumor, Apple rumor reporter ever, in my opinion. Just in

01:20:25   terms that it seems like a like a gig that burns people out. But also just the

01:20:30   fact that he seems to be he gets good information what seems like a lot more

01:20:34   often than other people. I mean I don't care whether he has the most popular

01:20:37   site it's just that the accuracy of what he's gotten right not just by throwing a

01:20:41   million darts at the board but by saying this this this and this and most of

01:20:44   that's true I think it would be hard to argue that he's been the most successful

01:20:47   in terms of track record. Yeah he's definitely not a darts at the board type

01:20:52   person you know you do you know which is it which is to say that what if you

01:20:57   predict anything and everything and then you know one of them is bound to hit and

01:21:03   then you're good you ever hear about this I somebody told me about I think

01:21:07   our friend Paul kafasas told me about this a couple of weeks ago that I guess

01:21:12   I have to put it in the show notes and find it but during the last soccer World

01:21:15   Cup, which I guess was what like two years ago. Somebody, what they did is they

01:21:24   started pointing to these tweets from this account that was called like FIFA

01:21:32   corruption. FIFA is the world soccer organization. Right, that's the

01:21:37   Sepp Blatter guy? Yeah, well so these tweets had all the scores in advance of

01:21:45   the game right right and it was like Germany Germany's Germany will beat Sweden two to one

01:21:51   and you know so-and-so kicks a kicks a goal late you know in a extra time to to as the you know

01:21:57   to break the one one tie and that it would the timestamp on the tweet is before the game and

01:22:03   here that's exactly what happened and it went super viral it was like holy shit this guy whoever

01:22:10   this anonymous person tweeting these things in is, you know, all of his tweets are exactly right and

01:22:15   they're all, you know, they've all got the scores right. So it's obviously these matches are all

01:22:21   fixed. But what the guy did was brilliant was he tweeted like hundreds and hundreds of tweets with

01:22:27   all sorts of--and soccer scores aren't that hard to get. Yeah, it's not going to be like 135 to 7.

01:22:34   Right, it's, you know, it's going to be three to one nil. So he tweeted hundreds and hundreds of

01:22:39   these tweets with these possible things, very plausible things that would happen, and hadn't

01:22:45   publicized the Twitter account at all, then went and deleted all the ones that didn't

01:22:49   come true, leaving only the ones that happened and then started publicizing the Twitter account.

01:22:56   Well, that's the way a lot of rumor blogging works, and Germin definitely isn't that style.

01:23:01   I mean, you can't go back and delete it, but certainly these financial analysts and stuff

01:23:06   like that, they do it all the time.

01:23:07   say, you know, 10 different things. Nine of them are ridiculous, but one of them hit,

01:23:11   and then they just point to the one that hit, and they're like, "See?"

01:23:14   Yeah, that's so interesting when you think of it that way, and it's—there are reputations

01:23:19   that end up getting made that—it's almost like, you know, imagine if you had to sit

01:23:23   down in a Google spreadsheet and, you know, like, remember there's a website for a while

01:23:27   where you could make a bet about anything that could happen in the future, and, you

01:23:30   know, I forget what it was called, but the idea is the artfulness is coming up with what

01:23:34   actually constitutes the bet. Like you can't say like, oh computers will get

01:23:37   faster within the next year. Like okay thanks that doesn't really help us. You

01:23:40   have to have something very specific and quantifiable. If you were, if you were,

01:23:43   and obviously you would never be this person if you're a rumor monger, but like

01:23:47   if you had to like make that say that by this date the following kind of thing

01:23:51   will happen. My level of certainty is this much and basically the number of

01:23:55   chips I'll put on the table is this much. Right? You know what I'm saying? Like I'm

01:23:59   like I'm gonna give this in I'm gonna give this a you know five out of ten on

01:24:03   on how much I'm pretty sure it's gonna happen,

01:24:05   and I'm gonna bet this many chips that it would happen.

01:24:07   So it'd be sort of like odds.

01:24:09   You know, it would be really interesting to go back

01:24:11   over somebody's career and be able to look at those.

01:24:13   I bet it would be, especially for some of these

01:24:15   ding-a-ling analysts, can you imagine

01:24:16   what that would be like?

01:24:18   And not just your trip-child-re types,

01:24:19   but like just any of these folks out there

01:24:21   who have some kind of speculative half-reckon

01:24:24   about something that might happen.

01:24:26   It's like doing a cold reading, you know?

01:24:28   Like, you know, you walk up to anybody

01:24:31   who can speak English and say,

01:24:32   Do you have an uneasy feeling about an older man in your life right now?

01:24:37   It's like almost everybody does.

01:24:39   It'd be like going, do you sometimes feel like you might be

01:24:41   slightly more intelligent than a lot of the people around you?

01:24:44   Like, "Oh, yeah, actually I do."

01:24:46   Interesting, interesting, interesting.

01:24:48   Have you had a loss in your life in the last one?

01:24:51   That's the thing where it really feels like a cold reading to just some of this stuff.

01:24:57   Apple is going to make a bigger phone,

01:24:59   Apple is going to make a smaller phone.

01:25:01   "Well, congratulations! You just covered the entire board."

01:25:04   Like, thanks. That's great. That's really useful.

01:25:06   You know what? This reminds me of a very specific rumor that is, you know,

01:25:10   somewhat recent, super widespread.

01:25:14   And I wanted to bring it up with you.

01:25:17   I didn't write it down. I kept it in my head. But now I remember.

01:25:20   Otherwise, I would have forgotten it.

01:25:22   I'm fascinated by this rumor that the next iPhone is going to get rid of the headphone jack.

01:25:27   Not particularly because of the practical consequences of living with an iPhone that doesn't have a standard headphone jack,

01:25:35   but the way that tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people have reacted to the news.

01:25:42   There's a petition that somebody put together that apparently...

01:25:46   And everybody knows how effective online petitions are.

01:25:49   Especially for things that haven't been announced as a reality yet.

01:25:52   It's like being mad about a speculative change of wardrobe by the cartoon character Tinkerbell.

01:25:58   It's like, "Well, that's not anything we actually thought about, but sure, give us your petition."

01:26:03   So what are people saying? What is the nature of their demand?

01:26:07   That they not get rid of the audio jack, or what's the specific beef?

01:26:11   To me, that's what's interesting. The ramifications of this are extremely interesting.

01:26:18   really interesting because there are a lot of things that this will screw up a

01:26:21   lot of things that it will allow and just a whole bunch of stuff that it'll

01:26:24   change and it all comes down to these little implementation details to like

01:26:28   what this means in the near term and I find that incredibly fascinating here it

01:26:32   is it's a here's an online head online petition that has two hundred ninety one

01:26:38   thousand eight hundred forty eight signees and their goal is three hundred

01:26:41   thousand so they're actually a little short of their goal here I'll send you

01:26:47   link. I'll just read it to you though. This is the way the petition reads.

01:26:53   I think it's very... I think the way it's read... I'm gonna... I'll try to use my voice

01:27:01   to put the bulb. There's a lot of bulb. Oh my goodness there is. Apple is about...

01:27:08   Maybe you should read it. Maybe you should read it. So Apple is about to rip

01:27:13   off every one of its customers again.

01:27:18   Forbes and Fast Company are reporting that Apple plans to ditch the standard 3.5mm headphone

01:27:23   jack when it releases iPhone 7 later this year.

01:27:25   Only a massive - who are these people?

01:27:28   Have they been to - have they finished high school?

01:27:31   Only a massive international campaign could force Apple to change course now.

01:27:35   Really?

01:27:36   Is that the only thing that can cause it to happen?

01:27:37   That seems like a very odd thing to just guess.

01:27:39   Oh my god, this is horrible.

01:27:41   only will this force iPhone users to dole out additional cash to replace their

01:27:45   Hi-Fi headphones, their Hi-Fi headphones, it will single-handedly create mountains

01:27:49   of electronic waste that likely won't get recycled after an em dash. According

01:27:55   to the United Nations, up to 90% of this... oh my god this is so horrible. This is,

01:28:01   and further down, this is right out of the Apple corporate playbook. Did you know

01:28:05   that you know that, Jon? Did you know that they have a corporate playbook out of

01:28:09   which things are right taken. A few years ago it swapped out the original...

01:28:13   sounds like John Roderick wrote it, except John would never write this poorly. A few years ago it

01:28:18   swapped out the original iPod dock connector with the new one, making countless

01:28:22   cords, cables, and chargers obsolete. Further down, tell Apple to keep the

01:28:28   standard headphone jack and ditch planned obsolescence! Exclamation point.

01:28:31   So I find it fascinating. This is incredible. I do realize that if it's true that the

01:28:37   headphone jack goes away, that it will be an inconvenience to people who have purchased

01:28:45   third-party headphones, and the more expensive they are, the more inconvenient it might be.

01:28:50   Does it have to be an inconvenience?

01:28:51   Well, I mean, you have to have an adapter or something like that, and the adapter's

01:28:55   going to stick out further than it did before.

01:28:57   I mean, it's, you know, it...

01:28:59   Yeah, it just, I mean, like, first of all, this has not been announced yet.

01:29:03   There's no way to know.

01:29:04   This is the class, this is one of those classic...

01:29:07   It's one of those classic examples of taking something that isn't a thing yet, taking even

01:29:12   - how do you begin with the idea of something that's not a thing yet, guess like two orders

01:29:16   of change away from that until you find something that makes you infuriated, and so where people

01:29:20   are extremely angry about something that hasn't happened.

01:29:23   So I don't know.

01:29:25   I guess I just feel like - I think it is interesting because it would - it could mean lots of different

01:29:32   stuff for the company, but if you watch Apple at all - and I'm not even saying this will

01:29:36   But if it does happen, I don't think this would be surprising at all, especially given

01:29:39   how much they want slimness and given how much they want might want this added functionality.

01:29:44   I don't think they're doing it to make you buy new headphones.

01:29:46   I think they're doing it because they think that's the future rather than the past.

01:29:49   Right.

01:29:50   And implicit in this line of argument is the idea that they should never get rid of this

01:29:55   headphone port and that devices that we buy 20, 30, 40 years from now should still have

01:30:00   the same headphone port because at any given point, if every device that could have headphones

01:30:08   uses the same port, there's never going to be a year where it's like, well, now's the

01:30:12   year when nobody's going to be put to any inconvenience whatsoever by this.

01:30:18   And the fact that they make mention of the 30-pin to lightning adapter thing is, to me,

01:30:24   it's like the people who signed this are still upset about that one.

01:30:29   It's like, yes, that was an inconvenience.

01:30:31   And I know, just from talking to people, one of the scenarios where that was really inconvenient

01:30:35   would be like, let's say that maybe you and your spouse are on every other year's schedules

01:30:43   getting new phones.

01:30:44   You each get one every two years, but one year for one, one year for the other.

01:30:48   So there was a year there where one of the household members had the old iPhone port

01:30:54   and the other had the new one.

01:30:55   Oh, it was the worst for a while, yeah.

01:30:58   And so it's not just as simple if, unless everybody in the house switches at once, it's

01:31:02   not as simple as just, "Well, just buy a couple of the new ones and leave them around."

01:31:06   But like if there's a charger in the kitchen or something like that, well, now you've got

01:31:09   to have a dongle or something.

01:31:12   But once, you know, give it a couple of years to work itself out.

01:31:15   And now it's a better world because we have a better port.

01:31:18   It's smaller.

01:31:19   It works bi-directionally.

01:31:20   Right.

01:31:21   In hindsight, it's like, "Wow, that really worked out well."

01:31:24   Well let me ask you an extremely carefully worded question or ask our listeners an extremely carefully worded question.

01:31:30   How many of you out there are using headphones that you bought over five years ago that you still use several times a week?

01:31:40   And do you intend to keep using them for the next two years?

01:31:45   Let's even say the next year.

01:31:46   How about this? Headphones you bought in the last four years that you still use more than one time a week.

01:31:53   several times a week. Maybe are there any that you bought over four years ago

01:31:56   that you're using every day with an iPhone, right? And do you intend to

01:32:00   use that for another year? Because here's the thing. That's when the Lightning

01:32:04   Adapter came out, was four years ago. Do you follow? Yeah. In the amount of time

01:32:09   since the Lightning Adapter has come out, I am not finding it difficult to deal

01:32:15   with not having a 30 pin USB jack anymore. It just doesn't come up. It comes

01:32:21   up a couple times a week, maybe, or maybe even less, because I have to charge my kids

01:32:26   ancient iPad 2. But that transition is well and truly over. With the exception of maybe

01:32:33   going into a hotel room and finding some places that still have those. Do you see my point

01:32:37   though? So what's the legacy problem here? Do you personally have any headphones that

01:32:42   you couldn't afford to replace that you've used for more than four years and need to

01:32:45   use for more than the next year or so? Because it's going to be at least a year, I'm going

01:32:49   guess until that happens. So to me, it all falls apart already because, you know, it's

01:32:54   not like you get a, it's not like getting your dad's Rolex. We're talking about headphones

01:32:58   that people probably buy every couple years anyway.

01:33:00   Yeah, and boy, an awful lot of people. I know, and it's nice at this point where we've got,

01:33:06   I don't know, I think if you did like a thorough, you know, comb, combing of our household and

01:33:14   and counted up all of the pairs of white apple earbuds

01:33:17   that are in this house.

01:33:19   I would not be surprised if the number of working pairs

01:33:22   of them was at least, I don't know, 12, maybe more,

01:33:27   maybe like 15, 20, wouldn't be surprised.

01:33:31   And it's nice, therefore, like I've got a pair here

01:33:33   at my desk and I think I've been using these for a while.

01:33:35   - Those are just my emergency travel headphones.

01:33:37   I hate them.

01:33:38   I hate them.

01:33:39   - They fit my ears pretty well, so I use them.

01:33:42   Amy doesn't really like them, but uses them.

01:33:45   And Jonas just goes--

01:33:46   Jonas likes them a lot, so Jonas uses them.

01:33:49   But it's nice if you misplace a pair,

01:33:51   you just find another pair, you pick it in.

01:33:52   So it'll be a pain, yes.

01:33:54   You'll get a new iPhone, presumably,

01:33:55   if it comes-- unless they go, who knows what they're

01:33:57   going to do?

01:33:58   That's the other thing that makes me so crazy about the--

01:34:01   or not crazy, but so--

01:34:03   what's wrong with you people?

01:34:05   We haven't heard the story yet.

01:34:07   If it's true, we haven't even heard

01:34:10   what Apple expects us to do.

01:34:11   Are they going to go entirely wireless?

01:34:13   Is it a new thing?

01:34:14   Is it going to be the Lightning port?

01:34:18   Let's just say, though, that they do include a pair of wired headphones

01:34:21   and they plug into the Lightning port.

01:34:24   Yes, it'll be mildly inconvenient that the 15 pairs of headphones

01:34:27   in the house already no longer work on this phone

01:34:29   and you have to use the one that came with your phone.

01:34:31   But they're going to give you a pair of headphones at work.

01:34:34   They're going to give you a pair of headphones that work.

01:34:35   And knowing Apple--

01:34:36   I mean, Apple has been fairly consistent about this.

01:34:39   I call it, personally, I call it the one-year warning shot, which is that Apple will give

01:34:43   you, if you're looking for it, you will notice a warning shot about what's going to go away

01:34:46   in a year, if you're paying attention.

01:34:49   That could be all kinds of different devices, but the classic for me is the scrolling direction.

01:34:52   I said, "Okay, from now on, we're changing the scrolling direction on OS X.

01:34:56   It's going to seem weird, but that's going to be..."

01:34:59   Here's the thing.

01:35:00   If it absolutely drives you crazy, you can go back and change it to the other way, like

01:35:04   an animal.

01:35:06   But we want you to know that this is the way we're moving, and if you want to move in the

01:35:09   direction Apple is moving I'm not saying this is good bad or indifferent you need

01:35:12   to listen for those warning shots and in the next year get your head around the

01:35:14   fact that this is going to change so yes I think they will give you if if this is

01:35:18   the change and I don't think there's evidence that there is but whatever if

01:35:21   there is they're gonna give the right headphones and you know what I'll bet

01:35:24   you you can find some kind of janky ass adapter that'll let you use your beloved

01:35:28   headphones but I don't think I think if they do this it's not gonna be because

01:35:34   it makes your life miserable it's because they want to do something really

01:35:37   new and that to me is super interesting what could you do with lightning

01:35:42   headphones there's so many things that are super interesting to me and thinking

01:35:45   about that and I'm thinking also about stuff like could you have like else you

01:35:49   had a charger pack it would it be conceivable to have a charger pack that

01:35:51   had just a slightly larger than usual chin on it where you could potentially

01:35:56   plug that in to the lightning and then have both the transmitter and off to the

01:36:01   side a dingus for plugging in old-style headphones I mean that's me that's not

01:36:05   beyond imagination.

01:36:06   Sure. You could do it. What would an adapter look like, you think?

01:36:09   Well, I mean, it might just be... just a straight adapter would just be like a

01:36:14   little,

01:36:15   you know... On a cord, probably.

01:36:18   Yeah, maybe it would be on a cord. Because otherwise you're gonna get that iPad Pro

01:36:22   Pencil problem if you've got this...

01:36:24   For the full-on, long iPhone jack, that's gonna be pretty long, accounting for what's

01:36:29   already inside the phone.

01:36:31   Yeah, maybe it should be on a little cord.

01:36:33   Because that way, in a little cord, if it was on a little, like, you know, like, inch,

01:36:37   two inch cable, then it wouldn't be like a Chris Brakey off-y thing in your pocket.

01:36:43   Like the size of one of those splitters, like where you want to split into two and you get

01:36:47   two separate cords coming out.

01:36:48   Something along those lines.

01:36:49   But like, that would fix the legacy problem.

01:36:52   Is it elegant?

01:36:53   No, but welcome to the future.

01:36:54   Like you're gonna buy new headphones anyway, especially, I don't know, it just seems like

01:36:58   a scratch.

01:36:59   use this old 3.5 millimeter port forever, forever, or...

01:37:05   On an infinite time scale.

01:37:06   Or eventually somebody is going to ship a product that doesn't use it. And so I don't

01:37:11   get it. I really do enjoy it though. So here's the thing though, I really do wonder if it's

01:37:16   true, I wonder if this actually is a rare case, in my opinion, of a deliberate leak

01:37:22   by Apple to vent a whole bunch of the anger almost an entire year in advance

01:37:29   so that when it is announced it doesn't come as a shock to nearly as many people.

01:37:35   Who has done the most significant and reliable reporting or you know

01:37:41   apparently reliable reporting on this? I guess the guy at Fast Company. Okay, okay.

01:37:48   I guess, and notably not Germin.

01:37:52   Or Forbes?

01:37:53   Yeah, Forbes and Fast Company is what the petition says.

01:37:56   Although they don't...

01:37:57   Oh no, they do have links to it at the bottom.

01:37:59   So if you go to that petition page...

01:38:01   I don't think Forbes will let me look at their page anymore.

01:38:03   iPhone 7 leaks, quote, "Confirm Apple-abanding headphone jack."

01:38:09   Oh my god, it's like they've got a different dictionary.

01:38:12   Exactly.

01:38:14   Well, they did put the word "Confirm" in quotes.

01:38:17   That's great. That's great. That's just a little better than putting "proves" in quotation marks.

01:38:26   It's like reality, but maybe not?

01:38:29   The Fast Company headline is "It's true, colon, Apple will drop headphone jack to make the iPhone 7 slimmer, comma, says source."

01:38:36   I would say that the Fast Company one is probably the most reliable.

01:38:42   So, okay, so I didn't exactly ask you this. Do you think this will happen?

01:38:46   I do. Because I feel like it has to happen eventually,

01:38:51   and so why not now?

01:38:54   What are some of the benefits? I guess the most obvious one

01:38:58   apparently is that it is the gating factor

01:39:01   for getting the phone any thinner. Well, maybe.

01:39:05   The counter argument to that is that the current iPod

01:39:08   touches are significantly thinner

01:39:11   than the iPhone, the current iPhone, and so, and they still have the standard

01:39:15   headphone

01:39:16   jack and there are iPods, other regular non-iOS iPods that are even thinner still that still

01:39:25   have that port. But like on the iPods that are thinner that have that port, there's like

01:39:32   a chin area where the inserted part of the headphone jack doesn't actually go underneath

01:39:39   the display, which makes it easier engineering-wise.

01:39:43   On the iPod Touch, it does.

01:39:46   You could make a significantly thinner iPhone

01:39:49   and keep this port.

01:39:51   But without question, every port you remove

01:39:54   has got to make the device smaller and lighter.

01:39:58   Yeah, well, it's also--

01:39:59   I mean, it just seems like there's several--

01:40:01   I'm not an engineer, obviously.

01:40:02   But it's--

01:40:03   Common sense, though, that if you just take the port out

01:40:06   and don't even replace it with another port of any kind,

01:40:08   But every dingus you can take off of there, it could mean all kinds of things.

01:40:13   It means more space to do anything with that area, including what components you could put there in its place.

01:40:17   Remember also we're talking about at least what, three quarters of an inch of depth?

01:40:20   You've got to engineer around with that.

01:40:22   Yeah, I think it's the depth.

01:40:23   Aside from this thing that's already got that depth accounted for.

01:40:25   I actually think if you could pick the brains of a hardware engineer at Apple who works specifically on these problems of

01:40:33   How do we cram all the stuff we absolutely need and get the biggest possible battery that we can,

01:40:38   given the insane thinness that Johnny Ive's team is saying we're supposed to build this at?

01:40:44   I would bet that if you talk to one of the engineers who works on that,

01:40:50   here's what Johnny's team says we're supposed to be able to build. How do we make this reality,

01:40:54   that the depth of the jack into the device is actually a bigger problem than the 3.5 millimeter

01:41:02   diameter. As well as I'm gonna I don't think I don't know electronics but I'm

01:41:05   as well as I'm guessing being one of the most difficult parts in terms of

01:41:09   moisture. The lightning I don't know I feel like did I talk to you about my

01:41:14   weird lightning thing last year where one particular pin on my lightning

01:41:19   cable had turned like a bluish green on all of my chargers? No! The exact same pin

01:41:26   on both sides and I wondered if it was a hardware virus but basically and

01:41:34   then all sudden all my devices weren't charging as well and it looked like

01:41:37   basically an aquamarine... is that the kind of dark blue green? Yeah. Like a dark

01:41:42   blue green crayon had been very lightly smudged on the same pin of six

01:41:47   different lightning jacks. Isn't that insane? But it must... I'll bet the problem

01:41:52   must have been with the device, that you had a device where the internal pin...

01:41:56   What caused what is the question? Do you remember Jeff Veen talking about the hardware virus

01:42:00   at Google? Did you ever hear about that?

01:42:01   No, I don't think I have.

01:42:03   I love this story. They had a hardware virus. I'm going to give you a minute to mull that

01:42:07   over in your head. They had a hardware virus at Google where basically people's DVI jack...

01:42:14   What do you call the female on the laptop? The jack?

01:42:17   I think it's the jack.

01:42:18   The port stopped working, and they all had this same...

01:42:25   People would notice that they would go in, they would plug into the projector, it didn't work, they'd go and look.

01:42:30   And this one pin had gotten basically bent and distorted inside all these different people's laptops.

01:42:39   So you would go, and if you were in whatever room you were in, you'd look at the plug, and that plug was messed up, your laptop is messed up.

01:42:46   suddenly everybody's noticing all the laptops and all the plugs are messed up,

01:42:50   and you can figure out why, right?

01:42:51   It all started with one slide projector having a broken pin and passing that

01:42:55   defect onto any piece of hardware it plugged into.

01:42:59   And then consequently each piece of hardware that plugged into that computer,

01:43:04   then got it too, which would then pass it on to everybody else.

01:43:06   That's insane.

01:43:08   It's incredible. What an amazing idea. I've never heard of that before.

01:43:12   And now it's kind of amazing. It doesn't happen more often.

01:43:14   So that was my first thought. Isn't that how Skynet started?

01:43:17   Is that the one in RoboCop? Terminator. Oh, sorry.

01:43:21   Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's how that started. Uh, so I don't,

01:43:26   I don't know much about that. You know,

01:43:29   what's funny is like I can't believe I'm living in an age where my phone feels

01:43:33   too thin and my touch ID seems too fast.

01:43:36   Like when I take the naked robotic core out of the leather case and I hold it in

01:43:39   my hand, I have to tell you,

01:43:40   my six S prime feels like a little too thin.

01:43:45   It's not that comfortable to me. I don't think I'd want it to be any thinner.

01:43:49   Yeah. Well, and I wish I now to get like right now,

01:43:52   I want to see if I have any messages.

01:43:53   I use my pinky now because I want to be able to see the lock screen before it

01:43:58   turns on. It's so impossibly fast now.

01:44:01   Could you ever imagine that that'd be something a grown man would bitch about?

01:44:04   Yeah. It still gets me when I want to take a photo, like something is happening,

01:44:07   like, Oh my God, I gotta get a picture of this. Right.

01:44:09   And I developed the habit a few years ago when they added the feature where there's

01:44:13   a camera shortcut on the lock screen.

01:44:15   I'm just swipe up.

01:44:16   Remembering that.

01:44:18   But when I'm normally using the phone, I'm getting better at if I really do want to see

01:44:24   the lock screen, I know to use the side button to wake it up instead of the fingerprint button.

01:44:29   Oh, that's good.

01:44:30   Yeah, but when I'm in like that emergency, holy cow, there's a squirrel eating a, you

01:44:37   know...

01:44:38   Eating a duck.

01:44:39   There's a squirrel eating a duck.

01:44:41   I don't have time to think.

01:44:43   I have to think to use that side button.

01:44:45   I just instantly go to the home button, and then I'm--

01:44:48   That's like muscle reflex.

01:44:50   And now I'm looking around for, oh, man, now--

01:44:52   [QUACKING]

01:44:53   Yeah, and now it's like my Twitter client is open,

01:44:56   and I'm like, oh, look at this on Twitter.

01:44:58   You start shaking like an old man.

01:44:59   You're like, oh, wait a minute.

01:45:01   I want to get back to the screen I was on.

01:45:02   By the way, I'm thinking about writing about this,

01:45:05   but I actually looked up.

01:45:06   I had the same problem you just went through verbally

01:45:08   minute or two ago there about the the word jack and is Jack when you talk

01:45:12   about the headphone jack is the jack the the male or is it the female it ends up

01:45:17   here's the deck different dictionary definition oh good good a socket with

01:45:21   two or more pairs of terminals designed to receive a jack plug so it is the

01:45:27   female but in the dictionary this is the Apple dictionary which is what like

01:45:32   American heritage or something they describe it as needing two or more pairs

01:45:37   of terminals. So like, I feel like the dictionary is wrong on that case, because

01:45:41   every, you know, it doesn't seem like they have a definition that would work with

01:45:44   headphone jack where there's just one terminal.

01:45:48   But that's jack or socket?

01:45:50   Jack. J-A-C-K. Jack. A socket with two or more pairs of terminals designed to receive a

01:45:57   jack plug.

01:45:58   So that's the female headphone dingus? Is it jack?

01:46:01   They're saying that the female--

01:46:02   They should call that a jill.

01:46:03   They're saying they should. I've thought of that.

01:46:06   It does seem like maybe the jack.

01:46:09   What about airplane fluid?

01:46:12   Socket jack.

01:46:13   So they're saying it's a jack is the socket and the jack plug is the plug.

01:46:19   Oh, okay. Then what do you call the pig face thing that you get 110

01:46:25   electricity out of in your house? Is that an outlet? You call it an outlet?

01:46:29   I would normally call it an outlet, but I might call it...

01:46:32   When you jack your plug into the socket, you call that an outlet?

01:46:34   Yeah, I might call it a jack casually.

01:46:36   I would prefer to call it a jack, because I feel like jack is a pretty good word.

01:46:40   Uh-huh, uh-huh.

01:46:41   I feel like with headphones and casual speaking,

01:46:44   it doesn't make any logical sense,

01:46:46   but that you can get away with calling the male and the female a jack.

01:46:49   Yeah.

01:46:50   If you've got your headphones,

01:46:51   just take the jack and plug it into the jack.

01:46:54   Jack into the jack.

01:46:55   Yeah.

01:46:55   Yeah, absolutely.

01:46:57   Take the headphone jack and just plug it right into the jack on your phone.

01:47:00   Why-- what do you, um, what do you make of the apparent obsession with increasing thinness?

01:47:09   What do you make of that?

01:47:10   I mean, I want to say what do you make of that?

01:47:13   Do you like that? Do you feel that it is useful and important?

01:47:17   And why in particular do you think it seems like such an obsession inside the white room to make things thinner?

01:47:24   And is that a thing? Because it feels like a thing.

01:47:28   I don't know anybody, I don't know, I can't think of anybody I know

01:47:31   who's top of the list, even their top five would be "I want a thinner phone."

01:47:35   Pretty much everybody I know says I would, and who knows this could be at cross

01:47:38   purposes like

01:47:39   with your thinking fast mind, your thinking slow mind, but like everybody I

01:47:43   know says they would like to get more battery.

01:47:44   I don't know anybody that says I want a thinner phone. I asked

01:47:48   Schiller about that when he was on the show at WWDC and he gave

01:47:51   a good answer, at least at the time I was like, "Damn, that's a good answer."

01:47:55   and damned if I can remember it.

01:47:57   - I was backstage.

01:47:59   I was backstage drinking, I don't remember.

01:48:01   - Damned if I can remember it.

01:48:04   I don't know.

01:48:05   I don't know what to make of it

01:48:07   because it's gone past the point where I care.

01:48:10   Like I'm impressed now,

01:48:12   like when I go to one of these Apple events

01:48:16   and it's the year when you get a new form factor

01:48:19   and then they have them on a, you know,

01:48:21   Apple table backstage and you get to touch them

01:48:24   see how thin they are and it's like wow that is thin but I think honestly even

01:48:31   starting I honestly I don't think that the thinness of the thing has ever

01:48:34   really mattered to me I liked the original iPhone I didn't think it was

01:48:38   too thick and I think starting somewhere around the four yeah the four and the

01:48:45   four s the one that had the glass back the glass front glass back I still that's

01:48:50   still my favorite. The 4S is still my favorite form factor.

01:48:54   At that point, I thought, "This is fantastic. This feels so great in my pocket. This is

01:49:03   great." Then when they made the next one even thinner, I was like, "Wow, that's amazing,"

01:49:09   but I didn't think this is better for me. They could have stopped at the thinness of

01:49:13   the 4 4S, and I'd be happy if they just packed it with battery.

01:49:17   Well, you know, I like that... I don't wanna sound like an idiot, obviously. I'm glad to see enhancements to the phone.

01:49:21   I like that it's faster, I like that it's bigger, it's all that kind of stuff.

01:49:23   But, like, to me the 4S design still... you know, the whole, like, chamfered edges or whatever they called it,

01:49:29   that still feels so classic to me.

01:49:31   No, that was the 5 and 5S.

01:49:32   Was that the 5 and the 5S?

01:49:33   Yeah.

01:49:34   But that has... wait, no, what was the 4?

01:49:35   That was the one that had the glass back.

01:49:38   And it just had metal sides. They were like... it wasn't chamfered, though. It was...

01:49:43   All right. Ah, see, but that, that, yeah, I guess in my head I think of that. Yes.

01:49:46   I see what you're saying. Yeah. But I still think of that as like,

01:49:49   I'll remember that as the classic iPhone look, I think. Yeah. I don't know.

01:49:53   I like the rounded ish edges. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. I misspoke. Yeah.

01:49:57   This one looks like a Mophie before there was a Mophie. Right.

01:50:00   It's got that with that metal edge. Was this the antenna gate phone? Yes. Yeah.

01:50:05   Right. God, look at, I'm looking at just what the OS look like. Oh my goodness.

01:50:08   Oh my gosh. It's so, I don't hate it though.

01:50:12   I'm not going to blanket party on forest all like I think I don't know man.

01:50:16   It's, it's when the iPhone got good, you know,

01:50:19   he was still there running the show. Um, so thinness.

01:50:24   Yeah. So I don't know. I don't know. And you know, again,

01:50:26   it's I have to always in my head discount the fact that, you know,

01:50:29   the way that we, you know, that book I'm talking about, that Kahneman book, uh,

01:50:32   thinking fast and slow. It's, it's, yeah, it's an amazing book. But you know,

01:50:36   there are the ways that when we stop and think and meta think about what we're

01:50:39   doing. That's actually very different from the way that we think from day to

01:50:42   day. There's just, I mean, setting aside the research, there's just the

01:50:46   anecdotes, there's so much stuff about like what we think we want versus what

01:50:50   we actually do and how what we actually use and how we actually process

01:50:53   information. If you ask anyone who's a gambler whether gambling is a good way

01:50:57   to make lots of money and you say to them, they will say no, it's not. It's

01:51:01   dumb that I do this. It's dumb that I drink. It's dumb that I gamble. It's dumb

01:51:04   that I do these things. It doesn't change the fact that we still do it. So I have

01:51:07   to guess that there's something going on on a sub rosa level here where there

01:51:11   they are there's some reason that they are making these things the way they are

01:51:16   making them and it may not exactly comport with the way that my brain

01:51:19   thinks that these things should be made but they must have their reasons right

01:51:22   that's what I try to think I try to I try to remain unemotional about it like

01:51:28   I don't see it and I don't get it but I feel like it's of a it's of a part with

01:51:32   the outrage over the headphone jack yeah where I don't want to be the one who's

01:51:36   outrades that they've made this the next iPhone even thinner and the battery life

01:51:41   isn't any better you know when obviously if they had you know kept it the same

01:51:47   thickness and just added a little more battery they could have made battery

01:51:50   better that sounds good better to me and I know that there's these you know

01:51:55   literal laws of physics that affect image quality of the camera where the

01:52:00   longer the distance you have between the lens and the sensor it helps to have a

01:52:03   bigger sensor with bigger pixels and therefore get better image quality.

01:52:08   I understand that. I don't get it. It seems to me, my look at it as common sense is if they kept the

01:52:16   thinness the same at this point, then they could have more battery, which would increase battery

01:52:21   life, and they could have better image quality on the camera, which are like the two things that

01:52:24   I care about most, using the camera and the battery. Instead, they keep making it thinner.

01:52:30   I don't get it, but I don't assume that there's no good reason for it, or that the only reason is

01:52:36   uh, like, Johnny Ive's personal obsession with the thinness. I get that there must be something,

01:52:43   I just don't see it. Right, right, and I think for folks who are technologically inclined,

01:52:48   scientifically inclined, or even rationally inclined, you might want to look at something

01:52:53   like, you know, in this case the thinness of the phone, and you can come up with half a dozen

01:52:58   reasons why making it thinner is not a good idea or you know or is not the first good idea but at

01:53:03   the same time you could look at stuff like the skeuomorphism that goes into automobiles you know

01:53:08   in terms of like making this sporty wheel look even more sporty than it needs to look for the

01:53:13   sportiness of it like does that actually help make it a better car not not in the usual sense but it

01:53:19   makes it more attractive to people having it create more like making it make more engine noise than it

01:53:24   it needs to make.

01:53:25   Does that make it a better car?

01:53:27   Not really, not in an engineering sense,

01:53:29   but there's a reason.

01:53:30   There's reasons for all of this stuff.

01:53:32   It goes beyond simply fashion, but there's

01:53:34   something about when you're using it,

01:53:36   this makes you feel a certain way.

01:53:38   And that's why people keep going back and buying

01:53:40   these same brands over and over.

01:53:42   Yeah.

01:53:44   I'll try to channel my inner Siracusa here.

01:53:46   And I feel like Siracusa, if he's listening,

01:53:49   is championing at the bit here.

01:53:51   Because I feel like he could explain this best.

01:53:54   But like the end result eventually is that these phones are just going to be pieces of glass.

01:53:59   You know, like remember, did you see the movie Looper?

01:54:02   Yeah, like those are basically, it's like, or even in Parks and Rec,

01:54:06   it's basically going to be like a, it'll be like a clear floating screen kind of thing.

01:54:09   Just, yeah, just the piece of glass, or maybe it's not glass, maybe it's a polycarbonate,

01:54:15   but just the screen. And when it's off, maybe it's even translucent, and everything is built into it.

01:54:21   to get from here to there they have to keep making everything thinner

01:54:25   and that they know that that's where it's going and in the meantime

01:54:29   they have to keep pressing the gas pedal on making these things thinner

01:54:33   even though it's at the expense of trying to also... it's working counter to

01:54:38   making battery life better and counter to making the camera better

01:54:41   they have to keep working on all three because that's inevitable and if they

01:54:44   don't do it somebody else will

01:54:46   because we're still thinking about a power device as relying on the kind of

01:54:50   of power with the kind of constraints that we do right now. In the same way, think about

01:54:54   the leap from CRT to LED. Making that mental model, that leap from what a TV is, what a

01:55:01   TV looks like, how is it that within less than 10 years, you went from a TV being what?

01:55:08   An 80-pound box into being almost like a plane, right? That takes an entire quantum leap.

01:55:17   Whereas if you ever opened up a TV or opened up a stereo, like a crappily made stereo system,

01:55:21   it's all air inside.

01:55:22   There's no reason for any of that.

01:55:24   It's just cheapest to make that way with stock components.

01:55:27   So that's kind of what you're saying, right?

01:55:28   If we look at this as more than one axis changing in the future, you can't help but think that

01:55:32   there's going to be some changes we don't immediately understand.

01:55:37   Yeah.

01:55:38   I also wonder if there might not be a very practical near-term product marketing angle

01:55:45   on it which is that Apple and other companies as well might know that if they made the device,

01:55:54   let's just say that the iPhone 7 coming out, the new iPhone is called the iPhone 7, it's

01:55:59   coming out later this year and it's thinner than the iPhone 6. That's probably, everything

01:56:05   I just said is what I guess is going to happen because it's what's been happening for years

01:56:09   now. I don't have anybody, I don't know any sources who've told me that but it's a very

01:56:12   logical guess. Apple might know that if they made the iPhone 7 the same thickness as the

01:56:19   iPhone 6, even though they could make it thinner, but if they made it thicker and used that

01:56:25   extra thickness to increase the battery life and maybe get rid of the—maybe if image

01:56:31   quality isn't even better than it would be otherwise, but there's no—the camera lens

01:56:37   doesn't stick out from the back, which would make me very happy.

01:56:41   They might know that in the long run that would make people happy, but that in the short

01:56:45   run if they did that and then people go into a Verizon or AT&T store and side-by-side with

01:56:52   a Samsung that is thinner, even if it's at the expense of battery life, that they have

01:56:59   a reasonable reason to believe that X number of people will then pick that Samsung because,

01:57:04   "Wow, look how thin this is," and walk out of it,

01:57:06   even though in the long run they might have been happier

01:57:08   with the thicker phone that gets better battery life.

01:57:10   But at the point of sale, that thinness will help.

01:57:13   - Yeah, the thinness has curve appeal over bullet stats.

01:57:17   - Right.

01:57:19   - And in that sense of,

01:57:21   that's a really interesting way to put it.

01:57:22   You think about what you buy

01:57:25   when you just walk into the store,

01:57:27   and how it makes you feel in the moment.

01:57:29   That could actually have a huge impact.

01:57:31   - Yeah, and I really, and it's a little,

01:57:33   I know that there aren't the nerds out there, the people who either do think more logically

01:57:38   than most people or at least like to think that they think a lot more logically than

01:57:43   most other people.

01:57:44   I suspect there's a lot of people listening to us right now who that applies to.

01:57:47   I think, "That makes me angry because I'm so logical.

01:57:50   That would never fool me."

01:57:53   A, you might be fooling yourself about just how emotional, the emotional context of buying

01:58:00   it.

01:58:02   Even if you do have a good point because you pre-order your phones and you buy your new

01:58:05   iPhone before you've ever even seen it in person, you can't underestimate that when

01:58:11   you're selling in the quantities that Apple sells at, that most people are not like the

01:58:15   people who listen to this show.

01:58:17   Yeah, but also what feels like a real change in attitude from over the years.

01:58:24   I don't know if you can call this a real change in attitude, but there was a time when being

01:58:30   somebody who said, "Hey, look, just give me exactly what I want in this device and

01:58:38   then leave me alone and stop trying to make this pretty." If somebody said that in 1999,

01:58:45   would you guess that that's a Mac user or a PC user? Because that really sounds like

01:58:50   a PC user to me.

01:58:51   Yeah, me too.

01:58:52   Right? There was a time when one of our many indignities in the Apple community was that

01:58:58   We did, by and large, we certainly could do more at a certain time on your Mac.

01:59:02   It wasn't as reliable or stable, but you know, that's been the trade-offs over time.

01:59:06   But it is kind of funny to me that everybody comes in, it's like, you know, whatever the

01:59:10   six different guys, you know, the six blind men describing an elephant.

01:59:14   It's like everybody's holding a different part of the elephant when they describe it.

01:59:17   And it is kind of funny, like how quickly, like we can go down this personal rat hole

01:59:21   of having exactly the idea of what we would want in a phone, but exactly the idea of what

01:59:26   we want in a phone.

01:59:27   If we actually sat down with people in a room, it would end up being surprisingly different

01:59:30   from person to person.

01:59:31   There has to be somebody there at some level making those executive decisions about what

01:59:35   they can do and make well at scale.

01:59:37   I don't know, maybe I'm pulling that out of my ass, but I do feel like you eventually

01:59:41   get into this Homer's car type situation with people where, "Oh, you know what?

01:59:45   I'd love to have a way bigger phone or a way smaller phone," or, "I'd love to have a way

01:59:48   longer battery life," or, "Everybody's got their own," in your case, with the camera.

01:59:53   people, I'm going to guess, don't know enough... I don't know enough about the camera to know

01:59:57   that thing about the lens and things like that. Otherwise, they wouldn't make a lot

02:00:01   of these arguments.

02:00:02   Well, you know it on common sense level though, right? Like when you look at the sideline

02:00:07   guys at the Super Bowl shooting the photos for Sports Illustrated, what do their cameras

02:00:10   look like? They have these giant lenses because there's definitely some tremendous advantages.

02:00:16   Well, to your point about what I'm calling the curb appeal part, for example, what you

02:00:21   said you wish the lens didn't stick out. When I think of the camera on my phone, I

02:00:25   think of that lens. I don't think about what's going on inside, I think about

02:00:28   that lens and I think about the fact that every time I put my phone down, I

02:00:31   feel a little nervous and I feel a little bit unsettled in an OCD way about

02:00:35   that thing sticking out. Or in the example of talking about the headphone

02:00:39   jack, the audio jack, I mean like we were sort of getting to, I mean how many

02:00:43   people think about that in terms of a cylinder versus a circle, if you take

02:00:49   my meaning. I think when most people think about the gating factor of, I don't know what you call it,

02:00:53   they think of a circle, not a tube. The tube is actually a much bigger deal than the circle.

02:01:00   Right, they think of the diameter of that port as opposed to the depth of the port.

02:01:04   Right, so to apply that same analogy, when you talk about the camera, I think of a hoop and you

02:01:11   think of a cylinder. So for anybody else, you go, "No, no, no, look, it's a hoop. You can

02:01:18   make that as flat as you want. But no, no, no, actually, that's a cylinder. And that

02:01:22   does have an impact. And this is one case where, you know, these two things, the bigger

02:01:28   this gets, the better the phone is. The smaller this thing is, the better the phone gets.

02:01:32   And those two, I mean, what are you going to do? You're going to make it look like an

02:01:35   iMac box? Like, what would you do? You could make it like a ramp or a wedge.

02:01:41   I would love to, I like to imagine, I would like to have been, to see a transcript even,

02:01:47   a transcript of meetings within Apple where it was explained to Johnny Ive that, "Okay,

02:01:54   but the camera lens is going to protrude."

02:01:58   What do you mean it's going to protrude? Well, it's going to visibly be not flat. Well,

02:02:05   how much are we talking about? Are we talking about a monocle here? Well, Johnny, it's just

02:02:10   enough to drive you insane.

02:02:12   We've made a prototype here to his.

02:02:17   And the first time he grabs that 3D printed thing, he goes, "Hmm?"

02:02:21   He turns it around, he places it on the desk, and it goes, "Waka, waka."

02:02:26   Waka, waka.

02:02:27   Because it's not flat.

02:02:30   Can you imagine in – oh my god, that – I bet he was just slamming Xanax after that.

02:02:36   That would just have to make him so crazy.

02:02:38   It's like selling somebody a pair of gloves with a built-in hangnail on it.

02:02:42   Like, can we have it without the hangnail?

02:02:46   The nubbin on the iPhone 6, all of, you know, 6, 6S, and the Plus models

02:02:51   is, to me, like, one of the most fascinating things that's ever come out of Apple.

02:02:55   Because if you have to know the company's history and their obsessions

02:03:00   and the sort of things that the people who work there care about.

02:03:03   It's what? A couple three millimeters, maybe?

02:03:06   I don't even know how you would measure it.

02:03:07   I mean, it's real, real small.

02:03:10   But on the other hand, your finger has no problems like--

02:03:13   Oh, no, no, no.

02:03:16   --running over it like a wart.

02:03:17   Well, yeah, and that's a--

02:03:19   or like a canker sore, like when you've bitten yourself,

02:03:22   or you can't--

02:03:23   I can't stop doing this.

02:03:24   Yeah.

02:03:26   You're not doing it because you like it.

02:03:28   You're doing it because you can't stop.

02:03:29   Yeah, you just can't stop.

02:03:30   It's compulsive.

02:03:31   All right, let me take a break here and tell you

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02:05:06   If you have a team, you have a need for team communication, go check out Igloo.

02:05:09   You know what I love about Igloo? I'm just repeating what you said, but there's so many

02:05:14   of these things where you feel like you get into a piece of software, even some very good

02:05:19   pieces of software, where you feel like you're really entering into a worldview, where you

02:05:24   have to learn to think like the people who made it. As an example of a famous company

02:05:29   that we both admire. You kind of need to think like that one guy and then you'll

02:05:33   really get the software. What's neat about igloo is like there's nothing you

02:05:36   have to do. You can just shut off the stuff you don't need. There's something

02:05:40   very satisfying about knowing the features are there but you don't have to

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02:05:46   like a world-changing philosophy that you adopt in order to make the tool work.

02:05:51   I love that. Yeah it's you know it's sort of like a you know it's overuse analogy

02:05:56   but sort of like a Lego approach to making toys where, you know,

02:06:00   it's not like here's the toy. You have to use it exactly this way.

02:06:02   You just put the pieces together the way you want it.

02:06:05   Well put.

02:06:07   All right, let's start the show.

02:06:10   Yeah. You ready to go? Should I start recording?

02:06:12   Well, have you, uh, the main thing, I mean,

02:06:15   I don't know if there's anything else you want to talk about,

02:06:16   but I want to talk about the Godfather.

02:06:18   Oh man, come on. I got to pick up my kid in like an hour and a half.

02:06:22   Well, just briefly. It's, you know,

02:06:24   (laughs)

02:06:26   - Okay, yes, yes.

02:06:28   - So I did not see this coming.

02:06:30   I don't know if they kept it secret

02:06:31   or if I'm just a dummy who doesn't know

02:06:34   where to look for stuff like this.

02:06:37   But it was like, I don't know, just a couple days.

02:06:39   I saw it on Kottke's site first,

02:06:41   where Kottke was like, "Hey, HBO is going to have

02:06:44   "the Godfather epic on,

02:06:46   "a, the regular HBO on TV."

02:06:51   Which, to me, it doesn't make any sense.

02:06:52   I don't know how anybody--

02:06:53   whole thing makes almost no sense the godfather epic the godfather saga

02:06:56   whatever you want call which version

02:06:58   we tell what it is yeah that well I think the story that I heard was that one

02:07:02   point

02:07:02   you know the godfather and the godfather to have just been so huge so critically

02:07:06   acclaimed

02:07:06   and at some point somebody got the idea to make it a miniseries that you could

02:07:09   show on TV

02:07:10   and with the idea being that copeland went in and personally supervised

02:07:14   a putting this together in

02:07:17   putting it together for TV meaning be

02:07:21   taking out the stuff that would be, you know, too violent in that case, but also

02:07:25   see,

02:07:26   doing it in chronological order of the scenes in The Godfather 1 and 2.

02:07:30   Right? So far so good? So that ran as a miniseries over, I think, two or three,

02:07:34   four nights in the seventies or eighties. And then I can't...

02:07:39   John, I have been looking for a copy of this for so long.

02:07:42   It's hard to find a Samusdat copy of this, let alone a legit one.

02:07:46   Like, you can find, like, maybe sometimes a VHS, multi-VHS, or...

02:07:50   It's just it's one of those things. It's very hard to find but and it's not it's not the it's not the place to start

02:07:56   I would say but like it is if you are a godfather fan

02:08:00   It's a it's such with the new scenes or old deleted scenes brought back in it's a whole new way to watch the movie

02:08:06   So what it's you can go if you have HBO go or HBO now

02:08:09   I don't know why they have two different things HBO go is what I have because I still have cable TV and I have HBO

02:08:15   So if you have Take Cable TV and HBO, you use HBO Go.

02:08:19   If you don't, if you're a quote unquote "cord cutter"

02:08:21   That's me, I got that.

02:08:22   You sign up for HBO Now, which is exactly like HBO Go, except you just pay for it.

02:08:28   And you don't have to pay for it.

02:08:29   There's got to be a very interesting reason why that is.

02:08:31   Don't you think?

02:08:32   I guess.

02:08:33   And it's like maybe like, I think we, but I think you get exactly the same stuff.

02:08:38   I think you have all the exact same, I think it's like the way that you have to log in

02:08:41   is different.

02:08:42   I just don't know why they don't make two different apps for it.

02:08:44   I don't know.

02:08:45   maybe there's some way that maybe it's so that they can just say,

02:08:50   "Here's how many HBO Now users we have."

02:08:52   Oh, I see. Sure, sure, sure.

02:08:53   I don't know. But anyway, if you have either one of those.

02:08:55   Seemingly out of nowhere, this thing that is...

02:08:58   I've got it in, well, in places where one can find things off certain trucks.

02:09:03   I've been looking for this thing for five years.

02:09:05   Because I remember when it would come on TV, in reruns,

02:09:09   it would come on sometimes on like, what, like USA?

02:09:11   I guess, yeah. USA used to have it.

02:09:14   But they never had this one that, that, the one that's chronological order.

02:09:18   Or did they?

02:09:19   Well, I think that's like,

02:09:21   I think it was originally called the Godfather saga.

02:09:24   I think so too.

02:09:25   You got to go to the Wikipedia page for this. Cause I think there,

02:09:27   is there also a version that has three in it?

02:09:29   I think so. Yeah. Yeah.

02:09:32   And I mean like, so,

02:09:34   And I don't think it had,

02:09:35   I don't think the Godfather saga had the cut scene to put back in.

02:09:38   Okay. Like I don't think I could be wrong.

02:09:41   I had seen when Michael goes to Chicago to find, um...

02:09:48   help me out... not Thomasine, uh, Fabrizio. I remember, I definitely, I very much remember

02:09:53   that, and I remember thinking,

02:09:54   "That's a scene I'm glad they put in." There's a lot of scenes I'm kinda not so sure I'm glad they

02:09:58   put in,

02:09:58   but I thought that was great. The idea of them finding Fabrizio and being able to go after...

02:10:02   Do we need to do a spoiler alert here?

02:10:04   Uh, yeah. Probably.

02:10:07   No, it's a big deal. It's a big deal, Johnny. Yeah, so you should, if

02:10:10   If you've never seen The Godfather or if you haven't seen it in forever and would like to rewatch it and keep it fresh, you should stop listening to the show.

02:10:22   It feels so silly to say.

02:10:24   My thanks to Igloo, Mail Route, and Backblaze. My thanks to Merlin Mann and You Can Stop the Show.

02:10:29   Goodnight, everybody.

02:10:30   And I think you'll agree with me. My ending advice to you is just watch the cinematic releases of The Godfather I and Godfather II

02:10:39   as originally released in chopped up, you know, spoiler alert, in chopped up chronological order.

02:10:46   Yeah. Well, it's not chopped up as in like a, you know, Charlie Kaufman movie or something.

02:10:51   No, but it's, you know...

02:10:53   But it's, yeah, but I mean, watch Godfather I, Godfather II. Each one is better than the other.

02:10:57   They're awfully, awfully good.

02:10:59   Right. And the best way to watch them really is the way that they were originally made,

02:11:02   where there's flashbacks interspersed with, you know, divinity.

02:11:05   You're gonna appreciate so much more. It's a little bit like a machete order type situation.

02:11:10   Yeah.

02:11:10   Where there's gonna be stuff, like I want to mention to you is like it's neat to see young Tessio

02:11:15   when he's young, but like it's way more fun as you go, "Oh my god, that's totally Abe Vigoda."

02:11:21   Like that's really cool. Like you appreciate it more in a Darth Vader kind of way.

02:11:24   Yeah.

02:11:24   Hey John, thanks for having me on. This has been great. And may your first child be a masculine child.

02:11:28   All right.

02:11:30   Now for those of you who are...

02:11:32   digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga dig

02:12:02   I hear certain songs from the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin or the bands whose albums I've

02:12:07   listened to a gazillion times. And when I hear the song, I know what song's coming next. And if I

02:12:12   don't hear that song next, it's not... It's disruptive.

02:12:15   Yeah, but it's interesting. It's an interesting juxtaposition and it takes me out of my comfort

02:12:21   zone. Watching the Godfather epic does the same thing, where I know what comes after this. I know

02:12:27   we go back to the 1950s and we see Michael do this and instead we stay in the 1910s and that's

02:12:34   disruptive to me and it makes me see that in a new way. Well and it's funny because watching it in

02:12:40   that order and this is much more, a couple things to note, I would, you okay? I am. I thought you're

02:12:46   laughing, coughing or dying. You need some white bread? We can get you some white bread. I have two

02:12:52   things first of all in the saga which is seven seven hours long right this is the

02:12:57   thing is yeah I love it I took a Twitter picture of it is you start playing it

02:13:02   and it just comes up and it just shows on your TV as a seven hour movie it's a

02:13:08   seven hour movie so two things to note is that first of all the first Godfather

02:13:13   movie which I think was well over three hours to begin with is the lion's share

02:13:17   because I think it's also where they added the most deleted or you know

02:13:23   removed footage. Wouldn't that be fair to say? I feel like we were at least two-thirds

02:13:27   of the way through the seven hours when we got into the Godfather 2 part.

02:13:32   Isn't that right? It seemed like that to me too. And then second of all, the one

02:13:37   that is then much more affected by this change in approach is Godfather 2.

02:13:41   Oh you know in here, wait a minute, I'm sorry I'm an idiot because I'm not

02:13:45   accounting for the stuff from 1900. Oh right, yeah that's it. Duh, duh. Yeah so it

02:13:50   starts out, the movie, the Godfather saga starts out with the... it's the funeral of

02:13:56   Vito's father where Paolo gets shot. Yeah I made the same mistake you did where I

02:14:01   completely forgot. I'm so fucking stupid. But I do feel like, I can't, I can't Pepsi

02:14:09   challenge this, but I do feel like the movie that ended up having much more

02:14:13   deleted footage was the first one. If for no other reason then there's a lot

02:14:18   more Marlon Brando than before. I mean, really noticeable a lot more Marlon Brando.

02:14:22   IMDb says that The Godfather is 175 minutes. So it was, you know, as intended

02:14:28   as originally released, it was close to three hours. I mean, 175 minutes.

02:14:32   It's called three hours.

02:14:33   Wow! I always thought it was over three hours.

02:14:36   Well, you know what I mean. Once you get up close to three hours, it's, you know, it's over three hours.

02:14:43   The reason I remember that is like I've often sat down and watched The Godfather and gone,

02:14:48   "I can't believe that three hours just went by."

02:14:50   Yeah.

02:14:51   That sounds silly, but I mean it really goes by.

02:14:54   Where are you on IMDb versions?

02:14:57   Oh, I don't know.

02:14:58   I just went to-

02:14:59   I'm just on Wikipedia.

02:15:01   I just went IMDb The Godfather and it says 1972.

02:15:04   So I don't think it's any kind of special edition or anything.

02:15:07   Oh my gosh.

02:15:10   Lots of versions.

02:15:12   I found myself, and I'm not, I guess, like, with Star Wars, I'm a little bit more of a

02:15:18   superfan, and I think any additional scenes or restored scenes I would instantly know.

02:15:23   And I've seen The Godfather many, many times. There were a couple of the scenes that were

02:15:28   added where I knew instantly, "Wow, I've never seen this before." And then there were a couple

02:15:32   where I was like, "Wait a minute. Have I seen this?"

02:15:34   Yeah, like when Al Neary goes to talk to...

02:15:39   Shoot, who's the guy who owns the casino?

02:15:44   Uh...

02:15:45   Clingman?

02:15:46   Is it Clingman?

02:15:47   Yeah, well, remember when he goes and he beats the guy up in front of the dancers?

02:15:51   Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:15:52   Like, I had this thought.

02:15:53   Well, first of all, the scene right before that where he's talking at length with him

02:15:56   and starts kicking his ass in the casino, I was trying to remember, is that in Father

02:16:00   2?

02:16:01   That's one of the ones that I couldn't remember.

02:16:03   Is it new?

02:16:04   added, I think. Yeah, and the whole thing with the--God, you know, it's so funny, I

02:16:10   was thinking, Coppola loves big stage shows. There's so many stage shows in The Godfather

02:16:15   and in Apocalypse Now, also, you think about all the stage shows with the Playboy bunnies

02:16:19   and stuff. He's so great, or like the donkey show, the show with Superman, or like all

02:16:24   the other shows in Havana. It's really interesting. That seems like such a big thing. Anyway.

02:16:28   That's a scene that I think had to be added, because I think it would have stuck out to

02:16:32   me because to me it emphasized the power dynamics because a casino is a very...you have to actually...this

02:16:41   is one of those things where the Godfather kind of builds on cultural...

02:16:43   Oh man, there's no grab ass. No grab ass in a casino.

02:16:46   Right, and there's no fighting in a casino. Like you don't...everybody knows you go in

02:16:51   a casino and there's beefy security guys around there and they just...all they want to do

02:16:55   is make sure there's no trouble and that the money just keeps flowing on the tables. So

02:16:59   So like the way that, you know, to start banging a guy on the head in a casino.

02:17:03   The way he's doing it, it's so undignified.

02:17:07   If I had to have a dictionary and animate like a Harry Potter picture of what I would

02:17:10   call a bitch slap, it would be Al Neary hitting Clingman in the casino.

02:17:14   He's like, "Pop!

02:17:15   Pop!"

02:17:16   Poor Clingman.

02:17:17   They're pushing Clingman out.

02:17:20   Right.

02:17:21   I loved it.

02:17:23   I guess I can kind of see why they cut it, you know, that these movies are so long and

02:17:26   that they really wanted to just cut every little bit of fat and leave.

02:17:31   Oh boy, there were a couple that really stuck out.

02:17:34   I'm trying to remember.

02:17:38   There were a lot involving backstory on Mike.

02:17:40   I feel like involving Mike and Kay backstory stuff.

02:17:43   Yeah.

02:17:44   Again, it's seven hours long.

02:17:46   I haven't watched the whole, whole thing, but I've been skipping around to significant

02:17:50   parts.

02:17:51   Yeah, I feel like it really is a testament.

02:17:54   Well, first of all, it is fun to watch it in chronological order because it's just a,

02:17:58   it's a, I never felt more, I don't want to say I've never felt more empathy,

02:18:01   but it made me really appreciate the Niro's performance.

02:18:03   I say that the interleaving was pretty great,

02:18:07   but it's fun to just see all the De Niro in a row almost as a short story.

02:18:11   I, you know, I, I, I'd say hyperbole. Like I, you can't,

02:18:15   you can't say something like this definitively,

02:18:17   but just to be a jackass on Twitter after I got done with that first hour or so,

02:18:21   which is the De Niro is Young Vito, I just tweeted that it's the greatest

02:18:27   screen performance in the history of American cinema. Now, do I really mean

02:18:30   that? I would put it up there with any performance that De Niro's ever done.

02:18:33   Name one that's empirically better.

02:18:35   Right. It's in that A-plus. Let's just say that there's an A-plus category that you

02:18:39   can't go past. This is one of them. Yes, some of the other people who disputed it,

02:18:43   there were others that were out there, but it's as good as any performance

02:18:46   I've ever seen because it does like

02:18:48   It does like ten things at once like one it is completely convincing that he is the younger version of Brando

02:18:57   That you saw in this movie

02:18:59   Before it is completely convincing that this is the same guy. It's a different actor, but it's it's like oh my god

02:19:06   That's the guy and he his carriage not even just the catchphrase

02:19:11   It's his carriage and just yeah the way that he he's exactly like Vito

02:19:15   but how you would imagine him younger. He's very dignified and reserved and kind, and you could see

02:19:22   it's before, you know, he became quite the tough guy he became, and you feel that he could lose at

02:19:28   any point. Well, and the other thing that struck out to me, and when you see it all condensed

02:19:32   consecutively instead of being interspersed, one of the things that jumped out to me, and you know

02:19:36   it, I mean it's... but it just really sticks out to you that this is a guy who likes to listen more

02:19:42   than he likes to talk. And that might make a lot of logical sense for the character,

02:19:46   but it's not the way that movie characters are written, right? Because you tell an actor

02:19:52   you don't have a lot of lines. You know, that's not good. De Niro makes that work, like where

02:19:59   he's acting and he is telling you so many things about this character and it has almost

02:20:03   nothing to do with what he says.

02:20:05   And you're really articulating something I didn't have words for. When I watched parts

02:20:11   this again the last like three nights I've been watching this. You just really

02:20:14   articulated something to me.

02:20:15   You're right, in other movies, you know like a straw man, but in other movies

02:20:19   yeah it is about the number of lines, about how much you get to

02:20:21   pull a face and have an emotion. But think about scenes like, think about

02:20:26   everything with De Niro.

02:20:27   Think about Robert Duvall throughout the movie.

02:20:31   Think about everybody like in the courtroom scenes.

02:20:35   So much is telegraphed, so much is communicated

02:20:39   by how each person mutes their emotional response.

02:20:44   Right, a famous scene, like when they had the first sit down

02:20:48   and Vito says to Sunny,

02:20:50   "Never tell the family what you're thinking.

02:20:51   "Never tell people what's on your mind."

02:20:53   - Never tell anybody outside the family.

02:20:55   - Never tell anybody outside the family

02:20:56   what you're thinking, right?

02:20:57   Yes, yes.

02:20:58   And you see that throughout the movie.

02:20:59   Like when Tom has to go into the place

02:21:02   where the senator is with the, you know,

02:21:04   into, you know what I'm talking about?

02:21:06   - Yeah, yep.

02:21:07   With the little problem with a girl.

02:21:08   It's a little problem with the girl and the scene is it's so awful. It's so scary

02:21:12   And it's so but it's it's not only scary and awful, but it's just he

02:21:16   Geary is so undignified in the way. He's trying to kind of like gather up the sheets while he's wearing a towel

02:21:22   Yeah, but you but how does Robert Duvall in that case telegraph so much of this?

02:21:27   Oh, come on guy as well as oh my god

02:21:29   I can't believe this is another fucking thing I have to do for the family

02:21:32   Do you it's all that I have a question about that scene because I I'm not and it's so long

02:21:37   I'm not done with this yet. I think I'm maybe around with you. I'm about and maybe a little bit more than two-thirds

02:21:42   I'm about three quarters through it, but I saw that scene last night

02:21:44   Did did the family set him up? Yes. Yeah, is that ever made clear or I just know it is not well

02:21:52   I'm just telling you what I think they say in particular because um

02:21:55   Hagen makes Tom makes a point of saying you're very you're lucky that this is Fredo's place

02:22:01   Yeah, because we were able to come in and help you. I think they probably slipped him a Mickey

02:22:06   Yeah, and we're gonna kill the kill the girl. Yeah, that's exactly what I think. It's a little why you can't you know

02:22:11   Remember anything right? I've always thought cool - but I love that. They don't make it core Leon a I

02:22:17   Love him in that role. He's so good. He's such a scumbag

02:22:21   Gary I like the way that as he's

02:22:25   he's

02:22:28   first time we see him at

02:22:30   young Anthony's first communion party and he's

02:22:33   reading from these cards.

02:22:35   Perfect. It's perfect. Now with a special performance, I'm like,

02:22:40   he's obviously, he has no idea what they're going to play.

02:22:42   I like it when I like it when he says Vito Corleone.

02:22:46   Vito Corleone.

02:22:49   Yeah, he's good. And his wife, Mrs. Geary.

02:22:54   So then I said, I said, said this to Syracuse. I think I said this to you.

02:23:00   I said this to other people. The thing that strikes me throughout these movies,

02:23:02   maybe even especially Godfather II is the minor roles.

02:23:07   There's so many people, like I remember,

02:23:09   I still remember like the cop who guides Vito

02:23:13   out of the line at Ellis Island.

02:23:15   I remember the guy with the accordion and the glasses

02:23:18   when Fredo greets Mike to Las Vegas.

02:23:23   Like I just, I feel like there's so many faces

02:23:26   in this movie that I remember so clearly

02:23:28   that even if they weren't a speaking part,

02:23:29   they still feel like a giant part of the movie to me.

02:23:32   the nurse who's the only other person in the hospital when Michael just happens,

02:23:37   no,

02:23:37   when Michael happens upon his father and realizes he's not guarded and that

02:23:42   nurse comes in and just says like,

02:23:43   you can't be here and says it with that sort of authority where like,

02:23:48   let's just say that you're, you know, you're, you know, you're not,

02:23:53   you're, you're relative,

02:23:55   your beloved one is not an endangered member of the mafia.

02:23:58   You're just there to see somebody in your family's in the hospital and a nurse

02:24:01   comes up to you and says to you in that, in a sort of authoritative manner, you can't

02:24:06   be here right now. You're like, oh, it's almost like you like you've wandered into where the

02:24:09   medications are locked up. Like, hey, you can't be here. Like you probably don't know

02:24:12   it, but you can't be in here. You're in the wrong area. It's a vivid performance. It's

02:24:16   like it, you know, she's got, I don't know, three or four lines, but, and, but it's a

02:24:21   great little interaction. The way that Michael conveys to her, you're not, a, you're not

02:24:27   getting at me out of here and b, if you don't help me, somebody's going to come in here

02:24:30   and shoot my father.

02:24:33   I totally agree.

02:24:34   Yeah, I started a list of fives a long time ago of five

02:24:37   incredibly minor characters from The Godfather.

02:24:40   And there's just so many.

02:24:42   And I guess the guy's name's Fred Ruse,

02:24:43   somebody was telling me, who was a producer on the film that

02:24:46   actually also got lent out to Lucas from Coppola,

02:24:50   I guess from Zoetrope.

02:24:51   But yeah, I mean, whoever was responsible for getting

02:24:53   those faces in there, they were really

02:24:56   clicking on an all cylinder.

02:24:57   Oh, the cinematography, everything about this movie.

02:24:59   It's so gorgeous.

02:25:00   How much darker could these scenes get? You can barely make out the figures, the shadows of two people in a room, and yet it completely works.

02:25:06   Oh, it's... it's amazing. And then when there is a scene, and then all of a sudden when there is a scene in the sunshine, it's amazing.

02:25:12   Look at the way... I guess we talked about this once before. So, we talked about this. You've watched the documentary,

02:25:17   where... oh god, I feel so bad. It's not Heskow Wexler. What's the guy's name? What's the cinematographer's name?

02:25:23   Not Roger Deakins.

02:25:26   No, it's not, but...

02:25:28   it's I could just go look it up on the internet yeah we could I hear a thousand

02:25:33   people screaming Gordon Willis Gordon Willis shame he said he he basically you

02:25:40   stop me here if I got this wrong he lit those scenes but as dark as talking to

02:25:46   mama in the house as light as the wedding outside the wedding is

02:25:49   completely blown out to the edge of exposure we can barely make out figures

02:25:52   inside you know there's certain scenes like where you can barely make out the

02:25:56   He said if you move one stop in either direction, it would ruin it would ruin the movie

02:26:00   He was so particular he's like if you if you move one if you move one stop up

02:26:05   That is gonna screw up all the wedding scenes. It's gonna be unusable

02:26:08   If you move one stop down, you literally won't be able to see anything on screen in the boathouse

02:26:12   right, but it's just it's like a microcosm of like the way and that in the Godfather 2 in the in the movie order that

02:26:21   you're in the

02:26:23   Michael Corleone era and then you go back to Young Vito and then you go back to Michael and then you go back to

02:26:31   In The Godfather you're in this dark

02:26:34   office that is so dark and so serious and so somber and then you're out there with this great Italian music and the

02:26:42   Dancing and and the fun and the sunshine. It's the same thing

02:26:46   It's the exact same thing and it's just the right amount of this and then just the right amount of that

02:26:50   But there's a lot of stuff where light ends up playing an important role where light almost becomes a character

02:26:55   Certainly in terms of like the oh without question, but think about the scene the entire sequence

02:27:00   With going after Finucci during the parade

02:27:03   Holy shit, like I just like I have like 50 things to say about that that entire sequence how they pulled that off with those

02:27:10   Side, you know tracking shots that they do and him on the roof

02:27:13   But then the scene when he gets into the building and he's waiting outside the door for Finucci

02:27:18   and he has the towel and he undoes the light bulb. And then Finucci comes up and does this like tap tap tap

02:27:23   to get the light back on and he's back. Ah, it's just it's exquisite because the light is I don't know

02:27:29   It's just it's just so gorgeous light as a character in that scene

02:27:31   I can't help comparing it because it's on my mind because the new movie came out

02:27:36   And you know, obviously Lucas and Coppola were peers and good friends and they came up at the same time and they know each other

02:27:44   But to compare and contrast their stewardship over their fantastic 70s masterpieces

02:27:50   Yeah, and what the ways that Coppola has gone back to the Godfather and put the Godfather 3 aside number one

02:27:58   The Godfather 3 is way better than the prequels for the Star Wars movies, whatever you think of the Godfather 3

02:28:03   But it's it's disappointing but it's not a dumpster fire right it's not you know, right it's not a disaster right nobody

02:28:12   nobody complains about the Godfather 3 the way they complain about the Star Wars prequels.

02:28:15   And then what he did with the Godfather 1 and Godfather 2 are things that like people like me

02:28:20   and you are just praising to no end. And we're not saying, "Hey, don't watch them the way they

02:28:25   were originally released." We're saying, "Watch them like that first and then watch it this way

02:28:28   and you'll gain more perspective." Whereas what Lucas did with the quote unquote "special editions"

02:28:33   like I got found myself this I'm thinking about talking about this I knew that I wanted to have

02:28:38   you on the show this weekend. We talked about this, and I started thinking in my head of like what the

02:28:43   like Lucas special edition of the Godfather epic would be. And like yeah this thing he would like

02:28:51   CGI the faces like Michael's Michael's wounds from the cop beating him up would be much more

02:28:57   like elaborate. Yeah yeah exactly that's exactly one. Okay so one of the things that stuck out to

02:29:03   me everybody knows Star Wars was groundbreaking special effects because it showed you these things

02:29:06   that were impossible, like a giant, you know, two-mile long starship.

02:29:11   Yeah.

02:29:11   Whereas the special effects in The Godfather, though, are amazing. I find

02:29:17   that their street shot from--for being made in like 19--early 1970s--

02:29:22   Oh, unbelievable.

02:29:22   The street shots of like old New York, whether you're talking the 1950s or 1940s,

02:29:30   or you're talking all the way back to the 1910s, they're all a hundred percent

02:29:35   convincing and I'm guessing they did it with like

02:29:39   matte paintings.

02:29:41   That's how they did a lot of like wide shots back then, you know, before the

02:29:44   digital age.

02:29:46   But they're all just convincing and I don't know how they did it.

02:29:49   I really don't. They sweated so much of the details in,

02:29:53   it feels like to me, like just dumb stuff. Like I was noticing when

02:29:57   Michael pulls up at Hyman Roth's house, I think he's in like a Thunderbird, that red and

02:30:00   black Thunderbird,

02:30:01   There's a little parking sticker in the window that looks completely

02:30:05   contemporaneous to the time. Like somebody sweated that.

02:30:07   Somebody got that and put that in there. But also, you know,

02:30:10   think about stuff like, uh, not that to, you know, go for the obvious one,

02:30:14   but the authenticity of like some of the shootings.

02:30:18   Yeah. I mean, I remember reading one time,

02:30:21   I think I saw a life magazine article even as a kid about shooting the scene at

02:30:25   the, um, at the toll bridge was sunny. Oh yeah. And like what was involved in that?

02:30:30   I mean, think about all the moving pieces in that.

02:30:32   It's mind-boggling.

02:30:34   Or like the scene, you know, again, the scene at,

02:30:38   what's called Lewis's or whatever,

02:30:39   at the scene at the Italian restaurant.

02:30:42   That looks like a crime scene.

02:30:44   You're watching a crime scene happen.

02:30:47   You know, like when they go to the mattresses,

02:30:49   you see all the black and white photos.

02:30:50   That's what it looked like.

02:30:51   And it's not pretty.

02:30:53   Like when the captain gets shot in the throat or whatever,

02:30:55   like it does not look like a Chicago bang bang

02:30:58   kind of shooting.

02:30:59   How about when Moe Green gets shot in the eye?

02:31:01   Oh my god, I can't even think about it.

02:31:03   How do they do it?

02:31:04   But they don't cut, they don't cut on the gunshot.

02:31:07   No, there's like a beat.

02:31:09   He's laying down getting a massage.

02:31:11   He gets shot in the eye with his glasses, and then it takes a second.

02:31:14   Maybe he ought to be telling the guy to maybe help him out, do something with that back hair.

02:31:18   He looks up and next thing you know, he's been shot through his eyeglasses right into his eye.

02:31:24   I don't know how they did it.

02:31:26   Do not talk to a man like Moe Green like that.

02:31:29   I'm Moe Green!

02:31:31   The other one, I guess it's...

02:31:33   He's supposed to be Meyer Lansky, is that right?

02:31:35   In the Ramona Clay.

02:31:37   Who's the guy that wore in Beatty?

02:31:39   Bugsy Seagal?

02:31:41   That must be a Bugsy Seagal.

02:31:43   With a lot of creative licenses.

02:31:45   I think it's a Bugsy Seagal

02:31:47   crossed with a bunch of other people.

02:31:49   Maybe, A, not to piss off any real people

02:31:52   who are still involved in that business in 1971.

02:31:55   1971 and then be just you know make it a better story. Oh

02:31:58   Lee Strasburg

02:32:01   Just Lee Strasburg just so so many things but like for me like the moment the moment when

02:32:07   Mike is at his house and says basically is that okay if we knock off, you know, Frank Pantangeli and

02:32:12   He takes it without he's looking at the football game. He picks up a potato chip. He says yeah, he's small potatoes

02:32:24   They're talking about slicing up Cuba while they're literally slicing up a cake of Cuba.

02:32:28   Here's my note. My notes are that I have a little note here written. It says "Hyman Roth equals Yoda."

02:32:35   Oh, yeah, totally.

02:32:36   Like evil Yoda.

02:32:37   He just came back to vote in the presidential election.

02:32:40   Vote I will, yes.

02:32:43   He's gonna live out his life as a Jew in Israel.

02:32:46   The other death scene that really--it was sort of towards the--it's fresh in my mind because it was sort of towards the end of

02:32:51   where I paused it last night was when Carlo, now this is, uh,

02:32:55   Oh God. When this is Connie's first husband. Uh,

02:32:59   and he's, he's, he's been abusing Connie, right?

02:33:06   Well,

02:33:07   and while she's pregnant and did it on did it purposefully,

02:33:09   did it to collude with the Bart, uh, with Barzini Barzini,

02:33:14   knowing that when Sonny got the call, Sonny was going to drive as fast as he could,

02:33:19   straight over that, you know,

02:33:20   They knew exactly which way he was going.

02:33:21   - That is a really dumb plan.

02:33:23   (laughing)

02:33:24   That's all I gotta say, Carlo.

02:33:26   I know you're not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

02:33:28   How does that turn out well?

02:33:29   - Right.

02:33:30   - But it's perfect, 'cause his character

02:33:31   would probably do that.

02:33:32   His character's like a small time hustler.

02:33:35   - Yeah, there's that one little scene at a family dinner

02:33:37   when he, it's foreshadowing,

02:33:41   where Sonny's running the show

02:33:44   because the old man is in the hospital.

02:33:46   And Sonny is talking business,

02:33:48   and Connie says, "We never talked,

02:33:49   but you guys never talk business at the table when daddy was here

02:33:52   and he's like "ahh shut up, blah blah blah" and then

02:33:55   Carlos says something "hey you know I'd like to talk to you and Michael" and Sonny goes

02:33:59   "we don't talk business at the table"

02:34:00   Right exactly, exactly. But it just shows you it's funny because at first you

02:34:05   think it's a funny way

02:34:06   of Sonny being a hypocrite and then later on though it plays as Carlo

02:34:10   wanting, you know, he kind of wants some attention from this, he wants to get in

02:34:14   you know. Absolutely, well here's the thing that's interesting and bewildering about

02:34:17   that the this kind of costa nuestra world is that it seems to me that like

02:34:22   the number one qualification I mean apart from being you know Sicilian I

02:34:26   guess is family so if you're in the family regardless of your blood in the

02:34:31   family blood family right like we'll find something for you to do but after

02:34:34   that like wow so much so much demonstrated competence and so much

02:34:42   demonstrated loyalty like we're don't worry dude like we're not we're not

02:34:46   light on people. We can find people who want this job, but if you want to work in this place,

02:34:50   you're going to have to have a surpassing level of both loyalty and competence, neither of which

02:34:54   Carlo has, and he's not blood. He doesn't understand that. He thinks I'm in the... I think,

02:34:58   in my read of this, he's in the family now. Why doesn't he get to be higher than Fredo?

02:35:02   Right. Even though... But that's not how it works. Right. Well, anyway, when he gets killed...

02:35:07   Oh my gosh, because he says... Because Michael plays him like a fiddle. He's like, "I can't

02:35:11   can't kill you. You're my, you're my, uh, you're my wife's husband.

02:35:14   And you're my God, my Godson's father. Yeah, exactly. And you're,

02:35:18   you were here, there's a plane. You just got to go out.

02:35:19   You're going to get on the plane.

02:35:20   Gets in the car and they start strangling them and he kicks the windshield

02:35:27   out.

02:35:27   First you hear the squeaking sound,

02:35:28   the squeaking sound of his shoes rubbing against the windshield.

02:35:31   Ah, it's sound design. And it's,

02:35:34   it's this way that the violence is, it really, it's unsettling.

02:35:39   even though I've seen this so many times, umpteen times, like I've said,

02:35:43   I can't count it, I've seen it, but it got to me. It's like uncomfortable.

02:35:46   And it's because there's no cuts, it's no editing, it's just

02:35:49   a camera right on the the hood of the car,

02:35:54   and the car is driving away.

02:35:57   Right. But what a brilliant shot to get that right to where, like, first of all, he kicks it

02:36:02   and it makes a noise, he kicks it again and it gives a little,

02:36:05   he kicks it another time, and it shatters in a fairly believable way.

02:36:08   You think that was an easy shot to get?

02:36:10   Oh, I was thinking about it, because it...

02:36:12   No, because the guy's driving the car.

02:36:14   And then there's motion with the car, yeah.

02:36:15   Right.

02:36:15   Exactly.

02:36:16   I mean, and who knows how, you know, whether kicking the windshield would...

02:36:20   I don't know how they mounted it to the hood of the car, but however they mounted the...

02:36:23   I don't even know, like, is there a way that they have...

02:36:26   The camera doesn't pan or move at all, so I'm guessing that maybe they had it set up

02:36:30   so that it ran without a human operator?

02:36:33   I don't know.

02:36:34   It seemed to me like...

02:36:35   Walter Murch was the filmmaker who's the sound designer for this.

02:36:40   When in the end of the first movie, remember we talked about in Toy Story 3 the seatbelt,

02:36:46   the seatbelt you ever saw? When Michael is in the study and they come in and they pledge

02:36:54   their faithfulness to the Godfather and Al Neary walks over to the door that K, or K again,

02:37:00   and doors always so important. No, it's only the Kubrick guy doors mirrors.

02:37:04   But the K is standing outside watching this and you see Alan near you walk up

02:37:08   making eye contact with the camera and he closes that door.

02:37:12   And that door closing is the door closing us door close you've ever heard in

02:37:17   your life. Like how did you get such a perfect sound of like, Ooh,

02:37:21   when that door closes in case face, right? It's,

02:37:25   it is true. It's the door closing a store close.

02:37:30   Oh, how much do you love Al Neri, man? What a badass.

02:37:33   He's such a badass. He's like...

02:37:36   Remember at one point the Don says to Michael, "It looks like you found your Luca Brasi."

02:37:40   Even when Al Neri

02:37:43   gets a gut, he's still a badass.

02:37:47   I guess we should probably wrap soon. I could talk about this all day, buddy,

02:37:51   because...

02:37:52   Oh, you know what? To get you back to your Star Wars point, though, you know, and it's...

02:37:56   It's not fair as a comparison because I'm sure there's a million differences.

02:38:00   But you know, here's one, here's one bald fact of this.

02:38:04   And this kind of goes to Spielberg is two to two in some ways where, you know,

02:38:08   in the case of Spielberg and all three of them are proud of their work, right?

02:38:12   You got Coppola, you got Spielberg, you got Lucas. In the case of Coppola,

02:38:17   he's so proud of his work that it means a lot to him to have the best

02:38:20   conceivable copy available.

02:38:22   George Lucas has claimed that there's not a decent single good copy of Star Wars to

02:38:26   put together. Well, you know what? You know who's in the same position? Fucking Francis

02:38:29   Ford Coppola. So if you watch that documentary, you sit there, your heart skips a beat when

02:38:34   you watch what the actual footage after Paramount had gone out, gone out, you know, basically

02:38:39   cut out all of the, uh, all the fades. What do they call that? They had the long leaders

02:38:43   between scenes. They'd cut those out to put on, they take an original copies of the film

02:38:47   and butchered them. And so he basically, I guess they put down some serious dough to

02:38:52   do like a 4K scan and rebuild the film, right? Like that's, that's pride in what you do.

02:38:58   Is it like, yeah, we've got all kinds of things where we've shucked and jive, we made this

02:39:01   into five different versions for TV. There's different versions on video, but like here

02:39:04   is a version that we, that will stand the test of time that we can all be proud of.

02:39:08   Did you see that there's, there's a new Shamizdat thing floating around from Star Wars?

02:39:16   harmony extended? No, a totally new one. Somebody found a 35 millimeter print and have secretly

02:39:29   been digitizing it and color correcting it frame by frame for years now. What? I'm not

02:39:38   joking you it's let me see here is there any like test footage out there let me

02:39:46   see if I have a link here it's it's called the negative one version so if

02:39:50   you do Star Wars negative one negative numeral one oh here we go team negative

02:39:57   one yeah team Star Wars real three sampler yeah it's if you I mean not that

02:40:02   I don't have it cuz you know I mean it's it wouldn't wouldn't be legit but if you

02:40:05   did. Oh, I see, but if it did exist, it might exist. And it might be a 26 gigabyte MKV.

02:40:11   Okay, okay. But if you look just at the stuff that's out there, it's a bunch of

02:40:16   still frames. And they show you like what they had from the...because they went from

02:40:20   a 35 millimeter print. So that's not really, that's not a great starting

02:40:24   place. No, no. That's a product, not a source. Yeah, they went from there and

02:40:29   that's why they went through literally frame by frame. And you know like... Sort of

02:40:34   as they did with the Godfather, right?

02:40:36   Where they'd have to go through and frame by frame,

02:40:37   like rebuild this and clean it up.

02:40:39   - So just for example, like one of the things

02:40:40   they had to do with this negative one print of New Hope

02:40:43   was that it, like the initial digital scans

02:40:47   of the space scenes didn't even,

02:40:48   you couldn't even see the stars.

02:40:49   They had to do work just to get the,

02:40:51   to bring my exposure up to get the stars.

02:40:52   - Oh, that's amazing.

02:40:54   - But they, it's, I literally,

02:40:59   I'm not even trying to be coy here.

02:41:00   I don't have the digital copy.

02:41:01   - What's out there, it looks like?

02:41:02   yet. Well no, no, I mean like this is not difficult to find

02:41:06   information. There's several

02:41:08   places you can go to, but one is called Original Trilogy, where

02:41:12   they have discussion forums about the different

02:41:15   versions that are out there. Right, but one of the things though that it's like

02:41:18   and with the, what do you call the ones that are out there, the D Specialized

02:41:21   Editions that a lot of people do have.

02:41:23   Well, there's two, I think two general

02:41:26   genres and people will correct me on this, but I think one is

02:41:29   fan edits where people like, something like the Phantom Editor,

02:41:34   right, where you go in and you kind of remake your own version of how you think

02:41:38   it should be or all the way down to a fan fiction kind

02:41:40   of idea, mixing several movies together as fan edits.

02:41:43   And then what is the other version called? Like you've got,

02:41:46   "Harmy" is in kind of a different thing where "Harmy's" de-specialized versions

02:41:50   are just what is the highest quality source

02:41:53   version that is what was in the original theatrical release,

02:41:57   right? Basically putting together and which is harder than it sounds because you have to get the sound editing right too.

02:42:02   But even with his versions

02:42:03   I think one of the things that's lost just from going with all the diddling that Lucas had done over the years is that the

02:42:09   color correction is off and the film grain

02:42:12   texture is gone from what you see and that it's it's the Lord's work and it's the way I would recommend anybody watching those movies

02:42:21   if they can get their hands on them

02:42:23   but one of the things that that like it's like Lucas somehow had this aversion to the technical limits of film of the 70s and

02:42:31   It's like his as his sensibilities changed on the way you do color correction and and the color temperature of things

02:42:38   They changed those original things to do it. Whereas

02:42:41   - ma

02:42:42   I mean again, I can't say that I remember seeing the Godfather in the theater because it came out in the theater before I was born

02:42:47   But it the way that Coppola has overseen, you know, the this footage it embraces

02:42:53   the film grain and it embraces the color temperatures and and you know color

02:43:00   grain. As I understand it, I haven't watched the documentary in a couple years, but it is a very

02:43:04   good documentary both as a story and as a technical document, but basically

02:43:08   the grain was not seen as certainly as noise. Part of the restoration was not

02:43:12   screwing up the grain.

02:43:13   Right, whereas part of the special editions and whatever for Star Wars was

02:43:17   let's get rid of this grain that we wouldn't have if we shot it today.

02:43:21   Which, you know, and anyway, that's what this negative one issue of A New Hope apparently,

02:43:28   you know, embraces the film grain and you can see it and that, you know, there's skies

02:43:32   that are on Tatooine that are completely blown out, which is the way it looked when we were

02:43:35   kids instead of being bright blue like they are in the prints we know today.

02:43:39   Oh my goodness, that's so interesting.

02:43:41   I'll keep an eye out for that.

02:43:43   Anyway.

02:43:44   Yeah.

02:43:45   I don't, you know, I hate to be overly critical.

02:43:48   so it's a fashionable to beat up on George Lucas or what we perceive George

02:43:52   Lucas to be but you know it's just the part to the part that makes it difficult

02:43:55   and complicated I am NOT the first person to say this is that when we start

02:43:59   to wonder if what we love about Star Wars was what he loved about Star Wars

02:44:04   not that it has to matter but like I'll bet you you could sit in a room with

02:44:07   Coppola and watch that movie and he would be excited to watch it yeah where

02:44:11   he would go I can't believe we got that like you know like just that shot you

02:44:16   You have no idea how hard it was to get that shot.

02:44:18   Whereas with Lucas, I wonder if he even enjoys any version of that film.

02:44:22   Because it really just feels like it's an ongoing Christmas tree in his life that he's

02:44:27   constantly redecorating depending on how he feels right now.

02:44:30   Not based on what the ideal version of this would be.

02:44:32   But I don't know.

02:44:33   And I know that's unkind.

02:44:34   But that's the part where you go like, it's really strange.

02:44:37   When he got left to his own devices with a not unlimited but very generous budget, it

02:44:42   didn't get better.

02:44:43   didn't produce what we hoped or like what you know when we thought of

02:44:49   George Lucas in the 70s was like he's the king of our imagination like he's

02:44:52   got the bet he's like up there with Jim Henson right in terms of like he gets

02:44:56   something in a way that I just can't and he gets that on the screen and

02:44:59   especially in those first two movies yeah and it's just weird when you were

02:45:02   like you got to point we're like what happened is this a cap grass thing did

02:45:05   they swap him out like who thought puppet meetings would be fun yeah I think

02:45:09   for the special editions in particular you could you could effectively say he

02:45:13   had an unlimited budget. That to just make the original trilogy as good as he

02:45:18   wants it to be for reissue in theaters now in preparation for the new trilogy

02:45:22   just to get people excited again, whatever it costs, I'm sure it was well

02:45:26   within the bounds of what what any studio you know would have you know put

02:45:30   up the money for. And you know we we got like a dinosaur stuck in the most

02:45:36   isolated. Yeah exactly that's that's a very just like more more advanced little

02:45:41   rats running around. Yeah. With a jaw hanging off it. And everything farting. Yeah, everything

02:45:48   farts. Everything farts. That would be a great addition to the Godfather. Just add some farts.

02:45:55   Boy, you can't stop noticing those oranges. Once you notice the oranges, you really see

02:46:00   the oranges, don't you? There are so many oranges in these movies, and it's never something

02:46:04   good that happens after. The guy comes in at the beginning to talk about his daughter

02:46:10   who got, you know, pffft up the voice and when he...

02:46:17   Right after Vito says, "You never come from a friendship before."

02:46:23   Just to show you, I'm not a callous man.

02:46:27   She was the best piece of ass I ever had!

02:46:32   Mr. Waltz, could you call me a car?

02:46:36   [

02:46:46   Pimp you never go down about Santino and

02:46:48   The same way that they they made a Han Solo look like he stepped on Jabba's tail

02:46:54   Just make make Robert Duvall look like he lifts

02:46:56   right, but

02:46:59   Where he like awkwardly shifts a little bit like

02:47:05   I'll get it out in one burst

02:47:07   They're going around and Godfather - and introducing everybody the Batista is introducing everybody at the meeting and her Anna and from UT and T

02:47:16   Simon Roth

02:47:19   Okay, somebody out there I don't know who it's gonna be I'm just imagining somebody like a Joe Steele somebody could do this Todd

02:47:29   I'm sure Todd could do this. Could we please get at least a short super cut of the George Luke?

02:47:35   George Lucas special edition of the Godfather with farts

02:47:40   That meeting in Cuba just some CGI had a bunch of like

02:47:45   Really rich Cuban food to the table. I'd give four million bucks for it to not hurt when I take a piss

02:47:53   All right, I think that's a show oh

02:47:59   Thanks for having me on John. I think we helped a lot of people. I hope the weekend goes okay

02:48:03   I hope you ski you survive make sure you pick up some extra bread

02:48:05   God I love you