Upgrade

00:00:00 ◼   ► [Music]

00:00:10 ◼   ► From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, Episode 103.

00:00:15 ◼   ► Upgrade is brought to you by Ring and Mack Weldon.

00:00:19 ◼   ► I am Jason Snell.

00:00:20 ◼   ► I am always here for Upgrade, but I don't always read the introduction.

00:00:25 ◼   ► But Myke Hurley is on assignment in the United States of America as he was for our last episode.

00:00:30 ◼   ► So I'm enjoyed. I'm... I'm enjoyed.

00:00:32 ◼   ► My voice is being enjoyed right now by Merlin Mann. Hi Merlin.

00:00:36 ◼   ► - Freudian slip, you are enjoyed. You are...

00:00:38 ◼   ► You reside in my ear holes for so much of the week. You're on so many damn shows.

00:00:42 ◼   ► I hear... I hear pretty much all of them.

00:00:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's... There are many. It's true. It's true.

00:00:47 ◼   ► - I get to know the mini moods of Jason.

00:00:49 ◼   ► - Mm-hmm. Do I have many... Do I have many moods? Do they vary?

00:00:53 ◼   ► Do they vary from week to week or just from podcast to podcast?

00:00:55 ◼   ► Oh, I think I've got your number.

00:00:56 ◼   ► I've got your number pretty good.

00:00:58 ◼   ► But there was no TVTM this week?

00:01:00 ◼   ► No, the TV Talk Machine was off this week because that's the podcast I did with Tim

00:01:04 ◼   ► Goodman from The Hollywood Reporter and they just finished.

00:01:07 ◼   ► He was like in a hotel for 17 days in LA for the summer press tour.

00:01:10 ◼   ► He sounded great in that previous episode.

00:01:12 ◼   ► I was walking down a hallway in a hotel at Disneyland, listening to that, avoiding my

00:01:16 ◼   ► family.

00:01:17 ◼   ► And I was thinking, "Man, that guy sounds, I think he's really learned to pace himself."

00:01:19 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:01:20 ◼   ► the trick is that he this time he learned on day eight when they say hey Mariah Carey is going to be

00:01:26 ◼   ► having cocktails to talk about her new lifetime special that you go nope not going to do that and

00:01:32 ◼   ► you just say no and you go back to the room and you do a little bit of work and you you pace

00:01:36 ◼   ► yourself and he learned that but when he was done with his two and a half weeks a press tour he went

00:01:41 ◼   ► on vacation last week so we just let it go we let it get that point in life where you realize that

00:01:46 ◼   ► not every fact or announcement is an invitation.

00:01:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

00:01:51 ◼   ► You don't have to hit all of that.

00:01:52 ◼   ► - No Mariah tonight.

00:01:54 ◼   ► - I have a little, I don't think it was actually

00:01:55 ◼   ► Mariah Carey, but I just picked that one out of the hat.

00:01:58 ◼   ► 'Cause it's that idea, it's like, it's a celebrity,

00:02:01 ◼   ► and you know who they are, but they're not big

00:02:03 ◼   ► like they used to be, but they've got a show,

00:02:04 ◼   ► and you could meet them, and then you're like,

00:02:06 ◼   ► yeah, there's no way, and you just let it go.

00:02:08 ◼   ► I've done that with tech stuff too, where they're like,

00:02:11 ◼   ► we've got this sort of C-list celebrity

00:02:13 ◼   ► who will be appearing, and I have that moment of like,

00:02:15 ◼   ► Well, it would be kind of cool to say I met that person, but I'm not interested in the product.

00:02:21 ◼   ► I could see Huey Lewis in the news, or I could sleep.

00:02:23 ◼   ► Well, okay, I live in Marin County. I can see, if I met the local Supercuts at the right time, I can see Huey Lewis.

00:02:30 ◼   ► True story.

00:02:32 ◼   ► Well, thank you for having me on. I hope I can fill his large English shoes.

00:02:35 ◼   ► Yes, yes, I think so, absolutely. I'm glad to have you back.

00:02:39 ◼   ► I have a little bit of follow-up.

00:02:41 ◼   ► Thank you.

00:02:43 ◼   ► I was in Memphis, as people know,

00:02:46 ◼   ► who listened to Apple Grade 102.

00:02:47 ◼   ► Myke and I did that episode live in person

00:02:50 ◼   ► in Steven Hackett's office.

00:02:52 ◼   ► Steven Hackett wasn't there, because even if he was there,

00:02:54 ◼   ► you wouldn't hurt him because he lost his voice completely.

00:02:57 ◼   ► And you can listen to last week's episode of Connected

00:03:00 ◼   ► to hear Steven Hackett's voice two days later when

00:03:03 ◼   ► it was actually much better.

00:03:05 ◼   ► And it's still like he was gargling glass.

00:03:06 ◼   ► He was still pretty shredded.

00:03:08 ◼   ► That's a really good episode and a nice reminder.

00:03:10 ◼   ► Listening to that was a nice reminder of how hard those two gentlemen work.

00:03:16 ◼   ► When they were answering questions about the second anniversary of Relay, it was nice to

00:03:20 ◼   ► hear.

00:03:21 ◼   ► I was just, you know, because they do so much, and they edit Reconcilable Differences.

00:03:25 ◼   ► Myke does that for us, and they just do so much stuff, and I don't blame them for saying

00:03:29 ◼   ► we're not going to grow as fast this year.

00:03:32 ◼   ► Myke told me about how he's the secret third host of Reconcilable Differences, to the point

00:03:39 ◼   ► that you will just say things just for him

00:03:43 ◼   ► during the broadcast, during the recording,

00:03:45 ◼   ► knowing that it'll get cut out of the podcast,

00:03:48 ◼   ► but it doesn't matter.

00:03:49 ◼   ► It's just there to tell Myke things.

00:03:51 ◼   ► He loves it.

00:03:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, you know that Stephen King book,

00:03:53 ◼   ► wonderful book on writing,

00:03:55 ◼   ► and he talks about how his wife, Tabby,

00:03:57 ◼   ► is what he calls his first reader.

00:03:58 ◼   ► He says, "Everybody needs a first reader."

00:03:59 ◼   ► Somebody who's the right kind of critical about it.

00:04:02 ◼   ► He's our first listener.

00:04:03 ◼   ► So we have to think about spoiler warnings with him

00:04:05 ◼   ► more than anybody else,

00:04:06 ◼   ► and sometimes we'll throw in a sly reference.

00:04:09 ◼   ► Yeah, he appreciates it. As a host, I take it, and I assume Myke is like this too, sometimes

00:04:14 ◼   ► you just gotta take it for the team. There are going to be spoilers. You're going to

00:04:17 ◼   ► have to just deal with them. We'll talk about spoilers maybe a little bit later.

00:04:20 ◼   ► So were you actually in the Bass Pyramid? Is that true?

00:04:23 ◼   ► Yeah, okay. So among the things I did when I was in Memphis, which is the first time

00:04:27 ◼   ► I've been in that part of Tennessee, I've never seen the Mississippi River with my own

00:04:31 ◼   ► eyes before, but I did see that. And I saw it from atop the giant pyramid on the shores

00:04:37 ◼   ► of the Mississippi in Memphis that used to be a basketball arena and is now a Bass Pro

00:04:42 ◼   ► Shops. I did, yeah. And we had a meeting. We had a Relay FM business meeting in the

00:04:50 ◼   ► restaurant at the top of the pyramid. It was like two in the afternoon, so it wasn't like

00:04:54 ◼   ► there was a meal or something. I think we all had something to drink and we just sat

00:04:58 ◼   ► there and chatted. But we were high atop the giant Bass Pro Shops pyramid in Memphis.

00:05:03 ◼   ► So was it stirring?

00:05:06 ◼   ► It was nice.

00:05:07 ◼   ► I've never had a business meeting on top of a pyramid before.

00:05:09 ◼   ► The only time I've ever been on top of a pyramid before, quite honestly, was in Dungeons & Dragons.

00:05:13 ◼   ► Oh, nice.

00:05:14 ◼   ► So, this was nice.

00:05:15 ◼   ► Of all the things I imagine having a pyramid about it, bass fishing isn't at the top of

00:05:19 ◼   ► the list.

00:05:20 ◼   ► Well, I mean, it really was this decommissioned basketball arena, and they didn't know what

00:05:24 ◼   ► to do with it.

00:05:25 ◼   ► And the guys who started Bass Pro Shops, I think this is an anecdote I heard in the pre-recorded

00:05:29 ◼   ► audio that plays when you take the elevator up to the top of the pyramid.

00:05:33 ◼   ► it's like one of the founders of Bass Pro Shops saying they made a bet basically.

00:05:37 ◼   ► "If I catch this big catfish, we'll put a Bass Pro in that pyramid over there, and

00:05:43 ◼   ► we caught the catfish and here you are!" is basically how the story goes.

00:05:46 ◼   ► I call that a Tennessee contract.

00:05:47 ◼   ► But it's pretty good.

00:05:48 ◼   ► It's cool.

00:05:49 ◼   ► I thought it would be like, have you ever been to the sports basement at the Presidio?

00:05:54 ◼   ► You ever been over there?

00:05:55 ◼   ► Sure.

00:05:56 ◼   ► It's the old—Presidio used to be an army, for those who don't know, an army base in

00:06:00 ◼   ► in San Francisco and now it's a national park and they've tried to, in order to make it

00:06:03 ◼   ► self-sustaining, they've rented out space and the old PX, the old commissary, so it's

00:06:07 ◼   ► like where everybody did all their shopping and everything, it's this huge building and

00:06:11 ◼   ► it's now a sporting goods store, it's a sports basement.

00:06:12 ◼   ► I thought my kids biked there, it's impossibly large.

00:06:14 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, exactly right, yeah, and we, that's, I bought bikes there and we go there for like,

00:06:20 ◼   ► we rent our skis there when we go skiing, we rent them because it's way cheaper, turns

00:06:23 ◼   ► out way cheaper to rent skis in San Francisco than on a mountain where it snows. Because

00:06:28 ◼   ► not a lot of demand. So, um, sports basement, I thought Bass Pro Shops would be like the

00:06:33 ◼   ► sports basement, which is huge, but like just racks and racks of stuff. Like, you know,

00:06:37 ◼   ► you got your, I don't even know, bass over here and your pros over here. And, uh, that

00:06:42 ◼   ► was not it. It's no, it's like a, it's like a theme park. It's like a, uh, there's a,

00:06:46 ◼   ► there's a, uh, a hotel. There's like a five star hotel that's built on the inside of the

00:06:50 ◼   ► Bass Pro Shop pyramid, uh, with all this like wood. It's very much like a hunting lodge

00:06:55 ◼   ► kind of feeling. There's water. It's a little like the entrance to the Pirates of the Caribbean,

00:07:01 ◼   ► honestly. There's boats that they sell at the Bass Pro Shops that are floating in water,

00:07:06 ◼   ► and there's fish in the water.

00:07:08 ◼   ► That's a good use of that space.

00:07:09 ◼   ► Yeah, and there's a bowling alley, and there's a shooting range, apparently. Of course, there

00:07:14 ◼   ► is. And there's lots of other businesses in it. So you don't just go there to—you can

00:07:20 ◼   ► go there to pick up a vest or something, but you can also go there and it's like a destination.

00:07:26 ◼   ► It's like you can go to a bunch of different stuff or go have dinner or whatever. It was

00:07:30 ◼   ► really interesting. So we had a business meeting in a pyramid. True story. And we have one

00:07:35 ◼   ► piece of content follow-up from episode 102, which is #MykeWasWrong. That was brought to

00:07:41 ◼   ► us by listener Justin, which is that Myke said maybe the iPad Mini should come in 128

00:07:46 ◼   ► gigabyte configuration and actually does and has for a while now so I said this

00:07:51 ◼   ► mostly to stop the emails from coming yes Myke was Myke was wrong Myke did not

00:07:57 ◼   ► Myke was not aware you can't stop the emails from that you can't well you can

00:08:00 ◼   ► only hope to contain them and then my other piece of his follow-up piece of

00:08:05 ◼   ► follow-up is about the specials this is of course relays sort of membership

00:08:10 ◼   ► drive week month whatever and we're releasing a whole bunch of different

00:08:14 ◼   ► specials and the special for upgrade which was not out when we recorded last

00:08:21 ◼   ► week is out now it's the upgrade cortex special and that is me and Myke and CGP

00:08:30 ◼   ► gray and we're playing what's called a parsley adventure which is like an old

00:08:33 ◼   ► school computer text adventure and except instead of having a computer I am

00:08:38 ◼   ► the computer it's nellatron right uh-huh and they they have to 2,000 I think and

00:08:43 ◼   ► And they have to give me commands to try and solve a text adventure about the Old West.

00:08:49 ◼   ► And relay members can go get that.

00:08:52 ◼   ► It's way more fun than it sounds. Now when you describe it like that,

00:08:55 ◼   ► you know, I don't know if you're really selling it, but it's very, very funny to hear

00:08:59 ◼   ► CGP Grey interacting with you as a text adventure.

00:09:03 ◼   ► It was funny, and that was the first time I ever spoke to CGP Grey. We recorded that a few months ago,

00:09:07 ◼   ► and that was the first time I've ever actually sort of spoken to him one-on-one.

00:09:10 ◼   ► that was a lot of fun. I met him since then, but it was good because they're trying to

00:09:15 ◼   ► divine the secrets of the computer, and I'm sort of trying to be a computer, and at other

00:09:19 ◼   ► points, I'm hardly able to hold in my frustration with them at being bad players.

00:09:24 ◼   ► This is the old west, I don't know what a refrigerator is.

00:09:27 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're like, "Maybe we can look at the refrigerator." What are you

00:09:30 ◼   ► talking about? There is no refrigerator in the old west. And if people did listen to

00:09:35 ◼   ► that and liked it, I also wanted to point out, we did two of these on the Incomparable

00:09:40 ◼   ► Game Show. Two of these episodes that were based on Parsley Adventures, both with Tony

00:09:45 ◼   ► Sindelar as the computer, and you can go to the incomparable.com/gameshow, which is maybe

00:09:50 ◼   ► my favorite podcast that I do, honestly. It is so fun and funny, but there are two episodes

00:09:56 ◼   ► in that run that are Action Castle and what's the other one? Jungle Adventure, I think.

00:10:05 ◼   ► And the vibe's a little bit different, but it's very similar because we're playing the

00:10:08 ◼   ► the same game. And there's also a special Reconcilable Differences episode with you

00:10:14 ◼   ► and Jon. What's that one about?

00:10:16 ◼   ► This is a long, yeah, this is like, I can, well first of all I just want to say, hey,

00:10:20 ◼   ► you know what, you should go join Relay. It's easy to do. You go to relay.fm/membership.

00:10:26 ◼   ► And you sign up. Because you know what, I don't do this a lot, but we want your money.

00:10:29 ◼   ► And it benefits everybody in the network. I bought the all, I've done it myself. I did

00:10:35 ◼   ► I did the $100 All the Great Shows package,

00:10:37 ◼   ► 'cause I want to support everybody.

00:10:39 ◼   ► But if you enjoy these shows, it's a nice thing to do.

00:10:40 ◼   ► And everybody gets a little bit of it,

00:10:42 ◼   ► and it's a nice thing to do.

00:10:43 ◼   ► But you also do, now you know what John Siracusa says,

00:10:46 ◼   ► if he did it, you get nothing.

00:10:48 ◼   ► But in this case, you don't get nothing, you get something.

00:10:50 ◼   ► Which is, I think almost every show

00:10:52 ◼   ► is doing a special episode.

00:10:54 ◼   ► - Almost, yeah.

00:10:55 ◼   ► - So there was the, I just, I just,

00:10:58 ◼   ► you were on this, I just listened to Clock Four.

00:11:01 ◼   ► - To Clock Four, okay, so that's another one that we did,

00:11:03 ◼   ► it's Clockwise Plus Top Four.

00:11:04 ◼   ► So it's me and Dan Morin and Marco and Tiffany Armand.

00:11:06 ◼   ► And it's totally delightful.

00:11:08 ◼   ► And we made lists.

00:11:09 ◼   ► We went clockwise and made four lists of four.

00:11:12 ◼   ► And I revealed my dislike for salad.

00:11:15 ◼   ► So you can check that one out too.

00:11:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:11:18 ◼   ► I'm not a rabbit.

00:11:19 ◼   ► I want to say you should go and do that.

00:11:20 ◼   ► And if you do that, you're going to get something that people have been asking for for a long

00:11:23 ◼   ► time, which is an episode of Reconcilable Differences, a show that Jon Siracusa and

00:11:27 ◼   ► I do with our special guest, Jon Roderick.

00:11:33 ◼   ► I think it's going to end up being probably an episode plus an after dark, but it's three

00:11:37 ◼   ► hours.

00:11:38 ◼   ► So I really, I really recommend.

00:11:40 ◼   ► And they talk about skiing for a really long time, but it's, I thought it was really fun.

00:11:43 ◼   ► I thought it turned out great.

00:11:45 ◼   ► And you know what though?

00:11:46 ◼   ► That's a nice freebie.

00:11:47 ◼   ► But if you enjoy these podcasts and you don't want, you know, podcasting to turn into some

00:11:51 ◼   ► kind of horrible monstrosity, support it with things like this.

00:11:53 ◼   ► If you've got the money, you know, kick a little in and if you don't, that's okay.

00:11:57 ◼   ► We're just happy that you listen.

00:11:58 ◼   ► And when we launched the membership, I know that people were complaining.

00:12:00 ◼   ► It's like, oh, are you going to do a pledge break every week to talk about it?

00:12:03 ◼   ► And the answer is no, actually this is the way that the plan was meant to work all along

00:12:06 ◼   ► is that now that it's launched, once a year around relay birthday time in August, we'll

00:12:11 ◼   ► all do specials and talk about them and that they're out there and that's it.

00:12:15 ◼   ► And then we just do them the rest of the year and we appreciate everybody's support and

00:12:19 ◼   ► we made some extras for the people.

00:12:21 ◼   ► And I do that for the Flop House, I don't know if you do that, where I support Maximum

00:12:24 ◼   ► Fun and one of the reasons that I do that is I wanted to support the Flop House, but

00:12:28 ◼   ► another reason is that I want their bonus episode that they do.

00:12:31 ◼   ► And they've done three of them, actually.

00:12:34 ◼   ► And they're great, and they're a lot of fun.

00:12:35 ◼   ► And I feel like that's a great deal to support my favorite podcast, and I also get something

00:12:39 ◼   ► back.

00:12:40 ◼   ► But we won't do this every week.

00:12:43 ◼   ► Let me talk about a sponsor, and then we'll go into our topic, because I want to talk

00:12:46 ◼   ► to you about...

00:12:47 ◼   ► This is an episode topic generated by a Twitter conversation, which I think was really interesting,

00:12:54 ◼   ► where literally I knew I needed to find a guest host, and I was thinking of asking you.

00:12:58 ◼   ► And then we had a back and forth about rating things and reviewing things, and I thought,

00:13:04 ◼   ► "Aha!

00:13:05 ◼   ► That's a topic we could talk about on Upgrade!"

00:13:07 ◼   ► So let's do it, but first I want to tell you about our first sponsor.

00:13:10 ◼   ► How about that?

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00:14:29 ◼   ► for 50% off that's ring.com/upgrade and thank you so much to Ring for

00:14:34 ◼   ► supporting this show and all of Relay FM. Myke usually does those but it was me.

00:14:41 ◼   ► You did great. Thank you, thank you. Reviews and ratings so this I got into

00:14:48 ◼   ► this conversation and and and you and I were going back and forth with some

00:14:51 ◼   ► other people on Twitter. It started with a conversation Todd was having.

00:14:56 ◼   ► Yeah, it's our friend Todd Vizzeri who works at Industrial Light and Magic and is a heck

00:15:00 ◼   ► of a nice guy. And he, so he's in the business, you know, he's actually in the entertainment

00:15:06 ◼   ► industry. And he follows this stuff, like he'll frequently

00:15:08 ◼   ► toot out some very interesting charts. Yeah, just saw one today about box office

00:15:13 ◼   ► and rotten tomatoes scores, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly.

00:15:16 ◼   ► And those box office mojo rankings, inflation-dusted rankings of franchises and things, those are

00:15:21 ◼   ► Those blow my mind and I always see those through Todd.

00:15:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

00:15:25 ◼   ► - So, Todd was actually replying to

00:15:30 ◼   ► and finishing on a chain, something that was a tweet

00:15:33 ◼   ► that started with a guy named Scott Derrickson,

00:15:35 ◼   ► who said, "If you look at Rotten Tomatoes scores

00:15:37 ◼   ► "without reading selected reviewers that you respect,

00:15:39 ◼   ► "you're doing it wrong.

00:15:40 ◼   ► "You and cinema deserve better."

00:15:42 ◼   ► And Todd's follow up to that was,

00:15:44 ◼   ► "Absolutely, it's a shame how so many folks

00:15:46 ◼   ► "misinterpret and oversimplify

00:15:47 ◼   ► "what the Rotten Tomato score actually means."

00:15:50 ◼   ► And I thought this would be an interesting topic because reviews are everywhere.

00:15:55 ◼   ► That's one thing.

00:15:56 ◼   ► People are trying to find information about what they should do in terms of consuming

00:16:00 ◼   ► entertainment, in terms of buying products.

00:16:03 ◼   ► And I am somebody who, and I hadn't really thought about it this way, but the fact is,

00:16:08 ◼   ► for like 25 years now, one of the things that I've done professionally is evaluate things

00:16:15 ◼   ► and for most of that time slap a number on my evaluation.

00:16:18 ◼   ► You've got to give a certain number of mice.

00:16:19 ◼   ► Right, exactly. The mice, oh, the mice, right? I mean, and from the very, from 1990,

00:16:24 ◼   ► when was that, 1993, '94, I've been applying mice to things until like, well, actually,

00:16:32 ◼   ► I think I applied a mouse rating to something like last year. So, it still happens occasionally

00:16:37 ◼   ► when I write for Macworld. So, rating things and giving ratings is something that we do,

00:16:42 ◼   ► and people can rely on it, but it's, you know, it's problematic in so many different ways.

00:16:48 ◼   ► And I know when I talked to you about this, you said, "I'm very excited about this."

00:16:52 ◼   ► And then I checked our little document about what we were going to talk about today, and

00:16:56 ◼   ► it was full of things.

00:16:58 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, I was very interested in it because I've been thinking about it a lot because

00:17:05 ◼   ► you're right, so many things have ratings.

00:17:07 ◼   ► But if we just take a tiny step back, if you go beyond even just reviews and ratings, just

00:17:12 ◼   ► look at metrics.

00:17:13 ◼   ► almost everything we look at, we cannot help but see

00:17:17 ◼   ► some kind of a ranking or you think about

00:17:21 ◼   ► even something like Twitter followers.

00:17:23 ◼   ► Like when you're thinking about, some rando contacts you

00:17:25 ◼   ► and you're thinking about like should I respond to this,

00:17:27 ◼   ► especially if it's something kind of unkind,

00:17:28 ◼   ► I frequently look at how many followers that person has.

00:17:30 ◼   ► If they've got like five followers,

00:17:32 ◼   ► I'm not going to get in a big toss with them

00:17:33 ◼   ► because you know, they're probably just a troll.

00:17:35 ◼   ► That sounds silly, but I mean, what I'm trying to get at

00:17:38 ◼   ► though is whether it's the iTunes store or it's Netflix

00:17:40 ◼   ► or Amazon, stuff that I use, all of which I use a lot,

00:17:44 ◼   ► you can't help but see a rating for something

00:17:48 ◼   ► and I think it's extremely difficult

00:17:50 ◼   ► for it not to have some effect on you in one way or another.

00:17:53 ◼   ► And I guess I am opening statement here.

00:17:57 ◼   ► The main thing I just, I'm really of two minds

00:18:00 ◼   ► because I realize how weird and wrong and broken

00:18:05 ◼   ► and easily abused reviews and ratings are

00:18:09 ◼   ► and I think we have many examples here to talk about,

00:18:11 ◼   ► but at the same time, I still rely on them.

00:18:13 ◼   ► If I'm in a new town, I don't think twice about

00:18:15 ◼   ► looking at the Yelp score.

00:18:16 ◼   ► - Absolutely. - You know what my feelings

00:18:17 ◼   ► about Yelp are?

00:18:18 ◼   ► Dynafire.

00:18:19 ◼   ► Like, I really don't like Yelp,

00:18:20 ◼   ► I don't like their business practices,

00:18:21 ◼   ► and I know their reviews are mega, mega broken in many ways,

00:18:25 ◼   ► but if you've got six otherwise undifferentiated places,

00:18:29 ◼   ► what are you, do you pick by the name?

00:18:30 ◼   ► It's like betting on a sports team based on the uniforms.

00:18:33 ◼   ► So even though I don't like that, I still look at that.

00:18:35 ◼   ► And so I guess I want to talk about and unpack

00:18:40 ◼   ► what it is that feels broken and abused about ratings

00:18:44 ◼   ► and reviews, which I think we will contrast,

00:18:46 ◼   ► but then also why it is we still end up using them even

00:18:50 ◼   ► when we don't mean to.

00:18:51 ◼   ► Not to jump too far ahead, but you mentioned Yelp.

00:18:54 ◼   ► And I've never used Yelp a lot, but we took a family trip

00:18:58 ◼   ► last summer, and we drove basically to Seattle

00:19:01 ◼   ► and back, a family road trip over the course of about eight,

00:19:04 ◼   ► nine days.

00:19:05 ◼   ► And one of the things that I decided,

00:19:07 ◼   ► it's kind of on the fly that I would try to do,

00:19:09 ◼   ► is have us not eat at a chain restaurant

00:19:14 ◼   ► at any point on that.

00:19:16 ◼   ► Like eat at people's houses,

00:19:18 ◼   ► even if we had to break in, no.

00:19:20 ◼   ► Eat at people's houses and eat at restaurants

00:19:22 ◼   ► that are the local places.

00:19:24 ◼   ► - It's so much harder than it sounds.

00:19:25 ◼   ► - And Yelp is the way I did that.

00:19:28 ◼   ► And it was interesting because I have,

00:19:31 ◼   ► we are gonna talk about this,

00:19:33 ◼   ► feelings about Yelp are very similar to my feelings about Goodreads, which is that they

00:19:38 ◼   ► are mostly amateur reviews, which is okay, except that they're compromised by some

00:19:47 ◼   ► issues about amateur reviewers and what brings somebody to decide to be an amateur reviewer.

00:19:53 ◼   ► But I never really--did I trust Yelp? Sort of--it's a little bit like how I trust Rotten

00:19:59 ◼   ► tomatoes, which goes back to the point that that first tweet made, which is I kind of trust them

00:20:05 ◼   ► a little in the aggregate to understand that it's really a very hazy, non-specific idea about a

00:20:14 ◼   ► place or a movie or whatever. That it's more about, it's generally liked, or this thing doesn't seem

00:20:23 ◼   ► to be generally hated, and here's some information about it, oh, and it's open, and here's the menu,

00:20:29 ◼   ► using it as a research tool but not as the gospel. And that worked pretty well. We went to one place

00:20:36 ◼   ► early on that was not very good, and then after that, every place we picked was

00:20:40 ◼   ► pretty great. And so, Yelp was a factor in that, but individual Yelp reviews were not really what

00:20:49 ◼   ► did it it was more you know you dig into the reviews and then you see all the axe

00:20:53 ◼   ► grinders are in there. You're exactly hitting it I mean I felt for years that one of the

00:20:57 ◼   ► problems with Yelp, well one of the benefits of Yelp is that you can rate other

00:21:00 ◼   ► raiders which I think is a very interesting idea or look at how many, how much wuffy they have on the system

00:21:05 ◼   ► but you know one problem with Yelp is people use it like a blog like you know people who go to SF State

00:21:10 ◼   ► they just that's like their blog about dim sum basically. Let me tell you how angry I was about this bent fork that I got at this place

00:21:18 ◼   ► It's like, wow, this is a really interesting tone poem about cutlery.

00:21:22 ◼   ► But also, if that's the first month that place is open and you get your table full of people

00:21:27 ◼   ► to go in and leave five bad reviews, that has an incredible impact on that place.

00:21:32 ◼   ► And I don't know how much recourse there is.

00:21:34 ◼   ► But you know, okay, so I think maybe I have the habit of taking over your shows.

00:21:38 ◼   ► Have you ever noticed that?

00:21:39 ◼   ► No, I have.

00:21:40 ◼   ► Or I try anyway.

00:21:41 ◼   ► This is why I deploy you tactically.

00:21:44 ◼   ► I think it's beneficial though to, I mean, I feel like my real beef in some ways is with

00:21:50 ◼   ► ratings. Star ratings, number ratings, but I think we should talk a little bit about

00:21:54 ◼   ► reviews because they have such an impact. Reviews, I mean, personally, I don't read

00:21:58 ◼   ► reviews for podcasts. I do. I just, I can't.

00:22:01 ◼   ► Oh yeah, I don't either.

00:22:02 ◼   ► Well, I know a lot of people who are there like all the time and like screenshotting

00:22:05 ◼   ► the ones that they don't.

00:22:06 ◼   ► Well, first off, first off, it's not for you, right? I mean, I feel like if you're looking

00:22:11 ◼   ► at podcast reviews as a some sort of a curative like it's supposed to be a

00:22:16 ◼   ► correctional thing like let me give you feedback on how you can change your

00:22:20 ◼   ► podcasts like I just don't view them that way I view them as it's people

00:22:23 ◼   ► talking to other potential listeners about their feelings and that's fine and

00:22:28 ◼   ► if I really have no idea what I'm doing I suppose I would look at the reviews

00:22:32 ◼   ► but it's like I kind of know the show I want to make and if people don't like it

00:22:35 ◼   ► then that's fine because it's like trying to find a date on a bathroom wall

00:22:39 ◼   ► It's just like that's not where I would go for that particular kind of information.

00:22:42 ◼   ► I get why it's there, and I can, but really frequently a lot of times reviews, something

00:22:48 ◼   ► I'm sure we'll talk about is the uneven distribution of the way that reviews work, especially if

00:22:53 ◼   ► they have a rating associated with them.

00:22:54 ◼   ► Like, you know, what would happen if we threw out every review in the world that was one

00:22:58 ◼   ► star and every review that was five stars?

00:23:00 ◼   ► I mean, just for the sake of argument, if you hid all of those on a site, you'd have

00:23:04 ◼   ► a much more interesting site.

00:23:06 ◼   ► Because I think people tend to go and vote up to stuff that they like, and I think they

00:23:09 ◼   ► they tend to go and vote down the stuff they don't.

00:23:11 ◼   ► If you don't have a strong feeling about something,

00:23:13 ◼   ► whether it's a podcast or a Dutch oven,

00:23:16 ◼   ► you're not going to go leave a three-star review about it,

00:23:19 ◼   ► probably, unless you're mad.

00:23:21 ◼   ► Like, I don't think, you know what I mean?

00:23:22 ◼   ► Unless you're very mad or very excited,

00:23:23 ◼   ► most people don't do that.

00:23:24 ◼   ► I mean, that's the worst part of this.

00:23:26 ◼   ► I have maybe left, you'd have to go look on the page,

00:23:29 ◼   ► but maybe two or three Yelp reviews ever.

00:23:33 ◼   ► So that should tell me something.

00:23:34 ◼   ► The fact that I'm not contributing to that

00:23:36 ◼   ► should be kind of a bellwether.

00:23:39 ◼   ► There's a bias inherent in it, which is you've got people who know the proprietors, who want

00:23:45 ◼   ► to talk it up, or they've been paid by the proprietors, and then you've got people who

00:23:49 ◼   ► are angry, and they want to let it out.

00:23:51 ◼   ► They had a bad experience.

00:23:52 ◼   ► It's very rare.

00:23:56 ◼   ► If my family and I have a nice dinner at the Lost Coast Brewing Company in Eureka on our

00:24:01 ◼   ► way back to San Francisco, which we did last year, and we're having a nice time, and I've

00:24:07 ◼   ► had a couple of beers and we're gonna go back to the hotel room and watch a movie

00:24:11 ◼   ► and then go to sleep and drive home the next day." It's probably not likely that

00:24:15 ◼   ► I'm gonna say, even though I used Yelp to find the place, probably not gonna say

00:24:20 ◼   ► "let me stop and write a review," right? I'm just gonna let it go. We had a fine

00:24:24 ◼   ► time, it was nice, maybe it wasn't perfect, there were some things about it that I

00:24:28 ◼   ► liked and didn't like, but I'm just not gonna do it. If they, you know,

00:24:33 ◼   ► know, spill a whole pitcher of iced tea in your lap and cook your medium steak till it's

00:24:40 ◼   ► burned, then maybe you have enough of your dander up to write an angry one-star review,

00:24:48 ◼   ► and that ends up being what you see, is the people who have been offended in some way

00:24:53 ◼   ► and not the people who are just your regular, everyday people, because it's not a scientific

00:24:57 ◼   ► survey, right? It's people who go out of their way to post.

00:25:00 ◼   ► Well, and unless you consider yourself, for example, and I think this does happen on Yelp,

00:25:05 ◼   ► there are people who have decided that they're going to review all of the, let's say, Chinese

00:25:10 ◼   ► restaurants or Thai restaurants or something like that.

00:25:13 ◼   ► And in that case, those are the kind of folks that might be out applying some B minuses

00:25:17 ◼   ► to things.

00:25:18 ◼   ► Most people don't have time to assign B minuses in life because there's not anything really

00:25:24 ◼   ► to be gained from that to just say, "It was fine."

00:25:27 ◼   ► It was fine.

00:25:28 ◼   ► Exactly right.

00:25:29 ◼   ► what would my review of that brewpub be? It would be something like, it was a little crowded,

00:25:34 ◼   ► but we got in fairly early, there was a big kite of a shark that was hanging from the

00:25:40 ◼   ► ceiling that was kind of interesting, the beer was good, the food was fine, my kids

00:25:46 ◼   ► had a good time, and we left. Like, okay, great story. Three stars, right? I mean, it's

00:25:53 ◼   ► just like, what do I even have to contribute at that point? But that is part of the crowdsourcing

00:25:58 ◼   ► challenges is I do believe that if you had everybody fill out a five-star

00:26:04 ◼   ► rating at the end of their meal regardless and it was just anonymous and

00:26:09 ◼   ► put into the internet that you would probably get a pretty good idea of how

00:26:12 ◼   ► good that place was but that's a fantasy because that's just never gonna happen

00:26:15 ◼   ► and and Yelp is not the the thing that has solved that and made it that that we

00:26:20 ◼   ► live in that world now because again it's only the people who self-select to

00:26:24 ◼   ► to do that.

00:26:25 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:26:26 ◼   ► And I think this gets us, this will eventually, I guess, get us into the ratings part of it,

00:26:30 ◼   ► but I think it's worth breaking down.

00:26:33 ◼   ► When I think about what is a review for, well, for a long time, film criticism was considered

00:26:37 ◼   ► a kind of art, where it was in the days before, let's say arbitrarily, Siskel and Ebert.

00:26:43 ◼   ► Back in the day, you'd have whatever Vincent can be, or Roger Ebert back in the day, or

00:26:48 ◼   ► who's the lady?

00:26:50 ◼   ► Janet Maslin?

00:26:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:26:52 ◼   ► The other one I'm always forgetting.

00:26:54 ◼   ► Everybody's gonna yell at me.

00:26:54 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

00:26:55 ◼   ► - You know I mean, that one lady.

00:26:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, I know that lady.

00:26:57 ◼   ► - But it was more a way,

00:26:58 ◼   ► it was really closer to film criticism in some ways.

00:27:01 ◼   ► You know, but when you started following somebody

00:27:03 ◼   ► like Roger Ebert, once you understood Roger Ebert's

00:27:05 ◼   ► like approach or ethos, I found it very useful.

00:27:09 ◼   ► I mean, I can't quote this from memory,

00:27:12 ◼   ► but I think he once said something along the lines of

00:27:14 ◼   ► that he grades a movie based on how well it executed

00:27:18 ◼   ► what it was trying to do.

00:27:20 ◼   ► - Yes.

00:27:21 ◼   ► to not just give, you know, what does it mean

00:27:24 ◼   ► just because it's an 80s college comedy,

00:27:26 ◼   ► it's gonna get one star, and just because, you know,

00:27:28 ◼   ► it's a Bergen movie, it gets five.

00:27:30 ◼   ► It's, you know, and I think stuff like that

00:27:31 ◼   ► can be very useful.

00:27:32 ◼   ► I mentioned here, you know, with, what's his name,

00:27:34 ◼   ► Miklas Sal.

00:27:35 ◼   ► Miklas Sal's just about perfect for me,

00:27:37 ◼   ► because no matter what he says about a movie,

00:27:39 ◼   ► I always feel almost the opposite,

00:27:40 ◼   ► and then that becomes useful.

00:27:41 ◼   ► - The Miklas Sal test is amazing.

00:27:43 ◼   ► That's the San Francisco Chronicle movie critic,

00:27:45 ◼   ► and I have the same thing.

00:27:46 ◼   ► I've talked to other people about that, too,

00:27:48 ◼   ► that for a lot of people, Miklas Sal is like the perfect

00:27:51 ◼   ► anti-critic. Like, if he really likes something, you gotta be wary, and if he hates something,

00:27:55 ◼   ► you probably might like it. You know, not 100%, but that's true. And Ebert is a good

00:28:01 ◼   ► example of somebody who's calibrated his rating system. He gave a good rating to Rambo

00:28:09 ◼   ► First Blood Part 2. He gave a good rating to Benji the Hunted. And people are like,

00:28:14 ◼   ► "What's wrong with you?" And he would say, "Benji the Hunted is a kid's movie about a

00:28:19 ◼   ► a dog, and it's a pretty good kids movie about a dog. Rambo First Blood Part II is this over-the-top

00:28:25 ◼   ► machine gun action movie, and it's pretty good at what it sets out to do. And, I mean,

00:28:29 ◼   ► that goes back to context, though, right? Because in the end, on Siskel and Ebert, it

00:28:34 ◼   ► was a thumbs up or a thumbs down. On one level, that seems atrocious, like, I know a lot of

00:28:40 ◼   ► film critics got bent out of shape about having to boil it down to a yes or no, but on another

00:28:44 ◼   ► level I felt like that was actually a really radical notion on their part, that they were

00:28:48 ◼   ► really saying, "Look, at some point, our rating system is so pointless that we're

00:28:53 ◼   ► just going to tell you whether it's worth seeing or not, and we're going to walk away

00:28:56 ◼   ► at that point." And Ebert said many times he hated rating systems. It was not—

00:29:03 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin Arguably what he's best known for.

00:29:05 ◼   ► David Tompa Yeah, right.

00:29:06 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin Like the thumbs up and thumbs down. I think,

00:29:08 ◼   ► I don't know if they exactly invented that, but I think they invented that.

00:29:10 ◼   ► David Tompa Oh, it's a trademark of Gene Siskel, I think,

00:29:16 ◼   ► the Cisco and Eber Corporation or something like that, but yeah, it's a trademarked thing.

00:29:22 ◼   ► And so every time you use the thumbs up emoji, that's not true. But I think that's really

00:29:27 ◼   ► interesting though, the idea that somebody who's famous for quantifying things at that

00:29:31 ◼   ► simple level actually was kind of, they didn't like it, but the reality was the context,

00:29:37 ◼   ► like I said, you know, the personal philosophy of a person with a rating is going to determine

00:29:43 ◼   ► what the rating is and so you can't compare them between not even like at the San Francisco

00:29:47 ◼   ► Chronicle could you compare them because Mick LaSalle doesn't review all the movies. There

00:29:50 ◼   ► are other reviewers there too. They also don't use stars. They use a cartoon of a little

00:29:54 ◼   ► man which is...

00:29:55 ◼   ► - I love a little man. But even our good friend Tim Goodman, he is clearly so not interested

00:30:03 ◼   ► and obviously I'm a fan and constant listener of your show so I know that there are just

00:30:06 ◼   ► some things where he's like, "I'm gonna let the other guy do this or the kid. The kid

00:30:09 ◼   ► will take care of this. Like I'm not gonna do sci-fi. I'm not gonna do, you know, I'm

00:30:12 ◼   ► I'm not going to keep following Doodlebug or whatever,

00:30:14 ◼   ► but he has a pretty strong feeling about what even should

00:30:17 ◼   ► be on his radar screen.

00:30:18 ◼   ► I want to follow up on one thing you said,

00:30:20 ◼   ► that I think is really smart, which

00:30:22 ◼   ► is that I almost think in terms of the way we measure podcasts.

00:30:26 ◼   ► Because whether or not you want to measure elements

00:30:29 ◼   ► of your podcast and how it's downloaded and so forth,

00:30:32 ◼   ► you kind of need to if you're going to have sponsors.

00:30:33 ◼   ► You have to give them something.

00:30:35 ◼   ► Now, I think this is changing, probably in ways

00:30:37 ◼   ► I won't always be happy with.

00:30:39 ◼   ► But in the past, something that has been consistent

00:30:41 ◼   ► is there are two, three, four different ways or companies

00:30:47 ◼   ► or methods that you can use.

00:30:49 ◼   ► And the nice thing about, for example, PodTrack.

00:30:51 ◼   ► The nice thing about PodTrack is, is PodTrack perfect?

00:30:54 ◼   ► Is it the exact number of downloads?

00:30:55 ◼   ► No, it's not, but it's consistent.

00:30:57 ◼   ► And that's what makes PodTrack useful.

00:30:59 ◼   ► If everybody's using PodTrack and they're not deliberately

00:31:03 ◼   ► gaming the system, PodTrack, which I think it even accounts

00:31:06 ◼   ► for, PodTrack will give you a good conservative number

00:31:09 ◼   ► of how many downloads you have.

00:31:11 ◼   ► They've recently added Audience,

00:31:12 ◼   ► which is super interesting.

00:31:13 ◼   ► In the last week or so,

00:31:14 ◼   ► they've added Audience to their statistics.

00:31:15 ◼   ► So you can see how many users you've had in the last month.

00:31:18 ◼   ► Stuff like that is useful,

00:31:19 ◼   ► but even though that's not perfect,

00:31:20 ◼   ► it works because everybody's using that system

00:31:23 ◼   ► in the same way.

00:31:24 ◼   ► But your point, I thought, that's super interesting is,

00:31:26 ◼   ► like this stuff all works.

00:31:27 ◼   ► You know, if you go to the homepage of Rotten Tomatoes

00:31:29 ◼   ► and you say, "Show me what's opening this weekend,"

00:31:32 ◼   ► or, "Show me what's new on DVD," or whatever,

00:31:34 ◼   ► well, you know what?

00:31:35 ◼   ► That's actually pretty good.

00:31:36 ◼   ► If you do a quick glance,

00:31:37 ◼   ► if you know you wanna see a movie,

00:31:38 ◼   ► where in my case, I know my sweet, overworked wife

00:31:43 ◼   ► needs a day, well, we'll probably go downtown

00:31:46 ◼   ► and see a movie, so we're gonna see a movie.

00:31:48 ◼   ► So I'm looking for red on that page.

00:31:51 ◼   ► So the thing is, if there's, I mean,

00:31:54 ◼   ► take the kid part out for a minute,

00:31:55 ◼   ► but there's gonna be five or six new movies that open.

00:31:58 ◼   ► If four of them are green, meaning they are below,

00:32:01 ◼   ► whatever, 60%, something like that,

00:32:05 ◼   ► and there's one that's got the red tomato

00:32:07 ◼   ► and has like a 90%, well at that point,

00:32:09 ◼   ► that totally makes sense, kind of.

00:32:11 ◼   ► You go, well clearly, you know,

00:32:13 ◼   ► and I guess we should talk a little bit

00:32:14 ◼   ► about how Rotten Tomatoes works,

00:32:15 ◼   ► but in that case, you know, as against these other movies,

00:32:17 ◼   ► clearly there's one movie that's better than the others.

00:32:21 ◼   ► What's fascinating though to me,

00:32:22 ◼   ► I mention this in the notes here,

00:32:23 ◼   ► when you drill down onto a detail page for a movie,

00:32:26 ◼   ► especially I feel like with blockbusters,

00:32:28 ◼   ► you might get like a summer blockbuster

00:32:31 ◼   ► that's say 80% fresh, 75, 85, maybe even 90% fresh.

00:32:36 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:32:37 ◼   ► - And I think this is Todd's point.

00:32:38 ◼   ► What's crazy is go in and read the pull quotes

00:32:41 ◼   ► next to that red tomato, and they are often,

00:32:44 ◼   ► they sound like a negative review,

00:32:47 ◼   ► or they're maybe kind of diffident at best.

00:32:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, well this is the problem with it,

00:32:51 ◼   ► 'cause you're aggregating something

00:32:52 ◼   ► that's already a question mark in terms of the score,

00:32:55 ◼   ► especially, you know, sometimes they'll use

00:32:57 ◼   ► the rating system, and sometimes they'll use

00:32:59 ◼   ► the words of the reviewer, but what Rotten Tomatoes wants

00:33:02 ◼   ► is a yes or a no, and Metacritic is a little different,

00:33:05 ◼   ► Metacritic, TRIES.

00:33:06 ◼   ► - Well, I think we should say this,

00:33:08 ◼   ► I'm not sure everybody knows this,

00:33:09 ◼   ► the way Rotten Tomatoes works.

00:33:10 ◼   ► It's my understanding, and we have a page of notes

00:33:13 ◼   ► that points to this, it's my understanding

00:33:14 ◼   ► that somebody at Rotten Tomatoes goes in

00:33:17 ◼   ► and looks at that review.

00:33:18 ◼   ► If it's a three, four, or five star review,

00:33:22 ◼   ► or in that range, that's considered a positive review.

00:33:25 ◼   ► - Yes.

00:33:26 ◼   ► - Based on the rating that they gave it,

00:33:28 ◼   ► that's considered a positive review.

00:33:30 ◼   ► And like you said, they might have to kind of read through it

00:33:32 ◼   ► and sort of interpret from words what it was.

00:33:34 ◼   ► But they assign it basically a score of,

00:33:36 ◼   ► was this a positive review or was this a negative review?

00:33:39 ◼   ► That's what the red or the green means on a movie.

00:33:43 ◼   ► Now this is the part I think Todd was pushing back on.

00:33:45 ◼   ► The problem is, when you go in and say like,

00:33:47 ◼   ► oh, this movie got an 82%.

00:33:49 ◼   ► Well, it got 82% of what?

00:33:51 ◼   ► Well, what it got was 82% quote unquote positive reviews.

00:33:55 ◼   ► Even if those reviews are shot through

00:33:57 ◼   ► with all kinds of provisos and go like,

00:33:59 ◼   ► oh yeah, I guess it's good for a dumb summer movie.

00:34:01 ◼   ► - And you see those all the time,

00:34:02 ◼   ► you may get a movie that gets 60% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the 60% who liked it loved it

00:34:08 ◼   ► and think it's a masterpiece and it's to be taken seriously as a great work of art.

00:34:13 ◼   ► And then you get a movie that's a summer movie and the reviews are all like, "Yeah, it's

00:34:17 ◼   ► fine. It delivers. It does what it was meant to do." And that's got a higher Rotten Tomatoes

00:34:28 ◼   ► score, but is it really better thought of by critics than the other movie? Probably

00:34:33 ◼   ► not, but that's not what Rotten Tomatoes is for.

00:34:38 ◼   ► Why is it 30% lower on Metacritic? Like, what's their problem?

00:34:41 ◼   ► And that's the difference, is that Metacritic is trying to come up with a score, and this

00:34:46 ◼   ► is a lot easier if you provide your own score, but some don't, and then they have somebody

00:34:51 ◼   ► who comes in and reads the review, basically, and assigns a score based on their reading

00:34:57 ◼   ► of the review and the textual analysis of the review, and they aggregate based on that.

00:35:02 ◼   ► So Rotten Tomatoes will look at a Mick LaSalle review and say, "positive." And Metacritic

00:35:08 ◼   ► will look at a Mick LaSalle review and say, "six out of ten." And those are different.

00:35:14 ◼   ► And so you get a better sense of sentiment from Metacritic and a better sense of sort

00:35:19 ◼   ► of overall trend of positive versus negative from Rotten Tomatoes. Both of them have their,

00:35:25 ◼   ► I think aspects of validity. I actually think that one of the problems with Metacritic is

00:35:29 ◼   ► that I'm not sure I trust the decisions they make about how they summarize reviews, how

00:35:35 ◼   ► they come to those ratings.

00:35:36 ◼   ► Do they wait for, like for example when you go to Rotten Tomatoes you can have facets

00:35:42 ◼   ► to see like just top reviewers. Does Metacritic give extra weight to like professional reviewers

00:35:47 ◼   ► the bigger the paper? Do you know if they weight it based on that?

00:35:50 ◼   ► I don't know that. I'm not sure.

00:35:51 ◼   ► I do know that there's a very fat middle, and I've seen this on charts. There's a chart

00:35:55 ◼   ► LinkedIn the show notes here about Fandango versus IMDB versus

00:36:01 ◼   ► Metacritic versus Rotten Tomatoes and the thing is like there's most it seems

00:36:05 ◼   ► like most of the Metacritic movies like you're not gonna see many movies that

00:36:09 ◼   ► are gonna get 90% that is very unusual. Right because it's not likely that all

00:36:13 ◼   ► critics gave it a rave and five stars right that doesn't that doesn't happen

00:36:17 ◼   ► whereas it's fairly easy for Star Trek Beyond to get an 83 on Rotten Tomatoes

00:36:22 ◼   ► I'm a lifelong Star Trek fan and I've seen Star Trek Beyond and would I say that it's

00:36:28 ◼   ► a 83% of a good movie? I would not. My review of it would be like, "It's fine." And the

00:36:34 ◼   ► fact is, I read a lot of Star Trek Beyond reviews, they're all kind of like that. They're

00:36:38 ◼   ► like, "It's fine. It's fine." And yet it's 83% certified fresh, right? But what does

00:36:45 ◼   ► that mean? Whereas on Metacritic, the problem I have with Metacritic is that I'm not sure

00:36:49 ◼   ► I believe them when they read a review and say, "This is a 7 out of 10." Like, somebody

00:36:55 ◼   ► read somebody else's review and then gave it a score of how they feel the sentiment

00:36:59 ◼   ► came out of it. But, you know, this goes back—I know we're kind of wandering a little bit

00:37:02 ◼   ► here—but this goes back to the point—I think it's also a large point—which is,

00:37:06 ◼   ► these are not people running the 100-yard dash, where there's a number to the thousandth

00:37:11 ◼   ► of a second or the hundredth of a second that tells you the difference between first place

00:37:15 ◼   ► an eighth place. These are numbers generated by squishy sentiment. And as somebody who

00:37:23 ◼   ► assigned mice to products for years, that's the part that always stops me cold a little

00:37:28 ◼   ► bit is that it's, I was, so I was explaining this to my kids the other night. So Saturday

00:37:33 ◼   ► night we had dinner and it was a Blue Apron, not a sponsor, not a sponsor. Call me Blue

00:37:38 ◼   ► Apron. We're Blue Apron family for about a year now. And we were having a conversation

00:37:44 ◼   ► about how what we ought to do is rate the Blue Apron meals. Like, my son is a picky

00:37:50 ◼   ► eater, my daughter is okay with kind of everything, I'm kind of a picky eater, and my wife is

00:37:54 ◼   ► kind of okay with everything. So we have different perspectives, and we discussed ratings, and

00:37:58 ◼   ► we ended up in this whole discussion of what the rating system was, and whether you would

00:38:02 ◼   ► be out of five or out of ten, would you allow half steps, all of these things that were

00:38:06 ◼   ► absolutely—I've been in—literally been in meetings where people have argued about

00:38:10 ◼   ► this as part of my job back in the day. And we ended up with a five-star rating system

00:38:17 ◼   ► with no havesies, because I feel like it forces you to make some decisions instead of kind

00:38:21 ◼   ► of half-assing it and being like, "Well, it's three and a half. It's fine." Right?

00:38:25 ◼   ► Instead, it's like, "No, you got to choose. Is it three? Is it four? Is it five? What

00:38:29 ◼   ► is it?" But, and good news, everybody, I think we got two fours and...three fours and a three?

00:38:38 ◼   ► It was good. It was a pretty good dinner. So, hooray for Blue Apron dinners. But it

00:38:44 ◼   ► allowed me to talk to my kids about the concept of significant figures, which I kept thinking

00:38:49 ◼   ► of in terms of what you and I are talking about today, which is this idea that if you

00:38:54 ◼   ► only measure anything to a tenth or a half or an integer, something that's super squishy,

00:39:05 ◼   ► you aggregate out 15 different things. And we used to do this all the time, MacWorld

00:39:09 ◼   ► and MacUser and PCWorld used to do this a lot, where you have like 15, 20 different

00:39:14 ◼   ► ways you measure a product. And they're all like out of 10, let's say. And then you

00:39:18 ◼   ► have a formula and you add them all together and you get this incredibly precise number.

00:39:23 ◼   ► Like this got an 81.5. The truth is, it is a precise number generated by incredibly imprecise

00:39:31 ◼   ► numbers that are themselves in some cases a judgment call. And the rule of significant

00:39:37 ◼   ► figures teaches us you don't pretend to have more precision than you actually have.

00:39:44 ◼   ► And I could argue something like Metacritic is actually failing the rule of significant

00:39:49 ◼   ► figures. And you could maybe even argue that Rotten Tomatoes, even though it's got a

00:39:53 ◼   ► binary, it's got a Boolean, like is it good or is it bad, also fails it. Because, you

00:40:00 ◼   ► You know, writing a review of something that's completely subjective, there's no precision,

00:40:08 ◼   ► right? Like, it's an art. And so then we're trying to apply a number to art and put it

00:40:14 ◼   ► on a chart. And I'm not sure that's possible, which is not to say that I don't use Rotten

00:40:19 ◼   ► Tomatoes. It's just, I feel like you've got to at least call it what it is, which

00:40:24 ◼   ► is a really gross approximation of the general sentiment. I mean, how many ways can I diffuse

00:40:31 ◼   ► this? The general sentiment of a group of movie critics. That's like, I backed all the

00:40:36 ◼   ► way out of the authority of Rotten Tomatoes and said, "It's something you can look at,

00:40:40 ◼   ► but don't take it too seriously."

00:40:42 ◼   ► - But I think, you know, you're right, they're all over the map, but at the same time, there's

00:40:45 ◼   ► a thread that runs through all of this, which I think is, is there, how much context is

00:40:49 ◼   ► there to what you're looking at? Which is, in my case, why I really, if you're going

00:40:54 ◼   ► you're going to have ratings, whether it's stars or numbers.

00:40:57 ◼   ► I would like to understand, well, first of all,

00:40:59 ◼   ► if you're going to give a number like 75,

00:41:02 ◼   ► well, does that mean it's 75% successful,

00:41:05 ◼   ► it was 75% entertaining, it was 75% a good value?

00:41:09 ◼   ► So that's why, you know, looking at things like,

00:41:11 ◼   ► I think, I want to say like DP review, the photo site,

00:41:14 ◼   ► the places that offer you facets,

00:41:15 ◼   ► because even with something as simple as like

00:41:17 ◼   ► rating Blue Apron, I mean, just to problematize it,

00:41:21 ◼   ► well, okay, so really what you're saying is,

00:41:23 ◼   ► did we enjoy eating this?

00:41:24 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:41:25 ◼   ► - Which is totally, that's certainly a primary marker

00:41:27 ◼   ► of what you would want to evaluate for a meal.

00:41:30 ◼   ► How about how hard was it to make?

00:41:32 ◼   ► How about how healthy was it?

00:41:34 ◼   ► How about does it have milk in it

00:41:36 ◼   ► because somebody in the house has an allergy?

00:41:38 ◼   ► Well, do we just throw that one out

00:41:39 ◼   ► because it had milk in it?

00:41:40 ◼   ► Probably.

00:41:41 ◼   ► But if you don't account for all of those things,

00:41:44 ◼   ► it's hard to communicate anything useful to people

00:41:47 ◼   ► unless you can help them understand

00:41:48 ◼   ► why it might be right for them.

00:41:50 ◼   ► - And you said useful there,

00:41:51 ◼   ► which I think is actually an important point here too,

00:41:52 ◼   ► which is the other question you always have to ask yourself

00:41:55 ◼   ► is what is the rating used for?

00:41:57 ◼   ► Like our Blue Apron rating is partially just for fun.

00:42:00 ◼   ► We thought we would try it.

00:42:01 ◼   ► And I think partially influences decisions

00:42:04 ◼   ► about whether we'll make it again.

00:42:06 ◼   ► Like it gets my kids to really ponder

00:42:08 ◼   ► how much did you really enjoy this?

00:42:10 ◼   ► And if--

00:42:11 ◼   ► - It's also a MacGuffin.

00:42:12 ◼   ► I mean, it's a MacGuffin in some ways

00:42:14 ◼   ► 'cause basically you're gonna go,

00:42:14 ◼   ► "Hey, it turns out that there's these two meals

00:42:17 ◼   ► "that most of us like."

00:42:18 ◼   ► And that's really good to know.

00:42:20 ◼   ► - Right.

00:42:21 ◼   ► - So, I mean, that's not a bad thing,

00:42:22 ◼   ► But-- - So like a Yelp review,

00:42:25 ◼   ► the point is sort of not to get your anger out,

00:42:28 ◼   ► it's to help other diners decide

00:42:31 ◼   ► whether they should go there.

00:42:32 ◼   ► And Rotten Tomatoes, the point is,

00:42:34 ◼   ► it's to help moviegoers decide,

00:42:35 ◼   ► is this a movie I should like or not?

00:42:37 ◼   ► What do people generally think?

00:42:38 ◼   ► And I feel like that's why Rotten Tomatoes is really useful

00:42:41 ◼   ► when a movie's between like,

00:42:44 ◼   ► Flophouse territory and like 30%,

00:42:46 ◼   ► or if a movie's like 70 to 100, or even 60 to 100,

00:42:50 ◼   ► 'cause that's the level where it's sort of like,

00:42:52 ◼   ► people mostly liked it or people mostly didn't like it.

00:42:55 ◼   ► So what number, what number, arbitrary Jason Snell, what arbitrary number do you give to

00:42:58 ◼   ► Fateful Findings?

00:42:59 ◼   ► Oh well, Fateful Findings is a zero, but it's a very interesting zero.

00:43:03 ◼   ► There's so many asterisks on a zero.

00:43:05 ◼   ► On a scale of zero to infinite, it's a zero, but it's still an interesting failure, but

00:43:12 ◼   ► it is a failure, I have to say.

00:43:16 ◼   ► But I don't know, I'll tell you this too, as somebody who doesn't see a lot of movies

00:43:20 ◼   ► since we had kids, I don't see a lot of movies. I am positive that there's a movie

00:43:25 ◼   ► out there that I have a bad opinion about purely from other people writing about it,

00:43:30 ◼   ► purely from aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes, that in reality if I had seen it,

00:43:36 ◼   ► it would have been one of my favorite movies. I have no doubt that that movie exists. It's

00:43:41 ◼   ► nestled among 300 terrible movies and that's the truth of it is I can't watch all the

00:43:48 ◼   ► movies and find the diamonds in the rough. I only get to see 15 movies a year or whatever.

00:43:53 ◼   ► I need to not have them be losers. But I have no doubt that that's all that Rotten Tomatoes

00:44:01 ◼   ► is telling me when it says 15 percent, is 15 percent of critics thought this was okay

00:44:06 ◼   ► and the rest of them hated it. It's not a 15 percent chance that I might love it. I

00:44:11 ◼   ► might really love it, I just am not willing to put that on myself and take a chance on

00:44:16 ◼   ► - Well, I'm a bad father, so I watch a lot, a lot of movies,

00:44:20 ◼   ► and this actually came up like last night.

00:44:25 ◼   ► So, oh, I just have to tell you something.

00:44:30 ◼   ► Something I mentioned in that thread with Todd.

00:44:32 ◼   ► He used to watch Letterman.

00:44:33 ◼   ► Do you remember when Letterman,

00:44:35 ◼   ► it was around the time that Flashdance came out.

00:44:38 ◼   ► Do you remember he invited a professional,

00:44:40 ◼   ► like veteran welder onto the show

00:44:42 ◼   ► to do a review of Flashdance?

00:44:44 ◼   ► - Yes. - And like,

00:44:45 ◼   ► think about now every time I think about movie ratings is like it depends on what

00:44:50 ◼   ► you're looking for in a movie like you know if you're like a foot fetishist you

00:44:53 ◼   ► might not like this movie that's gonna affect your ratings for it but like last

00:44:57 ◼   ► night for example my daughter was away for the night with some visiting with

00:44:59 ◼   ► some friends and and so we had you know free rein to just do stuff and I watched

00:45:03 ◼   ► two movies last night I watched I rented rented actually two movies off iTunes

00:45:08 ◼   ► the new Werner Herzog documentary it's essentially about the internet mm-hmm and

00:45:13 ◼   ► and a movie called Imperium,

00:45:16 ◼   ► starring Daniel Radcliffe.

00:45:18 ◼   ► And if you had done a CinemaScore,

00:45:21 ◼   ► well not a CinemaScore,

00:45:22 ◼   ► but you know, basically before I went in the theater,

00:45:24 ◼   ► you said to me, "Rate these movies before you've seen them."

00:45:26 ◼   ► You know what I would have said?

00:45:27 ◼   ► I would have said,

00:45:28 ◼   ► "Warner Herzog, four and a half stars, probably."

00:45:30 ◼   ► I haven't seen it yet,

00:45:31 ◼   ► but no one would have heard about four and a half stars.

00:45:33 ◼   ► Mm, you know, Daniel Radcliffe

00:45:36 ◼   ► as an undercover FBI agent, solid three.

00:45:40 ◼   ► And then I saw in the movies,

00:45:41 ◼   ► But the Warner Herzog movie was fine.

00:45:44 ◼   ► It was not super insightful.

00:45:47 ◼   ► It was great 'cause it was Warner Herzog

00:45:48 ◼   ► and it's just great to hear him talk.

00:45:50 ◼   ► But that movie, and it's very prestigious,

00:45:52 ◼   ► it's getting very good reviews, but in my case,

00:45:54 ◼   ► especially as a guy who knows a little bit of stuff

00:45:56 ◼   ► about the internet, it didn't really land with me.

00:45:58 ◼   ► I thought a lot of it was a little bit touchy-feely,

00:46:01 ◼   ► a little too deep on technology at some parts

00:46:04 ◼   ► and not deep enough in others.

00:46:05 ◼   ► My wife, okay, it's my wife who actually, turns out,

00:46:07 ◼   ► was recovering from a migraine yesterday,

00:46:10 ◼   ► I ended up watching the entire run of Stranger Things

00:46:13 ◼   ► last night, and she kept pointing out to me

00:46:15 ◼   ► the different snails that she found,

00:46:17 ◼   ► just 'cause I told her about your problems with it,

00:46:19 ◼   ► and she's like, "Oh, this."

00:46:20 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

00:46:21 ◼   ► - They would never say stick in the butt,

00:46:22 ◼   ► that's a total snail.

00:46:22 ◼   ► - It's an anachronism.

00:46:24 ◼   ► Saying we're gonna chill, and he's a douchebag,

00:46:27 ◼   ► which are not things that kids in the mid-80s said.

00:46:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, or stick in the butt.

00:46:31 ◼   ► But the reason I mention that there is like,

00:46:33 ◼   ► okay, so I mention Stranger Things because in your case,

00:46:36 ◼   ► I thought it was masterful.

00:46:39 ◼   ► seems like in Slack you were saying it felt like you were really taken away

00:46:42 ◼   ► from it by how distracting those things were. Even though you could

00:46:45 ◼   ► appreciate on some level what was happening with the story and the homages,

00:46:48 ◼   ► that was too much for you. Well I don't know about too much because I've kept

00:46:51 ◼   ► watching it, but like how do you put a rating on that? How do you put a

00:46:55 ◼   ► rating on that to say well you know here's five asterisks if you're super

00:46:59 ◼   ► familiar with Dungeons & Dragons you may not like this. That was I mean honestly

00:47:03 ◼   ► this is this is something that reviewers struggle with and I think I think this

00:47:06 ◼   ► actually an interesting, Andy and I have had long conversations about this before, the

00:47:11 ◼   ► idea of your responsibility when you're a reviewer and thinking philosophically, as

00:47:15 ◼   ► silly as this is, thinking philosophically about like if you're in a rating system,

00:47:18 ◼   ► what your ratings mean, if you have to assign a number to a review. I'm very happy now

00:47:23 ◼   ► that the mean man who runs sixcolors.com does not require me to do a numerical rating because

00:47:30 ◼   ► it's freeing to not have to worry about that anymore. And I would never impose one,

00:47:35 ◼   ► like no, never. But if you have one you have to think about it philosophically.

00:47:39 ◼   ► I think that's where it's interesting when you have citizen reviewers because

00:47:43 ◼   ► some of them think about it and internalize their code and they go with

00:47:48 ◼   ► it.

00:47:49 ◼   ► Other people don't think about it and you can just come straight from you get

00:47:52 ◼   ► you can tell and then there are also those people which I like to call

00:47:55 ◼   ► Goodreads reviewers who have thought about it and would like to share your

00:47:58 ◼   ► their entire rating system with you at the top of every review they write where

00:48:02 ◼   ► where it's like, "Well, Goodreads doesn't really allow me to do half-rating, so this

00:48:06 ◼   ► would be a four and a half, but since it's not a four, I can't do that. Because of this

00:48:10 ◼   ► one aspect of the main character, I'm going to give it a four, but trust me, it's in my

00:48:13 ◼   ► personal database, it's a four and a half." It's like, "All right, I get it. I get you've

00:48:17 ◼   ► got a system. You've got to move on." But you do have to internalize that system, and

00:48:20 ◼   ► you do have to have one. Like, at Macworld, we always had that, where people would get

00:48:24 ◼   ► three out of five, and they'd be bent out of shape. They'd be like, "I can't believe

00:48:26 ◼   ► you only gave us three mice. That's a negative review." And it's like, "No, actually, for

00:48:31 ◼   ► For us, three is fine.

00:48:33 ◼   ► Three is the lowest rating you can get, and it'd still be a recommendation.

00:48:37 ◼   ► It's flawed, but you could still get it, and it would be fine, because it's a recommendation.

00:48:43 ◼   ► And I get the "it's not as positive a recommendation as I would like," but we would get a lot of

00:48:50 ◼   ► "it's negative."

00:48:51 ◼   ► It's like, no, it's not.

00:48:52 ◼   ► It's not a bad review at three out of five.

00:48:53 ◼   ► Well, that's the Uber.

00:48:54 ◼   ► Dude, this is the Uber problem.

00:48:55 ◼   ► This is exactly the...

00:48:56 ◼   ► Please give my manager five stars and say I did a five-star job, otherwise I'm going to lose my job.

00:49:01 ◼   ► It's like when you go to the car dealership, five stars on everything. Four stars is a failure. Five stars on everything.

00:49:07 ◼   ► I don't know if this is true or if this is just an urban myth, but supposedly if you don't maintain a 4.7 average on Uber, you are subject to being fired.

00:49:18 ◼   ► And, you know, when's the last time you really got a five-star ride? I mean, like, where

00:49:23 ◼   ► it was, where, I mean, if you're somebody like a John Siracusa type, like five stars,

00:49:27 ◼   ► like, wow, I've given about two of those ever. It's almost like five mic reviews.

00:49:31 ◼   ► I need to leave for hip-hop albums. Five stars to me is a political statement.

00:49:36 ◼   ► I need to leave the Uber with two new books that are going to change my life when I read

00:49:42 ◼   ► them. That's a five-star Uber ride for me. But I understand that it's not, you know,

00:49:47 ◼   ► not designed for me because again for me

00:49:49 ◼   ► an accident we set my arm five star

00:49:51 ◼   ► three is the baseline and then they have

00:49:54 ◼   ► to do they have to work on things to get

00:49:56 ◼   ► it up to five it didn't still didn't

00:49:58 ◼   ► smell like smoke and they didn't make

00:49:59 ◼   ► racist jokes yeah that's right three

00:50:01 ◼   ► stars three stars that's right time you

00:50:03 ◼   ► got for this because I got a lot more

00:50:04 ◼   ► let's we got a lot of time but we're

00:50:06 ◼   ► going to take a break how about that I'm

00:50:09 ◼   ► talking about something you like I want

00:50:10 ◼   ► to tell you about something awesome it's

00:50:12 ◼   ► Mack Weldon Mack Weldon better than

00:50:15 ◼   ► whatever you're wearing right now they

00:50:17 ◼   ► like to say and I like to say I have Mack Weldon products, I have the Mack Weldon underwear,

00:50:22 ◼   ► I have the Mack Weldon socks. They are very high quality. In fact, when I first did my

00:50:27 ◼   ► Mack Weldon sponsorship on TV Talk Machine, I want to say, they gave me a little coupon

00:50:32 ◼   ► to buy some stuff and this is what I have to say about that. I went back and bought

00:50:35 ◼   ► more stuff with my own money because it was that good. And so that's my endorsement. It

00:50:39 ◼   ► was good enough that I went past the podcast try it out phase to the I need to actually

00:50:46 ◼   ► this is costing me money now because I need to buy this stuff. Great socks, little stripes,

00:50:50 ◼   ► I love them. High quality underwear. They also have shirts. I think they've got, I think

00:50:55 ◼   ► they have hoodies too. They've only got underwear, socks, and shirts. Their website's really

00:50:59 ◼   ► well designed, easy to use. You go in, click on the stuff you want. It's got what the sizes

00:51:05 ◼   ► are and all the styles. And then you check out. It's really fast, very convenient to

00:51:09 ◼   ► do this. And it's risk free. If you don't like your first pair, you can keep it. They

00:51:14 ◼   ► don't want it back. They really don't. You wore it. You can keep it. But they'll refund

00:51:18 ◼   ► your money anyway. So it's no questions asked. And yes, you can keep that pair of underpants

00:51:23 ◼   ► that you don't like if you want. But I like that because most things on the web, I think

00:51:29 ◼   ► you get that added fear of like, "I don't have it in my hands. I don't see it. What

00:51:33 ◼   ► does this mean?" And so just being able to allay that fear and say, "No, no. If you don't

00:51:37 ◼   ► like it, we'll give you your money back. It's not a problem." They've got socks. Here's

00:51:42 ◼   ► the list socks shirts undershirts hoodies and sweatpants including a line of silver

00:51:48 ◼   ► underwear and shirts yes actual silver they're naturally antimicrobial uh meaning they repel

00:51:55 ◼   ► odor using the power of science wow is it like a faraday cage for your joke um it could be

00:52:02 ◼   ► it could be uh you'll have to ask mr faraday about that silver um and they perform well too

00:52:11 ◼   ► to they're good for working out they're good for going to work they're good for

00:52:14 ◼   ► going out on dates they're good for living your everyday life you can get

00:52:17 ◼   ► 20% off your order that's right that's a lot of stripey socks my friend by going

00:52:23 ◼   ► to Mack weldon calm now we talk about the Mac on this show a lot so I need to

00:52:28 ◼   ► spell this for you because it's not spelled like that it's Mac Mac K W E L

00:52:33 ◼   ► do and Mack weldon calm use code upgrade a check off for 20% off that silver

00:52:40 ◼   ► underwear, those stripy socks, that hoodie, whatever, 20% off with code UPRADE. Thank

00:52:45 ◼   ► you, Mac Wilden, for supporting UPRADE.

00:52:47 ◼   ► Well, now, when stupid John Roderick brags about his Faraday underwear with the silver

00:52:52 ◼   ► in it, now I know where he got it, and I'm totally going to get some.

00:52:55 ◼   ► Yeah, there you go.

00:52:56 ◼   ► I can do it.

00:52:57 ◼   ► Um, where, so where, where were we? We're talking about reviews and ratings.

00:53:00 ◼   ► You've got to deploy me tactically. You've got to get me in a lane.

00:53:02 ◼   ► I know, I know, I know. Um, well, I, I've already made my joke about Goodreads, so I'm

00:53:07 ◼   ► good at this point. I, no, it's, it's also the, it's also the,

00:53:10 ◼   ► the other part of the Yelp problem, the other part of so many of these things, and of course

00:53:13 ◼   ► we won't go through all of our hilarious anecdotes we have here, but, is that, you know, you

00:53:17 ◼   ► don't have to, it doesn't cost anything to leave a review. You have this, you have a

00:53:21 ◼   ► link here to the wonderful Amazon movie reviews.

00:53:23 ◼   ► - Amazon movie reviews is one of my favorite Twitter accounts, and it's generally-

00:53:27 ◼   ► - Would you want to curate a couple, can you curate a couple of those real quick for us?

00:53:30 ◼   ► - It's generally, well, okay, like the most, this is a pinned one on there, which is The

00:53:34 ◼   ► Wolf of Wall Street. One star, there were no wolves in this movie.

00:53:38 ◼   ► Right? And most of their reviews, some of them are five, they're all five and one stars

00:53:43 ◼   ► for the most part. Yeah. And beyond that, it's people who are unclear on what the point

00:53:52 ◼   ► is. Jurassic World, one star. I don't like this film. This film is a bit unrealistic

00:53:58 ◼   ► since the existence of dinosaurs has not been proven. There may be some bones, but these

00:54:02 ◼   ► are easy enough to fake. Yeah. That's the review of Jurassic World. Ghost Rider, five

00:54:07 ◼   ► Good flick. My son is five and loves this movie. I had to get him six feet of chain

00:54:12 ◼   ► from Home Depot. Because the ghostwriter has chains. Yeah, so anyway, it's an amazing

00:54:20 ◼   ► Twitter account and I recommend it, but it is an example where a lot of fives, a lot

00:54:24 ◼   ► of ones, you know, and what I'm not trying to do is say people don't have the right

00:54:31 ◼   ► to write a review. I guess what I'm saying is writing reviews is hard, and writing good

00:54:36 ◼   ► reviews is harder, and a lot of internet things that want you to write reviews don't really

00:54:42 ◼   ► care if you exert effort, which is good because most people don't want to exert the effort

00:54:47 ◼   ► to do it. And so you end up with weird reviews, and you end up with the axe grinders who are

00:54:51 ◼   ► the ones who push through, like their anger will fuel them.

00:54:54 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin Activist, activist reviewers.

00:54:56 ◼   ► Jared Ranere Exactly right. And so it becomes problematic,

00:54:59 ◼   ► huh, there's that word again, because it's just-

00:55:03 ◼   ► Steve McLaughlin I'm going to shame you out of that one.

00:55:05 ◼   ► No, you know what? The reason I use the word problematic is because I feel like I can't

00:55:09 ◼   ► say why it's bad because there's so many different vectors of badness in it that you start to

00:55:14 ◼   ► pull them apart and it's like, can I give you a list of all the ways that this is bad?

00:55:18 ◼   ► Because there's so many of them. It's just like, it's hard to ask people to write a review.

00:55:23 ◼   ► We're Americans and so we nominally believe in a sense of fair play and justice and equal

00:55:26 ◼   ► access to things. So it's nice that anybody, I mean, I'm not being sarcastic. It's great

00:55:31 ◼   ► that everybody gets a vote on stuff. I think that's really good. But the problem is like,

00:55:35 ◼   ► This is one, this was one from memory.

00:55:38 ◼   ► Who was it, was it, oh, was it Wilson Miner?

00:55:41 ◼   ► Was one of the, whoever made Every Block.

00:55:44 ◼   ► Every Block was this great app that would aggregate

00:55:46 ◼   ► all kinds of local information about your neighborhood.

00:55:49 ◼   ► And it was only available in a few cities,

00:55:51 ◼   ► but it was so great, 'cause you could go in

00:55:52 ◼   ► and you could find honest stuff, like police activity,

00:55:55 ◼   ► like all stuff from public records in this beautiful site.

00:55:58 ◼   ► And at one point, I think they rebooted it.

00:56:02 ◼   ► And it was only available in four cities.

00:56:04 ◼   ► and it's said in giant, giant letters

00:56:06 ◼   ► in the description of the app.

00:56:07 ◼   ► This will only work if you are in San Francisco,

00:56:10 ◼   ► Boston, Phoenix, do not download this app

00:56:13 ◼   ► if you don't live in one of these cities.

00:56:15 ◼   ► Hand to God, one of the first reviews,

00:56:17 ◼   ► "One Star, not available in my city,

00:56:19 ◼   ► "guess I should have read the description."

00:56:22 ◼   ► - So they're reviewing themselves then.

00:56:25 ◼   ► - And one of my other favorites,

00:56:26 ◼   ► I don't know if you see this much anymore,

00:56:27 ◼   ► do you remember this a few years back,

00:56:28 ◼   ► "One Star, fixed for jailbreak."

00:56:31 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:56:32 ◼   ► - You ever seen that one?

00:56:33 ◼   ► I jump break my phone it's like really vulnerable and broken now could you go

00:56:37 ◼   ► in and like make your work better with this

00:56:39 ◼   ► yeah the one of the things that we tried at one point to we don't know whether we

00:56:43 ◼   ► implemented or whether it was just on the list of things that didn't get

00:56:47 ◼   ► implemented by our development team not that I'm bitter but the idea of I think

00:56:53 ◼   ► there's a difference on the internet between asking people for ratings and

00:56:58 ◼   ► having them itunes does this you can rate a podcast without writing a review

00:57:02 ◼   ► And I think writing a review is really intimidating for a lot of people.

00:57:05 ◼   ► It also is asking for time. A lot of people aren't really confident writers,

00:57:09 ◼   ► let alone product reviewers or movie reviewers or podcast reviewers.

00:57:14 ◼   ► And a lot of sites make the mistake of wanting, of asking for text.

00:57:21 ◼   ► Like, giving us an integer out of five is not enough. We want your text.

00:57:26 ◼   ► And I feel like that is a step down the path

00:57:29 ◼   ► toward having a worse idea of the general sentiment

00:57:32 ◼   ► of something, because a lot of people are going to be like,

00:57:34 ◼   ► well, forget this.

00:57:35 ◼   ► It's like giving a survey.

00:57:36 ◼   ► I get those in email every now and then.

00:57:37 ◼   ► It was like, how did you like your interaction

00:57:39 ◼   ► with Hotels.com?

00:57:40 ◼   ► And it'll be like, it was good, it was bad, it was I don't care.

00:57:43 ◼   ► And you click on it, and it's like, OK, great.

00:57:45 ◼   ► Now we want to ask-- it opens a browser window and says,

00:57:47 ◼   ► let's ask you 20 other questions.

00:57:49 ◼   ► I'm like, I don't want to answer 20 questions.

00:57:51 ◼   ► We get that from my kid's school,

00:57:52 ◼   ► where it's like all this stuff about how satisfied we are

00:57:54 ◼   ► with diversity at the school with dozens of questions with one to four.

00:57:59 ◼   ► Oh, it's the worst. See? You're talking about quantifying.

00:58:02 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, actually I'm really pleased with all of it, but I'm also kind of a size

00:58:06 ◼   ► queen about giving out fours and fives.

00:58:08 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly right. Even if you're pretty happy, you're going to pull down the average

00:58:11 ◼   ► because you're like, "Look, three is a positive review, okay?" And they're going to be like,

00:58:16 ◼   ► "No, if it's not five, the school shuts down."

00:58:20 ◼   ► - I wonder if there's ways though to introduce facets

00:58:23 ◼   ► in clever ways.

00:58:25 ◼   ► I mean, you know, there's all kinds of interesting stuff.

00:58:27 ◼   ► Like one thing I guess we should mention in passing is,

00:58:29 ◼   ► I didn't notice this at first,

00:58:30 ◼   ► but you're a pretty big Netflix user, right?

00:58:33 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:58:34 ◼   ► - I mean, I remember for a long time,

00:58:35 ◼   ► Netflix was so ahead of the curve on so many things.

00:58:38 ◼   ► I remember back in the day it became kind of like a sport

00:58:41 ◼   ► to like rate movies, 'cause it would give you more to rate

00:58:43 ◼   ► and it would get better and better.

00:58:44 ◼   ► And back then it wasn't collaborative filtering

00:58:49 ◼   ► the way we think of it today, but it was definitely like using aggregate information.

00:58:52 ◼   ► Yes, they had a famous algorithm that would guess what rating you would give a movie based

00:58:59 ◼   ► on your ratings of other movies.

00:59:00 ◼   ► Right.

00:59:01 ◼   ► And they had a whole contest about like getting people to write a better algorithm that would

00:59:06 ◼   ► give somebody, you know, a team a million dollars if they could improve their algorithm

00:59:10 ◼   ► by a certain amount.

00:59:11 ◼   ► And back in the disk days, that was sort of important because they're trying to float

00:59:14 ◼   ► up like, "What disks should you get next?" and say, "We think you'll like this movie."

00:59:17 ◼   ► And it's still really relevant for streaming now.

00:59:20 ◼   ► Well, I mean, like one thing, two things I like, one thing I like is, and it is a fairly,

00:59:25 ◼   ► it's become a fairly blunt instrument.

00:59:27 ◼   ► It's not as useful as it used to be.

00:59:28 ◼   ► Maybe I don't know, it's too much stuff.

00:59:30 ◼   ► Maybe they know too much about me, but I like it when they say recommended because you watched

00:59:35 ◼   ► this.

00:59:36 ◼   ► I think that's kind of interesting.

00:59:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:59:38 ◼   ► And I really like it when you get to the detail page and it says, you know, recommend because

00:59:41 ◼   ► you like you, you like this certain thing or you like these kinds of movies.

00:59:44 ◼   ► - Well, we should find for notes the cheat sheet

00:59:46 ◼   ► for genres on Netflix.

00:59:49 ◼   ► You ever seen that?

00:59:50 ◼   ► - No.

00:59:50 ◼   ► - The full list of genres, like adult anime,

00:59:53 ◼   ► like there's like a ridiculous taxonomy

00:59:55 ◼   ► that's not exposed to the public,

00:59:57 ◼   ► but you can view them in a web browser.

00:59:58 ◼   ► I will find that for notes.

01:00:00 ◼   ► But what I didn't know about,

01:00:01 ◼   ► and I just discovered probably, I don't know,

01:00:03 ◼   ► in the last year, was that,

01:00:06 ◼   ► if I hope I'm getting this right,

01:00:07 ◼   ► tell me if I'm getting this wrong,

01:00:08 ◼   ► but when you're on Netflix and you're flipping around,

01:00:09 ◼   ► you're saying, "What am I gonna watch?

01:00:10 ◼   ► "What am I gonna watch?"

01:00:11 ◼   ► and you see the ratings for something,

01:00:14 ◼   ► apparently turns out those are the ratings

01:00:16 ◼   ► that people very much like you have given this.

01:00:20 ◼   ► - Right. - More to the point,

01:00:21 ◼   ► this is basically the rating they think you would give it.

01:00:23 ◼   ► Which is a fascinating idea to me.

01:00:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's, yeah, I've had that too.

01:00:28 ◼   ► I'm fascinated by the whole like, because you liked,

01:00:31 ◼   ► sometimes they'll say it's because you liked Primer.

01:00:33 ◼   ► Other times they'll be like,

01:00:34 ◼   ► because you like smart, mind-bending time travel movies,

01:00:38 ◼   ► and I'm like, okay, well I know what movie

01:00:40 ◼   ► talking about there. But it'll say, "Well, you should watch Safety Not Guaranteed."

01:00:44 ◼   ► And it's like, "Yes, I should. You're absolutely right. I should watch that movie. They have

01:00:47 ◼   ► a lot in common."

01:00:48 ◼   ► Give me all of the time travel news, please.

01:00:50 ◼   ► It's amazing that your computer can divine that, but quite right. It should. It should

01:00:57 ◼   ► be able to figure that one out. And it's helping. I do like it in that respect.

01:01:04 ◼   ► I crave facets. And so, just some quick examples. In terms of maybe what I wish were different

01:01:09 ◼   ► or what could be improved.

01:01:10 ◼   ► I sent you the list, by the way,

01:01:11 ◼   ► to the Netflix streaming genres.

01:01:13 ◼   ► How crazy is that list?

01:01:15 ◼   ► We'll just pull that up in a sec.

01:01:16 ◼   ► But, you know, I guess I just wish things like,

01:01:19 ◼   ► I mean, for Rotten Tomatoes-ish things,

01:01:21 ◼   ► or things where, like, especially if it's crowdsourced,

01:01:23 ◼   ► there's some dumb questions that you could ask

01:01:25 ◼   ► that actually might be really useful.

01:01:28 ◼   ► I would recommend this movie to my close friends,

01:01:31 ◼   ► yes or no.

01:01:32 ◼   ► This movie was better than I expected, yes or no.

01:01:36 ◼   ► It seems to me like, over time, those kinds of things

01:01:38 ◼   ► could actually be really useful.

01:01:40 ◼   ► And when it comes to products, I mean,

01:01:41 ◼   ► you've got to get all DP review on this.

01:01:43 ◼   ► Like, was this a good value?

01:01:45 ◼   ► How did you feel about the content

01:01:47 ◼   ► of the CD versus the packaging of the box set?

01:01:49 ◼   ► Because I've seen Pet Sounds get one star,

01:01:51 ◼   ► because people think it's been released too many times.

01:01:53 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

01:01:54 ◼   ► That's bananas.

01:01:54 ◼   ► I love that.

01:01:55 ◼   ► I look at-- sometimes when I'm looking for a Blu-ray

01:01:57 ◼   ► or something, and you'll get-- what was it?

01:02:00 ◼   ► Is it digital bits?

01:02:02 ◼   ► So one of the Blu-ray review sites,

01:02:04 ◼   ► I always really liked it, because they gave two reviews.

01:02:06 ◼   ► They give a review of the content, which is like,

01:02:08 ◼   ► "Yes, I'm glad you liked "Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan."

01:02:11 ◼   ► Good for you.

01:02:12 ◼   ► Yes, it's a good movie."

01:02:12 ◼   ► And then they would do the release.

01:02:14 ◼   ► It's like, "Now, yes, please actually tell me

01:02:17 ◼   ► "what's good about this.

01:02:19 ◼   ► "Is this a good transfer and all of that?"

01:02:21 ◼   ► And you see that on Amazon, where it'll be like,

01:02:22 ◼   ► "I already had this," or, "Khan, it's great!"

01:02:26 ◼   ► It's like, "Okay, that doesn't tell me anything.

01:02:28 ◼   ► "I'm really specifically trying to find out

01:02:30 ◼   ► "if this new release is good or not."

01:02:31 ◼   ► And that comes back to knowing your audience.

01:02:34 ◼   ► But you're right, we talked about that at IDG

01:02:36 ◼   ► lot about could we ask questions to get signal on a product that was not just tell me how

01:02:41 ◼   ► numbered this product is, right? Like, give this product a number. But instead it's like,

01:02:45 ◼   ► was this, we showed that with games, like iOS games, we tried to do that. And it didn't

01:02:50 ◼   ► work very well because we didn't have enough users to do it. But it's like survey data

01:02:53 ◼   ► of like, was this game challenging? Was this game fun to play? Not just rate this game,

01:02:59 ◼   ► like ask a specific question about about the iOS game and that way we could say

01:03:06 ◼   ► users found this game challenging but fun to play or users found this game fun

01:03:12 ◼   ► but not very challenging and that's interesting and way more I feel like a

01:03:16 ◼   ► way better use of everybody's time then you be the reviewer give this a rating

01:03:23 ◼   ► out of five because totally totally yeah here's you know two sites I wouldn't I

01:03:28 ◼   ► I would appreciate you putting in notes.

01:03:30 ◼   ► Very different, but working toward the same thing.

01:03:32 ◼   ► One is Kids in Mind, and the other one

01:03:35 ◼   ► that you might have noticed popping up on Apple TV

01:03:38 ◼   ► is Common Sense Media.

01:03:40 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

01:03:41 ◼   ► - And they, so Kids in Mind is,

01:03:43 ◼   ► I think this is an endlessly fascinating site.

01:03:45 ◼   ► It's a, it feels a little Christian-y,

01:03:47 ◼   ► definitely a little conservative,

01:03:48 ◼   ► but the notion is they go in and they review a movie

01:03:52 ◼   ► for three vectors, the amount of sex and nudity,

01:03:55 ◼   ► the amount of violence and gore,

01:03:56 ◼   ► the amount of profanity,

01:03:57 ◼   ► And then in a hilarious turn, they go through,

01:04:00 ◼   ► and in a very antiseptic way, describe every instance

01:04:03 ◼   ► of all of those things in the most hilarious way.

01:04:05 ◼   ► And yes, the Big Lebowski is in there.

01:04:07 ◼   ► So if you're worried about how much of those things

01:04:09 ◼   ► you might find offensive, and then want specifically

01:04:11 ◼   ► to know, Kids in Mind is good for that.

01:04:13 ◼   ► So the reason I mentioned Common Sense Media,

01:04:15 ◼   ► I think they might be a little better at it,

01:04:16 ◼   ► but they are doing something I wish more places would do,

01:04:19 ◼   ► which is facets, facets, facets.

01:04:21 ◼   ► So right now, I am on the page for Imperium,

01:04:23 ◼   ► which is this Daniel Radcliffe movie I watched last night.

01:04:27 ◼   ► They give it a rating of 17 plus,

01:04:30 ◼   ► so I guess it's R rated.

01:04:32 ◼   ► They give it a quality rating of three out of five stars.

01:04:34 ◼   ► Okay, good to know.

01:04:36 ◼   ► And then they have a section here

01:04:37 ◼   ► called What Parents Need to Know.

01:04:38 ◼   ► Positive messages of this movie, one to five.

01:04:41 ◼   ► Positive role models, one to five.

01:04:43 ◼   ► Violence, sex, language, consumerism,

01:04:46 ◼   ► drinking, drugs, and smoking.

01:04:47 ◼   ► Okay, so I'm not saying the way they're doing that

01:04:49 ◼   ► is perfect for every movie,

01:04:51 ◼   ► but something like that would be very welcome to me.

01:04:54 ◼   ► Even if it's an opinion,

01:04:55 ◼   ► I would like those facets to be there.

01:04:57 ◼   ► - I've used those reviews a lot to--

01:05:01 ◼   ► - Look, if you know your kid is afraid of scary music,

01:05:03 ◼   ► it's good to know that.

01:05:04 ◼   ► Like, your kid might be the toughest kid in the world,

01:05:06 ◼   ► but sometimes kids, there's certain things

01:05:08 ◼   ► that just set your kid off,

01:05:09 ◼   ► whether that's spiders, scary music, you know,

01:05:12 ◼   ► Slender Man, whatever it is,

01:05:13 ◼   ► knowing it's in there is good to know.

01:05:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, my high school pal, Jeff Anderson,

01:05:18 ◼   ► who used to be the movie critic

01:05:20 ◼   ► at the San Francisco Examiner,

01:05:22 ◼   ► back when it was a newspaper. He has his own site, Combustible Celluloid, and he used to

01:05:29 ◼   ► write the now streaming column for TechHive, which was great, and he writes for Common

01:05:33 ◼   ► Sense Media, too.

01:05:35 ◼   ► Oh, terrific.

01:05:36 ◼   ► And it's good, because he's a real movie critic, and he's able to say, like, I'm looking at

01:05:41 ◼   ► his review of Vice on Common Sense Media, which is great, because parents need to know

01:05:46 ◼   ► that Vice is a terrible sci-fi action film. It's very violent, there's a lot of sex,

01:05:52 ◼   ► There's a lot of bad language, but also it's a very bad movie with one star.

01:05:58 ◼   ► It's great knowing somebody who grew up to be a film critic is fantastic because I have

01:06:02 ◼   ► to say, knowing him in high school, he would see movies and rate them on a five-star scale.

01:06:06 ◼   ► He had internalized his star rating system as a teenager, and of course he ended up being

01:06:12 ◼   ► a movie critic.

01:06:14 ◼   ► But I had to learn the five-star rating system much later.

01:06:18 ◼   ► Some people just have that gene.

01:06:19 ◼   ► By the way, if you have kids, you might want to steer them away from The Big Lebowski.

01:06:22 ◼   ► It gets a 10 for profanity.

01:06:24 ◼   ► About 240 F-words, many scatological references, many anatomical references, many model settings.

01:06:30 ◼   ► They didn't even bother to go through the specific.

01:06:32 ◼   ► But they also offer discussion topics if you show it to your kid.

01:06:35 ◼   ► Kidnapping, pornography, marijuana use, the Vietnam and Gulf Wars.

01:06:38 ◼   ► Is there marijuana use in The Big Lebowski? Interesting.

01:06:41 ◼   ► I've seen that movie one time, by the way.

01:06:44 ◼   ► Oh dear.

01:06:45 ◼   ► Single time. I liked it.

01:06:46 ◼   ► Who are you, Scott McNulty?

01:06:48 ◼   ► I liked it, but I only saw it the one time and that was like four years ago.

01:06:51 ◼   ► It's about around about the same time I saw Ferris Bueller's Day Off for the only time that I've seen that.

01:06:55 ◼   ► Really? But what do you think?

01:06:57 ◼   ► Facets though, huh? I mean doesn't it seem like that's one way to kind of

01:07:00 ◼   ► Cut a lot of the stupid out of this?

01:07:03 ◼   ► Yeah, I agree. I think that's I think there's a tyranny in the empty box

01:07:07 ◼   ► Saying review this here in a lot of different ways, right? I think it's bad

01:07:12 ◼   ► I think I think it's bad for the person being asked to fill in the empty box and I don't think it really solves anything

01:07:18 ◼   ► And so, I mean, you, in our document, and we are going to move on here in a minute,

01:07:22 ◼   ► but in your document you talked about interesting case studies, and basically it's like examples,

01:07:26 ◼   ► and you mentioned the wire cutter, which does a lot of texting, puts a lot of context in.

01:07:29 ◼   ► They don't do ratings, but they do pick a winner, which is how they kind of stack it

01:07:33 ◼   ► up because their feeling is, "Who reads the wire cutter?"

01:07:36 ◼   ► And what they're saying is, "People who read the wire cutter want to know what to buy."

01:07:40 ◼   ► They don't want to know, like, the full--

01:07:41 ◼   ► - Their asterisks are not below the fold.

01:07:43 ◼   ► Their asterisks are the article.

01:07:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, that's true.

01:07:46 ◼   ► I have written a couple articles for them.

01:07:47 ◼   ► - It's absolutely true, and they're still building

01:07:49 ◼   ► their format as they learn what their business is,

01:07:51 ◼   ► and as they learn what their audience is,

01:07:53 ◼   ► but what they're not, they're not interested

01:07:55 ◼   ► in the cultural conversation about a film, right?

01:07:58 ◼   ► Wirecutter is interested in people who want to buy a product

01:08:02 ◼   ► in a category, but they don't know which product to buy,

01:08:04 ◼   ► and Wirecutter can say, "That one,"

01:08:06 ◼   ► or if you wanna spend a little bit of money

01:08:08 ◼   ► for something better, "That one,"

01:08:09 ◼   ► and that's all they wanna do, which is good,

01:08:12 ◼   ► because that's how they make their money,

01:08:14 ◼   ► is by click-throughs to buy those products on Amazon,

01:08:18 ◼   ► in large part.

01:08:19 ◼   ► But it's a great example of them putting a lot of work in

01:08:22 ◼   ► to understand their categories,

01:08:23 ◼   ► but also to think about what is the output.

01:08:26 ◼   ► And the output, saying something like,

01:08:28 ◼   ► somebody in the chat room was saying like,

01:08:30 ◼   ► oh, The Verge gave this 7.3,

01:08:32 ◼   ► and they gave this other one a 7.1,

01:08:34 ◼   ► which is like, Macworld did that

01:08:36 ◼   ► when I first started at Macworld,

01:08:37 ◼   ► is they had this essentially 100-point rating system.

01:08:40 ◼   ► And the fact was that there was no,

01:08:42 ◼   ► talking about levels of precision,

01:08:44 ◼   ► There was no level of precision to that point of 100.

01:08:47 ◼   ► Like there was a difference between a 6.8 and a 6.7.

01:08:49 ◼   ► Is there really a difference between those?

01:08:50 ◼   ► - Well, is your friend a significant figure?

01:08:52 ◼   ► - Significant figures, yes, significant figures.

01:08:53 ◼   ► It's just like, no, there's no way, there's no way, right?

01:08:56 ◼   ► So with Wirecutter, it is much more like a Cisco

01:08:59 ◼   ► and Ebert situation, which is like this one.

01:09:02 ◼   ► But it's not even like yes or no to this product.

01:09:04 ◼   ► It's like in this category, just buy this product.

01:09:06 ◼   ► And there is something freeing about that.

01:09:07 ◼   ► - If it's too different, they break it off.

01:09:09 ◼   ► - Exactly. - Where it'll be like,

01:09:10 ◼   ► it isn't just like here's the best TV to buy.

01:09:12 ◼   ► It's like here's the best TV to buy

01:09:13 ◼   ► they could say at the higher high-end or not just any like specific it could be

01:09:18 ◼   ► different kinds of knives or whatever but they if it's too big of a topic they

01:09:21 ◼   ► break it into pieces and it maintains its use exactly exactly right and they

01:09:24 ◼   ► and they and they saw that stuff which is not to say that there aren't issues

01:09:27 ◼   ► because having written a couple wire cutter pieces I mean it was a judgment

01:09:30 ◼   ► call in the end it was a judgment call I couldn't you know it's very a very rare

01:09:36 ◼   ► product where you can set up some measurements and press some buttons and

01:09:39 ◼   ► run some tests and have your answer

01:09:41 ◼   ► Most of the time you end up having to make a judgment call based on your experience and

01:09:45 ◼   ► your... and even even when you're pressing the buttons you have to decide what you want

01:09:49 ◼   ► to measure, which was when we had a lab back at Macworld and PC World.

01:09:54 ◼   ► You know, the lab is deciding what to measure and there's a great skill in that in figuring

01:09:57 ◼   ► out what the most appropriate measurements are and how to make them.

01:10:00 ◼   ► I mean it's no surprise that the Macworld lab is largely employed doing performance

01:10:09 ◼   ► marketing testing at Apple now, right? They were really good at coming up with tests. And so, yeah,

01:10:15 ◼   ► the test, the numbers were objective, but who made the test that measures the numbers? And

01:10:21 ◼   ► it's all, it's, you know, it's judgment calls all the way down, is what I'm saying. And turtles.

01:10:27 ◼   ► - Well played. - And turtles. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, if we're putting a button on this, I guess,

01:10:36 ◼   ► because people like buttons. You know, I guess as we can agree that people should watch

01:10:39 ◼   ► "Fateful Findings" with the great Neil Brady. It is an amazing, amazing film. Even with that coffee.

01:10:44 ◼   ► He does, and he's got lots of laptops that just don't work. And books. And books. I guess what I

01:10:51 ◼   ► would say about ratings is they're a tool to be used and disregarded by the people who look at

01:10:58 ◼   ► them. And so, as with so many things, if you're a savvy consumer, be aware of where those ratings

01:11:04 ◼   ► come from and who is writing them and how they're calculated in the case of something

01:11:09 ◼   ► like Rotten Tomatoes. I think that's a healthy thing in life. I mean, that is something that

01:11:12 ◼   ► I would say about anything from tech products to cultural things like movies to the way

01:11:20 ◼   ► that somebody like Nate Silver analyzes political polling.

01:11:24 ◼   ► Steven: Oh, great points. Yeah.

01:11:26 ◼   ► Jared: Nate Silver came out of the baseball analytics background. He was a baseball prospectus.

01:11:31 ◼   ► way that the people who do sapermetric stuff are looking at numbers and saying, "Hey,

01:11:38 ◼   ► this batting average doesn't seem like it's actually the best measure of whether somebody's

01:11:42 ◼   ► a good baseball player or not." And all of that, I mean, I just think it's healthy

01:11:46 ◼   ► for all of us to keep that in mind. What are the biases? What are the, where does this

01:11:51 ◼   ► number come from? Because the old joke is numbers never lie, you can't argue with

01:11:56 ◼   ► numbers. And the people who say that are generally people who know that the numbers always, they

01:12:01 ◼   ► lie and don't believe it when somebody tells you that. And I just feel like that in the

01:12:08 ◼   ► end you need to know what's in the sausage when it comes to reviews. And the other thing

01:12:13 ◼   ► I wanted to say in the button up here is I always took it as a great responsibility and

01:12:21 ◼   ► I did try to internalize what my rating system would be when I was rating a product.

01:12:24 ◼   ► You're asking people to spend $3,000, well not asking, but sure people are making $3,000,

01:12:28 ◼   ► $3,000, $5,000 decisions.

01:12:30 ◼   ► I gotta tell you, I don't want no pressure here,

01:12:31 ◼   ► but back in the day, that was, I mean,

01:12:33 ◼   ► the number of mice was the definitive review

01:12:36 ◼   ► for Apple stuff for me.

01:12:37 ◼   ► That was, I would read all the other ones,

01:12:38 ◼   ► but yours was the one, Macworld's was the one

01:12:41 ◼   ► that I would really put the most credibility into.

01:12:43 ◼   ► - And if you didn't like something,

01:12:45 ◼   ► you could potentially destroy somebody's business, right?

01:12:48 ◼   ► I mean, you could literally be like,

01:12:49 ◼   ► this is a piece of garbage, and they would never sell any,

01:12:51 ◼   ► and they would be done.

01:12:54 ◼   ► And so it's a great responsibility to do that.

01:12:56 ◼   ► all said, you know, the moment I got a chance to not give a rating to something anymore,

01:13:00 ◼   ► a numerical rating, I took it because I felt like the point of my reviews was not--we always

01:13:08 ◼   ► had this, like with OS X, I would review OS X every year and be like, "Are we rating this?"

01:13:12 ◼   ► And sometimes we did and sometimes we didn't, but it was like, "What's the point? What are

01:13:16 ◼   ► we comparing it to?" If OS X gets a 4 or a 3.5 or a 4.5, does anybody know or care?

01:13:25 ◼   ► What should you do differently?

01:13:26 ◼   ► Why would it be right?

01:13:28 ◼   ► I mean, would I change a word of my review?

01:13:31 ◼   ► No, I will say that after 20 years of editing reviews, I could re-review and say what the

01:13:35 ◼   ► rating was.

01:13:37 ◼   ► And if the rating wasn't what I thought it was, I would go back to the reviewer and say,

01:13:42 ◼   ► "Okay, we got a problem here."

01:13:44 ◼   ► Either – I know you gave this two and a half, but either this is a three or three

01:13:51 ◼   ► and a half and you just got the rating wrong and we'll change the rating or

01:13:56 ◼   ► your review is far too positive the words and you need to make it much more

01:14:01 ◼   ► clear about why you gave it two and a half out of five that's so frustrating

01:14:04 ◼   ► when they don't man and but it was something I could internalize it was

01:14:08 ◼   ► something that I you know and that was that was good because I would much

01:14:12 ◼   ► rather the rating on something come from like what Metacritic does come from the

01:14:16 ◼   ► words than from like a spreadsheet that you have tricked yourself into believing is totally

01:14:21 ◼   ► objective, but is in fact not remotely objective, because that happens a lot.

01:14:28 ◼   ► - I think we fixed it. - Okay, good. High five. Congratulations. Thanks, everybody. You're welcome.

01:14:33 ◼   ► - Oh, a lot of genres. - So many Netflix genres.

01:14:40 ◼   ► - Oh my goodness. Deep Sea horror movies. - Like, with Deep Blue Sea, I guess.

01:14:46 ◼   ► And the Abyss is not really a "well, well..."

01:14:50 ◼   ► I keep holding off on the Abyss because I know I can't get the right version and the right resolution, so I keep waiting. I've never seen it.

01:14:55 ◼   ► This is not on our list, but I love the Abyss.

01:14:58 ◼   ► I don't think we have time for anything else.

01:15:00 ◼   ► No, the Abyss Director's Edition. I saw it, I think, in a 70mm on Van Ness at the big, at the time, new theater on Van Ness.

01:15:15 ◼   ► S. Oh wow. And we came into the city to see it, and it was so great, because if you've

01:15:24 ◼   ► seen James Cameron's The Abyss and you've only seen the original theatrical release,

01:15:28 ◼   ► it's not very good. It has a really bad ending. And the special edition that he did on video

01:15:33 ◼   ► on VHS, and they did release in theaters briefly, is great. But apparently, James Cameron is

01:15:38 ◼   ► too busy making more Avatar movies to supervise the HD release of The Abyss special edition,

01:15:45 ◼   ► And there is an HD version that plays on HBO occasionally, but it's the stupid original version.

01:15:50 ◼   ► And it's kind of a shame. And yeah, I feel I want to do an incomparable episode about it,

01:15:53 ◼   ► but I really don't see the point if the only edition that you can get that's the good version of the movie is on VHS.

01:15:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, I've looked on the back of trucks. I can't find it. - No.

01:16:02 ◼   ► No, I got a VHS tape here. I can loan you, but I don't know if I have a VCR.

01:16:07 ◼   ► Um, yeah. Yeah.

01:16:10 ◼   ► I wanted to let's let's see we got we got I want to do one other topic really

01:16:16 ◼   ► quickly

01:16:17 ◼   ► maybe we'll skip over spoilers will come back to that circle back some other time

01:16:21 ◼   ► because I do want to follow up with you about reconcilable differences episode

01:16:24 ◼   ► 30. Deploy me tactically again in the future because I'd love to talk about it.

01:16:27 ◼   ► I would love to talk about what you know I listen to your podcast I listen to

01:16:30 ◼   ► rectives especially and I feel like these are two people I know and you're

01:16:34 ◼   ► having this conversation about things that I don't ever talk about on podcast

01:16:37 ◼   ► even though I'm on a million podcasts,

01:16:39 ◼   ► these are the things you guys talk about

01:16:40 ◼   ► are not things I talk about,

01:16:41 ◼   ► just like Myke and Casey on Analog, right?

01:16:44 ◼   ► And I have a moment where I am doing

01:16:45 ◼   ► what every podcast listener does,

01:16:47 ◼   ► which is I'm talking back to,

01:16:49 ◼   ► I'm jogging up the bike path in Mill Valley,

01:16:52 ◼   ► and John is in one ear and Merlin's in the other,

01:16:55 ◼   ► and I'm like, "No, no, Merlin is wrong!"

01:16:58 ◼   ► Or, "John is wrong!"

01:16:59 ◼   ► - I always slough that off when people say that,

01:17:01 ◼   ► 'cause I'm like, "Ah, whatever, I'm just talking."

01:17:03 ◼   ► But then I listened to a podcast

01:17:04 ◼   ► about Mr. Robot the other day,

01:17:06 ◼   ► and the guy kept calling Darlene Dolores,

01:17:08 ◼   ► and I was screaming, screaming at my iPhone.

01:17:12 ◼   ► I was like, this is what it's like to listen to me.

01:17:13 ◼   ► This is, you know, fair turnaround.

01:17:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah.

01:17:15 ◼   ► So I would like at some point to talk to you about that,

01:17:19 ◼   ► 'cause you talk about interesting stuff

01:17:20 ◼   ► that I don't necessarily get to on my other podcast,

01:17:22 ◼   ► and you talked about spoilers in Rec. Diff's 30.

01:17:24 ◼   ► People could listen to that.

01:17:25 ◼   ► Spoilers for the concept of spoilers on that episode.

01:17:30 ◼   ► But maybe we should jump ahead.

01:17:33 ◼   ► I wanted to just mention some,

01:17:34 ◼   ► were talking about, you mentioned Common Sense Media, and one of the notes I had was about

01:17:39 ◼   ► showing adult things to kids, and I just wanted to mention, at least anecdotally, so we were

01:17:43 ◼   ► going to do an episode of The Incomparable about Alien, and it was going to be this morning,

01:17:47 ◼   ► and we ended up, some people couldn't make it, so we pushed it off a couple of weeks,

01:17:50 ◼   ► but we watched Alien on Saturday night. After we raided our dinner, we watched Alien. What

01:17:56 ◼   ► a night to be alive, let me tell you, in the Snell house.

01:17:58 ◼   ► - Things are blowing up at Shaysnail. - So we're watching Alien, we're going to

01:18:02 ◼   ► alien and Julian refused which I find fascinating because he apparently has

01:18:07 ◼   ► looked everything up on the internet this is a he's a very 21st century kid

01:18:11 ◼   ► because he was like oh no that's scary you know what happens that movie the

01:18:15 ◼   ► alien comes out of a guy's chest spoilers for alien which was made in

01:18:18 ◼   ► 1979 by the way alien comes out of this guy's chest shame it's really scary and

01:18:23 ◼   ► gross and we're like doing what do you want to see these like no it's too

01:18:26 ◼   ► scary so he knows all about it but doesn't want to see it whereas Jamie

01:18:29 ◼   ► Amy doesn't know about it and wants to see it, and she's 14. I feel like it's a perfectly

01:18:36 ◼   ► right age for her to start seeing movies that are a little bit rougher. I've been hesitant

01:18:41 ◼   ► for a while, but at this point it's really more that her little brother usually is around

01:18:46 ◼   ► and we are nipping off what she's allowed to watch because he's in the room. But this

01:18:52 ◼   ► was a case where we're like, "You know what, Julian? If you want to be scared out of your

01:18:55 ◼   ► mind by the alien, you can do it. Knowing full well that he's going to be like, "No,

01:19:00 ◼   ► I'm going to be in my room." And so we watched it. And it was just funny because it is an

01:19:06 ◼   ► R-rated horror movie. And she ended up asking Lauren to come on the couch with her. Lauren

01:19:13 ◼   ► was sitting next to me on our little chair. And my teenager asked her mom to come over

01:19:18 ◼   ► and sit with her to give her some support.

01:19:21 ◼   ► She can't prepare people for is the tension.

01:19:24 ◼   ► It's just, you know, that's the thing about a great movie like that is that, yeah, sure,

01:19:29 ◼   ► I mean, there are some famous scenes in that movie where there's a big scare, but like,

01:19:33 ◼   ► it's just that music, the tension, the hallways, it's just, it's unbearable.

01:19:37 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, she laughed when the alien comes out of John Hurt's chest and runs out.

01:19:43 ◼   ► She laughed because it's a puppet.

01:19:45 ◼   ► It's a ridiculous puppet.

01:19:47 ◼   ► It's much better later, but that scene is like, you know, it might as well be Kermit

01:19:50 ◼   ► the frog running across here. - And there's one shot at the very end in the otherwise just stunning

01:19:56 ◼   ► third act of that movie. There is a scene when the guy in the suit's kinda flapping around,

01:20:00 ◼   ► and you're like, "Oh, come on, you're showing him too much. You're doing a Jaws on me here. Show me less, show me less."

01:20:04 ◼   ► - Exactly.

01:20:05 ◼   ► - But then in Aliens, in Aliens, the second one, they got a lot better. They are way more menacing

01:20:10 ◼   ► as like moving around characters in the second one. - Yeah. Yeah. - What a good movie.

01:20:14 ◼   ► - But anyway, that was that moment. - It's so hard to know, 'cause every kid is--

01:20:19 ◼   ► I find this topic endlessly, yeah, I find it endlessly fascinating because every kid

01:20:23 ◼   ► is so different and you could have the kid that is the toughest kid in the world about

01:20:26 ◼   ► almost everything except this one thing and on top of it all you don't want to scar them.

01:20:29 ◼   ► But like I made that crack about scary music. I have a bunch of friends whose kids are otherwise

01:20:34 ◼   ► totally normal kids but as soon as they hear some cellos like while they're looking at

01:20:39 ◼   ► a dark forest, game over, shut it all down.

01:20:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, Julian's like that. He, to the point where, because we'll watch Doctor Who, right,

01:20:46 ◼   ► and it's got scary stuff in it too, but the thing that gets in is not the scary aliens

01:20:50 ◼   ► it's the scary tense music and he used to run out of the room when he hears scary music and stuff and

01:20:55 ◼   ► And now he even though he's now 12 years old. He will put his hands over his ears

01:21:01 ◼   ► Like it's okay to watch it, but I'm not gonna listen to the music and then he'll take the hands back off again for my kid

01:21:08 ◼   ► I think it's jump scares. It's uh, you know, I

01:21:11 ◼   ► Aliens got those.

01:21:12 ◼   ► Well, they got a couple.

01:21:14 ◼   ► But yeah, anything where something pops into the screen or, you know, I started getting

01:21:19 ◼   ► good at this when I was about 13, which is like, even though I didn't have the vocabulary

01:21:22 ◼   ► for it, I go, "Hmm, that's kind of an odd camera angle."

01:21:25 ◼   ► In the years before Mr. Robot, you go, "Boy, that seems like a lot of white space in the

01:21:29 ◼   ► upper right area."

01:21:31 ◼   ► Why so tight on Ripley as she's turning around?

01:21:34 ◼   ► Yeah, right.

01:21:35 ◼   ► Why not give that a little more headroom?

01:21:37 ◼   ► "Oh, is it because there's an alien right behind her that's about to be revealed?"

01:21:40 ◼   ► Yes.

01:21:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, I'm with you because there's so many struggles

01:21:44 ◼   ► to this where like, and a lot of it's just dumb and selfish,

01:21:46 ◼   ► which is like, I think you'd really enjoy this.

01:21:49 ◼   ► We're going through this a little bit with books right now

01:21:51 ◼   ► where I've been buying my daughter some books

01:21:53 ◼   ► that are a little old for her,

01:21:55 ◼   ► just kind of having them around

01:21:56 ◼   ► that if she wants to discover some nerd books,

01:21:58 ◼   ► they're there.

01:21:59 ◼   ► We've been reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy at night.

01:22:01 ◼   ► I got her a copy of Ender's Game.

01:22:03 ◼   ► Her mom and her are reading A Wrinkle in Time.

01:22:04 ◼   ► I've been trying to get her some kind of classic nerd books

01:22:07 ◼   ► just to have around.

01:22:08 ◼   ► And it's very difficult to know,

01:22:10 ◼   ► I don't want to push, but I also wanted to be able to read it as a new reader of that

01:22:17 ◼   ► and then come back to it and go, "Oh." You know what I mean? We get those successive

01:22:21 ◼   ► layers of like, "Oh, now I get that. Now I really get that." I see why that's what

01:22:25 ◼   ► they mean by nailing a guy to a tree. Now I know what that means. But it's hard to

01:22:30 ◼   ► know. What's your guidepost for these things?

01:22:33 ◼   ► - Well, so Lauren is a children's librarian.

01:22:37 ◼   ► So this is her job.

01:22:39 ◼   ► I mean, essentially her job is to know what the books are

01:22:43 ◼   ► and gauge the kids' ages and interests

01:22:47 ◼   ► and sort of what they're up to

01:22:48 ◼   ► and then try to put it all together.

01:22:50 ◼   ► So I'm fascinated by that because she,

01:22:52 ◼   ► so she, that is actually a big part of her job

01:22:56 ◼   ► is a kid comes in and she has to sort of quiz them

01:22:58 ◼   ► about what they've read and what they liked

01:23:00 ◼   ► and know what's out there.

01:23:01 ◼   ► Um, I... it's funny, 'cause you mentioned in our notes, you mentioned the scene in Ghostbusters,

01:23:08 ◼   ► where Dan Aykroyd crosses his eyes and falls off the bed.

01:23:11 ◼   ► Absolutely. As unnecessary as it was unsuccessful.

01:23:15 ◼   ► Apparently, the story is that that was supposed to be in the movie as part of the plot, and they're like, "No."

01:23:20 ◼   ► And they, instead, they added it to be part of the montage,

01:23:24 ◼   ► because that was going to be a wacky, ghost sex scene,

01:23:28 ◼   ► and they're like, "No, Danny, we're not gonna do that. We'll just put it in the montage."

01:23:32 ◼   ► But my argument for that scene is very much my argument for a lot of books, thinking about the

01:23:37 ◼   ► books that I read as a kid, too, which is, I think when you're so young and innocent that you don't

01:23:43 ◼   ► want to expose them to concepts that are problematic, huh? See? Look what I did there.

01:23:47 ◼   ► I think—thank you—I think if they're really young and innocent like that, they're not gonna

01:23:56 ◼   ► to get it because I didn't get the the ghost thing in Ghostbusters I didn't go

01:24:02 ◼   ► to go to go the ghost job in Ghostbusters I did not stop I did not

01:24:06 ◼   ► it's a ghost job well the ghost could have lots of jobs Berlin come on don't

01:24:10 ◼   ► be normative I didn't get it I didn't get it until I was much older and then I

01:24:13 ◼   ► watched the movie and I was like that's what that is because at the time I just

01:24:17 ◼   ► thought it was wacky that that that his pants got unzipped and he fell off his

01:24:21 ◼   ► bed. And that was just the thing. And I just never did that great silly. Exactly. It never

01:24:26 ◼   ► he's like that. It never occurred to me. And there's books that I read that are because

01:24:31 ◼   ► because there's there's stuff that's explicit, right? And then there's also stuff that's

01:24:34 ◼   ► like suggestive. And the great thing about things that are suggestive is it flies right

01:24:38 ◼   ► over your head. And so my worries about my kids and what they've been exposed to, it's actually

01:24:43 ◼   ► I actually am a lot less worried about it than I was when I started as a parent, because I've seen

01:24:49 ◼   ► it happen too many times now where if they're old enough to get it, they'll get it. And

01:24:54 ◼   ► if they're not old enough to get it, they don't get it. And it's fine.

01:24:58 ◼   ► A lot of times they're queuing off of our reaction, you know, "What's your fascination

01:25:02 ◼   ► with Daddy's forbidden closet of mystery?" You know, it's when we get really keyed up

01:25:06 ◼   ► about things that I think that's what they remember. It's like whether or not they realize

01:25:10 ◼   ► that I think kids make a mental note of what punches their parents' buttons. Even if they

01:25:15 ◼   ► don't understand it, they can look to us and know that we're freaked out about it.

01:25:18 ◼   ► hidden closet of mystery is full of comic books by the way. At least in this house.

01:25:24 ◼   ► We were watching, sometimes we'll just go through jags where like, well it's not really

01:25:28 ◼   ► official TV time yet but like maybe we'll watch some music videos and so we'll

01:25:31 ◼   ► frequently watch like OK Go videos or what we both enjoy is My Chemical Romance

01:25:37 ◼   ► and we were watching, yeah that's right I'm 50, I like My Chemical Romance, but we're

01:25:44 ◼   ► watching that video for I'm Not OK which has, which is a really good song, really

01:25:48 ◼   ► It's a really good video, but it's got a couple things in it

01:25:50 ◼   ► that are a little dodgy, and sometimes she'll offer up

01:25:53 ◼   ► what her explanation is for something,

01:25:55 ◼   ► and it's wrong, and I'm relieved,

01:25:57 ◼   ► but I still feel bad that she's looking at it.

01:25:59 ◼   ► Same thing with Parks and Rec,

01:26:00 ◼   ► which is like our absolute go-to show

01:26:03 ◼   ► for the last few months.

01:26:04 ◼   ► We're like, you know, and in that case,

01:26:06 ◼   ► I think you're right, it's suggestive.

01:26:07 ◼   ► It's not like too on the nose,

01:26:09 ◼   ► but like when Tom's talking about condoms or something,

01:26:12 ◼   ► and we don't shy away from it,

01:26:13 ◼   ► but now it's funny though,

01:26:13 ◼   ► 'cause now I think she has seen us tense up a little bit,

01:26:16 ◼   ► So the one where Chris and Ann are talking about, you know, getting the sample, she grabs

01:26:21 ◼   ► the remote and fast forwards.

01:26:22 ◼   ► She's like, "Oh, we could skip over this."

01:26:25 ◼   ► Anything that's even remotely romantic, Julian just wants to like leave the room or forward

01:26:31 ◼   ► or skip or something.

01:26:32 ◼   ► Enjoy it.

01:26:33 ◼   ► Enjoy it while you can.

01:26:34 ◼   ► I know.

01:26:35 ◼   ► He's 12.

01:26:36 ◼   ► They grow up so fast.

01:26:37 ◼   ► Want to do some Ask Upgrade before we go?

01:26:38 ◼   ► I would love that.

01:26:39 ◼   ► All right.

01:26:40 ◼   ► It's time for #AskUpgrade.

01:26:41 ◼   ► Ask Upgrade.

01:26:42 ◼   ► Thank you.

01:26:43 ◼   ► Very, very nicely done.

01:26:46 ◼   ► uh... eric wrote in saying i waited all year for a new twelve point nine inch

01:26:49 ◼   ► ipad pro should i finally by

01:26:51 ◼   ► or painfully wait

01:26:53 ◼   ► for twenty seventeen

01:26:56 ◼   ► all signs eric point to painfully waiting for twenty seventeen it sounds

01:26:59 ◼   ► very much like apples decided that

01:27:02 ◼   ► flawless for iphones

01:27:03 ◼   ► and spring is for ipads

01:27:06 ◼   ► like boat

01:27:08 ◼   ► what else and uh... you know i i i i i realize that you're propped up by big

01:27:11 ◼   ► ipad on a lot of these shows what's so big i can just lean back on it and it

01:27:15 ◼   ► props me up. Well, funny thing, I popped for the big one and, which sounds terrible, I popped for

01:27:21 ◼   ► the big one and I liked it. Most young kids, that'll just go right over their heads though.

01:27:25 ◼   ► Just suggestive. It's not a ghost beach. But like, you've seen this go around and around and around

01:27:32 ◼   ► in the slack where it's like, there are people who are like, "Well, you know, you asked me anything

01:27:38 ◼   ► about the iPad Pro. It's so big." Yeah, but what about, you know what? It is so big. I gave it to

01:27:44 ◼   ► My wife, she loves it.

01:27:45 ◼   ► - I love mine.

01:27:46 ◼   ► - She loves the giant one.

01:27:47 ◼   ► She watched all the Stranger Things on it last night.

01:27:50 ◼   ► She watched the entire Stranger Things yesterday.

01:27:52 ◼   ► And I bought the smaller one,

01:27:55 ◼   ► and it's already up there with the SE30 for me.

01:27:58 ◼   ► Like, it's up there in the Apple Hall of Fame.

01:28:00 ◼   ► 'Cause now I can thumb type again

01:28:01 ◼   ► without all my words having commas in them.

01:28:04 ◼   ► It's perfect for me.

01:28:05 ◼   ► So my question to you, Jason Snell,

01:28:06 ◼   ► what is this, our listener Eric,

01:28:09 ◼   ► what is it he should be waiting for?

01:28:13 ◼   ► In other words, what's he going to miss out on if he buys one now?

01:28:15 ◼   ► I think the problem with this is he waited all year for a new 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

01:28:18 ◼   ► All years suggest that Eric was waiting in January when the iPad Pro had only been out

01:28:22 ◼   ► for like a month or two.

01:28:25 ◼   ► And you know, you shouldn't have just bought it in January.

01:28:31 ◼   ► I think, yeah, will there be new models that are a little bit better come next year?

01:28:35 ◼   ► Yeah, almost certainly.

01:28:36 ◼   ► But there's so...

01:28:37 ◼   ► You shouldn't wait a year because there always will be a next year's model.

01:28:41 ◼   ► Always.

01:28:42 ◼   ► - I'm not hobbled by Jason's legacy of assigning mice

01:28:44 ◼   ► to things, so I was just gonna say,

01:28:46 ◼   ► like if you can really use it,

01:28:47 ◼   ► and you can probably really use it,

01:28:49 ◼   ► if you can use it, I would say go test out the different

01:28:51 ◼   ► ones, make sure it's the one you really love.

01:28:53 ◼   ► In my case, I'm a big proponent of the smaller one,

01:28:56 ◼   ► but the big one is very, very special as a device.

01:28:59 ◼   ► But if you can use it, I would say don't wait too long.

01:29:01 ◼   ► I mean, I bought the giant, giant one,

01:29:03 ◼   ► 'cause I'm gonna use this thing forever.

01:29:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, and they do last, and I don't feel when I'm using

01:29:08 ◼   ► the 12.9 inch iPad Pro that I'm like, oh boy,

01:29:10 ◼   ► only this thing we're just a little bit better and I don't think it's going to

01:29:13 ◼   ► be kind of like blowing everybody away better in the spring anyway it'll be

01:29:17 ◼   ► better you have a faster processor. Well you know when they put out the iPad Air 2 and we all

01:29:21 ◼   ► thought my goodness what could the reason possibly be for making this so

01:29:24 ◼   ► powerful we learned with iOS 9 why that is. Yeah. It's on the public beta of iOS 10

01:29:29 ◼   ► on everything and boy it just keeps getting better the stuff like split view

01:29:35 ◼   ► and Safari. Oh I did I used that for the first time today and I just had a moment. You gotta turn it

01:29:39 ◼   ► - You can do it sideways, I forgot you always got

01:29:41 ◼   ► a short sideways. - It's just brain melting.

01:29:43 ◼   ► - But stuff like that and the now getting split view

01:29:46 ◼   ► with Google Docs, and the thing is that you don't

01:29:49 ◼   ► appreciate on the bigger iPad is the,

01:29:52 ◼   ► you can kind of pull over to get like a little view

01:29:54 ◼   ► into something, if it's a compatible app.

01:29:56 ◼   ► You pull further over, now hey, you got the whole thing,

01:29:58 ◼   ► you can go over to halfway, then you can,

01:30:00 ◼   ► it's just like once you get, it's going to take a while

01:30:02 ◼   ► to get used to doing that, but once you do,

01:30:04 ◼   ► like using Siri, like dictation,

01:30:06 ◼   ► it's going to be hard to ever look back.

01:30:08 ◼   ► got it's a great device I love mine I really do we've got so there are three

01:30:13 ◼   ► in the document right now people can't see this because people who listen can't

01:30:17 ◼   ► look in the document there's three questions here I want to answer one of

01:30:21 ◼   ► those which one would you like us to address we don't have time for all three

01:30:25 ◼   ► those middle three listener Dan listen Dan says you both have daughters I have

01:30:29 ◼   ► one year until mine starts kindergarten what should I make time to do with her

01:30:34 ◼   ► before then. What do you got? It's a hard one. I'll jump in. I think

01:30:48 ◼   ► there's a funny line to walk with with kids stuff and family stuff

01:30:52 ◼   ► where like I feel like there's a lot of pressure to have family things and stuff

01:30:57 ◼   ► and traditions and let's go read a book about like what to do on Valentine's Day

01:31:01 ◼   ► and there's so much pressure to that stuff but what I'll say is this like

01:31:04 ◼   ► discover the organic emerging patterns

01:31:06 ◼   ► that are already there,

01:31:07 ◼   ► and then just officialize them a little bit.

01:31:09 ◼   ► So I think really dumb, obvious stuff,

01:31:11 ◼   ► but that's a perfect age to start having a place,

01:31:14 ◼   ► and we're here talking about a dad and a daughter.

01:31:16 ◼   ► So if there's a daddy-daughter place,

01:31:18 ◼   ► become aware of that and make that part of daddy-daughter day

01:31:21 ◼   ► like have that be a place

01:31:22 ◼   ► that both of you look forward to going to.

01:31:24 ◼   ► And especially if it could be something

01:31:26 ◼   ► as simple as a library or ideally not just shopping,

01:31:30 ◼   ► but someplace, a destination where you both like to be

01:31:32 ◼   ► with rituals associated with it.

01:31:35 ◼   ► I still, me more than her probably,

01:31:38 ◼   ► but dumb stuff, like for two years we had a bookmobile

01:31:41 ◼   ► while our library was being redone

01:31:42 ◼   ► and we would always get a book and go read it

01:31:44 ◼   ► in this little area in the woods.

01:31:46 ◼   ► Like silly stuff like that is really fun.

01:31:48 ◼   ► I think having a certain,

01:31:50 ◼   ► I know you're really good at this,

01:31:51 ◼   ► having a certain meal that you really like making together

01:31:55 ◼   ► will always be fun.

01:31:56 ◼   ► And then this one's kind of silly and corny,

01:31:59 ◼   ► But if there are other people in your house,

01:32:02 ◼   ► like say a mom in this case especially,

01:32:05 ◼   ► start a tradition, or you may already have a tradition,

01:32:08 ◼   ► but turn it, semi-officialize it into a random,

01:32:11 ◼   ► arbitrary nice thing that we do sometimes for no reason.

01:32:14 ◼   ► So maybe that could be in my, this is really silly,

01:32:17 ◼   ► who cares, my daughter likes making my wife a fancy water.

01:32:19 ◼   ► So we'll make her like a spot, like a nice glass with ice,

01:32:22 ◼   ► you put in lemon, you put in cucumber,

01:32:24 ◼   ► you know, she's eight, give her a break.

01:32:25 ◼   ► She's really into that and she brings it in on a tray.

01:32:27 ◼   ► and it never doesn't delight my wife.

01:32:29 ◼   ► So find something, a little dumb, cheap thing

01:32:32 ◼   ► that delights the other people in the family

01:32:34 ◼   ► and make that something you and your daughter do.

01:32:36 ◼   ► - And I will go just a little more pragmatic

01:32:39 ◼   ► and say one of the beautiful things

01:32:41 ◼   ► about when a child is not in school

01:32:42 ◼   ► is that they're available all the time,

01:32:45 ◼   ► which means that if you're working a regular kind of job,

01:32:48 ◼   ► I would say taking a morning or taking a day

01:32:53 ◼   ► and doing something on a weekday

01:32:54 ◼   ► that is harder to do on the weekend

01:32:57 ◼   ► something that you can do when they're not in school that you can't do like we

01:33:00 ◼   ► would do we would go my wife at the time wasn't working at that time I don't know

01:33:06 ◼   ► if she was working at all and so she would do it a lot I would do it

01:33:09 ◼   ► occasionally but she would take our daughter to the zoo to the San Francisco

01:33:13 ◼   ► Zoo and sometimes with some other families or we meet other families there

01:33:17 ◼   ► and that was apparently that scene is a whole lot better on Tuesday

01:33:26 ◼   ► at one in the afternoon or when the one is going to be nap time on Tuesday at

01:33:30 ◼   ► 10 in the morning. It's so fun. You walk right in you just you can run the place

01:33:35 ◼   ► The only thing is make sure it's not the free day

01:33:37 ◼   ► You don't want to go on free day if you remember because boy is it full but no

01:33:41 ◼   ► I think it's a great one or a ball game something like that something that you you know, once they're in school

01:33:45 ◼   ► That's gonna be your responsibility to have them go in school and you can you can play hooky or take the day off

01:33:51 ◼   ► But you can't really do that with your kid

01:33:53 ◼   ► I mean you can but it's a lot harder and there's a lot of guilt attached. So this past summer went so fast

01:33:59 ◼   ► I mean, we're already back in school. We're about to start the second week of school and it's it's just stunning

01:34:05 ◼   ► It's like I just remember saying goodbye to you and I'll see her last like, you know, she's in third grade now

01:34:10 ◼   ► So she's got this whole like rogues gallery of former teachers. I see and it's like I mean it goes fast

01:34:15 ◼   ► last question

01:34:17 ◼   ► Lucas

01:34:18 ◼   ► Asks, what's your favorite episode of Doctor Who?

01:34:22 ◼   ► - Ask me anything.

01:34:24 ◼   ► This one is hard.

01:34:25 ◼   ► - I know, right?

01:34:26 ◼   ► - I mean, in some ways, I'm fighting it

01:34:28 ◼   ► because the answer is so blindingly obvious to me,

01:34:30 ◼   ► but it's mostly for kind of sentiment.

01:34:33 ◼   ► "Day of the Doctor."

01:34:34 ◼   ► - "Day of the Doctor."

01:34:34 ◼   ► - I love, love, love "Day of the Doctor."

01:34:36 ◼   ► - You just watch that as like comfort food, right?

01:34:38 ◼   ► - Oh, I do.

01:34:39 ◼   ► I just watched it the other day.

01:34:40 ◼   ► Somebody, this is one of those things where like,

01:34:41 ◼   ► if somebody mentions like Radiohead,

01:34:43 ◼   ► I have to go listen to OK Computer.

01:34:45 ◼   ► If somebody mentions talking about

01:34:47 ◼   ► good Doctor Who episodes, and I just go in,

01:34:49 ◼   ► I just go straight through the scene with the,

01:34:50 ◼   ► "No, sir, all 13." And I'm crying.

01:34:53 ◼   ► You know, never cowardly or cruel, never give up, never give in.

01:34:56 ◼   ► It's the biggest... It's not a good first episode,

01:34:59 ◼   ► but the payoff in that episode just keeps coming and coming and coming,

01:35:02 ◼   ► and it's delightful on so many levels, if you like anything about Doctor Who at all.

01:35:06 ◼   ► - Um, you know, John Hurt, he's an alien, too.

01:35:10 ◼   ► - The war doctor, absolutely.

01:35:12 ◼   ► - Yeah, I blew my daughter's mind when I said that's the old guy from the Doctor Who episode.

01:35:16 ◼   ► - He's also Ollivander. He's Ollivander.

01:35:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, so for me, yeah, why you have to be so mean, Lucas.

01:35:23 ◼   ► I think, I'm torn, I like, you know,

01:35:29 ◼   ► I like choosing episodes that are not the ones

01:35:32 ◼   ► that everybody chooses, so I'm not gonna say like Blink

01:35:34 ◼   ► or something like that, even though I really do love Blink.

01:35:38 ◼   ► I'm gonna choose Midnight, which I would argue is,

01:35:43 ◼   ► that's a David Tennant episode by Russell T. Davis.

01:35:46 ◼   ► I would argue-- - Who's the companion?

01:35:47 ◼   ► Well, it's Donna, but she's not in it other than like the bracketing scenes. It's just David Tennant.

01:35:53 ◼   ► And that's the one where they go off in the space truck and it breaks down in the middle of nowhere in the uninhabited--

01:35:58 ◼   ► Oh, is this like the box episode? It's all inside the--

01:36:01 ◼   ► It's so good.

01:36:02 ◼   ► And I would say it is, like Blink actually, Twilight Zone level writing. Like, it feels like a Twilight Zone episode.

01:36:12 ◼   ► - And all in one, you don't need to know all of the history

01:36:16 ◼   ► and the tapestry of Doctor Who, like Blink,

01:36:18 ◼   ► you can just go in and appreciate this.

01:36:20 ◼   ► It's really great to compare to Twilight Zone.

01:36:22 ◼   ► - It's chilling, it's about human nature.

01:36:23 ◼   ► You could, literally the camera could flip around.

01:36:26 ◼   ► Instead of him going back and talking to Donna

01:36:27 ◼   ► about what just happened, the camera could flip around

01:36:29 ◼   ► and Rod Serling could tell you something

01:36:31 ◼   ► about human nature in that episode,

01:36:33 ◼   ► and it is a beautiful thing.

01:36:34 ◼   ► And my runner up is probably Vincent and the Doctor

01:36:38 ◼   ► for similar reasons, which is like it's an anti--

01:36:39 ◼   ► - Oh, I cry and cry.

01:36:40 ◼   ► - It's an anti-Doctor Who episode,

01:36:42 ◼   ► there's an obligatory plot about an invisible chicken alien there, but it really is about

01:36:47 ◼   ► depression and about understanding Vincent Van Gogh, if you want to get something in

01:36:53 ◼   ► your throat.

01:36:54 ◼   ► - But then they go and they talk to Bill Nighy and they cry and cry.

01:36:56 ◼   ► - That's the thing is it does what no other Doctor Who episode bothers to do, which is

01:37:00 ◼   ► they meet a historical figure who's Vincent who is depressed and they know is going to

01:37:05 ◼   ► kill himself very soon.

01:37:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, and he's never going to amount to anything and nobody will remember him.

01:37:10 ◼   ► because he like somebody like Emily Dickinson and he's a tragic historical

01:37:13 ◼   ► figure who's considered to be one of the greatest if not the greatest artist of

01:37:16 ◼   ► all time one of the greatest writers of all time somebody like Emily Dickinson

01:37:19 ◼   ► but never had any praise in Vincent's case like sold one painting and in the

01:37:25 ◼   ► episode it like the plot ends with like 10 minutes left and you're like what are

01:37:29 ◼   ► they doing and the answer is they take Vincent by the hand take him to the

01:37:32 ◼   ► future walk into the art gallery with all of his paintings in it talk to Bill

01:37:36 ◼   ► Na'i, who is the curator of the art gallery, and says, "Tell me your opinion of Vincent

01:37:40 ◼   ► Van Gogh." And he says he's the greatest artist that humanity has ever created.

01:37:45 ◼   ► And nobody's ever done anything like what he's done, and Vincent's just sitting there

01:37:48 ◼   ► hearing this like...

01:37:49 ◼   ► And so like finally, you know, it's like you will be remembered and appreciated for the

01:37:52 ◼   ► work that you did in your life. And they take him back, and of course the other part of

01:37:56 ◼   ► it is, the tragedy of it is, he had a mental illness and he did kill himself. And I think

01:38:03 ◼   ► That is a beautiful message about, although tragic, it's a beautiful message about depression

01:38:08 ◼   ► is not something that can be reasoned away, even with something as reasonable as "you

01:38:12 ◼   ► will be known as the greatest artist ever."

01:38:15 ◼   ► It's like, he was shown that and it didn't matter because of who he was and the disease

01:38:20 ◼   ► that he was struggling with.

01:38:21 ◼   ► So that's a beautiful episode.

01:38:24 ◼   ► But Midnight is probably my number one.

01:38:26 ◼   ► But it's like, what's the last day of attendance?

01:38:28 ◼   ► At the end of time?

01:38:29 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:38:30 ◼   ► the end of time where it's like something, something, something, you know, Syrian, Syrian,

01:38:36 ◼   ► Syrian. There's a whole bunch of blah, blah, there's some really kind of crappy TV show,

01:38:41 ◼   ► and then the ending, the last part is so good. Don't you think with that one?

01:38:45 ◼   ► - Before that, it's a terrible episode, and then the last 20 minutes is like the goodbye

01:38:49 ◼   ► part, and the goodbye part is great. - Oh, it's just crushing. Did you say that

01:38:53 ◼   ► when you're waiting in line at the museum, they play that his I don't want to go thing on repeat?

01:38:58 ◼   ► - Yes, at the Doctor Who experience,

01:39:00 ◼   ► which I went to when it was in London,

01:39:01 ◼   ► now it's in Cardiff,

01:39:02 ◼   ► they play that last two minutes on a loop

01:39:05 ◼   ► where he walks into the TARDIS and says,

01:39:07 ◼   ► "I don't wanna go," and it explodes and all that,

01:39:09 ◼   ► and then it just starts again and again,

01:39:11 ◼   ► and you're standing in that room for like 20, 30 minutes.

01:39:13 ◼   ► - Why, that's so brutal!

01:39:15 ◼   ► All the things you could show,

01:39:16 ◼   ► why don't you show Christopher Eccles

01:39:18 ◼   ► has been celebrating?

01:39:19 ◼   ► - I'm sure they do that now.

01:39:20 ◼   ► I'm sure they've moved on from that,

01:39:21 ◼   ► but boy, that was a thing.

01:39:23 ◼   ► So that's upgrade.

01:39:25 ◼   ► We talked about a lot of stuff.

01:39:26 ◼   ► It was a little change of pace.

01:39:27 ◼   ► what happens when Myke's not here and when we're one of you deployment yeah I

01:39:31 ◼   ► appreciate it the tech thank you so much for having me on I never miss an episode

01:39:34 ◼   ► and it's an honor to sit in thanks a million for having them thank you so much

01:39:38 ◼   ► for taking time to be here of course you can hear Merlin on all his many podcasts

01:39:43 ◼   ► including Reconcilable Differences with John Syracuse are right here there's

01:39:46 ◼   ► that you're on the back to work you're on the rhetoric on the line you got your

01:39:50 ◼   ► you're all over the place these days but I am but rectus is the one here at relay

01:39:54 ◼   ► Thank you to our sponsors Ring and Mack Weldon. Thanks to everybody out there for listening. Myke will be back next week

01:40:00 ◼   ► I think we may actually be back to drafting

01:40:03 ◼   ► Apple event topics next week. We'll see but until then thanks to everybody for listening. We'll see you next week

01:40:11 ◼   ► Say goodbye Jason

01:40:13 ◼   ► Goodbye, Jason

01:40:16 ◼   ► You cut that out probably

01:40:19 ◼   ► Say goodbye Merlin

01:40:23 ◼   ► No, I will not.

01:40:24 ◼   ► I will not.

01:40:24 ◼   ► level not

01:40:26 ◼   ► [Music]