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0:00:08From relay FM it's Upgrade episode number 21.
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0:00:31postage on demand. My name is Myke Hurley and I am joined as always
0:00:36by the one and only Mr. Jason Snow. Hi Myke, how's it going?
0:00:40I'm good PowerSlider, how are you? Oh I'm doing great. I did,
0:00:43I sent you guys a picture of me listening to Connected
0:00:47while driving past one infinite loop in Cupertino last week, that was just for
0:00:51you. It was, that was old school, kicking it
0:00:54I was power sliding through the loop, as we do.
0:00:57It's the only way to roll.
0:01:00So we have a big show today.
0:01:01Big show, lots of stuff.
0:01:03We have lots of...
0:01:04I'm looking at the document right now, and we have a whole series worth of follow-up.
0:01:09Yeah.
0:01:10But we have a little special thing that we're gonna do...
0:01:12At the end.
0:01:13At the end today.
0:01:14So last week...
0:01:15I'll tease it for now.
0:01:17Last week, we were talking about the Holocaust Cloak.
0:01:20Yes.
0:01:21Which is a reference to the Princess Bride.
0:01:23Indeed.
0:01:24horrified to find out that I have not seen The Princess Bride. So I watched The Princess
0:01:29Bride yesterday and we're going to talk about it today.
0:01:31Yes, so stay tuned till the end if you want to hear that.
0:01:36So should we kick it off with some good old-fashioned follow-up?
0:01:38Yeah, let's do the follow-up. I had one quick bit of follow-up from Lister Michael about
0:01:45Marco Marketing, which is from a couple of shows ago, but I wanted to pass this along
0:01:52because the idea here is, you know, yes, Marco is, Marco Armet is high profile, but he's
0:01:57also putting himself out there and becoming high profile. And I think the argument I made
0:02:02was that 21st century marketing, that's part of the deal. That's not cheating. That's part
0:02:07of the deal. So Lister Michael wrote in and said, "I'm in the process of changing jobs
0:02:11for the second time in almost exactly a year. I'm going from a pretty good to a great one.
0:02:14And I can partly lay that on the fact that I was willing to do something in public and
0:02:18be a professional about it. I'm an iOS developer, and most of the openings understandably want
0:02:22to see candidates who have an app they can point to in the app store to even be considered.
0:02:26I don't really get to do that because I used to work for the government making interactive
0:02:30training and the job I'm just winding down is an enterprise app for sales reps and managers.
0:02:34In theory I could make an app in my free time, but trying to put the effort to make an app
0:02:37that I consider worth releasing is daunting. So last year I set writing at least one blog
0:02:42post a week in a professional voice and stuck with it. I'm nearing almost a full year of
0:02:47of posts without missing a week now,
0:02:48and it's lucky to break 20 page views on a good week.
0:02:51Some weeks it feels like pulling teeth to write anything,
0:02:53other weeks it goes well.
0:02:54The thing that amazed me is when I decided to apply
0:02:56to a handful of the very best iOS developer shops
0:02:58in my area, right around the one year mark
0:03:00of starting my new job,
0:03:01both because I wanted a change of culture
0:03:04from my current job and to see if I was good enough,
0:03:06I got an interview at my number one choice,
0:03:08which I had gotten a form letter rejection from a year ago.
0:03:11In the interview, three of the four interviewers
0:03:14mentioned checking my blog, which I put on my resume under contact info and in a positive
0:03:19light as they had skimmed it over before the interview to get a feel for me.
0:03:22Even more surprisingly, one of them skipped the technical portion of the interview because
0:03:25of it and instead focused much more on the cultural process section.
0:03:29The blog probably isn't the whole story.
0:03:31Not being a relocation hire probably made me a lot more appealing and I've done a whole
0:03:34lot of professional development in the last year, but I'm convinced it helped get me in
0:03:37the door.
0:03:38So yeah, being willing to put yourself out there has value, even if you're not remotely
0:03:43popular, listener Michael. Thank you. I just thought that was a great story.
0:03:48I think that, like, I enjoy reading this as well, because it's a good--I think it's good
0:03:53to show these days that you have the ability to do other things, you know?
0:03:58Yeah, yeah, and that you're serious about. I mean, this is--I think we might have talked
0:04:03about this on an earlier show, I know I've talked about it on a podcast somewhere, that
0:04:07when I hired somebody, when I would interview people at IDG, especially for junior editor
0:04:12jobs. I would ask them about things like if they were straight out of college or recently
0:04:17out of college, what they did in college in terms of writing and editing. And, you know,
0:04:22it was a check to see how committed they were to this as a profession. And if they said,
0:04:27"Well, you know, I wrote papers for my English classes," I was much less impressed than if
0:04:31they said, "Oh, well, I worked on the student newspaper and I started this online journal
0:04:35and I did this other thing," because that's a sign. That's a sign that this is somebody
0:04:39who takes this area, this business, this profession seriously. And I think listener Michael is
0:04:46doing that here where he's saying, he's not even raising his profile necessarily as he's
0:04:51putting himself out there and demonstrating his commitment. And I think that's a big deal.
0:04:58And I think it's something people look for in interviews. That checks a box. That's like,
0:05:03oh, this person is serious about this,
0:05:05has something to commend themselves.
0:05:08I think it's very valuable if you're trying
0:05:11to hire somebody to look at something like that.
0:05:14- My brother's in university,
0:05:16and he would like to do journalism one day.
0:05:19That's what he's interested in.
0:05:22And he's really interested in sports journalism.
0:05:24So he's done some stuff,
0:05:27like he wrote for a couple of websites,
0:05:29but I'm always really, really pushing him
0:05:32to have his own blog because whenever he applies for internships or any kind of like small
0:05:39position somewhere or writing programs they all just want to see examples of his work
0:05:45and the best place to do that is to just have a blog and it's like what I kind of take it
0:05:49back to how I got started doing this stuff.
0:05:52I just had a podcast I did every week and I showed up every week and just got better
0:05:55over time and you can kind of practice in obscurity in a way because it's very rare
0:06:01that you'll put something onto the internet and all of a sudden all of the internet find
0:06:06out about it on day one.
0:06:08But it allows you to hone your skills and to practice.
0:06:11So if you have any sort of interest in anything technology related, I'm assuming that you
0:06:19like it.
0:06:20If you want to have a job in it or anything that you're interested in, if you want a job
0:06:24in a certain field that is a passion of yours, get a blog about it and write about it or
0:06:30do a podcast about it.
0:06:31- Yeah, showing passion for the subject
0:06:35that is also what you want to have be your profession
0:06:38is generally a really good sign.
0:06:40It's a good sign for people who are hiring you
0:06:42and it's a good sign for people who want,
0:06:44you know, who are colleagues
0:06:45or potential future colleagues that,
0:06:47oh, this is somebody who's got enthusiasm
0:06:48and wants to talk about this stuff.
0:06:50And it makes a difference
0:06:51and it's not necessarily a calculation of like,
0:06:53score them from one to 10 on enthusiasm.
0:06:56But it just, it's,
0:06:59The fact is that most of the other people in that industry
0:07:01are enthusiastic about that too.
0:07:02And seeing your enthusiasm about it makes a connection too.
0:07:08So yeah, I thought-- anyway, I thought
0:07:10it was really great feedback.
0:07:12And it was a hole that I didn't expect this podcast to go down.
0:07:16But it's actually been kind of a very interesting place
0:07:19to go, this idea that in this modern era,
0:07:23There's a perception of what deserved success looks like.
0:07:28And then we throw a lot of things away
0:07:35that are actually a huge part of whether something
0:07:37is succeeding or failing and you can't ignore it.
0:07:39And this was just another example of something.
0:07:41This is a site that nobody read.
0:07:43But the people who needed to read it read it
0:07:46and it made a difference and that's cool.
0:07:48It's good to know.
0:07:49- I'm gonna be a good brother, Jason,
0:07:51and get my brothers.
0:07:52I'm going to put his site in the show notes today.
0:07:56Good for you.
0:07:59Scoring some good brotherly love points there, I think.
0:08:02Well done.
0:08:03Let's move on.
0:08:04What else do we have today?
0:08:05Oh, so much feedback about pens and tablet computing.
0:08:10Do you wish you'd never said anything?
0:08:11No, no I don't.
0:08:14I think this gives me perspective.
0:08:16I will point out up front that when I brought up this subject, the very first thing I said
0:08:20is I hate pens and can't write and don't like styluses because I don't like pens and pencils
0:08:29and writing things out longhand. I'm really bad at it. My handwriting is illegible. I
0:08:34don't enjoy it. I would much rather type notes. But I did profess a skepticism from seeing
0:08:42pen-based computing technologies in the past. And we had a really interesting spectrum of
0:08:47responses from people about their experience with pen input and tablet computers. So I'm
0:08:56going to run a bunch of it down. Really, hopefully really quickly, but probably not. Okay, here
0:09:03we go. So listener Alec wrote in and said notability changed the game for him. Beside
0:09:10the benefit of syncing with the cloud and audio recording, he said there were some key
0:09:14features copy and paste not just for text but for drawn figures this is
0:09:17something that I think you might have mentioned briefly this idea that that if
0:09:22you're if you're taking notes on something that requires figures or that
0:09:26requires little pictures things like that having that available and being able
0:09:31to kind of copy and paste it it's not something you can type you have to write
0:09:35you have to write that down so so we listed that colors didn't need multiple
0:09:41Pen's laying around on a small pullout desk. Sorry, Myke, but I could change the color
0:09:45later if I wanted to. Easier to tap a swatch and change the color than physically drop
0:09:50and regrip a new pen. "Hey dude, I missed class. Can you send me the notes?" Share sheet. Boom.
0:09:57That's good. And he said, "Notability subtly tweaks your strokes and I found that made
0:10:01my handwriting and figures look better." So I thought that was interesting. Notability
0:10:05listener Troy wrote in to say, "For most undergraduate students, tech needs are driven by two things,
0:10:13cost and reliability, and it's going to be a long time before any type of digital note-taking
0:10:17technology beats pen and paper on either of those. By far the most common note-taking
0:10:21technology used in my classes is pen and paper. That said, I see students take notes on just
0:10:25about every sort of device except pen input tablet. I've actually seen students two thumb-type
0:10:30notes on a phone, something I wouldn't have thought possible. Those students are going
0:10:34to fail, by the way.
0:10:35[laughter]
0:10:36You think?
0:10:37I can type pretty quickly.
0:10:39No, they're probably fine.
0:10:40That was my initial thought, was they're not the best students, but they are trying to
0:10:45get something down on their phone.
0:10:47No, it may be.
0:10:49I like listener Troy's point here, which is he thought it impossible, but hey, if it works
0:10:55for them, then that's great.
0:10:57So here's my question to you.
0:10:59Yeah.
0:11:00Would you think that someone would fail if they were typing on a keyboard on a laptop
0:11:03their notes.
0:11:04No, my concern is just that, I mean, we don't have any judgment here about how good these
0:11:10students are.
0:11:12They could either be great phone typers or they could be people who just like couldn't
0:11:17find their pen and need to take a couple notes, but it's not very good.
0:11:22If I was taking notes on a phone, that would be bad.
0:11:26But they could also be just geniuses who are great at taking notes on the phone.
0:11:31that could be just a purely generational shift. I feel way faster on the iPhone.
0:11:38Like, I feel it. Whether I am or not, like, I feel like I'm a faster typer on the
0:11:42iPhone than I am on the on the Mac. Wow. I should do some sort of test. I don't
0:11:50even understand. I can't even understand what you're saying, Myke. Are you speaking
0:11:53English anymore? Have you lapsed into some other words you're using? Not words
0:11:58that I understand. Is this, has the Atlantic Ocean separated us again? Oh no, okay.
0:12:03Listen, Troy goes on to say, "I see a variety of Mac and Windows laptops,
0:12:08occasional iPad, a handful of Surface devices. I've seen some live scribe pens." Live scribe is
0:12:13that thing that records audio and, but you know, but he asked students if they use the audio and
0:12:18they say they thought they would, but they never do. But here's the key point from Listen to Troy.
0:12:22"If I can go a little professory on you for a bit, most of the time the tech gets in the way.
0:12:25The purpose of class notes is to provide something for your memory to latch onto so you can remember
0:12:30the material, not to produce a verbatim transcript.
0:12:33An aside from me, Jason, we used to have a lecture note service when I was in college
0:12:38and the whole...and sometimes what they'll do is, even now, is sometimes professors will
0:12:45record their lectures and post them as podcasts.
0:12:47The idea is, you know, if verbatim...don't do a lot of work to generate the verbatim.
0:12:52It's like trying to do a verbatim transcript of an Apple event.
0:12:55It's like, you know what?
0:12:56They're gonna post the video.
0:12:57You can get the verbatim transcript later.
0:12:59Take the important notes, get the highlights here.
0:13:01And this is what he's saying is,
0:13:03verbatim transcript is not the objective.
0:13:06The key, he goes on to say,
0:13:08is to have as close to a friction-free environment
0:13:10for that as you can.
0:13:11Note-taking is as much about the process
0:13:13as it is the result.
0:13:14Having to quickly summarize the material
0:13:16and reshape it in a way that makes sense to the note-taker
0:13:18is a large part of it.
0:13:19For people like Jason, who type, that's me,
0:13:21100 words per minute, that probably means a laptop
0:13:23with a good keyboard for a majority of my students,
0:13:25the note-taking method with the least friction
0:13:27and least distraction from the task at hand
0:13:29to still pen and paper,
0:13:30and I don't see that changing for many years yet."
0:13:33Listener Troy.
0:13:34So thank you for that.
0:13:35I would say actually, as a college student,
0:13:37I was not, even when I got a laptop in grad school,
0:13:42typing to take notes was not something that I did.
0:13:45And the only time I type to take notes now
0:13:47and type quickly is when I am trying to get quotes down
0:13:51because if I'm doing an interview or something like that,
0:13:56where there is no transcript
0:13:57and I need to get the direct quotes,
0:13:59I will type because I can type down
0:14:01what they're saying really fast.
0:14:02But in general, I prefer much shorter notes.
0:14:05Like Troy says, I'm really trying to hit the highlights
0:14:08and give myself, and give my memory,
0:14:10like he says, something to latch onto.
0:14:12And there's other feedback we got,
0:14:16not all of it in our document here, that was very similar,
0:14:19which is the point to having notes is more a process
0:14:24that leads to you pondering the information
0:14:27and filtering it and attaching it
0:14:29and it's part of the learning process.
0:14:30Not, you're not a court recorder,
0:14:33you're not writing down a transcript
0:14:35of everything that's said.
0:14:36Listener Gary wrote in to say,
0:14:39"Regarding note taking on the iPad,
0:14:41"I prefer it over pen and paper
0:14:42"for the same reason I prefer reading books on the iPad.
0:14:45"I can have all my notes with me.
0:14:46"I can have other documents that I need
0:14:48for a meeting on the iPad and mark them up with notes. So that's a fair point.
0:14:52I think the interesting thing about this feedback, and we do have some more, is how much we received.
0:14:58I was surprised how much came through. I have strong feelings about this topic, and I think
0:15:05you do too, but it didn't necessarily mean for me that I thought we were going to get
0:15:11this much feedback about it. Just because we have opinions doesn't mean
0:15:14that anyone else cares at all about what we care about.
0:15:19I think of all of the things we've spoken about, this may be by word count the most
0:15:25feedback we've ever received. Lots of long emails about this.
0:15:29Not handwritten, I'll point out. There should be. Well, we're waiting, you
0:15:33know. Post takes a little bit longer than email, so we're waiting for the handwritten
0:15:37stuff to come through. We do have a sponsor break I would like to
0:15:42take now, Jason, if that is okay before we continue the rest of the follow-up for today.
0:15:46All right, epic follow-up. You know it's epic when there's a sponsor break in the middle
0:15:49of it.
0:15:51It's already February. What are you waiting for? Invest in yourself this year and start
0:15:55learning something new at lynda.com with a 10-day free trial for listeners of Upgrade.
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0:16:12you want to set new financial goals, invest in a new hobby, or improve upon some current
0:16:16skills for your personal life or for your job, lynda.com has something for you.
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0:16:25on your tablet, your mobile device, their apps for iOS and Android, and of course you
0:16:29can look at them on the desktop and they have searchable transcripts and they have different
0:16:33speed settings you can play for the videos as well if you want to learn super fast at
0:16:37lynda.com you can do that.
0:16:39Maybe you want to learn a little bit about marketing online to help with your business
0:16:42or website, which goes back to what we were talking about a little earlier.
0:16:45You want to improve some skills in something that you love and you set up a blog.
0:16:50These guys at lynda.com, they can help you out with that.
0:16:52They can help you think about how to present yourself a little bit differently.
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0:17:04in.
0:17:05Listen yourself today and sign up for a free 10-day trial to lynda.com by visiting lynda.com/upgrade.
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0:17:18Thank you so much to lynda.com for supporting this show and all of Relay FM.
0:17:22- All right, again not handwritten.
0:17:25This comes from a good, good friend of the show.
0:17:28It's Upgrading Tony.
0:17:30This is Tony Sindelar from various Uncomfortable podcasts.
0:17:35This is not about Dungeons and Dragons though.
0:17:37Tony is in academia.
0:17:38He says, "I would say that students have overwhelmingly moved to doing note-taking electronically,
0:17:41whether typed on a laptop or inked on a tablet, just as faculty have overwhelmingly moved
0:17:45from chalk talk to PowerPoint.
0:17:48Inking with an iPad or Surface does have a lot of advantages for note-taking, especially
0:17:51diagrams, symbols, concept mapping, but we still aren't there yet in terms of ease of
0:17:55use of the tools.
0:17:56So I guess I agree with Jason's skepticism.
0:17:59People in education have been hoping for crazy new improvements that will fix everything,
0:18:03but it keeps not being here regardless of the latest vendor trying to push something.
0:18:06I remember a pre-iPad era associate provost lobbying for all first-year students at a
0:18:10large state school to be required to buy one of those clunky expensive Windows XP-based
0:18:15tablets.
0:18:16So Tony—interesting points because he's saying electronic note-taking is predominant
0:18:24now but that he's skeptical about whether the tools are just good enough yet, which
0:18:31is sort of where I am is I don't dispute that this could be great. I just am a
0:18:35little bit skeptical about whether people who are writing and saying "oh yes
0:18:38I use digital link for note-taking" whether they're doing that despite it
0:18:43being clunky or because it's just not it's just super awesome and I need to
0:18:48get a rush out and get a stylus and start writing everything. That's never
0:18:53gonna happen. It's never gonna happen.
0:18:57This makes me think of that Surface Hub, you know, like the digital kind of note-taking type thing.
0:19:03Oh yeah.
0:19:04Yeah, because you know it's like that sort of idea, right?
0:19:07Everything's better if it's on a screen instead, but none of these things have really caught on.
0:19:12I remember in school we had smart boards, they were called, where basically the teachers could...
0:19:25They were kind of like projected screens.
0:19:28It was weird. It was like it was a whiteboard,
0:19:30but they would write on them with these pens that didn't actually write on the board.
0:19:33It just created something that was projected onto them.
0:19:35But very often, the projector was turned off and they just used the whiteboard.
0:19:40Yeah. We had one that was...
0:19:43It was a real whiteboard, but you used these pens with special little stickers on them.
0:19:47And the idea was that it was recording everything that was written up on the whiteboard,
0:19:51and you could play that back later.
0:19:54But yeah, it didn't. I don't know. I mean, the world, this is one of the reasons why I think I
0:19:59bring more skepticism to this than a lot of the listeners is because I've been in this, I've been,
0:20:05this is one of those areas where my, my, I've lost my childlike enthusiasm for technology
0:20:10that I, I, that I keep in other areas. I have lots of areas where I'm very enthusiastic about
0:20:15new technology. This is one of those where I've been disappointed so many times that I, I now have,
0:20:22I view it much more cynically.
0:20:24I can't tell you, it's been like 15 or 20 years
0:20:26that people have been saying,
0:20:28we're gonna change how people take notes.
0:20:29And I just, I remain quite skeptical that it's good enough.
0:20:34Not that it doesn't have advantages,
0:20:35but that is it good enough?
0:20:36Is it, and maybe that's,
0:20:38and we were originally talking about Apple doing a stylus.
0:20:41I mean, maybe that is what, you know,
0:20:43Apple is trying to do here is can we make something
0:20:45that is good enough for Apple standards?
0:20:47'Cause boy, if Apple comes out with a stylus
0:20:49and it's lame, then that's not good.
0:20:52So I have two more pieces of feedback here
0:20:55about this issue that I wanna get to
0:20:57'cause so many people wrote in.
0:20:59Listener Dave writes in,
0:21:01"My previous two laptops were Windows tablets.
0:21:03Much of my work involves being onsite
0:21:05with clients and their environments.
0:21:06I'm mostly on the normal work floor rather than in meetings.
0:21:09When you're sitting next to someone's desk,
0:21:10I find writing notes much easier than typing.
0:21:12You can sit in what is for me a much more natural position.
0:21:16You can also make notes standing up.
0:21:17As Myke said, the notes are automatically backed up.
0:21:19My tool of choice was OneNote synced via Dropbox.
0:21:22Therefore, I have all my notes instantly accessible.
0:21:25My handwriting's pretty awful.
0:21:26Yay, me too.
0:21:28But it's important to remember software
0:21:29to understand handwriting has a much easier job
0:21:31when it knows the strokes you used
0:21:33as opposed to trying to OCR a random scrawl.
0:21:35This is a really good point.
0:21:36From my initial use in 2004,
0:21:38the recognition was very impressive
0:21:39and improved with new Windows versions.
0:21:41I never formally converted my notes.
0:21:43OneNote just made them searchable.
0:21:44Combined with OneNote's fuzzy searching,
0:21:46it was very rare for searches to fail.
0:21:48In fact, it felt like it was sometimes better
0:21:49at reading my handwriting than I was.
0:21:51I thought that was good feedback.
0:21:53That's some positive words about Windows tablets.
0:21:57And finally on this topic, Upgrader Darcy wrote in
0:22:00and said, "I really enjoy this show,
0:22:03"especially when you two disagree.
0:22:04"In that vein, allow me to take issue
0:22:08"with something that Myke said."
0:22:09(laughing)
0:22:11I deleted all feedback that disagreed with me.
0:22:15So every feature that people think they need,
0:22:18whether they need it or not,
0:22:19if they think they need it and then Microsoft's doing it,
0:22:22that's a potential sale that you lose to Microsoft.
0:22:24This is something that you've said on the last show.
0:22:26I think that's accurate.
0:22:27And what Darcy says is,
0:22:28"Isn't this the opposite of what made Apple so successful?
0:22:30Apple's products are typically less feature rich
0:22:33than its competitors.
0:22:34Instead, Apple focuses on certain core functionality,
0:22:37making the product as easy
0:22:38and as enjoyable to use as possible."
0:22:40Darcy goes on, "I've been an Apple user since '96
0:22:43and have been with a company through the darkest times."
0:22:44that's true, I can verify that.
0:22:46While I'm elated that Apple's been so successful,
0:22:48I'm terrified its success will cause the company
0:22:50to lose focus and to try to fill
0:22:52every product niche imaginable.
0:22:54I'm not saying that a stylus is necessarily a bad idea.
0:22:57It may be part of a focused, well thought out strategy
0:22:59for the iPad, but focus is key and it is so easily lost
0:23:02when a company continually breaks its own sales records
0:23:05quarter after quarter.
0:23:06Okay, that doesn't apply to recent iPad sales, but still.
0:23:09In this, I am in complete agreement with Steve.
0:23:12Steve who?
0:23:13Oh, Steve Jobs, right.
0:23:14when he said, "Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.
0:23:18In light of the recent,
0:23:19Apple is losing the functional high ground discussion."
0:23:22Hi Marco.
0:23:23"It is perhaps more important than ever
0:23:25that Apple focus on core functionality
0:23:26and making sure it's hard earned,
0:23:28it just works, reputation isn't tarnished any further."
0:23:31Any thoughts about that?
0:23:32About how wrong you were, Myke?
0:23:33Any apologies to Upgrader Darcy?
0:23:36- Yes, 'cause I don't think I am wrong.
0:23:38So my feeling on this is I agree
0:23:42that that is how Apple was.
0:23:45I don't think it's where Apple will be like into the future.
0:23:48I think that Apple are trying to attract different markets now.
0:23:54They have a lot more of a focus on the Asian markets than they
0:24:01did before which is probably a really good reason for why the
0:24:04iPhones got bigger. And I think it's if they do a stylus I think
0:24:08that's another reason for why they've done that.
0:24:10I do believe that if Apple wants to grow,
0:24:13they have to start doing things like this.
0:24:15They have to start going for the features
0:24:18that other people have to attract the other customers.
0:24:20And I just see that that is a path that they may take.
0:24:24I agree it's not the one that they have had before,
0:24:27but I think it's the one
0:24:28that they could start to take going forward.
0:24:30That's my own personal opinion.
0:24:33- All right.
0:24:33- My punditry.
0:24:34- I guess, I don't think either of these approaches
0:24:40is wrong. I think what I would say is Apple is trying to reach different markets. That's
0:24:46absolutely true. I do feel like that Apple, look, if all Apple was concerned about was
0:24:52checking a feature box in a list of features, then they would have had an Apple stylus available
0:25:01for a phone and tablet years ago. So there is a line that Apple needs to cross, a bar
0:25:08they need to clear. That is, you know, we've got a story with this, that it's good
0:25:14enough for us. It meets our--I don't mean it good enough in a negative way, I mean
0:25:18like it meets our standards. Below this point we can't ship it. That bar
0:25:24may change depending on the market, but I do think it is there, and I think
0:25:28that's sort of what Darcy is saying here is--
0:25:30Yeah, that makes sense.
0:25:32--is it needs to--you can't just throw a pen out there because other people have pens, and they
0:25:37haven't right they Samsung has been waving that stylus in Apple's face for
0:25:42years and Apple's done nothing yeah it's a it's like taunting them look at the
0:25:47stylus the s-pen is here and nothing so when if Apple does come out with
0:25:54something that would be an interesting moment because what they're saying is
0:25:57now we've got a story to tell now we've got a product that meets our standards
0:26:01and what's that going to be and the software and the hardware need to be
0:26:05good enough to make that something.
0:26:08'Cause otherwise, if it's good enough now,
0:26:10if everything is good enough now,
0:26:11then why doesn't Apple have that product?
0:26:13I think that's the argument is,
0:26:14it may be good enough for some people now,
0:26:16but it seems to not be good enough for Apple,
0:26:18'cause Apple is content to not upgrade their digitizer
0:26:21and not come out with its own pen
0:26:23that kicks all the other pens out of the market.
0:26:26So what makes that change?
0:26:28And what's the thing that pushes them to do that?
0:26:30And maybe it's just to find a reason for an iPad Pro
0:26:34for being, maybe it's just we need reasons
0:26:37why we would sell this thing,
0:26:39but that's troubling in its own way, if that's the case.
0:26:42I don't know, but I think, yeah,
0:26:45I think it'll be interesting to see.
0:26:46This is one of those things that's very,
0:26:49the answer to this, what happens here,
0:26:51will give us an interesting data point
0:26:53on where Apple is right now
0:26:54in terms of its product philosophy in 2015.
0:26:58If it does this, that'll be fascinating to see.
0:27:02And I will try some note-taking app at some point here
0:27:06against my better judgment because I don't like pens
0:27:10just to get a better idea
0:27:11of what the current experience is like,
0:27:12at least on the iPad, I don't have a surface to try out.
0:27:16But, all right, that's follow-up.
0:27:20Yay.
0:27:22- Time for follow-out.
0:27:24- Time for some follow-out.
0:27:25We should mention #AskUpgrade on Twitter.
0:27:28You can go to Relay FM
0:27:30and send feedback via the feedback form.
0:27:33That works too.
0:27:34And you can be a part of follow up.
0:27:36We love to hear from you.
0:27:37Follow out, I just wanted to mention Connected24 this week.
0:27:41This was your big, and I mean big,
0:27:45it's like three hours long podcast
0:27:48where you break down the iPad launch.
0:27:50- Yeah, it was quite an undertaking.
0:27:54People may have been familiar with the prompt episode 30
0:27:59where we did this for the iPhone.
0:28:00The difference being from a production perspective,
0:28:05this time we went back a bit further as well
0:28:07and we looked at the run up to the iPad's introduction.
0:28:10- Yeah, a lot of research.
0:28:11- Yeah, Federico did some incredible research
0:28:14and he took a look at kind of what the rumors
0:28:17were like leading up.
0:28:18And so we did that, then we did like the play by play
0:28:22breakdown of the iPad introduction
0:28:26and spoke about how we feel about the iPad.
0:28:28So it was a lot of fun and we really enjoyed it.
0:28:30- Yeah, I liked it a lot.
0:28:32I really enjoyed, I listened to that on my drive
0:28:34down to Cupertino and back last week.
0:28:36I was just visiting a friend, nothing secret,
0:28:39just visiting a friend.
0:28:40I've got more friends at Apple these days
0:28:43'cause some of my former colleagues
0:28:45are doing work at Apple now, so, but I can say no more.
0:28:48It's not that exciting.
0:28:51It's just, it's nice to go down there and visit with pals
0:28:55who are inside the rainbow curtain now.
0:28:58That's not a phrase.
0:29:00- I like it though.
0:29:02- I wanted to mention this mostly
0:29:05because I wanted to tell a story
0:29:06about when I went to the iPad event
0:29:08related to our note-taking thing.
0:29:13I think Dan Morin was live blogging it
0:29:17and I was, or maybe I was live blogging it.
0:29:20Anyway, you do that and when you're covering it
0:29:22that intensely, you kind of miss, you miss seeing it.
0:29:26You miss the, you lose the, you lose the big picture.
0:29:31You don't see the forest for the trees
0:29:33when you're covering an event like that.
0:29:34So I will often watch an event video afterward.
0:29:37So the later that day, or maybe the next day I'm home,
0:29:43and I'm watching on my Apple TV,
0:29:46I am watching the iPad launch on the TV.
0:29:50on the TV.
0:29:52And I don't realize that my son,
0:29:58who was five at the time, is behind the couch
0:30:01and is transfixed by this.
0:30:04And it's a fond memory for me now
0:30:05because he was exposed
0:30:08to the untempered reality distortion field.
0:30:11And I had that moment where I was like,
0:30:12"Oh my God, he's been inside the RDF."
0:30:14Because he doesn't usually see TV commercials,
0:30:18he doesn't know. And now he's got Apple event, Steve Jobs just talking to him about how great
0:30:23the iPad is. And it totally worked because for the next whatever, four months, he would
0:30:28not stop talking about how we needed an iPad. He's like, "We need an iPad. We have to have
0:30:32an iPad." This five-year-old kid, "We have to have an iPad. It does this. It does this.
0:30:36Is the iPad out yet? When are we going to get an iPad? We have to get an iPad." And it
0:30:39was amazing how powerful that event was, whatever, you know, 30-minute chunk of it he saw was
0:30:45to him because he was completely enthralled and then could not stop talking about the
0:30:49iPad. And you know flash forward 10 years and his favorite device is in fact an iPad
0:30:57and he uses it all the time. So you know he's an iPad kid. Thanks Steve.
0:31:04I love that. I mean that he was caught up in it. I feel like I was caught up in it as
0:31:09well. Like I mentioned on the show I was watching the I was watching Steve through the intro
0:31:14I was like, I should buy an iPad Air 2.
0:31:17It'd be so amazing to read the New York Times.
0:31:20And then I was able to break out of it
0:31:21not too long after, thankfully.
0:31:23But it will get ya.
0:31:26- It's dangerous.
0:31:28- It's very dangerous.
0:31:29Right, we have completed follow up and out.
0:31:33And we do have a couple of topics today.
0:31:35So why don't we take a quick break here and jump right in.
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0:33:47Thank you so much to Squarespace for the support of all of Relay FM.
0:33:51Squarespace.
0:33:52Start here.
0:33:53Go anywhere.
0:33:55A website on the internet you said?
0:33:57I have created a website on my computer that is not on the internet and here's the address.
0:34:02MacintoshHD/sites/Jason'scoolwebsite/coolwebsitepage1_is-this-file.html
0:34:19That sounds really good. I look forward to visiting that.
0:34:23Yeah, check it out. It's not on the internet, but you can get to it on my hard drive.
0:34:27I'll be right over.
0:34:28Good.
0:34:28(sighs)
0:34:31We have topics now.
0:34:32We should put a thing at the beginning of the show
0:34:34that says, "If you would like to skip the follow-up,
0:34:38please advance to 30 minutes in."
0:34:40- We could make it like one of those
0:34:43tech space adventure games.
0:34:45- Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
0:34:48You need to know the cheat code to get to the...
0:34:50So here's the thing.
0:34:51One of the reasons I'm excited about doing this show
0:34:55every week is the follow-up.
0:34:57I've thought a lot about the problems of doing—I think it's an advantage of these sequential
0:35:01shows, shows that people listen to every week, is that it's telling an ongoing story and
0:35:07the follow-up is—not only does that allow the listeners to interact, but it also means
0:35:12that like sort of—there are these echoes that move through the episodes that as you
0:35:16listen to them you're like, "Oh yeah, I remember that and they said this," and it all kind
0:35:19of builds, and I think that's great.
0:35:20I think one of the challenges with it is if you do 30 minutes of follow-up at the beginning
0:35:24of the show. This is, I think, hypercritical I always felt this about, is I liked the follow-up,
0:35:29and yet I also felt like you go back and you want to listen to the TiVo episode of hypercritical,
0:35:34but you've got to go through 20 minutes of follow-up to get there, and it's follow-up
0:35:37from shows that you haven't listened to in ages. So it hurts on that. It's not like instantly
0:35:44accessible. You have to wait, or you have to just go through follow-up of things you
0:35:48haven't heard. And, you know, we don't do anything incomparable for a bunch of reasons,
0:35:52I always thought the way you could do it is just stick it all at the end, but the danger
0:35:57there is that then you never get to it. So I don't know what the best... short of putting
0:36:02in chapter marks, Myke, and that's not gonna happen.
0:36:05I like the chronology of having the follow-up at the front, because it's leading on from
0:36:15last time.
0:36:16Well, like I said, that gives you, for regular listeners, I agree, I think that is the power
0:36:21of it. I think that's, like I said, that's why I was excited to do this show in this
0:36:24way is I listen to all these shows that have the follow-up at the beginning and I love
0:36:28the follow-up at the beginning and the other shows that I do don't have it. So I like that
0:36:34part of it but there's always that, the downside of it is that, you know, it's 30 minutes of
0:36:39talk before you, you know, it's not like follow-up isn't topics, it's just in a context that
0:36:47is lost if it's the first episode you listen to.
0:36:49I don't know I totally get that because it makes logical sense but I've listened to
0:36:56shows I've jumped into podcasts before and I've still drawn entertainment from
0:37:01listening to the follow-up I don't know maybe I'm crazy but I'm assuming that
0:37:06people well I know people don't go right back to the start and listen all the way
0:37:11but we do get new people every week so all right
0:37:14Rifola in the chat room suggests a follow-up sandwich so there's a term
0:37:18that we need to copyright immediately and steal from Rifola. Follow-up sandwich would
0:37:22be you start with a hot topic and then you move to follow-up and then you go on with
0:37:26the rest of the stories. I don't know, that feels a little choppy too. There's no, that's
0:37:31the beauty of this medium, this format is there's no right answer. We could try different
0:37:38things. We moved Ask Upgrade to the end, so you know, or near the end. I mean the big
0:37:45topic this week is Apple's huge results last week.
0:37:50Yeah, they were huge.
0:37:54That was a crazy thing the last Tuesday afternoon that Dan Morin and I were covering on Six
0:37:59Colors.
0:38:01You get to listen to Tim Cook talk, you get to listen to Luca, the CFO, talk about headwinds
0:38:08and foreign financial transactions and hedging and things that I do not understand because
0:38:17they are business and finance things. But you get Tim Cook dropping little tidbits here
0:38:21and there about sort of, again, I love that stuff about why, you know, why does Apple,
0:38:25what's it thinking? Why do they do what they do? What is their approach to this? And we
0:38:29got and we got some of that. There was a good ask upgrade item that we put in here from
0:38:38a listener whose name I did not translate,
0:38:40'cause one of the problems with the Ask upgrade
0:38:43is it just gives us the username.
0:38:44It's David, it's listener David,
0:38:47said, "How does Apple produce 34,000 iPhones an hour
0:38:52and still be supply constrained
0:38:54and ship them around the world?"
0:38:56It's a good question.
0:38:59Nine phones a second were sold in that three month span,
0:39:05nine iPhones a second.
0:39:07- Magic and robots.
0:39:09- It is hard to imagine.
0:39:13I mean, it's just, I said this,
0:39:15I can't remember where I said this.
0:39:17I think I said this somewhere,
0:39:18but maybe not on this show.
0:39:20It gets to the point, maybe it was on Clockwise,
0:39:22it gets to the point where the numbers are hard
0:39:24just for people to fathom.
0:39:26It's like the law of large numbers that we talk about
0:39:30is this idea that, I mean,
0:39:34and people misuse the term law of large numbers,
0:39:36But it's often used in terms of Apple in saying that at some point you're so big that you
0:39:40can't get -- you can't grow much, you can't get much bigger because the number's just
0:39:44too big to begin with.
0:39:46This is sort of the argument about Facebook growth will eventually be constrained because
0:39:50they will run out of human beings.
0:39:52I think though when we talk about large numbers with Apple, sometimes the problem is it's
0:39:58just hard for our brains to comprehend what it means that they made that many billions
0:40:02of dollars and sold that many iPhones.
0:40:04These are very large numbers.
0:40:06They're outside of the scope of our day-to-day experience.
0:40:10And when you look at the numbers too, you see how huge the iPhone is and it continues
0:40:14to be bigger.
0:40:15I mean, Apple is essentially iPhone incorporated with a nice side business of computers and
0:40:21iPads and iTunes and Apple Pay.
0:40:25But those are all like little cute little side businesses that on their own would be
0:40:29big businesses, but the iPhone just dwarfs them and every other tech company in, and
0:40:37maybe every other company in existence. It's hard to fathom.
0:40:44How do you think Apple feel about having their company so iPhone heavy, and do you think
0:40:51that it is a, or should be a concern to have one product line out of their maybe five or
0:40:58or six product lines drive that amount,
0:41:01that sort of percentage of revenue?
0:41:03- It's a good problem to have.
0:41:06I don't think anybody's going to turn down a product
0:41:10that is that successful and profitable,
0:41:13but I do think it's potentially distorting.
0:41:18And I've been thinking about this
0:41:21with regard to the Apple Watch.
0:41:24The Apple Watch is a really interesting product, right?
0:41:28But there are lots of interesting products
0:41:30Apple could come up with.
0:41:31In fact, Apple's got some interesting products,
0:41:33not just the Mac and the iPad, but like the Apple TV.
0:41:37And they say, "Well, are we looking at that?
0:41:38"That's an area of interest."
0:41:40But what's the Apple Watch?
0:41:42The Apple Watch is an iPhone accessory.
0:41:45It does not work without the iPhone.
0:41:47It is an iPhone accessory.
0:41:49And it may be very successful
0:41:52as a really, really great iPhone accessory
0:41:54because we know, I mean, looking at the other smartwatches
0:41:57that are out there, the only one that really even works
0:41:59with the iPhone is the Pebble, and as a Pebble user,
0:42:02I can tell you it doesn't work that well.
0:42:04They are sort of, it works despite the OS's issues
0:42:07with the Pebble, not because of.
0:42:10And so this thing is instantly going to be the,
0:42:16not just a cool piece of hardware
0:42:19and not just a fashion item,
0:42:20but it's going to be really the only way you would interact
0:42:25with a smartwatch and an iPhone because of that.
0:42:28It's not just Apple's trademark hardware
0:42:31and software integration, it's their hardware, software,
0:42:33and accessory connectivity to other hardware and software.
0:42:38It's this ecosystem integration on a really,
0:42:43not like ecosystem like there's a Mac over there,
0:42:45but it's like there's a watch and a phone
0:42:47and they're connected together just perfectly, seamlessly.
0:42:50This is the kind of product you make
0:42:54when you have a product as huge as the iPhone.
0:42:57The Apple Watch is exactly what kind of a product
0:43:04a company makes when they are the iPhone company,
0:43:09because it's an iPhone accessory.
0:43:12And I'm not saying that's not gonna be
0:43:14a really interesting product,
0:43:15but I was just thinking about it this weekend.
0:43:19It just, it feels,
0:43:20if the iPhone was as successful as the iPad and the Mac,
0:43:25the Apple Watch wouldn't be a thing, I think,
0:43:27or it wouldn't be the thing that it is,
0:43:29because you're only gonna sell it to a certain percentage
0:43:32of the people who have iPhones.
0:43:34And so you need this giant number
0:43:36in order to justify making that product.
0:43:38But they've got the giant number.
0:43:40They've got the giant number.
0:43:42What percentage of iPhone users need to buy an Apple Watch
0:43:44to make the Apple Watch bigger than the iPad and the Mac.
0:43:47There's a number and it's probably not that big.
0:43:49(laughs)
0:43:51Not in saying they'll get there,
0:43:52but they could theoretically.
0:43:54- It seems like that the margins might be quite high,
0:43:58like if the rumored price is believed to be true, right?
0:44:02'Cause they're charging kind of like
0:44:04fashion accessory price lines, you know?
0:44:08There is a potential, maybe not initially
0:44:10'cause these things can be difficult to produce,
0:44:12But eventually there could be at least some models
0:44:15of the Apple Watch where the margins are quite good
0:44:17on it for Apple, maybe.
0:44:20- Yeah.
0:44:21So without putting a value judgment on it,
0:44:27I think the Apple Watch is a good example
0:44:29of what is probably a distortion from,
0:44:32again, I'm trying not to be negative about it.
0:44:34I'm trying to say this is behavior that is changed
0:44:38because the number that goes along with the iPhone
0:44:41is so huge.
0:44:42and Apple TV is a different product
0:44:45and it's relying on Apple's ecosystem.
0:44:48And yeah, iPhone is a part of that,
0:44:50but it's the iTunes ecosystem
0:44:53and Macs and iPads and other things.
0:44:55And if you're prioritizing,
0:44:57when the iPhone gets this big, I feel like,
0:45:01any math you do about what kind of products
0:45:05should you do next comes back to,
0:45:08well, yeah, but look at this iPhone.
0:45:09It's like, should we do more iPhones?
0:45:11should we do things that we sell to iPhone users?
0:45:14Because even if you sell a small percentage of,
0:45:19sell a product to a small percentage of those users,
0:45:21that number is just so large now that, you know,
0:45:25it's, I don't think this is ever gonna happen,
0:45:27but I think it's worth just as an exercise, ask yourself,
0:45:32what would the decisions that an Apple
0:45:35that just had the Mac and the iPad,
0:45:40or the Mac, the iPad, and an iPhone that was at the same sales level as the Mac and the
0:45:45iPad, they're roughly comparable in terms of revenue. What decisions would that company
0:45:49make in terms of its product direction and development? And what decisions does the real
0:45:53Apple make? And, you know, those decisions are going to be different, I think, because
0:45:59I don't think it's a question of like, there's only one path forward. I think there's a question
0:46:02of there are lots of paths forward, which paths do we choose to walk down? And how much
0:46:06do energy do we invest in them? And the existence of the iPhone is this great success, you know,
0:46:12that is going to lead you down those paths, the paths that are fed by and can feed the
0:46:18iPhone. I think it benefits, ultimately, I do think the Mac and the iPad benefit to a
0:46:23certain degree just because there's so much money, and it makes Apple successful, and
0:46:27there's a halo around the iPhone that extends to those products. But, you know, at the same
0:46:32time if you stand up and say, "Yeah, the iOS for iPads, you know, that interface and
0:46:37software should be better," you may get a lot of agreement even inside Apple, even inside
0:46:43the iOS development team that the iPad could be a better product, that iOS could be tuned
0:46:47more for the iPad. At the same time, look at the numbers. What are you going to prioritize?
0:46:53It's very difficult to prioritize the iPad ever, I think, when you look at the iPhone.
0:46:59So it's a challenge.
0:47:01It's fascinating to look at that number and try to imagine what that does to a company's
0:47:08priorities.
0:47:09Lester Jeff wrote in and related to this and said, "Has the iPhone become a little boring
0:47:15into mainstream?
0:47:16Is it time for Apple to do something with the next major model that either does something
0:47:20interesting hardware or software wise?
0:47:22I'd personally like them to incorporate some gesture-based maneuvers for app switching,
0:47:26for example."
0:47:27bad idea, Jeff, but I think what I would say is boring and boring mainstream when
0:47:34it is this making this much money. Again, how motivated is Apple to do something
0:47:40big that's like different? Other than wanting to improve things, but I think
0:47:45there's also a feeling like why would you mess up the thing that's doing so
0:47:49crazily well? And I guess this is one of those things that I always hear on ATP
0:47:53that John Siracusa especially talks about, which is this, you know, the idea that success
0:47:59hides a lot of problems. And I think this is one of those good examples, which is at
0:48:05some point, if the iPhone really could make a step and be that much better, is there a
0:48:12point at which Apple would be hesitant to do that because it's just too successful now?
0:48:19I mean, the counterargument would be back in the day, and this is in Apple's DNA, I
0:48:22really do believe is that the iPod mini was the biggest selling iPod and they killed it
0:48:27and replaced it with the Nano because they thought it was better. And you would like
0:48:32that to be part of this company's culture that they will not be afraid to make a big
0:48:37change. But at the same time, they are not going to want to alienate their existing iPhone
0:48:43audience. I don't know.
0:48:45- Yeah, sure. - What do you think?
0:48:47- I think boring and mainstream is a little harsh.
0:48:52I don't think I would agree with that.
0:48:55I think it's always good and fun to have new things,
0:48:59but I don't, by kind of, I don't think necessarily
0:49:03that gestures like the pre would then make the iPhone
0:49:08not boring if your current concern is that it's boring.
0:49:11I don't really, considering the phone
0:49:15significantly changed form factor. Like I don't think you can get bigger than that.
0:49:20- The six is a big thing. I wrote a piece on Macworld back in April of last year titled "Apple is not here to entertain you."
0:49:32And it came out of a conversation I was having with Rene Ritchie over lunch in Petaluma, actually, after we did one of the Twitch shows.
0:49:40And the idea is, yeah, I get it.
0:49:45People want Apple to do new things,
0:49:46but Apple's business is not to keep analysts and reporters
0:49:50and even fans of technology entertained by new things.
0:49:55That's not their job.
0:49:57Their job is to make great products
0:49:59and have a successful business.
0:50:01And they do entertain us from time to time,
0:50:05but their job is not to like,
0:50:08'Cause it's like, you know,
0:50:09we have this incredibly successful product.
0:50:11Come on, that's boring.
0:50:12You already had that product.
0:50:13Give us a new product.
0:50:14Like, no, we're gonna keep doing this good product
0:50:16that we have.
0:50:17Entertain, you know,
0:50:18I get that it might not be as entertaining,
0:50:21but it's incredibly successful and a popular product
0:50:24and people like it.
0:50:25And so that's okay.
0:50:28As long as it isn't hiding problems.
0:50:31You know, I would hate for Apple to bypass
0:50:33a revolutionary change to the iPhone
0:50:35because they don't need to bother.
0:50:38but they seem to try very hard to not go down that path.
0:50:42- Should we address something?
0:50:46- Yeah, yeah, we should.
0:50:49Well, I want one more point on this just really quickly,
0:50:52which was I liked that Tim Cook talked about the iPad
0:50:55and gave it his, and it's in my transcript
0:51:00that I put on six colors about it
0:51:02'cause I transcribed everything Tim Cook said.
0:51:05I recorded and then I used those fast typing fingers
0:51:08to get a transcript of everything Tim Cook said in the call.
0:51:13And he makes his sort of impassioned defense of the iPad
0:51:15and says, look, it's obviously the refresh cycle,
0:51:19the buying cycle is not as rapid as it is for iPhones,
0:51:24but he's a believer in the category.
0:51:26I think it's interesting to watch that
0:51:27because iPad sales were flat and they're flat.
0:51:31iPad sales are flat.
0:51:32So it's something to watch.
0:51:34It's interesting to see that Apple's not backing away
0:51:38from it in the sense that Tim Cook says that over time,
0:51:40he believes that this is a fantastic category.
0:51:43I also feel like the iPad is unfairly being compared
0:51:46to the iPhone because smartphones
0:51:49are just a different category.
0:51:50Smartphones do not follow the same laws
0:51:52as computers and tablets.
0:51:54They don't.
0:51:55It's much more, the iPad business is roughly
0:51:57the Mac business at this point, which is not bad.
0:52:00that's a good business to be in, but it's not the iPhone,
0:52:03and it's not gonna be the iPhone.
0:52:05So it's something that's worth watching,
0:52:07but I do think it's worth people checking out
0:52:10what Tim Cook said about the iPad,
0:52:11because it's a statement about how they believe in it,
0:52:15but that they're still learning what the issues are,
0:52:18and how often people are gonna buy a new iPad,
0:52:21because the iPads last, iPads last,
0:52:23and there's no subsidy to drive you
0:52:24to buy a new model every two years.
0:52:26- That's totally it.
0:52:28I think Apple in the long term, I believe,
0:52:31will need to get accustomed to the fact
0:52:34that people will upgrade their iPads
0:52:36as frequently as they upgrade their Macs or PCs.
0:52:39I think that that's the thing that they maybe hoped
0:52:45wouldn't be the case, naturally.
0:52:47But I think time is telling that that is kind of
0:52:51the way people treat these devices.
0:52:53- Yeah, well I mean you upgrade every two years,
0:52:55you'll upgrade an iPhone for $200,
0:52:57but that's because your phone company
0:52:59is paying the other three or 400.
0:53:01And the iPad doesn't, if the iPad was 199,
0:53:05maybe that would be the case, but that's just not,
0:53:08and that's just not how it works.
0:53:09It's not how it works.
0:53:11- Do you know what, I still don't even think
0:53:12that that would be it.
0:53:13I think it's the inertia of the contract ending
0:53:17that pushes people.
0:53:20- And it just isn't there. - Because they can't do it.
0:53:21Yeah, and there just isn't a thing.
0:53:23- Right, you could argue that most of the phone's
0:53:26Phone life can be much longer than two years too.
0:53:29Maybe not as long as an iPad, but longer than it is.
0:53:32But if you're on a contract cycle,
0:53:34it makes it that much easier.
0:53:35You actually, in the US, the way the contracts
0:53:38generally have worked up to now, some are changing this,
0:53:41but generally the phone companies calculated out,
0:53:45their subsidy is covered in two years,
0:53:47and your contract is two years.
0:53:49You can keep your phone for three years.
0:53:50They don't make your bill, in most cases, any lower.
0:53:55So you're motivated to get a new phone every two years
0:53:58because otherwise you're just handing money back
0:54:02to the phone company.
0:54:04So there's actually a bunch of motivations.
0:54:08Now that is changing.
0:54:09Some of the plans now are more specifically subsidy plans
0:54:12and you're paying extra for the length of the subsidy
0:54:15and not forever.
0:54:17And then there's less motivation to get a new phone
0:54:19right away because your bill goes down.
0:54:21- Yep.
0:54:23Okay, we should make a note before we move on
0:54:26to our next topic that something crazy happened.
0:54:29I used to play a dice baseball game.
0:54:33This is gonna be right up your alley, Myke.
0:54:37A tabletop dice baseball game, a couple actually.
0:54:42And both of them had the same mechanic,
0:54:44which is if you rolled a certain set of dice,
0:54:47a certain dice roll,
0:54:49it's like D&D for sports nerds basically,
0:54:52is what I'm saying.
0:54:53There would be, I remember in the game that I played in high school, it was 38 was "Something Crazy Happens."
0:54:59It's like, almost everything else was just a normal play, but then the crazy thing would come up and you'd be like,
0:55:04"Oh, what happened?" And then something weird, there'd be a guy would be hit by a pitch or there'd be an injury or whatever.
0:55:10You, during the middle of the last segment, rolled 38.
0:55:14Yeah, I did.
0:55:15And all the crazy things happened simultaneously.
0:55:18So, you are now hearing me locally recorded. Up to this point you have heard
0:55:24the Skype recording. I apologize if it sounded below our usual standards.
0:55:30Basically, Skype seemed to be the catalyst for a catastrophic destruction of my Mac,
0:55:36in which my entire UI froze. The clock didn't move for five minutes and I had
0:55:44to suffer multiple restarts, I upgraded Skype, then it couldn't read or see any of my audio
0:55:52inputs or outputs. So after lots of troubleshooting and reading the K-base, here we are and I
0:56:00think we're okay and we can move on ahead. But it was kind of a catastrophic failure
0:56:06enough that we wanted to point it out at this point during the show and then move on from
0:56:11it.
0:56:12We survived, apparently.
0:56:15That's the rumor.
0:56:16You shouldn't say up to this point, "Now it all sounds good," because you don't know.
0:56:21We may be patching in, "You may have another failure here."
0:56:24It's possible, but probably not.
0:56:26Well, we'll address that one when we come to it.
0:56:28Okay, yeah.
0:56:29Sorry, wait for the next footnote.
0:56:30All right, do you want to talk, before we get to Ask Upgrade and the movie, do you want
0:56:34to talk about YouTube a little bit?
0:56:35Because this was a link you put in the show notes actually last week and we didn't get
0:56:38to it.
0:56:39Yeah, I did want to talk about this.
0:56:42I'm actually currently listening,
0:56:43well before we started the show today,
0:56:46I was listening to an episode of Hello Internet,
0:56:48which is a show that everybody knows I love so much.
0:56:50And Brady and Gray were just about
0:56:52to start discussing this issue.
0:56:55So for the YouTube discussion, I haven't heard it yet.
0:57:00- This sort of advanced follow out.
0:57:01It's follow out with us having not heard it yet.
0:57:04- Yeah, I would assume that that's probably
0:57:06the way we could look at things.
0:57:07But I think that they are probably gonna have
0:57:10much better discussion about the YouTube side and it isn't really I don't really
0:57:14want to talk about YouTube per se so let me just set this up so basically
0:57:20musician Zoe Keating she is kind of being pushed by YouTube into signing the
0:57:27contract for the new YouTube music deal so basically at the moment she can
0:57:32currently decide whether if her music is used in a video if she wants to take a
0:57:36cut of the ads from it that's kind of the contract that she's currently on she
0:57:40then YouTube want to move her into a totally different contract which has
0:57:43totally different rules and regulations about the way that her music is done and
0:57:48she could be a pay channel and there'll be ads on everything and
0:57:51basically the stuff that she doesn't want to do. Now the reason I wanted to
0:57:55bring this up is because there was a bit of discussion on the day that you wrote
0:57:58a little piece, this is like a week or so ago, with people that are on YouTube,
0:58:02people that are not on YouTube and looking at how kind of YouTube owns this
0:58:07market and if you want to create videos on the internet you have to be on
0:58:12YouTube. Like there is nowhere else. You can be on other places but you will not
0:58:17get the critical mass that you want. If you want to get the audience the
0:58:20audience is there. And it made me think about what we do and the fact that there
0:58:24is not currently one single source and how important I think that that is for
0:58:31entertainment and media for there not to be one single source because you're
0:58:36you're destroyed. I am very intrigued looking at how Microsoft was
0:58:41completely railroaded by the European Union. That YouTube is not finding itself
0:58:45or Google is not finding itself in a sort of sticky situation with them.
0:58:48Because it is very much like they own the pipe, they own everything. It's all
0:58:53there, you have no say, there's nowhere else you can go. But I know that there's
0:58:56there's lots of different reasons as to why it was a problem for Microsoft. But I
0:59:00just look at it and think you are such a dominant force, you are such an
0:59:04incredible monopoly on the video streaming world. It scares me to think
0:59:12that somebody might come and try and do this to podcasts. And there are companies
0:59:16that are trying but they are not really... I don't... they're having success. I don't
0:59:21know how much they're succeeding though, you know? Well yeah, it's the... I mean the
0:59:26fact that podcasts are founded on RSS is a fundamentally decentralizing feature.
0:59:32that even when you have a big podcast directory like iTunes, in the end all
0:59:37iTunes is doing is pointing you back at an RSS feed that is elsewhere, and that
0:59:43has had this great democratizing effect, although it also, you know, not having an
0:59:49official central point for all podcasts does make it harder to find podcasts. I
0:59:53would argue that this is one of the great things about the iTunes directory
0:59:55for podcasts, is there is a place run by a company everybody knows that has a
1:00:01a directory of podcasts. And that's really good. You need to be in that directory. You
1:00:06don't have to be, but it's a really good place to go. People know that they can look on iTunes
1:00:11for podcasts. And it's like YouTube, except that Apple doesn't actually serve the files
1:00:16or, you know, they could remove you from the podcast directory, but they just don't care.
1:00:22It's a hands-off kind of thing. It's just the podcast directory is there for you to
1:00:27to use and it's decentralized behind it.
1:00:29And YouTube is not the case and it is scary.
1:00:32And yes, I'm sure Stitcher or some company like that
1:00:37would love to be able to be,
1:00:40it's not like, I think what would need to happen
1:00:46is there would need to be some sort of ground swell
1:00:49for a particular kind of technology
1:00:52or all the cars get only one way that they can.
1:00:57that podcasts get into cars are only two ways.
1:01:00And they're through Stitcher or, you know, Company X,
1:01:04and that's it.
1:01:05That would be the scary thing,
1:01:06because then they could really exert power and say,
1:01:09you know, if you wanna play,
1:01:12if you wanna be in the only place that most listeners go,
1:01:16then we have power over you.
1:01:18And that's where YouTube is right now.
1:01:19And it's scary because YouTube is,
1:01:21I mean, Gray called it a, it's a monopoly and a monopsony.
1:01:24It is the only market,
1:01:25and it is the only place for people to receive the goods.
1:01:29And it is, you know, it is the Soviet grocery store
1:01:32with the long bread line.
1:01:34My kids are huge YouTube fans.
1:01:38They are YouTube viewers.
1:01:39They watch YouTube like I watched sitcoms
1:01:44at four in the afternoon when I was a kid.
1:01:46I mean, like they don't need to watch "Gilligan's Island."
1:01:49They have YouTube and they watch it.
1:01:52That's what, that's their TV.
1:01:55and it's all on YouTube,
1:01:56and it all links to other things on YouTube,
1:01:57and all the creators are on YouTube.
1:01:59And maybe we'll get to the point
1:02:01where there's an alternative to YouTube.
1:02:04I'm sure people are trying,
1:02:06but Google's purchase of YouTube
1:02:08has turned out to be pretty powerful
1:02:10because that is the place.
1:02:12It's like its own genre, its own network,
1:02:15it is everything, and it is wildly successful,
1:02:19and there's a whole generation coming up now
1:02:23that is going to view YouTube as just the definitive place where all video lives. So
1:02:28it's, it's, it'll be interesting to see how it goes. In fact, I mean, I could see like
1:02:34five or ten years out a scenario where Google's, you know, what we think of as Google's big
1:02:40businesses, especially like the text ad stuff, is a lot less relevant, but Google controls
1:02:46all video advertising on the internet essentially with this, with YouTube.
1:02:50- I actually do believe, and I've been thinking about this
1:02:52recently, that in 50, 60, 100 years,
1:02:56Google will be remembered for YouTube primarily.
1:02:58I think that that is gonna be the thing
1:03:01that people will remember them for.
1:03:03I think it's that powerful. - It'll be like a trivia
1:03:04question, did you know that that Google search engine
1:03:06also was behind YouTube?
1:03:09- Yeah. - Wow, really?
1:03:10Both of those things were from the same company, yeah?
1:03:13In fact, Google bought YouTube, wow, they bought them, wow.
1:03:17I hope they spent a lot of money on,
1:03:19I mean, 'cause YouTube,
1:03:20I was trying to explain this to somebody,
1:03:21I think maybe it was on the talk show,
1:03:23'cause Jon Gruber's son is roughly my son's age.
1:03:26You know, YouTube is not like,
1:03:29even like a channel two showing "Gilligan's Island" reruns
1:03:33in the afternoon when I was a kid.
1:03:34YouTube is all the TV networks.
1:03:36YouTube is not like a TV network when I was a kid.
1:03:39It's all, it's television.
1:03:41Imagine one company owning all of television.
1:03:45For my kids' generation, that's what this is.
1:03:48It's not, that's why I think it's a good buy.
1:03:52And Minecraft, it's the same deal.
1:03:53Microsoft buying Minecraft,
1:03:55they're not buying a game,
1:03:59they're kind of buying the game.
1:04:02And between Minecraft and YouTube,
1:04:04you've pretty much described 80% of my kids'
1:04:09entertainment life over the last four years.
1:04:12- It's like it's not even so much it's all of the TV,
1:04:17It's everything you could ever want to watch.
1:04:20Like that's the difference.
1:04:21It's not just it's all the TV channels.
1:04:23It's like what do you wanna watch right now?
1:04:25Okay, it's on YouTube.
1:04:27Like because somebody is making it.
1:04:29Someone somewhere is making it.
1:04:31Like my nephew watches people,
1:04:35like videos of people unboxing toys.
1:04:37- Yeah, oh yeah.
1:04:39- And just showing toys on YouTube.
1:04:42Or he watches people play Disney Infinity.
1:04:46Like, it's just what he does.
1:04:48And it's just this crazy world.
1:04:50And I remember when he was like,
1:04:52maybe 18 months old,
1:04:55and he was playing with my iPhone.
1:05:00For the first time playing with my iPhone,
1:05:01he watches YouTube on my brother's,
1:05:04like his dad's iPhone.
1:05:06But I gave him my iPhone,
1:05:08and he navigated to the screen,
1:05:09and opened the folder in which he could see the YouTube icon.
1:05:13Like, and I was just blown away,
1:05:15because he didn't know where it was,
1:05:17but he saw that little red play button inside that folder
1:05:20and he knew what that meant.
1:05:21And then he started going around the recent history
1:05:25'cause he knew that was where the videos were in his mind.
1:05:28- Amazing.
1:05:29- That he's been watching.
1:05:31That's his remote control, right?
1:05:33That is his world, his entertainment view.
1:05:37Now I think that this is incredibly powerful
1:05:39and I think that YouTube fundamentally is a great thing
1:05:43because it enables that and it enables creation
1:05:46and it enables people to find a voice for themselves online.
1:05:49Anything like that is fantastic.
1:05:51The problem is when it becomes a business
1:05:53and it's the only option.
1:05:55I think that it,
1:05:56YouTube, the great thing about YouTube is not Google
1:06:01or the YouTube company.
1:06:03The great thing about YouTube is the people within it
1:06:05creating the stuff and like that's when it becomes a problem.
1:06:09So like with podcasts, we have all of the people
1:06:12but there is no company that is making us do anything.
1:06:17- And if you don't like your deal,
1:06:19you go somewhere else and get a better deal.
1:06:21- Yeah, because all of the companies
1:06:23that you might get deals with, there are other ones.
1:06:26- Right, and with YouTube, the Zoe Keating example
1:06:28that was chilling, and it's unclear whether this was just
1:06:30some overzealous rep or what, but the message was
1:06:34essentially, here are our new terms, you can either say yes
1:06:39or you can go away.
1:06:41- And where are you gonna go?
1:06:43- And where are you gonna go?
1:06:44- Like this is your living, what are you gonna do?
1:06:46- Yeah, it'll happen though.
1:06:48Some YouTuber or set of YouTube stars will do something
1:06:53where they go off of YouTube and all that's left on YouTube
1:06:59is pointers to this other place.
1:07:02And that'll, I mean, I think it's already happened,
1:07:05but not super successfully,
1:07:07but I feel like that will just keep happening.
1:07:09You're gonna try to,
1:07:11somebody's gonna try to establish a competitor
1:07:13and try to make deals with these YouTubers to come over.
1:07:17But it's scary for them because, you know,
1:07:19unless you're guaranteeing them revenue,
1:07:21you know, you're really risking,
1:07:22you're losing that ecosystem.
1:07:24'Cause not only do they have their followers,
1:07:26but those people are subscribed to, you know,
1:07:2820 or 30 different YouTubers
1:07:29and they're all kind of mixed in together.
1:07:31It's like leaving a TV network.
1:07:33You're out of the rotation over there
1:07:34and instead you have to remember to go to this other site
1:07:37and watch the videos over there, it's tough.
1:07:40I mean, that's the kind of mind share YouTube has.
1:07:42So yeah, I hope that doesn't happen for podcasting,
1:07:44but it would really,
1:07:45at this point it would really require
1:07:47some technological shift
1:07:52where somebody gets in somewhere
1:07:53that really opens the door to a huge audience
1:07:55and that's why I keep bringing up the car.
1:07:57And if it ended up that every car had Stitcher
1:08:01and that was the only way people were listening
1:08:04to podcasts and cars anymore,
1:08:06then we would all be like,
1:08:08"God, I guess we have to go to Stitcher
1:08:10and that would be scary."
1:08:11But I don't think it's gonna happen
1:08:12because I think in all those cases,
1:08:14it's like AppRadio and there'll be multiple options.
1:08:17Even if it ends up being, unfortunately,
1:08:19like you have to make a deal with somebody
1:08:21to get into the car.
1:08:23But even there, I feel like there will be
1:08:26some better independent options.
1:08:30- Yep, 'cause that's why we're not on Stitcher.
1:08:32Like, I've taken a look at some of their contract terms,
1:08:37and me and Steven, we just, we don't wanna sign it
1:08:41'cause we don't think we have to.
1:08:42So we're not going to.
1:08:44It's as simple as that.
1:08:45Like, we're perfectly fine with the audience that we have,
1:08:48and that audience grows,
1:08:50and that audience comes from where it comes from.
1:08:53I'm not really in the interest of signing
1:08:55my, our souls away, you know?
1:08:58- Yeah.
1:08:58All right, we should move on.
1:09:02Yes, so we should do some Ask Upgrade before we do our special inaugural movie segment.
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1:10:51I will endeavor to send,
1:10:53I've got a couple of packages to mail out now
1:10:55using stamps.com.
1:10:56I have to put together my care package for Myke.
1:10:58I haven't done that yet.
1:10:59And I'm sending a little care package to Dan Morin
1:11:02all the way in Boston.
1:11:03And I'm gonna put that together later today
1:11:06and stick it in my mailbox.
1:11:07And I'm not gonna even walk to the post office 'cause why?
1:11:10There are people there.
1:11:11I don't wanna deal with those people.
1:11:13- If anything, stamps.com is great
1:11:16for Jason Snell to send people gifts.
1:11:18And if that's not a reason enough to sign up
1:11:20so you can send gifts, then I don't know what is.
1:11:23(laughing)
1:11:24- Care packages.
1:11:25It's important for my business.
1:11:27It's business development for the incomparable incorporated.
1:11:31Askupgradetime, just a few selected entries from the hashtag.
1:11:36Lister Brian wrote in to say,
1:11:38"Do you pirate movies or television?
1:11:40"If so, how do you explain this to your kids
1:11:42"or your future kids?"
1:11:43How do you explain this to your future kids, Myke?
1:11:45And is it different than jailbreak and app pirating?
1:11:50So I'll answer first.
1:11:53I don't pirate stuff.
1:11:54I will make a minor exception
1:11:56for things that are completely unavailable
1:11:58for purchase or rent.
1:11:59And even then I feel like I need to buy something
1:12:02in order to balance out my media karma.
1:12:05So for example, there was a period where Doctor Who
1:12:08was airing months in advance in the UK.
1:12:11And I bit torrented those and pre-ordered the DVDs.
1:12:16And I felt like, eh, it's a fair trade.
1:12:18And back in the pre-comicsology days,
1:12:22I would occasionally download comic torrents.
1:12:25And that would basically drive sales of,
1:12:29I would buy the trades or the hardcovers of those comics.
1:12:32And I wasn't downloading new issues.
1:12:35I was sort of like downloading the,
1:12:36"Oh, here's 50 issues of this comic."
1:12:38And I'd read them and I'd be like, "Okay."
1:12:40And then I'd buy the hardcover of that.
1:12:41So I don't do it much at all anymore.
1:12:44Like I said, unless there's something
1:12:46that's just totally unavailable in the US,
1:12:49and then occasionally I'll do that.
1:12:50Like, let's see, "Black Mirror," which is now on Netflix,
1:12:54was not available in the US for several years.
1:12:56And one of the incomparable people saw it,
1:12:59presumably on BitTorrent and recommended it highly.
1:13:03And I watched that through that means, but that's about it.
1:13:07I would say the only difference between that
1:13:08and something like app pirating for me
1:13:10is that without pirating,
1:13:11you are often harming a small business
1:13:14and with movie and TV show pirating,
1:13:15you're usually harming a huge conglomerate
1:13:18or set of conglomerates.
1:13:19I'm not sure that really makes it any better or worse,
1:13:21but it is different in that way.
1:13:23But anyway, yeah, that's my feeling about piracy
1:13:27is that at this point, I'm not using it
1:13:29to get around buying things.
1:13:31I'm using it occasionally to get around
1:13:33geographic restrictions or distribution problems
1:13:36or just an unavailability of something digitally,
1:13:39that happens.
1:13:40Sometimes for the incomparable, we have that
1:13:43where we're trying to talk about something
1:13:44that's not widely available.
1:13:46Or I've downloaded some British stuff early
1:13:50because we had, I did a Dr. Who recap
1:13:53with somebody in Scotland and it wasn't gonna air in the US
1:13:57until like four in the morning his time.
1:13:58So I downloaded the BitTorrent version, watched it,
1:14:00we talked and then I watched it again with my family
1:14:03on TV that night.
1:14:05So, and when I can I buy things
1:14:07in order to balance out the books.
1:14:09So that's mine.
1:14:10Myke, what about you?
1:14:12- I do feel like the balancing out the books thing
1:14:15should be like, that should make it okay.
1:14:18Like legally, like that should be fine.
1:14:21- It doesn't, but I feel better about it.
1:14:24I felt better about those Doctor Who downloads
1:14:26because I bought the DVD.
1:14:27It's like, all right, well look,
1:14:29I was not patronizing,
1:14:32I think I even recorded them when they aired in the US,
1:14:35just to feel better about having recorded them
1:14:37when they aired in the US.
1:14:38But ideally, yes, I should have waited patiently
1:14:41for them to air months later in the US,
1:14:43and watched those, and watched the commercials,
1:14:45and then felt good about it.
1:14:47But at least, like with the comics, it's the same thing.
1:14:49I downloaded a BitTorrent of whatever, of Invincible,
1:14:53and then I liked it, and then I bought the trades,
1:14:56or Why the Last Man, something like that.
1:14:57And it's not ideal, and I don't do that anymore
1:15:00because it's a lot easier to get that stuff legally
1:15:04through a digital means,
1:15:05'cause I was also reading comics on a device,
1:15:06I wasn't reading them on paper.
1:15:08So that made a big difference too.
1:15:10So, you know, but it doesn't,
1:15:13I don't think it absolves me legally,
1:15:15but I feel like it absolves me somehow morally,
1:15:18karmically in some way to have given the creator money after the fact?
1:15:24I mean obviously like before before people email us, yes I understand that if
1:15:31you are not being very careful with your settings, your peer-to-peer settings, by
1:15:39using BitTorrent you are helping other people find the stuff and I know
1:15:44know that that's that's probably the bigger problem but you know you can you
1:15:48can lock off your upload and not not be sharing out you're just but I'm sure
1:15:53they're you know anyway invincible by the way is a great comic book it is I
1:15:58thoroughly recommend it it's a favorite of mine so I'm gonna put that in the
1:16:02show notes which you can find at relay.fm/upgrade/21 or in your
1:16:07podcast app of choice right now. Indeed. So I've, my main reason for not pirating
1:16:16these days is I cannot be bothered with the aggravation of pirating. I find it to
1:16:22be a frustrating experience full of just things that I'm not interested in doing.
1:16:27That's the classic Steve Jobs line, right, when he announced the iTunes Store.
1:16:31One of the things he said was it's hard to use these peer-to-peer networks and
1:16:36the quality is questionable and the tagging is bad and it's hard to find the stuff and
1:16:41it's much easier to just go on iTunes and click a button. And you know, he was right.
1:16:46There is something to that. People will pay, not everybody, but a lot of people will pay
1:16:49for convenience. And so if you can make the legal means convenient and pirating is sort
1:16:55of fundamentally inconvenient in many or most cases, then you know, that makes a difference.
1:17:00Unless you're like literally like, I cannot and will not buy this, but that's a different
1:17:05approach than saying it's I'm willing to pay to get that convenience.
1:17:10So I just believe in streaming just please make it available like that's all I want just
1:17:16make it available I will pay like I will pay like when I was looking for the Princess Bride
1:17:22I googled for it and there were a bunch of like daily motion videos or whatever and I
1:17:27just ignored them until I could find the easiest way to pay and I went to iTunes like because
1:17:32I just don't want the aggravation. There are, I mean, I guess the only thing that I
1:17:36maybe do that's questionable is like I use like American Netflix via using a
1:17:42VPN. Cloak is my VPN of choice by the way. Big fan of that. I like Cloak a lot.
1:17:48Getcloak.com. Works on iOS and Mac. It's really fancy. I'm a big fan.
1:17:54But, so you know, sometimes I will do that. Like I will sign into
1:17:59American Netflix like we're watching Parks and Recreation at the
1:18:02moment and Amazon Prime Instant only has the first three seasons in the UK so to
1:18:09get more to get like seasons four to seven I can sign into American Netflix
1:18:12like I don't even understand why these things happen like okay I do but like it
1:18:18makes no sense to me like why do this just make it available to me like don't
1:18:22don't make me do this you are making me want to pirate like season three ended
1:18:27in like 2010. Come on! Anyway, so Parks and Rec is a great show by the way.
1:18:34I'm enjoying it. Fantastic show. I'm really really enjoying it a lot. So that's kind of my
1:18:42thing. I do that. I use cloak. But I'm a paying customer of those services. So if I
1:18:47was in the United States of America that's what I would be seeing. But I'm not.
1:18:50I'm here. There's nothing I can do about it. All right. Well that's a good mini topic. I bet
1:18:56We'll have some feedback on that one.
1:18:58- Yeah.
1:18:59- Another Ask Upgrade, listener Chris said,
1:19:02"Podcasting is a large chunk of both of your careers.
1:19:04"How many hours a week do you guys spend
1:19:06"working on your shows?"
1:19:07What do you think, Myke?
1:19:09- This is so hard for me to answer now
1:19:12because it's literally all of my time, you know?
1:19:15Because there's so much more that goes into it.
1:19:18So like for example, for this show,
1:19:20for the like the standard pre-preparation,
1:19:24Jason puts the majority of the work in,
1:19:26he puts together the document, which is fantastic,
1:19:29and I love him dearly for that.
1:19:30And that's the same with most of my shows, actually,
1:19:33is that the co-hosts that I work with
1:19:35put together the document,
1:19:37and then I take care of all of the other bits, you know?
1:19:41Like, make sure that there's advertisers,
1:19:42and make sure that my Mac doesn't blow up.
1:19:46I didn't do very well doing that today.
1:19:49But you know, I do the editing and the posting
1:19:50and that kind of stuff.
1:19:52I don't know, maybe, let's say,
1:19:55We used to kind of say like, oh, for every hour
1:19:59that we record, it's probably an hour's worth
1:20:02of other stuff as well.
1:20:03And I think that that's still a pretty fair thing to say.
1:20:07But one of my big things is it's not even like active time
1:20:12working on the shows, it's thinking about them.
1:20:16I think about them all the time, you know?
1:20:18Like what can we do for this show?
1:20:20Like I have a little idea and then I put that in a document
1:20:23or why don't we try this and send a message to you.
1:20:26So there's so much even unconscious time, I guess,
1:20:31that goes into the now.
1:20:32But for me, it's all I do.
1:20:34I mean, it's probably different for you.
1:20:36- Right.
1:20:37- Because you do other things as well.
1:20:38But basically, all of my working time is on podcasts.
1:20:43But one of the big things is it's changing show by show now.
1:20:46It used to be very clear cut, I would do this,
1:20:49these are my responsibilities,
1:20:50these are responsibilities of my co-hosts,
1:20:52and this is how long it would take to edit.
1:20:54But now I have different shows
1:20:55that I edit in different ways,
1:20:56and I prepare for some shows differently to this show.
1:20:59So it's very flexible right now,
1:21:01but it's all of my working time.
1:21:04- Well, all of my shows are different.
1:21:07I mentioned this actually in a piece that we'll link to,
1:21:10which went up on Six Colors
1:21:13the day that we recorded this, February 2nd.
1:21:15It's about how I edit podcasts.
1:21:18And in there, I say,
1:21:20look, every one of my shows is different,
1:21:22and the amount of work that goes into it is different.
1:21:23You're absolutely right, there is this unconscious time.
1:21:26This is true about writing stuff too.
1:21:28There's the time where you're thinking about things
1:21:30that somebody on the outside would look at and say,
1:21:31"Look, you're not doing anything now,"
1:21:33but you actually are.
1:21:34And we have the Relay FM Slack group
1:21:36and there's stuff that shoots around in there
1:21:38that I think is informing what we end up with on the shows.
1:21:42There's a lot of stuff that's hard to define,
1:21:45but it's also true that there's the specific stuff.
1:21:48So yeah, on Friday afternoon,
1:21:50as I'm wrapping up my work week,
1:21:52I have that moment where I start to think
1:21:54about what am I gonna talk about on upgrade?
1:21:57And that kind of goes through the weekend
1:21:59and at some point on Sunday night or Monday morning,
1:22:03I will go through our document
1:22:05and start to cull things from the Ask Upgrade list
1:22:10and from Twitter and from email
1:22:12and think about what the topics are of the last week
1:22:14and what's worth talking about.
1:22:16And then there's the time to record.
1:22:19This show is different because you do the editing.
1:22:21So that's actually very different in terms of my time input
1:22:24because I'm really spending the time we spend talking
1:22:26and then the thinking about it beforehand
1:22:28and assembling a document,
1:22:30which isn't a massive amount of time,
1:22:31but it's definitely time.
1:22:33For something like Clockwise,
1:22:35there's time spent booking guests
1:22:36'cause we have to book two guests every week.
1:22:39And I'm trying to do that more in advance,
1:22:41which actually saves me time
1:22:42because I can send out invitations
1:22:43and try to schedule people weeks in advance
1:22:46instead of every week having to try
1:22:48and beat the bushes and find a couple of people
1:22:51who are free at that particular time.
1:22:53So that takes time.
1:22:54And doing the show doesn't take a lot of time.
1:22:57It's, you know, probably we're on Skype
1:22:59for about 40 minutes, but it's a half an hour show.
1:23:02So that's easy.
1:23:02And then the editing time is mostly me getting it to length.
1:23:07Like last week's show was 34 minutes long.
1:23:10So I had to pull four minutes of conversation out
1:23:12of a pretty tight show, which is hard,
1:23:15but that's the format.
1:23:16So that's what it is.
1:23:17For something like "TV Talk Machine,"
1:23:20which I do with the TV critic Tim Goodman,
1:23:22that's a Skype conversation.
1:23:23That's a two-person Skype conversation.
1:23:25I do almost nothing to that show.
1:23:26So we talk for an hour or a little bit less than an hour.
1:23:29And then in about 10 minutes, I've edited it and posted it
1:23:32because there's very little for me to do.
1:23:34I don't really, unless I note something where, you know,
1:23:37one of us had to, you know, had a technical problem
1:23:40or had to go talk to our kids who were being too loud
1:23:42or something like that,
1:23:43that's pretty much a just very straightforward kind of show.
1:23:47Something like "The Incomparable,"
1:23:48not only is there, there is scheduling time for that,
1:23:51but, and then those shows,
1:23:55recording sessions tend to be a couple hours long.
1:23:57And then that is, I posted a video of my edit process
1:24:01for an episode of "The Incomparable."
1:24:03That's a two to four hour long post-production for most.
1:24:07I'd say on average it's probably about two or three hours
1:24:11to do an episode of that.
1:24:12And that's, I edit that more,
1:24:15in a more detailed fashion than I do other shows.
1:24:17And part of that is the content of the show.
1:24:20And part of that is the number of panelists on the show
1:24:22and the fact that it's an unstructured conversation.
1:24:25So there's more interruptions that have to get smoothed out
1:24:27and all of that.
1:24:28And then the total party kill is, you know,
1:24:30that's a totally different commitment because that's a,
1:24:33you know, three or four hour gameplay,
1:24:34which we usually have about a half an hour
1:24:36of technical frustrations at the beginning
1:24:38to get it rolling.
1:24:39But then it's just me having fun.
1:24:40And then over the course of several weeks,
1:24:43I have to go through the edit
1:24:45and do a less detailed edit than I do
1:24:47for something like the incomparable,
1:24:49but still, you know, I'm still looking for stray noises
1:24:52and things like that.
1:24:53So it varies.
1:24:54I numbered it up.
1:24:55I haven't tallied in a while
1:24:56how much time I spend on podcasts,
1:24:58but you know, I think it's pretty efficient.
1:25:00Like this podcast, I probably spend three hours a week on,
1:25:04and clockwise, I probably spend two hours a week on,
1:25:07and incomparable, I probably spend five hours a week on,
1:25:10and TV Talk Machine, that's probably like an hour and a half.
1:25:14So it varies based on what the show is.
1:25:17- But like, so like saying about that,
1:25:18that episode of "Connected" that we did.
1:25:20- Oh my God.
1:25:22- That took me between five and six hours to edit that.
1:25:25- Well, we talked about on one of your previous
1:25:27interview shows, we talked about the radio drama
1:25:30and the incomparable radio drama, you know,
1:25:32the first one and the second one too,
1:25:34they probably both took me 30, 40 hours to edit,
1:25:36but those are, you know, exceptions to the rule.
1:25:38There's the weekly cycle of like,
1:25:41this is what a regular episode is.
1:25:43And then there's the, it's just like anything, right?
1:25:44Then there's the week where you have to work above
1:25:46and beyond 'cause you're on some crazy project.
1:25:48And then you go back down and it's like,
1:25:49now we're back in kind of regular time mode.
1:25:52Anyway, I hope that answers your question, Lister Chris.
1:25:58You do the math, add it all up.
1:26:02But it varies, the recording time
1:26:05and the edit time can really vary.
1:26:07And then there's the prep time that can vary.
1:26:09But it's not, I get the impression from some people,
1:26:11it's like I can't believe you do like you do what six shows and I do five four a week six weekly shows and four weekly
1:26:17Shows and there's like how do you have time for anything else? And for me the answer is
1:26:21It's a part-time job. It is a big chunk of my time, but it's still not
1:26:27You know, it's you can do the math there, but it's less than 20 hours a week that I spend on this
1:26:33yeah, so I
1:26:35Could do more but I'm not gonna
1:26:39Yeah, you can do more. Trust me. I do. But like, you know, for me, it's, it's, it's,
1:26:43there's so much more, you know, now than for me to do than there ever was before with all
1:26:49of my arrangements. Because we run the machine. And, and that, and the machine takes a lot
1:26:57of oil to get it to run.
1:26:59Right. Well, there's the running the business part of it too, that is totally, that's not
1:27:04on every show. That's like running your business. It's separate from the shows, but that's also
1:27:08and I have that with the incomparable and six colors both.
1:27:11Brian, real time follow up,
1:27:14Brian Hamilton asks in the chat room,
1:27:15how does, how do my sound quality standards
1:27:18shift between shows?
1:27:19- That's a really good question.
1:27:22That is an excellent question
1:27:24'cause I do have different standards.
1:27:26- Yeah, me too, me too.
1:27:28Like I said, I do TV Talk Machine and I don't even record,
1:27:32I just use the Skype call.
1:27:34I don't even have Tim record his end.
1:27:37And my two reasons for doing that is,
1:27:39generally our Skype call is very good quality,
1:27:42and we're both local, we're both in the Bay Area,
1:27:45it's very good quality, it's fine.
1:27:48And two is, he's not a super technical guy,
1:27:51and I kinda just don't wanna walk him through the steps
1:27:54every week of doing his own recording
1:27:56and then getting it to me.
1:27:57And if it was a problem, I would probably go through
1:27:59and set him up with Dropbox,
1:28:00and set him up with Call Recorder and all of that,
1:28:02but it's never been a problem, and I don't wanna bother.
1:28:05So my standards are a little lower,
1:28:06But since it's only two people talking
1:28:08and it generally is of good quality,
1:28:10it's good enough for me.
1:28:11And I still do take the two tracks
1:28:13and noise gate them and compress them
1:28:15and do some stuff with them.
1:28:16But I don't ask for a self-recorded track for him.
1:28:18And that's the only show I do like that.
1:28:21All the rest of them, you know,
1:28:23it varies somewhat,
1:28:25but I try to have everybody record their end.
1:28:28And then it's just a matter of what you prioritize.
1:28:30With "Incomparable," I'm prioritizing overtalking
1:28:32and interruptions because that's a panel show.
1:28:34With Clockwise, because the format is so regimented,
1:28:37there's not a lot of overtalking and interruption,
1:28:39but it has to fit in 30 minutes.
1:28:41So that's what I prioritize is cutting it to fit.
1:28:44It just varies.
1:28:45In Total Party Kill, I'm all over the place.
1:28:46'Cause I told myself when we started doing that,
1:28:48that I wasn't gonna edit that heavily at all.
1:28:50And it turns out I edited about as heavily.
1:28:53In my Six Colors piece, I say I don't.
1:28:56It's a lie.
1:28:57I kind of edit that as heavily,
1:28:58almost as heavily as I do the incomparable.
1:29:00And that's, I probably shouldn't,
1:29:02because it takes too much time.
1:29:05But I kinda do.
1:29:07I kinda just get into the habit of saying,
1:29:09I wanna get out all those,
1:29:11all the over talking and all the weird,
1:29:12like people bumping their microphones
1:29:14'cause it sounds better.
1:29:16But sometimes it's just,
1:29:17what I said in that article,
1:29:18and Myke, I know we've talked about this too,
1:29:20is there's a spectrum.
1:29:21There's like on the one side,
1:29:22it's like my wife listens to a knitting podcast
1:29:24that literally they press record and then they press stop.
1:29:28And like the act of pressing record is in the podcast.
1:29:32And if they have to go away for a moment,
1:29:34they say, okay, we're gonna pause it.
1:29:36And then, and now we're back.
1:29:38They like literally there was no editing.
1:29:40And then on the other end of the spectrum
1:29:41is something that's like an NPR podcast
1:29:43or something that's like super edited
1:29:44within an inch of its life.
1:29:45And as you move from the one side to the other,
1:29:48it's just time.
1:29:49It's more and more exponentially increasing time.
1:29:53And you gotta decide every show is different.
1:29:55And that's what I found is every podcast that I do
1:29:57falls somewhere on that spectrum and it's different based on what the needs are of that
1:30:01show and I think that's absolutely true. The relay shows are more similar than my shows
1:30:06are but they're, but still every show is going to be different. You're editing someone else's
1:30:11show now too and that, the rocket, so that's got to be a different experience still.
1:30:15That's totally different. Editing a show that's not mine is weird. It's weird. I like to do
1:30:22it because whilst we're getting kind of the kinks worked out, I have the ability to help
1:30:29guide the show a little bit, which I quite like, so I can give them thoughts and stuff
1:30:34like that.
1:30:36I like that.
1:30:37And also I would be listening to the show anyway, so I may as well make it part of my
1:30:41work at the moment, which is fun.
1:30:48But yeah, it's different.
1:30:50It's totally different because it's, I don't know, there's something strange about it because
1:30:54I don't know what's going to happen next.
1:30:56Like, if I'm editing something of my own, I kind of have a feeling of like, "Oh, I know
1:31:00I need to work on this bit."
1:31:02It's strange.
1:31:05It's just a different kind of experience.
1:31:07I probably won't edit Rocket forever.
1:31:09We're probably going to get someone to help us on it, but just for the time being, I am,
1:31:15which is a good thing.
1:31:16I like doing that for them to lend a hand.
1:31:20But I agree, different shows that we do, they're similar, but I do have different standards
1:31:28of the amount of time that I spend on shows.
1:31:32And that comes from audience size to the discerningness of the audience.
1:31:40So I feel like, and I believe there's listeners of The Pen Addict are less critical about
1:31:44audio then this is this show and if you listen to Bonanza well God help you
1:31:50that just rolls out as it rolls out you know it's just kind of there's just
1:31:55different different kind of different strokes for different folks I think
1:32:00yep too quick we have two more quick bits of ask upgrade that I'll just blow
1:32:07through here really quickly listener Yap wrote in to say every time I see
1:32:13Manchego cheese, I have to think about the Manchego vertical and send a picture of Manchego
1:32:17cheese. So I wanted to mention this only to throw in my Super Bowl fact. We had Manchego.
1:32:23Philip Michaels, Lisa Schmeiser, and their daughter came over for the Super Bowl. Always
1:32:28nice to have more people around for the Super Bowl. We had some Manchego. We had a nice
1:32:31cheddar that I got from Whole Foods. And some Gouda. So that's your cheese update, your
1:32:38cheese vertical update Super Bowl you missed the Super Bowl this year Myke
1:32:43you're sleeping so frustrating so that was the plan because I had something I
1:32:47needed to do this morning then I couldn't sleep oh just just read about
1:32:51the Super Bowl on Twitter themed I was awake for the entire Super Bowl I'm so
1:32:56annoyed because I really enjoy watching it but but didn't like I could have even
1:33:00watched it online but no I didn't I thought I was trying to sleep and I was
1:33:07just kind of reading Twitter when I couldn't sleep. Never mind, never mind. It looked like
1:33:11it was an exciting one.
1:33:13And last bit of Ask Upgrade is Peanut Gallery who said, "I wish for an iOS app that would
1:33:17let me listen to Relay FM live and participate in the live chat room," which I think is a
1:33:21good idea and I mentioned this in my monologue in the chat room earlier. I don't think a
1:33:28dedicated app for this is necessarily going to reach a big enough audience, but if you've
1:33:31got a--if somebody has a suggestion, if there's some app out there that does this, that would
1:33:36great I'd love to hear about it but if you are a developer of an iOS IRC app
1:33:42IRC chat app I guess C stands for chat IRC app you could probably make a nice
1:33:51differentiator of a feature by point it letting your users also point the app to
1:33:57a stream URL and do audio while you're in the chat room because that is a use
1:34:04for podcast fans. So I don't know about a dedicated app or not but if somebody
1:34:09knows something because that it happens that like you you set it to you set it
1:34:13to stream audio in the background and then you go to the IRC app and at some
1:34:16point there's memory problems and it quits the stream and you're not
1:34:20listening anymore. If only you knew the man in charge. Yeah, if only.
1:34:26Anyway. So this is going to be the first Myke watches a movie vertical. Yes. And
1:34:33And at the end of the episode, I will announce there is going to be another one next week.
1:34:37There is.
1:34:38Which I'm excited about. But the Myke Watches a Movie vertical is brought to you by our friends
1:34:44at MailRoute.
1:34:46Yes, indeed. MailRoute is the sponsor of this vertical. Imagine a world without spam,
1:34:51viruses, or bounced email. You don't need to imagine it because it's real if you use
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1:35:30super simple and effective. I always talk about this digest I get, which I find very
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1:35:40It's kind of hilarious, but I check that to see if there are any false readings, which
1:35:44there almost never are. It's maybe happened once in the last month. If I do find a good
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1:36:29So thank you to MailRoute for sponsoring the "Myke watches a movie" vertical and for filtering
1:36:34my mail.
1:36:36So The Princess Bride.
1:36:39Mm-hmm.
1:36:40Now can you please give a little bit of context to this movie?
1:36:45Because it's one of those films that is a cult classic, right?
1:36:48It is a cult classic.
1:36:50Why is that the case?
1:36:51Like, do you have any kind of feeling as to why The Princess Bride is a cult classic?
1:36:56So we talked about it in "Incomparable" episode 25.
1:36:59I think one of the-- so I was late to "The Princess Bride."
1:37:02I went off to college, and people were quoting lines
1:37:04from "The Princess Bride," and I had no idea what was going on.
1:37:08And then I didn't see the movie until I was maybe out
1:37:11of college even at that point.
1:37:13So I think for some reason, this movie is particularly quotable.
1:37:20I think the heightened--
1:37:24It's the storybook element that these are tropes
1:37:26that we're used to seeing in fairytales
1:37:29with a knowing and kind of postmodern,
1:37:34you know, knowing spin.
1:37:35There's a commentary on this kind of story
1:37:38that's happening inside the story.
1:37:40Plus it's got the framing device
1:37:41with Peter Falk and Fred Savage.
1:37:43So, you know, you're commenting on it as a story
1:37:46while it's happening.
1:37:48I think all of that is kind of mixed in there
1:37:50that this is very quotable.
1:37:53And I would say for the period in my life,
1:37:55when this came out, the reason that all the college students
1:37:58in my college were quoting it also is,
1:38:00you know, when you're younger,
1:38:04this is the kind of movie that is both familiar
1:38:06in the sense that it is an old fashioned fairytale
1:38:09and also, you know, beautifully different
1:38:13in that it is winking at the whole thing.
1:38:15And that's clever.
1:38:17And I think, especially when you're,
1:38:19you know, high school college age,
1:38:21You love that idea that somebody is taking this form
1:38:25that you've been seeing your entire life
1:38:26and is now playing with it and winking at it.
1:38:29So, but if I had to pick one thing,
1:38:31it's that it's just insanely quotable.
1:38:34- So when I first started hearing people mention
1:38:38the Princess Bride kind of on the internet
1:38:40and on shows like yours, there was something in my brain
1:38:45that got it mixed up with the Anne Hathaway movie,
1:38:48Princess Diaries and I was very confused as to why all of these nerds enjoyed the
1:38:54Princess Diaries so much. The Princess Diaries has a 6.2 on IMDb and it's about
1:39:03Mia Thermopolis has just found out that she is the heir to the apparent throne
1:39:08of Genovia so it's like a regular American girl who finds out she's a
1:39:14Princess basically it's so I was very confused but then once I was able to to
1:39:19break the confusion the interest in Hathaway is not in the Princess Bride
1:39:24she is not in the Princess Bride Julie Andrews not in the Princess Bride not at
1:39:28all not even a little bit it is interesting though that even though I
1:39:33have never seen this movie it has snuck into my conscience like I am aware of
1:39:37the references I am aware of inconceivable I am aware of would you
1:39:43like a peanut. You know, I am aware of these things. They have snuck in.
1:39:49I always find that interesting when you can relate to the reference and can even
1:39:56make the reference without actually knowing the source material. So that's
1:40:01one of those interesting things that happens in college.
1:40:03That's what happened to me in college at first too. It's like, "Hello, my name is
1:40:08Negan Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die. Oh yeah, I know that reference.
1:40:12I know it from other references, but not from the actual movie, but from the references!
1:40:16Yeah.
1:40:17So, I have to make one brief aside, just to read verbatim from my notes.
1:40:25And my notes say, "Oh my, Robin Wright."
1:40:27Yes.
1:40:28"She is beautiful."
1:40:30Oh yes!
1:40:31"In this movie, she is just incredibly beautiful."
1:40:34I am only very familiar with her from House of Cards.
1:40:39House of Cards, right, sure.
1:40:40where of course she is also a beautiful lady, but she's younger, probably closer to my age
1:40:46in the Princess Bride. I was going to call it Diaries. She's very stunning and she's kind of
1:40:54in her look, the perfect look for a fairy tale princess. It makes perfect sense, right?
1:41:02And as well, the way that the movie starts, I find to be very interesting because it starts off as
1:41:08this idyllic romance story right and and it's it's very it's very well done I
1:41:15like that a lot because it's kind of like with is it care how do you say
1:41:20Carrie Carrie Elwes that's it Carrie Elwes and and Robin Wright are these two
1:41:25blonde beautiful blue-eyed you know like sure perfect fairy tale stars and it's
1:41:32like you know like soft focus lens you know they're like in love it's it starts
1:41:36off really well and I love how the young boy, is it Fred Savage, right?
1:41:42Yeah. He's just like, "Is this a kissing book?" And I just think it's so funny, like the way
1:41:47I just really enjoyed the way that it started. I have a real love for Andre the
1:41:52Giant, just in general. I was a pro wrestling fan as a kid and remember fondly
1:42:00watching Andre, you know, the biggest man in the world, you know, fighting Hulk Hogan.
1:42:05He apparently was given his lines phonetically for this because he doesn't he didn't speak
1:42:10English very well at all.
1:42:11No, no, he's French.
1:42:12French, yeah.
1:42:13Yeah, and does not, never did speak English very well.
1:42:16Yeah, but I would argue that it enhances that character that he's sort of this somewhat
1:42:23impenetrable, confusing giant man.
1:42:26It's like, yeah.
1:42:28And they paint him as quite simple as well, you know, because he's like, yeah, which is
1:42:32which is great and I really like that because when Inigo says to you know says
1:42:38right at the very end he's like is it Fezzik? Fezzik. Fezzik, like you have
1:42:45finally done something right like when they're making their escape right right
1:42:49there's a nice moment where where they're they're they're on the chase and
1:42:54and he said he wants to fight he wants to fight them and he says no no hide
1:43:01behind a rock and throw a boulder and throw rocks at them and he says my way
1:43:06is not very sporting. He's like upset he's like no that's not because he's a
1:43:11good he's a good guy he's not a bad guy. Vizzini is bad but Fezzik is a very nice
1:43:15giant person.
1:43:17Like he's Andre in this role is so fantastically terrible like
1:43:23yeah that's what's so good about him.
1:43:25It's endearing yeah it's endearing he is an
1:43:27endearing character and it is in part because he is not an actor and he's his
1:43:32lines are kind of you know muddled and and yet I think I think it works because
1:43:38of that I think it makes you love love that big that big lug yeah I mean
1:43:42because he's cast because he's the closest you can get to a giant to a
1:43:45giant yeah like he's seven foot tall also and he suffers with gigantism you
1:43:52know so he kind of has these larger-than-life features and he so he's
1:43:57kind of perfect for the role that they're fitting. One of the things that I
1:44:03really liked about the book, like the storytelling device, is when it would
1:44:08break to like the present day and then the grandpa would, the grandfather,
1:44:14would start to read the story back and you'd see the flashes of it happening.
1:44:20So like he would start to tell the story and it would be his narration.
1:44:23Where was I? And he'd start reading the parts and then start flashing
1:44:26around again. And I don't know if this is something that is intended and I wonder
1:44:32how you feel about that but you know when the grandson complains about
1:44:37certain ways that the story's going I had the feeling that his grandfather was
1:44:41changing the story. Ah interesting. Because he's like oh but you know such
1:44:47as they they shouldn't get away or whatever and he'd be like oh no wait
1:44:51just just let me continue because they seem to like at these points that the
1:44:54the story takes sharp turns. Well, but what goes against that is that there's a moment where he says,
1:45:02you know, what happens to Prince Humperdinck? You know, how does he die in the end? And he says,
1:45:12"No, he lives. He lives. He gets away with it." And the grandson says, "Jesus, Grandpa,
1:45:19"Why are you reading this book to me?"
1:45:21[ Laughter ]
1:45:24Yeah. -Yeah, I like that bit.
1:45:26I like that. -Yeah, the whole commentary,
1:45:28the, you know, "Stop with the kissing" and all of that,
1:45:30and, you know, that is a -- Yeah, it's a great --
1:45:33I think it's a great framing sequence to have them all,
1:45:36you know, commenting on the story as they go.
1:45:39Like, this is a fairy tale.
1:45:40We are listening to and watching a fairy tale as it happens.
1:45:45-I think single-handedly, the best scene in this movie
1:45:49is the whole scene when Wesley,
1:45:53who is the Dread Pirate Roberts,
1:45:55is scaling the wall and Inigo is waiting for him.
1:45:59And their whole back and forth,
1:46:01and then the very civil conversation that they have
1:46:04about their lives, and talking about how they got there,
1:46:08and then have the fantastic fight, which is so well done.
1:46:12'Cause there are so many parts of it where it's clearly,
1:46:15it is Mandy Patinkin and Carrie Elwes.
1:46:19Mandy Patinkin, like the guy from Homeland.
1:46:21I was like, oh my God, the guy from Homeland.
1:46:23That whole scene makes the movie.
1:46:28The movie could have been so much worse than it was
1:46:31'cause overall, I will spoil it,
1:46:32overall I really enjoyed this movie.
1:46:34That is just so, it's such fantastic, just everything.
1:46:39Comedy and just great storytelling,
1:46:41like the whole, it just worked so well for me.
1:46:45I really, 'cause it frames those characters so well.
1:46:48full of honor and like, you know, they will die for the cause.
1:46:54You seem a good man, I hate to kill you. You seem a good man, I hate to die.
1:46:57And you get the double, I'm not left-handed. I'm not left-handed either.
1:47:03Yeah, and then like, you know, one would knock the sword out of his hand, so he'd pick up the sword
1:47:08and knock the sword, and like no one would kill each other at that point. And I really love the
1:47:13the line, "There's not a lot of money in revenge."
1:47:15- Yeah. - "I'm in the revenge business."
1:47:17Like, that is just so fantastic.
1:47:20- That's like, one of my favorite lines in the movie
1:47:23is also where they're talking about
1:47:24the different sword techniques,
1:47:25and Mandy Patinkin says, "If he has studied his Agrippa,
1:47:29which I have,"
1:47:30(laughing)
1:47:31so it's just, it's a non-segue, "which I have,"
1:47:34okay, Mandy Patinkin, angry Spaniard with a sword.
1:47:38And I like that he, you know,
1:47:40in the end, Cary Elwes knocks him out, right?
1:47:42He's not gonna kill him.
1:47:44This pirate that we don't know anything about,
1:47:46he's not gonna kill Inigo.
1:47:48He's a good guy.
1:47:50- Right, so this is where that leads
1:47:52to a big question for me.
1:47:54And please correct me if I've got something wrong here.
1:47:57So Wesley knocks out Inigo.
1:48:01He does the same to Fesic.
1:48:05He puts him in a sleeper hold.
1:48:06That whole thing is hilarious
1:48:07'cause there's no way Wesley would have survived that.
1:48:10Like, he's ribbed crushed.
1:48:14Which, that's a great, I love all of that as well.
1:48:19- Sleep well and dream of large women, he says,
1:48:23he leaves Fezzik behind.
1:48:24- That's good. - Be quotable.
1:48:26- Good line, good line.
1:48:27And then when it comes to Vizzini, he kills him.
1:48:31- Yes, well, Vizzini really kills himself,
1:48:34but he is the worst of them, right?
1:48:36He is the instigator of this and he's telling them to kill,
1:48:39That's why you see him say, "Throw rocks at their heads," and all that,
1:48:43and don't be sporting about it, just kill them.
1:48:45It's because Vizzini is, he's arrogant, he doesn't care if they die,
1:48:49he's just in it for the money, and then it's his own arrogance that kills him in the end,
1:48:54because he dies with his own poison.
1:48:58Which is funny.
1:48:59- Yeah, it's just... - Look over there, what is that?
1:49:02- I don't see anything. - It's just very interesting.
1:49:06Like, I get it, 'cause the other guys,
1:49:08they're just like hired help.
1:49:09- Yeah, right.
1:49:10Again, they're trying to make money.
1:49:13They're in it for the work.
1:49:16And you also get the sense that as it goes,
1:49:19they're increasingly uncomfortable
1:49:21with what Vizini is trying to do.
1:49:23This is not necessarily what they signed up for.
1:49:26And he's the instigator of it.
1:49:27So yeah, he ends up dying in the end.
1:49:29But even then, he doesn't end up dying
1:49:30at the hand of the man in black.
1:49:32He ends up dying at his own hand.
1:49:34He's just outwitted by the man in black.
1:49:36- Yeah, yeah, but he put poison.
1:49:40But yeah, he was always gonna kill him.
1:49:43- That's true, he did put poison in his cup, that's true.
1:49:46He did actually poison him and he died, this is true.
1:49:48- Like it wasn't like he was in the episode of Sherlock
1:49:52where the pills, right, where it's like this game of wits
1:49:57as to who's gonna take, do you know what I'm talking about?
1:49:59Like I think it's the second episode
1:50:00and they're playing that game of wits
1:50:02as to who's gonna take the pills.
1:50:04because he just like, you know, Wesley says that he built up an intolerance to the poison.
1:50:08Yeah, so they're both gonna drink the poison and yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's true, that's
1:50:13true. He does, he kills him. He sort of, I mean, he set up that he sort of deserves it.
1:50:17It's a great, it's a great death. Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the
1:50:22line. Many deaths.
1:50:26Couldn't be as far from a Sicilian accent as possible, which I loved.
1:50:30It's just Wallace Shawn being Wallace Shawn.
1:50:33- He's an incredible voice.
1:50:35- Yeah.
1:50:36- So then we kind of get to the point where then
1:50:39Wesley is, he's caught buttercup and they're on their way.
1:50:44And we're treated to one of the most ridiculous scenes
1:50:48I've ever seen in cinema,
1:50:49which at this point I am enjoying.
1:50:52When they're tumbling down the hill.
1:50:54- Oh.
1:50:55- And the noises they're making.
1:50:56- Oh yeah.
1:50:57- It's so.
1:50:58- Oh.
1:50:59(laughing)
1:51:00and they show one part where like this the stunt double who's filling in for
1:51:05buttercup takes a terrible turn at one point yeah like it looks really painful
1:51:10so that that's kind of kind of beautifully ridiculous and then so there
1:51:16are some weird points in this movie right where it kind of it took me out a
1:51:20couple of times like so then when they're in the well right after that
1:51:23they get to the fire swamp and there's the big Muppet rodents that's why that's
1:51:27what I'm gonna talk about and the incredibly violent fight between Wesley
1:51:33and one of the the giant rodents that's where we see them he stabs the R.O.U.S.
1:51:38like multiple times with his sword yeah yeah and and he is bitten quite
1:51:44savagely a few times as well which is interesting is this the movie kind of
1:51:50didn't it didn't stick to anything like I felt like it kept changing around a
1:51:55lot but the whole time I'm entertained throughout it at all and I
1:52:04really like that this is such a weird and varied cast because then we're met
1:52:08by Mel Smith a British actor who plays the character known as the albino
1:52:16but Mel Smith is like he's familiar to me because he is a very famous
1:52:20British comedy actor and drama actor like he's been lots and lots and lots of
1:52:25British TV so it's just very peculiar to see some of the casting like it's just
1:52:30it's so out of left field a lot of a lot of it and it's like I never really they
1:52:36just didn't seem to be like a real kind of cohesion but not in a bad way just
1:52:41it's like I kept being surprised by the faces that I was recognizing you know
1:52:45right and then there's like the very peculiar pain machine suction machine
1:52:53yes which is which is really weird and then Wesley is killed and then they take
1:52:58him to the miracle worker mm-hmm I loved all of that who who is it that plays the
1:53:04miracle worker it's Billy Crystal yes because I knew I Carol Kane is his wife
1:53:08yeah that whole scene is just so fantastic it's very Woody Allen like
1:53:13Yeah, so it's a bizarre sort of like just a comedy sketch scene all on its own, but
1:53:18it's great. The miracle at the Miracle Max shop, he's like, "He's only, yeah,
1:53:22mostly dead is partially alive!" And Valerie, leave me alone, because she's like, "You're a liar!
1:53:30You can save him!" And yeah, that's a funny bit. They did a retrospective on the
1:53:36Princess Bride in a magazine that I was reading last year, and Billy Crystal and
1:53:39Carol Kane were interviewed and they said they'd be up for a Princess Bride
1:53:43sequel since they could play the part their parts without makeup now because
1:53:48they're very old yes they're like anciently old yeah that actual nobody
1:53:55really lives to kind of old because they're like witches and wizards I guess
1:53:58something along that line right and then we're treated to think so Wesley is
1:54:02brought back to life and just in just pure comedy saved by saved by indigo and
1:54:08- Yes. - And brought back to life.
1:54:09- Yes, yes.
1:54:11How he cannot function correctly.
1:54:14- Right, he's paralyzed basically.
1:54:16- And the way he moves his body around,
1:54:18it's just so incredible.
1:54:20Like, you know, to move his arm,
1:54:21he like has to get momentum from his other shoulder
1:54:25to like throw it around.
1:54:26And then the whole instigation of this episode,
1:54:30the Holocaust Cloak is brought up.
1:54:31- Yes, yes, listed among our list of assets
1:54:35is we also have a Holocaust.
1:54:36That's a funny scene because they're like,
1:54:38well, there's, you know, what do we do?
1:54:39There's too many guys down there.
1:54:40And then he says,
1:54:42"Oh, well, if we have a Holocaust cloak, then."
1:54:45And then they had to put Andre the Giant
1:54:47on the bonfire thing.
1:54:48And, "I'm the Dread Pirate Roberts," he says.
1:54:53- Like there's a few things about this.
1:54:55So one, like I love the introduction
1:54:58of the Holocaust cloak is great.
1:54:59It's like, I liked it, so I took it
1:55:01and the guy said I could have it.
1:55:04which is how Vesic says that he has it.
1:55:07But then there is no explanation.
1:55:09So I looked this up as to why he could be set on fire.
1:55:13- He's high up and also a giant, I don't know.
1:55:17- I looked it up and apparently a holocaust cloak
1:55:21is impervious to flame.
1:55:23- Ah.
1:55:24- And I think that there is something
1:55:27Dungeons and Dragons related.
1:55:28- Interesting.
1:55:29- 'Cause I found a Yahoo Answers article.
1:55:33And one of the points in here, where does it say?
1:55:35I'm sure,
1:55:36oh here we go.
1:55:40Any who attack the wearer of the cloak
1:55:42must save versus magic or suffer 2d8 points of damage
1:55:46from the flames and any weapon they strike with
1:55:49must make a saving throw or be damaged as well.
1:55:52- There you go.
1:55:54- Now I only know about that from your show.
1:55:55I would not have understood any of that,
1:55:57but Total Party Kill has prepared me
1:55:59for the Holocaust Cloak. - It's good.
1:56:00Good, I'm glad to provide the service.
1:56:02So, so yeah, that the, uh, it works in that they, uh, they scare off the fear of the dread
1:56:08pirate Roberts combined with this horrible flaming giant thing moving toward them, scares
1:56:15off most of the guards.
1:56:17And then the guy with the gate key says, "I don't know what you're talking about.
1:56:21Oh, you mean this gate key here?"
1:56:23And he runs off and they get into the castle for the last momentous bit where you have
1:56:29have to save the princess and stop the six-fingered man who is Christopher Guest.
1:56:36More great actors in this movie. Well that's a nice showdown where he can't
1:56:40move too, right? And the prince is there and it's unclear whether he has any
1:56:46strength or not to get up from the bed but he talks the prince into giving up
1:56:51without a fight. Yeah what is the line he uses? Something about pain? To the pain.
1:56:57To the pain not to the death. Yeah, nice this great kind of like rousing speech as to how he will make you know
1:57:04He's life misery
1:57:06He'll cut off all of his arms and legs and
1:57:08Yes, as you keep and I'll tell you why
1:57:12Yeah
1:57:15portable
1:57:16and I
1:57:18Really enjoyed this whole scene as a lot of action in it and I like
1:57:23Diego's scene with his retribution, you know that that's that's a good scene
1:57:28And it kind of you know, it ends it ends nicely. Everybody's happy
1:57:33And the grandson ends up in having enjoyed the book and then you get you know
1:57:38The payoff the payoff as you wish as you wish at the end
1:57:42You know saying that somehow in some sort of time in some sort of like time-traveling timeline because how could it be?
1:57:49Yeah, because it's hundreds of years
1:57:52- Yes, well.
1:57:53(laughing)
1:57:54Oh, that grandpa, he says crazy stuff.
1:57:56- I really enjoyed this movie.
1:57:58- Good, I'm glad.
1:57:59Were the accents acceptable to you?
1:58:00Because there were some Americans
1:58:02doing British accents in this movie.
1:58:04- It was, so I was confused by it a lot
1:58:10because I kind of couldn't understand
1:58:12where they were attempting to have this movie set.
1:58:17- That's 'cause Americans don't understand
1:58:18about regional British accents.
1:58:20It's just fairytale Britain is where it's set.
1:58:23- Well, there's just no-- - Except it's actually Florin,
1:58:24it's actually Florin and Gilder, so it's,
1:58:27which are currencies, but, you know,
1:58:31so theoretically that could be like Italy,
1:58:33but it's just, it's nowhere.
1:58:35But most of them, most people, with some exceptions,
1:58:38are trying on English accents to some degree,
1:58:41fake and not fake.
1:58:42- So my problem with it is there's no commitment.
1:58:45Like there's no, nobody will commit to a certain,
1:58:49So they will not get everybody to commit to a certain accent, right?
1:58:52Because you have a Spanish guy, you have a French guy,
1:58:55you have Americans pretending to be English,
1:58:57you have Americans that just don't even care and are just being American and
1:59:01saying they're Sicilian.
1:59:02Yeah. Well, it's more like there are New Yorkers in this movie.
1:59:06Yeah.
1:59:07The Miracle Max and the, and the, uh, and,
1:59:10and Vizini are both sort of just doing New York accents and, and, and, uh,
1:59:14Miracle Max's wife, Valerie too.
1:59:17- So I had, even though everybody's talking British,
1:59:20well, a lot of the main characters
1:59:21are talking in British accents,
1:59:22and that's because it's medieval times.
1:59:24Many, many, many, many medieval time movies,
1:59:27everybody has British accents.
1:59:28I don't know where this started,
1:59:30but it seems like something that I've seen a bunch.
1:59:32I assumed that it was Italy,
1:59:34because Florin sounds, and Florian Gilder sounds Italian,
1:59:38and obviously you've got Vassini, who's Sicilian.
1:59:41Like, it just kind of made sense to me
1:59:43that it would be Italy.
1:59:44- Yeah, it is made up though.
1:59:46I mean, Gilder was a Holy Roman Empire currency,
1:59:51and a Florin was a, I think that was an Italian currency,
1:59:55and they're named, so Florin and Gilder
1:59:57are just named for currencies.
2:00:00It's the Florence currency was the Florin.
2:00:02So it's all made up.
2:00:04- The setting doesn't really give anything.
2:00:08- No.
2:00:09- It kind of could be anywhere in the world.
2:00:10- Lots of hills and a little medieval city, and yeah.
2:00:13- But I enjoyed it.
2:00:15I really did enjoy it.
2:00:16- I'm glad you did.
2:00:17- My girlfriend didn't.
2:00:19- Oh.
2:00:19- I don't know why she--
2:00:21- Oh.
2:00:22No reasons given?
2:00:24- She just didn't think it was very entertaining.
2:00:27That was kind of her, she just didn't really--
2:00:29- She hates me now.
2:00:30- Probably.
2:00:30I don't know how she's gonna feel after my next assignment.
2:00:36- What's your next assignment, Myke?
2:00:37- So I enjoyed this enough that I would like to do it again
2:00:41and we're gonna do it again next week.
2:00:43And this is because basically I know that The Princess Bride
2:00:46is kind of important to you, it's a movie that you enjoy.
2:00:50- I love it, yeah.
2:00:51- But there's a movie that is extremely important to you,
2:00:56that references are made and I don't get them.
2:01:00And it's about time that I do, and that's Real Genius.
2:01:03- Yes.
2:01:04- So I'm going to watch Real Genius
2:01:06in between now and next week's episode,
2:01:08and we will do a second Myke Watches a Movie vertical.
2:01:10This is not gonna be every week, by the way.
2:01:12No. Although it may recur.
2:01:16Yeah, and I think there's a fun in it because you are obviously a man who very much enjoys movies.
2:01:25You know, The Incorporated shows that, of course.
2:01:28And I also very much enjoy movies, but I have big gaping holes in my movie history.
2:01:39And I don't even want to tell you about some of them,
2:01:41or we'll be doing this forever.
2:01:43(laughing)
2:01:44And so I think, yeah, I think it might be fun.
2:01:46I think it might be fun.
2:01:47We're doing it at the end of the show,
2:01:48and people can choose if they want to listen or not.
2:01:50- Exactly.
2:01:51- So--
2:01:52- I have one more note about "The Princess Bride"
2:01:54just to say one of the reasons
2:01:55that I think it's interesting and relevant
2:01:56is that the director of this movie is Rob Reiner,
2:01:59and I think one of the reasons people are,
2:02:03it's an interesting run of films for him,
2:02:05because Rob Reiner's first seven films are all
2:02:10consensus, critically acclaimed movies.
2:02:15It wasn't until his eighth film that he made a bad movie.
2:02:18His first seven are all kind of great.
2:02:21So his first feature was this,
2:02:24and he was known as a sitcom actor.
2:02:25He was Archie Bunker's son on "All in the Family."
2:02:30And then he made these movies.
2:02:32He made this a Spinal Tap.
2:02:33Have you seen this a Spinal Tap, Myke?
2:02:35- No.
2:02:36- Oh, Myke, put it on the list.
2:02:38(laughing)
2:02:39- We'll be doing it forever.
2:02:40- Then he made "The Sure Thing,"
2:02:41which is an 80s romantic comedy, teen sex comedy,
2:02:44but it's a really good one.
2:02:46Then he did "Stand By Me."
2:02:48Have you seen "Stand By Me," Myke?
2:02:50- Hmm.
2:02:51- Oh, Myke.
2:02:52Then "The Princess Bride," then "When Harry Met Sally,"
2:02:55then "Misery," and "A Few Good Men."
2:02:58Those were his first seven movies.
2:03:00They're all pretty good.
2:03:01Then he made "North," not good.
2:03:03(laughing)
2:03:04And since then, he has not made very many good movies.
2:03:07But those first seven are all pretty good,
2:03:11and you've probably not seen any of them,
2:03:13except "Princess Bride."
2:03:15- Let me look again.
2:03:16- Have you seen "A Few Good Men"?
2:03:18"Misery"? - No.
2:03:19- "When Harry Met Sally"?
2:03:20- Yes. - Okay.
2:03:21- I'm sorry.
2:03:25Anyway, anyway, so a great run of movies including This Is Spinal Tap which is also, This Is
2:03:32Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride, and When Harry Met Sally are all in my top 25 probably.
2:03:37So three movies from one director is pretty outstanding but he had a really good 1980s.
2:03:43Really good 1980s.
2:03:44I feel like the Myke watches a movie that could just be renamed the Jason is disappointed
2:03:50in Myke photo.
2:03:51That'll be a subtitle.
2:03:55Myke watches a movie, Jason is disappointed.
2:03:57But, you know, we'll get feedback from the listeners.
2:04:01I think putting it at the end is a good decision
2:04:03'cause people can just dump out
2:04:04if they don't wanna listen to us talk about a movie.
2:04:06But, you know, there's a precedent for this.
2:04:09I recall John Groover and Dan Benjamin
2:04:10talking about Bond movies.
2:04:12And if something comes up that it turns out you haven't seen
2:04:15and you feel like you need to see it,
2:04:17or I feel like you need to see it,
2:04:19then maybe we'll revisit this.
2:04:20So we will do "Real Genius."
2:04:22We will talk about that.
2:04:23'Cause why not?
2:04:24'Cause I want to watch it, I do want to watch it.
2:04:27I have to admit, I have listened to the entire episode
2:04:31of Defocus that you did.
2:04:32I am one of those people.
2:04:35- Who listens to podcasts about things
2:04:38they haven't seen or read.
2:04:39- Yep, which probably helps with my being able
2:04:42to get the pop culture references.
2:04:45- It's like you've seen it.
2:04:46- I know.
2:04:47So I will watch it, but I don't, I kind of listen to it,
2:04:52but when you listen to those things,
2:04:53It doesn't necessarily all go in, I don't think.
2:04:56But I am excited to see Real Genius.
2:05:00- Okay, it's very 80s, be prepared.
2:05:02Put on some leg warmers.
2:05:03- I'll do what I can.
2:05:05I didn't get a lot of the 80s, so this can be my 80s time.
2:05:10Thank you so much for listening
2:05:11to this week's episode of Upgrade.
2:05:14If you want to find the show notes for this week,
2:05:16you can check your podcast application of choice
2:05:19or go to relay.fm/upgrade/21.
2:05:22If you'd like to find Mr. Jason Snell on the internet, he is at SixColors.com and of course
2:05:27TheIncomparable.com as well, or he is on Twitter.
2:05:30He is @JSNELL, J-S-N-E-L-L-L.
2:05:33I am @imike, I-M-Y-K-E.
2:05:35This show is a production of TheGloriousRelay.fm.
2:05:39You can find our other shows at Relay.fm.
2:05:41Thanks again to our sponsors this week, Linda, Squarespace, Stamps.com and MailRoute.
2:05:47And thank you most of all for listening.
2:05:49We'll be back next time.
2:05:51Until then, buh-bye.
2:05:52Bye bye.
2:05:53[MUSIC PLAYING]
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