00:00:14 ◼ ► and I can't think of any better occasion to break my procrastination streak on inviting you here
00:00:28 ◼ ► what, a week or so ago? Yeah. Yeah, about, I guess, a week ago yesterday. And the reason is
00:00:35 ◼ ► that Hunter, you are the developer of a fantastic and I think very long standing iPhone app called
00:00:45 ◼ ► Took us a couple of weeks to get through that initial app review, but since 2008. So yeah,
00:00:50 ◼ ► it's a fairly niche travel app for people that are doing Las Vegas stuff, but it's long standing.
00:01:02 ◼ ► But let's warm up with a totally utterly uncontroversial topic just to welcome you to the
00:01:10 ◼ ► show, guns. Yeah, no opinions there. Did you see though the news that Twitter, well now X, has,
00:01:21 ◼ ► you know how they have their own custom emoji set? Oh yes, yes, I did see this. I know what
00:01:26 ◼ ► you're going to say. So A, why does Zandy, to me the broader topic is why any of these services
00:01:34 ◼ ► have custom emoji sets, but B, I think we can, I will put a link to the Emojipedia article about
00:01:43 ◼ ► this in the show notes so people can look at it and see the before and afters. But like prior to
00:01:48 ◼ ► 2017, I want to say, I guess it might be one of the original emoji from whenever they started in Japan
00:01:58 ◼ ► that one of them is a gun and until 2017, they all looked like real guns, usually handguns like
00:02:08 ◼ ► a revolver type thing. And then in 2017, Apple broke the seal and changed their gun emoji to
00:02:16 ◼ ► look like a kid's squirt gun. It's a little grain see through. It's clearly a squirt gun.
00:02:21 ◼ ► And I guess it was somewhat controversial at the time in terms of that's just a euphemism, blah,
00:02:28 ◼ ► blah, blah. But in short order, I think within two or three years, all of the other people,
00:02:34 ◼ ► companies that make emoji, whether it's Google for Android, Microsoft for Windows, all of the
00:02:41 ◼ ► various other services, changed their guns to look like toy guns. And for a few years, they've all
00:02:49 ◼ ► been toy guns, squirt guns, toy space guns, something like that. And leave it to Elon Musk.
00:03:02 ◼ ► Jared: And you know, that was like his decision, right? I mean, there's no question as to who's
00:03:07 ◼ ► in charge of where did this come from? I mean, I guess we don't know for sure, but really, I mean,
00:03:22 ◼ ► Pete Because isn't it, it is a very Elon move where it's going to, what did they say? Own the
00:03:30 ◼ ► libs? Right? I personally have mixed feelings about the whole thing. I kind of feel like once
00:03:39 ◼ ► everybody went to squirt gun, toy guns, what's done is done and the whole world should have
00:03:45 ◼ ► left that be. I will go back to 2017 and there's a part of me that, it's not that I'm pro-gun,
00:03:54 ◼ ► I don't own guns in US political parlance, I'm pretty far to the left in terms of how much
00:04:01 ◼ ► additional gun regulation I would personally support. I kind of, I'm on board with the idea
00:04:07 ◼ ► that American gun culture is crazy, for lack of a better word, and harmful. I mean, we're kind of
00:04:16 ◼ ► joking, but I also kind of feel like euphemisms over serious issues don't help. So, does it
00:04:22 ◼ ► actually help the issue? What's the real issue with guns is, to me, the real issue is people
00:04:32 ◼ ► getting hurt who shouldn't be hurt, who wouldn't be hurt if there weren't so many guns in the world.
00:04:37 ◼ ► Pete It's the actual injuries and the violence that guns beget. The iconography of the emojis
00:04:59 ◼ ► did, I don't think there was, I don't think there was like a particularly gruesome school shooting
00:05:07 ◼ ► or something that precipitated it. I kind of just feel like at some point, and I don't think anybody
00:05:14 ◼ ► would think Apple was ever comfortable with the fact that one of their icon designers had to draw
00:05:21 ◼ ► a realistic looking gun at some point. It's off brand for Apple. If emojis were a proprietary
00:05:29 ◼ ► Apple technology, the whole thing, there would, I mean, obviously, I don't think there would be
00:05:33 ◼ ► a gun. There wouldn't be a toy gun. Right? Right. Right. Probably not. And it's just one of those
00:05:38 ◼ ► things. And the other one in the, and again, I think it speaks to Japanese culture, too. But it
00:05:47 ◼ ► also speaks to the fact that emoji go back 20 some years. The other one that stands out to me as,
00:05:54 ◼ ► oh man, I bet Apple wishes they could just get it out of the whole Unicode specification is the
00:06:08 ◼ ► effectively originally. I mean, I would certainly think it predates the existence of the iPhone.
00:06:18 ◼ ► And all things considered, I'm sure Apple wishes that weren't an emoji. But with a cigarette,
00:06:25 ◼ ► what's the euphemism? Right? Like, how would you possibly make something else that technically
00:06:38 ◼ ► but I don't know how you would represent, A, I don't know how you could possibly draw an icon.
00:06:43 ◼ ► Maybe I lack the imagination of a truly talented designer. But a candy cigarette, A, pretty much
00:06:51 ◼ ► looks like a real cigarette, at least in terms of emoji artwork, and B, candy cigarettes themselves
00:07:06 ◼ ► Jared I think I'm a couple years younger than you are, but not by much. I definitely remember them,
00:07:10 ◼ ► and I guess, yeah, I never really thought about it, but they've kind of just phased out,
00:07:13 ◼ ► I mean, unsurprisingly, they phase out, and I don't think you find them anywhere anymore.
00:07:27 ◼ ► they were almost like Mad Magazine parodies of real cigarette brands. So, I forget what the fake
00:07:34 ◼ ► names, but they, you know, there'd be some pun on Marlboro, some pun on Camel, and some pun on
00:07:43 ◼ ► Palmao or whatever old timey cigarette brands there were. But I remember buying them, and then
00:07:51 ◼ ► Jared Oh, so bad. So bad. Yes. Terrible. And the dust stuff that they would put in them to see,
00:07:57 ◼ ► I feel like they're related in more ways than one, which is A, they're taboo subjects at this point
00:08:04 ◼ ► in our culture, because they both kill people, right, effectively. But the other thing is that,
00:08:11 ◼ ► at least when I was a kid, we would, if we didn't have candy cigarettes, we would still,
00:08:18 ◼ ► we'd make pretend ones out of rolled up paper, you know, like, not because we wanted to smoke per se,
00:08:24 ◼ ► just because we thought it looked cool, right, if you're pretending. And if we didn't have toy guns
00:08:31 ◼ ► handy, we would make toy guns out of sticks. Jared Right. Yeah. Something totally, totally did
00:08:36 ◼ ► the same thing. There's just something about that stuff. I don't know if it's because you see it on
00:08:38 ◼ ► TV or what, music's cool, rock stars are smoking or see the hero on the, on a TV show shooting the
00:08:49 ◼ ► people who smoked and looked cool and lots of movies where people shot guns and looked cool
00:09:03 ◼ ► But when he was grade school aged, it was a thing of, like, some parents were no toy guns. I mean,
00:09:15 ◼ ► it's, it's, it's, it's, that's a level even below the, hey, do you have real guns in your house?
00:09:29 ◼ ► you know, do you want to have a play date at your house? And they'll say like, hey, this is
00:09:33 ◼ ► uncomfortable, but we don't, we're no guns family, do you have guns in your house or something like
00:09:37 ◼ ► that? I don't remember that coming up so much because I think in our school's social circle,
00:09:43 ◼ ► it was sort of assumed that parents didn't, but the toy gun thing would come up. It was like a
00:09:49 ◼ ► thing, like, we're a no toy gun family. And we weren't, we, Jonas had all the toy guns he wanted,
00:09:56 ◼ ► which, you know, we're all like Star Wars guns and stuff like that. But even those, by the time,
00:10:02 ◼ ► 15 years ago, when he was four or five years old, like the Han Solo DL-44 blaster was bright orange.
00:10:15 ◼ ► judge me as you will as a father. Some listeners are going to say, yeah, now that's a good dad.
00:10:21 ◼ ► Others are going to say, wow, that was terrible. But he dressed as Han Solo one year for Halloween.
00:10:28 ◼ ► And I bought spray paint and black and silver spray paint and spray painted his orange blaster,
00:10:36 ◼ ► mostly black and then made the tip look silver. I think I'm not a real crafty person, but I actually
00:10:43 ◼ ► was very pleased with the way it turned out to make it look more like Han Solo's actual blaster.
00:10:53 ◼ ► there being like some concern about having a toy gun that looked too realistic because of
00:11:00 ◼ ► Pete Yeah, that was definitely a thing, right? And I remember even, and I'm 51, so I mean,
00:11:06 ◼ ► I'm pretty old, but even when I was a kid, they started putting like a little red tip on the end.
00:11:12 ◼ ► And of course, the first thing me and my friends would do whenever we got a new toy gun is take it
00:11:16 ◼ ► out, right? But then they started making the entire guns like the emoji. They would be bright
00:11:23 ◼ ► green or bright orange or some color that no actual firing firearm would ever look like.
00:11:30 ◼ ► And again, politics aside, just the actual safety, that's a real issue. There have been kids with
00:11:39 ◼ ► toy guns who've been shot by police because they had these realistic looking toy guns. So I mean,
00:11:45 ◼ ► that's a real issue. But the thing where I'm getting at, though, is in the same way that when
00:11:49 ◼ ► I was a kid, I certainly wasn't allowed to smoke cigarettes, but I would pretend with candy or
00:11:54 ◼ ► whatever. I observed it with Jonas's no guns friends, the kids that the friend and again,
00:12:00 ◼ ► I'm not judging the parents. I totally understand. I really am not judging. I it's one of those
00:12:05 ◼ ► things where it's I see both sides. I don't know if we did it the right way or not. But I can think
00:12:10 ◼ ► of several of his friends from grade school who were no toy guns, no toy guns. And those were the
00:12:15 ◼ ► kids who pick up any stick like a ruler, and then they would hold it in their hand like it was a
00:12:21 ◼ ► gun. Right, right. And my wife and I were like, Well, what should we do? Like, should we say,
00:12:25 ◼ ► Hey, you're not supposed to do that? Because we know that their parents had told us no,
00:12:29 ◼ ► no toy guns. Like what do you do if a kid just picks up a stick on the sidewalk and decides it's
00:12:34 ◼ ► a gun? And it's all fraught. I don't and I just don't want to judge. But here we are with this
00:12:42 ◼ ► emoji thing. And I just feel like why would you go back the other way rather than to just
00:12:48 ◼ ► purposefully shit stir? I mean, we think that's the reason I mean, I can't think of any other
00:12:53 ◼ ► better explanation. Right. So I give a thumbs down. I give a hmm, I don't know if it was the
00:13:03 ◼ ► right decision seven years ago for the whole industry to move from photo realistic or not photo
00:13:09 ◼ ► realistic, you know what I mean? Icon realistic, real guns to toy guns. But I kind of if you really
00:13:16 ◼ ► wanted me to give, I guess I would say yeah, I approve. Because why? Why? Why have a real gun?
00:13:29 ◼ ► but why would you ever go back after this? And then the other thing at a technical level, again,
00:13:35 ◼ ► I said this when I brought up the topic. I don't know why a company like Twitter has their own
00:13:40 ◼ ► emoji set period. Right. And they all do right? Twitter, Slack, any kind of these tools, they all
00:13:45 ◼ ► kind of seem to have their own version that are usually not as good or they're slow to get updates
00:13:50 ◼ ► or whatever. I mean, just not great. I was, oh, Jon, I was gonna ask you. So actually, this made
00:13:57 ◼ ► me wonder, and maybe you know from briefings or whatever, how, with something like Genmoji,
00:14:06 ◼ ► I really have no idea. Because with the briefings I had, we weren't allowed to do it ourselves. You
00:14:13 ◼ ► know, it was all we got a small group, three people in the press, two people from Apple,
00:14:19 ◼ ► and we got to see them go through a script. And I don't even know if I got to see them do Genmoji.
00:14:26 ◼ ► I don't think they did. I don't even, I think that's so early that they didn't even demo it
00:14:30 ◼ ► to us in private, let alone let us try to do it. And I can't help but think that that's more than
00:14:37 ◼ ► half the battle of, you know, why this is actually a complicated feature fraught with concerns from
00:14:53 ◼ ► is off the charts? Even with the stuff that's built in? I mean, obviously, we can think of
00:14:57 ◼ ► all sorts of stuff that the image playgrounds or whatever those tools are going to generate, but
00:15:02 ◼ ► there is a gun emoji, right? So it's kind of already within that realm. So are they going
00:15:06 ◼ ► to limit that? And that's an interesting question. Yeah, I really don't know. But I gotta give a
00:15:11 ◼ ► thumbs down, but a no surprise. And I'm actually surprised that it wasn't like the second thing he
00:15:16 ◼ ► did when he bought Twitter two years ago. But the other thing about everybody having their own
00:15:29 ◼ ► uses the iOS emoji set in the app. It's on the web where you get their custom emoji. So
00:15:36 ◼ ► depending on whether you're looking at it in the native app on your phone, or looking at it in the
00:15:43 ◼ ► web on your desktop computer, you get a totally different emoji, not in this case with now that
00:15:50 ◼ ► they've changed their gun, right? It's not just a different artwork style. Now it to me has a
00:15:55 ◼ ► different semantic meaning. Yeah, yeah. Definitely true. I does that rolled out already. I know I
00:16:00 ◼ ► saw the story about it. But yeah, I think so. Okay. I presume I don't know. Yeah, I guess I
00:16:04 ◼ ► should have checked before I open the show with an entire segment about it. All right, let me take a
00:16:11 ◼ ► break here and thank our first sponsor. It is a new sponsor on the show though a long time or
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00:16:45 ◼ ► I mispronounced things, SCIM provisioning, role based access control, audit trails, etc.
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00:18:08 ◼ ► sign up, they'll ask you where you heard of it. Tell them it came from Daring Fireball or the
00:18:18 ◼ ► Got it out of the system. Before we move on though to talking about the Mirage and Vegas,
00:18:28 ◼ ► Glasgow? Yeah. Last week. Thoughts? Well, I mean, I mean, it just, it is kind of amazing that
00:18:36 ◼ ► something like that, as it's been described and I say, we should explain what kind of what happened,
00:18:41 ◼ ► but as it's just been described, could have such a big impact. I mean, CrowdStrike is a security
00:18:46 ◼ ► software vendor. They sell software into enterprises for, I think Windows only. I don't
00:18:51 ◼ ► know. Do they have Mac and Linux? Yeah, I think so. But it's definitely Windows focused. They
00:18:56 ◼ ► issued an update. And since their software runs at the kernel level, the update was, had some kind of
00:19:02 ◼ ► flaw. And so as soon as it was applied, it wrecked all these machines and put them into blue screen
00:19:07 ◼ ► mode, where my understanding is that to recover them, you had to literally sit down in front of
00:19:12 ◼ ► them and boot into the local administrator, remove some files and then reboot again. So we saw on the
00:19:18 ◼ ► news photos of walking through the airports and just blue screens everywhere and people's planes
00:19:28 ◼ ► Were you hit by it in any way? No, not at all. I had some friends that had some travel stuff
00:19:34 ◼ ► that got messed up, but all of my stuff is either Apple on all my devices or service stuff is Linux.
00:19:42 ◼ ► So no, thankfully. And I wasn't traveling either. So I didn't personally run into it, but we were
00:19:48 ◼ ► having some work done at the, on the house. We're having a roof deck project put in and one of the
00:19:53 ◼ ► contractors, the day that it hit, he typically goes to the gym before he comes to the house,
00:19:58 ◼ ► like 6am. Couldn't get into the gym because their computer that scans the IDs was down and they
00:20:05 ◼ ► didn't know what to do. And he was like, well, I only, I think they should have just let any
00:20:11 ◼ ► everybody in, but they didn't know. So they weren't letting people, they just didn't know what to do.
00:20:15 ◼ ► And he's like, ah, screw it. I'll come back after work. I don't know what's going on. And Ben
00:20:19 ◼ ► Thompson, my dithering co-host, he was actually traveling that day. But his flight was a one hour
00:20:26 ◼ ► delay, which ordinarily would make somebody be like, ah, of course I got a one hour delay. Sucks.
00:20:32 ◼ ► But on a day when 3,400 flights canceled across the country, a one hour delay feels like winning
00:20:40 ◼ ► the lottery. So unreal. I know you guys talked about it. I think it was on dithering, just how
00:20:45 ◼ ► the fact that it does run CrowdStrike software runs in kernel space instead of in user space and
00:20:50 ◼ ► the contrast with Apple and how the Mac OS X and just how the EU regulation may be a component of
00:21:02 ◼ ► I also wonder how does Windows not have some kind of, I've just booted 10 times and I keep coming
00:21:07 ◼ ► up. Can I have like boot into safe mode or something? Pete: Right, right. Can't something
00:21:11 ◼ ► happen automatically where it would disable, hey, three straight corrupt boots in a row. How about
00:21:18 ◼ ► we reboot with all kernel extensions disabled to see what happens? I don't know. You would think,
00:21:24 ◼ ► it's been a long time since I knew Windows intimately, but I've heard that there is some
00:21:29 ◼ ► kind of upcoming feature for already been talked about and it's something that Linux already has
00:21:40 ◼ ► It's called EBL or something like that. And it's coming to Windows and it might prevent something
00:21:46 ◼ ► like this from ever happening again. But the other thing I've heard since Ben and I talked about it,
00:22:02 ◼ ► because this is just a very typical EU regulatory angle, which is that for a long time,
00:22:12 ◼ ► like the recurring theme that I keep coming back to is that the EU seems to have a perspective of
00:22:19 ◼ ► the way things used to be is the way things should remain. And it is a cultural difference. I mean,
00:22:27 ◼ ► in it, it is also exemplified in the European hiring laws where it is harder to fire people
00:22:36 ◼ ► or to do layoffs in Europe than it is in America and in Asia and other places around the world.
00:22:43 ◼ ► In other words, once you've hired people, it's harder to get rid of them or to fire them for
00:22:48 ◼ ► whatever reason, whether it's because you don't think they're doing a good job or whether the
00:22:52 ◼ ► profits are down and you need to do layoffs or you want to do layoffs to bolster your bottom line or
00:22:59 ◼ ► whatever the reason. And again, I do have opinions on that. I kind of, I have an American-centric
00:23:06 ◼ ► viewpoint, but I'm even willing to step back and say, well, both sides are valid. I do see
00:23:10 ◼ ► their perspective on that. But on the regulatory front, it's in this case, Windows used to have no
00:23:17 ◼ ► built-in antivirus security, whatever else you want to call it, protection software. And there
00:23:26 ◼ ► was a long while where Windows was sort of notorious for being like a virus magnet that,
00:23:33 ◼ ► man, you just typical consumer, you're surfing the web and you download something and the .zip
00:23:38 ◼ ► file opens automatically and a .exe just runs automatically because that's how the browser
00:23:43 ◼ ► was configured. And boom, now you've got a virus. Or you double click a Word document and the Word
00:23:49 ◼ ► document has a VB script that's somehow taking advantage of an exploit. And just because you
00:23:55 ◼ ► opened this Word document, now your computer is infected with some kind of virus, blah, blah, blah.
00:24:00 ◼ ► Microsoft eventually, A, tightened that down just without adding an extra tool or anything. They just
00:24:09 ◼ ► sort of addressed the problems in the operating system. And some of them are understandable in
00:24:15 ◼ ► terms of an operating system evolving from the late 80s when there was no networking at all,
00:24:24 ◼ ► period, let alone the internet, right? And to the modern day world of every computer is on
00:24:43 ◼ ► that there'd be this one network, non-proprietary, open standards, and all computers from all makers
00:24:53 ◼ ► are all on the same network and can communicate with each other. It was like, well, that's like
00:24:57 ◼ ► a fantasy, but that's the world today. I get it, but the idea is that it's called Windows Defender
00:25:03 ◼ ► is the built-in protection tool. And I don't even think they sell it though. I don't think so.
00:25:09 ◼ ► Matthew: I don't think so. Maybe if you get like one of their subscriptions, there's an add-on to
00:25:15 ◼ ► Pete: Right. But the EU perspective is, well, wait, there grew to be this cottage industry
00:25:21 ◼ ► of third-party tools that companies or consumers at different levels of protection or different
00:25:27 ◼ ► levels of complexity would install. And if Microsoft is going to add their own, they need,
00:25:42 ◼ ► Even though Microsoft is the company that makes Windows, their Windows Defender should be on the
00:25:47 ◼ ► same equal footing. And if Windows Defender runs in kernel space, then third-party tools should also
00:25:55 ◼ ► be allowed to continue running in kernel space. And that's how we got to where we are, where
00:26:00 ◼ ► CrowdStrike runs. And yeah, that's Microsoft's perspective on this, but I think there's some
00:26:06 ◼ ► truth to it. And the thing that I've heard, I got a couple of emails from people, they're all
00:26:12 ◼ ► little birdies, I can't say who they are. They all ask for anonymity. But basically though, what I
00:26:17 ◼ ► heard from a few people after that dithering episode was that if you want to defend the
00:26:24 ◼ ► European Commission and say, "Ah, it's not their fault. This is all Microsoft's fault," point to
00:26:29 ◼ ► the law that says that CrowdStrike has to run in kernel space. And you can't really, there is no,
00:26:37 ◼ ► it's not like where the DMA says specifically that a gatekeeping platform like iOS can't only
00:26:47 ◼ ► have a first-party app store, right? That's one of the things in the DMA that's not ambiguous.
00:26:52 ◼ ► It's very clear that part of compliance with the DMA is that iOS has to allow third-party
00:26:58 ◼ ► marketplaces and sideloading. There's no thing you can point to that says Windows had to allow
00:27:05 ◼ ► CrowdStrike to run in kernel space. But what I heard is that it's like a soft agreement. It's
00:27:12 ◼ ► like a handshake. They went to Microsoft and behind the scenes, they said, "This is going to be an
00:27:17 ◼ ► issue." And Microsoft's like, "All right, we'll just let security tools continue to run in kernel
00:27:28 ◼ ► Matthew 4 That's interesting. I wonder how many of those kinds of side agreements there are with
00:27:31 ◼ ► this sort of stuff, right? Especially as we talk about Apple and the DMA. I mean, what else is
00:27:37 ◼ ► Right. And there are, like I often argue, or I try to often argue, anything that's a hard decision
00:27:45 ◼ ► has trade-offs. And you have to, it's, you're probably wrong if you see it only in white or
00:27:53 ◼ ► black. It's this shade of gray, and there are trade-offs. And the alternate world where
00:28:10 ◼ ► rolling thing. So, they didn't just do it all at once, but it was more and more restrictive
00:28:16 ◼ ► Right. And it was like, like they started closing some of the APIs for kernel extensions, they
00:28:23 ◼ ► started doing things like requiring a reboot and sort of like Windows going into not safe mode.
00:28:39 ◼ ► and for example, our good friends at Rogue Amoeba who make good software like AudioHijack, which
00:28:44 ◼ ► we're using to record the show, have had to, you know, which is, it's not even kernel extensions,
00:28:52 ◼ ► it's, I forget these audio driver extensions, but they do run, rather than think about kernel space
00:28:58 ◼ ► specifically, it's better to think about, I think, broader just software that is running with higher
00:29:06 ◼ ► level of privileges, right? It's about privilege escalation and running with lower access to the
00:29:13 ◼ ► actual hardware, fewer abstractions that protect the rest of the system from what you're doing.
00:29:21 ◼ ► things like sandboxing for apps, where apps just get their own little space of the file system,
00:29:27 ◼ ► that's all they can see, and therefore they can't even read files outside their own sandbox,
00:29:33 ◼ ► let alone corrupt, keep the whole computer from booting. There's different levels of that.
00:29:38 ◼ ► But in some alternate world where Microsoft had shut off access to kernel space privileges
00:29:46 ◼ ► for tools like Crowdspace when Apple did with Mac OS, I don't think it would be a disaster
00:29:53 ◼ ► for Windows, and it probably wouldn't have put CrowdStrike out of business, but I don't know.
00:30:02 ◼ ► they're able to run at, I mean, it's, and I don't know all the details of exactly how this happened,
00:30:07 ◼ ► but the fact that A, they deployed this up to CrowdStrike, deployed this update to all of their
00:30:12 ◼ ► customers at the same time, it seems. Whoops. And they did cache in their own internal testing,
00:30:16 ◼ ► it seems like it was a pretty ubiquitous issue. How did it not come up? So both of those things
00:30:26 ◼ ► how did that happen? And I did read, I mean, and it is so unbalanced where to deliver this
00:30:44 ◼ ► updates every Thursday night or something like that. I don't know if it's every week or month,
00:30:48 ◼ ► but apparently last Thursday night, every CrowdStrike client that was currently running
00:30:54 ◼ ► and is connected to the internet, downloaded an automatic software update, and that put it into
00:30:59 ◼ ► this boot loop of Doom. And yet the fix is instead of something that could happen automatically,
00:31:07 ◼ ► because these machines are booting, that it's this manual, multiple reboots with physical access
00:31:14 ◼ ► of a person right in front of the computer to fix it, presumably one of the things they'll change is
00:31:20 ◼ ► maybe some kind of slower rollout. I think they've actually already said that they're going to do
00:31:25 ◼ ► that, right? And that's a very common industry standard thing. So it's kind of like, okay, guys,
00:31:30 ◼ ► we're glad you figured that one out. But I think that they've already committed to doing,
00:31:56 ◼ ► who's the head of Instagram and Threads at Meta, he'll post on Threads like, hey, we're rolling out
00:32:01 ◼ ► a new feature where you swipe to the right on a thread to market as something. We're rolling this
00:32:08 ◼ ► out to customers over the next week or two, let us know what you think. And it's, I'll try it.
00:32:14 ◼ ► It doesn't work for me. I tried in two or three days. Oh, now it works. And if you're a nerd and
00:32:20 ◼ ► you're like me and you'd like to blog about it, I kind of wish, yeah, gimme, gimme, I'd like to
00:32:25 ◼ ► try it so I can write about it. But I'm not a paying customer, right? It's a free social network.
00:32:30 ◼ ► So what am I going to do? Bitch about it. But what I've heard is that the reason CrowdStrike
00:32:36 ◼ ► wasn't doing it this way all along was that all of their customers were like, what are you telling
00:32:41 ◼ ► me? That you're going to roll out an update that protects against a new threat and I might get it
00:32:46 ◼ ► next week? What? And how come these other people are getting it right away? And they were like,
00:32:56 ◼ ► Matt Fondas That makes sense. I wonder, and I presume I don't know anything about CrowdStrike
00:32:59 ◼ ► software. I also presume that the IT admins at all these companies control whether or not these
00:33:03 ◼ ► automatic updates are applied or not, right? So just like a Delta Airline, just sure, give it to
00:33:08 ◼ ► us all. I guess, right? I guess or maybe I don't even know. I don't know enough. Yeah, I don't know
00:33:13 ◼ ► if it's even optional to opt out of that. But I guess it's one of those things where you want
00:33:17 ◼ ► automatic updates. Because otherwise, what, then you'd have to go through manually to each machine.
00:33:23 ◼ ► And it's, I don't know if you have 10,000, 20,000 PCs in the fleet that are at airports around the
00:33:29 ◼ ► world for Delta. I guess you want it to be automatic to some degree. Yeah, I don't know.
00:33:35 ◼ ► It's all a mess. The basic idea, though, is that the EC, the European Commission philosophy is that
00:33:42 ◼ ► more providers is naturally better. And even if it's something like security software that has
00:33:50 ◼ ► to run in kernel space to protect at the level that it does, more is better. And I think that
00:33:58 ◼ ► from the perspective of the operating system vendors, and there just aren't that many of them.
00:34:04 ◼ ► No, I think companies like Microsoft and Apple and Google want to be able to say no, really,
00:34:12 ◼ ► at a certain level of privilege, we should be the only ones with code running in that circle.
00:34:18 ◼ ► You know, it's, and it's not to say, oh, Microsoft could never make a similar mistake. Apple could
00:34:25 ◼ ► never ship. It is theoretically possible for any of these companies. And I'm sure that the engineers
00:34:32 ◼ ► who work on software updates for any of these operating systems are very high stress jobs,
00:34:38 ◼ ► right? Like, they're like, are we good to go with iOS 17.5.2? Yes, we're good. We've, you know,
00:34:45 ◼ ► here's all the green checkmarks from the whole testing suite. Everything's passed. We've tested
00:34:51 ◼ ► on all of the supported devices. Hit the button, roll it out. And I'm sure that they're like,
00:34:57 ◼ ► fingers crossed. Let's see how it goes. And we have seen things, never quite a boot loop of doom.
00:35:04 ◼ ► But I think that even with iOS 18 Beta 3, there was a second version of it that came out. It was,
00:35:17 ◼ ► Tim Cynova It's definitely happened for sure. Yes, absolutely. It's happened. Yeah. So I don't know.
00:35:22 ◼ ► I'm now thinking about it. I don't think I want that job. I don't want to be the guy that pushed
00:35:34 ◼ ► you know, for me, it would be like, I don't know, if I make a change to the HT access file,
00:35:42 ◼ ► during Fireball, and I go to bed, right. And, and it in during Fireballs homepage doesn't load.
00:35:49 ◼ ► But I've gone to sleep, and I don't find out about it until the morning. Well, I'm gonna get right on
00:35:56 ◼ ► it first thing in the morning when I check my phone and I see all these messages like, hey,
00:35:59 ◼ ► DFs down. I'll be like, oh, shit, I should never gone to bed. Oh, why did I know exactly what I did?
00:36:04 ◼ ► I was screwing around with the HT access file. Why in the world did I not double check that before I
00:36:09 ◼ ► went to bed? Right. But the world doesn't end, right? If you ship an update to Vegas Mate,
00:36:14 ◼ ► and it works and it launches, but there's, I don't know, like a date bug, and all of a sudden,
00:36:20 ◼ ► because the date rolls around from July to August or something like that, and now it crashes on
00:36:35 ◼ ► there's gonna be some users of your app who are in Vegas at the time who are disappointed because
00:36:40 ◼ ► it's not working for the day. But it's not the end of their vacation. It's not like, it's not
00:36:45 ◼ ► chutes and ladders where they get sent home because the app on their phone, it stopped working.
00:36:55 ◼ ► this is obviously a worst case scenario where all of these important computers, and they keep
00:37:01 ◼ ► saying it's only 1% or fewer than 1% of Windows PCs, but clearly more than 1% of people in the
00:37:08 ◼ ► world were affected by this, right? And certainly more than 1% of people flying last week were
00:37:22 ◼ ► Pete Laskowski Well, we saw it when, oh man, how was it, like two or three years ago when Southwest
00:37:28 ◼ ► had the disaster? And it makes sense. You don't have to be an air traffic controller, or you don't
00:37:34 ◼ ► have to work at a flight scheduling level at an airline to realize that one day of cancelled
00:37:41 ◼ ► flights has an enormous cascading effect because most of the flights the next day are probably 85%
00:37:48 ◼ ► to 90% full already. And the more efficient the airline, the more full they already are, right?
00:37:58 ◼ ► right? And so it, yeah, just causes this cascading mess that takes, I mean, Southwest took weeks,
00:38:05 ◼ ► I think, right before they were fully backed. I mean, it definitely, you see it in an example
00:38:10 ◼ ► Right. And you wind up having to do things, and I guess the airlines sympathize with each other,
00:38:16 ◼ ► and I'm sure they don't do it for free, but it was like, yeah, we can't even get you on another
00:38:20 ◼ ► Southwest flight till the middle of next week, but we could get you on an American flight. But
00:38:25 ◼ ► you and your wife will, you know, you're going to be in 17B and she's going to be in C23F or
00:38:33 ◼ ► middle seat or something. And it's like, well, I don't know, if it gets us home, it gets us home.
00:38:43 ◼ ► though, of privilege code and areas where this affects Apple, to bring it more on topic for this
00:38:48 ◼ ► show would be with things like the way AirTags get special blessed access. Again, not quite,
00:38:59 ◼ ► it's not kernel space, but AirTags work better than any third party tracker can work. And
00:39:18 ◼ ► make their own product look better. That is a factor, for sure, right? You can't say that,
00:39:24 ◼ ► again, that's the trade off, right? That's a real thing, right? Apple does sell AirTags. That's a
00:39:30 ◼ ► commercial product that they sell. And they work better than trackers from other companies or that
00:39:38 ◼ ► aren't part of the extended APIs that Apple has now for other tracking products. But on the other
00:39:45 ◼ ► hand, you can totally understand why they don't want to give a third party code that runs at the
00:39:52 ◼ ► level that the AirTags code runs on your phone. Danny Vorpahl Right. I mean, just all the levels
00:39:59 ◼ ► and just how frequently the background access that it needs to be able to do it as well as it can
00:40:03 ◼ ► with AirTags, especially on a very power constrained device like an iPhone, you don't want to give that
00:40:08 ◼ ► away, right? You see how strict they are about that on the platform with other stuff. So yeah,
00:40:14 ◼ ► it's a trade off and they've got to be careful. So I'm sympathetic to that definitely more than
00:40:18 ◼ ► the EU seems to be. Right. I mean, I guess the best example is just what Apple, it's not again,
00:40:24 ◼ ► not a kernel space, but just what Apple's own software is allowed to do in the background.
00:40:30 ◼ ► Right. Compared to what third parties can do reliably in the background, right, before they
00:40:36 ◼ ► get cut off. And the truth is, it's probably a good idea overall that third party apps are severely
00:40:49 ◼ ► let alone privacy and whatever else that might be a factor in that. But just for battery reasons alone,
00:40:55 ◼ ► it makes sense. But on the other hand, then it implicitly gives Apple's first party software
00:41:08 ◼ ► a lot of this stuff when it comes up, I think I'm fairly sympathetic to Apple's point of view in most
00:41:14 ◼ ► cases. But yes, that is the advantage. They built the thing. I mean, they have turned it into a
00:41:20 ◼ ► massive success, at least from my perspective, with limits and with some caveats, and they should be
00:41:26 ◼ ► able to benefit from that. Right. I mean, that seems reasonable to me. I know people disagree
00:41:37 ◼ ► against the DMA and European, the European Union's regulatory system as a whole, is that, to me,
00:41:49 ◼ ► they're the ones who are most ignoring the trade offs on the other side, who are just purely saying,
00:41:57 ◼ ► hey, we're just pro competition and more tracking apps that have the same privileges as Apple's that
00:42:04 ◼ ► run that you can install and run on your iPhone, the better because that's competition. And it is
00:42:10 ◼ ► competition. That would be, and that is the way computers used to work, right? Everybody could
00:42:15 ◼ ► write an extension that ran that could totally freeze your machine in the old days. Everybody
00:42:23 ◼ ► could do it. And effectively, everybody could write system software. There was the version of
00:42:29 ◼ ► the system that came when you unboxed your computer from Apple or from Microsoft or whoever, whatever
00:42:36 ◼ ► company made the operating system on your device. But then you could install extensions that had the
00:42:41 ◼ ► exact same privileges as the system software from the vendor. Same, absolutely no difference in them.
00:42:48 ◼ ► And in the old days, it was as simple, at least on Mac OS, you would just drag an extension to
00:42:54 ◼ ► the system folder. And reboot. You did have to reboot. But you didn't even have protective
00:43:01 ◼ ► memory too. So you could write these extensions and really go poking into the system to address
00:43:06 ◼ ► space and do all kinds of wacky stuff. And there were some interesting examples of some cool hacks
00:43:11 ◼ ► that people did with that access. But now nowadays we have machines that are much more stable than we
00:43:18 ◼ ► did. I mean, I remember crashing my Mac all the time in the 90s. So I don't miss that part.
00:43:22 ◼ ► Pete: I remember, it was only two years when I worked at Barebone Software from 2000 to 2002.
00:43:29 ◼ ► And everybody at the company took a turn doing tech support. And it was, there were like facts
00:43:35 ◼ ► for some of these. And on classic Mac OS, there were a couple of crashes of BB Edit that were
00:43:41 ◼ ► telltale signs of, I think it was called OSA Menu. OSA is the Open Scripting Architecture. It was
00:43:50 ◼ ► Leonard Rosenthal wrote it. And he went on to fame at, his day job was at Adobe and he was,
00:43:56 ◼ ► I think Leonard was one of the primary authors of the original PDF specification. Super talented
00:44:02 ◼ ► engineer. Really, and was friends with, is probably still friends with Rich Siegel. But
00:44:15 ◼ ► Daniel Jowkett. But it was a system-wide scripts menu that wasn't just per application, right?
00:44:20 ◼ ► It wasn't, oh, BB Edit has its own scripts menu. Some other app has its own scripts menu. It was
00:44:25 ◼ ► a scripts menu that was in your menu bar and you could run those same scripts from any app.
00:44:30 ◼ ► And it had some bugs and it did some things and there were some just telltale crashes. But I
00:44:36 ◼ ► remember that when, but it looked to the user like it was BB Edit's fault. BB Edit crashed.
00:44:42 ◼ ► Here's what I did. And it's like, oh, and you'd write back, do you happen to have OSA Menus
00:44:48 ◼ ► installed? And they'd be like, yes, how did you know? And we'd be like, either up to, you know,
00:44:53 ◼ ► maybe there was a new, and again, this is before automatic software updates or even before notices,
00:44:58 ◼ ► right? It used to be in the nineties, it was like considered creepy for software to check for a
00:45:05 ◼ ► software update, right? Phoning home. So you might not even know, you might be way out of date. And
00:45:10 ◼ ► so that would be the easiest solution would be like, you're probably using an old version,
00:45:14 ◼ ► update to the new version, the crash will stop. If it was the latest version, it was sort of like,
00:45:19 ◼ ► unfortunately you should probably disable it, you know? And then when in the very early days of Mac
00:45:33 ◼ ► Yeah, Unsanity and their Haxes. And most of them were to bring back features from classic Mac OS
00:45:47 ◼ ► Oh, I do, yeah. I think my first Mac was SE in 1989 or something like that. So it's been a while,
00:45:57 ◼ ► Window Shade for anybody out there, and I'm sure at this point there's a lot of you who don't
00:46:02 ◼ ► remember it, but it was a fantastic extension for classic Mac OS, where you would just double click
00:46:07 ◼ ► the title of any window in any app, and the whole window would collapse to just the title bar,
00:46:18 ◼ ► and it would come back down. And it was, once you got used to it, it was super, super useful.
00:46:23 ◼ ► And especially because back then, all displays, even if you had a quote "big display," it was like
00:46:33 ◼ ► We just didn't have a lot of room to position windows side by side, and double click the menu
00:46:40 ◼ ► bar, and then Mac OS X came out, the feature went away. It was like the built-in version.
00:46:49 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm trying to remember what happens now. I mean, they've changed those behaviors,
00:46:56 ◼ ► Yeah, it looks like in the Finder, double clicking just zooms. But it was sort of like,
00:47:01 ◼ ► for at least a while on Mac OS X, it worked like the yellow button in the red, yellow, green. You
00:47:06 ◼ ► can double click the title bar, and it would shoot it into the dock. But that wasn't...
00:47:11 ◼ ► That was cooler? Well, but it didn't let you... The advantage to window shade versus moving a
00:47:19 ◼ ► window to the dock was that if you just wanted to peek behind the window, you'd double click,
00:47:25 ◼ ► and it would collapse to the title bar. You could peek, and then without moving the mouse,
00:47:33 ◼ ► you shoot the thing into the dock, now you can see what was behind it, but now you've got to
00:47:40 ◼ ► Do you remember, and this just made me think of it, do you remember this... Maybe it was only in
00:47:45 ◼ ► the initial betas of Mac OS X, the single window mode button that like, I don't think it actually
00:47:50 ◼ ► shifted the purple thing that was in there. So bizarre. Yeah, I do remember because it was also
00:47:58 ◼ ► at a weird time for Apple. Yeah, it was like a purple lozenge button on the right side. So,
00:48:05 ◼ ► on the left side of the windows, it was still the red, yellow, green, which did do the same things.
00:48:10 ◼ ► Red was closed, yellow, minimize, green, zoom, or expand. I guess now it goes to full screen.
00:48:22 ◼ ► that would put it in single window mode. But now again, I think you're right that it either,
00:48:26 ◼ ► A, never shipped or only shipped in a developer beta. Yeah, it definitely was in a developer beta
00:48:32 ◼ ► because I remember running it in, I ran all of those early seeds, but I don't think it ever made
00:48:36 ◼ ► it into a production version. No, because I think it was even before they declared 10.0
00:48:43 ◼ ► shipping product. It was like, I don't know what it was called, but I will get in here. I'm making
00:48:49 ◼ ► a note. You can verify that I'm writing this on a piece of paper here. I can verify. Jon is writing
00:48:54 ◼ ► it down. Single window mode. Now, whether it'll actually make it into the show notes, who knows,
00:48:59 ◼ ► but single window mode. But yeah, it was a purple button. And I remember reading about it. I guess I
00:49:08 ◼ ► had it, I can't remember if I ever actually used it, but I remember reading about it in
00:49:13 ◼ ► like Mac world or something. That sounds like a terrible, terrible idea. I used it. I scanned
00:49:19 ◼ ► my way. I guess the statute of limitations on this is probably up. I sort of scanned my way into the
00:49:24 ◼ ► Apple developer program back when it used to be much more expensive than it is today. They had a
00:49:30 ◼ ► thing right after they bought Next where you could say you were a Next developer and they would just
00:49:34 ◼ ► give you an Apple developer membership. I was not actually a Next developer, but I figured what the
00:49:38 ◼ ► hell, I'll fill out this form. And so I got all those seeds. I remember running all those Rhapsody
00:49:43 ◼ ► and early Mac OS X seeds. So yeah, the ones I remember running were the ones that looked
00:49:50 ◼ ► like classic Mac OS, right? Like the first, until they came up with Aqua, the early builds of what
00:49:57 ◼ ► was, I guess they called it Mac OS X. It was like called Rhapsody. Rhapsody. And then Mac OS X server
00:50:02 ◼ ► was a shipping product, which was basically like the platinum theme on essentially Next Step 5
00:50:09 ◼ ► for PowerPC. And then yeah, Rhapsody. It was the best version of the platinum user interface that
00:50:15 ◼ ► Apple ever shipped. There's like a general principle. I forget what it's called, but do
00:50:20 ◼ ► you know Benedict Evans? Yeah, sure. Yeah. Well, let me put him in the show notes. He runs a great
00:50:27 ◼ ► newsletter. He's a great follow on threads. I think he's dropped Twitter. Yeah, I think that's
00:50:32 ◼ ► right. But Benedict Evans has written about this principle at length. And the idea is that when
00:50:40 ◼ ► technologies get disrupted, the old thing that's getting disrupted is at the best it's ever going
00:50:49 ◼ ► to be. And it's in fact objectively better than the thing that's disrupting it. It's just that
00:50:56 ◼ ► there's some other factor that means that this disruptive technology is going to obviate. And
00:51:03 ◼ ► the example he often uses is propeller passenger planes versus jet planes. And that the big bird
00:51:13 ◼ ► TWA planes from the 60s with propellers were way smoother, bigger, nicer cabins than the jets from
00:51:21 ◼ ► Boeing or whoever that were taking it over. You'd just get a much nicer ride. It was just, they were
00:51:27 ◼ ► the best propeller driven big planes anybody ever made. And of course, when's the last time you've
00:51:33 ◼ ► been on a passenger plane with propellers? Right, in a while. And I was on one in the 90s. And I
00:51:38 ◼ ► remember I was very nervous about it. And then it took off and I was like, "Ah, you can't tell."
00:51:47 ◼ ► Philadelphia to Washington or something. But that happens over and over again. I would say that's
00:51:51 ◼ ► true of the old pixel perfect non-anti-alias platinum user interface. The best version ever
00:51:58 ◼ ► was the one they shipped with Mac OS X server. They did things with the colors that made,
00:52:03 ◼ ► it was slightly darker. They had better contrast between the active window and the inactive window.
00:52:08 ◼ ► And it was super fast. It was just snappy. It was like, "Wow, this is really, really fast." And then
00:52:15 ◼ ► they shipped Aqua, which looked way cooler. Oh my God, transparency. And to everything's
00:52:35 ◼ ► And it was years. It was like what, 10.2 or something when they did, I think they called
00:52:39 ◼ ► it Quartz Extreme. And they finally started to catch up with this better, I don't know if it's
00:52:47 ◼ ► I've told this story before. Let me drag it out of my memory though. I still believe I can't say
00:52:54 ◼ ► who told me this, but at one point, like 10 years ago or so, I was at WWDC and I met somebody at
00:53:00 ◼ ► Apple from higher up in the engineering department. And they were like, "Do you want to have coffee?
00:53:06 ◼ ► Are you going to be at WWDC this year?" I was like, "Of course." They were like, "I'd love
00:53:09 ◼ ► to have coffee." And I was like, "Okay." You know, it'd be fantastic. And one of the stories that I
00:53:13 ◼ ► was told was that they knew, and of course Apple knew that Aqua was super slow. And they set up
00:53:21 ◼ ► these labs where they would, they had, I don't know, a list of 10 or 20 things, like just
00:53:27 ◼ ► clicking on the file menu and using a high-speed camera to test how long does it take the menu to
00:53:33 ◼ ► draw. Dragging Windows, resizing Windows was like one of the slowest things in Mac OS X in those
00:53:40 ◼ ► early years because it was trying, rather than just dragging an outline, it was updating the
00:53:44 ◼ ► contents live as you did it. All of that was super slow. And they knew it was slow. They tested it.
00:53:52 ◼ ► Every time they do a new build, they'd rerun the tests and give numbers. But in the same lab where
00:53:56 ◼ ► they were doing it, they had Windows XP. And they would test the exact same things on Windows XP,
00:54:03 ◼ ► which they knew was their main competition. And say what you want about Windows XP, it was snappy.
00:54:10 ◼ ► Right? It was a very snappy user interface. You click a menu, it would draw instantly. And so,
00:54:16 ◼ ► they knew down to the millisecond how much slower they were than Windows XP. And they kept that
00:54:23 ◼ ► going for years. And then Windows 7 shipped. And Windows 7 was sort of like Microsoft's Aqua. It
00:54:32 ◼ ► got slower. And there was a debate inside Apple. Well, this is the new version. We should, that
00:54:38 ◼ ► should be our new competition. Let's only compare against Windows 7. But the person who I spoke to
00:54:43 ◼ ► was on the other side. Like, no, we should still benchmark against Windows XP. Just because they've
00:54:48 ◼ ► shipped a slower update doesn't mean that we should lower our standards. That's our gold
00:54:54 ◼ ► standard would be to make Mac OS X's interface snappier than Windows XP. And I thought that was
00:55:00 ◼ ► pretty cool. Now that is pretty cool. I like that story. It reminds me of the philosophy too that
00:55:05 ◼ ► the WebKit team has always had. Right. No speed regressions or something like that, right?
00:55:10 ◼ ► Right. You can't check. I don't know if that's still true, but I hope it is. And WebKit still
00:55:15 ◼ ► seems very snappy. But the idea was you can't check any change into WebKit if it results in the
00:55:23 ◼ ► overall speed of the browser being slower. And if you really, really needed to check something in
00:55:30 ◼ ► for a feature that was going to slow it down, you would, before it got checked in, you'd have to
00:55:36 ◼ ► find something else in WebKit to speed up so that the overall speed would be the same. So you can
00:55:41 ◼ ► balance it out. Yeah. Anyway. All right. Let me take a break here and thank our second sponsor of
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00:58:45 ◼ ► to them. All right, that brings us to Vegas Mate. So tell people, pitch people on Vegas Mate.
00:58:55 ◼ ► it's been an app in the store for many years now, and it's evolved quite a bit over that time.
00:59:00 ◼ ► It is kind of two main functions. One is as sort of a travel guide, so information on hotels,
00:59:07 ◼ ► restaurants, and other activities like shows and the like. And it also is a trip planning tool.
00:59:12 ◼ ► So you can use it to build out your trip like you would in maybe an old school with a piece of paper
00:59:18 ◼ ► and a calendar, but you can do it right on your phone and get all the kind of benefits that you
00:59:22 ◼ ► might expect. It's got live activities that run while you're in your trip, so you can get quick
00:59:27 ◼ ► access to phone numbers and restaurant menus and that sort of thing. There's an Apple Watch app,
00:59:31 ◼ ► it's on Vision Pro now. It's been a fun project for me because I've been able to evolve it over
00:59:37 ◼ ► time as Apple's added products, changed APIs. I mean, it's been through multiple rewrites from
00:59:43 ◼ ► Objective-C to Swift and from UIKit to SwiftUI. So yeah, it's a lot of fun, and it's free in the app
00:59:56 ◼ ► a friend of the show, Marco Arment, the creator of Overcast, which according to my analytics,
01:00:08 ◼ ► A big new update to Overcast. I keep wanting to say like 3.0 or whatever, but Marco switched his
01:00:26 ◼ ► Anticlimactic version number, and I don't know if you listen to ATP, but he said he thought about
01:00:32 ◼ ► like numbering it 10,000, but realized, oh, but then that just defeats the whole purpose of having
01:00:39 ◼ ► the date be the version number, which has its own advantages. But major rewrite in Swift, he's talked
01:00:56 ◼ ► Yeah, I think a lot of I've heard Marco talk about it on ATP and also his more developer-focused
01:01:02 ◼ ► podcast Under the Radar, and I think a lot of my experiences have been similar. I jumped on the
01:01:07 ◼ ► SwiftUI bandwagon quite early, probably before I really should have. I get excited about new stuff.
01:01:13 ◼ ► I go all in even if it's maybe not fully baked, so I think I felt some of his pains even more acutely
01:01:32 ◼ ► in a published form since 2008, so it's had a lot more time to add features. And especially in the
01:01:38 ◼ ► first couple of versions of SwiftUI, there were just not a lot of ways you could customize things.
01:01:43 ◼ ► So if the framework did something the way that you liked it and how it looked, that was great.
01:01:48 ◼ ► If it didn't, too bad. And that's gotten a lot better over time as they've added to the platform.
01:01:53 ◼ ► But I guess I should have said at the top, I really like SwiftUI. I think it's really powerful,
01:01:59 ◼ ► and I enjoy using it. It's fun to build stuff with SwiftUI, but there's clearly still a lot of
01:02:05 ◼ ► things that they can add. There's still a bunch of low-hanging fruit that needs to be addressed,
01:02:09 ◼ ► plus some interesting new ideas that I probably can't even imagine. But yeah, it's fun.
01:02:18 ◼ ► because I don't write apps, so I don't have firsthand knowledge of it. But observing it as a
01:02:24 ◼ ► user and as somebody with, I think it's safe to say, an obsessive focus on UI details, I see
01:02:34 ◼ ► certain SwiftUIisms, and I've seen them from the beginning, and I see, "Oh, I get why that's good."
01:02:40 ◼ ► And then I see other things, and I see how this is sort of frustrating and limited compared to before.
01:02:46 ◼ ► And it's another example of trade-offs, right? It's a very different philosophy, very clearly
01:02:59 ◼ ► when the App Store was new, you really didn't see a lot of stock UIKit apps, right? It was,
01:03:12 ◼ ► you'd be like, "Well, that's not even a good-looking button." And I'd complain about it,
01:03:17 ◼ ► like, in a beta or something, and the developer would be like, "Well, that's just the default
01:03:21 ◼ ► UI button." And it's, "Oh, well, it's kind of ugly." Right? And there was more of an assumption
01:03:30 ◼ ► that developers were going to customize the look of everything because that's what Apple was doing
01:03:36 ◼ ► with their own apps, right? The Notes app looked like yellow paper on a paper pad, and the Calendar
01:03:42 ◼ ► app looked like rich Corinthian leather, and every app had its own look, and so they sort of
01:03:48 ◼ ► did that, whereas UIKit, I think like you said, it was sort of like, "Hey, you should probably
01:04:05 ◼ ► a lot of their defaults are good, especially on iOS. It varies by platform. SwiftUI on the Mac
01:04:16 ◼ ► and I should be careful how I say this because I don't know it to be true, but some of it doesn't
01:04:20 ◼ ► feel very Mac-like, some of the default decisions there, which make me wonder if they're not being
01:04:25 ◼ ► done by sort of longtime AppKit people. But on iOS especially, it's in pretty good shape.
01:04:31 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah, I think the best example on the Mac would be the Shortcuts app, which I'm pretty sure
01:04:38 ◼ ► is all SwiftUI, and it's at least mostly SwiftUI. And it has gotten, thankfully, it's like, "Hey,
01:04:44 ◼ ► relief." They must see it because it has gotten better, but like the first version of Shortcuts
01:04:49 ◼ ► for Mac that shipped was so weird in so many ways, just really, like just the way that an alert looked,
01:04:57 ◼ ► like just a simple alert with a simple text string message or warning and a cancel button and an
01:05:06 ◼ ► okay button. And it was like, this doesn't even look like a Mac alert. It looks, what is this?
01:05:15 ◼ ► Brian Kardell: That Shortcuts is what I was thinking of when I was making that statement. Yeah,
01:05:20 ◼ ► I mean, you're right, it has gotten better, which is great. And the Mac, for whatever reason,
01:05:24 ◼ ► it seems like it's a little bit further back when it comes to SwiftUI integration than some of the
01:05:28 ◼ ► other platforms. I mean, I guess understandably, iOS is more of a focus, but it's getting there.
01:05:36 ◼ ► what are we talking about here, 16 years at this point, of dealing with App Store and App Store
01:05:50 ◼ ► Brian Kardell Yeah, yeah. I don't think it'll be hard to get resolved, but I mean, so over,
01:05:55 ◼ ► I'll explain what it is in a second. Over time, it's gotten a lot better. At the beginning,
01:06:01 ◼ ► the process seemed to take forever and it was very opaque. I mean, I can't even remember how far into
01:06:07 ◼ ► it was before we got published App Store review guidelines. I mean, at the beginning, it was,
01:06:11 ◼ ► you know, very much just like totally opaque from our side and took a long time and seemed,
01:06:18 ◼ ► it still sometimes seems a bit arbitrary whether something will get flagged. I assume that's just
01:06:22 ◼ ► the human component of some of this stuff. People are interpreting the rules. But whenever it was
01:06:27 ◼ ► that I guess still Schuler took over, it really seemed to change quite a bit. The approvals are
01:06:32 ◼ ► now much, much faster than they were. Sometimes it just takes hours. And sometimes you can get an App
01:06:37 ◼ ► Store build approved quicker than you can get a test flight build approved. And for people that
01:06:41 ◼ ► don't know test flight, their beta testing program where you would presume the stakes are a little bit
01:06:44 ◼ ► lower for approval, but I guess that maybe that team's smaller, I don't know. So it's gotten a
01:06:49 ◼ ► lot better. I mean, it's still the issue that I have yesterday is I have a feature in the app
01:06:54 ◼ ► that you can turn on step tracking for your trip. So if you wanted to see how many steps you walk,
01:06:59 ◼ ► if you go to Vegas, you walk a lot, right? And so sometimes people that, especially people that are
01:07:04 ◼ ► using my app are really into the data. They'll have about dozens of trips over years that they'll
01:07:08 ◼ ► go back and look at and write notes about stuff that they liked. So having the number of steps
01:07:13 ◼ ► you walked as a piece of data attached to that is something that people appreciate. So to do that,
01:07:18 ◼ ► I'm using the health kit API. And there are a lot of rules around how you can use health kit,
01:07:23 ◼ ► understandably, it's sensitive data. And of course, as the as the user has to approve it,
01:07:28 ◼ ► but even beyond that, they have rules about how things can be displayed. And they can tell because
01:07:32 ◼ ► of static analysis that my app uses the health kit framework. This has come up before multiple times
01:07:37 ◼ ► the rejection yesterday was we see that you're using health health kit, basically like WTF,
01:07:43 ◼ ► right? Like doesn't seem to make sense in this in this context. And I had to explain it multiple
01:07:48 ◼ ► times. There's a notes area that you can fill in some information when you submit a build for app
01:07:53 ◼ ► review. And I've got a few things in there. I'm not sure this reviewer read that section because
01:07:57 ◼ ► it does address this. So I don't think it'll be difficult to get it resolved. But that's an
01:08:01 ◼ ► example of something where this feature has been in there for years, it's sailed through dozens of
01:08:08 ◼ ► Pete: I kind of, and I know this, this part of it, I do know from, I mean, my personal firsthand
01:08:15 ◼ ► experience is outdated at this point from Vesper, but I shipped an app and recognize some of those
01:08:22 ◼ ► complaints. And one of them is it always felt like one of those video games with no saved state,
01:08:30 ◼ ► where every time it's like you've powered down the whole system, and you have to start on level one.
01:08:36 ◼ ► Pete; Each time you submit an app and so something like, "Oh, this has come up before I use HealthKit
01:08:43 ◼ ► because the app does step tracking because the people who use the app on a vacation to Vegas do
01:08:50 ◼ ► a lot of walking and want to track their steps and see how far they've gone. Oh, okay." And then you
01:08:56 ◼ ► have to repeat it again a month from now. And then six months go by and you think, "Ah, it's fine.
01:09:00 ◼ ► Nobody's going to do it." Same thing. And it's just like starting over from scratch. And you have to,
01:09:06 ◼ ► the other added stress is the last four times we had to, it's frustrating that you have to explain
01:09:13 ◼ ► it for the fifth time, but at least the last four times the explanation was like, "Oh, okay,
01:09:17 ◼ ► that makes sense. Please, please, please don't let this fifth time be the time." They're like, "No."
01:09:22 ◼ ► Brian; Yeah, exactly. And then what, you know, they basically say, "Okay, well, take the feature
01:09:27 ◼ ► out or don't ship your update." I mean, they, fortunately, they've gotten better about allowing
01:09:33 ◼ ► some things to fly temporarily. So you can say, "Hey, this is an important bug fix update. Please
01:09:39 ◼ ► release this build and I'll address this with you next time." Right? That's a thing that you can
01:09:44 ◼ ► usually do now, which is great. I've used it many times for stuff like this where it's like,
01:09:53 ◼ ► it's got some other fixing here. I do really want this to go out to my customers. So please do that.
01:09:57 ◼ ► And they're good about that. But yeah, I mean, the other thing about App Store Connect is the
01:10:02 ◼ ► tool that we use to log in and we get these emails. If anybody on that team is happening
01:10:07 ◼ ► to listen to this, please change some of those emails. All you get is a subject line saying,
01:10:12 ◼ ► "Your app is rejected." I mean, there's the terms that they use for something that's kind of high
01:10:16 ◼ ► stress for a developer. They're not like, "Hey, we have a small problem we need to talk to you about."
01:10:26 ◼ ► Yeah, right. Just make the subject more, let me know where I stand. Am I in a little bit of
01:10:42 ◼ ► "I'm in a lot of trouble." Yeah, exactly. It's a very stressful thing to get that email with
01:10:46 ◼ ► all the info you have. So I'd love an update. Yeah. What made you think to write this app
01:10:52 ◼ ► in the first place? Well, I have been interested in Las Vegas for a long time. That might sound
01:11:05 ◼ ► there's a whole community around people that are interested in these things, right? There's the
01:11:08 ◼ ► whole people at Disney and going to the theme parks and whatnot. There's a whole community of
01:11:12 ◼ ► people that were interested in Las Vegas. Maybe they're regular visitors, they're interested in
01:11:18 ◼ ► the business side of it, the casino industry. So there is a whole subculture there, something that
01:11:24 ◼ ► I got interested in a long time ago now, 25 years ago. So it's been quite a while. It started out
01:11:47 ◼ ► this pretty enamored by it. But I remember the, I think March or April of 2008 presentation where
01:11:55 ◼ ► the first I'll give a demo of the iPhone SDK and they explained how the App Store was going to work
01:12:00 ◼ ► and all of that stuff. Even I think from that first day, I knew that it was something that I
01:12:04 ◼ ► wanted to do. Just as an interesting pursuit to see what it would be like to build an app with
01:12:10 ◼ ► all of these new technologies, but also something that I could put on my phone, which was in my
01:12:20 ◼ ► just kind of sparked something that's been rolling ever since. Yeah, it's one of those things that,
01:12:36 ◼ ► bet you hit you up for tickets for a talk show thing at one point and just talked about it.
01:12:40 ◼ ► Yeah, it was just, and you very graciously helped me out and yeah, it's been a long time.
01:12:51 ◼ ► I don't know when I first mentioned that I like going to Vegas, but maybe I'm sure it came up at
01:12:57 ◼ ► some point and you probably thought, "Hey, maybe he'd like this." But it's a perfect example. And
01:13:02 ◼ ► I know at this point, we're so far into the iPhone era that it's hard to remember what it was like.
01:13:17 ◼ ► drag a file to a folder and restart and no prompts, no OKs. But the internet was a thing you did on a
01:13:27 ◼ ► computer, right? And yeah, you could buy the 2000s power books and Windows laptops. The shift from
01:13:35 ◼ ► tied to a socket in the wall desktop to laptops was already underway. But still, a laptop still
01:13:44 ◼ ► isn't a thing you go on vacation with, you know, what you might take it on the trip, but you're not
01:13:50 ◼ ► spending your day with your laptop with you. So, the internet was like watching TV in a way. It was
01:13:57 ◼ ► a thing you did in certain rooms, in certain contexts where you were indoors, you had to have
01:14:05 ◼ ► internet access, right? Which was not something you just had everywhere you went. And once you
01:14:15 ◼ ► had this idea of a really good internet enabled device that was in your pocket all the time with
01:14:21 ◼ ► location awareness and with a camera and stuff like that, all of a sudden, something that would
01:14:27 ◼ ► make sense as a blog, talking about the design of casinos, all of a sudden, well, what if you had
01:14:33 ◼ ► this with you all the time while you were in Vegas? I can immediately see how all these light
01:14:40 ◼ ► bulbs started going off in your head. Oh, this wouldn't just be a version of the blog and the
01:14:44 ◼ ► phone. It would be different because it would be like, where am I right now? Where can I go
01:14:54 ◼ ► like what's near me that I would like to go check out? Where can I go have lunch that's nearby? I
01:14:58 ◼ ► mean, those kinds of questions that you couldn't really answer, tech wise easily. Now you could
01:15:03 ◼ ► do all that stuff. And also, it was just a lot of fun. I wanted to learn the APIs and how to work on
01:15:10 ◼ ► the platform. And I just always found that building something real is a lot better way to do that than
01:15:15 ◼ ► a sample project type thing, right? And I totally get your comparison to Disney and to the detriment
01:15:22 ◼ ► of my own family's finances. We're both fans of going to Vegas and fans of going to Disney World.
01:15:30 ◼ ► I think it's very similar. It's obviously very different in terms of what you do. I mean,
01:15:37 ◼ ► even including the humidity, significant differences in the weather and the activities,
01:15:42 ◼ ► but it is very similar in terms of, oh, there's no place like it on earth, right? And this is
01:15:49 ◼ ► very different. And if you think that Disney World is sort of like going to Great Adventure
01:16:00 ◼ ► in tiny ways, it's similar, but it's like overall, no. And Las Vegas is not like going to Atlantic
01:16:09 ◼ ► City. There's parts of it, once you're sitting down at a blackjack table, yes, this looks like
01:16:14 ◼ ► a blackjack table and the rules are mostly the same. But the overall experience of being in
01:16:20 ◼ ► Atlantic City is not at all, oh, it's like a mini Vegas. No, it's really not like Vegas at all. It's
01:16:26 ◼ ► very different. Yeah, I totally agree with you there. I mean, one of the things that got me
01:16:32 ◼ ► interested in just the whole area was the economics of building some of these giant hotels. They don't
01:16:38 ◼ ► make sense in any other context, right? And these are like mini cities, especially if you get the
01:16:43 ◼ ► chance to go kind of behind the scenes to see how they work. The amount of design and thought that
01:16:48 ◼ ► goes into not just the customer facing stuff like a volcano or fountains dancing or whatever,
01:16:54 ◼ ► but the flow of the thousands of employees that need to walk through every day so that you can
01:16:59 ◼ ► get breakfast on time and all the different pieces. It's very intricate. It's highly designed down to
01:17:04 ◼ ► a science. I mean, moving the people around the property, both front of house and back of house,
01:17:10 ◼ ► I find that stuff fascinating. And it's kind of one of a kind place for that sort of thing because
01:17:16 ◼ ► of the scale. Because the economics make sense, right? People are losing money in a casino. And
01:17:20 ◼ ► so, it makes sense to build something like that, which you don't really have in very many other
01:17:25 ◼ ► places. Yeah, and that's definitely what keeps me interested in both places, right? And my wife was
01:17:33 ◼ ► sort of, we first went to Disney when Jonas was like two and a half or maybe a little past two
01:17:38 ◼ ► and a half. And I had never been there. My family growing up had never been to Disney World and my
01:17:42 ◼ ► wife was like, "I don't know if you're going to like it. You might get really bored." But the
01:17:45 ◼ ► thing that always kept me from getting bored and still does, we still go and I still like going,
01:17:51 ◼ ► is thinking about design details, sight lines like, "Oh, man, look at how they did this." And
01:17:56 ◼ ► it's, I can't believe that when I look towards there that I can't see Space Mountain anymore,
01:18:01 ◼ ► even though I know Space Mountain is big. And the idea is that, oh, when you're in frontier land,
01:18:06 ◼ ► you're just supposed to see frontier land. You're not supposed to see tomorrow land where Space
01:18:12 ◼ ► Mountain is. And same thing with Vegas, where it's like, the design and everything you just said, it
01:18:20 ◼ ► constantly fascinates me. And then getting to know people who work at some of the hotels
01:18:25 ◼ ► and, you know, like a bartender or something like that, who's like, "Oh, John, John and Amy are
01:18:30 ◼ ► back. How are you doing?" And getting to know some of the details about how they work and stuff like
01:18:35 ◼ ► that, I just find so interesting. Like, to me, one of the most fascinating things, and it is,
01:18:52 ◼ ► Disney does this thing like on Main Street, both at Disneyland and every Magic Kingdom that they've
01:18:58 ◼ ► made around the world, where you come in on Main Street, USA, and it looks like an old-timey,
01:19:04 ◼ ► early 1900s American town. And they use something called forced perspective to make it look like two
01:19:13 ◼ ► or three story buildings, but they're really not. Like, the second floor is sort of like, wouldn't,
01:19:19 ◼ ► a grown adult wouldn't be able to stand up in there. But they use forced perspective to make
01:19:25 ◼ ► it look like they're taller than they are. What they do in Vegas with these massive hotels is
01:19:33 ◼ ► actually make them look smaller than they are, right? Like, you find out, like, when you're
01:19:39 ◼ ► at the Wynn or Encore that there's, I don't know, 58 floors. Like, 58 floors is a skyscraper,
01:19:46 ◼ ► right? There are legitimate skyscrapers in major cities around the world that are fewer than 50-some
01:19:52 ◼ ► floors. But yet, when you're out on the strip and you look at them, they don't look like skyscrapers.
01:19:58 ◼ ► They look big. They definitely are big. But there's something about the way they make them
01:20:04 ◼ ► look where they look much squatter than they actually are. Yeah, they definitely play with
01:20:11 ◼ ► scale quite a bit. And you can see it. A good example of that effect specifically is like a
01:20:16 ◼ ► hotel that has Wynn and Encore are like all just glass curtain wall. But look at a place like,
01:20:22 ◼ ► say, Bellagio, for example. You look from afar, it kind of looks like you've got one hotel room
01:20:28 ◼ ► window, but it's actually four, right? Because of how they've done it. And it's a perspective
01:20:32 ◼ ► trick that makes it look smaller. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about where they have,
01:20:36 ◼ ► yeah, it looks like one window from the strip. Like, you're in a cab, you're driving by Bellagio,
01:20:42 ◼ ► and you're like, "Oh, there's Bellagio." And you think, "Oh, that's 20 floors. I see 20 windows."
01:20:46 ◼ ► But it's really 60 floors because the thing that looks like it's a window is for four floors of
01:20:51 ◼ ► hotels or something like that. Well, speaking of Bellagio and speaking of Wynn and Encore,
01:20:57 ◼ ► which are my two favorites, let me ask you this. What's the first place you ever stayed in Vegas?
01:21:03 ◼ ► The first place I ever stayed was at New York, New York when I was 19 years old. So yeah,
01:21:09 ◼ ► and that was not picked through any deliberative process. I didn't know anything. People from
01:21:14 ◼ ► California will laugh at this. When you drive from California into Las Vegas, you go through PRIM,
01:21:18 ◼ ► which is right over the state line on the 15. And it's basically two kind of rundownie casinos
01:21:25 ◼ ► right as far as, you know, as close as they can get to making it legal. The first time I visited
01:21:30 ◼ ► Las Vegas, I asked my then-girlfriend, now wife, "Hey, is this it?" That's how little I knew about
01:21:38 ◼ ► it. So yeah, that first trip was to New York, New York, a place that I don't think I've stayed since.
01:21:46 ◼ ► and a couple of her best friend from college and her best friend's cousin, three girls, they drove
01:21:53 ◼ ► coast to coast. They took one of their dad's cars and drove from the East Coast to California and
01:22:00 ◼ ► took a different trip east than they did west. And I forget which leg, the returner, but one of the
01:22:06 ◼ ► legs, they stopped in Vegas and they stayed at New York, New York. My first trip, I hadn't been there
01:22:11 ◼ ► until I was, what was 2001? Oh yeah, I know it was 2001 because it was— The reason I know the date,
01:22:19 ◼ ► it was like literally one week before 9/11. It was the end of August 2001. And the side story of how,
01:22:28 ◼ ► and this is with my now wife, Amy, we, on the way home, we had to fly through JFK. I don't know why.
01:22:39 ◼ ► It was good because we were young and it was cheaper than flying direct from Philly. So it
01:22:44 ◼ ► was like Vegas to JFK. And inside JFK, we had to switch terminals, which meant we had to go through
01:22:51 ◼ ► security again. And my wife went through the magnetometer and it beeped and she stopped.
01:22:56 ◼ ► And the guy just looked at her like, "Come on, lady, why are you stopping?" Like, he just gave
01:23:01 ◼ ► her like a, "I can't believe you're even making me wave you on." Like, they didn't make her go
01:23:06 ◼ ► back through and figure out what set off the magnetometer. They just took one look at her and
01:23:10 ◼ ► were like, "You're fine." And literally one week later was 9/11 and we were like, "Yeah, that's
01:23:16 ◼ ► never going to happen again." But yeah, we stayed at Bellagio for that first trip, which A) spoiled
01:23:22 ◼ ► me. But it definitely, I was like, "Oh, I made the right choice. I love this place. It smells good.
01:23:30 ◼ ► I was worried because I don't like the smell of cigarette smoke." And I've been to Atlantic City
01:23:37 ◼ ► many times beforehand and knew what a not so great smelling casino smells like. But the thing to me
01:23:46 ◼ ► as a design nerd, and this is why I mentioned it up front on the show, is that the Mirage closed
01:23:53 ◼ ► last week. And to me, I don't even think there's any dispute about it. That the Mirage was like,
01:24:08 ◼ ► And yeah, I'd agree with that. I have to make a quick note up top for anybody that listens to this,
01:24:13 ◼ ► because I may say some nice things about Steve Wynn and appreciate some of the work that he's
01:24:18 ◼ ► done. He obviously had a very, very public falling out, was forced out of his company due to
01:24:28 ◼ ► people don't think that I'm brushing that under the rug there, because it's a pretty serious thing.
01:24:32 ◼ ► Pete: Same here, and I'm glad you brought it up. The allegations against him are so overwhelming,
01:24:39 ◼ ► it has to be said. For all the good things that he's done design-wise, it's pretty clear he's a,
01:24:46 ◼ ► for lack of, you know, let's, I was talking about euphemisms with the gun emoji. Let's not use a
01:24:55 ◼ ► Jared: Yeah, scumbag. Yeah. But he's since been forced out of the company that has his own name
01:25:01 ◼ ► on it. So you can stay at the Wynn now and not worry that you're putting money into Steve Wynn's
01:25:13 ◼ ► Ex-wife, yeah. Elaine. Yeah, so I mean, I agree with what you were saying as far as the progression
01:25:18 ◼ ► of Wynn's properties, right? So before he built Mirage, he had invested in and expanded the Golden
01:25:24 ◼ ► Nugget, which is in downtown Las Vegas, and then had also built a Golden Nugget in Atlantic City.
01:25:34 ◼ ► Atlantic City really hurt their bottom line. It was kind of, people were wondering if it was
01:25:39 ◼ ► going to have a resurgence or kind of just limp along. And so, yeah, I mean, he opens the Mirage
01:25:44 ◼ ► in November of '89, and it was like a $600 million hotel, 3,000 rooms, which is big scale then. And
01:25:52 ◼ ► it included a lot of new stuff at the time that has became the standard, at least for properties
01:25:58 ◼ ► at the high level. And he definitely went on and expanded that. The team that designed and built
01:26:04 ◼ ► Mirage, most of them went with him to work on Bellagio, so a lot of the same people were doing
01:26:10 ◼ ► the design work especially. And then when his company that owned Bellagio was bought, he started
01:26:16 ◼ ► a new company, Wynn Resorts, which operates Wynn and Encore. A lot of them are with him. So there
01:26:21 ◼ ► is a lot of design continuity between those places for sure. And it's not just that they're both
01:26:26 ◼ ► named Steve. And in terms of their personal life, there are very big differences that we just
01:26:33 ◼ ► covered in terms of whether you can say I like the guy or not. But Steve Jobs sort of did the
01:26:39 ◼ ► same thing, like where he took a lot of people from Apple with him when he went to NeXT. And
01:26:45 ◼ ► certainly when Apple bought NeXT, the whole leadership of the company effectively within
01:26:51 ◼ ► two years was the leadership of NeXT. There is a similarity in terms of, hey, he's got his trusted
01:27:06 ◼ ► designer. I heard Steve Wynn one time, he was talking about, I forget which hotel he went to
01:27:18 ◼ ► Pete: No, I think it was, I think it was, no, maybe it's not. What was the name of the one,
01:27:30 ◼ ► Pete>> It was like right before his disgrace. It was like the tail end of Steve Wynn being able to
01:27:36 ◼ ► be mentioned as this. But he came in to just take a look at it because they were looking, they like,
01:27:40 ◼ ► ran out of money three quarters through buying it. And he came in and just looked at three things and
01:27:47 ◼ ► it was like looking in a typical room and he's, this is crazy. You put the vent right over the
01:27:51 ◼ ► bed, it's going to blow cold air on people. They're going to be miserable. Forget it. This whole hotel
01:27:55 ◼ ► is garbage. Like, he just knew things like that. Like, you don't want to put the air conditioning
01:28:03 ◼ ► Matt>> Yeah, he definitely, he seemed to play, you mentioned Steve Jobs and his team. I mean,
01:28:09 ◼ ► whereas he often will hear Jobs referred to as like an excellent editor working with a lot of
01:28:14 ◼ ► other people that were actually doing design work, whatever. And I think Wynn did a lot of the same
01:28:18 ◼ ► things, right? He had these great teams. He was very good though at being like, this is in, this
01:28:23 ◼ ► is in, this is out, this is not good enough, we're going to do it again. And you hear those stories
01:28:32 ◼ ► figures in other fields that you can look at like this who just were rightfully called visionaries,
01:28:38 ◼ ► where the whole industry said, oh, the way it should be is X. And these people look at it and
01:28:46 ◼ ► say, no, no, not just Y, no, we're going to go all the way back to A. We're going to do something
01:28:51 ◼ ► totally different. And one of the things was like daylight, being able to see daylight in a casino.
01:28:57 ◼ ► The old adage was that casinos never had windows because they don't want gamblers to know what time
01:29:02 ◼ ► of day. They don't have clocks on the wall, and they don't have windows because if you're sitting
01:29:07 ◼ ► there losing money, they don't want you to realize the sun's come up. Which you're in trouble anyway.
01:29:12 ◼ ► Like, if you need, if you need to see sunrise through a window to realize that you've been
01:29:19 ◼ ► gambling longer than you thought, you're probably in big trouble. So, the mirage, the first thing
01:29:27 ◼ ► you see when you come in is this big glass dome. The whole place was bathed in sunlight. And
01:29:42 ◼ ► And he went further and further from that, right? Where of the three, mirage, Bellagio,
01:29:48 ◼ ► Wynn, each one has way more sunlight than the others, right? The mirage, which I love and I've
01:29:55 ◼ ► stayed at many times, is dark compared to Bellagio and Wynn. But was considered unbelievably,
01:30:04 ◼ ► this guy's crazy for putting a big glass dome at the entrance to the casino. And the first thing
01:30:09 ◼ ► you see when you come in wasn't slot machines and blackjack tables. It was like a nice lobby bar.
01:30:20 ◼ ► Jared: And even beyond that, I mean, most casinos in Las Vegas up to that point were built right up
01:30:25 ◼ ► against the street. But the mirage is significantly set back and there's a volcano, fake volcano,
01:30:30 ◼ ► and a bunch of foliage up in front with a bunch of water effects, which were very, very deliberate
01:30:36 ◼ ► way to kind of be like, "Oh, this is not like every other place," right? You were trying to,
01:30:40 ◼ ► you're not in Las Vegas anymore. You were in the South Seas or the Polynesian vibe they were going
01:30:44 ◼ ► for. It was a different thing at the time. Some people thought he was crazy, right? They said,
01:30:48 ◼ ► "You had to make, I think," not get these numbers wrong, but like a million dollars a day to cover
01:30:52 ◼ ► debt service and they made $2 million a day. I mean, it was a success from the very first minute.
01:30:57 ◼ ► Pete: Right. The volcano is a perfect example, though. Nobody else had ever thought to do this,
01:31:05 ◼ ► I don't know, it was like every hour on the hour, every night for, I don't know, I guess what, 35
01:31:11 ◼ ► years? There's a, just a, and you don't have to stay there. It's not like, "Oh, you need to have
01:31:17 ◼ ► a room card and it's guests only." It's right out on the strip. Anybody walking by could just go and
01:31:25 ◼ ► watch the volcano show. Why would you do that, right? It's, but you know, they have attractions
01:31:31 ◼ ► like that at Disney World, but guess what? You need to be inside the park with a park pass to
01:31:36 ◼ ► see them. You don't just get to walk by and see a free volcano show. But his thinking was, "It'll
01:31:51 ◼ ► Fountains of Bellagio, which are now iconic and it's hard to imagine Las Vegas without them.
01:31:58 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah. I know the other thing that everybody, quote, "everybody" thought he was nuts about
01:32:04 ◼ ► was putting, hiring actual chefs to put in actual good restaurants. I don't know if Wolfgang Puck
01:32:13 ◼ ► was one of the originals, but people like Wolfgang Puck have had restaurants at the mirage and at
01:32:19 ◼ ► all of his subsequent resorts have upped the ante in terms of the dining. And the idea in the 80s,
01:32:27 ◼ ► when the mirage opened, was nobody spends money on food in Vegas. They just go to the all-you-can-eat
01:32:31 ◼ ► buffet for 20 bucks and that's all anybody wants. This guy, Wynn, is crazy putting in a $100 plate
01:32:38 ◼ ► dinner restaurant. Nobody's gonna do that. And it turns out, yeah, people wanted good food.
01:32:43 ◼ ► Matthew: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the theory of the case up to that point was that you made all
01:32:49 ◼ ► your money with gambling, right? Everything else there was to service the fact that you needed
01:32:53 ◼ ► gamblers in your building in order to win from them, but they really changed that to that equation.
01:32:58 ◼ ► And now gambling is a minority share, right? Food, beverage, and hotel make up more in almost all
01:33:08 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah, I guess the other thing that Vegas definitely was known for, and yeah, I know this,
01:33:14 ◼ ► but shows, right? That was the other thing that Vegas had always had from the 50s, 60s, 70s was
01:33:20 ◼ ► shows. But even there, I don't, I kind of feel like the mirage turned it up a level with Siegfried
01:33:28 ◼ ► and Roy and built them not just like a little old-timey theater, but like a big, huge, enormous
01:33:36 ◼ ► theater, which I guess was where the Beatles love Cirque du Soleil has been for, well, since the
01:33:46 ◼ ► Siegfried and Roy show unfortunately ended. Matthew: Yeah, prematurely. Did you ever see
01:33:53 ◼ ► that show? I never went to see it. It was all one of those things that was always on my to-do list,
01:33:59 ◼ ► but it just kind of never happened. I actually had tickets to go the week after the Tiger
01:34:06 ◼ ► Pete; No, I regret that I didn't because, and obviously it ended unexpectedly and before they
01:34:12 ◼ ► would have planned for their retirement, and I just always thought I had more time. Because I do
01:34:17 ◼ ► like going to see magic shows in particular. I mean, my wife and I have seen Penn and Teller
01:34:22 ◼ ► at least four times, maybe five times. Yeah, probably five. And one of the things that's
01:34:28 ◼ ► great about Penn and Teller is that they change up their act continuously. You can go see them
01:34:34 ◼ ► six months later and you might see an entirely different show start to finish. And if one of
01:34:40 ◼ ► the bits they do is the same, I've seen some of their bits a couple times and it's still,
01:34:45 ◼ ► every time, I don't know how they do it. I mean, it's kind of crazy, but I love magic. So,
01:34:50 ◼ ► the Siegfried and Roy combination of magic with the animal thing, it was definitely on my list,
01:34:59 ◼ ► Have you ever heard the Kevin Wynn, that's one of Steve's daughters, the abduction story,
01:35:12 ◼ ► without anybody getting hurt, but I'm sure it's very scary at the time. It was, I think, '93.
01:35:17 ◼ ► Kevin Wynn is one of Steve and Elaine's two daughters. She was, I think, working at the
01:35:21 ◼ ► Mirage at the time and then finished her work for the day, went home, and there were two guys
01:35:28 ◼ ► waiting for her in her house and they abducted her. They, I think, tied her up and blindfolded
01:35:34 ◼ ► her and we're going to kill you unless we get the money. So, they called Steve Wynn at the hotel
01:35:39 ◼ ► and they said, "We have your daughter. You need to pay us $2 million or we're never going to see her
01:35:45 ◼ ► again. We're going to kill her." Steve, I guess, depending on the different versions of this story,
01:35:51 ◼ ► I think, negotiated with them a little bit. He's like, "I can't get $2 million." He was like,
01:35:55 ◼ ► "We don't have that much money here." And so, they had a little back and forth. But he did go down to
01:35:59 ◼ ► the casino cage and he got out like one and a half million dollars in bricks. It was like fresh from
01:36:04 ◼ ► the Federal Reserve or wherever they get it from. Big chunks. And he went then and met or dropped
01:36:10 ◼ ► this money off. They had, they arranged, it was just like out of a movie, they'd arranged some
01:36:13 ◼ ► kind of like, "Leave the money here and then we'll call you." So, he dropped off the money and then
01:36:18 ◼ ► did get a call. "Your daughter is at the airport." And so, they get there and her car is there and
01:36:23 ◼ ► he can't tell. She's not, he can't see her, but he's walking up. She thinks she's in the trunk,
01:36:30 ◼ ► but he doesn't know what, if she's alive or dead. Obviously, pretty high stress situation. Opens it
01:36:36 ◼ ► up. She is in there. She's fine, physically fine. Right? And so, they go home and she's okay.
01:36:43 ◼ ► The kidnappers are caught a week later trying to buy a Ferrari in Newport Beach with cash.
01:36:48 ◼ ► So, there's a little bit more to the story, but that's basically it. They were not very smart.
01:36:55 ◼ ► I think they had been using their calling, making some phone calls on a pay phone right next to the
01:37:01 ◼ ► money drop location, all the same numbers, that kind of thing. So, they were kind of dumb criminals,
01:37:05 ◼ ► but there's a line in the Oceans 11 remake where the Andy Garcia character says something like,
01:37:18 ◼ ► Pete: I dig that. Ah, interesting. No, I hadn't heard that. The only thing that would have made
01:37:23 ◼ ► it dumber is if they had waited until there was a Ferrari dealership at the Wynn, right? Which
01:37:29 ◼ ► isn't there anymore. I think they turned it into the poker room or something, but there used to be,
01:37:37 ◼ ► Pete; Yeah, there was a Ferrari dealership at the Wynn, which, and it was, when you think,
01:37:41 ◼ ► "Oh, that'd be a fun thing to go into," but you needed like an appointment or something.
01:37:47 ◼ ► but if you wanted to actually look at a car, you had to be a serious buyer. They didn't
01:37:52 ◼ ► Pete; Right. Which I guess makes sense because I definitely would have been a looky-loo.
01:37:59 ◼ ► Pete; Yeah, you know what? I don't even need a test drive. I would just like to sit in one,
01:38:03 ◼ ► and I can only imagine how long the line would have been, but yeah, I had no desire to buy the
01:38:06 ◼ ► jacket. But I can't think of anything dumber than trying to buy a Ferrari with cash than trying to
01:38:16 ◼ ► Pete; What else? I could wax poetic about details of the Mirage and Bellagio and everything,
01:38:29 ◼ ► I always thought the Mirage had the best sportsbook in Vegas, including that light bright,
01:38:37 ◼ ► red, yellow, green, super low resolution board that would put all the odds up. And it's,
01:38:47 ◼ ► I understand why all of the casinos have switched to modern day jumbotron screen technology.
01:38:56 ◼ ► And it's, as you get older, when you're a kid, you think everything new is good, and then you,
01:39:02 ◼ ► that's when you know you're hitting middle age, when you become nostalgic for things like that.
01:39:05 ◼ ► But I always loved the Mirage sportsbook. It just was like the right, it was at the right place in
01:39:11 ◼ ► the casino. It had the, it had big, huge TVs. It had the right kind of light bright odds. Oh, man.
01:39:21 ◼ ► Matthew; Oh, I was going to ask you, I think we kind of alluded to this, but maybe didn't
01:39:25 ◼ ► sort of completely close the loop on this. So, the Mirage closed last week. It's being replaced
01:39:30 ◼ ► by a hard rock. And if we want, we can talk about what they're planning to do because it sounds
01:39:35 ◼ ► pretty dramatic. But I was going to ask, are you going to miss the Mirage? I mean, that was the
01:39:39 ◼ ► place to say it. Yeah. Well, I definitely will. But it's, so I've stayed at the Mirage two
01:39:46 ◼ ► different ways. Me and two of my friends, including Jim Kudall of Field Notes and Kudall.com fame,
01:40:03 ◼ ► we would go to Vegas for the Super Bowl weekend and stay at the Mirage. And if, because we had,
01:40:10 ◼ ► I'm not a huge gambler, but I have some kind of cred as a player's card. You could get,
01:40:18 ◼ ► if you had at some level of gambling on your card, the, oh, this guy plays $50 a hand blackjack for
01:40:41 ◼ ► center ballroom in the back of the Mirage that they would just cover. I don't know where they
01:40:47 ◼ ► got the TVs. We used to wonder, like, what did they do with these giant movie theater size TVs
01:40:54 ◼ ► from, to be, I don't know, maybe a thousand people. I don't know. We always tried to figure
01:41:00 ◼ ► out how many people they'd let in, but you couldn't just line up. You had to have a special
01:41:04 ◼ ► ticket and you could only get the ticket from a casino host who kind of vouched that, oh yeah,
01:41:09 ◼ ► you gamble enough to get free tickets. And you go in there, A, it was a fantastic way to watch
01:41:15 ◼ ► the Super Bowl, but they had all the free food and beer and anything you could possibly want,
01:41:21 ◼ ► just bucket, and you'd just raise your hand and they'd bring another bucket of beer to the table,
01:41:25 ◼ ► you know, lots and lots of fun like that. And then the other way I've been there is with my wife and
01:41:31 ◼ ► son. We've gone out there and stayed in the villas. Have you, I know you and I have talked
01:41:39 ◼ ► about this, probably. I have stayed in that, I had to stay there once. It was a bucket list thing for
01:41:44 ◼ ► me. If people have seen the movie Vegas Vacation, it's the Rusty Griswold character, Mr. Nick
01:41:53 ◼ ► Pete: But the villas are even better than the Lanai Suites. The Lanai Suites are like the first
01:41:59 ◼ ► level and for, and apparently the backstory on them is that they never even, in the early days
01:42:05 ◼ ► of the Mirage, they weren't even, you couldn't, you couldn't rent them. There was no, you couldn't
01:42:10 ◼ ► just call up and say, I'd like to reserve a villa. They were literally only for mega high rollers,
01:42:16 ◼ ► the whales in the industry lingo. And I should mention, just to go back to the scumminess of
01:42:23 ◼ ► Steve Wynn, there are awful stories after his demise came out about like, the shenanigans that
01:42:31 ◼ ► people who stayed in the villas could get up to, you know, that, you know, that there was a certain
01:42:37 ◼ ► class of cocktail waitress that was really more like a prostitute and, you know, just send them
01:42:42 ◼ ► back to the villas, you know, where, Villa 7 or whatever. But when I went, you know, recent years,
01:42:49 ◼ ► they were, for what you got, they were very affordable. Very expensive way to spend four or
01:42:54 ◼ ► five days, but multiple bedrooms so my son could have his own room, my wife and I had our room,
01:42:59 ◼ ► and just opulent decor. It looks like, I don't know, I hate to say it, but like Trump Tower or
01:43:06 ◼ ► something like gold ornate. Yeah. Or, you know, you know, like when you've, but like Baroque
01:43:16 ◼ ► sort of European kind of, right, with a little, plenty big for three people, like a wife,
01:43:22 ◼ ► husband and son, but you'd have your own private pool in the back just for the three of us,
01:43:28 ◼ ► a putting green. I mean, who has their own putting green at vacation? But we went, I think,
01:43:34 ◼ ► three summers for three or four nights. Again, not drinking and gambling guys in Vegas weekend,
01:43:48 ◼ ► Really more like a family vacation. Just go out to a nice dinner every day, and when you're staying
01:43:53 ◼ ► in those villas, you could just get room service. It was included. When you hear the price of the
01:43:58 ◼ ► villa, it was, it wasn't, I hesitate to call it free, but you could just get like a really good
01:44:09 ◼ ► And the coolest thing, what we used to love doing, and this is, I will miss that part of it,
01:44:15 ◼ ► because if I wanted to go back to watch the Super Bowl with my pals, we could pick at Bellagio or go
01:44:20 ◼ ► to the Wynn or whatever, and we'd have just as good a time. The thing I'll miss about the villas
01:44:30 ◼ ► so it'd be like 100 degrees and, but like a nice dry heat. Be in the pool all day. They had big
01:44:36 ◼ ► outdoor TVs, and the TVs were hooked up to every, every villa had its own Apple TV, and just hooked
01:44:43 ◼ ► up to whatever movies you want, you could just buy them for free. So, A, it might be Ocean's Eleven
01:44:50 ◼ ► was all, it was like my go-to. Is this, is Ocean's Eleven already on this Apple TV? Always was,
01:45:00 ◼ ► But you could pick any obscure movie you want, and if it wasn't already purchased, you just
01:45:05 ◼ ► could purchase it for the Apple TV. And again, sounds pretty cool. Most hotel rooms don't let
01:45:15 ◼ ► Yeah. You're not getting a deal, but it does kind of feel cool to be able to do that and be part of
01:45:22 ◼ ► Yeah. And just really, really, I don't know, it just was like a side of Vegas that I just never
01:45:36 ◼ ► The Mirage was sort of an outlier. A lot of hotels, especially the later Wynn places we
01:45:51 ◼ ► Mirage was sort of an anomaly in that sense, which made it possible for someone like me to go and do
01:46:00 ◼ ► Right, right. It's just spend a thousand dollars or $2,000 for the night or whatever, rather than
01:46:07 ◼ ► betting $2,000 a hand blackjack for 12 hours just to get the room. No, it wasn't like that. But
01:46:14 ◼ ► it was the advantage of going in the latter years of The Mirage was that it was no longer
01:46:20 ◼ ► Right. It was no longer the place where the people who spend or who gamble $10,000 a hand
01:46:27 ◼ ► at Bacharach go anymore. So it opened it up. And I know just from talking to you and having stayed
01:46:32 ◼ ► at the Wynn and Bellagio that there are rooms like that there. I don't even know where they are there,
01:46:38 ◼ ► Yeah, both Wynn and Bellagio are kind of built the same way, where at Bellagio, they're right above
01:46:45 ◼ ► the casino floor area. So if you're in a sort of regular room at the Bellagio, you look kind of
01:46:50 ◼ ► straight down, you'll see these little cutouts where they've got swimming pools and stuff. They're
01:47:00 ◼ ► You can see it in Apple Maps. You can see it in a satellite view picture pretty easily.
01:47:09 ◼ ► that kind of thing. And Wynn's are even more exclusive. There was only a few of them for
01:47:14 ◼ ► a while. Stephen Lynn lived in one. And they are also, if you've ever been to Wynn, Las Vegas,
01:47:20 ◼ ► they've got this tower suites area. And to get into it, you walk through this atrium where they've got
01:47:24 ◼ ► some fish in a little pond. And there are elevators there that go up to the villas in that
01:47:38 ◼ ► I will make sure I send you this link for people that are interested in seeing some of these
01:47:42 ◼ ► places. I have a friend that did his 40th birthday at the villa's at Mirage. I think maybe one of
01:47:48 ◼ ► the similar to the room you were just talking about. He's got a lot of pictures in there. So
01:47:52 ◼ ► I'll send that to you. You can stick it in the show notes. You can see what it looks like.
01:47:55 ◼ ► I would love to see it. You know I would. And you sent me a video a while ago of somebody else
01:47:59 ◼ ► who had taken like a sort of a video. I don't know if that was against the rules or what.
01:48:05 ◼ ► I didn't quite understand it. I think it was a Persian guy. I think it was in Farsi. So like,
01:48:11 ◼ ► you can't, I don't speak the language. So I didn't, can't understand anything they're saying.
01:48:15 ◼ ► But it looked like he was given a tour of these super high-end villas at Wynn by like the head of
01:48:23 ◼ ► villa services or something. So it's like semi-legitimate. But it's interesting because
01:48:28 ◼ ► other than Architectural Digest, those have never been like photographed or videoed before. So I
01:48:33 ◼ ► don't know how that happened. That was on the up and up or what. But it was pretty cool to see him.
01:48:44 ◼ ► I saw Steve, my wife and I saw him three different times. One time we saw him at SW, the steakhouse.
01:48:52 ◼ ► And the other thing I learned about it was when he was in town, if he was in Vegas when he lived
01:48:59 ◼ ► there, they would reserve his favorite table at SW out on the patio. SW is like half the seating is
01:49:05 ◼ ► indoors, half the seating is outdoors on the patio. And that's where you could see the big
01:49:10 ◼ ► frog show on the waterfall. They would put a giant, what do they call them? A magnum of champagne
01:49:16 ◼ ► on the table. And it was his table. And because they didn't know if he was going to eat there or
01:49:38 ◼ ► it didn't mean he was coming. It just mean he might come. He's in town. So don't give that table. So,
01:49:47 ◼ ► you kind of have to make your reservation like before you get to town. They could have used the
01:49:51 ◼ ► table, but they would just keep that one table with a magnum of champagne on it. But the one time
01:49:56 ◼ ► that the magnum went away and I thought, "Oh, is he coming?" And then lo and behold, there he was
01:50:01 ◼ ► eating there. Another time I saw him at the pool and he was wearing the shortest shorts I've ever
01:50:07 ◼ ► seen any man wear with like a terry cloth shirt, like the type of material a robe would be made out
01:50:16 ◼ ► of, but it was a shirt. And then the third time I saw him, it was with a bunch of friends and I
01:50:22 ◼ ► think we were eating at SW again, but I forget why I had to, they were like waiting for the table. We
01:50:30 ◼ ► weren't ready to eat yet and I had forgotten something or something. I had to go back to
01:50:33 ◼ ► the room and as I was going through the casino, Steve Wynn and his entourage were coming through
01:50:39 ◼ ► and the other thing people know, he has macular degeneration, which means he's effectively,
01:50:46 ◼ ► it's like the worst way to go blind because you go blind from the center of your vision out.
01:50:50 ◼ ► You could see, it was, you could see that he couldn't really see in a casino. But the other
01:50:54 ◼ ► thing was that his security was like, it wasn't subtle. Like when I see Tim Cook at Apple events,
01:51:01 ◼ ► I kind of know, I know the one guy who's definitely security, but they don't scream security. They're
01:51:07 ◼ ► sort of subtle and it's like, you might think they just happen to be somewhat large men who maybe are
01:51:16 ◼ ► working on Apple. Yeah, assistant or Apple PR. Whereas Steve Wynn's guys were like 6'5", 6'6".
01:51:24 ◼ ► I'm 6'2". I'm not a small man. I felt like dwarfed. I mean, like Bruce Willis in Die Hard 3 when he
01:51:32 ◼ ► gets in the elevator or Die Hard 2, whichever one, when he gets in there and everybody's like a foot
01:51:36 ◼ ► taller than him. Crazy. But he definitely, you could see him. He was there all the time for him.
01:51:41 ◼ ► He was, yeah. I mean, for a long time he lived on property and was definitely around. I spoke with
01:51:45 ◼ ► him once. He was just kind of like standing there staring out into the garden area at Encore and I
01:51:54 ◼ ► said, "Well, fuck it. I'll just go talk to him." And so we had a five-minute conversation. I can't
01:51:59 ◼ ► remember what we talked about. Nothing that either of us would ever remember, but friendly enough guy
01:52:03 ◼ ► and then he went on his way. Yeah. I encourage people. If you ever meet somebody you want to
01:52:08 ◼ ► say hello to, just think of a good introduction or—Merlin Mann always taught me if you meet
01:52:13 ◼ ► somebody famous, the best way to just break the ice, and you don't even have to break stride,
01:52:17 ◼ ► is you just say, "I'm a big fan of your work." And it really does, I forget who, but, you know,
01:52:23 ◼ ► Merlin told me, like, he saw David Byrne at the airport one time, walking this way, Merlin's
01:52:29 ◼ ► walking the other way. Merlin just waved to him and said, "Huge fan of your work." And he just
01:52:33 ◼ ► looked up, smiled, and let him keep going. Yeah. Perfect. For Steve Wynn, I'd be a huge fan of
01:52:40 ◼ ► your work, huge thumbs down on your personal life. I mean, now he's disappeared. I think he's like
01:52:44 ◼ ► in Maggaland in Florida, so. Yeah, yeah. And it must be, if you're—I'm justifiably thinking,
01:52:53 ◼ ► "Ah, that guy ought to suffer a little bit." It must kill him to be subservient to Trump.
01:53:03 ◼ ► Really hated him, and dating back to Atlantic City, where the Golden Nugget was sort of like
01:53:08 ◼ ► that and Caesars, I think, would be the top two places in the place. And back in the day.
01:53:15 ◼ ► And Trump's place is infamously somehow lost money. I've also heard, have you heard this?
01:53:21 ◼ ► We've got to wrap up, but Trump has a place in Vegas, but he doesn't own it. It's one of those
01:53:36 ◼ ► And he was just the blowhard on The Apprentice, just because I was curious what it was like. And
01:53:41 ◼ ► this must have been, I don't know, 20, maybe right after it opened. I can't remember exactly when it
01:53:46 ◼ ► was, but a long time before he ran for president. I want to stress that. It was a long time before.
01:53:51 ◼ ► But yeah, I stayed there. It was fine. It was like generic nice hotel. Every single thing in there,
01:53:59 ◼ ► I've been in, I've walked over talking, because that's one of my favorite things to do in Vegas
01:54:04 ◼ ► is walk. I just like walking to different casinos. If there's a new casino that's open, I love to
01:54:09 ◼ ► just go check it out and just walk through. But the weird thing about Trump Las Vegas is there
01:54:14 ◼ ► is no casino. It's a big hotel resort and big gaudy sign, but there's no casino. And I'm
01:54:21 ◼ ► and I've heard that Steve Wynn personally sort of put the kibosh on him getting a casino license.
01:54:33 ◼ ► backroom shenanigans go on that would keep a place or have a place, get a casino license, that
01:54:40 ◼ ► his personal animosity towards Trump is one of the reasons that the Trump place in Vegas doesn't have
01:54:45 ◼ ► a casino. But I don't know, it could be BS. I have no idea if that's true, but those guys definitely
01:54:51 ◼ ► really, really didn't seem to like each other as they were when they were competing against
01:54:55 ◼ ► each other for many, many years. And now he's forced to shuffle off down to Mar-a-Lago and
01:55:08 ◼ ► Hunter, thank you so much for joining me. I've been wanting to talk to you, like I said,
01:55:14 ◼ ► on the show for a while, and I've been wanting to profess my love for the now closed Mirage for a
01:55:19 ◼ ► while, and I feel like I've gotten it off my chest. Well, yeah, thank you for having me. It's a super
01:55:24 ◼ ► fun, long time listener to the show, so it's a bit surreal to be on it. And I know it's a little bit
01:55:32 ◼ ► Yeah, good summertime, good summertime break into regular programming. Everybody can, of course,
01:55:40 ◼ ► find your app on the App Store, Vegas Mate. It'll show right up. It really say what you want about
01:55:45 ◼ ► App Store search, but I just tried it. Vegas Mate definitely works. Anything else, any kind of
01:55:59 ◼ ► an—it's Copeland. I know it's spelled the same way. It's an homage to the never shipped Apple