00:00:00 ◼ ► There might be some listeners out there who think perhaps this podcast has too much baseball content
00:00:13 ◼ ► - But I do think there are numerous, talking about the strategy and why Apple's even getting into,
00:00:21 ◼ ► you know, what we're alluding to here for anybody who's been under a rock is Friday night baseball,
00:00:26 ◼ ► which I guess is a new thing, right? It's not like Apple is taking over Friday night baseball from
00:00:36 ◼ ► - Right, or like a traditional cable network like TBS has had Friday night baseball for the last 10
00:00:42 ◼ ► years or something like that. It's sort of a new national franchise. And the basic idea
00:00:56 ◼ ► there's an East Coast seven o'clock in the evening game and then a West Coast seven o'clock in the
00:01:01 ◼ ► evening game, which for me and you on the East Coast would be like 10 or 1030 or something like
00:01:10 ◼ ► So it's Apple. Apple is California-based. I've always said they have a real California bias with
00:01:16 ◼ ► things like Touch ID, where on the East Coast we wear gloves in the winter and suddenly you
00:01:20 ◼ ► can't unlock your phone. Did you notice that they were promoting the game times in Pacific time?
00:01:24 ◼ ► - Yes, I absolutely did. That is one of the- - Which is so, and that's strange to me because
00:01:29 ◼ ► plenty of stuff is out of LA, TV-wise, movie-wise, obviously, but I think TV-wise too. But everything
00:01:34 ◼ ► in my lifetime has always been seven o'clock Eastern, six o'clock Central, and you never see
00:01:41 ◼ ► a Pacific time zone mentioned. So I think Apple's really, they're throwing their weight around there
00:01:58 ◼ ► and is sort of putting their thumb on the scale. And you know, all right, fair enough. You know,
00:02:02 ◼ ► you're a California company. You want to make Pacific times primary and Eastern and, you know,
00:02:17 ◼ ► - Central is boring. East is where the East, Pacific, all right, it's all right. But mountain
00:02:25 ◼ ► going to, I don't think, I don't think there's ever going to be a company headquartered in, say,
00:03:15 ◼ ► So, but we've, you know, we've got one week under our belts. I watched with great enthusiasm,
00:03:26 ◼ ► you know, like I might, I would, maybe I wouldn't take such scrupulous notes if it were on Amazon,
00:03:41 ◼ ► at one point, I don't even, I've tuned into a little bit of these. I watch Red Sox games,
00:03:45 ◼ ► I watch most of them, and then I watch national games sporadically until the playoffs. But yeah,
00:03:50 ◼ ► I did the same thing you did. I tuned into this and sort of, I don't think we'd even talked about
00:03:54 ◼ ► it beforehand, but I thought maybe it'd be something we'd talk about on the show, and now it is.
00:03:58 ◼ ► - Well, it's, for those who aren't baseball fans, one of the weird things, and you and I
00:04:05 ◼ ► have talked about this at great length, is, so, if you, baseball is a very long season, six months
00:04:12 ◼ ► and 162 games in the regular season, which is a lot of, that's a lot of baseball, even if you're
00:04:43 ◼ ► you know, the Florida Marlins, well, you get closer to 162 games on your local affiliate.
00:04:54 ◼ ► Miami Marlins. I don't expect to see, I don't know, I don't want to poke fun at the smaller
00:04:59 ◼ ► market teams, but it's, you know, let's say 150 games. There are occasional, I guess it depends
00:05:05 ◼ ► how much the network's bid for the games. So the Yankees-Red Sox game over the weekend,
00:05:11 ◼ ► one of the games over the weekend was also on Fox. Did you notice that, or did you not even notice?
00:05:24 ◼ ► Saturday afternoon, Fox had a national, Fox Sports Network had a national telecast of the Yankees-Red
00:05:37 ◼ ► - Right, but then Sunday night, for Sunday night baseball, which is an ESPN franchise and has been
00:05:44 ◼ ► for quite a long time, that's an exclusive, and so the local networks didn't have it. But anyway,
00:05:50 ◼ ► where I'm going with this, though, is that the local networks have so much more experience
00:05:54 ◼ ► broadcasting these games, and they get really good at it, and they've got, you know, cameras,
00:06:00 ◼ ► you know, and they just know how to do slow motion and when to expect there might be a close tag play
00:06:06 ◼ ► at second base, get it, you know, make sure there's a high-speed slow-motion camera with a good angle.
00:06:18 ◼ ► - That your team makes the playoffs, and you're like, "This is great. They're gonna, they're gonna,
00:06:22 ◼ ► you know, win the World Series, but now I gotta listen to these horrible announcers who don't know
00:06:26 ◼ ► nearly as much as I, a fan who's watched all season, know." And the production, as you just
00:06:32 ◼ ► said, they don't. It's strange to me because obviously ESPN, Fox, TBS, these are national
00:06:37 ◼ ► companies with all kinds of money, but somehow they can't hire people who, I think you're right,
00:06:42 ◼ ► I think it's just the experience of doing 150 games makes you better at it than someone who
00:06:51 ◼ ► - Yeah, and I don't know, you know, I don't tune in randomly. I mean, one thing is I subscribe to
00:06:57 ◼ ► the MLB app. And I know, I think you and I have talked about this on the show, like baseball's TV
00:07:07 ◼ ► - But there's these local restrictions on the MLB app that are still in play. Here we are in 2022.
00:07:12 ◼ ► I mean, and this has been, I think I've been subscribing. I don't remember when I didn't
00:07:17 ◼ ► subscribe. I mean, I don't even know how long ago. - I know at least 10 years. I can remember
00:07:26 ◼ ► - Yeah, but I'm lucky because my favorite team, the Yankees, is out of market in Philadelphia.
00:07:32 ◼ ► So I get to watch all of their games, except if they're playing the Phillies, which happens every
00:07:39 ◼ ► couple of years due to the way interleague scheduling works. Then I can't because it's on
00:07:44 ◼ ► my local TV and I have to watch the Phillies telecast on terrestrial TV or through some
00:07:51 ◼ ► online service that shows you terrestrial TV uninterrupted. It's very strange. And then these
00:07:57 ◼ ► local broadcast teams that spend 162 games following the team, then the playoffs start.
00:08:04 ◼ ► If your team is lucky enough to get into the playoffs, then that's it. They're done. They
00:08:14 ◼ ► they often do pre-game stuff and post-game stuff, but it's not nearly as good. And I'm sure they're
00:08:21 ◼ ► disappointed to not be able to do it. And as a fan, you're disappointed to not hear your team
00:08:26 ◼ ► getting, you know, your announcing team. People always say, these announcers always say,
00:08:32 ◼ ► "Thank you for letting us come into your home." And they really do. We listen to these people for,
00:08:36 ◼ ► like you said, 150 games a year, two, three hours a game minimum. You're talking about hundreds of
00:08:40 ◼ ► hours a year. It's honestly, it's even more than your podcast, you know, in terms of content,
00:09:02 ◼ ► - Well, it'll actually be higher, right? - Slightly higher. Yeah, it's a lot of talking.
00:09:06 ◼ ► And I also think it's, you know, as somebody who feels mentally exhausted after doing my show,
00:09:14 ◼ ► roughly three times a month, two hours-ish, two plus hours, I'm mentally exhausted at the end.
00:09:22 ◼ ► And it's given me a tremendous appreciation for daily broadcasters, people who, I've been
00:09:29 ◼ ► thinking more about it lately, just of all sorts. Somebody like a Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert
00:09:40 ◼ ► like AM talk radio, like the Rush Limbaugh style or sports talk, you know, there's all sorts of ways
00:09:48 ◼ ► to do talk radio. But those hosts on talk radio do four hours in the afternoon every day.
00:09:59 ◼ ► sitting there talking. Like you said, it does get exhausting. I think of, I mean, he's retired now,
00:10:09 ◼ ► - In his depth, I think older than that. I mean, towards the end, he was not doing a ton, but-
00:10:14 ◼ ► - He wasn't doing road games for the Dodgers. - Right. Well, I mean, good for him. He earned
00:10:26 ◼ ► - Well, for a small market team like the Dodgers, maybe. No, he was absolutely great. But yeah,
00:10:34 ◼ ► it's just, you know, it's deep, deep appreciation for being able to hold people's interests and sort
00:10:40 ◼ ► of hold their affection. I don't know. I mean, it's like, how can you not be, sometimes I wonder,
00:10:45 ◼ ► how can people not be like sick of me by now? Like maybe you love talking about all these nerdy
00:10:51 ◼ ► things like fonts and Apple computers and their operating systems and the company strategy and the
00:10:59 ◼ ► occasional rant on baseball and an extended rant on the graphic design of the fonts in the Apple
00:11:07 ◼ ► baseball thing. - Scorebug, sure. Yeah, which we're gonna get to. - This might all be things that are
00:11:11 ◼ ► like, yes, this is why the talk show is my favorite podcast. But it's like, sometimes I just think,
00:11:16 ◼ ► aren't you sick of me by now? I'm glad you're not. Whoever you are out there, I'm very, very glad
00:11:23 ◼ ► that you're not. But it does occur. - You're gonna, next week, you're gonna see the listener
00:11:26 ◼ ► numbers crater. Everyone's gonna be like, you know what? He's right. He's a smart guy and he's right
00:11:30 ◼ ► and I'm sick of him. Let's go. Canceled. Deleted. Unsubscribed. - You know what's funny? Amy and I
00:11:36 ◼ ► are going through old Seinfeld's Netflix, which I mostly haven't watched since it was like on
00:11:46 ◼ ► prime time back in the mid to late '90s. - Not lately, but I've done Seinfeld reruns for years.
00:11:53 ◼ ► That's a great background show. - It is, but I'm sort of watching them new. And for some reason,
00:11:59 ◼ ► I don't know why. I think I started with season four. I could check somewhere. I wrote it, but
00:12:04 ◼ ► I think I skipped seasons one to three for reasons I just don't know. I just saw an episode of season
00:12:10 ◼ ► four and Netflix suggested it. I was like, yeah, I would like to, why don't we watch that before we
00:12:16 ◼ ► go to bed? But there was an episode we just watched last night from season seven where George
00:12:28 ◼ ► And the gist of the plot is Jerry and Elaine are both interested in the people in this couple.
00:12:35 ◼ ► And then they come over and say, hi. George comes and they introduce themselves. And the woman
00:12:41 ◼ ► is a doctor and the man is a salesman of some site. And George says, a salesman. And he looks
00:12:47 ◼ ► at the woman. He goes, you could have done so much better than him. And then she goes home and says
00:12:54 ◼ ► she thought about it and thought, you know what? I think I could do better. And that's...
00:13:15 ◼ ► All I can tell you if you are out there and that thought is now bouncing around your head is there
00:13:19 ◼ ► really are not very many podcasts out there. - No, there's nothing else to listen to. So
00:13:27 ◼ ► - You got to fill your time with something. It might as well be this because there's nothing else.
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00:15:18 ◼ ► you're a listener of the show. My thanks to Squarespace for their continuing support of the
00:15:22 ◼ ► talk show. Speaking of sponsors and advertisers, that was one of the first things that kind of hit
00:15:26 ◼ ► me about Apple's Friday night baseball telecast was I actually had the question before. I wasn't
00:15:32 ◼ ► even sure if they were going to have regular commercials. They would have ads at all. Yeah.
00:15:35 ◼ ► Right. Like what's Apple in this for? Right. Like why, you know, let's just big, big picture,
00:15:41 ◼ ► broad strategy. Why did Apple pay Major League Baseball for the rights to do two national
00:15:47 ◼ ► telecasts every Friday night for baseball season? I mean, the obvious answer they're doing the first,
00:15:53 ◼ ► what did they say? The first half of the season is free. And then after that, you're going to have
00:15:56 ◼ ► to be an Apple TV plus subscriber. So they want to juice their numbers. They want to get more
00:16:01 ◼ ► subscribers and the rest of the service doesn't have ads. So it's very, it definitely is once you
00:16:06 ◼ ► stop and think about it, if you watch baseball, yeah, of course there's ads. Every 10 minutes,
00:16:12 ◼ ► there's a break for the half inning and you've got to fill that with something. But if you put
00:16:16 ◼ ► this on, if HBO had baseball, would they put ads on? I don't know because they've never had it or
00:16:22 ◼ ► Netflix. Right. And just by sheer coincidence, Ben Thompson had wrote last week and you know,
00:16:28 ◼ ► the analysts have been chewing this around. Like it looks like, I don't want to get sidetracked
00:16:32 ◼ ► talking about Netflix, but it looks like Netflix growth worldwide is slowing. And for the very good
00:16:39 ◼ ► reason of... There's not too many more people left to capture. Right. Amongst people who have
00:16:46 ◼ ► internet access and you know, eight to 10 bucks at least per month, they've got most of them
00:16:54 ◼ ► subscribed. Which if you were a normal business, someone would think, well, that's an amazing
00:17:01 ◼ ► business. But if you're a publicly held company... If you're publicly traded, then your growth is
00:17:05 ◼ ► flat lined and your stock is almost worthless now. Right. And so where's the growth going to
00:17:10 ◼ ► come from? It doesn't matter how big you already are and how sustainable it is and how loyal your
00:17:14 ◼ ► customers are. Growth, growth, growth. And so people are talking about Netflix adding ads and
00:17:19 ◼ ► Netflix has long said, we don't want to do ads. We don't want to have an ad based here, blah, blah,
00:17:24 ◼ ► blah. I don't know. Maybe that's one of the reasons they don't have sports. It's a good
00:17:31 ◼ ► question. Apple... I guess I wonder how much... I have no idea in terms of numbers, but how much
00:17:36 ◼ ► money are they making on the ads? I mean, it's millions upon millions. Is it tens of millions?
00:17:42 ◼ ► Is it hundreds of millions for the season? It would definitely be a lot of money to just be
00:17:45 ◼ ► leaving on the table and I guess showing some Apple TV ads, but beyond that, and maybe some Mac
00:17:52 ◼ ► ads, maybe some iPad ads. But it'd be a lot of money to be leaving on the table to not sell these
00:17:56 ◼ ► ads because there's a ton of ad time during a baseball game. Well, that's... See, now that's one
00:18:05 ◼ ► has very natural ad time. In between half innings, one team, three outs, now you're half of the
00:18:12 ◼ ► innings over. You have to switch sides. The catcher... More than any other sport. It's like
00:18:18 ◼ ► clockwork that you're going to have these breaks. Right. The pitcher has to come out and start
00:18:22 ◼ ► warming up to get ready to throw. You can't just come out and start throwing 100 miles an hour
00:18:26 ◼ ► without a couple of warmups. Players have to get out to the outfield and warm up their arms a
00:18:31 ◼ ► little. The catcher might have to put their equipment back on if they were just up or were
00:18:36 ◼ ► ready to be up. You got about three minutes in there. If you go to a minor league game or a high
00:18:42 ◼ ► school game, just go to a high school game that's not even on TV or televised other than parents
00:18:48 ◼ ► holding their phones out to watch it. There's three minutes between innings where if you were
00:18:53 ◼ ► broadcasting it, you might as well... Why not put ads? As opposed to the beauty... And again,
00:18:58 ◼ ► I'm not a huge soccer fan, but I do have to admit every four years when I watch the World Cup,
00:19:02 ◼ ► it's just lovely, absolutely lovely that when they start playing the half of a game of soccer,
00:19:10 ◼ ► it just goes and goes and goes until the half is over and that's it. Well, or unless a player flops
00:19:16 ◼ ► with a fake shin injury and then you just sit there and watch them. They just sit there and
00:19:21 ◼ ► five minutes go by and they add on two minutes at the end. Right. Don't even get me started on
00:19:26 ◼ ► soccer timekeeping, but I do agree that it's nice to just have a continuous flow of action.
00:19:37 ◼ ► could use some outside blood, especially from two Americans who don't really know much about soccer.
00:19:46 ◼ ► We would have... The first change, I think you and I would agree, the first change we would institute
00:19:51 ◼ ► is there would be a real clock that... Proper clock, yeah. And everyone from the fans in the
00:19:57 ◼ ► stadiums to the coaches to the players could see how much time was left in the half. And if...
00:20:15 ◼ ► magic gift of a soccer referee's mind where they know not to just blow it mindlessly at
00:20:21 ◼ ► this moment. Like, "Oh, wait till the ball goes out of bounds," or something like that,
00:20:29 ◼ ► Nonsense. You got to have a clock. But it is lovely that they don't have commercial breaks.
00:20:35 ◼ ► They just don't. And so they've, you know, worked around it. Obviously, there's tons of money to be
00:20:45 ◼ ► and I believe this is part of why it's not that popular in the US, is that you can't...
00:20:49 ◼ ► You know, we've got Major League Soccer. We've got MLS. But it's not nationally broadcast
00:20:54 ◼ ► because they can't put ads in it. At least not to the extent that you can with baseball, football,
00:21:00 ◼ ► One of my favorite stories about sports and TV is that basketball, traditionally, is a game of
00:21:07 ◼ ► four quarters instead of two halves. And like the NBA still plays four quarters. High school, junior
00:21:13 ◼ ► high, you know, at that level of play is still four quarters. But top level college basketball
00:21:19 ◼ ► is two halves. And that change happened while I was... I don't even want to Wikipedia it. It was,
00:21:25 ◼ ► like, I think sometime in the 80s. But I remember I was a fan of college basketball when they made
00:21:31 ◼ ► the switch. And I was like, it seemed into... I was like, "Yeah, this will help the game flow more.
00:21:36 ◼ ► Why the hell have all these buzzer beat... You know, why have four buzzer beater scenarios a
00:21:42 ◼ ► game instead of just two?" This feels right for basketball. But then it turns out what they did
00:21:47 ◼ ► is they really chopped each half. Instead of into two parts, they chopped them into three.
00:21:59 ◼ ► Yeah. And the 12-minute timeout. It's a 20-minute half. But there's these two periods where once you
00:22:05 ◼ ► reach, like, a certain point on the clock, like, it might be like eight minutes into the game,
00:22:09 ◼ ► the next time any break in the action happens, that's a media timeout. And what they mean by
00:22:14 ◼ ► media is commercials. Well, is that... Are there only two? So it's 12 minutes and four minutes,
00:22:20 ◼ ► I guess? Or 12 and eight. I forget. It doesn't matter. You know, and maybe they've tweaked them
00:22:25 ◼ ► over the years. But I think that there's two, you know. But that's in addition to the fact that when
00:22:32 ◼ ► the coaches call timeout because they want to, like, talk to their players or regroup or strategize
00:22:37 ◼ ► or just give the guys a break, a full timeout is long enough to show commercials too. It's,
00:22:49 ◼ ► nobody would ever do that with a high school basketball game because there's no reason for it,
00:22:54 ◼ ► right? It's the money. Baseball, it's a gift. And, you know, football, there's no doubt in my mind
00:23:00 ◼ ► that the NFL, when you watch the NFL, there's no reason for the breaks to take as long as they do.
00:23:09 ◼ ► kickoff, break. That's where it's really brutal is right after a score, right around a score.
00:23:23 ◼ ► Well, there's a reason these networks and, you know, there's a reason Monday Night Football is
00:23:29 ◼ ► a billion dollar franchise. I know you're not a golf fan, but do you ever watch the golf on TV?
00:24:00 ◼ ► Game? Yeah, it's erectile dysfunction. It's life insurance. Life insurance, cars, you know,
00:24:06 ◼ ► you name it. But the Masters, which just finished this last weekend, is a very strange and unusual
00:24:14 ◼ ► golf tournament where it is run not by the PGA. It is not run by the network, CBS. It is run by
00:24:24 ◼ ► the Augusta National Golf Club. They call all the shots. It's always been on CBS, but CBS does,
00:24:31 ◼ ► I don't know how long their contracts run, but there have been weird situations over the years
00:24:36 ◼ ► where there was a golf announcer, the one guy, his name is Gary something, and he was sort of
00:24:47 ◼ ► standards of golf. Yeah, but he's also like if you tuned in for half an hour, you might listen to him
00:24:53 ◼ ► and think, you know what, if I was going to grab a beer after this, he might be the guy. But he
00:24:57 ◼ ► described one of their greens as being so fast. The Masters, when you putt, the greens are
00:25:04 ◼ ► extremely, extremely fast. One golfer's described it as like putting on a windshield. Very, very
00:25:11 ◼ ► fast. Well, he described it as having been bikini waxed. That was his quip on the air. Well-
00:25:23 ◼ ► And that wasn't CBS's decision. It was the Masters. But they also vastly undersell the ad
00:25:29 ◼ ► inventory. This is where I'm going, is for years and years when I was a little kid, I think they
00:25:34 ◼ ► only had two advertisers. I think it was, one of them was definitely Travelers, which I don't even
00:25:44 ◼ ► But that red umbrella logo is etched in my mind. It was like, and so they'd only have like two
00:25:50 ◼ ► sponsors for the whole weekend. It was Travelers Life Insurance and EF Hutton or something like
00:25:56 ◼ ► that. And they just limit it to like, and now it's like three or four. I watched a little bit of the
00:26:02 ◼ ► Masters over the weekend just to see some Tiger Woods. IBM has been involved now for quite a long
00:26:07 ◼ ► time. IBM is one of their sponsors. Rolex is involved at some degree, but it's like just
00:26:12 ◼ ► three or four companies like that. But here's the weird thing, because they have so few sponsors,
00:26:27 ◼ ► like golf has a lot of flexibility because there's just groups of golfers all over the golf course.
00:26:35 ◼ ► Yeah. But for the most part, they show the golfers who are in the lead or close to the lead,
00:26:44 ◼ ► Or Tiger Woods, right. There's three groups of golfers. The ones who are in the lead are
00:26:50 ◼ ► very close to the lead, and they tend to be playing at the back because they start those
00:26:54 ◼ ► golfers last. Whoever's leading going into the last day is the last group to come through.
00:27:01 ◼ ► And for the most part, nobody who's too far ahead of them generally scores so low on one day that
00:27:07 ◼ ► they come into contention. But if they do, they'll just cut ahead to hear so-and-so who's shooting an
00:27:13 ◼ ► unbelievable round today. And then they'll also cut away if somebody hits a hole-in-one or...
00:27:19 ◼ ► Yeah, something amazing happens like that, or it knocks an 85-foot putt that goes left,
00:27:24 ◼ ► then right, then drops right into the hole. Then they'll cut away to that. But for the most part,
00:27:36 ◼ ► then they can just say, "Here's the scoreboard. Cut to a commercial." Because you've got minutes
00:27:44 ◼ ► Right. But when you watch the Masters, it's way more soothing. For somebody who hates golf,
00:27:54 ◼ ► they could just put it on. And it's so soothing. And if there's nothing going on and there's no
00:28:00 ◼ ► golfers on hole 10 doing something interesting, they just play this soothing Masters music and
00:28:08 ◼ ► just show beautiful footage of the golf course from a drone. It's really quite—when you're used
00:28:15 ◼ ► to the way most sports are on TV, where it's as many commercials as they can possibly fit in,
00:28:39 ◼ ► last place if you finish. I think it still might even be a thousand bucks, whatever it is.
00:28:44 ◼ ► I believe he got $44,000, which is just such a hilarious number to me. It's a ton of money. It's
00:28:49 ◼ ► a great amount of money. But it's Tiger Woods, who's worth, I assume, hundreds of millions of
00:28:54 ◼ ► dollars, has sponsorships still that are worth millions, tens of millions of dollars. He played
00:29:07 ◼ ► But I will say this. It was a pleasure to watch him play. That's after making the cut. In the
00:29:14 ◼ ► first two rounds, there's way more golfers and you have to—the Masters is also unusual compared to
00:29:19 ◼ ► other tournaments where they invite a lot of amateurs and stuff like that. But then the cut
00:29:31 ◼ ► And was he—I don't even know, you probably know—was he able to play as a former champion?
00:29:38 ◼ ► I forget how much—there are certain rules where, like, if you win any of the major tournaments—the
00:30:04 ◼ ► Right. But the U.S. Open, because it's truly an open championship, run by the United States
00:30:11 ◼ ► Golf Association, and so any kind of organization like that has a rule book. And here's what you
00:30:16 ◼ ► have to do to qualify for the U.S. Open. And you could just—it's like a computer algorithm. You
00:30:21 ◼ ► can just check or X whether you qualify or not. The Masters, because the Augusta National Golf
00:30:27 ◼ ► Club has the ultimate say, can just say, "Yeah, but we're also going to invite Jack Nicklaus."
00:30:31 ◼ ► Even though he's 84, and obviously he isn't going to be competitive, but he gets to play
00:30:48 ◼ ► Night Baseball, or will they only be for other Apple products? And it gets to the question of
00:30:58 ◼ ► Right. Like, all right, Major League Baseball charged them—I have no idea what it would cost.
00:31:04 ◼ ► We'll make up a number. They had to pay $500 million to have these games this year. That's
00:31:09 ◼ ► probably high, but whatever. $500 million this year. Are they trying to sell $501 million worth
00:31:15 ◼ ► Right. So, yeah. So it would be—if they were purely in it to make a profit, it would be the
00:31:24 ◼ ► number of ads that they sell and their share of those ads, which I don't think is 100% for
00:31:38 ◼ ► —who they think came because of the baseball, which they'll never know, right? And this isn't
00:31:48 ◼ ► No. You've heard about Ted Lasso, and you think, "Eh, maybe I'll check it out," and then you hear
00:31:57 ◼ ► But you could probably come close to at least a decent spitball guess by looking at people who
00:32:04 ◼ ► didn't have a subscription that gave them—a paid subscription that gave them TV+ access,
00:32:20 ◼ ► You know, that's the sort of tracking that I assume Apple does with TV+, right? That they
00:32:37 ◼ ► I—and I don't think that's contrary to their privacy argument, because they don't care about
00:32:52 ◼ ► nobody is watching Severance, which I hope is not true because I love that show, it's like my
00:32:57 ◼ ► favorite new show, but like, if nobody watched it, it's like they're not going to renew it, right?
00:33:01 ◼ ► Like, so there's some net additive number of subscribers that they will get out of this,
00:33:07 ◼ ► and what else? How else could they make money? Oh, the promotional value that they get for free
00:33:13 ◼ ► ads, you know, for their own Apple products, telling people to buy the new iPhone 13, which
00:33:18 ◼ ► is now in green. They obviously advertised a lot of Apple TV shows. How else could they make money
00:33:26 ◼ ► from this? I don't think they're going to make money, and I think they know that they're not.
00:33:36 ◼ ► broadcast companies that show sports do so to make money, right? Like, when CBS shows the Super Bowl,
00:33:52 ◼ ► dollars per year for the rights to do it. So many people watch football that they think that they
00:33:58 ◼ ► make money on that, right? That's what's so tricky if you're like a traditional company like NBC or
00:34:06 ◼ ► CBS, and these streaming services like Amazon and Apple come in and might have different strategies
00:34:15 ◼ ► and are just willing to write a check for a couple hundred million dollars for baseball rights,
00:34:19 ◼ ► because that's just a, you know, what's like a huge deal to CBS Sports is like, eh, you know,
00:34:25 ◼ ► pocket change to Tim Cook, right? I sort of think that the overall strategy is less about making
00:34:32 ◼ ► money directly on Friday Night Baseball, but more just broadly trying to get more people to sign up
00:34:38 ◼ ► for not just TV+ as a paid subscription, but any sort of Apple subscription that includes TV+,
00:34:50 ◼ ► Right. The Apple One bundles, right? There's like Apple One and Apple One+ or something.
00:35:00 ◼ ► But it's like you can still just pay for Apple Music, but it doesn't really make much sense.
00:35:05 ◼ ► Maybe you just pay $9 a month or $10 a month for Apple Music and that's all you get. But they
00:35:11 ◼ ► really want you to spend like 15 or 20 bucks a month and get Apple Music and TV+ and, you know,
00:35:16 ◼ ► guess what? Some extra iCloud storage, blah, blah, blah. They just want more people to be on a tier
00:35:21 ◼ ► like that. And I think that's my guess is that adding some sort of sports is a way to sort of
00:35:34 ◼ ► Yeah, I think that makes sense. It's very strange because you mentioned that this was announced late.
00:35:38 ◼ ► Baseball was potentially in a strike situation or a lockout rather, I should say, because it was the
00:35:44 ◼ ► owners, not the players. But there was the potential that the season wasn't going to start
00:35:47 ◼ ► on time and that it wasn't going to happen at all. So then, yeah, when Apple announced this,
00:35:51 ◼ ► what, in March, I guess, right? They announced it in March and we said, "Well, if there's baseball,
00:35:59 ◼ ► But they announced it like four weeks before they actually started doing it. And so it's been
00:36:05 ◼ ► interesting to see that it wasn't something to anticipate for a long time. It was just,
00:36:12 ◼ ► Right. And they didn't announce the production details and announcing team and stuff like that
00:36:20 ◼ ► Yeah. And I'm fascinated by that too, because that's, in my opinion, extremely unusual. I
00:36:41 ◼ ► the number of women was phenomenal. They were, I think, in the booth. What did we have? Two women
00:36:46 ◼ ► and one guy on both of them. Is that right? Or was there, it doesn't matter. There were at least
00:36:52 ◼ ► three women in the booth that I can recall in my head out of six announcers, which is three more
00:36:57 ◼ ► than pretty much ever before about five years ago when Jess Mendoza was on ESPN. And most broadcasts,
00:37:10 ◼ ► to see some diversity there. And then even the other announcers that they had were not,
00:37:19 ◼ ► who's done this before. They brought in people who were more fresh voices, which I really liked.
00:37:29 ◼ ► I think the diversity clearly was deliberate. I mean, I think that they came into this thinking,
00:37:34 ◼ ► "We're going to diversify, especially gender-wise." Because I think it's safe to say that racially
00:37:41 ◼ ► commentators, at least in sports, have been racially diverse for a while. Play-by-play,
00:37:50 ◼ ► not so much, which is weird. And I know if you're not a sports fan, you're like, "What the hell are
00:37:53 ◼ ► you talking about?" And it's like, usually for any of these sports, basketball, baseball, hockey,
00:37:59 ◼ ► football, there's... The play-by-play person is someone who went to broadcasting school.
00:38:13 ◼ ► though, and follow the game. Like, they're telling you, you know, "Here's the pitch. It's low and
00:38:20 ◼ ► outside. That's ball three." And, you know, you're not even watching. You can hear them say this,
00:38:25 ◼ ► and it's like, "Oh, it's a long drive to left field," and, you know, then tells you what
00:38:29 ◼ ► happens. That's play-by-play. It's telling you what happens. And you can say, "Well, why is...
00:38:32 ◼ ► I've thought about this over the years. Why do you even need that if it's television?" Like, is that...
00:38:45 ◼ ► Right. But I think it would drive people... I think there's a... I don't know. I think there's
00:38:50 ◼ ► a reason that it works. And maybe it is just tradition, but it does work. But anyway, that
00:38:55 ◼ ► role is, in my experience, watching nationally televised games, not as diverse. It's typically...
00:39:02 ◼ ► It's a whole lot of white dudes. So the racial diversity on play-by-play, not so great.
00:39:08 ◼ ► Gender diversity on play-by-play, almost nonexistent. I think Apple, when they announced
00:39:12 ◼ ► that Melanie Newman, who does... She calls games for the Baltimore Orioles, is their East Coast...
00:39:17 ◼ ► I don't think they're announcing an East Coast crew and a West Coast crew, but I think that's
00:39:21 ◼ ► obviously what's going to happen because if she's calling most games for the Orioles, she can't
00:39:26 ◼ ► really zip across the country. But that's, you know, I think that was absolutely deliberate.
00:39:38 ◼ ► **TK:** And that's, you know, for baseball, honestly, that's another angle of diversity.
00:39:44 ◼ ► I would say it's the least important maybe of them, but it was a different group of faces
00:39:58 ◼ ► didn't get big names, that they didn't go poaching for Karl Ravitch from ESPN or somebody else?
00:40:04 ◼ ► **BEN HONG** Well, you had seen... Was this a tweet that you saw? I can't remember what you...
00:40:07 ◼ ► **TK;** Yeah, I'll put it in the show notes. I just added a note to make sure I put it in the
00:40:13 ◼ ► **BEN HONG** That you had seen that they were trying, at least had talked to Bill Simmons,
00:40:17 ◼ ► who's a decently big name, formerly of ESPN. And I can't remember who the other name was,
00:40:30 ◼ ► **TK;** Yeah, I don't know. Apparently, the rumor from the New York Post media reporter was that
00:40:54 ◼ ► although those aren't necessarily big names that have done baseball broadcasts. But yeah,
00:40:58 ◼ ► I really liked the crews that they had. Katie Nolan, I thought, was great on the second
00:41:03 ◼ ► broadcast. And it really, to me, was where Apple stood out from a lot of the other broadcasts,
00:41:08 ◼ ► because they all tend to sound the same, which is fine. But this, at least, I felt that there
00:41:14 ◼ ► was a difference watching these games. And I think that's something that was a result of who
00:41:31 ◼ ► especially when it comes to the media. But for whatever reason, when the barrier broke,
00:41:39 ◼ ► like when I was a little kid, there were no women broadcasting sports, period. Just none,
00:41:45 ◼ ► or at least not nationally. And when they first sort of broke into it, it was always as the
00:41:50 ◼ ► the sideline reporter, right? So you'd have two dudes in the booth, and then when there's
00:42:16 ◼ ► all of these jobs are open to the most talented broadcast, to the people who are the most
00:42:21 ◼ ► engaging and have the most interesting stuff to say, which clearly would lead to the sort
00:42:32 ◼ ► no reason that there shouldn't be more than one or two women calling play-by-play on nationally
00:43:07 ◼ ► Yeah, I guess we can risk it. It's a very—you know, they love to look at all the stats and
00:43:22 ◼ ► Well, what other details did you want to talk about? I want to talk about the graphics.
00:43:29 ◼ ► watching it. So Chris Young was a player for—he was in the first broadcast, and he was a baseball
00:43:34 ◼ ► player, retired now. Never a superstar, but I think he was decent. He played on the Yankees
00:43:38 ◼ ► for a little while, and he played on the Red Sox for a little while. And as I was poking
00:43:43 ◼ ► at his Wikipedia page, I saw this little explanation that he had claimed to have invented or at
00:43:51 ◼ ► least popularized sign stealing in baseball via Apple Watch, which both the Red Sox have
00:43:58 ◼ ► been accused of and the Yankees. So, you know, neither of our hands are clean on this. But
00:44:24 ◼ ► talk about it, but I bet that will not come up. But it is funny that of all people, the
00:44:34 ◼ ► been on the Yankees and Red Sox, but he was at the heart of the only micro scandal that
00:45:06 ◼ ► The reason to have it is they can look at, like, there are swings. They can look at how
00:45:10 ◼ ► a pitcher throws and prepare for their next at bat. There's all sorts of reasons to use
00:45:19 ◼ ► Right. Whereas the NFL has embraced technology for decades, you know, and they've got coaches
00:45:25 ◼ ► who are up in the booth, 300 seats above the field with binoculars and with TVs, and they
00:45:33 ◼ ► can show the video. They can look at the video of the game and the last play, and you see
00:45:38 ◼ ► the players down there with these Microsoft Surfaces through a sponsorship deal looking
00:45:46 ◼ ► team signed up. And they've got headsets, and the quarterbacks have, you know, headsets
00:46:01 ◼ ► Right. So this season, they've added a thing, which you and I have talked about offline,
00:46:09 ◼ ► Pitchcom, yeah. And this is another thing. There was all this stuff that got introduced
00:46:31 ◼ ► I would say it sort of looks like—the catcher gets a thing that looks like a garage door
00:46:36 ◼ ► opener. It's a little black piece of plastic with, like, a keypad with, I don't know, nine
00:46:42 ◼ ► Oh, I'd almost say, like, a video game controller, but yeah, like the pin pad outside of a garage
00:46:50 ◼ ► Yeah, I guess a garage door opener typically only has, like, open and closed buttons or
00:46:58 ◼ ► It's a little more complex than that, but it's not super complex. I think you're right,
00:47:01 ◼ ► it's about ten buttons. And so basically, the catcher's got this pad that they can have
00:47:10 ◼ ► they hit a button, and it says "fastball," and that plays in the pitcher's ear, it plays
00:47:16 ◼ ► in an outfielder's ear if they're wearing the earpiece. And actually, this was an interesting
00:47:34 ◼ ► a hundred years, of just throwing down fingers to indicate what pitch they want to throw.
00:47:48 ◼ ► Right, and another thing for the people out there who aren't baseball fans, it is actually—I
00:47:57 ◼ ► remember when I was a kid when I learned this, I was like, "That's amazing! I just thought
00:48:00 ◼ ► the pitcher just got up there and threw whatever pitch they wanted and the catcher caught it."
00:48:15 ◼ ► And if they call it getting crossed up, like—because so the sign stealing is a huge part of the
00:48:35 ◼ ► But if the pitcher and the catcher have the signals crossed up between them and the pitcher—
00:48:46 ◼ ► It's actually dangerous, right? Because it can like sail past—because it's a huge difference
00:48:51 ◼ ► in speed, huge difference in where you expect the ball to wind up. You know, 20 to 25 miles
00:49:09 ◼ ► a slower, curvy, you know, like Frisbee-type pitch that's going to bend, and instead it's
00:49:26 ◼ ► But it's really interesting that they've added this technology this year, and it's—when
00:49:47 ◼ ► Is this an April Fool's joke? And I stumbled upon it. I knew it wasn't April 1st anymore,
00:50:04 ◼ ► But if you made up the joke, the keypad that they actually use would be a very good mockup
00:50:24 ◼ ► company, but they make communication systems that magicians and mentalists use and, you
00:50:29 ◼ ► know, have to have some sort of wireless communication that most people can't detect, can't see.
00:50:34 ◼ ► And that turns out, a whole lot of that translates to making a communication system that a pitcher
00:50:59 ◼ ► like links to how it actually works, is it—I presume the only other option is bone conduction,
00:51:08 ◼ ► you don't see, like, you know, it would be funny, too, if like on Friday Night Baseball,
00:51:23 ◼ ► apparatus that fits inside their caps, you know, like the pitcher's cap or the shortstop,
00:51:47 ◼ ► Oh, thank you. Because it's just bone conduction, but that's where—and then that's where
00:51:59 ◼ ► Well, that's exactly what made me like convinced it was an April Fool's joke. It was like,
00:52:09 ◼ ► And the worst part is baseball, I think of all the sports I follow, baseball is the one
00:52:13 ◼ ► that to me seems most prone to April Fool's jackassery. There was famously—I think you're
00:52:37 ◼ ► like sometime around like 1986, I'm thinking, and it was the back page column in Sports
00:52:43 ◼ ► Illustrated and George Plimpton, well-regarded, very famous—I guess it wasn't even a back
00:52:56 ◼ ► who liked to pitch barefoot and could throw 120 miles an hour. And it was an April Fool's
00:53:17 ◼ ► People were very upset about it. I remember—I don't know what year it was, but I remember
00:53:29 ◼ ► Very beginning of the season. Usually the first games are like April 1st or 2nd or something
00:53:42 ◼ ► during spring training, but Major League Baseball players are all very excited about the fact
00:54:04 ◼ ► Major League Baseball the last three seasons was 98 miles an hour off the bat or something
00:54:32 ◼ ► Right. And he said that he honestly expected—this is where I realized this has got to be a gag.
00:54:49 ◼ ► Right. He was like, "I think I'll hit 100. If I stay healthy, I'll hit 100. No problem."
00:55:14 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's right. You were watching the terrible other broadcast part of the time.
00:55:25 ◼ ► it played more like a normal speaker. So I'm not sure—I've got to look this up, because
00:55:29 ◼ ► I've looked at this a little bit, but yeah, I'm not sure how the audio is being played.
00:55:33 ◼ ► Bone conduction certainly makes sense, because then no one's going to be able to hear it
00:55:40 ◼ ► transmitting sound in a way that could be heard, so, you know, through the air. So I'm—I'll
00:55:55 ◼ ► minds or speak to the dead or something like that, you know, the things that mentalists
00:56:08 ◼ ► that it goes through their glasses or something like that so that it, you know, it's bone
00:56:13 ◼ ► Yeah, no, so it definitely is bone conduction. So I'm not sure how they made that work on
00:56:41 ◼ ► audio, you know, it doesn't have to be—doesn't mean every receiver has to be bone conduction.
00:56:50 ◼ ► But anyway, technology and baseball. What else on the Friday night baseball? The graphics
00:57:03 ◼ ► they were showing, you know, the number of hits somebody got last year compared to other
00:57:10 ◼ ► interact with it. Because I at least was watching on my Apple TV, and it looked exactly like
00:57:16 ◼ ► every control on an Apple TV where you could scroll through the settings or whatever. And
00:57:19 ◼ ► there was a little—you noted there was like a little, what looked like a disclosure triangle,
00:57:27 ◼ ► But yeah, I found the graphics a little—they looked nice enough, but I found them a little
00:57:32 ◼ ► disconcerting because it looked like I could interact with them. And actually, honestly,
00:57:37 ◼ ► there's not a reason why you couldn't interact with them. Apple certainly could, with an
00:57:41 ◼ ► online-only broadcast, make it such that you could, on certain devices, interact and say,
00:57:49 ◼ ► It was sort of the—you know, it's a variation of the uncanny valley. It's instantly recognizable
00:58:11 ◼ ► know that's San Francisco. You're not allowed to use it like that." It looked so instantly
00:58:27 ◼ ► instantly figured out, "Hey, Apple's doing baseball. This has got to be an Apple broadcast."
00:58:32 ◼ ► But on the other hand, it is weird that within the confines of Apple's 2D fonts and colors
00:58:41 ◼ ► and lots of black backgrounds with white text and the way that the highlight looked exactly
00:58:52 ◼ ► And even one out of Apple's, you know, the way that Apple has sort of gone in a similar
00:59:03 ◼ ► you know? And you can't. But like you said, why not, right? That's actually very interesting
00:59:10 ◼ ► to me is if Apple has more ambitious technical goals. And if this whole thing was sort of
00:59:16 ◼ ► delayed until March because of the lockout, like, I honestly don't know what was allowed.
00:59:32 ◼ ► it seemed like other things were prevented too. So maybe this was all a bit rushed towards
00:59:37 ◼ ► But if you're showing it on a computing device, and that's all Apple is, right? They're
00:59:44 ◼ ► not simulcasting it to any sort of terrestrial TV. Everything is either like an Apple TV
00:59:59 ◼ ► You could have way more interaction with it. Yeah. I mean, so you've used MLB TV in the
01:00:04 ◼ ► MLB app. And that's got way more interactivity than just a traditional broadcast. You can
01:00:11 ◼ ► change how it looks. You can pull up different stats. You can do all sorts of stuff. And
01:00:23 ◼ ► don't know. I kind of feel the other thing, you know, to wrap this segment up. Well, let
01:00:31 ◼ ► to audio hijacked for after that. But let me take a break here. And thank our next sponsor.
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01:03:28 ◼ ► the commercials before, the thing that, this is the part that really, hmm, that makes me
01:03:33 ◼ ► go, I wonder. It looked to me like the sponsors for Friday Night Baseball were largely the
01:03:46 ◼ ► Right. It's the opposite, you know, and that's harkens back to my, hark's back, I forget,
01:03:54 ◼ ► I think that they're both accepted. This is a little insight into me and Paul's friendship,
01:03:58 ◼ ► because if I were writing and I haven't even spoken to Paul in a week or something like
01:04:03 ◼ ► that, I'll just immediately, I message Paul with a question like that. He's on the copy
01:04:18 ◼ ► It hark's back to my discussion of the masters where I thought, and you know, I thought it
01:04:23 ◼ ► was coincidental that it was Masters Weekend, the same weekend Apple was doing this, but
01:04:27 ◼ ► I thought that maybe Apple will do something prestige like that and just sort of, instead
01:04:31 ◼ ► of that bombastic in between innings, boom, boom, boom, you know, go to Chipotle, go to
01:04:44 ◼ ► Right. Crypto, crypto, drink a beer and then go gamble some more. Maybe it'll be more sedate
01:04:56 ◼ ► You're talking about the, the like ASMR quality of the, of golf. I would like to just, just
01:05:03 ◼ ► Right. And, and some scores from around the league at the bottom. Make sure people know
01:05:11 ◼ ► really it just looked to me like a white label MLB network broadcast. It was obvious...
01:05:24 ◼ ► Apple clearly hired all of the talent, right? The announcers, as we discussed, the announcers,
01:05:29 ◼ ► the sideline reporters, the pregame hosts, you know, Apple hired those people. They work
01:05:39 ◼ ► ended up selling the exact same style of ads. Is it distasteful? Is it, you know, like the
01:06:01 ◼ ► Yeah, potential activities, right. And without getting into any kind of argument about drug
01:06:07 ◼ ► policy at a legal level, why is it that alcohol has been legal? Well, not forever, but...
01:06:18 ◼ ► Since the 18th amendment was repealed with what, the 21st amendment? Yeah, 21st amendment.
01:06:25 ◼ ► Isn't it funny too that that amendment didn't last long, but they were amending like gangbusters
01:06:41 ◼ ► has been a staple of sports commercials ever since it's, ever since TV sports have been
01:06:46 ◼ ► a thing. But like, you know, marijuana has been illegal in the United States for, until
01:06:56 ◼ ► kind of advertising for that. I wonder if it'll start. New Jersey, which is right across
01:07:00 ◼ ► the river from me, is on the cusp. They've already voted to make recreational marijuana
01:07:12 ◼ ► Oh, no, no, no. So, so yeah, here in Mass, it got legalized. I don't even know the timeline.
01:07:16 ◼ ► It got legalized a while ago. It's taken some time. But if you drive down a highway, three
01:07:21 ◼ ► quarters of the billboards will be dispensary ads. The sides of every trash can in the city
01:07:25 ◼ ► are telling you about weed delivery. It's going to be huge. As soon as it's legal anywhere,
01:07:38 ◼ ► I think you're right. I do think you're right that they won't because it's still, even though
01:07:42 ◼ ► a state like New Jersey or Nevada or California, Massachusetts might legalize it. Pennsylvania,
01:07:50 ◼ ► it is legal for medical purposes only recently. I mean, I think within the last 18 months,
01:08:14 ◼ ► Even if you're going from one state where it's legal to another, it's all kind of bananas.
01:08:18 ◼ ► But it falls on this spectrum of is this beneath us or our brand or not. And the gambling stuff
01:08:28 ◼ ► was truly illegal everywhere but Nevada. Sports gambling has been illegal everywhere but Nevada
01:08:39 ◼ ► because it's all of a sudden when Pennsylvania sees that Delaware is getting all of this
01:08:53 ◼ ► a... I remember being like six years old or so when Atlantic City started opening their
01:09:05 ◼ ► looks like a lot of fun." It was a huge deal because it was the first place where there
01:09:09 ◼ ► was any gambling outside Nevada, except horse racing, which has always been oddly legal
01:09:14 ◼ ► everywhere even though you're allowed to bet on the horses. But then the horse tracks around
01:09:19 ◼ ► here state by state started adding slot machines. And once one state did it and they saw how
01:09:25 ◼ ► much money was coming in and how people stopped going to Philadelphia Park to watch horse
01:09:40 ◼ ► my mind, it was always Vegas and Atlantic City and that was it. There was nothing else.
01:09:45 ◼ ► And then yeah, in the past, I don't know, 20 years or so is where, as you said, the dam broke and all these
01:09:49 ◼ ► states started allowing all sorts of gambling. But that's funny that for you, it was just
01:09:53 ◼ ► Nevada. And for me, it was just Nevada and Atlantic City. And then now, you know, anyone
01:10:01 ◼ ► Right. Well, and then in the in-between time when they legalized it, there were a couple
01:10:05 ◼ ► of... for whatever, I guess, some kind of exception to federal laws where Indian reservations
01:10:13 ◼ ► And then did build them. And they're a huge, huge deal in between... on the, as we call
01:10:38 ◼ ► Well, you might as well just fly... at that point, you might as well fly to Vegas, right?
01:10:44 ◼ ► But anyway, the whole Apple pregame show was sponsored by BetMGM, which is... I actually
01:10:51 ◼ ► have an account at BetMGM. I pass no judgment. I enjoy sports gambling. Somehow they've managed,
01:11:09 ◼ ► the same MGM account. It's a pretty good sports app, you know, for betting on football and
01:11:14 ◼ ► baseball and stuff. But, you know, am I surprised that Apple took them on as a sponsor? A little
01:11:20 ◼ ► Yeah, it definitely... you know, we said it earlier, but if Apple had done this and shown
01:11:33 ◼ ► said, "Well, that's why it's on this premium, you know, network," or whatever we want to
01:11:37 ◼ ► call it, premium service. And they want to show off their technology, they want to show
01:11:44 ◼ ► They certainly don't need the money from this. Early on, we were saying, "How much money
01:11:47 ◼ ► would they be leaving on the table?" Whatever it is, they don't need it, you know, with
01:11:58 ◼ ► and it's going to be a much more enjoyable experience." And the same way that, you know,
01:12:07 ◼ ► So, they're not going that route so far, at least. I'll be interested to see when it is
01:12:14 ◼ ► don't need a subscription to tune in. And the second half is when they're going to say,
01:12:46 ◼ ► a Windows computer, you can go to tv.apple.com, and you don't have an Apple ID yet, but you
01:13:01 ◼ ► Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. But, you know, if your favorite team is on, and this is the
01:13:11 ◼ ► to pay for the second half. I think it's just—they just haven't answered the question. And I
01:13:16 ◼ ► Okay, so they've—all they've said is that the first half is free, and now we're getting—we're
01:13:29 ◼ ► see. Let's see, and we'll make up our mind later.'" Right? I mean, they didn't even announce
01:13:33 ◼ ► WWDC until, like, three days ago, right? It's, you know, they—why do they always announce
01:13:38 ◼ ► WWDC so bizarrely late, compared to every other developer conference from a comparable company?
01:14:06 ◼ ► World, whatever. I don't even know what the hell else. Oracle World? I don't know. I guess
01:14:10 ◼ ► that's the same as Java World now. But Salesforce—Salesforce has a big conference every year. You know, they
01:14:19 ◼ ► All right. Well, so I'm looking at this—at the PR, and it says, "And for a limited time,
01:14:38 ◼ ► is even getting into this at all is just to sort of increase the surface area of the number
01:14:50 ◼ ► to subscribe to TV Plus. And if the most interesting thing to a certain demographic is Friday Night
01:15:01 ◼ ► it's the same way. You know, and they have, you know, they're expanding the type of shows
01:15:13 ◼ ► would presume, you know, they marginally increase the number of people who might be interested.
01:15:18 ◼ ► There might be a ton of people out there who do not like watching prestige drama TV, like
01:15:24 ◼ ► The Morning Show and Severance and, you know, all the other shows that typical Apple TV
01:15:31 ◼ ► Plus shows. They don't like stuff like that, but they love Jon Stewart. Right? Well, then,
01:15:39 ◼ ► Right. And you get all this other stuff and you might like some of it. So I presume that
01:15:43 ◼ ► you're right. I would guess that the second half of the season will be you require a paid
01:15:53 ◼ ► sign up. I don't know. They'll do something, but that's in there. I am a little surprised
01:16:04 ◼ ► I, as you know, on occasion we go on, we've been on the cruise vacations and we've been
01:16:14 ◼ ► think. If you've never been on a cruise, Royal Caribbean cruise is exactly what you think
01:16:22 ◼ ► Because that's what I've never been on a cruise. And I assume that as soon as you get on, you
01:16:37 ◼ ► but I've never gotten sick by going to a conference. I know people used to say they'd go to Macworld
01:16:41 ◼ ► and come home and everybody always got some kind of Macworld flu because of people coming
01:16:46 ◼ ► together. And it's not like I have a particularly hearty never get a cold or flu immune system,
01:16:52 ◼ ► but I never came home from a conference. All the times I've been to WWDC or Macworld or
01:17:18 ◼ ► I don't like that. I get too many false positives. It's too stupid. It's a nice idea, but it
01:17:26 ◼ ► doesn't work for me. We've been on the Disney cruises and it's a lot of fun. And even when
01:17:36 ◼ ► to anybody with little kids who are into Disney. It's a terrific family place where the adults
01:17:40 ◼ ► can get some time away from the kids and the kids can go to a supervised thing that they
01:17:44 ◼ ► will love and they won't feel like they'll be begging to go to the kids club or whatever
01:17:49 ◼ ► they call it. They want to get away from you when they're young. But we've been, it's a
01:17:53 ◼ ► nice cruise and it's a nice vacation, a nice way to see different islands in the Caribbean.
01:17:57 ◼ ► But the most distinctive thing, at least from my mind as a degenerate gambler, of Disney
01:18:08 ◼ ► ships. And the casinos on all the cruise ships operate once they're in international waters
01:18:13 ◼ ► so that there's, well, and it's for tax purposes and regular tours. So gambling is, casino
01:18:21 ◼ ► gambling is illegal in Bermuda and we've gone on a couple of cruises to Bermuda with our
01:18:27 ◼ ► extended families, parents and my sister and her family and stuff like that. But Bermuda,
01:18:34 ◼ ► there are no casinos on the land in Bermuda, so once the ship is docked, the casino has
01:18:38 ◼ ► to close anyway. But I think they close, even if they land at an island where there are
01:18:46 ◼ ► to the country where they're docked. And I think the logic behind why does every cruise
01:19:00 ◼ ► Right? But Disney does not. They have no casinos on their ships, even though there's no legal
01:19:05 ◼ ► reason. And again, like Apple, nobody from Disney is going to come out and explain that
01:19:09 ◼ ► we think gambling is a filthy vice and we don't want to be associated with it. But Disney's
01:19:18 ◼ ► Well, it's exactly like the Intel Inside stickers until a year and a half ago, two years ago.
01:19:23 ◼ ► But you know, when Apple switched to Intel and they were asked, you know, are you going
01:19:31 ◼ ► machine you sell? And Apple certainly didn't do that because it wasn't their brand to do
01:19:49 ◼ ► at Apple's town hall, which was famously small, very cozy at the old Infinite Loop campus.
01:19:56 ◼ ► I forget what the... If it was in Tennegate and they just happened to take questions on
01:20:03 ◼ ► No, it's too late. It's got to be earlier than that. Were they introducing a new machine,
01:20:17 ◼ ► was wonderful, but also makes me feel ancient. Because imagine if Apple did this now, if
01:20:31 ◼ ► a minute, set up some stools, get some water for whoever's going to... Tim Cook and Jaws
01:20:36 ◼ ► and Federighi, whoever else is going to answer some questions, and then just take 10 minutes
01:21:01 ◼ ► Right. It's a business question as opposed to an Apple... Someone who covers Apple thinking
01:21:11 ◼ ► Hardware, but somebody who at the time covered the whole spectrum of the technology industry.
01:21:16 ◼ ► But everybody in the hall laughed and giggled a little, but Jobs had the perfect answer.
01:21:33 ◼ ► deflated the fact that some of us in the audience had chuckled at his question. It made the
01:21:43 ◼ ► their new partner who they'd just done it. It was absolutely perfect. Steve Jobs at his
01:21:49 ◼ ► But anyway, Disney doesn't do casinos. And I wondered, would Apple not do gambling? Well,
01:21:54 ◼ ► no, they do gambling. Now, of course, they have the gambling apps in the App Store, but
01:22:03 ◼ ► ads for. But sports gambling has just sort of rocketed from completely, literally illegal
01:22:20 ◼ ► Strange times. Well, and you're right, it is within the past. Is it a year? It's a year
01:22:36 ◼ ► been sort of a bad time for sports gambling to sort of get legalized nationwide because
01:22:46 ◼ ► I think that's overblown. I think people who have gambling problems, it's a bad idea in
01:23:05 ◼ ► Right. For people who have a gambling addiction, it can't be good that it's legal in any way,
01:23:10 ◼ ► anywhere at any time, let alone making it so that you can do it from your phone anytime
01:23:30 ◼ ► That's the term I've always used because we've had other products that have been more popular
01:23:53 ◼ ► other Mac apps. The Mac is an established platform, let's say. You know, there are certainly
01:24:04 ◼ ► Photoshop and Illustrator and, you know, the list goes on. Graphic converter, if you want
01:24:11 ◼ ► I think my beloved Keyboard Maestro, it was in different hands at the time, but I believe
01:24:19 ◼ ► You know, but 20 years, it's a long time. But it's just kind of fascinating that something
01:24:45 ◼ ► you can't predict that. And if you, you know, tried to predict right now what's a great
01:24:49 ◼ ► new app to make, but I want to make sure this thing is more popular than ever in the year
01:24:55 ◼ ► 2042. I want it to be more popular than now. Good luck. You know, that's just good luck,
01:25:03 ◼ ► Oh, absolutely. I mean, the biggest thing for us... So Audio Hijack, when we first created
01:25:14 ◼ ► it really dates me and makes me sound old and makes the product sound old. Because real
01:25:18 ◼ ► player streams don't even exist anymore, and, you know, it predates podcasts. So it's something
01:25:24 ◼ ► where the initial idea was... is not something that it's used for ever at this point. But
01:25:30 ◼ ► the general idea of recording audio is something we've been doing for decades. And the biggest
01:25:36 ◼ ► stroke of fortune that we had was the rise of things exactly like this, podcasts, because
01:25:42 ◼ ► there aren't that many people making podcasts compared to people listening to podcasts.
01:25:46 ◼ ► So something like Overcast, where, you know, you're listening to podcasts, that has a much
01:25:49 ◼ ► wider audience. But people that are making podcasts like you are making money from making
01:25:55 ◼ ► podcasts, a whole lot of them, selling ads, having subscriptions, and making a tool that
01:26:00 ◼ ► helps them do that is something where there actually is a market for it. And as podcasts
01:26:04 ◼ ► have become so mainstream, it's been... that's really... that's the number one reason why
01:26:18 ◼ ► I know we've talked about Audio Hijack before, but I don't assume that everybody listening
01:26:23 ◼ ► has keenly remembers your March 2019 appearance on the show when we might last have spoken
01:26:41 ◼ ► and it is not available on Windows or Linux or TiVo, or I don't know where else it could
01:26:54 ◼ ► could be something you think obviously a microphone, duh, but you could just assign application
01:27:06 ◼ ► Safari is playing," like if it were a real player stream or something else that through
01:27:14 ◼ ► whatever JavaScript chicanery they've tried to keep you from just being able to download
01:27:20 ◼ ► it and listen not live, right, you know, like you should be able to do with a computer,
01:27:24 ◼ ► you could just pump that in as an input stream and then do all sorts of stuff. To do all
01:27:47 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, so the three word summary of the app is record any audio. And that's served
01:27:57 ◼ ► you can do beyond just making a recording and a whole lot of reasons why you would make
01:28:02 ◼ ► The big difference I see as we look at this 20 year mark is, you know, we're joking about
01:28:12 ◼ ► Well, one of Jonas's high school friends is a listener of the show. It just blows me away
01:28:17 ◼ ► because I just assumed that, come on, I don't know. I'd like to think I'm not too middle
01:28:23 ◼ ► aged, but it's like I kind of worry that I've lost the idea that I'm going to get the teens,
01:28:28 ◼ ► that some computer enthusiast teens who listen not because that's their pal's dad, but just
01:28:38 ◼ ► know, it was kind of bananas. Real player was what, Flash? Was it Flash or was it their
01:28:48 ◼ ► It was very bad, but it was the option for streaming audio at the time. Besides, I don't
01:28:57 ◼ ► Right, and QuickTime audio. But the idea back in those days was that web browser plugins
01:29:04 ◼ ► are fundamentally hugely different from today's extensions, where today's extensions for browsers
01:29:10 ◼ ► are all built using web technology. The extensions themselves are programmed in JavaScript, and
01:29:16 ◼ ► if they have a presentation layer, it's HTML and CSS. Whereas plugins were like binaries.
01:29:26 ◼ ► Just inside the web browser. And, you know, real player was one of them. It was a thing.
01:29:49 ◼ ► So they were like, I don't know, like 64 kilobits per second, probably less, probably like,
01:30:14 ◼ ► to your hometown radio station in Philadelphia while you were in San Francisco, you could
01:30:22 ◼ ► It was amazing. And yeah, I mean, we're denigrating real player. It wasn't that bad. It was not
01:30:32 ◼ ► you said, I think it was ahead of its time because it's sort of, I always think of this
01:30:36 ◼ ► about the Newton, you know, the network wasn't really ready for what they were doing in those
01:30:42 ◼ ► Oh, absolutely. Oh, I think so too. I've always said that, that to me, the biggest problem
01:30:50 ◼ ► It was too big, too expensive, and there was no wireless networking. The Wi-Fi didn't even
01:31:00 ◼ ► size. You could definitely carry it in a pocket and it was cheaper. It was like 400 bucks
01:31:04 ◼ ► instead of a thousand. So there's one reason why Palm was successful. Palm Pilot was successful
01:31:10 ◼ ► and Newton wasn't. But ultimately, the Palm Pilot kind of fizzled out because it didn't
01:31:15 ◼ ► have wireless networking either. And really the whole point of carrying a pocket computer
01:31:28 ◼ ► utility," the idea primarily was, "Let's record audio from known sources out there," you know?
01:31:36 ◼ ► Yeah, that was certainly like one of the biggest uses. Another one that was sort of funny was
01:31:40 ◼ ► adding an equalizer to DVDs. So a DVD player on the Mac didn't have an EQ. And people were
01:31:51 ◼ ► basically the original use cases... If I looked back at our original press release, I could
01:31:56 ◼ ► probably tick off all the original use cases and say, "Yep, no one's doing that anymore.
01:32:10 ◼ ► You can just pipe it through live and apply filters and just have it come through... Just
01:32:27 ◼ ► But you could listen to it. The big difference, like you said, clearly now, especially greatly...
01:32:33 ◼ ► I'm not even going to say exacerbated by COVID, but accelerated by COVID. Because I think
01:32:48 ◼ ► But I don't think it's going to go back, right? Like, I think even as people now, literally
01:32:52 ◼ ► as we speak, are returning to offices and stuff like that, like the need and acceptance
01:32:57 ◼ ► for... Well, Paul always works from home Thursdays and Fridays anyway, so any kind of meeting
01:33:15 ◼ ► up when, you know, knock on wood, COVID is in the wide rear view mirror overall, is where
01:33:56 ◼ ► didn't really have a computer-based device. So the iPod was the first big thing for us.
01:34:01 ◼ ► Podcasting was the second big thing for us. And in terms of Audio Hijack, at least, yeah,
01:34:04 ◼ ► having people working from home in March of 2020, even before the pandemic had affected
01:34:15 ◼ ► down temporarily, we saw a sales spike and we honestly did not know what was happening.
01:34:21 ◼ ► We saw such an extreme sales spike of Audio Hijack and another one of our tools, Loopback,
01:34:26 ◼ ► which lets you route audio around your computer. And it took us a little while talking to users
01:34:40 ◼ ► are helping them do that." And it was really... It was a very strange thing initially to just
01:34:45 ◼ ► see this huge sales spike totally unrelated to, you know, we just released Audio Hijack
01:34:49 ◼ ► where we see a sales spike based on that because people are talking about it, people are linking
01:34:52 ◼ ► to it. That's great. But to see a sales spike come out of nowhere was very odd. And then
01:34:58 ◼ ► to realize that it was associated with this horrible event that was affecting everything
01:35:03 ◼ ► was... It's still difficult to... I've yet to figure out how to talk about this because
01:35:17 ◼ ► business because they can't sustain themselves. And, you know, it's not nice for it to be
01:35:21 ◼ ► on the back of a global pandemic. So I'd rather have made less money and not had the global
01:35:25 ◼ ► pandemic, but, you know, it was really nice to be able to help a whole lot of people with
01:35:30 ◼ ► these products to do things that they suddenly needed to do and that they didn't realize
01:35:34 ◼ ► they would need to do. It was very gratifying. It's a small thing, obviously. We didn't create
01:35:54 ◼ ► Fortune favors the bold is one of them, but I don't even know if this was bold. This was
01:35:59 ◼ ► But yeah, it's funny. For as many businesses that suffered terribly during their, especially
01:36:06 ◼ ► 2020 in the pandemic, there were others that did well. And it's funny to think of you guys
01:36:22 ◼ ► if you have a small company with seven employees and all you do is sell stuff to help people
01:36:36 ◼ ► That was the thing. Yeah. I mean, you're mentioning a particular case where, what is it, King
01:36:40 ◼ ► Arthur Flour is a small company and they suddenly needed a hundred times as much capacity as
01:36:52 ◼ ► a similar issue where we had this sales spike and we had a usage spike. And we fortunately
01:36:58 ◼ ► were able to bring on an experienced support technician who previously had worked at the
01:37:02 ◼ ► Omni group, an old friend of ours named Brian Covey, was able to come in and work for a
01:37:06 ◼ ► few months to do support for us. It was something where we suddenly had this spike in support
01:37:19 ◼ ► certainly, you don't want to have that capacity all the time on the off chance that you'll
01:37:31 ◼ ► with suddenly having twice as many or five times as many or 10 times as many people using
01:37:38 ◼ ► Craig: In some ways, I know that I'm entering into Ben Thompson territory here by bringing
01:37:42 ◼ ► up marginal costs, but it is sort of the magic of software is that there's no marginal costs.
01:37:50 ◼ ► Craig; Well, it's, you know, you do pay more for some things as sales go up, but it's all
01:37:56 ◼ ► commensurate as opposed to... You don't want to be Peloton, right? Where Peloton saw this
01:38:14 ◼ ► of a trend and Peloton thought the whole world is going to stop going to the gym anyway because
01:38:27 ◼ ► factory here in the United States. Let's buy this, get as many of these bikes made. And
01:38:31 ◼ ► then it turned out that, no, it was, you know, a one-time spike from the one-time pandemic.
01:38:37 ◼ ► And then they have all these bikes on their hands and a factory that they'd broken ground
01:39:09 ◼ ► but let's just say three times as many people downloaded the software. We didn't notice
01:39:33 ◼ ► Craig; Yeah. Let's take a break here and thank our next sponsor. I'm very, very excited.
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01:40:00 ◼ ► could tell you in two words, Drafts is a notes app, but Drafts is so much more than a notes
01:40:06 ◼ ► app. And trust me, I know notes apps. Drafts and Drafts is very different than the notes
01:40:10 ◼ ► app I made, but that's what makes it so interesting. It is a very different approach to using your
01:40:15 ◼ ► iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch. It is very, very much an Apple ecosystem app. If there
01:40:22 ◼ ► were a sensible reason to have Drafts on tvOS, I guarantee you they would have it. But there's
01:40:28 ◼ ► not, so there isn't. But your watch, iOS, and Mac, definitely. It's a low-friction way to
01:40:43 ◼ ► you want to dash down, just a couple of words, a thought, something to buy, whatever, and
01:40:47 ◼ ► you don't want to lose it, open Drafts, start typing, put the phone back in your pocket
01:40:52 ◼ ► or your purse or wherever, and there it is, a new Draft ready for you. No more fumbling
01:40:57 ◼ ► around to find the right app or find the folder where you want to put it. You just make the
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01:41:06 ◼ ► that or process it. Once you've created your text, they're a customizable editor, which
01:41:11 ◼ ► has terrific, by the way, I will say, markdown support, syntax coloring, all sorts of keyboard
01:41:16 ◼ ► shortcuts that are totally customizable for adding markdown links or italics or something
01:41:22 ◼ ► like that. This is not one of those things where it's like there was, here's how Drafts
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01:41:49 ◼ ► You get actions for sending emails, for sending messages, for tweeting right from Drafts.
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01:42:26 ◼ ► And you could just build your own, and it's terrifically well-documented, just a terrific
01:42:32 ◼ ► user manual. The scripting interface for creating your own extensions is absolutely perfectly
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01:44:10 ◼ ► the most intriguing new features to me is the new... what are you calling it? Scripting,
01:44:19 ◼ ► It's such a wonderful similarities to Drafts and being well-documented and it's supported
01:44:26 ◼ ► right within the app itself. So it's not just... not that there's anything wrong with just
01:44:31 ◼ ► saying, "Oh, there's a folder," and you put your scripts in the folder and then they show
01:44:40 ◼ ► a scriptable app. But it's like the actions in Audio Hijack, they're just like the actions
01:44:53 ◼ ► new in Audio Hijack. And also, like Drafts, it's using JavaScript. And I'm just curious
01:44:59 ◼ ► what the thinking was there. It's a custom... not custom, but it's not based on the JavaScript
01:45:16 ◼ ► Yes, I have written... I have probably written as much AppleScript as anybody who's never
01:45:23 ◼ ► Okay, okay. So you're familiar with AppleScript, obviously, as am I. But then you know, you
01:45:29 ◼ ► certainly know, and I think probably a lot of listeners know, Apple doesn't seem to care
01:45:32 ◼ ► about AppleScript and hasn't seemed to care about AppleScript for... at least five years,
01:46:07 ◼ ► you went back to 1994, 1995, I think AppleScript came out in 1993. Two years in, a lot of apps
01:46:14 ◼ ► adopted it. The need for sort of inter-application scripting was out. But by 1995, people sort
01:46:24 ◼ ► what AppleScript was going to be, and it's like what was good about it and what was bad
01:46:40 ◼ ► future of the Mac and Apple technology." If you looked around at what technologies were
01:46:47 ◼ ► in macOS at the time and said, "What do you think will still be here in 25 years?" I don't
01:46:56 ◼ ► know where AppleScript would have been on the list, but I'll tell you, it would be very,
01:47:01 ◼ ► very close to the bottom, in my opinion. Both... not because I hate... I don't hate it. I use
01:47:06 ◼ ► it. I like it. But it was weird. It certainly seemed... it did not seem like it was long
01:47:11 ◼ ► for the world then, when it was three years old. And yet here we are, and it might be the
01:47:28 ◼ ► pro users' workflows to just get rid of, but yet they've... like you said five years, but
01:47:35 ◼ ► they just haven't really had great enthusiasm for it at any point in the post-next reunification
01:47:53 ◼ ► Well, like you said, it had grown so essential for so many things that most users don't ever
01:48:18 ◼ ► But so, yeah, so when we looked at scripting, AudioHijack 3 came out seven years ago in
01:48:24 ◼ ► 2015, and that was sort of a sequel to multiple AudioHijack products before it. And one of
01:48:30 ◼ ► those was AudioHijack Pro 2, which had a little bit of scripting built into it, and AudioHijack
01:48:40 ◼ ► the types of users that we just talked about who would be upset about losing their workflows.
01:48:44 ◼ ► And people said, "I want to be able to script, I want to be able to automate some things."
01:48:58 ◼ ► to do that. There wasn't an obvious, "This is the way to do it, and it's going to work,
01:49:20 ◼ ► it's not getting any attention. So we weren't terribly interested to do anything with AppleScript.
01:49:25 ◼ ► And we had looked at JavaScript, and that was what we felt was the best way to do this.
01:49:32 ◼ ► And in the years since then, you know, JavaScript has only become more and more popular, more
01:49:40 ◼ ► a ton of JavaScript tutorials and resources. I don't know if you went to Apple and said—if
01:49:51 ◼ ► to do scripting in my application, how should I do it?" I don't even know if they would
01:50:02 ◼ ► You know, it's just sort of interesting the way it petered out. Not petered out, but the
01:50:15 ◼ ► new, and what I like to call—I know consistency gets misused as a word, that, you know, one
01:50:22 ◼ ► of the hallmarks of the Mac compared to Windows or other operating systems, if you go back
01:50:28 ◼ ► far enough, you know, when there were more competing PC operating systems, was consistency
01:50:35 ◼ ► David Schiessl and that, you know, it's file, edit, view, you know, and it's like, "Which
01:50:47 ◼ ► consistency was good for users, and that AppleScript and OSA scripting, where it was supposed to
01:51:01 ◼ ► was that there'd be this fundamental scripting layer, and if your app adopted it, then the
01:51:22 ◼ ► want to go on a rant about scripting languages, but even if you're not someone who's ever
01:51:26 ◼ ► written a script yourself, you could look at AppleScript and see, "Oh, this is a programming
01:51:30 ◼ ► language that's supposed to look like English prose." Tell application, and you have all
01:51:36 ◼ ► these spaces, you know, like writing a real language, whereas most computer programming
01:51:49 ◼ ► idea was something you could read and anybody could look at and pick up and understand.
01:52:06 ◼ ► can go to the script editor app and write an app to drive an AppleScriptable application
01:52:13 ◼ ► and write it in JavaScript instead of AppleScript, and it's the app's perspective, it all
01:52:38 ◼ ► the way anybody would write a real JavaScript API today, it looks like JavaScript mimicking
01:52:48 ◼ ► Right, and it's like—so like in the alternate world where seven years ago, Rogue Amoeba
01:53:15 ◼ ► Yeah, and the ones that you guys have come up with, with an API native, not just to JavaScript
01:54:23 ◼ ► It's not exposing security vulnerabilities to buffer overflows because it's our JavaScript
01:54:29 ◼ ► So on iOS, there have been, for, you know, 10-plus years, apps that have added scripting
01:54:45 ◼ ► Even though I know there's tons of exceptions now and there's apps that let you do stuff
01:54:48 ◼ ► with Python and there are, in fact, apps that let you program script, write little scripts
01:54:57 ◼ ► But you guys didn't have to pick JavaScript, though, because of iOS or App Store restrictions
01:55:22 ◼ ► that still influenced us because, yeah, if you've got a decade worth of JavaScript programming
01:55:32 ◼ ► an iPhone and a Mac are more likely to have that experience and just to be able to make
01:55:38 ◼ ► So, yeah, it was something where the timing—over time, it became clear that this was the best
01:55:44 ◼ ► way for us to do this and so far, you know, this has only been out for, what are we, two
01:55:50 ◼ ► But, you know, we've seen a whole lot of uptake from people who are interested to automate
01:55:59 ◼ ► Shortcuts iOS originally workflow, but, you know, shortcuts on iOS that have been there
01:56:13 ◼ ► we have a couple shortcuts that you can use and then you can tie in all different sorts
01:56:20 ◼ ► couple posts on doing things with shortcuts and using like a stream deck, a hardware device
01:56:26 ◼ ► that can run a shortcut and trigger, you know, start a session running and start a recording
01:56:31 ◼ ► and basically just making it possible to—anything that is possible with the scripting that we've
01:56:40 ◼ ► It's just making it a whole lot easier and it's making it a whole lot simpler to integrate
01:56:44 ◼ ► into things that you're already doing, such that, you know, it can be one click instead
01:57:01 ◼ ► And it was—that was sort of what made sense was because most users weren't using scripting,
01:57:06 ◼ ► but those who were really loved it and they appreciated it and then, you know, it's the
01:57:21 ◼ ► Audio Hijack 4 is potentially, you know, a little more headed that way in terms of podcasters
01:57:28 ◼ ► But yeah, it's something where, for us, scripting has sort of evolved over time from—early
01:57:33 ◼ ► on, it was something we did because of AppleScript and that was just, you know, a good Mac app
01:57:41 ◼ ► But people still want to have that automation and this is sort of the best way to do it
01:57:46 ◼ ► Yeah, I think it's fascinating and it spans this—these different eras of personal computing
01:58:14 ◼ ► I don't know what I would do with this thing and I don't know how to do the things I might
01:58:19 ◼ ► You know, make it easier to understand and democratize computing and let you be creative
01:58:31 ◼ ► I actually, at the time, like when AppleScript came out, believed that this might be the
01:58:36 ◼ ► way of the future, that an English-like programming language might be just what the doctor ordered
01:58:45 ◼ ► People like me and you, Paul, you know, who are program-ery, you know, and kind of understand
01:59:13 ◼ ► with computer programming that was—the idea was, well, maybe just this bizarre mathematical-like
02:00:00 ◼ ► But it turns out that whole English-like programming language thing truly did peter out.
02:00:15 ◼ ► And then I think people got turned off from—including Apple—from emphasizing scriptability, and
02:01:14 ◼ ► Like browser extensions are probably almost as mainstream as apps for mobile phones, right?
02:01:32 ◼ ► So people certainly understand what a browser extension is at a great—to a great level,
02:01:39 ◼ ► And really, you know, like I said earlier, browser extensions are really just a scripting
02:02:17 ◼ ► too few people, but the people who need that, oh my god, like being able to press one button
02:02:22 ◼ ► on my Steam Deck and have it, you know, trigger an action in Audio Hijack 4 while I'm recording
02:02:35 ◼ ► Or it could be that so many people are using a handful of extensions for Audio Hijack 4
02:02:42 ◼ ► that by the time Audio Hijack 4.1 or 4.5 comes out, you could build some of those features
02:02:57 ◼ ► So yeah, if something happens where we see, oh, you know what, that should be a first-party
02:03:06 ◼ ► But yeah, it's something where, so when we created the API for this, we sort of intentionally,
02:03:15 ◼ ► but we intentionally said, this is a skeleton, and we want to see what people build on it
02:03:37 ◼ ► You were talking about anticipating what people might do, and obviously we had to do some
02:03:44 ◼ ► But over time, we're going to watch and see, okay, people are looking to automate something
02:03:52 ◼ ► And then people are using this script all over the place, that should just be a feature
02:03:59 ◼ ► And at this point, the app is fairly mature, you know, it's been around for 20 years, so
02:04:09 ◼ ► what, that's something we wouldn't have thought of ourselves, but it's worth including in
02:04:16 ◼ ► And that has value, even, you know, all that scripting work can help guide that development.
02:04:25 ◼ ► Yeah, and not to keep going back to drafts, but, you know, drafts implements a bunch of
02:04:37 ◼ ► in addition to, I think, making life easier for Greg Pierce, the developer and designer
02:04:42 ◼ ► of drafts at Agile Tortoise, you know, because he can just write this quick thing in JavaScript.
02:04:50 ◼ ► great idea for a feature request, but also here, I've attached this action, you can just
02:04:57 ◼ ► And I was like, oh, well, I guess I should have thought of that myself and I could have
02:05:06 ◼ ► But that's happened to me and, you know, it's a cool thing, but I don't know, I was very
02:05:12 ◼ ► But the other thing about AppleScript compared to today, and I feel like I have so many complaints
02:05:22 ◼ ► Now that it's on the Mac, but I think adding it to the Mac has really, to my view, I don't
02:05:28 ◼ ► think it's my personal bias as if someone, an Apple user whose favorite platform is and
02:05:37 ◼ ► I think it's real that shortcuts, enthusiasm, nerd universe wide skyrocketed over the last
02:06:13 ◼ ► Like you're getting text out of BB edit and, or text out of drafts to put into a BB edit
02:06:28 ◼ ► You could use shortcuts as the sort of framework for talking to all of these apps that support
02:06:47 ◼ ► And it sounds like that's more complicated because Apple script was supposed to be both
02:07:12 ◼ ► But the thing that made that so frustrating is that no two applications had the same style
02:07:21 ◼ ► No, it was like talking a completely different dialect of the programming language once you
02:07:45 ◼ ► We called them dictionaries, but it's like each app had its own API for scripting anyway.
02:07:50 ◼ ► So the fact that they were all glued together at the Apple script layer really wasn't more
02:07:57 ◼ ► In fact, it was more confusing because there'd be things that looked like they were the same
02:08:05 ◼ ► But then within that app, I'm telling Audio Hijack to fire off an extension or an action
02:08:15 ◼ ► I think that's actually, it's both the, it seems to be the way the whole platforms, plural,
02:08:29 ◼ ► And we're seeing a whole lot more uptake with this than we ever did with cross application
02:08:34 ◼ ► So yeah, I think it's, I don't know that you'd sit down and you'd say, yes, this is how it
02:08:41 ◼ ► And it is why we have shortcuts support and didn't have things like Apple script support
02:09:17 ◼ ► And you know, sort of put up with it because it exists, it's possible to do so many things.
02:09:22 ◼ ► And even though it's a crummy app, the output of it is still useful and still functional.
02:09:27 ◼ ► So it's this bizarre, you and I were talking about catalyst apps in general, and it's this
02:09:32 ◼ ► bizarre, not very good app on the Mac, but it's better than the app not existing on the
02:09:39 ◼ ► I think it's SwiftUI, which is even, I think, which is why it's even worse because there's
02:09:45 ◼ ► just certain things that even catalyst would get right, but that SwiftUI didn't even support
02:10:01 ◼ ► for text, and it shows, it doesn't matter if you're on iOS or the Mac, it shows a little
02:10:06 ◼ ► dialog box, and you can type some text, and then there's like a cancel button to cancel
02:10:27 ◼ ► You have to, if you hit a return, you can just enter a new line of text within the field,
02:10:31 ◼ ► and you'd always have to hit, you're right there on screen anyway, you just hit the okay
02:10:48 ◼ ► And the return button doesn't do that because instead they want to allow you, which is reasonable,
02:11:11 ◼ ► Option is, you can't, you shouldn't use option for it because option would enter a return
02:12:00 ◼ ► I know we're going a little long, but several years ago, our good friend Brent Simmons was
02:12:26 ◼ ► And so instead of saying Wendy's old fashioned hamburgers, literally the part of the sign
02:13:55 ◼ ► in general, where, like I said, like you get like a product manager hat on yourself and
02:14:28 ◼ ► whole thing with AppleScript is it never made it to iOS for good reason, I think, but it
02:14:37 ◼ ► So there was a long stretch where there was literally no user level automation built into
02:15:02 ◼ ► And it just, I feel like that chicken and egg problem, if shortcuts, would it have been
02:15:14 ◼ ► And now that they've done it and brought it to the Mac, and I think it's the enthusiastic
02:15:22 ◼ ► And if there was any doubts within Apple about how much to devote to it, I would hope that
02:16:05 ◼ ► It allows you, a creative individual, to build a sustainable, recurring revenue based on
02:16:22 ◼ ► They have everything you need to run a membership program, including custom branding, gift
02:17:06 ◼ ► I subscribe to probably at least half a dozen Memberful sites, probably more if I actually
02:17:11 ◼ ► dug into it, but sites like Six Colors, Jason Snell's site that we just mentioned earlier
02:17:37 ◼ ► Any other interesting tidbits about version 4, the sort of thing that you couldn't really
02:17:54 ◼ ► I mean, we just spent so much time on so many little parts of this, but yeah, in the past
02:18:14 ◼ ► The scripting stuff has been really interesting just to see what people are doing with it,
02:18:30 ◼ ► You know, when I wrote up our blog post and our press release and everything, and I was
02:18:34 ◼ ► going through our change log, and there were over a hundred different notable bullet points,
02:18:43 ◼ ► When usually an update, even a major upgrade can be as little as ten or twenty major things,
02:18:55 ◼ ► I know you're a big fan of quality release notes like Barebones always has, and I strive
02:19:22 ◼ ► know you and I have spoken about this, but writing clarifies your thinking, and sometimes
02:19:29 ◼ ► I just don't know what I think about something until I actually write about it, because it's—and
02:19:33 ◼ ► I might think I do, but until I actually start writing about it, I realize, "Ah, you know
02:19:55 ◼ ► run through the changelog and work that out, and then I've got, in this case, over a hundred
02:20:04 ◼ ► are the most important, and which of these do we think are the most interesting to talk
02:20:53 ◼ ► So, you know, something like scripting was—that was something where we heard from users of
02:21:23 ◼ ► We're focused on selling to new users all the time and assuming that the existing users
02:21:28 ◼ ► are satisfied and that when there is a new version that they will come along to it because
02:21:39 ◼ ► But we don't really optimize for, "Oh, we need to make people purchase the new version."
02:21:49 ◼ ► If somebody bought AudioHijack in 2015, they have had seven years' worth of free updates
02:21:58 ◼ ► It's honestly, when I put it that way, it sounds awfully inexpensive to the point where
02:22:40 ◼ ► is up to date and sort of customizes things in a way for branding, like you've got distinct
02:22:50 ◼ ► And if anything, whenever they deviate from the system standard ones, they look better,
02:23:16 ◼ ► The first run screen often has little things like that because you don't see it as much
02:24:24 ◼ ► Yeah, in between my last episode from March and this episode, WWDC was announced sort of, right?
02:24:32 ◼ ► They announced that there's going to be this weird watch party in person, but not an actual
02:24:50 ◼ ► the country to go back to a mandatory indoor mask mandate, which again, I could do a whole
02:24:57 ◼ ► I think it's both a policy mistake and a political mistake that is going to be grossly,
02:26:02 ◼ ► On the one hand, it exasperates me, because it's like, obviously, this isn't an emergency if you're giving us a week.
02:26:09 ◼ ► But on the other hand, I'm glad, because I'm going to go out and buy as much stuff as I can.
02:26:16 ◼ ► Yeah. So it's like, I guess we'll go out to eat a couple times this weekend and, you know, live it up without our masks until next week when this week's emergency measure takes effect.
02:26:24 ◼ ► But I realize, though, from a WWDC planning perspective, no matter how solid one feels about COVID being at a manageable place overall,
02:26:39 ◼ ► I don't think the traditional in-person WWDC could possibly have been planned for June.
02:26:49 ◼ ► Of all the things you could do, packing 5,000, I guess counting the Apple employees, 7,000 people into a convention hall is, you know, among the least recommendable.
02:27:03 ◼ ► But, you know, I say this knowing that, you know, the NBA playoffs have started and, you know, there's 30,000 people going to these basketball games and arenas.
02:27:15 ◼ ► I'm just saying if you could do your convention, you can't really play basketball otherwise.
02:27:27 ◼ ► It would have been very surprising to me if they had announced last week WWDC is back and it's exactly like it used to be before COVID.
02:27:43 ◼ ► You know, I was just some random thing about, just a random story outside my usual wheelhouse, but about like car dealers and, you know, a big car dealer conference in Vegas and all sorts of places are having conferences.
02:27:57 ◼ ► It's a weird mix of people who don't even realize how much a lot of the world has gone back to normal and people who would be flabbergasted if Apple said we're going to have 5,000 attendees.
02:28:12 ◼ ► Well, so they did this weird hybrid though, or it sounds like they're doing this weird hybrid where it's unclear, although I think if you read it properly you can tell that on day one they're going to have an event where you can go and watch, but it sounds like it's going to be videos.
02:28:39 ◼ ► And again, I think this is typical Apple, well, we can hedge our bets on this, so why not? We'll just tell people as late as possible.
02:28:51 ◼ ► I mean, it doesn't make any sense to pack people in to watch a video but not pack them in to see sessions.
02:29:00 ◼ ► I know some people wear masks outdoors, it's widely accepted though that COVID doesn't really transmit very much outdoors if at all.
02:29:09 ◼ ► So certainly it's safer, you know, whether to meet any particular person's definition of safe enough, you know, that's up to that person, but clearly outdoors would be safer than indoors.
02:29:25 ◼ ► Could be something where they're going to have events all over the world, you know? I don't know.
02:29:29 ◼ ► You know, or at least several locations around the world, not just somewhere in California, and would it be?
02:29:36 ◼ ► Right? Where and where would it be in California? Like, I was thinking like San Jose, but why would they even have it in San Jose if they're not at the convention center?
02:29:47 ◼ ► No, my thought was outdoors in the middle of Apple Park, you know, you can set up a big video screen as long as, it doesn't rain a lot there.
02:30:04 ◼ ► Yeah, Apple employees. I don't know exactly what level of it is security and what level of it is something else.
02:30:18 ◼ ► The old visitor center at Infinite Loop was, Infinite Loop was not very Apple-like architecture-wise, or it is not. I know that it's still stuffed to the gills with people who work there because there are so many employees.
02:30:32 ◼ ► But like the company store, it's just in one of the buildings. You just park where employees park and you just walk right into, you know, the new Apple Park.
02:30:44 ◼ ► The ring building and the Steve Jobs Theater are across the road from the visitor center.
02:30:49 ◼ ► And the visitor center has its own parking lot, and that is where the media park for an event, but then they have...
02:30:55 ◼ ► You could see how unusual it is that those of us parking at the visitor center for an event are being escorted over here, across this street, up this walkway to get to the Steve Jobs Theater.
02:31:10 ◼ ► I mean, they could do it at the Steve Jobs Theater. The Steve Jobs Theater is sort of meant for that, but it really doesn't seat many people at all.
02:31:18 ◼ ► I mean, it's certainly bigger than the town hall we mentioned before, but it's just a couple hundred. That doesn't really make sense. And it's indoors.
02:31:24 ◼ ► But there's no way to get to that center courtyard of the ring without going through a place that I don't think was ever meant to take any visitors at all.
02:31:38 ◼ ► I mean, if you could teleport them there, it's certainly enough space. And they've had, like you said, they've had concerts and stuff like that, but it won't be there.
02:31:46 ◼ ► Well, so here's my question for you. If it is only in California, will you go to that if there's a press portion of it?
02:31:53 ◼ ► I don't know. And I will say, I guess I can say, because there's nothing under NDA, because I haven't heard anything from anybody at Apple, whether there is a press thing.
02:32:02 ◼ ► Or if it is from the media's perspective, it'll be exactly like the last two, where you just watch wherever you watch remotely, and all of our post-event media briefings are conducted via WebEx and stuff like that.
02:32:16 ◼ ► I don't know. I guess if it's in person for the media, I would like to go. I mean, I'm ready to go back.
02:32:23 ◼ ► Makes a lot more sense. I've talked with other developers and things, and there's not a lot of enthusiasm that I've seen to go to this watch party as a developer, because it's a trip to California, which from the East Coast is a trek.
02:32:37 ◼ ► And it doesn't sound like, we'll see what Apple announces, but it doesn't sound like there's going to be a lot to it, as opposed to a week of sessions and after-work things that the conference usually is or formerly has been.
02:32:51 ◼ ► Yeah, my guess is it's just the Monday stuff, which would be the morning keynote, then the afternoon State of the Union keynote with the technical details.
02:32:59 ◼ ► And then maybe they'll have the Apple Design Awards, you know, and let you watch them. I mean, they move Apple Design Awards all over the place on the schedule, but it would certainly slot right in as something to do as the third thing of the Monday.
02:33:15 ◼ ► You know, and then Tuesday through Friday are when the regular sessions come out, and they're all just like the last two years, just online. They were pre-recorded.
02:33:26 ◼ ► Probably, you know, there are probably people listening to this podcast this week who are hard at work on their WWDC presentations and Cupertino, you know.
02:33:35 ◼ ► That's my guess. I don't know. The only other thing I could think of other than the keynote, the State of the Union, would be the Apple Design Awards.
02:33:41 ◼ ► Or some other special thing, you know, maybe they would have a band come, and Simulcan's a band? I don't know.
02:33:48 ◼ ► But yeah, it sounds like it makes a lot more sense. If there's an in-person press thing, that makes sense to go to.
02:33:53 ◼ ► But if there's an in-person, if all the in-person developer portion is watching a couple videos, and even if there's a band or something, it to me is not worth a trip across the country.
02:34:03 ◼ ► I think they'll get a whole lot of people from California attending that, and not from very far away beyond that.
02:34:09 ◼ ► Now, correction here. I'm getting a piece on my earpiece. I actually loaded up their website, and I'm glad I did.
02:34:16 ◼ ► It does say here on the website, go to Apple.com/WWDC. It forwards you to the developer/WWDC 22 page.
02:34:25 ◼ ► But, no, you were right, Paul. I owe you a being right point. In addition to the online conference, Apple will host a special day for developers and students at Apple Park on June 6th.
02:34:36 ◼ ► Okay. To watch the keynote and State of the Union videos together, along with the online community.
02:34:42 ◼ ► So they're saying keynote, State of the Union, and it will be somewhere at Apple Park. Maybe there's some kind of walkway. They will get people into the ring. I don't know.
02:35:00 ◼ ► I don't know. I'm very intrigued now, now that I think about it, where they're going to do it. If there's some way they can create a walkthrough through the ring.
02:35:10 ◼ ► But I don't even know where the people would park, though, because I think it's actually quite a haul from the visitor center.
02:35:16 ◼ ► And the visitor center, I don't think, is meant to have that many people park. You know, like, I certainly don't think 4,000 people.
02:35:25 ◼ ► Well, it's certainly unclear what sort of numbers we're talking about. I think it says space is limited, details, blah, blah, blah. But if there's 1,000 people, that's a number that makes sense to me.
02:35:37 ◼ ► But even that, it sounds like, would be potentially too many for a lot of this, for the infrastructure.
02:35:43 ◼ ► Right. I mean, honest to God, I don't want to harp on parking too much, but it's not like—all right, San Francisco, when it was at Moscone, there were dozens and dozens of hotels within walking distance of Moscone, because it's downtown San Francisco.
02:35:59 ◼ ► It literally, the area is built up, you know, around the convention center, or they put the convention center there because the hotels were already there.
02:36:35 ◼ ► You know, but you still get those great $500 a night prices for a mid-priced two-queen room. You can't beat it, really.
02:36:42 ◼ ► But still, wherever you stayed in San Jose, you could walk to the, whatever the name of the convention center is there.
02:37:04 ◼ ► I've never tried it. I mean, I've been to multiple events at the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park, but it's nowhere near any hotels that I'm aware of.
02:37:13 ◼ ► I mean, certainly not walking distance. I mean, there are, there was a weird hotel in Cupertino that you can definitely walk, easily walk to Infinite Loop, but it's miles away from Apple Park.
02:37:25 ◼ ► And I don't know. And it's like, so how many, you know, if you're not local, how do you get there? You don't have to rent a car, you could take an Uber, but how many thousands of people can show up in an Uber on the same morning?
02:37:38 ◼ ► You know? And it's like, you know, I don't know. I don't know what that's going to be like. It's going to be, they must have something in mind.
02:37:44 ◼ ► They must have something planned. I mean, shuttle buses, something, but yeah, that's interesting to think about. It's not something that I had thought about as far as just sort of the security of the campus and not necessarily wanting people to park in their, in the employee parking lot, which has an employee parking garage, which has thousands of spaces or anything like that.
02:38:01 ◼ ► It feels, when I've been there, it feels like, in fact, at one time they had an event that I was at where they did have a certain fitness component and I, like, I've been to their, their fitness center for, for employees because they've, they've used it to demo stuff.
02:38:19 ◼ ► It's far enough from the Steve Jobs theater that they, they had, like, golf carts to take people. No, they really did. And I think that, and I think I tried, I wanted to turn it down and they're like, no, no, you got, you got to take a golf cart.
02:38:36 ◼ ► You or I, you know, when your, your foot isn't broken, you would easily walk it, you know, it's like walking a couple holes of a golf course or something, but it's, it's certainly not walkable for everybody of all ages and, you know, state of their broken foot.
02:38:51 ◼ ► You know, there's all sorts of reasons. It's, it's not close though. The visitor center is close-ish to the Steve Jobs theater, but the Steve Jobs theater is not that close to the ring and that's just the outside of the ring.
02:39:05 ◼ ► so I don't know. I don't know what they're going to do. Although there is a lot of green space in between. Maybe that's where they'll put something. Outside the ring, but in the big green space that's in between, who knows?
02:39:21 ◼ ► Well, and it raises the question of, are they also, are they going to have media on site for the keynote? Which I believe they will be willing to wait until the end of May.
02:39:34 ◼ ► Right. Right. And just, you know, and because what do they care if some people have to fly from
02:39:41 ◼ ► London or Europe or way further away than I do, they'll fill up the room, that's for sure.
02:39:49 ◼ ► You'll get there or you won't, and yeah, exactly. I mean, even for developers, as you alluded to
02:39:55 ◼ ► earlier, they've never announced this a year in advance or six months in advance. It's two or
02:40:00 ◼ ► three months heads up to try and book a room in San Jose and get flights and everything. So yeah,
02:40:05 ◼ ► so if the developers aren't getting much heads up, the media certainly is not going to get any.
02:40:10 ◼ ► You and I, how many years have you and I spent bargain hunting hotels based on guest WWDC days?
02:40:17 ◼ ► Oh God. Yeah, from when it was in San Francisco, we could see the calendar of the Moscone Center
02:40:29 ◼ ► so I'll book one that week. I mean, reading tea leaves to go to a conference is ridiculous,
02:40:46 ◼ ► but I knew I'd fly somewhere else and I wouldn't be paying any kind of fee on the airline tickets.
02:40:51 ◼ ► That was a nightmare. But anyway, I'm sure I'll find out. What is it? June 6th? I'll probably find
02:40:55 ◼ ► out. June 6th. So by June 4th, you'll definitely know if you're going out there. Well, that's
02:41:00 ◼ ► the ultimate was the—and again, I think it might have—no, it wasn't Antennagate, but Antennagate
02:41:06 ◼ ► was when I had my crowning moment and asked Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller and Tim Cook and Big Bob
02:41:12 ◼ ► whether they used the bumper case on their iPhone 4, and all four of them took out their phones and
02:41:19 ◼ ► showed that they just keep them in their pocket without a case. No case whatsoever. Yeah, and
02:41:23 ◼ ► we're making phone calls just fine. But that was my—number one, it's not because I'm shy,
02:41:28 ◼ ► it's because they don't take questions anymore. I've always got a question that I would ask if
02:41:39 ◼ ► I had a phone call from Apple PR around three in the afternoon, Philly time. Can you get here
02:41:44 ◼ ► tomorrow morning? And I may only be slightly exaggerating, but it was definitely like a
02:41:51 ◼ ► Thursday afternoon. And money was—you know, the revenue at Daring Fireball was not what it is
02:41:58 ◼ ► today. It was theoretically possible that I could get a flight, but it would be out of the budget.
02:42:04 ◼ ► But I got like a United flight at 420. I was like, "Hey, Amy, I'm going to California."
02:42:10 ◼ ► I gotta go to the airport. Yeah, she's like, "When?" And I'm like, "Oh, no, now. I'm packing."
02:42:14 ◼ ► She's like, "What are you talking about?" And I'm like, "Oh, my God, it's the antenna thing."
02:42:18 ◼ ► You know, there we go. But no, it was like, I would say, 18 hours of notice. But now that was
02:42:25 ◼ ► an emergency press conference. I don't know. Like you said, I'm sure they'll give me at least two
02:42:30 ◼ ► days for WWDC. I thank you for your time. This is long, but we did have four sponsors, so it kind of
02:42:34 ◼ ► made it worthwhile for everybody. Everybody should absolutely check out Audio Hijack 4. It is at the
02:42:40 ◼ ► Rogue Amoeba website. Do you play the Wordle? I do. Has Rogue come up yet? I think Rogue
02:42:48 ◼ ► will be one of those words of the day that's going to trip people up. Yeah, no A, no E, no N, no S.
02:42:55 ◼ ► Yeah, that's a tricky one. No, it's got an E. Rogue? Oh, you're right. I was running through the
02:43:01 ◼ ► most common letters in my head. All right, so no N, no S, no—yeah, I don't know. I think people
02:43:05 ◼ ► would get that. But wait, let me—I've probably done this on the show before, but we've got,
02:43:10 ◼ ► because no one can spell "rogue," as I even just demonstrated, and no one can spell "amoeba,"
02:43:20 ◼ ► we snapped that up when it became available, and basically use it for nothing but podcasts,
02:43:26 ◼ ► because everyone—if you can't spell macaudio.com, then I don't know, we can't help you.
02:43:31 ◼ ► I've got to say that Rogue Amoeba definitely has the highest vowel-to-consonant ratio of any
02:43:37 ◼ ► company in the indie Mac space. Ooh, yeah, probably. That's probably right. Pretty high.
02:43:43 ◼ ► It'd have to be like AAA—AAA-adieu to beat it. All right, so macaudio.com, and it'll just,
02:43:52 ◼ ► what, redirect people? It just takes you to rogueamoeba.com. If you want to try and spell
02:43:56 ◼ ► rogueamoeba.com, you can, but Amoeba has multiple valid spellings, and we don't own all of them,
02:44:15 ◼ ► We have rouge amoeba, we have—I forget if we have one of the other spellings of amoeba, but
02:44:19 ◼ ► Google makes this, you know, web searching, duck, duck, go, whatever. Search engines make this
02:44:25 ◼ ► unnecessary, except in a case like a podcast, where, you know, someone might just type it in
02:44:35 ◼ ► keen observations on this. I'll thank all of the sponsors of this episode. We had Squarespace,
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