244: ‘Plagiarists and Fabulists’ With Glenn Fleishman

0:00:00I am happy to report I'm healthy as a horse. I had my annual physical today. They don't call

0:00:06them physicals anymore, you know. They call them a wellness exam. Yeah, that's because the ACA,

0:00:11because the ACA will pay for wellness exams. Is that really true? I honest. Yeah. And so it's

0:00:17required. But the question is, how often can you go in for a wellness exam? Are you well once a

0:00:22year? Or do you need to go in multiple times? I found this out because we had a terrible health

0:00:26plan last year and I went in to see the doctor and I called and said, "I'm scheduling this as

0:00:32a wellness visit." And they said, "Great!" And I saw the doctor and I said, "We have a terrible

0:00:35insurance plan. This has to be a wellness visit." And he said, "Oh, I totally understand. Absolutely."

0:00:40Then I got a bill for like $300 because we had a terrible plan last year. And I called, you know,

0:00:45through Kaiser, which is both the insurer and the health plan provider, right? The health provider.

0:00:52And I wrote them and said, this was a wellness visit. And they wrote back and said, Well, you're

0:00:57responsible for any services incurred during a visit, no matter what. And I said, but the doctor

0:01:06even told me it was a wellness visit. I wound up having to make a stink. I wrote letters to Kaiser,

0:01:10they wound up eventually assigning a fixer to me at Kaiser. And this person addressed all of my wife

0:01:16in my issues because we kept having issues. A nurse made my wife cry on the phone, which is rare.

0:01:23My wife is very level-headed because her wife called and the nurse said, "You have such a

0:01:28terrible health plan. It's awful. You should be ashamed of yourself for having such a plan." She's

0:01:33like, "It's what we can afford." And they're like, "Okay, that probably shouldn't happen."

0:01:37It's like, "Yep." They're like, "We're going to have that nursing for retraining." I'm like, "Look,

0:01:40I don't want to get in any trouble, but really the nurse is probably frustrated also." But like,

0:01:45I think that's the state of healthcare,

0:01:46is you have nurses yelling at people

0:01:49for terrible health plans.

0:01:50It's great.

0:01:51- I was in, I'm knocking out all my doctors' appointments

0:01:54this week and next.

0:01:55I went to the eye doctor two days ago.

0:01:57I went to my general practitioner today.

0:02:01And then next week I'm going to the dentist.

0:02:03So I'm doing it all.

0:02:04I'm taking care of myself.

0:02:05- Oh, your eyes.

0:02:06Didn't you have an eye problem?

0:02:07- Oh, I have terrible eye problems.

0:02:08But it's a mixed bag.

0:02:10It's, you know, it is.

0:02:11- It's not Andy Baio's terrible eye problem, right?

0:02:14Oh, yeah, yeah. I forget what the details were.

0:02:17It was just like a tiny, tiny, tiny something got embedded in his eye.

0:02:21Oh, yeah, yeah.

0:02:22And it wound up being this like a year-long odyssey. And I think he's fine now. I believe

0:02:27he's on the other side of it. But it's just one of those things. I have friends who,

0:02:31their kid had a fishbone in their throat, and they didn't know what was going on,

0:02:37and no doctor could diagnose it until the kid was old enough to articulate exactly what

0:02:42was going on.

0:02:43Ah, geez.

0:02:44say, "Oh, my throat hurts right here," they were able to find it with an endoscope

0:02:48and take it out and then they were fine. You're like, "Oh my God."

0:02:52Yeah. But I did hear a funny story—well, funny, funny, funny to our friends in Europe

0:02:57and Canada and elsewhere. And oh yeah, that makes sense here in the United States is my

0:03:02ophthalmologist is at the Will's Eye Hospital here in Philadelphia. It's seriously a world-leading

0:03:09hospital. It's a hospital just for the eye. That's where I had my retinal surgery four

0:03:15years ago.

0:03:16Darrell Bock Oh, that's great. That's great.

0:03:17Dave Asprey But anyway, their emergency room, their hospital

0:03:21is on the east side of—oh, jeez, is that 8th Street or 9th Street? I'm going to say

0:03:269th Street here in Philadelphia, like corner 9th and Walnut. They're on the east side,

0:03:30but they're like at the 8th floor and up. I don't know what's on the first seven

0:03:32floors. But their emergency room, the Wills Eye Emergency Room, is on the west side of

0:03:37street and an older building that used to be the entire wills I hospital. Oh, gentlemen,

0:03:41gentlemen who goes to my eye doctor came in and he has one good eye. He was actually in it. I mean,

0:03:48this is probably a violation that she's telling me this story, but she's a doctor. She tells

0:03:54stories. He's got one good identifying information. I think it's okay. He's got one. He's got one

0:04:00good eye. And he's he was taking some chairs out of the trunk of his car. And well, the leg of the

0:04:05the one chair poked his good eye out.

0:04:07Jesus. No.

0:04:09So he goes through the Louie braille. It's like,

0:04:12do you ever believe the story that Louie braille was playing with an all and

0:04:15poked his eye out as a child? I don't believe that.

0:04:17I don't know either,

0:04:18but this guy poked his eye out with the leg of his good eye with the leg of a

0:04:21chair. So he does the right thing. He goes to the Will's eye emergency room.

0:04:24And, uh, I'm not quite sure how, what,

0:04:28what level of in or out his good eye was at the time. I mean, I'll,

0:04:31I'll say this so that nobody is, is distressed.

0:04:34It's all good.

0:04:35He's a, you know, they got his eye back in

0:04:37and they did some surgery and his good eye

0:04:39is still his good eye.

0:04:40He's good.

0:04:42But in the meantime, he's in the emergency room.

0:04:43And I believe that when your eye is only partially

0:04:46in the socket, they quickly diagnose this one

0:04:49as a genuine eye emergency.

0:04:50And they said, "You need surgery."

0:04:53Now the surgery is gonna take place across the street.

0:04:55But in the meantime, for whatever reason

0:04:57in the emergency room,

0:04:58they'd already hooked him up to an IV.

0:05:01So he's already got the IV.

0:05:03this is how certain they were that you're gonna need surgery.

0:05:05They will get you the IV now.

0:05:07But then he's literally across ninth street

0:05:11in center city Philadelphia from the hospital

0:05:13where he needs to have the surgery.

0:05:14So they can't just have them cross the street with an IV.

0:05:17So they put them in an ambulance just to go across the street.

0:05:19- Yeah, of course, right.

0:05:21- $3,000.

0:05:22(laughing)

0:05:22- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:05:23- To go across the street.

0:05:24- Yeah, oh my God.

0:05:26- This is, I had cancer over 20 years ago

0:05:29and I had chemotherapy.

0:05:32some point they're giving me some drug and they're like, "If you need to go to the bathroom, you need

0:05:35to tell us because you're a biohazard. So, if you need to wheel this down the hall, we have to do

0:05:42like this protocol." I was like, "Okay, that's kind of scary, but sure." I think it got taken

0:05:48care of. I think at some point somebody talked to me, you know, talked to this insurance company

0:05:52and said, "You cannot stick this gentleman with this bill for this. We insisted upon this,

0:05:56you know, he had no option, you know, we'd already, you know." And I guess, so I, you know,

0:06:00it was all good. His eye's okay now, and it's back in his head. But he initially got a bill

0:06:07for the hospital, for the ambulance, right? It was $3,000. And when I say across the street,

0:06:11I mean, like, it just across the street, like you could kick a pebble as far as it needed to go.

0:06:18Pete: Yeah, yeah, it's tricky. My in-laws have had to go to the ER recently, and they're fine,

0:06:22but there are things where you have to go to the ER. My mother-in-law broke her wrist,

0:06:27unintentionally fell over. And she went late enough today, she they're in a relatively small

0:06:32town nearby. We've just they've just moved closer to us, like three blocks from every hospital in

0:06:37Seattle, which is great. It'll help in the future. But they're like, okay, how do we get home? And

0:06:41they're like, no cabulances, no taxis would take them. They had to get an ambulance to take them

0:06:46home. And it was so far away. My wife can't drive at night now. And so we would have to drive a half

0:06:53an hour leave the kids home alone in the middle of the night. So they took an ambulance home was the

0:06:58only way they could get back to their retirement place, which is wild. That's crazy. The good news

0:07:05is my eyes my eyesight I have very good eyesight for 82 year old man. That's I got the lungs of a

0:07:1270 year old and he wants them back. But my lung capacity apparently is not very good either.

0:07:16Because they did this. They do this test. I don't know if they do this where you go,

0:07:22but they give you this lung capacity test. You got to take it's like a plastic thing,

0:07:26sort of like a big amateurs. If I go and you got to like, you got to take a deep breath,

0:07:31and then you blow as much air into it as you can. And then you suck as much air into it as you can.

0:07:35And it came up, I saw the computer, it was hooked up to it said, Okay, or something. I know, like,

0:07:40this is good. But my, you know, the doctor is like, Have you ever smoked cigarettes? And I'm

0:07:45like, No, never. I've never smelled. She's like, Are you sure? Yeah, I had to understand. It's

0:07:50I'm really serious.

0:07:51- Sphygmomanometer is the name of it.

0:07:54I had, oh no, wait, that's a blood pressure gauge.

0:07:56I'm looking up the wrong thing.

0:07:57It's a spiro, spiro-metometer.

0:08:01Anyway, I had the same thing.

0:08:02The doctor's like, "You know, this would be great

0:08:03if you were 70."

0:08:05Not so good at 50.

0:08:06I'm like, all right, anything I can do about it?

0:08:08Like, well, spirometry, that's a spiro meter.

0:08:11It's much easier.

0:08:12Yeah, well, we're old, we're falling apart.

0:08:15- No, but I got a good checkup overall.

0:08:17I got good cholesterol.

0:08:18I've got good liver enzymes, always a bit of a concern for me. Everything's good.

0:08:24You'll get an eye lung in a few years. Apple's focusing on healthcare. It'll all be set.

0:08:29Five years from now, lung transplants.

0:08:31I'm not a… oh, I can't put up with dropping a word. What's the word when you imagine

0:08:39you have every disease?

0:08:40Oh, I can't think of it. Psychosomatic.

0:08:43No, no, but there's a…

0:08:45Oh, it's allophobic? No, no.

0:08:47No, it's I can't believe we're drawing a blank on this. It's a hypochondria hypochondria, right?

0:08:53Right. There's a famous Keith Richards quote, or he says, there's only one disease I'm aware

0:08:57of that's deadly. And it's hypochondria. That's good. I'm not a hypochondriac. But I'm a

0:09:02hypochondriac like within 48 hours of a doctor's appointment. Like, I'll go 363 days at this point,

0:09:10and I'll feel fine. And I won't worry about it. But then I'll find out on two days before my

0:09:15quote unquote, "wellness exam" next year, and all of a sudden I'll be like, I think I'm having a

0:09:19heart attack. Oh, geez. The flip side is my friend Tessa Miller wrote this beautiful, beautiful

0:09:25essay/reported piece for the New York Times a couple days ago. You probably saw it.

0:09:29It's called "Five Things I Wish I'd Known Before My Chronic Illness."

0:09:31I saw that. I did see that.

0:09:33It's an amazing thing. She's an editor I've worked with and just an incredibly lovely human being,

0:09:38and she has Crohn's disease, and she basically, if health insurance changed, she would die. There's

0:09:43lot of people in that boat because the drug she needs, essentially an immune suppressant style

0:09:50drug, would be unaffordable. But she wrote this beautifully and again in a reported fashion about,

0:09:57you know, what's it like when you're never going to get well? And she's been posting responses

0:10:02she's gotten on Instagram from people who are just so grateful that it's partly it's like,

0:10:06how do you get other people to stop being a pain and suggesting terrible ideas to you because

0:10:11you've tried everything or you know there's suggesting things just at work or have no

0:10:15medical validity. It's a beautiful story.

0:10:17Dave: Did you see the thing—I linked to it a couple weeks ago—about how vitamins

0:10:23are a racket? Didn't we talk about this on Twitter?

0:10:25Daishi; I think so. Yeah, I've been gradually—it's taken me over the last several years I've

0:10:30gradually eliminated most vitamins from my diet that I don't consume.

0:10:33Dave; So my doctor is good and my doctor—I don't sit here and tell my doctor how to

0:10:37to be a doctor. I've chosen her to be my doctor because I think she's a very good doctor,

0:10:42and she's both had the medical training and years of expertise and has been doing it.

0:10:50And I trust her. I'm sure she stays up on things more than I do. But I've gotten on

0:10:55this schedule where my annual—I keep wanting to call it a physical, but my wellness exam—although

0:11:00if you think about it just in terms of being a language geek, calling it a physical isn't

0:11:03really a good word either.

0:11:05And I know, you know, also the science shows that we shouldn't get annual checkups to checkup. I

0:11:09guess a checkup is the biggest, we're not supposed to get them. There's actually a good clinical.

0:11:13Why not? Can you tell me why? Yeah, because it's unnecessary medical spending, and the interventions

0:11:19are typically either feudal or unnecessary, it winds up more tests are ordered and more money

0:11:25spent without any discernible improvement in outcomes. So I forget what the number is. But

0:11:30they're like, basically, I think the clinical work was, you should go in when you're actually

0:11:34sick or when you have something that's inexplicable and maybe every several years. But the yearly

0:11:38thing is actually just, it's almost a revenue enhancer that's become so codified we expect it.

0:11:44So, if someone said to you, it's like with breast mammograms, those are now seen as the research

0:11:50shows that women should not be getting them annually above a certain age. It doesn't,

0:11:53or below a certain age, because it doesn't increase the outcome statistically. Now,

0:11:59individually, if you go in, they say yes, you have breast cancer and it's operable. That's

0:12:04great, but statistically, it actually exposes women to more radiation as necessary, and probably

0:12:08increases the amount of unnecessary intervention. So you're like, Oh, you know, how do you walk

0:12:12back from that anyway? But so your so your annual exam probably shouldn't be an annual anyway.

0:12:17Yeah. Well, anyway, I've long been on the schedule where it's it's in mid February.

0:12:21And here on the East Coast, you know, we're in the middle of winter. And I tend to, you know,

0:12:27stay inside. It's cold, it's dark, there's not a lot of sunlight anyway. So, you know, for years,

0:12:32is my vitamin D has shown up. Yes, low and the point I'll tell you what, by the way,

0:12:36Glenn, I mean, I'm not complaining. There's a lot worse things that can happen. But when

0:12:39you go in, you got to go in, I got to go in at least a week before my wellness exam and

0:12:43they to get my quote blood work done. And they couldn't be nicer. I've been going to

0:12:48the same place. It's actually like physically connected to where my my physician is. And

0:12:53and very nice woman. So I was there a week ago and I you know, I don't I don't like getting

0:12:57my blood drawn. I'm a little queasy about stuff like that. I gotta say it was as painless

0:13:01as it could be. It really was. But I'll tell you, they take a lot of blood.

0:13:05[laughter]

0:13:06Pete: Oh yeah. How many vials was it?

0:13:08[laughter]

0:13:09Jon: It was five big ones and two small ones.

0:13:12Pete; Oh my god.

0:13:13Jon; And it's a lot of blood. I think, and all I can think is, what the hell are they

0:13:16doing? Why can't they, what are they doing that they need more than a drop of? Why isn't

0:13:21one vial enough for all of these tests?

0:13:23Pete; And you're like, why was Theranos a fraud? Why couldn't they have been, didn't,

0:13:27you know, produced an actual product?

0:13:29Jon; They take a lot of blood.

0:13:30Pete; It is funny. They take a lot of blood.

0:13:31blood for years, it's been showing up as slightly vitamin D deficient. And so I've I swore to

0:13:35my doctor, I will take these vitamin D supplements every day. And I remember to do it, I keep

0:13:41them right next to my coffee. And so I'll never forget to make coffee. And so my vitamins

0:13:45are right there. I take these vitamin D's. But I read this story. And it's very, very

0:13:49compelling. I think that that, yes, it's like a correlation, not causation thing that yes,

0:13:55there are, you know, there are people with very high levels of vitamin D tend to be healthier

0:14:00and have a lower risk of all sorts of things, you know, excluding heart problems and all sorts of

0:14:05things. But the reason isn't because they're full of vitamin D. It's that they have vitamin D,

0:14:10because they go outside all the time and live active lifestyle. Yes, yes.

0:14:14Right. Like, so and that makes so much sense in the world to me. And they're like, and this over

0:14:21over fear of the sun in the United States is really bad. Like, yes, getting a sunburn is

0:14:26really bad for your skin, tanning, getting your, you know, skin as dark as it can get

0:14:31very bad for your skin. In the long run, you can get these skin cancers, but even even

0:14:35then the type of skin cancers that you tend to get from long term overexposure to the

0:14:40sun are among the most treatable cancers that you can have. It's not, it's not the worst

0:14:44thing in the world, but we've gotten to the point where there's a lot of supposedly health

0:14:49conscious Americans who literally just avoid the sun at all costs. They just don't get

0:14:53any sun, and that's actually very bad for you because that's where the vitamin D,

0:14:57you know, that's supposedly good for you. And there's no clinical proof that taking a little

0:15:01tiny vitamin D pill instead of going out and being active in the sun actually has any of the benefits

0:15:09that the people who have their vitamin D from healthy outdoor lifestyles do. And I—

0:15:16Pete: In that article you're talking about, there was one, I think a few months before,

0:15:19there was more about the guy. There's like one guy who has been such a vitamin D advocate

0:15:24that this doctor has overwhelmed everybody else who's like, "Whatever." And it's actually almost

0:15:30entirely due to this one person's influence. It's not even like a drug industry thing or,

0:15:35you know, a supplements thing. It's this one guy has had a mania about it and he's wrong.

0:15:40Pete: Yeah.

0:15:40Alan: You know, he's not wrong like he's in falsifying data, but his conclusions

0:15:44aren't actually well supported enough. And Kaibash put on this a long time ago because,

0:15:49right, it does encourage people to take vitamin D instead of going outside. And yeah, that article

0:15:55was great about how like, actually, the kinds of skin cancers people get that are most, that are

0:16:00worst are either genetic or they're caused by non-sun related reasons, right? So, most of those,

0:16:06so yes, you can get sunburns and yes, we have the ozone depletion and there are other things that

0:16:11are an issue, but spending, you know, 30 minutes in the sun or an hour in the sun without any

0:16:15sunscreen for most people is probably a really good thing depending on time of year and whatever.

0:16:20No, it's funny because you wonder, you're like, if the sun was that bad and even when the ozone

0:16:26layer was thicker, wouldn't everyone have died of cancer in like 1940? They'd be covered in skin

0:16:30cancer? Because people spent, most people spent most of their time outdoor before offices and

0:16:35And even as we became an industrialized society, there are still massive amounts of time, and

0:16:41the historical evidence, as people live longer lives, the historical evidence isn't there

0:16:44that like people are just covered in skin cancer, so…

0:16:47Jon Moffitt Yeah, and I linked to that, and then I got

0:16:49some email from my good readers down in Australia who were in the midst of a… I'm not good

0:16:55with Celsius. I think it was somewhere around 50 degrees Celsius, you know, it was like

0:16:58180 degrees Fahrenheit in Australia.

0:17:01[Laughter]

0:17:02Alan Corey It is crazy. Like at the limits of human endurance,

0:17:04right?

0:17:05I'm wearing sunscreen.

0:17:06And I'm like, I get it, I get it, I get it.

0:17:08I'm not telling, please, please, what's the saying?

0:17:11Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

0:17:13I'm not saying sunscreen is a racket and not called for it.

0:17:16Clearly where you are, you should, yeah,

0:17:18you should probably put a lot of the SPF 50 on.

0:17:21Like, I'm just saying, here in the US,

0:17:24there's a lot of people who really have,

0:17:27I'm never exposing my skin to the sun, period.

0:17:30And that's probably not,

0:17:31that's probably actually doing harm to them.

0:17:33not. We should combine different trends and just rub peanut oil all over our faces. Just

0:17:40cook our reduce reduce allergies.

0:17:45How are you so ends the health aspect of the show, although the other thing I should write

0:17:48as I just saw a story today, and I know it's gonna bother you because I know you're bothered

0:17:52by this. But I did see that the the the Russian troll farm that's been responsible for putting

0:18:02thumbs on the scale of US and UK elections in the last few years, they've conclusively have shown

0:18:09that they have helped promote the anti-vaccination movement. And it's like, surprise, surprise,

0:18:16you know? Because, you know, it's like, I'm aware of like the—it's up by you, right? It's up in—

0:18:20Pete: I know, it's in our state. They're just an announcement this morning that's going to cost

0:18:25at least a million dollars, minimum of a million dollars to deal with the measles outbreak.

0:18:29break. Washington State. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's also one in Europe, though, which

0:18:33I was not as aware of. And it's the same thing where it's been, you know, this, this whole

0:18:38nonsense science, you know, and it's funny, because, you know, it's like, you know, you

0:18:42read one story, and somebody says, you know, this vitamin D supplement, then all these

0:18:46supplements are a racket. And then it's, you know, it, I could see where, you know, you

0:18:51got to know who to trust and who not to trust, you know, and, and somebody else, somebody

0:18:56else saying that these vaccinations cause more problems and you don't need your kids

0:18:59don't need them. All of a sudden, it sounds like the same thing like, you know, vitamin

0:19:03D is a racket, but vaccinations are good. Now it's all you know, nonsense, but it's

0:19:08actually what's the trust Big Pharma. I mean, this is a recurring thing. It's like, I'm

0:19:11alive because of Big Pharma. Well, no, I'm alive actually, because of the academic research

0:19:15that was taken and paid for typically by government grants that was then commercialized by Big

0:19:20Pharma, which is where a lot of some of the better drugs I mean, there's more recent stuff

0:19:24that has less relevance for more people, right? So, like Vioxx was supposed to be a great new

0:19:30anti-inflammatory, turned out to have all kinds of problems that were suppressed, the company

0:19:33faced, you know, they ignored warning signs. It was terrible. And so, after Vioxx, how do you

0:19:39trust Big Pharma? No, no, it's fine. The vaccines are okay. But there's a very simple way to test

0:19:44efficacy of things is you look around the world at places in which there is no financial motivation

0:19:50for a particular thing. So, there's no financial motivation for vaccination in Europe and other

0:19:56places. There's no profit motive. There's no government motive. So, you look at 180 countries

0:20:01or something and you say, "Are the rates of autism different? Are the side effects different?

0:20:05What are the, you know, what are the outbreaks of measles?" And you can say, "Okay, so even if the

0:20:09U.S., Big Pharma had some weird plot to vaccinate everybody, it was unnecessary and they were

0:20:13disregarding problems, it doesn't explain why the rest of the world is doing it and it's been

0:20:18efficacious and there's no side effects. As opposed to, there are other drug things where

0:20:23European or other regulators are like, "We don't want this drug in the market. The U.S. allows it

0:20:27in the market. There are these problems, but they're not basic things like vaccines."

0:20:31Pete: Yeah. And we've had, you know, we had a thing, I remember when Jonas was young,

0:20:36there was a time where he had a checkup and he was, the doctors wanted to give him, I think,

0:20:41three or four vaccinations and my wife was like, "That's too much. How about two and we'll come

0:20:45back." And they're like, "Okay." And I post sometimes about this anti-vaccination stuff,

0:20:51and there are some people who are clearly not anti-vaxxers, but who bring up situations like

0:20:55that, which my wife and I agreed on. We're like, "You know what? How about no more than two at a

0:20:59time, and we'll come back in a month or six weeks or whatever and get the other one." He's had all

0:21:05the vaccinations that are recommended, just maybe didn't get four of them in one day. And I probably

0:21:11wouldn't have spoken up. I mean, honestly, I, you know, I say

0:21:14toughen the kid up, but my wife didn't want him stuck four

0:21:17times. Something like that perfectly reasonable, as long as

0:21:21your kid can still say, like, at the age of eight has had all the

0:21:25recommended vaccinations. You know, yeah, yeah, it's, it's

0:21:29all the crazy. It is absolutely crazy as a child of the 70s. And

0:21:35early 80s. You know, like, I just grew up thinking like,

0:21:40"Wow, we live in an age of medical marvels. There's something called measles that used to

0:21:44affect kids. I can't get it." You know? Polio brought down a president. "I can't get it!"

0:21:50You know? I just—do you ever think measles would come back? Honestly, like, it just—

0:21:56Alan: No, it's horrific. But it's interesting, because this is that—not to get political,

0:22:01but it's the "this spans" ideology. So it has more to do with—

0:22:04It's not quite left-right. It is definitely, you know, it's not—

0:22:08It's a rejection of empirical evidence. It's a rejection of sort of fact, which has infected us

0:22:14all over the place, is it's in a world in which it's increasingly hard to know what is really fact

0:22:20based. I can understand why people start subscribing to a belief in like, I mean,

0:22:24Gwyneth Peltrow is a great example where a terrific actress—Goop is a terrible thing.

0:22:30a terrible influence, but in a very particular way. Like, she's actually, I think, endangering

0:22:36my online friend, Dr. Jen Gunter, who has a great new book out about the vagina that

0:22:41apparently people should buy. I think whether you have one or not, it's a very good book,

0:22:44apparently. Can't wait to get a copy and great cover. So, she's been a leading voice, not

0:22:51a genscoop, but at like, trying to demystify these things like, you know, why is a jade

0:22:56egg bad to insert into your body?

0:22:58Well, it's because the surface is essentially a porous surface and like, you can get infection

0:23:04from it. It's not safe. So yes, people may have done it a thousand years ago, the jury's out on

0:23:08that. But like today, we understand the transmission and vector of illnesses, we're going to live to be,

0:23:13on average, more than 40. It's really an unhealthy thing. So if you need to do that,

0:23:18maybe there's a different kind of object that would work. But you know, there's just,

0:23:21there's a rejection of, I think there's a desire to try to find something more.

0:23:26and sometimes that leads people into magical thinking. And I think with vaccines, the fact that

0:23:30they've been so effective, we just don't look at it as a problem. And when it's not a problem,

0:23:35you think you're being lied to when you're told it is one. Then you have an outbreak,

0:23:39and they interview people whose kids have measles, it's like, "Yeah, well, sort of. I wish now."

0:23:43The great one was somebody—I think this is real—on Twitter said, "I wish there were," you know,

0:23:47said, "I didn't get my kids vaccines, and now they have, they may be exposed to measles. I wish

0:23:52wish there were a way to prevent that.

0:23:54Right. What is the best advice for protecting my kids?

0:23:59Yeah. Oh my God.

0:24:00I saw that. And people were like, "Invent a time machine. Go back and get your kids

0:24:05vaccinated."

0:24:06I know. And I want to laugh and I want to not laugh, because I think it's ridiculous.

0:24:12Like I'm somebody who, you know, there's this—I always like this from art history, which was

0:24:16these Egyptian statues, they always show these countries, you know, the pharaohs and leaders,

0:24:22like, staring directly at the sun, and there was a sun-worshipping society and so forth.

0:24:26This idea of like, looking straight at the truth, it's really, really hard. It might burn your eyes

0:24:30out, but you gotta do it. And I feel like there's a difficulty in just accepting what's real, however

0:24:37uncomfortable it is to you. And it's very easy to believe in conspiracies when in fact conspiracies

0:24:41bound to rat madness. How do you differentiate between the Russians influencing the 2016 election

0:24:47and Big Pharma trying to affect children with vaccines? How about this awful dreadful Sachtler

0:24:54family behind the one of the opioids every day and new horror from them like they just didn't care

0:25:01right. Not only did they not care then they then they then they had the brainiac idea that maybe

0:25:07Maybe they could make money on the drugs people take to get off opioids.

0:25:11Oh, yeah, yeah.

0:25:12It's like, you know, treatment's probably a growth business that we created, so perhaps

0:25:15we could make money there too.

0:25:16Right.

0:25:17Talk about institutionalized, legalized corruption.

0:25:19Oh my god.

0:25:20Absolutely horrible.

0:25:21Right.

0:25:22And again, I get it where it all kind of blurs together and you just want to chalk it all

0:25:25up, but some of this is important and good stuff.

0:25:28Yeah.

0:25:29And it's just—it's just maddening.

0:25:31Measles.

0:25:32I just cannot believe that measles—honest to god.

0:25:36I mean, you just never would have thought of this.

0:25:37Like, you know, when we were kids, you know, it's 1980,

0:25:40I'm a seven-year-old, you think,

0:25:41what are the problems gonna be on your mind

0:25:42when you're 40 years from now,

0:25:44when you're a middle-aged man, John?

0:25:46Measles was not one of the problems, you know?

0:25:49- I assumed we'd have eliminated all disease

0:25:51because of vaccines.

0:25:52It's actually the most,

0:25:52there's two things that are most shocking to me in 2019.

0:25:56One is that more diseases haven't been eliminated,

0:25:58especially ones that really,

0:26:00it's just a matter of a small amount of money,

0:26:01and that's something like the Gates Foundation,

0:26:04like river blindness and things like that,

0:26:06like things that require so little money in relative terms

0:26:09with such an incredible personal and productivity benefit.

0:26:14And the other is, have you had an x-ray

0:26:16in the last several years?

0:26:18- Probably, but not--

0:26:21- It's like magic now.

0:26:22You remember how even like-- - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:26:23- 10 years ago, they saw the film and whatever,

0:26:26I had to get one, they worried I had maybe

0:26:27walking pneumonia or something the other day.

0:26:29So I go and there's, you know, I don't, but I walk in

0:26:31and the guy's like, "Oh yeah, this is great."

0:26:33I was chatting with the guys, like, "We're done."

0:26:34It was like three minutes, start to finish,

0:26:37and he's been able to review them, examine them,

0:26:39send the file back to the doctor.

0:26:41By the time I left, I already got a reading,

0:26:43like, "Everything's fine."

0:26:44That to me is actually the most understated miracle,

0:26:48and it's a great example of all the aspects

0:26:50of technology that come together.

0:26:51- Yeah, they can see inside you really well now.

0:26:53It's really, really amazing.

0:26:55And it happens very quickly, yeah.

0:26:58Amazing sensor technology.

0:27:00All right, let me take a break.

0:27:03Might as well, and thank our first sponsor.

0:27:05They've been in the news lately.

0:27:06It's our good friends at Eero.

0:27:08Look, Eero does Wi-Fi so well.

0:27:12Basic idea of the Eero system

0:27:16is that they create a mesh network.

0:27:18Basic Eero kit, I believe, comes with a base station

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0:27:25But you can get as many as you need.

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0:27:33Basic idea, you plug one of them in to your cable modem,

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0:27:38that's your main station.

0:27:39And then you just plug in other ones around your house.

0:27:41Maybe you have a three floor house,

0:27:42you put one on every floor,

0:27:45and it saturates your whole home with one network.

0:27:48So it's not like, oh, now you've got three networks

0:27:50and your devices have to like jump around.

0:27:53And everything from your devices perspective

0:27:55looks like one network,

0:27:57but the three devices on the Eero side work together

0:28:00to create one mesh network.

0:28:03It is so much better for saturating an oddly shaped house

0:28:07or a big house or a tall house with network

0:28:09than trying to get one base station

0:28:12somewhere in a central location

0:28:14or maybe you don't even have a choice

0:28:16because this is where your cable comes in.

0:28:17It has to be in this one spot

0:28:18at like in the one side of the house.

0:28:21Trying to get one base station to saturate your whole house

0:28:23with a strong wifi signal.

0:28:25Mesh networks are the way to go.

0:28:27Eero is great hardware, so easy to set up.

0:28:31Everything goes through the Eero app,

0:28:33which is just a terrific app for iOS,

0:28:35works on the iPhone, works on the iPad,

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0:28:40You can set it up optionally if you want

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0:28:44a new device joins the network.

0:28:45You can sign up for their Eero Plus system,

0:28:50which gives you all sorts of stuff

0:28:51like ad blocking, content blocking,

0:28:53and ways to manage your kids' devices

0:28:56and stuff like that.

0:28:57All, it all sounds like, wow, that would be really hard.

0:29:01You have to be like a network engineer

0:29:02to get something like that working.

0:29:04Not with Eero.

0:29:05It is so easy and obvious to look at it

0:29:08and figure out what to do on the app.

0:29:12I'm speaking to you right now.

0:29:13If you hear me, it's because Glenn's hearing me speak

0:29:16over an Eero network here

0:29:18at Daring Fireball World Headquarters.

0:29:20It is truly a terrific product.

0:29:22I've been using it for years.

0:29:24And it's even easy when you do things like upgrade,

0:29:27'cause I got an ERO with the first generation hardware

0:29:29years ago when they first started

0:29:30'cause they sponsored the show.

0:29:31And then when they came out

0:29:32with their second generation hardware,

0:29:34which adds all sorts of, I forget what it does,

0:29:37but it's just better signal.

0:29:39Doesn't matter, it's just better.

0:29:40That's what you get if you buy it now anyway.

0:29:42But I wanted to figure out how hard is it gonna be

0:29:44to replace like my first generation base station

0:29:47with the second generation one.

0:29:48Couldn't have been easier.

0:29:49There's even, there's just like a big fat button in the app

0:29:51that's like, oh, you wanna replace an ERO with a new ERO?

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0:30:02Easy to set up, easy to manage, I really love it.

0:30:05What do you do to find out more?

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0:30:16The beacons are the smaller ones that plug right in,

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0:30:35Go to ero.com, E-E-R-O.com/the-talk-show,

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0:30:47one base unit, two beacons package.

0:30:50thanks to Eero for their continuing sponsorship of the show. Don't know how long that's gonna last

0:30:55because the reason they've been in the news is it was announced last week that Amazon is gonna

0:30:59gonna buy them. Don't know how that's gonna work out. But in the meantime, I, you know,

0:31:05I recommend it. A little bit weird, a little bit sad. I wrote that it's a little sad because I

0:31:09liked him as a plucky upstart in the hardware industry. And it seems like every plucky upstart

0:31:15either goes bust or gets bought by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple.

0:31:19David Tenenbaum Yeah, it becomes part of an ecosystem

0:31:22issue. It seemed to me like they were doing pretty well on their own. They were, you know,

0:31:25one of the—there's only one other real startup that's in that space, I think, that's been—that

0:31:32stayed independent. I think the rest got acquired. But yeah, they wanted the part of a bigger hole,

0:31:38because they'll get pushed out, or maybe they did their plotting in the future. And they said,

0:31:42You know, in three years, every company that has an ecosystem is going to have a mesh system

0:31:47and there's going to be no space for us in the market, so we've got to have an exit plan

0:31:49or we're going to be under.

0:31:51Me, I just use old tin cans, tin cans and string.

0:31:55[Laughter]

0:31:56That's from the guy who used to run the Wi-Fi…

0:31:59[Laughter]

0:32:00Yeah, Wi-Fi news blog.

0:32:02I like Ethernet.

0:32:03Ethernet is great.

0:32:04I have Ethernet in my house and Wi-Fi.

0:32:06Yeah.

0:32:07Well, I'll be back to Ethernet eventually.

0:32:08There's going to be some kind of vaccination apocalypse, and everything's going to have

0:32:13to be wired.

0:32:14Darrell Bock Well, you'll just string it.

0:32:15There'll be …

0:32:16Ben

0:32:16- A lot of news to cover.

0:32:18And some of it is even broke today.

0:32:20I'll just get this one out of the way

0:32:21'cause I wrote about it before I went to the doctor

0:32:23is the Wall Street Journal had a report today

0:32:25that Apple is teaming up with Goldman Sachs

0:32:28to do a credit card, like a MasterCard,

0:32:31an Apple credit card.

0:32:32And I have to say,

0:32:34it leaves a bad taste to my mouth

0:32:40'cause I don't like the credit card industry.

0:32:42I think that it's, I think the interest rates are too high.

0:32:47I really do.

0:32:49And I think it's too easy for people to get in debt.

0:32:53And it's like, you know, I mean, I shoot from the hip,

0:32:58but it's like I quipped on Daring Fireball.

0:33:00You know, if this works out, what are they gonna do next?

0:33:02Start doing payday loans at the Apple store?

0:33:04And I get it that all sorts of big companies,

0:33:07Disney has a credit card and any place you go on vacation

0:33:11hotels have their own credit cards, every airline has their own credit cards. But to me, having your

0:33:16own credit card when you're not a bank is like something industries do. Like the airlines are

0:33:21the perfect example where they're long established, they're out of new ideas to make money, their

0:33:27margins are getting ground down every way. I mean, when you think of the airlines,

0:33:32at least in the US, do you really think of customer service oriented companies? Or do you

0:33:36think of companies who are looking for a way to charge you $25 to get another bag,

0:33:41you know, onto your trip.

0:33:42- Yeah, it's like, it's always the Apple should buy

0:33:45a cable company and I'm like, no, no,

0:33:46what's the most hated companies in the country?

0:33:49It's cable companies and it's credit card companies.

0:33:51Yeah, they should definitely be involved

0:33:53in both industries that people,

0:33:54although you can argue there's an opportunity

0:33:56to change things.

0:33:57This is what I thought about Virgin America,

0:33:59which is, I want to say the late lamented,

0:34:00'cause I got folded into it.

0:34:02My second favorite airline is Alaska Airlines.

0:34:05So that wasn't terrible for me, but it's not the same.

0:34:08Virgin America, I felt like they always did everything they could do within the structure

0:34:13of a terrible broken and dysfunctional system to make your experience better.

0:34:16And that included, I had a Virgin America credit card and I think the annual fee was like $150,

0:34:22but it let you do free refunds and exchanges on tickets, plus free bags and free food and a free

0:34:31class upgrade, like micro class upgrade to premium cost coach or whatever. And I was like,

0:34:37like, man, this was so in keeping with their philosophy.

0:34:40It's like, yeah, yeah, we have a branded credit card

0:34:42and we'll give you 1%, or what, I'll give you miles,

0:34:44but what we're really gonna do is give you a better service

0:34:46because you bought into us.

0:34:48I was like, yeah.

0:34:49- On American, which is what I fly all the time,

0:34:51premium coach really just means,

0:34:53well, you're closer to the front of the plane,

0:34:55so you'll get off sooner.

0:34:57Like, there's no-- - You don't get a dirty cup.

0:34:58We'll give you a clean cup. - There's no difference

0:34:59in like leg room or anything,

0:35:01whereas Virgin's premium economy actually had more,

0:35:03like, a little, in like an inch or two of more leg room.

0:35:06It really was something.

0:35:08- Yeah, they gave you free food,

0:35:09and it was, ah, I missed them.

0:35:11But I wonder, so does Apple,

0:35:13this is always that argument,

0:35:14Apple tried to do that with the cell industry.

0:35:15The cell industry was the most hated industry

0:35:17in the country just about,

0:35:19besides credit card companies and cable operators.

0:35:21And Apple came in and said,

0:35:23"We're gonna do unlimited service, we're gonna do this."

0:35:24They forced change.

0:35:26And so the cellular industry is still kind of terrible,

0:35:29but it's morphed into something that is generally bearable,

0:35:33and especially when they got rid of overages

0:35:35and they switched to throttling.

0:35:36So, you know, you no longer can wind up

0:35:38with a thousand dollar bill accidentally.

0:35:40Like it has gradually gotten to that point.

0:35:43And so Apple was part of the push.

0:35:44If Apple had never gotten into,

0:35:46well, who knows what kind of company they'd be,

0:35:47if they've never released an iPhone,

0:35:49what would the sell industry be like?

0:35:50I'm like, do they have an opportunity

0:35:52to make the credit card industry less horrible

0:35:55by being involved in it?

0:35:56I don't know. - No.

0:35:57- Well, that would be nice if that was their,

0:35:59I hope that's their attitude.

0:36:00And I hope it's not to make as much money as they can.

0:36:04profiting off people's debt that they shouldn't have incurred at the first place, paying interest

0:36:09rates that should be, in my opinion, illegal.

0:36:12Yeah, like 20. I mean, I had some balance on a card and I was like, I've got some money

0:36:17on some cards at 0%. I'm like, if you're gonna give me free money, this is actually less

0:36:21than the interest rate I have. And so I got, I paid off some balance and I was like, oh,

0:36:25I wonder what the balance transfer deal is now. It's like, you can transfer money at

0:36:2820%.

0:36:29How is that legal?

0:36:32I don't, it doesn't seem right to me.

0:36:34Like, I have good credit and now I can understand.

0:36:37I mean, there's prime and subprime and whatever.

0:36:38Like, maybe if I was bad credit risk,

0:36:40I'm like, I don't think that, that's a gotcha.

0:36:44That's a, we want you to accidentally not pay

0:36:47and pay just 20% interest.

0:36:49- I, you know, maybe I'm misremembering.

0:36:51I don't know, but I did.

0:36:53I ran up credit card debt that was unwise

0:36:56when I was in my 20s.

0:36:59And as I recall though, I was paying like

0:37:03seven or eight percent interest.

0:37:05And I don't know, maybe I got a student rate,

0:37:06maybe that 'cause that's when I got the card, I don't know.

0:37:09- No, no, they used to be lower.

0:37:10They used to be like eight to 12% even when,

0:37:12I mean, we're historic still, not historic,

0:37:14we're at a relatively low prime rate,

0:37:16relatively low interest rates overall.

0:37:18And it used to be prime plus like five or seven percent.

0:37:21- Yeah, I don't know.

0:37:22- And now it's like prime plus 15.

0:37:23- I was paying like eight percent interest

0:37:25and it was way too much.

0:37:26It was everything my dad had told me not to do,

0:37:30everything anybody with any sense tells a 20-year-old

0:37:33in college who's finally getting credit card offers,

0:37:35well, whatever you do, don't run up more

0:37:38than you can pay off in a month.

0:37:40And of course I did.

0:37:41- I did that too.

0:37:42- But now, it's like, so Amy and I are in a situation

0:37:45where for years, we've literally only had one credit card.

0:37:48We have an Amex, and it's the only credit card we have.

0:37:51We have debit cards for the bank

0:37:53and a couple other debit cards from PayPal

0:37:55and I have a Square Cash card, that's debit.

0:37:59I have Apple Pay card now, that's debit.

0:38:01You know, it's all, I have a gazillion debit cards

0:38:03and one credit card.

0:38:05And we were getting a mortgage two or three years ago.

0:38:10And that turns out, I thought that was good,

0:38:12but it turns out that's bad.

0:38:14You're supposed to have like two or three credit cards.

0:38:16You're supposed to pay them all off,

0:38:18but you're supposed to have more.

0:38:20And then we're like, well, should we get another credit card?

0:38:22And they're like, oh no, no, no.

0:38:23And they're like, it's too late now.

0:38:24Like whatever you do is--

0:38:25- Yeah, if you cancel credit cards,

0:38:26it makes your credit score worse.

0:38:28- Yeah, so yeah, so it's this Kafka-esque situation

0:38:33where they're like,

0:38:34"You should have two or three credit cards."

0:38:35So then they're like,

0:38:36"Don't you have a Target card or something?"

0:38:37And we're like, "No, we don't have a Target card."

0:38:39You know, it turns out Target actually has

0:38:40a very nice cash back thing where you get like 5% off

0:38:43all your Target purchases.

0:38:44I didn't know that.

0:38:45So it turns out Target card is, you know,

0:38:47is actually, if you shop a lot,

0:38:49there's actually a good card to have.

0:38:51But I just thought it was sensible to have one card,

0:38:54You pay it off every month.

0:38:55The AmEx we have, you have to pay off.

0:38:57I don't even think we're allowed to carry a balance.

0:38:59Whatever we charge, we pay off at the end of the month.

0:39:01And it turns out that for your credit, that's actually bad.

0:39:04You're supposed to have two or three and pay them all off.

0:39:07But when you're in the process of getting a mortgage,

0:39:09don't sign up for more credit cards.

0:39:11That looks bad.

0:39:12You're supposed to already have them.

0:39:14So anyway, a couple years later, we have the mortgage,

0:39:19but we're thinking if that's supposedly better

0:39:22for our credit, why don't we sign up

0:39:24for another credit card?

0:39:25And we're looking and we're thinking,

0:39:27we fly American all the time,

0:39:28so maybe we'll get this American,

0:39:30there's an American Airlines card,

0:39:33and it gets you, it sounds expensive,

0:39:36it's like a $400 a year fee,

0:39:38but it gets you unlimited access to their lounges.

0:39:42In combination of Philly and Orlando for going to Disney

0:39:47and a couple other places where we travel,

0:39:50It would probably be worth it for the lounge access alone.

0:39:53And there's a couple other benefits,

0:39:55like a multiplier on your miles.

0:39:58So we did the math.

0:39:59- Bag fees too, right?

0:40:00So it's like 75 bucks for the three of you.

0:40:02- Yeah, effectively it's like you get treated

0:40:05like you have platinum status no matter what your status is.

0:40:07- Ah, see, that's awesome.

0:40:08- Yeah, it seems like a decent card.

0:40:10All we plan to do with it is charge our airline tickets

0:40:16for everywhere we go, henceforth, to use that. Anyway, I'm reading the fine print of this

0:40:22thing and it's like the starting interest rate is like 15 percent or 14 percent or something

0:40:26like that. And that's like, you know, and then it goes up from there.

0:40:29But that's crazy! That is absolutely insane.

0:40:34It's all gotcha. And this is the thing, is you would think there'd be space in the credit

0:40:37card industry. Like, why is there not a disruptor in there at this point? There have been in

0:40:41the past, you know, Discover was a whole different kind of model. There were other companies,

0:40:45But right now I don't feel like there's anybody

0:40:47in the credit card industry saying,

0:40:49we are going to, you know, we're gonna have a high,

0:40:52you have to have a credit score of, you know, whatever.

0:40:53It's gonna be super high.

0:40:54You have to have 700 or 650 or whatever.

0:40:57So we're only gonna take people who are super high risk,

0:40:59or super low risk, but we're gonna have,

0:41:02we're only gonna charge, you know, prime plus five.

0:41:04And so we're not gonna encourage balances,

0:41:06but if you have a balance,

0:41:07it's not gonna be, you know, 15 or 20%.

0:41:09I mean, I have cards, I have a couple airline cards

0:41:12for this exact reason.

0:41:13the cheaper Alaska card because I fly that just enough. And my wife and I both got United Cards

0:41:20recently because they're like, "We'll give you like 40,000 miles." We're like, you know,

0:41:24we were able to go to Europe, go to London for a couple weeks last summer entirely on miles. I

0:41:29cashed all the miles in. And then we both got United Cards and by next year we'll have like

0:41:34a couple hundred thousand miles again between bonuses and I run all my business stuff through

0:41:38through the card.

0:41:40So it's this really weird scam,

0:41:43but the interest rate in the United card, I think is 25%.

0:41:46So we pay everything down, of course.

0:41:47- Crazy. - I mean,

0:41:48I feel very fortunate to be--

0:41:49- But how is that even a legal interest rate?

0:41:51That's usury. - I don't know.

0:41:52- I mean, it's usurious.

0:41:54It's really, I just can't--

0:41:56- I don't know why the market,

0:41:57but the market should have solved that.

0:41:58There should be a disruptor in the market

0:42:00that is well-funded by somebody who's a, you know,

0:42:02Warren Buffett style person who's like,

0:42:04"Yeah, yeah, I got billions of dollars

0:42:05"and we're gonna create the uncredit card.

0:42:07Why, you know, that hasn't happened.

0:42:09- I think that somebody should be able to come in

0:42:12and do, like you said, like a prime rate plus five,

0:42:15and it shouldn't even have to require

0:42:18that high of a credit card, or credit rating.

0:42:20You know, like, you shouldn't even need great credit.

0:42:23It should be like anything but bad credit.

0:42:25You should be able to get in on that.

0:42:26I can't see how that's not super profitable.

0:42:29I really can't.

0:42:30I don't know.

0:42:32So I'm really a bit depressed reading

0:42:35that Apple is getting involved in this,

0:42:36because it just really, it just seems like another canary

0:42:40in the coal mine of ideas that companies have

0:42:43when they're out of regular ideas.

0:42:45Let's sell a credit card.

0:42:48- Yeah, I'll be curious, when we see what their rates are,

0:42:49now it's possible it will be a ridiculously old

0:42:52throwback rate because Apple's in the position

0:42:56where Goldman Sachs would never offer a card

0:42:58with a low rate, but Apple can say,

0:42:59"Yeah, yeah, we're self-insuring the card

0:43:02"with $50 billion from our store," or something like that.

0:43:05- The gist of the wall and friend of the show

0:43:07and occasional guest, Dan Fromer,

0:43:10it runs a mailing list, Points Party,

0:43:13which is all about, he's a real super nerd

0:43:16on airline and credit card points.

0:43:18And I'm like enough of one where like every year or so,

0:43:23like I said, my wife and I were just like,

0:43:25let's see if we're gonna get one more credit card,

0:43:27what should we get?

0:43:28And we're like, well, she get like a Visa or a MasterCard,

0:43:31we can use it everywhere that doesn't take Amex.

0:43:33And, you know, seems like, you know,

0:43:35we'll get the most out of this American Airlines one

0:43:37'cause we fly American 'cause 95% of all the planes

0:43:41that leave Philadelphia are American.

0:43:43I get it, I get why people geek out on this stuff.

0:43:48And the journal's story though is that Apple

0:43:51is not going to chase the,

0:43:53that this Apple credit card is not going to chase

0:43:56the sort of rewards-oriented cards.

0:44:01They're just gonna do like 2% cash back.

0:44:04And I would presume, like the journal even said,

0:44:07like we presume some kind of discount on Apple stuff.

0:44:11Like maybe you'll get 5% cash back

0:44:12every time you buy something from Apple.

0:44:14- Mm-hmm.

0:44:15- I can only presume they would do that.

0:44:18'Cause it seems like a no brainer

0:44:19if they're going after their best customers,

0:44:22that seems like one of the most likely ways

0:44:24to get them involved.

0:44:27but they're not gonna do anything like airline clubs,

0:44:32or anything like that.

0:44:36But that their other point of appeal

0:44:38will be integration with the iPhone

0:44:40and that you'll get Apple Watch-style circles

0:44:43about your financial health or something.

0:44:46- Oh, interesting.

0:44:47- And that doesn't seem appealing to me, really.

0:44:49I don't know.

0:44:50My Amex thing has a great integration with iOS.

0:44:53You install the Amex app and you sign in,

0:44:56and it's the same sign in you use on their website.

0:44:59And I have it set up, it gives me a notification

0:45:01every time my card is charged, which is great.

0:45:04I mean, I kind of trust them on fraud anyway,

0:45:06but it's, you know, and it just is a nice reminder

0:45:09of like monthly stuff that you have on your card.

0:45:14And it's like, it's just, to me, it's a nice reminder

0:45:16of hey, why am I paying $10 a month for that?

0:45:18I never use that, maybe I should cancel it.

0:45:20You know, and it's just one alert when the card's charged,

0:45:23that's it.

0:45:25and I can go into the app at any time.

0:45:26They have nice integration with the Apple Wallet,

0:45:29so you can use your card with Apple Pay.

0:45:31And then I can go in the app and see all of my charges

0:45:35and the Amex app categorizes stuff.

0:45:38If I wanna see stuff like,

0:45:40how much have I blown on restaurants in the last month?

0:45:42Very easy, it's just like a tab.

0:45:44So I can't see what Apple would do

0:45:48that would be better than that.

0:45:50I mean, maybe other credit cards

0:45:51aren't as nice as the Amex app,

0:45:52but it doesn't seem like that would be a reason

0:45:55to sign up for an Apple credit card.

0:45:57- No, I mean, yeah, I've got the Chase United card is,

0:46:00excuse me, the Chase card is just as well integrated.

0:46:04I've got an Amex, and it's there so I can compare them,

0:46:07and the apps are very good.

0:46:09Like, Apple's given good hooks,

0:46:10and the Apple Pay works, and Wallet is great,

0:46:13and I can't think what else would be a benefit

0:46:17that would be a typical thing.

0:46:18Like, it's one thing if you go in the Apple store

0:46:21and the credit card does something fancy,

0:46:22but how often is even the most avid person

0:46:25in an Apple store buying something?

0:46:27Not very often.

0:46:28So the only advantage they can give you

0:46:30is it's got Apple's name on it,

0:46:31and maybe that's what, they're a lifestyle brand now.

0:46:34So people just want that card with the Apple on it.

0:46:38It'll do that thing where you move it,

0:46:40and it glitters, just like the--

0:46:42- The Apple Pay thing.

0:46:43- Yeah, exactly.

0:46:44- If anybody doesn't know, there's a very cool feature

0:46:47of the Apple Pay Cash where you can tilt your phone,

0:46:50It does something with the accelerometer

0:46:53to create the illusion that the on-screen card you see

0:46:58has like a holographic label.

0:47:00And it's more than just a cool feature,

0:47:03if you think about it.

0:47:03It's actually a way so that, you know,

0:47:06like if you know that to look for this,

0:47:08if you're worried like that, you know,

0:47:10like if I'm PayPalling you 50 bucks to split a dinner tab

0:47:14and you're worried that I just screenshotted it,

0:47:17and I haven't really given you 50 bucks,

0:47:19I've just sent you an iMessage with a screenshot

0:47:23that makes it look like it,

0:47:24it wouldn't have that holographic effect.

0:47:27It's a way for you to say,

0:47:28"Yeah, this is a legit Apple Pay cash payment."

0:47:31- It's a nice touch.

0:47:33My question is always,

0:47:36this gets you into that Clayton Christensen thing,

0:47:38is what is the job of the thing, right?

0:47:40And the question is, what is the job of a credit card?

0:47:42And the job of a credit card is to make,

0:47:46like for the consumer, the job of a credit card

0:47:48to remove friction and fuss and make something like an invisible thing. I had this conversation,

0:47:54I don't know if you've had this conversation with Jonah, but at different times I have with my kids.

0:47:56My younger, who's 11, was like, he's like, "What's the deal with money?" Like, he had done some dog

0:48:01walking. He gave me, he gives me a $20 bill to deposit for him in his account. And he's like,

0:48:07"This is super weird." I'm like, "Yes, it is." So he's gonna give me the money. I'll have the cash

0:48:11bill. And then I go line, I just transfer that into, you know, his accounts LinkedIn,

0:48:16because he's a minor. And he's like, "How does money work that you just transfer bits around?

0:48:21Why does that make sense?" And I'm like, "It doesn't. It really doesn't." It was only a few

0:48:25years ago, several years ago, that every night— Don't think about it too hard.

0:48:30Yes, you think about it too hard. It's like the Monty Python sketch, the buildings

0:48:33erected entirely by hypnosis. And then you're like, "Let me tell you about what's going on

0:48:38in Venezuela." Oh, geez. But like— I hate to laugh. I hate to laugh at the place.

0:48:44It's a terrible humanitarian crisis, but it's incredible. So, you know, there are a bunch of

0:48:47pilots who were really bummed several years ago because they are making a great living. Every

0:48:52night, they would fly pallets of checks from all over the country to Federal Reserve offices.

0:48:57And that was their job. They're on like midnight flights and the checks would be brought in, right?

0:49:02And they would fly the physical checks to the 19 Federal Reserve offices or something like that.

0:49:07And I found this pilot's forum. I was researching something about the check 21 thing, which made it

0:49:11do a photo based deposits of checks that we can do now, which

0:49:15has, you know, gone on for years now. But when this was new, and

0:49:17the pilots like this is terrible, like, like a big chunk

0:49:20of my living has been these, you know, midnight flights every

0:49:23week, to fly checks. So, you know, you're abstract that so we

0:49:27don't even fly checks, I take a picture of a check, if I get a

0:49:30check or it's bits, and so it's perfectly reasonable. So So what

0:49:33is the job that an Apple credit card could do? That another

0:49:36credit card can't, I can't think of a job. So I'm hoping they

0:49:38So I'm hoping they have one and it's not just,

0:49:41we give you 5% back on Apple purchases,

0:49:43although it'll be fine, I guess.

0:49:44- Yeah, I don't know, I'm a little,

0:49:46I don't know, a little stressed by it.

0:49:48Can I tell you, I'll tell you this,

0:49:49Dan Fromer actually turned me on to this card.

0:49:52Do you have the Square Cash app?

0:49:55- Yes, I do.

0:49:57What's the deal?

0:49:58There's some kind of special thing with that, right?

0:49:59- Yeah, so I've had the Square Cash app for years,

0:50:03and it's sort of, you know,

0:50:05just sort of fallen into the back of my iPhone

0:50:08something I don't really use. I had used it in the past for

0:50:11things like, hey, here's a four of us are going out to dinner,

0:50:15you I'll pick up the check, you just give me the money and then

0:50:17I could square cash, you know, you whatever it takes for me to

0:50:21do if it you know, usually you just put a bunch of credit cards

0:50:24in and the restaurant splits it but maybe it's a restaurant that

0:50:26doesn't want to do that, you know, whatever you're you owe if

0:50:29you owe somebody 100 bucks for something, you square cash it to

0:50:32him. But now I use Apple pay for that. But I still had this

0:50:35square cash. But you what you can do in the square cash app is

0:50:38say I want the card to and they send you a visa debit card. It's kind of nice. You sign

0:50:43it on screen and then and then they like laser and etch your signature onto the front of

0:50:48the card. It's a it's a very cool looking credit card. It's just a flat black card with

0:50:52my signature. And you can draw whatever you want. It doesn't have to be your signature.

0:50:59But the thing that makes this card very cool that that Dan turned me on to is they have

0:51:02these things called boosts. And you go into the app and you say pick your boost and they

0:51:09wrote they change over time like Shake Shack was on it for a while and we have a Shake

0:51:16Shack in the neighborhood we go to. But they also have one that it's really the whole reason

0:51:21I got the card. It's just $1 off any purchase at any coffee shop. Oh, that's wild. And it's

0:51:27literally any coffee shop. It's not like well, here's our list of partners. It's Dunkin Donuts

0:51:31and Starbucks and whatever. It's anything that's a coffee shop, even like neighborhood

0:51:35ones that I think this isn't going to work here because how square gonna know this is

0:51:39a coffee shop? Well, they know it. And you can go in and get like a $2 just black coffee,

0:51:45and you get $1 back on every purchase. So it's like, and that's, that's what I tend

0:51:50personally to drink at a coffee shop is just like a, you know, like the cheapest thing

0:51:54on the menu, a black coffee. So I'm getting like a 50% cash back on my coffee purchases.

0:52:00And even when I get something else, like for my wife, it's usually like the combined bill

0:52:04for two beverages is like six bucks. A dollar back is 16% cash back. It's crazy. And it's

0:52:12how is this possible?

0:52:13John, they make it up in volume.

0:52:15Exactly. That's it.

0:52:17But this is Jack's well run company.

0:52:20Exactly. Exactly.

0:52:21And but but they're doing not for it. Square is apparently done very well. So I don't know.

0:52:25I'm trying to remember where they are in the profitable. I don't know.

0:52:28- Dan point, but it's by all reports Square has made,

0:52:32like they've grown in a really sensible manner,

0:52:35they're making good decisions.

0:52:36So this is likely an incredible customer acquisition tool

0:52:41that then applies in other areas.

0:52:43- It got me to get the card, you know,

0:52:45and I'll tell you if you--

0:52:46- Well now I'm gonna get the card.

0:52:47- If you're out there, if you've got the Square Cash app,

0:52:49which is free, and then you can hook it up

0:52:51to your bank account to load money in,

0:52:53'cause it works like a debit thing, that's free.

0:52:56and to get money back out is free.

0:52:58You don't pay it.

0:52:59- 10% off on Whole Foods, I found his article.

0:53:01And there's a whole, so did you see,

0:53:03this is a side door.

0:53:04- Yeah, Whole Foods is another one.

0:53:05And so the catch, you think, well, what's the catch?

0:53:08The catch is it's only up to like 150 bucks or something

0:53:11at Whole Foods and you can easily go over that.

0:53:14But even so, that's 15 bucks.

0:53:16- Did you see the pictures?

0:53:18We had a big snowstorm for Seattle.

0:53:20It was actually a fair amount of snow.

0:53:22Like we were all laughing about it originally.

0:53:24And then it just kept snowing

0:53:25and Seattle is hills and we don't have,

0:53:28people don't have time to sell tires.

0:53:30- I was talking, I have friends up there, Brent.

0:53:32- Yeah, Brent Simmons and yeah.

0:53:34- Gus Mueller is up there somewhere.

0:53:36- Oh yeah, yeah.

0:53:37So we were sort of shut down here,

0:53:39but we were kind of prepared,

0:53:39but you probably saw the photos.

0:53:41People went in and like bought everything off the shelves.

0:53:43And it wasn't like they were buying bread and milk.

0:53:45They were buying like arugula and like goat cheese.

0:53:48It was like, but something is left and it's edible.

0:53:51- Oh my God. - Buy it.

0:53:52- It was hilarious.

0:53:53My wife went in and she sent me a picture

0:53:54I thought, "Well, this is funny." And then I search on Twitter and there are thousands

0:53:58of photos of people just laughing. They're like, "I'm at Fred Meyer." So, the one place

0:54:02I went up before the storm, there's a Whole Foods near my house they just opened and they

0:54:07put it in a location that apparently nobody has discovered. And so, I go there and the

0:54:10place is empty all the time. The people there are perfectly nice. Before the storm, their

0:54:14shelves were totally stocked. I should have bought more stuff there. But so, I have a

0:54:18Whole Foods I can go to and always get in. But there's that Amazon connection too. So,

0:54:21I'm gonna be paying Jack Dorsey,

0:54:23I'm gonna give him money to use,

0:54:25or actually I'm gonna take money from him, so that's okay.

0:54:26And then we give the money to Jeff Bezos up the street.

0:54:29- But if you want to get in on the sweet,

0:54:31some sweet, sweet venture capital money

0:54:33that is just floating around out there,

0:54:35get the Square Cash debit card.

0:54:37And you can switch your boost in the app whenever you want.

0:54:41So you can go get a cup of coffee,

0:54:43get your dollar boost on the coffee purchase,

0:54:46and then head over to Whole Foods and switch,

0:54:48you have to go in the app and switch the boost.

0:54:49- Oh, and switch it.

0:54:50You can only have one active at a time,

0:54:52but there's not really a limit.

0:54:54Like the limits are all very, very fair.

0:54:57So like on the coffee one,

0:54:58there's a 30 minute timeout before you can use it again.

0:55:01- Oh, sure, sure.

0:55:02- So the idea is if I were gonna buy coffee for me and you,

0:55:05I couldn't just use it for mine,

0:55:07then use it for yours and get $2 back.

0:55:10You have to wait 30 minutes.

0:55:11It's ridiculous, but you can switch immediately.

0:55:13You can switch to the Chick-fil-A one

0:55:16and go across the street and get a chicken sandwich

0:55:18and use the boost right away.

0:55:20oh my God, you just saved it.

0:55:21Well, this is a great listener tip.

0:55:23Saved me a bunch of money.

0:55:24I don't know about the Whole Foods thing.

0:55:25I'm Amazon Prime, so I go there and I scan my card,

0:55:28and there's like, it starts to feel like

0:55:30you're playing a video game.

0:55:31You go in and there's, the shelf tags are RF-based

0:55:35and automatically update.

0:55:36They're like Amazon tags, now I'll use the Square card

0:55:38and the Amazon, and the scan my thing,

0:55:41and 2D codes, it's amazing.

0:55:43- I've heard that the Amazon Whole Foods merger

0:55:46hasn't gone as smoothly as Amazon anticipated.

0:55:48Interesting, interesting.

0:55:50- Just that the Whole Foods business

0:55:54is more complicated than Amazon anticipated.

0:55:57- Yeah, I can believe it.

0:55:58I always wonder, this is like,

0:55:59whenever anybody said Apple should go into Business X,

0:56:01my reaction has always been Business X has a tiny margin,

0:56:03why would they do that?

0:56:04And so when Amazon, I mean,

0:56:06books can have a very large margin.

0:56:07Some of the businesses,

0:56:09Amazon progressively entered businesses with larger margins,

0:56:12which is smart.

0:56:13And the Whole Foods thing is like,

0:56:14the grocery business is historically,

0:56:17classically a very high volume, very low margin business

0:56:21and Whole Foods and a few of the other sort of fancier

0:56:23chains have been able to use merchandising and other things

0:56:26to crack that and crank the margin up a little bit,

0:56:30but most of what you're selling is like lettuce and milk

0:56:32and bread and very little is sushi and baguettes or something

0:56:36or not baguettes, but croissants or notepads or something.

0:56:40So I don't know, I mean, I just wonder about the synergy

0:56:43of you walk into the stores and it's like,

0:56:44is this when I buy an Amazon dash?

0:56:46or dot, probably not. I don't know. Maybe I will. It doesn't seem like it's the perfect thing. I do

0:56:52like the integration of Amazon lockers. There's that kind of thing. I don't know.

0:56:57Dave: Yeah, I enjoy Amazon's growing. I mean, I'm a big customer. I mean, I'm wary of them.

0:57:03I mean, we spend a fortune at Amazon all the time. We get all sorts of stuff from Amazon.

0:57:11You know, and their growing physical presence is intriguing to me. They just opened a new—because

0:57:16there's a couple of Whole Foods here in Philadelphia, and so they're all in the

0:57:21Amazon family now—but they just opened an Amazon locker. I forget where it's—it's

0:57:27sort of like on the—it's close to Penn here, but that's not too far from us. It's

0:57:32close enough where it's closer than the last time I looked for where the nearest locker

0:57:36was to where we live. It was like, "Ah, I'd rather wait a day and have it show up at my house than

0:57:41go over there." Now it's like, "Oh, that's tempting." It's, I don't know. And it looks very nice.

0:57:48It looks like a very nice clean place. It doesn't look sketchy at the least bit. But it is weird.

0:57:53It's weird to see Amazon in the real world because it's a brand that I associate as not really being

0:57:58real, right? It exists entirely in a browser tab.

0:58:04It's yeah, it's a I don't know what the real world objective I mean, I don't know what Amazon is anymore. I don't know what they're supposed to be. Because the everything store was you know, I don't know if that was their label actually, but that's what they get called. And like, I don't I don't know what they are now. I think they're like a, like a ravening job machine or something. I don't know. I don't know. Even in Seattle, it's very confusing as to like, what, what is Amazon trying to do? Are they trying to be essentially a giant co op?

0:58:32giant co-op. Who was it? Was it Matt Iglesias? Somebody had that great thing years ago. I

0:58:38probably quoted this even on this podcast before that said before Amazon was making

0:58:42a profit, it was like Amazon appears to be a company whose shareholders are—

0:58:46It was Iglesias.

0:58:47—benevolently allowing—yeah, it was great—benevolently allowing its members to take all the money as

0:58:52discounts. And now they're profitable, so it's a different thing. But what is the future

0:58:57the future of Amazon? Is it just, you know, they obviously believe they need to grow bigger,

0:59:03and they've had setbacks. And you probably don't want to get into the jobs thing. I don't

0:59:09know what they are.

0:59:10Tom Bilyeu (01h00m 33s): I've read though that their profits, A, it's

0:59:12managed. Like, they make the profit, it's like they just turn a spigot and it's like,

0:59:15let's have this much profit, you know? And it's also the fact that Amazon Web Services

0:59:21has become profitable and there's really nothing they can do about it. Like, they've kind of

0:59:27got to book those profits. I guess they could just keep reducing the rates of everything

0:59:34to be break-even, but it's almost like they can't turn down the profits from Amazon

0:59:39Web Services. They already have industry-leading rates on a lot of these large-scale online

0:59:45things. Their retail stuff is still sort of run the way it used to be. I could be wrong

0:59:49on this. I'm not an Amazon expert.

0:59:51No, I think that's true is that is that they consistently everybody, the big players, Google

0:59:57and Amazon and a lot of the there's a lot of smaller African IBM has business services, a bunch

1:00:02of people involved in that space. And they continuously everyone's continuously ratcheting

1:00:07down just slightly, often not by big amounts. And so like your but you know, I do I have various

1:00:12things hosted in various places, and things just get cheaper all the time or faster or better. And

1:00:17it's kind of cool. It's like you get to see that improvement curve in your bill every few months.

1:00:23Tom Bilyeu: Yeah. I was just talking to Krista Murgen at Panic. She's doing a—I hope that maybe,

1:00:32I don't know if it'll be out before this episode, but I was talking to her about a retrospective of

1:00:36a 10-year-ago thing with the gang at Panic. Anyway, it'll be fun. She's talking to a lot

1:00:43lot of fun people, but we were talking about the early days of podcasting, which is not

1:00:48that long ago. The biggest problem was that it was very expensive to host 100 megabyte

1:00:56MP3 files. It was, "Where the hell are you going to put it?" You put it on your regular

1:01:02web hosting account, and it's like, "Hey, the good news is you have a couple thousand

1:01:06listeners, and the bad news is you've got a thousand dollar bandwidth bill."

1:01:11(laughs)

1:01:13- Marco did a bunch of figuring about like,

1:01:14you know, then there was like,

1:01:15do you put it on an edge server or a cloud?

1:01:18- Just hosting the MP3 files.

1:01:22Not even like my show length two and a half hour shows.

1:01:25I mean like you could do like a tight 20 minute show

1:01:28and you can like use 64 megabit per second compression

1:01:33to kind of make it sound, you know,

1:01:35go to the point where you can even hear it with your ears

1:01:37that it sounds a little crappy

1:01:38and it was just too big to host

1:01:40if a couple hundred people were going to download it.

1:01:43It was a real problem, whereas, you know,

1:01:45we've, you know, blown past that.

1:01:48That's like a distant memory.

1:01:49But it wasn't that long ago.

1:01:51- This is something I was just looking up,

1:01:53Stewart Brand's favorite, famous formulation,

1:01:55"Information Wants to be Free."

1:01:57And as you know, it's like, that gets quoted,

1:01:59it gets quoted inaccurately,

1:02:01and it's only half of the formulation.

1:02:03It was, "Information Wants to be Free,

1:02:05"but Information also Wants to be Expensive."

1:02:07went by free is he's like the marginal cost of providing information—this is in the 80s, he said

1:02:14this—gets ever lower. And now it's essentially zero. And what he meant by expensive was there's

1:02:18a value. Like the expense wasn't necessarily money, it was that information has a value

1:02:23attached to it. So there's this tension between the ease of delivery and the value associated

1:02:27and how that works out. You know, sometimes you charge a lot of money, it's very easy to get,

1:02:31sometimes it's very expensive to get, like all these parameters. But we're now at a point where

1:02:36it's, it's costs essentially nothing to deliver any individual piece of content, it's only an

1:02:41aggregate that you have to start to work if you're hosting 10,000 podcasts, and they have a million

1:02:45downloads each, well, then you're talking a little money, but even that money is not a crazy amount.

1:02:49But if you've got, you know, a talk show scale thing, it's essentially, the bandwidth bill is

1:02:54effectively free, no matter what you did. I mean, not exactly free, but it's not, it's nowhere near,

1:02:58you're not gonna be spending 10s of thousands of dollars like you would just a few years ago.

1:03:01No, it is amazing. Hey, before we get off the subject of credit cards, one of the things the

1:03:05the Wall Street Journal article brought up at which I thought was interesting was that

1:03:11that the rumor is that Apple's card is going to be a MasterCard, which is the second biggest

1:03:14network in the US behind visa. And it occurred to me, I know visa has more customers, but

1:03:19it occurred to me that I, I tend to think of visa and MasterCard as being interchangeable,

1:03:24because off the top of my head, I couldn't think of any business that takes one but not

1:03:27the other like, Amex is pretty widely taken, but it's not that hard to find a place that

1:03:32take Amex. I know as somebody who carries one and that's why

1:03:35you know, I'm sorry, I'll take care of take my visa debit card.

1:03:38Can you think off the top of your head of an establishment

1:03:41that takes visa or MasterCard but not the other?

1:03:44I had this happen where I went to where was it? I can't

1:03:47remember. They only took visa and at the time all I had with

1:03:52me was a MasterCard. Was it Costco Amex? It wasn't? No, it

1:03:56was not Costco because that's well known, right? They only do

1:03:58They only do one brand at a time.

1:04:01I don't know if it was when I was in London.

1:04:03It was really, I was like, oh, well I can pay with,

1:04:05I'm like, oh, I don't have that.

1:04:07I just didn't have a Visa at that moment

1:04:09in the right configuration.

1:04:10It was weird.

1:04:11- So Costco only takes Visa, and it's fascinating.

1:04:15- They cut out an amazing,

1:04:16and they had Amex for many years,

1:04:18and they cut some incredible,

1:04:20I mean, they get some vast amount of kickback

1:04:23or proceeds or whatever.

1:04:24- I'll put a link in the show notes,

1:04:26but they only pay 0.4% processing fees on purchases.

1:04:31That's the sweetheart deal they got from,

1:04:35and I think the standard for most companies

1:04:37on most credit cards is somewhere like north of 2%.

1:04:40So most establishments pay like two to 2.5% processing fee

1:04:45on every single charge, and they paid 0.4.

1:04:48And when they had Amex, it was 0.6.

1:04:51And so Visa talked them down.

1:04:53They're like, "Well, if you'll switch from Amex,

1:04:54will give you 0.4. And so Costco, well known company, very, very popular, devoted, devoted

1:05:03fans only takes visa because they have a you can use any visa you want, but they have a

1:05:09Costco visa you can sign up for and and the extra deals and they only pay 0.4% to be sound

1:05:15like a purchase. It's an amazing deal because you have to be a member of Costco to shop

1:05:18there. And they probably have some fascinating extra layer of fraud protection because they

1:05:23such experience because they have so many deals. So, you know, you have, with the card in hand,

1:05:28the odds of you being a bad customer, someone who's going to somehow have a fraudulent card

1:05:33are probably extremely low. So, you're, there are, and it's also possible, I don't know this,

1:05:37I think Apple was engaged in this as well, is that there's a backstop for fraud. And I think

1:05:43there was something, I remember there was talk when Apple launched Apple Pay that they were going

1:05:47to provide like self-insurance against a certain kind of thing in order to secure a better rate or

1:05:52or offer a better rate.

1:05:53And I assume Costco is in the same boat

1:05:55where they're like, they have such good fraud management

1:05:58that they're like, look, it's gonna be 0.4%

1:06:00and if we exceed X whatever, we're gonna pay that overage,

1:06:03but they don't 'cause they know they, you know.

1:06:06- That was the only one I could think of

1:06:07off the top of my head.

1:06:08And I do recall that it was more of a problem in Europe.

1:06:11I think maybe that might be, I think you're right

1:06:13that in Europe, Visa might be more, you know,

1:06:15part of Visa's edge over MasterCard is that they're out.

1:06:18But in the US, the only thing I can think of is Costco

1:06:21and that's fascinating.

1:06:22All right, let's move off personal finance advice.

1:06:28A couple of rumors this week from Ming-Chi Kuo,

1:06:32Ming-Chi Kuo, and he decorated them with some artwork

1:06:35that I presume that he made himself.

1:06:37I thought the most interesting of them

1:06:41was that he claims that Apple is working on

1:06:43an all-new 16 or 16.5-inch MacBook Pro,

1:06:48and I thought that was pretty interesting.

1:06:49My wife was a huge fan of the 17-inch MacBook Pro.

1:06:52Absolutely loved it and has not been happy

1:06:55with any MacBook.

1:06:57I mean, she's had 15-inch ever since

1:06:58'cause that's as close as she can get.

1:06:59She feels they're too small.

1:07:01She liked the, it's almost like an iMac-like screen

1:07:05but it's a MacBook that she could move around the house.

1:07:08- I have a 12-inch MacBook.

1:07:10So I'm a small format person.

1:07:12My kids think it's hilarious.

1:07:13I got the MacBook Airs, new models.

1:07:15- Yeah. - That's kind of a long,

1:07:16like after, it's like, you know,

1:07:18got seven-year-old computers, they're barely working, so one of them is going to be backed

1:07:21up. I'm like, "Maybe it's time. We'll use some education money, upgrade them."

1:07:25So they're like, "How can you type on that thing? It's so tiny." I'm like, "No,

1:07:27I love my 12-inch, a little 12-inch computer."

1:07:30Tom Bilyeu (01h00m 10s): I'm a small, small laptop man myself, but

1:07:33I could see it. But it's interesting to me that Apple might go back to that. It seemed

1:07:36… I don't know. I'm always a little suspicious of Ming-Chi Kuo's non-iOS rumors

1:07:46because they seem to have a lower hit rate.

1:07:48It seems like he's way more,

1:07:49he's always been more juiced in to the iPhone specifically,

1:07:54maybe iPad secondarily.

1:07:56But I thought that was an interesting rumor.

1:07:58- I can see, I mean, there is definitely an audience

1:08:02for bigger laptops.

1:08:04You see a lot of them on the Windows side,

1:08:06often for gaming, but they're still,

1:08:08and I mean, how long ago,

1:08:10well, what was the 17 inch,

1:08:11when there was a 17 inch MacBook Pro,

1:08:14I don't remember what the actual screen display was.

1:08:18- I don't remember what the resolution was,

1:08:19but I remember, and I remember where I saw one

1:08:22very specifically.

1:08:23I had a friend who's a very talented storyboard artist,

1:08:27and this is probably 10 years ago at this point,

1:08:30but he did the storyboards for a lot of commercials,

1:08:33and he did one for an AT&T commercial

1:08:36that was going to star Martin Scorsese.

1:08:39He wasn't directing the commercial, but he was the star.

1:08:42And the premise of this ad was that a little girl is being put to bed by her mommy at nighttime

1:08:51and daddy's away on business and the little girl misses him. And you know, and Martin

1:08:57Scorsese bursts into the bedroom. He says, Oh, no, no, no, this is all this is boring.

1:09:03This is all wrong. Your dad's not away in business. Yeah, he's in prison. And the mom

1:09:06is like, No, he's not hot. He's in Newark. And he's like, No, he's in prison. He killed

1:09:10man. And anyway, my friend did the storyboards for this Adam. And he got invited to go up.

1:09:18It was shot in Brooklyn and like a real house and he was invited. You want to come see this

1:09:22commercial be shot? And it was like, Yeah, of course. He got like an and one and so I

1:09:29got to see it. Oh, man, that's great. Yeah, I forget where I was going with this. Oh,

1:09:33remember I was going is to see the setup of a truly professional, you know, commercial this was

1:09:39and it was shown wasn't too shown on TV. It was like shown I remember seeing the actual commercial

1:09:44in movie theaters as one of those ads they show you before the movies start. It was the first time

1:09:49anybody in history that I'm aware of was happy about seeing an advertisement before a movie that

1:09:54wasn't a trailer. But I was like, I was there I saw this. But I remember specifically I was, you

1:09:59know, as anybody who knows anything about how movies and commercials are shot, it's an awful

1:10:05lot of work. And then very in between very short takes of actual filming. And I was fascinated by

1:10:14the setup they had, it was shot in a real family's home. You know, and they they like put put like

1:10:20craft paper over all the family's real belongings and tape it all up. And they have these tape

1:10:24pathways like the everybody walks in between these blue lines so that we're not you know,

1:10:29you know, going into rooms that we don't need to go into and we don't have to disturb their stuff.

1:10:33But they had like this whole mobile production center and they use 17 inch. Maybe they were

1:10:40PowerBooks at the time. Maybe they weren't even MacBook Pro. But they had like a couple of them

1:10:45set up to like immediately review the footage. I mean, and you've always known intuitively that

1:10:51like video, you know, video pros would use the biggest, biggest and most powerful MacBook Pros

1:10:56they could get or a professional photographer wants to see if you're going to look at the

1:11:00images as you're shooting, you want them on the biggest screen possible. But if you're not in a

1:11:04studio, if you're you're out in the field, you know, that's going to be a portable computer,

1:11:10not a desktop computer. And that's just where I remember thinking like, oh, here's who's buying

1:11:14all the 17 inch MacBook Pros, because they had like a bunch of them. Oh, yeah. And I think I mean,

1:11:19think that's it. It's for video. But I think that's a very

1:11:22interesting point. Because I think there was there was a

1:11:24point at which there were a lot more video professionals

1:11:26working on, not just on max, I don't know if they're all

1:11:30switched to high performance, you know, Thunderbolt three

1:11:33linked GPS, I don't know what I don't know what that market is

1:11:37now. But it seemed like that was a more significant segment of

1:11:40the market. And it included people who wanted the

1:11:42portability. It was anybody who needed that kind of power. And

1:11:46the portability because there was no good I mean, monitors

1:11:49monitors were super expensive and not portable. And now you could probably, I mean, there

1:11:55are cases you can carry an LCD with you, or you'd have a monitor in both locations. That

1:11:59would be crazy in the past because you'd spend so many extra thousands or $10,000 to

1:12:04do that. But yeah, there was a more, I mean, graphic designers. I know a lot of people

1:12:09had 17 inch monitor, they might have the Mac and then they'd have an external monitor,

1:12:13but then they could use the 17 inch one as well when they were working away from the

1:12:18office. So it but that seemed to fall away. It seemed like more people had either a desktop

1:12:22computer, or the the retina display made up the difference for them plus the better brightness

1:12:28and so forth. I can't help but think that if it's true that this is not going to be a replacement

1:12:33for the 15 inch that this would be an addition to the line because I, you know, I understand the

1:12:39simplicity of really only offering two sizes 13 inch and 15 inch and you know, now it's three

1:12:45sizes because they've gone back to 12-inch, as you know. And the Mac side, I think it's one of

1:12:54the things I like about being in the Apple camp is that I feel like I don't have to make too many

1:12:58hard decisions, like buying a Windows laptop. It can be overwhelming. My son got a gaming PC

1:13:05for Christmas, and my God, are there a lot of options. And it's really, it's difficult.

1:13:12But I feel like going back and adding a 16.5-inch or 17-ish size display, I don't feel like that's

1:13:23unduly confusing to the consumer who's just looking for a MacBook. You're going to know if

1:13:28you want to lug that around, and most people are going to say no. Most people want something

1:13:34that's going to be a lot easier to put in a backpack and lighter, and they don't really

1:13:39have a need for a screen that big. But the people who do want it.

1:13:43Pete: There's an interesting problem there too, is like, how do you decide what Mac you get?

1:13:48And when we were going to upgrade our kids' computers, we went through that, where we're like,

1:13:54the best Mac, the best Mac is like a 2014, 2015 MacBook Pro, right? That's the best Mac.

1:14:01But we're trying to figure out the combination where we could get a high-quality model from that

1:14:07that had an SSD, 'cause I want future-proofing

1:14:10and the speed, I don't want a moving,

1:14:13I don't want a rotating drive in there,

1:14:15and I wanted sufficient memory so it's future-proofed also,

1:14:18which means typically like 16 gigabytes.

1:14:21And so finding a 2014 or 2015 MacBook Pro is an issue,

1:14:25and then they're rather heavy.

1:14:28The MacBook Air is not exactly the right choice, I think.

1:14:31I'm sorry, the MacBook is not the right choice.

1:14:33The single port and other limitations it has

1:14:35hasn't been refreshed recently enough,

1:14:37So it's kind of a bad thing to buy in like late 2018,

1:14:39early 2019.

1:14:40The MacBook Pro models, I don't like the touch bar.

1:14:43I don't know if it has a future

1:14:45in the way that it's been expressed.

1:14:46And it's also too expensive for what it offers.

1:14:49So the MacBook Air was like, all right, you know,

1:14:52this isn't affordable in the sense of being cheap,

1:14:53but it's like the dollar amount.

1:14:55Like if this is a computer that they're gonna have

1:14:58for the next seven years, which is feasible,

1:15:00is this the right one?

1:15:01And we figured that was probably their best use of money

1:15:04was to move in that direction.

1:15:07Plus the fact that AppleCare now includes,

1:15:10if you buy the extended care,

1:15:11includes a very small deductible if you break the screen.

1:15:15So like, that's probably the,

1:15:18that's the right choice for kids.

1:15:19- Yeah, yeah, probably.

1:15:21That's what we did.

1:15:22- But the bigger one, it's like,

1:15:24who wants the bigger machine?

1:15:25Like, you're either gonna get your own monitor

1:15:27and a Mac mini Mac and Mac Pros super annuated.

1:15:30Are you gonna get an iMac?

1:15:31I have an iMac that I really like,

1:15:33but you know, you just don't have the many choices.

1:15:35So in that specific area, a 17-inch MacBook Pro makes tons of sense, because there's

1:15:41nothing that fits that exact need.

1:15:43If that is kind of the size, power, and portability you need, there's no—like, a 15-inch doesn't

1:15:49cut it, and there's no desktop that's, you know, there's nothing that's going

1:15:53to be right in that space.

1:15:54Yeah.

1:15:55Which brings me to Mark Gurman, who had a report this week for Bloomberg, mostly about

1:16:03the progress that Apple has made on "Marzipan," which apparently is still the code word for

1:16:08the Transmogrify iOS apps to run on Mac apps, which was preannounced as a preview of future

1:16:18technology for third-party developers at last year's WWDC.

1:16:22And the big reveal was that, in the meantime, Apple itself has used an early version of

1:16:30this technology to bring four apps to the Mac. Apple News, the Stocks app, which is

1:16:37very, very similar to Apple News, because most of what's in the app, the Stocks app,

1:16:42is just business news about the companies. The Home app for HomeKit automation, and then

1:16:48the fourth one, I'm drawing a blank on, what's the fourth Marzipan app?

1:16:52Oh, Weather.

1:16:53Oh, VoiceRecorder.

1:16:55Oh, right, right.

1:16:56- Which is one that I still have to write.

1:16:58I'm lazy and negligent.

1:17:01I have a rant in me about these apps.

1:17:03- Voice memos.

1:17:06- Right?

1:17:06Then that, it might be the worst of the bunch

1:17:08in terms of being the most incongruous on the Mac.

1:17:13Because one of the limitations of all of these apps

1:17:15is that none of them can open more than one window.

1:17:17So like if you're reading an article on Apple News

1:17:21and you wanna double click it

1:17:22so that you can open it in a window

1:17:24'cause you're not done with it

1:17:25or you wanna refer to it later

1:17:26and just keep reading new articles, you can't do that.

1:17:29And you can't--

1:17:29- I'm not sure there's a Mac app

1:17:31that I've hated more than Apple News.

1:17:32I mean, in any version of it, or in any incarnation,

1:17:35I feel like Apple News has been, I don't know who,

1:17:38the usual thing is, what is this app for?

1:17:41It's not, it's trying to be Flipboard,

1:17:43and it has none of the redeeming features of Flipboard.

1:17:46- Right, it is a very bad Mac app.

1:17:49I enjoyed Apple News as a service.

1:17:51I like Apple News.

1:17:52I have my iPhone set to send me notifications

1:17:55from the New York Times and Washington Post,

1:17:58both of which I subscribe to.

1:18:00Actually, I subscribe to the Journal too.

1:18:02I don't get many notifications,

1:18:03but I get notifications from all three of those

1:18:05through Apple News.

1:18:06None of them overwhelm me.

1:18:07Very seldom do I get one that is like,

1:18:09"Come on, that's nonsense.

1:18:11"Don't send me nonsense.

1:18:12"Send me actual news."

1:18:13I like it on my iOS devices,

1:18:16and I liked it better when it didn't exist at all on the Mac.

1:18:19And if I happen to have an Apple News URL from Twitter

1:18:23or from an iMessage and I was on my Mac,

1:18:25it would just forward me on to the article in Safari,

1:18:29the same article, but instead of reading it in Apple News.

1:18:32And now it goes, now that I'm upgraded to Marzipan,

1:18:34it goes into Apple News and I get angry.

1:18:37It's a very bad app.

1:18:38(laughing)

1:18:40- Apps should make you angry.

1:18:41I think that's really a good feature.

1:18:43- The lack of being able to open multiple windows

1:18:45is most insane in the Voice Memos app.

1:18:48Because why in the world would you not?

1:18:51Like I get why the iPhone version doesn't let you open

1:18:54multiple voice memos at once, 'cause you're on the phone

1:18:56and the phone is like a one thing at a time thing.

1:19:00And I kind of get it on the iPad,

1:19:03because the iPad is sort of a big iPhone

1:19:05and it's simplified computing experience

1:19:07and it doesn't have the concept of Windows.

1:19:10But the Mac, it is the most,

1:19:13would be the most natural thing in the world

1:19:15to open multiple of these memos at a time

1:19:18into their own windows and you can't do it.

1:19:21- The Mac App Store, the new one, is not Electron, right?

1:19:25I mean, sorry, it's not Marzipan.

1:19:26- No, no, but it's not. - But it's weird

1:19:28'cause it feels-- - It is weird.

1:19:30It is the new-- - Yeah, it's its own thing.

1:19:32But it will open other windows,

1:19:34but only when you read articles in it, I think,

1:19:38then it opens a kind of, is that another window

1:19:41or is it an overlay you have to click done in?

1:19:43But it is neither efficient or foul,

1:19:45but it really feels Marzipan-y.

1:19:47- Yeah, it has some very strange navigation

1:19:50in terms of it's all in one window

1:19:51and I've just opened an article.

1:19:53Now, how do I go back?

1:19:54Oh, I have to go up to the top right corner and hit done.

1:19:56- It's a done button, yeah.

1:19:58- And it disappears down to the bottom

1:20:01like it was a sheet,

1:20:03but it didn't look like a sheet while it was opened.

1:20:06- It's an evolving concept.

1:20:08It feels like a little bit,

1:20:10there's a little bit too much of Apple.

1:20:13I mean, look, I'm glad they released,

1:20:15I mean, Mojave has a lot of excellent features in it.

1:20:18There's things they use, you know, for instance, the SMS,

1:20:21the automatic thing where it drops in second factors

1:20:24and codes and SMS.

1:20:26That's an incredible feat.

1:20:27Like that's great.

1:20:28That saves me time and it delights me every time.

1:20:31I'm like, oh, it's just there.

1:20:32I just clicked this thing.

1:20:33It's fantastic, right?

1:20:35So there are things to be said that are positive,

1:20:37but it still feels like there's a lot of works in progress

1:20:40on the Mac side, things that are, this is a good idea.

1:20:43and maybe a little more work could have been done

1:20:46before it was pushed out.

1:20:48- Well, so Apple told us at WWDC last year

1:20:51that this would be coming next year

1:20:52to third-party developers in some form,

1:20:55and they would have more to say about it

1:20:57at a technical level at that time.

1:21:00I mean, it's very strange for Apple

1:21:01to announce something like that in advance.

1:21:04They're not really, but I think they kind of knew

1:21:06that if they planned to ship these four apps

1:21:10in macOS Mojave that people were gonna figure this out

1:21:15as soon as they got their hands on the beta of Mojave

1:21:17and poked inside the app bundles.

1:21:19They were gonna say,

1:21:20"Hey, there's something weird going on here.

1:21:22These things look like iOS apps in a lot of ways

1:21:25and smart hackers are going to figure it out."

1:21:28So they had to kind of get in front of it and say,

1:21:29"Yeah, yeah, these are iOS apps."

1:21:32Garmon's report was a little curious

1:21:35because he said that this year's focus will be on iPad apps.

1:21:40- Yeah.

1:21:41- And that iPhone apps would be a year later

1:21:45because Apple's engineers have had a hard time

1:21:47getting, figuring out how to get small screen iPhone apps

1:21:51to run on the Mac.

1:21:53And Steven Trout and Smith pointed out,

1:21:55that's a little weird.

1:21:55In some ways, it seems like it would be easier

1:21:58to get iPhone apps rather than iPad apps to run

1:22:00because you could just run them

1:22:02in a roughly iPhone-size window on the Mac.

1:22:06Like, the thing about Windows isn't just

1:22:09that you can have multiple of them on screen at once,

1:22:11it's that they can be any size that you want or need

1:22:14or what makes sense for your app.

1:22:16As I sit here and look at the little tiny Skype window

1:22:20that tells me I've got a Skype recording

1:22:21going on in the background, right?

1:22:23It's just like a little thing floating above my windows

1:22:26and it's like the size of a business card here on my screen

1:22:28so it's not obstructing more than it needs to.

1:22:31That's part of the flexibility

1:22:34of a tiled window graphical user interface.

1:22:39And that you could, if that's what you wanted,

1:22:42to have an iPhone app running on your Mac,

1:22:44you could do it in a little window that's that size.

1:22:47And one of the reasons that iPhone apps

1:22:49that haven't been adjusted to scale

1:22:52and use size classes, et cetera,

1:22:54to have an iPad counterpart that truly embraces

1:22:57the nature of the iPad.

1:22:59One of the reasons that those apps are weird on iPad

1:23:01is that when you run an iPhone only app on the iPad,

1:23:05because the iPad doesn't have windows that it can run in,

1:23:08it just puts it in an iPhone sized thing.

1:23:11- I know, I've always thought, it's so weird to do that.

1:23:13I still have, there's a handful of apps like that.

1:23:15Did Instagram ever come up with an iPad app?

1:23:17- Instagram is exhibit A in the--

1:23:21- I say that and I'm just like, that can't be right.

1:23:23Like every time I think that, it's like, that can't be right.

1:23:25And then I launch it on an iPad, I'm like,

1:23:27what, there is, why, you know,

1:23:30There's no reason or sense for it,

1:23:32and they can make it really interesting,

1:23:33given how much in the way Instagram's used,

1:23:36they can make it really great.

1:23:37- It's the most baffling thing in the world to me.

1:23:39One only thing I've ever heard that anybody say

1:23:42that makes any sense at all is that,

1:23:44I forget the size of photos that Instagram,

1:23:48like when you update your Instagram feed,

1:23:50what the pixel dimensions of the photos that come down are,

1:23:54but it's small enough that they wouldn't,

1:23:56unless they updated it,

1:23:57They wouldn't quite be naturally retina on an iPad.

1:24:01- I think they've been quietly, like if you zoom,

1:24:03you know, you can't tap and make pictures bigger

1:24:05on Instagram, but you can pinch and zoom.

1:24:08I think they actually do build more resolution in

1:24:11and have for a bit, because once you were able to do that

1:24:13and put different, remember when they added that feature,

1:24:16that you could have different portions to the square.

1:24:19I think there's more resolution under that.

1:24:20And I assume that was a building block

1:24:22for the next thing that has never come.

1:24:25- Even if they just made an iPad app

1:24:27and it had to scale the images artificially to some degree.

1:24:31It would be better than what they have now.

1:24:33- I don't get it.

1:24:34- And photos are the one thing that looks

1:24:36the bigger the better, right?

1:24:37And I just, I--

1:24:40- I don't get it.

1:24:41- It's one of my very favorite things

1:24:42about having an iPad and using an iPad

1:24:45is if I go on a vacation or there's like a school event

1:24:48or something and I've shot 100 photos

1:24:52and I want to, let me go through my photos

1:24:54and throw out the garbage and pick the winners

1:24:57that I might wanna share with people.

1:24:59Doing it on the iPad, I just love, I love it.

1:25:01It's one of those things I love on the iPad

1:25:03more than any, more than a Mac, more than an iPhone,

1:25:06because it's like this perfectly intimate,

1:25:08it's so big, I can see detail that I couldn't see

1:25:11if I just did it on the phone.

1:25:13It's like so much easier to see, oh God,

1:25:15this one's no good, the one person's eyes are closed.

1:25:18But you couldn't see it on the phone 'cause it's too small.

1:25:21And it's just, you know, the pinch zoom

1:25:24is so much more natural than doing it on the Mac.

1:25:26It's so great.

1:25:28Instagram on iPad would be so great.

1:25:30- Yeah, the iPad has a magic window

1:25:32and the iPhone is a different beast.

1:25:34I've always thought it's interesting

1:25:36how distinct the iPhone and the iPad are

1:25:38even when you get a large iPhone or a small iPad.

1:25:41They really are different animals

1:25:42and people tend to lump them together, I think,

1:25:44who write about the technology,

1:25:46or write about it from a marketing,

1:25:48technology, business standpoint

1:25:50when the iPad remains, it's like it is a magic window.

1:25:53And apps that don't take advantage of that

1:25:56are always stunning.

1:25:57But yeah, that is weird.

1:25:59But I could, so yeah, so for most apps,

1:26:02most sensible apps, if it's the iPad version

1:26:05is what shows up in Marzipan in the first iteration

1:26:08in Mac OS, then that's fine, right?

1:26:11You're gonna get a decent size display.

1:26:13- I don't think it's fine at all.

1:26:15I think this is deeply problematic.

1:26:15- No, I'm sorry, I mean, I don't mean it's good.

1:26:18(laughs)

1:26:19But I mean, it makes some sense

1:26:23that that's the form factor you choose, right?

1:26:26Don't get me wrong.

1:26:27- I think there's an awful lot of problems,

1:26:29and I know there's so many problems with this idea.

1:26:32A, there's the existence proof of the four ones

1:26:35that Apple has done so far,

1:26:36and they are very bad Mac apps.

1:26:38One of the ways that I've mentioned,

1:26:40I keep harping on it, but it's very, very bad

1:26:42that these apps are limited to one window.

1:26:44And there are ways where you would naturally want

1:26:46to open a second window and you can't and it feels incredibly frustrating and it's

1:26:51terribly un-Mac-like. But that's an assumption that iOS developers have safely made for a

1:26:59long time. It is not going to be easy to take an iPad app that assumes that there's only

1:27:03one UI window at a time and that one UI window takes up the whole screen to be updated for

1:27:09multiple UI windows. And this might coincide. There's been rumors that one of the, "Hey,

1:27:16give some love to the iPad side of iOS would be to, at a low level in EOS, give apps a better

1:27:22system-wide, this is the standard way to do it in the system frameworks to do multiple documents,

1:27:30which I presume would be sort of Safari-style tabs. Safari obviously has the ability to open

1:27:36multiple tabs and has had that ever since the iPad existed, because who would want to use the iPad if

1:27:43if you can only have one Safari window open at a time.

1:27:45So how do you do, you know, but adopting that,

1:27:51even if that comes at WWDC this year,

1:27:54it's going to be a lot of work for developers

1:27:56just to update their iPad apps,

1:27:58let alone do it in a way that makes sense on the Mac.

1:28:00- Yeah, and I thought that your changes

1:28:01to the app switcher for the iPad

1:28:03were actually really great,

1:28:04'cause it's, you know, it's now it's a very native,

1:28:06it makes more sense in that form factor,

1:28:08the way you see apps.

1:28:09And it also, it felt to me like it's a prelude

1:28:13to document management in that same style.

1:28:15It's providing a preferred way for you

1:28:17to show multiple documents or tabs.

1:28:19You know, there's the app screens,

1:28:21and then if you do something else,

1:28:22you get the document screen,

1:28:24so it's kind of a zoom in out kind of thing.

1:28:26So I mean, I don't know if that's what the UI will look like

1:28:28but at least there's a,

1:28:30they've changed the approach from the iPhone form factor,

1:28:33so they're thinking about it differently,

1:28:35but then it wasn't extended beyond that.

1:28:37- My hope would be the one class of apps

1:28:39that I could see this making sense.

1:28:42And okay, the Mac is now better for this

1:28:45than it was before would be like media consumption apps.

1:28:50Like, so there's no native Netflix app for the Mac.

1:28:53Like if you wanna watch Netflix on your Mac,

1:28:55you've gotta go to a web browser

1:28:57and you lose all sorts of things.

1:29:00Like the big one is you can't do offline access.

1:29:02And you know, it's a huge, you know,

1:29:05if you're ever, you know,

1:29:06we were talking about air travel before.

1:29:07I mean, I know that, you know, they always,

1:29:12Wi-Fi on an airplane is not gonna be good

1:29:14for watching Netflix. (laughs)

1:29:15- No, no, no, no, not unless it's,

1:29:17I mean, there's those things where they cache

1:29:19movies on the plane.

1:29:20- Yes. - But that's a different thing.

1:29:20- That's different, that's different than you,

1:29:22you know, you've gotta pick from their cache of movies.

1:29:25And even then, it's, in my experience, it's kinda sketchy.

1:29:28So the fact that an iPad can, you can say,

1:29:31hey, give me all 10 episodes of this show,

1:29:34I'm gonna watch it on the plane,

1:29:35and then they're just there on your iPad.

1:29:37You never even have to take your iPad out of airplane mode.

1:29:39You don't even have to pay for the wifi.

1:29:41They're just there and you can watch them

1:29:43and your Mac can't do that.

1:29:45That kind of stinks and it's kind of frustrating

1:29:48because the Mac in theory

1:29:50is the more powerful capable computer,

1:29:52but it doesn't have a Netflix app.

1:29:53And so if it would be easy for Netflix

1:29:56or easy-ish for them to take their iPad app

1:30:00and turn it into a Mac app that has those features,

1:30:03I think that would be a win for the Mac

1:30:05and limiting it to single window, et cetera,

1:30:09doesn't really feel like a limitation.

1:30:12Like you're gonna wanna run the Netflix app full screen

1:30:14probably anyway.

1:30:16- Yeah, how many movies are you gonna watch at once?

1:30:17- Right.

1:30:18And I could probably see the same thing

1:30:20for something like Overcast.

1:30:22- Wait, do people watch four movies at once

1:30:24like they do podcasts at double speed?

1:30:26- We're gonna watch four episodes at once

1:30:28while it's tiled on my screen.

1:30:30- Well, I don't know.

1:30:31So I can see it for those apps

1:30:33And you know, there aren't,

1:30:35most of those type of media consumption apps,

1:30:38for lack of a better term.

1:30:39I mean, I was just watching a basketball game

1:30:41on ESPN last night on my iPad.

1:30:44I don't, there's no ESPN Mac app.

1:30:46So there's all sorts of things that--

1:30:48- No, it's perfect.

1:30:49And the picture in picture thing too,

1:30:50it's like you obviously want it on your Mac.

1:30:52I mean, I know you can do it in Safari,

1:30:54but having a Netflix app or TV app or whatever,

1:30:58that is, it's basically the iPad version

1:31:02with macOS whatever, and that it then can be

1:31:06sized on your screen.

1:31:07I mean, I've got this 20-something inch,

1:31:09I can't remember how many inches, iMac here,

1:31:11and be able to resize it and have it in the corner

1:31:14if I'm watching news in the background.

1:31:15That would be great to not have it tied to Safari.

1:31:17So there's a clearer case for it.

1:31:19- I remember talking about this with somebody,

1:31:21but it's like all these other apps, it's like, man,

1:31:23it would just, I can't think of what would make,

1:31:26other classes of apps, I can't see how the iPad app

1:31:30running on the Mac without redoing it from scratch?

1:31:33And if you were going to do that, why, you know,

1:31:35where's the benefit engineering and code base wise

1:31:38from just making a Mac app in the first place?

1:31:41- Yeah, I've wondered if it's a nail

1:31:42or a hammer looking for nail with this whole thing.

1:31:44Like I understand that it would make sense

1:31:47for Apple to converge and for developers

1:31:49to have a smaller code base.

1:31:50But you think if there were,

1:31:53let's say we were talking about it

1:31:54and we had a hundred examples of apps or 20 categories,

1:31:57but we don't, you know?

1:31:58And the ones that Apple did initially are simple ones

1:32:01that are largely unused or are interesting to most people,

1:32:05especially in a Mac environment.

1:32:06Like why would I use the Stocks app

1:32:08when I have a website I can use that does stocks, right?

1:32:10And is much more sophisticated.

1:32:12So it's not like, and you're, you know,

1:32:13streaming media, absolutely perfect case.

1:32:16And like, what is case number two?

1:32:17I can't think of a thing that I use on the iPad

1:32:21that I would want in a, to have an iPad version on my Mac,

1:32:26even if it took on some Mac properties

1:32:28that was single windowed, or even with hands, really.

1:32:31- I use a couple of iPad apps

1:32:33that have Mac counterparts now.

1:32:35I use the app Things to manage my to-dos.

1:32:37I love OmniOutliner.

1:32:40The OmniGroup has a bunch of great apps.

1:32:41The one that I use is OmniOutliner.

1:32:44They're Mac apps for Things and for the OmniGroup.

1:32:49They don't look like iPad apps running on the Mac.

1:32:55They look like real Mac apps.

1:32:57And conversely, their iPad apps don't look like Mac apps

1:33:00running on an iPad.

1:33:02They're just very different interaction models.

1:33:05And I just don't see how this is a good thing

1:33:09for anything other than media consumption.

1:33:11- We're nine years into the iPad,

1:33:12and no one has yet made a good case

1:33:14for why those should be interoperable

1:33:17or why they should be the same platform.

1:33:20So either Apple has some really clever ideas

1:33:22that they haven't told us about

1:33:23and haven't occurred to people who are developers

1:33:26or think about how this stuff works,

1:33:28or it's just not a great idea and it's being driven

1:33:31by forces that don't actually have a great advantage,

1:33:34which is a shame 'cause we don't really wanna get shoehorned

1:33:38into something that is not good or useful.

1:33:42I mean, you could argue, there was a report out actually

1:33:47as we record this, I think, from Axios

1:33:49about the ARM migration that's upcoming.

1:33:52- I did not see this.

1:33:54- Oh yeah, Einefried posted something

1:33:56just before I think we started recording.

1:33:58And there's some reports that there's actually

1:34:03more like a timetable about ARM-based Max.

1:34:08And so in that environment,

1:34:12Mars Japan and cross-platform development

1:34:14maybe make sense because you're migrating

1:34:16to the same platform, but I don't know.

1:34:17I mean, how critical is that in a cross-compiling world?

1:34:21Like I'm not a developer, so I can't talk about it.

1:34:21- I really don't think, it was a bigger problem

1:34:25with the earlier transitions,

1:34:27especially the 68K to Ford PowerPC one,

1:34:30'cause it was so early in the industry

1:34:32where writing stuff in this,

1:34:33writing your most intensive algorithms

1:34:38in 68K assembly code was more of a thing.

1:34:45And making assumptions about whether it's a big endian

1:34:51little-endian machine because you're actually dealing with these bytes on a byte-by-byte

1:34:55level and you need to know the order was more of a thing. After the second time, anybody

1:34:59who's been writing code that assumes that you're on an Intel processor is an idiot.

1:35:05And I know people who work bigger companies, and they know that. Adobe is not going to

1:35:11get caught flap-footed, you know, and like, "Oh, shit, our stuff can only run on Intel."

1:35:17Like that's not going to happen. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying…

1:35:20- No, but it's been, it's been extracted.

1:35:22- Right, I'm not saying that like somebody

1:35:25with something as complex as Photoshop

1:35:27can just open it up in Xcode and click a checkbox

1:35:31and spit out an ARM version of it,

1:35:35but they're ready for that.

1:35:36- No, but nobody has like a hand tweaked C in there,

1:35:39I hope still, maybe some people do,

1:35:41but not, I mean, as I'm moving forward, maybe not.

1:35:45But yeah, so I mean, I don't,

1:35:46so it doesn't feel to me like having ARM-based processors

1:35:49is the motivation for this.

1:35:52So there is some kind of, but there's clearly--

1:35:54- The one thing, even if it's not assembly code,

1:35:55the one thing that could bite some apps,

1:35:57maybe in the scientific community,

1:35:58would be if you're relying on Intel C compilers,

1:36:01as opposed to the default LLVM ones,

1:36:05which should be able to,

1:36:06anything you've been compiling through LLVM

1:36:10through, for 68K, or x86, you should be able to

1:36:14just click a checkbox and spit out ARM.

1:36:17But if you're relying on Intel's compilers, you might have a bit of work ahead of you.

1:36:24But they're not the default in that sort of esoteric scientific commuting thing.

1:36:29I don't want to teach a computer science class here.

1:36:35No, but the other thing that I thought was so funny, too, about—and I didn't mention

1:36:39this, but I thought I'd save it for the podcast—was that Gherman had this report

1:36:43on Bloomberg, it was eight or nine paragraphs, mostly about Mars Pan. And then the very last

1:36:48sentence of the report was sources that Apple say the company is considering unveiling its new Mac

1:36:53Pro at WWDC. And I had two thoughts on that. The first is what I did write, which is it better be

1:37:00unveiled at WWDC because it certainly doesn't look like it's coming. They said it's a 2019 thing,

1:37:05but they announced this initiative in April of 2017. The whole thing where they invited me and

1:37:11and Pansarino and Ina Fried, speaking of Ina, and said, "Hey, we kind of made a mistake

1:37:18with the trashcan Mac Pro," although they of course didn't call it the trashcan Mac

1:37:22Pro, but the phrase was that we've backed ourselves into a thermal corner and did not

1:37:27anticipate the rise of GPUs as the force that they've become in terms of intensive computing

1:37:39today.

1:37:40like, you know, and they even told us that they said, Hey, and we've got a cool iMac Pro, or they

1:37:47didn't call it that they said a pro iMac coming out. And we think this is going to be great. But

1:37:52we now see that there is a need for, you know, for people who that's not even good enough for

1:37:58a real Mac Pro with a modularized design. And we're working on that. And then last year, they

1:38:04said, Yeah, we're still working on that. It's still a thing, but it's probably it's not a 28.

1:38:09didn't even say probably. It's not a 2018 thing. It's a 2019 thing. It doesn't seem like it's

1:38:16coming out anytime soon. There are rumors of a March 25th event that Apple is going to hold at

1:38:22Steve Jobs Theater, which is supposedly, I don't know anything about it, but supposedly focused on

1:38:29subscription content, some kind of Apple News subscription thing, possibly the unveiling of

1:38:35of their original video content subscription thing.

1:38:39That does not sound like an event

1:38:40where you would unveil Mac Pros.

1:38:42They could, they could just say this.

1:38:45- Yeah, they don't usually in spring,

1:38:46they'll do laptops some years, right?

1:38:49Not every year, sometimes it's speed boosts.

1:38:51- But if they have one event in March 25th,

1:38:54I don't think there's gonna be another event

1:38:55until WWDC in June, and that's a very--

1:38:59- That's the right one.

1:38:59Yeah, that's the one to announce a Mac Pro at too.

1:39:01It is weird.

1:39:03I mean, you know, people, this gets us back

1:39:05to that whole thing about like, you know,

1:39:07is the company, can Apple execute well?

1:39:09And look, I read your report card.

1:39:11I read Jason Stell's summary.

1:39:13I filled out a report card for Jason Stell for six colors.

1:39:15And I read the summary and there, you know,

1:39:17there's a lot of dissatisfaction among those of us

1:39:20who are longtime users of various platforms

1:39:23about Apple's consistent ability to execute.

1:39:25And the Mac Pro, it's weird to me.

1:39:27It's like, if you have a deep bench and a lot of money,

1:39:30why can't you make this in a finite amount of time?

1:39:32and they are not.

1:39:34And that's been the issue that was people were concerned

1:39:36about that with the Mac Mini,

1:39:37which finally shipped and seems perfectly fine.

1:39:39I haven't done a deep dive in it,

1:39:40but it seems like a perfectly fine update.

1:39:42There's something that's not right there.

1:39:46- There's a sense among people who truly want,

1:39:49at a personal level, the most of the people who I know

1:39:52who are most looking forward to a Mac Pro are developers.

1:39:56- Yeah, absolutely.

1:39:57- But I know people who are in the graphics world

1:40:01and Video World who are in that scheme too.

1:40:04But most of them, the consensus is that the old Mac Pro

1:40:09was the right idea, it's a big tower.

1:40:11It's a big, big tower with lots of cooling,

1:40:13and then when you open it up, there's lots of room inside

1:40:16to put more stuff in.

1:40:18If what you need is four video cards,

1:40:21you can put four video cards in there.

1:40:23If what you need is lots of storage,

1:40:25you can put lots of fast storage inside the box

1:40:28if that's what you want.

1:40:29build a big tower that that has lots of cooling to keep everything cool. And then you're done.

1:40:34And the consensus is that the trashcan Mac Pro was Apple getting too clever by far by saying you

1:40:40don't need a big tower. Here's this little thing. And it is beautiful. And it looks like nothing

1:40:45else any computer makers ever made as a professional workstation. And it was too clever

1:40:51by far because it a lots of people I know who have one have had to replay have the video card replaced

1:40:57at least once because even with the built in video card, it was too hot, let alone expandability

1:41:04to faster and faster and hotter and hotter video cards as the years went by. And so I think the

1:41:09fear that these people have is all we ever wanted is for you to make a big, fast, airy tower. That's

1:41:17it. Just just put all of Intel's latest stuff in a big tower and call it done, which is sort of what

1:41:22you had before. And don't get too clever. And why in the world is it taking you two hours, two years,

1:41:27two hours, two years to do this unless they're getting too clever again by far because they're

1:41:32Apple. Did Apple get obsessed by Thunderbolt 3 based GPU connections? Oh, I think so. Yeah.

1:41:38I mean, because that seemed to be their answer was like, I don't know if they said that or if it was

1:41:42hinted, but it was like, look, all these are coming down the pipe. There's 40 gigabit per second,

1:41:46symmetrical, blah, blah. The answer is not to stick in bigger video cards, because the thermal issues

1:41:51for, I mean, you have seen some of these cards you can get on the PC side, and they're nuts.

1:41:57And you just want to stick four of those into a Mac. I mean, the cool, it just, it's a whole

1:42:02different engineering project. So my, and I'm not a developer, so I don't know if this, it doesn't

1:42:08make sense in developer side, it's for different uses, you know, like AI processing and things like

1:42:13that. But I, or animation, but I just, it felt to me like they were like, we, you just, like,

1:42:19Thunderbolt 3 is the answer for now.

1:42:20And maybe we'll figure out something else later.

1:42:22But I don't feel like that potential was realized.

1:42:25I know you can buy Thunderbolt 3 connected GPUs,

1:42:27but I don't feel like that actually solved

1:42:30the problems people were trying to address.

1:42:32- Well, anyway, to wrap up the segment,

1:42:34the thing that I found ironic that I didn't write about,

1:42:36but I will mention here is,

1:42:38here's this article from Gurman talking all about

1:42:40how they're gonna have all these ways

1:42:42to run iPad apps on your Mac.

1:42:44Oh, and by the way, we're gonna come out with this fancy,

1:42:46Probably five six seven thousand dollar professional workstation. Hope you enjoy running tablet apps on it, right?

1:42:52Like what a mixed message for one article of is here's this here's this computer that we're making because we hear you that even the iMac

1:42:58Pro isn't pro enough for some of your needs and

1:43:01You can run an iPad app on it. That's that's not exactly a clear message

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1:46:01We've got more. We've got to go into the speed round, I guess. Other topics.

1:46:07Pete: It's a busy week. Jeff Bezos is a member of us last week.

1:46:11So what's the…

1:46:12John "Lucky" Baum: Well, how about this? Samsung had a big event yesterday.

1:46:16Pete Oh yeah. It's interesting to watch their coverage these days, how people write about them.

1:46:21John "Lucky" Baum Well, and they're in a weird space, you know,

1:46:25like where five years ago, I guess it's six years ago now, but it was right around 2013,

1:46:31where the consensus was that Apple's in trouble. You know, Steve Jobs had been dead two years.

1:46:36That was the peak of Apple can't do it without Steve Jobs. Samsung's eating their lunch, you know.

1:46:42You know, it wasn't just that, quote-unquote, Android was going to do the iPhone and it was

1:46:47Samsung in particular. Yeah, yeah. And nobody's really saying that anymore. But they're still,

1:46:53you know, they're obviously a major player at a high level, at least in the US. I know that one

1:46:58One of the weird things that's happened to Samsung is that they've been pretty much wiped

1:47:01out of the Chinese market. Chinese brands like Huawei and a couple of others have taken

1:47:08up the Android Slack inside mainland China. Samsung, I forget what their market showed.

1:47:12They had 18 or 19% at one point inside China for smartphones, and now it's under 1%. It's

1:47:18crazy. But they're obviously still a big player in the West. They obviously do really good

1:47:25They can do cameras.

1:47:27You know, it was interesting.

1:47:30I know I watched the actual keynote online

1:47:33and it was fascinating staging.

1:47:35Did you look at it at all?

1:47:36- Yeah, I saw a picture of this.

1:47:37I saw your call out about that too.

1:47:39And I'd seen pictures and didn't understand

1:47:41what I was looking at.

1:47:42Then you mentioned that and went back and looked

1:47:43and I thought it's actually was my pre-rections.

1:47:47It's really sad when the takeaway from an announcement is,

1:47:50wow, they did a really good job on the stage

1:47:51with a very, they were very innovative on stage.

1:47:55But yeah, it was something I'd never seen before.

1:47:57- Yeah, the stage itself was display,

1:48:03and then they wrapped around the ceiling above the stage.

1:48:07So like the presenters who came out were,

1:48:10you know, sometimes they'd turn it off

1:48:11and they'd just have like a traditional display behind them.

1:48:14But then at certain times,

1:48:15they'd use the floor and the ceiling too.

1:48:19I've never seen anything quite like it.

1:48:20It was pretty interesting.

1:48:22But they unveiled a bunch of new high-end phones,

1:48:25all of them at the high end.

1:48:27And I guess I shouldn't be surprised,

1:48:30and I don't wanna look at it

1:48:31through too Apple-focused lens,

1:48:34but it's very strange to me that they introduced,

1:48:38the ones that people are supposed to buy

1:48:40are the Galaxy S10 models, of which there's three.

1:48:45There's the S10e, which is smaller, 5.8-inch diagonal,

1:48:50but also it's $750, so it sort of competes

1:48:54against the iPhone XR, but also is missing,

1:48:57like the XR, it doesn't have as many cameras

1:49:00as its more expensive brethren.

1:49:02Doesn't have the cool new in-screen fingerprint sensor.

1:49:06You have to actually touch the side button

1:49:07to get a fingerprint sensor.

1:49:09The S10 is 6.1 inches and has a bunch of features,

1:49:15and then there's the S10+, which is 6.4 inches.

1:49:19So they're the three phones that people will buy and Samsung should be hoping to get people

1:49:25talking about. But they couldn't help themselves and also showed the Galaxy Fold, which is

1:49:32a folding tablet that folds up to a ridiculous looking phone.

1:49:37Alan Corey Yeah, I—who is that? It's like a Homer

1:49:41Simpson phone. And I don't mean to be rude, it's just like—I'm sure, I mean, it

1:49:47actually looks technically very impressive. And as I recall, journalists were not allowed to get

1:49:52hands on time with it after the event. So the only time it's supposed to ship in April,

1:49:56are they taking orders in April? Are they shipping?

1:49:58I don't know. It seems fishy to me that they're not taking orders. And there's a lot of people

1:50:03have a lot of questions about the hinge on this. Like the display is in indisputably cool,

1:50:09you know, that the inside display.

1:50:11Yeah, it's very interesting. And they're like, you know, last for thousands of

1:50:14foldings and unfoldings, which I imagine is enough. It's got some very clever gears and so forth.

1:50:19Yeah, but how durable is that hinge? How sturdy is it when it's open? How hard is it to close?

1:50:27I mean, there's a lot of ways I can go. And the other display, the one that you see when the phone

1:50:35is in closed mode, is ridiculous. It's only 4.8 inches on a giant device, and so it has these

1:50:42preposterous chin and forehead. Like it's clearly intended to be used open in the full-size

1:50:51mode and then that closed cover is there. So like if your phone buzzes, you can like

1:50:57look at it and see what, you know, why is my phone buzzing? Oh, I see it's, you know,

1:51:01a phone call from Glenn or, you know, I've got email from so and so.

1:51:06But it's not like a one-line display. I mean, the cover is like a high resolution display

1:51:11that would be just a phone on another phone. Which is a 4.6 inch phone on the front that another

1:51:18could just be different. It's funny, I keep laughing every time I look at it. It's not

1:51:23that it's ridiculous. I mean, you know what I also remember was the palm, remember the palm folio?

1:51:26Pete: Yes, yeah.

1:51:27Pete; Yeah.

1:51:28Pete; The external device for your palm, which was like a little laptop. And I, but my sense was like,

1:51:33well, I got a phone and then I got another thing. Do I really want the other thing or do I want that?

1:51:38what what is my purpose? Again, I go back to the job, what's the

1:51:42job for? But it's like, do I really want to like, is being

1:51:48able to fold something up instead of putting it in a

1:51:50sleeve that critical to me as a differentiating factor that's

1:51:55worth like $1,000 premium?

1:51:56Well, do you watch Westworld?

1:51:59Oh, yeah.

1:52:00Yeah. So the Westworld people have the tablets that fold, you

1:52:04know that everybody's uses the same type type of device and

1:52:07and you can fold it up to be phone size,

1:52:10or you can unfold it to make it bigger.

1:52:12But when you fold it,

1:52:14it doesn't really get that much thicker.

1:52:16You know, it's very, very thin.

1:52:18You know, and obviously that's science fiction,

1:52:24but it doesn't seem that preposterous, you know?

1:52:27And it seems like that's what you want

1:52:29so that when the people on Westworld are using it

1:52:31without unfolding it to tablet size for a quick interaction,

1:52:35it's not a preposterously thick device

1:52:38that looks like it has a giant thick hinge.

1:52:40It still is very thin, and that's what they can put

1:52:42in their jacket pocket or pants pocket or something

1:52:44so it's nice and tidy and folded up.

1:52:46But still a very usable device as a phone size

1:52:49held in one hand device.

1:52:51- Yeah, it's the same, but that's 'cause the resolution

1:52:53and intent are the same whether,

1:52:55I mean, this is a smaller screen on the front

1:52:58so that it's not useless when folded up,

1:53:00and the actual product is inside.

1:53:02the front is intended to be a little thing you use, but then so how often will you switch between it?

1:53:09Have you seen the Expanse, that TV series? No, I have not seen that. It's just shotgun season two

1:53:14and three, which are great. But they have the communicator there. They're different sized ones,

1:53:19but a lot of them are a handheld thing, like a phone size thing with a clear display. And it

1:53:24actually holographically gets bigger. So when you're holding it, stuff appears around it,

1:53:30hovering around it at the same 2D plane. I was like, Oh, you know, I don't know how feasible like I

1:53:35don't I mean, it's a very clever idea, but it's physically the size of a phone often. And the

1:53:40display is just essentially effectively moves beyond the boundaries of the thing. And I'm like,

1:53:45that feels like what Samsung's trying to do here is they're trying to give you the sense that it's

1:53:50a single device with two kinds of resolutions, but instead it's kind of a chunky device, but it's,

1:53:55it's just two things. Yeah, I mean, that the foldable OLED display is a real thing. It is very

1:54:02cool. But it is clearly a demo. It's a prototype at this stage. And it's like the old Steve Jobs

1:54:08thing that you know, you've done dozens of stories like this, where he had a very keen sense of,

1:54:13that's not a product, that's a feature, you know, that's, that's a technology, right?

1:54:18Just how hard is it to put an iPad in a tablet in a sleeve? Well, or your back?

1:54:25It's not, but it wouldn't be in your pocket. It would be cool to have something that was thin

1:54:29enough that if it was phone-sized while pocketable and unfoldable to be, or stretchable or something

1:54:37to be bigger when you needed it. Like, I'm sure we will get that. We'll get that, you know,

1:54:42I don't know if it's 10 years out, if it's five years out, I don't know. But we'll get

1:54:47something like that. But this is not it. Like...

1:54:51do respect their interest in making something that is technologically well ahead of its time.

1:54:56They're pushing the price envelope. It's clearly got a crazy number of features in it. So it's not

1:55:03they're not skimping on this. This isn't a bad product. Like, oh, my God, everything is horrible.

1:55:10Look, it's terrible. It's more like I'm mystified about it. But I can't say it lacks ambition. And

1:55:16that's neat. I mean, I know they're a multi billion dollar company, and they shouldn't be doing things

1:55:20that are so risky, they can lose the farm on it. But after the events the last few years, and

1:55:26various executives being indicted, and some sent to prison and then released and all this other

1:55:30stuff going on, the fire, you know, their phones bursting to flames, maybe they need to do

1:55:35something that is over the top. Maybe it's not successful. But it's interesting. It's

1:55:40provocative. We'll see if there's a market for it. So I do have that to say, which I think is

1:55:44pretty positive.

1:55:44I think I'm intrigued that the starting price is nineteen hundred and eighty dollars, you know

1:55:49I don't know how far that goes that they're a little sketchy on details, especially for something that supposedly slip shipping in April

1:55:55but I really do think that that's interesting and

1:55:58you know, I

1:56:00wrote before the iPhone 10 came out when there were rumors that it was going to be more expensive that I would like to see

1:56:05Apple make a fifteen hundred dollar iPhone and see what they could come up with like I

1:56:11dispute the notion that the highest price iPhone should be priced for everybody and that it should never go above

1:56:18600 700 dollars like it was 10 years ago

1:56:22because I feel like phones have become too important to people that they've they've grown in importance and

1:56:28You know, we've had $2,000 laptops for years. I mean used to be, you know laptops for five six thousand dollars

1:56:36And there's I know a lot of people personally who their most used most important computing device is their phone

1:56:42So why not have one that cost fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars and and justifies it on technical grounds?

1:56:49Sure, you know if that's your most important device

1:56:52So, you know, it's interesting to see somebody jump so far ahead of Apple in terms of highest starting price for a smartphone

1:56:59But I don't I don't see this as being I mean who knows I could be surprised

1:57:05and maybe it'll come out and be well reviewed, but it looks awfully thick and they seem to go

1:57:10to great lengths to disguise it in closed form and seems very awkward in closed form.

1:57:16Pete: Yeah, and they're holding it when you, all the photos, I was trying, I saw you'd

1:57:19commented how thick it was. I looked at a lot of photos of this thing and every picture appears

1:57:24to be so they can show it in as 2D, plainer, relative to the camera as possible. And I don't

1:57:30blame him for it. But you know, and there is an obsession with

1:57:33thin like if this thing, again, this is I love the idea that a

1:57:37company is exploring something at the edge of what's possible.

1:57:40That doesn't look like a technological failure. We'll

1:57:43find out when it hits the market if it actually succeeds, but

1:57:46they're trying something so far on the edge, the question will

1:57:50be, will the potential audience for this be big enough to be

1:57:53worthwhile? And if so, does the thickness matter for the first

1:57:56release? I mean, we remember the first iPad, it was kind of

1:57:59I look at a, I have an iPad, I don't know which version,

1:58:02iPad two, we still have that works.

1:58:04And it seems absurd to me.

1:58:07It's so big and thick and weird.

1:58:08I'm like, oh my God, this is what we used to have.

1:58:11And that's seven years old, eight years old now.

1:58:13So maybe this is the first version

1:58:15and it has enough utility that it drives

1:58:18a new market segment.

1:58:19Samsung gets people to pay 2,000 to $2,500

1:58:23or more for this thing.

1:58:24And it sparks a huge investment in drawings

1:58:28to make foldable displays, and their next one is, you know, 30 percent thinner in a

1:58:33year. But I mean, this is—it's not an absurd idea like some other ideas in the past

1:58:40have been absurd. It's an interesting idea maybe too early.

1:58:43I think it's a very interesting idea that has a lot of future, but I feel like this

1:58:47particular implementation borders on the absurd and might—when we find out more—

1:58:53I can hear that, yeah.

1:58:54It might. And I just question their... To me, it's a lack of corporate institutional discipline to be

1:59:05able to say, "We could build this now. We have this. They've created this foldable OLED technology

1:59:11that you can fold up and when unfolded has no ugly crease or seam in the middle." That is cool.

1:59:18There's no doubt that that is cool technology. But it just seems to me like the fact that they have

1:59:22this technology, they just couldn't stand not putting it into a product, whether it's ready

1:59:27to be a product or not. Whereas the discipline, and I think something that Apple historically has

1:59:32done very well, is to have that discipline and say, "Okay, this is cool technology, but this

1:59:38isn't a good product yet." So we wait and we keep our mouths shut and go back to work and turn it

1:59:43into a good product. I also don't want to overemphasize this, but we shouldn't underemphasize

1:59:48that Samsung is—I was alluding to it before—they've gone through, you know, an amazing amount of

1:59:55criminal accusations. There are trials to come. The—who was it? One of the—is the

2:00:00CEO, was it put in jail?

2:00:02Soterios Johnson Yep.

2:00:03Alan Corey And then released on a suspended sentence. So,

2:00:05like the company, it's actually shocking that it's not in more disarray because so

2:00:09many of the executives have been swept up into this and it's had to take their attention.

2:00:12So there is a little bit of it when you say, you know, have they been exercising corporate

2:00:16I'm like, I don't even know how they function,

2:00:19given all the rest of what's going on.

2:00:20So they are shipping new devices

2:00:22and they were able to move on from the burst into flame thing

2:00:26which is really difficult to recover from.

2:00:28- Yeah, yeah.

2:00:30Which happened with phones that they put

2:00:32really, really big batteries in

2:00:34and it was a disaster for the company.

2:00:37They seem to have confidence in that now

2:00:39'cause a lot of these phones,

2:00:41one thing that they'll brag about that Apple never mentions

2:00:44is the mega amp hours of the batteries.

2:00:46And some of these phones that they announced yesterday have like 4,000, I swear like 4,000

2:00:514600 I think one is 4600 mega amperes.

2:00:56So they seem to they seem to have recovered from the burst in the flame.

2:00:59They seem to have a confidence.

2:01:00You can't squeeze it.

2:01:01That was the problem.

2:01:02You can't you can put a big battery in it.

2:01:04You just can't cram it in so that it's sealed.

2:01:07It's under pressure.

2:01:08The other phone they announced yesterday and this one is even it's crazily enough even

2:01:12even more vaporware-ish than the foldable one is the S10 5G. Which again, why would

2:01:21you announce that now? Well, clearly because they want to be able to scream, "We were first."

2:01:25We were the first 5G flagship phone. I didn't even pick this up in the data. I read this this

2:01:33morning that they haven't even said what it'll cost. They've said it'll come to Verizon first

2:01:39in the US and they had Verizon CEO come out and wearing a t-shirt which I thought was

2:01:44weird. I'm trying to do the T-Mobile CEO thing I guess. Yeah, he came out and but no price and

2:01:52no date. They didn't haven't even really said that it's going to come out in 2019. First half of 2019

2:02:00is the promise but yeah, you know, you know, let's see if it actually comes out. And that's another

2:02:04- It's not a contract.

2:02:06- And the funny thing is that the guy for Samsung

2:02:08who introduced it, I don't remember his name,

2:02:10but he was something VP of product marketing.

2:02:14He said something to the effect of,

2:02:16he was going through the history of cellular networks

2:02:20where there was the original data network

2:02:22and we had text messaging and we had 2G,

2:02:24which made email and other stuff possible.

2:02:27And then 3G was a breakthrough that really kind of made

2:02:30doing the web on mobile devices was possible.

2:02:34And then we had 4G, which made everything blah, blah, blah.

2:02:38And he said, every step of the way,

2:02:39the first generation of phones

2:02:40that supported these networks

2:02:41were too big and thick and heavy.

2:02:43Well, this is the end of that.

2:02:46But then the next thing he says is, here's the S10 5G,

2:02:50and it has a 6.8-inch screen.

2:02:53It's almost as big diagonally as the foldable one

2:02:58when it's unfolded.

2:02:59It's so much bigger than the other S10 phones.

2:03:03So he's just said, how can you introduce it

2:03:07by saying every time the first phones

2:03:10to support a new networking technology were too big?

2:03:13Here's a seven inch phone.

2:03:15- Well, but too big is always code for too thick.

2:03:19- Right, so maybe it's not thick.

2:03:21I don't know, but it seems ridiculous.

2:03:23- I don't know, all I see is, again,

2:03:24of seeing it in a plain view.

2:03:27It's perpendicular to the plane of viewing,

2:03:30so I can only see how wide it is.

2:03:32I missed it, it's 4,500 milliampere hours in the 5G S10,

2:03:37the 4,100 milliampere hours in the S10+, which is great.

2:03:41That's tons of power.

2:03:43But then you ask for 4,500, do you need that

2:03:45in order to support the 5G chips?

2:03:47I don't know.

2:03:48This is the other thing, is cellular networks

2:03:50have gotten ridiculously more power sensitive

2:03:55or power efficient for, as the data rates have gone up,

2:04:00they become much more efficient relative to throughput.

2:04:02So that issue usually is backed off.

2:04:05- I, it just seems maddening to me.

2:04:08And if I had been at Samsung

2:04:09and worked on the S10 regular models,

2:04:13I would be so mad to see them debut

2:04:16alongside this 5G model,

2:04:19which you can't really promote 5G

2:04:22without implicitly slagging 4G, right?

2:04:284G doesn't, you know, I still get maintained.

2:04:304G doesn't exist because when 4G was first,

2:04:33or when LTE was first announced,

2:04:35and then 4G sort of got lumped into it being LTE,

2:04:38the data rates were supposed to be like

2:04:40100 megabits per second to a gigabit per second downstream.

2:04:43We still don't have those networks.

2:04:45There's some around the world that have them.

2:04:47So our 4G networks, 4G LTE are really,

2:04:50they just, you know, what they do is they redefine

2:04:52the name to fit whatever got built,

2:04:55and remember that got done early.

2:04:57So the 5G networks, nobody knows why they want 5G.

2:05:01- No, it's a carrier thing, right?

2:05:03It's a total carrier thing.

2:05:04And they're already playing games with it.

2:05:06Is it AT&T who's already trying to get the 5G label

2:05:11on existing phones?

2:05:13- Yeah, it's gonna show up as if it were,

2:05:15it's like gonna have a little extra thing.

2:05:17And I mean, it's sadly, everything's been marketing.

2:05:20I mean, 3G was a distinctly different technology.

2:05:22There was 2G and sort of 2 1/2G and 3G,

2:05:26And then what they were calling 4G

2:05:27was more like three and a half G.

2:05:29It was like an advancement of 3G technology.

2:05:314G did have a, there's a fundamental change.

2:05:354G is the evolution to an all IP phone network.

2:05:38So there is a fundamental change in it.

2:05:40That's how you get voiceover,

2:05:41a high definition voice was a voiceover LTE calling

2:05:46and things like that.

2:05:47So there's a fundamental evolution

2:05:49in the underpinnings of the network.

2:05:50It is a better network.

2:05:51It's more efficient.

2:05:52It's higher throughput.

2:05:53You get better coverage.

2:05:54It supports more in different kinds of frequencies.

2:05:57There's better OFDM sub-channelization,

2:05:59like all these technical bits

2:06:01that mean you can get better performance

2:06:03and the carriers can roll at higher and higher speeds

2:06:05and they can use more in different frequencies.

2:06:08So you have the base bands and the phones are ridiculous

2:06:10in the number of frequency ranges they support

2:06:13within one country or worldwide.

2:06:15All that's great, but the 5G thing is like,

2:06:17ours is 1G faster.

2:06:18I mean, Trump tweeted today, you saw this, right?

2:06:20- No, I did not.

2:06:21I was at the doctor, remember?

2:06:22needed to be the first to deploy 5G and even 6G networks.

2:06:26(laughing)

2:06:27I'm not making this up. - Of course he did.

2:06:29Of course he did.

2:06:29That's the way his mind works immediately.

2:06:32He has no idea, he has no friggin' idea

2:06:34what any of this means, and of course--

2:06:35- But he's the best marketing person, right?

2:06:37He's like, "5G is clearly one better."

2:06:39- Right, and 6G, (laughing)

2:06:42like we're so far away from widespread deployment of it.

2:06:45Of course he wants 6 or 7G.

2:06:47- But isn't that great?

2:06:48I mean, it is like a parody to you.

2:06:49I want 5G and even 6G technology in the United States

2:06:52as soon as possible, it is far more powerful,

2:06:54faster and smarter than the current standard.

2:06:56American companies must step up their efforts

2:06:58or get left behind.

2:07:00- I just ran the speed test app here on my phone.

2:07:02I turned off wifi just to see what am I getting.

2:07:04I get pretty good Verizon service here in Philadelphia.

2:07:07I got just tested at 72.6 megabits per second down.

2:07:11- Oh, that's amazing. - 5.5 up.

2:07:13But usually, yeah, I'm in the basement as I record this.

2:07:1625-- - Oh, that's great.

2:07:17I mean, the networks have gradually gotten faster

2:07:19getting to it, but it's like even at the 100 megabits

2:07:21second. The target was one gigabit per second if you were standing still basically. 100 megabits

2:07:27per second if you're driving 60 miles an hour. Yeah. And, you know, the other thing and the one

2:07:32thing that Apple never seems to lose sight of is that it's the holistic experience, the whole

2:07:39experience of using the phone that matters the most. And of course, faster networking is better

2:07:44than slow networking. It controlled for all other variables, of course. And slower, you know, faster

2:07:51ping times are better than slower ping times. Of course, latency is not good. But battery life is an

2:07:57issue. Coverage, cellular coverage is an issue. And what happens as you hand off from tower?

2:08:02It's the whole day long, weeks long, year or two year or three year long experience of using a

2:08:09phone that matters the most. And the 5G stuff is, come on. It's such a carrier. It's just the

2:08:17carrier's obsession with, well, that is their thing, and they would love for the most important

2:08:22thing in Jane Consumer, who's in the market for a new phone, to be most worried about the network

2:08:30as opposed to the device. All they ever talk about is how great the network is. And you know what?

2:08:37All people want is for the goddamn phone to work and be fast, and that's it.

2:08:41Yeah, and I have gigabit internet at home. I've had it for a few years now.

2:08:43- Oh, and to have a bill that is,

2:08:46like your $50 phone bill should be $50, not $75.

2:08:50- Oh yeah, yeah.

2:08:51But yeah, I have a side gigabit internet

2:08:54and I've had it for years.

2:08:56And the thing you experience

2:08:57when you have a super fast network,

2:09:00and often they'll do speed tests,

2:09:01it'll be six or 700 megabits per second up and down.

2:09:04So it's really, they're not live.

2:09:06It's actually sort of gigabit.

2:09:08But the thing is,

2:09:09the internet doesn't really run at gigabit speeds.

2:09:11Very few things can transfer anywhere near that fast.

2:09:14So there's a point at which really,

2:09:16what the carriers are saying

2:09:20when they say 5G is so important,

2:09:22it's the next thing is they're saying,

2:09:23what they should be saying, I think,

2:09:25and I'm not a marketing person,

2:09:26is you're gonna be able to get high definition

2:09:29streaming video wherever you are, whenever you want,

2:09:31and it's gonna be part of your plan.

2:09:33You know, in your 5G plan.

2:09:35You're gonna be able to download any file, anything,

2:09:38Download a high definition movie to your phone

2:09:43in five minutes.

2:09:45That's what 5G promises.

2:09:47That's something that people could act upon

2:09:49and it's something that tells you something.

2:09:52The saying 5G is faster, it's because they don't know,

2:09:54they can't promise anything.

2:09:55For them, there's great network improvements

2:09:57they'll get out of it and that's terrific,

2:09:59but it certainly doesn't translate into that.

2:10:02My great grandmother apparently used to say something

2:10:04along the lines of, you know, essentially,

2:10:08so how rich do you need to be?

2:10:09Are you gonna eat five meals a day?

2:10:10(laughing)

2:10:12And that's what I feel about with 5G.

2:10:13It's like, how fast do you really need it?

2:10:15If I only need, if I had consistent three or 4G speeds,

2:10:19it'd be great, I don't need 5G.

2:10:20- Right, and there's so many things,

2:10:21and I know 5G is meant to address this,

2:10:23and each subsequent level of cellular networking technology

2:10:27has gotten better at it, but for example,

2:10:30one thing that would be more meaningful to me,

2:10:33way more meaningful, may more frequently,

2:10:34is when I'm in some place very crowded.

2:10:36I mean, I live in Center City, Philly,

2:10:37so it's already pretty dense,

2:10:39but Manhattan is usually pretty dreadful

2:10:41for cell phone coverage,

2:10:43or you go to Disney World or something like that.

2:10:46Being able to get the same speeds that I normally get,

2:10:49but get it when I'm amidst thousands of people,

2:10:51or at a concert or a sporting event, right?

2:10:54I go to see the Sixers or the Yankees

2:10:56or something like that,

2:10:57and there's 50,000 people in Yankee Stadium,

2:11:00and they're all taking pictures of the same thing

2:11:03and trying to upload them or text them at the same time.

2:11:06If I got the same speed I normally got,

2:11:08but it worked better when 25,000 other people

2:11:11were using their phones at the same time,

2:11:12that's a meaningful upgrade.

2:11:14But it's-- - Yeah, and 5G will.

2:11:16I mean, 5G, 802.11ax, the new WiFi standard

2:11:20that's starting to sort of roll out a tiny bit, I think,

2:11:23that is all about how do you get a bazillion mobile devices

2:11:27to talk efficiently and better use

2:11:29all the spectrum that's available.

2:11:31And 5G has a lot of similar principles.

2:11:34There's tons of devices we need to make sure

2:11:37we can handle the load of micro cells,

2:11:40break it all out and just deal with the capacity.

2:11:43'Cause what you're describing,

2:11:44I mean, Yankee Stadium is not unique anymore.

2:11:46Like there's Yankee stadiums in every part of the country

2:11:49every day during commutes or in downtowns or wherever.

2:11:52So it's a fundamental problem.

2:11:54And again, I think if they said 5G is gonna be incredible

2:11:57because you could be, you know, they show somebody,

2:11:59they have John Gruber close tight up,

2:12:01or tight shot on John Gruber.

2:12:02They pull back, John is in a stadium.

2:12:04And he's uploading 4K video,

2:12:06and then you see everyone else is uploading 4K video,

2:12:08and it's like 5G, that's what it offers.

2:12:11That's a great ad, right?

2:12:12I think, I'm not an ad person.

2:12:14But that tells people something that frustrates them today

2:12:18that they'll be able to do.

2:12:20- Well, I'm not, when do you,

2:12:22there's the Apple-related note on 5G is that

2:12:26it apparently is caught up in their ongoing legal squabble

2:12:31with Qualcomm.

2:12:32- Oh yeah, yeah.

2:12:33where Qualcomm is like the leader

2:12:36or the only source for 5G stuff.

2:12:39But I don't think, Apple has been,

2:12:44the original iPhone shipped when quote unquote,

2:12:47most smartphones were already on 3G and it wasn't 3G

2:12:51and it was like the number one knock against it

2:12:54and it was fine.

2:12:55And the other phones went to LTE or quote unquote 4G,

2:12:59whatever the marketing wanted to call it.

2:13:02and the iPhone was at least a year late to that,

2:13:04you know, when the gadget sites had on daily basis

2:13:08had 4G phones.

2:13:10I think even if Apple's relationship with Qualcomm

2:13:13was hunky-dory, I really doubt that this year's phone

2:13:17would be, iPhones would be 5G.

2:13:20It's just the nature of Apple to, you know,

2:13:23to not get on board quickly for scaling reasons, you know,

2:13:28because they don't, you know, they,

2:13:31It's not like they're gonna ship a weirdo iPhone 5G

2:13:35in small quantities like Samsung's doing with the S10.

2:13:38They're gonna do it for all of the flagships

2:13:40or they're gonna wait.

2:13:41And the power efficiency thing is real,

2:13:44that the early versions are not going to be

2:13:47as power efficient as subsequent ones,

2:13:49and Apple tends to wait for the subsequent ones.

2:13:51- Well, it'll be super power efficient

2:13:53'cause there won't be any 5G cell base stations out there,

2:13:56so it'll all be 4G using the previous power efficiency.

2:13:59But no, but I agree.

2:14:00I think Apple tends to wait for the networks to mature

2:14:03to a point that it makes sense for them

2:14:06to promote it as a technology,

2:14:07because otherwise their customers are unhappy

2:14:10that they're not seeing promised speeds

2:14:12and 5G icons of their phone, which makes sense,

2:14:16'cause why release a 3G phone

2:14:18if the phone only says 2G on it all the time?

2:14:19- Yep.

2:14:20All right, let me take a break here

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2:17:52I have to tell you, terms and conditions apply.

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2:17:58Oh, what else?

2:18:01This is the real speed zone.

2:18:02We got a bunch of little things to talk about.

2:18:04You've got this in the show notes.

2:18:05I don't know what you're talking about, to be honest,

2:18:07is Twitter's new threaded approach.

2:18:09- Oh, have you not seen this yet?

2:18:11- No.

2:18:12- Jack Dorsey,

2:18:14Twitter's flooded with Nazis and fascists and abuse.

2:18:19And he's like, "What if, what if we removed likes?"

2:18:23- Is that what they're doing?

2:18:25- That heart really bothers me, he says.

2:18:27What if we got rid of that?

2:18:28That would probably solve problems.

2:18:29What if we threaded and nested conversations

2:18:33so it's easier to follow a conversation?

2:18:34That would produce more understanding among people

2:18:37and less harassment and abuse.

2:18:39So yeah, they're trying stuff and I haven't seen it yet.

2:18:41I've seen some screen captures,

2:18:43but some people are apparently getting this rolled out

2:18:45in some early testing, or if you click a link,

2:18:47I think it may show up as an option.

2:18:49I almost never used Twitter's own software.

2:18:51I just use Tweetbot for everything.

2:18:53So I'm like in bizarro Twitter universe

2:18:56where this stuff doesn't exist.

2:18:58- Yeah, it's funny.

2:18:59I have switched to, I use Tweetbot on my phone,

2:19:03but I use Twitter on my Mac

2:19:05because I find it a better workflow.

2:19:08And there's some things you can see in Twitter.

2:19:09There's some interesting statistics and things.

2:19:12Yeah, in certain interactions,

2:19:14I've discovered Tweetbot won't show me some replies

2:19:16and Twitter will.

2:19:18So I go back and forth.

2:19:19- Yeah, I shouldn't say I never use it.

2:19:21There's magic powers that I get as a blue checkbox person.

2:19:27- Oh yeah.

2:19:28- There's certain features.

2:19:31I have to say in my defense, I never asked for it.

2:19:34I got my blue checkbox as a verified Twitter user

2:19:37in the aftermath of the Matt Honan hacking years ago.

2:19:42- You were very early though,

2:19:43and you had a bunch of users early on.

2:19:45So they kind of went through

2:19:46verified people who'd write and were subject to it.

2:19:49It seemed like, you know, yeah, I was at risk of being targeted in the way Matt Honan was,

2:19:55you know, probably true. I mean, yeah, I think, I think Matt and my Twitter history and our

2:20:03background and the number of I'm sure algorithmically it was like, yeah, this guy's,

2:20:07this guy's a target. But, but anyway, I get, I get notifications that other people can't get. It's

2:20:14It's like a level of notifications of tweets I might find interesting.

2:20:21I can't turn on every time somebody likes my tweet because I'd get too many.

2:20:24I have too many followers.

2:20:26But I have the option of only seeing it for people who I follow.

2:20:29I forget.

2:20:30There's a great—some of those are—I have a blue checkmark, so I see some of those,

2:20:33and some, though, they've now rolled out to everybody that used to be exclusive.

2:20:38So I have, you can say, don't show me, like, people who haven't confirmed a phone number

2:20:44or people who haven't changed their default avatar.

2:20:46There's a few of those.

2:20:47I found when, back when Eric Trump responded angrily to me about something and my Twitter

2:20:53was – yeah, I know, this is – my kids are still – this is how I impressed my children.

2:20:57They were very happy about that.

2:21:00And my tweet mentions were trash fire and tweet bot, which can't use Twitter filtering.

2:21:04It can only accept the raw API timeline.

2:21:07I went into twitter.com and I turned on a couple of those boxes so I was like, "Don't

2:21:12show me notifications from people who haven't changed their default avatar."

2:21:17And all of a sudden, like, there were thousands of people tweeting at me for like two days

2:21:21solid and I saw like two of them.

2:21:24Because everybody else was, and I also had low quality filter enabled.

2:21:28So the thing is, most people who engage in abuse and whatever have not done the basics

2:21:32or they follow very few people, or they only tweet at people who don't follow them, and

2:21:38Twitter will read those signals.

2:21:39So if you check the right checkboxes and you use a Twitter client, you wind up with a lot

2:21:43less noise.

2:21:44So most of the time, Tweetbot is great.

2:21:46It's just when there's a flood of response.

2:21:49I tweeted something the other day about Seattle.

2:21:51The Seattle Times runs this regular feature, "X restaurants open and X closed."

2:21:56The other day they had a headline like, "43 restaurants open in Seattle, 19 are closing,"

2:22:00I tweeted the 43 saying the hellhole that Seattle has become or the, you know, the devastating

2:22:05nightmare we live in with the high minimum wage we passed.

2:22:08The people found that funny.

2:22:09So I got thousands of retweets of it and whatever.

2:22:12And all of a sudden, like, oh, and I wound up having again to use Twitter because I couldn't

2:22:15cope with the flood of stuff coming in.

2:22:17And then I got back to tweet.

2:22:18I got one like that in the last year where there was one of these incidents with gun

2:22:24violence and oh, yeah.

2:22:25I tweeted impetuously something to the effect of to somebody. It was like an ad, it was

2:22:32a reply or something, and I just wrote something about we're going to take away your guns.

2:22:37I don't know. That's not even my politics. I actually don't support taking away lawful

2:22:42gun ownership. But somebody, I've never even figured out who retweeted it, but somebody

2:22:48with a large number of conservative followers retweeted it. And my Twitter mentions were

2:22:54garbage for, like, and I thought, you know what, I shouldn't have tweeted that. I actually,

2:22:58and I was like, this is what I get. I actually felt like, this is my punishment. I can't

2:23:02use Twitter.

2:23:03Right.

2:23:04You know, it's like, and, but like 72 hours later, it was still like three whole days

2:23:07later, it was still a fire hose of garbage.

2:23:11I know exactly who retweeted you.

2:23:15Really?

2:23:16And I'm not going to say their name. Yep. Because they do this, they actually have a

2:23:19They're a prominent conservative who used to be somewhat reasonable.

2:23:23And there are plenty of reasonable conservatives.

2:23:25I have friends who are conservatives. I'm not playing some kind of political thing.

2:23:29There are people who exist to be trolls who happen to be conservatives, just like there are liberals.

2:23:33This guy went from an interesting thinker to a troll.

2:23:37And he can be very cruel and nasty.

2:23:39I had to block him because I would tweet something very anodyne or very normal, and he would retweet it with comment.

2:23:45And I would get dogpiled.

2:23:47turn his fanatics, yeah.

2:23:48So I know exactly, but he's also got a little bit of an intersection with the Mac world,

2:23:53so I think, or has an interest in it, so he follows people like you and me. That's as

2:23:57opposed to, there's a fellow who I'd say is like the exact opposite, is Brad DeLong,

2:24:01who's a well-known economist, a very thoughtful person, does not engage in trollery, but he's

2:24:05like the inverse of this other guy. It's also very—

2:24:08I follow Brad DeLong.

2:24:09—Mac-interested.

2:24:10Yeah, also Brad DeLong, long time during Fireball Reader, actually.

2:24:13Yeah, I've been listening to great guy. I've read his stuff for years and years and years.

2:24:17Tom: And the other thing that I run into, and I think even like in that gun thing,

2:24:23people think it's me, is they conflate me with Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who is the

2:24:30quote unquote "architect of Obamacare." But he generally goes by Jonathan, and I realize that

2:24:37a lot of people don't realize that JOHN is almost never a Jonathan, you know. It's something that we

2:24:43John's know, like Moltz and I will go on at length about it. If you're a JOHN, there's only,

2:24:48I've only met like a handful of JOHNs who are actually Jonathan's. JON is the diminutive form

2:24:55of Jonathan. And that's who the Gruber, who's the Obama architect is. But when that whole thing

2:25:00erupted five, six, seven years ago about him saying something pretty stupid on stage, the way

2:25:08it came out of his mouth that people were—you had to kind of—I forget what he said, but it

2:25:16kind of insinuated that people are too stupid to understand what was good for them about Obamacare.

2:25:20Oh my god. But he's not on Twitter. And so a lot of people would guess, "Well, maybe @Gruber is

2:25:27this guy." And they'd see it of somebody with a lot of followers. His name is John Gruber. And

2:25:33"Oh my God, did I get a lot of those. Oh my God." I used to write back to those people though,

2:25:38sometimes I would just have fun with them and just say like ridiculous, like unto the guys. And I

2:25:45almost feel bad because I was, I never claimed to be the other John Gruber, but I would just

2:25:52write back to them and say ridiculous things like, "This is really just the first step. We're going

2:25:56to have everybody get their healthcare at the post office."

2:26:02and there's just something ridiculous like that.

2:26:06Like once we can get everybody on Medicare for All,

2:26:08we'll just put all the doctors in the post office

2:26:10and we'll save money, you know,

2:26:11we'll save tremendous amounts of money at the federal level.

2:26:14- Oh my God.

2:26:15- It was a lot of fun, but I have to,

2:26:19I try to avoid that now.

2:26:20Anyway, getting rid of the hearts on Twitter,

2:26:23that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

2:26:24- Yes.

2:26:25- You know what we were talking about Square earlier,

2:26:28Jack Dorsey's other company,

2:26:29And he did a bunch of interviews a month ago.

2:26:31I forget why, but you know, he was making the media rounds.

2:26:36He did a really good interview on the Bill Simmons Podcast.

2:26:38You probably don't listen 'cause it's mostly

2:26:40a sports podcast, but Bill Simmons did a tremendous job

2:26:43interviewing Jack Dorsey.

2:26:45I'll put this in the show notes.

2:26:46It's not sports-related at all.

2:26:48I guess they touch a little bit on like NBA Twitter,

2:26:51meaning the subset of Twitter that's, you know,

2:26:55likes to talk about the NBA.

2:26:57Jack Dorsey is a big Golden State Warriors fan.

2:27:00- Ah, okay.

2:27:01- But one of the things that came up

2:27:02was the difference between Square and Twitter.

2:27:06And he said this in a couple of interviews,

2:27:08not just with Bill Simmons,

2:27:09but he said something to the effect of,

2:27:12we have to be super careful about everything we do at Square

2:27:15because it's money and people will get upset

2:27:18if we handle this wrong.

2:27:19(laughing)

2:27:20And so many people had came,

2:27:22and I mean, I can't take credit for it,

2:27:24but everybody who listened to this had the same thought

2:27:26of, "Oh my God, what if you did treat Twitter

2:27:30that way though?"

2:27:31And just, you know, like, you know,

2:27:35what if you were as careful about what you allowed

2:27:38to happen on Twitter as you were on Square?

2:27:41Like if we, what, if we charged a penny a tweet,

2:27:44you'd suddenly get rid of the Nazis and the...

2:27:47- This is what leads to regulation is industries

2:27:50accidentally confess that because they're not regulated,

2:27:53that they do anything they want and people are like,

2:27:55- Oh, well I'm really not in favor of regulation,

2:27:58but now that you said that.

2:27:59- Yeah, we don't do any experiments at Square,

2:28:02you know, like this whole, like,

2:28:03well what if we let Nazis have, you know, a platform?

2:28:07Oh.

2:28:08- Yeah, I have to highlight this thing.

2:28:10There's a thing that Pinterest did.

2:28:11Pinterest has been actually trying to create,

2:28:14like, more sensible communities in a way

2:28:17that YouTube and others are not, and Twitter are not.

2:28:20And what they said is, I saw this formulated just today,

2:28:24was there's freedom of speech, not freedom of reach. So, yes, there's a bunch of forums

2:28:29in which you should be allowed to say whatever you want, but you're not given the right

2:28:36to a platform, especially a privately owned one. So, there's people trying to suppress

2:28:41your ability to speak in public fora and that's unconstitutional and there's issues about whether

2:28:46it's hate speech and inciting violence and all that, but it's like there is no right on Pinterest

2:28:51to have access to Pinterest's audience, right? So, I think Pinterest now, like,

2:28:56we came up with the anti-vax stuff. It's not that you can't pin anti-vax things and you're on board,

2:29:00but you can't promote them in the way that you can in other platforms now.

2:29:04Yeah. I knew you were—I saw the same thing and hadn't read it, but I knew that it was gonna,

2:29:09you know, tie back into a topic we talked about earlier in the show. It was an anti-vaccination

2:29:14thing and that they've taken concrete steps to keep that anti-vaccination. Honestly, I feel

2:29:21feel safe describing it as disinformation from spreading at the scale that stuff can

2:29:26spread on Pinterest because they realize it is collectively not—it's against the interest

2:29:32of society at large.

2:29:33I just read a story, too. Somebody dug it up. It was like on the 50th anniversary of

2:29:40Jonas Salk's polio vaccine getting approved. They just talked about how it was like another

2:29:47VJ day or VE day, it was like a day when people went out in the streets to celebrate and party

2:29:57like it was New Year's Eve because it was, you know, and I don't know anybody, I realized

2:30:02that our generation, like me and you, I don't know anybody who had polio of my peers, but

2:30:07my family, like my grandparents did, my mom's dad had a brother who I think died from polio.

2:30:16I mean, I don't know anybody. I mean, it was, you know, it, it, it was crazy, you know,

2:30:21I mean, your kids could get measles and maybe they die and it was nothing you could do about

2:30:25it because they were going to get it, you know, and then all of a sudden, yeah. And

2:30:29then, you know, this terrible disease that even if you survived it, you know, would,

2:30:33could leave you, you know, severely handicapped for life. You know, we, you know, we've got

2:30:38a thing, we can just give this to every kid and they'll never get it. And the science

2:30:42backs it up. The largest clinical study at the time that anybody had ever conducted,

2:30:47and it was conclusive that this is going to work. It was great. And I just can't imagine

2:30:53so many of the people who are of that generation because of their age are gone now. But if

2:30:58you could just listen, they could just come back here and slap some sense into people.

2:31:03[laughter]

2:31:04Alan Corey I think you could—there's a great book I

2:31:07read a couple years ago called Get Well Soon by Jen Wright. She's @JenAshleyWright on

2:31:11incredibly funny and wonderful person. And the book is A Hilarious Account of History's Worst

2:31:17Plagues. It's written in a very friendly and delightful manner. And she recounts all of it.

2:31:22It's really, it's very interesting. It's much more approachable because it's not this deadly,

2:31:26either a dry or horrifying thing. She has kind of a little bit of a doo doo doo doo tone about it,

2:31:32which lets you get through it. But it is, it gives you some insight into what the scope of things we

2:31:38we used to go through, and then terrifying things like the 1918 flu that killed so many

2:31:45people and we still don't know exactly why or if it would recur in that form and whether

2:31:49we have any way to protect against it. But it's I think it's a great, I don't know,

2:31:53I really, I really enjoyed reading about plagues. But it just lets you see the scope of what's

2:32:00happened across human history and what we've managed to avoid for, you know, 60 something

2:32:04years, 70 something years for the most part.

2:32:06All right, the lightning round continues. Okay, the big hack Bloomberg's

2:32:11Blockbuster story from I think it was October and maybe I remember

2:32:15I keep doing the thing where every time I mention a report from Bloomberg or Businessweek

2:32:22I put an asterisk in right away and then include a boiler now boilerplate footnote

2:32:27remarking that

2:32:30Bloomberg has

2:32:31Since since that's published offered no evidence backing up their story bit yet have not retracted the story

2:32:37Which to me is an untenable position?

2:32:41They either need to retract it or show further evidence that no we were right all along and everybody else

2:32:46Who's tried to back this up and hasn't found any evidence of it whatsoever of any of the crap that we said happened happened and that

2:32:52You know, I

2:32:56Don't get it

2:32:57I had more conversations with people after that story came out and and since when it comes up

2:33:01you know, usually like off the conversation with other journalists, we're just chatting or you know, sometimes publicly on Twitter, sometimes privately, and we're all just like, I don't I don't understand it because Bloomberg has high journalistic standards. I don't suspect them or any of the reporters of engaging in in a fraud or fabulous. And yet, this is a ridiculous story. And no reporter has managed to match it. And there's no way that Bloomberg had the only access to

2:33:31to the large number of people. And after the story came out, some sources, as you know, even said, this isn't exactly what was going on. So it does feel like the story is wrong, and they don't understand it's wrong. And I can't believe they don't understand it's wrong. It seems like they dug themselves into such a pit and they got such pushback both from the companies profiled and other journalists and experts in the field that they just didn't know what to do about it. The thing I'll say this is closest to is the Guardian wrote a story

2:34:00is it two years ago, about WhatsApp,

2:34:03and they talked about a--

2:34:04- I remember this.

2:34:05- Yeah, a technical flaw, and at the end,

2:34:07I think like 150 computers or security experts

2:34:10wrote a letter to the Guardian urging them to retract it,

2:34:12and I still think it took them six months

2:34:15to essentially rewrite the story.

2:34:17I'm not even sure they fully retracted it.

2:34:18It was just, it was in error.

2:34:21I mean, it wasn't totally wrong,

2:34:22but the way in which they described the scope

2:34:25of the problem was totally inaccurate,

2:34:27and it was shocking, given the Guardian's normal

2:34:30So I don't understand. There's something so wrong here. I'm sure. So what I'm could guarantee you,

2:34:36John, is there are people researching the Bloomberg side of the story, not at Bloomberg,

2:34:40who are going to write a remarkable 10,000 word story that is going to explain how,

2:34:45what Bloomberg did wrong here.

2:34:46Yeah, it's, it has to come out eventually, but I like to keep reminding people of it because

2:34:51it is, it's too long. And, and I really do feel like Bloomberg's goal is let's just hope everybody

2:34:58let's just hope everybody forgets about this

2:35:00'cause we don't wanna bring this up again.

2:35:02- It's the worst, and of course, you know,

2:35:05we both cover Apple and write and like Apple stuff.

2:35:07So it sounds like this is, I never,

2:35:08I always like to say I'm not defending Apple here.

2:35:10Apple defended itself very well,

2:35:12or Amazon or the other companies affected by it.

2:35:15But it's more like I haven't seen a story

2:35:19that had as many credible people involved in it

2:35:22that is so obviously wrong as this one.

2:35:25And I don't even remember the last one.

2:35:27that's if one ever approached this scope. I mean, there's Plagiarists and Fabulous, but they were

2:35:33writing about stuff that wasn't very important. The Theranos story is the closest one, but it's

2:35:38the flip side. It's like what Theranos was doing was as bad as what, almost as bad as what Bloomberg

2:35:46was reporting on, but Theranos was true. Everything that the most true reporter came out was.

2:35:52The other downside to this is the the boy who cried wolf aspect where the basic kernel of their story that the Chinese state

2:35:59Was manipulating their access to the Chinese supply chain

2:36:04Yeah, you get stuff in all sounds plausible and very worrisome given the world's

2:36:10reliance on the Chinese supply chain and

2:36:13you know, there's a lot of

2:36:16seemingly credible reports that Huawei in particular is really just a state-owned front and

2:36:21Not just you know, like the u.s. Has banned Huawei phones from being sold on military bases

2:36:27So they're you know, you can't you know, and they really don't have much of a presence in the u.s. Consumer market

2:36:32Huawei also makes and speaking of 5g they make yeah cellular networking technology including 5g stuff and that you know

2:36:41The u.s. Is taking steps to say well we you know

2:36:45legally, we're going to say we don't want their stuff forming the backbone of the US

2:36:505G network because we literally don't trust it.

2:36:52But as our countries around the world, so the US is saying that and as our countries

2:36:55across Europe and elsewhere as well.

2:36:57Right. And yet, you know, having this story out there of, hey, the Chinese state intelligence

2:37:06services manipulating the supply chain. Oh, that was BS. Everybody says that was, you

2:37:11Bloomberg ran a story about it. It was BS. I'm sure this next one is BS.

2:37:14You know, like, yeah, yeah, there's like, it feels like disinformation. It's not,

2:37:17it's just something went terribly wrong. And I do believe we will, we will find out. And I believe

2:37:22it's taken this long to find out because people are cracking sources inside Bloomberg and trying

2:37:27to figure out some of the external sources. And I expect we will get a big story in a Vanity Fair

2:37:33or New Yorker magazine or something like that. Not New Yorker, New York magazine.

2:37:38Yeah, and basically the one thing I know, I don't have good sources at Amazon, but I have sources

2:37:42at Apple. And basically, you know, they did Apple's vehement defense was not a surprise to Bloomberg.

2:37:52You know, that they, and the only surprise really was that Apple did not expect them to publish the

2:37:56story when they did, because they knew they were working on it. They had been asked for comment,

2:38:00they had been presented with, "Hey, we're going to say X, Y, and Z. What do you have to say about

2:38:05it. And they had done, you know, they did, after the story came out, they redoubled into

2:38:10let's do it all over again. And make sure that not there's not a just a truth to this because my God,

2:38:15look at what they've wrote. But you know, they gave the adamant defense to Bloomberg, and so

2:38:20did Amazon before it was published and Amazon and Bloomberg's more or less was Oh, of course,

2:38:26Apple and Amazon are going to say that. And they really, really disregarded the plain strenuousness

2:38:33of their denials under the guise of—

2:38:35Yeah, publicly traded companies making statements that extreme, especially with Tim Cook saying it,

2:38:43he could go to jail for that if he were lying. It's not like he can say it and brush it off,

2:38:48and executives have. It would be seen as manipulation of the stock price, and it could

2:38:53be forced out as CEO and barred from serving in publicly held companies, things like that.

2:38:57All right, another one. Here's a story you wrote, published on December 31st,

2:39:02And criminally, criminally, I still haven't linked to it from during Fireball. This has fallen under

2:39:07the guise of something that happens at during Fireball, where I either link to something when

2:39:11it's hot off the presses, or I file it away and think I'm going to link to that when I'm when I

2:39:16need something. And I've had that with this one in my back pocket. Now this is criminal because it's

2:39:21here we are. It's February 21st. Well, yes, came out at a funny time. I forgot about that. Well,

2:39:25it was New Year's Eve, which isn't exactly great. But it's the old guard of Mac Indie apps has

2:39:29thrived for more than 25 years. And you wrote this feature for Macworld on, uh, the ones I remember

2:39:35running were BB Edit from bare bones and PCalc from, uh, James Thompson at a TST, no, TLA, TLA.

2:39:44Who else was in the story? Oh, Fetch, right?

2:39:49Fetch. And then also Lemke software's, uh, Thor's, Twiston's Lemke's, uh, graphic converter.

2:39:54Graphic converter.

2:39:55Yeah. I picked those for somebody. BB Edit put out a thing about, hey,

2:39:58we have merch for our 25th anniversary." And I was like, "Oh my God." And then, of course,

2:40:02it's more than 25 years technically and whatever. And I'm like, you know, it'd be fun to look back

2:40:07at this because I routinely, every day, I use Graphic Converter, BB Edit, Peacock every day,

2:40:14and some other software I think that I use that some of it has been around for more than 25 years,

2:40:19but it's changed hands once or twice, but it's still developed. And I'm like, what are the

2:40:23indie, like indie developers, still a handful of people. Sometimes there were a lot more people

2:40:27in the company and then shrunk or some are very consistent all along. Like Torsken Lemke,

2:40:32Torsken Lemke is, it's mostly him now. And he has contractors who work in the past, I think he had

2:40:39a little more like full time-ish help. But this is software that is basically, you worked on BB Edit,

2:40:45it's not the same piece of software. It's kind of the, the intent is the same after a quarter of

2:40:53a century, and most of the people involved are primarily making their living for it. I should

2:40:59say at Fetch, it's Jim, whose last name I'm going to tell you?

2:41:02Pete: Matthews. Jim Matthews.

2:41:03Alan: Thank you. Jim Matthews, who won on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,

2:41:06the story of how he funded.

2:41:08Pete; Right. He was a professor at Dartmouth?

2:41:11Alan; Yeah, he's on staff and he wrote this on. My dad calls me and says, "You've got to turn on

2:41:15Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." I said, "Why?" He said, "Jim Matthews is on it." And I turn it on

2:41:20and I watch him make a very smart decision to stop because he didn't, he knew he didn't know the

2:41:25answer and walk away with a half a million dollars. So Jim Matthews, he now works for

2:41:30the company that makes JIRA, Atlassian. He's, but he, so Fetch has become a little more of a

2:41:38side project. It's still developed, it's still updated, but it's no longer in the same kind of

2:41:42active forward motion. But I would still, you know, it's still out there and there's people

2:41:45who love it. And if you've been using it with FTP or SFTP, it doesn't support all the new

2:41:49cloud stuff in it the way transmit does. But it is still a piece of software that is totally

2:41:54up to date. It's ready for Mojave. And it's a big part of his life for a big chunk of his life.

2:41:59Yeah, I, I remember using it. It was before so now I've been using I was using fetch back before

2:42:06the there's like a standard open Apple event. I think it's the ODB editor suite. I forget what

2:42:13ODB stands for but it's a way that you can set an FTP client like fetch or in our key or transmit

2:42:20to say for this type of file when I double click it don't download it instead open it and

2:42:25it opens a temp file and then when you save all you have to do to make an edit is just save the

2:42:33file command s and then it sends the apple event back to your FTP client and then your FTP client

2:42:38will update the version on the software I was doing that before ODB even existed because I

2:42:43I didn't want to use. I was so appalled by using Emacs or VI in a terminal window that

2:42:50I was editing my computer science stuff on a Unix system back in the '90s before this

2:42:56even existed, where I would just make a local copy, save it, and then I had to do one more

2:43:02step. I had to drag it back into the fetch window and say, "Yes, overwrite. Do you want

2:43:07to overwrite the file, yes. And so I was editing files, you know, on a remote server in BB

2:43:13Edit before it even existed. And I was just thinking you say transmit. I remember, I think

2:43:17transmit came out around—

2:43:19It's not quite, it's very, it's close. I looked it up. It's like 91.

2:43:22No, I think transmit was like 97 or 98.

2:43:25I'm sorry, oh, I'm sorry. I'm doing the math wrong.

2:43:26So it'd be like 20 years.

2:43:28Yeah. So there's, but it's really, I mean, I—

2:43:30But I remember when, so transit at 20 years old, transmit, I'm using the original, remember

2:43:36original name was Transit. And they ran panic, the cable and Steve ran into like a trademark

2:43:42conflict. And they'd already built up all this goodwill around the name transit as their

2:43:48name. And they had the truck icon already and and this great branding and they didn't

2:43:53know what to do because they're just two kids who are getting started and, and then it like

2:43:58the I forget who I probably cable but one of them came up with Well, what if we just

2:44:02call it "transmit," and they realized not only is that verbally very similar—it starts with the

2:44:08same four letters—it actually fits the branding even better. It's actually the better word over

2:44:16the two. But anyway, I still think of "transmit" as the upstart. It's the new FTP client, right?

2:44:23Pete: I know, yeah.

2:44:24Pete: It's 20 years old and has been in constant development, but it's the new one.

2:44:30- And I use, I mean, Graphic Converter is my go-to app,

2:44:33partly because of its batch processing.

2:44:35I had to do something the other day with a,

2:44:37I was doing a take control book,

2:44:39and I needed to do this thing where I was resizing it,

2:44:41make sure it was retina, and the resolution,

2:44:43and you know, the usual thing.

2:44:45And I was like, "Yeah, I can write an Apple script,

2:44:46"I can do Automator," and I'm like, "No, no, no, no, wait.

2:44:48"I just need to do, I crack open Graphic Converter,

2:44:51"and I do a batch thing in there,

2:44:52"and I just am like drag and drop and click,

2:44:55"and it's just fantastically useful."

2:44:57I mean, it was built as a file conversion,

2:45:00you know, it's Graphic Converter, and it supports,

2:45:02I forget what he said, but like over 200 formats

2:45:05or something. - Right.

2:45:06- But it's like, yeah, I had this idea.

2:45:09Oh, sorry, go ahead.

2:45:09- Well, at a time when most apps support the graphic files

2:45:12that the OS supports, you know, like Graphic Converter

2:45:16did all the hard work of actually having the native support

2:45:19for these formats built in, and that's why it has, you know,

2:45:22this list of formats that's well above and beyond

2:45:25what the system supports natively.

2:45:29- Well, and I was having this conversation

2:45:30with my wife about something we'll talk about in a minute,

2:45:32which is putting something away archivally for centuries.

2:45:36And she was like, "Will someone be able to read

2:45:38"this movie file that you're putting on a USB stick

2:45:41"in hundreds of years?"

2:45:42And I said, "Yes."

2:45:44I'm so confident 'cause I won't be here.

2:45:46But it was partly 'cause graphic converter, right?

2:45:48Like in 200 years, we'll be able to run graphic converter

2:45:52and open like a 1960s image format.

2:45:55In 200 years, there'll be somebody like Graphic Converter

2:45:59for movie files as well.

2:46:00Like I'm not concerned for a non DRM protected files,

2:46:03but it is Graphic Converter that gives me the hope

2:46:06for the future that we'll still be able to,

2:46:08like OpenLibre, if you need to open an Apple works file

2:46:11from version 1.0, I think OpenLibre has filters in it.

2:46:15- Really? - Open it in a moderate.

2:46:16Yeah, I had to do that.

2:46:17Someone asked for advice.

2:46:18They found a bunch of old disks.

2:46:20I think that's the one.

2:46:22But if it's just a straight, if it's just a conversion,

2:46:24it's an encoding thing, there's all,

2:46:26graphic inverter, the joy of it is

2:46:28they don't have to change it.

2:46:30Like he wrote some formats in the 90s

2:46:32that will never have to be changed.

2:46:34This has to upgrade the frameworks

2:46:36that still work within the latest OS.

2:46:38But anyway, and what's funny is that I got email

2:46:41from some developers, nobody really like that in a shape,

2:46:43but they're like, "You know, I've been around for 25 years."

2:46:45Like Plum Amazing, PopCare, the thing that predated keycaps.

2:46:51that's it's still being developed, same people.

2:46:55And so I was like, you know, I can only fit so much in,

2:46:56you're totally awesome also,

2:46:58but I try to pick like four examples and whatever.

2:47:01And I'm like, I could probably write one that featured,

2:47:04that's the amazing thing to feel,

2:47:05to say maybe there's 15 pieces of Mac software

2:47:09developed by independent developers

2:47:11who are still working on it.

2:47:12Maybe sometimes part-time,

2:47:13maybe it hasn't advanced in a while,

2:47:15but it's still fully supported,

2:47:16up to date 64-bit compatible or already.

2:47:20It's really cool, I love that.

2:47:22- You know what's funny?

2:47:23I remember pop care,

2:47:26but I don't know that I've ever spoken about it

2:47:28with anybody in my life,

2:47:29because in my mind, I've always said it, pop char.

2:47:32Even though I knew--

2:47:33- Oh my God, I don't know.

2:47:34I've never said it that loud before.

2:47:35- Even though I knew that the char stood for character,

2:47:39I've always, I think that it wasn't Pascal

2:47:42that used to have a char character type

2:47:44like to hold one letter,

2:47:46and I always thought of it as char,

2:47:48even though I knew it stood for character,

2:47:50just because it made it what I wanted to type.

2:47:54I don't know. - I think we said it char

2:47:55because if you said car, no one knew what you were saying.

2:48:00- Right, it was unambiguous to pronounce it as char.

2:48:03- I think I called it pop char.

2:48:04Now that you say that, wait, pop char, pop chair.

2:48:07- Pop char. - I don't know, it's funny.

2:48:08I don't think I've ever said it aloud.

2:48:11I used it back in the QuarkXPress days

2:48:13when I was doing a lot of page layout.

2:48:14Pop char was the most amazing thing.

2:48:17And over time, I'd need it less

2:48:18because I don't have a specialized need.

2:48:21But what an incredible thing.

2:48:22This person's done, and there's other stuff,

2:48:24like suitcases still developed, but not by the same people.

2:48:28It's gone through different hands.

2:48:29And it shows how much the community is committed

2:48:33to these developers, not how much developers

2:48:35are committed to what they've been doing.

2:48:36And sometimes products get Sherlocked

2:48:38or they lose their necessity, but it's really,

2:48:42what a great thing.

2:48:43- Yeah, it really is.

2:48:45Anyway, I swear I'm gonna link to it on Daring Firewall,

2:48:47but I will also include it in the show notes.

2:48:49And then last but not least, as we wrap up,

2:48:52you are in the midst, I think we got about a week out.

2:48:56- We got a week out, I know.

2:48:57- All right, well that's good.

2:48:58This is the time to hit, this is the time to hit it.

2:49:00We're gonna, this episode should drop tomorrow.

2:49:02We'll have six days left,

2:49:03but you've got a Kickstarter going on.

2:49:06You've done a couple, you did a Kickstarter a year ago,

2:49:09two years ago for the Letterpress book.

2:49:12- I've been kinda doing them little by little.

2:49:14I've been, I've done, what have I done now?

2:49:17done seven and five have funded my last five in a row have funded and it's not like I broke the

2:49:24code but I did one for a letterpress book in 2017 when I had a design residency which I essentially

2:49:29funded the cost I did an edition of that and and thank you for your participation in that so now

2:49:35you have a copy now it is one of the nicest I mean this not just because you're a guest on my show it

2:49:39is one of the nicest books I own it is it is an artifact and and and to me as we rocket forward

2:49:46into an ever more digital future and I spend so much more time reading stuff on screens,

2:49:51having an actual—that's the only word I can think of—making an actual printed book more of an

2:49:58artifact and something that appeals to senses other than your sight, you know, just the feel

2:50:04of it is—it's always been a nice thing and I've always been obsessed with books, obviously not to

2:50:10your degree, but I've always been obsessed with printed books and printing technology, but it's

2:50:16It's really one of the nicest things that I own.

2:50:19I just--

2:50:19- Well, thank you so much.

2:50:21And it was, you know, it was a massive amount of effort

2:50:23'cause I printed it on a essentially manual letterpress.

2:50:26The inking thing was motorized.

2:50:28And that, so 2017, I had this residency

2:50:30and I printed the book, you know, I designed the book.

2:50:33You, it's digitally designed, output to plastic,

2:50:37rubbery plates that are then printed on letterpress.

2:50:39It was this whole melding of old and new.

2:50:41And that year I went to the Hamilton Wood Type

2:50:43and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin,

2:50:46on the lake for their Waze Goose, their annual confab,

2:50:50where letterpress printers and type designers

2:50:52from all over the world come and had this great time

2:50:56at the end of the year, had this incredible year.

2:50:57And then this thing came up where Monotype calls me

2:51:00and says, you know, we're doing a revival

2:51:02of Five Typefaces by Bertolt Volpe,

2:51:04who is, who died in 1989,

2:51:07who is my favorite type designer in the world.

2:51:09- Really?

2:51:10- And I'm like, yeah, it was just this coincidence.

2:51:11They had no idea I had any interest.

2:51:13Do you want to write about it?

2:51:14Oh, and by the way, we have an exhibition we're underwriting in London of his papers

2:51:19and the original, and I'm like, "Lynn," my wife, "Lynn, how would you feel if I went

2:51:24to London to a type exhibition?"

2:51:25She's like, "You go. Go." And I wound up coming up with a book idea and going to London

2:51:32and going to the exhibition and going to two type museums there that are barely open to

2:51:38the public. And I wrote a book called London Kerning about those museums and sort of London

2:51:42of London type history, and that fed into this wacky thing I'm doing right now. So, in the last

2:51:48two years, I've gone to four different type and printing museums, two in London, one in Portland,

2:51:54Oregon, and this one in Wisconsin. And I've created this project called the Tiny Type Museum

2:51:58and Time Capsule. This is my latest Kickstarter. And it's basically like a little museum with

2:52:04genuine type artifacts. So, it'll have metal type and wood type, it'll have some of the molds used

2:52:11make hot metal, you'll be able to get a linotype slug. So a

2:52:15metal slug set on the old hot type settings, hot metal type

2:52:18setting system used mostly by newspapers with your custom

2:52:21text. I'm doing a small letterpress printed book that I'm

2:52:24not putting my hand that if it raises enough money, I'll be

2:52:28able to have that set in hot metal and printed in linotype,

2:52:31probably in England with people I met on this last trip. And the

2:52:37idea is that I had this thought of like, there, there are a

2:52:40are a bunch of type museums around the world. Many of them are sort of, they're not open

2:52:43very much or they're teetering financially. Very few are well funded. Some are funded

2:52:47by the state in Europe or by, there's a place called Tipoteca in Italy that's funded

2:52:52by this family of printers for generations. And they've poured an incredible amount

2:52:58of money into this institution. I would love to go there. It's near Venice. But so this

2:53:02is a museum that you can own and hold that has actual pieces of type and printing history

2:53:07in it. And you get you as a as a backer of the Kickstarter, get your own personal, tiny

2:53:13type museum. That's, that's the, that's the gimmick. Because I was thinking, I was thinking

2:53:18I should I had this thought after going to all these museums, I'm like, you know, none

2:53:21of them are nearby. I wish I had some resources myself. Maybe I should make a little museum

2:53:26for myself. I'm like, no, no, no, I should make a museum for other people. And so I have

2:53:30a friend who's a woodworker. She's taking cabinetry courses now, but she already is

2:53:34fine woodworker and she's kind of honing all her skills. And she and I talk about this. She's also

2:53:39a letterpress printer and she worked at Glowforge, which is the 2D laser cutter company that's here

2:53:44in Seattle, a friend of mine founded. And so, we're talking about this and I'm like, you know,

2:53:49you can make a box and I could do, huh! So, she's designed a prototype and she's going to make these

2:53:56beautiful hand-joined boxes that are going to last for centuries, like a little beautiful piece

2:54:02of woodworking with drawers. The book is going to slide into a slot in the case. We're going to hide

2:54:08something in the case too. We're still working out the details. There will be something hidden in

2:54:11secret in each case as well. And then there'll be two drawers. One will have sort of flat things,

2:54:16and the other will have metal and other objects. And it's exciting. I sent an email to Eric

2:54:22Spiekerman about it. He's like, one of the greatest designers in the world. He's like,

2:54:25"This is very exciting. How can I help you?" I'm like, "How am I?" You know, it's like,

2:54:28all right. I've interviewed him and I've kind of correspondents with him. He's like,

2:54:32"Let me send you some stuff." So, I have some metal he sent me. He's like, "We could print

2:54:36a postcard, letterpress studio in Berlin." And so, there's various people who really want to be

2:54:41involved in it too, because it's partly a way to, I mean, the time capsule aspect is like,

2:54:48I'm not trying to make it a conceit. It's really, each of these things will really be a

2:54:52preservation of history. So, if you find, you know, you can use it as a teaching tool,

2:54:56as your own thing, but even in like 100, 200, 500 years, the things inside are not going to degrade.

2:55:02The metal will not melt. The wood is all hard-aged, seasoned stuff that's used for wood type. So,

2:55:09and the books can be printed on your acid-free paper, everything's going to be whatever.

2:55:13So, this thing is, I mean, I wish I'd be here in 500 years to see it, but I really am thinking

2:55:18about it in that way, that it's like, both has present utility, but it will be a way to send,

2:55:24You know, send a gift to the future too.

2:55:26uh Eric Spiekerman at I don't even know where you start

2:55:30he uh he has a new book I forget who he did it with I have it

2:55:35does he have a new book how do I not know that?

2:55:38didn't the with the guy who co-founded Wired magazine right?

2:55:41oh yeah yeah he did this thing what he what I'm going to get from him as well is uh this is a

2:55:46story I wrote for uh in uh late 2017 is when I met him is I did a skype interview about it

2:55:53He has developed a hybrid digital letterpress approach. He calls it digital letterpress.

2:55:58Pete: Yeah.

2:55:58Alan: He figured out, he's invested like, 60,000 euros into adopting a machine that makes plates

2:56:05for, mostly for package printing called flexography. And these plates, these rubbery plates,

2:56:10are exactly the kind of thing I use for my book project as well. But he wanted to be able to

2:56:15ingrate, basically to laser cut an entire, like, eight up printed sheet at once. So,

2:56:22So you can print eight pages of a book at one time on a larger press.

2:56:25And he's put all this money into it and he developed it. So is a Louis Rosetto.

2:56:29That's it.

2:56:29Book's called Change is Good.

2:56:31And they did a Kickstarter and I've got a copy of it. It's amazing.

2:56:34I do too. And I haven't read it, but I have, I have it.

2:56:37I know. I've looked through it.

2:56:38Is this in my giant pile of books to read?

2:56:41So it's letterpress printed, but it's, it's, it, he's made it the most,

2:56:45he's taken it the most easy way to go from, uh,

2:56:48from digital into letterpress that has ever existed.

2:56:52because you can image these big sheets at once,

2:56:55and they printed it on an old letterpress

2:56:57that's beautifully maintained,

2:56:59that can print at high speed.

2:57:00- Right, and it is the best of both worlds,

2:57:04because digital design is better

2:57:09than laying out metal type by hand.

2:57:12Not better, but it is certainly faster and more flexible.

2:57:15And nobody wants to give up the incredible efficiency

2:57:20digital design, but on the other hand, the actual printed output of letterpress just cannot be

2:57:25beaten. It is visceral, it's beautiful, it's everything you want it to be. So it truly is a

2:57:33combination of, you know, you get this superior output without sacrificing the incredible

2:57:40efficiency of the creative process doing it digitally. No, it's really, it's amazing. It

2:57:45It could only be done in like, well, he started in 2017 or 2016 on it, and he's done books for

2:57:49Sircampf and other publishers too. And, but so the museum I make, every museum is going to have

2:57:56samples of printing in it. So it'll have the artifacts that are used for printing. And I've got

2:58:00all, it's amazing. I may put a small font of type in so it'll actually have individual

2:58:05small type characters. There's a foundry founded in 19, was it 15 in San Francisco,

2:58:11that's still in operation. There's this couple called the Bixlers in upstate New York in

2:58:17skinny atlays that have been running a foundry for decades. Ed Tufti's books, his original series,

2:58:23I think of four books, were set in hot metal by the Bixlers because even though digital type

2:58:30existed, Tufti did not like it at that time. Well, he wanted to use Bembo and Bembo was one of the

2:58:38typefaces that its translation to digital was—I'm just stealing this all from Dean Allen's

2:58:45great, late write-up of these great faces—but Bembo really was—its digital translation was

2:58:53criminally bad. Because—

2:58:55Yeah, there's better versions now. It was terrible at the time.

2:58:58Basically, it was done in a robotic fashion where, "Here's the metal. Let's take precise

2:59:03measurements will make a digital version that is exactly like this. And when you used it,

2:59:10it came out way too spindly. I don't know what other adjectives. It was too thin and spindly

2:59:15and fragile, whereas Bembo is this sturdy, sturdy text type. And it's because what they should have

2:59:22been looking at is what did the metal Bembo look like on paper, not what did it look like.

2:59:28Absolutely.

2:59:28Well, not what did it look like. It's actually a great case study

2:59:32for the way to do a digital translation, you know, right? Where in a certain sense, what they did was

2:59:38more accurate because they were accurately modeling the shape of the letters on the metal.

2:59:43But in practice, it was a tragedy because what actually came out of your laser printer when you

2:59:50use the digital version of Bembo was not good. And so that's why. But in the meantime, Tufti has

2:59:58commissioned an ET Bembo, a digital version of Bembo that actually is good.

3:00:03Alan Corey That, yeah, right. Yeah, so he went from metal to his own version,

3:00:07but there was this era, the prototype era, and a lot of type was redrawn for prototype,

3:00:12which had its own parameters. So when they went to digital, they would take the large drawings for

3:00:16prototype and just scan those. This is the whole thing, the monotype, the Bertolt Volpe face,

3:00:21Albertus is the best known of his faces. Yeah, right, using the prisoner and a bunch of other

3:00:27places. The version of Albertus that Monotype sold for 30 years is kind of terrible because it was

3:00:33taken from prototype. And there's a younger designer's guy, Toshio Megari, who's become a—so

3:00:38as a result of these books, Toshi has become a friend of mine. Volpe's youngest son, Tobi,

3:00:43is a technology editor in Europe, and he and I are friends now. It's an amazing thing to have done

3:00:49that London project. And so Toshi reinterpreted and redrew these five different faces, including

3:00:56Albertus so that they were actually designed for modern typesetting and printing. And they're just,

3:01:02I mean, he went back to the original brass patterns used by monotype to cut the metal,

3:01:11and then to Volpe's original hand drawings done for monotype for this. And so they're not just

3:01:18slavish to the original, but they're informed by Volpe's own hand and the interpretation.

3:01:24Anyway, so part of what I mean, this is part of the thing is I'm going to include

3:01:27Little bits and pieces of that whole era. So like the pre-Hot Metal era

3:01:32includes some letterpress examples as digital letterpress with some examples from from Speakerman to include

3:01:39Rich Keggler who runs p22 type foundry. It's got a bunch of stuff that we're gonna get from him

3:01:44from someone from the digital era and

3:01:46He's offered I'm going to include at least two films that it also in digital form making faces

3:01:53about a metal type designer and graphic means that's about the

3:01:56Phototype era. So yeah. Anyway, I want to make something that's like really

3:02:01you want to take everything out and hold it in your hand and look at it and

3:02:05We'll see we'll see it's getting it's getting close about two-thirds funded as we talk with a week left and that's right Xo

3:02:13Let's go. Well, let's make it. Let's make it work and people can find out more at

3:02:18Tiny type museum calm right? Yes. Yeah, it will redirect to the Kickstarter campaign and then after the campaign it will

3:02:25Have its own own thing, but tiny tight museum calm. Let's make this let's get this funded

3:02:31I I say you're gonna hit I think you're gonna make it you get it. It's as

3:02:34Your as usual with yours though. It's gonna be right down to the wire. That's that's my trademark the the the last

3:02:41Podcast crowdfunding and it funded with 15 seconds to go

3:02:47last year. It was great. But the thing is, here's the deal. I've had so many amazing

3:02:51conversations with people, design educators and designers, letterpress people and people

3:02:56like my father, my mother was a typesetter for 50 years. It has been such a like, glorious

3:03:01emotional experience. I'm happy when I can actually make the thing. But wow, and this

3:03:06is what's great. And you know this from your interest and love of design and type is that

3:03:11it's not just about the way something looks. There's this incredible emotional experience

3:03:15around it and being part of that is always exciting to me and whenever I can get back

3:03:19to it I just am so happy to step a little bit away from the digital side and back into

3:03:24that kind of, or I should say from the non-aesthetic side and into the digital design and analog

3:03:29design side.

3:03:30Well, I'm glad you're doing it and I can't wait to see it hit.

3:03:36Well, thank you very much.

3:03:37Let's wrap it up.

3:03:38Thank our sponsors for the week.

3:03:40Eero at eero.com/thetalkshow,

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3:03:55and code for them is talk show.

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3:04:0150 bucks off with code talk show.

3:04:04And tiny tight museum, Glenn's Kickstarter,

3:04:07which is probably as you listen to this six days or less

3:04:11before it goes up.

3:04:12Let's make it happen.

3:04:15Glenn, thank you for the time.

3:04:16It's always a pleasure having you on the show.

3:04:18Our interests overlap to a degree

3:04:20that is almost frightening.

3:04:21- I know, I was gonna say,

3:04:23is "Moys and Lays" talk to you about all of this?

3:04:25- BB Edit, old Mac apps, and letterpress typesetting.

3:04:29- Bembo.