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The Talk Show

197: ‘Nancy Reagan Was Right’ With Glenn Fleishman

 

00:00:00   Glenn Fleischmann, it is so good to have you back on the show.

00:00:03   It's a pleasure to be back.

00:00:05   There is so much going on.

00:00:07   There's a lot going on.

00:00:09   A lot going on this week.

00:00:10   Which is good news, I guess, if you're in the business of talking about stuff that's going on.

00:00:15   It's bad news if you're like me and at a couple of weeks here where it's just been really hard to make time to record a podcast.

00:00:21   I feel like I'm looking at the show notes I made and I'm like, "Oh my God, this is like a month's worth of shows."

00:00:27   - It's July, there's not supposed to,

00:00:29   well it's August now, there's not supposed to be any news.

00:00:30   - It hasn't been like that.

00:00:32   It hasn't been like that all this summer.

00:00:33   It's great though, really, it really is.

00:00:35   I remember when it used to be

00:00:38   when there was nothing going on in August.

00:00:41   - Yeah, WWDC would happen,

00:00:42   and then it would just sort of peter out,

00:00:44   there'd be no news, but now we have lawsuits,

00:00:46   we have Chinese intervention,

00:00:48   we have hackers being arrested on their way out of DEFCON,

00:00:52   we got all kinds, or Black Hat, or other--

00:00:54   - No, I thought it, or was it--

00:00:55   Anyway.

00:00:56   - Was it Defcon?

00:00:57   - I forget.

00:00:58   But they used to be-- - It's Defcon.

00:00:59   - Apple used to have little quiet Mac events in August.

00:01:02   Remember those?

00:01:03   Like, I think like--

00:01:05   - Were they introducing new Mac models, not--

00:01:08   - Yeah, or maybe like when they first came out

00:01:10   with the iWork Suite, they did it like in August.

00:01:13   It was like, you know, it'd be like--

00:01:14   - It's in August!

00:01:16   I never went down for those.

00:01:17   I would go down for hardware,

00:01:18   but not software in the olden days.

00:01:21   But I remember going down to like Aprils

00:01:22   and Septembers, typically.

00:01:24   Those events, that was before my time of attending events.

00:01:26   That was when I did everything remotely from Philadelphia.

00:01:30   But I don't even know if I would go out.

00:01:32   I guess I would go out for it,

00:01:33   but they don't really do small events anymore.

00:01:35   Not like that.

00:01:37   - Yeah, there's nothing small,

00:01:38   'cause everything they do is a $10 billion

00:01:40   more line of business, or starts at that and then goes up.

00:01:44   - Right.

00:01:44   So where do you wanna start?

00:01:46   What do you think is the one thing?

00:01:49   - Jeez, well, I'm interested,

00:01:51   the Chinese market is interesting to me.

00:01:53   We start with the VPN?

00:01:54   And we have things to say about that.

00:01:56   Although it's also a little more, it's a funny situation.

00:02:00   'Cause so Apple removed some.

00:02:03   I thought there was this, neutrally it sounded like,

00:02:06   'cause you can't really check the Chinese app store

00:02:08   from another country very easily.

00:02:09   It sounded like a lot of VPN apps,

00:02:12   virtual private network apps that were being removed.

00:02:15   And so there's this thing that, the background is too,

00:02:18   so China has various kinds of interception

00:02:20   and blocking tools to keep people who are either

00:02:24   residents or citizens of their country from

00:02:28   reaching outside the country for data.

00:02:30   And so, some things are approved and some are not,

00:02:33   but they've really been cracking down on a lot of

00:02:36   ability to get outside of China or get out at least

00:02:39   at some kind of speed that makes it functional

00:02:41   to do things.

00:02:42   And Google famously left China in 2010 and set up

00:02:45   shop in Hong Kong, even though that's, you know,

00:02:47   part of China, but it's very confusing little

00:02:49   relationship, how that works, that's an ongoing change.

00:02:54   And Apple stayed in, it's gotten bigger and bigger.

00:02:57   But so the Great Firewall of China is an effort

00:03:00   by the Chinese government to, so like standard VPNs,

00:03:03   my understanding is you can't just use,

00:03:05   you can't just sign up for like a regular VPN service,

00:03:08   forget the app part and just use it inside China.

00:03:11   So the standard protocols are now being broadly blocked.

00:03:14   So you have to use a service that does some other kind

00:03:16   tunneling or uses SSL-based or some other system

00:03:19   that's not just using the old-fashioned stuff

00:03:22   like IPSec and over L2TP and all that.

00:03:26   So that's my understanding.

00:03:27   So all these services have thrived

00:03:28   because they use different ways,

00:03:31   and a lot of them are sold worldwide,

00:03:32   so it's not just they're being sold in China.

00:03:34   Some are China-specific and some are worldwide.

00:03:36   And so three of them at least have been removed

00:03:39   from the App Store by Apple

00:03:40   because the Chinese government says

00:03:43   they lack the appropriate license

00:03:46   that allows them to operate in China.

00:03:48   And Apple said hundreds of other VPN apps remain available,

00:03:53   including those by companies that are outside China.

00:03:56   So the VPN companies themselves are kind of peeved.

00:04:01   They made a lot of noise about it,

00:04:02   but it gets us the whole question of like,

00:04:05   what is compliance to local law?

00:04:08   So we don't think that this law requiring registration

00:04:12   of services and compliance with whatever rules China has

00:04:15   that might allow blocking and sniffing and other things,

00:04:18   this doesn't comport with our feelings,

00:04:20   and it might, you know, not,

00:04:21   I'd argue it's probably in violation

00:04:23   of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

00:04:26   in terms of freedom of expression and freedom from--

00:04:29   - Well, and let's just stop it right there and admit

00:04:31   that whether this particular move is in violation

00:04:35   of the Declaration of Human Rights,

00:04:38   the People's Republic of China has an awful lot,

00:04:40   as official policy, has a lot of policies

00:04:42   that are violations of human rights.

00:04:44   So fundamentally, this is the thing

00:04:49   that frustrates me about that.

00:04:50   It is an interesting story.

00:04:51   It is absolutely worth noting.

00:04:54   It is worth making a stink about.

00:04:55   But the knee-jerk reaction from a ton of people,

00:05:00   even after I tried to painstakingly,

00:05:02   and this is just feedback from people who read my site,

00:05:05   but painstakingly tried to say,

00:05:06   "Hey, you could be upset about this.

00:05:09   "You can even object to what Apple's done,

00:05:11   "but you can't just say Apple should've said no

00:05:14   and kept the apps in the App Store.

00:05:16   Right.

00:05:16   Because it's like--

00:05:18   I sort of didn't really use the analogy that great.

00:05:21   But I said, you pull that thread--

00:05:23   like, OK, it's just a little thread, which is saying,

00:05:25   no, we're not removing any of these apps from the App Store.

00:05:30   You can't say Apple should pull that thread

00:05:32   without acknowledging that an awful lot of stuff

00:05:34   is going to happen after they pull that thread.

00:05:36   It isn't something that they can do in isolation

00:05:38   and not expect retribution.

00:05:40   My guess is if Apple just said,

00:05:44   "No, we're keeping these available in the App Store,"

00:05:46   that the great firewall would start blocking

00:05:48   the App Store entirely.

00:05:50   - Apple would very likely have to exit the market.

00:05:53   So there's things in China that are official policy,

00:05:57   that are promulgated as laws and regulations,

00:05:59   and there's things that are informal,

00:06:00   and the government demand stuff happens behind the scenes,

00:06:03   and it doesn't conform to any process, right?

00:06:05   So this, to some extent, you could say,

00:06:08   is like a promulgated law.

00:06:09   there's a regulation, you can look it up. They announced they're going to be doing this big

00:06:13   enforcement action. So, you have to say, then Apple is saying, we are in opposition to a law

00:06:21   regulation in a country in which we're doing business, and we are resisting it without using

00:06:24   the channels available to us. Because we don't know, the Chinese, you know, legal system is

00:06:29   very opaque. We don't know if they've gone through judicial processes, if they've been working

00:06:32   through government agencies. I assume they have. I mean, Apple is no, there's no reason for Apple

00:06:36   to court to go like, "Yeah, yeah, we'll just remove whatever they say." So, I presume they've

00:06:40   spent the six or seven months since China said they were going to step up this policy in January.

00:06:44   I presume they've been lobbying and just saying, "Look, you know, what can we do? What can we do

00:06:49   to make this happen where we're not creating a public relations nightmare for everybody,

00:06:54   it doesn't become a deal?" And you know, China, I don't think per se cares,

00:07:00   the Chinese leadership cares about that part because it's not, it's not something that

00:07:07   affects how they govern the country to worry about the response to it, right?

00:07:13   Tom Bilyeu (01h00m 10s): The question is, should Apple be in China or not? And honestly,

00:07:19   and if they are, if they're going to sell iPhones and Macs in China, this is the sort of thing that

00:07:25   they have to do because it is compliant,

00:07:27   it's complying with the law.

00:07:28   I don't think, for example, that Apple is particularly happy

00:07:35   about the Amber Alert thing that your iPhone does

00:07:41   when it goes off.

00:07:43   I don't think they like that sound.

00:07:44   I don't think, frankly, I don't think it's a good law.

00:07:48   I think it's, to my knowledge,

00:07:51   it's never once helped rescue a child.

00:07:54   - No, I think it did once. - Or has it?

00:07:56   - It didn't really?

00:07:57   - Yeah, I think there was, well, versus the phone,

00:08:00   I believe that some of the alerts

00:08:02   that have gone up on highway signs and through other means,

00:08:05   I think that has actually helped track people down.

00:08:08   - But has it helped to have everybody in a certain area

00:08:11   have their cell phone make a terrible noise all at once?

00:08:13   - Right, I mean, everybody in the north,

00:08:15   I got one the other day where it said,

00:08:16   like, Meade, Washington, just yesterday at 84,

00:08:19   like, Meade is hundreds of miles from here,

00:08:22   And I totally get the reasoning behind it.

00:08:25   It's not regionalized enough, right?

00:08:27   That's the problem.

00:08:27   - Right, so, but does Apple have a choice in the matter?

00:08:29   No, the law says in the United States,

00:08:32   if you're gonna sell a cell phone,

00:08:33   it has to, you know, made after a certain date,

00:08:35   it has to do this thing.

00:08:36   I guess, I think there's a way to turn it off.

00:08:39   I think I'm pretty sure I turned it off on my phone.

00:08:41   - Oh yeah, you can disable it, that's right.

00:08:44   - Right, but by law though, it has to be on by default.

00:08:47   - Right.

00:08:49   And again, this is not an issue of human rights.

00:08:53   It's not an issue of free speech,

00:08:55   but it's just the nature of being

00:08:57   a multinational corporation that sells

00:09:00   in a bunch of countries is you've got to be compliant

00:09:02   with the law in every country you're in.

00:09:04   I mean, it's a, you know, there's a reason

00:09:07   why Apple's legal department is humongous.

00:09:09   It's not because Apple has just allowed it

00:09:12   to grow into a giant bureaucracy just for the hell of it.

00:09:16   It's a hell of a thing.

00:09:17   And China is a country where complying with the law

00:09:19   is gonna involve things that deeply offend,

00:09:22   in my opinion, correctly so, the sensibilities

00:09:24   of people in Western civilized democracies.

00:09:28   Or democracies anywhere, really.

00:09:31   - Yeah, and then of course, and then there's this very easy,

00:09:35   the what about-ism response,

00:09:36   which you can look up on Wikipedia.

00:09:38   It's a great entry for what about-ism.

00:09:40   Then you say, well, what about the US?

00:09:42   We have all this garbage we do here.

00:09:43   We have warless wiretaps.

00:09:46   have extraordinary rendition, we have secret FISA courts, all this stuff. But you say,

00:09:50   by and large, things come out. Like, by and large, there's a process and most of the, I would say,

00:09:55   most of the friction we have about government, let's see, like a continuous thing under any

00:10:01   administration, I want to say like, not most of the friction we have about government, but one

00:10:05   of the big issues about privacy is that so much of what should be subject to due process and

00:10:13   constitutional protections seems to have been exempted without any review of the constitutionality

00:10:18   without a good way to overturn that. So, you have lots of organizations in the United States working

00:10:22   on that, but we have a process, we have courts, we have SCOTUS, we have a thing that we agree

00:10:26   as a mechanism. So, even when we veer towards something that is anti-constitutional, there

00:10:30   should be a way to veer back. And it may take sometimes years or decades for that to happen,

00:10:34   but we tend to hew towards upholding constitutional rights, which include upholding, you know,

00:10:41   which broadly upholds human rights. And we'd argue maybe that, so, my what aboutism is like,

00:10:46   well, okay, we're criticizing China for this. But America has all these issues. You know,

00:10:49   we have all these things we've done. We've got people in Guantanamo, we've got, you know,

00:10:53   trillions of bytes of data being collected every month by people on black budgets who are

00:10:58   contractors to the government, sorting through, you know, blah, blah, all this stuff's going on.

00:11:02   But I would say we are still fundamentally, we are a democracy with a rule of law,

00:11:06   with a justice system that's judiciary, that's independent, and has review,

00:11:10   and were wrestling with some of those fine points. So, when Apple opposed the FBI in the

00:11:14   San Bernardino case, Apple had a process. It was not ordered to do something, people didn't come

00:11:18   in with guns the middle of the night and, you know, point them at Tim Cook and make him march

00:11:23   out and find engineers. They went through a process, most of it was public, and the FBI

00:11:28   eventually bought tools from hackers to break into the phone and found apparently nothing useful.

00:11:34   So, we'd argue, I guess, that in China, it's, you know, partly they have, don't have the same

00:11:39   orientation towards the primacy of human rights and individual expression that many other countries

00:11:45   do and that we believe is kind of the foundation of, you know, I believe—I don't agree with

00:11:50   China's approach to human rights and freedom of expression. I'm not sure it's a valid—I can't

00:11:54   even say I think the approach is a valid one in terms of how it crushes the human spirit, right?

00:12:01   But I can also understand if I step back and say objectively, they have a different orientation

00:12:05   to that, and they are a sovereign nation. They've established their sovereignty. And if Apple wants

00:12:09   to work in that market, they have to work within the constraints of a system that is not organized

00:12:14   in a way to provide this kind of a judicial access and appeals process and transparency to what they

00:12:19   do. Yeah, I totally agree. I think the thing that we do as the United States that's most objectionable

00:12:24   on our front are those, the secret orders. I think you mentioned it, right? The ones where

00:12:29   the company.

00:12:29   Pete: Oh, the FISA court things, right?

00:12:31   Is that, or there's also-

00:12:32   Michael Gentry. Legally not,

00:12:33   legally not allowed to notify the person that it's been issued, which is bullshit. That's,

00:12:38   that's to me, a violation.

00:12:40   Pete; That is a different thing. Those aren't FISA,

00:12:42   has that FISA court, it's, that's a different thing where the government, right, can issue a,

00:12:46   right, and that's where you have the canary documents on the site, right? Where you can say,

00:12:50   Apple, I forget which site everybody has it, but you have a document that says,

00:12:53   the government hasn't asked us for this yet. And if that document were to disappear,

00:12:57   that's legal, and it means the government has asked them for something, right? That's a

00:13:02   great little mechanism to get around that limitation of—because right, there's an argument that it's

00:13:07   probably not constitutional if it were firmly tested. I don't believe SCOTUS has taken up

00:13:12   that particular issue.

00:13:14   Tom Scott No, I don't think so. So, I really do. I just,

00:13:19   it frustrates me that people don't, really don't think this through. And I really do think, so,

00:13:26   Somebody, and then some people I've seen,

00:13:28   some people arguing that Apple should

00:13:29   just pull out of China.

00:13:31   They should not, they just should not sell products

00:13:34   in a country with policies like this.

00:13:37   And I think there is a line that,

00:13:40   and I think there are lines that China could feasibly,

00:13:44   it might actually happen where China would make a demand

00:13:47   that would prompt Apple to actually pull out of China

00:13:50   and sacrifice all the money.

00:13:51   I think, for example, if China mandated

00:13:53   that there has to be a backdoor to get into the,

00:13:57   like a San Bernardino backdoor, some kind of golden key

00:14:00   so that a confiscated phone in the People's Republic

00:14:03   of China that the government could decrypt it.

00:14:06   And any phone sold in the country

00:14:09   must have such a mechanism.

00:14:11   I don't believe Apple would make a separate SKU

00:14:14   for iPhones to comply with that.

00:14:17   I really don't.

00:14:18   - I don't think so either.

00:14:20   I think, so there's this issue of would China push Apple to a point where it knows that Apple

00:14:26   would exit? And that might actually occur because China, I mean, I forgot if you had Ben Thompson

00:14:31   on to talk about this or you were talking about it. He wrote that great thing several months ago

00:14:36   about the key, and I've seen it repeated a number of times since, and I don't know if his insight

00:14:41   was original, but it's Ben's, so I'll claim it was. That in China, the app has primacy, not the

00:14:47   ecosystem, right? So you have WeChat and Alipay and other kinds of things that are app-based,

00:14:53   and they work the same across every platform that's available. So you can buy a cheap Linux

00:14:58   phone that's not Android even, you can buy Android phone, whatever, iPhone, and you're using the apps

00:15:04   and the apps are the thing that are primacy. So this explains just not as much, even though there

00:15:09   was originally very clearly this brand awareness and brand desire for iPhones in China, it sounds

00:15:15   like that's faded somewhat, and we can see that in sales and so forth, and that people have now

00:15:20   kind of very rapidly switched over to just thinking about the efficacy of the individual apps.

00:15:25   So, Apple has less of a, I don't know, like when they were selling more devices and were a more

00:15:31   critical part of that market, they might have had more leverage. I think this boils down to,

00:15:35   you know, would China care if Apple left the market? Would it harm China as a country?

00:15:40   Probably not that much, because they have all the alternatives they need. It wouldn't be harming

00:15:44   competitiveness or whatever, it does, of course,

00:15:47   then you get into this whole, okay, well, you

00:15:48   know, Apple not only does it make like, made $10

00:15:51   billion in the most recent quarter in revenue in

00:15:54   China, which was down year over year, but they

00:15:56   have all this manufacturing operation that they

00:15:59   contract, Foxconn and everybody else, some

00:16:01   billions and billions of dollars. I don't know

00:16:02   what the scale is that's dedicated to Apple. What

00:16:04   happens to that? If Apple refuses to obey, just

00:16:07   suddenly all those production lines get shut

00:16:09   down and they're incapable of making iPhones? I

00:16:11   I really don't know what would happen there,

00:16:15   but the Chinese government is supreme and centralized,

00:16:18   and it can do whatever it wants at some level.

00:16:21   - Right, Apple's relation with China is unique,

00:16:26   and the only other country where they have a relationship

00:16:29   as unique would be the United States,

00:16:31   since their headquarters is here,

00:16:33   and most of their employees live here.

00:16:35   I would argue that Apple's relationship

00:16:39   with the United States, though,

00:16:40   though it's almost not a relationship because it's like,

00:16:43   that's, this is where the roots of the company are.

00:16:47   You know, it's like intertwined.

00:16:49   Their American identity is almost,

00:16:51   you don't even think of them as having a, quote,

00:16:53   "relationship" with the United States because they're here

00:16:55   and that's where their headquarters is.

00:16:57   But their relationship with China is inordinately complex

00:16:59   and China is not just the second biggest market.

00:17:03   You know, and the people who want to be cynical about it

00:17:07   and say that Apple is bending over, you know,

00:17:11   kowtowing, kowtowing, how do you say the word?

00:17:14   - Cowtowing. - Cowtowing.

00:17:17   Just because of the money.

00:17:19   And that would be true if, let's say,

00:17:23   they did all of their manufacturing in Japan,

00:17:26   or I don't know, Taiwan's not a good example

00:17:29   because it's sort of tied to China.

00:17:31   But let's just say that they didn't have

00:17:33   any actual manufacturing and assembly footprint

00:17:35   in mainland China.

00:17:36   That still would be a tremendous,

00:17:40   just the size of the market makes it important.

00:17:42   But because that's actually not true,

00:17:44   they do have a massive manufacturing

00:17:47   and assembly footprint in China,

00:17:49   and so many of their suppliers also are there.

00:17:53   I mean, part of the whole success of Foxconn in China

00:17:57   is the proximity.

00:17:58   It's not just Apple and Foxconn.

00:18:01   It's the proximity to the companies

00:18:03   that drive the trucks in every day

00:18:05   with pallets full of one tiny little thing for the camera.

00:18:10   It's the proximity to it that also,

00:18:15   that further tightens, would make it so hard

00:18:18   for Apple to move manufacturing somewhere else.

00:18:21   And it's, let's face it, so Apple's relationship with China

00:18:26   on any of these matters is way more complicated

00:18:29   than simply, than it would be if they were simply

00:18:32   products to the people of the country.

00:18:33   Yeah, I totally agree with all that.

00:18:36   It's that you can't—I mean, and I thought Tim Cook expressed the frustration pretty frankly.

00:18:40   I was sort of surprised in the analyst call a few days ago, where it was, you know, he has to be very

00:18:46   careful what he says, but it wasn't—what do I want to say?

00:18:53   It was a very—it was balanced, but I thought it was also sort of frank about the fact that they

00:18:59   want to engage with what's going on. And if they can't, you know, as we said, they can't just say,

00:19:05   "No, that's not going to, you know, that's not going to cut anything for them just to say no."

00:19:12   But because they don't have the basis under the law or in process to do that, and, you know,

00:19:19   I was saying, you know, Apple, I actually feel like Apple should take a stronger stance,

00:19:22   even if it's not saying no. I feel like they should be making more effort, and I think Tim's

00:19:28   comments went more towards that. Because one of my concerns is that by agreeing to Chinese

00:19:34   restrictions, regardless of how legal they are under Chinese law, even in self-consistent,

00:19:39   it empowers more countries to ask for more, and the US and UK in particular are asking for it.

00:19:45   So, with that in mind, I feel like there's a danger that this, and this is kind of an ongoing

00:19:53   thing, the bigger power China gets, the more it was seemingly going to have to liberalize because

00:19:58   It was facing the reality of more citizens with more money, a higher standard of living,

00:20:02   and a middle class demands more indifferent, and it's more comfortable, and thus it's not

00:20:06   as malleable, and there's more power that's distributed when money is distributed that way.

00:20:10   So, the Chinese government, I think, I mean, not to get, I'm not a Chinese scholar, Chinese scholar,

00:20:15   I don't know how long the current structure can stand. It seems very fragile to me,

00:20:20   and there's all this money and pressure and what have you. But as it's grown as a power,

00:20:25   as economic and market and world power, people are learning the wrong lessons from it. So,

00:20:31   democracies have adopted more restrictive policies. I mean, you see Russia, which has always

00:20:35   had kind of totalitarian, centralized, whatever, like when has Russia actually been free?

00:20:40   Pete: Right.

00:20:40   Alan: Maybe sort of under Yeltsin, but I don't know. But it's, it's frustrating to see that

00:20:46   the wrong lessons are being learned, they're being imported into democracies, that democracies learn

00:20:50   how they can repress their own citizens better because they're seeing it demonstrated with

00:20:54   with no repercussion in countries that are not democratic.

00:20:57   - I think that, so somebody on Twitter,

00:21:02   and it seems like he deleted the tweet.

00:21:04   I don't know if he's somebody who deletes his,

00:21:06   it was like a conversation, a public conversation we had.

00:21:11   But I'm not gonna, I still have it here to read,

00:21:13   but I won't say his name, but just because I'm worried

00:21:18   that he deleted it for a reason.

00:21:20   But anyway, it was somebody who objected to,

00:21:24   accused me of defending Apple, just blindly in the face,

00:21:28   simply as, and I said, well seriously,

00:21:31   what would you have them do differently?

00:21:32   Do you really want them to pull out of China?

00:21:36   And let's face it, when we talk about this,

00:21:38   pulling out of China is not just a decision

00:21:40   to forego about 25% of their current revenue.

00:21:43   It quite possibly would, it could,

00:21:48   I mean, cost Tim Cook his job, I mean,

00:21:51   because it's quite possible that a majority

00:21:54   of Apple's shareholders would look at this

00:21:58   and say this is not worth pulling out of 25% of our revenue

00:22:03   for the foreseeable future

00:22:06   and jeopardizing our relationship with this country.

00:22:08   - Apple actually makes a ton of profit,

00:22:11   so it's not making all its profit in China,

00:22:14   but voluntarily giving up all that revenue

00:22:16   and all that profit, right?

00:22:18   And so this person was reasonable though.

00:22:21   It was a good, it was a very, it was an adult argument.

00:22:26   Argument gets a bad rap as a word

00:22:28   'cause everybody, you become so overly sensitive

00:22:31   that we think argument is a fight.

00:22:33   But no, it's a logical argument.

00:22:35   But his thing was that Tim Cook

00:22:36   should personally state his opposition on Twitter

00:22:39   as he has to many other political issues in the US.

00:22:42   Like he has, for example, Tim Cook has publicly come out

00:22:46   in opposition to the Trump administration's

00:22:48   immigration policies.

00:22:50   - Right.

00:22:51   - I don't think, that's a reasonable opinion

00:22:57   to say that Tim Cook should do that.

00:22:59   That wouldn't cost Tim Cook his job.

00:23:01   He could do that.

00:23:02   I'll bet he's thought about it.

00:23:03   I wouldn't be surprised if he does at some point.

00:23:06   But, you all, and again, I'm not a Chinese expert

00:23:09   in any way, neither are you, I don't,

00:23:10   but I do know enough about China that

00:23:15   politically you must be extraordinarily delicate.

00:23:20   It is a culture and a government that,

00:23:25   on both sides, both in what they say

00:23:28   and what they expect to hear,

00:23:29   they value subtlety.

00:23:34   - I'll tell you something, I talked to a Chinese expert,

00:23:37   this fellow whose name is Rajer Krimers, who's Dutch.

00:23:42   He's an expert in Chinese law and governance,

00:23:45   of studied this kind of thing. I said, what could Apple do? And he has some, you know,

00:23:49   what kind of response could they have other than what they did? And he said, you know,

00:23:52   this is Chinese—we talked about this earlier here—but he said this is Chinese law. And

00:23:56   they could become part—there's a board, the TC 260 is the committee that oversees this. Microsoft

00:24:02   and Cisco are members of this board, Apple is not. They could. He thinks that actually,

00:24:08   I think his stance is very interesting for someone who is from a Western democracy. Like I say,

00:24:14   I believe he's from the Netherlands, he's taught and researched the Netherlands and

00:24:19   England and Oxford, and he thinks that actually this sort of unfettered ability of expression

00:24:25   on the internet may actually not be in the best interest of citizens, not just a governmental

00:24:30   thing, which is an interesting stance.

00:24:33   The reason we limit rights by law is that their unfettered exercise might cause undue

00:24:39   harm limiting the liberty of others.

00:24:41   It's long overdue.

00:24:42   notion is introduced to the online sphere. Acts that are unlawful in real law should not be

00:24:46   condoned just because one happens to commit them in cyberspace." And after having seen—so,

00:24:50   that's distinct from free speech, right? People would read that, and originally I thought, well,

00:24:53   that seems awfully harsh. And then I thought, aren't I one of the people who would like to

00:24:57   see consequences happen when people commit, you know, basically crimes in Twitter, or have some

00:25:04   consequential mechanism for things that are not simply about the ability to state an opinion

00:25:09   and exercise free speech, but have a real world consequence,

00:25:13   like doxing things that are in fact illegal under some state

00:25:16   and federal laws.

00:25:17   But he says this, which is I think interesting.

00:25:18   He says, "The Chinese starting point is that historical

00:25:21   political mission needs to be fulfilled,

00:25:23   which requires the mobilization of the entire society

00:25:26   and therefore the imposition of discipline.

00:25:28   This requires the state not to be limited and controlled

00:25:31   in its power, but to have the ability to quickly

00:25:33   and decisively intervene to clear roadblocks.

00:25:35   That is anathema to the US and to most democracies,

00:25:39   But I, you know, it's good to get insight from

00:25:41   someone who studied this so deeply, who says

00:25:42   this is, you know, their guiding philosophy is

00:25:45   that that is the most important factor.

00:25:47   We have, in our country, we want to be able to

00:25:49   carry our, you know, our guns and our liquor and

00:25:51   drive 100 miles an hour.

00:25:53   All at the same time.

00:25:54   And not have anybody pull us over.

00:25:55   All at the same time.

00:25:56   We want the drive-through liquor store and

00:25:57   whatever.

00:25:58   And there's Americans.

00:25:59   With a gun on the passenger seat.

00:26:02   Right.

00:26:03   Right, you got broken glass in the back seat

00:26:05   with your child sitting in it, no seat belt, and

00:26:07   that's what you want.

00:26:08   I mean, I'm making a character sure, but it's true is that we favor individual expression,

00:26:13   individual rights, there's a primacy of it that's encoded in the central tenet of our government,

00:26:18   and there's various, I mean, look, we have a lot of disagreements about what those limits are. But

00:26:23   what Roger's talking about is really that is like, some political parts of the political spectrum

00:26:30   want to impose more rules in some ways on people's bodies or property and others want less. And it

00:26:35   It surprises me sometimes which end of the political spectrum wants government to impose

00:26:40   rules on others in those fashions.

00:26:42   With China, it's just a much more monolithic—the society becomes paramount, and this ability

00:26:49   for us to control things and mobilize all the forces at once and move us forward in

00:26:53   a single, central direction is the most important thing.

00:26:56   Dave: I really do think—and I have yet to be proven wrong, and I know that there are

00:27:01   There are some people who simply say Apple is a for-profit corporation and because they're

00:27:07   so insanely profitable, literally the most profitable country in the world for the last

00:27:11   few years.

00:27:12   I mean, that won't last.

00:27:13   That's true.

00:27:14   No.

00:27:15   Yeah, that's a bite.

00:27:16   There's zero doubt in my mind that that won't last because it never lasts.

00:27:19   That's the sort of thing, but they should remain very profitable for a very long time

00:27:26   and that inherently any for-profit corporation is full of shit and nothing they say can be

00:27:30   believed and they're usually, usually you should default to assuming that they're lying

00:27:34   in anything they say. Okay, but in my experience as a very close watcher of this particular company

00:27:41   and somebody who has a personal relationship with their PR department, I've never been lied to

00:27:48   by anybody at Apple. Not off the record. Never. Not once have I been told something that turned

00:27:55   out not to be true. They often give no answer. They often refuse to answer. Every once in

00:28:01   a while, they give a circuitous answer, but not one that is like Bill Clinton style, depends

00:28:11   what the meaning of the word is, is or something like that. And I say this as a huge Bill Clinton

00:28:16   fan. I'm just saying, I found them to be, I think that they are a tremendously honest

00:28:22   And again, they don't necessarily say,

00:28:25   they'll give a lot of non-answers.

00:28:27   And I think Tim Cook's public statements,

00:28:31   if anything, if there was anybody in the company

00:28:35   who said things that weren't true, it was Steve Jobs.

00:28:37   And that he wasn't really a liar, but that he would,

00:28:41   the reality distortion thing.

00:28:46   So I would say in the post-jobs era,

00:28:48   the company has been, one difference

00:28:50   between the Steve Jobs era and the post Steve era

00:28:53   is that the company has become completely honest,

00:28:56   in my opinion.

00:28:57   And I think Cook's remarks on the call

00:29:00   were honestly what he meant.

00:29:03   And I think you're right that they were very carefully

00:29:07   considered so that he could state his opposition

00:29:11   in terms that were politically digestible

00:29:15   to the Chinese ears.

00:29:16   But I think his overall argument of,

00:29:19   we think it's better to be engaged than not engaged,

00:29:22   was true, and that's also what he said

00:29:25   about his involvement with the Trump administration,

00:29:28   that it's better to be involved,

00:29:30   and if I can get his ear and make my case

00:29:33   for why he's wrong on these things,

00:29:35   I have a better chance, we have a better chance

00:29:39   of affecting it by being engaged than not engaged.

00:29:42   Do I think he enjoys putting a suit on

00:29:44   and sitting there next to Trump?

00:29:47   And he's always conspicuously right next to Trump

00:29:50   because he's the CEO. - The richest one.

00:29:53   - Right, he's the, you know,

00:29:54   maybe not the person, personally not the richest,

00:29:56   but he certainly is the one of the company

00:29:58   that's the richest.

00:29:59   Do I think he enjoys it? - I thought about that right.

00:30:02   - Do I think Trump? - They probably rank it

00:30:03   by company size, right?

00:30:05   If you're half trillion dollars, you're over there.

00:30:06   If you're three quarters trillion dollars, you're there.

00:30:08   - I don't think the other administrations would do that.

00:30:10   I think Trump though certainly would, you know.

00:30:13   - No, I agree.

00:30:15   I mean, I think it's a direct relationship too,

00:30:16   is, you know, there was an argument, is that Apple, especially with its progressive policies,

00:30:21   with a gay CEO, with its history and interest in immigration, with its employees all over

00:30:28   the world, including in affected countries that were affected by the travel ban, that

00:30:33   they should completely, you know, create a kind of Cold War situation with the Trump

00:30:37   administration and just support and battle elsewhere.

00:30:42   And I, you know, as much as I would prefer Trump to be frozen out, on the other hand,

00:30:46   it doesn't do any good for the US economy, doesn't do any good for Apple, for its employees,

00:30:50   its shareholders, you know, Apple's customers.

00:30:54   It just, it makes things worse, as unpleasant as it might be to see what feels like, you

00:31:00   know, co-opt, being co-opted or being used.

00:31:03   Like Trump's comment, you know, "Oh, they're opening three big, beautiful plants."

00:31:06   This makes things up as we know.

00:31:08   Three big, beautiful plants.

00:31:09   It turns out that was total bullshit.

00:31:11   I thought it was.

00:31:11   - The fox, the fox, can we talk about,

00:31:14   I wanna segue slightly, if that's right.

00:31:16   - Let's hold this, let's hold this thought.

00:31:18   Remember that we're gonna come back to this.

00:31:19   I just wanted to say this.

00:31:20   - I'm gonna pause and fox-

00:31:21   - I wanna say this about the China thing,

00:31:23   is that to me, the thing that I think

00:31:25   that the zealots who want Apple to stand up

00:31:28   and shout a no, no, no about this,

00:31:30   that they are overlooking is the welfare

00:31:32   of the people of China.

00:31:33   Isn't that the most important thing?

00:31:36   It's not the abstract notion of are you,

00:31:40   are you hindering free speech?

00:31:42   Second, the notion of why free speech is important

00:31:48   is fundamentally about are the people,

00:31:50   it's the welfare and the freedoms of the people that matter.

00:31:53   And are the people of China better off or worse off

00:31:56   if Apple completely pulls out of China?

00:31:58   I would say they're worse off.

00:31:59   It's better-- - I think that's the issue.

00:32:01   They're so big, it'd be one thing

00:32:02   if we were a smaller company, they're so big

00:32:04   and they're so intertwined with the Chinese company,

00:32:07   they have sales, they have customers,

00:32:08   they have employees, they have stores,

00:32:11   they have manufacturing partners.

00:32:13   Regardless of what people think about Chinese

00:32:15   outsourcing and manufacture, the iPhone's would not be made

00:32:18   if it were not for China, it would not be affordable.

00:32:20   - China is cracking down on end-to-end

00:32:22   encrypted messaging systems.

00:32:26   They just stopped, they pulled the plug,

00:32:29   well not pulled the plug, but they set up

00:32:30   the great firewall to block WhatsApp two weeks ago.

00:32:34   - But iMessage and FaceTime are still working.

00:32:37   - Right, and iMessage and FaceTime,

00:32:39   and I know that there are cynics out there

00:32:41   who think, ah, Apple probably gave China

00:32:43   the back door or something like that.

00:32:45   They really are engineered, I can't prove this,

00:32:48   I'm not an encryption expert, I don't have the source code,

00:32:50   but everything I know about them is that they were drawn

00:32:53   from the ground up so that there could not be

00:32:55   a man in the middle back door just for China

00:32:58   or something like that.

00:32:59   They really are--

00:32:59   - There is a way to do it, but we require changes

00:33:04   that I think if we discovered that Tim Cook had authorized,

00:33:08   or anyone in the company had authorized

00:33:09   those kind of changes, and they'd been rolled out,

00:33:12   it's possibly he'd be committing a crime under US law.

00:33:15   So it's, right, you wouldn't,

00:33:17   I don't think he could do it.

00:33:19   It would be, it could be fraud.

00:33:20   I mean, their marketing materials,

00:33:22   everything they say says they don't do it,

00:33:23   so they would be committing certain kinds

00:33:25   of consumer and criminal fraud potentially

00:33:27   if they changed that.

00:33:28   - Right, the hit to their credibility

00:33:29   would be worth more money financially

00:33:31   than the Chinese market.

00:33:32   It would absolutely devastate the company.

00:33:34   It would crater the company.

00:33:35   And do I think, is it possible

00:33:38   that they might start blocking iMessage?

00:33:39   And is that the line where they would pull out of China?

00:33:42   No, probably not.

00:33:43   I'm just saying, I cited iMessage and FaceTime

00:33:46   as end-to-end encrypted things

00:33:48   that completely work in China.

00:33:50   Not as that's the only reason why Apple should stay in China

00:33:54   but just one example of why I think it should.

00:33:56   And that the main thing is to think about,

00:33:58   is it good or better or worse for the Chinese people?

00:34:02   Anyway, that was my thing.

00:34:04   What do you wanna talk about?

00:34:05   You had a Foxconn idea?

00:34:07   - Well, I just wanna, this is a little bit of a segue,

00:34:09   but it's kinda very similar.

00:34:10   So you know, Foxconn, so Trump had that big announcement

00:34:12   with Scott Walker in Wisconsin that,

00:34:14   "Hey, I've brokered this deal and Foxconn's coming,

00:34:17   "even though the deal has been in progress since 2014."

00:34:19   And Foxconn's been talking about it.

00:34:21   Foxconn's enabling the presidency

00:34:22   by allowing these kinds of messages to be said,

00:34:25   and you know, so that's a deal.

00:34:27   But so here's the thing that cracks me up,

00:34:28   is this is the kind of good deal we're getting,

00:34:30   is that, of course, states unfortunately work—they're actually all competing against each other to

00:34:37   lure businesses, and it winds up—Boeing got billions of dollars from my state, Washington

00:34:41   State, and then immediately, almost immediately, started laying people off and restructuring

00:34:44   its operations.

00:34:45   And there's a lot of anger here about Boeing because of that, because they got, I think,

00:34:49   the largest single tax incentive plan, and it was not structured to only be in effect

00:34:54   if—based on employment issues.

00:34:57   So you know, they're able to locate new production lines elsewhere.

00:35:00   So Wisconsin is very happy to offer $3 billion in state tax breaks, which winds up being

00:35:06   $230,000 per worker, assuming the factory employs 13,000 jobs.

00:35:14   So this is a 15-year deal, and in 15 years, 13,000 jobs probably won't generate tax revenue

00:35:19   that even approaches that much.

00:35:21   I mean, there's the issue about the tax, there'll be revenue booked from the plant that they'll

00:35:25   get taxed from.

00:35:26   There's other things, although because of this, we don't know what the final thing would

00:35:30   be, but I'm just like, this is the kind of big, beautiful deal that's being made, is

00:35:33   just giving all this money away. The state's giving away so much that it's going to wind up

00:35:38   maybe never making more money. It's great.

00:35:41   [laughter]

00:35:43   I really, while we're on it, I just have to say that this thing where Trump—was it an interview

00:35:47   with the Washington Post? I forget who it was with.

00:35:49   Oh, was nothing in your—no, which one is this?

00:35:52   I don't know. The one where he said that—I talked to—Tim Cook called me up. He said,

00:35:57   "Don, we're gonna build three big beautiful plants

00:36:00   "right here in the US."

00:36:03   - Yeah, Wall Street Journal.

00:36:03   - Wall Street Journal.

00:36:05   - Yeah, that was that interview

00:36:06   where they didn't release the transcript originally

00:36:08   and then it got released later.

00:36:09   They got leaked and eternity said all kinds of crazy things.

00:36:12   This part was reported.

00:36:13   - Apple did not respond.

00:36:15   I wasn't sure if that had something to do with

00:36:19   that they were only a week away

00:36:20   from the earnings call or whatever,

00:36:21   but it was obviously asked on the earnings call.

00:36:24   and Tim Cook gave another very politically--

00:36:28   - That was a very good answer, I thought.

00:36:29   - Well considered, but the translation is,

00:36:32   we have no idea what the fuck he's talking about.

00:36:35   - Right. - We have no plans.

00:36:35   - Well, I think the Foxconn, like, it's just,

00:36:38   he doesn't, nobody--

00:36:39   - I guess that's the kernel. - Summarizes things

00:36:40   where he puts it in a bullet point.

00:36:41   - I guess that, you know, 'cause he did,

00:36:43   he did make political hay out of this Foxconn plant

00:36:46   in, not Minnesota, it's Wisconsin.

00:36:50   Yeah, speaking of Ben, Ben Thompson.

00:36:51   - Yeah, Wisconsin, yeah.

00:36:54   And I guess somehow that rattled around

00:36:57   in that big emptied skull of his,

00:36:59   and somehow Foxconn makes Apple stuff.

00:37:03   And so a Foxconn plant for flat panel TVs in Wisconsin

00:37:08   turned into three huge factories for iPhones.

00:37:11   - It's great.

00:37:14   - It literally is the case that Apple hasn't even,

00:37:17   the flat panels that they're making at this Foxconn plant

00:37:19   aren't even part of anything that Apple would use.

00:37:22   So they're not even, there's no,

00:37:24   it could obviously change and perhaps

00:37:27   they could start making different types of flat panels there

00:37:30   and Apple obviously makes an awful lot of devices

00:37:32   that use displays.

00:37:33   So in theory, it's possible that displays made

00:37:37   in that facility might end up in Apple products someday,

00:37:39   but it's certainly not an Apple plant

00:37:41   in any way, shape, or form.

00:37:43   - But the thing I was more excited about

00:37:45   is that Cook said they're gonna invest all this money

00:37:47   in US manufacture, which is great.

00:37:49   I think the big story, so here's the big story

00:37:51   I think of the next 10 years is,

00:37:53   So, you know, a lot of the thing in China that makes it possible to manufacture goods

00:37:56   there very affordably is not just the labor costs, which have been going up steadily.

00:38:00   Labor is a tiny, tiny percentage of, at one point I think it was 1% of the retail price

00:38:05   of the iPhone was actual labor to assemble it.

00:38:08   And a lot of the times you have chips coming from all over the world, you've got components

00:38:11   coming from a bunch of places, but the main stuff is all being made and integrated in

00:38:15   China and it's the locked-in value of having all of these different industries that work

00:38:20   together, making components all in these, you know, sometimes one city or one area that form

00:38:26   these close relationships, that's the lock-in advantage they have. But labor is becoming less

00:38:30   and less of so, especially as robotic assembly is going to become, you know, even more so than

00:38:35   today. But so, what I'm interested about is this, the trend of the next 10 years is how much stuff

00:38:39   gets made domestically, whether it's domestically in the US or China for Chinese products for Chinese

00:38:45   which is a big push China has as well, is trying to

00:38:48   make high-tech products and other things that are

00:38:50   made in other countries, which still exists in

00:38:52   large quantities. Remember, the U.S. is still the

00:38:55   number one, or maybe we're down to the number two,

00:38:57   manufacturing economy in the world, despite the

00:38:59   fact that we've decreased employment in that

00:39:01   industry because we're so efficient. So, there's

00:39:04   this big trend. Stuff's going to come back here

00:39:06   because everything's gotten more, it gets more

00:39:08   expensive to move things around. It gets more

00:39:10   expensive to, like, I was just reading a great

00:39:14   a great article the other day about companies that are switching to software development in like,

00:39:19   you know, companies are hiring in Indiana and smaller states and mid-sized cities, not rural

00:39:24   yet or small towns, but they're hiring in these places where they have plenty of qualified people,

00:39:29   people willing to be trained. They pay them a great salary for the area, but it's a fraction

00:39:33   of the salary in Silicon Valley or New York or Seattle. They're in the same time zones or within

00:39:40   companies you're dealing with, they're native

00:39:42   English speakers. And as much as I want to, I mean,

00:39:45   I am not making any bias against people who learn

00:39:47   English as a second or third or fourth language,

00:39:49   because many people communicate perfectly well

00:39:51   in those. But when you add all the things up, it's

00:39:53   like they're finding, and wages in India have now

00:39:56   gone up as well as China. So, this article noted

00:39:59   that I think wages are now maybe, maybe cost half

00:40:01   as much on an hourly basis for a programmer in

00:40:04   India, but they're, all the things added up make

00:40:06   it harder to turn stuff as fast. It makes, it puts

00:40:09   it puts in enough friction that these companies

00:40:12   are now delighted to have people they can call

00:40:13   and work with in real time who are in the culture

00:40:18   and in the regulatory environment

00:40:20   and it's all kind of in the same place.

00:40:21   So I think that is exciting to see Apple invest

00:40:24   into more of the US manufacturing economy

00:40:27   because stuff is coming back and more of it will

00:40:30   as the cost and quality of life improves

00:40:33   in developing countries.

00:40:35   - That's well said.

00:40:36   All right, I'm gonna take a break here

00:40:37   I wanna thank our first sponsor.

00:40:39   Long time sponsor of the show, but they're back

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00:40:43   just stay tuned even if you've heard of it.

00:40:44   It's Eero.

00:40:46   Eero makes WiFi mesh network equipment for your home.

00:40:50   They have a new second generation product, just came out,

00:40:52   I really think it might have been even last month,

00:40:54   it's brand new.

00:40:56   Second generation base station.

00:40:57   Looks exactly like the first one, almost.

00:40:59   You actually have to turn it upside down

00:41:01   and look at the model number to really tell the difference.

00:41:03   And they sort of did a little slightly different treatment

00:41:05   of the Eero logo on the thing,

00:41:08   but it's the same size, same shape.

00:41:10   And it can integrate, right?

00:41:11   If you already have Eero, you can buy the new stuff.

00:41:13   You can buy the new base stations

00:41:15   and they hook right into the network.

00:41:17   But the new one, they've added a new thing.

00:41:19   It's called the Eero Beacon, and it's about half the size.

00:41:22   The Eero's are really, really small, the base stations.

00:41:25   But now they have a beacon.

00:41:26   And in the original setup, the first gen Eero setup,

00:41:29   all of the stations were the same.

00:41:30   You'd get these little Apple TV style things.

00:41:32   One of them's your main one.

00:41:33   you hook it up to your ethernet for your cable,

00:41:36   wherever your internet comes into the house.

00:41:38   And then the other ones you put around the house.

00:41:41   Well now they've got this thing, and they were the same,

00:41:42   you just pick one to be the main one,

00:41:43   hook it up to the internet and you didn't have to do it.

00:41:46   Well now they have these ones called beacons,

00:41:47   and the beacons are half the size, they're smaller,

00:41:50   they don't even have a power cord.

00:41:51   What you do is you just plug it right into the wall.

00:41:53   It's just a little device that plugs in the wall.

00:41:56   Like a nightlight, except it actually has

00:42:01   a nightlight feature, which is awesome.

00:42:03   It's really, really clever.

00:42:04   And if you don't want that, you can turn it off.

00:42:07   And it's smart, and it knows it has ambient light sensors,

00:42:09   so it only comes on when you want it to.

00:42:12   But this second generation thing with the beacon

00:42:15   adds a third 5 gigahertz radio.

00:42:19   And so the second generation Eero is now tri-band,

00:42:21   and it makes it twice as fast as its predecessor.

00:42:24   And I had the first gen setup in my house,

00:42:27   and it's the fastest Wi-Fi I've ever had in the house.

00:42:30   and we have a four-story house,

00:42:34   gets really good internet up in the fourth floor,

00:42:38   which never would have,

00:42:39   with a base station that's on the first floor.

00:42:40   So it never could have happened with like a traditional,

00:42:44   try to blanket your house from one base station

00:42:47   Wi-Fi system, just wouldn't work.

00:42:48   If you don't know Eero,

00:42:50   the basic idea is that they set up a mesh network

00:42:53   where it's like this type of network

00:42:56   that like a big office would have at great expense

00:42:58   with a professional setup.

00:42:59   And instead, you don't have to be an expert at all.

00:43:04   You just use the excellent, excellent Eero app

00:43:07   right on your phone.

00:43:08   And it tells you, walks you right through how to set it up.

00:43:10   It gives you advice on where to position them

00:43:13   related to stairs and stuff like that.

00:43:15   The beacon makes it even easier

00:43:18   to just blanket your whole house

00:43:22   with really, really strong wifi signal.

00:43:25   It's a great product.

00:43:26   I really, really love the company.

00:43:28   and the second generation one is just better in every way.

00:43:31   It's literally faster.

00:43:32   The beacons really, really make it better.

00:43:35   And last but not least,

00:43:37   Eero has incredible customer support,

00:43:39   and it's something that the company

00:43:40   has really invested a lot in.

00:43:41   They wanted to emphasize that I mentioned it here

00:43:43   on the ad read.

00:43:44   They'll get you, hook you up, you call them up,

00:43:47   and they'll put you in touch with a Wi-Fi expert

00:43:49   within 30 seconds.

00:43:51   I didn't need it.

00:43:52   I don't think you would either,

00:43:53   but just in case you have a weird thing

00:43:54   or you run into something,

00:43:56   You can get somebody on the phone in 30 seconds

00:43:59   and they know what they're talking about.

00:44:01   Really, really, this is just a great product.

00:44:03   So go there, figure it out, and you go to the Eero.com

00:44:06   and buy enough equipment based on the size

00:44:10   of your apartment or home or whatever

00:44:12   you're trying to set it up.

00:44:13   And remember this code, the talk show, the talk show.

00:44:17   And you use that code when you buy your Eero kit

00:44:20   and you will get free overnight shipping.

00:44:21   So literally, you could just pause this podcast right now

00:44:24   and go order up your Eero.

00:44:26   If you were thinking, if you've been thinking for a while

00:44:28   about getting a new Wi-Fi setup,

00:44:30   and you've just been putting it off,

00:44:31   well now's the time to do it,

00:44:32   'cause the Eero version two is out, so go get it.

00:44:35   Pause the podcast, come back when you're done,

00:44:37   and it'll show up at your house tomorrow for free.

00:44:40   So my thanks to Eero, great product.

00:44:43   Back to the show.

00:44:45   - I don't wanna provide any, what's the rest,

00:44:50   endorsement of products I haven't used,

00:44:51   but I have not used Eero yet,

00:44:52   but oh my God, is everybody talking about it?

00:44:54   So I've gotta try this.

00:44:55   As a long time Wi-Fi guy,

00:44:57   I have a ridiculously working network now

00:44:59   with like TP-Link and Apple routers and CRUD

00:45:02   and lots of wires, so.

00:45:03   - You used to.

00:45:04   - Eero is my future for testing.

00:45:05   - For those who don't remember,

00:45:06   Glenn used to write a Wi-Fi blog, right?

00:45:10   - Every day.

00:45:12   - There was, the early days of Wi-Fi,

00:45:14   there was so much news that you actually could,

00:45:16   and did legitimately have a daily updated Wi-Fi blog.

00:45:20   - I've attempted to reboot it.

00:45:22   I shut it down in 2011.

00:45:23   still get a lot of traffic, which is hilarious.

00:45:25   One of the most popular articles in that story is a link, not an article, but a link to David

00:45:30   Pogue's review in like 2007 of some Wi-Fi connected speakers, because the Internet's

00:45:35   a weird place, man.

00:45:36   But I've been tempted to reboot it just to write about mesh, because there's so much.

00:45:39   I just wrote like an overview.

00:45:40   What was the name of the blog?

00:45:41   For Macworld.

00:45:42   No, what was the name of your blog?

00:45:44   Oh, Wi-Fi networking news.

00:45:45   So, it's Wi-Fi netnews.com.

00:45:46   Still there, still there.

00:45:47   The main part, major article is, hey, I shut this thing down.

00:45:50   just wrote a mesh explainer for TechHive, a part of a Macworld sister site, and part of it was

00:45:57   just kind of like, you know, so, like, why do you want to, like, what's the point of this? And

00:46:03   really, there's like seven or eight systems out there, some are from startups, some are from third,

00:46:08   you know, existing companies, and the deal is people are just sick, sick to death of dead

00:46:13   areas and configuring things. And you know, I wrote for Harry McCracken, the first article I

00:46:19   I wrote for PC World, I want to say it was 10, 12 years ago when Harry was the editor-in-chief,

00:46:25   they had gotten this thing back from the survey. They used to do customer surveys at PC World. It

00:46:28   was great. They'd go out to read those surveys and get huge amounts of information. And they

00:46:32   had found the return rate on Wi-Fi equipment was like 30% to retail. And I would not be surprised

00:46:39   if for conventional Wi-Fi stuff, like just the base station router stuff that you get, not the

00:46:44   mesh things if the rate wasn't still 30 percent. Just based on people's frustration

00:46:49   with setting it up.

00:46:52   I just can't say enough good things about the way that Eero works. I know that AdRead's

00:46:56   officially over, but I don't care. It's a part of the show.

00:46:58   I have to find the thing. Everybody's talking about it.

00:47:01   You know how you get like—I had to do it with the stupid cable modem I got from Comcast

00:47:07   when I moved, where you end up going to a web page in there. Like, go to this web page

00:47:12   and you configure things there.

00:47:14   - Yeah.

00:47:15   - Always feels janky configuring something

00:47:17   from a web app or a web forum

00:47:19   and you're typing in IP numbers

00:47:21   and you're seeing IP numbers and stuff like that.

00:47:22   Setting up an Eero is nothing like that.

00:47:24   And you don't, it's one of those things too

00:47:27   where you do it on your phone, not on your computer,

00:47:30   and it feels right that you're doing it on your phone.

00:47:33   It actually, 'cause the experience is so just tap this,

00:47:36   tap that, you know, okay this,

00:47:38   that doing it on a phone doesn't feel

00:47:41   like you're trying to,

00:47:43   Like if you're, a lot of times when you do something

00:47:45   on the phone instead of on a computer,

00:47:47   it feels like you're drawing, getting water

00:47:49   from a very, very narrow straw.

00:47:51   And it's like, oh my God, if I was on my Mac,

00:47:53   I could just drink it as fast as I want.

00:47:55   (laughing)

00:47:55   That's how I feel. - Exactly.

00:47:57   - But with the Eero setup, doing it on the phone

00:47:59   is actually ideal because it really is just a big fat,

00:48:03   tap this, tap that type of process.

00:48:05   Also the build quality on their equipment is amazing.

00:48:10   Absolutely amazing.

00:48:11   It feels like Apple quality.

00:48:13   I really, they can't say that I guess,

00:48:15   but that's what I would say.

00:48:16   It's like--

00:48:17   - This is really, it's a Sonos strategy, right?

00:48:19   It's that Sonos was ex-Apple people,

00:48:21   but Sonos made a thing that is,

00:48:23   as the people liked as much as they like Apple products,

00:48:25   which is really hard to do.

00:48:26   It had the build quality, the features,

00:48:28   they charged a premium price,

00:48:29   'cause they did a premium thing.

00:48:30   - I'll trash a company.

00:48:32   I'll name it, and I'll say Linksys.

00:48:33   You ever have Linksys equipment?

00:48:35   And I've had it, I've had it.

00:48:36   But just, don't even talk about the experience of it,

00:48:38   but just the type of plastic that they use.

00:48:40   They use the cheapest shit plastic that you could ever do.

00:48:43   And if you squeeze the device, it creaks,

00:48:46   as a brand new device, it creaks in a way that,

00:48:48   you know what I'm talking about,

00:48:49   like a cheap plastic gadget.

00:48:51   - I, yeah, it's just.

00:48:52   - Eero stuff is so solid, it is amazing.

00:48:54   What did they say here?

00:48:56   There's something in their talking points about it.

00:48:57   - Does it give off a pleasant scent also?

00:49:00   - No, but it has no scent whatsoever.

00:49:01   And it doesn't have that cheap scent, you know what I mean?

00:49:04   Here, this is from their talking points.

00:49:06   Our manufacturing process rejects any performance flaw

00:49:09   cosmetic defense larger than the tip of a needle. And I believe it. They look like museum objects.

00:49:16   Anyway.

00:49:16   Pete: That's good, though. That's part of the thing. Yeah, it's Wi-Fi still painful,

00:49:21   or still, I'm sorry, still painful enough people are inventing more solutions to solve it,

00:49:25   like 15 years, 16 years into Wi-Fi being a widespread thing.

00:49:28   Ted, that's the truth.

00:49:28   Yeah. So, speaking of that, it rolls right out of the Eero topic, or Eero read, is the XKCD comic

00:49:35   I linked to this week.

00:49:36   Pete; Oh my God, that was great.

00:49:38   Where, what's his name, Randall, whatever his name is.

00:49:42   The comic is--

00:49:43   - Monroe.

00:49:44   - Yeah, over time with phone, like starting in 2007,

00:49:49   'cause that's like the AD one of the iPhone era,

00:49:54   there was this sense of you'd be doing things

00:49:59   and if you're trying to do it on the cell network

00:50:01   on your phone, you'd say, ah, this is flaking out,

00:50:04   this won't load or it's not fast enough or whatever,

00:50:08   I gotta do this on Wi-Fi.

00:50:09   And that at some point a handful of years ago,

00:50:12   around 2011 or so, the reliability of the cellular network

00:50:17   surpassed this reliability of Wi-Fi networks.

00:50:20   And more often than the other way around,

00:50:22   when you're doing something on Wi-Fi,

00:50:24   you wind up turning off Wi-Fi and turning on cellular

00:50:27   to get it to load.

00:50:31   And I find personally for me, that is absolutely true.

00:50:34   And I will even say, not here at home with my Ero setup,

00:50:39   and I really am saying that, I mean this sincerely,

00:50:42   I'm not saying this because they were the sponsor,

00:50:44   but Wi-Fi in general, like Wi-Fi at just,

00:50:50   like my mother-in-law's house or my parents' house

00:50:52   or anywhere else where I might have Wi-Fi,

00:50:54   or like at a hotel or something like that.

00:50:56   I never get the Wi-Fi, the hotel Wi-Fi anymore.

00:50:58   I just use my phone, unless it's like video.

00:51:03   it's a funny, I totally, I was laughing my head off when you linked to this because I was just

00:51:08   thought, oh my God, I'm thinking of the number of times when I'm, so I have, like I said, I have a

00:51:13   hilarious router set up in my house, so it all works, so I haven't changed it out yet because

00:51:17   I have good performance everywhere and I paid the money and so at some point I will just swap it all

00:51:21   out for mesh because this is ridiculous what I'm doing. I have wires running, I'm a wifi guy, I've

00:51:26   got ethernet running all over the house. It's ridiculous, makes me mad. It's terrible. But so,

00:51:32   I'm thinking the number of times I am out of my

00:51:34   house somewhere and it has a Wi-Fi network and I

00:51:37   have to, I'm like, oh God, and I go and I swipe up

00:51:39   control center and I turn off Wi-Fi. How many

00:51:42   times are you doing that? I mean, I, we get by, my

00:51:45   wife and I get by with a three gigabyte a month

00:51:48   pooled plan with AT&T. We are very low, we don't

00:51:53   spend that much time away from Wi-Fi networks or

00:51:55   the house or whatever. And we're starting to

00:51:57   exceed it because the networks are so bad and

00:51:58   we're like, oh, we're going to have to spend

00:51:59   another like $200 a year to upgrade to the next

00:52:02   mark because we're burning through it because we need it elsewhere. But it's

00:52:07   true. Judging by the reaction I got from people, I got a whole bunch of "yes,

00:52:12   that's amazing, I never really thought about it." And I have to admit, until I saw that

00:52:14   comic, I just never really thought about it because my first impression,

00:52:20   and I think this is true in so many ways psychologically, and it's, for

00:52:26   example, just one that everybody who listens to this show is familiar with,

00:52:31   with.

00:52:33   It took Apple 15 years after it should

00:52:38   have been the conventional wisdom

00:52:40   that this is a thriving company.

00:52:43   I would say it was at least 15 years

00:52:45   after the consensus of the business world

00:52:47   is that this is a very successful company that has

00:52:49   a bright future ahead.

00:52:51   15 years of Apple as a company that's on the verge of collapse

00:52:55   because they were on the verge of collapse in 1997.

00:53:01   And they were on really shaky ground.

00:53:03   And people who formed their opinion of Apple

00:53:05   as a business in that time, it stuck.

00:53:09   It stuck long after it shouldn't have,

00:53:11   because that was the first impression.

00:53:13   And it was true at the time.

00:53:15   And I think that the fact that cell networks are flaky

00:53:19   and can't be depended on, and Wi-Fi is definitely

00:53:23   a better, more sturdy technology than cellular,

00:53:26   was absolutely the truth worldwide, everywhere.

00:53:29   And the fact that that's different now,

00:53:33   I never really reconsidered that.

00:53:35   Even though it was subconsciously without thinking about it,

00:53:38   I was raising the window shade and turning off the,

00:53:42   whatever you call the thing, the control center,

00:53:44   and turning off Wi-Fi.

00:53:45   - No, I had the same reaction for a long time.

00:53:48   I was a big fan of LTE when it started rolling out,

00:53:51   and we got it here in Seattle reasonably early, feels like.

00:53:54   And the first time I was testing it, I was like,

00:53:57   "Wow, I'm actually getting,"

00:53:59   like 20 megabits per second or 10. It was something

00:54:01   outrageous compared to 3G, even HSDPA+ or whatever

00:54:06   it was at the time that was the big thing. It was

00:54:08   like, all right, this is really great, and we're at

00:54:10   the bottom of LTE. Like, we're still in the US,

00:54:13   we're still, it's not that other countries are that

00:54:16   far ahead, but the general LTE flavor that's being

00:54:19   deployed or that's deployed everywhere is really

00:54:21   still the bottom. Like, we're going to, just like

00:54:23   with Wi-Fi where we started at like, you know, 11

00:54:26   megabits per second, but it was much higher, it was

00:54:28   but it was much lower. And then we went up to 54 and higher and higher. Now we have 802.11ac,

00:54:33   and there's different models. You can push, if you're lucky, you can push a gigabit per second

00:54:37   or more across two different frequencies with your one base station now, right? And that's amazing

00:54:43   when it works correctly. But LTE, yeah, and LTS, so, and there's more advanced, these Wave 2 AC

00:54:51   units that are coming out that are going to be, that are much better for throughput and range and

00:54:54   because they do beamforming, so they focus energy

00:54:56   in the right place.

00:54:57   But the LTE still has, there's so much headroom in LTE,

00:55:00   and 5G is still a long way away, but like 4G LTE,

00:55:03   we will have networks eventually that are hundreds

00:55:05   of megabits per second that are just gonna be

00:55:07   generally available, and then you have to deal with

00:55:08   what the bandwidth cost will be when you're,

00:55:10   that kind of thing.

00:55:12   But here's the thing, John, this is I think the big thing,

00:55:14   is that we forget sometimes, I have gigabit internet

00:55:18   at my home, which I am delighted with,

00:55:19   and I'm paying too much for it, like 100 and,

00:55:22   hundred and, well, I think I'm paying 156 bucks a month and it includes a phone line.

00:55:26   If I didn't get the phone line, it would cost $40 a month more, because that's how bundling works.

00:55:30   Pete: Cracks me up. Do you actually get, what speed do you actually get?

00:55:34   Pete; I get like 600 up and 300 down.

00:55:38   Pete; Wow, that's fantastic. That is, wow.

00:55:40   Pete; And sometimes more.

00:55:41   Pete; I'm coming over.

00:55:42   Pete; But it's like, you know, it's awesome.

00:55:43   Pete; I'm coming over. I'm coming to see you.

00:55:44   Pete; My friend, you know, your friend of mine, Jeff Carlson, is going to come over,

00:55:47   we're going to lunch someplace in a few weeks and he's going to come over in the morning and just,

00:55:51   do his back plays back up. He's got like 700 gigabytes to go and he's like, can I plug in

00:55:55   for a few hours? But yeah, come on over. Use some of my untapped bandwidth. But most people in the

00:56:00   country, so I think the average bandwidth, I just found a number from last year, but it's like 50

00:56:06   megabit per second downstream is now the average. That's because there is more gigabit and 100

00:56:10   megabit per second internet being pushed out. But the, let's see where we're at now. I think it's

00:56:16   I think it's the, oh here it is, 18 megabits per second

00:56:18   is the 10 fastest average speeds right now.

00:56:22   So it's still, I think most people in the US

00:56:26   have home broadband that's much slower than LTE

00:56:31   in the same area they're at.

00:56:33   - Yeah, at my new house we have much,

00:56:36   my internet used to be a running joke

00:56:38   about how bad the internet was at my old house.

00:56:40   It really was, and it really did.

00:56:41   I know, Merlin, I still don't know if Merlin believes me,

00:56:44   but we've had a couple of, we had that one,

00:56:46   one of my favorite episodes of this show ever

00:56:48   was with Merlin and we were talking about Comcast

00:56:50   and the stupid webpage they had with the,

00:56:52   (laughing)

00:56:54   the giant orange cone that was,

00:56:56   if it was in proportion to the van,

00:56:59   it's like a 20 foot, there's a dog chasing a cat.

00:57:03   Anyway, but it really did, in my old house,

00:57:06   it really did, the internet service

00:57:08   suffered tremendously when it rained.

00:57:10   (laughing)

00:57:12   I swear to God.

00:57:14   - Oh my God.

00:57:14   - So like if I was set to record the show

00:57:16   and it was a rainy day, I knew that we were in for trouble.

00:57:20   - That's 'cause there's old rotted cables

00:57:22   that rain infiltrates and it disrupts the,

00:57:25   there are just holes in your coax.

00:57:27   - I forget how long ago it was.

00:57:29   There's an episode of it.

00:57:30   I'm pretty sure I'm not making this up.

00:57:32   There was an episode of the talk show

00:57:33   a couple hundred episodes ago.

00:57:34   Might have even been back in the Dan Benjamin era,

00:57:36   but it was so many Skype drops because it was a rainy day

00:57:39   that we literally edited the show

00:57:41   and just kept the Skype drops in.

00:57:44   Instead of editing around them seamlessly,

00:57:46   we just played the Skype connection sound

00:57:49   over and over again.

00:57:50   What do I get?

00:57:53   So here's what I get.

00:57:54   It depends, but I can get, I have some speed tests here

00:57:58   where I'm getting 220, 230, 238 down,

00:58:03   and that's over Wi-Fi.

00:58:06   That's Wi-Fi.

00:58:08   but up is on the same test, 12, 12, 12.

00:58:13   Yeah, it's super consistent.

00:58:14   - 12 megabits per second?

00:58:16   - Yeah.

00:58:16   - 12 megabits per second, what the?

00:58:18   Yeah, so this is what I love,

00:58:19   so CenturyLink is one of the old baby bells,

00:58:21   or no, I'm sorry, it's not one of the old baby bells exactly.

00:58:24   It was like, there were different smaller companies,

00:58:27   like rural telephone companies, and it all kinda merged.

00:58:30   They took over, it was US West and then Quest,

00:58:32   and CenturyLink was like Century something else

00:58:35   and whatever.

00:58:36   they have like the worst portfolio. They have like all wired phone lines and they're kind of like a

00:58:42   junk, I mean, I'm being too harsh because I don't know all the business model issues, but you know,

00:58:45   like Verizon spun off all of its wired phone lines. Like, Verizon doesn't own any POTS anymore.

00:58:51   Pete: Right.

00:58:51   Pete; And Sprint, I think, got rid of their, so like,

00:58:53   excuse me, there's still millions and millions of wired phone lines in the country, even as they

00:58:59   decline super rapidly, it's like, you know, how many modems are in use? We're in that title of

00:59:03   Oh my God, wait, sidebar, I'm starting to watch Futurama from the beginning with my

00:59:07   other son who is 10.

00:59:08   We got to an episode in season two, which is a joke about logging.

00:59:11   Good news, everyone! I started, I tried to log on starting weeks ago. We finally got

00:59:15   through to AOL. And, you know, it sees they're putting on virtual reality to go this whole thing.

00:59:20   And I'm like, oh my God, we pause, my wife and I are explaining for like 10 minutes to my 10-year-old.

00:59:25   Okay, so there was a phone and you dial, and he's like, I'm like, so there was a time when the

00:59:30   when the internet wasn't always on, it wasn't always available. He's like, "Really?" He's just

00:59:34   like, looking at me like an anthropologist, like, "How did that work?" Because we dialed up and it

00:59:39   made noises, and it was a thousand times slower than our current connection.

00:59:42   Pete: Maybe more. It might be more than a thousand times slower.

00:59:45   Pete: What's, what is 56k divided by gigabit? I got a, I got a math program here.

00:59:50   Pete: Yeah.

00:59:50   Pete: But so, that was hilarious. But so, I interrupted myself.

00:59:54   Pete: Do the math. Can you do the math?

00:59:55   Pete; I have, yeah, I use Solver, which lets you pipe an arbitrary S-O-U-L-V-R.

01:00:00   I love that.

01:00:01   You can type in, I can type 56 kilobits per second

01:00:03   divided by one gigabit per second,

01:00:05   and it tells me, wait, I got the units wrong.

01:00:07   It's in percentage.

01:00:10   I'm gonna put a link in the show notes to solve it.

01:00:12   I'm doing it wrong, wait.

01:00:12   One, I gotta do it.

01:00:14   One gigabit per second divided by 56,

01:00:16   I did it the wrong way around.

01:00:18   56 kilobits per second.

01:00:19   Oops, I can type right in real time.

01:00:21   It is, oh, it's, so I have a connection

01:00:24   that is 2200 times as fast as I did.

01:00:27   I was correct that it was more.

01:00:29   - You're right, more than a thousand.

01:00:30   - So mine, 200 megabits would be what?

01:00:34   Divide by five, so like 500 times faster, 600 times faster?

01:00:38   - Yeah, like 400, 446 times faster.

01:00:41   Yeah, so and the scale of things, right,

01:00:43   like you know, it's one thing when you say I have--

01:00:45   - Did you explain to your son that if somebody picked up

01:00:48   one of the phones while you were connected that it would--

01:00:50   - Oh yeah, my wife was like, Flynn was saying,

01:00:52   so you know, so understand honey,

01:00:54   that if you use the phone to connect to the internet,

01:00:57   you couldn't use it for something else.

01:00:58   He's like, "Huh."

01:01:00   He wasn't incredulous.

01:01:00   He was sort of like, "This is, okay."

01:01:03   - If somebody picked up the phone,

01:01:04   it would instantly disconnect you.

01:01:05   And if they quick hung up, it didn't put you back on.

01:01:07   You had to start all over again.

01:01:09   - That's right.

01:01:10   There was that call waiting feature

01:01:11   that was added in some version of v.something.

01:01:15   So that was hilarious.

01:01:17   - Yeah, you could even have your connection drop

01:01:20   just because a call came in.

01:01:22   And you didn't even, even if you don't answer.

01:01:25   - Oh, you didn't even call anything.

01:01:26   Oh, I know what I remember.

01:01:27   So, CenturyLink, so this is the thing, the reason we have Gigabit Internet in Seattle

01:01:31   by our phone company is that they are desperately trying to, they're putting in fiber as fast

01:01:36   as they can possibly string it up in order to replace the income that they're losing

01:01:40   much more rapidly.

01:01:41   So what I'm hoping, I assume, and this is probably rude of me because, I don't know,

01:01:45   it's a company, I assume at one point, at some point, CenturyLink will be unable to

01:01:49   sustain their business model and I will have to switch to Comcast, which now has something

01:01:53   that's cheaper but has its limits. So, I have uncapped internet. When I switched over to

01:01:58   Blackblaze, gosh, a while ago now, I switched over and I had like, I don't know, 1.2 terabytes

01:02:04   to upload. I think it uploaded in like a day or something, like a day and a half. It was

01:02:08   ridiculous. I set it to 10 concurrent threads. It's like, you're uploading at 500 megabits

01:02:13   per second. I'm like, right on! And I had my whole, you know, life back up there. So.

01:02:17   That's crazy.

01:02:18   I know. And so, I'm paying it through the nose for it, but as a home worker and as what I need,

01:02:22   I could have saved money and got 100 megabit per second.

01:02:26   - I would spend it if I could.

01:02:27   We don't have the, as far as I know,

01:02:29   what I have is the fastest internet

01:02:30   that I could possibly get in Philadelphia.

01:02:32   Because we're--

01:02:33   - It'll keep changing though.

01:02:34   Yeah, home of former Adelphia Comcast headquarters.

01:02:37   - Well no, they're still there.

01:02:38   They're building a new tower one block over.

01:02:40   They have the two--

01:02:41   - Yeah, so you gotta--

01:02:42   - Two biggest skyscrapers in town.

01:02:44   Welcome to cable town.

01:02:45   - So, oh my god.

01:02:47   - But that's why we don't have fiber.

01:02:48   There is no fiber in Philadelphia.

01:02:50   Because Comcast keeps it.

01:02:51   - Docsis 3, this requires them,

01:02:54   they have to keep rejiggering channels

01:02:55   'cause they give up certain things,

01:02:56   but people, they don't need as much

01:02:57   and eventually you will be able to get it,

01:02:59   but it'll be subject to the one terabyte,

01:03:01   not cap, but I guess non-overage fee thing that they do.

01:03:07   But it'll come.

01:03:08   I mean, I think it's fascinating.

01:03:09   I thought actually the rollout of much higher speed internet

01:03:12   would take a lot longer than it has

01:03:14   because I thought the incentives were

01:03:15   in keeping it scarce and charging through the nose.

01:03:17   But I think we're seeing just small enough competition

01:03:20   And I think the cellular pricing on some networks,

01:03:23   especially with T-Mobile with its unlimited thing,

01:03:25   even though you can't tether,

01:03:27   like the migration to mobile services

01:03:29   away from desktop computers

01:03:30   and conventional television watching,

01:03:32   especially through tablets,

01:03:33   I think is forcing the wire line,

01:03:37   fiber, cable, DSL firms,

01:03:40   I think they've had to up what they do

01:03:41   faster than they wanted to.

01:03:43   - I'm sitting here looking,

01:03:44   I wanted to see how much internet I've been using.

01:03:47   And I couldn't find the app on my phone.

01:03:49   and I swear to you, I'm telling you the truth.

01:03:51   So you know how Comcast rebranded their home services

01:03:54   as Xfinity, right?

01:03:56   Because the Comcast name is so sullied

01:03:58   that they have to call it something new.

01:04:00   - Something you can't spell, right?

01:04:02   - Right.

01:04:02   But their app that you use to see your account and stuff,

01:04:08   the icon for the app, the icon has some kind of little logo

01:04:12   and then it says on the icon Xfinity.

01:04:14   But the name of the app, this is for the iPhone

01:04:19   so I can't rename the app.

01:04:20   The name of the app is called My Account.

01:04:23   (laughing)

01:04:26   I swear, I swear to God, go to the App Store

01:04:28   and look for it.

01:04:29   I swear to God.

01:04:31   - That's great.

01:04:33   - Like they literally don't even know how you name apps.

01:04:36   Can you, I mean, that they put the name on the icon.

01:04:40   So anyway, my whole problem was that I couldn't,

01:04:43   you can't just go to whatever that,

01:04:46   The, what's the search feature called?

01:04:49   In, you know, when you pull down on the iPhone

01:04:52   and you can search for your apps, whatever you call it.

01:04:54   - Oh, the spotlight thing or whatever spotlight?

01:04:55   - Yeah, so you can't search for Xfinity or Comcast,

01:04:58   you have to search for--

01:04:59   - Oh, 'cause it's not named that.

01:05:01   - It's called My Account.

01:05:02   - It's great spotlight work, too.

01:05:06   - Oh my God, you can't make this stuff up.

01:05:08   Let me see here.

01:05:13   How much, how much internet did I use here?

01:05:16   I don't know, I can't find it in the app.

01:05:18   I don't know, we use a shocking amount.

01:05:20   I thought it was a mistake, I really did.

01:05:22   I thought that that was like, well,

01:05:23   we can't possibly use that much per month,

01:05:25   but I think having a--

01:05:27   - Use over a terabyte?

01:05:29   - I think so, yeah.

01:05:30   Yeah, I think it was--

01:05:31   - I think it's pretty easy.

01:05:32   If you stream video and you have backups,

01:05:34   so do you do internet-based backups, right?

01:05:35   You got backplays or something running.

01:05:36   - I do.

01:05:37   - Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that I am sending

01:05:41   several hundred gigabytes a month with backplays,

01:05:44   I take, if you take photos and you use iCloud photo library and you do anything else, you're just,

01:05:50   I mean, I'll go out, you know, my wife was like, why is my phone falling? I'm like, oh my God,

01:05:54   you have like 15 gigabytes of images on there and she had a sync issue and whatever, but you don't

01:05:59   feel like you're creating that much. And it just adds up so fast. Cause the, and I'm shooting raw

01:06:04   sometimes and on my cameras, cause I like shooting raw and editing later. So yeah, it's easy to add

01:06:10   I think Jason stills out of himself,

01:06:12   but I think he easily crosses a terabyte a month too

01:06:15   with his service.

01:06:16   So then you have to pay the overage fee.

01:06:17   - Yeah, it's, I don't know if I get, I don't know.

01:06:20   I don't even look at my bill.

01:06:22   So I don't know.

01:06:23   I don't know if they're hitting me with overage fees or not.

01:06:25   I just have auto pay on and just pay it.

01:06:28   - They're charging you for a modem

01:06:29   you didn't rent 15 years ago probably.

01:06:30   - No, I finally, you know what?

01:06:31   That was great.

01:06:32   That was one of the good things about moving is that we--

01:06:35   - Finally got rid of it.

01:06:36   - Yeah, well, we like canceled the old account.

01:06:39   And so any kind of thing that went back in my head

01:06:41   that was like a nagging, like am I paying for like

01:06:45   some goofy, you know, like you said,

01:06:47   like a modem 10 years ago or whatever,

01:06:49   like I know that I'm not.

01:06:51   Like I have a good, whatever you want to call it,

01:06:56   a clean, I was gonna say conscience.

01:07:00   - They charged me, I had business service

01:07:02   for obscure reasons, 'cause I moved,

01:07:04   they wanted to charge me.

01:07:05   They have a 75% cancellation fee for your entire contract

01:07:08   if you cancel business service within the term,

01:07:11   which should be illegal and somehow is not,

01:07:14   'cause, so it's ridiculous.

01:07:15   So I moved from a business location to my home

01:07:17   and I kept the business service

01:07:18   and they absorbed all the costs, which was nice.

01:07:20   And eventually, I switched to what I have now.

01:07:23   They started charging $5 a month for a modem

01:07:25   because they didn't have,

01:07:27   you couldn't get like an over-the-counter one

01:07:28   that worked with their business flavor, which was fine.

01:07:30   Then at some point, they upped the rate to like $13 a month

01:07:33   and the modems were like 50 bucks.

01:07:35   So, I finally realized this and canceled it.

01:07:38   Then they just kept keep charging me,

01:07:39   and every month I'd be like, "You charged me again."

01:07:40   They're like, "Oh, we should be able to take that off."

01:07:42   And then at some point I got somebody who's like,

01:07:43   "Oh, this is ridiculous."

01:07:44   I mean, I got someone actually at Comcast

01:07:45   who thought it was ridiculous

01:07:47   that I had to be working that hard to get it off.

01:07:49   Like, somebody must have been new.

01:07:50   And they even think they gave me a credit even.

01:07:52   Like, they pulled it off and it never got charged again

01:07:54   and I got like a $20 credit 'cause it's such a hassle.

01:07:57   But that's their business model.

01:07:59   And that person didn't know, they weren't trained yet.

01:08:01   (laughing)

01:08:03   I was flashing back on the Ryan Block call

01:08:06   with Comcast.

01:08:07   - I can't find my usage.

01:08:08   I have no idea.

01:08:09   (laughing)

01:08:10   - It's the perfect Comcast infinity experience.

01:08:13   - Oh, here it is.

01:08:13   Data usage, here we go.

01:08:15   Data usage overview.

01:08:18   95 gigabytes used this month.

01:08:19   And that's--

01:08:20   (laughing)

01:08:21   - Okay.

01:08:22   - That's August.

01:08:23   - Three days in as we've heard this.

01:08:26   Two and a half days in.

01:08:27   - Right, so--

01:08:27   - Oh, that's good.

01:08:28   That's all right.

01:08:29   That's what it's there for to use it.

01:08:31   - Right, I am getting--

01:08:32   - I am getting, so what they promised me

01:08:34   is 200 megabits down and 10 megabits up.

01:08:37   So the 12 megabits up that I'm seeing over WiFi

01:08:41   is actually more than they promised, but.

01:08:43   - Oh my God.

01:08:44   - That's great, it's cable town.

01:08:45   - Wait till you get better, someday.

01:08:47   - Oh, all right, let's take a break.

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01:11:00   All right, moving on.

01:11:03   What else do we have on the agenda?

01:11:04   So we knocked China out.

01:11:06   You wanna do the Apple Park?

01:11:08   - Yeah, let's talk about that.

01:11:10   Let's talk about that.

01:11:12   - Sometime in the interim between the last episode

01:11:14   of the show and this one, there was a really,

01:11:17   really fascinating and well-written

01:11:19   beautifully photographed profile of Johnny Ive and Apple's new campus, Apple Park, in

01:11:28   the Wall Street Journal's like Weekend magazine. Lots of interesting details. I guess I should

01:11:33   put a link to the article in the show notes. But the part that stuck out, at least in our

01:11:40   community, were the pictures of the workspaces for like, you know, the whatever you want

01:11:46   you wanna call them, the enlisted men,

01:11:48   the rank and file Apple employees.

01:11:51   - Enlisted men, yes.

01:11:55   - It's largely open floor plans,

01:11:58   which is not the way Infinite Loop is set up.

01:12:02   Infinite Loop, now Apple's existing campus,

01:12:04   they have more than a campus.

01:12:07   It's funny 'cause when I was out there

01:12:10   back in April for that little Mac roundtable

01:12:13   that a handful of press people got invited to.

01:12:16   We got to walk around and we went to the new cafeteria,

01:12:22   which is, according to this article,

01:12:25   I guess somebody said that to me when we were at lunch

01:12:28   before we had the meeting.

01:12:30   But it was built as sort of a prototype

01:12:33   of the cafeteria in Apple Park.

01:12:35   There's a new Cafe Max and it's huge and it's spacious

01:12:40   and it must be three stories tall

01:12:43   and the fit and finish is just phenomenal

01:12:46   in the way that everything lines up,

01:12:48   like the floor tiles where they meet.

01:12:51   If you look, meet perfectly where the beams are

01:12:55   that are supporting the weight

01:12:56   and then you look at the ceiling

01:12:57   and there's tiles in the ceiling

01:12:59   and they're not just beautiful,

01:13:00   but where the seams are perfectly aligned,

01:13:03   either center with something else.

01:13:05   There's nothing that you could say,

01:13:07   oh, if you had thought of it,

01:13:08   you'd have that centered between these two things.

01:13:11   Everything like that is like that, it's so beautiful.

01:13:13   But the walk from Infinite Loop, like where you park,

01:13:17   like where the press usually parks,

01:13:19   - Yeah.

01:13:20   - To this cafeteria, it's a couple block walk,

01:13:22   and you just realize as you walk it.

01:13:24   Oh, and the other thing I got to see a lot of too

01:13:27   is 'cause I stayed at a hotel across the street,

01:13:30   I forget the name of it, but it's right there by the,

01:13:33   instead of staying in San Francisco like I usually do,

01:13:35   I was like, I'm just here for Cupertino,

01:13:37   so I'll just stay there.

01:13:39   But the walk from my hotel to where I had to go

01:13:41   in the morning, I don't know,

01:13:42   a nice little 10 minute walk, beautiful,

01:13:44   'cause it's sunny California.

01:13:46   But you realize as you walk down Bandly Boulevard,

01:13:52   every building is Apple's now.

01:13:53   They just bought everything.

01:13:55   Anything that's not like a restaurant is an Apple office.

01:13:58   And so they have a bunch of offices at the quote,

01:14:00   "old campus" that aren't really part of what you would

01:14:03   think of as the old Apple campus.

01:14:05   They're just any office space anywhere down there

01:14:08   they've bought.

01:14:08   But anyway, that is to say,

01:14:12   I still think most of those offices though,

01:14:14   even the ones that are just random real estate pick-ups

01:14:16   that Apple's made in the last 10 years.

01:14:18   - Yeah.

01:14:19   - Most Apple employees have their own office.

01:14:21   That's a very long way of me getting to Apple.

01:14:24   Most people at Apple have their own office.

01:14:27   They always have and they always did

01:14:30   and those who are moving to the Apple campus too now won't.

01:14:34   I'm shocked by it, because it's not like Apple is run by a bunch of managers who are

01:14:43   disconnected from what they do, right?

01:14:46   This is, you know, I try not to say if Steve Jobs were live, X, and I feel like this is

01:14:50   one of those things I'm baffled by, because again, I don't think Apple is confused internally

01:14:56   about how people work best.

01:14:57   They have their own history.

01:14:58   I wonder about that, though, because it seems like Jobs really was deeply

01:15:04   know, they had the spaceship to, you know, famously, his last public appearance was before

01:15:08   the Cupertino City Council to pitch this thing, and they had drawings of it. And so I feel like

01:15:15   he might have, you know, he and Johnny were both on board with this.

01:15:19   Pete: I guess, but it just, I mean, there's decades of really good research about

01:15:24   productivity. I mean, people were throwing up studies left and right, because it's not,

01:15:28   it's like, we all have our own anecdotal experience. And anybody who's a programmer or

01:15:32   writer, I would say virtually, gosh, can I say like 100% of people? That's probably not 100%.

01:15:38   But I don't know anybody who's a programmer or writer, and I'm not disparaging people in other

01:15:42   professions, but I know specifically where your job is to stare at words and type on a screen and

01:15:47   maintain a state of flow. With that, you're not on the phone all the time, where if you're on a

01:15:52   phone, you also need privacy and whatever, but you're not on the phone all the time,

01:15:54   you're not walking around, you're not constantly in meetings with other people. Your job is,

01:15:59   as much of it as you can maintain is a relationship with that screen, right? Is what you're doing.

01:16:06   I don't know anybody who wants to be in a place where people are walking around them. They want

01:16:10   a place where they can close the door and have as little visual disruption as possible, as well as

01:16:15   oral disruption. So, I can't imagine talking to any 10 people in Apple who did those jobs,

01:16:20   and any 10 of them saying, "Yeah, that'd be great. I'd love to be in a place where I have to wear

01:16:24   headphones all the time, and I have to almost wear blinders to keep, you know, from being disrupted

01:16:28   by people walking by."

01:16:28   - And they're not doing it because they're cheaping out.

01:16:31   There's nothing about this project

01:16:34   that is about being cheap.

01:16:35   It is like an Apple product

01:16:37   and like any Johnny Ive obsession.

01:16:39   It is about, you know, maybe not quite spare no expense,

01:16:43   but it is, you know, spare little expense

01:16:46   at making it exactly what they want.

01:16:48   - Yeah, and looking at the photos,

01:16:49   it's not like they're saving space per se.

01:16:51   It looks like there's a lot of really kind of opened spaces

01:16:54   for people to work where you could easily have,

01:16:57   even if it was two people to an office,

01:16:58   which is not uncommon, or some other thing,

01:17:00   at least some spaces that could be closed.

01:17:02   - Yeah, and I think that-- - I don't get it.

01:17:05   - I realize that there are a ton of people listening to us

01:17:10   talk about this now who work in an open floor plan.

01:17:12   I realize that that is certainly the modern way

01:17:14   to do things.

01:17:15   I know that a lot of startups, it's almost assumed

01:17:18   that that's how they're going to lay out the floor plans.

01:17:22   I realize whether it's for cost-cutting reasons

01:17:25   or cultural reasons, because I think startups think

01:17:28   fosters a collaboration or whatever.

01:17:32   The difference is that Apple already has a culture,

01:17:37   an accompanying culture.

01:17:38   And it also is sort of self-selecting,

01:17:41   where if you're a software engineer

01:17:46   and you like having an office,

01:17:51   that might be one of the reasons

01:17:52   you went to work for Apple in the first place.

01:17:56   I don't know, I find this very, very, to me, alarming.

01:17:59   I honestly feel like it's,

01:18:00   and I've been saying for years,

01:18:02   - Oh.

01:18:03   - And I always, I have to give him credit.

01:18:04   Like Guy English had a blog post, oh man,

01:18:07   it might have been, I don't know if it was right before

01:18:09   or after Steve Jobs died, but it was right around that time,

01:18:12   and just like, what are the biggest,

01:18:14   what's the biggest thing Apple should be worried about?

01:18:15   And his take was, number one is talent retention.

01:18:19   The single biggest threat to the--

01:18:20   - Oh God, yes.

01:18:20   - The single biggest threat and concern for Apple

01:18:23   as a company is talent retention.

01:18:25   and that, you know, this was written,

01:18:29   he wrote it at a point where the iPhone was clearly,

01:18:32   you know, it was on that trajectory

01:18:34   where you could see what a sensation, you know,

01:18:36   it was going to be for years to come.

01:18:39   And obviously was built by a fantastic army of employees,

01:18:44   designers, hardware engineers, software engineers.

01:18:47   But that having, you know, that's a conquered thing

01:18:53   and that the type of people who can make a world

01:18:58   where everybody has a flip phone to create the iPhone,

01:19:02   those type of people are drawn to new things.

01:19:06   Let's tackle the next amazing new thing,

01:19:09   not keep making the best, the new 10th iPhone.

01:19:13   Obviously, there's a ton of interest.

01:19:16   If we have time, we might even get to talk about it.

01:19:18   There's a ton of interest in the 10th iPhone.

01:19:22   But you could lose those people if they're bored.

01:19:26   And there's all sorts of other reasons

01:19:27   that people might leave companies,

01:19:29   is that there's other thriving companies in the area

01:19:30   that might offer them more money, et cetera, et cetera.

01:19:33   So we could spend a whole show listing the reasons,

01:19:36   the challenges that Apple has

01:19:38   at maintaining the talent they have.

01:19:41   Where they work, your work environment, is absolutely huge.

01:19:47   Because it's every day, it's all day, every day.

01:19:49   It's one of the biggest, to me,

01:19:51   It's one of the biggest things possible.

01:19:52   And think about the people who work at Apple.

01:19:57   That it's not just like any random,

01:19:59   if they have 10,000 software engineers.

01:20:02   Well, it's not just any random 10,000 software engineers

01:20:05   from the area, it's a self-selecting group

01:20:08   of the sort of people who care about the things

01:20:10   that Apple cares about, which is like, how nice is this?

01:20:14   Is this app nice to look at?

01:20:18   Is the user interface logical?

01:20:21   Apple draws people who care about those things.

01:20:23   And it's good for Apple that they do

01:20:26   because then it reinforces,

01:20:29   when the quality of your app or the design of your app

01:20:33   draws engineers who are interested in designing nice apps,

01:20:36   it makes the apps even better, right?

01:20:38   Well, one of the things that people who care

01:20:41   about stuff like that care about

01:20:42   is they care about their work environment.

01:20:44   I mean, I'm sure, I know that there are people,

01:20:47   I got email from them when I wrote about this,

01:20:49   that there are people who are like,

01:20:50   "Ah, I work in an open office,

01:20:52   "and I don't really like it.

01:20:53   "I'd love to have my own office, but I don't care."

01:20:55   It's all right, I put headphones on and I don't care.

01:20:58   - Although, well, some of the open offices,

01:21:01   I mean, the one advantage of cubicle farms

01:21:03   is that you lose some of the visual clutter

01:21:05   and some of the noise clutter too.

01:21:06   So if you're literally in an open office,

01:21:08   and I've seen, I think Wired,

01:21:10   when they published that big thing

01:21:11   of the $3 million office space they opened

01:21:13   that looked like it was for a photo shoot a few years ago,

01:21:17   editor has since left, you know, and they were laying people off after that. It's great optics.

01:21:21   Great optics. Anyway, that space had a lot of spaces that looked intolerable to me because

01:21:26   you're just, you know, you're going to be cheek to jowl with other people. There's no—you're

01:21:29   just sitting at like long tables and things. I see some of that in some of the Apple photos,

01:21:33   too, where you're just going to be like among people.

01:21:35   Yeah, it's not even a cubicle. It's like you're—

01:21:38   No. Cubicle would offend Johnny's sensibility. I have a funny story that's like, it's an anecdote

01:21:43   that I would relate to this, which is, my grandfather, one of my grandfather's first

01:21:47   cousins, so my first cousin twice removed, was the first chair, or sorry, second chair,

01:21:51   oboist in the New York Philharmonic for many decades. And he came through, when I was growing

01:21:56   up in Eugene, Oregon, the New York Philharmonic, came through Eugene, Oregon. We had this beautiful

01:22:00   new convention, or concert hall, and the local whatever boosting group managed to book them.

01:22:08   And so we got to hear him play and spend some time with him. And he said, "I love your hall so much,

01:22:12   You can hear everybody, you can hear every other instrument. He said, "You know,

01:22:15   Avery Fisher Hall, which is the famous hall that was built for the Philharmonic,

01:22:18   was originally called Philharmonic Hall, was built in 19—" I was looking this up,

01:22:22   it was built in 1962. He said, "We were on tour when the hall, they were interviewing the architect

01:22:29   who was building the hall, and he said, 'Wood is an overrated material for concert halls.'" So,

01:22:33   we said, "Oh, no." And we get back there and we play in the hall and it's terrible. It's so dead

01:22:36   you can't hear people, two people away. And I found an article from 1974, I just searched on

01:22:42   Lady Official Hall, 1974, this article in the New York Times is discussing what a disaster

01:22:48   this space is. And they made some changes over the years, whatever. But he said,

01:22:53   "We know there's concrete in the floor. They swear there isn't. It took many years." I think it was

01:22:56   only 10 years ago they were renovating the hall, maybe 15. They discovered there was concrete under

01:23:01   the stage. They had been told there was no concrete. They pulled it out and the halls,

01:23:06   you know, acoustics change.

01:23:07   And I was like, it's such a perfect example.

01:23:10   We're gonna make a beautiful new conference hall,

01:23:11   it's specifically designed,

01:23:13   and you're telling the people who know what they need,

01:23:16   no, no, no, no, you don't need to hear, you know,

01:23:18   wood is an overrated material for acoustical properties.

01:23:21   Like, ah!

01:23:22   So I sort of feel like I'm hearing that story right now.

01:23:26   - I got tons of feedback from Apple employees

01:23:31   who either read my settings or maybe listened to the show.

01:23:34   And if any of you are out there

01:23:35   who have an opinion on this, I would love to hear from you and you can trust me.

01:23:39   I'm proud to say that there's not one person who's ever told me anything in confidence

01:23:47   that might harm their job if I publicize it or whatever. Not one person has ever told me anything

01:23:54   in confidence that they have come to regret telling me. I know how to keep my mouth shut.

01:23:58   So anyway, if any of you at Apple have interesting stories to tell about this

01:24:02   open office space, I'm all ears.

01:24:05   - I'm particularly interested if Apple did,

01:24:08   because you know Apple famously doesn't do focus groups

01:24:10   for its products, did they have stakeholder meetings

01:24:13   with programmers and marketing or whatever

01:24:15   to ask them what they wanted from a space?

01:24:17   I'm guessing not.

01:24:18   - Here's a story I heard that I cannot confirm

01:24:20   because it was third hand, so I cannot confirm it.

01:24:23   It could be totally false, but it sounds true to me

01:24:27   and I think it would be easily checked

01:24:29   because if it's true, people will know about this.

01:24:34   But I heard that when the floor plans were announced,

01:24:38   that there was, I don't know, either a meeting,

01:24:41   or however it got were Gianni Cerucci's team,

01:24:43   that he's in charge of Apple Silicon,

01:24:46   the A10, the A11, all of their custom silicon.

01:24:50   Obviously a very successful group at Apple,

01:24:53   and a large and growing one with a lot on their shoulders.

01:24:56   When he was shown the floor plans,

01:24:57   he was more or less just, fuck that, fuck you, fuck this,

01:25:02   this is bullshit. - Oh my God.

01:25:04   - And they built his team, their own building,

01:25:07   off to the side on the campus.

01:25:08   So they're not even in-- - Oh my God.

01:25:10   - Not only are they, they're not going along

01:25:12   with the open floor plans, but that Suruji's team

01:25:14   is in their own building.

01:25:15   And they might, maybe internally, they're saying

01:25:18   it's for security or that it's, you know,

01:25:21   that they're just off, you know,

01:25:24   that there's a logical reason for it,

01:25:25   But my understanding is that the building was built

01:25:30   because Suruji was like, fuck this,

01:25:32   and my team isn't working like this.

01:25:34   - Don't I remember too, the spaceship

01:25:36   is already totally outstripped, right?

01:25:38   Like they built it, they already have more people, yeah.

01:25:41   So that's gonna be a fraction of the,

01:25:43   can I talk to Amazon for a second?

01:25:45   This will sound like a segue or whatever,

01:25:47   but it's really about this.

01:25:48   I'm working on a story right now for Fast Company.

01:25:50   I'm not giving away a secret by, it's not out yet,

01:25:52   but I'm looking into like, it's not a secret,

01:25:55   nothing proprietary about it. It's just, I'm living in Seattle. John, I don't know if you know,

01:26:00   if you've seen any of the coverage about what's happening to my city? Does it make the newspaper?

01:26:04   Like, okay, it's crazy.

01:26:05   I know we were just talking about it privately, but I did see it somewhere. I did.

01:26:09   Outrageous. We have more cranes, we have almost twice as many cranes in our skyline right now in

01:26:14   the city as Los Angeles, which has six times the area of Seattle. We have more, a higher

01:26:20   percentage of open jobs in software and related fields than Silicon Valley. We have, you know,

01:26:26   we have the richest or second richest, actually sorry, we have the first and second richest people

01:26:30   in the world in our area. We have—

01:26:32   Trenton Larkin That would be Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates in that order.

01:26:35   David Zucchino Yeah, they're competing right there. Well, except I think it shifted back,

01:26:39   like they lost a buck—

01:26:40   Trenton Larkin Ebs and flows by Microsoft and Amazon stock price.

01:26:44   David Zucchino We have so much construction going on. So,

01:26:46   We had this minimum wage debate, and we got a socialist on the city council, and she is

01:26:51   a firebrand, and she reignited this thing in our liberal progressive town, which is

01:26:55   very proud of itself for being liberal progressive.

01:26:57   And, but hey, you know, wages!

01:26:59   They're like, "No, no, no, we don't want to rock the vote, no honor buck."

01:27:01   She comes in, she makes this her thing, and then everybody takes it up, because they don't

01:27:06   want to be left behind.

01:27:07   We now have, we are on track, we have a $15 an hour minimum wage if you're a large employer,

01:27:13   500 or more employees, and you don't pay towards medical benefits.

01:27:16   If you're a small employer in Dew, it's 11.

01:27:18   We're on track, we have a staggered introduction.

01:27:21   So it's inflation-based, so it's gonna keep going up.

01:27:24   In a few years, it's gonna be like $18 an hour.

01:27:26   It's gonna keep going up from there.

01:27:28   So, and everyone predicted doom and despair,

01:27:30   all the restaurants would close, whatever.

01:27:31   We have more restaurants now, more openings.

01:27:33   All the restaurants, the restaurateurs

01:27:35   who threatened to leave have opened more off.

01:27:38   You know, it's hilarious.

01:27:39   We have a shortage of short-order cooks.

01:27:42   We're becoming aspen in terms of people being able to live

01:27:45   in the city affordably and work in the city, even though the wages have gone up.

01:27:49   You know, the $15 an hour is a starting point for these larger companies, and you can be like

01:27:55   a bottle washer, and you can get a rate of $16, $17, $18 an hour. So, we're in the middle of this

01:28:00   weird, crazy, overwhelming prosperity. Our housing prices went up by more in the last period of time,

01:28:07   like 18% versus like 5% nationwide. Like, everything is out of control here. And Amazon,

01:28:13   And I say this with all happiness, too.

01:28:15   Amazon is, they have two giant buildings downtown.

01:28:19   They built these signature sphere, biosphere thing

01:28:22   that's actually, I was appalled by when I first saw the plans.

01:28:25   It's actually really cool.

01:28:26   I've been letterpress-printing a book at a school

01:28:30   that is like two blocks from the Amazon headquarters,

01:28:33   and they're building a third big tower.

01:28:35   They have like 30-something buildings.

01:28:37   They own, Amazon is leasing almost 17%

01:28:39   of all office space in Seattle right now,

01:28:42   of all office space.

01:28:43   not just downtown. The whole pace, they have 8 million square feet and they're on track to

01:28:48   like 10 in a couple years. They have 10,000 open jobs in our state. I think that's just

01:28:53   like white collar jobs, not including, I mean, just in our state, I think mostly downtown.

01:28:58   So, the pace, it's just unbelievable. But the most interesting thing to me is they chose to

01:29:03   stay downtown. They were kind of always around there. Like, Jeff founded the business in his

01:29:10   his garage in Bellevue, which is on the east side,

01:29:12   not Seattle proper, and that was just a temporary thing.

01:29:14   But then they had an office down south

01:29:17   of what used to be the Kingdome, we still call it Soto,

01:29:19   next to Pecos Pit, the best barbecue in Seattle.

01:29:21   Then they were in the beautiful

01:29:23   heroin district of Seattle.

01:29:24   That's when I worked there for about six months,

01:29:26   11 years ago.

01:29:28   We were across the street from the methadone clinic.

01:29:31   And then they started, then they moved to the,

01:29:33   the Lex Luthor building on the hill.

01:29:35   It's the tallest building, or the highest point in Seattle

01:29:37   with a giant building on it.

01:29:38   It's an old medical center.

01:29:39   They immediately outstripped that.

01:29:41   Then they started having all these, they started

01:29:42   leasing all these Paul Allen buildings, and then

01:29:45   they have all this stuff built.

01:29:46   So, Vulcan and some other local, Vulcan is Paul

01:29:48   Allen's real estate company.

01:29:50   They've been selling property to Amazon, other

01:29:52   local contractors.

01:29:53   Anyway, so it's this massive, massive building

01:29:56   boom, and it's not just Amazon, it's Google and

01:29:58   Facebook have bigger and bigger operations.

01:30:00   I was in Facebook's kind of small temporary

01:30:03   offices, which I think has like a thousand people

01:30:05   in it, that's not quite in downtown, and they're

01:30:08   and they're building a big, so it's out of control.

01:30:10   But here's my thing, they're downtown

01:30:14   and Apple is in Cupertino, Facebook's in what,

01:30:17   Mountain View or something?

01:30:18   They're out in the middle of nowhere.

01:30:19   All these other companies are often the burbs

01:30:22   'cause they got founded out there and they grew

01:30:23   and there's no, they're not part of the life of the city.

01:30:26   So, this whole long thing is employee retention,

01:30:29   a lot of young people and a lot of people looking

01:30:31   for a change in life who are not necessarily young, young,

01:30:34   they want to be in a city and they're making wages

01:30:36   where they can afford to have a condo and apartment

01:30:38   that's very nice and it's within walking distance

01:30:41   or we have streetcars and light rail now and all this stuff.

01:30:44   So being, you know, the spaceship in the suburb

01:30:47   is maybe not the best strategy for future retention.

01:30:49   - Seattle's not cheap, but it's the,

01:30:51   like housing is not crazy like San Francisco.

01:30:53   San Francisco housing.

01:30:54   - Yeah, we're like half or something.

01:30:56   We're like half as much, I think,

01:30:57   but it's growing very rapidly, but we're still much--

01:31:01   - But that's a big, and it is a recruiting problem

01:31:03   and it certainly is true for the younger you are,

01:31:05   the more likely you are to wanna live in a city

01:31:07   and it's a big problem for these valley companies

01:31:09   because they can shove all the money they want

01:31:12   and make the buses as nice as they can,

01:31:14   and they are, by all accounts, very nice buses,

01:31:17   so that if you live in San Francisco,

01:31:21   you can catch the Apple bus instead of driving to work

01:31:24   and be annoyed.

01:31:25   - Yeah, but you're still on,

01:31:26   it's like still an hour plus on the bus, right?

01:31:28   - Right. - Something or more,

01:31:29   there's an hour at least on the--

01:31:30   - It depends on the time of day.

01:31:31   - Which is a lot of Amazon employees,

01:31:33   there are a lot of Amazon employees

01:31:34   who are living in an apartment

01:31:36   like, a view of the water and they go downstairs and they walk a few blocks and they're at work,

01:31:40   which may be healthy or not, but, or we have, like, there's all these condos, I mean,

01:31:44   I've lived in Seattle for 20 something years and I much prefer, talking to non-profits too,

01:31:50   about how this has affected them. Non-profits serve like, endangered communities, women who

01:31:55   need shelter and homeless, voting homelessness and so forth. And everyone's saying the same thing

01:32:00   as like, this is really hard on everybody, the housing increase, but would we prefer the reverse?

01:32:04   no, like less money, no growth, no jobs, no, that's terrible.

01:32:09   So we can, with money and resources,

01:32:11   we can kinda help people and lift up folks,

01:32:14   'cause there's the work there for them,

01:32:15   but it is like being in one of those cartoons

01:32:19   where there's going bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum,

01:32:21   bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum,

01:32:22   in the background the whole time.

01:32:24   - So anyway, I understand, I don't know

01:32:26   what the original Apple plan was with the new campus.

01:32:28   With it was, if the original idea was that almost all

01:32:32   Apple employees would move there,

01:32:33   And they would like, I thought it was, I think, I think so.

01:32:37   And I seem to recall that Jobs kind of tackled it the way he tackled, you know,

01:32:43   his deep, deep involvement with Pixar's, um, campus, you know, and that he, you

01:32:50   know, which by all accounts is, is, uh, you know, Pixar people love their, their

01:32:54   building and they love, you know, there's these ideas that he had that, you know,

01:32:59   Everybody would have to--

01:33:01   restrooms are located strategically in a way

01:33:05   that you're going to bump into people who aren't just

01:33:07   from your team and stuff like that.

01:33:10   And that all of these ideas that he had worked out.

01:33:14   And I think that that was sort of the idea,

01:33:16   a lot of the idea of Apple Park, or at least the spaceship,

01:33:20   that it would be designed in a way that

01:33:21   would foster people bumping into each other and blah, blah, blah.

01:33:25   But my understanding now is that Apple

01:33:27   isn't leaving any office space.

01:33:30   I don't, maybe some of the--

01:33:30   - No, I think that's what I heard is,

01:33:32   they're keeping, I think they're keeping everything

01:33:34   'cause they've grown faster than they could've,

01:33:35   I mean, I thought they were gonna try to get

01:33:37   almost all their core teams,

01:33:39   so maybe there's outlying teams or different groups,

01:33:42   or maybe, I don't know, maybe marketing wouldn't be in there.

01:33:43   I mean, sorry, marketing would be not, but.

01:33:46   - There might be some small,

01:33:48   some of the small buildings that you wouldn't think of

01:33:50   as Apple buildings when you drive down the street

01:33:52   in Cupertino, maybe they'll get rid of,

01:33:54   but the main Infinite Loop campus

01:33:56   is gonna remain fully occupied.

01:33:57   - Yeah, I think it's, this is actually one more

01:34:01   Amazon point related to that though is,

01:34:03   because Apple's in, you know, they're in a suburb

01:34:05   and they're not, I mean, you've walked there,

01:34:07   I mean, one of your groups is in one spot,

01:34:08   but there's not enough restaurants

01:34:10   to absorb this many people.

01:34:12   And Amazon specifically, I met with the VP of real estate,

01:34:15   they specifically designed their facilities,

01:34:17   they can only feed about a third,

01:34:19   there's only like room to have a third of the staff

01:34:22   actually eat lunch inside the buildings.

01:34:24   And they have all these restaurants and cafeterias

01:34:26   and whatever, so they are essentially either forcing

01:34:29   people to bring food in, and people who are working

01:34:31   in these environments typically buy food,

01:34:32   I don't know how they bring it in.

01:34:34   Because they're making, they're paying piles of money,

01:34:36   there's a lot of eat out, so there's a bazillion

01:34:38   restaurants, and they also encourage local restaurants.

01:34:41   So it's not just big chains, there's a lot of like

01:34:43   one-off or small chains all across this neighborhood,

01:34:46   and it's part of their philosophy of creating this,

01:34:49   you know, downtown, or this environment.

01:34:51   And Apple, again, by being in the burbs, it's like,

01:34:53   I don't know if you've been to Microsoft's campus,

01:34:55   but it's kind of this very self-contained world.

01:34:58   - I have never stepped foot in the state of Washington.

01:35:01   - No, well, someday you will.

01:35:02   Let's give you a tour around here.

01:35:03   - I can't explain why.

01:35:04   - Stuff doesn't happen here.

01:35:06   - I probably have more friends, and I really do.

01:35:11   Enormous, Brent Simmons is up there.

01:35:15   I know a bunch of people who have Omni, Moltz.

01:35:19   - Oh, that's funny.

01:35:20   I didn't really never been here.

01:35:21   Well, you'll have to come out at some point.

01:35:22   jeez, with you and Moltz, I mean, it's like half the regular rotation of the talk shows

01:35:25   from last year. But I've never had reason to go there. I've never had reason to go there.

01:35:30   Pete: Talk show live.

01:35:30   But Microsoft, Microsoft's off in the suburbs. They started out there, they were kind of,

01:35:34   you know, they were suburban kids that started Microsoft and they stayed out there. But you know,

01:35:38   you can drive places from campus, there's some stuff within walking distance, but not very much.

01:35:42   So, it's really an insular thing. And I just think, again, I think this is one of the reasons

01:35:47   Amazon built its whole thing. They planned this partly not just to have room for stuff,

01:35:52   but they plan it partly to appeal. They are creating a lifestyle mall of sorts around their

01:35:57   offices. And they're saying, when you come to work for us, you're not going to be off in a sterile

01:36:01   thing with an hour commute away. I mean, you can choose to live out of town, you can choose to live

01:36:04   wherever, and they're paying highly competitive salaries so people can choose to live essentially

01:36:08   wherever. But like, and they've been underwriting, they underwrite some streetcar service, they've

01:36:12   been helping promote transit taxes and ballot measures. So, like, you can take streetcars

01:36:17   all, like to Amazon from all these different places now. It's a very different thing than this

01:36:21   I come to the spaceship, or maybe the spaceship,

01:36:23   maybe it'll be in our old building,

01:36:25   and we're off in the suburbs, so.

01:36:27   - I don't know, I do think, judging from the private

01:36:32   feedback I've gotten from some Apple employees,

01:36:34   there is, I'm 100% certain there's going to be

01:36:37   some degree of attrition based on the open floor plans

01:36:42   where good employees are going to choose to leave

01:36:45   because they don't wanna work there.

01:36:47   And they don't wanna-- - I can just take--

01:36:49   - They don't want, there's no,

01:36:50   and if they don't find,

01:36:52   and like the one email I got from somebody was perfect,

01:36:55   and it's perfectly Apple person sensibility.

01:37:00   He's not screaming, he's not angry,

01:37:02   it is what it is, and he's dealing with it.

01:37:05   He said, "I'm working on something."

01:37:07   It's a new thing that I think is gonna blow people's minds

01:37:11   when we ship, and like a typical Apple employee,

01:37:15   it offers me no clue what it is,

01:37:17   and of course I don't ask,

01:37:18   'cause I know he's not gonna tell me

01:37:19   This is how it is.

01:37:20   But he's working on some team.

01:37:22   He's working on something cool.

01:37:24   He definitely wants to see it ship,

01:37:26   but his team is moving to Apple Campus too.

01:37:29   And then once they ship, if he doesn't like it, he's out.

01:37:32   And he's been there, he's an 18-year veteran of Apple.

01:37:34   He's been at Apple for 18 years.

01:37:36   And I got a couple of others from people like that too.

01:37:40   I'm not gonna quit before they move me there.

01:37:42   I'm gonna see what it's like,

01:37:45   but if it's as shitty as I think it's gonna be, I'm out.

01:37:49   yep, I can under, yep, it's like, what's it like to go to work every day and have your entire day, you know, disrupted, if that's what it turns out to be?

01:37:57   It may be that there, that what we've seen isn't as full a realization of what it's going to look like, but it's clear there aren't a lot of offices with doors, and even the spaces that look like they're closed spaces are all glass!

01:38:08   Look, I have, I discovered in my relatively old age here, I clearly have sensory processing disorder.

01:38:14   And it's a very interesting thing, I'm trying to, and it's very common among folks who are

01:38:17   programmers and engineer types like myself. I've done a lot of programming in my life,

01:38:21   I have a mind for it, and there's an affinity, I think, between different things. And I'm super

01:38:27   highly attentive to anything. So, high registration it's called. And so, I see and it's very hard for

01:38:33   I get keyed up and I try to work in a co-working space.

01:38:37   I really like the people and the space.

01:38:39   It was open, it was very affordable,

01:38:41   and even with headphones and a screen I was staring at,

01:38:43   it was just too much stuff around me.

01:38:45   I could not focus, I had to go back

01:38:46   into my quiet, day-lit basement.

01:38:48   So I have a lot of sympathy for the folks

01:38:50   who are gonna be in that environment.

01:38:51   - I think I have a touch of that.

01:38:54   You know what I do?

01:38:55   I cannot help but look at a TV.

01:38:58   And so whenever we go out to eat as a family,

01:39:00   I strategically, they don't make a big deal out of it.

01:39:03   It's not like I'm a princess on the P,

01:39:08   and I absolutely have to have a seat with no view of a TV.

01:39:11   But I do try, when we get like, oh, here's your table,

01:39:14   I try to pick a seat where I don't have a sight line

01:39:16   to a TV, because if I do, I'm going to be looking at it,

01:39:19   and my wife's gonna be like, what are you looking at?

01:39:20   You don't even know if it's like a basketball game

01:39:22   or something, you know, of two teams I don't care about.

01:39:24   Like, why are you watching that?

01:39:25   And it's like, I don't know.

01:39:27   I don't know, but there's a TV in my view line,

01:39:31   I'm going to be looking at it.

01:39:33   - There's a book called "Too Loud, Too Bright"

01:39:35   that I've been reading and marking up.

01:39:36   I don't mark up books, and this one I have,

01:39:37   I've never done it before, my wife's like,

01:39:39   "You should mark this up."

01:39:40   I have highlighters and like those post-it tags

01:39:43   all over the thing, because I'm just, it's like all,

01:39:45   it's like I feel like I've been written in a book.

01:39:48   It's a bunch of different traits you have about yourself

01:39:49   you didn't realize were actually all connected

01:39:51   to one neurological state, and there's ways to train yourself

01:39:54   out of responsiveness to it, so I haven't gotten

01:39:57   to that part yet, but it's, you desensitize yourself

01:40:00   so you can function better in the world.

01:40:01   If you walk into Costco or Ikea

01:40:03   and you need to go cry in a corner,

01:40:05   you may have, well, you may be just a normal person also,

01:40:07   but you may have the sensory processing as well.

01:40:10   - I have a friend who works at Apple

01:40:11   who I know is not looking for,

01:40:13   is definitely on a team that's moving to AC2.

01:40:16   I keep calling it AC2.

01:40:17   I can't get used to Apple Park

01:40:19   and is not looking forward to it.

01:40:20   He has not, I don't think he's,

01:40:23   he hasn't said anything like,

01:40:24   if I don't like it, I'm leaving.

01:40:25   He just thinks it sucks.

01:40:26   And so when I linked on Daring Fireball,

01:40:29   I don't know if you saw it, but I--

01:40:31   - I saw that.

01:40:32   It was like you Rick rolled me and I'm like,

01:40:34   "Wait, what are these?"

01:40:34   Like, oh--

01:40:35   - I love a post like that.

01:40:36   It's like to really make this like a director's commentary,

01:40:39   like me talking about how I write during Fireball.

01:40:41   So I wrote, I had a post, a link post, very short.

01:40:45   The headline was video footage

01:40:47   from one of the open workspaces in Apple Park.

01:40:49   And I wrote, "Really does seem like a different vibe

01:40:51   "from the Infinite Loop Campus.

01:40:53   "Some engineers are getting their own offices,

01:40:56   "but they don't seem great either."

01:40:58   - Oh my God.

01:40:59   Goes to footage from Terry Gilliam's masterpiece Brazil and there's a great tracking shot of this open area

01:41:05   It's it if you've not seen Brazil it is it is 1980

01:41:10   It's like that the pitch is let's do 1984, but make it will make it a comedy

01:41:14   Except it's a it's such a great film except. It's actually a more profound tragedy at the end than 1984

01:41:21   Sidebar have you seen the made-for-tv edit? Yes? Yeah?

01:41:25   I used to be upset when I was in the 90s.

01:41:27   - Travesty.

01:41:28   - When I was in the 90s,

01:41:30   I actually thought maybe I would like to be a filmmaker.

01:41:33   I really have such a profound love of movies.

01:41:36   And a friend of mine and I from college,

01:41:38   we got deep and we just started,

01:41:41   like when our eyes were opened

01:41:43   to the great world of cinema

01:41:46   and that it was that,

01:41:49   and that old movies,

01:41:50   there are old movies that are every bit as good

01:41:53   or better than new movies.

01:41:54   Just don't let the production quality,

01:41:58   or like the black and white, you know,

01:41:59   like deep dive, like watch 20 Hitchcock films,

01:42:02   watch, you know, just went on benders like that.

01:42:06   But Brazil became like one of our obsessions,

01:42:09   where like we watched it over and over again,

01:42:11   and then when we found out there was a terrible TV edit,

01:42:13   we're like, well, we have to watch it.

01:42:15   And it was great though, because we had seen, you know,

01:42:18   Gilliam's vision of it so many times

01:42:20   that we knew it by heart, and so.

01:42:22   - Yeah.

01:42:23   It's not just the brutal parts of the TV edit.

01:42:26   It was like even the little things.

01:42:27   Like, oh my God, why would they take that out?

01:42:30   But anyway, I linked to that and it's a very great movie.

01:42:34   Anybody listening to this, if you've never seen it,

01:42:36   Brazil, I swear to God, move it to the top of your like,

01:42:39   I don't know if it's on Netflix, but if you, go watch it.

01:42:42   It is such a wonderful, wonderful movie,

01:42:44   but it's a dystopic, open floor plan workspace.

01:42:47   - Tiny admission is, I used to get a little high as a kid

01:42:51   back when, before it was legal in my state,

01:42:54   in various states, and I was a huge Brazil fan.

01:42:56   I'd watched it a bunch of times, and it comes on TV,

01:42:58   and I'm at some friend's house, and we're toasted,

01:43:01   and I actually thought I had a psychotic break,

01:43:03   'cause I watched the TV, it was the first time

01:43:04   I'd seen the made-for-TV version,

01:43:06   and it didn't end the way I remembered,

01:43:07   and I thought, oh my God, I'm hallucinating.

01:43:08   (laughing)

01:43:09   And I was also like, it's terrible,

01:43:11   my hallucination is so awful.

01:43:12   What is my brain doing to me? - Nancy Reagan was right.

01:43:15   (laughing)

01:43:17   No, but anyway, I sent, after I posted that,

01:43:20   I sent my friend at Apple a DM and I just wrote,

01:43:23   (laughing)

01:43:24   I just wrote, this was for you, and sent a link to it.

01:43:27   And then he wrote, he wrote,

01:43:29   that was DF's best post of the week.

01:43:31   (laughing)

01:43:33   So anyway, Apple employees are definitely,

01:43:36   have strong opinions about this open floor plan

01:43:39   and for the most part, it ranges from hatred

01:43:42   to at best ambivalence.

01:43:45   This is something to keep an eye on,

01:43:48   in my opinion, moving forward.

01:43:49   Anyway, I gotta take a break here.

01:43:50   I gotta thank our next sponsor.

01:43:51   We gotta wrap up the show.

01:43:52   We've been getting close to the end here.

01:43:55   And I wanna thank our friends at Squarespace.

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01:44:07   I can't explain strongly enough

01:44:11   that Squarespace is literally

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01:44:16   You can register your domain there.

01:44:18   They host the site.

01:44:20   They have the CMS so that if it's like a blog

01:44:23   and you have updates, you do it all through Squarespace

01:44:26   and it's a great interface for something like that.

01:44:28   You can host a podcast there.

01:44:30   You can have a store there.

01:44:33   And if you have a store, if you need to have stuff to sell,

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01:44:50   and I wanna start entering SKUs and pictures of the items.

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01:45:01   just how many of the websites you use on a daily basis

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01:45:07   I swear to God, go look at Pixar.com.

01:45:12   Pixar.com and then view source on it

01:45:14   and you will find in the source

01:45:16   that it's a Squarespace site.

01:45:17   I don't know if the whole Pixar.com is.

01:45:20   I wouldn't be surprised if they have parts that are not,

01:45:22   but the homepage with the big cars three thing

01:45:24   is made with Squarespace.

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01:45:33   is that they think, 'cause this is what I would think

01:45:35   if I was out there listening to me

01:45:37   tell you to try Squarespace.

01:45:38   I would think, eh, I don't wanna pick from 10 templates

01:45:41   and all 10 of 'em look like a Squarespace site.

01:45:43   You know, like back in the day when you'd install WordPress

01:45:46   or something like that,

01:45:47   and there were only like three default themes.

01:45:49   And so as soon as you looked at a site,

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01:45:52   "'cause it's a default theme."

01:45:53   Squarespace is so profoundly open to design ideas

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01:46:08   The website is squarespace.com/talkshow.

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01:46:20   Try them both.

01:46:21   Try slash grouper or slash talk show and one of them is going to give you 10% off your

01:46:25   first order.

01:46:27   My thanks to Squarespace.

01:46:28   You want to talk about some letterpress?

01:46:30   Yes, let's do that.

01:46:32   I want to do that because I love, love, love getting people to pitch their things on this.

01:46:37   So you, tell me about, you've got a book that is on the cusp of coming out?

01:46:42   It's, yeah, well, it's been a very interesting thing is I've been, I'm printing a book

01:46:49   of reporting I did about, I say reporting, I keep thinking of saying like, well, it's

01:46:54   a book of writing on it.

01:46:55   It's like, no, these are actually reported pieces I did.

01:46:57   Some appeared in the Atlantic, some appeared at Meh.com, which has had me write stuff for

01:47:02   their forums and some I've written for the book or for other places.

01:47:06   And it's reporting on things like the history of unintentionally, or intentionally blank

01:47:10   pages, which dates back to like the 1470s, it turns out.

01:47:14   People started to mark this page intentionally blank.

01:47:16   And like, whether, I wrote a piece for the Atlantic about quotation marks, whether we're

01:47:21   going to stop seeing curly quotation marks, they might disappear because people have lost

01:47:25   the desire or finesse and was there ever a reason.

01:47:28   And so, I collected, I was like, you know, I want to do something with this.

01:47:30   I want to do something for myself that's new and creative in 2017.

01:47:34   And I called up the woman who runs the letterpress program at the School of Visual Concepts here

01:47:40   in Seattle, who had taken a letterpress class from, and I'd done some letterpress back in

01:47:43   the 1980s also.

01:47:44   You know, I've been a graphic designer for 30 years, I've studied graphic design, I've

01:47:49   designed books, and I'm like, you know, I called her to see if she had any ideas about

01:47:51   where I could get something like this printed, thinking some offset or digital printing thing,

01:47:55   and she said, "You should print it on letterpress, you should be our designer in residence for

01:48:00   this year, we're starting the program, you should be our first person."

01:48:02   I'm like, "Okay, great!"

01:48:03   And so, I threw myself into classes, got up to speed, designed the book, and then the last,

01:48:09   till about last week, I spent six weeks printing the book by hand on a proof press that's about

01:48:17   70 years old, flatbed proof press, and it's getting close to being done. I've got to do a

01:48:23   little more work. I have endpapers to print and a cover, and then I've got a bookbinder who's

01:48:27   actually putting the thing together for me and handing off that piece of expertise.

01:48:30   But that's the project.

01:48:31   - That's the project. - The status,

01:48:32   and so you did a Kickstarter,

01:48:34   and you only sold 100 copies of the book.

01:48:38   - Yeah, it's a numbered,

01:48:39   signed, numbered, limited edition run.

01:48:42   - All right, I gotta-- - And I'll have some.

01:48:43   - I gotta tell you something right now.

01:48:45   - Yeah. - I gotta tell you.

01:48:47   I knew you were gonna do this.

01:48:49   I think you told me before you did it,

01:48:50   and I'm right up my alley.

01:48:52   I love, number one, I'm just a fan of your work,

01:48:55   but I love graphic design. - Thank you.

01:48:57   - I love the idea of doing something by hand,

01:48:59   so of course I was on board.

01:49:01   And then the Kickstarter came and went,

01:49:02   and I just wasn't paying attention,

01:49:04   and I didn't get in, so I didn't get a copy of your book.

01:49:07   - Well, you know, we'll have some artist proofs afterwards.

01:49:10   So I'm gonna have to make, so it's this whole,

01:49:12   so actually, I'll tell you about this too,

01:49:14   'cause I thought this was, this is actually great

01:49:15   for your own-- - Can you hook a brother

01:49:16   up, Glenn? - I can, I will have, yeah.

01:49:18   So you gotta do, there's like a yield issue,

01:49:20   because this is the first time,

01:49:21   I've never printed a book before.

01:49:22   I've done other letterpress projects, the scale of this.

01:49:25   And for starters, I didn't, this is not a handset book.

01:49:28   This is a book I'm using, a process called

01:49:30   which is a technology used for printing packaging

01:49:33   materials mostly, but there's a subculture of it

01:49:36   that uses the same material.

01:49:38   There's service bureaus, and you, so I designed

01:49:40   this in InDesign, picked appropriate fonts that

01:49:42   would work and licensed correctly and sent it off

01:49:45   to the service bureau, and they send me back

01:49:47   printing plates, and they're like, it's like a

01:49:49   rubbery material.

01:49:50   So, you expose it, just like in the old days,

01:49:52   we'd, you know, you'd make film and the film would

01:49:54   be exposed to an offset plate, and you'd wind up

01:49:56   with an offset plate that would go on press.

01:49:58   an offset plate that would go on press, I get this stuff is relief material, and it's used mostly,

01:50:03   like I say, like 99.9% of it is for printing plastic bags of mulch and the labels on your

01:50:11   stuff. Anything that's an irregular surface or whatever is printed with flexography using

01:50:15   photopolymer plates. And anyway, so this is printed on a letterpress, but it's not printed with,

01:50:21   it's not metal or wood type. Although I did, I put an Easter egg in, there is actually a line set in

01:50:27   six-point italic type that's in the book that's a little joke that I did in metal, and I did the

01:50:32   last thing I did is that last little bit. But, so there's this, so the thing I realized in doing

01:50:37   this, I was working on this and I'm kind of churning away, and I'm on this press that has,

01:50:40   it runs the ink rollers automatically. So, you put ink on a metal roller and it distributes it,

01:50:45   and it has a reciprocating thing that moves back and forth to make it even. So, you can get presses

01:50:49   that are even more primitive, where you're actually running a brayer over the stuff you're trying to

01:50:52   print. In this case, I've got like, this is a motorized thing, it takes a big part of it out,

01:50:56   But there's still a manual crank so I'm sitting there takes about three turns of the crank to go from one end of the press

01:51:00   To the other to do each sheet and I wound up. I think I've done about

01:51:03   12,000 passes on the press to do this book so far

01:51:07   So right now the status of the book is that it it's been printed and so it's on paper

01:51:11   There are sheets of paper on paper

01:51:13   And you had to do did you have to do the thing where you had to collate it so that like page 11 is on?

01:51:19   One side. Oh my god

01:51:21   47 or whatever, you know, 88 is on the other side, right?

01:51:24   I know you love this stuff, so I'll tell you, yeah, I actually posted, I had this planning

01:51:29   document, I started with a simple document, and I was like, well, I should just lay this

01:51:32   out, I needed the imposition, and then it got more and more complicated, and now it's

01:51:35   like this incredibly dense thing with like ink color and I'm using a paper that has a

01:51:39   deckle edge, but the parent sheets are 25 and a half by 38 inches.

01:51:44   So the deckle is along the long edge.

01:51:48   It's machine-made, so it's made continuously, so it only has a deckle edge on, this is the

01:51:52   Decal edges, that's that rough edge you see.

01:51:54   Sometimes it's made by like actually being stamped

01:51:57   out by a form.

01:51:57   So, a lot of books get a book club edition book

01:51:59   and has a fake decal edge that's stamped out.

01:52:02   And you can tell it's fake because the decal,

01:52:04   the edge is even all the way across.

01:52:06   If it's a true decal edge, it's the edge of the

01:52:08   form, which is called the decal that the wood

01:52:11   pulp is sieved on top of and the water's drained

01:52:14   out, it's pressed and dried.

01:52:15   If it's a true decal edge, it's feathery on the

01:52:17   edge, that's how you tell the difference.

01:52:19   So, I got a paper with a decal edge, but because

01:52:21   but because the sheets are so big, I can only have a decal edge on every other sheet of paper.

01:52:26   This is a 64-page book finished. I'm printing it four up on each side.

01:52:32   So each press sheet is four pages on each side.

01:52:34   So, in order to get the decal edges to alternate, not only did I have to figure out how to impose

01:52:39   four 16-page signatures, but also rotate each sheet.

01:52:45   One of the folios, the two-page things that are going to be folded in half when it's cut down,

01:52:51   I had to flip that so the deckle edge would be alternating when the final book was made.

01:52:55   It was a little, so I made folding dummies out of paper and numbered them and took them apart

01:53:01   and then turned this into a digital document. It was a lot of fun.

01:53:04   I, it's one of those, being a printer is sort of one of those things and, and, and I think you

01:53:10   and I share, have somebody shared interests, but like one of the other things, I, I really love

01:53:13   mechanical watches and I think watchmakers, watchmakers think like programmers. It is,

01:53:18   it might be what I if I was living 100 years ago, maybe what I would have done is get into watchmaking because it's

01:53:23   It's all if this then that you know, this will turn at this rate and if this every once every you know

01:53:31   eighth of a second it's gonna hit this and when it hits this it's gonna turn this and

01:53:34   One logical this then it'll touch this and then the second hand will tick 1/8 of a second on the dial of the watch

01:53:44   - Yeah, printers have the same thing,

01:53:46   like where printers sit there and can strategically,

01:53:49   algorithmically, well, one goes here,

01:53:53   two goes there, three goes there.

01:53:54   And that's why I always loved spending time

01:53:56   in the print shop, back in my graphic design days.

01:53:58   I loved going there, and I just loved picking the minds.

01:54:02   Well, show me how you set that up.

01:54:03   And most people who take pride in their work,

01:54:08   and that's another thing, too.

01:54:08   I don't know anybody who ever went to work

01:54:10   in a print shop is like a printer

01:54:11   who didn't take tremendous pride in their work.

01:54:14   They're all, and they could spot errors

01:54:18   a million miles away.

01:54:19   - Yeah, you wouldn't last is the kind of thing.

01:54:22   But here's the thing, at some point,

01:54:25   actually I was talking to my friend Becky Slatkin,

01:54:27   who is one of the funniest people,

01:54:30   I'm gonna embarrass her if she's listening to this,

01:54:31   'cause she's one of the funniest people on Twitter,

01:54:33   doesn't tweet a lot, she's an iOS developer back east,

01:54:35   Rebecca Slatkin is her Twitter handle.

01:54:37   I recommend following her if you're a programmer

01:54:39   or you like programming-related humor,

01:54:41   because she's just so dry.

01:54:43   no vermouth in her tweets at all. And I was talking the other day and she's asking how the

01:54:47   book was going, and I was like, "You know, I just realized something. Your programming tweets and my

01:54:52   letterpress actually have a lot in common." She's like, "What are you talking about?" And it was,

01:54:56   I realized this letterpress I'm working on, it's like Xcode. And I'm not even kidding because,

01:55:02   you know, you see the metaphor. It's like, it's like, I have a device that I didn't make,

01:55:07   and it's kind of wonky and weird. And when you're using letterpress printing, you have

01:55:11   these parameters. You have where the relief, it's a relief process, so you have to raise it off the

01:55:16   bed of the press by exactly .918 inches, it's type high. So, anything that takes ink should be

01:55:22   exactly that high, no higher or no lower, which is a whole thing when you look at the history of how

01:55:27   type was made, that it was possible in early industrial days that they could get it that

01:55:31   exact. Gutenberg was a genius, right? So, there's that thing. Then you have ink rollers, which can

01:55:35   be raised or lowered, and the ink rollers have to have the relationship, because you don't want to

01:55:38   you don't want to under ink.

01:55:40   Then you have this thing, and what I'm using

01:55:42   is a cylinder press, and there's a timpen on top,

01:55:44   which is a piece of paper, like a kind of slightly

01:55:46   waxed oiled paper, which you place the paper

01:55:49   that you're printing on over.

01:55:50   The timpen is packing underneath,

01:55:52   and the packing has to be raised to,

01:55:53   I mean, working in thousandth or five, ten thousandths

01:55:57   of an inch increments.

01:55:58   We have a digital caliper, so I'm constantly working

01:56:02   on the difference between, say, .047 and .046 inches,

01:56:06   sometimes a little bit less than that. So, this is the degree of precision you're working with

01:56:11   on equipment that, again, it's 70 years old, and we have presses in the shop that are like 120 years

01:56:15   old that are a little different. So, I realized I'm messing with this machine, I'm like, this is

01:56:20   really, this is so much like programming, even though I'm working in this very analog environment,

01:56:24   you're making tiny changes, you're tweaking stuff, then you kind of run your tests and you see,

01:56:29   you're looking at the feedback out of the machine, it's a little bit of a black box. You're looking

01:56:32   at it and I'm building in my head a mechanical model of the press. And the better I can model

01:56:37   in my head what the press is doing and all the relationships between all the parts, the better

01:56:41   I can program in all these settings that are all, you know, I'm pulling off these rollers, there's

01:56:47   like a set screw, you use a hex wrench and you're turning, there's no mark. So, I have to turn

01:56:52   something like one eighth of a rotation of a screw to move the ink rollers up, you know, one thousandth

01:56:57   of an inch. And it actually struck me as a long-time programmer on a low level, like I'm

01:57:03   a scripter, not an Objective-C writer, it struck me how much this felt like actually debugging code.

01:57:08   Pete: Yeah. Yeah, very much so. Yeah, debugging, it's that right mindset, right? Or you

01:57:13   gotta start working backwards, you know? And well…

01:57:17   Pete: Yeah, fine detail.

01:57:18   Pete; And you can, well, let's just do this and at least show us if that's the problem, you know?

01:57:23   Like putting a print statement in.

01:57:24   - And then like with Xcode, sometimes you just baffle,

01:57:27   just throwing out errors and you're like,

01:57:29   why won't you sign this code and upload it?

01:57:32   What's the pattern?

01:57:33   - All right, so I wanna mention, before we move on,

01:57:36   I wanna mention that the print edition of the book

01:57:39   is a limited edition.

01:57:40   There is some mention on your site

01:57:41   that there are gonna be a couple of copies

01:57:43   that you might sell for and donate the proceeds

01:57:45   to a charitable cause or something like that.

01:57:47   I would like one of those, that's what I would like to do.

01:57:50   I don't want a freebie, I wanna put some money

01:57:53   towards a good cause.

01:57:54   But I do want to--

01:57:55   - I will alert you, I gotta figure out the best cause.

01:57:56   It might be ACLU, it might be

01:57:57   Canadian-American Islamic Relations.

01:57:59   I gotta figure out a good cause for it.

01:58:01   'Cause I feel like this was a great thing.

01:58:03   The Kickstarter funded all my expenses for all materials.

01:58:05   It's kind of breaking even.

01:58:07   But I feel like this year especially,

01:58:08   I'm like, this was for me, it was great.

01:58:10   But I wanna do something that affects other people.

01:58:12   - I feel like the ACLU, they don't really have much

01:58:14   going on.

01:58:15   - They gots, I know.

01:58:16   They've been doing okay with fundraising.

01:58:18   I wanna find another group that needs a little more money.

01:58:22   But I'll have some artist proof.

01:58:23   - So this is like this incredible thing too.

01:58:24   So I started, I want 100 copies of the book,

01:58:26   so essentially I started with printing 200 pages

01:58:30   or 200 sheets for each press sheet

01:58:33   because I knew things could go wrong.

01:58:35   So it's actually some pages have three colors on them,

01:58:37   which means multiple passes, which means more to go wrong.

01:58:39   So I'm hoping I'm gonna be able to get out

01:58:41   about 125 to 140 copies at the end

01:58:44   that are good quality copies,

01:58:46   and then I'll have some to give to people

01:58:47   who are help with the book,

01:58:49   and then I'll have some to sell as artist proofs.

01:58:51   But how much pressure did you feel to not have typos?

01:58:54   Like what's the over-under do you think

01:58:56   on how many typos have made it in?

01:58:58   Are you aware of any now that you've printed it?

01:59:00   Are you aware of any typos already that now you can't fix?

01:59:03   - No, I know, isn't this the terrible,

01:59:04   it's a terrible feeling.

01:59:05   I mean, it's like the worst thing

01:59:06   when you're used to working with interactive media

01:59:08   to go like, oh my God, I can never fix this.

01:59:10   So, so far, I have not spotted anything

01:59:12   that's wrong in the book, which is astonishing

01:59:14   'cause I've been looking at it a lot.

01:59:16   Some of these pieces that already appeared in print

01:59:18   had been proofread.

01:59:19   Others of them had not, or I'd taken an earlier, longer form than it wound up online.

01:59:25   And Jeff Carlson, he has no responsibility for errors, but he did an editing and proofing

01:59:29   pass for me at the end of the whole thing too.

01:59:31   So, it's pretty, I mean, I've looked at it so much, I think I fixed everything.

01:59:37   But you know what I'm thinking of doing, John, is I think there was enough interest

01:59:39   in the book that I've been thinking of doing an offset edition that'll be twice as long.

01:59:44   So, I got a bunch of stuff I couldn't fit in.

01:59:45   Well, that's good.

01:59:46   In the same vein.

01:59:47   I just wrote a long piece for Wired about like letterpress and technology and I have the rights

01:59:52   back to that after 90 days, so, which is only a couple months away. So, I may do an offset

01:59:57   edition that's like 128 pages and I'll, including, I have, with this campaign, I did both the limited

02:00:05   edition, but there's also an ebook that's going to include writing about the process of making

02:00:09   the book, so that'll wind up in an offset version too.

02:00:11   - And I definitely wanna mention this,

02:00:14   is that the ebook, you can still get it right now.

02:00:16   Like it's, or you could--

02:00:18   - Yeah, I'm selling it on the site.

02:00:19   So you can go in, I've got a commerce page

02:00:22   and you can buy a--

02:00:23   - Where is that?

02:00:23   What site is that? - You can buy a copy of it.

02:00:24   - What's the best one to go to?

02:00:25   - It's, if you go to, it's a good question,

02:00:28   I know, I'm so organized about this.

02:00:31   It's, I've got a destination page,

02:00:34   and of course I can't remember what it is.

02:00:36   If you go to glog.glennf.com,

02:00:40   I will put a, I should put a link up,

02:00:42   'cause I had a link up about being able to buy copies

02:00:45   and what is it?

02:00:47   Oh, it's glog.glennf.com/pans-on-patronage,

02:00:52   which is a terrible URL.

02:00:54   But that's the URL.

02:00:57   And then there's also a keepsake that's part of the project

02:01:00   that I'm printing as well.

02:01:01   That's not related to the book that I'm still working on.

02:01:05   - So anyway, this is great.

02:01:06   I am so looking forward to it.

02:01:09   and you know how fast it was. - It's a lot of fun.

02:01:10   - Does the room where you printed it,

02:01:13   does it have a good smell?

02:01:14   - Oh yeah, it's great, and I'm using,

02:01:18   I mean, the room is full of metal type and wood type.

02:01:20   - Most print shops, to me, have the most amazing smell.

02:01:23   I just love it.

02:01:24   - Yeah, the ink, you know, it's a incredibly physical thing,

02:01:29   so I would be sometimes printing for eight or nine hours

02:01:31   a day, and I'd look at my Fitbit,

02:01:33   and I'd walk 10,000 steps in the shop,

02:01:35   just walking three steps forward, three steps back

02:01:38   to crank that thing.

02:01:39   - The smell, it's sort of, the closest I can think of

02:01:41   is it's sort of like any kind of machine shop

02:01:44   has that smell of metal and grease.

02:01:46   But ink has a smell too, and paper has a smell

02:01:50   that sort of gives a print shop a unique,

02:01:53   different than like any other, something else,

02:01:55   like a metalworking shop or something.

02:01:57   It's a great smell. - Everything feels good too.

02:01:59   It's like everything has a texture and your list,

02:02:00   it's also this whole thing,

02:02:02   one of the things that letterpress printers

02:02:03   talk about a lot and I've been learning is

02:02:05   there's a sound, it's a machine.

02:02:06   So if you get the wrong sound,

02:02:08   then you should be able to hear that

02:02:10   and know that something's wrong.

02:02:12   And I've been tuning into that.

02:02:13   We have a platen press, it's a pinwheel thing

02:02:16   where you spin a wheel and there's a,

02:02:18   this one has a foot pedal on it, foot treadle.

02:02:20   And I recorded it in slow motion one night.

02:02:23   And then listening to slow motion,

02:02:24   it makes a tolling of a bell.

02:02:26   The spring action, when it's slowed down,

02:02:27   it's just bong, bong, bong.

02:02:30   It's this beautiful thing.

02:02:31   - One of the most amazing things,

02:02:34   I couldn't believe it, but back in college,

02:02:37   I don't even know how I walked into this,

02:02:39   but there was a trade show here in Philadelphia,

02:02:41   like a big convention of print, print stuff,

02:02:45   and people trying to sell you big, expensive,

02:02:47   professional print things and stuff like that.

02:02:50   And I got to go with the dean

02:02:52   of Drexel's College of Design.

02:02:54   I don't know how, 'cause I wasn't in the College of Design.

02:02:57   - Oh, yeah.

02:02:58   - I guess it might have been the year after I graduated,

02:03:00   'cause I was hired to build their website,

02:03:02   and I guess that's how I went,

02:03:03   But I did take a lot of class, anyway.

02:03:05   But it was me and the dean of the College of Design

02:03:07   touring this convention, and he said,

02:03:08   "Hey, you wanna take notice of something.

02:03:10   "Notice how many of the guys,

02:03:11   "when you shake people's hands,

02:03:12   "you just walk past them.

02:03:13   "Notice how many people are missing."

02:03:15   Do you know what I'm gonna say?

02:03:17   "Notice how many people are missing a finger

02:03:18   "or like the tip of a finger."

02:03:20   And the idea is that so much happened so fast

02:03:24   in print shops, and there's so many ways

02:03:26   that you could lose the tip of a finger.

02:03:29   And you tour here, and it's all these guys,

02:03:31   like, you know, in the '50s, '60s,

02:03:33   guys who had spent their career in print.

02:03:35   And it was unbelievable how many people were missing

02:03:37   like the tip of a finger or like a pinky

02:03:39   or something like that.

02:03:40   And he said, "There's an awful lot of people

02:03:42   "who lose the tip of a finger,

02:03:43   "and it's the sort of mistake you only make once."

02:03:46   - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, this is, this is,

02:03:48   we have in the north, in Seattle,

02:03:50   we have a fellow who's a letter press repairman,

02:03:52   and it's sort of his full-time job.

02:03:53   He prints too, but he used to be a motorcycle racer,

02:03:56   and he had an accident that made it impossible

02:03:59   him to race comfortably after that. But he knew how to take apart and rebuild motorcycles,

02:04:03   and he gets kind of a wind of letterpress and discovers, and this is, I mean, I'm talking

02:04:07   about just several years ago, not like 30 years ago, he's a young guy. And he realizes letterpress

02:04:12   are much simpler to his mind than motorcycles. So, he learns, reads the manuals are all online.

02:04:17   I mean, you can find these scanned Google books of things from 70, 100 years ago,

02:04:21   and he learns how to take these things apart. And because of him, if it weren't for him,

02:04:24   I think a lot, there's a pretty big Northwest letterpress community, and I think Seattle

02:04:28   would be impoverished without his assistance,

02:04:32   'cause he knows stuff that people haven't known

02:04:34   for 50 years or 40 years.

02:04:37   He has relearned it and taught it to other people.

02:04:40   - Yeah, I believe it.

02:04:42   I believe that one person could make a difference in--

02:04:45   - Oh yeah, he's missing part of a finger.

02:04:46   That's why I was thinking that.

02:04:47   (laughing)

02:04:49   That's the sad part.

02:04:50   - Hey, let me take one last break here

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02:07:41   We gotta go into speed round now, Glenn.

02:07:43   We've been going for a while.

02:07:45   - Boom, okay.

02:07:47   - Apple inadvertently leaks HomePod OS,

02:07:49   spilling many beans. - Oh, I was embarrassed.

02:07:51   - Wow. - It's always that thing

02:07:52   of like, did somebody get fired?

02:07:54   I don't know.

02:07:55   It's just, wow, that's the worst thing for them.

02:07:58   - I almost, I suspect nobody got fired

02:08:00   because I think whoever was ultimately responsible for that,

02:08:03   nobody feels worse than they do.

02:08:06   So what happened is Apple was apparently,

02:08:09   this is, I can't prove it, this is what I've heard,

02:08:12   was on the, Cosper, maybe they already have,

02:08:15   but they were about to start rolling out a lot,

02:08:18   I don't know, hundreds, let's just say hundreds

02:08:20   of prototype HomePods to employees.

02:08:23   - Right. - Maybe even more.

02:08:25   And because it's a revealed product, the wraps are taken off, they can do this.

02:08:33   And apparently this software update that got leaked was meant for them.

02:08:36   And I don't know enough, so that's the why, of why in the world would Apple have an OS

02:08:43   release for an unreleased product.

02:08:45   Well it's sort of like the cold opening, it's being released to employees at this point.

02:08:51   it was a world readable disk image and there's some guys like our friend Steven

02:08:57   Trout and Smith and a couple of other people who man do they know what to do

02:09:03   when it so it's running apparently it's running a beta version of iOS 11.02 I

02:09:09   mean it's I think that you know the numbers get weird but it's you know yeah

02:09:13   and what they usually do for like for example with the public betas and the

02:09:18   developer betas of iOS right now. Inside Apple there are versions of the beta

02:09:22   versions of iOS 11 that are running on the prototype new iPhones or

02:09:28   pre-production whatever whatever stage of production are at now in August. And

02:09:32   the version that goes to me and you or you good listener of the show if you're

02:09:39   in the developer beta or the public beta of iOS they they have in programming

02:09:45   terms to #ifdef statement in C where you can say in your code if this

02:09:51   variable has been defined, do this. And if it's not, then that code

02:09:57   doesn't even go into the compiler. It's called, you know, I want to

02:10:03   make this as layman friendly as possible. It's the C preprocessor.

02:10:07   So this gets processed before the code goes into the compiler. And so all the

02:10:12   stuff specific to like the new secret iPhone Pro or whatever doesn't even hit

02:10:17   the compiler when they do a build for public release because this this HomePod

02:10:25   OS release wasn't meant for public consumption none none of that stuff was

02:10:30   defined out I almost feel like that would had to be a mistake because I could

02:10:35   see why the HomePod specific stuff wasn't but why in the world the release

02:10:39   had the images on I guess it didn't really I guess that's it the that it

02:10:44   that the icon that leaked was somehow related to the home pod somehow I don't

02:10:48   know but anyway all sorts of stuff leaked out including an icon showing the

02:10:52   the deal at d22 codenamed iPhone Pro with the the notch you know the bezel

02:10:59   to bezel design and the little notch at the top for the the camera and other

02:11:04   sensors. Boy, what a screw up.

02:11:06   Pete: Yeah, it's funny. It's, I feel bad, well, it's interesting because you feel bad for the

02:11:14   people involved because this isn't, like, I had this discussion with somebody the other day,

02:11:19   it was about like, leaks at companies and like, well, I like to find out stuff that's coming

02:11:22   before it happens. It's also, you know, when stuff's purposely leaked, you're like, well,

02:11:26   unless this is the company's intent, this is somebody who kind of wants to be, you know,

02:11:30   It's like there's fine color about an issue and there's like okay. Here's what's coming next when it only has a commercial interest

02:11:35   There's not a like public service interest or you know, something's wrong and was being fixed in this case

02:11:41   It's just it was just a screw-up. And so it's sort of the whole thing is sort of sad

02:11:45   So let me it's among the details that were revealed

02:11:48   This is what I noted in my post on during fireball the sound effects of the home pod

02:11:52   So you can hear some of the things that the little wave files that they have

02:11:58   the icon for the new high-end iPhone matching the descriptions. Now, that's a bad one.

02:12:03   That's bad.

02:12:05   But on the other hand, if, for example, if the poor soul who was ultimately responsible for this is a

02:12:11   listener of the show, you can feel a little better because there are part leaks.

02:12:16   I mean, it only confirmed what the rumor mill had already said. It wasn't like this came out of the blue and nobody

02:12:21   wasn't expecting it. That's actually,

02:12:24   at least at an icon level, exactly what we as close followers of the company were expecting.

02:12:29   The code name for the new high-end iPhone is D22. As far as I can tell, I did find a link to like an

02:12:36   Apple insider report from back in December. That was the first instance I found of D22,

02:12:42   where some random source in China from the supply chain leaked a thing that said,

02:12:48   "Here's a schematic of where the SIM card is moving, and the code name for this phone is D22."

02:12:53   Well, it turns out that whoever that source was was exactly right.

02:12:56   It is code named D22.

02:12:58   Is that really a big deal?

02:12:59   No.

02:13:00   It's not.

02:13:02   It's not like that Apple doesn't really talk about those code names.

02:13:05   It's not like you spoiled something from the keynote.

02:13:08   We've got the display resolution, 1125 by 2436.

02:13:12   So that's interesting because it's actually different than what Ming-Chi Kuo said.

02:13:16   He said it was going to be like 12 something by 2800 and that there would be an 1125 by

02:13:23   by 2436 area within that, that's the usable display.

02:13:27   But from what Steven Trout and Smith has uncovered,

02:13:31   it doesn't seem like it.

02:13:32   It seems like that's the actual display.

02:13:34   So there's a little bit of a mystery there.

02:13:37   We learned that the HomePod does have a color display,

02:13:40   and we learned that there are APIs for the phone

02:13:42   to have an infrared-based face recognizer.

02:13:45   Well, all of those things only confirm rumors

02:13:47   that have already been out there.

02:13:49   - Right, it's nothing particularly new,

02:13:50   but it's still, I mean, Apple's always fighting

02:13:54   against the sale of the next model they haven't made yet,

02:13:56   right, and every detail about something that's gonna come,

02:14:01   although I think they've defeated, in some level,

02:14:03   they've defeated that cycle a bit

02:14:04   because they're now in a routine cycle for now years,

02:14:07   and we know, and people buying a phone know

02:14:10   that in September-ish, there's gonna be a new series

02:14:13   announced, it'll be available either shortly after

02:14:15   within a few weeks, and it's gonna be somewhat better.

02:14:17   So it's not like people don't know

02:14:20   when they get a phone, what's gonna happen.

02:14:21   The iPhone 8 or whatever it'll be called,

02:14:25   I think the word that it's gonna be an expensive phone

02:14:27   doesn't mean that people are not gonna buy a phone now

02:14:30   either if they're planning to or they need one.

02:14:33   But I assume sales get really slumpy around now

02:14:35   except for people who just don't care.

02:14:37   They're just like, it's 20 bucks a month, or you know--

02:14:38   - I think it's surprising how many people don't care.

02:14:41   I mean, obviously, you can see it.

02:14:42   You can look at the charts,

02:14:44   and you can see that there's a huge spike

02:14:47   for when the phones just come out.

02:14:49   So the October, November, December quarter

02:14:52   has a huge spike because even though the phones

02:14:54   usually technically go on sale in September,

02:14:56   it's just like at the end of September.

02:14:59   Whereas, and they often have trouble,

02:15:02   or almost always have trouble meeting demand,

02:15:04   and so the sales don't go on the books

02:15:05   until they actually sell it.

02:15:07   So it's that October, November, December quarter

02:15:10   is the biggest quarter.

02:15:11   But it's also the biggest quarter

02:15:13   'cause it's the holiday quarter,

02:15:14   and people get iPhones for the holidays.

02:15:16   I mean, the iPods used to have that huge spike

02:15:21   in the holiday quarter too, because they were amazing gifts.

02:15:24   And I think it's a little bit easier

02:15:26   to give somebody an iPod, because you're just giving them,

02:15:28   it's like giving them a Walkman.

02:15:29   You're just giving them an electronic device

02:15:31   and you're on your own, whereas giving somebody a thing

02:15:32   that comes with a $30 a month or an up,

02:15:36   I wish my cell phone was $30 a month, whatever.

02:15:39   But you don't just give somebody an iPhone

02:15:42   if they didn't ask for it.

02:15:43   But I'm sure there are tons of kids and families

02:15:46   and spouses and stuff, and it's like,

02:15:48   you know what, you can get me this year,

02:15:49   I'm gonna get a new iPhone,

02:15:49   and give it to me as a Christmas gift.

02:15:51   - Yeah, just add it to the, yeah.

02:15:53   But I'm, you know, it's actually,

02:15:55   I'm encountering this problem

02:15:56   'cause I wanna sell my iPhone 6S.

02:15:57   I have a 7 Plus, and I was reluctant to switch to it,

02:16:00   but I'm like, yeah, it's probably time,

02:16:01   but then I'm like, well, I'm gonna get a new phone

02:16:03   'cause of the computational photography stuff

02:16:06   that I'm interested in.

02:16:07   I will almost certainly get a new phone when they come out,

02:16:09   so now I'll have two phones to sell,

02:16:11   and nobody wants a 6S right now,

02:16:12   even though it's in good shape,

02:16:13   because why buy it at 400 something dollars,

02:16:17   a used version of this, when the price is gonna drop

02:16:20   after the 7S ships and people will then

02:16:23   be able to get it for 100 bucks.

02:16:24   So I think people who are looking at a used phone

02:16:26   are actually savvy about waiting

02:16:27   'cause have not been able to find a,

02:16:29   usually can sell any iPhone very quickly

02:16:32   if it's in good shape and this time not.

02:16:33   - Yeah, I don't know though, anecdotally,

02:16:35   a lot of people in my family over the summer

02:16:37   have been asking me, hey, if I'm thinking

02:16:38   about getting a new iPhone, which one should I get?

02:16:40   And I'm like, just wait.

02:16:41   - Oh, you're like, just wait. - And they're like, oh,

02:16:42   and they're like, why?

02:16:42   I was like, well, the new ones will come out in September,

02:16:44   and they're like, really?

02:16:45   And I'm like--

02:16:46   - Well, although a lot of the features don't appeal,

02:16:48   I mean, some people don't see the incremental features

02:16:50   as more than like Chrome. - No, they don't.

02:16:51   No, and that's why they-- - You don't study it.

02:16:52   You're like, well, it's a new collar, right?

02:16:54   It's like, no, it's not a new collar.

02:16:55   It's actually a whole better device.

02:16:56   - And so even though there is a spike,

02:16:58   they still sell, I don't know,

02:16:59   40 million of them every quarter.

02:17:00   They'll sell 40 million or 10, 15 million of them this month

02:17:05   in the month of August, in five weeks

02:17:07   before the new ones come out.

02:17:08   Because most people don't care about that.

02:17:11   In the same way that most people, including me, frankly,

02:17:16   I bought a 2006 car in December of 2006.

02:17:21   The 2007s were already out 'cause I didn't give a shit.

02:17:25   I don't know what the difference was between the 2006, 2007,

02:17:27   but I knew I didn't give enough of a shit

02:17:30   compared to the thousands of dollars that cost less.

02:17:33   - Exactly, exactly.

02:17:34   - And I think that there's an awful lot of people

02:17:36   who feel that way about their iPhone.

02:17:37   They just don't care.

02:17:38   They accept, they know, I'm sure they believe

02:17:40   that for people who are truly tuned in like we are,

02:17:43   that we know, oh my god, the camera's gonna change

02:17:46   from F1.8 to F1.6 or whatever.

02:17:50   They don't give a shit.

02:17:52   They don't even know what the hell that means.

02:17:54   - What's the Merlin Mann line?

02:17:55   Isn't it something like, it has more mega-florps.

02:17:57   - Yeah, mega-florps, exactly.

02:17:59   That's what people think.

02:18:00   - That's what it, the thing that, I'll tell you,

02:18:02   the one statistic that floored me,

02:18:04   I still think about on a regular basis,

02:18:06   is when Jason Snell backed out the

02:18:07   how many simultaneous production lines there has to be.

02:18:10   was Jason, right? How many simultaneous production lines do you have to be?

02:18:12   No, wasn't it Jean-Louis Grasé?

02:18:14   No. Was it him? Oh, well, I confused the two of them, I guess.

02:18:17   Yeah, maybe Jason quoted it. Yeah.

02:18:18   All right, one of those guys. But that how many simultaneous production lines have to

02:18:23   be going to achieve the number because of the end-to-end time it makes to assemble an

02:18:27   iPhone, so it was some thousands, right, that are being made simultaneously. And I thought

02:18:32   that floored me more than—like, 40 million is a number, but when you're like, "No,

02:18:36   at the same time going down parallel production lines

02:18:40   all over Foxconn plant, you're like, that is astonishing.

02:18:44   But that came out, you talked about,

02:18:46   I don't want to get too deep,

02:18:47   I know we're near the end of the show,

02:18:47   but is that you talked about that issue of the scaling,

02:18:50   it's like any part you make, you can't come out

02:18:52   with a certain kind of innovation anymore

02:18:54   because it has to scale to hundreds of millions of times,

02:18:56   has to work instantly, the availability,

02:18:59   it has to be so extraordinary.

02:19:01   It's going to be a problem they have for years now.

02:19:03   It's gonna be a problem they have for years now.

02:19:05   - I'm sure of it.

02:19:07   It's, you know.

02:19:08   - Well, I think they're, I think they're,

02:19:10   I mean, we'll see how it goes,

02:19:11   but I think they're, with this D22 phone,

02:19:15   I think that they're trying to get the,

02:19:17   wiggle their way out of it.

02:19:19   - Yeah, yeah.

02:19:20   - Yeah, I mean, again, it's like I said.

02:19:22   - They're only gonna sell 50 million of them

02:19:24   instead of 200 million or something, right?

02:19:25   - I don't know.

02:19:26   I don't know.

02:19:27   Let's see.

02:19:28   Also, the other thing was that that year ago report

02:19:31   that had the D22 code name also said that internally

02:19:34   it was nicknamed Ferrari, which I thought was,

02:19:38   and so since they had the D22,

02:19:40   it certainly adds a lot of credibility

02:19:42   that the Ferrari was a real nickname for it.

02:19:44   And like I wrote on there,

02:19:45   Fireball Ferrari does sound like a nickname

02:19:48   for a product that might be a little bit more expensive.

02:19:51   I really don't think it's gonna be Ferrari expensive,

02:19:56   but I'm pretty sure I'm right

02:20:00   that this is going to have a surprisingly high,

02:20:02   surprising to many people high price.

02:20:04   We shall see.

02:20:06   Last but not least, the other thing I had on my list here

02:20:11   was this Facebook post from Vic Gundotra.

02:20:14   - Oh my God, oh my God.

02:20:16   - So you may or may not remember.

02:20:18   - Cotton it for you.

02:20:19   - Right, I still haven't linked to it from Daring Fireball

02:20:21   because I haven't had time 'cause I,

02:20:24   it's almost like, did this really happen?

02:20:27   So Vic Gundotra used to work at Google

02:20:29   and he was the most, you know, he was in charge of Android,

02:20:32   or not really in charge of it, but he was,

02:20:34   like he was the ringleader of their keynote in 2010,

02:20:37   when they most harshly went after iPhone and Apple directly

02:20:42   with, you know, just like,

02:20:44   we, you know, if it wasn't for us,

02:20:48   meaning Google and Android, we'd live in a world

02:20:50   where one man, one company controls the future,

02:20:53   you know, this sort of dystopian, you know,

02:20:54   Steve Jobs controls everything,

02:20:57   and has all sorts of quotes over the years.

02:20:59   I'll put some links in the show notes,

02:21:01   but more or less tearing into Apple for being closed

02:21:04   and closed is bad and open is good.

02:21:06   He had a post on Facebook where singing to high praises,

02:21:12   the portrait mode on his iPhone 7 Plus.

02:21:16   And here, the money line is bottom line.

02:21:21   This is a quote from Vikhoon Dothra,

02:21:23   who's doing something else now.

02:21:23   He's left Google a couple years ago.

02:21:25   If you truly care about great photography,

02:21:27   you own an iPhone.

02:21:28   If you don't mind being a few years behind, buy an iPhone.

02:21:31   - Oh my God, so rude.

02:21:33   It's true, but it's also.

02:21:35   - The funny part to me was reading the comments.

02:21:37   And he's obvious, I don't know how Facebook works exactly

02:21:40   'cause I've never had a Facebook account,

02:21:41   but this post is available, it's world readable,

02:21:44   so I could read it and I could see these comments.

02:21:46   But there are an awful lot of people who follow him

02:21:48   or whatever you do to people on Facebook

02:21:50   who are in a circle, whatever the hell they have,

02:21:54   who are obviously Android fans and they were,

02:21:57   he did not take this very well at all.

02:22:00   But they're also deeply in denial.

02:22:02   Like there was somebody who obviously fancies himself

02:22:04   as a technical person, you know,

02:22:06   but somebody was trying to say that the Samsung S8

02:22:09   has the same feature and it's better implemented.

02:22:12   The Samsung, I mean, whatever you wanna say

02:22:13   about the Samsung Galaxy S8 as a camera

02:22:16   compared to the regular iPhone 7, maybe it's as good.

02:22:19   I know that, I'm sure it has a very good camera.

02:22:21   I own a Google Pixel upstairs.

02:22:23   The Google Pixel has an excellent camera.

02:22:25   I don't, I honestly don't know if it's better or worse

02:22:29   than my iPhone 7.

02:22:29   I'm familiar with the iPhone 7,

02:22:31   but I can see that they're technically

02:22:33   on par with each other, you know.

02:22:35   Somebody cited the Pixel thing and that stupid DxOMark

02:22:40   that ranked the Pixel as having the highest rated sensor

02:22:43   in their history.

02:22:44   That DxOMark thing is bullshit.

02:22:46   It's total bullshit.

02:22:47   The people pay to be in it.

02:22:50   The reason that they rated the Pixel

02:22:52   before that even came out was 'cause Google paid them

02:22:54   to do it.

02:22:55   It's a bullshit metric.

02:22:57   And even if you believe the metric,

02:22:59   it's only rating the sensor of the camera.

02:23:01   It's not even telling you whether it takes good pictures

02:23:03   or not, it's saying it has the best sensor.

02:23:05   But it's obviously, it worked to Google's advantage

02:23:08   where people who want to believe it took it as meaning

02:23:10   that some independent firm has certified

02:23:13   that the Google Pixel has the best camera on any phone.

02:23:16   It doesn't.

02:23:17   The iPhone 7 Plus has the best camera on any phone.

02:23:19   And I say this as somebody whose daily phone,

02:23:21   phone I own is an iPhone 7, not the 7 Plus, because I like the size better.

02:23:25   I love the 7 Plus so much.

02:23:26   But it hurts my heart.

02:23:27   I carry—

02:23:28   The 7 Plus is so much better as a camera. It's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous.

02:23:32   And portrait mode is amazing.

02:23:33   It's astonishing.

02:23:34   And it has gotten—

02:23:35   Yeah.

02:23:36   It has gotten so much better since it came out last year. The edge detection is so much

02:23:39   better. But the Galaxy S8 camera, they do have a—they call it like fake bokeh mode

02:23:43   or something, and it has something that tries to do it, but it's still just a one-lens

02:23:48   camera and it's doing it all with edge detection and it's all software, whereas there's no optical

02:23:53   aspect to it like there is with the iPhone.

02:23:54   Pete: Yeah. His point he makes is, I mean, I think, I think he, I actually think that he

02:24:00   isn't betraying what he said in the past. I think he did not like, it's clear the evolution of

02:24:06   Android was not the direction he thought it would go. And his statement in the Facebook post in

02:24:10   reply to people are like, well, you know, when you don't control the hardware and you got to

02:24:15   make compromises in all the software, you can't do great things like this. Google was way ahead,

02:24:19   and they really were. Google is way ahead. Project Tango is really interesting, where it has a depth

02:24:24   camera in addition to a regular camera. And I wouldn't be surprised if Apple ads, actually,

02:24:29   a literally separate depth finding lens or thing. It's kind of, well, it's not a lens, like a laser

02:24:36   bouncing thing. But anyway, it makes a lot of sense to do that for, if you're trying to do AR

02:24:41   and other kinds of depth-based things.

02:24:43   Two lenses is good, and this is even better.

02:24:46   So anyway, Google has been more advanced in

02:24:48   computational photography.

02:24:49   They acquired, sorry, they hired away the father of

02:24:53   computational photography from Stanford, you know,

02:24:56   went to work there.

02:24:57   I tried to interview him for an article.

02:24:58   He said, yeah, let me talk to PR.

02:24:59   And there's dead silence.

02:25:00   After that, wasn't able to get him into a piece I did

02:25:03   for a fast company last year about the future of

02:25:05   computational photography.

02:25:07   And without being able to enforce and push stuff down low enough, they can't do the stuff

02:25:13   Apple can.

02:25:14   And he admits it, and I think that's obviously, I don't know why he left the team or what

02:25:18   happened there, but it's clearly a point of frustration for him.

02:25:21   And he's not wrong about the iPhone 7 Plus.

02:25:23   I own one.

02:25:24   I bought it specifically for photography, and I carry it like I have a nice mirrorless

02:25:28   camera I really like, and I pick up the iPhone 7 Plus all the time.

02:25:32   Now, when we had double rainbows the other day, we had a crazy 180-degree double rainbow

02:25:36   of a weird weather thing, I grabbed my nice camera

02:25:38   and a zoom lens and went out and shot all kinds of shots.

02:25:41   And when I was doing some other photography

02:25:43   in a nature area near here, I brought my nicer camera,

02:25:46   my camera with the lens.

02:25:46   But the iPhone 7 Plus is the most fantastic

02:25:51   cell phone camera you can get.

02:25:52   - I have the, I think I mentioned this with Renee

02:25:55   in a recent episode, but I still have the red,

02:25:58   when the red iPhones came out mid-year or mid-cycle,

02:26:02   Apple gave me a review unit, very nice of them.

02:26:05   I mean, I don't know what to do.

02:26:06   I mean, you know what I mean?

02:26:07   It's exactly the phone I reviewed six months earlier,

02:26:09   except now it's red, you know.

02:26:12   But that's nice.

02:26:12   So I still have it.

02:26:14   That's the phone I've been using

02:26:16   the iOS betas on all summer.

02:26:17   And because I'm running the betas on it,

02:26:20   I took it, we had a family wedding down in South Carolina,

02:26:24   and we were there for a week.

02:26:25   We had a family that rented a beach house,

02:26:28   and it was very nice.

02:26:29   And we went to right near Charleston,

02:26:32   which I'd never been to Charleston before.

02:26:34   Beautiful city.

02:26:35   oh my God, if you ever have a chance to go

02:26:36   to Charleston, South Carolina, it's truly, truly beautiful.

02:26:40   And it's really interesting to me as a Philadelphian

02:26:42   to see a city with roots from the exact same era,

02:26:45   pre-colonial, colonial times,

02:26:47   and to see certain things that are the same

02:26:49   and certain things that are so different

02:26:51   between Philadelphia and Charleston.

02:26:54   But anyway, took my Fuji X100S,

02:26:59   which is, if you're not a camera nerd, it's not an SLR.

02:27:02   It doesn't even have detachable lenses.

02:27:04   as one lens, a 35 millimeter equivalent lens.

02:27:07   But a really, really nice mirrorless camera.

02:27:11   I really love it.

02:27:12   It's a couple years out of date.

02:27:13   I think there's two successors already.

02:27:16   But it really is a great camera.

02:27:17   It takes great video and really nice stills.

02:27:21   And I took my regular iPhone,

02:27:22   and I also took the iPhone 7 Plus

02:27:24   just because I was testing iOS betas at the time.

02:27:27   And so I took a portrait of Jonas in Charleston.

02:27:31   It was just real nice light.

02:27:33   I took a portrait of my son using the iPhone 7S,

02:27:36   or the 7 Plus, and then took one with the X100S

02:27:41   from the exact same spot, you know.

02:27:43   And I do have to say, the X100S shot definitely looks better.

02:27:47   I could see it, it is, there's no shame in that.

02:27:51   I mean, it's a dedicated camera that cost me like $1100.

02:27:55   But boy oh boy does the portrait mode get close.

02:28:00   And boy oh boy does the portrait mode take a picture

02:28:03   that looks so much better than anything you can get

02:28:05   with the regular iPhone 7.

02:28:07   - Oh, and holy cow, after WWDC,

02:28:11   when I went through the presentations

02:28:13   and looked at what they were demoing

02:28:15   or showing in presentations and then read stuff

02:28:17   about developers who were testing that,

02:28:19   that is gonna be so amazing with the depth API added.

02:28:22   They're showing, I mean, I think it's seven different

02:28:25   distinct layers of depth that, if I'm remembering right,

02:28:27   at least in the current version,

02:28:28   and just the idea of you'll be able to have

02:28:30   black and white background, color foreground,

02:28:33   drop people into things, automatically do silhouetting,

02:28:35   which is useful for all kinds of purposes.

02:28:37   The AR integration relies on depth mapping,

02:28:41   that's a whole other thing, but I think the two camera phone,

02:28:45   I mean, I'm curious if the premium phone

02:28:47   is gonna have two cameras,

02:28:48   'cause it would be weird if it didn't, right?

02:28:50   But-- - I think it does.

02:28:51   I think the premium phone-- - It does?

02:28:53   - My big question is-- - Has to.

02:28:55   - I don't think the rumor mill has answered it,

02:28:57   is are all of the new ones gonna have dual cameras?

02:28:59   Like, will the-- - All the phones?

02:29:01   - Right, like, I don't know--

02:29:02   - They should, it's not very expensive

02:29:04   to add a second camera at this point.

02:29:06   I mean, they're building the camera system already,

02:29:07   it's more about space.

02:29:08   - Yeah, and so far in the plus era,

02:29:11   meaning starting with the iPhone 6,

02:29:13   the plus model has had a better camera

02:29:17   than the non-plus model, but every single year,

02:29:20   the next year, the regular model gets

02:29:24   whatever the one had before,

02:29:26   whereas the first one was optical image stabilization.

02:29:30   And I think the iPhone 6S, the iPhone 6S got it.

02:29:34   But it was optical image stabilization

02:29:36   that only worked for stills and not video.

02:29:38   But then the iPhone, when the 6S got it,

02:29:41   the 6S Plus got optical image stabilization

02:29:44   that works for video too.

02:29:46   And then last year, now the iPhone 7

02:29:49   has optical image stabilization that works with video.

02:29:52   And that is one of the most striking things too,

02:29:54   where I did notice that, where optical image stabilization

02:29:57   on video on these phones is so unbelievably good.

02:30:01   I realize, and so for example,

02:30:03   on the X, my X100S doesn't have it.

02:30:06   And so the video, in terms of the still quality

02:30:09   of the frames of video, it's unbelievably beautiful.

02:30:13   But because it doesn't have optical image stabilization,

02:30:15   or not optical image, yeah, optical image stabilization.

02:30:18   - Yeah, yeah.

02:30:19   - The video I shoot on my phone looks way better

02:30:22   for like, you know, just typical,

02:30:25   taking stuff on vacation, walking around.

02:30:27   It's not on a tripod, it's handheld.

02:30:30   The smoothness of that makes it so much more,

02:30:34   it looks, honestly, if you'd have shown it

02:30:37   to somebody 10 years ago, it looks like professional video.

02:30:39   Like, there's no way, how could an amateur shoot video

02:30:41   that we were walking down a sidewalk and it's not shaking?

02:30:45   How could you get-- - Yeah, it was weird.

02:30:46   I was shooting something the other day

02:30:48   and it was bizarre to me.

02:30:49   I thought something was wrong with the camera

02:30:50   because it was so smooth.

02:30:51   There's like, oh yeah, yeah, it's OAS.

02:30:53   I was actually doing the right thing,

02:30:55   but it was so smooth, it was,

02:30:56   it felt like it wasn't tracking me correctly,

02:30:59   and it was just doing it the right thing.

02:31:00   - I honestly think it's a bigger difference

02:31:02   for consumer video than the move

02:31:05   from standard deaf to high deaf,

02:31:06   at least in terms, if you compare it

02:31:08   to the last years of standard deaf, the quality.

02:31:13   Like when Jonas was born, Jonas is 13,

02:31:15   so we got a video camera right before he was born,

02:31:17   so it was like the best mini DV was the tape technology.

02:31:22   I got the best mini DV that I could,

02:31:25   It was within my budget from Panasonic.

02:31:27   So the first couple years of his life,

02:31:29   our video of him is all shot on a standard def.

02:31:33   And you could see it, and the frame is four to three,

02:31:35   it's not 16 to nine.

02:31:37   But the quality's not that bad.

02:31:38   It was really, it really doesn't look so bad.

02:31:41   Like when we watch those old movies now,

02:31:43   the aspect ratio stands out more than the image quality.

02:31:48   I mean, the image quality's there, you could see it,

02:31:49   but I think that the biggest difference in consumer video

02:31:53   is the optical image stabilization,

02:31:54   because the video I shoot on my phone now,

02:31:56   I'm just shocked sometimes at how smooth it is.

02:31:59   One thing, you know where I got on this rant,

02:32:03   was I noticed it was the Clips app.

02:32:06   I don't wanna go on a long rant here,

02:32:08   I know we gotta wrap up, but Apple's Clips app,

02:32:11   when you shoot video in Clips,

02:32:12   it doesn't have optical image stabilization.

02:32:15   And it stuck out to me like a sore thumb

02:32:18   when I was making just a little clip of a family birthday,

02:32:22   second birthday of like a niece or a nephew,

02:32:25   I forget whose birthday it was earlier this summer,

02:32:26   I made, shot a bunch of clips with it,

02:32:28   and then when I watched it, I was like,

02:32:30   this looks like shit compared to my usual videos.

02:32:32   And then I realized that when you shoot a clip in clips,

02:32:34   and I wrote to Apple and confirmed it,

02:32:36   it doesn't use optical image stabilization.

02:32:39   I don't know why.

02:32:39   - Oh, that's, might be, well, it's weird,

02:32:42   because you think it'd be pulling it out of the,

02:32:44   what is it called, the image, the ISO,

02:32:47   no, what is it, the thing that does the image processing

02:32:50   on the--

02:32:51   I don't know if it's a battery thing or what,

02:32:53   but you know, huh, it's interesting.

02:32:55   But it really sticks out.

02:32:56   And so if you do this, if you just like,

02:32:58   just in your house, just like shoot, use the camera app,

02:33:01   take a video of yourself walking down a hallway,

02:33:04   and then go back to the beginning, go to the Clips app,

02:33:08   and reproduce the shot, and try to hold the camera still,

02:33:13   and then put the two clips side by side and watch,

02:33:15   and I guarantee you, you will see the difference.

02:33:17   Anyway.

02:33:20   Anyway, my big hope, my single biggest hope

02:33:23   for the iPhone this year, and I don't think

02:33:25   the rumors have answered it.

02:33:27   If they are, somebody let me know.

02:33:28   But I don't think we know yet whether the iPhone 7S,

02:33:32   if that's what they're gonna call it,

02:33:33   but the new 4.7 inch new iPhone has dual cameras or not.

02:33:37   And I certainly hope it does, because it's a huge, huge,

02:33:41   it's just a game changer.

02:33:43   - It's so great, and they've barely,

02:33:44   I mean, what Apple and tech parties can do with it

02:33:46   is really, we've barely seen anything.

02:33:49   Computational photography for me,

02:33:50   why I wrote the piece for Fast Company last year. It's the most exciting thing nobody talks about

02:33:55   because it requires too much background to understand what the future might bring,

02:34:00   so you have to see examples of real things happening and then be able to do it yourself.

02:34:04   And portrait mode is a taste of that, but there's so many things you can do because it gives you

02:34:09   the ability, especially with two cameras that have different characteristics, you essentially

02:34:13   can combine those in a way that gives you almost like more F-stops. You can de-blur things because

02:34:19   you have two images, you can actually interpolate a deblur. There's like a million things that are

02:34:24   super cool. And we've seen one of them. We've seen HDR, which dates back years. That's a form of

02:34:31   computational photography. And now we're seeing this portrait mode, and there's like 50 other

02:34:36   cool things that are gonna come that will be exciting as a photographer to use as an

02:34:40   additional tool in your art studio.

02:34:41   - Do you know what I've noticed too? I don't know if you have. I noticed this summer,

02:34:44   and I guess in shocking summers when I'm outside and not in my little cave.

02:34:49   But like I noticed with some shots we were at Disney World last month, I noticed that I almost

02:34:55   always now, I have when you have HDR on it, I have it set so that it saves two, it still saves

02:35:00   two versions of the photo, one with and one without. And the reason that preference exists

02:35:05   is that when the iPhone first got HDR, sometimes it did, sometimes it made the photo better and

02:35:11   sometimes it definitely didn't. Sometimes it would, there'd be like a weird double exposure

02:35:15   type thing or something would just look wrong in the HDR version. I'm on the cusp

02:35:20   of just turning that preference off because whenever it's on, I always

02:35:24   prefer HDR now. I can't find one in my last several hundred shots where I

02:35:28   prefer the non HDR version. Yeah, if it takes an HDR shot, there's a reason

02:35:33   for it and the non HDR one is blown out or something else. They've gotten better

02:35:36   though, they've gotten better at avoiding it and it's the sort of incremental

02:35:41   improvements that nobody really sings the praises off. So if you're there on

02:35:44   on the HDR team at Apple's photo engineering team.

02:35:47   - We noticed.

02:35:48   - We noticed and I thank you for your blood, sweat, and tears.

02:35:51   - I should turn that off too.

02:35:52   I'm taking all these extra shots for no good reason.

02:35:54   - Yeah, I've got all these extra shots

02:35:55   and I realize now that I, but I used to think,

02:35:57   well, I, but I, you know, look at this one.

02:35:59   This one looks weird with HDR

02:36:01   and now I don't see that anymore.

02:36:03   - The funny thing is that the one thing

02:36:04   that I had to deal with recently,

02:36:05   I was trying to take a very long,

02:36:07   I wanted to take pictures of me printing a time lapse

02:36:10   and I looked into Apple's options.

02:36:12   You know, Apple's time lapse has this thing

02:36:13   dynamically adjust so it's always about the same length when you're done. It just starts

02:36:17   dropping frames and kind of reworks it. So, I used a, what's it called, Frame,

02:36:21   not Framoleum, it's from our friends at Studio Neat, Framographer, which is, I think, is an old

02:36:30   app. They still sell it and it's actually, it was incredible. It's, the interface seems a little

02:36:34   outdated, so I think it may be made for an earlier iOS version. And it's great. So, I was able to do

02:36:41   I used it with the iPhone 7 Plus to get a better image.

02:36:46   And at one point recorded like seven hours, I think,

02:36:50   or five hours, and wound up with a few minutes,

02:36:52   and it just was fantastic to get a,

02:36:54   but I wanted it spaced a certain interval apart

02:36:57   as opposed to having it dynamically shrunk to a certain,

02:37:00   to fit to a certain total length.

02:37:02   - Anyway, I imagine there was some laughter

02:37:07   within Cupertino when this Vic and Joe Terpo

02:37:10   (laughing)

02:37:11   - Passed around.

02:37:12   - Oh, it's okay to have some shot in front of it,

02:37:14   but I think, I mean, it's great that he came to see

02:37:16   what the truth was, right?

02:37:17   - Well, between him and now with Steven Stanofsky

02:37:20   being probably one of the top three or four

02:37:22   iPad proponents in the world.

02:37:25   - Oh my God.

02:37:26   - Outside Apple, at least.

02:37:28   I mean, he's like right behind Federico Vidicci.

02:37:31   I mean, that's how staunchly Steven Stanofsky,

02:37:34   who, if you don't know the name,

02:37:35   was formerly at Microsoft and was sort of the brains

02:37:38   behind the whole Surface tablet thing,

02:37:41   you know, and left a couple years ago.

02:37:45   Now it's a huge, huge iPad proponent.

02:37:47   And a good writer on the subject as well.

02:37:51   But anyway, that's it for me.

02:37:53   We're gonna run out of tape here on the tape machine.

02:37:56   - That's right, I know the tape,

02:37:57   that's why the tape machine started to slap.

02:37:58   - Either that or we'll flip it around and go to side two.

02:38:01   (laughing)

02:38:03   Anyway, Glenn, I thank you for your time.

02:38:05   - It's a pleasure.

02:38:07   - I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of this book.

02:38:09   Glog.glennf.com is the main headquarters

02:38:13   for your sprawling empire of web presences.

02:38:18   And then on Twitter, you are Glenn F.

02:38:20   G-L-E-N-N-F.

02:38:23   He's paid for the extra N.

02:38:25   - Come for my fights with Eric Trump.

02:38:28   Stay for the tweets about letterpress printing

02:38:29   and books from the 1800s.

02:38:31   - Personally, I don't know about you personally,

02:38:33   almost every single name where there's alternate spellings,

02:38:35   I prefer the one with the extra letter.

02:38:38   I like G-L, I like my Glens with two Ns,

02:38:40   I like my Saras with an H, and I like my Johns with an H.

02:38:43   Now maybe I'm biased on the John issue,

02:38:46   but I like a Sarah with an H.

02:38:48   If you're out there and you're an S-A-R-A,

02:38:53   I still think it's a lovely name,

02:38:54   but I like the extra letter.

02:38:57   And I'll tell you what, I don't like a Glenn

02:38:59   with only one N, untrustworthy.

02:39:00   - I know, those people, I know they have problems with them.

02:39:03   shifty in my opinion, in my experience.

02:39:06   I would never buy a car from a Glenn with one end.

02:39:09   I'd walk right out of the dealer.

02:39:10   (laughs)