143: ‘A Squirrel Eating a Duck’ With Merlin Mann

0:00:00[Music]

0:00:22I'm really great. I'm in a great mood.

0:00:25You're kidding.

0:00:25I'm in a particularly good mood.

0:00:27I'm so glad.

0:00:29You're not worried? You're talking about the snowpocalypse, right? Yeah, right.

0:00:33The Joan-astrophe. Yeah, it's...

0:00:37what do they call it? Winter Storm Jonas, which is obviously a big point of conversation here

0:00:42at the Gruber household. Jonas is

0:00:46a bit impressed. He's excited. He's like a hashtag on Twitter now.

0:00:51So he's very excited about that. Your son is trending.

0:00:55But he is

0:00:58disappointed and slightly embarrassed by the fact that this is a big storm that

0:01:03is coming on a Friday night, which is the worst possible time for a storm

0:01:10to hit in terms of maybe getting a day off of school. Like it could not

0:01:14possibly be worst time. Like there was no conversation whatsoever

0:01:22about canceling school today in advance of the snowstorm because they're so

0:01:25certain of when it that is not going to come until this evening that there was

0:01:29no need to cancel school in advance. See at this point science is working against

0:01:33children because when we were younger we did not have this kind of technology to

0:01:37know we had a rough idea of what kind of thing would happen like in a given week

0:01:41you know and and also I don't think there was that as much concern for like

0:01:45makeup days like I feel like when I was a kid you'd only get into the makeup

0:01:50days if you had like five or I don't know ten snow days and nowadays today

0:01:53everything runs on such a tight schedule. Right, like maybe they'd go back.

0:01:57After a bunch of snow days, they'd assign one of the school secretaries, "Hey, go

0:02:01back and count just how many days we've had school." You know what? We should

0:02:04probably write that down. Okay, somebody go ahead. Louise, can you go check that out for us?

0:02:08No, I'm excited. Here's why I'm not excited, but I'm excited about this note,

0:02:13but I'm happy. I'm in a good mood because I woke up terribly sick on

0:02:18on Wednesday and just felt almost dead.

0:02:23And then I felt a little better

0:02:25but still definitely sick yesterday.

0:02:26And today is the day where I feel,

0:02:28I still feel I'm not like good,

0:02:30but I'm on the upswing.

0:02:34And to me, it's the best.

0:02:36It's better than being at 100% health

0:02:38is that day after you've had a bug for a couple of days

0:02:41where you feel like, hey, I woke up feeling good today.

0:02:45- Especially when you've had like a,

0:02:46especially especially when you had a long cold and

0:02:50you know maybe you just starting to get into the coughing phase or something you

0:02:52know that kind of late end but the day you stop getting worse

0:02:55is such a good day. The first day we were like, "Oh God, I might survive this."

0:02:59You know you told me about that yesterday and I have to say you sound way

0:03:02better than I expected but I was thinking like you're sick,

0:03:05Marco's sick, Dan's had some kinda crazy

0:03:08like stomach bug, there's so many... I was kinda just sitting there, you know when you're waking up and you get

0:03:12paranoid

0:03:12I was waking up and I was just thinking about like how many people I know are

0:03:15sick right now

0:03:16Is this a big East Coast thing? They say there's like this killer flu that is going around the East Coast.

0:03:20Well, I want to ask you about this. I want to get your medical advice, honestly.

0:03:24Yeah, I'd love to help.

0:03:26Is that I think I had the flu. And Amy tells me, "No way did you have the flu, because nobody shakes the flu off in 48 hours. You obviously didn't have the flu. You had a cold."

0:03:36But I know what a cold is like. And for me, a cold is entirely in my head and my throat.

0:03:41It is in my nose, it's in my forehead.

0:03:44Sometimes it's like pressure in my eyes

0:03:46and it's always in my throat.

0:03:48This was a whole body thing.

0:03:49This is what happened.

0:03:50Tuesday night, I felt perfect.

0:03:52I felt 100% healthy.

0:03:54Went to bed, woke up Wednesday morning

0:03:57and I felt horrible.

0:04:00I mean, just, I was like, I think I'm sick or something.

0:04:03And my whole body felt like maybe I had signed up

0:04:06for the gym the day before

0:04:07and decided I would do everything.

0:04:10- Oh, you had the overall body soreness and heaviness.

0:04:14- Oh, without, I mean, real, real, I mean, like,

0:04:16my legs hurt, I felt like I was, you know,

0:04:19maybe I'd put on 100 pounds and my legs weren't suited

0:04:22to carry this much weight up and down the stairs.

0:04:24My arms hurt, everything that was, you know,

0:04:29and muscle ache, you know, like I had gone to the gym,

0:04:32you know, and worked out after never having lifted weights

0:04:35in my life, and overall, every muscle in my body hurt.

0:04:38a headache

0:04:42a clearly I felt like I had a fever all the since that to me are not a cold

0:04:46that like that's the flu mm-hmm I mean what are the other options I mean what

0:04:51do they what are they calling me maybe

0:04:53you can do differential differential diagnosis yeah

0:04:56no I funny to say like for me I totally agree I

0:04:59a like if something starts for me it always starts with an

0:05:02a 0 in that up if I get a cold usually like

0:05:06"Oh, my throat doesn't hurt exactly, but my throat feels weird."

0:05:10That's the first thing. It's like swallowing doesn't hurt exactly, but I notice swallowing.

0:05:14That's the first "uh-oh" red flag. But what you're describing, I had something really similar maybe

0:05:19a month and a half ago, maybe a little longer, and I woke up and I was like, "Oh, I'm getting the flu.

0:05:26I'm definitely getting the flu." And this was on like maybe like a Saturday or something or Friday.

0:05:30Anyway, and then the thing was it kind of presented as being flu-like. I didn't have any of

0:05:36of the tummy stuff, but I did feel really heavy, really tired.

0:05:44And then it turned into what felt like, within a day, it felt like I was getting over a cold

0:05:48within a day.

0:05:49So I wonder if there's some kind of a new hybrid cold flu that might be out there.

0:05:52Yeah, I think that sometimes you can get lucky and get a mild case of the flu.

0:05:56I realize that if you really get whacked right in the bull's eye by the flu, that you're

0:06:02down for two weeks, and that's terrible.

0:06:05been years since I've had something like this, but this is clearly not a cold.

0:06:08Do you really understand the difference? No, not really. I don't either. I say that,

0:06:12or you say something, so when you self-diagnose, I love how you self-diagnose, and you go like,

0:06:16"Oh, man, I think I'm getting a little cold." Or you go like, "Oh, man, I'm coming down with the

0:06:22flu." Or you go like, "Eh, I probably got a 24-hour bug." I don't know what any of that actually

0:06:26means, but I'll do it with my daughter, too, because with my daughter, I'm the house shaman.

0:06:30Like, I'm the one who tries to predict, like, how much this is going to destroy, because, you know,

0:06:34as soon as the kid gets sick, it's game over.

0:06:36Everybody will get sick and it's going to be the worst.

0:06:39And so I'll go like--

0:06:40I'll come in with my rattles and my headdress and my beads.

0:06:43And I'll be like, mm-hmm.

0:06:45Eleanor will be fine by Sunday afternoon.

0:06:49And I'll make a pronouncement.

0:06:51It's rarely right, but then sometimes it is just weird.

0:06:53I feel like colds and flus are changing.

0:06:55I feel like it used to be you knew how long you

0:06:57were going to get sick.

0:06:58I think something has mutated and is changing.

0:07:00It might be the water.

0:07:01It could be meats.

0:07:03but I think stuff is changing from when I was a kid.

0:07:04I've always felt like it's the,

0:07:08the difference between the two things. It's, you know, it's all nebulous to me.

0:07:14It's a lot of the symptoms overlap, but I did, I Googled it again and you know,

0:07:17here I am. I'm pretty well,

0:07:18you're getting scientific about it.

0:07:20Yeah, I Googled it. Uh, I mean,

0:07:23there's no better way to get expert medical advice,

0:07:25but there's like a checklist on the web MD and they're like a cold, uh,

0:07:28you know, often comes on slowly. You know, like you said,

0:07:32you get that heads up. You have that day where you're like, "Oh my god, I feel like there's

0:07:36a 50% chance I'm going to be sick as shit tomorrow."

0:07:38You feel like you're getting like 20%--no, you're getting like 8% worse every hour, like

0:07:43fairly consistently.

0:07:44Do you know what? I'll tell you what a big telltale sign of a cold for me is. A big telltale

0:07:48sign, like the 24 hour advance notice. Like, "Here I am, wake up, feel fine, no suspicions,

0:07:54no warning flags, whatever. I make some coffee, I'm reading some news, seeing what happened

0:07:59overnight. And then I take a first sip of coffee and it

0:08:01tastes like shit. Like terrible. Like how can anybody drink this?

0:08:05And then I think that I and then I quick like run through did I

0:08:08did I make it wrong? Did I not put enough beans in? And then I

0:08:12think, Oh, shit, I'm good. Oh, you know what it is, buddy. You

0:08:15know what it is. I'm getting sick. You're exactly you're

0:08:17ignoring it. You're you're trying to throw yourself off the

0:08:19scent. But that's probably as scientists, we can look at this

0:08:22and say that's probably a little bit about scent. It's got to

0:08:24have to do with your sense of smell. It might have to do with

0:08:27like your throat not feeling so good, but your body is telling you, "Oh, you're gonna

0:08:30get sick, buddy."

0:08:31Yeah, and it's like something on my tongue, you know? And then the other thing in advance

0:08:37is that something acidic like orange juice will start stinging the back of my throat.

0:08:42Like I don't have a sore throat yet, but like something acidic like orange juice, it doesn't

0:08:45go down, it isn't pleasurable as I swallow. And that to me is like, "Ooh, the next day."

0:08:52See, and they say that's a cold, that a cold, you know, you have advanced warning, and that

0:08:55cold seldom has a fever seldom has a headache I had a terrible fever I would I didn't take a

0:09:04measurement of it I don't have a thermometer I would estimate my fever on on Wednesday and then

0:09:09overnight going into tomorrow I would estimate it around 107 hmm that's pretty high well I tell you

0:09:17what I but I think the reason I felt started feeling better yesterday I think I sweated it

0:09:21I think I sweated this flu out of my body because I'll tell you what I woke up

0:09:25I woke up yesterday morning, and it was like I was like a grease stain

0:09:29Every single thing you're mentioning

0:09:32I don't know if there's any basis in science or medicine for what you're describing

0:09:35But I've thought all of those things when I was a little kid if you had a fever you had to stay in bed until you

0:09:40Quote unquote sweated it out. Is that a thing? I think it is

0:09:43I don't believe I I and I know it's different with small children with small children. You're worried. Oh, thank you. It's like 114

0:09:50Oh, yeah, and you want to take care of that because I could you know, that's serious business

0:09:54But I think as an adult you don't take I don't take anything to

0:09:58Take you know, take the fever down or whatever

0:10:01I feel like if your body wants to have a fever then let it go it, you know, you'll sweat this out

0:10:05Let me ask you this. I think I don't speak for you

0:10:09but I feel like anyone who has kids can agree that it's children that cause illness because

0:10:13They're little disgusting sponges who touch everything they eat other kids boogers on a dare

0:10:17and then they rub around on the playground and then they come home and

0:10:21they bring that into your home. Do you have a sense, let me ask you this, this is a

0:10:25factual question, do you know what your school's rule is for when you should or

0:10:30should not send your kid to school? That's an excellent question. I don't. I

0:10:34think Amy would probably know a little bit more, but it is in the modern age,

0:10:43and you know, I mean this goes back decades, I think when you and I were kids

0:10:47were at the pivot point of this. Clearly before our time there was a stay-at-home

0:10:53parent in a lot of households, usually obviously the mother, and you know in

0:10:58today's world there are you know there's not so many stay-at-home parents.

0:11:02Also I mean like I can tell you our my my daughter is in you know enrichment

0:11:07and aftercare until usually three or four every day but there are kids who

0:11:12are there till dark. They're just six. Like the parents need those both parents

0:11:15working. There is no one to take care of that kid unless someone doesn't get paid that day.

0:11:18Right. And so I actually, I don't know the rules, but I know that a lot of kids go when they

0:11:22probably shouldn't and probably when the parents kind of wish that they could leave them home,

0:11:25but that it is such an enormous thing to untangle from to if you don't send the kid to school,

0:11:34what do you do? And, you know, and a lot of times it pops up. It only pops up in the morning,

0:11:39you know, when you wake up and it's, you know, you might have meetings, you have stuff. So I am super

0:11:44sympathetic to that. I don't know, and I know that the school's rules for this is

0:11:48not very... Well, I'll tell you what ours are. So, first of all, to your point, I

0:11:52think the pendulum has swung. I think that there was a time, you

0:11:57know, in the post, you know, Benjamin Spock era where we wanted to toughen up our

0:12:00kids and not turn them into sissies and dancers, and so you send them to

0:12:03school. You got to send them to school. You got to go to school. It doesn't matter how sick you are.

0:12:06And then I think I feel like, for me in the last... I want to say, even when I

0:12:11had a job in the 90s they made it very clear to people you know don't come to

0:12:14work if you're sick because you'll make other people sick we never used to talk

0:12:18about that used to just be you had to be home because you were ill but then there

0:12:21was this sense of no let's be more you know the pendulum swings that way and

0:12:24you say like oh no let's not make other people sick it's my understanding today

0:12:27and I might get this wrong but I believe this is correct because I don't like

0:12:31going to school and seeing a bunch of snot yeah freaks me out I hate those

0:12:34kids who are just walking down the hallway and coughing I get all like

0:12:38coward Hughes. I get all damn Benjamin when I see that. And so...

0:12:41You know, and I hate to say it, and my kid's a bit fastidious, so

0:12:46he is not this way, but there's a classic kid who just seems

0:12:50completely ignorant of snot coming out of the nose. He's just used to it, and he doesn't

0:12:55mind it.

0:12:55You could see one, you know, the really classic pro-level snot kid

0:13:00will have the crust around the rim,

0:13:04and then the still kind of moist droplet, like pine tar falling.

0:13:07And then, you know, it might take years for that one to fall, but it's there.

0:13:10It almost looks like they're like one of those...

0:13:12Like a stalactite.

0:13:13Well, you know how, like, there's like two kinds of aliens in Star Wars.

0:13:17There's the ones that look like totally, you know, like some kind of outlandish design.

0:13:21And then there's the ones that are like mostly human, but have like a little thing different.

0:13:25And like, it looks like, you know, maybe you're an alien who has like a crusty rock formation coming out where your nose should be.

0:13:32[laughs]

0:13:34Uh-huh. Here's what I think. This is what my wife said is, I think she... I might be getting this wrong,

0:13:39but I feel like what she told me was, "You keep your kid home officially if they have a fever,

0:13:44vomiting, and/or diarrhea. Otherwise, they're good to go. Your kid could be, like, literally have a

0:13:53vein open, and as long as they're not vomiting and inconveniencing people, you just wheel them right in."

0:13:58Isn't that nuts? Can you imagine that?

0:14:01Honestly, whether it's official or not, it sounds...

0:14:05it seems to me like that is, practically speaking,

0:14:10the way it goes. And those are the things... The fever's the one where it's

0:14:14like,

0:14:14a kid with a fever is so miserable.

0:14:18Because when you're little you feel it so much more. I hate having a fever,

0:14:23but I remember the fevers, I still remember the ear aches and fevers of my

0:14:26childhood title.

0:14:27that still, in my mind, I feel like I still remember thinking,

0:14:31maybe short of my first migraine, like this is the most excruciating thing I will ever feel,

0:14:35is like the feeling of being out of your body

0:14:38and yet incredibly connected to the pain in your body when you have a fever.

0:14:42And then also like having the same dream over and over.

0:14:44- Yeah, yeah.

0:14:45- Let's go to school, let's do some geography today, Jon.

0:14:47- I remember, the thing I remember about having a fever as a kid

0:14:51was how severe the chills were.

0:14:54And what a great name for the symptom that is. I mean, it's kind of obvious, but it sounds like a Stephen King novel.

0:15:00And when you're a kid having the chills, for me at least, I remember it vividly, there was nothing you could do.

0:15:06You could douse me in lighter fluid and light me on fire and it wouldn't warm me up.

0:15:11Even though I had a fever.

0:15:13My torso and trunk would feel like they were in a walk-in freezer.

0:15:16And my head might feel like it was in a microwave at the same time.

0:15:19And I could not stand anything touching my skin.

0:15:22Right. And like you're like, "Hey, Candel, the bike is not helping me."

0:15:25Right. And like the real life, like, you know, I think it's only like 20 degrees here in

0:15:30Philadelphia today. It's...

0:15:3126.

0:15:3226 earlier.

0:15:33Mm-hmm.

0:15:34You go out in weather like that and it's unpleasant, but eventually your skin starts to burn. You

0:15:38know, there's like a... I don't know. There's some kind of way that your nerves sort of

0:15:41compensate for this and they're like, "All right, we got to just real cold. We're going

0:15:43to, you know, even this out." When you have the chills, especially as a kid, like you

0:15:47said it's so much more sensitive. The cold just never stops. It's the worst.

0:15:53Well, it's like, you know, I haven't had time to Google this, so I'm just going to guess.

0:15:58But what is that? Something's happening. Something's telling you your body is way out of whack.

0:16:03And I think what a fever is doing is whatever it is that is causing the fever, it's trying

0:16:07to raise your body temperature to kill that thing. Is that what it is?

0:16:10Yeah, to sweat it out.

0:16:11To sweat it out. That's ultimately...

0:16:13That's what happened. I didn't fight the fever and then last, not this night, not Thursday night going into today, but Wednesday night going into Thursday, I sweated it out.

0:16:21I woke up as a breathing grease stain.

0:16:24So Wednesday, so it's Friday as we record this, but like let's say around, if you can remember, in your state, around lunchtime Wednesday, what was your prognosis?

0:16:34Did you feel like, "Oh, this is going to be something I get over, or this is going to be like a two-weaker, or is this going to be, you know, what's this going to be?"

0:16:40gonna be? I never had, I well I shouldn't say never knock on wood, but I haven't

0:16:45been sick for like more than a handful of days in years. I am you know I have to

0:16:49say I'm fortunate to have overall very good health. You know how to sweat it out.

0:16:53Yeah. I but I wouldn't have guessed that I would feel as good as I do today. I

0:16:59thought I was looking at it maybe like through the weekend type thing. Let me

0:17:03tell you this. What a pathetic thing as an adult that like the high point of

0:17:06your week is you don't feel sick anymore I love it let me tell you that here's not

0:17:12like I got a free model or something or I got I get to go to Disney World here's

0:17:15hey I don't feel as bad here's my Wednesday my Wednesday is I had no idea

0:17:19I was getting sick I woke up and and actually I should say when I woke up I

0:17:27didn't really even think that I was sick I just felt sore and I thought you know

0:17:31that boy I'm really in bad shape because I'd you know run some errands or you

0:17:34like Monday and Tuesday, walked a couple miles.

0:17:38And my legs felt so sore.

0:17:39I was like, that is pathetic that my legs feel so sore

0:17:42after just normal urban walking.

0:17:46And then I started thinking a little bit more

0:17:50about how I felt and I was like, you know what, I'm sick.

0:17:52And I'm like, oh, I'm hot.

0:17:53And it's like, the heat's not on high.

0:17:55I've got a fever.

0:17:57And then I realized I was just parched with thirst.

0:17:59And I was like, this isn't good.

0:18:00And I realized, it just dawned on me very slowly.

0:18:03like I've got the flu or something.

0:18:05And I thought I'm parched with thirst.

0:18:07I cannot, I just need something cold to drink.

0:18:12But I really want, it had to be bubbly.

0:18:14I needed fizzy water because the idea of drinking

0:18:17still water was absolutely disgusting to me.

0:18:20It just felt like it would,

0:18:21I normally don't like to drink still water,

0:18:23but at this moment, getting sick--

0:18:25- Once you really get into fizzy water,

0:18:26there's something slightly revolting

0:18:28about room temperature flat water.

0:18:30- And it's exaggerated when I'm sick.

0:18:31In the same way that coffee doesn't taste good

0:18:33when I'm sick, only something fizzy tastes good.

0:18:37It's like, it's the way my tongue feels.

0:18:39I need the bubbles to like kind of burn the sick

0:18:41off the tongue or something.

0:18:42So I go downstairs and all of my,

0:18:45all of my SodaStream bottles are empty.

0:18:47Now that's my own fault because I'm the only one

0:18:50in the house who drinks this stuff.

0:18:51It's not like I can't blame anybody else

0:18:53because nobody else drinks it.

0:18:55So I go to fill one up and I put it in the penguin

0:18:58and I start pumping it and it makes that sick sound

0:19:00when the canisters empty.

0:19:03So the CO2 canisters empty.

0:19:05Now, months ago, I had switched

0:19:08from keeping the spare canisters under the sink

0:19:10to keeping them down on our first floor,

0:19:12which is sort of a basement garage level.

0:19:14There's no living area down there,

0:19:16but it's not really a basement

0:19:17'cause it's sort of street level,

0:19:19but it's ground level

0:19:20and we have like a storeroom down there.

0:19:22I keep them there as a courtesy to Amy

0:19:25to not take up space under the sink

0:19:27with my own fizzy water thing

0:19:29that I only have to replace every couple weeks. So I go downstairs and I'm barefoot, but it's

0:19:34only like 20 degrees outside and it's like a tile floor. And it's just so cold. I couldn't

0:19:41take it. So I'm down on the first floor and it's a stone... I don't know. I would say

0:19:45that the floor was around negative 30 or 40 degrees.

0:19:50That's pretty cold.

0:19:51And I go back to where I keep...

0:19:52Well, that's one of the properties. Is it like a concrete? Kind of just like cement?

0:19:54Eh, it's not concrete. It's tile. It's some kind of...

0:19:57- [

0:20:05and where they are. And I reached it. I got to get down on the floor to find these things.

0:20:09And all three of the ones I have there, they're all empty already.

0:20:13Oh, no.

0:20:14So apparently at some point, my system is I have four... I keep four canisters of the

0:20:18CO2. And when I have three empties, I go to the Williams-Sonoma across town and, you know,

0:20:25swap the three old ones out for three new ones. And then I've, you know, my fourth is

0:20:28the one that... So apparently I screwed that up whenever I swapped the last one out. But

0:20:33And so I'm left with nothing. I've got nothing and I'm already down there on this cold floor.

0:20:37Oh no.

0:20:38And I've got no fizzy water, but I need something fizzy. So I had a beer.

0:20:43Oh, good for you. And that's got the performance characteristics.

0:20:47Yeah.

0:20:48Yeah, it's fizzy. And so the beer doesn't freeze when it's sitting... Was it outside

0:20:54or was it in a downstairs refrigerator?

0:20:55No, it was in a refrigerator.

0:20:56Your regular refrigerator, your primary refrigerator.

0:20:58Yeah. So I had a beer and I went back to bed, but I had four flights of stairs.

0:21:00I think any doctor's gonna tell you that's totally permissible because you're hydrating,

0:21:03you're helping to sweat it out, and you're getting the fizziness that would prevent you

0:21:06from being disgusted by flat water.

0:21:08Right.

0:21:09Mm-hmm.

0:21:10So then I woke back up around noon.

0:21:11Did they help you sleep at all?

0:21:14Yeah.

0:21:15Well, it was about an hour.

0:21:16Then I took a shower, which is the best I felt.

0:21:19Do you feel good when you're sick?

0:21:20Do you feel good when you take a shower?

0:21:22Six a day when I'm sick.

0:21:23It's the best, right?

0:21:24Yeah.

0:21:25It's like some–

0:21:26Drought, schmout.

0:21:27I'm in there for six hours.

0:21:28No, it's literally the only thing, and it will give me relief or make me feel like,

0:21:33make me feel less awful for a little while, and then even for a little while after I get out,

0:21:39I'll continue to feel like less awful. It's the only relief.

0:21:41And if you have a cold and if you're stuffy in some way, the steam, you know,

0:21:45it temporarily opens you up and stuff like that. It just feels good. So I felt,

0:21:48I started feeling better again. I got dressed, put some nice clean clothes on,

0:21:52and I was gonna go out and buy. I couldn't make it far enough away. There's no way.

0:21:58I in my state I was going to make it far enough to get the CO2 cartridges I was going to buy

0:22:04some Pellegrino or some Perrier or something that the you know just a block or two away

0:22:11and so I I went to the store and we didn't have any orange juice in the house either

0:22:16so I went to the store and the only stuff I wanted to buy I wanted to buy fizzy bottles

0:22:20of fizzy water some orange juice and I forget what else something else oh those little cans

0:22:26of San Pellegrino, the orange ones, you know what I mean?

0:22:29Oh yeah, those are nice with the little wrapper on them?

0:22:32Yeah, exactly, with the little wrapper on them. It's sort of like a cross between fizzy water and soda.

0:22:36You know, there's... It was like the heaviest stuff you can possibly buy from a market.

0:22:42And I realized that I... I realized exactly who I felt like, what my posture looked like,

0:22:48and the pace that I was walking at, and my capabilities of carrying these groceries,

0:22:53groceries is I was C Montgomery Burns.

0:22:56Hey, you look like a question mark.

0:22:59I didn't have the strength to keep my back straight.

0:23:04And you're you're a tall fella. So you you bet that was pretty pronounced as you

0:23:11walk home with a little orange sodas. Oh, that's so sad.

0:23:15But here I am on Friday and I feel

0:23:18you're not you're not. You got the instacart there in Philadelphia.

0:23:23Yeah. See, I don't know how that works. Oh my God.

0:23:25I can't believe you're not using this. And I was,

0:23:28it would it get it to me within an hour? Uh, well in San Francisco,

0:23:32it's usually two hours depending on how busy they are. It's two hours,

0:23:34but sometimes they have one hour availability. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

0:23:38And they'll bring it right out to you. But no, but uh, yeah, I just,

0:23:41it's just to me like just the dread of even leaving the house in a situation

0:23:44like that. This just can't do it.

0:23:47I will add that Amy was busy at the time. She, I forget where she was,

0:23:50but she was out of the house and and so it wasn't as though Amy was there

0:23:54and wasn't willing to help me. I needed to help myself or remained completely

0:23:58parched.

0:23:59Just keep telling yourself that. I think she saw that I was getting sick and got the

0:24:03hell out.

0:24:04Anyway, you're right about the kids

0:24:08as the source. I feel like if we could now, I mean we don't wanna kill all the

0:24:12children,

0:24:12but if we could... Not immediately, no. If we could isolate them, if we could just collect

0:24:16all the children of the world

0:24:18and, you know, lords of the fly them, like, let's send them to Australia, because I think

0:24:22there's plenty of land down there. Put them all in Australia for maybe like an 18-month stretch.

0:24:26-Mm-hmm. So some of them, obviously, will be killed by spiders?

0:24:30-I'd-- well, I mean, that's inevitable down there. -Is that a stereotype, John?

0:24:34-That there's spiders in Australia? -But there's giant deadly spiders?

0:24:38-Yeah, I feel like-- yeah, I would say Australia-- most of Australia is pretty much like that room in

0:24:44Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. That's kind of what I imagine, like not...

0:24:48and maybe a little better lit. But yeah, yeah, absolutely.

0:24:51Huh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you got? You got probably howler monkeys.

0:24:55You got, you got killer wombats. Like, it's just

0:24:58people with big knives. I don't know. It sounds like a pretty rough place.

0:25:02I'm just picking a place that's isolated, you know. But you... but yeah.

0:25:06If we could just eliminate children for about a year and a half.

0:25:10Isolate children for a year. Oh, somewhere... especially somewhere dry where they could

0:25:13sweat it out. You got a year to be sick, get it out of your system.

0:25:18We would eradicate every contagious disease known to man, maybe other than STDs, in the

0:25:27rest of the world.

0:25:28Let's hope they don't discover them.

0:25:29Right.

0:25:30Australia, it really makes you a little wild.

0:25:33It popped into my head that STDs might not be helped by this, but in terms of diseases

0:25:38like colds and flus, if we could get rid of the

0:25:43children for about a year and a half just to let these things they would just

0:25:46die right out if we just spent one day a week during that you're scrubbing

0:25:49everything you know well here's the thing and I'm not gonna shut up about

0:25:53this I think the hand-washing thing makes a huge difference at my kids

0:25:56preschool they washed hands you wash hands when you like grown-ups and kids

0:26:00you wash hands when you arrive at school you wash hands when you leave school and

0:26:04you go and you wash hands at every transition point throughout the day and

0:26:07I'm not a hand-washing lunatic except that I have seen the difference and I I

0:26:12I know what a difference it makes. It won't stop your kid from getting sick, but it makes

0:26:17a huge difference. Because you just think about it. We go downtown, we ride public transit,

0:26:22we go to the movies, and then my kid grabs some popcorn and sticks it in her mouth. I'm

0:26:26like, "Are you kidding? Do you have any idea where your hand has been? Do you know how

0:26:29much of San Francisco is on your hand right now?"

0:26:31It's true.

0:26:33Yeah. I mean, she sits on the floor on public transit. It's like, "Don't do that. What

0:26:38are you doing?" "No, at her school now?" "No, no, they're real busy. They're real busy.

0:26:42You can't wash hands all the time." And so she gets sick a lot more.

0:26:48I realize, I see the logic of the legislation. You know, the employees must wash hands. There

0:26:55must be a sign that states those exact words in every restaurant.

0:26:58Yeah, I think you have to put up the sign. I don't know if you have to enforce the actual

0:27:02hand washing.

0:27:03But the thing that always gets me about those signs is the idea that if you're not an employee,

0:27:08whatever you want to do yeah but conversely also you kind of love the

0:27:14idea of somebody who works in a kitchen that has to be reminded to wash their

0:27:18hands after taking the shit or just touching the door no I know we started

0:27:30watching kitchen nightmares now I don't eat out anymore oh it shows terrible I

0:27:35I don't want to watch a show like that.

0:27:37What have you done to this avocado?

0:27:40Who's the host of that show?

0:27:42That Gordon Ramsay.

0:27:44That's what I thought. Yeah. You know what?

0:27:46Jonas and Amy like to watch that show.

0:27:48I'd choose not to.

0:27:50You should not. He also does Hotel Hell,

0:27:53which is similar. It's with hotels.

0:27:55He seems like he's a pretty smart guy.

0:27:58It seems like, I feel like every episode,

0:28:00he seems like a guy who probably wants to do a little less coke than he does.

0:28:03He's very, very animated.

0:28:05Kind of a hair trigger, but you know, it's formulaic, you know, comfort food.

0:28:11How would we get the kids to Australia?

0:28:13Would it be by like a ship or how would that work?

0:28:18Well, see, my friend John Roderick and I have talked about is how useful it would be like

0:28:25instead in lieu of like middle school, you send kids out to work in a national park for

0:28:31like three years because just to first of all get them away from us get it out

0:28:35of society and get them somewhere where they can really be exhausted they'd have

0:28:38to make their own clothes from things that they find while they're working

0:28:40during the day you know it would be kind of like what it'd be like you know

0:28:45Hunger Games meets Lord of the Flies which is I guess already kind of Lord of

0:28:51the Flies but yeah be good for everybody be good for them you become strong you

0:28:56get a tan you learn how to make a bunk bed maybe what we could do instead

0:29:01Those are all very good ideas. What we could do instead is maybe pick one of the states here in the US and make it a no children state.

0:29:10And then we'd have subsidies so all the children who are already there...

0:29:14Sort of like a smoking area in restaurants.

0:29:16Exactly. Exactly what I'm thinking. But we'll do the whole state.

0:29:20We'll have some kind of subsidy system set up so that everybody who already has children will be able to move somewhere. Nice.

0:29:28And then we'll let's just see what happens to the remaining adults in that state how frequently they they get the colder flu and I'll

0:29:36Bet that they don't get it at all

0:29:38Plus they can afford to retire except for the ones and then and then we'd have to have something in place for

0:29:42You know, what do you what do you call it when you quarantine a quarantine for anybody who?

0:29:48Leaves and goes to like say Disney World or something like that. You'd have to oh, I see that have to pass through a zone

0:29:55and we make sure that they haven't brought any kid germs with them.

0:29:57Yeah.

0:29:58Oh, that's pretty good. I think a lot of people would love that. Based on the

0:30:00glares that we get when we eat out, I think a lot of people would be happy

0:30:03with that state. Yeah, maybe there could be a state just

0:30:07for people who don't want to be around kids or have

0:30:10kids or just even know kids exist. And then there could be, well, I guess

0:30:14technically it would be San Francisco's Noe Valley.

0:30:16It would be a place that's dedicated just to people who are way too into

0:30:19their kids. You know what I mean? It would be like,

0:30:22It'll be like the first time you go to a parent's meeting for a school and you're like, "Ugh! Yikes!"

0:30:28You're like, "I'm really glad I'm not any of the people who are here. I don't like the way anybody here is raising their kids."

0:30:36Tyler! Tyler Marie! Tyler Marie! Have you done your Mandarin?

0:30:43Shut up. Just shut up.

0:30:46What percentage of children today are named Skylar?

0:30:49Oh, you got Skylar and you got Tyler.

0:30:51Uh...

0:30:52I think Skylar might have been hot a while back.

0:30:55There's a lot of Annabelas.

0:30:57We get a lot of...

0:30:59What do you get there?

0:31:00I've lost track. I used to keep track.

0:31:02That was a real thing of mine when Jonah started school,

0:31:05and I've since lost track.

0:31:07And the worst part is, I could really see Amy doing this.

0:31:10The problem for me is, I start...

0:31:12I have an explosion of laughter

0:31:15before I even have a second to realize

0:31:17how awful it is to laugh at a child's name. We'll just go, "Bwah!"

0:31:20I feel so bad.

0:31:24Anastasia helicopter. Or like, my daughter has a friend whose little sister's

0:31:29name is Daenerys.

0:31:29And I can't decide, it's kind of a super cool name. It's kinda pretty weird.

0:31:34But it's cool. Like, Daenerys, that's a cool name. It's a... what is that? What's that?

0:31:37Game of houses? House of Games? House of Cards. Yeah, exactly.

0:31:40It's from that show. It's the Lady with the Dragons. No spoilers. That's kind of a cool name,

0:31:44but now she's got like a Welsh name. She's got a spell to people for the rest of her life.

0:31:47life. I don't know. You try-- you see, the thing is everybody suffers from this

0:31:51because you try and get ahead of it. I bet this happened to you. When we picked

0:31:54our kid's name, it was not like a super popular name, and it seemed like-- this is

0:31:59one of those John Siracusa things where, like, you think you're doing this thing

0:32:01outside of the culture and the evolution, and then like a year later, your kid

0:32:05has the same name as everybody. And you're like, "How did that happen?"

0:32:08Well, now they're naming tropicals or winter storms after after my kid.

0:32:12That's so embarrassing. You know, if they've got like stuff like t-shirts, you

0:32:16should buy him I'm sorry about his party that's such a bummer we you know what

0:32:26Amy likes to do I'll tell you she's as happy as a pig on a poke today what she

0:32:29likes to do she this is like a holiday for her is that she likes to watch when

0:32:34there's a big snowstorm coming and they know it's coming she likes to watch the

0:32:38local news oh yeah because the local news oh this is boy this is they've been

0:32:45waiting all year for this day, maybe a few years for this day.

0:32:48There's a local Philadelphia news channel, and they had a live report. She called me

0:32:55in to see it. She re-rounded on the TiVo. She's like, "You have to see this right before

0:32:58we started recording." They had a live report from a hardware store in Virginia that was

0:33:07rationing shovels and salt.

0:33:13Some people want to buy 10 shovels.

0:33:15Yeah, exactly.

0:33:16No, that is panic.

0:33:17Two shovels per customer limit.

0:33:20What if I break five of these?

0:33:24That's really, really odd.

0:33:25There's so many odd things about that.

0:33:27Why Virginia?

0:33:29Why that problem?

0:33:30Why report it?

0:33:32What were the stories that they rejected to decide that that was the right one to show

0:33:36in Philadelphia?

0:33:37I don't know.

0:33:38I sent you the link here.

0:33:40I'm looking at the page.

0:33:41I don't know if this is still your old address maybe, but

0:33:43essential link there to a forecast. So right now you got, you know, God, you got 21 to 28 Fahrenheit today.

0:33:50Five to eight inches of snow starting in the evening. Tomorrow, there's that tomorrow's the big day, right?

0:33:56Yeah, tomorrow's supposed to be the big day. So it's your Saturday. You get 12 to 18 inches throughout the day and windy until evening.

0:34:03Is that right? You're gonna, you might get like a foot and a half of snow?

0:34:06That's what they're saying and honestly,

0:34:08What makes me think it's gonna be bad is that it's actually...

0:34:12it's gone up. Usually they give you the worst, you know, like 48,

0:34:1672 hours in advance. They make a terrible prediction

0:34:20to get everybody, you know, to

0:34:23get everybody hysterical. And then it gets closer and closer and then

0:34:27they dial it down. This one, it was like they were talking about like

0:34:308 to 10 inches a day or two ago. Now they're talking...

0:34:33Jeez, look at that. What is it?

0:34:36It'd be what, like 17 to 23 inches total.

0:34:39Oh, God.

0:34:40Uh, all the things that we've benefited from with cord cutting.

0:34:45One of my favorites is we just don't get localness anymore.

0:34:47We don't watch it ordinarily, but when we do it, isn't it Philly culture shock?

0:34:53Yeah, it really does.

0:34:54And it's not so much that it's changed.

0:34:56It's just that it's no longer seems normal to me.

0:34:59And so that the way that they handled stories, whether that's like this or

0:35:03whether it's just like an average day, the stuff that they decide to highlight and the

0:35:09way that they do it really stands out.

0:35:11And the way that I feel like in some ways it has not, the actual format and style of

0:35:18local TV news like evening and nighttime news has not changed that much since I was a kid,

0:35:25but it's changed enough in a couple of ways. I mean, I don't know how this started, but

0:35:29whatever it became the tradition to have like top of the hour news, you got news, sports

0:35:32in weather. And you always put weather... is that still the case? Isn't that still how they do it?

0:35:35Oh yeah. And you put weather last because you want people to watch. All they're really there for is to find out

0:35:39whether to wear a coat tomorrow or what coat to wear. But they give you just a tease in the first 30 seconds.

0:35:44That's right. Yeah, exactly. So... There's some surprising weather news that you have got to...

0:35:49you've got to wait for this. Every day. Every single day, 365 days a year, there is some surprising and

0:35:57important weather related news and Kathy is going to tell you about it later in the broadcast.

0:36:02Coming up right after Magnum PI. Are deadly fecal bacteria living on your

0:36:07doorknob? Right. Like in the first three minutes of the broadcast, Kathy will come on

0:36:12and all she's gonna say is, "Jim, just wait until you hear this." You're not gonna fucking believe this. Oh my god, this is... we better wait though. Let's get a couple of...

0:36:22let's talk about this apartment fire first. Yeah, exactly. But the way I feel like it has

0:36:27change is that as much as it felt very glossy when I was a kid in the 1970s, oh my goodness,

0:36:33everything the motion graphics, everything, it was so much glossier now and it just really

0:36:38seems like they've gotten it down to a science where it's extremely professional chipper

0:36:45people reporting horrible, horrible things, like horrible dangerous things. I mean, I'm

0:36:50far from the first person to say this, but I'm always struck when I watch it that so

0:36:54So much more about American culture and society makes sense to me when I watch local news.

0:36:58Because I think like, wow, if you really did watch this as your one of your primary sources

0:37:03of information about the world, I'd be losing my mind too. I'd be like, I'd be stocking

0:37:06up on guns and snow shovels as well. It's like you just you really feel like like people

0:37:11like everybody is getting killed. Everybody. Everybody's getting killed or they're dying

0:37:16from something they can't prevent.

0:37:17I think it's why I've said this to Amy before, like most of our family lives within an hour

0:37:22of Philadelphia, overwhelming majority of our family, and nobody ever wants to come

0:37:28see us here.

0:37:29And I think it's because of TV news, because they think if you travel in the city, you're

0:37:35either going to get shot or the building you're in is going to catch fire.

0:37:38[laughter]

0:37:39[0:14]

0:37:40Steve McLaughlin You're going to get one of those increasingly

0:37:44all too common fire stabbings that they have in Philadelphia.

0:37:47Yeah, I don't know.

0:37:49Gosh, I hope it goes okay now.

0:37:51who's, you know, down where Casey List is, down there in the Virginia, they're getting

0:37:55it even worse, right? Oh yeah, that's like the epicenter. Yeah, that's the epicenter.

0:37:59And DC, yeah, the whole, what do they call it down there, Beltway. Sure. I'll tell you

0:38:04what, I got to point this out about the TV news before we move off it. I got it.

0:38:08The thing that strikes me when I watch it now, and I grew up with it, and they

0:38:12certainly did the same thing back then, but I just accepted it as that's how you

0:38:15do TV news, is the way that the correspondence, you know, there's the

0:38:20anchor person at the desk. Maybe there's two, maybe there's a man and a woman. But you know,

0:38:24there's, you know, an anchor person or two at a desk in the studio who lead the broadcast and

0:38:28introduce every story and then they go to a correspondent. And no matter what the story is,

0:38:32no matter no matter what sense it makes, the correspondent needs to be out doors somewhere

0:38:43in the in the TV broadcast area. And it doesn't matter what the story is, they could just be on

0:38:50some random street corner but they have to be reporting, for example, they might be doing

0:38:54something about

0:38:55like a Federal Reserve report for that matter but they've got to be outside somewhere

0:38:59like outside a Walmart in order to like

0:39:01deliver that. And then they absolutely positively must find

0:39:06someone walking by

0:39:08who will stop and talk to them for 10 seconds about the story.

0:39:11Yeah, I think

0:39:15increasingly you've got to have at least two or three people and I think

0:39:19I think that one way that becomes so addictive to watch is there's always something happening,

0:39:24there's always another transition coming, there's always another thing you're looking

0:39:27forward to happening.

0:39:29You're teasing the next thing, you throw to the other person, the motion graphic goes

0:39:32on.

0:39:33When I watch CNN to me it feels like a demo reel for a motion graphic company.

0:39:37It doesn't feel like there's really anything very substantial to learn.

0:39:40You could get it down to three bullets, basically what half an hour of CNN does.

0:39:44But I think the style of it is very engrossing to people.

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0:43:35And Backblaze would say, this is great.

0:43:37We love the response.

0:43:38But now nobody else is signing up

0:43:39because everybody's already signed up.

0:43:41And that would make me feel great

0:43:43because it would make me feel good to know that everybody out

0:43:45there, you guys are backing up to somewhere in the cloud.

0:43:48Go here.

0:43:48Get a no credit card required trial.

0:43:51Go to backblaze.com/daringfireball.

0:43:55That's all you have to do.

0:43:56Backblaze.com/daringfireball.

0:44:01I think years ago--

0:44:02I think I mispronounced it.

0:44:03I think I said years ago on Backblaze read,

0:44:07I called them Blackbaze or something, Blackblaze,

0:44:10and they went and registered the domain.

0:44:12Blackbaze, Black-- hm.

0:44:15That's interesting.

0:44:16Let me see if they've still got it.

0:44:18No, not Blackbaze.

0:44:19Maybe Blackblaze.

0:44:22Something mispronounced.

0:44:23Sounds kind of dirty.

0:44:24Yeah, it does.

0:44:25A little bit.

0:44:25Oh, yep, go to Blackblaze.

0:44:27Go to blackblaze.com.

0:44:29I love that.

0:44:29Do it.

0:44:30Go to blackblaze.com.

0:44:33I believe that they registered it because of a mispronunciation that I did on their show.

0:44:38Oh yeah, totally redirects. That's great. Oh my god. So my thanks to Black Blaze.

0:44:45For doing the evil. That's the evil twin of Backblaze. It's the one that's got the

0:44:52handlebar mustache. Yeah, otherwise identical. Jet black, a jet black handlebar mustache.

0:44:59Now I'm looking, I googled snow on the internet and with the news section.

0:45:05A lot of pictures of empty grocery shelves and people in line waiting to buy things.

0:45:12Here's the thing. I've said this before in years past.

0:45:15I understand the need to stock up on groceries. We've done it. We've already gone and we've

0:45:20bought some staples to make sure that we've got not just food to eat but maybe actually

0:45:27meals that we have in the house ready to prepare. Sure, and some 1.75 liter sized bottles. But it

0:45:33still boggles my mind the way that there are certain staples that literally sell out. Like,

0:45:40I would guarantee you that when we finish recording this show today, if I go to the

0:45:45ACME down the street, that there's gonna be no bread. No bread. No bread. Because all the,

0:45:51because you know, when you're really, really getting attacked by snow, you're gonna want

0:45:55I want to have some bread.

0:45:56(laughing)

0:45:58Oh my God, we're out of bread.

0:46:01- But ordinarily there's so much bread in that supermarket

0:46:04that there's--

0:46:05- So much bread, it's like, it's ridiculous.

0:46:08You don't realize how big that section is

0:46:10until it's been totally cleared out during a snowstorm.

0:46:12- Right, and when it's cleared out,

0:46:14you realize that all the weird bread is gone too.

0:46:17(laughing)

0:46:19- Yeah, all that kind of dark bread,

0:46:20only like your older relatives like.

0:46:22(laughing)

0:46:23- Right.

0:46:24so dark stuff with weird seeds that you don't know what the weird seeds yeah

0:46:29exactly oh my goodness we make we make light but I you know this well that's

0:46:35probably well this this won't come out until the damage is done right we should

0:46:40probably watch our ass it might come out it'll probably come out tomorrow oh good

0:46:44oh it could come out later today could come out later today never know no what

0:46:47happened oh god I don't know what else do people buy they buy eggs that's

0:46:53That's another one too, where it's good to have eggs in the house.

0:46:55I enjoy eggs.

0:46:56I feel like maybe there was some brochure that went around from the '50s to the '70s

0:47:01and it's the same shit everybody buys.

0:47:02You buy canned soup.

0:47:04You buy bread.

0:47:06You got to have non-perishable items.

0:47:08You got to have things that you could make over the hot plate that you don't actually

0:47:11own.

0:47:12There's all the things that you would need, but you go into this lizard brain thing where

0:47:14you just click and your brain goes into buy stuff at the grocery store mode.

0:47:19And then, of course, it's like the stock market.

0:47:21It's just like trading places.

0:47:22You go in there and you see everybody freaking out and that makes you freak out.

0:47:26I think that's exactly it.

0:47:28It's I think that maybe you go in there and you think, "Well, I want to get bread because

0:47:31I'm supposed to get bread."

0:47:32"I'll just go pick up a loaf of bread.

0:47:34Oh my God!"

0:47:35And you see that the guy next to you is taking two loaves of bread and you think, "I better

0:47:41get…"

0:47:42I see you're punching some lady in the neck because she's touching your butter top.

0:47:45Right.

0:47:46And then all of a sudden you're buying three loaves of Wonder Bread.

0:47:49I've never bought this before.

0:47:52But you feel like if you don't buy these three loaves of Wonder Bread, you won't be able

0:47:55to get it an hour from now.

0:47:57Yeah, like it seems like you should probably buy crappier stuff than you normally buy,

0:48:01because maybe it'll last longer.

0:48:02Like, don't get the Progresso.

0:48:03Like, get the generic brand suit.

0:48:05Make that, that'll be better when you go into your theoretical bunker.

0:48:08You know, bring that along.

0:48:09Hey, that's probably...

0:48:10Yeah, there's, there's shelves here that are, that have been totally wiped clean of all

0:48:13lettuce.

0:48:14So maybe this is a big salad event.

0:48:16Maybe you have like a lock-in and you make some Caesar salad.

0:48:19You guys, you don't get snow in San Francisco.

0:48:21No, I just get a lot of weird weather but snow is snow is not something you guys have to deal with we get

0:48:27Our climate it's our clothes not our weather. It's our climate

0:48:31Our climate is very unconventional and the short version is as you probably know is that?

0:48:35we have

0:48:37because of our proximity to you know

0:48:40What is called the Golden Gate like we San Francisco sits astride a big hole in California

0:48:45And so basically the cold air over the ocean

0:48:47There's a cold air over the ocean and there's the very hot air over the basin like where they grow a lot of the vegetables and

0:48:52That causes some very strange things for one thing our air is incredibly clean because it's basically being washed every day

0:48:57It's being moved out and in every day

0:48:59But it also means stuff like you know

0:49:01You might start out at a certain temperature in the morning and then it gets colder

0:49:05Then it gets warmer for an hour from three to four and then it plummets again at night

0:49:10And explain stuff like why we have it's cold in the wind and the in the summer. It's cold here

0:49:15It's warm in October and then it rains for most of

0:49:19mmm late December January February my favorite evergreen

0:49:24WWDC joke WWDC is almost always held in June is you know hey first-timers. It's

0:49:31It's sunny, California. Don't bother taking a jacket or jeans

0:49:34Yeah, you know German tourists. It's it's it's just evergreen source of humor

0:49:39They the poor bastards to go I'm coming to dos California, and it's like yeah

0:49:43Yeah, it's going to be like 50 every day.

0:49:46Well, they used to give out backpacks.

0:49:47That was for attendees.

0:49:48They'd give out backpacks or laptop bags of some sort and embroidered with WWDC and then

0:49:53the two digits of the year.

0:49:55And then like three or four years ago, they started giving out jackets.

0:49:57And they've done jackets ever since.

0:50:01And I asked somebody at Apple once, is that because so many people-- and you see people

0:50:04wearing them.

0:50:05Is it because so many people come and they need them?

0:50:07And they're like, yeah, exactly.

0:50:09That's exactly it.

0:50:10and that people, you know, attendees come up and they say, like, I can't do the German accent, but

0:50:15the German accent, thank you for this jacket, I'd be dead without it.

0:50:21Donka. Yeah, you ever go up to Twin Peaks?

0:50:26No.

0:50:26Oh, it's really, you should do it sometime, it's pretty cool. There's not that many things I

0:50:29recommend about San Francisco, but you drive up in, near the, somewhat near the geographical

0:50:36center of town, basically at the end of Market Street. So, Market Street begins at the Embarcadero,

0:50:41the Ferry Building. There's the part of Market Street you're familiar with by Moscone. And

0:50:44then if you go all the way to the end of Market Street, essentially it mostly ends, it ends

0:50:48at the Castro, and then you'll see this big mountain. And so anyway, you go up this big

0:50:52hill to get to my neighborhood, and Twin Peaks are these two big mountains in the middle

0:50:56of San Francisco. And it's where that big tower is, that robot-looking tower you see.

0:51:03But if you go up there, man, and it's clear, you get this amazing view of the city.

0:51:08It's really, really beautiful.

0:51:09One of the very few actually nice things in San Francisco.

0:51:12But of course, you go up a mountain in San Francisco, and it's like 10 to 20 degrees

0:51:17colder than it was where you were, plus it's incredibly windy.

0:51:21So you just see these little ladies up there just like selling sweatshirts.

0:51:24They go up there at 8 in the morning and they just sell sweatshirts all day long.

0:51:28Yeah, yeah, I want to see that view from the Twin Peaks.

0:51:33I feel like I probably, maybe even a majority of the people who listen to my show have been

0:51:38to San Francisco at least once. I mean, I feel like it's, you know, it's probably an

0:51:42awful lot. I know that an awful lot of people who read my stuff and listen to it or, you

0:51:46know, work out there. And, you know, if you work anywhere, even vaguely Northern California,

0:51:50of course, you've been to San Francisco. But for you know, there's probably a lot of people

0:51:53who, you know, just have never had reason to go. I feel like you can hear these stories

0:51:58about how the weather in San Francisco is incredibly isolated, you know, from the area

0:52:02around it. But you just can't...

0:52:04Well, you walk around within two blocks, you could change, you know, basically be a different

0:52:08climate for reasons that are very unclear.

0:52:10Why is it cold here? I've just moved... I've just gone from Union Square down to, you know...

0:52:17How is the wind blowing from both directions?

0:52:21Like all of a sudden you're down by, what are they called, AT&T Park, wherever the Giants

0:52:25play.

0:52:26Yeah, sure, sure.

0:52:27I know I know it's bananas, right? Yeah

0:52:30Hope it all goes. I hope it all goes well for you, you know, god bless you

0:52:35I hope I hope it's I hope it's it's fun now

0:52:38Do you face I don't want to make this the whole show but I mean like do you face much in the way like of damage?

0:52:42Like when I was in Florida and there's a hurricane coming there's all kinds of stuff

0:52:45You got to do depend all the way from tape up the windows to like board over the windows

0:52:50Like do you have to do any special preparation? No, you know big snow is coming. No

0:52:55No, except stock up on bread.

0:52:57No, you know, you know what, we as a family have it very easy and I understand, again,

0:53:04this is just, it's just like kids getting sick.

0:53:07If you have a job where you've got a, it's important that you be there, snowstorm is

0:53:12an enormous pain in the ass.

0:53:14And the fact that it's coming on a weekend could be good news for a lot of people, but

0:53:17there's still some people who have jobs that it's essential that they be there.

0:53:21Huge pain in the ass.

0:53:22Well, I guess where my office is, it's right downstairs.

0:53:24So the fact that we can easily and work-wise, you know, a snowstorm is often indistinguishable

0:53:31from a normal day for us.

0:53:32It's actually kind of nice.

0:53:33You're very fortunate.

0:53:35In any other generation, the idea of having your bedroom, your office, and your bar be

0:53:41essentially the same room, you know, that's powerful.

0:53:45You got everything you need right there.

0:53:47You know what?

0:53:48You're like your own personal food court.

0:53:49Everything you need is right there.

0:53:50Yeah.

0:53:51it and sometimes it's really it's just so nice in the city to have the big snow come and have

0:53:56very few cars on the road and it's you can go out right and before the snow turns all gray and black

0:54:02from the cars that eventually get back on the road everything looks beautiful and it's quiet it is

0:54:08quiet in a way that you can't believe that the city could ever be this quiet because in addition

0:54:13to the fact that there's no or very few cars on the road the snow is like a what would you call

0:54:18it a sound dampening soft substance it absorbs. It's hard to even describe that

0:54:23sound but it's even when I lived in the suburbs in Ohio it's it's a very special

0:54:27winter feeling to go outside and it's very it's very crisp it's very quiet and

0:54:31it's very still it just feels like everything has slowed down. Yeah I

0:54:35remember a couple years ago it's very vivid in my mind it was Michael Lop my

0:54:40friend Michael Lop of Rans and Repose was in town for a conference of some

0:54:44sort or somebody had paid him for a it was like a paid speaking kid I don't

0:54:47it was a conference or a corporate thing, but he was in town. And a huge snowstorm hit.

0:54:52One of these, you know, at least a foot of snow type things. And we went out to dinner,

0:54:56just the two of us. And there was nobody on the street. And, you know, steakhouse was

0:55:03open and there was only like one other table that was taken. Only like two or three waiters

0:55:07were on shift. And we asked the waiter, you know, like, "Hey, was this like a huge painting?"

0:55:11He asked, he was like, "I live in the city. What else am I going to do tonight? I don't

0:55:14So it was like empty steakhouse, super quiet, great meal.

0:55:19And I feel like it's because whoever was in the kitchen, it was like, well, what are we...

0:55:22you know, we're only cooking like three things, might as well make it perfect.

0:55:25Great meal. And then we just went out and just walked back

0:55:28to his hotel and then I walked home and it was... it was like we were the only two

0:55:31people in the whole city of Philadelphia.

0:55:33It was amazing. It was like you can't make that up.

0:55:37That's such a great feeling. Yeah, you know, something that

0:55:41Syracuse and I have ended up talking about on the show that we do is I'm

0:55:45always interested in what I would call like seam exposing events, right? And like

0:55:50the kinds of things where you don't realize how fragile something is until

0:55:54some complexity or difficulty is introduced and that's when the seams get

0:55:58exposed. And that's the thing I feel bad about with a city is if you look at a

0:56:01city like, you know, a city like Atlanta which is already so on the edge in terms

0:56:06of, you know, I think it has something like them, you know, in the aggregate the

0:56:10most commuted miles per day. Oh, without question. Yeah, there was a

0:56:13New Yorker story about it a few years ago. It's ridiculous. People drive...

0:56:17It's actually shockingly bad in its scale and the amount of time, right? I mean

0:56:21it's pretty bad. Most people commute like an hour or something like that.

0:56:23Yeah. Is that right? It's something like that. Something like that. But then you

0:56:26introduce rain or, God forbid, you introduce snow to that or even the

0:56:30smallest bit of snow. Like, they don't... there's not many accommodations that the

0:56:36city of Atlanta can make for snow. And that's the part where it starts to feel

0:56:39like they say, the apocalypse, you know?

0:56:41Or you think about so many places,

0:56:42like what happens in California when it rains a lot,

0:56:45this happens everywhere.

0:56:46Like the first time it rains,

0:56:47after it hasn't rained for a long time,

0:56:48there's all this oil and, you know, various detritus,

0:56:52like just sitting there on the streets.

0:56:54And so once you start, you know, zooming around on there,

0:56:57that water basically, I don't know, I'm not a scientist,

0:56:58but like that makes the roads very slippery.

0:57:00Or the drains, you know, the ground can't absorb

0:57:04all the water 'cause it's been so dry.

0:57:06It's just, I don't know.

0:57:07I always brace for the first big snow, the first big

0:57:11rainstorm. Will, can we take this?

0:57:15I was talking to Dan Fromer about it on this show

0:57:18last time, it was a good episode. And in Vegas when it rains, the

0:57:23cars are terrible, people don't know how to drive, and a couple of Vegas residents said

0:57:26it's

0:57:27you know in addition to the fact that people here don't really know how to

0:57:29drive with wet roads,

0:57:30it really is actually worse than typical wet roads because we get so little rain

0:57:35that there is like a coating of oil on

0:57:37on the tarmac. For somebody who claims to like CES,

0:57:42wow, he really... I feel like

0:57:46every impulse I've ever had to go to CES, I'm really glad I didn't listen.

0:57:50That sounds so awful. You and I should go together.

0:57:54It sounds like you're committed for next year. Do you think we should go and do some

0:57:58reporting?

0:57:58I think we should. I think that within a

0:58:02couple of weeks I'll just file that away and do another show next year

0:58:05where I say, "I'll go next year."

0:58:07- Well, knowing your record with this,

0:58:09I'll make you this mostly promise.

0:58:11I'll go if you go, but I don't think you're gonna go,

0:58:13so I'm not worried.

0:58:14I don't wanna go.

0:58:15Oh my goodness.

0:58:17(laughing)

0:58:18That description of the shuttle buses,

0:58:21like how long it took to go somewhere in a shuttle bus.

0:58:23Like, I walk everywhere in Las Vegas.

0:58:25I can't imagine driving.

0:58:26If it's anywhere on the strip, you walk there.

0:58:28I mean, what's the worst thing that happens?

0:58:30You get an alcoholic beverage and walk.

0:58:33It's not hard.

0:58:34but like, oh my God.

0:58:36And I'll imagine all of those people who are like us being there at the same

0:58:38time, how miserable that would be.

0:58:40Oh yeah, that's part of it.

0:58:41I remember one time I was in Vegas and it was just by coincidence at the end of

0:58:45some massive convention, you know, I don't even know what it was, but it was,

0:58:49it must've been like CES sized or close thereabouts. And, um,

0:58:54we were like waiting for a cab somewhere and it was like taking forever and we're

0:58:59like, ah, screw it. We'll just walk. And then it somehow came up that like, we,

0:59:03we heard it that they said that at the Venetian,

0:59:06that there was a three hour wait for cabs.

0:59:09A three hour wait for cabs? Because it was the end of this massive convention

0:59:13and everybody was leaving.

0:59:15Yeah, but think about that. Like, who leaves for the airport three hours in advance?

0:59:19Nobody.

0:59:20So in other words, when they tell you it's a three hour wait to get to the

0:59:22airport, that means you're missing your flight.

0:59:25Oh no. And that's a thing you can't walk to.

0:59:29No! And the thing is, that airport is not that big.

0:59:32In other words, it doesn't have that much tolerance for needing to expand.

0:59:37Right. But so, like, there are times when Vegas is, you know, as much as they can support

0:59:43truly massive conventions, conferences, whatever you want to call it, there are times when

0:59:48it still is, you know, 10 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.

0:59:53Well, you know, it's interesting if you think about, you know, I don't know, it's an interesting

0:59:58kind of a planned community in some ways because there seems to be even as much as Las Vegas

1:00:04has pivoted toward more or less family friendly or more up or down scale.

1:00:10Everybody's still mostly been marching in the same direction with Las Vegas since what,

1:00:15the 40s, right?

1:00:17I mean, the basic idea of what Las Vegas is for has not changed that much.

1:00:21And I have to imagine like the infrastructure to support that, it mainly needs to grow and

1:00:26get bigger, but does it need to change that much? You're always going to need prime rib,

1:00:30shrimp, liquor, and chips. It's not like you're suddenly going to need like, you know, I guess

1:00:37you get live animals occasionally. Like if a white tiger dies, you get a fresh one. But

1:00:40like other than that, I mean, it's got to be a pretty steady supply train for making

1:00:43that place run. And I bet it's pretty easily disruptable.

1:00:46Part of the problem is that they have a monorail that goes up and down the strip, but it's

1:00:50terrible. And Dan was saying on the show that at one point it was like an hour long wait

1:00:55thinking on the monorail. But the monorail is is terribly,

1:00:59terribly located. It's like way behind the strip. I remember the

1:01:04first time I tried to take it was like, this is great. We'll

1:01:06get out of these expensive cab rides, we'll take the monorail

1:01:08down. And then it they're like these signs like monorail this

1:01:11way and you start you go through this casino and they're like,

1:01:14you know, keep looking for signs that say where the monorail is.

1:01:16And it's like, Oh, yeah, keep going. Keep going. Keep going.

1:01:20Now you're going through the employee parking lot. And it's

1:01:23monorail this way and you're like, wait a minute,

1:01:26the monorail. And then you still get to get there and find out it's an hour

1:01:31wait. It's ridiculous. But really, I mean the big,

1:01:33one of the big problems with Vegas is that they really are in desperate need of

1:01:37some public transportation just, and it wouldn't be that complicated.

1:01:41It really just up and down the strip. Uh, and they don't have it. I've,

1:01:45I've often thought, what do you do if you're, you're staying at the Venetian,

1:01:48your conference is over,

1:01:49you have a three o'clock flight

1:01:51and it's one in the afternoon and you think you're doing a responsible thing

1:01:54by leaving two hours. It's not far. If you want you're in a cab. No, it's like as soon as you

1:01:58pull out from the airport you can already see the strip. It feels very very close.

1:02:02Like anything in a desert it's kind of difficult to tell how far away

1:02:05something is. Yeah, traffic permitting it's usually ten or fifteen minute cab ride.

1:02:09So it's two hours in advance and then they tell you

1:02:11it's gonna be three hours until you get a cab. What do you do?

1:02:15Oh my god. What do you do?

1:02:17You know, in another time, you know, even probably 20 years ago, I would say you call up the airline and try to reschedule it and pay what used to be, I'm going to say a $75 fee, something like that.

1:02:26It used to be that flights were more expensive, but you could do more with them. I think nowadays, almost everybody buys, I'm pulling this out of my ass, but you know, like nowadays, almost everybody buys refundable or non-refundable tickets, right?

1:02:38Right. You always buy the least expensive thing. But like, you know, certainly back

1:02:42when my dad was flying, back when there were three different classes on every plane, and

1:02:46you know, they were costly, but you could do a lot more with them. I feel like even

1:02:4920 years ago, most airlines for 75, 100 bucks, you could change your flight. I don't know

1:02:54what you do in that case. Because it's sort of a can't get there from here situation.

1:02:58What are you going to do? You're going to hire a local car? I mean, what are you going

1:03:00to do?

1:03:01Well, the local, the local, they're not local, the modern day thing, the thing that you can

1:03:05do now is that you have a cell phone where maybe you can start stabbing your finger at

1:03:10your airline's website and see if there's something you can do right there, right now.

1:03:14You could just do it right now.

1:03:15The other thing I thought you could do is if you're in that situation is take your suitcases

1:03:20and schlep them not to the airport but maybe see if you can walk across the street to a

1:03:25different hotel and see if you can get a cab there.

1:03:27But my thought would be, wait, if there's a big line here, there's probably going to

1:03:31be a big line at every hotel that is nearby because the nearby ones are the

1:03:37same ones that the same people have been at.

1:03:39Yeah, that's one of those things, I'm so interested in these sorts of things,

1:03:41something that feels like a cause but is actually an effect. Like in that

1:03:45instance, the fact that there's a lineup for cabs is not the source of the

1:03:49problem, it's the result of the problem.

1:03:51You know what I mean? It could just be that everybody's trying to get a cab

1:03:53right now.

1:03:54So let's see here. You stay at the Wynn, is that right?

1:03:58well usually. Okay I'm just trying to look here. So yeah my god look at that!

1:04:03So you can see like Mandalay Bay and Luxor

1:04:06practically from the airport. Yeah.

1:04:10It looks so close. Ooh the Mob Museum.

1:04:13Wow.

1:04:17Sorry I get the sneezes. You might have caught something from me here on this.

1:04:21You know what? I wasn't going to say anything but I was feeling fine when I got on this call.

1:04:25I even wash my hands.

1:04:28When Las Vegas, is that what you stay at?

1:04:31Yeah, that's where I usually stay.

1:04:32Okay, then you got the Palazzo, the Venetian, the Mirage, Treasure Island.

1:04:36There's the Flamingo, okay. And that's that big corner. So that's the corner of Las Vegas and

1:04:41Flamingo

1:04:42is that big corner. Every time my daughter took her first step at the Bellagio...

1:04:46I think I told you that story. I don't know.

1:04:51Yeah, I was doing a talk to the senior management

1:04:54at the founder of Cirque du Soleil's very purple house in Las Vegas.

1:04:58Well, I got a call from my wife that in our room at the Bellagio,

1:05:03our exactly one-year-old daughter had taken her first step.

1:05:06Oh, by the way, did I mention it was her first birthday?

1:05:07Cover your nose, honey. We have to get through the casino to get to our room.

1:05:13I feel like, depending on how our life turns out, they could either just be an amusing anecdote.

1:05:19How many therapists will have to hear that story over the years?

1:05:23It's either going to be a very amusing anecdote like, "Well, that's quite a story." Or it's going

1:05:30to be, "Well, of course." It all started out as so simple. It seemed like such a joke. What else

1:05:41is going on? Well, I could take another break and thank you. Tell me about something you like,

1:05:46John. I'll get a seltzer and wash my hands. I'm going to tell you about our good friends at

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1:06:22Use mail route instead.

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1:06:28They're not asking you to move your email to trust them with with storing your email.

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1:06:45You don't have to ask all of your users to go into their mail clients and change all

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1:07:00first before it gets to your servers, all the spam is gone, all the email with junk

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1:07:14couldn't work easier and it's really really accurate. I mean this stuff is as

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1:07:27have things mailed to you you can have like a report mailed to you or to any of

1:07:31the users on the domain with like hey here's the you know here's what we did

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1:08:08here it is. It's mailroute.net/tts. mailroute.net/tts, the initials of the show, the talk show/tts.

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1:08:51of spam and viruses.

1:08:54I've heard more than one success story. Actually, Dan Medjeman was just talking about this,

1:08:59but I've heard lots of people say this, where they've had a domain where, what, 10 years

1:09:04ago, even 10 years ago, they were like, "You know what? This one is out there. There is

1:09:09just too much spam at every conceivable user at this. I will never get this back. God bless

1:09:14it. Gmail couldn't help this." And you're done. And I've heard people go in and attach

1:09:18mail route to that domain, and it's like a miracle. It's like something from an infomercial

1:09:23where actually suddenly they've got that domain back. It's so good at getting the spam with

1:09:28a scalpel that you get your own domain back. And what more can you say?

1:09:32I used to talk about some of the techniques that Melrath uses.

1:09:36I feel like it's like, so it's not even worth it anymore. Like this,

1:09:40it's their problem to worry about the details of how they do it, but it is,

1:09:45it's amazing. Surgical is a good way to describe it. Yeah. Yeah. You know,

1:09:49you don't hear about Dan Benjamin on the show as much as he used to.

1:09:51Is that right? Yeah. On this particular show? Yeah. On the talk show.

1:09:55You mean like for example, like when he was the cohost?

1:09:57Exactly. Well, technically this is, this is Mark three.

1:10:02How do you refer to it? First of all, for anybody who's listening in, it's the talk show.

1:10:06Right.

1:10:07Right? We should be clear about that.

1:10:09Right.

1:10:09I always have it.

1:10:10Yeah, clearly Mark 3.

1:10:11And this is Mark 3?

1:10:12Yeah.

1:10:13Hmm.

1:10:14Do you ever think about the future of the talk show? What Mark 4 would look like?

1:10:17Would you bring Jonas on, maybe?

1:10:18Hmm.

1:10:21It's kind of the same show.

1:10:23The biggest change in the talk show, well obviously when you and Dan weren't doing it together anymore, was quite different.

1:10:28But like, you know, I like, for example,

1:10:32Lonely Sandwich loved the original version of the talk show that you two did.

1:10:35I could never get into it.

1:10:36I could never get into it.

1:10:37It was when you and Dan were doing it that I really liked it.

1:10:39But yeah, yeah.

1:10:42What do you, like when you think about that, that must seem pretty weird.

1:10:44That's a lot of change over time.

1:10:46Uh, it does.

1:10:48It's weird for me because it never,

1:10:51it, it, it creeped up on me as a,

1:10:53as a serious part of my, uh, I don't know.

1:10:57we don't want to call it business income, you know, it's, you know, your job. Yeah,

1:11:02it's part of your job. Now, it always seemed like I was a guy who wrote a website or what

1:11:05I even at the point when like the first incarnation, I mean, what were the dates on that? The first

1:11:10incarnation? You could still see it. What is that the talk show dotnet? So those are

1:11:20the first... You guys had done it for a while. Wow, look at that. No, wait, 2007, huh? Yeah,

1:11:27so that goes back to 2007. And when the hell did I start doing this shit full time? 2006?

1:11:33So it's, you know, it was close to, it was within a year of when I started doing Daring Fireball

1:11:39full time. I always, you know, Daring Fireball was a career and doing a podcast was, you know,

1:11:48well something you could do on the side and something that the nature of

1:11:52writing a blog as a full-time job that I would easily have time to

1:11:56Fit in look at the episode lengths 34 minutes

1:12:0029 minutes

1:12:0337 minutes

1:12:0536 minutes 30 minutes some of them are over an hour, but most of them are like under 45

1:12:11Episode 8 is 19 minutes

1:12:1528 seconds.

1:12:16My god.

1:12:17We spent that on white bread today.

1:12:19A half-size episode with our predictions

1:12:21for the upcoming Apple announcement later today.

1:12:23Wow, wow, wow.

1:12:27This is amazing.

1:12:30This is a time travel.

1:12:33You know what?

1:12:35It just snuck up over time that it is podcasting.

1:12:38I mean, you know this.

1:12:39You do a couple of shows.

1:12:45doing a podcast in 2000, even through the end of the run of this first one,

1:12:49which was what, the last episode was 29th October

1:12:532009, that was ahead of the time of

1:12:57for podcasts. There just weren't enough people. I'd say even at that point

1:13:01still, I mean it still feels like there's an

1:13:04article every month or so that's essentially about

1:13:08how podcasts are finally becoming a thing,

1:13:10you know, and it's become, I mean it's a tired bit for those of us.

1:13:14it's even a, it's even a, a bit as a bit at this point to joke about this,

1:13:18because it's been for five, for what feels like five years now,

1:13:21everybody who's been doing podcasts since the mid two thousands is saying like,

1:13:25Oh, that's great. It sounds like that's another, uh, you know,

1:13:28it's a meta joke because it's like, once again, someone says, Oh, you know,

1:13:31have you heard about this thing? Serial podcasts,

1:13:33which are like this and this and this are going to really be a thing. And Oh,

1:13:37you know, the mid roll puts out another press release.

1:13:40So somebody does an article about it and it's, you know,

1:13:43I don't have that much... It doesn't frustrate me that much except that it is

1:13:47it is funny. It frustrates other people much more than it does me.

1:13:50Because I think it is this is still so

1:13:53very much the earliest of days. I mean this to me is like as something like

1:13:57Ernie Kovacs was to TV.

1:13:59Or like you may never see another Ernie Kovacs again because Ernie Kovacs could

1:14:02only have been Ernie Kovacs at that time.

1:14:05You know? Or for that matter I mean you think about any of those weird shows that were on the

1:14:08forties before they really knew what TV was gonna be.

1:14:11Think about, I mean, go back even further. What was a movie? Well,

1:14:13a movie was a mostly a camera sitting still and filming a bunch of people

1:14:17performing a play without sound. Right. I mean, it was, you know,

1:14:21I don't know if he gets the appropriate amount of credit,

1:14:24but somebody like D.W. Griffith not only had much more ambition in how you can

1:14:28tell a story with film,

1:14:29but what you could do with the camera as its own artifice or as its own,

1:14:33you know, tool. And then introducing like, you know, doing more than, you know,

1:14:37having things like closeups and then getting into things like editing.

1:14:39Think about the dimensions of editing that we just take for granted today.

1:14:42But there was probably what, 10 or 15 years of filmmaking that went on where people were

1:14:45just walking around going, "I guess this is a movie."

1:14:49So we think about those and we might have nostalgia for watching The Sneeze or The Kiss

1:14:53or something like that, but it didn't take 15, 20 years before we go, "Oh, no, there

1:14:58really is a vocabulary.

1:15:00There's the 180 degree rule eventually."

1:15:02There's all these different things of conventions of understanding how we splice time and tell

1:15:07a story with film.

1:15:08I still think it's really early days for podcasts.

1:15:10It's not anything as sexy or sophisticated as film,

1:15:13but I think it's still very early days.

1:15:15Well, the thing I've- it's the only part of my racket that's still growing.

1:15:20Like the website does not- any of the measurements that I can use,

1:15:25RSS subscribers or page views or whatever,

1:15:27it peaked a while ago.

1:15:29I think I was talking about- I forget how I was talking about this one.

1:15:32You were talking with Dan last week about it.

1:15:33Yeah, about how once Google Reader went away,

1:15:37Actually the numbers all went down and never really recovered and I don't again

1:15:41I don't think that who knows like how much like it's not necessarily that that was the thing

1:15:46But there was probably a zeitgeist there was a variety different things coming together to create a certain zeitgeist around that time, right?

1:15:52And it broke including the ascendance of I have to be honest with you. I

1:15:56Couple people on Twitter had been mentioning a talk

1:15:59We did at South by Southwest in 2009 and it's not look back and listen to it once a year or so

1:16:03And I'm still proud of it as something that we did

1:16:06And I love that people still like listening to it.

1:16:09And so that's 2009.

1:16:12Even then, we're there talking about the rise of things like Gawker or the rise of things

1:16:17like TechCrunch.

1:16:18Even the TechCrunch at that point is what, four years old, five years old.

1:16:21But you just think about at that point, Facebook was big, but Facebook was not what Facebook

1:16:26is today.

1:16:27No.

1:16:28I don't even--

1:16:29It wasn't so much--that was still the time when we were still feeling a little miffed

1:16:32about how much people got their news from aggregation sites rather than the sources

1:16:35that were writing them, which now today seems relatively quaint in comparison.

1:16:42Facebook didn't even have their IPO until 2012, which seems crazy because we just talk

1:16:47about them as like a pillar of the tech industry, you know.

1:16:51Well, we weren't more than a few years off of MySpace, kind of being the big thing.

1:16:56I mean, that's a throwaway line now, but at a talk I did at South by Southwest the year

1:17:02before that, I made mention of MySpace.

1:17:05I mentioned MySpace in the inbox zero talk from 2006.

1:17:10So, you know, that seemed like the unvanquishable,

1:17:16big player for a long time,

1:17:17which now everybody looks at it and laughs,

1:17:18but like, no, no, honestly,

1:17:20MySpace really was the thing for a long time.

1:17:24And it just seemed like Facebook was gonna be a,

1:17:27have nicer typography and be, you know, whatever.

1:17:29I'm not gonna be like a dork about it,

1:17:31but Facebook seemed like the next MySpace.

1:17:33It didn't seem like,

1:17:34I'm pretty impressed with how much it has stuck around and grown in that

1:17:38amount of time.

1:17:39Yeah, I wouldn't have predicted it.

1:17:40But for you, so with your, where you are with during Fireball, this is probably a

1:17:46little bit inside baseball, but is it that has the size of your slice stayed the

1:17:53same and the pie has gotten smaller?

1:17:56That would be my gut.

1:17:58I, you still seem like very influential in the same circles you were influential in

1:18:01five years ago, but maybe it's a smaller pie.

1:18:04Yeah, I think it's something like that.

1:18:07And I think that if you polled people and said, "Who's influential writing about Apple?"

1:18:13I probably do better now than I did then, but I have fewer page views per month than

1:18:18I did then.

1:18:21And I think it just all hits on an argument.

1:18:23Everybody does, right?

1:18:24And it fits very well with my career-long argument that page views are a terrible way

1:18:32to measure anything other than how busy your version of Apache is.

1:18:38I don't know.

1:18:40Do people still use Apache?

1:18:41I use Apache.

1:18:42Imagine.

1:18:43Apache?

1:18:44I don't know.

1:18:45You don't even know if Apache's out.

1:18:47But think about something like, and again, you always got to give me a little bit of

1:18:52a pass.

1:18:53I don't follow all this stuff super carefully.

1:18:54I read your site.

1:18:55I read Six Colors.

1:18:56I read iMore and Macworld.

1:18:58I'm not an Apple follower.

1:19:01I'm a user. I'm a super user, but I'm not I don't follow the business. But with that said I

1:19:06Mean could you have guessed what four years ago that Mark Gurman?

1:19:11Would have risen in a sentence the way that he has now that still feels like a story that's not done being told

1:19:16Oh, yeah, definitely

1:19:18I mean I've noticed I feel like I've noticed a change in how you talk or think about him you had didn't you have on

1:19:23The show one time at least once maybe twice

1:19:25I think it was twice least once but like wasn't there a time when you well put this way

1:19:29I would lump all of those idiots into the same group of like who cares? Why are you talking about rumor stuff?

1:19:35but he has been

1:19:37It seems to me unique in his ability to get to the right sources that he is true

1:19:43He is he does know about stuff before other people and he finds a way to make it into a story in a way that

1:19:49A lot of other folks haven't where it doesn't really just feel like a blown-up forum site about rumors. You know what I mean?

1:19:54Yeah, I think he's he's changed that particular game a little bit. Oh, definitely

1:19:58So I've had him on twice. I had him on last June. He seems like a pretty smart guy.

1:20:03And then I had him when this show, this incarnation of the show was

1:20:06hosted over at Mule. He was on episode 79 in 2014. Yeah, you know, and I, he's the

1:20:18most successful rumor, Apple rumor reporter ever, in my opinion. Just in

1:20:25terms that it seems like a like a gig that burns people out. But also just the

1:20:30fact that he seems to be he gets good information what seems like a lot more

1:20:34often than other people. I mean I don't care whether he has the most popular

1:20:37site it's just that the accuracy of what he's gotten right not just by throwing a

1:20:41million darts at the board but by saying this this this and this and most of

1:20:44that's true I think it would be hard to argue that he's been the most successful

1:20:47in terms of track record. Yeah he's definitely not a darts at the board type

1:20:52person you know you do you know which is it which is to say that what if you

1:20:57predict anything and everything and then you know one of them is bound to hit and

1:21:03then you're good you ever hear about this I somebody told me about I think

1:21:07our friend Paul kafasas told me about this a couple of weeks ago that I guess

1:21:12I have to put it in the show notes and find it but during the last soccer World

1:21:15Cup, which I guess was what like two years ago. Somebody, what they did is they

1:21:24started pointing to these tweets from this account that was called like FIFA

1:21:32corruption. FIFA is the world soccer organization. Right, that's the

1:21:37Sepp Blatter guy? Yeah, well so these tweets had all the scores in advance of

1:21:45the game right right and it was like Germany Germany's Germany will beat Sweden two to one

1:21:51and you know so-and-so kicks a kicks a goal late you know in a extra time to to as the you know

1:21:57to break the one one tie and that it would the timestamp on the tweet is before the game and

1:22:03here that's exactly what happened and it went super viral it was like holy shit this guy whoever

1:22:10this anonymous person tweeting these things in is, you know, all of his tweets are exactly right and

1:22:15they're all, you know, they've all got the scores right. So it's obviously these matches are all

1:22:21fixed. But what the guy did was brilliant was he tweeted like hundreds and hundreds of tweets with

1:22:27all sorts of--and soccer scores aren't that hard to get. Yeah, it's not going to be like 135 to 7.

1:22:34Right, it's, you know, it's going to be three to one nil. So he tweeted hundreds and hundreds of

1:22:39these tweets with these possible things, very plausible things that would happen, and hadn't

1:22:45publicized the Twitter account at all, then went and deleted all the ones that didn't

1:22:49come true, leaving only the ones that happened and then started publicizing the Twitter account.

1:22:56Well, that's the way a lot of rumor blogging works, and Germin definitely isn't that style.

1:23:01I mean, you can't go back and delete it, but certainly these financial analysts and stuff

1:23:06like that, they do it all the time.

1:23:07say, you know, 10 different things. Nine of them are ridiculous, but one of them hit,

1:23:11and then they just point to the one that hit, and they're like, "See?"

1:23:14Yeah, that's so interesting when you think of it that way, and it's—there are reputations

1:23:19that end up getting made that—it's almost like, you know, imagine if you had to sit

1:23:23down in a Google spreadsheet and, you know, like, remember there's a website for a while

1:23:27where you could make a bet about anything that could happen in the future, and, you

1:23:30know, I forget what it was called, but the idea is the artfulness is coming up with what

1:23:34actually constitutes the bet. Like you can't say like, oh computers will get

1:23:37faster within the next year. Like okay thanks that doesn't really help us. You

1:23:40have to have something very specific and quantifiable. If you were, if you were,

1:23:43and obviously you would never be this person if you're a rumor monger, but like

1:23:47if you had to like make that say that by this date the following kind of thing

1:23:51will happen. My level of certainty is this much and basically the number of

1:23:55chips I'll put on the table is this much. Right? You know what I'm saying? Like I'm

1:23:59like I'm gonna give this in I'm gonna give this a you know five out of ten on

1:24:03on how much I'm pretty sure it's gonna happen,

1:24:05and I'm gonna bet this many chips that it would happen.

1:24:07So it'd be sort of like odds.

1:24:09You know, it would be really interesting to go back

1:24:11over somebody's career and be able to look at those.

1:24:13I bet it would be, especially for some of these

1:24:15ding-a-ling analysts, can you imagine

1:24:16what that would be like?

1:24:18And not just your trip-child-re types,

1:24:19but like just any of these folks out there

1:24:21who have some kind of speculative half-reckon

1:24:24about something that might happen.

1:24:26It's like doing a cold reading, you know?

1:24:28Like, you know, you walk up to anybody

1:24:31who can speak English and say,

1:24:32Do you have an uneasy feeling about an older man in your life right now?

1:24:37It's like almost everybody does.

1:24:39It'd be like going, do you sometimes feel like you might be

1:24:41slightly more intelligent than a lot of the people around you?

1:24:44Like, "Oh, yeah, actually I do."

1:24:46Interesting, interesting, interesting.

1:24:48Have you had a loss in your life in the last one?

1:24:51That's the thing where it really feels like a cold reading to just some of this stuff.

1:24:57Apple is going to make a bigger phone,

1:24:59Apple is going to make a smaller phone.

1:25:01"Well, congratulations! You just covered the entire board."

1:25:04Like, thanks. That's great. That's really useful.

1:25:06You know what? This reminds me of a very specific rumor that is, you know,

1:25:10somewhat recent, super widespread.

1:25:14And I wanted to bring it up with you.

1:25:17I didn't write it down. I kept it in my head. But now I remember.

1:25:20Otherwise, I would have forgotten it.

1:25:22I'm fascinated by this rumor that the next iPhone is going to get rid of the headphone jack.

1:25:27Not particularly because of the practical consequences of living with an iPhone that doesn't have a standard headphone jack,

1:25:35but the way that tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people have reacted to the news.

1:25:42There's a petition that somebody put together that apparently...

1:25:46And everybody knows how effective online petitions are.

1:25:49Especially for things that haven't been announced as a reality yet.

1:25:52It's like being mad about a speculative change of wardrobe by the cartoon character Tinkerbell.

1:25:58It's like, "Well, that's not anything we actually thought about, but sure, give us your petition."

1:26:03So what are people saying? What is the nature of their demand?

1:26:07That they not get rid of the audio jack, or what's the specific beef?

1:26:11To me, that's what's interesting. The ramifications of this are extremely interesting.

1:26:18really interesting because there are a lot of things that this will screw up a

1:26:21lot of things that it will allow and just a whole bunch of stuff that it'll

1:26:24change and it all comes down to these little implementation details to like

1:26:28what this means in the near term and I find that incredibly fascinating here it

1:26:32is it's a here's an online head online petition that has two hundred ninety one

1:26:38thousand eight hundred forty eight signees and their goal is three hundred

1:26:41thousand so they're actually a little short of their goal here I'll send you

1:26:47link. I'll just read it to you though. This is the way the petition reads.

1:26:53I think it's very... I think the way it's read... I'm gonna... I'll try to use my voice

1:27:01to put the bulb. There's a lot of bulb. Oh my goodness there is. Apple is about...

1:27:08Maybe you should read it. Maybe you should read it. So Apple is about to rip

1:27:13off every one of its customers again.

1:27:18Forbes and Fast Company are reporting that Apple plans to ditch the standard 3.5mm headphone

1:27:23jack when it releases iPhone 7 later this year.

1:27:25Only a massive - who are these people?

1:27:28Have they been to - have they finished high school?

1:27:31Only a massive international campaign could force Apple to change course now.

1:27:35Really?

1:27:36Is that the only thing that can cause it to happen?

1:27:37That seems like a very odd thing to just guess.

1:27:39Oh my god, this is horrible.

1:27:41only will this force iPhone users to dole out additional cash to replace their

1:27:45Hi-Fi headphones, their Hi-Fi headphones, it will single-handedly create mountains

1:27:49of electronic waste that likely won't get recycled after an em dash. According

1:27:55to the United Nations, up to 90% of this... oh my god this is so horrible. This is,

1:28:01and further down, this is right out of the Apple corporate playbook. Did you know

1:28:05that you know that, Jon? Did you know that they have a corporate playbook out of

1:28:09which things are right taken. A few years ago it swapped out the original...

1:28:13sounds like John Roderick wrote it, except John would never write this poorly. A few years ago it

1:28:18swapped out the original iPod dock connector with the new one, making countless

1:28:22cords, cables, and chargers obsolete. Further down, tell Apple to keep the

1:28:28standard headphone jack and ditch planned obsolescence! Exclamation point.

1:28:31So I find it fascinating. This is incredible. I do realize that if it's true that the

1:28:37headphone jack goes away, that it will be an inconvenience to people who have purchased

1:28:45third-party headphones, and the more expensive they are, the more inconvenient it might be.

1:28:50Does it have to be an inconvenience?

1:28:51Well, I mean, you have to have an adapter or something like that, and the adapter's

1:28:55going to stick out further than it did before.

1:28:57I mean, it's, you know, it...

1:28:59Yeah, it just, I mean, like, first of all, this has not been announced yet.

1:29:03There's no way to know.

1:29:04This is the class, this is one of those classic...

1:29:07It's one of those classic examples of taking something that isn't a thing yet, taking even

1:29:12- how do you begin with the idea of something that's not a thing yet, guess like two orders

1:29:16of change away from that until you find something that makes you infuriated, and so where people

1:29:20are extremely angry about something that hasn't happened.

1:29:23So I don't know.

1:29:25I guess I just feel like - I think it is interesting because it would - it could mean lots of different

1:29:32stuff for the company, but if you watch Apple at all - and I'm not even saying this will

1:29:36But if it does happen, I don't think this would be surprising at all, especially given

1:29:39how much they want slimness and given how much they want might want this added functionality.

1:29:44I don't think they're doing it to make you buy new headphones.

1:29:46I think they're doing it because they think that's the future rather than the past.

1:29:49Right.

1:29:50And implicit in this line of argument is the idea that they should never get rid of this

1:29:55headphone port and that devices that we buy 20, 30, 40 years from now should still have

1:30:00the same headphone port because at any given point, if every device that could have headphones

1:30:08uses the same port, there's never going to be a year where it's like, well, now's the

1:30:12year when nobody's going to be put to any inconvenience whatsoever by this.

1:30:18And the fact that they make mention of the 30-pin to lightning adapter thing is, to me,

1:30:24it's like the people who signed this are still upset about that one.

1:30:29It's like, yes, that was an inconvenience.

1:30:31And I know, just from talking to people, one of the scenarios where that was really inconvenient

1:30:35would be like, let's say that maybe you and your spouse are on every other year's schedules

1:30:43getting new phones.

1:30:44You each get one every two years, but one year for one, one year for the other.

1:30:48So there was a year there where one of the household members had the old iPhone port

1:30:54and the other had the new one.

1:30:55Oh, it was the worst for a while, yeah.

1:30:58And so it's not just as simple if, unless everybody in the house switches at once, it's

1:31:02not as simple as just, "Well, just buy a couple of the new ones and leave them around."

1:31:06But like if there's a charger in the kitchen or something like that, well, now you've got

1:31:09to have a dongle or something.

1:31:12But once, you know, give it a couple of years to work itself out.

1:31:15And now it's a better world because we have a better port.

1:31:18It's smaller.

1:31:19It works bi-directionally.

1:31:20Right.

1:31:21In hindsight, it's like, "Wow, that really worked out well."

1:31:24Well let me ask you an extremely carefully worded question or ask our listeners an extremely carefully worded question.

1:31:30How many of you out there are using headphones that you bought over five years ago that you still use several times a week?

1:31:40And do you intend to keep using them for the next two years?

1:31:45Let's even say the next year.

1:31:46How about this? Headphones you bought in the last four years that you still use more than one time a week.

1:31:53several times a week. Maybe are there any that you bought over four years ago

1:31:56that you're using every day with an iPhone, right? And do you intend to

1:32:00use that for another year? Because here's the thing. That's when the Lightning

1:32:04Adapter came out, was four years ago. Do you follow? Yeah. In the amount of time

1:32:09since the Lightning Adapter has come out, I am not finding it difficult to deal

1:32:15with not having a 30 pin USB jack anymore. It just doesn't come up. It comes

1:32:21up a couple times a week, maybe, or maybe even less, because I have to charge my kids

1:32:26ancient iPad 2. But that transition is well and truly over. With the exception of maybe

1:32:33going into a hotel room and finding some places that still have those. Do you see my point

1:32:37though? So what's the legacy problem here? Do you personally have any headphones that

1:32:42you couldn't afford to replace that you've used for more than four years and need to

1:32:45use for more than the next year or so? Because it's going to be at least a year, I'm going

1:32:49guess until that happens. So to me, it all falls apart already because, you know, it's

1:32:54not like you get a, it's not like getting your dad's Rolex. We're talking about headphones

1:32:58that people probably buy every couple years anyway.

1:33:00Yeah, and boy, an awful lot of people. I know, and it's nice at this point where we've got,

1:33:06I don't know, I think if you did like a thorough, you know, comb, combing of our household and

1:33:14and counted up all of the pairs of white apple earbuds

1:33:17that are in this house.

1:33:19I would not be surprised if the number of working pairs

1:33:22of them was at least, I don't know, 12, maybe more,

1:33:27maybe like 15, 20, wouldn't be surprised.

1:33:31And it's nice, therefore, like I've got a pair here

1:33:33at my desk and I think I've been using these for a while.

1:33:35- Those are just my emergency travel headphones.

1:33:37I hate them.

1:33:38I hate them.

1:33:39- They fit my ears pretty well, so I use them.

1:33:42Amy doesn't really like them, but uses them.

1:33:45And Jonas just goes--

1:33:46Jonas likes them a lot, so Jonas uses them.

1:33:49But it's nice if you misplace a pair,

1:33:51you just find another pair, you pick it in.

1:33:52So it'll be a pain, yes.

1:33:54You'll get a new iPhone, presumably,

1:33:55if it comes-- unless they go, who knows what they're

1:33:57going to do?

1:33:58That's the other thing that makes me so crazy about the--

1:34:01or not crazy, but so--

1:34:03what's wrong with you people?

1:34:05We haven't heard the story yet.

1:34:07If it's true, we haven't even heard

1:34:10what Apple expects us to do.

1:34:11Are they going to go entirely wireless?

1:34:13Is it a new thing?

1:34:14Is it going to be the Lightning port?

1:34:18Let's just say, though, that they do include a pair of wired headphones

1:34:21and they plug into the Lightning port.

1:34:24Yes, it'll be mildly inconvenient that the 15 pairs of headphones

1:34:27in the house already no longer work on this phone

1:34:29and you have to use the one that came with your phone.

1:34:31But they're going to give you a pair of headphones at work.

1:34:34They're going to give you a pair of headphones that work.

1:34:35And knowing Apple--

1:34:36I mean, Apple has been fairly consistent about this.

1:34:39I call it, personally, I call it the one-year warning shot, which is that Apple will give

1:34:43you, if you're looking for it, you will notice a warning shot about what's going to go away

1:34:46in a year, if you're paying attention.

1:34:49That could be all kinds of different devices, but the classic for me is the scrolling direction.

1:34:52I said, "Okay, from now on, we're changing the scrolling direction on OS X.

1:34:56It's going to seem weird, but that's going to be..."

1:34:59Here's the thing.

1:35:00If it absolutely drives you crazy, you can go back and change it to the other way, like

1:35:04an animal.

1:35:06But we want you to know that this is the way we're moving, and if you want to move in the

1:35:09direction Apple is moving I'm not saying this is good bad or indifferent you need

1:35:12to listen for those warning shots and in the next year get your head around the

1:35:14fact that this is going to change so yes I think they will give you if if this is

1:35:18the change and I don't think there's evidence that there is but whatever if

1:35:21there is they're gonna give the right headphones and you know what I'll bet

1:35:24you you can find some kind of janky ass adapter that'll let you use your beloved

1:35:28headphones but I don't think I think if they do this it's not gonna be because

1:35:34it makes your life miserable it's because they want to do something really

1:35:37new and that to me is super interesting what could you do with lightning

1:35:42headphones there's so many things that are super interesting to me and thinking

1:35:45about that and I'm thinking also about stuff like could you have like else you

1:35:49had a charger pack it would it be conceivable to have a charger pack that

1:35:51had just a slightly larger than usual chin on it where you could potentially

1:35:56plug that in to the lightning and then have both the transmitter and off to the

1:36:01side a dingus for plugging in old-style headphones I mean that's me that's not

1:36:05beyond imagination.

1:36:06Sure. You could do it. What would an adapter look like, you think?

1:36:09Well, I mean, it might just be... just a straight adapter would just be like a

1:36:14little,

1:36:15you know... On a cord, probably.

1:36:18Yeah, maybe it would be on a cord. Because otherwise you're gonna get that iPad Pro

1:36:22Pencil problem if you've got this...

1:36:24For the full-on, long iPhone jack, that's gonna be pretty long, accounting for what's

1:36:29already inside the phone.

1:36:31Yeah, maybe it should be on a little cord.

1:36:33Because that way, in a little cord, if it was on a little, like, you know, like, inch,

1:36:37two inch cable, then it wouldn't be like a Chris Brakey off-y thing in your pocket.

1:36:43Like the size of one of those splitters, like where you want to split into two and you get

1:36:47two separate cords coming out.

1:36:48Something along those lines.

1:36:49But like, that would fix the legacy problem.

1:36:52Is it elegant?

1:36:53No, but welcome to the future.

1:36:54Like you're gonna buy new headphones anyway, especially, I don't know, it just seems like

1:36:58a scratch.

1:36:59use this old 3.5 millimeter port forever, forever, or...

1:37:05On an infinite time scale.

1:37:06Or eventually somebody is going to ship a product that doesn't use it. And so I don't

1:37:11get it. I really do enjoy it though. So here's the thing though, I really do wonder if it's

1:37:16true, I wonder if this actually is a rare case, in my opinion, of a deliberate leak

1:37:22by Apple to vent a whole bunch of the anger almost an entire year in advance

1:37:29so that when it is announced it doesn't come as a shock to nearly as many people.

1:37:35Who has done the most significant and reliable reporting or you know

1:37:41apparently reliable reporting on this? I guess the guy at Fast Company. Okay, okay.

1:37:48I guess, and notably not Germin.

1:37:52Or Forbes?

1:37:53Yeah, Forbes and Fast Company is what the petition says.

1:37:56Although they don't...

1:37:57Oh no, they do have links to it at the bottom.

1:37:59So if you go to that petition page...

1:38:01I don't think Forbes will let me look at their page anymore.

1:38:03iPhone 7 leaks, quote, "Confirm Apple-abanding headphone jack."

1:38:09Oh my god, it's like they've got a different dictionary.

1:38:12Exactly.

1:38:14Well, they did put the word "Confirm" in quotes.

1:38:17That's great. That's great. That's just a little better than putting "proves" in quotation marks.

1:38:26It's like reality, but maybe not?

1:38:29The Fast Company headline is "It's true, colon, Apple will drop headphone jack to make the iPhone 7 slimmer, comma, says source."

1:38:36I would say that the Fast Company one is probably the most reliable.

1:38:42So, okay, so I didn't exactly ask you this. Do you think this will happen?

1:38:46I do. Because I feel like it has to happen eventually,

1:38:51and so why not now?

1:38:54What are some of the benefits? I guess the most obvious one

1:38:58apparently is that it is the gating factor

1:39:01for getting the phone any thinner. Well, maybe.

1:39:05The counter argument to that is that the current iPod

1:39:08touches are significantly thinner

1:39:11than the iPhone, the current iPhone, and so, and they still have the standard

1:39:15headphone

1:39:16jack and there are iPods, other regular non-iOS iPods that are even thinner still that still

1:39:25have that port. But like on the iPods that are thinner that have that port, there's like

1:39:32a chin area where the inserted part of the headphone jack doesn't actually go underneath

1:39:39the display, which makes it easier engineering-wise.

1:39:43On the iPod Touch, it does.

1:39:46You could make a significantly thinner iPhone

1:39:49and keep this port.

1:39:51But without question, every port you remove

1:39:54has got to make the device smaller and lighter.

1:39:58Yeah, well, it's also--

1:39:59I mean, it just seems like there's several--

1:40:01I'm not an engineer, obviously.

1:40:02But it's--

1:40:03Common sense, though, that if you just take the port out

1:40:06and don't even replace it with another port of any kind,

1:40:08But every dingus you can take off of there, it could mean all kinds of things.

1:40:13It means more space to do anything with that area, including what components you could put there in its place.

1:40:17Remember also we're talking about at least what, three quarters of an inch of depth?

1:40:20You've got to engineer around with that.

1:40:22Yeah, I think it's the depth.

1:40:23Aside from this thing that's already got that depth accounted for.

1:40:25I actually think if you could pick the brains of a hardware engineer at Apple who works specifically on these problems of

1:40:33How do we cram all the stuff we absolutely need and get the biggest possible battery that we can,

1:40:38given the insane thinness that Johnny Ive's team is saying we're supposed to build this at?

1:40:44I would bet that if you talk to one of the engineers who works on that,

1:40:50here's what Johnny's team says we're supposed to be able to build. How do we make this reality,

1:40:54that the depth of the jack into the device is actually a bigger problem than the 3.5 millimeter

1:41:02diameter. As well as I'm gonna I don't think I don't know electronics but I'm

1:41:05as well as I'm guessing being one of the most difficult parts in terms of

1:41:09moisture. The lightning I don't know I feel like did I talk to you about my

1:41:14weird lightning thing last year where one particular pin on my lightning

1:41:19cable had turned like a bluish green on all of my chargers? No! The exact same pin

1:41:26on both sides and I wondered if it was a hardware virus but basically and

1:41:34then all sudden all my devices weren't charging as well and it looked like

1:41:37basically an aquamarine... is that the kind of dark blue green? Yeah. Like a dark

1:41:42blue green crayon had been very lightly smudged on the same pin of six

1:41:47different lightning jacks. Isn't that insane? But it must... I'll bet the problem

1:41:52must have been with the device, that you had a device where the internal pin...

1:41:56What caused what is the question? Do you remember Jeff Veen talking about the hardware virus

1:42:00at Google? Did you ever hear about that?

1:42:01No, I don't think I have.

1:42:03I love this story. They had a hardware virus. I'm going to give you a minute to mull that

1:42:07over in your head. They had a hardware virus at Google where basically people's DVI jack...

1:42:14What do you call the female on the laptop? The jack?

1:42:17I think it's the jack.

1:42:18The port stopped working, and they all had this same...

1:42:25People would notice that they would go in, they would plug into the projector, it didn't work, they'd go and look.

1:42:30And this one pin had gotten basically bent and distorted inside all these different people's laptops.

1:42:39So you would go, and if you were in whatever room you were in, you'd look at the plug, and that plug was messed up, your laptop is messed up.

1:42:46suddenly everybody's noticing all the laptops and all the plugs are messed up,

1:42:50and you can figure out why, right?

1:42:51It all started with one slide projector having a broken pin and passing that

1:42:55defect onto any piece of hardware it plugged into.

1:42:59And then consequently each piece of hardware that plugged into that computer,

1:43:04then got it too, which would then pass it on to everybody else.

1:43:06That's insane.

1:43:08It's incredible. What an amazing idea. I've never heard of that before.

1:43:12And now it's kind of amazing. It doesn't happen more often.

1:43:14So that was my first thought. Isn't that how Skynet started?

1:43:17Is that the one in RoboCop? Terminator. Oh, sorry.

1:43:21Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's how that started. Uh, so I don't,

1:43:26I don't know much about that. You know,

1:43:29what's funny is like I can't believe I'm living in an age where my phone feels

1:43:33too thin and my touch ID seems too fast.

1:43:36Like when I take the naked robotic core out of the leather case and I hold it in

1:43:39my hand, I have to tell you,

1:43:40my six S prime feels like a little too thin.

1:43:45It's not that comfortable to me. I don't think I'd want it to be any thinner.

1:43:49Yeah. Well, and I wish I now to get like right now,

1:43:52I want to see if I have any messages.

1:43:53I use my pinky now because I want to be able to see the lock screen before it

1:43:58turns on. It's so impossibly fast now.

1:44:01Could you ever imagine that that'd be something a grown man would bitch about?

1:44:04Yeah. It still gets me when I want to take a photo, like something is happening,

1:44:07like, Oh my God, I gotta get a picture of this. Right.

1:44:09And I developed the habit a few years ago when they added the feature where there's

1:44:13a camera shortcut on the lock screen.

1:44:15I'm just swipe up.

1:44:16Remembering that.

1:44:18But when I'm normally using the phone, I'm getting better at if I really do want to see

1:44:24the lock screen, I know to use the side button to wake it up instead of the fingerprint button.

1:44:29Oh, that's good.

1:44:30Yeah, but when I'm in like that emergency, holy cow, there's a squirrel eating a, you

1:44:37know...

1:44:38Eating a duck.

1:44:39There's a squirrel eating a duck.

1:44:41I don't have time to think.

1:44:43I have to think to use that side button.

1:44:45I just instantly go to the home button, and then I'm--

1:44:48That's like muscle reflex.

1:44:50And now I'm looking around for, oh, man, now--

1:44:52[QUACKING]

1:44:53Yeah, and now it's like my Twitter client is open,

1:44:56and I'm like, oh, look at this on Twitter.

1:44:58You start shaking like an old man.

1:44:59You're like, oh, wait a minute.

1:45:01I want to get back to the screen I was on.

1:45:02By the way, I'm thinking about writing about this,

1:45:05but I actually looked up.

1:45:06I had the same problem you just went through verbally

1:45:08minute or two ago there about the the word jack and is Jack when you talk

1:45:12about the headphone jack is the jack the the male or is it the female it ends up

1:45:17here's the deck different dictionary definition oh good good a socket with

1:45:21two or more pairs of terminals designed to receive a jack plug so it is the

1:45:27female but in the dictionary this is the Apple dictionary which is what like

1:45:32American heritage or something they describe it as needing two or more pairs

1:45:37of terminals. So like, I feel like the dictionary is wrong on that case, because

1:45:41every, you know, it doesn't seem like they have a definition that would work with

1:45:44headphone jack where there's just one terminal.

1:45:48But that's jack or socket?

1:45:50Jack. J-A-C-K. Jack. A socket with two or more pairs of terminals designed to receive a

1:45:57jack plug.

1:45:58So that's the female headphone dingus? Is it jack?

1:46:01They're saying that the female--

1:46:02They should call that a jill.

1:46:03They're saying they should. I've thought of that.

1:46:06It does seem like maybe the jack.

1:46:09What about airplane fluid?

1:46:12Socket jack.

1:46:13So they're saying it's a jack is the socket and the jack plug is the plug.

1:46:19Oh, okay. Then what do you call the pig face thing that you get 110

1:46:25electricity out of in your house? Is that an outlet? You call it an outlet?

1:46:29I would normally call it an outlet, but I might call it...

1:46:32When you jack your plug into the socket, you call that an outlet?

1:46:34Yeah, I might call it a jack casually.

1:46:36I would prefer to call it a jack, because I feel like jack is a pretty good word.

1:46:40Uh-huh, uh-huh.

1:46:41I feel like with headphones and casual speaking,

1:46:44it doesn't make any logical sense,

1:46:46but that you can get away with calling the male and the female a jack.

1:46:49Yeah.

1:46:50If you've got your headphones,

1:46:51just take the jack and plug it into the jack.

1:46:54Jack into the jack.

1:46:55Yeah.

1:46:55Yeah, absolutely.

1:46:57Take the headphone jack and just plug it right into the jack on your phone.

1:47:00Why-- what do you, um, what do you make of the apparent obsession with increasing thinness?

1:47:09What do you make of that?

1:47:10I mean, I want to say what do you make of that?

1:47:13Do you like that? Do you feel that it is useful and important?

1:47:17And why in particular do you think it seems like such an obsession inside the white room to make things thinner?

1:47:24And is that a thing? Because it feels like a thing.

1:47:28I don't know anybody, I don't know, I can't think of anybody I know

1:47:31who's top of the list, even their top five would be "I want a thinner phone."

1:47:35Pretty much everybody I know says I would, and who knows this could be at cross

1:47:38purposes like

1:47:39with your thinking fast mind, your thinking slow mind, but like everybody I

1:47:43know says they would like to get more battery.

1:47:44I don't know anybody that says I want a thinner phone. I asked

1:47:48Schiller about that when he was on the show at WWDC and he gave

1:47:51a good answer, at least at the time I was like, "Damn, that's a good answer."

1:47:55and damned if I can remember it.

1:47:57- I was backstage.

1:47:59I was backstage drinking, I don't remember.

1:48:01- Damned if I can remember it.

1:48:04I don't know.

1:48:05I don't know what to make of it

1:48:07because it's gone past the point where I care.

1:48:10Like I'm impressed now,

1:48:12like when I go to one of these Apple events

1:48:16and it's the year when you get a new form factor

1:48:19and then they have them on a, you know,

1:48:21Apple table backstage and you get to touch them

1:48:24see how thin they are and it's like wow that is thin but I think honestly even

1:48:31starting I honestly I don't think that the thinness of the thing has ever

1:48:34really mattered to me I liked the original iPhone I didn't think it was

1:48:38too thick and I think starting somewhere around the four yeah the four and the

1:48:45four s the one that had the glass back the glass front glass back I still that's

1:48:50still my favorite. The 4S is still my favorite form factor.

1:48:54At that point, I thought, "This is fantastic. This feels so great in my pocket. This is

1:49:03great." Then when they made the next one even thinner, I was like, "Wow, that's amazing,"

1:49:09but I didn't think this is better for me. They could have stopped at the thinness of

1:49:13the 4 4S, and I'd be happy if they just packed it with battery.

1:49:17Well, you know, I like that... I don't wanna sound like an idiot, obviously. I'm glad to see enhancements to the phone.

1:49:21I like that it's faster, I like that it's bigger, it's all that kind of stuff.

1:49:23But, like, to me the 4S design still... you know, the whole, like, chamfered edges or whatever they called it,

1:49:29that still feels so classic to me.

1:49:31No, that was the 5 and 5S.

1:49:32Was that the 5 and the 5S?

1:49:33Yeah.

1:49:34But that has... wait, no, what was the 4?

1:49:35That was the one that had the glass back.

1:49:38And it just had metal sides. They were like... it wasn't chamfered, though. It was...

1:49:43All right. Ah, see, but that, that, yeah, I guess in my head I think of that. Yes.

1:49:46I see what you're saying. Yeah. But I still think of that as like,

1:49:49I'll remember that as the classic iPhone look, I think. Yeah. I don't know.

1:49:53I like the rounded ish edges. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. I misspoke. Yeah.

1:49:57This one looks like a Mophie before there was a Mophie. Right.

1:50:00It's got that with that metal edge. Was this the antenna gate phone? Yes. Yeah.

1:50:05Right. God, look at, I'm looking at just what the OS look like. Oh my goodness.

1:50:08Oh my gosh. It's so, I don't hate it though.

1:50:12I'm not going to blanket party on forest all like I think I don't know man.

1:50:16It's, it's when the iPhone got good, you know,

1:50:19he was still there running the show. Um, so thinness.

1:50:24Yeah. So I don't know. I don't know. And you know, again,

1:50:26it's I have to always in my head discount the fact that, you know,

1:50:29the way that we, you know, that book I'm talking about, that Kahneman book, uh,

1:50:32thinking fast and slow. It's, it's, yeah, it's an amazing book. But you know,

1:50:36there are the ways that when we stop and think and meta think about what we're

1:50:39doing. That's actually very different from the way that we think from day to

1:50:42day. There's just, I mean, setting aside the research, there's just the

1:50:46anecdotes, there's so much stuff about like what we think we want versus what

1:50:50we actually do and how what we actually use and how we actually process

1:50:53information. If you ask anyone who's a gambler whether gambling is a good way

1:50:57to make lots of money and you say to them, they will say no, it's not. It's

1:51:01dumb that I do this. It's dumb that I drink. It's dumb that I gamble. It's dumb

1:51:04that I do these things. It doesn't change the fact that we still do it. So I have

1:51:07to guess that there's something going on on a sub rosa level here where there

1:51:11they are there's some reason that they are making these things the way they are

1:51:16making them and it may not exactly comport with the way that my brain

1:51:19thinks that these things should be made but they must have their reasons right

1:51:22that's what I try to think I try to I try to remain unemotional about it like

1:51:28I don't see it and I don't get it but I feel like it's of a it's of a part with

1:51:32the outrage over the headphone jack yeah where I don't want to be the one who's

1:51:36outrades that they've made this the next iPhone even thinner and the battery life

1:51:41isn't any better you know when obviously if they had you know kept it the same

1:51:47thickness and just added a little more battery they could have made battery

1:51:50better that sounds good better to me and I know that there's these you know

1:51:55literal laws of physics that affect image quality of the camera where the

1:52:00longer the distance you have between the lens and the sensor it helps to have a

1:52:03bigger sensor with bigger pixels and therefore get better image quality.

1:52:08I understand that. I don't get it. It seems to me, my look at it as common sense is if they kept the

1:52:16thinness the same at this point, then they could have more battery, which would increase battery

1:52:21life, and they could have better image quality on the camera, which are like the two things that

1:52:24I care about most, using the camera and the battery. Instead, they keep making it thinner.

1:52:30I don't get it, but I don't assume that there's no good reason for it, or that the only reason is

1:52:36uh, like, Johnny Ive's personal obsession with the thinness. I get that there must be something,

1:52:43I just don't see it. Right, right, and I think for folks who are technologically inclined,

1:52:48scientifically inclined, or even rationally inclined, you might want to look at something

1:52:53like, you know, in this case the thinness of the phone, and you can come up with half a dozen

1:52:58reasons why making it thinner is not a good idea or you know or is not the first good idea but at

1:53:03the same time you could look at stuff like the skeuomorphism that goes into automobiles you know

1:53:08in terms of like making this sporty wheel look even more sporty than it needs to look for the

1:53:13sportiness of it like does that actually help make it a better car not not in the usual sense but it

1:53:19makes it more attractive to people having it create more like making it make more engine noise than it

1:53:24it needs to make.

1:53:25Does that make it a better car?

1:53:27Not really, not in an engineering sense,

1:53:29but there's a reason.

1:53:30There's reasons for all of this stuff.

1:53:32It goes beyond simply fashion, but there's

1:53:34something about when you're using it,

1:53:36this makes you feel a certain way.

1:53:38And that's why people keep going back and buying

1:53:40these same brands over and over.

1:53:42Yeah.

1:53:44I'll try to channel my inner Siracusa here.

1:53:46And I feel like Siracusa, if he's listening,

1:53:49is championing at the bit here.

1:53:51Because I feel like he could explain this best.

1:53:54But like the end result eventually is that these phones are just going to be pieces of glass.

1:53:59You know, like remember, did you see the movie Looper?

1:54:02Yeah, like those are basically, it's like, or even in Parks and Rec,

1:54:06it's basically going to be like a, it'll be like a clear floating screen kind of thing.

1:54:09Just, yeah, just the piece of glass, or maybe it's not glass, maybe it's a polycarbonate,

1:54:15but just the screen. And when it's off, maybe it's even translucent, and everything is built into it.

1:54:21to get from here to there they have to keep making everything thinner

1:54:25and that they know that that's where it's going and in the meantime

1:54:29they have to keep pressing the gas pedal on making these things thinner

1:54:33even though it's at the expense of trying to also... it's working counter to

1:54:38making battery life better and counter to making the camera better

1:54:41they have to keep working on all three because that's inevitable and if they

1:54:44don't do it somebody else will

1:54:46because we're still thinking about a power device as relying on the kind of

1:54:50of power with the kind of constraints that we do right now. In the same way, think about

1:54:54the leap from CRT to LED. Making that mental model, that leap from what a TV is, what a

1:55:01TV looks like, how is it that within less than 10 years, you went from a TV being what?

1:55:08An 80-pound box into being almost like a plane, right? That takes an entire quantum leap.

1:55:17Whereas if you ever opened up a TV or opened up a stereo, like a crappily made stereo system,

1:55:21it's all air inside.

1:55:22There's no reason for any of that.

1:55:24It's just cheapest to make that way with stock components.

1:55:27So that's kind of what you're saying, right?

1:55:28If we look at this as more than one axis changing in the future, you can't help but think that

1:55:32there's going to be some changes we don't immediately understand.

1:55:37Yeah.

1:55:38I also wonder if there might not be a very practical near-term product marketing angle

1:55:45on it which is that Apple and other companies as well might know that if they made the device,

1:55:54let's just say that the iPhone 7 coming out, the new iPhone is called the iPhone 7, it's

1:55:59coming out later this year and it's thinner than the iPhone 6. That's probably, everything

1:56:05I just said is what I guess is going to happen because it's what's been happening for years

1:56:09now. I don't have anybody, I don't know any sources who've told me that but it's a very

1:56:12logical guess. Apple might know that if they made the iPhone 7 the same thickness as the

1:56:19iPhone 6, even though they could make it thinner, but if they made it thicker and used that

1:56:25extra thickness to increase the battery life and maybe get rid of the—maybe if image

1:56:31quality isn't even better than it would be otherwise, but there's no—the camera lens

1:56:37doesn't stick out from the back, which would make me very happy.

1:56:41They might know that in the long run that would make people happy, but that in the short

1:56:45run if they did that and then people go into a Verizon or AT&T store and side-by-side with

1:56:52a Samsung that is thinner, even if it's at the expense of battery life, that they have

1:56:59a reasonable reason to believe that X number of people will then pick that Samsung because,

1:57:04"Wow, look how thin this is," and walk out of it,

1:57:06even though in the long run they might have been happier

1:57:08with the thicker phone that gets better battery life.

1:57:10But at the point of sale, that thinness will help.

1:57:13- Yeah, the thinness has curve appeal over bullet stats.

1:57:17- Right.

1:57:19- And in that sense of,

1:57:21that's a really interesting way to put it.

1:57:22You think about what you buy

1:57:25when you just walk into the store,

1:57:27and how it makes you feel in the moment.

1:57:29That could actually have a huge impact.

1:57:31- Yeah, and I really, and it's a little,

1:57:33I know that there aren't the nerds out there, the people who either do think more logically

1:57:38than most people or at least like to think that they think a lot more logically than

1:57:43most other people.

1:57:44I suspect there's a lot of people listening to us right now who that applies to.

1:57:47I think, "That makes me angry because I'm so logical.

1:57:50That would never fool me."

1:57:53A, you might be fooling yourself about just how emotional, the emotional context of buying

1:58:00it.

1:58:02Even if you do have a good point because you pre-order your phones and you buy your new

1:58:05iPhone before you've ever even seen it in person, you can't underestimate that when

1:58:11you're selling in the quantities that Apple sells at, that most people are not like the

1:58:15people who listen to this show.

1:58:17Yeah, but also what feels like a real change in attitude from over the years.

1:58:24I don't know if you can call this a real change in attitude, but there was a time when being

1:58:30somebody who said, "Hey, look, just give me exactly what I want in this device and

1:58:38then leave me alone and stop trying to make this pretty." If somebody said that in 1999,

1:58:45would you guess that that's a Mac user or a PC user? Because that really sounds like

1:58:50a PC user to me.

1:58:51Yeah, me too.

1:58:52Right? There was a time when one of our many indignities in the Apple community was that

1:58:58We did, by and large, we certainly could do more at a certain time on your Mac.

1:59:02It wasn't as reliable or stable, but you know, that's been the trade-offs over time.

1:59:06But it is kind of funny to me that everybody comes in, it's like, you know, whatever the

1:59:10six different guys, you know, the six blind men describing an elephant.

1:59:14It's like everybody's holding a different part of the elephant when they describe it.

1:59:17And it is kind of funny, like how quickly, like we can go down this personal rat hole

1:59:21of having exactly the idea of what we would want in a phone, but exactly the idea of what

1:59:26we want in a phone.

1:59:27If we actually sat down with people in a room, it would end up being surprisingly different

1:59:30from person to person.

1:59:31There has to be somebody there at some level making those executive decisions about what

1:59:35they can do and make well at scale.

1:59:37I don't know, maybe I'm pulling that out of my ass, but I do feel like you eventually

1:59:41get into this Homer's car type situation with people where, "Oh, you know what?

1:59:45I'd love to have a way bigger phone or a way smaller phone," or, "I'd love to have a way

1:59:48longer battery life," or, "Everybody's got their own," in your case, with the camera.

1:59:53people, I'm going to guess, don't know enough... I don't know enough about the camera to know

1:59:57that thing about the lens and things like that. Otherwise, they wouldn't make a lot

2:00:01of these arguments.

2:00:02Well, you know it on common sense level though, right? Like when you look at the sideline

2:00:07guys at the Super Bowl shooting the photos for Sports Illustrated, what do their cameras

2:00:10look like? They have these giant lenses because there's definitely some tremendous advantages.

2:00:16Well, to your point about what I'm calling the curb appeal part, for example, what you

2:00:21said you wish the lens didn't stick out. When I think of the camera on my phone, I

2:00:25think of that lens. I don't think about what's going on inside, I think about

2:00:28that lens and I think about the fact that every time I put my phone down, I

2:00:31feel a little nervous and I feel a little bit unsettled in an OCD way about

2:00:35that thing sticking out. Or in the example of talking about the headphone

2:00:39jack, the audio jack, I mean like we were sort of getting to, I mean how many

2:00:43people think about that in terms of a cylinder versus a circle, if you take

2:00:49my meaning. I think when most people think about the gating factor of, I don't know what you call it,

2:00:53they think of a circle, not a tube. The tube is actually a much bigger deal than the circle.

2:01:00Right, they think of the diameter of that port as opposed to the depth of the port.

2:01:04Right, so to apply that same analogy, when you talk about the camera, I think of a hoop and you

2:01:11think of a cylinder. So for anybody else, you go, "No, no, no, look, it's a hoop. You can

2:01:18make that as flat as you want. But no, no, no, actually, that's a cylinder. And that

2:01:22does have an impact. And this is one case where, you know, these two things, the bigger

2:01:28this gets, the better the phone is. The smaller this thing is, the better the phone gets.

2:01:32And those two, I mean, what are you going to do? You're going to make it look like an

2:01:35iMac box? Like, what would you do? You could make it like a ramp or a wedge.

2:01:41I would love to, I like to imagine, I would like to have been, to see a transcript even,

2:01:47a transcript of meetings within Apple where it was explained to Johnny Ive that, "Okay,

2:01:54but the camera lens is going to protrude."

2:01:58What do you mean it's going to protrude? Well, it's going to visibly be not flat. Well,

2:02:05how much are we talking about? Are we talking about a monocle here? Well, Johnny, it's just

2:02:10enough to drive you insane.

2:02:12We've made a prototype here to his.

2:02:17And the first time he grabs that 3D printed thing, he goes, "Hmm?"

2:02:21He turns it around, he places it on the desk, and it goes, "Waka, waka."

2:02:26Waka, waka.

2:02:27Because it's not flat.

2:02:30Can you imagine in – oh my god, that – I bet he was just slamming Xanax after that.

2:02:36That would just have to make him so crazy.

2:02:38It's like selling somebody a pair of gloves with a built-in hangnail on it.

2:02:42Like, can we have it without the hangnail?

2:02:46The nubbin on the iPhone 6, all of, you know, 6, 6S, and the Plus models

2:02:51is, to me, like, one of the most fascinating things that's ever come out of Apple.

2:02:55Because if you have to know the company's history and their obsessions

2:03:00and the sort of things that the people who work there care about.

2:03:03It's what? A couple three millimeters, maybe?

2:03:06I don't even know how you would measure it.

2:03:07I mean, it's real, real small.

2:03:10But on the other hand, your finger has no problems like--

2:03:13Oh, no, no, no.

2:03:16--running over it like a wart.

2:03:17Well, yeah, and that's a--

2:03:19or like a canker sore, like when you've bitten yourself,

2:03:22or you can't--

2:03:23I can't stop doing this.

2:03:24Yeah.

2:03:26You're not doing it because you like it.

2:03:28You're doing it because you can't stop.

2:03:29Yeah, you just can't stop.

2:03:30It's compulsive.

2:03:31All right, let me take a break here and tell you

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2:03:41struggle with productivity where everybody's constantly under pressure to accomplish more

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2:04:53for up to 10 people. So if you have a small team that you're already all set, go to igloosoftware.com/tts.

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2:05:06If you have a team, you have a need for team communication, go check out Igloo.

2:05:09You know what I love about Igloo? I'm just repeating what you said, but there's so many

2:05:14of these things where you feel like you get into a piece of software, even some very good

2:05:19pieces of software, where you feel like you're really entering into a worldview, where you

2:05:24have to learn to think like the people who made it. As an example of a famous company

2:05:29that we both admire. You kind of need to think like that one guy and then you'll

2:05:33really get the software. What's neat about igloo is like there's nothing you

2:05:36have to do. You can just shut off the stuff you don't need. There's something

2:05:40very satisfying about knowing the features are there but you don't have to

2:05:43have them on. You can make it look the way you want and it doesn't have to be

2:05:46like a world-changing philosophy that you adopt in order to make the tool work.

2:05:51I love that. Yeah it's you know it's sort of like a you know it's overuse analogy

2:05:56but sort of like a Lego approach to making toys where, you know,

2:06:00it's not like here's the toy. You have to use it exactly this way.

2:06:02You just put the pieces together the way you want it.

2:06:05Well put.

2:06:07All right, let's start the show.

2:06:10Yeah. You ready to go? Should I start recording?

2:06:12Well, have you, uh, the main thing, I mean,

2:06:15I don't know if there's anything else you want to talk about,

2:06:16but I want to talk about the Godfather.

2:06:18Oh man, come on. I got to pick up my kid in like an hour and a half.

2:06:22Well, just briefly. It's, you know,

2:06:24(laughs)

2:06:26- Okay, yes, yes.

2:06:28- So I did not see this coming.

2:06:30I don't know if they kept it secret

2:06:31or if I'm just a dummy who doesn't know

2:06:34where to look for stuff like this.

2:06:37But it was like, I don't know, just a couple days.

2:06:39I saw it on Kottke's site first,

2:06:41where Kottke was like, "Hey, HBO is going to have

2:06:44"the Godfather epic on,

2:06:46"a, the regular HBO on TV."

2:06:51Which, to me, it doesn't make any sense.

2:06:52I don't know how anybody--

2:06:53whole thing makes almost no sense the godfather epic the godfather saga

2:06:56whatever you want call which version

2:06:58we tell what it is yeah that well I think the story that I heard was that one

2:07:02point

2:07:02you know the godfather and the godfather to have just been so huge so critically

2:07:06acclaimed

2:07:06and at some point somebody got the idea to make it a miniseries that you could

2:07:09show on TV

2:07:10and with the idea being that copeland went in and personally supervised

2:07:14a putting this together in

2:07:17putting it together for TV meaning be

2:07:21taking out the stuff that would be, you know, too violent in that case, but also

2:07:25see,

2:07:26doing it in chronological order of the scenes in The Godfather 1 and 2.

2:07:30Right? So far so good? So that ran as a miniseries over, I think, two or three,

2:07:34four nights in the seventies or eighties. And then I can't...

2:07:39John, I have been looking for a copy of this for so long.

2:07:42It's hard to find a Samusdat copy of this, let alone a legit one.

2:07:46Like, you can find, like, maybe sometimes a VHS, multi-VHS, or...

2:07:50It's just it's one of those things. It's very hard to find but and it's not it's not the it's not the place to start

2:07:56I would say but like it is if you are a godfather fan

2:08:00It's a it's such with the new scenes or old deleted scenes brought back in it's a whole new way to watch the movie

2:08:06So what it's you can go if you have HBO go or HBO now

2:08:09I don't know why they have two different things HBO go is what I have because I still have cable TV and I have HBO

2:08:15So if you have Take Cable TV and HBO, you use HBO Go.

2:08:19If you don't, if you're a quote unquote "cord cutter"

2:08:21That's me, I got that.

2:08:22You sign up for HBO Now, which is exactly like HBO Go, except you just pay for it.

2:08:28And you don't have to pay for it.

2:08:29There's got to be a very interesting reason why that is.

2:08:31Don't you think?

2:08:32I guess.

2:08:33And it's like maybe like, I think we, but I think you get exactly the same stuff.

2:08:38I think you have all the exact same, I think it's like the way that you have to log in

2:08:41is different.

2:08:42I just don't know why they don't make two different apps for it.

2:08:44I don't know.

2:08:45maybe there's some way that maybe it's so that they can just say,

2:08:50"Here's how many HBO Now users we have."

2:08:52Oh, I see. Sure, sure, sure.

2:08:53I don't know. But anyway, if you have either one of those.

2:08:55Seemingly out of nowhere, this thing that is...

2:08:58I've got it in, well, in places where one can find things off certain trucks.

2:09:03I've been looking for this thing for five years.

2:09:05Because I remember when it would come on TV, in reruns,

2:09:09it would come on sometimes on like, what, like USA?

2:09:11I guess, yeah. USA used to have it.

2:09:14But they never had this one that, that, the one that's chronological order.

2:09:18Or did they?

2:09:19Well, I think that's like,

2:09:21I think it was originally called the Godfather saga.

2:09:24I think so too.

2:09:25You got to go to the Wikipedia page for this. Cause I think there,

2:09:27is there also a version that has three in it?

2:09:29I think so. Yeah. Yeah.

2:09:32And I mean like, so,

2:09:34And I don't think it had,

2:09:35I don't think the Godfather saga had the cut scene to put back in.

2:09:38Okay. Like I don't think I could be wrong.

2:09:41I had seen when Michael goes to Chicago to find, um...

2:09:48help me out... not Thomasine, uh, Fabrizio. I remember, I definitely, I very much remember

2:09:53that, and I remember thinking,

2:09:54"That's a scene I'm glad they put in." There's a lot of scenes I'm kinda not so sure I'm glad they

2:09:58put in,

2:09:58but I thought that was great. The idea of them finding Fabrizio and being able to go after...

2:10:02Do we need to do a spoiler alert here?

2:10:04Uh, yeah. Probably.

2:10:07No, it's a big deal. It's a big deal, Johnny. Yeah, so you should, if

2:10:10If you've never seen The Godfather or if you haven't seen it in forever and would like to rewatch it and keep it fresh, you should stop listening to the show.

2:10:22It feels so silly to say.

2:10:24My thanks to Igloo, Mail Route, and Backblaze. My thanks to Merlin Mann and You Can Stop the Show.

2:10:29Goodnight, everybody.

2:10:30And I think you'll agree with me. My ending advice to you is just watch the cinematic releases of The Godfather I and Godfather II

2:10:39as originally released in chopped up, you know, spoiler alert, in chopped up chronological order.

2:10:46Yeah. Well, it's not chopped up as in like a, you know, Charlie Kaufman movie or something.

2:10:51No, but it's, you know...

2:10:53But it's, yeah, but I mean, watch Godfather I, Godfather II. Each one is better than the other.

2:10:57They're awfully, awfully good.

2:10:59Right. And the best way to watch them really is the way that they were originally made,

2:11:02where there's flashbacks interspersed with, you know, divinity.

2:11:05You're gonna appreciate so much more. It's a little bit like a machete order type situation.

2:11:10Yeah.

2:11:10Where there's gonna be stuff, like I want to mention to you is like it's neat to see young Tessio

2:11:15when he's young, but like it's way more fun as you go, "Oh my god, that's totally Abe Vigoda."

2:11:21Like that's really cool. Like you appreciate it more in a Darth Vader kind of way.

2:11:24Yeah.

2:11:24Hey John, thanks for having me on. This has been great. And may your first child be a masculine child.

2:11:28All right.

2:11:30Now for those of you who are...

2:11:32digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga digga dig

2:12:02I hear certain songs from the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin or the bands whose albums I've

2:12:07listened to a gazillion times. And when I hear the song, I know what song's coming next. And if I

2:12:12don't hear that song next, it's not... It's disruptive.

2:12:15Yeah, but it's interesting. It's an interesting juxtaposition and it takes me out of my comfort

2:12:21zone. Watching the Godfather epic does the same thing, where I know what comes after this. I know

2:12:27we go back to the 1950s and we see Michael do this and instead we stay in the 1910s and that's

2:12:34disruptive to me and it makes me see that in a new way. Well and it's funny because watching it in

2:12:40that order and this is much more, a couple things to note, I would, you okay? I am. I thought you're

2:12:46laughing, coughing or dying. You need some white bread? We can get you some white bread. I have two

2:12:52things first of all in the saga which is seven seven hours long right this is the

2:12:57thing is yeah I love it I took a Twitter picture of it is you start playing it

2:13:02and it just comes up and it just shows on your TV as a seven hour movie it's a

2:13:08seven hour movie so two things to note is that first of all the first Godfather

2:13:13movie which I think was well over three hours to begin with is the lion's share

2:13:17because I think it's also where they added the most deleted or you know

2:13:23removed footage. Wouldn't that be fair to say? I feel like we were at least two-thirds

2:13:27of the way through the seven hours when we got into the Godfather 2 part.

2:13:32Isn't that right? It seemed like that to me too. And then second of all, the one

2:13:37that is then much more affected by this change in approach is Godfather 2.

2:13:41Oh you know in here, wait a minute, I'm sorry I'm an idiot because I'm not

2:13:45accounting for the stuff from 1900. Oh right, yeah that's it. Duh, duh. Yeah so it

2:13:50starts out, the movie, the Godfather saga starts out with the... it's the funeral of

2:13:56Vito's father where Paolo gets shot. Yeah I made the same mistake you did where I

2:14:01completely forgot. I'm so fucking stupid. But I do feel like, I can't, I can't Pepsi

2:14:09challenge this, but I do feel like the movie that ended up having much more

2:14:13deleted footage was the first one. If for no other reason then there's a lot

2:14:18more Marlon Brando than before. I mean, really noticeable a lot more Marlon Brando.

2:14:22IMDb says that The Godfather is 175 minutes. So it was, you know, as intended

2:14:28as originally released, it was close to three hours. I mean, 175 minutes.

2:14:32It's called three hours.

2:14:33Wow! I always thought it was over three hours.

2:14:36Well, you know what I mean. Once you get up close to three hours, it's, you know, it's over three hours.

2:14:43The reason I remember that is like I've often sat down and watched The Godfather and gone,

2:14:48"I can't believe that three hours just went by."

2:14:50Yeah.

2:14:51That sounds silly, but I mean it really goes by.

2:14:54Where are you on IMDb versions?

2:14:57Oh, I don't know.

2:14:58I just went to-

2:14:59I'm just on Wikipedia.

2:15:01I just went IMDb The Godfather and it says 1972.

2:15:04So I don't think it's any kind of special edition or anything.

2:15:07Oh my gosh.

2:15:10Lots of versions.

2:15:12I found myself, and I'm not, I guess, like, with Star Wars, I'm a little bit more of a

2:15:18superfan, and I think any additional scenes or restored scenes I would instantly know.

2:15:23And I've seen The Godfather many, many times. There were a couple of the scenes that were

2:15:28added where I knew instantly, "Wow, I've never seen this before." And then there were a couple

2:15:32where I was like, "Wait a minute. Have I seen this?"

2:15:34Yeah, like when Al Neary goes to talk to...

2:15:39Shoot, who's the guy who owns the casino?

2:15:44Uh...

2:15:45Clingman?

2:15:46Is it Clingman?

2:15:47Yeah, well, remember when he goes and he beats the guy up in front of the dancers?

2:15:51Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:15:52Like, I had this thought.

2:15:53Well, first of all, the scene right before that where he's talking at length with him

2:15:56and starts kicking his ass in the casino, I was trying to remember, is that in Father

2:16:002?

2:16:01That's one of the ones that I couldn't remember.

2:16:03Is it new?

2:16:04added, I think. Yeah, and the whole thing with the--God, you know, it's so funny, I

2:16:10was thinking, Coppola loves big stage shows. There's so many stage shows in The Godfather

2:16:15and in Apocalypse Now, also, you think about all the stage shows with the Playboy bunnies

2:16:19and stuff. He's so great, or like the donkey show, the show with Superman, or like all

2:16:24the other shows in Havana. It's really interesting. That seems like such a big thing. Anyway.

2:16:28That's a scene that I think had to be added, because I think it would have stuck out to

2:16:32me because to me it emphasized the power dynamics because a casino is a very...you have to actually...this

2:16:41is one of those things where the Godfather kind of builds on cultural...

2:16:43Oh man, there's no grab ass. No grab ass in a casino.

2:16:46Right, and there's no fighting in a casino. Like you don't...everybody knows you go in

2:16:51a casino and there's beefy security guys around there and they just...all they want to do

2:16:55is make sure there's no trouble and that the money just keeps flowing on the tables. So

2:16:59So like the way that, you know, to start banging a guy on the head in a casino.

2:17:03The way he's doing it, it's so undignified.

2:17:07If I had to have a dictionary and animate like a Harry Potter picture of what I would

2:17:10call a bitch slap, it would be Al Neary hitting Clingman in the casino.

2:17:14He's like, "Pop!

2:17:15Pop!"

2:17:16Poor Clingman.

2:17:17They're pushing Clingman out.

2:17:20Right.

2:17:21I loved it.

2:17:23I guess I can kind of see why they cut it, you know, that these movies are so long and

2:17:26that they really wanted to just cut every little bit of fat and leave.

2:17:31Oh boy, there were a couple that really stuck out.

2:17:34I'm trying to remember.

2:17:38There were a lot involving backstory on Mike.

2:17:40I feel like involving Mike and Kay backstory stuff.

2:17:43Yeah.

2:17:44Again, it's seven hours long.

2:17:46I haven't watched the whole, whole thing, but I've been skipping around to significant

2:17:50parts.

2:17:51Yeah, I feel like it really is a testament.

2:17:54Well, first of all, it is fun to watch it in chronological order because it's just a,

2:17:58it's a, I never felt more, I don't want to say I've never felt more empathy,

2:18:01but it made me really appreciate the Niro's performance.

2:18:03I say that the interleaving was pretty great,

2:18:07but it's fun to just see all the De Niro in a row almost as a short story.

2:18:11I, you know, I, I, I'd say hyperbole. Like I, you can't,

2:18:15you can't say something like this definitively,

2:18:17but just to be a jackass on Twitter after I got done with that first hour or so,

2:18:21which is the De Niro is Young Vito, I just tweeted that it's the greatest

2:18:27screen performance in the history of American cinema. Now, do I really mean

2:18:30that? I would put it up there with any performance that De Niro's ever done.

2:18:33Name one that's empirically better.

2:18:35Right. It's in that A-plus. Let's just say that there's an A-plus category that you

2:18:39can't go past. This is one of them. Yes, some of the other people who disputed it,

2:18:43there were others that were out there, but it's as good as any performance

2:18:46I've ever seen because it does like

2:18:48It does like ten things at once like one it is completely convincing that he is the younger version of Brando

2:18:57That you saw in this movie

2:18:59Before it is completely convincing that this is the same guy. It's a different actor, but it's it's like oh my god

2:19:06That's the guy and he his carriage not even just the catchphrase

2:19:11It's his carriage and just yeah the way that he he's exactly like Vito

2:19:15but how you would imagine him younger. He's very dignified and reserved and kind, and you could see

2:19:22it's before, you know, he became quite the tough guy he became, and you feel that he could lose at

2:19:28any point. Well, and the other thing that struck out to me, and when you see it all condensed

2:19:32consecutively instead of being interspersed, one of the things that jumped out to me, and you know

2:19:36it, I mean it's... but it just really sticks out to you that this is a guy who likes to listen more

2:19:42than he likes to talk. And that might make a lot of logical sense for the character,

2:19:46but it's not the way that movie characters are written, right? Because you tell an actor

2:19:52you don't have a lot of lines. You know, that's not good. De Niro makes that work, like where

2:19:59he's acting and he is telling you so many things about this character and it has almost

2:20:03nothing to do with what he says.

2:20:05And you're really articulating something I didn't have words for. When I watched parts

2:20:11this again the last like three nights I've been watching this. You just really

2:20:14articulated something to me.

2:20:15You're right, in other movies, you know like a straw man, but in other movies

2:20:19yeah it is about the number of lines, about how much you get to

2:20:21pull a face and have an emotion. But think about scenes like, think about

2:20:26everything with De Niro.

2:20:27Think about Robert Duvall throughout the movie.

2:20:31Think about everybody like in the courtroom scenes.

2:20:35So much is telegraphed, so much is communicated

2:20:39by how each person mutes their emotional response.

2:20:44Right, a famous scene, like when they had the first sit down

2:20:48and Vito says to Sunny,

2:20:50"Never tell the family what you're thinking.

2:20:51"Never tell people what's on your mind."

2:20:53- Never tell anybody outside the family.

2:20:55- Never tell anybody outside the family

2:20:56what you're thinking, right?

2:20:57Yes, yes.

2:20:58And you see that throughout the movie.

2:20:59Like when Tom has to go into the place

2:21:02where the senator is with the, you know,

2:21:04into, you know what I'm talking about?

2:21:06- Yeah, yep.

2:21:07With the little problem with a girl.

2:21:08It's a little problem with the girl and the scene is it's so awful. It's so scary

2:21:12And it's so but it's it's not only scary and awful, but it's just he

2:21:16Geary is so undignified in the way. He's trying to kind of like gather up the sheets while he's wearing a towel

2:21:22Yeah, but you but how does Robert Duvall in that case telegraph so much of this?

2:21:27Oh, come on guy as well as oh my god

2:21:29I can't believe this is another fucking thing I have to do for the family

2:21:32Do you it's all that I have a question about that scene because I I'm not and it's so long

2:21:37I'm not done with this yet. I think I'm maybe around with you. I'm about and maybe a little bit more than two-thirds

2:21:42I'm about three quarters through it, but I saw that scene last night

2:21:44Did did the family set him up? Yes. Yeah, is that ever made clear or I just know it is not well

2:21:52I'm just telling you what I think they say in particular because um

2:21:55Hagen makes Tom makes a point of saying you're very you're lucky that this is Fredo's place

2:22:01Yeah, because we were able to come in and help you. I think they probably slipped him a Mickey

2:22:06Yeah, and we're gonna kill the kill the girl. Yeah, that's exactly what I think. It's a little why you can't you know

2:22:11Remember anything right? I've always thought cool - but I love that. They don't make it core Leon a I

2:22:17Love him in that role. He's so good. He's such a scumbag

2:22:21Gary I like the way that as he's

2:22:25he's

2:22:28first time we see him at

2:22:30young Anthony's first communion party and he's

2:22:33reading from these cards.

2:22:35Perfect. It's perfect. Now with a special performance, I'm like,

2:22:40he's obviously, he has no idea what they're going to play.

2:22:42I like it when I like it when he says Vito Corleone.

2:22:46Vito Corleone.

2:22:49Yeah, he's good. And his wife, Mrs. Geary.

2:22:54So then I said, I said, said this to Syracuse. I think I said this to you.

2:23:00I said this to other people. The thing that strikes me throughout these movies,

2:23:02maybe even especially Godfather II is the minor roles.

2:23:07There's so many people, like I remember,

2:23:09I still remember like the cop who guides Vito

2:23:13out of the line at Ellis Island.

2:23:15I remember the guy with the accordion and the glasses

2:23:18when Fredo greets Mike to Las Vegas.

2:23:23Like I just, I feel like there's so many faces

2:23:26in this movie that I remember so clearly

2:23:28that even if they weren't a speaking part,

2:23:29they still feel like a giant part of the movie to me.

2:23:32the nurse who's the only other person in the hospital when Michael just happens,

2:23:37no,

2:23:37when Michael happens upon his father and realizes he's not guarded and that

2:23:42nurse comes in and just says like,

2:23:43you can't be here and says it with that sort of authority where like,

2:23:48let's just say that you're, you know, you're, you know, you're not,

2:23:53you're, you're relative,

2:23:55your beloved one is not an endangered member of the mafia.

2:23:58You're just there to see somebody in your family's in the hospital and a nurse

2:24:01comes up to you and says to you in that, in a sort of authoritative manner, you can't

2:24:06be here right now. You're like, oh, it's almost like you like you've wandered into where the

2:24:09medications are locked up. Like, hey, you can't be here. Like you probably don't know

2:24:12it, but you can't be in here. You're in the wrong area. It's a vivid performance. It's

2:24:16like it, you know, she's got, I don't know, three or four lines, but, and, but it's a

2:24:21great little interaction. The way that Michael conveys to her, you're not, a, you're not

2:24:27getting at me out of here and b, if you don't help me, somebody's going to come in here

2:24:30and shoot my father.

2:24:33I totally agree.

2:24:34Yeah, I started a list of fives a long time ago of five

2:24:37incredibly minor characters from The Godfather.

2:24:40And there's just so many.

2:24:42And I guess the guy's name's Fred Ruse,

2:24:43somebody was telling me, who was a producer on the film that

2:24:46actually also got lent out to Lucas from Coppola,

2:24:50I guess from Zoetrope.

2:24:51But yeah, I mean, whoever was responsible for getting

2:24:53those faces in there, they were really

2:24:56clicking on an all cylinder.

2:24:57Oh, the cinematography, everything about this movie.

2:24:59It's so gorgeous.

2:25:00How much darker could these scenes get? You can barely make out the figures, the shadows of two people in a room, and yet it completely works.

2:25:06Oh, it's... it's amazing. And then when there is a scene, and then all of a sudden when there is a scene in the sunshine, it's amazing.

2:25:12Look at the way... I guess we talked about this once before. So, we talked about this. You've watched the documentary,

2:25:17where... oh god, I feel so bad. It's not Heskow Wexler. What's the guy's name? What's the cinematographer's name?

2:25:23Not Roger Deakins.

2:25:26No, it's not, but...

2:25:28it's I could just go look it up on the internet yeah we could I hear a thousand

2:25:33people screaming Gordon Willis Gordon Willis shame he said he he basically you

2:25:40stop me here if I got this wrong he lit those scenes but as dark as talking to

2:25:46mama in the house as light as the wedding outside the wedding is

2:25:49completely blown out to the edge of exposure we can barely make out figures

2:25:52inside you know there's certain scenes like where you can barely make out the

2:25:56He said if you move one stop in either direction, it would ruin it would ruin the movie

2:26:00He was so particular he's like if you if you move one if you move one stop up

2:26:05That is gonna screw up all the wedding scenes. It's gonna be unusable

2:26:08If you move one stop down, you literally won't be able to see anything on screen in the boathouse

2:26:12right, but it's just it's like a microcosm of like the way and that in the Godfather 2 in the in the movie order that

2:26:21you're in the

2:26:23Michael Corleone era and then you go back to Young Vito and then you go back to Michael and then you go back to

2:26:31In The Godfather you're in this dark

2:26:34office that is so dark and so serious and so somber and then you're out there with this great Italian music and the

2:26:42Dancing and and the fun and the sunshine. It's the same thing

2:26:46It's the exact same thing and it's just the right amount of this and then just the right amount of that

2:26:50But there's a lot of stuff where light ends up playing an important role where light almost becomes a character

2:26:55Certainly in terms of like the oh without question, but think about the scene the entire sequence

2:27:00With going after Finucci during the parade

2:27:03Holy shit, like I just like I have like 50 things to say about that that entire sequence how they pulled that off with those

2:27:10Side, you know tracking shots that they do and him on the roof

2:27:13But then the scene when he gets into the building and he's waiting outside the door for Finucci

2:27:18and he has the towel and he undoes the light bulb. And then Finucci comes up and does this like tap tap tap

2:27:23to get the light back on and he's back. Ah, it's just it's exquisite because the light is I don't know

2:27:29It's just it's just so gorgeous light as a character in that scene

2:27:31I can't help comparing it because it's on my mind because the new movie came out

2:27:36And you know, obviously Lucas and Coppola were peers and good friends and they came up at the same time and they know each other

2:27:44But to compare and contrast their stewardship over their fantastic 70s masterpieces

2:27:50Yeah, and what the ways that Coppola has gone back to the Godfather and put the Godfather 3 aside number one

2:27:58The Godfather 3 is way better than the prequels for the Star Wars movies, whatever you think of the Godfather 3

2:28:03But it's it's disappointing but it's not a dumpster fire right it's not you know, right it's not a disaster right nobody

2:28:12nobody complains about the Godfather 3 the way they complain about the Star Wars prequels.

2:28:15And then what he did with the Godfather 1 and Godfather 2 are things that like people like me

2:28:20and you are just praising to no end. And we're not saying, "Hey, don't watch them the way they

2:28:25were originally released." We're saying, "Watch them like that first and then watch it this way

2:28:28and you'll gain more perspective." Whereas what Lucas did with the quote unquote "special editions"

2:28:33like I got found myself this I'm thinking about talking about this I knew that I wanted to have

2:28:38you on the show this weekend. We talked about this, and I started thinking in my head of like what the

2:28:43like Lucas special edition of the Godfather epic would be. And like yeah this thing he would like

2:28:51CGI the faces like Michael's Michael's wounds from the cop beating him up would be much more

2:28:57like elaborate. Yeah yeah exactly that's exactly one. Okay so one of the things that stuck out to

2:29:03me everybody knows Star Wars was groundbreaking special effects because it showed you these things

2:29:06that were impossible, like a giant, you know, two-mile long starship.

2:29:11Yeah.

2:29:11Whereas the special effects in The Godfather, though, are amazing. I find

2:29:17that their street shot from--for being made in like 19--early 1970s--

2:29:22Oh, unbelievable.

2:29:22The street shots of like old New York, whether you're talking the 1950s or 1940s,

2:29:30or you're talking all the way back to the 1910s, they're all a hundred percent

2:29:35convincing and I'm guessing they did it with like

2:29:39matte paintings.

2:29:41That's how they did a lot of like wide shots back then, you know, before the

2:29:44digital age.

2:29:46But they're all just convincing and I don't know how they did it.

2:29:49I really don't. They sweated so much of the details in,

2:29:53it feels like to me, like just dumb stuff. Like I was noticing when

2:29:57Michael pulls up at Hyman Roth's house, I think he's in like a Thunderbird, that red and

2:30:00black Thunderbird,

2:30:01There's a little parking sticker in the window that looks completely

2:30:05contemporaneous to the time. Like somebody sweated that.

2:30:07Somebody got that and put that in there. But also, you know,

2:30:10think about stuff like, uh, not that to, you know, go for the obvious one,

2:30:14but the authenticity of like some of the shootings.

2:30:18Yeah. I mean, I remember reading one time,

2:30:21I think I saw a life magazine article even as a kid about shooting the scene at

2:30:25the, um, at the toll bridge was sunny. Oh yeah. And like what was involved in that?

2:30:30I mean, think about all the moving pieces in that.

2:30:32It's mind-boggling.

2:30:34Or like the scene, you know, again, the scene at,

2:30:38what's called Lewis's or whatever,

2:30:39at the scene at the Italian restaurant.

2:30:42That looks like a crime scene.

2:30:44You're watching a crime scene happen.

2:30:47You know, like when they go to the mattresses,

2:30:49you see all the black and white photos.

2:30:50That's what it looked like.

2:30:51And it's not pretty.

2:30:53Like when the captain gets shot in the throat or whatever,

2:30:55like it does not look like a Chicago bang bang

2:30:58kind of shooting.

2:30:59How about when Moe Green gets shot in the eye?

2:31:01Oh my god, I can't even think about it.

2:31:03How do they do it?

2:31:04But they don't cut, they don't cut on the gunshot.

2:31:07No, there's like a beat.

2:31:09He's laying down getting a massage.

2:31:11He gets shot in the eye with his glasses, and then it takes a second.

2:31:14Maybe he ought to be telling the guy to maybe help him out, do something with that back hair.

2:31:18He looks up and next thing you know, he's been shot through his eyeglasses right into his eye.

2:31:24I don't know how they did it.

2:31:26Do not talk to a man like Moe Green like that.

2:31:29I'm Moe Green!

2:31:31The other one, I guess it's...

2:31:33He's supposed to be Meyer Lansky, is that right?

2:31:35In the Ramona Clay.

2:31:37Who's the guy that wore in Beatty?

2:31:39Bugsy Seagal?

2:31:41That must be a Bugsy Seagal.

2:31:43With a lot of creative licenses.

2:31:45I think it's a Bugsy Seagal

2:31:47crossed with a bunch of other people.

2:31:49Maybe, A, not to piss off any real people

2:31:52who are still involved in that business in 1971.

2:31:551971 and then be just you know make it a better story. Oh

2:31:58Lee Strasburg

2:32:01Just Lee Strasburg just so so many things but like for me like the moment the moment when

2:32:07Mike is at his house and says basically is that okay if we knock off, you know, Frank Pantangeli and

2:32:12He takes it without he's looking at the football game. He picks up a potato chip. He says yeah, he's small potatoes

2:32:24They're talking about slicing up Cuba while they're literally slicing up a cake of Cuba.

2:32:28Here's my note. My notes are that I have a little note here written. It says "Hyman Roth equals Yoda."

2:32:35Oh, yeah, totally.

2:32:36Like evil Yoda.

2:32:37He just came back to vote in the presidential election.

2:32:40Vote I will, yes.

2:32:43He's gonna live out his life as a Jew in Israel.

2:32:46The other death scene that really--it was sort of towards the--it's fresh in my mind because it was sort of towards the end of

2:32:51where I paused it last night was when Carlo, now this is, uh,

2:32:55Oh God. When this is Connie's first husband. Uh,

2:32:59and he's, he's, he's been abusing Connie, right?

2:33:06Well,

2:33:07and while she's pregnant and did it on did it purposefully,

2:33:09did it to collude with the Bart, uh, with Barzini Barzini,

2:33:14knowing that when Sonny got the call, Sonny was going to drive as fast as he could,

2:33:19straight over that, you know,

2:33:20They knew exactly which way he was going.

2:33:21- That is a really dumb plan.

2:33:23(laughing)

2:33:24That's all I gotta say, Carlo.

2:33:26I know you're not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

2:33:28How does that turn out well?

2:33:29- Right.

2:33:30- But it's perfect, 'cause his character

2:33:31would probably do that.

2:33:32His character's like a small time hustler.

2:33:35- Yeah, there's that one little scene at a family dinner

2:33:37when he, it's foreshadowing,

2:33:41where Sonny's running the show

2:33:44because the old man is in the hospital.

2:33:46And Sonny is talking business,

2:33:48and Connie says, "We never talked,

2:33:49but you guys never talk business at the table when daddy was here

2:33:52and he's like "ahh shut up, blah blah blah" and then

2:33:55Carlos says something "hey you know I'd like to talk to you and Michael" and Sonny goes

2:33:59"we don't talk business at the table"

2:34:00Right exactly, exactly. But it just shows you it's funny because at first you

2:34:05think it's a funny way

2:34:06of Sonny being a hypocrite and then later on though it plays as Carlo

2:34:10wanting, you know, he kind of wants some attention from this, he wants to get in

2:34:14you know. Absolutely, well here's the thing that's interesting and bewildering about

2:34:17that the this kind of costa nuestra world is that it seems to me that like

2:34:22the number one qualification I mean apart from being you know Sicilian I

2:34:26guess is family so if you're in the family regardless of your blood in the

2:34:31family blood family right like we'll find something for you to do but after

2:34:34that like wow so much so much demonstrated competence and so much

2:34:42demonstrated loyalty like we're don't worry dude like we're not we're not

2:34:46light on people. We can find people who want this job, but if you want to work in this place,

2:34:50you're going to have to have a surpassing level of both loyalty and competence, neither of which

2:34:54Carlo has, and he's not blood. He doesn't understand that. He thinks I'm in the... I think,

2:34:58in my read of this, he's in the family now. Why doesn't he get to be higher than Fredo?

2:35:02Right. Even though... But that's not how it works. Right. Well, anyway, when he gets killed...

2:35:07Oh my gosh, because he says... Because Michael plays him like a fiddle. He's like, "I can't

2:35:11can't kill you. You're my, you're my, uh, you're my wife's husband.

2:35:14And you're my God, my Godson's father. Yeah, exactly. And you're,

2:35:18you were here, there's a plane. You just got to go out.

2:35:19You're going to get on the plane.

2:35:20Gets in the car and they start strangling them and he kicks the windshield

2:35:27out.

2:35:27First you hear the squeaking sound,

2:35:28the squeaking sound of his shoes rubbing against the windshield.

2:35:31Ah, it's sound design. And it's,

2:35:34it's this way that the violence is, it really, it's unsettling.

2:35:39even though I've seen this so many times, umpteen times, like I've said,

2:35:43I can't count it, I've seen it, but it got to me. It's like uncomfortable.

2:35:46And it's because there's no cuts, it's no editing, it's just

2:35:49a camera right on the the hood of the car,

2:35:54and the car is driving away.

2:35:57Right. But what a brilliant shot to get that right to where, like, first of all, he kicks it

2:36:02and it makes a noise, he kicks it again and it gives a little,

2:36:05he kicks it another time, and it shatters in a fairly believable way.

2:36:08You think that was an easy shot to get?

2:36:10Oh, I was thinking about it, because it...

2:36:12No, because the guy's driving the car.

2:36:14And then there's motion with the car, yeah.

2:36:15Right.

2:36:15Exactly.

2:36:16I mean, and who knows how, you know, whether kicking the windshield would...

2:36:20I don't know how they mounted it to the hood of the car, but however they mounted the...

2:36:23I don't even know, like, is there a way that they have...

2:36:26The camera doesn't pan or move at all, so I'm guessing that maybe they had it set up

2:36:30so that it ran without a human operator?

2:36:33I don't know.

2:36:34It seemed to me like...

2:36:35Walter Murch was the filmmaker who's the sound designer for this.

2:36:40When in the end of the first movie, remember we talked about in Toy Story 3 the seatbelt,

2:36:46the seatbelt you ever saw? When Michael is in the study and they come in and they pledge

2:36:54their faithfulness to the Godfather and Al Neary walks over to the door that K, or K again,

2:37:00and doors always so important. No, it's only the Kubrick guy doors mirrors.

2:37:04But the K is standing outside watching this and you see Alan near you walk up

2:37:08making eye contact with the camera and he closes that door.

2:37:12And that door closing is the door closing us door close you've ever heard in

2:37:17your life. Like how did you get such a perfect sound of like, Ooh,

2:37:21when that door closes in case face, right? It's,

2:37:25it is true. It's the door closing a store close.

2:37:30Oh, how much do you love Al Neri, man? What a badass.

2:37:33He's such a badass. He's like...

2:37:36Remember at one point the Don says to Michael, "It looks like you found your Luca Brasi."

2:37:40Even when Al Neri

2:37:43gets a gut, he's still a badass.

2:37:47I guess we should probably wrap soon. I could talk about this all day, buddy,

2:37:51because...

2:37:52Oh, you know what? To get you back to your Star Wars point, though, you know, and it's...

2:37:56It's not fair as a comparison because I'm sure there's a million differences.

2:38:00But you know, here's one, here's one bald fact of this.

2:38:04And this kind of goes to Spielberg is two to two in some ways where, you know,

2:38:08in the case of Spielberg and all three of them are proud of their work, right?

2:38:12You got Coppola, you got Spielberg, you got Lucas. In the case of Coppola,

2:38:17he's so proud of his work that it means a lot to him to have the best

2:38:20conceivable copy available.

2:38:22George Lucas has claimed that there's not a decent single good copy of Star Wars to

2:38:26put together. Well, you know what? You know who's in the same position? Fucking Francis

2:38:29Ford Coppola. So if you watch that documentary, you sit there, your heart skips a beat when

2:38:34you watch what the actual footage after Paramount had gone out, gone out, you know, basically

2:38:39cut out all of the, uh, all the fades. What do they call that? They had the long leaders

2:38:43between scenes. They'd cut those out to put on, they take an original copies of the film

2:38:47and butchered them. And so he basically, I guess they put down some serious dough to

2:38:52do like a 4K scan and rebuild the film, right? Like that's, that's pride in what you do.

2:38:58Is it like, yeah, we've got all kinds of things where we've shucked and jive, we made this

2:39:01into five different versions for TV. There's different versions on video, but like here

2:39:04is a version that we, that will stand the test of time that we can all be proud of.

2:39:08Did you see that there's, there's a new Shamizdat thing floating around from Star Wars?

2:39:16harmony extended? No, a totally new one. Somebody found a 35 millimeter print and have secretly

2:39:29been digitizing it and color correcting it frame by frame for years now. What? I'm not

2:39:38joking you it's let me see here is there any like test footage out there let me

2:39:46see if I have a link here it's it's called the negative one version so if

2:39:50you do Star Wars negative one negative numeral one oh here we go team negative

2:39:57one yeah team Star Wars real three sampler yeah it's if you I mean not that

2:40:02I don't have it cuz you know I mean it's it wouldn't wouldn't be legit but if you

2:40:05did. Oh, I see, but if it did exist, it might exist. And it might be a 26 gigabyte MKV.

2:40:11Okay, okay. But if you look just at the stuff that's out there, it's a bunch of

2:40:16still frames. And they show you like what they had from the...because they went from

2:40:20a 35 millimeter print. So that's not really, that's not a great starting

2:40:24place. No, no. That's a product, not a source. Yeah, they went from there and

2:40:29that's why they went through literally frame by frame. And you know like... Sort of

2:40:34as they did with the Godfather, right?

2:40:36Where they'd have to go through and frame by frame,

2:40:37like rebuild this and clean it up.

2:40:39- So just for example, like one of the things

2:40:40they had to do with this negative one print of New Hope

2:40:43was that it, like the initial digital scans

2:40:47of the space scenes didn't even,

2:40:48you couldn't even see the stars.

2:40:49They had to do work just to get the,

2:40:51to bring my exposure up to get the stars.

2:40:52- Oh, that's amazing.

2:40:54- But they, it's, I literally,

2:40:59I'm not even trying to be coy here.

2:41:00I don't have the digital copy.

2:41:01- What's out there, it looks like?

2:41:02yet. Well no, no, I mean like this is not difficult to find

2:41:06information. There's several

2:41:08places you can go to, but one is called Original Trilogy, where

2:41:12they have discussion forums about the different

2:41:15versions that are out there. Right, but one of the things though that it's like

2:41:18and with the, what do you call the ones that are out there, the D Specialized

2:41:21Editions that a lot of people do have.

2:41:23Well, there's two, I think two general

2:41:26genres and people will correct me on this, but I think one is

2:41:29fan edits where people like, something like the Phantom Editor,

2:41:34right, where you go in and you kind of remake your own version of how you think

2:41:38it should be or all the way down to a fan fiction kind

2:41:40of idea, mixing several movies together as fan edits.

2:41:43And then what is the other version called? Like you've got,

2:41:46"Harmy" is in kind of a different thing where "Harmy's" de-specialized versions

2:41:50are just what is the highest quality source

2:41:53version that is what was in the original theatrical release,

2:41:57right? Basically putting together and which is harder than it sounds because you have to get the sound editing right too.

2:42:02But even with his versions

2:42:03I think one of the things that's lost just from going with all the diddling that Lucas had done over the years is that the

2:42:09color correction is off and the film grain

2:42:12texture is gone from what you see and that it's it's the Lord's work and it's the way I would recommend anybody watching those movies

2:42:21if they can get their hands on them

2:42:23but one of the things that that like it's like Lucas somehow had this aversion to the technical limits of film of the 70s and

2:42:31It's like his as his sensibilities changed on the way you do color correction and and the color temperature of things

2:42:38They changed those original things to do it. Whereas

2:42:41- ma

2:42:42I mean again, I can't say that I remember seeing the Godfather in the theater because it came out in the theater before I was born

2:42:47But it the way that Coppola has overseen, you know, the this footage it embraces

2:42:53the film grain and it embraces the color temperatures and and you know color

2:43:00grain. As I understand it, I haven't watched the documentary in a couple years, but it is a very

2:43:04good documentary both as a story and as a technical document, but basically

2:43:08the grain was not seen as certainly as noise. Part of the restoration was not

2:43:12screwing up the grain.

2:43:13Right, whereas part of the special editions and whatever for Star Wars was

2:43:17let's get rid of this grain that we wouldn't have if we shot it today.

2:43:21Which, you know, and anyway, that's what this negative one issue of A New Hope apparently,

2:43:28you know, embraces the film grain and you can see it and that, you know, there's skies

2:43:32that are on Tatooine that are completely blown out, which is the way it looked when we were

2:43:35kids instead of being bright blue like they are in the prints we know today.

2:43:39Oh my goodness, that's so interesting.

2:43:41I'll keep an eye out for that.

2:43:43Anyway.

2:43:44Yeah.

2:43:45I don't, you know, I hate to be overly critical.

2:43:48so it's a fashionable to beat up on George Lucas or what we perceive George

2:43:52Lucas to be but you know it's just the part to the part that makes it difficult

2:43:55and complicated I am NOT the first person to say this is that when we start

2:43:59to wonder if what we love about Star Wars was what he loved about Star Wars

2:44:04not that it has to matter but like I'll bet you you could sit in a room with

2:44:07Coppola and watch that movie and he would be excited to watch it yeah where

2:44:11he would go I can't believe we got that like you know like just that shot you

2:44:16You have no idea how hard it was to get that shot.

2:44:18Whereas with Lucas, I wonder if he even enjoys any version of that film.

2:44:22Because it really just feels like it's an ongoing Christmas tree in his life that he's

2:44:27constantly redecorating depending on how he feels right now.

2:44:30Not based on what the ideal version of this would be.

2:44:32But I don't know.

2:44:33And I know that's unkind.

2:44:34But that's the part where you go like, it's really strange.

2:44:37When he got left to his own devices with a not unlimited but very generous budget, it

2:44:42didn't get better.

2:44:43didn't produce what we hoped or like what you know when we thought of

2:44:49George Lucas in the 70s was like he's the king of our imagination like he's

2:44:52got the bet he's like up there with Jim Henson right in terms of like he gets

2:44:56something in a way that I just can't and he gets that on the screen and

2:44:59especially in those first two movies yeah and it's just weird when you were

2:45:02like you got to point we're like what happened is this a cap grass thing did

2:45:05they swap him out like who thought puppet meetings would be fun yeah I think

2:45:09for the special editions in particular you could you could effectively say he

2:45:13had an unlimited budget. That to just make the original trilogy as good as he

2:45:18wants it to be for reissue in theaters now in preparation for the new trilogy

2:45:22just to get people excited again, whatever it costs, I'm sure it was well

2:45:26within the bounds of what what any studio you know would have you know put

2:45:30up the money for. And you know we we got like a dinosaur stuck in the most

2:45:36isolated. Yeah exactly that's that's a very just like more more advanced little

2:45:41rats running around. Yeah. With a jaw hanging off it. And everything farting. Yeah, everything

2:45:48farts. Everything farts. That would be a great addition to the Godfather. Just add some farts.

2:45:55Boy, you can't stop noticing those oranges. Once you notice the oranges, you really see

2:46:00the oranges, don't you? There are so many oranges in these movies, and it's never something

2:46:04good that happens after. The guy comes in at the beginning to talk about his daughter

2:46:10who got, you know, pffft up the voice and when he...

2:46:17Right after Vito says, "You never come from a friendship before."

2:46:23Just to show you, I'm not a callous man.

2:46:27She was the best piece of ass I ever had!

2:46:32Mr. Waltz, could you call me a car?

2:46:36[

2:46:46Pimp you never go down about Santino and

2:46:48The same way that they they made a Han Solo look like he stepped on Jabba's tail

2:46:54Just make make Robert Duvall look like he lifts

2:46:56right, but

2:46:59Where he like awkwardly shifts a little bit like

2:47:05I'll get it out in one burst

2:47:07They're going around and Godfather - and introducing everybody the Batista is introducing everybody at the meeting and her Anna and from UT and T

2:47:16Simon Roth

2:47:19Okay, somebody out there I don't know who it's gonna be I'm just imagining somebody like a Joe Steele somebody could do this Todd

2:47:29I'm sure Todd could do this. Could we please get at least a short super cut of the George Luke?

2:47:35George Lucas special edition of the Godfather with farts

2:47:40That meeting in Cuba just some CGI had a bunch of like

2:47:45Really rich Cuban food to the table. I'd give four million bucks for it to not hurt when I take a piss

2:47:53All right, I think that's a show oh

2:47:59Thanks for having me on John. I think we helped a lot of people. I hope the weekend goes okay

2:48:03I hope you ski you survive make sure you pick up some extra bread

2:48:05God I love you