0:00:00You were at CES.
0:00:01- I was.
0:00:02- Now correct me if I'm wrong.
0:00:04So this is the second year, okay.
0:00:05And you came on the show last year
0:00:06and talked about CES, right?
0:00:07- I think this might be our third or fourth
0:00:10annual CES discussion.
0:00:13And I think the first two I didn't go
0:00:14and were like, oh, we should go.
0:00:17And then last year I went for the first time.
0:00:19- It is absolutely a John Gruver, the talk show tradition
0:00:25that like mid January, I have someone on,
0:00:28we talk about CES and then I say, you know what,
0:00:30damn it, next year I'm going.
0:00:32And then next year comes and goes and I don't go.
0:00:36- You almost need to start planning it now.
0:00:38And it's funny because they've already changed the website
0:00:40over to 2017 CES.
0:00:43I wonder if they have a script that does that.
0:00:45It was like the next day, boom.
0:00:48Their website's already turned over.
0:00:49It was great, man, I love it.
0:00:52It was super fun.
0:00:54It's absolute insanity.
0:00:55I mean, you go to Vegas a lot.
0:00:57And I had not been to Vegas in 10 years actually
0:01:01before last year's CES and it is absolute chaos.
0:01:06I mean there are 200,000 people there who do not belong.
0:01:09They are from, it's kind of neat because basically
0:01:13what happens is at the beginning of the year,
0:01:15not everyone but 200,000 people who work in tech
0:01:21and in adjacent industries are all living
0:01:24in one city for a week.
0:01:25So you run into people who, you know, you would not expect to see, I'm totally
0:01:30like randomly ran into a guy in a restaurant.
0:01:34We were both waiting to eat at the bar and we ended up eating lunch together.
0:01:38Who's like, was partially responsible for the creation of the MP3, uh, random,
0:01:43random stuff like that.
0:01:44And then you're like reading Slack and your coworkers are like, Hey, you know,
0:01:48that Reed Hastings is giving a talk across, you know, in another place in Vegas.
0:01:52I'm like, no, I didn't know that.
0:01:54You know, there's just so much going on.
0:01:56It's absolute madness and chaos,
0:01:59but if you can tolerate it,
0:02:03and I guess enough trips to Tokyo have now made me
0:02:05totally chilled out around massive crowds,
0:02:09it's really cool, it's very special.
0:02:11- I think the crowds, that wouldn't bother me.
0:02:14I can take crowds in small doses.
0:02:17I mean, I go to Disney a couple times a year
0:02:19and stuff like that.
0:02:20What I like though, if you go somewhere like that,
0:02:23is if you can take the time to spend some time
0:02:27somewhere away from the crowd every day.
0:02:29- Yeah, where it gets to you,
0:02:31I don't mind the actual crowd where it gets to you
0:02:33is that the infrastructure is just way beyond capacity.
0:02:37I mean, people are talking about waiting an hour
0:02:40just to get on the monorail.
0:02:42Just to get into the station.
0:02:44Or you wanna go anywhere to eat lunch, forget it.
0:02:47Like you're waiting.
0:02:48Or they have this shuttle bus that goes from one,
0:02:53'cause it basically takes up both the Sands
0:02:56and the Las Vegas convention centers.
0:02:58And they have a shuttle bus, a free shuttle bus
0:03:00that goes between them.
0:03:02It can't be more than a mile.
0:03:03And you know what? - It's not far.
0:03:05- No, and I've walked it, and it's totally walkable.
0:03:07I mean, there's barely any sidewalk,
0:03:09but this bus trip takes like 40 minutes
0:03:13because there's so much traffic,
0:03:14because everyone else is in a cab
0:03:16trying to get between these places.
0:03:17And it's just madness.
0:03:20Last year I stayed at the fairly far south end of the strip
0:03:25and this year one of my priorities was
0:03:27stay somewhere further, closer to the action.
0:03:29So at least you could walk from--
0:03:31- South is the airport side, right?
0:03:33Like down by Mandalay Bay?
0:03:35- Yeah, Mandalay Bay.
0:03:36- It's funny, in my head I feel like that's up,
0:03:38like that's up the strip.
0:03:40- Oh yeah.
0:03:40- Down the strip is down by like the wind.
0:03:42- Stratosphere.
0:03:43- Yeah, but it's the other way around, right?
0:03:44- Right, yeah.
0:03:45And so that was useful, although a lot of the stuff,
0:03:49A lot of the official press conferences are at Mandalay Bay.
0:03:53- That's crazy though.
0:03:54It's so far away.
0:03:55- I know.
0:03:56I'm in a fortunate position where I could basically pick,
0:04:00Quartz, where I work, qz.com,
0:04:03we're still small enough that we can be picky
0:04:08about what we cover.
0:04:09So I don't have to actually go and live blog
0:04:12an Nvidia press conference or something like that.
0:04:15No one's telling me I need to do that.
0:04:17So I actually got to skip all those official
0:04:20press conference type things.
0:04:21So I didn't actually have to go down
0:04:22to Mandalay Bay this time.
0:04:23But a lot of the action, like the good stuff's going on
0:04:27at Cosmopolitan, at the Wynn, and Venetian.
0:04:32So you really wanna be hanging out toward,
0:04:37kind of center to north strip most of the time.
0:04:41- So was anybody else from Quartz there,
0:04:43or were you the only representative of Quartz there?
0:04:46- No, several, I think there were four of us this year,
0:04:49two from our ad side, and then my colleague, Mike Murphy,
0:04:52who's a reporter who writes about,
0:04:55we have a beat called Machines with Brains,
0:04:59and it's drones, robots, AI, and that kind of stuff.
0:05:03And he was very busy, there was a lot.
0:05:05Although he came to CES with a cold, you can't do that.
0:05:10(laughing)
0:05:12'Cause you're gonna get sick by the end,
0:05:14but you can't show up with a cold.
0:05:15so I felt bad about that.
0:05:17So yeah, he was there with me and we were basically
0:05:21just doing meetings, hitting the show floor.
0:05:24The show floor is comically extensive.
0:05:27Like you can walk, I had my Apple Watch with me,
0:05:31so Wednesday was my busiest day.
0:05:33I think I walked over 14 miles on Wednesday,
0:05:38whereas on an average day I probably walked six to eight.
0:05:41- Yeah, that's a lot.
0:05:42Anything over 10 is a--
0:05:43I did 27,000 steps, so that was pretty crazy.
0:05:48In boots too, which was dumb.
0:05:50But it was cool.
0:05:53- So it's a recurring theme,
0:05:56and I know we say this every year,
0:05:57but everybody goes to CES, quote unquote everybody goes,
0:06:01and then all the writers, they all say they hate it.
0:06:05Everybody just, as soon as it, it hasn't even started yet,
0:06:07and Twitter is filled with people in our racket
0:06:11saying how much they hate it.
0:06:13which always makes me think, well then, why do you go?
0:06:16You know, like, why does everybody go to this thing
0:06:19that they hate?
0:06:19But I'm exactly with you.
0:06:20My temptation to go is, it's because I, obviously,
0:06:25I could write whatever the hell I want,
0:06:27so I'm not going, and I can skip whatever I want.
0:06:30So, well, I understand that the hatred comes from people
0:06:32who, if you get an assignment from an editor,
0:06:35and they're like, here, here's your list
0:06:36of press conferences to go to,
0:06:38figure out what's new from, you know, LG and Samsung,
0:06:42and you know, whoever, and it all just starts
0:06:44to blur together because everybody is making
0:06:46the exact same things.
0:06:47Five inch Android phones and tablets and curved OLED TVs
0:06:52and it all just blurs together.
0:06:54And then you've got a schlep from one end to the other
0:06:56and it's gotta be backbreaking,
0:06:58if you can't pick and choose where you go.
0:07:01- One of the things we struggled with was we shot a video.
0:07:04Mike put on this exoskeleton suit that's designed
0:07:08to age you to like a hundred years old
0:07:10or something like that and do various things.
0:07:12It had like VR goggles built in
0:07:14and things that would make your muscles,
0:07:17that basically make your body move more slowly
0:07:20and it would affect your vision and all this stuff.
0:07:23And we took this video of him in this suit
0:07:26and then we realized that we literally didn't have
0:07:29the ability to upload the video to Dropbox.
0:07:32I'm not gonna tether on my cell phone and do it.
0:07:36Our hotel wifi sucked, we couldn't do it.
0:07:38It's like, okay, we almost have to go to a Starbucks.
0:07:41And I wonder if the press room had a free
0:07:44ethernet connection.
0:07:45We didn't actually go in the press room
0:07:46because it seemed like it was kind of a dump,
0:07:49but actually that may have solved our problem.
0:07:53But it's just stuff like that
0:07:54where you're just completely out of your element.
0:07:57But it's amazing, like you go,
0:07:59one of the things we did is we scraped the list of exhibitors
0:08:02and just did some very basic text analysis
0:08:04to see if there's anything interesting we could find.
0:08:08One thing that was cool was over 500 of the companies
0:08:11had the word Shenzhen in the title of the company.
0:08:15There are aisles and aisles and aisles of tiny booths
0:08:20with one or two people from Shenzhen, from China,
0:08:23who come to America once a year and there they are
0:08:26and I got a great little tour from a little old lady
0:08:30of her line of perfect GoPro knockoffs.
0:08:34And she's like giving me a demo of these things.
0:08:37the same case, same size, you know,
0:08:39it looks exactly like a GoPro,
0:08:41but it's $60 or something like that.
0:08:43- Was she saying it looks like a GoPro?
0:08:47Or was that, so she was mentioning the word GoPro.
0:08:50- Yeah, yeah, totally.
0:08:51Like that's the same case as a GoPro.
0:08:54Actually, one of the booths, you probably saw this,
0:08:56one of the booths that the,
0:08:58one of the hoverboard knockoffs was so similar
0:09:01to this one specific kind of balance board thing
0:09:06that the US Marshals raided it.
0:09:08- No, I didn't see this.
0:09:09- Oh yeah.
0:09:10I think Bloomberg got tipped off
0:09:12'cause I think some other sites got tipped off too
0:09:14and they videotaped it.
0:09:15And basically the US Marshals raided a booth.
0:09:19They confiscated all the product and shut these guys down.
0:09:23Yeah, yeah, it was crazy.
0:09:26I mean, there are a lot of knockoff looking things.
0:09:29And I believe the Bloomberg article interviewed someone
0:09:34from the people who put together the show.
0:09:37And they're kind of, as long as you're not,
0:09:41I forgot what the kind of limitations are,
0:09:44but basically like, don't be too fake,
0:09:45I think is the line.
0:09:48So in this case, that didn't work out.
0:09:52- It's gotta be such a surprise to the vendor.
0:09:54'Cause you know what I mean?
0:09:56It's like, there's the culture of how we value knockoffs.
0:10:03it's so different between here and China.
0:10:06And it's obviously, the whole concept
0:10:09of intellectual property isn't really
0:10:10like an institutional, cultural thing over there.
0:10:13Like there's no way that they would have,
0:10:17that had to be a complete surprise.
0:10:19'Cause if they would have thought it's even a possibility,
0:10:20they would have dialed it back.
0:10:23- I think so.
0:10:23It seemed like they were surprised.
0:10:26I wasn't there and I actually tried to look for the booth,
0:10:28but I couldn't really find it.
0:10:29And it wasn't really worth putting a lot of effort into.
0:10:32But that's the kind of stuff that goes on.
0:10:35But meanwhile, there's like 40 different drone companies
0:10:38of all shapes and sizes.
0:10:41A bunch of companies who paid up big bucks for big booths,
0:10:46like the size of an Intel booth from China
0:10:49that you really haven't heard of
0:10:51unless you're in the TV industry.
0:10:53So it was really fascinating.
0:10:56You realize how insignificant you are in the world
0:11:00when you're at CES.
0:11:01There's just so much stuff you've never heard of,
0:11:04and there's so many people who are doing stuff
0:11:07that is similar to what you're doing,
0:11:09but you've never heard of before,
0:11:11and you walk around exhausted, dehydrated,
0:11:16and it's cool, I love it, it's great.
0:11:19- Why are you dehydrated?
0:11:22Can't you get water?
0:11:24- I guess, yeah.
0:11:26I joke about this, but I almost set calendar reminders
0:11:30saying, "Okay, drink water right now.
0:11:32"Make sure you have lunch."
0:11:33Because then it's three o'clock
0:11:34and you haven't eaten lunch and you're falling asleep.
0:11:37I was carrying around a Kind bar in my backpack
0:11:40just to make sure that if I needed some protein,
0:11:43I'd still be alive.
0:11:44- I find that true.
0:11:46I've developed the reflexive habit
0:11:49of always be drinking something in Vegas.
0:11:51So in the morning, you're guzzling coffee,
0:11:54or afternoon, whenever you wake up.
0:11:57But then in the afternoon, it's like at any free moment,
0:12:00if you have an opportunity to put water in your hand, do it.
0:12:03'Cause it's like, in addition to the dehydrating effects
0:12:08of alcohol, the desert air really is a thing
0:12:12if you're not used to it.
0:12:13I mean, and it really, even if you don't drink alcohol,
0:12:16I mean, you're gonna get dried out in Vegas.
0:12:19- Shockingly, it was actually raining a couple of the days,
0:12:22which was super weird.
0:12:25- Yeah, I remember, I saw people,
0:12:27and that definitely makes everything worse,
0:12:29any temptation to walk is decreased.
0:12:32People actually drive.
0:12:33I've been out there when it rained and it's like people, the natives, the locals, they
0:12:37don't know how to drive in the rain.
0:12:41It's not icy, obviously.
0:12:43It's usually even in the winter above freezing.
0:12:47But the roads get a little wet and people are slipping and sliding.
0:12:50They don't even know how to drive on wet roads.
0:12:52Dave Asprey Yeah, that was weird.
0:12:57But it didn't get too bad.
0:12:58So I brought an umbrella and I didn't have to use it.
0:13:01So it was fine.
0:13:02It was interesting though.
0:13:03And I definitely feel like going back,
0:13:06I'm definitely gonna go back next year
0:13:08from in the position too.
0:13:10I think that like the,
0:13:12and my advice to you would be,
0:13:14do you think a little bit ahead of time
0:13:17and plan way ahead.
0:13:19I booked my hotel in, I wanna say November
0:13:23and by then like every good place was sold out.
0:13:25You really have to do it in like August or September,
0:13:28whenever they open up reservations, just book it
0:13:31and think a little bit ahead of time
0:13:33about what you want to get out of it,
0:13:36but really save a lot of time to wing it
0:13:39because there's just gonna be stuff that
0:13:41either you don't know about until you get there or--
0:13:44- I'm always confused by just the basic schedule of CES.
0:13:48Tell me if I'm wrong.
0:13:49I think the convention itself, the show floor,
0:13:53is Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
0:13:55- Yeah, and it changes, it was different this year though,
0:13:59actually, it was--
0:14:01- Maybe that's why I'm confused then.
0:14:02- Yeah, I think this year it was Wednesday,
0:14:06Thursday, Friday, Saturday, but I think previous years
0:14:09it was like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
0:14:12I don't know, it was definitely a day off this year
0:14:14to go later, I think because of the holiday.
0:14:17- But everybody who covers it, or almost everybody
0:14:19who covers it, comes a couple days early
0:14:21because there's pre-show announcements,
0:14:24Like there's like, I don't know if they call them keynotes,
0:14:27but there's like big keynote addresses that happen
0:14:31like this week, like this year, like on Monday and Tuesday.
0:14:34- There are press conferences and then there are keynotes
0:14:37and they're separate, I guess.
0:14:39I don't know, I remember like Steve Ballmer always did
0:14:42what it was like the Sunday night.
0:14:44- Right, the kick off. - Warm up, yeah, the kick off.
0:14:46I don't know, like this year there were some things,
0:14:48we were gonna go on Sunday and then I think there may have
0:14:52even been some stuff Saturday or at least Sunday.
0:14:55Uh, and we decided to fly in on Monday and then leave Friday.
0:14:59And we did miss some stuff that had happened Monday.
0:15:02But Tuesday, like the show floor is not, was not open yet.
0:15:06Although we got in to do a couple of meetings.
0:15:09Um, they like escorted us in and they were, it was crazy.
0:15:12Like a lot of the booths were, were barely half finished like the day before.
0:15:16And people were definitely there all night working to set stuff up.
0:15:20And it's absolutely like there's, you could, you could get killed by a machine
0:15:25any second, like there were just lots of stuff going on.
0:15:28Uh, and then Wednesday is when it was totally open and just chaos.
0:15:35Like I had a guided tour of the Samsung booth, but it was really not useful for
0:15:41any of us because there were just so many people standing between you and the
0:15:45refrigerator with a TV on it that you could barely even see it, it was just
0:15:49absolute chaos. And most of that stuff was at the Las Vegas convention center or was
0:15:55it split like the show floors were literally split between the convention center and the
0:15:59sands split and I bet there's a some sort of theme to it like that. So the basement
0:16:06of the sands has a lot of very small booths. And that's actually one of the best things
0:16:13I did was I met up with a couple guys from Kickstarter and they took me on a tour of
0:16:20the little, like the interesting startups that had all either done Kickstarters or were
0:16:26going to be doing Kickstarters. And that was actually really cool because there's a bunch
0:16:31of stuff I had never heard of and it was all pretty good. There's just a lot of garbage
0:16:36everywhere so you have to try to find the good stuff.
0:16:39the thing that I miss about Macworld and Macworld was you know and and it's I've
0:16:43said that you know I'll say it again next year too but the whole reason I
0:16:47never got into the habit of going to CES was that it overlapped with Macworld and
0:16:52I went to Macworld and then even when Macworld like after like Macworld's
0:16:58multi-year slow demise from being a thing to being literally nothing started
0:17:06with them moving the date around, where they moved it to the end of January. And then there
0:17:10was the one year where they had it like Super Bowl weekend, which was stupid. I forget where
0:17:15my it went into February, I think before they finally pulled the plug. But even then, when
0:17:19it wouldn't overlap, it just felt that felt like too much. Like it felt like I don't want
0:17:23to go to two of these things if I don't have to. So I'll just keep going to Mac world.
0:17:27But that's what one of the reasons I didn't get in the habit of it. But one of my favorite
0:17:30things about going to Mac world without question, was talking to the little booths, the little
0:17:35booths were always way more interesting than the big ones because usually you get to talk
0:17:39to the actual principals and there would always be at least a couple of booths that were like,
0:17:45"Wow, I did not even know that that was possible," type products.
0:17:50Yeah, one of them I saw that was pretty cool was a very small booth of a company that makes
0:17:57this clip-on camera that just kind of goes on your lapel and it's not recording video
0:18:02all day. It's constantly doing image analysis and recognition and making a text list via
0:18:08API of all the stuff that you've seen that day.
0:18:11Wow, that's crazy.
0:18:13Yeah, it was very cool. I actually have to write it up. I took some photos of it and
0:18:17I'll write up a post about it. This is the kind of thing where it's like, "This is really
0:18:23cool technology. This could be a cool product in a couple of years or in a year, or it could
0:18:28be nothing but here these guys are you know they got kind of a you know an
0:18:33okay-looking booth and this really interesting technology that you know and
0:18:39it's actually kind of cool like you know and of course with any camera that's
0:18:44always on privacy concerns but you could maybe train it to your LinkedIn account
0:18:49so it could tell you who you're looking at at a party or something like that I
0:18:53I don't know. It was interesting and it was one of those things where I was like,
0:18:58"All right, this is kind of the value of coming to a show like this because I never
0:19:02probably would have met these people otherwise and it's not like you're
0:19:07standing in the gigantic Intel booth, wondering what you're
0:19:10doing there." So that was pretty cool.
0:19:13I saw there was an episode of, I mean, it's not a new idea, but the BBC show
0:19:22Sherlock. I think it was Sherlock, but there was like a billionaire magnate bad guy sort of person
0:19:30and he had like heads he had just had regular wire rim glasses but when they showed his first person
0:19:36perspective it would instantly give him a sort of profile of anybody whose face he was looking at,
0:19:41you know, their name and you know some facts about them. And I feel like we're I feel like that is
0:19:47like it's still science fiction, but it's very, very near term science fiction.
0:19:52Like it's going to happen, you know, within the next decade.
0:19:55Yeah. I mean, I kind of I'm always the guy who wants I want the
0:20:02feed of random Instagram photos that I'm in the background of.
0:20:05No, I do, too. I'm I'm you know, I feel like we as a society and culture
0:20:12just we're already wrapping our heads around the fact that everything is on camera all the time.
0:20:17Totally, you know, and it's, you know, it's like, and some of
0:20:21the people who are adjusting the slowest are the ones who really
0:20:26should be adjusting the quickest, you know, like the way
0:20:28that when police officers have some kind of incident, and it's
0:20:31all caught on tape, and you see that it's just absolutely
0:20:34horrible police work. That's actually, you know, to me, it's
0:20:38helping to make our society better. I mean, there's
0:20:42obviously trade offs, big, big trade offs, and there's some
0:20:44and definite downsides to the lack of privacy.
0:20:46- I think that specifically has proven to be very powerful
0:20:51over the last couple years.
0:20:53What was weird though was looking up and seeing a guy
0:20:57wearing Google Glass for the first time in over a year.
0:21:01That was crazy.
0:21:02That was very weird.
0:21:04- How many people did you see at CES wearing Google Glass?
0:21:07'Cause I feel like if there's anywhere left
0:21:08that people are still pretending that Google Glass
0:21:11is gonna be a thing, it's CES.
0:21:13I saw two in a row and that was it.
0:21:16Like two in the basement of the Palms,
0:21:19or Palms, the basement of the Sands Convention Center.
0:21:24And that was at the whole show, two guys.
0:21:27And the one guy was like tall and large
0:21:29and it was just kind of weird.
0:21:32But that was the last time I'd seen him.
0:21:33Sometimes in New York, you see them
0:21:35when you're walking around over by the Google offices.
0:21:39But otherwise I haven't seen one in over,
0:21:42least over a year.
0:21:43All right, let's hold this thought.
0:21:45I still have more CES stuff to talk about, but I might as well fit in our first break
0:21:48here and tell you about our good friends at Wealthfront.
0:21:54Wealthfront is a low-cost, automated investment service that makes it easy to invest your
0:21:58money the right way.
0:22:00It works 24/7 to manage your portfolio, keeping it diversified, customized to your personal
0:22:06risk profile and it optimizes its trading behavior to keep your tax bill low, all without
0:22:13charging commissions.
0:22:15Whether you've got millions of dollars to invest or you're just starting out and you
0:22:19want to start a regular program to save for your retirement, Wealthfront is a great fit
0:22:26for you.
0:22:27So where do you go to find out more?
0:22:28Go to their website.
0:22:29It's wealthfront.com/thetalkshow.
0:22:33Just a couple of the points here.
0:22:36More or less Wealthfront is an automated service that replaces a personal financial manager.
0:22:40The reason you might want to consider that is that algorithms can actually do pretty
0:22:45good with this just by putting your money into index funds.
0:22:47It's not really Wealthfront.
0:22:49You can read all the details on their website, but they're not really about trying to magically
0:22:52pick individual companies that their stock is going to go up.
0:22:55That's really, really tough and most people who try that don't win.
0:22:58The way to win in the long term is to go with index funds and that's what Wealthfront mostly
0:23:02does.
0:23:03They charge way, way less than a personal financial manager.
0:23:07Instead of 1% to 3% of the money under management,
0:23:12they charge a fraction of 1%.
0:23:14And they don't charge anything up to $10,000.
0:23:18And for listeners of the show who
0:23:20go to wealthfront.com/thetalkshow,
0:23:22they actually raise that up to $15,000.
0:23:24So the first $15,000 you put in there,
0:23:26just to see how it works and see if it works
0:23:29for you and your family, you don't pay any fees at all.
0:23:32So you really can't beat that.
0:23:33Last but not least, for compliance purposes,
0:23:35I have to read this to you.
0:23:38Wealthfront is an SEC registered investment advisor.
0:23:41Brokerage services are offered through Wealthfront Brokerage
0:23:43Corporation, member FINRA and SIPC.
0:23:47This is not a solicitation to buy or sell securities.
0:23:51Investing in securities involves risks,
0:23:52and there is the possibility of losing money.
0:23:55Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
0:23:57Please visit Wealthfront.com to read their full disclosure.
0:24:03So here's, so you didn't get there till Monday,
0:24:07you're saying?
0:24:08- That's right, Monday night.
0:24:10- So what did you do on Tuesday?
0:24:11- Tuesday, I woke up too early and got breakfast
0:24:16and then we went to this meeting
0:24:21where Mike wore the exoskeleton and it was--
0:24:24- How did you set that meeting up?
0:24:26That's one of my worries is that I would go there
0:24:28and without having set anything up
0:24:30and I don't have like, I don't have anybody
0:24:32set stuff up for me and then I'd get out there and I'd just, you know, end up playing blackjack
0:24:35all day.
0:24:36See, that would be fun. I would like to play blackjack with you all day because as we'll
0:24:40discuss in a minute, I did not play any blackjack. Uh, so which is, which is not excusable. I
0:24:46don't see that again. I don't see how that's possible. I know. So, so here's, here's the
0:24:51worst part of CES. When you sign up for a press badge, your email gets given to all
0:24:59the 3000 or whatever, 2000 companies that have, uh, signed up to exhibit and you get
0:25:06emails from about half of them.
0:25:08I'm not even exaggerating.
0:25:10Like I, this year I was smart and I, I did the Gmail thing where you can add a plus sign.
0:25:16So I made it, you know, Dan plus ces@qz.com so I could filter there now all filtering
0:25:22into the toilet.
0:25:23Like I'm not getting the people are still sending emails.
0:25:26They're good for them, but I'm not seeing any of them.
0:25:29So you get, you're overwhelmed for weeks.
0:25:32- I know about that trick.
0:25:33I just wanna just, I mean, hold you there.
0:25:35Is that it instantly popped into my head.
0:25:38I mean, it's like if I was the type of dirtbag
0:25:40who ran like a PR, well, PR people aren't dirtbags,
0:25:43but if I was about to start sending email to those people,
0:25:45I would write like a little script
0:25:47that takes any Gmail address with the plus
0:25:49and take out the plus, you know what I mean?
0:25:52Like it would be so easy to algorithmically filter that out.
0:25:55- Yeah, I mean, I'm sure some,
0:25:57a couple of people remarked on it.
0:25:59They were like, oh, clever with the plus sign or whatever.
0:26:02I mean, I get a lot of email from PR people as it is.
0:26:05And I'm actually, I would say pretty fair
0:26:09about just asking people not to send me
0:26:11certain types of email.
0:26:12- I find it so hard like at a convention or conference
0:26:15or something like that.
0:26:16I'm terrible at staying on top of my email
0:26:18on a normal day when I'm at my desk,
0:26:19but it's really, I always fall behind.
0:26:21And so to have them making it even harder
0:26:24to just keep an eyeball on what's coming into my email
0:26:28would be terrible.
0:26:29- The problem for me is that I've now been at inbox zero
0:26:33for four years, which means all day
0:26:36I'm constantly deleting emails.
0:26:38I don't let them pile up anymore.
0:26:41So anyway, so I would get invited to everything
0:26:46from like tours to meetings to press conferences
0:26:50and that kind of stuff.
0:26:51And I accepted, I think, five or six of the,
0:26:55I don't know, roughly a thousand that I got.
0:26:58And I say--
0:27:00- And those came, but just to be clear,
0:27:02those came long before the show even started
0:27:06because it starts when you actually register with CES
0:27:09like in November or whatever.
0:27:11- Yes. - Okay.
0:27:13- Yeah, so, you know, and some of them are like party
0:27:16invites, some of the stuff doesn't come until
0:27:19Um, you know, the week before or a couple of days before, but a lot of the companies
0:27:25are, you know, trying to set up as many meetings as possible.
0:27:29You can also kind of check what, what topics you're interested in.
0:27:32And I think I was probably a little too excited about checking lots of different topics that
0:27:37I should not have like audio, you know, you check off audio and then every headphone company
0:27:43is emailing you asking for a meeting and that kind of stuff.
0:27:45So I think next year I'll probably be more selective about that and do even fewer meetings.
0:27:54If you need to get a last minute meeting, they're pretty much always available.
0:27:58The stuff that's really cool is going to be kind of hard to access anyway and those are
0:28:02the people who are least likely to set stuff up with you ahead of time unless you're the
0:28:09the verge or something like that.
0:28:10Um, who get first dibs on a lot of stuff.
0:28:14Uh, so yeah, I set all that stuff up and so what else I Tuesday, you know, I had
0:28:20a couple of meetings and, uh, I had lunch and then I went to, uh, a dinner probably.
0:28:28And then met up with people.
0:28:30Oh, Tuesday, I went to a party and probably stayed out late and yeah.
0:28:36And, uh, that's when I saw Rupert Murdoch.
0:28:38That was kind of interesting.
0:28:40And so where was he?
0:28:42He was just walking down the hall of the wind.
0:28:44That's where he stayed.
0:28:46So I actually wrote this article.
0:28:49So, so one thing I didn't know, uh, and I thought it was going to be, I thought
0:28:53it was going to be a bigger surprise to people then it turned out to be no one
0:28:56really cared, but, um, so Eddie Q was at CES, Eddie Q you wrote an article on this.
0:29:03Yes.
0:29:04Oh, I didn't see it.
0:29:05Eddie Q is at CES speaking at Rupert Murdoch's private mini conference, which
0:29:11he holds in his suite every year.
0:29:13It's two days and he brings in like a fantastic list of people.
0:29:17Um, and it's not for the public or anything.
0:29:20It's for news Corp and Fox executives.
0:29:24And this year, the people who were scheduled to present range from the CEO
0:29:29of Snapchat to, uh, Sundar from Google, CEO of Google, uh, Eddie
0:29:35Q from Apple and a bunch, just a bunch of other, like the guy from salesforce.com,
0:29:41a bunch of other really high level, uh, Benedict Evans from Andreessen,
0:29:45Horowitz, some, some startup people.
0:29:47And, um, so that's cool.
0:29:49And I, you know, that's the kind of thing where it's like, there's
0:29:52this whole huge CES thing going on.
0:29:54Meanwhile, in Rupert Murdoch suite, there's like the best, you know, one of
0:29:59the best conference lineups in the world.
0:30:01And it's just for like a handful of top executives who work for him.
0:30:06But that's the kind of thing you can do at CES because so many of those people
0:30:09are there anyway.
0:30:09Right.
0:30:10Uh, although it was interesting because of course, Apple somewhat famously does
0:30:14not have an official presence at CES.
0:30:17Uh, my guess is that, you know, some people from Apple go just to kind of look
0:30:22at stuff, there'll be kind of silly not to, um, I know for a fact that it, and
0:30:26even when Mac world was a thing and it was coincident that there were people
0:30:31from the product marketing group who went every year
0:30:34just to do the due diligence of walking around.
0:30:36And the question was always whether,
0:30:39what they would put on their badge.
0:30:41And most of the time I think they just would officially go
0:30:44and they'd have Apple on the badge
0:30:45and if people wanted to talk them up, they'd do it.
0:30:47They just didn't,
0:30:47it wasn't real cloak and dagger stuff, they just,
0:30:51but they were there to just see what else
0:30:54the industry's doing.
0:30:56- Yeah, I mean, it'd be foolish not to.
0:30:59I think that someone was telling me
0:31:00that they saw a couple Apple people this year
0:31:05just walking around, but I wasn't there for that.
0:31:08- Yeah, I wouldn't even be surprised
0:31:09if it's actually multiple teams,
0:31:10like different, not even in coordination,
0:31:13the product marketing people there are just there in general
0:31:16but maybe notebook engineers are there
0:31:18just to look at all the crazy notebooks
0:31:21that are being put together.
0:31:23- Yeah, I would and then you get to be in Vegas.
0:31:26- Right.
0:31:28- And maybe run into Rupert Murdoch.
0:31:30He looked good, he was wearing a nice suit
0:31:32and some sneakers, walking down the hallway
0:31:36outside of a party that I was leaving.
0:31:39- So it was just like in the hotel, you mean?
0:31:41Like a hallway?
0:31:42- Yes, in the Wynn, outside of one of their
0:31:44like nightclub-y type venues.
0:31:47- Huh.
0:31:48Crazy.
0:31:49- Yeah, I mean-- - What time of day was that?
0:31:51- This was around, I think, 11 p.m. or 10 something p.m.
0:31:59See, that's why you go to CES.
0:32:00- Totally.
0:32:01Yeah, actually, I'll never forget.
0:32:03One of my, when I worked at Forbes,
0:32:05now almost 10 years ago,
0:32:07one of my colleagues wrote an article about,
0:32:10actually it may have been CES 10 years ago
0:32:13where she was randomly at a booth
0:32:16when Bill Gates showed up to look at the booth,
0:32:19and what an interesting and cool experience that was.
0:32:22Like, can you imagine being the tiny booth operator
0:32:25and then yoink, Bill Gates walks up and says,
0:32:28"Hey, give me a demo."
0:32:29(laughing)
0:32:31I'll have to find that article.
0:32:32I wonder if Forbes has archived that.
0:32:34- Have you ever worked at trade show booth?
0:32:36- I don't think so.
0:32:40When I was a kid, my dad, I think,
0:32:42had a booth or like a part of one at some point
0:32:45for a store he was involved in,
0:32:46but I never had to work a booth.
0:32:49- I did when I worked at Barebones software
0:32:52for BB Edit and I guess MailSmith even at the time.
0:32:54But we'd have a booth at Macworld,
0:32:56and it is grueling.
0:32:59Sometimes though, it could be like, I don't know,
0:33:03it's like three in the afternoon
0:33:04and you've been on your feet since nine
0:33:06and you've been making the same pitch over and over again.
0:33:09And you know, repetition has never been good for me.
0:33:12I mean, not that I'm not good at it,
0:33:13but I get bored quickly.
0:33:15But then all of a sudden, like you meet somebody
0:33:17and somebody will tell you this amazing story
0:33:18of how like BB Edit, you know,
0:33:20saved their website or something like that.
0:33:22And they just want to thank you
0:33:24and you're just like, oh my God, that's amazing.
0:33:26and he made my day, you know.
0:33:27Let me go get Rich Segal, and you can tell it to his face.
0:33:30- That's great.
0:33:31- But boy, it is hard, it is really hard.
0:33:35And you can just see it.
0:33:36Now it's just a funny thing to have
0:33:39under my belt this experience.
0:33:40And now whenever I'm at a trade show and I walk around,
0:33:42I have a sympathy for every single person
0:33:46doing those, you know, working those booths
0:33:48that I wouldn't have had otherwise.
0:33:50- Yeah, it's grueling, and you have like
0:33:52trade show approved vendors
0:33:55that you have to do everything with,
0:33:56and good luck, there's a 20 minute line for the bathroom.
0:34:01- So what else, what else did you do at CES?
0:34:07- Oh, I hung out with Walt Mossberg, that was a highlight.
0:34:12- I saw that. - That's when you were
0:34:14texting me. - I saw a periscope.
0:34:16This is my perspective, it's,
0:34:18oh, I think it might have been maybe like 1230 at night,
0:34:23east coast time so would have been maybe like 930 Vegas that sound about right?
0:34:27I think so yeah. And I saw somebody who I follow on Twitter from the Verge
0:34:31tweeted a link to Periscope that they're Periscoping from
0:34:35inside a blinged out a crazy blinged out limo that
0:34:39Neelay had rented for some unknown reason. And I thought I gotta see this because I
0:34:44don't know I know what a regular
0:34:46limo looks like I gotta see what like a special you know
0:34:49call attention to it limo looks like so I put the Periscope on and it's a
0:34:53and a couple of other people I knew from The Verge.
0:34:56And the inside of this limo, it really was like,
0:34:58it was like all the leftover neon from old Las Vegas
0:35:02was all inside this limo.
0:35:04- Basically.
0:35:05- And then the Periscope is painting around
0:35:07and here's Verge staffers,
0:35:08and I was just about ready to disconnect
0:35:10'cause it's a buoyant.
0:35:11And then I see a guy and I was like,
0:35:12holy shit, that one guy looks like Dan Fromer.
0:35:14And I was like, who is that?
0:35:15And then they're like, and we've got Dan from Quartz,
0:35:18and I'm like, holy shit, it is Dan Fromer.
0:35:20And I was like, wow, now it's like,
0:35:22Now I have a friend in the limo, now I'm interested.
0:35:25And I noticed, it seemed to me like everybody
0:35:27was a little tipsy and you were like just totally normal.
0:35:30And then it got crazier because then it got
0:35:35to the far side of this, it was a truly massive limo.
0:35:38And then all of a sudden, Walt Mossberg
0:35:39and Kara Swisher were in there.
0:35:41- Yeah, they were riding in the back seat.
0:35:44- And I was fascinated.
0:35:47What were you guys doing?
0:35:49You guys were on your way from like one end of the strip
0:35:52to the other?
0:35:53- We were all at a dinner that they have
0:35:57usually the last night or one of the last nights every year,
0:36:02a kind of a press dinner.
0:36:04And I guess we were all going to the Cosmopolitan
0:36:09where there was a Twitter Spotify party.
0:36:12And rather than taking four cabs,
0:36:15Neil, I think threw his hands up and said,
0:36:17"Let's get a limo."
0:36:18So I just went in the limo.
0:36:21Um, and uh, yeah, that was it.
0:36:24I mean, it wasn't, uh, I don't think it was preplanned or anything.
0:36:28It just happened.
0:36:28It was funny though.
0:36:30I did, but it's the sort of thing that happens when, like, what do you say on a
0:36:34Periscope when they, when they put the camera in your face, I never know what to
0:36:37say.
0:36:38I never, I don't know what to say.
0:36:39It was, it was funny though.
0:36:40I am, I'm like, there were like 300 people watching.
0:36:43I enjoy Periscope.
0:36:45I, but I'm, it, it, it, it requires a certain personality that I, I, I am not in
0:36:50in possession of to really be good at it.
0:36:53- I haven't done, I don't think I've ever done one.
0:36:57- The other problem I have with it,
0:36:58and last time I tried using it,
0:36:59I think I tried using it when the Pope was in town here
0:37:02in Philly and I was doing some periscopes walking around
0:37:05at the crazy ways that they'd shut down
0:37:09enormous major thoroughfares in Philly,
0:37:12which created this, it was awesome,
0:37:13but it's like you had these like six, seven lane streets
0:37:18that were entirely free of cars, not even like parked cars.
0:37:21It was great.
0:37:21But the problem for me is I've got so many Twitter followers
0:37:25that I easily overflow the limits of Periscope,
0:37:28even just for something like that.
0:37:30- Did you recently join Snapchat?
0:37:36- I did, that was me.
0:37:38- That was you?
0:37:39- Yeah.
0:37:40- Okay, I was like, oh, that's weird.
0:37:42- Do you understand Snapchat?
0:37:43- No, no, and someone was, and this,
0:37:46I'm not that old, but I sound like it.
0:37:48I mean, someone was, was showing it to me the other day and, uh, I have not,
0:37:53I don't think I've ever posted anything.
0:37:55Cause I just don't really know what to post or, or how, I guess the whole idea
0:38:00is that it's kind of very raw, uncut, like spur of the moment life through
0:38:05your eyes, whereas I'm more of a retouch edit, like frame the perfect, uh,
0:38:11in, you know, I'd say I'm more of an Instagram person than a Snapchat person.
0:38:16You need to I my understanding of snapchat previously was that it was
0:38:21like texting service where everything was ephemeral and nothing gets saved and
0:38:26Everybody had you can send dick pics
0:38:28but people did use it for that but then like teenagers could use it and send like
0:38:33Love notes to each other and know that there are going to be disappeared by the next day and that
0:38:38That made sense to me and I felt like I understand what this product does and I'm not a teenager anymore
0:38:44I have no I have no need for it. So I didn't know but then I've hurt now
0:38:47It's more like a social network and I see what turned me on to it was do you know who Gary for Vaynerchuk is? Yes
0:38:53Gary Vaynerchuk has been raving about it lately and he's been saying that he hasn't been this excited about something since Twitter circa
0:39:022007 and he really was I do remember that's when I first met Gary and Gary was huge on Twitter in like 2006-2007
0:39:09Said this thing is gonna blow up. It's gonna be huge
0:39:11everybody's going to be on Twitter. And he was right. And so that him saying that this is how
0:39:16he feels about Snapchat made me think, well, I should sign up for this and see if I can figure
0:39:21it out. And so I did. And there's a part of the process where it's like, do you want us to, you
0:39:25know, notify, you know, here's people, you know, if from your address book, do you want to follow
0:39:31them? And I did. And you're, you're not the first person who's asked, is this really you?
0:39:35Because it, I guess it seems a little surprising that I would sign up for Snapchat.
0:39:40- Well, it was also under the name of the site
0:39:42and not as your name.
0:39:44- Oh, right, and that was because...
0:39:46- You might be a little late to get the Gruber name on.
0:39:50- Yeah, I couldn't get it,
0:39:52and all the variations on Gruber weren't there.
0:39:55And I also had the notion that if it does become a thing,
0:40:00maybe it would be more of a daring fireball thing
0:40:02than a personal thing.
0:40:04- Yeah, it actually would not be,
0:40:06it's kind of like Periscope in the same way.
0:40:09It's like, here's a kind of unedited view of life,
0:40:14maybe from the WWDC press bullpen or something like that.
0:40:18- Yeah, that's exactly what I was saying.
0:40:20But I didn't even get the right
0:40:20Daring Fireball name either, right?
0:40:22- Oh, really?
0:40:23- I think there's like,
0:40:24I had to put like a dash in it or something.
0:40:25I don't know, because some,
0:40:26I don't know who the shitbag is,
0:40:27but some jerk has Daring Fireball.
0:40:30Like that can't possibly be legit.
0:40:33Like whoever it is stole it from me.
0:40:35- Well, did you see on Peach?
0:40:38Have you used Peach yet?
0:40:39- Yeah, I'm on the Peach.
0:40:41- I'm on the Peach.
0:40:43Someone has, Casey Johnston got P. Marka,
0:40:47so she's (laughs)
0:40:49Peaching it up.
0:40:51- Is she really?
0:40:52- Yeah.
0:40:52- Is she masquerading as--
0:40:57- I think just the username.
0:41:00I actually haven't looked at it in a couple days, so.
0:41:03- The Peach is really weird, I think.
0:41:06So what happened, for anybody who missed this, and trust me, if you did, you're not really
0:41:11missing anything.
0:41:12It was like over the weekend, I think it was over the weekend, but within the last few
0:41:15days, all of a sudden, everybody on Twitter is talking about a new social network called
0:41:18Peach.
0:41:19And in fact, the fact that I just tried to get my name on Snapchat and couldn't, I do
0:41:24have this habit where if I hear of a new social network, even if I think there's a very low
0:41:27chance I want to do it, I'll quick sign up to try to get a username that I want.
0:41:31And so I signed up for this peach and it's as best as I can figure out it.
0:41:36Number one, I don't quite get it,
0:41:38but as best as I can figure out is it sort of like Twitter,
0:41:41except that instead of getting a timeline,
0:41:44you have to go to each single,
0:41:46every single person you follow individually to see what they're up to.
0:41:49And it's a poor idea for a social network implemented in a,
0:41:55uh, a very poorly made and designed app. Like the buttons in the app don't,
0:42:00you tap the button and there's no visual indication
0:42:03that you've tapped it.
0:42:04There's no highlight.
0:42:05And to make it even worse, nothing happens sometimes.
0:42:09And then you tap it again and it's gone
0:42:12because whatever it is that you tapped to do before,
0:42:14it took three seconds and then it went away.
0:42:17It's a very, very shitty app.
0:42:18- It's interesting.
0:42:22I mean, it's actually, as Twitter starts to add more,
0:42:28I don't know what you would call them, formats or something, media types to Twitter.
0:42:32This is kind of like, you know, going a giant leap ahead of that because you can make drawings,
0:42:37you can make animations, you can add photos.
0:42:42But the timeline is weird.
0:42:43It's not a timeline of posts, it's a timeline of people.
0:42:48So one of the more interesting analyses I read, basically said, you know, you're incentivized
0:42:56to just post as much as possible because then you'll always be at the top of the
0:42:59timeline and you know, you won't be spamming people in the sense that they'll
0:43:03see 20 of your posts in a row, but.
0:43:05You know, you'll always be the person at the top of the timeline
0:43:09and that might get annoying.
0:43:10I don't know.
0:43:11It's uh, I don't think it's worth talking about much more.
0:43:15No, let's not, as with any new social network, most of the posts, well, not
0:43:19most, but many of the posts are about peach itself, so we'll see if it gets beyond
0:43:24that. What's interesting about it is that it's made by one of the people who made
0:43:29it is the guy who made vine. So that's the only reason it got any kind of
0:43:34traction because vine is a real thing and there's real people who are you know
0:43:38using it happily and it's it you know but I don't think this is a fine or
0:43:42unless it they somehow quote-unquote pivot and invent a new something new
0:43:47that you can do with this that's different than what this is yeah it's
0:43:51always dangerous to say like there's been too many of there's been too many
0:43:54social networks because I'm sure someone said there were too many search engines, um, right
0:44:00before Google came out. So, you know, who knows what's actually going to happen, but it seems like
0:44:05this is one of those things where it's just not different enough to really justify putting too
0:44:11much time and effort into, um, maybe it'll catch on among some like path was huge in Singapore or
0:44:19or something or Indonesia or wherever.
0:44:22But yeah, we'll stop talking about Peach now.
0:44:28- All right, well, we'll stop talking about Peach
0:44:30and start talking about our next sponsor
0:44:33and it's our good friends at Squarespace.
0:44:36You guys know Squarespace.
0:44:37It's the all-in-one service that lets you,
0:44:41handles everything you need to have your own website.
0:44:44They do the hosting, they have the templates
0:44:48that you can use to start.
0:44:50You just start with a website that is gorgeous,
0:44:54but, and they have templates for all sorts
0:44:56of different types of websites.
0:44:58If you're setting up an online store,
0:45:00they have a whole bunch of store designs to choose from.
0:45:02If you're setting up a portfolio,
0:45:03because let's say maybe you're a designer
0:45:06and you wanna create a new portfolio site
0:45:09to show off your work, they've got examples of that.
0:45:12It's really, really easy.
0:45:15And it is so far beyond any kind of website,
0:45:18Even if you're thinking that you're gonna have to design it
0:45:22or program it from scratch,
0:45:24the old fashioned traditional way,
0:45:25the stick shift way, if you will,
0:45:27the manual transition where you're writing the code
0:45:30and designing it and doing the HTML
0:45:32or maybe it's the programming,
0:45:33you really ought to think about trying it first
0:45:36with Squarespace,
0:45:37even if you can think of it as a prototype.
0:45:39And for a lot of different types of sites,
0:45:41you'd be very surprised just how far you can go.
0:45:44And you may not need to build a website.
0:45:46You really can just use Squarespace.
0:45:50I was actually looking around with it recently.
0:45:52Because I thought these guys sponsor the show all the time, and I haven't looked at it in
0:45:56a while.
0:45:57And I know they had a major new version last weekend, so I tried building, just to spend
0:46:01like an hour building a little store design.
0:46:04And I was blown away by how much improved it is from the way Squarespace used to be.
0:46:08Just how much more it feels like you're working in, even though you're in a browser doing
0:46:13all this stuff. It really feels like you're in like an app, like a design app, doing these
0:46:18things. Really, really impressive. Where do you go to find out more? Easy. Go to squarespace.com
0:46:24and you'll get a free trial, no credit card required. And then when you do pay, when the
0:46:30free trial is up and you want to keep the site and keep it going, just remember the
0:46:33offer code GRUBER, my last name, G-R-U-B-E-R, and you will get 10% off your first purchase.
0:46:40That could be a lot of dough because if you pay for a whole year at a time, uh, the 10%
0:46:45can apply right to that.
0:46:47So, uh, my thanks to Squarespace, build it beautiful.
0:46:52One more thing I want to say about CES now, now having been twice, all the, you know,
0:46:58this was a different apple that back then it was, it was smaller and, you know, still,
0:47:03I would say maybe a little more mysterious, but all the so-called rumors and like calls
0:47:08for Apple to headline CES and all that stuff.
0:47:13That was just completely idiotic.
0:47:16Even now more in hindsight than it seemed then.
0:47:19There's no way that Apple is going to waste their time trying to have any sort of signal
0:47:25among the noise at CES.
0:47:27There's absolutely no reason for them to do that.
0:47:30And just even halfway believing that that could have happened back then just seems completely
0:47:35foolish now.
0:47:37I miss Macworld and I really do and its heyday was great.
0:47:42And it was for exactly what you said though.
0:47:44It's that it was a way,
0:47:46the main reason was just the fact that everybody
0:47:48who covered Apple or worked in Apple related things
0:47:51was all in San Francisco at the exact same time,
0:47:55which was great.
0:47:56And then secondarily, it was great.
0:47:58It was actually great.
0:47:58So every year I'd find one or two things,
0:48:01new companies of making products
0:48:03that I didn't know otherwise.
0:48:05And even in the internet era, when that became a lot easier,
0:48:10to find little companies that are from oddball locations
0:48:14around the world, it still always happened.
0:48:18But I totally understand why Apple pulled the plug
0:48:20on their involvement in Macworld,
0:48:21which was way less involved than it would have been
0:48:23if they'd gone to CES, right?
0:48:25'Cause Macworld, especially the San Francisco one,
0:48:28which was the last show, was local to them.
0:48:30And the entire show revolved around their ecosystem.
0:48:35But I totally understand why they got away from it.
0:48:39- Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised
0:48:40if like someone took a meeting with someone from CEA
0:48:44or whatever and heard them out.
0:48:46But there's just no, Apple can command as much attention
0:48:51as it gets on its own.
0:48:53Why would it participate in something
0:48:56that's gonna be super noisy and not focused?
0:49:00- Yeah, and the thing, and Apple, I think,
0:49:03actually was upfront about this.
0:49:04I think when they stopped, they publicly said,
0:49:07this is the last time we're gonna do a Macworld keynote.
0:49:10It was the year that,
0:49:13it was the year when Steve Jobs fell ill again
0:49:18and ended up going on a medical leave.
0:49:21And he, you know, they announced like his medical leave,
0:49:24I forget, it was like December, January.
0:49:26But they said that, you know--
0:49:30- Very messily, if you recall.
0:49:33it was handled very poorly, probably because of Steve.
0:49:36You know, that it was his desire for privacy
0:49:40was in direct conflict with the company's need to,
0:49:44they, A, they were giving a keynote at Macworld Expo
0:49:47in early January, and B, you know,
0:49:50they have certain public obligations
0:49:51regarding the executive leadership.
0:49:53It was all very messy.
0:49:54It's all, you know, obviously it's a moot point now,
0:49:58but I remember though that it was announced
0:50:01that A, Phil Schiller will be giving the keynote
0:50:04at Macworld next month, and B,
0:50:06this will be the last keynote Apple ever gives
0:50:08at Macworld Expo.
0:50:09So they announced that before the Macworld Expo,
0:50:13which was, and some people took that as sort of a dick move
0:50:17'cause it kind of did cast a funereal feel
0:50:22to the whole thing, 'cause I mean, they were,
0:50:24they still had at least two more Macworlds after that,
0:50:26but everybody knew at this point
0:50:28that it was going to be a greatly diminished Macworld
0:50:31without Apple. But on the other hand, I kind of think, I don't know that it was a dick
0:50:34move pre-announcing that because I think it gave everybody a chance to soak it up and
0:50:39it maybe gave people who were like, "Eh, maybe I'll go, maybe I'll not go." It motivated
0:50:43them to, "Yeah, I better go."
0:50:44Yeah, that was the only year I went and it was really cool to be able to see it once.
0:50:54Anything else from CES?
0:50:56I don't think so.
0:50:57I mean, you know, I could go on forever.
0:51:00It was, it was really interesting.
0:51:01Um, it was fun.
0:51:03It was exhausting.
0:51:05And, uh, next year you're coming so we can, so someone will play blackjack with me.
0:51:09I can't believe you didn't play any blackjack.
0:51:11How do you not find time for blackjack?
0:51:13Cause it would be like 2 AM and I hadn't, you know, it was like,
0:51:16Oh, I guess I should go to sleep.
0:51:18Um, see, cause the people, you know, the people I was with, they either
0:51:22would just want to keep drinking or.
0:51:24I don't know.
0:51:26I actually don't know. And there's like some, I think it started ironically,
0:51:29but there's like a lot of the tech writers play pie gal poker, um,
0:51:34which I also didn't get to play. We were going to,
0:51:36and then I got separated from that group and I don't know if they ever did or
0:51:39not, but, um, anyway, next year.
0:51:42See that I,
0:51:44I'm starting to get a sense of how this could happen and why it's inexplicable
0:51:48to me,
0:51:48how you can have like a four day trip to Vegas and not end up playing blackjack.
0:51:52And it sounds to me, and I know you, I think this is probably true.
0:51:55It seems to me that the difference is that you have at least a lick of common
0:51:59sense. I don't know. I don't know. I was, yeah,
0:52:05no, I would have liked to, uh, in like last year I was like, Oh,
0:52:10I'll just do it the last night. And then the last night it was like 1 am.
0:52:13And I,
0:52:13I couldn't even put a hundred bucks on the Cubs to win the world series last
0:52:17year. Cause I ran out of time before the sports book closed.
0:52:19Oh, did you get it in this year? No. Or are they not taking,
0:52:23Are they not taking those yet?
0:52:24I don't know.
0:52:25I'm sure they're taking them.
0:52:26It's there.
0:52:28I don't know.
0:52:28I guess they probably could win this year.
0:52:30I didn't think they were going to win.
0:52:32I didn't think they were going to be even close last year.
0:52:34So they're going to be, I think they're going to be good.
0:52:36They're going to be good.
0:52:37Are they going to be the national league favorites?
0:52:40Maybe.
0:52:40Could be because it's going to be cardinals have gotten worse.
0:52:44Cardinals have gotten more in the Mets.
0:52:45Come on the Mets.
0:52:46That was a fluke.
0:52:47The Mets have gotten worse already.
0:52:48The Mets have already lost, lost talent and I don't think they're going to sign
0:52:51Caspidus
0:52:52They've met till have pitching and that's it and then the Dodgers are in turmoil, right?
0:52:58And nobody I don't think anybody knows what's gonna happen with the Dodgers and they're probably worse because they they lost
0:53:02What's his name the pitcher? Oh
0:53:04What's his name
0:53:09The guy who used to be on the Royals. Yeah, I forgot
0:53:12So anyway, I think your cubbies are gonna be I don't think you're gonna get good odds. Just could hear one
0:53:17- Yeah, that's the thing.
0:53:19- This could be the year where you get your Cubs
0:53:21win the World Series ticket
0:53:22and you end up winning like $600 on a $100 bet.
0:53:25- Not even, I think it's like four to one
0:53:27or something right now. - Wow.
0:53:28- I think last year was seven to one.
0:53:31- That just doesn't seem right.
0:53:32It seems like even when the Cubs have talent,
0:53:33the Cubs ought to have--
0:53:34- They're the Cubs.
0:53:36- Yeah, they're the Cubs.
0:53:37There ought to be like a,
0:53:38they're the Cubs discount on the tickets.
0:53:41And the same way with the Yankees
0:53:42that even when the Yankees look like
0:53:44they're not in a good spot,
0:53:45they don't really have it,
0:53:46The Yankees still should only be like eight to one
0:53:49every year, even if they have no chance.
0:53:52Because they're the Yankees.
0:53:53Like you shouldn't really, you should not be able
0:53:56to make a lot of money by betting on the Yankees
0:53:58to win the World Series.
0:53:58- No, that's practically cheating.
0:54:00- Right. (laughs)
0:54:02That's why I love them.
0:54:06It's like betting on the house.
0:54:08- Basically, yeah.
0:54:09- So anyway, basic gist of it, you go to CES,
0:54:13you go two days early or so,
0:54:14'cause you wanna hit these, the keynotes
0:54:16and the announcements and then you book two days,
0:54:19you stay there for two days to do the show floor.
0:54:22Can you do the whole show floor in two days?
0:54:25- You'll never get, you'll never do the whole thing.
0:54:28- You have to pick and choose.
0:54:29- Even we didn't get to talking about
0:54:31more than one tiny portion of it.
0:54:34There's the whole convention center,
0:54:35which is like the north, central and south halls,
0:54:38each of which have multiple zones.
0:54:41And then there's the West Gate too,
0:54:43which is something else I don't even know.
0:54:45I didn't even go to the West Gate.
0:54:47I don't know. - What the hell is that?
0:54:48- That's something else.
0:54:49It's like next door.
0:54:50- I've seen the sign.
0:54:53I don't even know what it is though.
0:54:54Is it like a hotel, casino?
0:54:56- Yeah, I think it's kind of a junky casino hotel
0:54:58with its own convention center.
0:55:00- And part of CES is in there.
0:55:02- Yeah.
0:55:03- I think it's so crazy.
0:55:06I'm going next year.
0:55:07- Yeah, you should.
0:55:08- I should book it. - Let's do it.
0:55:10- All right.
0:55:11- Stay somewhere nice though.
0:55:12- Well, I'll only stay at the Wynn.
0:55:14- Oh, well, all right.
0:55:15That might be pricey.
0:55:17- Might be. (laughs)
0:55:20- When I looked, well, when I looked at it,
0:55:21it had sold out, but I think before that,
0:55:23all right, we'll figure out how to do this early
0:55:26so that we don't get screwed, but.
0:55:28- I wonder what the, I know that they sell,
0:55:31I know that the Wynn and Encore sell out
0:55:33because they're, A, they're the best place on the strip,
0:55:36and B, it's, well, there's no ideal location,
0:55:40but it's about as close to ideal as you can get
0:55:43because it's right across the street from the Venetian and the Palazzo,
0:55:47which is the where the, the, the,
0:55:48that's the casino that's connected to the sands convention center.
0:55:52Yes. And so my guess is that the, you know, the first,
0:55:56like my hotels, the first night was $50 and the second,
0:56:00the third and fourth nights were $350. Wow.
0:56:05Yeah. It's like a huge,
0:56:06like just the difference between pre CES and
0:56:11Where did you stay?
0:56:13Well, I stayed at the Flamingo.
0:56:15Oh, that's right.
0:56:16You told me that.
0:56:17You did tell me that.
0:56:17Right.
0:56:18And the Flamingo is not that great.
0:56:20It's a pretty good location.
0:56:22Yeah, it was well located, and it's on the monorail.
0:56:24So that was fine.
0:56:26It was fine.
0:56:26I mean, I stayed in the new tower, and it was fine.
0:56:30But hey, maybe next year by CES we'll
0:56:33have the Las Vegas City Notes so you'll
0:56:35know where to actually hang out.
0:56:39Yeah.
0:56:39Well, I know where to hang out.
0:56:40Oh, you know where to hang it.
0:56:41Yeah.
0:56:42I should probably write the Las Vegas city notes.
0:56:44Did you see, I relaunched it.
0:56:46No, you've been offline a lot.
0:56:48Lily.
0:56:48Yeah.
0:56:48If you go to city notes.co, uh, you know, as, uh, I think I, you know, talked
0:56:54about it on the show before, but the, the idea was that I was making these
0:56:58apps where, um, if you go, if you're traveling to a city and you just want
0:57:02a short list of like the cool stuff where your cool friend would take you.
0:57:07and not the lame touristy stuff or like, you know, fancy, silly stuff.
0:57:13Um, did I would just have this list for you.
0:57:16And I did a New York one and I had a San Francisco one and these were iPhone
0:57:19apps that I was selling in the app store.
0:57:21And, um, it was, you know, long story short, it was cumbersome to make and,
0:57:28uh, and update these apps as apps.
0:57:31And it was also not really, you know, the paid app model has, uh, as you know,
0:57:36is not a great business model for for certain types of uh... of content so
0:57:41it's a website now it's city notes dot co i have a tokyo and a paris list up
0:57:46there and if you're going to those cities check 'em out
0:57:49and work on new york next and
0:57:52then probably los angeles and uh...
0:57:54you know it's working as a website it's like
0:57:57free for me to update and
0:57:59keep current and uh...
0:58:01we'll see what happens
0:58:02but interesting that's my little side project yeah i'm you know we'll see what
0:58:06We'll see what happens with it, but I just relaunched it about a month ago and so far
0:58:12so good.
0:58:13Excellent.
0:58:14What else is going on?
0:58:16Do you want to talk about this El Chapo?
0:58:21I haven't read the Sean Penn thing yet.
0:58:23Did you?
0:58:24I did, but I didn't finish it.
0:58:26It's like the stupidest thing.
0:58:28I couldn't remember which device I was reading it on, so I haven't gotten back to it.
0:58:32But I loved it.
0:58:33I thought it was fantastic.
0:58:34I really, really liked it.
0:58:36I'm going to read it tonight.
0:58:38I think it's one of the best pieces written by a non-writer.
0:58:42It's funny, it seems like maybe Rolling Stone...
0:58:46I'm not sure what the backstory is, and I don't know how much of this is out there,
0:58:49and I just don't know because I didn't finish the article yet.
0:58:52He visited him in October, and the article's coming out now, but it seems like maybe they
0:58:56felt like their hand was pressed when the authorities took El Chapo back into custody
0:59:01and they wanted to publish it.
0:59:03But it's clearly a very light editing pass, you know, in terms of it doesn't read like
0:59:11your typical Rolling Stone feature.
0:59:15A lot of Sean Penn's personality is infused in the prose, and I think he did a hell of
0:59:21a job.
0:59:22There's certain touches that, as a writer, like, felt like, you know, a little over the
0:59:27the top like it's a little awkward in certain phrasing but for the most part
0:59:33though I really enjoy the visceral nature nature of the pros I think is
0:59:38just a tremendous read and it's just such a crazy idea you know it I kind of
0:59:45fascinated by Sean Penn you know he just does things that other people it just
0:59:49never occurs of to do right remember like with with the hurricane in New
0:59:54Orleans. What was that hurricane? What was it called? Katrina? Katrina. There's like,
0:59:59there's Sean Penn, like, in a rowboat saving people, you know, getting them off
1:00:05their roofs, you know, like, what the hell is Sean Penn doing on a rowboat in New
1:00:09Orleans? How did he get there? How do you get to a flooded city if you
1:00:13don't live there? You know, it's not like he's, he just went, you know, what a crazy
1:00:18idea to have is I'm gonna go meet the most notorious drug kingpin in the world
1:00:22today and write a story about it.
1:00:25Yeah, and a lot of the criticism has been that El Chapo...
1:00:31Chapo or Chapo?
1:00:32Well, I guess in Spanish you'd say Chapo.
1:00:36El Chapo.
1:00:37He was given editorial control, essentially,
1:00:39that he was allowed to make changes or at least reject the...
1:00:46It was submitted.
1:00:47The agreement was, we'll submit to you a manuscript,
1:00:51And if you have objections, we will take your objections.
1:00:53Right.
1:00:54So a lot of people are saying, and, and whatever they said that he didn't make
1:00:59any changes or something like that.
1:01:00But a lot of people are criticizing that as, uh, you know, essentially, uh, you
1:01:05know, a press release from El Chapo, uh, written by Sean Penn submitted to rolling
1:01:11stone, which is, you know, historically a journalistic organization and they just
1:01:16go and run it.
1:01:17Um, I don't know.
1:01:19I think it's, I think it's, uh, that's kind of the time we're in where a lot of
1:01:23places are just publishing directly on medium and, uh, or on their websites
1:01:27or something like that, if you look at Elon Musk, he does the same thing.
1:01:31So I don't, you know, I, it would be a tough call if I were the editor of
1:01:35rolling stone, I think that if I were the publisher of rolling stone, I'd be very,
1:01:39like, very excited about this because it's certainly gotten them a lot of attention
1:01:43and probably a lot of web traffic.
1:01:44And, um, but it's interesting.
1:01:47Like, do you allow that? What do you...?
1:01:50Here's my take. And this is really what I wanted to talk about. It was that journalistic angle.
1:01:54I don't have a problem with it because right up front, that's how the article starts,
1:02:00is in italics, like it's an editor's note, it explains that situation entirely, which is that
1:02:06part of the deal for this entire thing before it started was an agreement that the article would be
1:02:11submitted to El Chapo's people for their approval. And it was, and they didn't make any changes.
1:02:17And so to me, the "what makes it okay" is the fact that they disclosed that in very clear language right up front.
1:02:25And that they sec... like, so the El Chapo people said, "We want to approve the article."
1:02:29And I think the Rolling Stone people said, "Okay, we'll do it, but we're going to explain what was approved."
1:02:36You know, "We're going to explain that this deal was in place, and we're going to say whether or not you changed anything."
1:02:43And so to me, obviously that's less than ideal. It'd be great if the El Chapo people just said you can write whatever you want,
1:02:49but obviously they weren't gonna let that happen. And so,
1:02:52yeah, the world is a better place that this article exists than if it didn't. Like it was, it's not like they had the option
1:02:59to do it without that arrangement.
1:03:01Right. The fact that it was disclosed to me makes it
1:03:05acceptable. Like I think the people who are objecting to it on a, like it's failing a certain purity test are being
1:03:13A lot of them are jealous that they didn't get the story, I think.
1:03:16Yeah.
1:03:17I mean, the truth about this, there are no rules.
1:03:19It's not like there's a law or something that says that, you know, every, every
1:03:23article published anywhere must be vetted by something or something like that.
1:03:27I mean, uh, so whatever, uh, if, if you're jealous that your publication did not get
1:03:34the scoop on El Chapo from Sean Penn, um, I guess that sucks, but it is interesting.
1:03:40I think it's, I think it's cool.
1:03:42I want to read it. I saved it. I'm going to read it.
1:03:45Uh, I,
1:03:47I like the idea of getting kind of raw writing from non-traditional writers.
1:03:52I think that's really interesting.
1:03:54That to me is exactly what it feels like. And in terms of, well,
1:03:59the argument that this could just be a press release from El Chapo,
1:04:02obviously that's a risk. I mean,
1:04:04but you just read the article with an open mind and judge for yourself.
1:04:08And I having read most of the article would say it's definitely not the case.
1:04:11It doesn't whitewash over anything. It's really just sort of a first-person narrative. You are there. This is what it's like to try to get to this guy
1:04:18story. To me, it was just a good read.
1:04:22But I think you have to keep an open mind on something like that. And I also think that there's a certain
1:04:27sanctimoniousness among the professional journalists who like object to this on
1:04:32you know, this is not the way it's done by serious publications.
1:04:38is that those publications that have those rules, like if and I'm sure a lot of them really do have it codified, you know, like
1:04:4460 minutes does not allow the sources of a show to
1:04:49See it before it airs
1:04:52That's fine. That's you know, it's fine to have rules like that and it certainly does protect you from you know
1:04:58Accusations that you're you're currying favor with your subjects or something
1:05:02But those publications obviously they miss out on an awful lot of stuff that they're that these you know
1:05:07these rules and traditions keep them from getting. Exactly. And self-publishing, like
1:05:14you said, like how much stuff is going on medium these days. The world where, you know,
1:05:21in the old days, they could take a stance like that and the only people who could really
1:05:26get a story out were the ones who owned a printing press and had a million or two million
1:05:32in circulation, newspaper or magazine.
1:05:34You don't need that anymore, right?
1:05:37So anybody can handle two or three million people
1:05:40reading their site if they publish it on WordPress
1:05:43or Medium or something like that.
1:05:44And so they don't control the means of distribution anymore
1:05:51and they're sort of holding on,
1:05:53oh, you know, get me to the fainting couch.
1:05:55They let the subject pre-approve the story.
1:05:57It's this is, you know, I've got the vapor,
1:06:00somebody get the smelling salt. It's ridiculous. Yeah, it's fascinating. Dave
1:06:04Weiner actually wrote a good essay about this, making many of these same points
1:06:09and I totally agree. I mean, listen, I went to, you know, quote-unquote
1:06:14"professional journalism school." I mean, that's what my undergrad college was and
1:06:18I don't care. I think it's great that people can sell publish now. There's
1:06:23certain things that I won't do because that's the job I have, but
1:06:28But that's fine.
1:06:30I think the best thing you can do is be very clear about what happened and what didn't
1:06:34happen and it seems like that's what they did here.
1:06:37Right.
1:06:38I feel...
1:06:40Dave Weiner has been thinking about these things since the invention of the web in the
1:06:4590s.
1:06:46And I think he has a really interesting perspective on this stuff.
1:06:52And I think it is, to make a long story short, I think that institutional journalism, the
1:07:01capital J journalism, like you said, like going to actual journalism school and working
1:07:05at a long standing, you know, traditional publication, they've made things more complicated
1:07:12than it really is.
1:07:13They've set up this, this like, written and or unwritten list of rules of how it's done.
1:07:18Whereas the truth of it is, lowercase j journalism that anybody can conduct is, to me, fundamentally
1:07:27about getting the truth out there.
1:07:31Whether it's true facts or whether it's, in a lot of my writing, truly what I believe
1:07:37and think, my opinion, my honest opinion about how things are going, that's what it's all
1:07:41about and that's it.
1:07:42And so part of the truth could be like writing a disclaimer that says the subject of this
1:07:47the story had the following demands, and that's the truth.
1:07:51The truth is we had this arrangement, and now you know it.
1:07:53- Yeah, let's be honest, like the people with all the rules
1:07:58get stuff wrong all the time too, so.
1:08:00- Exactly. - It's not like
1:08:02they lead to perfection. - Right, and you know,
1:08:05and I love the New York Times.
1:08:06New York Times is one of my favorite newspapers,
1:08:09or it is my favorite newspaper, and it's its source
1:08:11that I read, I read something in the New York Times
1:08:13every single day.
1:08:14But, you know, and they exemplify
1:08:18that sort of traditional journalism,
1:08:19and they've had some absolutely terrible things
1:08:22in the last few decades, you know,
1:08:23with the Judy Miller reporting on the lead up
1:08:27to the Iraq War, and who was the guy they had,
1:08:31the serial fabulous, Jason-- - Oh, Jason, hmm.
1:08:36- Well, whatever his name was, Jason.
1:08:38You know-- - Jason Bourne?
1:08:40No, uh, it was a J A Y S O N too.
1:08:44Oh, right.
1:08:44Uh, Jason Blair.
1:08:45Yeah.
1:08:46Jason Blair.
1:08:47So they had a reporter on the staff who it turns out had, uh, serially
1:08:51fabricated news reports.
1:08:53Uh, uh, you know, again, those rules are not a protection against
1:08:58things like that going wrong.
1:08:59And fundamentally in both of those cases, the problem is that it wasn't
1:09:02the truth that was coming out.
1:09:04You know, what Judy Miller was reporting from her sources in Iraq was not the
1:09:08truth and that led to disastrous circumstances. And the Jason Blair stuff, it didn't really
1:09:14lead to any kind of disaster like the Iraq war, but the whole problem is that it greatly
1:09:20diluted the credibility of if it's printed in the New York Times, it's true.
1:09:26And then all those David Pogue reviews. I miss Pogue.
1:09:32Well, I don't see his stuff anymore. I was just talking to somebody about that, that
1:09:38But I know he's still doing this thing at Yahoo.
1:09:41I just saw him recently too.
1:09:43Oh, I saw him in New York when I was getting my iPad Pro review unit.
1:09:49He must have been right before me.
1:09:54I was going into a hotel while he was coming out.
1:09:57So he still does.
1:09:58But I don't know what it is.
1:09:59There's some kind of tech meme search optimization strategy that the Yahoo people aren't doing.
1:10:08doing because I don't see his stuff. I don't know what, I don't know why that is.
1:10:12Yeah, I don't know. Like now that Mossberg is, you know, not at the journal and is writing for
1:10:17Recode and The Verge and stuff, I still see Mossberg reviews, you know, like they percolate
1:10:22into my peripheral vision and it's like, oh, open that in a tab. Whereas pogues don't. I somehow wind
1:10:29up not without any David Pogue tabs. Yeah, same. Maybe he just needs to tweet more. Yeah, maybe,
1:10:36I don't know. Let's take one last break here. I'll thank our third and final sponsor of the day. And
1:10:42it's our good friends at igloo. Now you guys know what an intranet is. Intranet is a thing
1:10:48that your company has for internal communication that nobody ever looks at or updates.
1:10:53igloo is an intranet you will actually like because it doesn't look like it was designed in the late
1:10:5990s because it wasn't. It's really just been designed in the last few years. And it is entirely
1:11:05designed around the modern concepts of how the web should work. Everything works on all
1:11:11devices. It scales from your phone to your tablets to desktop and it has features that
1:11:16are modern. Things like microblog so you could have for your internal team a little Twitter-like
1:11:22thing that's private on your internet and you can do links and texts and stuff like
1:11:26that but it's entirely private and it's hosted and you can access it anywhere from your phone,
1:11:32on the road, anything like that.
1:11:35All sorts of great features.
1:11:37You can have to-dos, you can manage the to-dos, calendars,
1:11:42so many features, and all the features you would want
1:11:44for internal communication on an intranet, they've got it.
1:11:47So where do you go to find out more
1:11:49and get started with a free trial?
1:11:51Go to igloosoftware.com/tts, the initials of the show.
1:11:58igloosoftware.com/tts and you'll get a free trial.
1:12:03Go check them out if you have any kind of team
1:12:05that needs an internet.
1:12:06What else is on the list?
1:12:10- I just wanted to say, that's something I think of a lot,
1:12:12is like how to get your stuff noticed.
1:12:17It's really interesting, it's almost hard to predict
1:12:19who's gonna read your stuff, and it's almost,
1:12:21really it doesn't seem to be correlated
1:12:25with how much traffic your site gets,
1:12:27even or anything like that.
1:12:30It's almost a different kind of science.
1:12:33And I don't know, I don't know if there's a way to crack it,
1:12:36but it's something that fascinates me
1:12:37because sometimes I put a lot of effort into an article
1:12:41and it just won't get read or the other way around.
1:12:44Like, you know, something that surprisingly does really well
1:12:48and sometimes it's, you know, you get lucky with a headline
1:12:50or a link here or there, but it really is weird
1:12:54how the web works with sharing
1:12:57and just getting read and who's reading it and sharing it.
1:13:01- I have found that,
1:13:04and I don't know quite why it would be,
1:13:08but to me, in my career,
1:13:11in the time I've been writing "Daring Fireball,"
1:13:13one of the apical moments was,
1:13:16you know, it's like a meteor that changed the,
1:13:19you know, hit and changed the world forever,
1:13:21was when Google shuttered Google Reader.
1:13:25Google Reader shuttering instantly cut into the traffic
1:13:30that Daring Fireball gets.
1:13:32So if I measure, I don't think it cut people.
1:13:34I honestly don't, I truly believe that the number of people
1:13:37who read my writing on a regular basis,
1:13:39if anything, continued to slowly grow.
1:13:41But in terms of like page views,
1:13:43it was instantaneous and permanent.
1:13:47And the number of pages I get per month
1:13:49is way fewer than from before.
1:13:52And it correlates exactly to when Google
1:13:54pulled the plug on Google Reader.
1:13:56And I think, my guess is that a lot of,
1:14:01awful lot of people who read "Daring Fireball"
1:14:04used Google Reader and they subscribed to my site.
1:14:07And whenever something new came up,
1:14:09they would go to, you know,
1:14:11click the thing that would go to my website.
1:14:13And I would register, you know,
1:14:15my analytics and whatever would register as a hit.
1:14:19And anyway, long story short,
1:14:20I don't get the traffic I used to in terms of page views.
1:14:22I've never been happier that I don't have page view tied advertising because that would
1:14:29have been, it really would have hit.
1:14:31It absolutely would have hurt if the advertising on Daring Fireball was correlated to page
1:14:35views.
1:14:36And I think it's just that people now, a lot of people check it when it comes to mind instead
1:14:40of checking as soon as, you know, treating Google readers like a notification system
1:14:45of, "Oh, Gruber posted something.
1:14:46I'll go check it out."
1:14:49The other thing, and this is where I'm getting at,
1:14:51is that pre-Google Reader,
1:14:53I was very, very good at guessing
1:14:55which longer pieces I wrote were gonna have legs
1:14:57and which ones weren't, and now I don't.
1:15:00I often think, wow, I think I hit a home run with this one,
1:15:04and it doesn't really, like the next day,
1:15:06nothing is, there's no bump.
1:15:09And then like last month, I wrote,
1:15:11I spent an awful lot of time
1:15:13really examining the battery case.
1:15:16- Oh, I remember.
1:15:19And all the lot of the feedback I got was why in the world would you spend that much
1:15:21time on the battery case?
1:15:23And the explanation is, it's because I could write about it.
1:15:27I found it interesting.
1:15:28I think there were some very interesting things about it.
1:15:31And because it's such a simple little thing, you can fully consider it.
1:15:37You can explore every little alley and crevice and notion about it.
1:15:40But it was one of the most popular things I've written in months.
1:15:44I think it was more popular than my iPhone 6s review.
1:15:48If I just measure by page views and seemingly
1:15:51how many new people did it.
1:15:52And I wasn't even the first to write the article.
1:15:54But somehow that one really took off.
1:15:56And I no longer can predict which ones
1:15:59are gonna be popular or not.
1:16:01- Speaking of that article, I mean, I still can't believe
1:16:04how controversial that battery case was.
1:16:08- Well, I guess that's why the article was popular.
1:16:11I think that people really have strong feelings
1:16:14about this. I mean you also went very deep on it. Yeah, I think what it is too
1:16:19is that there's an awful lot of people who viscerally hate this design. They
1:16:23really do. I mean they are... it is like, you know, like bringing up Obama or
1:16:31something, you know, with your, you know, your crazy uncle who's a Donald Trump
1:16:36supporter, you know, it like, it like turns on like a red anger bulb in
1:16:40people's heads and there are some people cannot even talk about it you know you
1:16:44know you would you would think that an argument a little debate if you will
1:16:48over the design of a phone battery pack would be the sort of thing that would
1:16:53not make anybody angry but you would be wrong and so the people who dislike it
1:16:58really really dislike it and it it if seemingly it seems to offend them on an
1:17:03emotional level and on the other side I think what maybe made my article popular
1:17:08is that the people who either are intrigued by it or actually like it, they can't articulate
1:17:13what why. It's, it's, again, almost like at an emotional level, they're like, Oh, I don't
1:17:18know, it doesn't look bad to me. But they're, they, I think that they've largely been quiet
1:17:24in public, because if you try to take that position, anything other than this design
1:17:31is an abject failure. And maybe johnny I've is, you know, we ought to investigate whether
1:17:35that he's losing his mind.
1:17:37If you take any position short of that,
1:17:38the people who hate it will jump all over you.
1:17:40And most people don't wanna be jumped all over.
1:17:43Me, I don't care.
1:17:44The only way--
1:17:48- You know what it reminds me of?
1:17:49Have you ever seen the Boeing Dreamlifter?
1:17:52- Oh, I think so, yeah.
1:17:53- Just like the 747 that they just added a bubble on top of
1:17:57to make it big enough so they could carry the fuselage
1:18:02of the Dreamliner?
1:18:04Yeah.
1:18:04Yeah.
1:18:04It's literally like just putting a bump on the, uh, you know, around, around the.
1:18:08The 747.
1:18:10Um, yeah, I think it's funny.
1:18:12Uh, it reminds me a lot of when a new logo comes out and everyone just jumps on it.
1:18:18The first day, you know, this is horrible.
1:18:20I can't believe it.
1:18:21And then no one cares after that.
1:18:23Um, I think, you know, and so much of the design of that thing is how it works.
1:18:29And I haven't used it.
1:18:32I haven't used it, I have a 6S Plus,
1:18:34so I don't need a battery pack, but, brag.
1:18:39But actually I did need a battery pack at CES.
1:18:42- Oh, that's interesting, even with the Plus.
1:18:45- Yeah, 'cause the cell signal is so bad there
1:18:47that I'm sure you're using way more battery
1:18:49than you should be.
1:18:50And-- - Yeah, even when,
1:18:52I've never been in CES, obviously, or repeated again,
1:18:55but I've been to Vegas many times,
1:18:56and Vegas has notoriously bad, in my opinion,
1:18:58cellular coverage.
1:19:00And in addition to the fact that the cellular coverage
1:19:02isn't that great in general,
1:19:03that's just talking like if you're outside or near a door,
1:19:05but the buildings are these caverns
1:19:08and they're the Faraday cage aspect of
1:19:11what it's like when you're covered by three tons of concrete
1:19:15and who even knows whether if you're underground
1:19:18or above ground or where the hell you are,
1:19:20it could definitely be a challenge.
1:19:23- Yeah, I got one of those anchor packs
1:19:26that's supposedly big enough to charge a MacBook
1:19:30and an iPad and a phone and all kinds of stuff.
1:19:33So I did use that.
1:19:35But anyway, I don't remember where I was,
1:19:37but if you need a battery pack,
1:19:40it seems like it actually works pretty well,
1:19:41which is the whole point.
1:19:42So I don't know, whatever.
1:19:44I thought you went deliciously over the top on that post,
1:19:48but as you say, it's a small enough thing
1:19:51where you can really examine it from every angle
1:19:55And why not?
1:19:56Like that's the whole point of being a self-publisher
1:19:59on the web is you could do something ridiculous like that.
1:20:02- The other thing I'm thinking about,
1:20:05and I went and bought a bunch of them.
1:20:07But I've always been, and I even said it there
1:20:09on the bottom of my article,
1:20:10my solution to battery challenge days
1:20:14is to have a little external battery pack,
1:20:16but I like the little ones.
1:20:17I like ones that I can put in my other pocket
1:20:19and it's almost like I don't even notice it's there.
1:20:22And Mophie makes a bunch of them.
1:20:24But I honestly consider it to be a shortcoming
1:20:27in their company in that they make too many of them.
1:20:29And that one of the things I really, really appreciate
1:20:32about Apple is that if you're going to buy an Apple blank
1:20:35and insert any product there,
1:20:37you can go and decide which one to get.
1:20:39And it's, I'm an indecisive person and I will pause it,
1:20:43but I never have a problem figuring out
1:20:44which MacBook to buy.
1:20:46I, and even now at a moment when their lineup is in flux
1:20:50and they still have the old MacBook Airs
1:20:52and the new MacBook One, which is underpowered,
1:20:55and the MacBook Pro.
1:20:56I know which Mac I want.
1:20:57I want the 13-inch MacBook Pro.
1:21:00That's the best, that's the one I want.
1:21:02I find it so hard to figure out,
1:21:04go to mophie.com and figure out which battery pack to buy,
1:21:07because they not only have different sizes
1:21:09in terms of like, well, here's the small one
1:21:11that'll refill one iPhone from, you know,
1:21:13throughout the day.
1:21:14Or here's a really big one that you could use
1:21:16to charge an iPad and two phones or something like that.
1:21:20but they also have multiple designs.
1:21:22They have ones with built-in cables,
1:21:24not with built-in cables, ones, you know,
1:21:26that it's too much.
1:21:28They should be the ones who, they're the battery experts.
1:21:30They should design the right design
1:21:33and then I don't have to worry about it.
1:21:35It's almost like when you go to mofeed.com
1:21:37and pick a battery pack or the, you know,
1:21:40external battery pack, you almost have to design it yourself
1:21:44'cause you've got to figure out,
1:21:46do you want an integrated cables?
1:21:47Do you want to have separate cables?
1:21:49Do you care that the battery is gonna charge by micro USB,
1:21:53but the phone is gonna charge by lightning,
1:21:55so you have to bring two different things at night?
1:21:58Does it do pass through charging,
1:22:00meaning that at the end of the day,
1:22:02when you put up next to your hotel bed,
1:22:04do you have one thing to plug in,
1:22:05and the battery will fill your phone first
1:22:08and then fill itself up,
1:22:09or do you have to plug two different things in
1:22:11because the battery pack won't charge the phone
1:22:14while it itself is being charged?
1:22:16They have all of those options are there
1:22:18for you to consider.
1:22:19from just one company and I kind of, I find it maddening.
1:22:23So I feel like I want to write an article and figure out which,
1:22:25which is the best one and effectively design it for Mophie.
1:22:29This is your version of Marco's headphone test. Yes, exactly. It's exactly it.
1:22:34It's my version of Marco's headphone test is battery packs,
1:22:37except that I'm only going to do Mophie's and speaking of Marco,
1:22:40Marco recommended one to me personally. Uh,
1:22:44I can't find it here.
1:22:46The other one to check out is Anker, A-N-K-E-R,
1:22:49which are some ex-Google people
1:22:51who make very nice battery and charging stuff.
1:22:56They're the ones who I also have a four port USB charger,
1:22:59which I travel with now.
1:23:01So I can, don't have to bring any of the Apple
1:23:04charging bricks, I just bring this and plug in my Macbook,
1:23:09iPhone, Apple Watch, and can charge something else
1:23:13at the same time.
1:23:14- All right, I'll take a look at the Anker ones.
1:23:15But anyway, Marco recommended one to me.
1:23:18He bought at Amazon for 24 bucks.
1:23:21And it has built-in cables.
1:23:24And I'm a built-in cable fan,
1:23:25so you don't, you know, it's just one thing
1:23:27to put in your pocket.
1:23:28And the son of a bitchin' thing broke.
1:23:31I hadn't even gotten past the point
1:23:32where I was just testing how, you know,
1:23:34like how quickly and, you know,
1:23:38just testing a whole bunch of different,
1:23:39these battery packs on my phone
1:23:41every time I'd let my phone go down.
1:23:42I'd only used it like three times,
1:23:44I'd never even taken it out of the house, so it wasn't like it was dropped or anything
1:23:48like that.
1:23:49The lightning port on it just stopped working.
1:23:53So I think there's a sort of "you get what you pay for" aspect in there.
1:23:56And I also found it curious that Marco, of all people, was the one who recommended this
1:24:01cheap one to me.
1:24:03Hmm.
1:24:04Yeah.
1:24:05Maybe an imposter.
1:24:07I don't remember the name of the company.
1:24:10It was weird.
1:24:11Oh, here it is.
1:24:12on my desk. I hate to throw the company under the bus, but it's a volt ready. V O L T R
1:24:19E A D Y. And if you go to Amazon and look at the volt ready, you'll see what I mean
1:24:23about these integrated cables. And they're super, super thin. The cables. I mean, it's,
1:24:29it's so much thinner than the lightning port itself. And I, you know, I don't, I think
1:24:33that's probably why it broke. I think you need like a good thick cable.
1:24:40- Have you installed iOS 9.3 yet?
1:24:43- No, I have not.
1:24:45- I haven't either, I'm not in the beta cycle.
1:24:48- What's different about it?
1:24:52- The Sherlock Flux or whatever that thing is called,
1:24:58F-Lux, so you can get the warmer colors at nighttime
1:25:03so it's easier on your eyes when you're about to go to sleep.
1:25:07- Interesting.
1:25:09And there were all those new features for education,
1:25:12like the multiple user mode and that kind of stuff,
1:25:16which you assume is gonna be part of iOS 10.
1:25:19- Yeah. - So everyone can--
1:25:21- No, but it's still just in beta, right?
1:25:23- Yes, yeah, yeah.
1:25:24- I thought maybe I really was out to lunch.
1:25:27- No. - No, I'm kind of done.
1:25:29I do the betas of the major new OS over the summer,
1:25:33but that's mainly because I know my phone's a year old,
1:25:36I'm getting a new phone anyway,
1:25:37So if it goes belly up and it's usually there's like major major features
1:25:41I want to get get a hold of them but for stuff like the minor ones. I usually don't do the pay this
1:25:45Yeah, same. Have you?
1:25:48Have you been using the Apple TV a lot
1:25:51Every day every day. Have you used the game controller yet? Yeah, I have the game controller
1:25:58I don't use it very frequently because I just I just don't play video games
1:26:02Yeah, I bought one to
1:26:05To hopefully play games on and I used it the first day I had it and then I haven't used it since then
1:26:11Yeah, but that's really just me. It's not like that. I couldn't find some games. I liked I found a couple games
1:26:16I really liked but
1:26:18It just never occurs to me to play video games
1:26:20Yeah, I mean either I thought I would though. I
1:26:23thought so too, I think of all the things like if I time-traveled back and talked to my
1:26:30Like 10 11 12 year old self
1:26:32I think that I would have lots of good news to tell young John Gruber and I think he would be very happy about his
1:26:37Future but I think the of all the things he'd be most surprised by is that I would tell him that I
1:26:42You're gonna grow up and have the financial ability
1:26:45And the flexibility in your daily schedule to own and play any video game
1:26:52You want for as long as you want practically speaking and you're not going to
1:26:59Yeah, I think that pretty much I think that it my like
1:27:0412-year-old self would instantly suspect that whoever this guy who does kind of look like me
1:27:10And it was credibly well cast to play the person who's going to prank me and tell me that it's me when I'm 42
1:27:18Is obviously full of shit because there's no chance that if I could spend four or five hours every night playing cool video games that
1:27:26I wouldn't be doing it. I
1:27:29I downloaded one for the Apple Watch, which, you know, that was another one of those things
1:27:33where they were like, "Oh, WatchOS 2 is going to be, you know, it's going to be really helpful
1:27:38for games because they'll be able to run directly on the watch and also be able to use the digital
1:27:44crown as a controlling mechanism."
1:27:47And no, not fun.
1:27:50One of the games was like a, almost like a card game type thing and it was just too,
1:27:55weird and the other one was like pong type thing and it was just so jerky that
1:27:59I saw that I kept losing because I either got the same one or I downloaded
1:28:04a similar one and I think maybe there might be a bunch because if all you have
1:28:08is the crown pong is a very obvious concept and it was terrible it was
1:28:14absolutely terrible yeah I did not enjoy that as as we head into the new Apple
1:28:20Watch season and I suspect that they're going to announce it early ish this year
1:28:25you know, at this event that they're supposedly having in March, I do think we'll get a new watch.
1:28:31And as we, you know, what do we think of Apple Watch? I have to write this piece, I do, because
1:28:36I have a lot of thoughts on it. But bottom line, I think it's very clear in hindsight that they
1:28:41should not have had any apps at all for the first Apple Watch. I mean, maybe eventually it'll be an
1:28:46app platform, but it's clearly not ready for it yet. And slow apps is way worse than no apps,
1:28:53in my opinion. And to me, even now, even, you know, with watchOS 2 and everything,
1:28:59it's also still incredibly inconsistent, where if I go to like a weather app on
1:29:05the watch, sometimes it'll just spin and spin and spin until the screen goes off.
1:29:10And if I go to the exact same app, like Dark Sky or something, and take my phone
1:29:15out of my pocket and go to Dark Sky, it works instantly and has all, you know, all
1:29:19the data I want, you know, the information about the weather that I was looking for.
1:29:22And so what it doesn't take long to be psychologically conditioned to
1:29:26Because you don't trust that it's even going to work at all on the watch
1:29:30It doesn't take you very long at all that you just instinctively go for the app on your phone
1:29:35Totally especially with
1:29:39the this s 6s phones being so fast and also the 3d touch shortcuts like it's now
1:29:46You know when the watch launched to me
1:29:49it was really helpful to be able to quickly access something
1:29:52without reaching in my pocket
1:29:54and taking out this giant phone.
1:29:56But now the phone is so fast that,
1:29:59and the Touch ID unlock is so fast
1:30:02that it actually is faster now again to take my phone out
1:30:06than to try to get anything done on the watch.
1:30:08- Right, it's just, and that doesn't mean that the watch
1:30:12as a whole is a failure, but I feel like what
1:30:15this first watch was good and interesting for
1:30:18is just the ambient stuff, you know, the tracking, the health, you know,
1:30:21tracking your stuff,
1:30:22doing the workouts and whatever you configure to be shown at a glance on your,
1:30:27you know, without even doing anything is, you know, and that's enough,
1:30:31that's enough to make it a product.
1:30:32I think that the idea that they had to make had to have apps and their first one
1:30:36was wrong.
1:30:37And I think it's kind of funny because they famously had no apps on the first
1:30:41iPhone. And it turns out that the phone was absolutely, you know,
1:30:45probably the best platform for quote unquote apps that mankind has ever
1:30:50created.
1:30:50It's like the pinnacle of apps as the central premise of how you're going to use
1:30:54a device. Um, didn't even have it at first. So if the,
1:30:57if the phone could get away without it at first,
1:30:59I don't see why the watch couldn't have. And I think in hindsight,
1:31:01the watch should have,
1:31:02yeah, I wrote kind of a, whatever it was like seven month review, uh,
1:31:08about a month ago now. And that was, you know, similar. I mean, my,
1:31:12my high level conclusion was I still use it every day and I still really like it a lot,
1:31:17but I'm not using it for any new things than I was at the beginning.
1:31:21I'm still basically using it for the same things as I did when I started.
1:31:25So in that way, it felt stalled in the sense that we were promised this kind of unlimited
1:31:30platform and no one's really taking advantage of it.
1:31:34Whereas in reality, I'm very happy with the things that it does well, the fitness tracking,
1:31:39the, you know, again, I'm always surprised how useful it is
1:31:43to have the time in front of me,
1:31:45especially with my phone now being so unwieldy.
1:31:48And, you know, and a few very other basic things, so.
1:31:54- I enjoyed that.
1:31:55I've enjoyed that from other people too.
1:31:56I know Marco was saying on his podcast,
1:31:59either the last episode or the last one I listened to,
1:32:01where he's, like for Christmas, got a mechanical watch
1:32:04because he's, you know,
1:32:06he never wore a watch in his entire life,
1:32:08but just the convenience of having the time on your wrist,
1:32:10it turns out that's actually pretty cool.
1:32:13All of us like me have been wearing watches in my life,
1:32:15it's like, come on, why did you have to be told this?
1:32:19- I know, I was the kid with the nerd watch in school
1:32:23with the calculator or Casio or whatever,
1:32:25but I forgot, I forgot all about that.
1:32:27Honestly, like the temperature is cool to have.
1:32:30- Yeah, that's the one thing when I wear
1:32:31my traditional watch, my regular watch,
1:32:34the one thing that I miss every single day
1:32:38is that I expect to be able to look at my wrist
1:32:40and see what the temperature is outside.
1:32:42- Yeah, I like it. - And every time,
1:32:45it's always, I mean, it's uncanny
1:32:49how I could go days without wearing my Apple Watch
1:32:51and I still, as I'm heading out the door
1:32:53and deciding which coat to put on, I look at my wrist
1:32:56and I'm like, oh, it's not gonna help.
1:32:58- Yeah, are you Apple paying with it?
1:33:01- Yeah, I do, when I have it on, I Apple pay,
1:33:03and that's another thing too is,
1:33:05'cause the supermarket where we go
1:33:07is a Whole Foods and they take Apple Pay.
1:33:09And I instantly, every single time,
1:33:12whether I'm wearing my Apple Watch or not Apple Watch,
1:33:14I put my wrist up to the kiosk.
1:33:17(laughing)
1:33:18- Nice.
1:33:19Yeah, I do.
1:33:22I mean, almost every day I do that, so.
1:33:24- It is, I find, and I thought so.
1:33:27I thought it would be true back in May when I first got it,
1:33:29and it turns out it's very true.
1:33:30It is terrific in the East Coast winter
1:33:33to have an Apple Pay thing
1:33:35that you don't have to fish out of your pocket
1:33:37when you're wearing a coat
1:33:38and layers of clothing and stuff.
1:33:40- Gloves too. - Right.
1:33:42- And actually you can go straight through the sleeve.
1:33:44You don't even need to roll up your sleeve.
1:33:47You just double click on that button
1:33:50and the NFC will go right through your shirt.
1:33:53- It is interesting.
1:33:53I'll tell you one thing too is I never used the single click
1:33:58on that contact thing to contact people.
1:34:01- Only by accident.
1:34:02- Right, and so I really feel like in hindsight,
1:34:05got that wrong. Like single click should have been Apple Pay and double click should have
1:34:09been jumped to context shortcuts, at least for me personally. Because when I do want
1:34:13to contact somebody, like if I want to text my son, I'll do it via Siri. I'll long press
1:34:19the other thing and just say, text Jonas, whatever it is I want to text him. Because
1:34:25you have to dictate the text anyway. So why not just initiate the contact from the voice
1:34:32too?
1:34:33It seems-- - Yeah, I assume
1:34:34they probably thought people would be doing the drawings
1:34:37and the touch stuff more than they do.
1:34:39Like I haven't done that stuff in months.
1:34:41- No, only when somebody gets a new Apple Watch.
1:34:43- Yeah, right. (laughs)
1:34:45- In hindsight, I mean, it's just one of those things where,
1:34:47and I kind of, it makes me a little worried.
1:34:50It's a worrisome product in some ways about Apple
1:34:52'cause it makes me wonder what made them think
1:34:55while they were using it themselves
1:34:56that this would be useful.
1:34:58It just seems to me that if they spent
1:35:01as much time thinking about it as I have
1:35:03in the first six months while I wore it.
1:35:05Why didn't they come to the same conclusions I did?
1:35:08I mean, that's a good, the whole idea was a great idea.
1:35:12I was very intrigued by it,
1:35:13the idea that you would have these favorite people
1:35:16and one touch away from just sending your heartbeat
1:35:19or whatever, fabulous idea.
1:35:21But then I feel like once you actually have it on your wrist
1:35:24and you can do it, it turns out it doesn't really stick.
1:35:27- I think that it's gonna be,
1:35:30Some of the most interesting things are gonna be
1:35:32what they change based on what they've now learned
1:35:35from millions of people using this thing.
1:35:38And that's the software as well as the hardware.
1:35:41I think we've already seen they realizing
1:35:43that the Sport is the main watch.
1:35:48There's more colors now, we'll see what else
1:35:51changes with that.
1:35:52- Well, I said-- - The software changes.
1:35:54Yeah, I know you said it was the best one.
1:35:56- Yeah, I think it's the best one.
1:35:57I think all of the worrying that people did,
1:35:59I think this is to me one of the most interesting things about it.
1:36:02It's all the worrying people did that the common person is going to get short changed
1:36:06and gets this cruddy aluminum one and it's only rich people who can afford a $1000 stainless
1:36:12steel one who are going to get the nice one.
1:36:14It's actually the other way around.
1:36:15The people who bought the $400 sport one got the best watch.
1:36:18I really do believe that.
1:36:20Yeah, I love mine.
1:36:22So I'm just super curious to see what they change software wise too.
1:36:28Yeah, I am too. And I don't...
1:36:31The software group has really gotten good at keeping
1:36:35a little... not much leaks out of Apple software these days. So I think we're in
1:36:39for a surprise.
1:36:40I don't think that, you know, who knows? I mean, you never know what Mark Germin's
1:36:44gonna
1:36:44figure out. But yeah, I don't know. I think there's a good chance that we'll be
1:36:48surprised. So any guesses we have are actually
1:36:51real guesses. If you ask me right now,
1:36:54what do I think they're gonna do? I'm gonna guess a lot of
1:36:58health and sensor related improvements.
1:37:01And this one might be more of a me just wishful thinking, but I really,
1:37:06really,
1:37:06really would like to see them do something a lot smarter with where the aggregate
1:37:11health data is, you know,
1:37:15making health center more of a here's everything that we know about you type
1:37:21thing. Like to me,
1:37:23it's way too separated with the activities is just for the watch stuff and
1:37:28Not you and you know what I mean? Right. And you know, I have six months or well, I have eight months of aggregated
1:37:36Fitness tracking like okay. What what higher level trends can you tell me? Yeah, you know
1:37:42Okay, when you I don't know when you work out on the weekend you do something better during the week
1:37:50I don't know just like give me some more other than that page of all the rings, which is kind of cool, but
1:37:58Was cool, you know the first couple times I looked at it
1:38:00It is nice to be able to go back and kind of brag about the day. I walked
1:38:0427,000 steps steps at CES, but it would be great to actually get some more useful information out of that page
1:38:11Yeah, I think that if there's if they're paying attention to how people seem to be using the watch in the real world
1:38:18It's gonna be a lot more about quantifying
1:38:19You know and helping you make sense and organize your the data that the watch knows and like I mean the other thing too
1:38:25is if I'm not wearing my watch but I have my phone with me, the minimal compared to the watch,
1:38:30but the minimal tracking that the phone does should be easily combined with the watch,
1:38:34you know, to create an overall picture of my activity and stuff like that and where I've been.
1:38:40And then the other thing I think I hope that they're working on is I think that they should
1:38:44really work to make it smarter about whether it's watch faces or the glances or locate, you know,
1:38:53but something so that it's just smarter about showing you what you want to be looking at when you look at your wrist.
1:38:57Yeah, there's plenty of context that knows about, you know, where I'm at, what I'm doing, that it could...
1:39:04I would even trust it to shuffle the complications for me somehow.
1:39:09Yeah.
1:39:10Based on the context, you know, if I'm at the airport, show me the travel complications.
1:39:16If it's nighttime, show me, you know, certain things.
1:39:19And I know that it would be kind of obnoxious to have to program the logic behind that so maybe you wouldn't be able to program it
1:39:26but
1:39:27to me that would be there's so much more context that
1:39:31That they could be integrating into a lot of the decisions about what they show you
1:39:35Were there a lot of?
1:39:39Android watches at the CES not in a really noticeable way
1:39:45I mean, last year it was so,
1:39:48the whole watch thing was very novel,
1:39:50and of course there was the famous Apple Watch knockoff,
1:39:54and yeah, a lot of the boots I guess had
1:39:56kind of Android watches, but I think that
1:39:59it didn't really, it wasn't like a huge thing.
1:40:04I mean, like Samsung had one,
1:40:05but I think their only major change was just the color.
1:40:07- Yeah.
1:40:08- And then there was that Fitbit thing
1:40:12that looks a little like an Apple Watch.
1:40:14- They put it like a hexagonal.
1:40:16It's like they cut off corners.
1:40:18- Yeah, I kinda dumped on it.
1:40:19I looked at it, it's fine, I mean, whatever.
1:40:21If you're trying to buy a $200 thing or whatever,
1:40:25and you want a Fitbit that also does a couple other things.
1:40:29- The advantage that Fitbit has is they can get away
1:40:31with an ugly-ish design, and quite frankly,
1:40:33I think that their thing is ugly.
1:40:35It's certainly uglier than the Apple Watch.
1:40:38- Yeah.
1:40:38- They can get away with it because their audience
1:40:40is primarily looking at fitness tracking.
1:40:42And so if the thing you're most interested in
1:40:44is fitness tracking,
1:40:45therefore less than great aesthetics,
1:40:50you can get away with it.
1:40:51Whereas Apple Watch, its primary thing
1:40:54is it's supposed to be a good looking watch.
1:40:56- Yeah, and I think the whole point behind this
1:40:59is that they wanna become a more universal device
1:41:03and get away from, you know, the biggest risk to Fitbit
1:41:07is that fitness tracking becomes an app
1:41:09on a more universal device as opposed to a separate thing
1:41:14that you carry around.
1:41:17The way that calculator is now an app on a phone
1:41:20or a flashlight, no one's carrying a little mag light
1:41:24around anymore, it's your camera flash.
1:41:27So I could see why they would wanna kind of go after
1:41:32that more mainstream universal, more useful market,
1:41:36but I just don't know if they're the company
1:41:38that has the software and the ecosystem that they can get enough people using it.
1:41:44I mean, there's still, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's selling a lot.
1:41:47People are buying a lot of foot bits there.
1:41:48The brand has a awareness and people like it, but I don't know.
1:41:53I think they're doomed because I think that they're not going to be able to stay
1:41:57far enough ahead to, to, to stay ahead of the eventual good enough fitness tracking
1:42:04that's built into other devices.
1:42:06You know, including
1:42:07- Yeah, I think right before, right after they went public,
1:42:11I did kind of a trolly post where I said,
1:42:13Fitbit's long-term stock chart revealed
1:42:16or something like that,
1:42:18or the long-term sales chart revealed,
1:42:19and it was the shipments curve of the iPod.
1:42:23It was like, you know, this is a single-purpose device
1:42:27that has basically become an app
1:42:29on a more general-purpose device.
1:42:32- Over the holidays, we were at Amy's mom's house
1:42:34for something, I don't know,
1:42:36at some point during the Christmas, New Year's thing,
1:42:38and it must have been Christmas,
1:42:40and her mom had a LED Maglite,
1:42:45and I was just blown away by how awesomely powerful
1:42:50the flashlight is.
1:42:53All the flashlights, and we have a bunch of them
1:42:55from Maglite, I've always been a fan of their stuff
1:42:57'cause it's so well made,
1:42:58but ours are all the old incandescent thing,
1:43:01and I was like, wow, it's like I have somehow
1:43:03missed this revolution, and I need to upgrade
1:43:05or flashlight. So I went flashlight shopping for myself. And it's so funny how it's like
1:43:11maglite has all this, so many slogans on a bunch of their smaller ones. So it's like,
1:43:15you know, yes, you really do need a flashlight. Yes, you can, you can have a flashlight that's
1:43:19so much better than the one on your phone. And it's like, if you're telling people that
1:43:22they, if you're just reminding them that they still need to buy a flashlight, you're, you're
1:43:26in trouble. Like it is exactly, it mirrors exactly what the consumer camera company started
1:43:32saying five or six years ago about,
1:43:34"Yeah, you totally need a $200 point and shoot camera."
1:43:38And it's like, no you don't.
1:43:39Go to any tourist location in the world
1:43:41and look at what people are using.
1:43:42They're all using their phones.
1:43:44- Totally.
1:43:48- And the flashlight is right there.
1:43:50It's like, who knew?
1:43:52To me, it's like something I would have never predicted.
1:43:54I mean, and Apple obviously didn't predict it
1:43:55'cause they were a little late to the game
1:43:57at making it something that you didn't need an app for.
1:44:00but I use my iPhone as a flashlight
1:44:03probably at least once a day every day.
1:44:04- Every day, yeah.
1:44:06It's crazy to me, but it's awesome.
1:44:09- Right, but it's, you know, to me in the same way,
1:44:12I'm not saying MagLite's going out of business,
1:44:14but they're gonna go,
1:44:15their business that was selling little $10 ones
1:44:18that you keep at your desk is gone.
1:44:21And it's never gonna come back.
1:44:22The only lights, flashlights they're gonna sell
1:44:23are the big serious ones that you need, you know,
1:44:26where you really do want like a, you know,
1:44:28a two D cell flashlight.
1:44:31- Yeah, and I mean, and just to bring it back to that Fitbit
1:44:35I guess that was the criticism was that it wasn't going
1:44:37after the serious fitness market
1:44:39'cause it doesn't have a GPS.
1:44:41- Right.
1:44:42- You know, the marathon runners aren't using that model.
1:44:46And I don't think it's gonna be enough of an Apple watch
1:44:49to beat Apple or even the Google watches
1:44:53at being a more general purpose device.
1:44:56- Yeah.
1:44:57Anything else you wanna talk about this week, Dan?
1:45:00- Not really. (laughs)
1:45:05- There was, you know what--
1:45:06- What do you wanna talk about?
1:45:07- Well, I was gonna say there was,
1:45:09it comes and goes, but it's,
1:45:12I don't write about finance generally,
1:45:16but I'm somewhat intrigued by it,
1:45:18and I don't think that the company is immune to it.
1:45:21I think even if you're primarily interested in Apple
1:45:23because of their products, as I am,
1:45:26that you still have to consider their stock price
1:45:30and their quarterly financials
1:45:32because they're a publicly held company.
1:45:35And we're at a point, the whole market is down,
1:45:38quite frankly, but Apple is down further than the market
1:45:41and they're trading at a ridiculously low
1:45:44price to earning ratio at the moment.
1:45:46And it just brings out the crazies.
1:45:50I mean, you cannot make this up.
1:45:53I mean, this guy, Trip Chaudry, is almost comically,
1:45:57it really is hard to believe that he's not a parody,
1:46:00that there's somebody out there who made up the name
1:46:02and, you know, like the McElope,
1:46:04and it's a fake analyst who doesn't even exist,
1:46:07and for years now, he's been getting away with this
1:46:10and getting quoted, and he keeps saying
1:46:12more and more outrageous things,
1:46:14and everybody just keeps quoting him.
1:46:16That, you know, putting the word analyst
1:46:18in front of your name is somehow this magical credibility
1:46:21badge.
1:46:23He literally said last week, he called Tim Cook a bozo
1:46:26and called for him to be not fired.
1:46:29He called for him to be demoted back to chief operating
1:46:32officer.
1:46:34Amazing.
1:46:34And says that John Rubenstein should come back to the company
1:46:38and become the CEO.
1:46:40Perfect.
1:46:41Which is not going to happen.
1:46:44That is not the way it works.
1:46:45Maybe co-CEO with Fidel.
1:46:47I guess, yeah, bring them all back.
1:46:49And that Angela Arndt's is a nitwit or something.
1:46:51I forget what his word was and she's gotta go.
1:46:54Meanwhile, Apple stores have never been more popular
1:46:57or more successful.
1:46:58- I mean, there is a lot of,
1:47:04I wouldn't say pessimism as much as just kind of,
1:47:10people are not quite sure if iPhone sales
1:47:14are gonna grow this year.
1:47:16And I don't know, maybe that doesn't matter
1:47:18to the average person.
1:47:20It does matter to Apple as a growth story.
1:47:26And growth certainly is important in any company.
1:47:29And sure, there are cycles where things flatten out
1:47:35or maybe they decrease a little
1:47:36and they start growing again.
1:47:37And yes, Apple, relative to the market,
1:47:44That's one thing, but there are companies
1:47:46whose stock performed great last year.
1:47:49I believe Amazon was one of those.
1:47:50- Amazon, definitely.
1:47:51Amazon, it seems like everybody has really, really
1:47:53caught on to Amazon, and I think deservedly so.
1:47:57But just little things like the way that Amazon,
1:48:00by most, the accounting I've seen,
1:48:03got 51% of the online holiday shopping.
1:48:05That's an enormous number,
1:48:07and it's sort of a magic number, too.
1:48:09Fundamentally, if they got 49% of it
1:48:13instead of 51%, it's the same.
1:48:15It's a rounding error and probably well within
1:48:17the margin of error for however the outside group
1:48:20guesstimated the numbers.
1:48:22But 51 is over that 50% line and that's a magic number
1:48:26and you can see why that would fuel
1:48:29investor confidence in their stock.
1:48:31- Yeah, so in the meantime you have
1:48:34this huge group of analysts who try to guess every quarter
1:48:40how many phones Apple's gonna sell
1:48:42and what their revenue and profits are gonna be.
1:48:43And what's been happening recently
1:48:47is that they've been reducing their forecast
1:48:49for iPhone sales and for, I think also for revenue.
1:48:53I don't have the trend line in front of me.
1:48:57I actually have access to what I thought
1:48:59would be an interesting chart
1:49:00of like how the estimates change over time,
1:49:03but they actually changed so little
1:49:04that it's just kind of a flat line.
1:49:06It's not very, it's not actually a very interesting chart,
1:49:09but we'll see.
1:49:11- And yeah, this could possibly be a year.
1:49:14And by the way, this has been known for a while.
1:49:16Like I think I wrote about this in, I would say July
1:49:20or even April of last year that this coming year
1:49:24could be the year where the company doesn't grow very much
1:49:28if at all.
1:49:29And we'll see.
1:49:32I mean, it certainly does matter for some reasons,
1:49:36but it also seems to be creating an opportunity
1:49:39for a lot of people to blow things out of context
1:49:42and be silly about things.
1:49:44- There's a very interesting story here, I think,
1:49:48but it's all nuanced and it requires, you know,
1:49:51let's be serious about this,
1:49:52that this company, the biggest company in the world
1:49:55is not going to implode.
1:49:56It's, like we're talking about growth stopping,
1:49:59not that the iPhone is going to,
1:50:02the way some of these people are talking about it
1:50:04is as though, I mean, here's the literal headline,
1:50:06the iPhone slowdown spells doom for Apple.
1:50:09I mean, that's an actual headline
1:50:10in an ostensibly serious business publication.
1:50:13It's ridiculous.
1:50:14It doesn't spell doom.
1:50:15But it certainly is interesting.
1:50:18And I think it's almost, if you're realistic about it,
1:50:21you have to admit that just back of the envelope math
1:50:25would suggest that the basic story is actually very easy.
1:50:30iPhone sales were suppressed for at least a year or two,
1:50:33it seems, because consumers decided they liked bigger phones and the iPhone didn't have a
1:50:39big phone. And it takes Apple at least two years to make a change like that because of
1:50:46their "we only do one major new design a year and we bet the bank on it." They're stuck
1:50:52with it for two years. And when the 6 and 6S came out, or the 6 and 6 Plus came out
1:50:58last year. There was, A, it satisfied the demand, but B, it was pent up because a lot
1:51:04of people had waited because there were rumors. I mean, anybody who, like us, knows casual
1:51:10people who are like, "Hey, is it true that Apple's going to come out with a bigger phone?"
1:51:13And we'd be like, "Well, you know, give your standard, I don't know, but it certainly seems
1:51:17like it." That's what all signs point to. And they were like, "Cool, I'm going to get
1:51:21that," and they waited for it. And then they did, and they had unbelievable sales.
1:51:26I think that the sales so far, from what we know,
1:51:29that the 6S and the 6S Plus are matching that,
1:51:32but the question is are they gonna grow even further?
1:51:35And they may not, but the thing that's also very obvious
1:51:37is that at this point, they're getting to the point
1:51:40where they're running out of people on the planet
1:51:42who can afford iPhones.
1:51:44- Right, which they're maybe actually gonna help out
1:51:48with the second hand-me-down subscription phones this year.
1:51:53phones this year. We'll see.
1:51:58At this point, though, they're reaching a point where I really think that to grow, it
1:52:03has to be at the lower end by widening the number of lower-cost phones that are being
1:52:09sold that are iPhones. Because at the high end, I really do think they're at the point
1:52:14where there just aren't untapped people left.
1:52:21There are a few Google employees with Nexus phones and then that's about it.
1:52:27And that's where other products come into play too, like the watch or the Apple TV,
1:52:31but those are both so early in their life cycle that there's even Apple Music, which
1:52:37we calculated is on a billion dollar revenue run rate.
1:52:41Billion dollars is not that much to Apple.
1:52:44How many watches do we think that they sold?
1:52:47The last time I ran, after last quarter,
1:52:50my number was around five million,
1:52:52just based on kind of the changes
1:52:54in that other products thing.
1:52:56Could be a little more than that,
1:52:57but the Christmas quarter is probably gonna be
1:53:00on another level, so.
1:53:01- Right.
1:53:02- We'll know in a few weeks.
1:53:03I mean, just making up a completely random number,
1:53:05I would guess that they probably moved
1:53:07like five to 10 million last quarter alone,
1:53:10but who knows, I have no idea.
1:53:13- Right, and each one of those
1:53:16that
1:53:19it did the average selling prices easily gassed at around five hundred dollars
1:53:22because
1:53:23overwhelmingly most of them are sport and the sport ones are four hundred dollars and
1:53:27then you know just enough of those steel ones would raise it up to around five
1:53:30hundred
1:53:31if they every million that they sell is five hundred dollars in revenue that's
1:53:36what is that
1:53:38so basically a billion for every two million
1:53:40phones, their watches so and so they've you know they've built in year one a
1:53:44multi-billion dollar business, which is pretty good.
1:53:47And I think it's about that.
1:53:48Yeah.
1:53:48But if you're Apple, it's not going to really drive much growth, especially if
1:53:53you have to offset, you know, the iPad declining and, um, you know, the Mac is.
1:53:59The Mac has been up, but it sometimes falls and that sort of stuff.
1:54:03So, yeah, my guess is that the iPad is stabilized.
1:54:06I think that the iPad is going to settle in as a nine to 10 million, a quarter
1:54:13device in the same way that the Mac has long been a very very stable product
1:54:18where but it but it actually grown in a very nice but conservative way where in
1:54:26the old days you know like 10 15 years ago it was like a million max a quarter
1:54:32was the magic number good quarters were over a million and bad quarters were
1:54:36under a million and it's slowly but steadily grown to the point now where
1:54:41they're doing like three, four, four and a half million
1:54:44max a quarter.
1:54:45- More.
1:54:46- Is it more now?
1:54:47- Yeah, well I'm gonna pull out my spreadsheet here.
1:54:52So give me 10 seconds, but let's see,
1:54:55last quarter was 5.7.
1:54:59- There you go, I'm behind the times.
1:55:00So they've grown past five.
1:55:02- Which is I believe a record.
1:55:03- Right.
1:55:04- All time record.
1:55:06- You know, and I noticed though,
1:55:08I noticed just the other day,
1:55:09I saw a guy in Starbucks and he was working on an old,
1:55:14remember the white MacBooks?
1:55:16Remember the ones that you could either get white or black?
1:55:18And he was working on one of those.
1:55:19It was in beautiful shape.
1:55:21It was absolutely, it really was.
1:55:23It was totally clean and the screen looked great
1:55:27and he was working on like, I couldn't tell which app.
1:55:29It was either Excel or Numbers.
1:55:31It was clearly a spreadsheet.
1:55:32Doing work on it and it looked great.
1:55:35And so I had no surprise that he's still using it.
1:55:38But that's what normal people do
1:55:39is they buy a MacBook or a laptop
1:55:42and they use it until it breaks.
1:55:45- Hey, this is a 2009 iMac we're using.
1:55:47So we're chatting right now.
1:55:49- Right, and I feel like the iPad,
1:55:51my theory on the iPad is that it sold
1:55:55in these 20 million a quarter numbers
1:55:58because it was this sensational new thing
1:56:01that met a demand that no product had ever met before.
1:56:04And lots of people decided,
1:56:06hey, I could use one of those.
1:56:07And they weren't replacing anything.
1:56:09and they were adding it to their life.
1:56:11And so it was way out of proportion
1:56:13to what could be expected in a normal quarter.
1:56:16And that now it's settled in.
1:56:19And it settled in, I think, roughly like
1:56:21somewhere around two times the number of Macs they sell.
1:56:25And that that's the natural number of iPads
1:56:27to be sold a quarter.
1:56:28- Yep, and hey, I just bought an iPad too, off eBay,
1:56:32just to use as a screen.
1:56:34So the old ones have value too.
1:56:36- Yeah, and again, I don't think people get rid of them
1:56:38until they break.
1:56:39- No, I had to stop using my original iPad
1:56:42because it was still on, I think iOS 5.
1:56:44And the app we were using to watch TV on
1:56:49needed iOS 7, I think so.
1:56:52Got an iPad 2 and now I'm solved.
1:56:56- So I don't know.
1:56:59I think that the hyperventilating over this is ridiculous.
1:57:03I do think it's interesting though.
1:57:04It's interesting to say what does Apple do
1:57:07now that the iPhone has reached peak iPhone.
1:57:10- Right, and much like when they mess something small up
1:57:16with the product, people love to jump on it.
1:57:18So imagine the whole company collapsing,
1:57:23or not collapsing, but actually just not growing
1:57:26like crazy for a few quarters in a row.
1:57:30But yeah, what do they do?
1:57:31They've done a few things,
1:57:35and we'll see.
1:57:38- Well, and I think in terms of anybody
1:57:40who's looking for growth,
1:57:42I don't see how the watch could have done better
1:57:44in the first year.
1:57:45And honestly, I've given the numbers it's gotten.
1:57:47I think that they've sold outside the number,
1:57:49outside how well it deserves to have sold.
1:57:51I don't think it's that great of a 1.0 product,
1:57:53but it's actually remarkable that they're selling
1:57:56as many millions of them as it seems like they are.
1:57:59And I think that's great.
1:58:01And I think it's only gonna get better.
1:58:02And they do really, in the last few years,
1:58:05they've really, with every product since the iPad, they do an amazing job in the first
1:58:10two or three years of greatly improving the product. I mean the iPad went from the iPad
1:58:17to the iPad 2, which is way thinner. Then there was the iPad 3, which was weird because
1:58:22it went retina, but it got thicker and heavier, which was a weird sort of, now you have this
1:58:26awesome retina screen, but it's also thicker and heavier. And then ever since, from that
1:58:30point onward, it's just gotten crazily thinner and faster and lighter. So I expect the exact
1:58:35same trajectory with the watch, with a very aggressive annual schedule.
1:58:39Yeah, I'm excited. I've liked mine a lot more than I thought I would. But it's still a long
1:58:48way to get between now and 100 million units a year.
1:58:54One last thing I thought of from CES was that it sort of ties into the "What does Apple
1:58:58do now and it sort of ties into my thing about maybe they shouldn't have done apps on the
1:59:03watch was a, I think it was Dieter Bone for the Verge had an article about Tizen, which
1:59:07is Samsung's not Android, their own homegrown operating system and that maybe it's going
1:59:13to do okay even though it never, you know, nobody, there's no app developers, you know,
1:59:18targeting Tizen. And that's sort of the problem that windows exemplifies is that at best,
1:59:27usually there's just one dominant platform that developers write for.
1:59:31In the old days it used to be the Windows, then it became on the desktop,
1:59:36then it became the web. And nowadays it's split. People still develop
1:59:40for the web, but on mobile people develop for iOS and they develop for Android.
1:59:44And if you're trying to be the third, you're out of luck because there's just
1:59:49too much to ask. So Windows doesn't really get apps. And Tizen certainly
1:59:54gets less than Windows. But that maybe, you know, I guess what he was writing about was
1:59:59these Samsung watches that are running Tizen. And it occurs to me that as we move past the
2:00:05phone and get into these other devices, platforms going forward and operating systems, apps
2:00:11may not need to be a part of that. Like, and having your own operating system that you
2:00:16inside your company completely control and you can have your engineers optimize it, you
2:00:21You know, what you really want to work on is low energy consumption.
2:00:25Well, you can make that the highest priority because you have your own operating system.
2:00:31Or if you want to do like what Apple's done with Metal and make this, you know, incredibly
2:00:36custom and high performance graphics pipeline, you can do that and you can bake that into
2:00:42the operating system at whatever point where it makes the most sense for your desires because
2:00:46you control the operating system.
2:00:49I just think that a lot of these things going forward that are going to become computerized,
2:00:53they don't need apps.
2:00:54And therefore, it doesn't matter if Samsung can do a good watch and it runs Tizen, but
2:00:59there's no third-party apps for it, that may not matter at all.
2:01:02And where I'm going with this is, to me, the car might be the same thing, where what you
2:01:06want out of your computerized car has nothing to do with third-party apps.
2:01:10Right.
2:01:11I mean, so Tizen is also being used, I believe, in many of their televisions, as well as the
2:01:17new fridge with a tablet built into it and a bunch of this stuff.
2:01:21And, you know, you can laugh, but if every, if every gadget is eventually
2:01:25going to have a screen on it, um, you know, your washing machine or something
2:01:29and the value of the apps, the logic is mostly running in the cloud and, and
2:01:34what you're, um, interacting with is just, you know, either a notification
2:01:38or a, you know, just a button that basically says, run this, this app in
2:01:43the background or respond to a notification or something,
2:01:47then absolutely.
2:01:49It doesn't, you don't really need all the UI development
2:01:52or a separate app running on the device.
2:01:56- Did you see the summon feature for the Teslas?
2:02:02- You know, I feel dumb 'cause I actually had heard
2:02:06about that before but I didn't realize
2:02:08it hadn't been announced.
2:02:10Yeah, I saw that.
2:02:12It's cool.
2:02:12the type of stuff that I think that's this is the revolution that's coming to the car
2:02:16industry and it has nothing to do with apps, right? Like the fact that you can't get apps
2:02:20for your Tesla does not change anybody's desire to buy a Tesla at all in either direction.
2:02:26Whether you didn't want one before you do. The fact that it's not an app platform is
2:02:30irrelevant. It's the fact that the car can do it. Apps are just the wrong concept for
2:02:35a car. They really are. I mean, I know that there's certain things like maybe you would
2:02:39want something app-like for music,
2:02:42but it doesn't have to be apps.
2:02:43You just wanna get music in your car.
2:02:45And yep, so the summon feature is really cool.
2:02:48It's like you can, you tell your Tesla
2:02:52that you're ready to go to work,
2:02:53and the Tesla will like open the garage door,
2:02:57get outside, and be right there at the curb
2:03:01ready for you to get in and drive.
2:03:04And when you get home, you can just get out of the Tesla
2:03:07in front of your house and go in the front door,
2:03:08and Tesla will go through the nitpicky detail
2:03:12of carefully driving itself into your garage.
2:03:15- And like the crazy long-term thing they said was like,
2:03:19if you're in LA, your car will drive from New York
2:03:22and come pick you up or something like that.
2:03:23- Right, that's absolutely, yeah.
2:03:26Right, right now it's like limited to a very,
2:03:28very near proximity around your house or whatever,
2:03:31but that they've already got it in place,
2:03:34plans in place where you'll be able to do it
2:03:35from any distance where there's contiguous land access.
2:03:39So, you know, you can't make your car magically
2:03:40get itself to Hawaii, but you can.
2:03:42- Yet.
2:03:43- Yeah, but you can go LA to New York.
2:03:45- Yeah, I love this.
2:03:47I think that the concept of a car
2:03:54and of transport is really changing a lot.
2:03:57And yeah, I mean, it was funny because CES
2:04:01was literally the week before the biggest car show
2:04:05in the world, but it's there that a lot of these companies
2:04:08were making their big announcements
2:04:09because they're all trying to position themselves
2:04:12as technology companies now.
2:04:13And you know, some of them are gonna,
2:04:17what I love about Tesla is just that these ideas
2:04:21are so wacky, but then they just release a software update
2:04:25and they're there, like the self-driving mode.
2:04:27I don't think anyone the week before was like,
2:04:30"Oh, I wonder when my Tesla's gonna be able to drive itself."
2:04:33And then Elon Musk is like, "Here it is, boom."
2:04:36And I think they even have to dial it back now
2:04:38'cause it was like a little too crazy.
2:04:40I love it.
2:04:42- Did I mention this on the show?
2:04:45I forget if I did or not.
2:04:46I have such a terrible podcast amnesia,
2:04:48but that I got to ride in a self-driving Mercedes Benz.
2:04:52- Oh, cool.
2:04:53- And it was amazing.
2:04:54It's truly, truly amazing.
2:04:56Mercedes flew a bunch of, not a bunch,
2:04:59a small number of writers out.
2:05:01And I don't know why they picked me,
2:05:02but I didn't question it.
2:05:04- Where'd you go?
2:05:05- Sunnydale, Sunnyvale, Mountain View,
2:05:08somewhere out there, somewhere out,
2:05:10it's out in the valley, down the street from Yahoo.
2:05:12And got to ride in a self-driving S-Class.
2:05:17We went out on the highway and the car drove,
2:05:20did everything, it was amazing.
2:05:23And it works, it absolutely works.
2:05:25And it's not perfect yet, obviously,
2:05:28But if anything, all of the imperfections
2:05:30are on the side of being conservative.
2:05:32It is, it's a very heavy breaker.
2:05:35It breaks very, very aggressively.
2:05:36We were heading up like an on-ramp
2:05:39to get onto a highway and go high-speed driving.
2:05:42And it was later in the afternoon
2:05:44and we were heading right into the sun.
2:05:46And basically, just talking to their engineers,
2:05:50all of the things that make driving hard for humans
2:05:52are the exact same thing that make self-driving hard.
2:05:54If you have trouble seeing,
2:05:55the cameras on the car have trouble seeing as well.
2:05:57And it was really a lot of glare.
2:05:59And it braked going up the ramp because the glare was so bad
2:06:03that it couldn't really even see.
2:06:05It was like the status indicated was just like,
2:06:07can't tell what's ahead, therefore it's going to stop.
2:06:10And it was an unnatural thing
2:06:12that a human wouldn't have done.
2:06:14And a couple of other times,
2:06:16it broke a little bit too aggressively.
2:06:18But for the most part, I think you could easily,
2:06:20if you didn't tell somebody,
2:06:21I think you could, and blindfolded them,
2:06:23I think that you could easily,
2:06:25the cars they already have today
2:06:27could easily fool somebody in thinking
2:06:29that a human did the driving.
2:06:31- That's great.
2:06:33Yeah, that's gonna be awesome.
2:06:34- So one of the questions I asked them was,
2:06:37do they anticipate, and that they're obviously solving,
2:06:40they're solving really, really fascinating
2:06:43AI engineering problems, hardware, software, sensors,
2:06:47the braking systems and the software,
2:06:49of course, to drive all this,
2:06:50but they're also solving legislative
2:06:53and regulatory problems at the same time.
2:06:56And do they, like right now, I said,
2:06:59I could go buy a Mercedes Benz.
2:07:00Any Benz I drive off the lot, I can instantly go
2:07:03and greatly exceed any speed limit in the United States
2:07:07at my own discretion.
2:07:08Will I have that ability in a self-driving car?
2:07:11And I was told quite bluntly, no.
2:07:15There's almost no chance that it would be legal
2:07:17for them to make a self-driving car
2:07:19that'll exceed speed limits, which is kind of weird.
2:07:22And it's gonna drive the sort of libertarian mindset
2:07:25people I think a little nutty, but their explanation was, "But why do you want to drive faster
2:07:29now?" It's because you're bored. And if you're not paying attention to the road, if you're
2:07:36just reading or watching TV or whatever on your way to work, you're not going to care
2:07:40that it takes five minutes longer.
2:07:42Totally. And I think I also saw something similar with the Tesla thing where it's programmed
2:07:51that it could maybe go, I think, five miles over the limit or something like that based
2:07:54on where it is? I'm not sure, I may be making that up, but I thought I read something about
2:07:58that. And then of course, if you need to go faster, there's the flying car that they had
2:08:04at CES too, the scary quadcopter with a person in it. Did you see that?
2:08:11No, I did not.
2:08:12Oh yeah, that's the, it was like a human-sized drone.
2:08:15Oh God.
2:08:16So great, so we got that to look forward to.
2:08:20The one thing talking to people at Mercedes is they were very, they, you know, it's, they
2:08:27are very confident in their ability and that they are going to have world class self driving
2:08:31cars. I mean, I wrote in one that already was real, the real deal. Um, but they're talking,
2:08:37they, they, they divide this, the stages of self driving cars in like four levels and
2:08:42like level one is like the stuff that we already have. You can get on the market today where
2:08:46where you can set your car to maintain distance
2:08:49from the car in front of it.
2:08:50And that Tesla has a feature where you can turn on a thing
2:08:54and it'll do the highway driving for you.
2:08:57But part of stage one is that stage one means
2:09:02you still have a human driver who is expected
2:09:06to be able to take over the control of the car in an instant,
2:09:09like hands ready to take over at all times.
2:09:13And that's where the industry is today
2:09:15in terms of what's on the market,
2:09:17and that they were absolutely,
2:09:18it was like they considered it almost seemingly,
2:09:21this wasn't what they said,
2:09:22but reading between the lines,
2:09:23it seemed like they were angry,
2:09:25and it was like a setback to the industry
2:09:28that when Tesla first made this feature available,
2:09:30that jackasses were setting up GoPros
2:09:32and showing themselves reading the newspaper
2:09:35while their car drove.
2:09:36There was a guy who got in the backseat of his Tesla
2:09:39while it was on a highway in California.
2:09:43And that it's so, that's not, that's not,
2:09:46you're not supposed to do that.
2:09:48And somebody's gonna do that in a disaster,
2:09:51you know, they're gonna have a catastrophic accident
2:09:53because of it and it's going to, you know,
2:09:56the fear is it's gonna make people say,
2:09:58we should ban self-driving cars
2:10:00before they even get a chance to do it.
2:10:03Who would do that?
2:10:07What kind of a-- - Yeah.
2:10:09- And it really is funny.
2:10:10It's like, it's just like some random Yahoo
2:10:13with a Tesla is gonna ruin this for everybody.
2:10:16- Yeah, I think if you go on YouTube
2:10:18and search like Tesla fail,
2:10:19you'll find some people who were very surprised
2:10:23by what they were recording.
2:10:25But yeah, I mean, it's interesting.
2:10:29And I'm sure we've seen other tech example.
2:10:33I mean, it's not too dissimilar
2:10:35from what we're seeing with Airbnb and Uber,
2:10:38where there's the company that wants to
2:10:42kind of skirt the way that things have always been
2:10:43and then reality which will fit somewhere in the middle.
2:10:47- I just think bottom line for Apple is that
2:10:49until they get to their car comes out,
2:10:51which is even if everything goes swimmingly,
2:10:53it's gonna be 2020, 21 or something like that.
2:10:56I think, I don't see how they can get it out before 2020.
2:11:02But who knows?
2:11:02But even if I'm wrong,
2:11:04it's not gonna be that much earlier.
2:11:06Until then, I don't see how they can do anything
2:11:08to create like a totally grossly inflate
2:11:13the revenue of the company, right?
2:11:17Like watches and other things that they could do
2:11:20in the interim.
2:11:20The watch is a good business, but like you said,
2:11:22like a billion here and a billion there
2:11:24doesn't move the line for Apple very much.
2:11:26- Right, unless it's the kind of thing
2:11:28where almost everyone within iPhone gets one too,
2:11:32but then it's still smaller than the iPhone.
2:11:34It's still, it's basically accessory level.
2:11:37- But I think that the Wall Street's desire
2:11:39for Apple to do that is just magical thinking.
2:11:42And I think it's good as somebody who wants the company
2:11:45to continue doing good work.
2:11:47It's good that they're, by all appearances,
2:11:50are not obsessed with finding another iPhone.
2:11:54I think that they knew going into it
2:11:55that the watch was not going to be like the iPhone,
2:11:57and they did it anyway.
2:11:59And I think that's as it should be.
2:12:00I think the phone is like a once in a generation opportunity.
2:12:05- Yeah, I don't think anything can be like the iPhone,
2:12:08at least in the next, you know,
2:12:10at least knowing what we know today about the world,
2:12:14I don't think there's gonna be another product
2:12:16that is like the iPhone for Apple.
2:12:18- Right, it's just a perfect storm of everything.
2:12:22It's this device that everybody wants one
2:12:25and that they have engineering advantages.
2:12:28- Just couldn't be-- - And the price is hidden,
2:12:32all that stuff. - Right, right, right.
2:12:34that nobody even knows what they're really paying for it.
2:12:36And they just, the industry just keeps finding new ways
2:12:39to further obfuscate just how much you're paying.
2:12:42- Yeah.
2:12:43(laughing)
2:12:44- I love it when you tell somebody that,
2:12:45like if you just buy a no contract iPhone,
2:12:48that it's, you know, eight or nine hundred dollars,
2:12:49and they're like, well I would never pay that.
2:12:51But yet, they have an iPhone.
2:12:53It's like, trust me, you're paying it.
2:12:56Anything else?
2:13:00- That's good, I think.
2:13:01- All right, Dan Fromer at Quartz,
2:13:03That's qz.com.
2:13:04I'll make sure to throw in a couple links
2:13:07to your CES stuff.
2:13:08- I didn't do much, so I'll send you what I did.
2:13:12But, which was nice.
2:13:15- Well, it's always good talking to you.
2:13:17- Yep, From Dome on Twitter.
2:13:18- From Dome on Twitter.
2:13:19And citynotes.co.