The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► So guy Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays Merry Christmas, this is the holiday special the

00:00:09 ◼   ► holiday the first annual during or not during fireball because it would be the talk show

00:00:13 ◼   ► slash during fireball level up during fireball sponsored holiday spectacular. We're gonna

00:00:21 ◼   ► have we got guy English here for the first segment. We've got Marco Arment who's going

00:00:26 ◼   ► to do a – he's going to do a couple of Christmas carols.

00:00:30 ◼   ► We have John Siracusa coming on later to do a reading of The Night Before Christmas.

00:00:35 ◼   ► He's going to correct Marcus Carolling too.

00:00:38 ◼   ► Right.

00:00:39 ◼   ► We've got John Moltz is going to come out with his family recipe for eggnog.

00:00:43 ◼   ► He's going to tell everybody how to make it.

00:00:47 ◼   ► All this and more.

00:00:48 ◼   ► A lot of songs, a lot of dancing.

00:00:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:00:51 ◼   ► I'm looking forward to the Scott Simpson dance number.

00:00:54 ◼   ► Dance number over radio is…

00:00:55 ◼   ► See now I did not hear what he, I know he's coming on.

00:00:58 ◼   ► Uh huh, I ruined it for you.

00:00:59 ◼   ► Well, see that was it.

00:01:00 ◼   ► It was going to be a big surprise.

00:01:01 ◼   ► Well, that's alright.

00:01:02 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:01:03 ◼   ► I can't wait to see the costume.

00:01:05 ◼   ► Haha.

00:01:06 ◼   ► Yeah, right.

00:01:07 ◼   ► Funny man.

00:01:08 ◼   ► You know, he should, when he fills out his taxes, that's what he should fill in.

00:01:10 ◼   ► You know, because they have to, I don't know what you do up in Canada, but here you have

00:01:13 ◼   ► to put like an occupation.

00:01:14 ◼   ► I think he should just put funny man.

00:01:16 ◼   ► Yeah, makes sense.

00:01:19 ◼   ► I wonder what he does put.

00:01:20 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:01:21 ◼   ► Well, we'll ask him at the top of the show.

00:01:25 ◼   ► My accountant used to always... I swear to God, over the last 12, 13 years, my accountant

00:01:31 ◼   ► and I have spent more time trying to figure out what to put on in that field than anything

00:01:36 ◼   ► else.

00:01:37 ◼   ► What do you put? Writer?

00:01:38 ◼   ► Publisher? I forget. I don't know. He figured something out. He seemed to think it mattered

00:01:43 ◼   ► because you want it to look legitimate. It's not like a legal thing. I guess legally, you

00:01:49 ◼   ► could put anything because legally, you're allowed to be anything. You could be a clown.

00:01:55 ◼   ► But, you know, you want it to look...

00:01:58 ◼   ► It's not like whatever you put limits the kinds of things you can claim?

00:02:03 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:02:04 ◼   ► Okay.

00:02:05 ◼   ► So this Christmas Spectacular started off pretty awesome talking about taxes.

00:02:10 ◼   ► Taxes in accounting.

00:02:12 ◼   ► That would be a good idea.

00:02:14 ◼   ► You know, that would actually probably be pretty smart if you just call it every year

00:02:17 ◼   ► if you did your taxes at Christmas just to get a jump on them.

00:02:21 ◼   ► Really put you in the holiday spirit.

00:02:24 ◼   ► The only other question I have before we get into the week in nerdery is I just want to

00:02:30 ◼   ► make sure because we're recording this now in the evening of December 23rd.

00:02:34 ◼   ► When is Canadian Christmas?

00:02:37 ◼   ► January 3rd.

00:02:39 ◼   ► All right.

00:02:40 ◼   ► So we're not too far off.

00:02:41 ◼   ► No.

00:02:42 ◼   ► All right.

00:02:43 ◼   ► Well, do you guys do – so Amy's got the Greek background stuff, right?

00:02:48 ◼   ► Is it like – do you do it on Christmas Eve like the 24th?

00:02:53 ◼   ► No.

00:02:54 ◼   ► Okay.

00:02:55 ◼   ► Well, Greek Easter is more of a thing.

00:02:56 ◼   ► Greek Easter actually is a different day.

00:02:59 ◼   ► Christmas I don't think is...

00:03:01 ◼   ► It's all the same thing, right?

00:03:03 ◼   ► So like Greek Orthodox Church doesn't do anything different?

00:03:06 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:03:07 ◼   ► Maybe.

00:03:08 ◼   ► It's not a big deal, I guess.

00:03:10 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:03:11 ◼   ► Because here are like a lot of like the Francophone populations celebrates on Christmas Eve.

00:03:17 ◼   ► They celebrate or you mean like they celebrate religiously?

00:03:19 ◼   ► Well, they open all the presents.

00:03:20 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:03:21 ◼   ► They open all the presents.

00:03:22 ◼   ► like that Christmas Eve is the big one for them hmm yeah Midnight Mass is a big

00:03:27 ◼   ► thing I grew up Catholic that was a big thing yeah but we didn't do presents

00:03:31 ◼   ► yeah I know we I mean you know we had the typical Anglo British thing where

00:03:37 ◼   ► you open the presents in the morning like you come down the stairs and you

00:03:39 ◼   ► open the presents yeah but Midnight Mass is pretty cool you know honestly my

00:03:45 ◼   ► thought growing up the whole time was going to church stunk anyway but if

00:03:49 ◼   ► going to have to go to church. Get it out of the way the night before and then you don't have to

00:03:54 ◼   ► go on Christmas. Like the worst to me was the times that we did go on Christmas morning. It's like,

00:03:58 ◼   ► here's everything you wanted and here's an amazing pile of like toys and video games. Okay,

00:04:04 ◼   ► go get dressed up. Let's go to church. That is the worst. Right. If you think about it,

00:04:09 ◼   ► it's torturous. I mean, what would be worse? And if anything, and I know, you know, it'd be a hard

00:04:14 ◼   ► sell on, you know, an eight, nine, ten-year-old kid. But it would be better to just make them

00:04:19 ◼   ► get up and go to church first. Just leave the toys and presents there. And I mean, I

00:04:25 ◼   ► don't know. Maybe I'm underestimating how hard it would be to drag a kid out. But it

00:04:29 ◼   ► was pretty hard to drag them out once they were opened up, too.

00:04:32 ◼   ► Oh, for sure. Plus, Midnight Mass is good because as a kid, you're like, "Midnight

00:04:36 ◼   ► is pretty special and awesome, man."

00:04:39 ◼   ► Yeah. Actually, as a kid, it actually makes you feel like you're, you know, it's about

00:04:41 ◼   ► as close as you can get, you know, going to church to feeling like a badass.

00:04:46 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:04:46 ◼   ► >> Chris I go, "I wear church, but it's pretty badass. It's midnight."

00:04:51 ◼   ► Jon I remember thinking it was pretty cool that I got to stay up,

00:04:55 ◼   ► but I remember thinking that it was amazing that the priests were still up. Because I

00:04:58 ◼   ► just always imagined that priests, you know, were the type of people who go to bed around sundown.

00:05:02 ◼   ► Chris Yeah. Well, you never know. They could be getting into the Holy Spirit there.

00:05:08 ◼   ► Jon Yeah.

00:05:08 ◼   ► I'm trying to come up with a name for wine, and that's how out of my Catholic roots I am.

00:05:13 ◼   ► What do they call the wine? It's the blood of Christ, right? There's the Eucharist.

00:05:21 ◼   ► No, I think they have a lot of names for it.

00:05:23 ◼   ► It's a bit of a cop-out, but okay.

00:05:26 ◼   ► We're going to get in a lot of trouble for this one.

00:05:29 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:05:31 ◼   ► Speaking of a lot of trouble, here's the first thing I wanted to talk to you about. So, just

00:05:37 ◼   ► the other day I guess it was the beginning of the weekend this this

00:05:40 ◼   ► Justine Sacco Justine Sacco thing yeah yeah where Amy and I were out we were

00:05:46 ◼   ► out for the evening we had a little little date night we were now and I was

00:05:52 ◼   ► I was like she went to the restroom so I quick check Twitter and it was clear

00:05:55 ◼   ► that that was the first time it was late at night Friday in the East Coast and

00:05:59 ◼   ► there was this this hashtag it was people who I follow using it this has

00:06:03 ◼   ► Justine landed. Hashtag. Did you follow this? Yeah, yeah I did. I mean, long story short,

00:06:10 ◼   ► I mean probably everybody listed because this thing blew up like it's like crazy how big

00:06:16 ◼   ► it blew up. Yeah it's not just Twitter it's like actual news. Right like front page of

00:06:21 ◼   ► CNN etc etc but long story short she's a PR executive at IAC which is Barry Diller's company.

00:06:29 ◼   ► She was I guess she's from South Africa she's probably going home for the holidays she was

00:06:33 ◼   ► was flying from London to South Africa a 12-hour flight and before she got on the

00:06:37 ◼   ► flight she tweeted what she say here I'm going to go into Africa hope I don't get

00:06:47 ◼   ► AIDS just kidding I'm white and obviously offensive or inappropriate

00:06:58 ◼   ► insensitive I think is the word I would use but before we get to that what

00:07:02 ◼   ► What happened then is somehow, and she only has like 200 followers, she's not, or at least

00:07:07 ◼   ► at the time did, was not super well known on Twitter, certainly didn't expect more than

00:07:12 ◼   ► a couple hundred people to see the tweet.

00:07:16 ◼   ► And somehow, I don't know if it was the guy at Buzzfeed or one of these other sites, but

00:07:20 ◼   ► somebody found it and posted it.

00:07:23 ◼   ► Now, this is somebody with like 100,000 followers said, "This might be the worst tweet ever

00:07:28 ◼   ► written," and retweeted it or whatever.

00:07:31 ◼   ► then it got picked up elsewhere and then there was this hashtag has just teen landed yet

00:07:36 ◼   ► because this whole thing took place while she was on a 12 hour flight with no internet

00:07:42 ◼   ► which I to me is like is is in separate you know I the whole thing I think would play

00:07:48 ◼   ► out separately otherwise and so she gets off the plane probably even forgotten she'd posted

00:07:54 ◼   ► the tweet and it's like she's like front page news at CNN and she's fired.

00:08:01 ◼   ► Yeah. I don't know what to say about it. I mean, because again, it's a pretty delicate

00:08:08 ◼   ► thing to talk about. You don't want to…

00:08:11 ◼   ► Well I don't want to excuse the tweet, but I don't want to say that I think it was

00:08:14 ◼   ► funny. But I also think it is pretty clear if you think about it and you do any research

00:08:18 ◼   ► into the woman at all that she did not mean it in a way that obviously that it could be

00:08:24 ◼   ► this surface misinterpreted as that she's somehow taking delight in the fact

00:08:28 ◼   ► that AIDS in Africa is the epidemic that's going on there is largely a

00:08:35 ◼   ► problem of non-whites yes yeah it's well there's two first of all not a very

00:08:46 ◼   ► well-written joke right second absolutely cracking jokes about AIDS is

00:08:51 ◼   ► total third rail and so is race. So I don't know, you're juggling hand grenades at this

00:08:58 ◼   ► point poorly.

00:08:59 ◼   ► Right. You know, and somebody, there was somebody who was more or less defending her. Not defending

00:09:05 ◼   ► her and saying, "Hey, this was fine," but, "Hey, this was not somebody, you know, jumping

00:09:10 ◼   ► on the graves of AIDS victims in Africa. This is somebody who is trying to make like a joke

00:09:16 ◼   ► from the liberal perspective." And more...

00:09:19 ◼   ► I think it's almost that like it's one of those sad jokes where it's like, "Oh, isn't

00:09:26 ◼   ► it crazy that it disproportionately affects black people rather than white affluent people

00:09:32 ◼   ► in South Africa?"

00:09:33 ◼   ► Right.

00:09:34 ◼   ► And somebody's example was, "Well, what if somebody who was a well-known white liberal

00:09:39 ◼   ► had posted, 'I'm off to Florida.

00:09:42 ◼   ► Hope I don't get shot.

00:09:44 ◼   ► Just kidding.

00:09:45 ◼   ► I'm white.'"

00:09:46 ◼   ► Everybody – now, people might be offended.

00:09:47 ◼   ► People might – a lot of people.

00:09:49 ◼   ► Most people would think that's not funny

00:09:51 ◼   ► but if the person was known, you know not to be the opposite of a racist to be a

00:09:56 ◼   ► liberal who sort of takes you know

00:09:59 ◼   ► Crusades against racism you would at least understand that that they're trying to make a joke about the fact that

00:10:05 ◼   ► Gun violence

00:10:09 ◼   ► Disproportionately affects black people especially in some states like Florida

00:10:13 ◼   ► Yeah, and that is clearly the angle that she was trying to take and and the thing is I think so

00:10:19 ◼   ► Yeah

00:10:19 ◼   ► Whatever chance she might have had to defend herself or to delete the tweet if she had not been on the airplane and realize oh

00:10:25 ◼   ► People are taking this the wrong way

00:10:26 ◼   ► It all got lost because she was on this 12-hour flight and everybody realized and not it maybe not everybody but

00:10:32 ◼   ► Literally hundreds of thousands of people retweeting this hashtag

00:10:36 ◼   ► Knew that, you know found out. Hey this woman got on an airplane in London after tweeting this insensitive thing

00:10:43 ◼   ► Wow, is she gonna be surprised when she got off and it really was like a very the Twitter equivalent of a lynch mob

00:10:51 ◼   ► which I say knowing that lynch mobs carry a racial overtone, but

00:10:55 ◼   ► But I don't know how else to describe it, you know, that's some kind of weird. Yeah, definitely got everybody frothing at the mouth

00:11:03 ◼   ► Even I mean just what was the hashtag has Justine landed yet? Yeah, like it's implicit in that hashtag that

00:11:10 ◼   ► She has no way of defending herself or even know what's going on

00:11:13 ◼   ► It was like that's what people were somehow taking delight in that, you know, there's this, you know, unbelievable

00:11:20 ◼   ► Outrage, you know, it was like the number one hashtag on Twitter and it's all about this one woman and she has no idea

00:11:28 ◼   ► And she didn't you know and there were like people there waiting people who figured out what flight she was on

00:11:33 ◼   ► You know a couple yeah, there was a flight tracker, right? And there were people right? There was a flight tracker

00:11:38 ◼   ► People were following it. There were people who showed up at the airport to take her picture and stuff

00:11:43 ◼   ► And to me it's it's real, you know, again, I'm not defending the tweet I'm not saying

00:11:50 ◼   ► No, it's a shitty tweet, but it jokes about any of those is bad, right?

00:11:55 ◼   ► But you can only get away with it with a crap load of context

00:11:58 ◼   ► Not just about I mean so the Florida one

00:12:04 ◼   ► Not that funny frankly, but you've got you know, you got the Trayvon Martin thing. You've got it stand your ground

00:12:10 ◼   ► There's been it's there's so much news around like surrounding that issue right now that you can kind of

00:12:16 ◼   ► Quip that joke and people have context for it. This is

00:12:22 ◼   ► Context free as far as most of the world is concerned, you know, yeah, and you know and somebody who is

00:12:29 ◼   ► Known like somebody who's a professional comedian or known for telling

00:12:34 ◼   ► Insensitive jokes like I don't know off the top my head like Daniel Tosh could probably get away with the exact same joke

00:12:40 ◼   ► Simply because everybody's braced for the fact that he this is what he does. He tells

00:12:46 ◼   ► Really it jokes that really make you like sucking air through your teeth like ooh. Yeah

00:12:52 ◼   ► You know where she's just you know, she's you know, not a comedian she's you know, just a

00:12:59 ◼   ► corporate executive. But it's this, I don't know, it was the delight that the

00:13:05 ◼   ► crowd of people, you know, literally thousands of people every hour or minute

00:13:11 ◼   ► even, retweeting this hashtag that really I found worrisome. Because I don't think,

00:13:17 ◼   ► and I think people knew she was going to get fired, you know, I think it was pretty

00:13:20 ◼   ► clear. And that's a separate topic, I guess, is what her employer should have

00:13:26 ◼   ► have done.

00:13:27 ◼   ► Well, yeah, I want to talk about that after because…

00:13:30 ◼   ► But I really found it worrisome how people, you know, like…

00:13:33 ◼   ► Well, it's like sharks, you know.

00:13:35 ◼   ► You chum the water and it's like this gleeful, you've got 12 hours to just kind of dig

00:13:41 ◼   ► in and tear everything apart without having her be able to respond and ruin your fun in

00:13:49 ◼   ► any way.

00:13:50 ◼   ► And I think a lot of it is like was meta level, right?

00:13:53 ◼   ► people were like, "Oh my god, I can't believe what's gonna happen to her when she lands."

00:13:56 ◼   ► Right.

00:13:57 ◼   ► And that was the joke.

00:13:58 ◼   ► Like, I'm not sure...

00:14:03 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:14:04 ◼   ► It seems like you could do some kind of study to figure out...

00:14:07 ◼   ► If she'd been on...

00:14:08 ◼   ► If the...

00:14:09 ◼   ► Sorry.

00:14:10 ◼   ► If the...

00:14:11 ◼   ► If most of the Twitter stuff was about outrage about her joke or sort of leaf on this in

00:14:19 ◼   ► her predicament.

00:14:20 ◼   ► I think...

00:14:21 ◼   ► See, I think it's the latter.

00:14:22 ◼   ► I really do think it's the latter and I almost feel like that's what got it picked out by the guy at Buzzfeed who decided to make it because it's sort of like this sixth sense that some of these people have about what can make of a...

00:14:38 ◼   ► I hate to even say it... a viral meme. But it's that combination of the fact that on the surface the tweet is very offensive. Obviously so.

00:14:50 ◼   ► I don't particularly blame the BuzzFeed guy for...

00:14:54 ◼   ► I kind of do.

00:14:55 ◼   ► I mean, I'm not a fan of that kind of...

00:14:57 ◼   ► I don't want to call it journalism, but whatever it is that they call it, entertainment.

00:15:03 ◼   ► I kind of do because I feel like he probably knew as he did it that he was ending her career.

00:15:11 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess so.

00:15:14 ◼   ► Or at the very least...

00:15:15 ◼   ► Well, her career is a long time.

00:15:17 ◼   ► I think she's like 33 years old.

00:15:19 ◼   ► career might be over selling it but you know I don't know I hopefully like it

00:15:28 ◼   ► most things internet this will blow over in a couple of weeks and everybody's

00:15:32 ◼   ► gonna forget so do you think she should have got fired for this I I do not you

00:15:39 ◼   ► know I think she should have got fired before she even landed right at the very

00:15:44 ◼   ► least I think that I think that I see the company she worked for should have

00:15:50 ◼   ► been able to put a statement out immediately that you know that they

00:15:55 ◼   ► don't agree with it and she's not speaking for the company but you know

00:15:58 ◼   ► that there's you know they're not it can't deal with this until they've

00:16:02 ◼   ► spoken to her I don't know though I mean it because it seemed like it it exploded

00:16:09 ◼   ► like it was like explosively in the public consciousness you know that

00:16:17 ◼   ► somehow it shot to the top of this like you know every news site was writing

00:16:24 ◼   ► about it I mean I really do think most of this stuff like it had like peaked

00:16:28 ◼   ► in in I don't know what the awareness are or buzz I mean not to overuse that

00:16:36 ◼   ► that word but it was like the the buzz was peaked before her plane landed like

00:16:41 ◼   ► it had gotten so big so fast I don't know that you know that the standard

00:16:46 ◼   ► rules of PR apply I don't know right well I mean you know I think it was also

00:16:54 ◼   ► primed by the the duck dynasty stuff that had gone on earlier the week right

00:16:58 ◼   ► I I can't help but think that that didn't help yeah yeah that it somehow

00:17:04 ◼   ► had gotten people's attention turned to white people saying offensive things

00:17:12 ◼   ► about honky-tonk you say the darndest things right exactly

00:17:16 ◼   ► although I guess half of what he said that was you know it really got him in

00:17:21 ◼   ► public it wasn't just about stuff he said about black people but about gay

00:17:26 ◼   ► people yeah a man at least yeah he went old school bigotry right he basically

00:17:32 ◼   ► But yeah, he had the full suitcase there.

00:17:36 ◼   ► But yeah, I don't think that that helped at all.

00:17:38 ◼   ► I'm still looking at this tweet.

00:17:43 ◼   ► This is not a funny joke.

00:17:44 ◼   ► No.

00:17:45 ◼   ► You can kind of see, like, there's

00:17:47 ◼   ► a scaffolding of what she's trying to do,

00:17:49 ◼   ► and it just totally doesn't--

00:17:50 ◼   ► Right.

00:17:51 ◼   ► But I do think, though, that there's really only two ways

00:17:54 ◼   ► that you--

00:17:54 ◼   ► again, not to defend it.

00:17:56 ◼   ► It was really, really poorly considered,

00:17:57 ◼   ► and you really should--

00:17:58 ◼   ► it's one of those things where I really

00:18:01 ◼   ► hate to say that there are things you can't joke about but there are things

00:18:05 ◼   ► that you should be so hesitant to joke about that yeah leave it leave it to the

00:18:09 ◼   ► pros at the very least right that it's effectively rounds off to never right

00:18:15 ◼   ► right it's 99.9 something percent of jokes yeah you know I make a great joke

00:18:21 ◼   ► on Twitter right well don't do it anyway but don't you know just right yeah but

00:18:27 ◼   ► But it's, you know, well, but it's somehow, it's different though.

00:18:33 ◼   ► It is different to make a joke on Twitter than to make it verbally.

00:18:36 ◼   ► And it's probably true that any joke that you shouldn't make in one place, you shouldn't

00:18:39 ◼   ► make in the other.

00:18:40 ◼   ► But it's, you know, it's more dangerous to make it somewhere where there's a written

00:18:45 ◼   ► record of it.

00:18:46 ◼   ► Well, do you find the record is the thing?

00:18:49 ◼   ► I find it more like…

00:18:50 ◼   ► And it's also the case that it can be, it's easier when it's just a string of…

00:18:57 ◼   ► gets back to the all these arguments about the internet in general dating

00:19:00 ◼   ► back to you know people first got online and started using smiley you know colon

00:19:05 ◼   ► you know that parentheses because it's just as not right people needed to know

00:19:11 ◼   ► when you're joking or some people do and some people really just don't you know

00:19:17 ◼   ► some people pick it up less than others and it's also true even people who might

00:19:22 ◼   ► pick it up in their native language everybody who who's you know it speaks

00:19:27 ◼   ► more than one language has trouble picking up on the subtleties of humor in

00:19:31 ◼   ► their second third fourth languages so for anybody who's not a native English

00:19:35 ◼   ► speaker any hope of interpreting something like that as a joke is a lot

00:19:39 ◼   ► more difficult that said I don't think a smiley at the end of this would know

00:19:43 ◼   ► what I do although I do think that was the purpose of the exclamation mark you

00:19:49 ◼   ► know, an exclamation mark is sort of a more formal smiley. Yeah, yeah, you know,

00:19:55 ◼   ► yeah, like I read this and I don't see this as a, like a white supremacy thing.

00:20:00 ◼   ► I see more of it like this is a depressing reality thing. Right. There's only two

00:20:06 ◼   ► ways, you know, and maybe there's a lot of people who did see it that way and

00:20:10 ◼   ► who didn't see it as, again, like you said, like a white supremacy thing, who did

00:20:15 ◼   ► instantly recognize it as you know as something else but who did then think

00:20:21 ◼   ► that it was making light of the situation and arguably that's exactly

00:20:24 ◼   ► what is genuinely that's what's genuinely offensive about it not that

00:20:29 ◼   ► it's racist but that it's making light of an incredibly seriously grave

00:20:35 ◼   ► situation you know yeah fact any millions and millions of people yeah I

00:20:42 ◼   ► I mean, especially in Africa.

00:20:44 ◼   ► Well, first of all, it's super widespread.

00:20:46 ◼   ► Second of all, while we have drugs in the West now

00:20:52 ◼   ► that can kind of manage HIV at least,

00:20:57 ◼   ► way too expensive in Africa.

00:21:01 ◼   ► There's no managing that disease.

00:21:02 ◼   ► It's ravaging, and it's horrible, and it's--

00:21:06 ◼   ► oh, man, it just affects giant sections of the population.

00:21:09 ◼   ► And it seems almost, it's like one of those catch-22

00:21:13 ◼   ► intractable situations where as devastating

00:21:16 ◼   ► and as epidemic and tragic as AIDS was in the West,

00:21:21 ◼   ► you know, in the US and in Europe,

00:21:25 ◼   ► that it's worse in Africa because they're not equipped

00:21:29 ◼   ► to deal with it in terms of education,

00:21:32 ◼   ► in terms of the medical infrastructure,

00:21:34 ◼   ► and in terms of societal norms where there's huge problems,

00:21:37 ◼   ► You know, like in the US and in Western Europe, a lot of it was helped with a campaign to,

00:21:43 ◼   ► you know, increase condom usage.

00:21:44 ◼   ► Again, I don't want to get all serious here and turn this into an AIDS podcast, but it

00:21:48 ◼   ► really, you know, but it's, you know, and there's – and that's relatively simple

00:21:53 ◼   ► and cost-effective.

00:21:54 ◼   ► I mean, you know, condoms are –

00:21:55 ◼   ► Dr. Justin Marchegiani Sure.

00:21:56 ◼   ► I mean, one of the reasons it got so bad in the West was that it was stigmatized as a

00:22:01 ◼   ► basically a gay man's disease.

00:22:02 ◼   ► Dave Korsuns Right.

00:22:03 ◼   ► Dr. Justin Marchegiani Effectively what?

00:22:04 ◼   ► Early 80s.

00:22:05 ◼   ► People were calling it the gay cancer.

00:22:06 ◼   ► I don't really understand it. Once, you know, people got their head out of the sand and

00:22:13 ◼   ► actually started realizing just how horrible this thing was and that it affected not just,

00:22:20 ◼   ► you know, some kind of subculture that you could dismiss. Subculture is the wrong word.

00:22:27 ◼   ► I'm going to screw this up, I'm sorry, I'm talking about sensitive issues and I'm sure

00:22:31 ◼   ► I'm going to offend someone.

00:22:32 ◼   ► Well, let's say a minority culture.

00:22:34 ◼   ► Right. Yeah, a stigmatized group, subgroup, basically. But once people got over that,

00:22:40 ◼   ► yeah, condom usage, you know, just STD awareness, that kind of thing.

00:22:45 ◼   ► All sorts of problems in Africa where there's, you know, enormous cultural

00:22:50 ◼   ► resistance to the use of condoms at all, you know, and then just go from there. And it just is,

00:22:57 ◼   ► you know, it truly is. I mean, the whole Project Red campaign is, you know, is about raising

00:23:02 ◼   ► awareness and trying to help the situation.

00:23:06 ◼   ► I guess it kind of ties into all of our mutual interests because Apple has participated in

00:23:12 ◼   ► the Project Red stuff for a long time with various iPods and special editions and stuff

00:23:17 ◼   ► like that.

00:23:19 ◼   ► Benji Farrar So what outcome would you have liked to have

00:23:25 ◼   ► seen?

00:23:26 ◼   ► Like, you know, given Perfect Good World, I guess somebody would have rated the tweet

00:23:31 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know. I guess somehow for it never to...

00:23:37 ◼   ► Well, saying "never taken off" is not right, because she did write it, and so some sort of...

00:23:42 ◼   ► If you write something like that, it's facing some sort of...

00:23:45 ◼   ► Feedback is...

00:23:46 ◼   ► Exactly. But that... I don't know. I wish somehow... I do. I don't know.

00:23:53 ◼   ► I just don't feel like it's right that she lost her job, or that lost her job automatically.

00:23:58 ◼   ► Dramatically, you know like had no chance to defend herself

00:24:01 ◼   ► Yeah, like, you know, everybody should have a chance to defend themselves

00:24:05 ◼   ► I think you know, I feel the same way about the the duck dynasty guy that got booted off a nae

00:24:09 ◼   ► Yeah, I wonder about that really don't I really don't like that guy I don't the other hand he's paid to that's what he's paid

00:24:19 ◼   ► to do right

00:24:20 ◼   ► It's like you put a bunch of dudes

00:24:22 ◼   ► Like that and to entertain you and you ask them a question like that. Well, that's the

00:24:27 ◼   ► It's part of the reality show concede right is that they say crazy stuff. I

00:24:31 ◼   ► Certainly didn't agree with any of the things that were deemed controversial about his interview

00:24:38 ◼   ► I mean, I disagree with all of them and think you know, some of them are just factually factually wrong

00:24:43 ◼   ► But yes, I didn't think anything he said was

00:24:46 ◼   ► sensational or

00:24:48 ◼   ► Hateful, you know, I think it's it's you know

00:24:51 ◼   ► Close my mouth. It's pretty hateful

00:24:55 ◼   ► Maybe it's I mean, there's no in he's not inciting anybody to take action. All right, but it's just it's

00:25:01 ◼   ► Certainly hateful in terms of its close-mindedness, right? Right? Well

00:25:05 ◼   ► Maybe hates the wrong word though. I don't know maybe I'm always a little careful to use the word hate. Yeah

00:25:11 ◼   ► Get so fused. I

00:25:14 ◼   ► Hate this ice cream. Well, you know, yeah

00:25:19 ◼   ► But I did in and I'd never seen the show, you know, it's I guess I'd heard of it

00:25:25 ◼   ► But I didn't even know what it was about and then ends up I guess there's literally you know

00:25:29 ◼   ► Like ducks on the show. I thought the family name. I thought they were like the duck family or something. I

00:25:34 ◼   ► Really did. I don't know. It's a duck dynasty. I just figured it was a bunch of hillbilly

00:25:38 ◼   ► You know, what's funny is the only reason that came to my mind

00:25:40 ◼   ► Originally was weeks ago when the baseball playoffs were on and there were all sorts of people

00:25:46 ◼   ► making fun of the Red Sox for their ugly beards and

00:25:49 ◼   ► People were saying they look like the guys from Duck Dynasty and I'm a that was the first I'd ever even heard of the show

00:25:55 ◼   ► I was like, oh it's a show about a bunch of

00:25:57 ◼   ► You know bearded

00:26:00 ◼   ► hillbillies in Louisiana

00:26:02 ◼   ► And that's all I knew about it until this I don't know anything about it

00:26:05 ◼   ► I did know that up until recently

00:26:08 ◼   ► Like the new season was out and Apple had it all over their Apple TV interface like with one of those nice

00:26:15 ◼   ► Bumble banners. Oh, really? Yeah, they might have pulled it. I don't know. I haven't looked. Yeah, but it might have just come out of rotation

00:26:20 ◼   ► I know I don't want to read too much into the tea leaves of that

00:26:23 ◼   ► But anyway, the thing is I alright so I haven't watched the show so I could be far off base

00:26:31 ◼   ► But my understanding reading up on this is that anybody who does watch the show wasn't the least bit surprised

00:26:37 ◼   ► By a single thing that he said that got him into trouble this week

00:26:42 ◼   ► It doesn't seem...

00:26:44 ◼   ► It's kind of my understanding. Like, I know they're very devout.

00:26:47 ◼   ► Right.

00:26:49 ◼   ► Which is intentionally, let's use the word, Bible thumping or anything.

00:26:53 ◼   ► Like, I don't know enough about them. I've never watched the show.

00:26:58 ◼   ► I know that they take their religion seriously.

00:27:03 ◼   ► A little bit too seriously, if you ask me, based on the comments.

00:27:07 ◼   ► But, here's a question for you.

00:27:10 ◼   ► In both of these cases, a lot of sort of the defenders have been saying that it's a matter of free speech,

00:27:20 ◼   ► which I think is just, that's just a smoke bomb. I don't think there's any merit to that argument at all.

00:27:27 ◼   ► How do you feel about that?

00:27:29 ◼   ► Wait, can you repeat the question?

00:27:31 ◼   ► Basically, people are saying that, well, these people are just exercising their right to free speech.

00:27:36 ◼   ► Oh, right, yeah.

00:27:37 ◼   ► They're not on the hook for it.

00:27:40 ◼   ► You shouldn't be mad at them.

00:27:42 ◼   ► - Right.

00:27:43 ◼   ► There were a lot of people jumping to defend this

00:27:48 ◼   ► Duck Dynasty guy immediately on the US political right,

00:27:52 ◼   ► including some major politicians.

00:27:55 ◼   ► And they were calling it a First Amendment issue.

00:27:57 ◼   ► And the First Amendment here in the US

00:27:59 ◼   ► includes the freedom of speech.

00:28:01 ◼   ► And I don't, I think that's, yeah,

00:28:05 ◼   ► I think that's totally off base.

00:28:06 ◼   ► Because the freedom of speech means that you can't be arrested for saying things like that, right?

00:28:11 ◼   ► He broke no laws by saying these things that are offensive to many.

00:28:17 ◼   ► Or you can say things that are offensive to most, you know, that you're allowed to speak up in favor of the Nazi party and Hitler.

00:28:26 ◼   ► Certainly legally allowed to.

00:28:29 ◼   ► I mean that you know just to pick so I an egregious example of something right that an overwhelming majority of people

00:28:36 ◼   ► Across any divide would agree is you know offensive totally you guys have hate speech laws, right?

00:28:42 ◼   ► We do although, you know, honestly, I can't

00:28:45 ◼   ► I'm not a hundred percent sure whether they are federal or go state by state. Yeah

00:28:52 ◼   ► But we do, you know the general concept being that yes, you have the right to say anything and then

00:28:58 ◼   ► effectively if you incite hatred towards a group and right but I think that by the standards of a lot of Western countries the u.s

00:29:05 ◼   ► hate speech

00:29:07 ◼   ► laws are liberal and favor the size, you know the favor the you know, the speaker

00:29:13 ◼   ► Yes, I think you would know more so than Canada Canada

00:29:16 ◼   ► We have some reasonably strict ones not strict

00:29:18 ◼   ► But I know you mean that and a lot of Western Europe does too where just by saying some of these jimmy's right?

00:29:24 ◼   ► You cannot display a swastika anywhere

00:29:27 ◼   ► For you know good reasons right and that's I'm not even saying I disagree with it, but exactly

00:29:31 ◼   ► that's a perfect example where you're legally not allowed to speak in favor of the Nazi Party or to display the

00:29:38 ◼   ► Stuff whereas in the u.s. That would not fly it would not I don't think you know if it were challenged

00:29:44 ◼   ► I don't think it would pass you know

00:29:46 ◼   ► the Supreme Court constitutional muster

00:29:49 ◼   ► But your freedom of speech does not not include the ability to keep your job

00:29:55 ◼   ► No matter what you say, especially if your job is as public as being on a hit TV show.

00:30:06 ◼   ► And apparently this Duck Dynasty show shows how...

00:30:10 ◼   ► It's crazy over the top.

00:30:12 ◼   ► But it's all crazy popular. It's like the most popular reality show on TV in America.

00:30:17 ◼   ► So yeah, you don't have any right to keep your job.

00:30:20 ◼   ► No. And so I guess that goes the same for Justine, right?

00:30:24 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean I don't think that, you know, she's...

00:30:27 ◼   ► So I don't think she has a right to keep her job based on the fact that she's exercising

00:30:31 ◼   ► her free speech.

00:30:32 ◼   ► I think that the company mishandled it, probably because they got scared of all the, you know,

00:30:40 ◼   ► all the hate mail in the beginning.

00:30:41 ◼   ► Right, and you know, it's a tough call because clearly it's in the company's interests to

00:30:47 ◼   ► protect the company, you know, and that's...

00:30:50 ◼   ► Yeah, it's demanded, they have an obligation actually.

00:30:52 ◼   ► And you know something like this starts burning up and it just keeps getting worse and worse hour by hour

00:30:58 ◼   ► I mean like more and more you know that you know between

00:31:02 ◼   ► The seventh hour of her 12-hour flight and the ninth hour over 12-hour flight now

00:31:07 ◼   ► It's gone from the Huffington Post to CNN, you know, yeah

00:31:11 ◼   ► You know and that they needed to do something man to be it to be a fly on the wall in that airplane

00:31:19 ◼   ► She was blissfully unaware of it. All right, but I really do think and I know that this sounds, you know

00:31:25 ◼   ► I could be wrong because it's so inflammatory

00:31:27 ◼   ► What she wrote that maybe it would have burned up anyway, but I really do believe though that it was the the that that

00:31:36 ◼   ► She's locked on a plane for 12 hours

00:31:39 ◼   ► Like it almost that's the part that almost made it seem like at first that maybe this was another one of these pranks

00:31:45 ◼   ► Right and this comes after the Elon Gale thing with the Diane and yeah

00:31:49 ◼   ► Where it was again with an airplane and that one was hey this plane has Wi-Fi

00:31:55 ◼   ► You can follow along as I do this my first thought too

00:31:57 ◼   ► And when I showed it to Amy Amy's first thought was this is Amy said this is fake

00:32:01 ◼   ► She was like this has got to be fake. Oh, that's good. Good on her because it's too perfect, right? It is it is an

00:32:08 ◼   ► inflammatory

00:32:11 ◼   ► Offensive

00:32:14 ◼   ► joke

00:32:15 ◼   ► Yeah, but it's not super

00:32:17 ◼   ► Unredicted it's not impossible to believe that someone would write it right

00:32:22 ◼   ► It's not it's it was you know if it were fake it was well-crafted and then well

00:32:26 ◼   ► You know the guy was a producer for a reality show right so right and somebody else is aware of what you know captures people's

00:32:34 ◼   ► Imaginations imagine if some you know it's a great scenario imagine. You know it's it's it's dramatic imagine if somebody

00:32:41 ◼   ► tweets something offensive, gets on an airplane that's 12 hours long and doesn't have in-flight

00:32:46 ◼   ► Wi-Fi, and in the meantime, it blows up as the top hashtag on Twitter.

00:32:51 ◼   ► Like, that sounds like something out of a brilliantly conceived fake hoax.

00:32:57 ◼   ► Right.

00:32:58 ◼   ► Yeah, all you got to do is plant it with BuzzFeed.

00:33:03 ◼   ► I do think – or I wonder, like, what if it had been a 24-hour flight?

00:33:07 ◼   ► I don't know. I feel like the oxygen would have just got sucked out of the out of the room

00:33:12 ◼   ► Because it's one tweet and you can only yeah

00:33:15 ◼   ► How many jokes are you gonna make about that one thing? I wonder like maybe it would have been better if it was 24 hours

00:33:21 ◼   ► I don't know. I'll tell you what

00:33:22 ◼   ► I think if it was a two-hour flight like if she'd been flying to Berlin or something, you know that distance

00:33:27 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't I don't think it would have been that big a deal might have blown up a little but I think it would

00:33:32 ◼   ► Have you know she could have contained right? She could have deleted the tweet and in you know

00:33:37 ◼   ► So here's another question for you. First thing she does, well I don't know about the first thing, but when she discovers that this has gone crazy, she deleted the tweet immediately. Go to bed.

00:33:50 ◼   ► I think you have to. I think. I don't know. I mean, and it's weird because...

00:33:56 ◼   ► I don't know either. I know that I would probably panic and then delete the tweet.

00:33:59 ◼   ► Yeah, and it's like, you know, again, not to abuse a cliche, but it's, you know, like

00:34:06 ◼   ► trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

00:34:08 ◼   ► I mean, because, you know, for everybody who just retweeted it, and when you, you know,

00:34:14 ◼   ► use a real, the native retweet feature of, you know, the original tweet gets deleted,

00:34:19 ◼   ► the retweets get deleted.

00:34:21 ◼   ► But for everybody who does that, there's a lot of other people who still retweet the

00:34:24 ◼   ► old way where you type RT space the username and then the tweet and all the articles that

00:34:31 ◼   ► are written about them.

00:34:32 ◼   ► For everyone that embeds it using Twitter's embedding tool, there's an awful lot of people

00:34:36 ◼   ► who still just take screenshots of tweets.

00:34:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:34:39 ◼   ► I mean, even...

00:34:40 ◼   ► And people know what they saw.

00:34:41 ◼   ► Right.

00:34:42 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:34:43 ◼   ► I mean, so even me...

00:34:44 ◼   ► So, you know, I know how it works.

00:34:45 ◼   ► I could still see myself wanting to delete the tweet, if only because I'm like, "Whoa,

00:34:51 ◼   ► I put something out there that's really offending people and I'm going to remove that and then explain why.

00:34:56 ◼   ► I think the smart thing to do is not delete it, but rather to explain that,

00:35:01 ◼   ► you know, basically go into apology mode and keep it there for the,

00:35:06 ◼   ► for lack of a better term, the historical record, right?

00:35:11 ◼   ► But you know, that takes balls to sort of have that sitting in your timeline with all that.

00:35:16 ◼   ► And it didn't take her long either to delete her old Twitter account

00:35:20 ◼   ► I'm not even sure if she I'm actually not even sure about that because it's like by the time I got up the next day

00:35:26 ◼   ► Her whole Twitter account was gone. So I'm not sure

00:35:29 ◼   ► I read somewhere that she deleted the tweet on any account. So I'm going with that but maybe was just nuke the whole account. All right

00:35:36 ◼   ► And again, it's like I don't even know what do you do? I don't know. I but I I just do I

00:35:42 ◼   ► Again, I don't excuse the tweet at all. I think it was incredibly

00:35:46 ◼   ► you know, insensitive. Yeah, and to the point where I really think that she should have known better. I really do.

00:35:52 ◼   ► You know, like I can imagine some other tweet that might get some people riled up,

00:36:00 ◼   ► but which I think would be a little bit more defensible as a joke. And I think this is pretty hard to defend as a joke.

00:36:05 ◼   ► Well, it's just not a very good joke. Right. Well, not even because it's not good because I really do think that,

00:36:11 ◼   ► you know, I really do think that AIDS in Africa and the the racial disparity of

00:36:18 ◼   ► that

00:36:20 ◼   ► Situation it combined is is just I'm just gonna put it in the unjokeable file by which I mean, you know

00:36:27 ◼   ► And you know ninety nine point nine percent or you should just know better

00:36:31 ◼   ► But I just think that the reaction and the the the size of the reaction is just

00:36:40 ◼   ► Unportionate to the crime, you know, and it's just this weird way that online

00:36:45 ◼   ► stuff like this can have repercussions that it's just there's no analogy to

00:36:53 ◼   ► anything and

00:36:55 ◼   ► You know the old the pre-internet world, you know, and it's it sounds corny to say hey the whole world, you know

00:37:02 ◼   ► This is one of those ways the world has changed

00:37:04 ◼   ► But it's true. Like there is no way that in

00:37:08 ◼   ► in, you know, 19, I don't know where to peg it, but let's just say like...

00:37:14 ◼   ► 75 or something.

00:37:15 ◼   ► Well, even like 1995, right?

00:37:18 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know. What could she have done in 1995? Posted something on AOL?

00:37:23 ◼   ► I mean, there wasn't anything like Twitter. I don't recall any way where any individual AOL user

00:37:29 ◼   ► could post something that would blow up like this.

00:37:31 ◼   ► I mean, there were, you know, we had, people like us had NewsNet,

00:37:36 ◼   ► but i mean people posted all sorts of crazy shit on usenet and nothing ever

00:37:40 ◼   ► became of it

00:37:42 ◼   ► man

00:37:43 ◼   ► because it just weren't enough people on it you know

00:37:46 ◼   ► what it'd be like letter to the editor

00:37:47 ◼   ► yeah in the new york times but they never would have published a letter to the editor

00:37:52 ◼   ► like that right no it's true though there was no

00:37:55 ◼   ► it would never have been picked up by other newspapers which is what happens

00:37:57 ◼   ► you know the closest you could have gotten pre-internet i guess would be

00:38:02 ◼   ► a crazed rant on TV like the famous Howard Beale rant in Network you know

00:38:10 ◼   ► where the network news anchor just snaps and just says you know I'm mad as hell

00:38:16 ◼   ► and I'm not gonna take it anywhere and just goes on a I'm not gonna take it

00:38:19 ◼   ► anymore and goes on a rant against you know whatever crazy shit was in his head

00:38:24 ◼   ► but it would be hard it was very few people could have gone crazy on you know

00:38:29 ◼   ► And it would really have to be going crazy where she didn't go crazy and tweet something

00:38:34 ◼   ► She got reckless or she has a blind spot to something, you know

00:38:39 ◼   ► I mean, I think she was probably shocked as shit when she got off the plane. I

00:38:43 ◼   ► Bet yeah, and I sympathize too because I know what it's like

00:38:47 ◼   ► I certainly don't know what it's like to make a mistake of that magnitude, but I know what it's like to make a mistake

00:38:53 ◼   ► period and then to just sit there and have it be a

00:38:56 ◼   ► Stupid mistake like because I that's what I think. I'm sure well I say sure

00:39:01 ◼   ► Yeah

00:39:01 ◼   ► I'm nearly sure that

00:39:03 ◼   ► The thought that has to be going in her head over and over again is how could I be so stupid?

00:39:08 ◼   ► Because it's I'll bet it's as obvious to her how stupid it was to tweet that as it is to all everybody else

00:39:14 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean I crack jokes and then cringe like a cat

00:39:17 ◼   ► You know, I can feel embarrassed like an hour or two later like even just one, you know

00:39:21 ◼   ► hanging out with people like, "Oh man, that was a really crappy joke. I don't know why I did that

00:39:25 ◼   ► one." This is like a whole new level. And you know, you're pretty public figures, so you got

00:39:30 ◼   ► a big target on your back. So to keep you up, not keep you up at night, but do you worry about this?

00:39:35 ◼   ► Like you're going to crack some joke about a baseball thing and the internet's just going to

00:39:41 ◼   ► go after you? I hate to say, I don't want to say it in a way that I don't want to, I don't want to

00:39:47 ◼   ► I don't want to take this thing and say it's all about me, but it did occur to me, like, there is a sort of there but for the grace of God go I, you know.

00:39:57 ◼   ► Like, I'd like to think that I have the common sense not to tweet something like that.

00:40:01 ◼   ► I don't think it's just about you. I mean, that's shared wealth, sub 200 followers.

00:40:05 ◼   ► Right. And maybe...

00:40:07 ◼   ► You do something when you talk baseball.

00:40:09 ◼   ► that actually helps someone like me where obviously if I tweeted something like that it would it would

00:40:14 ◼   ► get me in trouble very very quickly because I have so many followers on Twitter but it's the fact that

00:40:18 ◼   ► I have so many followers on Twitter that makes me relatively cautious you know yeah well again and

00:40:25 ◼   ► there's context to you right because you're more of a public figure like this person gets retweeted

00:40:31 ◼   ► and you have no idea maybe she's just a crazy racist like constantly right and you just don't

00:40:35 ◼   ► don't know. Right. But it's, you know, it's certainly possible, you know, and it's, you

00:40:40 ◼   ► know, and you might, somebody out there might think, "Well, I don't have to worry

00:40:43 ◼   ► about that because I can't be fired." But there's, no, but that's actually not true.

00:40:48 ◼   ► I couldn't be fired, but what would happen easily, and, you know, if I tweet,

00:40:52 ◼   ► well, people would go after my sponsors and make it, make it poisonous to

00:40:58 ◼   ► sponsor, you know, my website or my podcast or whatever else. And, you know,

00:41:03 ◼   ► Now again, if I tweeted something like that, maybe rightfully so, but hopefully not for

00:41:08 ◼   ► like a Red Sox tweet.

00:41:10 ◼   ► But…

00:41:11 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, like you like to throw firecrackers, but you're not throwing like hand grenades

00:41:17 ◼   ► around.

00:41:18 ◼   ► Right.

00:41:19 ◼   ► But I'm not, you know, somebody who, you know, like Michael Bloomberg, you know, nobody

00:41:24 ◼   ► can screw him.

00:41:25 ◼   ► He's got a billion dollars.

00:41:26 ◼   ► He can do whatever he wants.

00:41:27 ◼   ► You know, somebody who's dependent on sponsors, it's, you know, it's not a single source

00:41:31 ◼   ► where one, you know, boss could fire me. But it's, you know, I'd certainly

00:41:36 ◼   ► certainly susceptible to... Yeah, you could get run out of town. Yeah, exactly. I can

00:41:41 ◼   ► get run out of town. Speaking of which, you want to do a sponsor? How are we going to...

00:41:47 ◼   ► How the hell do you transition into a great sponsor spot after like... I don't know. AIDS,

00:41:53 ◼   ► epidemic, and all kinds of stuff. Good. Well, here's a good one. This is, I think,

00:41:59 ◼   ► they're going to do first. It's a new sponsor and this sounds like a great

00:42:06 ◼   ► service. It's called symporium. Here's the idea. If you travel with your

00:42:14 ◼   ► smartphone outside your local country, you know exactly what I'm going to talk

00:42:20 ◼   ► about. As soon as you're outside the country, you're roaming and you're paying

00:42:23 ◼   ► like $500 a minute for data. So the smartest thing to do, the cheapest way to

00:42:28 ◼   ► to use your iPhone or any other smartphone outside your country and are

00:42:33 ◼   ► traveling is to get a local SIM card with local rates wherever you're going

00:42:37 ◼   ► it's way cheaper than roaming it's just just the right way to go the problem is

00:42:43 ◼   ► unfamiliar geography and language barriers make it a pain to find a SIM

00:42:47 ◼   ► card when you get where you're going and to understand what you're getting so

00:42:50 ◼   ► symporium get it sim porium they do it for you you go to the website you choose

00:42:56 ◼   ► your destination before you go. Tell them what your carrier is, what wireless package

00:43:02 ◼   ► you want. You get a pick from one of their local carriers where you're going and they

00:43:05 ◼   ► do the rest and they'll send you the SIM card to your house before you travel or if you'd

00:43:12 ◼   ► prefer or if you're more likely like me and doing it closer to the last minute, they'll

00:43:19 ◼   ► send it to your hotel at your destination. So you go, I could go to Ireland or something

00:43:26 ◼   ► like that. And then when I get to my hotel, right there at the desk, I'll give them my

00:43:29 ◼   ► name and they'll say, "Oh, here's this package for you. It's from Symporium. I already have

00:43:33 ◼   ► the local SIM card." So you just put your local SIM card when you arrive and you've

00:43:38 ◼   ► got data worry-free. And you already know what you're paying because you paid for it

00:43:42 ◼   ► in advance and Symporium's website explained it all out. So there's no hidden costs, no

00:43:47 ◼   ► bill shock back home.

00:43:49 ◼   ► Okay, what do you do? Well, you go to their website at symporium.com. As I am like a SIM

00:43:56 ◼   ► card. As I am p o r i u m.com symporium. You can check out which countries they serve right

00:44:05 ◼   ► now. They have a pretty decent list right now and it's growing every week. And when

00:44:11 ◼   ► you check out, you can use this promo code, john sent me j o h n, s e n t m e. And the

00:44:18 ◼   ► first 1000 orders that use that code, it's just for the talk shows discriminating audience

00:44:23 ◼   ► first 1000 orders save, they don't pay the convenience fee. And that's $5 savings per

00:44:29 ◼   ► order. john sent me at symporium.com. Check them out and see what countries they have

00:44:35 ◼   ► service for. Great, great idea.

00:44:40 ◼   ► That is a killer idea.

00:44:43 ◼   ► As you know, I run a conference here in Montreal, which involves dragging a bunch of you American

00:44:49 ◼   ► guys up here.

00:44:53 ◼   ► This is actually a big deal.

00:44:54 ◼   ► People keep asking me all the time, "What do they do about their SIM cards and data

00:44:57 ◼   ► roaming?"

00:44:58 ◼   ► I don't really have a good answer and now I do.

00:45:01 ◼   ► I guarantee you and I love the sponsors of this show and an enormous number of them are

00:45:10 ◼   ► services and products I use.

00:45:12 ◼   ► Here's one I can't say I have used it.

00:45:14 ◼   ► I hadn't heard of them before this and I haven't been outside the country in a while.

00:45:20 ◼   ► But I'll tell you what, next time I leave the country, I guarantee you I'm using Symporium

00:45:24 ◼   ► because it is an enormous problem.

00:45:26 ◼   ► Dave: Yeah, I'm going to do the same thing.

00:45:27 ◼   ► Cost me an arm and a leg to travel.

00:45:29 ◼   ► I always thought that they should and again, I don't want to put a crimp in symporiums business, but I always thought that the

00:45:34 ◼   ► The airlines should have something like this where like when they come around with your custom cards like 90 minutes before your international flight

00:45:43 ◼   ► Lands they should offer to sell you a local SIM card

00:45:46 ◼   ► That's a good idea because it seems to me like these airlines are looking the nickel and dime yet over everything

00:45:53 ◼   ► Anyway, you know that they wanted, you know charge you for drinks. They want to charge you for

00:45:57 ◼   ► Bags and stuff like that. Well, why not sell you a $15 SIM card for $25

00:46:03 ◼   ► Anyway, but instead yeah, you know what they should do is team up with some poor. Yeah, exactly team up with some points

00:46:10 ◼   ► I'm pouring will hook them up that way. They'll be all hooked up country by country because some poor Ian's already done all the work of

00:46:15 ◼   ► Figuring out, you know, which local carriers and which countries are available for what? Yeah, I'm gonna definitely gonna go with this

00:46:22 ◼   ► It looks awesome

00:46:24 ◼   ► Fantastic. Save me a fortune. It's really a brilliant idea.

00:46:27 ◼   ► Even if you go to Africa, I'm sure they can hook you up.

00:46:30 ◼   ► I forget where I went the one time and I just assumed, I didn't Google it or anything, I just assumed that when I got off the flight,

00:46:37 ◼   ► I don't think it was at Heathrow, but I think it was, maybe it was in Dublin. Maybe it was when I went to Dublin for the OOL conference last year or something.

00:46:45 ◼   ► I just figured, hey, you know what? I'll get off the plane and buy a SIM card at the airport.

00:46:49 ◼   ► And I got all the way from my gate looking scanning back and forth where can I buy a

00:46:55 ◼   ► SIM card where can I buy a SIM card all the way to like the baggage carousel which is

00:46:59 ◼   ► like the end of any hope of finding any kind of commercial service and or what I if there's

00:47:04 ◼   ► something there I couldn't find it.

00:47:06 ◼   ► And I ended up I forget what the hell I did but it was pain in the ass.

00:47:10 ◼   ► Well problem solved.

00:47:11 ◼   ► You're gonna go this year to you?

00:47:14 ◼   ► I would bet on it I don't have anything booked.

00:47:18 ◼   ► You're gonna speak there right?

00:47:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, I'm excited.

00:47:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, well then I'll go if you're going.

00:47:22 ◼   ► - Oh, perfect.

00:47:23 ◼   ► - All right, holiday spectacular coming up,

00:47:25 ◼   ► but I still have more to talk about with you

00:47:27 ◼   ► before we bring out--

00:47:28 ◼   ► - Who's up first?

00:47:30 ◼   ► Marco's up first, right?

00:47:31 ◼   ► - Right, 'cause Marco's gonna sing.

00:47:33 ◼   ► I guess we should do this.

00:47:35 ◼   ► Or should we smell?

00:47:37 ◼   ► We'll save the dramatic reading of

00:47:38 ◼   ► A Night Before Christmas by John Siracusa for the end.

00:47:41 ◼   ► - Well, Paul has his, I mean,

00:47:44 ◼   ► Kefasas has his bell choir thing, right?

00:47:46 ◼   ► Yeah, they're slated there be towards the end it's gonna be a long show probably perfect

00:47:55 ◼   ► Well we want to sweet brighten this up, let's talk about something cheerful should we talk about something cheerful yeah, yeah

00:48:02 ◼   ► Hey congrats on being in the

00:48:04 ◼   ► Besters 2013 yeah, that was it that was a real thrill. We got a nice review, and this is the Vesper Vesper

00:48:14 ◼   ► The Vesper app was picked by the Apple App Store as one of the best productivity apps

00:48:19 ◼   ► of 2013.

00:48:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:48:21 ◼   ► That was nice.

00:48:22 ◼   ► We got it too.

00:48:23 ◼   ► Well, there you go.

00:48:25 ◼   ► Congratulations.

00:48:26 ◼   ► Screw you.

00:48:27 ◼   ► Do you know what's funny?

00:48:29 ◼   ► I'll tell you what's funny.

00:48:30 ◼   ► As I said something, and I generally – I don't talk shop with the wife very often.

00:48:39 ◼   ► And if I do, I'm definitely – and you know her.

00:48:42 ◼   ► I'm not going to brag.

00:48:44 ◼   ► So if something good happened, I generally am even less likely to bring it up.

00:48:48 ◼   ► But with Vesper, I feel like it's a little easier for me to – maybe not brag, but to

00:48:52 ◼   ► say good things because I feel like I can share it with others.

00:48:55 ◼   ► Like when good things happen about during Fireball, it's just me.

00:48:58 ◼   ► So it's just – it's self-serving to mention it.

00:49:02 ◼   ► Whereas I can say thanks to Dave and Brent, we got this nice award from Apple.

00:49:10 ◼   ► So she went to look it up and she said, "You're full of shit.

00:49:14 ◼   ► You're not listed here.

00:49:15 ◼   ► I went through every single one of these productivity apps."

00:49:17 ◼   ► Why would you lie to her?

00:49:21 ◼   ► Well, no, because she went to the – she was on her Mac and she went to the app – and

00:49:25 ◼   ► she knows.

00:49:26 ◼   ► She knows the iPhone app store and Mac app store.

00:49:30 ◼   ► But it's a funny thing because I've done that mistake too, although not for five minutes.

00:49:34 ◼   ► But it just says app store.

00:49:36 ◼   ► You go there.

00:49:37 ◼   ► She went to the app store and just looked to see what they said about Vesper, but it

00:49:40 ◼   ► wasn't listed because we don't have the Mac version.

00:49:43 ◼   ► But she did see your app.

00:49:45 ◼   ► Oh, cool.

00:49:46 ◼   ► She didn't say anything, though.

00:49:48 ◼   ► Am I supposed to be in it like take that hard or something?

00:49:54 ◼   ► Yeah, they need to fix that.

00:49:59 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:50:00 ◼   ► I don't understand why everything is separate.

00:50:02 ◼   ► Because that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do is to go to the App Store and to look for an app.

00:50:06 ◼   ► Well, and the other thing too, like on the iPhone, I never go there and expect to be able to find Mac apps.

00:50:14 ◼   ► But on the Mac, I know that I can find iPhone and iPad apps.

00:50:19 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:50:20 ◼   ► But you have to go to iTunes. It doesn't make, you know, it makes historical sense, but it doesn't make logical sense that if you want to find iPhone and iOS apps while you're on your Mac, you go to iTunes.

00:50:31 ◼   ► But if you want to find Mac apps, you go to the App Store.

00:50:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I think this is just another case of iTunes being cross-platform.

00:50:40 ◼   ► Yeah, because it's—

00:50:41 ◼   ► Because they could shoehorn it into the App Store app, except then Windows is all wrapped there, right?

00:50:48 ◼   ► Right.

00:50:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:50:51 ◼   ► I almost feel, though, at some point they should just—well, actually, I don't know. That's a good question.

00:50:59 ◼   ► I was gonna say at some point they should just say,

00:51:04 ◼   ► look, if your computer is Windows,

00:51:06 ◼   ► but you have an iPad and/or iPhone,

00:51:08 ◼   ► then you gotta just,

00:51:09 ◼   ► you have to use the App Store on your device.

00:51:13 ◼   ► You can't use a computer.

00:51:15 ◼   ► But then I was gonna say,

00:51:16 ◼   ► but then that would mean you'd only be able

00:51:18 ◼   ► to back up through iTunes.

00:51:20 ◼   ► And I don't know if they want to do that.

00:51:22 ◼   ► I think they want most people to use iTunes for backup.

00:51:27 ◼   ► but I don't know that they want to go iTunes only for backup?

00:51:32 ◼   ► Well, they have iCloud, right? I think they'd actually prefer iCloud.

00:51:35 ◼   ► That's what I meant, iCloud.

00:51:36 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:37 ◼   ► Right? But if they-- I'm saying no.

00:51:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I know what you mean. You know what? Maybe it's as simple as you just pull out the apps--

00:51:45 ◼   ► remove the app store from iTunes. Like, it's just not there.

00:51:48 ◼   ► Right.

00:51:50 ◼   ► And on the Mac, you get it inside the app, the app store app.

00:51:54 ◼   ► like it includes all the iOS stuff and on Windows, well, you know, you host, you got to buy it on your device.

00:52:00 ◼   ► Right. But then how would you still be able to back up your device to iTunes on Windows?

00:52:08 ◼   ► Sure, yeah, because the App Store is different from, I mean, those are separate, right? Like when you connect the thing, you get your device, right?

00:52:15 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess so. But there's sort of, but that's, see, but the way backups work is they don't really back up your apps, right?

00:52:22 ◼   ► They back up your data and then your backup comes and you get your data from each of your

00:52:28 ◼   ► apps back.

00:52:29 ◼   ► But then you have to…

00:52:30 ◼   ► Yeah, and then you have to read down the list of apps that you…

00:52:31 ◼   ► Right.

00:52:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:52:33 ◼   ► But then I guess they could do it where instead of downloading them or copying them over from

00:52:35 ◼   ► USB from your saved copies of the apps in iTunes on your Mac or PC, you'd have to

00:52:42 ◼   ► re-download them over the air to your device.

00:52:44 ◼   ► Right.

00:52:45 ◼   ► They could do it, I guess.

00:52:50 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:52:51 ◼   ► feel like eventually the hatchets just gonna come in again

00:52:54 ◼   ► they're gonna cut all that out of five tips

00:52:56 ◼   ► that's gonna it's gonna have to come

00:52:58 ◼   ► right and just make itunes about buying and playing music

00:53:02 ◼   ► yeah i think we've been saying that for years and i

00:53:06 ◼   ► i don't know if everybody likes this one better items ten mike

00:53:10 ◼   ► it's going on me i like it i think it's pretty good

00:53:13 ◼   ► uh...

00:53:14 ◼   ► just you know conflating functions

00:53:18 ◼   ► you know like sticking out store in itunes and

00:53:21 ◼   ► all the device management stuff that had

00:53:24 ◼   ► it's getting weird

00:53:27 ◼   ► well and i i i

00:53:29 ◼   ► i want i think that

00:53:30 ◼   ► i think of something different being a member that looked at that i do remember

00:53:33 ◼   ► that i forget then you could get like plugins for did to backup all sorts of

00:53:37 ◼   ► crazy devices to your right

00:53:39 ◼   ► right yet again like my uh... my razor and i a m

00:53:42 ◼   ► your your arco stand p three player

00:53:45 ◼   ► yeah all yeah

00:53:47 ◼   ► I think you could use iSync with things like that if somebody wrote like a plugin for it.

00:53:51 ◼   ► I know you could do it with crazy phones. I know that you could do things like plug

00:53:54 ◼   ► a Razer in and get like your contacts synced over and stuff like that.

00:53:59 ◼   ► Yeah, it's funny because in a lot of ways that worked really well.

00:54:04 ◼   ► It worked pretty awesome back in the day.

00:54:07 ◼   ► Do you remember that there was like a Bluetooth thing that you could run on your Mac

00:54:12 ◼   ► and you could connect to it from your, let's say, your Razer

00:54:16 ◼   ► and you could use it to sort of perform tasks on your Mac.

00:54:21 ◼   ► Am I making any sense?

00:54:23 ◼   ► Like you could,

00:54:24 ◼   ► like you could,

00:54:25 ◼   ► Cueda would show up as a device

00:54:26 ◼   ► and you could pick it on your crappy little phone

00:54:29 ◼   ► and then like, you know,

00:54:30 ◼   ► press the D pad buttons to like skip tracks and move around.

00:54:34 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:54:35 ◼   ► It actually worked pretty well.

00:54:37 ◼   ► - Right, but you'd have to,

00:54:37 ◼   ► it'd be like 20 clicks like into a D pad menu to.

00:54:42 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.

00:54:44 ◼   ► But it worked and it was kind of cool.

00:54:45 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:54:46 ◼   ► What else we got? Oh, you know what? Yeah, let's get back to the investor.

00:54:50 ◼   ► So, you're like an indie software guy now.

00:54:54 ◼   ► Yeah. For what? A year? We shipped late January.

00:54:58 ◼   ► I can't remember when you guys shipped. Around the same time. No, we shipped it. We didn't ship until WWDC.

00:55:02 ◼   ► We were like in a race against time and shipped like the week before

00:55:06 ◼   ► WWDC. And we like hit the app store I think like the Friday before the

00:55:10 ◼   ► Monday WWDC. Oh, that was it. Yeah. So you've been out six months-ish?

00:55:14 ◼   ► months ish yeah but we incorporated on 12 12 12 yeah so we've had we had our one

00:55:22 ◼   ► year anniversary would that be 11 days ago and we don't have you know Dave and

00:55:27 ◼   ► I at least got to work right away right so how are you finding it fun yeah yeah

00:55:35 ◼   ► I really enjoy it I mean yeah you're not you're not a stranger to working on a

00:55:39 ◼   ► team but it's uh...

00:55:40 ◼   ► no but it was it's good to be back

00:55:42 ◼   ► yeah

00:55:43 ◼   ► no and i i'm as happy now as it was a year ago and it was

00:55:47 ◼   ► it's good though i feel like i've got as i've gotten older and even though i was

00:55:51 ◼   ► out of

00:55:52 ◼   ► doing actual indie development for a while there it's uh...

00:55:56 ◼   ► just

00:55:57 ◼   ► agent maybe to cynicism like the type of cynicism that just builds up over years

00:56:02 ◼   ► i've gotten

00:56:04 ◼   ► a lot better at estimating how long stuff is going to take.

00:56:10 ◼   ► Are you accurate? Like, do you estimate and then just do like an arbitrary thing?

00:56:14 ◼   ► Like, you multiply it by 1.5 or 2 or something? Or do you actually...

00:56:17 ◼   ► I figure anything UI-related will take at least twice as long, and that's been

00:56:22 ◼   ► pretty good.

00:56:22 ◼   ► And then anything that involves networking, I just multiply it by a hundred.

00:56:28 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:56:30 ◼   ► Like when I wrote when I...

00:56:31 ◼   ► It's not a bad rule of thumb.

00:56:32 ◼   ► Right.

00:56:33 ◼   ► Like when I wrote and people thought I was just...

00:56:37 ◼   ► Some people really took it the wrong way.

00:56:38 ◼   ► But like when I wrote the thing about that publicly pre-announced that we're going to

00:56:42 ◼   ► work on sync.

00:56:44 ◼   ► And I said...

00:56:45 ◼   ► But I think it was the right thing to do.

00:56:49 ◼   ► I have no regrets over it so far.

00:56:51 ◼   ► Even though in general I'm against pre-announcing anything.

00:56:53 ◼   ► But for all the reasons I outlined when I wrote about it, I think this is an exception

00:56:58 ◼   ► that proves the rule.

00:56:59 ◼   ► How long is it gonna take, I think, at least a year?

00:57:03 ◼   ► And do I really think it's gonna take a year?

00:57:04 ◼   ► No, or at least I hope it won't,

00:57:06 ◼   ► but I just assume that everything

00:57:08 ◼   ► that could possibly go wrong will go wrong

00:57:10 ◼   ► and that it'll take a year.

00:57:12 ◼   ► So we're ahead of schedule.

00:57:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, I think that's,

00:57:16 ◼   ► pretty sure you said that explicitly in the post.

00:57:19 ◼   ► - Right, but people took it the wrong way.

00:57:21 ◼   ► It's like I posted that

00:57:22 ◼   ► and then there were some of the reactions were,

00:57:27 ◼   ► Holy fucking shit, a year for sync?

00:57:29 ◼   ► Are they out of their minds?

00:57:30 ◼   ► I thought these guys knew what the hell they were doing.

00:57:32 ◼   ► It's like, oh, you know.

00:57:34 ◼   ► - Well, so that was your racist days moment.

00:57:38 ◼   ► - Right.

00:57:39 ◼   ► - Sync is hard.

00:57:42 ◼   ► I don't envy Brant at all having to deal with that.

00:57:45 ◼   ► And I guess that is sort of the number one

00:57:49 ◼   ► requested feature for your app.

00:57:50 ◼   ► - Oh, by far and away.

00:57:51 ◼   ► I don't even, and it's, you know, it's,

00:57:54 ◼   ► You

00:57:56 ◼   ► Know it's it's I forget

00:57:59 ◼   ► There's all sorts of analogies I can use but it's more like like other feature requests are planets and asteroids

00:58:05 ◼   ► And sync is the Sun around which all of them revolve, you know

00:58:10 ◼   ► There are no other feature requests other than sync to see in some arguments in some ways of looking at it

00:58:16 ◼   ► Because people you know and Brent has said, you know said this before before we pre announced

00:58:21 ◼   ► Sync and people would say well, how come it doesn't have an iPad version?

00:58:24 ◼   ► Well an iPad version doesn't make sense until you have sync because what you know you I say can't but you know

00:58:31 ◼   ► you know what, I mean that you can't have a

00:58:33 ◼   ► Universal app that's iPhone and iPad and not have them sync the data between them good, but it would really be stupid

00:58:40 ◼   ► I mean it would confuse people

00:58:42 ◼   ► I mean people would just you know

00:58:44 ◼   ► Rightfully would assume that it must sync somehow and then when they didn't they'd be like I don't I don't understand what I'm doing wrong

00:58:51 ◼   ► And so sync comes before anything because people are asking for things like well

00:58:55 ◼   ► How about an iPad version or a Mac version or how about some of these other features and there's all sorts of great features

00:59:01 ◼   ► But it's you know without sync. It's you know, it doesn't make sense

00:59:04 ◼   ► But on the other hand, you know, if people there's all sorts of other people who've said

00:59:08 ◼   ► Many times. Well, how did you ever ship without sync?

00:59:11 ◼   ► But I don't know that we I don't think we would be a single day ahead of where we are today

00:59:17 ◼   ► If we had waited for sync, so we instead of having

00:59:20 ◼   ► Having spent the last seven months making money in the app store, we have been making

00:59:27 ◼   ► zero dollars working on the app.

00:59:29 ◼   ► Well, it would have been digging a hole is what you would have been doing.

00:59:33 ◼   ► Right.

00:59:34 ◼   ► You know, if you were costing out your time, it would have been way harder to justify spending

00:59:41 ◼   ► that amount of time doing development if you hadn't actually shipped something.

00:59:45 ◼   ► So yeah, I think that's the right thing to do.

00:59:48 ◼   ► Maybe I'm just weird, but I don't know if I care that much about sync for Vesper.

00:59:53 ◼   ► I mostly just use it on my phone. I use it constantly, but it's pretty much all just on my phone.

00:59:59 ◼   ► I don't care about it on my iPad so much.

01:00:01 ◼   ► It's a reasonable argument.

01:00:03 ◼   ► I mean, and I get frustrated sometimes because I'll be there at my Mac and here's a paragraph of text.

01:00:10 ◼   ► This is it, or an address or something.

01:00:12 ◼   ► And I just want to stick it on my phone real quick and Vesper would be a perfect place to stick it.

01:00:17 ◼   ► But it's like the getting it from A to B is you know without some kind of syncing thing is you know, it's convoluted

01:00:24 ◼   ► What do you do? Yeah email it or you switch out to the what's the tap bots thing pay spot?

01:00:29 ◼   ► You know

01:00:30 ◼   ► But then all of a sudden you're tapping this app tapping that app or loading an email or waiting for an email to come in

01:00:35 ◼   ► And copying and pasting it and why didn't you just leave in an email?

01:00:37 ◼   ► Yeah, you got a bit of a dance to do. Yeah, that's true

01:00:40 ◼   ► And all I wanted to do was put my you know

01:00:43 ◼   ► Airplane reservation number into Vesper so that when I get to the airport I can type this six-letter code in and I know where it

01:00:48 ◼   ► is

01:00:50 ◼   ► But on the other hand the I think one of the reasons we got away with it

01:00:54 ◼   ► Is that one of the things you know we were looking to you know?

01:00:56 ◼   ► We see this as replacing is like a notebook that you put in your pocket or something like that

01:01:01 ◼   ► Like the fact that we went iPhone first is not coincidence

01:01:05 ◼   ► And I think the iPhone version is the one that is most usable without sync because it's just like a little

01:01:11 ◼   ► thing in your pocket where you can... Yeah, I agree. I mean, I end up using it like

01:01:16 ◼   ► digital field notes kind of thing. I've never carried you field notes stuff, but

01:01:21 ◼   ► I actually put my shopping list in it, which is kind of suboptimal. You know what I mean? Like, there's shopping

01:01:26 ◼   ► list apps, and I've got them. And you can type them in, and you can check them off.

01:01:31 ◼   ► But I just end up using Vesper, manually deleting a line or two.

01:01:36 ◼   ► Just because everything's in there. I used to use Notes. Now I use Fesper.

01:01:40 ◼   ► So, good work.

01:01:44 ◼   ► You know what, though? I've used it

01:01:48 ◼   ► for that, too, but for certain things. But then, see, as soon as you mention it, people

01:01:52 ◼   ► love List Apps. And List Apps are hard, like a good List App. And there's so

01:01:56 ◼   ► many cool features that you can do in a List App if it's really about lists.

01:02:00 ◼   ► And that's, we have a slew, there's like a whole

01:02:04 ◼   ► family of feature requests for Vesper that are all about like shopping list

01:02:10 ◼   ► style stuff that I don't know that we'd ever even really do because it's almost

01:02:14 ◼   ► like a different genre of app. A great genre of app and useful one but one that

01:02:19 ◼   ► is sort of it's removed it takes away from the simplicity. I agree. I have a

01:02:26 ◼   ► bunch of them but there's a bunch of great ones. Aita is I think currently my

01:02:30 ◼   ► favorite right from mohawk nice mohawk nice mohawk yeah goodbye that's it

01:02:37 ◼   ► they're cheap so you call it Ida I call it Ida but maybe it is Ida because it's

01:02:42 ◼   ► only one T the name of the app is I TA yes I TA yeah but I guess if it was if

01:02:48 ◼   ► they wanted me to say it I have always said Ida in my head but I I guess that

01:02:52 ◼   ► would require a second T it's a weird name to my understanding yeah I also I

01:02:57 ◼   ► I think you get item from that like it's a it's a whatever it's an old-school

01:03:02 ◼   ► lominoush word right like a man what the hell is the name of that so I I'd a it a

01:03:08 ◼   ► Ida Ida Ida I'm pretty sure it's you get a strong well okay so Ida Ida is for

01:03:14 ◼   ► lists it is actually to me a very good companion to Vesper because it it in the

01:03:19 ◼   ► same way that Vesper doesn't really have list specific features it a Ida yeah

01:03:25 ◼   ► It doesn't have note features where there's no way that you can...

01:03:30 ◼   ► You can't just write arbitrary text and like...

01:03:33 ◼   ► Right. There's no way to say, "Well, this one item, I want to put a whole paragraph of text in."

01:03:36 ◼   ► No. All you get is, you know, like what you can fit on the one line of 16-point albedica.

01:03:41 ◼   ► I have a list in IDA that I use every single time I travel. Every time. It's just pack list,

01:03:48 ◼   ► and it's just everything that I might want to take on a trip.

01:03:52 ◼   ► That's a good idea.

01:03:54 ◼   ► Then when I leave the house, I just re-uncheck all of them.

01:03:57 ◼   ► And then every time I go anywhere, I just go through this list.

01:04:01 ◼   ► And some of them I want to pack, and I don't check them off until I pack them.

01:04:05 ◼   ► Others, like if I'm going to Montreal, I obviously don't need sunscreen.

01:04:10 ◼   ► But I'll just tap it because I don't need it.

01:04:12 ◼   ► Either I've -- so every time I tap one of them --

01:04:14 ◼   ► It's considered these, right?

01:04:15 ◼   ► Right.

01:04:16 ◼   ► And then every time I've left and forgotten something, like, "Oh, I forgot blank," then

01:04:22 ◼   ► And I add it to that list.

01:04:24 ◼   ► And at some point, within like eight months of using that list, I'd forgotten everything

01:04:31 ◼   ► I could possibly forget.

01:04:33 ◼   ► And so now I've got a list of everything.

01:04:37 ◼   ► And ever since, I've never once forgotten anything of importance.

01:04:40 ◼   ► Benji Smith That's great.

01:04:42 ◼   ► That's a good idea.

01:04:43 ◼   ► That's like Merlin level life hack tip.

01:04:46 ◼   ► Good work.

01:04:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:04:48 ◼   ► Merlin will be calling in later actually from the uh...

01:04:51 ◼   ► slide for the north pole. Yeah, for the rest of the holiday spectacular.

01:04:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:04:56 ◼   ► Um...

01:04:59 ◼   ► So how is that twenty thirteen for you? Let's, I mean... Let me take a second break.

01:05:03 ◼   ► I'll take a second break here.

01:05:05 ◼   ► Because I think we have like... Because it's a holiday spectacular. We have a bunch of

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01:07:18 ◼   ► So you're all up in the .NET. How come you went with .NET for Fireball?

01:07:23 ◼   ► Yeah, that's a good question. It's like probably some kind of mental deficiency in my head.

01:07:33 ◼   ► Because you've got the .COM too, right?

01:07:34 ◼   ► I do. I do have the dot com. People used to ask me this all the time and I think it's

01:07:40 ◼   ► one of those signs of how daring fireball has sort of been around long enough that whatever

01:07:47 ◼   ► is odd and unusual about it, people just accept because that's just how it is. People don't

01:07:52 ◼   ► complain about the color scheme anywhere near as much as they did the first three, four,

01:07:58 ◼   ► five years. First three, four, five years, every day somebody would complain about the

01:08:02 ◼   ► colors. Now people don't complain about the colors.

01:08:04 ◼   ► Now it's just that the text is illegibly small?

01:08:06 ◼   ► Yes, but that's – see, but the difference there is that they're actually right.

01:08:10 ◼   ► The difference with the text size is that it's overdue for a gentle redesign with

01:08:15 ◼   ► larger type.

01:08:16 ◼   ► Actually, just do the – even on the Mac, I did the double-tap thing just to center

01:08:19 ◼   ► that column.

01:08:20 ◼   ► And then everything's perfect.

01:08:21 ◼   ► It's nice and big.

01:08:22 ◼   ► But yeah, so .NET was a – so this was – what?

01:08:27 ◼   ► Early 2000s?

01:08:28 ◼   ► 2001?

01:08:29 ◼   ► Earlier?

01:08:30 ◼   ► You know, I actually don't remember when I registered the domain name.

01:08:33 ◼   ► It's possible I registered it a few years before the site ever launched because I had

01:08:37 ◼   ► the idea for the name long, long time before I started the site.

01:08:42 ◼   ► Remember when top-level domains actually used to mean something?

01:08:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:08:46 ◼   ► Like .NET was like, "This is a non-profit thing."

01:08:49 ◼   ► No.

01:08:50 ◼   ► See, I didn't get that with .NET.

01:08:53 ◼   ► In the old days...

01:08:54 ◼   ► You're ahead of the game, man.

01:08:55 ◼   ► Like to me, .NET was always like, "Well, this is my ISP."

01:08:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:08:59 ◼   ► The original idea is, at least in the US, was that you could choose between .org, .net,

01:09:06 ◼   ► and .com.

01:09:07 ◼   ► Yeah. Like I would feel guilty registering a .org, or I would have back in the day, you

01:09:11 ◼   ► stay said.

01:09:12 ◼   ► Well, you know, but like Kotki has a .org, right?

01:09:15 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

01:09:16 ◼   ► And it speaks to the fact that back then it was a little, you know, it was a little nebulous

01:09:21 ◼   ► when you registered a personal site because it didn't fit into anything. .org was meant

01:09:26 ◼   ► for like nonprofits or something like that like like yeah you know like the

01:09:30 ◼   ► Red Cross would be like clearly a dot org dot-com was for calm for commercial

01:09:38 ◼   ► it was for a commercial business and you know cocky's blog wasn't commercial at

01:09:43 ◼   ► first during fireball wasn't at first and dotnet was for like things related

01:09:51 ◼   ► to the network itself like is PS or like some kind of you know like a DNS

01:09:56 ◼   ► server or something like that. And so if it was just, well I just want a site to host,

01:10:01 ◼   ► you know, my stupid rants about the finder. It didn't fit into any of them. But the one

01:10:07 ◼   ► that I thought, I always thought, and maybe I'm misremembering this, but I seem to recall

01:10:10 ◼   ► that they, that ICANN or whoever is in charge of them, that .NET was the first one where

01:10:16 ◼   ► they were like, ah, forget about that networking thing. You just use this one for whatever.

01:10:21 ◼   ► And so to me, it sounded just semantically like, well, there's org for organization,

01:10:28 ◼   ► com for commerce, and then there's net for like the internet.

01:10:32 ◼   ► So to me, .net always felt like the one that was the most neutral.

01:10:38 ◼   ► That makes sense.

01:10:39 ◼   ► Think about that.

01:10:40 ◼   ► It just seemed to me like it just meant you're on the internet.

01:10:43 ◼   ► And I know that they've since added it.

01:10:45 ◼   ► They've since added like a .web, which I don't think anybody uses any of these.

01:10:50 ◼   ► I don't know. Unless HostGator sells that, in which case...

01:10:54 ◼   ► Although I probably wouldn't have gone with that either, because to me the web is specifically

01:10:58 ◼   ► HTTP in a web browser, and I never knew... Yeah, we both know way too much about

01:11:02 ◼   ► this shit to mix up a domain name with the server's name, right?

01:11:06 ◼   ► Right, exactly. But the service goes at the front. It's either ftp. or www.

01:11:10 ◼   ► Right, and who's to say that it's always going to be a website, you know? I mean, it could...

01:11:14 ◼   ► In theory, it could be, you know, they look at something like the magazine, or

01:11:18 ◼   ► or the loop magazine where they're publishing in apps, but they need a domain name for sending

01:11:26 ◼   ► people to.

01:11:27 ◼   ► I probably wouldn't have gone with .web.

01:11:29 ◼   ► That's why it's during fireball.net as the primary domain.

01:11:33 ◼   ► The .com, which I registered at the same time, is always just forwarded over.

01:11:37 ◼   ► That's good.

01:11:38 ◼   ► Well, I mean, I commend you not just going with .com.

01:11:43 ◼   ► Mine's what?

01:11:44 ◼   ► And I went with calm just because whatever.

01:11:48 ◼   ► It had that years and years ago, but it had that

01:11:52 ◼   ► cache of like, "Well, this is what the big kids have."

01:11:56 ◼   ► I can't tell you, I am glad. This is why I think dot com just filled up immediately, right?

01:12:00 ◼   ► It's kind of silly. It's totally arbitrary. And you know the way,

01:12:04 ◼   ► I mean, you know very well how easily I will piss away

01:12:08 ◼   ► money. I'll piss away money on anything. I'll piss away on

01:12:12 ◼   ► booze, blackjack, I mean anything shiny,

01:12:16 ◼   ► I'll just throw money at.

01:12:18 ◼   ► But I'll tell you--

01:12:18 ◼   ► - You actually bought me a shoe shine and a cocktail.

01:12:22 ◼   ► - Exactly, you weren't wearing shoes at the time.

01:12:24 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:12:25 ◼   ► - I think it costs me like, I don't know,

01:12:29 ◼   ► $12 a year to keep renewing during fireball.com.

01:12:32 ◼   ► At least, you know, and at some point I was smart

01:12:34 ◼   ► and just registered them all for six, seven years.

01:12:37 ◼   ► Although I don't know if that's smart

01:12:38 ◼   ► 'cause six, seven years from now,

01:12:39 ◼   ► who knows, I'll friggin' forget to renew.

01:12:42 ◼   ► But, you know, it's like...

01:12:44 ◼   ► Well, you gotta keep...

01:12:45 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, you can't give up dot com at this point.

01:12:48 ◼   ► No, no, and it was...

01:12:49 ◼   ► But originally I came really close to not registering it,

01:12:53 ◼   ► because I kind of had the intention, I'm gonna publish it dot net.

01:12:57 ◼   ► And I thought, should I buy the dot com too?

01:12:59 ◼   ► And I thought, I'm not gonna use it separately,

01:13:01 ◼   ► because that would be confusing.

01:13:02 ◼   ► Like if I had a podcast at duringfireball.com

01:13:05 ◼   ► and a website at duringfireball.net.

01:13:07 ◼   ► Well, that's confusing as hell.

01:13:08 ◼   ► Nobody would do that.

01:13:11 ◼   ► And I thought, well, maybe I'll come to regret it and I'll switch it over.

01:13:15 ◼   ► If I ever decide maybe I should make .com primary, I'd like to have it, I'll do it.

01:13:22 ◼   ► And that was sort of why I did it.

01:13:24 ◼   ► But then in hindsight, it's very clear that it was smart to do it because some jerk would

01:13:28 ◼   ► have done it.

01:13:29 ◼   ► And I think that there's a whole bunch of other Daring Fireball dot blah, blah, blah,

01:13:34 ◼   ► you know, insert weird ass domain here.

01:13:38 ◼   ► I think somebody has the .org.

01:13:39 ◼   ► Really? Yeah, which I decided not to get because I thought, you know, one's enough.

01:13:44 ◼   ► But it would be, you know, a perfect way to scam people.

01:13:49 ◼   ► And he puts his name right on it.

01:13:51 ◼   ► What's that? I don't want to say his name. Well, I don't know. Now I feel like we're going to get back to shaming people on the internet for no good reason.

01:13:59 ◼   ► It's funny because Safari just froze up on me. So I don't know what's there.

01:14:07 ◼   ► Oh, really? So, it's somebody's site. It looks legit. It's not reprinting your stuff.

01:14:16 ◼   ► Right. But I don't think it's up to date either, though.

01:14:19 ◼   ► June 27th, 2012.

01:14:23 ◼   ► Yeah. So, it's not being actively used.

01:14:26 ◼   ► No. But on the other hand, he's not being a dick. So, you know, whatever. It is what it is.

01:14:32 ◼   ► Right. Yeah, so you can go there and make of it what you will.

01:14:36 ◼   ► Yeah. Go and post comments.

01:14:40 ◼   ► Yeah. Poor bastard.

01:14:44 ◼   ► Anyway, that was a bit of an aside.

01:14:48 ◼   ► Hostgator. Yeah. So go there and register your .NETs.

01:14:52 ◼   ► So, how was 2013 for you?

01:14:56 ◼   ► I don't know. I feel like it's a holiday spectacular.

01:15:00 ◼   ► Yeah, it's the time to sing songs and look back and yeah

01:15:04 ◼   ► I got the

01:15:06 ◼   ► You know the Wookiees

01:15:08 ◼   ► From the Star Wars spectacular all lined up

01:15:12 ◼   ► Yeah, I saw a funny tweet about that somebody tweeted

01:15:17 ◼   ► It was yeah

01:15:19 ◼   ► You know what? I never remember where these tweets come from so I can't give people credit, but it was funny

01:15:24 ◼   ► It was like do not whatever you think however, I want however

01:15:29 ◼   ► Much ironic fun you think you're gonna have do not watch the Star Wars holiday special from 1977

01:15:37 ◼   ► You'll never get that hour back. You know what? I've never seen it and

01:15:40 ◼   ► After like I have you know, and then it comes to mind. I'm like, maybe I should watch that

01:15:46 ◼   ► I saw five minutes of it years ago

01:15:49 ◼   ► I

01:15:52 ◼   ► think atrios who runs a

01:15:54 ◼   ► US politics blog called eskaton blog

01:15:58 ◼   ► years ago, I mean like might have been ten years ago linked to like a five minute YouTube clip of it

01:16:06 ◼   ► and it was enough like yeah that was enough. I just yeah I mean for as much as like that hand

01:16:13 ◼   ► not shooting first kind of ruins the character I just have a feeling that that specials just

01:16:20 ◼   ► gonna really sort of ruin everything for me. Yeah it's interesting because if you didn't know better

01:16:25 ◼   ► You would assume that somehow it was like a ripoff and you might think well

01:16:30 ◼   ► It wasn't maybe it wasn't outright theft

01:16:32 ◼   ► But that there was some kind of bizarre clause in George Lucas's contract with 20th Century Fox that allowed them to do this and

01:16:40 ◼   ► That nobody is more upset about it than George Lucas, but it you know, George Lucas

01:16:44 ◼   ► Like what we get now of TV time

01:16:48 ◼   ► Yeah, but he was like George George thinking like Oh ads or whatever Dale and it turns into this friggin

01:16:55 ◼   ► Awful special right and like in the mindset of someone who only knew George Lucas at the time like that

01:17:01 ◼   ► You maybe you even knew American graffiti and thx 1138, which were great

01:17:05 ◼   ► Certainly, you know far less well-known or mass-market than Star Wars both. Yeah, but both great truly great

01:17:13 ◼   ► films that that that

01:17:16 ◼   ► Presage him as you know the genius that he yeah, he was really one of the great 70s filmmakers exactly really was

01:17:23 ◼   ► Get that now but 70s is an awesome period and he was way up at the top, you know

01:17:27 ◼   ► And and you know followed Star Wars up

01:17:29 ◼   ► He didn't direct but he you know, certainly, you know

01:17:31 ◼   ► He like quasi directed, you know Empire Strikes Back and even empower even Return of the Jedi great great movie finished a great trilogy

01:17:38 ◼   ► but in hindsight knowing a lot of the Owen Raiders of the Lost Ark, which he wrote and you know

01:17:45 ◼   ► You know collaborated with Steven Spielberg on this great run of amazing movies and stuff that you know guys like us still talk about endlessly

01:17:52 ◼   ► to date the Star Wars holiday special is the clue to the guy the guy who did

01:18:00 ◼   ► Howard the Duck the guy who yeah the guy who did the second trilogy the guy who

01:18:06 ◼   ► did Jar Jar Binks yeah like it's all there it all makes sense and in hindsight

01:18:12 ◼   ► like you take his whole career in in retrospect and you think you think well

01:18:18 ◼   ► now the holiday special makes sense yeah it's like he had a zen garden like every

01:18:23 ◼   ► pebble perfectly placed little bonsai trees and there's just a turd sitting in

01:18:26 ◼   ► the middle of it and you like yeah it's kind of weird which is our the special

01:18:30 ◼   ► yeah and then you know 30 years down the line the whole thing's just a freaking

01:18:35 ◼   ► litter box how was my 2013 I think it was pretty good I think it was pretty

01:18:41 ◼   ► good I would say I'm pretty pretty proud of and again I don't mean to brag about

01:18:47 ◼   ► about it but I you know it's Brenton Dan but you know the whole Vesper thing

01:18:52 ◼   ► worked out well enough and I've had a lot of fun doing it you know and I've

01:18:56 ◼   ► never if there's anything nagging in the back of my head at all times it's that I

01:19:01 ◼   ► don't want to get complacent because daring fireball has become so successful

01:19:07 ◼   ► and I'd write to me not only is that dangerous and that it could lead to me

01:19:14 ◼   ► losing relevance and losing the success that it's had.

01:19:19 ◼   ► But that it's just no way to go through life.

01:19:23 ◼   ► You can't, you should never rest on your laurels.

01:19:25 ◼   ► You should always be, you know.

01:19:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, I agree.

01:19:28 ◼   ► I was, like all you guys, I was happy to see Vesser do well.

01:19:32 ◼   ► And I don't know, it's kind of easy to say,

01:19:36 ◼   ► well, it's, you know, Whiskas may not have a huge profile,

01:19:39 ◼   ► but you and Brent have large followings.

01:19:43 ◼   ► people are going to pick up the app no matter what. And you've got a platform in which to pimp it.

01:19:48 ◼   ► But that's actually just a pretty good app. So congrats on that.

01:19:53 ◼   ► I guess I'm trying to say I don't think the success is

01:19:58 ◼   ► predicated upon your fame. I don't know if you would have had the scale?

01:20:03 ◼   ► Well, we wouldn't have had the

01:20:08 ◼   ► We wouldn't have had the opening weekend that we had.

01:20:11 ◼   ► I think I was talking about this with Jalkid last week.

01:20:14 ◼   ► But I really do firmly believe that in the long run,

01:20:18 ◼   ► the app has to speak for itself.

01:20:19 ◼   ► And no doubt in my mind whatsoever, of course,

01:20:23 ◼   ► I'm not ignorant.

01:20:24 ◼   ► Me having Daring Fireball and Brent being Brent Simmons,

01:20:28 ◼   ► obviously gave us a leg up in terms of initial publicity.

01:20:33 ◼   ► But in the long run, that can't sustain the app.

01:20:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't know what your graph looks like,

01:20:40 ◼   ► but we had a huge opening and then, you know,

01:20:43 ◼   ► it looks kind of depressing.

01:20:43 ◼   ► I think it totally knows that.

01:20:45 ◼   ► Not embarrassingly so, we're not doing business,

01:20:49 ◼   ► but like the opening weekend kind of thing is,

01:20:52 ◼   ► you can tell what movies bank a lot of the--

01:20:55 ◼   ► - It is-- - Bank on that kind of thing.

01:20:57 ◼   ► - The app business is surprisingly getting,

01:20:59 ◼   ► I think, more and more like that.

01:21:01 ◼   ► and it's because of the nature of the media.

01:21:06 ◼   ► - That's pop software, right?

01:21:07 ◼   ► - Right.

01:21:08 ◼   ► - It's like you get the big out of the gate push,

01:21:10 ◼   ► and then after that, you gotta spend a lot of money on ads.

01:21:13 ◼   ► - Do you know what, I'll tell you,

01:21:15 ◼   ► even just as recent as when I was at Barebone Software

01:21:18 ◼   ► from 2000 to 2002,

01:21:20 ◼   ► I mean, the internet was certainly a thing.

01:21:23 ◼   ► I mean, it was 2000.

01:21:25 ◼   ► I mean, the internet had been out for a while,

01:21:26 ◼   ► and website publicity was important,

01:21:29 ◼   ► But we definitely still saw major spikes when Macworld reviews came out in print.

01:21:36 ◼   ► That was a big deal because there were an awful lot of people who that's when they found out there was a new version of BB Edit.

01:21:41 ◼   ► It was when three months later when the version of Macworld came out with the review.

01:21:47 ◼   ► Yeah, that makes sense. You know, if you go to the Macworld Expo, you can kind of see the skew of the, like, the demographic there. Kind of skews older.

01:22:02 ◼   ► Right.

01:22:03 ◼   ► A little bit, you know what I mean? And these are diehard Mac people. And they have been for, like, 20, 30 years.

01:22:10 ◼   ► uh...

01:22:11 ◼   ► and he used to be that yet mac world was the

01:22:15 ◼   ► go to place where you get any kind of

01:22:19 ◼   ► recognition and all even then though there was definitely a spike when new

01:22:22 ◼   ► versions came out

01:22:24 ◼   ► because i think i remember and it was visceral

01:22:27 ◼   ► was that time bb edit

01:22:29 ◼   ► shipped

01:22:29 ◼   ► a lot of hardware copies in a like actual boxes with a cd and uh... printed

01:22:35 ◼   ► user manual

01:22:37 ◼   ► And like when we'd have like a major version like I think I think

01:22:41 ◼   ► 7.0 was the biggest version when I was there which was like the first native for Mac OS 10 version

01:22:47 ◼   ► And I just remembered like when the boxes came in it was like

01:22:51 ◼   ► And it was kind of awesome. It was a thing. Yeah, I actually miss it because it was like well, holy shit

01:22:57 ◼   ► I had I you know I played a part in that like and it was just a mountain of

01:23:02 ◼   ► physical objects like like a truckload of boxes

01:23:06 ◼   ► Yeah, and it was like well you must have had that thrill when you go to a store and you see something that you helped

01:23:11 ◼   ► Create like on the shelf in a physical form. Oh, it was it was true with BB edit because

01:23:18 ◼   ► Yeah, because then it you know, I

01:23:21 ◼   ► Love that I still have boss games that I worked on like years ago. They're like on my bookshelf

01:23:26 ◼   ► Oh, I still have all the BB editor manuals, especially I have all the ones from before I worked there too, but

01:23:31 ◼   ► I'm prouder of the ones that my name is in the credits for

01:23:36 ◼   ► But yeah, it was totally cool to go into the first couple of the Apple stores in Massachusetts

01:23:44 ◼   ► and see BB Edit on the shelves.

01:23:46 ◼   ► Yeah, it's awesome.

01:23:47 ◼   ► I used to go in and do what people do in bookstores when they have a book.

01:23:52 ◼   ► I'd go in and put the BB Edit in a better spot on the shelves, lower it down so that

01:23:58 ◼   ► it was reachable.

01:23:59 ◼   ► They'd put it up on the top shelf.

01:24:01 ◼   ► You'd be like, "No, no, no.

01:24:02 ◼   ► I'm going to put that on the lower shelf."

01:24:04 ◼   ► I've done the same thing.

01:24:06 ◼   ► Can't do that these days.

01:24:07 ◼   ► Can't just stick around for the app store and get some better

01:24:11 ◼   ► placement.

01:24:12 ◼   ► Larry, imagine, with all the conversations

01:24:14 ◼   ► we've had recently about jackassery or gimmicky moves

01:24:20 ◼   ► in the app store, imagine if anybody could just

01:24:23 ◼   ► go in and move around your app.

01:24:24 ◼   ► It would be kind of fun in a Wild West kind of way.

01:24:31 ◼   ► Probably not great.

01:24:33 ◼   ► So wait, yeah, let me follow up a little bit on that Jelka one-star thing.

01:24:37 ◼   ► I don't know, so your comments...

01:24:42 ◼   ► I saw the... I don't know how to... I'm trying to come up with a phrasing for this.

01:24:47 ◼   ► Somebody who's been at this for a long time sort of colored your comments as being anti-developer.

01:24:52 ◼   ► The fact that you call for a one-star review.

01:24:59 ◼   ► I don't think it's anti-developer because again, like we've just been chatting about, you are a developer and you get plenty of one-star reviews for, well, Sync is missing.

01:25:09 ◼   ► Which is clearly, I don't think you should be getting one-star review for that.

01:25:14 ◼   ► Well, but at least it's true.

01:25:16 ◼   ► Yes.

01:25:17 ◼   ► It is true. I mean, so if you really think that that makes it one star, at least you're, you know, it's not…

01:25:22 ◼   ► It is, I totally agree. I totally agree. And I actually read all of the reviews we get for

01:25:29 ◼   ► for napkin and even the low ones I actually find super useful. You know, like getting a one-star

01:25:35 ◼   ► review for Missing Sing is actually informing you in a way. So I don't think your call for the

01:25:41 ◼   ► one-star thing was anti-developer. I do think it was maybe a bit of a dick move.

01:25:48 ◼   ► Maybe, and it comes back to what we talked about before about what happens when you have

01:25:54 ◼   ► a major platform.

01:25:56 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:25:57 ◼   ► Like when you're in charge of BuzzFeed's 100,000 subscriber Twitter feed and you're

01:26:01 ◼   ► drawing attention to a woman's tweet about Africa that she thought was only going out

01:26:08 ◼   ► to her 200 followers.

01:26:10 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:26:11 ◼   ► And I will say this too, again not to defend her, but that it is also very possible and

01:26:16 ◼   ► perhaps even easy given that the last like 400 tweets she wrote went to 200

01:26:21 ◼   ► people to assume the next one would go to 200 people to you know and that you

01:26:26 ◼   ► just sort of forget that you were one retweet away from going out to 100,000

01:26:31 ◼   ► exactly and I'm cognizant of that and I you know I worry you know like you asked

01:26:36 ◼   ► me if I worry I do a little because on the one hand I'm cognizant of it and so

01:26:41 ◼   ► I want to be a little bit more careful than maybe I used to have to beat

01:26:45 ◼   ► circa 2003, 2004, 2005. But on the other hand, I don't want to neuter the site and take all the

01:26:51 ◼   ► piss and vinegar out of it. Yeah. No, I agree with you. I think I do think that calling for

01:26:59 ◼   ► the one-star review is a bit of a heavy-handed thing only because of the weight that you throw

01:27:07 ◼   ► around these days. You know, if there's only one thing I regret about it and like, you know,

01:27:11 ◼   ► I don't want to rehash the whole thing. Yeah, I did a lot more research about it though, you know

01:27:15 ◼   ► Not since last week, but before last week, but I agree with you. I think it's a shitty practice

01:27:20 ◼   ► well

01:27:20 ◼   ► and likes like the one thing that I just I don't know and it was like something that I knew vaguely annoyed me and I

01:27:26 ◼   ► It was like constant grain of sand in my eye or a pebble in my shoe

01:27:30 ◼   ► Every time it came up, but until I really studied it and looked into it

01:27:35 ◼   ► I didn't really realize just how often even I was seeing it like just how often and it wasn't like I said

01:27:41 ◼   ► said like that when Dan Weinman on Twitter went through this irate project

01:27:45 ◼   ► that I figured out oh my god this is the project almost everybody is using

01:27:49 ◼   ► because this dialog box especially you know like with the no thanks at the

01:27:53 ◼   ► bottom you can customize all these strings and a lot of people do but the

01:27:58 ◼   ► the whole idea that it's three buttons rate ask me later and no thanks and

01:28:04 ◼   ► The recipe is exactly the same basically.

01:28:06 ◼   ► Right. And that it is, that what no thank, the code path for no thanks is don't ask again for this version, but do ask again as soon as there's a new version of the app, explains everything that had been going through my head for like two years on this.

01:28:27 ◼   ► Right. And again, see that was the positive outcome.

01:28:32 ◼   ► Right.

01:28:33 ◼   ► Dan looked into it the developer

01:28:36 ◼   ► Longwood Nick Longwood. Yeah, I think I don't I don't want to butcher the name

01:28:42 ◼   ► Fixed it. All right, basically effectively towards your

01:28:46 ◼   ► specifications, right and you know

01:28:49 ◼   ► And even though there's people who are still defending staunchly the old way of doing it

01:28:54 ◼   ► Which is that in the App Store your apps get reset with each version and therefore there are people who do still

01:29:01 ◼   ► support the idea that yes, you should ask your users every single time, even if they

01:29:07 ◼   ► said no thanks, which to me is crazy.

01:29:10 ◼   ► Like to me, that's what…

01:29:11 ◼   ► Well, okay.

01:29:12 ◼   ► I mean, here's the thing is that it's just a matter of design.

01:29:17 ◼   ► This is not like anti-developer, pro-consumer thing.

01:29:20 ◼   ► There is design.

01:29:21 ◼   ► You design the software to serve the requirements of the user.

01:29:29 ◼   ► popping up a dialog box begging for a rating, and even wording it in a way to encourage higher ratings, that is not servicing the user.

01:29:34 ◼   ► That is serving your own self-interest.

01:29:44 ◼   ► Right. It's your problem. It is a problem. It's your problem. It's not the user's problem.

01:29:46 ◼   ► The problem I have with the counterargument to your position is that it's not that you're being anti-developer.

01:29:58 ◼   ► is that you're maybe a little myopically focused on serving the user.

01:30:03 ◼   ► Which I agree is probably the right thing.

01:30:12 ◼   ► What I would like to see is everybody agrees that, yes, popping these things up is bullshit,

01:30:15 ◼   ► and it in no way serves the user.

01:30:19 ◼   ► It just doesn't do it.

01:30:22 ◼   ► It helps the company survive.

01:30:23 ◼   ► And so maybe in a roundabout way, you can say, "Well, you're going to get support longer."

01:30:25 ◼   ► But at that moment, the user is not in any way interested in rating your app.

01:30:30 ◼   ► And you're kind of presenting them.

01:30:35 ◼   ► You're interrupting. At the very least, you're interrupting them.

01:30:39 ◼   ► People bend over backwards never to interrupt the user with dumbass dialog boxes.

01:30:41 ◼   ► I don't know why you'd do it in this case.

01:30:46 ◼   ► Except that you feel it's essential to your business.

01:30:48 ◼   ► And that's rough.

01:30:50 ◼   ► But at least admit like, yeah, we made an anti-usability decision in order to support

01:30:55 ◼   ► our business because that's the way we had to do it.

01:30:57 ◼   ► Well, and like the…

01:30:58 ◼   ► Sort of like shareware, like back in the day.

01:31:00 ◼   ► The irate recipe or library, whatever you want to call it.

01:31:04 ◼   ► And like I suspected all along, I do think it was written in – with nothing but good

01:31:11 ◼   ► intentions.

01:31:12 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:31:13 ◼   ► I don't think…

01:31:14 ◼   ► Everybody's acting…

01:31:15 ◼   ► There was a whole bunch of things that he never thought about and that everybody using

01:31:21 ◼   ► it seemingly never really thought about, like that there really should be a way that you

01:31:28 ◼   ► can just say, "Never show me this again.

01:31:30 ◼   ► I really don't care."

01:31:32 ◼   ► And…

01:31:33 ◼   ► And, well, whatever.

01:31:34 ◼   ► He changed it.

01:31:35 ◼   ► So…

01:31:36 ◼   ► And, like, for example, one of the things that I find maddening about it is that to

01:31:38 ◼   ► me it seems to pop up randomly.

01:31:41 ◼   ► But apparently it's like the intention of that was, "Well, we don't want to bug

01:31:44 ◼   ► you immediately upon launching the app because you just launched the app and you probably

01:31:48 ◼   ► have something in your head that you want to do. So we don't want to interrupt you then.

01:31:52 ◼   ► You know, that there's some... it tries to be intelligent about when it pops up, but

01:31:56 ◼   ► it actually just ends up seeming random.

01:31:59 ◼   ► And I still think...

01:32:00 ◼   ► He's never a good heuristic about interrupting a user.

01:32:02 ◼   ► I still think that to me, my favorite example of this, and I just can't believe the timing

01:32:06 ◼   ► of it, is the way that Kevin Systrom, the Instagram founder, was interrupted during

01:32:10 ◼   ► his on-stage demo by his own app.

01:32:14 ◼   ► And it's because they're using iRate,

01:32:17 ◼   ► and it was trying to be clever about when it showed it to him.

01:32:20 ◼   ► So no matter how many times he rehearsed it before,

01:32:23 ◼   ► he ran into the heuristic that was like,

01:32:25 ◼   ► we didn't want to bug you right away when you first updated,

01:32:28 ◼   ► and we didn't want to bug you when you first launched the app.

01:32:30 ◼   ► So we just did it halfway through posting a picture

01:32:33 ◼   ► while you're on stage.

01:32:34 ◼   ► Yeah, he got a bad roll of the dice on that one.

01:32:37 ◼   ► Still handled it with aplomb.

01:32:40 ◼   ► If there's one thing, there is one thing, if I could do anything different, I don't

01:32:43 ◼   ► regret raising the awareness of this. I don't. And I think it's good things have come of

01:32:48 ◼   ► it and I think they'll continue to come of it. If there's one thing I regret, it's the

01:32:51 ◼   ► one star thing. Which, and a couple of people have suggested like an alternate here, you

01:32:57 ◼   ► know, like idea which would be like rated but give it like one star fewer than you think

01:33:02 ◼   ► the app would otherwise deserve. So instead of giving it one total star, give it one fewer.

01:33:06 ◼   ► If you would have given it four, give it three. Or maybe, you know.

01:33:09 ◼   ► mention that mention right and maybe if you're super annoyed by it maybe give it

01:33:14 ◼   ► to fewer stars so give it three instead of five or give it two instead of four

01:33:18 ◼   ► and mention it and be you know and and go over you know bend over backwards in

01:33:24 ◼   ► your comments to say that it's you know otherwise a great app but that you are

01:33:28 ◼   ► doing it for this because I do think hurting the overall average rating of

01:33:34 ◼   ► the app is an effective way to get developers to stop doing this because

01:33:37 ◼   ► the whole reason they're doing it in the first place is because they're concerned

01:33:40 ◼   ► with their ratings. And I think it is unfair to, and like you going back to

01:33:49 ◼   ► your idea that that my whole stance is developer hostile, I think it helps, right,

01:33:55 ◼   ► but that there's a perception that it is, but what about the developers who have

01:33:59 ◼   ► deliberately not done this specifically because even though they know that they

01:34:04 ◼   ► would get more reviews and that most of those reviews would be positive and that you can

01:34:08 ◼   ► do certain tricks with the way you word the dialogue to try to only steer people there

01:34:13 ◼   ► who want to leave good reviews, which I think is a shady practice.

01:34:18 ◼   ► I think it steers the whole thing into even more SEO-like spamminess.

01:34:24 ◼   ► But anyway, the developers who've resisted doing this at all and don't have anything

01:34:29 ◼   ► in there that pops up a dialogue to do it are hurt by the developers who do because it works.

01:34:36 ◼   ► I agree. So you get an arms race.

01:34:38 ◼   ► Right. So you make it so it doesn't work. And then everybody – and then I think implicitly it helps the developers who've never done it in the first place.

01:34:48 ◼   ► Yeah. I agree. And you had a great talk with Jockhead last week about it, so I don't want to rehash the whole thing.

01:34:54 ◼   ► I don't necessarily see the guiding...

01:34:57 ◼   ► So there's two ways of seeing that what you just called a shady practice, right?

01:35:03 ◼   ► There's either you guiding good reviews to give you a good star rating.

01:35:07 ◼   ► Personally, I would rather... if somebody had an issue with the app, I would rather have them email me.

01:35:13 ◼   ► Or like file a support ticket. Because I can deal with them and I can help them.

01:35:17 ◼   ► Well, you know what? Let's get back to that.

01:35:19 ◼   ► Which is what I want to do, right.

01:35:21 ◼   ► Hold that thought because jalkin and I didn't talk about that and I do think it's one of the

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01:36:53 ◼   ► were dealing with was junk.

01:36:54 ◼   ► Once they started using mail route, the junk just went away.

01:36:59 ◼   ► Then your mail server, all it has to do is actually serve the real email to your users,

01:37:03 ◼   ► which is way, way, way, way, way less stressful than having to do all the spam and virus filtering.

01:37:13 ◼   ► Fully customizable.

01:37:14 ◼   ► They have an API, so if you're a programmer, you can customize it through your own scripts.

01:37:21 ◼   ► They have an interface for changing the filters that you can do through their own website

01:37:26 ◼   ► so you can configure it in a point-and-click sort of way.

01:37:32 ◼   ► Truly customizable.

01:37:33 ◼   ► They really know how nerds want to have everything just the way they want it with their mail.

01:37:39 ◼   ► Where do you go to find out more?

01:37:41 ◼   ► Go to mailround.net.

01:37:43 ◼   ► another one mail route net they know what they're doing slash the talk show

01:37:49 ◼   ► and that way they will know that you came here through the show but it's a

01:37:53 ◼   ► great service every week I think it's why they keep coming back on the show

01:37:58 ◼   ► but I keep getting emails and tweets from people who are like I've you know

01:38:01 ◼   ► signed up for it I cannot believe you know how accurate the spam filtering is

01:38:05 ◼   ► gets it all very very few false positives and it's just a great service

01:38:10 ◼   ► Couldn't be easier.

01:38:12 ◼   ► My thanks to MailerApp.

01:38:13 ◼   ► So you were talking about asking users for reviews or email feedback.

01:38:19 ◼   ► And this is a huge problem on the App Store is that users will go there when they're either

01:38:26 ◼   ► like a bug or a misunderstanding about the way it works or a feature request and then

01:38:32 ◼   ► they leave it as a review.

01:38:35 ◼   ► And not only is that not really what a review is for, especially if it's a bug, but – and

01:38:40 ◼   ► And I don't think people know this.

01:38:41 ◼   ► Developers can't respond to the comments on the App Store.

01:38:44 ◼   ► Like, there's…

01:38:45 ◼   ► And I don't think that these people are acting in bad faith.

01:38:48 ◼   ► I think that…

01:38:49 ◼   ► They don't know what to do.

01:38:50 ◼   ► They don't know where to go.

01:38:51 ◼   ► And posting reviews is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

01:38:54 ◼   ► I just can't help you.

01:38:55 ◼   ► Right.

01:38:56 ◼   ► I'm sorry.

01:38:57 ◼   ► Well, and it's super frustrating when it's like a known issue that you have a workaround

01:39:03 ◼   ► for or you know what's causing it.

01:39:05 ◼   ► And if, you know, if they wrote email, you could write them back.

01:39:09 ◼   ► And it's like such a frequently asked question or frequently hit bug that you have like a

01:39:14 ◼   ► text expander snippet that explains it all to them.

01:39:18 ◼   ► When you see it on an app store review and it's just their app store pseudonym, you can't

01:39:25 ◼   ► get in touch with them.

01:39:26 ◼   ► And there's no way to post…

01:39:27 ◼   ► You know what?

01:39:28 ◼   ► It goes both ways.

01:39:29 ◼   ► I've seen this one review.

01:39:32 ◼   ► It's our only one-star review.

01:39:34 ◼   ► And I feel a little bit bad.

01:39:36 ◼   ► Originally, it was posted as a five-star review, and it said, "App crashes all the time in

01:39:42 ◼   ► a red MacBook Pro."

01:39:44 ◼   ► And it doesn't.

01:39:45 ◼   ► I mean, we haven't seen that.

01:39:46 ◼   ► One of the—like, Chris, my partner, has a red—I don't know.

01:39:49 ◼   ► So I don't know what's happening.

01:39:50 ◼   ► Then I cracked a joke on Twitter about it, and then the guy reposted it as a one-star

01:39:56 ◼   ► review.

01:39:57 ◼   ► And it's good for him, because it's true.

01:40:00 ◼   ► If he's having that experience, it's bad.

01:40:01 ◼   ► I can't help him.

01:40:03 ◼   ► I don't know. And so it's not like I can give you a text expander and fix this.

01:40:07 ◼   ► I want to know what the hell is going on with your thing because maybe this is affecting other people.

01:40:12 ◼   ► This is like, you know, when you get a letter to a politician, you're like, well, that counts as 10 people getting pissed off or right.

01:40:19 ◼   ► You know, like it counts. Like I actually want to fix these issues.

01:40:23 ◼   ► Right now. And it's, you know, it's true with radars app with Apple where, you know, just because you know, other people have filed it, they you really should file the dupes.

01:40:32 ◼   ► because it gives them a sense of how many people are encountering it.

01:40:36 ◼   ► I can't recall, I mean, nobody loves dealing, no developer loves dealing with tech support.

01:40:42 ◼   ► But you do want to find out about bugs, especially.

01:40:47 ◼   ► Or at least you do if you take pride in your work.

01:40:50 ◼   ► And getting duplicate bug reports is super helpful because it helps you prioritize them.

01:40:56 ◼   ► right if like you suspect that there's one user who when they increase the font size

01:41:04 ◼   ► and then they do something that they can't quite reproduce but it crashes the app it

01:41:08 ◼   ► makes you a lot less likely to chase that down than if you've gotten in the last month

01:41:13 ◼   ► eight bug reports all saying that they increase the font size and then even though none of

01:41:17 ◼   ► them maybe have the steps but eight people have had the app crash after they've increased

01:41:22 ◼   ► the font size. Then you think, well now this is min, and maybe you can triangulate it from

01:41:28 ◼   ► the steps that they did mention they did afterwards.

01:41:31 ◼   ► That's the big thing, is the triangulation. And again, it's not... Prioritizing bugs isn't...

01:41:41 ◼   ► It's not that any individual's problems aren't important. It's sort of an aggregate effect,

01:41:49 ◼   ► effect, right? Like you need to sort of...

01:41:52 ◼   ► Like if there's one guy that's just crashing every time when he launches and it's only one guy,

01:41:57 ◼   ► well that sucks. Here's your money back. I'd rather give you your money back.

01:42:01 ◼   ► And if there's a bug that hits

01:42:04 ◼   ► a couple hundred people,

01:42:08 ◼   ► that's probably the better problem to address. Because again, you know,

01:42:12 ◼   ► we're both small companies, right? Like we can't...

01:42:15 ◼   ► Even big companies can't address everything.

01:42:17 ◼   ► - Have we mentioned Napkin?

01:42:18 ◼   ► We said Napkin by name,

01:42:19 ◼   ► 'cause people might be confused.

01:42:21 ◼   ► The app you're talking about is a Mac app called Napkin.

01:42:24 ◼   ► And that's-- - Yeah,

01:42:25 ◼   ► I might have dropped it, but yeah.

01:42:26 ◼   ► - You and Chris Parrish do it,

01:42:27 ◼   ► and your company has aged and distilled.

01:42:30 ◼   ► - Yes. - It's a great app.

01:42:31 ◼   ► I've mentioned it in LinkedIn, and I use it all the time.

01:42:33 ◼   ► I use it whenever I bug Whiskas with UI reports.

01:42:38 ◼   ► Not to make indie development sound cooler

01:42:40 ◼   ► than it really is, 'cause you know,

01:42:42 ◼   ► you'd be a computer programmer.

01:42:43 ◼   ► But, fixing bugs or trying to identify a bug can be like being a detective, you know?

01:42:49 ◼   ► And bug reports are like crime reports and you use them to solve the crime and figure

01:42:53 ◼   ► it out.

01:42:54 ◼   ► And when there's a hundred of them that sound like it's the same criminal, that's

01:42:58 ◼   ► a case that you're more interested in than like you said, like a, well, one guy got mugged.

01:43:04 ◼   ► Right.

01:43:05 ◼   ► Well, I mean, like anything, more data, more possibility that you're going to figure

01:43:09 ◼   ► out what the hell is going on.

01:43:11 ◼   ► Right.

01:43:12 ◼   ► know again it's like being a police it's like being the police department where

01:43:15 ◼   ► you know you solve the crimes that are affecting the most people first yeah and

01:43:19 ◼   ► you get shot at too right before you head for the utopia of the bugless

01:43:25 ◼   ► exactly how was your 2013 fair not to reciprocate good it's fun yeah I don't

01:43:34 ◼   ► know um I don't know if you listen I do debug show I know you've heard a couple

01:43:39 ◼   ► Listen every week. I think I might have missed the last week.

01:43:43 ◼   ► You don't really, it's Vicki Murley.

01:43:45 ◼   ► Well, that's great. I did not know that.

01:43:48 ◼   ► Yeah. She's awesome.

01:43:50 ◼   ► Oh, she's super awesome.

01:43:51 ◼   ► Yeah. Good stuff. All about WebKit.

01:43:54 ◼   ► Right.

01:43:55 ◼   ► And, you know, worth listening to.

01:43:57 ◼   ► Daring Fireball readers might vaguely, if they're thinking I've vaguely recall the name Vicki Murley,

01:44:04 ◼   ► Vicki Merle she just published a book what was the name of the book CSS

01:44:12 ◼   ► transforms CSS transforms it's totally guessing at that but yeah right but it's

01:44:18 ◼   ► just transforms yeah it's like a fancy schmancy it's this great self

01:44:24 ◼   ► evidential I don't what's the word for that but it's like it's an iBook full of

01:44:29 ◼   ► CSS transforms about yes so she's the former Safari technology evangelist from

01:44:37 ◼   ► Apple right and you know gave and other you know anybody who's been to WWDC and

01:44:43 ◼   ► gone to WebKit sessions over the last five or six years has seen her give some

01:44:47 ◼   ► of the best WWDC sessions I've seen yeah so that's great so you know we've been

01:44:54 ◼   ► doing a lot of that I've been actually having a blast doing that show yeah

01:44:58 ◼   ► what's her company now sprightly books is that they her company sprightly books

01:45:03 ◼   ► right she left Apple to start her own ebook publisher right she was neck and

01:45:09 ◼   ► neck with Sir Kusa and his review for I was 10 mavericks at the time she was

01:45:16 ◼   ► right sir accuses he's he's just enough in the green room here he's shaking his

01:45:21 ◼   ► fist. I just got a report somebody just they just told me from the green room

01:45:26 ◼   ► that Moltz fell asleep. I don't you did you see him hit the nagnog? I'm not quite

01:45:32 ◼   ► sure what the explanation is I don't know if it's past his bedtime or if if

01:45:36 ◼   ► he was practicing too much but Moltz is asleep we'll see if he'll wake up but

01:45:39 ◼   ► we're running short on time so we may have to cut a few of these yeah holiday

01:45:43 ◼   ► spectacular Daring Fireball yeah yeah Dan Frommer's looking a little bit in

01:45:50 ◼   ► bag at this point.

01:45:52 ◼   ► That's actually just how Dan looks.

01:45:54 ◼   ► Yeah, it could be.

01:45:55 ◼   ► So whatever, he could be good to go.

01:45:57 ◼   ► Anyway, yeah, so debug's been great.

01:46:00 ◼   ► The napkin's been doing well.

01:46:02 ◼   ► Do you guys do a debug every week?

01:46:04 ◼   ► Every two weeks.

01:46:06 ◼   ► Every two weeks.

01:46:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I couldn't do it every week.

01:46:08 ◼   ► I mean, you know how it is.

01:46:10 ◼   ► No, but you know like-

01:46:12 ◼   ► I do know how it is.

01:46:15 ◼   ► You know, you develop a bunch of your buddies and we shoot the shit, but...

01:46:20 ◼   ► Ostensibly the talk show is weekly, but I keep watching all of these other shows catch

01:46:25 ◼   ► up to me in version-- or episode numbers, like the ATP guys, like, 'cause those guys

01:46:30 ◼   ► all have their shit together, and they do-- I think they do a show every single week.

01:46:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:46:35 ◼   ► What do you call it?

01:46:36 ◼   ► Whiskus's show with...

01:46:37 ◼   ► Unprofessional.

01:46:38 ◼   ► Right, with, uh...

01:46:39 ◼   ► I forget his name.

01:46:43 ◼   ► But anyway, Whiskus's show...

01:46:44 ◼   ► Alex Shreiman. Alex Shreiman.

01:46:47 ◼   ► Right. Is like weekly like clockwork. And even Amy and Paul's show, which they only did like 13

01:46:58 ◼   ► episodes of, but like the 13 weeks that they did it, it was like every Monday at like 4 o'clock

01:47:05 ◼   ► Eastern, a new episode came out. I keep watching these shows gain on the talk show in episode

01:47:10 ◼   ► numbers and I feel a little bad about it.

01:47:13 ◼   ► Yeah, but it's a quality game, right? Which is why you have me on.

01:47:16 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:47:19 ◼   ► Oh, god I wish we were out of stuff to talk about, but we're not.

01:47:23 ◼   ► I know.

01:47:24 ◼   ► So that would have been a good point.

01:47:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:47:26 ◼   ► You had a good 2013, so Napkin's doing well?

01:47:28 ◼   ► Yeah, Napkin's doing pretty good.

01:47:31 ◼   ► I'm thrilled, like you, to be featured in the best of 2013.

01:47:35 ◼   ► That was great.

01:47:36 ◼   ► Came out, had an editor's choice.

01:47:38 ◼   ► That was great.

01:47:39 ◼   ► Got a lot of stuff that we got to have.

01:47:41 ◼   ► Oh, you guys got an editor's choice.

01:47:42 ◼   ► yeah when we came out we had an editor's choice yeah and we had the most

01:47:46 ◼   ► important editors choice we got the you pimped us oh we didn't get an editor's

01:47:51 ◼   ► choice oh really no huh 2014 you know what you got to add some sink you know

01:48:01 ◼   ► what honestly I think that's actually very fair I do actually I think that I

01:48:05 ◼   ► don't know I don't know how fair that is it's pretty reasonable anyway so I've got

01:48:10 ◼   ► I had like a list of – I don't know.

01:48:13 ◼   ► It's my group of beef list, I guess.

01:48:15 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:48:16 ◼   ► It's stuff I wanted to talk to you about.

01:48:20 ◼   ► So the Mac Pro came out.

01:48:21 ◼   ► I wanted to talk to you about that.

01:48:23 ◼   ► So do you have any opinions on these?

01:48:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:48:25 ◼   ► I ordered one.

01:48:26 ◼   ► What did you order?

01:48:27 ◼   ► I didn't have too much money.

01:48:29 ◼   ► When?

01:48:30 ◼   ► Well, what?

01:48:31 ◼   ► No, what?

01:48:32 ◼   ► What did you get?

01:48:33 ◼   ► I ordered it like 3.30 in the morning, the night that it came out basically effectively

01:48:37 ◼   ► as soon as I can.

01:48:38 ◼   ► Let me look at the... and the insane thing is I can't actually remember the details of the short configuration details.

01:48:46 ◼   ► So a six core, 32 gigs of RAM, 512 flash storage, and dual D500 video cards.

01:48:56 ◼   ► And I got my user guide in English.

01:48:59 ◼   ► Which cost me an extra two bucks.

01:49:02 ◼   ► You know what I did do, which is insane? I bought a magic mouse and an Apple wireless keyboard with it.

01:49:08 ◼   ► Which added up to like another hundred and some odd dollars.

01:49:11 ◼   ► Because you don't have a mouse or a keyboard?

01:49:13 ◼   ► I do. I'm just an idiot. I don't know. I'm like, I'm getting, I'm spending this much money and it is like, it is way too much money to be spending.

01:49:21 ◼   ► Yeah, I saw...

01:49:22 ◼   ► What's another, you know, hundred bucks to get?

01:49:24 ◼   ► hundred bucks. I saw that somebody tweeted, I don't even know if it's a joke,

01:49:28 ◼   ► you could probably tell me though, but somebody tweeted that as you go through

01:49:33 ◼   ► you say here's my base model now I'm gonna configure it and in the

01:49:37 ◼   ► configuration steps they're like do you want to throw in an iPad? It's like an

01:49:45 ◼   ► error like you know you're ordering Apple's high-end product when tossing in

01:49:49 ◼   ► an iPad is there with like mouse and keyboard. Do you want to just throw in a

01:49:54 ◼   ► $700 tablet. What the hell?

01:49:58 ◼   ► Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I mean, they've got Final Cut Pro and X and all that in that list, too, which makes sense.

01:50:03 ◼   ► But, yeah. So, I

01:50:08 ◼   ► came under $5,000 until they configured, except then I paid

01:50:13 ◼   ► tax on it. So, there's federal tax, well, what we call federal tax and provincial

01:50:18 ◼   ► tax. It was probably like, what, like $1,000? Yeah, $740.

01:50:23 ◼   ► So it came out. That's a lot of money. Frankly, I don't think I'm ever going to buy Mac Pro again.

01:50:28 ◼   ► I haven't received this one, actually. But I think for a lot of the work I do,

01:50:33 ◼   ► and iMac is great. But I am super excited about this because it is a new thing.

01:50:39 ◼   ► It's just a new way of looking at how to do these kind of computers. And that fascinates me.

01:50:46 ◼   ► As much as an iOS device, this just gets me excited.

01:50:50 ◼   ► I saw somebody post on Twitter, and again, don't remember who, but somebody could do

01:50:55 ◼   ► the work.

01:50:56 ◼   ► I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of the whole thing, is that if you

01:51:01 ◼   ► leave it plugged in all day, I think let it go to sleep or whatever, but using it, you

01:51:06 ◼   ► can save, you might save $1,000 a year on energy versus a similar…

01:51:14 ◼   ► No, it's called Mac Pro.

01:51:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:51:17 ◼   ► like the similar, you know

01:51:19 ◼   ► Same basic Intel chipset, but you know in a Dell or an HP or something like that because this thing is so

01:51:26 ◼   ► you know iOS inspired in terms of like power efficiency, you know and

01:51:31 ◼   ► And I don't and it's you know, it's to me. It's one of the most under

01:51:35 ◼   ► Appreciate I mean it like with with

01:51:38 ◼   ► Battery devices whether it's a laptop like a MacBook or a phone or iPad

01:51:43 ◼   ► The battery thing is or the energy thing is easy because it directly correlates to battery life and battery life is very very important to the

01:51:50 ◼   ► actual usability of the product whereas with a device like a Mac Pro that's plugged in

01:51:54 ◼   ► Energy use is you just don't think about it

01:51:58 ◼   ► Like I don't really think about how much money I pay per year because I have a MacBook Pro at my desk that I never

01:52:03 ◼   ► unplug

01:52:04 ◼   ► But it costs something and it's actually you know computers actually used in general speaking. They actually use a lot of energy

01:52:11 ◼   ► Yeah, they're one of the higher draw devices in you right and it's not just about being good for the environment and everything

01:52:17 ◼   ► It's like you can actually save some dough, you know, and if you you know, I think it's you know

01:52:21 ◼   ► I mean, you know saving the environment good right and you're probably planning to actually get to see that right?

01:52:27 ◼   ► Yeah, and you're gonna use this thing for a couple years

01:52:29 ◼   ► Yeah, you save more than a couple. Yeah, this is gonna be a

01:52:32 ◼   ► Like a you know, I'm looking in like five years kind of thing

01:52:36 ◼   ► Which is why I didn't mind bumping up the memory to 32 gigs, which is

01:52:40 ◼   ► So my current device all my Macs are effectively dead

01:52:44 ◼   ► And I'm left with like a like a MacBook Air from 2010

01:52:49 ◼   ► Yeah, so this is like, you know, I'm investing in something. Does the MacBook Air have a light-up keyboard?

01:52:56 ◼   ► Yeah, it does. See my MacBook Air does not. Mine is, but that's because mine's an 11

01:53:02 ◼   ► I think that's how old my MacBook Air is and to me that sounds ancient

01:53:05 ◼   ► But on my desk I have a 2008 MacBook Pro, which is five years old. It's crazy.

01:53:11 ◼   ► I mean, at the time it was, you know, like the fastest MacBook Pro money could buy.

01:53:16 ◼   ► It was more than enough power for me. But I want to get a Mac Pro.

01:53:20 ◼   ► Because I feel like if I buy a Mac Pro, I could probably buy one now and then retire on it.

01:53:25 ◼   ► I honestly, for your workload, yeah, I don't...

01:53:29 ◼   ► You know what?

01:53:30 ◼   ► Not to diminish, but I mean, come on, like, BBA, it's well-written software, and that is just...

01:53:34 ◼   ► You know what I need it for? I need it for Safari tabs. I need like an eight-core Mac

01:53:41 ◼   ► Pro just to keep all my Safari tabs from slowing down BBS.

01:53:45 ◼   ► Yeah, Safari tabs are the worst. Well, tabs are… You know what? I don't like tabs.

01:53:49 ◼   ► I use them constantly in web browsers. They make finding anything fucking impossible.

01:53:55 ◼   ► Yeah. Well, I say that, and I'm looking at my window menu now. I've also got at least

01:54:01 ◼   ► 30 Safari windows open.

01:54:03 ◼   ► 30? That's a lot.

01:54:04 ◼   ► No, maybe 20. But it's a lot.

01:54:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I've got like probably 12, and in each one there's like three tabs. It's crazy.

01:54:13 ◼   ► What are you going to use for a display?

01:54:16 ◼   ► Okay, so here's my beef with you. I'm going to stick with my 27-inch Apple display.

01:54:28 ◼   ► See, my problem is I don't have a modern Apple display. Mine is like, you know, it's like

01:54:35 ◼   ► only 20 inches and it's old.

01:54:38 ◼   ► I mean, so the 4K display that they pimped, what was it, Sony?

01:54:43 ◼   ► Sharp.

01:54:44 ◼   ► Sharp. I honestly just don't have the money to drop like 10 grand on a computer and 4K

01:54:52 ◼   ► 4K display. That's asking a lot, right?

01:54:57 ◼   ► So no, I'm not going to buy that.

01:55:02 ◼   ► Plus, I don't like the look of it.

01:55:04 ◼   ► Now, you in your post, I've got it here,

01:55:07 ◼   ► "No surprise 4K Cinebit display announcement."

01:55:12 ◼   ► First of all, I probably should have been thoughtful about

01:55:15 ◼   ► display, because I haven't called it Cinebit display in a while.

01:55:17 ◼   ► You amateur.

01:55:18 ◼   ► I don't really follow this stuff that closely. No, you're right. Everybody still calls it cinema display. It's like calling them power books, right?

01:55:25 ◼   ► But you said, all joking aside, I'm disappointed and a little baffled that Apple doesn't yet have a 4K display.

01:55:32 ◼   ► It's unlike Apple to leave money on the table.

01:55:35 ◼   ► It's that last sentence that I...

01:55:37 ◼   ► Yeah, other people took issue with that too, and some people point out, well then why the hell don't they sell printers, dummy?

01:55:43 ◼   ► But see, to me there's no money in printers.

01:55:45 ◼   ► I don't know that it's spread but I mean Apple does sell displays

01:55:49 ◼   ► That's the thing they do sell displays, but now they don't sell one that truly takes advantage of the Mac Pro

01:55:55 ◼   ► Yeah, but there's any number of reasons for that right right?

01:55:58 ◼   ► That's what I've heard. It's like

01:56:00 ◼   ► Sorry, I think maybe better before I just yeah, right

01:56:05 ◼   ► Yeah, what best one you've heard is what is that and I could be wrong on this?

01:56:09 ◼   ► But that it's just not possible for them to make a good 4k display yet

01:56:13 ◼   ► but that the 4k stuff that's out there is sort of more about like video playback and it makes sense for like

01:56:19 ◼   ► Like

01:56:23 ◼   ► film editors who are editing 4k footage to have a

01:56:27 ◼   ► One of the current like the sharp one that they're selling are these Dell things and use that for editing your 4k video

01:56:33 ◼   ► But like for using it as what I want to use it for is a big-ass retina display

01:56:37 ◼   ► For just general computing they don't there is that there isn't a good

01:56:43 ◼   ► There isn't a way to make one that ticks all the check marks that you'd want it to

01:56:48 ◼   ► check.

01:56:49 ◼   ► Adam Backman Or that Apple would want it to check.

01:56:50 ◼   ► Yes, I agree with that.

01:56:52 ◼   ► That was basically going to be my point.

01:56:53 ◼   ► It's like they constantly don't do things that you think they could – like they never

01:56:57 ◼   ► did a – what are they called?

01:57:00 ◼   ► Sub laptop thing.

01:57:01 ◼   ► Dave Asprey And netbook.

01:57:02 ◼   ► Adam Backman Netbook.

01:57:03 ◼   ► Never did an end book.

01:57:06 ◼   ► You could argue that they're leaving money on the table.

01:57:08 ◼   ► A lot of the iPod line for chunks of its life, they were leaving money on the table.

01:57:13 ◼   ► especially before they got into the solid state, low end stuff.

01:57:17 ◼   ► Well, or even then, why don't they make a 256 gigabyte one

01:57:22 ◼   ► that they could sell for an unbelievable sum of money

01:57:25 ◼   ► because professional DJs would buy it because they really

01:57:29 ◼   ► want 256 gigabytes of music on one device.

01:57:32 ◼   ► Right.

01:57:33 ◼   ► So I just think that they can't make a display

01:57:37 ◼   ► that they're happy with right now.

01:57:39 ◼   ► I guess you're right.

01:57:40 ◼   ► This is why I have you on the show to call me out.

01:57:42 ◼   ► That's me being petulant and wanting whatever I want, whether it's feasible or not, right now.

01:57:49 ◼   ► Yeah, that's kind of how I read it, which is why I want to call you out on it.

01:57:52 ◼   ► Because I want that too. And I probably couldn't have afforded it, but I probably would have found a way to work the streets and money.

01:58:01 ◼   ► Do you know what? I guess the weak spot for me, it's a weak spot for me, and it has been for years.

01:58:06 ◼   ► years and it's like been one of the things that's like united Caleb's cable

01:58:11 ◼   ► Sasser and I for years is an obsession with what is now called retina displays

01:58:17 ◼   ► but you know Apple has been on high high DPI and get your Mac apps ready for high

01:58:22 ◼   ► DPI long before they coined the term retina display I mean even before there

01:58:26 ◼   ► was an iPhone yeah there were WWDC sessions going back god it might even be

01:58:30 ◼   ► close to ten years now where they were like did an amazing job of having a high

01:58:34 ◼   ► DPI

01:58:36 ◼   ► Right like I just wanted I just have always been obsessed with high-resolution graphics like I remember, you know when when

01:58:47 ◼   ► 600 DPI laser printers came out and just being like we should take all the 300 DPI ones and just throw them in the garbage

01:58:56 ◼   ► And everybody was like, I don't really see the difference. I'm like are you nuts?

01:59:00 ◼   ► Let's just throw the 300 DPI ones out and then when 1200 DPI laser printers come out

01:59:04 ◼   ► I was like finally finally, you know, these fonts look right. Can you really tell how's your I said, you know what?

01:59:11 ◼   ► I don't know if I could see it anymore. But when I was in college, I could definitely tell the difference

01:59:14 ◼   ► Yeah, you were contact right I do but it's starting, you know, like my close I

01:59:20 ◼   ► See I can see close up way better when I don't have my contacts in and if I have my glasses on and I take

01:59:26 ◼   ► The glasses off I can see the way the curse of corrective, right?

01:59:30 ◼   ► It's like all of a sudden I can see the room the way I remember seeing when I was a kid

01:59:34 ◼   ► 1200 600 versus 1200 DPI laser printer output was a little bit harder and it was you know

01:59:40 ◼   ► You know it depends

01:59:42 ◼   ► You know especially if you were looking at like half tones for like you know not not even totally

01:59:47 ◼   ► If you're looking at half tones, you could definitely see the difference text. It was a little harder, but 300 to 600 was huge

01:59:53 ◼   ► In my tone as it has a dead giveaway right because you effectively lose a bunch of resolution because you're

02:00:00 ◼   ► Just the way the colors are done. Yeah

02:00:04 ◼   ► But the you know 1200 dpi you get such fine dots and it would really really make it just looked more like it really started

02:00:11 ◼   ► To look like real black and white photography on film output on just black and white

02:00:16 ◼   ► But anyway, I've been I've been waiting for the Mac and you know

02:00:20 ◼   ► All of my computing devices to go to effectively laser printer quality pixel size for forever

02:00:26 ◼   ► I mean, you know just I just want it

02:00:30 ◼   ► Well, I mean that's sort of the end game right right like there's a limit to how sharp you can your eyeballs can see

02:00:37 ◼   ► Right, and once you hit that you're done move on to other stuff

02:00:41 ◼   ► and you know, I just want the Mac to be I

02:00:44 ◼   ► Still I hear right though that like coda one being like completely retina ready

02:00:50 ◼   ► That was awesome. It's an awesome technical accomplishment, but it was such a it was wasted because there were no retina displays for it

02:00:57 ◼   ► Yeah, but that's why panic's panic, right?

02:01:00 ◼   ► It is exactly sweat all of those kind of details

02:01:02 ◼   ► Even if they never come to light that they've really sweated those details. They they did it, right?

02:01:07 ◼   ► And it's not like, you know, like apps aren't like movies where like, you know

02:01:13 ◼   ► You know like it's great that Kubrick shot 2001 and 70 millimeter because yeah, you can even if you're watching at home

02:01:23 ◼   ► there's a great is a much better resolution source to strike the blu-ray from

02:01:28 ◼   ► Then if he had shot it on 35 million film all of the effect shots said in 72, I think so

02:01:36 ◼   ► You don't need to sometimes that the effects guys or whatever like they they set it up differently in order to achieve

02:01:43 ◼   ► Yeah, I think everything we shot 70

02:01:45 ◼   ► You know, I I could what do I know about Kubrick movies?

02:01:52 ◼   ► Right, but an app isn't like that because now that we actually do have retina

02:01:57 ◼   ► MacBook Pros, you know, you can run Mac apps on retina displays, but only on these MacBook Pros

02:02:04 ◼   ► It doesn't matter what coda1 was because all coda users are using coda2

02:02:08 ◼   ► Right now I'm not gonna say it was wasted though because maybe it got the panic guys

02:02:12 ◼   ► You know that the whole development team in there, you know, their designers were in a retina workflow early. They developed their retina muscles

02:02:20 ◼   ► But anyway, it's a we have stuff it is a personal. I'm so personally

02:02:24 ◼   ► obsessed with it that it it it makes me irrational about my when I expect Apple to

02:02:31 ◼   ► Provide it to me on all their device

02:02:33 ◼   ► I wanted it if you'd asked me before I saw the price tag and thing that a Mac Pro that I ordered I would have

02:02:39 ◼   ► Said don't worry. I will buy

02:02:42 ◼   ► Whatever retina display like cinema retina cinema display. Just give it to me. I'll

02:02:49 ◼   ► And then you know you see the price tag in like yeah, this is just a lot of money, right?

02:02:54 ◼   ► Yeah, and well, and it's also the sort of thing that'll probably be like

02:02:58 ◼   ► It's gonna hit one of those over the you know price over time curves like you know like plasma and LCD TVs

02:03:06 ◼   ► Like when high def flat panel TVs first came out and first started getting popularized

02:03:11 ◼   ► They were you know a decent one was like five thousand or six thousand dollars and then very quickly

02:03:15 ◼   ► they were 4,000 and then I forget how much I paid for mine but maybe I paid like $2,800

02:03:22 ◼   ► or something like that.

02:03:23 ◼   ► And then like within six months my exact model which I love but all of a sudden it was on

02:03:27 ◼   ► sale for $1,800 and then I just saw a thing the other day, just the other day, I think

02:03:33 ◼   ► it was like a TV that Syracuse recommended and it was like the Panasonic 60T plasma display.

02:03:39 ◼   ► Vt60 I think, yeah.

02:03:40 ◼   ► Yeah, and what is it, the Vt60?

02:03:42 ◼   ► Yeah, that sounds great.

02:03:43 ◼   ► It's totally pulling from my programmer random code remembering table.

02:03:48 ◼   ► The CNET review is like best TV we've ever reviewed, great blacks, insanely expensive.

02:03:54 ◼   ► And the con was insanely expensive and it's $1500, right?

02:03:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

02:03:59 ◼   ► And that's because, in some sense that makes sense because you go into like a TV, you know, Best Buy or something like that and there's all sorts of big screen TVs that are, you know, five, six, seven, $800.

02:04:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

02:04:09 ◼   ► But I expect that like, you know, I don't know if we're going to call them 4K displays, but...

02:04:15 ◼   ► I hope that they skip 4K and just go to whatever they call it right now. Double whatever those 27 inches.

02:04:22 ◼   ► Right. The retina thunderbolt display. And just double it and, you know, let me see everything and, you know, let 4K be called the video format or whatever.

02:04:31 ◼   ► But effectively, double the pixels on like a 27 inch display. That's what I want.

02:04:36 ◼   ► That's what I want.

02:04:37 ◼   ► Yeah, I want that too.

02:04:38 ◼   ► Yeah, I just don't think it's un-Apple-like that they didn't ship one when you want.

02:04:42 ◼   ► Right, that maybe they're going to wait until the…

02:04:45 ◼   ► Well, I think they'll wait until they have a good product, which is what they do all

02:04:49 ◼   ► the time.

02:04:51 ◼   ► So for those eight words, "ja-couze."

02:04:53 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm sure that there's also the people, if there's anybody at Apple who's working

02:04:59 ◼   ► on it, and surely somebody is, who reads Daring Fireball, I'm sure that I gave them an eye

02:05:04 ◼   ► role and I'm very sorry for that get back to work so you were big Beyonce fan

02:05:14 ◼   ► that's what Amy said to me she was like I've never seen so much Beyonce on on

02:05:18 ◼   ► your website before and then and then I said I laughed at her because it proved

02:05:22 ◼   ► that she was actually reading my website I I can't say you know what this is not

02:05:28 ◼   ► a joke I did not notice that you'd mention it on your website oh I thought

02:05:33 ◼   ► that was what you were making the joke about. No, it was just big news. So that's, you know,

02:05:36 ◼   ► I know to talk to you about it. I didn't notice that you'd actually mentioned it on your website.

02:05:40 ◼   ► Yeah. I mean, it makes sense to you because, oh, yeah, because you did the snarky thing, right?

02:05:45 ◼   ► Yeah. The what? The snarky. I mean, you got it. No, I didn't do snark. Did I? I thought I was

02:05:51 ◼   ► serious. Oh, yeah. Yeah. What do you mean? Yeah, you were serious. But you're like,

02:05:55 ◼   ► Target doesn't. Target will play the single of I can't even find it right now. I'm gonna

02:06:00 ◼   ► They will sell you the mp3 single of the world's tiniest violin

02:06:04 ◼   ► Satisfied I did find one of your more satisfying jokes, right? Cuz you're not a funny guy, right?

02:06:11 ◼   ► So there for those who've forgotten or missed it Beyonce

02:06:14 ◼   ► Somehow secretly like and you know, it's one of those things where usually when a major artist is working on a new album

02:06:20 ◼   ► Everybody knows in advance. Well, she had an entire album that she produced in secret

02:06:25 ◼   ► Nobody knew it was coming and it hit iTunes as an exclusive

02:06:29 ◼   ► And then you know with here it is and a coordinated like social media campaign and it sold like

02:06:35 ◼   ► 800,000 copies of the whole album not like a single but the whole album in three days

02:06:40 ◼   ► which is you know a lot and

02:06:44 ◼   ► Apparently it's some innovative thinking about what an album can be in digital format because I think there's a video for every song

02:06:51 ◼   ► I

02:06:54 ◼   ► Should probably should have bought it just to see but yeah

02:06:56 ◼   ► Yeah, that's why I just, I don't...

02:06:59 ◼   ► But it's not just eight or nine songs, it's songs mixed with video and they're all, you

02:07:04 ◼   ► know, it's a bigger production than just the music.

02:07:08 ◼   ► You know what I found you post, it was new iTunes exclusive Beyoncé album sells 800,000

02:07:14 ◼   ► copies in the first three days, selling music albums, not dead yet.

02:07:18 ◼   ► So yeah, not too snarky.

02:07:21 ◼   ► It's when you go at Target.

02:07:22 ◼   ► Well, because what happened then is that Target, it was, you know, it is going to be on a regular

02:07:28 ◼   ► CD, I guess, and Target has announced that they aren't going to carry it because it debuted

02:07:36 ◼   ► as an iTunes exclusive and that, you know, they're going to take their ball and go home.

02:07:42 ◼   ► Even though her previous album apparently debuted as a Target exclusive for a week or

02:07:48 ◼   ► a weekend or something like that, which makes it even funnier.

02:07:51 ◼   ► A lot of Apple, I don't want to use the word "pundits," but whatever. People that yap about Apple, I don't know. They were kind of pissed about this.

02:08:04 ◼   ► Like a downplaying target. This happens all the time. It's like that's the way business works, right?

02:08:11 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't understand. When people get mad about exclusives, it always boggles my mind.

02:08:17 ◼   ► I don't find it that disjoint. Remember when Apple wouldn't sell that book about Steve Jobs that wasn't authorized?

02:08:25 ◼   ► Right.

02:08:26 ◼   ► Yeah, kind of lame. But I mean, that's the way the world works. There's no like, "Ah, Target's being a total loser."

02:08:33 ◼   ► And iTunes is, you know, it's ass behavior constantly in order to accrue profits, basically.

02:08:44 ◼   ► And if Target can try to scare other artists from trying what Beyonce tried, then maybe it's worth it to them.

02:08:51 ◼   ► Because I don't think it's about Beyonce. They're not trying to teach Beyonce a lesson.

02:08:55 ◼   ► They're trying to teach people without her reach and her power this, "Do not screw with us. Do not try to do the iTunes thing because we will destroy you."

02:09:03 ◼   ► And you know you're not going to sell as many as Beyonce did just on iTunes.

02:09:07 ◼   ► Yeah, she can write her own check. And she's not going to do it. That's fine. She's huge. She's popular. Awesome.

02:09:12 ◼   ► Awesome. Target's just sending a message.

02:09:15 ◼   ► Right.

02:09:17 ◼   ► Mob style, but you know.

02:09:19 ◼   ► Yeah, but maybe that's, you know, it's, I'm not saying it's unreasonable. I'm just saying,

02:09:23 ◼   ► you know.

02:09:24 ◼   ► It is funny.

02:09:24 ◼   ► Nobody's crying for them.

02:09:26 ◼   ► No, but I don't think they're asking for anybody to cry for them.

02:09:30 ◼   ► Do you know what I remember? I remember...

02:09:32 ◼   ► I don't think they're playing the victim. I think they're playing the thug, effectively.

02:09:35 ◼   ► The exclusive that I remember hurting, and really, I forget what year this was,

02:09:40 ◼   ► somebody else you know who would know syracuse who would know we'll have him mention it when he comes out for his thing uh

02:09:46 ◼   ► Was he's got bells on his little elf shoes was halo because halo in development

02:09:52 ◼   ► Was a mac game because it came from bungee who had done the marathon series

02:09:58 ◼   ► Uh and others I forget the previous ones before marathon

02:10:02 ◼   ► But marathon was the big one like that marathon was to the mac what like it did math too. But yeah, they they were

02:10:09 ◼   ► Yeah, marathon was to the Mac what doing one was right, right?

02:10:13 ◼   ► everybody who spent the 90s playing doom and you know if you had a Mac instead you spent it playing marathon and

02:10:19 ◼   ► You know Halo looked like it was way more

02:10:24 ◼   ► Immersive and impressive in every way in terms of storytelling in terms of graphics

02:10:29 ◼   ► it's I honestly think that was the first game that Steve ever showed on stage I

02:10:33 ◼   ► might have been

02:10:36 ◼   ► Might have been yeah, so I mean it was and it was in you know the way that games are often promoted before they come

02:10:41 ◼   ► Out yeah, it was shown. I think at a Mac world keynote or something like that

02:10:45 ◼   ► Next thing you know Microsoft bought Bungie and all of a sudden Halo instead of being a Mac game became an Xbox

02:10:53 ◼   ► Exclusive yeah, and you know again

02:10:56 ◼   ► Can't and I remember people saying why not just sell the Mac version, too

02:11:00 ◼   ► I mean for God's sake it was our it

02:11:02 ◼   ► We're not asking you to port it to the Mac.

02:11:04 ◼   ► It obviously was already written for the Mac.

02:11:08 ◼   ► Just sell it to us.

02:11:09 ◼   ► Just take my money.

02:11:10 ◼   ► But in hindsight, you can see, and why, correctly so, they saw it as a franchise and something

02:11:18 ◼   ► that would be a reason.

02:11:19 ◼   ► Yeah, they wanted it to be a first-party title that would sell.

02:11:23 ◼   ► Eventually it did come to the PC and the Mac.

02:11:25 ◼   ► So I've worked in that business and if you're playing a game that runs on a console, 90%

02:11:35 ◼   ► of the time it's also running on the PC because that's how we debug and develop it.

02:11:41 ◼   ► Like you got Photoshop in one window and you got the game running in the other window and