41: See You on Larry`s Island
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I've been up lately. I've been working lately.
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What do they call them? Coles in the fire? I was gonna guess that.
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Is that how the saying goes? I've been butchering my idioms lately. Coles in the fire? You got a lot of Coles in the fire?
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Well, if you have...
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It's my understanding in smithing. I think the term is
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You need Coles in your fire so that you can put iron irons in there.
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I think that's blacksmithing or it could just be I don't know. What do you think? That's the blacksmith thing, right?
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All right, but that doesn't make any sense to me though. What I'm trying to say is I'm working on multiple projects
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But it seems to me that just putting a lot more coals in your fire doesn't necessarily imply
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No, you're out. You're absolutely saying it wrong
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It's irons in the fire. So it is it and at the risk of making it sound like you work for a circus
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I think you might see a lot of balls in the air
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Got a lot of balls in here. Yeah, maybe that's better. Yeah, we can do better
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Really? It's a little bit more like I got a lot of balls on the ground all over the place. Oh, okay
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That's a good one. I heard one time my friend
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we were working at dot com right before the final implosion
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he said there's still on the stock market he said there's still a lot of
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grenades rolling around
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I've always liked that one. Oh, that is a good one. Maybe you got a lot of
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you know maybe you got some grenades rolling around
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and maybe maybe you'll kick him out the door I don't know
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I can always tell like a lot of people I can tell when you're posting
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via mobile as you say
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But no, you're posting less lately, so I assume that you had some coals.
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I don't know what. We don't talk enough, but I assume you have coals or grenades.
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Nothing you can talk about.
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No, nothing I can talk about.
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Good for you. I got coals.
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Interesting that you could suss it out, though.
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Well, you know, I'm a student. I can figure things out.
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Yeah, yeah, you got less of the full star post lately. I figure that's, you know, an indicator.
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But that's exciting. This is exciting. You have coals.
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Plausible deniability.
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Right. Well, possibly exciting. Definitely have coals. I don't know if it's exciting.
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Wow. I hope you'll tell me more when it's time to reveal your coals.
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You know what I can do? I can announce, because the show hasn't...
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While we're recording, this has not been announced, but by the time this show airs,
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it'll be announced. We're going to do a live show at the WWDC again.
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Wow. At the event?
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Yeah. Well, no, no. Like last year, it would be... It's not officially sanctioned. It would be
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coincidental with WWDC. Well, I've been to a lot of your live shows during WWDC, but it's usually
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in that one bar?
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No, I did it the one time at the 111 Minnow last year.
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I didn't say it was recorded.
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It just seems like you're in that bar a lot.
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Oh, I got you.
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Yeah, that's right.
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I've eaten a lot of hot wings in that place.
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They call them sliders.
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That's exciting now.
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Are you in a position to say when that will be and who will be visiting with you?
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It's going to be on Tuesday, I believe, whatever the day of the month is in June.
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What is that? What's that gonna be a Tuesday Tuesday? Yeah Tuesday that the 11th Tuesday, June 11th
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Tickets is you're gonna have to go to a certain thing to go on tickets
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Actually by the time you hear this the tickets will probably be gone. Well, that's but maybe not maybe you should go check
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You can go I'm sure that by now. There's a weird thing. I've probably announced it on I have a website called daring fireball
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I've probably announced it there and linked to the place where you'll go to get the tickets and then you could go and
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And I would it would be a great time last year meeting a couple hundred fans of the show
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Well, I heard I first of all congratulations on selling out
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I also heard that a lot of people were disappointed that they couldn't get tickets and that the website was kind of unresponsive
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Which I understand as you said briefly was not your fault
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For my show or for WWDC. I'm acting like it's already done
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Well, that's awesome, do you know the venue
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Yeah, it's a place called mezzanine SF you ever been there. I've never been there. I don't think so
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Yeah, it should be a little bigger than last year should have more seating than last year
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But it will still have an open bar like last year. Hmm. That's that's Wow. How great is this?
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Let me tell you this. We have a couple sponsors for the show, but we have a like a headline like a mainline
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Event sponsor like a big, you know big ticket sponsor. It's gonna be Microsoft's Azure
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Web services mobile web services, so how great's that gonna be to have a bunch of WWDC nerds drinking on Bill Gates's dime, huh?
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It's coming right out of the Gates Foundation. Yeah, you're taking algebra straight out of children's mouths
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Yeah, or is it flute? What are the flu shots? What what what's the Gates Foundation? Did they do flu shots, right?
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Whether it's malaria and polio, I think is new what you know, he's on polio now. I like
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I thought we solved that.
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You know what we did, but we didn't 100% eradicate it.
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And that's like he's been making the rounds.
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And you know, God bless him.
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I really do think he's doing great work on this front.
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But it's that he's making the case that you really have to get to 100%.
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Like 99.9% eradication isn't good enough because 20, 30 years later, all of a sudden you get
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these little mini outbreaks.
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Apparently, it's heartbreaking, but it does seem like now there's more kids with polio
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right now than there were, I don't know, since Jonas Salk invented the vaccine.
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Well, I don't know.
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And I guess because not all these idiots don't get their kids vaccinated and stuff like that.
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You know what I mean?
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We should get started.
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Did you see that infographic?
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Which one's that?
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No, I don't think so.
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We shouldn't get started.
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I'll send it to you.
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But there's an infographic somebody did.
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know, infographic and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee. But it was a big bubble
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graph to do. They did a to-do on how basically life before and after vaccines and like what
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it's really meant. And, you know, well, we probably should, you know, this is like breastfeeding
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and circumcision, you know?
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I guess so, you know, but to me, it's a little bit more, you know, the side A and side B
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you really don't hold equal weight. I don't know. The vaccine thing really gets to me.
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Oh, I told I 100% agree with you.
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When I was a kid, it's you know, like my grandparents, I can't say that I recall any times where
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they sat me down and told me, you know, gave me an afternoon spiel about, you know, here's
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what life was like. You know, when I was your age at the turn of the last century, I mean,
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my grand, my dad's dad was born, I think, in like 1903 or something like that. But it
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I knew enough though that having been born in like 1903 to have lived to be a grandfather
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in like the 1970s with a bunch of grandkids and stuff, that he dodged a lot of grenades.
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People he knew got shot up in world wars.
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People got just walking down the street, you just pick up some polio and then next thing
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you know, your legs don't work.
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That's just the sort of thing that happened.
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Well yeah, and also my grandmother was one of the many people of her three siblings,
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one of them died from the flu epidemic when it was going around.
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But then also you've got this craziness, I think it was polio, I was talking to my wonderful
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mother-in-law about this, and the time when, I'm probably going to get this wrong, but
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something along the lines of, they knew polio was a thing, they knew that it was really
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bad news, but it was still, I think, somewhat or very unclear, like how people got it. And
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so you would just like keep your kids in the house. I guess it was sort of maybe like the
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early days of AIDS, like you didn't know. There's a time when people thought you got
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AIDS from, you know, amyl nitrates. So, you know, in the early days of that stuff, it's
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so frightening. But to your point, yeah, during the Depression, for a variety of reasons,
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or really, gosh, any time before this era we're talking about, you just have kids die.
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you just see the kids the kids down your street we just die and and it's you know
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as somebody who had the opportunity our parents and grandparents had the
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opportunity to have their kids not have to deal with that it's sort of strange
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to look back at yeah you know and I don't you know it shouldn't be
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political it's you know and it's the sort of thing that should have united
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everybody but there was this you know like after World War two at the 50s and
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the 60s there was this this just a sense that you know each time we click a
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decade forward we're gonna make great progress and we're gonna beat things
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like polio and and it was something to celebrate it's like hey we beat this
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terrible thing that that's been you know crippling us for decades and it was a
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celebration and everybody you know ran out and did it and it's like people just
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I don't know what goes through people's minds today I don't know what they think
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the world would be like without vaccination there's a post you a link
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post you had, I'm gonna have to guess, in 2004 or 2008, maybe 2008, but it was...you
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cited a statistic that's...maybe you'll remember this, something like 25% of Americans, long
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after it had been conclusively shown to be an urban myth or whatever, that something
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like...did you say like 25% of Americans still thought that Obama was not qualified to be
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president, that he was like not American?
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Oh, I don't know. It's ridiculous, the number of...
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But it was at the time you posted that. It was at that time when it was like, "Guys,
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there's nothing else that can be proven here to anybody who's not bananas." This is a thing.
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But that's how it is. I mean, there are always going to be people who are... I'm always coming
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to that book. I'm coming back to that book, Don't Think of an Elephant. There are people
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People who have – we all do.
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We all have a frame of reference for understanding the world.
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There are certain people who use different kinds of information and, to be honest, gut
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feelings about how things go, to have very emotional responses to things.
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Again, we all have this.
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In that instance, there's no amount of evidence that will convince people that that is incorrect
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because it so closely comports with the frame of reference about how things really are.
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I think something really ties in to the way, I think, television in particular legitimizes
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anything that's on TV carries a legitimacy that isn't really warranted but somehow it
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psychologically is.
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And famously, I don't know if it was the Oprah show.
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I think it might have been the Oprah show but it's the one on the vaccinations and Jenny
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McCarthy is there and they brought out the actual scientist.
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I can't talk you out of this.
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But the guy actually made like a Carl Sagan style look. I know this stuff like a, you know,
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a world literally one of the maybe the top minds in the world on vaccination medicine and laid it
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out beautifully in layman's terms that there is absolutely zero scientific evidence that
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vaccinations lead to autism. There's no evidence. And then, you know, and more than he just said
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said that he made the case. He showed that there's no evidence and told about the studies
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and that showed this and how the studies worked and that there's not even a dispute about
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it in the scientific terms. This isn't even a dispute. And they turn to Jenny McCarthy
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and she says, "Well, my son is my evidence," because her son has autism.
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There's probably a Latin name for what she did. That sounds like a trope, a rhetorical trope.
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Well, and you know, again, I'm not a vaccine expert, but it's my understanding.
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But then that puts it in your mind if you're at home and you're the sort of person—
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Because you love your kid. You love your kid, right?
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But didn't they drum out? Didn't the British Medical Society or whatever drum out the guy whose spurious study
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was the nominal
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Fuse that set all of this off. I mean there was this one thing that came out in England that right
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But here's what's interesting about that
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And this is where I come back to the frame of reference thing because it applies to everything from how people think about
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Their inbox to how people think about Apple
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Formerly Apple computer is that people is I think people come kind of pre-loaded to any
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any bit of cultural
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I don't want to say cultural warfare, but any kind of cultural opposition.
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First of all, let's just say we're all expected to pick a side about everything, whatever.
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But there are certain people who come at that with a certain point of view who are, let's
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just say, charitably going to cherry pick evidence to support their point of view.
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And again, that's probably something we all do.
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But the part of it that I think is a little bit lamentable is that it's one thing to say,
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"Well, God said it.
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I believe it.
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That settles it."
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that that I you know I don't agree with that but I can respect that but when it
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comes to things where like we have the evidence for this but you go no no no as
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long as you're going to throw all this quote-unquote science at me let me point
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at this study I heard about third hand that disagrees with that so they feel
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like I think in that instance they feel like they have more than enough basis to
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back up their emotion they didn't start out with the data I mean how many people
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even go out and read the abstract for something that Malcolm Gladwell is
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crying about. Don't get me started, but...
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It turns out reading books actually makes you stupider.
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But I think we all do that. We all look for evidence to support our own point of view
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and then get more and more sort of dug in about it.
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I think I mentioned this a few weeks ago, too. There's also this weird unfortunate aspect
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of human psychology where we... I forget the term, but it's like a loss avoidance that
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feel it if I give you a dollar say here here's a dollar Merlin and then I toss a
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coin and it comes up tails and I say well you lost I give me the dollar back
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you feel worse than if I toss the coin first and it comes up tails and I say ah
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if it had come up heads I'd have given you a dollar right it's the exact same
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Math, right?
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There is, you know, you've got a 50% chance of gaining a dollar in this incident, but
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that you had it in your hand and I took it away makes you feel worse.
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And the way it plays into the vaccination thing is there was like a poll that somebody
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did where they like polled parents and said, I might get the numbers wrong here, but more
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or less. Let's say there's a disease that there's a one in a thousand chance that
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your child will get, and if your child gets it, it'll be it'll be fatal. But
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there's a vaccine that will make sure your child doesn't get it, but if you
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give your child the vaccine, there's a one in ten thousand chance that the
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vaccine will kill your kid. Right. What do you do? If you're just, you know, if you
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even just play the basic odds. I mean, if you're a kid, if your kid, this is, boy, people
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take this apart, but you know, if your kid swallows something and you're not sure if
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it's poison, you know, you probably call 911. But just for the sake of argument, you know,
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what are the chances of that kid being really sick from poison versus what are the chances
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of that kid dying in an automobile accident on the way? Like, there's risk to everything.
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You know, do you know what I mean? It's like, you have to weigh, you have to weigh all of
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do you weigh the risk of, you know, of flying in a plane somewhere? Or of, you know, again,
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so many things that are, you know, and it turns out culture, so many things that are
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good for us and then bad for us. Do you remember in the 90s when it was all about, like, avoiding
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fat? And so you go out and buy a box of Snackwells, you know, which is basically like eating a
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bag of flour. And it was just a green box, green of course. It was really way ahead of
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of its time by being green.
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It basically said on it, low fat.
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Well, I can eat like 90 of these.
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Or are you--
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John, be honest.
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You have a microwave oven, I'm guessing, right?
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Now, what's your position on plastic in the microwave?
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Are you dealing with this?
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I'm dealing heavily with this in my household.
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You know what?
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I feel like, why take a chance?
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So we've actually--
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I don't think we rushed out and immediately banned
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all plastic in the microwave but we well I say we it was really Amy I don't I
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mean what am I I don't order stuff like this but we recently ordered like new
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all the the stuff that you put leftovers in and then put it in the fridge we got
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this noose it's all glass now so when you take something out of the fridge and
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you want to heat it up it's already in like a little glass thing so you don't
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have to put plastic and you gotta clean it you know I mean when they make when
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When they make a glass Ziploc bag, I'll start rethinking this.
00:17:22
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►
If I can't put saran wrap on a bowl of vegetables like a gentleman, I'm not sure I want to live
00:17:29
◼
►
I don't really microwave a lot of stuff, though, to tell you the truth.
00:17:32
◼
►
Because you're artis anal.
00:17:33
◼
►
You get all local.
00:17:34
◼
►
You shop at your little Whole Foods there.
00:17:35
◼
►
You get everything artis anal, and then you cook it in, what, like a bamboo steamer?
00:17:39
◼
►
How do you do that?
00:17:41
◼
►
I don't know.
00:17:43
◼
►
You're not involved in the preparation of a lot of meals.
00:17:45
◼
►
No, I really don't know where food comes from.
00:17:48
◼
►
I generally just wake up all day, drink fizzy water and coffee all day long.
00:17:54
◼
►
And then at some point when the sun goes down, my blood sugar is in a desperate situation
00:18:01
◼
►
and I'm ready to pass out.
00:18:03
◼
►
And then my wife provides me with a hot meal.
00:18:08
◼
►
And then I fall asleep.
00:18:09
◼
►
God, that's so sweet.
00:18:10
◼
►
I think someday when I eventually, as I'm sure you will have at some point, when we
00:18:14
◼
►
eventually each have interventions in our life.
00:18:18
◼
►
I think one of the things I'll be forced to confront
00:18:20
◼
►
is that most of my day is built around
00:18:23
◼
►
which beverage I'm having.
00:18:25
◼
►
I don't even, I don't need a clock.
00:18:28
◼
►
- Exactly, I might.
00:18:29
◼
►
I think that's why you and I get along so.
00:18:32
◼
►
- Yeah, I think--
00:18:33
◼
►
- It's a lot of caffeine in the waking hours
00:18:37
◼
►
and then there's a long stretch in the middle
00:18:40
◼
►
filled with lots and lots of over-carbonated fizzy water.
00:18:44
◼
►
And then in the evening there's some alcohol involved.
00:18:49
◼
►
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:18:50
◼
►
And I think as long as you keep those—it's sort of like the food pyramid, right?
00:18:56
◼
►
Or you want to try and minimize the number of fats or whatever.
00:19:01
◼
►
Let's be honest.
00:19:02
◼
►
You've got fats, carbohydrates—fats, carbohydrates—what's the other one?
00:19:09
◼
►
In the food pyramid?
00:19:10
◼
►
You've got your grains?
00:19:11
◼
►
Here's what I'm trying to say.
00:19:13
◼
►
As long as you can keep the alcohol
00:19:15
◼
►
to less than a third of your waking hours,
00:19:18
◼
►
I think even the FDA would say you're on the right track.
00:19:20
◼
►
When you get to half of your day, even-- let's be honest--
00:19:23
◼
►
even if it's staggered through the day,
00:19:25
◼
►
you can't start with it that's a little bit of a cheat.
00:19:27
◼
►
Or just don't start with a lot.
00:19:29
◼
►
Like if you have an Irish coffee in the morning,
00:19:30
◼
►
I don't think anybody's going to argue about that.
00:19:32
◼
►
Plus you're alone.
00:19:33
◼
►
Your family's out of the house, right?
00:19:34
◼
►
My wife is so mad at me on St. Patrick's Day
00:19:40
◼
►
because she wanted an Irish coffee.
00:19:42
◼
►
And we do-- I mean, I don't think we have a gigantic liquor
00:19:47
◼
►
collection in the house.
00:19:49
◼
►
Not at any given time.
00:19:51
◼
►
Right, it's a well-stocked bar.
00:19:54
◼
►
But we did not have any Irish whiskey.
00:19:58
◼
►
And I said, well, you could just-- you know,
00:20:00
◼
►
you can make an Irish coffee with bourbon.
00:20:01
◼
►
And it was as though I told her, you know, I don't know,
00:20:05
◼
►
you could make wine out of cherries or something.
00:20:09
◼
►
Like the way some people are about martinis and vodka, right?
00:20:13
◼
►
Like our friend Dan Benjamin would say that that is absolutely not a martini if it has vodka in it.
00:20:17
◼
►
Right. It's a separate drink, separate cocktail.
00:20:19
◼
►
And so how did you resolve that? Did you go out? Did you fool her?
00:20:22
◼
►
Like what did you make a clinky noise and then just pour scotch in there? What'd you do?
00:20:26
◼
►
No, I don't think I went out. Was it a Sunday this year?
00:20:31
◼
►
We were out of town at the time and so we missed it.
00:20:36
◼
►
It was a Sunday. It was a Sunday.
00:20:38
◼
►
so you know and Pennsylvania is a no booze on Sundays town although there are
00:20:44
◼
►
they've lightened it up a little bit where now there's most of the liquor
00:20:47
◼
►
stores they're all state-run but most are not open at all on Sundays there is
00:20:51
◼
►
at least one within walking distance but but she was like I don't know. That seems so archaic to me.
00:20:56
◼
►
My wife's from Rhode Island and you know there's there's all kinds of little
00:21:01
◼
►
islands of different laws in New England it's it's very weird but I mean it seems
00:21:06
◼
►
strange to me that, and you know they would do this in high school, you know,
00:21:09
◼
►
when she was a kid, you can't, what is it, you can't buy liquor. They had all these
00:21:13
◼
►
weird, it's like little dry islands, but you could, you know, you could drive over
00:21:18
◼
►
to the next town like five minutes and there's like a liquor store like right
00:21:24
◼
►
by the county line or the city line or whatever. It seems, it seems so odd. See, in
00:21:29
◼
►
our neighborhood, it's like a Gaelic New Year's Eve, you know, like, like, like
00:21:34
◼
►
Like people who don't drink often, it's like on New Year's Eve, everybody thinks they're
00:21:39
◼
►
a great drunk driver and everybody thinks they're a great drunk, right?
00:21:43
◼
►
And so everybody in our neighborhood, which is very Irish in a lot of ways, people don't
00:21:49
◼
►
know their limits and pretty much our entire neighborhood is puking on St. Patrick's Day,
00:21:58
◼
►
which is a shame because I'm largely Irish and I think that's something you learn.
00:22:02
◼
►
You know? You gotta warm up. You know? You gotta keep going to practice.
00:22:06
◼
►
You know, Mariano Rivera didn't get good by just showing up. Do you know what I'm saying?
00:22:10
◼
►
I hear you. I don't think he got good by drinking.
00:22:17
◼
►
Is he totally out now? Is he gone? He's going out, right?
00:22:21
◼
►
Yeah. Well, I guess so. I mean, I think he—
00:22:24
◼
►
Did he recover from that? Or could he recover from that? Really?
00:22:27
◼
►
He had a horrible, bizarre, freak knee injury last year in April.
00:22:33
◼
►
He'd only shown up in nine games.
00:22:35
◼
►
I don't know what you call that thing.
00:22:37
◼
►
It's not the ACL. It's that neat thing you don't want to hurt.
00:22:42
◼
►
It's a technical term.
00:22:43
◼
►
It just completely ruptured.
00:22:45
◼
►
Wasn't it at practice and he wasn't doing anything?
00:22:47
◼
►
Like he was grabbing some Gatorade and turned wrong or something?
00:22:49
◼
►
No. What he does, he's a pitcher.
00:22:51
◼
►
But what he's always done for his whole career is before games.
00:22:55
◼
►
It's called shagging flies where he's out in the outfield and a guy, you know at home plate is taking batting practice
00:23:01
◼
►
Just hitting real deep, you know fly balls all the way from home plate out to the outfield wall
00:23:05
◼
►
and he run, you know runs after them and catches them and
00:23:08
◼
►
he was just running after a deep fly ball and just took like a funny step on the
00:23:14
◼
►
There's always a warning track before the walls, you know, like the grass. Yeah, the big white line and all that right
00:23:20
◼
►
Well, it's like a like a maybe like a 10-foot wide patch of dirt or clay or something around the walls
00:23:25
◼
►
So if you're an outfielder running toward the wall and all you have to do is know I'm not on grass anymore
00:23:31
◼
►
So I know I'm near the wall and he took one step on it
00:23:34
◼
►
Just like a fluke funny step and just snapped the ligament or tendon and whatever it is in his knee
00:23:39
◼
►
So he was out and I had to have that surgically repaired he's 43 years old and
00:23:47
◼
►
And apparent, you know, the idea was, you know, he didn't say officially, but everybody seems to think that last year
00:23:52
◼
►
he was planning to be his last year and he just didn't want to go down, you know, go out like that.
00:23:57
◼
►
So he did all the work to rehab. He's back this year and he's amazing. He's 43 years old. He had a complete
00:24:04
◼
►
ligament tear in his knee a year ago. And at this point he's appeared in 16 games and
00:24:10
◼
►
he has 16 saves. What's his, what's his, well,
00:24:14
◼
►
ERA does ERAs do you still have an ERAs were as relief pitcher does that still matter it does it's like around two which is
00:24:22
◼
►
That's insane
00:24:24
◼
►
He's there's like maybe three people in sports in the last ten years that I would sit around and watch and he's one of them
00:24:29
◼
►
He posted that video. It was that you yeah, you know of course you're the only one who opposed this
00:24:34
◼
►
So they track his his breaking pitch. Yeah, it's isn't that it's it's
00:24:41
◼
►
It's hard to be a grown-up and then realize
00:24:43
◼
►
How many things and we walk around all day, right? We we break up our day by beverage
00:24:49
◼
►
We posted the internet and then we don't think that much about how really close we are to
00:24:55
◼
►
Basically being ruined all the time, you know, we go out and stand by a street where cars are going by at
00:25:01
◼
►
You know 40 or 60 miles an hour I get on this multi-ton train
00:25:05
◼
►
That's being driven by a crazy person and I don't think about like how closely I'm to dying all the time
00:25:11
◼
►
And in that instance, what could be more of like a freak accident?
00:25:14
◼
►
And that guy's—I mean, admittedly, as you say, he's not a young man, but still, you know,
00:25:19
◼
►
he needs every part of his body to be working to do what he does.
00:25:22
◼
►
It's amazing. And it's one of those things where I know that, you know,
00:25:26
◼
►
I post Yankee stuff occasionally to my website. A lot of people do that.
00:25:30
◼
►
That's Death Staring Fireball? Is that what it is?
00:25:32
◼
►
Yeah. But the Mariano Rivera stuff, when I do, I often get email from people who say,
00:25:37
◼
►
"I don't even know the rules of baseball, but that's amazing."
00:25:39
◼
►
That thing last year where the New York Times had the thing that tracked his pitches was fascinating.
00:25:45
◼
►
Even our good friend Guy English who lives in Montreal said, "I don't even hardly even know the rules of baseball."
00:25:53
◼
►
But he was like, "That was amazing."
00:25:55
◼
►
Well, I think that sports team might have played our sports team in an important event a few years ago.
00:26:02
◼
►
One of the local sports teams played the Yankee sports team and we watched it.
00:26:06
◼
►
was my first exposure to that guy and I have no allegiance to anything in sports
00:26:11
◼
►
apart from publicly not enjoying it but watching that guy pitch what it's like
00:26:17
◼
►
what's watching like it's like Perlman or something or anything Malmsteen you're
00:26:20
◼
►
just sitting there and you're going how how is this happening and I mentioned
00:26:24
◼
►
this on the back to work program a couple shows ago but like the thing I
00:26:28
◼
►
really admire about that guy is how steely he is how he how seemingly un
00:26:33
◼
►
like he can't be unhinged. Right. If there's anything I'd... Serene. Yeah, I guess so, but like
00:26:40
◼
►
he, yeah, that's a good word for it. He's imperturbable, really. You know, and you
00:26:45
◼
►
know, I'm not a hippie-dippie sort of guy, but there is something almost mystical
00:26:48
◼
►
about him. He has a serenity to him that is, it's inspiring, honestly. He's just
00:26:56
◼
►
very different. There is something very, very different about him. Right, and he
00:27:00
◼
►
he can come up there and just throw impossible pitch after impossible pitch.
00:27:05
◼
►
And then finally somebody hits his impossible pitch and gets like a
00:27:09
◼
►
two-run homer and then he goes straight back to throwing impossible pitches. And
00:27:13
◼
►
that to me is a model. If I could add one pattern of grit to my life,
00:27:19
◼
►
it would be the ability to do that instead of sitting and crying like a
00:27:22
◼
►
little girl when this lightest thing goes wrong. You know what I mean?
00:27:25
◼
►
If there's anything that's inspirational about sports, yeah I know
00:27:28
◼
►
It's about family and blah blah, but like to me that that's the thing is to look at somebody like that
00:27:31
◼
►
There's nothing they used to say about Tiger Woods who I think is a golfer they used to say
00:27:36
◼
►
You know that you don't start you don't practice less when you become a pro you practice more
00:27:41
◼
►
And I don't know I think that's inspiring
00:27:44
◼
►
Yeah, and he's in a weird thing too is that he plays the position that you know for those who don't follow baseball
00:27:51
◼
►
It's fairly easy concept is you know you're a pitcher and most you know you think of pitchers you think of the guys as the guy
00:27:56
◼
►
who starts the game and you're first inning, you're the pitcher and you pitch until your arm gets tired and then other guys come in.
00:28:03
◼
►
And there's like a pretty average-ish number. Like they'll start when it gets over what like 60 pitches? Like you get to a certain amount
00:28:09
◼
►
and you go, "Wow, this guy's still in there and he's throwing this many pitches."
00:28:12
◼
►
Yeah, like 60-70 is when you start thinking, "Let's keep an eye on him."
00:28:16
◼
►
He's really on the right side of the curve at that point.
00:28:19
◼
►
Right, and then 100 is generally considered, in the modern game is considered a lot. In the old days
00:28:23
◼
►
they would just let guys pitch until their arms fell off.
00:28:26
◼
►
And then, you know, but in general the starting pitchers are the best pitchers.
00:28:30
◼
►
And then the relief pitchers are guys who are good, but really good in small doses
00:28:34
◼
►
or really good in particular situations. Like this guy gets out left-handers and
00:28:39
◼
►
you just bring them in
00:28:40
◼
►
against the left-handed guy and then you take them out. It's a much more
00:28:43
◼
►
defensive kind of pitching in some ways?
00:28:44
◼
►
Yeah, situational I think is, you know,
00:28:48
◼
►
in the modern game is that you bring in these guys for certain situations.
00:28:52
◼
►
But then you get all the way to the end of the pitching staff
00:28:54
◼
►
and almost every team has a guy that they call the closer and that's Mariano Rivera
00:28:59
◼
►
and that's a guy who you only bring in when you have a lead and it's a small lead because
00:29:04
◼
►
if it's a big lead you don't bother wasting him because you don't want his arm to be too
00:29:07
◼
►
tired for the next day.
00:29:08
◼
►
But I forget.
00:29:11
◼
►
There's a stat called the save and I think the save is if you can only get a save as
00:29:16
◼
►
a pitcher if the tying run comes to the on deck circle.
00:29:21
◼
►
In other words, if the tying run is going to come up next, you can get a save.
00:29:26
◼
►
So it's got to be, you know, two, three runs or something like that.
00:29:29
◼
►
It's a stupid stat, really.
00:29:31
◼
►
But in other words, though, you only come in in the ninth inning, the last inning, in
00:29:37
◼
►
a game where your team has a narrow lead.
00:29:41
◼
►
So every inning that the guy pitches in general, I mean, every once in a while, if he goes
00:29:45
◼
►
like a week without coming in, because there wasn't a safe situation, they'll bring them
00:29:49
◼
►
in because you know, they don't want them to go a week without ever throwing. But in
00:29:52
◼
►
general, the closer only comes in, in a high pressure situation. And the only other case
00:29:59
◼
►
where you bring a closer in would be at home in a tie game. So any game where your team
00:30:04
◼
►
has a narrow lead in the last inning or or a tie in the in home game is when you come
00:30:10
◼
►
in. And so it tends because as the home team, you would get one more at bat, right.
00:30:19
◼
►
So it's any kind of professional sports, there's obviously a lot of pressure involved in.
00:30:23
◼
►
There's thousands of fans and all this attention and stuff like that.
00:30:26
◼
►
And I'm not saying that if you're a starting pitcher and it's the third inning of just
00:30:31
◼
►
one of 162 games in May in the season and it's the middle of May and a long season ahead
00:30:38
◼
►
of you, that the third inning of any one particular game isn't high pressure.
00:30:43
◼
►
you know come on baseball's a little you know lugubrious whereas the closer is
00:30:50
◼
►
always high pressure and so it tends to attract personalities like what's his
00:30:55
◼
►
name out there in your town the beard oh that one crazy guy with the beard yeah I
00:31:01
◼
►
don't know these national league guys but you know I mean these guys who are
00:31:03
◼
►
eccentrics guys who are very very high strong you know wild characters and they
00:31:12
◼
►
don't tend to last very long and it tends to be guys who can throw the ball exceedingly
00:31:16
◼
►
hard and fast and then you know they burn out because it's such a high pressure situation.
00:31:21
◼
►
Mariano Rivera has been doing it for 16 or 17 years which is just it's just unprecedented.
00:31:27
◼
►
It's like being I don't know like like a you know like on the bomb squad or something. Well
00:31:32
◼
►
especially especially today and um boy thanks for getting me into my area of expertise which is
00:31:37
◼
►
sports ball but you're right into it. Thank you thank you can we get back to vaccines after this?
00:31:42
◼
►
By the way, breastfeeding, terrible idea.
00:31:49
◼
►
You guys, I read a thing.
00:31:50
◼
►
Turns out formula, actually formula and putting your child into a dryer, literally the dryer
00:31:55
◼
►
at your home.
00:31:56
◼
►
Put it in there.
00:31:57
◼
►
Don't turn it on and leave a crack in it, but just give them formula.
00:32:00
◼
►
They'll be fine.
00:32:03
◼
►
This is apparently especially true.
00:32:04
◼
►
It's true in baseball.
00:32:05
◼
►
It's true in basketball, but from everything I hear is that it's extremely true in football
00:32:10
◼
►
is they're getting bigger, they're getting faster, they're getting better trained.
00:32:13
◼
►
And you have to be more...
00:32:17
◼
►
Boy, why are we talking about this? You have to be so much more
00:32:21
◼
►
really, truly athletic than... Look at Babe Ruth.
00:32:24
◼
►
I mean, Babe Ruth wouldn't be able to survive a whole game of handing out peanuts today.
00:32:29
◼
►
You know? He's a, you know, a slugger, as they say. Not a slugger always
00:32:34
◼
►
that you also strike out a lot, that you also... In the sense that if you hit it,
00:32:38
◼
►
you're gonna hit it real far.
00:32:39
◼
►
It doesn't always connote that. I think it's... But slugging average would be the amount of times that you're able to...
00:32:45
◼
►
What counts as slugging? Is it always a home run?
00:32:48
◼
►
No, it's the number of bases you get out of the hit. So in other words, I guess slugger hits more doubles...
00:32:52
◼
►
Not just home runs, but doubles and triples.
00:32:54
◼
►
But I mean, the athleticism of being a football player today, you know, the escalating...
00:33:00
◼
►
...changes in the technology and the training and all of that stuff, you know, it's...
00:33:06
◼
►
I have to imagine that's also to some extent true in baseball, where as you say, you would
00:33:10
◼
►
have… Ken Burns' baseball is failing me at the moment. But Christie Brinkley, what
00:33:18
◼
►
was the name of that baseball player? Sure, Atkinson. What was his name?
00:33:21
◼
►
Oh, Christie Turlington.
00:33:22
◼
►
Turlington. That's right. You can bring on Christie Turlington or Goose Gossage or
00:33:27
◼
►
Raleigh Fingers. Anyway, you could be somebody…
00:33:30
◼
►
Great mustache.
00:33:31
◼
►
Oh, man. He was the Roll-Aids Relief Man of the Year of memory servers. Do you remember
00:33:35
◼
►
that when we were kids. Yeah, yeah, I do. It was sponsored by Roll-Aids. Christy
00:33:40
◼
►
Mathewson. Ah, that was the guy. I love PBS and baseball. But, um, 1880. I don't know, I'm
00:33:46
◼
►
not sure I'm going with this, except that today it seems like it must be, it always
00:33:50
◼
►
seems still, I actually did hear this one time, I was waiting for a hot dog, and
00:33:53
◼
►
everything I know about TV basically comes from Tumblr and where I get my hot
00:33:57
◼
►
dog, and they said, somebody said something like, described one of the
00:34:02
◼
►
people playing the game as being extremely athletic. And that still bothers me. But,
00:34:08
◼
►
you know, athleticism, obviously, it's more than just simply being an athlete. And it
00:34:14
◼
►
is so funny to even, dude, even when, I guess you two, yeah, we're not that far apart, but
00:34:19
◼
►
when we were kids, you go back and you watch one of those, you know, I don't know if iTunes
00:34:22
◼
►
still has this, but I used to buy those MLB like old games you could watch on iTunes.
00:34:27
◼
►
You know what I mean? Like I went in and bought the Reds versus the Red Sox 75 World Series
00:34:33
◼
►
game. You know, I think at one time you can go and buy the one where Reggie Jackson hits
00:34:36
◼
►
40 home runs or whatever in that one game. But it's so strange to see what those people
00:34:41
◼
►
look like. Do you remember Fernando Valenzuela?
00:34:44
◼
►
Yep. Fernando Mania.
00:34:46
◼
►
Or was it, who's the one Letterman used to make fun of? Was it Phil Nicro?
00:34:49
◼
►
Oh, I don't know.
00:34:50
◼
►
It was one of the Nicros. But you know, I mean, the guy looked like a bouncer. You know,
00:34:56
◼
►
Valenzuela looked like a guy who would come and cut your lawn.
00:34:59
◼
►
He was short, he was...
00:35:01
◼
►
He was bulbous, John.
00:35:05
◼
►
It's a little racist.
00:35:06
◼
►
Pancho is what you're thinking of.
00:35:09
◼
►
But today you see these guys and it's just the level of training that people
00:35:13
◼
►
And again, it's a lot like the Gulf Wars.
00:35:16
◼
►
We can prevent so many kinds of injuries with training,
00:35:20
◼
►
but that just means the injuries move to a different spot, right?
00:35:23
◼
►
And, yeah, I don't know.
00:35:25
◼
►
Well, that's one of the things I love about baseball, though, is that baseball is the
00:35:28
◼
►
one sport where a guy like Fernando, you know, a short, fat guy can come up and all of a
00:35:34
◼
►
sudden be a sensation, whereas Fernando was never going to make it into the NBA.
00:35:40
◼
►
Yeah, you don't see him being like a decathlete.
00:35:46
◼
►
I don't watch nearly as much basketball as I used to.
00:35:48
◼
►
Basketball is the thing I've given up.
00:35:49
◼
►
And that's what you've played the most of.
00:35:51
◼
►
Yeah, it is.
00:35:53
◼
►
the sport I actually was, had some aptitude for. I don't watch it anymore.
00:35:58
◼
►
Not because I don't like it, but just I had, you know, there's only so much time.
00:36:00
◼
►
And I've, you know, got work and a family.
00:36:02
◼
►
Now that the NBA playoffs are on, one thing I've noted, and it's what you're saying,
00:36:07
◼
►
NBA players look like action figures now. Like when we were, you know, like...
00:36:14
◼
►
Think about Dennis, when I first saw Dennis Rodman or Charles Barkley, like when you would first,
00:36:18
◼
►
when I first thought of Charles Barkley, I just thought he was really big. But that guy was just
00:36:21
◼
►
It was brawny as hell.
00:36:23
◼
►
Yeah, he was just—
00:36:25
◼
►
They didn't look like that.
00:36:26
◼
►
Like, Wilt Chamberlain did not look like that.
00:36:29
◼
►
You know what?
00:36:35
◼
►
Sure, Larry Bird.
00:36:36
◼
►
He could have been a pitcher.
00:36:37
◼
►
You know that guy.
00:36:39
◼
►
But, you know, Bird and Magic Johnson are good comparisons.
00:36:42
◼
►
Obviously, they were very tall.
00:36:43
◼
►
Both of them were 6'9".
00:36:44
◼
►
So, I mean, that's enormously tall.
00:36:46
◼
►
Is that right?
00:36:47
◼
►
Larry Bird was that tall?
00:36:49
◼
►
Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were both 6'9", like all of the many that they came out, you
00:36:54
◼
►
know, they played each other in college, they played each other in pros, they were the exact
00:36:58
◼
►
same height, 6'9", which is very, very tall.
00:37:00
◼
►
But you know, you look at pictures of them from their heyday and they were kind of like
00:37:03
◼
►
string bean type guys, whereas the NBA players now, they're ripped.
00:37:09
◼
►
Has the game become more physical in that time, do you think?
00:37:14
◼
►
You know, it's – I don't know.
00:37:16
◼
►
I don't know and I'm not – I don't watch enough to say.
00:37:19
◼
►
has become a little certainly become a lot faster than it used to be I
00:37:23
◼
►
definitely think so and I think that I do and I think that the guys you know to
00:37:29
◼
►
keep up that they really you know I work out like non-stop in between games I
00:37:35
◼
►
don't know I mean well most of what I know about again most of what I know
00:37:39
◼
►
about tennis comes from watching my mother play and reading David Foster
00:37:42
◼
►
Wallace but I will tell you this watching say Bjorn Borg and John
00:37:47
◼
►
McEnroe in 1980 versus watching tennis today, it feels like a completely different affair.
00:37:52
◼
►
There's so many aces now. There's just so much of it depends on having, and I think
00:37:56
◼
►
I've given to believe this has been true for a while, it's just kind of not as fun to watch.
00:38:00
◼
►
It would be like watching a hockey game where it's all about hitting the puck from the other
00:38:04
◼
►
side, like the net on the other side. You're like, "Well, I kind of like the volleying."
00:38:07
◼
►
You know, that's kind of what makes, that's what makes soccer, to me, one of the most
00:38:11
◼
►
interesting things to watch full stop, is that it is extremely athletic. They're running
00:38:15
◼
►
for whatever, 90 minutes, however long it is. And they're moving that whole time. And
00:38:21
◼
►
it really is very much about teamwork.
00:38:23
◼
►
And to be honest, another thing I love about basketball is almost everybody's involved
00:38:28
◼
►
almost all the time. You know?
00:38:31
◼
►
Yeah. Well, you know.
00:38:33
◼
►
I have to ask—
00:38:34
◼
►
There's more of a—you could parlay this. I mean, I can't believe we're spending
00:38:37
◼
►
the whole show talking about sports. But—
00:38:38
◼
►
I have a series of questions I would like to get to before we leave.
00:38:43
◼
►
Alright. But we could parlay that into something about, you know, like a back-to-work type,
00:38:48
◼
►
you know, collaboration type thing. Basketball is definitely a sport where if you have one
00:38:53
◼
►
guy on the team who's an asshole, it doesn't matter how good the team is. You're probably
00:38:57
◼
►
going to lose.
00:38:58
◼
►
Yeah. Right.
00:38:59
◼
►
You know, like if the team—one guy on the court who doesn't get along with the other
00:39:02
◼
►
four, and the more talented team might lose.
00:39:07
◼
►
If he's not on the same page, like in terms of, you know, not just knowing like which
00:39:11
◼
►
kind of defense we're going to play and stuff like that. But with five people on your team,
00:39:18
◼
►
you each have to be giving at least 20 percent. You've got to be thinking so many moves ahead
00:39:23
◼
►
because you're going to be called upon to do—even if you don't handle the ball. At
00:39:27
◼
►
least in football, everybody's got a guy to protect. But in that instance, it seems
00:39:32
◼
►
like you have to be thinking so many moves ahead and so quickly and based on communicating
00:39:37
◼
►
so well and knowing the patterns of what the other guys are likely to do that you're
00:39:41
◼
►
you're going to be in the right place at the right time.
00:39:43
◼
►
Let me do a sponsor break.
00:39:44
◼
►
Yeah, yeah, that'd be great.
00:39:45
◼
►
Let me tell you about--
00:39:47
◼
►
now look, I famously--
00:39:48
◼
►
I don't do this on purpose.
00:39:49
◼
►
I really don't.
00:39:50
◼
►
I don't know how to pronounce a lot of words.
00:39:52
◼
►
So like, I just told you before about my upcoming live episode
00:39:55
◼
►
with the Windows Azure, A-Z-U-R-E.
00:39:58
◼
►
I pronounced it when they sponsored the show
00:39:59
◼
►
a couple episodes ago, Azure.
00:40:01
◼
►
I thought that that word, it's like a shade of blue.
00:40:04
◼
►
I thought it meant--
00:40:05
◼
►
for 39 years of my life, for 40, however the hell old I am,
00:40:09
◼
►
I thought the word was pronounced "Azur."
00:40:11
◼
►
I didn't know, but apparently it's "Azur."
00:40:14
◼
►
Well, here's the thing.
00:40:16
◼
►
I don't know how to pronounce--
00:40:16
◼
►
- It's not "Azur"?
00:40:17
◼
►
- Azur, yeah.
00:40:21
◼
►
I don't know, but you know.
00:40:23
◼
►
Like I said, it's part of the deal that sponsors get
00:40:26
◼
►
is that you get the attention of the audience
00:40:29
◼
►
and you get a couple of unique pronunciations from me.
00:40:32
◼
►
Here's the deal.
00:40:34
◼
►
This week's first sponsor is a company called MailRoute.
00:40:37
◼
►
Now it's M-A-I-L-R-O-U-T-E.
00:40:41
◼
►
Now would you say mail route or mail route?
00:40:43
◼
►
- Are you asking me?
00:40:45
◼
►
- Yeah, okay, I'm asking you, Marlon.
00:40:47
◼
►
- Okay, if I'm using it out of the context of that product,
00:40:51
◼
►
I would say mail route, but I think mail route scans better.
00:40:56
◼
►
- Yeah, but I don't wanna say mail route
00:40:58
◼
►
because then I don't want people to go and Google it
00:41:00
◼
►
and spell it R-O-O-T.
00:41:03
◼
►
- Oh, it's like saying pin number.
00:41:04
◼
►
Like you could just say pin.
00:41:06
◼
►
John Sirkis is happy, but people may not know what you mean. You say pin number, there's
00:41:10
◼
►
no ambiguity.
00:41:11
◼
►
Exactly. But I'm all over the place on this because I'll say Route 66.
00:41:15
◼
►
Tell me about MailRoute.
00:41:16
◼
►
Well, look, MailRoute, or "route" if you prefer, but it's spelled with the "u." Look, it's
00:41:23
◼
►
a super, super simple service, and it's all based on the fact that email is still the
00:41:27
◼
►
number one way that everybody gets in touch with each other. We've got all the different
00:41:32
◼
►
messaging and stuff like that. But look, email is still—everybody knows it. It's the thing
00:41:35
◼
►
we use the most. Here's the most amazing statistic. Ninety percent of every email sent on the
00:41:42
◼
►
internet is spam. And I don't know. I think for me, it's got to be more than 90 percent
00:41:47
◼
►
of the email I get is spam. What MailRoute does, and it's from the team that created
00:41:51
◼
►
Microsoft Forefront. These guys have a long history of great email services. You take
00:41:58
◼
►
your domain, your email, your domain name. You set your MX records to point to MailRoute.
00:42:05
◼
►
Your mail goes there first, goes through their filters, then it comes to your mail server.
00:42:10
◼
►
Takes about a second per message.
00:42:12
◼
►
So your mail is delayed by one second.
00:42:14
◼
►
I mean if that bothers you then, you know, I mean stop listening to my show.
00:42:19
◼
►
Listen to my show if you think that's a problem.
00:42:21
◼
►
Their spam filtering takes all the spam out and it just goes right in.
00:42:25
◼
►
And it can take a domain or an email address that is inundated with spam and make it usable
00:42:32
◼
►
And it's just phenomenal.
00:42:34
◼
►
you go to their website and read about and they tell you how they do it. There's no magic
00:42:38
◼
►
involved, right? It's really, really smart, clever stuff. I talked about this last week.
00:42:42
◼
►
I love this idea they have, this gray listing thing, which is what they do as a proper mail
00:42:48
◼
►
server. If you have a good, clean mail server, you contact me. I'm a mail server. You're
00:42:53
◼
►
a mail server. You contact me and you say, "I have a message for John Gruber." I can
00:42:58
◼
►
say, "Hey, I'm not ready to take this message right now. Come back in a minute." And then
00:43:03
◼
►
You as a proper mail server will be ready to handle that.
00:43:06
◼
►
That's a normal situation in email communication.
00:43:09
◼
►
And a minute later, you'll say, "Hey, I'm back.
00:43:11
◼
►
I've got that message for John Gruber."
00:43:12
◼
►
And I say, "Okay, here I go."
00:43:13
◼
►
And I'll take it and I'll put it in the inbox for that account.
00:43:16
◼
►
The thing is, is that sort of, "Hey, come back and try again in a minute.
00:43:21
◼
►
I'm busy right now," thing doesn't work with all of the machines that send spam, which
00:43:25
◼
►
almost all of them are, you know, they're these botnets.
00:43:30
◼
►
You know, there are PCs that have been taken over by the malware and stuff like that.
00:43:35
◼
►
They just blast the spam out thousands and thousands of messages a minute and never come
00:43:40
◼
►
back to it, right?
00:43:41
◼
►
They just have a big list of email and they blast it out.
00:43:43
◼
►
So this little, this is one of the ways that mail route takes the spam out.
00:43:47
◼
►
But to me, that's brilliant because it's not even getting to the point of doing the sort
00:43:52
◼
►
of Bayesian analysis and looking at keywords and, you know, it has, you know, Viagra in
00:43:57
◼
►
the subject and all of this sort of analysis. It's just a simple, to me, it's such a great
00:44:03
◼
►
trick of getting on top of that from the outside. And it, you know, it's also the sort of thing
00:44:09
◼
►
that's never going to flag a good message the wrong way. So it's a great service. They
00:44:16
◼
►
match pricing on Postini or Forefront. All you have to do, if you're interested in this,
00:44:21
◼
►
to check them out. It's mail route dotnet mail route dotnet not.com.net just like
00:44:28
◼
►
Darren fireball dotnet. Check them out. And if you go to mail route dotnet slash
00:44:33
◼
►
the talk show, it's even a little better because then they'll know you came from
00:44:36
◼
►
the show. Here's your freebie. Just to not have confusion on the pronunciation.
00:44:44
◼
►
there's no mail route without you.
00:44:47
◼
►
I like that.
00:44:50
◼
►
Mail route without you. Okay, so here's the question.
00:44:53
◼
►
John Gruber.
00:44:56
◼
►
What's on your mind as your potentially career ending
00:45:00
◼
►
injury? Now you've already had a close call
00:45:04
◼
►
about a year or two ago. You had a very close call
00:45:07
◼
►
for somebody who types and doesn't want to talk into their computer through Perl
00:45:10
◼
►
like John Siracusza. You've had what could
00:45:13
◼
►
have almost been a career-ending injury. I'd like you to think even broader. You could
00:45:18
◼
►
talk about your hand. What's a career-ending injury? What does a Mariano Rivera knee tear
00:45:25
◼
►
look like for John Gruber?
00:45:31
◼
►
I would say, and I'm not going to give you a note, it's your show, but it seems to me
00:45:35
◼
►
that could be something that happens at Whole Foods. It could be something that happens
00:45:38
◼
►
at the liquor store. You're a liberal artist. You got to go broad.
00:45:43
◼
►
Yeah, well, head injury obviously comes to mind.
00:45:46
◼
►
I bet there was a ton—oh, man, you don't want that.
00:45:50
◼
►
You should wear a helmet when you're right.
00:45:53
◼
►
Head injury would obviously—I mean, I think that would—
00:45:55
◼
►
I think a lot of people assume you've probably already had one.
00:45:57
◼
►
Well, but maybe, you know, then, you know, I mean, it would be like one of those movies
00:46:01
◼
►
where the guy gets conked on the head and gets a superpower, and then he gets conked
00:46:05
◼
►
in the head again and it goes away.
00:46:07
◼
►
So, I mean, regardless, you know, even if my success is due to a previous head injury,
00:46:12
◼
►
subsequent one might might take it away. And I would guess secondarily I think I
00:46:18
◼
►
would do really poorly if I if I lost my eyesight. I think a lot of what I care
00:46:27
◼
►
about and write about is what I see. Ah, if you got that I don't even want to
00:46:32
◼
►
mention it but that Don Nuss disease if you got the macular degeneration. Right.
00:46:36
◼
►
You know about that where you start losing your vision from the middle?
00:46:39
◼
►
You know what? It's odd. I actually know a lot about it because back when I used to build websites as a freelancer, I was in charge of a website for a foundation.
00:46:52
◼
►
For macular degeneration.
00:46:54
◼
►
Oh boy, I'd like to give them some money. That scares the pants off of me, if I had pants.
00:46:58
◼
►
It was actually founded by a guy who invented the Chicken McNugget.
00:47:04
◼
►
I swear to God, and his wife...
00:47:06
◼
►
heard about that guy on NPR and he sold the idea to McDonald's right yep yep
00:47:10
◼
►
but he said they had all these parts they had all these parts they didn't
00:47:13
◼
►
know what to deal with right and they made nuggets and you know I mean he it
00:47:19
◼
►
wasn't one of those things where he sold the idea for 15 bucks it was like he
00:47:22
◼
►
sold the idea and had some like equity in it and I'll see that smart not like
00:47:25
◼
►
that guy who came up with the automatic windshield wipers you know that guy got
00:47:28
◼
►
the shaft the guy who invented yeah intermittent windshield yes intermittent
00:47:33
◼
►
And yeah, I know exactly what you mean, right?
00:47:35
◼
►
The guy, you know, it used to be you'd have two speeds, slow and fast, and this guy invented
00:47:40
◼
►
the little – put a little clock on the thing, and yeah, you could say, "Wait three seconds."
00:47:46
◼
►
I love that.
00:47:48
◼
►
Yeah, a guy got a sandwich out of it, like –
00:47:51
◼
►
Maybe half a sandwich.
00:47:52
◼
►
Lea Iacocca gave him, like, a leftover, like, tuna fish sandwich.
00:47:56
◼
►
Kebaya coca.
00:47:57
◼
►
Now, when you made your –
00:47:59
◼
►
But anyway, the guy built a fortune on that, and his wife came down with the macular degenerate.
00:48:03
◼
►
generation, and so he devoted the fortune that he'd made to trying to find a cure, find
00:48:09
◼
►
help for the people.
00:48:10
◼
►
But yeah, that's a tough one.
00:48:11
◼
►
How cool is that?
00:48:12
◼
►
That's like a James Burke thing.
00:48:13
◼
►
There could be a whole Connections episode about that.
00:48:15
◼
►
How we went from this chicken nugget to Don Nott's disease.
00:48:18
◼
►
That's a really cool story.
00:48:19
◼
►
Yeah, and it really is.
00:48:21
◼
►
It is sort of like the worst way to lose your vision.
00:48:23
◼
►
You lose it from the center out, and of course, the center is exactly...
00:48:28
◼
►
It seems like it would be maddening.
00:48:29
◼
►
As bad as it would be to start losing your peripheral vision.
00:48:32
◼
►
Well, at least you could look at the thing you wanted to look at by turning your head.
00:48:37
◼
►
Whereas macular degeneration, it's like you lose exactly what you're looking at.
00:48:39
◼
►
I don't want to talk about it.
00:48:40
◼
►
I don't want to talk about it anymore.
00:48:41
◼
►
It's freaking me out.
00:48:42
◼
►
But yeah, I think that would hurt my work.
00:48:44
◼
►
You made your bones, if I may say, such as they are with the Daring Fireball site.
00:48:50
◼
►
It seems to—we might have talked about this.
00:48:53
◼
►
You probably talked about it elsewhere.
00:48:54
◼
►
But I feel like you made your reputation at a time when Apple was not—certainly not
00:48:59
◼
►
Apple that they are now, but where it was, where people had every reason in the
00:49:03
◼
►
world to be suspicious about whether Apple, you know, was gonna survive, whether
00:49:07
◼
►
it was gonna turn into something, and then Apple, you know, got better, and you
00:49:12
◼
►
were there for that. I mean, there must have, I wonder, I guess I'm wondering, was
00:49:15
◼
►
there ever a time when that felt like a career-ending injury on the horizon? Like,
00:49:19
◼
►
given that, you know what I mean? Like, given that you made, your career really
00:49:23
◼
►
started at a time when you could provide a sane counterpoint to the people, you
00:49:28
◼
►
know, who were constantly announcing the death of Apple. Did you worry when Apple
00:49:34
◼
►
started getting better? I mean, it's cool because you're an Apple guy, you like
00:49:37
◼
►
Apple, but did you ever worry that they get too good and you wouldn't have a job
00:49:39
◼
►
anymore? No, I do, I will say though that I worry, you know, that's, I don't know
00:49:47
◼
►
what's more statistically likely, some kind of in, probably an injury to me or
00:49:51
◼
►
something like that, but I do worry though that if, if Apple does stop being
00:49:58
◼
►
popular and suffers, you know, like if their next ten years are a decline
00:50:01
◼
►
instead of the last ten years, which was this great ascent, that it would bode
00:50:06
◼
►
poorly for, you know, the sponsorship and ad revenue that I use, you know, primarily
00:50:12
◼
►
to earn my living. But on the other hand, I thought from the outset, I never, you
00:50:17
◼
►
know, I think we've talked about this, I never really set out just to write about
00:50:20
◼
►
Apple. I set out to write about whatever is on my mind, and for the last ten years
00:50:25
◼
►
years, an awful lot of what's been on my mind is what Apple's up to.
00:50:29
◼
►
To me, the worst thing would be if Apple got boring.
00:50:31
◼
►
That's what I was going to say.
00:50:33
◼
►
That was going to be my guess, because the obvious, you get bonked on the head, you get
00:50:38
◼
►
a power, you get bonked on the head, it goes away.
00:50:39
◼
►
That's too obvious.
00:50:40
◼
►
It wouldn't just be a matter of Apple sucks, Apple's really doing great, Apple sucks again.
00:50:44
◼
►
The bigger concern would be, without mentioning names, a lot of companies that I think you
00:50:48
◼
►
and I have had a lot of respect for over the years simply got big and contracted and got
00:50:54
◼
►
boring and got weird. And even if they just got boring, it wouldn't be fun. I mean, the
00:50:58
◼
►
rumors I hear are that it's getting harder to retain practitioner and manager talent
00:51:09
◼
►
at Apple just because there is a sense, not a Steve thing necessarily, but that there
00:51:13
◼
►
is a sense that the most interesting problems at this point may have been solved. That's
00:51:18
◼
►
just what I hear. I don't know if that's accurate or not. But at a certain point, every company
00:51:22
◼
►
is going to-- if they're lucky, they get big enough
00:51:25
◼
►
to where it is about scale.
00:51:27
◼
►
And it is about a different kind of problem.
00:51:30
◼
►
So the problem of going from iPhone-- not the problem,
00:51:33
◼
►
but a company that can go from the iPhone
00:51:35
◼
►
to the iPad in three years is like, wow, zing.
00:51:39
◼
►
But making it easier for me to not have my Apple ID be broken
00:51:44
◼
►
for two weeks is not as interesting of a headline.
00:51:47
◼
►
But there's an awful lot of ditch digging, just not exciting work,
00:51:58
◼
►
but just hard work that Apple obviously has to do over the next few years
00:52:03
◼
►
just to sustain the iPhone and iPad and the stuff they already have,
00:52:07
◼
►
which is not the sort of exciting stuff that the real A+ superstar
00:52:12
◼
►
Mariano Rivera type engineers and designers want to be doing.
00:52:17
◼
►
I mean, somebody at Apple over the next three, four, five years, not one person, but obviously
00:52:22
◼
►
there's a team, is obviously just going to spend an awful lot of time just like correcting
00:52:27
◼
►
the names of parks and putting the post office on the right side of the street and all the
00:52:32
◼
►
map data, right?
00:52:35
◼
►
It's not exciting work.
00:52:36
◼
►
Like you said, somebody has got to do the work of sort of making these Apple IDs a little
00:52:43
◼
►
bit more centralized so that you sign in once and everything is there, right? And
00:52:50
◼
►
then you're not signing in to Game Center separately then, you know, iMessage and
00:52:56
◼
►
and stuff like that. Not exciting work. And that is, in my experience,
00:53:00
◼
►
having worked on a single sign-in internet for a very, very, very
00:53:06
◼
►
large well-known company, it was unbelievable how much work was involved.
00:53:10
◼
►
And, you know, I'm guessing at Apple this is going to be easier than a place that
00:53:13
◼
►
that has such different silos as the place where we did this work.
00:53:16
◼
►
But that is, whenever I want to talk to somebody and find out how much they really understand,
00:53:20
◼
►
I'll say, "Have you ever worked on trying to implement even the most basic single sign-in
00:53:24
◼
►
for something?"
00:53:25
◼
►
Because it could hardly be… it's one of those horrible problems that could hardly
00:53:29
◼
►
seem simpler to anybody else.
00:53:31
◼
►
In a post-Google world, people are used to having a page with one or two or maybe three
00:53:38
◼
►
fields in it, and you hit it and then a thing happens.
00:53:41
◼
►
But in actuality, that is so hard.
00:53:43
◼
►
If you're doing that for HR, okay, well, so you got single sign-in.
00:53:46
◼
►
Well, first of all, all this information is by design in different places.
00:53:50
◼
►
The stuff about your health insurance is not sitting in the same place as your, for example,
00:53:55
◼
►
like when you were hired.
00:53:56
◼
►
It might not be in that same thing with this, you know, updated address information.
00:54:00
◼
►
Do we keep you signed into the extremely sensitive health data section as long as we keep you
00:54:04
◼
►
logged into the what's happening at the picnic this weekend section?
00:54:07
◼
►
Those are hard problems.
00:54:09
◼
►
And then the stuff that Apple, that a lot of people, and gosh, there are so many things
00:54:12
◼
►
everybody thinks Apple needs to do, but a common theme is that they still haven't
00:54:17
◼
►
gotten where a lot of people would like them to be with things like web services.
00:54:20
◼
►
And boy is that ever going to not seem super interesting to have a headline
00:54:25
◼
►
about uptime. Justin Williams, you know Justin Williams? Yes, I was actually, yeah,
00:54:33
◼
►
I was thinking of his hilarious post. I will link to it. It was all the things
00:54:39
◼
►
that Apple... What is it? All the things that Apple needs to announce at WWDC.
00:54:43
◼
►
Right. In three weeks.
00:54:45
◼
►
No pressure.
00:54:45
◼
►
Just to placate the internet. And it's a big long list, and it's really pretty good, actually.
00:54:50
◼
►
It's actually good... A couple of them are a little jokey, but for the most part,
00:54:54
◼
►
it's pretty serious. And obviously, they're not going to announce all of them.
00:54:57
◼
►
That's it. But I mean, it's not only... But the beauty of it is, it's not just things where people
00:55:01
◼
►
go, "It'd be neat if they made a blue iPhone." It's not stuff like that. It's stuff like...
00:55:07
◼
►
Stuff, you hear people saying the success and longevity of this company rides on FU.
00:55:14
◼
►
What do you have in front of you? Do you have a couple? Carpe aqua? Is that right?
00:55:18
◼
►
He's a good man.
00:55:22
◼
►
Everything Apple needs to introduce at WWDC to appease the internet.
00:55:27
◼
►
Completely refreshed design language for iOS 7.
00:55:30
◼
►
Modernized and updated system apps for iOS that match the new Ivy design language,
00:55:35
◼
►
you know, etc, etc, multiple people on FaceTime calls, an update to iMessage that makes it reliable,
00:55:42
◼
►
an update to iMessage that allows people to leave group chats. These are all really good features,
00:55:47
◼
►
right? I mean, and it's a long list and there's a lot of...
00:55:49
◼
►
But the point is, these features, you've heard a lot of people actually say.
00:55:52
◼
►
And it's really like ditch digging. It's just... I'm not saying that there's no satisfaction in
00:55:57
◼
►
doing it, but it's not exciting. You know, it's the sort of thing where it's hard to keep,
00:56:03
◼
►
you know, your A+ guys working on something like that as opposed to working on
00:56:08
◼
►
going off on their own and doing something new. When you were a developer,
00:56:12
◼
►
I mean, I was never like a real developer, but
00:56:15
◼
►
I mean, even just in making web pages, which is what I really did,
00:56:19
◼
►
it was so much more interesting to me to get to make a design,
00:56:23
◼
►
to do the UX. I mean, that was the fun brainy stuff.
00:56:27
◼
►
And then the satisfying stuff, even all the way down to doing production graphics,
00:56:30
◼
►
was always really fun for me. I really liked all of that.
00:56:32
◼
►
But then something like okay, well, we're moving to this different content management system
00:56:36
◼
►
And now we're gonna have to change hand change these you know variables in these things
00:56:41
◼
►
We're gonna have to certainly there's a certain amount you could do in Bb
00:56:43
◼
►
I would find a replace
00:56:44
◼
►
But I always know for the guys who did the real developing it was never that fun
00:56:48
◼
►
To have to take the code base and go make it work in this different place for example
00:56:53
◼
►
This is just anecdotal
00:56:54
◼
►
But did you ever experience that like it's one thing to get to write this Perl script that does a thing and then it's another
00:56:59
◼
►
thing to have to go all do this like scrubbing with a toothbrush to try and
00:57:03
◼
►
make this thing a little better it's not it's not absolutely well and that's why
00:57:07
◼
►
I admire the developers like barebone software or the Omni group who build
00:57:15
◼
►
apps and then spend years iterating and iterating and iterating and keeping them
00:57:20
◼
►
up to date and keeping them relevant whereas the most exciting part is the
00:57:26
◼
►
original version right? BB Edit 1.0 is the one that was the most exciting. It was actually
00:57:31
◼
►
2.1 was the first public version.
00:57:35
◼
►
That's all for until I got a WYSIWYG editor that is literally starting in 1995 that is
00:57:41
◼
►
pretty much that's all I used to make web pages. That was it. It was just BB Edit. I
00:57:45
◼
►
would use the includes when they came out.
00:57:48
◼
►
Rich I think just tweeted the other day that it was the 20th anniversary of the first public
00:57:53
◼
►
version of BB Edit and then he said and it's worth three days away from the
00:57:56
◼
►
first public griping about the price but that think about that 20 years working
00:58:02
◼
►
on an editor that is still one of the top most relevant programming text
00:58:08
◼
►
editors for the Mac right I mean that I just salute that because it is it you
00:58:13
◼
►
know most of those 20 years most of those 20 days in the 20 years Rich
00:58:18
◼
►
Segal's been working on the app and most of those days have not been exciting
00:58:21
◼
►
work. It's just hard work, you know. And same with, you know, Omni Group's another
00:58:27
◼
►
great example where these guys have been working on some of these apps.
00:58:30
◼
►
They sweat stuff so hard, you know, and again companies I've just done some work
00:58:35
◼
►
with, again Agile Bits. The stuff that they sweat that you will hopefully never
00:58:39
◼
►
notice how hard they sweated it, and you have no, I mean, not that you need to
00:58:44
◼
►
because you're the user. You're the Apple fan. You're used to, you are wonderfully
00:58:48
◼
►
lucky and you're fortunate to not have to notice how good this is. But it is
00:58:54
◼
►
difficult work and in the case of some of these things you've certainly been
00:58:58
◼
►
around when you have to do a giant teardown of something. You know like
00:59:03
◼
►
where it's almost like a Western town where all you see as the viewer are the
00:59:08
◼
►
fronts of these stores but sometimes you know but something like Snow Leopard.
00:59:12
◼
►
Let me ask you something. So they talked about this on the accidental tech podcast.
00:59:16
◼
►
the TikTok Tik thing? Is that a real term or were they making that up?
00:59:19
◼
►
No, that's a real term.
00:59:22
◼
►
Like every, something like roughly every other OS X release, is that right? Like has some zingers.
00:59:28
◼
►
But something like Snow Leopard was very controversial in some ways,
00:59:32
◼
►
because to somebody at Simpleton like me, you go like, "Okay, well, where's the publish and
00:59:37
◼
►
subscribe? Where is the theming?" Obviously, you know what I mean. Like, where's the zazz in this?
00:59:43
◼
►
But, you know, knowing if you go actually and read what happened, I mean, they're so
00:59:47
◼
►
that they tore the guts out and changed so much stuff about that, right?
00:59:49
◼
►
It's it was not a trivial thing where they were just being lazy.
00:59:52
◼
►
It's just that we couldn't, as a user, we shouldn't notice how much changed about it,
00:59:59
◼
►
And it was a tough thing to sell, I think, because of what people expect from Apple is
01:00:04
◼
►
people expect, you know, every time Apple has an event, they expect Steve Jobs pulling
01:00:11
◼
►
the iPhone out of his pocket and blowing it, the world away with something that seems like
01:00:16
◼
►
it's literally from five, ten years in the future.
01:00:19
◼
►
And then instead, they said, "Well, we went into the guts and we cleaned out a lot of
01:00:24
◼
►
And we modernized the plumbing and somehow pitched it in a way that didn't have people
01:00:32
◼
►
raising pitchforks.
01:00:34
◼
►
I do think though that it's the exact sort of thing that they could not get away with
01:00:39
◼
►
in a couple of years, but right now at this fever pitch of sort of, you know, Apple can't
01:00:46
◼
►
do anything new without Steve Jobs' doom and gloom, they couldn't do that today.
01:00:51
◼
►
No, no, I think you're right, but it's, yeah. Anyway, in terms of career-ending injuries,
01:00:57
◼
►
I think you will still have a very long, live career as long as you protect your head and
01:01:00
◼
►
let your lady do the cooking.
01:01:02
◼
►
What about you?
01:01:04
◼
►
Oh, my career-ending injury? I think I've already had most of them, and that's why I
01:01:08
◼
►
what I do. I mean, this isn't much of a career, Jon. But, you know, something could always
01:01:13
◼
►
go wrong. I've had a pinched nerve for a while, and so that's... I think I should probably
01:01:17
◼
►
go to a doctor about that, but...
01:01:19
◼
►
What about your voice? See, I think I...
01:01:21
◼
►
It's pretty reedy. I sound like somebody trying to throw away a clarinet.
01:01:26
◼
►
But what about if you got like this Larry Page thing?
01:01:28
◼
►
Oh, if I got... Oh, if I lost my instrument. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know,
01:01:33
◼
►
Scott Dilbert? What's his name? Adam Dilbert? He's been diagnosing him remotely. Did you
01:01:38
◼
►
I haven't. Yeah. Scott Dilbert, the Dilbert guy. Scott Adams. Thank you. He's pretty sure he knows
01:01:45
◼
►
what Larry Page has, because he has something very similar. And it sounds... Another one,
01:01:49
◼
►
it's like the vocal version of macular degeneration. It's another one of those
01:01:52
◼
►
things that sounds just awful. Or like when Rush Limbaugh had the hearing thing. That's what I live
01:01:57
◼
►
in fear of, is waking up one day and it's like something out of the Kafka story. I wouldn't mind
01:02:03
◼
►
waking up as a roach. I mean, my office is already a pretty good environment for that. But as you
01:02:08
◼
►
As you get older and your body starts working with less dependability and symmetry, you
01:02:14
◼
►
do kind of wonder, "Is there going to be a day where I wake up?"
01:02:17
◼
►
I don't understand how Rush Limbaugh does what he does.
01:02:21
◼
►
He's legally deaf.
01:02:24
◼
►
They couldn't fix that.
01:02:25
◼
►
I don't think so.
01:02:26
◼
►
I mean, he's not like stone cold deaf, but I think he's effectively deaf, but yet somehow
01:02:33
◼
►
does a four-hour daily radio show.
01:02:36
◼
►
Setting aside all the jokes that I'm tempted to make, that is actually really amazing.
01:02:41
◼
►
You know what I mean?
01:02:42
◼
►
To be able to continue doing that.
01:02:43
◼
►
You know, it just seems to me like you would do poorly.
01:02:46
◼
►
If I got the vocal cord thing, I might have to stop doing this show.
01:02:49
◼
►
I take your point.
01:02:51
◼
►
So if I lost my voice, like, I'd have to go back to not writing or not web developing.
01:02:56
◼
►
See, that would be a hard move for me.
01:02:58
◼
►
Yeah, this is pretty much all I'm good at.
01:03:02
◼
►
all uncomfortable doing is uh being on three or four podcasts a day. I yeah. Can I make
01:03:07
◼
►
a I'm gonna make a possibly and I don't mean this to be disparaging. No. There is uh you know.
01:03:13
◼
►
No I'll take any notes you give me John for sure. Well with the Larry Page thing did you see him
01:03:16
◼
►
did you see him talk the other day? No no. And I'd you know hats off to him you know he came out the
01:03:22
◼
►
day before I/O with a with a post and just said look here's what's been going on with my voice
01:03:26
◼
►
for the last year and and you know that he did you know that they don't know what the cause is but he
01:03:30
◼
►
He lost his left, use of his left vocal cord a while back.
01:03:35
◼
►
And then the same thing, a couple of years later, the same thing started happening to
01:03:38
◼
►
his right vocal cord, but it's not complete, but it's left him.
01:03:41
◼
►
His voice is, a couple of people have described it as froggy.
01:03:48
◼
►
It's not, you know, and it makes him, so it makes him quiet and he needed like a different
01:03:52
◼
►
microphone on stage, but he did well.
01:03:54
◼
►
And as his stint, you know, and he was on stage, it was a very long keynote.
01:03:58
◼
►
man they were up there for like over four hours but he was on for I don't
01:04:02
◼
►
know like 45 minutes and his voice was to me it seemed stronger at the end than
01:04:06
◼
►
when he first came out but it does remind me of the way that like in the
01:04:12
◼
►
Bond James Bond movies the the Bond villain usually has some kind of very
01:04:16
◼
►
unusual and distinct like physiological oh look you got a milky eye or you got a
01:04:23
◼
►
scar right you got a blow felt scar or something yeah you got like a metal
01:04:28
◼
►
claws for hands or something like that, you know, and I feel like it adds a sort
01:04:32
◼
►
of Bond villain aspect to Larry Page is that he has a very unusual froggy voice.
01:04:39
◼
►
Oh my god. Well you know the thing is... We'll just cut that part out. Yeah, you know the
01:04:45
◼
►
other thing is like he's got a lot of dough. If he were to get a claw hand, I
01:04:49
◼
►
think that would make be very distinctive. For example, I would know
01:04:52
◼
►
that it's him versus the other guy. I don't know who's who. He's also proposing to me
01:04:58
◼
►
some sort of Bond villain-esque grandiose things like he...
01:05:01
◼
►
You sure you don't have to get an Eric Schmidt?
01:05:03
◼
►
No Larry Page he offhandedly said look there's a you know wouldn't it be nice if technologists
01:05:09
◼
►
had like their own special island where we could we could have our own laws and we could
01:05:14
◼
►
try out new things that not maybe the you know the real world isn't ready for yet. You
01:05:20
◼
►
know we could get rid of all these pesky regulations on medical records and stuff like that and
01:05:25
◼
►
see what happens if Google could have access to everybody's medical records in this controlled
01:05:29
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environment without worrying about it.
01:05:30
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There's no way he said that.
01:05:31
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No, I swear to God he did.
01:05:33
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I swear to God.
01:05:34
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Read Matt Honan on it.
01:05:36
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I have bookmarked your link to that.
01:05:37
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I haven't read it yet.
01:05:38
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He's saying basically in this – in this – Testopian.
01:05:41
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In this utopian environment, we would finally get to do what our league of let's say developers
01:05:47
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would really love to do.
01:05:48
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We want to get our hands around this information and see what we can do with it.
01:05:52
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►
you know when you start talking about setting up islands you know I mean you
01:05:56
◼
►
know you're like Cobra Commander right oh there's no question about it
01:06:00
◼
►
remember that time that Cobra Commander they like set off a nuke in the in the
01:06:05
◼
►
Gulf of Mexico and it made it an island rise up and then they planted a Cobra
01:06:09
◼
►
flag on it and boom they had a country it was that easy yeah it was that easy
01:06:13
◼
►
because if you once you put your flag on the land then that's yours and they
01:06:17
◼
►
you know you made new land I know you're not a comic fan but when you get a
01:06:20
◼
►
chance Google for Magneto and Genosha because it sounds a little bit like this
01:06:24
◼
►
X-Men villain who on a variety of occasions I think he started his own
01:06:28
◼
►
meteor at one point he had a utopia or dystopia if you like for these things
01:06:34
◼
►
and that sounds kind of like what you're talking about it sounds to me like this
01:06:37
◼
►
fella is just a little bit away from like a like a purple metal hood and
01:06:41
◼
►
maybe some laser beam sharks. Let's be honest John like Metal Claw
01:06:46
◼
►
notwithstanding he's got the dough he's got the dough and he's got the developers
01:06:50
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►
They could be, again in my parlance, it would be more like Hydra, or in your case like these
01:06:53
◼
►
G.I. Joe fellas.
01:06:55
◼
►
He could certainly have his own standing army of people wearing, Google Glass, Google Glass,
01:07:01
◼
►
perfect for the soldier of the future.
01:07:04
◼
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Well, and these self-driving cars, right?
01:07:06
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Put a couple of guns on those self-driving cars and you've got an army, right?
01:07:09
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Oh, you've got to cut all this out.
01:07:11
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►
I think we, you know, I'm going to think about this now because there is so much there.
01:07:16
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►
So he's going to get all the information.
01:07:17
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He's got the standing army.
01:07:18
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He's got an island.
01:07:19
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claw arm, we're pretty sure he may eventually have a cool synthesized voice.
01:07:23
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►
All he needs now is he needs some kind of an affectation like, again, maybe
01:07:29
◼
►
he's really into playing competitive chess or maybe he's got a bullwhip.
01:07:33
◼
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Shouldn't he have something that he could put into the electronic claw that
01:07:37
◼
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would give him, like immediately, if you had an action figure of, it's Larry Page,
01:07:40
◼
►
not Sergey, Larry, right? If you had something where you could make an
01:07:44
◼
►
action figure of him. He'd have your data in one hand and a whip in the other.
01:07:50
◼
►
Balls. See, you'd have your balls. Is that it? What does your data look like? It's just like a
01:07:58
◼
►
big glowing sphere of ones and zeros. And he has this little Igor guy come up who says, "You could
01:08:03
◼
►
just go out and get to know name." Right, that would be Eric Schmidt. Let me do the second
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sponsor. Our second sponsor, you guys know them. They're great. They've been here for
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a while Squarespace. Man, Squarespace is just killing it. I keep running into sites that
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are built with Squarespace and they've blown me away. Everything you need to do to build
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a great modern website, you can get it Squarespace. They do everything from the domain registration
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to providing you with a huge number of really beautiful templates and their templates, unlike
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outdated website are all, what do they call it?
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Responsive, right, where you open it up on the iPhone and it looks perfect on the iPhone
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and you open it up on the iPad and it looks perfect on the iPad and you open it up on
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your 47-inch cinema display and it looks perfect on that.
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And if you're a coder, you can get in there, you can tweak anything you want.
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All the details, you can get in there and hack the CSS if you want to, hack the layout.
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If you're not a coder, you can just rearrange so much of it just by drag and drop and doing
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it all visually and plugging in your social media stuff.
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You can get your Twitter to show up in the side, anything like that, anything you might
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They've got e-commerce now, so you don't have to do your own credit card processing and
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stuff like that.
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So you can set up your own store.
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It's a great way to set up a blog.
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It's a great way to set up almost any website you can imagine.
01:09:35
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They blow me away with the stuff that they're doing.
01:09:38
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What do you do to – what do you do?
01:09:41
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You want to find out more?
01:09:42
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Just go to their website, squarespace.com.
01:09:45
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Not a custom URL.
01:09:46
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Just go to squarespace.com.
01:09:48
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But what you do when you sign up is you use this offer code, "Talkshow5."
01:09:54
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That's talk show and then the digit, the numeral, the Arabic numeral 5.
01:09:59
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And that just lets them know that – I guess because it's the fifth time that they've
01:10:02
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been up as a sponsor on the show that you're coming from this episode.
01:10:05
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It's the month of five.
01:10:07
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Maybe. But if you have a website, an idea for a website to build or a new version of
01:10:12
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an existing website, if you don't at least check out Squarespace as a way to build it,
01:10:17
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you're nuts because you're probably going to waste a lot of time doing stuff that they
01:10:22
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would just provide for you for free. So check them out, squarespace.com. Got a couple minutes
01:10:31
◼
►
But I'm gonna be thinking about that all day. We might want to wrap back around to that in a little while.
01:10:35
◼
►
I think with a little preparation we could come up with a pretty-- we could pitch. I think we could pitch that idea.
01:10:39
◼
►
And the thing is, if you're a supervillain, you know you're a supervillain. And it's like in the Avengers.
01:10:44
◼
►
Iron Man-- no spoilers-- but Iron Man figures out that Loki's a lot like him. Right?
01:10:49
◼
►
He figures out that part of the thing with Loki is he wants to be seen doing-- he wants to be noticed.
01:10:55
◼
►
So maybe it's the kind of thing where Larry Page would actually fund it himself.
01:10:59
◼
►
maybe as like an infomercial for Page Island.
01:11:03
◼
►
Yeah, maybe that's a better analogy than to the Bond villain, because the Bond villains always
01:11:11
◼
►
have some kind of dastardly plot to take over the world. And, you know, it's something that
01:11:18
◼
►
needs to be stopped. Whereas in a comic book, you got a long term, it's a saga, right? And,
01:11:24
◼
►
you know, a Bond thing is going to get wrapped up in two hours and the guy's probably going to be
01:11:28
◼
►
be dead. Whereas the comic book thing is going to go on for 20, 30 years and it's going to
01:11:32
◼
►
cycle around. Right? Because you know what I mean? Like we're going to be talking about
01:11:35
◼
►
Google 20 years from now. And Larry Page is probably still going to be the CEO.
01:11:38
◼
►
Well, there's different kinds of supervillains, whether it's in Bond or whether it's in whatever.
01:11:43
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►
And I think as with a lot of people have preferences in certain kinds of time travel timeline ideas,
01:11:48
◼
►
I think in this case everybody's got different kinds of villains that they really like. You
01:11:52
◼
►
got – what are some classics? You got the villain who has a grudge. Right? It could
01:11:57
◼
►
somebody like, you know, "Oh, Dr. Octopus, he wants to get that Spider-Man because
01:12:02
◼
►
he's so much cooler than him." I think there's always the money villain.
01:12:05
◼
►
There is, now, was Goldfinger, do you think he was, he was kind of a straight up
01:12:08
◼
►
money villain, right? Yeah, he, well, yeah, he wanted, yeah, he was a money villain.
01:12:12
◼
►
You've got the, you got the, what about, what about the guy from No Country for
01:12:16
◼
►
Old Men? He, he's, he is a, he's a revenge grudge villain, right? Yeah, he's a code of
01:12:23
◼
►
honored. He's going back. He's going back after M for what she did to his jaw, right?
01:12:28
◼
►
Yeah. Okay. That's great. How great was that scene when he takes that thing out?
01:12:32
◼
►
Oh, that was great. I mean, my wife watched it like three times. Yeah. And then you got,
01:12:37
◼
►
so you got that. And then you've got, of course, you've always got the, the anarchistic,
01:12:41
◼
►
no, you've got the sociopath, psychotic kind of person who just wants to cause mayhem.
01:12:47
◼
►
Kind of villain. You're a joker in the, the Dark Knight. Do you have a sense of it? No,
01:12:52
◼
►
I'm not saying Larry Page is a super villain with a claw for hand, but if he were, if he were, if he were,
01:12:56
◼
►
what would the nature of his villainy be? Does he, doesn't have to be evil, you know?
01:13:00
◼
►
I would say, I would say he's the misguided
01:13:04
◼
►
That he actually, it does not, I do not believe that he is a bad person or that he has bad intentions.
01:13:11
◼
►
I actually think that he truly is a utopian with the best interests of-
01:13:17
◼
►
That's what Magneto is too. That's, that's super interesting.
01:13:20
◼
►
at heart. But he's, but he is, I think, misguided and erroneous, and that it's a,
01:13:26
◼
►
you know, you know, like if Dr. Frankenstein had good intentions. That's a good point. So if you
01:13:34
◼
►
could, you could go even with the best intentions and a self-driving island and everybody wearing
01:13:39
◼
►
half a pair of glasses, you know, you could create an environment. It seems like everybody would be
01:13:44
◼
►
happy even if you're not allowed to live on the island like it would be better
01:13:49
◼
►
like and and and what I say by that is that I would be better if I'm wrong and
01:13:53
◼
►
that he gets everything he wants and it works out the way he's saying because
01:13:59
◼
►
that would actually be great for everybody yeah right what I'm saying is
01:14:03
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►
that I think what I think is that this stuff is just gonna be a disaster in
01:14:09
◼
►
terms of privacy and other aspects like that and that the utopian things aren't
01:14:14
◼
►
It's hard to see right now for me, it's hard to see how it turns out great, you know?
01:14:19
◼
►
But, you know, as Churchill said, you know, history is written by the guys with the claw hands.
01:14:24
◼
►
Yeah. We only have a minute or two, but I do think there is something weird going on.
01:14:27
◼
►
I feel like, you know, and I feel like the tech stuff, it goes through great cycles,
01:14:31
◼
►
and it's what makes it such an interesting thing to write about.
01:14:33
◼
►
And I do feel like we're reaching this inflection point where things are dividing.
01:14:39
◼
►
Dividing and and the Google Glass really as much as it right now
01:14:44
◼
►
It's just a curiosity that there's only you know
01:14:46
◼
►
A couple thousand pairs that have been put out in people's hands and they cost this ridiculous amount and they're not trying to sell it
01:14:51
◼
►
To the mass market yet, but it's clearly one of the most divisive things that's come out in
01:14:57
◼
►
Ever since I've been writing about technology, right and Nick Nick Bilton had a great piece in the New York Times today
01:15:04
◼
►
He's at the Google I/o conference
01:15:06
◼
►
Which and at this place he says there might be you know it seems as though there might be even a thousand people here wearing
01:15:12
◼
►
Google Glass right so instead of like where people out in the valley out in San Francisco like hey
01:15:17
◼
►
I actually saw a guy at the pizza joint the other day wearing Google Glass wow I saw somebody here you go to
01:15:22
◼
►
Easy peed was eating alone
01:15:25
◼
►
You go to Google IO, and there's a thousand people wearing it, and he you know Nick Bilton really seemed to it's a great piece
01:15:32
◼
►
I'll put it in the show notes, but
01:15:34
◼
►
It really seems like you know it's it's a divergence
01:15:37
◼
►
You know and he had this thing where he was talking to a guy who was talking about how great the winky app is
01:15:42
◼
►
Which is the actual name of the app and that's the one that takes a photo by an eye gesture like a winking right?
01:15:48
◼
►
The guy was saying that he's addicted to it and that he wasn't wearing his glass the other day
01:15:52
◼
►
And he was winking to take a picture and nothing happened
01:15:54
◼
►
And he realized that his brains been wired that he just assumes that when he winks he's gonna get a home
01:16:00
◼
►
And all right, really so yeah and then Bilton says and then you know, he's got real creeped out
01:16:06
◼
►
And he thought well, I'm gonna I got to go to the restroom
01:16:08
◼
►
I'm gonna go take a leak and I'm gonna get away from this for a little bit and he went in and it's you know
01:16:12
◼
►
It's a tech conference the line to get in a men's room is long. You got to wait
01:16:15
◼
►
He waits he waits and then you know
01:16:17
◼
►
You're an all opens up and he goes to take a leak and he looks and the four guys next to him are all wearing
01:16:22
◼
►
Glass and all sort of looking around while they're taking a leak in the urinal
01:16:28
◼
►
Right and that that's something that's weird. That's anything to indicate the activity
01:16:32
◼
►
Is there anything like a red or there's nothing to indicate what's happening inside the glass to somebody who's not wearing it?
01:16:39
◼
►
No, no, you have no idea. Oh, man
01:16:42
◼
►
Well, you know, I think you know, I think you're right if I understand what you're saying. I think you're right. It's
01:16:49
◼
►
It's it's so hard to tell until the time has passed like when something important has happened
01:16:54
◼
►
I mean you could think something important happened, but you know
01:16:57
◼
►
Now, it seemed like a really big deal
01:17:00
◼
►
when Google search came out, because as a consumer,
01:17:03
◼
►
we saw how different that was, even from the, at the time,
01:17:06
◼
►
amazing Alta Vista.
01:17:07
◼
►
But the real story, in some ways, was advertising.
01:17:09
◼
►
What made Google Google, in some ways,
01:17:11
◼
►
I think we could probably agree, is advertising.
01:17:14
◼
►
It was a MacGuffin in some ways.
01:17:16
◼
►
The search was great.
01:17:17
◼
►
And I wonder if there's a part of me that really does wonder
01:17:20
◼
►
if Google Glass will be that thing.
01:17:22
◼
►
But here's the thing.
01:17:24
◼
►
Talk about sauce for the gander.
01:17:26
◼
►
I've been roundly criticized by many of my friends
01:17:28
◼
►
for how skeptical I am about lauding Apple products
01:17:32
◼
►
before they've come out.
01:17:33
◼
►
I think it's pretty interesting the number of people
01:17:35
◼
►
I've seen-- well, and again, this is just--
01:17:38
◼
►
I don't follow this stuff, as you know.
01:17:39
◼
►
But in the aggregate, there are a lot of people,
01:17:42
◼
►
including me, who are a little bit freaked out by Google Glass,
01:17:44
◼
►
the whole notion of it.
01:17:45
◼
►
And the fact that it's tied to Google, who's already
01:17:47
◼
►
getting freaky.
01:17:48
◼
►
But given the massive number of people
01:17:50
◼
►
who've talked about that, I think
01:17:51
◼
►
it's also pretty interesting that how many people are saying,
01:17:55
◼
►
"Oh, but once you put them on, it's pretty cool."
01:17:59
◼
►
Have you heard people say that?
01:18:01
◼
►
- I have, you know, and I--
01:18:02
◼
►
- This doesn't seem kind of interesting though,
01:18:04
◼
►
it's like we always talk about with Apple products,
01:18:06
◼
►
you can say all you want about it,
01:18:07
◼
►
but until you hold it in your hand
01:18:08
◼
►
and use it for a couple days, that's the aha moment.
01:18:11
◼
►
So do you think we might be on the wrong side of this,
01:18:13
◼
►
that we need to like go around in these?
01:18:14
◼
►
- I could be, you know, definitely might be, you know,
01:18:17
◼
►
and I also see too how this is the,
01:18:20
◼
►
This is the Michael, what's his name, from the Wall Street movie.
01:18:28
◼
►
This is his, you know, that big brick-sized cell phone that he had in 1986.
01:18:33
◼
►
Wearing his bathrobe, walking on the beach.
01:18:35
◼
►
Right, and you're supposed to be really impressed by that, that you could be out on the beach and be on a phone call,
01:18:40
◼
►
and the thing is the size of, you know, it's like the size of a briefcase.
01:18:44
◼
►
You know, Google Glass is that for these heads-up displays.
01:18:48
◼
►
I mean, you know, I don't think there's any doubt
01:18:51
◼
►
There's no doubt in my mind that it won't be you know
01:18:53
◼
►
I don't know five ten years from now that you'll be able to buy a normal pair of eyeglasses
01:18:58
◼
►
And our committee contacts, you know, yes. Yeah. Well, who knows I the context seems hard battery wise. I'm not quite yeah
01:19:06
◼
►
You know, I'm not quite sure how you something electronic could be reduced to a contact lens at in in the near future
01:19:12
◼
►
I mean, but you'll never have a computer in your pocket. Well, I'm not saying never I'm just saying that seems
01:19:18
◼
►
Yeah, maybe a little bit further out in the event horizon, but so we look at it
01:19:22
◼
►
It looks a little bit wonky, but but who knows what the next or third iteration of this, right?
01:19:26
◼
►
I don't think people are gonna get used to Google Glass as it exists today not making you look like a complete jackass
01:19:32
◼
►
I I fully acknowledge though that they'll be able to it's quickly be able to iterate and get it
01:19:38
◼
►
So that it looks a lot more like a normal pair of glasses at which point
01:19:44
◼
►
Something like that, I guess is inevitable. I don't know
01:19:47
◼
►
You know that
01:19:49
◼
►
You know and that we're gonna have to get used to it
01:19:51
◼
►
And it's just just putting your foot in the stand or and your hand up in here and saying this is creepy is
01:19:57
◼
►
Irrelevant because people are gonna do it anyway. Mm-hmm
01:20:03
◼
►
Well, let's check back in see I can't wait to be I can't wait though to tell my habit of looking at my cell phone
01:20:08
◼
►
every five minutes makes me a curmudgeon rather than
01:20:13
◼
►
Like I'm the old-fashioned guy who's looking
01:20:15
◼
►
Staring at your external dingus instead of just leering creepily at men in the restroom, right? John's so antisocial
01:20:23
◼
►
He hardly ever watches anybody else pee right and instead of me looking at attention deficit disorder
01:20:28
◼
►
I look like the guy with you know, the the monk like serenity. I
01:20:33
◼
►
Gotta go. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on this was great. You're the best. I'll see you in a couple weeks
01:20:40
◼
►
You know you will.
01:20:41
◼
►
I'll be out in your town.
01:20:42
◼
►
Yeah, and if not, I'll just see you on Larry's Island.
01:20:42
◼
►
I'll be out in your town.
01:20:44
◼
►
And if not, I'll just see you on Larry's Island.