Cortex

00:00:00 ◼   ► IOS 10 is here and you know this full well because I have been sending you lots of stickers.

00:00:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:00:08 ◼   ► It's great!

00:00:09 ◼   ► It is just what I feared.

00:00:13 ◼   ► It's brilliant, isn't it? I can send you stickers, I can cover up your disapproval with more stickers.

00:00:19 ◼   ► Yeah, this is the thing I didn't quite realize is how terrible this can look because you can just keep piling stickers on top of other stickers and make it really look like garbage.

00:00:29 ◼   ► No, that's the good thing, because you can create amazing images by just putting more

00:00:34 ◼   ► stickers over them.

00:00:35 ◼   ► No, this is not the amazing thing.

00:00:37 ◼   ► What I'm hoping, Myke, is that this is a fad, just like with other people I know who have

00:00:43 ◼   ► installed iOS 10.

00:00:45 ◼   ► It's the same thing when the watch first came out, that everybody's having fun, sort of

00:00:50 ◼   ► ironically or semi-ironically sending each other those watch emoji faces.

00:00:56 ◼   ► I'm feeling like I hope this is a phase with iMessage where I'm getting messages sent with lasers

00:01:01 ◼   ► that don't require lasers at all and that everybody's just doing it because it's fun in the beginning

00:01:07 ◼   ► but you have rapidly stickered me out with all of your stickers

00:01:12 ◼   ► so I'm hoping this is a phase for you too and you'll grow out of it

00:01:15 ◼   ► We've known each other for two years now

00:01:17 ◼   ► Have we?

00:01:18 ◼   ► It takes about that sort of time, yeah

00:01:20 ◼   ► Long time

00:01:21 ◼   ► We've been friends since I quit my job and that was about two years ago now

00:01:26 ◼   ► Oh yeah, yeah, that's right, that would be the marker.

00:01:28 ◼   ► Do you think I'm gonna get bored of this?

00:01:31 ◼   ► No.

00:01:32 ◼   ► What do you think?

00:01:33 ◼   ► No, I really don't.

00:01:34 ◼   ► In my heart of hearts, I don't think you're gonna get bored of this.

00:01:38 ◼   ► It may be a fad, and people may get bored of it.

00:01:41 ◼   ► I will not get bored of it.

00:01:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:01:44 ◼   ► I think that's what's gonna happen.

00:01:46 ◼   ► I think your rainbow stickers over my emoticon disapproval faces, I think that's gonna be

00:01:53 ◼   ► a thing that happens forever.

00:01:54 ◼   ► There are disapproval faces stickers too.

00:01:57 ◼   ► Yeah but I don't want a disapproval face sticker.

00:01:59 ◼   ► I want to do it old fashioned with characters on a keyboard.

00:02:03 ◼   ► No, because you can put your disapproval over the top of the message it is proving.

00:02:09 ◼   ► I'm going to keep hand crafting my emoticons as long as I'm alive.

00:02:14 ◼   ► Oh you do artisanal stickers right?

00:02:16 ◼   ► No it's not a sticker.

00:02:17 ◼   ► Handcrafted artisanal stickers.

00:02:20 ◼   ► It's not a sticker.

00:02:21 ◼   ► It's not a sticker.

00:02:22 ◼   ► You can send your disapproval with confetti.

00:02:25 ◼   ► - I don't think that's how that works.

00:02:29 ◼   ► If the only thing, the only effect that I would want

00:02:32 ◼   ► is if I could send disapproval faces

00:02:34 ◼   ► that would just slowly drain all the color

00:02:37 ◼   ► out of your screen.

00:02:38 ◼   ► - God, that'd be pretty good actually.

00:02:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's the effect I want.

00:02:42 ◼   ► You're listening Apple?

00:02:43 ◼   ► That's what I want.

00:02:44 ◼   ► I want to send a disapproval face

00:02:46 ◼   ► that literally makes the phone

00:02:47 ◼   ► of the other person kind of sad.

00:02:49 ◼   ► How you feeling Myke?

00:02:51 ◼   ► I feel like I'm eight hours behind myself right now.

00:02:56 ◼   ► - Why is that?

00:02:57 ◼   ► - Because I came home from Portland yesterday.

00:03:00 ◼   ► - Ah, the worst time zone in the world to come back from.

00:03:04 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:03:04 ◼   ► - How was the annual HipsterCon?

00:03:07 ◼   ► - It was really, really good.

00:03:09 ◼   ► - Yeah?

00:03:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, I just spent the week and basically, or the week,

00:03:12 ◼   ► I don't even know when it was, it was eight.

00:03:14 ◼   ► - Do you wanna tell people what HipsterCon actually is,

00:03:16 ◼   ► just for those who might not be aware?

00:03:20 ◼   ► - I did this last year too.

00:03:21 ◼   ► I went to the XOXO festival in Portland, Oregon.

00:03:25 ◼   ► Of course.

00:03:26 ◼   ► Tentatively named BenchCon because I effectively

00:03:29 ◼   ► spent two or three days sitting on a bench under an umbrella

00:03:32 ◼   ► drinking coffee, eating food, and drinking IPA beers.

00:03:36 ◼   ► And I had a great time.

00:03:38 ◼   ► Oh, it does sound nice.

00:03:39 ◼   ► It was actually really nice.

00:03:40 ◼   ► I didn't really do anything.

00:03:42 ◼   ► There's two levels of pass that you can get for XOXO.

00:03:45 ◼   ► One is conference.

00:03:45 ◼   ► One is festival.

00:03:47 ◼   ► Festival allows you into the area.

00:03:49 ◼   ► and then they have events in the evenings that you can go to.

00:03:52 ◼   ► Like arcade nights and stuff like that.

00:03:55 ◼   ► I did festival this time, so I just spent my day

00:03:57 ◼   ► just outside playing board games with friends

00:03:59 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

00:04:00 ◼   ► - So you couldn't even go to the actual conference

00:04:02 ◼   ► if you wanted to, you just bought the

00:04:04 ◼   ► I wanna hang around outside ticket.

00:04:06 ◼   ► - Exactly, I mean this time for the first time,

00:04:08 ◼   ► they kind of simulcast some of the talks

00:04:10 ◼   ► into the couple of bars that were located in the venue.

00:04:14 ◼   ► But you couldn't fit all the festival people in there

00:04:16 ◼   ► 'cause the bars were too small.

00:04:17 ◼   ► So you just maybe, I did that with one talk.

00:04:20 ◼   ► And then the rest of the time just spent my time outside

00:04:22 ◼   ► enjoying company.

00:04:23 ◼   ► - So is that what you were going there for?

00:04:26 ◼   ► Was it kind of enjoy the people stroke networking event?

00:04:30 ◼   ► Is that the value that you get out of XOXO?

00:04:33 ◼   ► - That was the original plan.

00:04:35 ◼   ► What it ended up being was Adina basically telling me to go

00:04:40 ◼   ► because of everything that's been going on recently,

00:04:43 ◼   ► she's like, you need to just get out of the house

00:04:46 ◼   ► for a few days and just go and spend some time with your friends and do nothing. Turns

00:04:51 ◼   ► out buying a house is stressful. I think that came across last time.

00:04:55 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that definitely came across last time.

00:04:57 ◼   ► I just took a vacation, basically. I only recorded one podcast for the whole time of

00:05:04 ◼   ► the festival.

00:05:05 ◼   ► Wow!

00:05:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:05:07 ◼   ► That's like a 95% reduction in podcast recording for you.

00:05:11 ◼   ► Exactly. So the festival, I was there from the Wednesday and then it ended on the Sunday

00:05:16 ◼   ► and I just recorded one show during that time.

00:05:18 ◼   ► Oh, and then one kind of like bonus-y thing

00:05:20 ◼   ► that wasn't really a show, we just ate some cereal

00:05:22 ◼   ► and spoke about it, it wasn't really a real show.

00:05:26 ◼   ► - Was this Top Four?

00:05:28 ◼   ► It sounds like Top Four. - Yeah, it's Top Four.

00:05:29 ◼   ► Yeah, it's Top Four.

00:05:30 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:05:32 ◼   ► - Which podcast could they be eating cereal

00:05:35 ◼   ► and talking about it?

00:05:36 ◼   ► There's only one called Top Four.

00:05:37 ◼   ► - Because one of the food trucks was cereal from a van,

00:05:40 ◼   ► which was just a van and then you could buy cereal from them.

00:05:44 ◼   ► So we ate some cereal and maybe by the time this episode is out, if it is, it will be

00:05:50 ◼   ► in the show notes, there is a kind of a bonus top four where we did that and just ranked

00:05:54 ◼   ► top four cereal of the six cereals that we bought.

00:05:57 ◼   ► But I think the most interesting part of this trip, which relates to this show, is that

00:06:02 ◼   ► the festival ended on Sunday, but I left on Tuesday evening and I spent those two days,

00:06:09 ◼   ► the Monday and Tuesday, having a graycation.

00:06:12 ◼   ► Hey!

00:06:13 ◼   ► Hey, I'm so proud of you.

00:06:15 ◼   ► Well, I worked for two days.

00:06:17 ◼   ► So there was nobody, everybody had left.

00:06:20 ◼   ► So I spent basically two days in my hotel room

00:06:23 ◼   ► with the occasional leaving of the hotel room

00:06:25 ◼   ► to get supplies, working and catching up.

00:06:29 ◼   ► I recorded two of my regular shows as well,

00:06:31 ◼   ► one on Monday and one on Tuesday.

00:06:33 ◼   ► So how did you find the experience of the Gracation,

00:06:37 ◼   ► of being separated from your normal life

00:06:40 ◼   ► kind of narrowing focus down to just like you, a hotel room, and the work that you need

00:06:47 ◼   ► to catch up on. How did you find this?

00:06:49 ◼   ► So I had two feelings about this. Very useful was feeling number one, and I'll come back

00:06:55 ◼   ► to that. The second one, and I don't know if you feel this, maybe this would be pulling

00:07:01 ◼   ► away your armour a little bit too much. Lonely. I felt very lonely.

00:07:07 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:07:12 ◼   ► And I don't know if you would dare to say that you feel this way.

00:07:16 ◼   ► This is so sweet. This is so sweet of you, Myke.

00:07:20 ◼   ► Because this is...

00:07:22 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:07:24 ◼   ► This is one of these moments where...

00:07:26 ◼   ► It's sometimes so hard for people to understand other people.

00:07:31 ◼   ► And...

00:07:33 ◼   ► When I do a Gratation...

00:07:35 ◼   ► The thing that is I have a very hard time explaining to other people is that one of the chief benefits that I get is I don't quite know how to describe this but it's a bit like feeling as though I'm the only person in the world.

00:07:55 ◼   ► Like I'm just, I'm here, I'm just on my own, I'm focused down.

00:07:59 ◼   ► But when I say that, I mean it in a very relaxing way.

00:08:06 ◼   ► I don't have to, as much as I can shut out the outside world,

00:08:09 ◼   ► like I don't have to focus on external things right now,

00:08:13 ◼   ► I can just focus on internal things.

00:08:15 ◼   ► And so it's like the opposite of loneliness.

00:08:20 ◼   ► Like if loneliness was an awesome feeling,

00:08:22 ◼   ► maybe that's the way I feel when I do this.

00:08:24 ◼   ► I mean, I understand that because I felt that way as well. Uh-huh, but I also had the feeling of

00:08:30 ◼   ► Missing my fiance that was that's the loneliness feeling it's like I because most of the time I'm on my own, right?

00:08:38 ◼   ► But then I would see a dinner in the evening and right not doing that just being on my own for that entire period of

00:08:45 ◼   ► Time I felt very like isolated in a weird way

00:08:47 ◼   ► I mean, I see the benefit because I really it was very useful

00:08:52 ◼   ► But I felt the loneliness. I was ready to go home. Maybe the problem was that I'd already

00:08:59 ◼   ► spent an X amount of days away, even though I was like having fun and enjoying myself.

00:09:03 ◼   ► And then this was like the tail end of the trip. But even then, it wasn't as long as

00:09:07 ◼   ► your mammoth Amsterdam trip that you took last time. So maybe you just don't feel loneliness

00:09:12 ◼   ► in the same way that I do.

00:09:14 ◼   ► AO Well, it's a bit of an opposite feeling.

00:09:18 ◼   ► Myke.

00:09:19 ◼   ► You feel the loneliness, but there's a benefit of the loneliness.

00:09:21 ◼   ► No, no, you don't understand it all, Myke.

00:09:23 ◼   ► No, I think I understand.

00:09:24 ◼   ► I'm just trying to paint you as a human.

00:09:26 ◼   ► You don't understand it all.

00:09:29 ◼   ► Because the thing that's also hard to explain is, I think maybe the only time I experience

00:09:36 ◼   ► a kind of – what I think people mean by loneliness is actually sometimes at conferences

00:09:42 ◼   ► when I've been really overloaded with people interaction.

00:09:46 ◼   ► the only time I ever can conceive what you humans refer to as loneliness.

00:09:51 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:09:52 ◼   ► I don't, I don't mean it in, in that, like, in that way, but it's like, I just, I think

00:09:56 ◼   ► you fail to understand what I'm trying to say because I can't.

00:10:00 ◼   ► No, no, I thi- okay, I think I do, I just think I'm doing a bad job of relaying it back

00:10:05 ◼   ► to you.

00:10:06 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:10:07 ◼   ► It's like, when I say loneliness for me, it's that there's no one around, right?

00:10:10 ◼   ► Right.

00:10:11 ◼   ► "It's just me here," and you feel that feeling,

00:10:14 ◼   ► but it's a different label.

00:10:16 ◼   ► So you feel the feeling of, "It's just me here,

00:10:19 ◼   ► "there's no one around," but to you,

00:10:21 ◼   ► that's a positive for achieving the goal.

00:10:25 ◼   ► For me, I feel it's a negative in my life,

00:10:28 ◼   ► but I still see the positive of achieving the goal,

00:10:32 ◼   ► which is when I go back to usefulness.

00:10:34 ◼   ► So I felt lonely, but that loneliness helped me focus

00:10:39 ◼   ► on getting what I needed done out of those day and a half.

00:10:43 ◼   ► Because I have come back from this trip

00:10:47 ◼   ► and I don't feel the crippling behindness.

00:10:51 ◼   ► - Yes, yes.

00:10:52 ◼   ► - So I am busy the next few days

00:10:54 ◼   ► 'cause I've crammed some stuff in to Thursday

00:10:56 ◼   ► because tomorrow basically I've got the day off

00:10:59 ◼   ► and so I have to fit in maybe one extra show

00:11:03 ◼   ► than I would normally do on a Thursday.

00:11:05 ◼   ► But I don't feel like my email inbox

00:11:09 ◼   ► is ready to blow. Right? And like just I got a bunch of other things done that and a couple

00:11:16 ◼   ► of extra things than I would usually do whilst taking that day and a half and it was very

00:11:21 ◼   ► relaxed. I'm glad to hear that you feel this way and it's interesting that you mentioned

00:11:28 ◼   ► doing this while you were in Portland because I happened to I did a funny thing this summer

00:11:35 ◼   ► when I was traveling which was you know we did a whole bunch of travels and at the at

00:11:38 ◼   ► end of it my my wife and I were spending several days in Las Vegas. And then there

00:11:43 ◼   ► was a question of like heading home and kind of getting back into the routine

00:11:48 ◼   ► and getting back to work but this was around the time that I was I was trying

00:11:52 ◼   ► to get the traffic video out and ready to go and I talked to my wife about our

00:11:58 ◼   ► travels and and essentially made the decision that I was going to do a a kind

00:12:03 ◼   ► of graycation by actually staying in Las Vegas for a couple of extra days but shifting my mindset

00:12:10 ◼   ► from like "I'm here on vacation" and not doing anything to "I am here now focused on doing some

00:12:17 ◼   ► work" because I think it's the same thing of like especially when you're traveling back and you're

00:12:22 ◼   ► changing time zones just being aware of when you go back you're going to be really out of things

00:12:28 ◼   ► for a little while and I found it really beneficial to feel like I have made as much progress

00:12:35 ◼   ► as I can in a couple of days on a thing that's due soon before I'm stepping on a plane and

00:12:41 ◼   ► putting myself out of commission for a while.

00:12:44 ◼   ► It's a feeling of getting ahead of the work before you head back.

00:12:50 ◼   ► It sounds like you did a similar thing with spending a couple extra days out there in

00:12:53 ◼   ► Portland.

00:12:54 ◼   ► So the thing is here, I know that when you hear this,

00:12:58 ◼   ► you can see that all you're doing is displacing the work.

00:13:02 ◼   ► But the thing is, when you're flying back from,

00:13:06 ◼   ► especially from the West Coast,

00:13:08 ◼   ► you've lost a day and a half.

00:13:10 ◼   ► So you have to catch up on that day and a half

00:13:13 ◼   ► before you can even consider catching up on the work

00:13:17 ◼   ► that would have been if you were to come home

00:13:18 ◼   ► two days earlier.

00:13:20 ◼   ► - Exactly, exactly.

00:13:20 ◼   ► - So it has a compounding feeling.

00:13:23 ◼   ► and by being completely up to date before you catch the plane, even though it's still

00:13:28 ◼   ► taken probably the same amount of time, it is the emotional reaction to seeing that 18

00:13:35 ◼   ► hours worth of work from all of the travelling, that when you don't then have to think about

00:13:41 ◼   ► on top of all the other things you still have to do, it just feels way better. That's the

00:13:46 ◼   ► way I came away from this. It's like yeah, it's still the same amount of work, probably

00:13:50 ◼   ► over the same amount of time, but your emotional feeling towards it is different because you

00:13:54 ◼   ► come home with a cleaner slate.

00:13:56 ◼   ► Exactly, exactly. And I think this summer was the second time I did this kind of like

00:14:02 ◼   ► "I'm coming back from the West Coast but let me try to do some work before I return" thing.

00:14:07 ◼   ► And I also found it hugely valuable just psychologically, like you say. It's not like you're really gaining

00:14:14 ◼   ► any extra time, but it changes the feeling upon arrival of "Oh god, now I have all of

00:14:21 ◼   ► this stuff to catch up on that I'm behind on." Just trying to get ahead of it before

00:14:26 ◼   ► you return. Because again, returning from the West Coast is the worst. Absolutely the

00:14:32 ◼   ► worst coming back to London.

00:14:33 ◼   ► And so, I think this is kind of interesting because whilst I consider, as many people

00:14:38 ◼   ► do, the idea of a standard gracation completely unrealistic for most people, right? To just

00:14:43 ◼   ► like pick up and go to Amsterdam for two weeks. Like that, I'm sure you would agree, for the

00:14:48 ◼   ► majority of people, is unrealistic.

00:14:49 ◼   ► Oh yeah, of course.

00:14:51 ◼   ► But if you're going on a work trip, you know, or you're going to a conference, the idea

00:14:57 ◼   ► of staying one extra day is not that much more unrealistic, right?

00:15:03 ◼   ► No, it's totally, it's a totally doable thing. And I also just want to specify, because I

00:15:10 ◼   ► I can't remember if I've mentioned this on the show before, but my current gradations have grown out of a thing that I have done forever since having a job,

00:15:21 ◼   ► which is doing what I used to call a "hotel weekend" of just like, I'm really behind on a bunch of work or there's something I really want to focus on.

00:15:33 ◼   ► And essentially like, when I would go into school sometimes I would have a little suitcase with me,

00:15:37 ◼   ► And it's because I was going to then spend like that night and a full Saturday in a different location like at a hotel

00:15:45 ◼   ► just being able to separate from everything and kind of focus.

00:15:48 ◼   ► And that's another way where it's like I could steal some time in a sense

00:15:52 ◼   ► by doing these like hotel weekends every once in a while, even when I was still working as a teacher.

00:16:01 ◼   ► It's just that like now that I'm able to do it for longer stretches of time, I will.

00:16:04 ◼   ► But if I was still working as a teacher without a doubt that would still be a habit that I would be

00:16:10 ◼   ► doing to

00:16:12 ◼   ► stay on top of stuff or to focus on big projects when necessary.

00:16:16 ◼   ► So I would say as long as you can overcome the crippling loneliness

00:16:20 ◼   ► Gracations are a good move. There's no crippling loneliness.

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00:17:34 ◼   ► In the Reddit thread for the last episode, many people thought that you were making some

00:17:41 ◼   ► poor decisions with your dishwashing. Especially the fact that you could only fill half of

00:17:48 ◼   ► it at a time. And that really you were expending more energy filling and removing the dish

00:17:54 ◼   ► washer two times over than you were just washing the dishes.

00:17:58 ◼   ► Do people wash dishes?

00:18:00 ◼   ► Like, do people understand what the process of washing a dish is?

00:18:03 ◼   ► I don't understand how there can be a version of I lazily

00:18:08 ◼   ► and almost thoughtlessly throw a bunch of dishes into a robot that then cleans them.

00:18:12 ◼   ► How that how they can possibly think doing that twice.

00:18:16 ◼   ► So from my perspective, near zero effort multiplied by two.

00:18:21 ◼   ► how that can be more effort than hand washing all of the dishes, making sure they're all spotless,

00:18:27 ◼   ► drying them, loading them in the drying rack, and then putting them back. Like, this is, this is

00:18:32 ◼   ► insanity. I just feel like people who are complaining about this, they don't understand

00:18:35 ◼   ► washing dishes. Or they must wash their dishes very poorly. I can't imagine how, how they think

00:18:41 ◼   ► it's more effort to load a dishwasher and have the robot do work for you than to, than to do it

00:18:47 ◼   ► by hand like an 18th century peasant. I don't understand.

00:18:50 ◼   ► I saw a couple of people like recommending washing up as you go along

00:18:54 ◼   ► and I don't subscribe to this. That doesn't make any sense to me.

00:18:59 ◼   ► That makes me angry.

00:19:00 ◼   ► Has anybody who does this ever cooked a meal? Like actually cooked a meal?

00:19:05 ◼   ► By the time you're done with the washing up, the food is cold.

00:19:10 ◼   ► Like when you're, you know, cooking for two people and you have two pans

00:19:15 ◼   ► and like a tray and a bunch of utensils to clean

00:19:18 ◼   ► It's madness. No.

00:19:20 ◼   ► Yeah, there's so many things that are wrong with this. I mean look, I don't cook. I don't like to cook.

00:19:26 ◼   ► I don't have any interest in learning really how to cook but I do make one thing

00:19:30 ◼   ► which if I do say so myself is I make fantastic scrambled eggs

00:19:34 ◼   ► and so sometimes on the weekends like I make scrambled eggs for my wife and I and

00:19:38 ◼   ► that kind of cooking especially with scrambled eggs

00:19:42 ◼   ► It's it's a matter of seconds like if you have the scrambled eggs on the pan for 30 seconds too long

00:19:47 ◼   ► It's like oh, no

00:19:48 ◼   ► It's not it's not perfect anymore

00:19:50 ◼   ► And it's the same thing like getting it off the pan getting it onto both plates getting it into both of your mouths

00:19:55 ◼   ► I give you don't eat it within minutes of when it's done like it's a terrible terrible experience

00:20:01 ◼   ► so yes the going along as your as your

00:20:03 ◼   ► Cooking thing is insanity. It makes no sense

00:20:07 ◼   ► It's it's a terrible idea and it also it makes me mad because it goes against the whole idea of batch processing like okay

00:20:14 ◼   ► Look if for some reason I had to wash my dishes like we rewind to

00:20:18 ◼   ► What would be like five years ago when we didn't have a dishwasher and I was really sad

00:20:22 ◼   ► It's like but if you're going along its batch processing is way more effective like I would rather and I used to wait until

00:20:30 ◼   ► It's like okay. I have a the whole day's worth of dishes are here now now

00:20:34 ◼   ► Now I'm just gonna put in some headphones and I'm gonna listen to a podcast and I'm

00:20:38 ◼   ► gonna wash the dishes.

00:20:39 ◼   ► But I'll do it all at once because this is a way more effective way to do it than every

00:20:45 ◼   ► single time.

00:20:46 ◼   ► People just don't think about the little transition costs when you're doing a small thing every

00:20:52 ◼   ► single time.

00:20:54 ◼   ► And I also, I'm gonna be honest here, the people who say, "Oh, just do it as you go

00:20:57 ◼   ► along," I don't think they do.

00:20:59 ◼   ► I think that's--

00:21:00 ◼   ► I don't believe that either.

00:21:01 ◼   ► I don't think anybody does that.

00:21:02 ◼   ► I think it's a lie.

00:21:03 ◼   ► I think it's a lie that people spread to make themselves look good.

00:21:07 ◼   ► Yeah, they feel good saying it like, "Oh."

00:21:09 ◼   ► How practical I am.

00:21:10 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm a fantastic person.

00:21:12 ◼   ► And the reason I also hate it is because this falls into the category of solutions,

00:21:15 ◼   ► which to me are all under the category of "Just try harder."

00:21:19 ◼   ► And it's like, I hate that.

00:21:21 ◼   ► If your solution is "Just try harder" or "Just be more careful," go f*** yourself.

00:21:26 ◼   ► I'm not interested in your solution.

00:21:28 ◼   ► That's the worst solution ever.

00:21:29 ◼   ► I don't want you around here anymore.

00:21:31 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:21:32 ◼   ► Why don't you just pay more attention

00:21:35 ◼   ► to the thing that you do?

00:21:36 ◼   ► Because that's not how civilization works.

00:21:39 ◼   ► Like that's not how progress is made

00:21:41 ◼   ► is by requiring people to pay more and more careful attention

00:21:46 ◼   ► to tinier and tinier insignificant things.

00:21:48 ◼   ► - Well, here's my problem with that is

00:21:49 ◼   ► you've just spent a ton of work cooking something.

00:21:52 ◼   ► Before you can enjoy it, do more work.

00:21:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

00:21:56 ◼   ► - No, that is unacceptable.

00:21:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's why.

00:21:59 ◼   ► My solution, throw the things in the dishwasher.

00:22:02 ◼   ► As I, it's like, I know this will just drive these people

00:22:04 ◼   ► even crazier, but it's like, if you saw the way

00:22:07 ◼   ► I loaded a dishwasher, I'm sure most of these people

00:22:09 ◼   ► would just lose their minds.

00:22:10 ◼   ► Because again, since I'm only loading the top

00:22:13 ◼   ► because it is mildly inconvenient for me to bend down

00:22:15 ◼   ► to the bottom row, I will also just throw in a couple

00:22:19 ◼   ► of the biggest things, like if I've been cooking eggs,

00:22:22 ◼   ► it's like, okay, great, we have the frying pan,

00:22:24 ◼   ► we have three plates and it's full.

00:22:26 ◼   ► close, go, clean it robot, and now we're done.

00:22:30 ◼   ► Like I don't even want to have to think about it.

00:22:31 ◼   ► So not only do I use half the dishwasher,

00:22:34 ◼   ► I load the dishwasher in the most inefficient way possible

00:22:38 ◼   ► from the sense of how many dishes could you have gotten

00:22:41 ◼   ► in this dishwasher, but from the personally

00:22:44 ◼   ► most efficient way, which is what's the least amount

00:22:47 ◼   ► of effort I can expend to get these dishes done.

00:22:49 ◼   ► That's the only right way to do it as far as I'm concerned.

00:22:52 ◼   ► - One argument that I was expecting,

00:22:54 ◼   ► but we didn't get any of what I saw was people complaining about your effect on the environment.

00:23:00 ◼   ► We didn't get any of those.

00:23:01 ◼   ► I saw a couple of those.

00:23:03 ◼   ► Oh really?

00:23:04 ◼   ► I didn't see any.

00:23:05 ◼   ► Maybe it was just on Twitter, I don't know what it was.

00:23:08 ◼   ► But that's also like, I've also seen this thing in real life if this ever comes up with

00:23:13 ◼   ► people I know.

00:23:14 ◼   ► Like, "How do you use this dishwasher?

00:23:15 ◼   ► I don't understand."

00:23:16 ◼   ► And again, it's one of these things where people just focus on what they can see or

00:23:22 ◼   ► think about and so they think about the washing machine and they don't realize.

00:23:26 ◼   ► As always with this stuff that if you're hand washing dishes you're using, I've seen crazy

00:23:30 ◼   ► numbers like it's 20 times more water when you're hand washing a dish than when you're

00:23:34 ◼   ► doing the dishwasher.

00:23:35 ◼   ► I know how I wash dishes and I know I'm using what a dishwasher does.

00:23:40 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:23:41 ◼   ► The dishwasher we got has some, it's printed on the front, it's some crazy low number for

00:23:46 ◼   ► how much water it uses to clean all of the dishes.

00:23:49 ◼   ► So it's like, as usual, the robot is way better at this than you can ever be petty human.

00:23:55 ◼   ► Like, you're not gonna-- there's no way you can use three drops of water and actually get it clean.

00:23:58 ◼   ► It's not gonna happen, so...

00:24:00 ◼   ► But again, even if everybody's washing their dishes by hand versus using the dishwasher,

00:24:05 ◼   ► it still doesn't make any effect on the amount of domestic water use versus agricultural water use,

00:24:09 ◼   ► but that's a story for another time for people who like to complain about that kind of stuff.

00:24:14 ◼   ► So, inefficiently using the dishwasher, maximum efficient solution.

00:24:18 ◼   ► CORTEX COTAGE will have a dishwasher.

00:24:21 ◼   ► Yes, I'm so happy for you.

00:24:23 ◼   ► Not immediately.

00:24:25 ◼   ► But it will get one.

00:24:27 ◼   ► Because it takes some work.

00:24:29 ◼   ► And as we've been over before,

00:24:31 ◼   ► when you buy a house you're not really left with a lot of money.

00:24:34 ◼   ► Right.

00:24:35 ◼   ► But it will happen.

00:24:37 ◼   ► And it's also worth your time to get the dishwasher.

00:24:40 ◼   ► Talking about money,

00:24:42 ◼   ► my understanding being on the periphery of YouTube culture

00:24:46 ◼   ► tells me that you're not going to make any money anymore. That's what I have gotten from

00:24:51 ◼   ► seeing a bunch of blog posts and YouTube videos from some people that I follow. As it seems

00:24:56 ◼   ► that YouTube changed their monetization strategy. Are you able to provide an overview for the

00:25:02 ◼   ► listener or shall I bumble my way through it?

00:25:06 ◼   ► I can provide a brief overview of what has occurred recently in YouTube land. So this

00:25:13 ◼   ► This is a story of demonetization, which...

00:25:18 ◼   ► Is a great word, by the way.

00:25:20 ◼   ► Is a great word.

00:25:21 ◼   ► I really...

00:25:22 ◼   ► This is slightly tangent before we even begin.

00:25:24 ◼   ► I really hate the word monetize.

00:25:26 ◼   ► Yeah, it's terrible.

00:25:27 ◼   ► It's a really ugly word, and I'm also aware that it is a word I can never spell right,

00:25:33 ◼   ► and iOS text prediction never has any idea what I'm trying to say when I write out the

00:25:37 ◼   ► word monetize.

00:25:38 ◼   ► Because it doesn't exist, the word.

00:25:40 ◼   ► It is a fake word.

00:25:41 ◼   ► Yeah, I can't spell it.

00:25:43 ◼   ► I think it's just an ugly word.

00:25:45 ◼   ► And then like demonetization,

00:25:47 ◼   ► I feel like we're gonna build our way up

00:25:48 ◼   ► to some kind of anti-disestablishment

00:25:50 ◼   ► and to herringism of monetize.

00:25:53 ◼   ► - Soon there's gonna be retro demonetization

00:25:55 ◼   ► when they put it back again.

00:25:57 ◼   ► - Which yeah, which is almost certainly has occurred.

00:25:58 ◼   ► I do know people who have been retro demonetized.

00:26:00 ◼   ► So yeah.

00:26:01 ◼   ► - Oh my word.

00:26:02 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:26:04 ◼   ► - It's an ugly, ugly word.

00:26:07 ◼   ► - Retro retro demonetized.

00:26:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, I guess yeah, that could happen.

00:26:10 ◼   ► - When they take it away again.

00:26:11 ◼   ► or re-retro demonetized.

00:26:13 ◼   ► - Oh, re, re is good.

00:26:15 ◼   ► Re-retro demonetization.

00:26:17 ◼   ► - It's a horrible word.

00:26:18 ◼   ► But it feels like, I don't know,

00:26:21 ◼   ► like a tangent to the tangent is

00:26:24 ◼   ► the reason that business lingo like this

00:26:26 ◼   ► creeps into the language is because it is effective

00:26:29 ◼   ► at conveying an idea with a small number of syllables,

00:26:33 ◼   ► usually.

00:26:34 ◼   ► - Like the word monetize or monetization,

00:26:38 ◼   ► I don't know how to express in a better way

00:26:41 ◼   ► than that. Yeah, or with fewer syllables. Yeah. Like I can say "make money from" but

00:26:48 ◼   ► it just isn't as good. I mean I hate monetize, but it completely conveys what you're trying

00:26:55 ◼   ► to say. Yeah, it does. But so yes, there has been this latest round of demonetization in

00:27:02 ◼   ► YouTube. This is a long story that turns into YouTube drama as these things mostly do, but

00:27:07 ◼   ► I will try to briefly summarize it, which is that I guess maybe it was about two weeks ago now

00:27:14 ◼   ► a big brouhaha came about because a bunch of people discovered that their videos had been

00:27:21 ◼   ► demonetized so that YouTube was no longer running ads on them,

00:27:24 ◼   ► which meant that the creators were no longer earning money off of those videos,

00:27:28 ◼   ► and that they had been demonetized for

00:27:32 ◼   ► a set of guidelines that YouTube had put out which is related to the content of those videos.

00:27:39 ◼   ► So it seems like YouTube is trying to make a move to be more advertising friendly.

00:27:44 ◼   ► And that means YouTube doesn't want to run ads or...

00:27:49 ◼   ► Whose motives are the driving force here?

00:27:52 ◼   ► Is it YouTube or is it the advertisers? Who knows because you never see on the inside of these things.

00:27:57 ◼   ► [whispering] It's definitely the advertisers.

00:27:58 ◼   ► [whispering] You try to know what it is.

00:27:59 ◼   ► I think it's the advertisers as well. It's totally the advertisers.

00:28:02 ◼   ► but I still have some doubts about the mechanisms by which YouTube is doing it, but that's a different story.

00:28:06 ◼   ► So anyway, videos that include these sort of broad categories will not be monetized,

00:28:14 ◼   ► which includes things like sexually suggestive content or sexual humor, partial nudity, violence, inappropriate language,

00:28:24 ◼   ► harassment, swearing, promotion of drugs and related substances,

00:28:30 ◼   ► and controversial or sensitive subjects, including subjects related to war, political conflicts, natural disasters,

00:28:36 ◼   ► and tragedies, even if graphic imagery is not shown.

00:28:39 ◼   ► So these are like some pretty broad, very broad, very subjective guidelines about

00:28:50 ◼   ► what kind of content on YouTube can have ads run against it.

00:28:54 ◼   ► And as you can imagine, many people were quite upset to wake up one day and discover that

00:28:59 ◼   ► they weren't earning money on a bunch of their videos.

00:29:01 ◼   ► And in the constant...

00:29:03 ◼   ► [sigh]

00:29:07 ◼   ► I don't know how to describe it, but the constant...

00:29:10 ◼   ► just... disaster that is YouTube communication.

00:29:16 ◼   ► Everybody thought this was a new policy because all of the notifications went out on one day,

00:29:20 ◼   ► but it turned out this is a thing they'd been doing in secret for several years.

00:29:24 ◼   ► They just never bothered to send out any notifications to anybody

00:29:28 ◼   ► about videos being demonetized. Sounds like great. Thumbs up.

00:29:32 ◼   ► Great communication there, YouTube, as usual. Par for the course.

00:29:35 ◼   ► Let me ask you a question about that part, then I want to step back a little bit.

00:29:39 ◼   ► Yeah, sure. So, the idea of it being happening for years, were just people

00:29:43 ◼   ► completely unaware of it, because my understanding is now

00:29:46 ◼   ► they were showing a little marker in the YouTube Creator Studio that a video

00:29:51 ◼   ► was demonetized.

00:29:52 ◼   ► So previously they're just not showing that and you just weren't getting the money.

00:29:56 ◼   ► This is very hard to know.

00:30:00 ◼   ► I have had my own run-ins with demonetization in the past,

00:30:05 ◼   ► and it has always been the case that it shows up as a little sad,

00:30:10 ◼   ► greyed-out money icon when your video has been demonetized.

00:30:14 ◼   ► Yeah, one of our videos that happened to, one of the Cortex videos.

00:30:17 ◼   ► Oh, did it?

00:30:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:30:19 ◼   ► Did you ever get a notification? Any reason?

00:30:21 ◼   ► It just said it in the little box when I uploaded it before I published it.

00:30:26 ◼   ► So then I just removed it and did it again and it was fine.

00:30:29 ◼   ► That's always a prank.

00:30:31 ◼   ► It wasn't published so I just deleted it and started over.

00:30:35 ◼   ► Oh god.

00:30:36 ◼   ► Because I figured I'd done something wrong. It just said, "Can't be monetized."

00:30:39 ◼   ► And I was like, "Uh, I don't know why so I'll just do it again, shall I?" And it worked.

00:30:43 ◼   ► Yeah, it's... this stuff is so frustrating.

00:30:49 ◼   ► So my personal experience with demonetization has always been I have to notice.

00:30:56 ◼   ► I've never gotten a notification that the video has been demonetized.

00:31:01 ◼   ► I have had videos that are showing ads, like when I upload them and publish them,

00:31:06 ◼   ► and everything is hunky-dory as far as I know, and it's only when I go back later and check

00:31:11 ◼   ► do I see like, "Oh, the green money icon has turned to a grey money icon."

00:31:16 ◼   ► So that's something I find weird then.

00:31:18 ◼   ► So the videos that have been demonetized or are being demonetized, if ads run on them,

00:31:27 ◼   ► who gets the money?

00:31:29 ◼   ► Well when that grey icon pops up, there are no more ads showing on the video.

00:31:35 ◼   ► Okay, so how do people not know then?

00:31:41 ◼   ► Well-

00:31:42 ◼   ► If this has been happening for years?

00:31:45 ◼   ► The thing is, I think there's a couple of things here.

00:31:50 ◼   ► First of all, as you know very well Myke, runner of the Cortex YouTube channel, the

00:31:57 ◼   ► advertising rates from Google AdSense on those YouTube videos, how would you describe them

00:32:03 ◼   ► Myke?

00:32:04 ◼   ► They have advertising rates?

00:32:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:32:06 ◼   ► That's the way I would describe it.

00:32:09 ◼   ► Yeah, it's...

00:32:12 ◼   ► It's hilariously low.

00:32:13 ◼   ► That is really the best way to describe it. It is so low that it is funny. You have to

00:32:20 ◼   ► laugh otherwise you cry.

00:32:21 ◼   ► Like seriously, if you picked a number, it is lower than that number. It's kind of crazy.

00:32:29 ◼   ► It's ridiculous. When we think about the Cortex business, I'm sure you can just mentally round

00:32:38 ◼   ► off the YouTube advertising money as zero.

00:32:41 ◼   ► Never think about it.

00:32:43 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. It might as well be zero.

00:32:45 ◼   ► And so, that thing that you've said right there, like, you don't even think about it, like it doesn't even cross your mind about the advertising money that you get from the YouTube channel for the Cortex numbers.

00:32:54 ◼   ► That right there is an indication of how is it possible that people could have not noticed.

00:33:00 ◼   ► One of the reasons is that, again, my channel is a very unusual channel with a bunch of the numbers compared to most YouTube channels.

00:33:13 ◼   ► And so most YouTube channels don't upload a video once every six weeks. Six weeks if you're lucky.

00:33:20 ◼   ► Especially not channels at your subscriber and view size. Because at those rates, why would you not be uploading a video every week?

00:33:28 ◼   ► is the usual kind of thinking, right?

00:33:30 ◼   ► - Right, yeah, it's totally the usual kind of thinking.

00:33:33 ◼   ► Now, the thing is if you look at, for example,

00:33:38 ◼   ► the revenue chart of like how much money do I earn

00:33:43 ◼   ► every day in advertising from YouTube?

00:33:46 ◼   ► Like there's a little analytics chart

00:33:48 ◼   ► that you can pull up inside of YouTube to see this.

00:33:50 ◼   ► My chart looks like a flat line with a series of spikes,

00:33:55 ◼   ► right, coming one every six weeks or so.

00:33:57 ◼   ► So it's like nothing spike, nothing spike, nothing spike.

00:34:01 ◼   ► And that is extraordinarily rare.

00:34:06 ◼   ► Most people who have shown me their equivalent charts,

00:34:10 ◼   ► their charts look essentially like flat lines

00:34:14 ◼   ► with maybe occasional bumps.

00:34:17 ◼   ► Because what they're dealing with

00:34:18 ◼   ► is that they're getting like a ton of revenue

00:34:21 ◼   ► from the back catalog,

00:34:23 ◼   ► but maybe any particular video is not a huge percentage

00:34:26 ◼   ► of the monthly take. And this is what happens when you have hundreds and hundreds of videos

00:34:31 ◼   ► and you have people who go back through and will watch a ton of your videos in a row.

00:34:35 ◼   ► Whereas I don't think I even have like a hundred real videos yet.

00:34:40 ◼   ► So lots of people are watching your back catalogue but there's less back catalogue to consume.

00:34:45 ◼   ► Exactly, exactly. Whereas with tons of daily vloggers you have literally hundreds and hundreds

00:34:52 ◼   ► and hundreds of back catalogue episodes to consume.

00:34:56 ◼   ► And I think this also compounds the effect that when you as a creator are looking at the videos that you are uploading,

00:35:03 ◼   ► you're only ever seeing the last ten when you sort of casually go log on to YouTube and look through stuff.

00:35:09 ◼   ► So if you were not getting any notifications about being demonetized,

00:35:13 ◼   ► and if any particular video is a small percentage of what the monthly earnings are,

00:35:19 ◼   ► and you're only able to see the last 10 videos at a glance,

00:35:24 ◼   ► it's very easy to see how is it that people might not have noticed

00:35:29 ◼   ► that they have videos in their back catalogue that were demonetized.

00:35:34 ◼   ► And I've seen some examples where some people have discovered that they have literally hundreds of videos

00:35:39 ◼   ► that have been demonetized.

00:35:41 ◼   ► It's just like, "Oh, whoops!"

00:35:44 ◼   ► So I want to go back a little bit to this as an idea.

00:35:48 ◼   ► I was very surprised when I saw about all of this that this wasn't happening.

00:35:56 ◼   ► Now it turns out that it may have already been happening. Because why would an

00:36:02 ◼   ► advertiser want to associate themselves with some of the things that are in this

00:36:07 ◼   ► list of stuff? Why would you want your product playing before a video

00:36:14 ◼   ► video about X if it doesn't fit with your brand. Like there are some people that would

00:36:20 ◼   ► have no problem with their video playing before sexually suggestive content, but there are

00:36:24 ◼   ► lots of companies that wouldn't want to be associated with that.

00:36:27 ◼   ► Right, but you can imagine that like Durex might want their video in front of sexually

00:36:31 ◼   ► suggestive content.

00:36:33 ◼   ► Or wouldn't care.

00:36:34 ◼   ► Right, or yeah, or wouldn't care. Yeah, like whatever guys.

00:36:37 ◼   ► You know, maybe a children's toy company.

00:36:41 ◼   ► And I'm sure YouTube's algorithms are smart enough to understand a lot of this stuff anyway.

00:36:46 ◼   ► Mhm.

00:36:47 ◼   ► But so that's one thing, right?

00:36:49 ◼   ► So I imagine that's the case.

00:36:51 ◼   ► And I'm not surprised about it.

00:36:53 ◼   ► However, it doesn't seem to be happening to a lot of people.

00:36:58 ◼   ► So like I've watched a PewDiePie video where PewDiePie is complaining about this.

00:37:03 ◼   ► And in his video, he is attempting to break it.

00:37:09 ◼   ► But there was still a 30 second unskippable ad that played beforehand.

00:37:14 ◼   ► Because you're always going to advertise on PewDiePie.

00:37:17 ◼   ► So the rules that they've set out aren't accurate.

00:37:22 ◼   ► It doesn't make sense to me.

00:37:23 ◼   ► Saying "we will not do this, this, this, this and this, there will be no ads there"

00:37:27 ◼   ► isn't true.

00:37:28 ◼   ► It's very strange, because of course advertisers wouldn't want it and YouTube should have

00:37:32 ◼   ► this in place. It is unsurprising that something like this is in place to me.

00:37:35 ◼   ► Like just because like if you imagine me as the YouTube right like as in the

00:37:40 ◼   ► person who puts ads on stuff like one of the reasons that all of our shows remain

00:37:45 ◼   ► clean is for that reason. Mm-hmm. Right at Relay FM we don't have explicit shows

00:37:50 ◼   ► because it just becomes trickier to sell ads there so we just keep it clean. Yeah

00:37:55 ◼   ► yeah that's that's totally the case like I bleep curses on Hello Internet not

00:38:01 ◼   ► Not because I have some kind of prudish problem with cursing, which I don't because I'm cursing

00:38:07 ◼   ► on the show, but I bleep it because iTunes doesn't like it if you have curses in your

00:38:11 ◼   ► podcast, right?

00:38:12 ◼   ► You have to mark it explicit and it causes problems.

00:38:14 ◼   ► Yeah, and it just makes it easier.

00:38:16 ◼   ► This is something you don't have to deal with by doing that.

00:38:18 ◼   ► It's like a conversation you don't have to have.

00:38:20 ◼   ► So I'm not surprised about it, but then, you know, so it doesn't surprise me if this is

00:38:24 ◼   ► in place.

00:38:25 ◼   ► This should be in place because if I'm an advertiser, I want to be able to disassociate

00:38:29 ◼   ► myself with that type of content if I want to.

00:38:32 ◼   ► However, it also feels like at the top end of the scale, it's still not a problem.

00:38:40 ◼   ► Yeah I mean this is, I don't know, this gets off into a whole side realm, but I often,

00:38:51 ◼   ► I look at stuff like this and I always hate lists like this because you look at any of

00:38:57 ◼   ► the words. And it's always one of these cases of it's very hard to disagree with any of

00:39:02 ◼   ► these words, right? But the devil always comes down into the details by like, "What do you

00:39:09 ◼   ► mean by these words?" Like for example, partial nudity. What do you mean by that?

00:39:15 ◼   ► Like my arms. I know, right? I'm wearing a t-shirt.

00:39:20 ◼   ► How partial is partial nudity?

00:39:22 ◼   ► I hate to say this, I know a lot of vloggers who would not be anywhere near where they

00:39:29 ◼   ► are right now if they didn't have partial nudity, right?

00:39:34 ◼   ► Under the broadest interpretation of these words, right?

00:39:38 ◼   ► So it's like, and also something like partial nudity.

00:39:41 ◼   ► I'm gonna go out on a wild limb here and say that's a really culturally dependent term.

00:39:49 ◼   ► Yeah, like who are you basing that on?

00:39:50 ◼   ► Because there are a lot of people that can get upset

00:39:53 ◼   ► with even the realm that you consider to be okay.

00:39:57 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:39:58 ◼   ► So like, but again, it's like partial nudity,

00:40:00 ◼   ► just when you hear it as part of a list

00:40:03 ◼   ► and especially when they prime you

00:40:04 ◼   ► with like sexually suggestive content,

00:40:06 ◼   ► including partial nudity.

00:40:07 ◼   ► It's like, well, wait, wait, you know.

00:40:09 ◼   ► It's like, what level of suggesting are we talking here?

00:40:12 ◼   ► Like that just shouldn't exist.

00:40:13 ◼   ► They should just say sexually suggestive content.

00:40:16 ◼   ► Like partial nudity is the wrong phrase to use in that scenario.

00:40:21 ◼   ► It doesn't make any sense.

00:40:22 ◼   ► Right, but the thing is, it's like with this whole list, like running down the list, because

00:40:30 ◼   ► these things are just so broad and because they're so interpretive, there is almost no

00:40:37 ◼   ► video I could probably find on YouTube that I couldn't stretch one of these definitions

00:40:41 ◼   ► to include.

00:40:43 ◼   ► In knowing the way that YouTube are, like, with their basically openly hostile practices

00:40:48 ◼   ► at times, they may as well have just said any video that we deem unmonetizable.

00:40:54 ◼   ► It may as well have just said that.

00:40:56 ◼   ► Yeah, and that's whenever I see guidelines like this, this is always the conclusion that

00:41:00 ◼   ► I kind of draw, is... and it's one reason why I have a kind of ideological opposition

00:41:07 ◼   ► to some of this stuff.

00:41:08 ◼   ► Even if it is for the best of intentions, it always comes off as like, we're writing

00:41:14 ◼   ► a bunch of intentionally broad rules so that at any point we can demonetize stuff that

00:41:21 ◼   ► we just want to.

00:41:22 ◼   ► Right?

00:41:23 ◼   ► Like, you know, for whatever reason it is.

00:41:25 ◼   ► And like you say, we don't want to demonetize PewDiePie's videos because he's a huge number

00:41:32 ◼   ► one person on our channel.

00:41:33 ◼   ► And I don't think the reason for that is because they don't want to upset PewDiePie.

00:41:37 ◼   ► They just want that sweet sweet PewDiePie money.

00:41:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, and yeah, I mean,

00:41:42 ◼   ► yeah, they've upset PewDiePie enough.

00:41:44 ◼   ► - Yeah. (laughs)

00:41:46 ◼   ► He makes part of a living based on that now, I think.

00:41:48 ◼   ► - Exactly, it does seem like you do mind

00:41:50 ◼   ► intentionally provoking himself back.

00:41:52 ◼   ► (both laughing)

00:41:53 ◼   ► It's like not necessarily a good idea, guys.

00:41:56 ◼   ► Leave PewDiePie alone!

00:41:57 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:42:00 ◼   ► But yeah, so when I look at these lists,

00:42:03 ◼   ► that's always my conclusion.

00:42:05 ◼   ► And the one that really catches my attention is,

00:42:08 ◼   ► for years when people ask about examples of great content on YouTube,

00:42:13 ◼   ► I've always pointed to one of my favorite things,

00:42:15 ◼   ► which is the Crash Course World History series,

00:42:18 ◼   ► starting with John Green, like in episode number one.

00:42:21 ◼   ► And you go watch those, and it's an amazing example

00:42:24 ◼   ► of great high quality content on YouTube.

00:42:28 ◼   ► I am a person who's not a huge fan of history,

00:42:31 ◼   ► but those videos were just so well done.

00:42:33 ◼   ► So well done.

00:42:35 ◼   ► But like Crash Course World History certainly includes sensitive events related to war and political conflicts.

00:42:43 ◼   ► Right? Like how is the Opium War not a political conflict?

00:42:49 ◼   ► Or a sensitive subject related to war?

00:42:52 ◼   ► Or the Holocaust.

00:42:54 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. It's just ludicrously broad to include almost everything.

00:42:59 ◼   ► And so I just find this kind of stuff frustrating, right?

00:43:05 ◼   ► Like the thing, even what I think is perhaps one of like the clearest ones on this list is swearing,

00:43:13 ◼   ► inappropriate language including swearing, but I am always astounded by words other people think

00:43:19 ◼   ► are swear words that for me don't even register as swear words.

00:43:23 ◼   ► It is very different between me and you, for example.

00:43:26 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, we even have this disagreement.

00:43:28 ◼   ► Yep.

00:43:28 ◼   ► Where, yeah, I think you're a little sensitive on this topic and I'm always trying to get you to de-bleep stuff.

00:43:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:43:34 ◼   ► You want to bleep too many things, Myke.

00:43:37 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:43:38 ◼   ► I just go by what the way I was brought up.

00:43:41 ◼   ► Right.

00:43:41 ◼   ► You know, in Britain there are different curse words.

00:43:44 ◼   ► But of course that goes right to the core of the problem.

00:43:47 ◼   ► Could you, like looking at this list, could you get a room full of three people to agree on the sub points

00:43:54 ◼   ► of what should or should not be included on any of these bullet points?

00:43:57 ◼   ► No.

00:43:57 ◼   ► Of course you can't and I think when they're writing these guidelines they know.

00:44:02 ◼   ► Right, exactly. Like that is, like I don't think that's some kind of accident.

00:44:06 ◼   ► I think that that is intentionally part of this and I don't like it because then it leads to

00:44:13 ◼   ► capricious and weird and semi-random demonetization of particular channels.

00:44:19 ◼   ► And again, just like it seems like some channels that I'm like I'm guessing people at YouTube don't

00:44:25 ◼   ► like so much were hit harder than others. And it's like, that's bullshit is what that

00:44:30 ◼   ► is. Like it's, it's, it's frustrating.

00:44:32 ◼   ► You just demonetized this podcast.

00:44:34 ◼   ► Alright, so where is this, where is this right now? Like as we're recording right now, have

00:44:40 ◼   ► YouTube backed away from anything? Have they explained things any clearer?

00:44:46 ◼   ► I haven't really seen any updates other than just like this is our policy and, you know,

00:44:51 ◼   ► we'll let you know.

00:44:52 ◼   ► Deal with it.

00:44:53 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. Like this is a thing, we've changed this thing. Just deal with it.

00:44:58 ◼   ► And from a creative's perspective, it doesn't seem to be clear either, right?

00:45:02 ◼   ► Because now it's like, "Oh, well this has been happening forever."

00:45:05 ◼   ► And it's like, "Oh, okay then."

00:45:07 ◼   ► Right. Is that better or is that worse? I think it's worse.

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00:46:32 ◼   ► Reading about all of this and kind of trying to understand a little bit about what's happening

00:46:37 ◼   ► here has led me to a question that I have for you.

00:46:41 ◼   ► Which is basically, I don't understand, knowing you and the way that you work, and as I'm

00:46:48 ◼   ► sure many of the people that have listened to this show will also question, I don't understand

00:46:53 ◼   ► how you are comfortable enough to leave your revenue in the hands of someone else.

00:47:03 ◼   ► You have no control, zero control over the advertising money that comes into you from

00:47:11 ◼   ► YouTube's end. They can change the rules whenever they want. All of this is done without telling

00:47:18 ◼   ► anybody and you have no way of refining or changing any of the practices that occur.

00:47:28 ◼   ► And I don't see how this gels with your ways of working, which is mainly a sense of control,

00:47:36 ◼   ► I think, around a lot of the ways that you do business.

00:47:39 ◼   ► And I understand that you have trade-offs that you're willing to do for the sake of

00:47:44 ◼   ► convenience in a lot of the stuff that you do.

00:47:48 ◼   ► But this one feels like a step above that because it is completely like how the money

00:47:56 ◼   ► comes in, which is very, very different.

00:47:59 ◼   ► Yeah, so you're totally right about that, Myke.

00:48:04 ◼   ► And this is I think the kind of meta lesson to draw from this.

00:48:10 ◼   ► I mean this to me just strikes me as another example of like one of the many things that

00:48:14 ◼   ► occurs with YouTube.

00:48:16 ◼   ► And my feeling towards YouTube for a long time has been a bit of like, "Don't be too

00:48:27 ◼   ► reliant on it."

00:48:28 ◼   ► And I think people who have followed the podcasts and the videos that I make can be aware of

00:48:34 ◼   ► that, like putting out a video asking people to sign up to my email list like

00:48:39 ◼   ► that was like part of this whole don't want to be too reliant on on YouTube. But

00:48:45 ◼   ► there's the real wake-up call for me was like when I first started with YouTube

00:48:51 ◼   ► and things start getting successful it's like wow this is this is going really

00:48:54 ◼   ► well and I think I'm hitting high enough numbers that I can like maybe leave my

00:49:00 ◼   ► job and now I'm hitting high enough numbers it's like okay great like I'm

00:49:03 ◼   ► I'm replacing my previous income like this is this is all going this is all going well, and I was kind of living in like

00:49:08 ◼   ► YouTube is magic and amazing land until I can pinpoint the exact video which was my

00:49:17 ◼   ► My first like rude wake-up call with this this kind of problem

00:49:22 ◼   ► And it was the video that is Canada and the United States bizarre borders part 2

00:49:27 ◼   ► Which was very popular. I'm looking at now it has like

00:49:31 ◼   ► 1.7 million views, but whenever it went up it was the most

00:49:36 ◼   ► rapidly watched video of any video that I had made until that point. You know like the first 48 hours were just huge for some

00:49:43 ◼   ► reason like that one just went ridiculously viral and

00:49:46 ◼   ► that was one of those videos that I uploaded it to YouTube,

00:49:50 ◼   ► everything was fine, and then it was demonetized like an hour later and

00:49:56 ◼   ► monetized for maybe a day, a day and a half after that.

00:50:01 ◼   ► And I was like, frantically trying to get in touch with YouTube to be like, "What? What is going on with this video?

00:50:08 ◼   ► Why are there not ads running against it?" And it was

00:50:12 ◼   ► not a fun experience because

00:50:15 ◼   ► at that stage, it's like, I needed the money from that video to pay the rent for that month.

00:50:23 ◼   ► Like this was this was like a no joke we have a real problem here situation and also given the way my videos are

00:50:31 ◼   ► because they tend to be viral that means

00:50:35 ◼   ► essentially almost all of the ad money that I'm going to make off of them. I'm making in like the first

00:50:41 ◼   ► two to four days and then after that it just drops off tremendously in terms of the number of views

00:50:50 ◼   ► And so that was a real panic and a real wake up.

00:50:53 ◼   ► And that was the point at which I really started...

00:50:59 ◼   ► I think thinking of YouTube less as like a "Boy isn't this exciting, I can't believe I'm doing this for a living, it's totally amazing, everything's perfect" land.

00:51:10 ◼   ► And I started thinking of it much more strategically, like, I need to think of this as a business that can create a reliable and stable life for me and my wife.

00:51:26 ◼   ► And you can see if you kind of follow the things that happen, like, this is why not two months later there's an announcement video that I was on part of Subbable, which eventually became part of Patreon.

00:51:39 ◼   ► Like, how can I make it so that if there is a disaster with this part of the business

00:51:46 ◼   ► that I have no control over, that I don't have to go into complete freak-out mode?

00:51:54 ◼   ► Because it's just not a good situation to be in.

00:52:00 ◼   ► And over the years, I have successfully done that.

00:52:03 ◼   ► like this recent demonetization story with YouTube,

00:52:08 ◼   ► this was actually one of the times I felt really kind of,

00:52:12 ◼   ► in a meta way about the business,

00:52:14 ◼   ► I felt relatively good about it

00:52:15 ◼   ► because this thing crossed my radar when it happened.

00:52:20 ◼   ► But because I was occupied with a bunch of other things

00:52:23 ◼   ► at the time, I didn't feel like I have to drop everything

00:52:27 ◼   ► right now and focus on this and find out what's going on

00:52:30 ◼   ► with my YouTube channel.

00:52:31 ◼   ► I felt like this is a thing I can give some time to let it shake out, to see what the

00:52:37 ◼   ► situation is, you know, wait for a YouTube response and then see where we are.

00:52:43 ◼   ► I don't feel like I need to investigate this right now and I need to be seriously worried

00:52:48 ◼   ► about the future of my rental payments.

00:52:52 ◼   ► And that's because at this point you're comfortable with the money you have coming in from other

00:52:57 ◼   ► revenues that if YouTube explodes into a pile of demonetization, you have revenue coming

00:53:06 ◼   ► in from other areas.

00:53:07 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:53:08 ◼   ► Like this was the number one goal, which was to get to a point where I was not dependent

00:53:14 ◼   ► on the flakiest source of income, right?

00:53:18 ◼   ► The most unreliable source of income, which is like, maybe your video isn't monetized

00:53:24 ◼   ► for like no reason you ever get a good explanation for.

00:53:28 ◼   ► And this demonetization thing has actually made me wonder in retrospect,

00:53:32 ◼   ► what like, did that video somehow trip one of these things somewhere in the system?

00:53:38 ◼   ► Like is that what happened?

00:53:40 ◼   ► You know, it's a year after they said they supposedly started doing this.

00:53:43 ◼   ► It's like, I just don't know, I wonder.

00:53:45 ◼   ► But it's nice to be in a position where I feel like I don't really have to care.

00:53:49 ◼   ► Right? It's like, look, you guys have...

00:53:53 ◼   ► pushed me into a situation where I feel like I diversified my business much sooner than I might have otherwise

00:54:04 ◼   ► because of this kind of thing.

00:54:06 ◼   ► And I really do think it's, like for anybody who is self-employed, I don't know when this exactly occurs,

00:54:18 ◼   ► I think it's very likely that if you're self-employed, especially at the start, you probably have one big client or one major source of income.

00:54:28 ◼   ► And there's, I think that's almost necessary to start out, like that's what gets you going.

00:54:34 ◼   ► But there's an inflection point at which you have to realize like this is a real problem.

00:54:40 ◼   ► Like you're in a deadly, vulnerable situation if your income is reliant on a single client or a single product.

00:54:53 ◼   ► And I feel like probably sooner than you think you should, you should probably start trying to diversify.

00:55:04 ◼   ► And it's a funny thing, I've actually had a few meetings with smaller YouTube channels

00:55:09 ◼   ► and this is one point that I've actually tried to hit home with people who seemed to be in the phase that I was

00:55:15 ◼   ► of like, "Wow, YouTube's amazing!"

00:55:17 ◼   ► And like, yes, yes, it is amazing, but like you need to start thinking about diversifying right now.

00:55:20 ◼   ► Like, do this before you need to do this so that it is not a disaster that you wake up to one morning.

00:55:29 ◼   ► I mean, in the realm of these kind of little problems with YouTube, like this demonetization one is almost certainly the

00:55:37 ◼   ► minorest of these things that have ever occurred, but I'm always astounded when there's some kind of explosion on YouTube where

00:55:43 ◼   ► somebody just loses their whole channel, right? Like they wake up one morning and YouTube has just removed a channel, you know, like wow.

00:55:50 ◼   ► That would be a bad day. That would be a really bad day if

00:55:57 ◼   ► if you are entirely dependent on that one thing as your source of income.

00:56:04 ◼   ► And for all the office monkeys, try not to think about your employer that way, but it

00:56:06 ◼   ► is exactly the same situation.

00:56:08 ◼   ► Shhh.

00:56:09 ◼   ► Yeah, don't tell them.

00:56:11 ◼   ► Keep the office monkeys calm.

00:56:12 ◼   ► So I know that in your kind of idea of spreading out your revenue a little bit, part of that

00:56:20 ◼   ► and the diversification, part of that is included in the podcasts, right?

00:56:24 ◼   ► So they help with that.

00:56:26 ◼   ► But YouTube is still a big kind of hole.

00:56:30 ◼   ► Whilst you've taken steps that are outside of YouTube, so Patreon and/or your own advertising

00:56:36 ◼   ► protect against YouTube monetization stuff, there is nothing protecting YouTube implosion.

00:56:43 ◼   ► What do you mean about YouTube just going out of business?

00:56:48 ◼   ► Sure.

00:56:49 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a...

00:56:51 ◼   ► Which is a rare but not impossible thing.

00:56:54 ◼   ► But other than YouTube going out of business, your channel being taken down is another part

00:56:59 ◼   ► of that.

00:57:00 ◼   ► You know, your YouTube business going out of business.

00:57:02 ◼   ► Yeah, there are many ways that this can occur, right?

00:57:06 ◼   ► And some of the YouTube channel bans seem sort of remarkably arbitrary to me.

00:57:13 ◼   ► Again, there are sometimes people who could fit on this list of things YouTube doesn't

00:57:17 ◼   ► like, but again, anybody could fit on this list of things YouTube doesn't like.

00:57:21 ◼   ► And of course, there's always the possibility everyone can be MySpace.

00:57:26 ◼   ► YouTube can be MySpace.

00:57:27 ◼   ► It can always happen.

00:57:28 ◼   ► Just on Facebook.

00:57:30 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:57:31 ◼   ► Facebook could do to YouTube what Facebook did to MySpace.

00:57:35 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:57:36 ◼   ► And, I mean, it is, I have a long list of frustrations with Facebook.

00:57:43 ◼   ► But like there is a reason why I eventually gave in and started using my Facebook page

00:57:51 ◼   ► more as a place to at least post the videos and to post the blogs.

00:57:57 ◼   ► Is the same kind of calculation of, "You know what?

00:58:01 ◼   ► Let me just have a foothold here.

00:58:04 ◼   ► Let me just have a little bit of an establishment here so that if I ever feel like I need to

00:58:09 ◼   ► start shifting weight more, I'm already set to do it.

00:58:14 ◼   ► I don't have to be panicking at the absolute last minute.

00:58:17 ◼   ► Or it's the same reason why.

00:58:20 ◼   ► When Amazon announced their now incredibly popular video service that I only seem to

00:58:24 ◼   ► remember when we're discussing it on this podcast, I set up an account on that straight

00:58:30 ◼   ► away and I was ready to upload videos to it if it ever existed.

00:58:35 ◼   ► I don't even know if it exists.

00:58:37 ◼   ► Sorry Amazon video team.

00:58:39 ◼   ► I haven't heard anything about you guys. I'm sure it's doing great.

00:58:43 ◼   ► But like you want to set up these things before you need them.

00:58:47 ◼   ► And that metaphor of feeling like

00:58:51 ◼   ► I'm standing on YouTube, but like there's a little

00:58:55 ◼   ► tiny Facebook island that I'm on as well that I could maybe

00:58:59 ◼   ► start diverting resources to if it looks like the tide

00:59:03 ◼   ► shifts. And if it were not for the particular policies of Vimeo

00:59:07 ◼   ► and the way they want videos to be done. Like, I'd be doing the same thing on Vimeo.

00:59:10 ◼   ► It's just that they, their policies are not particularly friendly towards the way that I want to do business, which is totally fine.

00:59:15 ◼   ► They're running their business in a very different way, but that, like, that's

00:59:18 ◼   ► that's part of my feeling. It's like, try to be prepared

00:59:22 ◼   ► before you need to be prepared.

00:59:26 ◼   ► But I think, I don't think this is me being overly cautious. I think it's just a thing that

00:59:34 ◼   ► you have to think about and you're forced to realize,

00:59:38 ◼   ► like what happened to me, when you do have some kind of technical glitch which just

00:59:44 ◼   ► totally cuts off your source of income, your only source of income, for an unknown period of time. Like that is

00:59:51 ◼   ► absolutely terrifying when you are self-employed.

00:59:54 ◼   ► So my last kind of thought on this. This is the latest edition and a long line of things

01:00:03 ◼   ► in which YouTube upsets the creators within their system.

01:00:07 ◼   ► Hmm.

01:00:08 ◼   ► Is there anything at this point, in your opinion, that YouTube can do to actually make people leave?

01:00:18 ◼   ► [laughs]

01:00:20 ◼   ► Well, I mean, look.

01:00:22 ◼   ► YouTube is benefiting from the network effect.

01:00:25 ◼   ► Everybody knows all the videos are on YouTube.

01:00:27 ◼   ► YouTube has established the mindshare, particularly in younger viewers, of like, "This is where you go to watch videos."

01:00:34 ◼   ► It's essentially TV, and I think that's...

01:00:39 ◼   ► that is really, really hard to budge.

01:00:43 ◼   ► I think...

01:00:46 ◼   ► and this... when was this about, like, was it about a year ago this time? I think it was when YouTube first announced YouTube Red.

01:00:55 ◼   ► That to me was perhaps the only time where I thought they could have made an absolutely

01:01:00 ◼   ► devastating mistake

01:01:03 ◼   ► Which it seemed like they were approaching up against and then I think someone at YouTube realized like oh, it's too late

01:01:10 ◼   ► We can't reverse on this

01:01:12 ◼   ► But it seemed like they wanted to ban

01:01:14 ◼   ► the sponsorships at the end of videos or like brand deals in videos

01:01:22 ◼   ► Which again, would totally make sense if they're trying to offer a service where people are

01:01:26 ◼   ► paying money so they don't have to see ads.

01:01:31 ◼   ► And I think YouTube Red exists in this funny bizarro land where it's like, "Oh, you're

01:01:37 ◼   ► paying to not see ads?"

01:01:39 ◼   ► But lots of channels make videos that are essentially ads for particular products.

01:01:45 ◼   ► Sponsored content.

01:01:46 ◼   ► Yeah, like sponsored content or they do what I do, which is like a podcast style ad at the end of the video.

01:01:54 ◼   ► And I think YouTube wanted to close the door on that, but they were too late.

01:01:58 ◼   ► And that perhaps to me seemed like the only mistake that could have been a total...

01:02:06 ◼   ► If you do this, many people will just straight up leave.

01:02:11 ◼   ► Because it would make financial sense to straight up leave.

01:02:15 ◼   ► because as we have discussed, the YouTube ad revenue, particularly for bigger channels, is not holding anybody there.

01:02:23 ◼   ► Like if, you know, it's interesting, like at VidCon, you know, I was talking to some people who run much bigger channels than me

01:02:30 ◼   ► and channels that I'm always amazed, like are just huge teams of people.

01:02:34 ◼   ► Like I'm, again, always surprised how many people are involved with production sometimes.

01:02:39 ◼   ► and for really big YouTube channels that have big teams of people,

01:02:44 ◼   ► they literally can't exist without those brand partnerships.

01:02:49 ◼   ► Like, as much as I don't always like those videos where it's like,

01:02:51 ◼   ► "Okay, this video is essentially a commercial,"

01:02:53 ◼   ► if you have a team of 20 people making videos, like, that has to be there.

01:02:58 ◼   ► Right? There is no way you can do that without those kind of things.

01:03:03 ◼   ► And so that is a case of...

01:03:06 ◼   ► I always look at the economics of a situation,

01:03:09 ◼   ► and I think YouTube could have made it unviable for a decent number of very big channels to actually exist on YouTube anymore

01:03:19 ◼   ► if they had banned sponsorships at the end of videos or branded content in videos.

01:03:26 ◼   ► Aside from that, though, I...

01:03:30 ◼   ► I mean, it does make me think of, like, Facebook versus Myspace, like, why is it that Facebook took over?

01:03:35 ◼   ► Why didn't Myspace last?

01:03:37 ◼   ► I think it's like a very interesting question, you know, even before that you could think of like

01:03:41 ◼   ► Orkut as a social network that existed like that was really big for a while

01:03:45 ◼   ► But then why did it fade like what why do these things come in phases?

01:03:48 ◼   ► Who knows?

01:03:51 ◼   ► But I can at least say that as a YouTube creator

01:03:56 ◼   ► I feel like I always have my eye out for the next video platform

01:04:01 ◼   ► And I'm pretty sure I am not the only one who feels that way.

01:04:05 ◼   ► That everybody else is just like, ready just in case.

01:04:08 ◼   ► But is there going to be something else? I don't know. I don't know.

01:04:13 ◼   ► I could see YouTube dominating for, you know, the next 50 years.

01:04:18 ◼   ► I could actually, I could very well see that as a possibility.

01:04:21 ◼   ► Here's a scenario that I'll paint.

01:04:23 ◼   ► Okay.

01:04:24 ◼   ► Like a potential one. So, the way that I look at it.

01:04:26 ◼   ► at it. Social networks shift like that when they get too big because then your mom is

01:04:33 ◼   ► there.

01:04:34 ◼   ► Mmm, yeah. I think the, your mom being on the social network is a real genuine problem.

01:04:40 ◼   ► Right? Like that is a real shift that occurs that feels like, "Oh."

01:04:44 ◼   ► And this is why something like Snapchat is increasing as something, you know, as things

01:04:48 ◼   ► like Facebook and Instagram are decreasing, they're feeling the Snapchat effect because

01:04:53 ◼   ► kids don't want to go where their parents are.

01:04:55 ◼   ► Now that kind of thing won't happen for YouTube because there's no effect, there's no network,

01:05:03 ◼   ► right?

01:05:04 ◼   ► But what I could see happening there is if YouTube make it difficult for people to create

01:05:10 ◼   ► content which is explicit in any of the ways that they are mentioning, it could force creators

01:05:17 ◼   ► to go somewhere else to make that type of content which may take people with it.

01:05:24 ◼   ► So if you look at someone like PewDiePie, who we talk about all the time on this show

01:05:28 ◼   ► now for some reason, he is the most popular YouTuber in the world probably because of

01:05:34 ◼   ► the type of thing that he talks about.

01:05:36 ◼   ► And a lot of the stuff that he talks about by YouTube's new rules and a lot of the content

01:05:42 ◼   ► that he creates should not be able to make money anymore.

01:05:46 ◼   ► So let's say that that was actually true, which I don't think is for him, and then he

01:05:50 ◼   ► wasn't making any money anymore, right?

01:05:52 ◼   ► Like they had clamped down and he wasn't able to make any money from his ads.

01:05:57 ◼   ► He may go elsewhere.

01:06:00 ◼   ► And if he went elsewhere, his viewers would probably find him.

01:06:05 ◼   ► And then if a lot of people did that, that's a way that YouTube could maybe start to lose

01:06:09 ◼   ► its footing.

01:06:11 ◼   ► If they make it too difficult for people, it's like, you know, what some people would

01:06:14 ◼   ► call censoring.

01:06:16 ◼   ► Like in some kind of roundabout way.

01:06:18 ◼   ► Whilst they're not actually saying you can't make this type of content, what they are saying

01:06:24 ◼   ► is if you make this type of content you can't make any money anymore, this may force some

01:06:29 ◼   ► people to move somewhere else and then if they do it may take their audiences with them.

01:06:34 ◼   ► Or I think it could also have an effect on smaller starting creators.

01:06:40 ◼   ► Yeah, there's two sides to this.

01:06:44 ◼   ► there's the people already there entrenched,

01:06:46 ◼   ► and then there's the people starting out.

01:06:48 ◼   ► And either of those things changing could affect YouTube.

01:06:53 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:06:54 ◼   ► - So that's how I see they could go away.

01:06:56 ◼   ► - I really do wish there was a real YouTube competitor.

01:06:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, because it would make YouTube better.

01:07:01 ◼   ► - Yeah, it totally would.

01:07:02 ◼   ► I mean, it's just an example

01:07:04 ◼   ► of you can see a kind of monopoly effect,

01:07:05 ◼   ► but I think about it all the time.

01:07:07 ◼   ► It's like, man, I wish there was something else

01:07:09 ◼   ► that was even just a quarter as big as YouTube.

01:07:12 ◼   ► Like I would be so much happier with that.

01:07:15 ◼   ► - Because your only competitor is actually kind of worse.

01:07:18 ◼   ► Which is Facebook.

01:07:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, Facebook is awful.

01:07:21 ◼   ► Like Facebook I will reluctantly go to

01:07:24 ◼   ► if I have no other option.

01:07:26 ◼   ► Like the ocean has swallowed all of the islands

01:07:28 ◼   ► and my tiny Facebook outpost is the only place

01:07:31 ◼   ► that is left to go.

01:07:32 ◼   ► Like and then I will go there.

01:07:34 ◼   ► While I am simultaneously maintaining the RSS feed

01:07:37 ◼   ► for my videos as well, which I still operate

01:07:39 ◼   ► also as a kind of fallback like just in cases.

01:07:42 ◼   ► Yeah, but it's like Facebook is not an attractive option.

01:07:46 ◼   ► I would love to have an option that I could feel good about uploading my videos on that

01:07:54 ◼   ► was also financially viable.

01:07:57 ◼   ► I mean essentially it's like, again, I want to be clear, I totally understand why they

01:08:01 ◼   ► don't do it, but I would love it if I could upload my videos onto Vimeo and also make

01:08:05 ◼   ► money from them on Vimeo.

01:08:07 ◼   ► I would do that in a heartbeat and I'm sure there would be a ton of other people who would

01:08:12 ◼   ► do that as well because it's like even just having Vimeo to balance it would be fantastic.

01:08:17 ◼   ► Your RSS feed always makes me laugh because it reminds me of like a doomsday bunker.

01:08:24 ◼   ► That is totally what my video RSS feed is.

01:08:28 ◼   ► The RSS feed is just full of cans of beans.

01:08:31 ◼   ► Exactly, like there's one light bulb in the ceiling which flickers, there's an air filtration

01:08:37 ◼   ► system down there and there's 10 years worth of beans stored up and a mattress

01:08:42 ◼   ► and a table and a microphone to record and one sad old computer like that is

01:08:47 ◼   ► like one of those wool blankets that is impossibly itchy yeah that's in over

01:08:51 ◼   ► there in the corner I will I will totally agree with it because yes that

01:08:55 ◼   ► is the feeling in my mind too of like all has been lost like what can we

01:09:00 ◼   ► retreat to, this is the final place to crawl to for shelter.

01:09:08 ◼   ► There is one last thing in your shelter though.

01:09:10 ◼   ► What?

01:09:11 ◼   ► A steam-powered dishwasher.

01:09:12 ◼   ► Yes, a steam-powered dishwasher.

01:09:14 ◼   ► Because even in a doomsday scenario, you'd be a savage to wash your own dishes.

01:09:18 ◼   ► Yeah, you can't waste your life like that.

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01:11:22 ◼   ► Listener John wrote in, and John was interested to understand

01:11:27 ◼   ► how the MacBook Adorable lasted over the summer.

01:11:30 ◼   ► Last time we spoke about Little Adorable was when the battery died many episodes ago

01:11:36 ◼   ► whilst we were recording, and we have since recorded a selection of episodes of using

01:11:43 ◼   ► that machine whilst you've been gallivanting around. And of course you have been using

01:11:49 ◼   ► it over Cortexmas to get your work done and I assume record some episodes of Hello Internet

01:11:54 ◼   ► as well, and maybe even do some video work on it. So how did this purchase fair for you?

01:12:03 ◼   ► I'm gonna say it was an absolutely fantastic purchase.

01:12:07 ◼   ► Okay.

01:12:08 ◼   ► I have to say like...

01:12:09 ◼   ► The MacBook Adorable was...

01:12:14 ◼   ► everything that I kind of hoped that it would be.

01:12:18 ◼   ► We had that discussion about...

01:12:20 ◼   ► rethinking your devices, like not falling into old assumptions about

01:12:25 ◼   ► what is the equipment that you really need right now

01:12:28 ◼   ► and trying to reframe things.

01:12:31 ◼   ► And my whole purpose for getting the MacBook adorable was I am trying to maximize portability

01:12:38 ◼   ► over a period of time in which I'm going to be traveling a lot. Like what is the piece of

01:12:44 ◼   ► equipment that I can get that will serve this purpose? And this itty bitty MacBook is the

01:12:52 ◼   ► equipment that will do this. Comes with some interesting trade-offs, the OnePort as we found

01:12:57 ◼   ► out on the day when I opened it.

01:12:59 ◼   ► But, I mean, I essentially discovered, like, I can run all of the necessary parts of my business off of this little machine.

01:13:10 ◼   ► I can record the podcast without a problem, I can edit the podcast without a problem.

01:13:16 ◼   ► I did do some very, very light video work, but I was also able to export 4K video on

01:13:26 ◼   ► the MacBook, not at a lightning speed, but at a totally satisfactory pace.

01:13:33 ◼   ► So I've got to say, huge thumbs up to the MacBook Adorable team.

01:13:40 ◼   ► I'm really impressed with this little machine for the role that I need it.

01:13:47 ◼   ► And I just really, really, really like it.

01:13:51 ◼   ► So having also traveled over this summer, I really wish I bought one in June.

01:13:57 ◼   ► Because I was waiting for these Macs that never came.

01:14:02 ◼   ► Yeah, well, I mean, in some ways this conversation is an entirely hypothetical conversation.

01:14:09 ◼   ► Like, do you like the MacBook Adorable? Do you not like the MacBook Adorable?

01:14:12 ◼   ► It doesn't really matter because as far as I can tell, this is the only computer that

01:14:17 ◼   ► Apple makes anymore. So everybody's going to be buying a MacBook Adorable eventually.

01:14:22 ◼   ► They don't make any other computers. So you should have bought one.

01:14:25 ◼   ► What about the iMac that you're using right now?

01:14:27 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a legacy piece of equipment. When was the last time they updated it? Like a

01:14:31 ◼   ► year ago? Who knows?

01:14:33 ◼   ► Who knows?

01:14:34 ◼   ► The iMac was updated 338 days ago.

01:14:38 ◼   ► - But fine. - Infinity in computer time.

01:14:40 ◼   ► - It's not over a thousand, like some computers.

01:14:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, like some computers we could name.

01:14:45 ◼   ► All of the things that you might worry about

01:14:47 ◼   ► with the little MacBook, again, for me,

01:14:51 ◼   ► were not any problem.

01:14:53 ◼   ► Like I didn't have any issue with the battery life.

01:14:56 ◼   ► It was totally fine.

01:14:58 ◼   ► I was largely using it plugged in, however,

01:15:02 ◼   ► with adapters and things, so that,

01:15:03 ◼   ► like maybe if you're trying to do something

01:15:06 ◼   ► like, export 4K video on the battery, the battery might not last very long, because

01:15:12 ◼   ► I think it's probably optimized to be efficient, as opposed to like, being able to just have

01:15:16 ◼   ► a bunch of battery to grind through a difficult task.

01:15:19 ◼   ► But I'm totally impressed by it.

01:15:25 ◼   ► And I was speaking to someone who does development on the MacBook Adorable, like they just run

01:15:31 ◼   ► Xcode on it.

01:15:32 ◼   ► I get the impression that that kind of thing is very CPU intense and they seem totally happy with using the machine.

01:15:39 ◼   ► So, yeah, I'm just-- I really don't have any complaints about it.

01:15:47 ◼   ► Like, I'm trying to, like, shuffle through my mind and be like, "Were there things that I was really annoyed about?"

01:15:51 ◼   ► And the answer is no.

01:15:54 ◼   ► I mean, even the thing that's interesting to me is the keyboard.

01:15:59 ◼   ► keyboard, while I don't love the keyboard, having used the iPad Pro keyboard cover tremendously

01:16:09 ◼   ► extensively and really loving that keyboard cover really helped me kind of get used to

01:16:15 ◼   ► the MacBook Adorables keyboard.

01:16:17 ◼   ► And so over the summer I was like, "Oh, okay."

01:16:18 ◼   ► I started doing more typing on it.

01:16:20 ◼   ► I was doing some light administration work and it was totally fine.

01:16:23 ◼   ► And I was like, "Okay, I could get used to this keyboard."

01:16:26 ◼   ► But then I had the funny experience actually just yesterday that for a variety of reasons

01:16:31 ◼   ► I had to lug out my old brick of obligation, my old MacBook Pro 15-inch thing.

01:16:37 ◼   ► Like, okay, take it out, you know, on the table, blow off the dust, open it up, boot

01:16:43 ◼   ► it up.

01:16:44 ◼   ► And I used the keyboard and I was like, "This keyboard is garbage!

01:16:47 ◼   ► Like this is awful to use!

01:16:50 ◼   ► How did I ever type on this thing?"

01:16:52 ◼   ► It was a really astounding experience to go back to those dome switches for a keyboard

01:16:59 ◼   ► and just a funny thing when you realize you've gotten used to something else and then you

01:17:05 ◼   ► can feel the terribleness of the old thing that you used to use which you just never

01:17:11 ◼   ► really noticed.

01:17:12 ◼   ► Like I was never a super fan of laptop keyboards mainly because I like mechanical keyboards

01:17:18 ◼   ► because they are the best. But it's like, man, now if I have to choose between the old-fashioned

01:17:24 ◼   ► MacBook Pro keyboard and the MacBook keyboard, like, I will positively choose that MacBook

01:17:30 ◼   ► keyboard any day of the week. It's awful typing on the old keyboard.

01:17:35 ◼   ► Do you think, though, that this machine would last a few years for you?

01:17:39 ◼   ► Well, that depends essentially entirely on what does my podcasting workflow look like

01:17:45 ◼   ► in the future. There were a couple of times that the MacBook kind of stuttered

01:17:51 ◼   ► out when I was editing a very very complicated logic file towards the end.

01:17:56 ◼   ► Nothing major, like nothing even really worth complaining about, but you know as

01:18:02 ◼   ► these things happen, like when software updates occur, software gets bigger, it

01:18:07 ◼   ► takes more CPU cycles to run, you know, if you change microphones like you can start

01:18:12 ◼   ► using bigger and bigger files, like, there's a way I can imagine that this particular MacBook,

01:18:18 ◼   ► for me, might not be a product that would last several years and I would have to replace

01:18:22 ◼   ► a computer at some point.

01:18:24 ◼   ► But it really does feel entirely contingent on, assuming that I am doing podcasting several

01:18:32 ◼   ► years from now, what does that whole setup look like?

01:18:36 ◼   ► Ideally I would still love to transition all of that into my iPad Pro, but I think there's

01:18:41 ◼   ► a variety of reasons why that is extremely unlikely to occur, mostly related to the fact

01:18:46 ◼   ► that I work with other people when it comes to podcasting, so it's not just about the

01:18:50 ◼   ► tools that I use, it's about tools that you can use with other people.

01:18:54 ◼   ► And as far as I know, there is currently no professional-grade iPad Pro editing software

01:19:01 ◼   ► that also allows multiple users to work on a single file, and I imagine that there probably

01:19:07 ◼   ► won't be forever, possibly.

01:19:10 ◼   ► Well, never say never.

01:19:12 ◼   ► Never say never, but I'm not gonna hold my breath on that one.

01:19:16 ◼   ► So are you gonna wait for the next MacBook, Myke, forever? Or are you gonna give in and buy a little MacBook?

01:19:22 ◼   ► Well, I feel like at this point I might as well wait and see what the next announcements are gonna be.

01:19:27 ◼   ► Isn't that what you said the last time we spoke about this?

01:19:29 ◼   ► Yeah, but I haven't got a summer of traveling now.

01:19:31 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess that's true.

01:19:33 ◼   ► Like the majority of my traveling is now done for the year. So it does it's not an issue for me now.

01:19:38 ◼   ► I may as well wait because they may rev the adorable again.

01:19:43 ◼   ► Mhmm.

01:19:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:19:45 ◼   ► Like it's the least likely to happen but they might do it so there's no point in me doing

01:19:48 ◼   ► it now until I can at least see what the offerings are but the new MacBook Pro is going to have

01:19:54 ◼   ► to offer significant improvements for me now to consider that over the adorable.

01:20:00 ◼   ► Mhmm.

01:20:01 ◼   ► It's interesting to hear.

01:20:02 ◼   ► Because dragging around this laptop this summer I really just don't want to keep doing that

01:20:07 ◼   ► anymore because also like I've adjusted the way that I travel and record while I'm traveling

01:20:13 ◼   ► quite significantly this year to the point where I don't even know if I really need the

01:20:18 ◼   ► power anymore.

01:20:19 ◼   ► Like I'm basically now I'm trying to make sure that I never need to edit on a plane

01:20:26 ◼   ► which is something I used to do a lot of but now I just don't want to do that anymore because

01:20:31 ◼   ► I've found the value in sleeping on airplanes.

01:20:33 ◼   ► Right. Yeah, I was- you always mentioned to me whenever you were traveling like,

01:20:37 ◼   ► "Oh, I'll be editing the shows on the plane."

01:20:39 ◼   ► And I never understood how you could do that because-

01:20:41 ◼   ► I mean, it is a really good thing to do if you have something to do.

01:20:45 ◼   ► Like, if I'm going to work, editing is good because it takes lots of time to do.

01:20:49 ◼   ► So it helps the time go by.

01:20:51 ◼   ► Yeah. It just seemed to me like it's a poor environment spatially for doing that kind of thing.

01:20:58 ◼   ► I feel like if I'm editing a podcast, even if I'm on a small screen,

01:21:00 ◼   ► Like I want to be able to have both hands on the desk.

01:21:03 ◼   ► I want to have my tablet in front of me.

01:21:05 ◼   ► I want space to do this.

01:21:07 ◼   ► I get that.

01:21:07 ◼   ► But for me, if I'm ever going to edit on a laptop, it's never a good environment.

01:21:12 ◼   ► Right, right.

01:21:13 ◼   ► So like it doesn't matter if I'm editing on a laptop in my hotel room or on the plane,

01:21:16 ◼   ► it's never good.

01:21:18 ◼   ► So I may as well go with good and can't do anything else.

01:21:22 ◼   ► You know, like work-wise, like this is really for me, the only thing I can do work-wise

01:21:26 ◼   ► on a plane is edit a podcast.

01:21:29 ◼   ► because you never know if you're gonna get internet even if they tell you you're going to.

01:21:33 ◼   ► It sometimes even if you pay for it, it doesn't matter. You know, you may or may not get wi-fi on a plane.

01:21:38 ◼   ► No, the rule for flying is never buy the wi-fi. Just don't do it.

01:21:42 ◼   ► But that's your rule.

01:21:43 ◼   ► That's the rule.

01:21:44 ◼   ► I like to feel connected. It's part of the loneliness problem, you know.

01:21:47 ◼   ► Oh Jesus, okay.

01:21:48 ◼   ► So I, you know, I've now also... I try and do my best to get all of my editing done before I leave

01:21:56 ◼   ► and then when I am away I don't seem to edit the shows that I record really. I mean a lot

01:22:03 ◼   ► of the time I'm not even recording on my own equipment anymore I'm recording on somebody

01:22:07 ◼   ► else's equipment and or not recording on the machine that I'm you know that I have with

01:22:14 ◼   ► me I'm like recording to a solid-state recorder or something or somebody else's computer is

01:22:18 ◼   ► the way that I seem to be doing it these days. So really like on the show the trip that I

01:22:24 ◼   ► I just took the two podcasts that I recorded.

01:22:27 ◼   ► I didn't edit one of them, it was edited by Steven,

01:22:31 ◼   ► and the other one I'm just recording to edit later.

01:22:34 ◼   ► So in all honesty, I don't really need

01:22:37 ◼   ► a big powerful machine anymore it feels like,

01:22:40 ◼   ► but if the MacBook Pro is really cool

01:22:44 ◼   ► and is thinner and lighter to a point

01:22:49 ◼   ► that is close enough to the MacBook,

01:22:51 ◼   ► I would consider that machine

01:22:53 ◼   ► because then I have closer to the best of both worlds

01:22:57 ◼   ► because I then have something that's thinner and lighter

01:23:00 ◼   ► than what I have, which is what I'm looking for,

01:23:02 ◼   ► plus I have the power at hand if and when I need it.

01:23:05 ◼   ► Because if I do need it, I'm really gonna regret that.

01:23:09 ◼   ► So I'm still willing to wait and see,

01:23:13 ◼   ► but right now I am leaning adorable.

01:23:16 ◼   ► Just because I'm looking to, as we have spoken about,

01:23:21 ◼   ► just optimize for thinness and lightness?

01:23:23 ◼   ► - Whenever you're traveling, every pound counts.

01:23:31 ◼   ► When I'm packing for stuff, I'm always obsessed

01:23:36 ◼   ► with trying to really minimize the weight.

01:23:40 ◼   ► And sometimes when I'm in packing mode,

01:23:42 ◼   ► I think, am I going too far?

01:23:45 ◼   ► Am I really trying to cut this down too much

01:23:48 ◼   ► and cut out things that I might want

01:23:50 ◼   ► that I might need later on and the answer when I'm actually traveling is

01:23:54 ◼   ► always no. When I'm actually traveling I'm always looking at stuff and thinking

01:23:58 ◼   ► like I got to cut this out next time right I can I can do without this and

01:24:01 ◼   ► yeah so when when you're traveling a bunch every every ounce counts and and

01:24:09 ◼   ► the difference between the MacBook Pro and the MacBook really does matter like

01:24:14 ◼   ► the smallness of it the thinness of it the lightness of it this is this is one

01:24:18 ◼   ► case for this machine that it I do feel like Apple make it keep making it

01:24:22 ◼   ► thinner became making it lighter it's great like go go as close as you can to

01:24:26 ◼   ► the sheet of paper that we all know you want and and I will I will go with you

01:24:31 ◼   ► as long as I can ultimately plug in a microphone to it I'm totally fine so

01:24:37 ◼   ► talking about having to get used to things like one port mm-hmm iPhone did

01:24:45 ◼   ► The new iPhone has been announced by the time this show comes out.

01:24:50 ◼   ► I will have one because I am going tomorrow as we record this to pick it up at the store

01:24:57 ◼   ► at early o'clock in the morning.

01:25:00 ◼   ► What's early o'clock in the morning?

01:25:01 ◼   ► 8.15 is my reservation time.

01:25:03 ◼   ► That is pretty early for you.

01:25:05 ◼   ► It's pretty early to go to a store.

01:25:07 ◼   ► And you live on essentially American East Coast time.

01:25:10 ◼   ► It's nice and early but I want to have my phone.

01:25:13 ◼   ► You gotta have your phone.

01:25:14 ◼   ► of your job. It's part of my job. I would legitimately consider it irresponsible for you

01:25:20 ◼   ► not to have a new phone as soon as possible. Like this is this is literally work. I agree completely

01:25:26 ◼   ► with the phone definitely because I feel like if people tuned into the shows where I talk about

01:25:32 ◼   ► technology news and I'm like yeah no I just didn't get one they would kind of be like who is this guy

01:25:38 ◼   ► that's my feeling. Let's say Apple came out with a phone that was just universally regarded as a

01:25:44 ◼   ► terrible phone. They do the announcements and they're like "oh this year we made the back out of soap and we went back to a low resolution screen because 480p is all anybody needs and it's $1000."

01:25:58 ◼   ► I would think you should still buy that phone because it's part of your job to talk about what are the phones. Even if you knew it was bad, you are in a position where you just have to buy a phone every year to talk about it on the shows.

01:26:12 ◼   ► So I'm very glad to know that you're gonna be there at early o'clock in the morning to get your little mic hands

01:26:18 ◼   ► Around a new phone. That's quite big actually. That's why you go with the plus. Exactly because I can I can take that so

01:26:25 ◼   ► Are you getting one? Are you sticking with your ancient?

01:26:30 ◼   ► Ancient. Ancient SE. I mean it is ancient at this point. It's very old guts inside of that thing.

01:26:37 ◼   ► Like ancient analog audio devices pretty much. It was a line. I really appreciate it in the keynote

01:26:43 ◼   ► So I knew I knew this moment was going to come when I bought the SE

01:26:50 ◼   ► Because I thought like oh there's gonna be is gonna be an Apple announcement

01:26:54 ◼   ► they're going to have a new phone and they're going to have like ooh, look at this it's all shiny and new and

01:26:59 ◼   ► I know my personality. I do like having the new things and

01:27:03 ◼   ► it's like oh here's some some stuff we can demo like I knew this day was going to come and

01:27:08 ◼   ► When I was watching the presentation my tagline for the iPhone 7 like if they're making an Apple poster

01:27:16 ◼   ► It's like this iPhone 7 at the top

01:27:18 ◼   ► It has a beautiful picture of the iPhone then you can put a little quote from CGP Grey on the bottom and that quote would

01:27:23 ◼   ► be

01:27:24 ◼   ► Most skippable iPhone generation ever hmm. This is the most skippable one

01:27:29 ◼   ► I think they have ever made like you usually when people complain about the S

01:27:33 ◼   ► Generations like like the 4s or the 5s I often think people just like don't really understand the changes that have occurred

01:27:41 ◼   ► You know particularly like the 4s everyone was like, oh it looks the same

01:27:44 ◼   ► It's all like no the 4s is an incredible improvement over the 4. I

01:27:47 ◼   ► Just think this iPhone 7 I am amazed that they didn't call it like the iPhone 6e

01:27:53 ◼   ► Right or just throw some other letter on the back of it

01:27:56 ◼   ► I'm just kind of amazed that they bothered calling it the iPhone 7.

01:28:00 ◼   ► In retrospect that would have been a bad idea because it would have been calling out the same design too heavily.

01:28:06 ◼   ► Well, this kind of goes into when I was watching the presentation. There's

01:28:12 ◼   ► there's a thing that sometimes happens in presentations when someone's trying really hard to convince you of a thing and I just kept being

01:28:18 ◼   ► aware of like how often and how much they were leaning on words like "new" and "revolutionary" and I

01:28:26 ◼   ► I was just aware like, I think you're leaning on these words harder than normal because the reality is the exact

01:28:31 ◼   ► reverse of this. Now, I understand that like on the internals of the phone, right, it is much faster.

01:28:38 ◼   ► The like the low energy processors look like a really cool addition. There is actually longer battery life,

01:28:44 ◼   ► which is like a miracle from God, right, that the phone lasts longer. The waterproofing as well, like okay, that's great.

01:28:50 ◼   ► It's as waterproof as the previous generation watch was is my sort of understanding of it.

01:28:55 ◼   ► Like all of that stuff is great. Dual cameras.

01:29:00 ◼   ► The dual cameras, I was kind of disappointed in that but that's a slide of the story. I don't know,

01:29:08 ◼   ► I feel like watching that almost always when the new phones come out I have a real visceral desire

01:29:17 ◼   ► to be like "man there's a cool thing I want to get it" even if it's something like 3D touch.

01:29:22 ◼   ► I want to get the phone that has 3D touch because I want to experience what this is.

01:29:28 ◼   ► Like what does Apple think this is going to be? Is this going to change my interaction with the device?

01:29:32 ◼   ► Sometimes the answer is no, right? Like it doesn't really matter at all.

01:29:35 ◼   ► But this phone, I feel like, okay, I...

01:29:39 ◼   ► The only thing that to me is a real draw is

01:29:45 ◼   ► the dual camera system. That is the only thing I can point to which would be like, man,

01:29:51 ◼   ► it would be awesome to have that dual camera system. But when I think about the

01:29:58 ◼   ► place of the phone in my life now, I'm really happy with having a smaller phone.

01:30:07 ◼   ► And if Apple had actually made this generation's phone significantly lighter

01:30:14 ◼   ► or significantly smaller with the 7 Plus. I could have maybe talked

01:30:21 ◼   ► myself into getting it, but this is the one year where it's like, "Eh, it's essentially

01:30:26 ◼   ► the same weight and it's exactly the same size." And so it's really a question

01:30:30 ◼   ► of, "Do I want to have something bigger in my pocket for, in comparison to the 6E,

01:30:38 ◼   ► like a significantly upgraded camera?" The biggest knock against the SE is the

01:30:43 ◼   ► camera is like okay. It's not fantastic or anything. It's okay. But switching from that

01:30:48 ◼   ► to the dual camera system would be a hell of an improvement. But I feel like I am really

01:30:53 ◼   ► happy with the move that I have made to try to minimize the centrality of the phone in

01:31:01 ◼   ► my life. And I feel doubly secure in this after this past summer where whenever I'm

01:31:09 ◼   ► traveling, a lot of the stuff that I do to normally lock down the phone that, you

01:31:14 ◼   ► know, people think I'm crazy about, like turning off notifications from all kinds

01:31:17 ◼   ► of stuff, disabling the App Store, disabling Safari, like turning off

01:31:22 ◼   ► absolutely everything that buzzes or makes noise. When I'm traveling I have to

01:31:28 ◼   ► loosen up a bunch of those restrictions because otherwise it's just it's just

01:31:32 ◼   ► too inconvenient because I'm in too many situations where like I need to

01:31:35 ◼   ► communicate with someone now and my usual three-day response time to an

01:31:40 ◼   ► iMessage is not adequate like when you're trying to meet up with somebody

01:31:42 ◼   ► or I need to get notifications or I need to look up something on Safari. I've

01:31:48 ◼   ► come off of a summer of having the phone be more central in my life than it

01:31:53 ◼   ► normally was and now that I've pulled that back again I feel like no I really

01:31:58 ◼   ► like having a phone that does fewer and fewer things rather than more things

01:32:05 ◼   ► And I think the like the 7 Plus is a phone that calls to you to do more with it.

01:32:12 ◼   ► Like it, its size asks of you to do more with it.

01:32:17 ◼   ► And if it's in in your pocket as this huge device like it's it's just more of a focus.

01:32:23 ◼   ► So I feel like I'm really on on board with the idea of like minimizing the phone in my life.

01:32:30 ◼   ► and the SE fits into that perfectly. I like having the smaller device.

01:32:37 ◼   ► I, just for comparison, I was kind of playing around with my wife's phone to see,

01:32:42 ◼   ► it's been a long time since I've used that size phone, like oh maybe I could go back to the middle size phone,

01:32:47 ◼   ► and again it's like boy do I hate this size. This size for me is just the exact wrong size. I really don't like it.

01:32:53 ◼   ► So yeah, I find myself in this funny position of this is the first time Apple has released a generation of phone

01:33:02 ◼   ► that I feel like I am unconvinced to switch products.

01:33:06 ◼   ► I understand what you're saying, but I don't agree with what you're saying.

01:33:12 ◼   ► Convince me I'm wrong.

01:33:13 ◼   ► Well, no. I mean, that is a fool's errand.

01:33:17 ◼   ► But I mean like, I'd be happy to buy another phone if you could convince me, obviously I'd be happy to buy it.

01:33:23 ◼   ► My point here isn't to convince you, it's just to state my opinion.

01:33:27 ◼   ► I understand what you're saying about most skippable on the surface of it,

01:33:33 ◼   ► but I think that a lot of the component parts that they've changed make this as compelling an iPhone upgrade as any other.

01:33:41 ◼   ► But by not changing the design like the actual hardware design it taints it in people's mind for one reason or another and for you

01:33:48 ◼   ► That is you want something physically smaller to hold

01:33:52 ◼   ► So that's your issue if they would have done what everybody expects them to do next time which is to reduce the bezels

01:34:01 ◼   ► This would have been a perfect phone for you

01:34:04 ◼   ► Because I mean when you break it down the screen is way brighter and has the wider color gamut like what we're used to one

01:34:11 ◼   ► iPads. The camera is significantly better no matter what one you go with

01:34:15 ◼   ► including the front-facing camera. It is incredibly more powerful, it has longer

01:34:21 ◼   ► battery life, has stereo speakers, waterproofing, like there is a ton of

01:34:27 ◼   ► stuff here which is very interesting which I think makes for a bigger than an

01:34:33 ◼   ► S update would usually be. But the fact that it's in the same kind of hardware

01:34:40 ◼   ► case by and large makes it a less compelling phone for you like because I

01:34:45 ◼   ► think that no matter what they did unless they would have made it smaller

01:34:49 ◼   ► you would never have bought it.

01:34:51 ◼   ► I mean that's-

01:34:54 ◼   ► Because they have all of the parts here that would usually make you upgrade.

01:34:58 ◼   ► Yeah the camera is by far in a way the biggest draw. That's the thing

01:35:03 ◼   ► that's the biggest pull. The waterproofing is like well I've never

01:35:07 ◼   ► really had a problem with water around my phone. I don't take my phone to the beach

01:35:12 ◼   ► because I don't like to go to the beach. But now you can.

01:35:14 ◼   ► Yeah but I'm not gonna go to the beach with my phone.

01:35:16 ◼   ► So like for example I listen to podcasts in the bath and in the shower, right? You can

01:35:22 ◼   ► just have your phone in the shower cubicle with no problem.

01:35:25 ◼   ► Yeah but see I think you don't understand how I prefer not to use my phone. I wouldn't

01:35:32 ◼   ► want to bring my phone into the shower with me even if it was waterproof.

01:35:35 ◼   ► Again, I'm really, I have to underscore the point that I'm not trying to explicitly convince you.

01:35:42 ◼   ► Right, right, right.

01:35:43 ◼   ► Right, I'm just making my case.

01:35:45 ◼   ► I know what you're saying, and I agree that I think people overvalue a physical design change.

01:35:53 ◼   ► People just like that it looks different.

01:35:55 ◼   ► You know, and that's just, that's a thing that humans value, and that's totally fine.

01:36:00 ◼   ► And I think that that does add a bit to the underwhelmingness of it.

01:36:03 ◼   ► of it, but it's interesting that for me anyway this is a point at which I would want a physical

01:36:10 ◼   ► design change not because I feel like "oh this phone looks old" but because I want a

01:36:15 ◼   ► design change that would be a utility improvement.

01:36:18 ◼   ► And it's like "I'm in this awkward position of the size that I like is too big around

01:36:26 ◼   ► the screen and too heavy around the screen."

01:36:30 ◼   ► And, like I suspect, I don't know, but I've, the more I think about it, I have this like

01:36:39 ◼   ► nagging feeling that maybe the iPhone SE was a one-off device.

01:36:47 ◼   ► That maybe Apple won't ever make a phone in this size again.

01:36:52 ◼   ► And part of that is just wondering about if next year they bring in the bezels and bring

01:36:57 ◼   ► it a lot closer to a piece of glass, that maybe they decide that this is enough of a

01:37:03 ◼   ► change that people who want smaller phones are also happy, but everybody still gets big

01:37:09 ◼   ► screens.

01:37:10 ◼   ► And it may very well be the case that if they bring in the bezels like, "Oh, then I will

01:37:14 ◼   ► find the regular size totally acceptable."

01:37:17 ◼   ► But so I think I may be using a dead phone, which is even more of a push for me to like...

01:37:23 ◼   ► I always feel like I'm happy to kind of get on board with the future,

01:37:26 ◼   ► and if this phone is a phone that will never be updated,

01:37:29 ◼   ► then why don't you just get used to the different thing now,

01:37:32 ◼   ► instead of waiting until you absolutely have to?

01:37:34 ◼   ► Like, I'm okay with that.

01:37:36 ◼   ► But even still, I just don't feel the desire to have

01:37:40 ◼   ► the 7+ in my pocket

01:37:43 ◼   ► when I'm at the gym for the next year, right?

01:37:46 ◼   ► Which is one of the places where the phone bothers me the most

01:37:49 ◼   ► in terms of size and using it, or like...

01:37:53 ◼   ► Just a bunch of places where that is the case.

01:37:56 ◼   ► But I don't know, I've been talking to a few people about whether they--

01:38:00 ◼   ► 'cause of course, when you're known as the tech person in your circle,

01:38:03 ◼   ► everybody asks you the questions about should they or should they not get the things.

01:38:07 ◼   ► And I find this a difficult phone to pitch to people,

01:38:12 ◼   ► especially if they're just going for the regular phone size, right?

01:38:16 ◼   ► Like they have a 6s and they want to know if they should get the 7.

01:38:19 ◼   ► and kind of talking through with them, it's, I feel like it's a little hard to point to a particular thing to be like,

01:38:25 ◼   ► "This is an awesome reason why you should get this phone."

01:38:28 ◼   ► So that's why my tagline is "Most Skippable Phone Ever."

01:38:32 ◼   ► So for me, again, I don't agree. I think there are a lot of great reasons,

01:38:36 ◼   ► but I'm not pushing this one so hard on people because I also have to tell them that things are going away

01:38:42 ◼   ► and I just can't be bothered to have that conversation with people.

01:38:45 ◼   ► Yeah. Well, the other thing which we don't know at this point,

01:38:49 ◼   ► which is my particular real side-eye at the phone.

01:38:55 ◼   ► And of course, we don't know because they're not in our hands yet.

01:38:58 ◼   ► But man, when they started talking about that solid-state home button...

01:39:01 ◼   ► Yeah, it's gonna suck. I have no doubt it's gonna suck so bad.

01:39:04 ◼   ► I'm so upset about this.

01:39:06 ◼   ► That's the thing to me, which is like, no matter how much you love a camera,

01:39:11 ◼   ► do you press the home button more than you use the camera?

01:39:15 ◼   ► It's like, yes, by a factor of a thousand.

01:39:18 ◼   ► Right?

01:39:19 ◼   ► And so, if and when Apple produces their all glass, no bezel phone,

01:39:25 ◼   ► and there's some home button that you just have to get used to

01:39:29 ◼   ► because there's no moving parts and Apple has finally achieved the dream,

01:39:32 ◼   ► it's like, okay, fine, I'll move then.

01:39:34 ◼   ► But that home button, like, I just worry about the first generation of it with RSI issues.

01:39:40 ◼   ► It's like, that's the kind of thing where it's like,

01:39:42 ◼   ► I don't want to board the future if it's going to physically hurt.

01:39:46 ◼   ► And I just...

01:39:47 ◼   ► I haven't heard anybody say like,

01:39:49 ◼   ► "Wow, this home button is really convincing in the illusion of its clicking."

01:39:53 ◼   ► So that to me is one major, major potential downside to it.

01:39:58 ◼   ► Like, I'll be super curious to go into an Apple store,

01:40:02 ◼   ► probably if I'm near one, on Friday.

01:40:03 ◼   ► Like, I'll wander in just to see if I can...

01:40:05 ◼   ► I can see what it actually feels like in person.

01:40:08 ◼   ► But I'm not... I'm not holding out my hopes of like,

01:40:10 ◼   ► "Oh boy, it's an amazing new home button that I'm going to click hundreds of times a day

01:40:15 ◼   ► in a slightly uncomfortable way that will accelerate over time to greater and greater

01:40:19 ◼   ► discomfort."

01:40:20 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm unconvinced about this.

01:40:24 ◼   ► I'm just not sure yet.

01:40:26 ◼   ► I don't know if it's necessarily going to cause too much discomfort because it would

01:40:31 ◼   ► just be like 3D touch, which if I can set it super light, like my 3D touch is at the

01:40:36 ◼   ► latest, which means I barely have to do it.

01:40:42 ◼   ► Basically like for me it just feels like I just need to rest my finger on the screen

01:40:46 ◼   ► for a little longer than normal and 3D Touch will activate.

01:40:49 ◼   ► If I can do that then I'll be fine with it.

01:40:51 ◼   ► My feeling is just I know it's not going to be a satisfying click.

01:40:56 ◼   ► The way it's described, like people describing it as like the whole phone kind of shaking,

01:40:59 ◼   ► I don't like the sound of that.

01:41:01 ◼   ► It doesn't sound good at all.

01:41:02 ◼   ► But I'll find out tomorrow I guess.

01:41:06 ◼   ► That sounds absolutely terrible.

01:41:08 ◼   ► What about the Apple Watch?

01:41:09 ◼   ► I know that you're a very happy Apple Watch user.

01:41:11 ◼   ► Are you considering upgrading?

01:41:13 ◼   ► Oh yeah, that for me was an instant buy.

01:41:16 ◼   ► Oh see this isn't for me!

01:41:18 ◼   ► I don't understand you anymore.

01:41:21 ◼   ► Instant buy on the Apple Watch, of course.

01:41:22 ◼   ► Why?

01:41:23 ◼   ► Like, that makes even less ima- I need you to try and explain this to me then in a way

01:41:28 ◼   ► that makes sense in your brain, because that doesn't make sense in mine.

01:41:31 ◼   ► Okay, why do you think it doesn't make sense?

01:41:34 ◼   ► It's the same, like nothing in there is like a must have.

01:41:38 ◼   ► It's the same stuff.

01:41:39 ◼   ► Faster processor, better waterproofing.

01:41:42 ◼   ► It's exactly what's in the iPhone.

01:41:44 ◼   ► It doesn't look any different.

01:41:45 ◼   ► It's thicker.

01:41:46 ◼   ► It's actually thicker.

01:41:48 ◼   ► The battery life is better.

01:41:50 ◼   ► Right.

01:41:51 ◼   ► Well, what then?

01:41:52 ◼   ► But what do you mean what?

01:41:54 ◼   ► Like I'm a very happy Apple Watch user.

01:41:57 ◼   ► As I am a very happy iPhone user.

01:42:00 ◼   ► Right, right.

01:42:02 ◼   ► And so I feel like I do want the GPS in the watch.

01:42:08 ◼   ► That is definitely a feature that I want.

01:42:10 ◼   ► I've been doing a bunch of running and in the theme of how can I remove the phone from

01:42:16 ◼   ► the centrality of my life, the GPS while doing some exercise outside, that is actually a

01:42:22 ◼   ► big feature for me.

01:42:23 ◼   ► That is definitely a thing that I want to have.

01:42:26 ◼   ► So it's like tick mark for that one.

01:42:29 ◼   ► And I'm also happier to pay for the much brighter screen and a little bit of improved battery life.

01:42:34 ◼   ► Like, that is one thing where, like this summary in particular, I was aware that the--

01:42:40 ◼   ► perhaps the least optimal situation in which to try to read the face of an Apple Watch is

01:42:45 ◼   ► if you are standing in the desert at high noon with sunglasses on and you go to check something on your watch,

01:42:52 ◼   ► it's gonna be a real hard read on that screen.

01:42:54 ◼   ► I understand that is perhaps the most sub-optimal situation in which to ever read an Apple Watch.

01:42:59 ◼   ► I like that standing in the desert at high noon makes it sound like you were on a vision

01:43:03 ◼   ► quest.

01:43:04 ◼   ► Maybe I was.

01:43:05 ◼   ► While eating mushrooms also makes it very difficult to read the face of the Apple Watch.

01:43:09 ◼   ► It looks like a painting.

01:43:14 ◼   ► But there are enough times, even just in the UK I'm aware, like if I'm outside that the

01:43:18 ◼   ► watch face is not super easy to read in the sun, so it's like, "Okay, great, you made

01:43:22 ◼   ► screenwriter it's a little bit easier to read. I am happy to go along with that.

01:43:26 ◼   ► The waterproofing thing is not a huge deal for me because I don't do swimming and I have already

01:43:34 ◼   ► been wearing this watch for you know whatever it is a year and a half in the shower without any

01:43:38 ◼   ► problems at all. But I'm also feeling like a little faster with the processor. I'm also happy

01:43:43 ◼   ► for that so this is all thumbs up for me. Like Apple Watch better without any significant

01:43:51 ◼   ► downsides. I don't really care about the thickness. I'm actually... I wish Apple would make a bigger

01:43:55 ◼   ► Apple Watch. I think they should have like a 40... what is it? 44 millimeter version, right? Because

01:44:00 ◼   ► it's like 38, 42, 44. That's what I would want. So I don't mind the bigness at all. So to me, I see

01:44:06 ◼   ► like no downside, all upside, no brainer, new watch ordered. Delivered tomorrow, hopefully.

01:44:14 ◼   ► Ed, you didn't convince me.

01:44:15 ◼   ► I'm not trying to convince you, Myke. I'm just stating my point.

01:44:18 ◼   ► [Laughter]

01:44:20 ◼   ► All right, so what are you gonna do with your old watch then? You know, you have two watches now?

01:44:25 ◼   ► You have two watches on you.

01:44:26 ◼   ► Okay, so I was wondering about this, right? It did occur to me like, oh, what am I gonna do with two watches?

01:44:31 ◼   ► I have no idea what to do with it. But I realized in a stroke of genius

01:44:35 ◼   ► But I do know what to do with two watches

01:44:39 ◼   ► Can you guess what I'm gonna do with two watches Myke?

01:44:42 ◼   ► Are you gonna charge one overnight and then put the other one on when you go to sleep?

01:44:45 ◼   ► Bingo!

01:44:48 ◼   ► Day watch, night watch. And do you want to know why this is absolutely genius?

01:44:53 ◼   ► Can I tell you? Can I tell you? The thing that really sold this to me?

01:44:56 ◼   ► Okay.

01:44:56 ◼   ► Was okay. So for listeners, just so you don't think I'm totally crazy in case you're unaware,

01:45:01 ◼   ► I am one of those people who sleeps with the Apple Watch because I

01:45:05 ◼   ► discovered when I tried sleeping without a watch that

01:45:09 ◼   ► Nighttime Gray

01:45:12 ◼   ► half wakes up and checks the time on his watch without daytime Grey ever knowing that this is an activity that occurs.

01:45:19 ◼   ► So when I try to sleep without wearing a watch like I did the first few times with the Apple watch,

01:45:24 ◼   ► I discovered that I wake up in the middle of the night wondering what time it is. Like so obviously

01:45:28 ◼   ► sleepy me is actually checking the time because if I wear the watch this doesn't happen.

01:45:32 ◼   ► So I have to wear a watch at night.

01:45:34 ◼   ► Oh, wait, let me let me go over that once more because I didn't fully understand it, but I think I caught it.

01:45:40 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. You were, when you weren't wearing a watch,

01:45:43 ◼   ► waking up and wanting to check the time.

01:45:46 ◼   ► But then when you started wearing it again, you never had this feeling. Yeah, so when I bought the Apple watch-

01:45:52 ◼   ► Interesting. I put it on

01:45:54 ◼   ► the nightstand as you did to charge it overnight, and I would wake up several times in the night and

01:46:02 ◼   ► Yeah, it took me a little while to figure out that if I wore the watch

01:46:07 ◼   ► overnight this didn't happen.

01:46:09 ◼   ► But you were still waking up. It's not like the watch was keeping you asleep.

01:46:12 ◼   ► It's just like when you when you live with any other person you you see this interesting phenomenon that a person can be

01:46:18 ◼   ► awake without really being fully booted up. Like this is a thing that I find very interesting.

01:46:26 ◼   ► I sort of you know joke with my wife about having some interaction with the other wife, right?

01:46:32 ◼   ► Which is her not fully awake

01:46:35 ◼   ► But like awake enough to kind of interact or like make a little request or something, but she's not

01:46:40 ◼   ► conscious really. Yeah, I find that person to be a lot less polite.

01:46:44 ◼   ► There's a there's a bunch of funny things with this but so- airs and graces go out of the window.

01:46:48 ◼   ► Yeah, because you're dealing with like the cerebral cortex isn't there, you're dealing with lower parts of the brain.

01:46:55 ◼   ► And so I assume that this is what's happening with me while I'm sleeping that I'm I'm not

01:47:01 ◼   ► fully booting up into consciousness, but some part of me is awake enough and wants to be aware of what the time is.

01:47:08 ◼   ► And this also makes sense with the behavior that

01:47:11 ◼   ► I've had for as long as I can remember is if I really

01:47:17 ◼   ► focus on the time that I need to wake up in the morning, I can

01:47:21 ◼   ► pretty often just wake up without the alarm clock. Like I can wake up before the alarm goes off.

01:47:27 ◼   ► And I always used to wonder like that doesn't make any sense

01:47:30 ◼   ► Like how can I keep track of time accurately for eight hours while I'm asleep?

01:47:34 ◼   ► It's like the answer is that I'm not I think there's just what happens is some part of me is looking at the clock and

01:47:40 ◼   ► It's like oh right. This is when we wanted to get up and now let's start the Buddha process into consciousness

01:47:44 ◼   ► So that's just that's just my guess about what's occurring

01:47:48 ◼   ► This is explaining the behavior because otherwise I wouldn't really have a reason to wear the watch at night

01:47:52 ◼   ► Like I don't you know

01:47:53 ◼   ► I'm not I'm not doing like health tracking at night or anything

01:47:56 ◼   ► Which I do think is something that Apple should build into the watch. Do you not do the story?

01:47:59 ◼   ► Why would you not do that if you're already wearing it?

01:48:03 ◼   ► Because I I use what's it called?

01:48:06 ◼   ► I use sleep cycle on the phone as the as my sleep tracking thing

01:48:11 ◼   ► Because that is tied into an alarm that tries to predict the best time to wake you if you're not waking up automatically

01:48:16 ◼   ► But it doesn't do anything through the watch. It's it's on the phone only

01:48:19 ◼   ► And it works really well, but I think Apple should build in sleep tracking into the watch

01:48:24 ◼   ► But that means they need to expand the battery life significantly, which I don't think they're gonna do

01:48:27 ◼   ► But I really think that they should do it. Anyway,

01:48:29 ◼   ► So the one thing that did occurred to me, which is a little bit of a problem, is that the Apple watch is really

01:48:36 ◼   ► Bright at night. Like again when you're dealing with any source of light in a completely dark room, it's suddenly very bright. Now

01:48:44 ◼   ► I have a special

01:48:45 ◼   ► nighttime face that I use

01:48:48 ◼   ► Have you ever seen my nighttime face, Myke? I don't know if I have. Not at nighttime, but you have shown me in the daytime.

01:48:53 ◼   ► Okay, I'll send you a copy of what it looks like right now.

01:48:56 ◼   ► But so I have this nighttime face that I use, but even then it can still be quite bright.

01:48:59 ◼   ► But so then I realized, okay, brilliant! If I have two Apple watches, this is genius. I'm gonna solve two problems at once.

01:49:05 ◼   ► One of which is that when you do decide to sleep with the Apple watch, you need to be aware of

01:49:12 ◼   ► charging it more frequently during the day.

01:49:15 ◼   ► So essentially like if I take a shower or if there's some kind of little break

01:49:18 ◼   ► I'll throw the the watch on the charger for a little bit and that's annoying

01:49:21 ◼   ► I don't really like to have to think about that

01:49:22 ◼   ► You know, I want to eliminate the number of things that I ever have to think about

01:49:25 ◼   ► So if I have two watches it's like, oh great. I can just swap this where at nighttime

01:49:30 ◼   ► I will pick up the watch that has been charging all day and in the morning

01:49:34 ◼   ► I pick up the watch that has been charging all night and then plus extra bonus

01:49:38 ◼   ► It means on the new watch

01:49:40 ◼   ► I can just set the brightness to

01:49:42 ◼   ► maximum and never think about it. And on the nighttime watch I can crank down the brightness two

01:49:47 ◼   ► notches and never think about it because I'm not going to be wearing that watch during the day, so it'll be even dimmer at night.

01:49:52 ◼   ► So,

01:49:54 ◼   ► boom.

01:49:55 ◼   ► Perfect solution. Two watches. Day watch,

01:49:58 ◼   ► night watch.

01:50:01 ◼   ► [silence]

01:50:07 ◼   ► [music]

01:50:13 ◼   ► I just, I don't understand you.

01:50:14 ◼   ► Do you seriously not understand this?

01:50:16 ◼   ► No, what I don't understand is the iPhone and Apple Watch argument.

01:50:21 ◼   ► Like, why one is not new and the other is new.

01:50:26 ◼   ► That I don't get. I really don't get that.

01:50:28 ◼   ► Why don't you get that? I don't understand.

01:50:30 ◼   ► because you can't even articulate your thoughts no because like your your

01:50:38 ◼   ► feeling about it right this is out of the show now because I can't be bothered

01:50:41 ◼   ► to have this argument in the show like you're saying it's the most skippable

01:50:47 ◼   ► iPhone right and like even saying that like it's just like a categorical thing

01:50:52 ◼   ► mm-hmm like not just a full gray right it's the most skippable but the Apple

01:50:59 ◼   ► watch has the all of the enhancements of the Apple watch are exactly the same as the enhancements

01:51:04 ◼   ► to the iPhone.

01:51:05 ◼   ► Right.

01:51:06 ◼   ► They didn't change the way it looked.

01:51:07 ◼   ► Right.

01:51:08 ◼   ► They made it thicker, they put more battery life in it.

01:51:09 ◼   ► Right.

01:51:10 ◼   ► They gave it a GPS, which I guess you could say is kind of like the camera.

01:51:12 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, you could say that easily.

01:51:15 ◼   ► Right.

01:51:16 ◼   ► But like every advancement is just the same as what the iPhone has.

01:51:22 ◼   ► But yeah, for some reason the iPhone is skippable, but the Apple watch is not.

01:51:26 ◼   ► Well.

01:51:27 ◼   ► I feel like at this point you're so consumed with your two watch idea

01:51:31 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:51:35 ◼   ► that it's made it a must-buy.

01:51:37 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:51:39 ◼   ► I think that's it. I think I've cracked it. You had this idea, the two watches.

01:51:43 ◼   ► [I hate to ruin this scheming of yours here, but I only thought of this idea after I had already pre-ordered the watch]

01:51:50 ◼   ► I just don't get it. I think you've just got

01:51:55 ◼   ► SE brain.

01:51:56 ◼   ► Well...

01:51:57 ◼   ► That's your problem.

01:51:58 ◼   ► But there's also a question of are you asking if...

01:52:01 ◼   ► You didn't ask if I would give like a subtitle to the Apple Watch.

01:52:09 ◼   ► And I think you could make easily the same argument that for consumers,

01:52:14 ◼   ► the second generation Apple Watch, presuming that you already own an Apple Watch,

01:52:20 ◼   ► is also the most skippable Apple Watch ever.

01:52:23 ◼   ► I think you could totally make that argument.

01:52:26 ◼   ► But like, that's why I think the context of the phone argument is a little bit different because there's a bit of a presumption like everybody already has a phone.

01:52:34 ◼   ► And it's only a question of if they're going to get a new phone.

01:52:37 ◼   ► Right?

01:52:38 ◼   ► The Apple Watch is a different sort of market.

01:52:41 ◼   ► And I think for most people, if you already own an Apple Watch, there is almost certainly not a compelling reason to buy another Apple Watch.

01:52:51 ◼   ► Alright, like I got my mom an Apple Watch as a present a while back for Mother's Day.

01:52:57 ◼   ► And so, before this, before the presentation, I just kind of assumed, like,

01:53:03 ◼   ► "Oh, I'm gonna buy my mom another Apple Watch as a present."

01:53:05 ◼   ► After the presentation, I thought,

01:53:07 ◼   ► "But there's nothing in there that my mom needs, that really matters for her."

01:53:12 ◼   ► So, like, I am skipping the Apple Watch for my mom because it'll make no difference to her

01:53:18 ◼   ► if she has the Apple Watch 2 or the Apple Watch 1.

01:53:21 ◼   ► Makes no difference.

01:53:22 ◼   ► So I think you can easily say Apple Watch 2, also most skippable Apple Watch ever.

01:53:27 ◼   ► But I personally want two of the features that are on the Apple Watch.

01:53:35 ◼   ► Actually, three of the features.

01:53:36 ◼   ► Battery life, brighter screen, GPS.

01:53:39 ◼   ► And after having purchased it, realized that my two-watch idea is absolute genius.

01:53:45 ◼   ► So for me, it's just a total win.

01:53:47 ◼   ► Total win in every way.

01:53:49 ◼   ► I really hope tomorrow that I put that phone in your hand and you go, "Oh, s**t."

01:53:56 ◼   ► That's what I hope.

01:53:57 ◼   ► I hope so too, because I would rather have a thing that I think is better, right?

01:54:02 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:54:03 ◼   ► There's no downside in that to me.

01:54:06 ◼   ► You don't want to be proven, actually you want to be proven wrong, right?

01:54:09 ◼   ► Like ideally.

01:54:10 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

01:54:11 ◼   ► It would be great.

01:54:12 ◼   ► What you really don't want is for me to put that phone in your hand tomorrow and you're

01:54:16 ◼   ► go, "Yeah, Gray was right."

01:54:18 ◼   ► That's exactly it. I do not want to be right when I see it tomorrow.

01:54:23 ◼   ► I want nothing more than on the next episode of Cortex to be telling you about how much I love the iPhone 7 Plus.

01:54:32 ◼   ► That is, optimal outcome is when we record the next show, we have a whole big section about how two weeks ago,

01:54:39 ◼   ► Gray didn't know what the hell he was talking about.

01:54:41 ◼   ► Yeah?

01:54:43 ◼   ► Yeah, I hope so.