29. Enliven the Photo
2017Show notes
- WWDC 2017 Keynote
- Bob Fosse - Wikipedia
- Antisocial Woman Pretends to Be Blind for 28 Years So She Wouldn’t Have to Greet People | Oddity Central - Collecting Oddities
- Former NHL coach Demers admits he’s illiterate
- Walmart is asking employees to deliver packages on their way home from work - The Washington Post
- The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2017 on Vimeo
Transcript
Tap a timestamp or any sentence to play from there · machine transcribed (mlx:mlx-community/whisper-large-v3-turbo), expect mistakesSpeaker BThis is Do By Friday, the weekly challenge podcast with Merlin Mann, Alex Cox and Max Temkin. This week's challenge. Watch the 2017 WWDC Apple Keynote.
AlexOh, my God. Is that static me? Is that air? Oh, sorry. It's probably coffee. Water. Hang on.
MerlinTurning off. Is that static me?
AlexNo, I mean, I'm in this hotel room with questionable Wi-Fi.
MerlinYou know, they got air conditioning figured out, but it feels like they're still trying to nail Wi-Fi. You always can get way more air conditioning than you want, but you can't get more Wi-Fi than you want.
AlexIt should be like electricity, Merlin.
MerlinYou ever just go to some part of your house and you don't get electricity?
Speaker AHi, everybody. Hello, Max. How are you? Are you guys together in the same physical location? Yeah, we're down here on the show floor. Down here on the show floor. I'm reporting live for the floor. Don't let me know what you're saying. I'm here with Alex.
MaxMichelle Obama is right over there. Is Craig Federici there? Tell him to put the icons on my Safari. I have a request. I have a request. Can we all load up the Apple keynote and hit play at the same time? No. But just on mute. Come on, come on.
Speaker AIt's over two hours long.
MaxNo, no, we won't do the whole thing. while we're recording it'll be there. Trust me, it'll be funny.
Speaker BAlex is hanging on by a thread. You know how little Wi-Fi?
MaxI have to go to different parts of this hotel. No, no, just trust, just trust. I'll do it. I'll do it then and narrow.
Speaker AI'll do it and like narrate. I would love that. The interpretation like with Daredevil. Okay, I'm clicking, I'm dragging, I'm hitting play. Okay, here we go. And we're good. I almost installed the beta. Almost did it. No, don't do that.
Speaker BDid you buy another iPad?
Speaker AI know. I had to get out. I needed like 36 hours out of the reality distortion field. All right. Hi, everybody. It's Dubai Friday, the hit podcast. With breakout character, no Wi-Fi girl.
Are you having trouble hearing us? Alex sounds crisp. You sound good, Alex.
Speaker BWell, I sounded great. I didn't hear you guys great until I started to play the keynote, and then everything was like, ah, ah, ah. so I'm not gonna do that
Maxso I didn't watch the first like half hour of the keynote because I was in a meeting but I know that's always where they show a video of some opening of an Apple store and they're like our user satisfaction stats are 180% and everyone applauds oh no no no not this time
Merlinthey had a vaguely offensive very poorly timed video terrorist attacks are funny hey your phone all your apps disappeared that's funny nobody's worried about that right now what oh he unplugged the app store that's funny that's funny because the app store is so reliable
Maxoh no oh no where did uh where did the mario run guy go he's gone everyone's apps are going away oh my god uh follow up variety apple's planet of the apps is a bland tepid barely competent knockoff of shark tank apple made its name on game-changing innovations but this show is decidedly not one of them yes i'm so excited headline venture beat apple's planet of the apps
Speaker Blooks as depressingly vomitous as feared yes no the problem is if it was good then we couldn't i couldn't like make fun of i oh god there's no way it could have been good they're on an escalator
MaxSo you're saying it's a confet face situation where Apple is making it bad, so we talk about it. It's compromised.
Speaker BExactly.
MaxOf course. Of course. It's a double triple turns out.
Speaker BIt's the sextuple D chess.
MerlinEach player is playing. Every character on the board is playing their own separate game of 3D chess. Nobody's talking to each other.
Speaker APawns, pawns, pawns. Dig the erase all the way down.
MaxBoy, these comedy sketches that Apple does at the top of their thing now where they're like incredibly high production value, they're not very good. I thought the Bill Hader one was kind of funny. I thought that was very funny. It's a little up its own ass. You know what it is? It's like season 13 of The Simpsons where they're just making in jokes about The Simpsons. And like, it's not why I watch. Like, you know, I don't know. Like, I would prefer that these things be really cool and 45 minutes long and they never mention how many nits bright the screen is.
MerlinAre you talking about the 10-bit dithering? Is that what you're talking about? or how many nits of brightness you got on your sugar bites? Oh, I'm rock hard for the dithering. Oh, you got to get the dithering. Now, is it 10 bits of dithering or 10 bits for dithering? Because you want to check on your Katie Lake and make sure that you've deployed the Firefox to production.
MaxIt's like our hero smart computer man said. It's not what the computer does. It's how much dithering the user can do with it.
MerlinIt's not the size of your boat.
Speaker AIt's the motion of the dithers. Here comes Tim Cook.
MaxHere comes Tim Cook. slender, doesn't he? Tim is, I will say, I think Tim is, if I had one of those little Nielsen wheels where you turn it up, you know how CNN gives the people the little wheels? And it's like, when you like what Al Gore is saying, turn it up. And when you don't like what he's saying, turn it down. When Tim Cook is on stage, mine would go all the way up. I'm very happy when Tim Cook is on stage. I really like him. I'm very excited to see what we're going to do with this. Okay, now here's what Tim Cook, oh look, they're opening a new Apple store. Here's what Tim Cook does. Tim Cook,
one way or the other. Are the sleeves going to be down or are they going to be up?
MerlinWe talked about this. This is a big problem. The tuck and untuck and the button and unbutton. I'm over all of that, but we need to talk about sleeves.
MaxIt's like I saw a lot of presenters who do, they like, okay, so basically they have their sleeves all the way down, but then they unbutton the cuffs and do one roll of the cuffs. So I just see a little bit of wrist hair. What is that? Is that like a little wrist cleavage?
MerlinOkay. So you've got two ends of the continuum, just to be clear here, what you call a spectrum disorder. On the one hand, you've got all the way down and button. The other one, you've got it all the way rolled up and maybe even above the elbow, like Bob Fosse style. Like you're going to want a real high, tight roll. Are those two ends of the spectrum?
MaxWhen you roll, okay, I have my sleeves rolled right now. I'm rolled up. I'm doing my work right now. I'm at work doing a podcast. I need to dig in. You need that for your work. So I got a little Howard Dean shirt roll going on. Now, I roll into the crease of the elbow. Like, I want the shirt sleeve to stop in the fold of my elbow.
MerlinMax, we might want to stop. I think we've lost Alex altogether. I hate that we're stopping this because we're so close to sleeve gold. See?
MaxSee? What button do I push to put Alex back on the Skype?
MerlinThis is how you get ants. Are you at the Chicago studio, Dingus?
Speaker AYeah, but I'm surrounded by buttons. and I, you know... Click on the thing like under where my face is.
MerlinUnlock the pod bay doors. Oh, Alex says, keep recording. I have a good story about what is going on right now. Okay, fine. Let's just keep going. Back to sleeves. Okay, so you're saying you roll inward and upward and you're going to gently cup inside your elbow seam?
MaxWell, hang on. Let me break out some advanced sleeve tech. I recently learned... So what I used to do was I would sort of take the cuff of the shirt. I would fold it up one cuff length and then neatly sort of roll, roll, roll, like it was a tube of toothpaste until I got to the elbow. However, I recently learned—
MerlinRoll like fin socks, like an actual circular donut roll?
MaxYeah, but like folding a towel, like I'd fold, like fold, fold, fold. Folding, folding. At a period of one cuff length. Oh, one cuff per flip. One cuff per flip. Yes, my CPFs were one-to-one. So it was a solid one-to-one ratio. but now I've learned the better way to do it is what you're supposed to do is you take the cuff you just fucking do one big fold cuff all the way up to the elbow and then you sort of roll the tuck
Merlinand what it does is I think it wrinkles the sleeve less that is at least a 202 level fold that I was not if you want to do like a serious like I don't know I want to say like an Indiana Jones look and you want to make sure it's cinched in there tight when you're doing your work that is the fold for you because it actually provides a certain kind of if I may say pegging you get a nice peg to it You got a little tight buncher and then you just start flipping irrespective of the cuffs per flip.
MaxIt's like a pinch. Like when someone's trying to sell you real estate and they have one of those ties that they've spent a lot of time on and it's got the little dimple in it.
MerlinOh, yeah. Right, right, right. No, it's a lot like that. But then there's a lot of people that are trying to do something a little bit in between. And I'm not a fan of the one flip or the two flips.
MaxWhat is that? Would you ever leave the house like that?
MerlinI can't imagine why I would want to do that.
MaxDid they all buy shirts that were too long?
Speaker AHmm. Oh, yeah.
MerlinWhat are they doing?
MaxWhat is that?
MerlinWell, I mentioned one to you that's always really bothered me. And like I say, I think if you're Bob Fosse, you're allowed to do this. Or you're Roy Scheider as Bob Fosse. Everybody else, stop doing this. Stop doing the thing where you're wearing a sweater with a long-sleeved shirt under it. Stop doing the thing where you fold your shirt over the sweater and do a double-cuff flip partway up. And then have white Tommy Hilfiger shirt exposed outside.
MaxOh, boy. This is what the podcast is without Alex, huh?
Oh, hey, guys. Shit, don't. Alex is back.
Speaker BSorry I'm late.
MaxWhat happened?
Alexso uh this morning i was really like uh paranoid and making every day i've been testing skype i'm like ah this wi-fi is pretty reliable all right cool even though free wi-fi is pretty reliable but because i enjoy you and enjoy our calls so much i made sure you know upped the uh to the 25 a day premium wi-fi i don't know what that means um but then it just suddenly everything went dead including the tv in my room like is there a power outage what's happening um and
and i guess they had me checking out today and checkout time is 10 15 i guess and 10 15 what kind
Speaker Bof monster has a checkout time of 10 15 well here's the thing they they so i called downstairs
Merlinand why would that and why would it make your tv turn off that's very strange it was it was
Speaker Bwell i was like coin operated room did i was like did somebody like pull out the hotel's plug and now the dv is disappearing the wifi is disappearing it could be a it could be a it could be a heist
Maxit could be a heist and they just detonated the the emp to take down the casino's defenses
Alexwell no no this is this is even better so i i call down they're like oh no no you are checking out tomorrow my my apologies and uh we'll send someone up right away and so then i go into the bathroom because let's just say that I after last night I had a lot of fun and I don't look the best right now and I don't I wasn't looking forward to seeing a hotel employee and I go to turn the water on and the water is off what
Maxthey've got some sort of kill switch for the room where they're like
Speaker Bthey do it's so crazy
Speaker Athey're trying to Manuel Noriega you they're going to be playing Van Halen's jump yeah if you don't check out by 10 30 they they start a fire and they smoke you out
Maxwould you like a receipt
Alexand and the guy who came to the door i guess this has like clearly happened before because he's like i'm so sorry we are comping your wi-fi do you need anything and he had extra
Maxtowels with him as if it's like some sort of can i ask you a question what's the con here who is this kill switch designed to circumvent do they have like fucking you know george clooney from brother were out there staying in this hotel where they're like, you know, where they're like, boys, we got we got we got some bandits in this barn here. We got to smoke them out.
Speaker BYeah, I guess they really mean it because, of course, they've got that little card that says, if you're looking to help the environment, please hang up your towel. And maybe it's because
Alexyesterday I had used every single towel and towel and they were piled up and they they're like, oh, this is a kill switch person. We are getting them the fuck out of here. It's probably so,
MerlinIt's an algorithm. I bet it's machine learning on a chip. And it's detecting that you're a troublemaker. They're noticing some things about you. She is putting things in her mouth that are not food. There's a lot of very unusual behavior. She's checking Twitter a lot. They're going to throw up what they call an algorithmic flag on you.
MaxThe towel manager at the hotel, he's the evil sheriff with the reflective eyeglasses.
MerlinWhat we got here is a failure to communicate. Any man doesn't put his spoon back in the hotel room. That's a nut in the box. Ain't no man can eat 50 eggs.
AlexUpside to all this is that before we were recording, I could not find my glasses all morning. So I did not look at the Google Doc. I could not see my notes. And I'm like, well, we're just going to go into this. There's a Google Doc?
But I found my glasses behind the toilet. Everything's great. We're all good to go.
MaxTime Magazine. Actually, Time Magazine. I checked this time. Michigan Representative Tim Wahlberg said during a town hall in Coldwater, Michigan on Friday that while he believes climate change is real, it is not something for humans to solve. Quote, I believe there's climate change. I believe there's been climate change since the beginning of time, Wahlberg said. Do I think man has some impact? Yes, of course. Can man change the
entire universe? No. He continued, quote, why do I believe that? Well, as a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us, and I'm confident that if there's a real problem, God can take care of it. That's nice. Seems like a good plan A. Yeah, if I get lost in
Merlinthe woods, dad will pick me up. Just assume it'll all be fine. Why would we want to change what we
Maxdo. Do you guys know the story about the guy who's stuck on a rooftop on a flood? And he's on the rooftop and he's praying to God for help. And he's like, God, help me. I'm stuck on this rooftop. And eventually a guy in a rowboat comes by and he says to the guy on the rooftop, he says, jump into my boat. I can save you. And the guy says, no, that's all right. I'm praying to God. God's got my back. He's going to save me. So the rowboat goes on. A little bit later, a motorboat comes by and the guy yells up, jump into my motorboat. I can save you. And the guy goes, no, thanks. I'm talking to God. I'm good. I don't need that. And then finally a helicopter
comes by and the pilot shouts down, grab this rope and I'll pull you off this roof and we'll get out of here. And the guy goes, no, it's all right. Talking to God. God's got me. And eventually the flood gets worse and he drowns and the guy gets to heaven and he talks to God and he says, God, I had faith in you and I prayed to you and I asked you to save me, but you let me drown. What happened? And God says, I sent you a rowboat, a motorboat and a helicopter. What more did you want from me that's good it's got layers to it yeah i sent you a uh kyoto accords i sent you a paris climate agreement what more did you want from me what do you think god is doing
he's a busy guy god gave us god gave us god gave us obama who passed who got us into this fucking treaty like i don't understand this logic why is it that whenever it's something you don't
Merlinlike it's not god's will we're in a lot of bad deals max a lot of bad deals but you see what i'm
Maxsaying? It's like, why is it that if your thing is that, oh, surely God will come down and save us from climate change. It's like, yeah, okay. What about all the stuff that we're doing to prevent
Speaker Aclimate change? Why isn't that God's will? You think maybe they're specifically looking for a burning bush? I don't know what they're looking. What are you looking for? Antisocial woman pretends to be blind for 28 years so she wouldn't have to greet people. Oh, this sounds like fake news. We've been burned by this before. Don't get my hopes up. Starting over, starting over. Tuga Tuga Breaking
MerlinFrom pool spray Antisocial woman Pretends to be blind From what? Wait, wait, wait, wait From what? Pool spray Pool spray? Pool spray One more time Tuga Tuga Tuga Tuga Breaking news Antisocial woman Pretends to be blind For 28 years So she wouldn't have To greet people 28 years ago Carmen Jimenez From Madrid, Spain Became completely blind Due to a serious eye injury At least that's what She told everyone Including her own family Because she was tired Of having to say hello To people she didn't Actually want to greet This is brilliant Alex, Alex, what do you think? You want to maybe think about it?
AlexWell, I Googled it, and there's many a source.
MaxDid you guys hear about there was like a college football coach who was illiterate? And he got through almost his entire career without people realizing he was illiterate. And he developed all these strategies to cope with whenever he had to read something. So he would go into someone's office, and he'd be really flustered. And he'd go, I just can't make heads or tails of this. It's all nonsense. and he'd throw some paperwork down on their desk and be like, I need you to read this and tell me what it says. Or his woman was like, he'd always forget his eyeglasses and be like, oh, I need you to read this to me. I don't have my glasses.
MerlinGod, I can imagine a lot of different kinds of ways of being that require, including being a woman, that would require so many layers of those kinds of hacks just to get through a day. But that's amazing to go that long. Incredible.
MaxWow, I can have a kaleidoscope on my wrist. I can't wait to see what I do with that.
Alexoh no just you wait the next watch face coming up i'm very excited about um i'm declaring anti-social woman pretending to be blind as real news there's enough sources that look like fake news websites that are talking have you tried snoops i'm gonna go and try snoops veronica's
Maxgot the watch face where it's just a photo album and she has we have a photo album of the cat and so every time she looks at the time it shows her a different picture of the cat in the background and whenever she has her watch on and we're hanging out, periodically she just looks down on her wrist and goes, aw.
MerlinAw. Aw. That's nice. I don't see it on Snopes.
AlexDoesn't need to be because it's true.
Speaker AWould you consider it a dank meme? Should we look on Know Your Meme? Oh, here comes Craig. Craig's a handsome man. Yeah, he is. He's very charismatic. So you were at The Thing last night, right, Alex?
AlexYes. Last night I was at the talk show live, which—
MaxOh, shit, dog. did Gruber have a guest? did he get someone cool?
Alexit was Big Hair and Phil
MaxCraig and Phil were on there? Fuck
Alexit was just like last year
MerlinI only had time to listen to the first part of it but Craig is he's so charismatic and I don't know if he's always, how do I say this I don't think he's being dishonest but when he's out there you feel like he's really giving you the full story when he's talking I that's a he's very very good at that I don't mean that as faint praise but I mean like I imagine it's very difficult for him to I mean he think they need to do far they need to be doing
Maxfar less in these keynotes like these keynotes are I understand WWDC is like ostensibly like for developers but just for the PR purposes like the whole world looks at these things now like it's a major major commercial for Apple and these things are so long and technical and boring and And I just am more and more exasperated with these things every time.
Speaker BOh, wrong. That's not accurate.
Speaker AThat's not accurate at all. They're so bad. No, you're not watching it.
AlexWrong.
MaxIt's got 74 megablorps of processing power. No. Jesus Christ.
Speaker BThat's what this is for.
MaxNo, no. Do that in the sessions. This should be, go watch the Steve Jobs keynotes. It should be like 45 minutes long. It should be like, just the hits, just the hits. They should undersell everything and just be like, boy, isn't that neat? And then move on to the next thing.
AlexThat is what the fall event is for. This is, and maybe there is a weirdo like me who does watch WWDC jobs keynotes that I can get a hold of. But normally they were not traditionally streamed, actually. We would just, you know, follow it on the live blog. so most people who care who care about this in like uh and they're just purely consumers they don't make stuff for apple um or they are not a weirdo like me they just go on the verge or go on
aol and they see oh okay there's a new mac there's a new ipad hooray they're not watching the
Maxkeynote look it's an email from my daughter she sold her company for 100 million dollars they never hear about the nits she could have never she could have never done that if her screen didn't have so many nits. They're very bad.
AlexNo, they're so... I thought this was one of the best keynotes in a very long time.
MaxDaily Mail. President Harry S. Truman once advised that if you want a friend in Washington, get a pet. But President-elect Donald Trump has proven that he's determined to forge his own path, and he could be the first commander-in-chief in a century to lead without a four-legged friend at his side. Before Trump, Andrew Jackson was the last president not to own an animal. If Trump goes his entire presidency without a pet, he will be only the third after Jackson and James K. Polk. Presidents have owned conventional pets like cats and dogs and more exotic animals like bears, tigers, and pygmy hippopotamuses. Pets often... Chris Christie.
Pets often... Chris, fetch.
MerlinNext door. Subject line, plants. Neighbor Stacy writes, has anyone had plants taken from their THERE front yard? One of my tomato plants disappeared this week. Who does this? I know this is a very minor crime compared to car burglaries. Neighbor Sayuki says, the half-buried rock at my front tree was mysteriously moved a few inches.
Speaker AOne weed was pulled out and left to dry up in the sane spot. Oh, no, my half-buried rock. Oh, no, my half-buried rock.
MerlinOh, my gosh. Neighbor Mario opines, yes, it's called people not caring and behaving badly. Dog poop, too, is an issue. Neighbor Rosemary says, when I was living in San Jose, someone stole our Youngmeyer lemon tree. Asking the same question. Who does this? Sorry about your tomatoes. And then we get into the speculation about the business side of this. And I know this is going to appeal to you, Max, as an entrepreneur. A lot of speculation about the crews of people who sweep out across the western part of San Francisco, steal plants, and then sell them on the black market. Also, gophers.
Speaker BWell, was the initial poster, was she trying to, is that my game?
AlexOh no, nevermind.
MaxWas that the kill switch?
AlexNo, no, no, no.
Max20 seconds to comply. The blinds, like a hurricane shutter folds up over the windows and the water turns off.
Speaker ALay down flat on the floor with your hands behind your back. Alex Cox.
Speaker BDig, dug, dig, dug, dig, dug. Was the initial poster of the rock post, were they actually trying to get a resolution?
AlexBecause the rest of these people are just airing grievances and it's a therapy session.
MerlinThis is the beauty part. It's a lot like a podcast. Somebody said it'll be random. The other people say random things that are just on their mind. They're just kind of spinning out of it. So she's saying, has anybody had plants taken from their T-H-E-R-E front yard? One of my tomato plants disappeared this week. Who does this? And so, yes, and then people just start opining on things like tomatoes and trees and gophers and where the sane weed went.
Speaker ABut, yeah, and then let's see. Let's see.
MaxThis happened to me once. I was home, and I was recording a podcast, and all of a sudden the power went out. And I look up, and I'm like, what happened? And then all of a sudden there's a knock on my door, and I go to the door, and it's an old Russian man. He's got his briefcase full of emeralds, and he goes, Oh, I need to come in and give you my emeralds. And he's fucking fast-talking me. And meanwhile, a crew of handsome burglars, they come rappelling down the side of the house. They move my rock from one end of the garden to the other. They rappel back up, and only later do I learn that the power is out because Don Cheadle detonated an EMP. It was all part of the plan to disable the grid.
MerlinThey said no one was supposed to be in the area.
Alexreal-time uh follow-up coverate john syracusa um you're grammar shaming this woman but i'm i'm wondering if she's doing the opposite of what the football coach is doing and trying pretending to be illiterate and just like what if what if it's like oh i'm this innocent old lady what if she's
Speaker Bmoving the rocks what is what if she is just a person on next door posting crazy things it was her all along and she just likes to watch the the wheels of oh man you think this is you think this
Maxis the brown m&ms so she's kind of it's a little it's no it's like the van halen's brown m&ms and they're like it's a test to be like uh hey is anyone reading this thing are they reading the
Merlinrider yeah well i think she's i think i think neighbor stacy is the one who's probably running this, this, this gopher based plant stealing ring and front. I think she's the one, this is what you call plausible deniability. She put, they call it a false flag operation. You put this out. Has anybody had plants taken from their T-H-E-R-E front yard? That's exactly the kind of thing that you would never expect a plant ring leader to say. So let me ask you this. Am I supposed to buy one
Maxof these hideous black cubes and put it on my desk with like an external GPU and then like plug it into my laptop to like use Photoshop. Is that the, is that? I don't think that's for you. Why? I don't understand this. But I like edit high resolution video and it's slow as shit on my new MacBook Pro. Do I actually buy one of these discrete, like external discrete GPUs? I thought that was just for the iMac. No, they're showing it with the laptop. It's in Craig's big laptop chunk here.
MerlinYeah, I think that was a somewhat, what i don't exactly understand let me put that differently i have no idea what this thing is for i mean i can guess what it's for but it does seem like a weirdly inelegant solution as apple things go but i i mean it just seems like this is one of the things you run up against as the devices get smaller and we want more power right i mean isn't that doesn't that seem like probably what this is
Maxoh here's the muscular guy with the gray t-shirt and that's kind of squashed up face no no he's got a gray t-shirt he's not rolling he's got a gray t-shirt and he's he's he's a handsome man oh i remember this guy he was handsome yeah he's got kind of a cool 90s like up in the front haircut do you guys understand what's going on in qatar uh i heard i heard there's fake news being injected it's uh i i'm having a lot of trouble following it and i posted on facebook you know i don't full i don't know a ton about middle eastern politics when i was in i took like some classes on um islamic uh studies so i and like political like the geopolitical situation
in the Middle East. So I have a little bit of academic background, and I've read some books and stuff. So I think I probably know more than the average American about the Middle East politics, but far less than I need to to understand why the Saudis are withdrawing their ambassador from Qatar. And I understand it's enough that it's a huge story, because the BBC has it on breaking news. So I was like, all right, this is a big story. So I went on Facebook, and I was like, can anyone explain what's happening in Qatar? And all these fucking jackals come out of the woodwork like these just i don't even know why i pretty much only have
facebook to ask about what restaurants to go to in other cities and know when people's birthdays are but all these like fucking jackals that i don't want to hear from that don't know anything about this they start piping in and they'll go like well is it was politics or was it the guessing what was it that bothered you no the guessing it was like they didn't know what the fuck they were talking about and they're like well it all comes back to their fighting over this rock and it's like how you worship the rock and it's like you fucking idiot like that's not why the saudis withdrew their ambassador. It's like, I get it. You have some bit about Islam from a New Yorker article that you read, but it's like, don't post on my Facebook with your bad answer to my question.
And then I let a couple hours go by and no one said, no one had, everyone had a fucking joke. They had their little bit prepared about Middle Eastern politics. And, oh, I'm sure whatever's happening can't be good. It's all bad. Or, you know, some dumb fucking joke. And I was, I eventually was like there's like 10 million dollars of college degrees reading this post could someone tell me what's happening like is everyone too stupid to understand is that the state of the world is that all the people i know this is the whole social graph i've got you all and no one
Merlincan explain this to me yeah i i am not nearly done with the word mansplaining i'm people who are sick of hearing about it um i you're not listening carefully enough because we all have so much to learn man or otherwise but especially men we got a lot to learn about feeling the need to give a default answer or feeling the need to respond to everything. And I'll tell you, having that word hanging over my head has been useful to me, I think. Like, I used to be much more inclined to be exactly the kind of person you're talking about, Max, which is like, I'm trying to remember there's this cartoon.
I want to say it was Peanuts. It might have been the far side. But I just remember this one comic one time where somebody had studied for the wrong test and they had to do a blue book test. And like they'd studied for Moby Dick, but the test was about William James, right? And they're like, well, this book by William James, which is not to be confused with Moby Dick by him, which is Ishmael, and then they write an entire book report on the thing they studied for rather than what the person actually fucking asked for. And that hangs over my head now. And that mantle of mansplaining, not even so much out of shame, but just out of, God, just stop fucking being that guy. And you see it. You see it where people, you just say something that's
a very clear question. They can't have an answer. You don't want to put too many provisos in, but you want to leverage the fact that you've got all these millions of dollars in college out there. and there is certainly somebody who knows the answer but it's completely lost in this like you know here's my file card on the middle east what's the value what's the value of all this social
Maxnetworking and being connected to all these people and all this new infrastructure and communications technology if something's you know it's like fundamentally something's happening in the world i care about it i understand and i know enough to know that i don't understand it right so i'm ignorant and i know that and i'm like could one of the whatever thousand people that i'm friends with on this website could one of you please pop in and just give me the couple the background that i need on this and like not one fucking person knows what they're talking about it's i think it's possibly what you're talking about the mansplaining i think that comes in on twitter where the minute something happens anywhere in the world everyone's a fucking expert and they're
like ah qatar as you know their chief exports are uh frantically looks up wikipedia petroleum and sheep you know it's like uh well i've always said that qatar is a land of contrasts you know it's Like, what? Nobody knew you. You know what you're talking about?
MerlinOh, yeah. There's all those times that this has happened in the last few years where it's something with international policy, something with the emoluments clause, something with this thing. There's no fucking way you ever heard about more than maybe once in your entire life, and within an hour, everybody is suddenly an expert on it. So what's the best answer that you got, and who did it come from?
MaxSo basically, part of the issue was that this whole situation was not appropriately covered with any depth or context in the Western media, so you have to speak Arabic to be able to read the Arab media to understand the back and forth of what's going on. So it was friends of mine who speak Arabic were able to explain it to me because they were reading the news from the Arab world. Anyway, it's a bad situation. It's a bad situation.
MerlinYeah. I don't know a ton about it. I know that the capital is Doha. As you probably know, the government, the former government there, it's called a unitary constitutional monarchy. Personally, I always observe Qatar National Day, December 18th.
MaxWhat would you say their GDP was, if you had to hazard a guess?
MerlinOh. Oh, you're talking about Qatar, I say. Were you aware, for example, that they have the fourth highest GDP per capita in the world? Were you aware of that? Wow. Yeah, yeah. You know what's crazy is their average high temperature in June is 108 degrees Fahrenheit. Wow. Now, in Celsius, that's 42 is the thing I remember from school.
MaxWow, Merlin, you sure are knowledgeable about this. Boy, this VR demo is really awkward. Oof.
MerlinThe AR table thing? Oh, the VR. No, the VR one is bad. There's Darth Vader, and she's like, wow, watch out. Darth Vader's behind you. At one point, she almost falls over. You like this, though, Alex. You were very enthusiastic about this.
AlexYes, I can. And well, you know, it's hard for me to empathize with an awkward woman on stage who has to do something in front of thousands of people. But I thought she did a great job. And that's like actually how people make movies now. And that's just crazy that you can do that with a consumer piece of hardware.
MaxYeah, I'm glad you brought up it was a woman, Alex, because I was going to let it go. But then I was like, there's an opportunity for some real misogyny here.
Alexdid you did you get to when Darth Vader almost almost gets her yeah oh boy yeah the guy well
MaxI want this part I watched and the guy was like go watch out behind you that's Darth Vader yeah these non-apple demos are always awful do you remember when they showed halo what no they did way way back in the day hey they showed halo in an apple keynote and it was a big exclusive Apple title.
AlexNo, no, this is fault. This is fault. No.
Speaker AWay back in the day. I remember the car racing demo. I remember that one being pretty bad.
MaxYou know, those guys brought us, they came to our office and brought the cars one day and we played with them and they were a cool toy. Oh, nice. If I was seven, I would really have enjoyed that.
MerlinThat guy's a big deal. What's his name? No, John Knoll? Who is that? John Knoll. Yeah, he's a big boy.
Speaker BHe's a huge fucking deal.
Speaker AHe's got a half. He's got a one. He's got a one roll, though. He's got one fold. Oh, shoot. Oh, no. I'm looking at him on Wikipedia.
MerlinHe's got the two roll. He's got. Oh, see, he went one to one cuff to fold, but he's got a big watch and a big boy wrist. Oh, no. He does a lot of what Todd does. Look at that.
Speaker BHe is.
AlexOh, my God. This is the guy who. Anyway, now I'm.
MerlinHe worked on a Star Trek and he's been on a Star Wars.
MaxWashington Post. This is a really good. This one takes a little bit of setup, but I promise it's funny. Washington Post. First of all, incredible lead on this. As soon as his cab arrived in an Islamic State safe house in December 2015, his lawyers say Mohamed Kawis realized he had made a huge mistake.
Narrator voice? He did. The 27-year-old Fairfax County native fled the group three months later and was captured by Kurdish forces in Iraq. Now as his trial begins this week in federal court in Alexandria, a jury will weigh whether a mistake of that gravity can be forgiven under terrorism laws. So basically, this is a 27, I'm sure at the time he was a 25-year-old kid from Fairfax County, Virginia, who joined ISIS. Oops, I joined ISIS. That's the title. The case is unusual for several reasons. Kauhe successfully traveled to Islamic State territory, as few Americans have, and was
completely unknown to authorities before his capture. FBI agents have testified that they learned of his existence from a video posted by a kurdish fighter on twitter when he returned cowes chose to go to trial where the vast majority of terrorism defendants plead guilty cowes uh his defense attorney jessica carmichael said was a smoker and a drinker who lived with his parents and relied on their insurance and cell phone plans this is a isn't this a crazy story oh my god a 25 year old kid he smokes he drinks he's on his parents cell phone plan and he joins
isis well uh and then it gets really here's where it starts to get really good while with the islamic state she said he performed menial tasks buying groceries taking out the trash getting lunch can you imagine joining isis and they're like uh we actually just need someone to do uh grab groceries for us he handled he handled guns she said only when he moved them to sit on a couch and then there's an amazing there's an incredible um line but i need to cue up my my soundtrack here
for this here we go he was asked to be a suicide bomber because he had no skills according to carmichael and agreed only because he thought he might be killed as a spy if he did not
Speaker AI just like that story. That's really, what a disappointment. That's a real Seinfeld situation.
MaxLike, you get all the way to ISIS, and you travel there, and you, like, meet them on the message boards, and you want to join up with the cool kids, and they're, like, they take one look, and they're, like, ooh, I got a good job for you.
Speaker BThat's fine. I know. Like, just, I can just, who the fuck did, like, this kid?
MaxThat's also what's funny about these, all these, like, all these like alt-right kids these like uh you know like a sort of like a pudgy like like anime enthusiasts who like post online and harass people and they're like oh we're gonna like take to the streets and seize america it's like if the if the insurrection ever came all these kids would like report to their militias and everyone would take one look at them and they'd be like oh maybe suicide bomber i don't know what do we do with you like uh grocery run yeah yard work making a
Speaker Achalk mark on everyone suicide bomber suicide bomber suicide bomber yeah it's just they have no skills they're not like fighters they don't have any like technical competency like they're heavily heavily medicated and addicted to energy drinks it's like you're gonna be such a hindrance
Merlinlike one day away from your house and you're gonna be so unhappy we live in a fucking desert there's no playstation here you're gonna be so sad we don't have anime you're not allowed in fact You know, the music of Qatar is based on Bedouin poetry, song and dance. A lot of people don't know that. You're going to be very, very far away. You're going to be, you know what? You're going to be the second person shooter. How do you feel about that?
MaxOh, boy. I do like this black mouse and keyboard, though.
MerlinOh, look at that thing. Are you seeing how many gigaflops it's got?
Speaker ABig, big, huge balls full. Oh, it's got 44 million pixels.
MaxI was wondering that. Now it's got up to 36 threads. Local tone mapping. I mean, a lot of people go to the store and they're like, I just need a computer with local tone mapping.
MerlinYeah, Facebook and local tone mapping. That's really all I'll use it for.
Speaker AYeah, and they're like, does it have Bluetooth 4.2 or not? Yeah, 4.2 and also raw capture.
Speaker BYou're not excited, Mac.
MaxI mean, we truly live in the future. This is a big innovation. They made the whole thing gray.
Speaker BMax, you're going to buy all of this, and you can't tell me that you're just a little bit excited that it looks like a Death Star a little bit?
MaxI think it's a good industrial design, but a better industrial design would respond to my need as a user to change my hard drive or upgrade the GPU over many years.
Speaker ASo you mean basically more like a traditional tower?
Maxbut I don't I mean I I don't fully get why Apple doesn't do that because for many my first Mac as a matter of fact was a at the time it was fairly old but it was one of remember those G was it the G4 tower the one that was the cheese grater kind of a looking thing no that was the G5 the G5 but I that was the first Mac I ever had I bought it used from from the hand to family for who you know I made cards with from cards co-creator Ben and uh it was the first Mac I ever had it was great I And what was great was I was a broke-ass college student.
I had no money, so I bought this kind of older computer used. And then I was for years, I upgraded components in that computer. I put new RAM into it. I added more hard drives. And I was able to extend the life of the computer, and it made me a Mac user for life because I had this thing that I could take with me and really deeply learn how to use. I took care of it. I don't understand why that's bad design.
AlexOkay. Well, first of all, if that was the first Mac you had, you are a fake geek girl.
MaxI had a PC for my entire... Alex, we grew up in the bad era of Macs. No, we didn't! We truly did. When I was learning how to use computers, it was the clone era. It was the Mac clone era. They were really bad. It was OS 9. It was bad times. Nothing worked, and there was all this magic you had to know to use a Mac, all the good applications. Microsoft was, like, dominant. Like, it was, there was no contest. At the time that we learned, at the time that I learned how to use a computer, at least, it was so obvious that PC was the platform of the future and Mac was going nowhere.
And, like, obviously, like, you know, I don't, I think that that changed with, like, OS X. But, boy, it was bad times when I learned how to use a computer.
AlexYou are, like, five years older than me. And when I learned how to use, I was on OS 9 until I was 10. And that is when Mac OS 10 happened to come out. And then we got all of the, never mind, no ages.
Speaker BI'm just trying to put this in context.
MerlinBut it's important because it keys to, I won't let you guys finish your unnecessary argument. But it is important because it keys to what you use first and when, what your experience was. And once the gee whiz wears off, what is it that really made you stick to it and stay excited about it? I think that's an important story for everybody to tell.
AlexWell, the thing that's like driving is blowing my mind is that Max's first computer was the like powerhouse Mac Pro or what was it called at that time? It was called the Power Mac, I think, that you had.
MaxAnd that is not the experience that people had. At that time, laptops were very bad. not mac laptops all laptops laptops were really bad right but but most people were getting iMacs
Alexand sure like I was really excited to upgrade my ram but you still couldn't you couldn't swap out the gpu or anything and I still had my 12 inch power book for like eight years it was amazing
Maxit was every person in my life when I was a kid was like when you go to college you will need to know how to use a PC. Like, this is the only viable platform. Like, you need Microsoft Word and Excel. And, like, at the time, the Internet was worked really well on PC, and it was incredibly difficult to use the Internet on Mac. So it was like – Mac was like a joke. Like, I didn't know anyone in my life who used it. And then I eventually learned how to edit video, and Mac was the only game in town for video.
I've got new modes for the camera on the iPhone.
MerlinYeah, and you're going to get more with the magic photos. What's it called? Live photos? Live photos. That live photo of you and Todd, you should go back and look at it, Alex. It's very funny. When you enliven the photo, it looks like it's from an independent horror movie.
MaxOkay, this is one of my worst fears, honestly, of taking pictures with my iPhone, is I'm always worried I'm going to take a picture of the cat and send it to our group chat, and then you guys are going to be fucking Gary the privacy concern clown, and you're going to force press it and enliven the photo. And right before I pointed the camera at the cat, my dick was in the frame or something. I don't want that to happen.
Speaker ANow that I have finished masturbating, I'll take a photo of the cat. I know.
MaxIt's just like sometimes I get out of the shower and the cat's doing something cute and I take a picture of her. And it's like, well, I don't want my balls in the frame. Oh, no, my balls. Because in the picture that I can see that I send you,
Merlinthere's no balls. I shut mine off a long time ago even though it is great because of the exact same
Maxneurosis. There's fucking audio too. There's audio too. I don't want to be laughing at some, you know, dumb joke on a podcast and send it to a congressman or something. It's like, you know, I don't know.
MerlinEvery parents don't know that. You're like right before the picture everybody sees you're like, smile, damn it!
Speaker ABe more Instagram. It's creepy that it
Speaker Brecords the audio. No, it's cool. it's so cool people just need to not be taking pictures of their dicks with their cats i don't
Maxknow it happens to the best of us that's what i'm saying alex we all it's happened you know we're all one live photo away from our balls being on twitter
The Washington Post, Bentonville, Arkansas. Walmart's newest tactic in fighting against online giant Amazon enlisting its employees to deliver online orders on their way home from work.
The idea, Walmart executives said Thursday, is to cut costs on the so-called last mile of deliveries when packages are driven to customers' homes, often the most expensive part of the fulfillment process. Yep, that checks out. Quote, it just makes sense. We already have trucks moving orders from fulfillment centers to stores for pickup. Mark Lohr, chief executive of Walmart's e-commerce business, said in a blog post Thursday afternoon, those same trucks could be used to bring ship-to-home orders to a store close to their final destination where a participating associate can sign up to deliver them to the customer's house. That's weird.
MerlinThere's a lot about that that's weird. I mean, it's not just like, oh, God, am I right, Walmart? There's all kinds of stuff. Like, I mean, just as a middle-aged man, my first thought is, hmm, how do the Teamsters feel about that? or anybody, anybody involved, I guess maybe that stuff doesn't matter at all anymore. But like, aren't there like regulations on who's allowed to bring your stuff somewhere? I guess not. I mean, you can get food from Uber and DoorDash and whatnot.
MaxIt's just one more degradation of the American worker that it's like, they're not even, we're not even pretending that they like, all they are is just like a warm body to like move stuff around. You know, it's like they're not they're just like a totally fungible, you know, repository of energy to to to turn into labor. It's like it's like it's something just really creepy about it of like, all right, mop up that jizz in aisle seven and then get in your car and drive this thing to the customer.
It's like, I don't know.
MerlinWell, mop up that jizz in aisle seven and then you're going to get fired in two weeks. But we want to use that time to train the robot that's going to replace you. You know, there's something especially galling about the whole, like, you know your job is going away, but you need it so bad and you will totally participate in your own, you know, undoing. Sucks.
AlexHave you done the NPR test? What? The NPR, like, it just gauges how likely you are to be replaced by a robot in the next decade.
Speaker AI was scared to take that.
AlexOh, we're fine.
MaxThey're not going to have robots record our funny podcast.
AlexReal time challenge. I've sent you the NPR, what is it? Oh, NPR, Planet Money. Will your job be done by a machine? And there's an adorable dancing robot. Look at that robot. He's so cute.
MaxHi, buddy. What should I say my job? For the purposes of this quiz, what should I say my job is?
AlexSo there's a, all right. Is there under card games?
Speaker AIs there comedy? Comedy card games, yeah.
AlexI would say art, design, entertainment, sports, and media. my job isn't even on this list so no you work in art you literally work in arts and in design
Maxand in entertainment oh shit graphic designers graphic designers have an 8.2 percent chance of being automated hell yeah i don't know what to put podcaster producers and directors i guess
Merlinradio announcers no it's a different thing i'm i'm just clicking i'm just clicking around legal
Maxsecretaries have a 97.6 chance of being automated i'm just i'm just clicking around wow procurement clerks have a 98 chance of being eliminated bill and account collectors have a 94 chance of being eliminated mail carriers have a 70 chance of being eliminated oh that's an interesting one well yeah How do they derive this? They do have methodology.
They're smart. So basically they have people who do these jobs take polls on questions, for example, does your job require you to squeeze into small spaces? Does your job require negotiation? And based on the answers to those questions of people who actually work in the field, they can guess accurately whether it will be done by a computer or not.
MerlinSo the squeezing into small places, is that something I should be working on?
AlexNo, no, no. You don't want to squeeze into small spaces. Oh, so I should get bigger.
MerlinI become big boy.
MaxBig boy, not small boy. Yeah, ideally you do not want to be, for many reasons, you do not want to be employed in a field that requires you to squeeze into small spaces. Why?
MerlinBecause technology is going to change spaces?
MaxBecause they can always design a robot that's smaller than you are and almost as good as your job.
MerlinI want to be the John Henry of getting into small spaces. Be like me versus like a bomb bot. Man ain't nothing but a man. What are you up to in the keynote?
MaxWell, they're showing off the Apple Pay. It's a quick, Craig Federici is doing the demo of the Apple Pay and iMessage, and that's a good feature. I'll use that again, though. I do think that they're, they're not selective enough of all the things they're showing. and this is just an overly lengthy, technical, sprawling keynote.
Speaker BYes, exactly.
AlexIt is an overly technical, long demonstration of all of the things that people are going to be learning about that week and learning how to implement that week. It is exactly what people want to see and it's exactly what people...
MaxI completely disagree with you. The public would be if Apple... part of the reason that it's not for the part of the reason that apple people are frustrated and it's like easy to turn against the company is they over promise and under deliver they like hype things up and they go into so much detail and they make so they're like this uh apple wallet is going to change the world and change your life and they show an infomercial video of a lady like fumbling with her wallet and they're like this is your shitty life now but welcome to the future because you're just going to tap your phone that's just not the right way to do this stuff you got to
have someone come on play it cool and be like hey here's a neat thing we're working on i really like it isn't this neat and then you move on and then when you fucking get it you're like holy shit this thing's amazing you you like undersell and over deliver that's how you delight people in the
Speaker Bapple way are we talking about the same company like that's this is no that's that is apple's whole thing is oh like oh yeah we have this thing uh yeah it's a it's a it just happens to be a
Maxspeaker yeah it oh also the home pod is cool i don't know i mean well let me ask you this are you guys gonna get the home is this the challenge now the the challenge was to watch this stupid thing and talk about it but all right home pods are you guys gonna get them fuck yeah merlin
Merlini mean probably because i eventually will but uh yeah maybe yeah i don't think it'll be as good as
MaxEcho for a while. I'm probably going to get a HomePod and give away my Echo or get rid of my Echo. And the reason is I have not come to peace with having the Echo in my house. I think there's major privacy concerns. And I like that the HomePod does its listening. They explicitly said that it does its processing and listening locally on the device. Can I ask you this, Alex? Alex,
MerlinWhat's your favorite part or what surprised you in the announcement? Or, like, you know, this is something we're all obviously somewhat excited about. When you saw what it actually is and what it actually does, what surprised you or got you the most excited?
AlexSpecifically the HomePod? Yeah. Which piece of punditry are we? Okay.
MerlinWell, because, like, here's the problem. Like, yeah, fucking we're all Casey Liss. We're all going to buy this shit eventually. Like, it's just a question of, like, how excited are you to do it right this second? So just as a corollary here, I have absolutely zero need for a new iPad. I have a 99-whatever-inch iPad Pro that's probably the best computer I've ever owned. It will be good for two more years. I have absolutely no need to spend $1,100 on an iPad, but it is sitting in my basket right now, and it's killing me to not buy it. I know I don't need it. I don't need a laptop.
I don't need a desktop. I don't need lots of stuff. That is something I don't really need, and I'm dying to get it. I thought – I don't mean to seem evasive. I thought I would be more excited when this thing got announced because this is my jam like I'm the voice guy and I thought I was going to be super excited by the time they were done I was like that's really if that was 150 bucks I'd buy it but I if I had that I kind of want to because like is that going to replace my soundbar like my costly sonos soundbar that I love so now I'm up to 700 bucks for something that may not be as good as the echo that was just my gut feeling was I was ready
to love this thing and i'm like that's cool but that's why i ask you no with what you saw actually unveiled like what are you now excited or excited about or surprised by there is an iphone inside of
Alexit like there's an actual like the same silicon in an iphone is in this thing like but when are you without your iphone no no no at home when i'm on the couch and when i don't you don't have your
MerliniPhone with you? Yeah, but you don't want to have to touch anything. You want to talk in the air and have it work without having to look. This goes way back to an old app called Quicksilver that I used to love. Quicksilver was this amazing app where you could hit command space. You could replace spotlight with that key command, do whatever. You start typing. For a long time, Quicksilver was this app where you could just go click, click, tapity, tapity, tap, enter. It was what I call a no-look application, which means that your muscle memory was such that, like, if you, like, when you hit the escape key, do you go look to make sure that it worked? Like, or when you hit the space bar,
do you make sure a space got inserted? No, it's muscle memory. It's a no look application. What we're talking about here with a voice app is a no look application. If I talk into my fucking watch, which gets me right about 20% of the time, it gets me flawlessly right about 10% of the time. It hears me 30% of the time, something, here's something, right? You see where I'm going with this. To have a no-look app, that means you have to, without thinking about it too much, hail the device, talk out loud, and not worry about, not even listen back to what it says happened.
You just trust that that thing got it. Echo does that now. Siri does not. But I think that's what Alex wants, right? You want the Echo experience in your Apple ecosystem with all your stuff.
Speaker BIt's going to happen.
AlexI feel like there are two, there are two things going through my brain right now. Max seems to think that this keynote is for the public and it's not, that is the fall keynote, but, but everything, the public, when I say the public, I'm making it sound like we are super secret cult of the Apple fuck boys, which I guess we are, but, but like that, yes, this is going to be on the local nightly news. Ah, the home pod. So people like Apple does need to just like briefly tease that. because it's not going to be out until December.
And it felt, I don't want to say the announcement felt half-baked, but I think they're holding back a lot of what it is going to be able to do.
MerlinIncluding the screen, right?
AlexThat's super, wait, are you making a joke? I don't know. Are you talking about the thing on top?
MerlinI'm not. I'm not making a joke. What we saw in the demo was what looked like something like an advanced series of LED lights could do. But the word on the street is that behind that, there is actually a touchscreen, which makes this a lot more interesting.
AlexYes. And you could not touch the home or the people who had the demos. You could not touch them. You could not even talk to them. They were just.
MerlinI don't think they're ready. I don't think they're done. I think that was a rendering. I think what they saw is to quote Monty Python. It's only a model, you know, like, I don't think that's the thing. I don't think that's plugged in. I don't think they're done. They're not done. They're going to need this time.
AlexI will. I think that the I actually think that the speaker, part of it is is totally done and that's what they're like okay this is the thing that is um go this is what people know because the people who have all bought like echoes and like my mom who has bought an echo is gonna be like oh well if it's it's just a talkie thing i already have a talkie thing but it's like oh wow there's this there's a new ipod hi-fi because people did like
The iPod Hi-Fi.
MerlinMy problem with Sonos, my problem with Sonos as a consumer is I hate the app and it's not fun to deal with. I like the way that it sounds. My problem with Sonos as a technology dork is I don't think that's the future. I think even when, if they get Amazon Alexa integration with it, it's not the future. I mean, making speakers is not the hard part. The technology that people crave behind there I think is the hard part. and as long as they've got as long as i'm interacting like through an app i mean do you use their app it's kind of so you know what it is good at the the back end of the sonos app is
Maxgreat in the sense that sonos sucks like i don't want to use sonos i bought it because it was the the thing that sucked the least to have wireless speakers in my living room and now i really think the app i'm listen i'm gonna buy the apple speakers i'm probably gonna buy two of them and i don't know i'll sell my sonos stuff hopefully but it's like i don't know like i just am i then I'm going to have to, what, sell those Apple speakers when the version 2 comes out next year?
AlexWell, okay. The problem I have with Sonos is they are incredibly, incredibly expensive. And also, I live in a very small space, and I do not need Sonos speakers. And this, like, I'm, like, overflowing with excitement with these HomePods. Like, they are going to be very, very, very good. And they are not done.
Speaker AAnyway, I think we can all agree it was probably one of the best WWDC keynotes in a very long time. Well, fine. And I guess it was better than the last ones.
MaxIt's these things suck now. I hate them. They should, they need to be, they need to have some showmanship.
AlexI, this was actually, and it is across the board. Like if you talk to people walking down this, the street, I don't, I didn't, I don't think I said that I was in San Jose, but everybody knows that I'm in San Jose who listened to the show at, not at WWDC, but adjacent to it. And everyone is fucking losing their minds because last year was so, so bad. It was, we got nothing like it we got a bunch uh we got siri on sierra and it was everything else was crap and this was one of the best years and ww the the wwdc keynote is is not for showmanship
in the past it may have been because that because steve jobs existed and i don't want to be like if steve were alive but this still would have been a two-hour long keynote like they blew through so much stuff like everyone's taking screenshots of those crazy like word cloud things because there's like so much going on in in like metal 2 alone uh i i feel like people don't really know what metal is and i certainly don't really know what metal is but the the crazy stuff they were
doing with like vr and ar this is the place to talk about that stuff why who cares yeah people
Speaker Adevelopers care the people who are there for the developer conference the developers i can't wait
Speaker Bto see what they i can't wait to see what they do i'm glad as a consumer i was there's a lot about
Merlinthis we talked about this on back to work a little bit um yesterday but this made me very happy to see the glimmers of things that suggest to me that there are things that they haven't abandoned that they are working on the proof will be in the pudding i think if you're a developer um you want to see signs that the ecosystem is moving forward and evolving and that it's going to continue to be worth doing what you do. And whether that's the way we sell, I mean, and look here, I'm trying to abstract this. I'm going beyond the current idea of like, I make money through IAPs on the app store. Like who knows what that's going to be in five years. But the thing is, if we just
keep acting like it's seven years ago in every aspect of this entire company, that's going to be a problem for people because the world is changing and you need to see them putting their money down, placing bets on certain kinds of things. Like, you know what? I don't care if you are into or not into VR. You know what? No one cares. I am not into VR. I don't care. And you know who cares about that? No one. Because VR is where it is going. Voice is where it is going. This is all where this stuff is going. Trying to iterate on getting a faster floppy drive is not
going to be useful at this point. There's going to have to be indications that this is a platform and an ecosystem that is taking big strides and growing and taking risks, taking care of the base, And there's no better time to telegraph that kind of enthusiasm that they're putting the wood behind the arrow. There's no better place to do that than this conference. And that's what they did.
MaxCounterpoint to some of that. When you look at technologies that have truly been transformative, they change the way that people live the minute that they come out and are distributed democratically to the people. I would point to the smartphone, the iPhone, as like one of those moments, right? and I remember that keynote when I first saw the iPhone, right? Are you getting it? It's an internet communicator, a phone, and what was it? An iPod, an internet communicator and an iPod. And then it reveals the iPhone.
And in that moment, I think it was obvious to everyone who was watching and certainly it was obvious to everyone the first time they saw an iPhone in person. They were like, oh, that's how it'll be. I want one of those. I will have one. We'll all have it on our person. We'll all have a little computer. That's the future. Like there wasn't, I mean, there was some debate, like the idiots at RIM were like, this thing is never going to catch on. But like among the public and the popular consciousness, it was obvious. It was like, everyone was like, yes, I can't wait to have this and it will change our lives and we're all going to have it. It wasn't like an uphill battle. There was like no headwind to that adoption of that technology.
And it just sort of swept around the world and had a huge revolutionary effect. When you look at voice stuff and you look at VR, I see no indication that they rise to that level. Like, I don't think anyone, I don't think most people want to own VR. I don't think it's good to use. I don't think that it's obvious what the practical benefits are. I'm, I mean, maybe we go into some sort of like, you know, ready player one VR future, maybe. But I don't see any, I don't see any indication of that. Like, I think it's like, I don't see it. I don't see it. That's.
It's not obvious. It's not obvious to me in the same way that when you had like the personal computer or the laptop or the iPhone, whatever it is, right? Like sometimes something comes along and it's just like online news and you're just like, this is a fucking force of nature. You know, people who get mad at newspapers going away and the news being free online and they talk about how that's bad for civic society or whatever, why don't you go stand on the shore and yell at the ocean so that the waves go the other way? You know, good luck. It's a force of nature. It's happening with or without you.
I don't see any indication that VR is that way.
MerlinI just think that's a little short-sighted, which is a polite way of saying I think you're completely missing the point, which is we may not be able to show a lot in our GDP every year of the race to get to the moon. There's no way to say that because we went to the moon, therefore everybody makes this much more money every year. That would be an asinine thing to say. But think about how that race and the subsequent industries have had an effect. Just think about the materials that we got. Just think of aircraft materials that we got out of the space race. I mean, setting aside Velcro and shit like that.
Just Tang. Look at all of the kinds of things that came out of that thing. This kind of pyrrhic, like human victory where we're going to go to the moon. There was not anything attached. And what I'm saying here is that I just, I want to beat this to fucking death. Is that no, voice is not the important part of voice. The important part of voice is what's happening behind the voice. That the voice works well or doesn't right now is asinine. That's like saying I'm not going to buy a car because the roads aren't ready yet. Well, when the roads are there, aren't you going to want a car that works?
Speaker AThe technology behind that is the huge part. balls as well right it didn't have any apps and it was slow and the battery didn't last all day but you're also you're also making this narrative so much more so it was not it was not that widely
Maxadapted everybody but it was obvious but i'm not my point isn't that the original iphone was widely adopted by society but it was obvious to anyone with their eyes open the minute that they saw it that they were like all phones in 10 years all phones will look like this and we're we're glimpsing the future. I don't see any indication when I see voice stuff or VR stuff that we're glimpsing the future. Like I could easily see that stuff being like car phones or pagers or there's little televisions with the big antennas that pop out that truck drivers watch in their truck. Like, you know, passing dalliances that never really have a place in society and they never have
widespread adoption and they were sort of false cul-de-sacs on the road of how human computer interaction goes. I just see no evidence whatsoever that the public is yearning for voice commands and
Speaker BVR. Merlin, am I having a stroke? I can't. No, the problem is Max is not listening to anything
Merlinthat we're actually saying. He's just continuing to gainsay his point instead of listening to what
Maxwe're actually saying. No, look, I'm watching. Craig is moving the light around right now and the shadows are going on the coffee cup. Like, I fucking need that. I fucking need that because right now I pretend to move a lamp around the desk
Speaker Aand the shadows don't go anywhere. Your problem is you studied for the wrong test.
MerlinYou studied for the wrong test and you want to make it all about your Moby Dick. It's sickening.
Speaker AMerlin, do you own any VR stuff? No, I have no. Zero. God. Listen to the words coming out of my mouth hole, Max. Did you own an iPhone 1? Yes! No, someone bought one for me as a gift. But when you saw the keynote and you saw the iPhone unveiled,
Maxdid you go to yourself? Did you say to yourself, I want that in my life? I can see how I know why I want that in my life right now. It doesn't matter what I thought. It does matter. I'm asking you. No, it doesn't because you're changing the topic. You're a thought leader in the technology space. People listen to you and they form their opinions of technology based on what you say.
MerlinThat's true. That's a good point.
MaxSo I'm just saying like everyone saw it, right?
MerlinI don't give a flying fuck about VR as something that I use. What I know is if you're not in your little industry area moving forward with the technology behind what drives VR, you're going to miss out on so many boats you're not even going to need an ocean anymore. You can't just go, well, we're just going to keep doing this thing. We've done fairly well for seven years. You've got to fucking blue sky this shit, man. You've got to go do stuff that doesn't make sense yet because somebody else is getting there faster than you. Somebody's going to Elon Musk the shit out of your stuff.
MaxSo a phone represented like a new HCI model from a computer, right? like it was a couple of things, right? One was the adoption of like native apps and everything being in sort of its own little special garden on your device. And the other was like the utter personalization of computing. Like, you know, now I think we've all sort of, I don't think a lot of people share a computer with their family, but like that used to be how it was. And now we've just gone in a totally different direction where computing is very personal and it's like your music,
your songs, your files, your apps, your arrangement, your wallpaper, whatever. So what I'm saying is like when the phone came along, it wasn't the technology in the phone. It wasn't the processor. It wasn't the screen. It was all of it together showed us a new way that we would live with technology that once you saw it, there was no going back. And so that's a sea change. That's like a Copernican revolution of like a new way of looking at our place in the universe and the role the technology plays in it. And the whole idea that the world is going to be, that that's what VR or voice represents
is totally false to me. There's no new interaction model with VR. It's like you strap some shitty goggles to your face that make you nauseous, and you look at things in 3D. That's not a new way of interacting with computers. It's worse. Nobody will do that in their life. And similarly, I don't... I mean, maybe the voice stuff will catch on, but in the model, it's one of those things that... It was in Star Trek, so people think it's smart that you'll have a conversation with your computer, but it was a conceit that was created for Star Trek
because it worked well in television and it allowed for drama. And it's not actually a good interaction model. People would almost always prefer to privately type into a terminal, I think, than speak. Or at least I think it remains to be proven whether voice is going to be that thing. I don't see any evidence that that's the main way that we're all going to use technology.
Speaker BPeople are already using Siri every single day.
AlexYou don't see people on their phone outside. Like, I do not like using, I do not do the Siri thing publicly, but people do all the time, like on the train. It is already happening, and it is not very good. Like, I don't know if you're mad that, like.
MaxNo, I'm not mad. I just don't think, I think it's a bad, I think it's a bad, I think people do use Siri every once in a while. The main thing I see them use is text. No, the number one use that I see is I see old people or people who aren't good at typing, they use the text thing. So when they're texting someone, they can dictate it into the phone.
MerlinIt's all my, listen to my words. First of all, thank you so much for carefully considering the actual words that I said instead of what you wanted to add in your argument. You are absolutely correct. I am totally wrong, and I apologize. My daughter does not use the keyboard, except as a total fallback. All she uses is dictation, full stop. And this is how we turn on lights in the house. Is that weird? Yeah, to a lot of people, that's really weird. But that is the future. It's like the stuff behind this is the future. Whether or not you have anecdotal Friedman-esque evidence of seeing people in a taxi using Siri has fuck all to do with what this is actually doing.
Because A, the voice is not the important part. I'm going to say it one last time. The voice feels like the important part because that's the parlor trick. It's the intelligence behind the voice that you need to really put the effort into. I'm not convinced voice is the perfect, quote-unquote, interaction model for anything. But the fact that what you can do with these devices as appliances that don't require traditional interaction is a pattern that is going to get bigger and more important every six months for a very long time. So, I mean, I reject this idea of like, well, I wanted a phone when I saw it in 2007, and I don't see people except for old people using.
I just don't buy that.
MaxI don't buy that. I think we're in an era of technology, which we've been in. This is most of the time in technology and invention. where it's not clear what's going to happen next. We don't know. There was a while when mobile was obviously what was going to happen. There was a decade of fucking gold rush on mobile where from 2008 until now, it's just been an explosion of everybody pursuing this one obvious thing. And now we're trying to project forward, and we're like, well, what's in the next 10 years? And we don't know.
It's not obvious.
MerlinDon't you think it's clear what we're not? Isn't it clear? I'll try a different angle here. Is it not clear that there are some things we can be pretty sure aren't the future? Okay, so is Sears going to mount a huge comeback and suddenly come back 5X to where it was, like even more than where it was when I was a kid? Every mall is going to have a very large A-class Sears store in it. Will that happen in the next 20 years?
MaxNo, it's obvious that big box retail is like the walking dead.
MerlinOkay, so if big box retail is dead, what kind of knock-on effects can we expect in this year and in the next five years? So you're asking me to prognosticate? What I'm trying – what I want. All I'm trying to do is to say – we probably don't actually disagree all that much. It's just fun to argue. But I think there are some kinds of patterns where the direction, the propulsiveness, the trend line is so overwhelmingly clear that it feels a little bit blinkered to try and draw conclusions about what this little bit of change means.
It's really confusing. If the trend line is to have fewer big box stores, well, then your stuff is going to have to come from somewhere. If your stuff comes from somewhere, where's that somewhere going to be?
Speaker AYou lead to those kinds of questions. Oh, what do you want?
MaxI mean I have an answer to that specific question of like where our stuff comes from in the future. Where's my Sears? So I think there's two branches, and it's not obvious which one we'll take. Branch number one is what I'll call the good future, and that's in the good future, it becomes – the tools of creation become more democratic and the costs go down. And everybody is, many, not everybody, many more people are empowered to, like, make their own stuff. And there's tools of distribution to get it to people. And everybody has a relationship with the people who make their stuff.
And you have this, like, massive decentralization of, like, that's like the Kickstarter and Etsy world. Where, like, if you want a table, there's billions of tables to choose from. And you find the designer you like. And you customize it. And it gets made and sent to you. That's the good future. And, like, I can see us going down that road where it's, like, all, like, these, like, awesome, like, artists and you have this innovation and local communities of people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The bad future is there's massive consolidation that the internet basically continues with, and this is the trend that's happening now. The internet continues to, like, close up.
Open protocols are discontinued for, like, security reasons. And you essentially have five companies that you're allowed to buy things from. and although there may be the technology is out there to support all kinds of different you know whatever payments and e-commerce really it's like if you can't really have a business unless you're on like amazon apple pay paypal you know whatever facebook currency like you know you sort of like have to pick one of these five and pursue them and it's just like that's like the bad future where like it's like there's just like massive consolidation way fewer options for for consumers
and only these huge Goliaths can compete. And that's what will happen when you don't need to have a Sears in every town.
MerlinAlex, how are you?
AlexI'm fine. Everything's fine. Everything's great. How are you, Merlin?
MerlinWhat are you most excited about? Oh, God. Oh, my God. He's selling a Maria Bamford character. The Janjaweed.
Speaker BI am quite excited. Well, it doesn't matter because Max is right and everything I'm saying is wrong
Alexand no one should be excited about this. But the little things that were kind of snuck in there, the fact that there is a new Siri voice is crazy. And to go along with that, this wasn't in the keynote, But at the talk show live where Craig was talking about the work they've done so that when you say, hey, dingus, not all of the devices in your house go like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
There's both crazy amounts of hardware and software improvements that are going into SiriKit so that the HomePod is going to know you're talking to it. did you hear this part where like they they're basically like if you're all on the same network and and there's problems along with that that i'm sure it's gonna take years to iron out but all of your devices are talking to each other locally and trying to figure out like which device are you trying to talk to is this are you in your home so you are you going obviously you
don't want to talk to the your ipad across the the room if you want to talk to the speaker across
Merlinthe room and do but doing the thing that i've i noticed and i'll listen to the final one when it comes out but also just so there's all these ways where they could do this a lot more simply like there are there are easier ways to solve this problem but in but there's at least two layers that make it super interesting one is the functional layer of being smart about smart and convenient about the way that this thing captures what it's doing. But then every single thing they do is so much further complicated by the privacy stuff. I think that's what makes everything so much more difficult
and why they shy away from introducing features. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. I honestly, when Craig says that, I believe him. I think they are very, very serious about that. But that adds, when they talk about the way that it does the metadata, not to change the topic, but what I'm excited about is syncing the metadata. and they're only syncing the face information that you've overtly put in because they don't want to be sending the wrong thing all over the place and screwing up the truth.
But did you get that? That like they're doing, what they're doing is so much further complicated by trying to make it even better from a convenience standpoint, but then on top of that, including the privacy stuff, that it gets really complicated and difficult.
AlexThat was kind of the whole subtext of both the many parts of the keynote and the talk show live, which will be in show notes, is that this is very much the year of privacy. There's a reason that they spent a half an hour talking about Safari and why Safari is such a good browser and why Safari is still exciting and we can still be excited about browsers because that is the bad future that I see
is we are all... all, I kept saying that those other companies, that other company that has all of your information and all, all of your data. And I have kind of surrendered to it. I am in that world and that's, that's fine. But like, I think about it. I'm like, do I want my kids to have a Google email address? Like, yeah, sure. Yeah. That's going to happen, but okay. Do I want all of their, uh, everything they buy to to be there do i want like all of uh do i want every photo they take to live in there
like are they going to be taking picture of the cat and then their dick is on google like uh there's
Merlinit's also like the more the more real i also worry i love ifttt but like i also start to think about the ways that we authenticate with so many different places and and then like authenticate with this other layer of meta services that hook these together i mean this is kind of parallel to what you're describing. Yeah. You know, do you want your kids to have their dick pics online? But the other part is like, there's so now I sound like Gary, but you're introducing a lot of, you're introducing a lot of vectors here, you know, all of these things. So what I'm trying to say is to all of these things, there is this benefit of saying like, you know, will we reach
a point where it's, this is an honest question. Will we reach a point where it's extremely clear that there's only one sort of all in one platform that we could trust our stuff with that if we got, if we needed to, we could push a big red button and make it all go away. And I don't think there's anybody that could do that but Apple. And I think that could end up becoming a big value. Do you want to live in that world, though?
Speaker AI am in that world. I'm already in that world. No, you have an echo in your house. At least there's some competition.
MerlinOh, no, no, no. To your point about competition. No, no, absolutely. I'm glad there's competition, for sure. But for example, without going into too much triangulation, my home and my office are close enough that my canary proximity awareness gets screwed up. So it can detect, think that I'm at my office because the signal gets a little bit off, but it's just enough that like, it'll be confused. And suddenly my canary camera fires off at home. And I don't like that. I don't even want the thing on when I'm at home. And like, I'm thinking of, you know,
making this a feature request, but like, this seems so obvious to me. when you're figuring out whether I'm at home, yes, use my location on the phone. That's fine. But wouldn't it be even easier to figure out if I'm at home if this device is on this network? Like if this device, when this device is on this network, shut everything down. That to me, now to me, that seems incredibly obvious. It must not be that obvious because they haven't done it. But nobody wants these things firing off. Now, as far as the competition part,
just finally and quickly, I think the competition part is super duper important. It's just that right now, I guess when I saw the results, I forget where I read this. Somebody was posting the usage stats on the various voice services. Maybe you know where that is, Alex. I was surprised that Echo's in like third. I thought Echo would be far and away like toward the front. But just by dint of being on so many devices, Google has a lot more users. And I guess Siri has enough users and that it makes a big difference. But I think that competition is a huge factor.
And I hope healthy competition keeps everybody smart and honest.
AlexI was actually surprised to see the HomePod. I keep wanting to call them Siri speakers. But the reason they showed that is for the public.
Developers can't and won't do anything with it until the fall when we know more.
MerlinRight.
AlexBut that was very much what Max hates about the keynote is all of these little boring details that for 6,000 of us here is incredibly, incredibly exciting.
MaxBut put them on a fucking website.
MerlinDon't, don't, don't. But that's part of the story, Max. It's not just a leave behind. It's not a PDF you just stick into the packet. It's critical to understand it.
MaxApple is about what the person can do with the computer, not what the capabilities of the computer are.
MerlinBut this is what the developer can do with the computer. And that's a very important story to tell the developers. And it telegraphs your dedication to the technology platform. That's something that you don't want to go bury in a bunch of bullets. If you've done something really innovative with this iMac Pro, like letting them know about that, not only are they going to want that computer now, finally, but like they're seeing that there's a dedication to the technology platform. I mean, that's part of the story.
MaxI think the AR stuff was cool. I think that was one of the best demos that they had in the whole presentation.
MerlinIt was well chosen and well-
MaxIt was a very cool demo. And I could see that people would do something with AR before I could see. I could see that regular, normal civilians would use AR in their life before they would use VR.
MerlinOh, I totally agree. In terms of practical use, like for a consumer, I totally agree. I mentioned this on Back to Work, but I used to have a really cool app. This is, gosh, in the early days, it was an AR app where basically you held it up in landscape and panned around and would show you stuff like points of interest on Wikipedia or, you know, bars. This is before, you know, this was such a common thing. And I instantly thought, that's such a great idea. Or even, I mean, this sounds silly, but even think about what you could do with, my daughter and I love these different sky apps, like Skyview, like things to look at the sky and the stars. Like think what you could do with stuff like that. But the VR thing, my thing with the VR is,
that one is I'm sensitive about VR because of how much I personally don't care about it and don't want it. And so I'm trying to be extra super duper, I'm virtue signaling, as you say, about VR because I realize the importance of the technology being there. Like one part of what you have to do in any kind of a sales job is to overcome objections. So sometimes that's a fear, uncertainty, doubt thing. But one thing you've got to do is you've got to convince people that they don't need to be worried about your product line. And I think that's a lot of what they did was like is basically saying, hey, look, all of you people on all of these podcasts saying you're not going to buy a Mac because it can't do VR.
OK, we're overcoming that objection. I think that's it. It's a big it's a sales job not to sell computers. It's a sales job for the platform. And I think that's a very important role.
MaxI'll say this is so boring. I'll say one other thing about the keynote that I thought was interesting was I think there's been this, I don't know, maybe like a hot take or just like people. It sort of passes for common sense in the Apple world that iOS and macOS are converging and that at some point in the future they'll be the same operating system. And you'll sort of like the line between iPad and laptop blurs. You've heard people talk about this, right?
MerlinYeah. And which way is it going? I mean, the conventional wisdom had been that iOS, you know, the functions of iOS are coming to Mac OS, not so much vice versa. And then the big surprise with iPad was that some very Mac OS-like features are now making it into iPad.
MaxYeah, I just found that exciting. It's the first time for me that I've always been a little bit skeptical of that because I'm like, I just don't see how you could smash these operating systems together and have them good.
Speaker ALike, don't fuck it up. Don't make it slow.
MerlinDon't make it weird. Don't make it so that I've got to have a mouse to use it, right? I mean, don't make me use this in a way that's not on Google.
MaxYeah, and I can just see it now because what's interesting is like with the dock down there and multitasking and all of that and drag and drop, what I can start to see is that fundamentally what's the difference is like the atomic unit of use on macOS is the file. And when you open it up, you see your files on your desktop and you see like an icon of the hard drive and that's where you get to your files. And that's been a metaphor for how computing works since we've had personal computers of like, okay, here's your files.
And how you sort of organize them and open them is the metaphor of computing. And I can start to see where it's not that different that instead of the atomic unit being your file, that on iOS the atomic unit is the app. And I can start to imagine a world where there's basically a toggle where it's like when you turn your device on, do you want to see your files or your apps?
It's not that different. It's an interesting idea.
MerlinIt would default to apps. But why wouldn't it? But what if you could say, I want a Finder-like experience because I'm all about it. Like if you're a lawyer and you're all about the files, that kind of makes sense.
MaxHonestly, I know that having your files as the atomic unit of the interaction between the human and the computer, it's what we're all comfortable with and it's how we all think about pro-computing, but I don't know that it's that great. No one ever sat down and decided that was the best way that everything should work forever. It's just sort of –
MerlinIt's because – exactly. It's like that's what we could do was have these directories.
MaxDo you know the thing about the width of the highway has to do with the horseshoes?
MerlinTurns out. No, I don't know that one. Tell me.
MaxI don't know if this is probably apocryphal, but I just like – it's just a fun story of like that trails in England were built so that there could be like two horses could pass each other. on the trail, like one person going one way and the other person going the other way. And like the width of the horse, like the, was like, they would measure it in like the horseshoes of like the number of shoes between the horse's hooves or whatever. And then when you had cars, the width of the car was like designed on the, to fit on the
trail that was made for the horses. And then when they built the interstate highway system, they built it to accommodate the width of the cars. Oh, and then, and then now they have. Oh, so I see what you're saying.
MerlinSo these initial little – these things that didn't seem important at the time end up having a huge – in the same way that we – Cut the ends off the roast. Cut the ends off the roast. Internet wouldn't have gotten popular without dial-up, but that's about the last way you'd actually want to use it.
MaxYeah, and I forgot the final one, which is pretty good too, which is – and I also don't even know if this is true. But the end of the story that I always hear is like – and then when they were designing like jumbo jets, like whatever, the 747, that was constrained by the width of a highway because those things are designed in an emergency to be able to land on an interstate highway.
I hope that's true. So the design of the biggest jet is constrained by the size of a horseshoe in a way that was never planned. No one decided it would be that way.
MerlinListen, listen, if any of this is not true, don't tell us because let us have nice things for once.
AlexPlease don't. Please don't. I want this story. I want this.
Speaker AWhat have you already purchased or pre-purchased? I am a real piece of shit, and I bought the new iPad.
MaxIt's in my basket right now. I mean, I hope these... I've never sold an iPad because I've never... I've actually never had an iPad. I've never turned around an iPad purchase.
MerlinAre you actually going to sell this? People always say this so they don't sound like they're rich. Are you actually going to sell your iPad?
MaxSo I have an iPad Pro that I just got a year ago. What am I going to do with it? I don't have any use for it. Give it to your cat. To play games on?
AlexHonestly?
MaxNo, I can't. I have to say. I got a big, it has a big storage on it.
Speaker AIt has cell, do you do cellular on your iPad? I don't always use it, but I always buy it.
AlexYes. That's the, yeah.
Speaker AI always buy it. It's like a massive convenience when you need it. This is, now this is, you talk about cutting the ends off the roast.
MerlinWhat you're seeing with me and my brokenness, why I always buy not even the best that I can afford, I always buy the best, even if I can't afford it. Because that's what got into our heads was every time it's a big deal when a new Mac, because this is back when it was just Macs, right? So when a new Mac comes out, buy the fastest one with the biggest hard drive, with the most RAM, because nobody in their entire life has ever said, it sucks that I have so much RAM. Like you're always going to be behind eventually in that and you will have more usage out of that.
So there's not that many things in life where I'm that much of a ding-a-ling, but I still think that's not a bad way to go. Not least because it's very clear with Apple to me that when they do stuff, they do stuff for a reason. There was no need for the iPad Air 2 to be as powerful as it was until suddenly it needed to be. And you go, oh, I see. That's because you're going to be able to have these two apps showing up at one time. so if apple puts out a 512 or 5 or 500 meg storage space fuck yeah i'm gonna buy it like they're gonna they're gonna unlike the apple tv i do believe that there is a reason that it's that
big and you could put daddy's plex on there that's all i'm saying well i'm very concerned about
Maxthe laptop i'm specifically one of the things in the back of my head is the laptop ban that's allegedly going to happen on airplanes and i fly a lot all the time internationally oh that's such an interesting angle. I've been thinking to myself, when I fly, I guess I get anxious when I fly. I don't know. It's actually not the flying that bothers me. I have a fear of being bored on an airplane for nine hours. It's like a weird thing to be scared of, but I really don't want to be trapped inside my own head for nine hours on a flight with nothing to do.
AlexI can't empathize or understand at all. It's not the flying.
Speaker AI don't think it's... Why would somebody have anxiety about being bored? That's really weird. I always thought that was weird. Is that not weird?
MerlinIt has a term. T-H, this looks Greek. Th-a-s-a-phobia.
MaxWe should explore that on a future episode because it's probably my number one anxiety. But anyway, I'm very worried about being...
MerlinSitting, sitting, sitting. It's called sitting fear being idle fear, idleness fear, or boredom.
MaxOh, I mean, I truly have that. And that's why long flights tend to freak me out a little bit. It's not the being on the airplane. It's that I'm worried I'll go insane because I have nothing to do or whatever. So I like to bring lots of stuff. I like to have a lot of options. Generally, I bring something to read. I bring some movies to watch. I bring some TV shows to watch. I bring some podcasts. I like a lot of different options so I can prevent myself from having to truly be introspective in any way and experience any emotions or have any meaningful personal insight.
MerlinWhat about invasive thoughts?
Speaker ADo you ever worry about invasive thoughts?
MaxNo, I don't want to think about that right now.
MerlinNo, like a thought that you don't want to have that keeps coming up over and over?
MaxI don't want to think about that right now. I don't want anyone to think about it. I don't want anyone to think about that. So it really stresses me out. So my, like, MO when I go on a flight is I download a bunch of shit on iTunes and put it on my laptop. And, you know, I sit there and watch movies or whatever on my laptop. But, boy, if I can't have the laptop, like, I don't really have a good, like, mechanism. Like, if I don't get a good iPad with a lot of storage capacity, like, I don't have a way to sort of watch stuff on a plane. and they don't even have a fucking video
you don't even get anything on a plane anymore I don't know if you've flown recently but on these international flights they have the cheapest shit in the world it's like one of these plastic clips where you can clip your own iPad into the back of the seat there's no screen there
Merlinif we were going to get somewhat Thomas Friedman about this or Ron Johnson about this it's interesting to think about this confluence of things that are happening one is the reported drop in national and especially international travel within the U.S. There was one number being thrown around that it's gone down at least 10% since this administration. Now, add to that, and this sounds silly, boo-hoo for business people, but I think one thing is if you fly a lot, you're TSA pre or whatever, it's easy for you to get around. You get miles.
There are people who fly just to get the miles. I know that that is a thing. But also another big part of it is getting your work done, being able to do the stuff you do on a plane. There's all kinds of things that make me wonder, like, I don't know, this is just going to be, I think within five or 10 years, this could end up being one of those James Burke kind of things where you're like the surprising relationship between Donald Trump becoming president and people flying less. Like I could totally see that
Maxhappening. Well, anyway, so that's, that's part of my reasoning for, for getting the big iPad.
MerlinSo you got the 10 point, whatever inch, well, how much capacity? Yeah. Cause I want to load it up
Maxwith all the media that I, let's say, purchased.
MerlinYou're welcome. Alex, what have you pre-ordered?
AlexNothing.
MerlinGood for you.
MaxCan you, so you're definitely going to get one to two air home balls.
Speaker AWhen it's available, you get the homeboys.
AlexOh, yeah. I mean, see, that's the thing. I need to start selling powder so I can get the new pretty iPad. I am definitely going to get a HomePod.
MaxOoh, now it's the guy with the round glasses, and he did a one-sleeve roll, and he did this bit with his daughter, sold her company. This was a bad demo. Bad demo. Didn't like it.
MerlinI'm sorry. I know this is probably way off topic. What fucking part of the presentation was it?
MaxWhat product was he talking about? It was the software demo of the new iPad OS. and he did one sort of roll of his sleeves and he had the whole bit about his daughter sold her company for $100 million.
Speaker AThey should make it easier to identify the speaker by how they do their sleeves. They always look like a fucking magician who's about to show you a trick. What is that? Just button or don't button?
MerlinWell, you see, I don't want to out myself, but I do kind of a Ricky Jay thing around the house. I'm not proud of this. This is mainly around the house, which is that I now, I have two different wrist devices and I don't like things touching them. So I will do one big turn. This does not look good. It's a little bit Bob Fosse. I will do one, or Bob Fosse as you say. I'll do one big turn and get a big boy sleeve. I'll have like five inches of wrist and I look a little bit like Ricky Jay. Now how would you rule on that? You would say don't go on stage with that,
like with high water.
Speaker AThey hang down like a wizard's robes?
MaxLike a wizard's sleeve. gray drapes well christ someone say something funny so we oh my god we recorded for two hours yep fuck
Merlincomey comey's uh opening statement is available isn't this isn't it tomorrow
Speaker Ayeah you might want to check this out max yeah are we doing the podcast or are we talking about Comey, what's happening? We never get to be relevant.
MaxComey, my iPad is too slow. I don't know. Everyone's just silent. Are we all reading Comey's statement? Mm-hmm. Oh, my God, the pee tape is real. Oh, my God. He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed that he had been recorded in Russia.
Speaker AOh, my God, the pee tape. Yeah, you think it's real?
MaxIt's real.
Speaker AHmm.
MaxOopsie, oopsie. Happens to the best of us. I mean, whom among it? There but for the grace of God go I, right? I don't want all the time. I don't want all the time. Listen, whom among us would want all of the recordings of the times that we've had hookers to pee in the president's bed exposed?
MerlinI wish I had a couple, just for the record, so I could show it to my daughter someday. But I don't want all of them to come out. We all say things when we're paying people to piss on each other that we regret.