The Talk Show Transcripts

Merlin Mann: Had a heck of a day. I’ve had a very interesting 30 hours.

John Gruber: [laughs]

Mann: Yesterday morning, we woke up early. I knew I had jury duty at the Superior Court.

Gruber: Wow!

Mann: Yeah, yeah.

Gruber: On voting day?

Mann: I only found out finally yesterday that I’m registered under two addresses and basically that’s why I get called constantly. And I’m jury crack. I always get called, I always get picked, and no matter what I say, they’re like, “Haha, that’s great, we could really use you.” So in this case, Superior Court — oh my god, what it’s going to be — long story short, we get up early, the three of us go to the polling station, my daughter drops in the ballot for Hillary Clinton. I go to jury duty, I narrowly, narrowly avoid a multi-month attempted murder jury duty.

Gruber: Oh... [laughs]

Mann: John Gruber, I’m literally rocking in my seat and making this noise, [in a distressed voice] “mhhn-mhhnnn”. I won’t drag this out, but basically I pleaded hardship. Even though they said they’re probably not going to let us off for that, I astoundingly got deferred. I walk up 6th street. Are you familiar with 6th street?

Gruber: I am. You know what, I am oddly familiar with 6th street in San Francisco.

Mann: You don’t unsee 6th street, you don’t forget 6th street.

Gruber: Right. [laughs]

Mann: I walk up 6th street, and it’s like a Godspeed You! Black Emperor song. It’s just a lot of people with sores and amputations, I saw a sobbing man pooping on the street, there’s a lot of screaming and dogs and it’s basically, it’s like the end of the world. And that was my morning up till about 11:30. So then I just went home and started rocking at home. I couldn’t even play Threes, I was just rocking, going “mhhn”. Because I’m already — I’m sorry, I’m monopolizing your show — I don’t want to make a big deal about it because I think it’s unseemly —

Gruber: It was a bad start, it was a bad start to a bad day.

Mann: And I hoped that those would all be good, good portents. But that was my morning and then, yeah — how are you feeling, are you having a good day?

Gruber: [laughs] No! Here’s the thing, I think you and I owe it to the world? We owe it to America, we’re going to do this show, and we’re going to do this show for everybody.

Mann: Okay. You don’t have to be an Apple fan.

Gruber: Are you with me so far?

Mann: Oh, I’m so with you. You’re going to get notes. [laughs]

Gruber: We’re going to get notes because we’re going to miss some people. We’re trying to scoop up everybody... we’re trying to... we’re... we... [sighs] I don’t know, we’ve got the scoop... we’re coming in for everybody...

Mann: [laughs] Are you having a holiday party there?

Gruber: Yeah! Oh...

Mann: [laughs, claps]

Gruber: I’m having a holiday party. Merlin, we’re coming in with the scoop, we’re coming in for everybody, we’re going to try to pick everybody up.

Mann: Yeah, okay.

Gruber: And we’re going to miss some people. There’s no doubt about it. There’s no way —

Mann: John Gruber, you can’t get every person, that’s the first lesson you learn.

Gruber: No way, and we’re going to miss some people. In my opinion, this is the most special episode of this podcast I’ve ever recorded. I’ve recorded many Star Wars... [laughs]

Mann: Isn’t that still your record holder?

Gruber: Oh, of course, Star Wars episodes are about eight hours long. And I mean, we’ve had Harrison Ford on, we’ve had Mark Hamill on —

Mann: He was a lot nicer than I expected.

Gruber: — Carrie Fisher, I mean, some very special guests for those episodes. Nothing is going to compare to this episode of the show and I would tell you —

Mann: No pressure! [laughs]

Gruber: No, no pressure. Well, there was only one person —

Mann: We’re trying to scoop up everybody, but we’re going to miss some people.

Gruber: Well, I would tell you this, I’m going to be honest, open kimono, I’m opening the kimono here.

Mann: [laughs]

Gruber: [sighs] I’m not happy with the election results. I honestly fear for the state of Western democracy. I absolutely, positively had too much to drink last night. And when I woke up this morning, I thought, there’s only one person I can ask to be on my show today and it’s Merlin Mann.

Mann: Hello!

Gruber: And I will say this, I reached out to you —

Mann: For this very special emergency episode.

Gruber: Right. Because I’ll tell you what, I am, in general, I try to go once a week and once a week would’ve put me like a couple of days before the election, and a couple of days ago I was too pre-election obsessed, and I thought, nobody wants to hear pre-election obsessed John Gruber talk about the keyboard on the new MacBook Pro, right? I mean, who the fuck cares about the goddamn key travel on the MacBook Pro two or three days before the end of Western civilization? So I thought, I can’t do it. I probably should’ve. I should’ve just done like a regular show, just called Moltz up again, you know what I mean? Couldn’t do it.

Mann: You also, you as a person, you enjoy a winning franchise with a story.

Gruber: Ohh, I do, I do.

Mann: And one thing I’ve learned from you and I share with a lot of people was that distinction you made one time, I think, on this program, talking about how there’s numbers people in baseball and there’s story people, with regard to fans.

Gruber: Yes, right.

Mann: I still think about that a lot, and it did have an effect on how I think about sports as a thing. I’m not trying to take the piss, I mean, you like the Yankees, you like, what, Cowboys, right?

Gruber: Yep.

Mann: You like these teams with a storied past who are going to win. So it makes sense for you to wait until the inevitable win to be able to talk about it in a way that’s — I don’t know, more celebratory? Why be jittery on air. Because it all seemed like it was going in the right direction. Mostly. Mostly, I mean, I don’t even know where to begin.

Gruber: I’ll just tell you this. I was thinking last night, and early on, I started tweeting less because I started thinking like, you know what I like to do, I think people who, certainly people who listen to the show, but people who follow me on Twitter, certainly know, I like to tweet during sporting events I care about. And it is a similar feeling in my stomach when there’s a sporting event I care about and an election I care about. But then there’s a difference, and the difference is that sports don’t mean anything, and that’s kind of the fun part about sports, and I know that there’s —

Mann: Everything that’s wonderful about sports is what the fan brings to it. You can choose to bring all different kinds of history and expectations and import, but you get to pick what you’re going to be very emotional about, and on some rational level, you get to decide why those stakes are important to you.

Gruber: Right, like, if six months ago, you — something happened, and you had a terrible head injury, and you went into a coma, but you’re a terrific baseball fan, and you don’t wake up until like the middle of next year. You wake up, and you’re like, “Who won the World Series?” And somebody tells you, “Well, it was the Cubs.” The state of the world outside the word C-U-B-S, “Cubs”, is actually not any different than if they said, “Oh my god, it was the Cleveland Indians.”

Mann: I feel like I only hear this — but a lot of people say that was probably one of the — definitely one of the better World Series games, some people would put it in their top 50 games.

Gruber: Yeah! No, there are people who would put it in their top 5 games. I mean, it was an amazing game. But the truth of the matter is that outside of the baseball park, it doesn’t really matter and that is — so I do, I woke up yesterday and I thought, you know what, this feels like when the Yankees are in the World Series. I’ve got that feeling, I care, I can’t sleep, I’m jittery. Except, I know that this time it cares. In one regard it makes me say, this is why sports are great, and in the other regard it makes me say, this is why a lot of smart people don’t give two craps about sports because sports are actually nonsense. And I kind of feel like this election brings that into focus.

Mann: Yeah. I mean, I don’t like getting involved in a lot of political — I don’t like talking about politics in public. I have my feelings about all kind of stuff in life, and who knows, maybe it’s time for me to talk more about it, but I feel like, generally speaking, the cost-benefit analysis on — having a strong public opinion that’s unambiguous, and you argue about it a lot, and you encourage people to pick or continue fights with you, that’s just not my personality, it’s not how I want to live, it’s not who I want to be, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have those strong opinions. So my cards on the table. And I’m that guy, I’m that guy that used to say, get rid of all your news tabs, stop following stuff — time and attention. But I have started listening to probably half a dozen podcasts about politics this election year, some of which come out every day, or twice or three times a week. I’ve been utterly steeped in that. But at almost every step of the way, even when things were not looking great for the Democratic candidate, there was still part of me that said, I think I understand enough about the bones of this country to know how this will end up. And on top of that, I see enough stuff from different sources of data that tells me it’ll turn out okay. Is this going to be the best election ever? No. But I swear to Christ, even up until yesterday, that confidence in the American bones is — I think I might’ve gotten it wrong? And so when we were texting this morning, that’s kind of where I am. I’m not to angry yet, I’m not to fingerpointing, I’m not even to abject terror yet, I’m still stuck at sitting there in my living room with my family last night. My daughter was literally under a blanket, she put earplugs in and went under a blanket to read Wimpy Kid because she couldn’t take it anymore.

Gruber: I love the Wimpy Kid books.

Mann: Oh, there are better than you think. But watching that little drip, drip, drip and then seeing a state flip to red, and at first, when we walked up, I picked her up at school like I do, I said, “Hey, look, he’s got three on the board already, don’t worry, people knew he was going to get those, those are not giant electoral states.” She knows about this from school. But anyway, I don’t mean to prod along, but I’m here today because I’m not even to where I know I’m going to end up, I’m still — I’m just stunned by how wrong I was and how poorly I saw, and I think I’m going to be processing that for at least a few days. Words like “shock” and “surprise”, it sounds silly. I just listen to Keepin’ it 1600, which is a show I like a lot. And they’re just like, “We got every single bit of this wrong, and we feel bad that we told you not to wet the bed.” Now I’m just sitting here — I’m babbling, but I’m sitting here and I’m stunned with how much I got wrong, I’ll eventually try to figure out what I got wrong, but at this point it’s just an unconscionably large amount of assumptions that I had a fairly decent level of confidence in that I’m going to have to just rethink a whole bunch of things that make me very uncomfortable.

Gruber: Not for “let’s make sure everyone feels included” sake, but for “hey, everybody is sick of the divisive stuff”, is why I would love and I think you agree that this episode of the show should not be like, hey, Hillary should’ve won, Donald Trump is an asshole. I don’t want to divide people because everybody’s had enough of that and the time for that is over.

Mann: Not least because Democrats are the second most surprised party today.

Gruber: I agree, you’re right, I do think so too.

Mann: I don’t think most people in their hearts really believed this would go this way.

Gruber: I agree and I honestly think if we want to just for a moment get a little political —

Mann: [laughs]

Gruber: But seriously, Donald Trump’s win is not a Republican win, it’s a Trump win. What he is and what he represents and what drove his victory has almost nothing to do with the Republican Party. But I would like for this episode of the show to be for everybody, and I will just tell you that my son who is not, I wouldn’t think is political, because he’s 12 years old, he’s way too young to be political — before we sent him to bed last night, we’re watching the results, they were not, they were obviously heading towards where we are, and he said that his stomach felt bad. And I mean, it killed me because what am I going to say to him? [sighs]

Mann: I think kids pick up a lot from the people around them, particularly their parents, doesn’t mean they’re going to listen or put on their shoes, but they can read a lot of the emotional temperature and barometric pressure in the room. And we’ve talked a lot about this election at home, a lot, a lot, a lot, but I think the difference here is, it’s not that my team didn’t win, it’s that maybe I just don’t understand baseball anymore? And that’s a very different kind of thing to process, and I think, apart from the fact that we were both crying a little bit, which is never fun to do in front of your kid, it’s — I think there was definitely the sense that this was something very much different, it’s not like she sat and watched a bunch of presidential elections, but it felt like the stakes were higher than we had any idea. And then, god, what did Amy say today about, I mean, could you share what happened at his school?

Gruber: Yeah, well, the one thing was that we got a letter from the principal of the school, the head of the school, whatever they call the guy — we got an actual email that said like, “The rhetoric of the guy who won the presidential election is still no longer accepted at our school”, which is like —

Mann: That’s like when — did you get the creepy clown letter in October?

Gruber: Yes, we got the —

Mann: We got the creepy clown letter, and I remember thinking, oh my god, I know how busy our principal is, and I can’t believe that she had to take any amount of time from her day to acknowledge that there was such a thing as creepy clowns and then to feel the need or maybe the mandate, maybe it came down from the unified school district. But she had to say, there’s a couple of other things I’m not going to do today because I need to email everybody about creepy clowns. And you’re like, wow, that’s — just FYI, for my purposes, you don’t need to keep on the creepy clown bit, I trust you on the strength to just take care of that. But that’s something that your kid’s principal felt they needed to do.

Gruber: On that note... [laughs]

Mann: “You guys know Fracture!” [laughs]

Gruber: Let me take a break —

Mann: [laughs hysterically]

Gruber: — and tell you about our first friend.

Mann: If you’re going to have a holiday party, I feel like I should have one too. That’s just what we need, just need me to show up at my kid’s school in two hours just a liiittle bit drunk. [in a drunk voice] “Everything’s going to be fine, honey.”

Gruber: [laughs]

Mann: “Daddy’s just sleepy.”

Gruber: Today’s host of The Talk Show is Harry Caray. [laughs]

Mann: [laughs] “Hey, hey.”

Gruber: “Hey, hey.” [laughs] Seriously, we’re laughing because we’re crying, but I want to tell you about our g— [breaks into laughter]

Mann: You want me to take this one?

Gruber: — our good friends at Automatic.

Mann: Oh, love Automatic!

Gruber: It’s a small adapter, it turns your car into a smart connected car. They’ve just launched, I mean, seriously, within like the last month or so, the Automatic Pro, it’s a new version of the device they already sold that in addition to all the cool stuff it already does, it includes unlimited 3G online internet connection. Exactly, you think, well, that sounds too good to be true, well, look, your Kindle, Kindles have been doing this for years. I don’t know how they worked out the deal with the 3G providers, but the Automatic people did it. It’s a dingus, you plug it into your car, there’s a port on every car made since like 1997–1998, somewhere around there, there’s a port and that’s where when it says, like, you get a thing on your dashboard that says “A1 service due” or whatever, you don’t know what A1 service is. You take it into the car dealer, they plug a thing into this port and then it knows exactly what you need. Well, it turns out that’s just an oil change or whatever. Automatic lets you plug their dingus, they have a dingus, that’s what you buy. You plug it in and you get all that information, all the service information that your car can provide to a mechanic or a service provider, but instead you get it, you can — if it’s nonsense, if it’s just like, oh, you know, one of the lights is out or something like that, you can just turn it off, whatever you want to do. Otherwise though, it gives you so much information, it gives you information on your efficiency, on how you’re driving your car, it gives you information on fuel efficiency, all that stuff.

Mann: John, John, John, it does it all, it’s an app plus it’s a dingus, you did mention it’s a dingus, it’s a fantastic dingus.

Gruber: [laughs]

Mann: Here’s the thing, those fat cats in Detroit or Tokyo or wherever, no offense, I don’t want to be ping-pong, they never intended you to use that port for this, they say that’s for them, that’s for them, that’s their port, don’t use that. They [Automatic] are democratizing that port in a way that’s very important in our country right now. You get that dingus, you get that app, you plug it in, and you know what, you don’t have to think about it, you’re going to hear this — “beep” — that means it’s working. You can have it yell at you when you break, you can have it tell you, hey, quit driving so fast, you dork. Like John, for example, John lost his license now about five years ago —

Gruber: That’s true.

Mann: You were driving, I think you were driving 190 in a 30 mph zone.

Gruber: That, well, that was what they said I was doing.

Mann: Was it that fast? It was pretty fast.

Gruber: I don’t think that that’s true but that’s what they flagged me for. 105 in a 30 zone.

Mann: 105 in a 30, the speedometer only goes up so high. But you get this thing, it’ll automatically tag business trips for your expense purposes, it’ll do all of that and it will make you a better and more mindful driver, you don’t have to think about it, it just works. It also works with things like IFTTT, you can hook it up to all kinds of different things, you can have it turn your freaking lights on when you pull home. This thing is dynamite. Are you laughing at my tweet?

Gruber: I’m laughing because you’re the only person — I don’t know if anybody who listens to this podcast [drunkenly struggles with the word] regulllarrrly —

Mann: [laughs quietly]

Gruber: — has noticed, there’s a couple of regulars who come back. And you’re the only one who ever breaks in and helps with the sponsor read.

Mann: Yeah. [sarcastically] Thanks, John Moltz.

Gruber: Well, Moltz will never do it. Moltz will sit there and text me while I’m doing it, and he’ll give me notes on how the sponsor read could be better, but he won’t break in and say anything.

Mann: Sickening. Sickening.

Gruber: Moltz won’t say a goddamn word. He’s the worst.

Mann: I use this [Automatic], I love it, I bought this dingus with my own goddamn money, and we use it, and I look at it, and it is a terrific device.

Gruber: All right. Where do you go to find out more? Go to automatic.com/thetalkshow. There you go, there’s the [phenoms?] you need. My thanks to them. Great sponsor. I love them. I’ve got it plugged into my car, I’ve got the app, and honestly, it has gotten me to take the lead foot off the gas pedal. A little bit.

Mann: Oh, that’s, that’s so important. So did you ever get your — you probably shouldn’t say that.

Gruber: No, I don’t have a license, I haven’t had a license in six or seven years.

Mann: But the Automatic becomes a kind of ad hoc license. It’s license to be safe. They can just run with that. Did you get my text?

Gruber: Yes.

Mann: Can I tweet it?

Gruber: [laughs] Yeah, absolutely.

Mann: Okay.

Gruber: My hope would be that people — I mean, there’s not that many people who listen to this show, my hope would be that people are not going to report this to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.

Mann: No, no.

Gruber: We’ll keep it on the QT that I continue to drive without a valid PA driver’s license.

Mann: Yeah. You know, I don’t think that has to be a big deal. If you’re just moving the car or let’s say what if you had to go somewhere important. Should you need a license for that?

Gruber: No. I don’t think so.

Mann: What if it’s a fairly short trip, or better still, what if it’s a very long trip where you’re going to be on a highway. Everybody knows highways are safer.

Gruber: Oh, very safe. I mean, you could fall asleep on the highway, right? I mean, people who have the Teslas, they hit a button, and you could just go to sleep.

Mann: Yeah, yeah. Oh boy.

Gruber: I got a catalog the other day, just yesterday I think it was. I got a catalog, I don’t even know what I bought that put me on the list, but it came addressed to me. I got a catalog for a Radio Flyer. Now, you know Radio Flyer, right?

Mann: Oh, I got the same thing. With the Tesla?

Gruber: With the Tesla, yeah.

Mann: What are we on? How did we get this?

Gruber: You know what, maybe it’s this show, I don’t know.

Mann: They send it to — you know what it is, clicky keyboards, fussy coffee, fizzy water, has podcast. They call that an array.

Gruber: I got a Radio Flyer catalog —

Mann: We’ve gotten two of them!

Gruber: — with a delightful young boy riding in a Tesla, like a fake Tesla Radio Flyer wagon. [laughs]

Mann: Kids love Teslas.

Gruber: And I thought about taking a picture of it and making a joke, and I couldn’t make a joke, I couldn’t figure out the joke because what are you going to joke about? Zero emissions?

Mann: Self-driving, yeah.

Gruber: Zero emissions, it’s not actually a joke, that’s actually kind of cool. I couldn’t figure out the joke.

Mann: We get a lot of catalogs, John. We get a lot of political things, we had, I think it was, let me check here, 175 ballot initiatives yesterday.

Gruber: Oh my god, oh.

Mann: John, the Board of Elections had to provide guidance on how to fold your ballot to put in the envelope so that you didn’t end up spending like $11 on postage. They had guidance on that, I think they had, like, a QuickTime movie you could watch. Crazy days.

Gruber: [laughs] We had two — we don’t call them ballot initiatives here in Pennsylvania, I forget what we call them, it’s not like California. But we had two things to vote on that was sort of — the sort of thing that I don’t think you should be deciding by direct democracy, I think that this is exactly why we have a legislator. So one of them was, should we raise — in Pennsylvania, like many states, a surprising number of states if you just Google it, if you’re a state judge, when you reach the age of 70, it’s a mandatory retirement, you’re out.

Mann: That’s probably a pretty old law. From the time when being 70 was kind of a big deal.

Gruber: It seems like it, and on the ballot was an initiative, I don’t know what you call it, but whatever they call it here in PA, to raise the age to 75.

Mann: That’s so weirdly just slightly less arbitrary.

Gruber: Right, it’s not to get rid of it, exactly.

Mann: “Ah, come on, let’s make it 76.” Oh, okay, that’ll fix it. Done.

Gruber: [laughs] That’s exactly what I thought when I saw it. Do you want to get rid of this age thing, yes or no. I can kind of see that, but 70 to 75, it’s like, what? Where do these numbers come from? But we got a thing because we’re registered, we happen to be registered Democrats, I don’t think people are surprised to hear me say that.

Mann: [ironically] Huh, interesting.

Gruber: But we got something from our local Democratic word with a suggested ballot, like, here’s how we think you should vote, here’s everything that’s up, here’s who you should vote for. And it says like, President, you should vote for Hillary Clinton. Senator, Katie McGinty, that’s our senator who was running against this dipshit Pat Toomey, and so on as it goes down the ballot. But then it gets down to these ballot initiatives, and we only had two. And on the one that said “should we raise the mandatory retirement age for judges from 70 to 75”, it said, vote no, in other words, don’t raise the retirement age. It said, “Vote no —

Mann: Oh, that confusing language.

Gruber: — it’s already hard enough to get rid of bad judges.” That’s what it said.

Mann: What?

Gruber: I swear to god, Merlin. I’m not making it up. [laughs]

Mann: Doesn’t somebody have to approve these things? Do you just get to paste it up and it just goes in, whatever you have to say?

Gruber: Well, the next best thing was that the next question was “should the city of Philadelphia raise $185,000,000 in debt to finance infrastructure improvements”. And the answer on how should you vote, it was blank. It was blank!

Mann: What? Did they forget to fill it in?

Gruber: [laughs] They forgot to fill it in!

Mann: “Forget about it. Highways are for dicks!” Oh gosh, we had a lot. “Should people be allowed to sleep in tents on the sidewalk?”

Gruber: [laughs] No! I would vote no, I would vote no.

Mann: It’s very controversial, they don’t have anywhere else to sleep. You go down Division street, and it’s like a one long KOA under a highway. You got the, oh, the grocery tax, dun-dun-dun. [in a movie trailer voice] “In a world...”

Gruber: Here’s what I think they should do —

Mann: Okay. Just to be clear, we’re trying to scoop everybody in here, we’re going to miss a few people, but I think it’s really important that we try to really find some answers.

Gruber: I’m giving you an honest answer, here’s what I honestly think. I think they should drive buses, special buses around the city, and you find anybody sleeping on a sidewalk in a tent, you just scoop them up in a bus.

Mann: Where do they go after that? Do they stay on the bus? Are they allowed to get off?

Gruber: [laughs] They can get off wherever they want.

Mann: This may be closer to what we see in the next four years than you think.

Gruber: Whenever they wake up, they can get off if they want.

Mann: It’s going to be tremendous.

Gruber: They can get off wherever they want but... [laughs]

Mann: Okay, so the bus comes along, you scoop up the tent people and —

Gruber: And I’ll tell you what, this is an opinion that I would not have had if I hadn’t spent a lot of time in downtown San Francisco over the last ten years. But I’ll just tell you that there are people sleeping on the sidewalks in San Francisco who make the city an unpleasant place to be.

Mann: There are people living, it’s important, these are not people who take a nap, these are people who do not have anywhere else to go.

Gruber: We’re trying to have fun, I’m not trying to make light of a desperate situation, but —

Mann: People already ride on the public transit, you can ride on the public transit, you’ve got a fairly comfortable place to be.

Gruber: What I’m suggesting though would be a bus that has a toilet. [laughs]

Mann: Oh, nice, okay. You’ve got like a stadium restroom on wheels. John, would they have shower facilities at all? Maybe a small library? Could you get a LaCroix?

Gruber: I would like all of those things. I would vote for all of that.

Mann: You get a Google bus, you get a nice Google bus.

Gruber: I would vote for all of those things, I would vote for the shower facility, I would vote for the small library, and honestly, I would vote for the tax increase that would pay for it. Honestly, I do feel like that would make for a better city.

Mann: Well, if you never find a house, you should come out here. Too soon?

Gruber: Too soon. There’s an awful lot of people, and again, I’m not trying to rub it in anybody’s face, I’m not trying to say who — I voted for Hillary Clinton, I think a lot of people who listen to this probably voted for Hillary Clinton. I’m not trying to say she should’ve won, I’m not trying to rub it in anybody’s face if you voted for the other guy. But there’s an awful lot of people who voted for Donald Trump who I would really like for them to spend a day at, like, 3rd and Market in San Francisco. Just stand on the corner for 12 hours.

Mann: Yeah, yeah. That gets at a lot of the problem. We don’t have to go into this, but did you look at that Washington Post demographic breakdown?

Gruber: Yes, I did.

Mann: Boy, this is going to be an interesting few years. Basically, pretty cool — I don’t know if I could find the link now, I’ll send it to you here.

Gruber: I got it, I got it. I’ll put it in the show notes.

Mann: Essentially, I think these are exit polls so take it with a grain of salt, but basically they go in and do a full demographic breakdown, starting with the basic numbers but then going through gender, race, education, party, age. And I think it’s a pretty good infographic that really tells a hell of a story that I think many of us need to really digest. I love the fact that — so basically, they’ve got a line of like — so you say, for example, they could say “sex”, I say “gender” because I’m woke — what percentage voted blue and then I think that’s reflected — so basically, area of the circle is based on the size of the demographic group and percentage of vote obtained, so you actually get three different very interesting data points. You get the who did what, you get the how that went, and then you get the what percentage of the total amount do they represent. And therein is quite a story.

Gruber: It’s a fascinating thing to scroll through because it works on a couple of dimensions where the circles are the size of the group —

Mann: So like the total number per capita, like how many people are involved, right.

Gruber: Right, it’s like you see how far apart the two groups are, but the size of these circles lets you know, like, sex: men vs. women. Well, the groups are obviously humongous because almost everybody is either a man or a woman. And the race one, where it’s, you know, how did white people vote, how did black people vote. It shows you how many of the people who actually voted are white or black or Hispanic etc., etc. So you hear these numbers, you hear, here’s the numbers, this is from their page you’re saying, and we’ll put it in the show notes, but the black vote went 88 percent to the Democrats, 8 percent to Donald Trump, 2 percent to Gary Dingus or whatever his name is.

Mann: Yeah, but the size of that circle —

Gruber: Right, lets you know.

Mann: — ain’t that big.

Gruber: Right, you say, 88 to 8, holy hell, that’s a blowout and then you see the size of the circle and —

Mann: A pie is always round.

Gruber: Right, exactly. It’s a really interesting infographic in my opinion. It explains the election in a way that feels true to me. Obviously not in the way that is true, like, “Oh, this is the truth I want to hear”, because the election did not turn out the way that I wanted but —

Mann: Sometimes when I get real worked up, I take pictures of my TV, and so I just sent you an image from last night with a great state of Pennsylvania in which you live, and at the point this was taken — I don’t know if you’ve got that in your messages.

Gruber: I got it.

Mann: Look at that breakdown. So they’re breaking down voting for the two parties, presidential candidates by city, suburbs, and rural. City: 73/24 Clinton. Suburb: 48 percent dead even. Rural: 72 percent Trump.

Gruber: Yep. I remember all the way back to 1992, and it was, how old was I then? Jesus Christ, I was only, I think that was the first election I could vote in.

Mann: Oh wow.

Gruber: I was, like, a freshman in college. But I remember hearing James Carville on TV, at the time James Carville was like the horse whisperer in Bill Clinton’s ear, he’s the guy telling him what to do. And James Carville described Pennsylvania as Philadelphia on one side, Pittsburg on the other, and Alabama in the middle. And as a lifelong Pennsylvanian, I was like, oh yeah, that’s exactly right. And as a college kid who had just moved from that sort of Alabama middle to one of the cities on one of the sides of the state, I was like, yeah, that’s exactly right, that is totally right.

Mann: Scott Simpson always used to say the same thing, he comes from a very rural community, he said he felt absolutely no allegiance to any of those two cities, coming from the middle.

Gruber: Yeah, I believe Scott is from Lancaster or near Lancaster.

Mann: I should remember. All I remember is that he was in a Christian rock band.

Gruber: [laughs]

Mann: Company of Praise. They abbreviated C-O-P.

Gruber: If not Lancaster, it’s close enough. And everybody I know from Pennsylvania, it’s actually one of those things where it’s like, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or Republican, you hear that and you’re like, “Oh yeah, yeah, that sounds right.” Even if you’re pro-Trump, if you’re somebody from Pennsylvania who voted for Trump, you’re like, “Yeah, that sounds right, it’s dirty liberals on Pittsburg and Philadelphia and good people in the middle.” And it’s absolutely, it’s striking, the picture you just sent me is amazing.

Mann: There was that time last night where it was — trying to do the translation on time — but it was past my daughter’s bedtime, but it was at the point of, like, “ohh”. You know what I should not have been looking at? It’s that stupid New York Times little speedometer thing. That was the death of me.

Gruber: It was for me too, it absolutely was.

Mann: It was Clinton — I’ll say some names, I guess. But it was Clinton 82 for a really long time. Then it was like “beep, beep, boop” [?] down a little bit and you get to 50/50 — whaaat? And by the time I was getting up, at one point then it said greater than 95 for the Republican candidate. And that was around the time when — so I was going back and forth between CNN and CBS because CBS has John Dickerson who is flatly the best, he was so good on that show.

Gruber: I wish, in hindsight, honest to god, it wouldn’t change the result, which obviously is the only thing that really matters, but in hindsight, I wish that I had CBS on. I watched MSNBC and that was the worst decision I could’ve made, honestly.

Mann: Because they were — was there happy talk about how it would be okay or?

Gruber: No, it was more like... I don’t know, it was something about the attitude they were taking to the results that really got me. What I really want was just a total pro who didn’t have — I bet, I didn’t watch CBS but I bet John Dickerson was exactly what —

Mann: He was great, it was a pretty good crew, but when I would flip back and forth, and sometimes CBS would go to local coverage, and I was like, please, don’t tell me about legal marijuana, I need to see what’s happening with this national race.

Gruber: [laughs]

Mann: So I would hop over to CNN and it seems like — by the way, you guys can have your marijuana now, congratulations. You can have your 420s.

Gruber: The people of New Jersey, it was like, we’re having the most important, in my opinion, the most important presidential election in our lifetimes, and then half of the time was spent on did the people in New Jersey get medical marijuana.

Mann: Well, okay, so one nice thing is I think they’re finally getting their hands around on how to deal with those giant touch screens, it’s still kind of funny to watch them struggle with them.

Gruber: [laughs] Oh my god, on the MSNBC it was horrible!

Mann: Did they keep hitting the wrong thing? “Oh, whoa, oh.”

Gruber: And the guy kept complaining about it on air! He was like, “God damn this machine!” [laughs]

Mann: I don’t think they get time to practice nearly as much as — like, if you go see your local Perd Hapley doing the weather report, that is a person who has been dealing with the green screen and understands how to gesture their arms. In this case, they’re flying all over the place. But there was the point in the evening when they got to where it was like, “Okay, well, this is how it’s looking”, and this was right before it went to Florida, like pretty conclusively. But he’s going in, he kept zooming way in on Broward and saying, “Well, we know, this could still be Broward”, and zooming in further and then saying, “Then you compare that to 2012”, and then he kept going to these two counties in Michigan and kept saying, “Detroit, the story could still be Detroit, there could be like 150,000 people in Detroit that show up in a minute”, and we’re all going, “Yeah, yeah, that could be it. Detroit seems cool.”

Gruber: That was a little bit of the MSNBC experience too.

Mann: I’m sure we’re eventually going to get to our friends from South by South West but —

Gruber: [laughs] There was a little bit of this sort of — we’re watching it, and we came into it optimistic, we really did. And I don’t think we were unrealistic, everybody sort of expected a Hillary Clinton win. We went into it —

Mann: They at least expected something within a normal range, but it was like you went into your kitchen to make cupcakes, and it kept producing monitor lizards. I don’t even understand what’s happening in here! And I think they’re struggling with — because they can’t just say, “What the fuck is going on here?! What the fuck!” You can’t say that on the TV. So they’ve got to go like, “Well, Detroit, there could be a heck of a lot of, uhhh, underperforming with, you know, get out the vote, uh, news alert.”

Gruber: That is so true. I honestly think that that — again, I’m laughing because I am a white male with a job, so I can afford to laugh, but I’m crying on the inside because I really do think — I’m not making light of this election.

Mann: No, I don’t think that’s coming across —

Gruber: I hope so. I just want to double-emphasize it as many times as I can. But I really do think watching it live last night, there was this sort of like, we can’t say “what the fuck”, so therefore, because we can’t say “what the fuck”, we’re going to say stuff that doesn’t make any sense —

Mann: We have to utilize these other words that are in the parlance for our business that don’t get even near how what the fuck-y this is.

Gruber: Right, and so they were saying things like, “Hey, Hillary Clinton is down by 300,000 votes in Florida, but she might make up 80,000 votes in Broward County so...” And you’re like, wait, you just said she’s down by 300,000, and she maybe, if everything goes right in Broward County, might make up 80,000. You realize that’s not even close to making up the difference?

Mann: No, it’s this magical thinking. Everybody goes, “Well, you know, Wisconsin still isn’t all the way in.” They didn’t even bother to go to Wisconsin because that’s so in the bag, it’s not even going to be a problem.

Gruber: And I would turn to Amy and I would say, “Am I mishearing this? This doesn’t make any sense.” And by the time I turned to her, I would look and then all of a sudden they’re talking about Wisconsin.

Mann: [laughs]

Gruber: It’s like, wait, wait, put that manic guy with the glasses back on and have him explain to me how making up 80,000 votes in this — and MSNBC, they were going through these contortions about what they can call and when they can call it, and I was saying to Amy, I was like, wait a minute, if you’re saying, she is down by 300,000 and the most she could make up is 80,000, what in the world is the difference where you can say “we can call this”? Just call it! Just fucking call the goddamn thing! And here we are, 24 hours later, we’ve got these results, we see the results, and she didn’t win Florida. Why couldn’t they call it when she was definitively, best case scenario, down by 220,000 votes? I don’t understand that.

Mann: There’s this other phenomenon in, like, when you’re a little kid — I have to tell you, we might’ve talked about this before, talking about TV, but I always haaated election nights as a kid. It was so boring, all the shows got preempted, and then your parents would sit there and watch this incredibly boring thing, and you’d hear about this, like, who your new alderman is. Yay, where’s Happy Days, fucking bring it. I knew this was excruciating for my daughter, but I was like, “You know, we’ve told you this is a pretty big deal and we’re —” I won’t get too personal, but we had a lot of personal stake, all three of us, had a lot of personal stake in this. Yes, even my nine-year-old daughter, maybe especially my nine-year-old daughter, had a lot of stake in this, so that made it really difficult. You learn as you get a little bit older, like when you first see the map when you’re a little kid, you go what, like, oh, Texas. Well, Texas is a big state and it’s a big deal because there are a lot of electoral votes. But you know, all these little states you see running down the side because they’re too small to identify, some of those end up being really important. In other words, the amount of red or blue on the map, you learn to look at the numbers rather than the pretty colors because that’s the story, do you know what I’m saying? A smart person understands that you can for example, as recently as 2016, you can win the most votes and still not win the election because that’s not how the electoral college works. And my kid understood that, my wife and I understand that. So you start seeing more and more of the red pop up and then they go to somewhere like Michigan, and all of a sudden I felt like I was seven years old again. I was like, there’s so much red on there. And they keep zooming in on these two or three little blue areas, but it was very profound to me to then have to undo that idea because the colors were not lining up, the shapes were not lining up, and the numbers were not lining up. And that’s why I want to locate this a little bit in last night because over the period of about 90 minutes the world started to feel a little bit different, at least a little bit different, and then it started to feel different faster and faster, and my breath was taken away at several points.

Gruber: We’re three hours time-shifted from you, but we were watching the same thing at the same time, and that is exactly how I felt, exactly, exactly. I couldn’t put it any better. And again, like you were saying, with these county by county results in Michigan, I was just like, what the?.. How can this be, how can Hillary Clinton possibly win, looking at this?

Mann: Right. But also some 2015 part of your brain is spinning because the 2015 part of your brain goes, even if there’s three people in that county, how did three people in that county choose to vote for the Republican candidate? In my 2015 mind, which is still a big part of my brain, and again, now I have a different mind today, but that was part of the cognitive dissonance for me, was even, like, looking at straight numbers and having my iPad Pro sideways with multiple tabs open plus the side screen like an idiot, like a monster, I’m looking at all of this data and then drilling down, and New York Times actually had pretty good coverage on this, where you could go in and drill down into specific areas and see for yourself what was going on, and you could just look at the numbers. And the other thing we told our kid, and I think this is a good thing, is like, understand this is a multi-variant thing. There’s a certain number of electoral votes in that state, that state is comprised of counties, each of those counties are reporting in different ways and at different times, and shame on CNN for the amount of, like, 1 percent reporting special news alerts that they had, it was so gross. But you can go in and there’s this thing that happened though, and I guess this happens to everybody when their side is not winning is that you start seeing that number go up, and you see 60 percent reporting, you see 70 percent reporting, you start wondering how many more votes really could be there in a box somewhere in Portland that will pull this out. And then like you’re describing, you’re describing, I think, you’re very aptly describing that feeling of “oh my god, just say it”. Because I see it. I don’t believe it, I see it, why aren’t you just saying it because, oh my god, another one just turned red, why isn’t someone not saying what’s really happening here. And I really in my heart believed that at least some — I know they were trying to be journalistically canny and trying to be fair and trying to not freak out, but I bet you we’re going to hear a lot about a lot of things, and I bet one of the things we’re going to hear is how many people just can’t believe what happened on numerous levels. The failures or shortcomings of everything from our own perception to how we learn about what people think to how we choose to believe anybody else could see the world. I feel like I’ve just come out of a cult or something and I don’t know what I even think anymore. I mean, I know what I think, I know how I feel, I’m here to talk to you about how I feel, but I don’t know what to trust about my brain anymore.

Gruber: It was very frustrating, I thought, last night because what I want is somebody who knows as much shit about the goddamn new MacBook Pros as I do. I want somebody who knows that much about the elections to tell me what the hell is going on. And I felt like I wasn’t getting it. I felt like I was getting people who were as loosely informed as I was going like, “I don’t know, this seems kind of crazy, this is unexpected.” And I’m looking at the numbers on screen and I’m thinking, why won’t somebody just tell me, Florida is already lost. It was at the point, it was at least two hours after the point where me as a non-expert was looking at Florida’s numbers and thinking, this is gone, before they said, okay, Florida is in the Trump column. And I’m like, why did that take two hours? That’s crazy.

Mann: I can actually see this in my Safari, the two things that it says, “Do you want to visit this site?” on your iPad, the two of those have been 538 and The Upshot. The Upshot has done a really good job of graphically displaying whatever information they had. And you know, don’t yell at them, they’re just reporting the polls. But one of my favorite things to look at, because it’s very interesting, is the How Other Forecasts Compare area, which I’m sure you’ve seen. So this has not been updated since yesterday, but as of yesterday, New York Times, 85 percent Democrat. 538, the very conservative 538, really, in context, they were very conservative compared to the others, they got a lot of heat, 71 percent. Huffington Post: 98 percent Democratic. PW, I’m not sure what that is: 89 percent. PEC: greater than 99 percent Dem.

Gruber: Oh, that’s the Princeton Election something.

Mann: PW is PredictWise. So the 538 was the most pessimistic with the 71 percent.

Gruber: The Princeton Election Committee, or whatever the hell they’re called, I love the guy and I’m not doubting the statistical math behind the projection but that was how I slept the last few nights. [laughs]

Mann: Oh my god. Also they use WordPress. Anything else you want to tell me about today, anything you like?

Gruber: Should we talk about these buttons on the keyboards? [laughs]

Mann: Sure, sure, I just, at this happy point I thought you might want to wedge another sponsor to visit. I’ll help with the sponsor.

Gruber: I’m going to tell you, this is a new sponsor, first-time sponsor of the show. And I love it. I don’t know if you know this or not, I spend about 180 days a year at Disney World. I love Disney, and for the first time ever, Disney is sponsoring the show.

Mann: Oh, that’s so nice, that must’ve taken a long time to work out.

Gruber: Have you heard this though? This might be new to you, you might not have even heard about this, Merlin. It’s called Circle. Circle with Disney.

Mann: You’re not kidding me?

Gruber: I’m not kidding you, I am not kidding you, this is an actual sponsor.

Mann: Oh my gosh.

Gruber: It really is Disney. It’s a device called Circle. And it’s a little dingus. [laughs]

Mann: Look at that, it is a little dingus, it looks like the power adapter that comes with your iPhone.

Gruber: Exactly. You plug this into your house, it pairs with any Wi-Fi router —

Mann: [gasps] Oh my god.

Gruber: — that you might want. And what you can do is set up a thing so that if you have kids, you can manage their internet access.

Mann: Oh my god, this is so boss.

Gruber: It’s $99, one-time cost. But if you use the code “thetalkshow”, don’t forget the “the”, “thetalkshow”, you’ll save $10, it’s only $89. And you can get this — one-time cost, you can get Circle Go, which is like a service, you can get it for $10 a month, $9.95, for up to 10 devices. But it’s only for iOS. It’s super easy to set up. There’s nothing worse than setting up a complicated networking device. I mean, I’ve done it —

Mann: John, that’s table stakes nowadays. If you want to penetrate the market, as you like to say —

Gruber: [laughs]

Mann: — you’re going to have to come out with a device that has as little fiddle-y — save the fiddle-y stuff for your coffee, let Circle manage your content for you, you know what I’m saying?

Gruber: Exactly. If you’re going to spend a lot of time on something, it might as well be making your coffee. Circle with Disney lets parents filter content, customize what’s available, customize the time that kids can be on the internet. It’s amazing. Kids staying up late on their tablet — Circle with Disney lets you set a bedtime for each kid on each device. What about 4G? Because you think, hey, I’ll shut off the Wi-Fi, my kid will just hop on LTE. They know that your kids already have, probably, especially if they’re teenage years, they already have a smartphone and they already have that, so that’s why they make Circle Go. Disney Circle Go takes all the settings on your kids’ devices and lets you configure them with you Circle with Disney.

Mann: What?

Gruber: I swear to god, I don’t even know how that works.

Mann: Is it an MDM, how does it work? You know what it is, John, it’s Disney magic, they can use that.

Gruber: Disney magic. So here you go, if you got kids and you want to manage their access to the internet on your Wi-Fi, remember the code, “thetalkshow”. Go to meetcircle.com. M-E-E-T, not “meat” like we’re going to eat steak or whatever. It’s like you’re meeting somebody, you’re greeting somebody. meetcircle.com. And you get free shipping and $10 off with that code, “thetalkshow”. It’s a great device, super easy. They sent me one, I did, I set it up, it is super easy to set up. I mean, my kid actually is, just between me and you, is maybe sort of not the sharpest tack in the room because he — I don’t think he actually tries to go to anything that we wouldn’t approve of?

Mann: Hmm. Doesn’t it disappoint you a little bit?

Gruber: A little bit because I know —

Mann: Don’t you want him to be a little bit more ambitious?

Gruber: Yeah, a little bit. I would think that he would but — so we set it up and it was super easy to set it up. They sent me the thing and I set it up and it’s like, do we really need this? I don’t know because it seems to me like our kid just comes to us and he’s like, “Hey, is it okay if I search Google for blah blah blah?”

Mann: Wow, but you know what, belts and suspenders. Have a good kid and get yourself a Circle.

Gruber: Exactly, that’s what I thought, exactly.

Mann: Good deal.

Gruber: Couldn’t be easier to set up. It’s a beautiful little device. So go to meetcircle.com and remember the code “thetalkshow”, you will save $10 and get free shipping. There you go.

Mann: Just for what it’s worth, for now, it appears that meatcircle.com with an A is available. [laughs]

Gruber: [laughs]

Mann: You know what? I’m just going to go there. As a man from San Francisco, I’m here to tell you, if there was a website called Meat Circle with an A, about circles of meat, I got a pretty good feeling that Meet Circle with two E’s would not let you see it.

Gruber: I could’ve sworn that was the name of the restaurant where we went the last time I was out there.

Mann: Mmm. Meat Circle.

Gruber: We’re making a joke but it actually is not a bad name for a — not bad at all.

Mann: Think about those tourist-y sushi places you go where it arrives on the boat and they just count your plates, what if there was a rotating, let’s call it a carousel, a carne carousel, you’ve got a spinning meat Lazy Susan. And you could just try all different things, it would be kind of like going to a Brazilian steakhouse but with a technology. I think people would love that, Meat Circle. I think they’d gobble that up.

Gruber: At the Brazilian steakhouse, the ones I’ve been to — we’ve got two here in Philly, we’ve got Fogo de Chão and we’ve got — I forget what the other one’s called. The other one’s better.

Mann: [laughs] Ringing endorsement from John Gruber!

Gruber: Ringing endorsement.

Mann: Yeah, we’ve got one here, it’s costly but it’s a lot of fun — if you go at lunch, you don’t get as many varieties of meat.

Gruber: No, no, at the lunch you get screwed.

Mann: Lunch, they got chicken hearts.

Gruber: They desperately want you to come in at lunch.

Mann: [with an accent] “Would you like more chicken heart? Corazón de pollo?” Yes, I know that’s Spanish. We’re like, we’re good, we’re good. How about some more of that tri-tip? “Yeah, maybe you try the chicken heart. It’s on a sword. I think you’ll find it quite toothsome.” And the tiny little sausages?

Gruber: I love the little sausages.

Mann: My favorite I think is the straight-up, salty sirloin.

Gruber: All right, the other one here in Philadelphia is called Chima. That’s the good one. Fogo de Chão is a little... I don’t know, a little... you save like five bucks, there’s always like an all you can eat type deal.

Mann: Oh, you don’t want to be buying meat on price. Nuh-uh.

Gruber: Chima is the good one. But for anybody who hasn’t been to one of these places, both of them, at least here, and I’ve been to Fogo de Chão — you know, it’s going to be funny because it might come up again later in the show — in Austin, Texas, I’ve been to Fogo de Chão.

Mann: [laughs] You meet a lot of interesting people in Austin. “You okay, man?”

Gruber: But it’s the same deal though where you go into this place, and there’s these cowboys walking around who grill the steak, and they give everybody a little thing, red light/green light.

Mann: “Obrigado.” Yeah, more steak/less steak, red and green. Red steak/green steak.

Gruber: If you put it green side up, if the guy is coming around with whatever cut of steak he’s made, he’ll say, hey do you want some? And you say, yes or no.

Mann: They usually ask you, but if you have it on green, they’re not legally obligated to ask.

Gruber: Right, they might just give it to you.

Mann: That’s the law of Rio, it’s called, from the Magna Carta. They can come right up and put whatever meat suits them on your plate, and you have to eat it, and they don’t have to ask you, you don’t have to say your thank you, they’re just going to literally keep bringing meat until you can get your swollen, greasy fingers to change it to “obrigado”.

Gruber: [laughs] That is true, that is the law of the Brazilian steakhouse.

Mann: [laughs] You know what the other law is, don’t fill up on salad, that’s the second law. Second law of the Brazilian steakhouse, because that’s how they get you, they want you to fill up on potato salad and shit, don’t do that because they’re going to bring you a bunch of chicken hearts in a minute.

Gruber: And they always have, everyone, doesn’t matter what the name of the steakhouse is, if it’s a Brazilian steakhouse, it’s always a salad bar where you can go up and go hog wild on the salad.

Mann: Ours has a hot bar too, ours is called Espetus, and boy, is it ever good. Is that what yours is called, Buca di Beppo, Beppo di Buca, what’s yours called?

Gruber: [laughs] Well, we got two, we got Fogo de Chão, and we got Chima.

Mann: Espetus, they got a really nice salad bar of some unconventional salads, some non-traditional salads, and they got a hot bar, so if you want black beans and white rice, not a problem. You can go up there and get yourself some fake-y paella. It’s by the bathroom. Wash your hands, come out, get a plate. But that’s rule number two, rule number two of steakhouse club is that you don’t fill up — and bread, they’re going to give the cheesy bread, fuck that! Rule number three of the Brazilian steakhouse, do not fill up on the fucking — I’m talking to you, daughter! Big glass of milk. That’s for meat! Don’t fill up on that.

Gruber: And the cheesy bread is good.

Mann: It’s good, but that’s how they get you.

Gruber: [laughs] It’s so true.

Mann: It’s really disappointing.

Gruber: There’s a reason why at a regular steakhouse, where I mean “regular” meaning you don’t get an unlimited red light/green light meat, that they don’t also have a “just eat as much as you want at the salad bar” salad bar.

Mann: Exactly.

Gruber: It is true, you said “that’s how they get you” and that is, I think, for me and you, “that’s how they get you” is sort of a catchphrase of our parents’ generation. They would explain the way those systems work.

Mann: That’s the single greatest piece of conventional wisdom for everybody older than me. [in a low voice] “You’re going to 7-Eleven? Oh, you’re going to get one of those Big Gulps? Oh, how much is that, it’s a dollar? You know what that costs? A nickel. That’s how they get you.” Is that right? “You’re buying a Japanese car? That’s how they get you.”

Gruber: I remember somebody telling me that we you went to 7-Eleven, that you had to be careful of how much ice you put in the cup because —

Mann: “Don’t put ice in. That’s how they get you.”

Gruber: Right, that no matter what size cup you got, they’d fill it up with ice and you’d get the same amount of soda even if you got the 64-ounce — which is bullshit! Like, a 64-ounce soda is an enormous amount of soda, but there were people who told me in my youth that that’s how they get you.

Mann: It’s like the secret menu for cheapskates. It’s the things that you can get away with. [in a low voice] “Hey, listen, so you know when you go to this place, you can ask for extra rolls to take home and they have to give it to you.” We used to run a restaurant when I was a kid, and it would be the same people who were very unhappy, every weekend would come in, and they came here to be unhappy together. Same people who complained about the same things every time, there was a one couple who always came in, always got the same really crappy deuce right by the bar, and then they would complain about the noise in the bar, and then they would steal literally everything off the table. Every week, they would take all the silverware, the salt and pepper shakers, they would take the Sweet’N Low, they would take the sugar, they would take the flower arrangement, and then we’d have them back the next week. And that was just the thing we did. Florida.

Gruber: [laughs] We had like a —

Mann: I’m having a hard day, John, I gotta be honest with you, I’m having a hard day.

Gruber: You know what, I don’t know who else would do this with me, Merlin. Honestly.

Mann: Well, we were not going to scoop up every single person, but I think it’s good that we’re here, it’s good we’re here to talk about this.

Gruber: Right, so, Amy and I, you know this, maybe people who listen to this show don’t know this. My wife, Amy and I, and people maybe know her on Twitter, she’s @amyjane, but we literally were in the same kindergarten class together. We were in school together from kindergarten all the way through twelfth grade, then we were separated for the college years, somehow made it work. And here we are, now we’re married and we’re on Twitter, we’re married on Twitter.

Mann: [laughs]

Gruber: But we’ve often said though, it is an amazing thing that we spent our teenage years together because we can tell stories about our teenage years and instead of like, oh my god, just blacking out, rolling your eyes because your significant other, your partner is talking about being 14 years old, you’re like, oh my god, I remember that, and you’re like, I was there and yes, that is true. So where we grew up, everybody was a member — it was a public pool, it was public but you had to pay, your family had to pay like a hundred bucks a year to get in or something like that, so it wasn’t like you could just show up. But everybody was a member, you’d get a special badge, every year they’d put up a new color badge and you’d sew it on your swimsuit, so when you showed up at the pool, they could see that you were a paid member. And as a teenager, every day, every single day in the summer what I would do is I would wake up, I would go play basketball because I was an avid basketball player, I’d play basketball from like 11 am till 1 in the afternoon, and when it got just too goddamn hot to keep playing basketball, we would head over to the pool and that’s where we would go. And at the pool there was a snack bar. And the snack bar sold, like, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Swedish Fish. I think your entire selection of food offerings were Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Swedish Fish, which were a penny a piece, and they would count them out, and it would take forever.

Mann: [with an accent] “One, two, three. Three Swedish Fish. Now back to the pool with you, and wait a half hour before you go back in.”

Gruber: And they had a soda fountain. Long story short, at some point in my teenage years, somebody convinced me that they were screwing me over by filling my cup up with ice.

Mann: Because that’s how they get you.

Gruber: Yeah, that’s how they get you! So I would go over and get my — I would say like, “Give me a Dr Pepper, no ice.”

Mann: They’ll never see that coming.

Gruber: Two points, I have two points to make on this. Number one, warm Dr Pepper tastes like shit, it is horrible, it really is.

Mann: [smacks lips] The pruney-ness really comes out. You don’t realize how pruney Dr Pepper is until you have it at room temperature. It tastes like some kind of a 19th century elixir.

Gruber: And number two, this is the point — you’re going to love this, Merlin, you’re going to love it. About two or three weeks after I started ordering my sodas no ice and my friends were doing the same, it wasn’t just me, it was a bunch of us, they changed their policy —

Mann: [gasps]

Gruber: — and if you ordered your soda no ice, they only filled it to one inch below the cup.

Mann: Wow. Because of portion control.

Gruber: Right. And we would say like, “Give me a large Dr Pepper, no ice.” And they’d only fill it an inch below the rim and then you’d be like, “Wait, that’s not filled”, and they would be like, “Well, that’s where the ice would go.” [laughs]

Mann: It’s like one of those bars, bars with robot dispensers. You know what I mean, like, there are some bars now where when you get a drink, it’s like a — the robot does it, it tells it, this is exactly an ounce or half an ounce or whatever. Oh, that’s sickening, my god, and they got you again, that’s how they got you a second time.

Gruber: The thing is, in hindsight, one reaffirms the other, where on the one hand, it tasted terrible because it wasn’t cold, but on the other hand, the fact that they started screwing you on how much soda, reaffirms the initial reason why you did it, which was this is how they get you, because if it wasn’t how they got you, why would they be screwing you on how much soda they put in the cup.

Mann: Absolutely. The system always wins.

Gruber: System always wins, and this is honestly how we wound up with President Trump.

Mann: You blame the system?

Gruber: If you connect the dots, I would say that 1987 at the Antietam pool, a no ice Dr Pepper only being filled one inch below the rim dot dot dot here you go, 2016, President Trump. Do you agree?

Mann: It makes perfect sense.

Gruber: I think it’s a clear line.

Mann: When you put it that way, I see it. I’m thinking of any kind of documentary, not a documentary, but a docudrama, like you do something like And the Band Played On. And the Band Played On is about the AIDS epidemic, but it begins with Matthew Modine dealing with the Ebola and that sets us up for all the flashbacks. Paul McCartney walks by, sees a bass in the window, “Oh, one day I’ll be playing that at the Cavern Club”, you know, “As you know, Bob, this is what I ended up doing.”

Gruber: [laughs]

Mann: And so in this case, a young John Gruber, hot from basketball, 11:01 every day, he wants to take a dip, buy three cents worth of Swedish Fish, and have himself a refreshing cup of Dr Pepper. And now today everybody’s at school crying. You put it that way and I see it now.

Gruber: I think it’s a direct line. Jesus Christ, Merlin.

Mann: How did everybody get so — so I was telling you I was listening to all these podcasts, usually I’m getting six podcasts a day in the run-up to this, and boy, it was like radio silence this morning. There was one NPR Politics episode I think they recorded last night, there was a pretty short — what was the other one, 1600 finally came out, but so far today no Culture Gabfest, maybe John’s busy. No Trumpcast, still haven’t heard Election Profit Makers, it’s been a real quiet —

Gruber: Crickets chirping.

Mann: I don’t know how many of those things you listen to but I’m sitting there, flippity flippity flippity, like, come on, Overcast, let me “experience my emotions”, as my hippie girlfriend used to say. I want to experience my emotions, I want to walk through this.

Gruber: Again, I’m being more jovial than usual and quite frankly —

Mann: Well, it’s the holiday season.

Gruber: Right, quite frankly, without taking another sip of any beverage, I might be drunk for the next 72 hours based on how much I drank last night. So, you know.

Mann: You gave yourself a contact high.

Gruber: It’s table stakes. Let’s just face it.

Mann: It’s a complicated time, for sure.

Gruber: But I think it might be enjoyable. But here is what I thought. I’m going to be deadly serious here, and again, apolitical, it doesn’t matter what side you’re on, but there was a moment yesterday, let’s say 24 hours ago and as we record, no results were in, so it wasn’t even like, oh, it looks bad for her, it looks good for him or whatever. 24 hours ago, I thought, you know what, I should’ve done a show by now, I should’ve had a new episode. I don’t have a regular schedule, I don’t record on a regular schedule, and the reason I didn’t record a show is I thought, I can’t, I’m so distracted by this election, I don’t want to do a show because that’s all I can think about. And I realized, in hindsight, I should’ve done a show, not for myself, but because, hey, I’ll bet, tens of thousands of people who listen to my show would love to just distract themselves with me talking about the goddamn key travel on a new MacBook Pro. Like, two hours of me talking about what it’s like to type on the new MacBook Pro. In my mind, it was like, well, what a waste of fucking time, but in hindsight, I thought, that actually would’ve been great for the people who love the stuff that I do. And I should’ve done it. And then I woke up today and I thought, well, now I’ve got to get Merlin.

Mann: Yeah, I mean, basically, it’s been a really weird morning and my only thought was, like I said in the text to you, my only plan for this entire day was to try to stay sane and clean the shit out of the car.

Gruber: [laughs]

Mann: My whole plan for the day was — my wife biked to work today and I was like, “So, uh, how about I clean the car today?” And she’s like, “Yeah, that’s fine.” So I go out there, I got the vinegar —

Gruber: [laughs]

Mann: — I got the baking soda, I got the mini vac, I got the big vac, I’m taking it all out, I’m taking the whole thing apart, and I’m scrubbing it like a crazy person because I need to control a small area today.

Gruber: I did that yesterday, Merlin, I swear to god, I mean, seriously, go DM her right now, you can DM Amy, yesterday —

Mann: Is she at the holiday party too?

Gruber: No, she’s actually — she probably will be soon, but she’s not at the holiday party yet.

Mann: You know, the reason you didn’t get an invitation is because you asked for an invite. If you ask for an invite, you don’t get an invitation.

Gruber: You know my feelings on invites.

Mann: That’s rule number five of the Brazilian steakhouse.

Gruber: You never get invite. [laughs]

Mann: There is no invite, it’s not a word. Stop saying that.

Gruber: Yesterday, I swear to god, you can — I swear to god, DM her and find out —

Mann: You cleaned the car?

Gruber: No, what I did is I vacuumed in our dining room. [laughs]

Mann: [makes a vacuum cleaner noise]

Gruber: Our kid, he loves corn chips, he eats a lot of tacos, he just likes corn chips, and there was just a ton of ground-up corn chips underneath our dining room table and I thought, what better — why not now, let’s get the —

Mann: Somebody’s got to get these corn chips off.

Gruber: Somebody’s got to get them. And my wife came down. And, I mean — shocker — 99 times out of 100 when somebody vacuums up the corn chips, it’s my wife, not me. And my wife was like, “What the fuck are you doing?”

Mann: Oh, I cleaned the shit out of our dishes last night. I cleaned dishes I didn’t need to clean. I cleaned the cast-iron pan twice and then this is a life hack, you can use kosher salt and you can rub it around in there without harming it, you don’t want to put soap in there. So I did that a couple times, with the kosher salt. And they still kept turning red. Stopped at one point to watch Parks and Recreation because my daughter was on the verge. So we watched a very good, relevant episode of Parks and Rec where she narrowly wins the election, because it’s an educational program for a 9-year-old. We’ve got to talk a little bit about what we got wrong, don’t you think? I mean, is that too much, is that too deep? We could talk about the keyboard, you know, I’m not using my Das because I’m on the podcast but I could type on my Das if that would help.

Gruber: No, I think we should, I think we should talk about what we got wrong.

Mann: It’s got some amazing key travel, listen to this, let’s see. [types on a clicky keyboard]

Gruber: Oh, that sounds good.

Mann: You want to talk about key travel? [continues typing] “Sixth rule of Brazilian steakhouse.” I don’t know what kind of Cherry that is, that could be Cherry Blue, Cherry Brown, I’d have to have Jason [Snell] listen to this. You know, Jason types very fast.

Gruber: For two or three seconds there I completely forgot about this election. [laughs]

Mann: Oh, isn’t that nice. We can talk about it. It seems so relevant. “Yes, that’s all very interesting, but will I be dissatisfied with the butterfly switches on my computer?” AAAAA!

Gruber: I have photographed myself — kids call them a selfie — with Jason Snell —

Mann: I yesterday watched the video of you using an Escape key. “Is it over here, no? Uh, over here?”

Gruber: I had to delete that tweet.

Mann: Oh, because it’s a loaner?

Gruber: Turns out the embargo is not up yet. [laughs]

Mann: Oh man, the embargo still counts, even today? Doesn’t that seem ludicrous that anybody is doing anything today? Doesn’t it seem crazy that anybody is at work while worrying —

Gruber: Yes, it does. That’s exactly what I thought yesterday. Long story short, I tweeted a video of me using an Escape key on a MacBook Pro, and the embargo is not up on those MacBook Pros, but on the ones that have the physical keys, it is up and I just — it was yesterday and I was so — I mean, this is what I was thinking, why not obsess over the Escape key? [laughs]

Mann: Absolutely.

Gruber: I would love to spend the next four years thinking about Escape keys. It just seems like, wake me up four years from now when the next election is over and I’ll spend the entire, between now and then, just dealing with Escape keys.

Mann: Our friend Marco even said, “Hey, you know, I would get into sports if I could get that back.” I’ve gotten two emails today, one email was a 2FA to get into my Apple on the web when you sent me the notes for this, and the other one was somebody who just sent me an email today. And I was like, what the fuck? You sent me an email today? Who sends a fucking email the day after the election? I mean, it’s the way we used to feel about Christmas. It’d be like having a vacuum salesman at your house on Christmas morning. Why are you, what are you doing? Don’t you live in a civil society? You don’t send somebody an email on the day like today. What are you thinking? How did that even cross your mind to do that? I’m sending texts to my friends and saying, “Are you okay?” That’s what I’ve been doing all morning, is texting my friends to say, “Are you okay?”

Gruber: The sun never even came out here.

Mann: Oh dear.

Gruber: We’ve had about 36 hours of complete darkness. I’m not even making that up, it’s actually been a very dreary day.

Mann: You did go red.

Gruber: Yeah, and amazing thing — and I thought, well, this is a good sign — is yesterday, election day, it was beautiful! It was 62 and sunny.

Mann: Oh, what a good sign! What a great sign.

Gruber: Not a cloud in the skies. [laughs]

Mann: Everything’s coming up Milhouse.

Gruber: Yeah.

Mann: [laughs] But to return to that, because I just need to vent a little more, is, like, even at last night, and even when it got bad, and even with the needle moved past the 50 percent, that 2015 part of my brain said, “Calm the fuck down, there’s no way —” I mean, how late was it before you started to flip and then how long did it take for you to really say “oh shit”.

Gruber: That’s a very good question.

Mann: Because there were a plenty of chances and you expected that it would go back and forth, this is how it works, electoral —

Gruber: I started to feel really bad in my stomach when it took so long to call Virginia because —

Mann: So you’re okay with Florida because you realize, big state, lots of places, two time zones, there’s a lot going on in Florida.

Gruber: And I am enough of a political nerd where I kind of — I do feel like this election flipped a lot of the conventional wisdom, but the conventional wisdom is still basically true. And Virginia being so long was like a really bad sign. So Hillary Clinton ended up winning Virginia but the fact that it took so long to call it was really where it — so I would say, at least on the East Coast time, it was around, I don’t know, around 10 o’clock, so probably 7 o’clock your time where I just thought, the fact that they’re not willing to Virginia is a really bad sign.

Mann: I think I started to really get the fear a little before that. Last night — you know how you do the benefits where if you go and buy at this restaurant, the school gets money? We try to do this. So girls went out to get some poke at the poke place, poke bowl. And they were gone for a while, and they came back in, and I was like, “This is not good.” It was a situation where — you know, I follow this enough to know, okay, here’s the battleground states, I don’t need an infographic to understand the importance of that. Being somebody who’s followed this more closely than I would ever admit in public until today, I knew that there’s a handful of places that are going to make a difference. And I explained this with my kid, yeah, California’s got a lot of electoral votes, but what is it they say about companies, that’s baked into the price, or built into the price. We go into this knowing that there’s a really good chance, there’s a way beyond good chance that California is going to go this way. There’s a very good chance that, say, Utah is going to go this way etc., etc., etc. So you really focus on — it’s like we’re not going to worry about the ponds, we’re going to worry about the road that’s right in front of us here. These are the big things. And I kept going, okay, haha, here we go, I’m not going to have a drink, this is going to be fine. And I just kept thinking, okay, it’s time for a few of these to go from white to blue. And I kept thinking, feels like it’s really time for these to go from white to blue. To, like, well, this seems quite irregular. Why are more of these not flipping to blue? And that’s where I got to the headspace you’re in where you’re like, what is taking so long? We thought that was going to be one of the firewall states. What happened with that? And I bet that along with a lot of other people watching this, that’s probably around the time we had the WTF maybe aloud moment of going like, what if this is something — I don’t want to say fundamentally different because it isn’t like it started as an election and turned into a tennis game. It was an election that ended as an election. But at the same time there’s so many things that we thought to some level of certainty we understood about this — I’m sorry to keep coming back to this, but this is just where my emotions and my mind are today is I’m still stunned. I’m still stunned with how much I did not understand about what was happening. And then you go and you look at the polls. And you go and you look at the reporting on all of this. And I think it’s probably about five times worse for a journalist today. Like, listening to the NPR podcast this morning and they were just like, “Uh, yeah, this is real different than anything we had imagined could happen.” Do we rule out — just to get this out of the way because there’s certainly some part of your brain that goes, huh, it’s weird. If I were going to make a program that affected the elections, if I were going to do some kind of an exploit, I would make it look close for a while and then win by a little bit. Like, you’re a gambler. Right?

Gruber: I am.

Mann: Are we ruling that out? Do we feel like — that’s probably not — I just want to get it out of the way so we can move on.

Gruber: Yeah, I don’t think so.

Mann: Do you think there was meddling? I kind of do.

Gruber: No, I don’t, I don’t think so. I think it’s a totally legit election.

Mann: And that’s the problem.

Gruber: There was a period I would say between 8 and 10 Eastern time last night, we had MSNBC on before 8, but 8 was when real results —

Mann: That’s when polls start closing and you start being able to say something.

Gruber: Right. So from 8 to 10 I was kind of rolling my eyes and I kind of felt like MSNBC was sandbagging it to make it look close. There was that —

Mann: “Sandbagging” is a great word for it. They’re milking it, this is their last chance. They need to make this seem like a horse race up to the end. And everyone kept saying how close it was. That was the watchword of the night. This is so much closer than anybody thought.

Gruber: And there was an interchange between Rachel Maddow and — what’s the guy’s name, the guy who got fired from the big seat at NBC.

Mann: Tom Brokaw?

Gruber: No. He got demoted, not fired, but demoted.

Mann: Oh, oh, Brian Williams.

Gruber: Brian Williams, that’s it. There was an exchange between Brian Williams and Rachel Maddow where they kind of went meta and they were like, we are not fucking with you, honest to god, this is as up in the air as we’re making it seem. And it was right around that 10 o’clock at night moment where I thought, like, the fact that they are not willing to call Virginia yet, this is — something is going on. That’s where I thought, hey, this isn’t just the TV, they’re not just playing this for ratings.

Mann: Right, right. Yeah, I felt something similar. CBS did a really good job. I didn’t love every single one of the folks on, I think they could’ve done with fewer than six people and just let Dickerson talk more. But it was a very good group. I felt a similar thing at a lot of what I was looking at. And that’s when we were talking earlier about screaming WTF — I don’t know why I’m suddenly so precious about language. But there did get to be this feeling that you’re describing of almost like, we need to break the fourth wall for a minute here. Like, we all understand that there’s a performance aspect to this. A polling site is going to get less traffic if it’s a solid 85/14 for a year. If it’s a pretty solid 85/14 for a year, that’s not going to get as much traffic as something where those numbers are changing. So we get cynical about that, we understand clickbait and all that kind of stuff. But now I agree with you, I think there was a certain point or maybe I was just inferring this with my own increasingly frazzled mentality, but it really felt like they were struggling with it too. And so we’re avoiding getting to this but, you know, the polls. You go listen to anybody, and I told you in a text today, I’ve been listening to the FiveThirtyEight podcast and between Nate and Harry they always try to say, like, tamp down this irrational exuberance about what this means. Nate got burned pretty bad on Trump because at one point he said, he’s now famous for saying that he thought Trump — I can’t believe I’m saying his name — had a less than 20 percent chance of becoming the GOP candidate. And that really came back to bite him and I think he clamped down super hard with the model. And listen to that show all along, how they developed the model, updates to the model, what’s happening with the model. But I think they have all along been trying to tamp that down. But I had this really sick feeling where I want to hear this but I don’t want to hear this, I want to hear what they have to say because they were the most conservative and it was still so — I haven’t seen a side by side yet, I have not seen a side by side on how it turned out vs. what each polling site modeled. But that’s going to be a hell of a story. What parts of that broke down and how did I break down? I mean I’d like to think of myself as an empathetic person, I’m fond of quoting that old Renoir movie and saying “everybody has their reasons”. I think I’m a fairly empathetic person about this but I did not know realize how deep something was in this election. How deep some set of feelings and I think there’s a variety of feelings, I think just calling it racist or misogynistic is a little shortsighted, there’s something maybe even deeper than that going on there, and I called that way wrong.

Gruber: Yeah, and it is clearly — subtract white men and the election is a blowout for Hillary Clinton.

Mann: In the model, but a lot of white women came out.

Gruber: It’s true.

Mann: That’s the crazy part.

Gruber: And it’s weird, like, what is the difference, why was the white — whether you’re a man or a woman — angle so definitive here and not when the black guy was running the last two elections, you know what I mean?

Mann: Look at the margins, look at the margins in the — god, listen to me, I fucking hate myself. [in a mocking voice] “Let’s all look at the margins in the battleground states.” But look at the margins, the ’08, the ’12, and Hillary margins. And Wilkes-Barre — I don’t know if that’s how you pronounce it. But that’s one Obama ran away with. He won by like 20 points.

Gruber: Pennsylvania has gone blue since ’92, I think? It’s crazy, it’s really, really weird. And the turnout was phenomenal in Philadelphia. I don’t know what you were watching, you said that you were watching —

Mann: CBS and CNN.

Gruber: Right, but on MSNBC they kept cutting to Philadelphia and they were showing crazy long lines.

Mann: North Carolina, you see a line where somebody takes their iPhone — ugh, in portrait mode — and walks along and you just see several hundred black people waiting to vote and you’re like, well, clearly, part of this — when they say, like, the whole percentage reporting — well, what if we don’t know how many people have actually voted? And then they kept going, oh, maybe this is really going to pull it out, maybe North Carolina is going to be the one.

Gruber: I think for whatever reason they’re going to show — I think the results will show that the turnout in the middle of all these states where the rural areas, that the turnout was just phenomenal and hasn’t been even in the Obama election years. For whatever reason, Trump turned these people out. I don’t get it, but it’s there.

Mann: I need to dash in a bit. Did you want to tell me about one more thing that you’re excited about this week? I’m very happy to help if I can. That’s the eighth rule, the eighth rule was there are no sixth and seventh rules of Brazilian steakhouse. The ninth rule is you help a buddy with a read. Obrigado, obrigado.

Gruber: It’s a new sponsor, brand new company. Well, maybe you’ve heard of them, you’re juiced in.

Mann: Yeah, I am juiced in.

Gruber: Have you ever heard of the company called Squarespace?

Mann: Squarespace, is that with an S?

Gruber: With an S, Squarespace is —

Mann: Are you talking about the single best place to go to have a website, a portfolio, or an online store?

Gruber: Yeah. That’s exactly what it is.

Mann: You know what, yes, I do, I’ve heard of Squarespace, yeah.

Gruber: Well, you’re more juiced in than I am, I’ve never heard of this company.

Mann: I’m a little more juiced in, yeah.

Gruber: I’ve never heard of this company but you can start building your own website today.

Mann: Does it require a credit card?

Gruber: It does not but if you use this code, “talkshow”, now, they don’t have the “the”, it’s just “talkshow”, but you’ll get 10 percent off whatever level you end up signing up at, but you can sign up for free with no credit card.

Mann: Are you telling me you could start literally, literally building your website today with Squarespace by going to squarespace.com, is that what you’re telling me?

Gruber: If you have any notion in your head for, hey, that should be a website, I could make a website that is blank. And it could be, like you said, a portfolio of your work. It could be a store where you sell the... crap that you make. [laughs] Could be a blog, could be a podcast. Could be anything. If you just start by going to squarespace.com, you are almost certainly will have an easier time doing it than if you do it in any other way.

Mann: Is there any benefit at all of signing up for a year?

Gruber: I think you get a free domain?

Mann: You get a free domain name if you sign up for a year.

Gruber: Free domain. Are you looking at my screen? [laughs]

Mann: Yes. Why do you have your home screen like that?

Gruber: If you sign up for a year —

Mann: [in an internet critic voice] “Your Dock’s in the wrong place.”

Gruber: — you can get a free domain name. So literally, they cover everything from registering the domain name to the layout of your site, the fonts, the style. Is it a portfolio site where you’re showing the illustrations you make, is it a store where you’re selling T-shirts, is it a blog — all that stuff, you can set up visually, they have —

Mann: I don’t know, man, what if I’m a developer and I want to get my hands on the actual code, is there any way, do they have any provision for that, probably not, because it’s Squarespace, right? They wouldn’t have a platform for that?

Gruber: You would think that they wouldn’t, you would think it’s all just — you’ve got to click, click, click, but the truth is, Merlin, this is amazing, if you want to get in there and you want to write your own JavaScript code and put it in there, you can do it.

Mann: Right on the website, you can do that?

Gruber: Right on the website. You can just get in there and insert your own code.

Mann: But the thing is, with all these sites, if I run into any kind of trouble, I’m on my own, is that correct? Let’s say I run into some kind of trouble, maybe I get confused, maybe I follow the wrong tutorial from John Siracusa’s CPAN, and I do my backpack slashes the wrong way, is there anybody that can help me? What if you got a, what do they call it, a greedy enumerator, what if there’s something that’s accidentally eating your JavaScript, is there anybody that you can call?

Gruber: I would like to say that you are correct because you’re on this show and I don’t want to embarrass you, I would like to say yes, you’ve got to fix it yourself. The truth is though, they actually have 24 hour a day, real-time support.

Mann: Oh my god.

Gruber: You just call them up —

Mann: You can text them.

Gruber: Yeah. But they’ve got people, they’ve positioned them around the world, literally, if you think that I’m making this up —

Mann: What if I want to talk to somebody in Portland, is that anything they can help me with?

Gruber: Yeah, they’re in Portland, they’re in Ireland. They’ve positioned these people strategically around the world, so that when you need tech support, if you need tech support, you can get somebody on the horn —

Mann: It’s like the Doctor Strange portals! They’re protecting the globe with these three equidistant points and they put an entire web of support over the Earth and that keeps us away from Dormammu.

Gruber: Exactly.

Mann: That’s amazing. What’s the name of the service again?

Gruber: It’s called Squarespace. I think they’re going places, I think you’re going to hear about them. Keep it in mind, if you have a notion for a website, go to squarespace.com. Remember the code “talkshow”, no “the”, and you’ll get 10 percent off. But honestly, you don’t even need 10 percent off, even if you forget the code, just go there and sign up. It’s a great service.

Mann: And there could be somebody in your life today who needs this site and they don’t know it, but you do. That’s the thing. You do not want to be in the webmaster business, you don’t want to be making it for your pre-school, for your church group. You don’t want to be doing that. Get out of that business where you’ve got to know the SSH login to be able — no! You don’t need to do that anymore. Tell your friends and your family about this site because it’s perfect for somebody in your life.

Gruber: I’m tongue-and-cheek on this whole thing where you are jumping in on this, but that’s actually probably the single best advice about Squarespace is that keep it in mind for people who don’t listen to shows like The Talk Show because exactly, like if your kid’s preschool or the church group or whatever needs a website, guaranteed that is a better idea than you jumping in and saying, oh yeah, I’ll jump in and SSH in and start an index.html website — forget it, just go to Squarespace and cut yourself out of it. Totally true.

Mann: “Cut yourself out of it.” They’ve just got to run with that.

Gruber: Right. It’s totally true though.

Mann: [sighs]

Gruber: What are we going to do? I think we’re going to be okay.

Mann: Yeah, I think we will too. I share your interest and obsession with the whole idea of story. I’m doing a new show with a couple of friends of mine, we were talking last week about that Steve Jobs lost interview that you can see on Netflix. And I was realizing — forgive me if you’re one of the five people who listen to that show, but I’m very interested in the idea of how Apple and Steve Jobs and Pixar are so interested in the idea of story. Story about the company, story as a thing that we create. I was trying to make the case that Apple also, if you accept the notion that story is an abstraction layer, their computers and their devices are stories too. They’re taking out all of the inessential things and telling a great story with the minimal number of components needed to tell this story correctly. So I’ve been thinking a lot about story, and now today I’m thinking more about story because I feel like with our president-elect right now, you described something earlier, well, is this a victory for him? Or is it a victory for the party? Is it a defeat of the opposing party? It’s hard to know right now but the one thing I do feel that I need to learn more about before I try to do anything intelligent or rational, is to understand what stories he told, whether they’re true, whether they’re good, whether they’re accurate, whether they’re kind, whether they’re decent, whether they’re respectful. Whatever stories he’s telling meant a lot to people, and I think different parts of that story meant things to different people, and a lot of the folks in those red states found a way to overlook one to five terrible things about him because there was something about that story that worked for them. And the failure of imagination for me, as I sit here today, is that I don’t think I got that story well enough and I think like everybody else I missed it. I don’t know what’s going to change as a result of that, but I don’t know how I can proceed to do anything intelligently until I understand what I got wrong. I don’t want to point a finger, I don’t want to yell at Jill Stein, I want to first understand how I got it wrong and I think I didn’t get the story right.

Gruber: So I am of the opinion that in the 2000 election, that you can yell at Ralph Nader, that Ralph Nader really fucked that one up and you don’t even want to get my wife — you’ve probably heard her do it because that one is —

Mann: She has a few hot button issues.

Gruber: She has hot button issues and Ralph Nader in 2000 is one of them — is that Ralph Nader really fucked that one up. And I don’t feel like this is that at all. I’m with you, I don’t have any animosity towards the third-party candidates, towards Jill Stein or Joe [Schenectady?], whatever the guy’s name is [Gary Johnson].

Mann: Yeah, the pot guy, Joe [Schenectady?].

Gruber: The guy who doesn’t know where Aleppo is.

Mann: Aleppo is that Brazilian restaurant in Philadelphia.

Gruber: You know what? I think that’s the third —

Mann: That’s the twelfth rule of —

Gruber: Aleppo! If you yell “Aleppo”, you’ll always get a fresh cut of the house sirloin.

Mann: Don’t fill up on Aleppo.

Gruber: This isn’t that at all. It’s very different. And I tweeted it — my id comes out on Twitter. I tweet a lot looser than I blog. Even on this show, I’m looser on Twitter than I am anywhere else. And I tweeted before — I think it was two days ago where the Trump team had suggested that they’re going to appoint Rudy Giuliani as attorney general and —

Mann: You could not put those announcements — and Gingrich — you could not put that in Mad magazine and have it be plausible.

Gruber: And Newt Gingrich as secretary of state. And at this point, maybe that’s going to come to pass, and like you said, sounds like something out of Mad magazine, but honest to god, at least there’s a certain honesty to it. I think it’s preposterous, I don’t agree with it, I think it’s terrible, but at least they’re saying, this is how bad it’s going to be. I say “bad”, but this is how — you know.

Mann: Different.

Gruber: How different it’s going to be.

Mann: I think we can fairly say, things are going to be a little different for a while.

Gruber: [laughs] Yes, I think that’s exactly —

Mann: Did you see that video of Obama highfiving a little kid dressed like Superman?

Gruber: Yeah.

Mann: And then he fell down, Superman highfived him and he fell back. Like the force of that 5-year-old kid knocked him over. I don’t think you’re going to get so much of that anymore.

Gruber: Yeah, not so much.

Mann: I’m going to really, really miss that guy. Sorry, I cut you off there.

Gruber: No, I don’t know where I was going.

Mann: You’re going to edit this and put it out, this is going to help a lot of people.

Gruber: That’s exactly what I want.

Mann: I think you are probably one of the premier Brazilian steak podcasts that’s available today. I don’t know all of them, the thing is we can’t scoop up everybody, that’s the thing. We’re going to leave some people out of the Brazilian meat circle.

Gruber: Have you ever had the fried banana at a Brazilian steakhouse?

Mann: Shit, dawg! Hell yeah.

Gruber: [laughs] And here’s what I thought the first time I went, I was like, well, I’m not eating a fried banana, that sounds disgusting.

Mann: That’s how they get you. That’s how they get you.

Gruber: And that’s how they get it.

Mann: It’s pretty damn good.

Gruber: It’s really good, and next thing you know, you’re asking your guy, the guy thinks you’re asking for more of the top sirloin or the bottom sirloin, they’ve got like 13 different cuts of steak, and the guy thinks you’re going to ask for that, and you’re like, no, bring us another fried banana.

Mann: They should serve it on the sword though. That would make it more fun.

Gruber: They should.

Mann: Banana sword.

Gruber: I think the problem is it’s going to fall right off the sword, it’s going to cut right through it.

Mann: I agree. Do you get the little tongs on the table when you go? I love the little tongs.

Gruber: Oh, always. You’ve got to get the tongs.

Mann: Well, you get to participate a little bit. I don’t think they have to do that, but I like the fact that they cut most of it off, then they give you this look, they go, huh? And you grab your little tongs and you help with the rest of the way.

Gruber: They cut it about 80 percent of the way and then you take your tongs, and then they cut the rest of the way and you take your little slab of meat.

Mann: Mm. Now I want more Brazilian steak.

Gruber: I think that’s what America needs. America needs a Brazilian steak.

Mann: That’s a really good way — stronger together. I think it’s something we could all use. Do you feel like you’re going to be okay? I mean, after the holiday party is over. I know it’s probably too early to feel anything too coherently, but anything you’re thinking about going forward?

Gruber: All I keep thinking is — I am obsessed. I’ve taken this very hard. I am politically very fascinated — I’ve said this before, but when I first started thinking, I should start writing a blog, I had this name “Daring Fireball” in my pocket, and I thought, should I write about Apple and tech stuff or should I write about politics. And it was like a 50/50 call for me in 2002.

Mann: Wow. Wow.

Gruber: It really was, I really am that invested in this stuff.

Mann: Or maybe sports, did you ever consider sports?

Gruber: Sports is always up there.

Mann: I’m not being facetious, did it cross your mind?

Gruber: I’m totally serious, it did but not as much because I didn’t feel like it was as underserved. I felt like politics and tech were underserved by smart commentary.

Mann: Well, we both got lucky — obviously you’re way more successful than I was at this — but we had good timing on figuring out pie slice of a pie slice. Who would ever think somebody would want something about Mac productivity, like, most people don’t want a Mac site. Most people don’t want a productivity site. Who would want a Mac productivity site? That’s bananas. And in your case, there were not that many people out there doing what you were doing. But sports, a little more.

Gruber: Totally true. But I would tell you, previous elections, again, I’m glad that Barack Obama won the last two, I was despondent in 2000 and 2004 when George W. Bush won, but this one, I don’t just feel like my side lost, I feel a guilt. I feel like... You and I are almost identically aged, straight white men with wives and a kid, and our kids are both what, roughly 10 years old, my kid’s a little older, yours is a little younger — we’re almost the same guy. We really are. And we make our living on the internet, and we’ve got it good. Right? I mean, there’s no denying it. You and I have it really good. And I really do feel that at a basic level I almost, it’s not even my right to feel bad about this one because it’s my people who blew it.

Mann: That’s true but there’s another part of this, part of what eats at me is that I have seen — and I agree with you, who needs two white guys talking about anything, except I’m a white guy who’s really pulling it for a lot of stuff to change. Like, regardless of whatever apple sauce my dick is in, there’s some stuff that means a lot to me. And as I have had small and sometimes private little bits of evolution in how I think about the world, I got a little myopic in thinking that other people saw the same thing and that they could be thrilled and buoyed to see people who never had a chance to be normal American citizens before, get to do things in the last five years nobody could’ve expected. I mean, who saw the gay marriage thing coming along the way it did? Well, some people did, and then it happened. And how can you look at that and see anything but joy that two people just got to be the person they wanted to be. America is where you get to be the person that you want to be. And that’s the hard part. But even, or especially as a white guy, because no, I don’t have the same — I’m certainly, I’m extremely privileged in so many ways, I get to go where I want to go and all that kind of stuff, but my little miniature journey into understanding these little parts of America better and getting to see those people have these exalted moments of victory after years of being told that they aren’t an actual human being, to see so much of that progress in the last five years and now see that in jeopardy hurts my heart in a way that’s difficult for me to communicate.

Gruber: I feel exactly the same way. I can’t say it better, this is why I’m glad you’re on the show with me today, and I really hope that whatever side of the election people who are listening to this are on, that they can hear us and sympathize. I mean that. And in a way, for example, I think my wife — I don’t think she listens to the show —

Mann: No, she doesn’t. Uh-uh.

Gruber: I think she’d be furious if she heard me saying that I’m — “whichever side of the election you’re on” because she thinks people who voted the other way are shitbags. And she’s not wrong. [laughs]

Mann: No, she’s not wrong. Here’s something I got schooled hard on by friend of the show John Siracusa, and we were talking about things having to do with the way that women get treated by everybody. And I found myself saying this thing that I don’t say anymore. This was like less than a year ago, but I found myself saying, “Don’t these people, these Gamergate guys, don’t they realize that they’re talking to somebody’s sister or they’re talking to somebody’s daughter?” And John, I think, very intelligently said, “Hey, is that really, is that the hill that you want to die on? Are you sure you want to put the importance of their humanity and rights in terms of how they relate to you?” And I thought about it, for months and months and months, and then I saw it happening a lot after the pussy grabbing and I thought about it a lot, and now I think you have to want these things for people because they’re people, not because they’re people that you’ve decided are particularly empathetic based on your own feelings and needs. And that’s where I think — I do feel comfortable as a white guy saying that this is a shitshow because I’ve gotten to see those victories, I see it in my kid’s class, the girl in my kid’s class wears a hidjab, you see it, it is real. This is not an abstract thing about a wall, this is about actual human beings who worked extremely hard to make what they can here and to see that potentially taken away in such a massive way, if that doesn’t move you, you’re not wired right.

Gruber: I saw a thing just yesterday, somebody posted on Twitter — I mean, there’s a thousand of them, maybe there’s a thousand different pictures of the same thing, but somebody posted yesterday a picture of a white guy, maybe somewhere around 27 years old. White guy at a Trump rally the day before the election and he was wearing a shirt that said “Hillary is a bitch #Trump”. So, black letters, “Hillary is a bitch” and then the hashtag, it was in red, “#Trump”. The observation was, can you even imagine how much worse is the misogyny that allows somebody to go out in public with the shirt like that, because what would be the equivalent shirt against Obama? Nobody would go out wearing a shirt with the N-word on it, right? Or — I say nobody, but — maybe in a country of 300 million there’s one guy who would do it, but. This wasn’t that abnormal.

Mann: But you wouldn’t have 46 percent of the population thinking it’s okay.

Gruber: Right, exactly, there is something very different.

Mann: There’s no cultural prohibition against that that’s pushing back to make him go “maybe this isn’t such a good idea”.

Gruber: And it makes me feel personally — even before the — and again, this was like 48 hours ago, this was before the results, but that one tweet and the guy wearing that shirt that said that, it just emphasizes how I feel this whole time, I feel like I need to step backwards and let other people tell me what is going on rather than observe myself. Do you know what I mean?

Mann: I do, you have to shut the fuck up at the times when somebody is telling you something you need to hear and then increasingly I’m coming around to the idea of how important it is to speak up when somebody’s doing the opposite.

Gruber: Exactly. The only time I feel the need to speak up is to you observe — like for example, to say it is to me literally, I’m not exaggerating, unacceptable to wear a shirt that says “Hillary is a bitch”. It’s completely unacceptable. To me it’s as unacceptable as saying “Obama is the N-word”. It’s equivalent. Yet we are not there as a society. So I’m willing to stand up and say that, but in terms of how we got these election result — I just feel like, I don’t know.

Mann: I don’t know either.

Gruber: I’ll tell you what, the other thing too, and I think we’re in the same boat here with, like I said, with two kids who at this point, like when we first had our kids, it felt like they were so far apart in age, right?

Mann: Oh, I know, I know. We were just playing with that — last night Ellie was pulling out some of her stuffies because she was feeling pretty ragged, and she found that little bird Jonas gave her in New Zealand. They were like babies, a little baby and a big baby.

Gruber: But at this point it feels like they are both “about 10 years old”. And that’s a loose approximation. I have to say, honest to god, and we haven’t indoctrinated Jonas with politics, we don’t make him talk about it, we don’t make him think about it. He just absorbs what he picks up. I have to say, he is devastated. He is absolutely devastated. And the kids, again, maybe it’s because we’re in the city and it’s an urban environment, but the kids today are so open-minded.

Mann: Oh, it’s unbelievably different. My daughter does not need to be schooled that it’s okay for gay people to be together. I mean, it’s everywhere, it’s the teachers at her school, that’s where we live, this is life, these are our friends. And it’d be like saying to her, you shouldn’t punch people in the face just because they’re wearing a blue shirt. She’d be like, yeah, yeah, of course not, why did you need to tell me that? “Just so you know, it’s okay if gay people are together.”

Gruber: I’ve said this before and I think you listen to my shows so maybe you’ve heard it but — I think it’s the most amazing thing. Jonas’s school has a club and it’s called GLOW, G-L-O-W, and it stands for “Gay, Lesbian, or Whatever”. And to me, it is the greatest — it’s so much better than LGBT and then they keep — you know, there’s Q and —

Mann: QIA.

Gruber: QI... “Gay, Lesbian, or Whatever” is to me —

Mann: Oh, that’s the actual name?

Gruber: It’s literally the name!

Mann: [laughs]

Gruber: It’s officially the name. I’m not making it up, it is so great.

Mann: And it’s actually weirdly efficient.

Gruber: But he doesn’t think it’s funny or clever at all. But it actually is what everybody of his generation seems to think is like, oh, yeah, whatever you’re into, you’re into, cool. It’s all right.

Mann: Why would that matter to me. It’s like me worrying about you having a green car.

Gruber: But this election result is such a repudiation of that “or whatever” part, right? And the kids get it, there’s no denying it, it’s not just like the video of the Latino girl saying to Hillary Clinton, “I’m worried that my parents are going to be deported”, and Hillary says, “Come here, I’m going to do whatever I can.” It’s all kids. It doesn’t matter what their background is. All kids see it, and I don’t know what to do. It’s the most loss I’ve ever felt as a parent.

Mann: Yeah, I agree with you. It’s so early. I think at a time when you’re not sure what’s going on and you’re feeling at sea, I think the advice to not panic is a good one. It’s hard not to, but I think on some level you’ve kind of got to just feel your way through and know we’ve gotten through a lot of stuff. And we’ll go through a lot of stuff in the future. I don’t have anything inspirational to say here, except that you’ve got to keep your cool, keep doing the right thing and try not to be unkind. Like right now, there’s a lot of people going after each other, and feels like there’s the beginnings of the vibe of fingerpointing and there’s a big vibe — and you know, if that’s your thing, hakuna matata, but if I had one thing to ask, let’s go easy on that for a while. And let’s go easy on tearing each other apart or tearing other people apart and let’s maybe just a have at least a couple-three days where we don’t tell people that they’re feeling wrong incorrectly or they’re feeling bad wrongly. Let people have a time to grieve for whatever it is they’re grieving for, even if you don’t think they deserve it.

Gruber: That’s exactly how I feel. And I don’t want to point any fingers, I really don’t. I just want to say, keep pushing in the right direction. It’s so hard because as mechanical devices, human beings are meant to see everything day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, but the truth is, in the long term what matters is on the years and decades perspective. And just keep pushing in the right direction and it’ll work out, even though this is clearly a setback. But I really do think that it’s not right, counterproductive to start pointing fingers.

Mann: Well, let’s check back in after a while. I’ve got to go pick up my kid and start my holiday party. I have a holiday party, did you get the invitation?

Gruber: [laughs] I’m going to be joining you.

Mann: [rings a bell, laughs]

Gruber: Merlin Mann, where else can people listen to you? You are, in my opinion, probably the single greatest podcaster on the internet.

Mann: Oh, you’re always, you’re always saying that.

Gruber: But I actually mean that.

Mann: Oh, thank you.

Gruber: You have, like, a bizarre gift for being really good on a podcast.

Mann: “Bizarre gift,” declares John Gruber. I don’t know, I don’t fucking know at this point. I don’t have a very good branding. Just go to @hotdogsladies if you want to see me on Twitter. I’m feeling kind of quiet right now. [laughs]

Gruber: Go to @hotdogsladies on Twitter.

Mann: You know what they should do, they should listen to the show I do with John Siracusa. I do a show with John Siracusa called Reconcilable Differences.

Gruber: Never heard of the guy.

Mann: Never heard of it, it’s at relay.fm/rd.

Gruber: Yeah, but who is this guy John Siracusa?

Mann: I don’t know, I think he might be an Italian.

Gruber: [laughs]

John Gruber: Ladies and gentlemen, your pal John Gruber here. This is a very special episode of The Talk Show. It is a different episode of The Talk Show as you’re about to find out, and so it is a different kind of sponsorship setup. I’m just going to tell you right here, this episode is exclusively brought to you by Meh.com.

[sponsor break: Meh.com]

And without any other further ado, ladies and gentlemen, The Talk Show.

This is going to be fun, we’ve got Eddy Cue, senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. Eddy, welcome to The Talk Show.

Eddy Cue: How are you doing?

Gruber: And returning to The Talk Show, which must mean I didn’t botch it up too badly, Craig Federighi, senior vice president of Software Engineering.

Craig Federighi: It’s a rare honor to be here, John.

Gruber: Here’s my question, this is the tough one. I want to know, now, Eddy, you’re a big sports fan. Has Steve Dowling sent you to, like, photography school for taking pictures after sporting events now, post-Super Bowl?

Cue: You know, I love that because you may know, Tim and I went to the Super Bowl together, and he’s a huge Broncos fan. So when they won the game, we were all excited, high-fiving each other, we went onto the field, he’s taking the photos. He’s so excited, he wanted to congratulate them and sent the picture out, and the next morning I wake up and I get to see all of those messages and tweets and everything else. And I thought it was great because it shows, you know, Tim is just like you and me, he’s a huge sports fan and was loving it, he loved that his team actually won the Super Bowl.

Gruber: That’s exactly what I thought. I thought it was like, Tim is a human being, and that’s a real sports fan’s photo. I thought it was goofy — the reaction that people had, to me it was just a happy moment. All right.

Cue: I’m hoping to have a few more for you this year, maybe another repeat for the Warriors, repeat Duke national championship, you know.

Gruber: I don’t know about the Duke one. I wasn’t going to mention Duke, Eddy!

Cue: [laughs] We’ve been wanting to talk to you for like three weeks, but I told Dowling there’s no way I’m going to talk to John right now because we’ve been losing games straight. So I’ve waited till we’ve won the last two games in a row, we’re hot, and I’m like, let’s get on the call now.

Gruber: My last sports-related suggestion to you is, just in case the Warriors keep it up, and just in case maybe WWDC sticks to the typical schedule, maybe you want to rehearse more and if you have extra tickets for a Warriors finals game, I know a guy who maybe could take them off your hands, just saying.

Cue: You’re on.

Gruber: Let’s get down to brass tacks here. One of the reasons that this is even happening is that Apple is talking about and telling its users a lot more about what is coming down the pipeline in software. And the best example of that is that there’s a big, it’s not even like a developer page, it’s a big product marketing page on what’s coming in iOS 9.3.

Federighi: Yeah. We have real feature-release here with 9.3. So we certainly wanted to talk about it, and we also wanted to get it out in public seeds. So many of you are running it, certainly all of us here are, and there’s a lot of really cool stuff we were able to do, and we didn’t want to wait all the way till WWDC to get it out.

Gruber: So I’m not imagining things that this is at least a subtle change away from keeping features as a sort of — new features that you want to promote in the OS as a monolithic, once a year at WWDC we’ll announce them, and once a year, a couple months later in the fall, we will release them, sort of schedule?

Federighi: Yeah, you know, a huge part of what we do with iOS over year is we’re really advancing the platform for developers. And you really can’t trickle out a big change for developers at the platform level continuously throughout the year. So that’s something what makes a ton of sense for us to advance it all at once, have a conference, get everyone early access to the SDK’s that they’re going to use, give them a chance to get their apps ready and take advantage of all the new capabilities and then get it out with the major OS.

But there are things that we can do that don’t have that characteristic, and if you look at the kind of features coming in 9.3 with our support for education, shared-use iPads in the classroom app, or the Night Shift feature, or some of the improvements we made to Photos or even Smart Keyboard handling on the iPad Pro. These are the things that we wanted to get out right away to everyone because we think everyone can enjoy them, and they aren’t the kind of things that really impact moving the platform forward for developers.

Gruber: Right, it’s not really developer changes, but there are definitely major features. One of my favorites is, for the Smart Keyboard, that when you’d go to Spotlight search, you can arrow-key down to the search results.

Federighi: Yeah, I know, you did helpfully note for us shortly after we shipped the iPad Pro that we missed one there. We missed more than one, let me say. And so we’ve been responding to all kind of great feedback we’ve gotten on the iPad Pro. We’re all excited about the device and so excited that people have really embraced it. But as we all use it more deeply, we’re all seeing things where we can improve a bunch of things including the keyboard support. So we’ve taken this opportunity in 9.3 to make some of those enhancements.

Gruber: That is an interesting thing. So one of the things is you guys actually are — and I say not just you, Craig and Eddy, but everybody on the executive leadership team — in addition to having these jobs that are very specific in terms of your responsibilities, you’re also users of the products that Apple makes.

Federighi: Oh yeah. That’s why we’re here, for sure. I mean, no one was more enthusiastic to get access to the inside of Apple and software than myself and Eddy, and certainly I am installing — I think I probably installed something like five hundred versions, I mean, literally it’s five hundred to thousand versions of OS X and iOS myself, every year. I have four Macs and four iPads and two phones, and I upgrade them all to the newest build pretty much every day. I think I did the math wrong, I think it’s like a hundred thousand versions of OS X and iOS I install, every year.

Cue: John, I’ve been doing this for more than thirty years. The way I started with this was bringing my Mac into the office for my first job and so working on a Mac for me was like a dream-come-true. I live on our products every day, I use all of our products every day, they are part of my life. My kids, my family — it’s great, we share that experience and we give each other feedback. It’s what we do.

Gruber: But so, Eddy, when you get, like, a new MacBook Pro or whatever you’re going to use, but you set it up yourself?

Cue: Oh, absolutely. First of all, hopefully, everyone can set it up themselves because that’s how we built it for. It’s really easy, I set it up, I transfer my content from my old MacBook, I just did a new iMac as a matter of fact. I actually bought it myself, I went in on the online store, I wanted to see what the experience was. I ordered it, checked all the mail, I wanted to see the mail, the notifications that came to my phone. And then installed it all.

Federighi: No joke, Eddy — seriously, most meetings I’m in with Eddy — at some point in the meeting, he breaks out one of his devices and starts upgrading it, mid-meeting. And then we’re able to get on-the-fly feedback on the new software during the meeting so it’s very helpful.

Gruber: I know it sounds like a trivial question, but it’s something I’ve always wanted to ask people like you. Because I can see it both ways where I know you guys are technically adept and have the background to do it, but on the other hand, as the senior vice presidents of a semi-large corporation, you don’t have to. If you wanted to have somebody set up your stuff for you, you could do it. So it’s always been curious to me, whether you guys go through it because you want to get that, like, what’s it like to be a real user experience, or do you take advantage of the fact that you don’t have to if you don’t want to.

Federighi: Oh yeah, it’s not just that, we’re both involved every day in the development of the software that’s being put together, and so we all want to run the latest thing that we were just in [?] review talking about. We want to get that feature that we talked about last week and start living on it, so we can start giving the team feedback on what we’re seeing. So it’s an integral part of how we develop here is that we all live on the software. And at the same time, probably like yourself, we’re all the tech support teams for our families and our parents and our in-laws. All my kids are running the betas all the time, so we get live feedback, helpful feedback from the whole family, non-stop. We’re immersed in the Apple universe of feedback.

Cue: John, let me give you an example of something — because this happens all the time for me. I’m using our products. So this weekend I was using Apple TV, I’ve got the new Apple TV, and by the way, which we should talk about, there’s a lot of great new features coming out with this, this is a major release of Apple TV. But I’m doing a purchase of a movie, and I’ve got family plan, Apple Music, the whole thing with everybody. And the message that comes up on the screen says, “Somebody from your family has already purchased this. Would you like to buy it again?” Pretty dumb message. And so it’s an example of — I got on there, and I’m talking to my team, why are we doing it this way. And it’s just a history thing of before there was family plan, it would ask you that question because it was single-user. Once you have a family plan, it should just download, it shouldn’t even bother to ask you. And so, we live, both Craig and I, that’s part of what we love doing, and so it’s great to be able to have an impact and change these things because we’re using them ourselves.

Gruber: That’s a perfect example. One of the questions I wanted to ask you was what was the last bug that you encountered yourself and that’s a good one, and it’s an interesting explanation. Just to clarify, what you’re saying is, it’s saying that the person who’s now in your family plan, who made that purchase earlier, made the purchase before there was a thing called the family plan, and therefore it did not automatically download it.

Cue: No, it wasn’t. They did make the purchase and they were part of the family plan. Originally, when we were doing this, there wasn’t a thing as family plan and it was designed just to ask you if you wanted to purchase again. When we did this software for family plan, we didn’t take into account that, we just said, oh, somebody already purchased it, and instead of just downloading it, we didn’t do that. But I want to give you, since you’ve said, I want to tell you a little bit how crazy Craig and I are about this stuff. And you said, what’s the latest because it just reminded me of this. I was installing a new version of OS X on my iMac, and it’s an unreleased version, couple of days ago. And I ran into a problem that I knew would be very difficult to recreate and this was about 7:30 at night, I’d just gotten home doing the update, and I called Craig up and I said, “Here’s the problem that I’ve got.” I was leaving the next day to Yuma, Arizona. By the way, I want to give a shout out to the kids and teachers out in Yuma, Arizona, that are using iPads — but I called Craig up, told him about the problem, said, “Look, I’m leaving tomorrow, I want you guys to look at this because I think it’s kind of weird, I don’t think it’s going to be easy to recreate.” He says, “Sure.” So I took the iMac, put in my car, drove to Craig’s house, gave him the iMac, came back home, went on my trip. Craig and the engineers looked at it, figured it out, and the next day I got the iMac back.

Gruber: It was sort of like preserving a crime scene.

Federighi: [laughs]

Cue: That’s right, except we found out at the end that no crime was committed because we fixed it.

Gruber: Right, but if you have a bug or just an edge case that you’re worried you can’t reproduce, you really do just want to freeze the computer right where it is and let the engineers start debugging.

Federighi: Yeah, absolutely. And it was helpful that Eddy was on the case on that one.

Gruber: That’s a really great story though. I love that he just drops it off at your house.

Cue: It’s good to know people.

Gruber: It’s interesting, but that’s exactly the sort of question I had is how involved do you guys get when you run into one of these little — it’s inevitable, nobody has ever written bug-free software, it’s the nature of software, but what do you guys do when you guys encounter it. Drive over to Craig’s house is the answer, I like that.

So before we forget, let’s go back and talk about what’s coming up in Apple TV. So right now it’s a beta, it’s TV OS 9.2. And it really is a major feature, just of the top of my head, Siri dictation for text entry and searching for apps. That’s something people started complaining about as soon as the new Apple TV shipped. That’s a big one.

Cue: Yeah, it’s huge. Look, when you get your Apple TV the first time, the first thing you got to do is enter your Apple ID and your password, and you’ve got Siri built into this remote, why not just tell it and spell it out instead of having to go through the typing mechanism of doing it. And so we wanted to do that right from the beginning. And then searching on the App Store — we added searching across movies, TV shows, Netflix and Hulu, we’ve added a bunch of new content providers like FX, you can search Disney Channel, we continue to add more, but obviously the App Store is a huge one. And so we’ve done that, we’ve added some languages: Spanish, French to that. We’ve added iCloud Photo Library full support so you can see all of your photos. And also one of the things that you’ve noticed if you’ve downloaded a lot of apps from the App Store, having folders now. So just like you have on iOS, you can have folders.

Gruber: Right, so you could just group together all your little arcade games, put them in an Arcade folder.

Cue: That’s right.

Gruber: Can you tell me — I know this is from the list, and this is how lazy I am in preparing for a very important talk show — one of the features is Conference Room Display Mode. What is that?

Cue: We had this in the original Apple TV and part of this is, if you know, most conference rooms from Wi-Fi connectivities and to the networks, you have private networks that are set up for the corporation, but then somebody comes in to present, and you don’t really want to let them into your private network from the company. And so we had this capability, and we wanted to add that to the Apple TV so that it would be easy for people to come in and present.

Gruber: Gotcha.

Federighi: We can also lock the display so that instead of showing you the latest top movies at the beginning of every meeting, it can just tell you that you can AirPlay to it so — we all stay on top of all the top films here at Apple when we start every meeting. But now we have an alternative.

Cue: That’s true.

Gruber: So it’s really Siri-wide, and this affects every platform, but the expansion to include new languages, obviously that is really super important to, let’s just say, people who speak Spanish, it’s really like a make-or-break feature. How difficult is that to do each language, to keep adding languages to Siri and to keep the level of quality of Siri’s recognition?

Cue: We have over 35 languages in Siri. Apple TV presents an actually interesting problem compared to just Siri itself in that, a lot of the things that you search for are not in the native language you’re speaking. So you’re actually, let’s say, speaking in Spanish, but you’re searching for an English title. And so Siri has to be aware that it’s actually able to speak multiple languages and understand when it is that it’s asking for a title vs. when it is that you’re actually giving a verb or a noun to it from that. And so it’s an interesting, challenging problem, which is why we’ve been adding languages to Siri, to Apple TV — we’re not quite at 35 that Siri has, but we’ll keep adding on. And it’s supporting that multi-language aspect of Siri that makes it even more fun for us to try to resolve.

Federighi: Yeah, our machine-learning teams at Apple and within the Siri team have done some remarkable work, and I know you’ve noticed some of the improvements to Siri’s both performance and its ability to recognize, but the core technology has improved so much that it’s really helped us get high accuracy when we take on all of these new languages. And some of these challenges, like, now we have to know not just that you’re speaking Spanish, but while you’re speaking Spanish, you’re talking about There Might Be Giants, but you’re pronouncing those words with the Spanish accent, and Siri needs to recognize that. These are the kind of things that a few years ago were just out of reach and now we have the core technology to do it and I think the experience with Siri has just taken some giant leaps forward.

Cue: By the way, at a huge scale, these are billions of requests that are coming every week to Siri.

Gruber: Across all the platforms?

Cue: That’s right.

Gruber: So in addition to that, here’s another one that’s added to TV OS 9.2 is sort of the old-school way of text entry, Bluetooth keyboard support. And it’s a little thing but it’s one of those things where the old Apple TV supported it, including at setup. So that you could set up, like, if you had the Apple Magic Keyboard, you could connect to it. And then the new Apple TV came out, and it didn’t have it, and everybody was — some people maybe were a little annoyed that everything they had to do with the new Apple TV in November was up-down-left-right to enter everything. Is this just an issue of, hey, it was a new version of TV OS, all new, integrating it with iOS, we just didn’t get to it by November, or was this a rethink like, hey, a lot of people are asking us for Bluetooth keyboard support, let’s go back and put it back in.

Cue: That’s a great question. In that case it was really simple, we were doing the new OS, and it’s something we wanted to get to, we knew it wasn’t the majority of customers, and so we felt like we could add it later, and we always planned it. And yes, I did get a few emails and a few tweets about it.

Federighi: You know, what’s just hilarious about this though is, we have a very vocal community as you know, and when we were getting this feedback, even actually before making the decision not to include it in the first release that the team had done the analysis based on our diagnostics and usage data, about how many customers use Bluetooth keyboard with their Apple TV every week, and they charted it out over time, and it’s a small rate relative to how people are using the built-in remote and so forth. But we noticed that that rate of use of the Bluetooth keyboard dropped to almost nothing during WWDC. And what this told us was, pretty much everyone is using it as a developer who’s going to WWDC or an Apple employee. Now, that didn’t stop all of them from writing Eddy when it was missing but just to give you the sense of kind of what’s going on underneath all that.

Gruber: [laughs] That is hilarious. I was going to say that I think it’s a hard sell across your family. Whether there’s one person in the family who’s technically adept, who wants to put a Bluetooth keyboard in the living room. I think it’s a hard sell family-wide to keep a keyboard in the living room.

Cue: And we do have something even a little bit better coming out in a few months, which is we have a new remote app. So that if you have your iPhone, you can use the keyboard on the iPhone to do that, and I think that certainly will get a lot more use.

Federighi: And more than that, I mean really the full Siri to your phone communicating with your TV, that’s a great upgrade to that app.

Gruber: Well, there’s a remote app for the iPhone now that you can connect to Apple TV.

Cue: There is. As Craig said, it only does the keyboard. The new remote app will do all of the capabilities that the existing new Apple TV remote does, like Siri.

Federighi: And like gestures, for instance. Because you have — obviously, the trackpad function of the remote can be done with your phone now too without remote. So it’s a really full replacement.

Gruber: Ooh, so I have a scoop here.

Federighi: There you go. You heard it here first!

Cue: You can’t broadcast this for three months.

Federighi: [laughs] Yeah.

Gruber: I think that’s going to actually make a lot of people very happy though. Would that work with some of the games, too? So that if there’s a two-player game that somebody could use their phone and have it be the slider and somebody else can use the remote?

Cue: Yes, that’s exactly — you can use the Apple TV remote for one person and their phone for the second person.

Gruber: Oh, that sounds great. Let’s move on and talk about something that — it almost feels like a Groundhog Day, and since it’s February, it actually is close to Groundhog Day — is that last year there were a couple of posts that came up early in the year about Apple having little tiny sort of death by a thousand paper cuts software problems across the board, and there was a lot of discussion about it, and it sort of culminated, at least for me, when Phil Schiller was on this show, at the live show at WWDC and we talked about it. And I thought Phil talked about it really openly. And then it seemed to fade away from the punditry discussion, and then last week Walt Mossberg had a column, and the headline was “Apple’s App Problem”. What do you guys say to this, just the general, nothing specific, let’s not get into any specific app, but the general idea that Apple’s software has declined in quality, let’s say, over the last five years?

Federighi: I would say first that there’s nothing we care about more, so it’s not just me and Eddy filing lots of radars and using our devices, but everyone who works here at Apple, we recognize, this is the single most important thing about what we do and what we come to work to do every day. So I take extremely seriously any time any of our customers says that they aren’t having the experience that they expected from us. And clearly, Walt’s article indicates that he is at the moment in that camp. I look at it and say, I know our core software quality has improved over the last five years, improved significantly. But the bar just keeps going up, and that’s a bar that we embrace, that is a challenge that — every year we realize the things we were good at last year and the techniques we were using to build the best software we can are not adequate for next year because the bar keeps going up. We have a billion active devices now, and if you think back to just nine years ago now with the iPhone, think back then of how you interfaced with technology and, comparatively, how narrowly each of us interfaced with technology, and now think about how integral your iPhone, your iPad, and still your Mac are to your life, how many hours a day — I mean, we see the usage metrics and year after year as our team builds a new phone and thinks, how big of a battery we should put in this phone, we have to go back to them and say, “Guys, actually, you’re going to have to up that a good bit because people are using their phones more than ever this year.” And we see that trend go up and up and up and people are doing more and more. And what this means is when you have a billion people running phones in every corner of their lives with all of these third-party apps in all these countries in all these languages that there are going to be issues, there are always issues, but now these issues are — you got plenty of people that can encounter one here and there and it gets amplified. And maybe I could ask you, I feel like if you go back five or ten years in just the nature of internet journalism and the press and how stories like this get communicated and amplified, it’s changed things a little bit as well. And so I think that plays into the element of why are we hearing about this again or why do we hear about it in the way we do. But I know we put just tremendous focus on improving our game every year.

Gruber: There’s a certain aspect to the basic idea that to me is a little bit more of a — not just me, I’m saying what I detect when I see people nodding their heads in agreement on Twitter and follow a post to say that — like Mossberg’s column last week — that it’s more of a gut feeling than anything that anybody can put their finger on and say, “Here’s this one thing that’s absolutely terrible.” And I know, just from talking with Phil last year and with what you’re saying now, that you guys have a lot of ways that you measure this stuff with real analytics from the diagnostics that people explicitly opt in to provide to you when they’re setting up devices.

Federighi: That’s right.

Gruber: And I sense it — you guys, you two are both optimistic, cheerful people but I can’t help but — I suspect and it’s not coming from your voices here on this show, but I just suspect in general that there is a sort of frustration within the walls at Apple that you guys have these numbers that say software quality is going up and then on the outside everybody is saying, “Wow, Apple software, their eye is off the ball.” Is that frustrating?

Cue: No, look, I think you said a few words that I would disagree with, you said “everybody”. I think the vast majority of our customers are quite happy with our products, and the feedback that they get, and they ask for help, and that’s why we’ve built things like Genius Bars, which have been very popular, why we’ve spent a great deal of money and effort on our Apple Care and support lines so when people need help — training, all of those things. So it’s not to say that we don’t have any bugs or that we don’t have any issues. Every piece of software does. We care deeply about it, which is why we do all of these different touchpoints, monitor them, look at them, make sure we’re addressing them. And at the same time as doing that, upping the game even more. Because part of upping the game is not just standing still and making the things that you have work, but making them even better, making them easier to use. Those are all the things we have to do at the same time.

Federighi: Apple customers deserve the best, and that’s absolutely what we’re signed up for. So if and when we hear people are having challenges, well, on the one hand, we’re frustrated, of course, to hear it overall characterized as this “quality is dropping overall” because we know that’s not true. But at the same time, there is certainly reality, if people are having these experiences, then there’s something we can improve, and I can tell you the number of meetings we have and have had even over the last few weeks where we’re constantly talking about how do we up the game because when you talk about a billion customers and you talk about the kind of upgrade rates we have. I mean, I think back to when we shipped Snow Leopard and how many people installed 10.6.0? Effectively no one. Approximately no one. In fact, we used to talk about, well, the upgrade rate to this OS will about match the sales of new Macs that have it installed. People just didn’t upgrade. And if they did upgrade, it’s like, why don’t we wait for 10.6.5 or something. Now, we release a piece of software and in a matter of couple of weeks we have, you know, coming up on 50% of our base running that piece of software. Hundreds of millions of people suddenly pounding on it, running a diversity of apps that just is unprecedented, and using it in these incredibly connected ways. And so, yeah, the bar is higher, and we will continue to adapt every year to meet that challenge.

Cue: And the scale, John, for this is truly amazing because of the usage that people, I mean, they rely on these for their lives. I’ll give you a couple points that — we peak out at 200,000 messages a second that are sent on Messages, for example. We do 750,000,000 transactions every week in our App Store, iTunes Store. We’ve done billions of dollars — now you’re talking about dollars for payments in Apple Pay. This is like, it’s a part of everyone’s lives and it’s great, we love this, this is the reason why we do what we do and we get up in the morning, we’re excited about coming in because we can do more. So, the scale of this is huge, huge.

Gruber: What was the number for messages? 200k for second at the peak?

Cue: That’s right.

Federighi: People got a lot to say apparently.

Gruber: Yeah, that was probably right at the moment in the first quarter of the Super Bowl when they overturned that catch, right?

Cue: [laughs] Yeah, for some reason it was really high from North Carolina, I don’t know what was the —

Gruber: But that is extraordinary. Eddy, that gets to a specific point, and this is clearly a ball that’s in your court, is that the general meme that Apple doesn’t do online services well, and that’s your responsibility. What do you say to that?

Cue: I think you go back to the things that we do really well. Some of that we earned, to be clear, right? Part of the reason we did that, many years ago, with Mobile Me or Maps, but we’ve corrected those, and you look at iCloud, we have 782,000,000 iCloud users. Some have multiple devices, which is why we have a billion devices. They upload billions of photos every single week, every single day. And you look at the scale of messages, you look at Apple Pay, you look at our stores, we run some of the largest services in the world, very successfully. You take a look at Maps, we’ve corrected more than a 2,500,000 customer feedback that we’ve gotten from customers directly to Maps that we’ve corrected and notified them back that we’ve fixed them. So the scale of this is huge, and I would compare it to any company out there.

Federighi: And the ramp is unbelievable. Consider when we launch a new release of iOS and OS X and the corresponding cloud services, how we go from effectively zero to unbelievable international scale literally overnight. It’s incredible, and the team has done that at a scale that is — I can’t think of another example of what happens when we turn the lights on on a new service like we do. And it generally goes off without a hitch.

Cue: The other thing I love is, we’re not harping our services as the brand of services and the thing, it’s the experience. So whether you’re typing in a note on your iPhone and it’s on your Mac, we’re not advertising this as Notes services or anything, we just want the experience to be — so a lot of these things are behind the things and they just work and it’s great for customers.

Gruber: Yeah, even iMessage is a good example of that. And I personally have — I don’t even know, I’m a big chunk of that 200,000 messages per second, I send a lot of messages and almost all of my messages are blue.

Federighi: [laughs]

Cue: You have good friends.

Federighi: Yes.

Cue: And smart ones.

Gruber: But if you just look at how many people are using iMessage and how many messages they’re sending, it compares very, very favorably to a lot of the independent messaging apps and services out there like WhatsApp and WeChat and things like that. And I feel like that’s one of those things that Apple doesn’t really get credit for is that they’ve got this messaging service with extraordinary number of users who are extraordinarily engaged with it, and it’s not really figured into what Apple does at all because you guys don’t really brand it that way, you’re just like, hey, just use this app and send your message to the person you know and it goes through.

Federighi: Yeah, I think that’s what’s great really about what we do, is we tie together the hardware, the software, and the services in a way that you aren’t thinking you’ve just used a cloud service necessarily when you bought your new iPhone and all your settings came back exactly the way you expected and so forth, or when we do a feature like Apple Pay, I mean, Apple Pay is a hardware feature, it’s a software feature, it’s a cloud feature, and it just works. And it’s a tremendous, complex undertaking, but the customer doesn’t have to think about any of those component pieces, they get an experience that hopefully delights them.

Gruber: I’ll give you a real quick anecdote — hopefully quick — I was on an airplane recently, and the plane took off and I got on the Wi-Fi, and online service from a different company — wasn’t an Apple thing, it was somebody else — gave me a warning that I couldn’t — it looked like I was signing in from an unusual location because it was — I don’t know where the plane Wi-Fi was saying it from — how do I want to verify that it’s really me? And the only options were to get a phone call or an SMS text message, which I can’t get because I’m 10,000 feet up in the air. And I showed it to the guy — my friend for the day sitting next to me on the plane who we’d spoken before the flight took off, and he was like, “Oh yeah, you can get text, I’m texting my wife right now.” And he was sending an iMessage. And I was just like, “Oh yeah, okay, I’ll do that”, because I didn’t want to explain. He thought he was solving my problem because he was just, “Oh, oh, it’s great, this is absolutely wonderful, I’m texting right now.” He didn’t really have to think about what he’s using to text, he’s just doing it.

Federighi: Yeah, I think it’s a fantastic example.

Gruber: So let’s shift from services to talk about a specific bit of software, which isn’t really about how it works but really sort of how it’s designed. And it’s iTunes on the desktop. And here is when I wanted to quote Walt. Here’s what Walt Mossberg wrote, “Apple’s iTunes program was once the envy of the world. A combined digital music store and player, it could also sync your iPod. And it worked on both Mac and Windows. It was reasonably fast and very sure-footed. Now, I dread opening the thing.” And that sort of damning and the thing that to me is more damning is that I don’t — I see a lot of people who agree with that, and I don’t see anybody who really disagrees with it.

Cue: Yeah, look, let’s go back to Walt’s thing specifically to address — which is his performance issues and that we’ve actually looked at, it had nothing to do with iTunes, but your question is still dead-on because it’s something we started about two years ago, thinking about what we wanted to do with iTunes. And let me walk you back with where it’s designed from and where I think it can go to. So, first of all, we designed it in a time when everybody was syncing directly via cable. So the things didn’t exist in the cloud, and having a centralized place where all of your content was there to sync was really key because it made it really easy to do, didn’t matter where the content was, you didn’t have to launch multiple apps, you didn’t have a separate app that made it really difficult to see, and so it worked really, really well. And by the way, given that we have a billion devices out there, there’s still hundreds of millions of people doing exactly that. When we went to Apple Music, we said, “Well, let’s see, we’re building a new service, why don’t we do it all in the cloud, Apple Music is all in the cloud, let’s do it that way.” And one of the things that we wanted to do that was different was, we didn’t want just the music that lived in the cloud, if you had music, whether it was a live performance by Bruce Springsteen, for example, which I just bought because I haven’t seen the new show and I’m a huge Bruce fan, how do I get that to the cloud? Well, in most of the services that are out there, there is no way to do that. Because it lives in iTunes, it lets you do that, and it’s very easy to upload that into the cloud, and then it exists on all of your devices. And so we decided that in the short term what we wanted to do is really make it so that when you’re in music in iTunes, all you see is music. And if you were doing a separate music app, it would really look a lot like iTunes when you’re in a music player because there’s only one area where you pick which media type you want to do. That’s not to say that we aren’t continuing, and we’ll continue to think about what’s the best way to architect the app, and whether it makes sense to make a separate app for some of the components that are in there or all of the components that are in there. But right now we think we’ve designed iTunes, and you’ll see, we’ve got a new refresh with the new version of OS X that’s coming out next month that makes it even easier to use in the music space.

Federighi: There’s a big responsibility in transitioning the experiences for a lot of these apps. These are so important to people, we see it every time we change them at all, and there were cases where — if you look at Photos where we did a really bold rethink of where Photos needed to go and how to transition it. And by and large I think that’s been well-received. And I personally love it. But you’ll hear people who say, “Hold on, there was a reason why I liked the way things used to be.” And people are pretty serious about their music and about their collection, and so I think we debate pretty heavily internally the right way to evolve these things. And we tend to err on the side of being pretty bold, but there’s a lot of responsibility. You get the other side of these stories, some of the people, when you talk about people nodding your head, if I look at some of the comments that come online when people say, “Yeah, Apple’s quality’s bad”, and someone will say, “Yeah, when they took away my iPhoto app and replaced it with Photos, I don’t like the new Photos app”, and that’s why they think Apple’s software quality is bad. Now, many of us would say, “Hold on, that’s exactly an example where Apple’s software quality is quite good, we delivered something faster, cleaner, simpler”, but someone’s going to say, “No, but it’s changed, and I was attached to it.” And so this is a tricky balancing act, and I think our customers give us a lot of responsibility to thoughtfully evolve their experiences, and we try to take that responsibility very seriously.

Gruber: I don’t think anybody would disagree that institutionally Apple, compared to any company you might compare it against, has been always more willing to push through changes. Whether you go back to the ’80s and say that the Macintosh debuted without any kind of command line at all, which was the only way anybody knew how to use a computer up until then. And they’re like, no, this is the right way. Another, almost canonical example of it was the 1998, original iMac shipping without a floppy disk, and nobody had ever — how could you have a personal computer without a floppy disk? Little things like that. Do you guys find though that it’s getting harder to do that now that you’re talking about having 700–800 million users? Is it harder because of that resistance, that natural part of humanity that just is resistant to change of any kind?

Cue: Sure. Of course, it’s harder. When you have more customers, those things are harder to do but at least for me, and I’ve been here when we were really small, and now we’re much larger, it hasn’t really changed. We’re still willing to push, we just have to make sure that what we think about the ways that people are using the product, and when we make the changes, that they’re not significant and we’re improving more than we’re actually taking away, that it’s the right thing to do, and you have to be a little more conscious of understanding all of the different ways in which customers use it. But you bet we’ve got to keep pushing because if you want to innovate, you’ve got to move, you can’t sit still with what you have.

Federighi: And that’s so strong internally. The base instinct of everyone here is, let’s do it, let’s do it the right way, if this is now the right way, forget the past, let’s do it the right way, and it’s a second thought then, well, hold on, what does that mean for the transition and taking our customers along with us on this. But it’s so integral to who we are and how people think here. Yeah, there’s more of an external — there is a larger customer base that we have responsibility for, but we know part of why they’re Apple customers is because that’s what they expect from us. We would be doing them a disservice if we stopped pushing.

Gruber: All right, let me make this specific comparison between two apps we’ve just been talking about, iTunes and Photos for Mac. In the digital hub era when the Mac was positioned — here’s our idea for the Mac, it’s your digital hub for all of these little devices like cameras and iPods that you have in your life. iPhoto was the Mac solution to photos, and iTunes was the Mac and Windows solution to music and then later media like TV shows and stuff. The new strategy is clearly iCloud-centric. You guys have been explicit about that since iCloud was announced on stage in 2011. And it didn’t come right away, it wasn’t like Photos for Mac came out immediately, but that was the answer, and last year was really that transition year. But the idea was, look, iPhoto was great for then, but now we’ve got this Photos app, which is truly just a peer to what you’ve got on your iOS devices, and it’s really designed for the modern age and the modern model. And iTunes and music haven’t really made that shift. Is that because music is different and because iTunes has different responsibilities, or is it because iTunes has to exist for Windows and iPhoto didn’t? Or is it something else?

Cue: No, look, I think you’re seeing music make that transition now, since last year when we introduced Apple Music. The truth is, music before that was very local, it really didn’t live in the cloud, and you moved your content by moving it to a device locally, and then the device was there, and then if you wanted to update that device, you brought it back. And it’s not just bringing a subscription service as I said, it’s about bringing all of your music, no matter how you acquired it, if it doesn’t exist in the subscription service, and you bought it yourself separately, or it’s available separately as a bootleg, all of the things that you consume with music — and we’re seeing that transition now, so for myself, I live in a world where my music is all in the cloud. And I think we’re going to see more and more customers — we just passed over 11 million Apple Music subscribers, and all of those people live in a world where music is in the cloud.

Gruber: So that’s a big number, 11 million Apple Music subscribers is a big number, and it’s only since — when did it come out of beta?

Cue: It came out in September, but we gave away the first three month for free so think about it as later in the year, October.

Gruber: And the growth rate is good on that?

Cue: We’ve been very pleased, it’s great. Just this past week we introduced it in Taiwan, and we also introduced it in Turkey, which has been great, we introduced a version for Android, our first Android application.

Federighi: That’s our second, we had Move to iOS.

Cue: That’s true, thank you. [laughs]

Federighi: Much loved app on the Android Play Store.

Gruber: Always a good source of humor is to go — it’s like going to read the Yelp reviews for your favorite local restaurant and seeing the people who don’t get it.

Cue: And one of the things we’ve learned, by the way, as we’ve gone to Apple Music is that we have to educate people — as much as all of us know about music subscriptions, when you go around the world, what does it mean to have access to all of the music in the world and what does that mean and how does that work, and that’s something that we’re doing a lot of work on right now. Because we noticed that a lot of times people just didn’t understand the concept, “What do you mean I pay 99, what do I get, how do I get it?”, all of those things. And that’s been a big part of moving the number and continuing to move the number forward.

Gruber: All right, before we wrap this up, there’s a topic I want to get to, and I guess it’s a little bit more in Craig’s side of the court, but I’ve got some good friends who if I don’t talk about this, I think they’re going to shoot me because I have the opportunity.

Federighi: Is this about a dynamic dispatch in Objective-C? I’m ready.

Gruber: [laughs] No! It’s about Radar. So Eddy mentioned that with Maps, Maps has a feature where if you see an error, you can report the error, and when it gets fixed, you get notified, and it says, “Hey, thank you for reporting that this road is not where it used to be or there’s a new road here, we have now fixed it.” What I hear a lot from my friends who are third-party developers is that sense that Radar is nearly a black hole, that you file your report, it goes in there and an awful lot of bugs, even ones that are submitted with examples, like, here, run this example code and it will prove that this is a bug in this new version of the OS. And then they just never hear anything about it. How can Radar get more like Apple Maps where it gives —

Cue: [laughs]

Gruber: I’m serious! I think the developers really — and I feel like it’s a — I don’t know what the opposite of the virtuous circle is, an invirtuous circle where developers, if they feel like it’s a black hole, they report fewer bugs because they feel like they’re wasting their time, and developers not reporting bugs is I’m sure not what you want.

Federighi: That’s for sure, yeah. Quite honestly, we’re not where we want to be with Radar as an externally facing tool. It’s the lifeblood of the organization in terms of how we manage our bugs and manage our releases, and I file tons of them and so does everyone who works here in software. But our external interface is not great, and a big part of that is, something we struggle with is how we sort out communicating about the issues that we fix because you may report an issue, we may dupe it to a bug that we’re working on fixing, we may fix that bug, maybe we fix it in iOS 10, maybe we fix it in something that’s probably going to go on iOS 9.3. You want to know that we’ve fixed it, we don’t necessarily right now have a great way to decide when we want to communicate to you that there’s a release that it’s getting fixed in, that we’re promising that the fix is going to happen. And so we fundamentally have a communication feedback problems that we need to sort out. I can tell you that the reports do get read, that they do influence what we do, but our backchannel communication needs some work, because we are reading them, we just don’t tell you what’s happening with them, and I understand absolutely the frustration of a lot of the developers who file those bugs.

Gruber: Do you agree that that sort of improving that — is sort of a point where the trickle down from that — where if you guys can improve the backchannel communication from Radar, it would influence lots of little bugs getting fixed that people are complaining about and address — it’s like a centralized place to address the widespread, entire user base widespread problem of, hey, this little thing is going wrong and I don’t understand why?

Federighi: I think it helps. We have other ways also that we’re getting a lot of great feedback, we did our first, as you know, public beta for iOS and a year ago the public beta for OS X and actually in that way brought over a million people into the program, and we did include in those a feedback assistant tool, which was meant as a Radar-like feedback tool, but one that the average person could use whether on iOS or OS X, and it automatically not only just gives us what the user types, but it automatically gives us a lot of additional diagnostics. They get prompted, and it says, “Is it okay if we sent this, this, and this back?” and gives us some really great actionable information about the issues they encounter, so that’s another great channel to find out about the issues people are running into. And this made a huge difference on the quality of our software. There are lots of different ways in which lots of different kinds of feedback we get, but something that’s very measurable, things like crash rate, and I can tell you, in the past, you’d see this seesaw pattern where a .0 release would come out and that would have a certain high crash rate, and then we would issue our software updates and that rate would go down. After doing a public beta here for iOS, our .0, 9.0 was better than any previous release of iOS 8. And those are the kind of systematic steps where we can get feedback from our users, both automatic and the kind of things where they write up an issue, and it helps us improve the product. So you’re going to see more and more of that from us, and we think it continues to pay off.

Gruber: Just to reiterate that, I just want to make sure I heard you correctly, you’re saying that when 9.0 came out, the release version, that the crash rate for apps was actually lower than the version of iOS 8, whatever the stable version of iOS 8 was that people were upgrading from?

Federighi: That’s right. Of our apps. Third-party apps are — I don’t actually have a number on that but that’s always a challenge. One thing honestly that can happen to us on quality is sometimes a third party will happen to ship an app about the same time we ship an OS update, and independent of that, that app starts crashing and that affects users — it’s always a challenge to cut through the noise, but we get pretty good analytics, and our numbers show that we’re on the right track there.

Gruber: Well, it’s about the time to wrap this up. I wanted to know that because you guys were — is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you wished I had, is there something that you guys wanted to talk about that we haven’t discussed?

Cue: Well, since this is an audio podcast and not a video one, I’m disappointed that you can’t see the purple shirt I’m wearing.

Federighi: He did really rise to the occasion, I don’t know if Eddy thought he was going to be on camera here, but he’s in full stage wear, it’s —

Gruber: You know, I thought about that just before we got on the air, I linked to a story The New York Times had about this amazing science that astronomers have done where they’ve measured as audio this gravitational wave that proves this thing Einstein predicted a hundred years ago that if two black holes collided, you’d be able to produce this gravity wave that you can hear. And I thought, wouldn’t that be great if we had a microphone that could produce a sound of Eddy’s shirt?

Cue: [laughs]

Federighi: A synesthetic experience. All the senses come alive when we see Eddy’s shirt.

Gruber: We just didn’t have enough time to set up the technology.

Federighi: [laughs] Maybe next time.

Gruber: This was great, I hope you guys enjoyed it as much as I did.

Cue: I love it, John, I got one question for you though. Since we started with sports and it’s almost baseball season, give me your World Series prediction.

Gruber: Oh... I hate to say it, but I think the Cubs. Doesn’t seem like a good bet, but boy, the Cubs look good in the National League. And in the American League... Boy, I don’t know. I’ll just go out on the limb and say the New York Yankees.

Federighi: [laughs]

Cue: [laughs] That was for Phil. That’s great. You’ve got to remember though, it is an even year. And in even years the San Francisco Giants always win.

Gruber: That’s the weirdest little inexplicable — and they’ve kept the core together — I don’t understand that at all, I don’t know if they just party way too hard after they win a World Series and it tanks the whole next season or what. But that is the weirdest little mini-dynasty streak I’ve ever seen. So I don’t know that I’d want to bet against the Giants next year.

Cue: All right, well, it was great talking to you.

Gruber: Thank you, thank you both, Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi, I really greatly appreciate the time.

John Gruber: One of the things I want to try to hit with this, and so far it’s way too soon to be able to tell, but to have different types of episodes. And you won’t even know, if you’re a listener, from the listener’s perspective, you won’t quite know what you’re getting until you start listening and it’s like, oh, this is one of the episodes where Dan and John aren’t even talking about the news, what’s the new thing. So far it’s been dominated by iPhone because —

Dan Benjamin: You’re dropping the “the”.

Gruber: Dropping “the”?

Benjamin: Dropping “the”.

Gruber: What do you mean?

Benjamin: The iPhone. You missed it, you said “about iPhone”. I don’t know if I can do that.

Gruber: I don’t even think I like it. I’m not even going to say —

Benjamin: But you’re doing it now.

Gruber: When I think about it, I put the “the” in, but it just happens, I don’t know. In my iPhone fonts article, I proofread it and I went through and added the “the”s everywhere I saw it, and then I proofread it again from the top and caught like five more. I actually did a whole pass through the article to add articles before “iPhone”. And I thought, all right, that’s how I’m going to do it, that’s how I’ll be consistent, then I started reading the article and I kept catching more.

Benjamin: When people leave that off, we talked about this a little bit before, it feels wrong to me.

Gruber: It’s like I said though, it is weird though, it’s a weird thing because the name of the software platform, the environment, is the same as the product. It’s easy when you’re talking about Macs because you can say, look, I bought a new iMac and it’s got this gorgeous screen. Or if you’re having problems, you might say, you know, I was going to do it on my MacBook, but I can’t because the DVD drive on my MacBook is broken. So you’re always saying “my MacBook” or “the MacBook”, whatever, and then if you say like, hey, I’ve written a new app for Mac OS X, you never call it the Mac OS X.

Benjamin: No, it sounds really weird.

Gruber: So the product has a name, the hardware has a name like iMac or MacBook and the environment is called Mac OS X. But with iPhone it’s all the same thing. You have —

Benjamin: You just did it again, “with iPhone”.

Gruber: Right, I didn’t even think, I wasn’t even thinking about it.

Benjamin: But you just said you didn’t like it, but you did it.

Gruber: I know, but I do because to me it also means in addition to the little 4 inch by 2.5 inch hardware product, “I have a iPhone in my pocket”, “I bought an iPhone”, it’s also the environment, it’s this sort of platform, you’re writing web apps for iPhone. To me, you can always use the “the”, but it just comes out that way when you’re talking about it as a system, it makes sense to talk about it the same way you talk about Mac OS X and not use the articles.

Benjamin: Okay, maybe, but I would say a better comparison wouldn’t be Mac OS X, a better comparison would be Mac. Because I think of Mac as both a platform and a machine, a computer.

Gruber: Right, and people always say “a Mac” or “the Mac”.

Benjamin: If I said, I’m coming up with some new software for the Mac. This is Mac software, it’s software for the Mac. To me that implies whatever operating system the Mac is running.

Gruber: And whenever you hear somebody say something like “we’re Windows-only but we’re going to have a version for Mac soon”.

Benjamin: I don’t like that.

Gruber: It always to me sounds like you’re an idiot who doesn’t —

Benjamin: You don’t get it.

Gruber: You don’t get it, it’s going to suck. It’s only a half step up from the people who call Macs “Apples”. That’s like the sure sign that you just don’t get it. Like if you say —

Benjamin: “I really love my new Apple.”

Gruber: Right. “I was going to ask you what software you use for that but I remember you use Apple.”

Benjamin: “You use Apple so that won’t work.” You know what, somebody else did something really weird, a friend of theirs I guess does customer support for Apple, specifically they do technical support for the iPhone. And the person that I was talking to was saying, “Oh, I’d love to work for Mac, that would be so cool.”

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: There’s another thing that’s just — I have to talk to you about this, I already know what you’re going to say, but what do you feel when people from the UK, they’ll say something like — for example, here would be the American news headline, it would say, “Apple has released a game-changing device called the iPhone”. In the UK, they would say, “Apple have released”, “have”, H-A-V-E.

Gruber: Right, a company name is always treated as plural.

Benjamin: Bugs me more than anything else I’ve — I can deal with them adding an extra letter to “color” or whatever, spelling it whatever weird way, that’s fine, that’s a spelling difference.

Gruber: I tend to think that — I’m like the typical American who’s impressed by British accent, but I think as a writer and someone who cares about the details of English language usage to a degree far, far greater than most people, I think your typical Englishman speaks English far better than Americans.

Benjamin: I totally agree.

Gruber: I think they use better diction, I think they use better syntax, I think they have significantly better vocabularies on average.

Benjamin: I agree.

Gruber: I don’t know why this is. I don’t know if it has something to do with our culture, I don’t know why.

Benjamin: Like the poor guy who just got arrested in a bar fight in the UK speaks better than 90 percent of the college-educated Americans.

Gruber: Right, exactly. Just some average guy off the street can actually put together a sentence in a good way. And I also think that in the ways that their rules are different — I mean, the spelling rules to me, that’s just arbitrary.

Benjamin: It’s a same word, it’s a different kind of spelling.

Gruber: Right, but their other rules, the things that they do differently I think usually, I almost always agree with them. I actually do it on Daring Fireball is I put my commas and periods outside the quotes.

Benjamin: Always bugs me.

Gruber: But to me it makes sense. I know it bugs other people and I do get email about it occasionally, I know full well that it goes against the rules of American punctuation, but it always bugged me that it doesn’t really make sense. And in a programming language, of course — to me quotes are like strings in a programming language. And you quote exactly what it is you’re quoting and nothing more, and then if you’re going to follow it with a comma or a period, it goes outside unless the comma or period is actually part of the string that you’re quoting. And that’s exactly how in England, that’s how British people punctuate sentences.

Benjamin: Okay, you’re right and I prefer it, however, okay, but no, no. I agree with you, it is better, in this case the UK version or the British version is more correct in my mind. The punctuation should go outside of it. However, in America that’s incorrect, so I’m too scared to do it.

Gruber: See, it’s one of the things that I wanted to — it’s the sort of thing that I care about a lot. Probably 99 percent of Daring Fireball readers never even notice that I do that.

Benjamin: Oh, I notice.

Gruber: Well, that’s because you have a background in writing. You have actual training in writing and editing. And most of the people who do notice, 1 percent or 5 percent, whatever it is, who notice, probably think that I’m wrong, that maybe I don’t even know the rules. I get a lot of email like that, I used to, at least, especially when the site was new, in the first year I got a lot of email from people very politely saying — they quote the sentence and say, “The comma should go inside the quotes.” But it’s just a fun thing —

Benjamin: But what about the have/has thing?

Gruber: I can’t — to me, this whole thing is my long way of saying, yes, I almost always agree that the British way of doing things differently than Americans, I agree with. In that case, I can’t though.

Benjamin: Oh, thank you.

Gruber: Every time I hear it or read it, it’s just too —

Benjamin: I really thought the show was over for good. No, really, that was the most difficult five minutes of my life.

Gruber: I tend to think just, like, logistically. Like I said, if you really think about the rules for where you put the comma and period, to me —

Benjamin: You’re back on the comma/period thing.

Gruber: I think the British way clearly makes sense. The American rule is just arbitrary. It’s just something to remember, if you just want to say, which one makes more sense, it’s the English way. I think with this pluralizing company names or group names, to me in that case the American way makes more sense, and of course I’m biased. My biggest problem with it is that it just always sounds wrong to me. Even when I’m reading on a page, the sound of usage, that’s pretty much how I write, I don’t remember all the rules of grammar, I just know what sounds good. And the English way just sounds so wrong to me.

Benjamin: Nothing calls attention to somebody being from the UK more than that. And whenever I see that, it rubs me the wrong way. It’s crazy.

Gruber: It doesn’t make any sense to me either because to me a collection is a thing, and sure the collection is of multiple things, you can have a bag of marbles, but you’ve only got one bag.

Benjamin: Right.

Gruber: So yes, a company does consist of multiple employees, but a company also consists of multiple buildings, it consists of the products. A company is a weird entity, but it is ultimately an entity.

Benjamin: Who do we talk to over there to straighten this out?

Gruber: I don’t know, because if they fix that, if they could come around to our — if they could just budge on this one thing and learn from us, they would have a perfect language.

Benjamin: Overall a perfect language.

Gruber: They would beat American English in every single way.

Benjamin: A hundred percent. This is their Achilles heel.

Gruber: It’s, like, the one problem with the British language. I think if I were English, by the way, if I happened to have been born over there, I would probably be such an enormous snob about American usage. Instead of being about Macintosh and web nerdery, my website would just be about how stupid Americans talk.

Benjamin: [laughs]

Gruber: I do, I think I would be so — I would just be such a snob about it. Is this the show? Are we doing a show right now?

Benjamin: I am, I don’t know if you are.

Gruber: Who else should we thank, should we have sponsors to thank?

Benjamin: We should.

Gruber: This is The Talk Show. I’m John Gruber.

Benjamin: I’m Dan Benjamin. How are you?

Gruber: Good.

Benjamin: And we do have a sponsor, 37signals, an amazing — I don’t know how did we get — they came to us, really, I think. And they said that they’d love to sponsor this show.

Gruber: Well, I think they’re a smart company. Obviously, they’re very successful and I think they can tell that any company that doesn’t sponsor The Talk Show is probably going to suffer.

Benjamin: Do you remember back in the old days, did you ever use IRC, Internet Relay Chat?

Gruber: Long time ago.

Benjamin: There were so many things about it that were great at the time, but there were so many things that were annoying about it, and in these days, if anybody ever comes to me, like the people in the Ruby on Rails community, a lot of them use IRC, I won’t do it, and what I think, one of my favorite products that 37signals has created — I mean, I like Basecamp, I use it a lot, Highrise is very cool, we’ve talked about Ta-da List. One thing people I don’t think talk enough about is Campfire.

Gruber: It’s like instant messaging chat room in a webpage.

Benjamin: Yeah, it’s like everything good about IRC without all of the bad stuff about IRC. Everything that’s potentially good about instant message without most of the bad stuff. So for the people that don’t know what Campfire is, I’ll talk about it for a second.

Gruber: campfirehq.com.

Benjamin: Yes. Thank you. Basically, you go there, you create an account, you can even make a free account, and you can invite other people in, you can chat, everybody gets to see what everyone else types, and if you paste an image link, the image will actually appear in the chat, you can have little audio notifications — it’s chatting but it’s a web application and the amazing thing about this — like, to me, what makes Campfire indispensable is, one of the ways that we used it, whenever I’ve had to collaborate with people, especially people who aren’t maybe typically on an instant message client or don’t want to be because they get harassed too much or they’re too busy, they can jump into Campfire, they can participate in a group chat. The transcript gets saved so that later on you can go back and say, “Oh, remember when we made this decision in this chat to do it” — there it is, it’s archived, it’s saved. You can get back to it, you can review it. We’ve also used it in situations where we were doing server work or coordinating between a few different people, and we would actually talk about what we were doing to multiple servers at any given time, and instead of having three or four people on a conference call, especially if it’s early in the morning, you can type in, okay, this server is shut down, or this one is rebooted, or this one has been patched. And you keep track of it, and then if you’re pasting commands, you can actually show other people, this is the command that I typed, and they can cut and paste and run it on their server, that kind of thing. Genius application.

Gruber: Guess what.

Benjamin: What’s that?

Gruber: Guess what, it’s not campfirehq.com.

Benjamin: What are you talking about?

Gruber: It’s not, it’s basecamphq.com, but it’s campfirenow.com.

Benjamin: I’ll just edit all that out. campfirenow.

Gruber: campfirenow.com. It’s just one extra little thing that they do right. I remember seeing, I think it was a weblog post that Jason Fried wrote once on 37signals’s company weblog about their names for their domains, and it’s things like basecamphq.com and campfirenow.com and somebody asked — because you can’t get domains like campfire.com anymore.

Benjamin: No, of course.

Gruber: And his point was that people just Google for it anyway. If you just Google for “Campfire”, you get 37signals Campfire.

Benjamin: Right. It’s a great app and people just don’t talk — it’s almost a given that that app is out there.

Gruber: You know, the worst part about having 37signals as a sponsor is that I feel like I could just talk for half hour about their stuff.

Benjamin: Well, they’d love that. We could just do a show talking about that.

Gruber: But that seems gratuitous. But the other thing I love about Campfire is, to me, as an Ajax app, an app that you type, return, and the data shows up, and it’s not reloading the entire page, is that it’s, like, exactly the sort of thing that Ajax web apps are perfect for.

Benjamin: That’s what they should be used for.

Gruber: They’re not showing off. You never have to wait for the whole page to reload, but you type, return, and — bloop — it shows up on the thing just like you’d want it to.

Benjamin: It was funny, when I was waiting in line to buy the iPhone, there was a guy there, Charles, and he writes for iLounge and stuff like that. And we were all there in line and I said, “Are you on instant message?” And he said, “No, I’m only in Campfire now.” And you’d be surprised how many people have actually told me they’re not doing IRC, they’re not doing instant message. If they need to talk about a project, then they’ll go into that project’s Campfire and they’ll talk just about that. We should probably have something like that going on I think for the show.

Gruber: Yeah, probably.

Benjamin: We could go on the Campfire, we could tell — see, that’s the problem, I want this to be a live show.

Gruber: Right.

Benjamin: That’s the desire because then we could have more — people could call in or something. I don’t know how we’d work that out.

Gruber: I agree. That is the sort of the weird thing where — we’re very serious about this show, we’re going to do this every week, we’ve got sponsors, we’ve got top men working on a new website.

Benjamin: That’s right. We should talk about that, we should call those guys out.

Gruber: No, no, we’ve got to wait. Because what if it turns out that they do a crap job?

Benjamin: Yeah, what if it sucks and we ditch it, we have to go with somebody else, then it’s public.

Gruber: The other top men, yeah, it’s all top secret until it comes out.

Benjamin: Let’s just say, very high-end people on this. Everybody has heard of these people. We can say who it’s not.

Gruber: If you want.

Benjamin: It’s not Dan Cederholm.

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: You would think, of course it would be him, it’s not him.

Gruber: You guys did Cork’d together.

Benjamin: That’s right. I’m sort of seen as his assistant.

Gruber: Yeah, it’s funny that you would mention him because I was just away for the weekend and I came back, and there was a couple of days worth of mail, and I got a letter from Dan Cederholm. And it was just real cryptic, but it just said, “You should’ve said something to me before you started something with Dan Benjamin. You’ll live to regret it. Cheers, Dan C.”

Benjamin: [laughs] Right, “cheers”.

Gruber: And I don’t even know what that means, it’s like, boy, that seems out of the blue but I mean, I don’t know.

Benjamin: He’s only like a train ride away from you. I’d be nervous. He’s tall. I mean, you’re tall, but I think he could take you.

Gruber: I’d be nervous? You’re the one who seems to be some sort of —

Benjamin: Fixated, he’s fixated. I think I’m typically seen as like, “Dan Cederholm did Cork’d, and I think Dan Benjamin helped.” I’m okay with it, it’s fine. Like I was his intern.

Gruber: [laughs] Well, big part of it though is just that what it looks like — the way that software works is less noticeable to people brand-wise than what it looks like. One of the things with Cork’d is you go there and as soon as the page finishes loading in your browser, you’re like, wow, this is something.

Benjamin: I mean, if I had designed it, I wouldn’t even have used it.

Gruber: It’s just one of the most distinctive — it’s one of those websites where you could see somebody on it from across the room and you’d know that they’re on Cork’d.

Benjamin: Yeah, that’s nice. It’s true. Same with Daring Fireball because the font is so small.

Gruber: No, the color of course.

Benjamin: The color combined with the incredibly small font.

Gruber: You think the font is small?

Benjamin: It’s 11-point Verdana, right?

Gruber: Right. 11px.

Benjamin: I love that font, I think it’s one of the all-time fonts, the best fonts around. I think it was better before anti-aliasing, to be honest.

Gruber: Yeah, I agree. Totally agree.

Benjamin: Maybe if we could just get you to write less, it would be — because after reading one of your articles, I’ll tell you what, my eyes hurt.

Gruber: And we can get — couple of points here. It makes it sound like I’ve been doing this site for so ridiculously long, but it’s true that — it seems to me like it’s still relatively new, but when I started it, anti-aliasing was not common in web browsers, even on the Mac.

Benjamin: Well, at least not at 11px.

Gruber: Right, I started the site in 2002, and I think I had more Mac OS 9 IE users than Mac OS X users at the time. It was like 50/50.

Benjamin: That was such a charming font though, you could just sit and look at — I remember just looking at websites and at that 11-pixel Verdana and thinking —

Gruber: It was the best screen font ever.

Benjamin: — the web is never going to get better than this.

Gruber: It’s true. You know, it’s funny because I think if I redesigned now, and I’ve been thinking about it lately —

Benjamin: Which to you just means moving your logo one pixel to the left, that qualifies as a complete redesign.

Gruber: Right, or changing the font, maybe I would change the font to 12-pixel Helvetica or maybe switch to ems or something like that, switch it from Verdana to Helvetica or something like that. Because a big part of the reason that I chose Verdana was specifically because I liked the way that 11px Verdana rendered before anti-aliasing. It was specific, it wasn’t just that I wanted Verdana, it was that I wanted 11px Verdana. Not 10px, which is way too small, and not 12px.

Benjamin: So isn’t it true then to say that you haven’t really changed with the times?

Gruber: Well, but 11px Verdana even with anti-aliasing is to me a very good-looking font. But the complaints that it’s too small are growing. I would say I’ve gotten more of them in the last year than I’ve gotten it any time since the first year. And so I probably will if not change to Helvetica, at least change the way that the size is spec’d. But I still think, even with anti-aliasing, that when Verdana gets over 11 pixels, it looks different. It has a different character to it.

Benjamin: What font would you use right now if you had to pick right now?

Gruber: If you were going to make me pick immediately, I would just stick with Verdana, I would not change.

Benjamin: You’d keep, you would stay with it.

Gruber: Right. But if I had six or seven weeks to play with it, I would first try switching to Helvetica.

Benjamin: Yeah, I had Helvetica for a while and I think it’s a nice font, I mean, obviously, people talk about how it’s one of the best fonts of all time. But you almost feel like you want to do more? Be a little more distinctive in your font choice somehow?

Gruber: But I still think that even with a brand new top-end display, compared to how many pixels per inch you get of resolution, it’s worse than the resolution of an 18-year-old ink jet printer. An ink jet printer from 1990 was still putting out like 300 dpi, and yeah, it was a little bit smudgy, so maybe you got effectively like 200 dpi, but a brand new Cinema Display only has like 117 pixels per inch. So it’s still an incredibly crude form for type, output device for typography. So the fonts that in print are far superior, the best fonts that you’d want for reading a long article, to me they still don’t render that well on screen. To me, the screen is not a place where you want to get fancy with typography. So picking something right down the middle of the road like Verdana, or Helvetica, or Georgia if you wanted a serif font, it’s — yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re right there with 75 percent of all other websites, you’re not standing out because of your font choice but it’s almost — how can you on the web?

Benjamin: You make a good point. I can’t argue with you. I forget where I saw this, somebody was commenting about your recent fireball where you talk about fonts on the iPhone, the iPhone, and you say, Trebuchet, how can you have that as a font. But I think somebody had pointed out, or somebody was responding, or I read somewhere, they were saying, well, the reason why is because so many websites use that font.

Gruber: Yeah, but it’s garbage.

Benjamin: I agree, but that doesn’t mean —

Gruber: But the thing with websites, websites aren’t like PDF files or Word documents. If you open up a Word document and you don’t have —

Benjamin: So you’re saying it should just fall back and become Helvetica.

Gruber: Or substitute some other font. Because you can’t depend on — no matter how many sites specify Trebuchet specifically, they certainly — I don’t think anybody would assume that everybody has it, even if they list it first. I’ll bet if you look at most CSS files that specify Trebuchet, it also says like, “font-family: Trebuchet, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”. A web is not like a legal document, a Word document where if you don’t have the right font, everything gets screwed up and all the page breaks are wrong. That’s a big problem in the legal world because you submit a brief or something and you say “on page 87”, when somebody else opens your file, page 87 on your version has to be exactly the same, word for word, as page 87 on theirs, so you need to have the same font. So it makes sense that, for example, in the legal world everything is done in Times, or Times New Roman, 12 point. And when you’re writing screenplays in Hollywood, they still use Courier 12, everything is Courier 12, with the exact same leading, lines per inch. You could use Courier New instead of Courier because it’s exact same size, but they do this because that way if you get a screenplay that’s 130 pages, you know it’s about the same length of a movie as another 130-page script. Now, of course, some movies are all full of dialogue, and another movie might have page after page of action sequences or whatever but it’s a ball park estimate because every screenplay is in the exact same font, Courier 12, that two scripts that are about the same thickness in page count are about the same length in terms of how long the movie would be.

Benjamin: Listening to you talk, it actually sounds like you know what you’re talking about.

Gruber: Oh yeah, definitely. For screenplays?

Benjamin: Yeah.

Gruber: That’s what I used to want to be, I just wanted to make movies.

Benjamin: Well, you still do, you just kind of gave up on that.

Gruber: I’ll get back to it when I’m ready.

Benjamin: Let’s talk really quickly about Knox for Mac. Did you get to try this out?

Gruber: Of course.

Benjamin: You didn’t try it, did you?

Gruber: Yeah, of course I did.

Benjamin: The secure encryption back-up thing. So, sponsor.

Gruber: They are a sponsor of The Talk Show.

Benjamin: Knox for Mac. This is spelled Knox like Fort Knox so knoxformac.com.

Gruber: You can check our website thetalksnow.net to get a link to check it out.

Benjamin: This is one of those pieces of software where I was very skeptical about it at first because it’s exactly what I’ve been wanting for a very long time, and whenever I see something that appears, for all intents and purposes, to be perfect, I’m immediately thinking it’s too good to be true.

Gruber: Describe it, give me the nutshell description of what Knox does.

Benjamin: Because you didn’t try it?

Gruber: No, I know exactly what it does, but let me see if you can describe it.

Benjamin: So this is really you’re testing me?

Gruber: Right.

Benjamin: And it’s actually something I’ve been wanting for a while. So here’s what it is, you install this little application, and all you do is just drag it into the Applications folder, so that’s good, I was very concerned there was going to be an installer and it was going to do things I didn’t know what it was doing. It’s not like that. It’s just a single application and basically, what it does is it lets you create an unlimited number of what they call encrypted vaults. So it’s basically, it’s like an encrypted drive image, but instead of having it go through a whole bunch of hoops and Disk Utility to create your own kind of drive image, which you encrypt, and tweaking configurations and issues with getting the thing to mount or not — it just handles all of that. You just create a new vault, and basically, it acts like an expanding drive, it’s just like a folder, really. But whatever you put in there gets encrypted, and you can encrypt them in a whole lot of different ways, I think it uses AES 128, and you can use them for backups, they can be searched and indexed by Spotlight, or not, based on your preferences. Everything can be completely customized.

Gruber: And when you do let one of the volumes be Spotlight-searchable, it’s still only searchable when you have it open.

Benjamin: Exactly.

Gruber: Because it’s secure, so when you don’t have it open, which means it’s not mounted, it’s unavailable to Spotlight, and because the contents are encrypted. Now, what I like about it, and to me it’s like a little sign of Mac developers who get it, is that they leverage what Apple has done with the system to do as much as possible. And they just concentrate on making the user interface as convenient as possible. And that’s what it is, because you think like, well, why would I trust this software to encrypt my stuff with this serious encryption where if you don’t remember the passphrase, even the NSA is going to have a hard time, spend months and months and months trying to crack this open. You’re toast if you forget it, I mean, it’s serious encryption. It’s all based on Apple’s disk image encryption. What they’ve done, what Knox does is just makes disk images far, far more convenient than —

Benjamin: Right, it takes the hustle out of managing it.

Gruber: But you’ve got the peace of mind of knowing that the technical back-end is the stuff that’s been refined by Apple, it’s as reliable as using an Apple’s disk image because it is.

Benjamin: Did you try using it to re-format and encrypt a USB stick?

Gruber: No, because I lost my last USB stick, I had a great USB stick.

Benjamin: And now it’s lost and who knows what secrets were lost.

Gruber: No, I actually know what was on it.

Benjamin: That’s even worse.

Gruber: There was nothing on it, not a single file.

Benjamin: You’re lucky. Well, I actually did that, and you know what it does, it encrypts it, and it puts a copy of Knox on the stick so that when you — because I was thinking about it, okay, how am I going to — if I take this to another computer. Yeah, I know it’s formatted for a Mac, so it’s going to be usable by a Mac, but it actually puts Knox on there, so that when you go, you double-click it, it says, “You need to have Knox installed locally”, it copies it over locally, and then it lets you handle the drive and mount the drive. It’s just very cool, and everything is right — and I think we can —

Gruber: How much does it cost?

Benjamin: It’s $30, but I think we’re doing a $5 discount, aren’t we?

Gruber: That’s exactly it.

Benjamin: So if you go to the link on thetalkshow.net, you get 5 bucks off.

Gruber: It’s a great deal.

Benjamin: This is the kind of thing that you need to just go and get. This is one of those things, everybody should be using this.

Gruber: I think one of our recurring themes is going to be your aversion to profanity and my love of it. I love profanity.

Benjamin: I don’t — if you’ve met me in person and you’ve had a conversation with me, I’m — I’m not saying I’m perfect.

Gruber: You do swear in person, but in terms of anything that you’re actually publishing and you see as representing yourself, like, you would never allow a curse word to appear on Hivelogic.

Benjamin: Of course not, no.

Gruber: You don’t curse on the show.

Benjamin: Would never.

Gruber: You know, Duncan said [bleep] the last show.

Benjamin: Now I have to edit this podcast.

Gruber: Are you? Are you going to edit him?

Benjamin: Of course!

Gruber: I think it’s rude to edit somebody’s words. I don’t see why you have to edit.

Benjamin: May I go out on a limb and say, I think he said it and immediately regretted it and wished he could somehow go back in time and take it away. And I’m going to do him that courtesy.

Gruber: I don’t even think he knew. But how are you going to do it? What if it was a really good sentence and you’re going to embarrass him with a little beep?

Benjamin: Well, I could do it like that, or at the expense of the show I could cut the whole line.

Gruber: Have you ever heard Adam Sandler’s song “[bleep] Car”?

Benjamin: How many times are you going to make me edit this?

Gruber: But I’m just telling you the name of his song. I’m not swearing.

Benjamin: You could say “POS Car” like the T-shirt says.

Gruber: But that’s not the name of his song. Have you ever heard the song?

Benjamin: No.

Gruber: Now, the first time I heard it — I will not sing it.

Benjamin: I stopped listening to him when he did the Hanukkah song. That was too much.

Gruber: I would tell you this song is very funny, but the first time I heard it was on the radio, commercial radio, and I would say just about every verse of the song has some curse —

Benjamin: Profanity.

Gruber: Right, and the refrain is “piece of [bleep] car” and it’s over and over again.

Benjamin: It’s not like I’m offended, John, it’s just...

Gruber: All right, but here’s the thing, I heard this and it was beeped out, I would say at least four out of five verses of the song were beeped out. Even the “roses are red, violets are blue”, something something, like, you think the last line is where the curse word comes because that’s the joke — I mean, even the “roses are red” lines of the song had curse words. Every single line was — it was sung in the character of some down-on-his-luck guy with a junky car. I mean, it was just beep after beep after beep after beep. And I thought that was part of the song, I thought it was almost like a statement, I thought the recording from Sandler was beeped out because it was so funny that it was just beep after beep after beep.

Benjamin: That was part of the humor of the song.

Gruber: I thought so and then I found out, no, it wasn’t, it was that somebody actually went to the trouble of making a radio edit that was so overbeeped. You can’t imagine how profane the song is.

Benjamin: For the record, talking to you in general is like watching an episode of Deadwood. On every level that you want to interpret that sentence.

Gruber: [laughs] Right.

Benjamin: It’s true, I mean, anybody who’s ever talked to you, it’s both vulgar and insulting, profane and genius, all at the same time.

Gruber: Well, talk to you soon.

Benjamin: Yeah, that’s it, I mean, what else is there to say, it’s time.

Gruber: I don’t know. Thanks to 37signals.

Dan Benjamin: So where are you right now, Duncan, what conference are you at this week?

James Duncan Davidson: I’m actually at two conferences simultaneously. Today, tomorrow, and the next day is the Ubuntu Live conference. And then, starting tomorrow and going for the rest of the week is the Open Source Convention.

Benjamin: And you’re covering these, you’re photographing them?

Davidson: Yeah, I’m shooting them both.

Benjamin: That’s what we’re here to talk about. Last week, John and I said we gotta get you on here.

Davidson: Oh, I know, and I heard that actually. I was listening to the podcast while I was riding the MAX, and I think I was going over the bridge right about that point, and it was a very freaky feeling to be volunteered to do something while you’re listening to yourself on public transit. But I’m down with it, it’s pretty cool.

John Gruber: For those of you who don’t know, we’re talking to James Duncan Davidson. James Duncan Davidson is right now primarily — is that your primary source of income, you’re a conference photographer? I mean, most of your time is spent on photography now.

Davidson: Yeah, this year will be the first year it’s crossed the 50 percent line.

Gruber: But your background is very, very varied, and you’ve done everything from Java to Ruby on Rails, a lot of programming stuff. You’ve written books on Cocoa programming.

Davidson: Yep.

Gruber: So you go to these tech conferences, but you could easily not just be attending them, you could be and in the past have actually spoken at them.

Davidson: Oh yeah, yeah.

Benjamin: You spoke at Rails conference last year, right?

Davidson: Yeah, and they actually wanted me to speak this year, but I didn’t think I could actually do the job of shooting, and the conference, and get the talk ready. And even more tricky, photographing myself speaking, I thought that might be a little hard.

Benjamin: With all those strobes flashing all over the place, that’s a full-time job just setting those up.

Davidson: The conferences really have turned into — I mean, when I’m at a conference, it’s more than a full-time job. Like today, you’re catching me, it all worked out where I can find a break, but it’s going to be a 14-hour day. But it’s precisely because I spoke at tech conferences for so long that O’Reilly first picked me up to do the photography. They had the theory, and I agreed with them at the time and still do, that since I knew most of the people in this environment and knew what was going on, I probably would have a decent enough eye for understanding what would be important to take pictures of and what wouldn’t be at a tech conference. And that’s how the professional photography career got started.

Benjamin: As far as actually learning to be a photographer, you don’t just show up at a conference and start taking pictures, and now all of a sudden O’Reilly is hiring you to shoot everything. It can’t work like that.

Davidson: No, no, I’ve been shooting pictures since I was six or seven years old. My grandmother taught me how, and I’ve been shooting ever since.

Benjamin: You don’t have any formal training or educational background in photography though?

Davidson: No. All my formal training was in architecture actually. So, lots of design work, but no specific classes in photography, just lots and lots of experience.

Benjamin: So you said you grandmother taught you, Duncan, what did you start — because when I was a little kid, maybe this is how you started, when I was a little kid, we took a little — I guess it was some construction paper, and we folded it up into a little box, we painted it black, and then you took a little pinhole, and you just poke a pinhole and this little piece of tinfoil — and I understand now it’s aluminum foil — which was taped to a cut-out piece in the front of a thing, and there was like a little flap, and you would open up the flap, and just on the back of this thing you had one of those — you remember the old style 35 mm or whatever, the little pocket cameras that you would give to kids that had the little plastic U-shaped film thing that would fit into the back of the camera.

Davidson: The 110 cassettes, yeah.

Benjamin: Exactly. And you would crank that with a quarter, and then you would open the front of the thing, count to three, and then close it, and your picture would come out. That’s actually still how I photograph today.

Davidson: For some people, that would be the purest expression of photography because you’re directly manipulating aperture and shutter and everything right there. But no, I didn’t learn with a pinhole camera. You actually have a better background than I do then.

Benjamin: Well, my whole experience pretty much ends there though.

Davidson: [laughs] My grandmother shot 35 mm film on Leicas and I quickly picked up a — I had my own little 110 camera, I had one of those disc cameras. You remember those?

Benjamin: Oh yeah, that was really — if you had one of those — wow.

Gruber: Yeah, they were crazy cool because they were such an odd form factor because they were, like, up vertical. They were so thin in terms of front to back.

Benjamin: Yeah. They had these teeny-tiny lenses on them because they had such a small negative.

Gruber: And they took such crap pictures.

Davidson: They did.

Benjamin: [laughs]

Gruber: I should —

Benjamin: What — oh, go ahead, John. That’s John Gruber, by the way.

Gruber: I was just going to mention, for everybody who doesn’t know, you’re listening to The Talk Show. I’m John Gruber. I’m here hosting the show with my friend Dan Benjamin. We have some sponsors to thank this week, I would like to thank them, that’s why this show is here. And first up, I’d like to mention 37signals.

Benjamin: Can you believe that? How did we get them?

Gruber: They’re sponsoring The Talk Show. They have a bunch of great web apps, they do great software. The one that I want to talk about is Ta-da Lists. You guys use Ta-da Lists? It’s sort of like the list feature from Basecamp, broken out into its own little app. It’s free, you just go there, you make like a to-do list. And the reason — I never used it, I checked it out, I used it, it’s pretty good. But all of a sudden now I use it every day because what they did — and it wouldn’t an episode of The Talk Show if we didn’t bring up iPhone. They have an iPhone-optimized version of Ta-da List. You go to tadalist.com, you sign up, you get your own username. So I have one, I share it with my wife, we do all of our shopping lists on Ta-da Lists now. You get the regular Ta-da List interface when you go to it in Safari or Firefox, your regular web browser on your computer, so we can share shopping lists. We just do one for each store we go to. Then I go to the store, take out my iPhone, go there, and I get an iPhone-optimized view of the website. It’s not a little thing I have to pinch down in Safari, it’s just perfect. Every time I buy something, you just tap it, click “done”, it’s off the list, and I never — I’m the most absent-minded person in the world. We live about two blocks from a Whole Foods here in Philadelphia. I will leave the house and my wife can say, “Don’t forget to buy soy milk.” And I will say, “Okay.” And I will go there and I will see, oh, look, a new kind of chips! And I’ll buy these chips, come home, and she’ll be like, “Where is the soy milk?” And I’ll be like, “Oh.” And she’s like, “That’s the whole reason you went.” Never happens anymore. So, Ta-da Lists from 37signals.

Benjamin: Saved the marriage, it sounds like.

Gruber: No, it just saved me extra trips back to the grocery store.

Davidson: So it saved you frustration.

Gruber: And it also makes me feel like my iPhone is useful.

Benjamin: That justifies the purchase, I think.

Gruber: Oh, absolutely.

Davidson: Of course.

Gruber: I think one of the big differences for me — I got started as a hobbyist photographer with an actual film 35 mm Rebel about eight years ago or so. And I think the bad habit that it drilled into my head is that every time I press the shutter button, it’s going to cost me 50–75 cents to get the film developed. So if you started with film, it costs some amount of money every time you press the shutter, and you get into habit of really pinching your shots, make every one count. Whereas with digital, it’s effectively free, I mean, you do have to go back afterwards and pick the ones that you want to keep and get rid of [the rest], but it’s really a little bit of your time to go through and get rid of the bad shots. And you get so much better results if you just shoot-shoot-shoot-shoot-shoot as opposed to wait-wait-wait-wait-wait-okay, there it is-shoot.

Davidson: Right. It’s cheap until you have to go buy a terabyte array because you’ve taken so many shots.

Benjamin: You had a whole post, probably about a year ago, where you were sort of — the dos and don’ts for conference speakers, and one of them was, get anti-reflective coating on your glasses if you wear glasses. If you don’t wear glasses, get some, because people who wear glasses are significantly more intelligent. A whole bunch of things. One of the things that you said, you were talking about — dress appropriately for your audience. If your audience is going to be in a suit, you probably need to wear a suit. If your audience is going to be in business casual or t-shirts or whatever, dress relative to them. But as a photographer of the event, working the event, do you have to adhere to that dress code as well?

Davidson: I do, I do.

Benjamin: So it’s possible we might see you in a three-piece suit with a bow tie?

Davidson: If I were photographing an event where everybody else is wearing a three-piece suit, yeah, I would have to do something about that.

Benjamin: Most of the time though you’re a t-shirt and jeans kind of a guy?

Davidson: Most of the time. Most of the conferences I shoot are geek conferences where most of the people are pretty relaxed in what they wear. I have been trending though towards neatening it up a little bit. Dark colors work well when you’re shooting in the dark because I don’t really want to pull a lot of attention to myself. The day I wore the bright screaming magenta shirt was not a good day. Just kidding, never did that.

Benjamin: [laughs]

Davidson: But, like, today I’m wearing black pants and a black short sleeve button-down shirt. It’s not a fancy shirt, it’s some Old Navy kind of shirt, but you know. It’s nice enough, right?

Benjamin: In a way though, don’t you want to wear some kind of a t-shirt or a shirt that’s going to grab attention?

Davidson: Actually, most of the time I just want to blend in and not have attention come my way. Nothing ruins a shot more than somebody seeing a camera and going, “Hey, there’s a camera!” and pointing right into it.

Benjamin: What do you think about — as far as speakers go — let’s say I’m speaking at Rails conference next year, which is a pretty casual conference. And we’ll see if Chad lets me come back, but it tends to be a casual conference, and some people are in polo style shirts, other people in t-shirts. Can I wear a t-shirt on stage, is that okay?

Davidson: You could, and it would really depend on what t-shirt. If you had a really nice cottony material t-shirt that was, you know, the American Eagle ones or the American Apparel ones — maybe. And you’re a skinny guy, you can get away with it.

Benjamin: Thank you. You know who’s doing some really cool t-shirts actually right now? And you know what, they’re a sponsor, insanelygreattees.com. If you’ve seen the Flickr photos of me with the old-school bomb on the shirt or the one with the binary tree, there’s a lot of cool things that they do. They came to us and said, “We want to —” I guess they see these pictures of me on Flickr, and John, don’t you have the bomb shirt?

Gruber: Of course I do. The system bomb.

Benjamin: Yeah, system bomb from old OS 7.

Gruber: That shirt is the bomb.

Davidson: I want that shirt.

Benjamin: We actually worked out a cool deal with them, since you want the shirt. There’s some kind of — I don’t know how this works, maybe you go to the site, John, or what do you do? There’s a coupon they have worked out for us. So if you buy two or more shirts, you get free domestic shipping. And if you happen to be stuck in some other country, then you get —

Gruber: And how do you apply this coupon? What’s the coupon code?

Benjamin: That’s a good question, but it expires at the end of July, so you better act now.

Gruber: So go to our website, thetalkshow.net, to see the coupon?

Benjamin: Yeah, we’ll have a link, we’ll put up a link.

Gruber: I like the way you worked that in, that was very smooth the way you segued. I’m going to have to practice that for next week’s show.

Benjamin: It will be less abrupt if you can work it in that way — but I was actually, the reason I was wondering is —

Gruber: I like the challenge of having to work in, before I say something about to thank a sponsor, to think of — no matter how obscure, some way to work it in. I’m going to do it, that’s a challenge.

Benjamin: There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you, it’s a bit more technical photography type questions. Not really that technical because I’m still sort of starting out.

Davidson: You’ve still got the pinhole camera.

Benjamin: I finally moved up from the pinhole to the Canon Rebel Digital XTi. And it’s a great camera, I was definitely influenced by you and John and a few other people to go in the Canon direction, I’m happy I did it. So how come you wind up with these situations, very confusing to people who are just starting out, when they talk about a wide vs. a narrow aperture. You’ve actually got numbers going in the opposite direction that you would think, you think big and it’s actually small, and small is big. What is that and is there any kind of petition that I can be involved with or help support that would get them to straighten that out because it’s — I mean, I understand it philosophically but — we don’t need to keep that around anymore, do we?

Davidson: Oh hell yeah we do, it’s all about circles, it’s math. There’s a beautiful bit of math behind photography, and that number, f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8 — you can always tell when somebody’s been taking lots of pictures because they can rattle that scale off. It’s all ratios, it’s ratios, dealing with pi and circles, and each next step, going from 1 to 1.4, from 1.4 to 2, from 2.0 to 2.8 — that’s doubling the amount of light you’re getting in.

Gruber: But it does throw people off, it is an unfortunate circumstance that the numbers worked out like that because you end up with the thing where, for example, a lens that the fastest it gets is 2.8 is significantly slower than a lens that goes to f/1.8. But if you look at the total scale of numbers, and you show it to just some guy shopping at Best Buy, well, that looks like it’s almost the same. Because it also goes up to like f/16. Or f/7, you’re shooting in sunlight.

Benjamin: Your natural inclination is, well, this one goes all the way up to 16!

Davidson: [laughs] Or 32.

Gruber: 2.8, 1.8, what’s the difference. But the difference is actually huge. An f/1.8 lens, you can actually shoot indoors in relatively low light and get some really nice results. And then f/2.8, you really need a significant amount of light indoors to get a shot.

Benjamin: Duncan, when you’re shooting at these conferences, are you mainly shooting with a zoom lens? Do you use prime lenses at all in your conference shooting? Are you using prime lenses at all, period? I’ll tell you why I ask, when I first started out, John’s suggestion to me was, get one of a couple of these different prime lenses. I think one was 50 mm, and he also recommended a 28 mm, which makes sense if you take into consideration the crop factor on a digital SLR, which you can maybe hopefully explain in your answer. But I recall that when I was talking to you about it, you said, “Yeah, prime lenses are really great, you may also want to consider getting a lens that does zoom, but you’re going to zoom way less than you think you’re going to zoom.” So, to my original question, what are you shooting with most of the time? Does it vary? What’s the deal with the crop factor? And what do you think about the whole prime lens thing?

Davidson: Well, let’s take this one step at a time. What I shoot with right now in conference situations, there’s three lenses I lean on, it’s the 24–70, the 70–200, and then the 300 mm prime. So it’s two zooms and a prime. And they’re all f/2.8 lenses so they’re all pretty fast and pretty capable. I’ve got faster lenses in terms of aperture, I’ve got several 1.4 lenses and several 2.0 lenses, but I find when I’m shooting the events, I actually need to keep my aperture around f/4. So I’ve got enough depth of field to work with somebody’s head. So I don’t have, like, a totally focused nose and totally blurred out back of their hair. The 300 mm prime is an amazing lens, it’s also really expensive.

Benjamin: Is that the one with the white chassis?

Davidson: That’s the white long tube that looks like it’s going to suck your soul out when you see it.

Benjamin: [laughs]

Davidson: That one is my all-time favorite right now. It may be a little bit a new toy syndrome, but it’s just so damn sharp. I use the 70–200 as a zoom, and I prefer it as a zoom in that range because for the shooting I do I can’t necessarily jump right up on stage and get into somebody’s face, but a lot of times that’ll get me close enough to get the shot I want, or I can crank around and get a wider shot that encompasses most of the stage, at 70 mm, at the distances I’m usually work at. And the same is true about going sort of wide angle. Now, one thing I’ve considered doing is swapping out the 24–70 wide with just a prime, like a 24–35 mm prime for doing wide. But that’s for the professional shooting and that’s not really going to translate well into the kinds of pictures you want to take. So let’s take another example. When I go out, when I go out hiking or I go out on the town, or I just go running around, I’ll take a 50 mm 1.4 fixed lens, and sometimes I’ll take a 135 f/2 lens. Because when you have a little bit of time to work a shot, when somebody’s not paying you and you have to get the shot immediately, you can always zoom with your feet, or most of the time you can zoom with your feet. And you have time and usually ability to get closer to things. I liked John’s comment last episode where — one rule of thumb about photography is that you can always get closer, and that will usually make the picture better. And I agree with that a lot. So when I’m out doing more casual shooting, I tend more towards the primes than the zooms. So the zooms for me are convenience factor when I’m in the work situation. But I love the image quality you get with a good prime. And the reason that it’s really nice to recommend primes to learning photographers like you is that it forces you to think about composition more than a zoom. Zooms, you can get lazy and you can think, oh, I’ll just zoom and get closer. And really you should think about where you are in relation to your subject. And then the other thing that’s nice is that you can get extremely good quality at a lower price. Zooms have all these elements and to get a really good quality zoom you put out big bucks. Whereas you can get really good quality prime lenses for fairly cheap, in comparison. So it’s kind of the best of all worlds for people who are learning and people who are just doing photography for the love of photography.

Gruber: All the major SLR companies, Pentax, Canon, Nikon, they all have a 50 mm prime lens that costs about $100, maybe even less. You can get the Canon f/1.8 for like $85. I think the Nikon is similarly priced. And it is, in my mind, the single biggest bargain in all of photography. I mean, because for $85 you can get a lens that is very fast, f/1.8, and optically is better than just about any zoom that any consumer would ever consider buying.

Davidson: Right. To match one of those primes typically you’d have to spend at least $1000 on a zoom.

Gruber: And I think it just never occurs to people because they think, “well, I want a zoom”, or they think, “for $85 how good is it?” But it really is a fantastic lens, it just happens to be the easiest lens to manufacture so that’s why the price is so low.

Benjamin: So if I was a new photographer, and I asked you this question when I was going through it, but I think it’s a — I want to hear both of your answers — a new photographer, starting out, they’re done with the point-and-shoot, they’re ready to go to a digital SLR, maybe they’re going with the Nikon D40 perhaps, or they’re going with the Canon Digital Rebel XTi. What lens should they be getting? Should they get the kit lens that comes with it, should they say “forget that, I want to get a prime lens”, and if so, what should they be getting?

Davidson: I waffle on this a little bit. I mean, to some degree, I would say go ahead and get the kit lens that comes with it because it’s a zoom, it’s a typically okay zoom, it’s not a great zoom, but if you’re outside in the daytime, it’ll work fine. And it’ll give you a few different focal lengths that go with the camera, and it’s usually about $100 added onto the price or maybe a bit more. But then I would also go ahead and just immediately jump in and get a 50. It’s the best $100 you can ever do for your photography, as John said. And then start looking wide or start looking tall if that’s the kind of thoughts that you’re having for your pictures. That would be my starting point. What about you, John?

Gruber: I think the same thing. I waffle on whether to advise people to get the kit lens or not, because it’s the same thing where I don’t really like — I can tell — I know far, far less about photography than you, but I can see the results when I just look at the pictures people take with them, especially indoors.

Davidson: Oh yeah, you can always see the kit lens, yeah.

Gruber: But like you said, it’s only $100. But, see, my thought is if you get it, you’re going to be tempted to use it when you should be using a prime lens, learning to be a better photographer. So I would just say, especially if you’ve already got a point-and-shoot that almost always has some kind of zoom on it, if you really want to say, I want to become an avid amateur, I would say get the body without the lens and get the $85 50 mm lens. And just use that even for just a month where you got the camera, it’s brand new, of course you’re going to use it because it’s your new toy, but just have that 50, make it be the only lens you bought with the camera and you’ll have to use it, and it’ll give better muscles, better photographer muscles.

Davidson: I can’t argue with that, that’s totally solid advice too.

Gruber: I just think the one thing that I’ve gotten better at in five or six years of amateur photography, the one thing if anything that I’ve gotten better at is framing. And I look back at some of my older pictures, and I just see people with heads cut off or just weird stuff in the framing, and I think, boy, I wish I would’ve taken a couple more shots of that scene from a different angle. And having a fixed lens that doesn’t zoom at all, it just makes you think about moving the camera. If you can zoom, you just think, well, I can zoom, and it gives you two things to think about. So just removing the idea, just having a lens that only does one focal length, it makes you think about moving the camera because there’s no other way to change the framing.

Davidson: Right. So I totally agree, if you’re wanting to get good at photography, definitely stick to primes. I think the one case where the zoom might be handy is when you go to Disneyland, and your wife wants to use the camera or your husband wants to use the camera, your significant other who’s not necessarily wanting to join you in this endeavor, and you can slap that on there for them and say, here you go, knock yourself out. They might be happy with that. But then again, maybe not. Maybe zooms are just overrated at that level.

Benjamin: It was just such a weird experience for me when I did put the 50 mm lens on there. As far as I can remember, at least in my entire adult life, all of the cameras I’ve had have always been able to zoom. And it’s the weirdest thing, having a very expensive, relatively speaking, a very expensive camera with a somewhat expensive lens on it, the 50 or the 28, and all it does is focus. I mean, I certainly understand that photos are much, much better than anything else I’ve ever taken, but it’s sort of weird, you almost feel like the camera isn’t doing something that you’re used to cameras doing if that makes sense. My whole life — oh yeah, I’ll just zoom in.

Gruber: And it’s just an unfortunate fact that it’s a big selling point. People buy cameras based on the zoom. I can’t tell you — as a guy who, like, my friends know that I’m a hobbyist photographer, I get asked questions “what camera I should buy” and sometimes they’ll ask me a question like, “Look, these are the two cameras I’m looking at, I’m leaning towards this one, but it’s only got a 10× zoom and the other one has 12×, do you think that’s all right?” And that’s just how they think. You’re just so, so thinking about the wrong factors. I don’t even know where to start.

Davidson: It’s kind of like the Korean cell phone manufacturers looking at the iPhone saying, “well, we’ve got all those features and more” and yet not getting it.

Gruber: Right, right. “We’ve got a camera, we’ve got a web browser. What more do you want?”

Davidson: Right. “We’ve got the feature list.” Yeah, it’s a total mind-bender when you have to really think about framing without zooming, and it’s actually hitting me again with this new camera that I’ve got. Different cameras have a different amount of crop that you see through the viewfinder. This is getting a little esoteric, but my 5D only showed about 96 or something percent of what actually hit the sensor. So you get used to, when you’re framing through the viewfinder that the resulting image is going to have a little bit of extra stuff around the edge that you didn’t see through the viewfinder. And this new 1D, it’s 100 percent. What you see through the viewfinder is exactly where that crop line is going to be when you see the image resulting, and I’m already having to reprogram my head a little bit to make sure that I have enough space around people. But framing is everything. And having this little experience today, just the last few days, but especially today, as I watch the photos come through the camera, it’s a mind-bender, again, so I can totally understand how not putting a zoom on would bend somebody’s head too. It’s a good way to bend it.

Gruber: So one last quick question about the new camera, the — what is it, 3D?

Davidson: 1D Mark III, yeah. Super badass.

Gruber: So one of the big differences, your previous work camera was the full-frame Canon, what’s it, the 5D?

Davidson: Yeah.

Gruber: And now you’ve gone back to a camera which has the smaller digital sensor. It just makes up for it in a bunch of different ways. But do you find that that throws you off a little bit in terms of your lens selection because now you’re having to deal with the crop factor again whereas all that time you spent with the 5D you weren’t?

Davidson: It’s tossed me a little bit off but not too much, and that’s because the crop factor is different. It’s a 1.3× crop factor vs. the 1.6× crop factor. They call it APS-H for some reason. And it turns out that the 1D has the biggest sensor that you can image in one pass off of current chip technology machines, or the chip imaging machines. Whereas the 5D sensor, they actually have to stitch in multiple exposures so the yield goes way down. But I haven’t found it to be such a problem, because it doesn’t shift my lenses around as much as the 1.6 multiplier does. So when I stick on my 78–200 lens, it’s not really affected too much. I basically have a slight bit of cropping to the image and that’s about it from what I expected before. So it’s not too bad. The place where it hurts me a little bit is on the wides, and that’s why I keep the — I mean, the 5D I’m going to keep for landscapes, and I’m also going to keep as my back-up camera and for doing the wide angle stuff because if you really want 24 mm or you really want 17 mm, you’ve got to have the full frame.

Gruber: And that’s like the one thing in all of the brand name wars in photography, that is the one thing that Canon has, is Canon is the only company with a full-frame DSLR.

Davidson: Right. There’s two big differences: one is the full frame, and the second is the sensitivity of the sensors. Canon really rocks when you get up into the ISO 800, 1600, 3200 ranges. Both Nikons and Canons are great at ISO 100, which is when you’re out shooting landscapes and whatnot. But the high ISO characteristics of the Canon is really, really awesome.

Benjamin: What do you think of the camera on the iPhone?

Davidson: It’s great for snapshots. [laughs] As a camera, it sucks. It records images and if what you’re wanting is to make sure that you remember an event or remember somebody or a place for yourself, it’s perfectly serviceable.

Gruber: Do you find that it has a really weird white balance? I get the greenish-blue tint to almost every picture I take with it. Almost.

Davidson: It’s got a wonky white balance, yes.

Gruber: I’ll bet that that’s software. I mean, I’m hoping that that gets adjusted in a software update. Because I would think that the white balance is controlled by software, that it’s not part of the camera chip. Maybe it is, I don’t know. And I see pictures on Flickr from iPhones and it’s just rampant, this sort of sickly green fluorescent tone to pictures.

Davidson: Seems like they really optimized it for taking pictures under fluorescent lights. But yeah, it’s a little weird. It also has a lot of bloom, so if you have a bright area, you get all the lighting of the area around the bright areas. But I’ve found it pretty good if you’re out in daylight. I’ve had a lot of fun with it, just taking snaps and uploading them.

Gruber: What do you think of where the button is? I can’t stand where the shutter button is.

Benjamin: Horrible.

Davidson: The whole soft button thing, yeah, I hate it. I’m not sure I hate it because it’s a soft button, but I hate the location of it, for sure.

Gruber: And I think the worst thing about it — maybe they were thinking, because it’s right above the home button, which is the physical button, and maybe they were thinking, well, we’ll put it above the home button so you can feel it, it’s right above there. But what I found is that I keep hitting the home button by accident, and then I leave the camera app and go back to the iPhone home screen.

Davidson: I do that all the time. I wish you just tapped the screen to take the picture.

Benjamin: Anywhere on the screen.

Davidson: Because if you tap the screen, it does nothing. So might as well do something with that click.

Gruber: That’s the best solution, that’s the easiest solution, the best thing I’ve heard.

Benjamin: Who do we have to tell to implement that?

Gruber: I don’t know, we need someone with a popular Mac weblog, or something.

Davidson: [laughs]

Benjamin: So speaking of weblogs, Duncan has a weblog, he’s got a website, redoing it again. You almost redo it as much as I do.

Davidson: Well, that’s because both of us enjoy the challenge of it.

Benjamin: So it’s duncandavidson.com, right?

Davidson: Yep.

Benjamin: That’s the main one or is that the blog now?

Davidson: That’s everything. I had the blog separate because I was running over on Typepad and I nixed that, and it’s all collapsed down. So if you go to blog.duncandavidson.com, I do the Daring Fireball trick and just send you to duncandavidson.com and that’s it.

Benjamin: So if I want to hire you for a wedding or bar mitzvah to come out and take some pictures, you’re not doing it, you’re not available?

Davidson: [laughs] I’ve not actually done a wedding, I’ve done lots of events, but no weddings so far. So I would be a little hesitant unless that was somebody I really knew so that we could work through that and be a little bit less of a “oh my god, I’m dealing with a client I don’t know”.

Benjamin: Well, we’ve got to wrap it up. I don’t know how I’m going to edit this down, John.

Gruber: I don’t know, that’s your problem. I am so — I have never been happier that we worked it out that you do the editing and I just show up for the show and talk. Because I think we’ve been talking for about three hours here.

Benjamin: It’s been three and a half hours, 3 hours 38 minutes.

Gruber: It’s great, we’ll have lots of footage for our eventual director’s cut, complete, uncut The Talk Show DVD.

Benjamin: Right.

Davidson: There’s some edits you can make. Thinking back, there’s a few places I can think that you can cut down, but still.

Benjamin: Pretty much wherever John is talking.

Gruber: I was going to say the same thing but about yours.

Benjamin: Right. So the three things I think people need to remember today: James Duncan Davidson, 37signals, Insanely Great Tees. That’s it. If you leave nothing else, just remember those three things. And 50 mm.

Gruber: 50 mm fixed prime lens.

Davidson: 50 mm. 24, 35, any of those. Just fixed, fixed, fixed. [somebody talks into a megaphone in the background]

Benjamin: What is that in the background?

Gruber: I think James is getting arrested.

Davidson: Yeah, that would be security coming by.

Benjamin: It’s very sort of NPR of us to have that stuff in the background.

Gruber: I’ll call a lawyer.

Davidson: Yeah, and I have to say, it’s a bit embarrassing that I’m speaking on my laptop microphone after John took so much grief over his.

Benjamin: No, he was speaking into a high-quality microphone, he just had it in the closet.

Davidson: Ahh.

Gruber: The weird thing is that I actually sounded worse with a better microphone because I apparently wasn’t close enough to it.

Benjamin: Yeah, spend a few hundred bucks on a mic and you actually degrade the quality of his sound. We’ll end. We’re pretty much done.

Davidson: I think so, but it was a lot of fun doing this, guys. [somebody still talks into a megaphone in the background]

Gruber: Yeah, it was great, thanks.

Benjamin: I’m just so entertained by that sound in the background.

Davidson: [laughs]

Benjamin: Maybe there’s a filter I can put over what we’re saying right now that’ll make it sound like that.

Davidson: Maybe so, or maybe you can sample it out and have it running through the entire podcast.

Benjamin: I think it was anyway.

Davidson: Well, I’m running away from it, so it’s well in the background now.

Benjamin: All right, guys, we’re done.

Gruber: Thanks.

Davidson: Thanks, man.

Benjamin: See you later.

Davidson: Ciao.

Benjamin: We don’t have to even hang up if we don’t want.

Dan Benjamin: You were obsessed with the iPhone, you got the iPhone, and now you’re obsessed with email on the iPhone, specifically we’re talking about spam. So somebody like you, you get a lot of spam. A lot of spam.

John Gruber: And you don’t?

Benjamin: I get a little bit. I don’t get — I mean, I guess the encoder may have helped because where I have publicized the email address, it’s been encoded, so it helped a little. But I mean, I still get a decent amount. Nowhere near what you get, I’m sure.

Gruber: I think I get around 500 or 600 spams a day.

Benjamin: A day? Oh my gosh.

Gruber: It depends. Somewhere between 300 and 600 typically.

Benjamin: I don’t get anywhere near that many. So what was your solution to handle this?

Gruber: Well, we should say what the problem is.

Benjamin: What is the problem?

Gruber: The problem is that for years I’ve relied on client-side spam filtering with C-Command’s SpamSieve, which is a Macintosh program, it integrates with every Macintosh email program that I know of.

Benjamin: The best, I think, easily the best client-side anti-spam application that exists for the Mac. They should be a sponsor of this show.

Gruber: Well, everybody should be a sponsor of this show. Who shouldn’t sponsor, who wouldn’t want to sponsor this show?

Benjamin: I can’t think of a single company that wouldn’t benefit from that. That’s kind of silly.

Gruber: Yeah, I mean, honestly, I can’t think of one either.

Benjamin: But of all of them right now, I think SpamSieve should be the number one guy on the phone. When we put this out there, the phone better ring. That’s all I have to say.

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: But go on, go on. All Mac clients...

Gruber: For years I’ve managed it and it’s — how much spam I get hasn’t really been a problem because SpamSieve’s been running at somewhere around 99.8 or 99.9 percent accuracy for years for me, literally, I think since 2003 or something like that. But the problem is, because it’s client-side, the spam filtering happens, your client checks for mail, and before mail gets into your inbox, it passes it off to SpamSieve, and SpamSieve says “good”, “good”, “bad”, “bad”, “bad”, “bad”, “bad”. So when you check mail with your iPhone, without any kind of server-side spam filtering, all the spam is still there in the inbox, which for me would literally be hundreds of spams a day. It would honestly make using the iPhone for checking my email impossible. So the obvious option would be to — if you wanted to just do the simplest thing possible — would be to just set up a computer with SpamSieve on it and have it check mail continuously, never go to sleep. That doesn’t really work for me because my only computer that I use is a laptop, which I take with me places, so it’s often sleeping. I do put it to sleep at night. In theory, I wouldn’t necessarily mind leaving it running all night, but when I’m actually taking the notebook with me, or I’m traveling, I’m in an airport, and it’s in my backpack — that’s not feasible. So I could set up an old computer here in my home office and have it set up to run SpamSieve continuously, but that seems wasteful to me to have an entire — my own computer set up just for — my own personal spam filtering computer.

Benjamin: So what are the other solutions? You came up with one, a free one, that’s actually kind of — I think it’s interesting, it’s a neat idea, but I think it’s just a cut above having your own dedicated Mac in a corner running SpamSieve all the time.

Gruber: Right. So what I’m doing is — what I’ve long done is set up my email so that all of the addresses I use are really forwarders to another account that’s using an address that I never publicize, never give anyone, just to have the flexibility that I could redirect the mail somewhere else before it goes to that mailbox, and then I just set a Reply-To: header so that the mail that I send looks like it’s coming from the forwarding address. So what I did is I changed all the email addresses I use to point to Gmail accounts and then back to — so it goes from a forwarder at my domain, the address I want at daringfireball.net, goes to Gmail. Gmail is set to automatically forward back to my real mailbox name at daringfireball.net. And a lot of people, a lot of the stuff I’ve read said Gmail spam filtering is pretty accurate, and my results after doing it for about a week is that, yeah, it’s really, really good. It catches at least 99 percent of all spam. And more importantly, it doesn’t catch false positives, it doesn’t flag good mail as spam. Funnily enough, the two messages that it did that I caught just by looking through the Gmail spam mailbox were from you.

Benjamin: [laughs] That’s great.

Gruber: But one thing you can do is you can upload your contacts, your address book, export it to a comma-separated value file, upload it to Gmail, and it will automatically whitelist anybody in your address book. Now, the downside of that is that one time only you can upload a file, it doesn’t automatically — there’s no way to sync it. But so far, after a week, it’s a very good solution.

Benjamin: Well, that’s actually — it’s a neat idea, I think it’s a great idea if you already have your email set up, if you’re already doing the forwarding thing. I have a few aliases that I use, but I try to limit that. So the company that I use for my email services is Webmail.us, they’re great, and I like having things hosted there just because if I decide to switch hosting companies or if I have multiple domains or whatever, it’s — and I think it’s like $10–12 a month for pretty much as many email addresses as you’d ever want. Yeah, I mean, you can get free email hosting, and you can do the Gmail thing, which I’ve tried, it just never really worked for me. I don’t like using a web application as my primary email client. I tried it, I couldn’t get used to it.

Gruber: But that’s the thing with Gmail, I actually don’t use it.

Benjamin: You’re just using the forwarding, purely forwarding. But for me, what I like — Webmail actually has a really, really good, in-built spam filtering process that’s very customizable, you can have it put it into a separate spam folder, you can have it preface the subject line with “spam”, there’s all kinds of things that you can do and it’s sort of built in. I still am using SpamSieve, but I turned on this spam filtering option for the times when I knew I’d be checking with the iPhone to see how it would do, and it’s actually done a really, really good job. But I mean, this is to me, I think the people who are in the job of doing spam filtering should be thrilled about the iPhone.

Gruber: Oh, definitely.

Benjamin: Because more than any device I think it necessitates the fact — now you have to have spam filtering. And I don’t really anticipate that Apple’s going to put spam filtering into the iPhone mail app. That doesn’t seem like their priority.

Gruber: No, I don’t think so either. Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened. Obviously, the desktop mail client has junk filtering. But I’ve never been particularly impressed — and I only recently switched to Mail, so I can’t say that I really tested it extensively, but I have tried it.

Benjamin: It’s nowhere near as good as SpamSieve. It doesn’t even get close. It does okay for the most obvious spams, and it has a lot of incorrect positives where it tags things that aren’t —

Gruber: That’s what I always found was that even when — I think there’s an option to say, you know, “people in my” — I guess what the problem was, it was often catching — because I get a lot of email from readers who aren’t in my address book, and it would often catch — because I’ve tried using mail for IMAP before for some of my email, and I never thought that the built-in junk filtering in Mail was accurate enough. The one thing I really wish that the iPhone mail client supported that it doesn’t, is flagging.

Benjamin: Yeah. I saw that tweet and I commented on that. To me that was something that it didn’t occur to me until I was actually really using the iPhone for email, when I was spending more than just — I wonder if I got a new email, oh yeah, okay — but actually using it as a device to read and reply to email for more than a few minutes, that was the first thing that occurred to me. Because I flag email all the time that I want to — something I want to come back to, something I need to respond to, but I can’t get to it right now, or I need to investigate it before I can answer. And not having — that’s a huge, huge thing on the wish list right now. I think a lot of people have to be feeling that way.

Gruber: I love the idea of flagging because it’s one of those things where it’s like the 80/20 rule, where the simplest possible thing goes 80 percent of the way to solving what you need. Because you can always say, well, maybe you want some kind of full — you want labels, or tagging, or all sorts of stuff that you could do with messaging to say, this message is part of the project, I want to put tags on it, blah blah blah. Really though, just a simple flag, which is supported on a lot of IMAP clients, to say “This message is flagged”. At least from the iPhone’s perspective where you really can’t add a lot of stuff like tagging, and full labeling interface really wouldn’t fit in with the minimalist UI. Flagging really would. The way that you can mark a read message unread, there’s like a little hide/unhide details, and then there’s a thing you click that when you’ve read a message, you can mark it back to unread. Right there, I would love it if in addition to being able to mark it read, if you could mark it flagged. And when you hide that, you wouldn’t even have to see it. But the reason I need it, here’s typically — when I read email on the iPhone, there’s messages that I’m done with, that I can either respond to or just leave it marked as read because I don’t ever need to see it again, but then there’s a lot of times I’ll get messages where I can’t deal with it now because I’m on my iPhone. Because maybe I need to write a real reply, so it’s going to wait until I go back and I have my real keyboard and a real mail client. Maybe it’s because it’s something that requires me to do a lot of work on. Something I need to come back to. But I’ve already read it. So what I have to do now is mark it unread, so I know I’ll come back to it. But that’s sort of abusing unread.

Benjamin: So we need that. We’ve got to have that.

Gruber: Right, because I like to use unread to mean new.

Benjamin: Unread means “I haven’t seen this”. There’s one more topic I want to talk to you about. And I think the best way to bring it up is to completely change subjects and start talking about what you were doing in San Francisco that was weird. I liked it, I thought it was cool, but it was pretty weird. You would take your... [a noise is heard in the background] I don’t know if you guys can hear this, do you hear the thunder in the background here? [rain drums in the background]

Gruber: I thought that was your dog.

Benjamin: I don’t know if it’s going to come through on the mic, but I mean, it is crazy storming out here.

Gruber: Yeah, it did.

Benjamin: Another thing we need to do once we have a real website is we need to have a section for links, things that we talk about. [loud thunder in the background] Could you hear that?

Gruber: Yeah, I could.

Benjamin: So that I could, like, link the picture of what I’m seeing outside the window. It’s torrential, it’s like — Noah saw something almost like this. Anyway, so we’re in San Francisco and we’re hanging out, we go to these different places, and you’d pull this little camera out of your pocket, and you’d put it on top of your beer glass, and you’d have this weird look on your face, you’re sort of staring at whoever you’re trying to take a picture of, but you looked really creepy when you were doing it, and then the camera would kind of — I guess it would go into an autofocus sort of mode where it would try to gauge the right focus and everything, and it would flash the light repeatedly really, really fast, sort of blinding the person. And some of the pictures actually came out pretty good when you were doing that. But the reason I mention this, you’ve taken some really cool pictures with this new camera that you’re using, and it was sort of a disappointment to me to see you switch to this new camera after you’ve been using the Canon Digital Rebel for so long. Right after I get my Digital Rebel, you show up with this little — was it a Ricoh, is that how you say it?

Gruber: Right, a Ricoh — actually, I’m not 100 percent sure if it’s R[i]coh or R[ai]coh, I don’t know. I think it’s R[i]coh, I always say R[i]coh.

Benjamin: “Ricoh” like “vista”.

Gruber: Right. Ricoh GR Digital.

Benjamin: And it does an awesome job, and I’ll see one of these pictures, and I’m new to the digital SLR world, you’ve given me a lot of great advice about — you and James Duncan Davidson and a couple of other people guided me on lens purchases and stuff. So as soon as I go out, I get the camera, I get a couple cool lenses, now in my mind I’m thinking, okay, how do I take that kind of picture. So I’ll look at the picture, I’ll click the “More settings”, and I’ll learn, oh, this is the kind of lens he used, this is what the aperture was. And now you’re walking around with this Ricoh camera, which is irrelevant to what I’m doing. What’s up with that?

Gruber: Well, it’s a point-and-shoot, so the difference is that I can put it in my pocket as opposed to an SLR. But Ricoh is a Japanese company, I don’t know, are there any camera companies that aren’t Japanese? But they don’t really have a North American presence, they don’t officially have any kind of North American retail presence because they sort of see the North American market as being obsessed with things like how many megapixels and what length the zoom is on the lens, you know, people just go into Best Buy and pick the camera with the most megapixels and most zoom in the lens.

Benjamin: Didn’t you order this one from overseas too?

Gruber: Well, I didn’t get it overseas, I got it from a place called Popflash, which is a camera reseller. I guess they call themselves a camera broker where they sell cameras that aren’t officially sold in North America. There’s another place called Adorama in New York that sells the Ricoh GR or other Ricoh cameras. But the thing with the Ricoh, and people are always so surprised when they hear it, it’s $600, it’s a $600 point-and-shoot.

Benjamin: That’s essentially almost the same price as getting a Digital Rebel XTi body.

Gruber: Right, pretty much. And they say, well, how much zoom does it have? And the answer is none, it’s just a fixed length, 28 mm lens. And people are like, “Well, why would you spend $600 on a camera that doesn’t even have a zoom?” And it’s like, because a non-zoom, a prime lens has better... [a phone rings loudly] What the hell is that? Jesus.

Benjamin: That’s my iPhone. [laughs] Hold on.

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: [on the phone] Hello?

Gruber: Patch ’em in!

Benjamin: [on the phone] What time do you guys close?

Gruber: Ask them if they want to sponsor a podcast.

Benjamin: [on the phone] All right, I’ll be there, thank you. [to Gruber] Hey, John, my glasses are ready.

Gruber: Excellent.

Benjamin: My new glasses. I’m very excited. All right, please continue with what you were saying. I’m not going to edit that out. No editing.

Gruber: Oh, why would you want to edit that.

Benjamin: Did you hear that ring? See, that’s one of the things I like about the iPhone, yeah, you can’t use any sound that you want for your ringer, but you can pick a really cool sound that will not only go through the entire house and be heard anywhere but would scare the crap out of you in the process.

Gruber: You use the old-fashioned phone ringer. I’ve kept mine on Marimba. Because I want people to know I have an iPhone.

Benjamin: [laughs] Right.

Gruber: Hey, do you do the thing where you assign different people their own custom ringtones?

Benjamin: Can you do that on the iPhone?

Gruber: Yeah, you just go into contacts and assign a ringtone.

Benjamin: Oh, I’m going to do that now.

Gruber: Or maybe you go into ringtones and assign to contact. I think you do it by going into the ringtones and you can say “Assign to contact”.

Benjamin: I’m going to do that. I haven’t done that, but I will do, and I’ll assign Marimba to you. So, continue.

Gruber: But anyway, learning everything there is to know about photography is an enormous amount of work, and I certainly only know a very, very small amount of it. But it’s another instance of the 80/20 rule where you can learn the 80 percent of the basics, the fundamentals of photography very, very — it’s all very simple. You really can learn it very quickly, and then the other 20 percent will take you forever, and it requires, like, an encyclopedia.

Benjamin: So you’re saying, you can go and drop $600, get a 28 mm point-and-shoot from overseas, put it on a beer glass in a pitch black restaurant, and take some good pictures?

Gruber: Well, one of the advantages to a fixed, a prime lens, a lens that doesn’t zoom, is that typically it has better optical quality. It’s sharper, it gets better color saturation, and often it’s faster, faster meaning that it works with less light.

Benjamin: You can still take a decent picture inside without a full sun.

Gruber: Right. I almost never shoot with a flash. Even to the point where I end up not being able to even get an exposure.

Benjamin: You’d rather not take a picture at all as opposed to taking one of those deer-in-the-headlights, washed out, ghoulish-looking flash pictures?

Gruber: Right, because really to take a good-looking flash picture you need a real flash, an expensive external flash that gets mounted on top of the camera, and you need to know how to do things like bounce it off the ceiling.

Benjamin: When I was speaking at Rails conference, there were all these strobes going off, flashing all over the ceiling, and afterwards I asked Duncan about it and he’s like, “Yeah, yeah, that’s how I use the flash”, because he had this elaborate rig set up so that the flash never actually — it was always indirect light.

Gruber: So, like, Duncan with a very, very nice and very expensive equipment can take tremendously, just beautiful photographs that are actually lit by flash or partially lit by flash. But using the on-camera flash, even on an SLR, it’s almost always going to look bad. So I just try to do whatever I can not to. So resting the camera on something like a glass or resting it on the table, it’s just a way to keep — if there’s not enough light to take a long exposure, if the camera is going to — if you have to take a long exposure, if it’s going to be opened for a fifteenth of a second or a twentieth of a second, which is too long to hold the camera steady by hand, do something to stabilize the camera.

Benjamin: It was pretty weird. But it was neat, it was kind of neat. I mean, you looked really crazy when you were doing it, you’d look really suspicious when you were doing it. I mean, it’s all right, I’m just pointing that out.

Gruber: I don’t think it looks nearly as suspicious as if I tried doing it with an SLR-sized camera.

Benjamin: [laughs] Right. And for the record, you’ve given me a lot of advice about the lenses to get, and I have two of the same lenses that you have. A 50 mm one, a 28 mm, same two type lenses that you have. Another friend of mine has a 35 mm. I’ve seen his pictures, it’s taken some great pictures. Both of them are prime lenses, meaning they don’t zoom. And it’s great because in a way it forces you to rethink what you’re used to. Instead of just being able to zoom in on something or zoom back from something, you actually have to sometimes physically change your relationship to whatever you’re taking a picture of. So I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting where I’ll take a picture of something with a 50 mm then I’ll pop the other lens on without really changing where I am, and you’ll get a completely different kind of picture. It’s really cool. We could talk an entire show, I think, about just this.

Gruber: Here’s one simple, basic rule of thumb. And of course, there’s dozens of exceptions and there are scenarios where it doesn’t apply, but just as a basic rule of thumb for someone who’s learning to take pictures, just wants to take better pictures, is an amateur. The closer you are to what you’re trying to photograph, the better. So in terms of using a fixed lens, a prime lens that doesn’t have a zoom, you say, well, what if I want to make it bigger? Well, just get closer. And it’s almost always possible to get closer, especially if you’re shooting people. Obviously, if you’re at the zoo and you want to take a picture of a lion, yeah, there’s only so close you can get, and you want to have a nice long focal length lens, something with the zoom, or a 300 mm lens, or something like that. But for just shooting people in your house or shooting people you know and you go out to dinner or something like that, just get as close to them as you can to fill the frame with an interesting composition.

Benjamin: You sound good, John.

Gruber: Thanks. I got a new microphone.

Benjamin: What kind?

Gruber: Samson PS01.

Benjamin: All of our equipment is Samson stuff. Ira is responsible for that. He just sends stuff. “Oh, I got a new microphone, I’m going to send one out to you.”

Gruber: Yeah, I don’t understand how it happened, all of a sudden — I didn’t even ask for it, and he was nice enough to send me this as a sample.

Benjamin: You’ve got the USB one.

Gruber: Right.

Benjamin: And I’ve got one that — I don’t know all these terms, but it’s a regular microphone, and it plugs into a preamp, and I’ve got optical compression and all these boxes. Whereas yours is just plugged right into the USB port on your PowerBook. But it’s amazing how much better you sound. It’s a great mic that I actually started out — I did most of, maybe all but the last couple of Hivelogic podcasts with the mic that you’re using. It’s amazing how much better you sound through a good microphone.

Gruber: I don’t know what to say about that.

Benjamin: It’s true. You sound more like yourself. Like, when people —

Gruber: Dan, you’ve got to stop, you’re choking me up here.

Benjamin: Oh yeah. No, I mean, when people —

Gruber: Dan, stop.

Benjamin: — hear your voice. Just hear me out, when people hear your voice and you sound all tinny and crappy over your little crappy headset, people think it —

Gruber: [in a mock teary voice] Dan, this means so much to me.

Benjamin: Say what?

Gruber: This means so much to me.

Benjamin: Yeah, okay. I’ll edit that out. When they hear you over that little microphone, you sound so — everybody would email me and say, “Hey, Dan, new podcast sounds great, you sound great. WTF with Gruber?” Because the microphone was crap, you sounded like crap.

Gruber: Even on the first episode?

Benjamin: Especially.

Gruber: No, the second one was the one where I was recording on the PowerBook’s built-in mic. First one, I had a USB headset.

Benjamin: I don’t think there was a difference. I think they both sounded bad.

Gruber: Hm.

Benjamin: And people would literally write in and say, “He needs a new mic.”

Gruber: It’s like the podcasting equivalent of top-posting. Just poor form.

Benjamin: Using a bad mic.

Gruber: Right, right, right. It’s embarrassing. It’s like having dirt under your fingernails.

Benjamin: I was embarrassed. I’m embarrassed at the website now. But we’re going to get that fixed, we’re going to get that redesigned.

Gruber: We have top men on it right now.

Benjamin: Actually, we do. Actually, as of yesterday, the 11th, a new entity is in place on an issue.

Gruber: Top men. We get a lot of unsolicited suggestions.

Benjamin: Yeah we do.

Gruber: And that is very sweet and thank you to everybody who has sent in their own design suggestions for what it looks like. We definitely appreciate the sentiment.

Benjamin: We do.

Gruber: But top men are on the case. As for why it looks the way it does now, the question was do we wait until we have a good website to start recording and doing this show, or do we start recording.

Benjamin: Do we start recording or do we spend six months trying to make it look good, neither of us really being fantastic designers. So here’s the thing, we’ve got some interesting things from people. Like, more than one person I think has sent in music that we’re supposed to use, pictures, designs have come in. So it’s obvious to me that, number one, we obviously need some kind of a jingle, or an intro, or something.

Gruber: Nah, we don’t need a jingle.

Benjamin: We need a jingle, we need some kind of 1950s chewing gum jingle, I think.

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: So if you want to send something in and it’s good — if you can get a barbershop quartet together and sing something, we will air that.

Gruber: We could definitely air the best submissions that people send in.

Benjamin: Yeah, send us stuff. Maybe that’s what we ought to do, we ought to say, if you have some ideas for a jingle, or music, or something — but don’t send us something that we could — if I can do it myself with my Casio keyboard in my basement, then don’t send it to me. If it’s genuinely good, if you play an instrument, or have an amazing voice, or something legitimate — send that. But if it’s something that I could do with a Casio keyboard, don’t send it. I don’t know how I could be more clear, John.

Gruber: All right. What’s your problem with Casio?

Benjamin: No, I like it, it’s good. Infinite time. So that’s it, we’ve got to wrap, we’ve already gone — you just messaged me “40m”. So I’m going to have to cut this again, but at least you didn’t curse. I just want to say for the record, why do people have to curse on their blogs? You curse on your blog, and now Craig Hockenberry who is, by the way, where has he been for the last 10 years on the blogosphere, because he’s awesome. Furbo, furbo.org, he now owes us for advertising, I think. But, amazing writing, he’s a great guy, he’s actually shorter than I am, which you would never know because he looks really tall in the pictures. But, amazing writer, really good writer. Now he’s cursing, now he has an adult blog, now I can’t link to it.

Gruber: But you link to me.

Benjamin: Well, I have no choice, I have to do something.

Gruber: Because we’re partners in the show.

Benjamin: You don’t realize when you start working with somebody, now all this crap you have to do to keep them as your friend. What’s the next show going to be about?

Gruber: I don’t know, we should do more on the camera stuff. I think we really gave it short shrift.

Benjamin: If we’re going to do that, we need to get Duncan on the show though.

Gruber: Yeah, that’s what we should do.

Benjamin: He’s not going to come on the show, he’s too busy, he’s in Portland, he’s in San Francisco, he’s all over — but he would be — I had him on the Hivelogic podcast, but it was more of an interview. He should just come on here and just talk.

Gruber: You know what, I had a good idea for someone else we should get on the show. I’m not going to say names because I don’t want to put him on the spot, put all this pressure right on somebody —

Benjamin: Why not? Come on.

Gruber: You know, there’s a lot of people who listen to this show. You’ll know who I’m talking about. I haven’t said this to you, but I’m just going to say one word to you, “Newton”.

Benjamin: Oh yeah, of course.

Gruber: You know who I’m talking about. Now, we get him on this show, and we’ll talk Newton, we’ll talk iPhone, we’ll talk about — and you know what the problem is going to be with getting him on the show. The problem is that he’s Canadian.

Benjamin: Oh, that’s right. I don’t know if we should have him on the show.

Gruber: I mean, that’s just...

Benjamin: What kind of show would we become if we had him on the show?

Gruber: Right. But we’ll see, maybe we can make it work. I think that’s what we should shoot for next week.

Benjamin: Will he need a passport in order to be on the show?

Gruber: I don’t know. I really don’t.

Benjamin: We’ll have to see. I don’t want it to be an interview, I want him and Duncan, anybody else we have — not an interview, it’s like they’re guests, they show up, they sit down in the studio, they talk. That’s it.

Gruber: Right, exactly.

Benjamin: I don’t want it to be anything like an interview. It’s not Larry King.

Gruber: No.

Benjamin: Well, then that’s it.

Gruber: All right, see you.

Dan Benjamin: So this is a supplemental podcast to our regular weekly podcast just because we have to talk about our iPhones. So John, you got an iPhone, I guess.

John Gruber: Yeah, I did, I got one about 6:20 on Friday.

Benjamin: Yeah, I think you had a little bit of a shorter line than I did. How long did you wait?

Gruber: I got there around 11:30, and the line was about 50 or 60 deep, but I had a friend there and sort of [?] in line around space 45.

Benjamin: Nice. We had about — I heard the news say we had 300 people here in Orlando, in the Millenia Mall in Orlando. I think we had more like 400 or 500, I’m not sure. I got there at about 10:30 AM and probably got 70ish in line. How did the activation go for you?

Gruber: It went great for us, really. My wife and I, we each got an iPhone, we already had AT&T phones, but we were out of contract, we were month-to-month from a contract we had like 2.5 years ago. We have a family plan with plenty of minutes. No data plans because our phones were totally old, non-data phones. We upgraded, we just added two $20 iPhone data plans to our current account. It adds up to about — seems like no matter what you do, it adds up to about $60 a month per iPhone. I think we’re going to actually come out a little bit ahead of that. But AT&T’s family pricing seems like it’s fairly consistent, like, everybody with a reasonably recent family plan, it’s about $40 per phone per plan and $20 per iPhone.

Benjamin: Not outrageous, not too much more expensive.

Gruber: No. I don’t think so.

Benjamin: See, I have a family talk plan, I had a phone on this plan, AT&T customer, and activated it around when I got home sometime around 7:30–8 o’clock, and I was one of the people that saw the message that said, “You’ll get an email when you’re activated”, and I thought, what’s that? And just about midnight, when I had pretty much given up and said, all right, I’ll just let this thing sit here overnight, I got the email, clicked the link and it activated, but there are some other people I know who were not so lucky, and actually it took them even till the next day, and they had to take action and diligently call AT&T and Apple —

Gruber: Yes. It seems like the one and only really serious complaint about the iPhone is people whose activation was left in limbo, and it does seem like there are some people whose activations require — you have to call AT&T customer support and get them to fix it; otherwise, it’s never going to be activated.

Benjamin: Yeah, if you don’t take any action, you’re just not going to have an activation period, and how do you know if you’re the person who’s in that situation, you need to intervene vs. the person who’s really in a legitimate queue and you will get activated.

Gruber: Right, and it seems like a big problem because they’re selling so many iPhones that their customer service is just swamped. I mean, Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba wrote a thing on their weblog about his and — when he called them and spent like 45 minutes on hold and talked to them — more or less the problem was, for some people activation requires manual processing on AT&T’s end and whoever handled his just didn’t do the last step. There was like a final button, “Activate”, and they just never clicked it —

Benjamin: Wouldn’t it just kill you if you found out that literally a guy just forgot to click an OK button?

Gruber: I especially feel bad for the people who waited all day Friday because obviously if you’re that hepped up — I mean, even you, even you having to wait till midnight, that would’ve killed me. One of the big reasons that I did it, waited in line Friday, number one, I was afraid that they were going to sell out right away.

Benjamin: Totally.

Gruber: Well, that proved not to be the case. But I wanted to write something for Daring Fireball for the first day, just use it for a couple hours, drop a list of first impressions and notes and stuff like that and publish it, which I got to do. I probably wouldn’t have been able to do that if I had to wait till midnight to activate.

Benjamin: No, because all you could’ve done would’ve been to slide the slider and dial 911.

Gruber: Right. And that’s also the other thing that sort of stinks, is that I don’t know if it was Apple or AT&T, but somebody led people to believe that even before activation is complete, at least if you go through the iTunes part of registering your phone and waiting for activation, everything else would be active, and that’s not the case. Until the AT&T sends the signal to the SIM card, the iPhone is literally a brick, the only thing you can do is call 911.

Benjamin: Right. So what do you think, you’ve got the iPhone, is it not the coolest thing that Apple’s ever made? Is it safe to just say that, to say it’s the best Apple product maybe all around?

Gruber: I don’t know, it’s got to be close. I really do think — I mean comparisons to original Macintosh are completely legitimate. Really, just in terms of moving the state of the art forward in terms of what people can expect. And I think it’s funny because I think The New York Times had a story today about the Korean and Japanese electronics companies’ reactions to the iPhone, and that when they first announced it back in January, they were like, “Ahh, big deal, that’s just silly Americans getting excited about this, we’ve had these advanced cell phones that do cool stuff for years.” I think what they were doing was looking at it in terms of like a checklist: email, web, video on the phone, music playback on the phone, check, check, check, check, check — our phones already do all this stuff. Whereas it’s not really what the iPhone does, it’s just the way that it works, the way that it’s just so seamless.

Benjamin: 100 percent of the success of the iPhone, I think, maybe not 100, but 90 percent is going to be not the features, but the implementation.

Gruber: Exactly.

Benjamin: The way that people interact with the thing.

Gruber: And I mean, for example, if you call web browsing a feature and you just say, “Well, my phone does it too”, you’re totally missing the point. By far and away, the best app on the iPhone is Safari. I probably would’ve paid just as much money and waited in line for an iPhone that only had the phone and Safari.

Benjamin: [laughs] I think that’s key to it, but I’ll tell you what, that’s more important I think to people like us, but what’s funny is — and I had told you this but I think it’s worth mentioning here — I had an eye doctor appointment today, and while I was in the waiting room waiting, brought the phone out to check email. Interestingly enough, it found their wireless network, and I jumped right on that, which is just the coolest thing in the world, and so one of the people came up to me who worked there, and she’s like, “Oh, is that the new phone?” “Yeah, yeah.” Immediately I had a crowd of about 10 people who wanted me to just demo it, and the thing that I saw, they had the biggest reaction to, the thing they thought was the coolest — they loved the virtual keyboard, which really surprised me because that’s something that I would’ve thought people would’ve right away said, “Oh, that won’t work”, but when they saw me two-thumb typing on it really fast, they all just kind of looked at each other, like, oh wow, that’s cool. But the thing that got the biggest reaction wasn’t the webpage, it was flicking the photos back and forth and zooming in on them and rotating. That is like — people, they loved that, that was like the coolest thing they’ve ever seen.

Gruber: Right. My son, a 3.5-year-old boy, he’s totally picked up on the phone, and that Photos interface is just so — the flicking, he loves it. I have a couple vacation trips, folders from iPhoto synced to it, I’ll just bring one up and he’ll just be, “Let me see Christmas pictures”, and I’ll just bring up Christmas pictures and I’ll hold the phone and he’ll flick through — because that’s really all you do, you just flick, it really is nice. And it’s so fast.

Benjamin: It’s so fast.

Gruber: I just can’t express how you never have to wait for anything on the iPhone.

Benjamin: There’s no waiting and I think that is something that Apple has really gotten right. Every single feature on that last phone that I had that ran the miniature version of Windows, everything was waiting. I think it’s the instantaneous responsiveness of the iPhone — everything that you want to do, whether it’s — yeah, if you’re on the EDGE network, which, by the way, is much faster than people were saying, not as fast as broadband, of course, but not slow, I don’t think — with that as an exception, everything is pretty much instantaneous.

Gruber: Yeah, exactly. And for example, comparing it to iPhoto on the Mac, I mean, iPhoto has gotten a lot faster over the years, but if you’re just going through pictures, just like, hey, bring up this one group in iPhoto and just go through the slideshow, it’s usually pretty fast, and it caches the next one, but if you go fast enough, a lot of times you’ll get the beach ball, and you’ll have to wait because you’ve gone ahead of where it goes. Of course, the iPhone doesn’t have to show the full — it’s only a 480-pixel wide screen, but whatever they’re doing to cache them, to make them smaller, whatever they’re doing, it just works, instantly. It never looks like a low-res version is loading and then it’s high-res — you just immediately flick and you get the version of the picture that’s as good as it can possibly look on this screen.

Benjamin: Right, it’s just there. And it makes you feel like you’re actually manipulating the picture itself or whatever it is you’re doing on the phone, you feel like when you touch it, you’re actually moving the thing around. And I think some people have some legitimate complaints about things that are missing, one of them — and we’ve talked about this and James Duncan Davidson has a great list, a lot of people have really good lists of things they like and things they feel are missing. People talk about copy and paste, but I think your point earlier today was like, you can see why it’s not there because how do you actually implement that with this type of user interface? It’s a hard problem.

Gruber: Here’s my thinking about that, the more I think about the lack of copy and paste and selectable text, is that maybe they have an idea of how they’ll do it, maybe they had it in previous — while they were developing it, you know, versions — I think Craig Hockenberry had a good point on his weblog post where he said, you’re probably wrong if you think that they didn’t build a bunch of different UIs for this and threw them away before they settled on this, even though it’s a 1.0 product. The thinking behind the whole UI, the metaphors — I think they probably experimented a lot, and I think with the cut, copy and paste and the lack of text selection and that they agreed upon this simple interface that doesn’t have it — it reminds me of the fact that the original Mac in 1984 didn’t have arrow keys on the keyboard, and the reason for that if you read Andy Hertzfeld’s book or his website folklore.org with a bunch of stories from the original Mac, the idea was that they didn’t — whether it was Jobs personally or the overall team agreed — but more or less the people who were pushing for the radical GUI interface — which was totally radical at the time — didn’t want arrow keys, because they wanted to force people to use the mouse, and they wanted to force application designers to design applications they made you use the mouse.

Benjamin: It was almost forcing a new kind of mentality.

Gruber: Right, so if they don’t have cut, copy and paste, it’s like an enforced — there’s a limitation in place that forces them to create an interface that lets you work without it. And of course, we’re running into the fact that they haven’t covered all the cases, and there’s so many little places where you’d like to be able to like, ah, if I could just cut that, copy that URL, and go to the other page in Safari, so I could paste it into this Twitter field, so I could paste a URL in there, it would be so nice. But overall, the fact that we miss cut, copy and paste — we miss it but you still get so much done without it, and the fact that it’s not there is like, it’s just a way to force them to make it as good as they can without it.

Benjamin: Right. Well, jumping ahead a little bit, I was talking to Mike Davidson, who a lot of people would know from Newsvine, and he and I, we were talking, and he was going through and saying, “Here’s some things that I miss, here’s some things that I really need”, and one of them that he was saying was, “A friend of mine took a picture of a person that was good that I wanted to use as a contact picture, and there was no easy way for him to get that to me. He could email it to me, but then how could I use that, the [photo] which I just received in the email on my phone, how can I use that as the contact picture for the person here?” And I said, “Well, that’s easy, when you get the email, you just drag it on your Mac, drag it into your contact in Address Book.” And he said, “Well, I don’t use Address Book, I don’t want to do that on my Mac. What I want to do is to be able to do that on the phone, and what I really want is a file system so that I can browse the file system, I can save things out of Safari or that people send me.” And I realized that in a way, the last thing — and I’m an old-school UNIX guy, so if anybody should want a file system, it should be me, right — but I actually don’t want a file system on my iPhone, or the fact is, I want there to be one, I just don’t want to know about it. And in a way cut, copy and paste would have solved that problem for him if he had been able to copy that image and paste it into his contact right there, that would’ve solved that. But in a way it’s like, I think one of the big arguments about Macs way back in the day, especially with, like, system 7 time period or even 8, was that some people felt they didn’t have enough control over the operating system of the computer. And on Windows you could tweak every single little thing, and on the Mac you couldn’t, and I think with OS X that’s kind of gone away because you can now do even more on a Mac than you can do on a PC from a technical level behind the scenes — people are going to flame me for saying that — but in any case, the last thing I want on my phone is a file system, or even access to it. What do you think about that, is that nuts?

Gruber: I think that everything that you think of, from a computer science perspective, what makes a computer computer, the file system, the idea of processes, it’s all sort of abstracted away on the iPhone and that’s clearly part of the overall design, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change. So you never, as the user of the phone, never actually get to see the file system. You don’t quit or launch or close applications, you just go back to Home, click them. It’s still not clear to me using it, when they quit and when —

Benjamin: Do they quit? Do they ever quit?

Gruber: I don’t know, it seems like Safari sometimes quits, because when I go back to Safari and I click — say, I have three or four pages open in Safari, and I click the little button to let me list them, instead of showing me previews, they’re all blank. It remembers the URLs.

Benjamin: It’ll reload them, you’ll see them kind of coming back.

Gruber: But if you switch to one of them, you have to wait for it to refresh. Whereas if you do it right away, if you switch out of Safari and come back, they are all there and you just click on them and they’re already loaded. Whereas eventually it seems like Safari quits and when you switch back to it, relaunches, but it’s all abstracted away, you as the user never have to worry about that.

Benjamin: I’ll tell you what I think the philosophy — it’s one of those things where if you come into the iPhone looking for a small portable computer, you will not find that. But if you come to the iPhone looking for essentially — and I’ve heard somebody, I forget who it was, but somebody was calling it almost like it’s a satellite of the computer, or a portal to the computer. That’s a much better way to think of it. It allows you to sort of extend your computer, extend your desktop to this sort of portable device. I never really looked at my iPod as being like, that’s where my music lives. My music lives on my computer, and now I can take that music with me. And I think this is the same way you might think of it: my contacts, my calendar, my email, my browsing — that lives on the computer, but this is a way for me to take a lot of that and maybe even most of it with me wherever I go and be able to use it anytime. Is that fair?

Gruber: I think so, and I think it’s the single biggest philosophical difference from the Newton. I mean, to me the big problem, the core problem with the Newton back in the day was that the Newton was — and obviously some Newton people might disagree with me, this is obviously subjective — but my opinion is that the Newton was designed as a big new thing that completely replaced, ultimately would completely replace the need for a Mac. And whether it was egos, like, the Newton was developed after Jobs had left the company, and Sculley was running it, and the Mac was still seen as Jobs’s baby, and Sculley wanted something that was his Macintosh, his stamp on the industry. But anybody who actually used a Newton back in the day — Newton syncing was really bad, I forget the name of the app you used to sync, but it was like, almost nothing synced, the Mac didn’t even have standard address book and calendar apps at the time, so when you put events in the Newton, where did they go on your Mac? It was how you did downloads, if you wanted to add a new app to your Newton, you’d download it to your Mac and you’d fire up the Newton sync thingy and connect it with a serial cable and drag it over or whatever. It was really sort of a different universe, it was not really a satellite to your Mac, it was like something that, I think, ultimately if it had succeeded, would’ve replaced the Mac in Apple’s product line. And it was brilliant in so many ways, and so far ahead of its time. In so many ways it was just as far ahead of its time as the iPhone is. But the problem is that, it was so ambitious because it was meant to be a complete stand-alone all-by-itself thing whereas the iPhone is clearly meant as the satellite to your PC. And I think it’s more like the Palm Pilot, the original Palm Pilot, which was such a sensation in terms of its ambition in that regard. I think that’s why the Palm Pilot was so much more successful than the Newton because it was clearly a PC peripheral, not a PC replacement. That’s what I think.

Benjamin: I think you’re right. So we should probably take a second to say why, if there’s all kind of sound artifacts that people are hearing, why is that, John?

Gruber: Oh, I’m down at the shore. I’m on vacation for a couple days, and somebody forgot to pack my USB microphone.

Benjamin: So you’re talking into your MacBook.

Gruber: Yeah, this is just me talking — I don’t even have a MacBook, I’ve got an old, uh —

Benjamin: That’s right, a PowerBook.

Gruber: No, it’s an old Mac Portable from 1993.

Benjamin: Right. [laughs]

Gruber: It’s the size — I pack a suitcase and then I pack my Mac Portable, it’s about the same size.

Benjamin: I just have to say one more cool thing about the iPhone that happened today. My friend Ryan Irelan had called me, and he wanted to try out the conference call feature. So he conference-called, added in, which was so easy to do — I barely know how to use three-way calling on my regular home phone line, I’m almost sure how I use that. But on the iPhone it’s even easier and — so Ryan conferenced in Dan Cederholm, but Dan wasn’t there. So then Dan called back on Ryan’s other line, and Ryan then merged the two calls. And then you called me on my iPhone, and I said, “Hold on a minute, John”, only because I looked at the phone and there was this little “Merge calls” button that just showed up, and I clicked that, and now we were having a call with you, me, Ryan, and Dan, none of whom we had intentionally conference-called, just clicking this little “Merge calls” button.

Gruber: I didn’t even know that it would work that way where you and Ryan started the call, then Ryan conferenced in Dan, and you conferenced in me, so it’s not like one person has to be the person who does all of the adding new people.

Benjamin: And the sound quality, I thought, was great!

Gruber: It was phenomenal, I have to say. To me, the audio quality on the call so far ranges from amazing to at worse — ah, pretty good. But that call in particular, I thought the quality was outstanding.

Benjamin: Kind of amazing what they’ve been able to do. Even just the basic calling features, the way that things work — I didn’t even know if my old phone had a flash button or if I could use three-way calling. The other thing that’s certainly cool is visual voice mail and I think you said to me earlier today, the visual voice mail is so good that you don’t ever want anybody to call your regular home line again.

Gruber: No, I don’t, because to me the biggest pain is when you go somewhere and you come back and you’ve got five-six messages on your phone or whatever. Half of them are from people who then went ahead and emailed you or contacted you on AIM or called your cell phone or whatever, and they’re already out of date. Or if you go away for a couple of days and some of the calls aren’t even relevant anymore, and you still have to sit down and listen to them all and hit delete, blah blah blah, it’s awful. Half the time I just delete them all and assume that if any of them were important, they’ll just call me back.

Benjamin: This one — pick the call that you want to hear or the message you want to hear, tap it, listen to it, stop it, pause it, delete it — whatever you want to, right then. It was great.

Gruber: The two great apps on the iPhone are the phone app, which includes the call management, merging calls, that type of stuff and the voice mail — because the other cool thing about the voice mail is the way that when you want to set your greeting, you do it all on your iPhone, you don’t have to call into your account on AT&T and listen to a bunch of voice menus and click and record. You just click, there’s a big “Greeting” button at the top, you click “Greeting” and you can either choose between the default, which is to have the AT&T lady say, “This person you’ve called is not available, blah blah blah” or you say “Custom”. And when you say “Custom” then there’s a “Record” button. You hit “Record”, if you like it, you hit “Save” and that’s it. That’s your voice mail.

Benjamin: You can re-record it 10–20 times right there on your iPhone before it ever actually processes and uploads because you’re in control of that. Very, very cool stuff. And we were all talking earlier using the little headphones.

Gruber: Oh, I was actually on the phone itself. I’ve used the headphones, they’re great.

Benjamin: And the microphone is built right into the little plastic piece that you squeeze to control stopping or whatever and the funniest thing — Dan Cederholm said to me, he said, “Now people are going to think we’re all really crazy because now we’ll be just walking around with headphones on, white iPod headphones, talking.” And people are going to think we’re totally crazy because at least with the headsets that stick out of your ear, have the big flashing light on them —

Gruber: People are used to thinking that is somebody on the phone. Whereas this, you just look like an idiot with an iPod, talking to yourself. I should go back and say that iPod app is also a phenomenal app. The three apps — I should go back and say, there’s three absolutely, insanely good apps — the iPod app, the phone app, and Safari. I won’t list Mail in there yet, I think Mail needs a lot of help. You mentioned it, Duncan Davidson mentioned it, but to me the one thing that’s glaringly missing is a master inbox view where you get to see all new messages from all of your inboxes. Like on Apple Mail on Mac OS X, all of your inboxes, if you want to look at them one by one, they’re all within that one master inbox, but if you just click on that inbox, it shows you all of your incoming mail.

Benjamin: The fact that that’s missing, that kills me. It’s the one —

Gruber: We can fill up an hour with my complaints about the Mail app, and maybe we will later this week, I don’t really have time now.

Benjamin: Because this is just the supplementary podcast right now, this is not the podcast. My analogy was, if there was some kind of really big news item, we’d have to talk about it, and this is it, this isn’t our weekly podcast, this is a supplement.

Gruber: This is just a special edition. Hey, Jonas, you want to say hi to our podcast?

Jonas Gruber: [makes an indecipherable noise]

Gruber: This is our podcast, we’re talking to about 10 million people right now.

Benjamin: [laughs]

Gruber: You know, we’ve got so much good feedback from last week’s show, but there were a bunch of people griping about, and some people saying, “Hey, it’s great, sounded great, blah blah blah”, and then you get, I guess, the audiophiles who’ve complained about the audio quality, they’re really going to love my recorded in the PowerBook built-in microphone episode here.

Benjamin: I didn’t hear any complaints about the quality as much as the — some people would write in to say, maybe the pacing wasn’t good or whatever. So screw those people, I guess.

Gruber: Exactly. Lot of people complimenting us on the elaborate website design, too.

Benjamin: The website is actually — that is 100 percent me, that’s a really — I think we would make Tufte proud looking at that site because it’s only what’s actually needed.

Gruber: Right. No, I mean, you know — I think we’re probably going to have a nicer website at some point in the future. But I like the idea, and it’s very different from my typical way of working — we agreed to do this show more or less two weeks ago at WWDC. Craig Hockenberry, we were out having drinks after the Thursday night beer bash and Craig Hockenberry —

Benjamin: Incredibly tall.

Gruber: — more or less said what you’ve been saying to me for a while, which is, you and I should just do a little show every week. And I thought, you know, if it’s good enough for Craig Hockenberry, that’s good enough for me. And pretty much all we did, we said, okay, we’ll do it, we need a name, we took the most generic name we could think of, we spent an hour looking at domain names that were available. We clicked record, we recorded for 30 minutes, we needed a place to put it, we did the least we could possibly do and we put it up. Now, my typical way of working would’ve been to spend the next six months selecting a name and then, I don’t know, another eight or nine months going through about four or five different designs for the website and —

Benjamin: Each of which, the only noticeable difference in what you call the design is that the logo has shifted five pixels to the left or right.

Gruber: Right, right.

Benjamin: That’s a full redesign of Daring Fireball is that the logo is now five pixels to the right.

Gruber: Do you remember that time, the one time I redesigned daringfireball.net, I bugged you on AIM pretty much every 15 minutes for about two weeks.

Benjamin: Yeah, you’d say, “What will the ramifications of this redesign be?” and I would say, “How is this different from the other day?” You said, “I have a new Daring Fireball logo.” And I went to the site, and I thought, oh, maybe this is the bearskin rug t-shirt design up there, like, I don’t see anything different. “Dan, how can you not see it, there’s the whole new logo!” And I said, “What are you talking about?” Turns out, you had changed — instead of, like, “Mac nerd” it said “iPhone” or something, that was your redesign, under the logo, the logo text, the little 3-point text.

Gruber: But admittedly, that only took me about 30 seconds. But, you know. I’m kind of digging this “just click record for 30 minutes at a time and go”.

Benjamin: Well, hopefully the listeners will appreciate it too. We have a theme, we’re sticking to a theme.

Gruber: Yeah, definitely.

Benjamin: But you said you only had five — you gave me such a hard time, you said you only had five minutes, and now we’ve been talking for 30 minutes. This time we’re going to end it, because last time I had to try to figure out how to cut 10 minutes off. We’re trying to keep it to a 30-minute show, once a week. We did two times a week, that’s okay. But once a week, 30 minutes and I say we just end it. It’s almost 30 minutes, let’s just end it.

Gruber: All right, let’s do it again later this week.

Benjamin: We’re going to definitely do — and it will be a different topic though, it has to be something different. Maybe not even — because people are going to be sick of iPhones.

Gruber: That’s going to be old news by the end of the week.

Benjamin: Yeah, we’ll have to talk about something completely different. And so when do you come back from the shore, are you spending the 4th there?

Gruber: I don’t even know, nobody tells me. I’ll know it’s time to go when I wake up and my wife has our bags packed. I think later this week.

Benjamin: Well, good, have a great holiday.

John Gruber: That’s what you’re going to say.

Dan Benjamin: That’s what I’ll say when I start recording.

Gruber: Right.

Benjamin: Which I did.

Gruber: Right. All right. And who are you?

Benjamin: I’m Dan Benjamin.

Gruber: I’m John Gruber.

Benjamin: How are you doing?

Gruber: Doing all right.

Benjamin: Why don’t we start talking about the iPhone?

Gruber: The what?

Benjamin: The iPhone, that’s the big thing.

Gruber: Oh, right, right, right, it’s like the iPod phone.

Benjamin: It’s a phone that can play songs. I think it’s an MP3 player.

Gruber: Right. So...

Benjamin: Big question, I mean, are you getting one?

Gruber: Right, am I going to get one. I think we’ve got to get at least — I think the question is how many will we get. Do I need one for each pocket?

Benjamin: [laughs] So you’re getting one, I’m getting one. Are we sort of people that are — are we unusual, are we really going to be seeing the kinds of lines and people waiting like people saw for the PS3 and things like that?

Gruber: Well, I don’t know, maybe I’m just not connected, I don’t even know how many people were waiting for PS3. I think it’s a very different crowd. I mean, certainly nothing I’ve ever been interested in — I can’t remember the last time that I was interested in something where I was worried would I be able to get it.

Benjamin: You’re actually thinking there’s a fair chance you’re not going to be able to even buy one of these things?

Gruber: Well, nobody really knows — how many are they going to have available on day one? I’ve heard the number three million bandied about. But that’s certainly isn’t definitive. That’s not a statement from AT&T or Apple. Nobody really knows. I don’t even know where I saw it.

Benjamin: Who said that, who actually said that to begin with? I thought Steve Jobs said three million.

Gruber: No, I don’t think so. The only number that Apple has said is that the vague idea that they think they’re going to sell 10 million total by the end of 2008, 18 months from now. So obviously, if they had three million of the first generation model available on day one, that would be huge. I think partially I’m biased — you’re probably in the same boat — where years of following Apple — whenever they come out with something that’s really, really anticipated, it’s hard to get immediately. It’s never widely available or seldom widely available on day one.

Benjamin: When I called up Cingular, the 888 number, the Cingular people told me even just in their stores they didn’t see any problem. Nobody who wanted a phone would have a problem getting one. When I called a local Cingular shop — AT&T I should be calling them, right — when I talked to the local people, they’re behind the curve on what they know. They don’t seem to have any information that’s up-to-date. I actually was telling them, I said, “Oh, so I hear that the basic iPhone plan is going to be $20 a month.” And they were, “Oh, where did you see that?” And I gave them the URL, they were like, “Well, I wrote it down, and when I go home, I’ll read about it.”

Gruber: “I’ll ask my manager.”

Benjamin: “I’ll ask my manager if we can get online tonight, if we’re allowed to read something on Apple.”

Gruber: You told me yesterday that they told you that as far as they knew yesterday, this was late yesterday, that they still thought that you’d have to activate your phone at the point of purchase. Go through a 10- or 15-minute activation process per sale.

Benjamin: Right, so it’s kind of a puzzle. My main question — and something I’ve heard other people who are under an AT&T/Cingular contract as I am — one of the concerns, I think, was what happens to the existing contract, do we need to pay some kind of a fee or a fine in order to get the iPhone, and the answer is no, definitively no. The thinking is, the only reason that you would ever need to pay anything would be if you were canceling your contract, which you’re not, you’re extending it when you get the iPhone. And the only other time where you’d be forced to pay some kind of amount above and beyond something normal, is if you’re under contract and you want to upgrade to a brand new phone, you’re not eligible to do that until your contract is up, then you don’t get the discount price on the phone. What you get is the full retail price, so you want to buy one of those Razors or something, and it’s like $39 if you’re not under contract. If you are, then it’s $500. So in case of the iPhone, we have to pay full price anyway, so the answer is a simple one. You’re buying the phone for full price anyway, and there is no fee, just the activation.

Gruber: Right, and just to be clear, what we’re saying, we’re not reporting that this is news that you’re going to have to go through that sort of hassle if you buy at the AT&T store. We’re just saying that the retail employees are so in the dark that that’s what they think. I mean, I don’t even think that’s possible. I think that the way this is — from everything I’ve read so far, it seems like you have to — the fact that none of it works without iTunes — if it’s tied to your iTunes account, how would it even possibly be activated in the store unless they’re going to —

Benjamin: It makes absolutely no sense. Unless they have a Mac sitting up there or a PC for you to go up to, sign in with your iTunes account, which of course everybody has memorized, and you’re going to log in and activate it right there, and of course that’s not a security risk for you.

Gruber: [laughs] Right, like a public iTunes machine.

Benjamin: It’s just some guy’s — the manager brought his PC from home for you to use. I mean, it’s ridiculous. So they just don’t know yet, and I’ve heard that they’re receiving their training on the iPhone today.

Gruber: Well, and I think the big problem is that from an Apple Store retail employee’s perspective, it’s certainly going to be a big day, probably the busiest single evening in the store’s history, but it’s going to be a very Apple-style process, it’s not going to be that different than December 23rd iPod shoppers, where they’re going to have those little portable credit card swipers, and they’re going to move people as fast as they can. It’s not just going to be one guy at a checkout. Whereas from an AT&T retail store employee’s perspective, this is like nothing they’ve ever seen before. There’s never been this sort of — 150–200 people trying to buy the exact same thing in three hours on Friday night.

Benjamin: And I think something else that we had talked about a little bit before is there’s a big difference not only in what I think those people are used to selling but in the actual process itself. AT&T/Cingular stores are really becoming much more of a retail outlet than usual, they’re very much — and I think you made the comparison that buying a cell phone sometimes is more like buying a car as far as the experience goes. When you go to the Apple Store, if you want a straightforward experience where you just go in and say, “I would like this”, they’ll go and get it for you and you’ll buy it.

Gruber: My comparison was that the average cell phone store employee comes across more like a car salesman, it’s more like a personality type.

Benjamin: It’s all about the upsell. “Oh, you need a charger with that, don’t you?” And I think there’s a huge difference in the mindset, and I think when you go to the Apple Store, they’re expecting you to just buy something, and maybe you need help, if not, no problem, if you do, come back. The idea I think is that the individual person would be able to activate their own phone. I think it scares the crap out of the average AT&T salesperson.

Gruber: It just sounds crazy.

Benjamin: You can’t do that.

Gruber: Right. Assuming it’ll work, and presumably it’s pretty well-tested, but obviously, the one thing they certainly — I mean, in theory, maybe you could test it somehow, but live practice is always different — is how is the system going to stand up when 1.5 million people are trying to do it at 8:15 PM EST, simultaneously.

Benjamin: That’s actually good because I can’t answer that question, that’s a perfect segue into something I can answer, or I can talk about. These reviews have come out, the Mossberg review and some of these other ones, where they essentially say the iPhone is phenomenal, the keyboard issue is a non-issue, I think was one of the quotes. And that’s really great, but they seem to —

Gruber: I think Mossberg had the best line about the keyboard, and he really sort of backed up the Jobs’s line that you have to give it a week. And Mossberg said that three days in, he was so frustrated by the keyboard he wanted to throw the iPod [sic] against the wall, and five days in, he had like a breakthrough and felt like he could type just as fast as he does on his Treo.

Benjamin: That says a lot because those Treo people are kind of freaky. Or Blackberry, or whatever they are.

Gruber: And I think I know where you’re heading, but on the keyboard point — my thing with the keyboard is that — I’m a touch typist, I type pretty fast on a regular computer keyboard, so anything other than that to me has always been incredibly frustrating, whether it’s trying to type on somebody’s Treo — anything that I can’t touch type on to me feels like I’m completely and utterly hamstrung. So the way I feel, of course the iPhone on screen keyboard is going to suck. What’s the best portable keyboard ever made? A Blackberry, a Treo, or something like that? To me, they suck too. Do you want it to suck really, really bad or just sort of bad? So I feel like that’s where Apple made a trade-off where the best they were going to possibly do anyway with the hardware keyboard was still going to be something that you had to peck on, they traded that off for, compared to a Treo or Blackberry form factor, a much larger screen, and compared to any kind of slider phone, something that’s much thinner. Although I guess the BlackJack is pretty thin, but that’s not a slider. There’s no slider phone that compares to that sort of thinness, pocketability.

Benjamin: Where I was actually going with this was, the one thing that everybody sort of unanimously is criticizing now is the AT&T EDGE network. People talk about how sort of horrible it is. I have a phone now that is on the EDGE network that I use for checking email and very occasionally browsing the web. If you’re used to things being instantaneous, then it is horribly slow. If the idea of getting something like an email on your phone is still a novelty, then you probably won’t mind it. But I think one thing that’s actually a discussion point is why do you suppose Apple’s decided to partner with AT&T, and then as a second question, why do you think that the iPhone is only ever necessarily going to work on AT&T’s network? I think I know the answer to both, but I’d like to hear what you think.

Gruber: I think the answer to why AT&T was simply — I don’t really think it came down to networking capabilities or who had the best network, I think it was that AT&T/Cingular at the time offered Apple the best deal, that Apple, I think, came in with the minimal amount of “here’s how much control we want”, and maybe they didn’t even get that much, but I think Apple certainly wanted as much control in terms of pricing, in terms of the plans, in terms of the features they’d be allowed to add on the phone without any interference — a couple of people from Cingular have said they didn’t even get to see the iPhone until after they agreed to it. So obviously, Apple had a lot of control in it, and I think, I forget who had it, but a couple of people said, obviously, they did talk to the other networks, they certainly talked to Verizon, and I think it just came down to control, how much control was AT&T willing to — say, “Okay, you can do your thing if we’ll be exclusive for the iPhone.”

Benjamin: I think you’re 100 percent right, I think at the end of the day it came down to the company that was the most willing to say, “Okay, Apple, do whatever you want, essentially, but just promise us that it would be just us.” But I actually think that there is something else behind the reason why the iPhone is slated to only be on AT&T for as long as it is. I think a big part of it is the business reason that you gave, but they have done so much — and I’m saying this coming from a background in the telecommunications industry and telecommunication billing systems — there’s so much that happens behind the scenes from the billing and the processing and all of that. The idea that Apple would go and write software that would handle all of that, essentially replacing all of the point of sales systems, all of the prepackaged software, and all of the companies that are building software that does this, and Apple has actually gone and written something that on the front end is basically iTunes that we’re going to interact with, and on the back end is something that’s going to plug into all of this really, really old, ancient, legacy C-like type systems, in other words, all the software that Cingular and AT&T have — there’s a lot of work involved, I think, behind the scenes, in making that process be as streamlined as it appears to be on those videos. I think that took probably many months to get right, and I think the idea of Apple trying to build the system that’s going to continue to work seamlessly with multiple carriers, that seems almost impossible.

Gruber: Yeah, I think that’s a good point that they needed to get somebody who they were — pick one, work out the best deal, but then commit to it for the long term because they built their own custom iPhone back end on top of the network, for the visual voicemail and a couple of other unique features, or at least especially the visual voicemail, I can’t think of anything else at the top of my head. It wouldn’t just work with another carrier.

Benjamin: So tell me, what are some of the things that we don’t know about the iPhone.

Gruber: The two that come to mind for me are the calendar app and the notes app because while Apple has revealed so much in the last week and a half with these videos that they’ve been unveiling, showing off, you know, detailed how to use your iPhone, how the stuff works, the how-to video doesn’t show the calendar app. And I don’t even think they’ve shown screenshots of the notes app. And the notes app was also definitely one of the apps that back in January, when they let a couple of people at Macworld play with the early pre-production models, wasn’t even an application, it was just a screenshot. You’d tap the icon, and I think David Pogue said there were couple of the apps that at the time were just — just a screenshot would show up on the phone. So what happens with the notes app? Like I said, I don’t really think keyboarding — it’s not like you’re really going to be a good typist on this thing anyway, it’s not like anybody’s going to take — I think — really extensive notes on it, but if you type a note, where does it go? How does it sync? What is it, a text file? Is it an RTF file? It’s a total mystery. And with the calendar stuff, how does the syncing work? If you sync calendars from your Mac on iCal to the iPhone, can you edit and move those dates around? Can you change events and then sync it again and it goes back to your Mac and it keeps track? What happens while after you’ve untethered your —

Benjamin: What’s the point of a view-only calendar on an iPhone? I want to be able to enter an event right there, sync it up.

Gruber: I mean, I don’t know. Doesn’t seem to me like they’ve really said anything about that. And really, to me, the calendar stuff really sort of is this thing that really cries out for networking, somewhere to IMAP for email. You do most of your email on your desktop computer, and while you’re using your iPhone, you’re connecting via IMAP. The whole point of IMAP is that your inbox is going to be up-to-date wherever you go and look at it next. You sort of need the same thing for calendaring. But where would that shared calendar live? Obviously, I don’t think that’s going to be ready for any kind of official — here’s the official answer from Apple — it’s not going to be ready on Friday, but obviously, something like that is a much better way to deal with calendaring on a portable.

Benjamin: Absolutely.

Gruber: And it’s certainly one of those things, I think, people will criticize, people who are used to handhelds that connect to Exchange that already handles that sort of stuff.

Benjamin: Is the fact that it’s not going to do 3G — and I have used phones on AT&T 3G network, and they’re screaming fast, they’re really, really great. You could watch streaming TV on them, they’re really good. They don’t have much of a battery life but —

Gruber: I have to wonder because that’s one question nobody really seems to have a good answer for. It’s not like AT&T doesn’t have 3G networking, they do. I just read today —

Benjamin: It’s fast!

Gruber: — 160 markets that have phones, AT&T sells 3G data phones. So why isn’t the iPhone 3G? My only guess — I have two guesses: a) it’s about battery life, or b) it’s about widespread availability, that Apple wanted to have one device, just like the iPod. We’re going to ship the first time with one thing, or in this case there are two variations that are exactly the same except one has 4 GB and the other one has 8 GB of memory. But that’s obviously the single most insignificant — I mean, in terms of manufacturing, it’s a very insignificant detail.

Benjamin: So if they had built 3G capability into it, at least my understanding, which I could be wrong, but my understanding was that it can live happily on a 3G network, and if you step down to an EDGE network, it will jump on that.

Gruber: Yeah. I don’t know, maybe it’s battery, maybe it was cost. Battery might make sense. I don’t know. I mean, it must be something.

Benjamin: The battery lasted about an hour and a half on the 3G phone.

Gruber: And that to me is also, the battery angle, is the most surprisingly good news of the initial reviews from the newspapers this week. And even Apple’s announcement — what was it, about 10 days ago — when they said that battery life was higher than previously announced. Because I remember when the iPod [sic] was first announced back in January, there were so many of the initial people — there were two reactions: there were the people who said, “Oh my god, this is awesome, I cannot wait to get one.” That’s me, I was certainly there. Me and you were right there saying, “This is incredible, I cannot believe that they built this.”

And then there were the people who were saying, “They’re full of it. This is not going to work like they’re saying it is”, immediately began doubting it. And there were a whole bunch of people who said that it’s going to get about an hour of battery life, it’s going to get 90 minutes of battery life, it’s ridiculous that they built this thing, that with all these features and Wi-Fi it’s going to get so little battery life, and the battery is not replaceable, that it’s never going to get the battery life that Apple claimed — five hours or whatever they said. And so here they get closer to the release, and they say, guess what, by the way, eight hours. And the reviews more or less back it up, some of them said it ended up at seven, for music playback — 22–23 hours, nine hours of internet playback, I think, Walt Mossberg got, using the web and surfing Wi-Fi. And that’s with Wi-Fi on the whole time. The battery life is for real. Obviously, it’s not the sort of thing where you can use it for days at a time, but nothing with Wi-Fi is. In terms of its competitors, other phones that do even vaguely similar things, the battery life — iPhone blows it away. Blows everything else away.

Benjamin: So what are we really saying, are we saying go to the Apple Store, not the AT&T store to buy one, even though —

Gruber: Yeah, that’s a good — where do you go to buy one if you want to get one on day one? I think you and I both agree, go to an Apple Store if you live near one because I would say a) I think the retail staff is going to be better prepared for it, b) I refuse to believe that they’re not going to be at least as well stocked as Cingular stores, if not better. I just cannot believe that Apple Stores would not have more than Cingular stores, or at least as many.

Benjamin: Doesn’t seem possible that they wouldn’t have tremendously bigger volume going through those stores, and be able to move them faster.

Gruber: The big question is, is it worth gambling, if you really don’t want to wait in line for hours on Friday and spend the whole day in line, is it worth risking trying to swing by on Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon and pick one up? Or do you think they’re going to be sold out?

Benjamin: Well, yeah, that’s the question, are they going to sell out, and everything I’ve heard says no. And that’s the thing for me is, I don’t need to have one Friday evening.

Gruber: But I want it over the weekend.

Benjamin: Yeah, if I could pick it up Sunday, that would be great. If I could get it Tuesday, that would be fine. The point for me is, I don’t want to be the guy that thinks, “Ah, there are not going to be any lines”, and then on Tuesday I try to pick one up, or even Sunday try to pick one up, and now I’m the guy that’s not going to get one until August.

Gruber: I’m going to guess it’s not going to be August, but I’m the guy who’s been waiting since the first week of January to get a Wii because I don’t feel like showing up anywhere on Saturday morning at 6 in the morning. So every time I go to Target, or every couple of weeks I look in Best Buy online to see if they have any, and still can’t get one. I don’t think it’s going to be like that, I think that worst case scenario, you may have to wait till July, but who knows. I don’t want to take a chance. I want an iPhone a lot more than I want a Wii.

Benjamin: So you’re going to wait?

Gruber: No, I think I’m going to go Friday. I still haven’t really decided though.

Benjamin: You’re going to wait in line on the curbside?

Gruber: I guess so, I don’t know. I’m hoping they’ll let you stay inside, it’s going to be hot. What are you going to do?

Benjamin: I’m going to wait outside the Apple Store.

Gruber: Yeah, I think that the malls around here, I think they’ll let you wait inside. I mean, I don’t see how they would keep you from waiting inside, really. Today, right now, it’s like 97 degrees with like a 100 percent humidity in Philadelphia. Waiting outside for six hours is —

Benjamin: That’s like a nice fall day in Orlando.

Gruber: [laughs] When was the last time you waited for something?

Benjamin: Ah, that’s a good question. I think I waited for tickets when I was in college.

Gruber: Yeah, I don’t think I’ve waited in line, like a serious line, like got there hours before —

Benjamin: You’re not talking like at the local grocery store to buy milk or something.

Gruber: Right. I don’t think that I actually got in line hours before something went on sale since — I don’t know, must have been some concert back in college. 10–12 years ago.

Benjamin: So that says a lot, says a lot for Apple. I think there’s a lot of people in our situation who are sitting there thinking, yeah, I think I’m going to wait.

Gruber: Yeah, and I still don’t know — how many people do you really think are going to show up per store? I really don’t know what to expect. I’m not going to get there that early, I’m certainly not going to wake up early.

Benjamin: When are you going to get there?

Gruber: I’m thinking, like, 2. My thought is all you have to do is really get there ahead of the sort of people who aren’t taking off from work, the sort of people who are just going to leave work early on Friday. So I feel like if I get there around 2...

Benjamin: Probably safe. You’re thinking you just need to beat the people who are going to cut out early from work?

Gruber: Right. I figure a lot of people are going to start taking off work at 3 o’clock.

Benjamin: You don’t think there’ll be a lot of people saying, “Hey, it’s Friday, let’s do a half day.”

Gruber: Well, I don’t know.

Benjamin: I think if you want to be safe, John, you need to get there at 10.

Gruber: That isn’t going to happen.

Benjamin: I think that’s the only way to be safe.

Gruber: Yeah, that’s not going to — are you going to get there at 10?

Benjamin: Don’t know.

Gruber: See, I just can’t see doing it.

Benjamin: Get some breakfast on the way and —

Gruber: I feel like, get there at 10 and there’s like three guys with beards, neckbeards who — with folding chairs, sat up watching — I just can’t see getting in line with them. And if I get there at 2 and there’s 400 people in line, I would just go home and order it from apple.com.

Benjamin: And in that case you’ll have it in less than a week, probably. I think that’s probably the smart thing to do, we’re giving away all our ideas, but I think showing up there at about 2 o’clock when the store goes dark, seeing what the line is like, if there’s less than a hundred people in line, I say you wait. More than a hundred — get out of there.

Gruber: That’s what I think, look for about a hundred people.

Benjamin: And then do you go to the Cingular store down the road? Is that your fallback? Or is your fallback ordering online?

Gruber: I don’t know. My thought is that I’m so — unless I read something in the next day or two that really makes me think that AT&T is going to be prepared, really prepared for what’s going to happen, I’m just too afraid that you’d get there and even with like 20–30–40 people ahead of you in line in an AT&T store that it’s going to be a nightmare of 10 or 15 minutes per customer in terms of them not being prepared to just zip people in and out.

Benjamin: Personally, I think it’s going to be a nightmare at the AT&T store.

Gruber: Have you ever done Christmas shopping in an Apple retail store? Like, late, like, pick up an iPod around the 20th of December?

Benjamin: They set up special lines, and they get in and out really fast.

Gruber: It’s just fantastic if you’re buying anything that’s one of the big ticket items like any of the regular iPods, just give me the middle of the line iBook. You just hand the guy your credit card, he swipes it on a little handheld portable thing, asks for your email address, the receipt goes to your email address, they put a sticker on the box, and you walk out the door.

Benjamin: Done.

Gruber: Takes less time than it takes to walk into the corner grocery store and buy a bottle of iced tea.

Benjamin: Yeah.

Gruber: So I guess we’re about half hour into this thing, and we haven’t even —

Benjamin: Yeah, we’re wrapping up.

Gruber: We haven’t even said what it is.

Benjamin: We have a show.

Gruber: The Talk Show.

Benjamin: Yeah. The Talk Show dot net. Which you seem to like the dot net thing.

Gruber: Right. I’ve got the daringfireball.net.

Benjamin: So now we have thetalkshow.net.

Gruber: We’ve talked about this before. When I registered, people often asked me why is it daringfireball dot net instead of dot com. I actually own the dot com as well but don’t use it, and it’s just some sort of weird — I got on the internet in 1995 or 1994, and to me dot com means you’re selling stuff. I’ve since gotten past it, but for whatever reason I’ve always had a thing about using dot com as the generic domain name.

Benjamin: Well, and it works out because the dot com wasn’t available right now.

Gruber: Exactly. [laughs]

Benjamin: So this is perfect.

Gruber: I don’t think anything dot com is available anymore.

Benjamin: No. And this is a show that I’ve been telling you I wanted to do for a long time, since the very first podcast we’ve recorded, and it actually took us finally meeting in person in San Francisco a few weeks ago for me to finally convince you that it maybe wasn’t a horrible idea.

Gruber: Right, that’s very true.

Benjamin: And we have a sponsor.

Gruber: We do have a sponsor.

Benjamin: Would you like to tell us about the sponsor, John?

Gruber: No, I don’t even know who it is.

Benjamin: That’s not true.

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: Our first sponsor, and hopefully not our only sponsor, so if you’re interested, thetalkshow.net for information on how to become a sponsor.

Gruber: What you need to do if you want to be a sponsor is call Dan very, very late at night, Eastern Standard Time, call around 11 or 12, maybe even 12:30 in the morning. Just call Dan Benjamin and tell him you want to sponsor this show.

Benjamin: So, PeepCode. This is a company that my friend Geoffrey Grosenbach, very well-known in the podcasting world — he’s done the Ruby on Rails podcast for quite a long time. He set up his company, PeepCode, where he’s basically doing screencasts, and you can learn — it’s basically like instruction that’s on demand, you go there, you pick the topic you’re interested in, a lot of it has to do with Rails, but it’s not specific only to Rails, and you go and you — very inexpensive to actually buy the screencast that you want — you watch it, and you actually learn something.

Gruber: Right, it’s sort of tapping into some sort of psychological thing where it’s just easier to learn things when you’re seeing it than just reading it. It’s literally almost as good as being there and looking over his shoulder while he shows you the app. And it terms of getting the general idea — oh, that’s what you do — it’s just, you get it, it’s just the most effective way to learn it.

Benjamin: It really is. I think one of the things that Geoffrey’s really done with PeepCode is he’s taking things that generally are more difficult to explain in just a blog post, things that aren’t necessarily “first do this, then do that”, but involve a lot more of concept and involve a lot more multiple concepts coming together, and something where you can say, if you see it, you can learn this in five minutes, but if you have to read about it, it’s going to take you two hours, and that’s what he does.

Gruber: I think “concept” is the key word, in terms of getting the concept across, that sort of format is better. It’s the same reason people go to WWDC. You go there, and it’s not like it replaces the Cocoa documentation, but when you go to a 45-minute session on some new technology, and the guy who actually is an expert at it, from Apple, is telling you in 45 minutes, here’s the most important things you need to know about Core Animation, you get the basic gist. You’re like, oh, I see, I understand what it’s about.

Benjamin: peepcode.com.

Gruber: Yeah.

Benjamin: Okay. So what’s next? I guess we try and go get some iPhones, and we’re going to talk about it.

Gruber: All right, I guess next week’s show we’ll record on our iPhones in a conference call.

Benjamin: Excellent.

Gruber: [laughs]

Benjamin: And by the way, we’re going to try and do this every week.

Gruber: Right, no, every week.

Benjamin: And you know, it turned out, John, to be more than — we’re trying to stick to half an hour, I’m going to have to cut 10 minutes — I told you I didn’t want to have to edit this thing. You did really good by not cursing very — at all.

Gruber: I think there were only two times where I wanted to curse.

Benjamin: Is that all?

Gruber: Two where I had to cut myself off.

Benjamin: All right. Well, hey, good talking to you, and good luck, hope you get the iPhone. I’ll be looking for some live twittering and picturing.

Gruber: I’ll call you from the line on Friday.

Benjamin: Not if I call you first.

Gruber: You know, why don’t you get two and just FedEx me one.

Benjamin: Oh yeah, okay. Done. Easy.

Gruber: All right. Thanks, Dan.