Upgrade - 103: Significant Figures

Episode Date: August 22, 2016

Special guest Merlin Mann joins Jason to talk about reviews, ratings, Rotten Tomatoes, mice, thumbs up and thumbs down, using numbers to quantify the unquantifiable, when it's appropriate to show grown-up media to kids, and a whole lot more.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 103 upgrade is brought to you by ring and mac weldon i am jason snell i am always here for upgrade but I don't always read the introduction. But Mike Hurley is on assignment in the United States of America, as he was for our last episode. So I'm enjoyed. I'm enjoyed. My voice is being enjoyed right now by Merlin Mann. Hi, Merlin. Freudian slip.

You are enjoyed. You reside in my ear holes for so much of the week. You're on so many damn shows. I hear pretty much all of them. There are many. It's true. I get to know the mini moods of jason do i have many do i have many moods they vary do they vary from week to week or just from podcast to podcast oh i think i've got your number all right i've got your number pretty good but there was no uh no tvtm this week no the tv talk machine was off this week because um that's the podcast i did with tim goodman for the hollywood reporter and they just finished he was like in a hotel for 17 days in la

for the summer press tour he sounded great in that previous episode i was walking down a hallway in a hotel at disneyland listening to that avoiding my family and i was thinking man that guy sounds he's i think he's really learned to pace himself yeah yeah that that was the trick is that he this time he learned um on day eight when they say hey Mariah Carey is going to be having cocktails to talk about her new Lifetime special, that you go, nope, not going to do that. And you just say no, and you go back to the room, and you do a little bit of work, and you pace yourself, and he learned that. But when he was done with his two and a half weeks press tour, he went on vacation last week.

So we just let it go. It's nice to get that point in life where you realize that not every fact or announcement is an invitation yeah exactly you don't have to you don't have to hit all of that and all the riot tonight i have a little i don't think it was actually mariah carey but um i just picked that one out of the hat because it's that idea it's like it's a celebrity and you know who they are but they're not big like they used to be but they've got a show and you could meet them and then you're like yeah there's no way and you just let it go i i've done that with tech stuff too where they're like we've got this sort of c-list celebrity who will be appearing and i have that moment of like well it would be kind of cool to say i met that

person but i'm not interested in the product i could see huey lewis in the news or i could sleep well okay i live in marin county i can see if i'm at the local super cuts at the right time i can see huey lewis true story well thank you for having me on i hope i can fill his large english shoes yes yes uh i think so absolutely i'm glad to have you back i have a little bit of follow-up um thank you the uh i was in memphis uh as people know who listened to apple grade 102 mike and i did that story that uh that episode live in person in steven hackett's office steven hackett wasn't there because even if he was there you wouldn't have heard him because he lost his voice completely um and you can listen to you can listen to last week's episode of connected

to hear steven hackett's voice two days later when it was actually much better and it's still like he was gargling he was still pretty straight glass yeah that's a really good episode and a nice reminder listening to that was a nice reminder of how hard those two gentlemen work yeah when they were answering questions about the second anniversary of relay uh it was really it was it was nice to hear I was just you know because they do they do so much and they edit reconcilable differences Mike does that for us and they just do so much stuff and i i don't blame them for saying we're not going to grow as fast this year mike uh mike told me about how he's the secret um third uh host of reconcilable differences to the point that um that you you will just say

things just for him during the broadcast during the the recording, knowing that it'll get cut out of the podcast, but it doesn't matter. It's just there to tell Mike things. He loves it. Yeah, you know the Stephen King book, a wonderful book on writing, and he talks about how his wife Tabby is what he calls his first reader. He says everybody needs a first reader, somebody who's the right kind of critical about it.

He's our first listener. So we have to think about spoiler warnings with him more than anybody else. And sometimes we'll throw in a sly reference. Yeah, he appreciates it. Yeah, as a host, I just, I take it, and I assume Mike is like this too. Sometimes you just got to take it for the team. Like they're going to be spoilers.

You're going to have to just deal with them. We'll talk about spoilers maybe a little bit later. So were you actually in the Bass Pyramid? Is that true? Yeah, okay. So among the things I did when I was in Memphis, which is the the first time i've been in that part of tennessee um i've never seen the mississippi river with my own eyes before but i i did see that and i saw it from atop the giant pyramid on the shores of the mississippi in memphis that used to be a

basketball arena and is now a bass pro shops i did yeah and and uh we we had a meeting uh we we had a relay fm business meeting in the in the restaurant at the top of the pyramid it was like two in the afternoon so it wasn't like there was a a meal or something i think we all had something to drink and we just sat there and chatted but we were high atop the the giant bass pro shops pyramid in in memphis was it was it stirring uh it was nice i've never had a business meeting on top of a pyramid before the only time i've ever been on top of a pyramid before quite honestly was in dungeons and dragons so so this was nice i imagine having a pyramid about it bass fishing isn't at the top of well i mean it really was this

decommissioned uh basketball arena and they didn't know what to do with it. And the guys who started Bass Pro Shops, I think this is an anecdote I heard in the pre-recorded audio that plays when you take the elevator up to the top of the pyramid. But it's like one of the founders of Bass Pro Shops saying they made a bet, basically. If I catch this big catfish, we'll put a Bass Pro in that pyramid over there. And we caught the catfish and here you are it's basically how the story goes i call that a tennessee contract but it's pretty good it's uh it's uh it's cool it's not i thought it would be like uh have you ever been to the sports basement at the presidio you've been over there where it's like it's the old presidio used to be an army for those who don't know army base in san francisco and now it's a national park and they've tried to

to in order to make it self-sustaining they've rented out space and the old px the old commissary so it's it's like where everybody did all their shopping and everything it's this huge building and it's now it's sporting goods store it's a sports basement i thought my kids bike there it's impossibly large yeah yeah exactly right yeah and we that's my i bought bikes there and and we go there for like uh we rent our skis there when we go skiing we rent them because it's way cheaper turns out way cheaper to rent skis in san francisco than on a mountain where it snows because there's not a lot of demand so um sports basement i thought bass pro shops would be like the sports basement which is huge but like just racks and racks of stuff like you know you got your i don't even know bass

over here and your pros over here and uh that was not it it's no it's like uh it's like a theme park it's like uh uh there like a theme park it's like uh uh there's a there's a uh a hotel there's like a five-star hotel that's built on the inside of the bass pro shop pyramid uh with all this like wood it's very much like a hunting lodge kind of feeling there are there's water there's it's it's a little like the entrance to the pirates of the caribbean honestly there's well there's boats that that they sell at the bass pro shops that are floating in water and there's fish in the water that's a good use of that space yeah i mean they went and there's like a bowling alley and there's a there's a there's a shooting range apparently

of course there is and uh and there's lots of other like other businesses in so you don't just like go there to you can go there to pick up a a vest or something but you can also go there and it's like a destination it's like you can go to a bunch of a, a, a vest or something, but you can also go there and it's like a, a destination. It's like, you can go to a bunch of different stuff or go have dinner or whatever. It's, it was, it was really interesting.

So we had a business meeting in a pyramid. True story. Um, I have one piece of fall of content followup from episode one or two, which is, uh, hashtag Mike was wrong. I was brought to us by listener,

Justin, which is that Mike, uh, said maybe the iPad mini should come in a 128 gigabyte configuration, and it actually does and has for a while now. So I said this mostly to stop the emails from coming. Yes, Mike was wrong. Mike was not aware.

You can't stop the emails from coming. Of that, you can't. Well, you can only hope to contain them. And then my other piece of follow-up is about the specials. This is, of course, Relay's sort of membership drive week, month, whatever. And we're releasing a whole bunch of different specials. And the special for Upgrade, which was not out when we recorded last week, is out now. It's the Up cortex special um and that is me

and mike and cgp gray and we're playing what's called a parsley adventure which is like an old school computer text adventure and uh except instead of having a computer i am the computer it's nelatron right uh-huh and they they have to 2000 i think and uh and they have to give me commands to try and solve a uh a text adventure about the old west um and relay members can go get that and it's way more fun than it sounds now when you describe it like that you know i don't know if you're really selling it but it's very very funny to hear cgp gray uh interacting with you as a as a text adventure it was funny and that was the first time i ever spoke to cgp gray we recorded that a few months ago and and that was that was the first time i've ever actually sort of spoken to him one-on-one it was a a lot of fun i met him since

then but um and it was good because they're trying to divine the secrets of the computer and i'm sort of trying to be a computer and at other points i'm i i'm hardly able to hold in my frustration with them at being bad players. This is the old, this is the old West. I don't know what a refrigerator is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

They're like, maybe we can look at the refrigerator. What are you talking about? There is no refrigerator in the old West. Um, and if people did listen to that and liked it, I also wanted to point out, we did two of these on the incomparable game show.

Um, two of these episodes that were based on parsley adventures, both with Tony Siddall, ours, a computer, and you can go to the incomparable.com slash game show um two of these episodes that were based on parsley adventures both with tony cindelar as a computer and you can go to the incomparable.com slash game show which is maybe my favorite podcast that i do honestly it is so fun and funny um but there are two episodes in that run that are uh that are uh action castle and what's the other one jungle adventure i think uh and and uh the vibe's a little bit different but it's very similar because we're playing the same game and uh and there's also a

special uh reconcilable differences episode with you and john and uh what's that one about this is like i can well first of all i just want to say hey you know what you should go join relay it's it's it's easy to do You go to relay.fm. And you sign up. Because you know what? I don't do this a lot, but we want your money. And it benefits everybody in the network. I bought the all. I've done it myself. I did

$100 All the Great Shows package because I want to support everybody. But if you enjoy these shows, it's a nice thing to do. And everybody gets a little bit of it, and it's a nice thing to do. But you also do... Now, you know what John Syracuseacusa says if he did it you get nothing but in this case you don't get nothing you get something which is i think almost every show is doing a special episode almost yeah so there was the i just i just you were on this i just listened to clock four clock four okay so that's another one that we did it's clockwise plus top four so it's me

and dan moore and marco and tiffany are met and it, so that's another one that we did. It's clockwise plus top four. So it's me and Dan Morin and Marco and Tiffany Arment. And it's totally delightful. And we made lists. We went clockwise and made four lists of four. And I revealed my dislike for salad. So you can check that one out too.

I'm not a rabbit. I want to say you should go and do that. And if you do that, you're going to get something people have been asking for for a long time, which is an episode

of Reconcilable Differences, a show that John Syracuse and I do with our special guest, John Roderick. And I think it's going to end up being probably an episode plus an After Dark, but it's three hours. So I really recommend.

And they talk about skiing for a really long time, but I thought it was really fun. I thought it turned out great. And you know what, though? That's a nice freebie. But if you enjoy these podcasts and you don't want podcasting to turn into some kind of horrible monstrosity, support it with things like this. If you've got the money, kick a little in. And if you don't, that's okay.

We're just happy that you listen. And when we launched the membership, I know that people were complaining. It's like, oh, are you going to do a pledge break every week to talk about it? And the answer is no. Actually, this is the way that the plan was meant to work all along is that now that it's launched once a year around relay birthday time in august we'll all do specials and talk about them and that they're out there and that's it and then we just do them the rest of the year and we appreciate everybody's support and uh we made some extras for the people and and

i do that for the flop house i don't know if you do that where i support maximum fun and one of the reasons that i do that is i wanted to support the flop house but another reason is that i want their bonus episode that they do and uh those they've done three of them actually and and they're great and they're a lot of fun and i feel like that's a great deal to support my favorite podcast and i also get something back so but we won't do this every week so uh let me let me talk about a sponsor and then we'll go into our topic because i want to talk to you about this is this is an episode topic generated by uh twitter a twitter conversation which i think was really interesting where literally i knew i needed to find a guest host and i was thinking of asking you and then we had a back and forth about uh

rating things and reviewing things and i thought aha that's a topic we could talk about on Upgrade. So let's do it. But first, I want to tell you about our first sponsor. How about that? This episode of Upgrade brought to you by the Ring video doorbell. With Ring, you can see and talk to anyone at your door from anywhere in the world, all using your smartphone. You can protect your home and your loved ones today. Go to ring.com. What a great domain ring.com slash upgrade for a limited time. You'll get $50 off the ring of security kit. Now there are home burglaries happening all the time, even in broad daylight, they'll ring your doorbell, maybe to see if you're, uh, if you're there or not, they'll probably fake something up.

If you answer the door and if you're not there, then they know nobody's home. The Ring Video Doorbell can stop burglars before they happen because it lets you see and speak to anyone approaching your door using your smartphone, whether you're there or not. And they have advanced motion detection technology to protect your property with the Ring of Security Kit, including a Ring Video Doorbell for the front door and a Ring Stick-Up Cam, which is a wireless weatherproof HD camera to keep an eye on other other parts of your property they take just minutes to install and then they work together providing 24 7 monitoring of your whole home home whether you're in the living room or on the other side of the world so join the hundreds of thousands of people who protect their home with ring and for a limited time again listeners of listeners of Upgrade can save $50 off that whole Ring of Security kit.

The lowest price you'll find anywhere. Go to ring.com slash upgrade for 50% off. That's ring.com slash upgrade. And thank you so much to Ring for supporting this show and all of Relay FM. Mike usually does those, but it was me. You did great. Thank you. Thank you.

Reviews and ratings so this i got into this conversation uh and and and you and i were going back and forth with some other people on twitter uh we started with with a conversation todd was having yeah it's our friend todd faziri who works at industrial light and magic and uh he's a heck of a nice guy um and he so he's in the business you know he's in actually in the entertainment industry. And he follows this stuff. He'll frequently toot out some very interesting charts. Yeah, just saw one today about Box Office and Rotten Tomatoes. Box Office Mojo.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Oh, those Box Office Mojo rankings, inflation-adjusted rankings of franchises and things, those blow my mind, and I always see those through Todd. Yeah, exactly. and dusted rankings of franchises and things those blow my mind and i always see those through todd yeah exactly so um so todd uh was actually replying to and finishing on a chain something that was a tweet that started with a guy named scott derrickson who said if you look at rotten rotten tomato scores without reading selected reviewers that you respect you're doing it wrong you and cinema deserve better and todd's follow-up to that was absolutely it's a shame how

so many folks misinterpret and oversimplify what the rotten tomato score actually means and i thought this would be an interesting topic because um reviews are everywhere that's one thing people are trying to find information about what they should do in terms of consuming entertainment in terms of buying products and i am somebody who and and i hadn't really thought about it this way but the fact is for like 25 years now one of the things that i've done professionally is evaluate things and for most of that time slap a number on my number of mice right exactly the mice oh the mice? I mean, and from 1990, when was that? 1993, 94, I've been applying mice to things. Until like, well, actually, I think I applied a mouse rating to something like last year.

So, it still happens occasionally when I write for Macworld. So, rating things and giving ratings is something that we do and people can rely on it. But it's, you know it's problematic in so many different ways and i know when when i talked to you about this you you said i'm very excited about this and then i checked our little document about what we were going to talk about today and it was full of things oh yeah yeah i i was very interested in it because i've been i i've been thinking about it a lot because you're right. So many things have ratings.

But if we just take a tiny step back, if you go beyond even just reviews and ratings, just look at metrics. Almost everything we look at, we cannot help but see some kind of a ranking or you think about even something like Twitter followers. Like when you're thinking about some rando contacts you and you're thinking about like, should I respond to this, especially if it's something kind of unkind, I frequently look at how many followers that person has. If they've got like five followers, I'm not going to get in a big toss with them

because, you know, it's just, they're probably just a troll. That sounds silly. But I mean, what I'm trying to get at though is whether it's the iTunes store or it's Netflix or Amazon, stuff that I use, all of which I use a lot, you can't help but see a rating for something. And I think it's extremely difficult for it not to have some effect on you in one way or another.

And I guess I have my opening statement here. The main thing I just, I'm really of two minds because I realize how weird and wrong and broken and easily abused reviews and ratings are. And I think we have many examples here to talk about. But at the same time, I still rely on them. If I'm in a new town, I don't think twice about looking at the Yelp score. Absolutely. You know what my feelings about Yelp are?

Dying of fire. Like, I really don't like Yelp. I don't like their business practices. And I know their reviews are mega, mega broken in many ways. But if you've got six otherwise undifferentiated places, what do you do? Pick by the name? It's like betting on a sports team based on the uniforms. So even though I don't like that, I still look at that. what it is that feels broken and abused about ratings and reviews, which I think we will contrast, but then also like why it is we still end up using them even when we don't mean to. Not to jump too far ahead, but you mentioned Yelp. And I've never used Yelp a lot, but on our, we took a family trip last summer and we drove to basically to Seattle and back, a family road trip over the course of about eight, nine days.

And one of the things that I decided kind of on the fly that I would try to do is have us not eat at a chain restaurant at any point on that. Like eat at people's houses, even if we had to break in. No, eat at people's houses and eat at restaurants that are the local places. It's so much harder than it sounds. yelp is yelp is the way i did that and and it was interesting because i have we we are going to talk about this i have i my my feelings about yelp are very similar to my feelings about goodreads uh which is that they are mostly you know amateur reviews which is okay except that they're compromised by some issues about amateur reviewers and what brings somebody to decide to be an amateur reviewer. But I never

really, did I trust Yelp? It's a little bit like how I trust Rotten Tomatoes, which goes back to the point that that first tweet made, which is, I kind of trust them a little in the aggregate to understand that it's really a very hazy, non-specific idea about a place or a movie or whatever. That it's more about, it's generally liked. Or this thing doesn't seem to be generally hated. And here's some information about it. Oh, and it's open. And this thing, this thing doesn't seem to be generally hated. And here's some information about it. Oh, and it's open and here's the menu and using it as a research tool, but not as the gospel. And, and that, that worked pretty well. We went to one place, uh, early on that was not very good. And then after that, every, every place we picked was,

was, uh, was pretty great. Um, and, and so Yelp was a factor in that, but individual Yelp reviews were not really what did it. It was more, because you dig into the reviews and then you see all the axe grinders are in there. You're exactly hitting it. I mean, I've felt for years that one of the problems with Yelp, well, one of the benefits of Yelp is that you can rate other raters,

which I think is a very interesting idea, or look at how much Wuffy they have on the system. But, you know, one problem with Yelp is people use it like a blog. Like, you know, people who go to SF State, they just, it's like their blog about Dim Sum, basically. You know, let me tell you how angry I was about this bent fork that I got

at this place. It's like, wow, this is a really interesting tone poem about cutlery. But, you know, also like if that's the first month that place is open and you get your table full of people to go in and leave five bad reviews that has an incredible impact on that on that place and i don't know how much recourse there is but you know okay so i think well maybe i you know i have the habit of taking over your shows have you ever noticed that no i have or i try anyway this is why i deploy you tactically i think it's beneficial though to i mean i feel

like my real beef in some ways is with ratings yeah star ratings number ratings but i think we should talk a little bit about reviews because they have such an impact reviews i mean you go and i i personally i don't read reviews for podcasts i do i just i can't oh yeah i don't eat i don't eat well i know a lot of people who are there like like all the time and like screenshotting the one first off first off it's not for you right I mean that I feel like I feel like if you're looking at podcast reviews as a some sort of a curative like it's supposed to be a correctional thing like let me give you feedback on how you can change your podcasts like I just don't view them that way. I view them as it's people talking to other potential listeners about their feelings. And that's fine. And if I really have no idea what I'm doing, I suppose I would look at the reviews. But it's like, I kind of know the

show I want to make. And if people don't like it, then that's fine. Because... Well, it's like trying to find a date on a bathroom wall. It's just like, that's not where I would go for that particular kind of information. I get why it's there. And I can, but really frequently, a lot of times reviews, something I'm sure we'll talk about, is the uneven distribution of the way that reviews work, especially if they have a rating associated with them. Like what would happen if we threw out every review in the world that was one star and every review that was five stars? I mean just for the sake of argument, if you hid all of those on a site, you'd have a much more interesting site. Because I think people tend to go and vote up the stuff that they like, and I think they tend to go and vote down the stuff they don't. If you don't have a strong feeling about something, whether it's a podcast or a Dutch oven, you're not going to go leave a three-star review about it, probably, unless you're mad.

Like, I don't think – you know what I mean? Unless you're very mad or very excited, most people don't do that. I mean, that's the worst part of this i i have maybe left you'd have to go look on the page but maybe two or three yelp reviews ever so that should tell me something the fact that i'm not contributing to that um should be kind of a you know bellwether there's a there's a a bias inherent in it which is you've got people who know the proprietors who want to talk it up or they've been paid by the proprietors and then you've got people who are angry and they want to let it out they had a bad experience and it's very rare so you know if um

if my family and i have a nice dinner at the lost coast brewing company in eureka on our way back to san francisco which we did last year um and i i you know we're having a nice time and i've had a couple of beers and we're gonna go back to the hotel room and watch a movie and then go to sleep and drive home the next day i i it's probably not likely that i'm gonna say even though i used yelp to find the place probably not gonna say let me stop and write a review right i'm just gonna let it go we had a fine time it was nice maybe it wasn't perfect there were some things about it that i liked and didn't like um but i'm just not going to do it if they if they you know spill a whole pitcher of iced tea in your lap and cook your medium steak till it's burned then maybe you you have enough of your of your dander up to write an angry one-star review

and that ends up being what you see is the people who have been offended in some way and not the people who are just your regular everyday people because it's not a scientific survey right it's people who go out of their way to self-selecting it is well and unless you consider yourself for example and i think this does happen on Yelp, there are people who have decided that they're going to review all of the,

let's say, Chinese restaurants or Thai restaurants or something like that. And in that case, those are the kind of folks that might be out applying some B-minuses

to things. Yeah, yeah, totally. Most people don't have time to assign B-minuses in life because there's not any, there's not anything really to be gained from that to just say it was fine. Exactly right. I mean, what would my review of that,

of that brew pub be? It would be something like, um, it was a little crowded, but we got in fairly early. There was a, there was like a, a big, uh, like kite of a shark that was hanging from the ceiling. That was kind of interesting. Um, the beer was good the food was fine uh my kids had a good time and we left like okay great story um three stars right i mean it's just like what it's what do i even have to contribute at that point but that that is that is part of the crowdsourcing uh challenge is is i i do believe that if you had everybody uh fill out a five-star rating at the end of their meal, regardless, and it was just anonymous and put into the internet, that you would probably get a pretty good idea of how good that place was. But that's a fantasy because that's just never going to happen. And Yelp is not the thing that has solved that and made it that we live in that world now because, again, it's only the people who self-select who do that.

Yeah, yeah. And I think this will eventually, eventually i guess get us into the ratings part of it but i think i think it's worth breaking down when i think about what you know what is a review for well for a long time film criticism was considered you know a kind of art where it was in the days before let's say arbitrarily siskel and ebert like back in the day before, let's say arbitrarily, Siskel and Ebert. Like back in the day, you'd have whatever Vincent Canby or, you know, Roger Ebert back in the day or who's the lady? Janet Maslin? Yeah, and the other one I'm always forgetting. Everybody's going to yell at me. Oh, yeah.

You know who I mean, that one lady. Yeah, I know that lady. It was more a way, it was really closer to film criticism in some ways, you know. But, you know, when you started following somebody like Roger Ebert, once you understood Roger Ebert's's like uh approach or ethos i found it very useful when he would i mean i can't quote this from memory but i think he once said something along the lines of that he he grades a movie based on how well it executed what it was trying to do which enabled him to not just give you know what does it mean just because it's an 80s college comedy, it's going to get one star.

And just because, you know, it's a Bergman movie, it gets five. It's, you know, and I think stuff like that can be very useful. I mentioned here that, you know, with what's his name, Miklas Saal. Miklas Saal is just about perfect for me, because no matter what he says about a movie, I always feel almost the opposite. And then that becomes useful. The Miklas Saal test is amazing. That's the San Francisco Chronicle movie critic and and i have the same thing i've talked to other people about

that too that for a lot of people mcglissal is like the perfect anti-critic like if he really likes something you got to be wary and if he hates something you probably might you might like it um you know not 100 but um that's true and and ebert you know is a good example of somebody who's calibrated his rating system he he would do like um he gave a good rating to Rambo First Blood Part Two. He gave a good rating to Benji the Hunted. And people are like, what's wrong with you? And he would say, you know, Benji the Hunted is a kid's movie about a dog. And it's a pretty good kid's movie about a dog. Rambo First Blood Part Two is this over the top machine gun action movie. And it's a pretty good kids movie about a dog Rambo First Blood Part Two is this over-the-top machine gun action movie and it's pretty good at what it at what it sets out to do and I mean that

goes back to context though right because in the end on on Siskel and Ebert it was a thumbs up or a thumbs down and on one level that seems atrocious like I know and I know a lot of film critics got bent out of shape about having to boil it down to a yes or no but on another level i felt like that was actually a really radical notion on their part that they were really saying look at some point a rating system is so pointless that we're just going to tell you whether it's worth seeing or not and we're going to walk away at that point and and ebert said many times um he hated rating systems you know it was it was Arguably what he's best known for. Yeah, right. Like the thumbs up and thumbs down.

I think, I don't know if they exactly invented that, but I think they invented that. Oh, it's a trademark of Gene Siskel, I think, or the Siskel and Ebert Corporation or something like that. But yeah, it's a trademarked thing. And so every time you use a thumbs up emoji, that's not true. a trademarked thing. And so, every time you use a thumbs up emoji, that's not true. But I think that's really interesting, though, that the idea that somebody who's famous for quantifying things at that simple level actually was kind of, they didn't like it. But the reality was the context, like I said, you know, the personal philosophy of a person with a rating is going to determine what the rating is. And so so you can't compare them between

not even like at the San Francisco Chronicle could you compare them because Mick LaSalle doesn't review all the movies there are other reviewers there too they also don't use stars they use a cartoon of a little man which is a little man but even even our good friend Tim Goodman I you know it's he is clearly so

not interested and obviously I'm a fan and constant listener of your show. So I know that there are just some things where he's like, I'm going to let the other guy do this or the kid. The kid will take care of this. Like, I'm not going to do sci-fi. I'm not going to do, you know, I'm not going to keep following Doodlebug or whatever. But he has a pretty strong feeling about like what's even sort of what even should be on his radar screen. Yeah.

I want to follow up on one thing you said, though, that I think is really smart, which is that, i almost think i almost think in terms of like the way we measure podcasts because whether or not you want to measure elements of your podcast and how it's downloaded and so forth you kind of need to if you're going to have sponsors you have to give them something sure now i think this is changing probably in ways i won't always be happy with but in the past something that has been consistent is there are two, three, four different ways or companies or methods that you can use. And the nice thing about, for example, PodTrack, the nice thing about PodTrack is, is PodTrack perfect? Is it the exact number of downloads? No, it's not, but it's consistent. And that's what makes PodTrack useful.

If everybody's using PodTrack and they're not deliberately gaming know, deliberately gaming the system, PodTrack, which I think it even accounts for, PodTrack will give you a good conservative number of how many downloads you have. They've recently added audience, which is super interesting. In the last week or so, they've added audience to their statistics. So you can see how many users you've had in the last month. Stuff like that is useful. But even though that's not perfect, it works because everybody's using that system in the same way. But what your point, I thought, that's super interesting is, like, this stuff all works. You know, if you go to the homepage of Rotten Tomatoes and you say, show me what's opening this weekend or show me what's new on DVD or whatever. Well, you know what?

That's actually pretty good. If you do a quick glance, if you know you want to see a movie or, in my case, like, I know my sweet, overworked wife needs a day. Well, we'll probably go downtown and see a movie. So we're going to see a movie. So I'm looking for red on that page. So the thing is, if there's – I mean, let's take the kid part out for a minute. But there's going to be five or six new movies that open. If four of them are green, meaning they are below whatever, 60%, something like that, and there's one that's

like, got the red tomato and has like a 90%. Well, at that point, that totally makes sense. Kind of, you go, well, clearly, you know, and I guess we should talk a little bit about how Rotten Tomatoes works. But in that case, you know, as against these other movies, clearly, there's one movie that's better than the others. What's fascinating, though, to me, I mentioned this in the notes here, when you drill down onto a detail page for a movie, especially I feel like with blockbusters, you might get a like a summer blockbuster that say 80% fresh, 75, 85, maybe even 90% fresh. Yeah, what's and I think this is Todd's point. What's crazy is go in and read the pull quotes next to that red tomato. And they are often they sound like a negative review or

there may be kind of diffident at best yeah yeah well this is the problem with it because you're aggregating something that's already a question mark in terms of the score especially uh you know sometimes they'll use the rating system and sometimes they'll use the words of the of the reviewer but what what rotten tomatoes wants is a yes or a no and metacritic is a little different right metacritic tries well we should i think we should say this i'm not sure everybody knows this all right rotten tomatoes works it's my understanding and we have a page of notes that points to this it's my understanding that somebody at rotten tomatoes goes in and looks at that review if it's a you know three four or five star review or you know in that range that that's

considered a positive review yes based on the rating in that range that that's considered a positive review yes based on the rating that they gave it that's considered a positive review and like you said they might have to kind of read through it and sort of interpret from words what it was but they assign it basically a score of was this a positive review or was this a negative review that's what the red or the green means on a movie now this, this is the part I think Todd was pushing back on. The problem is when you go in and say like, oh, this movie got an 82%. What got 82% of what? Well, what it got was 82% quote unquote positive reviews.

Even if those reviews are shot through with all kinds of provisos and go like, oh, yeah, I guess it's good for a dumb summer movie. And you see those all the time where you may get a movie that gets 60% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the 60% who liked it loved it, and think it's a masterpiece, and it's to be taken seriously as a great work of art. And then you get a movie that's a summer movie, and the reviews are all like, yeah, it's fine. It delivers. You know, it does what it was meant to do. And that's not, that's got a higher Rotten Tomatoes score.

But is it really better thought of by critics than the other movie? Probably not. But that's not what Rotten Tomatoes is for. Why is it 30% lower on Metacritic? What's their problem? And that's the difference is that Metacritic is trying to come up with a score and this is a lot easier if you provide your own score but some don't and and then they have somebody who cut come comes in and reads the review basically and assigns a score based on their reading of the review and the and the textual analysis of the review and they they

aggregate based on that so uh rotten tomatoes will look at a mclesell review and say positive and metacritic will look at a mclesell review and say six out of ten and those are different and and and so you get you get a better sense of sentiment from metacritic and a better sense of sort of overall trend of positive versus negative from rotten tomatoes both of them have their i think aspects of validity. I actually think that one of the problems with Metacritic is that I'm not sure I trust the decisions they make about how they summarize reviews, how they come to those ratings.

Do they wait for, like, for example, when you go to Rotten Tomatoes, you can have facets to see, like, just top reviewers. Does Metacritic give extra weight to, like just top reviewers does medic critic give extra weight to like professional reviewers the bigger the paper do you know i don't know they weight it based on that i don't know that i'm not sure i do know that the that there's a very fat middle and i've seen this on charts there's a chart linked in the show notes here about fandango versus imdb uh versus medic critic versus rotten tomatoes and the thing is like there's most uh it seems like most of the Metacritic movies, you're not going to see many movies

that are going to get 90%. That is very unusual. Well, right, because it's not likely that all critics gave it a rave and five stars, right? That doesn't happen. Whereas it's fairly easy for Star Trek Beyond to get an 83 on Rotten Tomatoes. And I'm a lifelong Star Trek fan,

and I've seen i'm a lifelong star trek fan i've seen star trek beyond and would i say that it's a 83 of a good movie i would not i my review of it would be like it's fine right and the fact is i read a lot of star trek beyond reviews they're all kind of like that they're like it's fine you know it's fine and and yet it's 83 fresh certified fresh right but but that that what does that mean? Whereas on Metacritic, the problem I have with Metacritic is that I'm not sure I believe them when they read a review and say, this is a seven out of 10. Like somebody read somebody else's review and then gave it a score of how they feel the sentiment came out of it. But this goes back, I know we're kind of wandering a little bit here, but this goes back to the point,

I think that's also a large point, which is these are not people running the 100-yard dash where there's a number to the thousandth of a second or the hundredth of a second that tells you the difference between first place and eighth place. These are numbers generated by squishy sentiment. squishy um sentiment and as somebody who assigned mice to products for years that's the part that always stops me cold a little bit is that it's i was so i was explaining this to my kids um the other night so so saturday night we um had dinner and it was a blue apron not a sponsor not a sponsor call me blue apron um but we're we're blue apron uh a family for about a year now and we we're having a conversation about how what we ought to do is rate the blue apron uh a family for about a year now and we were having a conversation about how what we ought to do is rate the blue apron meals like my son is a picky eater and my daughter is okay with kind of everything i'm kind of a picky eater and my wife is kind of okay with everything so we

have different perspectives and we discussed ratings and we ended up in this whole discussion of what the rating system was and whether you would be out of five or out of ten would you allow half steps all of these things that were absolutely, I've been in, literally been in meetings where people have argued about this as part of my job back in the day. And we ended up with a five-star rating system with no halfsies because I feel like it forces you to make some decisions instead of kind of half-assing it and being like, well, it's three and a half. It's fine. Right? And instead it's like, no, you got to choose. Is it three? Is it four? Is it five? What is it? Um, but, uh, and good, good news, everybody. I think the, I think

we got two fours and two, three fours and a three. It was good. It was a good, pretty good dinner. So hooray for the, for, for blue apron dinners. But it,. But it allowed me to talk to my kids about the concept of significant figures, which I kept thinking of in terms of what you and I are talking about today, which is this idea that if you only measure anything to a tenth or a half or an integer, something that's super squishy, but you aggregate out 15 different things. And we used to do this all the time, Macworld and Macuser and PCworld used to do this a lot, where you have like 15, 20 different ways you measure a product. And they're all like out of 10, let's say. And then you have a formula and you add them all together and you get this

incredibly precise number. Like this got an 81.5. The truth is, it is a precise number generated by incredibly imprecise numbers that are themselves, in some cases, a judgment call. Right, right, right. And the rule of significant figures teaches us you don't pretend to have more precision than you actually have. And I could argue something like Metacritic is actually failing the rule of significant figures. And you could maybe even argue that

Rotten Tomatoes, even though it's got a binary, it's got a Boolean, like, is it good or is it bad, also fails it. Because, you know, writing a review of something that's completely subjective is there's no precision, right? Like it's an art. And so then we're trying to apply a number to art and put it on a chart. And I'm not sure that's possible, which is not to say that I don't use Rotten Tomatoes. It's just, I feel like you've got to at least call it what it is, which is a really gross approximation of the general sentiment. I mean, how many ways can I defuse this? The general sentiment of a group of movie critics. That's like, I backed all the way out of the authority of Rotten Tomatoes and said, it's something you can look at, but don't take it too seriously.

But I think, you know, you're right, they're all over the map, but at the same time, there's a thread that runs through all of this, which I think is, is there, how much context is there to what you're looking at? Which is, in my case, why I really, if you're going to have ratings, whether it's stars or numbers, I would like to understand, first of all, if you're going to give a number

like 75, well, does that mean it's 75% successful? It was 75% 75 successful it was 75 entertaining it was 75 a good value so that's why you know we're looking at things like i think i want to say like dp review the the photo site but places that offer you facets because even okay even with something as simple as like rating blue apron yeah um i mean just to problematize it well okay so really what you're saying is how much did we enjoy eating this? Yeah. Which is totally, that's certainly a primary marker of what you would want to evaluate for a meal.

How about, how hard was it to make? How about, how healthy was it? How about, does it have milk in it because somebody in the house has an allergy? Well, do we just throw that one out because it had milk in it? Probably. But if you don't account for all of those things you know it's it's it's hard to communicate anything useful to people unless you can help them understand why it might be right for them and you said useful there which i think is actually an important point here too which is uh the other question you always have to ask yourself is what is the rating used for like

our blue apron rating is partially just for fun we thought we would try it and i think partially influences um decisions about whether we'll make it again like it gets gets my kids to really ponder how much did you really enjoy this and if it's a well it's also a mcguffin i mean it's a mcguffin in some ways because basically you're gonna go hey it turns out that there's this there's these two meals that most of us like and that's really good to know right so i mean that's that's that's not a bad thing but so like a yelp a yelp review the point is sort of not to get your anger out it's to help other diners decide whether they should go there and rotten tomatoes the point is it's to help moviegoers decide is this a movie i should like

or not what do people generally think and i feel like that's why rotten tomatoes is really useful when a movie's between like a flop house territory and like 30% or if a movie's like 70 to 100 or even 60 to 100. Because that's the level where it's sort of like, yeah, people mostly liked it or people mostly didn't like it. What number, arbitrary, Jason Snell, what arbitrary number do you give to Fateful Findings? Oh, well, Fateful Findings is a zero, but it's a very interesting zero. There's so many asterisks. On a scale of zero to infinite, it's a zero. But it's still an interesting failure.

But it is a failure, I have to say. But I don't know. I'll tell you this, too. As somebody who doesn't see a lot of movies since we had kids, I don't see a lot of movies. a lot of movies since we had kids we have i don't see a lot of movies i am positive that there's a movie out there that i have a bad opinion about purely from other people writing about it purely from aggregation sites like rotten tomatoes that in reality if i had seen it it would have been one of my favorite movies i i've no doubt that that movie exists there it's nestled among 300 terrible movies and that's the truth of it is i can't

watch all the movies and find the diamonds in the rough i only get to see 15 movies a year or whatever i need to not have them be losers but i have no doubt that that's all that that rotten tomatoes is telling me when it says 15 is 15 of critics thought this was okay and the rest of them hated it. It's not a 15% chance that I might love it. I might really love it. I just am not willing to put that on myself and take a chance on it. I'm a bad father, so I watch a lot, a lot of movies. And this actually came up like last night.

Um, so, Oh God, I just have to also, so that I mentioned in that thread with Todd, he used to watch Letterman. Do you remember when Letterman, it was around the time the flash dance came out.

Do you remember he invited a professional, like veteran welder onto the show to do a review of flash dance? Yes. That's what I think about now every time I think about movie ratings. It depends on what you're looking for in a movie. If you're a foot fetishist, you might not like

this movie. That's going to affect your ratings for it. But last night, for example, my daughter was away for the night visiting with some friends. And so we had free reign to just do stuff. And I watched two movies last night. I rented actually two movies off iTunes. The new Werner Herzog documentary that's essentially about the Internet. And a movie called Imperium starring Daniel Radcliffe.

And if you had done a cinema score, well, not a cinema score, but basically before I went in the theater, you said to me, rate these movies before you've seen them. You know what I would have said? I would have said Warner Herzog, four and a half stars, probably. I haven't seen it yet, but no one Warner Herzog four and a half stars. You know, Daniel Radcliffe as an undercover FBI agent, solid three.

And then I saw the movies. The Warner Herzog movie was fine. It was not super insightful. It was great because it was Werner Herzog, and it's just great to hear him talk. But that movie, and it's very prestigious. It's getting very good reviews. But in my case, especially as a guy who knows a little bit of stuff about the internet, it didn't really land with me.

I thought a lot of it was a little bit touchy-feely, a little too deep on technology at some parts and not deep enough in others. My wife, who actually, turns out, was recovering from a migraine yesterday, ended up watching the entire run of Stranger Things last night. And she kept pointing out to me the different snells that she found, because I told

her about your problems with it, and she's like, oh, this. They would never say stick in the butt. That's a total snell. It's an anachronism. An anachronism. Saying we're going to chill, and he's a douchebag, which are not things say stick in the butt. That's a total snout. It's an anachronism. An anachronism. Saying we're going to chill and he's a douchebag, which are not things that kids in the mid-80s said. Yeah, or stick in the butt. But the reason I mentioned that there is like, okay, so I mentioned Stranger Things because in your case, I thought it was masterful. You, it seems like in Slack you were saying it felt like you were really taken away from it by how distracting those things were.

Yeah. Even though you could appreciate on some level what was happening with the story and the homages, that was too much for you. Well, I don't know about too much because I've kept watching it, but... But how do you put a rating on that? How do you put a rating on that to say, well, you know, here's five

asterisks for if you're super familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, you may not like this. That was, I mean, honestly, this is something that reviewers struggle with. And I think this is actually an interesting, Andy and I have had long conversations about this before. The idea of your responsibility when you're a reviewer and thinking philosophically, as silly as this is,

thinking philosophically about like, if you're in a rating system, what your ratings mean. If you have to assign a number to a review. I'm very happy now that the mean man who runs sixcolors.com does not require me to do a number to a review. I'm very happy now that the mean man who runs sixcolors.com does not require me to do a numerical rating because it's freeing to not have to worry about that anymore. And I would never impose one. It's like, no, never. But if you have one, you have to think about it philosophically. And I think that's where it's interesting when you have

citizen reviewers, because some of them think about it and internalize their code and they go with it other people don't think about it and you can it's just come straight from you you can tell and then there are also those people which i like to call goodreads reviewers who have thought about it and would like to share your their entire rating system with you at the top of every review they write where it's like well goodreads doesn't really allow me to do half rating so this would be a four and a half but since it's not a four i can't do that because of this one aspect of the main character i'm going to give it a four but trust me it's in my personal database it's a four and a half it's like all right i get it i get you've

got a system you got to move on but you do have to internalize that system and you do have to have one like a mac world we always had that where people get three out of five and they'd be bent out of shape they'd be like i can't believe you only gave us three mice it's a negative review and it's like no actually for us three is fine three is the lowest rating you can get and it'd still be a recommendation uh it was it's flawed but uh you could still get it and it would be fine because it's a it's a recommendation and i get i i get the it's not as positive a recommendation as i would like but we would get a lot of it's negative it's like no it's not it's not a bad review dude this is the uber problem this is exactly the this is the please give my please give my manager five stars and say i did a five-star job otherwise i'm gonna lose my

job it's like the that when you go to the car dealership, five stars on everything. Four stars is a failure. Five stars on everything. I don't know if this is true or if this is just like an urban myth, but supposedly if you don't maintain a 4.7 average on Uber, you are subject to being fired. And when's the last time you really got a five-star ride? I mean, if you're somebody like a John Syracuse type, five stars, wow, I've given about two of those ever.

It's almost like five mic reviews for hip-hop albums. Five stars to me is a political statement. I need to leave the Uber with two new books that are going to change my life when I read them. That's a five-star Uber ride for me. But I understand that it's not designed you know, it's not designed for me because again, for me- We were in an accident and he set my arm, five stars. Three is the baseline. And then they have to do, they have to work on things to get it up to five.

It didn't still, it didn't smell like smoke and they didn't make racist jokes. Yeah, that's right. Three stars. Three stars. How much more time you got for this? Cause I got a lot more. Let's, we got a lot of time, but we're going to break uh how about that tell me about something you like i want to tell you about something awesome it's mac weldon uh mac weldon better than whatever you're wearing right now they like to say and i like to say um i have mac weldon products i have the mac weldon underwear. I have the Mack Weldon socks.

They are very high quality. In fact, when I first did my Mack Weldon sponsorship on TV Talk Machine, I want to say, they gave me a little coupon to buy some stuff. And this is what I have to say about that. I went back and bought more stuff with my own money because it was that good. And so that's my endorsement. It was good enough that I went past the podcast, try it out phase to the I need to actually this is costing me money now because I need to buy this stuff. Great socks, little stripes. I love them. High quality underwear. They also have shirts. I think they've got I think they may have hoodies too. They definitely got underwear, socks and shirts. Their website's really well designed, easy to use. You go in, click on the stuff stuff you want it's got what the what the sizes

are and all the styles uh and then you check out it's really fast very convenient to do this and it's risk-free uh if you don't like your first pair you can keep it they don't want it back they really don't you you wore it you can keep it but they'll refund your money anyway so you it's no questions asked you can you know and yes you can keep that pair of underpants that you don't like if you want. But I like that because most things on the web, I think you get that added fear of like, I don't have it in my hands. I don't see it. What does this mean? And so, just being able to allay that fear and say, no, no, if you don't like it, we'll give you your money back. It's not a problem. They've got socks. Here's the list. Socks, shirts, undershirts, They've got socks, here's the list, socks, shirts, undershirts, hoodies, and sweatpants, including a line of silver underwear and shirts.

Yes, actual silver. They're naturally antimicrobial, meaning they repel odor using the power of science. Wow. Is it like a Faraday cage for your junk? It could be. It could be. You'll have to ask Mr. Faraday about that silver um and they perform well too they're good for working out they're good for going to work they're good for going out on dates they're good for living your everyday life you can get 20 off

your order that's right that's a lot of stripy socks my friend by going to mac weldon.com now we talk about the mac on this uh show a lot so ipy socks my friend by going to macweldon.com now we talk about the mac on this uh show a lot so i need to spell this for you because it's not spelled like that it's mac m-a-c-k w-e-l-d-o-n macweldon.com use code upgrade at checkoff for 20 off that silver underwear those stripy socks that hoodie hoodie, whatever, 20% off with code upgrade. Thank you, Mack Wilden, for supporting upgrade.

Well, now, when stupid John Roderick brags about his Faraday underwear with the silver in it, now I know where he got it and I'm totally going to get some. Yeah,

there you go. I can do it. Um, where, so where, where were we? We're talking about reviews and ratings. You've got to deploy me tactically.

You've got to get me in the lane. I know, I know, I know. well, I, I've already made my joke about Goodreads, so I'm good at this point. Well, it's also the other part

of the Yelp problem, the other part of so many of these things, and of course we won't go through all of our hilarious anecdotes we have here, but is that, you know, you don't have to,

it doesn't cost anything to leave a review. You have a link here to the wonderful Amazon movie reviews. Amazon movie reviews is one of my favorite Twitter accounts. Would you want to curate

a couple of those real quick for us? It's generally, well, okay, like the most, this is a pinned one on there, which is The Wolf of Wall Street.

One star. There were no wolves in this movie. Right? And most of their reviews, some of them are, they're all five and one stars for the most part.

Yeah. And beyond that, it's people who are unclear on um what the point is jurassic world one star i don't like this film this film is a bit unrealistic since the existence of dinosaurs has not been proven there may be some bones but these are easy enough to fake yeah that's the review of jurassic world ghost rider five stars good flick my son is five and loves this movie i had to get him six feet of chain from home depot because the ghost writer has chains yeah so anyway it's uh it's an amazing uh it's an amazing twitter account and i recommend it but it is an example where a lot of fives, a lot of ones. And what I'm not trying to do is say people don't have the right to write a review. I guess what I'm saying is writing reviews is hard and writing good reviews is harder. And a lot of internet things that want you to write reviews don't really care if you exert effort which is good

because most people don't want to exert the effort to do it and so you end up with weird reviews and you end up with the axe grinders who are the ones who push through like their their anger will fuel them activists activist reviewers yeah exactly right and so it's it becomes it becomes problematic huh there's that word again um because it's just i'm gonna shame you out of that one no you know what the reason i use the word again um because it's just i'm gonna shame you out of that one no you know what the reason i use the word problematic is because i feel like i can't say why it's bad because there's so many different vectors of badness in it that you you start to pull them apart and it's like can i give you a list of all the ways that this is bad because there's so many

of them it's just like it's hard to ask people to write a review we're americans and so we nominally believe in a sense of fair play and justice and equal access to things so it's nice that anybody i mean i'm not being sarcastic it's great that everybody gets a vote on stuff i think that's really good but the problem is like here's this is one i'm just this was one from memory um who was it was it um oh was it wilson minor was one of the one of the whoever made every block every block was this great app that would would aggregate all kinds of local information about your neighborhood. And it was only available in a few cities, but it was so great because you could go in and you could find like honest stuff, like police activity, like all like stuff from public records in this beautiful site. At one point, I think they rebooted it.

And it was only available in like four cities. rebooted it. It was only available in like four cities. And it said in giant, giant letters in the description of the app, this will only work if you are in San Francisco, Boston, Phoenix. Do not download this app if you don't live in one of these cities. Hand to

God, one of the first reviews, one star, not available in my city. Guess I should have read the description. So they're reviewing themselves then. And one of my other favorites, I don't know if you see this much anymore. Do you remember this a few years back? One star, fixed for jailbreak.

Yeah. You ever seen that one? I jailbreak my phone. It's like really vulnerable and broken now. Could you go in and like make your app work better with this? Yeah. One of the things that we tried at one point, I don't know whether we implemented it or whether it was just on the list of things that didn't get implemented by our development team.

Not that I'm bitter. But the idea of, I think there's a difference on the internet between asking people for ratings and having them, iTunes does this. You can rate a podcast without writing a review. And I think writing a review is really intimidating for a lot of people it also is asking for time a lot of people aren't really confident writers um let alone product reviewers or or movie reviewers or podcast reviewers and um a lot of sites make the mistake of wanting of asking for text like giving us an integer out of five is not enough we want your text and i feel like that is a step down the path toward having a worse idea of the general sentiment of something because a lot of people are going to be like well forget this it's like getting a survey i get those

an email every now and then it was like how did you like your interaction with hotels.com and it'll be like it was good it was bad it was it was uh i don't care and you click on it and it's like okay great now we want to ask it opens a browser window it says let's ask you 20 other questions i'm like i don't want to answer 20 questions get that from my kid's school where it's like all this stuff about how satisfied we are with diversity at the school with like dozens of questions with one to four oh it's the worst see you're like quantifying yeah like i mean like i mean actually i'm really pleased with all of it But I'm also kind of a size queen about giving out fours and fives. Yeah, exactly. Right. You're gonna pull down even if you're pretty happy,

you're gonna pull down the average because you're like, look, three is a positive review. Okay. And they're gonna be like, no, if it's not five, the school shuts down. So I wonder if there's ways, though, to introduce facets in clever ways. I mean, you know, there's all kinds of interesting stuff. Like one thing I guess we should mention in passing is I didn't notice this at first, but you're a pretty big Netflix user, right? Yeah. I mean, I remember for a long time Netflix was so ahead of the curve on so many things. I remember back in the day it became kind of like a sport to, like, rate movies because it would give you more to rate and it would get better and better. Back then, it wasn't collaborative filtering in the way we think of it today, but it was definitely using aggregate information.

They had a famous algorithm that would guess what rating you would give a movie based on your ratings of other movies. Right. And they had a whole contest about getting getting people to write a better exactly a better algorithm that would that they give somebody you know a team a million dollars if they could improve their algorithm by a certain amount and back in the disc days that was sort of important because they're trying to float up like what discs should you get next and says we think you'll like this movie and it's still really relevant for streaming now well i mean like one thing two

things i like one thing i like is and it is, and it's become a fairly blunt instrument. It's not as useful as it used to be. Maybe, I don't know, too much stuff. Maybe they know too much about me. But I like it when they say, recommended because you watched this. I think that's kind of interesting. Yeah. And I really like it when you get to the detail page, and it says, you know, recommended

because you like this certain thing, or you like these kinds of movies. We should find for notes the cheat sheet for genres on Netflix. Have you ever seen that? No. The full list of genres, like adult anime. Like there's like a ridiculous taxonomy that's not exposed to the public, but you can view them in a web browser. I will find that for notes.

But what I didn't know about, and I just discovered probably, I don't know, in the last year, was that, I hope I'm getting this right. Tell me if I'm getting this wrong. But when you're on Netflix and you're flipping around, you're saying, what am I going to watch? What am I going to watch? And you see the ratings for something. Apparently, it turns out those are the ratings that people very much like you have given this. More to the point, this is basically the rating they think you would give it, which is a fascinating idea to me.

Yeah, I've had that too. I'm fascinated by the whole like, because you liked, sometimes they'll say it's because you liked Primer. Other times they'll be like, because you like smart, mind-bending time travel movies. And I'm like, okay, well, I know what movie you're talking about there. But it'll say, well, you should watch Safety Not Guaranteed. And it's like, yes, I should. You're absolutely're absolutely right i should watch that movie they have a lot in common and give me all of the time travel yeah it's amazing that your that your uh computer can can divine that but it quite right right like it should it should be able to figure that one out

um and and it's great and it's helping right i i do like i do like it in that respect i crave facets and so i mean just some quick examples in terms of like maybe like what what i wish were different And it's helping, right? I do like it in that respect. I crave facets. And so, I mean, just some quick examples. In terms of maybe what I wish were different or what could be improved, I sent you the list, by the way, to the Netflix streaming genres. How crazy is that list? We'll just pull that up in a sec. But, you know, I guess I just wish things like,

I mean, for Rotten Tomatoes-ish things or things where, like, especially if it's crowdsourced, there's some dumb questions that you could ask that actually might be really useful. I would recommend this movie to my close friends, yes or no. This movie was better than I expected, yes or no. It seems to me like over time those kinds of things could actually be really useful. And when it comes to products, I mean, you've got to get all DP review on this. Like, was this a good value? How did you feel about content of the cd versus the packaging of the box set because

i've seen pet sounds get one star because people think it's been released too many times yeah oh yeah i love i love that the i look at um sometimes when i'm looking for like a blu-ray or something and you'll get d uh what was it uh is it digital bits so that one of the one of the blu-ray review sites i always really liked it because they gave two reviews they gave a review for the content which is like yes i'm glad you liked star trek to the wrath of khan good for you yes it's a good movie and then they would do the release it's like now yes please actually tell me what's good about this like is this a good transfer and all that and you see that on amazon where it'll be like i already had this or or khan it's great it's like okay that doesn't tell me anything like i'm trying i'm really

specifically trying to find out if this new release is good or not and that that comes back to knowing your audience but you're right we talked about that at idg a lot about could we ask questions to get signal on a product that was not just tell me how how numbered this product is right like give this product a number but instead instead it's like, was this, we tried that with games, like iOS games. We tried to do that and it didn't work very well because we didn't have enough users to do it. But it's like survey data of like,

was this game challenging? Was this game fun to play? Not just rate this game, but like ask a specific question about the iOS game. And that way we could say users found this game challenging but fun to play or users found this game fun but not very challenging and that's interesting and way more i feel like a way better use of everybody's time than you be the reviewer give this uh a rating out of five, because what does that tell us? Yeah.

Here's, you know, two sites I would appreciate you putting in notes. Very different, but working toward the same thing. One is Kids in Mind, and the other one that you might have noticed popping up on Apple TV is Common Sense Media. Oh, yeah. And they, so Kids in Mind is, I think this is an endlessly fascinating site. It's a, it feels a little Christian-y, definitely. And they, so Kids in Mind is, I think this is an endlessly fascinating site.

It's a, it feels a little Christian-y, definitely a little conservative, but the notion is they go in and they review a movie for three vectors. The amount of sex and nudity, the amount of violence and gore, the amount of profanity, and then in a hilarious turn, they go through and in a very antiseptic way describe every instance of all of those things in the most hilarious way. And yes, the Big Lebowski is in there. So if you're worried about how much of those things you might find offensive and then want specifically to know, Kids in Mind is good for that. So the reason I mentioned Common Sense Media, I think they might be a little better at it, but they are doing something

I wish more places would do, which is facets, facets, facets. So right now I'm on the page for Imperium, which is this Daniel Radcliffe movie I watched last night. They give it a rating of 17 plus. So I guess it's, you know, R rated. They give it a quality rating of three out of five stars. Okay, good to know. And then they have a section here called what parents need to know. Positive messages of this movie, one to five. Positive role models, one to five. Violence, sex, language, consumerism,

drinking drugs, and smoking. Okay, so I'm not saying the way they're doing that is perfect for every movie, but something like that would be very welcome to me. Even if it's an opinion, I would like those facets to be there. I've used those reviews a lot to... Look, if you know your kid is afraid of scary music,

it's good to know that. Like, your kid might be the toughest kid in the world, but sometimes kids, there's certain things that you know your kid is afraid of scary music it's good to know that like your kid might be the toughest kid in the world but sometimes kids there's certain things that just set your kid off whether that's spiders scary music you know uh slender man whatever it is knowing it's in there is good to know yeah my uh my high school pal jeff anderson who used to be the movie critic at the san francisco examiner back when it was a newspaper uh and he and he writes um he has his own site combustible celluloid and he used to write the now streaming column for tech hive which was great um and he writes for common sense media oh terrific and it's and it's good

because he i mean he's a real movie critic and he's able to say like i'm looking at his uh review of vice on common sense media which is great because it's parents need to know that vice is a terrible sci-fi action film and it goes from there it's like what parents it's got it's very violent there's a lot of sex there's a lot of bad language but also it's a very bad movie and he with one star and it's great knowing uh somebody who grew up to be a film critic is fantastic because i have to say knowing him in high school he would see movies and rate them on a five-star scale he had internalized his star rating system as a teenager and of course he ended up being a movie critic um but i had i didn't i had to learn the five-star rating system much some people just have that gene just by the way if you have if you have kids you

might want to steer them away from the big lebowski It gets a 10 for profanity. Yeah. About 240 F-words, many scatological references, many anatomical references, many mild obscenities. They didn't even bother to go through the specific. Yeah. But they also offer discussion topics, if you show it to your kid. Kidnapping, pornography, marijuana use, the Vietnam and Gulf Wars. Is there marijuana use in Big Lebowski? Interesting. I've seen that movie one time, by the way.

Oh, dear. Okay. Single time. I liked it. Who are you, Scott McNulty? I liked it, but I only saw it the one time and that was like

four years ago. It's about, around about the same time I saw Ferris Bueller's Day Off for the only time that I've seen that. Really? But what do you think,

facets though, huh? I mean, doesn't it seem like that's one way to kind of cut a lot of the stupid out of this? Yeah, I agree.

I think that's, I think there's a tyranny in the empty box uh saying review this here in a lot of different ways right i think it's bad i think i think it's bad for the person being asked to fill in the empty box and i don't think it really solves anything um and so i mean you you in our document and we are going to move on here in a minute but in your document you talked about interesting case studies and basically it's like examples. And you mentioned the Wirecutter, which does a lot of texting, puts a lot of context in. They don't do ratings, but they do pick a winner, which is how they kind of stack it up because their feeling is who reads the Wirecutter? And what they're saying is people who read the Wirecutter want to know what to buy.

They don't want to know. Their asterisks are not below the fold. Their asterisks are the article. Yeah. Well, that's true. I've written a couple articles for them. It's absolutely true. And they're still building their format as they learn what their business is and as they learn what their audience is. But they're not interested in the cultural conversation about a film, right?

Wirecutter is interested in people who want to buy a product in a category, but they don't know which product to buy. And Wirecutter can say that one, or if you want to spend a little bit a category but they don't know which product to buy and wire cutter can say that one or if you want to spend a little bit of money for something better that one and that's all they want to do and that which is good because that's how they make their money is by click throughs to buy those products on amazon for in large part but it's a great example of them putting a lot of work in to understand their categories but also to think about what, what is the output and the output saying something like somebody in the chat room was saying like,

Oh, the verge gave this 7.3 and they give this other one to 7.1, which is like a piece or macro did that. When I first started at macro is they had this essentially a hundred point rating system. And the fact was that, you know, there was no target levels of precision.

There was no level of precision to that point of 100 like like there was a difference between a 6.8 and a 6.7 is there really a difference between those significant significant figures yeah significant figures it's just like no there's no way there's no way right so with wire cutter it is much more like a cisco and ebert situation which is like this one but it's not even like yes or no to this product it's like in this category just buy this product and there is something they break it off and where it'll be exactly it isn't just like here's the best tv to buy it's like here's the best tv to buy at the they could say

at the higher high end or not just any like uh specific it could be different kinds of knives or whatever but they if it's too big of a topic they break it into pieces and it maintains its use exactly exactly right and they and they and they sort that stuff, which is not to say that there aren't issues because having written a couple of Wirecutter pieces, I mean, it was a judgment call. In the end, it was a judgment call. I couldn't, you know, it's a very rare product where you can set up some measurements and press some buttons and run some tests and have your answer. Most of the time, you end up having to make a judgment call based on your experience and your, and even, even when you're pressing the buttons, you have to decide what you want to measure, which, which was when we had a lab back at Mac world and PC world, you know, the lab is deciding what to measure. And there's a great skill in that and figuring

out what the most appropriate measurements are and how to make them. I mean, it's no, it's no surprise that the macworld lab is largely employed doing uh performance marketing testing at apple now right they were really good at coming up with tests and so yeah the test the numbers were objective but who made the test that measures the numbers and it's all it's you know it's judgment calls all the way down is what i'm saying and turtles and turtles yeah yeah so i i mean if we're if we're putting a button on this i i guess uh because people like buttons you know i guess as we can agree that people should watch faithful findings it's a great neil brady it is is an amazing amazing what's that coffee he he does

and he's got lots of laptops that just uh don't work and books and books um the i i guess what i would say about ratings is uh they're a tool to be used and disregarded um by the people who look at them and so uh as with so many things if you're a savvy consumer be aware of where those ratings come from and who is writing them and how they're calculated in the case of something like Rotten Tomatoes. I think that's a healthy thing in life. The way that somebody like Nate Silver analyzes political polling or the way that Nate Silver came out of the baseball analytics background, he was a baseball prospectus, the way that the people who do sapermetric stuff are looking at numbers and saying, hey, this batting average doesn't seem like it's actually the best measure of whether somebody is a good baseball player or not. And all of that, I mean, I just think it's healthy for all of us to keep that in mind. What are the biases? What are the, where does this number come from? Because the old joke is numbers never lie. You can't argue with numbers. And the people who say that are generally people who know that the numbers always

lie and don't believe it when somebody tells you that. And I just feel like that in the end, you need to know what's in the sausage when it comes to reviews. And the other thing I wanted to say in the button up here is I always took it as a great responsibility. And I did try to internalize what my rating system would be when I was rating a product. and I did try to internalize what my rating system would be when I was rating a product. You're asking people to spend $3,000, or not asking, but people are making $3,000, $5,000 decisions.

I've got to tell you, I don't want no pressure here, but back in the day that was, I mean, the number of mice was the definitive review for Apple stuff for me. I would read all the other ones but yours was the one, Macworld was the one that I would really put the most credibility into. And if you didn't like something, you could potentially destroy somebody's business,

right? I mean, you could literally be like, this is a piece of garbage, and they would never sell any and they would be done. And so it's a great responsibility to do that. That all said, you know, the moment I got a chance to not give a rating to something anymore, a numerical rating, I took it because I felt like the point of my reviews was not we always had this like with os 10 i would review os 10 every year and be like are we rating this and sometimes we did and sometimes we didn't but it was like what's the point what are we comparing it to is if os 10 gets a four or a three and a half or a four and a half does anybody know or care what should you what

should you do differently why would it be right i mean would i change a word of my review um no i will say that after 20 years of editing reviews i could read a review and say what the rating was and and if the rating wasn't what i thought it was i would go back to the reviewer and say okay we got a problem here either i know you gave this two and a half but either this is this is a three or three and a half and you just got the rating wrong and we'll change the rating or your review is far too positive the words and you need to make it much more clear about why you gave it two and a half out of five that's so frustrating when they don't match and um but it was something i could internalize it was

something that i you know and that was that was good because i would much rather the rating on something come from like what metacritic does come from the words than from like a spreadsheet that you have tricked yourself into believing is totally uh totally objective but is in fact not remotely objective um because that happens a lot i think we fixed it okay good high five yeah congratulations thanks everybody you're welcome um a lot of genres yeah so many netflix genres oh my goodness deep sea horror movies like with deep blue sea i guess uh and the abyss is not really well no i keep holding off on the abyss because i i know i can't get the right version and the right resolution so i keep waiting i've never seen it this is not on our our list but i

love the abyss um i don't think we have time for anything no the abyss Director's Edition, I saw it, I think, in a 70 millimeter on Van Ness at the big, at the time, new theater on Van Ness. Oh, wow. And we came into the city to see it. And it was so great. Because if you've seen James Cameron's the abyss and you've only seen the original theatrical release it it's not very good it has a really bad ending and the special edition that he did on video on vhs and they did release in theaters briefly is great but apparently james cameron is too busy making more avatar movies to supervise the hd release of the abyss special

edition and there is an hd version that plays on hbo occasionally but it's the it's the stupid original version and it's a kind of a shame and yeah i feel i want to do an incomparable episode about it but i really don't see the point if the only edition that you can get that's the good version of the movie is on vhs yeah i've looked on the back of trucks i can't find it it. No. No, I got a VHS tape here. I can loan you, but I don't know if I have a VCR. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to, let's see.

I want to do one other topic really quickly. Maybe we'll skip over spoilers. We'll come back to that. We'll circle back some other time because I do want to follow up with you about Reconcilable Differences, episode 30. Deploy me tactically again in the future because I'd love to talk about this sometime. I would love to talk about it.

You know, I listen to your podcast. I listen to Rectifs especially, and I feel like these are two people I know, and you're having this conversation about things that I don't ever talk about on podcasts, even though I'm on a million podcasts. These are the things you guys talk about are not things I talk about,

just like Mike and Casey on Analog, right? And I have a moment where I am doing what every podcast l lister does which is i'm talking back to you know i'm i'm i'm jogging up the bike path in mill valley and john is in one ear and merlin's in the other and i'm like no no no merlin is wrong or john is wrong and i always slough that off when people say that because i'm like ah whatever i'm just talking but then i listened to a podcast about mr robot the other day and the guy kept calling darlene dolores and i was screaming screaming at my iphone and i was like this is what it's like to listen to me this is you know fair turn around yeah yeah so i i would like at some point to to talk to you about that because because you talk about interesting stuff that i don't necessarily get to on my other

podcast and you talked about spoilers in rectifs 30 people could listen to that spoilers for the concept of spoilers on that episode but um maybe we should jump ahead i wanted to just mention so we were talking about you mentioned common sense media um and one of the notes i had was about showing adult things to kids and i just wanted to mention at least anecdotally so we we were going to do an episode of the incomparable about alien and it was going to be this morning and we ended up um some people couldn't make it so we pushed it off a couple of weeks but uh we watched alien on saturday night after we raided our dinner we watched alien what a night to be alive let me tell you in the snell house um things are blowing up at shay snow so we're watching alien we're gonna watch alien and uh julian refused which

i find fascinating because he apparently has looked everything up on the internet this is a he's a very 21st century kid because he was like oh no that's scary you know what happens that movie the alien comes out of a guy's chest spoilers for alien which was made in 1979 by the way alien comes out of this guy's chest it's really scary it's really scary and gross and we're like julian well do you want to see it he's like no it's too scary so he knows all about it but doesn't want to see it whereas jamie doesn't know about it and wants to see it and she's 14 um i feel like it's it's a perfectly right age for her to start seeing movies that are a little bit rougher i've been you know i've been i've been hesitant for a while but at this point at this point it's really more that her little brother usually is around and we are uh nipping off what she's allowed to watch

because he's in the room but this was a case where we're like you know what julian if you want to be scared out of your mind by the alien you can you can do it knowing full well that he's gonna be like no i'm gonna be in my room uh and so we watched it and it was just funny because it is an r-rated horror movie and um you know she ended up asking lauren to come on the couch with her lauren was sitting next to me on our little chair and and she she my teenager asked her mom to come over and sit with her to give her some support you can't prepare people for is the tension. It's just, you know, that's the thing about a great movie like that is that, yeah, sure, I mean, there are some famous scenes in that movie where there's a big scare, but like,

it's just, it's just that music, the tension, the hallways, it's just, it's unbearable. Yeah. I mean, she laughed when the alien comes out of John Hurt's chest and runs out. She laughed because it's a puppet. It's a ridiculous puppet. It's much better later, but that scene is like, you know, it might as well be Kermit the Frog running across there. There's one shot at the very end

in the otherwise just stunning third act of that movie. There is a scene when the guy in the suit's kind of flapping around. You're like, oh, come on. You're showing him too much. You're doing a Jaws on me here. Show me less, show me less. But then in Aliens, the second they they they got a lot better they are way more menacing as like moving around characters in the second one yeah yeah what

a good movie but anyway that was that was that moment and it's so hard to know because every kid is i find this topic endlessly uh yeah i find it endlessly fascinating because every kid is so different and you could have the kid that is the toughest kid in the world about almost everything except this one thing and on top of it all you don't want to scar them yeah like honestly i made that crack about scary music i have a bunch of friends whose kids are otherwise totally normal kids but as soon as they hear some cellos like while they're looking at a dark forest game over shut it all down julian julian's like that he to the point where um because we'll watch doctor who right and it's got scary stuff in it too but the thing that gets him is not the scary

aliens it's the scary tense music and he used to run out of the room when he hears scary music and stuff and and now he even though he's now 12 years old he will put his hands over his ears like it's okay to watch it but i'm not going to listen to the music and then he'll put his hands over his ears. Like, it's okay to watch it, but I'm not going to listen to the music. And then he'll take the hands back off again. For my kid, I think it's jump scares. It's, you know, I don't know if I'm using that term correctly. Aliens got those. Oh, they got a couple.

But yeah, anything where something like pops into the screen or, you know, I started getting good at this when I was about 13, which is like, even though I didn't have the vocabulary for it, I'd go, hmm, that's kind of an odd camera angle. In the years before Mr. Robot, you'd go, boy, that seems like a lot of white space in the upper right area. Why so tight on Ripley as she's turning around?

Yeah, right. Why not give that a little more headroom? Oh, is it because there's an alien right behind her that's about to be revealed? Yes, that could be. I'm with you because there's so many struggles to this. And a lot of it's just dumb and selfish, is like uh i i think you'd really enjoy this we're going through this a little bit with books right now where i've been buying um my daughter some books that are a little old for her just kind of having them around that if she wants to

discover some nerd books they're there we've been reading hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy at night i got her copy of ender's game her mom and her reading a wrinkle in time i've been trying to get her some like kind of classic nerd books just to have around and it's very difficult to know and i you know i don't want to push but i also like i wanted to be able to like read it as a new reader of that and then come back to it and go oh you know what i mean and we get those successive uh layers of like oh now i. Now I really get that. I see why that's what they mean by nailing a guy to a tree. Now I know what that means. But it's hard to know. What's your guidepost for these things?

Well, so Lauren is a children's librarian. So this is her job. I mean, essentially her job is to know what the books are and gauge the kids' ages and interests and sort of what they're up to and then try to put it all together so i'm fascinated by that because she so she and she that is actually a big part of her job is a kid comes in and she has to sort of quiz them about what they've read and what they liked and and know what's out there um i it's funny because you mentioned in in our notes you

mentioned the that uh the scene in ghostbusters where dan ekroyd crosses his eyes and falls off the bed absolutely as unnecessary as it was unsuccessful apparently the story is that that was supposed to be in the movie as part of the plot and they're like no and they they they instead they edited it to be part of the montage because that was going to be a wacky ghost sex scene and they're like no danny we're not going to do that we'll just put it in the montage but um but my argument for that scene is very much my argument for a lot of books thinking about the books that i read as a kid uh too which is i think when you're when you're so young and innocent that you don't want to expose them to concepts that are problematic.

Huh? See? Look what I did there. I think... Thank you. I think if they're really young and innocent like that, they're not going to get it. Because I didn't get the ghost thing in Ghostbusters. The ghost job. The ghost job in Ghostbusters. Just a ghost job. I did not... It is a ghost job in ghostbusters i did not i did not it

is a ghost job well the ghost can have lots of jobs merlin come on um don't be normative i didn't get it i didn't get it until i was much older and then i watched the movie and i was like that's what that is because at the time i just thought it was wacky that that that his pants got unzipped and he fell off his bed and And that was just the thing. And I just, it never- It did not go, it's silly. Exactly. It never, he's like that. It never occurred to me. And there's books that I read that are,

because there's stuff that's explicit, right? And then there's also stuff that's like suggestive. And the great thing about things that are suggestive is it flies right over your head. And so my worries about my kids and what they've been exposed to, it's actually, I actually am a lot less worried about it than I was when I started as a parent because I've seen it happen too many times now where if they're old enough to get it, they'll get it. And if they're not old enough to get it, they don't get it.

And it's fine. A lot of times they're queuing off of our reaction. You know, what's your fascination with that? He's forbidden closet of mystery. You know, it's when we get really daddy's forbidden closet of mystery you know it's when we get really keyed up about things that i think that's what they remember it's like whether or not they realize that i think kids make a mental note of what what punches their parents buttons even if they don't understand it they can look to us and know that we're freaked out about

it daddy's uh hidden closet of mystery is full of comic books by the way um at least in this house we were watching, sometimes we'll just go through Jags, where, well, it's not really official TV time yet, but maybe we'll watch some music videos. And so we'll frequently watch OK Go videos, or one we both enjoy is My Chemical Romance. And we were watching, yeah, that's right, I'm 50.

I like My Chemical Romance. But we were watching that video for I'm Not OK, which is a really good song, really's right, I'm 50 I like my chemical romance But if you're watching that video for I'm Not Okay Which is a really good song, really good video But it's got a couple things in it that are a little dodgy And sometimes she'll offer up what her explanation is for something And it's wrong, and I'm relieved But I still feel bad that she's looking at it Same thing with Parks and Rec

Which is our absolute go-to show for the last few months We're like, you know And in that case, I think you're right. It's suggestive. It's not like too on the nose, but like when Tom's talking about condoms or something, and we don't shy away from it. But now it's funny though, because now I think she has seen us tense up a little bit. So the one where Chris and Anne are talking about, you know, getting the sample, she grabs the remote and fast forwards. She's like, oh oh yeah we could skip over this yeah anything that's even remotely uh romantic julian just wants to like leave the room or or forward or skip or something enjoy it enjoy it i know yeah he's 12 they grew up so fast uh i want to

do some ask upgrade before we go i would love that all right it's time for hashtag ask upgrade ask upgrade thank you very very nicely done uh eric wrote in saying i waited all year for a new 12.9 inch ipad pro should i finally buy or painfully wait for 2017 well all signs eric point to painfully waiting for 2017 it sounds very much like Apple's decided that fall is for iPhones and spring is for iPads. Like, but... What else? You know, I realize that you're propped up by Big iPad on a lot of these shows. Well, it's so big

I can just lean back on it and it props me up. Well, funny thing, I popped for the big one and which sounds terrible, I popped for the big one and I liked it. Most young kids that'll just go right over their heads, though. But you're just suggestive. It's not a ghost beach.

But you've seen this go around and around and around in the Slack, where it's like there are people who are like, well, you asked me anything about the iPad Pro. It's so big. Yeah, but what about, you know what? It is so big. I gave it to my wife. She loves it it i love mine

she loves the giant one she watched all the stranger things on it uh last night she watched the entire stranger things yesterday and um and i bought the uh smaller one and it's already up there with the se30 for me like it's up there in the apple hall of fame because now i can thumb type again without all my words having commas in them. It's perfect for me. So my question to you, Jason Snell, what is this, our listener Eric, what is it he should be waiting for? In other words, what's he going to miss out on if he buys one now? I think the problem with this is he waited all year for a new 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

All year suggests that Eric was waiting in January when the iPad Pro had only been out for like a month or two. And you shouldn't have just bought it in january because you would you know i i think yeah will there be new models that are a little bit better come next year yeah almost certainly but you shouldn't wait a year because there always will be a next year's model always i'm not hobbled by by j Jason's legacy of assigning mice to things. So I'm just going to say, like, if you can really use it, and you can probably really use it,

if you can use it, I would say go test out the different ones. Make sure it's the one that you really love. That's true. In my case, I'm a big proponent of the smaller one. But the big one is very, very special as a device. But if you can use it, I would say don't wait too long.

I mean, I bought the giant, giant one because I'm going to use this thing forever. Yeah, and they do last and i i don't feel when i'm using the 12.9 inch ipad pro that i'm like oh boy if only this thing were just a little bit better and i don't think it's going to be kind of like blowing everybody away better uh in the spring anyway it'll be better you have a faster processor when they put out the ipad air 2 and we all thought my goodness what what could the reason possibly be for making this so powerful? We learned with iOS 9 why that is. It's on the public beta of iOS 10 on

everything. And boy, it just keeps getting better. The stuff like Split View and Safari. Oh, I used that for the first time today and I just had a moment of... You've got to turn it sideways. I forgot you've always got to turn it sideways. But stuff like that and the now getting Split View with Google Docs.

And the thing is that you don't appreciate on the bigger iPad is the... You can kind of pull over to get like a little view into something if it's a compatible app. You pull further over now, hey, you got the whole thing. You can go over to halfway. Then you can... It's just like once you get... It's going to take a while to get used to doing that. But once you do, like using Siri, like dictation, it's going to be hard to ever look back.

We've got, it's a great device. I love mine. I really do. We've got, so there are three in the document right now. People can't see this because people who listen can't look in the document, but there's three questions here. I want to answer one of those. Which one would you like us to address?

We don't have time for all three. Those middle three. Listener Dan. Listener Dan says, you both have daughters. I have one year until mine starts kindergarten. What should I make time to do with her before then? What do you got?

It's a hard one. I'll jump in. I think, i think there's a funny line to walk with with kids stuff and family stuff where like i feel like there's a lot of pressure to have uh family things and stuff and traditions and let's go read a book about like what to do on valentine's day and there's so much pressure to that stuff but what i'll say is this like discover the organic like emerging patterns that are already there and then just officialize them a little bit.

I think really dumb, obvious stuff, but that's a perfect age to start having a place. We're here talking about a dad and a daughter. If there's a daddy-daughter place, become aware of that and make that part of Daddy-Daughter Day. Have that be a place that both of you look forward to going to. Especially if it could be something as simple as a library or ideally not just shopping but someplace a destination where you both like to be with rituals associated

with it right i still mean more than her probably but dumb stuff like for for two years we had a bookmobile while our library was being redone and we would always get a book and go read it in this little uh area in the woods like silly stuff like that is really fun i think having a certain i know you're really good at this having a certain meal that you really like making together will always be fun um and then this one's kind of silly and corny but like uh if there are other people in your house, like say a mom in this case especially, start a tradition or you may already have a tradition but turn it, semi-officialize it into like a random arbitrary nice thing that we do sometimes for no reason. So maybe that could be in my – this is really silly. Who cares? My daughter likes making my wife a fancy water.

So we'll make her like a spot, like a nice – in a nice glass with ice. You put in lemon. You put in cucumber. She's eight. Give her a break. She's really into that and she brings it in on a tray and it never doesn't delight my wife so find something a little dumb cheap thing that delights the other people in the family and make that something you and your daughter do and i will go just a little more pragmatic and say one of the beautiful things about when a child is not in school is that they're available all the time which means that if you're working a regular kind of job i would say taking a morning

or taking a day and doing something on a weekday that is harder to do on the weekend is something that you can do when they're not in school that you can't do like we would do we would go my wife um at the time wasn't working um at that time i don't know if she was working at all and so she would do it a lot i would do it occasionally but she would take our daughter to the zoo to the san francisco zoo and sometimes with some other families or we meet other families there and that was apparently that scene is a whole lot better um on you know you lot better on a Tuesday at 1 in the afternoon.

Or 1 is going to be nap time. On a Tuesday at 10 in the morning. It's so fun. You walk right in. You can run the place. The only thing is make sure it's not the free day. You don't want to go on free day if you remember because boy is it full. I think it's a great one or a ball game. Something like that.

Once they're in school that's going to be your responsibility to have them go in school and you can you can play hooky or take the day off but you can't really do that with your kid i mean you can but it's a lot harder and there's a lot of guilt attached so this this past summer went so fast i mean we're already back in school we're about to start the second week of school and it's uh it's just stunning. It's like I just remember saying goodbye to you, and I'll see her last, like, you know, she's in third grade now. So she's got this whole, like, rogues gallery of former teachers I see, and it's like, I mean, it goes fast. Last question.

Lucas asks, what's your favorite episode of Doctor Who? Ask me anything. This one is hard. know right i i mean in some ways i'm fighting it because the answer is so blindingly obvious to me but it's mostly for kind of sentimental day of the doctor day of the doctor i love love you just watch you just watch that as like comfort food right oh i do i just watched it the other day somebody this is one of those things where like if somebody mentions like radiohead i have to go listen to okay computer if somebody mentions talking about good doctor who episodes and i just

go in i just i go straight to the scene with the no sir all 13 and i'm crying you know never cowardly or cruel never give up never give in it's the biggest it's not a good first episode but the payoff in that episode just keeps coming and coming and coming and it's it's delightful on so many levels if you like anything about dr who at all um you know john that john hurt he's in uh he's an alien too the war doctor absolutely yeah i blew my daughter's mind when i said that's the old guy from the doctor who episode he's also olivander he's olivander um so for me this yeah this why why you have to be so mean lucas um i think i'm torn i i like um you know i like choosing episodes that are not the ones that everybody chooses so i'm not gonna say like blink or something like that even though i dances i really do love blink um i'm gonna choose

midnight which i would argue is that's a david tennant episode uh by russell t davis i would argue who's the companion who's that well it's uh donna but she's not in it other than like the bracketing scenes it's just david tennant and uh that's the one where they go off in the space truck and it breaks down in the middle of nowhere and the oh it's just like the box the box episode it's all inside the it's so good and i would say um i would say it is like blink actually twilight zone level writing like it feels like a twilight zone episode you don't you don't need to know all of the history and the tapestry of dr who like blink you can just go in and appreciate this it's really great to compare it's chilling it's about human nature i you could

literally the camera could flip around. Instead of him going back and talking to Donna about what just happened, the camera could flip around and Rod Serling could tell you something about human nature in that episode. And it is a beautiful thing. And my runner-up is probably Vincent and the Doctor for similar reasons. Oh, I cry and cry. It's an anti-Doctor Who episode because there's an obligatory plot about an invisible chicken alien that there but it it really is about depression and about understanding vincent fagot um van gogh if you want to get something in your throat but then they go and they talk to

bill nye that's that's the thing is it does what no other doctor who episode bothers to do which is they meet a historical figure who's vincent who is depressed and they know is going to kill himself very soon. And he's never, he's never going to amount to anything and nobody will remember him. Because he like somebody like Emily Dickinson, he's a tragic historical figure who's considered to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest artist of all time, one of the greatest writers of all time,

somebody like Emily Dickinson, but never had any praise in Vincent's case, like sold one painting. And in the episode, it like the plot ends with like 10 minutes left and you're like, what are they doing? And the answer is they take Vincent by the hand, take him to the future,

walk into the art gallery with all of his paintings in it. Talk to Bill Nighy, who is the curator of the art gallery and says, tell me your opinion of Vincent Van Gogh. And he says, he's the, he's the greatest artist that humanity has ever created. And nobody's ever done anything like what he's done and vincent's just sitting there hearing this like and so like finally i you know it's like you will be remembered and appreciated

for the work that you did in your life and they take him back and of course the other part of it is um the tragedy of it is he was he had a mental illness and he did kill himself and and i think that is a beautiful message about um although tragic it's a beautiful message about depression is not something that can be reasoned away even with something as reasonable as you will be known as the greatest artist ever it's like he was shown that and it didn't matter because of because of who he was and and the disease that he was struggling with so um that's a beautiful episode good but midnight is probably my number one but it's like what's the last day of attendance at the end of time yeah yeah it's it's like the it's like the end of time where like it's like something something something

you know you know sirene sirene sirene like there's a whole bunch of like blah blah there's some really kind of crappy tv show and then the ending the last part is so good yeah before that with that one before before that it's a terrible episode and then the ending the last part is so good yeah before that with that one before before that it's a terrible episode and then the last 20 minutes is is like the goodbye part and the goodbye part is great oh it's just crushing did you say that when you're waiting in line at the me at the museum they they play that his i don't want to go yes at the doctor who experience which i went to when it was in london now it's in cardiff they play that last uh two minutes on a loop where he walks into the TARDIS

and says, I don't want to go. And it explodes and all that. And then it just starts again and again. And you're standing in that room for like 20, 30 minutes. And it's just all the things you could show. Why don't you show like Christopher Eccleston,

like celebrating? I'm sure they do that now. I'm sure they've moved on from that, but boy, that was a, that was thing. So there that's upgrade. We talked about a lot of stuff. It was a little, little boy, that was a thing. So, that's Upgrade. We talked about a lot of stuff.

It was a little change of pace. That's what happens when Mike's not here and when Merlin is here. Can you deploy me tactically? Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on. I never miss an episode, and it's an honor to sit in. Thanks a million for having me. Thank you so much for taking time to be here.

Of course, you can hear Merlin on all his many podcasts, including Reconcilable Differences with John Syracuse right here. You're on the back to work you're on the rhetoric on the line you got you're you're all over the place these days but i am but rec dips is the is the one here at relay thank you to our sponsors ring and mac weldon thanks to everybody out there for listening mike will be back next week um i think we may actually be back to drafting um uh apple event topics next week we'll see but uh until then thanks to everybody for listening we'll see you next week say goodbye jason goodbye jason you'll cut that out probably say goodbye merlin. No. No I will not. I will not.