Upgrade - 139: Make Money from the Money
Episode Date: May 2, 2017If there are two things Myke knows a lot about, it’s banking and stickers. And so this week he helps Jason understand why banks might not love Apple’s new attempt to expand Apple Pay and why he co...vers his sleek, pristine Apple devices with loads of stickers.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
from relay fm this is upgrade episode 139 today's show is brought to you by our fine sponsors
the folk at encapsula casper and mac weldon my name is mike hurley i am joined by mr jason snail hi jason snail hi mike hurley how are you today
i'm fine i would tell you about the weather but i'm not allowed to do that anymore no today jason
you have to tell me in our snail talk segment about your uh favorite peanut butter as asked
by timicus because they said that you have mentioned this on a couple of shows recently
that you like peanut butter and they want to know what brand of peanut butter is the snell approved brand i'm i i okay
yeah peanut butter is my favorite food that's true i decided this finally after after 40 plus
years on this planet i i finally realized my favorite food is peanut butter um you know you
always think of something else and then like a like a
meal or something instead of no it's peanut butter um i buy the uh the the peanut butter i get us
from trader joe's and it's the and i prefer the crunchy to the smooth um and i feel like i get
really john syracuse on this and that's probably not wise.
But I will say that generally, I prefer the, you know, what when I was a kid, we called
the 100% natural peanut butter, and it's the kind that doesn't have any other ingredients
other than peanuts and salt.
So none of the like stabilized, put it in your pantry, don't refrigerate it kind of
peanut butters that
they make that where they change the oil that's in it and take out the peanut oil and none of
that stuff the real the real deal the real stuff and the stuff that i get uh for my daily use is
uh trader joe's all right well there you go i'll never eat it but i'm pleased that you like it do
you know i have a peanut allergy i i did you how do you how are you feeling
now that we talked about peanuts is that okay are you still do you have any reaction passed out for
a moment there but uh okay i'm back to it now you're visualized eating a peanut and then passed
out realized it was just a visualization just the idea you're more allergic to the idea of peanuts. I'm allergic to peanuts as a concept
as opposed to peanuts as a food.
So that's my real problem in life.
Don't read any Charlie Brennan Snoopy comics.
You could die.
Jason Snell, we have some exciting news
to share with the Upgradians.
Do we?
That they now have the opportunity to be Downloadians as well
if they would so wish to be.
We have a new show on RelayFM, and it's called Download.
And this is a show idea that me and Stephen and you have been working on together for quite some time.
I am not involved in the production of the show.
You are the host of this show, and Stephen is your producer.
Would you like to tell the Upgradians a little bit about what Download is?
Yeah, I mean, it's different.
It is a different kind of thing for Relay, I would say.
In general, when we were in Memphis last summer,
we talked about the idea of a show like this for a while.
And the idea was, could we do something that covered a broader tech base than just...
Even like Clockwise, which I do with Dan, is because of my background and Dan's background,
a little more Apple-focused. And it's also very time-constrained for topics in 30 minutes.
We thought, what if we did something that was less Apple-focused, did not have that kind of
a time constraint? You could really discuss sort of the issues of the week. Um, and in terms of some of the ways it's structured,
like Steven is, so I'm hosting it. Steven is producing it, which is kind of a different
thing. He's there on the call, but generally doesn't participate much. Um, he's more there
as our facilitator. We're trying to, you know, just to have it be a little bit different
and then putting the show together
and having it be, ideally,
it's a recap of,
it's discussion of the stories of the week
in the general tech world
for people to listen to at the end of the week.
So that's sort of our part of the
conception of it that we, I remember you and I talked about too, the idea that you do a week
recap and you have it available for people to listen to basically on their Friday commutes.
So we do it, we're recording it on Thursdays and releasing sort of Thursday afternoon-ish.
And so it's on people's devices if they want to listen on Friday, either morning or
afternoon on their commutes as a sort of capper to the week of what's been going on in the broader
tech field. And then the idea of the guests is that this is a place where we want to bring in
people, some familiar voices, but we also want to bring in new people who haven't been on relay
before at all and introduce people to some some
some new new interesting people and voices talking about technology that um it's going to be one of
the biggest i think challenges in the show is finding and uh you know uncovering those people
and bringing them on the show and then you know there's the logistics of scheduling them to come
on and getting that all working and that but that's that's part of the premise of the show. And then, you know, there's the logistics of scheduling them to come on and getting that all working. And that, but that's, that's part of the premise of the show is to have
it be, it's not a, it's not the same people every week. It's, it's a, uh, it's, it's new people.
And it's hopefully from a, a different and larger pool than maybe we use for clockwise.
And it's a different Jason to the Jason that we get on upgrade, isn't it?
Yeah. I mean, I, I already have a show where i can talk
about what topics i want to talk about every week and that's upgrade right so and download the idea
is that i'm the host and like that's the that's part of the premise is i am a i am asking questions
and facilitating conversation but you should hear my voice a lot less on download than you do on upgrade.
My goal is to use my skills that I built up as an interviewer and as a podcaster to try and facilitate conversation with the interesting people that we have on as panelists. So really, I think if I'm doing my job,
I'm getting a lot of interesting conversation
out of the guests
and not filling it with my own stuff
because I have other places that I can do that.
And that's not my goal with download.
And so it's an ambitious project
that you guys have taken on.
And I really enjoyed listening to episode one
where your guests were Serenity Caldwell and Lisa Schmeiser.
You talk about a bunch of really interesting stuff,
including the Amazon look,
which it was really interesting to hear them talk about it,
especially Lisa,
because she seems to have quite a background in retail,
like understanding the inner workings of retail.
So people can go and find it.
It's at relay.fm slash download.
And there are a bunch of ways that listeners can participate and you talk about
that on the show but i think another one which is quite interesting you know we talk about and you
were speaking about trying to find new and interesting voices i mean i think you would
very much appreciate people letting you know who they want to hear on the show as well as the
stories right yeah and there's people can tweet at underscore download FM, which just fits right in with all the other Relay accounts.
That's really difficult to get anything with the word download in it on Twitter, right?
Yeah, probably.
So that's a funny thing.
I had a bunch of people respond saying, how am I ever going to find download?
Because if you Google for download podcast, you're going to get literally how to download a podcast.
And the answer is, one, we thought of this. And two,
people don't Google just the name of a podcast, really. They put it into their podcast player.
And I would wager that if you search in most podcast players, even for just the word download,
you'll probably find it. Because there aren't, I think there is not a podcast that we could find
that's just called Download.
So it should be in there.
It was when I did a search in Overcast the day after we launched it, it was the number one result. So I think that people can that was our idea was that it's actually a really bad name if you're trying to do something that has to be done via a Google search.
But I just don't think that's thinking in the podcast
context i think it's actually a clever name and it's like upgrade and then there's download and
relay has all these one word names the fact that you as a listener found the show upgrade means
you can probably find the show download i i think that's a fair very fair point right right that
it's just these are these are our simple words that it's going to be hard to find if you are just
doing a broad search.
But in your podcast app of choice, not a problem.
Another part of this premise is that it's the tech stories that are most interesting
of the week.
And it's meant to be a little opinionated.
One of the places where my and Stephen's sensibility comes into the show is the stories we pick.
We're trying to pick interesting stories from a variety of different angles that we think have some depth to them that go beyond just, here's a computer that was announced.
I mean, that'll happen from time to time, but like the Amazon, the Echo look, right?
We ended up talking about Amazon's ambitions for uh retail and fashion
and and also we talked about personalization and things like that so it allows us to pick
kind of interesting topics it's not going to be 15 topics a week and uh and also i think we're
shooting for like between an hour and 90 minutes for the shows so we don't want it to be we don't
want to be like a a very long show It's not super constrained like clockwise either.
We're trying to find a happy medium there, but it is opinionated in the sense that we're
picking some topics that we think are going to be really interesting and varied every
week.
And that's part of what Stephen and I are doing when we put the show together.
And we're watching all the headlines all week long and putting links together and then kind
of debating what we want the show's main topics to actually be when we get toward recording time cool so uh people can go get it now reader.fm download
and they can uh tune in and i bet people will enjoy it but we do have some more traditional
follow-up uh copyright john syracusa uh sure ryan uh sent us a link that already nine to five mac were reporting that uh i think
bloomberg had found the first images of somebody uh finding the self-driving lexus yeah we were
just we were just talking about this and here it is which is um with the apple car stuff uh i think i said it's only a matter of time before the uh first shot of
a lexus with stuff on it is revealed and here it is which is it's like a day or two later
yep there you go they found it and i think it's it's very highly expected to be the car that apple
is using because it's like completely unbranded has a bunch of tech on it that's expected and is the exact model of lexus so there you go it's there if you want to see what
it looks like it doesn't look very exciting um no it's it's a lexus with with bits on it like with
just like tech bits tech bits yep that's what they call it listed as such yeah just add the
tech bits in the car well it's got a little a
little silver ball here and a little camera pod there and it's just you know it's it's a uh that's
what it is it's a it's so i hope everybody's excited that we've seen the uh tech bits we've
seen apple cars in the wild in uh in this completely irrelevant test form. I did want to say, we were talking about Apple Car stuff.
The Tesla Show podcast was recommended to us by a couple of different people
because they did an episode there, episode number 53,
which was called The Apple Car.
And it's all about going into great detail about what would Apple's car strategy be.
And I thought it was, I thought it was really good. I having never heard this podcast before,
I thought the guys were, were, were very interesting with their analysis. I liked that.
I liked it a lot. And the thing that they did that I had never really considered in detail before
that they made me think is a serious
possibility is that the end game of Apple's car strategy is not to sell a car to anybody,
but to create a car service where you call for a car and it comes and gets you and takes you
where you want to go. And then they don't need a dealer network or anything. They go straight after,
essentially, if you can imagine what Uber would be if they replace, well, if, when they replace
all of their pesky drivers with computers, which is I'm sure their goal, right? They've said as
much. Imagining a world where people don't have to even own a car. They're just a
member of the service and they call for a self-driving car and it comes and picks them up
and takes them where they want to go. And that seems kind of wild, but if you think about it,
you can roll that out in different cities, in different markets. And given how many people
live in urban areas, you could cover a pretty large
portion of a population just by serving urban and suburban areas um really interesting argument i
think it has a lot of strength to it in the sense that it gets it gets apple out of the business of
sort of selling people a car and supporting them uh and fixing their cars when they're in warranty
and things like that and instead makes it more
about how apple's the owner of all those cars and all you do is sign up for the service and ask for
a car when you need it i think it's a it's a couple levels further back in terms of sort of
conceptualizing where the transportation personal transportation world is going but that sounds very apple to me too
i mean and it lines up with that investment they made in the chinese car handling service which i
think is called dd yeah yeah that i had that exact thought they didn't mention that in the uh in the
tesla show episode but that was my thought too was that shows apple gaining some expertise
by being a partner with Didi
is that they're thinking of car service as a concept.
Yeah, that is interesting.
Not necessarily like I'm going to...
Right, because if you believe,
and this is an open question,
but if you believe that in the long run,
if you have self-driving cars,
and most cars, as people pointed out,
most cars spend...
Well, every car spends most of its time unused, right? Unless you're a cab, your car sits in a driveway or a parking lot for
most of the time. It's only driving for a small fraction of time. So if you look at that and you
think that in the long run, it would be way more efficient for cars to be in operation all the
time and you've got self-driving technology, then for most cases, you'd be better off not owning a
car and being a member of a car network as long as they can provide you a car when you need it,
either on demand or by a schedule, and get you where you need to go, that actually would be a far more efficient use of the technology
and of space in cities to have the cars moving instead of parked. Now, not saying that that's
absolutely going to happen, but that's certainly a possible future for transportation. And if that's
the case, then, you know, that potentially simplifies a lot of what Apple would have to shoot for.
And if you're Apple, do you want to shoot for, if you believe that that's going to happen in 10 or 15 years, would you do all the work required to sell cars to people now, knowing that in 5 or 10 or 15 years, you're going to stop?
Now, obviously, Tesla's doing that.
Tesla has to do that right now.
going to stop. Now, obviously, Tesla's doing that. Tesla has to do that right now. But maybe Apple wouldn't have to do that if they're five years out for something like this, and they're just
rolling it out in certain markets. I don't know. It's a wild idea, but I was intrigued by it. I
think it's an interesting concept. And they cover that in some detail in that podcast. So it's worth
a listen. All right. Yeah, I don't know if I would have come to that conclusion
on my own for quite some time, if at all.
But that definitely makes way more sense
than building a car.
Right.
Or even making a CarPlay Plus type thing.
Yeah, and I think that Google,
I mean, I think this is what Google is thinking too.
I think it's a very similar thing to what Google is thinking,
which is in the long run, or, you know, alphabet,
that in the long run, you know,
transportation becomes more of a service.
And I know that this is what Uber is thinking.
Like Uber absolutely thinks that the future of Uber
is self-driving cars that come when you call.
And are they wrong about that?
I don't know.
I mean, there are always going to be
exceptions, right? If you're in a rural area, you're not going to be able to do that. There
are always going to be people who have to have, even in a world like this, if we accept that this
will happen, there are going to be exceptions. People who have to have their own car because
their roads aren't covered.
But, and here's the other part of this that I thought was interesting,
is all of those Apple Maps cars,
they talk about this a little bit in the podcast,
all those Apple Maps cars
that everybody got excited about,
but then they thought were Apple self-driving cars,
but they're not.
They're just Apple Maps cars
with all these sensors on them.
What they point out in this podcast
is something that, again,
I hadn't really thought about. And I'm kicking myself now, which is, well, yeah, they say they're
Apple Maps cars, but what they're probably is enhanced Apple mapping cars that are getting
lots of detail because for the Apple self-driving car, they need way more detail for their for their maps right so they you
know apple's apple's mapping cars that are out there mapping roads are not necessarily just
improving the data of apple maps but they're also building a data set that is much richer to use
with a self-driving system which makes sense right it makes sense so anyway interesting stuff
interesting uh and and maybe enough of a leap to help us make sense of what the end game here
looks like which i have had trouble seeing ever since this apple car story came out
huh there you go so go check that out that show even uh i guess we've they give a lot more
color than than what we've spoken about here and it sounds like that they're kind of more exposed
in this than we are uh yeah it's also funny because it's a podcast theoretically about tesla
and yet that episode is just about apple it's not about tesla at all so it's an interesting uh
interesting to get it from that perspective too of people who are enthusiastic about Tesla.
The future of cars, really.
Yeah, exactly right.
But they're taking a break a little bit
to talk about some other potential futures.
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Recode this week
had a report that apparently
Apple is looking to create a peer-to-peer
money transfer service.
Ooh. And that they've been
holding talks with payment processors
about creating something like Venmo.
Venmo is like a peer-to-peer money
transferring thing. I send you $5.
You know, it's
the... Lex Friedman made me sign up
for that when I was visiting
him. I forget even
what the context was. Maybe we were
like splitting our lunch
order or something and he was like oh just venmo it to me and i'm like but you know but it is
literally like oh yeah here's that ten dollars for fantasy football or whatever and you just
send money to your friends now obviously this is an add-on to apple pay right that's how apple
would be doing this.
You would open the Apple Pay app, which probably would exist then,
and you'd just say, or you'd go to your contacts or something,
and you'd just send, or even probably be an iMessage.
You know what? It's probably be an iMessage is where it would be.
Probably.
And you would say, send this contact $5,
and you'd hold your thumb or your finger over the Touch ID, and it would go.
The idea is Apple are trying to launch
something like this this year, hopefully. And that's one part of this story, right? They're
trying to do this. This is something that they would work with companies like Visa and MasterCard,
like the payment processors and the banks. And it'd be good to go, right? Everyone's going to
continue to get what they get right now. Like when somebody uses Apple Pay, pretty much everyone's
happy here. You know, the banks continue to do what they do, the car processors get what they get. However,
this report also says that they're in talks with Visa to create an Apple-branded prepaid card
so people could use this transfer of money instantly. So you would have a card in your
wallet that Apple would give you, and then you would be able to pay
for things with the money that somebody has sent you right because the idea here is if you receive
if somebody sends you ten dollars um if you don't what where does that money go right if you're if
you're not hooked up to your bank if you haven't given apple your bank account information or
something like that where does that money go and it sounds like the answer is it goes in a prepaid card uh that it goes it goes in essentially it is a little
mini temporary digital wallet containing the money that people have sent you and you can use that to
pay for things yep and depending on where you live in the world it may take time to get the money
back like if you live in the united kingdom i would be time to get the money back. Like if you live in the United Kingdom, I would
be able to withdraw that money instantly because we have a payment system between banks that has
basically instant transfer. But from this report, it seems like that does not exist in the United
States of America. And it would take multiple days probably before you would see that money
if you wanted to withdraw it to your bank account so apple would then create a prepaid card now i think personally that this rumor has been misunderstood and what apple wants to make
here is an apple pay only card i don't think apple want to distribute plastic cards to people
i think that they are working with visa on prepaid card technology
in which there is no card you just have it in apple pay but like this this this report talks
about a plastic card but i think they've misunderstood that yeah i i think the the
logic here is that you create a you create a virtual credit card like we've been talking
about for three or four weeks exactly well that's why this is follow-up right exactly it's a virtual credit card um and
all even that is a we can't even call it a credit card right because it's a debit card the idea is
that the money's already there but we have a card system with instantaneous transfers of of uh of
cash it is this is the way to do this is using the credit card system. And so rather than
having an Apple Venmo like thing where in order to sign up, you have to put in like things with
your bank account number and connect it up to your bank and have it move over time from point A to
point B and all this ridiculous stuff. The solution is use the credit card system. Well, how do we do that? We will create a digital card that we will be able to put money on. And then they only have
to deal with Visa. They don't have to deal with everybody's individual banks because it's just
for that. It's like the way I was thinking of it is it's like an Amazon balance. If you've ever
had somebody send you an Amazon gift card or something like that, or even an iTunes balance on an iTunes card, you end up
with this money and it's sitting there on your account. And where is it? It's kind of nowhere.
It's, but you know, when you pay for things, it's the money that comes off first.
And that's not as convenient in the sense that, you know, it's, can you transfer it out?
Can you do that? Can you take that money? Now, If my friend has sent me $10, but they've used Apple Pay, does that mean I have to
just spend it on my virtual card or can I transfer it back to my bank or something like that? And I
don't know, they probably, they'd probably work it out, but it wouldn't be instantaneous. But my
guess is that you would be able to just also just kind of keep it there as a balance like an account balance and use that um with your apple pay account and and therefore it's just a digital
it's it's it's a little digital storehouse for this equivalent of cash that's sitting there at
which point i'm not sure the banks would be too bent out of shape over it given that the bank
infrastructure just kind of doesn't support this right now the banks would be upset about this this is part of the problem oh here comes banking mike there we go he's gonna tell
me well i mean they're gonna be upset in the sense that that it's apple and visa walking away with
their customers but what's the alternative well i mean what you said about is it doesn't matter
there's an alternative they will be upset because Apple will be walking away with their customers
because what this does is cuts them out.
And there is some disruption happening in the banking industry right now,
especially in the UK, by a term called challenger banks.
And so these are new banks or new ways of banking that are popping up.
And I have signed up recently for something called Monzo.
And Monzo currently works a lot like this. You get a physical card. They don't work with Apple
Pay yet. You get it because they're not a bank. Apple would be doing some funky stuff with Visa
to get this to work. But you get a physical card and you top it up in Monzo's app using Apple Pay.
And then you can spend on this card. The app is amazing
and it does stuff that no other banking
app that I've used has ever done.
Every purchase you make, you get a push notification
and it tells you how much it was. It's fantastic for traveling
because you buy something in a foreign currency
and you get a push notification that tells you how much
it actually was in your local currency.
Everything's categorized in the app.
You can see things by spending. It's great.
You should try it if you live in the UK.
You should try it.
Now, this would be what Apple was looking to build here.
Now, what happens with this is the banks lose their customers potentially,
and they lose the money.
So they don't see any of the money.
So they don't make money from the money, which is how banks make a lot of money,
from just interest and doing whatever it is that they do.
And then when money is in the banking system,
people can lend against it, et cetera, et cetera.
I'm going way too far into this stack now.
I apologize.
So they make money from the money is what you're telling me.
Yeah.
Yes.
Interesting.
What a genius scheme.
It's funny.
Funny.
And then basically one of the things that the recode account recode story goes into
which is something that i used to hear all the time is that banks like to be what is called the
in the industry front of wallet which basically means right the card that you have the bank is
the one that people use first and apple and the banks worked hard together to make sure that this
type of thing is maintained.
Right.
So you have an actual wallet where you see your card in it.
Right.
And when I double tap on my Apple Watch or my iPhone, the first card that comes up is my Chase Sapphire.
Right.
Yeah.
And that is front of wallet. And you can pretty much guarantee that will change.
Right.
When you have your Apple Pay card account.
A little mad money card here well
yeah yeah no i see i see it i think that i think the question is if you're apple and you're trying
to launch this sort of a a person-to-person transfer service the and again won't stop the
banks from being angry but it's sort of like what what are your options what are your options here
to make it something that's fairly frictionless
now it's possible that apple is using this uh as a prod to the banks to maybe there's some
other situation some other solution that the banks have um that could do this but that they're
reluctant to implement like something something that would let you do that because wouldn't it be nice if you could just say if somebody sends me money just put it on my
you know basically send it to my card essentially right like send it to my credit card account
and credit it and do something like that but but you know this is the but this is the challenge so
i i see like apple's trying for expediency here to get something in the market,
but it goes right against their bank partners.
And the banks are partners of Apple with Apple Pay.
You can't just tell the banks to go away.
They are key partners in the whole Apple Pay scheme.
This would be a tricky thing for them because it would upset the banks.
And as you say, upsetting the banks is bad for Apple,
because if Apple want to, you know,
Apple has seen what happens when they upset their partners
in neighboring industries.
You know, look at the issues that I'm sure they're having
trying to launch a TV service.
All of the issues that they had trying to launch a music service,
because they upset their partners in the music industry,
right, by taking their industry away from them.
And this would be something that Apple's customers would really like, but Apple's partners who
are important to them may not like it so much.
And this would be tricky.
I mean, the peer-to-peer payment system, that works.
But cutting them out by putting it into Apple Pay,
whilst that would be brilliant, would be tricky.
It would be tricky for them to maneuver their way through that, I think.
I hope they do it, though, because I would like it.
Well, this is, I think, one of the most fascinating places
where Apple is playing right now, not banking
in general, but thinking of it more broadly, there's Apple trying to drive forward with
things that they think people are interested in, ways people can use technology to benefit
them.
But it comes up against partners that Apple needs.
Apple can't just build a thing.
They have to build a thing and get the partners on board.
And like the TV industry, it's reluctant to do that.
Banking was not reluctant or was somewhat reluctant with Apple Pay, but they got them
on board.
But this is a case where Apple's sheer will cannot make this work, right?
It has to be more.
And I think that's really frustrating for Apple.
It's got to be
because Apple is used to being able to just make something and everybody else, it doesn't matter
if everybody else says, no, that's a bad idea. We think you're doomed. Forget it. That Apple can
just defy them and do it anyway and be proven right. But in a lot of these other areas, Apple
can't do that. They can't play that game because they need to get people on board with their vision in
order to make a product a reality.
And that's hard because some of Apple's ideas, quite frankly, do go against conventional
wisdom.
And it's hard to get people on board with it.
You could argue that the iPhone would have had a very hard time, as revolutionary as
that product ended up being.
time as revolutionary as that product ended up being but you know they they got singular wireless which became at&t by the phone by the time the phone shipped to be on board with the iphone as
we currently conceive of it without junk on it with apple kind of controlling the customer
relationship and when that deal was announced i mean there were a lot of people in that industry who thought that that singular was taken for a ride by steve jobs and uh and yet they they were fortunate that they had
that partner and they made that deal and it had to be an exclusive in order to do it but they did
that deal um because this is the thing you can have the greatest most innovative idea in the
world if you're apple and if you can't get the people who need to say yes to say yes to it it just won't happen so this is an interesting
interesting uh way apple has to kind of like uh navigate here where they don't want to anger the
banks but they also want to provide more functionality and compete in some of these
other areas yeah it's like you know when apple wanted to create a maps app it's like okay all
they're doing is fighting against google and it's like it's they're just two people in their industry
they don't need each other anymore it's not a problem right like you can burn that bridge and
just carry on going and that will be fine but as you say that when they need when they need it
need someone for something you know like if all the banks say no screw it we're
gonna pull apple pay like that is a big problem for apple yeah this is this is um joe joe steel
our buddy in the chat room pointed out that you know one of the places and dan moran has written
about it on six colors a few times the um that in at a farmer's market or an art fair or something
like that the idea that instead like apple pay, all our devices have Apple Pay on them,
but you know,
you have to have a square reader
when you're doing a transfer like that
because they can't accept money.
They can only pay money.
And it doesn't really follow, right?
You should be able to put in
like the price of something
and like tap your Apple Pay
on their Apple pay right you should
be able to just go boop here here's some money without having cash and and that's the that's
the problem apple's trying to solve here but um but i you know i see the bank's point too that
they're that that's scary right because then you don't need a credit card anymore theoretically
you can just everything
is digital cash now and they're out of the equation at least they're out of the equation
until you decide to transfer some of your extra digital cash back into your bank account but
that's not quite the same yeah if you use apple pay all the time that just becomes your apple pay
credits you know and you just use it becomes your wallet it's cash in your wallet except digital but it's
the same thing it's like if you if you if you live a life where you're doing a lot of stuff with cash
and people are giving you cash and you're spending cash then you know that's invisible to your bank
because it's just the cash that's in your wallet until you deposit some of it if you're somebody
who who has so much cash that you end up depositing in your bank account and if the bank's business
model is based on cycling that cash through the credit card system then that's not so great let me tell you what i would love
to see with something like this the ability to do international transfers more easily
being able to then cut out paypal well yeah Wouldn't that be nice? Because whilst PayPal is the most convenient way
that I've found to send money overseas,
their fees, oh my God, they're so bad.
Their fees are so high.
And for someone like me,
they'll cut me on the transfer fee
and then also cut me on the foreign exchange fee foreign exchange fee yeah because i know what they're
doing right like i know where it works and i feel like apple's still gonna hit me but they're gonna
hit me less i think than than paypal would and yeah there are a bunch of other ways to do it
a lot of them take far too long you know and i know how the banking industry works and don't
sometimes want my money tied up in these really antiquated money transfer systems between international banks.
And I also find that so many of the other services are a little less reliable.
At least while PayPal are expensive, I know that they're likely not going to go away in between the time that the money is sent and received.
So I would love to see Apple try and hit that.
You know, that would be a great thing for me.
It'd also just be easy, you know,
as a way for me to pay you back for a meal, right?
Which there kind of isn't a good way to do that right now
without everybody losing out something.
So Apple, find a way to do the peer-to-peer thing,
but tread carefully on the prepaid card thing. I don't know if that's going to be the best thing
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Maybe I should call them Longs.
Longs. Long shorts would just be longs, right? Yeah, I guess
so. Or like averages? Regulars? I'm not sure. Maybe. I don't know. All right. So we accidentally
walked into a topic that for some reason I still care about more than I should, which is the way
that banks work. I mean, you know, 10 years I worked for a financial institution, like I can't help myself.
Absolutely.
Now we're going to talk about something else that I really love,
which we have been wanting to talk about for ages.
Today is the day, stickers.
Let's talk about stickers.
Let's do it.
Do you have any questions for me about stickers, Jason Snell?
Why?
Why?
I wish I could tell you why it began so in case you don't know dear listener i cover my apple devices primarily uh my ipads and my macbook uh in stickers i i'm not the only person that does
this like this is a thing you see this, right? People put stickers on their computers.
But I have become known for it because I don't like to just put stickers on.
I like to cover my devices in stickers.
And I know I began with this with what you have stuck on your laptop,
which is I covered an Apple logo on a laptop with the rainbow logo.
Yeah, I have that on my MacBook Air and on my iPad Pro now, actually.
I have a little decal that's exactly the size of the Apple logo on the device,
and I covered it with the rainbow Apple logo.
Yeah, and I don't have a specific place to recommend for these,
just Etsy.
You just look for one Etsy.
And I remember a while ago when the iPad Pro, the 12.9 came out,
there wasn't anything that fit it because it was a different size.
And there was just one Etsy person,
and I just contacted
them with a message like can you make one for this like sure and then they just sent it to me
right i got mine from from a company called super together that sells on etsy and they
they have a they had an ipad pro um 12.9 decal that fit perfectly for all i know that was the
person that i got it from could be oh it actually was because I remember this logo, just an S.
Yeah, this was that.
And it's UK-based, yeah.
So I'll put that in the show notes if you want to find it.
And this was just like a beginning for me.
And then it was just over time as I was doing shows and having stickers made,
I kind of wanted a place to put them.
And a place that made sense to me was to put them on my laptop.
And then it just went from there now i have an entire drawer in my office full of stickers
i try and get new and interesting stickers all the time and i like to do this because it feels like
some kind of personalization for me like i feel like what I'm doing is making these devices mine.
And the things that I tend to stick on to my devices are things that I enjoy. Like, it is
an expression of stuff that I like. And then when I look at these devices, I every time, you know,
it's like art for me in a way, like, I just look at them and I appreciate it, right? Like, these are things that I enjoy.
They're things that I find funny or things that I like the look of
or stuff that I have made.
Like, I make lots of stickers for shows and, like, just little jokes.
You know, like, anybody that came to the Upgrade Meetup
may have walked away with an Upgradian sticker
or a Pineapple Pizza sticker,
and I have those stuck on all my devices now.
It's just a thing that I really like, and i kind of treat every new device that i get these
big devices as like a blank canvas and it builds over time and i overlap right like i'm a sticker
overlapper i'm definitely not one of these people that like places things in a line i like it to be
all higgledy-piggledy because I like that however you hold the device,
you kind of get something, right?
Like it's always in the right orientation.
And my favorite thing to do is to kind of over time
try and fill as much of the device as I can.
Now, of course, this destroys resale value
unless you're willing to get all the stickers off.
I haven't yet had to resell the device that has stickers on them. They usually just get passed
down or passed around. The only thing that I have is I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro that I eventually
want to get rid of, but it's covered in stickers right now. I don't know what I'm going to do with
it. I just haven't gotten around to getting rid of it, but I have a family member I could probably
give it to. Yeah, well, so I've got two questions here one is uh well not a question um i think you can
since especially since these are um metal shells i think you can peel them off yeah with some elbow
grease i could get it off with with some elbow grease and also they there's stuff you can buy
that is that that's what it does is it takes the sticker adhesive off.
Some like that you spray on or put on a rag and that helps kind of melt the sticker adhesive.
So you could do it.
It just takes some work.
But how do your friends or family who receive these hand-me-down items, how do they feel about the fact that they're getting a thing that's covered in stickers?
Well, you know, they kind of can't complain if it's hand-me-down, right?
Here's a new device for you.
That's on you, right?
You're not giving me any money for this because the things that I hand down or hand around
to family for money are phones.
And I don't put stickers on phones because I put cases on my phone.
Plus, the phone is such a small space. I don't
put stickers on there. I don't feel like there's enough that I can do. I really like the covered
in stickers look and the phone doesn't provide me with that. So, you know, my iPads, nobody has
gotten one of those yet because Apple refuses to update them. And I just haven't done anything with
my MacBook Pro yet. And i don't know if i
have a family member that needs a macbook pro but i'm gonna ask around soon because it's kind of
just been sitting here and if they want to keep it this way they can keep it this way otherwise
they can do the work you know that's up to them um i love i i do really like getting a new device
and starting over like i don't um i don't like immediately cover them
although i have got a much larger sticker store now than i ever have before so i can do quite a
lot because the most awkward part is the in-between stage just when like you've just got a couple like
more than like three or four and like less than 15 stickers on the surface right because you've
got lots of gaps and you kind of have to be smart about the way that things get placed um but i'm ready now i'm ready for my next device jason because i have been amassing quite a
selection of stickers over the last few months via the means of a few services um i currently
subscribe to two monthly sticker subscription services oh Oh my god. I need to decide on one of them.
And I just haven't decided
on which one yet. I've been trying these both out
because they kind of both launched around the same time.
And I wanted to see what I would get.
One of them is called Slaptastic.
I'll put links in the show notes for these.
And this one, they kind of...
Wouldn't that be
Slaptastic?
It would definitely be that.
I've never thought of it that way before.
You've never said that out loud before?
Yeah, slap-tastic was always my way of reading this,
but it definitely is slap-tastic.
That's how it's pronounced in English, British English, I'm sure.
No, no, it should definitely be slap-tastic.
I've just never...
You know when you don't read things aloud?
I do. And they're just when you don't read things aloud? I do.
And they're just in your head in a certain way.
But yeah, Slaptastic is definitely what they're called.
And they seem to commission stickers.
They'll find some artists and they commission them around a theme.
And then another one that is called Sticker Swaps
is way more of a random selection of stuff.
This is probably the one that I would end up dropping,
but you get like really interesting random things with them.
And I don't know where their stuff comes from,
but it feels like that they might be like
buying them in bulk from somewhere
or like picking up stuff that's not used.
And also like you can trade stickers with them.
It's kind of an interesting thing.
And you get like like you get a lot
you get a lot more with this company because they have the stickers that they're creating or
collecting for the month then plus just some really random stuff like i got this tiny little
spider-man sticker that was all like shiny you know like a holographic sticker which had come
from like obviously a sticker book at some point. Very strange, but I liked that little sticker. It was funny.
And then another one that I use, Sticker Mule.
Now I use Sticker Mule, we use Sticker Mule to print the stickers that we sell or that we give away.
They're fantastic.
Sticker Mule can do anything, right?
From like just squares and circles to die cutting.
They're brilliant.
So if you're ever making stickers for anything,
I thoroughly recommend Sticker Mule. They're very very high quality vinyl stickers but they also have a marketplace so
you can go in and just buy individual stickers from them um some of them are pretty fairly
priced and some of them are not so much but they tend to be bigger but you can just go in
just have a scroll through and you'll find some stuff in there um and i i kind of bought a bunch of
stickers from there before which i which i like so that is how i have amassed a huge drawer of
stickers which is currently existing awaiting a new device uh to affix them to so that's interesting
so you've reached you feel like you've reached your saturation point on your existing devices
where you don't want to continue the pile up oh no what
i do now is um when i get new stickers if something if something works uh then i will add to my current
devices but at the point that i am right now i feel like well i have felt like they have been
close to replacement for a long time but that's just not been happening so i haven't been adding new stuff because when i get a really good sticker now i want to keep it
for the next device right like get something this is a good one like i don't want to put
in on something that might be gone soon right so you want you want to stock those stickers for your
next purchase because you want the stickers to have more time in the sun exactly i want to be
able to enjoy them for a longer period of time.
Now, when you get a new device, will you immediately
put on a bunch of stickers, or will you
roll them out slowly over time?
In the past, I've rolled it
more slowly, but now I have this huge
box, effectively, of stickers.
I will be adding more
for my next device, because I've been
collecting more and been waiting for longer.
But I won't cover it, because I want to leave space for new stuff that comes in
it's fascinating now lots of people when i talk about this they they feel a sense of abject horror
yeah i would um dare dare to cover the beautiful johnny ive work in stickers right they get i have had people jason
who get very angry with me and i know those people have already started to write to me
to express their email mike but a few years ago apple vindicated me by releasing an ad for the
macbook yes which featured featured stickers all over it.
Stickers, yeah.
Which was a great feeling,
because now I have something to send to these people
when they write to me.
It's like, well, Apple, this is approved via Apple, right?
Mm-hmm.
But are you someone that has this abject horror
at the amount of stickers that you see?
Because you've seen my devices right yeah yeah uh i don't have abject horror i think people should do what makes them
feel happy on their devices um i am somebody it's not it's not for me i have some practical
issues with it but also it's just not for me. I, the way that I always have phrased this is,
uh, I prefer to, uh, to be unadorned, right? I don't, I don't have any tattoos,
similar reason, believe it or not. It's like, I, you know, I, I, there's a limit. Like I,
I kind of like things the way they are. Um, very specific changes changes I can kind of get behind, like the fact that,
especially since doing six colors, I have taken the Apple logos on all of my devices and put
six color Apple rainbow decal on all of them. And that is a bit of customization. Also,
I just had this happen. And that's something I want to point out for on the practical side of
stickers. Believe it or not, there is a practical side of stickers.
My,
uh,
friend and former coworker,
uh,
Rob Griffiths was just tweeting the other day about how they went on,
uh,
uh,
he made sure to bring his laptop on a trip that they were taking,
get to their destination and discover that it's actually,
uh,
his child's laptop.
Yep.
That makes sense.
And I said, I said, Rob, you know what we did is
I made all the MacBooks in the house
get decals of some sort on them
so that we could tell them all apart
because I was endlessly picking up
my wife's or my son's and not mine.
And now mine has the Apple logo.
Hers has this knitting pattern on it.
And he has a TARDIS from Doctor Who
with the Apple, the cutout
for the, cause it's a MacBook Air, the cutout for the Apple logo, it goes over the windows.
So it's like the windows light up, but we can tell them all apart and that's good. Now my daughter
has a Chromebook and her Chromebook is completely covered with stickers. So she's doing it the mic
way and that's fine. In fact, and when we were in hawaii i
made sure that we got some stickers or decals i guess they ended up being of as a souvenir and
that got put down on her computer and my son's got his on his um on his ds his nintendo ds it's
got stickers on on it um and uh you know what device i put stickers on mike the ipod hi-fi oh i've seen them i'm on this
yeah because that i'm okay with that but most of them i'm not i for the for the same reasons which
is i i kind of i think they're kind of they they're kind of messy and and i don't want to
go all in with like you you've gone all in on messy. It's like a quilt.
Like it's just a whole bunch of different stuff piled on top of each other.
I didn't want to do that for a couple of reasons.
One is tactile.
I know that I will feel the edges on those devices and I'll just start picking on the
edges of them and it'll drive me crazy.
And that is me, but that's a thing that I know about myself.
And I also don't like if i put one on or
two on then it's sort of like this clean sheet with a couple of things defacing it and that
bothers me too you gotta you gotta go all in if you're gonna put them on in my opinion so i can't
do it i can't do it um the the ipod hi-fi is a fun place because i get all these great stickers and i
have no place to put them i i've stuck them on there because you know quite frankly i don't
really care if that thing gets covered with stickers. It's all, it's just fine. And then the other thing is the
hand-me-down thing where I feel like if I, if I stick a bunch of stickers on things, I'm going to
have to do the work to peel them all off before I, I sell or give away the, the, the device. So
it's not for me. I did put in honor of Mike Hurley, I, I've started putting some stickers on one of my keyboard cases, the Logitech 9.7-inch keyboard case.
Oh.
I put some stickers on there because I figured.
I have stickers on the cases, too, right?
So I have them on the devices and they're on the cases.
Anyway, I don't, you know, it's not're and stickers just feel so permanent to the fact that
they don't that they don't come off it can overlap you know yeah yeah i don't know
probably add to the thickness over time i think you'd have to go many layers deep for it you would
you would end up you wouldn't end up yeah with a very thick layer of stickers over time.
Imagine if John Syracuse loved putting stickers on his computer,
which let's stop there because it could never possibly ever happen.
But imagine now him using that same Mac Pro for eight years.
He wouldn't be able to fit it in the room anymore.
It would be like three inches thick of just stickers.
You'd have to cut through it, right?
It would be a real problem for him.
It would be archaeology to excavate back to the bottom layer of the stickers.
Stickers, they're awesome.
Yeah, it's kind of your calling card now.
They're fun. They're fun.
They're fun.
I just, you know, if I could like have an expiration date,
I've said this about tattoos too.
It's the same thing, which is like,
if it like disappeared after a period of time,
like just vanished, I would feel much better about it.
Like, yeah, I got that sticker on there now,
but you know, in three months,
that sticker will just be gone and it'll be fine.
But that's not how they work.
Speaking of stickers and tattoos,
you can buy a sticker of the tattoo I have on my arm.
It's true.
If you want to.
I don't.
Go and do that.
You should.
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it is time for ask upgrade
brent wants to know mike have you put stickers on your nintendo switch um i haven't yet but i
probably will because it feels like a device that like a device that would look good with some stickers on it.
I know that apparently the plastic does not take too kindly to you taking them off,
like sticker adhesive doesn't work very well with the Nintendo Switch plastic,
whatever coating it is that they use,
but as I said, I don't take stickers off, so it wouldn't bother me.
But yeah, it is a device in my mind that i could put it on if it feels like it passes the
size barrier now the nintendo switch plastic coating that of the actual unit itself if you
lick that it doesn't taste better right i haven't licked that i think it's just the cartridges though
okay um i haven't licked the cartridge Maybe that could be the next frontier for materials in tech products
would be like a taste or a personal coding.
Yeah.
Scratch and sniff or a taste test.
Mateus has wrote in, Jason,
and they want us to recommend a good app to manage time zones of a good widget.
Now, I can go 50% of this and can recommend a good widget that
I like. It's called clock with a K, K-L-O-K. And I've been using this for a while. It's a pretty
good widget. It allows five time zones. And you can also, within the widget, you can get what the
time will be at a certain point. So you can tap one of the time zones and it pops up a little
selector underneath and you can select time and it will show you what the time will be in each of the time zones.
It's pretty good. I've been using it for a long time and I like it a lot.
I don't have a good suggestion for a full on application or something more full featured in the widget if you're looking for that. And I wanted to throw this out to the Upgradians if they have any suggestions
for a good time zone
management app for Mateus
for his devices.
Hunter
has asked, you're allowed to keep
or he's not asked, it's more
given us a hypothetical, right?
That we're allowed to keep one iPad
or one iPhone with just
two apps on it.
Which device and which apps?
I spent a lot of time thinking about this, Jason.
That's a weird question.
It is.
It's very specific in a couple of ways which make me raise an eyebrow.
Is this the only device we have?
This was the way that I...
Well, I read it's iOS, right?
Like our iOS devices are reduced to one
and we're only allowed two apps on that device.
So I decided I'm going to pick with this
my 9.7-inch iPad with Slack and AirMail
because if I'm going to be only using one iOS device,
I will be doing my work on it the same that I always have.
And an iPhone doesn't work.
I need the split screen. And I would prefer to have the portability not completely destroyed.
So I would go 9.7 over 12.9, right? So I'm picking the middle of the road on the portability to still
get the use, but so I can still carry it around without needing a bag all the time. And I'm
assuming that I still have all of the other stock apps,
so I could, for example, read Twitter on their website, right?
So I would go with Slack because I don't think I can use it on iOS.
I don't think you could Slack in a window.
I've never tried, but I wouldn't want to.
And AirMail is just the best way for me to manage my email.
And so Slack and AirMail would be the two things
that I would want the most
because I could still continue to get my business done
in a world where, for some reason,
Hunter's restricted me so heavily.
Yeah, it's a cruel, dystopian future
that Hunter is displaying here
where you're only allowed to have one iOS device
and the App Store only has two apps in it.
So what have you gone with?
device and the app store only has two apps in it. So what have you gone with? I'm going to say the my iPhone 7. Okay. Because if I am only allowed to have one iOS device I'm going to have it be
the one that I can put in my pocket because although I prefer not to go back to the way I
lived before I will do it if I need to, and I'll just use my MacBook Air
or get a MacBook or MacBook Pro, whatever,
for the things I use my iPad for now.
But I can't stick...
Apple does not yet make a Mac
that I can stick in my pocket
and go walk the dog and listen to podcasts with.
So I'm going to say that and Overcast
and probably Slack for the same reasons that you did.
Yeah, Overcast would be one that I would miss a lot.
But, you know, I'm assuming that I have all the stock apps,
so I would have to move to the podcast app in that situation,
which would make me very sad.
But there's nothing...
I mean, I guess I could use the regular mail app, right?
But I really don't like it.
I'll struggle on that one.
Maybe I would change to Overcast and Slack.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, and maybe if I...
The question is, would I prefer to use Twitterific
and Apple Podcasts or Overcast
and the Twitter website?
You know, I guess flip a coin there.
But I'd have to be my phone just so I could have it,
the device that's with me when I'm out walking
around, and I would just go back to the Mac
for the stuff I use the iPad for.
Jimmy wants to know
what we expect from the next
upgrade to the Apple Watch.
I don't expect
huge stuff, but
this is maybe the things that I would at least want
the most, which would be for
it to continue to be faster,
continue to have better battery, but to be thinner.
I would really like it to be thinner than it is.
Thinner and lighter would be great for me
for the next version of the Apple Watch.
If I was going to think of a feature that they may put in,
this is something I definitely will think is coming eventually,
but it might be the the the version after this which
would be um lte chip would be really great uh but just because then you could just it would always
be able to use it and i feel like a lot like be able to use a connection i feel like that might
help a lot of the slowness because it's it's not always grabbing stuff from the phone if at all
um an lte chip might be nice because then you could just use it without the phone ever needing to be around um and you have a uh a feature that i definitely want but i'll let
you go with it yeah uh the screen always on yeah doesn't always have to be animated doesn't have to
be you know when you're not looking at it that doesn't have to have a second hand that's sweeping
through or something blinking or anything like that, whatever you need to do to save power. But that, that if I, to get rid of the thing where you need to actively kind of flip your
wrist in a certain way, or the screen doesn't show up and your watch doesn't is blank. That's no good.
It should be, you know, I've learned to live with it, but it's just, it should be on. There should
be something showing the time on when you look at it all the time and then i also agree about
cellular connection being something that they need to add down the road i don't even think
it necessarily needs to be lte a slower connection would be fine and might be cheaper and uh you know
smaller and be able to yeah i mean useless power i really doubt it needs LTE. Yeah, right. 3G would do it.
Just like 3G.
I think that there's a lot that you could do
if it can rely on having an internet connection all the time.
And they now have these things where your phone will also ring
on other cellular devices that are on your plan.
So you could have it where you go for a run,
and if somebody calls you on your phone, your watch will ring even if you're nowhere near your plan. So you could have it where you go for a run. And if somebody calls you on
your phone, your watch will ring even if you're nowhere near your phone. That's pretty great
because that means that you can stay in touch and you don't have to carry your phone with you at all.
Brent asked, how often do you use tap backs in iMessage? Now, in case you don't remember,
tap backs is the name that Apple gave to the thing where you can leave a heart or a thumb up or a thumb down, exclamation mark or a ha ha on a message, an iMessage.
I use them quite a lot, actually, especially in group conversations, especially if I'm catching up on a group conversation.
You know, I can kind of just leave something to show that I'd seen it.
I started using it a lot more after I realized the best way to get to this menu
is to double-tap the message, not to 3D touch it.
It's way easier to get to it just by double-tapping the message,
and then you're given a little dialog to select from.
What I don't like about them is the way the notifications
are presented to the other person.
I think it's silly.
That you see a full text notification it says it's like federico liked and then the name then the exact
text of the message i just feel like that it's there needs to be a better way to display that
information than in text like it just doesn't work for me yeah but do you use them uh i will
occasionally use them on ios and i never use them on the Mac because on the Mac getting to them is kind of ridiculous and you end up like
control clicking on a message and choosing tap back
and then choosing, it's no
but occasionally I'll do it on iOS because it is easy there like you said
Final question today comes from Gannon
Gannon wants to know, what is gannon the name gannon
makes me think of zelda now that's that's all i can do i'm sorry gannon what is your go-to pair
of everyday sneakers uh for me currently it is uh the nike air max fly knit that's so good so it is
the air max shape of shoe in the material that Nike
call Flyknit
which is like this nice woven
really light airy
material
I have a pair and I love them
and whilst looking for this
I have the Air Max 1 Ultra Flyknit
and whilst looking through their website
to get this link
I found a version 2
in some cool colors which I may have to treat myself to at some point in the near future
and it's so exciting my shoes are new balance m1340 which has a actually made is made of a
similar material i think um and uh yeah i that's what my my podiatrist told
me to get was some some control shoes stability control shoes so that's what i've got and and i
find it funny the way that this is my go-to pair of everyday sneakers it is these are my shoes i
wear them basically they're the only shoes that i wear so yeah i'm in those all the
time um i i have lots of pairs of uh sneakers i'm shocked yeah it's a it's a thing that i actually
do like a lot from a fashion perspective i'm not as interested in fashion as I used to be as a younger man, but sneakers is a thing that I do still really enjoy.
All right, that wraps it up for this week's episode of Upgrade. A few things you can do
if you want to submit a question for Snell Talk at the beginning of the show. Send us
a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk. If you have a question for us at the end of the show for us
to expand upon, give you an answer to something, our opinion on something, to provide us with some constraints that are unfairly put on us
for our iOS devices like Hunter did. You can send us a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade.
What you need to do, you can send it to us. You can send it to the Upgrade account. You can just
send it out randomly in the world. But do not worry. I will find it because that's what I'm
good at. If you want to find Jason online,
he is at jsnl,
j-s-n-e-l-l, he's at sixcolors.com,
and he's the host of the new show Download
on RelayFM, which is at relay.fm
slash download. If you want to find
him more, you can do that. I am
at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E
on the Twitter machine.
I want to take a moment to thank our sponsors
again, Casper, Mack, Walden, and Encapsular
for supporting the show.
But most of all, as always,
to you out there, the Upgradients,
thank you for listening, as you always do.
And we'll be back next time.
Until then, say goodbye, Mr. Snell.
Goodbye, everybody.