Upgrade - 21: You Rolled 38

Episode Date: February 2, 2015

This week Jason and Myke get a grasp on how the iPhone's runaway success affects Apple's decisions, including the development of the Apple Watch. Plus, lots of feedback about how people take notes with digital devices, and we inaugurate our 'Myke Watches a Movie' vertical with 'The Princess Bride.'

from RelayFM it's upgrade episode number 21 today's episode of upgrade is brought to you by lynda.com where you can instantly stream thousands of courses created by industry experts for a 10-day free trial visit lynda..com slash upgrade. Squarespace. Start here, go anywhere. MailRoute, a secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam. And stamps.com, postage on demand. My name is Mike Hurley, and I am joined as always by the one and only Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Mike. How's it going? I'm good, PowerSlider. How are you? Oh, I'm doing great. I sent you guys a picture of me listening to Connected while driving past one infinite loop in Cupertino last week. That was just for you.

That was old school. Kicking it old school. I was powersliding through the loop, as we do. It's the only way to roll. So we have a big show today. Big show, lots of stuff. I'm looking at the document right now and we have like a whole series worth of follow up

but we have a little special thing that we're going to do at the end today so last week I'll tease it for now last week we were talking about the holocaust cloak which is a reference to the princess bride and then you were horrified to find out that I have not seen The Princess Bride. So I watched The Princess Bride yesterday, and we're going to talk about it today.

Yes. So stay tuned until the end if you want to hear that. So should we kick it off with some good old-fashioned follow-up? Yeah, let's do the follow-up. I had one quick bit of follow-up from Lister Michael about Marco Marketing, which is from a couple of shows ago. But I wanted to pass this along because the idea here is, yes, Marco Armit is high profile, but he's also putting himself out there and becoming high profile. And I think the argument I made was that 21st century marketing, that's part of the deal. That's not cheating.

That's part of the deal. So listener Michael wrote in and said, I'm in the process of changing jobs for the second time in almost exactly a year. I'm going from a pretty good to a great one. And I can partly lay that on the fact that I was willing to do something in public and be a professional about it. I'm an iOS developer. And most of the openings understandably want to see candidates who have an app they can point to in the app store to even be considered. I don't really get to do that because I used to work for the government making interactive training and the job I'm just winding down. It's an enterprise app for sales reps and managers. In theory, I could make an app in my free time,

but trying to put the effort to make an app that I consider worth releasing is daunting. So last year, I set writing at least one blog post a week in a professional voice and stuck with it. I'm nearing almost a full year of posts without missing a week now, and it's lucky to break 20 page views on a good week. Some weeks it feels like pulling teeth to write anything, other weeks it goes well. The thing that amazed me is when I decided to apply to a handful of the very best iOS developer shops in my area right around the one year mark of starting my new job, both because I wanted a change of culture from my current job and to see if I was good enough, I got an interview at my number one choice, which I had gotten a form letter rejection from a year ago. In the interview, three of the four

interviewers mentioned checking my blog, which I put on my resume under contact info and in a positive light as they had skimmed it over before the interview to get a feel for me. Even more surprisingly, one of them skipped the technical portion of the interview because of it and instead focused much more on the cultural process section. The blog probably isn't the whole story. Not being a relocation hire probably made me a lot more appealing, and I've done a whole lot of professional development in the last year, but I'm convinced it helped get me in the door.

So yeah, being willing to put yourself out there has value, even if you're not remotely popular. Listener Michael, thank you. I just thought that was a great story. I think that, like, I enjoy reading this as well because it's a good, I think it's good to show these days that you have the ability to do other things, you know? Yeah, yeah, and that you're serious about it. I mean, this is, I think we might have talked about this on an earlier show.

I know I've talked about it on a podcast somewhere that when I hired somebody, when I would interview people at IDG, especially for junior editor jobs, I would ask them about things like if they were straight out of college or recently out of college, what they did in college in terms of writing and editing. And, you know, it was a check to see how committed they were to this as a profession. And if they said, well, you know, I wrote papers for my English classes, I was much less impressed than if they said, oh, well, I worked on the student newspaper and I started this online journal and I, this profession seriously. And I think listener Michael is doing that here where he's saying, he's not even raising his profile necessarily as he's putting himself out there and demonstrating his commitment. And I think that's a big deal. And I think it's something people look for in interviews. That checks a box. that checks a box that's like oh this person is serious about about this has something to to to commend themselves i think it's a i think it's uh very valuable if you're trying to hire somebody to look at something like that my brother is in university um and he would like to to do journalism one day that's kind of that's what he's interested in uh And he's really interested in sports journalism. So he's done some stuff, like he wrote for a couple of websites.

But I'm always really, really pushing him to have his own blog because whenever he applies for internships or any kind of like small position somewhere or writing programs, they all just want to see examples of his work. And the best place to do that is to just have a blog. And it's like what I kind of take it back to how I got started doing

this stuff. I just had a podcast that I did every week and I showed up every week and just got better over time. And you can kind of practice in obscurity in a way, because it's very rare that like you'll put something onto the internet and all of a sudden all of the internet find out about it on day one. But it allows you to kind of hone your skills and to practice. So if you have any sort of interest in anything technology-related, I'm assuming that you like it, if you want to have a job in it or anything, anything that you're interested in, if you want a job in a certain field that is a passion of yours, you know, get a blog about it and write about it or do a podcast about it. Yeah, showing passion for the subject that is also what you want to have be your profession is generally a really good sign.

sign. It's a good sign for people who are hiring you. And it's a good sign for people who want, you know, who are colleagues or potential future colleagues that, oh, this is somebody who's got enthusiasm and wants to talk about this stuff. And it makes a difference. And it's not necessarily a calculation of like, score them from one to 10 on enthusiasm. But it just it's the fact is that most of the other people in that industry are enthusiastic about that too. And seeing your enthusiasm about it can, um, makes it, it makes a connection too. So,

yeah, I thought, anyway, I thought it was really great, great feedback. And it's, I, it was a hole that I didn't expect this podcast to go down,

but it's actually been kind of a very interesting place to go. This idea that in, in this modern era that there's a, there, there's a perception of, um, yeah, a perception of what deserved success looks like. And then we throw a lot of things away that are actually a huge part of whether something is succeeding or failing and you can't ignore it. And this was just another example of something. This is a site that nobody read, but the people who needed to read it read it, and it made a difference, and that's cool.

It's good to know. I'm going to be a good brother, Jason, of my brothers. I'm going to put his site in the show notes today. Good for you. Scoring some good brotherly love points there, I think. Well done. Let's move on. What else do we have today?

Oh, so much feedback about pens and tablet computing. Do you wish you'd never said anything? No, no, I don't. I thought that, I think this gives me perspective. I will point out upfront that when I brought up this subject, the very first thing I said is I hate pens and can't write and, you know, and don't like styluses because I don't like pens and pencils and writing things out longhand. I'm really bad at it.

My handwriting is illegible. I don't enjoy it. I would much rather type notes. And so, but I did profess a skepticism from seeing pen-based computing technologies in the past. And we had a really interesting spectrum of responses from people about their experience with pen input and tablet computers. So I'm going to run a bunch of it down. Really, hopefully really quickly, but probably not.

Okay, here we go. So listener Alec wrote in and said, Notability changed the game for him. Beside the benefit of syncing with the cloud and audio recording, he said there were some key features, copy and paste, not just for text, but for drawn figures. This is something that I think you might have mentioned briefly, this idea that if you're taking notes on something that requires figures or that requires little pictures, things like that, having that available and being able to kind of copy and paste it.

And it's not something you can type. You have to write that down. So we listed that. Colors. Didn't need multiple pens laying around on a small pull-out desk. Sorry, Mike, but I could change the color later if I wanted to. Easier to tap a swatch and change the color than physically drop and re-grip a new pen. Hey, dude, I missed class.

Can you send me the notes? Share sheet. Boom. That's good. And he said, Notability subtly tweaks your strokes, and I found that made my handwriting and figures look better. So I thought that was interesting. Notability app. Listener Troy wrote in to say, for most undergraduate students,

tech needs are driven by two things, cost and reliability, and it's going to be a long time before any type of digital note-taking technology beats pen and paper on either of those. By far the most common note-taking technology used in my classes is pen and paper. That said, I see students take notes on just about every sort of device except pen input tablet. I've actually seen students two-thumb type notes on a phone, something I wouldn't have thought possible. Those students are going to fail, by the way. You think? I can type pretty quickly. No, they're probably fine. That was my initial thought was they're not the best students, but they are trying to get something down on their phone.

No, it may be. And that's I like listener Troy's point here, which is, you know, he thought it impossible. But, hey, if it works for them, then then that's great. So here's my question to you. Yeah. Would you think that someone would fail if they were typing on a keyboard on a laptop? Would you think that someone would fail if they were typing on a keyboard on a laptop with their notes? No, my concern is just that, I mean, we don't have any judgment here about how good these students are. They could either be great phone typers or they could be people who just couldn't find their pen and need to take a couple notes. But it's not very good. If I was taking notes on a phone, that would be bad.

But they could also be just geniuses who are great at taking notes on the phone. And that could be just a purely generational shift. I feel way faster on the iPhone. Like, I feel it, whether I am or not. Like, I feel like I'm a faster typer on the iPhone than I am on the Mac. Wow.

I should do some sort of test. I can't even understand what you're saying, Mike. Are you speaking English anymore? Have you lapsed into some... Are the words you're using not the words that I understand? Has the Atlantic Ocean separated us again? Oh, no. Okay.

Listener Troy goes on to say, I see a variety of Mac and Windows laptops, occasional iPad, a handful of Surface devices. I've seen some LiveScribe pens. LiveScribe is that thing that records audio. But he asked students if they use the audio, and they say they thought they would, but they never do. But here's the key point from Listener Troy. If I can go all professory on you for a bit, most of the time the tech gets in the way. The purpose of class notes is to provide something for your memory to latch onto so you can remember the material, not to produce a verbatim transcript. Aside from me, Jason, we used to have a lecture note service when I was in college.

And sometimes what they'll do is, even now, is sometimes professors will record their lectures and post them as podcasts. And the idea is, you know, if verbatim, don't do a lot of work to generate the verbatim. It's like trying to do a verbatim transcript of an Apple event. It's like, you know what? They're going to post the video. You can get the verbatim transcript later. Take the important notes. Get the highlights here.

And this is what he's saying is, you know, verbatim transcript is not the objective. The key, he goes on to say, is to have as close to a friction-free environment for that as you can. Note-taking is as much about the process as it is the result. Having to quickly summarize the material and reshape it in a way that makes sense to the note-taker is a large part of it. For people like Jason who type, that's me, 100 words per minute, that probably means a laptop with a good keyboard. For a majority of my students, the note-taking method with the least friction and least distraction from the task at hand is still pen and paper. And I don't see that changing for many years yet. Listener Troy. So thank you for that.

I would say actually as a college student, I was not, even when I got a laptop in grad school, typing to take notes was not something that I did. when I got a laptop in grad school, typing to take notes was not something that I did. And the only time I type to take notes now and type quickly is when I am trying to get quotes down. Because if I'm doing an interview or something like that, where there is no transcript and I need to get the direct quotes, I will type because I can type down what they're saying really fast. But in general, I prefer much shorter notes. Like Troy says, I'm really trying to hit the highlights and give myself and give my memory, like he says, something to latch on to. And there's other feedback we got, not all of it in our document here, that was very similar, which is, you know, the point to having notes is more a process that leads to you pondering the information and filtering it and attaching it, and it's part of the learning process.

You're not a court recorder. You're not writing down a transcript of everything that's said. Listener Gary wrote in to say, regarding note-taking on the iPad, I prefer it over pen and paper for the same reason I prefer reading books on the iPad. I can have all my notes with me. I can have other documents that I need for a meeting on the iPad and mark them up with notes. So that's a fair point. I think the interesting thing about this feedback, and we do have some more, is how much we received. I was surprised how much came through. I have strong feelings about this topic, and I think you do too, but it didn't necessarily mean for me that I thought we were going to get this much feedback about it.

Just because we have opinions doesn't mean that anyone else cares at all about what we care about. I think of all of the things we've spoken about, this may be, by word count, the most feedback we've ever received. Lots of long emails about this. Yeah.

Not handwritten, I'll point out. They should be. Well, we're waiting. You know, post takes a little bit longer than email, so we're waiting for the handwritten stuff to come through. We do have a sponsor break I would like to take now, Jason, if that is okay, before we continue the rest of the follow-up for today. Alright, epic follow-up. You know it's epic when there's a sponsor break I would like to take now, Jason, if that is okay, before we continue the rest of the follow-up for today.

All right, epic follow-up. You know it's epic when there's a sponsor break in the middle of it. It's already February. What are you waiting for? Invest in yourself this year and start learning something new at lynda.com. We have a 10-day free trial for listeners of Upgrade. Lender.com is used by millions of people around the world and has over 3,000 courses on topics like web development, photography, visual design, business, and so much more. Whether you want to set new financial goals,

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and they have different speed settings you can play for the videos as well. If you want to learn super fast at lynda.com, you can do that. Maybe you want to learn a little bit about marketing online to help with your business or website, which goes back to what we were talking about a little earlier. You know, you want to business or website, which goes back to what we were talking about a little earlier. You know, you want to improve some skills in something that you love and you set up a blog. These guys at lynda.com, they can help you out with that. They can help you think about how to present yourself a little bit differently.

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This comes from a good, good friend of the show. It's Upgradian Tony. This is Tony Sindelar from various incomparable podcasts. This is not about Dungeons and Dragons, though. Tony's in academia. He says, I would say that students have overwhelmingly moved to doing note-taking electronically, whether typed on a laptop or inked on a tablet,

just as faculty have overwhelmingly moved from Chalk Talk to PowerPoint. Inking with an iPad or Surface does have a lot of advantages for note-taking, especially diagrams, symbols, concept mapping, but we still aren't there yet in terms of ease of use of the tools. So I guess I agree with Jason's skepticism. People in education have been hoping for crazy new improvements that will fix everything, but it keeps not being here regardless of the latest vendor trying to push something. I remember a pre-iPad era associate provost lobbying for all first-year students at a large state school to be required to buy one of those clunky, expensive Windows XP-based tablets. So Tony, now, but that he's skeptical about whether the tools are just good enough yet, which is sort of where I am. I don't dispute that this could be great. whether they're doing that despite it being clunky or because it's just not.

It's just super awesome and I need to rush out and get a stylus and start writing everything. That's never going to happen. It's never going to happen. This makes me think of that Surface Hub, you know, like the digital kind of note-taking type thing. Oh, yeah? Yeah, because it's like that sort of idea, right?

Everything's better if it's on a screen instead. But none of these things have really caught on. I remember in school we had smart boards, they were called, where basically the teachers could – they were kind of like projected screens it was weird, it was like it was a whiteboard but they would write on them with these pens that didn't actually write on the board just created something that was projected onto them

but very often the projector was turned off and they just used the whiteboard yeah, we had one that was it was a real whiteboard, but you use these pens with special little stickers on them. And the idea was that it was recording everything that was written up on the white whiteboard and you could play that back later. But yeah, it didn't, I don't know. I mean the world, this is one of the reasons why I think I bring more skepticism

to this than a lot of the listeners is because I've been in this, um, I've been, to this than a lot of the listeners is because I've been in this, I've been, this is one of those areas where my, I've lost my childlike enthusiasm for technology that I keep in other areas. I have lots of areas where I'm very enthusiastic about new technology. This is one of those where I've been disappointed so many times that I now have, I view it much more cynically that I can't tell you, it's been like 15 or 20 years that people have been saying, we're going to change how people take notes. And I just, I remain quite skeptical that it's good enough. Not that it doesn't have advantages, but that is it good enough?

Is it, and maybe that's, and we were originally talking about Apple doing a stylus. I mean, maybe that is what, you know, Apple is trying to do here is, can we make something that is good enough for Apple standards? Because boy, if Apple comes out with a stylus, and it's, and it's lame, then that's not good. So I have two more pieces of feedback here about this issue that I want to get to because so many people wrote in. Listener Dave writes in my previous two laptops were Windows tablets. Much of my work involves being on site with clients and their environments. I'm mostly on the normal work floor rather than in meetings. When you're sitting next to someone's desk, I find writing notes much easier than typing. You can sit in what is for me a much more natural position. You can also make notes standing up. As Mike said, the notes are automatically backed up. My tool of choice was OneNote synced via Dropbox. Therefore, I have all my notes instantly accessible. My handwriting is pretty awful. Yay, me too. But it's important to remember software to understand handwriting has a much easier job when it knows the strokes you used, as opposed to trying to OCR

a random scrawl. This is a really good point. From my initial use in 2004, the recognition was very impressive and improved with new Windows versions. I never formally converted my notes. OneNote just made them searchable. Combined with OneNote's fuzzy searching, it was very rare for searches to fail. In fact, it felt like it was sometimes better at reading my handwriting than I was. I thought that was good feedback. That's some positive words about Windows tablets. And finally on this topic, Upgrader Darcy wrote in and said, I really enjoy the show, especially when you two disagree. In that vein, allow me to take issue with something that Mike said.

I deleted all feedback that disagreed with me. So every feature that people think they need, whether they need it or not, if they think they need it and then Microsoft's doing it, that's a potential sale that you lose to Microsoft. This is something that you said on the last show. I think that's accurate. And what Darcy says is, isn't this the opposite of what made Apple so successful? Apple's products are typically less feature-rich than its competitors. Instead, Apple focuses on certain core functionality, making the product as easy and as enjoyable to use as possible. Darcy goes on, I've been an Apple user since 96 and have been with the company through the darkest times.

That's true. I can verify that. While I'm elated that Apple's been so successful, I'm terrified its success will cause the company to lose focus and to try to fill every product niche imaginable. I'm not saying that a stylus is necessarily a bad idea. It may be part of a focused, well-thought-out strategy for the iPad, but focus is key and it is so easily lost when a company continually breaks its own sales records quarter after quarter. Okay, that doesn't apply to recent iPad sales, but still. In this, I am in complete agreement with Steve. Steve who?

Oh, Steve Jobs. Right. When he said, innovation is saying no to a thousand things. In light of the recent Apple is losing the functional high ground discussion. Hi, Marco. It is perhaps more important than ever that Apple focus on core functionality and making sure it's hard earned.

It just works. Reputation isn't tarnished any further. Any thoughts about that? About how wrong you were, Mike? Any apologies to Upgrader Darcy? Yes, because I don't think I am wrong. So my feeling on this is I agree that that is how Apple was.

I don't think it's where Apple will be like into the future. I think that Apple are trying to attract different markets now. They have a lot more of a focus on the Asian markets than they did before, which is probably a really good reason for why the iPhones got bigger. And I think if they do a stylus, I think that's another reason for why they've done that. I do believe that if Apple wants to grow,

they have to start doing things like this. They have to start going for the features that other people have to attract the other customers. And I just see that that is a path that they may take. I agree it's not the one that they have had before, but I think it's the one that they could start to take going forward.

That's my own personal opinion, my punditry. I guess I don't think either of these approaches is wrong. I think what I would say is Apple is trying Apple, Apple is trying to reach different markets. That's absolutely true. I do feel like that, that Apple, look, if, if all Apple was concerned about was checking, uh, a feature box on, on a, in a, in a list of features, then they would have had a, an Apple stylus available for phone and tablet years ago. So there is a line that Apple needs to cross, a bar they need to clear. We've got a story with this, that it's good enough for us. I don't mean a good enough in a negative way. I mean, it meets our standards. Below this point,

we can't ship it. That bar may change depending on the market, but I do think it is there. And I think that's sort of what Darcy is saying here is it needs to – you can't just throw a pen out there because other people have pens. And they haven't, right? Samsung has been waving that stylus in Apple's face for years now. And Apple's done nothing. Yeah, it's like taunting them. Look at the stylus. The S Pen is here.

Woo. And nothing. So if Apple does come out with something, that will be an interesting moment because what they're saying is, now we've got a story to tell. Now we've got a product that meets our standards. And what's that going to be? And the software and the hardware need to be good enough to make that something. Because otherwise, if it's good enough now, if everything is good enough now, then why doesn't Apple have that product? I think that's the

argument is it may be good enough for some people now, but it seems to not be good enough for Apple because Apple is content to not upgrade their digitizer and not come out with its own pen that kicks all the other pens out of the market. So what makes that change? And what's the thing that pushes them to do that? And maybe it's just to find a reason for an iPad Pro for being. Maybe it's just we need reasons why we would sell this thing. But that's troubling in its own way, if that's the case. I don't know. But I think, yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see. This is one of those things that's troubling in its own way, if that's the case. I don't know. But I think, yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see. This is one of those things that's very...

The answer to this, what happens here, will give us an interesting data point on where Apple is right now in terms of its product philosophy in 2015. If it does this, that'll be fascinating to see. And I will try some note-taking app at some point here against my better judgment because I don't like pens, just to get a better idea of what the current experience is like, at least on the iPad. I don't have a Surface to try out.

But, all right, that's follow-up. Yay. Time for follow-out. Time for some follow-out. We should mention hashtag AskUpgrade on Twitter. yay time for follow out time for some follow out we should mention hashtag askupgrade on twitter you can go to relay.fm and send feedback via the feedback form

that works too and you can be a part of follow up we love to hear from you follow out I just wanted to mention connected24 this week this was your big and I mean big it's like three hours long podcast where you break down the ipad launch yeah it was it was uh quite an undertaking uh we people may

have been familiar with the prompt episode 30 where we did this for the iphone um the difference being uh from a production perspective this time we went back a bit further as well and we looked at the run-up to the ipads introduction yeah a lot of research yeah federico did some incredible research and and and he took a look at kind of what the rumors were like leading up um and so we did that then we did like the play-by-playplay breakdown of the iPad introduction and spoke about how we feel about the iPad. So it was a lot of fun. We really enjoyed it. Yeah, I liked it a lot.

I really enjoyed it. I listened to that on my drive down to Cupertino and back last week. I was just visiting a friend. Nothing secret. Just visiting a friend. I've got more friends at Apple these days because some of my former colleagues are doing work at Apple now. But I can say no more. It's not that exciting.

It's just nice to go down there and visit with pals who are inside the rainbow curtain now. That's not a phrase. I like it, though. of phrase i like it though i wanted to mention um this mostly because i wanted to tell a story about when i went to the ipad event and um and related to our note-taking thing i i uh you know i think dan moran was live blogging it and i was uh or maybe i was live blogging it anyway you you do that and when you're covering it that intensely, you kind of miss seeing it. You miss the—you lose the big picture. You don't see the forest for the trees when you're covering an event like that.

So I will often watch an event video afterward. So later that day or maybe the next day, I'm home, and I'm watching on my Apple TV, I am watching the iPad launch on the TV. And I don't realize that my son, who was five at the time, is behind the couch and is transfixed by this. And it's a fond memory for me now because he was he was exposed to the untempered reality distortion field and i had that moment where i was like oh my god he's been inside the rdf because you know he he doesn't he doesn't usually see tv commercials he doesn't know and now he's got apple event steve jobs just talking to him about how great the ipad is and it totally worked because for the next whatever, four months, he would not stop talking about how we needed an

iPad. He's like, we need an iPad. We have to have an iPad. This five-year-old kid, we have to have an iPad. It does this, it does this. Is the iPad out yet? When are we going to get an iPad? We have to get an iPad. And it was amazing how powerful that event was, whatever 30-minute chunk of it he saw was to him because he was completely enthralled and then could not stop talking about the iPad. And flash forward 10 years and his favorite device is, in fact, an iPad, and he uses it all the time. So he's an iPad kid. Thanks, Steve. I love that. I mean, he's an iPad kid. Thanks, Steve. I love that.

I mean, he was caught up in it. I feel like I was caught up in it as well. Like I mentioned on the show, I was watching Steve do the intro. I was like, I should buy an iPad Air 2. It would be so amazing to read the New York Times. And then I was able to break out of it not too long after, thankfully. But it will get you. It's dangerous.

It's very dangerous. Right, we have completed follow-up and out, and we do have a couple of topics today. So why don't we take a quick break here and jump right in. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website, portfolio, and online store. For a free trial and 10% off, visit squarespace.com and enter the offer code UPGRADE at checkout. When it comes to giving

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make sure that you use the offer code upgrade to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for this show. Thank you so much to Squarespace for the support of all of Real AFM Squarespace. Start here, go anywhere. A website on the

internet, you said. I have created a website on my computer that is not on the internet, and here's the address. MacintoshHD sites Jason's cool website cool website page one on the internet and here's the address Macintosh HD slash sites slash Jason's cool website slash cool website page one

underscore is this file period spelled out period dot HTML that sounds really good I look forward to visiting visiting that yeah check it out it's not on the internet but you can get to it on my hard drive.

I'll be right over. Okay, good. We have topics now. We should put a thing at the beginning of the show that says, if you would like to skip the follow-up, please advance to 30 minutes in. We could make it like one of those text-based adventure games. Yeah, exactly. minutes in we can make it like one of those tech space adventure games yeah yeah exactly exactly um you need to know the cheat code to get to the so here's the thing i i am one of the reasons i'm

excited about doing this show every week is the follow-up i've i've thought a lot about the the problems of doing i think it's an advantage of these sequential shows shows that people listen to every week is that um it's telling an ongoing story and the follow-up is not only does that allow the listeners to interact, but it also means that like sort of there are these echoes that move through the episodes that as you listen to them, you're like, oh, yeah, I remember that and they said this and it all kind of builds. And I think that's great. I think one of the challenges with it is if you do 30 minutes of follow-up at the beginning of the show, this is, I think, hypercritical. I always felt this about it. I liked the follow-up, and yet I also felt like you go back and you want to listen to the TiVo episode of Hypercritical, but you've got to go through 20 minutes of follow-up to get there, and it's follow-up from shows that you haven't listened to in ages. So it hurts on that. It's not like instantly accessible. You have to wait, or you have to just go through follow-up of things you haven't

heard. And, you know, we don't do any of the incomparable for a bunch of reasons, but I always thought the way you could do it is just stick it all at the end. Um, but the danger there is that then you never get to it. So I don't know, I don't know what the best, short of putting in chapter marks, Mike, and that's, that's not going to happen. I like the chronology of having the follow-up at the front because it's leading on from last time. Well, like I said, that gives you, for regular listeners, I agree.

I think that is the power of it. I think that's, like I said, that's why I was excited to do this show in this way is I listen to all these shows that have the follow-up at the beginning. And I love the follow-up at the beginning. And the other shows that I do don't have it. So I like that part of it. But there's always that, the downside of it is that, you know, it's 30 minutes of talk before you, you know, it's not like follow-up isn't topics. It's just in a context that is lost if it's the first episode you listen to. I don't know. I totally get that because it makes logical sense. But I've listened to shows. I've jumped into podcasts before and I've still drawn entertainment

from listening to the follow-up. I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm assuming that people, well, I know people don't go right listening to the follow-up i don't know maybe i'm crazy but uh i'm assuming that people well i know people don't go right back to the start and listen all the way but we do get new people every week so all right um in the chat room suggests a follow-up sandwich so there's a term that we need to copyright immediately and steal from raffola follow-up sandwich would be you start with a hot topic and then you move to follow-up and then you go on with the rest of the stories. I don't know. That feels a little choppy too. That's the beauty of this medium, this format.

There's no right answer. We could try different things. We moved Ask Upgrade to the end. So, you know, or near the end. Anyway, the big topic this week is Apple's huge results last week. Yeah, they were huge. That was a crazy thing the last Tuesday afternoon that Dan Morin and I were covering on Six Colors. You get to listen to Tim Cook talk.

You get to listen to the Luca luca the cfo talk about headwinds and foreign uh financial transactions and hedging and things that i do not understand because they are business and finance things but you get tim cook dropping little tidbits here and there about sort of again i love that stuff about why, you know, why does Apple, what's it thinking? Why do they do what they do? What is their approach to this? And we got some of that. There was a good Ask Upgrade item that we put in here from a listener whose name I did not translate because one of the problems with the Ask Upgrade is it just gives us the username. It's David it's it's listener david uh said how does apple produce 34 000 iphones an hour and still be supply constrained and ship them around the world um it's a good question i i uh

nine phones a second were sold in that three-month span. Nine iPhones a second. Magic and robots. It is hard to imagine. I mean, it's just, I said this, I can't remember where I said this. I think I said this somewhere, but maybe not on this show. It gets to the point, maybe it was on Clockwise.

It gets to the point where the numbers are hard just for people to fathom. It's like the law of large numbers that we talk about is this idea that, I mean, and people misuse the term law of large numbers, but it's often used in terms of Apple in saying that at some point you're so big that you can't grow much, you can't get much bigger because the number's just too big to begin with. This is sort of the argument about Facebook growth will eventually be constrained because they will run out of human beings. I think, though, when we talk about large numbers with Apple, sometimes the problem

is it's just hard for our brands to comprehend what it means that they made that many billions of dollars and sold that many iPhones. These are very large numbers. They're outside of the scope of our day-to-day experience. And when you look at the numbers too, you see how huge the iPhone is and it continues to be bigger. I mean, Apple is essentially iPhone incorporated with a nice side business of computers and iPads and iTunes and Apple Pay. But those are all like little cute, little side businesses that on their own would be big businesses. But the iPhone just dwarfs them and every other tech company and maybe every other company in existence. It's hard to fathom.

it's hard to fathom. How do you think Apple feel about having their company so iPhone heavy? And do you think that it is a, or should be a concern to have one product line out of their maybe five or six product lines drive that sort of percentage of revenue? It's a good problem to have um i don't think anybody's going to turn down a product that is that successful and profitable but i do think it's potentially distorting um and i've been thinking about this with regard to the Apple Watch. The Apple Watch is a really interesting product, right? But there are lots of interesting products Apple could come up with.

In fact, Apple's got some interesting products, not just the Mac and the iPad, but like the Apple TV. And they say, well, we're looking at that. That's an area of interest. But what's the Apple Watch? The Apple Watch is an iPhone accessory. It does not work without the iPhone. It is an iPhone accessory. And it may be very successful as a really, really great iPhone accessory because we know, I mean, looking at the other smartwatches that are out there, the only one that really even works with the iPhone is the Pebble. And as a Pebble user, I can tell you it

doesn't work that well. They are sort of, it works despite the OS's issues with the Pebble, not because of. And so this thing is instantly going to be the, not just a cool piece of hardware and not just a fashion item, but it's going to be really the only way you would interact with a smartwatch and an iPhone because of that. It's not just Apple's trademark hardware and software integration. It's their hardware, software, and accessory connectivity to other hardware and software. It's this ecosystem integration on a really, not like ecosystem, like there's a Mac over there, but it's like there's a watch and a phone and they're connected together just perfectly, seamlessly. This is the kind of product you make when you have a product a company makes when they are the iPhone company, because it's an iPhone accessory.

And I'm not saying that's not going to be a really interesting product, but I was just thinking about it this weekend. And it just feels, if the iPhone was as successful as the iPad and the Mac, the Apple Watch wouldn't be a thing, I think. Or it wouldn't be the thing that it is. Because you're only going to sell it to a certain percentage of the people who have iPhones. And so you need this giant number in order to justify making that product. But they've got the giant number. They've got the giant number.

What percentage of iPhone users need to buy an Apple Watch to make the Apple watch bigger than the ipad and the mac there's a number and it's probably not that big maybe it's not in saying they'll they'll get there but they they could theoretically um it seems like that the margins might be quite high like if if the rumored price is believed to be true right because they're charging kind of like fashion accessory price lines. You know, there is a potential, maybe not initially, because these things can be difficult to produce, but eventually there could be at least some models

of the Apple Watch where the margins are quite good on it for Apple. Maybe. Yeah. But that is... So without putting a value judgment on it, I think the Apple Watch is a good example of what is probably a distortion from, again, I'm trying not to be negative about it. I'm trying to say this is behavior that is changed because the number that goes along with the iPhone is so huge. that goes along with the iPhone is so huge. And the Apple TV is a different product and it's relying on Apple's, you know, ecosystem. And yeah, iPhone is a part of that,

but it's the iTunes ecosystem and Macs and iPads and other things. And if you're prioritizing, um, when the iPhone gets this big, I feel like, you know, any math you do about what kind of products should you do next comes back to, well, yeah, but look at this iPhone, I feel like, you know, any math you do about what kind of product should you do next comes back to, well, yeah, but look at this iPhone. It's like, should we do more iPhones? Should we do things that we sell to iPhone users? Because even if you sell a small percentage of, sell a product to a small percentage of those users, that number is just so large now. That, you know, it's, I don't think this is ever going to

happen, but I think it's worth, just as an exercise, ask yourself, what would the decisions that an Apple that just had the Mac and the iPad, or the Mac, the iPad, and an iPhone that was at the same sales level as the Mac and the iPad. They're roughly comparable in terms of revenue. What decisions would that company make in terms of its product direction and development? And what decisions does the real Apple make? And, you know, those decisions are going to be different, I think. Because I don't think it's a question of, like, there's only one path forward.

I think there's a question of there are lots of paths forward. Which paths do we choose to walk down? and how much energy do we invest in them? And the existence of the iPhone is this great success. That is going to lead you down those paths, the paths that are fed by and can feed the iPhone. I think it benefits. Ultimately, I do think the Mac and the iPad benefit to a certain degree just because there's so much money and it makes Apple successful and there's a halo around the iPhone that extends to those products. But at the same time, if you stand up and say, yeah, the iOS for iPads, that interface and software should be better, you may get a lot of agreement even inside Apple, even inside the iOS development team that the iPad could be a better product, that iOS could be tuned more for the iPad.

At the same time, look at the numbers. What are you going to prioritize? It's very difficult to prioritize the iPad ever, I think, when you look at the iPhone. So it's a challenge. It's fascinating to look at that number and try to imagine what that does to a company's priorities. Lester Jeff wrote in related to this and said, Has the iPhone become a little boring and too mainstream? Is it time for Apple to do something with the next major model that either does something interesting hardware or software-wise?

I'd personally like them to incorporate some gesture-based maneuvers for app switching for example it's not a bad idea jeff but um i think what i would say is um boring and boring and mainstream when it is this uh making this much money again how motivated is apple to do something big that's like different i other than wanting to improve things but i think there's also a feeling like why would you mess up the thing that's like different other than wanting to improve things. But I think there's also a feeling like, why would you mess up the thing that's doing so crazily well? And I guess this is one of those things that I always hear on ATP that John Syracuse especially talks about, which is this, you know, the idea that success hides a lot of problems. And I think this is one of those good examples, which is at some point, if the

iPhone really could make a step and be that much better, is there a point at which Apple would be hesitant to do that because it's just too successful now? I mean, the counter argument would be back in the day, and this is in Apple's dna i really do believe is that the ipad mini ipod mini was the biggest selling ipod and they killed it and replaced it with the nano because they thought it was better and you would like that to be part of this company's culture that they will not be afraid to make a big change but at the same time they are not going to want to alienate their existing iPhone audience. I don't know. Yeah, sure. What do you think? I think boring and mainstream is a little harsh.

I don't think I would agree with that. I think it's always good and fun to have new things, but I don't think necessarily that gestures like the pre would then make the iPhone not boring if your current concern is that it's boring. Considering the phone just significantly changed form factor. I don't think you can get bigger than that. The 6 is a big thing.

I wrote a piece on Mac world back in April of last year titled Apple is not here to entertain you. And it came out of a conversation I was having with Renee Ritchie, uh, over lunch in Petaluma actually, after we did a, one of the Twitch shows. And, um, the idea is, yeah, I get it. People want Apple to do new things, but Apple's business is not to keep analysts and reporters and even fans of technology entertained by new things. That's not their job. Their job is to make great products and have a successful business. And they do entertain us from time to time, but their job is not to like, because it's like, you know, we have this incredibly successful product. Come on,

that's boring. You already had that product. Give us a new product. No, we're going to keep doing this good product that we have. I get that it might not be as entertaining, but it's incredibly successful and a popular product and people like it. And so that's okay. As long as it isn't hiding problems. I would hate for Apple to bypass a revolutionary change to the iPhone because they don't need to bother, but they seem to try very hard to not go down that path. Should we address something?

Yeah, we should. One more point on this just really quickly, which was I like that Tim Cook talked about the iPad and gave it his, and it's in my transcript that I put on Six Colors about it because I transcribed

everything Tim Cook said. I recorded and then I used those fast typing fingers to get a transcript of everything Tim Cook said in the call. And he makes his sort of impassioned defense of the iPad and says, look, obviously the refresh cycle, the buying cycle is not as rapid as it is for iPhones, but he's a believer in the category. I think it's interesting to watch that because iPad sales were flat. And they're flat. iPad sales are flat. So it's something to watch. It's interesting to see that Apple's not backing away from it in the sense that Tim Cook says that over time, he believes that this is a fantastic category. I also feel like the iPad is unfairly being compared to the iPhone

because smartphones are just a different category. Smartphones do not follow the same laws as computers and tablets. They don't. It's much more. The iPad business is roughly the Mac business at this point, which is not bad. That's a good business to be in, but it's not the iPhone, and it's not going to be the iPhone.

So it's something that's worth watching, but I do think it's worth people checking out what Tim Cook said about the iPad because it's a statement about how they believe in it, but that they're still learning what the issues are and how often people are going to buy a new iPad because the iPads last. iPads last and there's no subsidy to drive you to buy a new model every two years. That's totally it. I think Apple in the long term I believe will need to get accustomed to the fact

that people will upgrade their iPads as frequently as they upgrade their Macs or PCs. I think that's the thing that they maybe hoped wouldn't be the case naturally uh but i think time is is is telling that that that is kind of the way people treat these devices yeah well i mean you upgrade every two years you'll upgrade an iphone for 200 but that's because your phone company is paying the other three or 400 and the ipad doesn't if the ipad was 199 um maybe that would be the case but

that's just not and that's just not how it works that's it's not how it works do you know i still don't even think that that would be it i think it's the inertia of the one of the contract ending that that pushes people um it just isn't they can't do it yeah and they're just it just isn't a thing right you could argue that most of the phone's phone life can be much longer than two years too. Maybe not as long as an iPad, but longer than it is. But if you're on a contract cycle, it makes it that much easier. In the U.S., the way the contracts generally have worked up till now, some are changing this. But generally, the phone companies calculated out their subsidy is covered in two years and your contract is two years.

You can keep your phone for three years. They don't make your bill in most cases any lower. So you're motivated to get a new phone every two years because otherwise you're just handing money back to the phone company. So there's there actually a bunch of motivations. Now, that is changing. Some of the plans now are more specifically subsidy plans, and you're paying extra for the length of the subsidy and not forever. And then there's less motivation to get a new phone right away because your bill goes down. Yep.

Okay. We should make a note before we move on to our next topic that something crazy happened. I used to play a dice baseball game. This is going to be right up your alley, Mike. A tabletop dice baseball game. A couple, actually.

And both of them had the same mechanic, which is if you rolled a certain set of dice a certain a certain dice roll um it's like dnd for sports nerds basically is what i'm saying uh there would be i remember in the game that i played in high school it was 38 was something crazy happens it's like almost everything else was just a normal play but then you the crazy thing would come up and you'd be like oh what happened and then something something weird there'd be a guy be hit by a pitch or there'd be an injury or whatever you during the middle of the last segment rolled 38 yeah i did and all the crazy things happened simultaneously so you are now hearing me

locally recorded up to this point you you have heard the Skype recording. I apologize if it sounded below our usual standards. But basically, Skype seemed to be the catalyst for a catastrophic destruction of my Mac, in which my entire UI froze. The clock didn't move for five minutes, and I had to suffer multiple restarts. I upgraded Skype. Then it couldn't read or see any of my audio inputs or outputs. So after lots of troubleshooting and reading the KBase, here we are, and I think we're okay.

And we can move on ahead. But it was kind of a catastrophic failure enough that we wanted to point it out at this point during the show and then move on from it we survived apparently that's that's the rumor you shouldn't say up to this point now now it all sounds good because you don't know we may be patching in you may have another failure here it's possible but probably not well we'll address that one when we come to it

okay yeah sorry wait for the next footnote alright do you want to talk before we get to Ask Upgrade and the movie do you want to talk about YouTube a little bit because this was a link

you put in the show notes actually last week and we didn't get to it yeah I did want to talk about this I'm actually currently listening well before we started this show today, I was listening to an episode of Hello Internet, which is the show that everybody knows I love so much.

And Brady and Gray were just about to start discussing this issue. So for the YouTube discussion, I haven't heard it yet. This is sort of advanced follow-out. It's follow-out with us having not heard it yet. Yeah, I would assume that that's probably the way we could look at things. But I think that they are probably going to have a much better discussion about the YouTube side. I don't really want to talk about YouTube per se. So let me just set this up.

musician Zoe Keating, she is kind of being pushed by YouTube into signing the contract for the new YouTube music deal. So basically at the moment, she can currently decide whether if her music is used in a video, if she wants to take a cut of the ads from it. That's kind of the contract that she's currently on.

She can then, YouTube want to move her into a totally different contract which has totally different rules and regulations about the way that her music is done. And she could be a paid channel and there'll be ads and everything. And basically the stuff that she doesn't want to do. Now, the reason I wanted to bring this up is because there was a bit of discussion on the day that you wrote a little piece. This is like a week or so ago with people that are on YouTube, people that are not on YouTube, and looking at how

YouTube owns this market. And if you want to create videos on the internet, you have to be on YouTube. There is nowhere else. You can be on other places, but you will not get the critical mass that you want. If you want to get the audience, the audience is there. And it made me think about what we do and the fact that there is not currently one single source and how important i think that that is right for entertainment and media for there not to be one single source because you're you're destroyed like i am very intrigued like looking at how microsoft was was completely railroaded by the european union that youtube is not finding itself or Google is not finding itself in a sort of sticky situation with them. Because it's very

much like they own the pipe, they own everything. And it's all there and you have no say and there's nowhere else you can go. But I know that there's lots of different reasons as to why it was a problem for Microsoft. But I just look at it and think, you are such a dominant force. You are such an incredible monopoly on the video streaming world. It scares me to think that somebody might come and try and do this to podcasts. And there are companies that are trying, but they are not really... They are having success. I don't know how much they're succeeding though, you know? They are having success. I don't know how much they're succeeding, though, you know. Well, yeah, it's the, I mean, the fact that podcasts are founded on RSS is a fundamentally decentralizing feature that even when you have a big podcast directory like iTunes,

in the end, all iTunes is doing is pointing you back at an RSS feed that is elsewhere. And that has had this great democratizing effect. Although it also, you know, not having an official central point for all podcasts does make it harder to find podcasts. I would argue that this is one of the great things about the iTunes directory for podcasts is there is a place run by a company everybody knows

that has a directory of podcasts. And that's really good. You need to be in that directory you don't have to be but it's a really good place to go people know that they can look on itunes for podcasts and it's like youtube except that apple doesn't actually serve the files or you know they they could remove you from the podcast directory but they just don't care it's a hands-off kind of thing it's just the podcast directory is is there for you to use and it's decentralized behind it. And YouTube is not the case. And it is scary. And yes, I'm sure Stitcher or some company like that would

love to be able to be... It's not like... I think what would need to happen is there would need to be some sort of ground swell for a particular kind of uh kind of technology or or you know all the cars get only one way that podcasts get into cars are only two ways and they're they're through stitcher or you know company x and that's it. That would be the scary thing because then they could really exert power and say, if you want to play, if you want to be in the only place that most listeners go, then we have power over you. And that's where YouTube is right now.

And it's scary because YouTube is, I mean, Gray called it a monopoly and a monopsony. It is the only market, and it is the only place for people to receive the goods. And it is, you know, it is the Soviet grocery store with the long bread line. My kids are huge YouTube fans. They are YouTube viewers. They watch YouTube like I watched sitcoms at four in the afternoon when I was a kid. I mean, like, they don't need to watch Gilligan's Island. They have YouTube and they watch it.

That's their TV. And it's all on YouTube and it all links to other things on YouTube and all the creators are on YouTube. And maybe we'll get to the point where there's an alternative to YouTube. I'm sure people are trying. But Google's purchase of YouTube has turned out to be pretty powerful because that is the place. It's like its own genre, its own network. It is everything. And it is wildly successful.

And there's a whole generation coming up now that is going to view youtube as just the definitive place where all video lives so it's it's it'll be interesting to see how it goes in fact um i i mean i could see like five or ten years out a scenario where google's uh you know what we think of as google's big businesses uh especially like the text ad stuff, is a lot less relevant. But Google controls all video advertising on the internet, essentially, with this, with YouTube. I actually do believe, and I've been thinking about this recently, that in 50, 60, 100 years, Google will be remembered for YouTube primarily. I think that that is going to be the thing that people will remember them for. I think it's that powerful. It would be like a trivia question.

Did you know that that Google search engine also was behind YouTube? Yeah. Wow, really? Both of those things were from the same company? Yeah. In fact, Google bought YouTube. Wow, they bought them. Wow.

I hope they spent a lot of money on it. I mean, because YouTube, I was trying to explain this to somebody. I think maybe it was on the talk show because John Gruber's son is roughly my son's age. You know, YouTube is not like even like Channel 2 showing Gilligan's Island reruns in the afternoon when I was a kid. YouTube is all the TV networks. YouTube is not like a TV network when I was a kid. It's all it's television. Imagine one company owning all of television for my kids generation that's what this is it's it's not that's why i think it's that's why i think it's a good buy um and minecraft it's the same deal microsoft buying minecraft they're buying they're not buying a a game they're kind of buying the game and between minecraft and youtube you've pretty much described um 80 of my kids

entertainment life over the last four years it's like it's not even so much it's it's all of the tv it's everything you could ever want to watch like that's the difference it's not just it's all the tv channels it's like what do you want to watch right now okay it's on youtube like because somebody's making it someone somewhere is making it like my nephew watches people like videos of people unboxing toys yeah oh yeah and just showing toys on on youtube or he watches people play uh disney infinity like it's just what he does and it's like it's just this crazy world and i remember when he was he was like um maybe 18 months old uh and he was playing with my iphone for the first time playing with my iphone he watches uh youtube on my brother, like his dad's iPhone.

But I gave him my iPhone and he navigated to the screen and opened the folder in which he could see the YouTube icon. Like, and I was just blown away because he didn't know where it was. But he saw that little red play button inside that folder and he knew what that meant. And, you know, and then he started going around the recent history because he knew that was where the videos were in his mind that he's been watching.

That's his remote control. That is his world, his entertainment view. Now, I think that this is incredibly powerful and I think that YouTube fundamentally is a great thing because it enables that and it enables creation and it enables people to find a voice for themselves online. Anything like that is fantastic.

The problem is when it becomes a business and it's the only option, I think that it... YouTube, the great thing about YouTube is not Google or the YouTube company. The great thing about YouTube is the people within it creating the stuff. And that's when it becomes a problem.

So with podcasts, we have all of the people, but there is no company that is making us do anything. And if you don't like your deal, you go somewhere else and get a better deal. Yeah, because all of the companies that you might get deals with, there are other ones. Right. And with YouTube, the Zoe Keating example that was chilling, and it's unclear whether this was just some overzealous rep or what, but the message was essentially, here are our new terms.

You can either say yes or you can go away. And where are your options? And where are you going to go? And where are you going to go? Like, this is your living. What are you do yeah it'll happen though some some youtuber or or or set of youtube stars will do will will do something where they go off of youtube and all that's left on youtube is pointers to this other place and that'll i mean it's i think it's already happened but not super successfully.

But I feel like that will just keep happening. You're gonna try to, somebody's gonna try to establish a competitor and try to make deals with these YouTubers to come over. But it's scary for them because, you know, unless you're guaranteeing them revenue, you know, you're really risking, you're losing that ecosystem.

Because not only do they have their followers, but those people are subscribed to, you know, 20 or 30 different YouTubers and they're all kind of mixed in together. It's like leaving a TV network. You're out of the rotation over there. And instead you have to remember to go to this other site and watch the videos over there. It's a tough, it's tough. I mean, this is, that's the kind of mindshare YouTube has. So yeah, I hope that doesn't happen for podcasting, It's tough. I mean, this is, that's the kind of mindshare YouTube has. So yeah, I hope that doesn't happen for podcasting, but it would really, at this point it would really require a, um, some technological shift that where somebody gets in, you know, the only way people were listening to podcasts and cars anymore, then we would all be like, I guess we have to go to Stitcher and that would be scary. But I don't think it's going to happen because I think in all those cases,

it's app, it's like app radio and there'll be multiple options. Even if it ends up being, unfortunately, like you have to make a deal with somebody to get into the car. But even, you know, even there, I feel like there will be

some better independent options yep because that's why we're not on stitcher like i i've i've taken a look at some of their contract terms and i and me and steven we just we don't want to sign it because we don't think we have to so we're not not going to. It's as simple as that. We're perfectly fine with the audience that we have. And that audience grows. And that audience comes from where it comes from. I'm not really in the interest of signing our souls away. Yeah.

All right. We should move on. Yes. So we should do some Ask Upgrade before we do our special inaugural movie segment. Indeed. Would you like to tell our friends who is sponsoring Ask Upgrade this week? Yes. Hashtag Ask Upgrade is brought to you this week by Stamps.com.

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podcast you're listening to to get a special offer you get a no risk trial and there is a 110 bonus offer which includes a digital scale I've got a digital scale right here. Can you tap it? Digital scale. Yeah. And up to $55 of free postage. So don't wait. Go to stamps.com. And before you do anything else, click on the microphone at the top of the page and type in upgrade. That'll let them know that we sent you and you will get the special deal. So that's stamps.com. Easy to remember. Enter code upgrade. And thank you so much to stamps.com for sponsoring upgrade. I will endeavor to send, I've got a couple of packages to mail out now using stamps.com. I have to put together my care package for Mike. I haven't done that yet. And I'm sending a little care package to Dan Warren all the way in Boston. And I'm going to put that together later today and stick it in my mailbox.

And I'm not going to even walk to the post office because why? There are people there. I don't want to deal with those people. If anything, stamps.com is great for Jason Snell to send people gifts. And if that's not a reason enough to sign up so you can send gifts, then I don't know what is. Care packages. It's important for my business. It's business development for the Incomparable Incorporated.

Ask Upgrade Time. Just a few selected entries from the hashtag. Lister Brian wrote in to say, do you pirate movies or television? If so, how do you explain this to your kids or your future kids? How do you explain this to your future kids, Mike? And is it different than jailbreak and app pirating? So I'll answer first. I don't pirate stuff.

I will make a minor exception for things that are completely unavailable for purchase or rent. And even then, I feel like I need to buy something in order to balance out my media karma. So for example, there was a period where Doctor Who was airing months in advance in the UK. And I bit torrented those and pre-ordered the DVDs. And I felt like, eh, it's a fair trade. And back in the pre-comicsology days, I would occasionally download comic torrents. And that would basically drive sales of – I would buy the trades or the hardcovers of those comics. And I wasn't downloading new issues. I was sort of like downloading the, oh, here's 50 issues of this comic.

And I would read them and I'd be like, okay. And then I'd buy the hardcover of that. So I don't do it much at all anymore. Like I said, unless there's something that's just totally unavailable in the U.S. And then occasionally I'll do that. Let's see, Black Mirror, which is now on Netflix, was not available in the U.S. for several years. And one of the incomparable people saw it, presumably on BitTorrent, and recommended it highly. And I watched that through that means,

but that's about it. I would say the only difference between that and something like app pirating for me is that with app pirating, you are often harming a small business. And with movie and TV show pirating, you're usually harming a huge conglomerate or set of conglomerates. I'm not sure that really makes it any better or worse, but it is different in that way. But anyway, yeah, that's my feeling about piracy is that at this point, I'm not using it to get around buying things. I'm using it occasionally to get around geographic restrictions or distribution problems or just an unavailability of something digitally that happens. Sometimes for the incomparable, we have that where we're trying to talk about something that's not widely available. Or I've downloaded some British stuff early because we

had, I did a Doctor Who recap with somebody in Scotland and it wasn't going to air in the US until like four in the morning his time. So I downloaded the BitTorrent version, watched it, we talked, and then I watched it again with my family on tv that night so um and when i can i buy things in order to balance out the books so that's mine mike what about you i do feel like the the balancing out the books thing should be like that should make it okay like legally like that should be fine it does it doesn't but you know i feel better about it like i felt better about about those doctor who downloads because i bought the dvd it's like all right well look i am i i was not

patronizing i think i even recorded them when they aired in the u.s just like to feel better about having recorded them when they aired in the u.s but you know ideally yes i should have waited patiently for them to air months later in the u.s and watch those and watch the commercials and then felt good about it. But at least like with the comics, it's the same thing. You know, I downloaded a BitTorrent of whatever, of Invincible, and then I liked it and then I bought the trades or Why the Last Man, something like that. And it's not ideal. And I don't do that anymore because it's a lot easier to get that stuff legally through a digital means because I was also reading comics on a device.

I wasn't reading them on paper. So that made a big difference, too. So, you know, but it doesn't I don't think it absolves me legally, but I feel like it absolves me somehow morally, karmically in some way to have given the creator money after the fact. I don't know. to have given the creator money after the fact? I don't know. I mean, obviously, before people email us, yes, I understand that if you are not being very careful with your settings, your peer-to-peer settings,

by using BitTorrent, you are helping other people find the stuff. And I know that that's probably the bigger problem. But you can lock off your upload and not be sharing out. But I'm sure that there are... Anyway, Invincible, by the way, is a great comic book. It is.

I thoroughly recommend it. It's a favorite of mine. So I'm going to put that in the show notes, which you can find at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 21 or in your podcast app of choice right now indeed yes um so i i've my main reason for for not pirating these days is i cannot be bothered with the aggravation uh of pirating i find it to be a frustrating experience full of just things that I'm not interested in doing. That's the classic Steve Jobs line, right? When he announced the iTunes store, one of the things he said was, it's hard to use these peer-to-peer networks and the quality

is questionable and the tagging is bad and it's hard to find this stuff. And it's much easier to just go on iTunes and click a button. And, you know, he was right. There is something to that. People will pay, not everybody, but a lot of people will pay for convenience. And so if you can make the legal means convenient and pirating is sort of fundamentally inconvenient in many or most cases, then, you know, that makes a difference. Unless you're like literally like, I cannot and will not buy this. But that's a different approach

than saying it's, I'm willing to pay to get that convenience. So I just believe in streaming. Just please make it available. Like that's all I want. Just make it available. I will pay. Like I will pay.

Like when I was looking for the Princess Bride, I Googled for it and there were a bunch of like daily motion videos or whatever. And I just ignored them until I could find the easiest way to pay. And I went to iTunes because I just don't want the aggravation. There are, I mean, I guess the only thing that I maybe do that's questionable is like I use like American Netflix via using a VPN.

Cloak is my VPN of choice, by the way. I'm a big fan of that. I like Cloak a lot. Getcloak.com. Yep. Works on iOS and Mac. It's really, really, really fancy. I'm a big fan.

So, you know, sometimes I will do that. Like, I will sign into American Netflix. Like, we're watching Parks and Recreation at the moment. And Amazon Prime Instant only has the first three seasons in the UK so to get more to get like seasons four to seven I can sign into American Netflix like I don't even understand why these things happen like okay I do but like it makes no sense to me like why do this just make it available to me like don't don't make me do this you are making me want to pirate like season three ended in like 2010 like come on anyway so uh parks and rec is a great show by the way i'm enjoying it fantastic show i'm really really enjoying it a lot um so that's kind

of my thing i do that i use cloak But I'm a paying customer of those services. So if I was in the United States of America, that's what I would be seeing. But I'm not. I'm here. There's nothing I can do about it. All right. Well, good mini-topic. I bet we'll have some feedback on that one.

Yeah. Another Ask Upgrade. Listener Chris said, Podcasting is a large chunk of both of your careers. How many hours a week do you guys spend working on your shows? What do you think, Mike? another ask upgrade listener chris said podcasting is a large chunk of both of your careers how many hours a week do you guys spend working on your shows what do you think mike this is so hard for me to answer now because it's literally all of my time you know uh because there's so much more that goes into it so for example for this show for the like the standard

pre-preparation jason puts the majority of the work in. He puts together the document, which is fantastic, and I love him dearly for that. And that's the same with most of my shows, actually, is that the co-hosts that I work with put together the document, and then I take care of all of the other bits, you know, like make sure there's advertisers and make sure that my Mac doesn't't blow up i didn't do very well doing that today uh but you know i do the editing and the posting and that kind of stuff um i don't know maybe let's say we used to kind of used to kind of say like oh for every hour that i that we record it's probably an hour's worth of other stuff as well and i think that that's still a pretty fair thing to say um but one of my big things is it's not even like active time working

on the shows it's thinking about them i think about them all the time you know like what can we do for this show like i have a little idea and then i put that in a document or oh why don't we try this and send a message to you and you know like so there's so much like even like unconscious time i guess that goes into the now but like for me it's it's all i do i mean it's probably different for you um right because you you do other things as well but basically all of all of my working time is is on podcasts but one of the big things is it's changing show by show now. It used to be very clear cut.

I would do this. These are my responsibilities. These are responsibilities of my co-hosts. And this is how long it would take to edit. But now I have different shows that I edit in different ways. And I prepare for some shows differently to this show. So it's very flexible right now. But it's all of my working time.

Well, all of my shows are different um i mentioned this actually in a piece that we'll link to which i went which went up on six colors uh the day that we recorded this february 2nd um it's about how i had a podcast and in there i i say look every one of my shows is different and the amount of work that goes into it is different you're absolutely right. There is this unconscious time. This is true about writing stuff, too. There's the time where you're thinking about things that somebody on the outside would look at and say, look, you're not doing anything now, but you actually are.

And we have the Relay FM Slack group and there's stuff that shoots around in there that I think is informing what we end up with on the shows. There's a lot of stuff that's hard to define. But it's also true that there's the specific stuff. So yeah, on Friday afternoon, as I'm wrapping up my work week, I had that moment where I start to think about what am I going to talk about on Upgrade. And that kind of goes through the weekend. And at some point on Sunday night or Monday morning, I will go through our document and start to cull things from the Ask Upgrade list and from Twitter and from email and think about what the topics are of the last week and what's worth talking about. And then there's the time to record. This show is different because you do the editing. So that's actually very different in terms of my time input because I'm really spending the time we spend talking

and then the thinking about it beforehand and assembling a document, which isn't a massive amount of time, but it's definitely time. For something like Clockwise, there's time spent booking guests because we have to book two guests every week. And I'm trying to do that more in advance,

which actually saves me time because I can send out invitations and try to schedule people weeks in advance instead of every week having to try and beat the bushes and find, you know, a couple of people who are free at that particular time. So that, that takes time. And, um, doing the show doesn't take a lot of time. It's, you know, probably we're on Skype for about 40 minutes, but it's a half an hour show. So that's easy. And then the editing time is mostly me getting it to length. If we like last week's show was 34 minutes long. So I had to pull four minutes of conversation out of a pretty tight show, which is hard, but that's the format. So

that's what it is for something like TV talk machine, which I do with a TV critic, Tim Goodman. That's a Skype conversation. That's a two-person Skype conversation. I do almost nothing to that show. So we talk for an hour or a little bit less than an hour, and then in about 10 minutes I've edited it and posted it because there's very little for me to do. I don't really, unless I note something where one of us had a technical problem or had to go talk to our kids who were being too loud or something like that, that's pretty much a just very straightforward kind of show. Something like The Incomparable, not only

is there, there is scheduling time for that. But, and then those shows, recording sessions tend to be a couple hours long. And then that is, I posted a video of my, of my edit process for an episode of The Incomparable. That's a two to four hour long post-production for most. I'd say on average it's probably about two or three hours to do an episode of that. And I edit that in a more detailed fashion than I do other shows. And part of that is the content of the show, and part of that is the number of panelists on the show, and the fact that it's an unstructured conversation. So there's more interruptions that have to get smoothed out and all of that and then the total party kill is uh you know that's a totally different commitment

because that's a you know three or four hour gameplay which we usually have about a half an hour of technical frustrations at the beginning to get it rolling but then it's just me having fun and then and then over the course of several weeks, I have to go through the edit and do a less detailed edit than I do for something like The Incomparable. But still, you know, I'm still looking for stray noises and things like that. So it varies. I numbered it up. I haven't tallied in a while how much time I spent on podcasts. But, you know, I think it's pretty efficient. Like this podcast, I probably spend three hours a week on. And Clockwise, I probably spend two hours a week on. And Incomparable, I probably spend five hours a week on. And TV Talk Machine, that's probably like an hour and a half.

So it varies based on what the show is. But like, so like saying about that, that episode of Connected that we did. Oh my God. That took me between five and six hours to edit that. Well, we talked about on one of your previous interview shows we talked about the radio drama and the incomparable radio drama you know the first one and the second one too they probably both took me 30 or 40 hours to add it but those are you know exceptions to the rule there's the weekly there's the weekly cycle of like this is what a regular episode is and then there's the it's just like anything right

then there's the the week where you have to work above and beyond because you're on some crazy project. And then you go back down and it's like, now we're back in kind of regular, regular time mode. Anyway, I hope that answers your question, listener Chris. You do the math, add it all up. But it varies. The recording time and the edit time can really vary. And then there's the prep time that can vary. But it's not – I get the impression from some people, it's like, I can't believe you do – like, you do, what, six shows and I do four a week? Six weekly shows and four weekly shows? And it's like, how do you have time for anything else?

And for me, the answer is it's a part-time job it is a big chunk of my time but it's still not you know it's you can do the math there but it's less than 20 hours a week that i spend on this yeah so i could do more but i'm not gonna yeah you can't do more trust me i do but like you know for me it's it's there's so much's so much more now for me to do than there ever was before with all of my arrangements because we run the machine, and the machine takes a lot of oil to get it to run. Right. Well, there's the running the business part of it, too, that is totally – that's not

on every show. That's like running your business. It's separate. That is totally, that's not on every show. That's like running your business. It's separate from the shows, but that's also time. And I have that with Incomparable and Six Colors both. Brian, a real-time follow-up. Brian Hamilton asks in the chat room, how do my sound quality standards shift between shows? That's a really good question.

That is an excellent question because I do have different standards. Yeah, me too. Me too. Like I said, I do TV Talk Machine and I don't even record. I just use the Skype call. I don't even have Tim record his end. And my two reasons for doing that is generally our Skype call is very good quality.

And we're both local. You know, we're both in the Bay Area. It's very good quality. It's fine. And two is, he's not a super technical guy. And I kind of just don't want to walk him through the steps every week of doing his own recording and then getting it to me. And if it was a problem, I would probably go through and set him up with Dropbox and set him up with Call Recorder and all of that. But it's never been a problem, and I don't want to bother.

So my standards are a little lower, but since it's only two people talking and it generally is of good quality, it's good enough for me. And I still do take the two tracks and noise gate them and compress them and do some stuff with them, but I don't ask for a self-recorded track for him. And that's the only show I do like that. All the rest of them, you know, it varies somewhat, but I try to have everybody record their end. And then it's just a matter of what you prioritize. With Incomparable, I'm prioritizing overtalking and interruptions because that's a panel show. With Clockwise, because the format is so regimented, there's not a lot of overtalking and interruption,

but it has to fit in 30 minutes. So that's what I prioritize is cutting it to fit. It just varies. In Total Party Kill, I'm all over the place because I told myself when we started doing that, that I wasn't going to edit that heavily at all. And it turns out I edited it about as heavily. In my Six Colors piece, I say I don't. It's a lie. I kind of edit that as heavily, almost as heavily as I do the incomparable. And I probably shouldn't because it takes too much time. incomparable and that's I probably shouldn't because it takes too much time but I I but I kind of do I kind of just get into the habit of saying I want to get out all those you know all the over talking and all the weird like people bumping their microphones because it sounds better

but sometimes it's just you know what I said in that article and Mike I know we've talked about this too is there's a spectrum that's like on the one side it's like my wife listens to a knitting podcast that literally they press record and then they press stop and and like the act of pressing record is in the podcast and if they have to go away for a moment they say okay we're gonna pause it and then and now we're back they like literally there is no editing and then on the other end of the spectrum is something that's like an npr podcast or something that's like super edited within an inch of its life and as you move from the one side to the other, it's just time. It's more and more exponentially increasing time. And you got to decide. Every show is different. And that's what I found is every podcast that I do falls somewhere on that spectrum and it's different based on what the needs are of that show. And I think that's absolutely true. The Relay shows are more similar than my shows are, but still, every show is going to be different. And you're editing someone else's show now too,

and the Rocket. So that's got to be a different experience still. That's totally different. Editing a show that's not mine is weird. It's weird. I like to do it because whilst we're getting kind of the kinks worked out i have the ability to help guide the show a little bit which which i quite like um so i can give them thoughts and and stuff like that and and that i like that so and also i would be listening to the

show anyway so i may as well make it part of my work at the moment, which is fun. But yeah, it's different. It's totally different because it's, I don't know, there's something strange about it because I don't know what's going to happen next. Like if I'm editing something of my own, I kind of have a feeling of like, oh, I know I need to work on this bit.

It's strange. It's just a different kind of experience. I probably won't edit Rocket forever. We're probably going to get someone to help us on it. But just for the time being, I am, which is a good thing. I like doing that for them to lend a hand. But I agree, like different shows that we do, they're similar, but I do have shows that we do, they're similar but I do

have different kind of standards of the amount of time that I spend on shows and that comes from audience size to the discerningness of the audience so I feel like, and I believe this

listeners of the Pen Addict are less critical about audio than listeners of this Pen Addict are less critical about audio than listeners of this show. And if you listen to Bonanza, well, God help you. That just rolls out as it rolls out, you know? It's just kind of, there's just different kind of, different strokes for different folks, I think. Yeah.

Too quick. We have two more quick bits of Ask Upgrade that I'll just blow through here really quickly. Listener Yap wrote in to say, every time I see Manchego cheese, I have to think about the Manchego vertical and send a picture of Manchego cheese. So I wanted to mention this only to throw in my Super Bowl fact. We had Manchego. Philip Michaels, Lisa Schmeisser, and their daughter came over for the Super Bowl. Always nice to have more people around for the Super Bowl.

We had some manchego. We had nice cheddar that I got from Whole Foods. And some gouda. So that's your cheese update, your cheese vertical update. Super Bowl. You missed the Super Bowl this year, Mike. You were sleeping.

It's so frustrating. So that was the plan, because I had something I needed to do this year, Mike. You were sleeping. It's so frustrating. So that was the plan because I had something I needed to do this morning that I couldn't sleep. And just read about the Super Bowl on Twitter. I was awake for the entire Super Bowl. I'm so annoyed because I really enjoy watching it. But didn't.

Like I could have even watched it online. But no, I didn't. I thought I was trying to sleep and I was just kind of reading Twitter when I couldn't sleep. So never mind. Never mind. It looked like it was an exciting one. And last bit of Ask Upgrade is Peanut Gallery who said, I wish for an iOS app that would let me listen to RelayFM Live and participate in the live chat room,

which I think is a good idea. And I mentioned this in my monologue in the chat room, which I think is a good idea. And I mentioned this in my monologue in the chat room earlier. I don't think a dedicated app for this is necessarily going to reach a big enough audience. But if you've got a, if somebody has a suggestion, if there's some app out there that does this, that would be great. I'd love to hear about it. But if you are a developer of an iOS IRC app, an iOS IRC app, IRC chat app, I guess C stands for chat, IRC app, you could probably make a nice differentiator of a feature by letting your users also point the app to a stream URL and do audio while you're in the chat room, because that is a use case for podcast fans so i don't know about a dedicated app or not but if somebody knows something because that it happens that like

you you set it to you set it to uh stream audio in the background and then you go to irc app and at some point there's memory problems and it quits the stream and you're not listening anymore. If only you knew the man in charge. Yeah, if only. Anyway. So this is going to be the first Mike watches a movie vertical. Yes. And at the end of the episode, I will announce there is going to be another one next.

There is. Which I'm excited about. But the Mike watches a movie vertical is brought to you by our friends at MailRoute. Yes, indeed. MailRoute is the sponsor of this vertical. Imagine a world without spam, viruses, or bounced email. You don't need to imagine it because it's real if you use MailRoute like I do. Open your email.

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Go to mailroute.net slash upgrade. Mailroute.net slash upgrade for a free trial and 10 off for the lifetime of your account so thank you to mail route for sponsoring the mike watches a movie vertical and for filtering my mail so the princess bride now can you please um give a little bit of context to this movie? Because it's one of those films that is a cult classic. It is a cult classic. Why is that the case? Do you have any kind of feeling as to why The Princess Bride is a cult classic?

So we talked about it in Incomparable episode 25. I think one of the... So I was late to The Princess Bride. I went off to college and people were quoting lines from The Princess Bride and I had no idea what was going on. And then I didn't see the movie until I was maybe out of college even at that point. So I think for some reason this movie is particularly quotable. I think the heightened, you know, it's the storybook element that these are tropes that we're used to seeing in fairy tales with a knowing and kind of postmodern, you know, knowing spin. There's a commentary on this kind of story that's happening inside the story.

Plus, it's got the framing device with Peter Falk and Fred Savage. So, you know, you're commenting on it as a story while it's happening. I think all of that that is both familiar in the sense that it is an old-fashioned fairy tale and also, you know, beautifully different in that it is winking at the whole thing. And that's clever. And I think especially when you're, you know, high school, college age, you love that idea that somebody is taking this form that you've been seeing your entire life and is now playing with it and winking at it. But if I had to pick one thing, it's that it's just insanely quotable. So when I first started hearing people mention The Princess Bride kind of on the internet and on shows like yours there was something in my brain that got it mixed up with the anne hathaway movie the princess diaries and i was very confused as to why all of these nerds enjoyed the princess diaries so much um the princess diaries has a 6.2 on imdb uh and

it's about Mia Thermopolis has just found out that she is the heir to the apparent throne of Genovia. So it's like a regular American girl who finds out she's a princess, basically. So I was very confused. But then once I was able to break

the confusion, Anne Hathaway is not in The Princess Bride. She is not in the princess bride she is not in the princess bride julie andrews not in the princess bride not at all not even a little bit um it is interesting though that even though i have never seen this movie it has snuck into my conscience like i am aware of the references um i am aware of inconceivable uh i am aware of would you like a peanut uh you know i am aware of these things uh they have they have snuck in and i always find that interesting when you can relate to the reference and can even make the reference without actually knowing the source material

so that that's one of those interesting things that happens in that's what happened to me in college at first too it's like hello my name is nico montoya you killed my father prepared to die oh yeah i know that reference i know it from other references but not from the actual movie but from the references yeah so i have to to make a one one brief aside to just to read verbatim from my notes. And my notes say, oh my Robin Wright. Yes. She is beautiful. Oh, yes. In this movie, she is just incredibly beautiful.

I am only very familiar with her from House of Cards. House of Cards, right, sure. Where, of course, she is also a beautiful lady but but she's she's younger probably closer to my age uh in in the princess uh bright i was gonna call it diaries uh no she is she's very stunning and she's kind of in her look the perfect look for a fairy tale princess you know it kind of it makes it makes perfect sense right and and well, the way that the movie starts, I find to be very interesting because it starts off as like this idyllic romance story, right? And it's very well done. I like that a lot because it's kind of like with,

how do you say Carrie? Carrie Elwes. That's it. Carrie Elwes and Robin robin wright are these two blonde beautiful blue-eyed you know like oh sure perfect fairy tale stars and it's like you know like soft focus lens you know they're like in love it's it starts off really well and i love how the the young boy is it fred savage right yeah's just like, is this a kissing book? And I just think it's so funny.

I just really enjoyed the way that it started. I have a real love for Andre the Giant, just in general. I was a pro wrestling fan as a kid. And remember fondly watching Andre, the biggest man man in the world fighting Hulk Hogan he apparently was given his lines phonetically for this because he didn't speak English very well at all he's French

and never did speak English very well I would argue that it enhances that character that he's sort of this somewhat impenetrable confusing giant man it's like yeah and they paint him as quite simple as well you know because because he's like yeah which is which is great and i really like that because when uh inago says to you know says right at the very end

he's like uh is it physic is that how you say like you have finally done something right like when they're making their escape right right well there's there's a nice moment where um where they're uh they're they're on the chase and and he said uh he wants to fight he wants to fight them and he says no no hide behind a rock and throw a boulder and throw rocks at them um and he says my way is not very sporting he's like upset he's like no that's not because he's a good he's a good guy he's not a bad guy vazini is bad but fezik is a very nice giant person um like he's andre in this role is so fantastically terrible like Like that's what's so good about him. It's endearing.

Yeah. It's endearing. He is an endearing character and it is in part because he is not an actor and his lines are kind of, you know, muddled. And yet I think it works because of that. I think it makes you love that big lug. Yeah. I mean, because he's cast because he's the closest you can get to a giant to a giant yeah um you know like he's seven foot tall or so and he suffers with

gigantism you know so he kind of has these larger than life features um and he so he's kind of perfect for the role that they're fitting um one of the things that i really liked about the book like the storytelling device is when it would break to like the present day and then uh the grandpa would like the grandfather uh would start to read the story back and you'd see the flashes of it happening so like he would start to tell the story and it was narration yeah where was i and he'd start reading the parts and then start flashing around again and i i don't know if this is something that is intended and i and i wonder how you feel about that but you know when when the grandson complains about certain ways that the story's going i had the feeling that his grandfather was changing the story ah interesting because he's like oh but

you know such as they they shouldn't get away or whatever and he'd be like oh no wait just just let me continue because they seem to like at these points that the the story takes sharp turns well but the what what goes against that is that um there is a moment where he says, you know, what happens to Prince Humperdinck? You know, how does he die in the end? And he says, no, he lives. He lives. He gets away with it. And the grandson says,

Jesus, Grandpa, why are you reading this book to me? Yeah, I like that bit. I like that yeah the whole the whole commentary that you know stop with the kissing and all of that and you know that that is uh yeah it's a great i think it's a great framing sequence to have them all you know commenting on on the story as they go like this is a fairy tale we are listening to and watching a fairy tale as it happens i think single-handedly the best scene in this movie is the whole um the whole scene when you know wesley who is the dread pirate roberts is scaling the wall and inago is waiting for him and their whole back and forth and then the very civil conversation that they have about their lives

and talking about how they got there and then have the fantastic fight, which is so well done. Because there are so many parts of it where it's clearly, it is Mandy Patinkin and Cary Elwes. Mandy Patinkin, like the guy from Homeland. I was like, oh my God, it's the guy from Homeland. That whole scene makes the movie like the movie could have the movie could have been so much worse than it was because overall

i will spoil it overall i really enjoyed this movie um that is just so it's such fantastic just everything comedy and just great storytelling like the whole it just worked so well for me um i really because it frames those characters so well, you know, like full of honor and like, you know, they will die for the cause. You seem a good man. I hate to kill you. You seem a good man.

I hate to die. And you get the double, I'm not left-handed. I'm not left-handed either. Yeah, all of,. And then like you know one would knock the sword out of his hand so he'd pick up the sword and knock the sword and no one would kill each other at that point. And I really love the line

there's not a lot of money in revenge. I'm in the revenge business. That is just so fantastic. One of my favorite lines in the movie is also where they're talking about the different sword techniques and Mandy Patinkin says if he has studied his Agrippa

which I have it's a non-sequence, which I have okay, Mandy Patinkin angry spandrewed with a with a sword and I like that in the end Cary Elwes knocks him out he's not gonna he's not gonna kill, and this pirate that we don't know anything about,

he's not going to kill Inigo. He's a good guy. Right, so this is where that leads to a big question for me. And please correct me if I've got something wrong here. So Wesley knocks out Inigo. He does the same to Fezzik.

He puts him in a sleeper hold. That whole thing is hilarious because there's no way Wesley would have survived that. He's ribs crushed. That's great. I love all of that as well. Sleep well and dream of large women, he says as he leaves Fezzik behind.

Be portable. Good line, good line. He leaves Fezzik behind. Be quotable. Good line. Good line. And then when it comes to Vizzini, he kills him. Yes. Well, Vizzini really kills himself. But he is the worst of them, right? He is the instigator of this.

And he's telling them to kill. That's why you see him say, throw rocks at their heads and all of that. And don't be sporting about it. Just kill them. It's because Vizzini is, he's arrogant, he doesn't care if they die, he's just in it for the money, and then it's his own arrogance that kills him in the end because he dies with his own poison, which is funny.

Yeah, it's just... Look over there, what is that? I don't see anything. It's just very interesting. I get it because the other guys, they're just like hired help. Yeah, right. Again, they're trying to make money. They're in it for the work.

And you also get the sense that as it goes, they're increasingly uncomfortable with what Vizzini is trying to do. This is not necessarily what they signed up for and he's the instigator of it so yeah he ends up dying in the end but even then he doesn't end up dying at the hand of the man in black he uh he ends up dying at his own hand he's just outwitted by the man in black yeah i yeah but he put poison but yeah he so he was always gonna kill him that's true he did he did put poison in in his cup that's true he did he did actually poison him and he died this is true like it wasn't like he was uh in that the episode of sherlock sherlock where the pills right where it's like this game of of wits as to who's gonna take do you know what i'm talking about like yeah

i think it's the second episode and they're playing that game of wits as to who's gonna who's gonna take the pills because he just like you know wesley says that he built up an intolerance to the poison yeah so they're both gonna drink the poison and yeah exactly yeah that's true that's true he does he kills him he's sort of i mean he set up that he sort of deserves it it's a great it's a great death never go in against a sicilian when death is on the line. Many dies. Couldn't be as far from a Sicilian accent as possible, which I loved. It's just Wallace Shawn being Wallace Shawn.

He's an incredible voice. So then we kind of get to the point where then Wesley is, he's caught buttercup and they're on their way and we're treated to one of the most ridiculous scenes I've ever seen in cinema

which at this point I am enjoying when they're tumbling down the hill and the noises they're making oh yeah it's so and they show one part where the stunt double who's filling in for Buttercup

takes a terrible turn at one point. Yeah. It looks really painful. So that's kind of beautifully ridiculous. And then... So there are some weird points in this movie, right? It took me out a couple of times. So then when they're in the...

Right after that, they get to the fire swamp, and there's the big Muppet rodents that's why that's what i'm going to talk about and the incredibly violent fight between wesley and one of the the giant rodents that's where we see them he stabs the r.o.u.s like multiple times with his sword yeah Yeah, and he is bitten quite savagely a few times as well, which is interesting. The movie kind of didn't stick to anything. I felt like it kept changing around a lot. But the whole time, I'm entertained throughout it all.

And I really like that this is such a weird and varied cast. Because then we're met by Mel Smith, who is a British actor who plays the character known as the albino. But Mel Smith is like, he's familiar to me because he is a very famous British comedy actor and drama actor. He's been in lots and lots and lots of british tvs it's just very peculiar to see some of the casting like it's just it's so out of left field a lot of a lot of it um and it's like i i never really they just didn't seem to be like a

real kind of cohesion but not in a bad way it's just it just like I kept being surprised by the faces that I was recognizing, you know? Right. And then there's like the very peculiar pain machine, the suction machine. Yes. Which is really weird. And then Wesley is killed and then they take him to the miracle worker.

I loved all of that. Who is it that plays the miracle worker? It's Billy Crystal. Yes, because I knew I recognized- And Carol Kane is it that plays the miracle worker it's Billy Crystal and Carol Kane is his wife that whole scene is just so fantastic it's very Woody Allen like yeah it's a bizarre sort of like just a comedy sketch

scene all on it's own but it's great at the Miracle Max shop he's like mostly dead is partially alive and valerie leave me alone because she's like you're a liar you could save him and yeah that's a funny bit i they did a uh retrospective on the princess bride in a magazine that i was reading last year and billy crystal and carol kane were interviewed and they said uh they'd be up for a princess bride sequel since they could play the part their parts without makeup now yeah because they're very old characters

yes yeah they're aged up they're like anciently old like that actual nobody really lives too kind of old because they're like witches and wizards i guess something along that line right and then we're treated to that so wesley is brought back to life and just in just pure comedy saved by saved by indigo and phasic yes brought back to life yes yes uh how he cannot function correctly he's paralyzed basically and the way he moves his body around it's just so incredible like you know to move his arm he like has to get momentum from his other shoulder, like throw it around. And then the whole instigation of this episode, the Holocaust cloak is brought up. Yes.

Listed among our list of assets is we also have a Holocaust. That's a funny scene because they're like, well, there's, you know, what do we do? There's too many guys down there. And then he says, oh, well, if we have a Holocaust cloak then. And then they had to put Andre the giant on the bonfire thing and yeah i'm the dread pirate roberts he says like there's a there's a few things about this so one like i love the the introduction of the holocaust cloak is great it's like i liked it so i took it and the guy said i could have it um which is which is how vesek says that he has it.

But then there is no explanation. So I looked this up as to why he could be set on fire. He's high up and also a giant. I don't know. I looked it up and apparently a holocaust cloak is impervious to flame. And I think that there is something Dun impervious to flame. Ah. And I think that there is something Dungeons & Dragons related.

Interesting. Because I found a Yahoo Answers article. And one of the points in here, where does it say? I'm sure. Here we go. Any who attack the wearer of the cloak must save versus magic or suffer 2d8 points of damage from the flames and any weapon they strike with must make a saving throw or be damaged as well there you go now i only know about that from your show i would not have understood any of that

but total party killers prepared me for the holocaust cloak good i'm glad to provide the service so so yeah that the uh it works in works in that they scare off the fear of the dread pirate Roberts combined with this horrible flaming giant thing moving toward them, scares off most of the guards. know what you're talking about oh you mean this gate key here and he runs off and they get into the the the castle for the last the last momentous bit where you have to save the princess and stop the six-fingered man who is christopher guest more more great actors in this movie well that's a nice showdown where he can't move too right and the and the prince is there and it's unclear whether he has any strength or not to to get up from the bed but he talks the prince into giving up without a fight yeah what is the line he uses something about pain to the pain to the pain not to the death yeah it's this great kind of like rousing speech as to how he will make his life misery.

He'll cut off all of his arms and legs. Just leave his ears. His perfect ears. Yes, ears you keep and I'll tell you why. Yeah. Cordable. And I really enjoyed this whole scene. There's a lot of action in it.

And I like Indigo's scene with his retribution. That's a lot of action in it and i i like um indigo's scene with his retribution you know that that's that's a good scene um and it kind of you know it ends it ends nicely everybody's happy uh and the grandson ends up in having enjoyed the book and then you get you know the payoff the payoff as you wish as you wish at the end you know saying that somehow in some sort of time in some sort of like time traveling timeline because how could it be yeah because it's hundreds of years oh that grandpa he says crazy stuff i really enjoyed this movie good i'm glad were the um accents acceptable to you because you have there are some americans doing british accents in this movie uh it was so i was confused by it a lot because i i kind of couldn't understand where they were attempting to to have this movie set because americans don't understand about regional

british accents it's just fairy tale britain is where it's set. Well, there's just no... Except it's actually Florin and Gilder, which are currencies. But, you know, so theoretically that could be like Italy, but it's nowhere. But most of them, most people, with some exceptions, are trying on English accents to some degree, fake and not fake. So my problem with it is there's no commitment like there's no no that nobody will commit to a certain so they will not get everybody to commit to a certain accent right because you have a spanish guy you have a french guy yeah you have americans pretending to be english you have americans that just just don't even care and just being american and saying they're sicilian. Yeah, well, it's more like there are New Yorkers in this movie.

Yeah. It's the Miracle Max and Vizzini are both sort of just doing New York accents. And Miracle Max's wife, Valerie, too. So I had, even though everybody's talking British, well, a lot of the main characters are talking in British accents. And that's because it's medieval times. Many, many, many, many medieval medieval time movies everybody has British accents I don't know where this started but it seems like something that that I've seen a bunch I assumed that it was Italy because Florin sounds and Florin sounds Italian and obviously you've got uh Vecini who's Sicilian

like it just kind of made sense to me that it would be Italy. It is made up, though. I mean, Gilder was a Holy Roman Empire currency, and a florin was a, I think that was an Italian currency, and they're named, so florin and gilder are just named for currencies. It's the Florence currency was the florin. So it's all made up.

The setting doesn't really give anything. No. It kind of could be anywhere in the world. Lots of hills and a little medieval city. Yeah. But I enjoyed it. I really did enjoy it. I'm glad you did.

My girlfriend didn't. Oh. I don't know why she didn't. No reasons given? She just didn't think it was very entertaining that was kind of her she just she hates me now probably uh i don't know how she's gonna feel after my next assignment what's your next assignment mike so i enjoyed this enough that i would like to to do it again and we're gonna do it again next week uh And this is because basically I know that the princess bride is,

is, is kind of important to you. It's a movie that you enjoy. I love it. Yeah. But there's a movie that is extremely important to you. That, that references are made and I don't get them.

And it's about time that I do. And that's real genius. Yes. So I'm going to watch real genius in between now and next week's episode. And we will do a second Mike Watches a Movie Vertical. This is not going to be every week, by the way. No. Maybe.

Although it may recur. Yeah. And I think there's a funness in it because you are obviously a man who very much enjoys movies. You know, The Incorporable shows that, of course. And I also very much enjoy movies, but I have big gaping holes in my movie history. And I don't even want to tell you about some of them or we'll be doing this forever.

And so I think, yeah, I think it might be fun. I think it might be fun. We'll do it at the end of the show and people can choose if they want to listen or not. So I have one more thing, note about The Princess Bride, just to say one of the reasons that I think it's interesting and run of films for him because Rob Reiner's first seven films are all consensus, critically acclaimed movies. It wasn't until his eighth film that he made a bad movie. His first seven are all kind of great. So his first feature was this, and he was known as a sitcom actor. He was Archie Bunker's son on All in the Family. And then he made these movies.

He made This is Spinal Tap. Have you seen This is Spinal Tap, Mike? No. Oh, Mike. Put it on the list. Then he made The Sure Thing, which is an 80s romantic comedy, teen sex comedy, but a really good one. Then he did The Sure Thing, which is an 80s romantic comedy, you know, teen sex comedy, but a really good one. Then he did Stand By Me. Have you seen Stand By Me, Mike? Oh, Mike. Then The Princess Bride.

Then When Harry Met Sally. Then Misery. And A Few Good Men. Those were his first seven movies. They're all pretty good. Then he made North. Not good. And since then,

he has not made very many good movies. But those first seven are all pretty good. And you've probably not seen any of them. Except Princess Bride. Let me look again. Have you seen

A Few Good Men? Misery? When Harry Met Sally? Yes. Okay. I'm sorry. Anyway. Anyway, so a great run of movies, including This is Spinal Tap, which is also... This is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride, and When Harry Met Sally are all in my top 25, probably.

So three movies from one director is pretty outstanding, but he had a really good 1980s. Really good 1980s. pretty outstanding, but he had a really good 1980s. Really good 1980s. I feel like the Mike Watches a Movie vertical could just be renamed to the Jason is Disappointed in Mike vertical. That'll be its subtitle.

Mike Watches a Movie Jason is Disappointed. But, you know, we'll get feedback from the listeners. I think putting it at the end is a good decision because people can just dump out if they don't want to listen to us talk about a movie. But there's a precedent for this. I recall John Groover and Dan Benjamin

talking about Bond movies. And if something comes up that it turns out you haven't seen and you feel like you need to see it or I feel like you need to see it, then maybe we'll revisit this. So we will do Real Genius. We will talk about that.

Because I want to watch because why because i want to watch it i do want to watch it uh i have to admit i have listened to the entire episode of defocus that you did i am i am one of those people who listens to podcasts about things they haven't seen or read yep which probably helps with my being able to get the pop culture references. It's like you've seen it. I know. So I will watch it. But I kind of listen to it.

But when you listen to those things, it doesn't necessarily all go in, I don't think. But I am excited to see Real Genius. Okay. It's very 80s. Be prepared. Put on some leg warmers. I'll do what I can. I didn't get a lot of the 80s. So this can be very 80s. Be prepared. Put on some leg warmers. I'll do what I can. I didn't get a lot of the 80s,

so this can be my 80s time. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade. If you want to find the show notes for this week, you can check your podcast application of choice or go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 21. If you'd like to find Mr. Jason Snow on the internet, he is at sixcolors.com and of course theincomparable.com as well,

or he is on Twitter. He is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. This show is a production of thegloriousrelay.fm. You can find our other shows at relay.fm. Thanks again to our sponsors this week, Linda, Squarespace, stamps.com and MailRoute. And thank you, most of all,

for listening. We'll be back next time. Until then, bye-bye. Bye-bye.