Upgrade - 300: It's So Hard to Predict the Future

Episode Date: June 1, 2020

It's episode 300! This week we look to the future by drafting stories we'll be talking about over the next hundred episodes of Upgrade, and then we answer all of your questions about how the podcast got started, how we put it together, and where we're going from here.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 300 today's show is brought to you by squarespace doordash and cotton bureau my name is mike hurley i am joined by mr jason snell mr jason snell hello mike how have the podcast authorities not shut us down? 300 episodes. Amazing. Imagine such a thing. I have a hashtag Snell Talk question for you, Jason. Okay.

How's the weather today? You know, it was foggy this morning, but it's cleared up and there's blue sky out my window now. That was not the case even half an hour ago. So I think it's going to be a nice day. Not too hot, but not too cold. The reason I asked that question, because we are in a very celebratory mood today. It's going to be a lot of talking about ourselves.

The Snell Talk idea, in case you're newer around here, the idea that we start the show with a question that typically comes from our audience. Today's question came from me uh it was because we would always start the show like talking about things like that like i'd say how's you doing jc tell me what the weather's like you know little things like that yes small talk yeah small talk it was small talk then friend of mine matt mutual friend of ours said why don't you ask different questions every time instead of the small talk. And then we ended up coming up with Snell Talk. And that's one of my favorite podcast chapter artworks is this one.

Which Matt was this? Matt Scharf. Oh, Matt Scharf. All right. Paper Matt. Paper Matt. And so if you have never seen it before, maybe you don't look at the chapter artwork for the show.

If you use a podcast app, which does observe chapter artwork for the show, if you use a podcast app which does observe chapter artwork, apps like Castro, Pocket Cast, Overcast, the Apple Podcast app, apps like that, you will see beautiful artwork as if this show is like a late night talk show, which is so great. And it has the little Relay NBC logo, the iMac NBC logo at the bottom.

It's a really very good one. By the wonderful Simon, who does all of our artwork forgotten towel on social network so yeah yeah so yes we are uh we're celebrating today we're celebrating episode 300 to celebrate upgrade we've got some fun stuff to talk about uh before we get into the show today i want to just address something real quick. The past week has only added more anguish and upset to the lives of people in and outside of America, people who are already going through so much. You know, everybody is just so much happening in the world right now, and we don't want more

on top of it, but it's needed. And we just want to state that we support you. We hope, and you know, everyone, we support you. And we hope that we're all going to get through this safely together. It should go without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway, that of course, that we believe racism and police brutality should never be tolerated. And we want to make this abundantly clear on this show right now in the hope that adding more voices like ours will help to show that there is a majority in this world who believe in what is right. We're going to put a link in the show notes to some resources for how you can help with Black Lives Matter causes and others. We want to have fun here today and we

hope that we can continue to provide you with the escapism that you want right um but i feel like it we had to say something because we're aware of this as much as everybody else yep absolutely let's do some upstream news upstream is where we talk about what's going on in streaming media. We spoke about this last week. We touched on it last week a little bit. And Apple has indeed bought some back catalog content. But you never would have guessed what the first purchase would be. It's the back catalog of Fraggle Rock.

100 episodes and now on Apple TV+. They were previously on HBO. Yeah, back in like the 80s i want to say yeah rock was on hbo but it was a it was a henson production i think and that's why they have the rights to sell to apple and uh this is interesting because they are doing i mean they've got little shorts now they are doing full-length episodes that they're that they've ordered um this is something you know i feel like we almost got this last time when we talked about this because it's the idea that if apple's buying a catalog of old content maybe it's

related to their new content yeah you you said that like you you 100 we're talking about that and i suggested something like well battlestar galactica because ron moore does for all mankind or something but it's even more specific than that it's if we're going to do something that is a reference or a follow-on or a reboot or something to a previous show we could buy those episodes so if they if apple tv brought back a show that got canceled presumably they would bring back the archive here with fraggle rock it's a revival they're going to get the fraggle rock archive um and there's there's another one that it sounds like is going to happen which is a British show Mike so why don't you tell me about that one yeah this is a quote from Vulture Variety earlier this

month reported that Apple landed a deal to stream new episodes of Long Way Up which is a follow-up to the Ewan McGregoror led british travel series long way round and the long way down this is where ewan mcgregor just rides around on a bicycle a motorbike a bicycle maybe bicycles in places long way up presumably he'll be on like a hand glider i guess so uh i actually think it's it's like traveling right yeah i don't know just traveling around the uk but this is this is a perfect example of it's a follow-on to this other stuff. Why would you not buy the rights to the previous episodes? Because that gives you like, did you like our original?

We'll dive into the back catalog now. And that is actually, so it's a change in Apple's strategy, but not really, right? This is really saying it's all about our originals, and we will make strategic purchases to bolster our originals. And so we got all worked up about like, well, what could this mean and who could they buy? But like, this is not a sign of that. Maybe they'll do that down the road. Maybe not. But this doesn't feel to me like a sign of it.

This is all about just using the catalog to bolster the new shows. So it's all about like the new shows and then what's what trails from them what's ancillary material for them so if they do a reboot of something like actually the one that that comes to mind to me is amazing stories right they have amazing stories i would imagine that they've at least inquired about buying the streaming rights to the whole amazing stories catalog because they have amazing stories as originals and that would be uh that's a follow-on they could do that yeah let's just say if this is what apple ends up doing if this is the extent of it it's not very exciting um yeah i think

we kind of was hoping as you're saying that they were going to do maybe some bigger stuff than this as you say by like adjacent content um like all of battlestar galactica right it's a great one that you mentioned because there's tie-ins the showrunners are there but like if this is all they do one it's not that exciting and two it's not that original i've seen this with like netflix have done this like they pick up a show that had previously been dropped from a network they revive it and then get the back catalog as well you want right you want that it's a natural kind of fit i'm actually wondering now why Apple didn't get the rights to Amazing Stories. Did NBCUniversal just want to hold on to those?

Because it kind of makes too much sense that they would do that. I feel like that is just a case of just not doing it right. They didn't do it at launch because it would have confused things. Well, you know, it wouldn't surprise me then if that ends up happening because that would make sense, right? Like, oh, I enjoy this. Remember the original? Oh, they're all here. Let's go watch those watch those now yeah i think it makes a lot of sense and who knows maybe

apple will set its sights now more more on shows they can revive right because then they can get the back catalog like that might be a change in direction for them but sure sure and this is streaming services are often in a place where something beloved gets canceled somewhere where they ask, well, what could you revive this? Could you bring it forward? And the timing isn't right for this, but an example is like Counterpart, the show that I loved, which is now on Amazon Prime in the US. It's in other places around the world. after 20 episodes and they shopped it around and nothing came of it. And the executive producers now, there was a Reddit thread where he explained where they were going with it. So I think it's never coming back. But that's the kind of scenario where a show like that, that's really high quality, doesn't have a home there. The people at Apple look at it and go, actually, we really like that. Can we get the rights to those 20 episodes and we'll buy another 20. And they might do something like that. I know that that is sometimes frowned upon as being like you're taking somebody else's

leavings, but sometimes it happens that it just doesn't fit. This is the wrong show for this channel or service and a better fit for us. And so I think this positions Apple in a way to be one of those they'll start getting the letter writing campaigns is what i'm saying i mean i expect that will definitely be the case right like that save our show apple use your billions uh i think this is what scorsese said to them too uh killers of the flower moon the upcoming movie stanley luna dicaprio, and who else is in it? Robert De Niro, of course, is coming to Apple TV Plus now, reported by many outlets, including Deadline. It's expected to cost between $108 and $200 million.

I believe this is including the rights from Paramount and to finish the movie. The movie will still be distributed by Paramount in theaters. This is exactly the same as Netflix and The Irishman. Netflix bought it from Paramount to finish it because Paramount didn't want to spend all the money that Scorsese wanted to spend, but then they still got to put it in theaters, which is also important because then it puts it up for award season.

So, you know, Apple would want to do that anyway with this movie. So this is kind of like a win-win yeah it is and uh you know oscar oscar yeah it's big it's all about oscars yeah i mean this is a chance martin scorsese movie probably gonna get nominated for oscars and now apple will be uh sharing in that in that glow because this is an Apple production. Gal Gadot sets a star in a new Apple TV Plus series about the film legend Hedy Lamarr.

Quote from Variety, Hedy Lamarr will follow the true story of the Hollywood glamour girl spanning 30 years from Lamarr's escape from pre-war Vienna to a meteoric rise in the golden age of Hollywood to a fall and eventual disgrace at the dawn of the Cold War.

The show will also go into Lamar's life as an inventor, including one invention that became the basis for spread spectrum technology that is used today. So another big star that Apple is going for. Yeah, Wonder Woman herself. Exactly. I have some what's on Apple TV Plus news for you. So Central Park, which we've talked about here

from the bobs burgers people and there are a bunch of other people involved some voices from hamilton uh josh gad is involved uh it premiered on apple with two shows i want to say two episodes um i watched the pilot and i thought it was pretty fun it's a it's like a musical animated comedy thing and uh i thought it was pretty good so if you like musicals and you like bob's burgers or other animated stuff bob's burgers by the way great show uh you should check out central park i enjoyed it um and then i also watched the mythic quest raven's banquet quarantine episode and because everybody was talking about it it was really well done i was very impressed

um i think it was i mean it was better than the parks and recreation one and i love parks and recreation and so it had a great nostalgia value to see them but you could see the seams and like the people not quite acting right and all of that i would say like it was a little awkward um and then this one felt solid like it felt like a real tv episode it was very well done i read an article about how they did it where they were they they apparently you know it's that thing i think we might have even talked about it where they're like we need a bunch of iphones to shoot this can we get iphones like yeah i think you're an apple TV+. I think you can. Anyway, it was really good.

And I recommend it. And I think I've only seen the first three, four episodes of the season. So I assume it spoils some things about where some people are later, but not really. And it doesn't matter. And I would recommend giving it a try. I think it was pretty funny. it was pretty funny um and i have uh as a little sidebar um a netflix thing that a little netflix story to tell you which is they released another interactive on netflix all right yeah so this is uh unbreakable kimmy schmidt which is a show that ran on netflix for a long

time and they did a uh a follow-on like episode basically special um and it's an interactive special so it's an interactive sitcom special and i liked it it was really funny but i tried to watch it on the apple tv just to see if they've added apple tv interactive support because bandersnatch didn't work on the apple tv and when you play and it shows up in the interface so i'm like okay well it's here and i play it and basically a robot appears, not kidding, somebody in a robot costume and says, sorry, you can't watch this on this device. You need to go to a different device and watch it there.

And I thought, well, that's interesting and disappointing that they aren't building this support into Apple TV. And the amazing thing is they sent me an email i immediately got an email from netflix having played that video saying jason we see you tried to play the kimmy schmidt interactive special and it's not available on your on your device because it is too old okay um please consider a more modern device like a smart tv or streaming box i'm like that was what i was using that that email tells me they would love to make it available on apple tv i mean it also is weird right like apple tv the way they wrote the email, they wrote it for a bunch of old and compatible systems, but also the Apple TV gets it

because they just haven't gotten to it yet. And they didn't really think about the fact that it was also going to go to Apple TV people. Anyway, it turns out my TV set, which is a TCL, so it's got Roku OS on it. The TV set has a Netflix app that does support interactive. So we watched it on our TV set Netflix app because that's apparently more advanced than our Apple TV.

I imagine there's got to be something about what they're able to do with the remote that's stopping them from doing this. I don't think that's it. I think it's something about the app itself, their Netflix app on TV OS that they don't want to support it. It think it's something about the app itself, their Netflix app on tvOS that they don't want to support it. It's on iOS. It works on iOS.

And all you're doing, the interactive is literally there's just a menu and you go back and forth and then select one. There's no special interaction at all. But they've decided, I guess, not to do the work

to put it in their tvOS app, even though it's in their iOS app, which is kind of baffling. But anyway, the email was the part that really made me laugh because it was like you you seem to be using something very old that doesn't do cool things please upgrade your old apple tv it's like no no not gonna happen anyway that's my story last thing uh zane lowe's Apple Music interview series is now a podcast. So this is the interview series that he does on Apple Music Beats 1. Wait, is it called Beats 1? Beats 1, right?

Yeah, Beats 1. Worldwide, 24-7. This is an interview series that Zane has done since the beginning of Beats 1, talking to music artists. And this follows on from what he did on the radio before this. The Zane Lowe interview was an important part of a new artist's release. They would come on, talk to Zane Lowe, talk about the album. This is now available on Apple Podcasts and everywhere.

They've released it just as a podcast. It's not locked into anything. It is an open podcast. You can just go and get it yeah it's an apple original podcast yep yep interesting i wonder if it's on spotify i wondered that i didn't check because i figured it was kind of pointless because i bet you it's not so all right i would do a quick search while we're sitting here but i can't imagine that it is um i guess this is a foray you know this is doing something smart they can't really do this uh with a lot of the beats one content because it contains music um so they wouldn't be able to do this it's not on it's not on spotify it's worth checking definitely isn't it um but they can do it with

the interview stuff uh so they're doing this and i I think this is a good one because I think we said this a long time ago. We said this when Beats 1 launched. This is great content that is kind of being hidden in a place that people aren't expecting to find it. And so putting it out there as a podcast is a good move. And I wonder what we're going to see. This is clear. This is a clear change. This is clearly something new. This is Apple taking content that they create and putting it out there. The, the creator is Apple music.

That's kind of what it is locked as right now. It's like who made this podcast kind of thing. You know, like we are relay FM and the, in the podcast directory. So, so there you go. I want to do one little piece of follow-up

before we go to our first break. People should go subscribe to Liftoff, the Relay FM show hosted by Jason Snell and Stephen Hackett if they want to know more space stuff because people are excited about space right now. That's right. We did a little live stream

during the space launch over the weekend too, which was kind of fun. Learning new app we used for that. We used Live from Ecammam which had some weird audio issues because it's trying to be you know it's one of those things where it's we see this a lot with the stuff that we do where we want complete control over everything um and some apps try to be helpful and like just do the right thing but it gives you no control over it and so you then you try to take it over take control and then that doesn't work and yeah so we fixed we fixed it all there were some very weird audio switching

issues that it had but we got there in the end i learned a lot about it there's things i would i would change but um and there's features that that app i wish would add is it's a very unlike every other live streaming app i've used it's really nice as a mac app it's like a good app but it's super limited in what it can do right now and um so that's disappointing a lot you can't mix call recorder which we use for all our podcasts too but um and live as a as a live streamer it's got a great interface for connecting to the streaming service and giving you complete control over what you see and i'm very impressed by all of that and then i tried to make a a screen where steven and i were on like filling the screen and then there was a little

picture in picture of our video capture of the space launch and it just it can't do that you can do the reverse but you can't you just can't put video in a picture-in-picture box. And I emailed them and I said, am I wrong? And they're like, no, you can't do that. Okay, so very limited, but really nice for what it is. It is a decent Mac streaming solution, of which there are not many. I was using Streamlabs OBS over the weekend, which is an alpha, basically. And it is great and free and totally locked up my Mac and has crashed it on multiple occasions.

I think there's some sort of a memory leak that it is doing. And it's like, and I've used Wirecast, which is very expensive. And it's also not very good, although it's more reliable than Streamlabs OBS, but it's not very good. And then I use Live and I think, oh my God, this would be so great. But I need them to add like 10 features. And maybe they will over time. I mean, Ecamm is like two guys, maybe a handful more. It's a very small company, but it's a great app for what it does. It just doesn't do very much right now. All right. This episode is brought to you in part by our very good friends over at Cotton Bureau. Cotton Bureau are the folk who make amazing, awesome graphic tees, hoodies, and more. I have used Cotton Bureau in many ways. I've used Cotton Bureau as a customer.

I buy so many t-shirts from Cotton Bureau. I also use them as a content creator. They make absolutely fantastic stuff. Worked with them for so many merch options in the past for this show. All of our merch has been done from Cotton Bureau for my other shows, you know, and just so many wonderful projects that we've worked with Cotton Bureau on. They're incredibly awesome to work with.

They're very professional. And my favorite thing is that the quality of with Cotton Bureau on. They're incredibly awesome to work with. They're very professional. And my favorite thing is that the quality of their products are excellent. I wouldn't want to use anybody else when it comes to printing T-shirts, especially. They've worked with other great tech podcasts and communities. They've printed stuff for The Incomparable and Six Colors, our friends at ATP, Mac Stories, Shutechery, MKBHD. I have an MKBHD T-shirt on the way. And many real AFM shows like this one, Connective, MacPower Users, Cortex, Rocket, many, many

more. I have an ATP shirt on the way to me too. It is that time for ATP merch. It is. And just to be clear, I'm sorry to interrupt your ad here, but like, without speaking ill of other companies, I will say I have been very happy with both the quality of the shirts that Cotton happy with both the quality of the shirts that Cotton Bureau sells and the quality of the screen printing like yes I get a Cotton Bureau shirt and the screen printing is good and it lasts and it is not overdone yeah

that's exactly right it's not thick where like you wear it on a warm day and you come back and the portion of your chest that is touching the silk screen is all sweaty because it's like they don't do they're very good at that because they started it started as a screen printer and then cotton bureau kind of grew out of it as uh the ability to sell these shirts on the web so i mean i stick with cotton bureau because i am very happy with what they do and that's not an endorsement they can buy cotton bureau is a great place to buy and sell t-shirts of all kinds themed around sports, movies, gaming, food, any type of community, so many more. Their sweatshirts and tees are high quality and comfortable. They have great customer service. You can go to cottonbureau.com right now to check out their products and you can use the code UPGRADE10

and you can save 10% on anything that you buy at Cotton Bureau. This code is only valid until July the 3rd so hurry up. Go to CottonBureau.com and use the code UPGRADE10 UPGRADE, that's U-P-G-R-A-D-E 1-0 for 10% off. Thanks to Cotton Bureau for their support of this show and RelayFM. And all the great merch.

We don't have merch available right now. Maybe later. Some are fun. We're going to work on it. We got kind of derailed as everybody did by what was going on in the world We don't have much available right now. Maybe later. Summer fun? Yeah. We're going to work on it. We got kind of derailed as everybody did by what was going on in the world. But we're talking about doing something. Also, we didn't feel the need for people to get merch to wear at WWDC.

That's usually why we do it now. But I think we'll try to do a summer release of some stuff. So we'll get there. The summer of fun merchandise usually just comes to us in fever dreams, and we just haven't had one of those yet. It's true. More on that later. We're going to do a draft.

Of course we are. Surprise draft! Surprise draft! So this is episode 300. We're going to do a draft of predictions that we think things that Apple will have done by episode 400. Yeah, it's the episode 400 draft in episode 300. That's right. So we're looking at spring sometime in 2022 is when we're picking.

It perhaps will be a specific day in May 2022. But as you and I said before we started the show, although we tend to do an episode every single week for 52 weeks, it's possible we could skip a week. It's never happened yet. Or that we would do an episode, like a bonus episode, because of something like a secret Apple thing or something like that. You never know. So we don't know exactly when. But probably May 2022. We don't know for sure.

So this is also prep, I guess, guess because we're gonna be in big draft season in two weeks time wwc draft can't wait for that it's coming on june 15th will be the wwc draft yeah it was a 302 which is gonna be it's gonna be an interesting one i think it's gonna be some weird picks in that one so there's a message in a bottle. We're throwing it in the I don't know, Apple Ocean Plus. And we'll fish it out for episode 400. I think a time capsule would be a better

metaphor for that. Okay. We'll take a time capsule and we'll throw it in the ocean. No. Why does everything have to go in the ocean? I don't know. Just bury it. You bury a time capsule. Oh, okay. Alright, fine. We'll bury this episode then. everything had to go in the ocean just i don't know bury it you bury a time capsule oh okay all right fine we'll bury this episode then okay uh do you want to go first we're going to pick five things each that we expect apple will have done uh within the next two years um all right

do i i i want this to be fun and i also want to win in, I want to do a victory lap in spring 2022. Is this going to count toward our overall draft victories in 2022? Or is this just an exhibition? I don't know. Let's say it's an exhibition. Okay. Unless I win it and then we change the rules. All right, good.

That's perfectly fair. I, with my first pick in the episode 400 draft draft i'm going to say between now and episode 400 apple will have received an oscar nomination oh that's good that's real good i think that's gonna happen could be martin scorsese's movie could be yeah i just feel like they're buying movies and uh the tom hanks movie could do it it could be well this year's os's Oscars or I guess next year's Oscars are a real question, right? Because a lot of the eligibility is going to be for things that were going to be released and then ended up on streaming. But that plays into Apple's hand. And then with the Scorsese movie, they're happy to give it a release in theaters and then it will roll into Apple TV+.

But they're on the, you know, they're a producer of it. So they get the credit just like Netflix screening a movie and then pulling it off and putting it on Netflix. So I'm just going to throw it out there. I thought about other entertainment awards. I think it's almost as likely that Apple will win an Emmy as get an Oscar nomination. But I want to go for the nomination because I think that's an interesting idea, and I definitely think they want one. Yeah, I like that you've uh you've hedged it a little bit with nomination and not win an oscar yeah well yeah that's if i had to pick a

win i would pick an emmy because i think it's more likely to win an emmy than win an oscar yeah but um i'm gonna go with oscar nomination it's an honor just to be nominated mike it sure is uh similar ish i'm gonna predict that by 2022 apple will have launched a services bundle for their selection of services oh i'm never giving up on the services but no this is your long this is one of your long-term connected things too isn't it yeah i mean i've had it in every pick of anything hey once you're used to picking it just keep picking it and eventually it might happen yep i'm i'm basic like the services bundle for me is basically i'm jean monster in the television you know like jean would never let the apple television go and i'm never going to let the services bundle go because i just think at a certain point they'll have enough

stuff it'll be easier for everyone they'll make more money that way because people will you know where they may have just had one, they'll be like, all right, I'll pay an extra dollar a month and get everything. A services bundle makes sense at a certain point that they would do it. I just think that all of the stars have yet to align, you know, because they don't charge any money for Apple TV+, right? And Apple News+, or News whatever it it's called has not really gone very well so far i think that they the launches have been scattered over the last year and at a certain

point i think they're going to want to bring them together and offer one singular package i think that's a good choice never i mean bundles work that's why bundles exist. So if they want to continue to drive services, bundling is one way to do it. Oh boy. It's so hard to predict the future, Mike. You know, it's hard. I am going to predict that in spring of 2022 in episode 400, at that point,

the MacBook Air name still exists on a product. Wow. That's an interesting one. Because I want to say, and I've advocated that Apple should simplify its names when it moves to ARM. And I think by spring 2022, most or all of Apple's laptops, this could be a future pick, exactly what is going on with the arm transition but i feel like apple has just they can't get rid of it some days you just can't get rid of a bomb so i think the macbook air just they they can't kill it they will still be selling a product called macbook air in in spring 2022 all right i was gonna go with a kind of like serious big product one. But now I'm going to pick one of my stranger ones,

because that is a little strange little pick. That by 2022, they have launched some kind of Johnny Ive collaboration. Ooh, what form will it take? I would expect it will be some kind of watch band line or case line something like that from johnny's love from company uh-huh i think it will probably be a one and done they will do it one time right it's like an apple watch edition sort of yeah but i think they will do something like that whole idea of we're going to continue collaborating closely i do not believe that that was true but i think they're going to want to do it at least once.

Wow, you're right. That is a wacky pick. And if they do go into AR, I could imagine some kind of like, maybe they want to get a little bit fancy with some kind of glasses product. And maybe Johnny's there for something like that. And they maybe try and be quite stylish there.

I think that there is a possibility to do it to put his name on it and it make it seem like it is a more important thing than it is um as if that you know as if it was like a fashion designer like how they have the ms apple watches right which is like really it's just a different band and a different watch face so like the nike ones they don't change the product in any way, but I could imagine a like Apple watch Johnny, I have edition. I think, you know,

I just think it could have a clout around it, but I don't expect it to be a long-term thing, but I think they are going to do it at some point. All right. We'll put it in a bottle and throw it in the sea or whatever. Bury it, bury the bottle, bury the bottle in the ocean.

I'm going to say that you'll be able to develop iOS apps on the iPad by episode 400. That only gives us two WWDCs, Mike, the one that's this month and the one next year, right? Because there's another WWDC presumably in the summer of 2022, but we're not going to be there yet. But I'm going to throw it out there. I think at some point they have to say,

yes, you can build apps on the iPad. So here it is. What you just said about there only being two wbcs that really made me when i was writing out my picks i scaled it back significantly if only this was the episode 410 draft we would have been fine oh yeah yeah get one get one more in there no but like episode 400 feels like a long way away but then when you're like oh it's 2022 that's not so far away that's right two iphones two years and two wbdc's it's all we have right and it's actually not you can't get too like pie in the sky with these things um i am i kind of tipped my hand a little bit uh i believe that by spring 2022 apple will have launched some kind of hardware product focused on ar maybe glasses

maybe it's a uh mixed reality visor for home you know like and and they really just again like it's a it's a prosumer product in some way right like anyone can buy it but they really want developers to have it to continue pushing the ar story i do not believe that we are very close to a Google Glass-like product. I think Apple really want to be careful about the way they introduce that. And I think having some kind of at-home mixed reality visor is like another step, right? Without going too far, like let's get more people used to this. Let's get more use cases for it so when they eventually hit with apple glasses it will be a success in the way that the apple watch took a little while to get off the ground yeah i had this on my list and was thinking of picking it because at some point they've

got to introduce a product right they really do whether it's by spring 2022 or maybe it's summer 2022, you know, I think this is a good pick. I think that this is going to have to happen sooner rather than later. So in the next two years, sure, let's say so. I'm going to say that in the next two years,

Apple will be specifically targeted by a major piece of encryption legislation in the US. I'm not saying it will be specifically targeted by a major piece of encryption legislation in the US. I'm not saying it will be actually passed into law, but that there will be a big hubbub where somebody somewhere, maybe the Senate, who knows, somebody somewhere is going to make a big rumble and there's going to be a big debate about whether they're going to pass a law that makes some of apple's end-to-end encryption and others but apple will be in the spotlight because of all the law enforcement complaints about them and there will be another big hubbub that will involve proposed legislation because i feel like this is inevitable now that there's going to be a uh and unlike so much that's across party lines i feel like there are definitely uh politicians on in both parties in the u.s who want to look tough on terrorism and crime and think that a big tech company is an easy target also tough on big tech in general right like yes a lot of people want to

be seen uh as as like oh we're gonna keep these gonna keep these guys in line you know yeah exactly and i think if i'm following what you're saying it's it's an escalation of the stuff we've seen in the past where you know there's been a lot of like uh hand wringing about apple and a lot of name calling but there hasn't been legislation attempted right yeah right right so what if there's a big debate about whether they're going to pass a new piece of legislation and one of the debates is over this i'm not saying that they'll pass the legislation but i think that it will be a big debate at some point uh that they will threaten at least to uh make some aspect of what Apple is doing with encryption

and other companies illegal, even though, as we know, you're basically breaking encryption if that happens. It doesn't actually make sense. But I think they're going to try. Maybe, you know, we see Tim at Congress, like we've seen Zuckerberg at Congress. Oh, yeah.

I am going to go with apple by the spring of 2022 will have transitioned the consumer mac line to arm i was figuring trying to figure out how to slice the arm transition and that was one of the ones i was thinking of is consumer max so there may be still some pro max the mac pro one of my things on my list was only the Mac Pro will remain on Intel, but it could be broader than that. So yeah, the consumer Macs to arm by 2022 spring. So iMac and the consumer laptops. Anything that has Pro in the name that runs macOS

will probably remain on Intel or some x86 architecture. You're not predicting like all the Pro will be on Intel, right? You're leaving that out. You're just saying any Mac that doesn't have Pro in the title will be ARM. Yeah, because I actually, I mean, I don't know if you were going to pick this, but I actually don't. If they move to Intel, I don't think they'll stick. If they move to ARM, I don't think they'll stick completely with Intel anyway.

I think it's all up in the air for the Pro lines as well. Is the Mac Mini a Pro Mac or a consumer Mac? It's a consumer Mac. Okay. So I think this is the boldest prediction of all. You're predicting the Mac Mini will be updated in the next two years. And I say that because I was about to pick the mac mini will not be updated here's the thing jason here's the thing we have all thought oh maybe that a transition machine

would be the macbook or a macbook air what if it's the mac mini sure what if mac mini's first i don't think it will be it could be be though, right? Yeah. Because it's a small box. It's, I would probably expect, cheaper to make than the laptops. And if they want to have some kind of like transition hardware that isn't a conspiracy theory of the iPad 2020, it could be a Mac mini. Okay. I don't think this is going to happen, but...

No, it could be. You know, you got to throw out your wild conspiracy theories whenever they pop into your brain. I love absolutely you know i do that i do that right on this show um okay for my next pick my last pick i'm going to pick that apple will be selling four different products with the name airpods four all right so airpods okay airpods So AirPods, AirPods Pro, the rumored AirPods Studio over ear headphones, and some other product that continues to extend the brand of AirPods. And I don't know what it is. I'm not saying what it is. It could be anything.

But I feel like I want to have some fun here, but I also want to say the brand expansion of AirPods will proceed apace. So I guess if we're talking here that there will be four products for sale that have AirPods and then something, right? Yes. Interesting. You know, I could imagine there's been a lot of rumor of like AirPods Lite. That could be a thing, right? Sure.

I don't know. I don't really know what that would be, but, you know, this one makes sense to me. They have hit a hot brand, right? Yeah, that's what I keep saying is that if you're in charge of AirPods, I'm sure that Tim Cook has basically said do as much with it as you possibly can

because it's a huge hit. So over-ear headphones, yes. Some other kind of, you know, some other over-ear, behind-ear, open, whatever. Like keep making them. Keep making them. Make a little wireless charging pad for AirPods. Fine, do it, whatever, anything.

All right, my last pick. I have a couple that I want to share with you after, you know, like in our extras. But I will say that by 2022, Apple will have staggered their iPhone release schedule and will be releasing multiple phones a year that are new. All right. So that means not just by staggered, you don't mean just like October and November after one announcement.

No, I think they will do a spring and a fall iPhone event. That's what I think they'll do. All right. I think it's going to all start this year and I think that they will then start spreading it out. Because like the rumors say, we're going to get four new iPhones in September. I don't think that that will keep happening.

I think they will want to start spreading that out a little bit over time so they can hit twice. And I don't mean like the SE here, right? Like this isn't what I'm talking about. But I believe by 2022, there will be new iPhones twice a year. Okay, that's a bold pick. That's almost as ridiculous as for products named AirPods.

So great. So I will say for that one if you want to get an idea of what i'm talking about look at samsung yeah oh yeah no i think we've had this conversation about the possibility of apple doing it whether they will do it is a mystery but you're right if they're releasing four phones a year or five phones a year or whatever it is would it not be nice to have that be spread out a little bit i i just i keep wondering what what happens in the fall event do you release the iphone 13 pro and not the iphone 13 do you have to uncouple the names because the implications there do you wait on the pro model and release

the regular model maybe maybe if the regular model gets some things that are just pro but it's not better than the existing pros that gives you six months to release the new pros i don't know yeah i don't really know how it will look but i it's it's this is purely based on the fact that i can't imagine them releasing four phones every september forever it seems like too much i hear you so we'll see all right so what give me some of your uh some of your additional, the ones you didn't pick. The rest of my list that I was thinking of and picking from was no Intel Macs left. Only these Intel Macs left. No Mac Mini update.

AirTags will ship. Apple will ship a wireless charging accessory. Back to the dog that bit them. They're going to release the AirPod studio over your headphones I decided that was too easy they've begun assembling iPhones in a country that isn't China an additional country that isn't China they've announced their intention

to produce chips for their products in the United States won an Emmy and bought a movie or TV studio wow you had a lot more than me I only had two others which is to and bought a movie or TV studio. Wow, you had a lot more than me. I only had two others, which is to release a unified development platform and to have a new chief design officer. Oh, I like those.

The chief design officer one, I think would be important because it could allow them to add some diversity to their executive page. And they think that they should do that at some point. You know, they can look for somebody who doesn't look like the rest of the executives in there, right? Maybe they are doing that.

I don't know. Or, you know, just to kind of refresh that lineup a little bit more than it has been over the last many, many years. But so we'll see. But yeah, there's a couple in there that I thought were interesting. I think make a lot of sense, which is especially like the... I think it's already happening. There's already lots of headlines

about it happening, about spreading out the creation of their products and manufacture of their products to other countries. Like I think the... I saw a report somewhere saying that the AirPod Studio

will be made in Taiwan. Right. That they're kind of trying to spread things out a little bit, especially with the newer products. Yeah. And there have been rumors about Vietnam potentially being an assembly point. Yeah.

I think that they're definitely attached to China, but they don't want to be completely stuck where China holds the key to all their products. Oh, you know what you just said i got it wrong it's uh the report says that they were looking to make the airport studio in vietnam not taiwan oh okay so i got that one mixed up so thank you for then there's taiwan semiconductor which is where their chips are made but they may be made in the u.s in the future because they're opening a factory and it's all connected but yeah it was vietnam it's all connected we're gonna do a massive ask upgrade we got so many wonderful questions from the upgradians about a

lot of meta stuff about the show um and that's what we're gonna do for the rest of the episode i couldn't even include all the wonderful questions that we got but before we do uh i guess just to say about the draft we'll come back to it right like Like I'll put a note in my to-do app, like we will score this draft by episode 400. Like it's going to happen. So that will be a lot of fun. This episode is brought to you by DoorDash. You've got plenty on your to-do list,

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Puerto Rico, Canada, and Australia, you can support your local go-tos or choose from your favorite national restaurants like Chipotle, Wendy's, and the Cheesecake Factory. This is great. Being able to do the contactless delivery stuff is awesome right now, and you also get to support some of your favorite local restaurants. And as Jason said many times, it's not just about ordering what you want right now. It can also be about ordering something for later on. You're thinking, what do we want for dinner tonight? You can tee it all up, get it sent straight to you, and you get to

feel good about supporting a local restaurant, and you also get some great different food at home, right? Especially if you're doing a lot of home cooking, maybe you're getting in a rut. Absolutely. We just did this on Friday with Chinese. We're like, we don't want to cook. And I hadn't had Chinese food in like a year. So

we did it. It was great. And contactless, just dropping it at the door so perfect right now listeners of this show can get $5 off and zero delivery fees on their first order of $15 or more when you download the DoorDash app in the app store and use the code UPGRADE

that's $5 off your order and zero delivery fees on your first order when you download the DoorDash app in the app store and enter the code UPGRADE download it now, don't forget that's the code UPGRADE for $5 off your first order when you download the DoorDash app in the app store and enter the code UPGRADE. Download it now. Don't forget, it's the code UPGRADE for $5 off your first order with DoorDash. Our thanks to DoorDash for their continued support of this show and RelayFM. So it's big Ask Upgrade time. Oh, that was a nice one. That felt like very appropriate, you know?

Oh, yeah. So we'll celebrate by turning over to the Upgradians now. Yeah. For their questions. Someone will know what they want to hear. Joe asked, Are you glad you chose Upgrade for the show name? Do you remember any of the other contenders?

This has been so much work for me and Jason today to try and find other show names. And we hit a sticking point so basically this show began in september 2014 right that's when the first episode was and both me and jason remember having conversations over iMessage about this show but both of our messages in the cloud backups or whatever, they cut off in September of 2014. So maybe this is something to do with iOS or the iPhone that year, right? Because it's around that time. There's something about that time where neither of us have our backups before then of our messages.

So all of those conversations would have been happening probably in like august of 2014 right or like or very early september so we don't we don't have them but we did both find some emails uh to each other and including steven as well when we were starting out and we had one other name suggestion that came from a long list that we've been working on uh which was iconic was the other name that we'd come to uh but i think for me upgrade was definitely the winner of those oh yeah yeah and i'm pleased that we went we went with that one yeah and it's funny looking back on that email because um the point of the name and and this is something that i think has come up a few times where people are sort of like asking about the name um And this is something that I think has come up a few times where people are

sort of like asking about the name. It was very clear from the start. In fact, in your email to me when we sort of were boiling it down and we had come up with a long list and brainstorming and text and then you and Steven had talked and then you had set back to Upgrade and Iconic as the ones you liked the best. I wish I knew what the others were. What you wrote to me was, I think we're leaning toward Upgrade, but it gives the impression of showing that it's better than what you're currently doing on this topic. Are you happy with that? Maybe it was the intention. Because personally, I like it because of that as it sends a strong message, but just wanted to make sure you'd considered it. And the answer is, it was absolutely my intention as just a little portion of an elbow to my former employers

to have my podcast that i went out and did on my own be an upgrade over my previous job and i will if i haven't said that before publicly i will say it now is that a dig at idg you're damn right it is yeah and you know what just a little bit of spite just a tiny nugget of spite just a little bit not that every project not that it's better than every project you were doing of course the wonderful clockwise which came over at the same time yes we found like nine different versions of the clockwise art in that email thread as we were trying to work on a clock new version of clockwise uh was still on the network too, which is great. But yeah, that was like, I found it funny that you're like,

are you sure you want to, this leaves an implication. And I'm like, yes, it does. All right. Yeah. So it's a great name. It's a great name because it's a thing. It's a tech word. It means something in terms of always kind of moving forward. And there's always another upgrade and all of that.

Like it fits so well with uh while being a single word which is very hard right to find that word that that somehow kind of ties in and so it's a good one sometimes it's hard to find when you search because it's just a word sometimes it's hard to do little promo codes for sponsors because they have an upgrade promo already but we make it work well i mean i just did a google search and then click need to window for upgrade podcast and we're first beating out those punks over at lifehacker yeah what are they thinking uh yeah um zach in the discord the relay fm members discord by the way which you should become a relay fm, support this show.

There's a link in the top of your show notes. You can support Upgrade directly if you would like. You'll get access to loads of wonderful benefits, including access to the RelayFM members Discord, where there's a wonderful live chat as well while we stream the show live. But you can also ask your Ask Upgrade questions right in the Discord and they get put into the same sheet as the tweets.

The benefit there is they can be longer if you want because there isn't the tweet limit. And you don't have to be on Twitter. You don't have to be on Twitter. So Zach asked, why is there a 128k Mac startup beep at the beginning of, in brackets, nearly every show? So first off, it's not just the 128k, although it is the original Mac startup chime. My first Mac was a Mac SE and it had the same startup startup beep. And so I am nostalgic for that sound. I felt the podcast needed a startup sound when we got the theme music. I felt like the theme music was, I like the theme music a lot.

We did make one change. I had it be more guitar and less synthesizer. And sometimes when I'm editing the show, instead of Mike, I put it back to the to the the wacky wackier synth version just which is what makes it even weirder you wanted more guitar but you used the synth one i was afraid i was afraid that it was a little too cheesy for our primary theme song but once it was the primary theme song having the weirdly cheesy synth version uh by chris breen who was my co-worker at macworld for very long time and he works at apple now um but uh thank you to chris for doing that theme song

so great uh but i felt like it needed a start and i thought well how about a startup chime and i played with it and that was what i came up with was the original Mac startup chime followed by the music starting was like, really, I thought that sounded great. So it was really just me kind of making a judgment that I thought I wanted the show to start with a startup time. Because like, if the upgrade music had started with a big flourish, I would not have done it, but it didn't. It sort of like started slowly and then built and so i wanted that that kind of gating thing at the beginning so it really was just kind of a creative process of kind of following why i was feeling the way i was about how i wanted the show to sound and i edited we should mention this again i edited episode one because we had to it was under embargo for an iphone review embargo episode one was and you were on holiday yep so we recorded that episode uh like the weekend before and then uh i edited it and posted it so i was making those decisions about like the theme song you hadn't even heard the theme song i had not heard the the theme song at all before

the first time i heard it was when it was released yeah to everybody so that i had a lot of faith in you and chris and and and so as a part of that process and i've done a million other podcasts right i've been thinking about creatively like how do i want this to start and it doesn't sound right like this and there were no rules we were just figuring it out and i thought startup sounded good in that place and that's why what's fun about that speaking of the the synth version versus the guitar version is it does let us play with it and do things like have a different max startup chime which is hilarious we do that from time to time there was a time that i can't remember why but we did a different chime every week for a while was that during the summer of i don't even remember it was i think it was i think it was the summer of fun

and we rolled through or or maybe it was somebody asked a question about the startup chime and then we started messing with the startup chime. I don't know. I think it may have been the first Summer of Fun before we had the theme. Yeah, right. So we had a folder full of those. And then what we asked Chris for was we wanted to do the surf guitar Summer of Fun version of the upgrade theme. And I specifically asked him to have it start with that little slidey guitar thing like you'd hear in a David Lynch movie

or something like that. And it's perfect. So he's emulating the startup chime. We'll come back to that in a second. And we will get back to that in a second. So anyway, that's the idea of the chime. It is retro, which I like. It says something about Apple on the Mac,

but also it just felt like appropriate and then we can mess with it, which is also great. And one of my favorite Easter eggs is the episode when Apple TV Plus launched. I used the Apple TV Plus chime for that episode. Yes, because Apple TV Plus has a startup chime. It's hilarious. Whoever thought of that, bless your heart. That Apple TV Plus shows start with a startup chime it's the best it's great the question answer of this question is zach uh zach knox who is important in upgrade law because whenever we have interactive draft scorecards i think there will probably be one for this episode there will be one in a couple of weeks for the wwc draft zach creates those

and zach also helped me develop uh the upgraded website um at upgradies.com which is the hall of fame so zach helped me build that in in the sense of like zach built it there's like the help is zach did it um and i helped thank you for aiding us by doing everything yeah and zach is also a mod in the uh in the discord in the members discord another question from the discord comes from molly's and i moved this one up in the document for obvious reasons of all the bad things going on in the world i miss the summer of fun and the relaxing worry-free musical notes that accompany it could you play the theme music for me just this once please yes i will definitely play that theme music for you because we were just talking about

it so that's going to play right now. Speaking of the summer of fun. Oh, that felt good, right? I feel like I just was on the beach. It's going to start in a few weeks. So I'm looking forward to that. Don't know what we're going to do yet, but that's the fun of the feel like I just was on the beach. It's going to start in a few weeks. So looking forward to that. Don't know what we're going to do yet, but that's the fun of the Summer of Fun. That is the fun.

That's where the fun comes from. And after WWDC, we decided that the Summer of Fun can't begin until WWDC is over. Yeah, and depending on how action-packed WWDC is, it will either start the episode after or the episode after that. So it depends on how much stuff there is to talk about we may have to usher it in like at the end of our wwdc recap episode we may have to like usher it in and say yeah we i now like like when juan antonio samaranch stood on the podium at the olympics and said i now declare these olympic games open we'll do that but for the summer of fun it's a

deep cut juan antonio samaranch i hope people recognize how deep that cut is anyway and again thanks to chris spreen for that music and all the music the draft music the upgrade his music chris composed them all and then yeah he does all the variations and um it's they're great and he's a great sport and it's a fun uh you know he he's he basically does the theme song of all of my podcasts so thank you to chris for all the theme songs all the brain themes and i assume a different chris asked tell us about some personal accomplishments and milestones that you've each achieved outside of upgrade over the course of these 300 episodes i have four and they're pretty big uh i made podcasting my professional career i was professional podcasters i was not i was not like a self-employed podcaster when Upgrade started.

Right. I've grown a company around all of this. RelayFM has grown into the thing that it is today. I got married and bought my first home over the course of these 300 episodes. Life stuff, big stuff. Yeah. But you're in a very different place

than you were yeah for episode one yeah um i episode one occurred a week after i left a job that i'd had for um i'd been continuously employed for like 20 years because i came over from mac user to mac world and essentially other than some you know an internship at my local newspaper and some food service jobs summers at college it was my first job and it was my only job and upgrade one came out when i left it like a week before to go do question mark like start a website and there was no gap there was no like well i'm gonna take some time off and think about it because the iphone event happened the week that i left idg and i i got the phone and was under embargo and that we all know that's the biggest week of our year in terms of listener interest and reader interest. So we had to go right then.

So we had to do upgrade one right then. We had to launch Six Colors right then. So no break. And on the precipice, my wife and I had been taking walks for a couple of years talking about, like, how long are we going to give this? Is this going to work? What are the risks? How are we going to survive? We don't have any health insurance.

We're going to have to pay for that. All these things that were going on. So what's happened in the Intervening 300 episodes is I'm still doing that. It worked. So that's the biggest one for me is that I went from my first job and the sort of quote unquote safety of a corporate job

that I was burned out on and hating for the last year or two that I was there to a job that I was burned out on and hating for the last year or two that I was there to a job that I love that I do from my house which you know everybody does a job from their house now it seems but I have been doing it all of this time building up six colors I sent my daughter off to college then she came back because of the pandemic but we did send her off and that was a big thing and I'll put put in there, this is not quite outside of Upgrade or not. I got to do a bunch of amazing live events and it's not just like the Upgrade live events, but it's like the Relay live events. And that means a WWDC and the Relay fifth anniversary event where I got to host the

Family Feud. And you know what? If you don't already know this about me um being in front of a live audience i love it i love it i don't get stage fright i love it so that has been amazing for my life too but i would say the biggest thing is yeah i was going out on my own and had zero expectation of whether i was going to be able to make it when we did episode one and i i have been here ever since, which is awesome. Mark asked, how did you become aware of each other? What was the first time you met in person? So, I mean, I've been aware of Jason for a very, very, very long time.

It's just, you know, from, I don't know. Sorry, Jason, from when I was a kid. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. We'll get to that in a minute. You know, it's just like maybe it's just reading Macworld or whatever. It's like a 15-year-old. I have to admit, for a project that I have not announced yet, I've been looking through a lot of old issues of Macworld and Macuser

and seeing things that I've written or I know I worked on about things that i consider ancient history and i think to myself geez like that wow yeah i used to read macwell magazine you know i used to read the website um and then when social media was a thing i've been following jason the first time that we spoke was in uh 2012 march of 2012 when i had jason on my first podcast he was an interview guest i found the email that i sent to him yep i found it too and i wanted to read the topics that we spoke about on this episode back in march of 2012 yeah this is a classic this is one for the time capsule you know the new ipad one week on and it would be great to know your opinions having seen

it at the event if you're able to talk about it. I don't know what iPad. That's just an iPad. That would have been the third year of the iPad. Maybe that was the retina, first retina iPad in March 2012. I don't know. Second thing was Twitter buying Posterous and what we think they may want it for.

I don't know what Posterous is. Do you have any idea what that is? I just searched for it, and it's Posterous at Posterous on Twitter. Posterous is no longer in service. Posterous was a simple blogging platform started in May 2008. It supported integrated and automatic posting

to other social media tools, such as Flickr and Twitter. Tumblr's biggest rival. So Tumblr says, thanks for killing posterists. My word. I now remember this, because the logo looked like a post-it note. Wow, look at that. That's how time flies,

I suppose. And also, the upcoming Angry Birds space game. Are we excited, or do we have red bird fatigue they were the things that we spoke about and you said sounds great so yep i was very happy to i i still am sort of like that where i will sometimes get emails from people who are like hey would you like to be on my podcast and i try to say yes right because even that you know you never know i don't say yes because you never know when you're going to be working with that person for 300 episodes. But more like, why not?

Like, it's nice. It helps. If they want it, it's nice that they thought of me and all of that. So, yeah, I remember nothing about that other than I do remember doing it. I remember sitting in the podcast studio at IDG and recording that. But that's, like, I don't remember anything we talked about. No. And the first time we met was, I mean, by that point, after that point, I had you on my various shows multiple times.

Right. We'd met, I guess the first time we met was at a macworld party at wwdc oh yeah so we we had a party at wwdc for several years because macworld was in san francisco unlike so many like even the people who are in our sphere who are in the bay area a lot of them are at apple or in the silicon valley right but macworld was in San Francisco downtown. We were a little bit of a hike, right? It was like six blocks or something to get there up a hill. It's not easy. You have to work for it a little bit, but we were proximate enough that I thought, and we had a nice terrace that we could do a party on. So we did one for a few years. And I made up the guest list which was weird for me i hadn't done that before and so i invited sort of everybody i knew um which included all sorts of sort of apple related luminaries

and uh and you guys too yeah that was my first wwdc in 2013 and i i vividly remember getting a dm from you i was in my hotel room. And you said, hey, do you want to come to the Mackwell party? And I was like, oh, my God, because I knew about the Mackwell party. Because when people would go to WWDC, they would take pictures from the little terrace. And they'd post them online. It's like if you were someone who was just following along with this stuff from home, as I was up until that point, I knew this party existed. And then a few years later, we co-hosted it.

Real AFM co-hosted the party. Yeah. I think that was the last time it happened after i after i left actually which was really funny because i got to go back there and be like yeah i'm with these guys we put you on the guest list so so you obviously weren't on the guest list and i just invited you at the last minute and i said yeah we got room come on over yep don't say over you are you just you just figured that i wouldn't be there you know and then you saw me you saw that i was in town and you were like hey come over yeah that was somebody i know it's a lot of pressure making a guest list i don't know that many people so it's like who am i gonna and then it's always like oh i forgot oh you're in town please come to the party and then uh damon wayans walks in and you're like how did that happen but yep true story every year

damon wayans would arrive and it was always like naomi pierce brought him i think i think that's how that worked and i don't know how that happened and yeah that was always a fun thing uh jorvik in the relay fm discord asked what was the most surprised that you have been by one of your co-hosts opinions or purchases mine was when you told me you used a calendar as your task manager it's a classic yeah i was very upset about that as i as i explained myself i feel like you got a little less irate about it yeah because i kind of like built up the the idea of blocking time to work on tasks yeah but it still was yes it still very much offended you i do kind of have some task

managers that i sort of use now although i still do block out time and find it very effective to Yeah. But it still was, yes, it still very much offended you. I do kind of have some task managers that I sort of use now, although I still do block out time and find it very effective to say. That's fun. In fact, now that Todoist support is inside Fantastical, I have a recurring to-do that is at a time on the week to write my Macworld column and I check it off and it's like 2 p.m. on Tuesdays, write the Macworld column. So it's still in the calendar, but it's also a thing I can check off. And it is very satisfying to check off the check boxes, by the way.

But yeah, I remember blowing your mind and many other people's minds with my ridiculous calendar-based system. But I was also coming from a place where I was overscheduled. I was in lots and lots of meetings at IDG. And the only way I could get things done was by blocking off time.

And so it came out of that, I think too, where I'd be like, I'm going to write my column now two to four. Don't schedule me for anything during this period because like some of those people could see my calendar and they'd see free time and they'd pop things in there. So I would block them with space for me to do other things. For me, part of it, and it still gets me from time to time,

is your casual description of how you've got two iPads that you use for different tasks. I don't even know what it is about that. It always strikes me as like, two iPads. But it's always the multi-pad lifestyle originally hit me as being kind of wacky i don't know i get why you do it but it is wacky also i would say uh at several points i just forget how much younger you are than i am and it comes up sometimes with mike at the movies like

famously i heard from a lot of people about you not understanding that save the whales was a thing in the 80s and therefore not understanding the entire premise of Star Trek IV being resonant because Save the Whales was a thing. And you're like, what? Whales, they're fine. It's like, wow, okay, you're right. You did not actually live through that, and I had forgotten. Or my favorite moment where I felt like I was a million years old is when I talked about Crowded House with you, my favorite band, and you said, oh, my mom loved Crowded House. We had the greatest hits CD. I thought, yep, that's it. My favorite band is the band that your mom likes.

I mean, I like them too, but yeah. But it was a happy childhood memory of music your mother played. I was like, okay. Yeah, so that's it for me. You're only as young as you feel, Mike. Then maybe I feel older you feel younger we're somewhere around the same age i don't know how i'm feeling right now

we all feel old now we're all 100 years old uh sam in uh discord asked uh what have you accomplished with the show that you're most proud of um also the side, what would you want to improve or change in the future? I think one of my things that I am the most proud of is the upgrades. I love it. It was one of those things where I think when I first proposed it, you were a little bit like, here goes Mike with one of his wild ideas. Yeah, right. And also keep in mind, it was like literally episode like 10 or something or something was it we hadn't even been doing this show for a year yeah i think we did it didn't we do the and it was the first it was the first annual remember and i was very i was very opposed to that because uh it's not there's no such thing as a first annual episode 16 was the upgrade for 2014 the first ever upgrade is is what i demanded that

we call it yeah but then i was right it did become an annual tradition and i love it it's it's grown into something that like i genuinely look forward to every single year and like think a lot about and it's really something that i love um so i'm happy that we do that in the things of what would we want to improve or change in the future i would like to do some more in-depth topics that take more time to research and stuff like that i don't really have ideas for what they could be but it's just something that has been on my mind well we did that one segment a little while ago that was kind of like the big picture kind of thing where we tried to just disconnect a little bit from the week in week out and kind

of zoom back and talk about the big picture and that's a thing that i think fits with our format and yet is furthering it in a way that is good what about you for me i would say having worked with apple pr people for over coverage you know invite, invite to this event, review of this, all of that for years now. I think it was a milestone when I got a call from Apple PR specifically because of Upgrade. Yeah, that's nice. And it's that Colleen Novielli interview that I did in New York City. I did in New York City. That was an invite that I got, not because I was the guy who writes about Apple stuff for Six Colors, but because they wanted me to interview somebody and they felt that Upgrade was a good fit for a Mac. It was an iMac, right? For an interview about a new Mac.

you know a mac it was an iMac right for an interview about a new mac and I thought this is a real milestone that our show is the reason that I'm getting this call from Apple and not my writing so that was that was a big one for me and and it's and it's happened since then right but like for me that was a real milestone of upgrade that upgrade was was taken seriously and part of apple's launch plan for this product and and that was unusual and good um uh and on the flip side i always want us to keep searching for other trends like with upstream uh where we what i'm really about, about upstream is that we started talking about Apple's strategy and the other streaming media stuff, um,

long before there was anything. And I felt like we did a good job covering it as it came into, uh, reality. And it did also mean that at that moment where Apple TV plus launched, not only were we there with this whole history of talking about it, and so we really knew what the history was and what they were trying to do, but I feel like our listeners were super well-educated about what was going on. And I

would see it on Twitter sometimes where I'd see people who very clearly had listened to Upgrade and were like, oh, well, Apple's doing it because of this. And I'm like, that's awesome, right? It's not just about us, like look at how cool we are that we talked about this years in advance, but it's also like we talked about it with the listeners. And so when that happened, all the upgradians are like, yeah, okay. I've been following it.

I know what's going on, which is awesome. So I'd love to continue watching for opportunities to do stuff like that. The things that strike us as interesting that are maybe a little longer term and we plant the seed and then we just watch it grow for a couple of years yeah it's really nice i like that uh john in the discord asked what was the most unexpectedly delightful thing to happen on the show um it is for me when jason and federico nearly killed me on air in episode 26 of Upgrade, where we started the show, the show began, we were talking beforehand,

and then it turned out that Federico was sitting in the studio with Jason because it was after the Apple Watch, Apple event, where Federico went out. And I emitted a noise which can only be described as a man's brain uh just breaking i will play a clip now so you can hear that in case you've never heard that episode he got an invite we'll talk about that on connected that's a whole yeah whole big story i'm looking forward to connected this week actually or we can talk about it now if you want, Mike. Oh. Hello. Oh my God, that really scared me. Hi, Federico.

Hi, Mike. How are you? What are you doing there? A podcast, obviously. How long have you been there? The whole time. The whole time. Oh. It's good I didn't say anything bad about you.

Hey, buddy. Hi. Now I know that I can trust you because he didn't say anything bad about me yeah so the story there is that that was where the first time any of us met federico right no i think i've met him before because he came to london to do a briefing for an ipad i mean all of us americans exactly who go to apple events knew who he was but we'd never seen him in person and so that was great um he's very tall and that was my memory is like oh he's very tall this gentleman uh we went out to lunch with a few of us um and then went back to the mac world studios because i had to do the thing and it was

very much like a collaboration of wouldn't it be funny if you just came on the podcast and you'd be a guest, but also you'd blow Mike's mind. And then what we decided to do is not mention it to you and have him sit there silently until that moment when he spoke and blew your mind. Because there was also before the show, I was complaining about him to you because he wasn't answering my text messages.

The reason he wasn't answering the text messages is because he was with you getting ready to scam me. Yes. Which happened. I would say my most delightful thing that happened is that we had this dumb idea. One of my dumb ideas for upgrade Christmas special, holiday special. It was the Christmas Carol. Yeah. It was the Christmas Carol. Yeah. This is episode 225.

And the idea there, the very loose idea, was past, present, future. And like, how can we hang the Christmas Carol concept on Upgrade? And it was like, we'll talk to Steven about the past. We'll talk to Rosemary about the present. And we'll talk to Federico about the future. And I felt like that was a good set of guests and it would be a fun kind of thing. And Federico representing kind of

the iPad and other things that are going on, looking at Apple would be like a good future, goes to future Apple. What I didn't expect was that Federico would do the entire episode in character as himself, coming back from the future to reveal all the details of everything that happened in the future. And it's amazing. Like, amazing. We tried to do the past thing with Steven and it fell apart very quickly. But Federico was incredibly committed to the role. Yeah, I didn't want Steven to stay there because it was going to be us.

It was going to be the same bit, except we would be surprising Steven with facts of the present, and we're all aware of the facts of the present, so I thought that would be kind of boring. But Federico was committed to the bit in a level of detail that I never expected, and he went to a lot of very weird places,

and that was... If we're talking about unexpectedly delightful, that has got to be it for me. Yeah, if you've not heard that episode, that's one really worth listening to. I'll put it in the show notes. It's bananas. And then more broadly, the back and forth with us and the audience about ideas like, you know, Upgradians as a term, which was brought by the listener. Dongletown and the whole kind of like spinning out of where dongle town is and it's you know it's summer of fun connotations and it's sports connotations

and things like that has been very fun yeah and then even some some bits that we did that we then discarded later for new dumb bits that always happens like verticals we had verticals for a while which are segments essentially but we were joking about them and calling like verticals we had verticals for a while which are segments essentially but we were joking about them and calling them verticals because that's an industry term and we don't do that anymore but that was a fun thing for the first 40 episodes or whatever so that's that i love that back and forth of sort of silly bits that recur for a while well because some of the verticals just became parts of the show so then they just became parts of the show like ask us true yeah right everybody knows it's really it's

really a vertical but we don't talk about them anymore the internet's friend casey asked what is the biggest pinch yourself moment i think i had two that i that immediately jumped out to me one was the the colin novielli interview that you mentioned earlier colin was the first apple guest that we'd had i've had a few since but that was like really whoa okay right like when you were telling me all that stuff about like they want to bring me in for our show like it was amazing and then also in episode 56

John Gruber linked to the show and mentioned that Upgrade was a favorite show of his which again if you go back to Mike going all the way back in his history as like a 15 year old boy reading tech news on the internet you know I've always really back to Mike going all the way back in his history as like a 15 year old boy reading tech news on the internet you know I've always really respected John Gruber and I didn't I don't really think I knew that he listened to the show at all at that point and

then when he linked to the episode which is a classic episode which is episode 56 the migration experience where we talk about how frustrating it was to upgrade an ios device and john mentions that the upgrade is one of his favorite podcasts which i really meant a lot to me yeah very generous of him to say that and uh and that was that was a fun episode too for me it's similar uh when they started regularly mentioning upgrade on accidental tech podcast which is the the one tech podcast i listen to every single week i try to listen to others but that's the one that's at the top of my list that's why it's the lifetime achievement award winner yeah and it kept happening that's the part that gets me is that they mention it once and i'm like

wow that's uh that's great that's awesome that they're talking about that and then uh but they do they cite us a lot and it's every time i i mean they mention my name sometimes in passing i'm like but but it like it's so weird to listen to one of your regular favorite podcasts and then uh somebody just casually mentions your name on the podcast and then they go on. And, and I kind of haven't gotten over that of like, what, but huh, where'd that come from? I'm kind of disconcerting,

but also a lot of fun. So that's for me, that has honestly been, it is, I know those guys. So it's not like, like, Oh,

I can't believe they noticed me. Like I know those guys, but they don't need to talk about other podcasts on their podcast. They don't need to say nice things. They don't need to cite us or say, as Marco has done several times, you should really, Casey and John too, you should really listen to this week's episode of Upgrade. Marco does that all the time, even now. And it's very nice to say they really covered this well. You should go

listen to that. Not only is that good because they have a big audience and they're sending people to listen to us, but I'm honored by that because it's a podcast that I listen to. I don't need to go listen to Upgrade though because I've already heard it. Alright, we have more Ask Upgrade from the Upgradians to go but before we do, let me thank our final sponsor and that is Squarespace.

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when you check out and when you sign up for a plan, you'll get 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain and show your support for this show. That is squarespace.com slash upgrade and the code upgrade for 10% of your first purchase. So thanks to Squarespace for their continued support of this show and all of RelayFM Squarespace. Make your next move. Make your next website. So continuing the hashtag AskUpgrade from Tim. What have you not accomplished with the show that you would like to in the future?

This is bouncing on something you mentioned earlier. We've done some live stuff for this show. I want to do a large live show for Upgrade. Yeah, yep. I thought about what it would take to do a live Upgrade at WWDC in the past it would be difficult if we wanted to keep it on Monday and if we wanted to do it how we usually do it which is right after the keynote

but maybe one day but even if it's not WWDC like I want to do a large live show one day. We talked about before all of this was going on we talked about doing all of this was going on i mean we talked about doing um something we did one show in chicago yeah that was a live upgrade yeah and that was really great and we filled the cards against humanity theater yep and it was luckily enough was a draft week yeah and and and a draft i lost because i was caught in the lights i was just so dazzled by the lights and the audience. Oh, come on. I performed really badly.

You win all of them, right? Like just, you know. I was off my game, Mike. I was just too feeling the love and off my game. You were just picking joke picks to make the audience laugh, right? Oh, man, kind of, but also just bad judgment. Anyway, I know you won that one fair and square. But yes, I would love to do that too.

That would be really great to do a proper upgrade again in front of an audience. And one day we'll have audiences again and we'll do that. And Zach asks, Zach's got another question in. Do you find that the more segmented nature of upgrade helps you in producing the show compared to looser format shows that you also make um yeah it's a yes and no for me really why and why and no so yes because uh i can kind of like we've got this this and this to do it helps

me with timing of the show like i know how long the segments are going to be and and we can right you know like especially with ask upgrade if there isn't a lot of news we always have this wall that we can come back to to help with with topics stuff like it's great um but sometimes if i want to have a segment in a show i may have to work harder to find news for it that's true right it does it creates uh an assignment and this is something we'll come back to. I think later on, there's a question that's similar to this, but when you're making a podcast, right? So we did episode one. We then did an episode every single week. And now we're at 300

of them. This is the secret of doing something like this, or we're publishing back in the day, publishing a magazine, we're doing a website, right? It's like, it's a treadmill. You're not creating a single thing. You're creating a whole system that you then need to stay on forever until you stop doing it and that means that every time you do something you have to look at it not as this would be fun but as this will be fun but i'm also committing to a certain amount of work forever until i discard this thing and And that's always the bit that gives me, and I think you, an appropriate amount of hesitation about committing. Not that we don't commit to things because we do, but that you've got to be sure because it will create an expectation and more work for you. And more work isn't necessarily bad,

but you've got a limited amount of work that you can commit. So you've got to make the right decisions about it. I will also mention, I had never, I'd done a lot of podcasts. I had done, you know, whatever 300 episodes-ish of The Incomparable when we launched Upgrade

because The Incomparable is at like 515 or something now. So 200 some episodes of The Incomparable. But I'd never had a podcast of my own where there was the same hosts every week, there was continuity, there was follow-up. The Incomparable is different panels every week. So you can't really do follow-up. And we record some of them in advance. But even if you't you tried to schedule feedback like people be like i don't like what john syracuse said i mean who are we kidding nobody would ever say that about john sir because i don't know i don't like what steve let's said about this movie and steve's not there that week so i can read the comment but like there's nobody to answer it except me. And I didn't make that.

The Incomparable, I've said this many times, is a show that I love. And I've done it for 10 years almost now. And it's great. It is a catalog of what not to do in a podcast. Panels are too big. There's too many different rotating panelists. So there's no continuity. There's all these things.

And I wanted to do a show with Upgrade. I was like, oh, I finally can do that tech podcast. You know, like all those other tech podcasts where we talk and we're the same every week and we can do follow up and there's continuity because people listen last week and this week and it's the same people. And so that's one of the reasons that I love the segments in upgrade is because I never got to do that on any other podcast. And it's so much fun to have that as a change of pace from a lot of the other things that I do. So I do enjoy it.

I like that it focuses us on certain topics. I will, you know, I will send you links for upstream during the week. Like, here's something that happened. And that's, and so I do like that.

I wouldn't want our show to just be segments every week. Right? Like I think the, the, the big gap in the middle where it's just sort of like topics go here is very important for us to be relevant week to week and to not feel like it's super programmed and like a radio show or something where we have a format and we hit it every week and then we're just filling, you know, filling blocks of time with product. And that's too much. That's too processed. Yeah, we still like, even though we have all the segments that we have, we don't force them. Like if I have no news for Upstream,

I won't include the segment. But I do, saying about follow-up was funny to me. I remember how excited you were about follow-up. Oh man. We had to, over time, I had to, like, rein you in. Because you would happily do an hour of follow-up. Oh, yeah. Right?

And, you know, I had to let you get it out of your system. No other podcast would do an hour of follow-up, Mike. No. No other popular Apple-themed tech podcast spend most of their show on follow-up. Let's just say I didn't want to do an hour of follow-up. But you're right. Thank you.

Thank you for saving me from myself yeah fair enough it wasn't good for upgrade yeah but early on it was absolutely it was like catnip it's like oh my god we have follow-up we have continuity let's lean into it and then we got our it it's there and when we need it and it's a nice thing and i love that there's that conversation that goes back and forth about stuff like that i love it but i also am not gonna eat up the whole show with it anymore which is which is good there are some shows many episodes where we don't do it like that's true one we just didn't have any follow-up today there was nothing because we got everything correct last time that's why uh rob in the discord asked if you could give a message to yourselves before episode one what would it be well for me it's this will be exactly what you hope it is oh that's not oh

jason that's nice yeah oh oh that got me oh boy i wasn't expecting that it's in the show notes i guess i. I didn't read it, though. Ah, that's good. Spoilers. I said that, because mine's different, that this show is going to exceed every possible goal you could set for yourself. And so that means a lot to me that you said that. Well, we had spoken a few times but we hadn't done something this expansive together no and we were taking a chance right we were taking a chance

and and and i was like i think mike's the guy i think this is this is the thing we can do and i'd listen i mean you'd listen to me and i'd listen to you but that's not the same no and you know i like if this works this is what it will be like. And that is what it is like. So thumbs up, Mike. Thank you. Molly's asked, what is the most listened to episode so far? I didn't know the answer to this.

I had to go check it. And I was both surprised and pleased um episode 249 which is uh the episode the week after wwdc last year featuring josh uh josh sheffer and willie hodges from apple discussing swift ui and catalyst and also ipad os 13 i was really surprised about that honestly um because it just i just figured that maybe the WWDC episode that week would have been more because they're typically one of our biggest episodes of the year. So that was kind of cool. Also, we debated a lot about how we couldn't, you know, my interview

with Josh and Wiley was later in the week and we're like, we can't wait because we have to do the post episode or post keynote episode. Do we put out another episode? Do we put out another episode? Do we hold it? Is Apple okay with giving us this interview and then having us sit on it for four days? Which they were, which was nice.

It turned out that I think that interview, which was about like deep tech stuff about SwiftUI and Catalyst, but trying to make it understandable for a broader audience. You know, it was a real tight rope for me. I was really kind of like, how am I going to do this? And I think it turned out fine. But lesson learned is by getting it out of WWDC week and letting it breathe a little bit

so that people were kind of like done with the WWDC podcast. They're going home or they, if they never left home, they're like that, that bulk of them is over. And now this is a new thing. Like, I think it got more attention because we waited a little bit. So that was an interesting lesson. Cause also don't forget that WWDC week,

every tech podcast had someone from Apple on it, right? Like all of the large shows had guests right like it was a bunch of relay shows that had them and in the kind of extended universe um like lots of people had apple uh employees as guests so for sure i don't know if we would have got as much attention on the episode so it was hindsight worked out great yeah and i i used a lot of uh plugins to make remove the street noise and the echo from that one yeah uh this is actually closely followed by episode 237 which were mentioned for the third

time which was the episode of colleen ovielle which also had a draft in it that was a massive episode yeah that was um right so so that was the first episode where apple pr basically said we would like you to be we would like a person on your podcast was like wow um, so that was the first episode where Apple PR basically said, we would like a person on your podcast. It was like, wow. And because they hadn't done that, but they did with Rene Ritchie one time. Like, that was it. There was very little precedent for it. And so that was a big thing.

And yes, it was a draft episode. So we recorded different parts at different times. We recorded actually a big chunk of the show with me at home and then i flew to new york and then did the interview and then we did that segment it was this whole and we had to pretend like i was in romania exactly oh my god yeah it was it was a huge production challenge but uh so i'm glad people listen to it yeah i've recorded with you at like three in the morning or something yeah local time in Romania. It was wild. That was fun, but it was wild. Enoch in the Discord

asked, how do you get your thank you for this compliment, superb news? A lot of research. All week, I use RSS now. I used to use Twitter and stuff like that, but I use RSS now. I have a bunch of sources that I'll be checking, and if I see any tweet

that comes up, what I do is I just save all the links from RSS or from Twitter or whatever to an Apple note. And then on Monday morning, I sit down and go through all of the links I've collected. And we'll read through them and see what I think is right for the show and put them in. I wonder if there's a future goal. And I don't know what this is so we'll just we'll we'll talk about this later but like i wonder if we could build a system where you and i are throwing links into a document somewhere in a fairly straightforward way or you know maybe you should share your apple note with me i mean i could do that yeah and i could put things in it too because right now i

just paste them in slack from time to time and a lot of them I just let them go past so well one good source for me is like I just look at what you've posted on six colors that's what you're interested in that I mean I certainly that gives us fodder right anything that I'm writing during the week is something that we can talk about although except for the ones that we talk about at first and then I write about it because it was like really good and we had a good conversation like I'm going to make that a story for the people who don't listen to podcasts to read, which is part of the magic of having a podcast. For me, I want to thank Mike on the podcast for doing that work because we do the show on Sunday morning or Monday morning Pacific time. Not Sunday morning. Monday morning Pacific time.

Sometimes I will pop into the document over the weekend, but you know, it's the weekend. Uh, sometimes on Sunday, I'll be thinking about something. I'll go in there. I'll see if there's anything in the document. I might add some things in and it's like, I want to talk about this, but really I spend like an hour or two before we start doing the show. after I wake up on Monday morning, looking at the document and thinking about what we're going to do. And so often the document is just done on Monday morning because Mike has done it on Monday, uh, UK time.

And so the structure and the shape of the document is so much of that is just Mike's work. So thank you for doing that every week. I help sometimes a lot of times I don't. So thank you for doing that every week. I help sometimes. A lot of times I don't. So thank you. This is something me and Stephen were talking about

on our new podcast Backstage, which is for Real AFM members, where we talk about kind of like how to start a podcast. And we're talking about having co-hosts and stuff like that in preparation. This is just like a thing where we need to have a document together and i the type of person that i am i need lots of notes

for shows i like to have lots of notes and i think that you don't need as much as i do as in the sense of an outline um i get the sense that you could come to the show with some basic talking points but not to the level that i put together not to the level that you could come to the show with some basic talking points, but not to the level that I put together. Not to the level that you put together. That's probably true. But I mean, when I was doing download, like that was, I had to build those show notes every week and it's a lot of work. It is.

So thank you for doing it. Yeah. But it's just kind of the case of like, I need it. So I have no problem doing the majority of the work. I feel like I need it maybe more than you do. But Sal asked, how many hours do you actively spend preparing for an episode? How far in advance and how detailed is the show outline? So that document that Jason was talking about, it takes me about 90 minutes every Monday morning to put together.

The amount of detail differs from week to week. But as I said, there's a lot of research collection happening throughout the week and i might have an idea for a topic like jason does and i might go into my apple note and make some like a bulleted list of things that i want to touch on and then expand on it but that's that takes me uh around 90 minutes every monday morning to put together and that includes like getting all the ask upgrade questions and picking the ones that i want to do because i don't know if it's if we've really made it clear before but we get lots and lots of questions and i pick the ones that i think are best for each episode and all that kind of stuff so and then i wake up and somewhere you know i will look while i'm having my tea in bed in the morning but basically i try to be at my desk around eight and i spend an hour going through

the show doc and that's's where I will make sure that I have answers for ask upgrade questions. If there's a question or a Snell talk topic that I think is not going to do it for me, I'm not going to give a good answer. I will flag those and I'll say, Mike, I need a different Snell talk question or I'll, I'll mark an ask upgrade as, as a crossed out and we shouldn't do it it i'll go through the show document as well sometimes there's a how what do we think about this and then there'll be an mh i think about this this way and then that's the end of it and i'm like okay and then i'll i'll add in a little bit of a note i could just jump in during the show but i try to add a little bit of a note of

like here is what i will probably say in in just a very simple way of like this is this is what you should talk about here self yeah um and and we'll put it together that way and then sometimes i don't read jason's notes and then they make me cry on the show exactly right that's the beauty of it so uh we also uh sometimes i will make bigger creative decisions which is always problematic when it's an hour before we're going to record sometimes i will say to mike i don't know about this topic or i think we're i think this is too much or i would like to talk about this sometimes i'll insert things and mike will be like wow that's a whole thing i said yeah but i want to talk about it a lot of times we'll end up having a conversation

then or right before we start recording where we'll be saying um the show may be too long sometimes it happens during the show too we'll be like let the show may be too long sometimes it happens during the show too we'll be like let's take this out and do it next week um sometimes i'll come in before and i'll be like this is too much and he'll say let's make it a a follow-up item or a mini topic instead of making it a full segment because i i feel like the balance is off so i will give it a scan and say like this doesn't feel right this doesn't feel like what we should be doing so there's some of that. But a lot of that is happening in the hour before.

And it makes me feel bad on one level because I am swooping in at the end of Mike's process and then second guessing him. But it is also a collaboration between us. So it's like, I never want to do something that Jason doesn't want to do because then we're not going to have the conversation. It's just going to be me monologuing.

Like if there's a topic you're not interested in, and this is not criticism, this is how I would be too. Like I don't want to, if there's a topic that I have nothing to say on, then I have nothing to say on it. And so I like, and honestly,

like I cannot think of any time where we have not torn up part of the show document where it hasn't worked out for the best. I agree. And we'll go back and forth. Sometimes we will really disagree and we will go back and forth on where what the right solution is but we always end up with a good solution that is the that turns out to be the best one for the finished product also i you know i don't the other part of it is time wise like i

don't want us building the show on friday because stuff happens on over the weekend and Monday. I don't really want to commit to working. I get I work enough on the weekend already. So I don't want to commit to having Sunday be the day that the upgrade document gets built. And as a result, your your workday starts on Monday morning and you have that day while I'm sleeping to build the show doc. So that's sort of how it happens. I was thinking back, like, I don't even remember when we started doing upgrade on Mondays at 9am Pacific. I don't even remember when we started doing that. Cause you had a job at first.

Like that always. So at some point we, we settled on this regular time for streaming and stuff like that. But I don't even remember that. I think if anything, it would have just been a couple of hours later. Yeah. It would have of hours later. Yeah. It would have been Monday or sometime.

Yeah, and the first episode, of course, was pre-recorded, so we didn't even know. So anyway, that's the answer, is that this thing that you listen to every week, we don't just make it up as we go along, but we're also not reading from a script generally. It's just an outline. A friend of the show, Brian and the relay for members discord asked

upgrade is a very consistent show recorded and edited and posted at largely the same time every week what advice do you have for people who want to record edit and release podcasts on the same day oh it's hard like it's a lot of work right like if you if you do things the way that we do them, it's going to take you all day. Because again, so say it takes me 90 minutes to prep. We record typically for like two and a half hours.

Then I will spend at least another 60 to 90 minutes editing and posting the show. So like upgrade is Monday. Like it's the day, you know? Yeah. 90 minutes editing and posting the show. So like upgrade is Monday. Like it's the day, you know? Yeah. Um,

so the thing about the editing and releasing on the same day, so it's, it's a difficult thing to do and it's something I can do because I have a lot of experience in editing. Um, the way that upgrade is edited is whilst we are recording, I have a pen and paper in front of me, and I am noting time codes of all of the things that I need to edit. These can be when me and Jason are talking over each other excessively.

I don't cut out all of that, because I don't think that all of that should be cut out in a show like ours. There can be a little collision. It's a little bit. There's a right amount of it. Yeah, thank you. And I feel like i do the right amount of editing on there or there'll be like production notes where it's like all right we didn't do that part right we had to take that out or like someone someone like jason goes to get some tea which happened in this episode and i'll edit around

that or the audio clips that i put in this episode i write the times down and i'll put them in so that cuts down my editing time because if i edited this show the way that i edit say cortex where that's my heaviest edit i listen to the entire show and edit it as i'm going like listening back that takes me about so it's like three hours to every hour yeah and that means upgrade would not get put out in the same day. So, you know, this show is typically around 90 minutes long. It takes me about an hour to edit that, which is great. I'm working on, which I've not talked about, but I'll at least mention here. I'm hoping to do an online course about podcast editing.

That's my hope. Yes. And this keeps coming up. And I think it's a really important point about the spectrum of editing of a podcast you can not edit and you can super super detail edit and the truth is you have to choose based on your need so for upgrade your this is a perfect example upgrade gets an edit cortex gets a detailed edit upgrades edit is more than just posting it live but it's kind of assembly based with a little bit of cleanup so um it's i do similar with the incomparable i probably do a

little more detailed than upgrade but not a lot where i have notes about where we messed up or things i need to take out and i do that part and things i need to put in and i'll do that and then i will scan through looking for over talking which on the incomparable there's a lot of it because it's a big panel oh i also do do that but there's just not as much yeah well that's what when you were talking about over talking i mean it's very much the same kind of thing where it's like if i interrupt or there's a false start we both start talking at once you clean that up but you don't have to listen to the whole show to do that you can actually look in your editing app at the waveforms and say, oh, they're talking at the same time there. Let's listen and see what's broken there.

But so it's an edit, but it's not the heavy edit. And it comes back to, if you want to record, edit, and release on the same day, you're going to make a decision about where you land on that spectrum in order to get the show out. So if I was, I don't want to say if I was more like Gray, because that's not the point. But like if you and I decided that Upgrade needed to be made at the level of detail of Cortex, for reasons, we would do it. But then Upgrade couldn't come out the day that we record it. And I really, really like that Up upgrade comes out the day we record it because we talk about the issues of the day. And the longer you let a topical podcast sit, the more likely it is to be invalidated by events, right? So we want to put it out. And so we made that

decision. So I think that's my big advice here is, yes, it's hard. Consistency is really important. I thank you for mentioning, Brian, that upgrade is consistent. I'm a real believer that podcasts are more successful when they're consistent. And then you if you want to be consistent like that, you need to find where the right place on the editing spectrum is for you to be able to be consistent and be happy with the final product. And that's hard, but that's sort of what we've settled on here. And I'm reminded of that every time I have to edit Upgrade.

Yeah, like for me, it's, you know, that it wouldn't be terrible if we put Upgrade out on Tuesday morning. But the problem is I wouldn't be able to have it done by Tuesday morning. Because I do lots of shows, I have lots of things going on. Cortex, we record and then put the show out four days later, because I can't do all that editing in one day. I have to break it up, because either I don't have the time or it can be bad for my rsi to do that amount of editing in one day um i it just wouldn't like basically if we if i wanted to if

we wanted to do a cortex style edit which is like really going through and picking it all out like and you know every time one of us repeats a word cutting it which is i do that right like if we repeat things i will sure cut that up um upgrade would come out on like thursdays yeah and that's no good for this podcast that's not whereas cortex it's fine and that's also our time works for us here you were recording early it's late it's in the evening where you are but you still have some time that you can work on monday evening to do it if you need to pass it to me which sometimes happens because you have to go somewhere or you have other commitments and you'll pass it to me, I've got all day to do it. I don't take all day. I do it in a couple of hours right after just as you do,

but I've got all day to do it, which is if you look at something like ATP, they record late in the evening. And there have been times when Marco has edited that podcast immediately following when he has to get on a plane the next morning or something like that. But for the most part, like the incomparable, you record late in the evening and then you edit it later, right? And that works for them because that recording time works for them. Upgrade's advantage is that we get out sooner and we only have two hours where events can invalidate our podcast and that's i like that that's what i'm going for so i always say to people

when they are asking after we press record every minute upgrades getting out a day and i hate that i hate it uh and so that's why we get out as fast as we can but whilst maintaining a quality level whereas in contrast i just posted an episode of The Incomparable this weekend that we recorded like four weeks ago. So, you know, different kinds in different places. All right, so that wraps it up for this episode. Thank you so much to everybody who sent in a hashtag AskUpgrade question. You can do that by tweeting out with the hashtag AskUpgrade

or in the RelayFM members' Discord, use the question mark AskUpgrade and you can submit a question that way. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode and any episode you've listened to. Obviously, we're in a very celebratory mood today for episode 300, so we will extend our sincere thanks to you, the Upgradians, the listeners of this show,

for tuning in every week that you tune in, for supporting us by buying our merchandise, by being a member, by sharing the show with people. Um, we, it means the world to us that we get to produce this show for all of you and to have seen it grow over time and for there to be more upgradians.

Like it's a, it's really a wonderful thing. So thank you so much for tuning in. I will say thank you, Jason, as always for being a part of this with me. It really has mean the world to me. Thank you, Mike.

It all worked out, didn't it? It sure did. You can find Jason online. He's at jsnl, J-S-N-E-L-L, and at sixcolors.com and theincomparable.com. I am iMike. I am Y-K-E. Thank you to our sponsors for supporting this week's episode, Cotton Bureau, DoorDash, and Squarespace. And we'll be back next week.

Cotton Bureau, DoorDash, and Squarespace. And we'll be back next week. Well, next week is going to be a regular episode. Then it's all going out the window. It's like everything's about to happen. WWDC is coming fast now. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Jason Snell.

Yeah. Choo-choo-choo.