Upgrade - 4: I Regret My Endorsement of You

Episode Date: October 6, 2014

This week Jason and Myke start off the show with a discussion about terrible social networks, before attacking follow-up on Dropbox replacements, data security and streaming services. Other topics this week include Apple Pay and the Pebble.

Hello and welcome to episode 4 of Upgrade on RelayFM. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Hover, Simplified Domain Management. My name is Mike Hurley and today I'm joined by your host, as I always am, Mr. Jason Snow. Always. It's a pleasure to be back. Mike, hi. How's it going? Very well, sir. Happy birthday to you. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. It just so happens. All of our listeners can wish you a

happy birthday, too, if they haven't already. They can join the people on my Facebook page who are saying happy birthday. Nothing like waking up to 50 emails saying someone has added a comment to your Facebook page. But again, better that than nobody. Are you much of a Facebook user?

No. My wife is more than I am, and so she'll say, did you see this thing on Facebook? And I'll go to Facebook. I do use it, but I don't go, I don't check it. I go there sometimes to see it's, but I, I don't, I don't actually like actively check it. Um, so I, I've got like, you know, you got college and high school friends who are on it and family members and there are people there that that's the only way I, I communicate with them. And I don't mind, I don't mind it, but I'm not a big Facebook, you know, user because I've just, you know, to use Facebook, you just got to keep going back to their website. And I just don't work like that. That's, I mean, I use Twitter because I have a Twitter app that,

that I run, uh, on my Mac anyway. And on, on my iPad, I just, I just never even think about it. It's just not. Yeah. So I, I mean, I'm a very light Facebook user, I guess I would say. It's the place where on Twitter, it's all nerdy conversations, right, about technology and things. On Facebook, it's not. On Facebook, it's all pictures of the families and friends. And, you know, it's not. When I post my nerdy stuff on Facebook, it gets a very different reaction from when I post it on Twitter. Mostly like, oh, Jason's got more of his computer things, right?

Which is, that's what they say. All of your computer mess. Yes, exactly. I started using LinkedIn. I've tried to stay away from. I accepted your connection request earlier today, by the way, Mike. We're now colleagues at RelayFM. We are.

We're involved in our own professional network now, which I'm really excited about. That's right. I don't really know why I've started using it. I had a couple of requests from some people that I kind of wanted to stay connected with, like from a business perspective, like it just made sense. So I figured, well, now I may as well do it. So I figure it might be a way to help with business stuff, like sponsors and stuff like that maybe.

So I figured why not just invite one disgusting social network into my life. LinkedIn is one of the worst services I've ever used. Every time I do anything, it tries to scrape my address book every single time. It's crazy. I hate it. And I don't use it except I, you know, I use it as a resume, essentially. It's like I connect to people I know, and I make sure that my job descriptions are up to date, which I got to do recently. I logged into LinkedIn. I said, oh, I've had some changes. I'm going to put some different stuff down here.

I occasionally will get a recruiter or somebody who contacts me and says, would you be interested in this job or other? But otherwise, I find it totally useless. And it's funny because for some people, I guess it works because I know they've tried to make it much more of an actual social network where there are conversations and you send messages and things like that. And it just has no appeal to me at all. But then again, I'm not one of those business guys. I don't have a, I'm not wearing a tie. So I think I'm not allowed into the special rooms on LinkedIn because you need a jacket and tie to get in there. It's like every time I do anything, so like I use the app, right?

It's like, well, first I get a thousand emails, then I log into the app to accept the requests. And the first thing it would do before it lets me do anything, it's like it takes you through like a wizard every single time I open the app. Hey there, Mike. We've noticed that we've not been deep within your address book recently.

And you kind of have to be really careful. And then I have this weird thing, and somebody can explain this for me because I don't understand it, that in the application on my iPhone, there is a messages icon and the messages icon says two next to it when i click it and it tells me i have no messages and i don't understand what the number two because i that's the second thing you can do the first thing you can do is whatever and the second thing is click that button because the notifications thing so there's a little flag and that has two a little badge like a little red badge right but then the messages it has two and it doesn't have a red badge it's like messages squared it's kind of what it looks like and i

can't understand what it's asking me to do like i then sort of poked around and saw that upgrade to premium allows 10 in-mails i don't know what an in-mail is i assume it's something to do with that maybe i'm not in mailing enough and linkedin is expensive yeah yeah i do you remember when when you used to sign up for um network social networking services and they'd ask for your im and if you put that in it would it would send a message to everybody in your address book yep because I did that once and literally every single person I had in my buddy list got a note from me saying I'm now using this thing and then I got all these angry um IMs from everybody

saying what the hell just happened like path right do you remember path when it did that yeah address book what did it do it was just uploading addresses to them yeah yeah it was just that was just like a kind of breach of of trust because they were trying to connect they're trying to match you to people you knew um is what they is what they said and i think that was probably the case but you know there are also cases where it's just like spam it's like we're gonna tell and they often would cloak it on like a next button or a save button. Just let us know your information like, oh, you know, your IM. And then it would just like – just completely spam everything.

Yeah, not good. Not good. And LinkedIn strikes me as being a little like that too, that it's all upsell, which I mean on one level, it's great that they charge and that they're making a business of this. And it's not just we'll give it away and then drop ads in your feed or whatever. But it's a weird, like I said, I've never really got LinkedIn. And the reason, one of the ways I knew I didn't get LinkedIn is that at IDG and especially at Macworld, you you know twitter and facebook were great outlets for us and i always thought it was funny that pc world had much more luck with stumble upon and linkedin and the other part of idg the enterprise business was all about linkedin it was like oh linkedin

they're huge they're such are you on linkedin it's a big deal. And us consumer guys were like, no. So I may be divulging too much here, but I'm just going to go over it anyway and see what happens. So I work for a very large financial corporate company in marketing. And we've recently been discussing our social strategy. And one of those things was to work with LinkedIn and do like articles on LinkedIn and use like and create a LinkedIn page. And it was deemed that this would be more important than like others, other social networks that maybe we want to go with LinkedIn first. And that it just seemed very peculiar to me until I really thought about it and was like well corporations big business big money linkedin is probably the place to go

because people write blog posts and stuff there now don't they oh yeah their opinion their opinion leaders their thought managers their their brand net brand promotion custodial. Yeah, that's totally, that's what they are. I should endorse you for something while I'm on, now that we're LinkedIn buddies. Please do. I should endorse you. Please do.

For something terrible. Somebody endorsed me for volcanology earlier. A friend of mine, I'd say. Well, that's good. This is always good to have. Whilst we're talking about horrible social networks, and before we move on to follow up um ello are you have you signed up for ello did you just did you just say hello to me hello your accent hello or did you mean the i don't know i i'm very confused now it could be either i did sign up for lo um i don't understand it no at all i don't like

the design i don't understand that when i look at friends i don't see what they have to say i just see who's following me those people aren't my friends those are the people who are following me i don't get that um like i try to find a timeline and there kind of isn't a timeline i i don't know it it and i don't like the fact that although it was sort of put forth as being this like alternative to existing social networks you know it's venture funded and they can talk a good game but it's free and venture funded and so i imagine that the monetization strategy will be ads or personal data or the usual, right? It's sort of like Facebook for other people who want your data instead of Facebook. Andy Baio wrote a great mini blog post on Ello about this exact thing where he kind of discovered the venture funding nature of it very interesting i've not signed up for

elo i haven't had an invitation i'm not actively pursuing one i'm not massively uh interested um in it i think i think that could be a linkedin status not currently uh not currently pursuing an lo invitation um i think it's very peculiar to even though it is is a beta to not have an app of any kind i feel like a social network only on the desktop is a critical flaw and they probably should have worked on that even before they got to public beta. I think alpha may be fine, but even when you go into public beta stage,

you should really have some kind of application. Do they have a responsive site? I'm going to guess they probably do. Yeah, I assume they do. It looks like they do they do yeah the website looks like it would be responsive right there's the desktop website just has that look about it but there's not really much going on right it's a it's a very minimal layout too it's all like uh monospace font and uh you know gray and black text on a white background and you know that sort of thing so let's do some follow-up all right that was follow-up that was that was all about my birthday

by the way yeah that's birthday follow-up follow-up from last year's birthday yeah checking again next year that'll be episode uh 56 so we had we had a few people uh including mr stephen hackett and uh mr russell ivanovich contact us and i don't know why we didn't think about this but yeah it was a couple of different things around sort of uh hey siri and dictation things like that um stepven let us know that google now supports voice training which makes sense and russell let us know that the moto x even allows you to set a custom phrase yeah so you can just you can set up the moto x and all the motorola phones to go to sort of activate the voice dictation on a phrase that you decide, which is much more sensible.

Which is much better. Listener Ryan also wrote in about that. And that's great. I mean, one of the, I was telling Russell that I'm happy after a couple of years where I was doing PC World and GreenBot, the Android site, and TechHive, as well as Mac World, of being very much like all things to all people. I was very happy to sort of bring it down to the Apple perspective. And, and, but we did talk about, you know, this is a problem that everybody needs to solve. Um, you know, Android hasn't solved it, but it's great that it's in the Moto X. And I imagine everybody will, will get there eventually.

And Apple needs to get there too, because we triggered a lot of people's series and I feel bad about that but I also feel like it's sort of a topic we need to talk about it just seems completely impractical to me as it currently is but it's good to know that Moto X lets you set a passphrase

and Google at least whether it works or not, attempt to do some learning of your voice. Yeah, right. Which Apple don't even, at least publicly, they don't say that they even bother. Like, it's just like, whatever, just anyone. Anybody can talk to Siri.

At any time, anywhere. Why not? Just let everybody in. Yeah. Yeah, it's for kicks, for giggles. And we proved that by activating everybody's Siri in episode two. So we have some follow-up in the document, which has today...

However, today that follow-up has become less so. So the follow-up comes from at WoolenHat on Twitter to remind me that iPlayer shows are very time-limited and that a reason to use Netflix in the UK is because the BBC shows on Netflix don't expire so quickly. Now, this is really good for the back catalog stuff, but it's interesting to note that today, the BBC extended iPlayer shows from expiring from a week to 30 days.

To 30 days. So obviously they still expire after 30 days, but it's just interesting that I noticed that today and I wanted to just mention that too. So yeah, I mean, one good thing is if you want to watch that mitchell and web it's on netflix it's not on um it's not on bbc you know it's not on the iplayer or if you want to watch i don't know top gear i don't actually don't know if top gear is on netflix but that sort of idea you know you can you can watch watch these shows for a long time after they've expired on iPlayer.

But iPlayer is really great. So, I love it. Alright. Top hat. UK flag. Woo! Yeah, we don't have that. I mean, there are actually, there are like, ABC's got an app, and NBC's got an app, and my cable company has

an app that's tied into their on-demand. And some of this stuff does exist, but you're right. It's a window. I think in general, they, um, depends on what studio is, is, um, making them and what network is broadcasting them, but they're often available in the, in the watch again, or, you know, you just missed it kind of window and that can last a week or a month. But I was getting caught up on a new show last year and I watched the first couple and I thought, oh, this is pretty good. And I had like the last seven or eight on my DVR

and I had three or four I needed to fill in. And then one day I went and the first two that I needed to watch had vanished because it turns out they were in a six week window or something and they had fallen out of it. And so they seem to do that where you've got that first glance where it's basically saying this is like it was broadcast. It just happened. And then it goes away again until they can sell it to a streaming service. In some Casey List style real-time follow-up, I just received an important notification from LinkedIn

to let me know that Jason Snell has endorsed me in marketing, podcasting, public speaking, social media, social media marketing, social networking. It wanted me to endorse you for all those things. I just wanted to add podcasting, and then I clicked OK, and I endorsed you for everything. So I regret my endorsement of you for some things that I cannot actually independently confirm, but i was going to endorse you for podcasting

thank you well i appreciate all of the endorsements even though you know even the mistaken ones wanted all right well i endorse that we had lots of people um give us suggestions this week about alternatives to Dropbox. Yes. So many people suggested Google Drive as a good Dropbox alternative, just in general, because I know that we were kind of bemoaning Dropbox a little bit. Google Drive is really great, but there's a lot of things that it doesn't do so well, in my opinion.

And one of the big things that I was saying about why I love and use Dropbox is for the way that it integrates a lot of apps on iOS that Google Drive simply doesn't. And really, I completely forget that Google Drive is a storage solution. I know. I just think of them as where my documents are, like my Google Docs.

That's all I think of it for. And one host shares their audio with me that way. I can't remember why, but they do. I also, the UI changes they've made to Google Docs and Google Drive also baffle me because now they go to different places. And docs.google.com brings up something that looks like a drive. And drive.google.com brings up something that looks like a list of documents. And I'm completely confused. I very much like their apps on the iPhone, except the fact that I now have to have four apps,

which doesn't make complete sense to me. and they did make a change recently where they put some of the so they they have um i make lots of lists and and bulleted lists that's how we do our show rundowns and i indent them right as you do with an outline so you have like the bulleted lists and then you indent some of the lists i'm'm sure there's a different way. Is it nested or something? There's a better term. But now to be able to do the indent, you have to press two buttons or three buttons instead of pressing one, as it used to be. And I don't really know why they've done it.

I have my fingers crossed, Jason, for an iPhone 6 Plus update that will allow me better access to a lot of these controls. Although this is like another complaint that I have at the moment where I don't understand why companies like Google have not got even iPhone 6 optimized apps out yet.

Like it just seems so peculiar to me. Like as at the time that we're recording on October 6th, like Google released an update today, like a bug fix update for Google Drive. And I'm like, you are Google. Surely you can get this together. Yeah.

Yeah, I really like the Google Sheets app, especially on the iPad. It's kind of amazing. It is, I mean, I used, when I was at IDG, I did use the Office apps on iPad, and they're good. But the Google apps are pretty good for basic spreadsheets. Google Sheets actually works really well. That was a long time coming where Google Docs and Google Drive didn't work well on iOS.

But those apps are good. I like them a lot. It's like people have said to me in the past like oh why do you use google drive and not um i work in the cloud you mean you mean federico yeah um and many listeners as well and it's simply because google drive really works really really well and apple have in my opinion yet to do that like even if it works okay on the web because there was an episode of the prompt where we totally ripped into it and people said like oh it's getting a lot better it's getting a lot better take action mike take action take action apple still don't like their

app strategy for that is just atrocious it's just like download a copy and nothing will sync and then hopefully it will be okay yeah hold your breath close your eyes turn around three times and nothing happens uh yeah it's it's uh google drive google drive i believe does selective sync so it's actually exactly like dropbox in that way i don't think you can um you can just sort of say don't sync this folder which is the dropbox issue 2 although somebody mentioned that that microsoft one drive has this um uh offline files idea yeah this seems really smart i read about this uh at jane nathan yeah he said you can basically just say i want this to only be online and then it'll just sync and then you can delete it.

Very clever. They seem to have really kind of got that idea down. And there's nothing stopping from Dropbox from doing something like that and saying, let me just mark this file as an offline file. And you'd keep kind of a shortcut to it, but it wouldn't be stored locally. And if you went offline, you wouldn't see it. So you can do your online files and your offline files. Save these locally, and the rest of these I just want to be in the cloud. And Microsoft seems to be – I mean, it adds complexity, but it does allow you to sort of like use your space a little more functionally than saying I've got a folder that I'm not syncing that I can't see because I'm not syncing it, but it's there. My Space Monkey arrived this week. Oh okay the this we mentioned this last week this is the this is this crazy thing that it's uh it's it's like the file transporter actually it's a it's a it's a hard drive that you attach to your network and it acts as your own personal

drop box it's got a terabyte of data you can can just throw files in it. But what it actually is, and some people, I know I had a few people write in, are very disquieted by this idea. The way Space Monkey works is it's actually a two terabyte drive and one terabyte of it is your stuff. And the other terabyte is encrypted, mathematically hashed, you know, magical. It basically is part of the Space Monkey storage cloud. So it's got this, the Space Monkey storage cloud is this massively distributed network of hard drives that have bits of your data encrypted on them, but stored on them so that if your Space Monkey dies, RIP Space monkey. I think the first space monkey died. I think that the seal on the space capsule, the Russian setup was... Anyway, the idea is that even if your space monkey dies, your data is still in the cloud, but it's not like a big server farm cloud. My

understanding is the cloud is other space monkey users. And that can be creepy, although I think in practice, it's not necessarily much more creepy than relying on Dropbox. And it sounds like this is all, these are real computer nerds who put this stuff together. It seems like it's actually a pretty secure, smart idea. The thing I don't like about it as a podcaster is that I cannot pause it. I can limit its bandwidth, but I can't say, hey, Space Monkey, I'm doing a podcast now. I don't want you transferring any data while I'm doing the podcast to degrade the Skype connection. And it doesn't seem – I can unplug the network connector, but that's about it.

It doesn't seem like I have more control over it. But it's smart in the sense that you can fill it up and it actually does some intelligent things too. This is why I wanted to try it, where if you don't use a file for a while, it will just sort of like migrate it off into offline storage mode. It's trying to do some really intelligent things with the storage you're using on the device. It's not a one-to-one connection. You can pin something and say, I always want this to be on my hard drive. But otherwise, it's doing sort of like what Apple does with the Fusion Drive, where it's moving files from the fast SSD to the slow hard drive if you're not going to use them very often. Space Monkey seems to do that with your shared files on the Space Monkey is say, you don't need this anymore, but it's over there if you need it. And that's smart.

So I just wanted to try it out. And it's, you know, I'll let you know what I think of it when I decide. But it's an interesting product, and I like that kind of innovation in trying to do something smart about moving the files around and letting me store a terabyte's worth of data in that shared folder without having that whole terabyte be on my macbook air because it doesn't have room how do you feel about doing that though like i don't i don't know if i've if i've gauged from you really over time if you're uh very security conscious

um or if you're maybe more like me where it's like you know i'd lock down what i have to lock down but don't don't get really scared about things i don't get really scared about it i feel like there's so many things that are insecure that we don't know about and that we don't think are secure that worrying about i mean i'm not going to do things that are that that strike me as being like stupidly insecure i i look at the space monkey stuff and i think actually this is pretty smart i don't really think anybody's going to get uh you know anybody's going to open up their hard drive and find my files and read them. I don't think that's how it works. So I've got some level of trust, enough that it doesn't seem like BS to me. But there are other things, like I wrote about a while ago, this app for the Pebble that controlled your Nest. And I thought

that was really cool because I've got a Nest and I've got a Pebble and I can check what the temperature is and make it warmer or colder right from my watch. And then as I installed it, I realized the way it works is some guy wrote this app and what you do is you give his server your password and username for Nest and then it talks to Nest. And I thought, nope, not going to do that, right? I mean, there's a limit. It's like, I'm not going to give some guy who wrote some piece of software that's in a third-party app store on the Pebble

my username and password for the Nest website. I'm just not going to do it. Even though that's not a huge security breach, it's like, no, that seems dumb. There should be an API and I should be able to authenticate. And until that happens, I should be able to authenticate. And until that happens, I'm not going to use that.

But I'm not super paranoid about this stuff. If there was some incredibly important financial document, I suppose I would encrypt it in a disk image or something like that. But, you know, I keep – I've got a running tally of sponsors and things for The Incomparable and a Google Doc. And I've got files running tally of sponsors and things for the incomparable and a Google doc, and I've got, uh, files on Dropbox and, you know, I've got those secured, like two factors secured, in fact, but in the end, if I, you know, I don't, I, it doesn't reach the point where I'm like, oh, but Dropbox can see it. Google can see that stuff. Cause yeah, they can, they can, but I don't think they are seeing it. And, you know, at some point, it's just the feature is so convenient and it just doesn't bug me enough to be worried about it. That's the real thing that you've mentioned that I think about is I weigh up security

and convenience. Pete, I know that there are like a thousand listeners who just fired up their email clients to tell me that I'm insane. But I really do that. There are things where I think to myself, this could probably be more secure. But I, I think I want to like weigh up the convenience of it, like two factor authentication. I don't really do that anywhere. This is probably a terrible thing to say on air. Because I do it now i i know people that like they buy new machines like it was funny to watch

like people on new iphone day and like i can't log into anything just everything everything i can't log into and and that just seems like a horrible thing it's not fun but you know i don't do i mean hey there are plenty of times where I realize I need to log into my Google account and my phone, which is my two-factor source, is in the other room. And it says I need the six-digit number. And I go, okay. And I have to get up. I have to go. I have to open the door, walk over, find my phone, bring it back over here, and look up the number.

And that's, as opposed to just logging in. Yeah, that's kind of a pain, a minor pain, but it's a pain. yeah, that's kind of a pain, a minor pain, but it's a pain. But yeah, I feel better knowing, especially every now and then I get an email that says, somebody tried to log into your account. And I think, well, they can't get in because I've got two-factor. So I'm at least in a little better. They could still trigger some social engineering and things like that, but they're not going to, even if they guess my password, they're not all the way through and that makes me feel better um i'm only using two-factor for apple google and dropbox right now but um it isn't it is less convenient that's always what happens that's why people do things that are fundamentally insecure is because it's so convenient it's the uh it's the uh

i'm trying to think of the right metaphor here is it the, it's like the velvet coffin or something? I don't even know what it is. Is it the diamond encrusted handcuffs? It's, it's that kind of thing, right? Where it's like, well, it's so comfortable to do this thing. That's not really that great, but it's so comfortable. And the human nature is like, you know, I know that there, that this is bad, but it's convenient for me. So I'm going to do it anyway. And you've got to wait. I think we're better off engaging those issues than a regular person. That's the really scary thing is that people who are not as technically savvy are not equipped to understand this stuff. They're relying on people like us who are their friends

or people who write about this stuff to talk to them about it. And otherwise, they're relying on the goodwill of the companies involved, which is, that's scary, right? Because those companies don't often, you know, often really want to get as much as they can from you, and they aren't necessarily trustworthy. Here's a question for you. Do you think that Yosemite and the sms relay will make two um two-factor authentication better or worse is it good or bad for two-factor because obviously the good thing is you don't need to run around the house looking for the phone to get the code but the bad thing is if your phone like you know somebody in the house or whatever in the office could be at your mac and just get

the code yeah that's true that's true i mean the the ideally not but um but yeah i mean there are always scenarios in here where it's like okay well i've got the secure but if you've got my mac and you've got my phone then you can then you can and you can get into my phone that's the other thing right my phone is also passcode locked and touch id locked and yeah i don't know it's but something like space monkey i mean it certainly gives me pause and i'm not sure that i totally am on board with it but i i i like the idea um and this it's like what kind it's not even how paranoid are you it's what kind of paranoid are you it It's like, am I paranoid that parts of my data and, you know, or the math mathematically constructed bits that can be reassembled into my data are scattered across a bunch of hard drives of a bunch of other people around the world?

Is that creepier than my data is saved in a, on a hard drive or a bunch of hard drives in a, my data is saved on a hard drive or a bunch of hard drives in a file server room somewhere in Idaho that could be breached by a hacker who's looking to get into so-and-so's data facility. Take your poison, I guess, or don't do any of it and be a hermit. I mean, that's the other way to go. And then you lose the convenience, but you're much more secure. And yeah, that's fair enough. I mean, people who want to be a hermit, a data hermit, I don't think they're crazy. I think that's perfectly reasonable if they want to do that. They are going to lose a lot of convenience, but it's perfectly reasonable to do that. I just, I don't think I care enough to be a data hermit. Listener Daniel wrote in to suggest Unbound for iOS and Mac as a good way to view your

Dropbox photos. I don't know why I haven't thought of this because we spoke about it on the prompt and connected like a million times. because we spoke about it on the prompt and connected like a million times. But Unbound, it basically gives you the iOS camera view for Dropbox photos. And it makes that a much better photo sharing or photo storage solution. I'm still flummoxed about what I'm going to do about photos. I think seeing what Apple does with the new Phot photos app is going to be part of it because we've got a giant photo library in iPhoto that's 13 years of photos.

And it doesn't fit on my wife's MacBook Air hard drive. So we've got an external hard drive that we back up. And I don't know what we're going to do. I would like a workflow that allows us to put photos in it without attaching this hard drive. I would really like that. And we don't have it right now. So I'm not, you know, whether we just park that somewhere and use a cloud service for the rest of it, I don't know. I feel like there are no good solutions. There are solutions out there, but there are none that are like perfect. And given that we have so much in the Apple ecosystem already, waiting to see what Apple does with the Photos app and iCloud, it seems worthwhile. But I definitely have thought about all that new storage on Dropbox as a

potential thing. All we'd have to change is we'd need to import photos from our SLR, where we still take pictures on a digital SLR every now and then. We need to import those to Dropbox. But everything that we're doing on our phones can sync directly with Dropbox. So it's a possibility. You could get one of those iFi cards and it would do it for you. We have one of those. Actually, I could do that. Very interesting. do it for you oh we we have one of those i actually i could do that ah very interesting are you rubbing your hands i did i did that was one of my like yes

i like the way you think mike i'm going to endorse you for photo uploading now that's what i've always wanted um this was just an interesting story that I saw, which really made me smile. When I saw it, when was this? This was October 2nd. Yeah, so it was a couple of days after we recorded last week. I saw that Adam Sandler has signed a four movie deal with Netflix.

Yes. Strangely enough, announced on a Thursday in the middle of the day and not on late in the day on a Friday when most companies report bad news. Sing. Take that, Adam Sandler. Take that, rich guy. Have you ever liked Adam Sandler movies?

Oh, Adam Sandler movies? No. Never? None of them? No. I'm a fan of Happy Gilmore. If you haven't seen that, you should. Yeah. I think that, you should.

I think that's his best. It was one of his earliest. And I watched it recently, actually. It was on TV about a couple of weeks ago and there was nothing on, so I watched it. Holds up. Even after the Adam Sandlin-ness, because there isn't too much of that in this movie. He doesn't do a lot of the voices that

he does you know just his voice that he makes yes yeah he moves his mouth sounds come out in a monotone way uh it's still funny it's still good uh but i just find it really interesting and if you will allow me i would like to read adam sandler's official statement that he made to the press about why he did this. Go ahead. When these fine people came to me with an offer to make four movies for them, I immediately said yes for one reason and one reason only. Netflix rhymes with wet chicks.

Let the streaming begin. There you go. If that spoke to you, get ready. Then you're sold. Yeah. It's a really interesting idea. Netflix is experimenting with lots of different things. I read a piece this week, and I can't remember who wrote it. It was very much like, what does Netflix want to be?

Does it want to be HBO? Is it trying to beat? To be HBO before HBO becomes Netflix? Is it trying to do something completely different and take on movie theaters? It's it's fascinating. I feel like they're this is a Silicon Valley kind of thing, right? They're just trying stuff and seeing how they can disrupt and probably pivot and other things, too. You know, disrupting with adam sandler is an interesting idea but um what i don't like is exclusive content but i know that everybody does it it's like i don't love the fact that if you love adam sandler the only way you can see his movies now is going

to be to subscribe to netflix but that's how they get people to subscribe the same is true of like if you love game of thrones you got to get hbo if you want to see it when it airs. Or you can pirate it, but we don't talk about that. But one of the reasons that I did want to put this in the document was that, I mean, we were talking about the fact that Netflix is losing content because they can't secure the deals or they can't keep the deals or somebody offers more money. Now, the only way Netflix can secure content is if it pays for it. Like, it funds it. And Netflix's statement was,

Adam Sandler's movies are some of the most watched movies on Netflix. So to them, it was a no-brainer. And you can kind of see it from that perspective. If they're being truthful about that, it makes perfect sense to do this. Yeah, there's a rumor going around that um that uh cbs is talking to netflix about um doing a star trek series there's no star trek tv series on the air right now and i've heard other rumors that say look until they make that third movie they're not gonna they're gonna finish that trilogy and then they'll do a tv show but But what made it sound reasonable to me is, first off, Star Trek is popular,

but it's probably not popular enough to make a show on CBS about it, maybe on the CW or something like that. But it's probably not widely popular enough to do a cable version because the budget would be too small. So where does it go? How do you do that? They tried that with Enterprise and it didn't really work on a network. They canceled it after three years, I think. So the rumors about Netflix start to sound really interesting because Netflix has said their users watch Star Trek. They've got all the series. They get watched a whole lot. People love watching that. whole lot people love watching that and that's powerful right if you're netflix to say well we actually know what our people want and this is what they want so they've got the deal with marvel where they they know that people are watching those marvel movies and they ordered um a bunch of different series mini series based on other marvel characters right i totally forgot about that so they know they know what people are watching and so like the star trek rumor totally makes sense to me i don't know if it'll actually happen or when it'll happen,

but would a new Star Trek series go straight to Netflix? Why not? If Netflix knows that their people love Star Trek, why would they not do that? And they know that all the Star Trek fans are going to want to see the show, so they're going to get Netflix. So it is really interesting. Like, does Netflix become half a catalog of stuff that you like

and half a, you know, saying... And that's what HBO does, right? HBO runs old movies, and then they've got their originals, movies and TV shows that they do. So it's fascinating. It allows them to control some part of their destiny. When we talk about Apple, that's number one thing that Apple believes, too, is they want to control their destiny. Anything that's important to the future of their business, Apple wants to control it. And this is a little bit of that for Netflix. We can't necessarily control whether we're going to have a longstanding deal with Universal for their TV shows and movies. But what we can control is that we made our own deals for content.

And we've got that. We've got Orange is the New Black. And we've got House of Cards, although I think they actually, I think the deals have changed a little bit since House of Cards about its audience that nobody else knows it can pick what it wants um so yeah they know that people are watching happy gilmore over and over again so i bet it helps them assign budgets for these projects too sure you know you can see like something like uh arrested development i'm sure it costs them a lot of money to get everybody in but they probably knew that they would make it back or at least had a good idea for it because you could probably have done it with 75 of the cost you know but it wouldn't have been as good but you could have

you could have at least made it but i'm sure that they knew okay we need to pay this much for michael sarah because he's a big movie star now, but it's worth it because we think, you know, we look at these numbers and we can work out a lot of people will sign up for this. Yeah. The challenge, and this is the challenge for HBO too, is how do you connect specific pieces of content with motivating people to either sign up or remain signed up for your service, right? It's not quite the same. They can do ratings and ratings are good so they can see plays. But beyond that, they just sort of have to hope that the more plays they get, the more times, you know, the more minutes you're watching

Netflix in any given week, presumably have a direct correlation with retention. And then they probably have some idea based on like when Orange is the New Black comes on, like how many people add the service. But it's tricky, right? Because it's not like they make their money on a play of an Adam Sandler movie that they produced or on a play of Orange is the New Black or Arrested Development or House of Cards. They're not making money on those. In fact, they're paying money for stuff that isn't their production per stream. So, you know, they got to like back out the math and say, this is worth it to us because, you know, we've got these second level things that make us feel good about it. But, you know, they're not going to be able, even if the Adam Sandler

movies, if the Adam Sandler movies do great on Netflix, but it doesn't induce anybody to sign up for the service, was it worth it? How much was it worth it just to keep people happy, existing customers happy? It's tough. That's a really tricky one. I guess over time, they can kind of just assign a figure. Like, for example, if they pay $2 every time someone watches an Adam Sandler movie, Like, for example, if they pay, say they pay $2 every time someone watches an Adam Sandler movie. Right.

In theory, then they could assign those $2, fake $2 to themselves and work out if over time it was actually worth it. They're stealing money from their partners and funneling that content to the people who are, wow, that is really true. It's true that like the more Netflix content is on Netflix and the more times people spend watching Netflix content is less time presumably that they're watching other people's content, which means Netflix is getting some of the money back just by, you know, if you spend two hours watching Orange is the New Black instead of the Avengers, then Netflix is not paying Marvel and Disney for the Avengers. They've kept your $15. Diabolical. Listener Olivier wrote in to say, this is something we totally didn't consider at all, that streaming versus physical media is an interesting discussion when you think about bandwidth. Olivier said that in Canada,

I'm assuming he, right, Olivier? Yeah. It's still pretty expensive. I pay almost $80 a month for 100 gigabytes of bandwidth. And so he says it's way cheaper to buy a Blu-ray, a Best Buy, for $7 if they find it in the discount bin. And something that I wanted to add as well is speeds. I don't have very fast internet.

I cannot get faster internet than what I've got. And sometimes to download a movie from iTunes can take like four hours. Right. So then what's the point in downloading it? Yeah. These are all good points that the economics can be different. I'm not paying for my bandwidth here by the byte. So downloading a movie isn't a problem and our speeds,

although not fantastic are reasonable enough that, that I can, I can do that. I get the 10 80 super HD Netflix when I watch it on my TiVo. So, um, but you're right, you're right.

There are lots of reasons why you might not want to stream and get that, uh, get that disc in the, in the bargain bin in Canada for seven Canadian dollars. That may be an Adam Sandler movie. He's probably one of the ones he's working on.

It's The Wedding Singer. There's one more piece of follow-up in here that I think is 100% Jason Snow related. Listener Dave. Listener Dave wrote in to say, I'm enjoying your glee at having follow-up to deal with uh yes and then he he went on that wasn't the whole email he also um so lex friedman does this podcast called your daily lex uh which is pretty much what it says on the tin uh he five

days a week usually will do about a five minute podcast he just turns on the tin, he, five days a week usually, will do about a five-minute podcast. He just turns on the microphone, talks for five minutes, and then turns off the microphone and posts it. And I realized last week that I hadn't gotten a new Daily Lex in about a week. And I thought, what is going on? I know that he had a bunch of stuff that was going on. It was the Jewish holidays. And he had an offsite that was actually in his house from his company so he was entertaining his company's executives in his house which i would imagine how big is lex's house so i mentioned this on on lex's podcast is i like to call it the solar mansion because it's got solar panels on the roof the swimming pool in the backyard is heated by solar power i envision le Lex's house as being about 10 stories

tall with a thousand rooms. It's not. I've never been to Lex's house, but he's got a basement and he's got, I think, a couple other levels. And I think they did this all down in the basement, maybe. I don't know. I've never been to Lex's palatial estate in New Jersey. But the point is Lex didn't do a podcast for a while. And I was thinking about this because I haven't been listening to podcasts as regularly as I used to because I don't have my job anymore, which means I don't have my commute anymore. My new job is in my house. So that's great because I've spent two hours plus every day commuting. I got that time back. But it also means that the things I did during that time are not there anymore. I'm not doing those anymore. And I can do some of

them if I want, but I have to like say, I'm going to take the time to sit here and listen to a podcast. And a lot of times that doesn't happen. So I missed that Lex hadn't done a podcast in a while until I went to my podcast app when I was walking around. I dropped my son off at school and I was going to take a little walk to get some exercise and also to listen to some podcasts. And I realized there was only one Lex, Daily Lex. And I thought about this as an instructive about how my life has changed, that I expected there to be five Daily Lexes that I could just listen to all in a row. And I didn't. So I came home and I recorded my own episode of Your Daily Lex and sent it to Lex. And he posted it as an episode of Your Daily Lex, even though it was with me. So this was completely unsolicited.

Oh, yeah. I just sent it to him. I thought, you know, what would be funny is if I just recorded an episode of Your Daily Lex and sent it to Lex. And he said, do you mind if I post it? I said, well, that was kind of the idea. Yes, you should post this. And then the next day he came back and he's been posting it daily again. You challenged him. But it was so listener Dave said, I heard your five minutes on your daily Lex. And I think it would be interesting for the Six Colors newsletter that I'm doing. And I think for the podcast, too, since he likes follow, to reflect the changes happening with you. So it's something for us to, I think, bookmark and maybe talk about a little bit that after 18 years working in

downtown San Francisco, I am now in my garage in the suburbs. And I haven't, I actually, this is the longest I have been not setting foot in the city of San Francisco since probably 1996. It's been almost a month now and I haven't been back in the city in that time at all for any reason. And yeah, I think it's worth talking about at some point over time about like the life change stuff, because that is something that's happening with me is I'm not, you know, my life is very different than it was a few weeks ago because now I'm working out of my house and I'm doing Six Colors and I'm doing more you know, my, my life is very different than it was a few weeks ago because now I'm working out of, out of my house and I'm doing six colors and I'm doing more podcasting and picking up my kids at school and other stuff like that. So it's, it's definitely, I touched on a lot of these same issues in that, in that daily

Lex episode, but it's just, you know, the, the commute is a great example that you get that time back. You get to spend that in a different way than you spent it in the past, but what you spend it on is different. And so like, I'm not reading the newspaper every morning and I'm not listening to as many podcasts and I'm not, I don't have as much leisure or as you would say leisure reading time because I would do that on the bus. And now I'm like busy working on stuff instead. I sort of come in to the garage and start working. And so it's just different.

So it's worth, I think, maybe checking in on that every so often on this show because listener Dave is quite right that, you know, this is a very, not only do I love follow up, but this is a very different life, I think, than I had before. So, you know, thanks for being here with me, Mike. Hey, it's a pleasure. Just, you know, keeping it real with Mike. I don't talk to people is basically what I'm saying, so I'm glad that I get our time together. Our time together today, where we've just finished the follow-up, has been an hour.

So we're crossing into ATP. ATP territory, yes. Yep, that's the goal. Like this week's episode, the topic started in the post show, I think, was the point. But let's take a break and we can thank our sponsor for this week's episode. And then we do actually have some other stuff

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Wow. And I have Bleed6.com. I mean, I have lots of variations that I bought on Hover and it was very easy to dig down and find the ones that I bought on, on hover. And it was very easy to, to dig down and, and, and find the ones that I wanted. And then, and actually they,

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Oh Mike, Mike, Mike. They're going to be angry at us again I know maybe everybody's phones just took them to hover to buy some domains I hope so that wouldn't be a bad thing Apple Pay Apple Pay

you wrote an interesting article in response to an O'Reilly piece oh yeah Tim O'Reilly piece. Oh, yeah. Tim O'Reilly wrote a thing that I was going to link to it, and then I thought I can't link to it because it makes me too angry. And then I thought maybe I should write a thing about why it bugs me so much because I felt like just linking to it was not right. And, you know, it was about Apple Pay. And yet, in the end,

there's a comment that he leaves replying to somebody in his own article saying, well, it really isn't about Apple Pay, which actually made me a little bit more angry because this is your typical, let's use a current Apple thing that people are talking about. And then like pivot on it to grind some other acts that you would like to grind so even though he throws a lot of elbows at apple and says oh yeah apple's magical this and you know apple's uh marketing wizardry that in the end he's not even like talking in the end i think what he's really doing is promoting this company he invested in called cover which is like um not hover cover

which is like uber for restaurants and i know uber for whatever is a joke but seriously it's uber for restaurants you you use it and you go in and it's like you don't ever have to deal with the filthy, filthy paying of people or filthy, dirty having a wallet or having a credit card or signing a bill. Because we know people can't bear to do that. That is the most monstrous thing that you do at a restaurant is pay the bill, have to get out your wallet. It's awful. Life doesn't need to be that way. Why do that when you can use cover and you just walk in and say, hi, I'm Joe. And they're like, oh, Mr. Joe, I'm so happy to see you. And the tip is automatically calculated and it's like an Uber ride except at a restaurant and you don't go anywhere because the restaurant doesn't move probably. what Tim O'Reilly seems to have been using Apple Pay as a wedge to talk about the future of payments, which was his point was like, look, Apple Pay has a solution to an existing problem, but Uber and Cover are solving, you know, they're thinking way outside the box and they're solving

the future of payments. And it just seemed really silly to me because in the end, I'm not quite sure what, I mean, Uber still requires you to put your credit card in to set up your account. And if your credit card changes or you have to cancel it and get a new one because of fraud or something like that, you have to give Uber your credit card number again. You have to use the app in order to call the car, at which point, I'm not sure how that's much different than pulling out your phone and going beep and paying for something with Apple Pay. It actually doesn't seem, it seems kind of disingenuous to me.

I'm not sure that something like Uber is really that different from something like Apple Pay, except for the use cases, which is the Apple Pay use cases may be going to Whole Foods and doing some shopping and the Uber use case is calling a car. I think what he's trying to say, which I don't agree with, is that for some reason, having something that debits a transaction from your card each time you use it, whether you use your card or some other method, you know, he's saying that that's

somehow antiquated. But everything that he's doing still debits a card. It's just doing it under a veil. Yeah, well, that's it. It's like when you call an Uber, your interaction is when you call it. And then that's the last time you use your phone, although you still have to see the car and, you know, you might look at the screen to see if this is the driver of the car that you wanted and they need to see that it's you. And that all still happens. So it's not less complicated. It's just sort of different. I think he's – and I made fun of him in my piece a little bit. think this is this sort of Silicon Valley utopia thing, which is like, well, in the future,

we won't need to carry wallets because we'll be recognized on our own. It's just like our own faces will be our passport. And they'll say, it's like what SquarePay tried to do, which is like, you walk up to the counter at the deli having ordered a sandwich and just say, I'm Bob. And they're like, oh yeah, right, Bob. And they'll put it on your account, which totally doesn't scale because if every single customer uses that service and is checking in, it's going to get really confusing really fast. But in the end, these services need to authenticate. They need to say, I am who I said I was and you have an ability to receive money from me. And Apple Pay is one way to do that.

And the way Uber does it is a different way. But they're not that different. And to suggest that one is like mired in the past. And in fact, Uber you give your real credit card to. Whereas Apple Pay is using this one-time code. So it's actually more secure and more private than Uber is. So, you know, again, he's, he's pushing his own thing, but it really bugs me this idea that first off, I'm going to use Apple to get attention for my thing. Then I'm going to run down Apple's thing and say that it's not the cool thing because my thing is

the cool thing when in fact it is serving the exact same purpose and it's not any different. You throw in a little Silicon Valley utopia, which is like, oh, we're totally going to pivot the entire world with our new super train that we're building. And it's kind of ridiculous because, in fact, my final point was, do these people go to the supermarket? I mean, in the end, you have to buy – you have to put things in a basket and check out somewhere. I mean, that's – and you have to pay. And that's just – I mean, that's, and you have to pay. And that's just, I mean, that's not old school. It's going to be a long time before there's RFID tags on everything. And you can literally just walk into a store, grab some stuff, put it in a bag and walk out. It's going to be a

while before that. That's not a realistic vision of the near future. Well, Square tried to do this idea of replacing the checkout process with a different process which is square wallet and that where they'd see your face yeah and and they were they but then you set up square and i think what it's basically doing is it's detecting your presence because you've got square on your smartphone which again is really not that different from apple pay because what we're doing is we're using our phone to uh to create or authenticate. And then we're using sort of like Uber. They're looking at your face or whatever and saying, oh, yeah, it's you.

You know, it's not that different. It's I don't know. It's I love that different companies are trying different things in this cover idea where you'd like you make your reservation and then you just don't have to worry about it. When you're done eating, you just leave and it's-tipped and auto-paid and all of that i mean that's neat and all but like i said i don't think the big inconvenience about going to a restaurant is waiting for the check no i think that that idea sounds really good but it's not it's not the problem that he's trying to paint it as.

Yeah, oh yeah. And then this is real-time follow-up. Red King in the chat room is saying, sometimes startups in Silicon Valley are crazy out of touch with people in the real world. This is, I think, ultimately what set me off about this piece is I feel like Tim O'Reilly is writing from a position of being so far inside the Silicon Valley vortex that he doesn't have any conception of like how

real people pay for products and live their lives. And it's all about these, you know, fantastical Uber. You take your Uber to your cover restaurant. You never take out your wallet. It's all amazing. And just that's not, those are exceptions. Those aren't the future that everybody's going to be going to. Those are simple examples that don't scale and that are pretty much exclusive to a Silicon Valley mindset. And that bugs me because it's like, you can criticize, there are lots of reasons to be skeptical about the future success of Apple Pay. But to say, well, it's not Uber, not only is wrong, but it's completely without perspective. So, you know, it was thanks to Tim O'Reilly for writing that post and getting me all riled up.

That was good. Because there is that other part of Apple Pay as well, which is interesting, right? Which is kind of like what you can imagine that uber part being which is the like the apis that they're building right where you can pay right on your device and again then it's sending a one-time code and you don't have to um you don't have to ideally like uber could work with apple pay and then you wouldn't need to give uber anything right okay so you don't need to give uber your credit card you wouldn't need to give Uber anything, right? Okay, so you don't need to give Uber your credit card. You don't need to give Uber your identity, essentially. All you need to do is verify payment.

Sorry, like Uber ride now, I think they're calling it, something like that. That's nice. It sounds like override. That's great. Good job. Good branding. Hey, Siri, Uber ride now. I'm sorry.

Oh dear. People are going to hate me so much. I already, Mikey R in the chat room said I set off his phone. Of course you did. So, I've probably just done it again. He's probably screaming at me.

Do you want to talk about Pebble? Sure. Pebble? Sure. I got one. Yeah, I have one too. And I kind of mentioned to you, do you ever want to talk about Pebble? And you said that you were getting ready to publish something in the next couple of days. So I figure why not talk about it now. So you have

an original Pebble, right? I do. I have the Kickstarter Pebble. You have the Kickstarter one? Look at you. I have a Pebble, right? I do. I have the Kickstarter Pebble. You have the Kickstarter one? Look at you. I have a Pebble Steel, which I picked up as soon as they went on sale. Do you wear it every day? Yes.

I mean, for again, life changes. If I'm going out of the house and going out and about and not just sitting in my pajamas in my garage and writing things, I, I do wear it. Absolutely.

What do you, I mean, do you, do you like it? I mean, I love mine. I love my, okay.

Do you, do you wear yours every day? Yeah, I do. Yeah. A hundred percent. I like it. I mean,

I've been wearing it for a year and a half now. I like it. Um, uh, they announced last week that they are cutting the price to $99 for the base model, which I think is really smart. And then they added a bunch of, uh, they announced last week that they are cutting the price to $99 for the base model, which I think is really smart. And then they added a bunch of, uh, sort of software features like background tasks and things like that.

Um, and I was thinking about this and then I, um, I subscribed to Ben Thompson's Stratechery site and get his newsletter. And he, he made a bunch of the same observations that I'd been thinking. So I had one of those, like, I'm going to write about this to write about this is you know it's going to be similar and he's like well okay go ahead it's fine um and and so i i just wrote this thing that i'm going to post shortly after the show um is done that uh i think i think saying that pebble is dead because there are all these other smart watches with the bright color screens and stuff isn't right because it's got a week-long battery and it costs under $100 now. And when it was focused as it was initially on notifications, I think it actually did a pretty good job. And I

think they've done some good updates to the notification system. It works better with iOS. It works really well with Android. I think there's a place for a watch like that and say, look, we're not going to be brightly colored and anything like that, but we're going to give you your notifications. We're going to be really focused on that. And it's going to be under $100. The problem I have is that they also announced these background tasks and things like that, which threaten to wreck that battery life that is part of their appeal. And so we're in a fascinating point. Ben Thompson definitely made these points too.

We're at a fascinating point where Pebble needs to decide what it wants to be. And I think it needs to swallow its pride. I think the guys at Pebble need to swallow their pride a little bit and say, look, we are not going to compete on features with the Apple Watch and with the Motorola Watch and with the other Android Wear watches that are coming out. We're not going to do it. We will compete on battery life and price, but we're not going to add 50 different features and a whole bunch of apps that drain the battery because, quite frankly, our screen is black and white and low resolution and we only have buttons and not a touch screen. So don't try to play that game. Be the alternative. Be the under $100, really great for showing your phone notifications

on your wrist, lasts for a week device because there's probably still a place in the market for something like that, at least for a while. And if's probably still a place in the market for something like that at least for a while and if you focus on that and you focus your future development on that you might find a niche with people who just want something with neat customizable faces and basic notifications for a reasonable price instead of spending 350 for an apple watch that needs to be recharged every night. Or in the middle of the day, if you use it hard, we just don't know. So there are an interesting crossroads where they can really embrace being different, or I fear not want to give up on some of these other features.

And choosing is hard and focusing is really hard. i think pebble is an interesting place right now where they might have some potential but they may not be able to resist um the branching out instead of focusing so they just sort of had a new marketing campaign where which is on their site now they're like kind of uh their new marketing branding thing is like we're just a watch you know right right well which is good which is good but then they added the background notification things and they did the you know the the um playful johnny ive like relax johnny breathe johnny kind of thing it's like don't even compare yourself to the apple watch you are not the apple watch you don't want to be the apple watch um i think that's the i think that's the important thing is for them to to um not don't don't play their game that's

not your game you're never going to be good at that game play a different game but then on the day that they dropped the price recently they added like sleep tracking and fitness tracking to the pebble yeah which is kind of like okay you're kind of really crossing your yeah i you know again and they've got lots of those sensors in there and they sort of sold people on this stuff and we'll see where it goes but that that's my concern is that they're trying to do too much and look if fitness tracking ends up being a thing that actually has resonance that they're like for $99. It's a fitness tracker. It's a watch it's notifications. And that's what it is. And that's great. But then, you know, then it's like, well, we've got ESPN.

So you can check the scores and that apps interface isn't very good. And if your, if your iPhone auto quits the pebble app, because it's, um, it needs to free up the memory, then the connection drops and you have to launch the pebble app again. And, you know, it's at some point, I feel like they're not in this arms race. They need to pick their spots now. They need to admit that the world is changing and that their product is not going to, and their company is just not going to compete with those guys. They're not going to make a product that competes with a Moto 360 or the Apple Watch. It's never going to happen. They need to be playing on a different field. And that's, I think it's an interesting question because I like the product. And I know a lot of people are really skeptical. I think they believed it to be

something that it just isn't. But what it is, I kind of like. It's just, it needs to be true to itself, right? And not become, you know, ruin itself by trying to be something it's not. So on Connected, which is another fine show on this network, I know that Stephen is interested in the Pebble again, and he wants to talk about it this week. So I'm sure him and Federico will have some some interesting opinions about that later on this week but i mean i am uh i'm i'm i'm a fan i i am a big fan of my purple um and and i think that it's a nice kind of entry into understanding what i want and don't want from an Apple Watch. Example?

The notifications. I think that there is a benefit in having that stuff on your wrist. People think that it's crazy, but once you kind of get it to a point where you understand what you do and don't want, just the act of looking at your wrist is much better and more comfortable than looking at your phone in a lot of situations. Yeah, I agree. I mean, some people believe this and some people don't, but I would rather, and this is why I always wore a watch and not a pocket watch, because glancing at my wrist to see the time or to see a notification now is a lot less cumbersome than reaching into

my pocket and pulling out my phone and pressing the button and checking and then putting it back. And so, yeah, yes, it's a matter of degree, but I think there's some value in doing that. I definitely think that's why I bought the Pebble. One reason was I thought this would be an interesting category and there would be new devices like the Apple Watch eventually. And to get a sense of what's it good for and the glanceable notification stuff, I think, is great. I'm much more, you know, start dictating things and do work on, on my, on my watch. I don't, I don't see that as, as something I want to do. I like keeping it simple makes a lot of sense to me. So, you know, the pebble on that level has told me, yes, there is value in having something on your wrist. Um, the, I, I think these other watches have to

prove that there's value in doing more than that and what that value is. Well, let's see. We'll find out. I think that about comes to the end of this bumper birthday episode. I think so. But, you know, we're eventually going to talk about the Kindle. It may happen when I get my Kindle. When do you think you're going to get it?

Oh, it's like a couple weeks i think okay it might just be a couple weeks at this point it might just be worth holding it i don't know if you've noticed the listeners but we keep mentioning it every week we have a kindle on the topic list and then we just keep bumping it we actually had some follow-up that we didn't do that was about the kindle who were following up that we mentioned it, which is like, no, no, we haven't talked about it yet. This is all just – Hold on. Well, we're going to talk about it.

There's going to be a Kindle episode. It's going to happen, but we don't know when because there's so much follow-up. There's just so much. I love it. But I love it. I know you do. I love it too. I don't have a show that goes this in-depth on follow-ups,

but it's fun. I enjoy it. If you want to catch our links for this week's episode of Upgrade, go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash four. If you want to get in touch with us, there's a contact button there, but you can also get us on Twitter. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E, and Jason is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L, on Twitter. Of course, you can keep up with all of Jason's fantastic work,

including his upcoming piece about the Pebble, over at sixcolors.com, spelt however you choose, really, as long as you're just changing the U or not. If you use all different letters, you won't get there. You'll have to write six colors in some sort of English language. letters you won't get there you'll have to write six colors in some sort of english language yes s-i-x-c-o-l-o-r-s yeah you can enter the u if you choose you can and we'll be back next week's next week's all of the all the weeks we're back next week you're going to singleton in between right i am i'm going to be fresh off of a plane.

We may have to record at a different time than usual for those live listeners out there. But yes, I should be fresh back from Canada where streaming is expensive to talk next week. Excellent stuff. Keep an eye on the schedule. If we need to change it, you'll find it there. It's at relay.fm slash schedule, which is also where you'll find out

when all of our shows record live. We'll be back next week. Until then, bye-bye. Goodbye.