Upgrade - 608: Pop and Lock

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

From Relay, this is Upgrade. Episode 608. Today's show is brought to you by Delete Me, Sentry, The Pets Table, a nerd wallet. My name is Mike Hurley and I'm joined by Jason Snow. Hi, Jason Snell. Hi, Mike Hurley. Big show today. I'm very excited for today's episode. Busy, busy, busy. I have a Snell talk question for you. It comes from Seb. And Seb wants to know, Jason, if you were to appear on the UK game show Mastermind, what would you choose as your specialist? subject. Now I'll ask you, Jason, do you know about Mastermind? Do you familiar with the show? I am vaguely familiar with the show. This is a show where you choose the category and then they give you a bunch of hard trivia questions about your category. Essentially, yes. You are, you're going on and saying, I have a specialist subject and it can be super specific as a subject. You know, like, the band Oasis from the years 2000 to 2006 or whatever. Sure. And then they will go away and create a set of questions that are tailored to the knowledge of that subject. Yeah.

So what would you choose as your specialist subject? Well, it's funny, because you think about like, I can think of lots of generalist areas, because when you're playing a game show, when you're playing Jeopardy, especially one of the things you think of, is what are the categories that I would like to see come up in the game board, and what are the ones that I would not like to see come up in the game board? But Mastermind strikes me as being a little bit different,

because I am not the kind of person who, like, for example, like Star Trek. I know a lot about Star Trek, but like I don't want to answer Star Trek trivia because they're going to be like in this episode, what was the name of the ship that did this? And I don't know that. My brain doesn't work that way. So Apple is the answer. I think it would have to be, right? It would have to be Apple.

Yeah. If I was to do it, I would also pick Apple within a very specific time frame. Sure. Because it's the thing that I figure I have devoted the majority of the majority of the most of the most of the majority of my thinking to in my professional career. So I figured that would also probably be my answer, even though I don't actually think I would be very good at that. I've heard, I've heard, you know, various shenanigans unconnected. And it is, Apple trivia is hard, but like, what is my other specialist subject? What other, I am literally an Apple specialist. So I think it would have to

be that. I figure you would have to pick, like, the Mac, though. Yeah. Like, you wouldn't want to pick all of Apple. Like, you wouldn't want to pick all of Apple. Like, it would be, like, I would probably pick the iPhone, just like iPhone, give me iPhone trivia, and I reckon I can probably do a decent job of that. Maybe. Yeah, I think, I think that's right. And I think you're right, I probably would end up just saying something like the Mac. Yeah, because you'd be like, woo.

Mac and Cosh questions for you. It would like, even in the last, you know, even say 20 years or whatever, that's so much stuff. It's like, so we have a question about Apple News. It's like, oh, no. What's the name of this fitness plus trainer? Here's the question about snow leopard. Oh no. What?

If you'd like to send in a snow talk question of your own to help us open a future episode of the show, please go to Upgradefeedback.com and you can do that. We have some follow-up in today's show. So we're recording this episode a little bit early, a few days early, because I think you're traveling. And today, which is Friday, March of 20, Tim Cook posted on X to say that the Mac had quote,

its best launch week ever for first time Mac customers and said that we love seeing the enthusiasm. Now, while this feels to me very much like an F1 stat, so in F1 there's obviously a lot of statistics like there are in any sport, and like you can draw enough rings around any scenario to make a stat out of it, right? So like at the history on this racetrack with this race, this person's the first to do YZ. And so like there is like first week ever for first time Mac customers.

This is the best launch week. But that is still significant that there was some kind of record broken with you would assume the Mac Neo is the reason for this. Yes. You would think so. What do you think about this, about them talking about this even? I mean, it feels like they were primed to say this. They talk about new to Mac all the time.

they're probably doing some post-sales surveys, probably even specifically targeting getting this reaction, this result so that they could talk about it. This is a thing that they do. So I don't think they're wrong, but I think that maybe this was anticipated. And so they were kind of... They're prime in it. Yeah, I'm figuring out that this was where they were going to go. This is part of the narrative of this.

So they're going to do some research, and they know they're going to get this. I think that that's the other thing is that they're already doing pretty well new to Mac in general, and they figured that MacBook Neo would probably raise the bar there. And so, you know, they said, let's measure that so that we can make some claims. And it is all, you know, it is also Apple's typically vague, like, here's a thing that we think. And is there anything to back it up? It's like, no, you just have to take us on our word that we have stats that say this. It's like, okay, all right.

I mean, I believe it. But I think they were anticipating and planning this statement. But, I mean, you comply as much as you like, but people actually have. have to care about it and you can miss. And so I think it is at least notable that they hit, right? That this product hit. It hit with what they were looking for. This is clearly meant to be a new to Mac product.

And they were very successful in New to Mac. Like there is a scenario where they could say one of the best launch weeks ever, right? And you'd still say, oh, great, that good for them. There might also be a sort of perlative above this that they didn't hit and we'll never see that one. The best week ever for the Mac. Yeah. That's what, you know, would love to have done, you know, but unlikely.

Like, and again, it's like you would expect this is units sold, not revenue, right? Yeah, I mean, presumably, because they just said best, cool, best awesomeness. It just feels like to hit revenue would be hard, right? And, and my question is, like, what is, how do they get that first, that new to Mac number? Is that, um, are they doing a special program where they're like in stores asking people, or are they doing a fast, do they choose to like a fast follow? up. Like whenever anybody buys a computer the next day, they're like saying, you know, please take the survey now so that they can get these numbers this quickly because like there's a

whole strategy that goes with that too. But I'm sure that we spoke about this before and someone did write in to tell us how they do this. And I, and I feel bad for having forgotten. No, we talked about it and then I actually reached out to somebody who used to work in Apple marketing who said, yeah, it's, it's absolutely, you know, they do these post sales surveys and that's how they get those numbers and the numbers are you know vague like they're intentionally vague they're like more than about half more than half didn't they also say or maybe we got somebody else tell us this that there is also an element of apple data which helps them equate this as well as phone calls that like they have some like level of awareness for new customers yeah well i think

i think it's primarily the post sales survey where you get an email that says thank you for registering your Apple product or here's a new Apple, but we would like to know more, and then they do a follow-up survey, and that's where they get that data. Surveys are what they are, but nevertheless, I think this is notable, and I think is the achievement.

Zoe makes a point, too, that there could be some data involved if you're looking at an Apple ID that's being associated with a Mac for the first time. That's not quite the same, right? But like, it could be a signal, especially if it's a new Mac that was just sold. All of these things can only be signals, right? Because, like, you can make a bunch of

phone calls, but only the people that answer are the ones that give the results. What is knowledge, anyway? What does anybody really know? Such a great question. What is truth? Nobody knows. What is truth and knowledge? Why would you even ever construct some sort of a game where people needed to test their

knowledge? That would be pointless. Why would you bother? Sounds horrible. If you ask me, it sounds like horrible, it's spent an afternoon. Mark German is reporting that the head of hardware engineering for Apple's home division, and Brian Lynch has left the company to go to Smart Ringmaker Ura. Lynch has been in charge since 2022.

Before this, he was working on the car project. So it seems like he was working on iPods before. So he hasn't only ever worked on things that never shipped. But Lynch has been in charge of a couple of divisions, the hardware parts of these divisions, that have struggled in recent years. I mean, it is worth noting there is a level of management between Lynch and John Ternus, so it's not like complete management, but this is hardware engineering for the home products.

To me, when I read this story, I felt very much like maybe he's a bit annoyed. Look, I mean, the narrative is, and this is also based on Markerman reporting, that the hardware has not been the problem with these products. It's been that they've been let down by software and they've been ready to ship. So there could be frustration here. I would also say there was that report, I think from Mark German, who said that John Ternis is getting more involved in home hardware, which I will say if you've got a reporter reporting in separate stories that this new head of hardware or head of hardware who might be the new CEO is now getting more involved in home hardware and a separate story that says the guy in charge of home hardware is left. Are these connected? I mean, we don't know. And which direction is it, you know, that John Turnus is more engaged in this and sees it as a real priority and he's pushing harder.

And somebody like Brian Lynch is like, I don't want to deal with this. Or maybe he felt like he was not being respected. It's also possibly the reverse that John Turnus is more involved because the guy who's in charge of it is leaving. And so they're going to have to rejigger it. Either one could be true. It's very hard to judge from the outside. But like we've been saying a lot about Apple executive shifts, sometimes little power shifts can have effects like this just because there's a new boss or the new boss or the boss wants to do it differently or whatever. And you get kind of mad because you're like, look, I've been doing everything right.

It's not my problem. This is not. And stuff like this happens. I was amused by the fact that Mark German thinks that every person who leaves Apple is a tragedy for Apple. And I think that's, I think that's interesting because maybe, maybe, but like I have been in this situation. Sometimes you let people go because you think, you know what, you got another opportunity. That's great. We're going to let you go there.

We're not going to try to stop you from leaving. And he doesn't say they didn't try, but they didn't succeed. He left to go to URA from Apple. So I just, I want to inject a little skepticism because I'm not sure every departure from Apple is a loss for Apple. I'm not sure I buy that. It could be, it might not be. And I know we talked about this a lot with Alan Dye, but this is a great example of that too.

It's like, not every person who leaves Apple is a tragedy for Apple. And yet I think that's how Mark wants to tell the story. I don't know if it's, you know, I'm not saying you're not saying. I think that's more a, it's good for Bloomberg than it is necessarily what Mark thinks. That could be. It feels very much. way. The type of reporting that does well for Bloomberg is like,

company in trouble, company and trouble. That's the narrative building. And the narrative here is people are leaving Apple. And Mark Grumman's obviously got some very good sources in. I don't know where HR or every company that hires somebody away from Apple knows to contact Mark Herman and say, hey, Mark, we hired somebody from Apple. And he's like, I'm on it. I don't, these are the things that I do not know about this information. Again, just to reiterate great what I say about Mark Herman all the time. He's a really good reporter. He's the best of what he does. He is. He absolutely is. But there's also the question of like, what does it mean? And what are the narratives and all of that? And that one, you know, I like to take a step back a little bit. But I also feel for this guy because it's very clear he's been put in some difficult situations with products that have kind of like not happened for things that may have been out of his control. Very much both. seen, you know, from what we know about these things, like, there's the car project, which was just

a disaster from the beginning. It should, honestly, should never have been started. And then, you know, the smart home stuff, which is like, apparently the hardware is really interesting, but we just have yet to see it. Barclay's analyst, Tim Long, has published a report informed by supply chain sources on the upcoming iPhone slate. There are two details in this that are interesting. One is that he expects based on the way that production lines are being spun up, that the foldable iPhone will not be shipping until December,

which is similar to the iPhone 10, right? That was, it was announced and didn't ship until November, but the other iPhones were on the sound of September as normal. He also says that alongside the iPhone 18 in March, he expects Apple to ship both the 18E and either an Air 2 or 18 plus.

Now, all of that part is interesting to me. We're going to get the 18E in March, right? I guess we know that. Yeah, because we just got the 17E. That makes sense. Sure. This is March next year. But then either the Air 2 or an 18 plus.

And to me it seems a little bit late to be having either conversations, right? Like, we're not that, we're a year away, but that's not that far away for choosing an iPhone. But, yeah, I also don't know if it, I don't know what I think makes sense in this scenario. Do you give the air another shot? Or do you go back to the plus? It's a good question. Like either is the part that makes me wonder. It's also possible that they're planning on doing both of these.

And then they can say, let's kick this one down the line. Because you could, I see a scenario where you could say, we're going to alternate. I mean, they could kill the air if they're unhappy with sales or not with it. I don't know. And go back to the plus if they think that that's a more reliable thing. They could also alternate and say, we're going to do the 18 plus. and then you can see Air 2 in the fall or the following year, and it's on the different cadence,

and they could do that as well. I don't know. It's going to be really interesting to see what they do here, because it's unclear. I mean, we've heard reports that the air has just not sold that well, which is not super surprising in some ways because it is a niche product, but that's a niche product slot. That's not a mainstream.

It's never been the big selling iPhone. So why would this be any different? I think it's going to be interesting to see if what Apple comes to realize is if you want another iPhone slot to sell while it actually has to be at the top, not in the middle, price-wise, because that will be the fold, right? The fold will also be occupying an outside of the mainstream three spot, which is that has always been a problem, no matter where they put it, whether it's the cheapest, whether it's in the middle or whatever. it's just not seeming to work and it would be interesting to see if the fold does work yeah I don't know

I don't know they could also reconceptualize the air to to be you know I don't know different from the air to sort of explore that and see is there a is there a different price or screen size or whatever that would appeal to people or

or not I don't know don't know I think if I think it would be interesting to see how the air could perform if you removed its major downsides. If you could give it increased battery life and a second camera,

what would happen? Because then you remove the downsides of the product. A lot of the downsides. And then what would it do? So it'd be interesting to see it. Or all of those people going to just buy a pro or a fold instead.

Probably. Probably. I think they would lose, I think they would potentially lose a lot of air customers. to the folding phone, honestly. I think that, I do think that that's possible. The other thought that I had,

I mean, I like the idea of having a range of iPhones and if the air stays around, like, again, it doesn't have to sell, it has to sell enough to justify its existence, but if you're trying to create a spread of products, they're not all going to be your best selling iPhone, because

that's not possible. Like, you have to provide lesser selling iPhones, but they want to, they want to hit those spots right, and maybe they'll decide that the air is not going to ever hit that spot and it's just kind of an alternative that's never going to win the battle between maybe I should get this or a different model and so it's not worth doing. The other thing I wanted to throw out there is this, this expectation that this analyst has that the foldable phone won't ship until December.

Yeah, I mean, I can see it. I don't know enough about his track record to say whether he's right or not. I look forward to seeing maybe if there's some corroborative evidence from other reporters down the road. At some point, I have to say, if it's going to slip this much, maybe it should just get announced in March. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Fall is the best time to do it, but then if it's not going to ship for two months, I don't know.

Maybe, maybe not. Yeah. Still, if you can get it out in December and if you can take a lot of pre-orders and you can ship it to people and they've got it. and everybody's hands before Christmas, it's worth doing. But, like, I just, I would love more detail about this, this delay and how they're feeling about it.

I do hope, for our sakes, the fold does ship separately, though. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I loved having the ability to review the iPhone 10 separate.

Yeah. That would be lovely. That would be really nice. If you were happy about that, that would be really good. This takes me back. Back to that classic moment where I told somebody in Apple PR that we'd really like at Macworld, we'd really like if they just released one photogenic new product every month to put on our cover. That would be the product cadence that we would like because the product issues with a new Apple product on the cover always were the best issues of the year.

So please just do that. If you just did 12 iPods and just did one every month, it'd be awesome. Yeah. Oh man. That's great. That's great. Well, that's actually, that's the true tragedy of the 10-year. of Brian Lynch at Apple is that you said

you know he had a good product because he was on the iPod but unfortunately he was on the iPod July and it never came out their month their month themed iPods line didn't work out for them it was the U2 iPod shuffle it was coming out in July and it just never it was coming out of the door it was just the yeah

it was the iPod February and it was the color of of February. Sorry sorry about that poor guy this episode is brought to you by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make us all vulnerable. Because data brokers, they make money selling your data, so they want your data, they want as much as possible. But you can protect your privacy with Delete Me. You can keep your name,

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You can get 20% off your DeleteMe plan just by going to join DeleteMe.com slash Upgrade 20 and use the promo code, upgrade 20 at checkout. That is J-O-I-N-D-E-E-M-E dot com slash upgrade 20 and enter the code upgrade 20 to checkout. The only way to get that 20% off is by going to join deleteme.com slash upgrade 20 and use the code upgrade 20. Our thanks to delete me for their support of this show and relay. I have been so excited to talk to you about this because Jason, last week you were on Jeopardy. It's true. is Jeopardy. Yeah, I was. On Thursday, the 19th. Congratulations. Thank you for being on the show. I know how long you've wanted to do this. What is your background with Jeopardy? Why did you want to be on the show and how long have you tried to get on the show? Honestly, I think it doesn't align with a lot of the people who play the game. I started to watch, I mean, I was aware of it for sure throughout my life, but it was really Lawrence parents.

who watched Jeopardy every night. And so we would go down and visit them and we would watch Jeopardy. And I would, you know, shout out answers and all of that. And I, I, you know, played trivia games and other things and always thought like, oh, maybe I could do Jeopardy. Like, I mean, it was just a vague thought. It was really just a vague thought.

And it wasn't until, so there was a period where we had, who wants to be a millionaire mania in the U.S., where, ironically, the executive producer of that is the executive producer of Jeopardy now. Michael Davies And at Macworld offices That was like a Everybody was like

I forget what you did You called in or you Or you went to their website Or I don't even know what it was And there was like a quiz you could take And it was like how do you get on who wants to be a millionaire? And like my friend Phil Michaels did it And people were people doing that

And I remember doing that And it was just like kind of a fun idea of what if you You know Went on a game show like that And then, but nothing came of that. And then talking to Dan Morin, Dan Morin said that he would, he had always tried to get on Jeopardy and he hadn't.

I knew a couple other people who tried. In those days, it was really hard to get on. You had to like go to an audition or wait in a line or whatever. And Glenn Fleischman got on and my friend Jeff Duncan got on. And I thought that was really interesting. But again, it was just kind of remote. But when Dan was trying and they instituted the anytime test where you could just go to the web and take a test and if you did well, they might call you, basically. That was when I started to think, oh, maybe I should do that sometime.

But it was so, it was just idly, maybe I should do that sometime. And I honestly couldn't tell you what tipped me over other than that it was, I think in the pandemic, after. So, I mean, really, after Alex Trebek died, Alex Trebek was the longtime host of Jeopardy, the stage they. record on it, Sony pictures in Culver City is now, it's, uh, it's the Trebek stage. It's not the Alex Trebek stage. Yeah, yeah. Um, when Alex died, because he had, so he had cancer and, um, fought it for year plus, I forget. And when he died, they, they, um, it was like a moment where, uh, and, and, and this was sort of pandemic era, too, where, um, we just started watching jeopardy. Um, we watched his last games that he had recorded and then into the guest hosts.

all of that. And so in that era, we picked it up and started watching it every day. And that was really the impetus for me to say, well, maybe I should try the anytime test. So also, you know, you watch TV shows and you think, yeah, could I be on that or not? And the one that makes me laugh is that in the, there's always an ad break in Survivor where Jeff Probst will be like, hey, you should be on Survivor. And I think, Jeff, I should not. Don't speak to me. Don't speak to me, Jeff. This is not for me. I should not. 20 years ago, 25 years ago, when I started watching your show, I should not have been on then. I really should not be on it now. But Jeopardy, I was like, you know, I could try that. But it was just, you know, it was a lark. I was like, sure, I'll take the test. That'll be a fun thing. And all the way through, it was really like, wouldn't it be a fun experience? That's literally all it was was, wouldn't that be a fun experience? So,

Um, so two and a half years ago, uh, almost three years ago now, actually, I took the anytime test. And then things got weird because two weeks later, I got an email from Jeopardy that said, we'd like you to take the test again. And they take, you take it on Zoom with your camera on. And all they're, all they're doing is you and a bunch of other people. All they're doing is making sure that it's you take. the test. So it's a proxy test that's basically there to make sure you didn't cheat or have somebody else take the test for you. And then they're like, great, thanks. And again, it's just, I mean, when you finish taking the test, it's not like they tell you how many you get right, either of them. They just say, great, you took the test. That's it. That's it. And you're like,

okay. And if you don't hear from us, do it again next year. Literally. You don't know if you get right or wrong. No, just do it again next year. Yeah. So, so, after the proxy, so, so it's a a couple weeks later, and it's literally it's June of 2023, and I know this because I got the email while I was sitting in Otson's Stadium at the University of Oregon

waiting for Jamie's graduation. Oh, wow. Jamie had two graduations. They were both in the stadium, so we were there all day between the main graduation ceremony and the graduation for her school

within the University of Oregon. So we just stayed there. And I got this email. And it was like, we would like you to be on a Zoom to audition to be on Jeopardy. I'm like, what? What? What? What?

And they wanted the day we were driving back. And I said, I'm sorry, I'm driving back. My daughter's blah, blah, blah. And they're like, it's not a problem. We have a slot the next day. You want to do the next day? And I said, sure. And that was, that was a Zoom where you, they tell, get a pen.

So you can pretend it's a clicker, a buzzer. And we're going to play a kind of simulated game. and people are going to step in. You know, we'll pick three people from this group of like nine people or ten people who are on this Zoom and we'll play little mini games and they want to see you like buzz in.

They want to see you call for a category. They want to see you answer questions. It's an audition. In fact, what they said is you're already qualified to be on Jeopardy. This isn't about that. This is for casting. We want to see...

Will you be interesting on television? Can you hold it together? Are you fine? What do you sound like? I mean, it's TV casting. What do you sound like? What do you look like? And then they know about your demographic

Because they really do want to create a show That shows a broad spectrum of people They really do Broad spectrum in every possible way Including things like age and geography even, right? And I would say a job and like it's lots of different things And it's casting right They want to get the right people

And they want to get the right mix of people On the show. Yeah. So this is great. So I do this. And they're like, great. Thanks, everybody. You're in the pool. And wait to hear from us. That was it. That's it. That's it. That's all there is. Two and a half years pass. In the intervening time, Dan takes the test. He gets it. He does the proxying. He does the Zoom audition. And he gets on Jeopardy. And wins. And wins. And I hear nothing. And I'm like, well, I guess they didn't like me. And then in January, I got a text on like January 10th or something. thing from John Barra, one of the contestant producers at Jeopardy, saying, would love to talk.

Can we set up a call for tomorrow? Yep. And after a check of is this legit, which it seemed to be. I said, sure. And that call was, we'd like you to be on Jeopardy, February 11th in about a month, basically. Yep. We'd like you to be on Jeopardy. That was it.

11th and 12th. Pulled two days for it. kind of anticlimactic in one way because it was just like, yes, there was no like build, it was just like, yes, that's it. You didn't get a box in the mail that had confetti in it when you opened it. It's just like, can you do this?

There was no puzzle to solve. It was a text and a phone call where they said, you can be on Jeopardy. Yep. Of course, I had not been even playing and practicing for the last, like, year, because I was like, you know, I figured, okay, they're not,

I'm not going to be on, I'm not going to worry about it so much. And then, so yeah so that that was that was it and so um and i'll tell you my because again a lot of people talk about it being like their dream um one of the questions in the audition was if you win a lot of money on jeopardy what would you do with the money and i'm telling you i had never even considered anything about that it's not why i did it i didn't say i would like to go on a game show to win money. That was not my motivation at all. It was literally, wouldn't that be a great experience

to be on Jeopardy? Which, I mean, yeah, that's pretty much how it worked out. So that's fine. But that was, that was the point. The point was the, wouldn't it be interesting to do this more than anything else? And I would just advise everybody if your goal, if you need a lot of money, if your goal is, well, here's what I'm going to do. Here's my plan. Step one, get on a game show. Step two, win a lot of money. Like, that is a real low percentage chance. plan that you got there. So yeah. So I mean, and that was it. So I had a month warning.

And Lauren brought a bunch of children's books home from the library because children books are pretty good for studying. But I'm bad at like cramming for tests and all that. But I did try to read some stuff about classical music and about first ladies and about presidents and stuff like that and geography and things that might be helpful. But yeah, yeah. Also I had to read David Polk's 600 page book. that same time. That was my entire Hawaii vacation was studying for Jeopardy and reading David. Did that help? Did the Apple book help at all? I mean, neither of them helped, really, in the end. Neither of them helped. And I knew that maybe was the case, but I just, yeah. So,

that was pretty wild. And they let you have three guests there. So Lauren and her parents, obviously, were the people to come and be there. But, but yeah, it's funny. So I don't have that story of like it was a lifelong dream. It was more like, I think this would be, you know, one of my secret things that I do is I just say yes to things. Like, because once I agree to something, I will do it. I'm a committer. So, um, this was like that, which is like, this would be fun. And then once it happened, I'm like, well, I can't say no. No. Right. Like, let's do it. It'll be a great life experience. So, so that was it. So I want to know a little bit about what the day was like before you step onto the stage. So like, what happens when you arrive at the studio? Like,

what are you doing? How are you being prepared for? of the day. So, uh, so we're staying at a hotel that's not too far away. We didn't even rent a car. I just took a lift up, uh, and the, the call for contestants was 7.45 a.m. The audience can get to get there at like 9.30. That's what I always saw. 7.45 a.m. So I get dropped off at the gas station across the street from the Sony lot. And I'm waiting at the, uh, at the, uh, crosswalk to cross the, the big street to get to the lot. And the, there's another guy there and he looks at me and he says, Jason. It's John Barra, who, uh, at the, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, texted me and he knows my face because they've got the faces of all the contestants. Yeah.

Because he's a contestant producer. So he said, I was just looking at your file yesterday. And so he walked me over and, and pointed me the way to go. And you basically, you and, you and the other contestants gather at the, you know, beforehand in the, it was, it was kind of damp because it had ran the day before. This, this, uh, it's not basement. It's the first level of the Sony parking garage by the elevator. There's like some folding chairs set up there. Not glamorous. And there. And, and, and, and places to hang your garment bag because you've got to bring a bunch of changes of clothes in case you're on

the show for multiple days. And there were 13 of us who showed up. Okay. Because they're shooting many episodes in a day, right? Yeah, so you show up at 745 because they will shoot an entire week of shows in a day. You'll shoot three in the morning,

take a lunch break at like one or two in the afternoon, and then shoot two more. Yep. And so it's a full day. And so they've got all those contestants there. And we learned that the champion, because you always are wary that there's going to be like a super champion on a run who's going to get you. I hate poor suckers that don't do that.

For people that don't know Jeopardy, what does it mean to be a champion? When you win a game you play the next day. Right. So it is essentially a knockout competition, Jeopardy, right? You just keep going until you lose. It is. Always two new challenges. It used to be you could win.

five and then they would replace you and you'd just be a champion at five. But they don't do that anymore because they have had great success with including Ken Jennings, who is now the host and is the all-time record holder. He won like 70, 80 games in a row, like just crazy. How many? 70 or 80. I forget exactly what the number is. I forgot that number. Do you know what I interviewed Ken Jennings a very, very, very long time ago on one of my interview podcasts. In 2014, episode of Command Space called A Bit of a Know It All with Ken Jennings. That's amazing.

Well, see, now we have a little cross. I got to meet Ken. And Glenn, Fleischman has met Ken. You would not be surprised to hear. So yeah, so what you don't want to do because there are legendary stories of this is you get there in the morning

and then they're like, oh, there's the champion. And it's like somebody who's won 20 games in a row and you're like, oh, we're all doomed. But great news, everybody. The champion was this perfectly unassuming guy named Jamie Ding who had only won on Friday, which was yesterday, right? He won the day before

the last game. So he's a one day champion. Not a big deal. That was not true. And because, you know, for those who have seen the first four games of this week, uh, the eight of those 12 people in that parking lot were dispatched by Jamie Ding. It didn't go well. But, uh, so yeah, you show up in the parking lot once everybody's there and they're ready. they take you back into the studio into the green room, which is just a room with circular tables that you can sit at and there's two bathrooms and you can... And then they set in, it's TV, right?

So the wardrobe lady comes and she's looking at what you brought and she's looking at what you're wearing. And they have to camera test stuff because they're like, well, the sweater sort of has a pattern. Let's see what it looks like on camera. I was wearing a kind of a burgundy or kind of sweater quarters zip and she's like, oh, the knit has a little pattern. And Lauren also bought me a green sweater.

She's like, wear the green sweater and I'll camera test this. And that's what I ended up wearing for my game. And so they're doing, they're checking everybody's wardrobe. They're going to put everybody through makeup. They're going to look at your hair. There's a bunch of compliance stuff where it's like, here are the rules. You know, you're not allowed to cheat. There's federal, you will violate federal law if you try to cheat in this game.

They have to read all that to you. kind of stuff. Turn off your smartphones, take off your smart watches. I wore my dad's watch that he got in the 60s and gave to me because I thought that would be nice and also I couldn't wear my Apple watch. Yeah. So they do all of that kind of thing. And then they take you out and this is a thing that they started actually while Ken Jennings was on his run. They wanted to be fair to new contestants to have them not be surprised when they got on stage. So the whole crew does a, does a rehearsal show, just a rehearsal, but it's full with cameras and everything. And they rotate all of the contestants up onto the stage during that rehearsal in groups of three to play parts of the game. And the goal there is, I mean, they make sure if you're short or tall, they'll like, they have little risers behind the, the lectern. So if you're short, they will, they will find a right height for you. And then they, they mark that down. So they know when you come and play, they're going to raise the lectern to that or raise the potty, the pedestal behind the lectern to that height. And you get to use the buzzer. And you get to use the buzzer.

you get to try to feel how the buzzer works, which I was really bad at. They will give you feedback. They said to me, you were both too late and too early, which was the worst. I was like, I'm going to,

this is going to be awful. It turned out not to be because the rehearsal is not done by Ken Jennings, and I keyed off of Ken Jennings's voice. So once I was out on stage with Ken, it wasn't a problem, but during the rehearsal, it was bad. You were used to it based on hearing how Ken speaks.

You knew how to buzz in. So when he presented, you were good at that, I see. Yeah, when he stops, when he's done with the question, the light comes on. There's a producer who's called the enabler. You can't buzz in until the question's been completely read. And then the enabler, boom, enables the buzzing and you can buzz in. And the light goes on. But everybody, there have been studies about this.

The amount of time it takes your brain to process that the light goes on and press the button is too late. What you need to do is anticipate because you can see what he's reading. The text of the clue is up on the screen. You can see what Ken's reading. And so the way to do it is internalize his own rhythm, have a little virtual Ken Jennings in your head. You know how he's going to finish reading that clue. And so get ready to buzz in at the moment that you know, you anticipate is the moment where he finishes. So it's really like to dun, da, da, buzz.

That's how you have to do it. Not wait for the light. And that worked pretty well, except that when Jimmy McGuire was reading clues in the, in the rehearsal, it was a disaster for me. And I was really worried about that until I got out there and literally answered the buzzed in on the first question and got it right. And it was like, okay, this is going to be okay. So anyway, you do this rehearsal and the whole idea is just to get you comfortable on stage. And then you go backstage and they load the audience in and then it starts. And there's a cycle where basically they're like, they call two names. That's who's going to play against the champion. They pick that you draw a lot to see who's in the center and who's at the far right. They look they do they check your hair. they touch up your makeup if necessary. They have you line up in the order you're going to go out. And they go out. And the rest of us sit in the green room and watch on the TV.

You do see. You watch the games unfold. We are watching Jeopardy, except live, which is weird because they stop it occasionally. And Ken Jennings has to reread clues that he got wrong. Like he said wrong. It's not to affect the outcome. But it's like, if he flubs a line at the next commercial break, he'll go back and he'll reread those again. Okay. So he won't say the question twice in full. He'll say it so you understand it. If he says

something wrong, he'll quickly restate it. But he won't say it and then you, you'll have to answer it when he gets it wrong. Yeah, yeah, but they'll flag. He won't get it wrong. If he got it wrong and in effect the game, they would throw it away. But like, some producer is listening to what he's saying is like, he didn't really read that as clearly as we'd like and they'll flag it and they give him that list. And then he rereads those clues immediately at the commercial break so that it's, you know, as we know from podcasting, so it's the same voice and it's completely seamless in that moment. So there's, it's a little different when you're watching it because he's doing some of that. So the game, but otherwise, yeah, I mean, they take breaks between the commercial breaks to reset and all of that. And, and then the game ends and, and then they, the contestants chat with Ken a little bit afterward, and sometimes they post some of that on

social in various places. Sometimes they don't. But there's like a little segment where where Ken talks to them and the audience hears them and that's kind of fun. And then they get sent back. We all kind of like applaud everybody for doing a good, good job, you know, even though two of them have lost and are very sad. We're like, good job, everybody, and you did a great job. And we're trying to be very supportive in the green room. Ken does a little Q&A with the audience in between episodes.

We watch a little bit of that and then it gets cut off because when it gets cut off, it's they call the next two names and the cycle repeats. And you play three games and then it's lunchtime and then you come back and you play two more and you wait for your name to be called. So in my case, I waited through lunch and then for Thursday, it's game four that was after lunch. And they called my name and the name of Jordan, who is somebody I've been talking to all day, who is an Episcop a priest from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, who plays Dungeons and Dragons and does curling and is a podcaster. I'm like, no wonder we chat it all day. No wonder. I am not an

Episcopalian, but otherwise. I'm going to jump back because of forwards here between, like, because I have some questions about that, because I've seen it. Don't ask me how I've seen it. I've seen the game. It's not available here, but... I hooked you up. We don't have to worry about that, but I've seen the game. And when Jordan is talking, like, you know, doing her introduction,

it feels to me that, like, does Jeopardy attract just the same people? Like, the same kinds of nerds? No, no, but that was a funny one. It just so happened to be. a really funny connection. No, in fact, it can be, the knowledge base can be pretty diverse. There were definitely a lot of cases where we're in the green room watching and people, and then nobody answers on stage and we are shouting in the green room. We're like, come on. Oh, really? So yeah, some people know and some people don't. And that's just sort of how it is. It is. So it's different kinds of nerds all over the case. But in this case, yeah, Jordan and I had a bunch of things in common, which was pretty funny. Although, you know, she's better Bible questions. You'll be shocked to discover because as a priest, she knows the Bible stuff. better than I do. And leprosy questions, but I guess there's a lot of those in the Bible. I mean, leprosy, it is, it is Bible adjacent. Why was there a category about leprosy of all things? Why wasn't there? I mean, great question. Interesting, right? Great question. Yeah. So I want to

talk about the game itself a little bit. Yes. You got the first answer. So you buzzed and got the first answer. That must have felt good at that moment. Lauren said that's when she relaxed. I mean, it did feel good in the moment, but Lauren was like a feel, felt relieved that I was able to buzz in an answer. Yeah. Because she had watched the whole, they'd been there all day. And a little bit of context here.

I told people they should watch all week because it, there's a, it's a real ride. Jamie, that unassuming one game winner, um, well, he,

he went out Monday and demolished to the opposition. One woman didn't get to the end. She finished below zero and you don't get to even play in final jeopardy. It was a runaway, which means he was more than double the, the score of the next play. so he couldn't be beaten. On the second day, Tuesday,

he set two, he tied one and set one all time, all time since 1984, Jeopardy record for performance. And episode money, right? So it was, it was not about money. He set a record on Monday

for the most money in a season, or in that season, in that season. But on Tuesday, he set the record for, or tie the record for the most correct, answers in a game tied with Ken Jennings and set the record for something that's super oblique. It's called

the Coriatt score. It's basically how much how much money did you earn separate from daily doubles? Because daily doubles are random and it's a betting thing. And so it's different. It's more just like efficiency. Right. And he had the best Coriatt score of all time. So he kept answering the highest value questions, which are the hardest questions. He answered most of those, right, basically. In that game, he answered everything, right? I mean, it was really brutal. He, he, because he answered so many questions correctly. And the green room gets really quiet because everybody's like, oh, no.

What's good. Like, he wouldn't come in as a super, super player, but he is a super player. It's very clear. And there was, he ran through a category about fairy tales. And I was like, oh, no, this guy knows everything. I was like, okay, he knows this kind of stuff and that kind of stuff. I can kind of see, he's a law student. He's a bureaucrat.

I can see what he's going for here. And then in this other category, I'm like, yeah, let's see how he does with folklore. He killed it and I'm like, oh no, he knows everything. This is going to be a problem. It's interesting because you had told me this, right? And obviously I'd seen some of the stats. He didn't seem that strong against the two of you. Well, yeah.

I mean, there's a common thought that after lunch people sag, although we also were after lunch, but we weren't playing all day. But he's tired from playing. We were stressful, but not quite the same. And it was his second day. He had to sit all through the previous tape day and only played the last game. And then he had to go back to the hotel and try to get some sleep and then do it all again. So high degree of difficulty.

When Glenn was on, he won two games Thursday, Friday, had to go back to the hotel, slept, came back in the next day. And he was like, I can't answer any. I've run out of all my, and he lost. Right. So very impressive. But we will, I mean, I suppose they might have some reaction time stats. I would like to say that it's because Jordan and I are good players. I think you were both great.

Jordan was a great player. You were both very good players, I think. I think the difference might be that in the other games that Jamie was playing, one other person rang in a bunch and the other person, I felt really bad. There was a second player who didn't. And in our game, both of us were getting in on the buzzer. And so I think that made a difference. It's a lot harder to beat a player like Jamie Ding when it's just you.

and the other person there is just not buzzing or is just not buzzing in. But whatever the reason, yeah, without the context, like, again, I want to point people to Tuesday as like, I had to face that. I had to face a guy who a couple hours earlier had set an all-time,

all-time record for Jeopardy. And so, yes, buzzing in, I mean, okay, first off, watching Jamie totally recalibrated our expectations. It wasn't like, hey, maybe I'll go out there and win. It was like, we want to give our best and leave it all out on the floor and make him sweat.

And if we win, we win, but like the expectation of winning kind of dropped away and it was more like, let's fight. Let's fight. I think Jordan and I both felt that way. It's like,

let's give him our best. And so, yeah, buzzing in on the first question and getting it right, first off, it's like, oh, right, it's Jeopardy. And second, it's like, oh, I can buzz in.

He's going to let me in. I'm not going to just sit here while Jamie answers questions, which is what everybody been doing all week, to that point. Yeah. So it did feel good.

And Lauren, like I said, Lauren in the audience was like relieved because she'd watched all of this. And she was really relieved that like, oh, look, he buzzed in and got in. Now, I'll tell you the funniest thing about this is when you watch Jeopardy on your couch, you just play along with the players, right? There's a question. You shout out the answer if you know it and whatever. The one thing you never do when you're playing on the couch,

when you get a question right, you get to choose what question gets asked next. from a category and a dollar value. You don't do that on the couch. So I get that first question right, and then I'm like, oh. I'm in control now. Yeah, I guess that is a bit like, well, now what? Yeah, I'll take that for 800, Ken.

Like, I just, what? And it was a very funny. I think they may be tightened it up a little bit, honestly. I'm not sure. I didn't get the impression that you were flustered, so they helped you. No, in my memory, it took me longer to, to, I did a lot of like,

let's do this, Ken. And I don't know if I actually did that or if that was just in my mind, but it's not in the show. Yeah, I'm like, do I have to pick now? Jason, hello, pick, hello. Anyway, so that, that was, but then we're just playing the game. And what they tell you when you're trying to prepare is get couch brain, which is you're just playing Jeopardy like you are in your couch.

So just focus. And the focus, Mike, the focus. So the board is like this big blue box with text in it. And they have a giant screen. So when they reveal a clue, the whole giant wall screen fills up with this blue background with white text on it. And I'll tell you, if you ask me my memory of the entire taping day, other than the breaks, my memory is it's like I just was inside a blue box for half an hour, like a blue box where white text flew at you. It was just sensory overload, but also focus, right? You're trying to focus.

And like literally, you're playing Jeopardy. there's lights, you're on a stage, it's all unnatural. The text comes up. Ken starts reading it, but you can see it. And the way your brain has to work is you've got to look at the text,

parse it, see if you know the answer, decide if you're going to buzz in, and look at the end of the word, and the last few words of the clue, to time it right, to hit right when he finishes. That all has to happen in that small,

read ahead, not listen to him, but listen to him so you know when to bus in. That is an elite type of person, I've got to say. As a sidebar, I'll just say, if you go back and look at old games of Jeopardy, Jeopardy didn't used to be this competitive. When they went to the internet and they let anybody take the test and all of that, they really, and also people talking about Jeopardy strategy and stuff on the internet, it totally changed the aspect of the game. it is much harder now. The clues are harder. The players are better. It's a different kind. It's hard. I mean, it's hard. This episode is brought to you by Century. There are plenty of AI tools that help you write code, but Century SIA is built to help you fix it when it breaks. The difference is all about context. Sia isn't just guessing based on syntax. It's syntax. It's analyzing your actual Century data. That is your stack trace. your logs and failure patterns, because it has that full context, so it can spot buggy code

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That's Century.io and use the code upgrade 26 to get $100 in Century credits. Our thanks to Century for their support of this show and Relay. So there were two kind of, I would say, because I know he's so well. Absolute Jason moments.

Tell me about it. The final jeopardy, you did not know the answer. I could tell by looking at your face. You had no idea. Lauren says that she actually saw it's not in the show, but she actually saw when they revealed the clue. She saw me go, oh, no.

Which I don't remember, but I was feeling it. Because here's the thing, Mike, there are nightmare categories. I joke about this. They're the categories you want to get. Science. Sports. These are things that I'm always shocked at how many jeopardy people don't understand science or don't understand sports.

And it's like, I'm great at that. Give me those. And then there's the nightmare categories, which for me are like, the Bible, kings with numbers, French stuff. And classical music and opera. I don't know these things. I just don't know these things. So in final, the category was composers. And I was like, oh, no.

Oh, no. And I'll tell you, under normal circumstances, I would not bet anything in Final Jeopardy. The way Final Jeopardy works is you've got the score you've earned over the course of the whole game, and then you place a final bet, and everybody answers the questions. The only time everybody answers the question together, you write it down on a whackum tablet that displays. And so that's your moment. And I was in third place with $10,000. And there's math. I looked it up before I went on the show.

And there was a website called The Jeopardy fan that posted, you know, yesterday. It was like what each of the players should wager. I wagered exactly what I was supposed to wager because what you do is you try to imagine what if you get it right and they both get it wrong. And so you're like, well, if you're in second place, what do you have to bet to be in first place? And if you're in first place, what do you have to bet to protect against the person who's going to bet to be in first place? Because she could go past you. So you've got to protect. If you're in third place, you want to bet.

knowing what they're betting or guessing what they're betting, you want to bet so that if you're the only one to get it right, you end up ahead. And I couldn't bet zero because the way they were going to bet, if they got it wrong, they were still going to end up ahead of me. So I had to make some money. And so my only scenario,

which against Jamie was really unlikely, and again, this is all what you have to do while you're standing on a stage. It's bizarre. They do give you a piece of paper and they give you a Sharpie. And they let you do the math in the commercial break. and you can have as much time as you want. So I did that math.

And I was like, okay, I guess I got a bet, whatever I bet, $4,4,500, $4,600. I don't know what the number was. But I assure you, composers, I don't want that category. I just, I'm like, I'm not going to get this. But I had, but you got to play to win, right? You got to try to win. It would have been, imagine if I had known it and they didn't. And I didn't bet anything because I didn't like the category and I lost.

It's like, that would be the worst. You got to try to win. I could have played it safe and I actually would have gotten second place if I had. I could have bet zero and got in second place and made a thousand more dollars. But like, you got to play the win, right? You want to win. You want to win the game. So you go in with 10,000, which I thought it was unfair because you didn't get a double jeopardy.

And that annoyed me. It's true. We were searching for him and Jordan got two and and Jamie got one and I didn't get any. And I think that made a massive difference to the to you being in third. It's a huge difference. Daily double, that's it. Daily doubles is what I was looking for. I am very proud of having 10,000 having not hit a...

I got, I think, 15 right, one wrong, I think was my staff. Yes, you got 15 correct, one incorrect. So you were second incorrect answers. And if you look at the box score, I had the best buzz in percentage, which is pretty cool, too. Look at you go. I did pretty well there. So your Jason thing there was just seeing that it was very obvious that I had no idea what was going on. There is a moment when you get, if you don't answer, you raise your hands.

That hand raise, I've seen you do a thousand times, the hand raise. I love it. It's great. It's a great moment. So what I found very funny is in watching the show, Jordan also did it. You two are the same person. Jordan also did it I mean I wrote down a random composer

Because it was like I don't know who this composer is But I'm gonna write a random I'm gonna write down You gotta she didn't write down anything which I don't understand Just pull any composer out and you might be right But I did find it very funny that both of us were just like I don't know Like because absolutely I had no No idea But there's another moment which I think is more true to your soul

Which is you answer a question and it's like pop and lock is the answer right? Yes. And you make a face which is very much like how did I know this? And it's just this very quick reaction that you make. It's like

and you knew it somehow and you I think you surprised yourself that you knew it that was my favorite moment. I like rewound that like five times. It was a little more yeah that was like almost apologetic. It's like, I mean, I know, I was in the 80s. I know enough about break dancing to know that the phrase is pop and lock, right? Yeah. And that that, for that to be the

question, I'm like, well, I mean, it's lock. So, but I, but in in, because then you have to present it right. And so it's like, what is lock? I mean, it's very much like, uh, I, I'm sorry, I do know this answer. My favorite answer, watching it back, because again, it's all a blur to me. My favorite answer is there was a question that was, they had to recall this CSI game for kids, because the powder you used to dust for these contained asbestos. And I rang in and I was like, and instead of just saying, what are fingerprints? I said, what is dust for prints? I did it like the detective.

And Ken laughed and said, yeah, you don't want to give your kids asbestos. That's a bad idea. And we moved on. So that was a kind of a fun moment of personality, shining. through, but it is so weird because, I mean, you're not there to be funny. You're there to get the question right. You don't want to mess around. But moments, there were moments that I couldn't help it, right? And you're just reacting in the moment. And what's funny is, like, afterward, Ken asked me about one of my answers because during he was like, ooh, good. Like, he was impressed.

It was a $2,000 question about the ocean, deep ocean. And what, what's the word they use for the deep ocean and I just buzzed in. I was like, what is pelagic? And Ken's like, whoa, good. Afterward, the first thing he asked me, the only thing he really asked me in the post game interview was, Jason, Pelagic, where did that come from? And you know what? I think what I said there is it came from the deep, right?

I don't know, Ken, it came out of the deep ocean of my brain. I don't. It literally just popped in there. Although talking to some friends last night who were like, well, yeah, like Pelagic wales. Pallagic fish. I'm like, well, that's literally what went through my brain is like, pelagic whale.

That's a thing. Pelagic, we'll do it. And, but it's a good example of like, where does it come from? I don't know. It just, it just, it just, pop and lock. Just like that. So, so, yeah, in the, in the stats on, uh, on the Jepper data website, uh, I had, I, I got, I buzzed in 16 times, got 15 right.

I attempted, and this is data only they have, I attempted to buzz in 26 times, which meant that I got in 62% of the time, which was the highest score for the match. Jordan got in 55% of the time, but she only tried 20. Jamie got in 54% of the time. He tried 39, and that shows you how many times he had an answer. He had 39 times where he had an answer,

but we beat him out 18. of those times. So, yeah, I'm pretty happy with that. But I don't know, man, like, the, you want to give a good performance, but in that moment, you, you aren't performing. You're just trying to play Jeopardy. And so I'm, I'm very happy that I did dust for prints because,

and honestly, that came out of me saying, like, dust for these. And I'm like, well, I don't want to leave it out. Like, do I say prints? Do I say fingerprints? They probably would say. And so I just did the phrase, right, dust for prints. That's what they would do on CSI is dust for prints.

But in that moment, like, it's not calculated. Like, all of this happens so fast, reacting to the question. Like I said, parsing it, he's reading, you're reading the text, do I know this? Do I have a guess? The text is written with clues in it. So that, like, there's two ways in to get the answer. It just, it's a lot happening all at once. So you have an anecdote that you give during the Jeopardy, like, can we'll come over and he'll like, you know, get to know the contest thing. Yes. Your anecdote was having you got to touch the iPhone, right?

Yeah. Listeners to this show notice, you had time with the iPhone. I linked to it on six colors yesterday. The piece I wrote for Mac World about, yes, I've touched it. And that briefing where I was supposed to ask probing questions of Apple executives and also simultaneously put my hand on and touch the iPhone for the first time when nobody else was going to touch it for six months. And like my memory of that and so I wrote it down as a possible anecdote is, is that I'm supposed to be doing an interview and I hold this thing in my hand and

I like, uh, I have trouble forming sentences because I'm trying. I mean, really, I'm overwhelmed because this thing is so new and so interesting and I'm supposed to be observing it. This is my only chance. And I'm supposed to be asking questions. Probably, I mean, the right thing. to do and probably what I did was say, can I just play with this for a minute before we talk? But anyway, so I told that story. What were the other anecdotes that you gave as possible? All right. I have, as our YouTube viewers will see here, I have the card.

They give you the card afterward. Ken signs it and gives it to you. So I have the card. That's cute. So this is a card that he has, that has your anecdotes, and he will choose the one that he wants to talk to you about? So you fill out a, you fill out a PDF before you go that is, you suggest anecdotes and then there's a questionnaire that ask you a bunch of leading questions and this is obviously

for people who don't come up with good anecdotes they they have other ways in and then the contestant producers come up with a list of five and they put them on the card and then before the show when you know basically after rehearsal I think they pull you aside one by one and um walk through them with you okay and basically they're like okay tell me this story about the iPhone. And I tell her the story, and she's great. And then she asked me,

again, she's like, what about, and so the others are, has been writing about Apple for over 30 years, hosted a podcast game show based on reading the back

of a trivia card. She had me explain that one because the joke there is like, hey, asking the answer and trying to find a question is harder than it looks, Ken.

I don't know if you know that. The incomparable 800 plus episodes of a podcast that spawned the whole network. She didn't even ask about that one. And the last one is, in college started an online magazine when they basically didn't exist and I told that story. And then she circled the top one about the iPhone.

She says, I think Ken will like that one. And that was it. So the game show, is that the relay 10? Is that the one you're talking about or is that something else? No, there's a thing that I've done like three times on incomparable game show called Trivial Retreat, where it's various games based on reading the back of a trivial pursuit card with the answers. Oh, sorry. And some of it's like make a funny question.

What do you think the real question is? is what category is this in? There's a bunch. It's a, it's a tough one because they are, you know, you're trying to make fun out of a thing where you're really just looking at a list of answers.

So, which is not actually how jeopardy is constructed, but it's theoretically how jeopardy is constructed. Anyway, so they, so the producers circled the first one. It's a do this one. Now it's,

Ken could have chosen something else, but that's what he chose. And we had a little chat. So when the game's over, how did you feel? Felt great. Felt great. Also, so when you,

when you go out, you go out, the green room is in the hallway and the audience gets a chance to take a break between tapings as well. So I went out toward the green room to go back to the green room and Lauren was there. So she hugged me and she said, you did a great job. And then literally members of the audience are, the studio audience are going by and they see me that I was one of the players who just played. And they all were like, you did a great job. Congratulations. Which was very sweet because I finished third. But I feel great. And the reason, and the reason, reason why I felt great even in the moment was, like I said, playing Jamie Ding, who qualified for Jeopardy's Tournament of Champions with his fifth victory against me and Jordan. After seeing Jamie and what he did the first three games, I felt very happy with my performance and Jordan's performance. And what I have said, I said to her and I've said to my family afterward that on that day was we gave him all we got. We were landing punches.

We were making him sweat. We gave him a good game. And he won, but we made him work. And we played well, both of us. I would say, as a viewer of Jeopardy, if you get to Final Jeopardy and all three players are $10,000 or more dollars, that's a good game of Jeopardy.

It felt like, that's both of you would have won on different days with the performance that you put in on who can say um because they were both excellent performances there's some very nice people on the reddit on the jeopardy subreddit who who said yesterday i think i think under other circumstances jason and jordan both would have been winners and it's just a tough opponent and that's very kind of them to say we'll we'll never know there is a second chance tournament and sometimes they do pluck people who get destroyed by a champion and they bring them back. And they look at their stats and maybe they'll judge one of us to be worthy of playing again.

I wouldn't count on it. But you never know. But I am very happy with both of our performances. I mean, you said, you know, Jordan and I are so similar. Gosh, she rang in in front of me so many times. Jamie did too. But like, I knew it and she got it. And I was like, oh, Jordan, you know so much about this stuff.

I mean, we all knew Jamie knew it. But yeah, I just, again, if you had told me going in, bad news, Jason, you're going to finish last. You're going to be in Final Jeopardy, but you're going to finish last. I'd be like, oh, that's kind of a bummer. But, you know, whatever, I'm here for the experience. But after that game, I feel pretty good about the performance. My Corriat was $10,000.

I earned $10,000 and didn't get a daily double. I had the best buzz in. I answered 15 right, and only one. wrong because I decided to get all British about the Segway personal transporter and call it a personal transport. That annoyed me, by the way. I was really annoyed about that because there was another question where Jamie didn't give the full answer and Ken let him say, I don't know what the rules are, but like he said like one name of a person and he wanted the full name, that it really annoyed me because you were so close that he didn't say, you know, there's some literal like, yeah,

there's little rules that I was annoyed. Until I was ruled wrong, I could have said er, transport, and it would have been fine. They leave you with a moment. But I just, I had in that moment, I guess that it was transport instead of transport. It's literally, that's actually another one thing I'm happy about. I only got one wrong. At home, I say a lot of stupid stuff on the couch because I answer questions. I don't know the answer and I'm just guessing.

On stage, I didn't do that. If I didn't know it, I didn't buzz in. I just decided to be very conservative about that. Maybe that was a mistake, but I think in the end it would have just cost me because I wouldn't have known. and that's just how it is. So yeah, it's all about perspective. Given that we were going up against a guy who was about to win his fifth game

and had set records earlier in the week, I am very happy with my performance because I got 15 right, I got a good buzz percentage, I answered a bunch of questions on Jeopardy. The worry was always like, you just do badly. You don't buzz in very much.

You get a bunch of things wrong. You say a bunch of stupid. stuff on TV. You miss some real... And I didn't feel that way. You drop some real clangers and miss some real obvious ones or whatever, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I didn't do that. I was very proud of you watching it. I thought you did an incredible job. And I was really disappointed that someone was doing so well because I just thought you did so well. And I think you should be very proud of yourself. And I think you did such a great job. I think it's so awesome.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I had a good time. That's the other thing. In the end, to back up to what I said before. about like, don't do it for the money.

Like, I was doing it for the life experience. The whole point of the journey was the life experience. It was the friends who made along the way. I mean, I was not, woe to that person who's like, I would really like to earn some money. I would go on game shows. Again, it was like, that was not it.

I just wanted to have a good time and feel good about my performance. And I do. And I met a bunch of, I haven't even said this. I said this on another podcast, but like, being in a room,

also this world this world is kind of dark and if you're somebody who believes in the importance of knowledge and truth it's a tough time to be in a room with 13 people from every walk of life and all over north america all sorts of ages incredible different professions one of the guys aden who is on they put the irish guy on st patrick's day which I loved. Aden is a sewer maintenance worker in Las Vegas. He told a story about how when you're lowered into the sewer and you see the walls glistening, you know that it's bugs, but you just don't pay attention to it. Oh, God.

So my point is such a great group. And these people were smart and interesting and just like, and there is truth in the fact that you were. are a bunch of people put in a high stress situation together. And there is some bonding that happens among that group. Like, those people were awesome. I have nothing bad to say about any of them. It was so great to spend a day with them.

It was very sad when some of them lost and they were visibly upset. And some of them didn't come back after lunch because they just couldn't anymore. Because, you know, everybody reacts to stress. And yeah. Yeah, and everybody, they barely a lifelong dream for some of them. And everybody reacts different to stress. But like, I just, it was a moment. where I was with a whole bunch of very smart people

from all over North America who care about, like, knowledge and facts in an environment that's all about knowledge and facts and reality. And that was really special because it was a special little zone where that mattered in our world. And so it was a great experience, and that's why I went into it was for the experience.

It's been fun since I taped it. I've gotten to enjoy the Jeopardy part as we've approached Tape Day. going into it, I had trepidation, right? I was trying to enjoy it, but I also had to, I wanted to do well, right? Coming out of it, I felt, I did well. I didn't win, but I did well. And I just got to enjoy the ride.

And, you know, that was great. That has, I finally got that full enjoyment out of it this last month. And in the week leading up to and being able to talk and pop it into the Jeopardy subreddit to give details about the week since I was an eyewitness to it. I got to like talk about that a little bit. My knowledge of Jeopardy ends tonight. I don't know what happens tonight because I was in the audience, but I don't know after that. Although I know who I'm rooting for in the tournament of champions.

I am Jamie Ding all the way now. I want to lose to a legend. Yeah. If I'm going to lose, I want to lose to a legend. But, yeah, so great experience. And that was what I was going for, right? You know, great item on my life list to say that I did it. And I feel like I held my head up high and in other circumstances, would it have been great to win?

it's sure. I'll leave you with this. I asked Elliot Kalin from the Flop House for advice. He was on and got a really bad board and lost. And I said, do you have any advice for me as a Jeopardy player? And he said, yeah, don't face a returning 15-day Jeopardy Champion. And after I was done, I emailed Elliot and I was like, well, about that. But great experience. Fantastic. But is it a problem now that forever, Dan Moran, can hold over you? that he won. Is this an issue? Dan and, well, how many Jeopardy champions do I know? Because it's Dan and Glenn and my friend Jeff Duncan.

They all were multi-day champions. It's okay. They have a champions text thread now that you're not allowed in. Probably that I'm not going to get in. But I would say, I would say, like they say, when you show up for the show, getting on the show is the biggest accomplishment. Everything else is a bonus. And I think if you, I mean,

sure Dan is very happy that that he's got that over me. I think he was rooting for me, but I think that that's a good thing. Like, of course. I also, though, think that Dan and Glenn both were like, yeah, that guy was a really tough guy. Got to play.

I'm glad I didn't have to play. I mean, I talked to Dan about it. It's very much the, I'm, uh, you know, he, there was a, a recurring champion who got beat. And then Dan beat the person who beat that person. And it's like, that's the luck of the draw. Some of it is luck. I'm happy with my scores. I wish I had won. But I'm happy to give Dan and Glenn the two-day champion. I will just remain forever a Jeopardy producer or a Jeopardy player. And remember, everybody loses on Jeopardy eventually. I just got out of the way. This episode is brought to you by The Pets Table. You know your dog deserves better than Kibble, but with so many options, it's hard to know where the pet's table comes in. Personalized dog food from the team behind HelloFresh. They all

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That's the Petstable.com with the code upgrade 55. Our thanks to the Pets Table for their support of this show and all of Relay. So we are planning basically from now until the end of April a whole series of coverage around Apple's 50th anniversary. We're both pretty excited about some of the stuff that we've got planned. But we're starting it today with a special interview. Jason, do you want to talk about this? Yeah, I got to talk to David Pogue, whose book I reviewed for the Wall Street Journal, and he was surprised by that. And I just wanted to talk to him about his book, Apple, the first 50 years, which just came out is available everywhere.

And I go way back with David because he wrote for Macworld before I worked there and then when I worked there. And he wrote some stories for me and all of that. And so we got the opportunity. He's been making the rounds. He was just on the talk show. He's going to be on Mac Break Weekly. He's getting around. He's doing press to.

He was. I feel like we went to some places that other podcasts may be. didn't go with him. And it was a great conversation. So here it is. David, thank you so much for being here. How weird. We go back a long way. I mean, I was, I was going to say, so I reviewed your book for the Wall Street Journal. And we were saying before we got started, like, did they ask about disclaiming prior relationship? And it's like, I did tell them that I edited, you wrote a many feature stories for me, included as a young features editor. You wrote about the Palm Pilot. Are you actually older than me?

Are you a senior editor qualified? I am. I guess I could join, I could live in my mom's 55 plus community as of last year. So how old are you? 55. You're 55? I am.

You are my editor and I was older than you. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. No, you were Mr. Backpage columnist in Macworld at that point. I was talking to Andy and Ico about this and you,

and he was like, yeah, I took over when David left for the New York Times. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's right. I saw that Mac Break Weekly podcast. That was a great. That's right. I'm going to listen to that segment every time I ever get depressed because you three guys were like, oh, you was such a good guy. Yeah, right. And then we were so happy when you, when you got the, so you worked at the New York Times and, and you do, you've done like a bunch of PBS Nova and CBS morning, many books along the way, missing manuals. This is, this is not Apple the missing manual,

though. It is Apple the first 50 years. And one of the things that struck me while I was reading it. As I said before, we started on the beach in Hawaii because I got to sign this review right before I went on vacation. And your book is very long, David. Fifty years deserves length, I guess. It's not like a short history. Before I cut it down to 600 pages. Did they come to you and say, we can't make books this large? That's not possible. There was a crisis moment at Simon & Schuster when in last, last summer, where there's like, you're going to have to cut a third. Oh, my God. Now, it turns out they were wrong about that.

They had, they assumed, they knew there was 350 color illustrations, but they assumed that there would be no text wrap around some of them. So it actually turned out to be much, I didn't have to cut nearly as much. You saved a little bit there. But I will say this. I will say this. And only to you, only to this podcast, do not tell anyone in the audiobook version of, this book, which I recorded myself over 12 days, the result is 23 and a half hours long.

And about 20 hours in, I left an Easter egg. Okay. So it says, if you're still listening, send an email to this custom address, and I will send you a PDF of the outtakes. Nice. Very nice. You say 23 and a half hours. And my first thought is, what, David, you couldn't go for the full 24?

I know. My day with David and Apple. I didn't know. So one of the things that struck me while I was reading it in Hawaii and that I put in my review is the fact that so much that we get about tech is about products and people. It's these big egos and these big characters, including many who worked at Apple, and it's the products as they come out. And you know that as well as anybody, that those are the two sort of paths. of this. Did you go in to this book thinking this is this is a biography of the company? Because that's how it felt to me is like we don't see that very often where this is this is not about Steve Jobs.

And it's not about the iPod. It is a biography of this 50 year old, which means that we're both older, 50 year old company. Is that sort of what you were thinking? It is very much a biography. But I I thought that most of the existing books, which were written by business journalists, right, focused almost exclusively, including Walter Isaacson's book, focused almost exclusively on the scandal, the people, the illegitimate daughters, the adoption, blah, blah, blah, blah. And to me, this book was going to be like severance. You know, everything that happens after you leave the workplace, I don't care about. I want to know about the products.

I wanted this to be a lot of origin stories. How did they come up with X? And what were the products that didn't cross the finish line? And what were the cultural effects of the product? So, of course, there is the usual, you know, Steve Jobs battled with Scully and some of that stuff. But the focus is not corporate backstabbing and who's jockeying to be the new CEO. If I had one critique of your critique, you were absolutely right in your Wall Street Journal article that they did give me exclusive access to all the current

executive team and they had been media trained to the Hilt, not to say anything scandalous. There was a PR person in the room for all of these interviews and they said we will retain the right to strike things from the record. But in all those interviews, four entire days of our block interviews at Apple Park. They only struck one thing. And that was when someone said, when I met Steve Jobs and he told me that he wanted to make the company, a consumer electronics company, I said, what the fuck are you smoking? And that was probably John Rubin Stein.

And all they cared about was the F word. They wanted me to take the F word. Yeah, that's fair. But anyway. That's fair. But what I did get out of it was the origin story. stuff that I wanted, you know, the making of face ID, the Apple Watch stuff. I mean, I had never read that for a year, they walked, walked around with little iPod Nanos, the little square one

with a screen. That all the fans were making us watches, right? Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. So they walked around with Velcroed Apple Nanos, iPod Nanos on the wrist while they were trying to work out what the Apple Watch is going to be. So, yeah, I found value in the in the stuff they did tell me. But you're right. You're not going to find, you know, John Ternis naked in a hot tub.

Right. Like, there's going to be a wild, maybe, maybe not. Maybe Apple is a different company now. But my thought was like, there's probably a wild story

to be told about the invention of the Apple Watch. And those people still work at Apple and they're not going to tell that story for another 20 years. And that's, I mean, as I'm, so it is a sweeping book.

And one of the things that I noticed in the grand sweep of it is, early on there are lots of stories because those stories have been told and told again and there are other books that have been written about them and then as you move toward the present obviously just because of time there are fewer of them and so when you get in the last portion of the book

yeah those people still work at Apple in large part and so I could feel maybe it's me because I've been inside the Apple PR spin cycle as well but I could tell that these are things people are saying with a PR handler in the room I think it's amazing. I have to say, I think it's amazing that they cooperated with you, right? Because they, I was surprised when I saw, not that you did a bunch of interviews, but you did a bunch of interviews with Apple employees, which means that this is not an authorized biography or anything, but Apple cooperated with you.

And up to the point where you have a full Tim Cook interview that was posted on Sunday morning's YouTube channel, right? So how did that, did you expect that? Or did you ask sort of hoping, but not expecting them. to participate. The latter. I was really, I was just sick to my stomach because I had lots of source material for everything until the last 15 years.

And they're all still there. I mean, Apple executives stay for decades. They won't leave. I was just talking to Greg Josweck and Phil Schiller, both of whom I had conversations with at Macworld in the 90s, right? And they're still there. Still there.

They don't leave. Yeah. So I just, I pitched them on the book and they, you know, they said, you know, we don't really let current employees talk to journalists. I'm like, I know, but think of this as a like a 50-year biography, a retrospective. It's going to be, and I said, you know, this isn't a backstabbing. Like one of those Apple books I read, the subtitle, literally was inside the scheming and backstabbing. of America's biggest.

Yeah. I have that book. It's a pretty good book, but that's what the angle is for that. Also, and there's one, there's like a jobs biography that's called Icon,

but you can read it as I. Con. And I'm like, what are you doing? Okay, so they, I also get the sense, because they've mentioned this a couple times,

and Tim Cook mentioned it in his interview with you. Is it possible that your queries about this made them realize they were going to have to come up with a strategy for the 50th anniversary? I mean, who knows? knows, but I think yes.

Because you were in advance, right? Because you're writing a book. So you're well in advance. But it must have been a red flag like, oh, that's next year. Oh, no. Right. What are we going to do? Well, that was part of the answer is we don't look backward.

We look forward as a company. That's why we're not going to help you. And that's why we're not. Sure. It sounded like they weren't going to do it. And they did confirm that there would not be a book. So there was that. So, yeah, it was just six months of back and forth and haranguing.

I sent them a sample chapter so they could get a taste of the tone and I don't know why they changed their mind but in the end they finally said, okay, we're going to set you up with some interviews and we will get you in touch with our archivists. That's great. So anything you need,

so there are some, to me, incredible photos in the book of, you know, original documents and ancient ads and user manuals and these Like if I ask you, could you describe the first CEO, Mike Scott? Could you tell me what he looked like? Oh, my God. No one knows.

I would think of the old Houston Astros pitcher. That's who I'd think of, Mike Scott. Is it the same guy? It was not the same guy. Scotty, they called him. And how about this? He was one of four people who died during the, or developed dementia during the writing of the book. He died last fall.

Does anybody know that Apple's first CEO just died? Was there a press release? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. That happens. It's funny. I was listening to John Gruber's interview a few months ago with the guy wrote the Apple and China book,

really good book. I did a little sidebar in the Wall Street Journal where they're like, how about other books? And I was like, well, that one is, I feel like at this point, the definitive Tim Cook era book because that's so much of what Tim is about. Anyway, they were having the same conversation, right, which is, you learn something for a book and the deadlines are so long. And you're like, surely someone else will notice this.

And he said that in several cases, no one did. And so he got to break news in a book, which is very hard to do. So I like because who else is scrutinizing at that level, right? David, like you were scrutinizing things that all the rest of us are writing our Apple at 50 stuff like this month. And you were living there last year. So you got to, I do think you were the red flag. You were the canary in the coal mine where they realized there's going to be enormous media interest here.

And we need to have a strategy of what we're going to do in 2026 because people are going to keep on talking about this. And that maybe you were the test case or maybe you were just the flag. I'm glad that they work with you and that they opened up. So I don't know if you know this or remember this, but when the Mac turned 20, I interviewed Steve Jobs. It's the only one-on-one interview I ever had with Steve Jobs. It lasted about three minutes. He didn't want to be there. It was a phone interview.

and the ground rules were you can't ask about future products because we'll never talk about it and you can't talk about the past. I was like, well, what are we left with at that point? It was the most perfuner. We printed every word he said in Macworld

because he said very little. But that was his attitude, right? Which was next, next thing. And Apple University, which they have built to kind of keep the culture alive, that's one of the things they teach, right, is focus on what's next. So this is a big gear shift for them to even remotely deal with the past. It is. And as you probably know from, you know, German's amazing leak column in Bloomberg, just three weeks ago, Tim Cook announced to the company, not publicly,

but internally that we're going to do some stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And my guess is that it's, you know, videos and podcasts, that kind of thing. Yeah, and cooperating with you in your book, which is great. What do you think? So one of the things that I've been pondering, especially in the framing of your book as a biography, obviously, you know, anybody who's been thinking about Apple a long time has these thoughts, which is, and you talk to Waz, it's in the Sunday morning piece, actually, which I really liked.

Of what remains, like, are there aspects of what Apple was in the 70s when it was this tiny operation that emerged from the homebrew computing scene in an era of Silicon Valley where there were still fruit trees everywhere. Does something even now remain that was sort of part of the culture in the early days? Is there a trace of that left, a through line? I think an incredible amount. Astonishing for a 50-year-old company that's had six CEOs. I mean, absolutely amazing. As I'm fond of repeating, Samsung started out as a dried fish vendor,

and Nokia was originally a paper mill. Apple was founded to take... Nintendo did playing cards, right? Yeah. Whatever. But Apple, its mission statement, has never changed. It's take advanced complex technology and make it pretty and simple enough

for everyday people to use. That's still the mission. And I mean, there's also, as you know from the book, there's a whole chapter just on the through lines that have not changed that are all things that jobs started, you know, the obsession with secrecy, the small teams on tight deadlines working in isolation. They, I don't hear this talked about a lot, but Apple makes a lot of acquisitions of other companies, but other companies, but their little tiny, targeted no-nameo companies, you know, meta and Microsoft and Google, they buy three, four billion dollar, you know, they buy WhatsApp, you know, they buy Instagram. But Apple has never done that except for the beats acquisition.

Rounded corners, round wrecks, every window, every key, every power brick, every laptop watch, even though polishing cloth for $19, it has rounded corners. That was a Steve Jobs thing. Let's see. Oh, the debate culture was really interesting. So many people told me how much ranting and screaming goes on in those Apple meetings. But the rule is you got to do all your screaming within the confines of these planning meetings. And once the doors open and you leave, you're agreed.

And no one's allowed to say, I used to, I told you, you know. Right. So it's why even even Cook said that in the interview last week. So throw down in the meeting, get it all out. It's going to lead to the best result. Once we agree on the results, we're all aligned and we walk out of the meeting agreed. You said it better than I did. That's exactly right.

That's a really, I mean, Jobs, like I think, I feel like Steve Jobs simultaneously can be understated and overstated when it comes to Apple's history. Because like, he gets so much of the attention. And obviously there's so many, you talk to so many people who are involved in key things that happened in the history of Apple. And yet at the same time, I think a lot of us said like Apple Park was Apple was Steve Jobs's like final product in some ways. I do think that Steve Jobs thought that Apple was his product. And when he came back and saw how it had drifted, and I want to talk to you about the time at the interregnum, but when he saw how it drifted, that's one of the reasons I think Apple University happened is he was like, How do I stop culture drift so that the culture we can build here will not drift and sustain?

It will sustain and not fall apart. And sometimes that's for the better. And I would argue sometimes it's for the worst because conditions change and the culture is trying to fight against change. But I do think that that provides a bit of a through line because Steve created a culture. Then it drifted. He came back and he built like reinforcing material to try and keep that culture going. And you can see even today that he's largely done that. Which is funny because the big story that Tim Cook tells about Jobs' dying advice,

don't ask what Steve would do, just do what's right. Right. Every thought in their heads every day is what would Steve do. Don't do what's right. Do what is or do what's right as defined in Apple's corporate culture, which was laid down by Steve Jobs, by the way. I do think there, as I watch, you know, we talk about this week on week on upgrade. Apple behaving from a position of strength that it never had really ever under Steve Jobs

that there comes a time where you wonder are parts of your playbook out of date because you're now the big, you're the bully and not the underdog anymore and I wonder if we have new leadership at Apple in the next few years if one of the things they're going to need to do is go back to that touchstone of do what's right

and are all of the precepts of the corporate culture are still, do they fit when you're no longer the plucky underdog that Apple was for the first 25, 30 years of existence? I don't know. But it's an interesting question. The other, so the other through line that I thought is, I do think Jobs's obsession with the computer for the rest of us was there from the very beginning. And that's what you said about packaging technology in a way that people could understand it. Even the, those stories that you've got about the original Apple 2 and trying to find out somebody who would make a plastic case and trying to get the paint right and they didn't, but they eventually did. But that whole putting a computer in a

plastic case, like, seems real obvious, but the previous ones, like the Apple ones you see are all like screwed down to wooden frames and stuff. Or that wasn't there like a cabinet maker who made a wood box to put your Apple in? I interviewed him. Yeah. Like what, it's a great story, but also you're Like, what, that was what it was like. And so that moment when Steve Jobs hears from the computer store that they'd like them pre-assembled, please. And the idea that maybe you could put it in a case. And then so they go to the West Coast Computer Fair with this beige Apple II in a case, the productizing of it. Like, we talk about the Mac being the computer for the rest of us, but you can see it in Steve Jobs's brain with the Apple II.

Like, we need to make this a product. People will buy who are not going to install their own chips. and screw it to a wood frame. We just want it to be a product people can buy. And that through line does follow all the way to the iPod and the iPad. But also, I think you're bringing up a bigger point that people totally miss and totally take for granted, which is that this is one of the ways jobs is underrated. He decided that computers should be attractive. I mean, it's a tool.

You don't care what your wrench looks like. You don't care what your power drill. looks like when he came along, computers were those. They were metal boxes with sharp corners and lights and switches and ugly and they had vents and fans. And it was he who decided, why can't these be beautiful? It just hadn't occurred to anyone before. And then the magical thing, which I think also is kind of a through line, it's not,

it's not with Was anymore, right? Was was there in the early days and then he left and has not really been back since. but the through line remains, which is you have to couple that with some technical brilliance and that magical partnership that got it started, right? Because, Waz, I think, is there anybody who would deny that he's a genius? Like, there are so many stories in the early parts of your book about his invention of the Apple I and the Apple II, where he really did invent it. And even when he didn't invent it, like the disc drive, which really put the Apple II over the top, there was a mechanism out there.

And they're like, we don't want the whole thing. We just want part of it. And Waz will take care of the rest. And like that differentiated the Apple too is that Was was just, he was able to make Steve Jobs's dream kind of real by being able to do these incredible things with the low level technology of hardware and software, right? Yeah. And there's a through line of jobs there too that unfortunately didn't occur to me until after the book was done. But Jobs's greatest eras three times were when he glommed on to a mentor or glommed on to a talent. a collaborator.

And, like, he became, you know, soulmates and best friends with Waz. He became soulmates and best friends with Scully. I mean, those guys were, like, super bonded. And Johnny I. At conference, they would share a hotel room on conference. Yeah. And then it was Johnny Ive, you know. Yeah.

And I think, and they made each other better because they filled each other's weaknesses, right? Like, that was the idea there. And Jobs and Scully, maybe they were a little too closely aligned because Jobs turned out to be a CEO himself. and he thought he was and he wasn't ready, but like, I can see it. And with, with Waz and with Johnny,

I'd never really thought about that, too. You're absolutely right, that there's this alignment of, of, they've got these kind of interleaved skill sets where I would argue after Steve died, Johnny kind of was unmoored a little bit

because he didn't have Steve there to say, no, not that, Johnny. Who's going to say no to Sir Johnny Ive? Well, Steve Jobs would. But Johnny Ive would also push on Steve. And the,

and the Steve's in the early days, like what a, what a great combination. The other thing I thought about reading your book that I thought was taking me back to the 70s, right? I was a kid in the 70s. I remember first time I saw a personal computer. You know, in that area, everybody was like, you gotta show kids computers because computers are the future. And they weren't wrong. It was very vague, but like they weren't wrong. Computers are the future. We are surrounded by computers now. But a through line that I hadn't considered before is the idea that in the early days of computers, everybody had their own

thing. They were all incompatible with each other. You built the hardware, you built the software. Maybe they all ran basic, but they ran different versions of basic. Maybe they had some of the same chips, but you know, you couldn't actually run the same programs on them. They had to be ported to the different systems. And what happened

in the 80s is everything else got monolithic. All the TRS 80s, the Commodore pets and 64s, all of that stuff kind of fell away and all that was left was Wintel, right? All of that was left was DOS and Windows and Intel

IBM PC compatible computers, except for Apple, right? Like, Apple is still doing today what they did in 1978, which is what everybody did in 1978. Make the hardware and the software as an integrated unit. It's not compatible with anything

else. Too bad. It's a single product. And I hadn't thought about that before that, like, the rest of the industry used to do that, and then it all burned away in the PC era, except for Apple. Yeah. I mean, Jobs was freakishly right about so many things. I mean, he really could see around corners. And we can talk about that. There's a thousand examples. But he also made some whopping mistakes.

He made some huge wrong bets. Oh, yeah. And one of them was, you know, the iPod. He said, over my dead body, will we make that for Windows? That's going to be a Mac at a time when the Mac had three percent market share. He said, this is going to be for Mac only. and, you know, a year later, his, you know, Schiller and the other guys, Rubenstein persuaded him. No, no, you got to do it. And then the second was with the iPhone. Again, the first iPhone was an okay seller for the first year when all you had was 16 apps that Apple gave you.

And that was it. There were no games. There was no banking. Certainly was no Uber, DoorDash, Tinder, Airbnb, none of those social media. And then the following year, they opened it up to an app store. over Jobs' great unhappiness. And so one of the through lines of Apple is closed systems from the very beginning

of the two Steve's arguing about whether or not the Apple two should have slots. And Jobs was like, okay, two, modem and printer, but that's it. And Was was like, no, no, eight, man. And Was, who is, like, truly the gentlest, sweetest teddy bear of a person who never wanted to start a company, didn't care about making money,

literally gave away all his riches from Apple. Gave it away. He said, for the one and only time that I know in their history, if you want a two-slot computer, go find yourself another collaborator. And Jobs had to capitulate. But the jury is kind of out on the closed versus open, right?

Jobs's argument was that if we open it up to app developers, it'll be overrun by porn and hate and crud and stuff that doesn't work well. Now, Google was much more open with the Android store, and that's kind of what they got. And, you know, Microsoft with its Windows that was, you know, Jerry rigged to work on every different hardware company's computers. So Apple won with its closed policies, right? It's the dominant tech company in terms of hardware.

But Android won globally with the market share of the Android phone. So no one's really sure who was right on that issue. Yeah. And we've seen like Google, it's a great example where Google has, and they've run in some legal issues because of it, after they launched the play store, they have tried to crank up the control a little bit because they realized they wanted a little more control and they wanted to make some money. And the epic lawsuit, one of the reasons that Epic won that and they settled ultimately was because Google, Google set out the door that they were open and then they tried to close the door. Whereas Apple never said that they were open. And that has been a harder, harder case to make legally than Google. But you could see Google looking over at Apple and saying, actually, that's kind of not a bad idea to be more like Apple.

But I think, yeah, in the end, Jobs just, jobs thinks, jobs always thought about the product and what the consumers wanted. So it would be the end product. It would be, I want to keep it simple. I want to have that control. And you do see that. It is obviously successful with them. I would say there's that story about how they make more profit in the smartphone industry than anybody, even though they don't have the market share. I think that is really illustrative of what their goal was is not everybody's going to want to spend more money on what Apple considers the better and more refined product.

That's just not reality. And Apple's kind of okay with it as long as they can stay alive and they make so much money that they're doing fine. They're okay. This episode is brought to you by Fondera, powered by NerdWallet. Running a small business is tough and when it's time to get a loan, it can feel impossible to find a lender you can trust. Big banks say no, and then the internet's full of sketchy offers of sky high rates and fine print you can barely read.

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Another thing I wanted to ask you about, because you cover these distinct eras, and it is funny they have. I suppose, again, a biography of a human being, we all have our distinct eras too, probably, right? Not just Taylor Swift. All of us had those distinct eras. But I wanted to talk to you about the interregnum when Jobs was gone. Because I mentioned this in my review. It's so much history just gets flattened. And you can flatten the interregnum to it was a disaster.

And they almost died. and then Jobs came back and saved the day. But that covers like almost, it's like more than a decade. And what you and I entered in the Mac world in those earlyish days, that's after Jobs was gone. Jobs was kicked out so quickly from the Mac.

And like he didn't want, you talk about slots, he didn't want there to be a Mac with slots, but they did the two and the two C and all of those systems and the SE. And they like, there were a bunch of great things in the early days of the Mac that Jobs was gone and probably would have fought against.

And then you throw in the Powerbook, which was such a huge success and defined what a laptop would be. And that's long gone. Jobs has long gone by that point. And then even the Newton is, I think, I had not really thought about this until I read your book. From the perspective of 26,

it's really easy to look at the Newton and say, well, they weren't wrong. they were just way too early and too ambitious to do that product when they did. Did your thoughts, when you looked at it closely change about what the role of that interregnum was in Apple's history? A hundred percent. And as you know, at the end of the last chapter of that, there's an outline of all these things that Apple accomplished and did during the dark years. Again, as you say, the Powerbook sold a billion dollars worth of laptops the first year and redefined. the layout of laptops forever.

Quick time. They developed quick time. They had speech recognition. As you say, the Newton led to developments that paid off on the iPhone. There was a lot that happened during that time. You must know who Chris Espinoza is. Of course. I bet Chris.

The employee number of what seven? Yeah. He's the only person who has been at Apple for all. 50 years and he's still there. Yeah. And which made it awkward when I saw it help from him. Fortunately, the man has a steel trap mind. He's a great storyteller and he has so much detail about everything, everything in his head.

And he was just a god. He just opened himself up to questions day or night, technical things. What exactly happened with the Apple 3? Why did it overheat? Or everyone keeps talking about the Bub campus. What's the Bub? You know, he would make maps for me. He would do diagrams.

The guy, the book opens, by the way, as you know, with a two-page, right inside the cover, two-page color, full-bleed map of Cupertino. And what's astonishing talk about through lines, this company in 50 years has not moved more than two miles from its very first office. It's really amazing. but that was because I kept asking Chris Espinosa, like, where was the city center building? And so finally, he just took a screenshot of Apple Maps and with his stylus or his finger, he just put arrows.

And I thought, that should be a nice version of that in the book. But anyway, he is the one when I interviewed him on the record who made this point. And he rattled off all these great developments that happened during the dark times. I mean, yeah, they lost a ton of great talent. And the market share sank and they got into this ludicrous business of making a different set of Macs for each retailer. Right. Like the Perform a 6115 CD was for Sears. Yeah.

And the Performa 45B was for Tart, you know. And I mean, it turned into fiefdoms and infighting and duplication. At one point, they had 12 different ad campaigns going on, some of which contradicted each other. and of course, I think my favorite story in the entire book is the day two Apple lawyers showed up in trademark court to sue each other.

That is a good story. But you're right. Like, yeah, it just, the context collapse always surprises me that they were in bed. Look, I started at Mac user in 1993, I want to say. And like, it was starting to spin out of

control. The Newton was introduced that fall. Scully was fired, you know, the next year. It was starting to spin out. But like, the reason I was there is because I fell in love with the Mac in 1990, 1989. So there was a good era. But yeah, it did decay. And I think that went into Steve Jobs as thinking about like, how do I prevent that from happening again? And I get that. But also, I'm struck by when Steve came back he said he expected it to just be all bozos and he found that there were

a lot of people, this is why my site is called Six Colors he said I found a lot of people still bleed six colors here. It turns out and they believe in Apple and he was so they didn't like they let a lot of people go and they made a lot of changes but I think it's also

unfair to say that Apple had completely fallen apart and Steve and his next people came in and just threw everything over. There were a lot of people there who got what Apple was, even Johnny Ive, right, who got what Apple was, but were trapped in this dysfunctional company that needed new leadership and they got it. But like, I didn't expect to come out of this defending the Scully era at all, but your book points out, like the power book that I, that everybody fell in love with. That's not a Steve Jobs product at all. No. In fact, so that's, the power book story is a great one because it indicates a brilliant breakthrough that could not occur today. So I found this guy, John Crackauer, who was not a designer. He was a systems integrator. His job was to fit the different components onto the circuit board, right? And he worked on the Mac portable, the 16 pound disaster of a first transfer. I got one back here. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, really? That's a disaster. And he was on a press tour in New York, and it was getting terrible reviews, and he was really bummed because he'd worked so hard on it. And they had these tagboard brochures, like 9 by 12 color brochures for the portable, with a photograph, almost life size of the portable. And he took a pair of scissors, and he cut apart the components, the keyboard, the trackball, the screen, and he started rearranging them.

and he's like, dude, if you pushed the keyboard away from the front lip of the laptop, which all laptops were at the time, why? Because people were used to typewriters. The original laptops were meant to resemble typewriters with the keys right up front. If we push that up against the screen, A, you get palm rest space. B, you can put the track pad in the middle of the palm rests where your thumbs can be on them even while you're typing. C, now you can move the stuff that you're using. the stuff that used to be up against the screen inside, the hard drive, the battery, the

heavy stuff, you can move that to the front edge under your palms, which changes the center of gravity so that when it's on your knees and you're typing, it doesn't want to flip off. Exactly. So he, when he got back to Apple, he built a mockup of this. It had no guts. It was wired to a actual Macintosh off camera. And he had 45 different friends come in after hours when Apple was dark and the lights were out and everyone had gone home, he'd sneak them in to do impromptu test sessions to see how big should the trackball be, where should the enter key be, and so on. And finally, he presented this to Robert Bruner, who was the predecessor of Johnny Ive. Everybody thought it looked really weird because they were used to what laptops looked like at the time.

And a lot of the executives were like, oh, God, that's awful. But Bruner immediately got it. And he's like, this is going to be our new laptop. One guy working by himself, not just unauthorized in secret. And he said, that would never happen today because of security and badges and cameras. And like the designers do the design now. But that's also the through line of the people and having brilliant people. And it's not just like Steve Jobs came up with an idea.

You get brilliant people who get what Apple is about and think like what Apple would do. and that's what happened there, right? He's obviously emulating Apple's sense in his mind in that moment. And I do think, I mean, you say that would never happen now. I do think having things emerge from technical people is an important part of the process. So there needs to be, that some would argue that one of the issues that Apple has had recently with design stuff is that they became a little too disconnected from the reality of the other part of banking a product. And that good designers maybe wouldn't do that, but you can risk becoming disconteckel.

connected and listening to somebody who understands how this stuff goes together is maybe a good idea. Not not with to the exception of everything else, but but that's a great example. That's a great story. I say in my review that the sweet spot in your book is, I mean, it's in the middle. It's the iPhone and the iPod a little bit, especially the iPhone, because I feel like the beauty of that, not only is it incredibly important, I think historically, but the beauty of that is enough people are willing to tell stories about the iPhone now and it's not as as heavily trodden

as some of the books that were written about the early days of the Mac. It is right in that moment where you've got some people at Apple and people who've recently left Apple and you can tell those stories. And the one that I pulled out that was my favorite is about the keyboard. And obviously, Ken Kishenda wrote a whole book about it, but like you have the receipts of these terrible, keyboard designs that if people think that the iPhone keyboard is bad now, you should have seen

what they tried first. But Jobs is like, we got to do a software keyboard. We cannot have a Blackberry for this. And put it on all of these smart people to try and figure it out. And in your book, you get to see all the tries that did not go so well. It's just I laughed so hard when I read that line in your review. I think you called it horrifying. I mean, like it's a key, but it's got many letters on it and you're just supposed to figure it out. Just, and I mean, part of the mystery of Apple, and I think Steve Jobs really liked the black box and the mystery of it,

but I think part of the brilliance of it is seeing that really smart people had to work really hard to try to figure this out, and it didn't just magically appear. Steve loved the magic appearance. But like, in reality, they had those knock down, drag out arguments and a bunch of bakeoffs and a bunch of all of this stuff about something that, like, if they didn't get that keyboard right, the whole product really would have failed. And you detail like they did not get it right for a long time.

No, they didn't. I mean, I can see some of those designs working. One of those layouts proposed had only six keys. And each key was a triangle. And there's a key, a letter at the top. Now hear me out. Yeah, yeah. I get it.

A letter at each corner. And you would just swipe your finger in the direction of the letter that you wanted. Or if you just hit it dead center, you'd get the top letter. I mean, I could see people. Like, remember what people learn to do with flip phones, right? They learned that T9 system. Oh, yeah. I still remember palm graffiti symbols.

Oh, yeah. Where you could write, but you had to write weird shapes that were like, kind of like part of the letter. But that was pretty successful. I mean, people dug it. Yes. I agree. Some of those that look terrible might have actually been fine. But I think it's really interesting that where we got to, it was a really, it's interesting to think.

So the keys with lots of letters on them, the idea there was that they would function like our current iPhone keyboard does in the sense that you would just type and as you typed, it would figure out what word you almost certainly meant. But there was a moment where there was a leap where it's like, well, if we do,

why don't we just do a keyboard and underneath do that, autocorrect kind of thing? And that was the insight of like, let's make people feel comfortable with this as a keyboard. But what's happening underneath is not quite, It's not a one to one because they're changing the sizes of the targets as they intuit what word you're trying to spell.

And that was the brilliant penchenda like like break. Like originally he had a dictionary in there. So whatever word you would start it would type, it would compare what you'd done against the dictionary and put the word in. That fell apart when it was a word that wasn't in the dictionary like someone's last name. Right. So that's eventually they wound up with this idea that the keys are actually invisibly to you changing sizes. So if I type T-I-M, you know, the next letter is not going to be a Q, right? It's going to be an E for time or a B for timber.

So the E and B keys, invisibly do you get giant? And Ken said, Ken told me that it's not just one size. Like the probability determines the size of the key that's going to get. So it lets you be sloppy as you type. And that's what we have to do. And that was a great insight. I have a couple more things before we go, before I let you go. one of them

I jumped over the iPod but I want to come back to the iPod and I mentioned this this is one of those they're like we need an anecdote in there in the review

what's a good anecdote and I said it's got to be when they go to Japan for like a goodwill tour I mean it's it's really not important at all

and they and they get to it's is it Tishipa and and Taship the Tiship the Tiship executive says, oh, well, I've got you here. We made this little hard drive and we don't know what to do with it. Nobody wants it. And I mean, I'm sure it was a little more than this, but like in the movie in my head, John Rubinstein and Jeff Williams, right? Look at each other and are like,

we'll, we'll buy them all. We'll lock you up for as many as you can make. And you said it's a hard drive the size of an Oreo, which is such a great. That's what I quote up. I'm like, that is so good. Like, that's the iPod. They literally saw this hard drive and said, we can do something with this. And then went back to Cupertino and said, music player out of this thing, a thousand songs in your pocket. And in months, they made the iPod. But what a, what an example of just not only being ready to spring in a moment like that and

think about what you might do, but just luck at the same time, too, that the hard drive maker had made this amazing thing. And it's like, won't somebody in industry please apply our. technology to something because we can make it, but we don't know what it's for. And Apple said, we'll buy them all. We want them all. But see, this is the thing. Even in the comments of, I did a story this Sunday, March 8th for CBS Sunday morning

about Apple's first 50 years. And the comments in the YouTube were all like, Steve Jobs wasn't an engineer. He just coasted on the back of better people. Like, you are missing. The importance of Steve Jobs is. taste. No, he didn't invent any of this stuff. No, they weren't his ideas. But what he was,

this is unbelievable tastemaker. He knew right away if this thing had potential. He knew right away how it could be made better. And that's a classic, and I would argue that's just as important as being an engineer. Because you've got to make a product in the end, right?

You've got to make a product. And that's always been the case. When we were writing for Macworld, that was the era. That was like peak Wintel era and a new standard or thing would emerge from a, from a factory somewhere and what you would see is every PC would add it. And no one knew what it was for.

No one had any idea what it was for, but we all had to add it because it's the new thing. And we can sell new computers with this new whatever it is. And Apple would be like, no. And then like three, and people write articles like, why is Apple not ahead on the widget B revolution? Widget B is new. Why do they not do it? And then three years later, Apple's like, hey, we got widget B now and we're doing this thing. And everybody's like, oh, you could use it for that.

Great. And then they would pick it up. And that was always their game. It's like they were thinking product. Like, what user need does this serve in a way that a lot of the tech industry just completely lost the plot about? They were just like about integrating new technology in and then whatever. And that's Apple to me. Yeah, that's right.

I mean, it's that that jobs thing about you say no to a thousand things before you say, before you say to yes to one thing. And if that hard drive comes across your desk, you're like, this is interesting. We'll take it. Yeah. We'll buy them. That's right. And it was Rubenstein who said, we're going to do a new version every year, which they

maintain to this day with the iPhones and everything, which was brutal on the employees. I mean, to this day, they're thinking two years out for what the next thing is going to be. But it meant that they, Rubenstein says in the book that he was sure that Sony, the master of consumer audio, the Walkman and all that, was going to have their version that Christmas. And then the ride would be over. But Sony did not come out with one that Christmas or the next Christmas or the next Christmas. And then the fourth Christmas, they came out with an MP3 player that could not play MP3s. Yeah, it only did their weird DRM. That's right.

And so Apple, like, got away with murder because of, because of Sony's incompetence. Yeah. And just one more thought on jobs as seeing around the corner. The most amazing thing to me was they were selling, for the first time in Apple history, hundreds of millions of something. And it was the iPod Mini. It was that little one. Everybody loved that thing.

It came in colors. And up came this idea for the next version, which would be the iPod Nano. It would be thinner and flatter, but it wouldn't hold as much. It would cost the same, but it wouldn't hold as much. And Jobs told his team, we're going to kill the Mini and put all our chips on the Nano. It was insane. No executive should kill your most. popular product at the peak of its popularity, hundreds of millions, and he's going to cancel it

for the sake of a completely untried thing with worse specs. And he had his way. They shut down the mini and the nano multiplied its success tenfold. It became an even bigger. Like, how does he know? That's the definitive business school case, you know, is that story about you know, just leave the old product behind, go to the new, but you're right, nobody else would make that decision.

Tim Cook wouldn't make that decision, I would argue, right? Tim Cook is big and keeping the old things around at a lower price. But he knew, also, like,

you went from a spinning hard drive to flash memory there. So even though it was worse, it didn't, you didn't risk when you're running, right? That was a big issue is they could buffer a little bit.

There were technical reasons to do it. And also you could fit it in a jeans pocket, the little tiny jeans pocket. The little coin pocket. I'm sure he loved, I'm sure that was a directive as it needs to fit in this pocket.

Okay. Wrapping up, you've spent an enormous amount of brainpower surveying 50 years of Apple and talking to all these people, including some amazing interviews with people who are no longer with us, as you said. My friend, you posted that, like you've interviewed Bill Atkinson

before he passed for the project and that several people had died since you interviewed that, which led my friend Randy, who I went to college with, to say to you on Twitter or Blue Sky, what did you say to them? How did you kill them? I know.

Amazing. What did I say that made them die? Yeah, right. Like a shocking Pogue statement that killed Apple veterans. So having had that you've got the historical perspective, probably in your mind more than you ever have before. What does it make you think about where Apple is and where it's going? Man, it's a tough call. Clearly, they don't do a new revolutionary platform every three years, like the gold.

years of jobs and I've. So that's the typical, you know, the typical critique is they, you know, Tim Cook is all about money. He just, you know, it's all about services with 75% profit margin. And I miss the old days. I miss the old days too. It was exciting. But remember, it also came out during a critical conflagration of two forces. There was miniaturization coming from Asian components. and processor power was going up and the wave of people who felt intimidated by technology that began when computers came along had ebbed. So young people were coming along

and they were comfortable with technology for the first time and so that made possible the iPad, the iMac, the iPhone. I'm not sure that there is still low-hanging fruit like that to be plucked. No other company has come up since Steve Jobs died with something like that. I mean, may be that that era is over and that we shouldn't blame Tim Cook because nobody could do it. Of course, there's a parallel universe where Steve Jobs is still alive and he kept up that pace of new invention. We'll never know.

But there are two different ways of looking at it. You know, it's perfectly plausible that the world is moving into software and services, which is exactly what Tim Cook has done. And he's quadrupled the earnings and the stock and the revenues. Yeah, that's what people don't know is, and I say this, especially as we think about like Tim Cook's long tenure now as CEO, the company he took over was so much smaller. The company that Steve Jobs operated was so much smaller in revenue in the number of products that they're selling. And yeah, there is a, is it that Tim Cook said, aha, I will flip all these switches and make our company enormous? Probably not, right? Like, instead it was more, he is, I think, the right person for that time because he's the operations guy.

but ultimately what he took over was a company that was poised to grow at a massive rate. And how do you deal with that? And, and, you know, he has managed them through it. But, but that is the question is like, do, it seems unlikely that they're going to keep growing at anything resembling that rate. So what is the next move? And how will they react to, to what AI does in terms of distorting how we use devices? Like, not necessarily replacing them, but changing them. And how do you respond to that?

And whether that's Tim Cook or a future CEO, it is interesting to think about that. I would imagine the through lines that you've identified are going to be a touchstone for them of like these are, you know, Apple. Apple seems to want to be Apple, period, right? They want to be Apple and do, they don't ask what Steve Jobs would do. They ask what Apple would do, right? Yeah, I agree. And I think a big question hovering over this conversation is that. the AI question. Obviously, they're way late, but as I said in the book, people forget,

Apple does not like to release products that sort of work. Like, would we really be happy with something that is as accurate as chat GPT, meaning 80% of the time it's right? We don't know, supposedly soon they're going to unveil this new AI-based Siri that knows about your files and your messages and your email with complete privacy. I mean, that demo in 2024 made me my hands clammy with desire work, where she says, what time do I need to pick up my mom? And it knew that you meant her flight home for Thanksgiving. It knew what flight it was from a text message.

It consulted with Flight Aware to look at the flight. It consulted with Google Maps to see the traffic and just said 120. Right? That's the product dream. They just couldn't build it. And I think what happened is that they felt. so worried about being behind that they promised things that they couldn't

actually deliver. But you could see even in their failure that they were trying to deliver something that was the complete product that made sense that fulfilled a consumer desire. They just, the state of AI, they couldn't. I mean, it sounds like even now that they've switched

horses to Gemini, they still are not satisfied that it's good enough. And I think that's really interesting. Yeah. But the point I was going for is that that could be the next post services, post-cook thing. If you had AI that really worked, I mean, it could be in the, it could be like the movie her.

It could be like in your earpiece. It could be in your watch. It could be in the pendant, whatever. And the other point I was trying to make in the book that has totally crept up on people is that Apple has become a medical device company. Right. I mean, this thing on your wrist can now detect diseases in your brain and your heart and your lung, like, how does it do that? That is such advanced technology, detecting sleep apnea,

high blood pressure. There's a rumor there. It'll be detecting snoring soon and buzz you awake. That's really smart. But they've been working on glucose monitoring 15 years if they can master that. That's really important stuff that's already saving thousands of lives. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure that they're thinking about all of that in through that lens, right? It is through that lens of how we take technology and make it something that people will find useful. That comes from Steve Jobs and now comes from Apple University and is in their culture. David, it was great to catch up with you and so great to read your book. I did read it as an assignment, but it didn't feel like homework.

I swear, it was a lot of fun. And you covered, like I said, I love that there's a biography of Apple. And I'll say this, this is the highest compliment I think I can pay you, which is, as I was reading the book, I thought to myself, this is the definitive book about Apple. Like there are lots of books about Apple, but, and I could feel you writing, like you, you were sweating the details in some of those things where you could have said,

you know, there's a whole book about this. And you did not because you wanted your book to be the one people could point to and say, is there a definitive history of Apple? And, you know, yeah, there are hundreds of books about Apple. But if you have to point at one, I think this is it. And good for you for putting in all of that, lots of legwork.

I could see it. As a writer, I'd like, oh my God, he did so much work to make this book happen. But it does let me point at it and say, this is the one. If you want to know about the history of Apple, this is it. And maybe, like my review says, maybe in 20 years, we'll get some good, you know, dirt on some of the things that have happened in the last 15. But, you know, for now, like, this is the one that I tell you. If you want to know the history of Apple, there's, you know, you got it here, the whole sweep of it 50 years. So, so thank you for writing it. If you say so, editor, then it was all worth it. That's right. Now, get me 1,200 words about the Palm Pilot by next Tuesday. That's taking me back.

Not in a good way. I'm so happy that we had David on the show. Obviously, the Apple at 50 book, I think, is actually quite an important part of the overall thing that we've got going on right now. I agree. It's a definitive story. And, you know, we mentioned us on the show before, like the Unpressing. access that he got is clearly an important thing here. So I'm really happy that as part of, and beginning really, our coverage, we got to have David on the show. So thank you to you for setting

that up, Jason, and for doing the interview. Yeah, absolutely. I, you know, I didn't expect David Polk to be one of the first people to drop an F-bomb on upgrade, but that's what happens. It happens. It happens. It happens. It's going to happen. So I think that's it for this week's episode, bumper episode. I hope that you've enjoyed it. If you like to send us in, your questions, your feedback, your follow-up, if I've asked upgrade questions, we'll try and get to some next week. Always go to upgradefidback.com. I'd like to thank our members to support us of Upgrade Plus. This week on Upgrade Plus, we're going to talk about Jason's watch party for his episode of Jeopardy and what it was like to watch the show with friends and family. And if he was horrified about himself or not,

we'll find out. If you would like to see the YouTube version, the video version of this show, just go to YouTube search for upgrade podcast we're always there for you I want to thank our sponsors for this week's episode Fondera the Pets Table

Sentry and Delete Me but most of all thank you for listening we'll be back next week until then say goodbye to Snow What is Locke?