28: Moving Offices

28: Moving Offices
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This week we discuss what’s happening with our friends in the Midwest who are getting hit by a bomb cyclone that caused massive flooding. We have some new marketing material for the podcast, we discuss the new stickers a little bit and follow up with the status of Kyle’s DIY project as well as looming deadlines, scope creep, and interviews all sucking up time.

Our primary topic this week is discussing seating and rearranging people in the office. We discuss the issues, why it matters, and why they might upset some people.

In the news, we discuss Tesla’s new Model Y, an iOS trackpad mode to help with your text entry, Google Stadia a new gaming platform just announced by Google, and the second generation AirPods that were also just announced.

Show Notes

Full Transcript

[Music]

Welcome everybody to the Coffee and Code Cast, a weekly live stream tech podcast where we talk about neither coffee or code.

I'm Kyle Johnson.

And I'm Mike Sheehan today on the Cast.

In our follow-up and show news, we're going to take a check-in with Kyle's Do-It-Yourself project to get an update.

I see some cool thing on the table over here.

Want to hear more about that.

And we're going to-- Part 2 for our main topic today, we talked about last week,

last week, reorganizing your restructuring your tech teams.

And today we're going to continue on talking about office

culture and how you--

how do you what?

How you-- the space, your workspace.

That's what I was trying to say.

I haven't had any beers yet, I promise.

How to piss people off.

Yeah.

And in the news, we got quite a bit of news

that came out the last few days.

I'm going to try to talk about all my things

so that we can push the Tesla news to the end or kick it off.

We have more Tesla news?

Oh, fuck, dude.

We'll see if we have time for it.

We'll see if we have time for it.

All right, so that's kind of what we got coming up today.

First, I just want to,

oh, shout outs the right way,

but just kind of acknowledge our good friends

in the Midwest in the Silicon Prairie.

You know, they've been hit by some pretty awful weather.

They had that bomb vortex storm that blew through.

- Was it bomb cyclone?

- Bomb cyclone, yeah.

- Cyclone bomb?

- That sounds right, yeah.

- Yeah.

- Which really, I brought in just some nasty, nasty weather

And then following that, they had tons of--

well, the weather was so bad, it caused tons of flooding.

So things heated up really rapidly,

but the ground was frozen.

And so levees have broken.

I think now something like over a dozen levees broke,

causing massive, massive flooding.

I think it's even worse than in 2011

when they had been hit.

88 cities and 74 counties impacted.

So this is mainly because they had kind of a massive amount

of snow coming really, really rapidly, right?

Yeah, my snow, yeah.

Suddenly, like, and then a sudden heat up.

Yeah.

I melted all that snow and ice that they had accrued

within like weeks.

Like I kept seeing notices from people

that I know in the area.

And they were just like, can it stop snowing?

Can it stop snowing?

Can it stop snowing?

And sure enough, yeah, it did.

It did.

And it turned around so quickly that the ground,

you know, it's still the frost is so thick

that the water had nowhere to go.

And so yeah, it's caused just mass destruction.

I saw something a figure as high as a billion dollars

for the agriculture community alone, like the impact.

And I've seen just some horrific photos of, you know,

farms that are just obliterated and even a story today

that volunteer pilots are bringing planes in

to try to get people out of areas

where there aren't any roads anymore.

- Wow, I think I even saw that,

did I see and hear that Fremont

was one of the cities affected?

Huge, yeah, hugely affected.

It's like there isn't a Fremont.

I don't know.

I haven't seen a whole lot, but Jason,

I was talking to my brother the other day

and he had told me that, you know,

even Dodge Street, when you get out there near Valley,

is from 204th on, I think it's closed.

So you can't even get out.

And Dodge is like, I mean, that's like,

next thing to a highway out there.

And that's a major through fare going East-West.

Yeah.

Yeah, can't access that, can't get to Fremont.

So yeah, it's kind of, it's crazy.

Yeah, I worked in the Fremont area.

I actually worked in Blair, but we served at the Fremont area

when I lived back in the Midwest.

And I definitely spent a lot of time in Fremont,

so I'm very familiar with the area.

And that's, yeah, super sad.

I've seen some photos on Facebook where, yeah, it's just,

it's almost hard to comprehend

because all you see is just infinite water.

You don't even really know the scale

of what you're looking at,

just 'cause how massive the amount of water is

that's covering the ground.

Someone described it saying it's like an ocean.

Yeah, it looks like that.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, we're thinking of you guys,

and hopefully everyone's staying safe

and getting out of the way.

But we've got listeners out there

and so we just wanted to acknowledge that

top of the show, so hang in there.

- So looking prairie.

- Yeah, let us hear from you.

If you're listening, let us know how you're doing

and reach out.

- From some solemn and somber news

to something a little more exciting,

we've got our first coffee and code cast.

I don't know, do you wanna call it merch?

Marketing material?

I don't know what you'd call it.

- It's marketing material.

It's not really merch, maybe.

We could sell them for like a dollar, a nickel.

Yeah, there you go.

It's only for a nickel.

That'd be merch.

You gotta pay the postage.

Yeah.

We got coffee code cast stickers.

They're really cool.

They're the new logo that our friend, Yurne, did.

We got a really nice kind of die cut sticker.

So like the space needle kind of sticks out of the top.

Yeah, the top of the needle pops out the top of the sticker

and it's got a cool little slant on it.

And yeah, what is it?

The Pike Market signage.

Yeah, exactly.

Very cool.

Yeah, with our name on it.

It's got a nice little, like, I don't know, sunrise, sunset type background on it.

Yeah.

It's really great.

Sounds like you've already started to graffiti the office with these things.

Well, I handed them out to some folks.

What they do with them is their own prerogative.

Well, I'll tell you what.

If they end up on the elevator doors, it's not my fault.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, here's the problem that I have with it.

That's fine.

You're handing them out to people.

But I'm getting blown up.

I'm getting accused.

They're saying, "Oh, did you put the sticker on my desk or did you do this?"

I said, "Whoa, hey, I think that wasn't me."

They're like, "Sure."

I couldn't imagine it was Kyle that did that.

Well, I'm going to pimp the show a little bit.

I mean, somebody's got to get the word out there.

I'll help a little bit.

I'll do a little bit.

We'll get out there.

I think when we had a good plan, we're

going to go down to South Lake Union, Amazon's campus,

and have a couple margaritas, and then just plaster them

in every bathroom within a mile radius over there.

I like this plan.

And that's our recruiting.

That's our marketing strategy.

Yeah.

But hey, we've got a couple of hundred of these things.

I mean, if you really want one, reach out to us.

Maybe we can figure out a way to get one to you.

Yeah, we can drop one in the snail mail.

Yeah.

And tell your friends about it.

Stick it to your laptop.

Put them on here.

Help us get the word out.

Get some listeners.

They look very cool.

Yeah.

The feedback on those have been really spectacular so far.

Nice work.

And I've already been asked about more merch.

Somebody asked me when we were getting the coffee

code cast tease made up.

Oh, that's cool.

We could do that.

I think we have to-- what Lester had given me a ton of details

on who he goes for the printing.

So we've got a few sites and I think the min-order

is something like 12.

You can do one offs, but then you're

going to pay a lot of money.

It'll be like 30, 40 bucks a shirt.

So maybe we'll just get a small assortment.

If you're interested in a shirt, let us know.

And then maybe we can get together an order.

Yeah.

Yeah, that sounds awesome.

Wow, we're getting some swag.

That's pretty neat.

We had a lot of people listen to the episode last week,

and you'll don't rip my nuts off episode was a hit.

(laughing)

- I hope people appreciated the title on that one.

Right away, what in the hell is this?

- They could have scared some people away too,

I don't know.

- It could have.

- Yeah, but it was fun reminiscing the old college days

and shenanigans that I got into back then, so.

It was fun.

- Good, and a lot of good feedback.

- Good feedback, people enjoyed that,

and in fact, my mom even gave me a hard time.

She said, I hope you can appreciate that Friday night,

I'm learning how to download Spotify on my phone

so I can listen to this podcast of yours.

(laughing)

- Yes, gotta get her up to date on the newest technologies.

- Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Well, she's got it now, so hopefully she can tune in again

and check it out.

- Yeah, I know my mom listens too.

I don't know if she's forced my dad into it yet.

- Yeah, well, one at a time, man.

- Yeah.

- One at a time, we'll get there.

So what the hell's going on in here?

You talked about this a little bit, your DIY project.

Once you remind everyone what you're doing here,

and tell me what the hell I'm looking at.

Yeah, so I just wanted to do a quick update

on this little do-it-yourself project

that I've been talking about, or I've talked once about.

What it amounts to is kind of a controller for Sonos.

And the way that that might work is in this case,

you might take kind of what, if you can think of photo cubes,

you might have on your desk, right?

It has like a photo on each side of the cube.

Okay, yeah.

That type of thing.

And basically you put that onto a RFID reader and it picks up the particular ID for that

particular side and is able to match that to say a playlist or an artist or something

like that on Spotify or something in your Sonos and kick off Sonos playing whatever

that is.

So let's say for instance on your side of your cube you might have the playlist that

we play prior to our show.

that face down onto the RFID reader, it picks up the ID, sends it to some software, somewhere

in that software you have a matching of that ID to the playlist URL or whatever you need

for the API. That fires off a request to Sonos to say, "Hey, play this particular playlist

on this particular device in a way it goes." That's pretty cool. And as soon as you pick

it up, it knows that it's been removed, so instant stop. Oh, I see. So it's not just

just a queuing mechanism. It's like it needs to be on there when you pick it up.

That's right. Yeah. It's very interesting.

Yeah. So sitting in front of me and I'll take a picture of it and put it on the, uh, in

the show notes here as I have a breadboard. And if you're not familiar with what a breadboard

is, it's basically just a way to do kind of electrical engineering, I guess.

Yeah. Without having to solder, you can just get little jumper pins, right?

Yep. Exactly. Plug and play kind of a thing.

So on here, there's a, there's a board and Arduino board, which I think you're for, which

I think you're familiar with. Yeah, yeah. So we've got an Arduino board here that has a Wi-Fi connection

Which is able to send and receive requests

We've got a power supply over here that gives a I can do 3.3 volt or 5 volt, which is important because the Arduino is 3

The RFID reader is 5 so I have to have two different flavors of power here

And then I'll obviously here's the RFID reader

So you would set things here in this particular spot to have it pick up

and then away it would go.

So currently, this is the only portion of it

that I don't have working.

So power's working, this guy's working,

I have a piece of software running on my Synology at home.

So another piece of this whole thing

is you have to have an API running all the time

that the Arduino can talk to.

And on my Synology, I set up Docker.

So I have a Docker image that has the Sonos node API running

all the time.

If it dies, it'll just instantly restart it.

So this can now talk to that API at my house,

on my Synology.

So I have a lot of it set up.

So the next thing that I have to do is figure out

just how to make the IDs come from the RFID reader

over to the Arduino.

So that's my next piece.

And that's what these are.

So these are stickers, RFID stickers.

So these would go on the inside of the cube

that this thing would pick up.

As soon as you set it down,

bam, it would send a signal to the Arduino.

Away we go.

So this was really cool.

this probably in about a day, a little less than a day to get all this working.

It's an impressive setup and I'll say this, I have worked with Arduino and NetDuino and

Raspberry Pi. That's a small processor that chip there. It's probably the, what would you

compare it to? It's like probably the size of a match box? Maybe or like a couple, yeah,

maybe like the length and width of like a couple nickels stacked, you know, end to end type of thing.

It's not very big. It's tiny and it's super thin too. It's not a thick thing at all. Right.

And it's in its cape. I mean, it's not like a super powerful processor, but it's capable

It has a lot of functionality built into it, right? Right, right

Oh

Rain we did hear from rain. He says he wants a shirt. Oh

Well, we can he's gonna have to come on the show first

I mean that's been offered, but he's not taking us up on that. Oh

He said he wanted a free lunch, too. Ah

Freelunce now we got a now we got to pay the people that are coming on the show and the show and then once we have a

plan for the show then he wants a t-shirt and he'll come on and do it. Maybe if he

helps me set up this RFID reader I can help him out. Yeah that sounds like a

good dream. Yeah. Oh good man. I mean I already gave him a sticker what else does

he want? I don't know you know Rainn's always Jones in for one you know

something he's a good negotiator I was what I'd say so he's always trying to

get something out of the deal. There you go. He had a he did negotiate something

pretty cool today that I could give him credit for is that we got a couple new

guys that came in on Monday.

Well, yeah, a few new guys came in.

Anyway, he said, hey, you know, we

should really take these guys out to lunch on Q-Dubbs' dime.

And I was like, well, that's a good idea.

Let me see what we can do.

So sure enough, may have had a little crew over at Colin's pub

for lunch today.

Oh, I wonder I couldn't get ahold of anybody.

Compliments of the HQ.

Yeah?

Brian whipped out the old AmEx, sir?

I wanted some miles, so I paid for it.

Oh, yeah, and then expense it.

No reimbursement.

No big deal.

So that's the update on the DIY project here.

I'm still kind of working through it.

Like I said, I need to figure out the RFID piece,

but it's been easier.

It's very overwhelming to look at.

Like if you've never done any of this kind of stuff,

like just to kind of get into it, it's very overwhelming.

Yep.

And hard, like just like anything I guess you get into

that's technical, it's difficult to understand

at the onset, but starting to get my head wrapped around it

And it's easier than it may appear, at least to begin with.

I was just going to give you a hard time, because when you were describing the process,

I thought to myself, what happened to just press and play on the old tape player, man?

You're describing like 47 different processes.

Well, the Synology running through my docker's got to be running, then it'll auto restart.

And I've got 5 volts and 3.3 to power this RFID, and the sticker has to be here.

It's actually a really cool project.

just kind of funny like how we've advanced in a such a small time.

Well, two things.

Number one, I'm trying to get back to the point of like, you know, the record

player so I can just set something down and it plays, right?

Yeah.

So there's that.

And then number two, that maybe just gives you more appreciation for the

record player itself because how much technology did they have to have in the

record player to get the record to play?

Someone say, I know, I know.

It's just a difference.

You're just shifting it.

I get it.

I get it.

Yeah.

Um, you know, we get more people commenting here on teams than we do on Slack.

I'm gonna have to keep my teams open too. He goes he goes lunch first. Yep lunch first. He said he'll

then he'll

Come on the show. Oh, maybe we need to have a

Coffee code cast channel in the teams. We could yeah, we could do that. Yeah, I could do that too

Why not why not?

Yeah, dude, that's sweet how we do it. Oh that we're doing pretty good actually

Anything else you want to talk about before we jump into shit like what are you been up to man?

How's your week going?

I'm ready for it to be over.

Yeah, really?

It's been a busy one. It's been good.

There's been a lot of stuff going on. We've made a lot of progress on our projects.

But it's been a stressful week, to say the least.

Yeah, yeah, I know. You've had a long week.

And you've had some pop issues and some other things like that, unfortunately, that you're dealing with too.

Yeah, those aren't the worst of the issues.

Most of the issues are project related. Just trying to get things scoped, get things moving in a timely fashion.

Oh, because you've had some scope adjustments recently.

A few.

As I understood it mildly, right?

Yeah.

And an imposing deadline that originally was kind of a nice

to hit, and now it's a must hit.

So yeah, there's a few things in the fire.

Yeah.

Well, not surprised.

That's kind of how it goes sometimes.

Well, we have a lot of moving things right now, don't we?

I mean, we've got a lot of existing projects

that are on their way across the finish line,

But a lot of new things in motion since the acquisition,

things like compliance and I don't know,

that's the big one, compliance.

- Yep, and that's where a lot of those stressors

are coming from is getting scope around those projects

and getting those done in conjunction with things

that we already had planned that would have taken us

right up to the deadline as it is,

or even over the deadline, so.

- Yeah, that's a huge one and I would say too,

I mean, we've had a big hiring run.

So what, we've been engaged in quite a few interviews

this quarter. Really, since Jan 1, it was interview, I don't know, interview hell. I mean, it's

just like revolving door of people coming through. And now that they're coming on board,

it's very exciting, but it's even another slowdown because you got to get these guys

up to speed and make sure they're set up and know how the systems work before you can get

some productivity out of them. So it's going to take a little time to be fair, though.

I think when I tell my wife that how quickly we hired these folks, you know, how many interviews

we did as opposed to how many hires we had, she's kind of amazed.

Their hiring percentage is far less than ours is.

Is it really?

Yeah.

They'll interview 20 people before they make a hire.

Wow.

So she was like, holy crap, how did you fill that many heads that quickly?

So for us, although it felt painful compared to other companies, I think we did really,

really well.

But yes, there was some lost predictivity there for sure.

Yeah, it's good to hear that.

I think that's encouraging.

It is one of those things though, because we are so lean.

It feels like it just cuts into everything.

It's hard to find a chunk of time where you can be productive getting work done.

Well, when you have what a quarter of your engineering staff in the interview that does

cut productivity a little bit.

That is one, that is kind of a funny thing that's probably not typical.

I don't think that's something everybody does.

I remember coming into one of these things and it was like a fucking, I thought we were

in the Trump boardroom for a minute there, you know, like on the apprentice.

There was like, every chair was full of developers and this poor guy comes in the end.

He's just like, "Holy shit, man, what's going on over here?"

It's a panel interview, but at least you don't have to whiteboard.

That's true.

We don't do the whiteboarding, which a lot of people have appreciated that.

And I think we've still done a really fantastic job of vetting folks through the coding exercise

that we give them beforehand and then just the dialogue that we have on site, too.

So I know we talked about that before, but it did go really well.

And now that these guys are starting to sit down here and come in, it's been a very good

process. Yeah, already getting production. It's great. So we're moving. Yeah, exactly.

Let's move. All right.

Okay, last week, we had a good conversation about reorganizing your tech

team, restructuring, reorganizing. And I thought it would be fun to because of

this is what's cool about the cast. Like we sometimes we plan ahead for things

couple of weeks in advance. Sometimes we just decide, Hey, we want to do

something today, let's just do it.

And that was kind of the situation here,

is that this morning I came into the office

and there was a bit of a frenzy going on

because everybody, quite a few people on our floor,

were running out of space with all these new hires.

And so we had to reshuffle where people sit.

And so our IT group and our DBAs moved upstairs.

And so that freed up quite a few rooms

and caused a lot of chaos.

And so I won't have to talk about that,

Because I think as much as it's just kind of laughable,

like, oh, just pick a desk and shut up,

like it really is one of the biggest points of contention,

I would say, for the staff is when we move.

- Nobody wants to move.

- Nobody wants to move.

People are never happy about where they're going,

which is kind of funny because that always happens.

And then when it's time to move again,

it's like nobody wants to move again.

They're like, well, I fucking love this spot,

you know, that I hated three months ago.

Now it's great and I have to move again.

And what the fuck, man?

- It's more of a disruption.

It's like you have to pick up all your gear.

You have to take everything out of your drawers.

You have to move to a different place

that you aren't used to walking to every day, right?

I have that problem.

You know, I moved to the office here

and I think for a month after that,

I'd go to the bathroom and come back

and walk right on past it and then be like,

"Oh shit, come back over here."

- I'm not there anymore.

Which by the way, you have a lovely office.

I call it the Zen Room.

It kind of reminds me of like when I did some therapy

in college, like kind of one of those spaces.

I just want to go sit down and have you ask me questions about my childhood.

I don't want to ask any questions, but that's what I was shooting for.

I wanted it to be a good place that people wanted to come in and chit chat like I don't

want it to be cold and not inviting.

That's kind of the whole point.

Yeah, it's very warm and cozy and you have some nice furniture in there.

But that is important to a lot of people.

My setup and whether it's a cube or a desk, it's kind of a huge deal.

Like this morning, for example, I was kind of telling you,

people were not happy for various reasons.

Some people had really nice desks,

and now they're going to little cubes,

and they're kind of in the open,

where they had a private space with a couple people,

and now there's gonna be a dozen people in this open space.

- Well, and we've talked about this a little bit before.

You know, like you, we have some rooms here

that are pretty small.

You know, you might put two or three people in them,

and then we have other rooms

where maybe you're gonna have six, seven, maybe.

And it gets noisy.

Like it's hard to work in those kind of environments.

So you have enough people that even if,

even with headphones, it's almost overwhelming

unless you have something that maybe is noise canceling

or something like that.

- Right.

- The other thing you have to realize too is like

these people are spending what?

Half their life sitting in this position at this place.

So like it should be something that they're comfortable.

Like we joke here about that like it's not important

or you know, it's kind of silly that people

are making such a big deal out of it.

But you know what, like you spend a ton of your life

sitting in that exact spot.

- Well, I would agree with that.

And I would say that it is a big deal

and that we should put more emphasis on it.

We don't put enough emphasis on it here.

And I think most companies probably don't either.

Most companies would just say,

oh, grab a chair and make me money.

And I would say that I agree with you

because I know that I was already very curious

about where I was going to and not very happy at first

thinking, oh, I'm not gonna have,

I have a better setup now than I'm gonna have.

And I don't wanna do that.

I want it to be as good or better.

And we've talked about it before.

It seems like sometimes it can be differential treatment.

You've got executives that have glamorous suites.

You've got $100,000 renovations and things going on,

certain parts of the company, the office,

and then it's like, oh, shut up and just grab a cardboard box

and figure it out.

And so I do think that it's something

that companies that want to be competitive need to consider.

They need to have the ability to say, look, you pick out your desk

or you pick out your chair.

We're going to give you a budget or an allowance.

You can have what you want, just like you

can get computer equipment.

Let the guy have his damn setup, right?

I mean, for-- maybe you only say it's $1,000.

I don't know what it is, but you can do a lot with that.

It's interesting they say that too,

because I think the typical startup life, anyway, these days,

is now that you have the desks-- much like I have.

It's the sit stand desk, but they have them in a very open floor plan configuration.

Oftentimes, kind of, I guess, back to back, you might think of, I guess, is the best way to describe it.

And then there'll be rows of them, you know, just rows and rows and rows and rows that way.

So it's very open. You're, you're, there's no walls of any kind anywhere,

not even like the little, you know, short cue balls or anything like that.

No.

Just next, you're right next to the next person.

So there's no privacy whatsoever in a lot of these new startups.

startups and that's pretty typical. So I think it's something that as a tech

industry we have to kind of get used to. That's just kind of the way it works. But

I am interested to know like what is your feeling on like here we

can't really do an open floor plan because we have a lot of very structured

kind of rooms that we utilize. So there's not just one big massive floor space

like a lot of these companies. But do you prefer kind of an open floor plan with

like maybe kind of like the short cube walls or would you rather be in a room

where you have some separation.

- I'd rather have my own room.

I mean, I'm joking a little bit, but I would.

I would almost prefer, like, you have a nice size office.

I would be fine if it was something

that was even smaller than that,

that was maybe down the hall instead of having

four or five big rooms, you had eight smaller offices

with a door on each side.

So he had maybe 16.

Oh, that's nice.

Rain did say that your office is very cozy, by the way.

- Oh, well, thank you.

- I didn't spend much time in there.

- No, you need to go in there and check it out

a little bit more.

Maybe if you had a little, you need to have some offering.

Like can you have like a little candy bowl

or like some treats or snacks?

- That's a good idea.

Well, then I'll probably eat them all.

- Well, put them on the small table

so that you have to like turn around to see them.

- All right.

- All right, that's cool.

But no, I would prefer if you just had these little

studio offices for lack of a better word,

but just little mini offices where you could close the door,

have privacy, to take a call.

Right now if I need to take a personal call,

there's not really a lot of room to do that.

got to go in the meeting space, but then somebody comes in there.

And so that's difficult for one.

Um, the other problem is you asked me, do I like cubes versus the, the rooms that we have?

I would probably take the cubes over that because I wouldn't even say cubes.

I would say more of like a open floor plan versus kind of like we have very structured

rooms that it's not an open floor.

Right.

Right.

The problem with the rooms that we have, they aren't acoustically treated and you

don't have any kind of boundary.

And so you can hear a whisper.

And on the flip side of there not being privacy,

the room I'm in, we have remote workers now, right?

So we have a lot of teleconferencing going on,

video conferencing.

And in this room, there's a lot of that going on.

So it's not uncommon to have one or two people on a call,

like on teams with their headset on,

and then maybe another conversation happening

in the big room with the owl.

so it's kind of out loud on speakerphone.

It makes it really difficult to be productive.

I think if people knew how much of a productivity killer

it was, I don't think they would mind spending some money

to make a better space.

- Well, and that's a little bit of a mistake

that the company needs to address too,

is not having smaller rooms for taking calls

or taking online conferences on a one-on-one basis.

So again, using my wife's company as an example,

they just restructured an entire floor,

So they just moved an entire floor.

And in that floor, they have four,

you'd almost think of them as phone boosts,

just bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, right next to each other.

Just wide enough to go sit in, has a desk, has a stool.

You sit in there, you take your call, you leave.

But this company could benefit from something like that,

both for personal calls that have to be taken,

and as well as for teleconference,

which we're gonna do more.

We have, you know, we're owned by a company on the East Coast.

We have a company that we work with overseas.

We have companies in Denver and Sacramento and here.

So I mean, there's going to be more and more

and more of this happening.

It's just a matter of how do we deal with it?

- It is, it's only gonna be a bigger problem.

The project I'm working on now is truly remote,

cross, functional, whatever you want to call it.

I've got half the team is here,

half the team is in Sacramento.

So that was gonna be my ask too,

is for some more equipment to have.

We have the TV in the new room

and I want to get the owl set up

so that we can have our stand ups with everybody

and see each other and that sort of thing.

- Even beyond, you know, whether it's open floor plan

versus individual offices, the other thing

that a lot of people, a lot of engineers specifically

that I know have issues with is having your back

to the door, that's a big, a lot of people

have a lot of struggle with that.

- I hate it.

- You hate it too.

And you're in a particularly bad position

because you even have on the way to and from the bathroom,

the kitchen, whatever, basically leaving,

coming to or from the building,

They walk by a door that has a glass panel,

which they can see basically directly in on you.

So you have it even worse than many people,

but I personally am not of the mindset

that that bothers me all that much.

In fact, I turned mine intentionally,

so I back faced the door.

- You did, I'm so surprised by that.

- It doesn't really bother me.

- I don't have anything to hide.

It's just that I'm one of those,

it's a control thing probably.

I feel safer knowing what's going on.

I wanna see everything.

I wanna be in the back corner of the room,

having a full field of view.

And I don't need to, it's like with a team of mine,

I don't need to see what they're doing.

They can have their monitors, you know,

the opposite direction.

I'm not trying to look or snoop.

I just want to know what's happening.

I want to see everything.

- Yeah, same.

I don't necessarily feel like it's like

people are hiding anything or anything like that.

I think it's totally a, just a, you know,

people don't like to be spooked.

You know, I think of Rain who's apparently listening.

He has this big ass rear view monitor or mirror across the top of this monitor.

It looks bigger than the ones in most cars.

It is, I think.

It's about twice as big.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's almost like, yeah.

I walk in there and it's so funny just looking at it.

I zoom in on that.

It's the first thing I see is him looking at me, looking at the mirror.

So yeah, to me, like I said, it doesn't really bother me.

I have people come up in my office all day and the same guy, Rain,

He'll just stand behind me all creepy like and not say a word and then eventually I'll just be like, "Bleh!

Oh, damn! Oh!"

I don't know. It doesn't really bother me, whatever. If people want to creep on me, that's fine. I don't care.

But yeah, I know it bothers a lot of people, so being able to accommodate that sort of a layout with the rooms that we have is pretty difficult.

Yes.

And especially with the desk situation that we have, because of the desks that we have are built to intentionally kind of hug the walls all the way around.

It's a terrible layout too because these these desks if you're not in a corner

Then you have absolutely zero room for a monitor like the things you're basically kissing the monitor all day long

These these are like counter. They're not even countertop depth

I think they're probably 16 inches maybe 20 inches deep and

On the straightaway and so you just don't have any good space

Yeah, it's a terrible layout and why we keep paying people to come in here and reconfigure the damn cubes is another

thing that just drives me crazy because it's so fucking expensive and they do a

shitty job and it's never the way you want it so several times we've had to

reconfigure it ourselves and it still sucks everybody gets a desk and you can

do it how you want with it is your desk you get one and then you can't bitch

again because you got your desk now go work right and move you can move it on

your own don't have to hire a third-party company to come in and spend

five hours moving it I mean it's fucking insane how much business gets created

around business. How much you were talking about like even just delivering the furniture,

how expensive that can be. Okay, that's insane because like if I'm just a regular consumer

I could probably Amazon prime some cool shit for free. But now it's the business and it's

a commercial address and now there's 20 of them. It's like, oh yeah, it's gonna be 10

grand, man. Yeah, by the way, if you knew if you want to build some furniture for a living,

there's a lot of money to be made that apparently. It's insane. I mean, how many times these guys

I come in here and put it up tear it down put it up tear it down yeah

Tens of thousands of dollars probably more probably a hundred thousands of dollars

I'm sure probably for just for moving some shit around maybe ten hours total of work

Yeah, they bring in 50 guys for a day and then

tear it down and tear it back up

And nobody's happy

They don't want to be there

We don't want them to be here. I

Don't know. I'm going on. I'm ranting now. I'm sorry

It's just I hate the cube things so much

I wish they would all just go away.

I wish the best thing that could happen

is that this building, being an old building,

would-- the old earthquake happens when we're not here,

like on a Saturday morning, something like that.

All the cubes, I get obliterated,

and then we just have to go to another place that

has normal desks.

Moving to the Wells Fargo Tower or something.

Columbia Tower, a more modern building.

Smith Tower.

I mean, the Smith Tower would be fantastic.

I would love that.

I'm sure there's vacancy there.

Columbia Tower would be awesome, too.

we could go to the Columbia Tower Club.

There you go.

And Mike's all about his status, big baller status.

Baller status, dude, it's on the 75th floor.

I mean, who's gonna bitch about that?

Like that's the best view in Seattle.

The space needle doesn't even go that high.

Not even close.

I think that's probably, I don't know,

maybe goes up to the 50th floor.

I have no clue, but that thing's on a hill too.

It's further back than the space needle is.

I digress.

Anything else you wanna talk about with the office culture?

I just, all I would say, I'd make an appeal to

our leadership.

I think that they underestimate how important

it really is to people.

And I think there's a couple things there.

One, like they all have fucking offices anyway,

so I think it's hard to relate.

Like if you got a beautiful office,

you can shut the door or do whatever you wanna do.

Like do you really know what it's like to be

stuffed in a room with six people all day?

And two, we spend a lot of money on a lot of other perks,

But I think this is something that is just always forgotten and just assumed like, well,

nobody cares.

A desk is a desk is a desk.

And I would say that you could actually get a lot more productivity and satisfaction out

of the team if they had a work environment that they felt like they could focus in and

were comfortable in.

Yeah, I would say you're just hit the nail on the head if your environment's comfortable

and something that you want to be in day in and day out, you're going to probably have

a high level of productivity.

Whereas if you're constantly fidgeting with your chair or can't get comfortable because

of like you said, the depth of the desk or the feel of the desk or who knows, there's

a million different possible problems that you could run into.

But think of if all that stuff works for you, then that's one last thing you have to worry

about and one less and you can be more productive.

So bigger budgets for everything for everything, bigger budgets for office and office furniture.

Yeah.

I don't need a look.

I don't need a $1,200 Aaron share to be happy.

I mean, this one right here is probably like 150 bucks.

It's great.

- I don't know, you were looking when you were

in San Francisco, I remember there was a chair

that you were looking at that would hold your monitor.

You could like recline in it.

So you would basically be laying on your back

looking up at the monitor.

And then it would hold your mouse and your keyboard.

So you could basically like sleep in your desk, effectively.

- You could, yeah.

It was a, it looked like a high-tech dentist chair.

And you had to get in and sit down

and you'd be upright like a normal chair would be,

and you'd be looking at the monitor in front of you,

and then there's a few different buttons.

You press one of the buttons,

and all of a sudden the thing tilts back,

and the recliner kicks out,

and yeah, you're kind of in a zero gravity

kind of floating position while you work.

And everybody asked,

like, "Don't you just fall asleep

"in something like that?"

But they did a lot of research on this and said,

"No, actually, you're so relaxed

"that you can focus and get more work done."

I don't know if I really believe that,

but that's what the claim was,

And it was five grand.

Well, it must not have been too compelling

'cause you never pulled the trigger.

Well, that's a lot of money to spend on something like that.

And you don't seem to have trouble pulling the trigger

on expensive things. (laughing)

Yeah, I like to trade up in certain areas.

I really wanted the dentist chair,

but I don't have room for it now anyway.

I don't know where I would put it here.

You can imagine if I brought it here,

like where the hell would I put that thing?

How the hell would you have moved it from San Francisco?

Yeah, it would have cost me probably $5,000

just to move it from there up here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, that's something to look into.

Maybe they're on sale on eBay now.

Maybe people are getting rid of them for something else.

Get a deal.

Yeah.

Well, thanks for humor me there.

I just felt like today it was very fitting with everybody

moving upstairs and with the conversation I had last week.

This would be a good thing to bring up.

And that's all I got to say about that.

What is this?

Oh.

On Slack, Gomer, your buddy.

He said like a coffee machine that'll never get made

Man, I wasn't a good mood until I saw that shit now. You'll spin coffee. What is the spin update?

There's always a spin update and there's always always there's always Tesla news

So there's always a some spin in the update as well. Oh, okay. Yeah, that was good. That was a good segue. Yeah good segue

So they did come out with the March update what it's March 20th. I think it came out a few days ago

They're getting a little sloppy with their delivery updates

They had a lot of information like you can tell how delayed it is by how long the

Responses right like oh here's our update instead of being like shit start shipping next week. No, it's like 19 paragraphs long

Well, here's Jimmy like in Brazil like working on some tooling, you know, and they go into detail and show video

They are very thorough in their updates. So I appreciate that they weren't always that thorough in the beginning there

It's like yeah, we're working on it

but

Probably not going to ship any sooner than the end of the year.

Probably going to happen early 2020.

They are-- I forgot the design.

In manufacturing, you have these different toll gates.

And they've progressed past beta testing or beta 2,

I think, now or something like that.

But there's still a lot of kinks to work out.

So we're, what, two years on from order time?

Oh, no.

I ordered this in 2016.

OK, we're already over that.

Yeah, December of 2016.

It will be probably four years.

No, it would be three years if I get it this December, right?

We should create some more--

not Tesla, sorry.

I love my Tesla news.

We should create some more spin news,

because we do get Google hits searching for a spin coffee

maker.

Are you serious?

Yes.

So there you go.

We should--

Oh, that's funny.

Oh, Siri thinks I'm talking to her.

No, I'm not.

That's serious.

Oh, that's funny.

Well, then we should.

Maybe we can put Tesla on the back burner for a while

and just talk about spin.

- Spin update every week.

- I'll just read it.

Like that would take me 15 minutes in our topic section.

I could just spend that time like reading,

you know, exactly what the update says.

- Sounds riveting.

- It's very exciting.

Lots of videos and photos.

And the promise of one day there might be a coffee maker

that I paid for three years ago.

Well, hopeful it's looking up.

They're gonna get there.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Yeah, I know, I know.

Me too.

I've got a really cool, this is moving on

from the office culture thing.

This is something that you actually just uncovered too

and I have known about it for a little while

but when I found out about it, I was kind of shocked too.

So if you're an iOS user,

for anybody that's an Android user,

stop listening, actually don't.

But did you know that you could,

as let's say if you're texting for instance,

and let's say you've texted a paragraph,

If you click and hold or push and hold on the space bar, you can move the cursor around

as if it's like a mouse pointer, almost.

A precision mouse pointer.

This is brilliant.

This is brilliant.

Whoever came up with this really should get the Apple Innovation Award if they fucking

have one there or they need one if they don't have one.

This is life-changing.

How many times am I in the middle of a text message and I realize I misspell?

A lot of times I would just send the text misspelled because I don't want to try to

spend time to go back and fix it.

was very difficult to go back and I'd be pecking on the thing to be able to

touch in the right spot for it to put the cursor in that location was

incredibly difficult. Yeah, it would suck. And it didn't seem like it was accurate.

No, not accurate at all. Didn't do a damn thing hardly ever landed where it was

supposed to. So yeah, like figuring this out after they've had it for a few

years, I think, right?

I don't know when this came in. It'd be interesting to know what version of

iOS is actually shipped with or maybe it's been there all along. I have no idea.

Yeah, I have no idea. But I just found out about it a few weeks ago and I it's

It's transformed my texting experience,

typing, like putting notes in the iPhone,

anything I do with text input.

It's changed the whole thing, game changer.

- The crazy thing too is you're not alone.

Like it's not like something that like tons of people

know about I don't think because I didn't know about it.

Christina didn't know about it.

Dana didn't know about it.

You know, like so many people that I've like

shown this to and they're like, are you fucking serious?

- Yeah.

Yeah, so because it's so important,

you gotta say it again, but you gotta do what?

You hold, press and hold the space bar.

Anywhere that you're doing text entry,

you press and hold on the space bar,

it should kind of gray out, I think, all the text.

- All the characters on the keyboard disappear

and you just see the buttons, but nothing there,

and then you can, yeah, move your finger

like it's a touchpad, left, right,

and some apps up and down, depending on if it's a paragraph,

and boom, it's just a little mouse cursor thing.

- It gives you a precision point

to put your mouse cursor wherever you want, so.

- It's brilliant.

- Yeah, just wanted to bring that up,

'cause like I said, something that none of us knew

even in tech. So clearly, it's not a super well known thing. So

maybe other people would get some

That's something they talk about at the keynote. You know,

it's like, they're like, Oh, yeah, we have the new a nine chip

has 85,000 million more transistors in the last who

fucking cares, dude? But you say, look, iPhone users, get out

your phone, like, try pecking on some characters, we've got a

fix for you press and hold Holy shit, look at that.

Maybe Steve did that, you know, at WDW DC 2005.

He probably did.

And one more thing.

Yeah, right?

People are excited.

They're like, wow, we're going to have a bigger screen.

He goes, oh, yeah, we figured out the space bar thing.

So yeah, that was big news to me.

Big news to you.

Let's move on to some other news.

Rain says it's been out for a while.

Of course it is.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Let me tell you what hasn't been out for a while, Rain.

But just no more why.

[LAUGHTER]

Zinger.

Yeah, buddy.

Oh man, I'm gonna crack another one for you.

Enjoy, there you go.

There you go.

He's all hopped up on a mountain view over here.

I love it.

I thought that was a good one.

That was great.

What's happening now with the Model Y?

What the hell is this shit?

Last week, Tesla had another big announcement,

which was very a good day for me

because that means more Tesla news on the show here.

The Model Y was announced.

So the Model Y is the new Tesla SUV

that they've brought out.

It looks almost exactly identical to the Model 3,

just a little bit larger in proportions.

And the pricing is much more in line with what the Model 3 is.

So the only other SUV Tesla currently has is the Model

X, which has got the big--

what do they call those-- doors.

The DeLorean doors.

DeLorean doors, yeah.

And it's crazy expensive.

I want to say that car is like $150 grand or something

like that.

Whereas the Tesla Model Y starts at, I believe, $39,000.

So very affordable family car.

Same chassis as the three.

Yep.

With the ability to have seven seats.

Wow.

Seven seats is an upgrade, of course.

It's a $3,000 upgrade, but you can have seven seats

in the model Y.

So it was really interesting to watch

because there was an unveiling event naturally.

But watching the event was really, really kind of cool.

Not because necessarily the Y, I wasn't that excited

necessarily about that particular model.

But the event itself kind of reminded me

of like Apple back in the day,

like when they launched the iPhone in the app store

and like they were like, oh well,

now we have 800 million apps, you know, that kind of thing.

So they were kind of going through these slide decks

and the initial slide decks were like,

oh, here's Gigafactory five years ago

or whatever it was, right?

And it's just like an empty field.

And they're like, here's Gigafactory now

and they show a picture of current today.

And then they're like, oh, and this is, by the way,

This is only a quarter done, right?

And it already has a huge land footprint.

Wow.

And then they do the same thing for their China factory.

And they were like, well, and that one's gonna be,

I don't remember the exact number,

but they're like, oh, that'll be eight times bigger

than gigafactory.

And you're just like, what the scale of that is like,

yeah, exactly.

Like how do you even have that much of land available?

Same thing with like the Supercharger network.

They showed like, oh, well, five years ago

or eight years ago, I can't remember the numbers,

that they had 15 superchargers across the United States

or across the world, and now they have hundreds of thousands.

So like in the scale of like say five years.

So like it's just like the numbers are just so impressive

and how quickly they're moving.

Granted, they're burning through cash like crazy,

but it was just really, really cool to watch

like their progression and their growth.

And like even despite all these people saying,

you're never gonna make it, you're never gonna make it.

Like the things that they're doing are pretty impressive.

That was one of the criticisms of the announcement I heard,

is that because they're charging a larger deposit,

I think it's what, $3,500?

Could be, I'm not totally sure.

2,500, I think it was 1,000 before, right?

1,000 down you put in for years?

Yes, that's correct, for the three.

Yeah, so now they're asking for a little bit more money

up front for the deposit.

It's not actually a deposit, I forget they call it,

it's just like some bullshit thing,

and then you gotta pay more when the car's later on.

But that was, it knocked the stock down originally

because people were speculating that they were so hurting

for cash that they had to announce this

so they could just get a bunch of people to sign up for it

and then raise some money.

Quick little fundraiser.

- Yeah, I think, I looked at their stock recently

and it had been sliding, even post this announcement,

I don't know where it's at currently

if it's come back up at all, but yeah,

the Model Y has been kind of in the works

for a very long time.

There's been rumors of it for a very long time.

So I don't think it was something that they were just like,

oh, let's pump out another version of something real quickly

It makes more cash.

It's been in the works for quite a while.

I thought it looked pretty cool.

And the fact that you got a lot--

similar for having seven seats, the performance, the rain,

all that stuff was--

I don't remember now.

It was very close.

They're very similar to the Model 3.

Most everything was very similar.

The interior looks almost exactly the same as the Model 3.

There's almost no perceptible difference.

So the car itself looks very, very, very close.

So if you like the Model 3, you'll probably like this.

and it's an SUV, so it has a little more room.

There's more vertical room inside a side room.

So the thing that I did hear though,

is kind of back to the story that we did last week

where they had kind of retracted their,

the showroom thing,

where they were gonna close all their showrooms.

That was the one that I heard that maybe that was a gimmick,

because suddenly now they're announcing,

oh well we have a backlog of all these cars

that we have to produce because there was a sudden spike

in people that wanted the various cars,

because they weren't gonna be able to go to the showrooms

and check them out or whatever the case might have been.

So like now people are like, well, was that a media,

a publicity stunt basically.

Yeah, it's a little suspicious

if you have a 10 year lease run and still.

Yeah. (laughs)

Right.

Well, they wouldn't do something like that, I'm sure.

The other thing to note about this car,

which is really interesting because people have wondered

if this was gonna be the case for a very long time.

So they now have the model S, the model three,

model X and this is the model Y. Sexy. Sexy. Yeah. They even alluded to it in the actual

demonstration. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So Tesla is sexy now. I always thought their stuff

was. Yeah. The Falcon Wing door. That's what rain, rain reminds me. Falcon wings. There

you go. That sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Good to know. Very cool, dude. Well,

I'm happy that you're happy that you got some new Tesla news on the podcast today. That's

Yeah, well, we wouldn't want to miss a week.

Yeah, a lot happens in seven days over there.

Very cool, man.

Did you hear about the announcement of the new gaming platform out of Google?

Google Sadia?

You know, I've seen a ton of screenshots of controllers for this thing.

Yeah, yeah, it looks kind of like an Xbox style controller, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know a lot of the details of this.

It just came out.

I just skimmed over a few things, but I thought it was interesting because it doesn't require hardware.

hardware. It's not a dedicated hardware device, right? It's not like a PS4 or something else

that you have to go to the store and buy. It'll work on all kinds of existing hardware, mobile

phones, laptop, whatever you've got that you can pull the web up on, it will work with.

So they're moving more to the kind of idea, there's a number of these platforms that are

going to this like streaming concept. So you don't need the hardware necessarily to run

it. Really all you need is a screen that can stream the video and the hardware is back

somewhere else. That's right. It's all cloud-based. The compute power that they

have in the cloud supposedly is more like per, you know, for you or me would be

more powerful than an Xbox and a PS4 combined. Right. So you're getting 4k, 60

frames per second, performance out of it, all rendered in the cloud, streamed to you.

And what I thought was really impressive about the demo was they had somebody on YouTube that clicked into a game

And it just fired right up like I don't know what I don't know games

I don't play games, but yeah open it up clicked on it and they're instantly in the game

It's a lot like what we do what we're doing in the tech industry where everything same thing everything's moving to the cloud

There's so much more power there. There's so much more scalability available there same thing with games, right?

Like now if you're not playing your resources can be dedicated to somebody who is playing so there's a lot more

Hardware that can be thrown at it and it can be spun up in in incredible rates

And then like I said if you're not familiar with how this technology may work then basically you're running a game on a server

That's you know, let's say in Seattle

And then you're basically getting a streaming video feed back to you

That's not what that video is or game is doing basically, right? Yeah, that's exactly right

It's not unlike what we talked about a few weeks ago with HoloLens 2.

Same idea, right?

You have this dumb headset that can stream video.

It's a streaming service on your face.

And then all the compute is being sent back to the cloud and then being updated and sent

back to you in real, near real time.

And you don't have to manage any of the games, right?

Like you said, they're already there.

They're already updated.

You don't have to deal with installing software, updating software, or doing any of the maintenance

of that on your own.

It's all handled for you.

Yeah, the other piece of it that's going to be huge for them is using their controller to play these games.

There's some button that will start up a live stream on YouTube.

And so there's already an insane amount of people that watch live stream on YouTube.

I don't remember how many hundreds of millions of people, but it's like, it's a big bet on them.

Right now, Google, it's more than 200 million logged in daily active users watching gaming content.

And so from an ad perspective like they can they can just go

You know they're gonna go through the roof with this like if everybody has one of these little controllers and now they're streaming live

Oh shit look out. Well, and that's the crazy thing too is like I assume

I don't know. It's for a fact. I'm gonna just kind of go with it

But I assume if you have that controller you probably can connect to any of your devices probably your phone

Tablet probably whatever Bluetooth

So as long as you have that little controller with you, you can move from device to device to device and keep playing the same game

Even though you don't have it necessarily like quote-unquote installed as you would think of today. That'd be pretty cool. Yeah

I'll have to read more about it. It's hot off the press

Yeah, I've seen a ton of ton of news about this. So it's pretty exciting. I'm pretty sure steam has a similar product

I thought Microsoft had something coming out with this as well

Oh, it's a Xbox has the same or a similar thing where you can stream

To I think your TV as well. I got through the Xbox or some I don't remember

But I saw something very similar a lot of them are working on very similar products like this, but this is exciting

I think it'll be fun to see what happens. I would actually do this. I would try it out

Yeah, they did hear some data center specs. This is just fun. I like this kind of thing

The stadia data center PCs where games will actually be running will use Linux and

And the GPU, 10.7 teraflops.

That's a lot of flops.

56 compute units.

Custom x86 processors, 2.7 gigahertz hyperthreaded memory,

16 gigs of RAM.

I don't see that impressive.

Yeah, whatever.

PC Master Race says my friend Gomer from the Slack would say.

PC what?

I play on consoles a lot.

I usually play on Xbox and stuff like that.

anytime that we game together, he's playing on a PC, you know, and he's a PC gamer, he's got pretty high end specs on his machine.

So he always, you know, anytime he can kill somebody that I can't or something like that. Oh, PC master race.

Oh, PC master race. Oh, man.

That's funny.

Well, let's move on to this one here.

Before we move on real quickly, it's something that I brought up earlier this week with somebody else. It's just funny, the kind of the

transitions that we continue to go through in the computing world. Because I remember back in the day, like when I first started

working. My first computer job was at my community college that I went to and I

was setting up old wise terminals, if you remember those dumb terminals,

dumb terminals. Yeah, that basically was a screen that connected to a like a main

frame server somewhere in the building or off the building, you know, whatever.

And we now have went from that to everybody in the world had their own

personal computer. You had your own tower, you had your own whatever. And now

we're kind of going back to that model again, right? Everything's not on your

machine, it's on some other machine somewhere else.

Exactly.

And it's a similar but different paradigm too, because, yeah,

now it's like we've talked about a few times,

it's becoming just something to stream.

As long as you can get video, and we can kind of do the input,

output to the cloud now, latencies have gotten low enough.

Well, the cable that we taught, the undersea cable,

like the low latency, right?

We've advanced to a point now where

the latencies are getting so low that you don't have to even

have the box right there to do it for you. You can send it off, cite and bring it back.

It is cool to see how it goes back and forth like that.

Right. Yeah.

Let's grab one more story here. We got the Apple AirPods version 2 were announced. Was

that this morning?

Yeah, I saw it today.

What were your thoughts on this?

Well, I like the idea for one thing, wireless charging is a huge plus. We were kind of talking

about that. We thought that would happen, right?

I was disappointed when I got my original ones and they didn't have wireless charging.

I was surprised too.

It was probably just a quick--

well, there's a couple things about that.

They probably could have done that,

but then they wouldn't have an easy V2, right?

This is kind of a layup.

Yeah, there's not a ton of substantive--

substantive, is that how you say it?

Substantive.

Substantive.

Substantive updates here aside from the wireless charging.

Yeah, the only other thing I heard that was interesting

was the battery life calls.

You get an extra hour on calls, which I think

was a 50% increase or something like that.

And they're doing that with the update of a new chip.

Yes.

Yeah, a more efficient chip.

Yeah, they have updated the chip.

So you get a little bit more battery life.

It's more efficient and wireless charging.

If you're an Apple V1, AirPod owner such as myself,

and you have them too--

I do.

--then you can pay $79 to upgrade your case

to have wireless charging.

And it works on the standard wireless--

Cheat charger.

That's right.

Yeah.

That's right.

So am I going to upgrade?

I don't think so.

not going to pay one, I think it's $199. Not worth the upgrade for me. I just bought these.

And probably not going to get the wireless case because I don't really charge them a

whole lot. The fact that you can hold the charge in the case, I love that. And so I

usually can get by for a few days at a time. I'm not always on the phone or always listening

to music with those.

Yeah, I'm right there with you. I don't think I would buy these. Like, they didn't change

anything. The design is the same. The color is the same. Everything about them is the

same with the exception of the wireless charger and the chip really. And the chip in the battery

life to me is not a big enough win to warrant the upgrade, nor is the wireless charging,

although convenient. You plug it in for what, 10 minutes in the things like full.

[laughter]

Ryan asked the question he wants to know, but will they fall out of your ear?

Hmm. Well, they fall out of my ears all the time. So, I don't know. They're not, but that's

another, I would have that griped to you. I mean, they're definitely not, one size is

not fit all that is a that is a definite complaint that I have of them.

Although these more so than like the wired ones like I always I could never get those

to stay in for anything.

These are at least a little better.

Yeah.

For me, I have an adjustment on them.

I usually pop them in and when I do it the first time they're sticking out and then I

tuck them under.

It seems to hold a little better.

But I would say from Apple's point of view, that's a feature not a bug.

They sell a lot more AirPods when you lose them every few weeks.

Yeah, that's probably true.

But they are at least partially waterproof.

I know from a couple people now that I've had them in water.

Be very careful about that.

I did research on it, and people have had mixed results.

If the thing on the-- if the internal gets water,

the piece that's in your ear, then you're pretty much hosed.

But some people have done it and gotten a little splish-blash

on it, and it's fine.

I know when we were in Greece, my good friend Aaron

took a dive into a pool and lost them.

Felt out of the ears.

Yeah.

Lost them into the bottom of the pool.

I don't think she had her contacts in her glasses on her, whatever,

so she couldn't find them.

Oh no.

So it sat down there for, I don't know, 30 minutes, probably underwater.

And she did the whole rice trick, put it in a bowl of rice,

asked the hotel for a bowl of rice.

No shit.

Give me some dry rice.

And they brought it.

And yeah, we powered it up the next day and it worked just fine.

So she still uses them to this day.

Wow.

That's a testimonial.

If I've ever heard one, that's, that's way beyond what they're supposed to do.

And one day I came riding in from, from home on my bike and was in the locker

I mean, you were you were showering with yours on talking to your brother or something random.

I don't know. Yeah, I was taking a phone call and I thought, well,

just be very careful in there and be delicate with them.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, they survived that so far. Right. So it must not be too bad.

I don't know. But anyway, like 50,000 miles.

Exactly. I still love the things. I mean, the quality on them, like again,

the quality of the audio that we talked about the other episode, they're great.

The sound quality is wonderful.

So highly would recommend them, but I don't think this is an upgrade step if you already own a pair.

The verdict is in.

Kyle speaks.

That's right.

Boom.

Until next time.

Yeah.

Anything else you need to go over before we get out of here?

I think we're good.

All right.

Well, thanks for everybody for listening on the various chat apps.

We had some a whole bunch of people feedback.

That was cool.

We are at www.coffeecodecast.com/live.

The artwork for the show is provided by Yurne, the Gentle Giant.

You can see more of his wonderful illustrations

at www.coffeecodecast.com/gentlegiant.

If you have an idea for the show

or want to chat with us like anybody else did here.

- I thought that was really great, by the way.

Thanks for doing that today, guys.

- Yeah, on Twitter @coffeecodecast

or we are available at email,

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So thanks for listening everybody. See you next time.

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