The away message is a relic of desktop chat apps from decades past. But this simple feature helped keep boundaries between your online connections and your IRL self. Now that we all have tiny computers in our pockets wherever we go, those boundaries have evaporated. Instead, there's now the constant anxiety that comes with being connected—and available to chat—at all times.
This week on Gadget Lab, we talk about how messaging went from casual, asynchronous correspondence to an all-consuming attention hog, and how the tech companies that shape our correspondence could fix it.
Read Lauren’s story about how it’s time to bring back the away message.
Lauren recommends Jennifer Khan’s profile on Taika Waititi in WIRED. Mike recommends the book Led Zeppelin: The Biography, by Bob Spitz.
Lauren Goode can be found on Twitter @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. Our producer is Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Michael Calore: Lauren.
Lauren Goode: Mike.
Michael Calore: Lauren, why haven't you responded to my text message?
Lauren Goode: Because I was busy. That's why I didn't respond. I was away, or I was attempting to be away.
Michael Calore: But you can't really ever be away, right?
Lauren Goode: No, apparently not. That's the thing.
Michael Calore: All right, let's talk about it.
Lauren Goode: All right.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Michael Calore: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore. I'm a senior editor at WIRED.
Lauren Goode: I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.
Michael Calore: Twenty-five years ago, the only online messaging option you had was on your desktop.
Lauren Goode: Is that true? Neither of us were alive then, so how would we know?
Michael Calore: Oh boy. Yeah, it was just your desktop. When you got up and went outside or went to the bathroom, you could set an away message that let everybody know you were unreachable. You were either in a live chat or you were out and about. Things are very different now, obviously. We all have these little pocket computers with us at all times, and everyone we know can reach out to us at any moment, all of the time. We are probably not meant to be this connected as human beings, because being always on drains our time and our attention, and it makes us all just a little bit more anxious. Now, Lauren, you proposed a solution in a WIRED story this week, and a lot of people are talking about this. They're talking about it on Twitter.
Lauren Goode: Right, on Twitter, which we know is … Does that even count?
Michael Calore: Yes, it counts. It definitely counts. But in your story, you said we should bring back the away message. Please explain.
Lauren Goode: Do I need to explain it? We should bring back the away message.
Michael Calore: I think what we need to do is tell people who maybe aren't familiar.
Lauren Goode: Right, people who are just slightly younger than us. OK.
Michael Calore: What the away message is.
Lauren Goode: OK. There was this thing back in the day called AOL, America Online. OK. I think our audience is a little bit older, probably around our age. A lot of you are not going to need this explanation. But there was AOL, and that was how many of us got onto the internet. It was actually dial-up internet. For a lot of us, that was the gateway to always being … No pun intended because I had a Gateway 2000 computer in my home growing up. But that was like a gateway, a pathway for a lot of us to being online all the time or a lot of the time.
Within AOL, there was a chat service called AOL Instant Messenger, which many people called AIM, A-I-M for short, and within AIM, there was a feature known as away messages. This was live chat, this was real-time internet communication. You would log on to AOL or AOL Instant Messenger; a buddy list, which was your friend list, would appear in this vertical text box on the side of your screen, your home screen, and you would see who was online and who was offline. When people were offline or even if they were just online but unavailable, in many cases, they would throw up an away message.
They would draft a message within this text box, and sometimes they would have these little embellishments or different fonts and colors and tildes and asterisks and quotes and song lyrics and all that stuff, and they would basically say what they were doing that made them unavailable to chat. They were no longer DTC, down to chat. Then sometimes people would just use this as a form of personal expression as well. In many instances, it created this guardrail around our availability. In other instances, it was just like, “Hey, I'm here, but I'm not here. I'm not paying attention, and I'm going to use this thing as a form of creative expression.”
Michael Calore: I always likened it to the whiteboard on the outside of your dorm room in college. Everybody at my school had a whiteboard on their dorm room door, and you could say, “At class until 4:00.” I don't know why people would do that. But it's just like if your friends were looking for you, that was literally the only way they could find you. You would use it as a way to signal what you were doing, and then you would also write song lyrics on it. Right?
Lauren Goode: Of course, yeah. It was a dry erase board, right? Yeah, you'd say, “I'm at the cafeteria. Meet me for dinner,” or whatever it was. I think both you and I are old enough, despite what I said earlier about how young we are. I think we're both old enough that we remember those times. I am going to absolutely date myself. But when I went away to college, it was last century.
It was the last few months of 1999, and I didn't have a cell phone yet, and AOL Instant Messenger was very much a part of my life. But I actually didn't go to school with my own personal computer. I used the computer lab on campus. Sometimes I would use my roommate's computer. She had a Hewlett-Packard, and she would let me log on to my AIM and see what was going on with my buddy list, which was very nice of her. We're still friends to this day. Hi, Jenna.
But this was the earliest days of this melding of our digital communications with IRL communications and figuring out ways we could use these online tools to communicate more effectively and enhance what was still very much an analog experience. I remember, to your point about the whiteboard, the following year. At that point, I had my own PC. I had a Compaq, and I got one specifically with a CD burner because maybe, or maybe not, we were downloading songs off of Napster and burning off the CDs.
Michael Calore: Maybe, maybe not.
Lauren Goode: Maybe not. I think the statute of limitations is expired on that.
Michael Calore: But there's nothing illegal about burning songs that you downloaded off of Napster for free. Is there?
Lauren Goode: No, not at all.
Michael Calore: OK. I didn't think so.
Lauren Goode: No, no, no. It was all good and aboveboard. We were connected on the campus internet. I was living in a suite at this point, it wasn't just a dorm room. There were a few rooms within the suite. Sometimes, instead of going and knocking on each other's doors, we would use our AIM to message each other and say, “Hey, want to head out to the caff and get some dinner? Want to go to the party now?” or whatever it was we were doing. “Want to go to the game?” whatever it was we were doing.
I remember that felt like a moment to me. That felt like a moment of like, “Oh, these people are literally feet away and I'm relying instead on digital communications. What is that?” It's weird. It's funny and it's weird, and now it's just what we do. You and I sit in an office all day, and we could be feet away from each other, and we're Slacking.
Michael Calore: We're still Slacking. Yeah. AIM laid the foundations for the always-on life that we have now.
Lauren Goode: Right. I think in writing this piece I realized that my nostalgia—it's complicated because there are layers of abstraction here. I not only miss away messages and the ability to just say, “Hey, I'm away, please do not disturb me. Don't message me.” But I also just missed an era when we weren't messaging quite as much, and one of those things we can never return to. The other thing is that I am proposing a technology solution for a technology problem, which we know can be further complicating.
Yeah. I'm not entirely sure that having away messages now would fix the problems that exist around messaging, but I'd be willing to try because I think what happened … I talked to one of the creators of Apple iMessage about this, Justin Santamaria. He described it as, there used to be asynchronous text messaging, which was SMS on our phones, like using T9 to text each other or whatever, and then it was just fired off, and maybe when the person saw it, they saw it.
Then there was synchronous messaging, which was AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ and live chat services. There was this understanding that when you were on the live chat, that you were engaged in a conversation, and there was the understanding that when you were not live-chatting and you were getting SMSs on your phone, that it was asynchronous, and the message came in and you'd respond when you got the chance. But then because the way our social contracts have changed and because of technology, those have completely merged.
Michael Calore: Yeah. It's interesting because the away message gave you a way to tell people that you were unavailable. But in this forum that was still largely asynchronous, for the most part, right? You could still have back-and-forth chats with people, but there was not this really heavy expectation that you respond immediately.
When we did move to the technologies that allowed you to have immediate response, most likely in the smartphone era, right? Ten years after the fact, then all of a sudden, the away message was left behind and we didn't have it anymore, which is … that's when we need it the most, is once we move to these always-on lifestyles when we all get cell phones with onscreen keyboards and all the apps that allow us to talk to each other.
Lauren Goode: Right, because you're never really away. You're always connected. There are some things that exist now on our mobile apps, our mobile messaging apps, that let us do this. You're on a Pixel?
Michael Calore: Yep.
Lauren Goode: What do you use on Pixel to tell people you're just not available?
Michael Calore: I use my willpower.
Lauren Goode: Fair enough. You just let your messages pile up?
Michael Calore: Yeah. Because it's fine.
Lauren Goode: But there are some features on Pixel that are built into what? The control center or whatever. It's called control center on iPhones.
Michael Calore: Yeah. There's Do Not Disturb mode.
Lauren Goode: Do Not Disturb.
Michael Calore: The most simple one is that you just flip your phone face down, and it automatically puts your phone in Do Not Disturb mode.
Lauren Goode: It's pretty great.
Michael Calore: You can set different levels of disturbance and set notifications for all of the different apps and for different contacts in your contacts list. For example, my wife can always message me and can always call me. Whereas there are PR people who it always sends straight to voicemail. Sorry, PR people, but that's the truth. It's like I just don't … I can't handle the volume of messages I have now, so I limit them using those controls.
Those are separate controls for the native apps, for just regular Android messaging and for regular Android phone, as well as for things like WhatsApp. I set different controls on different apps, because I talk to different sets of people on all the different apps.
Lauren Goode: There's also something on Android called Schedule Send, where you can write a text message, but then choose to send it later, which is supposed to be good for when you have lots of friends or family in different time zones.
Michael Calore: Is there? I've never used it.
Lauren Goode: This is what Google tells me, because I did reach out to Google. I reached out to Google last week, and I love writing emails like this. I'm like, “Hey, random question. Has Google, especially with the implementation of RCS, ever considered doing something like an away message?” They're like, “No, but great idea. But here's some other things that you can do currently on Android phones.” I learned about Schedule Send through that email exchange, and I was thinking, “Oh, that's cool.”
I do wonder how many people would utilize that. I think part of the problem we're describing is not just the tools, it's how people, it's how we've all become these messaging maniacs. You can get frustrated at the way someone's messaging you, but you must first make amends by owning up to your own problems with messaging.
Michael Calore: Yeah. All of these tools that are around, they don't really matter because we're still overusing all of these apps, and we still have that expectation that when we text somebody, they're going to text right back. If they don't, it's rude or it means they're mad at you, or it means … Pile on whatever meaning you want to assign to it, based on your own social anxiety, but that's what it is, right? It's like you expect an immediate return, and if you don't get it, you start to get anxious.
Lauren Goode: Totally. On iOS, as another example, you can put your phone into Do Not Disturb mode, or what apple now calls Focus Mode, and then when you go to message your friend and initiate a text, you'll see it'll say, “Michael has notifications silenced.” I would take that as you're sleeping, you're driving, you're doing something that requires concentration.
But as Justin Santamaria, who I spoke to for this story, pointed out, other people might interpret that as, “Oh, that's good. I can send the message because they're not going to be disturbed. It's not going to come through and interrupt them as they're driving or whatever it is.” Rather than these things being guardrails, they feel more like squishy orange traffic cones that we just plow through because we see that as malleable, and we can make our own rules around messaging.
Michael Calore: Yeah. We should take a break soon. But first, we have to talk about ellipsis anxiety.
Lauren Goode: Oh my gosh. Dot, dot, dot. Dot, dot, dot. Someone is typing. Several people are typing.
Michael Calore: Simultaneously the best and worst feature ever to come to messaging.
Lauren Goode: Who really started that? Was that Facebook?
Michael Calore: I don't know. I have to dig pretty deep into the memory banks.
Lauren Goode: Let's just blame them.
Michael Calore: But yeah, I feel comfortable blaming them. It was either them or Apple. But yeah, somebody else is composing a reply and you see the dot, dot, dot or some sort of notification that they're typing. In Signal, it's a little bouncing user icon, right? Then it goes away.
Lauren Goode: Right. Because the person is drafting and then thinking, and then drafting and then thinking, or then drafting and getting distracted and walking away.
Michael Calore: Because somebody else messaged them, and now they're talking to that person, right?
Lauren Goode: Right.
Michael Calore: Then it just sends you down this rabbit hole. It's terrible. What would be better, seeing that or just getting an automated message saying, “This person can't talk right now because they have chosen not to be disturbed?”
Lauren Goode: Right. You can do that too. I think on iPhone, there's an automatic function that tells people when you're driving. It pops up and says, “I'm driving a moving vehicle and I can't respond.”
Michael Calore: Yeah, when your phone's in Car mode.
Lauren Goode: But yeah, wouldn't it be better if we had some version of away messages that applied across all of our mobile apps, so that the thing that people saw when they went to initially text you was your status, and if they texted you anyway, then they got the pop-up? Yeah. I'm liking this idea, and the more I think about it, my story was really smart. No, I'm liking this idea because you're right.
Michael Calore: I'm glad you recognize that.
Lauren Goode: The ellipses, the dot, dot, dot, is really more of just … It's making us more captive audiences. It's actually turning it that much more into live chat as opposed to asynchronous.
Michael Calore: I spend so much time just staring at my phone waiting for the person to hit Send.
Lauren Goode: Who is this person that never hits Send in your life?
Michael Calore: Oh, everybody.
Lauren Goode: Do I do that?
Michael Calore: Sometimes, but you're not in my top 20 offenders.
Lauren Goode: I thought you were going to say I was not in your top 20 people to text. Oh, man.
Michael Calore: All right. Well, look, let's take a break and we'll be right back.
[Break]
Michael Calore: Today, Lauren and I are talking about messaging, how it's changed over the years, how it got so broken, and what we can do to fix it, and this is the part of the show where we fix it. We're going to fix it, right?
Lauren Goode: We're fixing everything.
Michael Calore: Right?
Lauren Goode: Yes, we're fixing all of the messaging problems today.
Michael Calore: All right. Your primary solution is to bring back the away message. How would this work for, let's just say, text messages?
Lauren Goode: I know nothing. I know nothing. This is why tech companies pay UI and UX designers all the money to come up with these things. OK, in reality, I think on desktop chat apps, it wouldn't be that hard to implement because we already have existing protocols and examples around this, aka AOL Instant Messenger and away messages. I think solving the problem on mobile from an interface perspective is probably the biggest challenge, because our mobile devices are smaller.
In many cases, we don't see a person's status or what they're up to before we text them. We might get some kind of automated response after we've texted them, which also by the way can feel a little bit spammy the way it currently happens on mobile now. In the way that you get a "Reply yes if you want to confirm this doctor's appointment," and then you immediately get another pop-up, but you know it's not a real conversation you're having. Part of that challenge stems from the fact that mobile and desktop chat apps are now merged, right?
Michael Calore: Mm-hmm.
Lauren Goode: The way that we're messaging over mobile is no longer happening over SMS in some cases. It's happening over Wi-Fi. It's using data. There's this simultaneous experience that's happening on desktop. I'm probably being too abstract about this, but here's an example, iMessage, which is now known as Messages, which used to be known as iChat, right? It's had this evolution. When I get a text message, which is not actually a text message, it's a data message on my iPhone, it's coming through on my iPhone, my iPad, and my Mac computer, all at the same time.
Michael Calore: You have that experience where your whole house just dings?
Lauren Goode: Dings, right. I may have one of them silenced, but not the other, whatever. You'd have to create a uniform experience or maybe not uniform. Maybe someone doesn't want to be disturbed on their phone, but they don't mind if it comes through on their desktop because that's where they're doing their work, or that's where they might be able to get the information that they need from someone. It has to be really thoughtfully designed these days, because it is not just an isolated or verticalized experience of where we're chatting. We're chatting across all of our devices. What would you envision this looking like?
Michael Calore: Well, I think that Slack gets it right. Right? Slack allows you to pause notifications for a certain amount of time, it allows you to set hours that you would like to be disturbed and hours you would not like to be disturbed within the app, and it has a visual indication of your availability. Right?
Lauren Goode: People have said that about Microsoft Teams as well.
Michael Calore: Yes. Microsoft Teams is, I'm sure, an excellent product, which I've never used.
Lauren Goode: I have used it for meetings with Microsoft.
Michael Calore: It sounds about right. Just like I've only used Google Meet when I talk to other people who are Googlers. It has a little “z” for when you've paused notifications, and it has a little circle that's hollow when you're unavailable and green when you are available. Those types of experiences are not too hard to build into native chat apps. The only problem is that the native Android app is probably not going to be able to get a signal from an iOS user when the iOS user tells the world what their current status is.
Lauren Goode: That's a great point.
Michael Calore: The Google phones can't talk to the Apple phones, unless all the companies get together and they say, “You know what?”
Lauren Goode: “We're going to support RCS.”
Michael Calore: Yeah, or some other standard as yet to be determined, right? Some other way of communicating status across multiple chat platforms at once. Sounds like it shouldn't be too hard, but of course, if history proves anything, they're not going to want to do that, right?
Lauren Goode: That's an excellent point. I was thinking about interoperability among the same category of devices. But yeah, going from Android phone to a message that's ultimately going to appear on my Messages app on my Mac laptop, how is that going to work? If I don't want to be disturbed on my laptop, your message is still probably going to come through from your Pixel phone.
Michael Calore: You'll get—
Lauren Goode: Because you're not going to be able to see my little emoji or whatever it is, or my little asterisks and my song quote that lets you know I'm away.
Michael Calore: Right. Blue bubble people will be able to see whatever John Mayer lyrics you've put in your away message are.
Lauren Goode: Dave Matthews. Thank you very much.
Michael Calore: David. David Matthews.
Lauren Goode: Yes. Was that what we called him in 1999?
Michael Calore: But the green bubble people won't be able to see it, right?
Lauren Goode: Right. Yeah. That's a really good point. I would normally say, “Well, here's an opportunity for some upstart to come up with something really cool.” But I think messaging, it's so embedded in our daily lives now and it's a lot of really, really big tech companies controlling that experience at the moment, that I think it's very unlikely that you would suddenly get millions or potentially billions of people to use some other app.
OK. Let's just assume for a moment that technology itself is not going to be the solution to our technology problems, and that we as humans have to change our behaviors. What's your best advice for messaging and messaging well?
Michael Calore: I have two pieces of advice. One for how to message properly and one for how to be a good recipient.
Lauren Goode: Let's hear it.
Michael Calore: OK. Messaging properly, just send one text. Don't send 17 over 30 seconds.
Lauren Goode: Oh my God. This is on my list. OK. No, go ahead, please. Steal my idea.
Michael Calore: No, I want to hear your vitriol about this because I've got plenty, but I want to hear yours.
Lauren Goode: Oh, OK. Well, I've determined that how you write your messages can make a big difference. If you have a lot to communicate, first, ask a person if they're free, “Hey, have a second?” Then maybe don't fire off a series of messages, staccato style. Right? Write it like you would a thoughtful mini letter. Yeah. Echoing what you're saying. Don't fire off 17 messages in one thread.
Michael Calore: Yeah. You know what? I think desktop texting is the culprit for this.
Lauren Goode: Because we're so much faster on our keyboards than when we would be on our touch screens or T9?
Michael Calore: Yeah. People are used to real time, so they want to get all their thoughts out, but they don't want to leave the person hanging. They'll type eight words, hit enter, type eight words, hit enter, type 10 words, hit enter. Meanwhile, the person on the other end, their phone is vibrating in their pocket and they're trying to get the keys in the door and they've got their bag in one hand and their phone is going nuts, and they're like, "What the hell is going on?"
Then they finally get their phone out of their pocket, and they look at it and they see that their friend is just sending them a picture of an actor and asking, “Don't you think this person looks like a lobster?” It's anxiety-inducing to receive 17 texts over the course of two minutes. Don't do that to people.
Lauren Goode: I want to see the lobster man.
Michael Calore: Oh yeah. He does not look like a lobster. Sorry.
Lauren Goode: OK. No, no. It's true. Group texts, too. With emails, we at least have some kind of standard. It's just assumed you don't hit Reply All. With group text, that just goes totally out the window, because the point of the group text is you want everyone to weigh in. If you put your phone down for a while and your group text blows up, it's “Oh my goodness. Leave me alone.”
Michael Calore: Lived in. Lived in.
Lauren Goode: I'm pretty sure I put on “Do not disturb, taping a podcast” and here we go. Someone's like, “Nope, I got to know.”
Michael Calore: Producer Boone, leave that in.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. Let's see who is writing to me. Oh, it's our editor in chief. OK. Gideon, you are allowed to interrupt me. OK. After I respond to Gideon, what's your second piece of advice?
Michael Calore: OK. My second piece of advice is how to be a good recipient of text messages, which is forget about it.
Lauren Goode: Just forget about it.
Michael Calore: Turn off all your notifications until you are ready to look at your phone.
Lauren Goode: OK. That's very good advice. What if it's urgent?
Michael Calore: Obviously, if you're meeting somebody for dinner, you want to pay attention. But then when that person arrives, put your phone on Do Not Disturb, put it in your pocket, and sit down and enjoy your dinner, and just check your messages when you're in the rideshare back home or on the bus or whatever. Because that's the way that we used to live, and everything was fine. I'm not saying smartphones have ruined everything and they're totally distracting us because … Even though they are.
There's still important things that you need your phone for during dinner, and it's fine. But just knowing that you can't be reached at all times is, I think, a very healthy social signal to send out to the other people in your life. Then over time, it's going to be annoying at first, right? It's going to be annoying for you because you're going to miss things that you otherwise would not have missed if you'd been paying attention, and your friends are going to get annoyed at you because you're not immediately responding. However, over time, six weeks, three months, you become that person—
Lauren Goode: That's right.
Michael Calore: … who is not the type of person—
Lauren Goode: Expected to respond.
Michael Calore: … who immediately responds to everything.
Lauren Goode: Right, and the expectations are lower that you're going to respond.
Michael Calore: That's right. At that point, you get your brain back.
Lauren Goode: Wow.
Michael Calore: You can just be you, and you're not beholden to all of your friends all the time.
Lauren Goode: Wow. You sound like someone who could sell a little conference series on this, like three months to getting your brain back. You'd go on tour, you'd charge people at the door, you'd write a book about it. You'd have a podcast. You'd have to do this one first.
Michael Calore: Just text “Mike life coach” to 40404.
Lauren Goode: The Mike bot will give you advice. Wait, there'd be a Mike bot messaging people on how not to message. I love it. I love it. There's a whole business here.
Michael Calore: No, I'm serious. I think your away message idea is just something that you invent for yourself. You write your own away message for your life, and then you just deploy it.
Lauren Goode: This is so great. I love this advice because mine is so specific. Mine is really about the content of messages and yours is transcending that and just saying, “No, you don't need to engage all the time at all.”
Michael Calore: There are a lot of people I'm sure who are listening who are like, “Yeah, that would never work because of work, because I have kids, because of X number of reasons.” However, that's fine. There are times in your life when you can do that though, like when you are home with your children. You can turn it off. When you are not expected to be at the beck and call of your boss at work, you can put your phone down and just not look at it for an hour. Even—
Lauren Goode: What if you work for Elon Musk?
Michael Calore: Then I feel sorry for you. I don't know.
Lauren Goode: I have no good advice to give.
Michael Calore: I have not talked to a lot of people who worked at Tesla, so maybe I can't say that accurately. However, try it for 15 minutes. Try it for 30 minutes. Try it from 9 pm onwards. It's liberating.
Lauren Goode: I guess I would still say that if you are committed to using messaging as a primary form of communication, because it is a great utility, one, to what we said earlier, don't fire off a series of text messages if it can be accomplished in one. Here's another thing, too, that works sometimes: Sometimes you don't have to ask a question back. You're looking for an out, a way to end the conversation, and one way to do that is just to respond to what someone asked you or the thing that they needed from you and then just don't—you don't need to engage after that.
You don't need to ask, “How are you?” because they asked how you're doing. You don't need to say, “How's your day going?” Or, “Tell me more about this.” You can just have a natural endpoint to that message because you're using it as a send and receive. I needed information, I provided the information, here you go. It doesn't always have to be a long drawn-out thing. Then calming yourself, to be like, “I actually don't need to respond.” My friend knows I care about them. I don't need to go into a whole thing right now about how are you? How are you? No, how are you? Sometimes you just don't have time for it.
Michael Calore: Also, I think to be a good citizen in your world, it might be nice to start a text with, “No need to respond.”
Lauren Goode: Yes.
Michael Calore: “But I would like,” et cetera, et cetera.
Lauren Goode: Right. Not urgent, but. Yes. The truth is that even as I wrote the essay for WIRED about bringing back the AOL away message, I didn't actually fully believe that technology solutions would solve our technology problems. I think we do have to change our human behavior a bit too.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Well, that's a great place to end. Let's take another break, and when we come back, we'll do our recommendations.
Lauren Goode: Sounds good.
[Break]
Michael Calore: All right, welcome back. This is the part of our show where we each recommend something that you, the listeners, might enjoy. Lauren, you're going to go first. Please tell us, what is your recommendation?
Lauren Goode: OK, Mike. You know how I don't like recommending things that I haven't fully read yet?
Michael Calore: Sure. If you say so.
Lauren Goode: I'm going to break my own rule here. In this month's issue of WIRED, we have a feature story on the Oscar-winning director and writer, Taika Waititi. The photos, by the way, are incredible. Check those out. I haven't read the story yet. It was written by Jennifer Con, but I'm going to read it, and I'm going to recommend you read it too, because Taika Waititi seems like a really cool dude. The reason why he seems like a really cool dude is because, a couple of years ago, when he won his first Academy Award for writing the film Jojo Rabbit, he gave a little talk. He was actually asked about some stuff that was happening with the Writer's Guild at the time. His response was … Well, we're just going to play it for you.
Taika Waititi: Apple needs to fix those keyboards. They are impossible to write on, and they've gotten worse. It makes me want to go back to PCs, because PC keyboards, the bounce-back for your fingers is way better. Hands up, who still uses a PC? You know what I'm talking about. It's a way better keyboard, and those Apple keyboards are horrendous.
Lauren Goode: Basically, Taika took this opportunity when he had a big platform after winning an Academy Award to complain about Apple's keyboards, and boy, do I feel this, Taika. I quite literally feel it right now. I feel it in my shoulder, I feel it in my elbow. He was pointing to his elbow at one point as he was giving this little speech. I feel it in my hand. Mike, you and I were just talking about how I prefer to come in the office right now just because the chair is so much more comfortable and just in the hopes that it will help my arm feel better.
But really, Apple's keyboard is at the heart of this. I have not read this feature yet by Jennifer Con on Taika Waititi in WIRED, but I'm planning on reading it, and as far as I can tell, this guy is cool in my book, because we share a similar opinion on Apple's keyboards. Absolutely. Totally. I don't even know if he … Maybe he's been canceled. I don't know. But—
Michael Calore: I'm pretty sure he has not been canceled.
Lauren Goode: Right. We did just did a profile of him, so hopefully not. But I totally agree with him on Apple's keyboards.
Michael Calore: It's live on WIRED's website right now.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. The story is live. Not the story about Apple's keyboards. The story about Taika Waititi on WIRED.com. Mike, what's your recommendation this week?
Michael Calore: I'm going to recommend a book that I'm almost done with. Unfortunately, I already know how it ends because it is the new Bob Spitz book. Came out the very end of last year. It's called Led Zeppelin: A Biography.
Lauren Goode: Oh, so it's about Eddie Van Halen?
Michael Calore: It's not about Eddie Van Halen. It's about the mighty Led Zeppelin.
Lauren Goode: Cool.
Michael Calore: Bob Spitz wrote what is probably the best Beatles book. It's just called The Beatles, and it was amazing. I read it, I think, right at the start of the pandemic when I was spending a lot of time inside. All of a sudden I had all this time, so I was just reading and reading, and I blew through that book. It's like a doorstop, and I blew through it in two weeks, which is really fast for me. Then I heard he was writing a book about Led Zeppelin, and I put it on my list because Bob Spitz is a fantastic pop-music/rock journalist. He writes very intelligently, very thorough research, a lot of really good interview material, and pretty meticulously fact-checked. There's a lot of myth around Led Zeppelin.
Lauren Goode: What are the myths?
Michael Calore: Oh, just stories, backstage antics that maybe did or didn't happen—or maybe it was the roadies but over the years it became Robert Plant. There's a lot of infamous incidents in the band's history, and I feel like reading the Bob Spitz book really puts a lot of that into, well, this book says it happened, this book says it didn't, but here's the story anyway. You still get the story, but you also get the note that it may not be fact.
Anyway, it's also just chock-full of musical stuff from their early years. Everything that they were stealing from and borrowing from, everything that they were listening to, their contemporaries in the music world, all of the sessions that Jimmy Page played on. If you're a Led Zeppelin nerd, which I am … You're nodding.
Lauren Goode: This does not surprise me. This is OK. I grew up listening to Led Zeppelin because an older sibling was really into them.
Michael Calore: Well, yeah. Also, we grew up in the golden age of FM radio. Right? Also, we grew up at the time when the CD remasters were all coming out, and Led Zeppelin put out its big remastered catalog, and I think that hit, I don't know, when I was 17. Yeah, changed my life. Anyway, the book is great. It's really good. I've read everything about Led Zeppelin, and it was filled with new information. If you're a Led Zeppelin nerd, you got to get the Bob Spitz book.
Lauren Goode: Cool. How many members of Led Zeppelin are still alive?
Michael Calore: Three.
Lauren Goode: OK. Cool.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones.
Lauren Goode: Cool.
Michael Calore: John Bonham, the drummer, is the one who died, and the band broke up when he died.
Lauren Goode: You're not going to audition to be the drummer for Led Zeppelin anytime soon?
Michael Calore: There is nobody on earth who can replace John Bonham on drums.
Lauren Goode: Well said.
Michael Calore: I'm just going to … Argue with me all you want.
Lauren Goode: I'm not going to argue with you.
Michael Calore: No, I'm talking to Twitter right now.
Lauren Goode: The people out there. The internet.
Michael Calore: Oh boy. Speaking of the internet, that is our show for this week. Thank you all for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter. Just check the show notes, and be sure to look for our away messages to find out if we're available to answer you.
Lauren Goode: Twitter should have away messages.
Michael Calore: Absolutely, right?
Lauren Goode: Yes.
Michael Calore: Our producer is Boone Ashworth. Goodbye. We will be back next week with a new show. We're going to be talking about Apple next week.
Lauren Goode: Yes. WWDC is happening. It's all happening.
Michael Calore: Monday, June 6th, is the keynote. Watch it, experience it with us live on WIRED, and then we'll talk about it.
Lauren Goode: Sounds good.
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