Primary, Tertiary, and Third Cousin

Marco Arment (0:00)

Back from the beach.

Casey Liss (0:01)

Oh yes, because school started this week, right?

Marco Arment (0:03)

Yeah.

Casey Liss (0:04)

How's that going?

Marco Arment (0:05)

It's fine.

Casey Liss (0:07)

He says with zero enthusiasm.

Marco Arment (0:11)

Okay, who besides most parents is excited for school to start?

Casey Liss (0:17)

Yeah, no, that's fair.

Marco Arment (0:19)

Teachers generally aren't. The kids sure aren't.

And I understand, as a parent, I understand, like, get out of the house, get back to school, like, that's a perfectly valid thing. Until I started loving summer for other reasons. And now I'm like, no, the summer is over.

John Siracusa (0:37)

Yeah. At least you don't have to go to school.

Marco Arment (0:40)

I have to drive every morning towards the school. I mean, it's-

John Siracusa (0:43)

But you don't have to attend it. I feel like there's a summer lining here.

Marco Arment (0:45)

Well, we're at the stage of parenting where a good degree of involvement with keeping homework happening is required.

Casey Liss (0:53)

Oh, where does that come from, Marco?

John Siracusa (0:55)

There's an app for that, I think.

Casey Liss (0:58)

We are indeed in September, which means it is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. We are talking, of course, about raising money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. You can go to stjude.org/atp, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP to donate some amount of money to the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. St. Jude has made it their mission for no child to die in the dawn of life. They don't want any children to pass away because of cancer and other really, really terrible diseases.

Did you know that an estimated 400,000 children worldwide get cancer each year? When St. Jude opened in 1962, childhood cancer was largely considered incurable. Since then, St. Jude has helped push the overall survival rate in the United States from 20% to more than 80%.

And St. Jude won't stop until no child dies from cancer.

Curing childhood cancer is a tremendous undertaking. St. Jude needs your help. The generosity of donors everywhere, including our wonderful, wonderful, wonderful ATP listeners. It supports cutting-edge research that saves lives and ensures that families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food. Every child deserves a chance to live their best life, to live any life and celebrate every moment. When you support St. Jude, you can help make cures possible for kids with cancer. Together, you and me listeners, we can save more lives. We had a person write in to ATP. They did not write in anonymously, but I'm going to read their feedback anonymously, and I've sanitized it ever so slightly. This person wrote, this is an honest to God email that we, the three of us got at ATP. This person wrote, last December, we got the awful news that no family wants to hear. Our son was diagnosed with diffuse B-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. We live well outside the Memphis area, so we went to our local pediatric hospital. We received amazing care, including the great news early on that the chemotherapy regimen that would treat our son has been in place for the last 15 years after a very successful trial. Where, Marco?

Marco Arment (2:57)

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital?

Casey Liss (2:58)

That is correct.

The anonymous person continues, although the journey was brutal, through God's grace and the proven treatment plan, our son was declared cancer-free in May of this year. He's back in school and getting stronger every day. That is an honest to goodness, real life story from a fellow listener to this very program. So, if you want to support things like this, if you want to save children's lives, please give $1, $5, $10, whatever you can give to St. Jude at stjude.org, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP. Now, Marco, we have some breaking wonderful news from earlier today. Can you tell us about this, please?

Marco Arment (3:36)

As I discussed last episode, the Marco Offset previously was the suggested minimum donation for our listeners for St. Jude that you would basically take the amount over the starting MSRP of the new iPhone and maybe Apple Watch and whatever that you possibly ordered or about to order or are planning to order during this wonderful iPhone event season. The difference between the base price and what you actually paid after all the taxes and add-ons and cases and Apple cares and everything else, storage upgrades, all that stuff, that was your suggested minimum donation to St. Jude. And last episode, I introduced new levels two and three to the Marco Offset. Level two was you also add on to that whatever you spent on AI this month. Because if there's one thing that we need some kind of consumer absolution from, besides rampant consumerism, buying new phones to replace phones that work, it's AI.