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The Talk Show

132: ‘Peace, Porn, and Privacy’ With Guest Marco Arment

 

00:00:00   I'm worried because I feel like whenever you're on the show we always go and

00:00:03   you're the by far the longest guests like I feel like we could go like if we

00:00:07   ever needed to do like a charity talk-a-thon me and you would be the two

00:00:11   we can go for 12 hours and then this time we actually have a lot to talk

00:00:16   about so I'm a little concerned but well maybe not start moving did you hear we

00:00:21   don't talk anymore that that you got to me and that that somehow it with the

00:00:27   Specifics are kind of vague as to how how you got to me and what that means

00:00:31   But somehow you got to me and we don't talk anymore

00:00:34   Has five people said that if there's been further speculation that we're on the out. Oh my god, I mean

00:00:42   Fortunately, it's it's died down in the last few days. I think people have finally moved on

00:00:46   From the peace saga, which is good

00:00:49   The internet has a very short attention span and that that is both a blessing and a curse

00:00:54   It is it is definitely a blessing when you are on the receiving end of it

00:00:57   so that is nice, but

00:00:59   Yeah, I heard I read and got emailed and heard lots of interesting theories about the conspiracy between you and I

00:01:07   Or that that you?

00:01:09   Got to me or paid me off

00:01:12   Because people couldn't possibly believe

00:01:14   That the story was what I said it was which is that I didn't want to be in this business after all so I exited it

00:01:22   Right. You told this story on on your podcast the ATP

00:01:27   probably not what is now the last episode.

00:01:29   I'm guessing you have an episode coming out tomorrow,

00:01:32   but the one from last week. - Today, it's already out.

00:01:35   - Well, I have not listened, so you can stop me

00:01:38   if we start covering this time and stuff.

00:01:39   But last week's episode where you covered the peace thing,

00:01:41   your more or less long, very long story, very short,

00:01:44   is that what you wrote, as always, is exactly the truth.

00:01:49   You are one of the most, almost painfully honest people

00:01:53   I have ever met.

00:01:54   Like, you almost can't even bring yourself

00:01:57   to tell white lies, you know what I mean?

00:02:01   If you go through something like this

00:02:03   and then you explain yourself in public,

00:02:05   what you say is the honest to God truth.

00:02:07   So it's very funny that everybody would just assume

00:02:11   that it could be, it was something else.

00:02:13   And I think the part of the story that is the best

00:02:15   was that, and again, people who listened to ATP last week

00:02:19   know this, that you, I guess it was what, last Thursday?

00:02:23   Or was it Friday?

00:02:24   I don't know what day of the week it was,

00:02:26   But I was at the dentist and I was waiting to go

00:02:30   and you texted me and you were like,

00:02:31   I think I'm gonna pull Peace from the app store.

00:02:34   And I texted you, don't do it, don't be rash, wait.

00:02:38   Wait 'til I'm out of the dentist.

00:02:39   And I got home and it was already pulled

00:02:41   from the app store and the thing was there.

00:02:44   So I literally, you did not pull a lot of people.

00:02:47   You had kind of made up,

00:02:48   obviously you'd made up your mind

00:02:49   because I told you not to do it, which we will get to.

00:02:53   I will explain why I thought you should not do it.

00:02:55   But it did amuse me greatly though then afterwards

00:03:00   when I did notice immediately afterwards

00:03:02   that there were an awful lot of people

00:03:03   who assumed that it was pressure from me.

00:03:05   Somebody more or less said that it was like

00:03:07   that me and Kudol showed up with baseball bats.

00:03:11   - I would have loved to see that.

00:03:12   (both laughing)

00:03:14   It was especially funny because I was literally

00:03:17   just hanging out with you and Kudol like four days earlier.

00:03:20   (both laughing)

00:03:23   Yeah, it was interesting.

00:03:24   I also heard, when I was briefly on ATP,

00:03:27   like I heard people thought that Apple paid me off,

00:03:30   which is the funniest, I think.

00:03:32   'Cause like, I was making them a ton of money,

00:03:35   you know, promoting their platform,

00:03:38   doing everything they wanted me to do.

00:03:40   - And it wasn't also, it also wasn't one of those things

00:03:44   like today view widgets, right,

00:03:49   where they say, okay, now over here on this today screen

00:03:54   on iOS, what's that called?

00:03:56   - It doesn't even matter.

00:03:57   - Well, whatever, you know what I mean,

00:03:58   but you can put a-- - I think it's called

00:03:59   Stadu actually.

00:04:00   - You can put a widget in there.

00:04:02   And when they first opened this up,

00:04:05   there were people who made things that did things

00:04:07   that were creatively outside the purview

00:04:12   of what they expected people to make.

00:04:15   And then, you know, so like, I think one of the ones

00:04:18   that was an early victim of this was, I think,

00:04:21   PCALC, the calculator, made it so you can actually do your computation over there.

00:04:25   Well, that was more than, they kind of, I think they envisioned it as more just like

00:04:28   a status view, like it would show you the weather or whatever.

00:04:33   And when people were actually doing real things over there, Apple, you know, reacted.

00:04:39   This isn't that sort of, and it wasn't like they were breaking, you know, it wasn't like

00:04:43   they were using private APIs.

00:04:44   They were using the public APIs in ways that Apple didn't envision.

00:04:47   Well, peace was not like you use the content blocking

00:04:51   APIs in a way that they didn't envision.

00:04:53   It was almost like right down the middle, the canonical,

00:04:57   this is exactly the sort of thing that they envisioned

00:05:00   would be made.

00:05:01   Yeah, I mean, I got a couple of responses here and there

00:05:04   from inside of Apple, and they were all extremely positive.

00:05:08   Like, they definitely did not want

00:05:11   me to pull it from the App Store as far-- based

00:05:13   on the implication that they would have hated it

00:05:16   for some reason. Like, I mean, you know, they're not very generous with their communication,

00:05:21   but it sure seemed like people in Apple were big fans of it. And when I pulled it and placed

00:05:28   the burden on them to try to issue all these refunds first manually and then eventually

00:05:32   they did that batch thing, that couldn't have been pleasant for them either and certainly

00:05:37   couldn't have been cheap to have to process all those refunds. And, you know, just the

00:05:41   manpower alone of processing all those refunds was getting to be probably significant. So,

00:05:46   yeah, the idea that Apple paid me off to do all this was pretty entertaining. I also heard that

00:05:53   advertisers somehow paid me off. Man, an app that sits at the top of the App Store paid app chart,

00:06:01   if that could have sat there for like a month, I don't know if anyone else would have been able

00:06:05   able to afford to pay it off.

00:06:07   I mean, it would have made a ton of money.

00:06:10   And that's assuming a lot, of course,

00:06:12   but if you could have sat there for a while,

00:06:15   that would have been a good amount of money.

00:06:18   But the whole reason I canceled it was that it would have

00:06:22   felt like making a ton of money off of drug dealing

00:06:25   or something, it didn't feel right.

00:06:27   That was the whole point.

00:06:29   - I am looking right now, I actually have not been

00:06:32   paying attention to see what is atop the top charts.

00:06:36   So the top paid is, hooray, Tweetbot 4.

00:06:40   - Well, I think today's probably Tweetbot.

00:06:42   - Yeah, but number two is Purify.

00:06:46   - Yeah, but I think Crystal was up there for a while,

00:06:48   or Purify, I forget.

00:06:50   - I think you gotta look at Grossing, though,

00:06:52   but Grossing, they don't even register, it's all Candy Crush.

00:06:56   - Yeah, that's been up there for a while.

00:06:59   Well, I was on piece's top day, the one full day

00:07:03   on the chart, it was grossing at, I think,

00:07:04   like number 17 or 18 for a little while.

00:07:07   Not for the whole day, but that was the peak.

00:07:09   And then it was able to fall down the grossing ranks

00:07:12   pretty far while still being number one in the paid chart.

00:07:15   To give you, you know, like the volumes

00:07:17   are much lower, obviously, in paid.

00:07:19   But yeah, I mean, any app that's gonna sit there anywhere

00:07:23   like in the top 20 paid is gonna be making

00:07:25   really good money for a while.

00:07:27   So and I don't you know, if other people want to go in there and make a ton of money making ad blockers

00:07:32   That's fine. Like I'm willing and happy to yield that ground to other people. That's why I did it

00:07:37   You know, it's I got there realized I really didn't like being there and left

00:07:43   Yeah, I actually haven't looked in a while. It seems weird to me though

00:07:47   I thought that there would be a couple up there, but it looks like it's all down to

00:07:49   purify now

00:07:52   It doesn't I don't see any of the others although maybe maybe they're on the free list in there

00:07:56   I don't know which one's popular

00:07:58   I thought there were a couple that would be popular though for a while crystal and purify were neck-and-neck and then I think maybe

00:08:04   pure foot maybe crystals

00:08:06   Thing with the acceptable ads that's I mean that's a whole other

00:08:09   Drama that I don't really want to get into because I'm not involved happily anymore

00:08:13   But it that's the kind of thing

00:08:16   where it just shows how incredibly messy and difficult this business is and

00:08:21   That's a perfect example of why I don't want to be in it after all because it is just very messy and very difficult

00:08:27   as we record on on Thursday October 1st crystal is all the way down at 32 on the top paid and

00:08:34   Like I said purifies number two

00:08:37   So obviously there's been some divergence there, but you you you know, and and there is this weird

00:08:43   perpetuating, it's this, you know, we've talked about this

00:08:46   in so many different contexts ever since the App Store opened

00:08:48   but once something is atop these charts,

00:08:51   it tends to stay there because one of the ways that people,

00:08:54   people hear, hey, I hear there's odd ad blockers for iOS.

00:08:57   They go to the App Store, what do they do?

00:08:58   They go to the top chart, they see one that looks reasonable

00:09:01   at the top of the chart and they get it.

00:09:02   And by that time, then they get it.

00:09:05   Purify works, it, you know, it definitely does

00:09:07   what it says on the tin, so then they're done.

00:09:09   You know, they've just spent two or three bucks

00:09:11   or whatever it costs on their thing and they're done

00:09:13   and then none of the other, you know,

00:09:14   so being at top is a huge advantage.

00:09:16   So you, you know, peace having started at the top,

00:09:19   I think there's a very good chance

00:09:20   that it would still be there today if you hadn't yanked it.

00:09:24   - Maybe, but at the same time, like, you know,

00:09:26   right now you could see like Purify

00:09:27   has already fallen to number two.

00:09:29   You know, we'll see, you know,

00:09:31   how much it stays at the top

00:09:32   or how much it falls over time.

00:09:34   I mean, it's only been a couple of weeks.

00:09:35   It's been a pretty short time.

00:09:37   So I don't even know if I would have been able

00:09:38   to be there for a month.

00:09:39   I don't even know if that would have happened.

00:09:40   You know, there's no way to know.

00:09:42   - Yeah, and I also-- - It doesn't matter.

00:09:44   - I also wonder how much this is gonna be

00:09:46   one of those things where it's not like sustain,

00:09:49   not that it's not a sustainable business,

00:09:51   'cause I don't think it's that much

00:09:52   development work to keep it going.

00:09:54   But that, let's say 15 to 20% of iOS users

00:10:00   might be interested in a content blocker.

00:10:03   Well, how soon until all of them already have one?

00:10:05   And then what?

00:10:07   I'm not quite sure if it's gonna be

00:10:09   a chart topper in perpetuity.

00:10:12   - Yeah, and we tried speculating on that on ATP,

00:10:15   like what percentage of iOS people are likely

00:10:17   to actually install and critically enable an ad blocker?

00:10:22   And we came to about 10% being our estimate

00:10:25   of people who would actually enable it also,

00:10:27   'cause you have to like go through the settings menu

00:10:29   and dive down to the Safari settings

00:10:31   and actually turn it on in that convoluted settings thing.

00:10:34   So then like the idea that ad blockers are going to,

00:10:38   all of a sudden ruin everyone's lives,

00:10:41   I think is unlikely and probably exaggerated.

00:10:45   - Yeah, I think it's likely,

00:10:47   I don't think it's likely that it would be

00:10:50   that much different than on the desktop.

00:10:52   And on the desktop, I pulled the 15% from

00:10:56   what I think is what people estimate as the desktop number.

00:11:00   And obviously that changes a lot.

00:11:01   - Yeah, that seems reasonable.

00:11:02   - Changes a lot based on the audience.

00:11:04   I know Ars Technica, for example,

00:11:07   is really, really hit hard by that

00:11:09   because their audience is technically adept.

00:11:11   My site probably is, to some extent,

00:11:14   just because at least there's a high percentage

00:11:16   of people who read my site who know what an ad blocker is

00:11:20   and feel very, very confident installing an extension.

00:11:24   - It's also worth pointing out,

00:11:26   there's a lot of people, sorry,

00:11:30   it's also worth pointing out that there's a lot of,

00:11:33   like all those people who installed the ad blockers

00:11:36   who are more likely to install ad blockers like Nerds and your site, how likely were

00:11:42   they to click on the display ads to begin with? I bet the -- I mean, I've always kind

00:11:47   of suspected that display ads on the Internet are mostly supported by inadvertent accidental

00:11:55   clicks or people who don't realize they're clicking on an ad, who are misled into clicking

00:12:01   on it by it looking like content or by one of those like stupid story ads like, you know,

00:12:06   top 10 ways to lift your face up like all those crazy things like I've always kind of

00:12:10   suspected that the bulk of display advertising online was being clicked through and funded

00:12:16   by really accident or novices, you know, fueled by ignorance and confusion. Yeah, it's really

00:12:24   and you know, I'm sure that's I'm sure that's not all of it. But I bet it's a lot more than

00:12:30   both the advertisers and the publishers

00:12:32   would like to believe?

00:12:34   - Yeah, well, it is truly a,

00:12:37   they truly opened a Pandora's box way back in the '90s

00:12:42   when they first started measuring clicks in the first place.

00:12:46   And I've linked to this over the years

00:12:48   in numerous contexts talking about ads,

00:12:49   but it's come back up again.

00:12:51   It is absolutely a case of be careful what you measure

00:12:56   coming to bite them.

00:12:59   because at first, when nobody was trying

00:13:01   to game the system at all,

00:13:03   the idea of counting the actual clicks on the ads

00:13:06   was amazing because nobody ever knew

00:13:09   when you put an ad in a magazine,

00:13:11   you have a good guess that the circulation numbers

00:13:16   are probably pretty accurate

00:13:17   because they were industry standards,

00:13:19   and maybe they tried to fudge them a little bit.

00:13:21   For the most part, it was so expensive to print magazines,

00:13:24   they couldn't be that far off.

00:13:25   But how many people actually read your ad

00:13:28   if it's on page 13, or how many people skip right past it,

00:13:32   what was the register?

00:13:34   To actually be able to measure it in a meaningful way,

00:13:36   TV commercials could never really be measured.

00:13:39   If there was no gaming, if everybody was honest in the world

00:13:44   which is probably the biggest, stupidest,

00:13:46   if I've ever put forward,

00:13:48   counting the clicks on ads would be great.

00:13:51   And it did at first, web advertising was super,

00:13:56   super expensive, like in a per customer,

00:14:00   you know, however you wanna measure that,

00:14:01   because it could be measured.

00:14:03   But then as soon as people could, you know,

00:14:06   as soon as that started working,

00:14:08   people immediately started gaming it in various ways.

00:14:11   So it's, you know, once they started going down that path,

00:14:14   it was doomed, and still is to this day,

00:14:17   the fact that they try to measure it.

00:14:19   - Right, 'cause then you have all these problems

00:14:21   with click fraud and botnets doing click fraud

00:14:23   and all this stuff.

00:14:25   It's this whole world of people trying to rip each other off.

00:14:30   It's just disgusting to me.

00:14:32   Again, it's one of the reasons why I didn't want to be in the business after all.

00:14:35   It's just a dirty, messy world.

00:14:37   At a fundamental level, the way I view advertising, even online, is that it's fundamentally no

00:14:43   different than advertising in print or on TV, which is to say that it is primarily about

00:14:49   awareness, making people aware.

00:14:52   be people who've never heard of your product,

00:14:53   making them aware of it for the first time,

00:14:55   or if they have heard of it, reinforcing it with your brand,

00:15:00   if it's some kind of visual ad,

00:15:03   or with some kind of message about it.

00:15:05   Like for example, like the ads I'll be reading

00:15:07   during this podcast, where you're not seeing anything,

00:15:10   but you can hear these talking points,

00:15:12   here's what they want you to know about it,

00:15:15   so that you have it in your head,

00:15:17   so that if you need a new mattress, you can think,

00:15:19   well, what about that one that all these podcasts

00:15:21   you're talking about or something like that.

00:15:23   Just so it's in your head, awareness.

00:15:25   The fact that online ads can actually lead

00:15:28   to engagement quicker, meaning you can just click on an ad

00:15:33   and go and you're already at the Field Notes website

00:15:37   and you can buy the notebooks right there.

00:15:39   That's great, but that should just be,

00:15:42   anybody who's deciding how much to spend online

00:15:44   versus print or on TV, that should just be icing

00:15:47   on the cake.

00:15:48   It still should primarily be, look,

00:15:50   If we put an ad on this website, we can expect 100,000 people will see it, and we roughly

00:15:57   know that their demographics are like this.

00:16:01   That's really all they should be looking at.

00:16:03   But the fact that they think that they can identify people, "We'll spend this money,

00:16:07   and it'll only go to people who've searched in Google Maps for an oil change in the last

00:16:13   25 days," it's just crazy.

00:16:16   And it leads to all sorts of sickness.

00:16:18   yeah and all sorts of really creepy and perverse incentives and behavior like

00:16:24   it's it's one of those worlds where anybody who who is kind of privacy and

00:16:31   sensibly minded or anybody who has really strong ethics I think is often

00:16:37   driven out of that business like because if they won't do it someone else will

00:16:43   you guys on ATP you guys compared it to the pornography industry and then I

00:16:49   think you guys kind of backed away from it because it's almost like wow that's

00:16:52   a really strong comparison but I actually think it's actually really I

00:16:55   think that's not a bad comparison at all in terms of that you're it it's not you

00:17:02   know remove any judgment of whether the existence of pornography in and of itself

00:17:06   has any sort of moral you know any kind of moral quandary that you should be

00:17:14   pondering it's just that you end up in programming and doing things that are

00:17:20   you know whoever is implementing it is unhealthy right that if you know if it's

00:17:28   some kind of paper thing for porno you you're you know that they're they're set

00:17:33   up in a way. Somebody had to program the system that enables somebody who's got like an addiction

00:17:38   to the stuff to just keep spending as much money as they can. That is absolutely immoral.

00:17:45   I mean, either somebody feels really guilty about that or somebody who wrote that code

00:17:50   just doesn't have a moral compass that points that way. A lot of the stuff, the programmatic

00:17:55   stuff in advertising is down that path. It's maybe not quite as far, but it's pretty bad.

00:18:03   You know that you're doing things that you know that the user isn't happy about that isn't good for them

00:18:08   And that they wouldn't want to know exactly what's going on

00:18:12   Right and and one of the problems that that you know

00:18:16   So that's the side of the advertiser the side of the ad blocker of like the person or company

00:18:21   Making and running the ad blocker itself

00:18:24   That faces an interesting dilemma

00:18:27   where and I think you see this playing out with this acceptable ads thing with adblock plus and crystal and the

00:18:33   the controversy that has stirred up,

00:18:35   and some things you've said about the deck and everything

00:18:37   and how the deck had their privacy policy and everything

00:18:39   and whether, you know, the question of whether the deck

00:18:41   should be, should count as an advertiser

00:18:43   that should be blocked.

00:18:44   One of the problems here,

00:18:46   I faced this with Instapaper back forever ago.

00:18:49   I faced the problem that what people actually wanted

00:18:55   was to get the articles without ever viewing the ads,

00:18:58   even once.

00:18:59   They wanted me to go out and scrape new articles for them

00:19:02   they had never seen before and show them immediately

00:19:05   in the ad-stripped text view.

00:19:08   Like, that's what people actually want.

00:19:10   And what's actually healthy for publishers and for the world

00:19:12   and for me legally was not to do things like that.

00:19:15   It was to say, you know, okay, well,

00:19:17   I'm gonna save things you have viewed in your web browser.

00:19:20   You know, like, that's different.

00:19:22   And it was always a really tricky balance

00:19:24   because the user base, you know, the customer, the market,

00:19:28   was pushing me to go over that line.

00:19:31   and I would always try to hold back a little bit.

00:19:33   But not all my competitors did, and that hurt me.

00:19:35   And I think in the ad blocker industry,

00:19:37   I think you see the same thing, which is,

00:19:40   you know, we can talk all we want about how,

00:19:43   like, you know, well, like I also on ATP,

00:19:45   I compared it kind of to piracy, and it's not,

00:19:48   these aren't great comparisons, so please don't email us,

00:19:50   but you know, it has some overlap,

00:19:53   is what I will say about that.

00:19:55   And in the sense that, like, you know,

00:19:56   making an ad blocker is kind of like

00:19:58   making money from piracy, it's like, well,

00:20:00   People are going to pay me to hide everyone else's ads.

00:20:04   And I can say, well, I can justify it with reasons X, Y,

00:20:07   and Z, many of which are perfectly valid,

00:20:09   things like security, tracking, creepiness, et cetera.

00:20:12   Those are all very valid reasons.

00:20:14   But if I made an ad blocker that only blocked tracking

00:20:19   and still showed ads, nobody would want it,

00:20:23   because what people actually want is to block all the ads.

00:20:27   And all the tracking and the security and the creepiness,

00:20:30   those are all convenient justifications for them.

00:20:32   Just like when people pirate stuff, they say,

00:20:34   well, it wasn't available in my country yet,

00:20:36   or it wasn't available without DRM in the format I wanted,

00:20:39   on the box I wanted to play it on, whatever.

00:20:41   People can rationalize all sorts of reasons for piracy,

00:20:44   while also knowing, yeah, it's also kinda not right.

00:20:47   And so that's how I was feeling about ad blocking

00:20:49   when I quit, was like, I could rationalize

00:20:53   a whole bunch of reasons why this needs to exist,

00:20:55   and why I might even wanna still run one,

00:20:57   which I do right now.

00:20:58   I still run Ghostery on my computer,

00:21:00   and I still run, I'm switching between various blockers

00:21:04   on my phone trying to find a good one.

00:21:05   I'm currently using one blocker.

00:21:07   You know, people will rationalize these reasons,

00:21:10   but to be the person making it and enabling this

00:21:13   and making money from it even,

00:21:15   it puts it on a different level.

00:21:17   And there's always gonna be this tension between,

00:21:20   you know, trying to make it seem morally acceptable,

00:21:24   but also the reality of what the market really wants

00:21:28   To get everything for free and to not see any ads ever and no matter what they say if they if they say it's all

00:21:33   About something else. It's all about tracking whatever

00:21:35   Some people are honest about that most aren't most people just want to block all the ads. I disagree. I really do disagree

00:21:42   I think there's definitely some subset of people who really do want to block the ads really do

00:21:47   you know sort of the

00:21:49   What's that? There's even a magazine was that called?

00:21:52   Sort of like an anti-advertising magazine

00:21:57   We need the consumer reports. No, no, no used to sell it at Whole Foods, but they don't need more but it's

00:22:02   It'll come to me we need a goddamn forum like you guys have

00:22:08   It's the people who are opposed to advertising in general not just online advertising

00:22:14   But who actually are crusaders about the you know that that advertising is a perverse force on on

00:22:20   on our society

00:22:23   You know and obviously you don't have to go far to find cases

00:22:25   There are some cases where it is, you know, the cigarette companies and the way that legislation

00:22:36   has been passed that they really can't advertise anymore.

00:22:39   And that when they used to be able to, they really did.

00:22:41   You could prove it that they targeted their ads to children.

00:22:47   you know, famously the Joe Camel cartoon mascot for Camel cigarettes was, if there

00:22:57   were polls where they would go and, you know, talk to kindergartners and

00:23:00   they're amazing, amazing brand awareness in kindergarten age kids of the mascot

00:23:06   for a cigarette company. That's really sick and it wasn't an accident. It was

00:23:10   actually planned. So yeah, that's it, you know, there's an example. There are people

00:23:13   who kind of feel that way about all ads and maybe it's not even the

00:23:18   messaging, but there's others who are clearly online who really care about

00:23:22   every single byte of data. Every byte. Somebody pointed out to me, for example,

00:23:28   and with Daring Fireball and the deck, the deck ads are so small compared to

00:23:33   online ads, you know, in general. But because Daring Fireball has almost no

00:23:39   images, oftentimes has no images other than like the logo on the whole home

00:23:45   page, the deck actually comprises a significant portion of the average page

00:23:51   view, especially if you don't even look at the whole home page where there is a

00:23:54   whole big wall of text, but if you just go to like an individual short entry a

00:24:00   significant portion, maybe even a majority portion of the bytes that get

00:24:04   downloaded on the page view go to the ad. I think looking at that as a percentage

00:24:08   which is kind of unfair just because of the design of Daring Fireball.

00:24:11   But if you really want to look at it that way, okay, fine.

00:24:14   I say go ahead and block the ads.

00:24:16   But I don't think a lot of people feel that way.

00:24:18   I think people, the thing that's opening people's eyes with this, with the content blocking,

00:24:25   are the performance numbers that people are seeing.

00:24:28   I think when I see people whose eyes have been opened by some of the stuff that Ben

00:24:32   Brooks has been publishing when he's doing the yeoman's work of testing all these things,

00:24:38   and the New York Times published a thing today

00:24:40   where they tested a bunch of sites with ad blockers.

00:24:43   And when you see that you can save 30 seconds

00:24:46   on a mobile page view when you go to Boston.com

00:24:49   by having an ad blocker,

00:24:50   I don't think it's about blocking ads.

00:24:52   I want that speed increase.

00:24:54   - Yeah, and that's certainly a major part of it.

00:24:59   That is a major justification and a major motivator,

00:25:02   especially on mobile.

00:25:03   On desktop, it was easier to get wasteful

00:25:05   and kind of ignore it, but on mobile it matters more.

00:25:08   On mobile also, screen space matters more.

00:25:10   You know, like the ads that would come in

00:25:11   and take over a massive chunk of the screen

00:25:13   or do these stupid overlays or break when you zoomed in.

00:25:17   So many bad ad things out there,

00:25:19   but it's a major motivator,

00:25:21   but I think it comes down to like,

00:25:24   if you ask people, would you rather see this thing

00:25:28   with ads or with no ads,

00:25:30   they would choose no ads every time.

00:25:32   You know, obviously there's some exceptions,

00:25:34   like, you know, like certain magazines where like the ads are kind of the point, but for

00:25:38   the most part, most content, I think if people were given the option to take it with no ads,

00:25:42   they would take that option, you know, assuming the cost was equal and probably both free.

00:25:47   And so what you have in the ad business is this kind of tension, this kind of balanced

00:25:51   tension, well, usually it's balanced, where the people really want the stuff for free

00:25:58   and they don't want to pay, they don't want to pay for it and they also don't want to

00:26:01   see ads. And the publishers, you know, they obviously can't operate for free. So like,

00:26:06   they say, "All right, well, we'll kind of reach this equilibrium like, okay, well, we're

00:26:10   going to show ads and most of you are going to tolerate them. And you're going to tolerate

00:26:15   it because you don't want to pay us. And it's kind of okay." And for the most part, both

00:26:19   sides of that, usually it's this relationship of tolerating you, not actually wanting the

00:26:28   the ads or enjoying the ads. You know, most people, if given the choice, again, they would

00:26:33   say, "Well, I don't have to see the ads, then don't show them to me or don't waste my time

00:26:37   with them." So it's always this kind of tension. And in the grand scheme of things, I think

00:26:42   people do like free content better than they like paywalled stuff. So ultimately, I think

00:26:48   this is a necessary evil. Like it's, and obviously this is always evil, you know, but it's a

00:26:54   It's a necessary compromise of how content is viewed and paid for and everything.

00:27:00   And I run the deck ads on my site, I run ads on my podcast, just like you do on here, and

00:27:06   those are both choices where it's like I also, I would love to do an ad-free podcast

00:27:13   where people just paid us, but that would make a lot less money and reach a lot less

00:27:18   people.

00:27:19   And if you put a paywall up in front of a podcast, that is just death.

00:27:23   nobody listens. So it's really, it's never a great relationship. It's never perfect.

00:27:32   It's never really what all sides want, but it's this compromise that all sides have reached

00:27:37   most of the time. And anything you do to throw that out of balance, like making the ads really

00:27:41   obnoxious or really creepy or really overreaching or really slow or have other major problems,

00:27:48   there's gonna be pushback from that.

00:27:49   But the basic notion of I'm gonna show you ads

00:27:54   and you're gonna tolerate them,

00:27:56   it's a little bit uncomfortable even from the start.

00:27:59   And I've always kind of felt mildly irritated

00:28:04   by the fact that I make my living on ads

00:28:08   because I don't like ads.

00:28:12   But I think this is the best solution we have

00:28:14   given all the variables.

00:28:15   - I think that's where the comparison to piracy works,

00:28:17   I've always seen piracy as a negotiation. It is, you know, somebody if they're pirating

00:28:27   an app or a game, they're, you know, that whoever makes the game is saying here, it's

00:28:34   here's a new game for your PC, it's $40. And the person who pirates it instead of paying

00:28:40   for it is saying no, it's $0. And at some point, and I know that, you know, with piracy,

00:28:47   are absolute diehards, you know, and there are people, you know, kids, I when I was,

00:28:51   you know, in college, I pirated all sorts of stuff. And it wasn't wasn't like if Adobe

00:28:57   had halved the price of Photoshop, I was going to pay for it instead of pirating it. I realized

00:29:04   that but you know, for some things at some point, it's it and I think that that was the

00:29:09   The key to the iTunes Music Store making online music a success is that they were saying,

00:29:17   "Here's a better deal.

00:29:18   We'll have all the music.

00:29:19   You'll get your album art.

00:29:20   It'll all have good metadata right there.

00:29:23   You'll be sure of the quality, and it's a fair price, 99 cents."

00:29:28   Did it stop music piracy?

00:29:29   No, definitely not, but it definitely turned some people who might have otherwise or previously

00:29:35   using Napster or whatever the stuff that came after Napster was, to instead just say, "You

00:29:40   know what?

00:29:41   I'll just buy it from iTunes."

00:29:42   It's a negotiation.

00:29:44   I think what you see, and it's the same thing with a lot of piracy, and you see it with

00:29:47   the entertainment industry and the way they approach movies and stuff like that, and music

00:29:53   and games and software.

00:29:56   And I think it's very true with the advertising industry, is that the industry, the publishers

00:30:00   and the advertisers or the entertainment companies.

00:30:03   They don't see it as a negotiation.

00:30:05   They see this as a problem that could be solved

00:30:07   so that they can do whatever they want

00:30:09   and them, the people, will just take it.

00:30:13   We can show you whatever online ads we want

00:30:16   and you'll just suck it up.

00:30:17   And that there's some, you know,

00:30:21   I'm sure that there's a whole bunch of people who are,

00:30:24   if they're looking at, wow,

00:30:26   our mobile numbers are down this month,

00:30:28   you know, this iOS content blocking thing is totally real.

00:30:32   You can see it here, you know, five, six, seven percent down,

00:30:35   you know, over where we were before this came out.

00:30:39   You know that there's people right now who are thinking

00:30:44   or who are demanding of their engineering teams

00:30:46   to find a way around this.

00:30:48   So not like how do we, you know,

00:30:50   how do we start selling ads that people don't wanna block?

00:30:53   It's how do we defeat the content blockers?

00:30:57   And I think that's the wrong attitude.

00:30:59   That's not gonna win.

00:31:01   - Exactly.

00:31:04   Right, but on the other side,

00:31:10   when they make new kinds of ads,

00:31:13   then the ad blocker people are gonna say,

00:31:15   well, now we need to block this new kind of ad.

00:31:18   Neither side is willing to agree

00:31:20   to the other side's terms here.

00:31:21   Like the advertiser is not gonna say,

00:31:23   well, I guess we better stop publishing ads

00:31:25   'cause nobody likes ads.

00:31:27   And the ad blockers aren't gonna say,

00:31:29   "Well, you know what?

00:31:31   "That ad is fine, we're gonna publish that one."

00:31:32   Because if they do, the users revolt

00:31:35   and they go to something else.

00:31:36   - So I don't know what the ultimate solution is,

00:31:40   but it's absolutely some form of having a basic respect

00:31:45   for the user and for your product.

00:31:47   And I've been saying the following for years as well,

00:31:51   is to me, as somebody who's always been sort of obsessed

00:31:54   publishing and advertising and graphic design and branding and things like this, whether

00:32:00   it's print or TV or online, it has always been, right from the very get-go, it has always

00:32:07   been very clear to me that the traditional companies, either from TV or from print, when

00:32:13   they went online, by and large, they had very little to no respect for the web. They either

00:32:20   treated it as like, at some point they had to stop treating it as maybe a fad. But clearly

00:32:26   at the beginning a lot of them thought maybe this is a fad. And they never ever treated

00:32:31   it with the respect that they treat their main products. They would never put a pop-up

00:32:38   that actually covered the actors faces on a TV show. Whatever you want to say about,

00:32:45   even when they put, they do some stuff that still annoys me on TV, where they'll put little

00:32:49   things up at the bottom of the screen, but they don't do something that covers the

00:32:52   actual whole content of the show while the show is playing. Magazines don't allow advertisers

00:33:00   to make ads that like tape pages.

00:33:03   Jared: Well, they're getting worse every year with that.

00:33:05   Pete: Well, now that print is getting desperate, it might be out of desperation, but certainly

00:33:10   while they were profitable, they wouldn't do it. They wouldn't make you like, let's

00:33:13   say a popular page like the Op-Ed page in the New York Times. They weren't going to

00:33:17   to seal that with some kind of tape

00:33:19   so that you have to sit there and spend 30 seconds

00:33:22   looking at whatever logo is on the tape

00:33:25   while you carefully cut across it to do it.

00:33:27   But they've treated online ads like that all along.

00:33:31   - Give it time.

00:33:33   - I really do, but here's the thing.

00:33:36   I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna tell you,

00:33:38   I feel like I have to explain why I thought

00:33:41   you shouldn't have taken piece out of the store.

00:33:44   And at the time I didn't realize that

00:33:46   Having read your piece, your article explaining it,

00:33:50   I would have said, okay, you're right.

00:33:51   If that's the way you feel, then just get out.

00:33:53   I didn't know when you called me,

00:33:54   I didn't know what you were thinking the problem was.

00:33:57   I think the idea of that once it was out

00:34:02   and once you saw that this was,

00:34:04   that there was controversy to be had

00:34:07   and arguments to be made

00:34:08   and that it was going to be a nonstop,

00:34:10   never-ending slog of what deserves to be blocked

00:34:14   and what doesn't,

00:34:15   the realization that he didn't want to be in this business

00:34:18   was, you know, I think it was the right call.

00:34:21   I didn't know that that's what you were thinking.

00:34:23   I also think that this is why you're still getting shit

00:34:26   from people out on the internet,

00:34:28   'cause I have seen this, where there are people who,

00:34:30   you know, are like LOLing at

00:34:33   how could you build a content blocker all summer long

00:34:36   and not imagine what it was like to have a content blocker?

00:34:39   I can imagine that very easily,

00:34:42   that you didn't really think about it.

00:34:44   I thought your explanation, here's a cool API,

00:34:47   I'd like to build one myself.

00:34:48   I like to build things, so I'll build a thing.

00:34:51   And you don't think past that.

00:34:53   - Exactly, that was really it.

00:34:55   It's like, I explained all of it on ATP.

00:34:57   It's like all summer long I was focused on

00:35:00   how to make a really cool app using this stuff.

00:35:02   And I was not focusing on what will it actually be like

00:35:06   if I make this cool app succeed

00:35:09   and become a major person influential in this business

00:35:12   and having everyone look at me this way.

00:35:15   And I didn't think about that.

00:35:16   You know, I should have, but I was naive

00:35:20   and I wanted to do the cool thing

00:35:23   where I make the cool app and then, you know,

00:35:25   I didn't, you know, it didn't really matter

00:35:27   what the app did.

00:35:28   I just, I had this cool app idea and I tried it

00:35:31   and it worked really well.

00:35:33   And so I was motivated to keep going with it

00:35:35   and I just didn't think about, you know,

00:35:37   what would happen.

00:35:38   And, you know, I mean, a lot about this is,

00:35:41   A lot of the frustration and anger that I've received over it from other people is really

00:35:46   about like, you know, they just can't believe that I got to that position and that I then

00:35:54   gave it up for very few.

00:35:56   That's one of the reasons.

00:35:58   One of the other reasons is like, how do you walk away from all that money?

00:36:00   And it's like, well, you know, money isn't everything and I felt bad about it, etc.

00:36:05   And I mean, just once I decided to take it off the store, and when I had it, once I decided

00:36:15   that, like you said you were at the dentist, it was the moment I decided, oh, I should

00:36:20   take this off the store.

00:36:21   It was like 10 30 in the morning.

00:36:23   It was down by 12 30.

00:36:25   It was like two hours.

00:36:26   Like all I had to do was I talked it over with my wife.

00:36:30   I ran it by you and I ran it by the ghostery people to make sure that I even could do it

00:36:33   without breaking the contract,

00:36:35   and that they weren't gonna be horribly mad about it.

00:36:38   And that was it, and I was like, you know what?

00:36:41   Yeah, I wanna do this, I'm done.

00:36:42   Like, as soon as I even had the idea to do it,

00:36:43   I felt a million times better.

00:36:45   Like, it was like this giant weight off my shoulders.

00:36:49   And that night when I was working on Overcast again

00:36:51   for the first time in a couple of weeks, it felt so good.

00:36:54   Because Overcast will probably not make,

00:36:59   in its entire next year,

00:37:02   what peace could make in two or three days.

00:37:04   - But it's funny because--

00:37:07   - But I felt so much better about it, you know?

00:37:09   - And you and I have talked about this,

00:37:10   that one of the things some people

00:37:12   have a very hard time believing is that anybody,

00:37:17   obviously, I don't think everybody thinks this way,

00:37:19   I don't even think a majority,

00:37:20   but there are clearly some people

00:37:21   who cannot get it through their heads

00:37:23   that pure money is not a primary motivating factor for us.

00:37:31   It's great, I am successful right now,

00:37:33   and I do appreciate that, and it's important to me

00:37:36   'cause I have a family, and so it is certainly

00:37:38   a significant motivator, and it is a very high priority

00:37:42   for me, but it's not, number one.

00:37:44   And maximizing it, getting every single dollar that I can,

00:37:47   absolutely, positively is not.

00:37:50   Number one motivator for me is,

00:37:51   professionally, is doing good work that I'm proud of.

00:37:56   And number two is probably just what I feel like

00:37:59   the overall quality of my life. Am I happy? Money obviously plays a factor in that, but

00:38:05   making the most money possible definitely doesn't.

00:38:07   Right. And you and I are both fortunate that you and I have made enough money and make

00:38:13   enough money through other means that we can say no to things that don't feel right to

00:38:17   us. And there's all these studies done. There's a threshold for everybody and it's surprisingly

00:38:25   low where additional money that you make above that threshold doesn't really make you happier.

00:38:32   So there is this concept of what is enough and in most cultures that aren't Americans,

00:38:38   that number is way lower. But even Americans have this concept of what is enough beyond

00:38:43   which it stops really adding to your happiness in a proportional way. And I've heard estimates

00:38:49   of that number being as low as like $75,000 a year,

00:38:53   which in the software business

00:38:55   is a pretty mid-range to low salary.

00:38:57   So it's pretty, for people who are listening to the show,

00:39:00   it's not that hard to achieve that.

00:39:02   It isn't that unheard of.

00:39:04   So the idea that if you already make a six-figure salary

00:39:09   and the idea that you could turn away money

00:39:13   from something that makes you feel terrible,

00:39:17   that actually there's a lot of like widespread surveys

00:39:22   and psychology and stuff to back that up

00:39:24   where yeah, that actually is plausible to do.

00:39:26   And in fact, people do it frequently.

00:39:28   Like that once you've reached a certain level of income,

00:39:32   you don't have to say yes to everything.

00:39:36   And in fact, and a lot of people choose poorly on that scale

00:39:40   and say yes to everything and are miserable for it.

00:39:43   And they don't necessarily realize that

00:39:45   they don't have to do that.

00:39:46   - Yeah, and there's a lot of people who,

00:39:48   you know, here are people who do it

00:39:50   not just because they're well off enough

00:39:52   and they can keep their lifestyle,

00:39:53   people who downgrade their lifestyle

00:39:55   and are delighted by it.

00:39:57   You know, somebody who is just killing themselves

00:39:59   in a corporate attorney job, you know,

00:40:01   100 some hours a week doing this mind numbing work

00:40:06   and then they leave and become, you know,

00:40:09   a teacher or something.

00:40:11   - Yeah, or like, you know, you take a job

00:40:13   with a much shorter commute that's way close to your house,

00:40:15   even if it pays less than the job all the way in the city,

00:40:18   you're way happier taking the job that's a shorter commute

00:40:21   and you're able to rationally say,

00:40:24   "Yes, I can turn down the extra money

00:40:25   "for the job in the city because I will be way happier

00:40:28   "and probably healthier and probably have

00:40:30   "a better family life if I choose this one."

00:40:33   It's the same kind of thing, it all plays in.

00:40:35   - Or somebody who leaves a six-figure engineering job

00:40:39   at Apple or any of the big companies out there

00:40:43   and it just opens up their own coffee shop,

00:40:45   which is opening up a restaurant, notoriously low margin,

00:40:50   difficult business to be in,

00:40:52   but that all they've ever wanted to do

00:40:54   is roast their own coffee and make a cool place

00:40:57   where people can hang out.

00:40:58   - I've thought about that many times.

00:41:00   - If that's what you wanna do,

00:41:01   I mean, that could be so much happier,

00:41:02   and you're making way less money, way less.

00:41:05   But anyway, people don't think.

00:41:07   I'll give you a concrete example

00:41:08   of money that I have passed up.

00:41:11   And I don't think it's a thing.

00:41:12   It certainly wasn't sustainable.

00:41:14   I think Google's search algorithms have gotten around it.

00:41:16   But at some point in the late last decade,

00:41:20   I'm gonna guess that it peaked

00:41:21   somewhere around 2008 to 2010 or so.

00:41:24   It was a nonstop barrage every week

00:41:30   where I got offers from people

00:41:32   to place text ads on Daring Fireball.

00:41:35   - Oh yeah, the big text ad thing, yep.

00:41:37   - Either they wanted them on the homepage

00:41:39   or it would be some specific page

00:41:42   that ranked highly for a certain keyword,

00:41:44   a post that I had written,

00:41:45   and they would offer thousands of dollars.

00:41:48   I mean, I remember one time it was a guy,

00:41:51   and I actually pursued it,

00:41:52   not because I thought I would take it,

00:41:53   but I honestly, it was something like $20,000

00:41:56   for, I don't know, a couple of months.

00:41:58   And it just seemed like such a large amount of money,

00:42:01   but I just wanted to see, is this a scam?

00:42:03   This is a scam.

00:42:04   But then I thought, how can it be a scam?

00:42:05   Because if I don't get the money,

00:42:06   I'm gonna take the text ad down.

00:42:08   And it's, you know, it's the,

00:42:10   And I thought, well, maybe the scam is that they think

00:42:12   that Google will index it once.

00:42:15   And I was like, no, it can't be, because this is an article,

00:42:17   like let's say a year old article.

00:42:19   If they think that there's value to be gained

00:42:21   by putting a text ad there now,

00:42:23   they must know that Google re-indexes these pages.

00:42:26   And so therefore they must know

00:42:28   that if I take the text ad down, that it'll re-index

00:42:31   and they won't have that Google juice.

00:42:34   And I just researched the company

00:42:35   and it really seemed like, yes,

00:42:36   this is a company that pays publishers

00:42:38   tens of thousands of dollars to place these text ads.

00:42:41   And then you could do things, they didn't even care.

00:42:43   All they cared about was the search engines.

00:42:44   And you could do things like use CSS

00:42:47   to make it display none or fix position

00:42:51   at 4,000 pixels off screen, whatever you wanted.

00:42:53   They didn't care.

00:42:54   So it wasn't like anybody would know.

00:42:56   It wasn't like anybody would see it.

00:42:58   But it was thousands of dollars from just nonstop for years.

00:43:02   And I'd say no to all of them.

00:43:04   Or the other thing I would do is I would write back

00:43:08   and they would be like, a lot of them would say,

00:43:10   what would you want?

00:43:12   How much would you want for me to put a text ad on a page?

00:43:17   And I would write back $100,000.

00:43:21   And then they would say, that's too much.

00:43:22   'Cause they're looking at Alexa numbers

00:43:25   or something to gauge my traffic.

00:43:27   But before I got to ridiculous numbers like that,

00:43:30   I remember I would write back as a joke

00:43:33   and just say like $10,000.

00:43:35   And they'd be like, well, how about seven?

00:43:37   be like oh shit yeah it's like you thought you were throwing out this

00:43:41   obscene number that they would laugh at right and they were actually like yeah

00:43:44   that's pretty close actually yeah we can do that now these are ads that weren't

00:43:51   all they wanted was the text all they wanted to do is trick Google and other

00:43:55   search indexes there was a major industry for a while I think I think it's

00:43:59   finally probably died down as Google got smarter but that was a major industry it

00:44:03   - It was a major industry,

00:44:04   and the money was truly significant.

00:44:06   I mean, I don't know what I could've if I'd pursued it,

00:44:09   but easily tens of thousands a month.

00:44:11   - Yeah, I ran those.

00:44:12   Back when Market.org had like 100 visitors a month,

00:44:16   I ran those from a company called TextLink Ads.

00:44:18   It was like TextLink Ads with hyphens in it,

00:44:19   and that was the company name.

00:44:20   They might even still be around.

00:44:22   I'm sure they've been bought a million times.

00:44:23   - I don't think, but I think TextLink Ads were,

00:44:25   I think that in particular, they weren't so scammy.

00:44:28   They wanted-- - No, it was very similar.

00:44:31   Like, you embedded this PHP thing.

00:44:32   I remember I even, I was still very into PHP at the time,

00:44:35   but I even modified the code to add nofollow to the links.

00:44:39   And I think that eventually got me kicked out.

00:44:42   'Cause I was aware of what they were doing,

00:44:43   and I was like, well, I'm gonna add nofollow

00:44:45   because that's the right thing to do.

00:44:48   And they didn't have an explicit rule against it

00:44:50   that I could find at the time I wrote that code.

00:44:53   - But this wasn't doing any tracking.

00:44:54   It wasn't going to, I mean, literally it was just HTML.

00:44:57   So it wasn't even going to have any measurable effect

00:45:01   on download size.

00:45:02   We're talking about not even kilobytes, but bytes.

00:45:05   Actual, just extra bytes.

00:45:07   - Right, although it would, if it loaded synchronously,

00:45:09   which it would have had to do what they wanted with Google,

00:45:11   it would block the page load

00:45:13   while it fetched it on your server side.

00:45:15   - I don't even think, I think they just wanted me

00:45:17   to actually just paste, here,

00:45:18   paste this little snippet of HTML into the article.

00:45:21   - It wasn't even dynamic.

00:45:22   It was like static. - No, it wasn't even dynamic.

00:45:23   Most of the offers.

00:45:24   Now, I think that there were some services

00:45:26   like TextLink ads where it was dynamic

00:45:28   'cause they wanted to keep selling it,

00:45:29   but I used to field these offers

00:45:30   from people who just wanted to buy a month of, you know,

00:45:34   just put this snippet of HTML in this article for a month,

00:45:39   you know, for significant money.

00:45:41   And I didn't do it.

00:45:42   I turned it down because it just felt gross.

00:45:44   And it just, and I didn't need it.

00:45:46   I do have to admit, 'cause you know,

00:45:47   the whole RSS sponsorship thing at this point

00:45:50   was taking off and it was doing well

00:45:52   and the deck was, you know, I was already in the deck.

00:45:54   So I didn't need it.

00:45:55   I was already at the point where I could say

00:45:57   Daring Fireball is supporting my family.

00:46:00   I don't need to pile this on with things that I'm not proud of.

00:46:02   Exactly.

00:46:03   So I didn't.

00:46:06   But there's other examples.

00:46:08   I've fielded offers from people like other ad networks.

00:46:12   Effectively, I would have had to quit the deck and go to them, who offered me way more

00:46:17   than the deck has ever paid me per month.

00:46:22   I just said no to all of them because I was just dancing around switching ad networks

00:46:28   and going to the highest bidder and looking,

00:46:29   and their ads, obviously they just weren't,

00:46:32   they weren't little nice static ads like the deck.

00:46:34   They were big and ugly.

00:46:36   - Right, like the standard IAB, big rectangles and everything.

00:46:38   I mean, the idea of looking,

00:46:40   like the deck has this amazing lock-in

00:46:43   because once you are accustomed

00:46:45   to the way your own site looks with the deck,

00:46:47   and once your readers are accustomed

00:46:49   to the way your site looks with the deck,

00:46:51   just imagine what your site would look like

00:46:53   with the giant skyscraper ad on the sidebar,

00:46:56   like the regular, like a big white,

00:46:58   like that would look horrendous.

00:47:00   Like it wouldn't look like your site at all.

00:47:03   It would look like you were like on some crazy wifi

00:47:06   that was like injecting ads into every page you visited.

00:47:08   Like it would look like a scam or malware had taken over

00:47:12   or something.

00:47:13   It would, you would never say,

00:47:14   oh, that's Daring Fireball, that's normal.

00:47:16   Like, and that just goes to show, I think,

00:47:18   like the different worlds that are possible here

00:47:22   in the advertising space.

00:47:22   Like you have, you know, fully native stuff

00:47:25   like your RSS sponsorships that now everyone's doing,

00:47:28   that the podcast do, then you have like the very, very

00:47:31   subtle model like what the deck does,

00:47:34   and then you have everything else.

00:47:36   It's mostly like these giant, horrible things.

00:47:40   - But I can say for certainty that it wasn't like

00:47:46   the other ones that would come to me were offering me,

00:47:48   well, it would be 25% more than the deck or 30,

00:47:50   it wasn't like a percentage more,

00:47:52   it was a factor of like three, four, five times more,

00:47:54   like five times more than what I was making from the deck.

00:47:56   It was significant money.

00:47:58   The way I always chalked it up,

00:47:59   and Amy completely supported me on this,

00:48:01   is that to me, the money that I was leaving on the table

00:48:05   by not using those ads was effectively investing

00:48:08   in the brand of Daring Fireball.

00:48:10   - Yeah, that's totally right.

00:48:12   I mean, 'cause your site has always had that look.

00:48:15   It's always, even in the age now where, you know,

00:48:18   you might wanna consider a mobile layout

00:48:20   in a bigger font someday, maybe,

00:48:21   but your site has always had this look.

00:48:25   And that definitely does help.

00:48:27   It definitely does contribute.

00:48:28   It makes your site look higher class, more valuable.

00:48:32   Certainly it's much more pleasant to read

00:48:34   as long as you hit the plus button a few times

00:48:35   on the keyboard.

00:48:37   It is very, it very much contributes.

00:48:39   - You know, if you go to slash prefs,

00:48:42   you'll get a little pref,

00:48:43   it's actually, there used to be multiple prefs,

00:48:45   which is why--

00:48:46   - You think I'd do that on all my devices?

00:48:47   - Yeah, and then--

00:48:48   - Do you sync via iCloud?

00:48:49   I doubt it.

00:48:50   It sets a cookie on your device, but anybody who doesn't know this you can go to during fireball dotnet slash

00:48:55   Prefs and you can set the font size and it'll save it in a cookie on that device

00:48:59   Yeah, maybe maybe I should get to you sometime and make you finally update your font

00:49:04   Add a responsive layout maybe well, you know what though?

00:49:08   All right, not to it's we can keep going on this

00:49:12   I wanted I got a sponsor break but one of the things that

00:49:16   If I do if and when I do I want to change it once I want to change the layout to during fireball

00:49:22   Once and then have it last at least another 15 to 20 years

00:49:27   No pressure. Well, I the last design, you know has gone close to

00:49:32   What so I changed it like 2003 or 2004 there wasn't early there's like a for the first year during fireball

00:49:41   It's a slightly different design. So

00:49:43   11 years

00:49:44   I feel like I could get one that goes for 15 and maybe I'll need to tweak it like I have this one

00:49:50   You know here and there subtly over the years, but you know, I want to do it once but to do it once

00:49:56   I think it would require web fonts and

00:49:58   I've

00:50:00   procrastinated for years on web fonts because I just

00:50:03   Can't get over the fact that to me they feel a little slow and one of the things that I really love about tearing fireball

00:50:09   That's how fast is one of my favorite things I get from people from email or tweets or something like that

00:50:13   It's every once in a while

00:50:14   Like if Daring Fireball does go down or if there's like a DNS outage on the net,

00:50:23   which makes really weird things and it's like some people, you know, like people say,

00:50:27   "Hey, is Daring Fireball down?" And I check and it's definitely not down. It's right there really

00:50:31   fast, but I keep, I get like three or four of these. It's usually like a DNS problem and people

00:50:36   who are somewhere on some chunk of the internet can't get there. And when people say the following

00:50:42   to me. It always makes my day. They say, "Daring Fireball isn't just one of my favorite sites.

00:50:46   It's also the thing I always go to when I want to check my Internet connection."

00:50:49   That's great.

00:50:50   Yeah, but they expect that it's always up and they expect it to load instantly. And

00:50:57   web fonts definitely change that. So I've put off on that. And that's funny because

00:51:01   with the content bloggers, a lot of them have an option to block web fonts specifically

00:51:05   just to make things faster, not because nobody's opposed to good-looking fonts and nobody's

00:51:12   opposed to nice design, but people, some people favor fast page loads over, you know, pristine

00:51:21   designer, however you want to put it.

00:51:23   Yeah, I mean, I was I was doing that in from the early builds of peace that was like one

00:51:27   of the very first things I built was I built one that blocked all third party JavaScript,

00:51:31   which was insane, but worked. And, and I and it had an option to block all web fonts, and

00:51:37   It broke my site, it broke a lot of other sites,

00:51:39   but it was so much faster.

00:51:41   It was a massive speed difference.

00:51:45   And so now, as much as I love this wonderful

00:51:47   HFJ ideal sans font that I use on my site,

00:51:51   and as far as I know, I've seen a couple of benchmarks

00:51:54   here and there that suggest that the HFJ web fonts

00:51:57   are not as fast as Typekit, but either way,

00:52:00   none of them are what I would call fast enough.

00:52:03   You know, like you're still loading a few hundred kilobytes

00:52:07   of fonts for most people that, you know,

00:52:10   and it's from some other CDN that is off host,

00:52:13   so it's like making another connection and everything

00:52:15   and another opportunity for weird latency or DNS issues.

00:52:19   And, you know, the fact is web fonts are really nice.

00:52:23   They're very much like a nice to have,

00:52:25   but if they're gonna come at a big cost,

00:52:28   they're probably not worth it for most sites.

00:52:30   And what I found when I would, like,

00:52:32   when I've been browsing with web fonts disabled

00:52:34   on my phone for a while now.

00:52:36   And even with Ghostery on the desktop,

00:52:38   I would turn off Typekit,

00:52:40   'cause that's one of their trackers that they can block.

00:52:43   I've been doing that for a couple months too,

00:52:44   and you really don't miss much.

00:52:47   Like, you can tell on certain sites

00:52:50   where they didn't have a good fallback,

00:52:52   so it defaults to Times New Roman.

00:52:53   You can tell, like,

00:52:55   oh, this wasn't supposed to look like Times.

00:52:57   But for the most part,

00:53:00   things load really fast and nothing looks that bad.

00:53:03   And many times it looks pretty good

00:53:05   'cause it falls back to something sensible.

00:53:07   So, you know, I would say if I redesign my site

00:53:11   any time soon, I would almost certainly go back

00:53:16   to a regular system font and not use any more web fonts.

00:53:18   Just for speed, because it just isn't worth it.

00:53:21   And that being said, in defense of your ancient site design,

00:53:24   I will say that a couple months ago,

00:53:27   I decided to be a smart ass and to try to like,

00:53:32   just write like 10 lines of CSS or whatever

00:53:36   that I could just like text you

00:53:39   and have you inject it in your template.

00:53:40   Like here's your fricking responsive layout.

00:53:43   Here, like here, just modernize your site

00:53:45   with this little thing I just wrote in an hour.

00:53:47   So that was my plan, I was gonna do this.

00:53:48   And I tried, I started.

00:53:50   And your site is surprisingly complex.

00:53:53   Like I tried doing that and realized

00:53:55   it was gonna be way more work than what I had planned for.

00:54:00   This is a common theme with me.

00:54:01   (laughing)

00:54:02   It was gonna be way more work.

00:54:04   And I was like, "Eh, okay, now I understand

00:54:05   "why you haven't done this yet."

00:54:07   - Yeah, that's a pretty, well, I mean, it's been so long

00:54:10   that I don't really have an excuse, but it's--

00:54:11   - Well, you've probably started it like 10 times.

00:54:13   - Yeah, and it's a lot of boring backstories there,

00:54:17   but it'll happen sooner or later.

00:54:19   But yeah, there's no way to just take the current HTML

00:54:21   and easily do it.

00:54:24   I mean, you can make a new one that looks,

00:54:26   that on a wide screen looks the same,

00:54:27   but the way that everything is structured right now

00:54:30   is actually sort of fights against responsive layout.

00:54:34   It'll happen.

00:54:36   Well, the other thing, probably the worst thing

00:54:38   that ever happened was the fact that with a very,

00:54:41   a very short amount of, I think it's just like that one

00:54:44   viewport meta tag, and the fact that a double tap

00:54:49   on the main text column is pretty good,

00:54:52   and it has been since the original iPhone in 2007.

00:54:55   I mean, like two lines of code in 2007

00:54:58   made it easy to just double tap on the center column

00:55:00   of text and have it reasonable,

00:55:02   pretty good size and a pretty good width.

00:55:04   It's not nice and fixed so that you can still slide

00:55:07   around sideways when you scroll.

00:55:09   But it's actually pretty good for a,

00:55:12   for a non mobile optimized layout.

00:55:16   And that's probably the worst thing that ever happened

00:55:17   because if it had been terrible on iPhone,

00:55:20   I would have done something in 2007 or 2008.

00:55:23   - Yeah, I mean, and that's, I mean,

00:55:26   your site works the way every site worked in 2007, you know,

00:55:29   and that's, this was the problem

00:55:30   that I created Instapaper to solve.

00:55:32   Like one of the problems is like,

00:55:34   I didn't want to keep zooming in on everyone's pages

00:55:36   and then like, I would scroll, scroll, scroll

00:55:38   as I was reading and I'd accidentally get misaligned

00:55:40   a little bit side to side.

00:55:41   And then I, oh, let me try to realign back

00:55:43   to the center column and never quite get it right.

00:55:44   Have to zoom back out, zoom back in.

00:55:46   'Cause I'm, you know, just retentive like that.

00:55:49   And I talked to a couple of people

00:55:54   about a year ago with this.

00:55:55   I think if I was designing Instapaper from scratch today,

00:55:59   like if I was designing a thing

00:56:00   that would solve this problem from scratch today,

00:56:03   I don't think I would do the text view.

00:56:06   I think I would just save what was there on the page,

00:56:08   like the full layout, because responsive design

00:56:11   and modern sensible design on most of the sites

00:56:15   that I wanna read, and especially now

00:56:17   with content blockers existing,

00:56:18   if there was a way to hook into that kind of system,

00:56:21   responsive design really solved the problem pretty well

00:56:25   most of the time.

00:56:25   Like these, like back in 2007, 2008,

00:56:28   when I was designing Instapaper at first,

00:56:30   the text view was necessary

00:56:32   because no sites had mobile layouts.

00:56:34   Responsive design didn't even exist yet.

00:56:37   Like the spec wasn't even there.

00:56:39   Like the media queries I don't think even existed back then

00:56:41   or at least were not widely supported.

00:56:43   So like you couldn't do responsive design back then,

00:56:46   But that has really removed a lot of the need

00:56:49   for things like Instapaper's TextView

00:56:52   and Safari's ReaderView.

00:56:54   - Yeah, prior to the iPhone,

00:56:56   the only thing that had ever been done

00:56:58   in web standards for mobile were completely different sites.

00:57:01   WAP, I guess, was the big one.

00:57:03   W-A-P, I don't even know what it stood for.

00:57:05   But it was so, the devices pre-iPhone

00:57:09   were so primitive computationally

00:57:12   and displays were so small that it wasn't even feasible.

00:57:15   nobody had even really considered how would we make a dynamic layout that this

00:57:19   you could just have one URL one web page and it would look this way on a big

00:57:24   monitor this way on a smaller monitor and this way on a on a tiny little phone

00:57:28   nobody had even thought about that all right and that's why you still have

00:57:32   sites today that have like mobile dot blah blah blah URLs and that don't

00:57:35   redirect well and yeah and that's a little different because they usually

00:57:39   don't go to like a WAP type site but still there and still annoying but

00:57:42   Anyway, let me take a break here.

00:57:44   I gotta thank our first sponsor.

00:57:45   And this is a good one.

00:57:46   So don't skip ahead.

00:57:49   This is gonna be a good read.

00:57:51   It's the Brawer Group, B-R-A-W-E-R.

00:57:56   Now they sponsored during Fireball before.

00:57:58   I think they actually sponsored the talk show too.

00:58:02   And it was a great success.

00:58:03   So they're back to announce.

00:58:04   These are the guys behind an app called,

00:58:06   this is a Mac app called Ubar.

00:58:08   Just like a lowercase U-B-A-R.

00:58:11   Ubar3 and it implements a ton of suggestions from,

00:58:16   he even says specifically from listeners at the talk show

00:58:19   and readers at Daring Fireball.

00:58:20   It's a doc replacement for the Mac.

00:58:22   The purpose of Ubar is to vastly increase your productivity.

00:58:26   Pro users love it, but it's also, you know,

00:58:29   it's not just like a pro only tool.

00:58:30   You can definitely, you know,

00:58:32   see how a normal person in your family

00:58:34   would totally get into this.

00:58:36   And it sort of modeled more on the Windows taskbar

00:58:41   bar. So if you or anybody in your family has switched from Windows and sort of

00:58:46   doesn't like the ways that the Mac OS X dock isn't like the Windows taskbar,

00:58:51   U-bar is exactly the sort of thing you should look at. It looks good. It's not

00:58:56   ugly. It's very, very cool-looking, very beautiful. It's pure OS X style design.

00:59:01   And it's got, for power users, tons of shortcuts. You can do things like hold

00:59:05   down control and you can see the CPU and RAM usage for any of the apps that are

00:59:10   in there that are running.

00:59:11   Hold down shift and you can quit any app

00:59:13   or close any window from that app just by clicking it.

00:59:16   Apps that are unresponsive, get a red background

00:59:20   so you can spot hanging apps immediately.

00:59:22   You don't have to go and launch.

00:59:24   So it's sort of like it's adding features

00:59:26   from activity monitor right there in the taskbar.

00:59:29   Tons and tons of customization.

00:59:32   You can set the size, there's different themes,

00:59:36   dark and light, exactly what you would think.

00:59:39   You get the idea when you listen to the you know the idea of this type of app, you know, there's a lot of customization

00:59:44   You can put on any side of any monitor including the top you can pin it to a corner

00:59:49   Just unbelievable stuff so that here's what you do go to you bar app

00:59:55   Com and they have a four week trial. You can download it start running it you get four weeks

01:00:01   And the cost is only 20 bucks. So this is a great utility

01:00:05   typical Mac utility price 20 bucks

01:00:09   But and I think they're actually crazy because I think 20 bucks is a great price, but

01:00:12   Here's the deal. This isn't my idea, but they have a code retina Gruber

01:00:17   Retina than my last name retina Gruber

01:00:21   I don't know if that's a reference to retina graphics or my eye problems or both

01:00:24   But either way that's good the way could go either way

01:00:26   50% off so you can get it for just 10 bucks

01:00:30   so you get four weeks to try it and then it's 10 bucks to get it and

01:00:34   Then this is the part that's amazing one more thing

01:00:37   The developer of the app, his last name is Brauer.

01:00:42   I actually forget his first name.

01:00:44   Let me look it up real quick.

01:00:45   Seems like a shame, I don't know it.

01:00:49   He has, the app and saw Edward, Edward Brauer.

01:00:53   So the app and software development, that's his primary,

01:00:56   that's how he supports himself, he's a programmer.

01:00:59   But he has the most amazing hobby.

01:01:01   His hobby is watchmaking.

01:01:04   He makes real mechanical watches.

01:01:07   So he's actually launching a new timepiece

01:01:10   right here on the show.

01:01:11   It's called the Mirage.

01:01:13   It is a limited edition of only 300 pieces,

01:01:16   each with an engraved number on the back.

01:01:19   He has sent one to me.

01:01:21   It's really, really nice.

01:01:24   I think my number is, I forget what number I got,

01:01:28   104 or something like that.

01:01:29   Really nice dial, beautiful typography.

01:01:33   I mean, this is like a real serious watch.

01:01:37   I think, here's the price, 750 bucks.

01:01:41   So we're talking about, this is not like a joke.

01:01:44   It looks like a $750 watch.

01:01:47   It is really, really amazing, very, very nice.

01:01:49   It has a totally serious strap.

01:01:53   It's made by a company,

01:01:54   I'm never gonna pronounce this right,

01:01:55   Camille Fornay in Paris.

01:01:58   It's a lizard-like alligator leather strap.

01:02:02   They make OEM straps for actual serious watch companies

01:02:06   like Patek Philippe and others.

01:02:09   It has a single deployment clasp,

01:02:12   single fold deployment clasp.

01:02:14   That only means something if you're a watch person,

01:02:16   but if you are a watch person, you know what it means.

01:02:18   It's really, really nice.

01:02:19   It is like a serious dress watch,

01:02:22   but not so dressy that you couldn't wear it casually.

01:02:24   So go to, for the watch, go to Brauer,

01:02:29   V-R-A-W-E-R, timepieces.com.

01:02:34   And the same code works there, RetnaGruber.

01:02:37   And you can get that watch for 40% off.

01:02:42   So it's a $750 watch, but you can get it for 40% off

01:02:45   using that code.

01:02:47   Shipping is free in the USA and Canada.

01:02:50   And it comes in a real watch box.

01:02:53   Again, if you've ever bought like a fancy watch

01:02:55   or even like the Apple edition watches,

01:02:58   know that like you know thousand dollar ish watches supposed to come in a nice

01:03:01   box this thing comes in a really nice box you the thing that I can't believe

01:03:06   it's not that I can't believe that somebody made a nice watch there's lots

01:03:08   of nice watches out there I just can't believe that this guy designed and made

01:03:13   it and did all this stuff and you know did all the machining to actually

01:03:18   machine out the stainless steel frame of the watch and everything as like his

01:03:22   hobby it's absolutely crazy that this is like the second thing that the same guy

01:03:27   does who makes this amazing U-Bar app. So my thanks to them for the U-Bar, which is probably

01:03:33   something an awful lot of you ought to go look at and maybe buy, and for the new Mirage watch,

01:03:38   which probably isn't going to sell to a lot of you, but for those of you who are into watches,

01:03:43   it's absolutely positively worth looking at. Also, it's not too big. I hate big watches. I don't know

01:03:47   what I would say if it was real big, but it has a diameter of only 40 millimeters. So it's a

01:03:52   perfectly standard, not too big watch. A woman could get away with it. It would be like a

01:03:58   nice big watch for a woman. Totally normal size for men. It comes in three colors, white,

01:04:03   blue, and black. So my thanks to them. Check them out. Is that the craziest sponsor? That

01:04:08   might be one of the craziest sponsors I've ever had.

01:04:10   Jared Polin, " That is pretty impressive. Also, I want to give you all my French words

01:04:15   to pronounce whenever I need that."

01:04:16   Tim Cynova, " I have no idea if I pronounced that right. It's not even that hard. All right.

01:04:21   And here's the thing, I want to tell you why I think you were...

01:04:26   Here's the mistake I think you made with peace.

01:04:28   And I feel guilty about this because I knew over the summer that you were working on this

01:04:32   thing and I didn't test it until like the night before or something like that.

01:04:37   And I feel bad that I didn't because I would have called you out on the fact that it wasn't

01:04:42   whitelisting the deck or automatically.

01:04:44   And in fact, I was confused because I could swear that the night before when I did install

01:04:49   the beta, the first thing I did was check during Fireball and I could swear that it

01:04:53   did show the ad. And then you told me that there's some flakiness when you first enable

01:04:57   these things and sometimes you have to restart. And I think that's what I saw. I don't want

01:05:03   to put words in your mouth, but here's what I think you were thinking. You were thinking,

01:05:09   I'm not, A, I don't want to have a whole bunch of Fidli settings. So I don't want to have

01:05:14   thing that says block all ads, block most ads, block half ads, just block the worst

01:05:21   ads. I'm just going to say, here's a switch, block ads. I think you were thinking I would

01:05:28   be a hypocrite if I had whitelisted the deck just because that's what my site is in. I'll

01:05:36   do the thing that's not being a hypocrite and just include the deck, which is mine,

01:05:40   which is sort of, I don't know, magnanimous?

01:05:44   I don't know what the word is.

01:05:45   I think that by not white listing the deck,

01:05:51   you are committing an entirely different form of hypocrisy,

01:05:55   which is that all, everything is content.

01:06:00   And everything that you publish from marco.org

01:06:10   You're you're you're standing behind so by publishing ads from the deck by sending them to your users

01:06:16   You're implicitly saying this is an ad that's worth your

01:06:20   Seeing and it's worth your device that you're accessing this site downloading and rendering and putting on the page

01:06:28   So I feel like you you painted yourself into by releasing piece with the deck not being included

01:06:35   You have two things. You've got a website that is implicitly saying this is a thing

01:06:40   this ad is worth you seeing and is okay.

01:06:44   And then you have this other thing,

01:06:45   which is saying this is something that should be blocked.

01:06:48   And there's no way to square that circle.

01:06:52   - Yeah, that's true.

01:06:53   I mean, that was part of the problem,

01:06:55   is that this was an unsolvable problem.

01:06:59   You know, it was, I could say that I no longer

01:07:03   want any web ads to exist and I could leave the deck,

01:07:06   I could quit the deck and remove them from my site.

01:07:08   I could try to differentiate and I could say,

01:07:13   well, I'm gonna allow acceptable ads,

01:07:19   but we see the problems that causes.

01:07:21   When other sites try that or when other blockers try that,

01:07:24   we see that that's extremely messy and controversial

01:07:28   and I didn't wanna be in that business.

01:07:32   Or I can try to differentiate between,

01:07:37   well, I'm gonna block ads but not trackers.

01:07:40   And I said that's an ATP too.

01:07:42   You can't really make that differentiation

01:07:44   because if you want to block tracking,

01:07:47   you have to block almost all ads.

01:07:50   And trying to keep up the list of what belongs

01:07:56   on the other side of that almost

01:07:58   is very politically charged, it is very subjective,

01:08:04   It's very messy and arguable and vague

01:08:07   as to what kind of ad is okay,

01:08:10   what kind of ad is safe and is not a tracker,

01:08:12   what does tracking include?

01:08:15   It's such a messy world of vague distinctions

01:08:21   and impossible problems,

01:08:23   and whatever decision you make,

01:08:26   people are going to disagree with it.

01:08:28   And so actually, the safest, most defensible position

01:08:33   that an ad blocker can take is to just block everything.

01:08:36   Like that is the most defensible position

01:08:39   that I think that most of them can take.

01:08:41   And they just have to then own what they actually are.

01:08:44   And this is the part I had a problem with.

01:08:45   Like you can't just say, I'm gonna block trackers

01:08:48   and I'm gonna serve only good.

01:08:50   You have to hit some people

01:08:53   in the process of being effective.

01:08:55   Like some people have to lose

01:08:57   and some of them are gonna be good people.

01:09:00   Like the deck, you know, we know all these people

01:09:02   Like these are good people.

01:09:03   But if you're saying I'm selling an ad blocker,

01:09:06   it has to block the deck.

01:09:07   And it's weird, and if you sell an ad blocker

01:09:11   and you know about the deck and you know the deck is ads

01:09:16   and you whitelist it or you explicitly like go and omit it

01:09:20   from your database once it was already there

01:09:23   and you're selling people an ad blocker,

01:09:25   then you're lying to your customers.

01:09:27   - That's why I don't think you should call it an ad blocker.

01:09:29   I think, and I've--

01:09:30   - Right, but if you don't call it an ad blocker,

01:09:31   nobody buys it.

01:09:32   That's the problem. It's a terrible business.

01:09:35   I think that, I don't know. I don't know if that no one would buy it. I mean, what did

01:09:41   the marketing materials for Peace describe it as?

01:09:45   It said Peace block ads and trackers powered by Ghostery, something like that. Block web

01:09:50   ads and trackers.

01:09:51   I would have said something to the effect of, well, I wouldn't use the word crappy,

01:09:57   but block crappy ads and trackers.

01:09:59   And think of, put that off the top of my head,

01:10:03   I can't think of the way I would say that,

01:10:05   but that would be the gist of what I would get across

01:10:07   in very few words, block crappy ads and trackers.

01:10:11   And then that lets you whitelist.

01:10:13   And there are like one of the most popular ones right now.

01:10:17   And the one, if anybody wants my recommendation right now,

01:10:19   the one I'm using is One Blocker.

01:10:21   By default, One Blocker does not block the deck.

01:10:26   I've actually exchanged some emails with Ben Brooks,

01:10:29   who's doing a lot of work at the Brooks Report,

01:10:31   like really serious yeoman's work,

01:10:34   especially if he's, you know,

01:10:35   he's like restarting his iPhone

01:10:37   in between testing these things,

01:10:38   just to sort of get it to his neutral estate

01:10:40   and clearing the cache.

01:10:41   - That's good, because as you said,

01:10:42   like the system is buggy,

01:10:43   and it's really hard to know for sure

01:10:46   whether something's enabled or not,

01:10:47   and sometimes the system will,

01:10:49   like I had to make a test URL that like,

01:10:52   on Peace's website, a test URL that would load

01:10:55   and would try to redirect to something that piece blocked

01:10:58   and then would detect whether the redirect succeeded or not

01:11:01   and so like I had this button in the app

01:11:03   that would just test installation

01:11:04   and it would like slide up a web view for a second

01:11:06   and test something and slide it back down

01:11:07   and tell you what happened.

01:11:09   But it's very buggy, it's a very buggy system.

01:11:13   - What I'm looking for in an ad blocker

01:11:18   or a content blocker, whatever you wanna call it for iOS,

01:11:20   is I want one that is fast

01:11:21   and noticeably improves the browsing experience

01:11:25   on my iPhone,

01:11:27   blocks as much pernicious stuff,

01:11:33   like the type of ads that cover up, pop up, and full page,

01:11:37   block the page I'm looking at,

01:11:39   block stuff like that,

01:11:42   doesn't block the deck by default, and that's it.

01:11:48   And the fact that-- - See, the problem is

01:11:50   that nobody agrees on where that line is.

01:11:53   - I agree, I agree.

01:11:54   And that's, you know, obviously that's gotta go.

01:11:55   So one of the other ways to look at it is,

01:11:57   no ad blocker is going to be perfect, absolutely not.

01:12:01   And even if you could say, right now at this moment,

01:12:04   as I submit to the App Store,

01:12:05   I think it's as close to perfect as I can get it

01:12:07   in terms of what it blocks and what it doesn't,

01:12:09   by next week that's gonna be different.

01:12:12   Because some of the people you block

01:12:13   are going to find workarounds,

01:12:15   and some of the ones you don't

01:12:16   might clean up their policies.

01:12:18   It's totally dynamic.

01:12:19   But what I would suggest and what I really think

01:12:23   is possible, and what I think, for example,

01:12:25   one blocker right now is evidence of,

01:12:28   is that what you have to do is pick which side

01:12:30   of perfection you're going to be on.

01:12:32   Are you going to be, is your blocker going to be

01:12:34   on the side of letting through some stuff

01:12:37   that probably should be blocked,

01:12:39   or is it going to be on the side of,

01:12:41   erring on the side of blocking some stuff

01:12:43   that shouldn't be blocked?

01:12:45   And I think it's possible.

01:12:46   I think it's possible to build an ad blocker

01:12:49   or a content blocker, whatever you wanna call it,

01:12:51   that isn't over-aggressive.

01:12:55   And so therefore, errors on the side of maybe there

01:12:57   will be some things that get through

01:12:59   that you wish didn't get through,

01:13:00   but that overall gives you a really fast browsing experience

01:13:03   and blocks most of the stuff you want

01:13:05   and doesn't punish people who are doing it the right way

01:13:09   and are serving things that shouldn't be blocked.

01:13:11   I think that's possible.

01:13:14   one blocker is is the best proof of it today that it could be done but the fact

01:13:20   is that what's amazing to me is that in Ben Brooks testing and he's I think he's

01:13:24   up to like 32 of these I was content blockers that he's tracked in his

01:13:29   testing one blocker isn't just fast it's the fastest I don't know where peace was

01:13:34   on that because he you know he's taken peace out of that but the only one

01:13:37   that's faster it was roughly in the middle when he still had it in the only

01:13:41   one that's faster is some crazy one that I think is sort of like the one you wrote this

01:13:45   summer that just blocks all third party JavaScript. There's one that makes that is head and shoulders

01:13:51   faster than anything, but it breaks half the internet. Like Ben Brooks, I forget the name

01:13:57   of it. It's got like a funny name too, but there's a whole bunch of like mainstream sites

01:14:02   that just render as a white box.

01:14:03   white box. No I actually I had that issue with with my first one because I when my

01:14:10   first version of peace before I negotiated the deal with ghostery it

01:14:14   literally just blocked all third-party JavaScript and the funny thing is how

01:14:18   well that works most of the time. It's called script scrap. That's a

01:14:23   wonderfully awkward name. No I mean like it that approach actually works the vast

01:14:30   majority of the time. But, you know, it's one of those things where, like, if the error

01:14:34   rate, like, if the pages it breaks, if it breaks on 10% of pages, well, that's actually

01:14:39   very annoying in practice. Like, that's too high of a breakage rate. And the reason I

01:14:43   went with Ghostery instead was because it was the solution I found that had the lowest

01:14:50   rate of sites that broke, like, things that actually just stopped working. Because, like,

01:14:55   Like a lot of sites will tie in in weird ways,

01:14:58   especially analytics packages and especially Adobe Omniture.

01:15:02   That is one like Apple's site breaks without that.

01:15:04   A bunch of sites, functionality actually stops

01:15:08   if you don't have certain trackers enabled.

01:15:10   And Ghostery actually keeps a database of that

01:15:13   and builds it into their extension to try to whitelist,

01:15:18   to try to whitelist things like that

01:15:21   that are fairly innocent on certain sites

01:15:24   that are required for them to work properly.

01:15:27   And they maintain a list of sites that break

01:15:29   with, for example, Omniture disabled,

01:15:32   and that's automatically whitelisted by default.

01:15:34   - I forget what it was that I couldn't,

01:15:36   there's a part of Apple's developer website

01:15:39   that I couldn't get working,

01:15:40   and I was like, what the hell's going on?

01:15:41   - Yep, that's why.

01:15:42   - And it just occurred to me, it was like,

01:15:44   ooh, maybe I should whitelist this in Ghostery,

01:15:46   and I did, and it worked, and I was like,

01:15:48   oh man, of all the sites I never thought

01:15:49   that I would have to dick around in Ghostery,

01:15:51   it was apple.com.

01:15:52   literally has no ads, unless you consider the entire website an ad, has no ads that

01:15:59   you would think of as web ads, but it actually breaks without it being emphasized. I think

01:16:03   it was exactly that Adobe amateur, whatever the hell that is.

01:16:06   Well, and that's, I don't even know. I think it's some kind of analytics thing, but one

01:16:11   of the problems, one of the reasons why we have such obscenely rampant and over-the-top

01:16:16   tracking on the web is this this culture of data people where like everything it

01:16:21   is considered outrageous and obscene and and reckless if you run a website today

01:16:28   that doesn't do very detailed analytics and behavioral tracking like if you if

01:16:33   you have access to quote data and you're not collecting it and you're not mining

01:16:38   it and analyzing it for eyeballs and various other body parts like it is like

01:16:43   that you're considered like negligent almost

01:16:45   in an owner of a website, not doing all this tracking.

01:16:48   Like the standard industry wisdom

01:16:50   and the pressure from everywhere in the industry

01:16:52   is to track as much as you possibly can.

01:16:55   And this is, and we can get into it here if you want,

01:16:58   one of the issues with this

01:17:01   that is still mostly under the radar

01:17:04   is tracking happening inside of apps

01:17:06   that can't be blocked by Safari content blockers.

01:17:09   - Yeah, no, definitely.

01:17:11   like Twitter is famous for like always pushing the boundaries of like like they they they had this database of

01:17:17   Like something like over a thousand

01:17:19   URL schemes custom iOS app URL schemes that they that they would call can open URL on the system API

01:17:26   And that would tell them which of these URL schemes were registered and they could then derive

01:17:31   Which apps does each user have installed and they could tailor their ads?

01:17:35   And they could sell their as they could they could actually sell people the idea of we can show your Twitter ad to people who?

01:17:41   who have this particular app installed.

01:17:43   It's crazy.

01:17:45   And then, that was so egregious of a privacy violation

01:17:48   that Apple severely restricted that in iOS 9,

01:17:51   and they actually kind of broke it for uses like that.

01:17:54   - So in other words, just to explain that,

01:17:58   I know exactly what you're talking about,

01:17:59   but just for anybody who, if that went over your head.

01:18:02   So the way sandboxing works on iOS,

01:18:06   an app that plays by the rules and uses,

01:18:10   passes the test that they do

01:18:11   that you're not using private APIs,

01:18:12   can't really look outside at Sandbox

01:18:15   and look at the file system

01:18:16   and see what's in your iPhone's slash applications folder.

01:18:21   You can't do it.

01:18:25   But what Twitter did, and I'm sure other people did,

01:18:27   but Twitter I guess really went far,

01:18:30   is when a custom-- - Twitter got caught.

01:18:31   - When a custom app, like if Instapaper

01:18:33   has an Instapaper colon slash slash URL scheme,

01:18:37   And then the idea of the URL scheme is,

01:18:40   hey, that way another app can integrate with Instapaper.

01:18:44   And this was really common in the pre-sharing sheet days

01:18:47   where apps would, the only really way

01:18:49   that apps could communicate with each other,

01:18:52   Instapaper communicating with Tweetbot

01:18:55   or something like that was through a URL scheme.

01:18:57   So if Tweetbot was going to integrate with Instapaper,

01:19:02   it used a URL scheme.

01:19:04   Did it?

01:19:04   I admit, you'd know.

01:19:06   Is that how Tweetbot used to integrate with Instapaper?

01:19:09   - As far as I remember, yeah.

01:19:10   I mean, almost all the Twitter clients

01:19:12   integrated with Instapaper eventually.

01:19:13   - But through a custom URL scheme.

01:19:15   But then to make a nice user experience, there was an API.

01:19:18   So Twitter, Tweetbot, or whatever app,

01:19:21   Twitter, whoever, would call.

01:19:24   If I send an Instapaper colon slash slash URL,

01:19:28   is it going to be handled?

01:19:30   Yes or no?

01:19:31   And then if the answer is no, it's like,

01:19:32   oh, well they don't even have Instapaper installed,

01:19:33   I won't even give them the option.

01:19:35   So Twitter used it to survey whether any of a thousand apps

01:19:39   were installed on the system and used it.

01:19:42   And then they of course know your Twitter account

01:19:44   'cause you're logged into Twitter, you're using Twitter.

01:19:46   - And they would transmit that data back to Twitter

01:19:48   and they would save it probably forever on your account

01:19:51   in their ad analytics database.

01:19:52   All this creepy stuff that was made possible

01:19:55   by this relatively innocent intending system API.

01:19:58   - Yeah, and so that, but this, it's sort of a tangent,

01:20:01   but it absolutely gets to something

01:20:03   and that is a false accusation against me,

01:20:06   which is that in my defense of,

01:20:10   I think the problem that some people seem to have

01:20:14   with my take on this is that I'm not an absolutist,

01:20:17   that I don't feel like,

01:20:20   and I feel like there's some people who wanna say

01:20:24   that if you're gonna block some ads,

01:20:25   you have to block them all,

01:20:26   and if you're going to whitelist some ads,

01:20:28   you have to see them all.

01:20:30   And I think that's bullshit.

01:20:33   I think it's provably bullshit because people are doing

01:20:37   just what I'm suggesting, which is try to use white lists

01:20:41   and defaults for your ad blocker that strike a middle ground.

01:20:45   And again, who defines that middle ground

01:20:47   and whether different people have significantly

01:20:50   different tastes on where that line is drawn?

01:20:52   Absolutely, who knows how it's gonna shake out,

01:20:54   but I absolutely think that someone who wants to take

01:20:57   the absolutist all or nothing approach

01:21:00   is being stubbornly idealistic.

01:21:05   I don't know what the word is,

01:21:07   and they're fooling themselves.

01:21:08   But the false accusation against me is that I'm somehow,

01:21:14   because I'm in the bag for Apple and pro-Apple,

01:21:17   I'm on board with Apple destroying the open internet

01:21:22   and taking us to a world where there's nothing

01:21:24   but apps from the App Store.

01:21:25   And that falls for a couple of reasons.

01:21:28   Number one, my life's work is on a website

01:21:31   and I don't have an app for it.

01:21:32   There is no daring fireball app.

01:21:35   And I still have no plans to make one.

01:21:36   My site is in Apple News.

01:21:40   I haven't done anything related to it.

01:21:43   I really don't even understand how Apple News works.

01:21:45   I might do something with their stuff.

01:21:49   I haven't really looked at it yet.

01:21:55   I would not be in favor of most people reading my site through Apple News. I'm not in favor

01:22:00   of that. And lastly, I don't think I'm just as suspicious and concerned about the tracking

01:22:07   that's going on in native apps as I am on the web.

01:22:09   Right, because native apps, like, the web can do a lot more egregious things. They can

01:22:16   do a lot more cross-site tracking, like tracking between different sites by third parties.

01:22:21   the web makes a lot more of that possible.

01:22:23   Apps, you're mostly, I mean,

01:22:26   depending on what they've integrated,

01:22:27   but you're mostly in apps limited to

01:22:30   the maker of the app tracking you themselves.

01:22:33   - Right. - You know?

01:22:34   And again, there are some exceptions,

01:22:36   like with third-party packages,

01:22:38   but for the most part, that's what's going on.

01:22:40   And so you do have to worry about things like,

01:22:43   like the big social apps, which,

01:22:46   again, like when you're talking about,

01:22:48   if you wanna block tracking, you gotta block social.

01:22:51   and all the social widgets that are in all the sites.

01:22:54   You have to block the fancy richly formatted Twitter embeds

01:22:57   that people embed in blog posts.

01:22:59   You would probably also have to block

01:23:01   embedded YouTube players because that's owned by Google,

01:23:04   a massive ad and tracking company.

01:23:06   You know, there's a lot you have to block

01:23:07   if you wanna truly block tracking.

01:23:10   - Yeah, and if you just take a look,

01:23:11   YouTube's a good example because it's so ubiquitous.

01:23:15   I mean, it's central to the modern web landscape.

01:23:19   But if you ever just do a view source on a page

01:23:21   with a YouTube embed and just start going down

01:23:25   the rabbit hole of the iframe and what's going on there,

01:23:29   I mean, it's almost impossible to follow along,

01:23:31   but you can see that it is nothing even vaguely resembling

01:23:36   a video tag where the source pointing to a URL.

01:23:40   - Exactly.

01:23:40   - I'll bet like a single YouTube embed

01:23:45   would probably involve more markup, let alone JavaScript,

01:23:49   just more markup than the entirety of like a typical

01:23:52   Daring Fireball page.

01:23:53   - Exactly, yeah.

01:23:55   But you know, with app tracking,

01:23:57   they can do more detailed tracking of you,

01:24:03   but in a narrower scope.

01:24:04   Like you're not usually,

01:24:06   like if you just open up a random app,

01:24:10   like if you're, you know,

01:24:11   there's a new game from the Crossy Road people,

01:24:14   like Shooty Skies or something today.

01:24:16   And I downloaded that and knowing like, you know,

01:24:19   what's the most they can really do here like I know Ios is so sandboxed and

01:24:22   everything like they're not gonna be able to get to all my other data they're

01:24:25   not they're gonna be able to have like a unique identifier tied to me that they

01:24:28   can use in you know fifty other apps that aren't even published by them and

01:24:32   you know some other third-party thing to do it like the crossy road people have a

01:24:35   new app yeah it's called shootie skies oh is it good I haven't lost you yet oh

01:24:40   I mean I was gonna play it in bed tonight important planning play it in

01:24:45   second half of the talk show. I'll play during all your ad reads. Yeah. No, I always pay

01:24:53   attention to podcast ad reads. Never skip them. So is it nice? Do you like, do you enjoy

01:24:59   not having to do them? Because you do them on ATP. Yeah, this was, this was great. Like

01:25:04   it's great to just show up to a podcast and just talk and not have to worry about like,

01:25:08   all right, got to get the sponsors ready. Got to make sure I have all the scripts for

01:25:11   all of them. And if I don't, I got to write some and, you know, review them and everything.

01:25:14   has there ever been any discussion about letting casey do some of them.

01:25:17   I don't think we've ever actually talked about it. I think he kind of

01:25:21   assumed yeah he's he's so much nicer than me john you should do it, but john

01:25:26   does the toaster ones, which is yeah is the greatest single greatest ad campaign.

01:25:31   In my opinion in podcast history is there's a it's a good one this week to

01:25:36   this. This is a toaster week this week. It's a good one.

01:25:38   It's a really good one.

01:25:42   It's Cards Against Humanity's campaign.

01:25:45   For any of you, I'm guessing an enormous number

01:25:47   of the people listening to this episode listen to ATP as well.

01:25:50   But for those of you who don't, on the Accidental Tech podcast,

01:25:54   there's a year long, maybe over a year long--

01:25:58   It's this whole calendar year.

01:26:00   It's almost over.

01:26:02   --from Cards Against Humanity.

01:26:04   And the entirety of the ad campaign,

01:26:06   there is absolutely no talking points about the game itself.

01:26:11   They just send John Siracusa a toaster oven

01:26:15   every time an ad is coming up.

01:26:17   - Yeah, once a month.

01:26:18   - Once a month, they send him a toaster oven

01:26:20   and he just tears into it on air.

01:26:25   - Yeah, it's like the entire role of the ad

01:26:27   is for John to just review a new toaster oven every month.

01:26:30   - Talk about the dials, talk about how well it works.

01:26:33   - The knob feel.

01:26:35   - You know, what egregious design mistakes

01:26:37   that they've made.

01:26:38   - Yeah.

01:26:39   Turns out there's a lot of really badly designed toaster

01:26:41   ovens out there.

01:26:42   [LAUGHTER]

01:26:44   And he takes it totally seriously,

01:26:46   as of course he does.

01:26:47   It's fantastic.

01:26:48   But anyway, it must be nice.

01:26:50   I don't know.

01:26:50   I enjoy it when I'm a guest on somebody else's podcast

01:26:52   as well.

01:26:53   Yeah, it is quite nice.

01:26:54   Even though I do enjoy--

01:26:55   I actually enjoy doing these reads, though.

01:26:57   I think I've gotten better at it.

01:26:59   And I enjoy it because I've gotten to the point

01:27:01   now where I feel like it's a game where

01:27:03   I'm trying to keep people from hitting the 30-second skip.

01:27:08   And if you do, it is what it is.

01:27:11   And you know, it's funny, 'cause that's ad blocking, right?

01:27:15   I mean, it ties into it.

01:27:16   The 30 second-- - It's very similar.

01:27:19   It's like, it's not quite the same, but it's very similar.

01:27:21   It's in the ballpark for sure.

01:27:22   - I actually saw somebody on Twitter

01:27:26   at Peak Peace Controversy.

01:27:29   I still think that's so funny.

01:27:31   I think it was such a good name for a blocker.

01:27:33   And I think it's so funny that the way that it played out

01:27:37   (laughing)

01:27:39   So unpeaceful for you.

01:27:41   But I saw somebody who tweeted something to the effect of,

01:27:49   it's actually a pretty clever idea

01:27:52   that somebody who writes a podcast client could,

01:27:55   for any given episode of a show,

01:27:59   if you tracked people's use of 30 second skip,

01:28:02   you could probably very easily pinpoint where the

01:28:06   the sponsor breaks are in the episode.

01:28:10   - Right, and this is like,

01:28:12   I thought of this feature two years ago.

01:28:14   I think everybody who has made a podcast app

01:28:16   has thought of this feature,

01:28:17   especially once Amazon launched their shared highlights

01:28:21   for Kindles, 'cause it's very similar to that.

01:28:24   It's like you kind of track what people highlight

01:28:26   and then things that get highlighted a lot,

01:28:28   you can say are important

01:28:29   and you can default to highlight them.

01:28:31   Well, in a podcast app, yeah,

01:28:32   you could track what's being skipped

01:28:34   and sections of a podcast that are skipped a lot,

01:28:35   you can have an option to just automatically just skip them.

01:28:38   And first of all, it would be hard to make that work

01:28:42   very well in a way that wouldn't annoy people,

01:28:45   and that would be obvious what's happening.

01:28:47   But second of all, I think, like I've talked to other

01:28:51   podcast app makers and mentioned this before,

01:28:54   and everyone always says the same thing,

01:28:56   the same thing I thought, which is,

01:28:58   I don't want to do that to podcasting,

01:29:01   because I know like, that would by nature

01:29:05   hurt podcasting and I don't want to do that.

01:29:08   - I, you know, and I feel like the other thing

01:29:12   is that it's so respectful, you know, it's just time,

01:29:17   you know, and it's, you know, I've gone to four

01:29:20   on some of these summer episodes

01:29:22   just because I've fallen way behind a weekly schedule,

01:29:24   but my episodes are very long.

01:29:26   And so I absolutely, I do stick to never more

01:29:30   than one and a half hour, which I feel like is pretty fair

01:29:34   and compares extremely favorably to Terrestrial Radio.

01:29:39   - Oh my God, yeah, not even close.

01:29:41   - And even compares, I think, very well

01:29:43   to the Howard Stern show on Sirius.

01:29:46   Like Amy, Amy's a huge Howard Stern fan.

01:29:51   And she's still annoyed by the fact that the whole thing

01:29:54   that pitched her on Sirius in the first place

01:29:56   is that it was commercial free,

01:29:58   and they were like, except for Howard Stern,

01:29:59   because we can sell a lot of very expensive ads on his show.

01:30:02   You know, I think in the history of--

01:30:06   - Well, they aren't very expensive.

01:30:07   I've bought them before.

01:30:08   - Well, but from their perspective,

01:30:10   in the aggregate, they are.

01:30:11   I'm not saying each spot is,

01:30:13   but I think that, I don't think that they could do,

01:30:15   I don't think they could,

01:30:16   I don't think they could pay his salary

01:30:18   if it wasn't for that.

01:30:19   I don't know.

01:30:20   - Yeah.

01:30:22   - You disagree?

01:30:23   You think they could go, you think--

01:30:24   - I paid less for a live read on his show

01:30:27   than what you and I charge for live reads

01:30:29   on our shows right now.

01:30:30   (laughing)

01:30:32   I'm serious.

01:30:34   - That's amazing.

01:30:35   And you got Howard to actually read it.

01:30:38   - Yeah, yeah, it's a live read.

01:30:40   That's why it's valuable.

01:30:42   - That was really great.

01:30:43   It was a really cool thing.

01:30:44   But anyway, I just feel like that, again, it's negotiation.

01:30:49   And I'm sure there are people out there listening right now

01:30:52   who, even though I told them not to,

01:30:54   hit the 30 second thing during the Brower thing before,

01:30:57   and they're probably gonna hit it

01:30:58   on some of the ones that I'm about to do.

01:31:00   And that's okay.

01:31:01   I mean, you know, it's my job,

01:31:03   but I feel like I've gotten better enough at doing this,

01:31:05   and I feel like I'm still attracting

01:31:07   an interesting enough group of sponsors

01:31:10   that it's a fun game for me when I do 'em

01:31:13   to try to, you know,

01:31:14   and when I'm doing 'em, I'm imagining a listener

01:31:19   with his thumb hovering over the 30-second skip,

01:31:21   and I'm trying to keep him from pressing it,

01:31:24   or at least only having him press it once.

01:31:26   - Yeah.

01:31:27   - And I still think there's some value in it.

01:31:28   Like for example, I'll break right into one right now.

01:31:32   And here's one that I'll bet a fair number of people

01:31:35   will 30 seconds skip because they are here

01:31:38   almost every single week.

01:31:39   It's our friends at Fracture.

01:31:40   They'll fracture the people who print your photos on glass.

01:31:46   They sponsor the show all the time.

01:31:51   And the reason they keep coming back

01:31:52   is 'cause you guys out there keep buying pictures from them.

01:31:57   so you're probably familiar with them.

01:31:59   Really high quality printing.

01:32:00   They print on the back of the glass.

01:32:02   You send them a photo.

01:32:03   They print it on the back of the glass.

01:32:04   It's right there on the glass,

01:32:05   not like a piece of paper stuck to it.

01:32:07   It's not a frame where there's a piece of paper

01:32:09   behind glass.

01:32:09   It's right there on the glass.

01:32:11   Really, really nice.

01:32:12   The best way to get actual analog versions of your photos

01:32:15   that I've ever seen,

01:32:16   because there's no work involved on your part.

01:32:18   You just upload the photo and then it comes back to you

01:32:20   and it's all nice and ready to go.

01:32:22   They do have, they actually have a special message

01:32:25   that they want me to get across.

01:32:27   It's only October 1st as I record.

01:32:29   Clearly a big part of Fracture's market is gifts,

01:32:35   people buying photos for gifts.

01:32:37   And obviously the holiday season's coming up.

01:32:40   October 1st does not sound like it's close to the holidays.

01:32:42   Nobody's, I don't think, even though the holiday decorations

01:32:46   seem to go up earlier and earlier in retail.

01:32:48   Usually people at least wait till Halloween.

01:32:50   - Yeah, we're still in pumpkin spice season right now.

01:32:52   - Yeah, exactly.

01:32:53   You gotta wait till pumpkin spice goes away.

01:32:55   But, Fracture wants me to remind you

01:32:59   that they do get backed up at the holidays.

01:33:02   And so, this might be a good way

01:33:05   to just knock out a couple of your Christmas gifts

01:33:08   really, really early and not worry about cutting it close

01:33:11   and getting caught behind because by the end of December,

01:33:14   they actually can't keep up and you can't do it last minute

01:33:17   and get it in time for Christmas

01:33:19   because they're so, so busy.

01:33:20   So think about it.

01:33:23   about the people who you might want to give a fracture image to for the

01:33:27   holidays and get it over with now just do it and you'll feel better you'll know

01:33:31   you have you know somewhere sitting in your office you've got these boxes

01:33:33   packed up you've already got some of your Christmas gifts knocked out ready

01:33:37   to go really is a good gift we do it every year I can't even imagine until

01:33:42   fracture isn't even around anymore I can't imagine that a holiday season is

01:33:46   gonna go by where we don't get some of these for some of the people in our

01:33:48   family. Really, really great stuff. Where do you go to find

01:33:53   out more? Their website is fracture me.com. And their URL

01:34:01   code is, I think, daring fireball. And if you've never

01:34:06   ordered for them before, use that code daring fireball, and

01:34:09   you will save 15% off your listeners first order. And if

01:34:14   you're listening to the show, if you're like a Marco fan, you

01:34:16   could use the code ATP and you'll save the same amount and you'll give the

01:34:20   the mojo to to the accidental tech podcast ATP 15 ATP 15 what did that

01:34:30   change used to be ATP right or did they I think I think in 2015 I think it became

01:34:34   me to be 15 anyway you could do that long-term that you know they were

01:34:37   sponsors before 2015 they've been long-term sponsors anyway it's all good

01:34:41   they're a great company with a truly truly great product and you know

01:34:46   If you've ever wondered why in the world do they keep sponsoring these podcasts?

01:34:49   I swear it's because people keep buying the fractures from them

01:34:52   So so keep it up and really really can't say enough about I just bought one as a gift a couple weeks ago

01:34:56   I'm about to do another one. They make great gifts

01:34:58   Yeah, you get you do get because most of the people in your family probably don't listen to your podcast just like mine

01:35:04   I don't say they have no idea and when they see them they there really is like a whole like well

01:35:09   How did in the world did you make this and you just say, you know, you could tell them just tell them

01:35:14   go to fracturedme.com.

01:35:16   - Yeah, no, I have severe gift giving anxiety every year.

01:35:21   And to have an easy solution that's kind of like

01:35:24   a go-to thing, like if I don't know what to get

01:35:26   somebody in my family, I can get them a cute picture

01:35:28   of my grandparents or my kid or something.

01:35:32   That works out well.

01:35:33   Yeah, I don't know.

01:35:35   I'm always envious of your ad reads.

01:35:37   You and Hello Internet, I think,

01:35:39   do the best live reads I've heard.

01:35:41   - Those bastards, those guys.

01:35:42   - Aren't they frustratingly good?

01:35:44   - Yeah.

01:35:45   - They really are.

01:35:45   - That actually, 'cause again, I do,

01:35:47   I don't, like I listen to yours, you know,

01:35:49   because I wanna see how you do it, you know,

01:35:51   like it's a challenge.

01:35:52   - That's why I listen to it.

01:35:54   - It's just, it's, you know, like, okay,

01:35:55   it's Squarespace again, what are you gonna do?

01:35:57   You know, it's a challenge, it is,

01:35:59   'cause I wanna keep it fresh for people who aren't skipping.

01:36:03   I don't wanna say the same thing every time.

01:36:05   The Hello Internet guys, God,

01:36:06   they're fricking really good at it.

01:36:08   - Yeah, like it's frustrating enough

01:36:10   that their podcast is so good in general,

01:36:12   but that they also just kill it on the ad reads

01:36:14   and that they record, like I've always wanted

01:36:17   to try recording the ads separately from the show

01:36:19   and dropping them in afterwards.

01:36:21   - I just thought about it.

01:36:22   - I don't like doing it during the show

01:36:24   because it makes me pay attention to something else

01:36:28   during the show rather than what my co-host

01:36:30   is talking about.

01:36:31   And so like I always have in my mind,

01:36:32   oh, I gotta do another ad now,

01:36:33   and I, oh, what's it gonna be, load it up on screen,

01:36:36   maybe read it a couple times first, like,

01:36:38   and I'm having to do all that as Casey or Jon

01:36:40   talking about something that and so I'm not listening to them I'm looking at an

01:36:43   ad and so I feel like that makes the show worse but I I don't know I I

01:36:48   haven't figured out how to do it well yet maybe I'll have to try it sometime

01:36:51   and see I've I've been given serious thought to that exact same thing and I

01:36:54   might play with it cuz I feel like it's the sort of thing I can I can play with

01:36:57   and it's not irrevocable you know yeah but I feel like you do need some kind of

01:37:02   sound effect to start and end it and I don't have one of those ready and

01:37:05   that's one of the reasons I haven't done it yet because like if you just try to

01:37:07   drop it in you sound different and everyone notices like it is very obvious

01:37:12   like this is recorded at a different time your voice is more or less tired

01:37:16   and raspy than it was and like in the surrounding parts of the show you can

01:37:19   hear maybe the room sounds a little bit different maybe it's like a little bit

01:37:22   more echoey or you were using the mic a little bit further away or a different

01:37:25   mic that you were using two weeks ago or something like you can always tell when

01:37:28   it's when it was recorded at a different time have you ever noticed me I've done

01:37:32   that a few times have you ever noticed yeah every time I'll bet you did I

01:37:36   - I notice every time.

01:37:37   And I listen to podcasts on terrible headphones.

01:37:40   And I notice every time.

01:37:41   But that's just me, I'm a nerd.

01:37:43   - Yeah, if I switch to that, when I have done it,

01:37:45   it's because something has changed.

01:37:47   Either I've made a terrible mistake,

01:37:49   or somebody else has made a mistake,

01:37:51   or I didn't get it in time.

01:37:55   That there was some kind of communication problem

01:37:57   and it's like, crap, I told Marco,

01:37:59   we're gonna record at nine, I don't have it.

01:38:01   I'll just fill it in later.

01:38:02   And then when I've done that in the past,

01:38:04   I've tried to fake it as best we can to do it.

01:38:07   And if it doesn't come out perfectly, so what?

01:38:09   If I were to switch, I would switch to something

01:38:11   where it's obvious and it's, you know,

01:38:12   there's a little, you know, sound effect or something.

01:38:15   - Yeah, a jingle or a sound, yeah, something like that.

01:38:17   'Cause I really do think it would, like,

01:38:20   one of the reasons, like, I've always been interested

01:38:23   in the idea of trying an ad-free show.

01:38:26   But ATP is so big now, and it's not just me,

01:38:28   that I, like, you know, I'm willing to gamble

01:38:32   with large amounts of money of potential future income,

01:38:35   but I can't make that decision for two other people alone.

01:38:38   And so I don't wanna rock the boat there.

01:38:41   But one of the reasons I was motivated

01:38:43   to even consider rocking the boat there

01:38:44   is because I don't like doing the ads in line,

01:38:47   because I'm afraid of the attention it's taking away,

01:38:51   of my attention it's taking away from the conversation.

01:38:55   And I think that makes it worse, so I should try that.

01:38:57   I gotta figure out what sounds to bookend it with

01:38:59   and just try it.

01:39:00   And I also like, I heavily edit the ad reads because,

01:39:04   see this is why you frustrate me.

01:39:07   Because I try to cap my ad reads to three minutes.

01:39:11   And ideally it's at least one and a half,

01:39:14   and it's at most three minutes.

01:39:16   And if I, I almost always end up running way over that.

01:39:19   I'll usually do it on the live show,

01:39:22   I'll usually do a four minute ad read.

01:39:24   And then in the edit, I edit it down to fit three.

01:39:27   And I still feel like I'm not saying

01:39:29   everything I wanted to say in the read. Meanwhile, you come

01:39:32   in here and you talk at like one mile an hour during your

01:39:35   ad reads and you manage to say everything that you need to

01:39:38   say and they're not longer than three minutes. Usually, like

01:39:41   they're not that much longer or shorter than mine. So you

01:39:44   manage to somehow say way more with way fewer words in the

01:39:49   same amount of time and your sounds more relaxed and more

01:39:51   natural and mine sounds kind of stressed out because I'm

01:39:54   trying to cram it all in in three minutes. It's kind of

01:39:56   - That's probably right, I guess.

01:39:57   - Yeah, maybe.

01:39:58   Mine were brutal at first.

01:39:59   They were really bad.

01:40:00   I used to get, and I didn't get emails complaining about it.

01:40:03   I got emails, very sympathetic emails.

01:40:06   'Cause even though when I first started doing the show

01:40:08   on my own without Dan Benjamin,

01:40:12   and it was, obviously that was like my Marco moment

01:40:14   where I had really angered the internet.

01:40:16   The people who were angry refused to listen.

01:40:20   So they weren't listening and sending me hate mail

01:40:22   about how bad the show was.

01:40:24   They weren't even listening, and they were just--

01:40:25   You didn't even get to hate listeners?

01:40:27   - I got some, but I think most of them just didn't.

01:40:31   I really didn't get a lot of that.

01:40:33   I think they just went right to iTunes

01:40:35   and wrote terrible one-star reviews and they were done.

01:40:38   The people who listened were people

01:40:39   who were still enjoying it, and they were very sympathetic.

01:40:42   But it was sort of like the sort of email, I think,

01:40:44   that you get when you come down.

01:40:48   It was exactly like the email I got

01:40:49   when I talked about the stuff that's happened with my eye.

01:40:52   And you get these really nice emails from people

01:40:54   saying how sorry they are.

01:40:55   and they have all my sympathy.

01:40:57   And they're like, "I'm really sorry

01:40:59   "about the way you're doing these ad reads.

01:41:00   "It's terrible."

01:41:02   It was like I had an affliction.

01:41:04   - Yeah, but you picked it up pretty quickly.

01:41:07   I mean, yeah, those first few were definitely rough.

01:41:09   But I think by like the fifth or sixth episode,

01:41:11   you were pretty much in a groove.

01:41:13   - Yeah, well, if there's anything I did wrong,

01:41:15   and I'm not a big fan of,

01:41:16   like I read that the guy,

01:41:18   the Noah, whatever his name is,

01:41:20   just taking over the Daily Show,

01:41:21   he did a whole week or so of test shows,

01:41:23   that are never gonna air, but real shows, they do shows.

01:41:27   I understand why you do that, and hosting a TV show

01:41:29   that's as tight as The Daily Show

01:41:31   really does have to be rehearsed.

01:41:34   But you can't rehearse the whole episode

01:41:35   because every day it's that day's news.

01:41:37   So you have to get good at it.

01:41:38   But if there's anything that I should've rehearsed

01:41:40   and thrown away, I should've done sponsor reads

01:41:43   instead of doing them.

01:41:44   I should've just, not for episodes,

01:41:46   I should've recorded some and enforced myself

01:41:49   to listen to them and do it,

01:41:51   'cause it didn't take too long.

01:41:53   It only took a couple weeks before I got at least okay at it.

01:41:57   So I could have just skipped the point where I was really, really terrible at it.

01:42:01   Well, yeah, but that was part of the learning process.

01:42:04   You wouldn't have learned it necessarily.

01:42:05   I don't know.

01:42:07   Anyway, the thing that really got me was on the last episode of Hello Internet when Brady

01:42:10   did the fracture one.

01:42:13   And it was that he had sent a picture to CGP Grey, sent a fracture to him of, what was

01:42:22   it, the Jamaican rat?

01:42:23   of the two animals that he's been obsessed with lately.

01:42:25   - Yeah, no, the hen though.

01:42:27   - The hen?

01:42:28   - Yeah, the other one, yeah, the hen.

01:42:30   Yeah, the official bird of Hello Internet.

01:42:32   - Right, but had sent him a picture

01:42:35   that related to an entire huge segment of the show

01:42:38   that had already been gone.

01:42:39   So it just had this beautiful serendipity

01:42:42   and really made it feel like it was a part of the show.

01:42:46   Again, like I said, ads are content.

01:42:49   Part of the content of what you're serving is the ads.

01:42:51   It's not something separate.

01:42:53   And the Hello Internet, the way they do it,

01:42:56   it really does feel like part of the show.

01:42:58   - Those guys are so frustrating.

01:43:00   And they have, they mentioned their numbers

01:43:04   on the last show, they have way bigger

01:43:07   listener bases than we do too.

01:43:09   - Oh yeah. - It's with good reason

01:43:10   'cause their show is awesome.

01:43:11   And it's, people can enjoy that show

01:43:14   without being huge tech nerds.

01:43:15   Like our shows, you pretty much have to be

01:43:17   a huge Apple nerd to really get much out of our shows.

01:43:20   But their show is way more accessible

01:43:22   and it really like they joke about a long time ago,

01:43:25   they had a discussion about the two dudes talking

01:43:28   podcast format, which is very common,

01:43:30   especially two dudes talking loosely about tech matters.

01:43:34   But I think what makes their show so great is that yes,

01:43:38   there are a lot of two dudes talking shows,

01:43:40   but they really perfected that format.

01:43:43   Like to have these two specific people talking about

01:43:47   whatever they talk about, like they have amazing host

01:43:50   chemistry between the two of them.

01:43:52   and they're both amazing characters.

01:43:54   Like they're incredibly amusing to listen to

01:43:56   and they play off each other well

01:43:58   and it's very nicely edited.

01:43:59   So you have this combination of just like,

01:44:01   no wonder it's so popular

01:44:03   'cause they're really good at it

01:44:04   and it's a really good combination to begin with.

01:44:06   - Yeah, they also both have good voices.

01:44:08   - Yeah. - Which you really can't help

01:44:10   and you know, what are you gonna do?

01:44:13   - Well, that's one thing that I love about podcasting though.

01:44:16   This whole episode's gonna be frustrating

01:44:17   for like half the listeners who want us to talk about

01:44:19   whatever Apple news happened this week.

01:44:21   But one thing I love about podcasting,

01:44:24   like when I was a kid, I used to,

01:44:26   I think a lot of people did this,

01:44:27   especially who were nerds like me.

01:44:29   I used to record fake radio shows with my friends,

01:44:33   basically like us talking into a cassette recorder

01:44:35   as if we were on the radio and never listening back to it

01:44:39   or listening back once and then that would be it.

01:44:42   Like we'd make these fake,

01:44:44   like I always wanted to be a radio DJ.

01:44:46   And the reality is A, that is a terrible business.

01:44:51   business of being an actual radio DJ is horrible. So that's problem number one.

01:44:57   Problem number two is I was never going to be a DJ. I don't have the right voice.

01:45:02   I don't speak well enough. I certainly don't have the background or the

01:45:06   opportunity to become a DJ or the training like, you know, if there was any

01:45:10   training like, I was never going to be a DJ. I just, I don't have the voice for it.

01:45:15   I don't have the skills for it. I'm just not cut out for that job in the same way

01:45:19   I'm not cut out to be like a football player.

01:45:21   Like I'm just, that's just, I don't have,

01:45:23   I'm not the person for that.

01:45:24   I'm not made for that.

01:45:26   But with podcasting, it's really quite a meritocracy

01:45:31   in that like one of the beauties of this medium

01:45:32   is that you don't need to attract the wide audience

01:45:35   that TV and radio people do normally

01:45:38   with like the locality issues and everything.

01:45:41   With podcasting, even people who talk sloppily

01:45:46   and have mediocre voices like me

01:45:48   can, my job is podcasting.

01:45:51   I talk on a version of the radio for a living.

01:45:56   And the idea that like, I'm fulfilling this childhood dream

01:46:00   of this thing I've always wanted to do

01:46:02   that I really am not qualified to do,

01:46:04   but it just happens to work out better in this medium.

01:46:07   Like that is amazing to me.

01:46:09   And as a listener of podcasts,

01:46:11   as a massive listener of podcasts,

01:46:13   I love listening to other shows

01:46:15   that are also made by amateurs like me

01:46:18   that are just talking about interesting stuff.

01:46:20   And that's something, like the big public radio podcast,

01:46:25   I don't listen to almost any of them

01:46:27   because there's so much else going on

01:46:30   that I wanna listen to, I don't have time for them.

01:46:33   'Cause there's so much else that's made by amateurs

01:46:35   and people like me that I'm much more interested in,

01:46:37   that's much more narrowly focused than like,

01:46:40   here's a story I'm gonna tell you

01:46:41   about something interesting that happened.

01:46:42   You know, like I don't need that.

01:46:44   I have all my time is filled up with people

01:46:47   talking about more narrow interests that I like better.

01:46:50   - I totally agree.

01:46:52   But it still makes me jealous when I hear

01:46:57   the professionalism of Hello Internet.

01:47:00   - Yeah, it is frustrating when people

01:47:02   are really good podcasters who also have really good voices

01:47:05   in production and speak well and everything.

01:47:08   - They're two such interesting characters as well.

01:47:11   - Exactly. - I think they're very honest.

01:47:12   I don't think that they've made up personas

01:47:14   and they're just being themselves,

01:47:15   but they both seem like very nice fellows.

01:47:20   - Absolutely.

01:47:20   - Gray is obviously the straight guy.

01:47:25   He's the more logical

01:47:30   and doesn't come up with wacky ideas thing,

01:47:32   but then he's got the crazy tick

01:47:34   like that always comes up when he flies.

01:47:37   He books a standby ticket

01:47:40   and will wait weeks and weeks and weeks

01:47:42   with not knowing when he's gonna fly,

01:47:44   which is crazy.

01:47:45   - Yeah, that's why that show is so great

01:47:47   because you have these great, interesting people who,

01:47:52   and the fact that Brady can tease that out of him

01:47:56   and then hit him over the head with it constantly,

01:47:59   they're able to push each other's buttons

01:48:00   extremely well as well.

01:48:02   Like it is, oh, it's so good.

01:48:04   - Yeah, it's a really good show.

01:48:05   So anybody who hasn't listened to it, go listen to it,

01:48:07   but they're well beyond, like you said,

01:48:10   they're well beyond the size of our audiences.

01:48:12   We should have them talk about us for an hour.

01:48:14   - Yeah, deservedly.

01:48:15   So the funny thing was that they did a thing too,

01:48:16   they've done a thing which is,

01:48:18   which is actually interesting.

01:48:19   I've been thinking, it's funny that you bring it up,

01:48:21   'cause I was gonna bring it up.

01:48:22   So anybody out there do,

01:48:23   they did a thing where they solicited for the listeners

01:48:28   of their show to write to them and tell them

01:48:30   if they listened to the show while doing interesting things.

01:48:35   Like what is the context, something beyond just,

01:48:38   I listen to the show when I drive to work.

01:48:41   And there's people who are like,

01:48:43   there's like a guy who's like a surgeon.

01:48:45   He does like surgery on like mice brains

01:48:47   because he's studying the effects,

01:48:50   some kind of scientist,

01:48:51   and they put the mice through a study

01:48:52   and then he performs surgery on their brain

01:48:54   to see their effect.

01:48:55   So while he's doing this,

01:48:57   one of the things he does,

01:48:58   he listens to podcasts and he listens to their show.

01:48:59   Well, that's an interesting thing.

01:49:01   And they had,

01:49:03   they had a guy who,

01:49:09   who manned the ladder, I don't know what you call it,

01:49:13   the steps that Air Force One, when Air Force One lands,

01:49:17   he's the guy who puts the ladder up there

01:49:20   where the president comes down.

01:49:21   - Yeah, the stair car, right?

01:49:22   - Yeah, the stair car.

01:49:24   Listens to their show while he does,

01:49:27   and they even said, and just to make sure

01:49:29   this guy doesn't get into trouble, he's very, very clear.

01:49:31   He does this in, you have to stand here

01:49:34   and wait for four hours for the president to come down.

01:49:36   - While he's waiting.

01:49:37   - He's not listening while the president might be

01:49:40   coming down to staffs.

01:49:41   He's paying attention and doing his job,

01:49:44   but obviously it's a job with a lot of waiting involved

01:49:48   because the president shows up when the president shows up.

01:49:51   The president isn't running on a clock.

01:49:54   What an interesting job though,

01:49:55   and to think that that guy is alleviating the tedium

01:49:59   of the waiting part of his job

01:50:01   or while he's off duty or whatever

01:50:04   by listening to their show.

01:50:05   So anybody, I would be interested to know

01:50:07   The same thing, if there are interesting contexts

01:50:09   where people listen to the talk show.

01:50:12   So you can just email them to me

01:50:13   and maybe I'll read some of them in a future episode.

01:50:17   I don't know anything about my audience.

01:50:22   Like you said, the idea of you have to hook up the data

01:50:26   and collect all the analytics for everything.

01:50:28   - Oh yeah.

01:50:29   - I don't wanna know.

01:50:30   I do like knowing what's popular.

01:50:32   I like to try to look at the stats and just to see

01:50:36   if an article is unusually popular.

01:50:38   And I like to see,

01:50:44   actually it's not really audience tracking though.

01:50:47   I like to see referral tracking

01:50:48   and see if I'm getting an unusual amount of traffic

01:50:51   from some other popular place or site or tweet.

01:50:54   But in terms of knowing things about the audience,

01:50:59   I don't wanna know that.

01:51:02   - Yeah, well that's like,

01:51:03   Even like the checking of the mint and everything,

01:51:06   like back when I wrote the, my previous controversy,

01:51:11   the Apple functional high ground thing,

01:51:16   after that went crazy, I realized that I,

01:51:19   like there was a day where like I just turned off analytics

01:51:23   for the site during that, 'cause I was just kinda like,

01:51:24   I don't wanna be motivated by this anymore.

01:51:27   And it's kind of like, if you've gone on vacation

01:51:29   and you stop checking Twitter for a while,

01:51:32   and then you have such a massive pileup

01:51:34   that you can't keep up and you just hit scroll to top

01:51:36   and you realize like, oh, I didn't read Twitter

01:51:39   for like three or four days

01:51:40   and I missed nothing of importance.

01:51:42   Then it's kind of eye-opening.

01:51:45   Well, I had a similar kind of thing

01:51:47   with analytics on my website

01:51:49   where I ran first Mint for a while

01:51:51   and also I ran Google Analytics for a while

01:51:53   and eventually I realized when I turned it off

01:51:58   for a little while after the, in the wake of all that drama,

01:52:00   I just was like, I want some peace and quiet.

01:52:03   I turned it off for a while

01:52:05   and I realized I didn't miss it at all.

01:52:09   And part of that is a luxury that we have that,

01:52:12   we don't need to really know our day-to-day page views.

01:52:15   The deck builds in advance for page views basically.

01:52:19   And so we are paid a flat rate by the deck

01:52:23   based on the general amount of traffic

01:52:25   that we tend to have gotten over the last years or whatever.

01:52:28   Like my rate for the deck hasn't changed

01:52:30   in years, because my traffic is about the same.

01:52:34   And so if I write something that gets all of a sudden

01:52:38   a million page views out of the blue,

01:52:40   I'm not gonna see another dime for that.

01:52:42   And the deck has pre-sold the ads for that,

01:52:44   and so they aren't seeing another dime for it.

01:52:45   And that's just, so we have no incentive

01:52:50   to temporarily juice page views or write things

01:52:53   that are gonna get temporary traffic, really.

01:52:55   And so the only reason I would really need to run

01:52:59   web analytics of any kind is what you said.

01:53:03   It's like for me to know, like, oh,

01:53:04   where's traffic coming from?

01:53:06   And where, you know, what do I write

01:53:10   that gets meaningful numbers

01:53:11   compared to anything else I write?

01:53:13   And what I realized was that that information

01:53:16   was not beneficial to my life or my work.

01:53:19   It was, all it was doing was like being

01:53:22   another vanity metric to check.

01:53:23   And the reality is Twitter is that vanity metric now anyway,

01:53:26   and I should probably stop checking that as well,

01:53:27   but I still do.

01:53:28   Like I will check the number of retweets that,

01:53:31   like whenever I write a blog post, I tweet about it also.

01:53:34   So I'll check like the number of retweets that got.

01:53:36   And I have some idea like, oh, well, this one got two

01:53:40   and this one got 40.

01:53:41   So obviously that resonated with more people.

01:53:44   But the actual web advertising or web tracking at that level

01:53:47   for whatever reason, I've decided that's no longer a thing

01:53:50   that I need to care about and so I don't run any.

01:53:53   - Yeah, I like to know some of the user agent stuff

01:53:56   and I can get this out of my server logs.

01:54:00   It's just that, and that's the one thing

01:54:02   I've been talking about getting rid of Google Analytics.

01:54:04   I'm going to, I mean, it's seriously just a matter of days

01:54:09   that I just unhook it.

01:54:10   I probably should just do it tomorrow.

01:54:12   And mainly because I think that it's privacy invasive

01:54:17   and I actually think that it's wrong of me

01:54:20   to be using Google Analytics.

01:54:22   and they have a very opaque privacy policy

01:54:26   that as I've read it, and I've done this over the,

01:54:29   I've been using Google Analytics for years,

01:54:31   and there was a whole year or two period

01:54:32   where I stopped using it, and I missed some data,

01:54:36   like what percentage of my users are using which browser,

01:54:40   and what percentage of them are on iOS

01:54:42   versus Mac OS versus other operating systems.

01:54:45   And there's ways to get that without using Analytics,

01:54:47   but Google just re-hooking up Google Analytics

01:54:50   was the easiest way to do it.

01:54:52   And then it felt bad because a lot of my long-term stats

01:54:55   were entirely out of whack because I had this

01:54:57   like 14 month period where I had shut it off.

01:54:59   But I've read their private, the privacy issue

01:55:03   is the main thing that makes me want to shut it off,

01:55:05   above and beyond anything else,

01:55:06   is that I can't shake the suspicion

01:55:09   that Google is using the cookies they set

01:55:11   for Google Analytics to track the people

01:55:13   who read Daring Fireball across the web

01:55:16   and using it for advertising,

01:55:18   even though I don't use any Google advertising.

01:55:20   and if you read their privacy policy,

01:55:22   to me at least, to me it's like reading a foreign language.

01:55:25   And it's the way that I'm amazed and impressed

01:55:28   by attorneys who write the contracts

01:55:32   that run the whole world.

01:55:34   Because I think I'm a good reader,

01:55:36   I've always tested high in terms of reading comprehension.

01:55:39   I read most contracts and it might as well

01:55:42   be written in a foreign language.

01:55:43   I don't understand anything,

01:55:45   I don't understand what is going on.

01:55:47   and Google's privacy policy for analytics

01:55:50   is to me that type of privacy policy.

01:55:52   I understand what each of the words mean

01:55:54   and in the aggregate I have no idea what it means.

01:55:58   And I've come to the conclusion that

01:56:00   if you don't understand what a privacy policy means,

01:56:02   your worst assumptions are probably right.

01:56:05   - Right.

01:56:06   And you're right that by having Google Analytics

01:56:11   on your site, you are selling your visitors' data

01:56:16   to Google without their knowledge.

01:56:18   And it's one of those things,

01:56:19   it's kind of uncomfortable.

01:56:20   Like a lot of the things in web publishing and advertising,

01:56:24   if you actually face it,

01:56:26   if you actually think about all the ramifications of that,

01:56:28   and you face the truth of that,

01:56:29   and you face the reality of that,

01:56:31   it is uncomfortable.

01:56:32   And you have to weigh this decision of like,

01:56:35   do I keep using this for the utility it provides,

01:56:40   or do I take a principled stand

01:56:42   and accept the cost of that stand?

01:56:45   So Google Analytics gives you information

01:56:47   like how many people are in what country

01:56:48   and even like within the US, like what state,

01:56:50   like how many, you know, and unsurprisingly,

01:56:53   you know, my site is largely US,

01:56:55   a lot of people in the UK, a lot of people in Germany,

01:56:58   I think Germany's always been the third country,

01:57:00   but you're already down at a very low percentage

01:57:02   and then everybody else is spread around the world.

01:57:04   And then within the US, tons of people

01:57:06   on the Northeast Coast, most of them in California

01:57:10   and most of them in California largely centered

01:57:13   in the northern part of California.

01:57:14   It's exactly who you think.

01:57:17   I don't need Google Analytics to tell me that though.

01:57:19   And I find it weird and I just wonder

01:57:21   how the hell did they know that?

01:57:22   And I know there's ways to go back from IP addresses

01:57:26   and stuff like that, but I just can't help but worry

01:57:29   that part of it is that if you're logged into Google

01:57:32   from Gmail and then you go over to a separate tab

01:57:34   and you're at Daring Fireball, that they're saying,

01:57:37   oh, we know Marco lives in New York

01:57:39   because we know everything about Marco

01:57:42   and we've already got a cookie on this system

01:57:44   that's right there that does this.

01:57:46   - Right, and it doesn't take much

01:57:48   to uniquely identify somebody between sites on the web.

01:57:51   Like, you can, just by analyzing some very basic stuff

01:57:55   about the requests they make,

01:57:56   even if they block almost every kind of ad,

01:57:58   you know, if they come to your site a couple times

01:58:00   and if they, you know, you can just kind of match,

01:58:03   even if their IP changes,

01:58:05   you can just match like somebody's approximate zip code

01:58:07   by using IP lookup and match that with like

01:58:12   the request headers that their browser send,

01:58:14   which include the browser's version,

01:58:16   like the exact version, the OS exact version,

01:58:18   stuff like that.

01:58:19   Maybe sometimes if it has certain plugins,

01:58:21   then the plugin version, like Flash or Java,

01:58:24   those are all in the headers that it sends on every request.

01:58:27   So if you just take a couple of those things,

01:58:30   a couple of those data points,

01:58:31   you can uniquely identify people surprisingly quickly,

01:58:34   like with only two or three different data points

01:58:36   of that kind of set.

01:58:38   So it is very much like

01:58:41   if you give them an inch to take a foot.

01:58:43   Like, you have to be very careful what you allow

01:58:47   on your site if you wanna actually be protective

01:58:49   of people's privacy and you have to be aware as a visitor

01:58:52   that you might think that you have more privacy,

01:58:55   but in reality, you are inadvertently leaking data

01:59:00   all over the place to everybody who's willing to capture it.

01:59:02   And you might not care.

01:59:04   Most people don't think about it

01:59:06   and they might not care if you told them.

01:59:08   But, and especially young people tend not to care.

01:59:11   but certainly if you're privacy minded,

01:59:15   you have to be incredibly wary of what you let in

01:59:17   because they can do so much with so little.

01:59:21   - If you go, if you're logged into Google Analytics,

01:59:25   I was here, and you go to the bottom.

01:59:28   Maybe they have a separate one, I don't know,

01:59:29   but when you go and hit Privacy Policy,

01:59:32   it just takes you to Google's main privacy policy,

01:59:35   which is for everything that Google does.

01:59:40   So it's just, I don't even know if that's what they mean.

01:59:45   What I want to know as a publisher is what are my readers

01:59:49   being exposed to here and what's being tracked about them.

01:59:52   And it doesn't seem like there's any good way

01:59:54   to get that answer.

01:59:55   Or if there is, I'll be damned if I can find it.

01:59:58   And to me, that's just worrisome.

02:00:00   So I don't know, I really gotta get rid of it.

02:00:03   I'm sure there's other ways I can do it, I don't know.

02:00:07   There's this, the system I'm thinking about installing

02:00:09   called Piwik, Piwik, P-I-W-I-K. Yeah, that's a pretty common one. Yeah, I'm not quite sure

02:00:15   what information is there, but the gist of Piwik, Piwik, whatever it's called, is that

02:00:20   it's like Mint in that it's locally stored. And so I would be running it, my own copy

02:00:25   of it on my server, storing my copy of the stats in my SQL database. And there are no

02:00:32   cookies that are shared across other sites or anything like that that would track you.

02:00:37   All it is is knowledge of what people coming to my site do.

02:00:40   So there'd be nothing privacy invasive about it

02:00:43   at all, other than the fact that you are a person who

02:00:46   is reading my site, which I obviously do know.

02:00:51   Some of the stats, though, that from--

02:00:53   I don't know what PyWIC has, but some of the stuff that

02:00:55   is interesting and I will miss, but I don't miss it enough

02:00:57   to keep using Google Analytics, is

02:00:59   like the number of people using which browser

02:01:01   and how many people use which operating system

02:01:03   and stuff like that.

02:01:04   Right.

02:01:05   And some of that you can get out of the user agent,

02:01:06   but a lot of it you have to use JavaScript to get.

02:01:08   It's like things like whether it has written a screen or not

02:01:11   but I just think so much of that stuff

02:01:13   is just becoming so irrelevant.

02:01:15   What would you actually do with that information?

02:01:19   Most of it is not that important.

02:01:21   - Well, and the other fact is that I don't like,

02:01:23   like I truly do believe, I'll say it over and over again,

02:01:25   if there's a theme of this episode,

02:01:27   it's that everything you publish on your site

02:01:29   is content and counts.

02:01:31   And so I don't want JavaScript executing

02:01:33   that's getting the bounds of the screen.

02:01:35   It's a waste of CPU time.

02:01:37   And I get all Syracusey here, but I'm

02:01:40   sure it doesn't take very long for a little bit of JavaScript

02:01:43   to just figure out what the current screen size is

02:01:46   and send it back.

02:01:49   But every little thing you do that tests like that adds up

02:01:51   to something, and all of a sudden,

02:01:53   you've got five seconds of load time for ads and trackers

02:01:58   and analytics.

02:02:00   And each little step of it is a tenth of a second.

02:02:04   - Exactly.

02:02:07   - So anyway, gotta get rid of Google Analytics.

02:02:09   I might as well take a break right here

02:02:14   and talk about our next sponsor.

02:02:16   It is a new sponsor, first time sponsor of the show.

02:02:20   They're called JustWorks, J-U-S-T-W-O-R-K-S.

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02:02:31   I'm already asleep, this sounds terrible.

02:02:33   These are all the things that if you're a small business

02:02:36   owner that you could be doing instead of listening

02:02:40   to the talk show.

02:02:41   Sounds like a lot of fun, right?

02:02:44   Well, you could instead just let JustWorks

02:02:47   take care of that stuff for you.

02:02:49   JustWorks helps businesses take care of all that type of,

02:02:53   let's face it, crap.

02:02:55   Benefits, payroll, HR.

02:02:57   Not that it's crap that it doesn't matter.

02:02:58   I think most of your employees think payroll

02:03:00   is very important, but the bookkeeping aspects of it,

02:03:04   actually doing the work of making it run

02:03:06   and making all the books add up

02:03:07   and making sure everybody gets paid

02:03:08   what they're supposed to be paid, busy work, right?

02:03:11   You're not in a business of running payroll.

02:03:14   You're in the business of whatever your business is.

02:03:16   So check them out.

02:03:17   Their website is justworks.com.

02:03:20   They help businesses take care of this stuff.

02:03:23   They do it all for you.

02:03:25   Running a successful business is hard enough

02:03:27   doing the actual business of whatever your business is,

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02:03:36   But all those little details of HR and payroll

02:03:40   and stuff like that can make it feel overwhelming.

02:03:43   It's probably the sort of thing that keeps a lot of people

02:03:45   from even starting a small business in the first place

02:03:47   because you just think, well, who the hell am I,

02:03:49   I can't afford to hire somebody to do this.

02:03:51   Well, it just works.

02:03:53   It's just easy and intuitive software, very, very affordable.

02:03:57   Great prices.

02:03:58   It's not like you're hiring somebody to do this for you.

02:04:00   You're paying a little internet service

02:04:02   to do it and take care of it.

02:04:04   So if you run a business and you have payroll,

02:04:09   you have benefits, compliance with HR, stuff like that,

02:04:12   go check them out at justworks.com.

02:04:16   Take it all off your shoulders.

02:04:17   Relax, listen to more podcasts.

02:04:20   And you can use this code, very easy.

02:04:22   This is a nice code.

02:04:23   TTS, the talk show, three letter code,

02:04:26   when you sign up and you'll save 10% off

02:04:29   your first year of service at justworks.com.

02:04:32   So if you run a business, go check them out.

02:04:34   You're just wasting your time if you don't.

02:04:36   Probably a good sponsor for the show.

02:04:40   I bet there's a lot of people who run companies

02:04:43   that have to do stuff like that.

02:04:44   - Yeah, I had to do that for a little while

02:04:46   and I used one of the other big services to do it

02:04:48   and they forgot to file the state workers comp stuff

02:04:52   and I was threatened by New York State

02:04:55   to have to pay $15,000 a day until it was resolved

02:04:59   and I was able to negotiate that down

02:05:01   and only pay a few thousand bucks, but man.

02:05:03   Yeah, you want a company that does that right.

02:05:07   And I can tell you, the big guys don't always,

02:05:09   so I would definitely give Just Works a shot.

02:05:11   - Yeah, really good.

02:05:12   I would definitely do it.

02:05:15   I'd say anything, it's always worth reevaluating in your life.

02:05:19   Anything that is a pain in your ass,

02:05:20   you should look and see if there's a way

02:05:22   that you can pay someone to do it for you.

02:05:24   - Yeah, that's a really good rule in general.

02:05:28   - And it's the best part of the internet era

02:05:33   of modern society is that an entirely new realm of things

02:05:39   can be automated that just wasn't feasible before, right?

02:05:45   Like, you know, it's a silly example,

02:05:49   but like those buttons that Amazon gives you out now.

02:05:53   So like when you run out of detergent,

02:05:54   you can just hit a button

02:05:55   and have detergent sent to your house.

02:05:58   - Those are so bizarre.

02:05:59   - But there's no way that could happen

02:06:00   before the internet, right?

02:06:01   There's no way before the internet

02:06:03   that you could just easily set up a thing

02:06:06   that would do the payroll and HR for your company.

02:06:09   Like it just wasn't feasible.

02:06:10   How would you interact with them?

02:06:12   You need the internet and a website.

02:06:13   You need some way of interacting with them.

02:06:16   Like the Sears catalog existed,

02:06:18   So you could order stuff to get shipped to your house

02:06:21   before the internet, but you can't have

02:06:24   like a print-based interaction with the company

02:06:27   that's handling your HR, you know.

02:06:29   - I think you'd have to use a fax machine.

02:06:31   Maybe it'd be an LP player.

02:06:33   - You know, I think right now I might be,

02:06:37   this might be a good thing to keep track of,

02:06:38   is how long I've gone without being asked

02:06:42   to either send or receive a fax.

02:06:44   And I think, I think if I had been doing that,

02:06:47   know, like this many days since an accident at the plant. I think that right now, knock

02:06:52   on wood, I might be in the longest stretch of not having been asked to do a fax in my

02:07:00   life.

02:07:01   Until you buy a house.

02:07:02   Oh, are you serious?

02:07:03   Oh yeah, that's going to break your stretch. If you're going to buy a house anytime soon,

02:07:08   I'm pretty sure they still… I mean, these days you can usually… somebody who asks

02:07:13   you to fax something, you can usually say,

02:07:16   can I scan it and email it to you instead?

02:07:18   And usually they will say yes, but not always.

02:07:21   The percentage of time you can do that is going up,

02:07:26   thank God, but we're not there yet.

02:07:27   - I don't have a working scanner in the house.

02:07:30   Or I do, I shouldn't say I don't have a working scanner.

02:07:33   I've got a Doxy, but I don't know--

02:07:36   - You gotta go scan Snap.

02:07:38   - I don't have, I don't know where it is.

02:07:41   and Amy, I've mentioned this before,

02:07:43   Amy recently gave me a wonderful gift,

02:07:46   she cleaned up my office.

02:07:47   My office is a mess, I mean it's like a serious

02:07:51   Andy Rooney situation, but I do have, it's not a system.

02:07:55   I'm not even saying it's a good idea,

02:07:57   but I generally, if I go a long time without cleaning up

02:08:00   my office, I have a vague idea of in which pile,

02:08:04   on which shelf something is.

02:08:05   She cleaned it all up and it's all organized and stuff,

02:08:10   but I don't know where that is.

02:08:11   So usually when I have to scan something,

02:08:13   I don't know where an actual scanner is.

02:08:16   And so I just take a picture with my phone.

02:08:19   Like I'll ask them, I'll say,

02:08:20   "Can I scan it and email it to you?"

02:08:23   And they'll say, "Yes."

02:08:24   And I'll just take a picture with my phone

02:08:26   and then crop out the table.

02:08:27   Just send them that.

02:08:30   And I've never once heard anything.

02:08:32   - Well, and there are also,

02:08:33   there are lots of apps that will do a fancier job of that.

02:08:36   Like they'll use, they'll still use the phone camera,

02:08:38   but they'll be able to like detect where the page is

02:08:40   and then like de-skew it so it's properly,

02:08:42   you know, lined up and everything.

02:08:44   - I don't even know.

02:08:45   - I know Smile makes one, I think it's PDF Scan Plus.

02:08:47   - Yeah, yeah, exactly.

02:08:49   - Yeah, they make one, there's a bunch of these

02:08:50   on the App Store, but I have theirs, I'm pretty sure.

02:08:52   I honestly never use it 'cause I have a ScanSnap,

02:08:56   which is awesome, but a lot of people use those apps

02:08:59   on the phone and they're fine.

02:09:00   And you know, for your scanning volume,

02:09:02   which sounds like it's very low, that's probably fine.

02:09:05   - It is extremely low, very, very low on the scanning volume.

02:09:10   - Anything else you wanna say about peace?

02:09:12   - No.

02:09:13   (laughing)

02:09:16   I'm glad it's over.

02:09:17   I mean, it really does seem like it's over now.

02:09:19   Like I really, you know, I'm still getting like the,

02:09:22   the various like inquiries from media people.

02:09:27   I got a good one earlier.

02:09:29   Let me, this is a guy on Twitter asked me earlier,

02:09:34   any chance you can join us for a webinar on ad blockers

02:09:37   for the ad industry this coming Tuesday.

02:09:40   I can DM you more details.

02:09:42   I can't imagine a tweet that was less well-crafted

02:09:49   to get my response than that.

02:09:52   Yeah, so I'm still getting a lot of these media requests

02:09:58   from people who want me to go speak at their webinars

02:10:01   to the ad industry about ads, but for the most part,

02:10:05   everything else has died down.

02:10:06   and it is, I'm just so relieved.

02:10:09   And so now I'm back to working on Overcast,

02:10:11   which is so much better.

02:10:13   Like as I said, it's probably not gonna make anywhere

02:10:16   near the amount of money that Peace did,

02:10:17   but I don't care because I'm so much happier working on it.

02:10:21   It's no contest.

02:10:23   - I thought that you really, it seemed on your show,

02:10:27   and this wasn't even talking to you,

02:10:29   but it just seemed listening to ATP

02:10:31   that it really hit you hard personally.

02:10:35   The thing that seemed to me to most upset you

02:10:38   was the idea that this thing that you built in two weeks,

02:10:43   and I think you're probably right.

02:10:44   I mean, maybe on and off you've been thinking

02:10:45   about it all summer, but a really, really low level

02:10:50   of effort relative to everything else

02:10:52   was going to significantly outgrowse

02:10:56   the app that you've been working on for years

02:11:02   and thinking about for even longer.

02:11:04   And that you want to keep working on for years to come and that that seemed to really get to you

02:11:09   Yeah, I mean and you know, like it is really it is impossible to

02:11:14   to

02:11:16   understate how little code there is in peace like

02:11:19   people who asked me like a bunch of people in a bunch of the angry responses were

02:11:24   along the lines of the only responsible thing for you to do is to open source it since you abandoned it and

02:11:31   First of all, I can't because it has ghostery data,

02:11:33   which I don't have the rights to,

02:11:34   but the actual application code

02:11:38   that is not just the database of sites is so tiny.

02:11:42   There's almost no code there

02:11:44   because Apple basically made

02:11:46   this entire content blocking framework

02:11:47   to be really efficiently designed to create ad blockers.

02:11:52   And so that's why I assume from the beginning,

02:11:55   I assumed that mine wouldn't get significant traction

02:11:58   because I assumed there'd be tons of them.

02:12:00   right on day one, and there were a handful,

02:12:04   but not nearly as many as I expected.

02:12:06   But yeah, but that did, you know,

02:12:08   the reality was that the iOS ad blocker business

02:12:12   is not a technical challenge at all.

02:12:16   It is, I mean, I suppose if you've never made an app before,

02:12:19   it's as challenging as making any other kind of app,

02:12:21   but if you are an experienced app developer,

02:12:25   you can crap out a content blocker in a week or less.

02:12:28   You can do it in a couple days.

02:12:29   I mean, it is so easy to do.

02:12:33   And it is therefore not intellectually stimulating,

02:12:36   it's not satisfying really beyond the first couple days,

02:12:41   then it's just grunt work and it's just keeping up

02:12:43   the database, which is really boring,

02:12:44   which is not programming,

02:12:46   and it's not intellectually valuable.

02:12:50   So it is not stimulating if you desire

02:12:53   that kind of intellectual satisfaction.

02:12:54   So, whereas Overcast is full of really satisfying,

02:12:59   complex technical problems that require my brain

02:13:05   to be really working at its best to solve properly.

02:13:08   And that is incredibly satisfying to me.

02:13:11   And I would much rather work on that.

02:13:16   - Do you have the number, do you know how many

02:13:17   ATP listeners listen to via Overcast?

02:13:21   I don't have a head, it's something like 60%.

02:13:24   It's in that ballpark.

02:13:27   - Yeah, I think it's very close to that for me,

02:13:29   'cause I do get those numbers from SoundCloud,

02:13:32   where I host the audio.

02:13:35   Let's see how I, I always forget how to click around

02:13:40   and get it though.

02:13:42   Oh yeah, Overcast, number one.

02:13:43   Yeah, even more, and second place is

02:13:48   Apple Core Media iPhone, which I'm 99% sure

02:13:52   translates to the built-in podcast app.

02:13:55   - Yeah, it also includes anything with AV player,

02:13:58   so if you're playing a webpage, Embed,

02:14:02   or certain podcast apps actually report themselves as that,

02:14:07   just because they don't change it,

02:14:08   or they can't reach that part of the API

02:14:10   with the level they're playing at.

02:14:12   So some will be included in there.

02:14:14   - Yeah, for me it's a little, it's right around 50%,

02:14:17   So it's not quite 60%, but no surprise

02:14:20   that it's more like 60 for you, since you wrote the thing.

02:14:25   But it's-- - I'll just double check.

02:14:27   It's actually, I'm about 50.

02:14:29   - Yeah, that's right.

02:14:30   It's right around 50. - 49.92 on three episodes ago,

02:14:34   'cause I figured that gives people enough time

02:14:35   to actually download it.

02:14:37   So yeah, I'm up there.

02:14:39   - Actually, let me change it to a month

02:14:43   and see if that changes anything.

02:14:46   Yeah, actually it's even more, actually if I look bigger,

02:14:50   it's actually more, yeah.

02:14:53   'Cause I haven't had an episode in the last seven days.

02:14:55   So if you count the whole month,

02:14:57   which gets to all the people who listen right away,

02:14:59   and I think it under samples the people

02:15:03   of the last seven days because the biggest fans of the show

02:15:05   listen when they're new, and so in the last seven days,

02:15:07   there haven't been any.

02:15:08   So really, really overwhelmingly number one

02:15:11   for my listeners.

02:15:13   And if anybody out there has been curious about it,

02:15:14   I really do recommend it,

02:15:15   not just 'cause Marco's on the show today,

02:15:16   but it's my favorite app for listening to podcasts.

02:15:19   - I'm really good at promotion,

02:15:21   so here I am talking about the app

02:15:22   that I just pulled off the store for two hours.

02:15:25   And meanwhile, I'm gonna ship Overcast 2.0 pretty soon.

02:15:29   And I'm not gonna be right back on to talk about that

02:15:33   in like three weeks or whatever.

02:15:35   I'm really not good at this promotion.

02:15:36   - Yeah, you're not good at it at all.

02:15:38   The big new feature in Overcast 2.0 is the streaming engine,

02:15:42   which is in addition to just letting you listen

02:15:47   to stuff right away instead of download the whole episode,

02:15:51   it's really more of like a just play.

02:15:55   It's like a just play interface.

02:15:56   So whether you care about stream,

02:15:57   if you think you care about streaming podcasts or not,

02:16:00   if you've ever been frustrated

02:16:01   because you wanna just start playing something

02:16:03   but your phone's been asleep or whatever

02:16:05   and it didn't download in the background

02:16:06   or you just got the alert that the new episode

02:16:09   of Hello Internet is out

02:16:09   and you wanna listen to it right away,

02:16:11   It just means that you hit the play button and it'll just start playing.

02:16:15   So many people, when I was talking a year ago about how streaming was going to be a

02:16:20   big deal and I didn't even include it in 1.0 because I knew that not everybody would need

02:16:25   it, I heard from so many people who said, "Please don't work on that.

02:16:29   Please do other things because I don't care about streaming."

02:16:32   And granted, I heard from way more people who said, "I won't use this until it has streaming,"

02:16:37   which was the more common emotion by far,

02:16:41   but a lot of people just keep saying,

02:16:43   "I don't need it, I will never use it."

02:16:45   But the reality is, it is really nice to have

02:16:48   for those times when, you know, what you said,

02:16:50   an episode just came out or just came in,

02:16:52   you just got, you just synced it,

02:16:53   and you wanna start listening to it right now.

02:16:56   And podcasts can be, you know, 50, 100 megs,

02:16:59   and not every CDN is fast, and not every connection

02:17:01   that you might have is fast.

02:17:02   And so, a lot of times, you know,

02:17:04   if you have to wait for the whole podcast to download,

02:17:08   you know, it might take 10, 20 seconds

02:17:10   or it might take five or 10 minutes.

02:17:12   No matter what it takes, it feels like an eternity

02:17:14   as you're sitting there watching this stupid download thing,

02:17:16   1%, 2%, and you're like, oh my God,

02:17:19   I just wanna listen to it now.

02:17:20   And so like streaming really makes everything

02:17:23   a little bit better.

02:17:24   And it enables a bunch of other little stuff.

02:17:26   Like it enables me to, although I haven't done this yet,

02:17:30   to put a play button on the notifications for new episodes

02:17:34   that you can just start playing them immediately.

02:17:36   Like stuff like that, just like there's so many new

02:17:38   little things that it makes possible

02:17:40   and so many old things that it makes better.

02:17:42   'Cause right now with streaming now you can just,

02:17:44   as long as you are connected somehow,

02:17:46   you can tap on any episode in any list,

02:17:49   whether you have it or not, and it just starts playing.

02:17:51   - Yeah, and it's one of those things where, again,

02:17:54   the absolutist position, it just doesn't work

02:17:58   in software design, where if you wanna say,

02:17:59   nope, no settings whatsoever, the app,

02:18:02   I'm gonna make all the choices for the user

02:18:04   and do them right way.

02:18:05   Or you could say everything should be configurable

02:18:07   and the users should be able to configure everything.

02:18:09   Well, both of those extremes are absurd.

02:18:12   And if you think you're sticking to them,

02:18:14   you're fooling yourself.

02:18:15   The right way to think about it is,

02:18:16   you do have kind of have to pick which side

02:18:18   of the 50 yard line you're gonna be on though.

02:18:20   Are you gonna make this sort of app

02:18:22   where you're going to default to not offering options

02:18:26   and configurability and maybe, you know,

02:18:30   you'll wind up not having enough options

02:18:32   Or are you gonna default to saying yes to most things

02:18:35   and having options for things?

02:18:38   And you're gonna wind up with a complex number of settings.

02:18:42   And one way or the other,

02:18:44   you're gonna disappoint some users.

02:18:46   Clearly, you, Marco Arment, err on the side

02:18:52   of not offering too many options in the stuff that you build.

02:18:55   I mean, and peace was a canonical example of that.

02:18:59   But you have to, you've talked about this on ATP.

02:19:02   there have to be some settings for streaming

02:19:04   because it's different people have it around the world,

02:19:08   even maybe even within the country,

02:19:10   even just in the United States,

02:19:12   have incredibly different situations with,

02:19:15   and tolerance levels for data charges, right?

02:19:19   There's people who are living in countries

02:19:21   where their online data is still measured in megabytes,

02:19:26   not gigabytes.

02:19:30   or people who are traveling internationally

02:19:32   and are on an international data plan

02:19:35   and you're measured in megabytes, not gigabytes.

02:19:38   If you're on a 25 megabyte data plan,

02:19:41   you cannot download an episode of the talk show

02:19:43   over cellular unless you wanna pay over its charges.

02:19:48   But then there's plenty of other people

02:19:49   who have unlimited data or virtually unlimited data

02:19:53   with 15 or 20 gigabytes a month

02:19:55   and 150 megabyte podcast is no big deal

02:19:58   and they wanna download it there.

02:19:59   So there have to be settings.

02:20:01   - I mean, the funny thing is,

02:20:02   like going back to our earlier conversation,

02:20:05   I really sweat a lot of the details around this stuff

02:20:07   to try to minimize data transfer.

02:20:09   Meanwhile, you view a couple of web pages on a big site,

02:20:13   and that's as much as a podcast episode.

02:20:16   - It is, it's,

02:20:18   some of the, the fact that people

02:20:20   are measuring these things now,

02:20:21   I've always known that things are big,

02:20:23   and that some sites are obviously serving too much data,

02:20:26   or a ridiculous amount compared to the,

02:20:29   what, you know, something, if it's an article

02:20:31   I just wanna read, it should not be measured in megabytes.

02:20:34   - Right.

02:20:35   - But now that people are actually measuring it

02:20:36   while they test these content blockers,

02:20:38   it is like, holy crap, no wonder when I was in Ireland

02:20:42   for OOL that I mowed through my 100 megabyte data plan.

02:20:46   While I thought I was being, you know,

02:20:51   conservative with how much I used my phone,

02:20:54   I thought that, you know, hey, I'll just read

02:20:57   a couple articles on Techmeme and see

02:20:59   if there's anything new going on. Well, no wonder I ate through 100 megabytes. It's like

02:21:02   one page on the verge load, seven megabytes. Right? Yeah. Like you see all these, all these

02:21:06   net reports now, like pages, seven megs, nine megs, 30 megs on the Boston.com was that is

02:21:11   like some create. And it's like a podcast episode is like 30 to 50 megs usually. These

02:21:17   are not like, like that's, that's eight, 10 web pages. Maybe like it's not, that's really

02:21:23   scary. That's really scary and really sad. But anyway, yeah. So with streaming, I, yeah,

02:21:27   I've done a lot.

02:21:28   I've actually offered, I'm offering very few options

02:21:31   on 2.0, and we'll see how that plays out.

02:21:33   You know, you're right, you can't,

02:21:35   the absolute positions never work.

02:21:37   There's always gonna be realities

02:21:40   and also market pressures that set in.

02:21:42   So I'm trying to have as few settings as possible

02:21:45   to still make it good.

02:21:47   But of course, everyone's trying that,

02:21:48   and everyone, again, draws that line in different places.

02:21:51   - Yeah, I think the biggest thing

02:21:52   is to try to avoid surprise.

02:21:54   - Right.

02:21:56   - Yeah, like my theory, like right now,

02:21:57   the way it works right now,

02:21:59   it's probably the way it's gonna ship,

02:22:00   is if you choose to stream something,

02:22:03   it will always allow it to use cellular in that case.

02:22:07   And the rationale there is that,

02:22:10   well, that's how everything else works.

02:22:11   You know, if you load a webpage,

02:22:13   it doesn't ask, it doesn't say waiting for wifi.

02:22:16   You know, it just, if you click on a link

02:22:18   to load a webpage, it just loads it

02:22:20   via whatever connection it has available.

02:22:21   And if you want to restrict apps to not use cellular,

02:22:24   So you can do that globally in settings.

02:22:26   You can say per app, you can go to Overcast

02:22:28   in the system settings app, and you can say,

02:22:30   just never allow this app to use any cellular data.

02:22:32   Like, that's a switch right there.

02:22:33   You can do it.

02:22:33   And a lot of people do.

02:22:35   And so all I have to do is I don't

02:22:37   have to cover the case of people who

02:22:39   want the app to use no cell data,

02:22:41   because the system covers that.

02:22:43   I have to cover the case of people

02:22:45   who want to use it sometimes or want to use it always.

02:22:51   And so the way everything else works--

02:22:53   web pages, more importantly stuff like YouTube.

02:22:56   Like if you, you know, YouTube is obviously massive.

02:23:00   That is the entire internet to people like your son

02:23:03   and lots of other people in the world.

02:23:04   Like that's a big deal.

02:23:06   You know, YouTube, if you are on cellular data

02:23:10   and you launch a YouTube thing

02:23:12   and go view a YouTube video, it just plays it.

02:23:15   It streams it and it plays it over cell data and it's fine.

02:23:18   If you go play a song these days,

02:23:20   you're probably playing it off cell data.

02:23:22   you know, most of that's how most people are listening to songs.

02:23:24   Like, so the idea of like having to like prompt the user or make a lot of granular settings

02:23:30   for when to use cell data, I think is outdated.

02:23:33   And so now I think I can get away with the current options that I have, which is literally,

02:23:40   it just, it always allows cell data on streaming because you initiated that.

02:23:43   Like you, the user said, play this now.

02:23:45   And so in my opinion, then you don't have to ask, are you sure you want to play it

02:23:50   over cell data because you're currently on the cell network?

02:23:52   No, these days, what year is this?

02:23:53   You play it now.

02:23:55   And then the only option I have is

02:23:57   whether automatic background downloads should use cellular.

02:24:03   And it's default to off.

02:24:04   So the automatic background downloads

02:24:06   will default to Wi-Fi only.

02:24:08   Because in that case, it's like, well, you didn't initiate this.

02:24:11   This came in outside of your control.

02:24:13   It could have come in the middle of the night

02:24:15   when you were asleep.

02:24:16   And your iPad downloaded an entire episode of Mad Men

02:24:18   and burned through your whole Verizon cap.

02:24:20   That could have happened.

02:24:21   So, you know, that is a preference to me.

02:24:25   That is like, okay, do you have so much data

02:24:28   that you always want the app to use

02:24:31   as much of it as it needs to,

02:24:33   or do you want to basically use it on demand?

02:24:36   - Yeah, that seems about right.

02:24:37   That seems right.

02:24:38   Let the automatic stuff stay on Wi-Fi

02:24:40   and let the user-initiated stuff play.

02:24:43   And however, you know, you're never gonna win,

02:24:45   somebody's gonna complain,

02:24:47   but I think in general,

02:24:49   it's actually, your logic is completely correct,

02:24:53   that if the user hits play

02:24:54   and they have a working network connection, they mean play.

02:24:57   - Right, because that's how, you know,

02:24:59   podcast apps historically have not worked that way always,

02:25:02   like they've offered more granular control,

02:25:04   but I'm not, see, I'm not looking at what other podcast apps

02:25:06   are doing to solve this problem.

02:25:08   I'm looking at what other apps are doing, not podcasts,

02:25:10   like just what people expect based on the reality

02:25:14   of other apps that exist in the universe today.

02:25:16   And what that is these days is a lot of streaming media.

02:25:19   And it just uses cellular when it needs to

02:25:21   and it doesn't ask you.

02:25:22   - Yeah, I think part of it too is that

02:25:24   things have changed so quickly in so few years

02:25:26   and that streaming in general has just become,

02:25:28   it's a huge phenomenon.

02:25:31   But podcasting started back, I mean the name even says,

02:25:35   you know, it's the iPod, you know, that's the podcasting,

02:25:39   from a time when you downloaded stuff first

02:25:42   and then synced it over to your iPod and USB

02:25:45   and that it was a big deal.

02:25:46   and podcast episodes were things you had to wait for

02:25:50   while they downloaded, 'cause they were big.

02:25:52   Whereas, you know, they're not that big anymore,

02:25:55   and most people, an awful lot of people

02:25:58   have cellular network connections that handle it easily.

02:26:01   'Cause they can handle video, if they can handle video,

02:26:02   you can handle audio easily.

02:26:04   - Exactly, you know, so, and there was,

02:26:06   there's also, like, there's other implementation details

02:26:08   that were tricky problems.

02:26:09   Like, one of them is, if you're on cellular,

02:26:12   how much should the streamer read ahead of the file?

02:26:17   Like, should it just keep downloading

02:26:18   until it has the whole thing?

02:26:20   Or should it only buffer ahead

02:26:22   like five minutes worth at a time, you know, and so on?

02:26:25   And the decision I came to on that is

02:26:28   it should just download as much as it can

02:26:30   whenever it feels like it.

02:26:31   So if you start an episode of playing over cellular,

02:26:35   you know, in streaming,

02:26:37   it will download as much as it can

02:26:39   until the connection drops or until it finishes the file.

02:26:42   that's it because any other solution that I thought of and

02:26:45   tried would fail in other ways like it would it would be

02:26:49   inconvenient or annoying or it wouldn't be what I wanted in

02:26:51   other situations and the fact is an entire podcast episode.

02:26:55   You know most people who listen to podcasts aren't listening to

02:26:58   shows like this that are two hours long. Most people are

02:27:01   listening to stuff like you know public radio shows that

02:27:04   are maybe twenty thirty minutes, and so those are like

02:27:08   fifteen megs twenty megs like they they they were really

02:27:11   small files and again that's like two verge articles so so

02:27:15   it's no big deal to buffer ahead whereas it is a big deal

02:27:18   if somebody is driving on a long highway trip and they're

02:27:21   counting on streaming to play their their podcast for them

02:27:24   and they lose reception for a few minutes because they're in

02:27:26   the middle of the mountains and the show that they were

02:27:29   downloading just drops because it didn't buffer ahead enough

02:27:31   and it could have it had the connection back there. It could

02:27:33   have it could have downloaded the whole show had plenty of

02:27:35   time to download it and then just didn't you know so there's

02:27:38   situations like that or or you know more commonly like if

02:27:41   if you're on a metro system that's underground

02:27:42   and stuff like that.

02:27:43   So it was just better, again, another decision that

02:27:48   if I was making that decision five years ago,

02:27:50   10 years ago, I would have probably made it differently.

02:27:52   But now, this is the era where things stream

02:27:56   and it's not a big deal.

02:27:58   And if you need to really restrict the amount of data

02:28:01   that you use, you have to consciously download media

02:28:05   for offline use and then like, you know,

02:28:07   and avoid actively streaming things

02:28:09   or go into the system settings app

02:28:11   and turn off cellular for all these apps.

02:28:14   - I think you're on the right track.

02:28:15   I think it's gonna be a big hit.

02:28:17   Let me take one last break here

02:28:18   and hit the money button once again

02:28:20   and thank our fourth and final sponsor,

02:28:22   long time friends of the show,

02:28:24   long time friends of ATP as well, Igloo.

02:28:28   - Oh yeah.

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02:28:36   - I believe that one's just ATP.

02:28:37   ATP, you could probably figure it out.

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02:29:21   In a lot of businesses, good old fashioned documents,

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02:30:24   I keep waiting for this to end and it hasn't ended,

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02:30:32   So if you're on a really small team,

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02:30:34   that's under 10 employees, Igloo is just free.

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02:31:00   you go and they have very, very low prices for per user over 10.

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02:31:15   So go check them out.

02:31:16   Longtime friends of the show.

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02:31:21   they signed up for Igloo-- very, very happy with it.

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02:31:24   Those guys know how to spend their ad money.

02:31:28   I know they started, when they started years ago,

02:31:30   they got Sandwich to make videos for them.

02:31:33   - Yeah, they were really, they've been progressive

02:31:35   right from the start.

02:31:36   - Yeah, they did like TV commercials with Sandwich.

02:31:41   Good stuff.

02:31:41   We don't have much time.

02:31:43   We've been going on forever.

02:31:44   We always go long.

02:31:45   We haven't gone on too terribly long,

02:31:46   but we don't have a lot of time left.

02:31:48   I guess we can just briefly--

02:31:50   - It's been like two and a half hours.

02:31:52   - Briefly talk about the new iPhone,

02:31:57   now you've got one yeah we got two in the house now yeah so what did you guys

02:32:03   get success she got gold I got black you know usual and no no pluses no and we

02:32:11   went 16 gigs for you I think you guys have been more more critical of the 16

02:32:20   gig than then I have your your you are more convinced that it's an upsell

02:32:25   product market, or would you call it marketing? I don't know. It's not that they want to make

02:32:31   higher margins on the 16 gigabyte phones, it's that they want to make higher margins

02:32:36   because there's enough people out there who would, if the bottom line was 32 instead of

02:32:42   16, they would buy that 32. But they know that 16 isn't enough, so they just bite the

02:32:48   bullet and buy 64. And that's an entire $100, extra $100 in revenue, and probably close

02:32:54   to $100 in margin.

02:32:58   - Correct, I mean, you can look at something as,

02:33:00   well, there's lots of justifications for this.

02:33:04   You can look at it, there's reasons,

02:33:06   like when Phil Schiller was on here

02:33:08   and he explained a lot of justifications

02:33:10   for why this works.

02:33:12   There's also, I heard from a lot of people,

02:33:13   when we were talking about this,

02:33:14   I heard from people who were saying,

02:33:15   well, we buy these for business,

02:33:18   we buy thousands of these for our employees or whatever,

02:33:20   and we don't need them to have more space,

02:33:23   which I think is a terrible argument.

02:33:25   And you can apply that same thing,

02:33:26   well, do they need cameras?

02:33:28   Do they need a headphone jack?

02:33:29   Like, you know, you can apply that to lots of things.

02:33:33   So there's a lot of bad justifications for it,

02:33:36   but I think separating justifications

02:33:39   from reasons is important.

02:33:41   And I think the main reason for it is, you're right,

02:33:44   it is not necessarily to make the extra couple of dollars

02:33:48   of margin on the 16 gig model.

02:33:50   it's that they're selling so many more of the 64s

02:33:53   that it is most likely having a significant boost

02:33:57   on the average selling price.

02:33:58   And when you're talking about the most profitable product

02:34:02   of the most profitable company,

02:34:04   like a significant boost to the average selling price

02:34:08   of their best-selling product is massively important.

02:34:12   Like that is a big deal to them.

02:34:14   And they don't always do what's 100% best for the customer.

02:34:17   It's always a balancing act.

02:34:18   know, it's, it's, you know, they, they, they will, they're happy to charge $45 for,

02:34:25   you know, a leather case that they could sell for a lot less, you know, stuff like that.

02:34:29   Like, you know, they, they're not totally a charity here, like they're doing stuff

02:34:33   as a balance between satisfaction and profit and I think this is one of those things where,

02:34:37   in my opinion, they've chosen wrong. I think they have not balanced this correctly in this

02:34:41   case, that I think the long-term costs to satisfaction and to the load it places on

02:34:51   support on the Genius Bar, the problems people face with their full phones and trying to

02:34:58   manage storage themselves, you know, I think all these things are a poor balance of utility

02:35:04   versus profit. And I would say the same thing about other things like the iCloud storage

02:35:12   tier pricing. It just got better but it's still not great. There's problems. You can

02:35:19   point to all sorts of things like this with Apple and most of the stuff they do is a pretty

02:35:23   good value. But there's these little edges like this where you can just kind of tell,

02:35:28   "Oh yeah, they just did this because this would be a massive difference in profit."

02:35:33   Yeah, and I, it's weird, I can't help it. I think it has to change next year.

02:35:39   Although, who knows? You know what I mean? Like, I keep thinking, well, next year when I go to the

02:35:43   7, I'll have to up the minimum to the 32. And the OS isn't going to get bigger, so it'll just mean

02:35:49   that there's a lot more free space for everybody. And then I think to myself, I don't know if I'd

02:35:55   want to bet on that. Because maybe, you know, they've had, the thing that I keep thinking about

02:36:01   is if they did it again going from the 6 to the 6s with the exact same split.

02:36:05   And they changed so much other stuff.

02:36:07   They changed the actual aluminum alloy they make the things out of.

02:36:11   So it's not like they're afraid to change stuff in the Ss.

02:36:14   It also seems like they changed the flash.

02:36:16   Everyone's saying it's much faster.

02:36:17   Yeah.

02:36:18   And whether that's because it's the component or it's at least the--

02:36:24   like, was it Ars Technica?

02:36:27   I think that had the specs and wrote some code.

02:36:29   It's the storage controller is new and is now more like,

02:36:34   it's effectively like a MacBook storage controller.

02:36:40   So it's a serious upgrade.

02:36:42   It is in addition to like the CPU and GPU benchmarks

02:36:45   being equivalent to the MacBook One,

02:36:48   it really seems like they've upped their storage performance

02:36:53   and the way they treat storage to laptop,

02:36:57   MacBook quality engineering,

02:36:59   which is, again, it's a crazy big change.

02:37:01   This whole notion that the S1s are just minor revisions,

02:37:04   it's really, really crazy.

02:37:06   I think if anything in my review,

02:37:09   I think I undersold this new theory I have,

02:37:13   which is that it takes Johnny Ive's team two years,

02:37:16   I think I've got this boiled down to a good nut,

02:37:18   that it takes them two years to come up with it,

02:37:20   what they think is a superior design,

02:37:23   as in, this is what it looks like,

02:37:26   this is the basic gist of the,

02:37:28   it's gonna have these size screens

02:37:30   with this pixel resolution,

02:37:32   and there's gonna be a button down here

02:37:34   that'll be a fingerprint sensor.

02:37:39   These are the buttons, these are the sizes.

02:37:42   And then the engineering teams have to decide,

02:37:46   well, how do we make this?

02:37:47   And because it takes two years

02:37:48   for these new designs to come out,

02:37:50   and because two years is a good pace for them

02:37:53   for new designs, for product marketing reasons anyway,

02:37:57   it means that the engineering teams get two cracks at it.

02:37:59   They get the first crack, which is how can we make this

02:38:02   to hit this ship date?

02:38:05   And then they get a second, an entire year after that

02:38:10   to okay, how can we make that design even better?

02:38:14   And in terms of, they rethink everything.

02:38:17   Every single thing you touch on this iPhone

02:38:18   is a different material than last year's.

02:38:21   I mean, maybe the rubber gaskets that cover the antennas

02:38:24   are the same material, but it's a new aluminum

02:38:27   and it's a new glass.

02:38:29   So if they wanted to change the minimum to 32,

02:38:31   they could have done it.

02:38:33   And I just keep thinking about the fact

02:38:34   that if the customer satisfaction downsides

02:38:38   to the 16 gig minimum were as significant enough

02:38:43   to worry them, they would have changed it.

02:38:45   That they could have seen those numbers last year,

02:38:49   early on, and known that we've got, you know,

02:38:52   That's a thing that I think that they could have changed,

02:38:55   say, between last December and this September.

02:38:59   And I think a lot of it is locked down a year in advance,

02:39:01   but they could have changed the minimum.

02:39:04   - I do worry a little bit.

02:39:05   You know, we've seen, I think in the Tim Cook era of Apple,

02:39:10   I think it's safe to say,

02:39:11   based on our observations from the outside

02:39:13   and some other statements,

02:39:14   I think it's probably safe to assume

02:39:16   that they are more data-driven than they used to be.

02:39:19   Like with Steve, it was very much still

02:39:22   based on Steve's intuitions to a lot of degree, right?

02:39:25   And Tim is very much, is much more data driven

02:39:28   and so that's showing in the rest of the company.

02:39:30   And I worry, one of the things that came up

02:39:33   from various Apple people that I spoke with

02:39:37   or that I heard from, one of the things that came up

02:39:39   during the functional high ground thing is that

02:39:42   about half of Apple was like, oh my god,

02:39:46   thank you for finally saying this.

02:39:48   I've been trying to convince higher ups for years

02:39:49   that we need to slow down and fix things.

02:39:51   And the other part I heard was that

02:39:53   a lot of this was catching higher ups by surprise.

02:39:58   - Yeah.

02:39:59   - That they thought they were doing better

02:40:01   than what I thought and what a lot of other people thought.

02:40:03   And this is very much a metrics-driven company now.

02:40:07   - I would go even further than that.

02:40:09   And what I heard wasn't just that that side of the company

02:40:13   thought they were doing better than what you and others,

02:40:16   and the, "Yeah, I hear you, that's right."

02:40:19   They honestly and truly believed,

02:40:22   believed and maybe still continue to believe,

02:40:24   that they're doing better on software quality

02:40:26   than ever before in the company's history.

02:40:28   Not just that they were doing okay,

02:40:30   that they were doing better than ever.

02:40:32   - Right, and so my concern is twofold.

02:40:36   First of all, the fact that there's a massive

02:40:39   disconnect of opinion there,

02:40:41   regardless of which side is right,

02:40:42   that shows a problem somewhere on the line,

02:40:44   that that should be considered.

02:40:45   but my main concern is that we can see definitely

02:40:50   that they are way more metrics-driven

02:40:52   and numbers-driven than they have been before.

02:40:55   That is the new culture of Apple in the Tim Cook era.

02:40:58   And the Tim Cook era has brought a lot of positives,

02:41:03   and this is one that I think is certainly positive

02:41:06   in some areas, but it also has risks

02:41:09   that they have to look out for,

02:41:10   and I'm not sure they found the right balance yet.

02:41:12   One of the biggest risks is you gotta make sure

02:41:14   measuring the right numbers, you know, and, you know,

02:41:17   whatever metrics you are collecting,

02:41:20   is that the whole picture?

02:41:21   And also, whatever metrics you're collecting will,

02:41:24   first of all, they will be gamed by internal people

02:41:27   within the company, like internal departments

02:41:29   will gain the metrics because they have to,

02:41:30   because that's the pressure that is put on them,

02:41:32   and when they have to start making decisions

02:41:34   about difficult things to cut or to put off or to whatever,

02:41:37   you know, they know what metrics they're judged on,

02:41:40   and so people will gain metrics.

02:41:42   - It's the way that, you know,

02:41:44   And I know you're not a big sports fan,

02:41:45   but it's the reason that every single team sport

02:41:49   with a ball has what seems to be from an outsider

02:41:52   a complex set of rules.

02:41:54   The more you learn about baseball,

02:41:56   the more you think these rules are crazy.

02:41:57   But it's all about the fact that if the game is about

02:42:01   how many people cross home plate and touch home plate,

02:42:04   that if these rules weren't in place,

02:42:06   people, teams would do whatever they could

02:42:08   within the rules that are in place to game the game.

02:42:13   - Right.

02:42:13   gets gamed. You're exactly right. And that ties into the advertising discussion we had

02:42:19   four hours ago. Right. So I do worry that if Apple is putting all this emphasis internally on metrics,

02:42:27   I wonder what they're missing. And because we've seen already, you know, with the high ground thing,

02:42:33   we've seen that there are things they're missing and that they need to be shown that sometimes from

02:42:37   the outside. And part of the reason why I complain so much about certain things Apple does is because

02:42:42   Because I know that outside voices like ours

02:42:45   can affect things internally.

02:42:47   Usually whatever we are arguing about outside,

02:42:50   somebody inside is arguing about too.

02:42:52   And if there's outside support for one viewpoint

02:42:54   or the other, we can be giving ammunition

02:42:56   to the side that we want to win the fight.

02:42:58   - Yeah, I think that the whole Discovery D thing

02:43:00   was a perfect example of the type of thing

02:43:05   that slipped through their metrics.

02:43:07   I mean, one of the things I know that they specifically

02:43:09   were thinking about were crash reports.

02:43:11   and that there's this whole opt-in system

02:43:13   that Apple, I think, is very, very upfront about.

02:43:16   And in fact, there may even be too upfront about it

02:43:18   because when you upgrade your OS on systems,

02:43:21   you have to always re-opt into these things.

02:43:23   They might even ask, they might even err on the side

02:43:26   of asking too many times, you know,

02:43:27   are you sure you wanna let us have location services

02:43:30   enabled on this device?

02:43:31   Even if you've said it already,

02:43:32   you've just upgraded to a major new version of the OS,

02:43:34   they're gonna ask you again.

02:43:35   So they know that most of, an overwhelming majority

02:43:40   of users on the Mac, or Mac and iOS,

02:43:44   opt into the will you send us the crash reports

02:43:47   and stuff like that for helping us make things better.

02:43:50   And that's one of the things that they've measured

02:43:53   and one of the things that they know has gone way down

02:43:57   in recent years is apps crashing.

02:43:59   Anecdotally, that feels true to me as well,

02:44:03   that on my Mac, fewer and fewer apps crash

02:44:06   in terms of just disappearing and getting the,

02:44:10   And especially if I--

02:44:12   again, I'm not measuring statistics.

02:44:14   I'm thinking about it just in my mind.

02:44:16   Almost all the crashes I see nowadays on my Mac

02:44:18   are from beta software that I'm testing

02:44:20   and that I expect to crash.

02:44:23   It feels to me like apps crash less, especially Apple's apps.

02:44:27   Yeah, I'd say you're right.

02:44:29   And the whole discovery de-thing,

02:44:31   all of the various problems that people have seen from it

02:44:34   are the type of things that-- there aren't crashes.

02:44:36   They're just these weird silent failures.

02:44:39   You know, like when the printer that I've been using for the last four years, and it's

02:44:44   the only printer I use, and I hit Command P and nothing ever comes out of it, and I

02:44:50   go over to the thing with the red badge in my dock and it just says, "Printer cannot

02:44:54   be found," and I go to this thing and the system settings and try to configure the printer,

02:45:00   and I can't configure it, and I just sit here and I see if Amy can print and she can print,

02:45:07   I can't it doesn't even see the printer and then I just turn the printer off and on and back on again and

02:45:12   Now it all just works, but I haven't updated anything on my printer. That's for damn sure the printer hasn't changed at all

02:45:19   That never gets reported to Apple that never you know, there is no crash log that gets sent

02:45:25   There is no I you know Siri heard John cursing in his office about the fucking printer

02:45:32   That never it doesn't register, right?

02:45:34   it's the sort of thing that you just kind of have to you kind of have to play by feel and

02:45:39   Internally you have to be like hey guys. This is a shit show this

02:45:42   My Apple TV is keeps calling itself Apple TV parentheses 13

02:45:47   Right and that and playing it by feel that as we all know that was one of Steve's

02:45:52   Greatest strengths that he was like he was really on point and yeah, he wasn't always perfect

02:45:57   but his track record was pretty good in playing it by feel and

02:46:01   And so, you know, when you move to this metric system,

02:46:04   you have to both A, make, you know,

02:46:06   you have to be on the lookout for gaming

02:46:08   and try to reduce it or eliminate the incentives for it

02:46:11   whenever possible.

02:46:12   And that's an ongoing constant battle.

02:46:15   And B, you have to really make, you have to look at like,

02:46:18   what do the metrics not include?

02:46:21   Where are the blind spots of these metrics?

02:46:25   And every set of metrics is gonna have massive blind spots.

02:46:28   And that is where I think there is still room

02:46:31   for improvement there.

02:46:32   And so if Apple is measuring their beloved customer set

02:46:37   in ways that show that 16 gig is not a problem

02:46:41   for most of the people who have it,

02:46:44   I mean, they have way more data than we do.

02:46:47   So they could be right, that could be true.

02:46:49   Most of the things Apple says are,

02:46:52   you know, on our surface level, on the face of it, true.

02:46:54   Like my blog post, there was no deeper meaning.

02:46:57   and like most of the things, as you always say,

02:46:59   most of the things Apple says

02:47:00   are pretty straightforward and true.

02:47:02   But this is one of those cases where

02:47:04   if they keep saying that 16 gig is fine

02:47:06   and that people are happy enough with it,

02:47:09   that is a really stark contrast and disagreement

02:47:14   to what I and everyone I know sees anecdotally

02:47:18   from our friends and relatives who have 16 gig phones.

02:47:21   And like I love like when underscore David Smith

02:47:24   posted his analysis of like free space.

02:47:27   - You have that right in front of you right now.

02:47:28   - Yep, yeah, that was great, 'cause that shows

02:47:30   actual broad data set from people who aren't all nerds,

02:47:35   who have, like, how much free space they actually have,

02:47:37   and how many, and, you know, we all, everyone

02:47:39   who has been around other people with iPhones,

02:47:41   we've all known people who, like, oh, they go

02:47:44   to take a picture and their phone's full,

02:47:45   or they keep getting the message that their phone is full,

02:47:47   or their iCloud storage is full, and they have no idea

02:47:49   what to do about that exactly, and, you know,

02:47:52   iOS storage management has never been particularly easy

02:47:55   or obvious and how to do it.

02:47:57   You know, there's all these problems people have.

02:48:00   People who are stuck on old OSs,

02:48:02   like I think they learned big time

02:48:05   with how low the adoption rate was of iOS 8

02:48:07   compared to previous releases

02:48:09   because they had all these 8 and 16 gig phones out there

02:48:11   that didn't have enough space to install it.

02:48:13   And people just never installed it.

02:48:16   - I would say actually, I think that the way

02:48:18   that iOS deals with storage now

02:48:20   in terms of dealing with a low storage situation

02:48:22   is actually better than it's ever been

02:48:23   better than anything on the Mac.

02:48:26   Because the Mac, you're dealing with the Finder,

02:48:29   and you've already lost most people.

02:48:31   Like, the file system, you've lost them.

02:48:33   And so the way that you can go into Settings now,

02:48:35   and if you at least Google enough,

02:48:37   you can probably get someone to tell you, go to Settings,

02:48:40   go to General, go to Usage, and it'll show you

02:48:42   which apps are using how much data.

02:48:44   And then you can do something right there and deal with it.

02:48:47   That's actually pretty good.

02:48:48   And I think it's about as good just blaming the whole app.

02:48:51   here, this app is using four gigabytes,

02:48:54   is about as good as it's gonna get

02:48:56   for mass market typical people.

02:48:58   But most people aren't gonna get that far.

02:49:00   I just linked to a thing before we started recording today

02:49:03   that around the world, there's like five or six percent

02:49:07   of Facebook users don't know that they're using the internet

02:49:10   when they use Facebook.

02:49:12   - That's great.

02:49:13   - That you go around and poll people

02:49:14   and they say, "How much do you use the internet?"

02:49:17   And you get, you know, it's 40%.

02:49:19   And then do you use Facebook?

02:49:20   And it's like 60%.

02:49:22   Well, how is that, that's not really possible.

02:49:25   They're obviously misinformed,

02:49:27   but if you're surprised that there are that many people

02:49:30   who don't realize that Facebook is on the internet,

02:49:33   you really just don't understand

02:49:34   how untechical people are, you know?

02:49:38   And it's just not,

02:49:39   it doesn't even say that they're not intelligent.

02:49:40   They just don't, they might be unintelligent,

02:49:43   but it might just be that they are not technically inclined.

02:49:46   And the genius-- - It also might be

02:49:47   the decreasing relevance of the web.

02:49:49   I didn't say that.

02:49:50   - It's very possible, very possible.

02:49:52   Like that they, and combine that with the age old genius

02:49:56   of Microsoft branding their browser Internet Explorer,

02:50:01   which made people think that that was the internet.

02:50:03   Which was very purposeful and again,

02:50:07   gets tied into like the whole Joe Camel marketing angle,

02:50:10   you know, marketing is evil, you know,

02:50:13   from earlier in the show.

02:50:14   That was very deliberate.

02:50:16   and then they know they're not using the thing

02:50:18   that's the internet, 'cause they're not using the browser,

02:50:20   and so therefore they're not using the internet.

02:50:23   That's just the loose way people think about things.

02:50:25   And it speaks to the genius of modern smartphones

02:50:29   that they're able to do so much and share so much

02:50:32   and be so engaged by not really understanding

02:50:35   the underlying technology at all.

02:50:37   But therefore, if you're surprised that people,

02:50:41   some number of people buy 16 gigabyte phones

02:50:44   and have no idea that they're doing themselves

02:50:47   a great disservice, it's not their fault.

02:50:51   This is the bottom line.

02:50:52   The thing that gets people upset, like you say,

02:50:53   and I know there's people who are out there

02:50:56   rage-swearing at us listening to the podcast saying,

02:51:00   my company buys 16 gigabyte phones and they're just fine

02:51:03   because we do blah, blah, blah.

02:51:04   If Apple wants to sell them to the enterprise, fine.

02:51:07   Sell them directly to the enterprise,

02:51:08   but don't sell them in retail stores to consumers

02:51:11   because Underscore's data shows

02:51:13   that somewhere around 37% of those people have,

02:51:17   at least his users of his app,

02:51:18   but I think it's very, very possible that that's,

02:51:20   let's call it one in three.

02:51:21   So we'll even err on the, you know,

02:51:23   underscore says 37, we'll call it 33.

02:51:26   1% of the people with 16 gigabytes iPhones

02:51:29   have under one gigabyte of space available,

02:51:32   which is really, really,

02:51:33   and some of them have, you know,

02:51:34   really low mounts under one gigabyte.

02:51:38   But if you don't even have one gigabyte available,

02:51:40   you're really in trouble for a lot of little things.

02:51:43   - Yeah, like a lot of things just start failing

02:51:45   for you at that point.

02:51:46   - Right, like having the room to download

02:51:47   150 megabyte podcast that you wanna listen to,

02:51:51   or to record video, like the thing that he showed

02:51:54   that his wife got when she took out the camera

02:51:55   and she could not record video

02:51:57   because there wasn't enough space.

02:51:58   And, you know, it really bites you.

02:52:03   And then the other thing you look at in his stats is,

02:52:05   so the next step up now is 64,

02:52:07   and you look at how many people with 64 gigabyte phones

02:52:10   have storage problems, and it's effectively none of them.

02:52:12   - Yeah, I mean, and the sad thing is,

02:52:15   I've heard rumblings here and there from various tipsters,

02:52:18   some of which have no credibility,

02:52:21   I've heard rumblings that they are finally

02:52:23   going to fix this next year, and with the iPhone 7,

02:52:26   it's going to start at either 32 or even 64.

02:52:29   I worry, though, by the time, if they ever move up to 32,

02:52:35   maybe that's gonna be too small by that point.

02:52:37   (laughs)

02:52:38   You know, 'cause the point of this,

02:52:40   It's very much like when you're designing an app

02:52:44   with a paywall, and I have this in Overcast,

02:52:46   when you're designing an app with a paywall of some sort,

02:52:48   whether it's a free trial with shareware style,

02:52:52   unlock all features, whatever,

02:52:53   the idea is to put that wall at a threshold

02:52:58   such that you're creating a small pain point for people

02:53:03   so that they won't like frustratingly quit your app

02:53:06   and say, well, this is useless, I can't even try it,

02:53:09   but you have to create that pain point at such a place

02:53:12   where most people will reasonably run into it a few times

02:53:16   and a good percentage of those people

02:53:18   will run into it enough that it pushes them,

02:53:21   it motivates them into paying.

02:53:24   And I use the term pain point here intentionally.

02:53:27   Like this is like you're causing like inconvenience

02:53:31   or you're making people like hit a wall that's unpleasant

02:53:33   that they want to go past.

02:53:35   Because if you don't do that,

02:53:36   If you are too generous with what you give away for free,

02:53:40   effectively nobody buys the upgrade.

02:53:41   This is one of the things like apps that have ads by default

02:53:45   and you can pay to remove the ads.

02:53:47   Historically, those have very, very low payment rates.

02:53:50   Almost no, you know, effectively almost nobody

02:53:52   pays to remove ads.

02:53:53   - I always pay.

02:53:55   I always pay to save ads.

02:53:55   - Right, me too, but we're weird.

02:53:57   You know, most people are just like,

02:53:59   well, okay, I'll take the ads.

02:54:00   That isn't enough of a pain point.

02:54:02   Or if you say like, you know, suppose, you know,

02:54:05   So suppose with the overcast, if I said,

02:54:08   well, in order to subscribe to more than three podcasts,

02:54:12   you have to unlock the pay thing.

02:54:15   Well, most people subscribe to like two podcasts

02:54:18   or one and a half podcasts, something like that on average.

02:54:20   So hardly anybody would even hit that,

02:54:23   and then I would create this horrible incentive

02:54:25   for people not to try out new shows.

02:54:27   - Right, right.

02:54:28   - So like, that's why I don't limit that.

02:54:30   I limit other things, but I don't limit that.

02:54:33   And so, you know, with Apple, you know,

02:54:35   when they're pricing their products,

02:54:37   when they're designing the tiers,

02:54:39   of deciding what the storage tiers or whatever,

02:54:42   the product lines, you know,

02:54:43   where does the Mini run into the Air?

02:54:45   Where does the Air now run into the Pro?

02:54:48   On the MacBooks, you know,

02:54:49   where do the size boundaries lie

02:54:50   and what capabilities do you have to move up to get

02:54:53   at each stage?

02:54:54   Like, all these things are designed

02:54:56   to try to place those barriers and those limits

02:54:59   and those boundaries between classes

02:55:01   or between price levels.

02:55:02   try to place them at a point where you're going to capture a

02:55:06   lot more value from a lot of people who are going to hit

02:55:09   those barriers and are going to want to push past them by

02:55:12   paying you more money. That is the whole point. If they if

02:55:15   if Apple did their job badly, they would give away too much

02:55:19   for free at the low end, but Apple tries to do their job

02:55:21   well and they are very very good at that most of the time

02:55:24   and so so when like these these storage tiers are designed

02:55:29   specifically to maximize that I look at the iPad and the iPad Pro. I was just

02:55:34   about 32 and 128 right and the 128 is cellular only or it was only available

02:55:39   on the 128 right right so like so there's only three available you can

02:55:42   refer 799 I think it's 799 I'm looking at my notes yeah I think you're 799 you

02:55:47   can get a 32 gigabyte no cellular for 949 you can get 128 gigs no cellular and

02:55:53   And then for 1079, their usual $130 upgrade for the cellular, you can get 128 in cellular.

02:56:01   Those are the only three configurations available. I actually think that's great. I think it's great

02:56:06   that it's a lot simpler, that you don't have three storage tiers. It's just two. Do you want the real

02:56:10   one? And let's face it, the real one is the 128. Do you want cellular or not? And the 32 totally

02:56:17   make sense in the context of industrial uses of the iPad Pro, like for the enterprise.

02:56:24   Like single app uses.

02:56:25   Yeah, and I was talking to Dr. Wave from Pixar, and they even publicized this is public information

02:56:30   that's not secret, that Apple was there at Pixar last week and letting their artists

02:56:35   play with them and use them and test the palm rejection, which they were very pleased with.

02:56:40   I say very pleased, they called it like near perfect.

02:56:44   But like I said to him, I was like, I'll bet that the 32 is the one you guys are gonna

02:56:47   buy.

02:56:48   He goes, "Oh yeah, of course."

02:56:49   Because they don't store anything on the thing.

02:56:50   It's all connected to their little internal internet and it's all stored on the servers

02:56:55   and so that they can share it and it's all there.

02:56:57   So the extra storage would be completely and utterly wasted on them.

02:57:01   And it's also, the lack of cellular is a feature because they don't want these things connected

02:57:06   to cellular networks.

02:57:07   They want them connected only to their little internal network.

02:57:11   I didn't even talk to him about this, but I know in the movie industry in general, that

02:57:14   whole thing where Sony got hacked has really, really upped their game on security. And places

02:57:19   like hospitals and stuff like that with all the HIPAA laws, this configuration is perfect

02:57:25   for them. If you're a consumer though, you want the 128 and you probably want the one

02:57:29   with cellular.

02:57:30   And I think it's very obvious. And also, the low-end model, 32, is a great little low-end

02:57:37   thing where there's still plenty of space for things like software updates and temporary

02:57:42   caches and big files and stuff like that. Whereas like a 16 gigabyte model on that would have been

02:57:46   like, it just would be terrible. Yeah. I mean, like I like, you know, if I, if I end up having

02:57:51   to get one for various testing purposes, I would get 32 because I wouldn't be like a power user of

02:57:56   that. Right. That feels like it's okay. But just barely like it, it does feel kind of weird to

02:58:03   spend nine or $800 on this high end thing. And then to not spend the extra 150 or whatever to

02:58:12   to quadruple the storage because this is the kind of

02:58:16   thing that you can never change. You can never upgrade

02:58:18   that store the other way or like it's you can't undo that

02:58:21   decision and and they know that when they're pricing it

02:58:25   and when they're deciding these, they know that and

02:58:27   they know that a certain percentage of people usually I

02:58:30   would expect a pretty significant one will

02:58:33   rationalize that same thought of well, I'm already spending

02:58:36   eight hundred. If I go up to nine fifty, I'll quadruple

02:58:39   this thing that might be a problem for me in the future.

02:58:40   I don't do it.

02:58:41   You know, and same thing with adding Apple Care

02:58:43   and everything else, this is how retailers always work.

02:58:45   This is business.

02:58:47   So all this is a very long way to say,

02:58:50   I definitely still believe that these 16 gig phones

02:58:53   are a decision to raise average selling price,

02:58:55   not because it is best for customers.

02:58:59   And that I don't necessarily even,

02:59:02   I'm not even that mad at them about it

02:59:04   because, you know, that's just, that's business.

02:59:06   That's the kind of decision that they have to make

02:59:09   to be successful and every business person does this

02:59:12   and Apple is not Santa Claus.

02:59:16   They're a business and they're gonna make money off of us

02:59:19   and we happily keep giving it to them

02:59:21   and so they're obviously doing something right.

02:59:23   - The one and last point I wanna make about this,

02:59:26   the other thing that causes me to think about it a lot

02:59:29   is that the repercussions of this last

02:59:34   for at least three years because what it means

02:59:39   is that next year the mid-tier phone

02:59:41   is going to be a 16 gigabyte,

02:59:43   start at a 16 gigabyte iPhone 6S,

02:59:47   and then two years from now,

02:59:48   the free with contract $99 phone

02:59:51   is going to be the iPhone 6S with 16 gigabytes.

02:59:54   So there's going to be brand new iPhones

02:59:56   that some people are buying with 16 gigabytes

03:00:00   for at least the next three years.

03:00:01   - Oh yeah, I mean, they've been selling eights

03:00:04   at the low end, I think.

03:00:06   - Right.

03:00:07   - I don't know, are they still now?

03:00:08   - I think that that--

03:00:09   - They were before last week.

03:00:12   - Yeah, before last week.

03:00:13   - They're still selling the 5C,

03:00:14   the 5C had an eight gig version.

03:00:16   - Yeah, so it's the fact that the minimum

03:00:20   when the iPhone 5C came out was six,

03:00:22   it made a difference.

03:00:24   - And the minimum now, at least the minimum in the US

03:00:27   is 16 now in the 5S.

03:00:29   - Yeah, they might sell eight somewhere around the world.

03:00:32   But that still means though that it's going to be 16 though

03:00:36   for a while.

03:00:37   - Exactly.

03:00:39   - I thought, I linked to it today,

03:00:44   and I don't wanna repeat it.

03:00:45   I'll just tell people to go,

03:00:47   'cause you and I don't have,

03:00:49   this episode is pretty short,

03:00:50   so if you still have a lot of time left

03:00:51   for podcasts listening, go listen to,

03:00:54   it's a great podcast in general,

03:00:55   but I really thought it was a fantastic episode of Upgrade

03:00:58   with Jason Snell and Mike Hurley,

03:01:00   and they talked about upgrading to iOS 9,

03:01:04   or getting a new phone.

03:01:05   You buy a new iPhone, you have an old iPhone,

03:01:07   you wanna upgrade from your backup.

03:01:10   What an enormous pain in the ass that really is.

03:01:13   And if anything, it's gotten worse over the years

03:01:15   because the phones do so much more

03:01:17   and ask so much more permission.

03:01:18   And some of the things I totally understand,

03:01:20   I know it has to be that way,

03:01:21   it's actually a feature

03:01:23   that you have to redo your fingerprints.

03:01:26   That's actually good,

03:01:26   even though it's a little bit of a pain in the ass.

03:01:29   You have to reenter your credit cards.

03:01:30   I realize that's actually a feature

03:01:32   because the credit card data is stored on a secure element

03:01:35   and if it was a thing that they could just copy

03:01:37   one phone to another, that wouldn't be a very secure element. It's the fact that it literally

03:01:41   cannot be copied from there to here. That's great. So some of those things are obviously

03:01:46   — it can't be avoided, but it takes so long and it's so indeterminate what you're waiting

03:01:54   for. Like, did you run into — do you upgrade when you get a new phone? Do you upgrade from

03:01:57   a backup?

03:01:58   Yeah, I do. I do the iTunes encrypted backup and everything. This time I did it mostly

03:02:03   seamlessly. Tiff's phone came with a dead SIM card, so we had to swap the SIM on that

03:02:09   one. And I had the endless loop of iCloud authentication dialogues during this setup

03:02:15   process problem, which I've heard a couple people mention that they ran into as well.

03:02:18   Yeah. Other than that, I did the whole thing where I unpair the watch, then back up the

03:02:23   phone, then restore to the new phone, then repair the watch to the new phone and all

03:02:27   that. It went mostly okay. I've gotten this down because, and again, this is not really

03:02:33   a complaint. It's great that I get these review units. I get them two weeks early and I get

03:02:40   to write about them before other people and I get to spend more time with them. But now

03:02:43   that they do two new phones a year, 5C, 5S, 6 and 6 Plus and the 6S and 6 Plus, I get

03:02:50   two phones to test. So there's two phones that I have to go through this with. And then

03:02:53   I always buy my own. I already have my own. I bought my own. I pay for my own personal

03:02:58   use iPhone every year. So that means like in a period of like three weeks, I do this

03:03:02   with three phones every year.

03:03:05   And then later in the fall, I generally wind up doing it

03:03:07   with an iPad too.

03:03:09   And then I might buy my own iPad.

03:03:11   I don't buy a new iPad every year, but I at least test one.

03:03:14   So I do this with like five or six devices every year.

03:03:17   I'll bet there's people within Apple who do this more often

03:03:20   because they're using test units or the hardware.

03:03:22   So the people inside Apple have to know this.

03:03:24   And I think that if you do it like I do more than once a year

03:03:32   the inadequacies of this system are in your face.

03:03:34   And I really, and now that they're selling a program

03:03:38   to upgrade every year, encouraging people

03:03:40   to upgrade every year, I really hope that somewhere

03:03:43   within Apple there's a, you know, this is a high priority.

03:03:47   We really gotta streamline this.

03:03:49   One thing I was not aware of-- - I hope so too, but--

03:03:51   - I was not aware-- - I think--

03:03:52   - I'm sorry for the crosstalk, but I was not aware

03:03:54   that if you do the iCloud backup,

03:03:56   you still have to reenter all your passwords.

03:03:59   - Yeah, yeah, iCloud backup is not,

03:04:01   it doesn't count as encrypted,

03:04:03   because they don't want to store your passwords on iCloud.

03:04:05   So the iCloud keychain, I think,

03:04:07   is gonna be their long-term solution around that,

03:04:10   which doesn't store the password.

03:04:11   It always keeps it on one device, right?

03:04:13   It doesn't actually,

03:04:14   that's why you have to go to another device to approve it.

03:04:16   - Right.

03:04:17   - But no, so that's probably the long-term goal with that.

03:04:19   But I think one thing that is very obvious here,

03:04:23   first of all, is that once again,

03:04:25   sometimes stuff about the Apple Watch

03:04:27   kind of seems like it was developed

03:04:29   on a spaceship away from Apple.

03:04:30   like it just kind of got handed to them when it was done.

03:04:33   Like there's certain things about it that are just like,

03:04:35   this is obviously like the rest of the company

03:04:38   didn't see this or approve this before they got out

03:04:40   or like where did this come from, you know?

03:04:42   So there's certain things about it

03:04:43   and I think obviously the way the Apple Watch deals

03:04:47   with backing itself up to the iPhone

03:04:49   and moving it to a different phone,

03:04:53   it's very un-Apple like, if I can use that generalization.

03:04:58   It is very much like this does not seem like it was

03:05:01   well, you know, Apple's whole thing is like the

03:05:03   integration top to bottom. They make everything.

03:05:05   They make the software, they make the hardware,

03:05:07   they make the services, they make everything.

03:05:08   The way the Apple Watch pairs and backs up to a

03:05:12   phone or doesn't rather is it just seems like this

03:05:17   like thing that was tacked on and it was not

03:05:20   thought of with, you know, with integration in

03:05:22   mind, with the whole stack in mind, with what

03:05:25   happens with your phone upgrade in mind. And that

03:05:28   seems like a massive oversight and hopefully that's just because it's a 1.0

03:05:32   and they'll get to it because it does seem really weird that like by default

03:05:37   your watch is not backing up to your phone ever it seems. Does it only do it

03:05:44   when you unpair it? I think so yeah and if you so if you like wipe your old

03:05:48   phone and while in the process of I it's very easy to end up as a as an ideal

03:05:57   Apple customer, meaning ideal from Apple's perspective, you're a big fan and when they

03:06:01   when they release new things, you just go out and buy them. So you've already got an

03:06:04   Apple Watch and you're buying a new iPhone. It's very, very easy to wind up like, like

03:06:09   with a default factory installed watch again and like losing your activity data.

03:06:14   Yeah, and that's that's a major like that could like as as a slacker who like barely

03:06:20