132: ‘Peace, Porn, and Privacy’ With Guest Marco Arment
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I'm worried because I feel like whenever you're on the show we always go and
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you're the by far the longest guests like I feel like we could go like if we
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ever needed to do like a charity talk-a-thon me and you would be the two
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we can go for 12 hours and then this time we actually have a lot to talk
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about so I'm a little concerned but well maybe not start moving did you hear we
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don't talk anymore that that you got to me and that that somehow it with the
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Specifics are kind of vague as to how how you got to me and what that means
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But somehow you got to me and we don't talk anymore
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Has five people said that if there's been further speculation that we're on the out. Oh my god, I mean
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Fortunately, it's it's died down in the last few days. I think people have finally moved on
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From the peace saga, which is good
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The internet has a very short attention span and that that is both a blessing and a curse
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It is it is definitely a blessing when you are on the receiving end of it
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so that is nice, but
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Yeah, I heard I read and got emailed and heard lots of interesting theories about the conspiracy between you and I
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Or that that you?
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Got to me or paid me off
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Because people couldn't possibly believe
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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
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Right. You told this story on on your podcast the ATP
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probably not what is now the last episode.
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I'm guessing you have an episode coming out tomorrow,
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but the one from last week. - Today, it's already out.
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- Well, I have not listened, so you can stop me
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if we start covering this time and stuff.
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But last week's episode where you covered the peace thing,
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your more or less long, very long story, very short,
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is that what you wrote, as always, is exactly the truth.
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You are one of the most, almost painfully honest people
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I have ever met.
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Like, you almost can't even bring yourself
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to tell white lies, you know what I mean?
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If you go through something like this
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and then you explain yourself in public,
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what you say is the honest to God truth.
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So it's very funny that everybody would just assume
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that it could be, it was something else.
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And I think the part of the story that is the best
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was that, and again, people who listened to ATP last week
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know this, that you, I guess it was what, last Thursday?
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Or was it Friday?
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I don't know what day of the week it was,
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But I was at the dentist and I was waiting to go
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and you texted me and you were like,
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I think I'm gonna pull Peace from the app store.
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And I texted you, don't do it, don't be rash, wait.
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Wait 'til I'm out of the dentist.
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And I got home and it was already pulled
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from the app store and the thing was there.
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So I literally, you did not pull a lot of people.
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You had kind of made up,
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obviously you'd made up your mind
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because I told you not to do it, which we will get to.
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I will explain why I thought you should not do it.
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But it did amuse me greatly though then afterwards
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when I did notice immediately afterwards
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that there were an awful lot of people
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who assumed that it was pressure from me.
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Somebody more or less said that it was like
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that me and Kudol showed up with baseball bats.
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- I would have loved to see that.
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(both laughing)
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It was especially funny because I was literally
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just hanging out with you and Kudol like four days earlier.
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(both laughing)
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Yeah, it was interesting.
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I also heard, when I was briefly on ATP,
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like I heard people thought that Apple paid me off,
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which is the funniest, I think.
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'Cause like, I was making them a ton of money,
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you know, promoting their platform,
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doing everything they wanted me to do.
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- And it wasn't also, it also wasn't one of those things
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like today view widgets, right,
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where they say, okay, now over here on this today screen
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on iOS, what's that called?
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- It doesn't even matter.
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- Well, whatever, you know what I mean,
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but you can put a-- - I think it's called
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Stadu actually.
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- You can put a widget in there.
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And when they first opened this up,
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there were people who made things that did things
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that were creatively outside the purview
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of what they expected people to make.
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And then, you know, so like, I think one of the ones
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that was an early victim of this was, I think,
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PCALC, the calculator, made it so you can actually do your computation over there.
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Well, that was more than, they kind of, I think they envisioned it as more just like
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a status view, like it would show you the weather or whatever.
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And when people were actually doing real things over there, Apple, you know, reacted.
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This isn't that sort of, and it wasn't like they were breaking, you know, it wasn't like
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they were using private APIs.
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They were using the public APIs in ways that Apple didn't envision.
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Well, peace was not like you use the content blocking
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APIs in a way that they didn't envision.
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It was almost like right down the middle, the canonical,
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this is exactly the sort of thing that they envisioned
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would be made.
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Yeah, I mean, I got a couple of responses here and there
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from inside of Apple, and they were all extremely positive.
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Like, they definitely did not want
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me to pull it from the App Store as far-- based
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on the implication that they would have hated it
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for some reason. Like, I mean, you know, they're not very generous with their communication,
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but it sure seemed like people in Apple were big fans of it. And when I pulled it and placed
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the burden on them to try to issue all these refunds first manually and then eventually
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they did that batch thing, that couldn't have been pleasant for them either and certainly
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couldn't have been cheap to have to process all those refunds. And, you know, just the
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manpower alone of processing all those refunds was getting to be probably significant. So,
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yeah, the idea that Apple paid me off to do all this was pretty entertaining. I also heard that
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advertisers somehow paid me off. Man, an app that sits at the top of the App Store paid app chart,
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if that could have sat there for like a month, I don't know if anyone else would have been able
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able to afford to pay it off.
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I mean, it would have made a ton of money.
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And that's assuming a lot, of course,
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but if you could have sat there for a while,
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that would have been a good amount of money.
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But the whole reason I canceled it was that it would have
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felt like making a ton of money off of drug dealing
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or something, it didn't feel right.
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That was the whole point.
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- I am looking right now, I actually have not been
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paying attention to see what is atop the top charts.
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So the top paid is, hooray, Tweetbot 4.
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- Well, I think today's probably Tweetbot.
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- Yeah, but number two is Purify.
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- Yeah, but I think Crystal was up there for a while,
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or Purify, I forget.
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- I think you gotta look at Grossing, though,
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but Grossing, they don't even register, it's all Candy Crush.
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- Yeah, that's been up there for a while.
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Well, I was on piece's top day, the one full day
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on the chart, it was grossing at, I think,
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like number 17 or 18 for a little while.
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Not for the whole day, but that was the peak.
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And then it was able to fall down the grossing ranks
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pretty far while still being number one in the paid chart.
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To give you, you know, like the volumes
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are much lower, obviously, in paid.
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But yeah, I mean, any app that's gonna sit there anywhere
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like in the top 20 paid is gonna be making
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really good money for a while.
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So and I don't you know, if other people want to go in there and make a ton of money making ad blockers
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That's fine. Like I'm willing and happy to yield that ground to other people. That's why I did it
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You know, it's I got there realized I really didn't like being there and left
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Yeah, I actually haven't looked in a while. It seems weird to me though
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I thought that there would be a couple up there, but it looks like it's all down to
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It doesn't I don't see any of the others although maybe maybe they're on the free list in there
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I don't know which one's popular
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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
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pure foot maybe crystals
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Thing with the acceptable ads that's I mean that's a whole other
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Drama that I don't really want to get into because I'm not involved happily anymore
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But it that's the kind of thing
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where it just shows how incredibly messy and difficult this business is and
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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
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as we record on on Thursday October 1st crystal is all the way down at 32 on the top paid and
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Like I said purifies number two
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So obviously there's been some divergence there, but you you you know, and and there is this weird
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perpetuating, it's this, you know, we've talked about this
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in so many different contexts ever since the App Store opened
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but once something is atop these charts,
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it tends to stay there because one of the ways that people,
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people hear, hey, I hear there's odd ad blockers for iOS.
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They go to the App Store, what do they do?
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They go to the top chart, they see one that looks reasonable
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at the top of the chart and they get it.
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And by that time, then they get it.
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Purify works, it, you know, it definitely does
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what it says on the tin, so then they're done.
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You know, they've just spent two or three bucks
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or whatever it costs on their thing and they're done
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and then none of the other, you know,
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so being at top is a huge advantage.
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So you, you know, peace having started at the top,
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I think there's a very good chance
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that it would still be there today if you hadn't yanked it.
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- Maybe, but at the same time, like, you know,
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right now you could see like Purify
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has already fallen to number two.
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You know, we'll see, you know,
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how much it stays at the top
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or how much it falls over time.
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I mean, it's only been a couple of weeks.
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It's been a pretty short time.
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So I don't even know if I would have been able
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to be there for a month.
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I don't even know if that would have happened.
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You know, there's no way to know.
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- Yeah, and I also-- - It doesn't matter.
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- I also wonder how much this is gonna be
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one of those things where it's not like sustain,
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not that it's not a sustainable business,
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'cause I don't think it's that much
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development work to keep it going.
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But that, let's say 15 to 20% of iOS users
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might be interested in a content blocker.
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Well, how soon until all of them already have one?
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And then what?
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I'm not quite sure if it's gonna be
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a chart topper in perpetuity.
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- Yeah, and we tried speculating on that on ATP,
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like what percentage of iOS people are likely
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to actually install and critically enable an ad blocker?
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And we came to about 10% being our estimate
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of people who would actually enable it also,
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'cause you have to like go through the settings menu
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and dive down to the Safari settings
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and actually turn it on in that convoluted settings thing.
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So then like the idea that ad blockers are going to,
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all of a sudden ruin everyone's lives,
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I think is unlikely and probably exaggerated.
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- Yeah, I think it's likely,
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I don't think it's likely that it would be
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that much different than on the desktop.
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And on the desktop, I pulled the 15% from
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what I think is what people estimate as the desktop number.
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And obviously that changes a lot.
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- Yeah, that seems reasonable.
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- Changes a lot based on the audience.
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I know Ars Technica, for example,
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is really, really hit hard by that
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because their audience is technically adept.
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My site probably is, to some extent,
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just because at least there's a high percentage
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of people who read my site who know what an ad blocker is
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and feel very, very confident installing an extension.
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- It's also worth pointing out,
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there's a lot of people, sorry,
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it's also worth pointing out that there's a lot of,
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like all those people who installed the ad blockers
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who are more likely to install ad blockers like Nerds and your site, how likely were
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they to click on the display ads to begin with? I bet the -- I mean, I've always kind
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of suspected that display ads on the Internet are mostly supported by inadvertent accidental
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clicks or people who don't realize they're clicking on an ad, who are misled into clicking
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on it by it looking like content or by one of those like stupid story ads like, you know,
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top 10 ways to lift your face up like all those crazy things like I've always kind of
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suspected that the bulk of display advertising online was being clicked through and funded
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by really accident or novices, you know, fueled by ignorance and confusion. Yeah, it's really
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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
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both the advertisers and the publishers
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would like to believe?
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- Yeah, well, it is truly a,
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they truly opened a Pandora's box way back in the '90s
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when they first started measuring clicks in the first place.
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And I've linked to this over the years
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in numerous contexts talking about ads,
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but it's come back up again.
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It is absolutely a case of be careful what you measure
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coming to bite them.
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because at first, when nobody was trying
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to game the system at all,
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the idea of counting the actual clicks on the ads
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was amazing because nobody ever knew
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when you put an ad in a magazine,
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you have a good guess that the circulation numbers
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are probably pretty accurate
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because they were industry standards,
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and maybe they tried to fudge them a little bit.
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For the most part, it was so expensive to print magazines,
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they couldn't be that far off.
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But how many people actually read your ad
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if it's on page 13, or how many people skip right past it,
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what was the register?
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To actually be able to measure it in a meaningful way,
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TV commercials could never really be measured.
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If there was no gaming, if everybody was honest in the world
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which is probably the biggest, stupidest,
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if I've ever put forward,
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counting the clicks on ads would be great.
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And it did at first, web advertising was super,
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super expensive, like in a per customer,
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you know, however you wanna measure that,
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because it could be measured.
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But then as soon as people could, you know,
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as soon as that started working,
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people immediately started gaming it in various ways.
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So it's, you know, once they started going down that path,
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it was doomed, and still is to this day,
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the fact that they try to measure it.
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- Right, 'cause then you have all these problems
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with click fraud and botnets doing click fraud
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and all this stuff.
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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,
00:18:59
◼
►
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
00:27:19
◼
►
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
00:29:41
◼
►
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
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►
That's not gonna win.
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.
00:46:03
◼
►
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?
00:48:50
◼
►
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
00:49:44
◼
►
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
00:50:00
◼
►
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.
00:54:02
◼
►
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
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These are the guys behind an app called,
00:58:06
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this is a Mac app called Ubar.
00:58:08
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Just like a lowercase U-B-A-R.
00:58:11
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Ubar3 and it implements a ton of suggestions from,
00:58:16
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he even says specifically from listeners at the talk show
00:58:19
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and readers at Daring Fireball.
00:58:20
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It's a doc replacement for the Mac.
00:58:22
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The purpose of Ubar is to vastly increase your productivity.
00:58:26
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Pro users love it, but it's also, you know,
00:58:29
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it's not just like a pro only tool.
00:58:30
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You can definitely, you know,
00:58:32
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see how a normal person in your family
00:58:34
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would totally get into this.
00:58:36
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And it sort of modeled more on the Windows taskbar
00:58:41
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bar. So if you or anybody in your family has switched from Windows and sort of
00:58:46
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doesn't like the ways that the Mac OS X dock isn't like the Windows taskbar,
00:58:51
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U-bar is exactly the sort of thing you should look at. It looks good. It's not
00:58:56
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ugly. It's very, very cool-looking, very beautiful. It's pure OS X style design.
00:59:01
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And it's got, for power users, tons of shortcuts. You can do things like hold
00:59:05
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down control and you can see the CPU and RAM usage for any of the apps that are
00:59:10
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in there that are running.
00:59:11
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Hold down shift and you can quit any app
00:59:13
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or close any window from that app just by clicking it.
00:59:16
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Apps that are unresponsive, get a red background
00:59:20
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so you can spot hanging apps immediately.
00:59:22
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You don't have to go and launch.
00:59:24
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So it's sort of like it's adding features
00:59:26
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from activity monitor right there in the taskbar.
00:59:29
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Tons and tons of customization.
00:59:32
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You can set the size, there's different themes,
00:59:36
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dark and light, exactly what you would think.
00:59:39
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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
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You can put on any side of any monitor including the top you can pin it to a corner
00:59:49
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Just unbelievable stuff so that here's what you do go to you bar app
00:59:55
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Com and they have a four week trial. You can download it start running it you get four weeks
01:00:01
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And the cost is only 20 bucks. So this is a great utility
01:00:05
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typical Mac utility price 20 bucks
01:00:09
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But and I think they're actually crazy because I think 20 bucks is a great price, but
01:00:12
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Here's the deal. This isn't my idea, but they have a code retina Gruber
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Retina than my last name retina Gruber
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I don't know if that's a reference to retina graphics or my eye problems or both
01:00:24
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But either way that's good the way could go either way
01:00:26
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50% off so you can get it for just 10 bucks
01:00:30
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so you get four weeks to try it and then it's 10 bucks to get it and
01:00:34
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Then this is the part that's amazing one more thing
01:00:37
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The developer of the app, his last name is Brauer.
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I actually forget his first name.
01:00:44
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Let me look it up real quick.
01:00:45
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Seems like a shame, I don't know it.
01:00:49
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He has, the app and saw Edward, Edward Brauer.
01:00:53
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So the app and software development, that's his primary,
01:00:56
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that's how he supports himself, he's a programmer.
01:00:59
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But he has the most amazing hobby.
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His hobby is watchmaking.
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He makes real mechanical watches.
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So he's actually launching a new timepiece
01:01:10
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right here on the show.
01:01:11
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It's called the Mirage.
01:01:13
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It is a limited edition of only 300 pieces,
01:01:16
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each with an engraved number on the back.
01:01:19
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He has sent one to me.
01:01:21
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It's really, really nice.
01:01:24
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I think my number is, I forget what number I got,
01:01:28
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104 or something like that.
01:01:29
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Really nice dial, beautiful typography.
01:01:33
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I mean, this is like a real serious watch.
01:01:37
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I think, here's the price, 750 bucks.
01:01:41
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So we're talking about, this is not like a joke.
01:01:44
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It looks like a $750 watch.
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It is really, really amazing, very, very nice.
01:01:49
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It has a totally serious strap.
01:01:53
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It's made by a company,
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I'm never gonna pronounce this right,
01:01:55
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Camille Fornay in Paris.
01:01:58
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It's a lizard-like alligator leather strap.
01:02:02
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They make OEM straps for actual serious watch companies
01:02:06
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like Patek Philippe and others.
01:02:09
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It has a single deployment clasp,
01:02:12
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single fold deployment clasp.
01:02:14
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That only means something if you're a watch person,
01:02:16
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but if you are a watch person, you know what it means.
01:02:18
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It's really, really nice.
01:02:19
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It is like a serious dress watch,
01:02:22
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but not so dressy that you couldn't wear it casually.
01:02:24
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So go to, for the watch, go to Brauer,
01:02:29
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V-R-A-W-E-R, timepieces.com.
01:02:34
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And the same code works there, RetnaGruber.
01:02:37
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And you can get that watch for 40% off.
01:02:42
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So it's a $750 watch, but you can get it for 40% off
01:02:45
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using that code.
01:02:47
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Shipping is free in the USA and Canada.
01:02:50
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And it comes in a real watch box.
01:02:53
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Again, if you've ever bought like a fancy watch
01:02:55
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or even like the Apple edition watches,
01:02:58
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know that like you know thousand dollar ish watches supposed to come in a nice
01:03:01
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box this thing comes in a really nice box you the thing that I can't believe
01:03:06
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it's not that I can't believe that somebody made a nice watch there's lots
01:03:08
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of nice watches out there I just can't believe that this guy designed and made
01:03:13
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it and did all this stuff and you know did all the machining to actually
01:03:18
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machine out the stainless steel frame of the watch and everything as like his
01:03:22
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hobby it's absolutely crazy that this is like the second thing that the same guy
01:03:27
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does who makes this amazing U-Bar app. So my thanks to them for the U-Bar, which is probably
01:03:33
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something an awful lot of you ought to go look at and maybe buy, and for the new Mirage watch,
01:03:38
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which probably isn't going to sell to a lot of you, but for those of you who are into watches,
01:03:43
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it's absolutely positively worth looking at. Also, it's not too big. I hate big watches. I don't know
01:03:47
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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
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perfectly standard, not too big watch. A woman could get away with it. It would be like a
01:03:58
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nice big watch for a woman. Totally normal size for men. It comes in three colors, white,
01:04:03
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blue, and black. So my thanks to them. Check them out. Is that the craziest sponsor? That
01:04:08
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might be one of the craziest sponsors I've ever had.
01:04:10
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Jared Polin, " That is pretty impressive. Also, I want to give you all my French words
01:04:15
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to pronounce whenever I need that."
01:04:16
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Tim Cynova, " I have no idea if I pronounced that right. It's not even that hard. All right.
01:04:21
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And here's the thing, I want to tell you why I think you were...
01:04:26
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Here's the mistake I think you made with peace.
01:04:28
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And I feel guilty about this because I knew over the summer that you were working on this
01:04:32
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thing and I didn't test it until like the night before or something like that.
01:04:37
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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
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whitelisting the deck or automatically.
01:04:44
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And in fact, I was confused because I could swear that the night before when I did install
01:04:49
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the beta, the first thing I did was check during Fireball and I could swear that it
01:04:53
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did show the ad. And then you told me that there's some flakiness when you first enable
01:04:57
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these things and sometimes you have to restart. And I think that's what I saw. I don't want
01:05:03
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to put words in your mouth, but here's what I think you were thinking. You were thinking,
01:05:09
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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
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thing that says block all ads, block most ads, block half ads, just block the worst
01:05:21
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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
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do the thing that's not being a hypocrite and just include the deck, which is mine,
01:05:40
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which is sort of, I don't know, magnanimous?
01:05:44
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I don't know what the word is.
01:05:45
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I think that by not white listing the deck,
01:05:51
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you are committing an entirely different form of hypocrisy,
01:05:55
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which is that all, everything is content.
01:06:00
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And everything that you publish from marco.org
01:06:10
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You're you're you're standing behind so by publishing ads from the deck by sending them to your users
01:06:16
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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
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You have two things. You've got a website that is implicitly saying this is a thing
01:06:40
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►
this ad is worth you seeing and is okay.
01:06:44
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And then you have this other thing,
01:06:45
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►
which is saying this is something that should be blocked.
01:06:48
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And there's no way to square that circle.
01:06:52
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- Yeah, that's true.
01:06:53
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►
I mean, that was part of the problem,
01:06:55
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►
is that this was an unsolvable problem.
01:06:59
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►
You know, it was, I could say that I no longer
01:07:03
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►
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
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►
well, I'm gonna allow acceptable ads,
01:07:19
◼
►
but we see the problems that causes.
01:07:21
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►
When other sites try that or when other blockers try that,
01:07:24
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►
we see that that's extremely messy and controversial
01:07:28
◼
►
and I didn't wanna be in that business.
01:07:32
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►
Or I can try to differentiate between,
01:07:37
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►
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
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►
Like that is the most defensible position
01:08:39
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►
that I think that most of them can take.
01:08:41
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►
And they just have to then own what they actually are.
01:08:44
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►
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
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►
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
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►
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
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►
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.
01:17:45
◼
►
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
◼
►
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?
01:19:31
◼
►
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
◼
►
- 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.
01:26:39
◼
►
Turns out there's a lot of really badly designed toaster
01:26:41
◼
►
ovens out there.
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
01:26:53
◼
►
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
01:27:39
◼
►
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.
01:30:22
◼
►
- 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.
01:30:32
◼
►
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.
01:31:27
◼
►
- 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?
01:35:45
◼
►
- 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.
01:42:28
◼
►
- 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.
01:50:29
◼
►
- 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.
01:56:06
◼
►
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.
02:01:05
◼
►
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.
02:02:07
◼
►
- 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.
02:02:27
◼
►
running payroll, filing W-2s, negotiating healthcare prices.
02:02:31
◼
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I'm already asleep, this sounds terrible.
02:02:33
◼
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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
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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
◼
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You're in the business of whatever your business is.
02:03:16
◼
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So check them out.
02:03:17
◼
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Their website is justworks.com.
02:03:20
◼
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They help businesses take care of this stuff.
02:03:23
◼
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They do it all for you.
02:03:25
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Running a successful business is hard enough
02:03:27
◼
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doing the actual business of whatever your business is,
02:03:30
◼
►
whatever it is, making apps, making websites,
02:03:34
◼
►
selling coffee, whatever it could be.
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
◼
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I can't afford to hire somebody to do this.
02:03:51
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Well, it just works.
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It's just easy and intuitive software, very, very affordable.
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Great prices.
02:03:58
◼
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It's not like you're hiring somebody to do this for you.
02:04:00
◼
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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
◼
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you have benefits, compliance with HR, stuff like that,
02:04:12
◼
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go check them out at justworks.com.
02:04:16
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02:04:17
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This is a nice code.
02:04:23
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02:04:32
◼
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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
02:07:01
◼
►
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?
02:09:16
◼
►
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
02:11:16
◼
►
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.
02:20:35
◼
►
- 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.
02:21:56
◼
►
- 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.
02:28:29
◼
►
- Igloosoftware.com/thetalkshow or slash,
02:28:34
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what do you know what your code is offhand?
02:28:36
◼
►
- I believe that one's just ATP.
02:28:37
◼
►
ATP, you could probably figure it out.
02:28:40
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Igloo is the intranet, intranet that you'll actually like.
02:28:45
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I love that slogan.
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It lets you share news, organize your files,
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coordinate calendars, manage projects,
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set up a little microblog, think of that
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as like a little internal, like a private Twitter.
02:28:57
◼
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Imagine if you had like a little Twitter for your team
02:28:59
◼
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that you could use just for internal stuff
02:29:02
◼
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that can't go public, can't be shared publicly.
02:29:06
◼
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Igloo has that sort of feature built right in.
02:29:08
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Their latest upgrade, they call it Viking,
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I guess it's like a code name.
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The big push they had this summer for Viking
02:29:15
◼
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was all around documents and how you and your team
02:29:18
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interact with them, gather feedback, make changes.
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In a lot of businesses, good old fashioned documents,
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real files that you have to share with each other,
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not just things that live online as URLs, but real files.
02:29:30
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Still a big part of the business,
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big part of the real world.
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So they've really, really upped their game
02:29:35
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on that sort of stuff.
02:29:36
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And they've added the equivalent of read receipts and email.
02:29:41
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So you know when somebody's seen it.
02:29:42
◼
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Now it doesn't go on by default.
02:29:43
◼
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It's just like a read receipt and email.
02:29:45
◼
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Don't ask for it unless you need it.
02:29:46
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But you turn it on and if it's an important thing,
02:29:48
◼
►
some kind of thing that you have to get sign offs on,
02:29:51
◼
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put that on, share it, then you can see
02:29:53
◼
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that everybody who needs to see it has seen it.
02:29:56
◼
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Really, really important for certain legal agreements
02:29:59
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and in certain cases.
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If you don't need it, you don't have to worry about it.
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But if you do need it, Igloo can be part of your game now
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when it couldn't before, big, big part of their push.
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If your company has a legacy internet
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that looks like it was built in the '90s,
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that's because it probably was.
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It's very, very true.
02:30:20
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You should give Igloo a try.
02:30:22
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Here's the thing that's the most amazing about Igloo.
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I keep waiting for this to end and it hasn't ended,
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is if for up to 10 users, you can use Igloo for free.
02:30:31
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You just use it.
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So if you're on a really small team,
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or if you have a really small company
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that's under 10 employees, Igloo is just free.
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It's free not for a month, it's just free.
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If you have more than 10 people,
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you can try it out right now for free
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at igloosoftware.com/thetalkshow.
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Try it out for free with up to 10 of your colleagues,
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just to see that it works, get it set up,
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configure it the way you want it to work, test it out,
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and until you're satisfied with it,
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you don't have to pay for anything.
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And then when you are satisfied,
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you go and they have very, very low prices for per user over 10.
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But that's the way they work.
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Free for up to 10.
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Over 10, you pay a very, very reasonable, very competitive
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number of dollars per user.
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So go check them out.
02:31:16
◼
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Longtime friends of the show.
02:31:18
◼
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People keep writing to me.
02:31:19
◼
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I get a lot of email from people saying--
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they signed up for Igloo-- very, very happy with it.
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Good software.
02:31:24
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Those guys know how to spend their ad money.
02:31:28
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I know they started, when they started years ago,
02:31:30
◼
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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
◼
►
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.
02:36:18
◼
►
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.
02:39:59
◼
►
- 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
◼
►
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.
02:52:38
◼
►
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
02:56:48
◼
►
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.
03:00:07
◼
►
- 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.
03:00:39
◼
►
- 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
03:01:58
◼
►
Yeah, I do. I do the iTunes encrypted backup and everything. This time I did it mostly
03:02:03
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seamlessly. Tiff's phone came with a dead SIM card, so we had to swap the SIM on that
03:02:09
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one. And I had the endless loop of iCloud authentication dialogues during this setup
03:02:15
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process problem, which I've heard a couple people mention that they ran into as well.
03:02:18
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Yeah. Other than that, I did the whole thing where I unpair the watch, then back up the
03:02:23
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phone, then restore to the new phone, then repair the watch to the new phone and all
03:02:27
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that. It went mostly okay. I've gotten this down because, and again, this is not really
03:02:33
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a complaint. It's great that I get these review units. I get them two weeks early and I get
03:02:40
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to write about them before other people and I get to spend more time with them. But now
03:02:43
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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
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two phones to test. So there's two phones that I have to go through this with. And then
03:02:53
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I always buy my own. I already have my own. I bought my own. I pay for my own personal
03:02:58
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use iPhone every year. So that means like in a period of like three weeks, I do this
03:03:02
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with three phones every year.
03:03:05
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And then later in the fall, I generally wind up doing it
03:03:07
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with an iPad too.
03:03:09
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And then I might buy my own iPad.
03:03:11
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I don't buy a new iPad every year, but I at least test one.
03:03:14
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So I do this with like five or six devices every year.
03:03:17
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I'll bet there's people within Apple who do this more often
03:03:20
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because they're using test units or the hardware.
03:03:22
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So the people inside Apple have to know this.
03:03:24
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And I think that if you do it like I do more than once a year
03:03:32
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the inadequacies of this system are in your face.
03:03:34
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And I really, and now that they're selling a program
03:03:38
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to upgrade every year, encouraging people
03:03:40
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to upgrade every year, I really hope that somewhere
03:03:43
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within Apple there's a, you know, this is a high priority.
03:03:47
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We really gotta streamline this.
03:03:49
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One thing I was not aware of-- - I hope so too, but--
03:03:51
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- I was not aware-- - I think--
03:03:52
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- I'm sorry for the crosstalk, but I was not aware
03:03:54
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that if you do the iCloud backup,
03:03:56
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you still have to reenter all your passwords.
03:03:59
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- Yeah, yeah, iCloud backup is not,
03:04:01
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it doesn't count as encrypted,
03:04:03
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because they don't want to store your passwords on iCloud.
03:04:05
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So the iCloud keychain, I think,
03:04:07
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is gonna be their long-term solution around that,
03:04:10
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which doesn't store the password.
03:04:11
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It always keeps it on one device, right?
03:04:13
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It doesn't actually,
03:04:14
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that's why you have to go to another device to approve it.
03:04:17
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- But no, so that's probably the long-term goal with that.
03:04:19
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But I think one thing that is very obvious here,
03:04:23
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first of all, is that once again,
03:04:25
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sometimes stuff about the Apple Watch
03:04:27
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kind of seems like it was developed
03:04:29
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on a spaceship away from Apple.
03:04:30
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like it just kind of got handed to them when it was done.
03:04:33
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Like there's certain things about it that are just like,
03:04:35
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this is obviously like the rest of the company
03:04:38
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didn't see this or approve this before they got out
03:04:40
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or like where did this come from, you know?
03:04:42
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So there's certain things about it
03:04:43
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and I think obviously the way the Apple Watch deals
03:04:47
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with backing itself up to the iPhone
03:04:49
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and moving it to a different phone,
03:04:53
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it's very un-Apple like, if I can use that generalization.
03:04:58
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It is very much like this does not seem like it was
03:05:01
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well, you know, Apple's whole thing is like the
03:05:03
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integration top to bottom. They make everything.
03:05:05
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They make the software, they make the hardware,
03:05:07
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they make the services, they make everything.
03:05:08
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The way the Apple Watch pairs and backs up to a
03:05:12
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phone or doesn't rather is it just seems like this
03:05:17
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like thing that was tacked on and it was not
03:05:20
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thought of with, you know, with integration in
03:05:22
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mind, with the whole stack in mind, with what
03:05:25
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happens with your phone upgrade in mind. And that
03:05:28
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seems like a massive oversight and hopefully that's just because it's a 1.0
03:05:32
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and they'll get to it because it does seem really weird that like by default
03:05:37
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your watch is not backing up to your phone ever it seems. Does it only do it
03:05:44
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when you unpair it? I think so yeah and if you so if you like wipe your old
03:05:48
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phone and while in the process of I it's very easy to end up as a as an ideal
03:05:57
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Apple customer, meaning ideal from Apple's perspective, you're a big fan and when they
03:06:01
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when they release new things, you just go out and buy them. So you've already got an
03:06:04
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Apple Watch and you're buying a new iPhone. It's very, very easy to wind up like, like
03:06:09
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with a default factory installed watch again and like losing your activity data.
03:06:14
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Yeah, and that's that's a major like that could like as as a slacker who like barely