0:00:00How's your week? Oh my god. Oh
0:00:02Geez why did I why did I launch an app? I
0:00:09Forgot how much work this is
0:00:12It's been a while since I've had an app in the store and the last app that was in the store was the magazine
0:00:15Which wasn't very popular and didn't require tech support
0:00:18Man what was I thinking?
0:00:21What what's gone wrong?
0:00:27It's it's mostly the funny thing is it's been a very successful launch overall like there have been very few
0:00:32Real major problems there have been a few minor bugs
0:00:38many of which I've been able to fix server-side just like you know sub certain podcast feeds weren't being crawled right or something, but
0:00:45Overall the launch have been really good
0:00:49The problem is I've gotten nothing done since yesterday when I launched it because I've been trying to keep up with all the tweet responses
0:00:56trying to read all the reviews, trying to,
0:00:59and recently started to try to answer all these emails.
0:01:02- Yeah. - I currently have 1,099
0:01:06unread emails on my inbox.
0:01:08I just finally started tackling them tonight
0:01:10after making a bunch of text spender snippets
0:01:13for all the common responses.
0:01:14- The worst part is, the worst part is
0:01:16that's over 100 higher than the number you quoted me
0:01:19about six or seven hours ago when I checked
0:01:22to see if you wanted to be on the show.
0:01:24- Yeah, and I just responded to like 150 of them.
0:01:27(laughing)
0:01:28They're coming in faster than I can respond.
0:01:30- You were at like 900 around noon or so.
0:01:34- Yeah, I mean--
0:01:35- So I guess that was nine hours ago, so that's not that much.
0:01:37- To give you some idea,
0:01:38the total downloads of the entire app,
0:01:41like the number of people who've even downloaded it,
0:01:43not even the people who've made an account,
0:01:45just people who've downloaded the app at all,
0:01:47is roughly 35 to 40,000.
0:01:49I don't know, I haven't gotten today's stats yet,
0:01:50so I'm estimating a little bit,
0:01:51but roughly 35 or 40,000.
0:01:54- Wow, that's impressive. - And I've gotten,
0:01:56I mean, and that's a fantastic launch,
0:01:57I'm very happy with that, but out of those,
0:02:00at least 1,500 of them have emailed me.
0:02:04- Oh my God. - That seems like
0:02:05a kind of high ratio to me, I don't know.
0:02:07That kind of seems too high.
0:02:09- Yeah, that does seem high.
0:02:10But I think it's also the nature, though,
0:02:13the weird dual nature, and you know, I'm in the same boat,
0:02:17but we're media personalities, you know,
0:02:20people read our sites we're sort of have a columnist style and we do podcasts of
0:02:25course obviously I think we do I think that encourages a sort of wanting to
0:02:35give feedback you know what I mean like yeah and I don't think and again I yeah
0:02:40I'll bet you'll agree with me I will bet you will agree with me with this that
0:02:42even though you're complaining about being swamped but you're it's a
0:02:46privilege and a thrill that people want to do that and say nice things about
0:02:49about your app or ask questions and stuff.
0:02:51I don't begrudge it.
0:02:53- Oh, definitely.
0:02:54I mean, I really want to do as much
0:02:57of the support of this myself.
0:03:00And I probably will forget saying that.
0:03:03- Oh, God bless you.
0:03:04- Well, but what I've done instead is I've tried
0:03:06to ridiculously minimize the number
0:03:08of support emails I actually get.
0:03:10So I can actually treat them like a human being
0:03:13or at least hire somebody to do it
0:03:15and keep an eye on it very closely.
0:03:17Whereas with Instapaper, I was never able to do that.
0:03:19there was too much support. And that's sort of a virtuous circle where you
0:03:24being motivated to minimize support issues design and development wise
0:03:30because you know you're gonna have to deal with them yourself means that if
0:03:33you succeed it works and you have less time doing support and vice versa you
0:03:37know whereas if you had somebody doing support you may not maybe you wouldn't
0:03:40be as you wouldn't care quite as much. Right this is something that you know a
0:03:44friend of the universe, Daniel Jalkut, has always said
0:03:47that he, I believe this is still the case,
0:03:49that he always answers all of his own support email
0:03:52so that he is both on top of issues as they arise
0:03:55and aware of what people are asking for
0:03:58and so that he is motivated to fix problems in the app
0:04:02that cause a lot of support issues
0:04:04so that people don't even have to email him.
0:04:06So everyone wins there.
0:04:08So I'm trying it out, I'll see.
0:04:09I mean, I don't have any idea what the stable,
0:04:14email rate will be, five weeks from now on a Tuesday,
0:04:19what's gonna be the email rate that day, I don't know.
0:04:24So I'll see if I can still handle it myself.
0:04:27I would like to do as much about myself
0:04:29in the early days as possible though.
0:04:30Like this initial batch of, oh now it's 1100, got one more.
0:04:34This initial batch of 1100 plus emails,
0:04:37I would like to go through myself,
0:04:39just so I have some idea, like what are people asking for?
0:04:42what should I be doing differently?
0:04:45What is confusing people about the app
0:04:47that I should think about rearranging
0:04:50or relabeling or rethinking?
0:04:52- I know Cable Sasser does the same thing
0:04:54with major releases.
0:04:56I don't know if he does it with every major release,
0:04:59but I know that he's done that.
0:05:01And I don't think he hesitates to dive into the support
0:05:03on a regular basis, but when they launch Coda,
0:05:06I don't know, 4.0, whatever the next version is,
0:05:09he'll spend like that that like thirty six hour manic period of okay it is out
0:05:15uh...
0:05:16and on the front lines of the support you
0:05:18you know working through it because he wants that
0:05:21experience he wants to see that you know
0:05:24initial feedback
0:05:25and it's true valuable
0:05:27there's there's like an endorphin high of
0:05:29of a big release like this that
0:05:31and it to me it it's
0:05:34in hindsight you look back and say this is a great week
0:05:38if it's, you know, as long as the launch is successful
0:05:40and it's not something like, holy crap,
0:05:42the server actually can't take more than 100 users.
0:05:47- And I lucked out big time with that,
0:05:49'cause that's what I was most worried about.
0:05:51I had forgotten about the concept of support email.
0:05:53I was much more worried about the servers holding up.
0:05:56And 'cause I didn't really, I couldn't really predict
0:06:00how heavy the load would be on the server.
0:06:02So I went to Linode where all my stuff is
0:06:05a couple days ago, and I just added like eight new servers.
0:06:08Just because you can add or destroy them whenever you want,
0:06:11they're built hourly.
0:06:12So I was just like, you know, let me just add
0:06:13way more capacity than I think I will need,
0:06:17and make a way that I can easily clone them
0:06:18if I need even more than that.
0:06:20And then I can always take them all down next week.
0:06:23- Yeah, and you have the advantage where you've done
0:06:26large scale things before.
0:06:28Instapaper had a ton of users, and you know,
0:06:32a lot like Overcast is largely, you know,
0:06:36it's the whole thing is,
0:06:37the whole premise is built on the server.
0:06:39Tumblr, obviously, I think has a fair number of users.
0:06:43- Little bit, yeah.
0:06:47- And even, you know, however much smaller they were
0:06:49when you left Tumblr,
0:06:51Tumblr was a big ass website when you left.
0:06:53- Yeah, I mean, when I left, if I screwed up,
0:06:56I would serve about 1200 error pages per second.
0:06:58- Right, well, there you go, that's, yeah.
0:07:00- Which is kind of pressuring.
0:07:01But the thing, and so Brent Simmons was in the same boat,
0:07:04and I will return to this,
0:07:05'cause one of the reasons I'm so interested by Overcast
0:07:08is I do see some fair number of similarities
0:07:12situation-wise with Vesper, and design-wise even.
0:07:16But one of the things was that Brent has built
0:07:19large-scale online things.
0:07:21There's net news, wire syncing,
0:07:24some of the other stuff he did at NewsGator.
0:07:27So I felt really good being,
0:07:29having nothing to do with writing the code.
0:07:31betting on Brent Simmons and it did work out. We had a great launch. The sync all went fine.
0:07:36And I would have been just as happy betting on, you know, Overcast and Marco Arment having a good thing.
0:07:42Because experience really matters. But on the other hand, and Brent, you know, had a couple of these things in mind,
0:07:49especially for online stuff, every couple of years the state of the art changes and there's little things that are new and different, right?
0:07:56It didn't used to be that you could go to line ode and say you know what give me a couple of extra database servers
0:08:01You couldn't do that. Oh, yeah, right and so in in in the large part
0:08:07And I think the reason by both of those launches went well those things work really well
0:08:10But you just never know because there might be something there might be something that you overlook because that's what bugs are bugs are always
0:08:17things that you overlook and you can say here's all that here's the seven things that have bit me before scaling wise and I'm gonna
0:08:23Make sure all seven of these I've handled
0:08:24well. There might be a new one, an eighth one that you don't know about. And then all of a sudden,
0:08:29you've got a big launch, all these websites are writing about you, you're on the front page of
0:08:34this website, that website, all sorts of Twitter's going nuts, people talking about it, and your
0:08:39server is down. And yeah, it would, you know, you probably would be a much less happy Marco.
0:08:46Oh, yeah. And you know, because the difference like, I mean, I did a beta test with about 40
0:08:51for about two months and 40 people,
0:08:53'cause Apple has not, as far as I know,
0:08:55rolled out that new testing thing yet
0:08:57that they made test flight into.
0:08:58- No.
0:08:59- So you're still limited to 100 device slots.
0:09:01So 40 people, if you wanna leave any room
0:09:03for anyone to get new phones in the fall
0:09:04or anyone to have an iPad,
0:09:06that's about as big of a group as you can do.
0:09:08And this was the biggest beta I've ever done by a long shot,
0:09:13the longest beta I've ever done.
0:09:15And the beta did uncover tons of issues
0:09:17and which I'm very thankful for.
0:09:20And yet there are still bugs that none of us found
0:09:24because the difference between 40 people
0:09:27and 30,000 people is substantial.
0:09:31And out of the 40, it was mostly people I know,
0:09:36like you, and other tech people.
0:09:37So it wasn't a very diverse group.
0:09:39And so certain things we just never ran into
0:09:42because that isn't how we use the podcast app.
0:09:45Whereas a lot of people do run into that.
0:09:47- Any good examples?
0:09:48- That's part of the problem of--
0:09:49I'd love to hear an example of that.
0:09:51If you can think of one that's like,
0:09:52if there's like already like a frequently run into--
0:09:57- Oh yeah. - Sharp edge
0:09:58or something like that.
0:09:59- What do you think the average number of podcasts is
0:10:04that somebody subscribes to?
0:10:06- Three.
0:10:09- Yeah, right, I mean, you're ruling out anyone
0:10:10who does zero, you know, obviously.
0:10:12- Right.
0:10:13- So I don't have that number available for Overcast yet.
0:10:17However, I have heard from many people,
0:10:20apparently my OPML importer is having problems
0:10:24for people who have OPML files
0:10:26that have like 100 feeds in them.
0:10:28And there's a lot of these people who keep telling me this.
0:10:31- I can believe that.
0:10:32- I listened to, my feed list is about 35 or 40 long,
0:10:37'cause a lot of those are shows that are retired
0:10:39or on hiatus, or a lot of them are shows
0:10:41that I had one episode of,
0:10:42but I didn't subscribe to the whole show,
0:10:44and they're still on my list 'cause I haven't deleted them.
0:10:47And so the number of podcasts I listen to actively
0:10:51that actually produce new episodes every week
0:10:54is probably about 10 maybe.
0:10:56And I consider myself a heavy podcast listener.
0:10:59But compared to the general public,
0:11:03there are these edge cases out there.
0:11:05There are these people who listen to over 100.
0:11:07One guy complained that his had over 150
0:11:09and I couldn't import it properly.
0:11:12And I just never considered,
0:11:14and that also creates problems.
0:11:16The problem with OPML is that there's no way
0:11:21to specify episodes.
0:11:23You can only say which podcast you subscribe to.
0:11:26- It's in other words, it's the URL of the podcast feed,
0:11:30not the URL of the episode.
0:11:33- Correct, and that's it.
0:11:34And so the OPML standard cannot communicate between apps
0:11:39whether you've heard all the episodes or not,
0:11:41which ones are unplayed, how far you've gotten in them.
0:11:44It only knows which podcasts you subscribe to, period.
0:11:47That's it.
0:11:48- Well, that's not, and to be pedantic here,
0:11:50I'll fill in for Sir Kusa.
0:11:52It's not really a limit of OPML in general,
0:11:55'cause I believe OPML is a general purpose
0:11:57outliner file format.
0:11:59It's the specific flavor of OPML that is widely understood
0:12:03as the lingua franca, how do you say that, lingua franca?
0:12:08- I think so.
0:12:09- Of sharing-- - You're a wrong person.
0:12:10of sharing a list of feeds that you subscribe to.
0:12:14And that's true for RSS readers too.
0:12:17It's probably the exact same format.
0:12:18- And there's actually a very good reason why
0:12:21nobody's implemented episode exporting and importing.
0:12:24It's mostly because there is no good way
0:12:27to uniquely identify the episodes.
0:12:30- Yeah, I would imagine so.
0:12:30- Because GUIDs are not required in the standards.
0:12:33And there's a lot of feeds that do GUIDs wrong anyway.
0:12:38- And aren't there some feeds that,
0:12:39you couldn't even use the URL for the audio file
0:12:42'cause there's some, aren't there some shows
0:12:44where they'll give it and they'll put two in
0:12:46and they'll say like here's two different formats,
0:12:48MP3 and M4A.
0:12:50- Oh yeah.
0:12:51There's even still some people who put in Ogg Vorbis
0:12:53and then there's a new format called Ogg Opus, I think.
0:12:56I didn't even hear of until yesterday.
0:12:58I don't know how popular it is,
0:13:00but yeah, just to give you some idea of what I'm dealing with.
0:13:02- I think that tells you how popular it is.
0:13:04- Probably.
0:13:05(laughs)
0:13:06But yeah, and so like there's,
0:13:07And now I'm dealing with broken feeds,
0:13:10feeds that have clearly broken markup,
0:13:13but that people are angry about that I don't support
0:13:16and so I have to figure out how to support them
0:13:17and it's a mess.
0:13:19But anyway, so one of the biggest complaints I've gotten
0:13:22is from people who subscribe to a lot of shows.
0:13:25My default behavior when importing OPML is,
0:13:29I will assume that you want the one most recent episode
0:13:32in every one of those feeds listed.
0:13:34That is a bad assumption, it turns out.
0:13:36- Yep.
0:13:37(laughing)
0:13:38- And so when you have 150 feeds,
0:13:40I try to immediately download 150 episodes.
0:13:43- Right.
0:13:44- And people are complaining that I'm filling up
0:13:45their phones 'cause all of a sudden they have three gigs
0:13:47of podcast downloaded after their import
0:13:49and I don't have like a bulk cancel operation.
0:13:53And again, this is something that,
0:13:55that is a valid problem.
0:13:57I didn't think of it, it never came up in beta.
0:14:00I have to figure out some good way to solve that now.
0:14:02But that is very much a valid problem.
0:14:06Yeah, and I was a bad tester for that because I don't keep like an archive of old shows.
0:14:14I don't want, I don't have a subscription to Hypercritical anymore just because I want
0:14:18to go back and listen to it.
0:14:20If I do, it might strike me my fancy someday, but then I wouldn't think I want to have subscription
0:14:25to it.
0:14:26I would think I'll go into a directory, find it, find the episode I want and play and then
0:14:32add it there.
0:14:33think I want to even though I understand the mindset that someone would want to
0:14:36do that here's the hundred and fifty podcasts I've ever been interested in
0:14:40and I want to move this file around from app to app my mind that that seems crazy
0:14:44to me a new I kind of like the idea of switching and trying a new podcast app
0:14:49every once in a while just to start clean and say here let me find two or
0:14:54three shows I want to listen to I've got a long drive ahead of me right and I
0:14:57think it's easier because you know despite those outliers you know like RSS
0:15:01has always had that problem where usually people listen,
0:15:04or people subscribe to usually a pretty good number
0:15:07of RSS feeds if they use it at all.
0:15:09Like I subscribe to probably 200 RSS feeds.
0:15:11And again, most of them don't update every day,
0:15:12so it's easy to follow.
0:15:14But podcasts, you know, there's a limit
0:15:18on how many podcasts you can listen to on a regular basis.
0:15:21And so I always assume the numbers
0:15:23would be substantially lower for your number
0:15:25of podcast feeds that most people would be subscribed to.
0:15:27I assume that would be a very low number.
0:15:30And yeah, turns out not necessarily a safe assumption.
0:15:33- So what they want is they wanna be able
0:15:35to maybe even default to zero downloads per podcast
0:15:40and then go through and then change it from there.
0:15:43- Right, and I think honestly, I mean,
0:15:45a safe default might be zero
0:15:48and just make people pick one from everything.
0:15:51I think my assumption that you want the latest one
0:15:53from everything is probably problematic enough
0:15:56that I should probably change it,
0:15:57which is good 'cause I can change that one server side.
0:15:59Maybe that's a good one that you'd want to do if I add just a single new subscription
0:16:04in the app.
0:16:06Maybe assume I want to get the most recent episode, but if I'm importing an OPML file,
0:16:10don't assume I want any of the episodes.
0:16:12Yeah, I mean that is certainly, well, actually no.
0:16:15I think my default behavior now is that if you tap subscribe on a new show, I download
0:16:20the latest episode.
0:16:21If you add it from the directory, which, so I think that is a safe assumption.
0:16:24But yeah, I think you're right with OPML.
0:16:26I think it isn't.
0:16:27I think maybe I'll change that later tonight after I'm done with you.
0:16:29Yeah. Don't let me hold you. That leads directly to another question I've had, and I've seen it,
0:16:36and I'm not even following anywhere nearly as religiously as I'm sure you are on Twitter,
0:16:41the day one commentary about it, but I've seen a lot of people remark about the lack of streaming.
0:16:46Yes, that is a big one.
0:16:50And again, I never really noticed.
0:16:54I guess I have, because I guess there have been times,
0:16:57like I've been trying to run on a more regular basis,
0:17:02and that's one of the times where I do listen to podcasts,
0:17:06and it'll be like, hey, I know that there's gotta be
0:17:08a new ATP out, let me go look.
0:17:12And there it is, and I do, I have to wait
0:17:16until I get the whole thing before I go out,
0:17:17but I don't have to wait that long
0:17:19that it would ever even have occurred to me to, you know,
0:17:23write in as a suggestion that I would like
0:17:25to just leave the house and have it stream over LTE
0:17:27or something like that.
0:17:28'Cause it doesn't take that long for, you know,
0:17:31a hundred and some megabyte file.
0:17:35But it seems like lots of people want that.
0:17:36What they want is they want it to start downloading
0:17:40and playing at the same time.
0:17:42- Oh yeah, and streaming, it's, you know,
0:17:44it isn't there because it's hard to do
0:17:46and I didn't have time to do it
0:17:47and it's going to take months to do it right.
0:17:49That's why it's not there.
0:17:51A lot of people assume that I just forgot to add it,
0:17:53it's just some oversight.
0:17:54- Right, just start praying.
0:17:56- Right.
0:17:57- That's what I figured. - I did check that checkbox.
0:18:00- That's what I figured the answer was.
0:18:01The answer is that it's not,
0:18:03it's like a lot of these things, it's not easy.
0:18:05- It's really hard.
0:18:06And it's harder for me because of my audio engine.
0:18:09Like it's easier for the other players
0:18:11that don't use the low level stuff that I do
0:18:13to do my audio effects.
0:18:15It's easier for them, but it's a lot easier for them.
0:18:17the way I'm gonna have to do it is gonna be more manual.
0:18:20Like I'm gonna have to build more
0:18:20of those parts from scratch.
0:18:22But the main argument for it,
0:18:25and first of all, I think the need for it
0:18:28is exaggerated on day one,
0:18:30because so many people wanna just jump in
0:18:33and try playing it,
0:18:34and they have to wait for their files to download.
0:18:36Whereas if you just use the app regularly,
0:18:38most new episodes you'll get,
0:18:40we push to you in the background,
0:18:41and you won't even notice them downloading.
0:18:42By the time you launch the app next, they're just there.
0:18:45So, you know, background download,
0:18:47I think removes much of the need,
0:18:48but there are still situations where you need,
0:18:51or where streaming is very nice to have.
0:18:54The big two are immediate feedback.
0:18:57Like if you just wanted to add an episode
0:18:58and listen to it right now,
0:19:00like right as you add it, then you wanna hear it,
0:19:02you can start playing it immediately.
0:19:03And then the second big one is if you,
0:19:06like a lot of the clients offer a streaming only mode
0:19:10where nothing is ever downloaded.
0:19:12You only ever stream things,
0:19:13and that way you don't use any disk space.
0:19:16that would never even occur to me.
0:19:18- And it's a really good idea.
0:19:20And like, you know, if you think about,
0:19:21you know, for me, I would never use it
0:19:22because I, you know, I have,
0:19:24I live in an area that has spotty reception
0:19:26and I often, you know, travel and go upstate
0:19:28or on a plane or something.
0:19:29And so I want everything to be just downloaded
0:19:32and there and ready.
0:19:33But a lot of people don't work that way.
0:19:36A lot of people want everything to always only be streamed
0:19:40and leave all the space for you on their phone.
0:19:42And we'll see what happens like with iOS 8,
0:19:44with the new photo management thing.
0:19:46Maybe there won't be as much of a space crunch
0:19:50on iOS devices as there used to be, who knows?
0:19:53But either way, I am gonna add streaming,
0:19:55it's just a matter of doing it,
0:19:57which is probably gonna take a few months.
0:19:58- Yeah, it seems like that's actually sort of
0:20:01under the radar, like one of the big priorities of iOS 8
0:20:06is space management, because they're doing,
0:20:09it's a similar thing they're doing with messages,
0:20:14where it's defaulting to not keeping
0:20:17the images and other attachments that you've been sent and i think
0:20:22part of that is a sort of trend towards privacy
0:20:26in general
0:20:27and you know things like snapchat and stuff like that where it works like that
0:20:30and people seem to like it
0:20:32and maybe it just never occurred to them before but i think another big part of
0:20:35it is that you know even for me it was not like a super heavy texture but
0:20:40Whiskas and I communicate a lot about Vesper.
0:20:43I've got tons of screenshots in my iMessages with him.
0:20:46If I look in the usage, I do have a couple of gigabytes,
0:20:51I don't know, four or five gigabytes in messages,
0:20:54and there's no way to get them out.
0:20:57I mean, I think you can go through one by one,
0:20:59but that way lies madness.
0:21:01- Right, or you can delete the entire conversation
0:21:04with Dave Whiskas and lose that entire history.
0:21:06- Yeah, which I don't wanna do.
0:21:07Yeah, and it's also the weird way iMessage works where I've actually got like seven conversations
0:21:14with Whiskus.
0:21:15I don't know if they're based on different, you know, like his phone number to my Apple
0:21:19ID, my Apple ID to his Apple ID.
0:21:22I don't know quite how that counts, but everyone, you know, that would be less.
0:21:26I would probably be easier to delete seven conversations with him, but, you know, who
0:21:31knows how much of those gigabytes is all sorts of other people too, and I'd have to keep
0:21:34deleting all those things.
0:21:35I don't know.
0:21:36I don't know and I would love to know the answer to maybe somebody who's upgraded their regular phone to iOS 8 betas would know whether
0:21:42That applies to your old messages
0:21:46like if you upgrade your phone to iOS 8
0:21:48Well that that new world only apply to new messages as they come in or is
0:21:54IOS 8 going to do something smart about your archive of
0:21:58old images
0:21:59That's a tough one because you certainly you could see the other problem is like, you know, if if they just default to
0:22:05alright we're just gonna stop keeping all old stuff by default then as soon as
0:22:09you upgrade to iOS 8 all your old messages get deleted and that's that's
0:22:14kind of bad so I can see the problem there right it's one thing if new
0:22:19messages start coming in with that little keep button and you you know even
0:22:23if you don't quite notice it right away well it was there and you had the
0:22:26opportunity to press keep it's another thing to say yeah all those messages
0:22:30you got over the last three years that you never even had to worry about
0:22:34about whether they were gonna be kept or not,
0:22:36you knew they were gonna be kept.
0:22:37Yeah, we did you a favor and deleted them.
0:22:39- Right, I mean, I think what would probably make more sense
0:22:43would be to treat those attachments just like entries
0:22:47in your photos library where they are all kept on iCloud
0:22:51and then they can just be pulled down on demand.
0:22:53If you actually scroll up and go like, you know,
0:22:55three years back in history,
0:22:57they can be pulled off the network.
0:22:58- Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
0:23:00- And just have it use your storage.
0:23:01But unfortunately, with some people
0:23:02that might use a ton of storage, who knows?
0:23:04- Right, yeah, I was just about to say it.
0:23:06The problem is that it, for a lot of people,
0:23:08a couple of gigs of iMessage images
0:23:11is probably pretty close to the number of gigs they have
0:23:14in their iCloud storage.
0:23:15- Right, exactly.
0:23:17And there's also a lot of duplication, I think.
0:23:19Like if you send a picture to somebody,
0:23:22do you now have two copies of that in your storage?
0:23:25Like the one in your camera roll
0:23:26and the one you sent them?
0:23:27I don't know, like I don't know how that works.
0:23:28- Yeah, I do think that, oh, that's a good question.
0:23:32I think you might, because it might also, I don't even know, I actually never even checked
0:23:39whether they like shrink them at all or anything.
0:23:41I don't think they do.
0:23:43But I don't know, that's a good question.
0:23:45And when you do get a copy, like when you, you definitely get a dupe when you take the
0:23:49photo with your phone and then you switch to your iPad or your Mac or something and
0:23:54the conversation is over there too, that's obviously a copy of the image.
0:23:58Right, exactly.
0:23:59Yeah, I don't know.
0:24:00I don't know. It's a good question. Obviously something you have to concern yourself about
0:24:05though. That's one area where overcast, I think it's in a unique situation where some
0:24:14users might reasonably want overcast to literally take up a majority of the storage on their
0:24:20device. Somebody with a 64 gigabyte iPhone might actually want a podcast app that stores
0:24:28about 40 gigabytes of podcasts.
0:24:30- Right, especially if you're going on a trip or something
0:24:32and you're gonna be without coverage
0:24:34or you're going international,
0:24:35you don't wanna use data roaming,
0:24:36or you're just going out for a while
0:24:38and you're in a country where cell coverage
0:24:41or cell data is very expensive.
0:24:43Either way, there are so many reasons
0:24:46why you want it downloaded
0:24:48and why you want it to be taking up space in your phone
0:24:50rather than requiring it to be streamed constantly.
0:24:53But the other side of that is probably just as frequent
0:24:56which is you have a 16 gig device and it's full
0:24:59and you wanna download to podcast
0:25:01and you don't have enough space.
0:25:02That sucks.
0:25:03And so I can see both sides of the argument,
0:25:06but there's also a problem in having the app offer
0:25:11a very healthy blend of those two things
0:25:13'cause then everything becomes way more complicated,
0:25:16both the code and the interface.
0:25:19'Cause then you have to manage these states
0:25:21and offer ways for people to transform a stream
0:25:23into a download or delete something,
0:25:26but leave it streamable and all these things
0:25:28that really complicate the interface and the data model
0:25:31and even the mental model of the user to know,
0:25:35like do I have this thing or not?
0:25:37I'm trying to keep it very simple
0:25:40so that people can know what's happening.
0:25:43They can know what they have by looking at it.
0:25:46They can see it, they can tell, okay, I have this file.
0:25:48And they can be kind of assured of that
0:25:50and they can depend on that, you know?
0:25:51But it's hard.
0:25:53And this is why podcast apps are so challenging to make,
0:25:55I think because it's one of those categories like to-do lists where like it seems simple
0:26:00at first and then you start getting requests from people and you start realizing, wait
0:26:03a minute, there is not only is there no way to satisfy all of them, like any change you
0:26:08make is going to satisfy this group but anger this other group, but also that the problem
0:26:14space is so complicated of what somebody might want and exactly how they might want it that
0:26:20is infinite potential for improvement for every person. No one is ever 100%
0:26:26satisfied with their podcast app. Everyone's always like 60% satisfied. And
0:26:30I'm you know so I made one that satisfies my 60%. I'm very happy with it
0:26:37but it's it's never gonna appeal to everyone and it's not even close.
0:26:43I think that's another it's one of the broad areas where I see it as similar to
0:26:46Vesper in that there's a ton of notes apps including one that ships with the
0:26:53system from Apple that's not horrible you know and and it is there it's you
0:26:59know it's it's at least you know one of the things I like about it though is at
0:27:03least you see where Apple's coming from with it so you don't have to worry like
0:27:06it's more worrisome if Apple doesn't have an app in your category right like
0:27:10then you're always wondering like either why isn't there an app in my category
0:27:15or does my category suck that badly?
0:27:17Or what will happen if they make one?
0:27:20Then they'll crush us all, you know?
0:27:21- And even if it ends up not being crushing,
0:27:24it's stressful.
0:27:25Like you must have gone through that with the reading list.
0:27:27'Cause you start hearing about it before it comes out.
0:27:30Then they announce it and then you have to worry,
0:27:32well, how popular is it going to be?
0:27:33It's coming out in three months when the beta is over.
0:27:36And it's stressful.
0:27:39I mean, it's better to know that,
0:27:42wow, here's Apple's podcast app
0:27:44and here's all the reasons I don't like it
0:27:46and I know that there's a lot of other people
0:27:47who don't like it.
0:27:48And they're probably not going to wipe it out
0:27:52and start over, I don't think.
0:27:54- Well, and there are things about Apple's podcast app
0:27:58that are the way they are
0:28:00because that's how Apple does things
0:28:02or because there's a strategy tax in place.
0:28:04Like there's a certain amount of cludginess in the app
0:28:09that is entirely because it has to use
0:28:12the iTunes podcast directory.
0:28:14- Right.
0:28:15- And it has to be tied so firmly to that.
0:28:18And so like they can't do anything that like breaks that.
0:28:22- It has to cater to a casual,
0:28:24I don't even know what a podcast is yet person
0:28:27in certain ways. - Correct.
0:28:29And it also, it has to cater to every territory
0:28:32in the world, every language in the world,
0:28:34every genre of podcasts in the world.
0:28:37And like, you know, think about like whenever
0:28:41the podcast app team wants to get something changed
0:28:45or improved about the API to the store,
0:28:48how likely is that to really happen?
0:28:50You know, like inside Apple,
0:28:51you know, the iTunes store team has enough to do.
0:28:54Do you think if the podcast app on iOS team
0:28:58makes a request, how high a priority is that really
0:29:02to the iTunes store team?
0:29:03That's all this other stuff to do with, you know,
0:29:06the more high profile things like the app store
0:29:08and the music store, you know?
0:29:09And so the Apple Podcast app is always gonna be limited
0:29:13by that, plus it's limited by Apple's 80% strategy.
0:29:16- Yeah. - You know,
0:29:17they're never going to do features that are as nerdy
0:29:22as my playlists.
0:29:23Like the way I do playlists is so crazy
0:29:25with all these filters and everything.
0:29:26And it's a playlist system for nerds.
0:29:30And Apple's never gonna do one like that
0:29:32because that's not the way they do things.
0:29:33- Yeah, I don't think so either.
0:29:34And in fact, it might even be problematic for them in the way
0:29:40that their podcast app for iOS has this weird relationship
0:29:48with iTunes on Mac and Windows, which
0:29:50is Apple's solution for how you listen
0:29:53to podcasts on your Mac or PC, where playlist
0:29:56has a very different word.
0:29:58I mean, maybe they could just add--
0:30:00I guess they could maybe piggyback
0:30:02on playlists that include audio files,
0:30:04regular audio files from your library or whatever,
0:30:06but that just turns it into more of a mess in my mind.
0:30:10- Right, and that's why when the Apple Podcast app
0:30:13added something, I believe they call it channels,
0:30:16which is basically a smart playlist.
0:30:17You can just select which feeds go into this,
0:30:20and that's your playlist.
0:30:22And they added that to the podcast app,
0:30:24and I think the reason they had to call it channels
0:30:26was because playlists mean something else in iTunes land.
0:30:28- I never thought about that.
0:30:30I was always confused as hell by their channels.
0:30:32I thought their channels were a little bit more like
0:30:35categories in the store,
0:30:36and I think that's why I found it so confusing
0:30:39is that they're not really categories in the store.
0:30:41They are probably more,
0:30:42like it would have made more sense to me
0:30:44if they called them channels,
0:30:45and then in parentheses, playlists.
0:30:47- Right, yeah, smart playlists, that's what they are.
0:30:49They're smart playlists.
0:30:50- For podcasts.
0:30:51- Has there ever been anything in the history of technology
0:30:55after the television where the word channels was used
0:30:59for something that ended up being a success?
0:31:01- Ooh, that's an excellent question.
0:31:03- 'Cause it's been used in a bunch of like half-assed,
0:31:05terrible things, like the Windows 98 channels bar
0:31:08on active desktop.
0:31:09- Yeah.
0:31:10- Anybody who's listening to the show
0:31:11actually remembers that.
0:31:12You don't, 'cause you were a Mac person.
0:31:13You probably never saw it.
0:31:14- No, never saw it. - You were very lucky.
0:31:15(laughs)
0:31:16Imagine, imagine Microsoft at its worst,
0:31:20at a time when PC hardware was at its worst,
0:31:23where the software was trying to do way too much,
0:31:27web technologies were brand new,
0:31:30and this is when Microsoft tried to integrate IE
0:31:32into the desktop so that the desktop
0:31:34was basically a giant web view.
0:31:36On hardware that was like a Pentium 90 with 16 megs of RAM.
0:31:41Like, it was an awful time to be a PC user.
0:31:46And there are many awful times to be a PC user,
0:31:48but I think like 1997 was a particularly awful one.
0:31:53- That's pretty bad for being a Mac user too.
0:31:55- Yeah, fair point.
0:31:56- Just a bad year for computers.
0:31:57Steve Jobs called it in the interview in the interview with cringey a dark ages
0:32:01of computing exactly yeah he was not that far off about that yeah it was bad
0:32:06for everybody you know next had like three developers like really cool system
0:32:11in like six apps and they were super expensive you know the the machines that
0:32:16could run it maybe by 97 I guess they ran on PCs it was net next step or open
0:32:23but like no market whatsoever.
0:32:26Max were part of a company that was dying
0:32:30and had no real operating system,
0:32:33no modern operating system.
0:32:36And then Microsoft was so powerful.
0:32:39- Yeah, and they shipped Windows 98.
0:32:42- They just gave in to all of their worst impulses.
0:32:45- So bad, it was so, so bad.
0:32:48And the internet was, you know,
0:32:50the internet was so new in '97
0:32:52that everyone was, like the most used application
0:32:54on your computer started to become the web browser.
0:32:57But web browsers were so bad,
0:32:58and the hardware was so primitive,
0:33:00and there was no RAM, so just 1997 just sounds
0:33:03like hard drives grinding,
0:33:04as everything just swaps constantly.
0:33:07That's the entire year,
0:33:08everything was just swapping for a year.
0:33:09- And waiting for dial-up.
0:33:11- Yeah, exactly, that too, yep.
0:33:13- Oh my God, things that you just could not even imagine
0:33:19explaining to your kids today would be the dial-up.
0:33:23Dial-up is impossible.
0:33:25You can explain slow internet,
0:33:26but dial-up was so much worse than being slow.
0:33:28'Cause I remember being,
0:33:30I can't remember when I eventually,
0:33:33I think we eventually, Amy and I eventually broke down
0:33:35and bought a second phone line,
0:33:37got a second number just for internet.
0:33:39But I remember, it just, you know,
0:33:42and I understand this stuff,
0:33:44and I was able to set up a thing.
0:33:46Oh, I'm gonna draw a blank on the software,
0:33:49But it was by a great indie Mac developer named Peter Sitchill
0:33:53I'm gonna have to take a moment here and Google this and look him up
0:33:56But he had this great Mac utility that would let you share a dial-up with multiple Macs on your local network
0:34:03So Amy and I could both get on the internet at the same time and she could just she didn't have the modem hooked up
0:34:09The whole modem was hooked up to my machine, but she could just get on the internet
0:34:12Go check email and then you know wait the 90 seconds for the whole thing
0:34:17But then she'd have internet, you know with just one modem shared between us and we could both be on at the same time
0:34:22Yeah, that was unheard of back then. Oh
0:34:24Game changer. It was awesome
0:34:27This is where I need I need the forum that you guys have the live audience because somebody would yeah the chair I
0:34:34Don't know. This is pretty obscure even our chat. I'm not yeah, but I just feel like Peter Sitchill S I ch el sustainable softworks
0:34:42Let me see what?
0:34:44Well, I don't remember the name of it, but I'll give you a shout out to it
0:34:48He's still got his URL sustworks.com
0:34:53I used to have to I we only had one phone line on my house and I was I was like in seventh grade in
0:35:001997 so it was a little bit different. I couldn't just buy another phone line
0:35:04we only had one phone line and my mom had a lot of friends who would call her all the time and
0:35:09And so I was not allowed to disable call waiting
0:35:13on the modem. - Oh my God.
0:35:16- I had to, and it was an external modem.
0:35:18- So anybody calls your house.
0:35:20- Yeah, I had to listen, I had to leave the,
0:35:22you could configure the modem in its string
0:35:24to leave the speaker on all the time
0:35:26instead of turning off after it connects.
0:35:28So the whole time I was just sitting there
0:35:30listening to static, like shh.
0:35:33And then you could hear beep if a call waiting came in.
0:35:36And I had to listen for that, and if I heard a beep,
0:35:38I had to flick the modem off so it would hang up immediately
0:35:41and let the phone ring and pick it up and, you know,
0:35:43then just not be on the internet for the next 20 minutes
0:35:45during this phone call.
0:35:46- I've got it here.
0:35:49It's IP net router.
0:35:50It's a complete IP router and firewall solution,
0:35:52including a built-in DHCP server,
0:35:55NAT with inbound port mapping and IP filtering
0:35:58to set up your own firewall.
0:35:59I think it costs like 40 bucks.
0:36:01May I, what was it here?
0:36:02Here's a comment from, so it was 89 bucks.
0:36:05It was a steal.
0:36:06It was 89 bucks and you had superpowers.
0:36:11but that's a pretty advanced functionality and like a pretty
0:36:13immense network stack for that time. Well that was it was built on I'm going way
0:36:19out in the weeds here but at Mac OS 9 for as crazy convoluted you know a
0:36:26terrible bag of wires it was in some areas under the hood had some amazing
0:36:31stuff it was called open transport was the networking stack so he didn't
0:36:36necessarily write the whole networking stack all the way to the bottom it was
0:36:40built on open transport but his stuff was almost like like the flagship of why
0:36:47open transport was great and why a lot of Mac developers were beside themselves
0:36:54when Mac OS X went with the you know the Unix networking I forget that there was
0:37:03a whole controversy in that you know there were all these many there are
0:37:05thousands of these little mini converse controversies between classic the which
0:37:10parts of the classic Mac OS would stay in which pad parts of next step would
0:37:14stay and that was one of them I kind of feel very lucky that I didn't even come
0:37:20to the Mac until 10/4 in 2004 and I bought an aluminum power book so like I
0:37:28didn't come to the Mac until it was awesome yeah that's actually a good
0:37:31point because they're like it's like somebody coming to the iPhone with the
0:37:345s yeah it's like you've missed this whole history of like a little bit of
0:37:39rough patches here and there although the iPhone was way easier I think than
0:37:42being a Mac owner in the 90s yeah there were a couple of years in there where it
0:37:47was and it really that was the early years of daring fireball exactly around
0:37:512002 2003 that's when I started but maybe even count 2001 where Mac OS 9 was
0:38:00half awesome and half terrible and Mac OS X was half terrible and half awesome
0:38:07and you know maybe those percentages were 60/40 40/60 and then they got 50/50
0:38:11and they you know they shifted over time but it took years for Mac OS X to really
0:38:16be overwhelmingly yeah you know what I just want to use it all all the time
0:38:20clearly and so it was you know switching I remember for a while I had two
0:38:25machines at my desk I had a forget what it was running Mac OS X I think it was a
0:38:30PowerBook running Mac OS X and an old, really old PowerMac running Mac OS 9.
0:38:37And the older machine running Mac OS 9 of course felt way faster.
0:38:40Oh yeah, because it was doing way less.
0:38:42Right.
0:38:43Yeah, I mean, and Microsoft to their credit, like the 90s, they had a similar scale of
0:38:48transit, well not similar, they had a much easier transition, but it was still a pretty
0:38:51substantial transition between the Windows 95, 98, ME kernel and the NT kernel that powered
0:38:58and then XP and everything after XP.
0:39:01And that, I was using it heavily during that transition
0:39:05and I was like, I would be using the beta of Windows 2000
0:39:08and it was way more stable than Windows 98.
0:39:11- Yeah, I remember that.
0:39:12- Even the very first beta of it in February 1999
0:39:16was way, way more stable than Windows 98.
0:39:19But it was easier back then to go through that transition
0:39:23because Microsoft stuff was always mediocre.
0:39:25It was, to give the, to their credit,
0:39:28they were consistent.
0:39:30Whereas Apple, it sounds like they would have
0:39:32some amazing times and then some terrible times,
0:39:33whereas Microsoft was always impressively mediocre.
0:39:36It was like you could count on the mediocrity.
0:39:38It was the Starbucks and McDonald's
0:39:40of computer operating systems,
0:39:42and I would argue probably still is.
0:39:45And that's actually kind of valuable for a lot of people,
0:39:48to know what you're gonna get.
0:39:49It's dependable.
0:39:51And the transition from '98 to 2000
0:39:55was not that bad unless you had to scan or print anything
0:40:00and there were no drivers.
0:40:01But besides that, as long as you didn't have to scan
0:40:04or print, it was actually a really easy transition.
0:40:06- Yeah, I think that was the basic idea
0:40:08of why they didn't go to NT even earlier.
0:40:09'Cause I actually had to use Windows in some ways,
0:40:13like in college when I had jobs and stuff
0:40:15where that's what people used.
0:40:17And I remember the first time I saw Windows NT,
0:40:21I don't even know what the version number was,
0:40:22but it was before 2000,
0:40:23but it was probably like NT4 or three,
0:40:27I think 'cause they numbered it.
0:40:28- 3.5 probably.
0:40:29- Yeah, 'cause they numbered it to match Windows 3.
0:40:31- Yeah, NT4 I believe, or was NT4 2000 or was that NT5?
0:40:35It doesn't matter.
0:40:36- And I remember asking like the guys who knew a lot more,
0:40:39we're into the PC side, I was like,
0:40:41why isn't everybody using this?
0:40:42This is actually like, you know.
0:40:44- It was NT5.
0:40:44- It's still, yeah, that was it, that was it.
0:40:47- NT5 was 2000.
0:40:48- Yeah.
0:40:49- NT4 was the one that looked like Windows 95.
0:40:52Yeah, it was NT4 that I had seen and used and had some experience with.
0:40:56And I was like, this is--
0:40:58I still think it's kind of gross design-wise,
0:41:00but technically this is so far superior.
0:41:01Why isn't everybody using this?
0:41:03And then they were like, duh, there's no drivers for it.
0:41:05And I was like, well, don't you say there's an easy way to solve this.
0:41:08Shouldn't everybody just switch to this, and then everybody
0:41:12will write drivers for it?
0:41:14I mean, transitions are hard.
0:41:16I know it's not.
0:41:16But it just seemed crazy to me that they were in active development
0:41:19for so many years.
0:41:20And the PC world is, I mean, I don't know,
0:41:22it's probably better now.
0:41:23I'm actually not sure, I've been out of it too long,
0:41:25but you actually couldn't count on new drivers
0:41:28for almost anything.
0:41:29Like if you upgraded your version of Windows,
0:41:32you would probably, almost certainly,
0:41:34you'd have to get a new scanner at least.
0:41:35Like some of your hardware would just stop working reliably
0:41:38or at all because they wouldn't put out a new driver
0:41:41or they would put out a new beta driver
0:41:43and then go out of business or something.
0:41:45And like scanners and printers were some of the worst.
0:41:49And then like the more specialized
0:41:53your hardware peripherals were, the worse they would be.
0:41:56So like I had a couple of game pads
0:41:58'cause I wanted to like play emulators.
0:42:00And so I bought these game pads
0:42:02and they were always the absolute worst.
0:42:05And so you could almost be sure that any hardware
0:42:07or anytime you upgraded your Windows OS,
0:42:10you'd have to also spend maybe 200 bucks
0:42:13upgrading some of your hardware
0:42:15because just because of driver issues,
0:42:17you'd have to replace perfectly working hardware
0:42:19just because there wouldn't be drivers anymore
0:42:21or they wouldn't be workable drivers anymore.
0:42:23- Crazy, dark days.
0:42:25- And that's one of the reasons why Microsoft
0:42:27had to jump through hoops for backwards compatibility
0:42:29and all that crap, because that was the world
0:42:31they were operating in.
0:42:31That was like the hardware environment
0:42:33they were operating in, where they couldn't
0:42:35just dictate to people, you know what,
0:42:36everyone's now using this, so you have to catch up.
0:42:38The way Apple does that today,
0:42:40Microsoft could not do that in the 90s,
0:42:42and I don't even know if they can do it today.
0:42:44They probably still can't do it.
0:42:47Alright, let me jump in here in the early minutes of the show with our first sponsor
0:42:51break and remind everybody about our good friends at Connected Data, makers of File
0:42:59Transporter.
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0:43:10They come to your house, they have hard drives in them or you hook hard drives up to them.
0:43:14You put them on your local network.
0:43:15right there in your house in your office wherever you want them to be but they're
0:43:20in your control and then you install the software on your Mac and you get a
0:43:24little folder on your Mac like Dropbox and it sinks and where are those files
0:43:28in the folder they are stored on your transporter device and you can share it
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0:43:38you can hook more than one of them up but the basic idea is you have sync
0:43:44between computers through the cloud but not stored on servers in the cloud
0:43:50they're stored on devices that you own and control maybe that's just for your
0:43:55own peace of mind because you're interested in the privacy implications
0:43:58of that maybe it's because you have legal reasons that you actually can't
0:44:02store things on devices that you don't control for HIPAA or things like that
0:44:07they have an iOS app and this is new fairly new iOS app for the iPhone and
0:44:12iPad's been updated that has a pretty cool feature where it does things like
0:44:15upload all your photos and videos from your camera roll right to a special
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0:44:26things you really want to do is have a cloud-based effectively cloud-based
0:44:31backup automatically of your photos so that if something happens to your phone
0:44:35you know you've got them automatically somewhere else but you don't want that
0:44:40that somewhere else to be a server in california or who knows where controlled by some big
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0:44:52you really cool great stuff if any of that appeals to you go check them out where you
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0:45:28Or if you want to buy the little thing, the little thing that's like the puck is the transporter
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0:45:34functionality but what you do with this one instead of having a hard drive built
0:45:38into it you just hook any USB drive up to it so if you already have a big USB
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0:46:09dot-com so what are we talking about we were talking about overcast before
0:46:14before the detour into old windows of Mac yeah horrible days of the late 90s of
0:46:20using computers god I don't know how that happened that was terrible all
0:46:23right that was not the entire computer industry was in middle school yeah
0:46:25middle school always sucks for everybody and it sucks for the computer industry
0:46:29And that was it. That's a pretty good analogy. It really was and you're the worst of your personality comes out
0:46:34Right Apple Apple went pie in the sky
0:46:39You know off smoking pot thinking they were gonna write a universal
0:46:44I just linked that up today the Taligent thing with IBM
0:46:47Like I Apple had had was writing multiple operating systems that never actually came to exist, you know, and there was Copeland
0:46:56And they did the whole Newton thing which wasn't a failure wasn't a bus but obviously, you know wasn't a hit and therefore didn't
0:47:03You know, they took their eyes off the ball and left the thing that was actually keeping the company around
0:47:08they let it languish and
0:47:11Then Microsoft man, it's just it really got they got bad. But anyway, that's enough of that
0:47:16I do think it's amusing that that like the biggest Apple news this week is probably the IBM thing and
0:47:22You choose to have me on I am probably the least qualified person in the world to comment on that in any fashion whatsoever
0:47:29Well, maybe next to me
0:47:31Let's get well, let's save it. Let's go. Let's do news at the end of the week. Let's keep going on overcast
0:47:35I had a couple more programming questions. So
0:47:38Brent wanted me to ask this when I told him you were gonna be on the show
0:47:41He wanted to know how hard the audio programming was because he said it sounds like it would be hard
0:47:47it sounds like it would be hard for him and knowing just some of the
0:47:51trickery that you're implementing, that it's even harder. So that's, that's a question, how hard was
0:47:57audio programming, and you had no background in audio programming before you got into this, correct?
0:48:01Well, it's not entirely true. I did a project in college where I was, I was trying to make
0:48:07a better lossless compression algorithm like flack. And you know, those those kind of lossless ones.
0:48:12My project in college failed, because the compression that I wrote,
0:48:17took like 10 hours to compress one file and the resulting file was actually larger than the input
0:48:22file. So it was not a success. My idea for for how I can lossily compress them was not a good idea.
0:48:32Turns out, I remember when I was in college and I was taking computer science courses,
0:48:38this is mid 90s. I was, you know, 91 to 96. Everybody was writing ray tracers,
0:48:46ray tracers were like maybe they're still a common thing but man and i i was nowhere near good enough
0:48:52to even try but i remember that there are some some kids i knew who wrote one and they they were
0:48:58getting like like one frame a day i mean this just unbelievably slow and it just had no idea how to
0:49:06improve it and just like despondent it was like we're it's so slow that we can't even figure out
0:49:13why it's slow. Well when I was writing this thing in 2003, about the same number
0:49:20of people cared then as now about lossless audio encoding which was about
0:49:24five and I don't even use like I'm an audio file I love high quality audio I
0:49:31have all sorts of ridiculous equipment to listen to high quality audio but I
0:49:36don't even use lossless audio files like even if that doesn't even make sense for
0:49:40me to have those giant files sitting there when like a 256K MP3 well-encoded
0:49:44sounds just as good to me I can't tell the difference so it was it was a
0:49:48ridiculous background anyway compression in general compression in general though
0:49:53is hard whether it's lossy or lossless because you're still focused on quality
0:49:57I mean you know even if you're writing lossy compression you know JPEG or
0:50:02something like that you still you don't it's not it's not like you can
0:50:05disregard quality. Right. And it's just mathematically it's just it's really
0:50:10mind-bending. I mean that to me at least. Oh yeah I mean like that once you get
0:50:14past very elementary forms of compression the met it's all math and
0:50:19it's all like very complicated difficult to understand math that is far beyond my
0:50:24comprehension most of the time or like I might understand the general concept but
0:50:28I certainly couldn't implement it or do it myself. Right there's like a one a one
0:50:32level deep of compression that anybody can understand and it's like well if
0:50:35there's like what zip does yeah if there's if there's 16 ones in a row you
0:50:40could just write it down as six you know say that there's 16 ones and that takes
0:50:44fewer space than this 16 actual ones oh yeah well guess what that doesn't get
0:50:49you very far yeah exactly that's that's called RLE and that was in Windows 3.1
0:50:54you know 15 20 years ago there's these very obvious repeated patterns that's
0:50:59how gif works actually yeah but that's gif as well that's why gif has such
0:51:03wonderful compression that Twitter reimplemented this is the movie files
0:51:08right before living exactly see the cat pictures I saw people because that's I
0:51:15don't know if anybody doesn't know that the Twitter added quote unquote added
0:51:20support for animated gifs a couple of weeks ago and then somebody figured out
0:51:24that they're not actually animated GIFs, they're sending out h.264 video. And then
0:51:30I saw people who were upset about this, and it's like, well, there's a reason they
0:51:34did it. The h.264 video files are like 10 times smaller than the GIFs.
0:51:39Oh yeah, I mean like I wrote the GIF processor in Tumblr. It's dealing with
0:51:44GIFs is a ridiculous pain in the ass. It's a terrible format, for so
0:51:49many reasons, and you know, not least of which is that it isn't very efficient at
0:51:53compression but it for so many other reasons like it has the fixed 256 color
0:51:59palette right which is really limiting oh it's soul-crushing it's like that's
0:52:05and and those colors I don't think those colors can change between frames of an
0:52:09event animation about that oh I'm almost certain that I don't think so I don't
0:52:13think between frames yeah I I would be very surprised if that were true I
0:52:17remember can't change anyway yeah it's a terrible format it's terrible well you
0:52:22know, right back to the 90s, you know, but there was that whole debate when when was
0:52:26it unisys started trying to enforce the patent on gif. It was like they had it patented,
0:52:32and didn't do anything with it. And while they didn't do anything with it, you know,
0:52:36the world the World Wide Web grew up with tons and tons of gif files. And then all of
0:52:40a sudden, somebody unisys was like, well, we have a patent on that. Yeah, it was a submarine
0:52:44patent. It's like the canonical example of, of, like a submarine patent, I think. Yeah,
0:52:52Yeah, right why you should never trust a company that says hey just use our stuff. We're never gonna enforce it
0:52:57Yeah, but I remember that that the subcurrent of the whole argument about what we should replace it with and what are we gonna do
0:53:03And blah blah blah was we're doing all this to replace an awful truly awful file format
0:53:09And you can find people who complain about JPEG and that other there were other formats at the time for photographs
0:53:16You know with you know
0:53:17The role that JPEG plays that that there were better alternatives and stuff like that
0:53:22They could have been done better in certain ways, but nobody really says JPEG is terrible
0:53:26I mean JPEG is JPEG right, you know pretty good and served. Yeah, I mean JPEG like it and similar mp3
0:53:32MP3 is a very old format
0:53:35What people don't realize it stands for mpeg1 layer 3 right like mpeg1 files are I believe from the late 80s
0:53:44I mean, it was a while before they were commonplace,
0:53:47but late 80s or early 90s, I believe,
0:53:49is when MPEG-1 became a standard and became playable.
0:53:54And that is when the MP3 format, it's from that era.
0:53:58JPEG is not from that much later than that.
0:54:00I think it's also from the very early 90s.
0:54:03And it was a while before it was fast enough
0:54:06that computers could display them very quickly.
0:54:09But now, and there are better formats.
0:54:11There was a format called JPEG 2000
0:54:13that no one ever uses.
0:54:15And I believe there were some patent issues with it,
0:54:17which is one of the reasons why,
0:54:18but JPEG is good enough.
0:54:22- GIF is a horrible, just a horrible format.
0:54:24But yet it was, there were billions,
0:54:26I forget the estimates for how many GIF files there were
0:54:29on the early internet, but it quickly went
0:54:31from hundreds to billions.
0:54:33- Well, and they're back now.
0:54:34I feel like this is our bell-bottoms moment.
0:54:36- Yeah.
0:54:37- Where this thing that was a weird fad
0:54:4115 years ago, 20 years ago, mostly 15 years ago,
0:54:45that this thing was a weird fad back then,
0:54:48now it's back and all of us who were around back then
0:54:50are like, why is this back?
0:54:51This is terrible.
0:54:53It's the fashion that's come back around.
0:54:56These are definitely our bell bottoms.
0:54:57- Yeah, but it's used in a way that is,
0:55:02there's a little bit of retro to it,
0:55:03but then in most ways there's not
0:55:05because the GIFs that people post now,
0:55:07these huge animated ones with lots of frames
0:55:09from video and TV and stuff like that,
0:55:11are so humongous that computers in the mid 90s
0:55:16and internet connections in the mid 90s
0:55:17couldn't have even handled one of them.
0:55:19- Oh yeah, they're like three megs.
0:55:21I mean, you gotta figure,
0:55:22imagine the concept of a three meg GIF in 1997.
0:55:27- Right, we used to try to make,
0:55:29I forget the target for our web pages,
0:55:31but a lot of times,
0:55:33part of your project specs for building websites
0:55:36were what was the target size for the web page,
0:55:39and it was always measured in kilobytes, you know.
0:55:41- Right, like how many seconds would it take
0:55:43to load over a 56K modem?
0:55:45- Right, it was, you know, somewhere between,
0:55:46for most projects that I worked on,
0:55:48it was usually like 10, 20 kilobytes
0:55:49for the whole page, all assets.
0:55:51- Right, 'cause that would take a few seconds to load.
0:55:54- It would take forever to load, it was horrible.
0:55:57(laughing)
0:55:59- So to answer your actual question.
0:56:00- But a three megabyte GIF file
0:56:03in the middle of the page would be terrible.
0:56:05- Right, I mean, if it could even load
0:56:07without something running out of memory
0:56:09and crashing while decoding it, which is unlikely.
0:56:11But if it could even load,
0:56:12it would have taken 45 minutes to load.
0:56:14- Right.
0:56:15I also think if I'm remembering correctly,
0:56:18then this I hear I could be way off my rocker,
0:56:21but I seem to recall that like early hosting accounts,
0:56:26like if you were hosting a website somewhere,
0:56:29like storage and bandwidth were measured in megabytes.
0:56:33Like I don't know how many megabytes,
0:56:35but like, you know, you just, you couldn't serve up
0:56:39a couple hundred copies of a three megabyte file.
0:56:42You just couldn't do it. - Oh, definitely not.
0:56:44- Oh, God, and now people just crap them out every day.
0:56:48- Well, 'cause now you can host them for free
0:56:49in a million different services that all want your privacy.
0:56:52- All right, back to audio programming.
0:56:53So you did have some experience in college.
0:56:55- Yeah, and I've like toyed with it here and there.
0:56:59- Which was a complete failure.
0:57:00- Yeah, yeah, my college experience was awful.
0:57:04But you know, I got the basic concept of, you know,
0:57:06the samples and the frames and the formats and everything.
0:57:09So, you know, and I've always been an audio nerd.
0:57:13So I've always been familiar with editing audio
0:57:16in basic forms, playing with it, you know,
0:57:19I've, music and talk radio have always been
0:57:23very important to me.
0:57:25And so I've always kind of been in this.
0:57:27Anyway, so the audio programming in Overcast
0:57:31was by far my favorite part.
0:57:34And it was ridiculously hard.
0:57:36But it was the kind of good hard for a programmer,
0:57:40which is like, it's very intellectually stimulating.
0:57:43And so it's exactly what I love to do,
0:57:45which is working at a very low level C code,
0:57:48doing stuff that you don't think will be possible
0:57:51to do quickly.
0:57:52And you know, like it's questionable
0:57:54whether it will run on an iPhone at reasonable speed
0:57:57and at reasonable battery drain.
0:57:58You know, doing very low level stuff like that,
0:58:02using things that, you know,
0:58:02try to make it even more efficient,
0:58:04try to take an even better trick to get this way,
0:58:06throw in some of the vector algorithms and stuff like that.
0:58:09That, it was a very, very fun hard, if that makes sense.
0:58:15And it didn't take that much time,
0:58:18relative to the entire rest of the app,
0:58:20the audio engine, it's actually easier in many ways
0:58:25because it is self-contained and what it's doing,
0:58:29it's a relatively simple task, it's easy to test,
0:58:32it's easy to benchmark, it's easy to find bugs
0:58:36and fix them.
0:58:37Whereas if you compare that to like UI programming
0:58:41or sync logic to the server,
0:58:43like those things are much higher level code.
0:58:46There's much more code to do that sort of stuff,
0:58:50you know, in total for the whole app.
0:58:52And it's much harder to test,
0:58:54there's all these weird edge cases.
0:58:56You know, the audio code really was, it isn't that way.
0:58:58You have a stream of numbers coming in
0:59:01and you gotta put out a stream of numbers,
0:59:02and there's some buffering issues you gotta take care of,
0:59:04and some performance issues you gotta take care of,
0:59:06and some edge cases here or there,
0:59:09but it's nowhere near the level of possibility complexity
0:59:14that programming an interface is.
0:59:17- I think it helps that you're an audio file.
0:59:20In fact, I don't know that it would've worked
0:59:22that way otherwise, 'cause I'm not.
0:59:23I'm a complete anti audio file.
0:59:26I just wanna, yeah, I don't know.
0:59:29I shouldn't say anti, because I do care about quality,
0:59:31but my threshold for what sounds good seems a lot lower than people who, you know, like
0:59:36you who are really into headphones and stuff like that. Like my, you know, line up 20 pairs
0:59:42of headphones and I'm going to say there's a decent chance I might find that they all
0:59:46sound pretty good. If, you know, they're all cost, I don't know, 60, 70, 80 bucks or above.
0:59:53And I would have a harder time talking about the differences. If I did hear a difference
0:59:57between the two, I'd have a harder time describing it.
1:00:00Right?
1:00:01Right.
1:00:02And I think that helps.
1:00:03Because I would think most people, and I wondered, you know, maybe you know this, maybe you can
1:00:06even tell, like, if I were going to write a podcast app, or I were going to be part
1:00:11of a team that was writing one, my idea would be, well, I would just let the system, I'd
1:00:16let iOS handle all the audio playback.
1:00:18We get that, there's a part we get for free.
1:00:20We give the system an audio format that Core Audio knows how to play, and then it'll play
1:00:26and we don't have to worry about that.
1:00:28And then start from there.
1:00:29And I think that, you know,
1:00:32clearly that would rule out a whole bunch of the features
1:00:35that are in Overcast.
1:00:37- Yeah, I mean, the biggest one,
1:00:39like you can do voice boost using the simpler APIs.
1:00:44It is not, you can't do it very well, but you can do it.
1:00:48There's just a few little downsides,
1:00:49but most people wouldn't notice it'd be fine.
1:00:51You definitely cannot do smart speed
1:00:55in any reasonable approachable way.
1:00:57And so I had to do this if I wanted smart speed.
1:01:02And it was an important enough feature for me
1:01:04that I said it was worth it.
1:01:06And the reality is, as I said,
1:01:09like the audio engine was very, very hard
1:01:12for about a few weeks or a month maybe,
1:01:14and then it was done.
1:01:15And then the rest of the app
1:01:16was the rest of the development time.
1:01:19I haven't touched the audio processing code in months
1:01:22because it's fine.
1:01:23Like I made it over the course,
1:01:25I'd go in every once in a while and make a little tweak
1:01:27to how something was dealt with,
1:01:29or the levels or the EQ, stuff like that.
1:01:32But for the most part, it has barely changed
1:01:36in almost two years since I wrote it.
1:01:38- So those are the two magic,
1:01:41here, just make this better,
1:01:43features in Overcast.
1:01:46Smart Speed and Voice Boost.
1:01:49And I think of them as the audio equivalent
1:01:51of that magic wand thing in the Photos app.
1:01:54- Exactly. - Right?
1:01:55And you say, just make it better.
1:01:56And a lot of times for me,
1:01:58that button makes the photo better.
1:02:00And then every once in a while, it doesn't,
1:02:02and then you can tap it again and it goes away.
1:02:04And it's just like that with podcasts,
1:02:06where you can say, turn on Smart Speed.
1:02:08And if you think this is better,
1:02:09this is an easier way to listen to the show, keep it on.
1:02:12If not, turn it off.
1:02:14- Exactly, and there are some shows
1:02:16where one or both of those options
1:02:18will actually make it sound worse.
1:02:19And that's why there's buttons for those,
1:02:20instead of just being on all the time.
1:02:23But I found in the majority of shows I listened to,
1:02:25the combination of both of them
1:02:28usually make it sound better.
1:02:30- What was the deal, I remember this,
1:02:31there was a really interesting thread
1:02:33on the beta glassboard about the names of those features.
1:02:38And early on, I hope I'm not talking--
1:02:41- No, no, good. - Behind the scenes,
1:02:42but the voice boost had a different name, right?
1:02:45I think it just said boost? - Yeah.
1:02:47Early on, voice boost was not on or off.
1:02:50there were three modes to it.
1:02:54There was, there were four modes.
1:02:56There was off, where it didn't process anything.
1:02:58There was enhance, and then boost, and then also reduce.
1:03:03- Yeah. - And reduce was a mode
1:03:05that would actually cut off the spectrum
1:03:07on the extreme highs and extreme lows.
1:03:09So it would, like if somebody,
1:03:11sometimes you have a podcast where it's like
1:03:12way too much bass, and if you play it
1:03:15like in a bathroom or something,
1:03:16like it sounds really echoey and horrible
1:03:19and it's hard to listen to.
1:03:20Some of them also will leave in
1:03:23like very, very high pitched wines
1:03:25as an artifact of some part of their processing.
1:03:28And I never quite figured out what causes that,
1:03:30but some podcasts will have that occasionally.
1:03:32And this has been true for years, way before Overcast.
1:03:34And so reduce mode would cut those ends off.
1:03:37And then enhance and boost both did the same thing.
1:03:42Just boost did it more severely.
1:03:45Boost was like a larger boost basically.
1:03:48And so I had this slider, reduce off enhanced boost.
1:03:52And that was true for about half of the beta, really.
1:03:57- Yeah, I was always confused as hell by the whole thing.
1:03:59I kinda just wanted, I really just wanted,
1:04:03Marco, just make it sound better for me.
1:04:05- Right, and that was a common request, actually.
1:04:08And what I eventually found, what I realized is that
1:04:12even myself, I was just leaving everything
1:04:14on boost all the time.
1:04:16Like I wasn't using any of the other settings.
1:04:17I thought I would when I made them, and then it turns out I was not using them at all.
1:04:22And so that's when I redesigned that screen to just be just a button. Is this on or off?
1:04:27Yeah. And it sounds like it's also a real interesting difference between where you listen
1:04:33to podcasts. And it's like it seems like this feature, the voice booster in particular,
1:04:37really comes in handy to people who listen in their car.
1:04:39Yes, definitely. That's why I made it, because I listen all the time in my car. I got a new
1:04:45car a couple years ago and it came with a serious radio and probably like you
1:04:49know a six-month trials description I never activated it I'm only listening to
1:04:53podcasts now I used to listen to satellite radio before that I would
1:04:57listen to like mp3s and CDs and everything now in my car I'm always
1:05:01listening to either either nothing like if I'm talking to TIFF or if I'm
1:05:05writing alone usually it's always podcasts that's it and yeah voice boost
1:05:10makes a massive difference in the car right because noisy environment and you
1:05:13yeah, it's a noisy environment. So the baseline for where you need the quietest voice on the show
1:05:18to be audible is potentially dangerously high for like a burst of laughter or somebody else who's
1:05:26who was recorded at a higher level. Right, you know, if you have somebody who's very, you know,
1:05:30polite and soft spoken, like Brent, you know, I used his old show as an example, the what was
1:05:37that show called with the calendar guy? Oh, the Simmons, the Simmons brothers.
1:05:42- I don't have cousins, yeah.
1:05:45Yeah, I use that show as one of the test files.
1:05:46- Oh, that's good, 'cause Michael Simmons is so loud.
1:05:50- He was like a loud, boisterous voice,
1:05:51and Brent was soft-spoken.
1:05:53- Yeah, that's a perfect example.
1:05:54- And they didn't level it very well at first,
1:05:55'cause they were, when they first started the show,
1:05:57they weren't that experienced producing podcasts,
1:05:59and they got better at it afterwards.
1:06:00But I used the earlier episodes as a test for this feature,
1:06:05because it was the perfect case,
1:06:06where I wanted to hear what Brent was saying
1:06:08without having my ears blown out when Michael would talk.
1:06:11And so it was exactly the situation
1:06:15where voice boost is necessary.
1:06:16So voice boost is, it's a combination of an EQ
1:06:20and a compressor.
1:06:21And the compressor, and it looks at the files
1:06:23in a couple other ways, but for the most part,
1:06:25it's a compressor.
1:06:26That's most of what you're hearing is the compressor.
1:06:28And that was exactly what it's for,
1:06:32which is make Brent loud enough
1:06:34so I can hear him in the car
1:06:36without blowing out my ears when anyone else talks.
1:06:39- Yeah, and there's like an old record producer
1:06:41adage that you know you don't you don't optimize a music album for high-quality
1:06:49studio headphones you optimize it for the actual way that people in real world
1:06:53are gonna listen to this music which might be you know 10 20 years ago you
1:06:58know a piece of crap portable radio you want to make sure it sounds good on that
1:07:02because that's where you know that if it doesn't sound good on that you're never
1:07:05gonna have a hit song no matter how good it sounds on your you know thousand
1:07:09studio headphones. Exactly. Yeah, got it optimized for the real world. Yeah, and
1:07:13that's true, it's true. Web design, app design, it's true of everything. Yeah. One more
1:07:18question I had, I'm surprised Brent didn't ask, is feed parsing a
1:07:23nightmare for podcasts? Is it just like RSS? It's not as bad as RSS, because, you know, first
1:07:30of all, podcasts are just simpler than the entirety of RSS feeds, because, you
1:07:35You know the entire RSS feeds first of all includes Adam and four different versions
1:07:39of RSS and the use cases for RSS feeds are very varied.
1:07:46There's all sorts of things like it isn't just a site like Engadget posting news headlines.
1:07:51There's all sorts of things that publish RSS feeds that any feed parser has to handle.
1:07:57Podcasts have two things going for them.
1:07:59Not only is the scope of what they cover much smaller than that because for the most part
1:08:04It's audio shows that are produced once a day, once a week,
1:08:09maybe the most extreme ones might be published once an hour
1:08:11if it's like a dump from a radio station.
1:08:13But there's not much more than that.
1:08:15And usually it's pretty well formed for the most part.
1:08:20And the second big thing is that
1:08:22for all of the medium's history,
1:08:24iTunes has been the dominant player.
1:08:26And historically, iTunes is less picky now.
1:08:30But before, in previous years,
1:08:32iTunes used to be very picky about what kind of feeds it would accept. If your
1:08:36feed was malformed at all, iTunes wouldn't take it. And so it kind of
1:08:41enforced a level of consistency and quality, even a format. iTunes, for
1:08:46the longest time, only supported RSS. It didn't even support Adam.
1:08:49And it still doesn't support it that well. Right, yeah, exactly. Today it does
1:08:54support Adam, but not well. Because I looked into that when I had to take over
1:08:57over the feed for this show.
1:08:58And my backend publishing stuff is all set up for Adam,
1:09:03or at least it would work better with Adam in theory.
1:09:07And the bottom line was you could, but you don't want to.
1:09:10If you really want, you really want your podcast
1:09:12to be RSS.
1:09:14- Exactly. - Actual RSS,
1:09:16not RSS as a catch-all term that includes Adam,
1:09:19which is confusing. - Right.
1:09:21And Adam, I know this is like,
1:09:24this is like a holy war of 2003.
1:09:26but I really don't like Atom as a format.
1:09:30RSS was clearly designed to be pragmatic
1:09:35and Atom was designed to be the standard
1:09:38that ends all standards and can reproduce anything.
1:09:40- Yeah. - And it shows.
1:09:42It shows in the complexity of these two formats
1:09:44and Atom has a lot of ambiguity in like,
1:09:48okay, well, there are 17 different ways
1:09:49to represent the date and you need to support all of these
1:09:52'cause some people might use this one
1:09:53and then what the heck is an author?
1:09:54Does everything have an author?
1:09:56how is this author relevant to this other author?
1:09:58And there's like, everything in Atom is, well, it depends.
1:10:03You know, and there's like 17 different ways to do it.
1:10:06And in RSS, you know, it isn't a perfect format.
1:10:08There are some ambiguities built into the format
1:10:11that are kind of annoying,
1:10:11like the lack of required GUIDs, for instance.
1:10:14But for the most part, RSS, you know,
1:10:19as its name states, is way simpler.
1:10:22And just to deal with, to publish and to consume,
1:10:25it is so much simpler because the format
1:10:27just can't represent all the little tiny nuances
1:10:30that Adam can, and Adam sees that as a flaw.
1:10:33I see that as a feature.
1:10:35- Yeah, I totally agree, in hindsight.
1:10:37And who knows, maybe someday I'll just change everything
1:10:39at during fireball to go RSS instead of Adam.
1:10:42But for some reason, I picked the wrong side back then,
1:10:45and I somehow convinced myself that, I don't know,
1:10:48I think I kind of bought into the,
1:10:53the
1:10:54That does sound good arguments behind the Adam people
1:10:58I mean, I never got involved in it and wasn't really active but you know
1:11:01Rick reading Mark pilgrims blog back then and a couple other people who were involved it it all made a lot of sense to me
1:11:07And there were certain aspects of it that if you if you rendered a very simple feed in Adam
1:11:13It looked better to me than RSS and still does in a way
1:11:16Like I'm not thinking about it from the perspective of someone writing a parser and you have to handle everything
1:11:20I was thinking of it in terms of what would make my the daring fireball feed look better
1:11:27If you just looked at it, and I still think Adam is better
1:11:30In that regard but that's a stupid thing to make the judgment on I think I think
1:11:35the smarter way to look at it is just to say RSS is super pragmatic and it is
1:11:41Designed from the get-go for doing exactly and only what I was doing which was here's a bunch of articles
1:11:48- Yeah.
1:11:49- Right, as opposed to like here,
1:11:50we have to design an overarching standard
1:11:52that will encompass every possible thing
1:11:54everyone will ever want to do again.
1:11:55- Yeah.
1:11:56- You know, and Atom was also, you know,
1:11:58a lot more strict with certain things,
1:11:59and it's almost, there's almost a parallel
1:12:01between XHTML being Atom.
1:12:04- Yeah, I think so.
1:12:05- And like HTML5 or even old HTML being RSS.
1:12:08- Yeah.
1:12:09- Where it's just like, you know,
1:12:10it was more structured, more defined,
1:12:12but way more complex.
1:12:14- Yeah.
1:12:14- And it sounded good in theory,
1:12:16that in practice it just doesn't really work that well.
1:12:19And it's actually more complicated to deal with in practice.
1:12:21- Yeah, and the RSS thing went by really quickly
1:12:24in just a handful of years,
1:12:25whereas the HTML thing played out over almost 20 years.
1:12:29But I think it is pretty,
1:12:32I think that's a pretty decent high-level analogy.
1:12:34And in that analogy, I think RSS 2.0 is HTML5,
1:12:38which is, yeah, yeah, yeah, the RSS,
1:12:40and it had weird numbers.
1:12:41It was like 0.9 and 0.91 and 0.92.
1:12:45And the weird thing was that like .91 was from Netscape and Dave Weiner had nothing
1:12:51to do with it and .92 went back to Dave Weiner and ignored everything that was in .91.
1:12:56It was really a sequel to .90.
1:12:58I know I'm getting these version numbers wrong, but it doesn't matter.
1:13:01It doesn't matter that I'm getting the exact version numbers wrong.
1:13:04It's – yeah, Brent was literally at ground zero for all of that because he was like writing
1:13:09all the parsers and generators for all of these things.
1:13:11Yeah.
1:13:12And to be clear, when I'm talking about RSS, I'm talking about RSS too.
1:13:14Earlier ones. Yeah, like the RDF based ones that disaster, but we went but that was the battle though, right?
1:13:20That was you know, and that's why were they X X HTML never really was pitted against HTML 4
1:13:25It was really pitted against a you know, it's tml5
1:13:28I mean even though the time, you know, they weren't at the same time effectively
1:13:31it was well the world's gonna move off HTML for eventually and
1:13:35you know the standards people, you know really thought it was
1:13:43Gonna be X HTML because my god, it's gonna be great
1:13:46It'll enforce that all of your web pages are XML compliant because if it's not it won't render, right?
1:13:51Yeah, everything everything was like structure
1:13:53This is a battle that you know computing has gone back and forth in this in cycles for decades
1:13:58It was a battle for like structure and definitions and schemas and well-defined everything and extremely unforgiving
1:14:06implementations
1:14:08versus forgiving flexible, just kind of spew something out
1:14:12and we'll try to figure out what it is.
1:14:13And the same thing is happening now
1:14:16with Objective-C versus Swift even.
1:14:18I mean, we keep having the same battle over and over again
1:14:22where somebody will want,
1:14:23there'll be some kind of class of problems
1:14:28that academic people will think needs to be solved.
1:14:33And the way to solve it is to require standards.
1:14:35So everything can be strictly typed
1:14:37and we can validate everything
1:14:41and everything has to be defined in a file
1:14:43and we're gonna write everything in Java
1:14:44with 10 class deep hierarchies of every model.
1:14:48This isn't just a person.
1:14:49We need to have a person factory constructor
1:14:51to construct the factory that builds people.
1:14:53And like all this, like there's levels and levels
1:14:56of complexity and structure
1:14:58to combat the freeform wild west of dirty data.
1:15:03And then the dirty data people come in
1:15:04and do everything faster and everything just works anyway.
1:15:06then and then the cycle repeats again it's yeah I'm I think we're gonna always
1:15:11see this cycle just go back and forth I don't even know I was not going to get
1:15:15into this and this could be this could absolutely sink the entire you might as
1:15:21well now I mean have you seen this thing where there's this group that wants to
1:15:25turn markdown into an I ETF standard no it let me guess Jeff Atwood I I don't
1:15:31even know. You know what? It broke last weekend. I was out of town with Amy and I wasn't paying
1:15:38attention and I've been busy this week on other stuff. I haven't even paid attention
1:15:42to it. But I don't know if it's associated with Atwood's Crusade or not. And there's
1:15:49talk from some people. And the funny thing is they're doing it on a mailing list that
1:15:53I still host and I haven't participated on in years. And I don't know why I haven't pulled
1:15:58the plug on the damn mailing list. But I still host the Markdown discuss mailing list and
1:16:03there's people saying that they should just take the name Markdown from me because I've
1:16:08been such a lousy steward of it, of it and whatever. Meanwhile, you know, there's the
1:16:14web pages on my site for Markdown with describing the syntax and everything are more popular
1:16:20every single day. It's more popular. The mark I could actually I've thought about selling
1:16:25sponsorship just for markdown alone because it's more popular the markdown
1:16:29pages on during fireball get more traffic than during fireball did as a
1:16:33whole when I went professional with daring fireball and you can even you
1:16:38could get like you know web development kind of advertisements for that too like
1:16:42it's a different market right that's what I've that's exactly why I thought
1:16:45that I could do it job board just on that page although I do actually think a
1:16:49lot of the traffic is not coming from web developers it's coming from people
1:16:53who are using a site that is switched to Markdown as the format, you know, for their comments
1:17:01or whatever.
1:17:02But anyway, long story…
1:17:03I mean, I could go on forever about this, but to me, Markdown's not successful despite
1:17:08not being a standard and etc. etc. and all that would entail.
1:17:15But because of that…
1:17:16Now, it's possible that it would be better off if there were some kind of spec that could,
1:17:21you know if there were a spec that implementers could implement for some things and you know
1:17:29maybe I'll do either I don't want to get too deep in this but there's some ideas and some
1:17:33work that some people have done that's really interesting in that regard because ninety
1:17:37nine point nine nine nine percent of people wouldn't have to worry about it and it wouldn't
1:17:41change things but some of the things that people see as a problem like the fact that
1:17:46different markdown implementations are slightly different is not a problem it's
1:17:50actually you know that's actually a good thing because then github which has to
1:17:55my opinion a great flavor of markdown they even call it and they have a great
1:17:58name for it perfect name it's called github flavored markdown and it is
1:18:02exactly suited for github users and it does code a little differently because
1:18:07no shit github users are writing a lot of you know code blocks right and it
1:18:15would nuttin and almost none of their changes would make sense for markdown
1:18:19everywhere so you know it's great yeah I don't people see the world is broken
1:18:25regarding markdown because there's not one true markdown and meanwhile in the
1:18:30real world everybody's happy writing markdown yeah I think you're right it
1:18:35doesn't it doesn't seem like it's a problem that needs to really be solved
1:18:39exactly and you know it's I think I think there's this temp there's a
1:18:43a tendency for programmers to want to clean up standards
1:18:48and formalize things like that.
1:18:50And in many cases that is warranted.
1:18:53But I think saying that everything has to be a standard
1:18:57is like saying open always wins.
1:18:58- Exactly, yeah.
1:18:59- Like, you know, that is true sometimes,
1:19:02but it is not a generalization that holds all the time.
1:19:05And I don't know, I mean, maybe there are things
1:19:09that should be standardized, but it seems like Markdown
1:19:11has gotten along just fine without that.
1:19:13and it's moving along fine.
1:19:14And you're right that different implementations
1:19:17will have different needs.
1:19:18And it is not wise to try to cram all these specialty needs
1:19:23into one standard that everybody must follow.
1:19:26And then everything gets versioned,
1:19:28then you have to be like, oh, well,
1:19:29does this support markdown 2.0 or not?
1:19:31And it's kind of a mess.
1:19:33I don't know, it's a hard problem to solve.
1:19:35But I wouldn't assume that a standard's body
1:19:38is necessarily the right solution to this problem.
1:19:41I would almost certainly say it is absolutely not.
1:19:46- Well, of course you would say that
1:19:47'cause they're basically trying to fire you.
1:19:49- Right.
1:19:50- But I don't know.
1:19:51I think that the success of Markdown,
1:19:55despite not having a standards body behind it all this time
1:19:59is the biggest evidence why it probably doesn't need one.
1:20:02- Right, exactly.
1:20:03And part of what it meant lets it get by without a spec
1:20:07and I feel like it would be better in some ways.
1:20:11There are things that could be clarified.
1:20:13And there's things that make Markdown very hard, for example,
1:20:15to write a syntax coloring description for because of ambiguities.
1:20:20There's things-- the general assumption with Markdown, the thing that--
1:20:24the reason why it doesn't have a spec and why I think it probably shouldn't
1:20:27is the general assumption is that whoever is writing it
1:20:29knows what they're doing and isn't going to put input random gibberish.
1:20:34And there's all sorts of-- the problems that people are talking about is, well,
1:20:36what if you put seven asterisks in a row what does that generate well don't do
1:20:42that that's my answer I don't know what it generates is a generate a bunch of
1:20:46empty m tags or strong tags I don't know it just seems like just why would you do
1:20:52that you know check what it looks like before you publish it and if you see oh
1:20:57I forgot that if I put a bunch of asterisks there that means something at
1:21:00markdown I should backslash escape them just you know take a look at it it could
1:21:07be better I'm not trying to brush aside all criticism of it and say that there's
1:21:11nothing I could do better there's maybe I should wait take a couple of weeks and
1:21:15wait back in and clean up some things but I think what markdown needs from me
1:21:19would be like a version I don't even know what the official version but like
1:21:23if it's at 1.0 1 I should do like a 1.0 - right or at most like a 1.1 yeah maybe
1:21:32at 1.1 there's no need for a markdown 2.0 and there's no need for a standard or
1:21:37respect but people get really worked up about it what if they just make their
1:21:41own thing and give it another name and see if it catches on exactly that's I've
1:21:45said that that's like I probably should set up a text expander snippet for that
1:21:49make up your own thing and see if it catches on yeah cuz it might and then
1:21:53then find a problem solved then you have your own thing that you control it has
1:21:57it has a different name and fine you got it right I don't know we'll see how that
1:22:01goes it's it's either gonna Peter out or it's going to be a thing that I'm going
1:22:06to have to take a little more public and then you know and be like no you cannot
1:22:11take the name mark down and I I do have a nice soapbox for that and I have a lot
1:22:15of people who are probably gonna be on my side of this and then everybody's
1:22:18gonna be like oh my god I remember him talking to Marco about that on his
1:22:21podcast a couple weeks ago you even trademark it maybe yeah well and
1:22:25probably isn't worth it I mean I don't know I probably should try I don't know
1:22:29it's probably it probably is not worth it on maybe harder because it's a general
1:22:33it's a you know getting a regular word even though the pun involved in the name
1:22:38I think is I still think it's rather clever but I don't know it might be hard
1:22:42because it's a dictionary word I'm not a trademark lawyer however I filed for a
1:22:46a number of trademarks now,
1:22:48so I'm familiar with the process.
1:22:49And from what I understand,
1:22:52you could almost definitely trademark it.
1:22:56It doesn't matter that you haven't yet,
1:22:58it doesn't matter that it's out there.
1:23:00The fact is it's still your thing, your project.
1:23:02- Yeah, I'm not asking for the word.
1:23:03- It has not become a generic term
1:23:05that describes all things like this.
1:23:07It is still a specific thing that you made.
1:23:10And you could just make the,
1:23:13'cause you know, this is a very common thing,
1:23:14I hear people talking incorrectly about on podcasts
1:23:17all the time, they assume that a trademark
1:23:19is like a universally unique name.
1:23:22- Right.
1:23:23- When in fact, when you file for a trademark,
1:23:24you have to file for it in certain
1:23:27relatively narrow categories.
1:23:29And the more broadly you want that trademark to apply,
1:23:32the harder it is to get.
1:23:33And sometimes it is possible to get it more broadly.
1:23:37There might be someone else that's too close to you.
1:23:38So like, I have to file for Overcast's trademark
1:23:44within the parameters of a website
1:23:47that lets people search and find and play podcasts,
1:23:51and also a mobile application that lets people search
1:23:53and find and play podcasts and audio files,
1:23:55and you have to be that specific.
1:23:57And overcast is a word, it's an English dictionary word,
1:24:04but I still have a trademark pending on it
1:24:05that looks like it's gonna go through just fine.
1:24:08And there are other trademarks for the word
1:24:10that are in different industries, and that's fine too.
1:24:12And so yeah, trademarks are limited to a certain scope.
1:24:17And if you make that scope narrow enough,
1:24:18you can trademark almost anything.
1:24:20- Yeah, it's not like getting the Twitter account name.
1:24:23- That's impossible, yeah.
1:24:24(laughing)
1:24:25Every time it comes up where someone's like,
1:24:27oh yeah, I wanna recover this abandoned name on Twitter.
1:24:30Every time this comes up, there's like three people
1:24:32who are like, oh, I know a guy, I can get it done.
1:24:34Or oh yeah, you could just email this person.
1:24:37And every time, if anyone else does it,
1:24:39they can't do it anymore.
1:24:40The process has now changed, it is now more strict.
1:24:42No, sorry, I can't do it. Yeah, I think there might have been some loosey-goosey early days where you could get
1:24:47You know like in 2009 you could still get a claimed but vacant Twitter name
1:24:55But it's it's I don't know I think for obvious reasons that it's gotten harder. I have at markdown
1:25:01I don't think I've ever even posted from it, but I do have that do you know this?
1:25:05I think I talked about this on the show, but it was years ago
1:25:08Do you know who wanted to buy it from me?
1:25:12Matt Mullenweg, nope Glenn Beck
1:25:14What talk show right-wing talk show personality Glenn Beck? Does he have like a show with that name or something?
1:25:22Yeah, he started he got involved in some kind of
1:25:25Like an overstock comm
1:25:31competitor
1:25:34Okay, so it's like price mark down either yeah, or maybe it was like Groupon or something
1:25:38I went and looked at it and tried to figure out what the hell it was and I was just like no so and I just
1:25:43I got emails from them that they wanted to make a very serious offer about the Twitter account and I
1:25:48Just never answered him that that is that is really truly someone I just couldn't live with myself
1:25:55I didn't want to hear the number
1:25:57Because I don't think it would have been that big anyway. I really don't yeah, I doubt it
1:26:01I don't think it would have been an offer that I couldn't refuse but I was afraid that it would be an offer
1:26:06I couldn't refuse
1:26:08So on the other hand, it would be nice to take a whole lot of Glenn Beck's money. I don't know
1:26:12There's something about that it
1:26:14There's yeah, I thought of that too that wouldn't it be nice to you know, buy a new car with Glenn Beck's money
1:26:20but then I don't know there's something about taking his money that
1:26:22And I don't know but anyway he wanted to buy it but I think his whole thing fell apart
1:26:26anyway, now that his markdown is is
1:26:28Not even remembered. I don't think anybody remembered it
1:26:32They remember him. I
1:26:35I don't know because he's not on TV anymore.
1:26:37I still, he pops up on the politics sites I read every once in a while.
1:26:41You can actually, you actually read politics?
1:26:43I can, I, like politics make me so angry, like every, every political news thing I've
1:26:47ever read has just made me angry.
1:26:49So I just try to avoid it as much as I can.
1:26:50I used to be really into it when I, another enormous digression, but circa 2002 when I
1:26:56thought, you know what, I've got to start a blog.
1:26:59And it was, maybe it wasn't quite 50/50.
1:27:02And I know in hindsight everybody's going to say, come on, it couldn't have been.
1:27:04But it felt closer to 50/50 me whether I would write about tech and etc. or politics and
1:27:12etc.
1:27:13And then I thought, "Well, maybe I'll start the Daring Fireball one first," which I always
1:27:17knew would be the name of this one.
1:27:21And I thought, "Maybe I'll start a second blog."
1:27:23I even have a name for it, but I can't say what it is, where I would write about politics.
1:27:29But it's just, to me, it's not that it makes me angry anymore.
1:27:32It just bores me.
1:27:33It bores me to death.
1:27:34Because it's the same story all the time, you know, everyone's getting screwed.
1:27:39These people are, you know, being bribed or being bought by lobbyists and, you know, those
1:27:44common people are getting screwed even further and everything just sucks and there's no hope
1:27:47in sight.
1:27:48Like that's basically it.
1:27:49Like if you boil it down, that's basically what every political story is.
1:27:54And it's just awful.
1:27:55I think if I had been alive, if I had been born a few decades earlier and had been like
1:28:01a same to like a columnist typewriter in the 70s or 80s I think it would have
1:28:05been about politics because I think it was so much more interesting then and I
1:28:09know there's a lot of a lot of that some of the problems are exactly the same in
1:28:12a partisanship and stuff but it wasn't the money wasn't as as corrosive it
1:28:18wasn't so much that it was really all just about business you know it was it
1:28:22was more you know the partisanship was actually interesting and kind of fun to
1:28:26write about I just think it's funny also that you know you and I have a
1:28:30a similar problem, you have it to a larger scale,
1:28:33because your audience is much larger than mine.
1:28:36We have a similar problem in that we say things
1:28:39that are opinionated about topics
1:28:41that shouldn't be emotionally charged,
1:28:44but for many people they are.
1:28:46And we get a lot of crap from people
1:28:50who are like unreasonably, surprisingly angry
1:28:54about some statement we make about like a phone.
1:28:57I can't even imagine what it would take in your mind to think that it would be a good
1:29:01idea to enter political writing as an additional thing that you did from that point of view.
1:29:07Yeah, and when I've dabbled in it on Daring Fireball, it's, you know, I don't mind the
1:29:13criticism but it was enormous.
1:29:15It peaked in 2008 with the Sarah Palin thing because I couldn't not hold my tongue.
1:29:20I was so clear that the woman was, you know, borderline mentally disabled.
1:29:26I mean, you know, a real, real, real problem.
1:29:31And she was--
1:29:32- Yeah, that was a scary time.
1:29:32- Right.
1:29:33- When it appeared that like, there was a very good chance,
1:29:36like most people today who weren't voting
1:29:38or paying attention in 2008, don't realize that like,
1:29:42there was a very good chance Sarah Palin
1:29:44was going to be president.
1:29:45- Right.
1:29:46- 'Cause you know, McCain, yeah, McCain's still around now,
1:29:47but at the time everyone's looking at McCain
1:29:49saying he's not in great health, he's pretty old.
1:29:51He was like one of the oldest people
1:29:53to run for president in his life.
1:29:54- Well, and there was a tremendous,
1:29:56And I think well-grounded fear that the polling numbers might be severely off
1:30:00because there were an awful lot of people who wouldn't want to tell a pollster that
1:30:04they wouldn't vote for the black guy.
1:30:06But when they go in the privacy of the voting booth, would.
1:30:10Right. There was a very real chance
1:30:12that McCain and Palin were going to win.
1:30:14And because of McCain's age and health,
1:30:18there was a good chance he might not make it for a full eight years and that she
1:30:21might become president. Like these were really like non-trivial possibilities.
1:30:25And when I'd write about her, man, people would just, a certain subset of people
1:30:29would just go nuts. And it was funny because some of them were clearly
1:30:32themselves very low IQ, but others were not. Others were, you know, but that, you
1:30:37know, they're, because that's their side. And they'd say, you know, if she was
1:30:42a Democrat you'd love her. It's like, no, if she was, if, I'm not that partisan. It's
1:30:45It's like, my politics are certainly not conservative, but I'm not, you know, if a true moron ran
1:30:53on a Democratic ticket, I would do the same thing.
1:30:57Like it's way more dangerous, way more dangerous.
1:31:00I prefer to have a Democrat in the White House than a Republican.
1:31:03I do.
1:31:04But I would much rather have any Republican of reasonable intelligence than a moron who's
1:31:11a Democrat.
1:31:12I think that's terrifying.
1:31:13- Yeah, I mean. - It's terrifying.
1:31:14- Like, you know, 'cause when the Democrats
1:31:16sell out the public, they at least try to do it quietly
1:31:19and in more subtle ways that are less likely
1:31:23to be traced back to them.
1:31:24The Republicans have learned that they can sell out
1:31:27the public in public.
1:31:29Like, you know, brashly, they can just,
1:31:33they can do things that seem ridiculous
1:31:36to thinking people, but they can get away with it
1:31:40because no one cares.
1:31:42And like, they just, the public does not give a crap.
1:31:46And so, they just, they can do whatever they want.
1:31:49At least the Democrats give us the illusion that they are, that they have us in mind.
1:31:54Which of course they don't.
1:31:55But at least they give us that illusion.
1:31:58And here's Marco, proving in the email I'll get in the coming seven days exactly why I
1:32:03made the right choice in 2002.
1:32:06Totally.
1:32:07And I think it's best for you and I to keep doing
1:32:12what we already do with this issue,
1:32:13which is like, for truly important issues,
1:32:17blog about them on our tech blogs.
1:32:19Because if either of us had a political blog,
1:32:23the only people who would read it
1:32:25were people who agree with us.
1:32:26- Yeah, that's true. - Basically.
1:32:28And there'd be occasional drive-by trolls
1:32:30who wanted to yell at us,
1:32:31but that doesn't really do anything.
1:32:33And so I think you could make more of a difference
1:32:37for a cause you care about by not usually being political
1:32:41and choosing occasional times where it's worth it to be.
1:32:44And then you kind of trick some people
1:32:46who don't agree with you into seeing that opinion.
1:32:48- Here's the thing I keep thinking about.
1:32:50When I look back at it, I think that I wish
1:32:52that our system were set up in a way
1:32:54that it would be a lot easier for whoever won
1:32:56the last election to get whatever shit done that they want.
1:33:00And if it turns out to be unpopular,
1:33:03they're gonna get voted out and whoever comes in next
1:33:05can undo it.
1:33:06I think there should be a lot more of that.
1:33:11Whereas we've got a system now where it's like
1:33:13nothing happens, right?
1:33:14Like one major, I know I'm exaggerating to some extent,
1:33:19but really only one major thing has happened since Obama
1:33:23was elected president, which is the healthcare reform.
1:33:26- Right, and look at how well that,
1:33:27like everyone keeps trying to repeal that somehow,
1:33:29which is comical, you know, but.
1:33:31And that's one thing, right?
1:33:33And--
1:33:34- It's a big thing, but still, like that's--
1:33:35- Somebody's gonna say, you know, it's because, you know,
1:33:38that people are gonna email me and say,
1:33:39it's 'cause Obama is a terrible president and a bad leader,
1:33:41blah, blah, blah, but it's not.
1:33:43It's because it's so, the system is set up in a way
1:33:45that nobody can get anything done.
1:33:46Bush didn't get much done other than start the wars
1:33:49in terms of major accomplishments,
1:33:51because it was like this thing that both sides could somehow
1:33:54for a few brief years, it was like everybody felt
1:33:58like we had to get behind them.
1:34:01I'm not saying I was behind it, but I'm just saying that Democrats who were in the Senate
1:34:04and House also voted for it.
1:34:06It was something that...
1:34:07But other than that, not much...
1:34:09Nobody passes anything.
1:34:10I think it would be so much better.
1:34:11And I say this knowing that in my lifetime, there will be Republican presidents and Republicans
1:34:17control of the House and Senate and all those things have been flow.
1:34:20I'd rather see even the Republicans get to get more of their stuff done while they're
1:34:25winning and vice versa than the current system, which seems to be set up basically around
1:34:31any idea of let's try to make sure nobody can do anything.
1:34:33- Yeah, it seems like there are some like security holes
1:34:37in the procedures in Congress where like, you know,
1:34:41it's very easy for a party to block everything ever,
1:34:45even when they're not really in power,
1:34:47like the whole filibuster thing and certain majority rules.
1:34:49Like there are certain things where like, it's just,
1:34:52it seems like when these rules were considered
1:34:55or made or implemented, it was not really a thought
1:34:58into it that what if one party or the other just decides to block everything for a decade?
1:35:05Like just says no to everything the party ever does for a decade and no one ever compromised
1:35:08on it now on anything.
1:35:09Like I think that thought never crossed anyone's mind before because it never really happened
1:35:12before.
1:35:13And now we're being shown, oh, this is kind of a problem because we can't get anything
1:35:19done even things that are fairly moderate.
1:35:22Like we can't even get moderate things passed.
1:35:25So yeah, it could use some rethought,
1:35:27like some rule changes in Congress,
1:35:30just to make it so that it's possible
1:35:32to get something through for whoever
1:35:36has the technical majority.
1:35:39- Yeah, and I think in terms of looking at a career
1:35:41as a podcasting host and a columnist on a blog,
1:35:46that's what I mean when I say it to me,
1:35:48it would be too boring.
1:35:51I think I might have burned down on it,
1:35:53not because I would have worked harder at it
1:35:55that it would have been more stressful, I think I would have burned out from boredom.
1:35:59I think what makes what we talk about in general interesting is how quickly things can change.
1:36:04Just look at the phones alone that we've gone from a world where the iPhone didn't exist
1:36:11seven years ago or I guess it had just come out a couple weeks ago, seven years ago, to
1:36:17a world where IBM and Apple are selling iPhones together to corporate customers.
1:36:21It's crazy.
1:36:22Yeah, that's pretty nuts.
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1:38:57Speaking of commercials, you know what I saw the other day?
1:39:00Blew me away.
1:39:01I'm in a bar
1:39:03With Amy having a drink and on the TV behind the bar. It's showing ESPN and
1:39:09You know, I see a TV. I'm gonna pay attention to it and all of a sudden Adam Lisa Gore is on TV
1:39:15Oh, yeah for what?
1:39:17That there's a commercial that he shot a sandwich video for a company called true car
1:39:22T R U E C a R. It's the future of car buying. I actually haven't watched the whole thing
1:39:28I was in a bar. I couldn't hear it. All I did was see him
1:39:31Now his videos have gone on real TV like national TV
1:39:35That's gotta be like that's definitely a strange thing to see like your friend all of a sudden appear on TV. I went nuts
1:39:41I think I'm usually a pretty you know, I was like that. I know that guy. That's my he's been on my show
1:39:46Right my guy and there he is up there. It's in it's just a classic sandwich video there. He and he's the spokesman
1:39:53He's he's in it. He's all you know, that's awesome
1:39:57I'm so happy for him for everything he's like I remember back when he was you know before he started sandwich video
1:40:03He was just doing like video work for people and he didn't seem like he was that happy doing it
1:40:07I don't want to you know
1:40:08I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it seemed like he was he was not incredibly happy with his previous jobs and
1:40:14he
1:40:15He did this thing on his own and it's just exploded
1:40:18He is because like now everyone sees how cool he is like how his his style how?
1:40:25talented he is and how good his work is and and his unique like style and voice
1:40:30that he puts into these things that are so appealing to so many people like it's
1:40:34so great to see your friends have that kind of success and he's like the nicest
1:40:38guy in the world you know it couldn't happen a better guy no he's such a
1:40:41thrill but it's so it's so because - it's like who would have thought that he you
1:40:50know he just doesn't look like what you think of as celebrity pitchman right
1:40:53He's and he's like deadpan and like so like muted right and and it works and it works really well
1:40:58I mean we oh we you know
1:40:59We all thought that you know like internet nerds because we would see his videos previous videos and love them
1:41:03But yeah, I think it's it's a surprise in a very good way that Wow. Everyone else feels this way, too
1:41:11it's it's like like
1:41:13Nerdy smart stuff like what we so often like around these parts is now popular everywhere
1:41:20it was so funny like I was making the directory in overcast and I had like whipped together directory a few days ago and and
1:41:25Jason Snell suggested this category titled pop culture and
1:41:30almost everything in it is about geek culture and
1:41:34Part of that's because Jason Snell is a geek like us
1:41:37But part of it's also because geek culture now is pop culture and that was a very strange thing to realize, right?
1:41:45Yeah, like the thing the other day where that turned out that turns out the next Thor is a woman and
1:41:52It was like I couldn't like it was on every site
1:41:55It didn't matter whether it was a geek site or like a mainstream site. It was covered with equal, you know
1:42:01Excitement and you know
1:42:05The it was a perfect example to me because I remember growing up
1:42:09What happened in comic books would be like something like the other kids in fifth grade
1:42:15We're talking about you couldn't turn on TV and find out about the new spider-man outfit. You know what I mean?
1:42:21Yeah, well because they weren't making movies that made billions of dollars with it
1:42:25But it's just funny how it's crossed over and I but that's the thing though
1:42:30Is that it's I think it's highly doubtful that that the you know
1:42:35all sorts of stuff that happens in the comic books doesn't necessarily mean
1:42:38it's gonna happen in the movies you know so it it's it's only in the comic books
1:42:43where there's gonna be a where Thor is now a woman I mean I guess it could
1:42:49eventually be turned into a movie I don't know but I love that you've had me
1:42:53on here to talk about IBM TV and comics comics I'm like so incredibly unc
1:43:00I don't read comic books.
1:43:02It's for babies.
1:43:03I just think it's an interesting example
1:43:06of what you were talking about.
1:43:08- Yeah, yeah.
1:43:09I think it's more like,
1:43:10a lot of people know one or two nerds who,
1:43:15or maybe you are one of these nerds,
1:43:17who you were a nerd socially growing up,
1:43:20it did not serve you well,
1:43:22and then you got a job that paid you good money,
1:43:24and then all of a sudden people are interested in you.
1:43:26I feel like that has happened
1:43:28to the entire nerd industry,
1:43:30like the whole nerd and the whole geeky category of things.
1:43:34Now geeks are big business.
1:43:36We control all the internet stuff,
1:43:38our comic books and all that crap
1:43:40are now billion dollar movie franchises and stuff like that.
1:43:43I feel like the rest of the world now cares about us
1:43:46because we have all the money.
1:43:48- I guess to a certain degree that describes me,
1:43:50but I think I was always a little bit outside that,
1:43:54a little bit harder to pin down in that sort of, you know, like my high school years were
1:43:59not unhappy. I wasn't, I wouldn't, I would say the only thing that made me really unhappy
1:44:03is I just wanted to already live on my own. Not that I don't love my parents and they're
1:44:06not great, but I felt like I was, I was, I felt clearly able to make my own decisions
1:44:12about when to go to bed, you know. Like when I was around 11.
1:44:18You have now reached the conclusion of side one of your official National Lampoon Stereo
1:44:22test and demonstration record. And what better time for our special end of the record test.
1:44:29First of all, this is a test of your equipment. No matter what brand or type of record player
1:44:34you have, the tone arm should now be close to the center of the record and almost at
1:44:40the shiny area just before the label. If you own an automatic turntable, in a few seconds
1:44:46The arm should raise itself as if by magic and then return to its rest near the outside of the unit.
1:44:53If you do not have an automatic turntable, this should not happen.
1:44:58The second part of this test involves you.
1:45:02If you have been correctly installed as part of your stereo system, you will now lift the record up, turn it over, and replace it on the turntable with side two on the top.
1:45:14you will then proceed to listen to all of side two.
1:45:18If you do not do this, you have failed the test,
1:45:23and you have the worst hi-fi system in the world,
1:45:26no matter how much money you spent.
1:45:28[ Silence ]