0:00:00I guess we have to talk about him this week, huh?
0:00:02Okay, so here's the thing.
0:00:05Every year I say over and over again, you gotta order, you gotta order, you gotta order. And every time all of you
0:00:11justifiably roll your eyes, "Oh sure, Casey, whatever, ho ho ho, we've heard this before."
0:00:15Really, this is your last warning. If you're driving
0:00:19signal, because you're an adult and you know what a damn turn signal is, signal and then pull off the road.
0:00:26Park,
0:00:28open up ATP.fm/store and take a look at our wares,
0:00:32our merchandise, that's W-A-R-E-S.
0:00:35- Oh yes. - Mind you.
0:00:35- Not our wares.
0:00:36- Not our wares.
0:00:38So yeah, so here's the spread one last time real quick.
0:00:41We've got the M1 Ultra shirt,
0:00:43which is exactly as you would expect.
0:00:44The M1 Interposer shirt, which,
0:00:47follow-up is far and away in the lead of our new offerings.
0:00:50I am very pleased by this.
0:00:52If you don't know what we're talking about,
0:00:53this is the M1 logo that we've kind of created,
0:00:56and then underneath it, it says Max,
0:01:00and then adjacent to that with a kind of interposer
0:01:02in between them is an upside down Max.
0:01:05So I am in love with this shirt,
0:01:07I am so excited to get one, I have ordered mine.
0:01:09We additionally have M1 Ultra in monochrome,
0:01:12which is a little bit cheaper,
0:01:13because we're not doing 34 passes to print them.
0:01:16And then, and that comes in many, many different colors.
0:01:19We also of course have the traditional ATP shirts,
0:01:22and we have brought back the embroidered zip hoodie as well,
0:01:26which I quite like. I actually, to be honest with you, I prefer not to have the hood on my hoodie.
0:01:30I know this is very controversial, but it's still an excellent, excellent sweatshirt/hoodie.
0:01:34And then finally we have brought back the ATP Pankglass and you might ask, "Well, what do you mean finally? You said they're mugs."
0:01:39No, no, you should have ordered. You should have listened to Casey and you should have ordered because guess what? Mugs are sold out.
0:01:45I'm so sorry. There is a slim chance we will have some extras after returns and things of that nature.
0:01:51Maybe, and we might be able to put it up later, but no promises. You should have listened to me.
0:01:56You should have pulled the car over, stepped to the side of the sidewalk, done whatever you needed to do
0:02:00to go to ATP.fm/store. Your time is running out as we record this, which is presumably
0:02:07hours before you hear it. There's only a couple days left. It will end, the store sales will end
0:02:14on the 30th of April at eight in the evening ATP time.
0:02:18So that is Saturday at 8 p.m. ATP or New York time.
0:02:23That is your last chance.
0:02:24So now is your moment.
0:02:26Signal or say, "Excuse me," and pull the car
0:02:30or pull your butt over, do whatever you gotta do.
0:02:33Go to ATP.fm/store, please, and thank you.
0:02:36- Consider buying our pint glasses.
0:02:37We've got plenty of them left.
0:02:39- And they're actually-- - You'll be seeing them
0:02:40on the on-demand store for sure,
0:02:42'cause it looks like we are not going to sell out of those.
0:02:44And the funny thing is, hand to deity of your choice.
0:02:48I love these pine glasses. - Deity?
0:02:50- Deity, is that what I meant to say?
0:02:52Sorry, whatever.
0:02:52Hand to God, fine. - Affluent.
0:02:54- Affluent.
0:02:56What is that, bezel, but that was John's.
0:02:58Anyway, so yeah, hand to a thing that you consider holy.
0:03:02These pine glasses are excellent.
0:03:03They really, really are.
0:03:04They're dishwasher safe, they're engraved, they're excellent.
0:03:06I have four of them, I haven't broken any yet,
0:03:08and I actually have ordered two more
0:03:10'cause I love them so darn much.
0:03:11So all of my pronunciation mistakes aside,
0:03:15I apologize, the offending people have been sacked,
0:03:17but please, ATP.fm/store.
0:03:20- Not one store-related thing.
0:03:22I did another blog post.
0:03:23I'm out of control.
0:03:25I'm just like, "Foast into--" - It's a whole new world.
0:03:27It's a whole new world.
0:03:28- I would say not only did you write a blog post,
0:03:30you launched a new app, sort of.
0:03:32- Kind of. (laughs)
0:03:33- Anyway, the post is about,
0:03:35the thing I do on Twitter when the store is,
0:03:37when we have the ATP store up,
0:03:38I do this thing I call Frame Game
0:03:40I post little snippets of frames from movies or TV shows and I ask you to guess what it's
0:03:45from and the first person who guesses it gets a free t-shirt in the ATP store.
0:03:50I've been doing that for several years now.
0:03:52It's a fun little game.
0:03:53I finally did a post about it to explain the game for people who don't know.
0:03:59This was really unrelated as I started doing this before the holy animus twitter thing
0:04:03where I was like, you know, I've been playing this game for years on twitter and it's kind
0:04:07It's kind of hard to follow on Twitter if you go back in time and try to look at it
0:04:10because of the way I've chose to thread the tweets together.
0:04:13It's just not easy to go back in time and look at it for even my own purposes.
0:04:18Did I ever do this movie before?
0:04:20Did somebody guess it?
0:04:22It's not easy to look at.
0:04:23I was afraid having all this stuff locked up in Twitter isn't great.
0:04:27I do the thing where you download your Twitter archive periodically too, but that just gives
0:04:30you a local copy that's hard to follow.
0:04:32So I wanted to have my own copy of the history of Frame Game, which is stupid, whatever.
0:04:38But I saved all the images in a folder on my Mac, so I'm like, I should put a web version
0:04:42of this up.
0:04:43So I did.
0:04:44So there's the post explaining it, and then there's a big shiny candy button on the post,
0:04:49just because I always need something to distract myself with when I'm doing a blog post, and
0:04:53this time it was, can I make a shiny button?
0:04:54Anyway, you follow that button and it will take you to the Frame Game history viewer.
0:04:59Is that a place where you can go and play Frame Game?
0:05:01Kind of in your head if you want but really it's a history of you or if you want to see all the frames that
0:05:06We've ever done
0:05:07There's a surprising number of things like more than 50 of them all the frames you've ever done the person who won them
0:05:13How long it took them to win because I put that in there just because it's so surprising like I think the best one is
0:05:19The I'm not gonna ruin the movie in case you haven't seen it
0:05:22But there's one with I think the smallest little piece of a frame I've ever posted it was 64 by 64 pixels
0:05:29out of like a 1920 by 1200 frame.
0:05:32That's how much I posted with the frame
0:05:33and someone got it in like a minute.
0:05:35So.
0:05:35- It looks like 48 seconds for one of them.
0:05:38- Yeah, oh, and sometimes they're kind of easy,
0:05:39but, and as I noted in the post,
0:05:41there's a good chance that people will figure out
0:05:43how to brute force this with computers,
0:05:45but I like to think that most people
0:05:46are trying to play it legit.
0:05:47So anyway, read the post, play the game, it's lots of fun.
0:05:50One other aside I want to throw in here
0:05:51for a little dev corner thing.
0:05:53I ran, when making this thing,
0:05:56which is, oh, it's a history viewer
0:05:57that shows a bunch of pictures.
0:05:58How hard could that be, right?
0:06:00I ran into a classic of layout that I've certainly
0:06:03run into before on the web.
0:06:04And I imagine people with more experience doing iOS and Mac
0:06:08apps have also run into it.
0:06:10Tell me if this sounds familiar.
0:06:11So if you go to the frame game--
0:06:13game-- hypercritical.co/frame-game,
0:06:16you'll see that it's trying to show the frame.
0:06:20And it shows a small snippet of the frame.
0:06:22And then it shows the full frame.
0:06:23And when it's showing the small snippet,
0:06:25it's in a container that's the size of the full frame.
0:06:28And of course, every full frame is different aspect ratio,
0:06:31probably because movies and TV shows
0:06:32are different aspect ratios, and partially
0:06:34because I'm taking screenshots of video players
0:06:37and I'm not pixel accurate.
0:06:38So they're all over the place.
0:06:39So I have to change the aspect ratio.
0:06:41And it's like a single page web app or whatever.
0:06:45But something that you may not know
0:06:47if you're not a long suffering web developer
0:06:49is that when you get what we call the viewport width, which
0:06:53is the width of the browser window from the left
0:06:55to the right edge, that returns the same value,
0:06:58whether the scroll bar is visible or not.
0:07:01Now, most people who run their Macs
0:07:02in a default configuration don't even have scroll bars.
0:07:04They just have that thing where like,
0:07:05oh, when you're scrolling,
0:07:06like a little lozenge appears or whatever,
0:07:08but old people like me have it set
0:07:10in the general preferences and system preferences set
0:07:12to always show scroll bars, which is a confusing setting.
0:07:15It's kind of like the cache control, no cache header,
0:07:18which tells it it's okay to cache.
0:07:19But anyway, always show scroll bars means,
0:07:23it doesn't mean that always shows the scroll bar.
0:07:24means if there's stuff that you need to scroll to,
0:07:27then it will always show the scroll bar, right?
0:07:29So if you're looking at a very long web page
0:07:31and it's way taller than your monitor,
0:07:33you will see on the right side of your browser a scroll bar,
0:07:36you know, a Mac OS X or whatever Mac OS scroll bar,
0:07:39and it will always be there.
0:07:41When that scroll bar is there,
0:07:43the viewport width does not change,
0:07:45but part of the viewport is blocked by the scroll bar.
0:07:48So what if you want to have, like I did,
0:07:50want to have a frame for a movie
0:07:52that spans from edge to edge, okay?
0:07:55Well, you could get the viewport width and you could say,
0:07:58okay, I'm going to make this image
0:08:00the same width as the viewport.
0:08:02But of course, you know, frames have a width and a height
0:08:05and an aspect ratio.
0:08:07So if you make it the same width as the viewport,
0:08:09then you can calculate what the height would be
0:08:10based on the aspect ratio, right?
0:08:12And then you make it that height.
0:08:13But oops, what if making it that height
0:08:16pushed the crap on the bottom of the page
0:08:17down below the bottom of the browser window?
0:08:19Now you need a scroll bar
0:08:21and suddenly the scroll bar appears.
0:08:22And now the scroll bar is covering some of the content,
0:08:25which also means that a horizontal scroll bar now appears
0:08:28because there's some part of the content
0:08:29that you can't see that you need
0:08:30to horizontally scroll for.
0:08:32And so you're like, okay, well, if that happens,
0:08:35I'll figure out that the scroll bar is visible
0:08:38through an annoying hacky technique.
0:08:40And then I'll shrink the picture
0:08:43so that it moves out from under the scroll bar.
0:08:45And I'll say, make the picture the viewport width
0:08:48minus the width of the scroll bar,
0:08:49which I can also calculate using some hacky ass way
0:08:51to do it, right?
0:08:53And now you think you're all clever.
0:08:54So you shrink the thing, but when you shrink it,
0:08:57of course the height shrinks too, right?
0:08:59Because you have to maintain the aspect ratio.
0:09:01What if the height shrinks so that now the content
0:09:04doesn't roll off the end of the screen
0:09:05and you don't need the vertical scroll bar anymore?
0:09:08Do you see what the problem is here?
0:09:10Right?
0:09:11So you made it too big and a vertical scroll bar appeared
0:09:13because it pushed the content down.
0:09:15Then you move it out from under the scroll bar
0:09:16and now in certain scenarios, the vertical content
0:09:19is no longer big enough to require vertical scroll,
0:09:21now you have a blank space on the right side
0:09:22of your picture.
0:09:24This is a classic layout problem of like,
0:09:27changing my metrics to avoid things that pop in
0:09:30and out on the sides, also changes the metrics,
0:09:32because you have to maintain an aspect ratio.
0:09:35And so I had fun chasing my tail about this
0:09:37and sort of cursing and saying,
0:09:38like, I don't know why I didn't think of this,
0:09:40'cause I've run into this exact same problem so many times,
0:09:42but you just forget about it.
0:09:43It's like childbirth amnesia, right?
0:09:45You just forget about the pain, right?
0:09:47And so I have to do-- any programmer who's dealt with this
0:09:51probably knows what I did, because this is not
0:09:53a really important application.
0:09:54That's just throw ugly hacks at it.
0:09:56Isn't that all of web development ever?
0:09:58No, it's all of all development ever.
0:10:01Because if you think about this, there's no actual solution.
0:10:06In this edge case, which if you get a window that
0:10:09sides just right and a content that sides just right,
0:10:11both of those settings don't work.
0:10:13One of them, it's hidden underneath the scroll bar.
0:10:15The other one is an empty space.
0:10:17There is nothing in between that you can get.
0:10:18They're both wrong, right?
0:10:20So the only way to do it is to figure out
0:10:23how much did the content have to grow
0:10:26to cause the scroll bar to become visible
0:10:28and add a blank space that's that size
0:10:30so that you make sure that when I resize this image
0:10:33and it gets a little bit shorter,
0:10:35I shove enough white space in there
0:10:37such that the vertical scroll bar,
0:10:39I'm sure the vertical scroll bar is not gonna go away.
0:10:42Then you can shrink the image and shove in the white space.
0:10:44And so don't look at the code for this, it's horrendous.
0:10:48But you know, I just got sick of it
0:10:50and just wanted to get it done.
0:10:51So while you're playing the game,
0:10:53you can appreciate the edge case layout nuances
0:10:57that I had to suffer,
0:10:58all so I could get the image to go exactly
0:11:00from one edge to the other.
0:11:01And please don't look on a red and display
0:11:03and look for half pixels because they're there.
0:11:05(laughing)
0:11:06- All right, let's do some follow up.
0:11:09The Apple Studio Display has a beta firmware
0:11:13that is available that fixes all of the camera problems.
0:11:16It is now perfect in every measurable way.
0:11:19There's nothing else to talk about.
0:11:20- Oh, I wish.
0:11:22- This is interesting that this change,
0:11:24like we were saying, like, oh, the screen runs iOS, right?
0:11:27So I guess the next time the screen is gonna get
0:11:29new quote unquote firmware is the next iOS update.
0:11:32But of course this update is part of the next macOS beta.
0:11:35Now, you know, I'm sure there's an iOS beta
0:11:37to go along with this and this,
0:11:39maybe this beta is the same build number as the iOS beta.
0:11:42We don't know yet.
0:11:42Anyway, if you want to try out if you have a studio display you want to try this out
0:11:46Which I don't recommend by the way, but if you're really desperate to try it out, it's in the Mac OS 12.4 beta
0:11:50So a friend of the show Jason Snell has
0:11:53possibly the best
0:11:56Reasonable setup to show before and afters for this a lot of people like other friend of the show James Thompson
0:12:01Had you know taking some photos before and after or compared them to like an iMac Pro or what have you but?
0:12:07Jason still has a review unit which he didn't update and then updated his his actual unit or perhaps vice versa
0:12:13So he has two studio displays sitting right next to each other one at one updated one not and so he put a video on
0:12:20YouTube where he filmed and linked up, you know the both of them and have has them side by side
0:12:25So I am biased because I'm looking at a studio display and it's in my best interest not to think it's a piece of garbage
0:12:32Because I've been waiting for it for like six years. So consider your source here
0:12:35I have not installed the firmware update,
0:12:37but of course I've looked at all these different,
0:12:40you know, examples and whatnot,
0:12:41and it's not great, I mean, it's not fixed
0:12:45by any stretch of the imagination.
0:12:47I do think it's better from what I can tell,
0:12:49but it's not fixed, but I was talking with Jason briefly
0:12:52on Twitter, and having had only one experience
0:12:57with, what's the, not the front and center,
0:13:00that's your thing, what's the little--
0:13:02- Center stage.
0:13:03- Thank you, center stage, I couldn't think
0:13:04darn name. So I've had one experience with center stage and I loved it. I thought it was amazing. I
0:13:09thought it made being on a call when people are flipping in and out of the call, you know, just
0:13:14that much better. And perhaps if I was just sitting on Zoom by myself all day, I would have a very
0:13:18different opinion about it. But for my needs, I think I would take an imperfect camera with center
0:13:25stage over a flawless camera without it. I am not saying that anyone has to agree with me. In fact,
0:13:30In fact, I bet most people don't.
0:13:31But for me, I'm willing to make that trade,
0:13:34and I am happy to see that this is getting better,
0:13:38but I mean, I never expected this webcam
0:13:39to be particularly stupendous.
0:13:41I wish it was better.
0:13:42I think it should be better,
0:13:45especially for a company that seems to pride themselves
0:13:47on being so great at imaging and so on,
0:13:49but it doesn't look like this is fixed yet.
0:13:52And now people are starting to wonder,
0:13:53well, is this really hardware?
0:13:54Is this as good as it's gonna get?
0:13:56And I don't know, it's hard to say.
0:13:59I mean, I think it's pretty clear that the hardware here
0:14:01is very limited.
0:14:03When this first hit the news, whenever
0:14:06that was a few weeks back or a couple months back,
0:14:10my guess then was like, I think the software might
0:14:12be able to be tweaked a little, but you have this relatively
0:14:17low-resolution camera that's being cropped significantly
0:14:20to achieve center stage.
0:14:22And it's at quite a distance from people
0:14:25compared to the iPad that has similar hardware.
0:14:27So it just seems like this was doomed to always be pretty mediocre to poor.
0:14:33And so far this bears that out, that the tweaks that we're seeing now are seemingly fairly
0:14:39minor.
0:14:40And I think one of my favorite comparisons was, and I mentioned it a second ago, the
0:14:44James Thompson comparison.
0:14:45This is our friend who makes PCALC, you know, great programmer and a great member of our
0:14:50community.
0:14:51And James, he posted the before and after from the old software and the new software
0:14:54here.
0:14:55that him posted the similar shot from his iMac Pro
0:14:59built-in webcam, which may I remind you is I believe
0:15:03a something like a two megapixel.
0:15:04It's a very low-resolution camera.
0:15:06It's from 2017 and has no super fancy image processing.
0:15:11It probably has whatever kind of basic stuff
0:15:13would come in any webcam, any commodity thing
0:15:16up to at least a couple years ago.
0:15:18So no ML stuff.
0:15:20So in my opinion, and many others who saw this,
0:15:24The iMac Pro built-in webcam looks way better
0:15:27than the studio webcam, before or after.
0:15:30And it's not that it looks super great,
0:15:33but it seems like it was working with more
0:15:36on the hardware side and didn't need to do
0:15:39so much software processing to get it to look right.
0:15:42And there's only so much you can do in software
0:15:46when you have a little tiny sensor and a little tiny lens,
0:15:49and especially with these new center stage cameras,
0:15:52then you're further cropping it down
0:15:54to do the center stage effect.
0:15:56I think center stage in this context was a mistake.
0:16:00It makes a little more sense on the iPad
0:16:02in the sense that again, you're holding it closer to you,
0:16:05it is more consumer targeted,
0:16:06you might have those situations where like,
0:16:08you know the family's coming in and out,
0:16:09like they demoed in the background.
0:16:10But for a professional display like this
0:16:12that's mostly being bought for workplaces
0:16:14and power users and nerds like us,
0:16:17I don't think center stage is necessary
0:16:19and it's definitely not necessary
0:16:21if it comes at the expense of whatever hardware resolution
0:16:25is necessary to have a decent picture.
0:16:27And in this case, it seems very clear,
0:16:29putting this camera in here was a mistake.
0:16:33And if you look at the built-in webcams
0:16:35of all of Apple's recent hardware,
0:16:37I mean, look, they're never good.
0:16:38They're clearly relying very heavily on image processing,
0:16:43in all of them, including the brand new MacBook Pros.
0:16:45People also say, why don't you put the iPhone camera,
0:16:48you know, the iPhone front camera even
0:16:50in the MacBook Pro cameras.
0:16:52And you know, the answer there usually is depth
0:16:54of those screenlets being very, very limited.
0:16:56And you know, we had to get the notch now
0:16:58and you don't want the notch to be bigger
0:16:59and stuff like that.
0:17:00But again, in a desktop display,
0:17:03you have significantly more depth.
0:17:06Now, they did have to keep the margins thin
0:17:08to make it look nice and look modern.
0:17:10So agreed, you know, there's not a lot of like depth
0:17:13or not a lot of like width and height
0:17:15in the screen bezel that I put it,
0:17:16but I have to imagine there was better hardware available
0:17:19that could have fit, and they just picked wrong here.
0:17:22They just made the wrong choice.
0:17:24This webcam and this display was the wrong choice,
0:17:27and if they have to give up center stage
0:17:29to have a better one,
0:17:30I think that's the path they should have taken.
0:17:32- I think it's kinda weird that, as you noted,
0:17:34Apple has always had crappy cameras,
0:17:36crappy front-facing cameras in all its products.
0:17:39We used to complain about the two megapixel
0:17:40one and the iMac Pro, we were just saying it was good.
0:17:42It just seemed like they didn't care about them that much.
0:17:45We didn't think they would make it worse.
0:17:47- Yeah, same thing for the MacBook Air or the MacBook Pro.
0:17:49They have like a 640 by something camera
0:17:52in like the original MacBook Air.
0:17:54They were always just kind of not good behind the times.
0:17:57And we'd complain about them and nothing would happen.
0:17:59And I think the silver lining
0:18:00to this Apple Studio display thing
0:18:01is I think this is the first time
0:18:03that sort of the Apple tech review community
0:18:06has latched onto the idea that the camera sucks
0:18:09in such a way that Apple might notice.
0:18:10'Cause we all said it about the other ones.
0:18:12Like, oh, the new laptops are out.
0:18:14Oh, does it still have a non-HD camera?
0:18:17We meant like, is it not up to 1080p yet or whatever?
0:18:19Like we'd make these snarky comments,
0:18:21but it was never like a story, a big story.
0:18:24And the studio display, the front-facing camera
0:18:26has suddenly become a story.
0:18:27So I have to imagine, especially with the Mac hardware team
0:18:32that has produced the last few years of products,
0:18:34that they have taken notice
0:18:36that we all think their cameras suck.
0:18:38And the next version of anything that they put out
0:18:41that starting from now, right?
0:18:43so that's probably three years from now,
0:18:44like whatever the pipeline is where they are making
0:18:47decisions about future products now,
0:18:49I hope that they will say, oh, we don't want a repeat
0:18:51of the Apple Studio display thing,
0:18:52so let's actually put a decent camera in this.
0:18:55That's my hope anyway, we'll circle back in three years
0:18:57and see how it is.
0:18:58And the second thing is about this software update,
0:19:00I still continue to think that the processing they're doing
0:19:03in software is not as good as it could be, right?
0:19:07Because it's not as if we're looking at it and saying,
0:19:11oh, there's not enough light or it's too noisy or whatever.
0:19:14If you look at James Thompson's thing,
0:19:16some people were looking at the histograms of them
0:19:18and someone said, did they not have the iPhone camera
0:19:22image processing team look at this?
0:19:23'Cause the histogram is crap.
0:19:25You haven't processed it to,
0:19:27you could do a better job of processing this,
0:19:29it wouldn't look as gross.
0:19:30It still wouldn't look great,
0:19:31like it's not a good camera or whatever.
0:19:32And by the way, one of their solutions to like,
0:19:34oh, we have a big fisheye camera
0:19:36that you're taking a small crop of,
0:19:38they just took a bigger crop.
0:19:40So it makes it look less bad because you're not sort of
0:19:43throwing out more pixels.
0:19:44Of course, you are smaller in the frame than you were before
0:19:47and you can decide if that's a feature or benefit.
0:19:48But that's one solution.
0:19:52Like, okay, we'll just zoom back out.
0:19:53So now you can't see how ugly it is.
0:19:54But the processing, especially on James Thompson's one,
0:19:57looks off.
0:19:58If you look at Jason Snell, I agree he has the best example
0:20:01because he's literally like in front of both cameras at once
0:20:03so he gets to move and you can see how the camera moves
0:20:05around or whatever.
0:20:06And the one with the firmware update or the one without,
0:20:09at various times look very similar to each other.
0:20:12So I don't think it's a particularly big change.
0:20:15I still think they could do better with better firmware.
0:20:19And I do wonder if it's like, again,
0:20:21like I was saying in the camera, I think a policy choice,
0:20:24where they've decided that the most important thing
0:20:27is to have every pixel on a human being's face
0:20:29as bright as possible, even if it makes them look
0:20:31like a wax death mask.
0:20:33I think that's the wrong choice,
0:20:34but that sure seems like what they're trying to do,
0:20:36like eliminate shadows on people's faces.
0:20:39And they don't need to because like in James Thompson he had a ring light on him.
0:20:42He had plenty of light on his face and the image processing was like I've detected the
0:20:45human face.
0:20:46Brighten that sucker up because I guess most people like you know in front of their webcams
0:20:51and they all otherwise look like they're in a dark dungeon so that the processing is really
0:20:54trying to brighten the face up.
0:20:56They need to detect that they don't need to make certain faces brighter because they're
0:20:59already bright enough.
0:21:00So anyway we'll see in future firmware updates but yeah if you're buying this display for
0:21:05camera you're gonna get what you're gonna get and you're probably gonna be upset.
0:21:11Meanwhile, you know, when I first got the XDR, which as you know does not have a
0:21:15built-in webcam, you know, I bought the little Logitech magnetically attaching
0:21:20thing that goes on top of it. As I've said before, that's a pretty good webcam
0:21:24and when I first set that up I was kind of disappointed that I had to look at
0:21:29this giant black blob on top of my monitor all the time. But I've gotten
0:21:34used to it now and I'm really happy that I have a really good webcam for whenever I have
0:21:37to appear on a zoom call. I kind of wish like maybe, you know, the webcam now is pretty
0:21:43important of a feature and that seems to be only growing over time. You know, there's
0:21:48obviously a big a big bump during COVID of everyone all of a sudden working from home
0:21:52who wasn't before. But I think obviously a lot of that's going to stick around, even
0:21:56as COVID kind of, you know, goes into an endemic and waning state where a lot of people go
0:22:01go back to work.
0:22:01So to have designed this product,
0:22:04which chances are this studio display
0:22:06was probably designed almost entirely
0:22:09or entirely during the COVID era.
0:22:12And so to have designed this product
0:22:14with a really crappy webcam situation
0:22:17in this day and age, it was a misstep.
0:22:21And the more I look at the studio display,
0:22:23the more I think, you know, they put it in like,
0:22:25you know, the A13, it runs iOS, it's kind of buggy.
0:22:29I'm kind of thinking like, hmm,
0:22:31did they have to make this product,
0:22:33did they have to design this with all this complexity?
0:22:36Did they have to give it a whole like phone OS
0:22:38in there to control stuff?
0:22:39Did they have to do this fancy center stage thing
0:22:42with this crap hardware when the iMac Pro
0:22:46with its five year old basic webcam looks better than it?
0:22:50The XDR works as a perfectly great display
0:22:52without having to boot an OS that occasionally crashes.
0:22:55Like I just, I have to wonder like,
0:22:56Was all of this weird engineering they did in this
0:22:59the right choice when what they really just needed to do
0:23:03was make a smaller XDR?
0:23:05- I think it was the right choice to have all the features
0:23:07that it has, good speakers, camera, whatever.
0:23:10I mean, obviously we just wish they were better,
0:23:11but that's what you want out of,
0:23:13it's more of a middle of the road $1600 monitor thing.
0:23:17The really expensive one doesn't have any extraneous crap
0:23:19'cause you just, you know, you just buy that stuff,
0:23:22you're gonna have external speakers,
0:23:23you're gonna have a fancy external camera.
0:23:24Like it makes more sense on the pro end
0:23:26and this thing.
0:23:27And also for them doing the iOS thing,
0:23:29that was probably the fastest, cheapest way to do it.
0:23:32Because I think about it, if they didn't do that, OK,
0:23:34so we're going to have a camera, we're going to have speakers.
0:23:35And we want to do center stage.
0:23:37I can imagine them wanting to do that.
0:23:39Pretend the camera was good.
0:23:40We would all be saying, great, center stage is cool.
0:23:44How do you control center stage?
0:23:46You have to have some way to thread through your M-whatever
0:23:50chip in your Mac, and all of its image processing,
0:23:52and all of those smarts, and all that code that you wrote
0:23:55now has to control a camera that is not in the same piece of hardware as the
0:23:59system on a chip but is actually connected externally and so you have to
0:24:02write drivers to do all that and it's just like the the shortest distance to
0:24:07getting something working is that we already have an incomplete system that
0:24:09does this just put an a13 in there and then the a13 acts like it would in an
0:24:13iPad the cameras in the same case and the speakers are there and it's like
0:24:15it's it seems like it might even be less work I don't know probably people who
0:24:19worked on this project are laughing at me now but it seems to me that could
0:24:21the conceivable would be less work to do what they did.
0:24:24Like, because you don't have to do as much brand new stuff.
0:24:27You already have the pieces that know how to do
0:24:29the things you want it to do.
0:24:30And then it's a smaller amount of communication
0:24:33between the host Mac and the things there.
0:24:35If it wasn't less work, if it was in fact more work,
0:24:38and it's buggier, then it's definitely the wrong choice.
0:24:40But I look at this and I think, you know,
0:24:42it's part spin engineering.
0:24:44And part spin engineering is, you know,
0:24:46a dirty word in the car industry, but it shouldn't always be
0:24:48because if you have something that works, you know,
0:24:50If you have door handles that work on your cars,
0:24:52you don't need to reinvent the door handle with every car.
0:24:54Just put the good door handle on every car, it's fine.
0:24:56- We're talking about him already.
0:24:57- Yeah, right? - Yeah.
0:24:59(upbeat music)
0:25:00- We are sponsored this week by Sanity.
0:25:02What is Sanity, you ask?
0:25:03It's a content platform that powers exceptional
0:25:06digital experiences for many companies,
0:25:08including National Geographic, Figma, Nike, and more.
0:25:12Developers, designers, content professionals,
0:25:14and digital leaders rely on Sanity to collaborate
0:25:17in real time, ship new experiences quickly,
0:25:19and delight their customers with rich media content.
0:25:22It takes less than 10 minutes to get set up and running
0:25:24with Sanity, and then your content will flow across APIs,
0:25:27and there's no limit to how and where you can display it
0:25:30on any of your channels, websites, mobile apps, kiosks,
0:25:33anywhere you need it to go.
0:25:34You can use Sanity for free for low-scale projects,
0:25:37and it's pay-as-you-go if you need more API usage after that.
0:25:40And they have great price plans and features for larger
0:25:43businesses as well.
0:25:44So now let's talk about their inaugural conference happening
0:25:47this May called Structured Content 2022.
0:25:50Teams from around the world will be coming together
0:25:52to discover new approaches to creating rich, connected
0:25:54digital experiences.
0:25:56There will be a mix of talks, panels, and conversations,
0:25:59covering topics like foundations for building a content
0:26:01system, real-life applications for structured content
0:26:03from well-known brands like AT&T or The New York Times,
0:26:06proven collaboration methods to better connect everyone
0:26:08who works on content.
0:26:10And here's a few of the sessions, for example.
0:26:12Reflections on the Future of the Web,
0:26:13with digital leaders Guillermo Roque from Vercel
0:26:16and Michael Sippy from outside.
0:26:18Overcoming the challenges of digital transformation
0:26:20with Sanity CEO Magnus Hillestad and AT&T's Director
0:26:23of Technology Strategic Platforms Scott Gents.
0:26:26Improv consulting.
0:26:27A panel of content strategy consultants
0:26:28will improvise solutions to real life problems.
0:26:30That's pretty cool.
0:26:31So there's more than one way to attend as well.
0:26:33You can join in person in San Francisco on May 24th to 25th,
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0:26:42so if you want to attend, be sure to reserve your spot soon.
0:26:45To learn more about Sanity and the Structured Content 2022
0:26:49conference, go to sanity.io/atp.
0:26:53That's sanity.io/atp.
0:26:55Thank you so much to Sanity and the Structured Content 2022
0:26:58conference for sponsoring our show.
0:27:00[MUSIC PLAYING]
0:27:04Tell me, Jon, about your Sonos Roam power button.
0:27:06I was complaining about my Sonos Roam,
0:27:07that I didn't like the power button because to turn
0:27:09the stupid thing off, you needed to hold it down
0:27:11for a ridiculous amount of time and listen
0:27:13through a series of beeps.
0:27:14and it was hard to hold the button
0:27:15'cause the button was very skinny
0:27:16and it was on the edge of a triangle
0:27:17and you had to just keep holding it and holding it
0:27:19and it was terrible.
0:27:21Anyway, brilliant thingy, I noted on Twitter
0:27:23that the Sonos Roam software was updated a few months ago
0:27:26and now a quick press of the button on the back
0:27:28turns it off, so I updated my firmware
0:27:30and lo and behold, I can turn it off by pressing the button
0:27:32and it immediately turns off, so that's much nicer.
0:27:35The plus, minus and play buttons on the end still suck though.
0:27:39(laughing)
0:27:40- And then tangentially related, Patrick Niemeyer writes,
0:27:43"Hearing Jon talk about the power button
0:27:44on his shower speaker reminded me of a topic that I can't believe I've never heard him
0:27:47discuss. The fact that a few generations ago the lock button on the iPhone went from being
0:27:51instantaneous to more of a suggestion. It currently takes almost a second for the phone
0:27:55to lock after hitting the button, during which time the screen and touch input are fully
0:28:00active. I find myself constantly falling into the following trap. I prepare to pocket by
0:28:04making a quick volume adjustment, then lock the phone, and attempt to put it in my pocket,
0:28:08however in the movement to put the phone down I accidentally swipe down the on-screen volume
0:28:11gadget and mute the phone. Is this because the lock button became all things to all people?
0:28:17Because it used to be that the lock button was the lock button, but now it, well, even
0:28:21with guided access turned off, or sorry, accessibility turned off, you still have like Apple Pay
0:28:27and Siri if you hold it down. And so I think this, that's what this is, is because when
0:28:31you hit the button once, there needs to be some amount of time for Apple to wait and
0:28:36say, "Are they hitting it a second time? You know, is this really a double tap?" And we've
0:28:39only seen the first of the two taps. And so there's no way for them to divine what it
0:28:46is you're going to do. They just have to wait it out and wait whatever the amount of time
0:28:48is to time out, if you will, and know, "Oh, that was definitely a single tap we should
0:28:53lock now."
0:28:54That's exactly right. And so if you think about the different, you know, holding it
0:28:57down, they don't have to wait really for that. As soon as you release the button, they know
0:29:00you're not holding it down. But they do have a delay to see, are you double-clicking it
0:29:06or triple clicking it or just single clicking it.
0:29:08So the interesting thing is,
0:29:10if you disable the things that it might be waiting
0:29:13for double or triple clicks for,
0:29:14so that's Apple Pay,
0:29:16and if you have the accessibility shortcut
0:29:18as the triple click,
0:29:20if you turn those things off,
0:29:21which you can do in settings,
0:29:23and you hit the button, it sleeps instantly.
0:29:25So if you care that much about that being a thing
0:29:29and if you can live without double tap to Apple Pay,
0:29:33now I actually, I tried this,
0:29:34And I couldn't figure out how to go
0:29:37to that Apple Pay screen otherwise.
0:29:38Like I opened up the Wallet app.
0:29:40- That's what I was gonna ask, if I turn this off,
0:29:42then how do I Apple Pay?
0:29:43- Yeah, you go into Wallet
0:29:44and then you tap on a card, right?
0:29:45- No, it didn't bring up the,
0:29:48well, I don't know, maybe I did it wrong,
0:29:49but I tried that and it didn't bring up
0:29:50like the payment confirmation.
0:29:52- Oh no, you're right.
0:29:53- Yes, anyway, if you turn off those things,
0:29:55you can get instantaneous sleep again.
0:29:58But yeah, unfortunately, you'd have to like
0:29:59never use Apple Pay.
0:30:00- There's gotta be a way.
0:30:01- Oh, apparently the chat's saying
0:30:03that if you hover the phone over the active NFC terminal
0:30:07at the store, then it will prompt it to open up that screen.
0:30:11So you can't pre-approve it with your face,
0:30:13but you can at least open it up,
0:30:15move over the terminal first, then Face ID approve it.
0:30:17- Huh.
0:30:18- I do wonder if, for the double tap thing,
0:30:22if they could immediately sleep,
0:30:24but then if you hit the button again
0:30:26within the double tap interval, unsleep it,
0:30:28and do Apple Pay, you know what I mean?
0:30:30- Oh, that's interesting, yeah.
0:30:31- That is wild, I had no idea that
0:30:32That was the only obvious way to get into payments.
0:30:36That's very interesting.
0:30:37Anyway, Apple's self-service repair site is live.
0:30:40So if you recall, they announced--
0:30:41I don't know, it was a few months ago or something like
0:30:43that-- that you will be able to buy parts and repair things
0:30:49yourself if you so desire.
0:30:50And apparently, that has gone live, particularly
0:30:53for the iPhone.
0:30:54I don't believe there's anything for the Mac yet.
0:30:56And the website is weird.
0:31:00It is super weird.
0:31:02It's selfservicerepair.com and it looks super janky.
0:31:07I don't know what's going on here, but it's weird.
0:31:11And apparently it's version, what is this?
0:31:14It says on the bottom, on the bottom left,
0:31:16it's Spot version 8145.5.
0:31:20I feel like I'm looking at the little pie symbol
0:31:21in the corner now.
0:31:22And there's a little doggy in the icon, which is very cute.
0:31:25But anyway, I guess they just outsource this whole thing,
0:31:27this whole website, which is super weird,
0:31:29but you can go ahead and order parts.
0:31:32You can look at the repair manuals,
0:31:33and you can get general info, and so on and so forth.
0:31:36So that is something you can now do.
0:31:38Is it something that I would do?
0:31:39Heck no, because that scares the poop out of me.
0:31:42Trying to repair my phone, just the thought of it
0:31:44sounds terrible in my personal opinion.
0:31:45But I am genuinely glad that this
0:31:46exists for people who are not scaredy cats like me.
0:31:49Steven Hackett did an investigation
0:31:50of this whole external website and looked
0:31:52at the company that did it.
0:31:54Apparently, they've done some other work for Apple as well.
0:31:56We'll link to his blog post where he explains it.
0:31:58The service manuals themselves are on Apple's website.
0:32:01and we'll put a link to that, it's just support.apple.com/manual/repair-manual.
0:32:07And the website's fine.
0:32:08Like, the complaint is it doesn't look like it was Apple designed, which is for sure,
0:32:11it just looks like someone used, you know.
0:32:13It's a simple, it's perfectly fine, it's a perfectly reasonable website.
0:32:17It's got three boxes with icons and buttons and you know, it's like a template from a
0:32:22bootstrap website, I don't know.
0:32:24It's not terrible, but it certainly doesn't look like an Apple site.
0:32:27And it's not, to Steven's point, it's not an apple.com anywhere.
0:32:32It's not self-service-repair.com, it's self-service-repair.com, right?
0:32:35So it's not even an Apple's domain.
0:32:37You could be forgiven for thinking it's some kind of weird scam site or like not affiliated
0:32:41with Apple anyway, but it totally is.
0:32:43This is Apple's official, like, we'll link to the press release.
0:32:47Apple's press release links to this site.
0:32:48This is not a scam, right?
0:32:50And that I feel like is a slight problem for Apple, but on the other hand, I bet there's
0:32:54probably all sorts of not particularly nice looking websites
0:32:58that you have to go to if you're an Apple authorized dealer
0:33:01to deal with stuff.
0:33:02I mean, Steven obviously knows about these things
0:33:03having worked in an Apple store at least,
0:33:05but those ones still probably are under
0:33:08the apple.com umbrella.
0:33:09But yeah, if you want to dive in
0:33:11and start repairing your stuff,
0:33:12if your thing is one of the supported devices,
0:33:15check it out.
0:33:17- All right, moving right along.
0:33:18There's been a lot of discussion,
0:33:19mostly led by John Gruber about
0:33:22Would Apple do this WWDC thing inside the ring of Apple Park?
0:33:27And I think it's a very reasonable--
0:33:29- How is that discussion led by John Gruber?
0:33:30We recorded an episode where we said the exact same thing
0:33:32before he released his, so--
0:33:34- Yeah, but he really deep dove, did a deep dive, whatever.
0:33:37- We just said the same thing.
0:33:38We did just longer and later.
0:33:40I reject this notion.
0:33:41We have primacy about whether or not
0:33:43people are allowed in the ring.
0:33:44- So having nothing to do with John Gruber at all,
0:33:46copyright 2022, John Syracuse.
0:33:48- Copyright ATP, you were all there.
0:33:50We were talking about it, remember?
0:33:51"Hey, would they let people into the ring?
0:33:52"Doesn't it seem weird?
0:33:53"Have they ever had people in the ring?
0:33:54"That was us.
0:33:55"It was this show."
0:33:56(laughing)
0:33:57- Moving right along.
0:33:59- One thing.
0:33:59I just wanna remember it from one thing.
0:34:00- Just wanna be remembered for one thing.
0:34:03- I just wanna remember two episodes ago
0:34:05when we talked about people being let in to Apple Park ring
0:34:07and then the talk show episode came out a week later
0:34:08and everyone's like, "Led by John Gruber?"
0:34:10No, no, Casey.
0:34:11- Two episodes ago, it was like three months.
0:34:13We haven't recorded in forever.
0:34:14Anyway, all right, so regardless of who it was,
0:34:18gosh darn it, people familiar with the matter
0:34:21have been wondering about whether or not Apple would bring civilians, regular schmoes, into
0:34:27the inside the ring of Apple Park. And Anonymous wrote us the following, "You guys wondered
0:34:32if there had been any large events where visitors were able to go into the Apple Park Ring Courtyard.
0:34:37There was a series of Friends and Family Saturdays in summer of 2019. Employees could bring up
0:34:40to four people, the theaters, some lobbies, and some of the inner and outer hallway of
0:34:43the ground floor. Nearly all of the green space inside and outside the ring and all
0:34:47All of giant Cafe Max were accessible.
0:34:50The majority of staff keeping people going where they were allowed seemed to be contract
0:34:53event staff that had experience working with other Apple events like WWDC and Keynotes.
0:34:57Some people brought picnics, they served gelato pops (Apple doesn't do things as plebeian
0:35:01as the pros and novelties, you get an ice cream truck), and a beverage I don't recall.
0:35:06Officially no photos were allowed, but Twitter had plenty of photos from the days before
0:35:08I went.
0:35:09Unofficially, the staff seemed to direct people toward photos of outside spaces rather than
0:35:13inside spaces.
0:35:14So apparently it has happened.
0:35:17Yeah, and I think the Cafe Max thing answers another question of like, how are they going
0:35:22to feed people and where will people go to the bathroom and stuff like that?
0:35:24Apparently they do have a subset of the the the ring and the space in the building, you
0:35:31know, the inside of the ring and also the space in the actual building where they allow
0:35:34the public at least allowed the public to go once or twice that they can sort of cordon
0:35:38off with people and feel safe enough that, you know, there's places for people to be
0:35:43taken care of but that they're not going to just wander into the ring and you know.
0:35:46All the doors are locked in there anyway with key cards and stuff so it's not,
0:35:50I don't think it's a real problem but I also don't think they want strange people just wandering
0:35:53around. Indeed and then Benedict Evans tweeted, "An idle observation. I have no idea what this
0:35:59kind of fencing costs but it's very not cheap and it extends around the entire Apple Park site."
0:36:05And so I've not seen this in person but judging on this picture, I'll paint you a word picture here,
0:36:09It seems like there are many, many, many vertical metal rods,
0:36:14each of which I would guesstimate is like four
0:36:16to six feet tall, but they're completely freestanding.
0:36:19Like if you think of an average fence,
0:36:20you would put some posts down and then have some stuff
0:36:22linking from one post to the other,
0:36:24but you wouldn't put a post every six inches,
0:36:27which is apparently what they've done here.
0:36:29Like there must be either like a river of concrete
0:36:33that went through the ground, I don't know.
0:36:35- Yeah, I'm guessing they're bound together
0:36:37underground somehow.
0:36:38There's something supporting them.
0:36:40- But this is like the most expensive kind of fence
0:36:43you can ever imagine you're making.
0:36:44Very Apple-like, right?
0:36:45So in case you're having trouble picturing,
0:36:47I'll put a link to his tweet in the show notes
0:36:49with the photo, but it's like, you know like the bars
0:36:51of a jail cell, just vertical bars?
0:36:53Like that, but they just come out of the ground.
0:36:55There are no horizontal members whatsoever.
0:36:57It's just vertical bars.
0:36:59- Yeah, nothing bridges across the top.
0:37:01- Or the bottom.
0:37:02- Well, as far as we can see.
0:37:03- It's just a vertical bar.
0:37:05Now here's the thing about just vertical bars like this.
0:37:06Now first of all, yes, obviously there needs to be
0:37:08something underground to make it so these aren't just stuck into the earth
0:37:10they're probably in cement or something but the second thing is the precision
0:37:13required to make this fence not look terrible it's extremely high because
0:37:19these sticks are like probably look like they're at least six or seven feet tall
0:37:22the tops of these things need to be even with each other so the fence makes a
0:37:26line and not like a wavy thing right every one of these sticks needs to be in
0:37:30concrete and aligned up just so the correct distance from each other and
0:37:33they and it needs to be sturdy enough that you couldn't just go and like pull
0:37:37the tops of the bars apart, but think of the leverage
0:37:39that you have at the top of those bars.
0:37:40If these are stiff, you know, metal bars,
0:37:43just do the math and the physics,
0:37:45of how much leverage do you have down there?
0:37:46You have to not be able to bend them apart,
0:37:48and they have to not be able to be bent forward
0:37:50or backwards, and if this goes around all of Apple Park,
0:37:54how much does this cost per like, linear foot?
0:37:57I don't even understand, and I don't think it's any more
0:38:00particularly secure than any other kind of fence,
0:38:02'cause you know, you throw a carpet over this thing,
0:38:04and hop over like they do in every action movie,
0:38:06it's not like there's barbed wire on it, right?
0:38:08It's just as susceptible to hopping over
0:38:10by a bunch of kids or like climb a tree and hop over.
0:38:12They see the tree that's over there.
0:38:14If there's a tree near the fence,
0:38:15you climb up the tree, hop over it.
0:38:16Kids know how to get over fences.
0:38:17But it just boggles my mind.
0:38:19This is a Johnny Ive special.
0:38:22I would like a fence that looks like this.
0:38:23And they say, "Johnny, this is gonna cost
0:38:25"$250,000 per linear foot."
0:38:27It's like, I don't care, just do it.
0:38:29- Well, I mean, in all fairness,
0:38:31I've been fortunate, maybe, as a question mark
0:38:35at the end of that enough in life
0:38:36to have once purchased custom windows.
0:38:38And oh my God.
0:38:42And so if you look at the amount of glass
0:38:45that is custom made in Apple Park,
0:38:47this fence is a drop in the bucket
0:38:51compared to what they must have spent on glass, trust me.
0:38:55- Well, I mean, so the big doors on the cafeteria,
0:38:57like the height of the whole building
0:38:58and they go out or whatever,
0:39:00I think those are only a few million each
0:39:02and maybe this fence is more expensive than those two doors.
0:39:05Maybe, maybe.
0:39:06I mean, there's certainly, you know, if it's going through on the whole site, like,
0:39:08they had, like, how many miles of, like, it's probably, like, a couple of miles
0:39:11worth of fence, right?
0:39:12Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
0:39:13So if you were in the fencing industry, maybe this is just a standard kind of fence that
0:39:16we don't know, and there's been an advance in fencing technology that makes it cheap
0:39:20to manufacture, and it's actually not that hard to line these things up.
0:39:22Like, maybe they're all made in a factory, and they just come and you just bury them
0:39:25in units or whatever, but it looks expensive.
0:39:28It looks fancy and expensive and maybe not particularly functional.
0:39:32So very Apple-like.
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0:41:35All right, a very quick follow up. I had made offhanded comment, I think early on in the
0:41:42last episode that I was not a fan of the Radiohead song "Creep" and I think John, you were giving
0:41:46me a little bit of flack about that. Dozens of people, dozens I tell you, wrote in to
0:41:51to say I too love Radiohead and I dislike the song Creep,
0:41:54but most interestingly of all, my friend Spencer,
0:41:57a friend of the show really, Spencer Wohlers wrote in
0:41:59and said, "Hey, Tom York, the lead singer and songwriter
0:42:02"of Radiohead also hates Creep."
0:42:04And so I'll put a link into a short article
0:42:09that Spencer had sent that basically talks about
0:42:11how he always thought it was kind of garbage too.
0:42:13So there, Jon.
0:42:14- Bands always hate their big breakout hit
0:42:16because they just get sick of it.
0:42:17I can feel them.
0:42:19I think if you're asked any band how much they like the song that made them famous, they're probably over it now, too.
0:42:24Yeah, imagine like being Tham York and having to go to any party and like "Hey man, play creep, here's a guitar."
0:42:30Like it's just yeah, and yes, I know about the whole piano man comic or whatever the was it on The Onion or something?
0:42:36I don't know. I have no idea what you're talking about, but that's fine. All right. Why don't you tell me about your game streaming setup, please?
0:42:41Yes, so I mentioned I believe it was last show or the one before that. I was looking at some new
0:42:47video capture hardware and trying to get some video capture recommendations for the Team
0:42:52Arment video game streaming setup that we have here, where there are three gaming PCs
0:42:57being captured over HDMI, three webcams, and they're all shown on screen at once in like,
0:43:02you know, three video screens or three webcams. So there's six little viewports being shown
0:43:06on screen at once for our game streaming for our family.
0:43:08And to jump in real quick, I gotta say, we got a lot of feedback about this and more
0:43:12More than possibly any other time in ATP's history, the feedback was universal about
0:43:18Blackmagic stuff.
0:43:19And you can tell me whether or not it's good or not, but it seems like anyone who had touched
0:43:23Blackmagic stuff was like, "Oh, this stuff is great."
0:43:25Most.
0:43:26We did get a couple who said it had some issues, but for the most part.
0:43:30So quickly, before I go to the hardware route, I did mention briefly that I looked into NDI.
0:43:36This is basically sending video and audio over the network, running software on the
0:43:40the PCs to do capture and stuff in software.
0:43:43And I tried that, we had a couple of people write in,
0:43:47actually more than a couple, who wrote in
0:43:48with experience with NDI.
0:43:50Basically for me to use NDI to do all this over the network,
0:43:55it probably would require me to hardwire
0:43:58the gaming PCs with ethernet,
0:44:00and have possibly even like 2.5G or 10G ethernet,
0:44:05because the data rates for the amount of data
0:44:08I'd be capturing would be pretty high.
0:44:10I might still do that at some point,
0:44:11or maybe I'll do it for part of it,
0:44:12like the webcams maybe,
0:44:14'cause they're much lower bandwidth stuff.
0:44:15But I don't know, that seems more finicky
0:44:18than I wanna get into right now.
0:44:20Because the thing is, what I want here out of the setup
0:44:23is when we want to stream,
0:44:25to be able to basically turn it on and have it just work.
0:44:29However, because the setup is massive
0:44:31and lives on our kitchen counter basically,
0:44:34I have to be able to take it apart sometimes
0:44:37and put stuff away, and then take it back out,
0:44:39and have it work somehow without having to like
0:44:42reset up a bunch of stuff.
0:44:44So the more complex it is, the more finicky it is,
0:44:46the more things can change between invocations,
0:44:49the less appealing that is to me.
0:44:51And also, the more stuff is required to be out
0:44:55and to be used and to be bought and everything.
0:44:57Again, that also makes it less appealing to me.
0:44:59So anyway, so NDI I'm keeping on the back burner
0:45:02as an option, but right now I'm not using it.
0:45:04By far and away, the top recommendation
0:45:07was the Blackmagic, I don't know if it's ATEM or A-T-E-M,
0:45:11however you say that, ATEM Mini Pro.
0:45:14This was by far and away the most common recommendation.
0:45:16What this is is basically a little hardware video switcher
0:45:20and compositor thing and it has a bunch of great features.
0:45:23You can basically have it do,
0:45:26and the feature I need is called multi-view,
0:45:27where you show different view ports
0:45:29all at once on the screen.
0:45:30So the ATEM Mini Pro could show the three,
0:45:34it has four input multi-view.
0:45:36So it could theoretically show the three big game screens
0:45:40and then it can be a USB input to the computer running OBS.
0:45:45And so I could theoretically have that be the main input
0:45:48on the main background of the OBS composition
0:45:50and then put in the webcams myself manually.
0:45:53There's also a higher end ATEM Mini Extreme
0:45:57that has eight ports.
0:45:59I could theoretically use that and have it all in one box
0:46:02being done on hardware if I just replace the webcams
0:46:05with something that output HDMI instead of USB.
0:46:07So that's an option I might go with in the future.
0:46:09I don't really want to.
0:46:11Because this thing is this giant control panel
0:46:15covered in buttons with a thousand features
0:46:17I wouldn't use and don't need.
0:46:19And it's also super high end in its capabilities
0:46:24and so it's also like $1,000 for the big multi-input one
0:46:27or $500 for the only four-input one.
0:46:29So these are big chunks of money
0:46:31for a lot of features I wouldn't use.
0:46:33and I think it would actually make my setup
0:46:36physically more complicated,
0:46:38which is a little unappealing to me.
0:46:40So I'm also back-burnering that idea.
0:46:42I might go to that in the future, we'll see.
0:46:44But what I decided to try first
0:46:45was a PCI Express Thunderbolt enclosure
0:46:50and using the Blackmagic DeckLink Quad HDMI recorder,
0:46:54which is a four HDMI input PCI Express card.
0:46:58And I put it in the Sonnet Echo Express
0:47:01Thunderbolt enclosure that has three slots
0:47:03because once I started going into looking for this,
0:47:05I was thinking, well, hey, wait a minute.
0:47:08If I have the, if I could get a PCI Express enclosure,
0:47:12if I just get one that has more than one slot,
0:47:13I can also get one or two USB cards
0:47:17and get rid of the whole hub entirely,
0:47:19stop using a Thunderbolt hub and just use this one box
0:47:23with all these ports that I need all built into it.
0:47:25So that's what I did.
0:47:26I bought the one box, I got the three slot enclosure,
0:47:29I got the HDMI quad input from Blackmagic
0:47:32and I got two Sonnet USB cards.
0:47:34One that has four USB-Cs and one that has four USB-As.
0:47:39This is, so far, it looks like it has a lot of promise.
0:47:43I was very, very impressed that the enclosure
0:47:47and the USB cards don't need drivers.
0:47:50This is a huge appeal to me,
0:47:52because every single time I'm looking at these things,
0:47:55I have to first figure out, try to go to their site
0:47:57or they go to their support page and see,
0:47:58all right, does it support Macs, number one.
0:48:01When you're buying PC style hardware,
0:48:04you gotta really make sure, number one,
0:48:05does it support Macs?
0:48:06Number two, does it support Apple Silicon Macs?
0:48:09That's a huge question mark on a lot of these things.
0:48:12And the answer is not always yes,
0:48:13or the answer is sometimes like,
0:48:15well, it supports some features,
0:48:17or it supports some configuration,
0:48:18or it supports some of the hardware, but not all of it.
0:48:20- You forgot number three.
0:48:22Number three, does it look gross on the back of my Mac Pro?
0:48:25Nobody makes color matched cards.
0:48:29I was looking at USB cards and I was like,
0:48:30- Yeah, I have all these ports, I could put--
0:48:32- Are the brackets the wrong,
0:48:33what color are your PCI brackets?
0:48:35- Yeah, everything on the back of the Mac Pro
0:48:37is like matte black, like the part,
0:48:40the part that has the ports in it, right,
0:48:42that kinda needs to be matte black to match,
0:48:44and all these are shiny silver,
0:48:46and you just can't have that, what is this, a PC, come on.
0:48:48(laughing)
0:48:50- Wow.
0:48:51Anyway, so the enclosure and the USB cards
0:48:55require no drivers, they just worked instantly.
0:48:57I was very, very happy.
0:48:58So the Sonnet enclosure and the two Sonnet
0:49:00Allegra USB cards, fantastic.
0:49:02And I love the fact that I could just add this.
0:49:04I was also very pleased that the fan is not super loud
0:49:08relative to being in my kitchen.
0:49:10Now, I wouldn't really want this thing in my office.
0:49:14Oh, and also, I was impressed when I took it apart,
0:49:16the fan they use is a Noctua 80 millimeter fan.
0:49:19That's a really good fan.
0:49:21Noctua is an enthusiast fan brand
0:49:24that specializes in very quiet fans.
0:49:26So I was very impressed to see that in there.
0:49:28That's not something you usually see
0:49:29in someone else's hardware.
0:49:31So that was pretty cool.
0:49:33Anyway, so very impressed with the enclosure
0:49:35and the USB cards.
0:49:37The Blackmagic DeckLink Quad HDMI card,
0:49:40I did have to install their software.
0:49:41It is comically difficult to figure out
0:49:44where exactly you go on their website
0:49:46to download the software.
0:49:48It ends up being called desktop video something.
0:49:50Like it isn't called what you think it'll be called.
0:49:52You can't just go to the page from this card
0:49:54and click download.
0:49:55The manual doesn't, it's hilarious how opaque
0:49:59this process is.
0:50:00Eventually got it in there, got it working.
0:50:02The problem is, you know, this card said it works with Macs.
0:50:07It said it works with Apple Silicon Macs.
0:50:12It said you can capture things, and you know what?
0:50:15You open up any kind of capture app,
0:50:17including the one that comes with it,
0:50:18or OBS or anything like that,
0:50:20and all four ports show up
0:50:22as four different capture devices, great.
0:50:25Unfortunately, the card, while it says,
0:50:28it will capture audio from the HDMI signals,
0:50:32and while it will attempt to capture said audio,
0:50:37it will also crappily do that by overlaying
0:50:41a whole bunch of noise and repeated blocks of audio,
0:50:44so like, if you click a button in Minecraft,
0:50:46it'll play the click, and then a half second later,
0:50:48it'll play it again, and the whole time,
0:50:49they're static playing.
0:50:51And no matter what I did,
0:50:52tried searching their support forums and all that crap,
0:50:56could not get past this issue.
0:50:57I cannot figure out why it's doing that.
0:50:59It's difficult with Blackmagic stuff
0:51:01if something doesn't work right
0:51:03because they have so many different products
0:51:06that it's really hard to search for things
0:51:08that are relevant to what you are doing with them.
0:51:10But anyway, for whatever reason,
0:51:11the audio capture does not work on this card.
0:51:15So I'm going back to the drawing board on some of this stuff.
0:51:18I ordered a Magewell card,
0:51:21which is like a, I guess one of their rivals in this area.
0:51:24I already wanted those to try.
0:51:26Elgato does make a PCI express card called the Cam Link Pro
0:51:29with four inputs, but it's Windows only,
0:51:31so I can't use that one without, again,
0:51:33doing a whole PC based setup,
0:51:34which I really don't wanna do.
0:51:36So we'll see if the Magdwell card is any better,
0:51:39and then I guess I'll go from there.
0:51:40The Magdwell card also claims to support Macs,
0:51:42claims to support M1 Macs,
0:51:44so we'll see if it actually does,
0:51:45claims to support audio capture, we'll see if that works.
0:51:48But I'm very, very happy with most of the setup,
0:51:51except for the video capture card.
0:51:53(laughing)
0:51:54Which is unfortunately kind of important.
0:51:56So we'll see.
0:51:57- I know, far be it from me to recommend
0:51:59that you not bend over backwards to use a Mac
0:52:01for something that it's not well suited for,
0:52:03but I'm telling you, if you just made,
0:52:04use the PC as your capture machine,
0:52:07I think you'd have a lot easier time.
0:52:09But keep plowing bravely forward, I guess.
0:52:12- I guess.
0:52:14- You're spending some serious money on this.
0:52:16Like, I mean-- - I'm aware.
0:52:17- Well, he's gonna return a lot of this stuff,
0:52:18I'm assuming.
0:52:19- Well, I mean, I'm hoping to keep the enclosure.
0:52:23The only thing I might be returning
0:52:24is the Black Magic card,
0:52:24'cause the audio capture literally does not work
0:52:26the way they say it will.
0:52:27- Well, but eventually, when you give up on this
0:52:29and get a PC to do it, like all this stuff will come back.
0:52:32- Well, not necessarily.
0:52:34Presumably the PC could use a lot of it, right?
0:52:36- No.
0:52:37- A PC with Thunderbolt?
0:52:38Come on.
0:52:39- But I will say, this is the first time
0:52:40I've ever used a Thunderbolt enclosure,
0:52:41and I'm very pleased with how nice and easy it was.
0:52:45Now granted, I'm not using it for GPUs,
0:52:47which is I think what a lot of people use them for,
0:52:49but for this kind of thing, it was very nice to see.
0:52:52And this really solidified, if anything,
0:52:55this solidified my opinion that if we don't need
0:52:59external GPU support, or rather,
0:53:02if we don't need additional GPU support,
0:53:05then future Mac Pros are totally able
0:53:08to use Thunderbolt enclosures for other types
0:53:11of PCI card needs if they don't want to have internal slots.
0:53:15because this is great, this is all running off
0:53:16a 13 inch MacBook Pro, like I don't even need a desktop
0:53:19to have full bandwidth PCI cards in there.
0:53:21That's fantastic, and that works great.
0:53:24So certainly it at least has been educational
0:53:28in the sense that I now know what these enclosures are
0:53:31and how they work and the kinds of things they can do.
0:53:33We are brought to you this week by remote.
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0:55:16[Music]
0:55:18All right, I have some news.
0:55:21At long last, I am finally off of Gmail for my email.
0:55:26I switched my MX records like a week ago, maybe a week and a half ago,
0:55:30and I am receiving my email at Fastmail, as the prophecy foretold.
0:55:34foretold. So if you too are looking to move off of Gmail and would like a
0:55:38referral link where I believe both of us get some money off and I get some free
0:55:42time it is going to be in the show notes it's ref.fm/theosomemorableU2818-3245
0:55:47It's like an ICQ number. Right? 1202572. I still don't think I get a lot...
0:55:542-5-7-4-4-2-9-4. There you go. Why does that get drilled into every nerd's head? I don't understand.
0:56:00I mean I had an ICQ account but I did not memorize the number I don't know I
0:56:04I wasn't young enough to want to memorize it.
0:56:06Like, I never had a reason to memorize it,
0:56:09because if anyone wanted, I would just
0:56:10copy and paste it to them.
0:56:11- I don't know what my deal is, or Marko's for that matter,
0:56:14but I don't know, I memorize mine.
0:56:16- I'm kind of sad that I don't remember
0:56:17what my ICQ number was.
0:56:18I think I could dig out one of my classic Macs
0:56:19that probably still has the account information in there,
0:56:22just launch ICQ and see what it tries to log in with.
0:56:25- A couple years ago, I think I tried logging into ICQ
0:56:27with 1202572, and it was not happening.
0:56:30And God knows what email address
0:56:32associated with that account. So yeah so many new friends for Blista now. That wasn't Blista, that was AIM.
0:56:39So many new friends. Anyway we're getting sidetracked as per usual. So yeah so I did the
0:56:45migration for Fast Mail. So to fill you in in case you're not keeping up, I was on the Google Apps
0:56:50for Your Domain free plan which had come out somewhere around like 2004, 2006, something like that.
0:56:56And if you wanted to you could sign up for you know Gmail and then eventually you know Google
0:57:01Docs and all these other things were kind of stabled on the side. You can get it for free
0:57:04You thought for life and a couple of months ago. They've said oh no not for life
0:57:08We're gonna end of life this free thing and you're gonna have to start paying us which I mean, okay fair
0:57:13I mean, I've freeloaded for like 10 15 years at this point, so I can't entirely fault them
0:57:16But I would already been trying to wean myself off of most things Google as it was
0:57:23And so this seemed like a pretty good opportunity to wean myself off of Gmail
0:57:27So I went to fast mail. I signed up for an account and I paid for a year and I told it, okay
0:57:35Take all my things from Google and put them into fast mail
0:57:40Expecting that this would be a 42 month endeavor that never ends and and presumably will not work
0:57:46So what they have you do is you know sign in via OAuth and it looks at Gmail says I have about 20 gigabytes
0:57:54of email
0:57:56and so I started it at something like 930 in the morning like a week ago and
0:58:02It took all of my calendar entries, which was almost 5,000 calendar events
0:58:08It took that in I think it was literally two minutes or something like that
0:58:12It was absurdly fast, which like if you think about it, that's the way it should be right?
0:58:15Like you would hope that it would be able to download, you know from internet phone to internet backbone if you will
0:58:21extremely quickly, but I didn't expect it to actually happen and
0:58:25and even more so to work.
0:58:27And it seemed like it did.
0:58:30It did happen, and it did work.
0:58:32But that was calendars.
0:58:34What about my email?
0:58:35So sure enough, I'm buckled up for like two weeks
0:58:39of transferring and so on and so forth.
0:58:41And it took two hours.
0:58:45In two hours, I got an email that said, hey,
0:58:47all your past emails here now, we have downloaded 149,409
0:58:53of 149,396 messages.
0:58:56And you might ask, well, why does that number not match?
0:58:58Well, I think because at the time it started,
0:59:00which was 149,396, I had gotten like 20 emails.
0:59:04So it ended up with 149,409.
0:59:08- Well, that brings up a point.
0:59:09Is there a catch-up mode?
0:59:10Like how do you deal with the gap?
0:59:13- So I think it does.
0:59:15I think I could have it refresh,
0:59:18but once it was clear that it was actively working,
0:59:21I pretty much immediately flipped my MX records
0:59:23and was like, screw it, this is gonna work,
0:59:25I'm just going for it.
0:59:25Which is a bit cavalier, I'll be the first to admit.
0:59:27- I mean, you could've flipped down
0:59:29an MX record first, right?
0:59:31- I could have, theoretically, yeah.
0:59:33But I was a little--
0:59:34- But you just wanted to make sure
0:59:35there was still a race condition.
0:59:36- Yes, exactly right.
0:59:37(laughing)
0:59:39No, I really just wanted to make sure
0:59:41that something was being transferred
0:59:42and that it was working in some way, shape, or form.
0:59:45And once I saw the transfer was starting to work,
0:59:47I was like, okay, this is gonna be a mess.
0:59:49And so there was, maybe I lost five minutes of email
0:59:51because I was too slow on the MX record change.
0:59:53But one way or another, yeah, so the chat is asking,
0:59:57did I give FastMail my username and password?
0:59:59No, no, no, like I said, this is OAuth.
1:00:00So it has me log in via Google.
1:00:03Google gives them some sort of token back.
1:00:05It's been so long since I've done an OAuth implementation.
1:00:08So there's magic tokens that are exchanged,
1:00:10and then that's that.
1:00:11So I never actually gave FastMail my username and password.
1:00:15So yeah, so in the span of two hours,
1:00:16I got literally 15 years of email or something like that
1:00:20that went through Lickety Split, no problem.
1:00:22All of my folders, which are really labels in Gmail world,
1:00:27that came through.
1:00:28I had the option of importing the rules that I set up in
1:00:31Gmail, of which I had a not insignificant amount of them.
1:00:34But I wanted to take this as an opportunity to clean Slate
1:00:37and start anew.
1:00:39One thing that I did try was Fastmail, by default, is IMAP.
1:00:44And so it uses folders as folders rather than labels,
1:00:49which is what Gmail does.
1:00:51And I tried for a few days, maybe a week, to see if I
1:00:55could go back to the world of folders.
1:00:57And for me, I couldn't do it.
1:01:01And so what I did was, very nicely, Fastmail has an option
1:01:04that says, hey, instead of organizing your messages with
1:01:07folders, you can organize them with labels.
1:01:09And then it's basically what I would call Gmail mode.
1:01:12And so now it behaves much like Gmail does,
1:01:16which is super great.
1:01:16And not for everyone, of course, but for someone who's
1:01:19been used to Gmail, that worked out excellently.
1:01:21And like I said, all the folders came through,
1:01:22everything was great.
1:01:24- Sorry, so is the idea here that you can basically
1:01:26have a message in multiple folders,
1:01:27like it's kind of like a tag instead of a--
1:01:29- Yes, exactly, it's like a tag, yeah.
1:01:32And when you add a tag, it doesn't necessarily mean
1:01:37that it is no longer in the inbox.
1:01:39So part of the reason I went back to labels was,
1:01:42I like to label, say, ATP feedback with an ATP label.
1:01:47And that was all well and good,
1:01:49but what was happening was,
1:01:50and maybe this was user error on my part,
1:01:52but I don't think so.
1:01:54But what was happening was when I set up my rule
1:01:56that said, okay, put this in the ATP folder,
1:01:59that's literally what it did,
1:02:01is it moved it out of my inbox and into the ATP folder.
1:02:04And I personally prefer any new email,
1:02:07regardless of where it came from or why it's there,
1:02:09I wanna see it in my inbox.
1:02:10It's the only place I wanna check.
1:02:11Then I will file it away as necessary,
1:02:13but I only wanna have to look at my email.
1:02:15And with the way folders were set up,
1:02:17or perhaps the way I set up the rules,
1:02:19I would have to go into the ATP folder
1:02:20to look at the new ATP email.
1:02:22And so I said, now the hell with this.
1:02:23I'm just going back to labels.
1:02:24And now it works exactly as I want.
1:02:26I have a rule that says, hey, when an ATP email comes in,
1:02:28mark it with the ATP label, but leave it in the inbox,
1:02:32which is exactly what I wanna do.
1:02:33Again, not for everyone, but that's how I like it.
1:02:36So all good news on things that FastMail can control.
1:02:40The web app is surprisingly good.
1:02:43Now I'm not like John.
1:02:44I never use a Gmail web app.
1:02:46And I know the Gmail web app, if you like it,
1:02:48you really like it.
1:02:50I really enjoyed it when it was new.
1:02:51Over time, I decided it was not for me.
1:02:54I'm not saying Jon's wrong.
1:02:55It's just not for me.
1:02:57And the Fast Mail web app is really good.
1:02:58I don't have it open in front of me, but I believe there's
1:03:01even a way to make it use Gmail key shortcuts, or
1:03:05keystrokes, if you will.
1:03:06I'm not 100% sure about that.
1:03:08You'll have to check me on that.
1:03:09But I believe that to be true.
1:03:11So everything Fast Mail related, the web app is great.
1:03:13The email comes in super fast.
1:03:15I haven't had two, I've had a couple pieces
1:03:17of spam breakthrough, but not a lot.
1:03:19There's also a neat feature where you can set up a folder
1:03:22or a label and say, hey, when I put something in here,
1:03:26tell your spam thing that this is something
1:03:30it should have caught a spam,
1:03:31and so you can help train it.
1:03:32Or what's even more interesting is,
1:03:34there's a, you can set up a second label that you say,
1:03:38hey, if I put something in here, this is not spam.
1:03:41Like this is something that you thought was spam, but isn't.
1:03:43And that's not the only way to do that.
1:03:45Like if you're in the web interface,
1:03:47you can say, oh, not spam.
1:03:48But I just thought that was a very clever approach,
1:03:50especially if you're using a third party client.
1:03:52The other interesting thing about FastMail,
1:03:53which I feel like we said this on the show at some point,
1:03:56but FastMail seems to have some sort of
1:03:59certification or entitlement or something,
1:04:03such that it is one of the very, very few
1:04:05third party email providers that actually
1:04:08can do push email on iOS.
1:04:12I don't necessarily need that, but I turned it on
1:04:14'cause it's cool.
1:04:15(laughs)
1:04:16And so, in fact, I can make an argument why it's not cool,
1:04:18but because it's new and shiny, I turned it on.
1:04:21And you can get push email via iOS, which is cool.
1:04:25And oh, and to log into your email in iOS,
1:04:29one of the ways you can do it,
1:04:32they do have their own bespoke iOS app,
1:04:34but the way I did it is I logged into Fastmail
1:04:38on the computer, and then they give you
1:04:40a convenient little QR code,
1:04:42and you scan the QR code with your phone,
1:04:45and that installs a profile, which sounds sketchy,
1:04:47but all the profile does is put in the account for you,
1:04:51which is super neat.
1:04:52And so, again, like, FastMail's a prior sponsor.
1:04:56It wouldn't surprise me if there's,
1:04:57they're going to be a future sponsor, I haven't looked.
1:05:00So I'm at least slightly biased,
1:05:02but they didn't pay me to say any of this stuff.
1:05:04Like, this was all me on my own.
1:05:06And it's been really great.
1:05:08So if you're interested in moving away from Gmail
1:05:10for any reason or from whatever your current
1:05:12email provider is, I really do recommend Fastmail.
1:05:15It's really been really good so far.
1:05:17I mean, Marco, you've been there for forever, right?
1:05:19- Yeah, for, I mean, geez, probably over 10 years now.
1:05:23It's been fantastic, I have no complaints.
1:05:26- Yeah, I cannot say enough good things
1:05:27about how this process has gone.
1:05:29So then, by comparison, I went back to Gmail
1:05:33and was like, okay, what do I need to do
1:05:35to tell them I wanna get on the list of people
1:05:37that would like to maybe not do email anymore
1:05:40but I don't wanna lose like what little YouTube stuff
1:05:43I have saved, I don't wanna lose Google Docs,
1:05:45I don't wanna lose the shared ATP calendar,
1:05:49even though we should probably move it to Apple Calendar,
1:05:51I'm just gonna leave that here.
1:05:53I don't wanna lose any of that.
1:05:54- Move it to Apple Calendar, that's madness.
1:05:56What are you talking about? - No, it's not.
1:05:57No, it's, it's, right now what I have to do
1:06:00is do it via freakin' CalDAV, which is absurd,
1:06:04just because you're on Google, John, not that I'm bitter.
1:06:06- I'm the one who moves the calendar rent anyway,
1:06:07don't worry about it.
1:06:08Anyway, the point is, so I think the way this works is,
1:06:12if Google blesses me, which they're not guaranteeing,
1:06:16with, I forget what they call it, but like,
1:06:18if I'm allowed to have one of their freebie accounts,
1:06:21then I think I can keep all of the Google Docs calendars,
1:06:25et cetera, and YouTube and whatnot,
1:06:27and I just lose my email, which is fine by me.
1:06:29But when I went to go do that, you know,
1:06:32they sent all these scare grams about,
1:06:34"Oh, everything's gonna be expensive,
1:06:36"and you gotta pay, you gotta pay, you gotta pay,
1:06:37"Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh."
1:06:38Or you can sign up for this thing,
1:06:40but that's probably not what you want.
1:06:41(screams)
1:06:42And so I went to sign up for the thing,
1:06:43and for the life of me, I couldn't find it.
1:06:46And of course, the Google website has gone,
1:06:49especially Google Apps website, is so full-on enterprise,
1:06:53which means everything is confusing.
1:06:54It's all using verbiage that even I'm far enough removed
1:06:57from real jobs that I don't know what they're talking about.
1:07:00It was a mess.
1:07:01And eventually I finally found my way into an online chat
1:07:04where someone was genuinely very helpful and was like,
1:07:06"Yeah, I'll take care of it.
1:07:06put it on the list for you. But oh my word, it was just like the biggest F you on the
1:07:12way out the door. Like, Oh, you want to leave? Oh no, no. This is like canceling cable, baby.
1:07:18You got to work for it. And it was a mess, but fast mail. Great Google. I'm over you.
1:07:23And if you're interested in fast mail, please check out my referral code. It would make
1:07:27me very happy. John, tell me about your security camera.
1:07:30I feel when I sit on the show about this, did I just say I was getting one? I think
1:07:35were talking about how you had intended it as a home project and I don't think we went
1:07:41too much further than that, but I thought we talked about how you didn't want to put
1:07:45any holes in your house and I'm pretty sure a little birdie told me that involved in this
1:07:50process was putting a hole on the outside, through the outside of your house.
1:07:53I mean, I knew it would, I just wish the hole had worked out a little better, but anyway,
1:07:59that wasn't that bad. So I talked about this a bit more on a yet-to-be-released episode
1:08:04of our console differences which we would link in the show it's if we could
1:08:07but we can't but maybe we will later the camera that I got is this the latest
1:08:12nest camera it's called nest cam outdoor indoor comma battery great product name
1:08:17and I have a bunch of nest cams already and I the reason I got this one is
1:08:24because I realized that I'm already paying for whatever the fancy plan is it
1:08:27lets you add cameras without having to pay anymore so if I bought another
1:08:32camera I didn't have to like it doesn't increase my monthly fee. I used to have a ring camera and
1:08:35I got rid of that one so I could stop paying for that and I could you know just buy this camera and
1:08:40you know it's going to be an outdoor security camera and I had a place where I wanted to put
1:08:45it especially where the old ring camera was but I didn't want to have to deal with batteries. Now
1:08:50this camera as the description indicates has a battery so you can run it on battery but from
1:08:57experience I don't like you know using cameras and batteries no matter how long
1:09:01the battery lasts first of all the batteries degrade especially if they're
1:09:03outdoors all year long in New England and the freezing in the winter and hot
1:09:07in the summer that really kills the battery and second I don't want to have
1:09:10to recharge it right so why not get one of the ones that you can plug in well
1:09:14this camera you can also plug in and if you plug it in it just so it kind of has
1:09:18like a little it's like a USB C type cable or whatever but you can also get
1:09:23one that has a an AC plug wall wart thing and then a little cable runs so
1:09:27the camera and so even though the camera is battery powered it's still plugged in
1:09:30and if you lose power then the battery takes over right and the battery lasts
1:09:34like a month or whatever so this is great it's it's essentially power powered
1:09:39by wire all the time except when if the power goes out you don't lose your
1:09:42camera so I had to find a place to run the wire this is near a light that I had
1:09:48that kind of shines where like my garbage cans are so I can scare away the
1:09:51raccoons when I go out there to deal with that at night in the winter or
1:09:54whatever and so there was already like you know electrical wire running to the
1:10:00outdoor lights they're just plain old regular lights right so I knew there was
1:10:04a way to get a cable from where I wanted to go you know from from inside my house
1:10:09to outside my house and I figured what I could do was make another small hole and
1:10:14then fish a wire in the same place where the the wire that goes to lights go but
1:10:20instead of going out the hole where the lights are I would go out a different
1:10:23hole and I spent a long time trying to get that to work without tearing everything apart.
1:10:30In the end I had to tear apart a little bit more than I wanted to to get at the guts because
1:10:34this is like the eaves by my garage and the inside wall of the garage and the outside
1:10:39eaves and I drilled, here's my big mistake, I was trying to drill a hole that I was going
1:10:44to be able to fit this little wire through and so I was looking at my drill bits and
1:10:48I'm looking at the little adapter going is this drill bit big enough, is this drill bit
1:10:51big enough, whatever, and comparing it.
1:10:54And the little plug that I had to get through is not,
1:10:57it's not symmetrical, it's like the plug goes
1:11:01and then the sort of socket that's on the end of the plug
1:11:03is on an angle, and I think I miscalculated.
1:11:07It's kind of like if you have a square,
1:11:09you measure the dimensions of the square, that's fine,
1:11:12but if you tilt the square and the angle
1:11:13suddenly gets bigger because the diagonal
1:11:14is much bigger than the legs of the square, right?
1:11:17That's kind of the situation I was in.
1:11:18So I drilled a nice, neat hole that was about,
1:11:21half of a millimeter too small.
1:11:23Like, you could fit the plug into there,
1:11:26but it was like, the hole went in a ways,
1:11:28and so it would get like, it would get bound up and jammed,
1:11:31and so I had to make the hole bigger,
1:11:33and making an existing hole bigger is difficult to do.
1:11:37Didn't do a great job of it.
1:11:38It got bigger.
1:11:39But anyway, you can't see it.
1:11:42I'll, you know, I'll paper over it.
1:11:44Luckily, it's hidden behind a downspout,
1:11:45so you can't actually see my horrible job I did.
1:11:47But I did get it plugged in, and it works.
1:11:51and it's doing its thing.
1:11:53Two bits that I want to talk about with this camera.
1:11:56The first one is, if you look at the webpage of Lincoln,
1:12:00Google's website, you'll see that one of the things
1:12:04that they advertise about this camera,
1:12:05in fact, it's in the little animation,
1:12:07is that it is magnetically attached to the base.
1:12:10So the camera is just like a unit,
1:12:12like a little semi-circular thing or whatever,
1:12:14that's the camera, and it's got a really powerful magnet
1:12:17in it, and then the base also has a really powerful magnet
1:12:19and you screw the base to whatever surface you want,
1:12:21and you stick the camera on with the battery.
1:12:23And if you look their installation instructions,
1:12:25they say, "If you're putting this camera outdoors,
1:12:27"we recommend that you put it six to six and a half feet
1:12:29"off the ground for best operation, blah, blah, blah."
1:12:33Well, if you've got a supposed security camera,
1:12:36six to six and a half feet off the ground,
1:12:38that's connected only with a magnet,
1:12:40someone can just walk right up to it
1:12:42and yank your security camera off the wall,
1:12:45and A, now you don't have a security camera,
1:12:48And B, now they have your camera.
1:12:50Right, now obviously you probably got a recording
1:12:52of them doing that because it's sending the data
1:12:54to the internet constantly,
1:12:55but what good is that gonna do you
1:12:56when they've got your camera?
1:12:58It's like taking $200 bills and thumbtacking them
1:13:01to the side of your house, right?
1:13:03It's like, I don't want somebody to be able to take that.
1:13:05So there's this sub-market of products
1:13:08to try to take Google's stupid design
1:13:10and make it slightly more secure.
1:13:12So you can buy a little kit that connects one of those
1:13:16metal security wire things, you know?
1:13:19I mean, security wire, right?
1:13:22Little metal wire, right?
1:13:24And so one end of it is kind of screwed behind the base
1:13:26so you can't get to it, and the other end is screwed
1:13:28to the camera with like one of those security screwdriver
1:13:32tips that's like a weird shape.
1:13:33It's not a Torx wrench, it's not a normal shape, right?
1:13:37So you buy one of these little kits and it comes
1:13:39with a little 2 cent weird security screwdriver tip
1:13:42and a screwdriver, and anyway, at least now it's harder
1:13:46for someone to casually take the camera off my house,
1:13:49that if they tried to do it, they would say,
1:13:50"Oh, it's stuck with something."
1:13:51And then they'd have to have also brought with them
1:13:54a pair of nail clippers or something
1:13:55to cut through the metal security wire.
1:13:57- Or just pull harder.
1:13:59This is not a thick wire.
1:14:00- Yeah, or just, exactly.
1:14:01Or just pull, but if they pulled harder,
1:14:02they might break the camera too.
1:14:03So they should really just, you know.
1:14:05And no, it's not pentalobe.
1:14:06It's like, it's got a little nub.
1:14:08- It's a star with a dot in the middle.
1:14:10- Yeah, the dot in the middle is the security feature, right?
1:14:12So a Torx wrench doesn't have a hole in the middle.
1:14:14I guess probably some of them do.
1:14:15But anyway, it's stupid.
1:14:17But that's what I did.
1:14:18I mean, I don't think, I'm not in a neighborhood
1:14:20where people are routinely steering security cameras
1:14:22off of the wall.
1:14:23So, so far so good at that.
1:14:24But the real thing I want to complain about,
1:14:26and I went into more depth on this than on RecDiffs,
1:14:28but it's worth at least mentioning here.
1:14:31This camera, like the other Nest camera,
1:14:32has a feature where it can identify faces.
1:14:36And so you can teach it, like it'll, you know,
1:14:37you can have a prompt, you look at this face, who is this?
1:14:39Who is this?
1:14:40And you could just tell it who all the people are.
1:14:41So it attaches a name to a face.
1:14:44It calls that feature familiar faces, right?
1:14:46And so, you know, I already have this from like my cameras
1:14:50that are in my house that I know as all my family
1:14:51and stuff like that.
1:14:52And it's pretty good with the facial recognition,
1:14:56even at weird angles and with, you know,
1:14:57bad resolution and in the dark and all sorts of other things
1:15:00it can identify who it is and, you know,
1:15:02identify the face.
1:15:03And one of the features of that is
1:15:06if you have notifications turned on,
1:15:07instead of saying person was spotted in the kitchen,
1:15:10it will say, you know,
1:15:11so-and-so was spotted in the kitchen by name, right?
1:15:13it'll tell you the name of the person.
1:15:15But what I wanted from this,
1:15:19and I just assumed I would be able to get, silly me,
1:15:22is that, okay, if I have a camera
1:15:24that's facing outside my house,
1:15:26and it knows all about all the familiar faces, right?
1:15:29Then it also knows if it sees a face
1:15:32that's not a familiar face.
1:15:33Like, I saw a face, but it's not one of the five
1:15:36that's in my familiar face list.
1:15:39What I would like is for the outdoor camera to say,
1:15:42oh, hey, I saw somebody, and it's not
1:15:44on your familiar face list.
1:15:45So here's a push notification.
1:15:47And as far as I've been able to determine,
1:15:50even though they built this facial recognition
1:15:52system into their cameras, they have no way
1:15:54to tell it to notify you when it sees
1:15:56a face that is not familiar.
1:15:58Your choices are no notifications
1:16:00for people whatsoever or notifications
1:16:03of every single person.
1:16:04Those are the only two choices.
1:16:06Nice.
1:16:07And if you have a camera notify you of every single person
1:16:10and it's at your house, it's gonna constantly
1:16:12notify you, your son is by the camera,
1:16:14your daughter's by the camera, your wife is by the camera,
1:16:16you're by the camera, like that's too many notifications.
1:16:19But I don't want zero notifications.
1:16:22The camera knows whether it's familiar face
1:16:25because it tells me who's in front of the camera by name
1:16:27or it says a person.
1:16:29It knows, but there is no mode that I could find
1:16:32that says just send a push notification to my phone
1:16:35if it's an unfamiliar face.
1:16:36That seems like the feature that a security camera
1:16:39what happened, this thing doesn't seem to do it.
1:16:42And I Googled for it and I found one of those sad
1:16:44Google help pages, you ever see these ones?
1:16:45Like Google doesn't actually have any humans helping you,
1:16:47they just have like this community forum
1:16:49where users just wail into the void.
1:16:50Are you familiar with these pages?
1:16:52Like if you're looking for the answer
1:16:53to anything Google related, you'll find like,
1:16:55I don't know what it is, like a,
1:16:57it's like a sick twisted version of a web bulletin board
1:16:59where people are like, help me, I can't figure out
1:17:01this thing with Google and other users,
1:17:03commits are right, yeah, I can't figure out either,
1:17:04I can't figure out either.
1:17:05And at the bottom of the thread is always some Google
1:17:06employee saying, yeah, we don't support that,
1:17:09you should file a ticket and maybe we'll look at it.
1:17:10And then you look at the date, it's like 2015.
1:17:13No, right, so I found a page where somebody said,
1:17:17can I only get push notifications for unfamiliar faces?
1:17:20And they're like, yeah, you can't do that yet,
1:17:21you should file a feature request.
1:17:23Oh my God, I don't understand how they ship this product
1:17:25without that feature.
1:17:26Like what is the point of familiar faces
1:17:28if this feature doesn't exist for an outdoor security camera
1:17:31just so you can know exactly which person it saw
1:17:34but you still want notifications for everybody?
1:17:36Boggles my mind.
1:17:37So anyway, I don't have person notifications on,
1:17:40because otherwise I'd be notified every single day,
1:17:42every single time anyone in my family came
1:17:44and went from my house or walked in front of my house.
1:17:47Good job, Google.
1:17:48- That's amazing.
1:17:50This is the kind of thing I would assume
1:17:53Google would be very good at.
1:17:54- They're good at identifying faces.
1:17:56They're not good at understanding
1:17:58what to do with that information,
1:17:59which is tell me when it's not familiar.
1:18:02- Honestly, I don't find this surprising at all,
1:18:03but whatever.
1:18:04- And if this is a brand new product,
1:18:06"Oh, it's just version 1.0? Fine, whatever. It'll come in the next version." This is years and years
1:18:10they've had Nest security cameras. I've owned them for years and years, right? And inside my house,
1:18:15it never occurred to me that this would be an issue because my inside the house cameras aren't
1:18:18even on when we're home. They're only on when nobody's home. And so being notified when it
1:18:23sees any human is appropriate. If nobody's in the house and there's a human in the house, notify me,
1:18:27right? So I never went looking for the feature that I just assumed exists, which is just tell
1:18:31Tell me if you see an unfamiliar face.
1:18:33- I'm too lazy to look right now,
1:18:36but I wonder if the Synology surveillance station,
1:18:39which is there.
1:18:40(phone ringing)
1:18:41For third camera, I just had no idea what that noise was.
1:18:44It startled me.
1:18:45(laughing)
1:18:45Anyway, I wonder--
1:18:46- You need to get closer to the mic.
1:18:47You need to figure out how to mic a VibraSlap.
1:18:50- I can get closer.
1:18:51- Yeah.
1:18:52(phone ringing)
1:18:53- How's that, better?
1:18:54- That was better.
1:18:55- I can keep the bell really far away.
1:18:56It's nice and sharp.
1:18:58But I guess I gotta bring the VibraSlap closer.
1:18:59- You need to mic it.
1:19:01Like you need to like have it as in like an instrument setup
1:19:03where there's a separate little mic,
1:19:04little wire going, you know.
1:19:06- What black magic box will fix you?
1:19:08- Yeah, right.
1:19:09I got a PCI express capture card
1:19:10to capture the sound of the virus.
1:19:12(both laughing)
1:19:14Anyway, I wonder if Surveillance Station does any of this.
1:19:17And I honestly don't know.
1:19:18It may be the dumbest thing in the world.
1:19:19- It has to because the facial recognition
1:19:21is like table stakes.
1:19:22And once any product other than this,
1:19:24I assume has facial recognition,
1:19:25the first feature we implement is semi-notifications
1:19:28of his unfamiliar face.
1:19:29Unless you're Google,
1:19:30in which case you just let it sit there for years,
1:19:31without this feature.
1:19:32- Yeah, so I can say for whatever it's worth,
1:19:35I continue to have only very good experiences
1:19:38with HomeKit Secure Video and with the Logitech Circle View.
1:19:40I know it's a really weird specialized niche thing
1:19:44that no one besides me appears to be using.
1:19:46However, this is a pretty good product.
1:19:49I actually, we recently took a trip
1:19:51and so we had found on our previous trips
1:19:55that there were a couple of areas of our house
1:19:58that we wanted eyes on.
1:20:00I bought a couple of additional Logitech Circle views
1:20:04right before this trip.
1:20:05It's fantastic, like I set them up in two seconds.
1:20:08John, they are outdoor rated, John.
1:20:11And also, if you wanted to drill one through your house,
1:20:16you only need to fit a USB-A plug,
1:20:17a regular little rectangular USB-A plug through the wall.
1:20:20- My hull is bigger, smaller than a USB-A plug already.
1:20:23I was hoping it would be really tiny
1:20:25and I had to make it a little bigger,
1:20:26but it still wouldn't fit USB-A.
1:20:27- Oh, okay.
1:20:28Anyway, they have been fantastic.
1:20:30I have had perfectly fine luck with them.
1:20:33I think I now own something like four or five.
1:20:37HomeKit, like if you have much of an iCloud plan,
1:20:41if you have like the medium plan,
1:20:43you have I think five cameras worth of stuff.
1:20:45If you have the really big plan, you have unlimited cameras.
1:20:49Although I question like, what does unlimited mean exactly?
1:20:52(laughs)
1:20:53The only, the major downside, and I mentioned this
1:20:55back months ago when I first talked about this,
1:20:57the only downside is that Nest actually gives you
1:20:59continuous recording and none of the HomeKit stuff does that.
1:21:02HomeKit stuff is like, if it detects motion
1:21:05or whatever conditions you set,
1:21:06it will start recording a clip
1:21:08and it will record a clip until that motion
1:21:10or whatever is gone for a few seconds.
1:21:12So you don't have continuous recording,
1:21:15but you do have a lot.
1:21:16- Yeah, that was kind of one of the features
1:21:17that I like about the Nest is that it's internet,
1:21:21so everything's going up to the internet.
1:21:22So again, if someone steals the camera,
1:21:23I'll have a video of that and it is continuous
1:21:25because for things that are facing outside,
1:21:27even if there's no interesting events,
1:21:29like you can cordon off areas that you're not interested in.
1:21:31Sometimes you just want to see,
1:21:32did the UPS truck come?
1:21:34Did, you know, when did this Amazon thing?
1:21:36Does the neighbor walk in their dog?
1:21:37If the tree falls across the street,
1:21:39like just having it, just recording all the time
1:21:41and saving or whatever, it saves like 60 hours or 60 days.
1:21:45It saves a lot of video.
1:21:46- I think it's like 60 days.
1:21:47I mean, it depends on what plan you have, I think.
1:21:49- Yeah, but anyway, like it's just one less thing
1:21:51because I had, the Ring camera was the same type of like,
1:21:54oh, I only turn on when I detect
1:21:55something interesting happening or whatever,
1:21:57and that's cheaper and it's nicer on battery,
1:21:59but that's why I wanted this to be plugged in.
1:22:00So it's just recording all the time
1:22:02'cause it's facing out of the house.
1:22:04And it's plugged in so I don't have to worry about it
1:22:06and about it running out.
1:22:07- But I will say also, for whatever it's worth,
1:22:09because it's only recording via Eclipse,
1:22:11I haven't missed anything because it does have,
1:22:14it seems to be recording a rolling buffer
1:22:15because it doesn't, I've had certain ones,
1:22:18I think the Eufy ones, where if somebody walks
1:22:21into the frame, it wouldn't record the first couple
1:22:24of seconds of them being there because it would take
1:22:26a couple seconds for it to notice, wake up,
1:22:28and start the recording.
1:22:29Whereas the Logitech Circle View,
1:22:32and I don't know if HomeKit always works this way or what,
1:22:34but the Circle View, it seems to be recording
1:22:37a rolling buffer all the time, and if you text motion,
1:22:40the clip you get includes a couple of seconds
1:22:42before the person enters the frame.
1:22:44So you have the complete entrance, activity, and exit,
1:22:48and then a few seconds after the exit,
1:22:49all recorded, which is nice.
1:22:50So in practice, I haven't actually,
1:22:52it only recording clips has not been a problem for me.
1:22:55It also does have all similar features
1:22:57of like you can draw out an activity zone
1:22:59to pay attention to in the frame.
1:23:01All this within the home app,
1:23:02I mean it's by far the nicest part of the home app.
1:23:04And it's like for as much crap as HomeKit gets
1:23:07for a lot of other stuff,
1:23:09this has worked extremely reliably for me.
1:23:11And this hardware has worked great.
1:23:12I only wish there was more hardware available
1:23:14like with maybe a few different things
1:23:16like maybe a less expensive indoor cam that was good.
1:23:19There's not very many options.
1:23:20But overall the Circle View and HomeKit secure videos
1:23:23have been great for me.
1:23:24It detects people, it detects animals, packages.
1:23:28It's just fantastic.
1:23:29I can strongly recommend HomeKit Secure Video.
1:23:32I only have experiences with Nest with their older hardware,
1:23:36but my experiences with Nest have been very mediocre.
1:23:40Whereas HomeKit Secure Video with Circle View
1:23:42has been pretty good so far.
1:23:43- Yeah, this hardware seems good,
1:23:45and the recognition, like animal person, vehicle,
1:23:48like it all seems dead on.
1:23:50Like I don't have notifications,
1:23:51but I can still go and look at the events
1:23:53for the last, you know, whatever many days and see that, yeah, that is a person, that
1:23:57is an animal, you did hear a dog bark, you know, and it has all the other stuff like
1:24:00if it hears a fire alarm, if it hears glass breaking, I'm assuming all this stuff works
1:24:04well, I just don't want to find out.
1:24:05Hey, so I'm looking at the Circle View camera website and there's a, you know, a bunch of
1:24:12general marketing material and then like halfway down, unparalleled privacy, and there's three
1:24:18images side to side, side by side, tilt to hide, need instant privacy at a moment's notice,
1:24:23Simply tilt the camera down to instantly shield yourself from view.
1:24:26Simple turn off.
1:24:27A rear mounted button immediately cuts off both audio and video so you're not left fumbling
1:24:31during private moments.
1:24:32- Oh, that's what that button does?
1:24:35- Do people put these in their bedrooms?
1:24:37Is that what's going on here?
1:24:38- If they wanna go have intimate moments underneath Marco's house, they need to be able to turn
1:24:42the camera off.
1:24:43- That's true, that's a good point.
1:24:46That was a much better joke I did not even see.
1:24:48Well done, John.
1:24:49Well done.
1:24:50Alright, so since we last recorded a week and a half ago or whatever it was
1:24:53Elon Musk has said no really I would like to buy Twitter and Twitter was like no and then they were like
1:24:59Okay, sure. Yeah, let's do it
1:25:02Last week we remember he had just bought like
1:25:079.2% of Twitter and then we said, you know, we don't even know what could happen by next week
1:25:11So he hadn't even offered to buy the company
1:25:14He had just bought a percentage and they offered him seen on the board and eventually turned that down because it seemed you know
1:25:19My guess was that it seemed too restrictive.
1:25:22And then after he recorded, he said,
1:25:23"You know what, forget about being on the board.
1:25:25"I want the whole company."
1:25:26- Yeah, so he has put together the financing,
1:25:29and this is, all the financing stuff,
1:25:32I just plumb don't understand it.
1:25:34I will tell you the summary,
1:25:36but the particulars about who's paying what,
1:25:38and what is giving--
1:25:40- I can strongly recommend,
1:25:41if you're a Stratecker A subscriber,
1:25:43Ben Thompson did a really great job
1:25:45with the last two daily updates.
1:25:46I guess we'll link to them in the show notes.
1:25:48They do require a subscription to read.
1:25:50But the last two daily updates for Anjan Thakare
1:25:52were fantastic at explaining all of this stuff.
1:25:54- So, first of all, yes, I completely agree.
1:25:57But coming back to what we know,
1:26:00as of right now, it is 9.30-ish
1:26:04on the evening of Wednesday the 27th of April.
1:26:08And so who knows what'll happen tomorrow.
1:26:11- I gotta edit this show really fast
1:26:12before it gets out of date.
1:26:13- Right?
1:26:14So as we know, Elon has said he was going to buy Twitter,
1:26:18So from Twitter's PR announcement,
1:26:21Twitter announced that it has entered
1:26:22into a definitive agreement to be acquired
1:26:24by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk
1:26:26for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued
1:26:29at approximately $44 billion.
1:26:32Upon completion of the transaction,
1:26:33Twitter will become a privately held company.
1:26:34Under the terms of the agreement,
1:26:35Twitter stockholders will receive 54.20 in cash
1:26:38for each share of Twitter common stock that they own
1:26:40upon closing of the proposed transaction.
1:26:43The purchase price represents a 38% premium
1:26:45to Twitter's closing stock price on April 1, 2022,
1:26:48which was the last trading day
1:26:49before Mr. Musk disclosed his approximately 9% stake
1:26:52in Twitter.
1:26:53Note, that's not when he got it,
1:26:54it's just when he talked about it, but moving on.
1:26:57Quote, "Free speech is the bedrock
1:26:59of a functioning democracy,
1:27:00and Twitter is the digital town square
1:27:01where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,"
1:27:05said Mr. Musk.
1:27:06Quote, "I also wanna make Twitter better than ever
1:27:09by enhancing the product with new features,
1:27:10making the algorithms open source to increase trust,
1:27:13defeating the spam bots and authenticating all humans.
1:27:16Twitter's tremendous potential.
1:27:18I look forward to working with the company
1:27:19and the community of users to unlock it.
1:27:21Okay, sure.
1:27:24Let's go with that.
1:27:26- I actually, I am kind of okay with this.
1:27:31Twitter as a company has always been a disaster.
1:27:36Twitter's leadership has always been
1:27:40weird libertarian tech bro billionaires.
1:27:43They've always been that.
1:27:45And Elon Musk is another one of those.
1:27:47Twitter's leadership has always been really crappy
1:27:51and inconsistent with how they handle political problems,
1:27:54how they handle abuse problems.
1:27:56They've done a pretty crappy job of spam control,
1:28:00bot control, they do a really inconsistent job
1:28:05of dealing with abuse.
1:28:08They have really opaque and confusing
1:28:12and inconsistently applied policies
1:28:15regarding certain types of speech that are controversial
1:28:18or that are just outright illegal or hateful,
1:28:21they've always been really crappy at all that stuff.
1:28:25They've always been run by these tech dude bros.
1:28:28If you look at anything wrong with Elon Musk
1:28:31running this company, look at Jack Dorsey,
1:28:33and be like, well, why is he better?
1:28:35- I can answer that question.
1:28:38- Well, okay. - Other than Elon Musk.
1:28:39I get what you're getting at,
1:28:40that Twitter has been poorly run, and I agree with that.
1:28:44But I think there's a difference in degree for sure.
1:28:48Like, who is the bigger jerky tech bro, Jack Dorsey or Elon
1:28:52Musk?
1:28:52No contest, right?
1:28:55Is it no contest?
1:28:56Oh, no contest, right?
1:28:57I mean, I don't think that high a Jack Dorsey, I guess.
1:29:00Yeah, Jack Dorsey still wants to think of himself
1:29:02as a good person.
1:29:02And I think he's trying to do the right thing.
1:29:04Jack Dorsey spearheaded the Blue Sky Project
1:29:07of trying to do the right thing years later,
1:29:10of trying to make a protocol as a replacement for Twitter.
1:29:13- Right, so far that's very much still in the blue sky.
1:29:15- Yeah, no, but I'm just saying Elon Musk
1:29:17would never even think about doing anything like that.
1:29:19Elon Musk is definitely a difference in degree.
1:29:22I think he's also a difference in type,
1:29:25just because Jack Dorsey didn't buy Twitter
1:29:30because on a whim, sort of, like Elon Musk is doing.
1:29:34He's the company that he, was he a founder?
1:29:39He was there at the beginning at the very least,
1:29:41and has a tie to the company,
1:29:43and has high-minded ideals
1:29:44about what he wants the company for.
1:29:46So I think, and Elon Musk does not, as far as we can tell,
1:29:50despite the incoherent statements that he throws out,
1:29:52and then just goes and does whatever the hell he wants
1:29:54that isn't totally in conflict with the statements, right?
1:29:56But I wanna say that, like, I mean,
1:29:58so first let me just get this out there.
1:30:00I think it's obvious all the terrible things
1:30:01that could happen, like, we'll see,
1:30:02but everyone knows the terrible things.
1:30:04Why do people not like it?
1:30:05Elon Musk could make Twitter worse for everybody, right?
1:30:09We use Twitter, and if he makes it worse for us, that's sad.
1:30:13He can make it worse for the world
1:30:15by making Twitter do more evil and less good in the world.
1:30:17That's definitely a thing that he could do.
1:30:19And he would do that by allowing more bad behavior
1:30:23that is currently now not allowed.
1:30:25And despite what Margaret said,
1:30:27like that Twitter has done a bad job
1:30:29of controlling bad behavior, they've at least been trying.
1:30:32Elon Musk's stated goal is to do less of that,
1:30:35to essentially allow more bad behavior
1:30:37than they're currently allowing.
1:30:38So if you think it's crappy now, he's already said,
1:30:40I wanna make it crappier.
1:30:41But setting all that aside,
1:30:42because I think we could spend too long talking about
1:30:45how Elon Musk could make Twitter worse,
1:30:48there are parts of this deal that have the potential
1:30:51to make things better, right?
1:30:54First one is Twitter becoming privately held,
1:30:58which is, you know, Casey read before,
1:30:59that means there'll be no stock,
1:31:00no one is looking at the stock price,
1:31:02no one involved in the thing has to be
1:31:05worrying about what this move is going to mean
1:31:08for the stock price tomorrow morning,
1:31:09because there is no stock prices, privately held.
1:31:11Now it doesn't mean you just get to lose money forever then,
1:31:14but privately held gives you more leeway to do things
1:31:17that the quote unquote stock market would frown upon.
1:31:20The second thing that's good about private ownership
1:31:22and Elon Musk in particular is,
1:31:24when a single person controls your company,
1:31:27they can do things, like get things done.
1:31:29It's not the sort of middle of the road,
1:31:33you know, now now let's not be too hasty,
1:31:36big committee full of people,
1:31:38none of whom can make a decision.
1:31:39That's why Twitter stagnated for so long.
1:31:41That's why Twitter has just sort of spent years and years
1:31:44just not really getting any better
1:31:46and fumbling towards maybe making some things
1:31:49a little better.
1:31:50When you have a singular person in control,
1:31:52they can get things done.
1:31:53And Elon Musk in particular,
1:31:54one of the things he has going for him
1:31:56along with Steve Jobs is when they get it into their head
1:31:59or any strong leader, when they get it into their head
1:32:01they want to do a thing they make that thing happen. if you're lucky that thing
1:32:06is good like I think it would be cool to have an electric car powered by lithium
1:32:11ion batteries designed from the ground up to be electric. luckily that was a
1:32:16good idea and he made sure that it happened right? you can also have
1:32:21terrible ideas and then make them happen and that's not as good right but at the
1:32:25very least the just the years that Twitter went like not really changing
1:32:30their product at all.
1:32:31I was reading some articles today talking about like,
1:32:34people don't remember this if you haven't been on Twitter
1:32:36for ages like we all have, but like,
1:32:38so many things that are part of Twitter now,
1:32:40Twitter didn't even think of themselves.
1:32:42They were things the community was doing
1:32:44and they adopted them like, you know,
1:32:46it's going all the way back to like,
1:32:48the fact that an individual thing on Twitter
1:32:50is called a tweet, Twitter didn't even come up with that.
1:32:52It was like, what was it, Craig Hockenberry and Twitteriffic
1:32:54or whatever like? - Yeah, I believe so.
1:32:55- Yeah, retweets, that was the thing the community did.
1:32:59we would type capital R, capital T, space,
1:33:01and then paste the content of another tweet.
1:33:03And we did that for a while, and Twitter was like,
1:33:05huh, I guess that's a good idea, we should probably do that.
1:33:08@mentions, replying, so many features
1:33:11that people think are part of Twitter,
1:33:12Twitter didn't even think of and do themselves.
1:33:15They had to wait for people to sort of
1:33:16use in-band signaling to do them.
1:33:19You know, all the innovations that the clients came up with,
1:33:21Tweety, one of the original Twitter clients,
1:33:24invented pull to refresh.
1:33:25Have you ever pulled to refresh an iOS app?
1:33:27That came from a third party app that was used on Twitter,
1:33:30not from Twitter itself.
1:33:32And on and on for all the years of like,
1:33:33people who use Twitter,
1:33:34wanting them to add features in Twitter being like,
1:33:36I don't know, maybe we'll do ads I guess, I don't know.
1:33:41You know, we should do a little bit more to fight spam,
1:33:44but I don't want to annoy people, I don't know.
1:33:47They just, I just always see the Twitter board as like,
1:33:50and the CEO is just like hemming and hawing
1:33:52and not doing anything.
1:33:54And having a single leader who is known
1:33:57for getting things done and who will be running
1:34:01a private company where he's unanswerable
1:34:03to shareholders or whatever,
1:34:05means that at the very least things will happen.
1:34:07It all depends on what things will happen.
1:34:10If he has terrible ideas, then terrible ideas
1:34:12will come to fruition really quick.
1:34:14Or if he decides he doesn't want to do anything
1:34:17and just the fun of it is owning it
1:34:18so he can just sort of make the, satisfy his whims,
1:34:23that could happen too.
1:34:24I'm not making any prediction about what will happen,
1:34:25but I will say that it is not a relief.
1:34:28It is like,
1:34:29it could potentially be terrifying
1:34:33for him to be able to do all sorts of things,
1:34:35but at the very least, watching Twitter flail
1:34:38for the past decade and a half
1:34:41has always kind of been frustrating.
1:34:42And so now I kind of feel like,
1:34:44I feel this way about government a lot too.
1:34:46One of the worst things that can happen is
1:34:50that the thing you're trying to make better
1:34:52is too hard to change.
1:34:54So it can never get much worse,
1:34:57but also can't get much better.
1:35:00And it's just this war of these tiny,
1:35:01incremental ratcheting things.
1:35:03And it feels, in some ways it's better to say,
1:35:06to give a democracy example, right?
1:35:08If you vote for somebody and they wanna do X,
1:35:13and they just can't get X done
1:35:14because it's too hard to change government,
1:35:17then they get voted out because you're gonna say,
1:35:19hey, you said you were gonna do X and you didn't,
1:35:20so they get voted out.
1:35:21And then people come in and they want to do Y,
1:35:23and then they can't make Y happen
1:35:24because it's too hard to change anything,
1:35:25and they get voted out,
1:35:26and just nothing ever gets done, right?
1:35:28That's kind of been the case with Twitter,
1:35:31where there's been a lot of complaints about it
1:35:33and say, "You should do this.
1:35:34"You should do whatever things we think you should do."
1:35:36And they would just never really do them that well.
1:35:39I mean, you could say over the past several years,
1:35:41like the sort of the trust and safety team
1:35:43trying to make it better for harassment or whatever,
1:35:45has been making progress
1:35:47and making slow incremental changes,
1:35:48but it's taken so long.
1:35:50Like, Gamergate was a long time ago.
1:35:52It's not like this is like fresh,
1:35:53and oh, this is a new problem we have to face.
1:35:55They've had years and years to tackle it,
1:35:56and they've gotten better than they were,
1:35:58but not fast enough, right?
1:36:01So I'm hoping that whatever happens here,
1:36:05if Elon Musk decides to do literally anything with Twitter,
1:36:08that something will happen,
1:36:10and maybe that something will be disastrous,
1:36:12and we'll all hate it, but at least the disaster
1:36:13will just get it over with.
1:36:15Like, get the disaster over with.
1:36:16Burn it to the ground, destroy it.
1:36:17Whatever's gonna happen, make it happen.
1:36:19or do something that makes it better,
1:36:21or do something that turns out really bad
1:36:23and then make a hard right turn and then fix it, right?
1:36:26As opposed to a sort of slow motion,
1:36:29sort of floating dumpster on fire
1:36:31just floating down the river,
1:36:33which is like what Twitter has been for the past decade.
1:36:36So I'm not trying to give you the optimistic taste
1:36:38because I really think Elon Musk is a total jerk
1:36:41and has terrible ideas about almost everything,
1:36:44but at the very least his terrible ideas
1:36:45should come to fruition very quickly
1:36:48if he's doing anything at all.
1:36:49The other possible take I just read recently,
1:36:51I'll try to find the link for notes,
1:36:54is that there's a potential that he doesn't do anything.
1:36:56And the whole point is that he just wants to control it
1:36:57so he can make decisions like a king.
1:37:00But if there's nothing for him to decide about,
1:37:03he'll just let it run the way it is
1:37:04and not do anything at all.
1:37:07In which case, that's probably the worst case scenario
1:37:09where that means things won't get better
1:37:11and they'll maybe slowly, slowly get worse.
1:37:14And that I think would be a total waste
1:37:15of private ownership and single person control.
1:37:17I really hope something happens to Twitter.
1:37:20I can't bring myself to hope that the something that will happen will be good, but I kind
1:37:24of hope that the something bad, like let's just get it over with.
1:37:27Like just make it terrible now as fast as possible so we can all collectively push back
1:37:34against it probably futilely.
1:37:35Who knows?
1:37:36I mean maybe what will happen is we'll get round steering wheels back on Tesla cars and
1:37:41something terrible will happen to Twitter and we'll complain so much about it that he'll
1:37:44change it because he'll just be too annoyed.
1:37:46- I agree with a lot of that, but I think,
1:37:49I don't know, when you look at what Twitter has,
1:37:54how Twitter has run over the last 10 years,
1:37:58what all those improvements that you mentioned
1:38:00to the product, like they have really not improved
1:38:04the core product in a very long time.
1:38:08All the things they've worked on over time,
1:38:10like feature wise or product wise,
1:38:12have been basically trying to rip off
1:38:14the hot thing of the day.
1:38:15So, oh, look, Clubhouse exists,
1:38:16we're gonna make our own Clubhouse.
1:38:18Oh, look, you know, Substack exists,
1:38:21we're gonna make our own Substack.
1:38:22- That's every social media company, every.
1:38:24I mean, and Twitter has been even doing that
1:38:26more slowly and worse than their competitors.
1:38:28I mean, not that I'm saying that's a thing
1:38:31that they should be doing,
1:38:32but that's kind of par for the course.
1:38:33But I think about like, so they made tweets longer.
1:38:35They used to be one forwarding another 280.
1:38:37How long did that take to do?
1:38:39Like, it's just, it's too long.
1:38:42- There's so much they could do to make the product better,
1:38:45And this is why, all right, if you'll permit me
1:38:47a bit of a thought experiment here.
1:38:49One of the reasons why, as I've thought about this,
1:38:52I am less down on it.
1:38:54I mean, look, I think the idea of Twitter going private,
1:38:58getting out of the issues that come with being
1:39:01in the public market, especially since their business
1:39:03is just not a very good business.
1:39:05- Yeah, they're not good at being a public company.
1:39:06Like, the people who run the company never figured out
1:39:10how to make money, and so if you're gonna be
1:39:12a public company and you can't figure out how to make money,
1:39:14like what's the point? Yeah and I do by the way I do think this deal is going to
1:39:19go through. Now it isn't definite yet and everyone's like oh maybe he's you know
1:39:23he's gonna get tired of it and just like move on and just back out. I don't think
1:39:27he is. If you look at first of all how much of his personal wealth he has on
1:39:31the line here it's pretty clear he's thought a lot about this. You know say
1:39:35what you want about the guy but when he does have a big idea he tends to try to
1:39:40to do it. His track record is that he does achieve many of those big ideas. Not all of
1:39:45them. I think his self-driving promises have been grossly overblown, and there's a lot
1:39:53of problems there. But generally, electric cars, big solar company, rockets, all that
1:39:59stuff, he's done very, very well on most of his big promises. And so I think he is going
1:40:04to go through with this.
1:40:05There's a whole category of thing that he talks about and Twitter buying Twitter used to be in that category of just things that he says
1:40:11He just says things sometimes right and so you can find tweets from years ago or someone was like
1:40:16Hey, you know and you should buy Twitter and he said how much is it? Right? That was like years ago, right?
1:40:2152 minutes ago. He tweeted the following next. I'm buying coca-cola to put the cocaine back in
1:40:27He'll say things like this like he'll say Oh Flint Michigan has a problem with water
1:40:35I'll just just tell me I'm gonna pay to replace all the pipes. Oh kids are trapped in a cave. Don't worry
1:40:40I'm gonna send this up in there. Oh, there's a there's a power problem in Australia
1:40:43I'm just gonna send you a bunch of batteries, you know, oh you can solve solve world hunger for six million dollars
1:40:49Just tell me your plan. I'll give you the six billion like
1:40:51But he constantly says things that sound like you know
1:40:56what the the thing that we get from is like he'll say that he's gonna replace all the pipes in Flint, Michigan and
1:41:02His fans will latch on to that and say see Elon saves a day and never look at it again and just assume that that happened
1:41:07When it actually didn't happen, right?
1:41:09you know and he so fine, whatever he's a
1:41:12Brazilian there who just says random crap on Twitter buying Twitter could have been one of those things and in fact
1:41:19He did make jokes about buying quote-unquote jokes about buying Twitter before this time though. It's not a joke. And so I feel like
1:41:26Of all those things that he says some of them, you know, very often they sound like good things like hey
1:41:32I've got a lot of money. You've got a problem. Here's a solution. Let me just do it
1:41:35But they usually don't happen usually don't happen for this category of things. The only things that he's made happen
1:41:41SpaceX Tesla
1:41:43Maybe solar roof, but if you look at stories and that it's not doing too hot, right?
1:41:46He said so many other things some of which were jokes
1:41:50Some of which were half jokes some which would have been like yeah do fix all the pipes in Flint
1:41:55But nah lost interest right and so I feel like buying Twitter falls into that category of like
1:42:01like, thing that could have been a joke,
1:42:04but turns out to be real,
1:42:06but I don't know whether once he owns Twitter,
1:42:09he's actually going to do anything with it
1:42:10other than, you know, enjoy the control that he has,
1:42:14because Twitter is important for, you know,
1:42:16has outsized importance compared to the people
1:42:18who are on it, right?
1:42:19So one of the things he could do with it is, you know,
1:42:22continue the destruction of American democracy
1:42:24by allowing right-wing nut jobs
1:42:26to have free reign over the thing
1:42:27and make sure that Trump gets elected in 2024.
1:42:29Like, if that's what he wants to do,
1:42:30He can make that happen, or at least make it much more likely.
1:42:34But maybe he doesn't care.
1:42:35Maybe he just wants to be able to find the one or two people who he likes and give them
1:42:39a thumbs up and ban the one or two people he doesn't like, and that's the extent of
1:42:43him owning Twitter.
1:42:44But I can't tell now.
1:42:45It seems clear to me, despite his high-minded talking, that Twitter is not Tesla and Twitter
1:42:50is not SpaceX.
1:42:51Twitter seems more like, one, a cool toy, and two, an undervalued asset.
1:42:58Like as a businessman, he can see that Twitter has made him a lot of money and is a powerful
1:43:03tool to have control over.
1:43:05And why shouldn't he have control over that?
1:43:07He can probably use it to make a lot of money.
1:43:09We do have to think too, like, he has so many things going on, he has so many projects,
1:43:13he runs so many companies, he's not going to be running Twitter day to day.
1:43:17He's going to have to hire somebody.
1:43:18It looks like Jack Dorsey's kind of sucking up to him, maybe he's hoping to have the CEO
1:43:22job, who knows?
1:43:23He did so well the other two times.
1:43:24I know, right?
1:43:25But we're assuming that if this goes through,
1:43:30I think it probably will again,
1:43:31we're assuming that changes will happen.
1:43:33He's talking about changes.
1:43:35Honestly, some of the changes he's talking about
1:43:37sound pretty good if he can pull them off.
1:43:40- Which ones though?
1:43:41And I can tell you the contradictory ones.
1:43:43Which ones sound good?
1:43:45Defeating Spambot sounds good.
1:43:46Open sourcing the algorithm is not compatible
1:43:48with defeating Spambots,
1:43:50because if you tell them what the algorithm is,
1:43:52the Spambots will game it.
1:43:53He knows that, or at least I hope he knows that,
1:43:55but he just says random crap.
1:43:56- Yes, and the thing is, when you look at the things
1:43:59he's been good at, things like building pretty great
1:44:03electric cars overall, and the SpaceX stuff,
1:44:07a lot of these things are problems that I think involve
1:44:10different types of engineering and different types
1:44:13of challenges than the kind of really messy crap
1:44:17you get into with running a social network.
1:44:19Running a social network, you don't understand
1:44:22the level that you have to deal with this stuff.
1:44:24Like, everyone out there who thinks they have
1:44:26a silver bullet to solve the problems
1:44:30of moderating content and controlling people
1:44:33and spam and abuse on a social network, you don't know.
1:44:36It's way more complicated than you think it is,
1:44:38and there are so many instances where
1:44:41you're between a rock and a hard place,
1:44:42where there is no good solution
1:44:44to a certain type of problem or a certain situation.
1:44:47- The type of problem that it's most comparable with,
1:44:49that Elon does have experience with,
1:44:52It's not comparable to, like I said,
1:44:53the idea of, his big innovation for Tesla is like,
1:44:57it's a good idea to use modern battery technology
1:45:01to make a purposeful electric car, right?
1:45:03That's a good idea, make that happen.
1:45:06But the thing that's close to content moderation is,
1:45:08okay, so how do you build a whole bunch of cars
1:45:11reliably in a cost-effective manner?
1:45:14That is way more complicated than you think it is.
1:45:17It seems like, ah, just people build things all the time,
1:45:19how hard could it be, right?
1:45:20Turns out it's pretty hard.
1:45:21Like there's a reason Apple and all its manufacturing partners,
1:45:24part of their power and their strength
1:45:25is their expertise in building millions and millions
1:45:28of things precisely, without spending too much money,
1:45:33making a good product, making it reliable consistently.
1:45:36There's a whole auto industry that
1:45:38has spent decades and decades figuring out
1:45:39how can we build cars.
1:45:41So they all come off the assembly line,
1:45:42and they're all identical or whatever.
1:45:44And if you just think, ah, it's the detail, whatever.
1:45:47Just the big idea is we should make electric cars.
1:45:49and everyone's cheering you on and they think it's great.
1:45:52And Elon is like, what if we use robots?
1:45:54That would be cool.
1:45:55And it's like, Elon, people have spent a long time
1:45:58figuring out how to build cars.
1:45:59It doesn't mean they're all right.
1:46:00Like, you don't have to do everything that they do,
1:46:02but they do have some knowledge that you don't have.
1:46:05So maybe consider that you coming into this field fresh
1:46:08and reading a few books or articles,
1:46:10and you're just gonna say, I'm doing everything my way
1:46:12and I think it would be cool to have robots.
1:46:14You know, that's what I feel like
1:46:16what content moderation is like,
1:46:17where it maybe has a good big idea about Twitter,
1:46:20but the detail of like, I think we shouldn't allow bots.
1:46:23Well, great, you're the first one to think of that, Elon.
1:46:26(laughing)
1:46:26If you think that's your big idea,
1:46:28like that is a good idea, we all agree, get rid of bots.
1:46:30Like no one wants bots, right?
1:46:32That's not, you're not bringing any value here.
1:46:35Okay, but how do you get rid of bots?
1:46:36Lots of people have looked at this before
1:46:38and you say, I think we should use robots to get rid of bots.
1:46:40I don't know, I'm just making an example.
1:46:42He gets in his head like, I don't care about details,
1:46:44just do this thing that's cool
1:46:45and I know everyone else does it differently.
1:46:46I know everyone else is using LiDAR on their cars,
1:46:48but we don't need to just use cameras.
1:46:49But Elon, what makes you think we can do it
1:46:51all with cameras?
1:46:52I don't know, it seems like we can, just go.
1:46:53Right, that's where his mindset falls down, right?
1:46:57That there's nothing he can learn from anyone else,
1:47:00and the details aren't that important,
1:47:01just make it happen, and I'll just drive you
1:47:03until you make it happen, and that's why a lot of people
1:47:05don't like working for Elon Musk,
1:47:06and it's difficult to deal with him.
1:47:08Again, much like Steve Jobs, it all depends
1:47:11on how good your idea is and how right you are.
1:47:13Is it true that you don't need LiDAR
1:47:14and just need cameras?
1:47:15If so, you're a genius.
1:47:16It turns out not to be true, you wasted many, many years
1:47:19and had many, many promises of a thing
1:47:20that's just literally never gonna work
1:47:21because you can't do it with cameras
1:47:23or current technology, you need LiDAR.
1:47:24We don't know how that one's gonna turn out yet.
1:47:26So far it's not looking great.
1:47:28But content moderation is much more like
1:47:31how do you build cars reliably?
1:47:33And Tesla has not figured that out, they just haven't.
1:47:36And other car companies are better than they were
1:47:39despite Tesla saying we're doing everything our way
1:47:42and we don't look at you stodgy companies,
1:47:44you are stuck in the old mindset,
1:47:46the new mindset is better and it is better in lots of ways,
1:47:49but he's not able to synthesize the best of the past
1:47:52with new ideas, he's more like, ah, just do it.
1:47:55And so I feel like content moderation, he's gonna be like,
1:47:57I know lots of people looked at this problem for years,
1:47:59including Twitter, but I have an idea,
1:48:01we should just do this.
1:48:02And he's gonna like start from like,
1:48:04he's gonna start relearning mistakes that people learned
1:48:06in like 1994, if he falls down that route.
1:48:09So I am not optimistic that he has anything to bring
1:48:15to the table when it comes to implementing his vision
1:48:19of, for example, a Twitter free from spam bots.
1:48:23- I know this is very, very difficult for everybody.
1:48:26If we can step back for a second from the person himself
1:48:30and just think like, do we think it is possible
1:48:35to have a different balance between,
1:48:39I hate to use the term free speech,
1:48:43But let's use the term jerks,
1:48:47because that's the people who are yelling the loudest
1:48:49about demanding free speech,
1:48:51even though that doesn't even apply here.
1:48:52But the people who are demanding that the most
1:48:54are largely jerks, and what they're saying is,
1:48:57I want my jerkitude to have a publishing platform
1:48:59and an audience.
1:49:00But I wonder how much of this problem,
1:49:04'cause this is, again, this is a really hard problem,
1:49:07really hard, because everyone thinks
1:49:10that certain types of speech should be allowed
1:49:12and certain types of speech shouldn't be allowed
1:49:13on this platform, but they don't agree
1:49:16on what the types are, any decision they make,
1:49:18even if they decide we're gonna allow everything,
1:49:21is going to anger a large group of people,
1:49:23or break laws, or cause really horrible things in real life.
1:49:27And so maybe they're trying to tackle at a policy level,
1:49:32which can only ever be reactive to problems.
1:49:36Anything that they're gonna solve
1:49:39with a health and safety kind of team,
1:49:42or whatever those are called.
1:49:43If you're relying on the community moderation team
1:49:46or structure to respond to people who are jerks,
1:49:50what has to happen is first someone has to be a jerk
1:49:53and post something horrible,
1:49:55and then you respond by trying to get them kicked off
1:49:58and maybe a day or two in, maybe you get them kicked off.
1:50:02That's only ever gonna be so good
1:50:04and that's really inconsistent and hard to get right.
1:50:07So I wonder if it would be a better idea
1:50:10to tackle the problem more on the client side
1:50:15of basically, so I think a combination of two things here.
1:50:18Number one, we have to distinguish between
1:50:21what content is allowed to exist on the platform
1:50:25versus what content the platform will promote.
1:50:29Those are very different things.
1:50:31Like I face this issue in Overcast.
1:50:33You know, Overcast is a podcast platform
1:50:34and there's a lot, you know, I don't have
1:50:37any control over what people add to it
1:50:38it's all the Apple directory.
1:50:41But I will occasionally have people write in
1:50:43who are very upset that something has reached a point
1:50:46in a top list where it shows up in my directory categories.
1:50:49And it's something usually, some weird like ultra,
1:50:53alt-right kind of thing.
1:50:54And I have to decide, is this thing bad enough
1:50:58that it should not be available in Overcast?
1:51:02Or is it bad enough that I should not promote it
1:51:06in top lists and recommendations?
1:51:08Or is it neither and I should just leave it alone
1:51:11because people who are seeking this kind of stuff out,
1:51:13you know, they're seeking it out, you know.
1:51:14And so those are very hard decisions to make,
1:51:16even on my level as one person looking at
1:51:19the world of podcasts which is way, way, way smaller
1:51:21than the kind of thing they're dealing with.
1:51:22So like I see these issues and so I think,
1:51:25you know, the way I usually fall on this is
1:51:28stuff has to be pretty bad for it to not be allowed
1:51:32to exist at all on a publishing platform like this.
1:51:36But you can exert much more editorial control
1:51:39and have much more of an opinion as the platform.
1:51:42First of all, if you're small like me,
1:51:43then it doesn't matter.
1:51:44But even somebody like Twitter,
1:51:46they have much more control over what they promote
1:51:49in things like ranking algorithms,
1:51:51recommendation algorithms, stuff like that.
1:51:53And so I actually think most people
1:51:56should be allowed to post most stuff
1:51:58that is not outwardly illegal
1:52:00or like threatening harm to people.
1:52:01Most of that I think, having that be allowed to be posted
1:52:05is usually okay, again, with those exceptions.
1:52:08And even, I mean, I know a lot of people
1:52:10don't even agree with those exceptions.
1:52:11Those people are ridiculous and naive.
1:52:13But if somebody's posting something
1:52:15that is not like a threat, and is not harassment,
1:52:19and is not illegal in some other way,
1:52:21I don't see anything wrong with that,
1:52:22but I don't believe they deserve an audience.
1:52:26And I do think that the people who they're trying
1:52:29to be in communication with, if they're trying to like,
1:52:32some guy's writing in, calling somebody an (bleep)
1:52:35or whatever, you know.
1:52:37I don't think it's necessarily the platform's job
1:52:41to actively prevent everyone from being a jerk.
1:52:45It is the platform's job to give people the tools
1:52:50to not see most of that most of the time
1:52:53and to let people have way more control than we do now
1:52:56over how many jerks we allow access to us,
1:53:01how many jerks posts that we allow
1:53:04even to show up in our timelines.
1:53:05We have right now only extremely rudimentary controls
1:53:09over those things.
1:53:11You know, we have like blocking and muting
1:53:12and you can, in certain contexts,
1:53:14you can disable replies, I think.
1:53:15But for the most part, we have very little control
1:53:18over that relative to the platform's age
1:53:21and alleged maturity.
1:53:22If Twitter really focuses on that end of things,
1:53:26I think it would be less controversial, first of all.
1:53:31It would still be controversial
1:53:32because the jerks still believe that everything oppresses them because their politics are
1:53:38like factually wrong and factually dangerous and factually full of hate and abuse and horrible
1:53:45things and they call it politics and they think it's okay.
1:53:49And a quick aside back to him, it disturbs me greatly all of his tweets about basically
1:53:54both sides-ism.
1:53:55That's a clear warning sign that he doesn't really think right about this stuff.
1:54:00Anyway, going back to the product itself,
1:54:02if we can get to a point where the jerks
1:54:07are able to have their post on the platform within reason,
1:54:12but most people don't see them,
1:54:15and if you don't want to see jerks,
1:54:17you have very easy and obvious controls,
1:54:20probably hopefully that are on by default,
1:54:22that filter a lot of that stuff out
1:54:23from even being shown to you or your followers,
1:54:26that can go a long way.
1:54:28And this is the kind of area that I think Twitter
1:54:32so desperately should have been investing in all these years
1:54:35instead of building freaking Clubhouse and Instagram Stories
1:54:39and whatever else they were ripping off
1:54:41from other companies.
1:54:42Their core product is full of garbage
1:54:45because they haven't tackled problems like this.
1:54:48Whatever change in leadership has to happen
1:54:51to make them start looking at their product differently
1:54:54and maybe prioritizing different parts of it,
1:54:56I really hope they tackle that
1:54:58because that I think is so much more powerful
1:55:01than relying on letting a jerk post and become a jerk
1:55:05and then having to report them
1:55:06and then having to wait for the report to be seen
1:55:09and hoping the report is dealt with correctly.
1:55:11Like that whole thing leaves a bunch of jerks
1:55:13on the platform and lets a lot more people
1:55:15see their jerkitude.
1:55:16Whereas if you have filters up front
1:55:18and smarter filters and more controls for people
1:55:20to not see abuse in the first place,
1:55:22you're doing way more good for way more people
1:55:25and the jerks can still have their jerk Twitter
1:55:27if they wanted.
1:55:28- So one of the dumbest things Twitter ever did
1:55:30was when they cracked down on third party clients.
1:55:33So we already said earlier that like a lot of the new
1:55:36features, the new features, the features that we all take
1:55:38for granted on Twitter, like retweets and replies
1:55:42and you know, all that good stuff, came from users
1:55:47and client applications and there was a story recently
1:55:50of it explaining like one of the things that motivated
1:55:51Twitter cracking down on third party clients
1:55:53because there was some, a person was buying up
1:55:56all the third-party clients to try to hijack Twitter's network by making those clients
1:55:59work with Twitter and also his own new network or whatever.
1:56:02And then Twitter caught wind of this and they bought TweetDeck and then they shut down third-party
1:56:06clients.
1:56:07And anyway, turning off third-party clients killed all innovation on the client side.
1:56:12And I think a lot of what you're talking about, Marco, is like, and this was in Ben Thompson's,
1:56:15one of Ben Thompson's recent posts on Mr. Decker, the idea that, I'm not going to say
1:56:20it's an abdication of responsibility, but it is an outsourcing of certain responsibilities.
1:56:23It's saying, look, we, Twitter, are never
1:56:25going to get it perfectly right.
1:56:26So why not let third-party developers
1:56:29have a crack at this?
1:56:30We'll run the service.
1:56:31We'll have all the tweets and features and everything
1:56:33like that.
1:56:33But third-party clients will reopen our API.
1:56:35And we'll say, if you want to make a client,
1:56:38build on top of our API.
1:56:40We'll add more sophisticated features.
1:56:42We'll actually improve our API.
1:56:44We'll give you access to all the good stuff
1:56:45that only the first-party client has access to.
1:56:47And we'll add new features.
1:56:48And then you, third-party clients,
1:56:50can work on making clients that are better at--
1:56:53you know, hiding tweets that you don't want to see,
1:56:56or quality filtering and stuff like that.
1:56:58I think that is a good idea, and that is potentially
1:57:01one of the good things that could come out of Elon Musk,
1:57:03because if somewhere in his weirdo head,
1:57:06he has decided that having an API is cool and good,
1:57:09he'll make it happen.
1:57:11And he'll just say, and by the way,
1:57:12give the API all the features
1:57:13that the first-party client has,
1:57:14and that will be an improvement over the status quo.
1:57:17If he doesn't care about it, it won't happen.
1:57:18But it's possible that somewhere in his little brain,
1:57:21He'll be like, oh yeah, libertarian, API, good, whatever,
1:57:25just do it, and that will be like
1:57:26an accidental good side effect of this, right?
1:57:29But setting that aside, I feel like that is not
1:57:31the solution to the quality problem,
1:57:34because a lot of the things that you were describing
1:57:37are sort of just redefining the problem and say,
1:57:40oh, we'll see less bad stuff and more good stuff.
1:57:42The problem is always, what's the bad stuff?
1:57:44What's the good stuff, and who decides?
1:57:46And having third-party clients decide that
1:57:50is just asking each one of them to do something
1:57:51that Twitter, the company with 7,500 employees,
1:57:53hasn't been able to do over 15 years,
1:57:55where you think two people making a Twitter client
1:57:57are gonna be able to figure it out.
1:57:59I mean, maybe there's larger third-party companies,
1:58:01but there's no business model there.
1:58:02I don't understand how anyone would ever be able
1:58:04to staff up to the point where they can do any good here.
1:58:07Kind of like car manufacturing,
1:58:10it's not like no one has ever run a community
1:58:12on the internet before.
1:58:13There is tons of prior art on what works and what doesn't.
1:58:16There's academic papers on it.
1:58:18There's real examples of real communities.
1:58:19This is real communities that we've been in, personally,
1:58:22each individual person has been on the internet
1:58:23for a couple of decades or whatever.
1:58:25We've been in communities that have gone well,
1:58:27that have burned themselves down.
1:58:29It's not like this is totally new territory.
1:58:31It's a hard problem to be sure,
1:58:33but it's not like this is the first time
1:58:34anyone's ever looking at this.
1:58:36Even Twitter before Elon did a bad job
1:58:39of looking at other internet communities
1:58:41and learning from them what works and what doesn't work.
1:58:44The reactive thing where you were talking about is like,
1:58:46well, we have blocking and muting and you can report, right?
1:58:49that is such a rudimentary system and it doesn't scale well
1:58:52and any community that's reached this scale
1:58:55that has done a better job has differed in ways
1:58:58that are not mysterious.
1:58:59Like there's been tons of people writing articles
1:59:01about this for years, right?
1:59:03What distinguishes these big communities
1:59:05that work better from this one?
1:59:06Usually what distinguishes them is, first of all,
1:59:09they have much more restrictive rules,
1:59:11which I know people who are like,
1:59:13"Oh, I wanna be able to say whatever I want,
1:59:14wherever I want."
1:59:15The fact is communities with more restrictive rules
1:59:18and norms do better.
1:59:20Maybe those rules are rules you don't like
1:59:22or do like or whatever, but at least it defines the community.
1:59:25If you don't like that community,
1:59:27you'll know you don't like it because you'll say,
1:59:28"I don't like these rules, I'm gonna go elsewhere."
1:59:30You'll know, is this the place for me
1:59:32or is this not the place for me?
1:59:33Fairly strictly harshly defined rules.
1:59:37If you're the type of person who wants to be somewhere
1:59:41where there aren't harshly defined rules,
1:59:42you will go elsewhere, but that leaves only the people
1:59:44who are willing to work within those rules.
1:59:46Second thing that works is context.
1:59:49Twitter always seems to me that if you report
1:59:52someone's tweet, it's like they look at that tweet,
1:59:55they look at their set of rules,
1:59:56their whatever their set of rules is this week,
1:59:58and they try to make a decision.
1:59:59Even then it's hard 'cause the rules are,
2:00:01you know, whatever, are fuzzy, right?
2:00:03Communities that work well at scale don't just say,
2:00:07okay, I've got an incident, I've got a set of rules,
2:00:10I'm gonna smush 'em together
2:00:11and say thumbs up or thumbs down.
2:00:13You have to look at the context,
2:00:14and the context is, who is this person?
2:00:17Has this person been reported 100 times in this past week?
2:00:20Is this person a known bad actor?
2:00:23Is this a bot account?
2:00:24What is the larger context of this conversation, right?
2:00:29That's really hard to do at scale,
2:00:31but the way communities that have been more successful
2:00:34have done it is by having some kind of reputation
2:00:36type system that lets you build up and build down reputation.
2:00:39Look at Stack Overflow, for example, or look at Red,
2:00:40or any other kind of community where they have
2:00:43a sort of persistent, ongoing, gamified reputation system
2:00:46where the behavior that the system wants you to do
2:00:48gets rewarded and the behavior the system
2:00:50doesn't want you to do gets punished.
2:00:53And any time any action is taken,
2:00:55they look at the context of your history and activity
2:00:58in the community to decide what should be done.
2:01:00Not just, here's a tweet, I don't know who posted it,
2:01:03I don't know anything about them,
2:01:04and then here's a set of rules.
2:01:06Except of course, if it's the president of the United States
2:01:08and then the rules go out the window
2:01:09because it's all noteworthy, you know, anyway.
2:01:12I'm not saying this is an easy problem,
2:01:14but whenever I see Elon Musk talk about it,
2:01:16it's like he's never been in an online community before.
2:01:18And for years and years, when I've read articles
2:01:20about things that Twitter is doing poorly
2:01:23and here's these communities to do better,
2:01:25like there are a bunch of obvious things
2:01:27that they could be doing that would make things better,
2:01:29but almost all of them would anger people
2:01:32who think the real problem
2:01:33is that there are too many restrictions.
2:01:34That's just not the way online communities work.
2:01:37Online communities that are free for all
2:01:39burn down real quick,
2:01:40because when anyone can do anything,
2:01:43the only people who are happy to stay there
2:01:45are the people who just wanna tear everything down
2:01:49and everyone else leaves.
2:01:50It's like if you're at a party and someone comes in
2:01:52and they start screaming and shooting flames in the air,
2:01:54everyone who does not enter screaming in flames
2:01:56leaves pretty quickly and you're just left
2:01:57with a room full of people screaming
2:01:59and shooting flames in the air, right?
2:02:00That's why all these right-wing networks
2:02:01can't get off the ground,
2:02:02'cause you get a bunch of people together
2:02:05who just wanna scream at things.
2:02:06No one else wants to be there except for them
2:02:09and then they just look around
2:02:10they all see each other and they get bored and leave.
2:02:13- Also they have no ability to attract good talent
2:02:16to build them, none.
2:02:18- Well, I don't know, there's probably some people
2:02:20who will do something for the right price or whatever.
2:02:23But anyway. - Not good people.
2:02:25- I know people don't wanna hear that.
2:02:28What they wanna hear is, someone told me
2:02:31I couldn't post something once and now I'm angry
2:02:33so I think everything should be allowed, right?
2:02:36And if you feel that way, start a blog, right?
2:02:39You can write whatever you want and then no one can read it.
2:02:41But if you wanna be, if Twitter wants to run a community,
2:02:44especially, we haven't even talked about this,
2:02:46like Elon in theory eventually has to do something
2:02:50to make Twitter make some kind of money.
2:02:52I mean, first thing he'll probably do
2:02:53is lay a bunch of people off
2:02:54or maybe they'll get laid off before the buyout goes through
2:02:56like watch Twitter's earnings,
2:02:57probably by next week's show,
2:02:59maybe we'll see what happens here.
2:03:00But like one way you can make Twitter more profitable
2:03:02is to get rid of a lot of costs
2:03:03and most of those costs are people.
2:03:04So you can lay off a bunch of people
2:03:06and suddenly the balance sheet looks a lot better.
2:03:08But you probably do have to figure out some way
2:03:11to make money.
2:03:12Like Elon could probably run Twitter for the rest
2:03:13of his life just burning cash,
2:03:14but I don't think he wants to do that.
2:03:16I think he wants it to make money.
2:03:19So how do you figure out how to make money?
2:03:20One way you can make money is to, you know,
2:03:25do something to make it grow.
2:03:26That's the whole problem that Twitter has to be able to do.
2:03:28Like we're gonna need more people to be on Twitter.
2:03:30The way you grow a service, a social network service,
2:03:33you have to make it be a place where people want to be.
2:03:37And Twitter has not been as successful at that as,
2:03:39for example, Facebook.
2:03:40That has billions of users, and Twitter
2:03:42has a small number of hundreds of millions or whatever.
2:03:46Twitter has like-- is it like 20% of the US population
2:03:50or something?
2:03:50Anyway, they're not as big as Facebook.
2:03:53How do you make a place where people want to be?
2:03:55You have to make something that is pleasant for the majority
2:04:00of people.
2:04:01And the way you make a community that
2:04:03is a place where people want to be and is generally pleasant
2:04:06is not by removing rules.
2:04:08You have to add more rules.
2:04:10You have to make the rules well understood,
2:04:11and you have to make it restrictive,
2:04:13and you have to make it so that behavior you don't want
2:04:16that makes it an unpleasant place for people,
2:04:18that behavior is disincentivized.
2:04:21And good behavior, however you define that,
2:04:23that makes a nice place for people to be, is incentivized.
2:04:26There are lots of ways to go about doing it,
2:04:28but that's what you have to do.
2:04:29You have to add rules
2:04:30to make it a more pleasant place for people to be.
2:04:33If that's not your goal,
2:04:34if you don't want it to be a pleasant place
2:04:35for people to be,
2:04:36you wanted to adhere to some high-minded ideal about anything goes, you're not going
2:04:39to get new users that way.
2:04:41People are going to flee, and you're going to be left with a room full of loud jerks.
2:04:45That is not a money-making proposition, getting back to, "Do you want this to succeed?
2:04:50You're just going to narrow it down to the 500,000 loudest jerks and charge each of them
2:04:54$10 a month?"
2:04:55I don't think that's a good business plan.
2:04:57So far, I haven't seen anything as Elon said that made me think that any of these changes,
2:05:02he to implement them would suddenly make Twitter make more money.
2:05:06Every single one he said is going to make it a less pleasant place to be, which will
2:05:10translate for it making less money than it does now.
2:05:13But that's all assuming he's actually going to do any of these things.
2:05:15So if I had to give some advice either to the current owners of Twitter or the future
2:05:19owner of Twitter is you need to look at online communities that have been more successful
2:05:23and copy some of the things that they do.
2:05:25And then maybe imagine this, maybe add some innovations of your own with your millions
2:05:29of dollars and thousands of really super smart employees.
2:05:32you can do something better than a web forum did in 1997.
2:05:35I know that's hard to imagine,
2:05:36but you haven't even caught up to web forums
2:05:39with three wise admins from 1997.
2:05:41Like Twitter is below that level.
2:05:43Obviously scale is different, I understand that,
2:05:44but like the model of how to make a community
2:05:49that is a pleasant place for the people
2:05:51that you want to be there to be in the community,
2:05:53Twitter has utterly failed that,
2:05:55and so far I don't see Elon doing any better.
2:05:58- Thanks to our sponsors this week.
2:06:00Remote, Sanity, and Trade Coffee.
2:06:03And thanks to our members who support us directly.
2:06:05You can join atp.fm/join.
2:06:07And we'll talk to you next week.
2:06:10(upbeat music)
2:06:13♪ Now the show is over ♪
2:06:15♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪
2:06:18♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪
2:06:20♪ Accidental ♪
2:06:20♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪
2:06:22♪ Accidental ♪
2:06:23♪ John didn't do any research ♪
2:06:25♪ Marco and Casey wouldn't let him ♪
2:06:28'Cause it was accidental, it was accidental
2:06:33And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm
2:06:38And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them
2:06:43@c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s
2:06:47So that's Casey Liss, M-a-r-c-o-a-r-m
2:06:52[music]
2:07:13I think if there's any bit of consolation I can give people when dealing with this jerk
2:07:18is, so I was explaining to my kid the other day,
2:07:23there's this one kid that always will say or do something
2:07:30to provoke a response, like that's just the kind of kid
2:07:33he is, he's like the provocateur kind of personality.
2:07:37I was explaining to my son, like look,
2:07:40he's going to keep pushing buttons until he gets
2:07:44a negative reaction, that's what he's doing,
2:07:47You can see it, once you see it that way,
2:07:50you see that's what he's doing every single time,
2:07:52he wants that negative reaction.
2:07:54And he's gonna keep pushing buttons until he gets it.
2:07:57That's Elon Musk.
2:08:00If you see all the crap he posts on Twitter all the time,
2:08:03that's what he does.
2:08:04For all of the good ideas and implementation he has
2:08:09with some of his companies and stuff,
2:08:11he also is just that same kind of provocateur,
2:08:14kind of just, as people say, shit poster.
2:08:17Like what he's doing is provoking a reaction.
2:08:19He's, all of the good things, he's also extremely juvenile
2:08:24and a jerk in a lot of ways.
2:08:26That's what he's doing here.
2:08:28And so for all of us to pick apart any particular tweet
2:08:33that he posts and basically let it set us all on fire,
2:08:39you're just giving him exactly what he wants.
2:08:41You're feeding the trolls, as I said last week.
2:08:44I don't find that productive,
2:08:47and I think if I can advise all of you,
2:08:51well-meaning people out there,
2:08:53you're giving the bully what they want,
2:08:56you're giving the provocateur the negative reaction
2:08:59that they were literally seeking.
2:09:01He doesn't post these tweets
2:09:03because he thinks they're good ideas.
2:09:05He posts them to get that reaction.
2:09:07That is the entire point.
2:09:09So don't engage, don't let yourself get set on fire.
2:09:13Don't give him the reaction.
2:09:14Don't let him make you that mad
2:09:15because that's literally what he's going for.
2:09:17Ignore him like the troll that he is trying to be.
2:09:20My chapter title for the whole thing
2:09:23when you last talked to him last time
2:09:24was the roll eyes emoji.
2:09:25Give him that.
2:09:26Give him, not even respond.
2:09:27Just roll your eyes in real life and move on.
2:09:30That's it.
2:09:30Don't give him anything.
2:09:32Do not feed this negative energy that he wants
2:09:34because it's not gonna help anybody
2:09:37and you are literally making him win by doing that.
2:09:40And I know it's the hardest thing in the world
2:09:42not to get mad when someone's being a jerk like that.
2:09:44It's super hard.
2:09:46I know all this.
2:09:47I just gave this speech three days ago.
2:09:49It's super hard. (laughs)
2:09:52But trust me, don't engage.
2:09:54Don't feed the troll.
2:09:56Let him get the reaction from other people.
2:09:58Don't make it you.
2:09:59- He is getting the reaction from other people.
2:10:02Anyway, I mostly ignore him too.
2:10:03But the weird thing about him buying Twitter,
2:10:05and I mentioned this, I think,
2:10:07when we were talking about him investing,
2:10:09it's not like he's on Twitter getting banned and stuff.
2:10:11Yeah, he says stupid juvenile things, but they're all fine.
2:10:14Like, he's just-- he's just-- like, he
2:10:16posted that picture of, like, making
2:10:17fun of Bill Gates's gut.
2:10:19That's a jerk move, but there's nothing wrong with it.
2:10:21Like, that's not-- he's not going
2:10:22to get banned from Twitter for making fun of Bill Gates.
2:10:24He's just making a dumb joke.
2:10:25Like, you know what I mean?
2:10:26Like, he's not-- except for when he occasionally
2:10:28is leading harassment campaigns against people, right?
2:10:31But for the most part, you know, Musk's problem
2:10:34is he tweets things on the SEC, maybe gets mad at them
2:10:37or whatever.
2:10:38Like, he's done stuff on Twitter that
2:10:40has run afoul of various laws.
2:10:41but I don't think he has this long history
2:10:44of wanting to tweet things and then getting his account banned
2:10:47and having to delete tweets and stuff like that.
2:10:49So it's kind of like,
2:10:52it's not like he's buying Twitter
2:10:57so that he can finally say what he wants to say.
2:10:59He says what he wants to say all the time anyway,
2:11:01and most of it is just silly juvenile stuff.
2:11:05Some of it is harmful,
2:11:07some of it is just stock market manipulation,
2:11:10hyping up Dogecoin, like he uses the power of Twitter
2:11:13to whatever amuses him or whatever,
2:11:15but it's not like he's taking it over it
2:11:16so he's like, finally I can say what I want to say.
2:11:19The thing that I think a lot of people are afraid of is like,
2:11:22he would like to make it easier for people
2:11:24who are getting banned to come back
2:11:27and say what they want to say,
2:11:28like his Reinstate Trump's account,
2:11:30or this person was banned for saying something
2:11:32that I think, oh, you know, well it doesn't bother me,
2:11:35so I think he should probably come back, right,
2:11:37you know, 'cause I'm not a trans person
2:11:39so this anti-trans harassment doesn't bother me,
2:11:41so I feel like they should be allowed to come back.
2:11:42It's kind of funny, isn't it, right?
2:11:45No, it's not funny.
2:11:46And those kind of regressive attitudes that he has,
2:11:49it's not like he's doing that.
2:11:50He's spending most of his time doing random jerky things
2:11:54and occasionally either accidentally on a purpose
2:11:57initiating harassment campaigns
2:11:58just because he's got millions and millions of followers.
2:12:00But even that, half the time,
2:12:02it's probably just by accident, right?
2:12:04But to the degree that he has regressive attitudes
2:12:09that he mostly has kept under wraps that slip out,
2:12:14that's the degree to which his policy changes
2:12:17are just gonna make it worse when the people
2:12:19who are not afraid to say the things out loud
2:12:22that he is wise enough not to say,
2:12:25come on board and bring their army of bots or whatever.
2:12:27But of course he's gonna ban bots
2:12:28who don't have to worry about that.
2:12:31It's just easy, just ban bots, what's the problem?
2:12:33I know why no one thought of that before.
2:12:34- I wonder, so I know this is a big throwback,
2:12:37but I mentioned before that when I was a teenager,
2:12:40I was on the Something Awful forums.
2:12:42One of the things that worked really well
2:12:44was that this was like 2000.
2:12:46This was a long time ago, 2002, that kind of range.
2:12:49To have an account, you had to pay,
2:12:53I think it was five or 10 bucks.
2:12:54But if you violated any of the rules,
2:12:56your account would get banned,
2:12:57and you'd have to pay another 10 bucks
2:12:59if you wanna come back.
2:13:00- MetaFilter did the same thing.
2:13:01- Right, and I wonder,
2:13:04Like I've always thought, you know,
2:13:07for a modern social network to do that,
2:13:08it's just too much of a hindrance to new signups.
2:13:12- But Twitter is so small already,
2:13:13like I was totally thinking of this too.
2:13:15Like hey, you know what, another way you make money,
2:13:16just charge everyone who uses Twitter.
2:13:18But you know, of course, that would destroy the market.
2:13:22- Well, but he already said that he wants to quote,
2:13:25authenticate humans, well, a pretty good way to do that
2:13:29is like a $1 credit card charge for a new account
2:13:31or something, you know?
2:13:32And I know there's a lot of challenges for doing that,
2:13:35that kind of thing.
2:13:36There's a lot of people you'd be artificially keeping out
2:13:38and that's not good.
2:13:39But one of the reasons why,
2:13:43those old forums that charged money back then,
2:13:46those were pretty well under control for the basic rules.
2:13:50Occasionally you'd have somebody come in and violate them
2:13:52and then the moderator would handle it.
2:13:54Now granted, this is a very different problem today.
2:13:56Very, very different problem today.
2:13:58Hugely different scales, massively different situation.
2:14:01I recognize all of that.
2:14:03However, it worked really well.
2:14:06Now, Twitter is already not and never will be
2:14:10the biggest social network.
2:14:12It is not appealing for most people.
2:14:14Most people look at Twitter and they don't see
2:14:15why they should be there, and part of that's
2:14:17because of their crappy product direction
2:14:19over the last decade, part of that's just inherent
2:14:21to the product that I don't think will be solved.
2:14:23It's kind of the social network for,
2:14:25I wouldn't necessarily say smart people,
2:14:28but it's the social network for more engaged people,
2:14:31possibly, in certain ways, especially in things like media,
2:14:34compared to other networks.
2:14:37So it is already kind of a specialized audience,
2:14:39and I wonder, might that model work
2:14:43on some kind of level here,
2:14:45where many problems about spam and about abuse
2:14:48and about mass account creation and fraud,
2:14:51many of those problems get easier to deal with
2:14:53if the creation of accounts has a cost,
2:14:56and if the loss of an account has a cost.
2:14:58One of the reasons why people are a little more civil
2:15:03in real life compared to the internet
2:15:05is because in real life you have something to lose.
2:15:08You have your face in your community,
2:15:11you have a reputation, you have the safety
2:15:13of your physical body.
2:15:15If you say something,
2:15:16you might have somebody like punching the face.
2:15:18So you have something to lose in real life
2:15:20and so people tend to be a little more civil.
2:15:24One of the reasons why people tend to be jerks in cars
2:15:27is because they have a little bit less to lose
2:15:29because you can't really see who it is behind the wheel
2:15:32and you're out of there in two seconds anyway.
2:15:34And you look online and people are infinitely jerkier
2:15:37everywhere online in part because everything
2:15:40they created online is free.
2:15:42They have an account with no followers.
2:15:44They created it in two seconds.
2:15:46They have nothing to lose.
2:15:48Whereas you have a lot fewer people on Twitter
2:15:52who have like built up followings,
2:15:54like strong, you know, a valuable account basically.
2:15:57You have a lot fewer of those people
2:15:59being extreme jerks to others.
2:16:01And so I wonder if there is some way
2:16:03in this future product direction/revenue direction,
2:16:06maybe you involve something like paid account creation
2:16:09on some level, I don't know.
2:16:11I think this is the kind of thing
2:16:13that not being a public company anymore
2:16:15does give them the freedom to experiment
2:16:17with something that's that dramatic.
2:16:19because that kind of thing would absolutely crush
2:16:22quote growth, like that would crush new member growth.
2:16:26But that actually might be good in a lot of other ways
2:16:30for the people who are already on the platform
2:16:32and even if you crush much of the new member growth,
2:16:35you would probably still get like quote good people
2:16:39on a lot of levels, like people who are more valuable,
2:16:41who actually add to the conversation
2:16:42or who are actually intending to use it well
2:16:44instead of using it to crap all over people.
2:16:47So I don't know, I think that's the kind of thing
2:16:49that is worth considering.
2:16:51When you give people a cost to being jerks,
2:16:56when they are trying to protect something
2:16:58they have either paid for or built up over time,
2:17:01you tend to have better outcomes.
2:17:03- Well, I mean, the problem with that,
2:17:06probably a lot of it is like authenticating human things
2:17:08is that past experience with many online communities
2:17:11has shown that making people authenticate as themselves
2:17:15does not make them behave better, right?
2:17:17So the removing anonymity does not increase the,
2:17:20does not make people act more nicely.
2:17:22They're just as big a jerk as they always were.
2:17:25And of course anonymity and pseudo-animity
2:17:27or whatever you wanna call it,
2:17:28is super important online for a lot of people
2:17:30who don't want their identity to be shown
2:17:32because they're in an unsafe situation
2:17:33or they don't, you know,
2:17:34they don't wanna be outed for something or whatever.
2:17:36So it's very difficult to do that
2:17:37and has a lot of downsides.
2:17:38But the other side of that,
2:17:39of like making there be a cost for account creation,
2:17:42has proven its utility,
2:17:44but only in communities that have never needed
2:17:46to be all that big.
2:17:47Because the only way you get that done
2:17:49is not for like, hey, new account creation costs money.
2:17:51I suppose you could do it that way,
2:17:52but you kinda have to say, every account needs money.
2:17:55And it's very difficult to go to Twitter and say,
2:17:58okay, all, you know, whatever, 100 million active users,
2:18:01starting tomorrow, all your accounts are locked
2:18:03until you each pay a dollar.
2:18:05- What if it only applied to new accounts?
2:18:08- I know, but like if you only do it for new accounts,
2:18:09you kind of have your existing problem
2:18:11and you gotta weed out these giant bot networks,
2:18:12'cause like-- - Yeah, but that's way,
2:18:14I mean, that's so much easier of a problem to deal with
2:18:16than if they're still coming in the door, you know?
2:18:18- There's giant armies of bot accounts
2:18:20that get traded around the whole economy
2:18:22of having accounts that have existed for X number of years.
2:18:25Y accounts that have existed for X number of years
2:18:27and have Z followers, right?
2:18:28That's a thing that you can buy and sell on Twitter, right?
2:18:32That is a commodity, and the fact that Twitter
2:18:34hasn't been able to weed them out over a decade and a half
2:18:36shows that it's probably not a super easy problem,
2:18:39or maybe they just haven't been really into it
2:18:41because they don't want their daily
2:18:42active account numbers to go down.
2:18:43But either way, I feel like being authenticated
2:18:47as a specific human is a loser idea.
2:18:50It's not gonna make people behave any better
2:18:51and it cuts off a lot of people
2:18:52who would need to have access to it.
2:18:54Anonymity is an important part of being online.
2:18:56- Agreed.
2:18:57- But making there a barrier to entry,
2:18:59like charging for accounts, is a great idea
2:19:02as long as you don't really care about growing
2:19:05or being or staying big.
2:19:07And as long as you also don't care about people
2:19:09who can't afford that money being locked out
2:19:11of your network and it's just,
2:19:13like it works great for MetaFilter,
2:19:15works great for something awful.
2:19:16Twitter I feel like is probably on the other side of that.
2:19:20Probably a little bit too big, but hey,
2:19:21but like this gets into the idea of like just again,
2:19:23setting aside Elon, pretend you, you know,
2:19:25you're gonna have a conversation about Twitter or whatever,
2:19:27what kind of community do you want?
2:19:29If part of your definition of community is
2:19:31I would like a community where everybody in the community
2:19:34had at least one dollar that they could spend
2:19:35on Twitter once, that suddenly becomes a definition
2:19:38of your community, so like okay, so if that,
2:19:40If someone doesn't meet that criteria,
2:19:42I don't want them in my community.
2:19:44That's what you're saying.
2:19:44And you may be fine with that, right?
2:19:46That's maybe a perfectly good idea for like,
2:19:48you know, I don't want anybody in my model train club
2:19:51who couldn't pay the annual union dues of five bucks.
2:19:54Fine.
2:19:55Then if there's someone who's super into model trains
2:19:57who you'd love to have in your thing,
2:19:58but they don't have five bucks a year to pay for it,
2:19:59they're not gonna be in your community
2:20:01and you have to be okay with that, right?
2:20:03Coming up with that set of rules
2:20:04for something like Twitter is tricky, right?
2:20:07And this is assuming the answers that you come up with
2:20:09are going to be satisfactory.
2:20:14Again, Elon says nothing particularly coherent,
2:20:16but ask any of the current people on Twitter,
2:20:18what kind of community do you want Twitter to be?
2:20:22If you could snap your fingers and make it happen,
2:20:24what would it be like?
2:20:25And thus far, anything that has created a barrier
2:20:29to creating an account, like charging an amount of money
2:20:32or making it sort of slowing down
2:20:34the bot creation type stuff or making it
2:20:36so that people have something to lose,
2:20:38just hasn't been in their definition,
2:20:40or if it wasn't in their definition,
2:20:41they were doing nothing about it.
2:20:42It's so hard to tell with current Twitter management.
2:20:44Is this something that you want,
2:20:45or is this just something that you haven't bothered
2:20:48to not do?
2:20:48- Yeah, is this a choice or a neglect?
2:20:51- Yeah, it's really hard to tell.
2:20:53What is your vision for Twitter?
2:20:54And someone may say, "Well, it's 'cause we're a public
2:20:56"company, we can't do anything like that,
2:20:57"because our daily active users would go down like a cliff
2:21:00"and our stock price would fall,
2:21:01"but they don't have to worry about that anymore," right?
2:21:03- Yeah, well, beyond being a public company,
2:21:04I think a lot of this is like,
2:21:06Twitter's leadership has seemed to almost never understand
2:21:10their own product.
2:21:11They like create all these weird little side features
2:21:16that nobody wants basically,
2:21:19while not creating any of the features
2:21:22that people who have used Twitter for a while
2:21:23have been needing for years.
2:21:26- Musk said he's gonna bring an edit button,
2:21:27so we can just add that to the Flint water pipes
2:21:30or maybe it'll be a thing that really happens.
2:21:32- Maybe, but like the point is like I think the,
2:21:35we've seen the current direction,
2:21:39'cause they haven't changed in a very long time,
2:21:41and they haven't done anything.
2:21:43They don't understand the product,
2:21:44and so we've seen what they have now,
2:21:46and if they change it in some significant way,
2:21:51I think we've seen how the current direction,
2:21:54how it grows or doesn't.
2:21:56We've seen what retains users and what doesn't,
2:22:01and we've seen what works,
2:22:03And we've seen if you have the way things are now
2:22:06where everything's free and open to create accounts
2:22:07as much as you want, we see the problems with that.
2:22:11They have this huge number of employees,
2:22:15many of whom are having to deal with all this crap
2:22:17that results from all these bots and abusers and stuff
2:22:22being able to create 5,000 accounts
2:22:23and then spam the crap out of people.
2:22:25I feel like that is not free to them.
2:22:30It's free to the world.
2:22:31It's not free to them by a long shot
2:22:33and it creates all these problems
2:22:35that drive a lot of people off the platform
2:22:36or keep them off in the first place.
2:22:38And so if they do things that they might,
2:22:42in the short term, inhibit growth by doing things,
2:22:45and by the way, I fully agree,
2:22:47I'm not saying they should require real names.
2:22:50I'm not saying that at all.
2:22:52That causes way too many problems.
2:22:53I mean, look, look at what I did at Tumblr.
2:22:55That was very intentionally set up
2:22:57so that people could create anonymous blogs,
2:23:01any number of them on their own account,
2:23:03And you could never tell, like if you had an account
2:23:05with like five Tumblr logs on it,
2:23:07you could never tell, like the audience of those Tumblr logs
2:23:10could never tell which user had created that blog.
2:23:14That was always kept secret.
2:23:16And that was a very intentional decision.
2:23:18So if you wanted to have five blogs,
2:23:20and one of them was your meme blog,
2:23:23and one of them was your main blog,
2:23:24where you posted political quotes, whatever,
2:23:25and you wanted to have something totally different,
2:23:27something totally private that was like a sex blog
2:23:30or something, you could have that.
2:23:31That was all separate and nobody could see
2:23:34that that was the same person running all those things.
2:23:35Like anonymity by default,
2:23:39and you can choose whether to use your name or not,
2:23:42which is how Twitter is now, that is the right choice.
2:23:45However, that's separate from requiring
2:23:48possibly a small payment to create an account,
2:23:50or things like that.
2:23:52Now granted, yes, if you,
2:23:53in whatever payment method you choose,
2:23:56there are certain people who won't have that payment method
2:23:59or who literally can't afford the dollar it would cost
2:24:02or whatever, I agree.
2:24:03- Or there are certain people for whom the payment method
2:24:05is immaterial and then just billionaires will keep
2:24:08by unlimited number of accounts.
2:24:09Anyway, it's actually a pretty tricky problem.
2:24:11Again, works for MetaFilter.
2:24:12Doesn't work when some Koch brother decides
2:24:14that they're gonna put $17 million to burn
2:24:17into 17 million accounts right around election season.
2:24:20- Maybe, but the point is that that does overall
2:24:24dramatically cut down on the crap you have to deal with.
2:24:27And if Twitter is no longer going to be chasing
2:24:31user growth at any cost, which is what they have to do
2:24:34as long as they're a public social network company,
2:24:36like if they can pull back a little bit on that
2:24:39and try some things, and this is one of the things
2:24:41they end up trying, I actually think that could be really,
2:24:45that could work really well.
2:24:46And that's the type of thing that again,
2:24:48like if they're public, they could never do that.
2:24:51But now that they have a random jerk possibly owning them
2:24:55soon who does crazy things on a whim all the time,
2:24:59even if they are in the short term not very profitable.
2:25:02I mean look, we're gonna have the jerk running it
2:25:05regardless, we might as well have some good ideas
2:25:06come out of it.
2:25:07And I think that kind of thing is a possibility
2:25:10of the kind of thing they might try.
2:25:13I think that could be really good.
2:25:16Twitter has so many problems the way it is now
2:25:18and I don't see a lot of solutions that are gonna
2:25:21massively make a change to things like abuse
2:25:24and spam and everything like that.
2:25:26Unless you do something drastic like that.
2:25:28Hey, it's worth trying, you know?
2:25:30It's certainly worth a try.
2:25:31- Yeah, speaking of the edit button,
2:25:32just to foreclose and any people are gonna say this,
2:25:35Twitter's already working on the edit button.
2:25:36They already announced it on their official Twitter account.
2:25:39If it happens after Elon Musk buys it,
2:25:41it wasn't because of him, just FYI.
2:25:43They were already doing it.
2:25:45If it doesn't happen, I'm gonna blame him
2:25:46because they're already just, naturally.
2:25:49- No, I don't know.
2:25:50I feel like leaving Elon aside,
2:25:52I really have come around to the Ben Thompson idea
2:25:56that Twitter being private is a good thing.
2:25:58And I think while I wholly agree
2:26:02with what both of you were saying,
2:26:03that the company has just been chasing its own tail
2:26:05for as long as I've been a member,
2:26:07I do think that at least some of that was self-imposed
2:26:11because like you said just a moment ago, Marco,
2:26:13growth, growth, growth.
2:26:14All we care about is growth.
2:26:15That's all that matters.
2:26:16Growth, we need growth.
2:26:17We need it now.
2:26:18We need it yesterday.
2:26:19We need it tomorrow.
2:26:20We need growth.
2:26:20Yes, all the growth.
2:26:21- And they were bad at getting it.
2:26:22They didn't pursue growth to the exclusion of everything else and then and they grow really they grew really really fast and got huge
2:26:27No, they kind of topped out and I stagnated. Yeah, their growth has sucked
2:26:31They're a terrible business and they and they kept pursuing the strategy of growth at any course
2:26:35At any cost even when they had stopped growing really fast, right?
2:26:39So it's like we're just gonna keep doing this because we really need to grow. What else can we try to grow?
2:26:44it's like maybe you know, you could say maybe this is the natural size for the community you've created or
2:26:50Maybe you should try like, you know, it's a little Apple thing
2:26:53Oh, we'll just make really good products and that will help us grow and the other strategy is let's figure out
2:26:57What needs to grow and who cares if it makes the product worse? Yeah, but either way the idea of
2:27:02Twitter being able to focus on something other than growing that sounds super appealing to me and you know
2:27:09The the optimistic take on this is you know, we'll see that Twitter design Twitter apps becoming a design playground all over again
2:27:16we'll see Tweetbot and Twitterific no longer being neutered by crummy APIs or limited APIs
2:27:23or whatever the case may be. Like in so many ways, there's so many things that could be better
2:27:28if Twitter doesn't have to focus on growth. And I mean, I could argue that maybe being better at
2:27:34whatever sort of moderation or I mean, I guess the extreme version of this is censorship,
2:27:41but one way or another, cleaning up Twitter. Because I mean, why does everyone refer to
2:27:45Twitter as the hell site. Doesn't that indicate that there's a problem somewhere? If they
2:27:50don't have to focus on growth, if kicking thousands of bots off the network is suddenly
2:27:58okay, maybe we'll see some of that now. Maybe it'll be better for everyone. And again, the
2:28:04optimist in me, I'm really hopeful that we're going to see a lot of positive changes for
2:28:10or the social network that I love so much,
2:28:12even though I don't really know why anymore.
2:28:14So I'm hopeful, I'm really hopeful that
2:28:18if they go private through Elon or through someone else,
2:28:22I'm really hopeful they get to concentrate on the things
2:28:24that make the experience better for those of us who are here
2:28:28and not necessarily here for 10 years, just here in general,
2:28:31rather than always chasing the next new person.
2:28:35- Yeah, the downside of private ownership, of course,
2:28:37is like, let's say Twitter does something now.
2:28:39during Game Brigade, with people harassing everybody
2:28:41and these giant brigades of things.
2:28:43People complained about it, and the complainers
2:28:46had some leverage, because if Twitter becomes
2:28:50a hostile environment for certain classes of people
2:28:52and those classes of people leave, their numbers go down.
2:28:56And we know the numbers go down, because they
2:28:57have to report, and they're earning reports of,
2:28:59here's how we're looking in terms of user growth
2:29:01or user stagnation or whatever.
2:29:03And that means that the mass movement of users on Twitter
2:29:08and how they're feeling about using Twitter
2:29:10can change what Twitter does.
2:29:12Private ownership, that becomes much less powerful lever
2:29:16because the whole point of private is,
2:29:18I don't have to tell you how our daily active users
2:29:20are doing, what do you care?
2:29:21It's not your problem, I'll figure out how to make money.
2:29:24And if things get really bad on Twitter,
2:29:26because Elon does what some of the things he says
2:29:29he's gonna do, which everyone agrees is gonna make things
2:29:31worse for a lot of people, and people leave,
2:29:34he's like, good, that's what I wanted.
2:29:35The kind of community I want is where people like you leave
2:29:37because you can't take being harassed
2:29:41because of who you are, get off my network.
2:29:43And there's nothing you can do about that
2:29:44because it's a private company.
2:29:45If you don't like it, go somewhere else.
2:29:47And you leaving causes my numbers to go down,
2:29:50but I don't have to show those numbers to anybody
2:29:51and that's my problem to deal with,
2:29:52so don't worry about it.
2:29:54So, and now we're trying to be optimistic,
2:29:55like, oh, single ownership means they're free
2:29:57to do things they couldn't do before
2:29:58because Twitter was sort of, you know,
2:29:59not going anywhere and they were treading water
2:30:01and now they can make bold moves and they can,
2:30:03but it also means that our ability
2:30:05as the collective users of Twitter
2:30:07who enjoy it enough to keep using it today,
2:30:10have much less power to influence the direction it goes
2:30:13because if changes happen that make us like it less,
2:30:18that could be by design.
2:30:21And they could be showing us the door
2:30:22and saying, "We don't want people like you here, so leave.
2:30:24And I don't care if you leave
2:30:25'cause I don't need to meet any daily actor user numbers."
2:30:29- Yeah, I'm also interested to see
2:30:30what Elon really actually wants out of this
2:30:33because obviously the terrible (bleep) poster
2:30:37that we see says, "Oh, I just want edit button,
2:30:40"I just want an edit button, and I want all the bots
2:30:43"off the network, blah, blah, blah."
2:30:44But what does he really want?
2:30:45Like, is this-- - And why does he care
2:30:46about the bots?
2:30:47Are bots bothering him?
2:30:48- Yeah, who knows. - It seems, I haven't
2:30:49ever really seen him care much about anything
2:30:51that doesn't affect him personally.
2:30:53- I mean, for whatever it's worth,
2:30:54there, a huge amount of the harassment on Twitter
2:30:59and has been Russian bots.
2:31:02That's been a huge thing.
2:31:04And the whole thing with the Trump
2:31:07and all the original meaning of the word fake news
2:31:09and all this stuff, that's a big thing.
2:31:11A ton of what you see on Twitter that's crappy or negative
2:31:16is actually Russian bots.
2:31:18Now, there's also a lot of bad people
2:31:20that are legitimately posting those things,
2:31:22but I think it's more than you think that are actually bots.
2:31:25- Well, either way, what is his goal?
2:31:27Is his goal pump and dump?
2:31:28Is his goal to remove all the bots?
2:31:31What is his actual goal?
2:31:32because if his goal is to just make Twitter profitable
2:31:36and otherwise keep it mostly as is,
2:31:38then the difference to Twitter employees, I reckon,
2:31:43is that rather than having to convince
2:31:47thousands upon thousands upon thousands of shareholders
2:31:49that what they're doing is smart,
2:31:50they have to convince Elon and maybe a handful
2:31:52of other people, and I guess the board or whatever,
2:31:54but it can change the math dramatically,
2:31:58or maybe it doesn't change it that much.
2:32:00What if Elon says I want a 2x monthly active users
2:32:03because that's what the king wants
2:32:05and that's what the king will get.
2:32:07- Why would he want that?
2:32:08- I don't know.
2:32:09I don't, because he feels like it'll make Twitter
2:32:11more profitable, maybe because he could,
2:32:13he could bring it public again.
2:32:15This is pretty well outside my comfort zone,
2:32:17this is probably obvious, but it just,
2:32:19I can't help but wonder what is his goal with Twitter?
2:32:22Is it simply to make more than zero dollars?
2:32:25Is it to make gazillions of dollars?
2:32:27Is it just to pay off all the loans
2:32:30into the debts and whatnot and then walk away?
2:32:32Is it to IPO again and make a whole shed load more money?
2:32:36Like, I just, I wonder what he's really actually after.
2:32:40And I don't think anyone will ever know.
2:32:41But I wonder what he's after because, you know,
2:32:44our thinking, including very much my own thinking
2:32:47just a moment ago about, oh, you know,
2:32:48the API will get better 'cause who cares?
2:32:50And they don't have to worry about growth 'cause who cares?
2:32:52- Have you ever heard Elon mention the API?
2:32:54I mean, we're just saying that
2:32:55'cause it's the thing that we want
2:32:56and it's the thing that can happen now, right?
2:32:57- No, exactly, that's my point.
2:32:59But our theory is, oh, well,
2:33:01if they don't have the shareholders breathing down
2:33:03their necks more and more and more, growth, growth, growth,
2:33:05then everything will be perfect now.
2:33:07And that may not actually be the case.
2:33:09It may be that Elon says, no, I still want growth
2:33:11because that's what I want.
2:33:12And I don't know why, but he could say that.
2:33:14- I mean, I think he probably wants a lot of those things
2:33:17or all of those things.
2:33:18I've read this great article on New York Magazine today
2:33:21basically interviewing Kara Swisher,
2:33:23who knows Elon Musk pretty well,
2:33:26interviewing Kara Swisher about him
2:33:28and basically asking like, what is he like,
2:33:30what is he, how does he think, stuff like that.
2:33:33It's pretty short, it's worth reading,
2:33:35because the thing is, he's not a one-sided caricature.
2:33:40He is, for all of his faults, a very smart person,
2:33:44and he does seem to have complex and multiple thoughts
2:33:49on this kind of stuff.
2:33:50What does he want from Twitter?
2:33:52Lots of things.
2:33:53I'm sure he wants to make money eventually on it,
2:33:55But if you look at the kinds of things that he creates,
2:33:59the ways he invests his money, the companies he starts,
2:34:02he's not trying solely to make money.
2:34:05If he wanted to just make money,
2:34:07he could probably find out much better ways to do it
2:34:09instead of doing really risky businesses
2:34:11or buying a very unprofitable social network.
2:34:14- I don't think he needs to make money on Twitter.
2:34:17I think he just needs to make money by using Twitter.
2:34:20Which is, like you say, what does he want out of Twitter?
2:34:22Look at what he's ever used Twitter for.
2:34:24Twitter is a powerful way for him to influence the world.
2:34:27It is a powerful megaphone.
2:34:29Just think of something simple like hyping up Dogecoin.
2:34:33Barely hyping up, right?
2:34:35When you have that many followers
2:34:36and people hang on everything that you say,
2:34:38and you say something about Dogecoin
2:34:40and the price of Dogecoin goes up by X percent
2:34:42and you had a bunch of Dogecoin,
2:34:44Twitter is suddenly a powerful tool for you to make money.
2:34:46Even if Twitter itself loses money,
2:34:48even if you are the owner of Twitter
2:34:50and it loses money for you,
2:34:52you can make that up just by hyping up other things.
2:34:54And if you wanted to say like,
2:34:56Elon is very good at having things that he owns
2:35:00and controls be valued well beyond
2:35:02the supposed rational worth.
2:35:04Look at Tesla, look at how much Tesla is,
2:35:06I think isn't Tesla worth more than like the entire rest
2:35:08of the audio industry combined or something?
2:35:10Like, it's not, Tesla is not value based on its fundamental
2:35:14in terms of how much profit do they make
2:35:16selling cars each year.
2:35:17It's valued based on its potential value, you know,
2:35:20Like what could it be, right?
2:35:22That's all what all stocks are valued, right?
2:35:24Elon is good at making assets that he owns and controls,
2:35:28making you believe that they will be
2:35:30and are even more valuable than the hard numbers show.
2:35:34So he could do that to Twitter to say,
2:35:37now Twitter, this asset that we all basically believe
2:35:40is more valuable than the numbers show, right?
2:35:43But he could just use Twitter as he has in the past
2:35:46to continue to influence the world.
2:35:49And it's like a loss leader for him.
2:35:50It's like, I control it so I don't have to worry
2:35:52about anyone ever taking away this megaphone.
2:35:54I don't have to worry about this megaphone
2:35:55to do anything that screws me up.
2:35:57And I'm just gonna use it as it slowly drains money
2:35:59as a private company as long as I stay above
2:36:01where I need to so I don't have to repay
2:36:03that giant loan that I took over
2:36:04the hell the financing crap is.
2:36:06It's fine.
2:36:07And I can use it to, it's like,
2:36:09it's one of the most powerful tools he's found
2:36:12to help him accomplish his other goals.
2:36:15And he has a lot of them, right?
2:36:16So, I mean, who knows?
2:36:18It's so hard to tell what he's gonna do,
2:36:21and he's got so many different things going on.
2:36:23We're supposed to be going to Mars now too, by the way.
2:36:25I don't know why people don't think about that.
2:36:26And he's got satellite, internet.
2:36:28He's got a lot of things that he thinks are cool
2:36:31that he would like to see happen,
2:36:32but how many of them will actually get his attention?
2:36:36I don't know.
2:36:37And so far, what he's used Twitter for
2:36:39is whatever he's currently concentrating on,
2:36:41Twitter has been a component of that push.
2:36:45And it seems like controlling Twitter
2:36:46is a way to ensure that that continues to be the case.
2:36:49Setting completely aside,
2:36:51yeah, but what about Twitter itself?
2:36:52Is that a business where you're going to somehow make money
2:36:55or make it grow or whatever?
2:36:57Maybe, maybe merely by owning Twitter,
2:36:59everyone will suddenly believe it is way more valuable
2:37:01and who will be able to sell it for a profit.
2:37:03But he's not the type of person who like buy something
2:37:05and quickly sells it when it's more valuable.
2:37:07He didn't sell Tesla when it was worth more
2:37:09than he bought it for.
2:37:10He didn't sell SpaceX when it was worth more
2:37:12than he bought it for.
2:37:13He held them for way longer than anyone thought he should.
2:37:16and refused to sell and kept finding ways
2:37:19to keep them above water by financing them or whatever.
2:37:21And you don't do that when you're trying to just,
2:37:23you know, buy a company, make it more profitable,
2:37:26and dump it like the other private equity investors.
2:37:28So I can't imagine him doing that with Twitter.
2:37:29I think he's in it for the long haul
2:37:32until, nonetheless, it becomes super unfun for him.
2:37:35- I think his motivations are much more complex
2:37:38than anything.
2:37:39In the same way, like, I always say,
2:37:42when you have anything complex like a social network,
2:37:46Everyone has their hot take on what they have to do
2:37:49to fix their problem.
2:37:51And it always begins with, if they would just.
2:37:54If you would just X, if you would just do this,
2:37:58you'd fix, all you have to do is just this,
2:38:01and everyone has some simple thing,
2:38:03and the reality is much more complex than that, right?
2:38:05And I think that's, you know, he's a person,
2:38:08he's clearly a very smart person,
2:38:09again, for all of his faults,
2:38:11he's clearly a very smart person.
2:38:12He has achieved a lot of very lofty things,
2:38:15And so I don't think, if you say what does he want Twitter
2:38:18for, it's not just anything.
2:38:20He wants Twitter for lots of reasons,
2:38:22and I don't think it's as small as he wants a platform
2:38:26to pump up Dogecoin or whatever.
2:38:28I don't think that's it at all.
2:38:29I think he's been doing that for free.
2:38:31- I mean, but he uses it for everything,
2:38:33not just for pumping up Dogecoin,
2:38:35talking about Tesla, for talking about SpaceX,
2:38:37for saying he wants a platform where people can hear him
2:38:39say that he's gonna fix the pipes in Flint.
2:38:41Like that is valuable to him as a person.
2:38:44- Yeah, but he doesn't have to own it to do that.
2:38:45He's been doing it for free for years.
2:38:47- But he has to own it to make sure no one stops him
2:38:49from ever using it that way.
2:38:50- Yeah, but I mean, was that ever a risk?
2:38:51I mean, I think the worst case outcome here
2:38:54that's likely to happen, I mean, there's lots of worst cases
2:38:58that are unlikely to happen, I think,
2:38:59but I think the most likely bad outcome here
2:39:03is that his acquisition goes through
2:39:07and he appoints frickin' Jack Dorsey as the CEO
2:39:09and he doesn't really actively manage anything,
2:39:10and that's it, and then nothing else ever changes.
2:39:13And so then we have-- - You think that's
2:39:13the worst one?
2:39:14The worst one is he immediately reinstates Trump,
2:39:17Trump wins in 2024, our country is destroyed.
2:39:19I think that's the easy-- - No, frankly, no.
2:39:22First of all, I think this is the worst outcome
2:39:25that is likely, that is like the worst
2:39:27and most likely outcome is he puts Jack back
2:39:31and then nothing else really ever gets better.
2:39:33- Why would he put Jack back?
2:39:34Does he think, I know there are buds in everything,
2:39:36but like, man, I just don't--
2:39:39- Well, that's why, there are buds in everything.
2:39:40But ultimately I think, and again,
2:39:43'cause Elon can't run it himself 100% of the time,
2:39:46he's not gonna be a super active involved CEO.
2:39:51But worst case I think that is likely to happen is that.
2:39:54It becomes a jack vehicle again and everything gets,
2:39:58continues to just be finance tech bro BS and that's it.
2:40:02But hopefully more changes in a positive way.
2:40:07And again, I think the reason why I am not super down
2:40:12on this is just because I have so little faith
2:40:15in Twitter's leadership up 'til now.
2:40:16Like they have just shown themselves to be totally inept
2:40:19and weirdly guided and misguided
2:40:22and to not understand their own product at all,
2:40:25to not understand what it needs, what it doesn't need,
2:40:28like to not be able to properly moderate anything
2:40:31on their platform.
2:40:33I have zero faith in their,
2:40:35oh, and also to have it be a bad business.
2:40:37So I have zero faith in their current and past leadership.
2:40:41So to have somebody else come in, it's like,
2:40:43"Eh, I guess, let's see what happens."
2:40:46- No, I'm still thinking it definitely has to be worse
2:40:50'cause the attitudes of the people who have run Twitter
2:40:52are better, like what they were trying to do
2:40:54is better than everything I've heard Ian say
2:40:57he's trying to do.
2:40:57There's still, like I said, I'd much rather like fail fast.
2:41:00Like if you're gonna try to do some bad things,
2:41:02I want them to be bad immediately.
2:41:03I don't want them to be slowly bad
2:41:04over the course of a decade through neglect.
2:41:06Neglect is worse, right? And so that's my optimistic scenario is that all the bad
2:41:12things happen super fast and hopefully maybe after the election.
2:41:17(beep)