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ATP

111: That Big Ring Underground Somewhere in Europe

 

00:00:00   I have no idea what day it is anymore.

00:00:02   It's still Thursday.

00:00:04   What week is it?

00:00:06   The first week of April, is that right? I don't even know.

00:00:08   Is the watch out yet?

00:00:10   No it's not. Soon. But not yet.

00:00:12   Check your wrist.

00:00:14   Just look at your wrist.

00:00:16   It's hair o'clock.

00:00:18   So do we have some follow-up?

00:00:20   Starting with cooking, apparently.

00:00:22   Seriously? That's awesome.

00:00:24   Yeah, this was last week on the toaster episode.

00:00:26   I was making fun of the temperatures

00:00:28   making fun of the temperatures printed on the glass door of the toaster saying that

00:00:32   160 to 170 is not an appropriate temperature for pork despite the fact that it is printed

00:00:37   on the door of the toaster that I tested last week. And I also blame the government for

00:00:42   these crazy temperature ratings because they tend to be super conservative to make sure

00:00:47   you don't get any food borne illnesses. Well, I was told by several people that the government

00:00:51   had in fact changed their recommended temperature to pork. They changed it in 2011 and when

00:00:57   people mention this to me I had then recalled reading the story back then but

00:01:00   anyway the government now recommends a 145 for pork which is a perfectly sane

00:01:05   temperature for pork and it will make it not taste like cardboard so everybody

00:01:08   you can say the government says the US government that is that you can safely

00:01:13   cook your pork to 145 and eat it and not have it taste like cardboard all right

00:01:17   well I feel better knowing that piece of information I don't know about you guys

00:01:21   all right so why don't tell us about the f-16 there's another thing last we got

00:01:26   I think it was a four-touch trackpad.

00:01:29   The trackpad doesn't move, but it feels like it moves, and it reminded me of the stick

00:01:33   in the F-16, which doesn't move.

00:01:35   A couple of people knowledgeable about this stuff wrote in to tell me that the F-16, the

00:01:40   original F-16 stick, didn't move at all, and the pilots found it disconcerting because

00:01:45   there was no feedback, and so it was modified so that it moves slightly.

00:01:49   Some people say fractions of an inch, some people say it moves an inch total.

00:01:52   I saw a video of it at one point moving.

00:01:54   It doesn't move much, but it moves a little bit.

00:01:56   Because there was no feedback, it just felt kind of weird.

00:01:58   And I wasn't sure about the F-18, and people have already told me that the F-18 stick does

00:02:04   move, and it actually has a mechanical connection to the flight controls as a backup.

00:02:11   I remember reading about that years ago, the fly-by-wire thing.

00:02:14   Before drive-by-wire came to cars, not that we want to turn this into neutral already,

00:02:19   Fly-by-wire came to planes first, where the controls were not hooked up to the...

00:02:24   things that you put your hands on were not hooked up to the

00:02:27   control surfaces of the plane by a mechanical connection,

00:02:30   but rather just by like you would move the stick and it would figure out what you were trying to do and then it would

00:02:34   instruct electronics to move the control surfaces of the plane and predictably that freaked out pilots like "oh I got you know,

00:02:40   I gotta have a direct connection. I don't trust these computers blah blah blah."

00:02:44   But they made it triply and quadruply redundant. Anyway, in the F-18

00:02:47   It's fly-by-wire my understanding, but there is a backup system where if the fly-by-wire system fails

00:02:52   You can still move the surfaces with a stick

00:02:54   So there you go the f-16 and needed with its unmoving stick needed some haptic feedback as well

00:03:02   I don't they guess they did decide not to go with vibration and just go with tiny amounts of movement

00:03:06   But it still seems pretty weird

00:03:08   That's definitely wonky, but hey whatever works

00:03:12   Tell us about the current MacBook Pro and how many monitors you can connect to it

00:03:17   Yeah, the last week talking about the confusion of what would happen if they had two USB C ports on the new MacBook

00:03:25   and

00:03:26   But it only supported

00:03:28   Two monitors so you could only have the intro monitor and one external monitor

00:03:31   Wouldn't it be confusing that you had this other port that you thought you could hook something into it?

00:03:34   I said it would not be confusing because you would know that you bought a machine that only supports dual displays you would

00:03:39   Yeah, and Frank and Frank wrote in to tell me well the current MacBook Pro only supports two external displays

00:03:45   But it has three places you can plug in monitor

00:03:47   So those people must just be thoroughly confused when they plug in that third monitor, and it doesn't work alright, so there were two big

00:03:54   Pieces of follow-up that we got or two pieces of follow-up that we got often

00:03:59   One of them was everyone getting angry at you for falling into the Steve Jobs said or Steve Jobs did trap

00:04:06   Would you like to defend yourself John? Yeah, that's not it's one of those things where there's sort of

00:04:11   shared cultural knowledge of a meme or whatever and it

00:04:15   All nuance is rung out of that meme and the meme is kind of when when Tim Cook took over Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs died

00:04:22   Among the Apple nerd community where there were a lot of there was a lot of pushback on the idea

00:04:28   On the other stories that were coming saying Oh Jobs is gone

00:04:31   He was the only one who could have led Apple to victory now no matter what Tim Cook does he's doomed without

00:04:36   jobs Apple can't innovate and everything Tim Cook did it was well Steve Jobs

00:04:40   would have done it this way well he's no Steve Jobs well Steve Jobs would have

00:04:43   done that and so the blowback meme in our little circle was always I don't

00:04:47   want to see anyone comparing anything Tim Cook does to Steve Jobs I don't want

00:04:50   to see anyone ever saying Steve Jobs would have done this and would have done

00:04:52   that the spirit it was that meme is developed in was worthwhile and that

00:04:58   when that transition did take place there were a lot of those hysterical

00:05:01   stories about how Apple could never possibly succeed without Steve Jobs and

00:05:03   so on. But it has morphed into "It is now impossible to ever compare and contrast Steve

00:05:10   Jobs and Tim Cook." And that premise I reject. I think it is perfectly valid to compare and

00:05:15   contrast Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, whether or not you think one is better than the other

00:05:19   and whether or not you want to make that particular case. In the last episode, I was comparing

00:05:24   them directly on things that they had each done with the product line, not saying, "Well,

00:05:29   what would Steve Jobs have done about the watch or some product that he didn't even

00:05:32   know about I don't even know about the watch but anyway that type of thing I

00:05:36   think is not as useful but still I think is a valid line of inquiry as long as

00:05:41   you're not using it as a cudgel to say like Steve Jobs would never have done

00:05:45   that therefore what Tim Cook is doing is wrong because Steve Jobs was infallible

00:05:48   and so on and so forth so anyway I reject that criticism because I think it

00:05:52   is useful to compare these things and as long as you do it in a thoughtful way

00:05:55   and not just you know elevate Steve Jobs to godhood and use him as a way to say

00:06:02   whatever Tim Cook does is bad or to try to support your own opinion by saying

00:06:05   I think the watch is a dumb idea and Steve Jobs would have agreed with me was he was here

00:06:10   He's always right therefore. I'm right because I I'm telling you what Steve Jobs would have thought about the watcher

00:06:15   You know I again

00:06:16   I don't know if you knew about the watch it would be better if we had an example of a product that we were sure

00:06:19   The Steve Jobs never knew about a lot of these things have been in the works for a long time

00:06:23   But anyway, that's that's how I feel about the comparisons to Steve Jobs

00:06:27   So you stand by your comparison from last week? Yes, totally because I you know, it is not like completely speculative

00:06:34   I'm not using the ghost of Steve Jobs to sure I support my opinion

00:06:36   I said I didn't even know which strategy was better than Tim Cook one of the Steve Jobs one and I could go either way

00:06:41   On it and it's not clear like it's not it. It is completely valid

00:06:44   All right

00:06:46   Let's wake Marco up and have him tell us about something awesome and then he can go back to sleep for a few more minutes

00:06:50   It's something going on. We're doing a podcast something like that is the show

00:06:54   Is this what people tune in for do you want to explain why you're all sleepy because no one's gonna know why you're all sleepy

00:06:59   When they like you you think that everyone follows your life down to the the tweet on Twitter

00:07:03   But people are gonna listen to this who haven't been following you on Twitter have no idea why you're out of it

00:07:06   So why don't you explain that? Thank God. I'm so tired of Twitter. People are so nasty there anyway

00:07:10   Honestly, I'm I'm pulling away from Twitter I think I

00:07:16   It's just not worth it. It is simply not worth it. You haven't even been tweeting that much

00:07:21   What are you that's what I'm talking about. I'm pulling away from Twitter. All right

00:07:24   Well, maybe we'll save us for the after show and we'll have a therapy session and see what's going on on your Twitter

00:07:28   All right. Well, it's it isn't anything recent. It's like I'm slowly realizing over the course of time that

00:07:34   Twitter is

00:07:37   it's a tricky balance between whether it makes your life better or worse overall and

00:07:42   and I've been questioning what the what the value of it is for me recently and whether it is a net gain or loss and

00:07:48   I think

00:07:49   Maybe it's probably a net gain still but the ratio there is not as good as it should be

00:07:55   So I'm really not incredibly happy with it anyway

00:07:59   And I'm exploring ways to try to fix it. Young man, when you are tired of Twitter

00:08:04   You are tired of life. Another reference you will not get from a long time ago

00:08:09   So the reason I sound like this and the reason I'm out of it

00:08:12   And probably not making any sense is because I have just returned from a trip across the Atlantic Ocean

00:08:19   To Ireland for the wonderful ool conference and I would I would tell you how amazing it is in great detail

00:08:24   However, Casey didn't get to go this year

00:08:26   And it would just be cruel for me for me to tell you how awesome it was

00:08:29   But suffice to say it was awesome. And I've been awake for approximately 22 hours now. I

00:08:35   Forget what time my body thinks it is. It doesn't really matter

00:08:39   But I'm a zombie and I sound like this so I apologize

00:08:43   In better news. We have a new sponsor this week

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00:11:32   - All right.

00:11:33   So I had said earlier that there were two major pieces

00:11:37   follow-up that that we had got a lot of complaining about via the feedback just

00:11:43   well this week there were two and the other one had to do with some of the

00:11:50   statements we made on fabbing ram which in turn were based on some follow-up

00:11:55   that we had gotten two weeks ago so John do you want to set all this straight

00:11:58   yeah this was my memory I would which I just asserted as fact the first time I

00:12:02   of I talked about it that when when using when fabbing silicon chips that

00:12:08   the first thing they do to work out the kinks in a new process size was fab ram

00:12:12   because it's simple and very regular and not as complicated as actual full-fledged

00:12:15   CPU and then we got some feedback that said no no actually D RAM is really

00:12:19   complicated because they have capacitors they're like they're not like two flat

00:12:22   plates facing each other it's like a tube within a tube and it's really

00:12:25   complicated to fab them and actually it's much harder to fab those capacitors

00:12:29   than just regular planar logic transistors, so that's definitely not the case.

00:12:32   And I was like, "Alright, well, maybe my data is old, maybe I'm just remembering this from

00:12:37   when I was a kid and I never revisited maybe when they passed through 32 nanometers, something

00:12:42   changed."

00:12:43   Because things get weird when you start getting really small process sizes, like who knows,

00:12:45   maybe we only have X-ray lithography, maybe we already have X-ray lithography, that's

00:12:49   how much I've been keeping up with it, as in not much.

00:12:51   It's not like it just shrinks, shrinks, shrinks, and it's going to shrink your whole life.

00:12:53   We should have a whole episode about the end of Moore's Law, by the way, because Moore's

00:12:57   law has existed for most of our life where it's like, "Oh, you know, they just keep shrinking

00:13:01   in the process," but like, it doesn't take a genius to figure out you can't keep shrinking

00:13:05   forever. Eventually you get down to the things that they're slamming together in that big

00:13:10   ring underground somewhere in Europe, and you run into some problems. But anyway, we're

00:13:16   not there yet. And so, last week I said, "What the heck was I remembering with this whole

00:13:22   fabbing RAM first? Am I just crazy, or was it something they used to do but don't do

00:13:25   anymore, and I got a lot of people who would be in positions to know telling me that what

00:13:30   I was, it wasn't that they don't fab RAM, it's that they fab SRAM, not DRAM.

00:13:34   SRAM is the stuff you use to make like the caches and stuff on CPUs.

00:13:38   It is not the same as DRAM.

00:13:41   It is much more expensive than DRAM and faster because you need to use way more transistors

00:13:44   per bit of stored memory.

00:13:47   But unlike DRAM, it doesn't need to be refreshed every X number of milliseconds.

00:13:50   Anyway, we'll link to the SRAM Wikipedia page.

00:13:54   SRAM is not a new thing, but the point is SRAM is not filled with capacitors, it's just

00:13:58   a bunch of logic gates and it is very regular and that is what they use to test out the

00:14:02   Kingston New Processes.

00:14:03   In fact we have someone, Andrew Yang from, oh no he's not the one from Intel, but someone

00:14:07   else from Intel.

00:14:08   But anyway, he links to an Anetech story from a while back specifically talking about SRAM.

00:14:13   The Anetech story says "The good old SRAM test vehicle is a great way to iron out bugs

00:14:17   in the manufacturing process."

00:14:18   and he talks about how Intel was demoing in 2007 their 32 nanometer SRAM test chip.

00:14:24   And Eric, who used to work at Intel until 2006, says that each new process node in SDRAM

00:14:30   module was fabbed prior to the main production of CPUs.

00:14:32   I saw someone else, I don't have the notes here, was saying that that measurement of

00:14:36   like how small were you able to get SRAM is kind of like the yardstick for how you're

00:14:40   doing on your process size.

00:14:41   Like oh, we first got SRAM down to this size at this date or whatever.

00:14:44   So there you go, one letter makes a difference.

00:14:47   If you don't know the difference between SRAM and DRAM,

00:14:49   I encourage you to read the Wikipedia pages

00:14:50   that we will put in the show notes,

00:14:51   because all RAM is crazy,

00:14:53   and examining the difference between SRAM and DRAM

00:14:55   will make you appreciate the stuff

00:14:56   that's inside your computer

00:14:58   that you never need to think about.

00:15:00   And finally, Gordon McGregor sent us a link to a chart

00:15:02   that shows process size,

00:15:05   and I didn't quite understand this chart,

00:15:06   and it seems to contradict some of the things I just said,

00:15:08   but this chart shows that DRAM

00:15:11   still leads process development versus logic,

00:15:13   but the gap is closing over time.

00:15:14   Did you guys look at this graph here?

00:15:16   No, it is somewhat confusing it shows logic and then D RAM the NAND flash and I don't know what that other line is there

00:15:23   Anyway, I will leave the graph in the show notes

00:15:26   Anyone wants to parse that out and figure what it is I'm looking at there

00:15:29   But I'm fairly convinced that what I was remembering was s RAM and not D RAM in that first little letter

00:15:33   Makes all the difference that took surprisingly little time John. I'm very proud of I tried to trim it down

00:15:39   I didn't want it there was some more rehashing of the the new MacBook, but I felt we've covered it

00:15:43   Yeah, I think we can definitely never talk about the one port on the MacBook again

00:15:48   Oh, no, when Apple sends us all our free sample copies, then we'll talk about it some more. Oh, yeah that yeah

00:15:53   Oh, I didn't mention I got I got five of them on my mailbox today. Yes. I said check your wrist

00:15:58   You're wearing two Apple watches right now. Oh my god, you're right

00:16:02   If it were only that easy, oh damn. It's the sport

00:16:05   Okay, so

00:16:10   So it's funny that this is the week that we run through follow-up so quickly because we don't really have any

00:16:15   Terribly pressing topics. That's right. Now you where is your follow-up now?

00:16:18   All right, so I don't know which one of you guys put this in the show notes

00:16:26   But would you like to talk about our max and roadmap rumors? I think we all would I think we should all bring up

00:16:32   This page which is from a long time ago and it is a complete the unsubstantiated rumor as far as I can tell

00:16:37   - So we ran out of topics, so we're moving

00:16:40   from discussing new BS rumors

00:16:42   to discussing ancient BS rumors.

00:16:44   - Yeah, well, I mean, this BS rumor is a jumping off point.

00:16:48   First of all, it's in one of those sub-communities

00:16:51   that we don't really travel in,

00:16:53   like the whole semiconductor forums,

00:16:56   where they're debating, they're really into

00:16:58   who's particular process size

00:17:01   and what particular technology is getting what contract

00:17:03   for what chip and all that stuff.

00:17:07   So at the very least, like, anyway, look at the story.

00:17:12   It talks about like the A9, the A10, the A9X, the A10X,

00:17:15   the S1 and the S2, all names that you could very easily

00:17:18   make up based on, you know, Apple's current naming

00:17:20   of their chips.

00:17:21   And who might get those contracts

00:17:24   and what technology they're using

00:17:26   and the date they're supposed to start production

00:17:28   and contracts that are split over different fabs

00:17:31   like Samsung and TSMC and Global Foundry

00:17:33   and whether Intel is fabbing anything.

00:17:37   And there's a big table showing all this information, most of which is not that big of a deal except

00:17:41   from the perspective of Apple, you know, how is Apple managing its relationship with its

00:17:47   fiercest competitor Samsung that it is still relying on to fab a lot of its chips?

00:17:51   And that's always an uncomfortable situation and we've talked in the past about perhaps

00:17:55   getting Intel into the mix here because they are usually at the forefront of process technology,

00:18:01   very often far ahead of the rest of the field but so far Apple hasn't been using them for

00:18:05   anything but of course Intel has their own chips they want you to use instead of ARM.

00:18:09   Anyway, inside this entire story is a one line item showing on the A9X and A10X line,

00:18:17   on the A9 and A10 it says those are the iPhone.

00:18:18   On the Apple Watch it says of course the S1 and the S2.

00:18:21   And then it talks about the baseband chip on the iPhone and iPad.

00:18:24   And then the middle item it says A9X, A10X, iPad and Mac.

00:18:29   And that is not an exciting part of the story really to the people discussing this because

00:18:33   'cause all they care about is who's fabbing

00:18:34   and what technology it's on.

00:18:35   But it's like, "Oh, we'll just throw that in there."

00:18:37   Yeah, of course, the A9X and the A10X,

00:18:38   of course there'll be Macs based on those.

00:18:40   And this is the eternal ARM-based Mac.

00:18:43   Remember that we've talked about at length in the past,

00:18:45   I think it was worth revisiting.

00:18:47   Do we think anything has changed on the feasibility

00:18:52   and likability of ARM-based Macs in light of,

00:18:55   let's say, like the new MacBook with its five watt CPU

00:18:59   and the very latest iPad Air 2 with its benchmarks

00:19:04   versus the existing computers.

00:19:05   Do we think now is the time?

00:19:06   Do we believe this little table here

00:19:10   any more than we did in the past,

00:19:11   or is it just still a wait and see attitude?

00:19:14   - You know, I actually had an interesting

00:19:16   and related realization at work the other day.

00:19:20   One of my coworkers who is not a developer,

00:19:22   she had just swapped a Dell iPad Air,

00:19:27   excuse me, MacBook Air knockoff for a actual MacBook Air.

00:19:31   And this MacBook Air happened to be a few years old.

00:19:33   I don't recall exactly when it was built.

00:19:36   But she didn't have VMware installed.

00:19:41   Now, typically when we used to issue Macs to everyone,

00:19:44   doesn't matter if you're a developer or not,

00:19:46   we would, or our IT department of one,

00:19:49   would install VMware Fusion on every single Mac.

00:19:53   Because inevitably all of these people,

00:19:55   be it business people, developers, whatever,

00:19:58   are going to need to do something in Windows

00:20:01   that they can't do in OS X.

00:20:02   And so our IT guy would just get ahead of the curve

00:20:06   and just put VMware Fusion on there.

00:20:09   And I went to do something in VMware Fusion on her machine.

00:20:12   I can't remember what it was, but it doesn't really matter.

00:20:14   And VMware Fusion wasn't there.

00:20:17   And that was a little bit odd for me

00:20:20   because I thought it was a given that, say,

00:20:23   for Visio, if nothing else, that VMware would be on every Mac we hand out in the company.

00:20:29   And it isn't. And that relates to this discussion because I have to imagine that virtualizing

00:20:38   a Windows installation, unless it was whatever that weirdo version of Windows is that runs

00:20:42   on the surface, the ARM surfaces, virtualizing a Windows installation on an ARM Mac would

00:20:48   be unbelievably slow. I mean, we've talked about this in the past, but my recollection

00:20:52   of Macs before I ever touched a Mac was that they would have like separate daughterboards

00:20:56   on some of these old Macs that would basically be a PC on a daughterboard that you would

00:21:01   plug into your Mac in order to make emulation of PCs way faster. Do you know what I'm talking

00:21:06   about, Jon?

00:21:07   They had those, but nobody owned them. Like you would never see one in the wild. They

00:21:10   made a couple machines that you can do that with a couple of third parties actual shoulder

00:21:14   card, but it was not a thing like virtual PC was the thing. And that was all emulated

00:21:18   x86 PC on my power PC Mac and it was super slow.

00:21:23   Exactly, exactly.

00:21:24   And so that's what that's that's one of the things that I love about my Macs and this

00:21:29   is granted directly driven by the fact that I do all of my work on the Microsoft stack.

00:21:34   But nonetheless, I love being able to boot into when I don't love being being able to

00:21:39   boot into Windows, but I love being able to get my job done by booting into Windows and

00:21:43   using Visual Studio and doing all that sort of thing.

00:21:46   But it was very interesting to me that someone who isn't a developer apparently doesn't

00:21:51   need Windows anymore.

00:21:52   And that's a change from just a couple of years back, at least in my workplace.

00:21:56   And that is kind of what you were talking about, Jon.

00:21:59   Is this more feasible now?

00:22:01   Well, I don't know, but certainly could be.

00:22:04   I think it's not just Windows, because we always think, "Oh, x86, it's great that

00:22:08   we can run Windows software.

00:22:09   And now, finally, this divide that existed for so long."

00:22:12   It was Mac versus PC, and it was the software compatibility problem.

00:22:15   And when Apple went x86, it was cutting the Gordian knot

00:22:18   and say, game over, it is not an issue anymore.

00:22:21   You can boot Windows on these things.

00:22:23   There is no excuse not to get this Mac.

00:22:26   You know what I mean?

00:22:27   It can do everything.

00:22:28   You can kind of look at it as a transitional thing.

00:22:30   Like we need to be able to do what the competition can do

00:22:35   long enough to defeat the competition

00:22:37   and then it doesn't matter anymore.

00:22:38   It's not like the Mac is defeating Windows PCs,

00:22:40   but what's happening is that the PC is being defeated

00:22:43   by mobile, right?

00:22:45   And so it becomes less relevant what goes on down here in the PC world.

00:22:50   And maybe Windows becomes less relevant, even Microsoft is bringing all of its stuff to

00:22:54   be, you know, net-based services and cloud subscriptions and web-based things.

00:22:59   And you know, it's just the stakes are a lot lower, you know, the need for Windows is a

00:23:05   lot lower.

00:23:08   Within specific applications, like if you really need to use Windows stuff, x86 I think

00:23:12   is still indispensable for those things.

00:23:14   I don't think it's feasible for Apple to go all ARM for a variety of reasons.

00:23:18   And for x86, so the reason I bring up Windows is from my perspective, in my particular job

00:23:24   and everyone's varies, Windows, yes, is important, but I feel like Linux is just as important.

00:23:29   And you say, "Well, it doesn't matter.

00:23:30   Linux runs on everything.

00:23:31   Linux doesn't need x86."

00:23:32   You're right, Linux does run on everything.

00:23:33   I had Linux on my PowerPC Mac.

00:23:35   There was lots of different distributions.

00:23:36   But practically speaking, it's a lot easier to get binary packages and to work out compilation

00:23:43   problems than to just sort out everything you need to sort out on x86/64 Linux.

00:23:48   Because that is the sweet spot.

00:23:50   That is what everyone's using.

00:23:51   That's the common thing.

00:23:52   And if you have some exotic CPU like ARM or PowerPC or whatever, you are a little bit

00:23:57   off the beaten path.

00:23:58   Is that a big deal?

00:23:59   No, but it's just a hassle.

00:24:01   It's an annoyance.

00:24:03   It's the kind of thing that Mac users used to have to deal with.

00:24:05   Because they're like, "Oh, I can do that, but I'm a little bit different."

00:24:08   It's like OS X in the beginning.

00:24:10   try to compile your UNIX software and it'd be like, "You can build it on a Mac, but

00:24:13   it's kind of weird.

00:24:14   You might have to tweak a Makefile."

00:24:15   And it's like, "Why doesn't this just build out of the box?"

00:24:17   Luckily, all the people who maintain software packages for UNIX seem to get Macs, because

00:24:23   it only took a few years for all those packages to start building, and now you just expect

00:24:26   if I get something from the open source world, it will build on the Mac, and if it doesn't,

00:24:32   you're angry at somebody.

00:24:33   So we've already become entitled, like, "How dare that thing not build on the Mac!"

00:24:39   But yeah, I think x86 still serves a role as the sort of common base Windows, Mac, Linux,

00:24:46   even though the Mac in the past has run on different platforms, and even though Linux

00:24:49   in the present runs on a bazillion different platforms, and even Windows has at various

00:24:53   times run on different platforms.

00:24:54   There's an ARM version of Windows now, there was a PowerPC version of Windows NT, for people

00:24:57   who are really old, remember that one?

00:25:00   But x86 is still that commonality.

00:25:02   So regardless of what goes on at the low end of ARM, I have to think that Apple would have

00:25:08   to keep x86-64 at the very least on the high end for some period of time.

00:25:12   And the thing that trips me up about the ARM-based Mac is like, so do you have two different

00:25:17   CPUs in Macs for a long period, for multiple years, where you can get both ARM Macs and

00:25:24   x86 Macs?

00:25:26   That seems like more trouble than it's worth to me.

00:25:30   Yeah, that seems weird.

00:25:32   I mean, that's what Microsoft is doing with the Surface, right?

00:25:35   They have the Surface, what is it, RT, which is--

00:25:38   Windows RT, yeah.

00:25:40   I'm sorry, I'm conflating them.

00:25:42   But yeah, there's a Surface that runs ARM, which

00:25:45   at least the early ones--

00:25:46   I haven't kept up with the later ones,

00:25:48   but a few coworkers go to build every year,

00:25:50   and that's kind of the Microsoft WWDC, if you will.

00:25:53   It's in Moscone, the whole rigmarole.

00:25:55   And anyway, unlike Apple, Microsoft

00:25:57   gives away all sorts of awesome goodies.

00:26:01   I think they got Xbox Ones last year, et cetera.

00:26:04   Well, anyways, they got Surface RTs a couple of years ago, and they said that they were

00:26:10   great for the three or four or 10 pieces of software that came with it, but they were

00:26:15   pieces of crap for anything else.

00:26:18   And the chat room is telling me, well, that's not really a thing anymore, but it's still

00:26:22   an illustrative example of, well, it makes everything harder when you're not running

00:26:28   on the platform that they're not running on the CPU that most of the platform is running

00:26:32   on.

00:26:33   just like you said, Jon, over time that would change. But it's weird from a consumer point

00:26:39   of view. We've been lamenting, maybe not the three of us as much, but we as a community have

00:26:42   been lamenting all the different skews that Apple has now between iPads and certainly the watch and

00:26:51   iPhones and Macs. And this would just further complicate things. I don't know. I agree with

00:26:58   you for sure, Jon, that it seems really aggressive to get rid of Intel. Even on the low end,

00:27:02   even on like the little even on the low end it seems aggressive but i i would believe it because

00:27:08   apple is aggressive i hear they're coming out with a computer that only is one port um these very soon

00:27:13   don't know warning just acknowledge that the chat room is talking about that the arm-based version

00:27:20   of windows has gone around in circles two times oh it's dead it's just going away it's just sleeping

00:27:26   you know it is an x version of windows anyway that always struck me as a trial balloon we can

00:27:32   make, you know, because it's when they were doing like the original Surface, right?

00:27:35   And they were going to have one that was Intel power, but the best chips Intel could give

00:27:37   them still required like vents to be on the side of their tablet, and that was kind of

00:27:41   like, can we make one that's iPad-like, but still using, you know, like, can we do it?

00:27:47   We want to make an iPad, and Intel doesn't have a chip for us, can we still put Windows

00:27:52   on it?

00:27:53   Because their whole thing was like Windows 8, it's the same everywhere, blah blah blah.

00:27:55   Well, we can make an ARM version of Windows, how about that?

00:27:57   And if it sold like gangbusters, they would be like full steam ahead on it.

00:28:01   But Surface in general didn't sell like gangbusters and the ARM version even less so because just

00:28:05   like Casey said, people bought them and either I can imagine people buying one saying "wow

00:28:09   this runs Windows, I'll be able to run everything" and being mistaken despite the fact that I'm

00:28:13   sure the nice Microsoft sales people tried to emphasize to them that you will not be

00:28:16   able to run x86 software on your ARM based Surface.

00:28:20   And then it required Microsoft to do the thing that has not been really good at doing lately

00:28:24   which is make all the people who make its third party applications also compile an ARM

00:28:28   version to make sure your app works on ARM.

00:28:30   Like Apple is the king of hurting its developer community through platform transitions, whether

00:28:35   it be from one CPU to the next, from desktop to phone, or from PowerPC to Intel.

00:28:41   Apple has done that more times and more successfully than any other technology company, and Microsoft

00:28:46   has not done a great job of hurting its developer community from one API set to the other, from

00:28:52   one CPU architecture to the other.

00:28:54   hell, they had a really hard time getting them onto the Windows NT codebase off of the

00:28:57   you know, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98 DOS-based codebase.

00:29:02   So it could just be different strengths in the company.

00:29:05   I totally believe Apple could pull off an ARM/Mac transition, but I'm always looking

00:29:09   like aside from the obvious upside that we talk about all the time, Apple wants to own

00:29:13   and control every important technology and its products, like that is there.

00:29:16   That's the reason we're talking about this at all.

00:29:17   It totally fits with everything they want to do, but then you say, "What are you going

00:29:21   to do about the Mac Pro?

00:29:22   What are you gonna do about the MacBook Pro?

00:29:24   Are you gonna become a CPU design powerhouse?"

00:29:27   He said, "We already are a CPU design powerhouse.

00:29:29   Look at the A8.

00:29:30   We're amazing."

00:29:31   "Yes, alright, so I believe you could do it, but do you do it in all one big bang?"

00:29:36   "Do you say, 'And all the Macs are armed now, and we've got a 12-core arm for our Mac Pros

00:29:41   all the way down to the tiniest little arm in our Apple Watch, and we designed them all

00:29:45   because now we're the new Intel, and I guess we get Samsung and TSMC to fab them for us

00:29:52   a process node that may be a little bit behind Intel? I don't know. It worries me. The whole

00:29:57   thing worries me.

00:29:58   Well, and also, if we look at, like, did you see there was a benchmark on Geek Banks that

00:30:03   has been since taken down, but I saw a screenshot of it earlier. This is a benchmark of the

00:30:11   new MacBook, the new slow MacBook. And it's roughly equivalent to the performance of,

00:30:19   like 2010 MacBook Airs, like it's in that ballpark.

00:30:23   And I have reason to believe,

00:30:25   from a few details about the screenshot,

00:30:28   it looks legitimate.

00:30:29   I think this is a real deal.

00:30:31   So we now can see kind of what the CPU performance

00:30:35   would be like, I mean what the CPU performance is

00:30:39   as Intel tries to go all the way down to ARM level chips.

00:30:43   And this is not an Atom chip,

00:30:44   this is an actual core series chip,

00:30:47   but it's pretty close.

00:30:49   And if you think about like, compare this to the speed of the A8X chip in the iPad Air

00:30:55   2, which is currently the, I believe currently like the best, the best ARM chip that's kind

00:31:01   of in that ballpark for like, you know, wattage and everything like that, right?

00:31:06   It's fairly close, you know, it's in the ballpark, it's very similar to what we're seeing in

00:31:10   the ARM chips, you know, in the same power envelope roughly.

00:31:14   So I think if you look at this, you can kind of see, well, an ARM version of this laptop

00:31:19   really wouldn't be that different performance or battery wise like I think

00:31:22   it would be certainly in the same ballpark on both of those criteria so

00:31:26   then the question is why go through the transition at all like if Intel can with

00:31:31   enough pressure and enough technology if Intel can kind of reach down to the

00:31:36   power levels of ARM chips to make a very low level chip that still performs okay

00:31:40   even though it's not great and if ARM can reach up and try to make a chip that

00:31:44   performs as well as Intel but still keeps that that envelope and they're

00:31:47   both kind of reaching the same general range by doing that, then why should Apple transition

00:31:54   a product line that is so well established on Intel chips and has all these massive transition

00:31:58   costs if they were to choose to do it? Why make the jump? It seems like there's not enough

00:32:02   gain to be had there.

00:32:04   Simon Witte tweeted at us earlier on April 1st. He may have been in the air. He says

00:32:08   the iPad Air 2, he just, there's not enough room in the tweet to expand this out, but

00:32:12   He says 27.3 watt hours.

00:32:14   Is that just the battery capacity?

00:32:16   I don't know.

00:32:17   Anyway, 1800, 4500 Geekbench.

00:32:19   Those are two numbers separated by a slash.

00:32:22   And it's at 20 nanometers.

00:32:23   And the new MacBook is 39.7 watt hours.

00:32:25   Again, I assume that's the battery.

00:32:27   1900, 4000 Geekbench.

00:32:29   So it's a comparable Geekbench score and it's 14 nanometers.

00:32:33   So like you're saying, they're ballpark, you know, close to each other, the iPad Air 2

00:32:37   and the new MacBook.

00:32:39   But the bottom line of his tweet is Core M is $200 more.

00:32:43   Maybe that's retail price or whatever.

00:32:46   What can Apple do if they fab their own chips, save money, sell their computers for less

00:32:53   money, I guess?

00:32:54   I still think it's about owning control and not about we don't want to give a portion

00:32:59   of our profits to Intel.

00:33:01   But as I've said on many past programs, I really wish Apple and Intel, those two crazy

00:33:05   kids to just work this out. You know, I want I want the best I want my Macs and everything

00:33:12   to be fab with the best process technology human beings can make. And usually that's

00:33:16   Intel has that and the best CPU designs and like just I don't understand why we have to

00:33:21   fight Why can't I have both like, anyway,

00:33:24   well right now we have competition. That's great. I mean, right now you have like, you

00:33:28   know, I'm sure we've all heard that Apple probably has had a an R Mac, like in the labs

00:33:34   for testing as a contingency plan for years. I mean, that's not new, right? So, you know,

00:33:39   anyone who would agree to that who knows anything about this stuff. So, you know, Apple knows

00:33:44   they can make an ARM MacBook whenever they want to. Intel knows that Apple can make an

00:33:49   ARM MacBook whenever they want to. And so I think that keeps, you know, that healthy

00:33:54   competition there. Like, Intel has a bit of a fire lit under them in the last couple of

00:33:58   years to try to get these power needs down to compete with ARM because they have no meaningful

00:34:03   mobile presence. They really need a mobile presence if they want to see any more growth

00:34:08   ever again. And they certainly can't lose the business they already have in PCs and

00:34:17   servers. So they are working really hard and you're right, they do have the best process

00:34:23   manufacturing technology in the world most of the time. So I think that competition is

00:34:28   is great and I think we will see better results from Intel

00:34:33   as long as they are separate,

00:34:34   as long as this battle has not been settled yet.

00:34:37   As long as there's a threat

00:34:40   that Intel might lose their PC business

00:34:43   or any part of it to ARM,

00:34:46   Intel's gonna keep working really hard.

00:34:48   And so is ARM, and that's great.

00:34:49   - The semiconductor community site

00:34:51   that this rumor thing is on,

00:34:54   part of what they talk about in this article

00:34:55   is speculating about the idea that for future chips,

00:34:59   assuming this little table is correct, for future chips,

00:35:02   that Apple is spreading the manufacturing around,

00:35:04   not for technical reasons,

00:35:06   but just sort of the same reason

00:35:07   that the music makers went to Amazon

00:35:10   and tried to spread their business around from Apple,

00:35:12   just because they don't want to give any one fab

00:35:15   more power than the other.

00:35:17   So the idea is that Apple makes their own chip designs,

00:35:21   they own the intellectual property for the chip designs,

00:35:23   and they want to farm out fabbing of those chips

00:35:26   to the best company.

00:35:27   The same way they do, like who wants to assemble

00:35:30   our computers, who wants to make our glass,

00:35:32   who wants to, you know, like that's the relationship

00:35:35   Apple is comfortable with.

00:35:36   We own the intellectual property, we have a competition

00:35:39   amongst all these other lower margin businesses

00:35:41   to kill each other for our business.

00:35:43   Who wants to manufacture the watch?

00:35:45   Well, go ahead, you know, fight with each other

00:35:46   and we will pick the winner.

00:35:47   Like who wants to manufacture our car?

00:35:49   Like, you know what I mean?

00:35:50   Who wants to fab our chips?

00:35:52   And even if one company clearly has the best deal

00:35:55   and the best technology for a particular generation,

00:35:57   the speculation in this semiconductor,

00:35:59   semi wiki.com website is that Apple is saying,

00:36:03   if we wanted the best for the best price,

00:36:05   we would give all of our business to whoever,

00:36:07   Samsung, TSMC or whatever.

00:36:08   But long-term wise, it's better for us

00:36:11   to kind of spread it around.

00:36:12   So maybe give 75% to Samsung and 25% to Global Foundry,

00:36:16   just because we don't want to put all our eggs

00:36:18   in one basket.

00:36:21   Intel as much as Intel is in this fight or whatever like

00:36:24   That's the relationship. I feel like Apple once is

00:36:28   We just want Intel to be just another fab just like all these other people are

00:36:33   And then we will have you all fight amongst yourselves

00:36:36   And they would love to have Intel like fabbing some of their chips like we'll give Intel 50% and TSMC

00:36:41   25% and like but Intel's just not in it at all

00:36:45   Maybe because Intel wants all their business or none of their business or demands that Apple use x86 and its phones

00:36:50   I'm sure Intel is showing Apple roadmaps that show

00:36:53   What amazing chips they're going to have that could be in an iPhone and the iPhone 7 or 8 like that's how Intel got Apple's

00:37:00   Business to begin with they showed them the core lineup and they said I know we have stupid Pentium 4s now

00:37:04   And they suck but like netburst is dead

00:37:06   Here's what we're gonna make for you in the future and no one can compete with it and Intel was a hundred percent, right?

00:37:10   They got Apple's business and they did have by far the fastest most power efficient chips

00:37:14   During that first generation when they were you know coming out in Apple's laptop. So

00:37:19   I'm sure those meetings are still taking place, but in the meantime Apple is shipping a hell of a lot of armed devices manufactured by

00:37:25   nameless, faceless,

00:37:27   sometimes very big competitors that we don't know or hear about and that's just the way Apple likes it.

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00:40:17   Jon, you made an interesting observation, or at least I think it was Jon, maybe it was

00:40:21   Mark. It's probably Jon. That maybe other people have also realized, but the first

00:40:27   place I saw it was here in the show notes, and you had pointed out that the

00:40:30   Apple TV is actually cheaper than the VGA adapter for the MacBook that only

00:40:37   has one port. Yeah, I'm not the first person to make that analogy, but when

00:40:40   Because in the same keynote, they announced the price drop of the Apple TV from $99 to

00:40:47   $69.

00:40:48   And they also announced the availability, or they announced the product, and did they

00:40:51   announce the availability of the adapter?

00:40:53   Maybe.

00:40:54   Shortly after the announcement, we all went to the website and looked at the adapters

00:40:57   for the OnePort MacBook, and one of those adapters is $79.

00:41:02   Oh, they should have called it the MacBook One.

00:41:04   What a missed opportunity.

00:41:06   There you go, it's like the Xbox One, they'll start over.

00:41:09   Exactly.

00:41:10   named it like the 1-1, you know that one? The car, the supercar, the hypercar, sorry,

00:41:15   the 1-1.

00:41:16   I've lost track of what you're saying. They're still words, but they're not making any sense

00:41:20   anymore.

00:41:21   I believe the chat room will tell me, is it like O-N-E and then the number one or the

00:41:26   reverse? You haven't heard of this either, Casey?

00:41:28   No.

00:41:29   It's because it wasn't on Top Gear, and that's where you get all your car.

00:41:31   Oh, don't even bring it up. I can't handle another week of feedback about that.

00:41:35   Anyway, the 1-1 is by the car manufacturer whose name I'm not going to attempt to pronounce,

00:41:40   But you know it as the really long one on the Top Gear board.

00:41:43   What's the name of that company with the K?

00:41:44   Koning Seg.

00:41:45   Yeah, OK, there you go.

00:41:46   That one.

00:41:47   They're making a car called the 1-1, spelled in some weird way.

00:41:51   And I think it's because it's one horsepower per pound

00:41:54   or something.

00:41:54   Anyway, it's insane.

00:41:55   Go Google the 1-1 and see what the crazy people are

00:41:59   making for cars.

00:42:01   Apparently, it's O-N-E colon numeral 1.

00:42:04   That's not confusing at all.

00:42:05   It is a cra-- you have to look at it.

00:42:07   It's crazy.

00:42:08   Anyway.

00:42:08   The Ferrari love Ferrari.

00:42:10   It is way more crazy than that and will probably break after being driven 100 miles.

00:42:14   But you know, like anyway.

00:42:15   It's, yeah, you just still get the LaFerrari, but this car is crazy.

00:42:20   One horsepower per kilogram, sorry, they're in European.

00:42:23   It's not one horsepower per man.

00:42:25   All right.

00:42:26   Anyway, the fact that the new Apple TV is cheaper than the adapter, I don't know what

00:42:32   it highlights.

00:42:33   Does it highlight the fact that that adapter is too expensive?

00:42:36   Does it highlight the fact that that adapter also contains silicon chips?

00:42:39   We know that.

00:42:41   Are the silicon chips that are in that adapter actually more expensive than the ancient single-core

00:42:46   A5 that's in the Apple TV?

00:42:50   I don't know, but like the price drop itself, like dropping the Apple TV from $99 to $69

00:42:58   all points towards, and the fact that they announced the HBO deal we'll talk about in

00:43:02   a second, all points towards the idea that this current Apple TV is finally, blessedly

00:43:08   going to not be the best Apple TV you can buy, whether it goes away or continues on

00:43:14   in its $69 slot, as many people think it will.

00:43:17   Either way, a new Apple TV is coming.

00:43:19   It is long overdue, and when the new Apple TV comes, by dropping this one, it leaves

00:43:23   room for the new Apple TV to come in at $99 to have an actual decent CPU and to not give

00:43:29   me obscure errors when I try to watch television programs.

00:43:32   And if I'm really getting greedy here, and I know everyone who has a Roku or some other

00:43:36   box that they love is going to tell me this is not a problem there.

00:43:39   But all the TV connected thingies that I have, anything that streams video, whether it's

00:43:44   streaming from my Synology, streaming from my Mac, streaming onto my Playstation 3, Playstation

00:43:50   4, from my TiVo, from my Apple TV, what else do I have connected?

00:43:54   All these different devices from my TV itself, streaming from Netflix, all these things,

00:44:00   this one elusive piece of technology seems not to exist, which is the ability to scrub

00:44:05   around in a television program in anything resembling a reliable, meaningful way.

00:44:10   It is just like, fast forward, rewind, to be able to like, it just, sometimes fast forwarding

00:44:16   a rewind scan totally screws the stream and you'll have to start from the beginning.

00:44:20   Sometimes it kind of moves a little bit and stutters, sometimes a perfectly good stream

00:44:23   will stop and just like, I don't know what the problem is with this, like I do it on

00:44:27   web pages all the time, I move the little scrubber in YouTube and it actually works,

00:44:30   and yet for everything connected to my television, if I ever want to fast forward a rewind scan,

00:44:35   In not jump to the beginning not jump to the end but move in either direction at a speed faster than 1x playback

00:44:42   These applications these devices throw up their hands and say you're crazy. That's not gonna happen

00:44:48   Well, I don't know why you're even bothering now

00:44:50   Europe I will punish you with at least a three-minute delay before any picture moves again

00:44:54   And you won't know where you are in the stream and you won't be able to get back to where you are

00:44:57   And sometimes I'm you know, I'm starting over entirely

00:45:00   I'm gonna lose your place and you have to start over from the beginning and by the way

00:45:03   You can't get back to where you left off

00:45:04   because if you try to fast forward scan,

00:45:06   that won't work either.

00:45:07   Stream error.

00:45:08   Oh, it drives me nuts.

00:45:09   (laughing)

00:45:10   - I wonder if any part of it is related

00:45:12   to the hardware decoding chips they use

00:45:14   for the video codecs.

00:45:16   - I don't know what it's related to.

00:45:17   - I don't know.

00:45:18   I mean, that's probably not the problem.

00:45:19   It's probably just because they're sloppy

00:45:21   and cheaply made and their software

00:45:23   is sloppy and cheaply made.

00:45:24   I mean, this is like, I'm really not that into the idea

00:45:29   of a new Apple TV right now.

00:45:30   Like, I mean, it's fine.

00:45:31   I hope they make one and I hope it does well

00:45:33   and everything, but I'm not really excited

00:45:35   about the idea of a new Apple TV hardware device

00:45:38   because the problems I have with the existing Apple TV

00:45:42   don't seem hardware related.

00:45:44   - Well, that's the thing, that's what people are saying

00:45:45   in the chatroom as well, it's like,

00:45:47   when something like this happens,

00:45:48   like the puck or anything you connect to your TV,

00:45:50   you're like, what's the problem?

00:45:52   Is the problem that I'm not getting data

00:45:53   from the streaming service?

00:45:54   Is the problem that the software is crappy?

00:45:56   Is the problem that the hardware is crappy?

00:45:58   Is it some combination?

00:45:59   Sometimes is it one problem, sometimes it's the other.

00:46:01   is the problem that my ISP is throttling connection

00:46:04   to this thing and if I change my DNS,

00:46:05   I'll get a better stream,

00:46:06   is the problem that the authentication service

00:46:09   for iTunes aren't working and really you would stream fine

00:46:10   if only the authentication servers

00:46:12   weren't constantly installing

00:46:13   when it's trying to re-authenticate while I'm watching.

00:46:15   There are so many moving parts and there is so little

00:46:18   that you can debug with these closed systems

00:46:19   that you're just like, look,

00:46:20   it either has to work all the time 100%

00:46:23   or I just throw up my hands and I say,

00:46:27   I don't know what, you know, you go into Merlin Man mode,

00:46:29   you're like, well, I guess I'm rebooting everything I own,

00:46:30   I guess I'm unplugging my Apple TV from the power because it's the only way I can get

00:46:33   the thing to reboot because even the secret command handshake that you hold down on the

00:46:37   remote isn't working because the thing's frozen hard.

00:46:40   It is so frustrating not to know where the problem is.

00:46:43   Marco, you're diagnosed as saying you think it's not a hardware problem.

00:46:46   I think there are problems at every level.

00:46:48   And the hardware, because it's old, and the software, because it's so clearly in kind

00:46:53   of like maintenance mode, I just hope that all the good people are working on the new

00:46:56   version and the new version won't have these problems.

00:47:00   But even if they come out with new hardware and new software that's better, I also believe

00:47:03   that my streaming connection is crappy because I've heard that Apple uses a different connection

00:47:08   for streaming its Netflix than the other Netflix clients.

00:47:10   And I think this is mostly borne out by experimentation.

00:47:13   When I can't get a stream on Apple TV, Netflix client, I use my TiVo Netflix client and it

00:47:17   can.

00:47:18   Or I go to Netflix in a web browser on one of my Macs and it works.

00:47:24   The whole interconnected mess of things

00:47:27   that have to work correctly and in harmony

00:47:31   for me to watch a television program

00:47:32   streaming over the internet,

00:47:34   it seems like there's always at least one

00:47:36   out of the three layers that's screwing up,

00:47:37   and usually all three of them are screwing up in some way,

00:47:39   and it's very frustrating.

00:47:41   - The biggest frustration for me with these things,

00:47:44   so I don't know, maybe a month or two ago, two months ago,

00:47:47   whatever, I bought both a Roku TV,

00:47:51   whatever the newest Roku is,

00:47:52   and an Amazon Fire TV, like the big powerful one.

00:47:56   'Cause we have two TVs in the house

00:47:58   and they both have Apple TVs

00:48:00   and the Apple TVs are getting so flaky,

00:48:02   I'm like, let me just try something else

00:48:04   to see what everyone's talking about.

00:48:05   And wanted to check out Amazon Video Service anyway.

00:48:08   So they're both just really mediocre.

00:48:12   Like they're fine.

00:48:13   If I had to pick one that is less crappy,

00:48:17   I guess I'd pick the Amazon one.

00:48:18   But what's really frustrating is that

00:48:21   the Apple TV is still the best one.

00:48:23   - That depresses me.

00:48:24   I like having the fantasy that the Roku

00:48:26   that everyone loves would be better.

00:48:27   - That's the problem.

00:48:28   I had that fantasy too, and now that I've been using them,

00:48:31   like, the Apple TV is still the best one,

00:48:34   which a few people on Twitter told me in advance,

00:48:36   so I, but I was afraid that they would be right,

00:48:39   and unfortunately they are.

00:48:40   I mean, just by general, like, just usability,

00:48:43   the basic interface, I mean, these other players

00:48:46   have had years to rip off the good stuff from Apple,

00:48:49   and they just haven't.

00:48:51   And I don't know what it is.

00:48:54   Maybe they just don't have the kind of sensibilities

00:48:59   to develop simple interfaces, I don't know.

00:49:02   Maybe they think the way to compete with Apple

00:49:04   was by throwing on a whole bunch of stuff.

00:49:06   - Well, but that is the, the Roku's leg up

00:49:08   is like it's the most flexible, it can run Plex,

00:49:11   it's gonna let you do everything, right?

00:49:13   That's what it's trying to do.

00:49:14   But all of these boxes, the problem is,

00:49:18   for all the features and all the UI or whatever,

00:49:21   like if I could put some big giant sign

00:49:23   like the big old IBM Think pads or the big Think

00:49:27   framed poster after that or whatever,

00:49:29   but I would put it all, all these people's things

00:49:30   is would be much longer and I'd have to come up

00:49:32   with a snappy phrasing for it, but the bottom line is,

00:49:35   when I wanna watch a program,

00:49:36   I want to press a series of buttons and have video play,

00:49:39   pretty much immediately.

00:49:41   And that has to work, and that has to work every time.

00:49:44   Maybe it's because I'm old,

00:49:46   because I come from a place where a television,

00:49:48   If your television wasn't broken, then you turned it on,

00:49:50   you could see moving pictures pretty much instantly,

00:49:53   every time, right?

00:49:54   - The funny thing is, what you want out of seeking,

00:49:58   VCR is offered that perfectly.

00:50:00   - Right, exactly.

00:50:01   It wasn't great, but you could do it on a VCR,

00:50:04   you can do it on DVDs.

00:50:05   It was like, wow, I can skip without scrubbing through.

00:50:07   You know what I mean?

00:50:08   - Yeah, and there wasn't little staticky lines on DVDs

00:50:10   when you fast forwarded.

00:50:11   - You could pause, you could like, right,

00:50:12   we seem to have been making progress,

00:50:13   and now streaming, when it works right,

00:50:15   it's like, this is what I want, it's magic.

00:50:16   I have access to a million shows anytime I want them.

00:50:19   I can go to any part of the-- like, it's amazing, right?

00:50:21   They're organized by season.

00:50:22   Whole season's released at once.

00:50:23   Like, all the magic-- but all the magic crumbles into dust

00:50:26   as soon as I sit down in front of television,

00:50:27   press a series of buttons on my remote,

00:50:29   and moving pictures do not start happening.

00:50:32   And I either get an error message or something else.

00:50:34   And it's like-- and it doesn't happen to happen.

00:50:36   Like, 90% of the time, it works, right?

00:50:38   But that 10% just destroys the illusion

00:50:40   that I'm living in a future where things work.

00:50:44   So it's funny that Marco had brought up the Roku and the Fire TV and compared them to

00:50:50   the Apple TV because I maybe a month ago got a Fire TV stick, which is the less powerful

00:50:57   version of what Marco got. What Marco got is physically, as far as I know, is about

00:51:03   the same size as an Apple TV. Is that fair to say?

00:51:05   It's like an Apple TV that's been rolled over by a steamroller slightly. So it's like just

00:51:10   Same volume roughly, but just flatter and mm-hmm wider

00:51:13   Okay

00:51:14   So the fire TV stick is more like a chromecast in that it's just a little HDMI dongle and a little power brick to power it

00:51:21   And I got it on Dan Morin's recommendation because he had said he had had pretty good luck with fire TV

00:51:27   And I don't believe he had said he had ever tried the stick

00:51:29   But they're roughly equivalent unless you have a really really nice home theater setup

00:51:34   Which I do not so I got this fire TV stick. I believe it's $40 in Amazon

00:51:39   And I love it and the reason I love it mostly is because I can use Plex with it natively

00:51:47   I

00:51:48   Basically the only things I tend to do with my Apple TV are

00:51:51   airplane mirroring

00:51:54   typically video, but not always or

00:51:57   Netflix

00:51:59   the fire TV stick

00:52:01   Doesn't natively support a airplane mirroring of course there are apps that you can download and pay for to get airplane mirroring

00:52:08   I have bought a couple and they're not very good, which is not surprising, but they're enough in a pinch

00:52:14   But it has Netflix and it has Plex and that is easily 90% of what I want out of a

00:52:23   Box or dongle connected to my TV and again what makes the fire TV stick so wonderful for me is that the Plex support is?

00:52:31   Fantastic rather than airplane from my iPad or my iPhone or yes

00:52:36   I'm aware of that god-awful hack you can do with the trailers app on the Apple TV. I'm not going to do that

00:52:41   So it's I love it because it works great with Plex you can seek usually with Plex

00:52:47   It works pretty darn well with

00:52:50   Netflix so I really like it now that being said the user interface is crappy Marco is exactly right that the user interface

00:52:58   It's it's different but and too much Android leaks out for my taste like not that I have anything

00:53:05   Intrinsically against Android but fiddly bits that I shouldn't have to worry about

00:53:09   Yeah, I guess I don't have to worry about them, but they're still there

00:53:13   Like do you want to allow sideloading like that? Why is that even an option? No, I don't want that and

00:53:18   The way you go and get like apps is a little weird

00:53:22   It's just like a generic search which maybe is better

00:53:24   But I it's weird to me that when I search for Plex I could be ending up an app so I could be ending up on

00:53:30   Audio or whatever the case may be so there are definitely odd bits to the user interface

00:53:35   But by and large I like it and the other thing I really like about it that just occurred to me

00:53:40   Is that the remote is either Bluetooth or RF or something?

00:53:44   so that you do not need to point the remote at the Apple TV, which is really awesome because our Apple TV is

00:53:49   Kind of tucked away a little bit and not

00:53:52   extraordinarily easy to point a remote at so for all of those reasons

00:53:57   I really love my fire TV stick and I definitely recommend it if if you're if you have similar needs from your

00:54:04   Device that I do now Marco

00:54:06   I think you have very different needs from your device and as far as I recall you get a lot of your media through iTunes

00:54:12   Is that right?

00:54:13   It's not as much anymore

00:54:15   the the the constant

00:54:18   DRM errors on authentication trying to play my media that I've bought from iTunes

00:54:22   Is really convincing me to try to stop doing that. I actually went when I got these boxes

00:54:27   I did start using Plex I installed myself Plex for the very first time

00:54:31   Using Plex for me feels a lot like building a gaming PC in the sense that I'm getting a lot of functionality

00:54:38   more than I actually really need

00:54:41   but also coming at a cost of maintenance and fiddliness that

00:54:47   I'm sure I just have settings wrong, but it's just so freaking fiddly.

00:54:52   Plex?

00:54:53   Yeah.

00:54:54   There's nothing, the only fiddly thing about Plex is that you have to use their naming

00:54:58   convention which is not my favorite but not so egregious that I can't bend to it.

00:55:05   Other than that, everything just works magically.

00:55:08   I can watch my media that's stored on my Synology anywhere in the world as long as I have an

00:55:13   internet connection.

00:55:14   It will automatically transcode on the fly to whatever my speed is as it sees fit.

00:55:19   And it will grab all the metadata it needs as long as I name things appropriately.

00:55:23   Like I, I could not disagree more.

00:55:25   I've had nothing but wonderful experiences with Plex.

00:55:28   I've tried to use Plex, but like my problem has always been, I don't have anything attached

00:55:31   to my television that can run it.

00:55:33   And once the PS4 version of Plex came out, I'm like, now finally, well, now this is when

00:55:38   my PS4 was still attached to my television.

00:55:39   But anyway, I figured, well, the PS4 version of Plex came out, I should try it.

00:55:45   And I did, and it's very bad, and the setup process was super painful, and there's no

00:55:49   way a human could have figured out the crap that I had to go through to try to get this

00:55:52   thing to work in terms of opening ports on my modem and getting reverse lookups.

00:55:55   It was just like insanity, right?

00:55:57   But what I'm looking for out of – yeah, that's just because of the PS4.

00:56:01   I've used Plex on my Mac before, and it's way nicer.

00:56:03   Like the Mac version of Plex – if I could get the Mac version of Plex on my TV, say,

00:56:06   by having a Mac Mini or something,

00:56:07   it would make a big difference, right?

00:56:10   But anyway, what I'm looking for out of Plex,

00:56:12   and why probably no one will ever have it,

00:56:14   is I think what you're talking about, Casey,

00:56:16   that the dream thing,

00:56:17   sort of the software-connected box equivalent

00:56:20   of the omnivorous box that I was dreaming about

00:56:22   way back when, like that someone will make a box

00:56:25   that takes video input from everywhere and unifies it

00:56:27   so I don't actually care where it comes from,

00:56:29   and it would do everything.

00:56:30   Like, no one ever made that, and no one ever probably will.

00:56:33   The software equivalent of that is like Plex,

00:56:35   where it's like, give me your video.

00:56:38   Do you have random BitTorrent things

00:56:40   that you illegally downloaded?

00:56:41   Do you have videos that you rip?

00:56:42   Do you have videos of your kid?

00:56:44   Do you have Blu-ray extractions that you made with MKV,

00:56:47   make MKV from Blu-rays that you own?

00:56:51   I don't care where this video came from.

00:56:53   You just throw it all into the pit.

00:56:55   And I don't care what you name them.

00:56:57   I don't care what's in them.

00:56:58   I have this crazy crowd-sourced internet-powered database.

00:57:03   well I will figure out what the heck these files are,

00:57:05   I'll look at the fingerprints of the data,

00:57:09   organize it into seasons, give you cover art,

00:57:12   give you descriptions of every episode.

00:57:14   Plex does a hell of a lot of that.

00:57:17   Plex you can more or less throw a bunch of stuff at,

00:57:19   like the metadata lookup, the cover art,

00:57:22   being able to play a million different crazy formats,

00:57:24   transcoding on the fly, doing all that stuff,

00:57:28   Plex and various other utilities

00:57:30   and other sort of software apps do a lot of that,

00:57:33   but they're a little bit flaky,

00:57:36   they can't really play every file that you download.

00:57:38   Sometimes the device you're running it on

00:57:39   can't transcode fast enough to handle this thing.

00:57:42   Sometimes you lose the 5.1 track

00:57:44   and it mixes it down to something else.

00:57:46   You can't see the special features

00:57:47   from your DVDs or your Blu-rays.

00:57:48   Like the limitations just start stacking up and stacking up.

00:57:52   And because no one, like none of the legit people

00:57:55   are motivated to be able to take your illegal downloads

00:57:58   or your rips of DVDs and figure out what they are and sort them into sessions, Apple's never

00:58:02   going to do that.

00:58:03   Like, Roku's probably not even going to do that other than running the Plex app, right?

00:58:07   And so this is definitely an in-betweeny stage where we are in the transition from broadcast

00:58:13   television to streaming television, and there's lots of sort of do-it-yourselfer solutions

00:58:16   that work to varying degrees, but I feel like to come over the hump, the non-broadcast television

00:58:25   needs to be like the old one in one specific way.

00:58:29   When you press play, video has to play.

00:58:31   And I don't care where the problem is

00:58:33   and neither does anyone else.

00:58:33   Is it with the networks?

00:58:34   Is it an ISP fighting with Netflix or something?

00:58:39   Is it the hardware?

00:58:40   Is it my router?

00:58:42   Is it jumbo packets?

00:58:43   I don't care.

00:58:44   I just want video to play.

00:58:47   And I have to say, of all this complaining

00:58:49   about streaming devices,

00:58:50   the one television connected device

00:58:52   that I have in my house that is closest

00:58:53   the ideal of press play and video plays is the TiVo. Why? Because it's piggybacking on

00:58:59   the old cruddy coaxial cable that comes into my house that delivers television, which has,

00:59:04   you know, developed over the years to be different than what it was. But, yeah, you know, I have

00:59:11   a cable card, the coaxial cable goes into the back of my TV, I pay for all the pay channels,

00:59:16   I pay for all the fancy stuff, right? And then there's a hard drive and an incredibly

00:59:20   weak CPU and a bunch of video decoding chips that record six of those channels at once

00:59:25   onto a hard drive and when I press play it plays the video off that hard drive and when

00:59:29   I fast forward and rewind it fast forwards and rewinds and it works every time and it

00:59:34   doesn't crash and I don't get authentication errors and that's you know it does have a

00:59:37   Netflix client on it which is flaky and it does have all these other streaming clients

00:59:41   on it which are flaky but for the core purpose of recording video that's coming over my house

00:59:44   through the coaxial cable that I pay for it works and so my vast preference is record

00:59:50   Game of Thrones on my TiVo, watch it on my TiVo.

00:59:53   Yes, I have HBO Go, yes I have HBO Now, I have blah blah blah blah blah.

00:59:57   You know what I know will work?

00:59:58   Sit down in front of the TiVo, turn it on, go down to Game of Thrones, hit play, the

01:00:00   video will play.

01:00:01   Every time it plays.

01:00:03   And that, like, that's going to keep me loyal to TiVo and it's going to keep me paying my

01:00:07   whatever the heck it is, huge bill for real live old fashioned cable servers until these

01:00:12   streaming people can get their acts together to the point where now I can start choosing

01:00:16   things based on features or pricing or something like that.

01:00:19   but right now I'm choosing based on reliability.

01:00:21   - Yeah, I hear that.

01:00:22   I mean, it sounds like we all

01:00:24   sort of have our own unique needs.

01:00:26   Jon apparently boils down to just freaking work.

01:00:29   But yeah, I don't know.

01:00:31   It's sad that this hasn't been solved,

01:00:35   which I know, I think this is where you started, Jon,

01:00:37   but it's sad that this is still,

01:00:39   that Marco and I both felt like we needed

01:00:43   two different manufacturers' boxes

01:00:46   in order to fix this problem.

01:00:48   And neither of us feels completely satisfied with that fix.

01:00:53   - Yeah, all of us have multiple things.

01:00:54   Like I have, I watch things from Netflix

01:00:57   and I choose the Apple TV to be my Netflix client

01:00:59   because it has no fan.

01:01:00   I watch things from streaming video.

01:01:01   I buy things from iTunes.

01:01:03   Like I do all of it, right?

01:01:04   But it's like, when I have a choice,

01:01:05   sometimes you don't have a choice.

01:01:06   Like when I have a choice, TiVo is my go-to.

01:01:08   But if I don't, I go down the cascade.

01:01:10   Do I wanna try to stream it off my Synology?

01:01:12   Do I wanna try to watch it on Apple TV's Netflix client?

01:01:14   Do I wanna try my TV's built-in Netflix client?

01:01:16   Sometimes I make the rounds until one of them works right.

01:01:18   Sometimes my kid wants to watch a movie that I have.

01:01:21   I bought it on iTunes.

01:01:22   I have an illegally downloaded file.

01:01:24   I have the Blu-ray.

01:01:25   I have the DVD.

01:01:26   This is a very common case.

01:01:27   There are movies where I have all those things, right?

01:01:30   And it's like, how should we watch that file?

01:01:34   Is it important to make pictures moving on the television as fast as possible before

01:01:37   the kid gets cranky?

01:01:39   Or is it, for me, is it important because it's a family viewing that I'm going to take

01:01:42   out the actual Blu-ray disc and put it in because that has the highest fidelity video

01:01:45   and sound and that's very important to me. Why I own a big stack of Blu-rays, right?

01:01:49   Because movies that I already own and that I already watch, I like to have on Blu-ray

01:01:52   if I really care about the movie because it is the best quality. So having to be like

01:01:57   a connoisseur of like, "How do I want to watch this today?" and having to pick based on quality

01:02:03   and predicted reliability and speed and which one is just going to work, especially with

01:02:08   illegal downloads, which thing will actually successfully play this? Let's try it directly

01:02:12   from the Synology on my TV. Let's try it through the PlayStation media server. Let's try it

01:02:16   through Plex. Let's try transcoding it manually." And it's like, you know, sometimes you just

01:02:20   want to watch a movie.

01:02:21   Well, and the sad part is, like, I've hired almost nothing, and it still sucks. Like,

01:02:27   you can do everything "right." You can totally buy into one of these ecosystems, you know,

01:02:33   whether it's the Apple ecosystem, the Amazon, whatever, you can totally buy into it. You

01:02:37   can do everything right the way most people do, and it still doesn't work very well.

01:02:42   worse because that's a monoculture. You need biological diversity, right? That's why, like,

01:02:46   doing illegally has the advantage that there won't be like unskippable FBI warnings at the

01:02:52   front of it. You'll be, you won't have to fight through seven layers of menus and downloading new

01:02:56   Java updates on your Blu-ray player just to get to the movie. Like, pirating is almost always better,

01:03:00   but then like, okay, well now I don't get the, uh, I don't like the way this was transcoded,

01:03:04   or it was cropped wrong, or I don't like the the audio tracks that were included in this,

01:03:08   or they don't get the director's commentary. There's always trade-offs, but I would say,

01:03:12   Overall, illegal gives you a better experience.

01:03:15   Like again, even for movies that I own the discs for, sometimes if I just want to watch

01:03:20   the thing right now, I will look at either the ripped version of it or the illegally

01:03:23   downloaded version of it because I know I'll get to the movie part faster.

01:03:28   And that's one of the reasons why I've been ripping all my Blu-rays using Don Melton scripts

01:03:32   because like I bought this LG Blu-ray ripper and I have this Mac Mini that's doing this

01:03:37   live stream now and when it's not doing live streaming tasks it's doing Plex and Blu-ray

01:03:41   ripping and I'm doing all that because I keep having these stupid errors with stuff I've

01:03:45   actually bought on iTunes and like yeah like when my kid wants to watch a Pixar movie and

01:03:50   we try to play it and it doesn't and I can't get it playing after 10 minutes of fiddling

01:03:53   with stuff because of random Apple TV or CDN or service errors it's I want to just have

01:03:59   it locally on the LAN and have it play which used to work great but now home sharing sucks

01:04:06   And it's like everything sucks.

01:04:08   - You should never have turned off jumbo frames, Marco.

01:04:10   (laughing)

01:04:12   - Like I really, I don't get, it is so frustrating.

01:04:16   And the good thing is I think there is hope in sight.

01:04:21   Right now there is kind of this inconvenient hole,

01:04:26   or this inconvenient division in the market right now

01:04:28   because you can't get all the big stuff in one box basically

01:04:33   because the biggest offenders are that Apple,

01:04:36   the Apple TV is the problem basically.

01:04:38   That the Apple TV is the only thing

01:04:40   that can play iTunes stuff,

01:04:41   and the Apple TV can't, for the most part,

01:04:43   can't do Plex, and it can't play Amazon Instant Video.

01:04:47   If there is a future Apple TV coming out soon

01:04:49   that offers an app platform,

01:04:51   maybe that is how Apple will kind of finally,

01:04:54   quietly allow those things to happen on the Apple TV,

01:04:57   without having to partner with Amazon,

01:04:59   which they really probably wouldn't want to do,

01:05:01   and without having to install Plex as a built-in app,

01:05:03   which might cause piracy concern,

01:05:06   pressure from their content partners, whatever.

01:05:08   Like, if there's just another Apple TV

01:05:12   that has great hardware and an app platform,

01:05:16   and they permit Plex and Amazon TV to build apps for it,

01:05:20   which they almost certainly would,

01:05:22   then that, I think, will be a really great box, potentially,

01:05:27   if it actually works.

01:05:28   And maybe by then they will have fixed DiscoveryD,

01:05:31   which I assume is probably what's causing

01:05:33   all the home sharing issues.

01:05:35   - I still feel like the ISP issue is unresolved.

01:05:38   Like the battle between the content providers

01:05:41   and the content owners, whether it be HBO or Netflix

01:05:43   or some combination, and the ISPs who just want

01:05:46   a cut of everything and want, you know,

01:05:47   like the whole strangling networks that they know

01:05:49   that Netflix content comes from and like the whole

01:05:51   net neutrality thing, like that needs to sort it out.

01:05:55   You know, you need everything to work.

01:05:56   Even if all the hardware and software and business deals get worked out on the device

01:06:01   connected to your TV, if the ISP is still in a spat with one or more of those people,

01:06:06   your experience is going to suck.

01:06:07   And there's like nothing you can do about it because you'll do like a speed test and

01:06:10   you're like, "You've got 100 megabits down, but you can't watch a video at more than 480p."

01:06:15   And even then it stalls sometimes.

01:06:16   It's like, "Why am I even paying for this service?"

01:06:19   You know, that's I guess the HBO Now deal that was part of the same keynote with the

01:06:24   the one port MacBook, right?

01:06:25   - It's called the MacBook One now, Jon.

01:06:28   - Yes. - That's what we're calling it.

01:06:29   - God, all right, but before we do the HBO One stuff,

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01:09:14   All right, so back to the HBO deal that came up in the last Apple keynote.

01:09:19   Yeah, this is framed as an Apple win, but really it is just the natural evolution of

01:09:26   HBO.

01:09:27   In the past, they were a thing you had to buy as a premium addition to your cable bill.

01:09:32   And they had the HBO Go application, which first you could only watch on iOS devices

01:09:37   and then eventually they let you stream to your television.

01:09:39   But the important point was you couldn't do anything with that iOS app at all unless you

01:09:43   had a cable subscription that included HBO.

01:09:47   And that frustrated people because they were like, "Come on, HBO.

01:09:50   This is the future."

01:09:51   The whole point of us watching your content on our streaming Apple TV puck thing or on

01:09:58   our iPhone or on our iPad is that we don't want to pay for cable.

01:10:01   In fact, we're cable cutters.

01:10:02   We don't want to pay for cable at all, except of course for internet access, which we'll

01:10:05   never get rid of that.

01:10:06   But anyway, we don't want to pay for cable television.

01:10:09   We don't watch ESPN or we watch it on their website or we watch things on YouTube or whatever.

01:10:15   Divorce your service from the cable television industry.

01:10:17   And now finally, HBO is ready to do that.

01:10:20   They're not ready to do it themselves because apparently their technology act is not together

01:10:23   on the whole HBO Go front, so they're outsourcing it, I believe, to the MLB.TV people, the people

01:10:28   who do Major League Baseball television streaming, which by all accounts, despite the silly black

01:10:32   out nonsense, the actual streaming part of it works pretty well. So there are high hopes

01:10:36   for this business. If you pay them $15 a month, you can watch HBO. You don't need to have

01:10:41   a cable subscription. All you need is some device that can do this. And it is exclusive

01:10:45   to Apple for how long? Like six months or three months or…?

01:10:49   I thought it was three. But I've also heard that it's not really

01:10:53   exclusive to Apple. I didn't read up on this because I don't really watch HBO and

01:10:56   and I don't have HBO, but I could swear I'd read somewhere recently that it may or may

01:11:02   not actually be exclusive.

01:11:03   Yeah, well, but the deal is like, you know, so the new season of Game of Thrones is starting,

01:11:08   and Apple did just drop the price on its little silly puck thing. So for $69, cord cutters

01:11:14   can buy a puck, and $15 a month, they can watch Game of Thrones. They can watch it in

01:11:18   theory whenever they want without a cable subscription, without borrowing some borrowing,

01:11:23   "someone's HBO Go password" who does subscribe to HBO, which was the past practice, and for

01:11:29   a short period of time, which includes the time that the Game of Thrones season will

01:11:33   be premiering.

01:11:34   The only way to do this, or according to Apple the only way, is on their particular thing.

01:11:37   But that will expire and very soon I'm sure HBO Now will be available everywhere and it's

01:11:42   exactly what we all wanted out of HBO.

01:11:44   And this is the slow crumbling of all the people who are holding out, holding the line

01:11:48   and old media going towards, like what Margo said, eventually a potential app platform,

01:11:54   kind of like we have on iOS today, where there's a series of applications that you can use

01:11:57   to watch, you know, NBA or MLB or maybe, I don't know if the NFL is out there, all these

01:12:03   three-letter acronyms for sport things that none of us watch.

01:12:06   I do.

01:12:07   Yeah.

01:12:08   Do they have an NFL app?

01:12:09   You can tell me, maybe.

01:12:10   They do, but it only is useful if you get NFL Sunday Ticket, which you can only get

01:12:14   if you're a DirecTV subscriber or live in, like, the UK or whatever.

01:12:18   Yeah, so those deals, yeah, they're still kind of entrenched, but trying to slowly divorce

01:12:23   themselves.

01:12:24   Like, that I shouldn't have to pay for cable television or satellite television or whatever,

01:12:28   I should just be able to a la carte buy the...

01:12:31   It's still, you know, it's not the shows you want, you're still buying the channels you

01:12:34   want, right?

01:12:35   You're buying HBO, you're not buying Game of Thrones.

01:12:38   People would rather just be able to get Game of Thrones without buying the season on iTunes

01:12:42   after it's already aired or whatever, or the day after it aired.

01:12:45   Like, we're narrowing it, getting closer and closer.

01:12:47   There used to be you couldn't get a digital version of a television show ever, and then

01:12:51   you could get a digital version of a television show much later, and then you could get it

01:12:54   the next day, and now you're going to be able to watch it at the same time as the people

01:12:57   who subscribe to HBO.

01:12:58   Again, in theory, because if their servers are crushed under the weight of all the people

01:13:03   trying to do that, I know my TiVo will record it and I'll be able to watch it in real time.

01:13:07   That's the great thing about HBO, no commercials.

01:13:11   You can watch it in real time because you don't have to wait for the commercials to

01:13:13   queue up.

01:13:14   But anyway, I continue to watch those things on my nice reliable TV, but they're trying to get to the future and I feel like

01:13:19   If people go out and get the $69 puck so they can watch it and pay the subscription to HBO

01:13:26   So they can watch Game of Thrones finally in you know without borrowing someone's password

01:13:30   I'm without having to subscribe to HBO and they plug in the puck and they turn it on

01:13:34   They're all excited to watch them and they got their popcorn and maybe there's some friends over and they hit play and it doesn't play

01:13:38   They're not gonna be excited about the future of streaming TV

01:13:41   They're gonna regret that $69 purchase and when the new Apple TV comes out for $99

01:13:46   They're not gonna be enthused about buying that it is so easy to sour a normal person not a geek

01:13:50   But like a semi normal person on the experience of TV connected pucks by just having it not work once and them going

01:13:57   You know what? I didn't like paying for cable

01:13:59   I didn't like paying extra on top of cable for HBO

01:14:01   But at least I could watch my show when I wanted to watch my show. I have nothing to add

01:14:05   I agree with you completely. I mean, I think you nailed it

01:14:10   Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week Reuters TV Squarespace and Harry's and we will see you next week

01:14:16   Now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental

01:14:26   was accidental

01:14:29   John did any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental

01:14:36   was accidental

01:14:39   And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you're into Twitter, you can follow

01:14:46   them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Kasey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:14:56   Auntie Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse

01:15:06   ♪ It's accidental ♪

01:15:08   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:15:10   ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

01:15:12   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:15:13   ♪ Accidental ♪

01:15:14   ♪ Tech podcast ♪

01:15:16   ♪ So long ♪

01:15:18   - My stories, they call it.

01:15:21   Why do I watch my stories?

01:15:22   - Wow. - Good God.

01:15:25   All right, Marko, we talked a little bit earlier

01:15:29   and we told you to save it for the after show

01:15:32   about how you're falling out of love with Twitter,

01:15:34   which is funny because I feel like you're coming

01:15:37   to a conclusion quicker than I am,

01:15:39   but I have been having similar feelings about,

01:15:43   is really, is Twitter really doing anything positive for me

01:15:48   or is it just making me angry all the time?

01:15:51   - Well, like the thing that I quoted to you guys before,

01:15:54   I put it in the show notes,

01:15:55   so maybe you looked it up by now,

01:15:56   but did any of you recognize the quote I was referencing

01:15:58   when Marco first talked about this?

01:16:00   - Nope.

01:16:00   - This is an older quote, it's from 1777.

01:16:03   I don't know if you guys remember back that far.

01:16:05   - We're not as old as you, Jon.

01:16:06   - Yeah, it's from Samuel Johnson,

01:16:08   and the well-known part of it is,

01:16:11   I'll read the whole thing.

01:16:13   You find no man at all intellectual

01:16:15   who is willing to leave London.

01:16:16   No, sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,

01:16:19   for there is in London all that life can afford.

01:16:22   And that was my way of saying that

01:16:24   it's not specifically Twitter that is a tiresome thing,

01:16:28   in that I think at this point,

01:16:30   Twitter offers all that life can afford, more or less.

01:16:34   It is exposure to lots of people, which can happen anywhere on the internet, whether it

01:16:39   be in a Usenet group, where the exact same toxic things that Marco is going to discuss,

01:16:43   I'm sure, could happen and did happen, or it could be IRC, or it could be web forums,

01:16:51   web bulletin boards, AOL chat room news group things, I don't know, there's never an AOL,

01:16:55   whatever those things are called.

01:16:58   The problem is not the medium.

01:17:00   The problem is, and in fact Twitter is probably better than most in the ways that it handles

01:17:04   the social interactions and limiting people and having the asymmetrical follow and everything,

01:17:09   is being tired of life.

01:17:11   And I'm not saying that means he's wrong or anything.

01:17:13   I'm saying that we should put the blame where it lies, which is other people suck, right?

01:17:18   Or whatever.

01:17:19   However you want to deal with it.

01:17:22   How are you current feeling?

01:17:23   I'm going to put it in video game terms.

01:17:26   How are your shields holding up against the current onslaught, right?

01:17:30   Are you feeling weak?

01:17:31   Are you feeling strong?

01:17:32   Do you feel like it's wearing you down and doing something negative?

01:17:34   And disengaging is the way you deal with that.

01:17:36   Like if your shields are going down and you get bombarded from all sides, you go elsewhere.

01:17:41   You pull your ship back, you hide behind a rock and let your ships regen—I don't

01:17:45   know, I'm mixing video game metaphors here, but like—

01:17:47   Well, you treat it like the Halo thing, so you can step back for a minute and you recharge

01:17:51   your things.

01:17:52   Right.

01:17:53   And what I'm getting at is that it's not so much Twitter specifically, it really could

01:17:57   be anything.

01:17:58   It could be blog comments, if you have comments on your blog, and one way to fix that might

01:18:00   be to turn off comments.

01:18:01   It could be people sending you hateful emails.

01:18:03   There are many vectors through which people who have any amount of notoriety can be put

01:18:08   upon by others and it can start to affect them for a variety of reasons.

01:18:13   And I think acknowledging that and dealing with it in a way that were expressed for you

01:18:16   is healthy.

01:18:18   My only point with the tired of life thing is that I don't think it's specific to Twitter

01:18:23   or any one thing, and I don't think shifting your use to like App.net or Usenet or going

01:18:29   back to IRC or whatever, like nothing is going to solve that problem.

01:18:31   It is not a technology problem, it's just a like, a thing that you have to deal with

01:18:36   that goes in cycles that you have to deal with no matter where it is, and you have to

01:18:39   do whatever you need to do to make yourself, you know, be happier essentially.

01:18:44   So I actually agree with most of what you just said. The problem I have with Twitter,

01:18:52   the problem I'm having is partly my fault. It is partly that it is, and I've talked about

01:18:59   it before, like struggles with trying to keep my Twitter usage under control so it's not

01:19:03   just constantly sucking away little bits of time throughout the day and just being this

01:19:08   massive time suck and distraction suck, which hurts my productivity. And when I see my report

01:19:14   from Rescue Time every week and it says I spent X hours in Twitter, I don't feel good

01:19:19   about that. So that's part of the problem. And I've always had that problem. And I've

01:19:24   tried different techniques over the years to try to minimize that, like only using it

01:19:28   on my phone or only using it in a notification center or quitting it during the workday or

01:19:33   whatever, and they've all done slight help here and there,

01:19:38   but they mostly just kind of move the problem around.

01:19:41   They don't really tend to reduce the problem meaningfully.

01:19:44   The problem there is just me,

01:19:45   that I want to keep engaging and interacting with Twitter.

01:19:48   - You're not a Twitter completionist, right?

01:19:50   I keep forgetting. - No.

01:19:51   - Yeah, so you don't have that problem.

01:19:52   If you were, I would say that's one thing

01:19:54   you should definitely stop, 'cause that--

01:19:56   - And another problem that I have

01:19:58   is that I'm not keeping up,

01:19:59   because so much is going on on Twitter,

01:20:02   I'm missing what my friends are saying.

01:20:05   And I recently, a couple weeks ago,

01:20:08   I unfollowed about a third of the people I was following.

01:20:10   Like I went through and tried to call as much as I could.

01:20:13   And I started using mutes here and there,

01:20:15   but that's a little too much work for me,

01:20:17   so I'm not gonna do much of it.

01:20:19   But the problem is that all of my friends,

01:20:24   for the most part, are talking to each other on Twitter.

01:20:28   And if I wanna keep up with what my friends are doing

01:20:31   or talking about or what's going on in the world,

01:20:33   I need to be reading that.

01:20:36   Right now, I'm already not reading most of it

01:20:38   because I'm not a completionist.

01:20:40   I can't keep up, so I'm already not reading it,

01:20:42   but I'm missing all that, and at the same time,

01:20:44   if I want to talk to my friends in that context,

01:20:48   if I want to be part of that conversation, we're in public.

01:20:52   And so what I need, what I'm looking for

01:20:55   is some separation to, you know, in public,

01:20:58   somebody, I forget who,

01:21:00   somebody about a year ago I heard a talk where they were comparing like having a

01:21:04   conversation briefly with your friends on Twitter it's like having a

01:21:08   conversation like on your front porch with somebody and there's tons of people

01:21:12   walking by in the sidewalk and they yell at you like responses that like that you

01:21:15   weren't part of this conversation and they're like yelling butting in like

01:21:19   you're a dick it's like what do you like get off my porch like but that's the

01:21:24   that's one of the strengths of Twitter as well because if it was only happening

01:21:27   in private fewer people would benefit the reason it kind of works the way it

01:21:30   does is that groups of people can sort of organically form who like discussing a particular

01:21:36   topic and like, you're doing it in public, partially because you want some of the public

01:21:41   to see it.

01:21:42   What you don't want is people going by your porch and yelling at you while you're doing

01:21:45   your thing, but you do want, hey, maybe this interested guy who you met once or twice will

01:21:48   hear your conversation and join in kind of like at a party, right?

01:21:51   Like so the public nature of Twitter is both a strength and a weakness.

01:21:54   And how it plays out really depends on how many people are walking by your porch, so

01:21:59   to speak.

01:22:00   agree that that is an important strength of Twitter.

01:22:04   I like that that exists.

01:22:06   I don't like that that is the far and away dominant place

01:22:10   that my friends interact with each other

01:22:14   and that I need to interact with my friends.

01:22:16   Like, we are always in public.

01:22:19   And I think it should be the opposite.

01:22:20   I think we should interact in public sometimes

01:22:23   and most of the time it would be more pleasant

01:22:26   if it was private.

01:22:29   And so there's different ways to do that.

01:22:31   There's chat rooms and stuff, and Slack,

01:22:34   and stuff like that.

01:22:36   I think I'd rather spend more time looking

01:22:39   at stuff like that these days,

01:22:40   because it is so exhausting.

01:22:42   It is like, I was just at a conference,

01:22:46   and being at a conference was great,

01:22:49   but most groups of people on Twitter

01:22:52   are not as nice as the attendees of OOL.

01:22:55   And it's a much bigger crowd on Twitter.

01:22:59   You know, imagine going to a conference

01:23:02   where you have tens of thousands of people all around you

01:23:05   and listening to everything you say

01:23:07   and being ready to butt in.

01:23:09   And so you're gonna get a lot of good stuff out of that.

01:23:11   You're gonna meet a lot of good people,

01:23:12   you're gonna get a lot of good ideas

01:23:14   and good conversations out of that.

01:23:17   But you're also gonna get a lot of jerks,

01:23:19   especially if it's free to enter

01:23:21   and nobody knows your name

01:23:22   and you don't have to show your face.

01:23:24   So it is exhausting after a while to be always partially

01:23:29   or fully in public like that when you're really just trying

01:23:32   to have everyday interactions with mostly just your friends.

01:23:36   And you're welcome, it's like always being at a conference.

01:23:39   So there is value in being at a conference sometimes,

01:23:43   but there is also, there's a certain level,

01:23:46   there's a certain threshold of sanity

01:23:49   where you can't be publicly performing all the time

01:23:54   and have that be mentally healthy, at least I can't.

01:23:57   And so what I'm saying is not that Twitter is bad.

01:24:00   And by the way, and a lot of people rightly point out

01:24:04   in the chat room, like, much of the problem

01:24:06   when people complain about, quote, Twitter,

01:24:08   is they're complaining about the group they're following,

01:24:10   the group they're paying attention to.

01:24:12   I'm aware that social networks are what you make of them

01:24:15   with what you choose to follow.

01:24:16   However, in a network like Twitter,

01:24:18   they are not what you make of them in terms of

01:24:22   who talks to you and what you receive, that is mostly up to the public. I mean, you can

01:24:29   like, you know, try to avoid talking about certain topics, which is stupid, but you can

01:24:34   do stuff like that to try to minimize what you get. But for the most part, once you have

01:24:38   a non-trivially sized audience, you're going to have random jerks talking to you all the

01:24:42   time in a jerky way, and no matter how much good is interspersed throughout that, it's

01:24:49   just really exhausting.

01:24:50   Well, the problem is, is that the cost of entry to affecting somebody else's day is

01:24:57   almost zero, because you can fire off this 140 character or less message to darn near

01:25:04   anyone you want.

01:25:07   And that's free.

01:25:08   And it takes almost no time.

01:25:11   And just like you were saying, John, that's one of the strengths of Twitter is that it's,

01:25:14   You can get messages across quickly and easily, and you can have access to almost anyone on

01:25:21   the planet if you so desire, like celebrities.

01:25:25   And I'm talking about actual celebrities, not us three idiots.

01:25:29   But the problem with that is all of these people also have access to you.

01:25:35   And the thing that I've been struggling with with regard to Twitter is I feel like maybe

01:25:40   I'm just becoming more sensitive.

01:25:42   I thought I'd be coming I'd been becoming less sensitive, but I feel like I'm seeing

01:25:46   more and more negative or not constructive comments coming my way that bother me.

01:25:55   And granted, the easy answer is, well, don't let it bother you, you idiot, but it's hard.

01:26:01   I'm not good at just putting up that wall.

01:26:03   So like, for example, I had put up a post about Apple Pay and about how I thought it

01:26:08   was crummy that when my card had expired, the card didn't update, which I've since found out

01:26:14   it is theoretically capable of doing if the bank handles it right. And it also didn't tell me when

01:26:19   I went to use it to use the Apple Pay version of the credit card that had expired. It just said,

01:26:25   denied. So I wrote a post about that. Well, somebody tweeted, Apple Pay messaging at

01:26:30   Casey lists you're being ridiculous. Keep track of your cards

01:26:33   Sorry that I made an honest mistake

01:26:37   But did you also learn about the fact that your bank if your bank had handled it correctly?

01:26:42   That you that wouldn't have happened. Did you also learn about that on Twitter or from some stranger?

01:26:47   I learned about it from from some friends, but I also eventually heard about it on Twitter

01:26:54   It's the blessing and the curse like you will I mean it with any it's kind of like, you know

01:26:58   follow up, but anything we talk about here, if we were wrong, many people will tell us,

01:27:02   which I like. I like the fact that that's an advantage of having an audience. Some of

01:27:06   the people who tell you what we mean about it, that's the price you pay for having a

01:27:09   bunch of people tell you, like, "solve your problems for it." A lot of people who only

01:27:15   see the upside would love to do that. They're like, "Boy, it must be good to have a popular

01:27:19   tech podcast because you can say, 'Hey, I'm having trouble getting my whozit, working

01:27:22   with my whatever.'" And then a million people will tell you how to get them to work together,

01:27:27   and some percentage of those people will be right.

01:27:29   And you will have your solved problem, right?

01:27:31   But then some percentage of the people will be jerks.

01:27:33   - Like when I had my jumbo frame issue,

01:27:36   I would never have found that problem

01:27:38   if I hadn't asked on Twitter and gotten hundreds

01:27:41   of responses of what it might be,

01:27:43   and like two of them said jumbo frames.

01:27:46   And that ended up being right.

01:27:48   I am so lucky to have such a big audience on Twitter

01:27:51   that I have access to that kind of information.

01:27:54   I'm so lucky that I have a big enough audience

01:27:57   that I can launch products and write blog posts

01:28:00   that get attention.

01:28:01   Like the audience, like I have built in attention

01:28:05   for anything I do now.

01:28:06   That's the problem.

01:28:07   That's why I would feel like a jerk

01:28:09   just walking away from this.

01:28:10   I would feel ungrateful to other people

01:28:14   who have been following me.

01:28:16   And also I would feel like I was throwing away

01:28:18   a giant professional advantage.

01:28:20   So I feel like I can't leave Twitter.

01:28:23   - Yeah.

01:28:24   But that's why I need to find a better balance.

01:28:27   - But yeah, that's a skill, like anything else,

01:28:29   it's a skill you have to develop.

01:28:31   It's like, none of us have experience with this,

01:28:34   but can you imagine running a huge company,

01:28:36   being the CEO of a company with thousands of employees?

01:28:39   That is not usually a natural thing

01:28:42   that most people are used to.

01:28:43   You're used to just dealing with yourself when you're a kid

01:28:45   and you learn to gain responsibility.

01:28:47   But it is, at these extremes of extreme ratios

01:28:51   of you to other people, it's a skill that you have to learn.

01:28:54   There are things you can learn about being a manager

01:28:57   and being a CEO or running a large company

01:28:59   that you just have to figure out, right?

01:29:02   And you have to research them and learn them.

01:29:04   And some people are just not cut out for it.

01:29:06   Some people will never be a good CEO

01:29:08   or a good manager of a lot of people

01:29:09   because it's just not how they work, right?

01:29:10   So if suddenly you get an audience

01:29:13   and you have to deal with notoriety and fame

01:29:15   and a lot of input from other people,

01:29:17   you have to either learn to deal with that

01:29:20   or learn what your limits are.

01:29:21   Learn that I don't wanna be the CEO of a big company

01:29:24   because no matter how good I could possibly get at it,

01:29:26   doing so doesn't make me happy.

01:29:27   How big are you comfortable?

01:29:28   How big, you know, you see a lot with actual celebrities

01:29:30   who get big because of some talent they have.

01:29:34   They're in a hit movie, they're a great singer,

01:29:36   they have a hit song or something.

01:29:38   And very often, the prerequisite is to get that fame,

01:29:42   being very talented, being a good actor,

01:29:44   being in the right place at the right time,

01:29:46   some combination of those things,

01:29:47   are totally unrelated to the ability to deal with the fame

01:29:51   that is going to come with that.

01:29:52   You know, the ones that stick, the ones that stay are like,

01:29:55   yes, they're really talented, and also,

01:29:57   they're able to figure out how to have a successful,

01:30:00   well-balanced life in the face of what must be, you know,

01:30:04   the insane onslaught of like real fame, right?

01:30:08   Other people have the talent, get the notoriety,

01:30:10   and very clearly can't deal with the onslaught of real fame

01:30:13   and have tragic, terrible lives.

01:30:15   We are lucky that in our tiny little dose of notoriety here,

01:30:19   it's unlikely that Marco is going to, you know,

01:30:21   go on a bender and drive his Tesla off a cliff or something.

01:30:24   (laughing)

01:30:27   But I think that's why I think our problem

01:30:29   is more relatable because I think everybody has,

01:30:32   even if it's just like someone said something mean

01:30:34   on your Facebook post, who is like an acquaintance

01:30:37   or someone you knew in high school and that ruins your day,

01:30:40   that's pretty much the level we're talking about here.

01:30:42   It's not like we're getting bombarded

01:30:44   with thousands of people hating us,

01:30:45   but it doesn't take much.

01:30:46   It just takes one person making one mean comment

01:30:49   to make you think like, and are you used to that?

01:30:51   are used to acquaintances or even strangers perhaps

01:30:55   telling you mean things about yourself.

01:30:56   Maybe that's not something that happens in your regular life

01:30:58   but suddenly it happens on the internet

01:30:59   because they have access to you.

01:31:00   And everyone I think,

01:31:01   like this is the complaint we get when we talk about this,

01:31:03   like would you stop talking about your problems of like,

01:31:05   oh you have a lot of Twitter followers.

01:31:06   I think everybody, if you have one Twitter follow,

01:31:08   if you have 10 people who read your Facebook,

01:31:10   everybody has this problem

01:31:11   at pretty much exactly the same scale we do

01:31:13   because what we're talking about here

01:31:15   is handfuls of negative feedback from people.

01:31:21   because we're not that big.

01:31:23   And I think our handful is within an order of magnitude

01:31:26   of your handful, and is really the same type

01:31:29   of scope of prog, and I think everybody

01:31:31   who has any interaction in any social media

01:31:33   or any sort of one-to-many communication medium

01:31:36   that's not just like face-to-face has to deal with this

01:31:39   and has to figure out what are my limits?

01:31:41   How do I feel about this?

01:31:42   Am I gonna grow a thicker skin,

01:31:44   or am I going to pretend I'm growing a thicker skin

01:31:47   when really I'm just internalizing it all

01:31:48   and it'll come to a breaking point,

01:31:50   I'll like snap at my children and I realize I'm snapping at them because someone said

01:31:53   something mean to me on my Facebook post two days ago and I'm still thinking about it,

01:31:58   right?

01:31:59   That I couldn't agree more.

01:32:00   That's exactly how I feel.

01:32:01   That I'm trying to just fabricate a thicker skin, but I don't think I've actually built

01:32:06   a thicker skin yet.

01:32:08   And it's hard.

01:32:09   It's a hard thing to deal with.

01:32:11   It's weird.

01:32:12   And I think an ecstasy said a couple things in the chat that I thought were great.

01:32:16   Some people are a pleasure to interact with.

01:32:18   Others just suck your energy.

01:32:19   And I think that's a really good way of putting it.

01:32:21   That's that I see this comment like, oh, don't be ridiculous.

01:32:24   Keep track of your or you're being ridiculous.

01:32:26   Keep track of your cards.

01:32:27   And that just kind of like sucks the air out of my day a little bit.

01:32:30   Should it?

01:32:31   No, I should be big enough to realize this is some stranger that I'm never going to interact

01:32:35   with.

01:32:36   And that shouldn't bother me.

01:32:38   But it does.

01:32:39   And the thing I'm struggling with, again, coming back to an ecstasy is in his or her

01:32:43   case, I will also say the older I get less tolerance of energy sucking people I become

01:32:47   I put up with a lot more crap at 18 than I do at 48. And I feel like even in the last couple of years

01:32:52   as I've gained some fame, and I can't say notoriety because I was corrected once that it's not notoriety,

01:32:58   it's fame for us because we didn't do bad things. But anyway, as I get more fame, I'm finding that I

01:33:05   have less and less tolerance and time for the that kind of energy suck. And I've noticed kind of

01:33:10   building on what Marco had said, that I'm getting much more aggressive with the block button and,

01:33:19   and, and those sorts of things than I ever have been in the past. And granted, I'm, you know,

01:33:26   just freshly 33. And so it's not that I'm getting too old age, but even as I'm getting older at this

01:33:34   age, I'm finding that I'm less and less tolerant of it. And, and where we started this conversation

01:33:40   is where I'm coming back to now, which is, is it really worth me getting upset over these random

01:33:46   strangers on the internet? And I feel like I'm getting more and more upset over time. And in fact,

01:33:53   at the end of last year in December, and this is a little bit of a corollary for half or so of

01:33:59   December, I kept track every single day of what Twitter was pissed off about, because I felt like

01:34:06   Every day there was some unbelievable travesty that Twitter was all fired up about.

01:34:14   Every single day.

01:34:15   Now that oftentimes it didn't relate to me at all.

01:34:17   But that much negativity man, oh my goodness, eventually it just wears on you.

01:34:22   And the reason I kept track of this because I intended to post a blog post about it.

01:34:28   As it turns out, right around the time that the right I guess was midway through the month,

01:34:34   I want to say maybe it was time, but somebody put up a post that had basically done that

01:34:41   for an entire year.

01:34:42   And so at that point I figured, well, my post wasn't really worth it, but it's just, it's

01:34:48   stunning to me how much negativity I've seen on Twitter.

01:34:53   And like Marco, I'm trying to evaluate where does that fit in my life?

01:34:59   Because I don't want to eliminate it entirely, but I think I'm giving it much more time and

01:35:06   too many thought cycles.

01:35:08   And I need to back it off a bit, but I'm not sure the right way to do it.

01:35:12   And like Marco, I'm a freaking addict, which is not I don't say that with pride.

01:35:16   I wish I was less so.

01:35:19   But it is it is unbelievably thrilling to get responses from people that you respect,

01:35:25   Or even strangers that have good information like the big frames, fat frames, whatever

01:35:29   you call it.

01:35:30   That is the title, man.

01:35:33   Big frames, fat frames.

01:35:36   Fine.

01:35:37   See, now I'm totally derailed myself.

01:35:39   But one way or another, there's good things that come from Twitter, but there's also

01:35:44   so much bad, and I can't figure out, is the bad outweighing the good these days?

01:35:49   For me, anyway.

01:35:50   What Marco is doing, like, he's doing all the logical things that you would think to

01:35:54   Trim your follow this mute people try to cut down and when you do it don't be a completionist like he's going through he's

01:36:01   He's going down the punch list of things you can do to manage this on

01:36:04   Somewhere on the punch list for certain people maybe think your way out of it

01:36:08   Most people that doesn't work like a little bit Casey

01:36:11   It sounds like you're trying to think your way out of it like should I be upset intellectually?

01:36:15   Can I can I rationally think about that?

01:36:17   I shouldn't be bothered by what strangers that like I

01:36:20   Don't know if you can have that conversation with yourself and have it have effect my experience. It is very rare that

01:36:25   people can

01:36:28   Can use reason to change their emotions they feel from input from other people?

01:36:33   But some people can so it's worth at least giving that a try

01:36:36   But you know and curating the follow us

01:36:40   I think is probably the first thing you should do because you said like you know what is Twitter upset about today as Marco pointed

01:36:45   Out Twitter is who you follow like what is Twitter upset about you have no idea what Twitter is upset about Twitter as an

01:36:50   aggregate is probably talking about Justin Bieber. That is not in your headline, right?

01:36:53   You know what I mean? Your Twitter is upset about some Apple thing that nobody knows about, except,

01:36:57   you know, so changing your follow list. And it can be painful because even for all the asymmetry

01:37:02   in Twitter, it can be painful to unfollow people who, you know, you may agree with them. And you

01:37:07   may be, it is part of the reason you would unfollow them. Like, they're outraged about

01:37:11   Issue X. You 100% agree with them about Issue X, and you are also outraged, and that outrage is a

01:37:15   negative feeling. And so you're unfollowing them, not because they're posting things you disagree

01:37:19   with but because they're posting because you agree with and you're like now I too

01:37:22   am outraged you have transferred your outrage to me because we agree on

01:37:26   everything therefore I'm going to unfollow you like you're not unfollowing

01:37:28   people because their opinions are the opposite of yours you're following

01:37:31   people who you agree with but we seem to be angry all the time that's rubbing off

01:37:35   on you you know well and there's also you know to me I feel like there's

01:37:40   there's a big difference with with Twitter and a lot of it comes from from

01:37:46   the blog world too, which is that with Twitter, there's a very, very, you know, it is who

01:37:51   you follow, that's like, you know, what you see in your timeline, but there's still the

01:37:54   big problem with all of the, you know, replies from jerks and everything. And, you know,

01:38:00   a few weeks ago I mentioned how, you know, like I feel more comfortable saying things

01:38:06   in podcasts than I do on my blog, things that might be controversial or that might get people

01:38:12   to call me a jerk or whatever. And the reason why is because in blogs and on Twitter it's

01:38:19   really really easy to get drive-by rash reactions from people. And so when, and this is, you

01:38:26   know, that anger that you see, that you see like bubbling up on Twitter, that's directed

01:38:30   at something, that's a mood. It's this drive-by mood where someone sees a few words or a headline

01:38:38   that they disagree with and they fit it into their narrative with their confirmation bias

01:38:43   of whatever they think those people are like or whatever and they just lash out and yell

01:38:49   immediately. They don't look at context, they don't know the people they're talking to,

01:38:54   it's just this quick, harsh reaction. With podcasts, you don't really get a lot of that

01:39:01   because podcasts are so undiscoverable fundamentally by the format mostly, and I know there's ways

01:39:07   we can improve it, but ultimately the format is just pretty undiscoverable compared to

01:39:13   text, and I think it always will be that way, relatively speaking, you know, with the exception

01:39:18   of minor improvements here and there, but with podcasts, like most people who are hearing

01:39:24   what I'm saying right now are subscribed to this show, who hear it on a regular basis,

01:39:29   who hear the three of us talking for a couple hours every week, and who have probably heard

01:39:35   us for a couple hours every week for a long time. So they, like, you listeners who are

01:39:40   hearing me say this, you know us. Like, the vast majority of you know us on some level.

01:39:46   You know the context. You know the kind of people we are. You know roughly, you know,

01:39:51   the context in which we are saying the things we say, in which we think the things we think.

01:39:56   You know, if we say something that's a little bit off, you'll probably give us the benefit

01:39:59   doubt because you know who we actually are. And so there are, I think there are way fewer

01:40:06   of those drive-by nasty interactions for things you say on podcasts than there are for things

01:40:12   you say on Twitter or on blog posts. And for me, and the result is podcast audiences tend

01:40:19   to be much smaller than popular blogs, popular, you know, tweets, accounts or whatever, YouTube

01:40:26   channels that are a little more accessible to this kind of drive-by-ness. Like, podcast

01:40:30   audiences are way smaller, but I get so much less nastiness per capita in podcasts than

01:40:38   I do from any other audience, by a long shot. And I'll say things on here that are potentially

01:40:44   way riskier to say than I would ever say on my blog, and yet I get almost no crap for

01:40:51   it.

01:40:52   It's just too much work to listen to a podcast. Anyone, if someone starts retweeting your

01:40:55   tweet around you will get all the crazy drive-bys from people who have no idea who you are and

01:40:58   who are angry but it is just so much work. You're like I gotta download a big audio file

01:41:02   and then you gotta listen to audio and they don't know overcast exists so they don't know

01:41:05   podcast lines exist so they don't know they can listen faster and it's like where is the

01:41:09   part where they talked about this? Oh never mind. Whereas anyone can read a tweet in two

01:41:12   seconds and get angry. So. Exactly. It is not, not, and even a blog post like when you

01:41:17   know like when your blog post goes viral like you're on CNBC or whatever like you're just

01:41:22   gonna drive by us for for half a year just because of that one thing right I

01:41:26   mean here's like I would love I would absolutely love if Twitter had a setting

01:41:32   that would not show me mentions from people who didn't follow me for more

01:41:38   than the past week think about that yeah there's a lot Twitter can do for that

01:41:42   but that does actually get into that does actually get into the realm of

01:41:47   features that would only benefit the people who have a larger than normal

01:41:51   a number of followers, but--

01:41:52   - But they already have those features.

01:41:54   Verified accounts have a setting where you can only see

01:41:56   responses from people you follow, right?

01:41:59   And that's too aggressive, yeah,

01:42:01   'cause then you can't hear from strangers, right?

01:42:03   So that's too extreme, but if you look at the trash

01:42:08   that you get, if you look at the nastiness,

01:42:11   the nasty comments from people on Twitter,

01:42:13   the vast majority of them for me

01:42:15   are from people who don't follow me,

01:42:17   because they saw some retweet somewhere or something,

01:42:20   they're like, "Ahh!" and they lash out and they yell at me.

01:42:22   And they get nastier when they're eggs, I mean, we can talk to the whole thing.

01:42:25   Yeah.

01:42:25   Like, you know, we don't usually get the eggs, but we just get—we get the drive-bys of people

01:42:28   who have established Twitter accounts, and they just talk in their circle, and we talk in our

01:42:31   circle, and our circles don't interact, but some little thing from our circle lands over in their

01:42:35   circle, and they will just come back and yell. But the good thing about them is, for the most part,

01:42:38   you'll never see them again. Like, most of them won't make it their mission in life to make your

01:42:43   life miserable. Like, my one was, they had that video of the woman being cat-called on the street,

01:42:48   and I made one or two tweets about it and they somehow leaked out of our circle because

01:42:53   some right-wing site put up one of my tweets on their page and it was just months.

01:42:59   Months of random, fairly aggressive hate from people who are totally outside circles who

01:43:06   have no idea anything about who I am or that I have a podcast or that I'm just a person.

01:43:15   - That was miserable.

01:43:16   It was like, I think I said, I tweeted about it.

01:43:18   It was like, you know, five millisarkesians worth of hate.

01:43:23   Right?

01:43:24   But it just goes on forever.

01:43:26   Like, and eventually, you know, like, I mean,

01:43:28   I deal with things in a different way probably

01:43:30   than you two do, but like, it was miserable.

01:43:33   And it was like the rainstorm, it doesn't end.

01:43:36   Like, you know, I don't know what your CNBC story,

01:43:41   you know, the Apple functional high ground stuff is going.

01:43:44   I'm assuming you're still getting those,

01:43:46   but I'm hoping they're not as hate filled

01:43:49   as the things I was getting for this thing.

01:43:51   And at the very least, anyone who's gonna be angry

01:43:54   about functional high ground probably cares about Apple.

01:43:57   And so at least they're somewhere in your circle.

01:43:59   In that respect, you may not get rid of them,

01:44:00   but when I was getting the random hate from strangers,

01:44:03   it helped that I knew these people

01:44:06   didn't know anything about me.

01:44:08   It helped that I knew that I was never gonna see

01:44:11   these people on Twitter again.

01:44:13   It helped that it was so outside of the normal things

01:44:16   I tweet about, unlike your functional high ground things,

01:44:18   which is you're just, you are like cultivating the worst

01:44:22   of your actual audience.

01:44:23   Like people who care a lot about Apple

01:44:25   and you're really angry about you

01:44:26   for saying stuff about Apple.

01:44:27   Like, you know, if you say something,

01:44:30   what I'm saying is I was able to deal with it by saying,

01:44:32   by thinking to myself,

01:44:33   I'm never gonna see any of these people tweeting again.

01:44:37   It's probably not even worth my time to block them

01:44:39   because like, if I just simply don't engage with any of them,

01:44:43   They'll get it out of their system.

01:44:44   They don't know who I am, you know,

01:44:46   and it just, and it will blow over

01:44:49   in two to three months, right?

01:44:51   And so, and it did more or less,

01:44:53   I haven't got one of those in a long time.

01:44:55   And that was the way I dealt with that one.

01:44:57   But you know, having to deal with that

01:45:00   for two to three months, like going off Twitter

01:45:02   would be another way to deal with that one.

01:45:04   Like just say, I'm going to come back from Twitter

01:45:05   in two to three months when this is blown over, right?

01:45:08   And you just have to do whatever it takes

01:45:11   for you to feel okay.

01:45:12   and these unfortunate flare ups can happen to anybody.

01:45:15   Like, and again, I would say again, this is not a thing,

01:45:17   oh, poor you, you got too many followers.

01:45:19   Anybody's tweet, not because I had a lot of followers,

01:45:21   anybody's tweet can be pulled out

01:45:23   and put into the right place on like, you know,

01:45:26   some website or forum or bulletin board

01:45:30   that has an organized presence that disagrees

01:45:32   with whatever it is that you are passionate about.

01:45:35   That can happen to anybody, because on the page I was on,

01:45:38   there was 50 other people.

01:45:40   You know, some of those people had 10 followers, right?

01:45:42   they were gonna get the same exact volume of hate mail

01:45:45   that I was gonna get,

01:45:46   because nobody who's sending hate tweets to those people

01:45:49   knows who they are.

01:45:50   They just saw their tweets on a page,

01:45:51   became enraged and funneled that rage

01:45:53   into sending hate in their direction.

01:45:55   It can happen to anybody.

01:45:56   That's the beauty of the internet.

01:45:58   If the Huffington Post grabs your tweet and puts it up

01:46:02   and you could get angry, hate-filled email

01:46:05   from people for months and you could have 10 followers.

01:46:08   That is the beauty and curse of our age, I guess.

01:46:12   And so I really think that everyone will eventually

01:46:15   have to find their way of dealing with the situation

01:46:20   and learning what their limits are.

01:46:22   And I think what Casey was talking about before

01:46:23   of like not lying to yourself about what your limits are,

01:46:26   not thinking because it shouldn't bother me,

01:46:28   therefore I will continue to do the thing

01:46:30   that I know bothers me because I intellectually believe

01:46:33   that it shouldn't bother me.

01:46:34   That's probably not a healthy coping mechanism.

01:46:37   - Yeah, that's what I've been attempting and failing at.

01:46:40   just like Casey's, I've been failing miserably at that

01:46:43   for years now and I think for me the ultimate solution

01:46:48   is going to be reducing how much I use Twitter

01:46:51   because Twitter's not gonna change.

01:46:53   Twitter is, as a medium, that setting I just said,

01:46:56   no client is ever gonna be able to add that really.

01:47:00   They probably aren't even allowed to anymore

01:47:02   with the new Twitter rules of the road.

01:47:04   - Yeah, that would have to be a Twitter service thing

01:47:06   'cause these are the type of features

01:47:08   that Twitter as a service can do,

01:47:09   and maybe they could think about that,

01:47:12   but the fact that Verified is still this rare thing

01:47:15   that not everybody can get shows they really have no idea

01:47:17   what the hell they're doing in terms of making Twitter

01:47:18   a more pleasant place.

01:47:19   - Exactly, yeah, and it just seems like

01:47:21   the leadership of Twitter has no interest

01:47:25   from a product direction perspective

01:47:27   in doing much about these kind of problems,

01:47:30   and some of them are not problems

01:47:33   that Twitter really can solve, and I recognize that.

01:47:36   So for me, this is why I really,

01:47:39   like the direction I'm going to really try to go now

01:47:42   is just taking a lot of my usage

01:47:46   that is currently on Twitter and just taking it private.

01:47:49   Because being in public for everything I do

01:47:53   is just not working, it's just not.

01:47:57   - Yeah, it's funny because I have the show on Relay,

01:48:01   because I have Analog on Relay,

01:48:03   I've been a part of the Relay FM Slack channel,

01:48:06   and that has a really awesome group of people in it.

01:48:10   And I feel like that's kind of filling,

01:48:14   not filling a void necessarily,

01:48:16   but I'm getting more positive experiences from that.

01:48:20   In fact, they're pretty much universally positive.

01:48:22   And I've been, a lot of the little quips

01:48:25   that I may throw into Twitter,

01:48:26   a lot of times I'll just share with my close friends

01:48:30   on the Relay chat or Slack,

01:48:32   because I know reliably that they will understand

01:48:37   where I'm coming from, get my intention

01:48:39   and get what I'm trying to say.

01:48:41   Or maybe I'm just whining about something.

01:48:44   - They'll only secretly hate you.

01:48:45   - Right, and I'm okay with that.

01:48:47   I'm okay with them secretly hating me

01:48:49   because this way I don't have to know that they hate me.

01:48:52   But all kidding aside, I wonder if I sway,

01:48:57   let's say the pendulum swings

01:48:58   just all the way over to the relay FM slack,

01:49:01   and I almost completely stop using Twitter.

01:49:06   I think at that point though,

01:49:07   I'll miss some of the random interactions.

01:49:10   I'll miss hearing about fat frames

01:49:13   and I'll miss hearing about,

01:49:15   I'll miss hearing about,

01:49:17   hearing things from people that I don't know

01:49:19   because genuinely as much as we're complaining

01:49:21   and moaning or sharing, if nothing else,

01:49:24   our experiences with Twitter,

01:49:26   both of you have said it and I can't agree more

01:49:28   that some unbelievably wonderful, wonderful things happen on Twitter with random people.

01:49:36   And some people have sent 140-character messages to me that are just heart-crushingly awesome

01:49:43   in the best possible way.

01:49:46   And so because of that, I don't think I necessarily want to give up on Twitter.

01:49:49   And I'm not saying that either of you are saying that either, but I worry that if I

01:49:53   I get into this echo chamber in the Slack chat, that maybe I'll miss out on some of

01:49:58   the contrarian opinions that, if I'm honest, I'm probably not getting on Twitter anyway,

01:50:01   but I like to think I'm getting on Twitter.

01:50:03   Well, that's why it's a balance, right? It's a balance we all need to find. And I think

01:50:09   right now, we've, in the last few years, with the rise of all this social stuff and mobile

01:50:14   stuff, I think we've gone a little too far in the "everything is public on social networks"

01:50:20   and now I think we're gonna start swinging back

01:50:23   a little bit, hopefully on that pendulum,

01:50:24   with like, okay, not everything needs to be public

01:50:27   all the time, and being private can actually be

01:50:32   quite peaceful and a relief from always being

01:50:35   in public all the time.

01:50:37   - Well, there's a gap in the model lineup, so to speak,

01:50:39   going back to the MacBook type analogy,

01:50:41   where we all have private messages,

01:50:42   we all have iMessage, text messages, instant message,

01:50:45   one on one or one on, you know,

01:50:48   a small circle of people, right?

01:50:50   There's that.

01:50:50   Then there's the public thing over there on Twitter, right?

01:50:53   And then the in-between thing is this,

01:50:55   and I think there's a reason the in-between thing

01:50:56   is a big gap.

01:50:57   I think of things like Slack or Glassboard

01:50:59   or like a small group of people, even an IRC channel,

01:51:02   a small group of people who know each other.

01:51:05   Because you don't wanna talk one-on-one

01:51:06   with all your individual friends.

01:51:08   You do want a place that's in between.

01:51:09   Because if you wanna talk one-on-one,

01:51:10   you'll just send people text messages or instant messages.

01:51:13   Like, that's fine, that's a solved problem.

01:51:14   But sometimes you wanna talk to two or three or four

01:51:16   or be in a room or even be someplace as big as OOL

01:51:19   with like a whole bunch of people, right?

01:51:20   But it's still not public.

01:51:21   There's a difference between, you know,

01:51:23   even if you were talking to everybody in WWDC,

01:51:25   that's only a few thousand people,

01:51:27   it's not the entire world of, you know,

01:51:29   whatever it is, 7 billion.

01:51:31   So why is there that gap there?

01:51:33   And I think one of the reasons that gap is there

01:51:35   is we used to have, before we had the big public things,

01:51:38   all we had were the little places.

01:51:40   We had private, which would be like one-to-one email

01:51:42   or instant message.

01:51:43   we had self-constructed small social groups isolated by obscurity, like a bunch of people

01:51:49   on Galapagos Island where you have this little miniature ecosystem, it would be like one

01:51:52   Usenet group up in a corner with like 200 regulars and that makes a little community

01:51:57   there.

01:51:58   And technically it's in public, but it's protected by the fact that Google doesn't exist yet

01:52:02   and there's no way for people to find you and it's like you're hiding on your little

01:52:05   island until the boats show up, right?

01:52:07   And even things like Slack or whatever, you end up with these little islands and I remember

01:52:11   those days and what happened in those days was you ended up with too many islands.

01:52:15   Here's where I go to talk about people at Star Wars.

01:52:17   Here's where I go to talk to people about computer stuff.

01:52:20   Here's where I, you know, talk to my family.

01:52:22   And it was like, they were these little private islands at the scale that Marko was looking

01:52:26   for but you ended up with 50 of them and you're like, "Geez, I don't like having to go to

01:52:29   all these different protocols, all these different places, and sometimes I want to cross-pollinate

01:52:32   and I got to check, you know, five different places for it."

01:52:36   What happens is either those little places die out or those little places sort of metastasize

01:52:42   and become Twitter essentially.

01:52:44   That is the life cycle of those places.

01:52:46   Things at that scale either just fizzle and die out or become like there's too many of

01:52:52   them that you can't go to all the ones.

01:52:53   The reason we aren't going back to app.net even if there's like seven people there we

01:52:56   know it just doesn't have critical mass.

01:52:58   Or they grow.

01:53:00   They start just like, "Well, why isn't everybody on Usenet?

01:53:03   Now why isn't everybody on Wellandson message?

01:53:06   Why isn't everybody in this Slack room?

01:53:07   There's some people I wish were in the Slack room

01:53:08   who weren't, but the people you wish were in the Slack room

01:53:10   were different than the set of people the other person

01:53:12   thinks were in the, wishes were in the Slack room.

01:53:13   And eventually everybody that you follow on Twitter

01:53:15   is in the Slack room, you just recreated Twitter

01:53:16   inside your Slack room, right?

01:53:18   And so--

01:53:19   - It's true, it's true.

01:53:20   - That uncomfortable middle part is like,

01:53:22   I think it's very difficult for things to live

01:53:25   in that middle part because they always move

01:53:28   in one direction or another.

01:53:29   It's very difficult to find stasis there

01:53:31   unless you have a very narrow focus.

01:53:33   I think people find that stasis with Facebook,

01:53:35   even though Facebook is basically public,

01:53:37   because they have the same protection of obscurity,

01:53:39   and because they have one axis.

01:53:41   They just want to talk to their family and friends.

01:53:43   Maybe that's two axes, but it's not like,

01:53:46   it's probably you'll wanna say,

01:53:48   where are the people I wanna talk about fixing up my car?

01:53:50   Where are the people I wanna talk about metalworking?

01:53:51   Where are the people I wanna talk about this sports team?

01:53:53   Where are the people I wanna talk about that sports team?

01:53:55   And then you end up with these little islands again.

01:53:56   If you try to do it all at once,

01:53:57   then you just end up with Twitter,

01:53:58   and it is a difficult balance.

01:54:02   Talking to all these people who you don't,

01:54:04   who you never see, who live all over the world.

01:54:07   - No, I couldn't agree with you more.

01:54:08   And the funny thing is I have now dedicated

01:54:11   one of the spaces on my work machine

01:54:13   to be my communication pane.

01:54:16   And accepting Twitter, I have Slack,

01:54:19   I have, in like the upper left-hand corner,

01:54:22   I have IRC in the upper right-hand corner,

01:54:24   I have iMessage and IM in the lower right-hand corner,

01:54:29   and I have HipChat for work in the lower left-hand corner.

01:54:32   So I have four panes all on the screen at once

01:54:35   that are the four different places

01:54:37   that I have real-time communication,

01:54:39   and then on top of that is Twitter,

01:54:40   and on top of that is email.

01:54:42   And I already am feeling a bit of exhaustion,

01:54:45   but I'd much rather have tiredness

01:54:50   than the sadness that I wonder if I'm getting more of

01:54:54   than happiness from Twitter.

01:54:56   - At least you don't have web forums and Usenet, right?

01:54:58   So you're trying to list a little bit.

01:55:00   I remember back in the days where most of my communities of this size were web bulletin

01:55:05   boards.

01:55:06   Like, because Usenet had gone away and the big web hadn't come and there were web bulletin

01:55:09   boards that you just cycle through and check all of them.

01:55:11   There were little communities in each one.

01:55:14   And I don't think that was much better.

01:55:16   In fact, I find Twitter freeing because if you're in a web bulletin board community or

01:55:22   even a Slack channel and someone's being a jerk, you can't unfollow them or you couldn't

01:55:25   back in the day anyway.

01:55:26   There was no equivalent of like, "I don't want to see what they have to say again."

01:55:30   you know, because other people would reply to them and then you would see their replies.

01:55:34   Like Twitter has helped in that regard both by keeping their volume down because they

01:55:37   can only post too much and by sort of letting you try to trace the outlines of your own

01:55:42   little island by curating your follow list to give yourself a fighting chance.

01:55:47   Whereas, you know, if for example in your Slack thing a bunch of people were invited

01:55:50   in who you didn't like who didn't like you, you can't participate in that Slack room in

01:55:54   an enjoyable way anyway.

01:55:55   The tools aren't there for you to do it.

01:55:57   It becomes dead to you.

01:55:58   You have to just leave.

01:55:59   If a bunch of people come on Twitter and are obnoxious to you, or start becoming obnoxious,

01:56:04   you can either unfollow them or block them and still have the conversation with the people

01:56:06   that you like.

01:56:11   I think things are better now in the sense that the big public one is actually viable

01:56:18   enough to fool us all into thinking like, "Oh, I don't need that in-between one anymore.

01:56:22   The big public one is fine."

01:56:23   And for a long time that kind of worked out.

01:56:25   That's how good the big public one is now compared to what it was before, but we definitely

01:56:29   do need those middle-sized islands of connections.

01:56:33   I just don't know the solution to getting a set of those that is stable and satisfactory

01:56:38   that don't either disappear or become big things.

01:56:40   Yeah.

01:56:41   Oh, we'll see what happens.

01:56:43   But it's interesting.

01:56:44   It's an interesting conversation.

01:56:46   And I love when we get a little touchy-feely on this show.

01:56:49   Yeah, we're just stealing all your analog.

01:56:51   Yeah.

01:56:52   Oh, I, Mike, is going to be so angry.

01:56:54   - Oh, I wanna give you a couple more,

01:56:57   I don't know if they count as tips,

01:56:58   but things that I've been doing to try to help manage,

01:57:01   like Twitter, Twitter negative,

01:57:03   they may or may not work for you.

01:57:05   But one of the things is like,

01:57:08   you know how you're talking about

01:57:09   people don't give us the benefit of the doubt

01:57:10   and assume the worst about us and everything?

01:57:12   It goes both ways.

01:57:13   We do the same thing about them.

01:57:14   Because it's like, you know,

01:57:16   it's why smileys were invented.

01:57:17   Because text is not the best medium.

01:57:18   When someone types something like, you know,

01:57:20   with the kids, "Well, you typed okay with a period,

01:57:22   "that means you're angry," right?

01:57:23   It is very easy to misread what people are saying

01:57:27   and in the same way that you do.

01:57:29   So very often, someone will come at me with something

01:57:32   that I think that is aggressive.

01:57:34   And I will do something to try to determine

01:57:37   whether they were intentionally aggressive

01:57:39   or whether they were trying and failing to make a joke.

01:57:41   Because that's the whole thing like Mark was saying,

01:57:43   these people listen to us and they know us

01:57:44   and they feel like they're familiar in the same way

01:57:45   that we can say things to each other that,

01:57:47   we take for granted that the mean things we say

01:57:49   to each other are jokes, right?

01:57:51   And so at the very least, that gives us a leg up

01:57:53   thinking, "Does he really think that?" Like, well, no, it's obviously a mental joke, but when strangers do it,

01:57:57   they think they know us, we have no idea who they are,

01:57:59   totally reads as naked aggression to us, and so I will reply to them in a way

01:58:03   that will give them an opportunity to basically say,

01:58:08   in whatever so many words, like,

01:58:12   "I didn't mean it that way," or like,

01:58:15   to reveal themselves as being, it was an attempt at good-natured joshing, and they were actually a fan,

01:58:20   and they were trying to be nice, and they failed. Like,

01:58:23   trying to give them the benefit of the doubt,

01:58:25   especially if they follow me, because I am,

01:58:27   unlike, you know, I am more aggressive

01:58:30   in my blocking these days, but unlike Markowitz policy,

01:58:33   I have not come to the point

01:58:33   where I will reflexively block people,

01:58:35   and I feel really bad about blocking anybody who follows me.

01:58:38   Again, this is just my, how I'm dealing with things,

01:58:40   but you would think like, okay, fine,

01:58:42   do that thing where you try to see,

01:58:43   if they give them the benefit of the doubt,

01:58:45   all you're gonna do is just make them pissed off more

01:58:47   and make yourself more miserable,

01:58:48   and I have to admit that does happen sometimes,

01:58:50   But what I have found is that the one or two times

01:58:53   that I engage in someone in a way

01:58:56   that lets them reveal the fact

01:58:57   that I should have given them the benefit of that doubt,

01:58:59   that it was just like a joke that came off wrong, right,

01:59:02   or whatever, I feel better.

01:59:04   Like that is a positive lift,

01:59:07   more than I think even if they had just come out

01:59:09   in the beginning and said something nice.

01:59:10   Like I feel that there's a positive lift

01:59:12   that like I was able to turn it around,

01:59:14   that what could have turned into a fight

01:59:16   didn't turn into one, and we came to an understanding

01:59:18   that someone was misunderstood and that we worked it out,

01:59:21   and that it gives me faith in humanity

01:59:24   that not everyone who I think is evil and mean

01:59:27   is actually evil and mean,

01:59:28   and sometimes I just make a mistake with what they type.

01:59:31   And it happens every once in a,

01:59:33   it doesn't happen a lot, I have to admit.

01:59:35   It's not gonna, they're not all good,

01:59:37   but the few times it does happen,

01:59:38   I think personally it gives me a lift to counteract,

01:59:41   you know how the one bad comment

01:59:43   is disproportionately weighing on you?

01:59:44   The one good thing that happens,

01:59:46   I find disproportionately lifts me.

01:59:49   And I also think like, you know,

01:59:51   the person on the other end of that

01:59:52   feels better out as well and maybe learn something about,

01:59:55   you know, not being mean.

01:59:56   And the way I do this,

01:59:58   someone says they just saw me do this on Twitter today.

02:00:01   The way I do this is probably doesn't look very nice

02:00:03   because very often I do this by coming back at them directly

02:00:07   to essentially give them a reply that looks very aggressive,

02:00:10   but it lets them know you said something

02:00:11   that hurts my feeling and I don't even know who you are

02:00:13   and maybe you didn't mean to do that.

02:00:15   And if they are actually mean, I've done a comeback,

02:00:19   like, you know, I've come back at them

02:00:20   in the typical way that you argue with somebody.

02:00:23   But if they didn't mean to be mean,

02:00:25   like, I found that rather than trying to engage them

02:00:30   and say, did you really mean that, or blah, blah, blah,

02:00:32   if I come back at them in a way

02:00:34   that would make a good person feel shame,

02:00:36   they will feel shame and come back with a nice thing.

02:00:37   If I come back at them in a way

02:00:38   that would make a good person feel shame,

02:00:41   and they did intend to hurt my feelings,

02:00:45   then I still feel like I've made an aggressive counter move

02:00:49   and then I just block them and move on, right?

02:00:51   I don't know if that's gonna help for you guys.

02:00:53   I don't know if it's ever happened to you,

02:00:54   like you've turned someone around or like you,

02:00:56   I mean, we kind of had it with like, you know,

02:00:57   someone in the chat room who was, sent us an angry email

02:01:00   and we talked about it and like, you know,

02:01:03   kind of work things out and turn things around, right?

02:01:06   That positive outcome lifts my estimation of humanity

02:01:10   and can turn a bad day into a good one.

02:01:13   I don't know if you guys wanna take that chance.

02:01:14   certainly a lot of work, but I found that that does help me feel better about the whole thing.

02:01:19   Yeah, you know, that's another thing I'm working on in that sometimes I'll try to reply with an

02:01:29   equal amount, what I feel is an equal amount of snark for exactly the same reason, John. So,

02:01:35   for example, the person who had tweeted to me, you know, "You're being ridiculous. Keep track

02:01:39   of your cards, my reply to that person was, "It was an honest mistake. You're being ridiculous."

02:01:46   Which I'm not saying I'm necessarily proud of that, but my thought was I have replied

02:01:54   in kind. And the thing that bums me out about it, though, is that looking back on it, I

02:02:02   don't think I feel good about that reply. And it's tough because it bothered me enough

02:02:07   that I felt like I wanted them to, this person to know that I am bothered, but I don't know

02:02:15   that I've gotten enough relief from replying in a snarky way either.

02:02:19   Does that—

02:02:20   But I don't think you let them know that you were upset, though.

02:02:22   I think you just came back at them in the regular, just arguing way.

02:02:24   Like the one from today, I can't remember what it was, but someone was complaining about

02:02:30   my pronunciation of "Maria," which happens all the time.

02:02:32   It's fine.

02:02:33   Like, that's fine.

02:02:34   That happens all the time.

02:02:35   in a funny way or you can do that in a mean way, right? And this person did it in sort of a mean

02:02:42   condescending way, right? But as far as I knew, they could have been in their mind and could have

02:02:48   been exactly the same feeling as all the other people who like, you know, do it in a silly way,

02:02:52   right? Like we do it to each other and so like it's a running gag on the show, right? But if

02:02:55   someone misfires in an attempt at humor, it can come off seeming really mean. Rather than thinking

02:02:59   that person is really mean and getting down about it, what I came back with them was like,

02:03:04   you know, using a similar echo of their comments of like,

02:03:07   you know, I told them basically like,

02:03:10   being condescending, they're sometimes like,

02:03:12   "How hard is it not to say the word Mario?"

02:03:14   Like, you know, it's a subtle difference in phrasing

02:03:17   of just, you know, you pronounce it a weird way,

02:03:20   blah, blah, blah, or making a joke, or just saying,

02:03:22   "I roll, how hard is it to pronounce this word?"

02:03:25   Right?

02:03:26   And depending on your mood,

02:03:27   and I was in not a particularly good mood at that point,

02:03:29   I'm like, "Really, you're gonna come up to me and say,

02:03:30   "How hard is it to pronounce?"

02:03:31   Like, there are ways to phrase that

02:03:33   that are not quite as mean.

02:03:34   It wasn't that mean, it's not that mean, but it annoyed me.

02:03:36   So I said, "How hard is it not to be condescending

02:03:39   "to strangers on Twitter?"

02:03:40   Which emphasized a couple of things.

02:03:41   One, that I don't even know you,

02:03:43   that you are essentially like Marco said,

02:03:44   walking by my porch, seeing me have a conversation,

02:03:46   not even, because this is like from a podcast,

02:03:48   from who knows when, and just yelling at me

02:03:51   that you're disappointed that like,

02:03:52   how hard is it to do this thing I find so easy?

02:03:54   You're a terrible person, right?

02:03:57   And my thing comes back at them, it's like,

02:03:59   it is kind of a comeback, right?

02:04:01   But it also emphasizes the fact that

02:04:03   what were you just doing there?

02:04:05   You were being condescending to someone

02:04:06   you don't even know on Twitter.

02:04:08   We have never met, I don't know who you are,

02:04:10   I don't even know what you're referring to,

02:04:11   and you're opening salvos to be condescending to me

02:04:14   about how I pronounce something, right?

02:04:16   And the person came back and,

02:04:18   I forget what their reply was, but it was like,

02:04:21   it was acknowledgement that that's really not

02:04:22   how they meant to come across,

02:04:24   and they just thought it was funny

02:04:25   how it was pronounced or whatever,

02:04:26   and then I explained to them it was a regional accent,

02:04:28   and whatever, like, you know,

02:04:30   it has an effectively a positive result.

02:04:35   But the important point was to like,

02:04:37   communicate to that, like make them realize

02:04:42   how their actions look from my perspective.

02:04:44   I don't know if you're saying that like, you know,

02:04:46   that you said about the expiring credit cards,

02:04:49   let them really communicate to them

02:04:52   how you were feeling about it

02:04:53   or what it looks like from your perspective.

02:04:55   But like I said, sometimes, you know,

02:04:57   I think the percentage of this working is really low.

02:04:59   Like, and most of the time I don't do anything

02:05:02   and I just ignore it and move on.

02:05:03   But every once in a while I make a go at that

02:05:06   and I'm just so happy and pleasantly surprised

02:05:10   and it makes me feel better

02:05:11   when it actually does work and someone,

02:05:13   and what could have been a conflict

02:05:14   turns into not a conflict.

02:05:16   - I don't know.

02:05:17   I just feel like in retrospect that maybe the right answer.

02:05:21   I guess the reason I tweeted and replied

02:05:24   was because I wanted some amount of closure,

02:05:26   but in retrospect the closure I got

02:05:28   was not the closure I wanted.

02:05:29   Because if I just ignored it,

02:05:31   it would have eaten at the back of my head,

02:05:33   like all day long.

02:05:34   Like, why was that person such a jerk?

02:05:35   What did I ever do to bother them?

02:05:37   It was an honest freaking mistake.

02:05:38   Why are they so upset?

02:05:39   And so that's why I replied

02:05:41   because it did get it out of my head,

02:05:44   but I am not getting the relief and satisfaction

02:05:47   from my tweet that I wanted.

02:05:49   And that's probably, it's certainly on me.

02:05:53   I mean, I could have said something different

02:05:54   like you're saying, John.

02:05:56   I could have handled it differently, but I don't know.

02:05:59   It's just, it's stuff like that.

02:06:01   Like this little one shot thing that really,

02:06:03   in the grand scheme of things, is not a big deal.

02:06:05   But you get it constantly and it weighs on you.

02:06:10   I'm telling you things you already know.

02:06:13   It's just, it's constant, I feel.

02:06:15   And a lot more constant than it ever used to be.

02:06:17   And I think that's in large part because I have more

02:06:19   of an audience than I never used to have.

02:06:21   But I don't know, it's just, it's tough.

02:06:23   It's been tough for me to deal with.

02:06:24   And we're very lucky that we're receiving any sort of feedback at all.

02:06:30   And we're not just shouting into the abyss, but sometimes the echo you get back is not

02:06:35   the echo you want.

02:06:36   [BLANK_AUDIO]