0:00:00I'm glad Honda's perfect.
0:00:02Wow.
0:00:03It doesn't even take premium fuel.
0:00:08Yeah, so this is about bringing the iPhones in for the crescent moon problem and the various
0:00:13experiences people had and what the Apple geniuses asked them to do to their phone and
0:00:18what happened to the phone when it was taken into the back room and all sorts of stuff
0:00:21like that.
0:00:22So one theme was some people are super angry that we don't know this stuff.
0:00:28Like it makes me so angry to hear you talk about genius stuff that you don't know about.
0:00:33It's like, yeah, we don't know.
0:00:34And then plenty of people tell us.
0:00:36Like that's kind of how the show works.
0:00:38We say, "I wonder what does happen in the back room."
0:00:40And then a bunch of Apple geniuses anonymously email us and tell us what happens in the back
0:00:43room.
0:00:44So that was one theme.
0:00:45And by the way, I can relate to that.
0:00:47When you hear people talking about stuff on a podcast and you know the answer, but no
0:00:52one on the show knows the answer because you're an Apple genius or a former Apple genius and
0:00:56You hear the people thinking, "I wonder if it's this."
0:00:59Like all of us offered various ideas of what it could be or whatever.
0:01:03So that can be frustrating, but that's also part of the fun of podcasting.
0:01:06The second theme that I saw emerge from the very large volume of feedback we got from
0:01:11Apple Geniuses X.
0:01:12Apple Geniuses are people who are Apple Genius adjacent.
0:01:16They were all cagey about what their jobs were, and they all wanted to be anonymous
0:01:20for the most part.
0:01:21was that things are actually slightly different
0:01:24from Apple Store to Apple Store.
0:01:26We got email from geniuses in different countries,
0:01:30in different states in the United States,
0:01:33and they all describe what their store does.
0:01:35And there's a commonality,
0:01:36like we'll get to that when we get to the answers.
0:01:38There is an answer to all of our questions last time,
0:01:40but some stores were like,
0:01:42"Our store tends to do this,
0:01:43"except occasionally we do that.
0:01:44"Our store always does this and doesn't do it."
0:01:46Like subtle differences in policy
0:01:48that I assume are like maybe at the discretion
0:01:51of the store manager or just kind of like
0:01:53what they tend to do, other people delving into details
0:01:56of how the geniuses are rated by their managers
0:02:00based on certain metrics that have to do with
0:02:02how they choose to do discretionary things.
0:02:04Anyway, I was surprised at the variety,
0:02:07at how much things can vary from store to store.
0:02:09And these are not things that the people writing in
0:02:11presented as things that might vary.
0:02:13The only way we discovered that they vary
0:02:15is by the sheer volume of feedback.
0:02:17you know, oh, like these five people said they always do this,
0:02:19and these four people said they always do something slightly different.
0:02:22And all those people are not presenting that as a thing that they think varies.
0:02:24They think like all Apple stores do this, but they actually do vary a surprising amount.
0:02:29And that kind of matches up with, you know, the experience even just that you two had in terms of,
0:02:34if I bring it in at the end of the day and the store is going to close,
0:02:36maybe they'll give me a replacement phone instead of trying to repair,
0:02:40or they'll just tell me to come back the next day, you know,
0:02:42or if you, you know, if you have iOS 9 or a beta on it,
0:02:45the machine can't replace it, so they do that.
0:02:47Lots of variations from store to store.
0:02:50But anyway, we're not really interested in,
0:02:52I'm interested in the variations
0:02:54'cause I find it interesting that there is apparently
0:02:58so much discretion from one store to the other.
0:03:00But the common stuff is what we're gonna try
0:03:02to get to in the feedback, so one of you
0:03:03can try summarizing the answers
0:03:06to all of our questions from last week.
0:03:07- All right, let me take a stab at this very quickly.
0:03:08So the general theme seems to be
0:03:11that the reason that a genius will ask you
0:03:14turn off Find My iPhone. There's a couple of reasons actually. Number one, it's to prove
0:03:18that that is your phone. And you haven't stolen the phone and, you know, claimed that something
0:03:25is broken or perhaps something is broken, and you're trying to get a perfectly functional
0:03:30phone out of the deal. So the most obvious answer was, we want you to prove that it's
0:03:35indeed yours. Subsequent to that, if it comes that they need to replace the phone, according
0:03:42to the geniuses, if I understood them correctly, they, the activation lock is tied in some
0:03:48way shape or form to Find My iPhone. And so if they screw something up or something is
0:03:54just fundamentally broken and they need to give you a new phone, they're going to want
0:03:58to recycle or remanufacture is the word I heard used a lot, remanufactured the phone
0:04:06that you've just given up. And they can't do that unless Find My iPhone is off because
0:04:10because they have no back door to this.
0:04:12- I think that summary's accurate.
0:04:14The most common reason we heard cited
0:04:15was proof of ownership for a reason,
0:04:18because apparently people bringing in stolen phones
0:04:20and going through this whole thing
0:04:21or intentionally breaking part of it,
0:04:23like opening it up and disconnecting the home button
0:04:25and bringing it in saying,
0:04:26"Oh, the home button doesn't work with stolen phones,"
0:04:28was apparently a very common thing.
0:04:30So that is the primary reason
0:04:33is you're proving you're on the phone.
0:04:34And then the other reasons I'm still a little bit fuzzy on,
0:04:37but we got a lot of,
0:04:38What you summarized is the common answer, I think.
0:04:40All right.
0:04:40So that's the Find My iPhone portion.
0:04:42Now, the passcode was interesting.
0:04:46I didn't realize the order of operations
0:04:50that happens once my phone disappeared
0:04:52to get the crescent moon repaired.
0:04:56So apparently what happens is they go to the back room,
0:04:59and they use this little clampy thing that
0:05:04has suction cups on it to peel apart the phone once they've
0:05:07removed the couple of screws that are on the bottom of it.
0:05:10Then they replace the screen, and with the screen is the touch ID sensor and a bunch
0:05:14of other things.
0:05:15I don't remember the list off the top of my head.
0:05:17But the key is, then they put it into this big black calibration machine.
0:05:22And they are not allowed, or told anyway, not to give you your phone back unless you
0:05:26pass calibration.
0:05:28And apparently the way you pass calibration is, among other things, they put an app on
0:05:32your phone temporarily that interacts with the calibration machine in order to calibrate
0:05:36the screen and make sure the screen is working.
0:05:38Now this is important because they can't put this app on your phone or do any of those
0:05:41other things without you having either given them your passcode or just taken off the passcode.
0:05:47So they run this thing through, they run your phone through this calibration machine just
0:05:50to make sure everything's functional.
0:05:51And if it passes calibration, you get your phone back that has a new screen, new touch
0:05:55ID, et cetera.
0:05:56If it doesn't pass calibration, then they'll just hand you a new phone and say, "Be on
0:06:01your way."
0:06:02said that we also permit customers to decline giving us the passcode with the
0:06:06expectation that we'll perform this functionality check with the customer.
0:06:09Some of the geniuses who said this said that they trusted the machine more than
0:06:13like checking the functionality with the people. I would trust the machine more
0:06:16too, especially for screen calibration type stuff. It's not clear to me
0:06:20whether that can work with the passcode off or not. I think there's some feedback
0:06:23related to that in there. But anyway, you would think that we'd be nailing this
0:06:26down, but there are subtle differences between all the feedback that we got and
0:06:30And you can't tell the subtle differences are significant or just differences in phrasing or whatever, but bottom line in the passcode is
0:06:36they want to make sure that if they change something about your phone that all the stuff that's supposed to work still works.
0:06:43And the other thing I just wanted to clarify a little bit is when I said an app with the calibration machine
0:06:48I may have the details a little wrong about that.
0:06:50I think we had heard talk of a custom ROM or a custom firmware.
0:06:55We've heard talks, a talk from the feedback that it was an app.
0:06:59The point just being that something happens on your phone that interacts with this machine
0:07:03in order to make sure everything works right.
0:07:05All right, anything else on the repair things?
0:07:09I don't have anything else.
0:07:10I feel like all we have done is initiated another torrent of clarifications from geniuses,
0:07:14which is fine.
0:07:15How about this?
0:07:16Why don't we just say right now we're not going to be talking about this anymore?
0:07:19So please, you don't have to even email us about it.
0:07:20We're done with this topic.
0:07:21Please, for the love of God.
0:07:22Well, I mean, I don't think there's anything more productive to get out of it because we
0:07:26wondered why they want you to have Find My iPhone, and I think we got a solid answer
0:07:30on that to prove that you own it.
0:07:33And then the passcode stuff and the other things, and when you get a new phone and when
0:07:36you get a replacement and all that other stuff, I've got enough information to understand
0:07:40what they're doing.
0:07:42I don't think we implied that there was anything sinister going on.
0:07:44I think we were just wondering, and I don't think there's anything sinister going on,
0:07:48so I think we're all satisfied on that front.
0:07:50Marco still wants the ability to, you know, this one person said they have, basically
0:07:55the ability to test everything without having you unlock your thing with a passcode.
0:08:01But anyway, that's – we'll probably get clarification on that.
0:08:06I think I probably won't be able to help following up on that.
0:08:09You know, I totally withdraw my argument just because I don't want to get any more mail
0:08:11about it.
0:08:12I'm so done with this topic.
0:08:13Just –
0:08:14Hold on, we're not there.
0:08:15One quick – I just wanted to say thank you to the geniuses that did write in.
0:08:17As much as we're joking, I, for one, and I think I speak for at least John, I for one
0:08:24appreciated hearing all of this.
0:08:28And I know a lot of you, and I'm not trying to be funny, I know a lot of you probably
0:08:31felt like that was a risky thing to write into us and share any sort of information.
0:08:36So I speak for all of us, even those of us who are grumbling, in saying thank you for
0:08:41what you have already written.
0:08:42But I agree, I think we've got the gist now.
0:08:45So thank you.
0:08:46All right, Marco, what would you like to talk about?
0:08:48- Anything else?
0:08:49(laughing)
0:08:50So let's quickly, very fast,
0:08:53this is how you do follow-up, guys, very fast follow-up.
0:08:55(laughing)
0:08:56Last episode, we talked about the live photos mode
0:08:59on the 6S.
0:09:00I said that it was most likely dumping the entire sensor
0:09:04at 12 megapixels in a very fast burst to make those videos.
0:09:08You can see in John Gruber's review,
0:09:11which is excellent, you should read it,
0:09:12that the resolution is substantially lower than that.
0:09:14It is not dumping it at 12 megapixels for the video.
0:09:16It's basically taking a lower resolution video,
0:09:19it's like 1440 by something,
0:09:21and it's one of those things like it looks fine on the phone
0:09:24I wouldn't even say it looks good on the phone.
0:09:26It looks fine on the phone.
0:09:28On any more inspection than that,
0:09:31any larger viewing or any close viewing,
0:09:34it does not look very good,
0:09:35but it looks good enough on the phone.
0:09:37- Does it look good enough on the phone?
0:09:38I don't know. (laughs)
0:09:39- It is a very weird feature.
0:09:41I think it's cool.
0:09:43I think it's an interesting idea,
0:09:46but the quality is not amazing.
0:09:48And it's not gonna be for preserving things in high def.
0:09:55It's gonna be for a ha ha funny look at this moment
0:09:58surrounding kind of things.
0:10:01If you want to actually have video of something,
0:10:04just shoot video.
0:10:05It looks way better when it's in video mode.
0:10:07- One way or another, I am really, really excited
0:10:11and amp to see this because I really think this could be extremely cool.
0:10:16A lot of times when I'm taking pictures with either my phone or my big camera, I really
0:10:22wish I had either context or even just a crappy still from a half second before I actually
0:10:30hit the shutter.
0:10:31And I'm really, really excited to see this.
0:10:34I think it should be really cool.
0:10:35Now, it may end up that I get my iPhone 6s, which by the way is in Louisville, not that
0:10:40I've been looking. I will get my iPhone 6s, try it, and think it's crap, but I don't know.
0:10:46I'm really excited for it, and it just occurred to me, I am not saying that just because I
0:10:50want to sound enthusiastic about something. I genuinely am enthusiastic and excited about
0:10:55this.
0:10:56Yeah, for me, I'm most excited, reading all these reviews and everything, I'm most excited
0:10:59about 3D Touch, honestly. And also, the performance increase was way bigger than I expected.
0:11:05Yeah, my goodness. I feel like they talked about it, but I don't know. When you see it
0:11:08in the keynote or special event.
0:11:10- Well, I mean, every year they say,
0:11:11"Now it's even, you know, it's 20% faster, 80% faster."
0:11:14But, you know, usually, a lot of times,
0:11:16they cherry-pick that metric to be like the maximum
0:11:19and in reality, it's maybe only 30% faster,
0:11:22which is still great for one year
0:11:23of semiconductor advancement,
0:11:25especially compared to the world of PCs and Macs.
0:11:27But this is one of those years where, you know,
0:11:30some years it makes a bigger jump than others
0:11:32and this is one of those years
0:11:33where it's a noteworthy big jump.
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0:13:58So big week Marco
0:14:02- Yeah, you know what, we might as well go right to
0:14:06the main controversy of the week.
0:14:08The colored activity rings.
0:14:10- I don't get why that's such a big friggin' deal.
0:14:14Like, I don't like that it's color,
0:14:16but I seriously am like, whatever.
0:14:19But man, the internet's upset.
0:14:21- Is it only color on the modular face?
0:14:24- No.
0:14:24- I think--
0:14:25- Is it simple or the other one, that it's color as well?
0:14:29- It's on utility, where it's color.
0:14:30- That's the one.
0:14:31Yeah, and that's what everyone's mad about
0:14:32because Utility, which is the face I use
0:14:34and I have the activity ring on it,
0:14:36Utility is, well it was previously,
0:14:40a very kind of restrained design.
0:14:42It really, you could have called it simple.
0:14:44Like it is a very simple design
0:14:46if you don't crap it up with a bunch of stuff.
0:14:48It is a very good design and many people are very upset
0:14:52about the activity rings now being these bright colors
0:14:56that match their colors in the activity app
0:14:58rather than the previous monochrome version.
0:15:02- Gotta say the upgrade experience, so watchOS,
0:15:05it's watchOS 2, right?
0:15:06- Yeah.
0:15:07- I was very confused by it,
0:15:08'cause first of all I tried to do it at work,
0:15:09and that didn't work because the watch
0:15:11wants to be connected to the charger,
0:15:12and of course I don't have my watch charger work,
0:15:14so fine, I wait 'til I get home and do it.
0:15:16But I did like the phone part of it then
0:15:17where it downloads the OS, right?
0:15:19I get home and I put my watch on the charger,
0:15:22and I let it do the update and it goes long,
0:15:24and then I come back later, looks like it's all done,
0:15:26and I pick up my phone in the watch app
0:15:29and I'm not sure if it's done.
0:15:31So I go back into like the updates thing or whatever
0:15:33and it says, everything is up to date, 1.0.1.
0:15:36You've got 1.0.1, all good.
0:15:38I'm like, what do you mean 1.0.1?
0:15:41Why is it, it says there's no updates
0:15:43and I'm all up to date and the version is 1.0.1?
0:15:46Is that talking about the version
0:15:49of the Apple watch app on the, I don't know.
0:15:51I was super confused.
0:15:52Anyway, all I did was pick up my watch
0:15:53and turn the dial and see time travel go
0:15:54and basically say, "Oh, there you go, it's installed."
0:15:57So I do have watchOS too, but I was confused by that.
0:16:01What is that?
0:16:02If you did it too, did you discover
0:16:04what the 1.0.1 is referring to?
0:16:06- Well, that was the previous version.
0:16:07It's just a bug in the watch app,
0:16:08which it wouldn't be the first one.
0:16:11- All right.
0:16:12- Fair enough.
0:16:14I mean, again, I don't like the colors on the activity rings
0:16:17on the, which one did you say it was?
0:16:20- Utility. - Utility.
0:16:21I keep wanting to say simple.
0:16:22- I mean, I looked at it too, and I was, you know,
0:16:24'cause I use utility and I thought,
0:16:26you know, this really is now a much less elegant
0:16:30looking face than it was before.
0:16:32However, I also do use the activity rings pretty heavily.
0:16:37It's one of the most common reasons I look at my watch face.
0:16:40And so when I first saw it, I thought,
0:16:42ah, what a terrible mistake, those are so garish,
0:16:44and they are, but then I went for a dog walk.
0:16:47And on the dog walk, usually I would open the watch,
0:16:52or I would look at the watch, it would wake up,
0:16:54and usually I would tap the activity rings in the corner
0:16:56to launch the full activity app
0:16:58to check how I was doing in that app
0:17:00because the rings on the watch face
0:17:01either wouldn't have updated yet
0:17:03or it would be kinda hard to see
0:17:05when I was in motion on this big walk
0:17:07and there's these little tiny rings.
0:17:09And now with the colors, it is easier to see how I'm doing
0:17:12because when I'm doing a big walk or something,
0:17:15one of the rings can get ahead of the others
0:17:17and sometimes you can't quite tell
0:17:19whether it's the orange one or the green one.
0:17:21And so you gotta look more closely to really know.
0:17:25And now with these new colors, it makes it very clear.
0:17:27So what I find now is that I don't have to launch
0:17:31the activity app anymore.
0:17:32I can just glance at it with the colors
0:17:33and I can see how I'm doing with the green ring.
0:17:37So it actually works for me.
0:17:39And I really hate to say that because I really don't like
0:17:42the way it looks, but it does work better for me.
0:17:44- Anything else going on this week for anyone, Marco?
0:17:48- I don't think so.
0:17:49I mean, I'm working on some overcast upgrades.
0:17:52- Are we really not gonna talk about this?
0:17:53'Cause I don't carry the way.
0:17:54- Nah, we can talk about it.
0:17:55We can talk about it.
0:17:56- We're going to.
0:17:58It will happen.
0:17:59- Okay, so, Peace, your content blocker
0:18:02that we talked about last episode,
0:18:04it became extremely popular.
0:18:06You had a change of heart.
0:18:08You pulled it, and the internet got really,
0:18:10really upset about it.
0:18:12I will start by saying, I think it's kind of ridiculous
0:18:17how upset the internet got about it.
0:18:19It bothered me quite a lot,
0:18:21and I really have nothing to do with this, really at all.
0:18:24But I got bothered by it because I feel like
0:18:28the internet wholly and entirely overreacted
0:18:32over a decision that was not easy for you to make
0:18:36and quite literally cost you a ton of money.
0:18:40- Well, it didn't cost them any money in the end, right?
0:18:43It cost them time, obviously.
0:18:44He spent all his time making this app,
0:18:46and then it was all for nothing.
0:18:48I get, let me, maybe cost is a poor choice of words.
0:18:51What I mean to say is--
0:18:52- I lost money on the icons and the SSL cert,
0:18:55the domain name.
0:18:56- All right, so here's something I didn't know
0:18:58until this all went around that got clarified for me
0:19:01by asking questions about it.
0:19:02My previous understanding about how refunds worked
0:19:07was that if someone bought an application for a dollar
0:19:11and Apple issued them a refund,
0:19:14they would still want 30 cents
0:19:15from the person who made the app.
0:19:17In other words, if every single person who bought your application asked for a refund,
0:19:21you would still have to pay Apple 30% of the total revenue from your application.
0:19:26Apparently that changed some point in the recent past.
0:19:28Marco, do you know, like, an exact date?
0:19:30So people have said that over the years.
0:19:33The thing is with, I mean, it's probably different on the Mac App Store where the prices are
0:19:37usually a lot higher.
0:19:38On iOS, though, the number of refunds that happen, typically on iOS, is usually so low.
0:19:44I mean, most days I get, from Overcast,
0:19:47I'll get whatever thousand or hundred or tens of buys,
0:19:51and then you'll have one or zero or two refunds.
0:19:56It'll be a massive difference.
0:19:58And so it's the kind of thing
0:20:00that almost all iOS developers never have to think about.
0:20:03Therefore, I've never looked into it,
0:20:04and therefore, I don't know if that was ever true.
0:20:07- Yeah, anyway, the new system, as Marco can confirm,
0:20:10is when Apple issues a refund,
0:20:13Marco doesn't owe Apple any money for that particular purchase.
0:20:16Like all the money goes back to the person who paid for the application and that's that.
0:20:20So in theory, and as we'll find out in practice, if for example every single copy of an application
0:20:26that was purchased was completely refunded, the developer gets zero dollars and everyone
0:20:30who bought it gets the exact amount that they paid back.
0:20:33So it's a complete clean slate ignoring Marco paying for the development of the application
0:20:37and SSL certificates and icons and all that other stuff or whatever.
0:20:39So that is the current situation.
0:20:40And I'm happy to hear that because I remember hearing back in the old days about refunds
0:20:45saying, "Oh, that's pretty harsh that Apple still demands the 30%," or whether that was
0:20:50an intentional policy or a side effect of the system that they had or whatever.
0:20:55It's usually not a big deal because refunds are infrequent.
0:20:58But in a strange situation like we had here where many applications were purchased and
0:21:03all refunded, that could have ended up being even more costly.
0:21:06But it's nice that that wasn't the case.
0:21:09Yeah, if it becomes the case, believe me, I will notice and I will let you know.
0:21:15So the other thing most people don't understand about, and you can't really blame them, developers
0:21:21know this, nerds who know developers know this, but regular customers, why would they
0:21:25even have any need to know this?
0:21:27Developers can't issue refunds.
0:21:29They just can't.
0:21:30Like if you sell an application on the App Store and someone asks you for your refund,
0:21:33you literally cannot give it to them.
0:21:34There's nothing you can do.
0:21:35There's no button you can press to say, "Here's your money back."
0:21:38Apple can issue refunds. That's stupid and it has been the case forever and you know every time stuff like this comes up
0:21:46We all reflect once again about how Apple owns the customer and the developer doesn't
0:21:50We don't know the customers names. We don't know the customer, you know, the people who sell applications can't respond to customers comments
0:21:55Don't know who they are in some respects. That's good. It's like oh Apple is isolating you keeping your privacy blah blah
0:22:00But on the other hand developers cannot issue refunds. So a lot of the people who are angry
0:22:05Justifiably is like I bought an application for a whole three dollars and I'm really mad about it
0:22:09Anyway, and it's obviously not gonna be supported because it was pulled and the developer won't give me a refund which is true
0:22:15But he can't give you a refund. He literally cannot I'm sure I don't know
0:22:19I asked Marco this is first question for Marco
0:22:21If there was a big button that you could have pressed to refund everybody when you decided to pull the app
0:22:26Would you have pressed it?
0:22:27Maybe I would have I would have definitely considered it. I mean one of the weird things about the way this was done
0:22:33So, I'll get into why I pulled the app, you know, once we get off this topic, I will
0:22:38actually give people what they're looking for, which unfortunately I already did and
0:22:42it's a really boring story.
0:22:44The story is what I wrote.
0:22:46But anyway, I'll elaborate if you want.
0:22:49But no, so to refunds for a second, you are right so far, the way you said it, we don't,
0:22:55I mean, I wouldn't even gotten the, you know, assuming that the sales had gone through
0:22:58and had not been refunded, I wouldn't even have the money until like a month and a half
0:23:03from now.
0:23:04Yeah, but like if there was a way in Apple's system to basically say, "Oh, give all that
0:23:06money back," like the customers gave the money to Apple, and if you could push a button that
0:23:10made Apple give the money back to them, like it would never appear in any of your statements
0:23:13that would just be like, "Oh, plus this amount, oh, minus this amount," and then your statement
0:23:17a month and a half from now would be like zero dollars.
0:23:18Right, right.
0:23:19I mean, if, so if they gave me the control, then I would have really considered doing
0:23:24that.
0:23:26It does really suck that I am actually now losing money on this, on this project rather
0:23:32rather than making some money, but I also,
0:23:34it was a weird dilemma of like,
0:23:37do I keep all or any of this money that I,
0:23:41you know, whoever doesn't claim a refund,
0:23:43do I keep any of it, and then Apple made this decision
0:23:46for me, they sent me an email, like I got an email
0:23:49from iTunes Connect, whenever it was, yesterday afternoon,
0:23:52whatever day it was, I've lost track of all meaning of days,
0:23:56but whenever it was, they sent me an email saying,
0:23:58because you pulled your app,
0:23:59we are refunding all the customers.
0:24:02And it almost looked like a form email.
0:24:06You could tell that it was, you know,
0:24:07somebody filled in like three words in it.
0:24:10But they decided to do that, most likely because
0:24:14I was directing over 10,000 people to their refund form.
0:24:18(laughs)
0:24:19Like I was seeing over the last couple of days,
0:24:22there were, I think at my last count,
0:24:23it was something like 13 or 15,000 people
0:24:27who had been issued refunds
0:24:29the regular process. And what that process is involves doing some kind of live chat agent
0:24:36thing with somebody at iTunes. So this was a…
0:24:40Steve McLaughlin You cost Apple money too.
0:24:43John
0:24:59I messed up, simple as that.
0:25:01So I decided, given the situation I'm in,
0:25:03where I've already done that mistake,
0:25:05how do I resolve this mistake in the best way possible?
0:25:07And had I been given the option to issue everybody
0:25:10bulk refunds, I probably would have done it.
0:25:14I can't say definitely, yes I would have,
0:25:16because it was such a rush, I don't even know.
0:25:20I honestly don't know.
0:25:21But I had considered it, and I had asked some friends,
0:25:24I had asked some friends, is this possible
0:25:26to bulk cancel all these things and bulk refund them.
0:25:30And everyone I asked, I asked a handful of people
0:25:32and they all said, "I don't think that's possible."
0:25:34Because most of the time the way the iTunes store works
0:25:37is this total black box and it's all in Eddy Cue's team
0:25:42and Eddy Cue's team has enough to do.
0:25:44If there's one department within Apple
0:25:48that has way too much on their plate,
0:25:50it's Eddy Cue's department.
0:25:51And so I thought, especially in regards to the iTunes store,
0:25:55This is this old infrastructure that often does not work incredibly well with things
0:26:01like iTunes Connect errors and stuff like that.
0:26:03The idea of asking them to make an exception for you sounds so ridiculous to almost anybody
0:26:09who's involved in this because they know asking them to just make the basic functionality
0:26:14work every day is enough work for them.
0:26:16That's hard enough.
0:26:18Anyway, so I didn't, I was not given the option
0:26:22to bulk refund everybody, but I am kinda glad it happened
0:26:27because it resolved a lot of problems.
0:26:30Even though it was weird that they didn't ask first,
0:26:36but I'm not surprised, and it is kind of nice
0:26:40that I didn't have a choice in the matter,
0:26:42because then I didn't have to make that choice.
0:26:44- So related to that, and part of the reason
0:26:46why someone who purchased the application
0:26:48would be annoyed. I mean there's a lot of reasons. So if you purchase it, since Marco
0:26:53can't issue you a refund and since he had no way to do a bulk refund, what you were
0:26:57doing was directing people, please go request a refund. Because it's the only way you're
0:27:01going to get one. You have to ask Apple. And that process is annoying. And it's like, oh,
0:27:04you know, buying the app is easy. You just tap a button on your phone. Getting your refund
0:27:08seems like a hassle. I don't know how to do it. Now I got to like look on Apple's site.
0:27:11How do I do refunds? Marco will link you to the forum. Do I have to fill this out? Do
0:27:13I have to go to the chat thing? It's a hassle. So that's inconvenient. If you want your $3
0:27:18back thing to me, but why would you want your $3 back?
0:27:20Well, what people are basically doing is like,
0:27:21the app is pulled, obviously there'll be no further
0:27:23development of the app, but the question is,
0:27:25and a lot of people have this question,
0:27:27will the application continue to work?
0:27:30I bought it, I installed it, it's on my phone,
0:27:33Marco pulls it from the store,
0:27:34which means no new people can buy it.
0:27:35What does it mean about the copy of Peace
0:27:37that is on my phone right now?
0:27:39Will it continue to work?
0:27:40If I get a refund, will it continue to work,
0:27:42or will it be deleted from my phone?
0:27:44If I don't ask for a refund, how long will Peace work
0:27:46before it just breaks entirely?
0:27:48- Right, so the answer is, as far as I know,
0:27:53it doesn't affect the logical mark on your account
0:27:58that says you bought it.
0:27:59So you are still able to have it, run it,
0:28:03I think you're able to restore it.
0:28:05The way I deleted it was I didn't actually delete
0:28:09the entry out of iTunes Connect.
0:28:10I just set the availability date to be as far
0:28:12into the future as it would let me.
0:28:14I don't know the defined details of how that worked
0:28:16and so, I've had it works and so,
0:28:18I'm not gonna promise anything there,
0:28:19but I think it should allow restores and everything.
0:28:21Anyway, as for it functioning,
0:28:25once you have it installed,
0:28:27it will continue to function
0:28:29until something in iOS makes it stop working.
0:28:33It will though, stop getting updates from Ghostery
0:28:37sometime in the future.
0:28:38Right now, it is still able to get updates.
0:28:40These are gonna be somewhat costly for me to run
0:28:42if a lot of people keep the app installed,
0:28:44so I might stop that,
0:28:45I'm going to stop that eventually, because now that everybody has gotten a refund on
0:28:50it, that also makes it easier for me to say, "Well, you know what? In a few months, if
0:28:55I decide to shut down the updater and stop paying for all that bandwidth and hosting
0:28:59for that operation, then I feel okay doing that then." So I'm going to shut it down
0:29:05at some point, but I haven't yet. And when that happens, the app background updates to
0:29:09to get new definitions from my server.
0:29:12So eventually it'll become less effective over time
0:29:17as new ad servers and new trackers start existing
0:29:21on the web that it doesn't know about.
0:29:23So that's how it will eventually break.
0:29:25Or some iOS update comes out and says,
0:29:28"Well, now you have to be on our new 128-bit processor
0:29:32"by this date, and if you're not,
0:29:33"we're gonna cut you out of the store."
0:29:34As far as I know, I don't think they've done
0:29:36any permanent breaking changes that would, say,
0:29:39rule out an iOS 4 app from still running today.
0:29:42I don't think that's the case.
0:29:44All that is a very long way of saying,
0:29:47if you wanna keep Peace installed,
0:29:49and if, for whatever reason, Apple does not remove it
0:29:52off your phone, and it's any kind of botch-restore operation
0:29:55or weird thing like that, as far as I know,
0:29:57it should continue to work for a long time.
0:30:00- All right, let's, I think Jon and I both have
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0:31:51- John, any other questions immediately about peace?
0:31:54- Yeah, are we gonna get into the good stuff?
0:31:56We've just covered--
0:31:57Let me get into the why.
0:31:59I'll tell you the story of how this came to be.
0:32:02Is that good?
0:32:03- Well, can we just cover a couple of,
0:32:05something right off the bat.
0:32:07Can we just admit that it was just a complete glorified,
0:32:12well-executed money grab?
0:32:13That's absolutely what happened, right?
0:32:15- The most unsuccessful money grab in the history of play.
0:32:19- Yeah, I'm really bad at money grabs, apparently.
0:32:21(laughs)
0:32:23Yeah, so anyway.
0:32:26No, what actually happened was Apple paid me off.
0:32:28That was my best, the best theory I heard
0:32:31was that Apple paid me off to pull the app.
0:32:34Now, Apple, who made this content blocking API,
0:32:38who clearly wanted people to use it
0:32:40for ad and tracking blockers.
0:32:41- They just wanted you to block pictures of cats, Marco.
0:32:44- Who, I was also making them a lot of money.
0:32:47(laughing)
0:32:48'Cause they're 30%, 30%'s a lot, you know.
0:32:51So that I think by far was my favorite theory.
0:32:56That yeah, of course, yeah, Apple paid me off
0:32:58to take this down.
0:32:59For what exactly?
0:33:01To make them lose money and go against
0:33:02all their strategy goals?
0:33:03Yeah, that makes sense.
0:33:05No, I mean the fact is no one paid me anything.
0:33:06I'm now losing money on this because all the refunds
0:33:09got issued so I'm gonna lose a few thousand dollars on it
0:33:12but oh well, that's the risk I took.
0:33:13So what happened was over the summer,
0:33:19So we had the content blocker announcement at WBCC.
0:33:24And in fact, John and I are actually in the session video.
0:33:27There's one of the shots that pans over to the audience
0:33:31and there's a clip of me and John,
0:33:34I think we're clapping at one of the things
0:33:35that was said or whatever.
0:33:37- That's how I knew you were making a content blocker.
0:33:38It's like, "Margo's in this session.
0:33:40"He never gets the things that I go to.
0:33:42"He's making a content blocker."
0:33:43Didn't wanna say anything.
0:33:44- And I hadn't decided right then
0:33:46whether I was going to do it or not,
0:33:47but I knew right then it was going to be a big deal
0:33:50and a big market and I wanted to use one.
0:33:53And that is usually a pretty good recipe
0:33:55for me to want to make an app.
0:33:57And the reality is I also want to keep doing Overcast
0:34:02as my primary app.
0:34:05And so I wasn't going to tackle a new app
0:34:08that I thought was going to be a massive time sink.
0:34:11And so content blockers are so easy to make.
0:34:15I mean, really, the one I made that briefly did
0:34:20very, very well, and then the ones that are there now,
0:34:24this is probably the most money for the least effort
0:34:27that has ever been possible in the App Store.
0:34:29And it's, you know, soon enough,
0:34:31it'll be diluted by tons and tons.
0:34:33But I thought on day one, there would be way more
0:34:38in the market than there were.
0:34:39- Yeah, I couldn't make one.
0:34:40That's how easy it is to, because it's like one API
0:34:43that if you go to the session, you're like,
0:34:44this is how it works, and then it's just down to the data.
0:34:47Right, that's it.
0:34:48- And so the data is, yeah, the code part of it
0:34:52is ridiculous, people asking me to open source it,
0:34:55you don't understand how little code there is here.
0:34:56It is, it's incredible, especially because like,
0:34:59the extensions that I added, all they do
0:35:02is bring up Safari View Controller.
0:35:03It's like, I don't even write the mini browser.
0:35:05Like, there is so little code in the app.
0:35:08Anybody can make these, the only limitation
0:35:10is what the heck you use for the data,
0:35:13for the rules of what to block.
0:35:14That is the only hard part.
0:35:16And the fact is there's tons of publicly available lists
0:35:21and databases that you can use.
0:35:22- And you can even like, I'm assuming this is the case,
0:35:25and I expected to see more of these.
0:35:26I haven't really looked into content blockers that deeply,
0:35:29but couldn't you have it so that someone enters a URL
0:35:32from which to pull data in a format that you specify?
0:35:35Like it could be, like the app could come with no data
0:35:38and say, "Well, this is a content blocker,
0:35:41"and it works like this,
0:35:42and it expects its data to be in this format,
0:35:44so type a URL here of a file that I can pull
0:35:49that will be in that format and I will parse it
0:35:51and that will be your content blocker.
0:35:52And maybe you'd have like a default one
0:35:53that pulls like a content blocker
0:35:54that blocks like two big ad networks or something like that.
0:35:57Isn't that something you could do as well?
0:35:59- Yeah, I mean, the data you have to give them
0:36:02is just a list of rules expressed in JSON.
0:36:06And so you can get that JSON from anywhere.
0:36:08You can include it in the app,
0:36:10you can build it on demand.
0:36:11and the way I was doing it so you'd have dynamic rules.
0:36:14It doesn't matter, you can get it from anywhere,
0:36:15it doesn't matter.
0:36:16- And you can make up your own format
0:36:18that's just like type a bunch of host names
0:36:19if you wanted to make a super simple one.
0:36:21I'm actually surprised more people didn't do that
0:36:22because that is really the least amount of work you can do.
0:36:24You make a trivial application that uses one API
0:36:27and maybe even you go the extra mile
0:36:28like Marco didn't do the little extensions
0:36:30that bring up the Safari View Controller.
0:36:32- And I should just say right now,
0:36:34I said there's not a lot of code in here.
0:36:36A lot of people have said the right thing to do
0:36:39is for me to open source it.
0:36:40A, I disagree, I'm not obligated to open source it.
0:36:43B, my arrangement with Ghostery is that I'm just giving it
0:36:47to them and they can do whatever they want with it,
0:36:48so it's no longer mine and that's fine.
0:36:52The fact is if you want to reproduce this,
0:36:54it is not a lot of work to make another app like this.
0:36:58It really is very, very easy.
0:37:00The only hard part is the data and that is very hard.
0:37:04- And then you have to pay someone to make the icons
0:37:05or you could shamelessly copy Marco's icons.
0:37:07- No, I don't copy mine.
0:37:08No, go to Louis Mantia.
0:37:09I'm just saying like what the, what the, what the million ripoff applications, the same
0:37:14kind of applications that put like pictures of Mario into their games and stuff, like
0:37:18they'll just copy it exactly.
0:37:20Yeah, if you want to get icons made, go to Parakeet, it's great. I'll put the link in
0:37:24the show notes because they're awesome, they do great work. You can copy my design or don't
0:37:27copy my design. Anyway, so the thing is, all summer I was thinking, you know, I should
0:37:38really do this because I have like, A, it seems like there will be a market. Now again,
0:37:43I was assuming from the beginning that it would be a very crowded market right from
0:37:47day one and that somebody like Adblock Plus, like some well-known brand in ad blocking
0:37:54that had way more exposure and visibility and user base than I could ever muster, that
0:38:00they would be there on day one and would just own the whole market.
0:38:03And why do you think they don't?
0:38:04Are they just not paying attention to WWDC?
0:38:07Just not like, you know, because we all knew content blockers were going to be a big thing,
0:38:11but maybe that gets lost in the WWDC news?
0:38:14You would think, I don't know.
0:38:16I agree with you.
0:38:17I totally thought that on day one of the store there would be a million content blockers
0:38:22because they are so easy to make and there are so many places where you can get lists
0:38:26from and you can do the thing, like I said, and not even include lists.
0:38:29And when I found out you were making one, I'm like, well, that's pretty good because
0:38:34in the sort of, even if there are tons of them coming out because they're easy to make,
0:38:38how do you get yourself heard above the noise and people who are going to install iOS 9
0:38:43on day one, like, you know, and who are into, who know that there are content blockers and
0:38:48who are going to be looking for ones on day one, you have better access to them than a
0:38:52lot of other things.
0:38:53Maybe even better access to those people than a big company like the thing that makes Adblock
0:38:57Plus because you travel in Mac nerd circles and Mac nerds read your blog and listen to your podcast or whatever. So
0:39:03if your goal is to
0:39:05Try to sell a lot of content blockers being there on day one with the content blocker with a name that people recognize
0:39:11Was a good play and you know and it was it turns out
0:39:16That you know, there was a good play a lot of people bought it
0:39:19you ended up being number one paid app in the App Store and
0:39:22And there weren't a lot of other ones too, and I don't quite understand why either, other
0:39:26than maybe they were just, everyone else was asleep at the switch.
0:39:28- Yeah, I mean like, at the Loop, they tried to, they were publishing this list that was
0:39:32being updated, and even at, like on launch, there were only something like six entries
0:39:38on it, and only like two or three of them were really getting any traction on the charts.
0:39:42I mean, I was really surprised by how few there were.
0:39:45Anyway, and by the way, going back, I think one of the reasons why the big companies like
0:39:49like Adblock Plus didn't go there,
0:39:51or haven't gone there yet,
0:39:52is because iOS content blockers are very, very limited.
0:39:55They don't have access to what's being browsed.
0:39:58All you do is you provide a list of rules
0:40:01and regular expressions to say block things that match this.
0:40:04But you are not being,
0:40:06your code is not being called on every page load,
0:40:10or it's not being notified on what's being loaded.
0:40:12And you can't do things like inject your own scripts,
0:40:15do your own tracking from your site.
0:40:16Like, you have no access to the way things are.
0:40:20And these big companies, like Adlog Plus, like Ghostery,
0:40:24they have, you know, the business arm of those companies
0:40:27usually needs some kind of access or analytics
0:40:30or tracking, humorously, of what you are,
0:40:35what you're browsing and what things are being included
0:40:37on this page, what ads are being shown,
0:40:39what trackers are being loaded.
0:40:41Almost all these big companies have arrangements like that
0:40:43in some way, shape, or form.
0:40:45Some of them are kind of questionable.
0:40:47I think Ghosteries is pretty safe.
0:40:49The way it works, I explain that in the post,
0:40:51their business model I don't think
0:40:52is something to be concerned about.
0:40:54The whole acceptable ads thing on AppBlocks Plus
0:40:56is I think more, a little squishier.
0:40:59It doesn't matter.
0:41:01Fact is, that I think is why these big companies
0:41:04weren't there on day one.
0:41:06- Actually, now that I think about it,
0:41:07that actually kind of makes sense because,
0:41:10I understand that their business model doesn't work on it,
0:41:11but you're like, oh, well, why wouldn't they just
0:41:13do exactly what you did and sell an app for $3 and make a whole bunch of money.
0:41:17And I think the answer is probably that even though it's a lot of money for a one-person
0:41:21developer for a big company, they're like, "Well, paid apps, they can make a little money
0:41:28in a burst and then that's it.
0:41:29There's no recurring revenue and we can't support our main business model."
0:41:33So basically they're passing up what they consider to be chump change.
0:41:37What is significant to one person, I don't know how many people work for these bigger
0:41:39companies but presumably a lot more than one person, like that it just didn't seem worth
0:41:44it to them.
0:41:45So that might explain why the really big companies didn't do it.
0:41:48They want, you know, they want huge numbers, they don't want like something that would
0:41:52be significant to an individual, and especially if it's not recurring.
0:41:57But then it's like why didn't someone else, another single person developer, just give
0:42:04it a shot?
0:42:05Like there were so few of them that when people were making lists on iOS 9 launch day, like
0:42:09here are all the iOS 9 content blockers.
0:42:11There was two things on the list
0:42:12and yours wasn't even included
0:42:13because of the five hour delay getting it on the store.
0:42:15It was like Crystal, Purity.
0:42:17- Purify. - Purify.
0:42:19- Yeah, one blocker, blocker with an R.
0:42:22- Yeah, they started trickling in,
0:42:23but to be able to have them in a list
0:42:25that fits on a single screen,
0:42:27man, not a lot of people made content blockers.
0:42:29- Right, so that was surprise number one
0:42:31was that there were so few.
0:42:33Surprise number two was that mine topped the chart,
0:42:37at least the paid chart.
0:42:38Crystal was free on day one and got,
0:42:40I think the guy said it was like 100,000 installations
0:42:42and then he made it paid on day two.
0:42:45And I think now it's number one,
0:42:46but anyway, doesn't matter.
0:42:48And you're right, I mean, the kind of money
0:42:50that was coming in, it's great for an individual.
0:42:53If you have a big staff, it's questionable,
0:42:56if it's worth going against your business interests.
0:43:00- And then you'd have to support that.
0:43:01Say you're a big, well-known company,
0:43:03it's like, oh, I make my little burst of money from it
0:43:05and maybe a little bit trickles in from it,
0:43:06but it's not significant to my bottom line.
0:43:08And then I have to continue to pay some contractor
0:43:11to make sure the app continues to work
0:43:12and make sure whatever server is serving the data file
0:43:15that gets updated, it just might seem like a hassle
0:43:17to the big companies.
0:43:18- Exactly, so anyway, going through the summer,
0:43:21as I'm thinking about building this,
0:43:22and I really didn't spend a lot of time on it.
0:43:25Most of the summer was spent thinking about how to do it.
0:43:28And I formed the idea of the structure of the app,
0:43:32these extensions it would have,
0:43:33how that would work and everything, and that'd be great.
0:43:35I wasn't really writing a lot of code until kind of the middle of the summer when I started
0:43:39playing with the various block lists that exist out there and various hosts files. I
0:43:45started emailing the people who maintained them, asking if I could license them for use
0:43:48in a paid app because most of them are for non-commercial use only, so you have to get
0:43:53a separate license. So I started that kind of negotiation and discussions. But the original
0:43:58version of it that I made that I was running for at least a few weeks over the summer on
0:44:04on my own phone, it was much simpler.
0:44:07All it did was block all third-party JavaScript.
0:44:12That actually works surprisingly well.
0:44:15Like, one rule, just block all third-party JavaScript.
0:44:19I'm not entirely sure I would recommend that people do this,
0:44:22but if your main goal, if you're willing to tolerate
0:44:25a lot of things being broken, and you're willing to go
0:44:29through the process of making the exception,
0:44:30or whitelisting, or opening up without content blockers,
0:44:33If you're going to go through that process a lot,
0:44:36that gets you most of the way there.
0:44:38I would say just blocking all third-party JavaScript
0:44:42gets you 80% of the way there.
0:44:44(laughing)
0:44:45That's really, it's kind of sad how much that gets you there.
0:44:48And all these big databases and everything,
0:44:52their strengths are mainly in getting it more to the point
0:44:56where it blocks the ads without making anything break
0:44:58or with making very few things break.
0:45:01But if you just wanna block all the ads
0:45:02and occasionally have to open something up
0:45:05in the unresearched view, just block all JavaScript,
0:45:08that works fine.
0:45:08And so, all summer I was doing that,
0:45:10and towards the reason this problem attracted me
0:45:13in the first place, again, was because I knew
0:45:16there was gonna be a market for it, I wanted to use it,
0:45:19and I had the idea of how to do it my way.
0:45:21I thought, I did think at the time,
0:45:25you know, I wonder if I'm gonna get in trouble
0:45:28for making an ad blocker, like I wonder if people
0:45:30are gonna get mad at me if I make an ad blocker.
0:45:32I did think about that, but in the excitement
0:45:35of solving this problem in a way that I thought
0:45:37was very good, like I was very proud of this work.
0:45:41And so in the process of like kinda ramping up
0:45:43and seeing how it turned out, seeing how good it was
0:45:46on my phone, even with just that JavaScript rule,
0:45:48I kinda got lost.
0:45:51The idea of I wonder what people are going to think
0:45:55and if anybody's gonna be mad about this,
0:45:57that got pushed to the back of my head
0:45:59because I was so driven by and happy
0:46:02about how nicely the app was turning out.
0:46:05And so I was focused on totally the wrong things.
0:46:08I was focused on, I'm very proud of this nice app I made
0:46:13that is making me very happy on my phone,
0:46:16and I sent it to some friends later on,
0:46:18and they, it was making them very happy,
0:46:20so it's like, I was so caught up in that,
0:46:23that I didn't go back and rethink,
0:46:26like, you know, maybe I should do this.
0:46:27And then what happened was,
0:46:29in an effort to try to make it better,
0:46:32'cause at first, again, I said,
0:46:34running it for me with just the no third-party
0:46:36JavaScript rule, that worked okay,
0:46:38but I wasn't necessarily sure that that was gonna be
0:46:41a good enough product to attach my name to,
0:46:44because it's like, this is really great if you're a nerd
0:46:46and you don't care about reloading a lot of things
0:46:49a couple times to make them work properly.
0:46:51So that's when I started looking at licensing
0:46:55one of these other databases, and I couldn't find a good one
0:46:59until I tried Ghosteries, and then I tried that,
0:47:02it was amazing, so I contacted them,
0:47:04I didn't think they would even say yes,
0:47:06and then they did say yes, and it turns out
0:47:07they're actually really nice and easy to work with,
0:47:09and really fast to get things together,
0:47:10which I was not expecting any of these things
0:47:12from a company as big as them,
0:47:14but they were really, really easy and nice to work with.
0:47:18So I worked with them, and we met,
0:47:21their office is right here in New York,
0:47:22So we met in person, we arranged and we did the whole database, the contract, everything
0:47:27else.
0:47:28So then my mind, for those last few weeks before the launch, as this was all getting
0:47:33in place, my mind was all about that.
0:47:36And about like, "Okay, now we're on this train, this has inertia, we're going, this
0:47:40is going to happen."
0:47:41Once I signed that contract, I'm like, "This is going to happen."
0:47:43And I never went back to re-evaluate, "Should I do this?
0:47:47Do I want to be the person who owns the ad blocker?
0:47:52Do I want to be in charge of an ad blocker?
0:47:55I stopped evaluating that.
0:47:57Once I got on this train of like,
0:48:01this app is really good and now I have someone else's data
0:48:03in it and I deal with them to keep going with it
0:48:05and it's even better with their data.
0:48:07I was so excited about how good the app was,
0:48:09I never went back and rethought that initial decision
0:48:12to even make it in the first place.
0:48:13Also, honestly, I made the same mistakes with the magazine.
0:48:18Which, that was a much less interesting story.
0:48:20But when I made the magazine, I was so tied up
0:48:23with the idea of making this cool magazine app
0:48:26that looked really nice and worked well
0:48:27and was way better than all the other newsstand apps
0:48:29that I forgot to really truly evaluate
0:48:33what it would be like to have to publish an issue
0:48:35of a magazine every two weeks indefinitely.
0:48:38And that's a lot of work.
0:48:40And it's really hard to make the economics work.
0:48:43And I kind of brushed those aside
0:48:44'cause I wanted to make this cool app.
0:48:46And so I made the same mistake here,
0:48:47with different consequences, different downsides,
0:48:51where I was so enthralled with the app,
0:48:54with the technical side of it,
0:48:56that I didn't adequately think about, you know,
0:49:00so I didn't think ahead to be like,
0:49:02all right, in six months, do I want to be spending
0:49:05half or more of my time being the guy
0:49:08who runs this big ad blocker?
0:49:09- Casey, this is where you jump in
0:49:11with the Jurassic Park quote
0:49:12that you have off the top of your head.
0:49:15- I do?
0:49:16- Marko, do you have it?
0:49:17- No.
0:49:18- The chat room will have it in about seven seconds.
0:49:20Continue.
0:49:21- That he spared no expense?
0:49:23- No.
0:49:24That's good though, great movie.
0:49:25- All right, well, sorry.
0:49:27I've got nothing.
0:49:28- Chat room's got it.
0:49:29- Mark was so preoccupied about whether or not
0:49:31he could make an app,
0:49:32they didn't stop to think whether he should.
0:49:34- Right, exactly.
0:49:35Or rather, I stopped really early on to think
0:49:37and then I was like, well, let me try it.
0:49:39- So when you thought about it before you got into
0:49:41like the whole, I'm making deals with Ghostery,
0:49:44I'm happy with the app,
0:49:45whatever, but when you thought about it before that,
0:49:46Before all of that, you said,
0:49:48"I'm gonna make a content blocker."
0:49:49What did you, what was your thinking like?
0:49:52'Cause you gave yourself the green light.
0:49:54You thought about it very early on
0:49:57before you decided you were gonna do this,
0:49:58and you said, "You know what I am gonna do?"
0:49:59Was it based mostly on the fact that you wanted to run one?
0:50:04This is before anyone had run one.
0:50:05You hadn't made one, they didn't exist,
0:50:07but you're like, "I want to run one."
0:50:08Is that why you're making, you know?
0:50:11Like, take us back to that thinking
0:50:12before you got caught up in sort of
0:50:14the momentum of making the app.
0:50:16- Right, I mean, I absolutely want to run one.
0:50:18As soon as I had the very early prototype
0:50:20of the app on my phone with the just
0:50:22no third party JavaScript rule,
0:50:24as soon as I had that on my phone
0:50:25and saw the massive difference it made in browsing speed,
0:50:29and also, I really do object to tons
0:50:32of web advertising and tracking.
0:50:34I think what the web publishing world has done,
0:50:38and I blame the publishers.
0:50:40A lot of people, you know,
0:50:41I don't wanna get too far into this,
0:50:42'cause if you wanna hear more about the, you know,
0:50:45why this debate is so complicated.
0:50:46This week's episode of Back to Work
0:50:48is really good on that topic.
0:50:49Merlin and Dan talked at length about this whole thing
0:50:52and covered a lot of angles.
0:50:53'Cause it really is a very complex problem.
0:50:56It is not a simple yes/no kind of thing.
0:50:59They covered a lot of it.
0:51:00But just briefly, I do wanna make clear,
0:51:04I'm gonna still use an ad blocker.
0:51:06And I'm still going to advocate that people block things
0:51:10that they don't think are acceptable.
0:51:12What changed in my mind and what really started bothering me
0:51:16is that I don't want to be the person in charge
0:51:20of making this decision for everybody.
0:51:23I don't wanna be the enabler necessarily.
0:51:25I don't wanna be the arbiter of what is good
0:51:27and what is bad 'cause the problem is,
0:51:29you say block, first of all,
0:51:32I wanna clear up right up front the idea of,
0:51:36well, I just wanna block tracking but not ads.
0:51:40that's BS because ads are tracking.
0:51:43Like you can't, while there are very, very few ads,
0:51:48like The Deck recently published their new privacy policy
0:51:51where they explicitly say,
0:51:53"We will not do any tracking from The Deck.
0:51:55"We're disturbing these static images," or whatever.
0:51:57But that is really,
0:51:58there are almost no advertising networks
0:52:01that will claim that, that will guarantee that,
0:52:03and that actually do that.
0:52:05So the fact is, if you are saying,
0:52:08I want to block tracking but not ads.
0:52:10That is not really an enforceable thing.
0:52:14In order to block almost any tracking,
0:52:17you have to block almost all ads.
0:52:19That's simple, it's simple as that.
0:52:21You have to block ads to block tracking.
0:52:24Furthermore, if you really want to block more tracking,
0:52:28you also have to block things like social embeds
0:52:30because Facebook and Twitter and Google+,
0:52:32all these things, Amazon, all these links,
0:52:34these things that are embedded in people's sites,
0:52:36plus one this on Facebook,
0:52:38thumbs up this on Twitter, whatever.
0:52:39I know those are backwards, I don't care.
0:52:41All those things are also tracking
0:52:42because the social companies are some of the biggest
0:52:45tracking companies in the world.
0:52:47So you also have to block social embeds.
0:52:50And what about embedded YouTube videos?
0:52:52Google's tracking those.
0:52:54Like, there's a lot, if you really wanna block tracking,
0:52:57there's a lot you have to block.
0:52:59So the fact is, this is very, very complicated.
0:53:01It's a very much a gray area,
0:53:03but you can't have it both ways.
0:53:06If you say you object to being tracked
0:53:10or you say you object to bad ads
0:53:12or you try to whittle it down and say,
0:53:15well, I wanna block ads but not yours, yours are good.
0:53:19It becomes very, very hard to actually do that,
0:53:22to actually manage that because it's usually,
0:53:24usually you're asking for something that isn't possible
0:53:27or you're asking for a distinction
0:53:28that doesn't really exist.
0:53:29- Had you thought about this angle at all
0:53:32before embarking on creating the application, as in when I make this application, when I
0:53:40use it, I'll set it up so I like how it works, but then I will sort of de facto be, even
0:53:46if it's just by the defaults that I include in the application, be deciding what everyone
0:53:51who uses my application sees on the web, and therefore I am sort of like the linchpin of
0:53:57of some subset of the number of iOS users,
0:53:59like Marco controls whether this group of users
0:54:03sees this kind of ad on this site,
0:54:05because he sets the default for his application
0:54:07that happens to be populated.
0:54:08Had you thought about that at all,
0:54:09or had it not measured your mind?
0:54:11Or if you did think about it,
0:54:11how did you think that was gonna shake out?
0:54:13- I really didn't think that much about these distinctions.
0:54:19The only thing I thought of when I was making the app was,
0:54:22Ghostery's data is tagged with,
0:54:26This is one of the reasons why
0:54:27GhostReach database is so good.
0:54:28You can see this when you use the desktop plugin.
0:54:30Each of the entries is tagged, so it'll say
0:54:32like what it blocks on this page, and you can see,
0:54:34oh, it blocked, you know, Google page sense or whatever,
0:54:37ads, comma, ads, comma, tracker.
0:54:40It blocked the deck, ads.
0:54:41It blocked Adobe Omniture, tracker.
0:54:43And it tags each entry with whether it's an ad,
0:54:46a tracker, a social widget, font, comment,
0:54:48you know, whatever the categories it has.
0:54:51So I could have very easily made an option
0:54:53right in the app that said, you know,
0:54:56check mark, block ads, check mark, block trackers,
0:54:59and have you toggle those separately from each other.
0:55:01But again, I think that's a false distinction
0:55:03because the fact is, if you say you don't wanna be tracked,
0:55:06you have to block ads, simple as that.
0:55:09So anyway, so I really hadn't thought
0:55:13about the reality of me being the center.
0:55:14I thought, you know, up until a few weeks
0:55:17before the thing launched, I was just doing
0:55:19my JavaScript thing and didn't have
0:55:21any distinction whatsoever.
0:55:22And that's, I think, almost more defensible.
0:55:26If you say third-party JavaScript is a problem,
0:55:29because the reality is, most of the problems
0:55:33with web tracking and creepiness and bad ads,
0:55:37if you just block third-party JavaScript,
0:55:40that is a very defensible, practical thing
0:55:43that you should consider doing,
0:55:45because that is kind of why these trackers
0:55:48on the web can be so powerful,
0:55:49because you can embed a script tag on millions of different publisher sites and your server
0:55:56is called from the user's browser and you're able to run code, arbitrary code, on the user's
0:56:02browser and have access to the DOM, the browser, the hardware access that's now being exposed
0:56:06through all the web APIs. All this crazy stuff you have access to through these third party
0:56:11embeds, you as the creepy ad company or whatever, and you can track everything. And the fact
0:56:15is if people saw what is possible, like if you're on the fence about whether you want
0:56:21to block tracking, if you see like the kind of, it is so creepy what publishers are able
0:56:30to see. They're basically watching, they can watch an individual's every move. They
0:56:34can see when you scroll, they can see where your mouse cursor is, they can see what you
0:56:37hover over and how long you hover over it and how long you look at something. They can
0:56:40see everything. If you block cookies or if you block third party, you know, third party
0:56:45from other sites or whatever,
0:56:46there's almost nothing you can do,
0:56:47including setting the do not track header,
0:56:50there's almost nothing you can do to prevent them
0:56:52from identifying you uniquely.
0:56:55Because even if you disable cookies and everything else,
0:56:58they can identify what your phone's battery capacity is
0:57:01through the new battery level APIs.
0:57:03They can set different kinds of cookies through Flash
0:57:06or through databases, WebDB kind of stuff.
0:57:09There's so many, they can just analyze
0:57:12your browser's request headers
0:57:14And just combining that with your IP address,
0:57:18and they can generally get pretty unique with that.
0:57:20I mean, it is so easy to track you
0:57:24and to uniquely identify you between multiple sites.
0:57:29The only thing you can really do
0:57:31is block third-party embeds.
0:57:33Now, and so let me get to what Gerb just said in the chat.
0:57:37So what if publishers then just proxy the JavaScript
0:57:40through their servers?
0:57:42Good question.
0:57:44So first of all, and this is a whole topic
0:57:46that we can get to of like, you know,
0:57:48what happens if all this ad blocking does become so big
0:57:51that publishers have to change where they do things
0:57:53and, you know, the things they change to might be worse.
0:57:56And in some ways they will be.
0:57:57But the major thing holding this back right now
0:58:00is ease and trust.
0:58:04Publishers usually don't have big tech teams
0:58:07and whatever tech teams they're doing are busy.
0:58:10They're busy doing the crazy CMS stuff,
0:58:13trying to accommodate some crazy stuff
0:58:15the sales people sold on Advertiser
0:58:16for like a one-off kind of thing.
0:58:18That's what the tech teams are busy doing at big publishers
0:58:21and they're usually not very big teams.
0:58:22So to have those tech teams do any custom work
0:58:26that involves running more things through their software
0:58:29and through their servers and through their domain names,
0:58:32that's unlikely to happen in a lot of publishers.
0:58:35Secondly, the issue of trust.
0:58:38And the fact is the advertisers and the publishers
0:58:42and the visitors, we all hate each other.
0:58:44(laughing)
0:58:46The advertisers don't like the publishers either,
0:58:48because publishers try to rip them off.
0:58:50And so, the advertisers don't usually trust the publishers
0:58:54to say how many people viewed something.
0:58:57If you proxied everything through the publisher's server,
0:59:00then the advertiser, or the advertising network,
0:59:03has no way to verify that those were real hits
0:59:05that came from real unique people.
0:59:07The publisher could fake that data back to the advertiser,
0:59:10and enough people would that you might get,
0:59:13you might get like the big sites could agree to do that,
0:59:16like New York Times could do that,
0:59:18but you wouldn't see something like Google AdSense
0:59:20where like this common thing that's on tons of sites,
0:59:22you wouldn't see something like that
0:59:23going to that kind of model because it just,
0:59:25it couldn't be trustworthy back to the advertiser.
0:59:26So that's not gonna happen.
0:59:28Anyway, going back before I get too far
0:59:31into the post-release thing, so I released this thing,
0:59:34not thinking it would be a problem,
0:59:38And then as the success rolled in and as I started,
0:59:42as I hit number one, and as money started rolling in,
0:59:46big money started rolling in,
0:59:48I started getting a lot of attention
0:59:51that I really was not prepared to get.
0:59:53And I didn't want to be the face of this war.
0:59:57You know, I felt, and I used a war metaphor
1:00:00in my polling post, and I do wanna recognize
1:00:03that I'm using these metaphors extremely lightly,
1:00:05because this is all very much first world problems,
1:00:08and this is nothing like what real war is.
1:00:11So I really want to use these metaphors extremely loosely
1:00:14and with that giant disclaimer ahead of it.
1:00:16But I almost felt like I was an arms dealer.
1:00:19You know, like there's this war going on
1:00:22and these two sides really don't like each other
1:00:24and are trying to do whatever they can to disagree
1:00:27and a lot of casualties happening
1:00:29and I was the arms dealer that was enabling that.
1:00:32And yeah, if I pull my app, somebody else will step in.
1:00:36They already did.
1:00:37somebody else can step in and can become the arms dealer.
1:00:39So it's gonna happen anyway, let them be the arms dealer.
1:00:43I didn't want to do that,
1:00:44I didn't want to be in that position.
1:00:45And I just, I didn't expect the scale of it.
1:00:50I didn't adequately question how I would feel about it,
1:00:54you know, late enough in the process.
1:00:56I was so taken by how great the app turned out
1:00:59and how great the Go through Data Ace was working
1:01:02that I didn't put enough thought into
1:01:04do I really want to be doing this.
1:01:06And then all the requests started rolling in of,
1:01:08well, you know, this is really terrible for everybody,
1:01:11but if you just make these changes,
1:01:13and everybody had different changes,
1:01:14and they were all very complex.
1:01:16And I started, it was going to be that
1:01:19Peace was going to,
1:01:20it was going to have to replace Overcast completely.
1:01:24It was, I was no longer going to be a podcast app maker.
1:01:27I would have had to be a full-time ad-blocking app maker,
1:01:32dealing with the full-time realities
1:01:34of being in that position, of being that arms dealer,
1:01:38being that arbiter of what is acceptable and what's not.
1:01:41And the fact is, I don't know anything
1:01:44about that business at all.
1:01:47I've only even used an ad blocker
1:01:49for like three or four months.
1:01:50I've barely even used them for that long.
1:01:53I was totally unprepared to be in this role.
1:01:57And once I was faced with the reality
1:01:59of what this role is like, I realized,
1:02:02oh, I really don't like this.
1:02:03this is really uncomfortable.
1:02:05I was having trouble sleeping for those,
1:02:07I mean it was only a few nights before I pulled it,
1:02:11but I was having trouble sleeping,
1:02:12I was really kind of upset all day, all night.
1:02:15I mean it was, I really did not know what to do.
1:02:18I just realized that I had gotten in way too deep.
1:02:22I was way in over my head.
1:02:24I had not thought it through enough,
1:02:26and I had found myself in a very powerful position
1:02:32that I really didn't want that power,
1:02:36in an industry that I really didn't want to be in,
1:02:39being the face of a war
1:02:42that I really did not want to be the face of.
1:02:45That's what happened.
1:02:46- So, just to ask the question that a lot of people
1:02:49have asked on Twitter and in the chat room,
1:02:51even though I know what the answer is,
1:02:53was the fact that peace blocked ads on Marco.org
1:02:57a factor in any of your decisions?
1:02:59- No, I don't make that much money from those ads.
1:03:01It's fine.
1:03:02No, not at all.
1:03:03And it does block at them, right?
1:03:04Oh yeah.
1:03:05You run peace on Marco.org, your website, it blocks the ads on it.
1:03:08And you know that, and it did not affect any of your decisions.
1:03:11I thought it would be a massive dick move if I didn't.
1:03:13Right.
1:03:14I mean, that's maybe because if you know, like, all the different things that you do,
1:03:20you make overcasts, you've got the podcast, you've got a website, and they all kind of
1:03:24contribute to the stuff that you do.
1:03:26But it has seemed to me in recent years that your website, although it used to be much
1:03:31more important, is now less important.
1:03:34So maybe people who only know your sort of public face from – I mean didn't you stop
1:03:38selling sponsorships for the website recently?
1:03:41Like a year ago or more.
1:03:43It was a while ago.
1:03:44Anyway, yeah.
1:03:45I think people have the wrong impression and think of you – think of like Marco.org as
1:03:50the same thing as like DerekFireball.net as in like Marco.org is the main thing and then
1:03:54and you do these podcasts on the side
1:03:55and you make software on the side or whatever.
1:03:57But at various times,
1:03:58the balance between the things you do has changed.
1:04:00But anyway.
1:04:01- I barely even write on my side anymore.
1:04:03- Tell me about it.
1:04:04- Yeah.
1:04:05Yeah, you, you're even worse than me.
1:04:07- I'm winning.
1:04:08- You are.
1:04:09- I'm winning.
1:04:09- No, but I mean, yeah, the fact is,
1:04:11if the deck canceled my membership over this,
1:04:16that wouldn't have,
1:04:17threatening to do that wouldn't have been enough,
1:04:18which they didn't,
1:04:19but threatening to do that would not have been enough
1:04:22for me to make this decision.
1:04:23I made this decision with almost no input.
1:04:25I asked almost nobody.
1:04:27I did actually run it, a lot of the theories are
1:04:29that John Gruber somehow sat on me to force me to do this.
1:04:32The only person who knew before I pulled the app
1:04:36that I was going to pull the app,
1:04:37besides Ghostery and my wife,
1:04:39the only other person that I told was John Gruber.
1:04:42And because he's a smart guy.
1:04:45And so I ran up by him as kind of a sanity check.
1:04:49Like, am I totally insane here?
1:04:51And I didn't want to ask a lot of people,
1:04:54but I did ask him, 'cause he has a lot of thoughts
1:04:56on this issue, and he said that I should keep it up.
1:05:01He told me to leave it, like he said, don't do it.
1:05:05He said, wait, you're being rash, think this through,
1:05:08you probably don't want to do this.
1:05:10So the theory that he somehow got to me,
1:05:13I don't know, like a horse head on the bed,
1:05:15(laughs)
1:05:16the theory that he got to me is completely wrong.
1:05:18The fact is, I made the decision before talking to him about it.
1:05:22I ran it by him.
1:05:23He told me, "Don't do it," and then I did it anyway.
1:05:27So that's what happened.
1:05:30And you know, once, and Ghostery was great.
1:05:31I mean, I thought that was going to be a problem going to them and being like, "Hey, never
1:05:35mind."
1:05:36You know, right after all this.
1:05:38But they made their own post.
1:05:39I don't want to speak for them, but we were all on the same page.
1:05:41It was fine.
1:05:42And they were, again, so incredibly easy to work with.
1:05:46Like, "Yeah, okay."
1:05:48It was so easy.
1:05:49That's what happened before and during.
1:05:53And so I don't know how much I wanna talk about
1:05:57what I think about ads today.
1:05:59I mean, I already ranted about how ads and trackers
1:06:01are the same thing, 'cause they are.
1:06:02I will say that I think the biggest problem
1:06:06that web publishing faces is that the things they're doing,
1:06:11hmm, how do I say this nicely?
1:06:14I would say journalists are kind of like,
1:06:17I've had this problem with academics as well,
1:06:20and probably because I was a terrible student
1:06:22and had generally terrible experiences
1:06:24with schooling growing up,
1:06:26but academia puts itself in a really pious position,
1:06:31and some of that is deserved, but a lot of it isn't.
1:06:35In a lot of ways, they're just people
1:06:37with the same flaws as everyone else.
1:06:39The role they serve is in some part special and necessary
1:06:42and in some part just a business.
1:06:44And so journalism, I think you can say
1:06:47all the same things about.
1:06:49It is, it does serve a critical role in society, sometimes.
1:06:54Most of the journalism taking place today
1:06:57is not providing value really,
1:06:59or not providing enough value.
1:07:01It's really a hard business,
1:07:04because if you're in the business,
1:07:05like I thought it was kind of ironic,
1:07:09forgive me if I'm misusing that word, the ironic police,
1:07:12but it was kind of ironic that my post
1:07:17in which I said that I was pulling the app,
1:07:21somebody screenshotted on Techmeme that it was,
1:07:24there were like a hundred other posts from news sites
1:07:29that were basically just rewrites of it,
1:07:31just valueless, bad rewrites of it.
1:07:34That didn't even get the right point out of it, of course.
1:07:38My experience with journalists personally
1:07:40has been mostly mediocre to negative.
1:07:43I have said many times in the past
1:07:45that talking to journalists is like talking to the police.
1:07:48Ideally don't.
1:07:49They have different goals than you
1:07:52and they have lots of incentives
1:07:54that might be misaligned from your incentives
1:07:56and that you, in my experience,
1:07:58I've been very frequently misrepresented
1:08:01and I've had my quotes very frequently used
1:08:03out of context and against me
1:08:04or as weapons to fight a cause that I wasn't representing.
1:08:08So I've had a lot of mediocre experiences
1:08:11or negative experiences with journalists
1:08:13because there's this attitude in the business
1:08:16that they are untouchable,
1:08:19that they must be automatically supported by society
1:08:24somehow that what they're doing has infinite value.
1:08:26And the fact is then, I write this post
1:08:28and I see the hundred useless rewrites
1:08:31that most sites published about.
1:08:33I mean, some sites had original content
1:08:35that was interesting and interesting perspectives.
1:08:37Most didn't.
1:08:39There's a massive oversupply of journalism,
1:08:43of publishing on the web.
1:08:45Ad blockers have existed for a long time.
1:08:48People have been blocking ads for a long time.
1:08:50Ad rates have been going down for a long time,
1:08:54especially display ads on websites.
1:08:56Design decisions have been being made by data
1:09:00for a long time.
1:09:01There's this infectious culture of data people
1:09:04that drives me nuts.
1:09:05The analytics and data,
1:09:07That, all those things are euphemisms for tracking.
1:09:11And so this culture drives major decisions at publishers,
1:09:15including what analytics they're going to have
1:09:17on their site, what trackers they're going to embed,
1:09:19how they're going to track you,
1:09:20what they're going to track,
1:09:21who they're going to sell your data to.
1:09:23This culture of we're gonna track everything, that's okay,
1:09:27we're gonna make all of our design decisions
1:09:29based on data and A/B testing and everything,
1:09:32that has infected the industry so, so badly.
1:09:35And by the way, all this applies to apps as well,
1:09:38but what apps can do is different,
1:09:39and then we'll get to that possibly some other time.
1:09:41The combination of the data people
1:09:44plus publishing just being so hyper-competitive,
1:09:49so over-supplied, and ad rates being so bad
1:09:53leads to an environment where publishers are just desperate
1:09:58because, as I said, the economics are hard.
1:10:00They're really hard.
1:10:02If you have a staff of more than zero,
1:10:06if you're just yourself working,
1:10:08a lot of people can make money themselves enough to survive.
1:10:12But once you start supporting a staff,
1:10:14like if you're big enough to have an HR department,
1:10:17I think that's a good barrier.
1:10:19If you're so big like that
1:10:20and you're trying to make it in publishing,
1:10:21it's really hard to do.
1:10:24This environment, this atmosphere of difficult economics,
1:10:27decreasing ad rates, it's creating this environment
1:10:30where bad behavior, like embedding tons of trackers
1:10:33and doing creepy things to your data,
1:10:35is only going to increase.
1:10:37It is prevalent now, it's only going to increase,
1:10:40and the fact that, or the idea that journalism
1:10:44needs to be supported by society no matter what,
1:10:47despite all of this garbage,
1:10:49I don't think is a valid argument,
1:10:50and I think that there's really fault on both sides here.
1:10:54The attitude from publishers seems to be
1:10:56that they are helpless in this fight,
1:10:57that, well, it's not our problem,
1:10:59it's what the advertisers do and we have to use them,
1:11:02then that's your problem, you know?
1:11:04Then that's your fault, you are choosing to do this,
1:11:07you are selling me to them.
1:11:09So this is a hard problem.
1:11:13It is not going to be solved anytime soon.
1:11:16It's as much ad blockers fault as the decline
1:11:20of the music sales were Napster's fault.
1:11:23That's a contributing factor,
1:11:25but it's not really the root problem.
1:11:28And I think any discussion of ad blockers
1:11:32that comes over the next months and years
1:11:34as the economics of the surrounding world
1:11:36continue to crumble,
1:11:39a lot of it's gonna be blamed on ad blockers,
1:11:40but the reality is it's much more complicated than that.
1:11:43And I really think journalists and publishing companies
1:11:46are looking at it completely the wrong way.
1:11:48They're looking at it really in a way
1:11:49that buries their heads in the sand.
1:11:51They're saying, "Well, it's your fault.
1:11:52"You're blocking our ads," whatever.
1:11:54The real problem is them.
1:11:55The real problem is that they are adding things to their sites and tracking things and shoving
1:12:01in ads and arbitrary code. They are allowing themselves and advertisers to do really creepy
1:12:07things in the name of money and data. That's problem number one. Problem number two is
1:12:13that many of them are doing work that they assume has value, that might have less value
1:12:20they think. Like taking my blog post and rewriting it for your audience, how much value does
1:12:27that have really? Like are you adding much there? Should people be paying you for that?
1:12:32I don't know. I think they're in trouble. I think they're really looking at it the
1:12:37wrong way. And I don't want to seem like too anti-publisher here because there's
1:12:41a lot of them that are really good. But there's also a lot of them that are going to be having
1:12:45a really hard next few years, and I think they're gonna
1:12:49blame ad blockers, but the reality is this was happening
1:12:54with or without ad blockers.
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1:15:53- What did you learn from all this, from the peace thing?
1:15:55And I mean this not to beat you up,
1:15:57but clearly this did not go the way you thought
1:16:00it was going to go, and clearly--
1:16:02- It was a disaster.
1:16:03- Right, and I think what a lot of people lost sight over
1:16:07you pulled "Peace" was that that—it was going to be a long-term fix, but it was a
1:16:16short-term, increased disaster. Like, you were not making things easier on yourself,
1:16:23at least for the first few days, by pulling "Peace." And I'm curious, you know, what
1:16:29did you learn from this experience, and maybe even from the magazine? You've made a few
1:16:33parallels with that experience. What have you learned?
1:16:36I'd like to say that I learned not to tackle apps
1:16:39without thinking them through,
1:16:41but the reality is I'm probably gonna make that mistake
1:16:43again in the future.
1:16:44(laughs)
1:16:45I'm just gonna hopefully pick better ones.
1:16:47What can I say?
1:16:49I like making stuff and I got carried away,
1:16:51in both of those cases, I got carried away with,
1:16:54you know, first of all,
1:16:55underestimating how much work they would be,
1:16:57and then second of all, not thinking forward enough,
1:16:59like, do I really want to be this thing full-time?
1:17:04because that can and probably will happen
1:17:06to a lot of these things.
1:17:08I thought peace was gonna be a really simple thing
1:17:12that, especially since I outsourced the data to Ghostery,
1:17:15I thought it would be effectively no upkeep.
1:17:19I did not think it was going to do that well.
1:17:22I didn't think I'd become the face of ad blocking,
1:17:24and I didn't think through what it meant,
1:17:27what it would mean for it to be widely used,
1:17:31and what it would mean to put myself in that position
1:17:33and whether I wanted to be in that position.
1:17:35And the reality is, I'm not made for that.
1:17:39I'm not made for this business.
1:17:40I'm made for occasionally talking about it on podcasts,
1:17:44but I'm not made for actually being in it,
1:17:49for being involved, for being a major decision maker,
1:17:51for the politics, for the pressure,
1:17:53for possibly being sued.
1:17:55I mean, we don't know.
1:17:56I mean, ad blockers could get sued.
1:17:58There's all these things that could happen.
1:17:59And I didn't want to be in that business,
1:18:03that I just wanted to make a cool app
1:18:05and then get back to my podcast app.
1:18:08And the fact is it isn't that simple.
1:18:10And success makes it especially not that simple.
1:18:13- So you could have done that, like physically speaking,
1:18:16it could have been no upkeep,
1:18:17'cause you had to deal with the ghost tree,
1:18:18you could have made the app,
1:18:19you could have never modified the application again
1:18:21except to keep it running,
1:18:22and just continue to serve the ghost tree.
1:18:24Like that was a possibility.
1:18:26It's not as if there was something specifically
1:18:29about this application that required
1:18:30a tremendous amount of upkeep, right?
1:18:33- Yeah, it's more that I thought the problem
1:18:35was way simpler than it really was.
1:18:37I really thought that just having this master on/off switch
1:18:41and a handful of options below it would be enough
1:18:44to solve the problem, and the reality is that's not enough.
1:18:47Like any app, I mean, when I made Bugshot,
1:18:50whenever it was, two years ago?
1:18:51Yeah, two years ago, when I made Bugshot,
1:18:53I thought the same thing,
1:18:54that this is gonna be a simple little thing,
1:18:55I'm gonna spend a week on it,
1:18:58and then I'll use it, my friends will use it,
1:19:01maybe I'll sell a couple thousand copies.
1:19:02And in Bugshot's case, that's exactly what happened.
1:19:06But even on day one, it was like, well,
1:19:09gotta fix this bug, this feature request,
1:19:11it's coming in a lot, I really should address that,
1:19:13it wouldn't be that much work.
1:19:14And so it starts eating more and more time,
1:19:17and eating more and more of your attention.
1:19:19The idea of just releasing an app out there,
1:19:22and that's the end of it,
1:19:24is something that I keep falling into.
1:19:26That is one of the biggest lessons I have to learn here,
1:19:28is like, when I had these little ideas
1:19:30for little side apps, it's very hard to make those stay little side apps, to really
1:19:39make them not take that long, not take away a lot of time from my primary app, which right
1:19:43now is Overcast, and I expected to be that for a long time. I keep thinking I can do
1:19:49more than I really can in a day or at a time. That is the main problem here. I have a lot
1:19:55of things I want to do. I have a lot of ideas I want to work on, but I really need to first
1:20:01question A) how much time they will actually take, probably way more than I think of ongoing
1:20:08time, and then B) do I really want to be there? What if it succeeds? Then I'm that person,
1:20:15then I'm in that business. Do I really want to be there?
1:20:17See, I think what I see at the center of this is like, again, I get back to the idea that
1:20:22You could have made peace the way it was, made sure it could work as iOS is updated,
1:20:26but never add another feature to it, never change a thing on it, never update the icon,
1:20:30never like, "That's it."
1:20:31You do the app, you make it, you leave it on the store, it is for sale, you never make
1:20:35any other changes to it.
1:20:37That is a thing you could do, but I think the problem is, is like, "Oh, I think these
1:20:40applications are going to require this update."
1:20:42They don't require the update, they only require it because you feel bad about having an application
1:20:47that you know could be better in the million ways that everyone suggests to you.
1:20:50And so you feel compelled to, like with Bugshot, you're like, you know, those people have a
1:20:54point.
1:20:55It would be better if it had this feature that beer.
1:20:56And this actually would be a cool idea.
1:20:58And it just, you can't, you can't, you can't abide by having an application on the store
1:21:02that you made that is in some ways a representation of you.
1:21:06Like this is my work, this is the type of thing that I made.
1:21:08And then just never touch it again.
1:21:09Like that sounds like it would be torture for you to be forced to put out an application
1:21:13and say the only thing you're allowed to do is application from now on.
1:21:16You're not allowed to do any work on it except if it breaks because of an OS update.
1:21:19and then you do the minimum to get it working again
1:21:21and that's it.
1:21:22You can't add features, you can't change the behavior,
1:21:23you can't update the icon, you can't make it more efficient,
1:21:26you can't do anything with it, right?
1:21:28And it seems like you are constitutionally incapable
1:21:31and I think most developers are constitutionally incapable
1:21:34of doing that because it would just eat at you.
1:21:36You'd be like, but it's not good,
1:21:38it's not as good as it could be, it could be better,
1:21:41or I think I made a mistake with this,
1:21:43or these features should be different,
1:21:45or even just for your own purposes,
1:21:46you'd be like, you know what,
1:21:47the way I had this thing set up,
1:21:49It's not even working for me anymore.
1:21:50I can't even use my own app
1:21:51because I'm not allowed to change it.
1:21:52So that I think is at the core here
1:21:54because I know there are a lot of developers
1:21:56like who, you know, these places that just churn out
1:22:00thousands and thousands and thousands of applications
1:22:02with, you know, fleets or developers,
1:22:04they're fire and forget.
1:22:05It's like application goes out into the world
1:22:06and makes whatever money it's gonna make,
1:22:07it will never be revisited, right?
1:22:09But that is not how you are,
1:22:11you don't feel good working that way
1:22:13so you never will work that way.
1:22:14And so that's why it's basically impossible
1:22:16for you to ever have an app like that
1:22:18that you just say, oh, I'll just make this app,
1:22:20and it will just sit on the store making money,
1:22:22and I'll never look at it again.
1:22:25- Yeah, I think you're exactly right.
1:22:26I mean, I can't do that.
1:22:28I am not able, whatever I think will happen
1:22:33before it happens, when the time comes, I am not able,
1:22:37like, the morning that I decided to pull it,
1:22:41I decided to pull it mid-morning,
1:22:44before that, I was sitting down to start work,
1:22:47I had Xcode open, I had peace there,
1:22:48and I was starting to work on the 1.1 update
1:22:50that would add all these, you know,
1:22:52granular settings and all this crap people wanted.
1:22:54And I'm like, you know, that's when I started thinking like,
1:22:56I really don't want to do this.
1:22:58Like this is really, I'm not happy maintaining this app.
1:23:02I can't handle the heat.
1:23:03I would like to get out of the kitchen, please.
1:23:06Like I cannot handle this heat.
1:23:08And why am I, like, I wanna be shipping over Cast 2.0.
1:23:11What the heck am I doing doing this app
1:23:14that is making me hate myself.
1:23:19And one of the problems is, it was bringing in good money.
1:23:23It's really hard to turn that down.
1:23:25A lot of people wouldn't be able to turn that down.
1:23:27I was fortunate that I have other sources of income.
1:23:30I have made money in the past, so I could,
1:23:34I had to ask my wife, of course, like, am I crazy here?
1:23:37But I, you know, the fact is,
1:23:41it was really hard to turn that away.
1:23:44once it was working, but that should give you some idea
1:23:48of how bad I felt about it.
1:23:50Like, that I really, really did not want to be
1:23:55in that business once I was in it.
1:23:57Once I was in it, I was like, oh no, this is not for me.
1:24:00I can't handle it.
1:24:02I mean, being in the ad blocking business
1:24:06feels like being in the piracy business.
1:24:09You know, and please, I don't wanna hear from people
1:24:11about this comment, but, you know,
1:24:14'cause it isn't the same, it isn't a direct,
1:24:18perfect metaphor, but there's a lot of overlap.
1:24:20That being in the ad blocking, piracy, ad blocking,
1:24:24these are things that lots of people want.
1:24:28Lots of people won't admit they want it,
1:24:29but they want it anyway.
1:24:31Lots of people do it and don't talk about it,
1:24:33and it's no big deal.
1:24:34There are some legitimate reasons to do those things
1:24:38that aren't just you want things for free,
1:24:40Like there's actually legitimate reasons
1:24:41for people to pirate things sometimes.
1:24:43And there's, I think, very many legitimate reasons
1:24:45to block ads.
1:24:45But the fact is they kind of live in the same world
1:24:48of things that are either illegal or kind of close,
1:24:52you know, kind of in a gray area.
1:24:54It's a tricky area to define morals and standards around.
1:24:59And so making your living from an ad blocker,
1:25:04it kind of feels like work,
1:25:06it kind of feels like profiting off of piracy
1:25:09or I don't know, I wonder if like,
1:25:11I wonder like if people who work for porn sites
1:25:13feel any weirdness about it, like any sleaziness or,
1:25:17I don't know, I don't know what that industry's like either
1:25:18but I suspect it might have some similar issues
1:25:22of like some people just don't wanna be associated
1:25:26with that kind of industry, you know?
1:25:27And so I think ad blocking, it's one of those things
1:25:29where it is questionable, it is potentially risky,
1:25:33there's people getting hurt somewhere along the way,
1:25:37like it's kind of tricky to stomach.
1:25:40And I think there's a reason why most people
1:25:44who make ad blocking software are not like prominent
1:25:49indie personalities in public.
1:25:52Like I don't know the people who make the other
1:25:54ad blockers at all, I've never heard of them.
1:25:57It's fine.
1:25:58They probably would not be exposed to as much crap
1:26:02as what I was getting because I put myself
1:26:05out there in the public.
1:26:06I have a very public persona in this industry
1:26:10and among the press, which sometimes I really regret.
1:26:14And this is one of those times,
1:26:16where it's really hard to handle.
1:26:19But this is the business made for anonymous companies
1:26:23and people who don't mind the heat.
1:26:26It's made for them and I'm neither of those things.
1:26:29- So for all the people who are angry,
1:26:30like my anger about this thing,
1:26:32if I could speak to those people for a moment
1:26:35still listening to the show and didn't rage quit because now they're super angry at Marco.
1:26:39There's a couple aspects to that. First, I think it's reasonable for people to be angry because
1:26:46Marco did inconvenience a lot of people who had to go get a refund before the big thing happened.
1:26:51And also, it's this sort of feeling of betrayal, like I'm buying this thing because I trust the
1:26:57things that Marco makes and now that the trust has been betrayed. So there is a fundamental screw-up
1:27:02on Marco's part, underlying all of this. And understandably people are angry about it. And,
1:27:07you know, Marco knew that that anger would be coming, and I think you accept that, yeah,
1:27:11no, like, the short-term pain for long-term gain, it's best to just rip off the band-aid now,
1:27:15people are going to be angry at you, and that's just something you're going to have to deal with,
1:27:19right? Obviously it goes over the line when people get really mean about it, but whatever, like,
1:27:23there's that aspect of it. And I don't think that's, you know, that's, I think that's part
1:27:29of your decision making because I think although you may anyway the second thing is that the
1:27:33people the other thing people are angry about you know they're angry spins out all sorts of
1:27:37directions and it's like how did you make an ad blocker and not understand that you didn't want
1:27:43to be a person who makes an ad blocker and I think you've done a good job explaining that now but I
1:27:47think your blog post about it explains it even better particularly in the title and that you're
1:27:52like how dumb does this guy have to be he spends the whole summer making an ad blocker he puts it
1:27:56out there and then one day later he goes, "You know what? I don't want to make an ad blocker."
1:28:00They block ads, right? Like, somehow you didn't understand how ad blockers work. And my take on
1:28:06it based on your blog post and everything you said is that you understood that you were going to make
1:28:10an ad blocker, you wanted to use an ad blocker, you still do want to use an ad blocker, and you
1:28:15made one that you liked, which is, you know, like you said, your MO for doing things. An application
1:28:18that you think is going to be popular that you yourself want to use that you can develop,
1:28:22That's the formula for making an app, right?
1:28:24Yeah.
1:28:25And so you made the thing.
1:28:27And when it came out, the thing you didn't anticipate
1:28:29was the fact that-- not the fact that it blocked ads,
1:28:32but it was like making an ad blocker
1:28:34and having it block ads.
1:28:35All that worked the way you hoped, and it's great.
1:28:37What you didn't anticipate was how you would feel about being--
1:28:41how you'd feel about being the person who made an ad blocker.
1:28:44And people who think that you should
1:28:47be able to predict how you'll feel about something
1:28:49that has not yet happened are asking too much, I think,
1:28:53of, you know, like, you say, I really want to be,
1:28:57I don't know, like, the manager at the store that I work out.
1:29:01I really want to be married.
1:29:03I really want to, you know, get a tattoo.
1:29:07I really want to learn to fly a plane.
1:29:09I really want to be an accountant.
1:29:11Until you actually do all those things,
1:29:12you can have predictions about how much
1:29:14you're gonna like it.
1:29:14Are you really gonna like being a manager?
1:29:17Are you actually gonna like learning to fly a plane?
1:29:20You know, all those things.
1:29:21You say you wanna get married once,
1:29:23you're sure you wanna get married to this person?
1:29:24A lot of people change their mind about that,
1:29:26about half of them.
1:29:27You know, like, you may think, you know,
1:29:30like, it's like, didn't you understand
1:29:32what it would be like to be manager?
1:29:33You see the manager every day.
1:29:34You know what managers do.
1:29:35It's not like it's a mystery.
1:29:37And then when you're saying you're the manager now,
1:29:39now you're not happy,
1:29:40sometimes you just don't know how you're gonna feel
1:29:42about doing a thing until you actually do it.
1:29:44And that's a mistake.
1:29:45We all make that mistake in various sizes.
1:29:48Hopefully, most of us don't make those mistakes
1:29:50in the public eye, but sometimes you do, right?
1:29:52And so, the way I frame what Margo has done here
1:29:57is that he didn't correctly predict
1:30:00how he would feel about something.
1:30:01It's not an intellectual thing
1:30:02where he didn't understand the consequences
1:30:04or that all the grand conspiracy theories
1:30:07that we don't wanna get into,
1:30:09is that, like you said in your thing,
1:30:10it didn't feel good to you to be doing this.
1:30:12Everything else was working exactly as you predicted.
1:30:14Like you thought it would sell,
1:30:16could potentially sell a lot because you're prominent
1:30:19and it's a thing that people want
1:30:20and it was working more or less the way you wanted
1:30:22and your friends that you tried out were working well
1:30:24and it worked well for you, all working exactly.
1:30:26But other things made you feel bad
1:30:29about having the thing there.
1:30:30And so what you did was made the decisions,
1:30:31I feel bad if I want out of this feeling,
1:30:35make feelings stop now please.
1:30:37And the consequence of doing that
1:30:40was making a bunch of people angry
1:30:41and they're justified and they're angry
1:30:43'cause you screwed up, but you fixed it as fast as you could,
1:30:45and like I said, it's like ripping off the Band-Aid.
1:30:48The worst thing you could have done
1:30:49is him and Han feel bad about this for weeks and weeks,
1:30:51and then pull it.
1:30:52That would have been terrible,
1:30:53'cause it would have been even more money,
1:30:55even more people pissed,
1:30:56and it would have been the same situation
1:30:57of you still would have had no way to bulk refund them,
1:30:59and they would have to, even more people going through that,
1:31:01it would just, you made the best
1:31:05of many possible bad decisions
1:31:07at the time you had to make it.
1:31:08And that bad decision doesn't absolve you of everything,
1:31:10But I think people who don't forgive,
1:31:15who are very angry and would just say,
1:31:18I don't have to say it, that's too high of a standard.
1:31:22What you're basically saying is,
1:31:23my public figures can never make a mistake.
1:31:25You can't hold people to that, I mean, I guess you can.
1:31:29You can just say, well, this mistake,
1:31:30this is one mistake too far, and now I'm never gonna,
1:31:33I'm never gonna listen to anything Marco says again.
1:31:35I will never trust him again.
1:31:36I mean, it is a minor betrayal of trust,
1:31:38and you can decide that's not good.
1:31:39But I think it's unrealistic just to think that anybody is ever going to fulfill, you
1:31:46know, like they're never going to do what Marco did, which is basically not correctly
1:31:50predict how they would feel about something.
1:31:52I don't know.
1:31:53I'm not going to say that people should or shouldn't be angry or whatever.
1:31:57It just, from my perspective, in the grand scheme of things, if I try to point myself
1:32:02wherever, it's so understandable as a thing that happens to all of us, and it just happened
1:32:07to Marco on a grand scale in public,
1:32:09which is credit for Marco
1:32:10and credit for everyone else involved.
1:32:12- Yeah, I mean, and you know, to be clear,
1:32:15I really messed up.
1:32:16Like, I made a huge mistake.
1:32:18But my huge mistake was launching the app.
1:32:20It was not pulling it.
1:32:21Pulling it was my solution to the mistake.
1:32:24The mistake was launching it.
1:32:26That I should have seen some warning signs ahead of time
1:32:30that you know I don't wanna necessarily be in this business
1:32:32or I won't be able to handle the heat.
1:32:33I should have seen those warning signs.
1:32:35And I didn't, because I was blinded by the idea
1:32:37of this cool app that I just made
1:32:39that I thought was working really well
1:32:40and that I was very proud of.
1:32:42So I did make that mistake,
1:32:45but the mistake was launching it.
1:32:47Once the idea got in my head,
1:32:49I was feeling miserable for the two and a half days
1:32:52or whatever, and then once the idea got in my head
1:32:55that, you know, wait a minute, I can just end this,
1:32:58I can just pull it down and get myself out of this.
1:33:01And I knew it was gonna be really messy.
1:33:02I knew that it was gonna be a problem with Apple,
1:33:05it was gonna be a problem with all the customers.
1:33:08You know, part of the reason why the app launched so well
1:33:12and grows so quickly is because I've been building
1:33:16my reputation for years and my audience for years.
1:33:20And I knew that there was gonna be a major cost to that.
1:33:25That I have lost a lot of people.
1:33:28The next time I do anything, even when Overcast 2 ships,
1:33:31hopefully sometime soon, the next time I release anything,
1:33:35or ask people to buy or look at anything,
1:33:39I've lost a lot of the reputation I built over the years now
1:33:43that a lot of those people will no longer buy it.
1:33:45They won't look at it.
1:33:46I'm gonna be hearing about this in emails,
1:33:49in comments, in tweets for years.
1:33:52And people are still making butter coffee jokes at me.
1:33:54I mean, I'm gonna hear about this for years.
1:33:57- The other aspect of it,
1:33:58not to pile on with all the bad things about it,
1:34:00but the people who applauded your decision,
1:34:02I've seen a lot of people who are like,
1:34:05my respect for you, Marco, has increased
1:34:06for you doing this thing or whatever.
1:34:07Subset of them are happy about it
1:34:10because they think ad blocking is not ethical.
1:34:12And when they hear this podcast,
1:34:13they say, guess what guys, Marco didn't pull it
1:34:15because he's against ad blocking.
1:34:16- Right. - Right?
1:34:17And so they're like, oh, well, hmm.
1:34:21So then maybe you lose those people too.
1:34:23There's still, I hope, the majority of the people
1:34:25who applaud this decision understand
1:34:27this is a person who made a mistake in public
1:34:30and fixed it decisively as fast, as quickly as possible.
1:34:34And like, you know, and again, once you've made the mistake,
1:34:38you can't unring that bell.
1:34:39You did ship the app, but like the worst thing you could do
1:34:41is just like, oh, I don't know, leave it out there
1:34:44for a week, two weeks, and then just like,
1:34:47it was like two days, right?
1:34:48I don't, I think that is--
1:34:49- It was one night, one full day, and then one morning.
1:34:53So it was a total of about 48 hours or 36 hours or something.
1:34:56And like, so as soon as I decided that morning,
1:35:00I decided while having my morning coffee
1:35:01and talking to my wife, we were talking
1:35:03and I was like, I really wanna get out of this.
1:35:05I wanna be done with this.
1:35:07It was down within an hour and a half of that decision
1:35:11because the only thing I had to do
1:35:13was I had to look at my contract with Ghostery,
1:35:17make sure I even could do this,
1:35:19and then I wanted to call and ask them.
1:35:21And the CEO of Ghostery, super nice guy,
1:35:24was on a plane coming back from Germany during that time.
1:35:27But he had wifi.
1:35:29So we did this all over email on his in-flight wifi.
1:35:32I was bothering him on his plane trip
1:35:34because I'm like, we gotta talk right now.
1:35:36I gotta get out of this business.
1:35:38The app was pulled within an hour and a half
1:35:40of me deciding that this is what I wanted to do.
1:35:43And I would've even done it sooner.
1:35:45I just wanted to make sure
1:35:46I wasn't gonna be sued by anybody.
1:35:47But it, believe me, I did not take that decision lightly.
1:35:52And it would've been way more profitable,
1:35:56if I got to keep the money,
1:35:57it would've been way more profitable
1:35:58to just sit on it for a while.
1:36:00And you know, that's, the thing is,
1:36:04what a lot of people don't understand,
1:36:07you know, when Tumblr sold, I said that, you know,
1:36:11I didn't make yacht and helicopter money, which is true,
1:36:14but that I now have, I have enough of a cushion now
1:36:18from the Tumblr sale that I don't need
1:36:21to take every opportunity I get to make money
1:36:24if it's something that I don't feel good doing
1:36:26or they don't feel comfortable doing
1:36:27that I don't really want to be working on. I can pick and choose now. And when I was
1:36:32writing that, what I was actually talking about was making a podcast app. Because at
1:36:37the time, podcast apps were way smaller than they are today. Podcasting was way smaller
1:36:42than it is today. And I really wanted to work on a podcast app, but I knew it probably wouldn't
1:36:47make as much money as Instapaper was making or as anything else that I could do more generally
1:36:52would make. But the fact is, I am, I'm able now, I'm fortunate enough that I can make
1:37:01a decision that is against my best financial interests, but that is for my own mental health
1:37:06and for long-term reputation and for, you know, avoiding problems in my life, avoiding
1:37:13burnout, keeping time for my family, etc. I can make decisions like this and I had to
1:37:21to make one of those decisions for this, to preserve myself.
1:37:25I'm a programmer, I'm a geek.
1:37:27I like working on hard technical problems.
1:37:29And ad blocking is not a hard technical problem,
1:37:31it is actually a very, very, very easy technical problem,
1:37:34combined with a really, really messy, tricky,
1:37:39political, guilt-ridden problem of classifying sites
1:37:45and dealing with what is right and what is wrong
1:37:48and what is good and what is bad
1:37:50and all of these impossible to solve decisions,
1:37:53that's the ad blocking business.
1:37:56And dealing with really, really angry people all the time.
1:38:00That is what this business is.
1:38:03It's really gross to me.
1:38:05And again, I didn't think that through.
1:38:08My mistake was launching it, not canceling it.
1:38:11- So I think the subset of people who,
1:38:13I've really made the people who were applauding you
1:38:15because they thought you had a change of heart
1:38:16about ad blocking, which you have not.
1:38:18- No, I just didn't want to be the one doing it.
1:38:20- Right, so the remaining people who applaud your decision
1:38:24basically for basically showing,
1:38:27sticking to your principles,
1:38:28doing the decision that is bad for you,
1:38:31but doing it, again, ripping off the Band-Aid quickly
1:38:33instead of doing it slowly, right?
1:38:35I'm trying to think of what distinguishes those people
1:38:38from the people who will now never forgive you.
1:38:40And I think what it comes down to,
1:38:42as it very often does in these things, is empathy,
1:38:44because the people who applaud your difficult decision
1:38:49to have that feeling, what you have to do
1:38:51is empathize with the person.
1:38:52Like imagine yourself in that situation.
1:38:54Imagine that you had made a mistake.
1:38:56You had launched an application that you realized
1:38:59you don't want to be the person who makes that application.
1:39:01And it's too late now and you know that any course of action
1:39:06is going to make a bunch of people unhappy
1:39:08and it's gonna cost you money,
1:39:11it's gonna cost you reputation or whatever.
1:39:13If you can empathize with that,
1:39:14if you can put yourself in Marco's shoes and say,
1:39:17boy, that must have really sucked because, you know,
1:39:19I like, compared to your life,
1:39:21I remember when I made a mistake and miscalculated
1:39:23how much I would like doing X and Y,
1:39:24and then after the fact I found myself stuck in it,
1:39:26and then you're stuck with like, well,
1:39:28do I have to just, you know, well, I'm in it now,
1:39:30I just gotta get through it, or can I just, you know,
1:39:33imagine for example, you took a new job,
1:39:35and on the first weekend you go,
1:39:37I've made a terrible mistake.
1:39:38This, I am not happy at this job,
1:39:40I will never be happy at this job.
1:39:42Do you quit after working there for a week?
1:39:43They're gonna be like, that guy, we hired that guy
1:39:45and he quit in the first week.
1:39:46Don't hire him, he's flighty, he doesn't know what he wants.
1:39:48Like, that's a mistake, you should not have taken that job.
1:39:50I bet that's a mistake that people can relate to, right?
1:39:52Anyway, empathy is what separates the people,
1:39:55people who are able to empathize with your situation,
1:39:58say, boy, I feel bad, I've been in a similar situation,
1:40:00so I understand what it's like,
1:40:02and what I know the decision he had to make was hard
1:40:04and all his decisions were crappy,
1:40:06and it feels bad to have people angry at you
1:40:08for justifiable reasons.
1:40:11And therefore they say, now Marco,
1:40:13my esteem for you has risen
1:40:15because I understand what you were like.
1:40:18And the thing you just mentioned about Tumblr
1:40:21and being able to make podcast applications
1:40:23and not having to do Instapaper
1:40:25past where you wanted to and stuff like that,
1:40:27that really hurts empathy
1:40:29because people don't have empathy
1:40:31for people who are financially more well off
1:40:34than they do in general.
1:40:35Like that is a theme, not that it's,
1:40:37it's not saying all people, but anyway.
1:40:39It is sometimes difficult to put yourself
1:40:41in the shoes of somebody who you think doesn't have
1:40:44what you think is one of your main sources
1:40:46of problem or concern.
1:40:48If you worry about money a lot,
1:40:50and you think I'm a good, smart, hardworking person,
1:40:55and this guy doesn't have to worry about money at all,
1:40:59and how is he any better than me,
1:41:02it's harder to have empathy.
1:41:03It's like how can you, like all your problems,
1:41:05whatever your problems in your life,
1:41:07and you, Marco, in your life,
1:41:08they say, "Well, Marco may have stubbed his toe,
1:41:11But if I had his money, I wouldn't care about toe stubbing.
1:41:14You know what I mean?
1:41:14Like it's very popular to turn down the empathy dial
1:41:19when somebody is more successful than you
1:41:21or has something that you want
1:41:23as if that whitewash is everything.
1:41:24Famous people, like he's a celebrity.
1:41:26Well, like I have no empathy for, you know,
1:41:29name a celebrity.
1:41:33I was gonna say Tom Cruise,
1:41:34but that's all tied up in Scientology.
1:41:35I don't wanna go down that rat hole.
1:41:36But anyway.
1:41:37- How about Donald Trump, another rat hole?
1:41:39- No.
1:41:40(laughing)
1:41:41Julia Roberts, you can say mean things about her,
1:41:44well she's rich and famous.
1:41:45If I was rich and famous,
1:41:46nothing anyone could ever say would bother me.
1:41:48Or like, I don't have any sympathy for her,
1:41:50she is just the most, she's beautiful,
1:41:53she's rich, she's famous.
1:41:55It's very easy to not have empathy
1:41:56when you feel that about people.
1:41:58And so that I think is a factor
1:42:00in exactly how angry people are about what you did,
1:42:04because they feel like they can't put themselves
1:42:09in your shoes.
1:42:10They can't, they think that, you know,
1:42:12that they have to think that everything you do
1:42:14is sort of Machiavellian and made to maximize your profit
1:42:18or there is a conspiracy theory
1:42:20or you are taking advantage of your position of privilege
1:42:23to screw other people, like have no thought
1:42:26for the people who bought your application,
1:42:27all you want, all you care about is your feelings
1:42:29and so on and so forth.
1:42:30Like I get that, I see, and I see that playing out
1:42:34and this is a perfect sort of little crucible
1:42:37for that to play out because it is a legitimate mistake,
1:42:40but it's a small mistake in terms of like impact
1:42:43on an individual, right?
1:42:45It's $3.
1:42:45Like, I don't wanna get into all of like, you know,
1:42:47arguing with the people who are angry.
1:42:48Feel free to be angry.
1:42:49Like you were inconvenienced in a minor way,
1:42:51but some people are just so angry that it's as if
1:42:54you had like foreclosed on their house
1:42:56and kicked them out on the street.
1:42:58It's like, seriously guys.
1:42:59- Oh yeah, I mean, I got some,
1:43:01one guy threatened to sue me.
1:43:03That was interesting.
1:43:04- Yeah, now you should see how much lawyers charge.
1:43:06It's more than $3, I think.
1:43:07- Yeah, no, but seriously,
1:43:10one of the lessons I'm taking away from this,
1:43:12besides the previously expressed lessons
1:43:14about reconsidering what the heck I'm doing before I do it
1:43:17and whether I want to be in the businesses
1:43:19I'm trying to be in,
1:43:20'cause it's like reconsidering what if this succeeds?
1:43:24That's obviously the number one lesson
1:43:26that I have learned from this.
1:43:27But down the list somewhere,
1:43:29one of the additional lessons I've learned from this,
1:43:32do I really want to be allowing people
1:43:36to hold me hostage over three dollars?
1:43:39Because that's, you know, the attitude,
1:43:43there's a psychological thing,
1:43:45I probably heard about it from Merlin,
1:43:47Merlin's where I get all my psychology news,
1:43:49but there's some kind of thing where like people are
1:43:52way, way more reactive and feel way worse about a loss,
1:43:57like feeling like they had something taken from them
1:44:01than a missed gain.
1:44:03So if you said like, you know, I'm gonna give you $3.
1:44:06Oh, no, I'm not.
1:44:07You know, they don't feel as bad about that
1:44:09as if you take $3 from them.
1:44:12There's something like that.
1:44:13Forgive me if I'm butchering this.
1:44:14- Yeah, it's loss aversion.
1:44:16- Yeah, there you go.
1:44:17- You can look it up.
1:44:19I think that's the Google term.
1:44:20You just go to loss aversion.
1:44:21Tons of studies trying to put people
1:44:23in comparable situations and saying how the people
1:44:24felt really bad about the negative thing,
1:44:28but not so bad about the lack of the positive thing
1:44:30of equal magnitude.
1:44:31- Right, there you go.
1:44:32So we'll link to that in the show notes
1:44:33for anybody who wants to read the correct version
1:44:35of the thing I just butchered.
1:44:36But right now, I give people opportunities like that
1:44:40where by putting this app out there,
1:44:43I said, "Please give me $3."
1:44:46And in exchange, you will get this app,
1:44:48and of course, then most people implicitly assume
1:44:51that you will therefore have this app be free
1:44:53and updated forever as they're able to give me that $3.
1:44:56And so that's why they got so angry
1:44:58when I pulled it two days later,
1:45:00they then perceived that I had stolen that $3 from them.
1:45:04The things that were said to me by so many people,
1:45:08mostly on Twitter, you couldn't pay that person $3
1:45:12to go tell a stranger that.
1:45:14Like, if somebody came up to you on the street
1:45:17and was like, "Hey, I'll give you $3,"
1:45:18if you go over there and tell that person
1:45:21just this horrible thing about themselves,
1:45:23like just, "Oh, you're such a jerk,
1:45:25"no one's ever gonna love you again,"
1:45:27would you do that for $3?
1:45:29But people get so into this thing that like,
1:45:32they really, it's like they're holding you hostage
1:45:34with their expectations and they feel like
1:45:37they really have this over you that,
1:45:39that you owe me this massive thing for my $3.
1:45:43And the fact is, I don't think I wanna give people access
1:45:47to me that way anymore.
1:45:49I don't think I want to give you the chance
1:45:51to hold me hostage for that $3 anymore.
1:45:54Because you know what?
1:45:55I don't want your $3 badly enough.
1:45:57It's not worth it.
1:45:58So I'm gonna reconsider things I'm doing
1:46:01with that in mind.
1:46:03And I don't know how it's gonna play out yet,
1:46:05but that was another bit of perspective I gained from this,
1:46:09that you know what,
1:46:10if that's how you're gonna treat your money,
1:46:14then I don't want it.
1:46:15- Yeah, the amount of just unbelievable bitterness
1:46:20over this $3, I remain stunned,
1:46:24and I find it kind of comical,
1:46:25because I think to myself, I go to,
1:46:29and this is just an example,
1:46:30but I go to football games at my wife's alma mater
1:46:33at the University of Virginia.
1:46:35- No, do you mean soccer or football?
1:46:37- No, football, like the one that is actually fun to watch.
1:46:41(laughing)
1:46:42Don't email me.
1:46:43Oh, God. - Finally,
1:46:44you're taking the email from this episode, not me.
1:46:45- Yeah, seriously, no, don't email me.
1:46:47I know that American football is much slower.
1:46:49It was just a joke.
1:46:50Everybody calm down.
1:46:51Anyway, the point I'm driving at is
1:46:52I go to these American football games
1:46:55and a soda at these football games is, I believe,
1:46:59three or four dollars.
1:47:00A bottle of water, I'm pretty sure, is either 250 or $3.
1:47:03That's a bottle of water.
1:47:06- But it doesn't matter.
1:47:07It's a whole different context, a whole different context.
1:47:09- It's just ridiculous to me, but it is, and you're right,
1:47:13but it's $3 for a bottle of water
1:47:15that I'm literally pissing away in an hour, literally.
1:47:20And these people, some of these replies that you got,
1:47:23just unbelievably disproportionately, and I think that's the real crux of it here,
1:47:28disproportionately angry over the money. Not all of them, I mean John went over a
1:47:33lot of this before and he's right, but some of them are just disproportionately
1:47:36angry about three dollars. And so my first thought was, okay, was there was a
1:47:40time when I had no freaking money, just none, where going to McDonald's and
1:47:45getting myself like a Big Mac was a special treat. And yes, I know that's
1:47:48terrible for me, blah blah blah, I don't need to hear about it. At the time, going
1:47:51McDonald's and getting myself a Big Mac was a special treat, and I only allowed myself
1:47:55that once a week at most. And I genuinely had to think about whether that $7, whatever
1:48:01it was, was worth spending. And even then, I don't think I would have gotten this upset
1:48:06over a $3 loss, which ends up, as it turns out, not being a loss at all. And I think
1:48:11Jon really hit the nail on the head earlier when he said, "People just don't have enough
1:48:16empathy. And these people seem to think that you, Marco, are this infallible person that
1:48:23never makes a mistake and it's bull if you--if it's just completely wrong that--that you
1:48:28might have made a mistake and clearly--I mean, you are infallible, so this must be a money
1:48:32grab. This is--this is insane. There's no other explanation. And I just--people need
1:48:36to relax and understand that if people make mistakes and $3 probably isn't going to be
1:48:44the end of the earth on your $800 iPhone.
1:48:47- But see, they have the wider context.
1:48:48The people who are the most mad know the context.
1:48:50They know a lot of copies of this sold.
1:48:52They know that the total amount
1:48:53is much more than their $3.
1:48:55And what they're really angry about
1:48:56is this guy who doesn't need money as much as them
1:48:58is getting a bunch of extra money,
1:48:59and that makes them have less empathy for Marco.
1:49:01It's not as if they just write him off as like,
1:49:02"Oh, because I hate everybody who's richer than me?"
1:49:04No, all I'm saying is that for the people who are angry,
1:49:07it lessens their ability to empathize
1:49:09because they feel like this very good thing
1:49:12is happening to Margo and this minor bad thing is happening to me, but this minor bad thing
1:49:17is like Steve Jobs.
1:49:18Like, if I can shave one second off the boot time of this computer, if millions of people
1:49:22use this computer, you're saving millions of seconds every time people boot up.
1:49:26It's at scale, and they do the scale, and I'm like, "Yeah, my $3 isn't a big deal, but
1:49:30he stole $3 from thousands and thousands of people.
1:49:33He's basically a thief, and this guy doesn't even need the money, and it makes me even
1:49:36more angry."
1:49:37And to some degree, that's how people feel about all businesses.
1:49:40has seen the person who's angry at the person serving them coffee at a coffee shop or you
1:49:46know or at a store or whatever and they're out like a dollar fifty or whatever because
1:49:50they wouldn't accept their return because it was like all sales final and like a stick
1:49:53of gum or something they're like you know what I'm never coming to this coffee shop
1:49:57again and whether that's true or not like they're willing to say you know this entire
1:50:02business you know you this is not an ethical business you should have let me return this
1:50:07stick of gum like it's the principle it's not the dollar fifty it's the principle that
1:50:10you are not an ethical business, I'm never going to, you know, that's the power they
1:50:13have as a consumer and the whole, you know, customer is always right thing.
1:50:16We've all seen people get angry about that.
1:50:19And in that case, it's like the poor cashier is like, you know, just trying to do the job,
1:50:23they don't own the place or whatever, the brunt of this.
1:50:26Or someone who works at like a fast food place, they don't control the policies of the store,
1:50:29they're just trying to do their job, they get yelled at.
1:50:31But for the most part, those businesses are like faceless entities that people can be
1:50:35indignant and angry about.
1:50:36or even just think of like airlines where there's more legitimate reasons to be angry
1:50:41like I've been delayed a day from my destination and you know I got a ticket on this flight
1:50:47but now you know you oversold it and I have to check my back like whatever.
1:50:51Being mad at businesses is a thing.
1:50:53It just so happens in Marco's case that he is the business.
1:50:55It's a one-man business, there's a public face and it's not just like he's not Ronald
1:50:59McDonald he's the actual he's not just a figurehead he actually does all the pushing of buttons
1:51:04on keyboards too.
1:51:07And so it's a bummer for Marco, but that attitude is not unique to Marco, but it's exactly the
1:51:13same thing in the way that when people are really angry that the place wouldn't accept
1:51:17their return to their stick of gum, they're not thinking about the store's feelings, because
1:51:21the store is the man.
1:51:23And this is, you know, it's like it's a big faceless entity, it might as well be the government.
1:51:27Marco is the man, in the bad way.
1:51:30The bad man.
1:51:31And so they're like, "The man is sticking it to me.
1:51:33The man is taking three dollars from thousands of people, and the man is screwing us all
1:51:39over."
1:51:40And so it's easy to get self-righteous and indignant and angry at the man, and you don't
1:51:43spend a lot of time empathizing with the man and saying, "How does the man feel?
1:51:48Does the man sad?
1:51:49Does the man make a mistake?
1:51:51Does the man make a mistake, and now he has to do something that he knows is going to
1:51:56make people even more angry at him?"
1:51:58And so anyway, that's the divide.
1:51:59Some people are able to empathize and understand.
1:52:03Some people mistakenly thought that Marco is now against ad blocking.
1:52:06And some people were less able to empathize and were super angry about it.
1:52:11And I think all this will pass.
1:52:12I think we've covered all the positive negatives that come from it.
1:52:16We all make mistakes.
1:52:19It's a bummer.
1:52:21We do what we can.
1:52:22Hopefully we'll all learn from this.
1:52:24We can learn by proxy through Marco's mistakes.
1:52:26Marco can learn from his mistakes.
1:52:28and we can all move forward together
1:52:30and finally get Overcast 2.0 out there.
1:52:32If you ever stop reviewing podcast microphones.
1:52:35- This is a really good one actually tonight.
1:52:37Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week,
1:52:38Squarespace, Igloo, and MailRoute,
1:52:40and we will see you next week.
1:52:42(upbeat music)
1:52:45♪ Now the show is over ♪
1:52:47♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪
1:52:50♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪
1:52:51♪ Accidental ♪
1:52:52♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪
1:52:54♪ Accidental ♪
1:52:55♪ John didn't do any research ♪
1:52:57Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental.
1:53:02It was accidental.
1:53:05And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
1:53:10And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at
1:53:15C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey List M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
1:53:24♪ Anti-Marco, Armin, S-I-R-A-C ♪
1:53:29♪ USA, Syracuse, it's accidental ♪
1:53:33♪ It's accidental ♪
1:53:35♪ They didn't mean to ♪
1:53:37♪ Accidental ♪
1:53:39♪ Accidental ♪
1:53:40♪ Tech podcast ♪
1:53:42♪ So long ♪
1:53:45- Forgot the most important question.
1:53:47Are you going to make a peace fracture?
1:53:50- Oh yeah, a lot of people have asked this.
1:53:53No, I'm not planning to right now.
1:53:56I mean, maybe I'll change my mind in the future
1:53:57once it hurts less, but right now it's too painful.
1:53:59I can't do it.
1:54:00- What you should do is order the fracture,
1:54:02but then keep it for a day and throw it away.
1:54:04(laughing)
1:54:06[laughter]
1:54:08(beep)
1:54:10[ Silence ]