00:00:09 ◼ ► Oh, I'm telling you. So I'll tell you right now that I'm using headphones instead of canal
00:00:18 ◼ ► phones, earbuds, whatever you call them for this week's show. And you're going to hear this.
00:00:21 ◼ ► You're going to hear that all day and night. Is that your head hitting the microphone? Yes.
00:00:32 ◼ ► Because I turned to one side. So for example, like the mic is kind of coming in from my left-hand
00:00:39 ◼ ► side, and I have an external monitor on the right-hand side, and so I'm turning and smashing
00:00:48 ◼ ► I have two screens. There's one screen in front of me, one screen to my right. You heathens that
00:00:58 ◼ ► to Target today, and there was a woman who was getting into her car in front of us. Her
00:01:18 ◼ ► Indeed. So, she goes and she unloads her car in such a way that she's blocking the spot
00:01:34 ◼ ► wheels the shopping cart to the back of her car, because she had either done a pull through
00:02:03 ◼ ► say, "Don't worry, I'll get that for you." Did you give her a thumbs down? No, I should
00:03:47 ◼ ► If you are being an asshole and somebody tells you that you are being an asshole and you
00:03:51 ◼ ► know you're being an asshole, standard defensiveness response is to tell them, "No, you're
00:04:04 ◼ ► sentiment just like you said Marco but in the end of the day like you're just making it worse you're
00:04:09 ◼ ► just further confirming that you're an asshole well you were both apples in that situation just she
00:04:15 ◼ ► was the greater apple that's probably fair i mean does that make me a jerk to say don't worry i'll
00:04:20 ◼ ► get that for you i didn't say don't worry i'll get that for you you lazy punk i mean you you did a
00:04:25 ◼ ► snide response to someone's worst move so you are your hands are not clean there so do you know be
00:04:44 ◼ ► Seriously, like all the time at grocery stores, I see people just, you know, put two wheels
00:04:52 ◼ ► Oh, you're lucky your shopping centers even have the grassy knolls. In New York, we don't
00:04:56 ◼ ► have space for those, and so they just park the shopping carts like in the middle of flat
00:05:04 ◼ ► They're a self-organizing collective, see? Gravity and wind causes them to bundle together
00:05:17 ◼ ► I don't know, it's just so ridiculous. Like, why can't you just walk it the 10 paces? Or
00:05:38 ◼ ► windows? You know, it's the same kind of thing. It's like just slight reckless disregard
00:05:48 ◼ ► you might forget how much of an asshole you're being, or not realize it in the first place.
00:05:56 ◼ ► don't go into topics first. You don't jump to the events of the week. We have a format.
00:06:11 ◼ ► it was the last show. I don't remember. But anyway, it's not about sexism. Someone named
00:06:15 ◼ ► Michael wrote in to tell us—I don't know why we all didn't mention this when we were discussing
00:06:25 ◼ ► And that's true. We didn't think about that because we weren't thinking about iWatches or whatever.
00:06:43 ◼ ► because people have been saying they've been making advances in Sapphire that makes it more comfortable to Gorilla Glass,
00:06:49 ◼ ► fast, but maybe not just for cell phone camera covers or touch ID sensors, maybe for a tiny
00:06:58 ◼ ► little screen on a tiny little wearable thing, because that would also work for something
00:07:05 ◼ ► Yeah, there was a really good discussion on the talk show this week with John Gruber and
00:07:10 ◼ ► Craig Hockenberry about the potential of Apple making an iWatch or other wearable devices,
00:07:15 ◼ ► I highly recommend everyone go listen to that. And I think that this is very good feedback,
00:07:23 ◼ ► that yes, it is a very good point that watches do use Sapphire, and even if Apple is not
00:07:33 ◼ ► it would make sense that might be, you know, the cover material. So all these possibilities
00:07:37 ◼ ► make a lot of sense and are all, I think, probably more plausible than the idea of them
00:07:47 ◼ ► only is that just a lot of Sapphire that they would need, but also we already know they're
00:07:53 ◼ ► using it for Touch ID sensors and they need a lot of those, and if they use it in a wearable,
00:07:58 ◼ ► they need a lot of that, and it makes sense in those things, whereas the iPhone screen,
00:08:10 ◼ ► Well, the things I was reading about was not that they would make the whole screen glass
00:08:14 ◼ ► out of sapphire, but that you'd make a laminate where they have a super thin layer of sapphire
00:08:18 ◼ ► over it for scratch resistance, but then underneath that essentially gorilla glass type of stuff.
00:08:22 ◼ ► So you try to get the benefits of all of them really hard. That's like a knife edge where
00:08:26 ◼ ► you get really hard towards the blade edge and then sort of more flexible in the middle.
00:08:32 ◼ ► This is all just speculative and people investigating manufacturing. So down the road, I can imagine
00:08:37 ◼ ► some kind of sandwich like that, giving you the best of all the materials, like a flexible center
00:08:41 ◼ ► with a very, very hard surface. That makes sense for a phone or something where you don't want the
00:08:46 ◼ ► screen to be scratched. You get the hardest material possible just on the very, you know,
00:08:50 ◼ ► the scratch surface. But are we really scratching the screens on our phones? Because the damage I
00:08:55 ◼ ► see is shattering because of impact, not scratching. Well, I see a lot of scratched iPhones. I mean,
00:09:01 ◼ ► think of people who take their iPhones without a case and put it in like their purse with their
00:09:04 ◼ ► keys. People do that, and then they get scratched up. Do they? Maybe I've just never seen them, but
00:09:10 ◼ ► I see tons and tons of iPhones and Android phones and every kind of phone with a shattered or
00:09:15 ◼ ► slightly scattered screen. That's when you drop it, yeah. I mean, like, that's nothing—obviously,
00:09:19 ◼ ► they would like that not to happen too, but at a certain point, you drop it onto concrete
00:09:23 ◼ ► the wrong way. Sorry. I don't know, it's just—I don't know if scratch prevention is what we
00:09:43 ◼ ► Well, you get there by having these tacky, giant bouncy cases that a lot of people like
00:09:54 ◼ ► Well, but that actually helps, you know, like if you want to protect this tiny little brick
00:09:57 ◼ ► of glass and electronics in the middle of something, the bigger you can make that something
00:10:06 ◼ ► I put Apple wearable stuff way down like three topics down in the topic section who knows if we'll get to it today
00:10:17 ◼ ► So we'll see if we don't get to it. We have an extra let's move it up who cares about Facebook and oculus oh
00:10:47 ◼ ► Jared; I would say almost universally praise in the sense that people were very glad we spoke of
00:10:54 ◼ ► it, and in many cases, people were very pleased with the way you spoke of it, especially. And
00:11:30 ◼ ► in one entire show, let alone the last quarter of one of our shows. But I'm glad we talked
00:11:37 ◼ ► about it. I was very scared, as I said during the show last week, I was very scared to talk
00:11:41 ◼ ► about it because it's so hard to talk about sexism without offending somebody on the side
00:11:52 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. And that's why I pumped the brakes real hard in the beginning. And I'm really,
00:11:56 ◼ ► really glad and thankful that—I think it was mostly Jon basically said, "Tough noogies,
00:12:00 ◼ ► we're going to talk about it." And I'm glad that we did, but oh man, I was so scared. I was so
00:12:05 ◼ ► scared in the beginning. I think Marco said—did you tweet Marco or something? That you had been
00:12:09 ◼ ► afraid to touch on this topic, but were pleasantly surprised that the backlash was not that bad,
00:12:13 ◼ ► and that basically you had been too afraid of this topic for too long, and if you had known that it
00:12:18 ◼ ► wasn't the minefield that you thought it was going to be, that you wouldn't have been as hesitant.
00:12:24 ◼ ► Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, you know, I try to fight for social causes that I care
00:12:35 ◼ ► by the public discourse around sexism because it just seems like everyone's being attacked.
00:12:40 ◼ ► Even people who are trying to make progress in eliminating or reducing sexism, then they
00:12:45 ◼ ► get attacked for something they didn't include or accidentally omitted or didn't say the
00:12:49 ◼ ► the right way. It's really, really, it just, it seems like it's so cutthroat, the discussion
00:12:55 ◼ ► out there that I see so often, at least in print and on Twitter and stuff. It's so, it's
00:13:00 ◼ ► so like, no one's given any leeway, no one's given any slack, everyone assumes the worst
00:13:06 ◼ ► in everyone else in the discussion. And that's what, frankly, that's why I try to stay out
00:13:12 ◼ ► of it because I'm so afraid of something blowing up in my face when I was just trying to help,
00:13:19 ◼ ► I did it in not quite the right way, or I forgot about some condition or something that
00:13:30 ◼ ► to talk about it in a way that won't get you attacked as well. From your side. It's one
00:13:38 ◼ ► thing if you say sexism is a problem and then you've got a bunch of idiot men saying "No,
00:13:53 ◼ ► get attacked by anti-sexism advocates because I didn't do it correctly, that discourages
00:14:13 ◼ ► was the typical people like Marco just mentioned who either thought it wasn't a problem or
00:14:28 ◼ ► Yeah, there was one that was ridiculous, but there was other ones that you know, were borderline.
00:14:56 ◼ ► a compliment or to dwell on the positive things. So anyway, the negative things were like,
00:15:02 ◼ ► people who took this opportunity, sort of like preemptive backlash, took this opportunity
00:15:10 ◼ ► let me preemptively tell you about all the times in the past where you have said or done things that are sexist or racist or
00:15:14 ◼ ► whatever in your podcast or writing. And so I got a laundry list of all sorts of things that I've done wrong from various
00:15:19 ◼ ► people, most of which by the way were right, which is why it's, you know, it bothers me as much as it does, because it's like,
00:15:25 ◼ ► yeah, no, I remember that it was terrible. And in fact, in the particular show, there were cases, you know, I mean, I brought up
00:15:30 ◼ ► the one with Casey saying, and Lee, but I did things too. And I heard it myself when I listened to it. And then two days later, I
00:16:04 ◼ ► nasty way, she still did something wrong. And so, like, her defensiveness is like, "Well,
00:16:13 ◼ ► I may have done something wrong, but you were a jerk about it, therefore I didn't do anything
00:16:18 ◼ ► your instinct is to want to reply and say, "But I didn't mean it that way and blah, blah, blah."
00:16:23 ◼ ► But they're right. They're jerks, but they're right, you know. So that part of the experience,
00:16:28 ◼ ► like, "I expected it. It came. I'm fine with it." That's part of the whole deal. You just have to
00:16:40 ◼ ► insensitive way. Look at it for the content and don't engage with the jerkiness, I guess.
00:16:51 ◼ ► Well, we did what we could. Let me get through these two feedback items. I think I'll have a
00:16:57 ◼ ► a better overall view of the thing. Actually, this first one is barely about sexism, but it starts out
00:17:02 ◼ ► that way. So I'll read this. This is from Mike. This is just an excerpt from the email. "I just
00:17:06 ◼ ► wanted to lightheartedly point out that earlier in the show, you were talking about sending people
00:17:10 ◼ ► unknowledgeable about tech and Apple to interview Johnny Ive and then proceeded to thoroughly
00:17:13 ◼ ► discuss gender dynamics and technology for 40 minutes. As someone who has an academic background
00:17:18 ◼ ► and a lot of personal interest in styling gender issues and studying gender issues, I had to roll
00:17:22 ◼ ► my eyes ever so slightly. Many tech folks seem to be so quick to put down the layman who speaks
00:17:27 ◼ ► about technology issues for lack of research or knowledge, but they often feel completely informed
00:17:31 ◼ ► about gender and race and class issues that, in their opinion, is automatically well researched,
00:17:38 ◼ ► So there's two parts of this. One is us, you know, slamming the whatever Time magazine or the Times
00:17:45 ◼ ► or whatever, sending some reporter to talk to Johnny I, who didn't seem to know what he was
00:17:51 ◼ ► knew a lot about, gender or whatever." And then he had to roll his eyes like, "Oh, these
00:17:59 ◼ ► they just feel like they can talk about gender issues and they don't know what they're talking
00:18:07 ◼ ► that we are objecting to someone who doesn't know a lot about technology talking to someone
00:18:14 ◼ ► in the technology sector. It's kind of like the Walter Isaacson thing where people would say,
00:18:18 ◼ ► "Well, it's better for someone who's not kind of steeped in technology to do this because it's
00:18:23 ◼ ► supposed to bring the message to the masses. We want someone who isn't a tech nerd. We want
00:18:27 ◼ ► someone who can relate to these people at the level of normal people. We don't just want a nerd
00:18:32 ◼ ► going." And that and the idea of sending someone who's not knowledgeable about Apple or tech to
00:18:38 ◼ ► talk to Johnny Iov, it's the same thing. You don't have to be knowledgeable about this topic to report
00:18:42 ◼ ► on or to write a book about it. But the job of a reporter or an author is to, during the course of
00:18:47 ◼ ► doing this interview, preparing for the interview, preparing for the book, whatever, you learn about
00:18:52 ◼ ► the topic. Because the only way you can bring something to the masses is to first learn it
00:18:56 ◼ ► yourself. Either learn it by through research or learn it through talking to the person,
00:18:59 ◼ ► and then bring the understanding that you gained to everyone else. That's your job. Your job is not
00:19:03 ◼ ► to just transcribe words or just say the first thing that comes to mind and then transcribe the
00:19:09 ◼ ► the answers. Your job is to learn something about a topic, summarize what you've learned,
00:19:14 ◼ ► and get first-hand information from whoever it is you're talking to based on what you've
00:19:28 ◼ ► it. I mean, you could say, "Well, maybe it didn't have time. Maybe it was last minute,"
00:19:34 ◼ ► it was the case. But as I said in the last show, it's hard to believe that they couldn't
00:19:37 ◼ ► find somebody? Like, "Oh, we don't have enough time for you to do research. We need somebody
00:19:40 ◼ ► who already knows something about Apple. Can we find somebody, anybody, who's been following
00:19:48 ◼ ► The second is this other sentiment that, like, people—it's not just for this topic, but
00:19:53 ◼ ► all topics—people who are expert in the field—actually, it's specifically with sexism. If you're,
00:20:06 ◼ ► what we're talking about. That, I think, is poison, because if everyone thinks that, it's just like
00:20:11 ◼ ► the same thing that Marco was getting at, with the fear of like, you don't want to talk about this
00:20:14 ◼ ► topic because you're afraid you're going to say something wrong. It's too high of a bar to require
00:20:19 ◼ ► everyone who wants to discuss this topic to be like a women's studies major or a history major
00:20:24 ◼ ► or anything. Like, that's too high of a bar. We all have to talk about this. We all have to talk
00:20:28 ◼ ► about it and get things wrong and fumble and screw things up and occasionally yell at each other. You
00:20:34 ◼ ► You can't be like, "Well, I shouldn't say anything about this because I'm not an expert."
00:20:38 ◼ ► Anytime we talk about something where some listener knows more about it than we do, whether
00:20:41 ◼ ► it be like speakers or cars or gender studies, someone needs to come in to say, "I will listen
00:20:46 ◼ ► to your show and you were talking about something that I knew more about than you and let me
00:20:51 ◼ ► That's all well and good right up to the point where you tell us we're not allowed to talk
00:21:09 ◼ ► Yeah, I mostly agree with that. I mean, it's important, you know, when there's a social
00:21:31 ◼ ► through and making some mistakes. That's not to say, based on what I said before, that's
00:22:14 ◼ ► whether it's simply retweeting tech opinions by women or by linking to articles that directly
00:22:28 ◼ ► On the surface, it sounds patronizing—patronizing?—to deliberately seek this out, but clearly there
00:22:49 ◼ ► at because you don't do your homework, but what Anil had apparently done was exclusively
00:23:09 ◼ ► it didn't really change his own personal—workflow isn't the right word—but his own Twitter
00:23:15 ◼ ► experience very much. And whether or not you think that that particular course of action
00:23:20 ◼ ► is a good idea. I did read this Medium post, which I believe he had written and will put
00:23:53 ◼ ► It's easy to make a political statement on Twitter by changing your—by favoriting something,
00:23:59 ◼ ► or changing your avatar, or retweeting something. Those are all easy things, and the value—and
00:24:06 ◼ ► this, I don't mean to cut on an eel here—I think the value is commensurate with the effort
00:24:14 ◼ ► in this case. You know, if you want to really make a meaningful difference, choosing who
00:24:19 ◼ ► you retweet on Twitter is not a way to do it. It's a way to do a small difference, possibly
00:24:24 ◼ ► a very small difference. But I think making a meaningful difference requires putting yourself
00:24:28 ◼ ► out there a little more than that and doing something a little more risky and bold than
00:24:33 ◼ ► that. And so I don't really put a lot of weight on things like, you know, putting a star on
00:24:43 ◼ ► Stuff like that, like online petitions, favoriting a certain tweet a million times, those things
00:25:21 ◼ ► this recommended user. So, sure, I'll follow that guy. And by his own admission, he said
00:25:25 ◼ ► he got a gazillion followers. I think it was like, you know, many of the half million followers
00:25:34 ◼ ► is using his Twitter fame as a force multiplier, and that, like, what can one person do? Well,
00:25:38 ◼ ► few of us who happen to have four or five digit numbers of followers or have a podcast that a lot
00:25:45 ◼ ► of people listen to, one little thing that we do could make a big difference. And so he was being
00:25:50 ◼ ► very strict, like only retreating women or whatever for an entire year. But I find myself doing it
00:25:55 ◼ ► even with my small number of followers on Twitter. It's the conflict that Marco was mentioning,
00:26:05 ◼ ► tweet or retweet things related to these topics that I care about. And then I'll see a tweet,
00:26:10 ◼ ► and I'll want to retweet it. And you'll have that moment of hesitation where you're like,
00:26:14 ◼ ► "I know if I retweet this, because it's political or has to do with sexism or whatever, I know I
00:26:20 ◼ ► have followers who disagree with me and are going to yell at me about it." Or you're going to get
00:26:25 ◼ ► negative feedback about doing this. And the more followers you have, the more important
00:26:31 ◼ ► is for you to say, "Well, is this my Twitter account or isn't it? If this is what I believe,
00:26:36 ◼ ► then do I believe it or do I not believe it?" And so for the individual persons, like retweet
00:26:40 ◼ ► something that they agree with or, you know, giving voices to people who may not have many
00:26:44 ◼ ► followers is not a big deal. But the more followers you have, the more you're amplifying them by
00:26:48 ◼ ► either linking to them in a tweet of your own or retweeting something that they said. And
00:26:54 ◼ ► I still find myself having that hesitation and then having to sort of force myself to say,
00:27:00 ◼ ► "No, go through it. This is exactly what you're supposed to be doing." Now, I don't know what
00:27:03 ◼ ► kind of a difference it's making, but like in general, there's not that much individuals can
00:27:09 ◼ ► do unless we're in very powerful positions. But through the magic of social media, with the
00:27:14 ◼ ► multiplying effect, especially if you have a large number of followers or whatever, I think it is
00:27:18 ◼ ► important to consciously say, maybe normally if all the things were equal, I wouldn't retweet this or
00:27:24 ◼ ► mention this, but because I know it's an important issue and because I know this person, like I may
00:27:29 ◼ ► be doubling the reach of this person's tweet by retweeting it, then yes, I will retweet
00:27:58 ◼ ► Oh, well, yeah, that's obviously a gimmick. He's got the article in mind before he begins
00:28:08 ◼ ► did because I think exclusively retweeting women is, like, you know, that's maybe missing
00:28:13 ◼ ► the point of the entire thing. But in general, we all see tweets in our timeline that we
00:28:19 ◼ ► agree with but know that if we were to engage with or retweet or say something about, we
00:28:32 ◼ ► And like Margo said last time, our hesitance to talk about this topic like, "Oh no, people
00:28:49 ◼ ► And that's the weapon of the bad guys in this scenario, is that if it becomes so toxic,
00:29:03 ◼ ► The amount of rampant sexism is crazy, and the people, the rampant sexist are not going
00:29:20 ◼ ► someone's, you know, I do something like that, and then I get negative feedback. If I need
00:29:24 ◼ ► something to remind myself not to engage with those people, I mean, this may sound terrible,
00:29:32 ◼ ► and start arguing with them, there's the potential that more people would see this argument than
00:29:40 ◼ ► But if I engage and go back and forth or like hate retweet him or anything like that, that
00:29:44 ◼ ► actually increases the exposure of his toxic ideas, right? And so, it's better to just not engage and
00:29:50 ◼ ► leave them confined to their fore-followers and their hate-filled timeline. Like, look at their
00:29:54 ◼ ► timeline of tweets and just one hate-filled statement after another, and these people must not
00:30:03 ◼ ► Pete: And that's something that I think I'm still learning in general, not specifically to sexism,
00:30:09 ◼ ► is, you know, how do I choose when it's worth engaging, like, for example, in a parking
00:30:19 ◼ ► it's something I think we all struggle with. We are not done with the sexism follow-up,
00:30:32 ◼ ► Parker. Warby Parker believes that prescription eyeglasses simply should not cost $300 and
00:30:51 ◼ ► They bypass all the traditional channels, they sell higher quality, better looking prescription
00:30:55 ◼ ► eyewear online at a fraction of the price of brick and mortar places and your opticians
00:31:19 ◼ ► Every pair is custom fit, they have anti-reflective, anti-glare, polycarbonate prescription lenses,
00:32:04 ◼ ► And then the cool thing, the best thing about Warby Parker I think, besides their awesome
00:32:13 ◼ ► this home try-on program. So they have this great thing, you can pick out up to five pairs
00:32:21 ◼ ► fill the box so there's five. So anyway, great company, so you get these glasses to try on
00:33:24 ◼ ► quality stuff in certain places but really they're all pretty great. Titanium collection starts at just $145 including the lenses.
00:33:29 ◼ ► That includes premium Japanese titanium and French non-rocking screws. All their glasses at all price points include anti-reflective anti-glare coatings,
00:33:38 ◼ ► cleaning cloth, everything like that. Really great. So check it out. And one of the cool things about this, I'll go a little long here, but
00:34:51 ◼ ► use his Twitter following, which is not that big. It's bigger than mine, but not much bigger.
00:34:55 ◼ ► And he'll use that to get a bunch of people to raise money, not a lot of money, but a small amount
00:35:01 ◼ ► of money for charity. And he'll do that over the course of an hour and a half on like a Saturday.
00:35:05 ◼ ► That's something that you couldn't do before the internet and Twitter. And Twitter seems like just
00:35:09 ◼ ► a silly thing. "Well, I've got 50, 60,000 followers," or maybe he's got like 100,000, I don't know.
00:35:13 ◼ ► "What can I do with that?" You can do surprisingly, if there's a cause that's important to you,
00:35:20 ◼ ► spend a little time tweeting a few things, get a bunch of people who follow you to raise some money
00:35:27 ◼ ► for a cause that you care about. It's not a big thing, but it's not a little thing either. And
00:35:31 ◼ ► it's something that wouldn't happen if it's like, "Oh, I gotta go door to door, knocking on people's
00:35:34 ◼ ► doors, asking for money or whatever." Twitter brings together like-minded people who might
00:35:39 ◼ ► be inclined to do these types of things. And if it's all electronic, where you just tweet a URL,
00:35:46 ◼ ► everyone feels good about it, and someone gets helped. And Warby Parker, the same type of thing,
00:35:51 ◼ ► you know, it's just an extra bonus for like, why might I buy Warby Parker glasses? Well,
00:35:55 ◼ ► because they do this extra thing too, and you'll feel good about getting your glasses when you do
00:35:59 ◼ ► that. Yeah. So what else do we have on the sexism topic? I put a bunch of other things here, but I
00:36:06 ◼ ► think I would skip over most of them. The only one I think I want to touch on for now is, we didn't
00:36:10 ◼ ► talk about in the last show, but things that help with empathy. And I was thinking of the
00:36:16 ◼ ► I'm surprised it didn't come up. Maybe it didn't come up because I'm the only one in this camp.
00:36:20 ◼ ► But a lot of times when you talk about this topic, someone will bring up either casually
00:36:26 ◼ ► or as a weapon more likely, the idea that you don't understand this topic because you're a man
00:36:35 ◼ ► and only women understand it. Or I used to not understand this topic, but then I had a daughter.
00:36:42 ◼ ► And now if you don't have a daughter, you can't understand what this is like. Or just wait until
00:36:46 ◼ ► you have a daughter and you'll understand. And the daughter one is the one that gets me because I
00:36:52 ◼ ► and then have a daughter at another point in their life. And I never liked calling people out to say,
00:36:59 ◼ ► "Your ability to empathize with this is stopped by the fact that you don't have a daughter."
00:37:07 ◼ ► I agree that having a daughter definitely helps, can help, because it gives you—it forces you to
00:37:14 ◼ ► take a perspective that previously you couldn't. But intellectually, I don't like the idea that
00:37:19 ◼ ► it's impossible for someone to understand this issue until they have a daughter. I happen to
00:37:24 ◼ ► have a daughter and like, and it has helped me identify with this issue more. But I don't think
00:37:29 ◼ ► it is neither necessary nor sufficient to have a daughter to understand this issue because plenty
00:37:35 ◼ ► of people have daughters and still don't see the forest of the trees. Some people are helped by
00:37:41 ◼ ► having a daughter and some people. What I'm saying is that you shouldn't have to be pre-qualified by
00:37:46 ◼ ► something to say that you can—your ability to empathize with this issue is not dependent on
00:37:51 ◼ ► you having sisters or daughters or being a woman or anything. Everyone else can do it. Those things
00:37:57 ◼ ► may help, but I just don't like the exclusion. It just bothers me. Even if in general it may be
00:38:06 ◼ ► true that people don't get it until they have a daughter. I don't like people trying to
00:38:10 ◼ ► exclude people from the conversation and say, "Well, you can't understand this because you're
00:38:14 ◼ ► a man who doesn't even have a daughter or a sister or whatever." Yeah, the other ones I think we
00:38:22 ◼ ► probably don't have time for today, but there's more bits in there. I won't delete them out from
00:38:26 ◼ ► the notes. Maybe we can touch on them on another show. Really quickly, I do want to also add that
00:38:35 ◼ ► U.S.-centric view because simply that's where I am and what I know most about. But certainly it
00:38:39 ◼ ► seems like an American culture we, and of course not all of us, but the majority, the dominant
00:38:48 ◼ ► culture in America is to hold on very tightly to the past and the way we've always done things.
00:38:53 ◼ ► And the way we've always done things is like the Bible. It's always correct. It's how it always was
00:38:59 ◼ ► and how it always will be and we are the best, damn it, and we are never going to listen to
00:39:03 ◼ ► anybody else or anything else that suggests otherwise because we are the best USA, USA,
00:39:08 ◼ ► blah, blah, blah. And the problem with that kind of viewpoint, one of the many problems
00:39:25 ◼ ► do or think or say that is sexist or has some other social problem, your instinct if you're
00:39:32 ◼ ► in this mindset is to hold on tightly and tighten your grip even more and get even angrier
00:39:37 ◼ ► and more defensive and reclusive even around that. And that really hinders a lot of social
00:39:44 ◼ ► progress. And you know, it's hard to convince people that their history and their culture
00:39:49 ◼ ► and the way they think is wrong and bad. That's really, really hard to do. And that's probably
00:39:56 ◼ ► true everywhere for everybody. But that's one of the problems with moving an issue like
00:40:00 ◼ ► this forward. One of the challenges is, as we said last episode, things that we've always said,
00:40:07 ◼ ► words we've always used, assumptions we've always made, these things have problems. They are sexist,
00:40:15 ◼ ► they are discriminatory, they are insulting, they have problems. But if we hold on too tightly to
00:40:21 ◼ ► "this is the way we've always done things, this is who we are, this is who I am," and use that as a
00:40:28 ◼ ► Yeah, and this is applicable in America anyway across many, many, many different subjects.
00:40:49 ◼ ► But it's hard to have intelligent conversation about it for exactly the reasons that you
00:41:12 ◼ ► Pete; Yeah, like, well, any kind of change like that, usually you just have to wait for
00:41:16 ◼ ► people to die. And the worst thing about that is like, well, you just wait for people to
00:41:19 ◼ ► will be fine. But they teach their children these regressive ideas too, and they propagate it. And
00:41:25 ◼ ► it's so difficult to sort of stem that propagation. The most effective means that I've seen during my
00:41:32 ◼ ► lifetime of fostering change in society has been the sort of ambient exposure to ideas,
00:41:41 ◼ ► not shoving them in people's faces, but just kind of like—not really bombarding, but just like,
00:41:48 ◼ ► you're in contact with it all the time. So sort of the MTV generation constantly seeing different
00:41:54 ◼ ► kinds of people, just like exposure to just different people, different races, different
00:42:00 ◼ ► sexuality, not as like it's a message or an afterschool special, but just like they're just
00:42:04 ◼ ► there and you're just exposed to them. Everyone cites Will and Grace and sitcoms, stuff like that.
00:42:10 ◼ ► Some of those are more highlighting than others, but just generally that exposure, it makes it more
00:42:16 ◼ ► difficult for the adult generation that is never going to learn any better to pass on their
00:42:22 ◼ ► regressive ideas to their children because their children are just sort of like soaking in a
00:42:28 ◼ ► society that accepts these certain things as just like, "Well, that's just the way it is." And
00:42:34 ◼ ► that's, of course, why the parents hate it and, you know, don't want their kids to watch MTV and
00:42:38 ◼ ► blah, blah, blah, you know, all that stuff. But like, that kind of thing, it seems to me,
00:42:42 ◼ ► is even more effective than proselytizing or trying to teach kids the right way. Because
00:42:50 ◼ ► no one wants you to teach it. It's just like, you just have to be exposed to it. That's, again,
00:42:55 ◼ ► us talking about it. This being out in the open, even if it's in the form of a bunch of people
00:43:00 ◼ ► yelling at each other in blog comments, even that is just so much better than just not talking about
00:43:04 ◼ ► it. Because kids will grow up just exposed to this, like, "Oh, this is a thing." Or, "I've
00:43:09 ◼ ► I've seen people yelling about that. And even if kids are like on one side of the debate
00:43:20 ◼ ► right? But just being exposed to it, it doesn't seem alien or taboo or ridiculous. It's
00:43:43 ◼ ► You didn't have to. It's all kidding aside. It is a really, really, really good conversation.
00:43:48 ◼ ► And like I said before, as much as I pumped the brakes in the beginning, I am glad we're
00:43:56 ◼ ► we got bad feedback. I'm glad we got feedback saying, "Hey, you know, you didn't always
00:44:07 ◼ ► You know it's no fun for people to point out all the places you've done bad things in the past, but like
00:44:11 ◼ ► Anytime you talk about something someone's gonna want to say oh yeah, but you whatever it's a it's one of those Latin logical fallacies
00:44:20 ◼ ► Whose name I can never remember and always have to look up in Wikipedia, but like a hominin no
00:44:27 ◼ ► Because you did something that's counter to what you're saying what you're saying is wrong ah
00:44:34 ◼ ► So the fallacy is that if you have not lived your life in 100% consistency with the position
00:44:42 ◼ ► And I have not lived my life in 100% consistency, but my position is not wrong because of that.
00:45:04 ◼ ► Well, the great thing is because it's Latin, there is no authoritative pronunciation. Nobody
00:45:14 ◼ ► So, uh, so this week, Facebook bought Oculus, which I didn't see coming. Not to say that
00:45:33 ◼ ► I knew it existed. So yeah, so Oculus, is it Oculus Rift is the device? Is that correct?
00:45:39 ◼ ► I'm going to get my terminology wrong here, but they're making a VR headset. And it's like a
00:45:44 ◼ ► virtual boy, but it actually works from what I gather. And they were bought by Facebook and
00:45:49 ◼ ► a lot of people aren't happy about that. So John, you didn't back this Kickstarter, right?
00:45:54 ◼ ► Okay. So there's a lot of different things in flight here, a lot of different viewpoints and
00:46:00 ◼ ► and a lot of different, I don't know, conversations happening. One of them is, "Hey, I backed
00:46:05 ◼ ► this thing on Kickstarter, and I did that so they could stay independent, and now they're
00:46:11 ◼ ► not independent, so this sucks, and oh, P.S., I want my backer money back." Does that make
00:46:16 ◼ ► any sense to you two at all? Because it does not to me. Like, well, it makes sense in the
00:46:25 ◼ ► I think part of it stems from the same kind of thing where like if a paid app or service
00:46:49 ◼ ► sends and maybe not explicitly and maybe they try to disclaim it, but the message that it
00:47:53 ◼ ► Yeah, that's a good way of phrasing it. Because I would have felt the same way for Flash,
00:48:18 ◼ ► real VCs to sort out a bunch of stuff with angel investing being done, being distributed over a
00:48:24 ◼ ► huge group of nerds. So it's like, we don't want to do the angel investment where we just give
00:48:31 ◼ ► some people enough money to get off the ground. We want to wait to see where the winners are.
00:48:34 ◼ ► And even angel investors are like, well, I mean, that's part of the beauty of Kickstarter. It's
00:48:40 ◼ ► not worth anyone's time to invest in some dinky little thing that no one's going to care about.
00:48:43 ◼ ► But sometimes there are big things and it's like, well, we could go to real investors or
00:48:46 ◼ ► We could just get that same amount of money from thousands of regular people, but we don't
00:48:51 ◼ ► have to give them anything. An angel investor would want some part of the company in exchange
00:48:56 ◼ ► for their investment, but since each individual person gave five, ten bucks, we don't have
00:49:01 ◼ ► to divide the company up and give each person 0.0001% of the company. They get nothing since
00:49:06 ◼ ► it's so close to zero anyway. And that's kind of where people feel burned in that they,
00:49:12 ◼ ► first of all, they do feel like they're investing, which they're not. They're not investing.
00:49:18 ◼ ► sometimes they get nothing but there are backer rewards or whatever like because you want
00:49:22 ◼ ► this thing to be in the world. But it's not an investment because you don't get any ownership
00:49:26 ◼ ► over the thing, over the profits, over the company, over anything. And even if you did,
00:49:29 ◼ ► it would be a tiny little sliver but you get zero, you get nothing. And so it's like, "Hey,
00:49:33 ◼ ► we got all this money." In this case, it was like 2.5 million or something for the Kickstarter.
00:49:38 ◼ ► That's a reasonable amount of money for an angel investment. But it was distributed over
00:49:41 ◼ ► such a large number of people and all of them got zero equity. So from the company's perspective,
00:49:46 ◼ ► "Hey, this is great. We get money and in exchange, we don't have to do anything except make the thing
00:49:51 ◼ ► because people just want this to be in the world." And that's the beauty and the curse of Kickstarter.
00:49:55 ◼ ► And what's in these people's heads when they're giving them money is like, "Well, I was giving
00:50:00 ◼ ► them money so you could remain independent." That's not what the Kickstarter said. The Kickstarter
00:50:03 ◼ ► said, "Give us money so we can remain independent." I mean, there's no promise about what's going to
00:50:07 ◼ ► happen to the company in the future, but in their head, they're like, "I'm giving you money so
00:50:11 ◼ ► so you won't have to get bought up by some big company or whatever. But that's not what you're
00:50:16 ◼ ► buying. You're not buying equity. You're not buying the right to determine the future course
00:50:21 ◼ ► of the company. You are just giving them money because you want to see this thing in the world.
00:50:24 ◼ ► And the thing did go into the world and the Riff Dev Kit version one and two came out and
00:50:28 ◼ ► I'm assuming people got what they were promised for their Kickstarter thing. But time moves on,
00:50:33 ◼ ► and eventually Facebook comes and buys them. And I guess these people could kind of feel burned.
00:50:39 ◼ ► But I hope it doesn't sour people on Kickstarter, because I like the idea of someone who's like,
00:50:43 ◼ ► "I've got an idea for a board game, and it's going to cost $700 to manufacture 10 copies
00:50:52 ◼ ► Everybody let's all pull our money together, and we'll all get a copy of this cool board
00:51:36 ◼ ► I bought products that did eventually arrive very, very late, or that arrived finally and
00:51:54 ◼ ► really going to be one of the founding backers," or whatever. It's a good feeling before you
00:52:02 ◼ ► And then eight months later when you haven't gotten the thing yet that you paid too much
00:52:20 ◼ ► It's a different emotional scenario that you're in, a different type of buying, a different
00:52:25 ◼ ► type of messaging and rhetoric around it that I think distorts a lot of these expectations
00:52:37 ◼ ► and values and market effects. I think that the most sensible way to use Kickstarter is
00:53:08 ◼ ► All I'm doing by giving any money to this at all is trying to make it so that this website
00:53:22 ◼ ► And I'm basically paying for the entire internet to have access to this thing, paying for him
00:53:29 ◼ ► He's just doing it as like a hobby project, and he doesn't have a lot of money to spend
00:53:32 ◼ ► So here's some money to put towards your project, because I think it's a fun project, and I
00:53:40 ◼ ► It's where it gets fuzzy is where you think you're like, where it feels like you're part
00:53:58 ◼ ► And the people at Oculus get fabulously rich, you get no money, and the company's in the
00:54:18 ◼ ► I mean, I don't think people really thought they had a lottery ticket, but it's just like,
00:54:30 ◼ ► I have some quotes here from Notch, the guy who made Minecraft, but it's just human nature
00:54:35 ◼ ► to, not so much to feel that you're left out financially, but that you've been betrayed
00:54:51 ◼ ► what I mean is Facebook is very clearly very similar to Google in that they're an advertising
00:55:08 ◼ ► to, but are we sure that we're going to--that they're going to ruin Oculus? I mean, what
00:55:23 ◼ ► there's only so many companies out there in the tech business that could spend two billion
00:55:33 ◼ ► know, it would have been that much different. Obviously, like, you know, if Google bought
00:55:37 ◼ ► I bet nerds would all be a lot happier about it because nerds love Google for no reason.
00:55:46 ◼ ► company. They need some new stuff to do and they have this gaming business on the sides.
00:55:55 ◼ ► Sony bought it, that would be, I think, met with certainly some resistance as well, but
00:56:00 ◼ ► it would be a little bit more clear, "Oh, well, that's more likely that this thing will
00:56:04 ◼ ► actually come out and exist and be for games. But with Facebook buying it, the big question
00:56:10 ◼ ► is what the heck is Facebook going to do with this? Why did the Facebook buy this? That's
00:56:13 ◼ ► the big question. And, I mean, your guess is as good as mine. I think there's certainly
00:56:19 ◼ ► a contingent within Facebook, however paper got produced and shipped, and Facebook Home.
00:56:27 ◼ ► Whatever contingent made these products happen and made them come out and got them out, whether
00:58:46 ◼ ► post that we'll put in the show notes. The main reason I think that he's angry and that a
00:58:54 ◼ ► game developers. Like it was, I guess, gamers too, who wanted this to come, but basically it's game
00:59:00 ◼ ► developers. What good is a headset if you have no games to play on it, and you can't just take an
00:59:03 ◼ ► existing game and slap it in there and expect it to work? They wanted developers to make games
00:59:08 ◼ ► for VR. And he was thinking of making a version of Minecraft custom tailored to VR. And that was
00:59:28 ◼ ► They're just not a game company. And any time anything having to do with gaming is owned,
00:59:39 ◼ ► gamers distrust it. It's part of the reason that there's this distrust in the gaming industry of
00:59:58 ◼ ► Like, they'll say, "Oh, look at these great, you know, these games are selling very well,"
01:00:01 ◼ ► and they'll highlight games in their keynotes and stuff, but they're not like a gaming company.
01:00:05 ◼ ► Sony was a great point. If Sony had bought them, people would feel a lot better. I mean,
01:00:08 ◼ ► they'd still whine and complain because, you know, what else? They're always going to whine
01:00:11 ◼ ► and complain. But Sony, thus far, has shown itself to be a very dedicated gaming company.
01:00:16 ◼ ► And that's what people want. They don't want this tech to go off and be used for social things or
01:00:23 ◼ ► video conferencing or like all those things that you could use it for that Notch writes about here.
01:00:28 ◼ ► It's like it could be very good for those things. It could be very good for lots of different
01:00:31 ◼ ► applications. But he's a game developer. He wanted it to be all about games. And he's afraid that a
01:00:37 ◼ ► non-gaming company buying this is going to make it not be about games. Now, this is just what his
01:00:41 ◼ ► fears are, not necessarily what's always going to happen. But he did put another bit here,
01:00:45 ◼ ► speaking of kickstarts, he says, "I did not chip in 10 grand to see the first investment round to
01:00:50 ◼ ► build value for a Facebook acquisition." And he's not bitter because he missed out on money,
01:00:55 ◼ ► because he's got tons of money already. It's just human nature to feel like, "I invested in this
01:01:00 ◼ ► thing, and it seems like my $10,000 was just a little booster to Facebook, and why the heck does
01:01:09 ◼ ► Facebook need my $10,000?" It's like, "Here you go. I'll set this up for you, and you can scoop
01:01:13 ◼ ► scoop it up when it's ready and take it away from us, take it away from us game developers."
01:01:16 ◼ ► And he's saying now he's not going to make Minecraft for it, and we'll see if that happens.
01:01:27 ◼ ► Facebook has a business where they get everyone's information and they get them to be social
01:01:35 ◼ ► But I think they see not so much the writing on the wall, but just the evolution of their
01:01:39 ◼ ► product where more people are doing more things than mobile, and that's why they're trying
01:01:48 ◼ ► tech industry history, and he's trying not to find himself in the same situation lots of other
01:01:52 ◼ ► successful tech companies have been in. He wants to find whatever the next big thing is, and get
01:01:57 ◼ ► there before everyone else does. And when you've got a lot of money, when you're in sort of this
01:02:02 ◼ ► fat part of the growth curve and doing very well, that is the time to try to find out whatever the
01:02:06 ◼ ► next big thing is going to be. Maybe it's not this VR thing, but what if it is? It's a good idea,
01:02:11 ◼ ► it's a safe bet to go find the best VR company, buy them, just in case that turns out to be the
01:02:16 ◼ ► next big thing. Because, I mean, they kind of liniced out a little bit of that on mobile,
01:02:24 ◼ ► I think he sees himself like, it's kind of a shame that the name of the company is Facebook,
01:02:34 ◼ ► that it's so identified with that one product, I think he sees a future where, I mean, some
01:02:42 ◼ ► But I think he sees a future where Facebook is no longer defined by the product that we
01:03:32 ◼ ► If he is in control of that technology evolution because he's got the best people in the world
01:03:38 ◼ ► doing VR and he very well may have them now, that sets Facebook up to not be irrelevant
01:03:49 ◼ ► Maybe Facebook really just wants to own any way to simulate interacting with people without
01:03:59 ◼ ► I don't know, I have some thoughts on this, but before I get to the...do you want to tell
01:04:06 ◼ ► Igloo is an intranet you will actually like. Now, most people think of intranets as old,
01:04:15 ◼ ► to use Dropbox or WordPress or something that actually works from the real world out here
01:04:19 ◼ ► that helps you get your work done. Igloo brings the ease of use and familiarity from consumer
01:04:44 ◼ ► Well igloo is very IT friendly, they handle the security, the hosting and the management
01:04:49 ◼ ► They are SOC 2, that's S-O-C-2, that's probably a business thing, you guys know about business,
01:04:55 ◼ ► Well, anyway, they're SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, and they host data securely in SOC 2 Type
01:05:05 ◼ ► now I actually know about this. All right, back to English. 256-bit SSL, backups, disaster
01:05:10 ◼ ► recovery, single-tenant and shared environments, integration with many authentication and sync
01:05:14 ◼ ► systems including SAML, oh boy, back to you, SAML services and LDAP and more. Igloo can
01:06:11 ◼ ► someone who has been paid, or was, I haven't done it in a while now, who has paid for a long
01:06:16 ◼ ► time to make SharePoint intranets for companies. And I did a build actually, it was either
01:06:22 ◼ ► earlier this year, last year, that I did think went well because it was a very, very straightforward
01:06:28 ◼ ► build. But my prior job, I did a lot of SharePoint builds that were terrible. And Igloo certainly
01:06:34 ◼ ► looks a lot better for almost every particular, for almost every use you can think of. So
01:06:45 ◼ ► All right, so I said right before the break that I had a couple of thoughts on this. And
01:06:50 ◼ ► really I think, I have a thought about Kickstarter, which maybe we'll get to, maybe we won't,
01:06:54 ◼ ► but about Oculus and Facebook. I almost feel like Facebook, the business, the website and
01:07:03 ◼ ► the ad sales are really just subsidizing doing all the crap Mark wants to do. And I think
01:07:14 ◼ ► this money and in the company, all this money, so that they can go out and just goof off
01:07:19 ◼ ► and try different things. And so if that really is the case, that doesn't, in and of itself,
01:07:28 ◼ ► lead me to believe that they're going to ruin it with ads and just generally make it suck.
01:07:39 ◼ ► and terrible, but I don't know that there is a straight line from today directly into ads or
01:07:48 ◼ ► Well, they're not goofing off there, because there is a theme to what they're doing. Like they're trying to do it like social, like interactions like
01:07:55 ◼ ► Marco sarcastically said before, like interactions when you're not actually there with the people, because that's what Facebook, the product, the website is more or less about.
01:08:09 ◼ ► of, you know, telepresence or whatever you want to call it, where you are not with somebody,
01:08:21 ◼ ► So there is a theme to what they're doing, like Instagram, WhatsApp, those are all social
01:08:24 ◼ ► things, is how people communicate and share things with each other across great distances.
01:08:30 ◼ ► I think it's not kind of like Google self-driving cars, kind of like pie-in-the-sky nerd stuff.
01:08:35 ◼ ► You could draw a dotted line around this all and say, potentially transformative social
01:08:40 ◼ ► technologies, either current transformative ones like WhatsApp with the bazillion users
01:08:44 ◼ ► and everything, or Facebook, which of course, where people share pictures of their kids and
01:08:49 ◼ ► talk to each other, and then future things as well. So I think it makes some sense in that
01:08:54 ◼ ► respect. And I don't think they're just goofing off. But yeah, that's the question is like,
01:09:00 ◼ ► The Doomsday scenario is that lots of people had lots of graphics of this. I think there was a
01:09:04 ◼ ► Simpsons episode where they showed Facebook of the future where, no, it was Farmville. It was
01:09:10 ◼ ► like Farmville VR where a bunch of people with VR headsets and hedge clippers in their hands. And
01:09:14 ◼ ► then there was the Oatmeal comic showing Facebook VR from a couple years ago as well. And I don't
01:09:21 ◼ ► think that that's what they're going to do immediately either. It's like, "VR way to go
01:09:25 ◼ ► through your Facebook timeline and post things to your wall." No, I don't see that at all.
01:09:30 ◼ ► And that's, I think that wasn't their pitch. Like here's the, a couple quotes I grabbed from
01:09:34 ◼ ► Palmer Lucky, which I think is his real name, and a pretty good name for someone whose company just
01:09:38 ◼ ► got bought for $2 billion. Here's what they think they're getting out of this deal with Facebook.
01:09:45 ◼ ► He listed three items. This is on his Reddit thing, responding to people on Reddit. He says,
01:09:49 ◼ ► "One, we can make custom hardware and not rely on the scraps of the mobile phone industry." So
01:09:53 ◼ ► basically, their Oculus Rift that they currently made was like they would buy some screens that
01:09:57 ◼ ► they were intended for cell phones and they would put them in a case that they designed
01:10:01 ◼ ► and put some chips in there and try to wire it together. But they couldn't do what Apple
01:10:05 ◼ ► does, which is actually make custom hardware because it's just so expensive they didn't
01:10:08 ◼ ► have the money. $2.5 billion is how much Apple probably spends figuring out how to make the
01:10:17 ◼ ► more than $2.5 million to develop. So anyway, custom hardware is really expensive. And now
01:10:22 ◼ ► through Facebook promising them, "Hey, we've got tons of money. Now you can do real hardware
01:10:45 ◼ ► You tell them, "We may be a no-name company, but what we're doing is really cool, and we're
01:10:54 ◼ ► I think he was attracted by the technology, but I'm sure that didn't hurt and I'm sure he got a piece of it
01:11:07 ◼ ► So like it's half-life 3 gonna come to the oculus rift or whatever and they throw a bunch of money at valve who by the way
01:11:15 ◼ ► But basically if you want to make this a viable gaming platform, you got to have the games
01:11:30 ◼ ► He says why we want to sell to someone like Microsoft or Apple so they can tear our company apart and use the pieces to
01:11:35 ◼ ► Build their own vision of virtual reality one that fits whatever current strategy they have not a chance
01:11:39 ◼ ► So he's saying that if Apple had bought them all they'd be doing is say we just want your tech or your patents and forget
01:11:44 ◼ ► About this product you were making we're gonna use it to do like the next whatever the hell we're gonna do
01:11:50 ◼ ► We just want your tech or Microsoft like oh, we're just gonna make this an Xbox accessory and forget about what you've made and
01:11:55 ◼ ► The impression of the company is that Facebook is going to let them essentially do exactly what they were planning to do along exactly the same
01:12:09 ◼ ► With Facebook's big bankroll they can do custom hardware like they think it's basically
01:12:15 ◼ ► We're gonna do exactly what we were gonna do before but better and that may actually be the case for the first few years
01:12:21 ◼ ► Anyway until Facebook sees where this goes like that's the whole thing with these acquisitions people agree to acquisitions and they say all these things like oh
01:12:29 ◼ ► They told us everything's gonna be the same and I think they really believe it and I think they really were told those things
01:12:35 ◼ ► But like what no one wants to dwell on is like once you are no longer in control of your own company once once the buck
01:12:41 ◼ ► eventually several years down the line and there's going to be a difference of opinion and you're going to get overruled and you're going to
01:12:46 ◼ ► I mean, I know you know this intellectually that you're not in charge anymore, but at a certain point it's going to come home
01:12:53 ◼ ► Someone else is and they want us to do whatever and then you know, that's when founders leave their shares have vested
01:13:04 ◼ ► But like this is a honeymoon period where everybody thinks it's going to be a win-win-win
01:13:08 ◼ ► They think we're gonna get to exactly what we always wanted to do and we'll get to do it better
01:13:17 ◼ ► And that's probably where they're going to part ways so I don't want to be pessimistic about it
01:13:21 ◼ ► But I'm actually more optimistic than I think most nerds about the situation and that I think this does give oculus
01:13:31 ◼ ► Just wonder after a couple years of this if they have not hit it off in the gaming space and not hit it off
01:14:15 ◼ ► personality for that at all, with quite comical results. Gotta give the guy credit. He actually
01:14:41 ◼ ► necessarily ruin it. I think the big question is, what will they do with it? I don't know.
01:14:55 ◼ ► So I don't know where this came from, but this is a quote when he was asked about selling
01:15:05 ◼ ► There are certainly people who are interested, but we have a vision for our consumer product
01:15:10 ◼ ► We don't want to be assimilated into someone who's going to have us working on their own
01:15:26 ◼ ► But I don't think there's a reasonable number that would make me say, 'You know, I was going
01:15:45 ◼ ► but really like this is consistent with what he's currently saying now, which is that he didn't want to
01:16:00 ◼ ► We don't want to take it and make it into some other product or just subsume your tech into some existing thing.
01:16:09 ◼ ► they have their vision of VR and they want to pull it off and Facebook came to them apparently and
01:16:12 ◼ ► said, "You can do your vision. We will help you do it. We believe in it too." And so I think
01:16:18 ◼ ► like people pulling this out, it's like to show that he was hypocritical or whatever, but
01:16:21 ◼ ► first of all, I don't begrudge people selling out. I don't feel bad about that at all because
01:16:26 ◼ ► I know I would sell it in a second. But like he's getting to do his vision of VR. And that's what I
01:16:35 ◼ ► think is important. Like if you look at John Carmack's tweets, whatever, like what is their
01:16:37 ◼ ► vision of VR? Is it just that you play cool games on it? Both Palmer and Carmack both seem to have,
01:16:49 ◼ ► Casey's favorite book, Ready Player One, or Snow Crash or anything like that. All the future six
01:16:54 ◼ ► scenarios are like you just jack into the matrix, you know, whatever, like any sort of 90s bad,
01:16:59 ◼ ► like the original dream of VR, that you were going to be in this virtual world and it would be like
01:17:03 ◼ ► you were really there and there will be this other world. It's like Second Life, but you know,
01:17:36 ◼ ► That appears to be their vision, and I'm not sure if that's a good vision, or if that's a feasible vision, or if they're just all kidding themselves.
01:17:45 ◼ ► It's clear that right now they're concentrating on just making good games, which I think is a good idea.
01:17:49 ◼ ► But if you look at it from that perspective, it kind of starts to make a little bit of sense.
01:18:08 ◼ ► Yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking. And I don't know, I'm not sure that's the future and I'm not sure that I
01:18:37 ◼ ► 100 billion dollars or whatever if Apple were to buy us, but he genuinely seems to believe that
01:18:48 ◼ ► It's icing on the cake for the fact that he can still do exactly what he's always planned to do
01:19:16 ◼ ► think is overrated and overestimated in that I think the public thinks that people have
01:19:25 ◼ ► a lot more of a vision in place, like a predetermined vision in place, than they really do. And
01:19:39 ◼ ► direction that has never worked before and doing it with much newer technology and much
01:19:44 ◼ ► more advanced stuff than has ever been tried before. This is the kind of thing, like most
01:19:50 ◼ ► products and services where there's somebody at the top who appears to have a vision, this
01:19:55 ◼ ► is the kind of thing where the vision probably stretches out for the next six months, or
01:20:01 ◼ ► you know, maybe twelve months at the most. And the person might have this dream of future
01:20:10 ◼ ► in reality as a product goes on, you're never going to get there. They're going to change
01:20:50 ◼ ► So in a year, when they have to make some little decision, the fact that they are owned
01:21:12 ◼ ► And so what Oculus will become and what they will do and the products they will make and
01:21:24 ◼ ► But you know, there isn't like... people say Steve Jobs is this great visionary and the
01:21:30 ◼ ► fact is Steve Jobs was a really great editor and a really... and he had very good sensibilities
01:22:00 ◼ ► You know, that's part of the seduction of acquiring companies, that the acquirer always
01:22:08 ◼ ► I think the difficulty comes in that Facebook will convince them that they share the vision,
01:22:15 ◼ ► but Facebook shares the vision on a much shorter timescale. Like, well, let's see if this works
01:22:19 ◼ ► out. Whereas the founders of Oculus believe in this vision, like as in a lifetime, they are
01:22:24 ◼ ► never going to give it up. So if Facebook decides to sort of pivot, as they say in current parlance,
01:22:30 ◼ ► or, you know, edit the vision, then they're going to come in conflict with the founders.
01:22:34 ◼ ► They'll be like, "No, no, we still have the original vision. What do you mean?" It's like,
01:22:37 ◼ ► like, "Yeah, well, but we're your bosses now, so tough luck." So that's what I was getting
01:22:47 ◼ ► like, what are you making now? Are you going to make a product that people like, and do
01:22:51 ◼ ► you have a way to make money from it, or to make money from something else until it can
01:22:55 ◼ ► come into something that makes money? So you need to concentrate on that, because if you
01:23:27 ◼ ► did the laptops and the iPods and the iPhones. I would say that the iPad is essentially the
01:23:37 ◼ ► culmination of his vision of what computing should be like. If you go back to—I think he gave a
01:23:41 ◼ ► speech to some computer user group in 1983 that you can find the audio version of—and just go
01:23:51 ◼ ► specifically, "Oh, it's going to be this, that, and the other thing," but the vision that computing
01:23:55 ◼ ► should be simple and not have lots of fidgety bits and not have a lot of indirection and,
01:24:05 ◼ ► But like, that vision sounds all wishy-washy and it's like, how does that help you make
01:24:12 ◼ ► But maintaining that vision over his entire life was like kind of his guiding force led
01:24:17 ◼ ► him in the direction of, if I'm not sure where I want to go, like, if you zoom back on his
01:24:31 ◼ ► this ideal and finding lots of dead ends along the way and lots of fruitful things and lots
01:24:42 ◼ ► Actually, he probably thought it should be even simpler and even cheaper and even lighter,
01:24:48 ◼ ► But that being your guiding principle, not being married to some specific idea like it's
01:24:56 ◼ ► But a broad vision of where you want to go really helps you, guides you as you're going
01:25:09 ◼ ► But if you don't have like an overall vision, you will find yourself going off into one
01:25:13 ◼ ► of those tangents and then continuing that direction, like plowing forward in that direction,
01:25:18 ◼ ► and you will find yourself very far away from where you were, where you intended to go,
01:25:24 ◼ ► because you just found a fruitful avenue in another direction. And I think, I'm not sure
01:25:27 ◼ ► what Mark Zuckerberg's vision of the future is, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't agree with the
01:25:31 ◼ ► the Oculus guys. And yeah, that will probably come to a head. But I do think that the Oculus,
01:25:38 ◼ ► their vision, like having vision and having a clear one is an important thing if you ever want
01:25:50 ◼ ► Do you think Zuckerberg has a vision beyond today? If you look at what Facebook is doing
01:25:56 ◼ ► – and I mean, Zuckerberg's a really, really sharp guy. Even though I don't use Facebook
01:26:09 ◼ ► in so many ways and especially astute with the business of technology and being the business
01:26:16 ◼ ► that he's in. Do you think he knows what's next? Because it seems like Facebook has maybe plateaued
01:26:26 ◼ ► in a way that, and again because I don't use it regularly it's hard for me to really say this
01:27:02 ◼ ► weird moves from them since then. And maybe that's what some of these recent acquisitions
01:27:07 ◼ ► are about, because he is trying to find out what's going to be next, because what Facebook
01:27:18 ◼ ► I think he's a perfect example of a second-generation tech mogul. Not living generation, but second-crop
01:27:25 ◼ ► tech mogul. Another Ready Player One analogy is the protagonist in Ready Player One didn't
01:27:31 ◼ ► through the 80s but he's a student of 80s culture and so he's able to interact with that. But anyway,
01:27:35 ◼ ► Zuckerberg I think looks at Gates and Jobs and you know even in some respects the founders of Google
01:27:41 ◼ ► are a little bit in the second generation as well. Like the you know IBM and Apple and all those
01:27:46 ◼ ► things as like kind of that's his version of history. Like I want to be like those guys but
01:27:53 ◼ ► smarter so let me look at what all the things that they did and when I start my company I'm not going
01:27:57 ◼ ► make the same mistakes. And so we started out very early not making the mistake, arguably,
01:28:01 ◼ ► that Oculus has made or whatever of not selling your company. Yahoo offered him billions. I think
01:28:05 ◼ ► Microsoft offered him billions. He had billions of dollars thrown in his face so many times.
01:28:10 ◼ ► And every time he turned it down, every time he turned it down, the number was bigger. And people
01:28:13 ◼ ► would say, "I can't believe this kid is turning down all this money. What a fool. He's going to
01:28:16 ◼ ► be screwed." But he knew that step one, if you want to be a big boy in the tech industry, don't
01:29:20 ◼ ► like use your brain power to try to not make the mistakes that the people you admire had made.
01:29:25 ◼ ► And in some ways it reminds me of Pixar, the whole idea that like the creative process,
01:29:29 ◼ ► we can figure out what works and what doesn't and come up with a system as unorthodox as it might be,
01:29:34 ◼ ► which is truly a nerd's way to foster creativity. Like, but you know, not relying on tradition and
01:29:40 ◼ ► convention and egos and not worrying about who has power or whatever, just concentrating on like,
01:29:46 ◼ ► what works, what can we measure, what can we do that actually makes good products, and if something
01:29:53 ◼ ► doesn't work, change it. That, I think, is his MO. I think his lack of vision, as far as I can tell,
01:29:58 ◼ ► I don't know what his personal vision is, other than to, like, it's a little bit like Bill Gates,
01:30:02 ◼ ► like, be the victor in the technology world, like, to be the biggest one. That is not a,
01:30:08 ◼ ► some people wouldn't call that an admirable vision, but it's like a, I don't know, it's not
01:30:17 ◼ ► I don't know what Zuckerberg's vision is, I think it would help if he had one, but right now he's
01:30:20 ◼ ► doing better than a lot of the people who came in the generations before him merely because he gets
01:30:24 ◼ ► to learn from all their mistakes. Yeah. What else is cool these days, other than Oculus?
01:30:42 ◼ ► or you're trying to use Mark as unread as an organizational tool or the flag, you know,
01:31:04 ◼ ► no unnecessary features to get in your way or require any kind of complex integration work
01:31:50 ◼ ► Customers from single-person startups to Fortune 500 companies use HelpSpot to manage their
01:32:47 ◼ ► Obviously, this was in 1999, but his description of that making Snow Crash real is a moral
01:32:53 ◼ ► imperative to a lot of programmers, I'm assuming meaning himself, says all you need to know
01:33:03 ◼ ► or product like the idea that was gonna be like this virtual world and more like an RPG and
01:33:11 ◼ ► But then quake world where you could connect people over the internet like his entire career has been making steps in that direction
01:33:16 ◼ ► Like we wouldn't have this VR stuff if we didn't have all the 3d stuff that he pioneered
01:33:21 ◼ ► So it makes perfect sense to me. I think I can see what Carmack's vision is. He lays it out more or less
01:33:26 ◼ ► It's like he he read snow crash. He said yes, I want to go to there and he's been working towards that ever since
01:33:37 ◼ ► this Facebook hack language, language extension thing. And Marco, you wrote a post about it,
01:33:45 ◼ ► but I didn't know if you had any other commentary you may want to share, if you could summarize
01:33:56 ◼ ► overview hack is Facebook's, basically it's a modification in addition to the PHP language.
01:34:04 ◼ ► So they've taken PHP and they, a couple years ago they made this hip hop compiler that would
01:34:11 ◼ ► compile PHP to C++, that way it can be compiled to binary and be way faster. And they've actually
01:34:17 ◼ ► replaced that with something called HHVM for hip hop VM and that was about a year ago they
01:34:24 ◼ ► released that and it's basically a super high performance PHP JIT compiler runtime. And
01:34:34 ◼ ► PHP has had optimizing caching bytecode compilers before, it actually comes with one, but hip
01:34:41 ◼ ► hop is way faster. It's like 2 to 10 times faster and useless memory and everything else.
01:34:57 ◼ ► now that we've re-implemented all of PHP in a faster way, let's start customizing it more
01:35:06 ◼ ► Most substantially they added optional static typing and type hinting, which is really,
01:35:25 ◼ ► So, it's very, very interesting. I think, you know, PHP has always been a language where,
01:35:34 ◼ ► as I said in my post, it has not been stewarded well. It never was. You know, it's famously
01:35:57 ◼ ► it should be called, what method should be called and everything have made a lot of bad
01:36:09 ◼ ► I like it a lot and I don't love it. And I think, you know, I got a lot of crap for saying
01:36:17 ◼ ► in the article, PHP is not a great language, but it is a good language. And I didn't get
01:36:36 ◼ ► can look at the language you're using, like, this is actually a good way to bring you guys
01:36:58 ◼ ► PHP in that I think it's really, really good. I think it's been used to write some real,
01:37:03 ◼ ► real crap, but I think it's extremely powerful and can be bent to do almost anything. But,
01:37:14 ◼ ► See, "probably" qualifies as a great language. Not to do anything in particular, just because
01:37:37 ◼ ► Because if you think of what's awkward and weird about C, you're not going to say, "Oh,
01:37:40 ◼ ► it's got pointers." Well, yes, that's the whole point. The level of language exists that.
01:37:50 ◼ ► it's pretty good. Go maybe—I'm hesitant to say Go because Go is kind of like C done right,
01:37:57 ◼ ► but now we're in a different age and maybe Go is a little bit too low level to be a great language.
01:38:06 ◼ ► But I haven't used it enough to say, but it's kind of like C with the bad thing shaved off,
01:38:10 ◼ ► and then I added a bunch of other stuff too. But maybe something in that thing. Any of the
01:38:14 ◼ ► more modern languages—it's true of any programming language—the more you know about it, the more you
01:38:19 ◼ ► see all the warts and all the horrible things about it. Except for PHP, where you don't have
01:38:22 ◼ ► know that well to see all the warts because it's covered in warts. It is all wart. But yeah,
01:38:28 ◼ ► just think of anybody, like the more you know a language, the more you just are disgusted by it,
01:38:34 ◼ ► because if you use it for real and become an expert in it, you'll know where all the bodies
01:38:38 ◼ ► are buried and you'll just feel bad about it. But it's difficult. Anything that is in widespread use
01:38:45 ◼ ► and grows quickly and, you know, even in the best case scenario, is going to eventually
01:38:59 ◼ ► Right. I mean, you know, PHP started out as a pretty terrible language and became a good
01:39:05 ◼ ► language over time. But I think you're exactly right, John. My point in saying this is that
01:39:12 ◼ ► I feel like when you learn a new language, you go through these stages. First, it's unfamiliar
01:39:23 ◼ ► Either this is terrible because you're being forced to use it for something, either through
01:39:27 ◼ ► work or you have to use a certain language to be on a certain platform or whatever else.
01:39:31 ◼ ► And you know, we've had, when I first looked at Objective-C, I thought, well, this is a
01:39:41 ◼ ► the plus do and all this sort of crap of like, why can't they just use words like everyone
01:39:50 ◼ ► you're being forced or coerced to use it for some other reason, that's usually you look
01:39:55 ◼ ► at it and say, "This is terrible." If you're learning it because it's the new cool thing
01:40:00 ◼ ► and you really want to learn it, you might have the opposite extreme reaction of, "Everything
01:40:20 ◼ ► go, "Okay, now I'm getting a little more familiar with it. It's not as bad as I thought, or
01:40:25 ◼ ► it's not as good as I thought." And you start seeing, "Okay, well, here are the things that
01:40:30 ◼ ► are decent with this, and I think I'm getting the hang of it." And a lot of times, your
01:40:38 ◼ ► and knowing it, because you might not think it has a good way to do X because you don't
01:40:43 ◼ ► know a better way to do it, but there is a better way to do it and you just haven't learned
01:40:46 ◼ ► it yet. And then as you tend to get more expertise in a language, as you become an expert in
01:41:11 ◼ ► you know, here's this cool new way to do this thing that I didn't know about before, and
01:41:15 ◼ ► all the code I wrote before this point was crap, now I'm going to rewrite all that stuff
01:41:18 ◼ ► the right way, because now I know this language much better, this is great." And then a year
01:41:23 ◼ ► after that, you're still writing this language, and then you start seeing, "Okay, actually,
01:42:23 ◼ ► way you've used it just hasn't been expansive enough in the grand scheme of things to really
01:42:37 ◼ ► hard to say any language is particularly great, it's hard to say any language is particularly
01:42:47 ◼ ► that are not the languages. It's because of bad code they've seen, bad programmers they've
01:42:53 ◼ ► interacted with, or bad code they found online, or a bad situation that they had to write
01:42:59 ◼ ► that language in, or a bad codebase that they had to work on written in that language. None
01:43:10 ◼ ► people you were working with, or the way the language was used by a novice. And there are
01:43:15 ◼ ► writing bad code in every language. And so I feel like a lot of the criticism about PHP or
01:43:21 ◼ ► but any, you know, you could tell the same things about Visual Basic. Visual Basic back in the day,
01:43:26 ◼ ► yet another language I knew pretty well, I know how to pick them. Visual Basic back in the day,
01:43:32 ◼ ► I mean, you could say it was a weird language, there were a lot of weird things about it, but
01:43:36 ◼ ► a lot of people got a lot done in that language because it worked pretty well. And it wasn't cool
01:43:41 ◼ ► ever. It was never respected by programmers, but it worked. And it wasn't as bad as most
01:43:49 ◼ ► programmers think because they never bothered to learn how to write well in it, and they
01:44:03 ◼ ► some weird edge cases, but for the most part, the language works." You know, people build
01:44:09 ◼ ► large apps in it all the time. If you look, I found some page on Wikipedia that was like
01:44:20 ◼ ► top 10 or 20 were written in PHP, including Facebook, Wikipedia, WordPress.com, Tumblr,
01:44:39 ◼ ► and how you write it. And there are certain things like the libraries can help or hurt in certain ways,
01:44:44 ◼ ► although there's nothing stopping you from writing your own libraries or modifying the ones that are
01:44:48 ◼ ► there. So anyway, all this is to say back to Facebook's hack. The concept of Facebook taking,
01:44:57 ◼ ► like kind of taking control of this branch of PHP, first with HHVM and now with their own language
01:45:04 ◼ ► modifications that they're calling their own language. That, I think, is an interesting
01:45:16 ◼ ► other company. They just took it over. They literally just took it over. And PHP is going
01:45:22 ◼ ► to continue. So what they did was re-implement PHP 5.4. Now, if the real PHP people make
01:45:31 ◼ ► like PHP 5.6 or PHP 6.0 in ways that Facebook really doesn't like or in ways that Facebook
01:45:43 ◼ ► We're going to actually just fork the language and just say, 'All right, we're not going
01:46:23 ◼ ► Their ideas of where the language should go by looking at a hack, you can see what they
01:46:30 ◼ ► think some of their changes look really weird but ultimately the things they chose to add
01:46:39 ◼ ► So if Facebook really does kind of take the language over and become the dominant implementation
01:46:45 ◼ ► and the dominant spec of the language, that's great until Facebook decides it no longer
01:46:51 ◼ ► is interested. And then there, it could be, it would reach a weird point. Let's say you
01:47:02 ◼ ► is pretty cool, I want to start using it in my PHP code, let's do it. That's great. The
01:47:14 ◼ ► two years or three years, yeah, we're actually done with this, we're going to do something
01:47:35 ◼ ► community. That being said, the PHP community largely sucks, so the fact that it gets fragmented
01:47:41 ◼ ► Did you also point out in your blog post that they're using this to write stuff on the server
01:47:47 ◼ ► So it's not like they have a developer community out there who's like, for example, Apple objective
01:47:51 ◼ ► C, like they want people to write apps for the App Store in objective C. So they're sort
01:48:08 ◼ ► a development platform for people to write code in hack that either runs on top of Facebook
01:48:20 ◼ ► APIs that you write on top of Facebook and not like write something and hack it, it will
01:48:25 ◼ ► run inside Facebook. Maybe I'm wrong about that. But even if that was the case, I think
01:48:29 ◼ ► people who've built code on top of Facebook's platform have been burned in the past because
01:48:41 ◼ ► want to be able to write and maintain it efficiently. And that is their sole focus. And so if they
01:48:46 ◼ ► changed their mind as they had already, like they used to have hip hop, which was a thing
01:48:49 ◼ ► that took PHP, turned it into C++, and then compiled the C++ into this big monster executable.
01:48:57 ◼ ► maybe they'll have another approach. And at that point, it's not so much that they will
01:49:00 ◼ ► have forked hack so far, it's just that they will lose interest in it. Like I think another
01:49:09 ◼ ► originally a Facebook product, and they kind of lost interest with it. And it languished for a
01:49:13 ◼ ► long time. And I think like the open source community like picked it up and made a alternative
01:49:18 ◼ ► or a port or a fork of it or whatever. So it could be that hack ends up, you know, Facebook decides
01:49:24 ◼ ► on whatever the next approach is in four or five years. Hack is left to sort of die on the vine.
01:49:28 ◼ ► And since it's open source, the open source community grabs it and that is like PHP 7 or
01:49:32 ◼ ► something, and hopefully continues to run with it. But you hope there's still a PHP community around
01:49:41 ◼ ► out, and all there is is hack, and then Facebook loses interest in hack and replaces it with
01:49:50 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think if Facebook loses interest in this, if they abandon it,
01:50:00 ◼ ► who would have the time and the skill to maintain it properly. I think if Facebook abandons
01:50:05 ◼ ► it, it's done. That's it. Because the official PHP maintainers probably want nothing to do
01:50:22 ◼ ► Well, as you pointed out, they probably deserve that middle finger. What was their namespacing
01:50:38 ◼ ► If you had to pick a worse character, could you think of one without using, like, Unicode
01:50:58 ◼ ► Exactly. So anyway, yeah, I don't think the official PHP maintainers, even if they chose
01:51:08 ◼ ► to take it over, which I think is very, very unlikely, I don't think that would be a good
01:51:14 ◼ ► thing. So yeah, basically if Facebook gives up on hack, hack is over. And like, you know,
01:51:21 ◼ ► I'm choosing to write my overcast code base now, and I'm writing it in PHP. And I'm running
01:51:32 ◼ ► like, when I wrote Instapaper's codebase, it was late 2007 when I first wrote the beginnings
01:51:39 ◼ ► of that, and it was still running that codebase to the best of my knowledge until mid-2013.
01:51:48 ◼ ► And you know, it would have been added onto, but it had not been rewritten in a new language
01:52:16 ◼ ► reasonable to me. And so do I think this language is going to still be healthy and around and
01:52:23 ◼ ► maintained in three to five years? I don't know. I think it's way too soon to say. Because
01:52:29 ◼ ► Facebook is using it now, but what, you know, like they're not, I think somebody looked
01:52:34 ◼ ► at it and I think it's like, it's not being developed in the open. It's like they're having
01:52:39 ◼ ► just like code dumps every once in a while. So where like they're developing it internally
01:52:51 ◼ ► Yeah, I think so. So like, you know, if Facebook starts losing interest in this, we'll just
01:53:01 ◼ ► eventually the version they're going to use internally is going to be so divergent from
01:53:06 ◼ ► the public version, they'll just kind of stop thinking it's worth maintaining the public
01:53:12 ◼ ► version. There are so many plausible, realistic ways where this language could get just kind
01:53:28 ◼ ► needs change themselves that I would hesitate to build anything big on it today. What I
01:53:35 ◼ ► What I am interested in is one of the greatest advantages of Hack and of HipHop is the static
01:53:51 ◼ ► And that should be pretty easy to do because they have an open source compiler right there
01:53:58 ◼ ► So, in fact, there's even some command line options that are not yet implemented on HVAM
01:55:09 ◼ ► Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Help Spot, Igloo, and Warby Parker, and we
01:56:44 ◼ ► No, he's not. He's carefree. He's going wherever he wants. He's an adult. He doesn't have to worry about nap time
01:56:52 ◼ ► Feeding people or people being cranky or changing poopy diapers. He's always on vacation in Yosemite National Park. I
01:57:01 ◼ ► There's this like cult of California and maybe it's just me like generalizing. I see these tech people doing all this stuff
01:57:10 ◼ ► California people have have such like such beautiful climates and such beautiful landscapes and everything's great
01:57:16 ◼ ► Especially like but tech people who are young and again like, you know, as you said that they don't have you don't have kids
01:57:23 ◼ ► yeah, and like it's like I feel like being on the East Coast keeps me a little bit closer to reality even though I
01:57:47 ◼ ► **Matt Stauffer:** I don't know. I think it's the same as anything else. They're just better
01:57:50 ◼ ► at Instagram than we are. Like, they make it seem like they obviously can't always be on vacation
01:57:55 ◼ ► in Belize or whatever, but they make it seem like they do, because they take a lot of pictures when
01:57:58 ◼ ► they go, and I think they dole them out over time. So as far as you're concerned, like, they're
01:58:01 ◼ ► always in Japan at some noodle place, or they're always in South America somewhere in a jungle,
01:58:06 ◼ ► or they're always in Yosemite, but they're not. They go on vacations, they take a thousand
01:58:10 ◼ ► pictures, and they spread them out over the year. You don't see pictures of them sitting in front
01:58:14 ◼ ► of their MacBook Pro for 50 hours a week for most of the year, which I assume is how they spend most
01:58:19 ◼ ► of their time. But yeah, I do like Always on Vacation California. And I might have mentioned
01:58:24 ◼ ► this on the show, but both my younger brothers live in California now, one outside—or in San
01:58:29 ◼ ► Diego, one outside LA. And now when I talk to them on the phone, generally speaking, every single
01:58:35 ◼ ► time I talk to either of my brothers on the phone, one of them makes a reference to how
01:58:42 ◼ ► Just wait until the earthquakes and the fires come, Casey, and the drought, and the hyenas,
01:59:14 ◼ ► That's what I thought. Uh, one of us, I don't remember who it was, I don't think it was
01:59:20 ◼ ► I know, I almost made the comment, but I figured you guys wouldn't get that reference, and
01:59:26 ◼ ► Yeah, about that, two for two today. Well, maybe. Actually, the books that were not ready