War and Peace
John:
I'm glad Honda's perfect.
John:
Doesn't even take premium fuel.
John:
yeah so this is about bringing the iphones in for the crescent moon problem and the various experiences people had and what the apple genius has asked them to do to their phone and what happened to the phone when it was taken into the back room and all sorts of stuff like that so one theme was some uh people are super angry that we don't know this stuff like it makes me so angry to hear you talk about genius stuff that you don't know about it's like yeah we we don't know and then people you know plenty of people tell us like that's how that's kind of how the show works like
John:
We say, I wonder what does happen in the back room.
John:
And then a bunch of Apple geniuses anonymously email us and tell us what happens in the back room.
John:
So that was one theme.
John:
And by the way, I can relate to that.
John:
Like when you when you hear people talking about stuff on a podcast and you know the answer, but no one on the show knows the answer, you know, because you're an Apple genius or a former Apple genius.
John:
And you hear the people thinking, I wonder if it's this.
John:
I wonder if like we all of us offered like various ideas of what it could be or whatever.
John:
So that can be frustrating, but that's also part of the fun of podcasting.
John:
The second theme that I saw emerge from the very large volume of feedback we got from Apple geniuses, ex-Apple geniuses are people who are Apple genius adjacent.
John:
Like, I don't know.
John:
They were all cagey about what their jobs were and they all wanted to be anonymous for the most part.
John:
was that things are actually slightly different from Apple Store to Apple Store.
John:
We got email from geniuses in different countries, in different states in the United States, and they all describe what their store does.
John:
And there's a commonality.
John:
We'll get to that when we get to the answers.
John:
There is an answer to all of our questions last time.
John:
But some stores were like, our store tends to do this, except occasionally we do that.
John:
Our store always does this and doesn't do it.
John:
Subtle differences in policy that I assume are...
John:
like maybe at the discretion of the store manager or just kind of like what they tend to do.
John:
Other people delving into details of how the geniuses are rated by their managers based on certain metrics that have to do with how they choose to do discretionary things.
John:
Anyway, I was surprised at the variety, at how much things can vary from store to store.
John:
And these are not things that the people writing in
John:
presented as things that might vary the only way we discovered that they vary is by the sheer volume of feedback and you know oh like these five people said they always do this and these four people said they always do something slightly different and all those people are not presenting that as a thing that they think varies they think like all apple stores do this but they actually do vary a surprising amount and that kind of matches up with you know the experience even just that you two had in terms of
John:
uh if i bring it in at the end of the day and the store is going to close maybe they'll give me a replacement phone instead of trying to repair or they'll just tell me to come back the next day or you know or if you you know if you have ios 9 or a beta on it the machine can't replace it so they'll do that like lots of lots of variations from uh from store to store but anyway the we're not really interested in that i'm i'm interested in the variations because i find it interesting that
John:
There is apparently so much discretion from one store to the other.
John:
But the common stuff is what we're going to try to get to the feedback.
John:
So one of you can try summarizing the answers to all of our questions from last week.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let me take a stab at this very quickly.
Casey:
So the general theme seems to be that the reason that a genius will ask you to turn off Find My iPhone, there's a couple of reasons, actually.
Casey:
Number one, it's to prove that that is your phone.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And you haven't stolen the phone and, you know, claimed that something's broken or perhaps something is broken.
Casey:
And you're trying to get a perfectly functional phone out of the deal.
Casey:
So the most obvious answer was we want you to prove that it's indeed yours.
Casey:
Subsequent to that, if it comes that they need to replace the phone, according to the geniuses, if I understood them correctly...
Casey:
They the activation lock is tied in some way, shape or form to find my iPhone.
Casey:
And so if they screw something up or something is just fundamentally broken and they need to give you a new phone, they're going to want to recycle or remanufacture is the word I heard used a lot.
Casey:
Remanufactured the phone that you've just given up.
Casey:
And they can't do that unless find my iPhone is off because they have no back door to this.
John:
um i think that that summary is accurate the most common reason we heard cited was proof of ownership and uh for a reason because apparently people bring in stolen phones and going through this whole thing or like intentionally breaking part of it like opening it up and and disconnecting the home button and bringing in saying oh the home button doesn't work like with stolen phones was apparently a very common thing so that is the the primary reason is you're proving you're on the phone and then the other reasons i'm still a little bit fuzzy on but we got a lot of what you summarized is uh the common answer i think
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So that's the find my iPhone portion.
Casey:
Now, the passcode was interesting.
Casey:
I didn't realize the order of operations that happens once my phone disappeared to get the crescent moon unlocked or excuse me, repaired.
Casey:
So apparently what happens is they go to the back room and they use this little, I don't know, clampy thing that has suction cups on it to peel apart the phone once they've removed the couple of screws that are on the bottom of it.
Casey:
Then they replace the screen and with the screen is the Touch ID sensor and a bunch of other things.
Casey:
I don't remember the list off the top of my head.
Casey:
But the key is then they put it into this big black calibration machine.
Casey:
And they are not allowed, or told anyway, not to give you your phone back unless you pass calibration.
Casey:
And apparently the way you pass calibration is, among other things, they put an app on your phone temporarily that interacts with the calibration machine in order to calibrate the screen and make sure the screen is working.
Casey:
Now, this is important because they can't put this app on your phone or do any of those other things without you having either given them your passcode or just taken off the passcode.
Casey:
So they run this thing through, they run your phone through this calibration machine just to make sure everything's functional.
Casey:
And if it passes calibration, you get your phone back that has a new screen, new touch ID, etc.
Casey:
If it doesn't pass calibration, then they'll just hand you a new phone and say, be on your way.
John:
One person said that we also permit customers to decline giving us the passcode with the expectation that we'll perform this functionality check with the customer.
John:
Some of the geniuses who said this said that they trusted the machine more than like checking the functionality with the people.
John:
I would trust the machine more too, especially for screen calibration type stuff.
John:
It's not clear to me whether that can work with the passcode off or not.
John:
I think there's some feedback related to that in there.
John:
But anyway, you would think that we'd be nailing this down, but there are subtle differences between all the feedback that we got.
John:
And you can't tell the subtle differences are significant or just differences in phrasing or whatever.
John:
But bottom line in the passcode is,
John:
they want to make sure that if they change something about your phone, that all the stuff that's supposed to work still works.
Casey:
And the other thing I just wanted to clarify a little bit is when I said an app with a calibration machine, I may have the details a little wrong about that.
Casey:
I think we had heard talk of a custom ROM or a custom firmware.
Casey:
We've heard a talk from the feedback that it was an app.
Casey:
The point just being that something happens on your phone that interacts with this machine in order to make sure everything works right.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else on the repair things?
Casey:
I don't have anything else.
John:
I feel like all we have done is initiated another torrent of clarifications from geniuses, which is fine.
John:
How about this?
Marco:
Why don't we just say right now we're not going to be talking about this anymore.
Marco:
So please, you don't have to even email us about it.
Marco:
We're done with this topic, please, for the love of God.
John:
Well, I mean, I don't think there's anything more productive to get out of it because we wondered like why they want you to find my iPhone.
John:
And I think we've got a solid answer on that to prove that you own it.
John:
And then the passcode stuff and the other things and when you get a new phone and when you get a replacement and all that other stuff.
John:
I've got enough information to understand what they're doing.
John:
Uh, I, I don't think we implied that there was anything sinister going on.
John:
I think we were just wondering, uh, and I don't think there's anything sinister going on.
John:
So I think we're all satisfied on that front.
John:
Marco still wants the ability to, uh, you know, that there's one person said they have, you know, basically the ability to test everything without, uh, having you unlock your, your,
Casey:
thing with the passcode but anyway uh that's we'll probably get clarification on that i think i probably won't be able to help uh following up you know i totally withdraw my argument just because i don't want to get any more mail about it i'm so done with this topic just well hold on we're not there one quick i just wanted to say thank you to the geniuses that did write in as much as we're joking i i for one and i think i speak for at least john yeah
Casey:
I for one appreciated hearing all of this.
Casey:
And I know a lot of you and I am not trying to be funny.
Casey:
I know a lot of you probably felt like that was a risky thing to write into it to us and share any sort of information.
Casey:
So I speak for all of us, even those who are those of us who are grumbling in saying thank you for what you have already written.
Casey:
But I agree.
Casey:
I think we've got the gist now.
Casey:
So thank you.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Marco, what would you like to talk about?
Marco:
Anything else.
Marco:
So let's quickly, very fast.
Marco:
This is how you do follow-up, guys.
Marco:
Very fast follow-up.
Marco:
Last episode, we talked about the live photos mode on the 6S.
Marco:
I said that it was most likely dumping the entire sensor at 12 megapixels in a very fast burst to make those videos.
Marco:
You can see in John Gruber's review, which is excellent, you should read it, that the resolution is substantially lower than that.
Marco:
It is not dumping it at 12 megapixels for the video.
Marco:
It's basically taking a lower resolution video.
Marco:
It's like 1440 by something.
Marco:
And it's one of those things like it looks fine on the phone.
Marco:
I wouldn't even say it looks good on the phone.
Marco:
It looks fine on the phone.
Marco:
On any more inspection than that, any larger viewing or any close viewing, it does not look very good.
Marco:
But it looks good enough on the phone.
John:
Does it look good enough on the phone?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It is a very weird feature.
Marco:
I think it's cool.
Marco:
I think it's an interesting idea.
Marco:
But the quality is, you know, not amazing.
Marco:
And, you know, it's not going to be for preserving things in high def.
Marco:
It's going to be for like a ha-ha funny look at this moment surrounding kind of things.
Marco:
If you want to actually have video of something, just shoot video.
Marco:
It looks way better when it's in video mode.
Casey:
One way or another, I am really, really excited and amped to see this because I really think this could be extremely cool.
Casey:
A lot of times when I'm taking pictures with either my phone or my big camera, I really wish I had either context or even just a crappy still from a half second before I actually hit the shutter.
Casey:
And I'm really, really excited to see this.
Casey:
I think it should be really cool.
Casey:
Now, it may end up that I get my iPhone 6S, which, by the way, is in Louisville.
Casey:
Not that I've been looking.
Casey:
I will get my iPhone 6S, try it, and think it's crap.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I'm really excited for it.
Casey:
And it just occurred to me, I am not saying that just because I want to sound enthusiastic about something.
Casey:
I genuinely am enthusiastic and excited about this.
Marco:
Yeah, for me, I'm most excited, reading all these reviews and everything, I'm most excited about 3D Touch, honestly.
Marco:
And also the performance increase was way bigger than I expected.
Casey:
Yeah, my goodness.
Casey:
I feel like they talked about it, but I don't know.
Marco:
When you see it in the keynote or special event... Well, I mean, every year they say, now it's even, you know, it's 20% faster, 80% faster.
Marco:
But, you know, usually a lot of times they cherry pick that metric to be like the maximum.
Marco:
And in reality, it's maybe only 30% faster, which is still great for one year of...
Marco:
semiconductor advancement uh especially compared to the the world of pcs and macs but uh this is this is one of those years where you know some years it makes a bigger jump than others and this is one of those years where it's a it's an it's a noteworthy big jump our first sponsor this week is squarespace squarespace is the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website portfolio or online store for a free trial and 10 off visit squarespace.com and enter offer code atp at checkout
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Marco:
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Casey:
So, big week, Marco?
Marco:
Yeah, you know what?
Marco:
We might as well go right to the main controversy of the week.
Marco:
The colored activity rings.
Casey:
I don't get why that's such a big friggin' deal.
Casey:
Like, I don't like that it's color, but I seriously am like, whatever.
Casey:
But man, the internet's upset.
John:
Is it only color on the modular face?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Is it simple or the other one that it's color as well?
Marco:
It's on Utility where it's color.
Casey:
That's the one.
Marco:
Yeah, and that's what everyone's mad about because Utility, which is the face I use and I have the activity ring on it, Utility was previously a very kind of restrained design.
Marco:
It really...
Marco:
You could have called it simple.
Marco:
It is a very simple design if you don't crap it up with a bunch of stuff.
Marco:
It is a very good design.
Marco:
And many people are very upset about the activity rings now being these bright colors that match their colors in the activity app rather than the previous monochrome version.
John:
I've got to say the upgrade experience to watchOS, it's watchOS 2, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I was very confused by it because, first of all, I tried to do it at work.
John:
And that didn't work because the watch wants to be connected to the charger.
John:
And, of course, I don't have my watch charger work.
John:
So, fine.
John:
I wait until I get home and do it.
John:
But I did, like, the phone part of it then where it downloads the OS, right?
John:
I get home and I put my watch on the charger.
John:
uh and i let it do the update and it goes long and then i come back later it looks like it's all done and i pick up my phone in the watch app and i'm not sure if it's done so i go back into like the updates thing or whatever and it says everything is up to date 1.0.1 you've got 1.0.1 all good i'm like
John:
what do you mean 1.0.1 why is it it says there's no updates and i'm all up to date and the version is 1.0.1 is is that talking about the version of the apple watch app on the i don't know i was super confused anyway all i did was pick up my watch and turn the dial and see time travel go and basically say
John:
oh there you go uh it's installed so i do have watch os too but i was confused by that but what is that if you did it too did you discover what the 1.0.1 is referring to well that was the previous version it's just a bug in the watch app which it wouldn't be the first one all right
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
I mean, I, again, I don't like the colors on the activity rings on the, which one did you say it was?
Casey:
Utility.
Casey:
Utility.
Casey:
I keep wanting to say simple.
Marco:
I mean, I looked at it too and I was, you know, like, because I use utility and I thought, you know, this, this really is now a much less elegant looking face than it was before.
Marco:
However, I also do use the activity rings pretty heavily.
Marco:
It's one of the most common reasons I look at my watch face.
Marco:
And so when I first saw it, I thought, ah, what a terrible mistake.
Marco:
Those are so garish.
Marco:
And they are.
Marco:
But then I went for a dog walk.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
On the dog walk, usually I would open the watch or I would look at the watch.
Marco:
It would wake up.
Marco:
And usually I would tap the activity rings in the corner to launch the full activity app to check how I was doing in that app.
Marco:
Because the rings on the watch face either wouldn't have updated yet or, you know, it would be kind of hard to see when I was in motion on this big walk and these little tiny rings.
Marco:
And now, with the colors, it is easier to see how I'm doing.
Marco:
Because when I'm doing a big walk or something, one of the rings can get ahead of the others, and sometimes you can't quite tell whether it's the orange one or the green one.
Marco:
And so you've got to look more closely to really know.
Marco:
And now, with these new colors, it makes it very clear.
Marco:
So what I find now is that I don't have to launch the Activity app anymore.
Marco:
I can just glance at it with the colors, and I can see...
Marco:
how i'm doing with the uh with the green ring so it actually works for me and i i really hate to say that because i really don't like the way it looks but it does work better for me anything else going on this week for anyone marco i don't think so i mean i'm working on some overcast upgrades and are we really not going to talk about this because i don't carry the way but we can talk about it we can talk about it we're going to okay it will happen
Casey:
Okay, so Peace, your content blocker that we talked about last episode, it became extremely popular.
Casey:
You had a change of heart.
Casey:
You pulled it, and the internet got really, really upset about it.
Casey:
I will start by saying I think it's kind of ridiculous how upset the internet got about it.
Casey:
It bothered me quite a lot, and I really have nothing to do with this really at all.
Casey:
But I got bothered by it because I feel like
Casey:
The Internet wholly and entirely overreacted over a decision that was not easy for you to make and quite literally cost you a ton of money.
John:
Well, it didn't cost them any money in the end.
John:
Right.
John:
It cost them time.
John:
Obviously, he spent all his time making this app and then, you know, it was all for nothing.
Casey:
Maybe cost is a poor choice of words.
Marco:
What I mean to say is— I lost money on the icons and the SSL cert, the domain name.
John:
All right, so here's something I didn't know until this all went around that got clarified for me by asking questions about it.
John:
My previous understanding about how refunds worked was that if someone bought an application for a dollar—
John:
and apple issued them a refund they would still want 30 cents from the person who made the app in other words if every single person who bought your application asked for a refund you would still have to pay apple 30 of the total revenue from your application apparently that changed some point in the recent past marco do you know like an exact date i
Marco:
So people have said that over the years.
Marco:
The thing is with... I mean, it's probably different on the Mac App Store where the prices are usually a lot higher.
Marco:
On iOS, though, the number of refunds that happen typically on iOS is usually so low.
Marco:
I mean, most days I get... From Overcast, I'll get whatever thousand or hundred or tens of buys.
Marco:
And then you'll have one or zero or two refunds.
Marco:
It'll be a massive difference.
Marco:
And so it's the kind of thing that almost all iOS developers never have to think about.
Marco:
Therefore, I've never looked into it.
Marco:
And therefore, I don't know if that was ever true.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, the new system, as Marco can confirm, is when Apple issues a refund, Marco doesn't owe Apple any money for that particular purchase.
John:
Like all the money goes back to the person who paid for the application.
John:
And that's that.
John:
So in theory, and as we'll find out in practice, if, for example, every single copy of an application that was purchased was completely refunded,
John:
uh the developer gets zero dollars and everyone who bought it gets the exact amount that they paid back so it's complete clean slate ignoring marco paying for the development of the application and ssl certificates and icons and all that other stuff or whatever so that is the current situation i'm happy to hear that because i remember hearing back in the old days about uh
John:
refunds saying oh that's you know that's pretty uh pretty harsh that apple still demands the 30 percent whether that was a an intentional policy or a side effect of the system that they had or whatever uh it's usually not a big deal because refunds are infrequent but in a strange situation like we had here where many applications were purchased and all refunded that could have ended up being even more costly but it's it's nice uh that that wasn't the case
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
If it becomes the case, believe me, I will notice and I will let you know.
John:
All right.
John:
So the other thing most people don't understand about and you can't really blame them.
John:
Developers know this.
John:
Nerds who know developers know this.
John:
But regular customers, why would they even have any need to know this?
John:
Developers can't issue refunds.
John:
They just can't.
John:
Like if you sell an application on the App Store and someone asks you for a refund, you literally cannot give it to them.
John:
There is nothing you can do.
John:
There's no button you can press to say, here's your money back.
John:
Only Apple can issue refunds.
John:
That's stupid.
John:
And it has been the case forever.
John:
And, you know, every time stuff like this comes up, we all reflect once again about how Apple owns the customer and the developer doesn't.
John:
We don't know the customers' names.
John:
We don't know the customers.
John:
You know, the people who sell applications can't respond to customers' comments, don't know who they are.
John:
In some respects, that's good.
John:
It's like, oh, Apple is isolating you, keeping your privacy, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But on the other hand, developers cannot issue refunds.
John:
So a lot of the people who are angry...
John:
which justifiably is like i bought an application for a whole three dollars and i'm really mad about it anyway and it's obviously not going to be supported because it was pulled and the developer won't give me a refund which is true but he can't give you a refund he literally cannot i'm sure oh i don't know i asked marco this is the first question for marco if there was a big button that you could have pressed to refund everybody when you decided to pull the app would you have pressed it
Marco:
maybe i would have i would have definitely considered it i mean one of the weird things about the way this was done uh so and i'll get into why i pulled the app you know once we get off this topic i will actually give people what they're looking for um which unfortunately i already did and it's it's a really it's a really boring story the story is what i wrote but anyway uh i'll elaborate if you want uh but no so to refunds for a second um you are right so far the way you said it we don't i mean
John:
i wouldn't even gotten them you know assuming that the sales had gone through and had not been refunded i wouldn't even have the money until like a month and a half from now yeah but like if there was a way in apple system to basically say oh give all that money back like the customers gave the money to apple and if you could push a button that made apple give the money back to them like it would never appear in any of your statements it would be like oh plus this amount oh minus this amount and then your statement a month and a half from now would be like zero dollars
Marco:
right right i mean if so if they gave me the control uh then i would have really considered doing that um it does really suck that i am actually now losing money on this on this project rather than making some money but i also it was it was a weird dilemma of like do i keep
Marco:
all or any of this money that i you know whoever doesn't claim a refund do i keep any of and then apple made this made this decision for me um they sent me an email like i got an email from itunes connect um whenever it was yesterday afternoon whatever day it was i've lost track of all meaning of days
Marco:
But whenever it was, they sent me an email saying, because you pulled your app, we are refunding all the customers.
Marco:
And it almost looked like a form email.
Marco:
You could tell that it was somebody filled in like three words in it.
Marco:
But they decided to do that, most likely because I was directing over 10,000 people to their refund form.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
that's like i was seeing over the last couple of days there there were i think i think at my last count it was something like 13 or 15 000 people who had been issued refunds through the regular process and what that process is involves doing some kind of like live chat agent thing with somebody at itunes so this was uh i cost apple money too
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I mean, I can't imagine the load that put on them.
Marco:
And I was not very happy about that either.
Marco:
But I didn't have much of a choice.
Marco:
I mean, my original choice would have been don't launch this app.
Marco:
But I messed up.
Marco:
And I'll get to why.
Marco:
But I messed up.
Marco:
Simple as that.
Marco:
So I decided, given the situation I'm in where I've already done that mistake, how do I resolve this mistake in the best way possible?
Marco:
And had I been given the option to issue everybody bulk refunds, I probably...
Marco:
probably would have done it i can't say definitely yes i would have because i don't it was such a rush i don't even know i honestly don't know but i i considered and i had asked some some friends i'd asked some friends like is this possible to like bulk cancel all these all these things and bulk refund them
Marco:
And everyone I asked, I asked a handful of people and they all said, I don't think that's possible.
Marco:
Because most of the time, the way the iTunes store works is this total black box.
Marco:
And it's all like an Eddie Cue's team.
Marco:
And Eddie Cue's team has enough to do.
Marco:
If there's one department within Apple that has way too much on their plate, it's Eddie Cue's department.
Marco:
And so I thought, especially in regards to the iTunes store, this is, you know, this this old infrastructure that is, you know, often does not work incredibly well with things like iTunes Connect errors and stuff like that.
Marco:
It's like the idea of asking them to make an exception for you sounds so ridiculous to almost anybody who's involved in this because they know like, you know, asking them to just make the basic functionality work every day is enough work for them.
Marco:
Like that's that's hard enough.
Marco:
Anyway, so I was not given the option to bulk refund everybody, but I am kind of glad it happened because it resolved a lot of problems.
Marco:
Even though it was weird that they didn't ask first, but I'm not surprised.
Marco:
And it is kind of nice that I didn't have a choice in the matter because then I didn't have to make that choice.
John:
So related to that, and part of the reason why someone who purchased the application would be annoyed, I mean, there's a lot of reasons.
John:
So if you purchase it, since Marco can't issue you a refund, and since he had no way to do a bulk refund, what you were doing was directing people, please go request a refund.
John:
Because it's the only way you're going to get one.
John:
You have to ask Apple.
John:
And that process is annoying.
John:
And it's like, oh, you know, buying the app is easy.
John:
You just tap a button on your phone.
John:
Getting a refund seems like a hassle.
John:
I don't know how to do it.
John:
Now I've got to, like, look on Apple's site.
John:
How do I do refunds?
John:
Mark will link you to the form.
John:
Do I have to fill this out?
John:
Do I have to go to the chat thing?
John:
It's a hassle.
John:
So that's inconvenient.
John:
If you want your $3 back, it's inconvenient.
John:
But why would you want your $3 back?
John:
Well, what people are basically doing is, like, the app is pulled.
John:
Obviously, there will be no further development of the app.
John:
But the question is, and a lot of people have this question, is,
John:
will the application continue to work on you know i i bought it i installed it it's on my phone marco pulls it from the store which means no new people can buy it what does it mean about the copy of peace that is on my phone right now will it continue to work if i get a refund will it continue to work or will it be deleted from my phone if i don't ask for a refund how long will peace work before it just breaks entirely
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So the answer is, as far as I know, it doesn't affect the logical mark on your account that says you bought it.
Marco:
So you are still able to have it, run it.
Marco:
I think you're able to restore it.
Marco:
The way I deleted it was I didn't actually delete the entry out of iTunes Connect.
Marco:
I just set the availability date to be as far into the future as it would let me.
Marco:
I don't know the fine details of how that works, and so I'm not going to promise anything there.
Marco:
But I think it should allow restores and everything.
Marco:
Anyway, as for it functioning, once you have it installed, it will continue to function...
Marco:
until something in ios makes it stop working uh it will though stop getting updates from ghostery sometime in the future right now it is still able to get updates um these are going to be somewhat costly for me to run if a lot of people keep the app installed so i might stop that i'm going to stop that eventually because now that everybody has gotten a refund on it
Marco:
that also makes it easier for me to say, well, you know what?
Marco:
In a few months, if I decide to shut down the updater and stop paying for all that bandwidth and hosting for that operation, then I feel okay doing that then.
Marco:
So I'm going to shut it down at some point, but I haven't yet.
Marco:
And when that happens, the app background updates to get new definitions from my server.
Marco:
So eventually it'll become less effective over time.
Marco:
as new ad servers and new trackers start existing on the web that it doesn't know about.
Marco:
So that's how it will eventually break.
Marco:
Or some iOS update comes out and says, well, now you have to be on our new 128-bit processor by this date, and if you're not, we're going to cut you out of the store.
Marco:
As far as I know, I don't think they've done any permanent breaking changes that would, say, rule out an iOS 4 app from still running today.
Marco:
I don't think that's the case.
Marco:
All that is a very long way of saying if you want to keep piece installed and if for whatever reason Apple does not remove it off your phone and it's any kind of like botched restore operation or weird thing like that, as far as I know, it should continue to work for a long time.
Casey:
I think John and I both have some more questions for you about this, but let's talk about something that's awesome.
Marco:
Sure.
Marco:
Our second sponsor this week is Igloo.
Marco:
Go to igloosoftware.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Igloo is an intranet you will actually like.
Marco:
Now, anyone that's worked in a corporate environment knows how painful intranets usually are.
Marco:
The content can be stale.
Marco:
The interface is usually very hideous and very hard to use.
Marco:
And you usually can't access it on your phone or the layout breaks in your phone, so you can't really do much or it's a pain in the butt to use.
Marco:
Igloo fixes all that.
Marco:
Igloo is an intranet you will actually like because it is designed with modern technology for modern devices for the user in mind.
Marco:
Now, Igloo gives you flexibility to get your work done, how you want, where you want, and on whatever device you want.
Marco:
It is truly built for 2015, not 1997.
Marco:
Like, unfortunately, too many intranets.
Marco:
with igloo intranets you can share news you can organize files coordinate calendars and manage projects all in one place everything can be social with comments like buttons lots of modern conveniences like that anybody can add content based on their permissions with drag and drop widgets and what you see is what you get editor
Marco:
and igloo makes use of fully responsive web design so this looks fantastic on all of your devices they have so many advanced features for things like document editing annotation um you know red management tracking who's red what it is really advanced stuff check it out and one of the great things about igloo it is free for up to 10 people and there's also there's a free trial for even more than 10 if you have more than 10 if you have 10 or fewer people it's free forever
Marco:
So really give this a shot.
Marco:
And if you have more than 10 people, start with a free trial, and it's very reasonably priced after that.
Marco:
Check it out, igloosoftware.com slash ATP for your free trial.
Marco:
Get started today.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Igloo, the intranet you will actually like.
Casey:
John, any other questions immediately about peace?
Casey:
yeah we're gonna get into the the good stuff we've just covered let me let me get into the why let me let me i'll tell you i'll tell you the story of how this came to be uh is it does that is that good well can we just cover a couple of something right off the bat can we just admit that it was just a a complete glorified well executed money grab that's that's absolutely what happened right the most the most unsuccessful money grab in the history of
Marco:
Yeah, I'm really bad at money grabs, apparently.
Marco:
Yeah, so anyway... No, what actually happened was Apple paid me off.
Marco:
That was my best... The best theory I heard was that Apple paid me off to pull the app.
Marco:
Now, Apple, who made this content-blocking API, who clearly wanted people to use it for ad and tracking blockers... They just wanted you to block pictures of cats, Marco.
Marco:
Who... I was also making them a lot of money...
Marco:
Because they're 30%.
Marco:
30% is a lot.
Marco:
So that, I think, by far was my favorite theory.
Marco:
Of course, Apple paid me off to take this down.
Marco:
For what, exactly?
Marco:
To make them lose money and go against all their strategy goals?
Marco:
Yeah, that makes sense.
Marco:
No, I mean, the fact is, no one paid me anything.
Marco:
I'm now losing money on this because all the refunds got issued.
Marco:
So I'm going to lose a few thousand dollars on it.
Marco:
But, oh well, that's the risk I took.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
what happened was over the summer so so we we had the iowa we had the content blocker announcement at wbdc and in fact john and i are actually in the session video there's there's one of the one of the shots it pans over to the audience and there's a there's a clip of me and john i think we're clapping at one of the things that was said or whatever so that's how i knew you're making a content blocker it's like marco's in this session that i go to guess he's making a content blocker didn't want to say anything
Marco:
And I hadn't decided right then whether I was going to do it or not, but I knew right then it was going to be a big deal and a big market, and I wanted to use one.
Marco:
And that is usually a pretty good recipe for me to want to make an app.
Marco:
And the reality is I also want to keep doing Overcast as my primary app.
Marco:
And so I wasn't going to tackle a new app that I thought was going to be a massive time sink.
Marco:
And so content blockers are so easy to make.
Marco:
I mean, really, the one I made that briefly did very, very well, and then the ones that are there now, this is probably like the most money for the least effort that has ever been possible in the App Store.
Marco:
And soon enough, it'll be diluted by tons and tons.
Marco:
But I thought on day one, there would be way more in the market than there were.
John:
Yeah, I couldn't make one.
John:
That's how easy it is.
John:
Because it's like one API that if you go to the session, you're like, this is how it works.
John:
And then it's just down to the data, right?
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
And so the data is, yeah, the code part of it is ridiculous.
Marco:
People asking me to open source it, you don't understand how little code there is here.
Marco:
It's incredible, especially because the extensions that I added, all they do is bring up Safari view controller.
Marco:
It's like, I don't even write the mini browser.
Marco:
There is so little code in the app.
Marco:
anybody can make these the only limitation is what the heck you use for the data for the rules of what to block that is the only hard part and the fact is there's tons of public of publicly available lists and databases that you can use and you can even like i i'm assuming this is the case and i expected to see more of these i haven't really looked into uh content blockers that deeply but
John:
Couldn't you have it so that someone enters a URL from which to pull data in a format that you specify?
John:
The app could come with no data and say, well, this is a content blocker, and it works like this, and it expects its data to be in this format.
John:
So type a URL here of a file that I can pull that will be in that format, and I will parse it, and that will be your content blocker.
John:
And maybe you'd have a default one that pulls a content blocker that blocks...
John:
two big ad networks or something like that.
John:
Isn't that something you could do as well?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, the data you have to give them is just a list of rules expressed in JSON.
Marco:
And so you can get that JSON from anywhere.
Marco:
You can include it in the app.
Marco:
You can build it on demand the way I was doing it so you'd have dynamic rules.
John:
uh it doesn't matter you can get it from anywhere it doesn't matter so and you can make up your own format there's just like type a bunch of host names if you want to make like a super simple one i'm actually surprised more people didn't do that because that is really the least amount of work you can do you make like a trivial application that uses one api and maybe even you go the extra mile like marco didn't do the little extensions to bring up the safari view controller
Marco:
um and i should i should just say right now i said there's not a lot of code in here a lot of people have said the right thing to do is for me to open source it a i disagree that's i'm not obligated to open source it b um i my arrangement with ghostry is that i'm just giving it to them and they can do whatever they want with it so it's it's no longer mine um and that's fine the fact is if you want to reproduce this it is not a lot of work to to to make another app like this it really is very very easy um
John:
the only hard part is the data and that is that is very hard and then you have to pay someone to make the icons or you could shamelessly copy marco's icons i don't copy mine no go to louis mantia i'm just saying like what the what the what the million ripoff applications the same kind of applications that put like pictures of mario into their games and stuff like they'll just copy it exactly
Marco:
Yeah, if you want to get icons made, go to Parakeet.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
I'll put the link in the show notes because they're awesome.
Marco:
They do great work.
Marco:
You can copy my design or don't copy my design.
Marco:
Anyway, so... So the thing is, all summer I was thinking, you know, I should really do this because I have like... A, it seems like there will be a market.
Marco:
Now, again, I was assuming from the beginning that it would be a very crowded market right from day one and...
Marco:
that somebody like Adblock Plus, like some well-known brand in ad blocking that had way more exposure and visibility and user base than I could ever muster, that they would be there on day one and would just own the whole market.
John:
And why do you think they don't?
John:
Are they just not paying attention to WWDC?
John:
Like, just not, like...
John:
Because we all knew content blockers were going to be a big thing.
John:
But maybe that gets lost in the WWDC news.
John:
You would think?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I agree with you.
John:
I totally thought that on day one of the store, there would be a million content blockers.
John:
Because they are so easy to make.
John:
And there are so many places where you can get lists from.
John:
And you can do the thing, like I said, and not even include lists.
John:
And I...
John:
And when I found out you were making one, I'm like, well, that's pretty good because in the sort of even if there are tons of them coming out because they're easy to make, how do you get yourself heard above the noise?
John:
And people who are going to install iOS 9 on day one, like, you know, and who are into who know that there are content blockers and who are going to be looking for ones on day one.
John:
you have better access to them than a lot of other things maybe even better access to those people than a big company like the thing that makes that block plus because you travel in mac nerd circles and mac nerds read your blog and listen to your podcast or whatever so uh if your goal is to try to sell a lot of content blockers being there on day one with the content blocker with a name that people recognize uh
John:
was a good play and you know and it was it turns out uh that you know there was a good play a lot of people bought it you ended up being number one uh paid app in the app store and uh there weren't a lot of other ones too and i don't quite understand why either other than maybe they were just everyone else was asleep at the switch
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, like, like, at the loop, they tried to they were publishing this list that was that was being updated.
Marco:
And even at like, on Longstay, there were only something like six entries on it.
Marco:
And only a hand only like two or three of them were really getting any traction on the charts.
Marco:
I mean, I was really surprised by how few there were anyway.
Marco:
And by the way, going back, I think one of the reasons why the big companies like AdBlock Plus didn't go there or haven't gone there yet is because iOS content blockers are very, very limited.
Marco:
They don't have access to what's being browsed.
Marco:
All you do is you provide a list of rules and regular expressions to say block things that match this.
Marco:
But your code is not being called
Marco:
on every page load, or it's not being notified on what's being loaded.
Marco:
And you can't do things like inject your own scripts, do your own tracking from your site.
Marco:
Like, you have no access to the way things are.
Marco:
And these big companies, like AdVlog+, like Ghostery,
Marco:
The business arm of those companies usually needs some kind of access or analytics or tracking, humorously, of what you're browsing and what things are being included on this page, what ads are being shown, what trackers are being loaded.
Marco:
almost all these big companies have arrangements like that in some way, shape, or form.
Marco:
Some of them are kind of questionable.
Marco:
I think Ghostories is pretty safe.
Marco:
The way it works, I explain that in the post.
Marco:
Their business model, I don't think, is something to be concerned about.
Marco:
The whole acceptable ads thing on AppLock Plus is, I think, a little squishier.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
The fact is, that, I think, is why these big companies weren't there on day one.
John:
Now that I think about it, that actually kind of makes sense because
John:
uh like i understand that their business model doesn't work on it but you're like oh well why wouldn't they just do exactly what you did and sell an app for three dollars and make a whole bunch of money and i think the answer is probably that even though it's a lot of money for a one person developer for a big company they're like well paid apps
John:
They can make a little money in a burst and then that's it.
John:
There's no recurring revenue and we can't support our main business model.
John:
So basically they're passing up what they consider to be chump change, where what is significant to one person.
John:
I don't know how many people work for these bigger companies, but presumably a lot more than one person like that.
John:
It just didn't seem worth it to them.
John:
So that might explain why the really big companies didn't do it.
John:
They want, you know, they want huge numbers.
John:
They don't want like something that would be significant to an individual.
John:
Uh, and especially if it's not recurring.
John:
Uh, and, but then it's like, why didn't someone else, uh, another single person, uh, developer just give it a shot?
John:
Like there were so few of them that when people were making lists on iOS nine launch day, like here are all the iOS nine content blockers.
John:
there was two things on the list and yours wasn't even included because of the five hour delay and getting it on the store it was like crystal purity purify purify yeah one blocker block blocker with an r yeah yeah i saw they started trickling in but to be able to have them in a list that fits on a single screen man not a lot of people made content blockers
Marco:
right so that's that was surprise number one was that there were so few surprise number two was that mine topped the chart at least the paid chart um crystal was free on day one and got i think the guy said it was like a hundred thousand installations and then he he made it paid on day two um and i think now it's number one but anyway it doesn't matter
John:
um and and you're right i mean the kind of money that was coming in it's great for an individual if you have a big staff it's questionable you know if it's worth going against your business interests and then you'd have to support that like say say you're a big well-known company it's like oh i make my little burst of money from it and maybe a little bit trickles in from it but it's not significant to my bottom line and then i have to continue to like pay some contractor to make sure the app continues to work and
Marco:
make sure whatever server is serving the data file that gets updated like it just might seem like a hassle to the big companies exactly so anyway going through the summer as i'm as i'm thinking about building this and i i really didn't spend a lot of time on it uh most of the summer was spent thinking about how to do it and i i formed the idea of you know the structure of the app these extensions it would have you know how that would work and everything and that'd be great
Marco:
I wasn't really writing a lot of code until kind of the middle of the summer when I started playing with the various block lists that exist out there.
Marco:
And in various host files, I started emailing the people who maintain them, asking if I could license them for use in a paid app, because most of them are for non-commercial use only, so you have to get a separate license.
Marco:
So I started that kind of negotiation and discussions.
Marco:
But the original version of it that I made, that I was running for at least a few weeks over the summer on my own phone,
Marco:
It was much simpler.
Marco:
All it did was block all third-party JavaScript.
Marco:
That actually works surprisingly well.
Marco:
One rule, just block all third-party JavaScript.
Marco:
I'm not entirely sure I would recommend that people do this, but if you're willing to tolerate a lot of things being broken...
Marco:
And you're willing to go through the process of making the exception or whitelisting or opening up without content blockers.
Marco:
If you're willing to go through that process a lot, that gets you most of the way there.
Marco:
I would say just blocking all third-party JavaScript gets you 80% of the way there.
Marco:
And that's really, it's kind of sad how much that gets you there.
Marco:
And all these big databases and everything, their strengths are mainly in getting it more to the point where it blocks the ad without making anything break or making very few things break.
Marco:
But if you just want to block all the ads and occasionally have to open something up in the unrestricted view, just block all JavaScript.
Marco:
That works fine.
Marco:
And so all summer, I was doing that.
Marco:
And the reason this problem attracted me in the first place, again, was because I knew there was going to be a market for it.
Marco:
I wanted to use it.
Marco:
And I had the idea of how to do it my way.
Marco:
And I thought, I did think at the time, you know, I wonder if I'm going to get in trouble for making an ad blocker.
Marco:
Like, I wonder if people are going to get mad at me if I make an ad blocker.
Marco:
I did think about that.
Marco:
But in the excitement of solving this problem in a way that I thought was very good.
Marco:
Like, I was very proud of this work.
Marco:
In the process of ramping up and seeing how it turned out, seeing how good it was on my phone, even with just that JavaScript rule, I got lost.
Marco:
The idea of, I wonder what people are going to think and if anybody's going to be mad about this, that got pushed to the back of my head because I was so driven by and happy about how nicely the app was turning out.
Marco:
I was focused on totally the wrong things.
Marco:
I was focused on...
Marco:
I'm very proud of this nice app I made that is making me very happy on my phone.
Marco:
And I sent it to some friends later on, and it was making them very happy.
Marco:
So I was so caught up in that that I didn't go back and rethink, like, you know, maybe I should do this.
Marco:
And then what happened was, in an effort to try to make it better, because at first, again, I said running it for me with just the no third-party JavaScript rule, that worked okay.
Marco:
But I wasn't necessarily sure that that was going to be a good enough product to attach my name to.
Marco:
Because it's like, you know, this is really great if you're a nerd and you don't care about reloading a lot of things a couple times to make them work properly.
Marco:
So that's when I started looking at licensing one of these other databases and
Marco:
I couldn't find a good one until I tried Ghosteries.
Marco:
And then I tried that.
Marco:
It was amazing.
Marco:
So I contacted them.
Marco:
I didn't think they would even say yes.
Marco:
And then they did say yes.
Marco:
And it turns out they're actually really nice and easy to work with and really fast to get things together, which I was not expecting any of these things from a company as big as them.
Marco:
But they were really, really easy and nice to work with.
Marco:
So I work with them, and we met.
Marco:
Their office is right here in New York, so we met in person.
Marco:
We arranged, and we did the whole database, the contract, everything else.
Marco:
So then my mind, for those last few weeks before the launch, as this was all getting in place, my mind was all about
Marco:
that and about like okay now like we're on this train this has inertia we're going this is going to happen like once i sign that contract i'm like this is going to happen and i never went back to reevaluate should i do this do i want to do i want to be the person who owns the ad blocker do i want to be in charge of an ad blocker
Marco:
That I stopped evaluating that once I got on this train of like, you know, this app is really good.
Marco:
And now I have someone else's data in it and a deal with them to keep going with it.
Marco:
And it's even better with their data.
Marco:
I was so excited about how good the app was.
Marco:
I never went back and rethought that initial decision to even make it in the first place.
Marco:
Also, honestly, I made the same mistakes with the magazine.
Marco:
That was a much less interesting story.
Marco:
But when I made the magazine, I was so tied up with the idea of making this cool magazine app that looked really nice and worked well and was way better than all of their newsstand apps that I forgot to really, truly evaluate what it would be like to have to publish an issue of a magazine every two weeks indefinitely.
Marco:
And that's a lot of work.
Marco:
And it's really hard to make the economics work.
Marco:
And I kind of brushed those aside because I wanted to make this cool app.
Marco:
And so I made the same mistake here, just with different consequences, different downsides, where I was so enthralled with the app, with the technical side of it, that I didn't adequately think about... So I didn't think ahead to be like, all right, in six months, do I want to be spending half or more of my time being the guy who runs this big ad blocker?
John:
casey this is where you jump in with the jurassic park quote that you have off the top of your head i do marco do you have it no the chat room will have it in about seven seconds continue that he spared no expense no that's good though right movie all right well sorry i've got nothing chat rooms got it marco is so preoccupied about whether or not he could make an app they didn't stop to think whether he should
John:
right exactly and or rather i stopped really early on to think and then i was like well let me try it so when you when you thought about it before you got into like the whole i'm in you know i'm making deals with ghostry i'm happy with the app when you thought about before that before before all of that you said i'm gonna make a content blocker what did you what was your thinking like because you you you got you gave yourself the green light you thought about it or very early on before you decided you're even gonna do this and you said you know what i am gonna do it was it
John:
based mostly on the fact that you wanted to run one uh this is before anyone had run one you hadn't made one they weren't they didn't exist but you're like i want to run one that is that why you're making you know like take us back to that thinking before you got caught up in sort of the momentum of making the app
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I mean, I absolutely want to run one.
Marco:
As soon as I had the very early prototype of the app on my phone with the just no throughput of JavaScript rule, as soon as I had that on my phone and saw the massive difference it made in browsing speed, and also, I really do object to tons of web advertising and tracking.
Marco:
I think what the web publishing world has done...
Marco:
And I blame the publishers.
Marco:
A lot of people, you know, I don't want to get too far into this because if you want to hear more about why this debate is so complicated, this week's episode of Back to Work is really good on that topic.
Marco:
Merlin and Dan talked at length about this whole thing and covered a lot of angles.
Marco:
Because it really is a very complex problem.
Marco:
It is not a simple yes-no kind of thing.
Marco:
They covered a lot of it.
Marco:
But just briefly, I do want to make clear, I'm going to still use an ad blocker.
Marco:
And I'm still going to advocate that people block things that they don't think are acceptable.
Marco:
And what changed in my mind and what really started bothering me is that I don't want to be the person in charge of making this decision for everybody.
Marco:
I don't want to be the enabler, necessarily.
Marco:
I don't want to be the arbiter of what is good and what is bad.
Marco:
Because the problem is, you know, you say block... First of all, I want to clear up right up front the idea of, well, I just want to block tracking, but not ads.
Marco:
that's BS.
Marco:
Because ads are tracking.
Marco:
Like, you can't... While this is... While there are very, very few ads... Like, the deck recently published their new privacy policy where they explicitly say, we will not do any tracking from the deck.
Marco:
We're just serving these static images or whatever.
Marco:
But that is really... There are almost no advertising networks that will claim that, that will guarantee that, and that actually do that.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
The fact is, if you are saying, I want to block tracking but not ads, that's not really an enforceable thing.
Marco:
In order to block almost any tracking, you have to block almost all ads.
Marco:
It's simple as that.
Marco:
You have to block ads to block tracking.
Marco:
Furthermore...
Marco:
If you really want to block more tracking, you also have to block things like social embeds because Facebook and Twitter and Google Plus, all these things, Amazon, all these links, these things that are embedded in people's sites, plus one this on Facebook, thumbs up this on Twitter, whatever.
Marco:
I know those are backwards.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
All those things are also tracking because the social companies are some of the biggest tracking companies in the world.
Marco:
So you also have to block social embeds.
Marco:
And what about embedded YouTube videos?
Marco:
Google's tracking those.
Marco:
If you really want to block tracking, there's a lot you have to block.
Marco:
So the fact is, this is very, very complicated.
Marco:
It's a very much a gray area, but you can't have it both ways.
Marco:
If you say you object to being tracked, or you say you object to bad ads, or you try to whittle it down and say, well...
Marco:
I want to block ads, but not yours.
Marco:
Yours are good.
Marco:
It becomes very, very hard to actually do that, to actually manage that, because usually you're asking for something that isn't possible, or you're asking for a distinction that doesn't really exist.
John:
Had you thought about this angle at all before embarking on creating the application?
John:
As in, like, when I make this application...
John:
When I use it, you know, I'll set it up so I like how it works, but then I will sort of de facto be, even if it's just by the defaults that I include in the application, be deciding what everyone who uses my application sees on the web, and therefore I am sort of like the...
John:
The linchpin of some subset of the number of iOS users like Marco controls whether this group of users sees this kind of ad on this site because he sets the default for his application that happens to be popular.
John:
Had you thought about that at all or had it not entered your mind?
John:
Or if you did think about it, how did you think that was going to shake out?
Marco:
I really didn't think that much about these distinctions.
Marco:
The only thing I thought of when I was making the app was, Ghostory's data is tagged.
Marco:
This is one of the reasons why Ghostory's database is so good.
Marco:
You can see this when you use the desktop plugin.
Marco:
Each of the entries is tagged, so it'll say what it blocks in this page, and you can see, oh, it blocked Google Page Sense or whatever, ads, tracker.
Marco:
It blocked the deck, ads.
Marco:
It blocked Adobe Omniture, tracker.
Marco:
And it tags each entry with whether it's an ad, a tracker, social widget, font, comment, you know, whatever the categories it has.
Marco:
So I could have very easily made an option right in the app that said, you know, checkmark, block ads, checkmark, block trackers, and have you toggle those separately from each other.
Marco:
But again, I think that's a false distinction because the fact is, if you say you don't want to be tracked, you have to block ads.
Marco:
Simple as that.
Marco:
So anyway, so I really hadn't thought about the reality of me being the center.
Marco:
I thought, you know, up until a few weeks before the thing launched, I was just doing my JavaScript thing and didn't have any distinction whatsoever.
Marco:
And that's, I think, almost more defensible.
Marco:
If you say...
Marco:
third-party JavaScript is a problem because the reality is most of the problems with web tracking and creepiness and bad ads, if you just block third-party JavaScript, that is a very defensible, practical thing that you should consider doing because...
Marco:
That is kind of why these trackers on the web can be so powerful, because you can embed a script tag on millions of different publisher sites, and your server is called from the user's browser, and you're able to run code, arbitrary code, on the user's browser and have access to the DOM, the browser, the hardware access that's now being exposed through all the web APIs, all this crazy stuff.
Marco:
you have access to, through these third-party embeds, you as the creepy ad company or whatever, and you can track everything.
Marco:
And the fact is, if people saw what is possible... If you're on the fence about whether you want to block tracking, if you see the kind of...
Marco:
It is so creepy what publishers are able to see.
Marco:
They can watch an individual's every move.
Marco:
They can see when you scroll.
Marco:
They can see where your mouse cursor is.
Marco:
They can see what you hover over and how long you hover over it and how long you look at something.
Marco:
They can see everything.
Marco:
If you block cookies or if you block third-party cookies from other sites or whatever, there's almost nothing you can do, including setting the DoNotTrack header, there's almost nothing you can do to prevent them from identifying you uniquely.
Marco:
Because even if you disable cookies and everything else, they can identify what your phone's battery capacity is through the new battery-level APIs.
Marco:
They can set different kinds of cookies through Flash or through databases or WebDB kind of stuff.
Marco:
There's so many.
Marco:
They can just analyze your browser's request headers.
Marco:
And just combining that with your IP address, they can generally get pretty unique with that.
Marco:
I mean...
Marco:
It is so easy to track you and to uniquely identify you between multiple sites.
Marco:
The only thing you can really do is block third-party embeds.
Marco:
Let me get to what Gerb just said in the chat.
Marco:
What if publishers then just proxied the JavaScript through their servers?
Marco:
Good question.
Marco:
The main reason, so first of all, and this is a whole topic that we can get to of like, you know, what happens if all this hat blocking does become so big that publishers have to change where they do things and, you know, the things they change to might be worse.
Marco:
And in some ways they will be.
Marco:
But the major thing holding this back right now is ease and trust.
Marco:
publishers usually don't have big tech teams and whatever tech teams they're doing are busy they're busy doing the crazy cms stuff trying to accommodate some crazy stuff the sales people sold an advertiser for like a one-off kind of thing that's what the tech teams are busy doing it at big publishers um and they're usually not very big teams so to have those tech teams do any custom work that involves running more things through their software and through their servers and through their domain names and
Marco:
That's unlikely to happen in a lot of publishers.
Marco:
Secondly, the issue of trust.
Marco:
And the fact is, the advertisers and the publishers and the visitors, we all hate each other.
Marco:
The advertisers don't like the publishers either because publishers try to rip them off.
Marco:
And so the advertisers don't usually trust the publishers to say how many people viewed something.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
If you proxied everything through the publisher's server, then the advertiser or the advertising network has no way to verify that those were real hits that came from real unique people.
Marco:
The publisher could fake that data back to the advertiser.
Marco:
And enough people would that...
Marco:
you know you might get you make it like the big sites could agree to do that like you know new york times could do that but you wouldn't see something like google adsense where like this common thing that's on tons of sites you wouldn't see something like that going to that kind of model because it just it would it couldn't be trustworthy back to the advertiser so that's not going to happen anyway going back before i before i get too far into the like the post-release thing so i released this thing um not thinking it would be a problem
Marco:
And then as the success rolled in, and as I hit number one, and as money started rolling in, big money started rolling in, I started getting a lot of attention that I really was not prepared to get.
Marco:
And I didn't want to be the face of this war.
Marco:
I used a war metaphor in my polling post, and I do want to recognize that I'm using these metaphors extremely lightly, because this is all very much first world problems, and this is nothing like what real war is.
Marco:
So I really want to use these metaphors extremely loosely, and with that giant disclaimer ahead of it.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I almost felt like I was an arms dealer.
Marco:
There's this war going on, and these two sides really don't like each other, and are trying to do whatever they can to disagree, and a lot of casualties happening.
Marco:
And I was the arms dealer that was enabling that.
Marco:
And yeah, if I pull my app, somebody else will step in.
Marco:
They already did.
Marco:
I mean, somebody else can step in and can become the arms dealer.
Marco:
So it's going to happen anyway.
Marco:
Let them be the arms dealer.
Marco:
I didn't want to do that.
Marco:
I didn't want to be in that position.
Marco:
And I didn't expect the scale of it.
Marco:
I didn't adequately question...
Marco:
how I would feel about it, you know, late enough in the process.
Marco:
I was so taken by how great the app turned out and how great the Go3 database was working that I didn't put enough thought into, do I really want to be doing this?
Marco:
And then all the requests started rolling in of, well, you know, this is really terrible for everybody, but if you just make these changes... And everybody had different changes, and they were all very complex.
Marco:
And it was going to be that...
Marco:
Peace was going to have to replace Overcast completely.
Marco:
I was no longer going to be a podcast app maker.
Marco:
I would have had to be a full-time ad-blocking app maker dealing with the full-time realities of being in that position, of being that arms dealer, being that arbiter of what is acceptable and what's not.
Marco:
And the fact is, I don't know anything about that business at all.
Marco:
I've only even used an ad blocker for like three or four months.
Marco:
I've barely even used them for that long.
Marco:
I was totally unprepared to be in this role.
Marco:
And once I was faced with the reality of what this role is like, I realized, oh, I really don't like this.
Marco:
This is really uncomfortable.
Marco:
I was having trouble sleeping for those... I mean, it was only a few nights before I pulled it.
Marco:
But, you know, I was having trouble sleeping.
Marco:
I was really kind of upset all day, all night.
Marco:
I mean, it was...
Marco:
I really did not know what to do.
Marco:
I just realized that I had gotten in way too deep.
Marco:
I was way in over my head.
Marco:
I had not thought it through enough.
Marco:
And I had found myself in a very powerful position that I really didn't want that power in an industry that I really didn't want to be in being the face of a war that I really did not want to be the face of.
Marco:
That's what happened.
John:
So just to ask the question that a lot of people have asked on Twitter and in the chat room, even though I know what the answer is, was the fact that Peace blocked ads on Marco.org a factor in any of your decisions?
John:
No, I don't make that much money from those ads.
John:
It's fine.
John:
No, not at all.
John:
And it does block them, right?
John:
right oh yeah you run peace on on marco.org your website it blocks the ads on it and you know that and it did not affect any of your decisions i thought it would be a massive dick move if i didn't right i mean and like that's maybe it's because if you know like like that all the different things that you do you make overcasts
John:
You've got the podcast, you've got a website, and they all kind of contribute to the stuff that you do.
John:
But it has seemed to me in recent years that your website, although it used to be much more important, is now less important.
John:
So maybe people who only know your sort of public face from, I mean, didn't you stop selling sponsorships for the website recently?
Yeah.
John:
like a year ago or more it was it was a while ago anyway yeah i think people have the wrong impression and think uh think of you think of like marco.org is the same thing as like daringfireball.net as in like that marco.org is the main thing and then you do these podcasts on the side and you make software on the side or whatever but at various times the balance between the things you do has changed but anyway i barely even write on my site anymore tell me about it
Marco:
yeah yeah you you're even worse than me i'm winning you are i'm winning no but i mean yeah i mean the fact is like if the deck canceled my membership over this that wouldn't have like threatening to do that wouldn't have been in it which they didn't but threatening to do that would not have been enough yeah to for me to make this decision i made this decision with almost no input i asked almost nobody
Marco:
A lot of the theories are that John Gruber somehow sat on me to force me to do this.
Marco:
The only person who knew before I pulled the app that I was going to pull the app, besides Ghostery and my wife, the only other person that I told was John Gruber.
Marco:
And because he's, you know, he's a smart guy.
Marco:
And so I ran up by him as kind of a sanity check.
Marco:
Like, am I totally insane here?
Marco:
And I didn't want to ask a lot of people.
Marco:
But I did ask him because he has a lot of thoughts on this issue.
Marco:
And he said that I should keep it up.
Marco:
he told me to leave it like he said don't do it he said wait you know this is you're being rash you know think this through you really don't you probably don't want to do this so the theory that he somehow you know got to me i don't know like a horse head in the bed the theory that he got to me is completely wrong um that the fact is i made the decision before talking to him about it i ran it by him he told me don't do it and then i did it anyway uh so that's what happened um
Marco:
and you know once and ghostry was great i mean i thought that was going to be a problem going to them and being like hey uh never mind you know right after all this um but they made their own post i don't want to speak for them but we were all on the same page it was fine i mean and they were they were like they were again so incredibly easy to work with it like yeah okay it was so easy um that's what happened you know before and during and so
Marco:
i don't know how much i want to talk about you know what i think about ads today i mean i already ranted about how ads and trackers are the same thing because they are um i will say that i think the biggest problem that web publishing faces is that the things they're doing how do i say this nicely
Marco:
I would say journalists are kind of like... I've had this problem with academics as well.
Marco:
And probably because I was a terrible student.
Marco:
I had generally terrible experiences with schooling growing up.
Marco:
But academia puts itself in a really pious position.
Marco:
And some of that is deserved, but a lot of it isn't.
Marco:
In a lot of ways, they're just people with the same flaws as everyone else.
Marco:
The role they serve is in some part special and necessary and in some part just a business.
Marco:
And so journalism, I think you can say all the same things about.
Marco:
It does serve a critical role in society sometimes.
Marco:
Most of the journalism taking place today is not providing value, really, or not providing enough value.
Marco:
It's really a hard business because if you're in the business... I thought it was kind of ironic.
Marco:
Forgive me if I'm misusing that word, the ironic police.
Marco:
But it was kind of ironic that my post in which I said that I was pulling the app...
Marco:
Somebody screenshotted on TechMeme that there were like a hundred other posts from news sites that were basically just rewrites of it, just valueless, bad rewrites of it that didn't even get the right point out of it, of course.
Marco:
My experience with journalists personally has been mostly mediocre to negative.
Marco:
I have said many times in the past that talking to journalists is like talking to the police.
Marco:
Ideally, don't.
Marco:
They have different goals than you.
Marco:
And they have lots of incentives that might be misaligned from your incentives and that you...
Marco:
In my experience, I've been very frequently misrepresented, and I've had my quotes very frequently used out of context and against me or as weapons to fight a cause that I wasn't representing.
Marco:
So I've had a lot of mediocre experiences or negative experiences with journalists because there's this attitude in the business that they are untouchable, that they must...
Marco:
They must be automatically supported by society somehow that what they're doing has infinite value.
Marco:
And the fact is, I write this post and I see the hundred useless rewrites that most sites published about.
Marco:
I mean, some sites had original content that was interesting and interesting perspectives.
Marco:
Most didn't.
Marco:
There's a massive oversupply of journalism, of publishing on the web.
Marco:
Ad blockers have existed for a long time.
Marco:
People have been blocking ads for a long time.
Marco:
Ad rates have been going down for a long time, especially display ads on websites.
Marco:
Design decisions have been being made by data for a long time.
Marco:
There's this infectious culture of data people that drives me nuts.
Marco:
The analytics and data and... All those things are euphemisms for tracking.
Marco:
And so this culture drives major decisions at publishers, including what analytics they're going to have on their site, what trackers they're going to embed, how they're going to track you, what they're going to track, who they're going to sell your data to.
Marco:
This culture...
Marco:
of we're going to track everything, that's okay, we're going to make all of our design decisions based on data and A-B testing and everything, that has infected the industry so, so badly.
Marco:
And by the way, all this applies to apps as well, but what apps can do is different, and we'll get to that possibly some other time.
Marco:
The combination of the data people plus...
Marco:
publishing just being so hyper-competitive, so oversupplied, and ad rates being so bad, leads to an environment where publishers are just desperate.
Marco:
Because, as I said, the economics are hard.
Marco:
They're really hard.
Marco:
If you have a staff...
Marco:
of more than zero people.
Marco:
If you're just yourself working, a lot of people can make money themselves enough to survive.
Marco:
But once you start supporting a staff, if you're big enough to have an HR department, I think that's a good barrier.
Marco:
If you're so big like that and you're trying to make it in publishing, it's really hard to do.
Marco:
This environment, this atmosphere of difficult economics, decreasing ad rates, it's creating this environment where bad behavior, like embedding tons of trackers and doing creepy things to your data, is only going to increase.
Marco:
It is prevalent now.
Marco:
It's only going to increase.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
The idea that journalism needs to be supported by society no matter what, despite all of this garbage, I don't think is a valid argument.
Marco:
And I think that there's really fault on both sides here.
Marco:
The attitude from publishers seems to be that they are helpless in this fight, that, well, it's not our problem.
Marco:
It's what the advertisers do, and we have to use them.
Marco:
Then that's your problem.
Marco:
Then that's your fault.
Marco:
You are choosing to do this.
Marco:
You are selling me to them.
Marco:
um so this is this is a hard problem it is not going to be solved anytime soon it is not you know it's as much ad blockers fault as the decline of the music sales were napster's fault you know like it's you know that's a contributing factor but it's not really the root problem um and i think any discussion of of ad blockers uh that comes over the
Marco:
The economics of the surrounding world continue to crumble.
Marco:
A lot of it's going to be blamed on ad blockers, but the reality is it's much more complicated than that.
Marco:
And I really think journalists and publishing companies are looking at it completely the wrong way.
Marco:
They're looking at it really in a way that buries their heads in the sand.
Marco:
They're saying, well, it's your fault.
Marco:
You're blocking our ads, whatever.
Marco:
The real problem is them.
Marco:
The real problem is that they are adding things to their sites and tracking things and shoving in ads and arbitrary code.
Marco:
They are allowing themselves and advertisers to do really creepy things in the name of money and data.
Marco:
That's problem number one.
Marco:
Problem number two is that many of them are doing work
Marco:
that they assume has value that might have less value than they think.
Marco:
Like, taking my blog post and rewriting it for your audience, how much value does that have, really?
Marco:
Like, are you adding much there?
Marco:
Should people be paying you for that?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think they're in trouble.
Marco:
I think they're really looking at it the wrong way.
Marco:
And I don't want to seem too anti-publisher here because there's a lot of them that are really good.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
There's also a lot of them that are going to be having a really hard next few years.
Marco:
And I think they're going to blame ad blockers.
Marco:
But the reality is this was happening with or without ad blockers.
Marco:
Anyway, our final sponsor this week.
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
It's about time for that.
Marco:
Our final sponsor this week is MailRoute.
Marco:
MailRoute.net slash ATP to learn more.
Marco:
Just imagine for a second, a world without spam, without viruses, without bounced email.
Marco:
That is MailRoute.
Marco:
They can bring that to you today.
Marco:
Here's what you do.
Marco:
You put MailRoute in front of your mail server.
Marco:
They filter the mail and they forward the cleaned mail to your mail servers.
Marco:
that's it you can configure it if you want you can set tons of great options they can they can establish you know they can administer groups and they can administer individual stuff and all sorts of corporate buzzwords um that they support they support everything ldap mailbag active directory tls outbound really all this crazy stuff but that's all that stuff is all there it's all optional but if you want to all you got to do is just point your mx record to them have them point to you and then you just stop getting spam that's it i mean i've used this now for i don't know six months a year something i've used it for a while and
Marco:
And it is really good.
Marco:
I mean, they cannot pay me to say that it's really good.
Marco:
I'm telling you myself, off script, I've been using it, and it's really good.
Marco:
I hardly ever see spam.
Marco:
It is a rare occasion that spam gets through.
Marco:
They also have this cool thing where they send a quarantine email.
Marco:
If they think something might be spam, but they're not that confident about it...
Marco:
It goes into quarantine and it sends you like an email digest.
Marco:
And so I'll get like one email.
Marco:
I think it's one a day that I have mine set to.
Marco:
I'll have one email come in that says email quarantine for this time period.
Marco:
And then there's just a list of subject lines.
Marco:
And there's links in there.
Marco:
And you can just tap a link to say whitelist this one.
Marco:
Send it through.
Marco:
And the rest you can just ignore.
Marco:
And then that adds to your database over time.
Marco:
And then they learn from that.
Marco:
So I'm not worried about things getting falsely trapped in my spam filter because I'm being sent anything that was questionable.
Marco:
And occasionally I whitelist one and send it through.
Marco:
And again, you just click a link.
Marco:
There's no login.
Marco:
You just click the link.
Marco:
It's all hash and everything.
Marco:
You don't have to log in.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
It's such a great system.
Marco:
I can do it on my phone.
Marco:
I can do it on my browser.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
It is great.
Marco:
And so all you do, you set this up, and then you just don't see spam anymore.
Marco:
That alone, I'm telling you, it works.
Marco:
I'm telling you, this makes any email host have better spam filtering than Gmail.
Marco:
From what my Gmail friends have told me, from what I've heard from other people who have said that, I've said that on the previous ad reads, and I've heard from people who say the same thing, that this is better than Gmail's spam filtering.
Marco:
The combination of mail route in front of any other IMAP hosts gives you standards-based email with
Marco:
world-class spam filtering.
Marco:
I mean, the best spam filtering I've ever seen on any host you want.
Marco:
I mean, it's great.
Marco:
So check it out, mailrout.net slash ATP for a free trial.
Marco:
And if you use that link, you get 10% off for the lifetime of your entire account there.
Marco:
It is used by all sorts of people, from individuals like me, all the way up to large corporations, large universities.
Marco:
It can reduce load on your email servers if you run them yourself.
Marco:
It can really dramatically improve the spam filtering on a hosted service that you use like what I do.
Marco:
They have APIs.
Marco:
They have everything.
Marco:
It's amazing.
Marco:
Check it out.
Marco:
I'm telling you it works.
Marco:
MailRoute.net slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to MailRoute for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
What did you learn from all this, from the peace thing?
Casey:
And I mean this not to beat you up, but clearly this did not go the way you thought it was going to go.
Casey:
And clearly... It was a disaster.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And I think what a lot of people lost sight over when you pulled peace was that that...
Casey:
It was going to be a long term fix, but it was a short term increased disaster.
Casey:
Like you were not making things easier on yourself by at least for the first few days by pulling piece.
Casey:
And I'm curious, you know, what did you learn from this experience and maybe even from the magazine?
Casey:
You've made a few parallels with that experience.
Casey:
What have you learned?
Yeah.
Marco:
I'd like to say that I learned not to tackle apps without thinking them through.
Marco:
But the reality is I'm probably going to make that mistake again in the future.
Marco:
I'm just going to hopefully pick better ones.
Marco:
What can I say?
Marco:
I like making stuff.
Marco:
And I got carried away in both of those cases.
Marco:
I got carried away with, first of all, underestimating how much work they would be.
Marco:
And then second of all, not thinking forward enough like...
Marco:
do I really want to be this thing full-time?
Marco:
Because that can and probably will happen to a lot of these things.
Marco:
I thought Peace was going to be a really simple thing that, especially since I outsourced the data to Ghostery, I thought it would be effectively no upkeep.
Marco:
I did not think it was going to do that well.
Marco:
I didn't think I'd become the face of ad blocking.
Marco:
And I didn't think through what it meant, what it would mean for it to be widely used and what it would mean to put myself in that position and whether I wanted to be in that position.
Marco:
and the reality is i uh i'm not made for that i'm not made for this business i i'm made for occasionally talking about it on podcasts but but i'm not made for for actually being in it uh for being involved for being a major decision maker for the politics for the pressure uh for possibly being sued i mean we don't know i mean ad blockers could get sued you know there's all these things that could happen and
Marco:
i didn't want to be in that business that deeply i just wanted to make a cool app and then get back to my podcast app and the fact is it isn't that simple and and success makes it especially not that simple so you could have done that like physically speaking it could have been no upkeep because you had to deal with ghostry you could have made the app you could have never modified the application again except to keep it running
John:
And, you know, just continue to serve the ghost read like that was a that was a possibility.
John:
It's not as if there was something specifically about this application that required a tremendous amount of upkeep.
John:
Right.
Marco:
Yeah, it's more that I thought the problem was way simpler than it really was.
Marco:
I really thought that just having this master on-off switch and a handful of options below would be enough to solve the problem.
Marco:
And the reality is that's not enough.
Marco:
Like any app, when I made Bugshot, whenever it was, two years ago?
Marco:
Yeah, two years ago.
Marco:
When I made Bugshot, I thought the same thing, that this is going to be a simple little thing.
Marco:
I'm going to spend a week on it.
Marco:
And then, you know, I'll use it.
Marco:
My friends will use it.
Marco:
You know, maybe I'll sell a couple thousand copies, right?
Marco:
And in Bugshot's case, that's exactly what happened.
Marco:
But even on day one, it was like, well, got to fix this bug.
Marco:
This feature request is coming in a lot.
Marco:
I really should address that.
Marco:
It wouldn't be that much work.
Marco:
And so it starts eating more and more time and eating more and more of your attention.
Marco:
The idea of just releasing an app out there and that's the end of it.
Marco:
It's something that I keep falling into.
Marco:
That is one of the biggest lessons I have to learn here.
Marco:
When I had these little ideas for little side apps, it's very hard to make those stay little side apps.
Marco:
To really make them not take that long.
Marco:
Not take away a lot of time from my primary app, which right now is Overcast.
Marco:
And I expect it to be that for a long time.
Marco:
I keep thinking I can do more than I really can in a day or at a time.
Marco:
uh that is the main problem here i have a lot of things i want to do i have a lot of ideas i want to work on but i really need to first question a how much time they will actually take uh and probably way more than i think of ongoing time and then b do i really want to be there what if it succeeds then then i'm that person then i'm in that business do i really want to be there
John:
See, I think what I see at the center of this is like, again, I get back to the idea that you could have made peace the way it was, made sure it continued to work as iOS is updated, but never add another feature to it, never change a thing on it, never update the icon, never like, that's it.
John:
You do the app, you make it, you leave it on the store, it is for sale, you never make any other changes to it.
John:
That is a thing you could do.
John:
But I think the problem is, I think these applications are going to require this update.
John:
They don't require the update.
John:
They only require it because you feel bad about having an application that you know could be better in the million ways that everyone suggests to you.
John:
And so you feel compelled to, like with Bugshot, you're like...
John:
you know those people have a point it would be better if i had this feature that beer and this actually would be a cool idea and it just you can't you can't uh you can't abide by having an application on the store that you made that is in some ways a representation of you like this is my work this is the type of thing that i made and then just never touch it again like that sounds like it would be torture for you to be forced to put out an application and say the only thing you're allowed to do is application from now on you're not allowed to do any work on it except if it breaks because of an os update
John:
And then you do the minimum to get it working and that's it.
John:
You can't add features.
John:
You can't change behavior.
John:
You can't update the icon.
John:
You can't make it more efficient.
John:
You can't do anything with it.
John:
Right.
John:
And it's you are.
John:
It seems like you are constitutionally incapable.
John:
And, you know, I think most developers are constitutionally incapable of doing that because it would just eat at you.
John:
You'd be like.
John:
But it's not but it's not good.
John:
It's not as good as it could be.
John:
It could be better.
John:
Or I think I made a mistake with this or it should.
John:
These features should be different or even just for your own purposes.
John:
You'd be like, you know what?
John:
The way I had this thing set up, it's not even working for me anymore.
John:
I can't even use my own app because I'm not able to change it.
John:
So that I think is at the core here, because I know there are a lot of developers like who, you know, these these these places that just churn out thousands and thousands and thousands of applications with, you know, fleets of developers.
John:
They're fire and forget.
John:
It's like application goes out into the world and makes whatever money it's going to make.
John:
It will never be revisited.
John:
Right.
John:
But that is not how you are.
John:
You don't feel good working that way.
John:
So you never will work that way.
John:
And so that's why it's basically impossible for you to ever have an app like that, that you just say, oh, I'll just make this app and it will just sit on the store making money and I'll never look at it again.
Marco:
Yeah, I think you're exactly right.
Marco:
I mean, I can't do that.
Marco:
I am not able... Whatever I think will happen before it happens, when the time comes, I am not able... The morning that I decided to pull it, I decided to pull it mid-morning,
Marco:
Before that, I was sitting down to start working.
Marco:
I had Xcode open.
Marco:
I had P's there.
Marco:
And I was starting to work on the 1.1 update that would add all these granular settings and all this crap people wanted.
Marco:
And I'm like, you know, that's when I started thinking, like, I really don't want to do this.
Marco:
Like, this is really... I'm not happy maintaining this app.
Marco:
I can't handle the heat.
Marco:
uh i would like to get out of the kitchen please like i i cannot handle this heat and why am i like i want to be shipping overcast 2.0 what what the heck am i doing doing this app that is that is making me hate myself and one of the problems is it was bringing in good money it's really hard to turn that down
Marco:
A lot of people wouldn't be able to turn that down.
Marco:
I was fortunate that I have other sources of income.
Marco:
I have made money in the past.
Marco:
I had to ask my wife, of course, am I crazy here?
Marco:
The fact is, it was really hard to turn that away once it was working.
Marco:
But that should give you some idea of how bad I felt about it.
Marco:
That I really...
Marco:
I really did not want to be in that business once I was in it.
Marco:
Once I was in it, I was like, oh no, this is not for me.
Marco:
I can't handle it.
Marco:
I mean, being in the ad blocking business feels like being in the piracy business.
Marco:
And please, I don't want to hear from people about this comment.
Marco:
Because it isn't the same.
Marco:
It isn't a direct, perfect metaphor.
Marco:
But there's a lot of overlap.
Marco:
That being in the ad blocking, piracy, ad blocking, these are things that lots of people want.
Marco:
Lots of people won't admit they want it, but they want it anyway.
Marco:
Lots of people do it and don't talk about it, and it's no big deal.
Marco:
There are some legitimate reasons to do those things that aren't just you want things for free.
Marco:
There's actually legitimate reasons for people to pirate things sometimes.
Marco:
And there's, I think, very many legitimate reasons to block ads.
Marco:
But the fact is they kind of live in the same world of things that are either illegal or kind of close, kind of in a gray area.
Marco:
It's a tricky area to define morals and standards around.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
But making your living from an ad blocker, it kind of feels like profiting off of piracy or... I don't know.
Marco:
I wonder if people who work for porn sites feel any weirdness about it, like any sleaziness.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't know what that industry is like either.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I suspect it might have some similar issues of like some people just don't want to be associated with that kind of industry.
Marco:
And so I think ad blocking, it's one of those things where it is questionable.
Marco:
It is potentially risky.
Marco:
There's people getting hurt somewhere along the way.
Marco:
It's kind of tricky to stomach.
Marco:
And I think there's a reason why most people who make ad blocking software are not prominent indie personalities in public.
Marco:
I don't know the people who make the other ad blockers at all.
Marco:
I've never heard of them.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
They probably would not be exposed to as much...
Marco:
crap as what I was getting because I put myself out there in the public.
Marco:
I have a very public persona in this industry and among the press, which sometimes I really regret.
Marco:
And this is one of those times where it's really hard to handle.
Marco:
But this is the business made for anonymous companies and people who don't mind the heat.
Marco:
It's made for them, and I'm neither of those things.
John:
So for all the people who are angry, like my angry about this thing, if I could speak to those people for a moment if they're still listening to the show and didn't rage quit because now they're super angry at Marco.
John:
There's a couple aspects of that.
John:
First, I think it's reasonable for people to be angry because Marco did inconvenience a lot of people who had to go get a refund before the big thing happened.
John:
um and and also like you know it's the sort of feeling of betrayal of like i'm buying this thing because i trust the things that marco makes and now that trust has been betrayed so there is a fundamental screw-up on marco's part underlying all of this and understandably people are angry about it and you know marco knew that that anger would be coming and i think you accept that yeah no like the short-term pain for long-term gain it's best to just rip off the band-aid now people are going to be angry at you and that's just something you're going to have to deal with right i'm
John:
Obviously, it goes over the line when people get really mean about it.
John:
But whatever.
John:
There's that aspect of it.
John:
And I don't think that's... I think that's part of your decision-making.
John:
Because I think... Although you may... Anyway.
John:
The second thing is... The other thing people are angry about... They're angry spins out in all sorts of directions.
John:
And it's like...
John:
how did you make an ad blocker and not understand that you didn't want to be a person who makes an ad blocker i think you've done a good job explaining that now but i think your blog post about it explains it even better particularly in the title and that you're like how dumb does this guy have to be he spends the whole summer making an ad blocker he puts it out there and then one day later he goes you know what i don't want to make an ad blocker they block ads right like that somehow you didn't understand how ad blockers work and my take on it based on your blog post and everything you said is that
John:
You understood that you were going to make an ad blocker.
John:
You wanted to use an ad blocker.
John:
You still do want to use an ad blocker.
John:
And you made one that you liked, which is, like you said, your MO for doing things.
John:
An application that you think is going to be popular, that you yourself want to use, that you can develop.
John:
That's the formula for making an app, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so you made the thing.
John:
And when it came out, the thing you didn't anticipate was the fact that not the fact that it blocked ads, but it was, you know, like making an ad blocker and having a block ads, all that worked the way you hoped.
John:
And it's great.
John:
What you didn't anticipate was how you would feel about being how you'd feel about being the person who made an ad blocker.
John:
people who think that you should be able to predict how you'll feel about something that has not yet happened uh are asking too much i think of you know like you say i really want to be uh i don't know like uh the manager at my the store that i work out i really want to be married i really want to you know get a tattoo i really want to learn to fly a plane i really want to be an accountant
John:
Until you actually do all those things, you can have predictions about how much you're going to like it.
John:
Are you really going to like being a manager?
John:
Are you actually going to like learning to fly a plane?
John:
You know, all those things.
John:
You say you want to get married.
John:
You sure you want to get married to this person?
John:
A lot of people change their mind about that, about half of them.
John:
You know, like you may think you know.
John:
like it's like didn't you understand what it would be like to be manager you see the manager every day you know what managers do it's not like it's a mystery and then when you're saying you're the manager now now you're not happy you sometimes you just don't know how you're going to feel about doing a thing until you actually do it and that's a mistake we all make that mistake in various sizes hopefully most of us don't make those mistakes in the public eye but sometimes you do right and so my the way i uh
John:
frame what marco has done here is that he didn't correctly predict how he would feel about something it's not an intellectual thing where he didn't understand the consequences or that uh you know all the grand conspiracy theories that we don't want to get into is that like you said in your thing it didn't feel good to you to be doing this
John:
everything else was working exactly as you predicted like you thought it would sell could potentially sell a lot because you you know you're prominent and it's the thing that people want and it was working more or less the way you wanted and your friends that you tried out were working well and it worked well for you all working exactly but other things made you feel bad about having the thing there and so what you did was made the decisions i feel bad if i i want out of this feeling make feelings stop now please and
John:
And the consequence of doing that was making a bunch of people angry.
John:
And they're justified in their angry because you screwed up, but you fixed it as fast as you could.
John:
And, you know, like I said, it's like ripping off the Band-Aid.
John:
The worst thing you could have done is him and Han feel bad about this for weeks and weeks and then pull it.
John:
That would have been terrible because it would have been even more money, even more people pissed.
John:
And we're in the same situation of like, you still would have had no way to bulk refund them.
John:
And they would have to... Even more people going through their... You know, it would just...
John:
you made this you made the best of many possible bad decisions at the time you had to make it and that bad decision doesn't absolve you of everything but like uh i think people are who are who who don't forgive who are very angry and we're to say like you know that's it like i don't have to say like that's too high of a standard like what you're basically saying is my public figures can never make a mistake
John:
You know, no, that's not you can't hold people to that.
John:
I mean, I guess you can.
John:
You can just say, well, this mistake, this is one mistake too far.
John:
And now I'm never going to like I'm never going to listen to anything Marco says again.
John:
I will never trust him again.
John:
I mean, it is a minor betrayal of trust and you can decide that's not.
John:
But like, I think it's unrealistic just to think that anybody is ever going to fulfill.
John:
You know, like they're never going to do what Marco did, which is basically not correctly predict how they would feel about something.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm not going to say that people should or shouldn't be angry or whatever.
John:
From my perspective, in the grand scheme of things, I try to pull myself away, but it's so understandable as a thing that happens to all of us, and it just happened to Marco on a grand scale in public, which is cruddy for Marco and cruddy for everyone else involved.
Marco:
To be clear, I really messed up.
Marco:
I made a huge mistake.
Marco:
But my huge mistake was launching the app.
Marco:
It was not pulling it.
Marco:
Pulling it was my solution to the mistake.
Marco:
The mistake was launching it.
Marco:
I should have seen some warning signs ahead of time that, you know, I don't want to necessarily be in this business or I won't be able to handle the heat.
Marco:
I should have seen those warning signs.
Marco:
And I didn't because I was blinded by the idea of this cool app that I just made that I thought was working really well and that I was very proud of.
Marco:
So I did make that mistake, but the mistake was launching it.
Marco:
Once the idea got in my head... I was feeling miserable for the two and a half days or whatever.
Marco:
And then once the idea got in my head that, you know, wait a minute...
Marco:
I can just end this.
Marco:
I can just pull it down and get myself out of this.
Marco:
And I knew it was going to be really messy.
Marco:
I knew that it was going to be a problem with Apple.
Marco:
It was going to be a problem with all the customers.
Marco:
Part of the reason why the app launched so well and rose so quickly is because I've been building my reputation for years and my audience for years.
Marco:
And I knew that there was going to be a major cost to that.
Marco:
That I have lost a lot of people.
Marco:
The next time I do anything, even when Overcast 2 ships, hopefully sometime soon, the next time I release anything or ask people to buy or look at anything...
Marco:
I've lost a lot of the reputation I built over the years now that a lot of those people will no longer buy it.
Marco:
They won't look at it.
Marco:
I'm going to be hearing about this in emails and comments and tweets for years.
Marco:
And people are still making butter coffee jokes at me.
John:
I mean, I'm going to hear about this for years.
John:
The other aspect of it, not to pile on with all the bad things about it, but the people who applauded your decision... I've seen a lot of people who are like...
John:
you know my respect for you marco is increased for you doing this thing or whatever subset of them are happy about it because they think ad blocking is not ethical and when they hear this podcast and say guess what guys marco didn't pull it because he's against ad blocking right right and so they're like that's oh well
John:
hmm you know like so then maybe you lose those people too there there's still the the i hope the majority of the people who applaud the decision understand like this is a person who made a mistake in public and fixed it decisively as fast as quickly as possible and like you know and again once you've made the mistake you can't unring that bell you did ship the app but like the worst thing you could do is just like oh i don't know leave it out there for a week two weeks and then just like
John:
It was like two days, right?
Marco:
It was one night, one full day, and then one morning.
Marco:
So it was a total of about 48 hours or 36 hours or something.
Marco:
So as soon as I decided that morning, I decided while having my morning coffee and talking to my wife...
Marco:
We were talking and I was like, I really want to get out of this.
Marco:
I want to be done with this.
Marco:
It was down within an hour and a half of that decision.
Marco:
Because the only thing I had to do was I had to look at my contract with Ghostery, make sure I even could do this, and then I wanted to call and ask them.
Marco:
And the CEO of Ghostry, super nice guy, was on a plane coming back from Germany during that time.
Marco:
But he had Wi-Fi.
Marco:
So we did this all over email on his in-flight Wi-Fi.
Marco:
I was bothering him on his plane trip because I'm like, we got to talk right now.
Marco:
I got to get out of this business.
Marco:
The app was pulled within an hour and a half of me deciding that this is what I wanted to do.
Marco:
And I would have even done it sooner.
Marco:
I just wanted to make sure I wasn't going to be sued by anybody.
Marco:
But believe me, I did not take that decision lightly.
Marco:
And it would have been way more profitable if I got to keep the money.
Marco:
It would have been way more profitable to just sit on it for a while.
Marco:
And the thing is, what a lot of people don't understand...
Marco:
You know, when Tumblr sold, I said that I didn't make yacht and helicopter money, which is true.
Marco:
But that I now have... I have enough of a cushion now from the Tumblr sale that I don't need to take every opportunity I get to make money if it's something that I don't feel good doing or I don't feel comfortable doing or that I don't really want to be working on.
Marco:
I can pick and choose now.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
When I was writing that, what I was actually talking about was making a podcast app.
Marco:
Because at the time, podcast apps were way smaller than they are today.
Marco:
Podcasting was way smaller than it is today.
Marco:
And I really wanted to work on a podcast app, but I knew it probably wouldn't make as much money as Instapaper was making or as anything else that I could do more generally would make.
Marco:
Um, but the fact is I am, I'm able now, I'm fortunate enough that I can, I can make a decision that is against my best financial interests, but that is for my own mental health and for longterm reputation and for, you know, avoiding problems in my life, avoiding burnout, keeping time for my family, et cetera.
Marco:
I can make decisions like this.
Marco:
Um, and it,
Marco:
I had to make one of those decisions for this to preserve myself.
Marco:
I'm a programmer.
Marco:
I'm a geek.
Marco:
I like working on hard technical problems.
Marco:
And ad blocking is not a hard technical problem.
Marco:
It is actually a very, very, very easy technical problem.
Marco:
Combined with a really, really messy, tricky, political, guilt-ridden problem of...
Marco:
classifying sites and dealing with what is right and what is wrong and what is good and what is bad and all of these impossible to solve decisions that's the ad blocking business um and dealing with really really angry people all the time um that that is what this business is it's really gross to me and i again i didn't think that through my mistake was launching it not canceling it
John:
So I think the subset of people who have eliminated the people who are applauding you because they thought you had a change of heart about ad blocking, which you have not.
John:
No, I just didn't want to be the one doing it.
John:
Right.
John:
So the remaining people who applaud your decision basically, you know, for basically showing.
John:
sticking to your principles doing the decision that is bad for you and uh but doing it you know again ripping off the band-aid quickly instead of doing it slowly right uh i i'm trying to think of what distinguishes those people from the people who like will now never forgive you um and i think what it comes down to as it very often does in these things uh is empathy because the people who uh
John:
I applaud your difficult decision to have that feeling.
John:
What you have to do is empathize with the person like imagine yourself in that situation.
John:
Imagine that you had made a mistake.
John:
You had launched an application that you realized you don't want to be the person who makes that application.
John:
And and it's too late now.
John:
And you know that any course of action is going to make a bunch of people unhappy.
John:
Uh, and you know, and it, and it's gonna, it's gonna cost you money.
John:
It's gonna cost you reputation or whatever.
John:
If you can empathize with that, if you can put yourself in Marco's shoes and say, boy, that must've really sucked because you know, I like it compared to earlier.
John:
I remember when I made a mistake and miscalculated how much I would like doing X and Y. And then after the fact that I found myself stuck in it, and then you're stuck with like, well,
John:
do i have to just you know well i'm in it now i just got to get through it or can i just you know like imagine for example you took a new job and on the first week in you go i've made a terrible mistake this i am not happy this job i will never be happy this job do you quit after working there for a week they're gonna be like that guy we hired that guy and he quit in the first week don't hire him he's flighty he doesn't know what he wants like that's a mistake you should not have taken that job i bet that's a mistake that people can relate to right anyway
John:
empathy is what separates the people people who are able to empathize with your situation say boy i feel bad and i've been in a similar situation so i understand what it's like and what i know the decision he had to make was hard and all his decisions were crappy and it feels bad to have people angry at you for justifiable reasons um
John:
And therefore, they say, now, Marco, my esteem for you has risen because I understand what you were like.
John:
And the thing you just mentioned about, you know, Tumblr and being able to make podcast applications and not having to do Instapaper pass where you wanted to and stuff like that.
John:
That really hurts empathy because people don't have empathy for people who are financially more well off than they do in general.
John:
Like that that is a theme.
John:
Not that, you know, it's not saying all people.
John:
But anyway, it is sometimes difficult to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who you think doesn't have what you think is one of your main sources of, you know, problem or concern.
John:
If you worry about money a lot.
John:
you can and and you think i'm a good smart hard-working person uh and this guy doesn't have to worry about money at all uh and how how is he any better than me it's harder to have empathy it's like how can you you know like all your problems i mean whatever your problems in your life and you marco your life is a well marco may have stubbed his toe but if i had his money i wouldn't care about toe stubbing right you know what i mean like it's
John:
it's very popular to turn down the empathy dial when somebody is more successful than you or has something that you want as if that whitewashes everything famous people like he's a celebrity well like i have no empathy for you know uh uh name a celebrity i was gonna say tom cruise but that's all tied up in scientology i don't want to go down that rat hole but i mean but anyway how about donald trump another rat hole no that's
John:
Julia Roberts, you can say mean things about her.
John:
Well, she's rich and famous.
John:
If I was rich and famous, nothing anyone could ever say would bother me.
John:
Or like, I don't have any sympathy for her.
John:
She is just the most... She's beautiful.
John:
She's rich.
John:
She's famous.
John:
It's very easy to not have empathy when you feel that about people.
John:
And so that, I think, is a factor in exactly how angry people are about what you did because they feel like you...
John:
they can't put themselves in your shoes they can't they think that you know that they have to think that everything you do is sort of machiavellian and made to maximize your profit or there is a conspiracy theory or you are taking advantage of your position of privilege to screw other people like have no thought for the people who bought your application all you want all you care about is your feelings and so on and so forth like
John:
I get that.
John:
And I see that playing out.
John:
And this is a perfect sort of little crucible for that to play out because it is a legitimate mistake, but it's a small mistake in terms of impact on an individual.
John:
It's $3.
John:
I don't want to get into all arguing with the people who are angry.
John:
Feel free to be angry.
John:
You were inconvenienced in a minor way.
John:
But...
John:
Some people are just so angry that it's as if you had, like, foreclosed on their house and kicked them out on the street.
John:
It's like, seriously, guys.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, I got some... One guy threatened to sue me.
Marco:
That was interesting.
John:
Yeah, no, you should see how much lawyers charge.
John:
It's more than $3, I think.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, but seriously, one of the lessons I'm taking away from this, besides the previously expressed lessons about reconsidering what the heck I'm doing before I do it and whether I want to be in the businesses I'm trying to be in, because it's like reconsidering what if this succeeds?
Marco:
That's obviously the number one lesson that I have learned from this.
Marco:
But down the list somewhere, one of the additional lessons I've learned from this...
Marco:
Do I really want to be allowing people to hold me hostage over $3?
Marco:
Because that's, you know, the attitude... There's a psychological thing.
Marco:
I probably heard about it from Merlin.
Marco:
Merlin's where I get all my psychology news.
Marco:
um but there's some kind of thing where like people are are way way more reactive and feel way worse about uh about a loss like feeling like they they had something taken from them than a missed gain so if you said like you know i'm gonna give you three dollars oh no i'm not you know that they don't feel as bad about that as if you take three dollars from them uh something something like that forgive me if i'm if i'm butchering this
John:
Yeah, it's loss aversion.
John:
Yeah, there you go.
John:
You can look it up.
John:
I think that's the Google term.
John:
You just go to loss aversion.
John:
Tons of studies trying to put people in comparable situations and saying how the people felt really bad about the negative thing, but not so bad about the lack of the positive thing of equal magnitude.
Marco:
Right, there you go.
Marco:
So we'll link to that in the show notes for anybody who wants to read the correct version of the thing I just butchered.
Marco:
But right now, I give people opportunities like that where by putting this app out there, I said, please give me $3.
Marco:
And in exchange, you will get this app.
Marco:
And of course, then most people implicitly assume that you will therefore have this app be free and updated forever as a result of giving me that $3.
Marco:
And so that's why they got so angry when I pulled it two days later.
Marco:
they then perceived that i had stolen that three dollars from them the things that were said to me by so many people uh mostly on twitter you couldn't pay that person three dollars to go tell a stranger that like like if somebody came up to you on the street and was like hey i'll give you three dollars if you go over there and tell that person just how just this horrible thing about themselves like just
Marco:
Oh, you're such a jerk.
Marco:
No one's ever going to love you again.
Marco:
Would you do that for $3?
Marco:
But people get so into this thing that it's like they're holding you hostage with their expectations.
Marco:
And they feel like they really have this over you that you owe me this massive thing for my $3.
Marco:
And the fact is, I don't think I want to give people access to me that way anymore.
Marco:
I don't think I want to give you the chance to hold me hostage for that $3 anymore.
Marco:
uh because you know what i don't want your three dollars badly enough it's not worth it um so i i'm gonna reconsider things i'm doing with that with that in mind um and i don't know how it's gonna play out yet but uh that that was another bit of perspective i gained from this that you know what um if that's how you're gonna treat your money then i don't want it
Casey:
Yeah, the amount of just unbelievable bitterness over this $3, I remain stunned, and I find it kind of comical, because I think to myself, I go to, and this is just an example, but I go to football games at my wife's alma mater at the University of Virginia.
Marco:
No, do you mean soccer or football?
Casey:
No, football.
Casey:
Like, the one that is actually fun to watch.
Casey:
Ooh!
Casey:
Don't email me.
Marco:
Finally, you're taking the email from this episode, not me.
Casey:
Yeah, seriously.
Casey:
No, don't email me.
Casey:
I know that American football is much slower.
Casey:
It was just a joke.
Casey:
Everybody calm down.
Casey:
Anyway, the point I'm driving at is I go to these American football games, and a soda at these football games is, I believe, $3 or $4.
Casey:
A bottle of water, I'm pretty sure, is either $2.50 or $3.00.
Casey:
That's a bottle of water.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
It's a whole different context.
Marco:
A whole different context.
Casey:
It's just ridiculous to me.
Casey:
But it is, and you're right.
Casey:
But it's $3 for a bottle of water that I'm literally pissing away in an hour.
Casey:
Literally.
Casey:
And these people, some of these replies that you got...
Casey:
just unbelievably disproportionately, and I think that's the real crux of it here, disproportionately angry over the money.
Casey:
Not all of them.
Casey:
I mean, John went over a lot of this before, and he's right.
Casey:
But some of them are just disproportionately angry about $3.
Casey:
And so my first thought was, okay, was...
Casey:
There was a time when I had no freaking money, just none, where going to McDonald's and getting myself like a Big Mac was a special treat.
Casey:
And yes, I know that's terrible for me, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
I don't need to hear about it.
Casey:
At the time, going McDonald's and getting myself a Big Mac was a special treat.
Casey:
And I only allowed myself that once a month or once a week at most.
Casey:
And I genuinely had to think about whether that $7 or whatever it was, was worth spending.
Casey:
And even then, I don't think I would have gotten this upset over a $3 loss, which ends up, as it turns out, not being a loss at all.
Casey:
And I think John really hit the nail on the head earlier when he said people just don't have enough empathy.
Casey:
And these people seem to think that you, Marco, are this infallible person that never makes a mistake, and it's just completely wrong, that you might have made a mistake, and clearly, I mean, you are infallible, so this must be a money grab.
Casey:
This is insane.
Casey:
There's no other explanation.
Casey:
And I just, people need to relax and understand that people make mistakes, and $3 probably isn't going to be the end of the earth on your $800 iPhone.
John:
But see, they have the wider context.
John:
The people who are the most mad know the context.
John:
They know a lot of copies of this sold.
John:
They know that the total amount is much more than their $3.
John:
And what they're really angry about is this guy who doesn't need money as much as them is getting a bunch of extra money.
John:
And that makes them have less empathy for Marco.
John:
It's not as if they just write him off like, oh, because I hate everybody who's richer than me.
John:
No, all I'm saying is for the people who are angry, it lessens their ability to empathize because they feel like this very good thing is happening to Marco.
John:
And
John:
This minor bad thing is happening to me, but this minor bad thing is like Steve Jobs.
John:
If I can shave one second off the boot time of this computer, if millions of people use this computer, you're saving millions of seconds every time people boot up.
John:
It's at scale, and they do the scale.
John:
I'm like, yeah, my $3 isn't a big deal, but he stole $3 from thousands and thousands of people.
John:
He's basically a thief, and this guy doesn't even need the money, and it makes me even more angry.
John:
To some degree, that's how people feel about all businesses.
John:
Everyone has seen the person who's angry and...
John:
at the person serving them coffee at a coffee shop or, or, you know, or at a store or whatever.
John:
And they're out like a dollar 50 or whatever, because they wouldn't accept their return because it was like all sales final and like a stick of gum or something.
John:
They're like, you know what?
John:
I'm never coming to this coffee shop again.
John:
And whether that's true or not, like they're willing to say, uh,
John:
you know, this entire business, uh, you know, you are, this is not an ethical business.
John:
You should have let me return this stick of gum.
John:
Like it's the principle.
John:
It's not the dollar 50.
John:
It's the principle that you are not an ethical business.
John:
I'm never going to, you know, that's, that's the power that has the consumer and the whole, you know, customer is always right thing.
John:
We've all seen people get angry about that.
John:
Um, and in that case, it's like the poor cashier is like, you know,
John:
just trying to do the job they don't own the place or whatever get the brunt of this or someone who works at like a fast food place like they don't control the policies of the store they're just trying to do their job they get yelled at but for the most part those businesses are like faceless entities that people can be indignant and angry about uh you know or even just think of like airlines where there's you know more legitimate reasons to be angry like i've been delayed a day for my destination and you know i you know like
John:
i got a ticket on this flight but now i you know you oversold it and i have to check my back like whatever being mad at businesses is a thing it just so happens in marco's case that he is the business it's a one-man business there's a public face um and it's not just like he's not ronald mcdonald he's the actual he's not just a figurehead he actually does all the pushing of buttons on keyboards too um
John:
And so it's a bummer for Marco, but like that, that attitude is not unique to Marco, but it's exactly the same thing in the way that when people are really angry that the place wouldn't accept their return to their stick of gum, they're not thinking about the store's feelings because the store is the man.
John:
And this, you know, it's like it's a big faceless entity.
John:
It might as well be the government.
John:
Marco is the man.
John:
in the bad way the bad man you know and so they're like the man is sticking it to me the man is taking three dollars from thousands of people and the man is you know screwing us all over and so it's it's easy to get self-righteous and indignant and angry at the man and you don't spend a lot of time empathizing
John:
with the man and saying how does the man feel is the man sad did the man make a mistake did the man make a mistake and now he has to do the the you know something that he knows is going to make people even more angry at him but like and so anyway that's the divide some people are able to empathize and understand some people uh mistakenly thought that marco is now against ad blocking and some people were were less able to empathize and were super angry about it
John:
And I think all this will pass.
John:
And I think we've covered all the positive negatives that come from it.
John:
We all make mistakes.
John:
It's a bummer.
John:
We do what we can.
John:
Hopefully, we'll all learn from this.
John:
We can learn by proxy through Marco's mistakes.
John:
Marco can learn from his mistakes.
John:
And we can all move forward together and finally get Overcast 2.0 out there.
Casey:
If you ever stop reviewing podcast microphones.
Marco:
This is a really good one, actually, tonight.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Igloo, and MailRoute.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Casey:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Because it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
Marco:
we got the most important question are you going to make a piece fracture oh yeah i a lot of people have asked this um no i don't think i'm not i'm not planning to right now i mean maybe i'll change my mind in the future once it hurts less but right now it's it's too painful i can't do it what you should do is order the fracture but then keep it for a day and throw it away
laughing laughing laughing