My Fingers Are Still Moving
I don't think we let ourselves just be idiots often enough.
We don't.
I feel like that's our core competency.
So I was using my iPhone today.
I was sitting at, I would guess, 30% battery life.
I am aware that you can turn on battery percentage.
I think that is the mark of a lunatic because all that does is stress me out when it's on.
I'd rather not know.
So anyway, so I was sitting at, I would guess, about a third battery life.
And I go to record a video of Declan.
We were walking around outside.
And as I'm recording the video, it's not that I was framing it.
I'm actively recording the video.
All of a sudden, the phone turns off.
Okay.
That in and of itself is unfortunately common, but that was weird.
But okay, so I go to turn the phone back on.
Wait, wait, wait.
That's common?
Well, common enough that we're... I don't want to say functional high ground, but it felt like a functional high ground sort of occurrence, right?
Like, oh, that was weird, but I'm sure once it reboots itself, everything will be fine.
Okay, your Windows recency is showing.
That is not acceptable behavior.
That is not normal.
Yeah, well, before the show, we were just talking about how you rebooting your iMac fixed everything, but that's neither here nor there.
Yeah, I didn't say that was right either.
So I go to start the phone back up, and it tells me, no, I won't, because your battery's dead.
What?
You know what I'm talking about?
Like the, I will not start until you plug it in?
Yeah, a little battery with the red line and black screen, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So I'm like, that's weird.
I was just at 30%.
So I do the like, hold both buttons until it force restarts itself dance and starts back up and I'm back at 30%.
Okay, that was really weird, but I'll roll with it.
And then I go to record a video again, same exact thing happened.
Except this time it didn't want to turn itself back on.
yeah your battery is toast i've heard of this a lot of people have had this problem with many different models of phone iphone in the past that exactly the same symptoms you get your battery down to something that's below half but not really really low and then it's just like nope no battery for you and the same thing like sometimes it'll come back like oh here i am again 20 you you got to take that in that's that is a very common symptom and i don't know i don't know what it is it could just be a bad battery they just can't maintain the voltage and once it gets below a certain level the phone is just like yeah
So much for that.
But then you bring it back and it's like, oh, I can maintain the voltage.
No, not really.
I can't.
You just got to bring it in.
Don't bother.
Like like some people, John Roderick, who live with this for like a year or more and accept it as just like this darn phone.
It's like that's like Marco said, that is that's not the way it's supposed to work.
You have to bring that in.
Tell them the symptoms.
I'm sure they've heard it a million times before because this is a common symptom.
There is one exception, though, that is also almost exactly the same behavior you get during a hot or cold thermal shutdown.
Yeah, obviously temperature stuff, but I'm assuming it's spring.
It's like it's not too hot, not too cold.
I assume you hadn't left it in the sun on the dashboard of your car before using it.
No, we had just gone for a walk, about a mile and a half walk.
It was in my jeans pocket.
There was no I mean, it's it's humid out because it's been raining for the last year.
But but no, there was nothing environmental that should have caused it.
What I've done is I've left it plugged in and have and plan to leave it plugged in all night just to see.
This is before we had this conversation, but I thought, oh, well, maybe it's just like not calibrated or something like that.
So I'll just I'll leave it plugged in all night.
I mean, I always leave it plugged in all night long, but I'll just I'll be really diligent about leaving it plugged in and we'll see if that changes it.
But it sounds like I'm making a trip to the Genius Bar.
Typical Windows.
Blame yourself.
Just defrag it first.
No, you didn't update your Windows update virus definitions.
It's your fault.
It's totally your fault.
Aren't you happy now?
If I had something like this happen, especially on a device that I've had for a while, I'd be like, oh, yes, new battery.
Your battery's getting old anyway.
How many cycles has it been through?
You're going to get a fresh new battery, assuming you're still under warranty.
Well, I mean, it's a it's a success.
So, yeah, I'm still under warranty.
But what that also means is I got to go to the genius bar.
I've got to do the backup dance.
I've got to convince them that, you know, this is an actual issue that isn't my fault, etc.
Like I said, I'm sure I'm sure they're well versed in this exact problem and have a procedure and you are not the first person to tell them is it'll be fine.
I will say, though, it really when when I first saw this doing thermal shutdown, it was on Tiff's phone this past winter when she was trying to take videos of our kid playing in the snow in like in like the high 20s or low 30s Fahrenheit.
and like and the phone like after after a couple seconds of shooting video just kept shutting down on her and like and we thought it was broken and i was like oh we got to bring it in and then like we once we came inside and like the problem could never be reproduced at room temperature and we were like oh and i looked up and i figured out like that's actually expected behavior that i guess all those videos you see in apple commercials like the shot on iphone where people are like on ski vacations i guess they're taking really short shots
I know you have to keep the phone.
You can't keep the phone in a pocket that's essentially outdoors.
Like if your pockets are, you know, if you were to, if your pockets get cold, in other words, you have to have it in a pocket that's sort of the inside of the body heat part of it, because that's all the really, it's not as if your phone freezes solid within 20 seconds.
It's already frozen when it's in your pocket and you take it out and it just goes that, you know, a little extra bit.
So,
You really have to either keep it inside your glove or someplace close to your body so that the phone stays at more or less body or room temperature.
Then you get a long time before it freezes solid into a brick of inert lithium-ion battery.
Or you get one of those little hand warmer thingies, the little shaky packets with the chemical stuff that they give off heat.
Someone should sell a case like that.
You've already got the big lump for the battery case.
How about the heat case for the winter?
Then it would get hot thermal shut down.
well it doesn't they don't get that hot those things are you know so the the hand warmer things are the things that people who live in ridiculous climates use right so you guys use that all the time skiers use it oh the best is i don't know someone in the chat room would remember this before the age of the chemical packets that you would put in your pocket that you know you'd start a reaction and they would get warm not hot but you know warm like they're not burning your hands because they'd have lawsuits they had these things that were kind of like
metal clamshell things that had inside them essentially burning embers like not open flames but burning embers to give off heat sounds like the most dangerous thing you could possibly imagine uh and that was the old tech uh and that was much worse so the new stuff is uh considerably uh safer and more uh civilized
Was it like, was it airtight sealed in there or how did that?
My recollection was that it was like a clamshell or look more kind of like a compact or a snuff box or something.
And that the little burning ember things you get at by opening and closing it that way.
But you'd use it closed and just had a metal outside that would radiate the heat.
Weird.
It's something kind of crazy, like contraption from your drug days, John.
Yeah, my drug days, right?
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Anonymous has written in and said, can you please address the business model behind Tesla's offering to unlock, and that's in scare quotes, physical features already in the car like battery capacity otherwise locked down.
It seems worrisome that an in-app purchase strategy is spilling over into hardware, not just software updates like autopilot.
What this is about is the Tesla Model S, the 70 kilowatt hour.
I couldn't remember what the 70 stood for.
Anyway, for the 70, you can pay $3,250 to unlock another five kilowatt hours.
So you can pay $3,250 for someone to flip an electronic switch.
And that...
i don't know about that man that just seems a little weird to me like on the one side they are indeed making the car better so shouldn't you pay for that but on the other side they make it better in so many other ways and you don't have to pay for that so why is this something that costs money the joke i made on twitter about this was uh it's like an app purchase where they ship you the app that has the code for the features that are currently locked and by doing an app purchase all they do is flip a bit that enables that feature in other words you got you just like when you get the car the car comes with this extra battery and
but it's not enabled.
Well, you get this app.
The app comes with this extra functionality, but it's not enabled.
And that was mostly me being snarky because, of course, the difference is that it doesn't cost money to manufacture the additional functionality.
Copying bits is essentially free, whereas someone paid to manufacture and assemble the parts of your car that they're giving to you in a disabled state.
So you actually are receiving...
that's that's part of the the package it's a physical good it costs every time they do that they whatever it is they put that extra bit of battery in that that's a real physical item it's not just a simple copying of bits uh now i don't know if this makes this good from a business standpoint in terms of do you feel better or worse about tesla as a company in light of this maybe you feel better because like your car magically got better but maybe you feel worse and that you understand
You paid to manufacture, assemble this stuff, and then you give it to me, but you intentionally turn it off.
It's like you're making my car worse on purpose and then ransoming it that last little bit.
Unless I'm totally misunderstanding what they're actually doing with this bit flipping.
But if it is actually a physical thing that they are paying to create and then giving to you in a shutoff state to try to ransom more money from you later, it doesn't give me a particularly good feeling about the company or the car.
It's definitely a weird thing.
And yeah, I agree that it's probably not a way to win customer satisfaction.
People will feel ripped off by that.
Like people who own the 70D and then learn that actually you have 75 kilowatt capacity physically.
But we only shipped it to 70.
And then if you want, you can pay $3,000 to unlock it.
I can totally see why the people who own those 70Ds are like, that's kind of BS-y.
That's a little bit BS-y.
But Tesla, it's a weird company at a weird stage in its life doing weird things.
And most of those things are, I think, overall for the better.
With the Model S, keep in mind that the Model S is sold with a pretty healthy profit margin, from what I understand.
And the main reason is to basically fund the company's further development to do things like the Model 3.
Because if you look at what's included in the Model S and the starting price of whatever it is, like $70,000, whatever the starting price of the Model S is,
And then you look at the Model 3 with the starting price of $35,000.
And we already know some of the things that will be included and won't be included in that.
And it seems kind of crazy if you try to estimate, well, roughly how big of a battery is there in the Model 3?
Roughly how big of a battery is there in the Model S?
How can they possibly cut the cost of the car in half?
and sell the Model 3 with so much of what's also in the Model S?
And the answer is that their costs aren't being cut in half.
Just the Model S has a nice fat profit margin, and the Model 3 won't.
So what you're paying for with the Model S today is not just like...
cost of the components plus 20%, you're paying a premium for it because it is a brand new product.
You're paying kind of like the early adopter premium on it.
It has high profits now.
In the long run, it will have lower profit margins in all likelihood because competition will come in and push some of these prices down.
And as things mature, then the costs will also go down.
But the role of the Model S is basically to generate lots of profit for Tesla to make the Model 3.
So from that perspective, I can see why they do things like this, because you know that that additional battery that you're hauling around, the additional five kilowatt hour battery did not cost Tesla three thousand dollars to put in there.
Or even if it did, you already paid for it.
Like they sold you a car with that battery in it for the price that you paid.
You know what I mean?
Like that was right.
Like.
Someone in the chat room is saying it's the type of thing where they stopped manufacturing the 70 kilowatt, but you bought a 70 kilowatt.
So it's like, well, we don't have any more 70 kilowatts, but we'll give you a 75, but flip the switch so that when you get it, it looks like the 70 that you ordered.
Like that was the arrangement.
You order the 70, comes with 70 kilowatts.
We give you a car that comes with 70 kilowatts.
Everyone should be happy.
But again, from a...
from a feel good about the company perspective it should they should do what apple does in those cases where like if you have a really old mac and something goes wrong with it and you're still within warranty or whatever or apple just feels bad they're like well we can't we can't fix this for you we can't replace the part because we don't make that part anymore and we can't give you a new like you know laptop of this kind because we don't even make that laptop but here you go here's the current model of that laptop that happens all the time at apple
And every time it happens, it's like, you know, a miracle to the people who get it.
Like, you're giving me not only you give me a new laptop, you're giving me a new better laptop because you don't make my old crappy one anymore.
And you're not charging me any money for it because it's just like this.
This laptop is a total write off.
It's have too many hardware fairies.
We can't get apart.
That makes people love Apple.
So if Tesla, someone in the chat room said it would make the people feel bad who bought a 70D and just got a 70D, if you bought a 70D after they stopped manufacturing them and they gave you a 75, they're like, yeah, I know you ordered a 70, but here's a 75.
You would love Tesla.
You'd be like, this is awesome.
And would 70D people be mad?
No, because they've had their car for a year or whatever.
Well, they'd be mad, but it wouldn't be for legitimate reasons.
But, you know, do other Mac users get mad like, hey, that's no fair.
I had to pay for that computer new.
You bought an old crappy computer and it broke and you got the new one for free.
Anyone who begrudges people their good fortune involving, you know, the time they chose to purchase or the time their thing broke.
That's just...
ridiculous so anyway i i don't think this is uh as you noted margo like this this is a car that you know it costs a lot of money has a big margin the people who are buying it are probably not caring that much about three thousand dollars here or there because this is a very expensive car so in the grand scheme of things maybe it doesn't hurt them but they've sort of uh they've missed an opportunity to become even more beloved uh
using you know the apple style things of just like you know surprise and delight or whatever not just in your application but also in your policies it's one of the reason people like the genius bar i know people have bad experiences with it as well but to go there have a person who uh you know will take care of your needs and if there's any sort of issue to have the people go that that's like kind of like a a luxury goods experience where if you pay if you really really massively overpay for something the one good thing is like if you have any problem with it like oh return it anytime or we'll give a new and we'll clean it up for you for free or whatever
even though you don't massively overpay for Apple stuff, maybe just a little bit overpay, when you go in with your broken computer and they can't replace it because it's too old and they give you a brand new model, that's just awesome.
That's like you are loyal for at least another three years before you get mad at them again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And also, keep in mind also, even though all the hype right now is about the Model 3, for the next two years, possibly more, the Model S is still the only Tesla you can buy, or the X, I guess, but nobody wants that one.
Sorry, X people.
So the entry price, whatever they can make the cheapest Model S...
That is the entry price for Tesla for the next X years, two, three, whatever it ends up being before anybody can just go order a Model 3 and have it delivered in six weeks or whatever.
So the lower they can make that price, the more people they can get into being Tesla customers at all.
They also, though, want to preserve those profit margins on the higher spec models because that's funding the rest of the company.
So it's important for them to somehow get the price down enough so they can get a few more people in, basically without cannibalizing their higher-end sales.
So they have to do tricks like this, where it's like, well, if we sold it just as a 75 before, so it was like 75 for that one or 85 for the big one up, that was too small of a difference.
We would lose too many sales, maybe they figured, so they made that one a 70, even though it technically had 75 in there or something like that.
And then when they raise the other one from $85 to $90, then they raise the other one from $70 to $75 because now you're just keeping the same difference.
There's all sorts of reasons why they could have done this that make total sense and that even though they might annoy some of the customers who don't think things should work that way, it might be better than the alternative for the company as a whole.
This isn't unprecedented either.
When I first heard about the story a few days back, my first thought was, no, that's a little gross.
But as I was thinking about it while you guys were talking, I paid almost $1,000 for a Cobb access port, which is a thing – I refer to it as a chip colloquially, but really –
It's just a software reprogrammer that you plug into the OBD2 port and it will reflash the computer and give you a little bit more power and it makes the car a little bit faster.
And then I was thinking to myself, well, but that's a little bit different because that's third party.
And so, yeah, it makes sense that a third party is going to want to sell you something to make your car better.
But then I got thinking about it a little more and it occurred to me, BMW sells what they call the performance power kit, which to my understanding does have a little bit of hardware involved, but the majority of the changes are simply a reflash just like my Cobb does.
So this is a first party thing.
And again, it's not entirely apples to apples because there is a little bit of hardware, but it's a first party thing that I'm looking on BMW's website right now and it's $2,107.
So this is not that different in my eyes than what BMW is already doing and presumably other manufacturers as well.
I wonder, can you pirate a battery?
Yeah, I don't know.
You could pirate the bit flipping.
But in the BMW case, maybe part of the money that you're paying is to offset increased warranty repairs for your engine that is operating slightly outside the intended, you know, boundaries of whatever.
Yeah.
You know, depending on what it's changing about the engine, it could be impacting reliability or other issues like that.
So the price is basically everyone pays this price as a blanket insurance policy for the slightly increased odds that you're going to have your valve train blow up or whatever.
It could be.
But I mean, I would hope and assume that these engines are built in such a way that their tolerances give them enough leeway that a first party solution would not bump up against any of that.
Now, my solution might.
But there's a reason they sell them where they sell.
They sell the they try it with a car manufacturer trying to do or sell their engines tuned in a way that balances performance with reliability because.
And economy.
And emissions.
Right, right.
So there's a whole bunch of things in the mix there, and they're going for something that makes, you know, the worst thing you want to happen is you put these cars out there with a particular balance of things, and it turns out that all of them end up coming back in like six years with something really expensive wrong with the engine.
Like, you don't want that to happen.
But...
if people say well i know you can squeeze some more horsepower out of this thing if only you increase the boost on the turbos or you know change the the timing or or you know whatever you want to do on the thing uh and it might have a slight uh detrimental impact on reliability but if people are willing to give us some money uh we'll do that uh and then i guess like a big pool to pay for the one guy out of every hundred whose engine dies a premature death due to this tuning thing
But everyone has the same engine.
It's not as if there's part of your engine that you're not being allowed to use.
It's more like, I think of it as like buying AppleCare Plus or whatever.
Fair enough.
I was going to say it's like 80 minute CDRs versus 74 minute standard.
But as you kept going, it ended up being nothing like that.
Goodness.
All right.
Adam Bushman writes in to say getting to love something like ad bumpers by just by being exposed to it frequently.
That's called the is that Mary or Miri exposure effect?
I'm surely mispronouncing that.
But M-E-R-E exposure effect.
You know, Casey, you are the chief pronouncer on the show.
Oh, great.
Chief summarizer and chief pronouncer.
I thought it was like merely by being exposed.
And it's like the worst name effect ever.
The mere exposure effect.
Merely by being exposed.
Anyway, we'll link the Wikipedia article, which obviously none of us actually read.
But you can read it.
Indeed.
You all can do our homework for us.
That's how the show works.
It's accidental.
Well, you know, one of the jobs of Wikipedia is every phenomenon that you think has a name probably does.
That's probably a phenomenon, the idea that you call it an idea and it turns out there's a name for it already.
What is the name of that phenomenon?
I bet nobody knows except Merlin.
I guarantee you he knows.
He doesn't know.
He just looks it up on Wikipedia like everyone else.
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So the New York Times on the 7th, which was this past Saturday as we record, released an article, podcast surge, but producers fear Apple isn't listening.
And this article, it had some problems.
The quick summary from your summarizer in chief is that Apple supposedly had a handful of big name podcasters into their campus to talk to Apple about what they want from Apple to make their jobs easier.
And the way this New York Times article was written was that
basically we want all the data about all the things and apple may or may not be giving that to us and that's mildly alarming this has created quite obviously quite a hubbub in our little circle because most of the things that the new york times article is talking about about big data about getting access to who listened to what when and when i say who i mean you know
How old is this person?
What gender are they?
Where do they live?
How much do they make?
What do they like?
What are they not like?
Et cetera.
And when they listen, do they listen to the whole thing?
Do they only listen to part of it?
Did they listen to the beginning and skip the middle?
Do they skip the ads?
Do they not skip the ads?
Do they like the ads?
Do they not like the ads?
Tell us everything.
Well, for those of us who care about our listeners, we don't want that.
We don't need that.
We don't want that.
And we hope we never get in the position that we do need that.
And so this article had a lot of problems.
And Marco, you wrote a really nice post about it.
I don't really know what to say that hasn't already been said in either Marco's post or Federico's, but I'm sure there's something to be said, so Marco, take it away.
I mean, the good thing is all the other stuff that had to be said, Jason and Mike said an upgrade this week.
So I suggest you can listen to that instead.
But if you want to stick around here as well or listen to us as well, there's a few parts here.
I mean, so you mentioned the data gathering part that the leading podcasters allegedly wanted.
By the way, this whole article is stating a bunch of things as fact.
Like, this is definitely how Apple does things now.
This meeting definitely happened.
It definitely happened like this with these people in it.
And so far, I have not heard any corroboration to support some of these facts, like the specifics about the meeting.
Additionally, I know firsthand that many of the things in the article stated as fact or implied as fact are wrong or misleading with how the system works or Apple's role in it or technical details of how it works.
So take this article with a giant pile of salt.
Honestly, I would say don't even bother reading it if you did read it.
It reads more like something that maybe somebody on Forbes would have written to be like an anti-Apple clickbait piece.
Because it attributes a lot of intent and malice to Apple for what they've been holding back on all these years and stuff like that.
That is just...
misleading at best, and in some cases just outright wrong, it needs to be taken with a lot of salt.
So that being said, I think you can look at the medium here, the podcasting medium, the way it has worked so far.
Which basically works like RSS readers that happen to play audio files.
That's basically it.
Like it's sites publish RSS feeds with MP3s or AACs and the vast majority are MP3s.
I'm just going to say that from now on.
And clients are basically RSS readers and they fetch those RSS feeds for everything you subscribe to.
And when a new episode is present, they download the MP3 file that's embedded, the link of which is embedded in the feed.
Then they show it to you as an episode.
When it's playing, it's simply playing in MP3.
It is not like loading pages on the site of the podcast provider or anything like that.
It is not executing JavaScript on their behalf.
It is not sending them tracking information.
They do get the hit on their server for when you fetch that MP3.
So podcasters already have a certain amount of data about their listeners.
And so the idea that Apple needs to step in and provide data so that people can have any idea what size their audience is, it's a little exaggerated because...
We already know how big our audience is.
It's a little bit approximated, but I think history shows with a lot of this data science in massive quotes.
My fingers are just constantly moving during this whole thing.
Constant air quotes, just up and down.
All the web data stuff is also imprecise and is also very easily faked and defrauded all the time and everything.
So all the problems that apply to what we have now also apply to proper – my fingers are still moving – big data kind of analytics and creepy tracking stuff.
Anyway, so we already know how big the audience is to a rough degree, where they are to a rough degree, and how many of them download each show.
We don't need that level of data integration where you go much beyond this yet.
And we might in the future in order to get high ad rates.
But right now, we don't.
The reason the web had to do all this creepy data stuff...
is because web ad rates just plummeted.
I mean, they were never great to begin with.
And over the years since the web has been a thing, I think they've just basically always gone down.
Because general web display ads, like ads you'd see on the side of a news site or increasingly on top of the news site you're trying to read, floating in, flying around the news site, in the background of the news site, in every sidebar, above and below the content, posing as content, posing as, oh, these top news stories, these weird new tricks the news scientists wanted you to learn about Britney Spears.
The reason it keeps getting so bad on the web is that nobody looks at web ads.
It's not that people see them and ignore them.
People don't even see them.
Even if you don't have an ad blocker installed, you visually don't see them.
You don't perceive them.
You skip over them.
The whole banner blindness thing is real.
There's very little that web publishers can really do to make a lot of money on those things.
And so they've had to do all this crazy tracking stuff just to try to make it slightly more targeted, to raise the rates slightly more.
And then, of course, there's the rise of all these programmatic ad exchanges, which makes everything even worse and even more horrible and even more creepily tracked.
But that's a long aside that we don't need to get any more into.
summary version basically the web sucks for ads like it is it is a terrible place to advertise it is a terrible place to publish advertisements to try to make money from them additionally as i mentioned before all the massive fraud that goes on like it's such a mess it is so it's just bad for everybody because the medium just doesn't work that well for display i just it just doesn't work very well simple as that
And as everything gets more and more cutthroat and advanced technically and algorithmically generated and everything, it's just getting worse and worse and worse.
And there's kind of no end in sight there.
The web as a place to make money through advertising is really a pretty bad place to be.
So podcasts, on the other hand, because these are just MP3 files, it's just an audio stream.
There's basically nothing you can really do to advertise in an audio stream except just insert an ad that somebody is speaking into the stream.
And because of lots of reasons, there's not a lot of tracking you can do to say, like, you know, did people hear that ad?
With a few exceptions.
But for the most part, you can't really track, did people hear this?
Did people listen this far in the show?
Like...
You pretty much can't do it because what if somebody's playing it on their iPod that doesn't even have an internet connection?
You don't know that.
They're still playing the file they downloaded from you, and there's no way for that to be reported to you.
What if they're playing it in some web embed or Twitter embed where they can see the MP3 file, but they're not loading a whole app or they're not loading your whole web page or something?
They're still listening.
And by the raw metric of download counts, they will be counted.
But that's all you can really get.
What if the soothing sound of our voice puts them to sleep, and as they fall asleep, five ants play?
Yeah, should we get paid for those?
There's no way to tell whether somebody has listened to a certain point, basically, unless you control the app.
And we'll get to that.
So anyway, this to me is like this beautiful system because the web... I love the web.
And it makes me so sad to see what the web has become over the last five years or so as everything has just gotten so much more cutthroat and driven by automated ad tech and algorithmic content generation.
It's just...
As I said, it's just a mess.
And as a fan of both the web as a medium and also the openness of blogging and RSS feeds and everything, which I still use, by the way.
I still use an RSS reader.
It's not dead.
That world is losing to Facebook and Twitter and Apple and these kind of closed ecosystems.
That makes me very sad.
Podcasting is still run that way.
The question, basically, the debate here is whether podcasting can still be run that way for a longer time or whether this, you know, the article kept saying, like, it has outgrown its roots.
has it like does podcasting really need to add all this crap to let people's business grow because podcasting is working just fine the way it is we get so so if you talk about like how much you make per listener or per per user ad people call this the cpm uh the cost per thousand uh impressions however you measure that thanks france by the way for the m
So the web, I think you're lucky to get, I mean, what's a good web CPM today?
Like a few dollars maybe at most?
I mean, and with podcasting, the numbers are lower.
The listener numbers are lower.
Like, you know, a good website can get millions of hits a month.
the top podcast things like this american life like really big podcasts might get like a million downloads a month or something in that ballpark i don't know i don't have recent numbers on that but that's what i heard like a year or two ago or something like that so you know a million downloads a month for a podcast would put you in like the top handful of podcasts that exist in the world whereas a million hits to a web page is is kind of like lower to mid-level traffic these days like you can get way more than that if you're a big site but
the podcast can command something like a $20 to $60 CPM instead of what the web is getting, like, you know, a dollar or two.
Because podcast advertising is just so much more effective.
It's not even close.
It is way more effective.
And part of that's because you have, you know, people like us, like the hosts reading the ads, and that makes you pay attention more.
A big part of it is you're actually hearing them as opposed to the web where you just do not even see the ads at all.
Not because of ad blockers, because you actually just ignore them.
Podcast ads are so much more effective just because of the medium, because of how it's heard, where it's heard, who is saying it, what they're saying, the relationship people have, the dedication they have, where and how they're listening.
as opposed to like on the web, you're kind of just like skimming constantly and you kind of get through as fast as you can.
A podcast, you're probably listening to while doing something else, whether it's working, driving, whatever the case, you're less physically engaged in the activity.
So you're less likely, I think, to skip the ad.
It's just such a different environment that it just happens to work way better for ads.
So for some reason, this handful of big podcasters allegedly met with some people at Apple
allegedly trying to get them to say well we want we want to basically do like web levels of data tracking and we want apple to put that in their app because that's the only way we can have we can really have it done is to put these things in apps the the implication there is because they want their business models to be more like the web and that just seems insane to me because the web is in such shambles and we have it great over here in podcast land and
They don't know how lucky they are.
The web does these data things because it has to for most sites to get anything at all, not because that is the inevitable way forward to, quote, grow your business.
Podcasting is not new.
It is not even I wouldn't even say it's booming.
i think it's growing steadily the same way it has for 10 years and if you look at like podcast growth it's not a hockey stick curve it's basically a line and everyone's everyone who thinks it's new it's just like it's like the tip of the iceberg thing like where it finally poked out of the ocean where it's like they think oh my god this is here all of a sudden and in reality like no it's been growing the entire time under the ocean you just didn't see it uh i
There's basically the debate over whether podcasting needs to change in order to enable, quote, growth or to mature or something.
And what angered me so much about this article, in addition to all the things that it got factually wrong or misleading, it basically stated as given, as fact, that podcasting was outgrowing its roots and needed to change.
change the way it operates to be more like the web.
I very strongly disagree with that.
I'm not saying that podcasting should never change, but I am saying I don't think it needs to change in this way right now and possibly ever because this is a different medium.
It works very differently.
And the idea that a few people, most of whom come from the web and ad tech worlds, think that podcasts should work more like the web.
First of all, I find that baffling because, as I said, the web sucks.
And second of all, I think that is a bad argument.
It doesn't follow.
You can't make that argument without support that's showing that somehow podcasting is really suffering without this and is declining and needs this to survive.
And I'm seeing no evidence of that at all.
In fact, I'm seeing the opposite.
I'm seeing podcasting is growing and is doing very well.
Going to the Apple side, what could Apple do?
Apple is a directory.
They're the biggest directory.
And they have this big editorial section where they can promote shows, which they do.
And as far as I know, they're the only people who invest a lot of human effort to actually make editorial podcast picks in lots of different categories every week and around the world, I think.
So they're already doing a lot on the editorial side.
I don't know what else they could do on the editorial side.
I think they're already doing way more than anybody could be expected to do, given that they're making so little money off of podcasting.
I think they're doing a very good job.
Apple, I think editorially, I think they're set.
We should be thankful they're doing as much as they do.
And then you have the Apple Player.
And this is kind of where... So the Apple Podcast Player is the most popular podcast-playing app, the one built into iOS.
I don't know how well iTunes does anymore on the desktop.
I think it's pretty small, probably.
But the one on iOS that comes with iOS called Podcasts from Apple with the purple icon, that is the most popular podcast player in the world.
It has something like 60% or 70% of podcast downloads, according to most people.
And so they're basically pushing Apple to say, the stats we get now are not enough.
We want you to do two things for us.
We want you to, A, give us as much data as you can about the people.
So tell us how many of these downloads into your app actually get listened to.
Where do they stop playing each episode?
Exactly what timestamp down to the second so we can optimize our content and tweak our storytelling abilities.
And then our advertisers can ask how many people actually heard our entire ads and they can then, I guess, not pay us.
i get a lot of these things don't make sense once you think them through but i don't know why why podcasts would be asking for some of these things uh but anyway so that's that's part one is that they want apple to to add all this creepy data tracking to their player app and then to report it to the podcast in some way and
Once again, I think Jason Snell and Mike Hurley on Upgrade this past week did a very, very good job of covering exactly like what the kind of implications of this would be and how like just the scale of the operation this would entail to even do this if they wanted to and how useful the data would actually be considering that it's.
not the like it isn't all listeners it's depending on the show somewhere between like probably 20 and 70 percent of the listeners so you know that's and it might not be a representative sample so it's you know the quality of the data they would get would itself be in question even if they got it and in the process of them getting it and the the
systems involved the implementation of that would be a huge mess not to mention all the ethical and quality issues it would then create the incentives it would create with podcast creation with these pro podcasters to like structure their shows differently so that they would boost these numbers in these little tiny ways that would
kind of sacrifice quality or overall flow, but it would give us 5% more this month.
Because you can say now that would never happen, but look at the web.
It happens.
It always happens.
So let's not kid ourselves.
That would definitely happen.
So you have this massive problematic request of the more data.
Then you also have the request from the podcasters that Apple enable other business models.
And what they basically mean is enable a way for people to pay for our shows.
You know, there's already ways to pay for podcasts.
Lots of podcasts do.
I know this because Overcast doesn't support their feeds.
And I hear from all their fans every day.
There's already ways to do things like paid feeds, members-only feeds, whether it's password-protected or it's hidden URLs, because I do support those.
Thanks, Jason.
I do support those.
Please subscribe to Six Colors.
The password stuff I don't support, and a lot of them, they'll be a members-only area or paid podcast that aren't even distributed as podcast files.
They're in a feed.
You sign up with their website, and then you can download the raw audio files.
There are lots of ways to do this.
The biggest way to do this, though, Apple made in 2008.
It's called the App Store.
This is what most people do.
If they want to have a paid podcast, they release their own app to play their podcast, which gives them all of the capabilities that the podcasters are asking Apple for, allegedly.
That already exists.
It's existed for eight years.
It's called the App Store.
You can make your app.
You can charge whatever you want for the app.
You can have in-app purchase in the app.
You can control the entire player experience and do all the creepy data tracking you want.
That's already there.
Many podcasts have their own apps.
This is not a new thing.
And it works okay.
I don't know anybody who makes a ton of their listenership or money that way, but they make some.
It's fine.
So you know what?
If that's the kind of system you want, it already exists.
And take it from a developer, I guarantee you that whatever Apple would do with the podcast store that everyone's apparently asking for...
would be worse that would be a worse system than just making your own app you don't want that trust me like either way apple's taking 30 let's be honest here i mean we know that they're taking at least 30 either way you know at least in the app store it's only 30 if you if they make their own podcast store that gives them the opportunity to set a new rate it might be higher now that apple's a services company so believe me you don't want that
But don't you understand why they don't want to make their own app?
Isn't it obvious the fragmentation problem of that if everyone has their own app?
The advancement of the app store is the one place you go to get all the software instead of having to go to individual developers' websites that have discoverability problems and making people aware and getting the fatigue.
It's kind of like we have on Apple TV now.
the fatigue of like, uh, if I want to list this podcast, I got to do this app and I want to do that podcast.
I got to do that app.
Like kind of like when, when books were individual apps back when Apple was allowing that where you get one book as an individual app, it's just, it's just a lot of fragmentation.
And if everybody did that, it's really hard to get, uh,
attention from anybody and like the sort of level playing clear that you were talking about before is an advantage of saying look apple you just implement this stuff as sort of the baseline within the only podcast player app that matters the built-in apple one as far as these people are concerned allegedly in this uh in this article here uh then we wouldn't have to fight for the attention to get our app downloaded and it really is a barrier to people like people don't want to have to
download a new app for it's like having to download a new app for every movie you want to see it's like rather just go to a store and be able to rent or buy the movie and you don't have to go to 17 different stores and there are still multiple stores but if it was one per podcast that's bad um so i kind of what i'm trying to do reading this article is put myself into perhaps not the headspace of the theoretical people who talk to apple um
but the headspace of the author of this article because a lot of things in this article are not quotes are not and are not like sentiments attributed to people who supposedly met with apple but rather just stated yeah in what looks like the author's voice presumably informed by the i don't know by by accounts of the meeting and i'm trying to try to figure out like what
Why is it that the author or the people that the author spoke to believe these things about podcasting?
Like, what is I don't know what what are we missing?
Because I think you've outlined it pretty well, like from our perspective, doesn't make any sense.
But our perspective isn't the only perspective.
And I think the best thing I've come up with is that.
if you want to if you want to reach a bigger audience like podcasts are the size that they are serial is way bigger than lots of podcasts this american life is way bigger but that kind of barely counts because it built its audience on the radio and not as a podcast right um if you want to go really big with that
Big audience means, I suppose, high production values.
It costs more to make shows.
I don't even know if that's true, but again, I'm trying to get in their head and their thinking.
I think it's loosely correlated.
High production values can result in better shows.
They sometimes do result in better shows, but they don't always, and they aren't always required.
But anyway, if you were going for a much bigger audience, part of that would also be going for bigger advertisers.
Advertisers who would not bother advertising on the numbers that most podcasts put up.
And if you want big advertisers, having been conditioned by all the crap on the web that you just talked about,
want this information that is not available from podcasts so it's kind of like we want to go really big we want to go mass market and by the way when you go mass market your cpms go down because mass market like we're going to make a show for everybody everybody is not as valuable as people who are super duper into model trains because if you have a podcast you know for people who are super duper into model trains model train manufacturers will pay a lot for that
Whereas if you're going to have our podcast is listened to by everyone, everyone's not a great demo.
Or our podcast is listened to by... The reason podcasts get such high CPMs and the reason I think a lot of tech podcasts get high CPMs is...
It's a narrow self-selecting audience based on the topic.
And those audiences can be much more valuable than the mass audiences.
So anyway, if you want to make podcasts way bigger and sell to a mass audience and your CPM goes down, you really need the tools that will let you get Coca-Cola to put an advertisement on your thing or, you know, talk to Procter & Gamble or whatever, like...
these really big things that you know buy super bowl ads and are you have huge ad budgets and i think that's kind of the chicken egg the thing they're trying to go it's like podcasts is it looks like almost like a wasted medium from the perspective of these these people who are going want to go for a big audience like i bet many more people would go for any or think about radio like you'd have you know
Every kind of mass advertiser would be on radio because like, oh, this reaches everybody.
But the everybody model is so different than the current podcasting model.
I think what they want to happen is please make a world where Coca-Cola will advertise.
And here are the ingredients we see that will...
hook up all the pieces in this chain so that we will have a podcast that plays to 50 million people and that really big companies pay for ads at a tremendous rate and a tremendously low cpm but we'll make it up in volume and now we are a big player and we will just squish all the other shows and we'll make serial look like a little silly npr fluke i don't even know if serial was npr sorry pri if that's you or whoever the hell it is
And that's so outside our understanding of podcasts and our little tech circle and our nerdy podcasts and stuff like that.
I don't necessarily think that that can't and shouldn't exist, but...
like as a goal i kind of see it as well it's something to that like imagine if you have the podcast that everybody listened to serial it seems like it was most people you know like it's just big compared to other podcasts it's not as if uh someone came out with the the equivalent of you know star wars 1977 like the movie that everybody in a generation saw there is no podcast equivalent to that yet and they could be going for it and i think that's an interesting goal and interesting thing to aspire to but
the way the things they're asking for a are informed by the web and like you said like that's pretty stupid and b like the whole what they're asking apple to do i don't understand why maybe they haven't been burned enough by this but asking apple to hey build in these analytics into your app and make you know and subscriptions and stuff like that and of course there are so many things that only apple can do because their platform level things or have to do with the app store and there's only one way to get software on your things it's through the app store
uh again focusing on ios but i'm sure they make the same pitch to google although google's got its own google play thing going on over there uh but were they successful in lobbying apple for the things they supposedly want they will just you know in their wildest dreams what they will have successfully done is created youtube which is terrible which is you never run a situation where
the only reasonable way to make money with video on the web is through youtube and youtube controls or music yeah yeah youtube controls everything about it and there's no competition and they can change the terms at any time and what the hell are you going to do because it's youtube like why would you ask for that why would you you are you know again to apple's credit or whatever or apple's apathy or whatever like they're probably not going to do any of this stuff
But if they did, it would be terrible for everyone involved, both the big guys, because they would just be putting themselves under the thumb of Apple.
And for the small people who were like, no, we don't want that.
We like to be free and open or whatever.
Like, so it's a terrible doomsday scenario if they got what they wanted, because it would it would just make it dysfunctional.
All the ways you talked about for the Web and the data and the ever decreasing CPMs and the perverse incentives and the fraud and everything like that.
and you would be shoveling all of the power in the market to this one gatekeeper just because you didn't want to write your own app and because you couldn't abide to have a simple open system with rss feeds because it just it wouldn't didn't give you the analytics you want like it's it's such a terrible thing to want like again i kind of see where they're coming from and like we want the big breakout hit and we need this data and we need these tools but i feel like you should work that out
it's so hard for me to talk about this to even accepting the premise that these things happen in the article whether they said they did but right because they didn't pretend that it did um you should be talking to coca-cola about how they should be okay with uh you know funding this podcast full of celebrities that you think millions and millions of people are going to listen to without the obsessive data that they think they should technically be able to get she's like coca-cola picture back
to the olden days when people filled out little paper forms after they watched television shows and you and you bought you bought advertisement based on that and now we're going to tell you a precise number of downloads and you won't do it because it's just not enough data and you need to know the exact demos and again where they live and what their income is and what things they last clicked on and what their last boss on amazon
what cookie has been tracking them through their facebook clicks for the last oh it's just i i it's it's a somewhat admirable goal to try to make like a podcast breakout hit but i think the supposed uh demands of these people um in this article um
are totally the wrong way to go about it and one tiny passage that i highlighted here just to finish up like makes me just question everything about this this is again not a quote and not attributed to anything but it's uh the article says promotion within itunes which is one of the only reliable ways to build an audience particularly for a new show is decidedly decided by a small team blah blah blah promotion within itunes is
Not only one of the only reliable ways to build an audience, but probably one of the worst ways to build an audience.
If you could guarantee that you would be promoted as the number one podcast on iTunes for an entire year, would that build an audience?
Versus, say, if you made a podcast that promised to slowly lay out the plot for Star Wars Episode VIII?
The episode 8, entirely unpromoted in iTunes podcast, would crush your podcast.
Like, it's the only reliable way to build... You build an audience by making things that people like, and leveraging an existing audience is probably the best way to build an audience, but the only reliable way...
I can't think of a single person who found their favorite podcast because it was promoted on iTunes.
I'm sure they're out there and I'm sure they'll send us things, but it's just such a warped view of the world of podcast listening.
That's not how people discovered Serial.
People did not discover Serial because it was promoted on iTunes.
It was promoted on iTunes because people discovered Serial.
There is a place for editorial or whatever, but if you got it in your head that iTunes is already this kingmaker gatekeeper...
I don't know.
You are abdicating all of your responsibility to build your own audience by having a good show and doing your own marketing and stuff like that.
Again, editorial is important and they do promote shows and it's important for shows to come out of obscurity that Apple can put them in new and noteworthy and whatever weird systems they're having.
It's a fun little thing, but really, to frame it as the only reliable way to build an audience, particularly for a new show, that...
That just does not match with my understanding of the podcast world at all, especially when it comes to mass market shows, because the mass market is not trolling the iTunes podcast directory.
They don't even know what podcasts are, right?
They only know because they heard about cereal and then they figured out what podcasts are.
That's the problem.
By treating Apple as the whole world, as you very well said, you're not only trying to make them the only platform that matters at all and trying to increase their share, but you're also kind of investing in a sinking ship because that 60% market share that they most likely have among listening, that goes down every year.
Believe me, I've been watching.
That's decreasing over time.
As more podcast players sprout up on iOS, and as more people finally get around to listening on Android, because Android so far has been very underrepresented in podcast stats, according to most big hosts.
I know Libsyn used to announce numbers every so often.
It used to be something like 8 to 1 in favor of iOS for every show that they host, which is a lot of shows.
Now Android's getting higher.
You have people like Google Play and Spotify entering the podcast market in...
possibly big ways um we'll see how that how those end up going and i don't like them but they exist so we'll see how that ends up going but you know you have the podcast market being becoming more and more diverse apple's market share is going down and all of a sudden these people want to give apple a reason to lock things down and dominate that's a terrible idea um
Also, the idea of relying on them for all of your audience growth is ridiculous.
We know from the App Store.
Everyone who relies only on the App Store for their promotion, we tell them they're doing it wrong.
We tell them, like, no, you can't.
Even the App Store people will tell you, please don't rely on us.
And if you're trying to get featured by the App Store and you have no other marketing, that actually hurts your chances of being featured.
They want to feature things that have real marketing plans.
And so the idea of trying to, like, basically make Apple do all your work for you to promote your podcast...
as you said, John, is terrible.
Also, getting back to the ad thing for a second, which kind of ties into this.
Everything that the podcasters are asking Apple to do, or asking for, basically comes down to, we are not making enough per listener from our ads.
And we would like to add all this tracking so that we can make more money.
It's basically like saying the only way for us to grow is to extract more out of the existing listener base.
Remember what I said earlier about the relative size of the audience between podcasts and the web?
A great podcast might get a few hundred thousand downloads an episode.
That would put it in like the top probably five or one percent of podcasts.
On the web, that's nothing.
If you want to grow your business as podcasters, the way for growth is to get more people listening to podcasts and then to get more people listening to your podcast.
That's obvious.
I don't understand how anybody can look at the situation now and say, well, what we need to really grow this, we're outgrowing this old model here.
What we really need is ad tech?
What?
No, you need more people listening to podcasts.
You know how you do that?
It's not by making podcasts suck.
It's not by getting all creepy on people and putting all this stuff in their face.
It's not by putting up a paywall, sorry.
Grow the audience.
That's the way for revenue growth.
You start doing all this data mining crap when either your ads don't work or when you have saturated the audience and you need to find new ways to extract more out of what you have.
Neither of those things are true for podcasting.
It's the opposite.
Podcasting has tons of room to grow.
It is growing.
Not hockey stick level growth, but it is steadily growing over time.
There's tons of potential still to grow into, especially as we have further penetration of Bluetooth and cell phones in cars, which is where a lot of listening happens.
And we have all these new cheap home speaker Bluetooth devices for people to listen more at home.
And you have people getting more and more into the habit of listening to things on their smartphones.
There is tons of room for growth here.
And there are so many people who don't listen to podcasts now.
That's where you focus.
You focus your effort on growing the pool.
We're already making great rates on the ads.
Rates that...
As you said, when you expand Coca-Cola, all these things were like, oh, we have to expand into brand advertising.
Okay, so right now, we have mostly direct response advertisers.
This is things like Squarespace, things where you sign up for a service or you buy a product and you give them some kind of coupon or discount code or you visit a special URL and they track how many people...
bought their thing through each episode's URL, and that kind of gives them an idea of how many people might have heard the ad and how much they are willing to pay for future ads as a result of how much they're making from their past ads.
All these articles about how much we have to move into brand advertising, they're all like, well, we keep hearing the same ads from Squarespace over and over again.
You ever wonder why?
They're not dumb.
They're buying them because they work really well.
And whatever they're spending on the ads, which, as I said, is a really nice amount by CPM, whatever they're spending on the ads, they're making that back.
They can see it in direct response conversions and results.
The reason why we have so many direct response advertisers and why every podcast, for the most part, does is because they can directly measure the value, they see it, and they say, we want more because these ads are working ridiculously well.
Brand advertising, things like, oh, we're going to plaster Coke ads all over these billboards for the next 10 years and hope that increases our margin slightly.
Brand advertising, by definition,
is almost impossible to measure it basically goes unmeasured brand advertising is basically a shot in the dark there people are just hoping that over time by getting their logo and their name out there and associating happy things with their brand or whatever people will start recognizing their brand and sales will slowly increase as this recognition builds the web has has developed such incredibly sophisticated and creepy levels of tracking and analytics and behavioral monitoring and surveillance and
that they can see to a much greater degree what works and what doesn't.
Brand ads don't pay that much on the web because they can see it's not working.
When you're saying you want brand ads, what you're really saying is, we're going to sell brand ads because our ads don't work.
So we're going to sell these to you, Coke, because we know you won't really be able to measure.
Well, but Coke also isn't interested in the small numbers and Squarespace, maybe not Squarespace, but some other advertisers that are basically paying to acquire new customers for some kind of subscription plan may not be able to pay like Coke will pay more.
Because brand advertising is, by definition, a we-want-the-big-numbers, huge-shotgun approach.
That's the only type of advertising to which the sort of general-purpose, broad demographic is actually desirable because that's what we're going for.
We want everybody to know what Coca-Cola is.
We don't care who you are, what you do, what you're interested in.
You need to know about Coca-Cola, and it's awesome.
They want the big numbers.
Anything that is acquiring customers, even something like Fracture or whatever—
like i don't think that they that they're not gonna they're not gonna keep the same cpm and pay for a show that gives 100 million people that bankrupt the company right and they're not interested they don't they're not interested in spraying their like they'd be overpaying because only a small fraction those people are actually interested in signing up would be much better to go on a podcast where a much higher percentage of the people who listen are into digital photography and making prints of it or whatever you know so i i feel like
They want to get those big advertisers because, you know, the number on the check is going to be really big.
And the only people who are going to write that check are the people who are doing brand advertising.
And that's the way you get, again, you know, if you want to get a podcast that has 200 million downloads for every episode.
I think brand advertising is your only path to that.
And so they're trying to connect the dots to make that happen.
And by the way, I agree that the way you would get a big podcast like that is you have to get more people listening to podcasts.
But the best way to do that is to keep podcasts like the web.
The reason everybody...
can and did eventually come to use the web is because it wasn't controlled by microsoft or yahoo or whoever else like it was a thing that anyone can implement the web browser anyone can make a website and no one company owns and controls it uh that's what let it spread everywhere if you try to make apple the king of podcasts or android the king of podcasts or whatever
you're narrowing the number of people who can listen to podcasts, especially if you pick somebody who has a platform.
Because again, say you took iOS or Android and one of them became the only thing in podcasting that mattered.
You're cutting off half of the market right there.
You want everybody to be able to listen to podcasts really easily on no matter what device they have, whatever weird thing they buy in their house or have on their person or in their car or wherever.
You want everybody to be able to listen to podcasts just like everybody can go to your website.
The reason websites have huge amount of traffic is because,
everybody can go to websites that you doesn't you don't have to have a special kind of computer or a special operating system or a special application or whatever essentially every platform has some way to browse the web uh and we're at that point with podcast now it's just rss anybody can make a player for it for any apple for any type of thing
any move that big podcasts would do in the hopes of getting like big brand advertising or making a big podcast that tried to make podcasting more more narrow in that way is shooting themselves in the foot because the you know those people are out there you want to make you want to make them be able to listen to podcasts no matter where they are what they're doing do not make podcasting tied to a particular store particular application or anything like that that'd be so dumb
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So we talked about in an episode or two ago how I felt like it's been trendy to dislike the Apple Watch.
Well...
it's been trendy to really really really freaking love the amazon echo um i do not have one i don't i don't know that i've ever yet i mean sure probably um i've never seen one in person to my recollection but everyone that i know swears by it loves it etc and so it seems like everyone's getting really infatuated with voice-based control and
And the people who did Siri, which was that software was eventually bought up by Apple, and I believe the company was as well.
So a lot of the ex-Siri people have gone on to create Viv, which is kind of the spiritual successor to Siri, and they demoed it on Monday.
Now, I didn't have the time to watch the video, but my understanding was this was something pretty darn impressive.
Impressive if you don't think about it too much, I guess.
Why do you say that?
I have Hound.
I've seen the Viv things.
Maybe this only bothers people like me.
But on the flip side of it, I think none of these things are up to the point where they pass...
the regular person uh thresholds of uh of magic because as we've discussed many times in the past with siri the problem with siri and things like that is and you'll see when you have any kid use siri for five seconds people immediately jump to oh this is a little person in my computer but obviously it's not and as soon as they discover the very real and very close limits of any of these things it breaks the illusion it's like oh
I thought this was like a little person on my computer I could talk to.
Instead, it's just a crappy program that basically boils down to playing a text adventure game where you have to learn the syntax and what you can say and what you can't say.
And it's disappointing.
It's disappointing to people.
And then they kind of put it in a bin with...
I thought it was going to be this magical thing where I can talk to a person on my phone.
Really, it's just like the voice version of the command line where I have to learn the things that it can do, first of all.
And then I have to learn the ways I can say the things that it can do.
And granted, there are many ways that you can say it, maybe more than in the average text adventure, but probably about the same as in any good text adventure.
And the new demo is like...
uh showing off context like oh it kind of remembers last thing i said to it so i can refer back to it using you know if i as long as i use the right words and the the it will understand what i'm talking about and build on my past conversations and it's like i'm having a conversation if you see a demo with a preset script it is it seems to be very impressive until you realize there is only a very small number of things that you can ask about
And those things aren't always interesting.
If you want to ask about facts that you can pull out a wolf from Aphra or things having to do with the weather or date and time or unit conversions, then you can have this amazing but extremely boring conversation about stuff that you don't really care about.
But if you really want to know...
something more complicated uh you better hope that's within the problem domain i'm not saying well these are bad products i think they're amazing we need to keep advancing on this and it's great but i get like i said as soon as you have a voice talking to you or they can understand what you're saying people immediately jump to this is how 9000 or like it's a little person but it's totally not all the person it's so far from that that there's always the inevitable letdown um
so as we continue to march there uh progress there i'm you know i think that's good but this this slight diversion with vive and or viv or however you want to say it and all those other ones uh bothers me as the type of person who like reads the wire cutter or marco's headphones reviews or marco's light bulb reviews or anything like that and that
The the very boldly stated business model of these companies is we will make deals with other companies.
So you can say, you know, have a pizza delivered to my house at 5 p.m.
and also send flowers to my mom for Mother's Day.
You're like, wow, what an amazing demo.
It's like having a personal assistant.
But you don't get to pick what pizza it is or what company sends the flowers.
The company that makes the product that you're talking to does deals with Domino's and Pro Flowers, and that's what gets sent.
Not because those are the best flowers or because your assistant knows the best flowers to get for your mom or the kind of pizza that you like, but because these are the deals the company whose voice agent that you're talking to made, you know...
made partnerships with and so their incentives are all screwed up their incentives of the supposed personal assistant is not to help you get the things that you want in your life it's to dutifully follow through on the business deals that the company's made and all these companies are looking for if we make this thing so sticky that people love talking to it and just like rely on it as part of their life
then we can charge people a lot of money to, you know, like the same way that Google can charge money for search results.
We've got everybody typing into our search box.
Now, all of a sudden, you buy advertising keywords or search keywords for us.
It's very valuable.
If everybody does all their pizza ordering, then we can charge whatever pizza company a lot of money to say, do you want to be the pizza company that fulfills pizza requests?
But...
And obviously people like me, and I think a lot of people kind of care where their pizza comes from.
Maybe they don't care so much about where their flowers come from, but the model that they should be presenting is here is an artificially intelligent agent or whatever.
Yeah.
agents good 90s apple thing the knowledge navigators can help you your life it's supposed to be helping me it's supposed to be like i want it to do things that you know if it's going to save me work i would go and figure out what's what the best dishwasher is and what the comparative features are and stuff like that or
uh you know i would if i move into a new area i would you know troll reviews to try to find out where do people like you know the best pizza or you know like ratings or like i wanted to figure out what i want in my life what my needs are and follow through on that but i don't know if there's money to be made in that because we're not willing to pay for that service so someone's got to pay and the people who are paying is domino's and you're going to get a stupid domino's pizza
And so... You get what you deserve.
Right.
And it's just... It's misaligned incentives, but I don't know the way out of it because aligned incentives would be you pay me $5 a month for the privilege of using Siri or Vive and no one wants to do that either because they're not good enough for $5 a month.
It's like, I'll just do the web search myself or I'll just go to the Wirecarder myself, right?
So I don't know how you...
get you find your way out of this it could be i don't i don't know it could be that most people are fine with that they're like i don't really want to know or care what deals you make behind the scenes as long as somebody comes and pick up picks up my package i don't care what they ship it by or anything like just they don't they're not as picky they're not reading reviews about their light bulbs right they're just like whatever it's just convenient for me to be able to do this and i don't really care
what company or product is involved in i don't care uh what deals are made behind the scenes and i don't care that my needs aren't the most primary thing it's a service i get for free it's built into my phone or i yell it into the air and amazon echo does it i don't care that all the products are fulfilled through amazon or you know like it's like pushing that button to paper towels uh you know at least you get to pick because amazon has a wide variety but i don't care that they all come from amazon maybe most people are fine with that um but for me personally i don't like it and i also think that
the misaligned incentives will just become a larger and larger problem uh until and unless these services actually become so good that people are willing to pay for them because wouldn't you pay five dollars a month to have a personal assistant who you could just shout orders to and would do stuff and it was not actually a person you didn't have to like
care about their feelings and well-being or anything like that's the dream of artificial intelligent personal assistants for every movie about the future where you just yell things into the air and things get done and wouldn't you love it if that assistant learned more about you and about what you like and what you dislike and did the research for you and collaborated with other agents and you know just sort of asked your reaction to the meal you're just eating and instead of you having to hit a star rate like that's the magical future we think about and i think everyone would be willing to pay for that because paying for an actual personal assistant to do all that stuff it's really expensive five dollars a month looks like a bargain
um but we're not there yet the products just aren't that good so in the meantime dominoes will be paying them to deliver you excrucible pizza to your house i love that like that your dream scenario here is that you that you can basically have a virtual person who is totally basically your slave and you can be a jerk too it's not actually a person it's just a computer but you don't have to be a jerk too but you also don't have to like worry about like uh you know they don't
don't sleep don't eat don't get annoyed when you're frustrated don't get annoyed if you yell i'm like that's why we use computers because we don't have to have this constant like we're not we're not trying to emotionally support our computers most of the time we just want them to do what we tell them to do when we do it because they're machines and they're not people right and that's the the dream of having the computers you know just think not as a personal assistant but rather think of it as like
the using using a computer without having to sit in front of a computer and click on things or touch the screen or type things in you're just talking into the air and then somewhere else a computer is doing your thing and and the whole machine learning angle of like uh the same way a personal assistant would learn your preferences and everything that's what computers are great at that's what netflix is great at by seeing what we watch and we have to help with the silly way of hitting stars and stuff but eventually netflix gets good at thinking i think you will like this movie based on movies you've seen in the past and have liked uh
It's incredibly primitive compared to what we could do if we had a conversational long-term relationship with a voice-controlled thing that was on our side and was entirely made to try to make our lives better.
But again, there's no business now for that, and the tech still isn't quite there.
But I feel like we can get there eventually.
And once we do, someone is going to get $5 a month from a hell of a lot of people once that becomes good enough.
Well, but it doesn't have to be that it's $5 a month.
I mean, it could be that this future Siri or what have you takes a cut of whatever it facilitates a sale for.
But that's incentivized to make deals with the highest bidder who makes crappy pizza.
Back to the crappy pizza problem.
Well, perhaps.
But first of all, Domino's pizza is not crappy.
Second of all.
Oh, my God.
It's so bad.
What are you talking about?
Hi, John.
Yeah, I'm with John.
Sorry, Casey.
That's that's inexcusable.
You guys are you're way too snooty.
Anyway, the point is that why couldn't we have a hypothetical conversation where I say, hey, I'd like a pizza, please.
Sure.
Where would you like it from?
papa john's or domino's or what have i mean presumably would have to be some national chain so i'm not it's not gonna be but then how do you get paid how does that service get paid you think it's just taking a cut of that because they it's kind of like grubhub or whatever like they'd have to kind of opt in the money's got to come from somewhere because unless you want to pay extra for that pizza and like have this you know siri surcharge of experts because grubhub is so freaking expensive like there's lots of services that kind of do a small portion of what we would imagine veeve or siri doing but all of them the disincentive is
This is great if you have money to burn and you can't be bothered to go someplace and you don't mind your food being cold by the time it gets here and you don't mind waiting a long time and half the time it doesn't work.
There's so many caveats, but the money is a big deterrent.
$5 a month for the blanket service of essentially just connecting the dots to things that you could do themselves, that works financially if you have enough people to do it, as does Domino's being the exclusive will bring you a crappy pizza provider.
But I feel like the percentage of everything is just back to the Grubhub model, and it's...
that's that has proven to be good for uh you know in my day we would say yuppies but like good for uh people who with high paying jobs and not a lot of time and and uh more money uh money is less important to them than their time and so they do that and even those things you're kind of like yeah sometimes that just it's more worth of you to go there yourself and get the thing i don't know
everyone needs to i mean would any of us would any of us order a pizza in that way even if you could like well if you could tell at the store but it charged you 20 on top of that would you order a pizza that way i mean if i was in a position where i didn't want to sit down at a computer or an ipad or an iphone and i just wanted to within 30 seconds say hey get me oh i forgot i can't say that sorry well it's too late now yeah
What did they say on upgrade?
Ahoy telephone.
Thank you.
I wanted to say aloha.
Ahoy telephone.
Get me a pizza, a large pepperoni, no pineapple pizza from Domino's delivered to my house.
Your bad taste continues.
You're in favor of this bullseary pepperoni and pineapple?
I honestly have not tried pepperoni and pineapple yet, but I do like pineapple and ham.
And I don't get that a lot in New York because they don't really do it here because it's not canonical, John.
But I do enjoy that combo when I can get it.
But yeah, normally, I mean, I like pepperoni and I like pineapple.
So, you know.
There was a ham and pineapple discussion, but I'm not sure if it's on a podcast that has yet to be released.
Did you hear me talk about Hawaiian pizza on any podcast?
If not, it hasn't been released, so I won't spoil it.
I did hear you talk about it.
I forget which show it was on.
Yeah, same here.
It might have been when you guessed it on Upgrade.
You did that recently, right?
Yeah, maybe that was it.
But anyway, yeah, I don't want to get into it now.
So the point is, the point is.
The point is Casey has terrible taste in pizza, so his answer to this question is irrelevant.
Whatever.
If you, Marco and John, slash you... Switch to hamburgers if you need to.
No, because then I'm going to tell you I think Wendy's is just fine.
Then you're going to bust my balls about that, too.
What are they like in the South?
How about barbecue?
Would you just get it from Dallas Barbecue because it doesn't matter?
Well, barbecue is barbecue.
I guess Dallas Barbecue is fine.
But for all these things like this, you know, if the money is going to be coming from taking a cut, the money's got to come from somewhere.
So it's got to be a surcharge.
Right.
Because unless you you have to have deals, if you're going to take a cut, like the price remains the same, but they cut us in.
You have to have deals for that.
And if you don't, then you just have to add a surcharge because then you don't need deals on either end.
But the surcharge is usually pretty significant.
And that's in addition to whatever additional things they're charging you to deliver it plus tip and all that other stuff.
Well, that's the thing exactly though, because the delivery surcharge is a surcharge.
You could, if you wanted, get in your car or ride your bike or walk or what have you and go fetch your pizza.
But sometimes you just want the convenience of this meal magically showing up at your doorstep.
I personally cannot imagine a time where I would want to say, hey, ahoy telephone, get me a Domino's large pizza.
But there are certainly people in the world that may be willing to pay a dollar or two or whatever the case may be to ahoy telephone themselves a pizza.
I mean, Domino's lets you order pizza with emoji by some mechanism I've never tried.
So I would imagine that there are people that are doing that too.
You ever wonder why Domino's has to make it so easy to order their pizza?
Yeah.
You know, fine.
Okay.
If you want to believe Domino's is gross, that's fine.
All I know is, you know, just listen to the forthcoming episode of Analog where we probably won't cut the discussion about people that are too good for chain restaurants and how much I hate all of them, which is basically everyone in the chat room and the two of you.
There are good chain restaurants.
There just are very few good chain pizza restaurants, and I think most of them would be local chains that you wouldn't have heard of.
But it's fine.
No, it's fine.
Also, if you're going to have chain pizza, I'm not sure Domino's is even the best one of those.
Well, what would it be?
I was always a bigger fan of the really crappy ones, like Little Caesars or Pizza Hut.
Come on.
What are you doing?
If you're going to go with some really crappy big brand pizza...
You might as well go like super crappy and get like all the junk food value of it.
I feel like I would get something frozen from the supermarket before I would take delivery from any chain.
Yeah, I did a lot of those too.
And those are not good.
Don't get me wrong.
They are terrible.
That's how bad I think the delivery is.
You would take a Red Baron pizza over Domino's.
Not Red Baron, but maybe something else.
What is the thing?
It's not delivery.
It's DiGiorno.
Man, that marketing works.
Nice.
That would kind of be like a matchup.
Like an even... Anyway, like...
We shouldn't have gotten to the pizza topic.
I can't imagine.
No, I can't get past this.
I can't imagine a world where somebody says, man, I'd really like some pizza and I'd like to get Domino's.
And you have to be like, Domino's is not good enough for me.
I'm sorry.
We're going to have to go somewhere else.
Well, you know, sometimes you have to eat things you don't like, but I think it's, I'm even, this is more of an issue for me even than Marco's thing.
Cause Marco's like, he has this fancy coffee, right?
But when he's on the road, he'll get Starbucks.
Yeah, precisely.
When I'm on the road, I will, I would, the equivalent of me is I would choose not to have coffee.
Sometimes I do.
Like that's the level I'm at with it.
Same thing with pizza and bagel.
I just don't get pizza.
if i can't get good pizza and it's fine i eat something else and if someone else gets bad pizza i'll eat it you know you gotta eat to stay alive right it's it's not but i will never choose it like whereas marco because he's addicted will choose to get starbucks uh because it's like well it's better than no coffee but no it's not better than no pizza no pizza beats domino's pizza
Oh, my God.
If I listeners, if I ever get to the point that I'm this fussy about freaking anything, it's not it's not fussy.
It's just like it's just a preference.
Like, I don't I don't consider it the same category of food.
It's like I'll just pick a dip.
There's plenty of kind of foods to choose from.
Like, I'm not that picky about burgers.
Right.
I have many more options for burgers, including ones from chains and lots of things from chains.
But when it comes to pizza, I will just pick a different.
food product and i don't think it's being snobbish it's just kind of like that's i don't i don't like that doesn't taste good to me i don't don't want it uh and i don't need it for chemical reasons so i will just pick something else like a i'd rather have a sandwich from subway than bad pizza oh i don't know about that and sandwiches from subway are are probably the bottom rung of thing that you can call sandwich where we've lost as people know in the chat room we've lost the domino's brand sponsorship and we're losing the subway brand sponsorship from the show it's
This is why we can't have brand advertisers and podcasts, because we've already pissed off all the brands.
We'll take Waffle House sponsorships, though, because I feel like they embrace what they are.
I'm more of a steak and shake person myself over Waffle House.
I don't even understand why Subway is so bad.
You're watching them create it in front of you.
You don't understand why Subway is bad?
Please, Casey, please stop.
Please stop.
I don't.
I'm trying to help you here.
Subway is not the hill you want to die on.
No, I'm not saying that it's the hill I want to die on.
I don't want your help.
I want to be able to go to any friggin' restaurant I want and be genuinely happy with the meal I've had.
I have gone to Subway, although not lately, and been genuinely happy with the meal I've had.
Are there better sandwiches in the world?
Abso-frickin'-lutely.
Does that count as a restaurant?
Oh, God.
i haven't been this angry at you two since the mac pro discussions oh this is ridiculous just if i ever get this fussy and high maintenance just kick me in the shins what vodka would you drink casey would you drink the the big handle of like the cheap russian whatever vodka that comes in the plastic bottle would you drink that
He just got to run it through Brita filters and it's fine.
How do you know that, John?
No, you weren't privy to this?
Because it's the stupid secret of vodka.
Once I saw that, I don't drink it, I don't know anything about it, but once I saw that thing with the filters, I'm like, alright, everyone who deals with vodka is just...
that was bs i i know exactly what you're referring to but i thought that was bs maybe it is bs i might be wrong i might be i'm entirely willing to believe it especially with alcohol after the first few drinks anyway you can just like secretly switch to the crappier stuff and no one cares well that's true here's the thing like i would absolutely choose a a fussy vodka like tito's if i had the choice but if i don't have the choice or if i'm
Or like a rail vodkas on happy hour.
You know what you do?
You just put a couple lemons in there, wait a second to get a little bit watered down with a little bit of lemon in it, and then you're fine.
I'd prefer the Tito's for sure, but I am perfectly happy with a slightly watered down, slightly lemony vodka, and I am...
And I'd be happier about that having saved a bunch of money of getting a rail one instead of a Tito's.
I would be happy with that.
Although that is the best example I've heard so far of me being fussy.
Wouldn't you ruin like a $13 Brita filter by converting your cheaper vodka into $13 more expensive vodka?
You still come out ahead if you run it through enough times.
So it's equivalent to like the $500 bottle.
Is there $500 vodka?
Vodka's not that good.
I'm sure there is.
I'm absolutely sure there is.
There absolutely is.
And I should also note that my fussy vodka, Tito's, is like the cheapest of the fussy vodkas, which is part of the reason why I like it so much.
Yeah, I remember when you were coming over and we bought a bottle so that you would not judge our vodka collection because you're so judgy of things.
I remember being very surprised how inexpensive it was because the way you talked about it, I thought it would be like a really premium priced one.
But nope, turns out vodka's just terrible, so nobody presses it very high.
It's not terrible.
Are you a gin drinker?
You are a gin drinker, aren't you?
Oh, how's your grass taste?
I occasionally drink gin.
Not by itself.
I mean, I prefer gin-based drinks like martinis to drinking it straight.
Oh, God, a gin martini.
I forgot.
Honestly, I'm not that much of a liquor person.
I much prefer either not drinking or drinking beer.
Oh, so you like to drink your bread.
I understand.
I'm going to get so much angry email, I'm going to have to quit the show.
It's going to be the worst.
I tried to help you with the subway thing.
It's not too late to ask Marco to cut it out.
Oh, this is staying in.
No, you can let it stay in.
Try to get this back on the rails slightly.
I will say, John, you were seemingly puzzled by the idea of why would somebody pay a 20% premium for the convenience of ordering through a cylinder robot voice.
Not why, but that your audience is limited.
Because I know those services exist and I know the people who use them, but they're never going to be mass market because 20% is just too much for most people.
I'll tell you what, though.
I would probably pay roughly that premium to avoid talking to somebody on the phone.
I hear you.
Again, yeah, I know.
I understand.
If that was my only alternative, because a lot of the places around here, in the area that I think John and the both of us live in, there's not a lot of chains present.
And a lot of the places you order from are just independently owned places.
And so anything that relies on, like, you know, really convenient, like, you can order with our app or things like that.
Like, most of the places around here don't support that because they're not a big enough operation to be integrated that way or to have their own app or whatever else.
Which means, A, I can't use Apple Pay anywhere.
I can't even use my chip card anywhere, you know, in most places either.
Yeah.
And B, they don't support any of these automated ways of ordering.
So if I want to order something, I'm still doing it the way the San Francisco people think is barbaric of calling them on the phone and placing an order for delivery or going and picking it up in my car.
I hate talking on the phone so much, especially nerdy introverts with disposable income.
Again, it's a narrow market.
The potential for agents that can do things conversationally without you having to type things or really pay attention, just yelling commands out into the air, the potential for that is mass market.
But...
The number of people who are currently willing to pay to avoid phone calls and stuff like and don't blink at a 20 percent is just too small.
And I feel these things with the that's another ding against these things that are funded by having deals with providers of their services.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
use big data to figure out what the best whatever is and learn your preferences and do all that stuff they don't want to be hemmed into uh you know particular vendors and so i don't know maybe maybe he was just hoping to be purchased by apple or or uh google or alphabet or whatever and that's their big exit plan there but i i
i am not a fan of this model where uh the product isn't good enough for users to pay for it yet and the way they make their money is with back-end deals and you have this agent who you can't you have this personal assistant who can do a limited number of things hopefully if you get the syntax right and you have no control of or awareness over the companies that are fulfilling uh
And seemingly no way to give feedback about how well it went when the pizza arrived.
Did you like it or did you not like it?
You could just say, get me a pizza, but not from that last place because it was gross.
So going back to the original topic here of these voice assistant things, I think there's a lot more to discuss here, which we probably don't have time for today, honestly.
There's a lot more to discuss here about just how these things are and the kind of ecosystem around this.
First of all, I think it would be a hilarious business model if the Siri founders just kept making things.
selling them to apple and then just quitting and making the next thing and then apple buys that one like people do that all the time that's the serial entrepreneur thing you make a startup you you you know exactly what to make and you know that you have multiple potential buyers you play them off each other you sell you do the next one and what you get to do i guess is during all that time do the fun part that you like starting the company doing the exciting thing or whatever and you just have exit after exit that's that's the way some people live their lives totally viable business model especially in these days
So I do think, you know, getting back, because it wouldn't be an episode of this show without a complaint about Apple.
We almost made it.
I know.
I'm a little bit worried that this is an area where, like, you know, Apple started this game, really.
Like, Apple came out with Siri in 2011, right?
Yeah, 2011.
Yeah.
And, you know, Apple started this whole thing, really.
Like, you know, there was voice command stuff before that, but Siri took it to another level and integrated it with the phone.
And, you know, it was a big deal.
And then since then, Siri has advanced, but fairly slowly and in fairly small steps.
While at the same time, it seems like now there are multiple companies.
There's Amazon, there's Hound, there's all these companies now coming out with even better stuff that seems like a generation ahead of Siri in the intelligence and the recognition and the accuracy and things like that.
It seems like Apple kind of started this and now everyone's kind of overrunning them.
And I don't think Apple is like hustling.
I've used this word before that it seems like Apple recently lacks hustle.
This isn't the only area that this applies to where like Apple kind of starts something and then everyone else kind of rushes in and does their own version of it better.
And Apple just kind of can't keep up.
is this a problem well i wouldn't call it hustle in this case like do you remember when uh when jobs can the the uh atg uh apple technology group or advanced technology group i forget what atg stands for someone someone who works at apple but but anyway like apple used to do way more basic research type stuff like that whole whole department whose job was to do like basic research type things and in theory uh
maybe they would come up with a couple ideas that other groups in the company that made actual products would do and steve jobs concentrated the whole company i'm like no don't do pie in the sky wouldn't it be cool if let's investigate this kind of technology type thing i mean brett victor used to work at apple for crying out loud right and jobs like no we want to make great products that ship now uh and they've done that and that's a very successful advanced technology group the yeah the helpful casey list says in the chat room um
We want to make actual products because it doesn't do anybody good to have these research ideas and maybe one of them shows up many years later.
But things like Siri, the only real way you advance that is with some amount of basic research.
So it feels like Apple...
Found a company that was doing this thing, whatever the SRI company or company Siri came from, that already had done the basic research, acquired them, productized it, and then is working the improvements to Siri you're talking about.
A lot of them have to do with productized improvements, make it more reliable, make it faster, build it on a different platform.
But the basic research needed to take Siri to the next level.
I don't know if that is budgeted for and accounted for or dealt with within the realm of Siri, the product.
Like, so they're, they feel like they're advancing the product.
And meanwhile, the founders have left because they're like, I don't want to just incrementally advance this product or make it more reliable or faster.
Like that's your problem.
I'm not interested in that.
I'm interested in how do you make the next great, uh, personal assistant or whatever.
Um,
And the fact that they felt like they had to leave Apple to do that, I mean, maybe they're misinformed and really there was a place for Apple for them to do that basic research and it should have been part of the plan or whatever.
But the Apple of today is much less focused on basic research stuff.
And the things they do, like all that research into touchscreens and stuff like that, that's not the same as basic research.
It's more like...
pre-production product things like ideas for future concrete products and again i think this is a great strategy and it gives you great products instead of just great concept videos that don't actually lead to anything it's been the cornerstone of apple's success so you can't really fault them for that but i think it's also the reason that google who does tons of crazy ideas and basic research stuff in-house that just never goes anywhere which we criticize them for and startups who their whole point is like oh you have a great idea let's see it and half of them die and you don't care but if any of them end up being successful as we said before apple can just buy them again
uh that i think is actually a viable strategy like if if they can't or don't want to support that type of advancement in-house allow it to flourish out in the market wait for all the crappy ones to die find the ones that are left and buy them at the right time because one thing apple does have is a lot of money so maybe apple buys viv and the next version of series powered by that and who can say that's a bad strategy it's just uncomfortable during this time now where we see like
you know seemingly everybody else can do siri better than apple can and apple is just barely working on can we make existing siri reliable and a little bit smarter and expand the capabilities and by the way still no api so no real ecosystem or whatever and that i think is uncomfortable but i don't think it's insurmountable because you just throw money at whatever the most successful thing is the problem is if google
is the one who does Siri better than Siri, which arguably they already have, because Google's not going to sell you their stuff.
So that's a problem for Apple.
But Viv or Vive is not a problem for Apple.
It's an opportunity.
I'm going with Vive.
No, that's the HTC VR thing.
Yeah, but I'm never going to get that.
Or is that Viv too?
I don't even know.
That's Viv.
All right.
Thanks a lot for our three sponsors this week.
Fracture, FreshBooks, and Backblaze.
And we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Because it was accidental.
Accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
Accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental, they didn't mean to.
so instagram changed their icon and everyone lost their i don't like the icon that much but i don't think it's the total dumpster fire that everyone else says it's pretty bad it's pretty bad do you remember when web 2.0 was a thing you guys remember web 2.0 yeah
gradients and rounded corners yeah the web 2.0 parody sites that would like make fun of all the design tropes of web 2.0 the instagram icon looks like a modern version of making fun of the flat design tropes i could see that like if you tried to do a parody icon of like imagine if the instagram icon adopted all of the current fashion trends in the most obvious and glaring ways you would get that stupid thing but i don't think it's that bad i mean it's not as bad as domino's pizza or vodka
It's fine.
Whatever.
It has some things going for it, especially if you look at their alternate designs and how boring some of those were.
I like the design that was like a black square with a white circle in the middle of it.
Let's workshop that a little bit more.
At least this one has something to it.
It will stand out
uh a little bit on people's screens because it's not just a flat color i don't know like as so many people have said on twitter and as i've said about windows xp at bumper sounds in the end it doesn't matter that much because long term eventually you will come to associate with whatever the hell image they make you will come to associate that with instagram and kids who are just getting their first iphones now who don't know what the old icon look like will be fine with it and it will just cruise in but it is not the type of i think
um that that explains why it's not a disaster but i think you can also have an icon that the initial impression is that it's a nice well-designed pleasing icon and it also will come to be associated with the application that you know and love like you don't have to it's not as if it's an either or well you can have an icon that is immediately attractive but it will be crap long term no it'll also be good long term um so i feel like this one is a
missed opportunity to make a better icon and i don't particularly like it but it'll be fine it's not it's not disastrous like what was the disastrous one like when they tried to do that tropicana orange juice and they backpedaled on it you always know it's disastrous if they change their mind so come come back in two shows from now and see if they change the icon back but i have a feeling they won't because it's not that bad
The other changes they've made recently are more offensive.
The icon, they replaced one crap icon with another crap icon.
The old icon was crap too.
It wasn't crap.
That had a really good branding.
It looked great in iOS 6.
right and it stayed a long time but at a certain point when you're the last one standing i think it becomes sort of an act of defiance or like a quirk and you know only one only one icon gets to do that you can't have a home screen that has like six icons that still look like ios x but if only one does it like all right sure go with that but yeah it didn't need to be updated and they had a difficult challenge but
inside the app i actually like i like the i like the fact that it doesn't look like the central item on the toolbar is constantly selected i like the fact that stupid blue is gone um i'm a pretty big fan yeah i completely agree i really really like the the new look of the app
And I think you and I are mostly on the same page about the icon.
I don't love it, but I don't think it's bad.
And I also didn't think the last one was bad.
Yes, it looked outdated, but I completely concur that the branding was great.
I think I would have preferred just a flattened or perhaps simplified version of the old icon.
That would have been pretty timid, though.
If they did that, everyone would have been like...
Like, oh, you did the obvious thing.
You just made a flat shaded version of the camera.
And I think that would be more difficult.
I think that would actually be less successful than this because although it may be immediately kind of inoffensive, you won't have gone anywhere.
This at least is, you know, you can tell they made a change.
It's not like, oh, it's a subtle tweak.
Nope.
Big change.
Well, and on top of that, this icon definitely stands out, which presumably is the goal, right?
It's not another damn blue icon.
You know, it's something that is a color palette that looks different than anything else I have on my home screen.
And of course, that may not be true for everyone, but it's certainly the case on my phone.
I mean, it jumps out at me on my home screen.
It is on my very, very first home screen because...
That's how much I love this damn app.
So I think the icon's okay.
I'm sure I'll come to think it's decent over time, like you had said, John.
But I completely, completely agree.
I love the muted look of the app itself so that damn near all the color is either profile pictures or the actual photos on Instagram.
I really, really like it.
I wish I could pay money to get rid of the ads, though.
The ads in my Instagram feed are just oppressive.
Maybe I don't follow enough people, but it seems like every fifth thing is a giant ad.
I'm scrolling past without looking.
Way too many freaking ads on Instagram.
I guess I would give them a dollar a month.
Maybe that's not worth it.
I'll just continue to scroll past the ads.
I know some people are like, I don't see any ads in my feed.
I don't know what algorithm I've tripped to make them spam me with ads like crazy, but...
too many too many ads yeah i mean for a while i had no ads and it was great then a few months ago i started getting a very heavy ad load like we were describing and it really almost ruined instagram for me and i didn't go back for a while i guess my engagement dropped uh and then recently i just kind of stopped seeing ads like it like flipped back off for me but
The other day, about two days ago, I somehow got switched to the algorithmic timeline.
And they could put any icon they wanted into the ugliest graphical theme they wanted.
Just give me my stupid chronological timeline back.
Because the algorithmic timeline, I mean, I'm just not used to it.
So maybe I will get used to it and appreciate it.
and i've never used anything else with an algorithmic timeline i i don't read facebook like i technically have an account there but i literally have never used it to read its news feed i've never done that i don't use like youtube subscriptions or things like that to like browse youtube and i don't and whatever twitter is doing with their algorithm thing i don't i don't whatever it maybe doesn't show up in tweetbot i don't see i've never seen it
So this is the first time I'm ever actually seeing an algorithmic timeline in something that previously didn't have one.
And it's terrible.
It doesn't make any sense.
I'm seeing pictures out of order that they happened.
I have no idea when I've seen everything.
uh i i'm seeing things that that that don't make sense that make me think that i've reached completion but then i haven't because i see right below it like oh here's one that i saw 12 hours ago and the right below is one from eight minutes ago and it's like you got to be kidding me for all these years i've been using instagram i think i've mentioned this before but what i do is i launched the instagram app and it shows me whatever picture i was viewing last time
briefly yeah that refreshes right and then i i memorize in that brief moment i memorize what that image is and then i scroll backwards till i get to it yep so i'm basically doing my own my own tweet marker yeah don't get used to that because that's how i read it i i'm an instagram completionist and i read them chronologically and i don't want to miss any
It's slightly confused by the fact that I see a lot of them cross-posted to Twitter because sometimes I think, oh, I've seen that one already.
It must have gone too far.
But no, that's why I've got to memorize the one.
Oh, my God.
I know exactly what you're saying.
If they ever fix the app so it doesn't flash the last image you saw on the screen right before it refreshes the timeline, it would totally screw with my workflow.
So if I got hit with the algorithmic one, I don't know what I would do.
Maybe I would just stop using Instagram.
But I'll have to try it.
honestly that's what i'm considering it because it's that bad like so i'm here reading my timeline now i have uh four hours ago three hours ago four hours four hours five hours ten hours one day eight hours two days ten hours one day like it's completely it's just shuffled 12 hours like it's just shuffled like i'll see things even like
So you might be able to say, oh, well, I noticed that it puts my wife up top because I usually like her photos and I try to see them all.
It even shows her photos out of order.
It is so disruptive.
And I can't find any option anywhere to flip it back.
I think this is just...
Something that they're presumably doing to either boost some engagement thing that they measured once on Facebook, or they want a new revenue stream of charging the brands that you follow to appear higher up in your stream, or both.
Charging brands to make more people see their things.
You have 20 million followers, but we'll show your thing to 10 of them unless you pay us.
Yeah, it's like, you earned those followers.
Those people all said, I want to see everything this person posts.
And we're going to charge you for access to the audience that you earned.
Yeah, that's the Facebook model.
And Facebook goes to Instagram, so that's probably what this is for.
And man, it sucks as a user.
I feel so bad now for...
literally the entire rest of the world who actually uses facebook who you know trying to make sense of that news feed i remember when they made that change to the news feed a few years back i remember everybody was all upset and i didn't really understand why but now i do because it it completely changes the nature of the service and it kind of breaks it for me like i really i really don't like this and i think this is going to reduce my usage of instagram substantially
I think it's maybe I'm wrong about this, but Instagram seems not uniquely vulnerable, but more vulnerable than usual to if they screw things up to someone saying, all right, well, I'll just make an Instagram that work like it used to.
Like, imagine one that actually kept track of where you were in the timeline and just did it straight ahead and
I believe it's called TweetBot.
I know, but is the social graph so embedded?
Because you can't do that to Facebook.
Facebook has too many features, too many users.
It's too big.
Instagram has a lot of users, but not a lot of features, and it's still kind of an island unto itself.
They haven't really totally integrated with Facebook at this point.
So...
if if instagram really does screw things up and maybe there's a generation of people who like oh they're stuck in instagram but like look at snapchat it comes out of nowhere you can grab new users with a new product that people find compelling and if instagram breaks everybody's workflows who they care about um there is a market opportunity for someone to do a very straightforward ios app that shows you the pictures your friends took in order uh and has a simple asymmetrical following process like twitter and has likes and comments like it's not technologically unfeasible and
All that's required is for Facebook to anger enough people to make a viable market for some other small competitor, even if it's just like a company that's never going to be as big as Facebook, it's never going to be as big as Instagram, never going to usurp Instagram, but merely become an alternative.
I guess you could consider it a successful app.net for Instagram.
oh damn it you took the joke right away from me i was so excited to make that joke but never mind joke i mean it's a thing that could possibly happen like it's not inconceivable that that could be a thing depending on how badly instagram screws it up and how many people's workflow actually does disrupt for all we as people say in the chat room if you follow tons of people an algorithmic timeline is indistinguishable from a non-algorithic one because you're never keeping track of anything anyway you just launch the app and you scroll until you're satisfied or something do people scroll backwards like they launch the app they get zipped to the top of the timeline and they scroll the other way
I do, yeah.
I did.
Until they see a picture that they recognize already, then they stop?
Yep.
Is that how people use it?
That's the only way you really could use it before.
Or you could use it the way I was using it and the way Casey was using it.
Yeah.
Memorize the picture.
Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.
It's like a little game.
Scroll, scroll, scroll.
Found it.
Now go through them.
Oh, see, I misunderstood.
I actually do what you just described.
I misunderstood your original.
No, no.
When it loads, I see the picture.
Like I see the picture of like, I don't know, like Mike Mattis took pictures of cows in a field and that blinks on the screen for a second.
And then it loads 50 other pictures.
Then I scroll down to find the cow picture.
And then I see the cow picture and then I move it down.
But then you're spoiling it.
Yeah.
No, I go past him really fast.
oh come on what you have to do is you have to pay an assistant five dollars a month to scroll for you like i say vive take me to take take me to the picture that i last saw which again when i first played with instagram like maybe i don't understand how this app works is it broken do people how do regular people use instagram because every time i launch it i wanted to show me the last picture i saw the same way every time i launch a twitter app on it show me the last tweet i read frustrating
I think the way regular people do it, if they care enough at all, is what you just described and what I do, and it sounds like what Marco does, which is, okay, memorize what I just saw and then start at the top and keep going.
And stop when you hit it.
Right, exactly.
I'm too old to keep that in short-term memory for that long.
I have a couple of seconds before it leaves my head entirely.
Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.
Cow, stop.
Good.
And then I don't have to remember that picture anymore.
Well, the problem is I, the cross posts also screw me up too, because then I convinced myself that the one I just saw, like that, that I'd seen on Twitter previously was the one that flashed when I opened the app.
And sometimes that's not right.
That's why you got it.
You got to, yeah, try my technique.
It's a, it's, you only have to remember it for a very short period of time and you can immediately forget it.
Enjoy it while you can.
Don't close the Instagram app though, because when you relaunch it, if it gets purged out of memory, then you'll be back to the top again.
I never noticed that.
But now that you say that, you're absolutely right.
I never thought about it that way.
That's why I follow like three people on Instagram that I'm able to maintain this workflow.
Wow.
Just give me my regular timeline back for God's sake.
I'm going to get so many fucking emails.
Oh, definitely.
Yeah.
I think that you will find there are some kin of the subway defenders.
Someone already wrote just me, of course, saying that I'm not crazy and that it's okay to like things that other people don't like.
Yeah, they were too scared to sit on the doll, though, sir.
Apparently.
But Subway is vile.
Subway is vile, though.
Oh, yeah.
Subway is the worst.
Oh, yeah.
But, you know, Sbarro Pizza, that's so much better.
Sbarro Pizza is better than Subway.
Yes, you're correct.
Is it?
I don't think it's equivalent.
It is absolutely equivalent.
No, it is better.
It is better.
It is a better food product.
It's not a good food product, but it's better.
I think there is something I could order at Subway that I would rather have than anything Sbarro would serve.
No, because here's the thing with Savara.
They have dough, they have sauce, they have cheese, they assemble them, and they make them hot.
Dough is not good, sauce is not good, the cheese is not good.
How is that any different than Subway?
Subway has something that you think is bread, but it's actually some kind of mold that grows into a bread shape.
It's like this little mutant bread fetuses that have so many preservatives and chemicals in them, right?
And then the cold cuts are... I don't know what they are, but they're just...
Are they frozen?
They don't look like or taste like what cold cuts are supposed to be.
We know what cold cuts are supposed to be.
You go to the store and you slice them.
I don't know what's wrong with them.
They just look and taste like preservatives and come in these little units.
They're just not right.
But what do you think is the ingredient quality at Sbarro's?
right well but that's what that's what i'm saying i feel like their cheese is more like real cheese like there's nothing to go wrong like that like there's no there's no equivalent of like salami like salami is a difficult product to get right and sabaro's uh not sabaro subway salami is i don't know what the hell it is like same thing with their cheese same thing just the little pre-assembled like here's the ingredients for this type of sandwich slapped on there
it like and again the bread and and the cold because of such a big part of it then you can say okay well maybe their tomatoes and the lettuce is fine maybe maybe their tomatoes and lettuce are fine equivalent to whatever the sbarro is using but sbarro has no equivalent uh even the pepperoni i feel like pepperoni is the type of product where
you're not you know there is no sort of gold standard for pepperoni there's lots of variability and it's all kind of crappy in one way or the other but just you know sauce dough and cheese i feel like is as a higher quality is like these are honest products not good tasting products to borrow but they're honestly there whereas at subway they're taking a sandwich and screwing up the bread and the cold cut parts of it and then i'm like all right i'm out that's it what else is left like i'm not gonna go there for for the tomatoes and the lettuce it is just it is incredibly vile this is cognitive dissonance what about the cheese triangles john
hmm the cheese the tessellation i mean that's just yeah that's just a silly problem assembly problem but although cheese shouldn't really be triangle shaped really i mean it should be squares or circles right i mean who makes triangle cheese it's just like why are they even bothering to cut it well i think it starts out as a square i know and they cut it into triangles why so they can screw up the tessellation and anger people and it doesn't make any sense
I don't understand.
You're just waving your hands in the air like you just don't care and saying, oh, Sbarro is great ingredients, but Subway, they can't be great.
Not great ingredients.
They're more straightforward and honest.
No one's going to say that pizza dough isn't pizza dough, whereas I think their bread is not bread.
Nobody says that.
No, their bread is like eating a hot dog bun.
They make it fresh every day.
They bake it fresh from what?
From what?
From what?
From terrible, like, mushroom mold spore bread fetuses.
Oh, and Sbarro doesn't get shipped the same bread?
Probably from the same damn bakery?
It's dough.
No, it's not.
Pizza dough is more straightforward, too.
Like, here's the problem.
Is it?
There are so many good places where you can get sandwiches.
Like, maybe you have to be from New York and understand delis.
If you want a sandwich with cold cuts on it, it's not a high bar.
There's a billion delis in New York State.
that can give you a sandwich with cold cuts on it that is so much better than subway that you shouldn't just never pretend that store doesn't even exist anymore like you can go to whole foods and get a better sandwich like you can go to any supermarket and have them assemble you a sandwich with cold cuts on it that's better than subway you can go to panera also way better than like i can't think of anything worse than subway how can you is there any place that will sell you a worse sandwich than subway this is my question i can't think of one
The airport, when they're wrapped in saran wrap, those sandwiches are better than Subway.
This is what I'm getting at.
At least they have real bread on them.
Actually, even when Arby's added sandwiches to their menu a while back, they're way better than Subway sandwiches.
And that's from Arby's.
Yes, that's what I'm saying.
And again, those are probably literal hamburger buns.
No, they actually got bread.
They started stocking all bread and cold cuts and stuff, and they started making those.
Subway is, I feel like, the bottom rung of any chain food in the world.
I guess probably in the world.
I can't think of anything worse.
Ooh, Utah Brian just pointed out what is worse.
which i assume he said he said the plastic triangle sandwiches i assume he's talking about the ones you get like in gas stations that's what i was saying i was saying at the air the plastic triangle sandwiches at the airport are better than subway they probably give you food poisoning and kill you no no no because they have they're made with real bread they're and you know what are you sure the internal ingredients are going to be gross but most of that grossness is because they've been there for a long time which is also why you're gonna get food poisoning which is why you shouldn't eat them but based on like you know what what are they made of they're made of bread
there and the ingredients in them they're made of pathogens sometimes the airport sandwiches are bad because they're made with ingredients don't have enough preservatives in them they just sit there and they get all gross like it's it's like any airplane food like they try to make it out of good ingredients but if you know you have this pre-cooked chicken and tomatoes and then you let them sit there and you're like this would have been better with preservatives because this has just sat there too long and gone through too many pressure changes and now it's just a vile rubbery tasteless mess yeah
you know what's infuriating about doing this show with you john is that you are just completely and utterly wrong completely wrong i could concede that subway is not great food i'm not arguing that but you are name or a sandwich name or a sandwich hold on hold on hold on this the airport sandwiches are unequivocally worse but the problem is because everyone on the internet thinks you can never say anything that's wrong ever now we're going to get a thousand emails with people saying oh john is completely right i'm trying to
i'm trying to help you here subway really is the bottom okay well okay let's again let's let's concede for the sake of discussion that subway is the worst let's just assume even though it's not but let's assume it is i don't understand why you think sabaro is any better or different pizza dough is the same kind of dough that shipped from some factory in west bumble screw
into the local Sbarro that the Subway dough is.
And every day at Subway, they cook the dough.
You think they make the frigging dough at the Sbarro?
Rip the crust off a Sbarro thing.
That crust has more bread-like qualities than any bread ever to come out of Subway.
I don't know what crap Subway is cooked at high temperature.
It is more chewy and gluten-y.
It is much more like bread.
Not particularly good tasting bread, but much more like bread than that stuff.
You and I are going to opposite Sbarro's and Subway's.
again i'm not trying to say that subway is is the definition of good food i'm not saying that but what i'm i just i cannot reconcile in my head that you think that sabaro is leaps and bounds better than subway because they are to my eyes of effectively the same quality i like both better i would say leaps and bounds it's better but it's better like a lot of it is because degree of difficulty it's got so few ingredients and none of them are weird mutant versions of
Legit ingredients.
Pizza has so many more ingredients.
You're saying it's easier to make good pizza than a good sandwich?
Right.
It's easier to make pizza with actual honest ingredients.
How can you say that?
Because the cold cuts are a serious problem.
Any kind of cold cuts are... It's very difficult.
There's a high degree of difficulty there.
It's not simple like, oh...
sauce, cheese, and bread made really hot in an oven.
Cold cuts are a processed product that is complicated to make, that has a lot of variety.
The things that are similar between roast beef and turkey and salami, there's a huge range of expertise that you need to make any of those decently.
But they're not making them in each location.
They're buying that in.
I know, but where they're buying them from is, like, the lowest bidder, and they're so incredibly vile that they should not even be called salami or even their ham or their turkey.
Everything is just terrible.
Like, again, something like Panera, who has similar challenges.
Their Italian combo at Panera is not a good Italian sandwich.
The Coca-Cola's on it are not good, and yet still way better than the ones at Subway.
Everything you're saying about Subway, how does that not apply to Sbarro?
Thank you.
Because, like I said, mozzarella cheese is very... It's hard to screw up.
It's a very simple cheese.
It doesn't need to be aged.
It's inexpensive.
And most of it tastes more or less like mozzarella cheese.
It's not a complicated product like salami or slicing ham or roast beef or anything like this.
mozzarella cheese is very straightforward so is the dough it's very straightforward though it's not a complicated dough it's not a sour dough it's not some special thing you need to do it it's like perhaps one of the most straightforward doughs and tomato sauce also very easy tomatoes can very well whoa whoa whoa whoa slow down it's not how long do you spend making sauce when you make your own sauce pasta sauce is not pizza sauce casey please don't tell me you're putting pizza sauce on your on your pasta or vice versa
It's just the same thing with oregano added.
Right.
I mean, it's really not that different.
Those are sturdier ingredients that are harder to screw up that have a lower degree of difficulty to make something that qualifies as the food.
Obviously, it's not good, but it is honest, straightforward.
It is the food.
Whereas cold cuts and bread are, I don't think bread is that difficult.
Somebody somehow manages to screw it up, but cold cuts definitely are difficult.
And I would just rather not have cold cuts than have cold cuts that are that bad.
And not have bread rather than have bread that's that bad.
I can't reconcile you saying that it's harder to screw up a cold cut, like a slice of ham.
Harder to make, yes.
How can you screw up a slice of an animal easier than you can screw up a complicated multi-part sauce?
Because it's not just a slice of an animal.
That's the whole thing.
You have to...
You know, they put tons of preservatives and goop and everything on those things to try to make them be shelf stable for longer periods of time.
They're generally pretty perishable.
And you kind of have to do it right.
You have to ship them in big giant hunks that you slice on demand.
But there's no way in hell somebody is going to do that.
I just I can't reconcile this.
Like I've left behind.
Have you not had good cold cuts?
Maybe this is the problem.
Do you not know what cold cuts are supposed to taste like?
Oh, absolutely.
If I could live off of boar's head white American cheese, I would.
And this is where you start bitching at me about how American cheese isn't cheese.
White American cheese is what you go for.
Cheese is actually one of the easier ones because, again, cheese is inherently a little more shelf-stable than something... I mean, salami is pretty good at that.
But something like sliced turkey or roast beef...
That's got a pretty low shelf life compared to cheese.
Cheese is going to be much more sturdy to a fast food type environment.
Cold cuts are hard.
Not mozzarella.
Somebody's trying to do mass market with cold cuts, and they are forced to make this unholy alliance with chemicals, preservatives, and crap products.
but i mean isn't that also true of like every fast food place that has like burgers and stuff like that's all it's all the same challenges yeah i mean burgers like the burgers have the advantages that ground beef frozen ground beef you know reheated like there's a lot of fat that gets you by and those things where it's just like yes it's terrible it's grade d meat it's frozen uh but there's a lot of fat involved and there's actually not that much meat in the grand scheme of things and you slather a bunch of other stuff on it and basically just tastes like salty squishy fat
uh it's more difficult to hide bad salami because bad salami salami has a very distinctive taste it's a strong taste and if it's bad it's it's bad but you know but it's the same it's the same thing with burgers to some degree in that uh that's why you can tell the difference between shake shack and a burger that came to the store frozen right like it's not that big of a difference but you can tell
oh you're so wrong john also also jared is a really bad person so you should well there's that so are you basically saying that mcdonald's is better than subway because it's burgers better how i mean because mcdonald's is kind of its own thing i would eat mcdonald's before i eat subway i would eat subway before mcdonald's if only for health reasons because i feel like mcdonald's is it has fewer healthy choices whereas even subway will taste really bad it's gonna have less saturated fat and hopefully less calories depending on what i
Well, McDonald's is also so incredibly strictly managed and regulated and down to so many sciences.
And also, they probably do more throughput, customer-wise.
So I think the risk of... There's more throughput than Subway?
Subway, I think, has a pretty good system.
I find Subway to be about as consistent as...
mcdonald's i don't i don't go to mcdonald's at all well but like for from like a pure like you know fear of foodborne illnesses uh maybe perspective i think i think mcdonald's is probably a safer bet and things are hotter there especially if you get a hot summer like i i don't i i can tell you that i have eaten subway much more recently than i've eaten mcdonald's but it's mostly it's not for taste reasons because someone else wants subway someone who shall remain nameless uh and i i will eat it
Whereas when we want burgers, we go to Five Guys or Shake Shack these days.
Or In-N-Out when you're in California.
Oh, Donnie, Five Guys.
Five Guys, I mean, it's delicious, but it's pure fat.
It is pure fat.
I know, but it tastes better than McDonald's.
I have to agree with Casey.
I haven't had McDonald's in, I think, a few years.
But I've had Five Guys recently, and I don't get the appeal, honestly.
I really don't get the appeal of Five Guys.
It's not bad, but it's just like greasy fast food burger.
There's nothing special about it.
I don't think it's any better than a Wendy's or an Arby's.
Oh, no.
It's way better than Wendy's or Arby's.
Maybe you're going to the wrong ones.
It's a higher class of food than those places.
Is it?
Yeah.
the way i describe five guys is it's more like a burger that you would make yourself in your house with ingredients that you bought yourself which is not an expert chef is not going to be a great burger but it definitely does not taste like mcdonald's burger king or even in and out where you totally tell like that's a fast food burger five guys taste more like a mediocre regular burger
If I have a mini, I haven't had Five Guys in probably as long as Marco's had McDonald's, but if I eat a Five Guys, I forget what they call it, like a mini bacon cheeseburger, whatever the smallest bacon cheeseburger.
Don't get bacon at Five Guys.
That's my tip.
Don't get bacon.
You might think you want it, but don't get it.
It tastes better without their bacon as bad.
I don't know about that.
I have not gotten their bacon before, and I still think it's bad.
Hold on.
But the point I'm trying to get to, though, is if I eat a mini bacon cheeseburger, whether or not bacon is a good call at Five Guys, if I eat a mini bacon cheeseburger and some of their fries, an hour later, I feel like a beach frigging whale.
I can eat a equivalently sized burger at McDonald's or Wendy's or what have you and still be a functional human being an hour later.
Whereas Five Guys, not so much.
That may be a digestive issue you have.
I don't know.
I don't typically have digestive problems.
How do you feel about In-N-Out?
I think that it is very good.
I think that if I'm really honest, it is overrated by East Coasters because we don't get it ever.
So it's a very good burger, but I don't think it's that much better than any other equivalent chain.
I would lump in and out as in the same family as McDonald's Burger King, but better than both of them.
But I would not put it in the same family as Shake Shack or even Five Guys.
Because it's more of a fast food style burger.
Like everything about it, the bun, the way the burger is prepared, everything about it is a fast food style burger.
And it is a higher quality fast food style burger.
but it is not the non-fast food style burgers includes five guys and shake shack because it's a different style like it you know everything about the size the proportion of the meat to the bun what the bun is made out of how the burger is prepared whether the burger has ever been frozen before a whole nine yards see to me i i honestly object to lumping five guys and shake shack together i think five guys is way closer to the big fast food chains than it is to shake shack
It's closer to Wendy's, because Wendy's has a style of burger that's a little bit different than McDonald's Burger King in and out, I feel like.
So, like, as you go on the continuum, I think you go to Wendy's, then go to Five Guys.
And I agree with kind of separating it from Shake Shack, because Five Guys is obviously not as good as that, or not as weird, not as different.
I mean, Shake Shack's got like a potato bun and everything.
It's got all sorts of weird stuff going on that is not involved in...
In the Five Guys burger.
But Five Guys is definitely more straightforward.
And I think a lot of this is colored by their fries, which are all over the freaking map among all these ones.
And if you had to categorize them just by their fries, I don't know what you'd do.
Because the fry variability I found to be huge.
And even in individual locations.
Wait, where?
At McDonald's?
Every place.
Like, I mean, just locations like this Shake Shack has good fries, but this Shake Shack has bad fries.
How does that even make sense?
It's like no consistency.
I mean, there's more consistency as you get to McDonald's and Burger King, but... I was going to say, okay.
And I was also not impressed with Five Guys fries, to be honest.
I mean... Some people love them, some people don't.
Now, I've gone to the same Five Guys different times, and sometimes the fries are good, and sometimes they're not.
The same exact location.
No consistency.
No, really, if you're talking about French fries, it's Chick-fil-A waffle fries or Get Out.
I think you have to put waffle fries aside.
I don't think you can put them into the fry.
We're talking about steak fries.
That's basically hash browns at that point.
Oh, come on.
Well, yeah, waffle fries is a different thing.
They're good.
I'm not saying waffle fries are great, but you can't bring a waffle fry to a regular fry fight.
That's not true.
It's cut up potato.
You have the weirdest rules.
I mean, like, home fries are also cut up potato.
Again, yeah, exactly.
Why not include home fries and hash browns?
Like, why not throw Waffle House in there?
They got hash browns.
Oh, my God.
It's not a hash brown.
It's not even near a hash brown.
You guys are crazy.
Now I just want steak and shake.
I tried making a steak and shake Frisco melt last week.
I actually didn't get that far off.
The hardest part about it that I didn't achieve properly is that Steak and Shake Frisco Melts have two very thin burgers.
And I don't know how you make a burger that thin.
I tried, and it wasn't even close.
Yeah, it falls apart.
I've never been to Steak and Shake.
Yeah, me neither.
I've heard good things about it.
i would imagine you probably have to freeze the patties to to make them hold together yeah no all the all that's that's the secret to those very thin ones they come they come frozen as hockey bucks and you put them on the grill and they cook really fast because fast foods need to cook things really fast well if it tastes good i don't really care that's like uh what do you call it minute steak or the other steak with the holes pounded in it so it'll cook faster
Wow.
Speaking of, I had White Castle when I was at that bachelor party in Vegas a few weeks back.
So that's the bottom of the rung of hamburgers, speaking of, right?
It was different, but I was fairly inebriated, so it hit the spot at the time.
Drunk Vegas White Castle?
No.
This sounds like a really bad idea.
The same reason people find themselves at Taco Bell.
So were you drunk?
Oh, yeah.
No, Taco Bell's great.
I'm not kidding either.
I love Taco Bell.
Again, bottom of the ladder for Mexican food, right?
Taco Bell, we all agree?
That's probably fair.
Yeah, I think generally speaking, the later your fast food place is open, the worse it probably is.
The worse the food is, yeah.
I think that's fair too, but I love me some Taco Bell.
And actually, their morning crunch wrap, their breakfast crunch wrap, very good, believe it or not.
Wow.
Which has hash brown in it, as it turns out.
Of course it does.
Why wouldn't it?
I still remember that Saturday Night Live ad where they're making the ridiculous menu item for Taco Bell.
Put it in a tote bag, fill it with salsa.
You remember that ad?
Nope.
Nope.
Oh, God.
pick a pick a title while i look this up uh pete jackson on twitter uh casey has never had a good sub couldn't be more obvious that was 13 minutes ago four minutes ago okay listened a little further revised thesis hold on revised thesis casey has never had a good meal of any kind
i don't want to say it but some people sounds about right detecting detecting and trying to who is it who's the who's the chain food hound it's not you casey there's someone else who's better is it lex who's really into like going to you know like applebee's and tgi fridays
oh see curiously enough i don't particularly care for those like i'll eat there nobody does they're terrible but it is somebody in our circle who like is an aficionado of them like yeah or or you know what i'm talking about like that the again the bottom rung of the chain chain restaurant kind of like mid-priced chain restaurant for like for full table service yeah everything is really bad for you yeah and they have weird thing weird meals that appeal it's kind of like before guy fieri came and showed everybody the true meaning of evil like
you know with those terrible restaurants that i mean honestly i there's a lot like a lot of those big chain restaurants i've never even been to because like like in the in the times of my life that i lived in places that had them i couldn't afford to go there what was that one that was like with a b or something bennegan's bennegan's there you go
I mean, I used to go to Ponderosa sometimes for special occasions.
Growing up, I'd go once a year to Ponderosa.
I would put it in a similar category as Outback, but I would put it in a separate category from TGI Fridays, Applebee's, Bennigan's.
Is Bennigan's still around?
So CMF, I went to college in Pennsylvania.
That is true.
I went to college, however, in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania.
Most of Pennsylvania is the middle of nowhere.
Yeah.
Where basically, I went to college in Meadville, Pennsylvania, where the only restaurant in town, there was a Ponderosa, I think, but we never went there.
The only restaurant in town that anybody would go to was just a Perkins.
And so I went to Perkins a lot.
Before that, in Ohio, I went to Denny's a lot, which is basically the same restaurant.
Oh, Denny's is awesome.
It's something.
It's better than Waffle House.
Oh, it's so good.
Denny's is awesome.
Oh, so good.
I would disagree strongly on that.
Best pancakes in the world?
IHOP.
I don't know about that.
In case it's not clear, that was an attempt to ridicule Casey's very low-level taste.
I love eschatologist in the chat saying, Denny's is a place you wind up.
That is perfect.
That is well put.
Well, again, it's open very late, like IHOP, also open late.
Again, that's why I went to Perkins in college, because it was open 24 hours.
So the interesting story, Tiff and I, our first date was we drove 40 minutes to Erie, Pennsylvania, the nearest big town.
We drove 40 minutes to get there to go to the Olive Garden.
oh hell yeah it's amazing it's amazing this relationship lasted that was our nice restaurant for our first date again i would say bottom bottom of the of the the ladder for italian food restaurants we all not agree is name a worse italian food restaurant than the olive garden it's impossible
It's Sbarro's, obviously.
No, I know.
Sbarro's has better Italian food than the Olive Garden, hands down.
No.
That's not true.
That is untrue.
Not at all.
Not true.
The Olive Garden breadsticks are the only other bread item that I can think of that is similar to Subway bread.
They're delicious.
And it's basically a hot dog bun with grease sprayed on it.
Yes, and it's wonderful.
That's not bread.
That is not a bread.
It is absolutely bread.
It is, oh, you know.
As I once said on my blog, Olive Garden is the gold standard for bad Italian food.
Like, they intentionally overcook their pasta so they can be gummed by the senior citizens who are there, and so it won't offend the sensibilities of middle America.
This is not, like, a made-up thing.
This is what they do as corporate policy.
It is... No, no, just no.
Please, please.
Olive Garden, please.
I don't...
I don't understand why people like you so much.
Of all the fast food places that we've mentioned so far, I think I'd rather eat in an Olive Garden than almost any of them.
Oh, amen.
Marco, what's happening to you?
You're in New York.
Go have some real Italian food.
Please stop going to Olive Garden.
If that's an option, sure.
But if my alternatives are like Subway and Sbarro, I'm going to Olive Garden.
Amen, brother.
I would choose Sbarro over Olive Garden any day.
Not because I love Sbarro, but because I hate Olive Garden so much.
that's because it's cool to hate olive garden particularly when you're italian i didn't hate i didn't know about i didn't all gone existed until like much later in life long after i left long island because when i was in long island either there wasn't olive garden there i didn't know they existed certainly never went to one right when i went to like people like oh they like olive garden it's like this chain restaurant i expected it to be not good probably bad but i i was not prepared for exactly how bad it was and then i did internet research how
How can this be so bad?
Of course you did internet research.
They are intentionally making food to appeal to the tastes of people who don't like Italian food.
That's basically what it boils down to.
Oh, okay.
Well, you clearly have never been to Fazoli's, which was amazing.
I have never been to Fazoli's.
I don't even know what that is.
It's fast food Italian.
There's the place that's like Italian racial stereotypes.
It's like insulting to Italians.
It's the Bucca di Beppo thing.
Yep.
Yes.
That is more insulting than off guard.
Yeah, that is pretty bad.
I will give you that.
As an Italian, when I go to that restaurant, I feel insulted.
My heritage feels insulted.
You should.
Yeah, Bucca di Beppo is a disaster, but yeah.
To go back a step, I met Aaron at an Applebee's, and you could argue our first date, which we didn't think was a date at the time, but in retrospect was our first date was at an IHOP.
And here we are, almost a decade.
Well, it's a decade after that first date, and almost a decade into marriage.
Oh, and Marcus are at Allengarden.
Yep, see?
That's what you need.
You need s*** food.
That's how you build a good relationship.
That's the cornerstone, really.
Subway.
Fresh is what we do.