I Respect a Good Crust
John, how was your Long Island vacation experience, getaway, etc.?
That was fine.
So tell me all about your vacation.
What was your favorite part?
We always do the same things.
I don't know.
I don't have a favorite part.
I like all the parts.
We go to the beach.
We eat food that we can only get there.
I try to sleep late.
Take a lot of pictures.
You know, the whole deal.
There were a couple of pictures that I saw.
I think I saw them somewhere private, like in a Slack somewhere or something like that.
But there were a couple of pictures I saw that appeared to me...
to have been taken with a big camera with big glass.
But with you perilously close to being submerged in water, I was quite impressed by your bravery in taking those pictures.
That's not bravery.
That's zoom range.
Yeah.
Almost all of my pictures that I take of people in the ocean, I'm also standing up to my knees or waist, depending on the position of the waves, in the ocean.
And once again, I managed not to get knocked over.
And once again, I managed to almost get knocked over many times.
So it's quite an adventure.
Note to self, don't lend any lenses to John.
But the particular picture you're talking about was not taken by me.
It was taken by my brother with a not-so-great-but-waterproof camera.
And that's not a zoom.
People will be saying, wow, look at that zoom.
Look at where the wave is.
I would have to be on the side of the person.
It doesn't matter.
I would have to be like...
at just as far from the shore as they are but 100 yards away to the left or right to use a zoom like if all my shots yes of course they're with the zoom but that particular shot is someone who's standing like three feet away alongside the person on the wave so yeah those you can look at it's hard to see on instagram because that's where you saw that but if you look close you can see that camera is not that great it's not even as good as an iphone camera i feel like but it is waterproof and
And so that's why you could actually get right next to those people.
And looking again, I see what you're saying.
But if you zoom in on it, it's really not even as good as an iPhone.
I saw it and I was like, oh, that was because I knew your your I don't know if predilection is the word I'm looking for, but your but your habit of getting into the water deeper than I would be brave enough to do.
in order to take these pictures which are great they're great pictures i'm not trying i'm not trying to say you're you're making a mistake it's just oof i i have a bad history with water so i get scared easily yeah understandable i think this year i came the closest to to losing it because the the waves on a couple of days were particularly rough and they were the kind of waves where
where it's like it's even for a long time and you think i can just stand here and this is pretty much the level of the water and it's just going to be those little rumblers coming in and then one you know smacker comes in and just like smacks you real hard and that's you know i stumbled many times i didn't go down i didn't go down with one hand i didn't have to hold the camera up above me but i stumbled many times
And at this point, it's kind of like a death wish where it's like, go ahead, knock me over.
I'll just buy a fancier camera.
Because apparently I can't make myself buy a fancier camera for way more money.
But if this woman got destroyed, I would be like, all right, well, I guess I have to get a better camera now.
I have no choice.
There's nothing I can do.
Rationalization is powerful.
Although I do always bring a backup camera with me.
Yeah, I would ask why you don't get something like a GoPro, but the pictures would be garbage on a GoPro by comparison.
So I understand it, but you're braver than me.
Yeah, you can do video in some cases.
Some things we had would have been good for video, but I don't take video on my fancy camera and I wasn't about to do it on my iPhone either.
Out of curiosity, what is your backup camera?
It's just my previous camera.
It's the Tim Cook method.
The camera that I have for us.
What is it?
Panasonic Super Zoom?
So what is, you say you don't have a favorite part.
I'm not asking you to pick your favorite child, although I bet you that exists and I won't ask you who it is.
But you don't have any particular favorite part?
Everything is just its own perfect special snowflake?
i don't know i mean maybe the pies if i have to make something the pies because i've recently been dieting so it was nice to all diets were off on long island for the most part and there's the particular place they like to get pies on long island uh and so wait to be clear we're not talking pizza we're talking like savory or maybe even sweet pies dessert pies blueberry pie yeah apple pie we got some weird like cherry raspberry pie too whatever i'm all about the blueberry
well how it's good that was not the answer i expected at all i mean i like i like all the parts you know but is long island known for pies you know there's just a particular place that we got pies when i was growing up the place is out east and where where i go out east is like really close to that place where i live was not close to so it was quite a trek to ever go out and get those pies but now when we go on vacation that we're right there it's like five minutes away so
just go there and buy like three or four pies and just eat pie as a dessert after every meal.
Like an entire one?
No, just a slice.
Like, you know, you have breakfast and you have your breakfast pie.
You have lunch and you have your lunch pie.
Well, yeah.
I mean, if you have pie in the house, you have to have it for breakfast.
That's obvious.
It's this fruit in it.
It's part of a nutritious breakfast.
Yes.
Wow.
Now, first of all, I want to set aside this for everyone.
Has anybody ever actually eaten the, quote, complete breakfast that breakfast cereals always advertised they were a part of?
Oh, that's where it's like a banana.
Probably.
It was mostly just fruit and stuff, right?
It was like fruit.
You had the bowl of cereal and you had fruit in the cereal.
Then you had separate fruit and then you had like a muffin or something.
I bet people have eaten that.
And like a glass of milk and a glass of orange juice and water.
I don't think you need the glass of milk because that goes in the cereal, but the orange juice.
Yeah, I feel like the breakfast they give you on British Airways has a lot of stuff in it.
I feel like that could be a complete breakfast.
Yeah.
Yeah, probably.
All right.
So going back to the pies now, I have one more question about the pies.
I noticed in my travels on Long Island that for some reason they add sesame seeds to pizza crust frequently.
No, they do not or should not.
I don't know why they do this.
No one should ever do that.
And if they're doing that, they're ruining Long Island.
They need to stop.
No one ever did that when I was growing up there.
And I'm very angry and sad to learn that you found that exists anywhere on Long Island.
I did.
Yeah.
And honestly, I am in agreement with you.
I was not a fan of sesame seeds on pizza crust.
Now, I'm curious, do they add sesame seeds to the pie crust as well?
No, I've never... I mean, unless it's part of the pie of some weird kind, but no.
Where are you finding pizza with... This is very upsetting to me.
I'm already upset by your weird uncooked cheese crap thing that you get on... It's called cold cheese and boom boom, John.
Yeah, I know.
I make a lot of allowances for what I call East End pizza because things get weird when you go out there and it's like, all right, well, you know, you have nice speeches, you have to sacrifice something and something has the ability to make normal pizza.
Fine.
Fine.
but sesame seeds in the crust no they need to stop what makes a good blueberry pie do you uh i don't know have i had any blueberry pie other than this one i don't know i mean like this things you get out east in the summer on the island you want stuff that like is grown on the farm right there like this is this is like a farm stand type thing and they grow the blueberries and they be uh you know all different fruits that are put in there so they're fresh and
uh it's got a i don't know it's just you've seen what blueberry pie is like it's just blueberries there's not really lots of ingredients in it it's a pie crust with tons tons of blueberries in it and that's it like it can't be too runny i guess it has to be have some consistency hold up it's got to taste like blueberries and it's just wall to wall purple blue blueberries top and bottom crust or just bottom crust an open top top and bottom
lattice or not lattice uh this place this place is not lattice but i i don't you know i don't mind one way or the other see i i'm not a no i can't i don't know if i've ever had a blueberry pie to be completely honest but i love apple pie you've never had a blueberry pie i don't know if i have they don't have them at cookout you can buy one in the supermarket from like entamins or whatever they're not they're not rare
I actually don't terribly love blueberries.
There are certain scenarios where I love blueberries, like a blueberry muffin, for example.
But I do love apple pie.
I love, love, love, love apple pie.
And I have an interesting relationship with the Lattice Top because I think as a work of art, it is deeply impressive.
And it's clearly very intense to put together and do properly and whatnot.
Yeah.
But the crust is one of the best parts of a pie, and I feel like I'm missing out on half the darn crust if it's a lattice pie.
I want the whole pie crust up top and on the bottom.
See, to me, I prefer crumble pies.
I respect a good crust, and Tiff's actually really good at baking pies, and her crusts are awesome and makes me respect them even more.
However, I also really like a crumble pie, where the top crust is replaced by clumps of brown sugar and butter, basically.
Oh, yeah, I can get behind that.
You know, like a coffee cake kind of thing.
But like, you know, you can have a crumble top pie of almost any kind of fruit pie and it works pretty well.
And it is totally ridiculous in the sense of here's more blobs of fat and sugar to add to your pie.
But what does it make a good pie?
And I feel like it's it's hard to get a good crust top and bottom all the way through in from most bakers.
They can be okay, but it's rare that they're good because it's really hard, as I know from Tiff doing it at home, it's really hard to get both top and bottom crusts cooked properly without burning one or undercooking one or having it get too soggy or anything like that.
And so it's much easier.
The crumble pies seem to be more consistent for me.
You can get pretty much any crumble pie, and it's probably going to be really good.
That's why you buy your pies.
The place I buy my pies from, top and bottom crust, always cooked all the way through, always even, always good.
Although, like I said, some people don't like crust.
Like I'll see even people in my family, you give them a slice of pie, they'll eat it.
In the end, they'll be like the sort of the rim of the crust left.
Oh, God.
Monsters.
Or they'll just like eat out the filling and just leave the crust behind.
It's like, what are you even doing?
So not everyone is all on board.
pie in all fairness i i see why people can get there because there are bad crusts out there like if it's a really good crust i'm eating the crust as much as i'm eating the pie yep but if it's like a really crappy crust or it's really like overcooked or stale so it's kind of like gummy when you eat to the end like the little folded over part i can i can understand why like you know maybe like one bad crust ruins somebody forever
I don't know, man.
I know when Erin makes her annual apple pie or apple pies, if it's a good year, she has some sort of ridiculous procedure where certain pieces of the top get covered in aluminum foil at certain stages for certain stretches of time to fight exactly what you're talking about, Marco.
It's the same story.
Yeah, like making a good pie crust top and bottom is hard.
It takes a very advanced baking skill to do it.
Yeah.
So, anyway, I was not expecting the pie to be the highlight of your beach vacation, but you know what?
You do you, John.
Whipped cream, ice cream, or neither?
Ice cream.
Definitely ice cream.
Vanilla only or any flavor permissible?
Oh, vanilla only.
For me, vanilla only.
But, I mean, other flavors will be fine, but I want vanilla.
If they only have strawberry, fine.
If they only have chocolate, I want vanilla, though.
See, to me, I think...
An apple pie, it's got to be vanilla ice cream.
Any other kind of pie, I usually prefer whipped cream.
I was thinking about this when I was having the pie.
I said, we get the pie and we also get the ice cream, right?
And I was thinking, if we didn't have the ice cream, I would forego the pie and wait until we had the ice cream.
I don't even want the pie without the ice cream because I feel like it's a waste of a piece of pie.
Wow, you must really hate pie.
No, I want the combination.
I don't want to waste a pie in a suboptimal eating arrangement, right?
Because there's limited pie and you're there for a limited time.
Why waste a piece that's not going to be as good as it could be?
And I like a lot of ice cream.
See, to me, I like fresh whipped cream that only has a little tiny bit of sugar in it.
Because to me, having a mostly not sweetened whipped cream helps balance out the very sweet pie.
And I like that contrast between the two.
Whereas ice cream is so sweet, it's kind of like sugar bomb on top of sugar bomb.
Well, you got to try the different pies.
Like the, what was it?
Raspberry cherry we had was actually a little bit tart, right?
So the whole pie, the crust is savory and the filling is tart and then the ice cream is sweet.
It makes a great combination.
I have much to learn.
Let's start with some follow-up.
Michael Aldretti, I'm sorry, Michael, if that's wrong, writes in, Hey, guys, I just got to the crash plan part of the latest episode, and I literally just this week went through solving the problems that John mentions, missing menu bar, etc.
I have some notes.
According to Michael, you stole the Java client, John, and it's running out of memory and parts of the client are dying.
And there's never anything in the log or history about this, to which Michael grumbles.
You can check this by launching the main client app and then pressing command option C to bring up the console.
Then type Java MX to see your memory allocation.
Double the number and then type Java MX with the new number with an M at the end to increase the memory allocation.
The client will unload itself and then reload the engine, etc.
I didn't really trust it to do all the right things and ended up rebooting too, but you might be able to skip that.
So he was right.
I do still have the Java thing, even though it looks different.
It was dying frequently, as I mentioned, and I would have to like relaunch it or whatever.
I didn't know what the deal was because there was no indication of what the problem was.
This console thing, command option C, it's not even in a menu bar item as far as I can tell.
So you have to know this.
And then it gives you this ugly little command line GUI thing.
It's not even a shell.
It's just like a box where you type things anyway.
I increased my memory allocation, and now it doesn't crash anymore, and it's backing up.
And that leads me to my second follow-up item, which is an update about me and crash plan.
So finally, the thing is running consistently, and I don't have to, like, babysit it and, you know, stop it from crashing or whatever, because the amount I increased in memory was fine.
It hasn't crashed since.
So thumbs up, right?
And it's backing up, but for some reason it thinks it needs to back up way more than I think it needs to back up.
It doesn't think it needs to back up everything.
It's not like it forgot about my backups.
It knows that it mostly has stuff backed up, but it's backing up like hundreds of gigabytes.
And I don't have hundreds of gigabytes that's new.
So it's confused about something.
And the second thing is that...
The time estimates that were given me were terrible.
First of all, it's time estimating.
This is always a hard problem.
Regular people don't understand why can't the computer just tell me how long it's going to take.
It's because not only does the computer not know, nobody knows.
No human knows either.
It's not predictable.
If you do the naive thing and say, just look at the rate you've been uploading over the last five minutes and assume that will continue and put a number up, you get ridiculous numbers and it changes all the time.
So I'm looking at CrashPlan updating and I'm letting it run for a day or two.
Sometimes it says, you know, we'll be done updating in, you know, 15 days.
I'm like, well, that sucks.
But, you know, it's hundreds of gigabytes made it finished.
Then I'll come back and I'll say, should be finished uploading in 4.1 years.
And I say, well, that is no good.
Yeah.
And then I'll come back and it'll say, you know, two weeks.
And it's like, well, what's the deal?
Because like it doesn't even have like a thing where you can see the rate.
You can work on activity monitor to see how fast it's uploading.
But the point is it never dropped below like two weeks or like 10 days or whatever the lowest number it ever said.
And frequently it jumps up into the years.
And so that's my way of telling like how, you know, how fast is it going?
How long does it think this is going to take?
Like, well, this is no good.
I don't like the crash plan.
Yeah.
it you know seems to think it needs to upload more than i think it needs to upload and i don't like that it's uploading slowly and i don't like the razor variable so let me look at some alternatives so one that somebody tweeted at me this week was spider oak which i'd heard of before and it's been around for a while they had a sale or something it was like get unlimited backup for an unlimited number of computers for life for a rate and the rate was like
$180 a year, which sounds like a lot until you realize you can do all your computers and it's unlimited storage for all of them.
So I'm like, well, that might be a good deal.
But before I pay that, let me try the SpiderOak client.
So I install SpiderOak.
I don't have it back on my entire computer, but I just pointed it at my photo library.
And I say, go start backing up.
Let me see how you're going to do.
And it spent like a day and a half just at the phase where it's like trying to find files that need to be backed up.
Like it never got to the point where it was even uploading anything.
So I'm like, well, sorry, SpiderOak, but I'm glad I didn't pay $180 to try to get that good deal because I feel like I just have too many files.
And it was just taking too long.
So I gave up on that.
And then finally, I don't even know if they're a sponsor of this episode, but I've been using Backblaze since well before they were a sponsor.
And I use it on my computer all the time.
This is, of course, my wife's computer.
I don't use Backblaze there because I want a backup network drive from it.
And CrashPlan does that.
But CrashPlan was in the doghouse.
So I said, let me try Backblaze.
I put Blackblaze on her computer.
And one of the cool things about Backway is that it isn't mentioned in the ad reads, but is a thing that exists, is that you can manually control how fast it uploads, basically, like how many resources it uses.
Right.
So by default, it just automatically throttles based on your activity and stuff.
But if you're in my situation and you say, look, no one's going to be using this computer.
We're all going to sleep.
Just upload as fast as you possibly can.
You have a couple of settings.
You have like a slider for how fast you want to upload.
You can disable all the throttles.
And then there's also a number of threads that you can pick.
And the maximum is 20.
I wish I actually went higher.
So I just cranked everything up as high as it can go, put it down to 20 threads and just like let it run.
And it has no problem saturating my upload pipe, which is not that big.
I don't have a very fast file.
So I think mine is like 50 megabits up, which is, you know, like a half or a third of the maximum file speeds offer or whatever.
But it's way more than any other service was getting.
And so I'm like, well, I think Backblaze wins here.
So I ended up paying for like the business group thing for Backblaze.
It's just a billing convenience.
I don't think it's any cheaper or more expensive than anything else.
But it's like I already had an account at Backblaze.
So I just added my wife's computer to the account.
And now I'm stuck kind of thinking what I'm going to do with my Synology.
Of course, Backblaze will let you back up directly from the Synology to their B2 storage.
And I just have to do the math to see what that looks like.
I still might end up just having CrashPlan do my Synology.
So basically running Backblaze for the computer and the attached drives and then running CrashPlan for the Synology.
Because the CrashPlan deal I have is like $2.50 a month or something.
It's really cheap.
And I've already paid for like a year of it.
So anyway, all this is to say that my backup stuff is a little bit in flux.
But from my brief testing, Backblaze is still the upload speed champ.
And I paused it during the podcast.
But as soon as we're done with this, I'm just going to have it re-upload again.
It claims it's going to upload like three and a half terabytes per day.
That seems optimistic to me.
But it is way better than, you know, 4.1 years, whatever CrashPlan was saying before I paused it.
yeah i i whenever i tried crash plan which admittedly it's been a while but whenever i tried crash plan i it would always like just slow down to a crawl as it did my initial upload and just it was never going to complete it was going to take years and you know just never complete and i heard all the same tips that people are yelling at you about java limits and everything like that and i just didn't care like i tried a few of them they didn't work i'm like all right i i can't spend any more time on this you know so uh
so i i've been using backblaze for a while now they're not sponsoring this episode but uh they are our sponsor frequently so we should just close that as you did but um i was using them before they were sponsored because this all happened back then and boy are they so much better at the upload speeds and everything like it's it's just night and day different the only reason i think to not use backblaze is if you want network drive backups
that's it like i can't think of any other advantage that anyone else has over them like they're just so much better for every in every other way and back backblaze is also picky about what it backs up to like that it refuses to back up the user directory and stuff like that and you used to be able to override that but now it's either much more difficult or impossible so there are you mean like the unix user directory like us
Yeah, USR.
There's a whole bunch of directories that it just won't back up.
I find that annoying because my user local is the thing I want to back up because I compile all my software and put it there.
And the fact that it won't back up user local for me is kind of annoying.
I used to override it back when you could, and now you can't.
So there are other reasons to look elsewhere.
But for what I'm doing in this case, which is basically backing up photos and plain files on my wife's computer, it's fine.
Yeah, I would be on Backblaze, would have been on Backblaze forever ago were it not for me really wanting to back up my Synology.
And maybe the right answer is to do what you're saying, John, and double dip and pay both Backblaze and CrashPlan.
Or you can use the B2 storage.
It's probably some business model that makes this not profitable, but like...
So Backblaze and CrashPlan and a bunch of other things will run on your NAS.
You don't have to run on a computer with a NAS mount.
It will run directly on your NAS.
It's just that Backblaze's solution there is you have to pay them for the storage.
So they have this B2 storage, which is like S3, but a little bit cheaper.
a lot cheaper yeah and you and you have to pay them you know per per byte for your storage which is not like backblaze on your computer which is as the the tagline for the ad goes like unlimited on the product like you don't have to pay for your storage you just pay a flat amount a month and you you can uh you know upload everything i guess they assume that servers and nasa's can just have so much storage that doesn't make sense from financially uh but for me
There's not that much more.
I'm backing up maybe two and a half terabytes on my NAS and two and a half terabytes for my computer.
So it's about the same.
It's just that one of them, because it's not a computer, will charge me to store that all the time.
The other one won't.
So I kind of wish I had a... Financially, it's a better deal to do Crash Plan for the NAS, but...
I'm going to do the math on Backblaze B2 and see if I can just stomach whatever's going to charge, and then I'll just cancel the crash plan contract when it comes up for renewal.
I've actually been doing... I don't know if this helps at all for your needs.
Probably not, but I've actually been trying B2...
using the arc backup program arq that's a it's like a pretty popular mac backup app um it's arc is cool because like it you can basically you can set tons of different storage services as your endpoint uh for arc and you can arc is just the backup client that runs on on mac os and so and it backs up to like this you know documented format in case they ever got a business or whatever but i don't i wouldn't really be too worried about that
um and basically like so it's a way for you to have a little more control over what gets backed up so like if you wanted to do something like what john was saying earlier about like they don't you know how backblaze doesn't back up certain directories you know if you wanted more control over it you could use arc to back up to backblaze b2 or amazon s3 or although i wouldn't recommend this amazon glacier um and or all you know all sorts of other things dropbox i think google drive amazon one drive all this all this crazy stuff um but
i i decided um i was having my backblaze client i was running basically the same installation of the backblaze client for something like six or seven years and it was starting to get a little bit weird with um memory usage and their recommendation when this happens is usually to kind of like just blow it away and start over um or blow away certain log files and start over and so whatever whatever else like the case the case was i had this problem and i was going to start over so i figured i
while i'm starting over let me try arc let me you know try that to b2 it did it is costing me a little bit more because of how much i'm storing there because i'm storing a lot um compared to the flat rate of the regular client but it's kind of nice um you know it's it isn't that much more i forgot exactly what it is but it's it's a small amount more plus the cost of arc itself which i think is like 30 or 40 bucks um and then what's nice about it is
You as a user, I believe you're licensed on any number of computers you own for Arc.
It's just per user licensing instead of per computer licensing.
So I run Arc on my desktop and on my laptop.
And Backblaze has a feature where you can log into their web app and start a restore for any of your computers onto any device you're on.
So if you forget a file on your laptop or something or forget a file at home while you're traveling, you can go fetch it.
Well, Arc, if this is a thing that happens to you a lot, Arc makes it even faster and easier because it's doing all that with this native interface.
You do all that from your Mac with this little tree view thing.
It's not incredibly fast to restore because it has to download a bunch of catalog files before it does, but it is really nice to have all that in this one app that you can run on all your computers.
So on my laptop...
I run Arc, and I can browse my desktop's files and folders right there.
On my desktop, I can do the same thing to the laptop, vice versa.
So it's a pretty nice setup.
Again, it is more expensive if you're backing up more than probably about a terabyte or so, but it's kind of fun as an option.
I'm not sure I would recommend it to everybody, but if you're a nerd and you like that kind of control, Arc plus B2 is a pretty good combo.
Yeah, my crash plan account last I looked is backing up something like seven and a half terabytes.
Now, to be clear, most of that is stuff on the Synology and a tremendous portion of that is media that a lot of which, almost all of which I could probably recreate.
But the whole idea of my backup solution is I don't want to have to be, you know, just not discreet, but selective, I guess the better word for it.
uh about what i'm backing up and so to do that on uh b2 is like 40 bucks a month where i'm paying crash plan like 60 bucks a year or something like that and so if i were if i was an adult who actually did the right thing i would move to pack blaze because i have no doubt that it is better in every measurable way except being more expensive which makes sense because it's better so i don't know i don't know what i'm gonna do
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I've looked up what it meant to be part of a complete breakfast.
Tell me more.
So this is from our pre-show here.
I was asking about how the cereal commercials for breakfast cereal in the 80s and 90s would always advertise cereal as being part of this complete breakfast.
And it would show a picture of the cereal next to like a bowl of fruit and some yogurt and some milk and some juice and all this stuff.
And I don't think anybody has ever actually eaten that breakfast before, except maybe John on British Airways.
But for the most part, they wouldn't include cereal there.
Like no one has ever eaten the complete breakfast that cereal was always advertised as being a part of.
everyone i know including everyone in my family just ate the cereal and the milk that was their complete breakfast so apparently this was kind of a coordinated advertising thing between like post and kellogg uh back um you know in like the 70s uh or so where and please don't write it because it doesn't matter but but um
Apparently, it was because cereal being mostly regular carbs plus a lot of sugar and very little any other nutrition is part of what your body needs in the sense that your body needs carbs, fats, and proteins.
And what they're really saying as being part of this complete breakfast is that cereal alone is not giving you everything you need.
So it was kind of a way to cover the bus and say, you should be eating other things, not just cereal.
The funny part about this, though, is if you look at the pictures of screenshots from the commercials and everything of what they would advertise as being the complete breakfast –
It would be so much healthier for you and would lose no nutritional value if you took the cereal out of it and just ate the rest of the stuff in the picture.
To be fair to cereal, they did fortify it with vitamins, so you're not just getting sugar.
And minerals.
Yeah.
They also do that to the milk, though, so you didn't need it.
And if you eat everything else in the picture, you're getting that.
I know.
Well, they're just trying to prevent your friend kids from getting scurvy.
Ugh.
That's not my word.
Moving on.
All right, John, to continue the John Syracuse Hour, tell me about your photo book PDFs.
And I actually meant to ask you, then I forgot about it.
Did you already make your photo book from last week or no?
No, I didn't.
The 2008 book just arrived when I got back.
I haven't done the 2018.
I still have to do all that.
I think they moved the date back from September 1st to September 30th.
Every time you click on a on a book in the sidebar, it pops up a dialogue like every time it pops up to say, just so you know, blah, blah, blah.
I think it's September 30th based on how many times I've seen that dialogue.
But anyway, I got to make those.
Oh, and I think I'm basically full up on photos now.
Like, I'm down to double-digit gigabytes of free space on my wife's hard drive, and I've spent a lot of time in, like, Disk Inventory, X slash 10, or Grand Perspective, or Daisy Disk, or all those things that show you where your space is used, and I've really, I've rung every...
ounce out of this thing and there's not really any more room I can get back.
So I couldn't bring myself to buy a big disc and I wasn't ready to buy a new iMac because I think they're going to come up with a 5K with T2.
So I don't want to buy it for that.
So I just bought a one terabyte drive because my
The photo library is 600 gigs almost exactly.
So one terabyte drive should give me enough breathing room to get to the new iMac for her.
And that, of course, will be direct attached.
So Backblaze will back that up.
So I'm fine.
So anyway, I'm doing that.
So about the photobook PDF, someone mentioned this a couple of shows back that I didn't know.
if you and i've been thinking about this i've got these photo books that i made and yes they're printed and they're on the shelf when we look through them as a family and they're fun their paper and everything but like what if my house burns down or floods or i lose those books in some way i put a lot of time into them like selecting the pictures and deciding how they're going to be cropped and doing like the layout so like pictures go in pairs on pages that face each other that you know look cute and you know it's an art to doing it and i spent like a really long time doing this for all these books cumulatively i didn't want to lose that right
And I'm like, well, what if when Apple gets rid of the built in feature, like all my books go away to how do I how do I preserve this in some way?
And apparently in photos and Apple's photos app, you can select a book and basically print it to PDF.
And it doesn't.
It's cool.
It doesn't really like, for example, the cover, you have a front cover, back cover and then flaps like the dust jacket flaps.
Yeah.
when you do the PDF, the picture on the dust jacket flap just becomes like a regular, you know, like page with just a picture floating in the middle of it.
So it's not exactly how you can't just take that PDF and print it and get the book back, but it will do the pages in the order they're in with the pictures cropped the way they are.
I think at full res as far as I can tell, like they're big PDFs.
So I printed all mine to PDF and, you know, save them into a little folder and, you know,
That at least lets me know that if I lose my books, I'll at least know which pictures I use, how they were cropped.
And if I never even wanted to print them again, I could just look through the PDFs.
So that was a nice thing to know.
And so if Apple does the wrong thing and deletes all my books after they get rid of the built-in feature, at least I'll have them backed up somewhere.
And have you seen in the news over the last couple of weeks, there were a couple of articles, I think on 9to5, that have basically outed the company that was printing these books for Apple all this time.
And then also, I think, a second company that wasn't the ones printing the books for Apple, but has made plugins for Photos app that will mimic the exact same layouts.
Have you looked at those?
Yep.
I had all that information back from like three shows ago, like the supposed one that printed their books.
I hope like that's going to be my first go to is the one that was actually printing their books because I assume that they will literally print like the same exact product.
It'll be exactly the same.
I applaud the company saying we as a business opportunity here.
Let's mimic those books.
Let's give you offer you the same size of whatever, but they're not going to be exactly the same.
Like they'll do as good as they can, but they're not going to be exactly the same.
So I have no idea if the quality is going to be as good.
I have no idea if they're going to be exactly the same size down to the millimeter.
I have no idea if they're going to use exactly the same binding technology.
So definitely going with what is supposedly the contractor that Apple's been using.
But hopefully my plan is to print every single book I ever want to print.
And then the only time I'll have to pick one of those vendors is next year, next summer.
Well, good luck with that.
I hope it works out.
Anonymous writes in to tell us, AMD's top-end processors will be manufactured in TSMC's 7nm process node as seen at the NNTech link that we'll put in the show notes.
This is a pretty exciting time for AMD since they can kind of compete with Intel since they finally have access to a competitive process node.
They won't be competitive with Global Foundries, and they know that, but they would prefer to use Global Foundries since it would be their fab, but they can't and shouldn't for reasons.
In terms of timeline of TSMC 7nm equivalent node, as far as I can tell, TSMC is in the lead, closely followed by Samsung Global Foundry slightly behind, and Intel may be even behind that, which is kind of unknown, since it's hard to tell with all the delays of Intel 10nm.
Yeah, that's something we didn't talk about, you know, about Intel will be falling behind and Apple's able to manufacture its phone chips at TSMC, 7 nanometer.
Well, AMD now gets to leap at Intel, too, because even though they're fab, I mean, they're, you know, they're global founders, they're fab.
AMD used to fab its own chips and it split the company into the fab part and the other part.
And so the fab part is called global foundries and it's not at seven nanometer.
So but AMD doesn't have to use its ex fab like they're independent companies now.
So AMD has chosen not to use global foundries and now has the freedom to use whoever has the best fab and is offering to do it.
So, you know, seven nanometer Xeon like Ryzen based chips would be attractive to Apple in theory if Apple ever decided to go that route.
do you think ryzen has a chance like do you think um or just amd chips in general do you think that a reasonable next step for apple instead of going to arm necessarily could they go to amd chips are they competitive enough yeah they're totally competitive enough and especially not just like competitive enough the way they are like because intel chips are better at this point
if apple went with them the infusion of money right into into amd for those chips because apple's a good customer they'll buy your most expensive stuff right and they don't they can absorb some kind of a premium and apple tends to drive its manufacturers to make like what what it wants and they end up being powerful stuff i think would work out just fine the question is does apple want to keep going down that route or they just because that still doesn't give them the kind of control they would get even if they made their own arm chips let alone like their own
you know other architecture trips so it is uh it's kind of like saying intel is not doing it it's like when they switch to power pc like oh uh power pc is ibm's not doing the job for us and motorola is not making anything we want so let's switch to intel you go to the better horse like oh intel is a big improvement but you don't really get much more control you're just switching to a different vendor and
Apple doing ARM that chips that it makes itself, that's more control.
So Ryzen or an AMD thing is 100% viable, I think, you know, if they decide to go that direction and really commit to it, but it doesn't give them the control that we all think they crave in this realm.
And speaking of all of these fabs, the Intel Core i9-9900K, great model name.
Apparently, this relates to Digital Foundry because of a YouTube video.
Tell me about this.
Digital Foundry is the YouTube channel.
I watch it.
It's a gaming-related thing.
They talk about what the PS5 is going to be like, and they analyze video games.
But anyway, they do PC gaming, too.
So they were talking about what's Intel's next line of chips.
We talked about this last show that they were going to go 14 nanometers still, right?
But they just went to 6-core.
They're going to go to 8-core.
and the i9 will be eight core with hyper threading and the i7 will be eight core without hyper threading and it's just like let's just keep adding cores on 14 nanometers how are they how are they going to do that how can they keep adding cores like these are desktop chips we're talking about not laptop stuff right so there is a much bigger budget for power but at a certain point it becomes a little bit ridiculous and the one detail this is i think it's all like informed speculation like these aren't official announcements from intel and plans could change yada yada but like
you know this is an open secret of what they're doing uh the i9 apparently will have soldered heat spreader like it won't be like you buy the chip and you put thermal paste on and you shove a heat spreader on you put a heat sink on top of it they will solder it on like it'll be metal to metal soldered connection for the heat pipe from intel now it doesn't mean apple's going to use those or maybe apple because they always have custom cooling solutions and stuff like that but it just goes to show the lengths that intel is willing to go to to say
Can we actually cool a chip on 14 nanometers with eight cores and hyper-threading and all this stuff?
You know, what can we do to make it so that it's more viable in normal-sized desktop PC cases?
They're pulling out all the stops.
Let's solder the heat spurter on.
Get rid of the thermal paste.
Like, nothing has a better contact than metal-to-metal, you know?
And I think it would be great for Apple to use one of those in a Mac Pro in 2019.
Speaking of that, like, so I have my new 13-inch MacBook Pro.
And I don't know if I've used it enough to really have a solid opinion on it yet, although so far I will say it's generally positive.
But one thing I have noticed, which I told you guys in Slack earlier, is that it really is noticeably warm.
This is a generation of computers.
I would say probably every 2018 and probably 2019, maybe even 2020 computer is probably going to be kind of warmer than we expect because, you know, as we mentioned, Intel is shoving more cores into these chips without shrinking the process.
And so it's going to be, you know, they're really kind of pushing thermal boundaries here.
And while my laptop has no signs of throttling or anything else, it seems able to maintain its thermal load when necessary.
But it does run noticeably warm.
It's pretty warm most of the time that it's in use.
If I disable Turbo Boost, that helps a lot, but it still runs warm.
And I have a feeling this will apply to every computer in this generation and the next one.
So it's just one thing to consider if you're sensitive to that, maybe skip this generation and the next couple.
Good luck.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
John, tell me what whimsy means.
This is somewhat evident during the podcast, but very evident after as we got feedback of people talking about whether Apple has or hasn't lost its whimsy and the relative values of whimsy.
People don't know what whimsy is.
That's a big problem.
Lots of people were writing in
for things that they liked, like here is a quality of an Apple product that I like.
And just because you like it doesn't mean it's whimsical.
Like, uh, to give an example, the unibody on, on the laptops, like it makes them, makes them feel much more solid.
And we all agree that it's better than when they were just like connecting together, like a top and a bottom and a sides and everything.
Right.
Not whimsical.
It's good.
It's a good, it makes their products like, you know, high quality and attractive and we like it and we think it's great product design, but it is not whimsical.
So yeah,
I would encourage people to look up the word whimsy in your dictionary of choice and realize that it has to be playful, quaint, fanciful, and perhaps have a humor value.
That's whimsy.
That's when things are whimsical.
It's not just a good thing about a product.
All right, and then I have a little bit of neutral-related follow-up.
I had lamented on the video, and I think we discussed on the podcast, that the Golf R—I could swear DeMiro says golf, by the way, but anyway, the Golf R has a kickdown switch, so if you recall—
You push the gas pedal past where it feels like it can't go any further.
And then there's a little switch that flips.
And to me, I didn't understand the point because it was a manual transmission car.
And I got a lot of feedback from a lot of people, all saying mostly the same stuff.
But Eric Scala summarized it the best.
He writes the switch does have a function to to be accurate.
First, the adaptive cruise control can be switched off and instead the car will limit the speed to the speed you set.
You can push the gas pedal as much as you want.
The car will not go above the speed you set.
That is until you press the kickdown switch.
So that's like an override saying, no, really, I got to go.
Also, when you switch the car into eco mode, the throttle will respond much slower to your input.
It will only accept around 40% maximum input.
Everything beyond that, it will just ignore.
That is until, you guessed it, you press the kickdown switch.
Those both make sense.
I had no idea either of those were the case.
So that was useful.
I will collect my credit for doubting your story that the switch was non-functional.
Remember when I asked you, are you sure?
Did you check the owner's manual when you told me you hadn't?
You told me you had glanced at the owner's manual.
I guarantee this is in the owner's manual.
I found it hard to believe that the switch did nothing.
So now you know, read the whole owner's manual from cover to cover.
You got the car for a week.
Yeah.
I'll get right on that.
You're supposed to be reading the manuals for Marco.
Now, who's going to read the manuals for you?
This is like a chain.
I'm the only person left who reads the manual.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Hold on.
Hold on.
Hold on.
Hold on.
I will read the manuals.
Who reads the manual of readers?
I'll read the manuals for Marco when I'm going to be traveling in that car at extraordinary rates of speeds on the Autobahn.
You're going to help him find the battery so he can jump it.
Exactly.
And then the other question I got a lot, which is reasonable, is why not just get a GTI and chip it?
Or by that I mean get a box that will let you reprogram the way the computer, the onboard computer works.
And from what I understand, you can get a box that will reprogram the onboard computer that will give you, if not equal to Golf R horsepower and torque, perhaps even better than the Golf R horsepower and torque ratings.
And the reason I don't want to do that is because I did that to the BMW and I got moderate gains.
And for all I know, that could have been why the engine torpedoed itself twice.
So I know Volkswagen is not BMW.
I wouldn't put that on the record.
Yeah.
I know that this is not causation, but it just, no, thank you.
No, thank you.
If it was meant to be 300 plus horsepower, then the factory would make it 300 plus horsepower.
I am good.
Thank you very much.
It's a reasonable suggestion.
If you're braver than I, I fully encourage you to try it out, but I am not that brave anymore.
So thank you, but no thank you.
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Marco, you started a trend this past week.
Oh, God.
You removed InfoWars from the Overcast podcast directory.
And then Apple said, you know what?
Marco's right.
Let's do that, too.
And then Facebook and YouTube said, you know what?
Apple and Marco are right.
Let's do that, too.
And it was a trickle effect from there.
As an opening statement, I would like to request from Marco on this topic because it will lead into it eventually.
I think this is a good opportunity to have like a one on one segment.
And the one on one I think Mark should do is explaining what a podcast is, because to explain the nuances of this issue, it requires you to know what a podcast is.
And I think a lot of people kind of like whimsy don't actually know what a podcast is.
So can you explain to us and like boring one on one technical terms, literally what a podcast is and then like how how the parts work and how they fit together, who the players are, which will then explain.
what you're going to say that you did that's actually a really good idea yeah because i you know it doesn't work the way almost anything else in the internet works and and so it is kind of helpful to know this and and i get all sorts of um questions or or arguments that suggest people don't understand this very well and i can't blame them because it doesn't explain it very well so here i am going to try to explain it uh probably poorly uh but here we go so
To publish a podcast, you need audio files.
You put those audio files in a server somewhere, and then you need some way for people to find them and for podcast players to know when there's a new episode.
And so the way that you publish audio files in a useful way that makes that into a podcast is you create a special RSS feed.
An RSS feed?
Oh, jeez, do I have to explain this to you?
Keep on digging.
It's 101.
What the heck is an RSS feed?
An RSS feed is a document that is in a special version of markup language called XML.
It's kind of like HTML, but a little more strict, a lot more strict.
And anyway, so it's...
An RSS feed is a document that, in a structured, standardized way, lists items in a feed format.
So it could be articles.
It could be posts.
And if you have a special tag in those posts called an enclosure tag that points to the URL of an audio file,
that becomes a podcast.
And so when you publish a podcast, you are hosting the file yourself.
And there are a few exceptions to this.
Certain podcast platforms kind of take this over for you or copy your file and reserve it, but for the most part...
Most players out there, including by far the biggest one, which is Apple's podcast app, which has over 60% market share, and it's by far the biggest one.
The next one after that has something like 5% market share.
A podcast app doesn't re-host your podcast on its own servers.
It doesn't maintain its own content the way YouTube does.
YouTube videos are all hosted on YouTube.
So YouTube has way more control and way more liability over what is hosted on YouTube than a podcast player does.
Podcast players simply fetch those RSS feeds from each podcast server.
And then any new episodes they find that they didn't already know about, they download the pointed to audio file also from the publisher's server.
And then you can play it, you know, the user can play it in the app.
So, like, Apple's podcast app does not host the files.
Apple does not host the files.
When a new episode is published, it doesn't even go through Apple.
Like, the Apple maintains the directory that looks for the new files so it can, like, make a list of them for search and stuff.
But...
It doesn't actually ever host the file.
The file never even passes through Apple.
The way the podcast app, therefore, works is kind of, in some ways, kind of like a web browser in the sense that it's just pulling something from a URL.
It's pulling a special RSS feed from a URL that's structured in a special way to contain audio files.
And that's about it.
And so you can have that pull from any URL anywhere.
Where this gets complicated and where the news this week comes in is the user experience of a podcast app is usually not people entering URLs of all the feeds they want.
You can do that.
You can go to the website of the podcast you want to listen to.
You can find somewhere there, there's going to be a link to their RSS feed, and you can copy that link, and you can paste that URL into the add URL box in almost any podcast app, and you can listen that way.
That's fine.
But the way most people do it is they just use some built-in search function of the podcast, and they search a directory of podcasts.
By far, the biggest directory out there is Apple's podcast directory.
The way you get into Apple's podcast directory is you go to Apple and you submit your feed for consideration and they make sure that it doesn't break any obvious rules like that it's not illegal or that it's not obscene or spam or I believe they don't know porn or other adult content.
Apple has people review those and then they say, okay, this is okay to be in our directory and they add it to the directory.
They're still not actually hosting the file, but they're maintaining a search index.
So that way, when people go to their app, they don't have to enter the URL of every RSS feed.
They can just type in, you know, this American life and Apple, you know, uses their search engine and say, okay, here, this is the URL for the show you just asked for.
Here it is.
And you never have to see it as the user.
It just gets added to your podcast app.
And so it seems kind of like you're using something that Apple's in full control over.
It seems like you're searching Apple Podcasts for podcasts that are in Apple Podcasts and playing them, and Apple Podcasts is therefore responsible for everything in it.
In reality, though, the technical details of that are...
closer to a web browser with a search engine in the sense that you know a web browser can navigate to any url just like a podcast app could play any urls podcast feed but in a web browser you know you often will use search instead of entering a url directly because it's just more convenient or it's easier to find things or whatever else oh and i should clarify one other thing that is important to understanding what i my role in this um overcast my podcast app
I don't have my own directory.
I have stuff on my server that I know about, but I don't have any way for people to submit podcasts to me, and I don't have any content review of what gets into Overcast because I'm just one person.
I don't have the resources for that.
Apple has a whole staff around the world because you need to do things like you need to understand other languages to know is content in other languages obscene or illegal or anything.
This takes a huge amount of people to
actually run this kind of directory responsibly.
And there's a reason.
In Overcast, this is the reason why I have no areas in Overcast where users can enter text visible to other users.
That's why there's no user reviews of podcasts.
There's no star ratings.
There's no comments.
The reason why is because when you have any of those things in your app, you become responsible for...
content policing those things and for dealing with harassment and hate speech and illegal content being posted to it dealing with disputes dealing with complaints dealing with copyright issues like if you are allowing users to enter content in your in your platform you're going to have all those problems land in your lap eventually and so i don't want anything to do with that so i don't have any text input you know directory things no reviews like that and also
I outsource my content decisions of what should show up in my search engine to Apple's iTunes podcast directory.
Because they have that staff reviewing things, because they have way more resources than I do, because they maintain the big directory, and also just so that podcasters don't have to submit their podcast to Overcast to be playable in Overcast.
All they have to do is submit them to Apple's directory, which they're already going to do, because that's the biggest player, so everyone's going to do that.
And then they just become playable in Overcast when I search Apple's podcast directory next for whatever term people are looking for.
So anyway, so my Overcast mechanism for what I show in search and what I don't show in search is basically, do I know this podcast to have an iTunes ID?
If a podcast has an iTunes ID that I know about, it will show up in Overcast search.
If it doesn't, it won't.
And there are a couple of exceptions.
iTunes ID or not, I will not show a podcast that has the iTunes block attribute set, which is a custom tag you can have in your RSS feed.
I also won't show anything in search that has an HTTP basic auth username and password in its URL.
Because a lot of protected feeds and private feeds and passworded feeds use this mechanism.
I also won't show things that are like URLs that use big long hashes at the end that are meant to be single user private URLs.
Things like Patreon private URLs and Slate Plus private things.
They don't use basic auth passwords, but the idea is for them to be private.
So I have basically this list of conditions that even if something has an iTunes ID and would otherwise show up in search, if it appears to be a private feed or if the feed appears to want to be blocked from search, I don't show it.
But normally, otherwise, it will show up with Apple search.
If it shows up in Apple search, it will show up in my search because I want Apple to be the one enforcing these content rules.
The other side of this, I know this is long, bear with me.
I have to enforce these content rules to some level because to some level, I as the app owner, like if stuff is illegal, like if somebody's publishing something that's illegal and you can play it in my app,
Legally, I'm probably not at fault there because of the way this directory thing works.
But it certainly could become my problem, even if it isn't my fault.
And so I don't want to deal with that.
I don't have the resources to police everything and deal with that.
So I rely on Apple enforcing these guidelines.
That also keeps spam out of the directory.
That's why when you search for popular shows...
The reason why you don't get a whole bunch of spam with people trying to squat on those names is because Apple is doing spam filtering.
Some degree of filtering is necessary here.
Apple deals with copyright issues.
Somebody can't just take this show...
put it up, you know, call it something like, you know, accidental tech podcast with a typo in it somewhere and copy all of our files and make a separate feed and steal our, you know, downloads or whatever.
Like they can't do that because Apple maintains this and people can complain to Apple and get it taken down.
So anyway, some degree of human intervention, human curation of this directory has always been present and it's necessary for a good experience and for good legal and practical realities.
Yeah.
So, what happened last week is the Alex Jones show, basically what happened is it crossed a whole bunch of lines of things that... I mean, look, the guy's always been a tremendous jerk in a lot of ways, and incredibly damaging.
But...
It crossed a lot of lines that went from simply being a bad person to actionable problems, things like hate speech and inciting violence and things of that nature that are against Apple's terms for what they allow in their podcast directory and are in many jurisdictions are actually illegal.
And so a listener emailed me saying, hey, I'm leaving your app because you host this content and it's horrible.
I looked and I'm like, you know, this should not be allowed.
Like this is clearly in violation of Apple's own content guidelines.
And they were already at that point, they were already having problems with Facebook and YouTube because they were violating their guidelines too.
And so I do have a mechanism in Overcast that I can override a feed that would otherwise show up.
And I can say this feed should not show up.
I haven't used this mechanism very often.
I used it once before for NRA TV for similar reasons that I believe that it was violating Apple's own guidelines.
And I used it, I think, two or three times, something like that.
Occasionally, a random podcaster will find Overcast, will say, hey, my podcast is showing up in your app.
That's copyright infringement.
I demand you take it down.
And you know what?
When people say that, I say, okay.
And I set this flag and it's gone from Overcast.
Anyway, so I used this flag on these InfoWars properties because it was very clear that they were violating Apple's guidelines, but Apple was not removing it from their directory.
And I was hearing about it from a lot of people.
A few days after I did that, Apple pulled them from the directory, and so did everyone else, basically.
I think I was proven right.
Had I known Apple was going to pull them a few days later, I might have just waited for them to do it, so that way I'm not involved in this.
But ultimately...
uh you know it had to be done they were clearly in violation and it was high profile enough that a lot of people were seeing it and that can get me in a lot of trouble that like that could get me possibly involved legally in ramifications of this show that can get me kicked out of the app store because the app store has rules against this stuff so basically like i took action because it was clearly necessary and i didn't know that apple was about to take their own action so i took my own
I am 100% confident in the action I took and the ability I have to do this because sometimes it is necessary.
And I really try... I hope to use it as little as possible because I don't want to put myself in this position.
But sometimes you have to be in this position.
Sometimes something like this happens where people are demanding immediate action and you look at the problem and you're like, well...
I kind of don't like that I'm being kind of bullied into a decision like this.
But if you look at the actual situation, it's like, yeah, this actually should be solved.
This is a problem.
This does require action.
So they're correct.
The people asking me to do this are correct.
So it's important not to think defensively in that time and just say, okay, actually, yeah, this is right.
I should take action and just do it.
Anyway, so going back to the original topic, these crazy shows remain playable in Overcast if you enter their URLs, but they're gone from my search directory.
And so to continue with the events that took place, you did this, what, like last week, middle of last week or something?
yeah yeah i don't remember the exact day but it was last week and so after that apple did eventually do what you would you know the reason you had to do this because apple hadn't removed uh the info stuff correct and apple did eventually remove all the podcasts except for one i guess uh but anyway apple did remove it so your your block uh your custom block was pretty much only needed temporarily because now all those things are actually gone
from Apple's directory as well.
And after Apple did it, Facebook and YouTube both got rid of that, you know, the same content on their on their services.
And, you know, Gruber was investigating, trying to figure out, like, was this a coordinated thing between the big three companies?
Or was it that Apple did it?
And then once Apple did it, Facebook and YouTube did it.
And it seems like Apple did it.
And then Facebook and YouTube did it, which I find depressing because it's like,
It's so sort of reactive and so big company kind of thing where it's like nobody notices or cares until one of your few handful of important competitors does something.
And now you quickly have to do it.
Otherwise, you look bad.
It's like, well, you all looked bad for a really long time before this, but apparently no one cared.
But as soon as one goes, then everybody has to go.
It's such a weird kind of high school peer pressure thing among like the biggest companies in the world.
And it's not a good look.
Uh, cause it's not like, I find it hard to believe that these companies didn't know about this issue.
Like lots of it's, you know, it's, it's highly charged.
Lots of people on both sides are constantly probably yelling at both companies about it.
Uh, it's just like someone had to go first and then it looks, and then you have to follow what they did because if you don't do it and it's like, well, Apple did it, why didn't you do it?
I find it really depressing.
Um, but another interesting aspect of this, the group pointed out is that, so Apple removed it from the podcast directory, which again, the reason I wanted you to explain how podcasts work and what a podcast is, just to make it clear that unlike the case of like YouTube and Facebook,
All Apple has done is essentially removed an item from like a search index.
It's the same as like Google not showing your thing in search results.
Your thing, this podcast, continues to exist exactly as it has always existed, hosted exactly where it's always been hosted, available to exactly the same people it's always been available to.
The only difference is it doesn't show up in search.
Marco made it so it doesn't show up in his search, and then Apple made it so it doesn't show up in their search, and therefore won't show up in Marco's search, right?
That's it.
uh but apple didn't get rid of the the app in the app store for i don't know what the hell this app could possibly do it is probably just another way to get the same content right so it's an infowars app that remains in the app store uh and i'm not quite sure how to square that it seems like if you think it's it's all a gateway to the same terrible content right and if the content is violating some kind of guidelines like
I don't know.
Anyway, I'm imagining that there might be some follow up on that in the future to see if the app ever gets pulled because Apple, especially in the App Store, Apple's been really testy about like political apps.
Like, I don't know what the rules are these days, but I remember back like in the 2008 election, there was some political apps and Apple was like at one point they didn't want like overtly political apps in the App Store and would pull them.
Uh, anyway, I, I really hope that Apple gets on the same page here and delist the app as well.
Cause I don't, I don't quite get how the rules would be different.
It might just be like, it's a big company and there's different people in charge of those two things.
And so the other shoe will drop eventually.
Well, I thought it was because there were different guidelines, whether you're in the app store or in the podcast directory.
And for whatever reason, uh,
The guidelines and rules and regulations in the App Store are not 100% in lockstep with what's in the podcast directory or the rules for the podcast directory.
And apparently there were clear violations in the podcast directory, but I guess the app follows the letter of the quote unquote law in the App Store.
At least that's my understanding.
I haven't personally looked into whether or not that's true or not.
Yeah, honestly, I haven't had time to look into it either.
But it's it wouldn't surprise me if it's just because, you know, Apple's a big company.
These are totally separate divisions of Apple.
It wouldn't surprise me if the app is pulled like tomorrow or the next day, like because it just took a while to get, you know, approved by the right people or whatever else.
Like, it's complicated.
And I honestly, I haven't even looked at the app yet.
I don't have enough time.
yeah and it might it might just be like oh the app counts as like a player app like there's no actual content and all it does is play things so you wouldn't pull it just like you wouldn't pull a web browser but at this point it's kind of like the principle like the this entity is uh disapproved of by all the big peers and everything like that and but there's one exception and that was the subject of today's
uh, one, one of today's little buckets of gnashing teeth.
Uh, and that was, uh, Twitter, uh, InfoWars is also on Twitter.
And after Apple did it, Facebook and YouTube did it.
Twitter did not get rid of, uh, the InfoWars, Alex Jones accounts.
Shocking.
Yeah.
And many people were angry about that.
And, uh,
What is Jack Dorsey?
Is he their CEO?
I guess.
Yes.
Yeah.
Anyway, he's on Twitter, of course, trying to explain why they didn't get rid of it.
They're like, oh, it technically didn't violate our guidelines and so on and so forth.
And lots of people are angry about that.
And, you know, Marco was very measured in explaining exactly the parameters of the situation and his thinking behind doing it.
But, you know, that's...
marco or apple or youtube or facebook or twitter all these things are private entities and they all have to make decisions about what they want on their platforms that they pay for and they run no you know no thing has an intrinsic right to appear on youtube be on facebook be part of marco's you know podcast directory be broadcast on nbc like there's
There is no right to that.
You have a right to free speech.
You have a right to the government not putting you in jail for doing something.
But you don't have a right to these private platforms.
So every platform has to choose what kind of things do we allow here.
I try to pick an example that we can all agree on.
I think I found a better one that I usually pick.
Spam.
Almost everybody who has a platform tries to stop spam.
Spam is just like automated content that's like...
you know, advertisements or false things that are trying to make you think that there's something else or whatever, but spam, we all know what spam is.
Everybody who has a platform suffers from spam.
Everyone has a platform tries to stop it.
Uh, and nobody ever makes free speech complaints about spam because everyone understands, well, of course you're not going to let spam.
That's just garbage.
Right.
And well, I have the right to spam.
You know, you don't just like,
do you run twitter do you pay for our servers do you like no twitter makes the rules and the rules for twitter and youtube and facebook and apple's podcast directory is we try to stop spam because it's crappy and why why do we try to stop it because if we let spam there no it would make our service less attractive we think that if we let tons and tons of spam be in the podcast directory
people would find our podcast directly less useful, and we want it to be useful.
Why does Twitter try to stop spam?
There's too much spam.
Every time you go on Twitter, all you see is just tons and tons of people at mentioning you with pictures of boobs and butts.
That's bad.
It will make Twitter a worse experience.
So all these things make decisions about what is and isn't allowed to try to make their service how they want it to be, the best it can be to the customers that they want.
And so the entire argument about Twitter and all these things is...
from the group of people who says, Twitter would be better if you got rid of Alex Jones.
If you got rid of, insert whatever here.
And then it's Twitter kind of never really talking about that, but instead saying, well, we have some rules and we think these rules...
are the ideal rules to form the community that we want to form and this doesn't violate our rules therefore we allow it to be there it's just lots of people yelling and saying we think your service would be better if you got rid of this and them saying we don't think it would be better and they're an impasse because it's their service they can pick whatever they want they could let spam in if they want they could delete everyone's account that begins with the letter p like they can do whatever they want it's their platform the whole point is an argument over what makes a good community and
We're we're members of this community.
We can all have opinions and you can vote with your feet and say, well, this community has become accessible and it's unattractive to me.
So I'm going to leave this community and go elsewhere.
And that's the signal that you can give to Twitter to say the rules that you have chosen for your community no longer appeal to me.
Or you can yell at them on Twitter and say, I like your platform, but you're making it worse by allowing this to happen.
So please change things.
And YouTube and Facebook and Apple's podcast directory and Marco personally get exactly the same feedback.
People telling them,
you have a thing and a set of rules and it is less attractive to me because of this thing that you're doing.
Please change something.
And in Marco's case, you know, he said, yes, I'm going to change this because I agree with you.
My podcast directory would be better.
And it's also a smart business decision, yada, yada, all the things that he talked about if I got rid of this.
So,
You know, it's frustrating to see these kind of debates because at this point, I think the what I just tried to outline, like the basic parameters of like private platforms versus free speech issues should be so well known that it should be like a meme that everybody learns when they're seven that like.
how if you are putting your content on some website or social media thing or whatever that you have no right to be there that free speech and you know the first amendment and everything are in the United States or whatever only applies to like government restraint on speech it doesn't apply to your right
to have your message distributed by a private company.
And yet, every time this comes up, despite tons of memes and XKCD comics and explainers and animated GIFs and Wikipedia pages and 100 people trying to explain this patiently, literally every time it comes up, just go through the replies and just...
I thought this was a free country, free speech.
Are you in favor of censorship?
And it just it like it's like this is a lesson that apparently we can never actually learn.
We are doomed forever to have to re-explain it.
And so I guess we're I'm trying to fill that purpose here to have yet another venue in which people who have never heard this, you know, because people are born every day who haven't heard that it's not free speech when you can't post something on Twitter or it's not a violation of free speech when you can't post something on Twitter.
Uh, that that is not the situation that is merely an argument about what people think the rules should be for a private company's community.
And all we can do is either leave or complain or both.
And Twitter eventually makes a decision about what they're going to do.
Um,
I'm thinking that enough sustained pressure will make Twitter join its peers because I think Facebook and Apple and YouTube doing it is substantial amount of peer pressure.
But who knows?
Things happen so quickly these days.
This could all blow over and we'll forget about it until the next big flare up.
I don't know.
I'm just depressed that we keep going through this cycle.
And I'm doubly depressed because if it's not clear what side I come down on, I think Alex Jones should be
de-platformed, as they say, from everywhere.
He's got his own website.
He can publish his stuff.
If he can get a TV station to air his garbage, fine.
But I wish all the platforms that I participated in would boot him off because I think he's a garbage person.
Agreed.
My response to this, it's hard and people on Twitter accuse me of being partisan sometimes and everything because it's hard because I have the business that I run here and I also have my own personal feelings.
And my own personal feelings are pretty strongly left.
And I think very little of a lot of Republicans recently and people who vote for them and people who control their media like this clown.
I think very, very little of them.
I'm very vocal about that on Twitter frequently.
So people know that about me.
But I also run this business that shouldn't have that strong of an editorial voice to say only left-wing political stuff is permitted or whatever else.
That's not a position that my business should take.
And with this action of me removing him from search, a lot of people – I think people were more surprised – I mean I got a few people saying like –
I'm being biased here because of my political views or whatever else.
But I also got some legitimate people saying, I'm not comfortable with you having the ability or exercising the ability to delist shows.
And I think what I mainly wanted to communicate here, and I think what John did a better job of than I did, is that the ability to control what shows get listed is
is necessary.
And that ability gets exercised all the time, just usually by Apple.
But like, you know, as you mentioned the spam example, I mentioned like, you know, various other like legal concerns, copyright issues, stuff like that, where like...
There's lots of podcasts that exist in the world that don't show up in search engines in any popular podcast app because of very many legitimate practical reasons.
So the ability to remove podcasts from search indexes or to not add them in the first place after some kind of editorial or human decision
that ability is necessary for lots of reasons and is exercised all the time, always has been, and probably always will be.
The question of whether that ability should exist or should be used, in my opinion, is a totally solved problem.
Yes, that ability is necessary for lots of practical reasons and needs to be used.
So the only question becomes then when you use it.
And so I try to keep myself as uninvolved as possible by relying on Apple that
And only intervening when it's pretty clear that Apple has not enforced their own rules.
I haven't even written my own rules.
I just say these are Apple's rules.
I agree these are reasonable rules.
And if you can show me an example of a podcast clearly not obeying those rules that Apple won't take action on, then if I have to take action against it, I will.
And the person who is uncomfortable, like, I mean, you know, you can be uncomfortable, whatever you want to be uncomfortable with.
But like the idea that that Overcast is the kingmaker for a podcast, like it's when when certain, you know, private companies reach a certain size, that's when, you know, in theory, antitrust starts to become a factor.
And it's like, well, you're not the government, but you're so big.
You are the de facto decider on some large area of our life or culture or market.
And now this potential antitrust for you having too much, you know, blah, blah, blah.
In the past, that has been a thing, let's say.
And it has been used to both good and bad measure in various times in the history of the country.
But Marco is not at that point.
That's why I wanted to have an explanation of how podcasts work.
Marco, someone who is not the dominant podcast player in the entire world yet, he's working on it, is him delisting you not only doesn't make it...
appreciably harder for people to find your podcast it doesn't actually affect the podcast at all which continues to be hosted exactly where it has always been hosted and available to exactly the same people it's just removing something from a search result in an app that is used by a small fraction of the people listen to podcasts and they can still use this app to listen to the podcast so they just enter the url right so it is the most benign kind of de-platforming because unlike youtube and facebook he is not
kicking them off a platform he is removing them from a search result uh so i you know again you can be uncomfortable at whatever you want to be comfortable if you're afraid this is like an overreach of tremendous power hurting someone who wants to get their voice out this is not that in any reasonable sense of the word and understanding the boring nitty-gritty technical details of which most people don't
reveals that again independent of what you think about any of this like this isn't you know i i think it is not particularly reasonable to be uh uncomfortable with that because it is so it is such a it's such a non-event as far as the content and the reach of that content goes also and honestly you know i want to i want to set um you know set the expectations of what actually happened here accordingly um
I got very little actual pushback on this compared to the amount of people who were incredibly supportive.
So don't feel bad for me because this has been only good for my business, if anything.
I didn't do it for that reason.
But for the most part, there are way, way more people on the positive side of this than on the horrible side of this.
that's the argument i would make to twitter if i could ever talk to someone who would listen would be like your service will be better as in it will be more attractive to users if you get rid of things that most people on your service don't like like nazis and alex jones right and and just like in marco's case there were some people who there will be some people who are angry about that but i i would make the argument like a
profit motive you are a private company that wants to be successful not like a moral argument or anything like that which you should be able to make very easily too but just like the most craven capitalist argument is your service will be better and more attractive to people if you change it in this way because people like to hang out in a place that's pleasant and they get all tied up in knots worrying about oh no people will be uncomfortable because twitter is way bigger than overcast still um
And so like, oh, you are.
If you kick them off Twitter, that's such a big thing.
There is no equivalent to Twitter.
Now they can't get their voice out, which is not true or whatever.
But it will make the service better.
Like it will make the same same with spam.
Like if it's almost as if you have to explain to them, here's why you should get rid of spam, because every time I go on Twitter, it's just 100 bots telling me to buy real estate.
and showing me boobs and butts and linking me to porn sites.
And I can't see any of the people I follow because people are constantly at mentioning me.
It's just spam wall to wall.
And having to make like a years-long argument to Twitter to say, listen, you should get rid of spam.
It will make your service better.
And they'd be like, I don't know.
I'm really uncomfortable deciding what content is spam and what content is not spam.
I really don't want to make those calls.
I feel like our place is not to editorialize them.
But I was like, you just want to wring their neck.
That's what it's like with Nazis and Alex Jones.
And I can't seem to get through Twitter's thick skull that, you know,
you'll make your service better and like it just becomes clear they think you know that it's engagement at all costs and all these other even more craving reasons why people think like they need to have some element of of danger and badness because that causes people to yell at each other and they just need to have monthly active users and all those other stuff the same argument for spam in fact lots of bots they're like oh they don't want to get rid of the bots because their monthly active user numbers will go down but eventually they were convinced of that uh but yeah i would i would love to
sit Twitter down and explain to them that people will like your product better and will use it more if you make it nicer by getting rid of Nazis and Alex Jones.
But we have not yet won that argument.
Still trying.
Honestly, you're not going to ever win that argument because all these horrible hate mongers that have media presences and followings and hate groups on places like 4chan and some Reddit groups and stuff like that, these groups have...
been empowered by the political climate of the U.S.
in the last couple of years.
They're growing, or at least their volume is growing.
And all this is from people.
I mean, many of them are Russian bots, but some of them are actually people.
And so we say this as though...
Oh, the people running Twitter should recognize that these bad people who support this horrible hate shouldn't be along on Twitter without considering the possibility that the people who make these sorts of decisions at Twitter are among those bad people.
But I think it's very obvious when you look at the actions and inactions of Twitter regarding hate content, racist content, Nazi content, harassment, lots of related things like that.
I think it's very obvious that the people who make these decisions at Twitter up to Jack himself and God knows who else –
are these people they are these bad people they are alex jones's audience they are sean hannity's suck up audience like these they are those people i don't buy that i i think that the other explanation which is that they're so naive that they think they think they are the u.s government and they just don't they want to have this hands-off attitude and and their elevated position makes them not face the consequences of any of the damage they're just like i am a high-minded elevated
benevolent overlord of a free exchange of ideas type thing like they say all those things and i mostly believe them because naivete seems to be a more i don't say that there aren't there aren't sympathizers for all these things inside the companies but i think at the very top it's mostly just a bunch of left-leaning people who are incredibly misguided about what would actually make their service better and about their role and their damage to the world like zuckerberg's big thing was a good example they're asking him about
neo-nazis and alex jones that was holocaust deniers right they're asking about holocaust deniers and he's like well you know it's not really my place to say it's like like i really don't think oh he's a turd too i don't really don't think zuckerberg is a closet holocaust denier for you know it's it's highly unlikely but he definitely is very naive about uh the damage to his platform damage to his platform by allowing that stuff and the damage caused by
people using his platform to disseminate that.
So Navite is a more, I think, a more plausible explanation as far as I'm concerned than actual malice.
But there's probably some malice mixed in.
I just think not at the very top.
Well, I think if I may put words in Marco's mouth, I think your point, Marco, may be that they're really ultimately no different from those that sympathize with these terrible people because they're not taking action to silence them.
And
And even if Jack or Mark Zuckerberg don't personally agree with these hate mongers, which I think was a good description, by giving them a platform to spread this hate, they are effectively in bed with them.
Even if they're not conceptually in bed with them, for all intents and purposes, they are in bed with them because they're allowing this to continue.
Is that a fair description or am I totally full of it?
No, they're enabling it.
But they're also like...
It's like these places, they even have rules against hate content and stuff that they just selectively don't enforce.
They don't enforce it against this popular person.
They don't enforce it against the president.
There are rules that other people on Twitter have to follow unless you're a big media personality or the president, in which case rules against hate speech and racism and things don't apply to you.
They have those counter rules where it's like, oh, newsworthiness trumps all, so to speak.
I think naivety is a reasonable conclusion or explanation to a point.
For one or two instances like this, where they did something dumb because they didn't realize how bad it was, we're well past that point, especially with Twitter and somewhat with Facebook.
i still i still think they still don't realize because they it doesn't affect them or their life and they you know they're not it's not it's not real to them they don't see or understand the consequence like zuckerberg is the most amazing to me like because i think he was telling the truth like i don't think you can act that dumb and naive like it just seemed like he was earnestly expressed and the rules are the best because it's like it's rules they make up for themselves and like well we have to follow the rules like you make the rules and
like don't try to like they're like rules lawyering like dnd rules lawyering themselves like well we have you know no hate speech except for notability and newsworthiness is more important it's like those just you you don't need to make a set of rules and then follow them yourself you control the whole service you can do whatever you can do with literally whatever the rule could be whatever i feel like that is also a valid rule set and i understand having
A fixed set of rules is an important thing to do.
So everyone knows what's expected of them.
Sort of a code of conduct, if you will.
But if you find yourself constantly adding new amendments and stuff to sort of explain this weird... Because it's dishonest.
Everyone says, oh, the reason you allow the president there is because there's a tremendous amount of engagement and it's a high-profile way for people to constantly have the word Twitter on their lips.
But you'll never put that in the rules.
Like...
if you follow these rules will be banned unless your value to our platform is determined to be worth more than the violation of the rules like that's the real rule but they don't write that down so they're like well there's newsworthiness and there's you know the importance of your statement for other people to read even if it is a violence it's so silly and so kind of
you know, stereotypically sort of nerdy of like trying to make a system that rationalizes the thing that you were going to do anyway, for reasons that are too shameful for you to admit, perhaps even to yourself.
Yeah.
And I think, I think in this day and age, refusing to take action against like huge, obvious bad forces when you have the amount of power that Twitter and Facebook and Google have is,
I think refusing to take action is being complicit in these problems.
As was said on a past podcast, I forget who this quote from.
Neutrality favors the oppressor, never the oppressed.
So they're trying to be high-minded and neutral and just like we're just a platform man.
That helps the oppressor.
It always helps the oppressor.
It always helps the one in power oppressing the less powerful saying, oh, we're going to stay out of it.
They're like, great, stay out of it because otherwise someone might try to stop us.
So now we can have our way with all these people.
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All right, let's bring this up and end on a happier note with some Ask ATP.
And let's start with Fabian Diem, who writes, I would love to know your macOS doc preferences.
This is not going to end well, never mind.
With regards to placement, auto-hide, magnifying effect, and app running indicators, I will start with...
When I was at work and when I had a normal big boy job, I always had two monitors and I preferred to keep the biggest monitor directly in front of me with my laptop to my left.
And for whatever reason, that caused me to put my dock on the left.
I do have auto hide on.
I do have genie effect on, and I do have it.
What was the other one?
Oh, brown indicators.
There you go.
Yeah, I do have those on as well.
In my personal opinion, I prefer left.
I'm okay with right.
I think bottom dock people are...
i was going to say monsters let's be a little more respectful are making a poor choice because all of our screens these days are wide screens so with auto hide i guess you can get away with it but without auto hide especially if you're going to lose real estate lose some horizontal real estate not vertical real estate we have so little to begin with but anyway that's my situation auto hidden on the left that's where i like it marco how about you
I'm also a left dock person.
The bottom dock, you know, I respect people who do the bottom dock in the sense that it looks nice and it's the default and everything else.
But I think it's a bad default because Macs for a very long time have had short screens.
So it's weird to...
waste your more precious dimension of screen real estate uh on a an element that is by default static so um exactly anyway so yeah i uh i'm a left dock person i do auto hiding on laptops but not on desktops because on desktops i have enough screen real estate that i i actually get it'll get enough value out of having the dock always present that i do it i have it always on on desktops on the left side
I leave my dots on because I like dots, and no resizing or scaling or anything like that, just constant size.
Hmm.
John?
So I'm going to defend the bottom dockers because I am one on the desktop, and there are...
you know reasonable uh reasons to have it down there first if you're an old school mac person like i am you have your drives on the desktop and they go in the right so if you do right dock it's potentially overlapping your drive second if you're an old school mac person uh you like to have your windows in the upper left corner because that's where they've been for your entire life and you don't want to make room for them on the left side uh with your dock
Third reason, if it's your right hand and you tend to have a mouse cursor hovering towards the right side, left dock makes no sense.
I would love to hide the dock entirely and just use drag thing as my process switcher, but you can't because the APIs the dock uses for notifications and other stuff is not available.
through public APIs, and no one even hacks into them to use them with private APIs these days.
And finally, yes, the screens are wider than they are tall, but the only thing that matters is would you benefit from seeing an additional inch of vertical content in any of your windows?
And for me, on a large desktop display, my answer is no, because you literally have to move your neck to see from the top of a 5K to the bottom of a 5K.
I'm not getting any benefit from that additional inch of space.
And depending on how you have your dock scaled,
It takes up exactly the same number of pixels total on your screen, whether it's on the side or on the right.
Again, depending on how it's scaled.
Obviously, if you have a full width, it doesn't or whatever.
But it's not like it's actually taking up more room.
So do I need that to see that extra inch of vertical space or will it be more disruptive to have it on the right or left?
That said, on a laptop, my answer is yes, I do need to see that additional inch of space.
And so you just can't do bottom dock on a laptop because the screens are just, they're not 5K screens.
They're small.
So on a laptop, I do write dock.
I used to do pinning on the write dock, but these days I think they took that out even in the P-list setting or whatever.
Auto-hide, no, because I can't stand to wait for things to happen.
So I wish I could auto-hide it, but it just, it takes too long to, I can't stand the waiting.
Magnify, no.
Apparing indicators, no.
Yes, I was never sold on the fact that you don't have to care whether your apps are running.
You still do need to care.
Computers are not fast enough.
RAM is not plentiful enough.
So yes, for indicators.
All right.
Cecil Scheib writes, how many hours a night do you sleep?
For instance, John works a full-time job, parents, two kids, does many podcasts, at least two of which are generously over one hour a week, or I should say conservatively, as well as cooks, plays video games, watches Destiny videos and other movies, does 1,000 backups, et cetera.
That's actually pertinent given our discussion earlier.
and Cecil finishes how so John what's your secret this is just about how many hours a night you sleep so I tend to go to bed like podcast nights I go to bed between 11 and 12 depending on how long we run every day I wake up at 6 30 every weekday I wake up at 6 30 to you know get everything done and get to work on time so what is that like
seven six and a half seven and a half hours depending on the day uh weekends one day is my day to sleep in on weekends but with a house full of kids sleeping in sometimes just means like eight o'clock or 8 30 but so on the weekends maybe i'll get eight hours of sleep so i think that's plenty of sleep for an adult of my age six and a half seven and a half hours on weekdays eight and a half nine hours on a weekend on one day on a weekend uh
yeah so that's how many hours a night of sleep and if you add up all the time that i do like i work from nine to five i do breakfast and kids in the morning i cook dinner i take kids to activities uh i if i have a podcast i can squeeze in uh you know an hour of destiny in the middle there if i'm if i'm good on podcast nights i don't watch any television or anything else because there's just no time but on nights when i don't have podcasts i can watch a tv show
so it works out it's tight like i'm not gonna say there's lots of slack time in there but it works out and it's not like i'm sleeping three hours a night i mean i used to do that when i was younger where i would have a similar schedule and i would like write from you know write write some work on my uh you know mac os 10 article for hours and hours and go to bed at 3 a.m like but i can't do that anymore because i'm old
Thomas Brock writes, in Casey's latest video, he points out that the manual Golf R is missing a lot of the advanced driver safety and convenience features.
He didn't point out that this is because these features are incompatible with manual transmissions.
Things like adaptive cruise control, collision avoidance, and others may need to operate the vehicle beyond the speed range of a single gear.
Will these technologies eventually mean the death of a three-pedal car on an infinite timeline?
Well, this isn't entirely true.
The car has adaptive cruise.
And in fact, you can shift while cruise control is on.
And when it senses that the clutch pedal is depressed, it will kill the throttle until the clutch pedal is disengaged.
I always get it backwards until you pop your foot off the clutch.
The thing that the car does not have, the Golf R specifically does not have, is auto parking.
But everything else that I can think of, collision avoidance, I mean, I think it would stop itself if necessary.
And I guess it would just stall if that's the case.
But everything except parking, I think it...
had so i get your point thomas and will it ever mean the death of the three-pedal car i don't think this is what's going to be the the nail on the coffin i think the nail nail on the coffin is going to be people aren't buying them but john you were the one who put this in here i think so i presume you have thoughts
Yeah, I just wanted to hear actually which of these things the car has or not.
So you answered that because they can still implement a surprising number of assistive features.
But at a certain point, especially for automation type things, you need to have a different kind of car at that point.
Like you need to have like essentially an automated manual.
that somehow you could also have like an automated manual that also has like a clutch pedal or something like you could probably pull it off but in general once you get into things where the car is driving itself manual transmission is not going to work but as you said that's not why they're going away they're going to go away because people don't want them because you know that that's just that's why they're going away because the other transmissions are faster for performance we talked about this before the it's not it's not the fastest performance option anymore um
Automated manuals are amazing.
And the people who care enough to have a slower car because they like rowing gears, we're all getting old and dying and not buying cars.
And so that's why they're going to go away.
It's not because they can't add automation features.
Additionally, there's no fuel economy benefits anymore.
I remember years and years ago, it used to be that the automatics would be several miles a gallon less efficient.
And that's not the case either.
In fact, oftentimes it's the reverse.
And they used to be cheaper.
It used to be cheaper than an automatic transmission.
So there's a price advantage.
But nowadays, the volumes are so low that the price advantage, there's still a price advantage in parts.
It does cost less money to put a manual than an automatic.
But the volumes mean that it's the same price or sometimes more expensive to get a manual because they make so few of them.
That's not always true.
Like the Golf R, the DSG is $1,000 or $1,100 option.
But I think in M cars, for example, it is a no cost option to go manual.
I think in like Corvettes, it might be a no cost option to go manual.
I think it's BMW's only no cost option.
Yeah.
It's probably true.
And they're making money on it because like it is, it is less expensive to put it on my transmission.
Yeah.
Seagrid in the chat also asks an interesting question.
Casey, what's the bigger deal to you, the third pedal or lack of a torque converter?
So for those who aren't aware, a torque converter is the thing that makes an automatic work.
And it's to deeply, deeply, deeply oversimplify.
Imagine two fans in a pool of thick liquid and one of the fans is connected to the engine.
One is connected to the wheels.
And when the car stopped, that means the engine fan is still spinning, but the wheel fan isn't.
I please don't write me.
That is a gross oversimplification just to get the idea across.
So what's the bigger deal to me actually having a clutch or not having a torque converter?
I like shifting myself.
I just think it's fun.
And so to me, I would prefer to have a clutch pedal, but I have never particularly minded dual clutch cars where I don't have a clutch pedal, but there is no torque converter.
And as we explored in my very first Casey on cars, the ZF eight speed when tuned properly is
Like it was in the Julia.
That is a torque converter automatic.
And it was really good.
I'd still prefer a clutch.
Don't get me wrong.
But it was really, really, really good.
And I am slated to get a dual clutch car in the next couple of weeks for my next edition of Casey on Cars.
And I suspect I'm going to end up thinking, you know what?
It's good.
I'd still take my clutch if I can get it, but it's good.
I drove a dual-clutch car for three years and I came to the same conclusion.
And by the way, dual-clutch cars can have almost all of the assistive features that this question was originally about.
Mine had adaptive cruise and it could go all the way from a stop to whatever speed it was set to because it has the same abilities as automatics do where the computer can adjust the speed.
The car won't stall if you hit zero.
Dual-clutches have...
Pretty much all the same advantages of automatics in the realm of like what's possible in these advanced safety features.
And I can say like, you know, driving a dual clutch is not the same as driving a stick with a clutch.
It isn't the same, but I found it to be close enough and in some ways better.
John, what's your holdup?
I have never, still never driven a torque converter automatic that I found acceptable, but I haven't driven the fancy ones that you have.
So right now I'm going to say, uh, I will do pretty much anything to avoid a torque converter automatic until and unless I find one that I don't find disgusting.
Uh,
And beyond that, obviously, I prefer manual because that's what I continue to buy.
And my second choice would be automated manual.
And my distant third choice would be a torque converter automatic.
And my incredibly distant fourth choice would be CVT.
You know, it's funny you bring that up.
A little bit of a spoiler alert.
I did not buy anything.
Don't worry.
But...
I am getting a car in a couple of weeks that will be the next Casey on cars, but I'm actually currently in a different car, which is a CVT equipped car.
And I have to say, I don't.
I actively like it, but I don't actively dislike it either.
Is it simulating an automatic?
Is it one of those?
No, it's not.
So if I take off from a stop and let's say I'm at one third throttle, the car will just sit at 2000 RPM until I decide to stop accelerating.
It's the most peculiar feeling in the world.
It almost feels like, and Marco's going to be deeply offended by this, it almost feels like a halfway between a gasoline car and an electric car because...
There doesn't seem to be any division of gears.
It's just power.
Now, in this particular car, it's not a lot of power, and I don't want to disclose much more than that, but it's just power that's fairly consistent, if not an overabundance of it.
until you stop and it's a very very very odd sensation i agree with you like i would certainly never choose to have a cvt car and i i wouldn't say i like it but a lot of people i know especially early on when they were new deeply disliked these and i think perhaps because it doesn't even bother trying to simulate gears and
i don't find it actively bothersome but i don't particularly enjoy it either it's very very very peculiar most of them do simulate gears now because they've learned through bitter experience that people don't like it like the the promise of cbt is that you can run the engine at the most efficient speed all the time but people hate that in terms of like it just sounds like it's droning and it doesn't feel right so most of the cbt's you can buy today are they simulate all the stupidity of automatics like even though they totally don't have to they're doing it's like the fake engine noise and marco's old m5 it's
it is a simulation that makes the the cbt less efficient and worse than it could possibly be to make the experience subjectively more pleasing to people who expect that maybe eventually those people will get old and die and people will get used to it but honestly electric is the way out of this if you want something it doesn't have gears and stuff like just it doesn't have multiple ratio gear ratios that it shifts through get an electric and the droning i guess if you have a powerful engine with enough noise isolation and
You can pretend you're driving in like a bad electric, but I feel like the CBT is a transitional form that has no place in my life ever.
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Betterment, and Squarespace.
And we will see you next week.
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, 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-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental.
Accidental.
They did it in me.
Speaking of cars, because I know people love the neutral segments.
What in the ever living hell is Tesla doing?
Did you see this electric post?
I did.
What is this hot garbage?
Oh, God, I don't know.
You're not going to get a Model S anymore, are you?
I thought this was going to be a link about them taking the company private, but now I click on it, I see it's just a thing about the cars.
No, that, I don't care about that drama.
But like, so this is the, a couple of days ago, the site Electric posted an exclusive first look based, I think, on leaked documents at the Tesla Model S and X interior refresh going Spartan like Model 3.
Allegedly, I think, it's been about a year or so is when they're allegedly going to be doing this.
And it has what purports to be leaked sketches of the new interior for the Model S and X that really does basically look like a bigger Model 3.
It has the large, now horizontally landscape orientation touchscreen in the middle, just like the 3.
Almost no display in front of the driver, except for everything being on that big screen.
And the whole cockpit basically being even more Spartan and minimal than it was before.
To look basically like a giant three.
And the reasons given for this are basically cost savings.
Yeah.
What do you guys think of this?
It costs your $100,000 car.
You left out the best feature in these pictures, which is they've taken all the best features of the TV remote and apparently brought them to the steering wheel.
It looks to me that it's just a big featureless...
touch thing that you're going to brush your hand up against and accidentally like move your seat or some crap it's like taking the physical controls off of the steering wheel to just have a smooth black surface with some tiny white glyphs on it that i guess are capacitive touch or maybe like you can't tell because it's just a picture but like i'm having all the wrong feelings about the total apparent total removal of any kind of physical controls because physical controls are great because you can feel for them and you can know what position they're in and they're satisfying to move and change and
And they should not be removed from car interiors entirely.
Yeah.
And ultimately, like the current Model S and X have a surprising like before I got the car, I was afraid it would be like too much on the touchscreen.
But there are a surprising amount of physical controls on and around the steering wheel.
And that's where most of my interaction takes place.
any adjustment for audio stuff um that uh any like cruise control or like you know the auto steer adjustments that's all on the wheel even the sunroof map to the the dial on the right you can map the different things like oh that's cool yeah and so like although i have no idea how they they did it when during like the walkthrough they they did it for me and i have no idea how to how to ever change that um but anyway so uh because i don't read the manual casey um i don't even know if there is one
I think it's all electronic.
Anyway, so the Model S has a good deal of physical controls for the most frequently used things.
And I haven't driven a 3 yet, but I know one of the big complaints about it was that the...
The adjustment to the current cruise control speed in the Model 3 has to be done by the touchscreen because it apparently doesn't have that extra stock below on the bottom left of the wheel that the S and X do that allow you to quickly and easily adjust the set speed of the cruise control.
And that's something I do all the time.
Like, I do that all the time while driving.
I will raise the speed, lower the speed based on, like, oh, I'm in a construction zone on the highway.
I've got to slow down.
And then, oh, now I'm in a 65 zone.
I've got to speed up.
Or, you know, I just, you know, weather permitting or conditions permitting, I want to adjust this by a couple miles per hour up or down.
And so...
The lack of that on the Model 3 scares me.
And these pictures aren't clear enough or, you know, they're also not final.
They're just sketches.
So who knows?
And the fact that the wheel appears to have capacitive touch buttons, I wouldn't put any faith in that.
I think that's probably just like, you know, artist mock-up taking artist liberties.
But anyway...
Point is, I'm very happy with the amount of physical controls that the S has, and I don't want those to be reduced.
I also am totally fine having the critical information of my speed and stuff being in front of me, and not a little bit to my right.
Now, this does appear that it has a little tiny display that will still be visible or something.
I don't know.
It's not entirely clear.
It looks like there is still something tiny in the dash, but anyway...
Yeah.
So I don't love this.
Now, that being said, I don't think this is going to be a problem for me for the near future because my lease is up in April and this is allegedly not rolling out until like well later in the year or even the next year.
I don't think this update to the interior will be in my next car because I think my next car will happen sooner than this update is likely to hit the market.
That being said, I'm kind of glad about that because I'm really happy with the current interior of the Model S. I'm so happy with the Model S in general that I don't really want it to change radically right now.
Like, maybe this will be better.
That's cool.
But I'm happy enough with the current one and I'm wary enough about this one based on the Model 3 that, yeah, I'm in no rush to get this one.
Did I not talk to you guys about the fact that I drove a Model 3?
It was a while ago, right?
It was in May, and a listener, Dave G., was kind enough to swing by Richmond as he was going between New York and Florida, and he and I met up for like an hour, maybe two tops, and I drove his Model 3.
And
It was a very nice car, and I liked it quite a bit, but not having an instrument cluster, I did not care for.
I'm sure I could get used to it, but I think it would be one of those things that I tolerated rather than one of those things that truly and utterly went away.
Does that make sense?
You know, it would always kind of be, ugh, but it would be okay.
Okay.
And I do not think moving the S in this direction is a smart choice.
I think, in fact, sitting here now, if I were Marco and if the choice was, you know, to have an S without an instrument cluster or just say buy out the one that you have already, even with the three-year-old batteries, I'd buy the one I had today because I would not want a car without an instrument cluster.
It just seems...
wrong to me.
Maybe that's me just being an old man.
I don't know, but I do not dig it.
By the way, I have considered buying it out.
I'm probably not going to go that route if I can get the kind I like again for a decent price, simply because A, I don't want to take the financial risk of
what the heck this car's resale value will be in five years or whatever.
And B, what if the company actually does go bankrupt?
They probably won't.
That's usually BS in reporting everything.
But if the company actually goes under, I don't want to be stuck owning their vehicle that needs service ongoing forever.
And then that kills the resale value and everything.
So that's a big financial risk to take, I think, that I don't really want to take.
But buying it out, it has crossed my mind because I like it a lot.
there's nothing wrong with it.
I'm not dying to get rid of it.
And when I replace it, I'm probably going to replace it with pretty much the exact same thing.
I'm going to make very few changes to whatever I get.
It feels kind of wasteful to get the same thing again, but the benefit of leasing is avoiding all those risks that I was talking about a second ago.
So that's kind of my goal here.
But also, you look at what they're doing here, and they...
The goal of this redesign would allegedly be for two main reasons.
Number one would be cost-saving measures so they can use a lot more of the same parts between the Model 3 and the Model S and the Model X. And to me, I don't like those parts.
That solves your problem, not my problem.
Okay.
My problem is I want a nice car and I don't care whether your parts are shared between your vehicles or not.
That's your problem.
That's your economics to deal with.
And the second reason given is that this is to focus on autonomous driving.
And that's wonderful.
When we get to that world, this kind of cockpit will be great.
This kind of car design, you can go even crazier than this when we actually have autonomous driving.
We don't have that yet.
I have a feeling we're not going to have that next year either.
And so I'm going to have this car at a time when I'm going to be driving it.
And if I'm driving it and not you computer driving it,
I want it to look nice for me and to accommodate me, the human driver, because I'm still necessary.
And until that changes, it should accommodate me.
It's kind of sad to me that they've taken a bunch of good ideas about how a car interior could be better, particularly leaning heavily on the touchscreen, which is, you know...
a fairly obvious idea given how much we all interact with touchscreens these days and how good they are and so on and so forth and they had a balance between knobs and levers and stuff and screens on S and then they went more extreme in the three and I just feel like
it's almost like a Johnny Ive thing where it's just that they're now pursuing it to its, to its absurd conclusion.
Right.
And they shouldn't, they should use each thing for its strengths.
Like, I mean, you know, the, the absurd conclusion is like, why do you, why do you have pedals?
Why can't that be on the touchscreen too?
Like, you know, like,
And that sounds ridiculous.
And they would explain to you, well, it's a safety issue and it just feels better or works better or people are better able to modulate their legs or they know how to drive.
All those things are true of things like turn signals and also buttons and knobs for less important functions.
Now, the steering wheel is still physical.
The pedals are still physical.
The stalks are still physical.
But right up until that point, they say, but let's have like literally nothing else be physical.
Everything is capacitive.
And it's just that's a bad that's a bad tradeoff.
That's a bad design for the exact same reason that the steering wheel and pedals like.
So they're they're moving the line like as far as they can, seemingly in those two possible innovations.
One is the misguided sort of pursuing of your vision to its logical and absurd conclusion.
Right.
How far can we go?
Right.
I mean, I'm almost surprised that the steering wheel doesn't look like the one in kit now.
And speaking of kit, the second reason I think we talked about this in neutral is, and this is actually a reason I could justify in some ways.
I just wish they found a different outlet is part of the appeal of Tesla and electric cars in general is that people want to feel like they're buying a futuristic car.
So you need features of the car that are worse from a usability and reliability perspective, but that make people feel like they're cool.
I wouldn't say they're whimsical, but I would say that they feel futuristic.
And if the door handles popping out on the Model S were a great example, the Falcon wing doors are an example.
That...
tremendously increases the appeal of their products, even though it basically makes them worse because if they feel cool to people, they impress strangers like they're that makes you feel like I'm not just buying a car that's a regular car, but it happens to have an electric motor in it.
It is a futuristic, cool car.
And this kind of dash treatment.
fulfills that like they they had to go away from the the pop out handles because it's just you know too annoying so on the three they have a thing where you pop out the handle by pushing your stupid little fingers into this thing and it and you know it hinges out as opposed to waiting for the thing to pop out with you from the motor right so it seems like they have like a displaced need to put that futuristic stuff and i just i just wish they'd put it somewhere other than messing with the steering wheel and the knobs and the instrument cluster