The Residue of Seven People
Casey:
Can you hear us?
Casey:
Are you okay?
Marco:
Very funny.
Casey:
Do you need me to speak up, Maury?
Casey:
Oh, God.
Marco:
You have no idea how unpleasant it is to have stuff constantly coming out of your ears.
Marco:
Like, ears are supposed to be input devices?
Casey:
There's a title.
Marco:
It is.
Casey:
I am sorry for you.
Casey:
I feel bad.
Marco:
Thanks.
Casey:
You know, Marco, I know you've had a rough, I don't know, 48 hours or so, but I got to tell you, things are not good at the Liss household.
Casey:
Oh, yeah?
Casey:
My fast.com speed test reported a mere 770 megabits per second.
Marco:
Oh, poor baby.
Casey:
I know, the struggle is real.
Casey:
I just wanted to tell everyone, and hopefully this won't make the show so I don't sound like a big jerk, but I need to tell you two one more time that I have gigabit internet now, and it is amazing.
Marco:
Well, you know, as the old joke goes, do you know how to identify somebody at a party who has gigabit internet?
Marco:
Just wait a few minutes, they'll tell you.
Casey:
Marco, what's going on with your ears, man?
Casey:
Even though you sound normal to me, we should probably disclose in case there's any weird snorts or anything that somehow make it through the edit, or if the edit just sounds really, really funny.
Casey:
What's going on, man?
Marco:
I have clogged Eustation tubes in both ears and can't hear anything, really.
Marco:
Yeah, I have significantly reduced hearing in both ears and lots of gross problems with things coming out of them and stuff.
Marco:
I developed a severe ear problem that's just some kind of, you know, side effect of kid virus.
Marco:
It's winter.
Marco:
I have a child who goes to school.
Marco:
So therefore, we get sick on a regular basis.
Marco:
Not much we can do about that.
Marco:
And so anyway, so this manifested itself in me.
Marco:
Fortunately, this didn't affect him this way, but it manifests itself in me as just this like massive ear congestion all of a sudden.
Marco:
I had had this once before, and so I kind of knew what I was dealing with.
Marco:
It's a blocked eustachian tube.
Marco:
It's most likely a middle ear infection.
Marco:
All this pressure was really painful and everything.
Marco:
So this all happened on a Saturday night into a Sunday.
Marco:
And I knew that the correct way to go about fixing this was to go to an ear, nose, and throat or ENT doctor to have them look at it, evaluate it, make sure I'm being safe and it's going to heal itself without damaging my hearing.
Marco:
But because it was a Sunday...
Marco:
I couldn't get into an ENT until at least Monday.
Marco:
So my solution naturally was to go to Twitter to complain in the meantime.
Marco:
So a person named Scott O'Reilly replied to me on Twitter to give me free advice from his wife, who happens to be an ear, nose, throat doctor.
Marco:
and even offered to have a facetime consultation with her oh that's tremendous yeah and i didn't do i didn't take him up on that but but that was incredibly generous and her advice was extremely helpful to bridge the gap until i could see a local ent doctor and the local guy that i saw earlier today gave the exact same diagnosis and recommendations you don't say
Marco:
So a huge thank you to Scott O'Reilly and his wife.
Marco:
And he didn't ask for anything in return, but I wanted to promote his stuff.
Marco:
Scott is S-C-T-T-O-R on Twitter.
Marco:
He runs Spider Strategies, spiderstrategies.com, and has a product that's actually sponsored us before.
Marco:
It's called Dash.
Marco:
It's thedash.com, not the documentation viewer, thedash.com.
Marco:
This lets you make wonderful real-time web dashboards for metrics in your business or home life.
Marco:
You can set it up to do whatever you want.
Marco:
First dashboard is free.
Marco:
Go to thedash.com.
Marco:
It's really awesome.
Marco:
And this actually is not even the first time Scott has saved my butt in some kind of significant way.
Marco:
So this is the same guy in 2013.
Marco:
I didn't get a WBDC ticket and Scott emailed in and sold me his at cost.
Marco:
that's right in 2014 he sponsored marco.org for the dash later that year he sponsored atp and i ran into him at a conference that year i misheard his introduction when he said he's the guy who ran dash oh i remember this i thought he meant the dash programmer documentation app which we now know is written by bogdan papesu and not scott o'reilly and
Marco:
And I carried on a conversation for a few minutes under that assumption that probably made no sense.
Marco:
And at no point in that conversation did Scott let on that I was making no sense or make me feel like a jerk for getting it wrong.
Marco:
So that was amazing by itself.
Marco:
And then my personal favorite in 2017.
Marco:
when I had a blocked ear tube going into a WBC flight that I was tweeting about, Scott gave me solid advice from his wife, an ENT doctor, to get through the flight from a blocked e-station tube.
Marco:
So thank you again to Scott O'Reilly and his wife.
Marco:
And really, you know, the world would be a better place if there were more people like them.
Marco:
So thank you very much.
Casey:
You know, it turns out not all angels are in heaven, Marco.
Casey:
That's what we've learned today.
Casey:
It's your ear angel.
Casey:
So what's the prognosis, all kidding aside?
Casey:
Like you just got to wait it out, basically?
Marco:
Yeah, I basically have a few more days of misery, but I should be all right after that.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
What's going on in your world, John?
Casey:
We all have stories of varying degrees of interestingness and various degrees of being dramatic.
Casey:
What's going on in John's world?
John:
Nothing.
John:
Same old stuff.
John:
I have a leak under my sink.
John:
That's the excitement over here.
Casey:
Oh, that's not fun.
John:
Hey, Scott, if you know anybody.
Marco:
I've got a plumber coming tomorrow.
Marco:
Just watch like Scott's actually a certified plumber.
Marco:
He just never mentioned it before.
Marco:
We're going to diagnose it over FaceTime.
Casey:
That's hilarious.
Casey:
All right, let's dive into the meat of the show.
Casey:
Let's start with some follow-up.
Casey:
Even though we recorded Wednesday and it is currently Monday, we have a surprising amount of follow-up.
Casey:
So let's begin with Apple and the FaceTime security bug.
Casey:
And I think we mentioned this on the show.
Casey:
I don't recall if we did or not.
Casey:
But one way or another, a lot of people got their feathers ruffled, and justifiably, because Apple has this bug bounty program, the purpose of which is if you report something that's a legitimate security problem to Apple...
Casey:
then they should, hypothetically, or they have stated that they would compensate you for that and give you some pile of money from not too big to actually surprisingly big.
Casey:
What we'd understood was that Apple had not offered this 14-year-old nor his parents any of the bug bounty money that they've
Casey:
really should have earned from reporting the space-time bug.
Casey:
And after we recorded, there was some information that came out that said not only are they going to provide some amount of money to this individual, Grant Thompson, I believe his name is, is the 14-year-old kid, but apparently they're also setting up some sort of thing for his college tuition as well, which is really cool.
John:
Yeah, there was the other story that didn't quite make it in last week.
John:
It was like somebody found a bug, like a Mac keychain bug that lets you pull secrets out of the keychain.
John:
But it was on the Mac, and there's no bug bounty program for the Mac, apparently.
John:
And this person said, hey, here's this bug I found, but I'm not going to tell you what it is because you don't have bug bounties for the Mac as a sort of foreign protest.
John:
Like, they didn't release the bug to the public, but also didn't tell Apple about it.
John:
So they're in that kind of standoff.
John:
I mean, I'm not quite sure whether there's no bug bounty for the Mac.
John:
Maybe...
John:
You know, the budgets are different.
John:
Does the money come from a different place?
John:
Who the heck knows?
John:
But they really should be because if they want people to report bugs and they're going to have a bug bounty on iOS but not on the Mac, they're just going to get iOS bugs and not Mac bugs or not as many Mac bugs.
John:
So there's that standoff thing going.
John:
The main reason I put this story about getting money for the kid who found the bug is...
John:
Partly because it just shows how overboard Apple's going with the PR.
John:
Not only are they giving them money, but they're also going to pay for some of his college, which is nice and all, but that's not a scalable system.
John:
Maybe just do the right thing to begin with instead of having these giant gestures.
John:
And the second is that it is a story that includes bounty hunter and the word compensating, and it makes me think of that scene from Empire Strikes Back.
So that's why.
Marco:
Yeah, and the thing with a few people regarding the new bug about the Mac keychain thing, a lot of people have said, oh, he should tell them the bug.
Marco:
It's the right thing to do.
Marco:
Bug bounties are not an Apple thing.
Marco:
This is an industry-wide thing that have started over the last few years, I think.
Marco:
And Apple was the last major player to start offering them.
Marco:
It makes a lot of sense.
Marco:
You might think in practice, or in theory...
Marco:
you should report bugs, it's the right thing to do, like report security problems privately to the company and then only go public if they don't do anything, you know, whatever.
Marco:
But the reality is the world out there is complicated and there's a whole bunch of incentives if you discover a vulnerability to sell it to someone else instead of the company.
Marco:
So to sell it to maybe a government or a hacker group that wants to exploit it, like, you know, there's lots of other bidders for bugs.
Marco:
And so the bug bounty is kind of a, it's a response to that to say like,
Marco:
Hey, you know what?
Marco:
Maybe we won't give you the money that the government of some country might give you, but we'll give you some money to come to us instead of going to somebody like that.
Marco:
Apple, again, was very, very late to this program on iOS.
Marco:
They, for some reason, didn't bring it to all their platforms.
Marco:
Like, what if I discover a watchOS bug?
Marco:
Does that have a bounty program?
Marco:
It should just be all Apple products.
Marco:
They shouldn't limit it to just iOS.
Marco:
And I think...
Marco:
Apple historically has been very stingy with a lot of things.
Marco:
You don't get to be the richest company in the world by not being stingy at some point.
Marco:
And Apple, for all the wonderful products they make, they are a very stingy company in a lot of ways.
Marco:
And I think this kind of smells like that.
Marco:
This kind of smells like Apple just really... They did the bug bounty program only very reluctantly after the whole rest of the industry did.
Marco:
And they only limited it to iOS and probably haven't paid out a whole lot from it because they probably really tried not to.
Marco:
So it's just like this just requires, I think, a change of attitude from Apple on this and to make it easier for people to file security bugs, easier to get them seen by the right people at the right time and to actually cover all their products with a bug bounty program that actually pays out on a regular basis.
John:
Here's the thing about the payoff of this thing.
John:
The mother asked, like, oh, and I heard, don't you pay money for these things?
John:
We've tried to report to you a bunch of times, and we would love to get money for this thing.
John:
Like, it's not like, you know, it didn't come up or they didn't think about it because it came through different channels.
John:
The topic of being paid a bounty for this bug was there from the very beginning, and Apple only did something after the whole big PR disaster.
John:
So, again, not a great look, even though they're, you know, they're making it right for sure.
John:
It's much better to do the reasonable, correct thing when prompted by the people asking about that.
John:
Like, I don't know if it actually is dangerous, but it certainly looks that way from the outside.
John:
It's like, well, why would we do something we don't have to?
John:
Oh, now it's a press story.
John:
Here you go.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So we have more information about Deirdre O'Brien, who is stepping up to be head of retail in addition to being head of people, I think is the term that Apple uses.
Casey:
I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
And then moved to vice president of people about 18 months ago.
Casey:
And there's also some business insider article about this as well.
Casey:
Just some information about her because she was an unknown quantity to me until I read some of this stuff.
Casey:
So sounds like she's the real deal, which is good.
Casey:
I'm excited for that.
John:
One piece that I was much interested in is that she was the VP of people, but she's only been there for 18 months and she was in operations.
John:
So now with this piece of information, like, oh, we knew her as the HR person or whatever, but she's only been in that job for a little over a year.
John:
Right.
John:
So now I think rather than her just keeping the seat warm while they try to hire someone from retail, since she was in operations.
John:
I think going from operations to retail makes a little bit more sense than going from HR to retail.
John:
So maybe what's actually happening is she's keeping the VP of people seat warm while they look for a new VP of people and she's going to be the new retail head.
John:
I don't know.
John:
We'll find out when another face appears on the leadership page.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, that's interesting.
Marco:
Or maybe the Angela Aaron's departure was not so sudden and unexpected.
Marco:
Maybe she was brought to that VP level to be maybe more visible.
Marco:
And as we mentioned last week, a lot of retail is really just a giant HR problem because they have such a massive retail staff.
Marco:
So maybe they elevated Deidre to the people position to have better optics for when she was moved to retail.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I assume we'll see more of this over the next few months, and maybe we'll be able to piece it together.
Casey:
One way or another, George Spencer writes to say, Hey, you know, Apple has a very well hidden product called Joint Venture.
Casey:
Here in the UK, we pay a few hundred bucks.
Casey:
I think it's about $500 a year in the US.
Casey:
And you get two awesome things.
Casey:
Firstly, if you check in your machine for a Genius Bar replacement, they'll give you a loaner machine and data transfer to it.
Casey:
Secondly, and most awesomely, you can get an immediate appointment even at the busiest stores.
Casey:
You can also do other things like adding up to five iPhones for cheap or free, perhaps, screen repairs and other things.
Casey:
But George says, I pay every year for the convenience of an immediate Genius Bar appointment whenever I need it.
Casey:
Now, this appears to be, at least in the U.S., aimed at business-to-business sort of thing.
Casey:
I think it requires a business account in order to do it.
Casey:
But if you're the kind of person that really wants to have all of your computers or perhaps your only computer working pretty much all the time, it's not a terrible idea.
Casey:
I was not aware of this at all.
Casey:
I think I'd heard of it but knew nothing about it.
Casey:
Did either of you guys know what this was?
John:
Nope.
John:
Nope.
John:
And like at $500, that's a –
John:
Heck of a price, although now that I mention loaners, Casey's all into it because he needs to have a loaner every time his car is brought in.
John:
But, like, the owner and data transfer, I just have to think, how long would it take them to do the data transfer?
John:
Like, would I trust them to do the data transfer?
John:
I wouldn't pay for this.
John:
I'd rather just wait in line to the, you know...
John:
If you have this problem, it's probably more economical to just not throw out your old Mac when you get a new one and just keep at least two in rotation so that if one dies, you're not out of machine and try to keep the data either in a cloud or in sync in some way.
John:
I don't want to pay $500 on the off chance that I might have to go to the Genius Bar.
John:
And the main advantage that I get is I can get a loaner, which I would be worried about, first of all.
John:
And second of all, I don't have to wait for an appointment.
John:
That's not worth $500 to me.
John:
But it's good to know that exists for people with more money than time.
Casey:
So let it be shown that John Syracuse was always on offense.
Casey:
We got a letter from Mike, who apparently was a genius at one point.
Casey:
And Mike writes us, this is a little bit long, but I think it's really, really interesting.
Casey:
No longer do geniuses train at Apple's secret genius room classrooms in Cupertino and later Austin and Atlanta.
Casey:
No, now they train geniuses in the crazy Apple store's break room through pre-taped videos and PDFs, the same material that's available to independent third-party authorized techs.
Casey:
An experience that this individual treasured in the mid-aughts, going to Cupertino for a month, getting to meet Waz one night, and waiting behind Steve Jobs to buy a blueberry muffin at Cafe Max with Johnny Ive right by his side, that's all gone for anyone new, and Angela approved it.
Casey:
Geniuses today learn how to fix your Mac or iPhone by watching videos and PDFs.
Casey:
If they even get to fix it in the first place, most of the laptops get shipped off to Flextronics, which I've heard of, or CTS Depot.
Casey:
I don't know if that's Apple terminology or what that is, but it doesn't really matter.
Casey:
The experience of having a veteran Apple trainer who was there in the 1980s showing you exactly how a black stick spudger should feel as it removes a connector and the tension of said move are all gone now.
Casey:
The insider knowledge that you need to feel the edge of the display clamshell with your finger, not your eyes, as you tighten down the T6 screws, that's gone too.
Casey:
Oh, and yeah, they pay geniuses a lot less than they used to.
Casey:
So I guess you could summarize that as saying, you know, being a genius used to have some amount of cachet and specialness to it that sounds like has mostly gone away, which is understandable as there needs to be more and more and more and more of these people.
Casey:
And, you know, Apple has more and more devices out in rotation in the world, especially for John, who's keeping his day Mac and night Mac.
Casey:
But it stinks.
Casey:
And I feel like I can definitely tell the difference.
Casey:
I don't know if quality is the right word, but I can tell the difference in maybe enthusiasm between the geniuses I occasionally saw 10 years ago and the geniuses I occasionally see around now.
John:
I put this in because it's just a concrete example of the trend I was talking about in the last episode about just starting on such a pinnacle of excess, of everyone being overqualified and overcared for and overpaid.
John:
Yeah.
John:
As compared to using the word over as compared to the retail and then the slow, slow, gradual slide down to be much more like a regular retail.
John:
It always boggled my mind that, you know, they have these Apple stores all over the country.
John:
And if you wanted to be an Apple genius, no matter what Apple store you worked in, they would fly you to Cupertino.
John:
and train you there to be a genius and then fly you back.
John:
So they'd have to pay for your flights, pay for your stay, and then have facilities to teach you there.
John:
It's not really a scalable solution.
John:
Can you imagine if you had to train everybody who worked as a Walmart cashier to a central location and train them and send them back?
John:
It's incredibly expensive.
John:
Obviously, this type of experience in the early days where...
John:
you get to fly them out you get to meet like an apple celebrity uh and you get to you know go to cafe max where jobs and johnny are running around like just it it's not a thing that can happen it's like it's too beautiful to to stay or whatever the poetic phrase is like it's it doesn't surprise me that it's gone so that doesn't bother me that much it's like well you got an early you got the really cool thing whatever uh but learned switching to learning from like
John:
videos and pdfs as opposed to being trained by an expert in person in sort of a hands-on way that's bad like that's that's the part of this that i think is you've gone from like okay get rid of the ridiculous luxurious frills and
John:
and try to get more real to now maybe the training is not as good as it used to be like you get more in person even if it's in person the store send people out to train them train the trainers like you don't have to fly everyone to california to do it but i don't want to think that like someone watched a video of someone doing this incredibly delicate repair it's like okay next step is you hack on a customer's piece of hardware maybe it's not as dire as this thing sounds and maybe yes there are videos and pdfs to read but there's also like hands-on training i don't know but
John:
You know, at a certain point, the people who work as geniuses do have to have more experience, more expertise, be better paid and better trained than your average retail employee because they are asked to do so much more.
John:
They're asked to know much more and they're asked to do much more.
Marco:
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Thank you so much to Casper for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
One thing we forgot to mention possibly last episode is that in addition to, or amongst all the things that Spotify is buying up these days, they also bought up Anchor, which is, I guess to some degree, like a square space for podcasting in the sense that it's kind of a turnkey solution to get your podcast up and running very, very, very quickly.
Casey:
And I don't know if we brought that up last episode.
Casey:
I don't really have a whole lot to add about that other than to mention that we forgot to mention it.
Casey:
but I'm assuming one of you guys who put this in the show notes have some thoughts.
John:
The angle that anchor is like a tool for making podcasts.
John:
I remember them back when they were like the voice blogging, you'd like launch the app and you would follow people.
John:
And then you just like start recording and speaking to the microphone of your phone for 30 seconds.
John:
And it would just go out and people could hear it.
John:
And you can find someone else's channel and hear what they're doing.
John:
Like they were,
John:
it's kind of like a micro blogging for audio type network but it has morphed and it morphed many years ago into like a podcast type thing and that's part of spotify's play like so they bought content with gimlet and the ability to produce content with gimlet but then anchor buys them the ability to attract people who don't yet have a podcast but would like to make a podcast and it's easy it's pretty easy to make a podcast like you can just go to squarespace or whatever and
John:
record some audio and upload it in Squarespace will make a feed for you.
John:
Like it's not that complicated, but anchor is purpose built to remove, you know, like it's not just a generic website builder.
John:
It's for making podcasts.
John:
And I forget they had some stat that's like 36% of all new podcasts are created on anchor.
John:
I don't know how they come up with those numbers, but the point is, this is another aspect of their attempt to reach critical mass and podcasts where when someone mentions a podcast, it's just assumed that it's on Spotify.
Yeah.
John:
And that if you want to go where the podcasts are, you have to go to Spotify.
John:
If over time they can get the default for like, hey, I'm thinking of starting a podcast.
John:
What should I use?
John:
And everyone says, just go use Anchor.
John:
It's easiest to make a podcast.
John:
And Anchor only puts things on Spotify.
John:
That's part of their play.
John:
So it's the tool angle.
John:
I don't know how good Anchor is.
John:
I've never used it in its capacity as a podcast creation tool.
John:
Last time I used it, it was this little voice blogging thing.
John:
But it makes sense to have a tool like that and to have what I assume is a pretty good one because it's been around for a while.
John:
I'm not going to tell people, like, don't use Anchor if you think it's the easiest way to get a podcast up.
John:
But I am going to tell people that you are not just getting a simpler – at this point, you're not just getting a simple way to publish a podcast.
John:
You're now slightly putting another pebble on the pile of Spotify gaining critical mass and becoming the de facto place for podcasts, which is a thing that I do not want to happen.
Marco:
Yeah, I actually – like I focused my thoughts last week on the Gimlet things.
Marco:
That's what everybody was asking me about.
Marco:
And again, a disclaimer that I was an investor in Gimlet, so I'm making money from that part of this deal.
Marco:
But I have nothing to do with Anchor, at least, so I guess I can talk neutrally about this.
Marco:
I'm actually more worried about what Spotify's plans are with Anchor than I am about what their plans are with Gimlet.
Marco:
Because Gimlet is obvious.
Marco:
It seems like what their plans are, and again, I don't have any inside information regarding this.
Marco:
I'm talking about what's known publicly.
Marco:
It seems like Spotify's plans with Gimlet are to get content that can be made exclusive to them.
Marco:
And even if Gimlet is not going to make their existing shows exclusive, which they said they weren't, to get a production house that can make new exclusive shows to Spotify.
Marco:
That makes total sense.
Marco:
And there have been great discussions, by the way, from our friend Ben Thompson on both his site at Stratechery and his podcast called Exponent about what this could mean, why Spotify wants this.
Marco:
It makes a ton of sense for Spotify to push podcasts heavily because every minute someone's listening to Spotify and they listen to music, every minute costs Spotify money.
Marco:
Whereas every minute somebody listening to Spotify is listening to a podcast, they don't pay a dime.
Marco:
So they have a huge financial incentive to not only attract new subscribers in general, but to make as many of their subscribers as possible spend their listening time with podcasts instead of music.
Marco:
So anyway...
Marco:
For Spotify to have exclusive content, that isn't a huge deal because lots of podcast-like platforms or podcast communication platforms have exclusive content, including Spotify before this deal.
Marco:
So that I don't think is a major change.
Marco:
It's going to really meaningfully affect things.
Marco:
But what worries me with Anchor is Anchor, as you said, John, Anchor is kind of like an all-in-one way to make a podcast.
Marco:
And so far, I don't think there's been that many huge podcasts on Anchor.
Marco:
I think it's mostly like small hobbyist stuff.
Marco:
But it's only a matter of time before there's big stuff on there, if there isn't already.
Marco:
And so there will be or already is significant content on Anchor that is worth paying attention to.
Marco:
What concerns me is that anchor recently launched a big centralized monetization program for people who host their podcasts on anchor, which is super easy and everything to join their ad network and get some money for their podcasts.
Marco:
Now,
Marco:
Again, it's mostly small shows, but not all small shows.
Marco:
YouTube is mostly channels that get very few views.
Marco:
Hi.
Marco:
Yeah, me too.
Marco:
But not all of them.
Marco:
Some of them make significant money, right?
Marco:
And you know, as a video creator, you know that you can go to YouTube and sign up for their ad thing after a little while and start making like a dollar a month.
Marco:
But you know someday maybe you can make real money from that.
Marco:
And so Anchor is building that same thing for podcasts.
Marco:
which doesn't really exist.
Marco:
There is no centralized podcast ad network that any show can join at any size.
Marco:
There's things like the mid-roll where they can have a whole bunch of shows that they sell all at once, but you have to be a certain size before they can really sell your show.
Marco:
And so it's kind of like invite-only, and not everybody has access to that kind of thing.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
By Anchor doing this, it's kind of like AdSense for podcasts.
Marco:
Google's AdSense thing is the thing that lets you put a little rectangle of terrible ads on any webpage about anything for the most part, and they'll send you 25 cents a month.
Marco:
That's what Anchor has made for podcasts.
Marco:
And
Marco:
I don't think they're going to compete for effectiveness or quality of ads or total income potential for shows that have enough audience to have their own sponsorships.
Marco:
We're not going to switch to Anchor's Ad Network because we would have worse ads and we wouldn't make as much.
Marco:
So it makes no sense for us to switch.
Marco:
It makes no sense for any show that you currently hear as paid sponsors to respond.
Marco:
It makes no sense for them to switch.
Marco:
But there's a whole bunch of smaller shows that can all of a sudden join that when they couldn't before.
Marco:
And so I worry that what might happen in the future is everyone might start their podcasts on Anchor and therefore Spotify by default because that's the place you can start a podcast and make a little bit of money and never really bother putting it anywhere else.
Marco:
And eventually those shows will become substantial.
Marco:
Like the long tail of shows, eventually that will become a substantial block of podcasts.
Marco:
And those podcasts by default might be set not to work anywhere else.
Marco:
Those might by default be Spotify only.
Marco:
And then you have a whole bunch of quote podcasts that aren't really podcasting.
Marco:
podcast in the technical sense because they're not accessible via public feeds but that people go seeking out a podcast you know they go seek out one of these podcasts by name they search an apple podcast or overcast and they don't see it because it isn't really out there and so spotify could over time leverage the anchor platform to become a much larger amount of exclusive shows and that could become a big problem and
Marco:
It could also be a problem if they get to a point where their ad network is really successful, which honestly, I don't think it will ever be as profitable and high quality as what you can do on your own once you're big.
Marco:
But it could reach a point where even big shows, it's like stupid not to go there.
Marco:
And so then you have all the big shows go there.
Marco:
So that's what I worry about for the future of podcasting and the health of the ecosystem.
Marco:
I worry about that far more than them buying a few big name shows and making those exclusive to them.
Marco:
Because that honestly is not going to make a dent.
Marco:
But when you have an entire creation platform with hundreds of thousands of podcasts being made on it and put up there, if those become exclusive, if that becomes exclusive to them and everyone pretty much participates because there's a huge financial reason for them to do it, that's a big problem.
Casey:
So if you're looking to start a podcast today, what would you recommend doing then rather than going directly to Anchor?
Casey:
I mean, it seems to me the better option is to use something like Libsyn, which we use.
Casey:
And from there, you can push to any number of places, including but not limited to Spotify.
Casey:
But Marco, what would you say?
Casey:
What would you recommend if I wanted to start my own podcast today?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The hosting side of a podcast is really not the hard part.
Marco:
There's lots of options out there to do it without too much work.
Marco:
I think the hard part is actually the creation side.
Marco:
There's some inherent complexity in making audio that isn't present for writing text.
Marco:
There's a lot of calls for somebody to be the Tumblr of podcasts.
Marco:
And I think Anchor is the closest anyone has come to that.
Marco:
But at the end of the day, you still have to make audio that is relatively easy to listen to.
Marco:
So it has decent levels, not a lot of noise, etc.
Marco:
And has interesting content and interesting personalities to get people there.
Marco:
And that's way harder to sustain and create over time than setting up a website and a feed with RSS audio things in it.
Marco:
What people are focusing on here is the platform area, and that's reasonable to worry about because that's what people think of first.
Marco:
When people think, I want to start a podcast, how do I do that?
Marco:
They're not thinking, how do I come up with interesting things to say with good personalities on a consistent schedule for the next year?
Marco:
They don't think that.
Marco:
They think...
Marco:
What kind of microphone do I need and how do I set it up?
Marco:
What do I do with the site?
Marco:
How do I publish this?
Marco:
I'm a little worried about Anchor's role here, again, because at scale, this could become a problem.
Marco:
But the podcast ecosystem, as I said last week, is so strong and has been so resilient over time at attempts to mess it up and lock it up.
Marco:
I don't think this is going to have bad things happen.
Marco:
I do, however, think that Spotify has reached the point and will continue extending further.
Marco:
I do think they're at the point now where...
Marco:
You basically need to be on it.
Marco:
If you care about your audience size, this is something I always dreaded with Stitcher back in the day when they were bigger.
Marco:
I was afraid that you would have to comply with Stitcher's terms and put yourself on Stitcher because their market share was too big to give up.
Marco:
And at the time, their market share was something like 5% or 10%.
Marco:
And now Spotify's market share is between 5% and 10%.
Marco:
And they've gotten that really quickly.
Marco:
And so it's going to go up.
Marco:
So Spotify, I think, is already at that point now where most podcasters are not going to say...
Marco:
I'm going to give up 5% or 10% of my audience on principle.
Marco:
It's too big of an amount.
Marco:
That's a significant amount.
Marco:
So they're probably not going to do that.
Marco:
Even we are probably going to put our show on Spotify because the risks start to be outweighed by, well, there's a lot of people there and we have to go where the people are.
Marco:
We've already gotten requests from listeners who email us saying, hey, I really would like it if you were on Spotify.
Marco:
I just switched to them and they don't have you or whatever.
Marco:
um so i think stitchers are i mean i think spotify is already to that point where most podcasts are going to want to be on it no matter what and i really don't love that i gotta say i really don't love that because they're not part of the open ecosystem and they're actively trying to take it over but they are that big and it's hard to tell podcasters to give up a big chunk of their audience on principle
John:
Ben Thompson had a little bit of follow up on podcast this week.
John:
By the way, if you're wondering where we get this Ben Thompson stuff from, he you can subscribe to his newsletter.
John:
He does like what one free article a week.
John:
But then like every single day, if you subscribe, you get his thing.
John:
So I highly recommend it.
John:
It's always good.
John:
It amazes me that he can write something that substantive every single day.
John:
Maybe he has a time machine.
John:
He just batches them up on the weekends.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, the follow-up on the podcasting stuff was a point that I remember making back in the e-book days where we found ourselves in a situation where Apple has all the pieces to the puzzle of a particular market and is just not interested in picking them up and putting them together.
John:
Like in the e-book time, they had devices that you could use for readers.
John:
They had a store where people paid money.
John:
They had relationships to people who create content, and then they were just not interested in it.
John:
the e-book business and basically let Amazon have it and only later came in and said oh I guess e-books are a thing we should do that too and came out with the iBook store.
John:
In podcasts Apple has been the de facto as we've said the de facto benevolent dictator king of podcasts for a long time.
John:
They still have the biggest player they have the most important index.
John:
It's not that they're not interested in podcasts but
John:
It's not something where they've taken the ball and run with it, which is good for us.
John:
We don't want them to be like Spotify, right?
John:
But if you wanted someone to save you from Spotify, it's not going to be individual shows like ours protesting by not putting their things up on Spotify.
John:
The only other player that is bigger than Spotify and can stop them from closing up the podcast ecosystem would be Apple.
John:
If there's a thing they wanted to do, Apple could make...
John:
you know continue to keep podcasts open like they are now where they have an index and they have a place where you can find the podcast but they do not re-host all your audio they don't make you agree to special terms like blah blah blah like just a hands-off type of attitude and if they just added on top of that you know their app store goodness of you know having a way to do subscriptions with your apple id or uh to have like four pay podcast episodes or whatever you know whatever i don't know not to go so far as to say they should have a centralized ad network although apple has not been in beyond
John:
making an ad network in the past but there are ways for apple to make money from podcasts apple is all about service revenue as uh ben points out but they don't see podcasts and say oh we can make more service revenue they could but it's just it's just either it's small potatoes for them or they're just not into it they're too busy with other things certainly it's nothing like video
John:
at least from their perspective.
John:
But it's not an area they pursued.
John:
And for years, it's been sitting there.
John:
They could have done these things years and years ago.
John:
They already have a store and a system of accounts and a way for creators to register and collect money.
John:
And most importantly, they have millions and millions of customers with payment information and an ID through which they can do that.
John:
And they could do it in a way that preserves privacy like they normally do.
John:
And while continuing in the ideal scenario,
John:
While continuing to be entirely hands-off that if you just want to have a podcast that's free, it's just like it is now.
John:
But if you decide you want to have a podcast where you charge people a dollar per episode or have a yearly subscription for a certain amount or whatever, they could do that.
John:
As Spotify grows in power and stature and size...
John:
only Apple as Tim Cook would say is in the running to do anything about it other than just hope Spotify fails because there's lots of ways this can go badly for Spotify you know they still do how music is their main business and they have to balance those two concerns and figure out how to if they are going to transition how to transition or how much of music to preserve yada yada yada maybe people unsubscribe if Spotify moves entirely into podcasts and they'll realize not that many people want to subscribe to anything just for podcasts so I don't know how it's going to turn out but
John:
And I'm not particularly asking for Apple to become more engaged because I mostly like the hands-off attitude.
John:
But they're there in the corner.
John:
They have always had the ability to do something about podcasting and thus far haven't done anything.
Marco:
Transcription by CastingWords
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
If you need a domain name, you can buy it there too and have it all under one roof.
Marco:
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Marco:
I highly suggest next time you have a project or a business or somebody's asked you to make a website for them, start it there with that free trial and
Marco:
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Marco:
And I bet you're going to be pretty much done, if not totally done.
Marco:
And it's so nice to just have it done out of your hands and you can move on to focusing on your business or your project.
Marco:
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Marco:
When you decide to sign up, and I'm sure you will go to squarespace.com slash ATP and use offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
That's squarespace.com slash ATP offer code ATP for 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
I don't have the list in front of me, but probably future sponsors.
Casey:
But I can tell you with an honest heart, and they cannot pay me to say this, that I really love their stuff.
Casey:
I was overjoyed to get rid of the Verizon router that I was compelled to use and instead put in an Eero setup.
Casey:
An Eero setup that, to be fair, they comped me.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it's really great.
Casey:
I really love it.
Casey:
And Amazon has declared that they're buying Eero.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I don't know how I feel about this.
Casey:
Like the doomsday person in me thinks, oh God, Amazon's going to know everything I look at on the internet and weaponize that to make me even more, or make me spend even more money than I would already spend at Amazon.
Casey:
And that's not good and a little creepy.
Casey:
But on the other side, you know, I also have a Ring doorbell, which was also a prior sponsor, also got comped.
Casey:
And they haven't really gunked that up with creepiness yet, as far as I can tell.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Like, John, what do you think about this?
Casey:
Is this going to be really bad or am I making a mountain out of nothing?
John:
Four words.
John:
Euro with special offers.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Oh, no, John.
John:
I mean, that's what we're all worried about.
John:
So it doesn't surprise me that Amazon bought it.
John:
It doesn't surprise me that someone bought Euro because they've got great products and having a small independent company that makes one very focused great product is just something that just seems not to stand in today's tech industry because someone will see them and scoop them up.
John:
And it also doesn't surprise me that it's Amazon because Amazon is all about lately electronic smart type devices that go in your home.
John:
And they have this budding ecosystem of their Echo brand products with and without screens and microphones and speakers of various sizes.
John:
And all those things are on Wi-Fi.
John:
So they bought Ring, to be clear, what you're talking about before.
John:
Amazon also bought Ring, which is more home stuff for cameras and doorbells.
John:
And Google's got Nest, of course, and it's home stuff.
John:
So it makes perfect sense for Amazon to buy Europe because unlike Apple...
John:
both Amazon and Google have not decided that they are going to expunge everything except for the most profitable core products from their lineups.
John:
Instead, they are actually trying to build an ecosystem that covers all bases that people need.
John:
And so neither one of them is shying away from, oh, we're not going to buy a camera company or a doorbell company or a Wi-Fi company.
John:
We just want to sell the very most expensive, profitable thing.
John:
We've talked about this before when...
John:
Apple getting out of the Wi-Fi business.
John:
Lots of people saying, I wish Apple had bought Aero, but we weren't having that conversation.
John:
Apple just doesn't see it that way.
John:
So instead, in the absence of big Apple buying up these companies, someone's going to buy them up.
John:
It's either going to be Amazon or Google, or I don't know who the third choice would be.
John:
But maybe some slightly larger fish would eat the very small fish.
John:
So I'm not surprised they're purchased.
John:
I hope in the short to medium term they continue to sell Wi-Fi routers that just do Wi-Fi things and don't report every single website you go to back to Amazon for the purposes of marketing.
John:
But...
John:
And I don't necessarily think they're going to combine it with an Echo.
John:
I'm not sure that Frank and Toaster needs to exist.
John:
They might make one because they're Amazon.
John:
Why the heck wouldn't they try it?
John:
But I think even if they just stay independent Wi-Fi things, resisting the urge as Amazon, a company that gets tremendous benefit about knowing what you do.
John:
resisting the urge to of that wi-fi router to tell amazon everything you do on the internet i don't know how i don't know how amazon resists that i don't know how someone goes into a meeting and says okay we own a wi-fi router now but we're not going to have a report back to amazon everything all our customers do just the data is just too valuable uh so i hope amazon holds the whoever is in charge of that decision i hope they hold the line for as long as they possibly can but it almost seems inevitable to me
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, on some level, Amazon already has the potential with AWS.
Marco:
They host a good portion of the internet.
Marco:
And they don't do that, as far as I know there, because I think the cost to the AWS customers, which are businesses, I think they wouldn't put up with that.
Marco:
That would be too much for them.
John:
Well, that's the difference.
John:
In a business-to-business range, there are contracts that set down what they're going to do.
John:
And a business has lawyers that looks over the contract.
John:
No way a business is going to sign that.
John:
But customers will click through any garbage TOS that pops up in front of them when they buy a product.
John:
So that's why they're going to do it on the consumer side.
John:
No way they'd pull it off on AWS.
John:
And actually, it would be difficult on AWS just because…
John:
of how opaque the infrastructure is from their perspective.
John:
And most businesses are good about having stuff encrypted in transit and at rest and yada, yada, yada.
John:
But the bottom line is lawyers.
John:
Lawyers will stop that from happening.
John:
But consumers don't each have lawyers when they go by their Wi-Fi router.
John:
And even if it's just as simple as it reporting what your DNS queries are, even that alone is enough sort of intelligence that Amazon would not be able to resist it.
John:
Forget about the men and men in your SSL or whatever.
John:
Like, I'm not saying they're going to go that far on day one, but it's just such a treasure trove of information that I just think they can't stay away.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
I mean, on some level also, like Eero has this Eero Plus service, which is optional.
Marco:
One of the things it provides is a service where it'll check the sites you visit against a database of no malicious sites.
Marco:
So therefore, Eero already has a service that people voluntarily opt in to
Marco:
have their site history checked against a database or something else.
Marco:
So Eero already has that information from some portion of its customers.
Marco:
So is it that different for Amazon to have that?
Marco:
And if that's as far as it ever goes?
John:
I think it's different because Amazon has an immediate use for that information.
John:
The Eero use for it is this would be useful...
John:
We could sell this to somebody, or it's useful for an acquirer to show why you should buy us.
John:
Like, hey, Amazon, look how we can collect this information.
John:
You should buy us because you would like this information.
John:
But Amazon, there's no speculative purpose for this information.
John:
We know exactly what we use it for.
John:
We use it to figure out how to sell you more stuff on Amazon.
John:
And the fact that it's opt-in, Amazon just has to make it like...
John:
Uh, you know, you get $5 off prime or whatever, like they have, they have so many knobs to turn to make a hundred percent of the customers use that.
John:
Even if it's just like, uh, like the, the Kindle was special offers.
John:
Hey, you can get a Kindle cheaper if you'd like to show you ads.
John:
Hey, you can get a, uh, and you're a router cheaper if you'd like to see your websites and everyone will just do it because it's cheaper.
John:
Why wouldn't you?
John:
yeah that's true yeah now that you say yeah you're i they probably will at least offer something maybe they won't have it always on that way but i bet they will down the road i bet they will offer something that really gives them this info yeah i'm not worried about it for like this year or even next year or whatever like and i i'm i'm sure my existing euro products will continue to work and i'll continue to buy them mostly because they work really well and they're problem free and they give me everything i want out of as long as it's optional and
John:
I will continue to get them.
John:
But it just makes me super duper extra angry that Apple has just abandoned this and many other markets because they want to let someone else have it.
John:
And in this day and age with these big players and all the consolidation, if Apple doesn't offer it, no one else in the industry is incentivized to give the kind of privacy guarantees that Apple is incentivized to give.
John:
And so it's bad for consumers if there is no Apple option.
John:
Bad for well-heeled consumers, let's say, if there's no Apple option for that type of thing.
John:
There's tons and tons of third-party Wi-Fi routers from companies that have absolutely no interest or incentive in gathering information.
John:
But that used to be true of television makers, too.
John:
Television makers just not care about what you watch.
John:
For decades and decades, they didn't care what you watch until they did.
John:
So I don't say, oh, well, don't worry.
John:
You can use Linksys or Netgear or whatever or Ubiquity.
John:
I guess Ubiquity is probably the last holdout again because they're a business-to-business type of seller for the most part.
John:
But eventually, nothing is safe because once Netgear and Linksys figure out that they can sell all your data to someone else, if they haven't already figured this out, they'll start doing it too.
John:
And then you're just left with buying ugly, complicated Ubiquity stuff like Marco has or just pining for the days when you could buy a Wi-Fi router from Apple.
Marco:
Yeah, I haven't seen anybody who was happy with this news so far.
Marco:
And I think that really says a lot about how much people love Eero and how much people don't trust Amazon to do the right thing long-term here.
Marco:
And I can't fault them.
Marco:
I mean, I'm a huge Amazon customer and it's hard to think of another company on the web that has more data on me than Amazon does.
Marco:
already, just from my activity on Amazon.
Marco:
But certainly, if you're trying to not have a lot of the web giants have info on you like this, Amazon is getting harder and harder to avoid.
Marco:
I think it says a lot about what people are thinking about and worried about these days, that the reaction to this acquisition from customers has been seemingly almost 100% negative.
John:
from tech nerd customers obviously and the thing about it is like we all have you know these devices in our house that we can talk to uh like you know i i have an echo thing i have the google thing all those things send my queries back to their respective companies and tell them what i'm doing like i'm voluntarily you know i'm an amazon prime subscriber i buy things from amazon like i hate these companies and don't want them to have any information about me um and i'm not even like even if the wi-fi router like uh has this opt-in report back to amazon thing i would
John:
like i said i would still buy it because i value a reliable nice to use wi-fi router like i'm not protesting like i'm never going to buy the euro again and not far from it it's just that it's like it's encroachment right so i buy these products and voluntarily use them knowing that they transfer their information back because i like i accept the trade-off i accept in exchange for you getting this information about me you provide this service and i feel like i know what i'm i know what i'm providing but like
John:
The Wi-Fi in your house, like the basic internet in your house, it's like the last backstop against devices that are owned by a company.
John:
It's just individual products.
John:
If I buy an Echo thing and put it on my network, I understand that when I talk to that thing, here's this thing that's happening.
John:
But if one company can see everything that's happening on my network and it owns the actual internet connection end of things...
John:
like Verizon does with that whole thing.
John:
That's the most scary about Verizon, adding HTTP headers every time you visit a website.
John:
That feels like, to me anyway, personally, a bridge too far.
John:
I want there to be some backstop where...
John:
this is the infrastructure that I own.
John:
And then I choose which products I put on it.
John:
Not like, you know, it's coming from inside the house.
John:
You own the entire infrastructure.
John:
You see everything.
John:
Uh, and that's, I'm not entirely comfortable with that relationship.
John:
Maybe it's unavoidable.
John:
Maybe there's no keeping them out.
John:
Maybe soon every single aspect of our internet connection in our life, uh,
John:
will be owned by some company but i'm i think getting back to the verizon thing i forget when this was but like and i forgot the particular details i think it was like uh since verizon is an internet service provider and they could see all your traffic coming and going they would see when you're making http requests and they would either shove in a header that identifies you or read headers or they would do something with the headers going through and they would see every single one of your your web requests that wasn't ssl which back in those days was a
John:
And when people found out about it, there was a little bit of an uproar, and I think they stopped doing it.
John:
So I think that it's not just me, that there is a line over which companies will not be allowed to walk without at least some form of protest.
John:
And I'm not saying having your Wi-Fi router report back to Amazon is that line.
John:
It's just that I think I'm not alone in drawing some kind of distinction between the products that I put on my network and the entirety of the network itself.
Casey:
I completely agree.
Casey:
I mean, for now, I don't plan on doing anything about my in-home network in no small part because I just spent hours doing everything.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I think it's one of those things where I'm going to keep a watchful eye on it.
Casey:
And I think, Marco, your point about...
Casey:
everyone's reaction says a lot about Eero.
Casey:
I think that's spot on.
Casey:
You know, I love my Eero devices.
Casey:
And again, they've sponsored before, they're sponsoring again, but they cannot pay us to say that we really, really, really friggin' love this stuff.
Casey:
And I think I speak for all three of us in saying that we do.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
And when I recommend something to friends or family, stuff that I will have to support if it goes bad, I'll recommend Eero.
Casey:
And of course, I'll recommend it with the coupon code ATP.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I will recommend Eero.
Casey:
And I do that because it really is good stuff.
Casey:
It really does walk the fine line between something that is configurable enough for a nerd like me, but also approachable enough for a regular human being.
Casey:
And for everyone to be like,
Casey:
Oh, Amazon, really?
Casey:
That that's I think that's like you said, Marco, I think that that's really indicative of kind of how we feel about both companies.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So the thing is, though, like recommending it to people, I think we fast forward five years and Amazon starts offering your products that do this kind of like, you know, the era with special offers thing.
John:
I think I would still be in the position where if I had some relative who didn't have a lot of money and there's no way in hell they were going to pay for a Wi-Fi router to replace the one they quote-unquote get for free from Comcast, right?
John:
Like if you can't convince them that they should buy their own thing.
John:
But there was an option to get an Eero with special offers or whatever that is free or cheap but reports everything you do back to Amazon.
John:
And I described this arrangement.
John:
They would jump on it.
John:
Right.
John:
That they would say, Oh, well, that's great.
John:
Like, yeah, totally.
John:
I'm like, well, because, because honestly, like people, not everyone cares as much about that.
John:
If you told them you can get a $500, a multi-node router set up for free, uh,
John:
But the catch is that it tells Amazon every website you go to.
John:
They're like, fine, good, do that.
John:
Sold.
John:
Right.
John:
And so that's why, I mean, that's why stuff like this is out.
John:
That's why we all buy everything.
John:
Like everyone has their own line.
John:
Like I'm not saying that it's even the wrong thing to do from a business perspective.
John:
And I think I would be in a position where I would bring that up to somebody to say it's an option because you can get better, you know, you'd get better coverage across your house.
John:
You wouldn't have the Wi-Fi dead spots.
John:
Like all the things that the ads say are absolutely true.
John:
I've basically done this with one of my relatives.
John:
They didn't want to pay lots of money for the Wi-Fi thing, so I just bought it for them and sent it to them because I wanted them to have Wi-Fi in their house.
John:
But there's no way they would have paid it if they had to buy it themselves.
John:
If I had told them about special offers things, they definitely would have jumped on it.
John:
And a lot of people are like that.
John:
I'm not even saying that's the wrong choice.
John:
Like if you can get good technology for less money and you understand what you're trading, you know, go into with your eyes open, have someone explain it to you and the consequences of it.
John:
it's approaching uh i think uh i forget where i read this so it's approaching the type of deal that come back to me brain where did they is that that that regular people i can't actually consent to because it's so pervasive what was that from was like a facebook story or something like that like that yeah from the uh oh yeah that it's impossible for anyone to uh to actually consent to because it's they don't grasp the full the entirety of what's going on
John:
you know assume again assuming euro is not going to man in the middle you and decode all your encrypted traffic you know this is not that like if you describe to them if you go to a website they they can see it but when you go to your bank they can't because it's ssl people would accept that trade-off and honestly i don't think it's an unreasonable unreasonable event to accept it i just got done saying that we all accept the trade-off of uh you know when we shout to our cylinders that it sends that back to a server in two out of three cases uh
John:
So, you know, we're sad that Eero stopped being the independent, beautiful snowflake that it was.
John:
And we're all sad that Apple didn't buy them or that Apple doesn't do Wi-Fi networks.
John:
But in the grand scheme of things, five years from now, we might still be recommending to our friends and relatives to get Eero.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
You know, as you were talking, I got thinking to myself, you know, is the individual data what's valuable or is there something else that could be valuable?
Casey:
And, of course, the individual data is valuable.
Casey:
But I'm looking at my Eero app on my iPad, and among the things that Eero does and does a really good job of is it will –
Casey:
Take a guess using, I think, the MAC address and some lookup table that's server-side, I guess.
Casey:
What are all these devices on your network?
Casey:
So as an example, my thermostat, which happens to be a Honeywell – or I'm sorry, a train thermostat, apparently the network connection within it is made by Murata Manufacturing Company Limited.
Casey:
And that isn't very helpful to me, but a lot of things it'll say like, oh, this is an Apple device and we're pretty darn sure it's an iPhone.
Casey:
This is an Apple device, we're pretty sure it's an iMac.
Casey:
This is a printer.
Casey:
And, you know, they'll at least be able to show you like a little icon that indicates it's a printer.
Casey:
And it got me thinking, you know, maybe there's something to be said about knowing of the...
Casey:
Of all of the Eero installations in the world, 80% of them have one Nintendo Switch hanging off their network.
Casey:
And 50% of them have Apple devices.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
And perhaps even in aggregate, in a way that is not across my personal threshold of...
Casey:
just having aggregated information about what kinds of people are, what kinds of things people are buying and in what quantity.
Casey:
And, and also like, you know, most switch owners tend to be Mac users and most PS4 owners tend to be PC users.
Casey:
I probably have that backwards.
Casey:
It doesn't matter, but you get my point that perhaps even just the aggregate information might be useful to Amazon in some way, shape or form as well.
John:
Sure, they would love it all.
John:
I mean, because they sell competitors to a lot of the products.
John:
They would love to know what's on everyone's Wi-Fi networks and everything they go to, every website they go to.
John:
Why wouldn't they?
John:
This type of information has value to almost anybody that sells anything.
John:
It's so broad-reaching.
John:
The internet is such an integral part of all aspects of life that this is incredibly valuable information.
John:
It's just a question of who has the ability to...
John:
to convince customers to trade that privacy for something.
John:
And Amazon has shown they have the ability to get customers to trade their privacy for the value they provide, the convenience of buying things on Amazon, to get a Kindle for a little bit cheaper, using all those things to bootstrap a video service by saying it comes free with your shopping, whether you like it or not.
John:
We talked about this before.
John:
They're able to honestly get customers to trade something that Amazon wants for something that the customers want.
John:
And it just so happens that thing is not always money.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So if you only need a server for a couple hours, and then you can turn it off, which you can do either manually or through their awesome developer API, you can script all sorts of stuff, then you only pay a few dollars maybe for it.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Once again, it's linode.com slash ATP, promo code ATP2019 for a $20 credit.
Marco:
Hey, on that cheap $5 a month plan, that could be four months for free.
Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, so let's do some Ask ATP, and we're starting tonight with David Hadley, who writes, Hey, what are your feelings about saving money by buying refurbished technology products?
Casey:
I want a Nintendo Switch, but since there's only one Nintendo-exclusive game right now that I really want, which happens to be Zelda Breath of the Wild, I can't bring myself to pay the full price for the console.
Casey:
Some retailers sell refurbished consoles that bring the price low enough that I'm willing to buy, but I'm worried that these have a high chance of being lemons.
Casey:
I personally don't do this terribly often.
Casey:
There are definitely times that I have and or would do this.
Casey:
Apple stuff is a great example.
Casey:
If I wasn't so needy about having the new hotness immediately, I absolutely would buy.
Casey:
And I'm pretty sure I've bought at least one refurbished Apple product in the past, and it's been fine.
Casey:
I had heard somewhere, and this may be a complete boldface lie, but I had heard somewhere that with Apple refurb stuff,
Casey:
Any Surface the user touches is brand new.
Casey:
It's just the insides that are gross, or I shouldn't say gross, but recycled.
Casey:
Do you guys know if that's BS or do you know if that's true?
John:
I read the same feedback you did, but I don't know if it was just specifically talking about phones or if it was all products.
John:
I'm not sure.
Casey:
Fair enough.
John:
I bet it might have just been phones or something because I can't imagine they're doing it with giant iMacs or whatever.
Casey:
That's also true.
Casey:
It's a good point.
Casey:
In any case, I would definitely do it with Apple stuff.
Casey:
For something like a Nintendo, probably, like I don't have any particular...
Casey:
problem with buying refurbished stuff i can't say i do it terribly often but i mean i bought a couple of used cars in the past and i didn't really i even though my bmw was a piece of garbage that was not because it was used i don't think i think it's just because it was a bmw um but you know i i don't have any personal problem with this marco how do you feel about it
Marco:
I have bought refurb stuff in the past.
Marco:
I've had mixed luck with it.
Marco:
Sometimes I've bought them and they've been totally fine.
Marco:
Other times they were a little bit flaky, but so have some of my new things.
Marco:
So I don't know if that's enough data to really say for sure whether it's worth or not.
Marco:
I would caution you, if you're going to go a refurb route, it's way better.
Marco:
I don't know what the options are for the Switch, but
Marco:
in general with tech products, it's way better to get the refurbs directly from the manufacturer because they will almost always have a regular warranty applied to them.
Marco:
And then you can always go to the manufacturer if you have a problem during that period and say, all right, hey, this thing's broken, fix it.
Marco:
As opposed to if you get it through a third-party refurbisher,
Marco:
Oftentimes, the warranty will then only be through the refurbisher, not through the original company.
Marco:
And it might be a pain to ever get anything serviced that way.
Marco:
So refurbs are a very good way to save a few hundred dollars off of a new Mac or something.
Marco:
And for a lot of people, that's a fine deal to take.
Marco:
But just make sure you're covered by a warranty from the actual manufacturer.
John:
I usually avoid refurbs just because I want to have the shiny new thing, which is a privilege I have being able to buy the shiny new thing most of the time.
John:
And in this specific case, Breath of the Wild, I would personally probably go without meals.
John:
Skip a meal for a week to save the extra money because Breath of the Wild is such an amazing game.
John:
But all that said...
John:
If I was in a position where I wanted something, I just didn't have the cash, I would be willing to buy refurbs.
John:
And again, like Marco said, buying it through the manufacturer, chances are probably about the same, maybe even slightly better than buying new things.
John:
If the outside of it shows any kind of wear and tear,
John:
Or if it's like a damaged box type of thing or whatever, you're kind of rolling the dice.
John:
It really depends how much money you're saving.
John:
If you're saving $10, forget it.
John:
But if you're saving $50 or $100, absolutely.
John:
Get it with a manufacturer warranty.
John:
Get it.
John:
And, you know, if you buy a new product and it flakes out and they give you a replacement, you're probably getting a refurb then anyway.
John:
Almost certainly getting a refurb then.
John:
So I wouldn't be too scared of it.
John:
Just be sure that you get a warranty as if it was new.
John:
Because if you don't, then I would...
John:
I would think twice about it and increasingly as the price of the thing goes up.
John:
And yeah, and just don't just don't be superstitious about the fact that it's refurbished because it'll probably be fine.
Casey:
Yeah, apparently Nintendo does have a refurb store, which we will put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
Thanks to Ryber for getting that link.
Casey:
And also real-time feedback from John Alper via Twitter.
Casey:
John writes that he has bought a ton of Apple stuff.
Casey:
And the only thing that didn't look as untouched as something brand new was the packaging.
Casey:
Because I guess they don't necessarily use the super fancy packaging for the refurb stuff.
Casey:
You might just get like a basic brown box, according to John.
Casey:
But yeah, like I said, I have no problem with it.
Casey:
Moving on, Ryan Bible writes,
Casey:
I know that I should break things up, but I've struggled to find answers on how an app should be structured and the best practices for creating and implementing my own classes.
Casey:
To summarize, I found tons of resources for beginners just starting out, but I'm really struggling to find intermediate resources, and I was hoping that you guys could point me in the right direction.
Casey:
Um, I don't have a lot of terribly great ideas here.
Casey:
Uh, if there happens to, especially when it comes to iOS, uh, iOS, there seemed to be about 8 billion ways to, uh, skin that cat.
Casey:
And the, there's the one true way, which is the MVC way that, uh,
Casey:
that Apple kind of recommends.
Casey:
And even Apple's own documentation talks about that some.
Casey:
And certainly WWDC sessions actually are useful for that.
Casey:
But in general, I like to find publications that seem to be pretty well respected on the particular field that you're dealing with.
Casey:
So as an example for iOS stuff, NSHipster is very good in my personal opinion.
Casey:
And just follow those and see what sorts of things they're talking about.
Casey:
That's less about...
Casey:
app architecture or, you know, really architecture in general, which is what Ryan is talking about, but more how to write decent and good code.
Casey:
The easiest and best way I've ever found to solve this problem is to work with somebody who is at a, who is better at what you do than you are.
Casey:
And you will by force or by will end up learning a lot from them.
Casey:
But I don't know, do you guys have maybe, we can start with Marco.
Casey:
Do you have any tips for kind of bridging the gap from being a beginner to being intermediate?
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, certainly if you have any ability to work with other people who maybe have more experience than you, that is by far the best way to advance yourself quickly in this area.
Marco:
Of course, not everybody has that option available to them.
Marco:
So assuming that Ryan here doesn't have that option available, I would say basically do what Casey did.
Marco:
Read up on what patterns and things people have been using.
Marco:
The only problem there is everyone has a different way of doing it.
Casey:
Exactly.
Marco:
You probably aren't going to find two sites that tell you to do the exact same thing.
Marco:
You're going to look at 10 sites and they're going to tell you to do 10 very different and totally incompatible things.
Marco:
It's a little hard to get good that way.
Marco:
You can...
Marco:
To some degree, you can look at Apple's example code.
Marco:
They don't usually ship as example code apps that are complex enough to really have a lot of code structure management to them, but there's probably something out there.
Marco:
You could also potentially look at open source apps.
Marco:
There aren't a ton of open source iOS apps out there, but there are some, and some of them are big enough to have to deal with problems like this.
Marco:
You can see how they did it.
Marco:
But for the most part, this is going to be the kind of thing that you're going to learn
Marco:
Mostly from experience.
Marco:
And whether you're on your own or whether you can learn from other people on the way, that might affect how quickly you learn that.
Marco:
But this is mostly an experience thing.
Marco:
And the other thing I'll add here is it probably doesn't matter as much as you might think.
Marco:
You can have a career as an iOS programmer and put everything in your main view controller.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
If you have a really complex app, that's going to start getting difficult to manage.
Marco:
But for the most part, most apps don't need advanced structures and they don't need to be perfect.
Marco:
They need to work.
Marco:
And if it works and it works for you and it works for the people, it's fine.
Marco:
So don't overthink this too much, especially this early in your career.
Casey:
You know, that's a really great point.
Casey:
So I've written and I'm working on this this poditor thing, which is to help me do my side of the edit for analog.
Casey:
And I also was playing with and actually, this is a very quick side thing that might be interesting.
Casey:
It occurred to me that a lot of my contacts in my in my address book on my phone and thus on my Mac were.
Casey:
don't have images and or the images are really, really old.
Casey:
And so it occurred to me, well, I could just use like Gravatar to slurp up all the images for people that keep that sort of thing updated, which given that I am friends with a lot of nerds, that's a lot of us and update my contacts with all of those images that I grabbed from Gravatar.
Casey:
And I wrote a little iOS app to do it, or I'm mostly done with it.
Casey:
And I bring all this up to say in both of those apps, 80 to 90% of the logic is just in the view controller.
Casey:
And there is only one view controller.
Casey:
And it is called view controller because it doesn't matter to Marco's point.
Marco:
Because when you do file a new project, it calls it view controller.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And ultimately, it really doesn't matter, at least not today.
Casey:
To your point, Marco, if I end up shipping either of these, which I strongly doubt, but if it happens, then that becomes a little bit different.
Casey:
Even if I open source it, I would probably rework a lot because this is not a particularly strong example of the way I generally like to write code.
Casey:
But if I'm just goofing off and doing my own thing, if I'm an independent person living my own life the way I want, then there's no reason to worry about these sorts of problems, at least at the stage that I'm at.
Casey:
And I suspect that...
Casey:
Ryan is that.
Casey:
But that being said, I think that where you would come into problems with this is if you go to like interview to get a regular develop, you know, iOS development job, at which point, if I was interviewing someone, I would want to know that they know one of the 805 ways that you can write quote unquote, correct code for iOS.
Casey:
So
Casey:
I echo what Marco's saying, as long as you're living the blissful indie life that we are, but if you're trying to be a real person with a real job, then it is worth digging into this a little deeper.
Casey:
And speaking of real people with real jobs, John, tell us, as the elder statesman, what is the right answer here?
John:
This question reminds me of back like 15, 20 years ago when I was writing my first e-commerce site, as we called them back then.
John:
Ah, yes.
John:
It was like a website that you go to that has products, you put them in a shopping cart, you go through a checkout process.
John:
I mean, this hasn't actually changed that much in the modern era, but...
John:
Back then on the web, that was basically the main and the only kind of thing that was not a static website.
John:
It was like there was e-commerce and then there were just pages full of text.
John:
And that was it.
John:
It was the idea of a web app didn't quite exist yet.
John:
We had not yet reached Web 2.0 or maybe it was just coming on.
John:
Anyway, so here I am.
John:
I'm like, I've got to write an e-commerce site.
John:
This has been done, even at that point, hundreds of times before.
John:
I'm not the first person to make a website with a shopping cart.
John:
And what I wanted to know was basically, okay, I'm writing one of these things.
John:
What's the right way to sort of structure it behind the scenes in terms of how do you model the cart and the orders and...
John:
how the inventory tracking and the transactions and the credit card processing and tracking payments.
John:
And like, you know, just if you're going to implement this, like, yeah, I know how it looks on the outside.
John:
That's easy enough.
John:
But how does it look on the inside?
John:
How do you correctly structure an e-commerce site?
John:
I'm like, well, this is totally a solved problem.
John:
So many people have done this so many times.
John:
It's got to be a library full of books about how to implement an e-commerce site.
John:
And guess what?
John:
There was not.
John:
There still isn't, I don't think.
John:
There is no book or, you know...
John:
I keep saying books, but there was no websites taught you this thing.
John:
I don't think YouTube existed yet.
John:
There's no one out there who's going to explain to you, here's how you implemented an e-commerce site.
John:
All there were were a bunch of engineers who worked at companies with e-commerce sites.
John:
They could say, well, here's how we did it.
John:
And if you were to hear those stories, mostly you'd probably be horrified because it's all a bunch of people who were learning their thing on the job because maybe they're the first people to make an e-commerce site.
John:
And it was their early days.
John:
But it seems like it was early in the grand scheme of things.
John:
But when I was coming in, I'm like, this is the thing that everybody does.
John:
There is a well-known state-of-the-art of here's the right way to build an e-commerce site, and there absolutely wasn't.
John:
And today, with iOS apps or Mac apps or choose whatever your platform is, you might think there's a way that everybody builds their apps, but as Malcolm Gacy just pointed out, that's not true.
John:
People do it all sorts of crazy ways.
John:
You have no idea what people do.
John:
especially small developers but even big companies if you were to look at their code bases you'd be like what is this it's like well it's the it's the thing that we have and it works and it's the residue of seven people who worked on it plus the original person and they all had different opinions about how things were done and you're like isn't there one agreed upon way to structure things and the answer is no
John:
So there's no place you can go to tell you at this level to say, what is the right way to break down a problem and structure this complicated thing?
John:
A, because it's really complicated, and B, because all the real successful examples look like gardens that have just grown over time for the most part.
John:
That said, I do have some advice on how to get out of this.
John:
I mean, it's not the advice to help me with my e-commerce site, but I basically say, well, I've just got to do it myself, and I just figured it out.
John:
uh, and did my own weird ass things like everyone else.
John:
But for, in the case of iOS specifically, uh, and, and I guess in the case of the modern web as well, this applies to, but didn't way back then there is a framework.
John:
iOS, iOS has frameworks there.
John:
You know, Apple provides these libraries, these APIs, this structure for you to build stuff.
John:
The best thing that you can do is to understand philosophically how
John:
How the framework sees things, how, if possible, how the individual people who made these frameworks, how the people who designed the overall system understand the philosophy that underpins the API.
John:
It's not going to tell you exactly how to structure things, but it will make sure that whatever you decide to do is not fighting against that.
John:
Understand how the pieces are meant to fit together.
John:
And so this framework is meant to be used in this way.
John:
We expect your state to be here.
John:
We expect this to be called back and forth like this.
John:
You can get the feel from that from just watching a WWDC session where someone explains their framework.
John:
They will present it in a way of saying, here's how we expect you to use this.
John:
Here's how it's designed to be used.
John:
And you can use it in all sorts of ways, especially with all these delegates and places where you can override things.
John:
You can put arbitrary code there, right?
John:
But the expectation is that you won't put completely arbitrary code that manipulates your model like in some background thread, right?
John:
Or you won't, you know, UI only has to be from the main thread.
John:
I forget if that's enforced now.
John:
But like there's lots of things that the framework is designed with this kind of practice in mind.
John:
You have to know those.
John:
And once you know those, it will guide you towards saying...
John:
ideas and then you can go build on top of that and come up with your own philosophy of how you want to divide things up or maybe decide if you want to do rx swift or any other sort of weird things but you're not starting from zero like we were back in the web 1.0 days where there were no frameworks there was no anything it's just like you and a blank page go
John:
you have a framework and there is absolutely a philosophy behind the framework.
John:
Sometimes the philosophy changes from library to library, by the way, like the VDSP philosophy is very different from like the UI window philosophy is very different from the NS table view philosophy.
John:
So there is a lot to know, but once you know that you can write a reasonable program and you will be able to answer intelligently the questions at an interview or whatever.
John:
So that's my suggestion.
Casey:
Yeah, I completely agree with you there.
Casey:
One of the wisest things I've ever been told, which was in the context of iOS development, but I think it's applicable basically everywhere, is my friend Jamie once told me, don't fight the frameworks.
Casey:
And that probably wasn't an original invention of his, but it was the first time I'd heard it.
Casey:
And I think that's absolutely true.
Casey:
And that's what you're saying, John.
Casey:
And the other thing I would say to build upon that is...
Casey:
even if you end up coming up with some bananas weird way to write your app, let's say RX Swift or something like that, then what I would recommend is knowing what the trade-offs are.
Casey:
Because even if you don't understand every possible way of architecting an app,
Casey:
If you understand the quote-unquote normal way of doing it, the MVC way of doing it, and even if you have your own pet way of doing it, as long as you can articulate what the reasons are, what the advantages and disadvantages are of that particular way of writing an app, then that will go quite far, or at least in my eyes, that would go quite far in an interview.
Casey:
You can come in and show me some sample code, and I can look at it and be really and truly disgusted with
Casey:
But if you tell me, well, this is why I did what I did and do so intelligently, then that's okay.
Casey:
Then I can work with this, you know?
Casey:
Finally, Nathan Miller asks, hey, I'm shopping for a new car, which happens to be an Audi A6, and I have the choice of 1920 or 21-inch wheels.
Casey:
What's the consideration?
Casey:
Why does it matter?
Casey:
Well, it matters because it can dramatically change a couple of things.
Casey:
One, how the car handles and two, perhaps even more so, how it behaves in terms of compliance and how cushy it is.
Casey:
And typically, the bigger the wheel, the less the sidewall and the less cushy it is.
Casey:
And additionally, to some degree, the bigger the wheel, the better it handles.
Casey:
It's not exactly one-to-one, but that's often the case from what I've understood.
Casey:
But if it were me, if I was looking between 1920 or 21 inch wheels, I would just look at whatever I thought was prettiest and go with that because I'm super vain.
Casey:
Marco, what's your thoughts?
Marco:
I think you covered it well.
Marco:
My decision is a little bit different.
Marco:
So for me, I live in the Northeast and we have winter, which means our roads are filled with potholes.
Marco:
And so we have a huge risk here of rim damage and unpleasant ride quality if you don't have a lot of tire to protect you.
Marco:
So the best option when you live somewhere with weather is to get the smallest wheel they offer, because that means they're going to fill the rest of the space with tire and you will have a nice cushy ride and anything else you're asking for trouble.
Marco:
Now, Nathan, according to his Twitter bio, lives in North Carolina.
Marco:
That's a lot more temperate.
Marco:
They still have weather, but it's more of the hurricane sort.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
Not so much the pothole sort.
Marco:
So it might not matter as much there.
Marco:
I don't know what the road conditions are like, but when you don't have winter, it matters a lot less.
Marco:
So maybe go somewhere in the middle there.
Marco:
But I usually find the absolute biggest ones with the skinniest tires...
Marco:
I actually don't care for that look a lot of the time.
Marco:
It's a little too in your face.
Marco:
So even if I lived somewhere pleasant that didn't have winter, I would probably, if my choices were 19, 20, 21, I'd probably go 20 and not 21.
Marco:
But definitely if you live somewhere with winter, go the smallest.
Casey:
You know, and I should also add that generally speaking, replacing a smaller tire, which implies a smaller wheel, is also going to be cheaper.
Casey:
So replacing a 21-inch tire is probably going to be a lot more expensive than replacing a 19-inch tire.
Casey:
But anyway, John, what are your thoughts?
John:
So on my Accords that I've been buying for many years now, they've been making the wheels bigger slowly, too.
John:
Of course, all car lines, like big wheels or bigger wheels have always trickled down from the expensive brands to the regular ones.
John:
So I forget what size my current ones are, maybe 17 or 18 inches, whereas my first Accords are like 15 inch.
John:
So they're getting bigger.
John:
Yeah.
John:
They're at the point now where, I mean, I think my wheels, if they're 18s, are smaller than any of these choices.
John:
But still, because I live in Massachusetts and live in New England and just the roads are destroyed here, I dented a rim on a pothole like two weeks after I got my car.
John:
And it was expensive to replace because it's a big wheel.
John:
So I would strongly urge you, if you live anywhere with lots of potholes,
John:
to not get the uh the low profile west now that my north carolina advice is still not to get the 21 inch for sure and to think twice about the 20 because this is where we get into the one where absolute values matter it's not three sizes right 19 is already a big wheel
John:
20 is huge and 21 is ridiculous.
John:
And unless the wheel archers are gigantic, there's not much room for tire in there.
John:
The ride quality over even reasonably okay roads is not going to be that great.
John:
If the sidewall, if the rubber part of your tire looked at from the sides of when they say the sidewall is what we're talking about, if that's like an inch and a half,
John:
At high speed, you might as well be running on your rims.
John:
Like, if you hit the smallest bump, unless your suspension is really, really good at quickly accounting for small motions, you're going to feel that up through the car, and you don't want to.
John:
And you're not racing.
John:
It's an A6.
John:
It's not a race car.
John:
It comes with an automatic.
John:
It's not even, you know, an automated manual.
John:
Like, get the 19s.
John:
I mean, unless they're super ugly, to Casey's point about being vain.
John:
there's no advantage of 20 or 21 that you're going to get that makes up for the ride quality difference now that said there are some car models that i read reviews of and people are like we tried the big wheels and we were shocked at how not awful they were so depending on the suspension technology there are a lot of fancy suspension technologies that actually are very good for that like first inch or so of travel of
John:
being very compliant and like absorbing that quickly before firming up a little bit either like a two-stage damper or those magnetic things where they get stiffer according to electrical impulses like there's all sorts of technology you can use to give a car that doesn't wallow in turns but it's also very good at absorbing small bumps and in those cars maybe you can get away with a slightly bigger wheel if you think it looks really good
John:
So, you know, my advice is to test drive, like decide how much you care about the different real choices and how much you care about how it looks.
John:
And if you really do think the 20 or the 21 inch looks so much better than 19 that you really want to try them out, test drive them on real roads at reasonable speeds and compare it to the 19.
John:
Most people's butts will prefer the 19 in those cases.
John:
But, you know, try it and find out.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Casper.
Marco:
And we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
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.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean it.
Casey:
Can I talk about people who don't know their email address?
John:
Because that's after show material.
John:
Sure.
John:
All right.
John:
This is a concern that has plagued me for many, many years.
John:
And we had some feedback about it, too.
John:
And this wasn't really a question.
John:
There's no question here.
John:
It's just another person complaining about a thing.
John:
I don't understand how...
John:
Mike McGuinn.
John:
We're going to go with that pronunciation?
John:
McWhegan.
John:
McWhegan, okay.
John:
Writes in because he has most recently discovered that dots are ignored in Gmail email addresses.
John:
The thing that most people, tech nerds, know, but...
John:
it has consequences that are surprisingly far-reaching.
John:
So if you do john.smith at gmail.com, it's exactly the same as johnsmith at gmail.com.
John:
It's exactly the same as j.o.h.n.s.
John:
The dots are ignored.
John:
Those all look like different email addresses to people, but to Google, they do not look different.
John:
This is relevant because it's kind of like a hash buckets problem, where there are many, many, many email addresses that all land in the same hash bucket and all land in the same Gmail inbox.
John:
And the problem of people not knowing their email address is if someone thinks that their email address is john.smith, but your email address you think is johnsmith, you're going to get all their email because they're going to type john.smith at gmail.com and the email is going to go to you.
John:
And this happens very frequently with people who have common names for email addresses.
John:
It also happens frequently.
John:
I can tell you this from experience with people who have short email addresses.
John:
One of my email addresses is only three characters long.
John:
And if you make one typo, it's easy to go from your three-letter email address to my three-letter email address.
John:
And now I'm getting all your mail.
John:
I do a thing in one of the slacks that we're all in where I post my misdirected email of the day because every day I get someone else's email.
John:
And occasionally they're funny or interesting or whatever.
John:
I don't want to post them for the world to see, but to a small slack, I want to show people the funny emails that I'm getting.
John:
But it's an epidemic.
John:
The reason it's unresolvable is because you can't tell the poor person whose email you're getting about it.
John:
You can't tell them, I just got your tax return.
John:
You can't tell them, I just got an eviction notice.
John:
You can't tell them, I just got, you know, sexy pictures from your girlfriend.
John:
You can't tell them your bill is overdue.
John:
You can't tell them anything because who do you tell?
John:
You don't know their email address because they think their email address is your email address.
John:
They open accounts under your email address.
John:
They like to register, in my experience, lots of people like to register for dating sites.
John:
It's surprising to them where people like to register for dating sites.
John:
Job things, like sign up here and we'll tell you when there's like temp work available.
John:
People obviously looking for jobs.
John:
Repeatedly sign up to job sites.
John:
This is the case where you can do something.
John:
I usually feel bad about it, but I don't anymore.
John:
When you sign up for an account on a legit site that you're trying to do something, you're trying to make a hotel reservation, get a job, go on a dating website, sign up for some service or whatever,
John:
I can't contact you because, again, I have no idea what your email address is because you think your email address is mine.
John:
But what I can do is log into your account.
John:
How can I log into your account?
John:
How do I know your password?
John:
I just say forgot password and it emails me a link so I can log in.
John:
And I go into that account and I either change the password to this person does not know their email address.
John:
This person does not know their email address dot com or something like that.
John:
Or I just close the account.
John:
I close it up, right?
John:
Then the person will register it again, and I'll close it again.
John:
And eventually, they'll get the picture.
John:
Oh, my word.
John:
Every time I register for an account, I don't get any email.
John:
But then in a second, I can't log in because I changed their email to change their password to something else.
John:
And then I close down their account.
John:
some sites this is where i learned the whole the menagerie the zoo of websites out there some sites will not let you change the email address associated with the website did you know that i know that because i'll go to there and i'll say change this email address and it's like nope sorry they'll send a confirmation email so then i try to use like mailinator or whatever like that service that lets you have like a spam email address and they'll reject mailinator because they're like oh we won't let you do that i haven't gone so far as to open new gmail accounts so i can switch my email address to it but i've come very close to it a few times
John:
many websites won't let you close your account or delete in any way unless you call them on this phone or send them like a registered letter by pony express but screw that it is an epidemic and sometimes i've even gone so far as trying to discern what they think their name is because i can see in their tax returns or in their eviction notice or whatever the hell email i'm getting and try to find who they are but there's just too much overlap like i can't how can i email everybody who you know named john smith and say
John:
Is this your email account?
John:
Is this your landlord?
John:
Is this your bill in Italian for party goods that you bought for a catered event six months ago?
John:
Is your daughter getting married?
John:
Is this your wedding registry?
John:
Do you pronounce it Syracusa?
John:
Yeah, I get a lot of stuff in Italian, as you might imagine.
John:
Half of it I can't read.
John:
I get attachments.
John:
I get spreadsheets.
John:
I get Word documents.
John:
I get PDFs.
John:
I get scans.
John:
I get photos.
John:
You name it, I get it.
John:
Uh, and it's not just that my short email address is at all of them.
John:
And so having something where the dots don't mean anything or the plus thing where you can add plus the end of it, it just, it just increases the service area of people getting other people's email.
John:
Um, so I, you know, this is, this is an idea for like a single serving site.
John:
It could be like,
John:
some way to put up information and say i got someone else's email if you think this is your email contact me like some sort of secure way to do that i don't know no one would ever go to the website the problem is these people don't know their own email addresses so they're never going to come there like the people who make legit typos you hear from once are people who just do not know their email address that's where you get the bad one and the final thing that factors into this besides the dots is apple in their infinite wisdom has had many domains for their email addresses they've had let's go
John:
mac.com me.com icloud.com and of course the employees have apple.com am i missing one in there i think there's others but i can't think of them yeah anyway um all of those tend to lead to the same email address so you know i always use the domain that i registered with but other people use newer ones but it's the same email address if it's you know john smith at mac.com is the same as john smith at me.com is the same as john smith at icloud.com which is not the same as john smith at apple.com
John:
So it just makes it worse, and I'm tired of getting other people's email, and so is Mike.
John:
He's tired of it, too.
John:
I have no solution.
John:
Oh, he actually ran into someone trying to create an Apple ID with his email address, and apparently the Apple ID registration will let you register the Apple ID, but then you get the other person's email, and they had to sort it out with Apple, and it's just...
John:
It was a case where the accounts cared about the difference, but the mail servers didn't care about the difference.
John:
That's how he describes it anyways.
John:
It just sounds like an incredible nightmare.
John:
And I don't know anything that's ever going to fix this.
John:
All I hope every day is that my misdirected email is at least entertaining and that I don't feel bad if it's not like someone's notice about like...
John:
They're lost child in the mall.
John:
Now they can't find them because I'm the only one who got the email about it.
Casey:
You know, it's also interesting that last I looked, and this may not be true anymore, but I'm pretty sure it's true.
Casey:
With Gmail, you can put a plus sign and put whatever garbage you want after that, and it'll be ignored.
Casey:
So one of my favorite pastimes...
Casey:
which I haven't done in a long time, but one of my favorite pastimes used to be to sign up for a new service where I was fairly confident that I was probably going to get my email address sold.
Casey:
And so, you know, I would use like Casey lists plus, I don't know,
Casey:
spam, you know, this name of spam company here at gmail.com.
Casey:
And so then as I see all the spam coming in, not to casey list at gmail.com or whatever my email address was back then, but it would be, you know, casey list plus some spam service at gmail.com.
Casey:
And I would be like, Oh, I see you some spam service.
Casey:
I know you're selling my information.
Casey:
I know it's you.
I know.
John:
You can't do any of that information anyway.
John:
Yeah, that was the plus thing I was talking about, which long predates Gmail.
John:
The plus thing is – I forget who did it first, but it was like – Oh, is that right?
John:
Yeah, it might have been a feature of like the send mail back in the day.
John:
It's a very old thing.
John:
I've never had the energy to try to do that.
John:
Because honestly, I just assume everyone's giving out my email address everywhere.
John:
And even if I did find out a specific site gave away my email, it's like, what am I going to do about it?
John:
Am I going to not use that site?
John:
Or am I going to complain to them?
Casey:
I just want to know, John.
Casey:
I just want to know.
John:
Anyway, all that means is that there's more ways for you to get misdirected email.
John:
Do you two get misdirected email to the degree I do?
John:
Or do you magically spam filter that does it just not bother you?
Casey:
Uh, I don't get very much misdirected email for my actual email address.
Casey:
However, I have held Casey at vt.edu for like 15 years.
Casey:
And there is a Casey Johnson somewhere in the world.
Casey:
I believe that's their name.
Casey:
And they love to sign up for all sorts of stuff with my old Virginia Tech email.
Casey:
And that happens constantly.
Casey:
And I almost never take any action on it whatsoever.
Yeah.
John:
You don't log in as them and see what's going on, close their account, change their email address?
Casey:
No, I just ignore it and delete it.
John:
I love it when there's like a notes field and I can put in, hello, this person does not know their email address.
John:
Is this you?
John:
Don't change it back to, and I put my actual email address in there because that's not your email address.
John:
It's mine.
John:
I like when I can send the messages.
John:
If I have lots of room in the box, I will say, do not change this back to what it was because it's not your email address at gmail.com.
Casey:
What about you, Marco?
John:
No, never.
Casey:
All right.
John:
That ends that.
Marco:
Yeah, sorry.
Marco:
I don't.
John:
No, it's fine.
John:
It's fine.
John:
Is Marco really that rare of a name?
John:
That's pretty surprising.
Marco:
Well, like marco.org is the domain.
Marco:
First, I don't use Gmail, so I think that takes care of a lot of it.
John:
Yeah, I suppose.
John:
I think you'd get lots of fake mail, like people saying marco at marco.org, which is a real email address, but they might put it and it's just like, oh, I got to put a fake thing and my name is Marco.
John:
Oh, marco at marco.org.
Marco:
I occasionally will get something like that, but it's very rare.
Marco:
Usually people who email that address, which is not really my address, but it'll sometimes get through, they're usually just people who are trying to reach me and just are guessing that's my email address, and it's never anything good.
John:
The thing that shocks me the most about the misdirected email is every time I get a misdirected email in Italian, I mark it as spam.
John:
And this is one thing that Gmail can't learn is that I don't speak any language except for English.
John:
Like every time I get any email that the entire body of the text is in a non-English language, Google knows.
John:
Google offers to translate it.
John:
I mark it as spam, and yet the Italian ones come in, and it's like, this is an important email that you probably want to see.
John:
Really?
John:
Is it?
John:
Do you think someone's writing to me Italian?
John:
Because I can't speak Italian.
Marco:
I can't read it.
Marco:
I mean, maybe they're thinking if you get enough emails in Italian, eventually you'll learn Italian.
John:
You're going to learn Italian, yeah.
John:
I mostly learn, I think mostly what I get in Italian emails is invoices, like things that people have purchased, and I go through the item.
John:
But sometimes I want to ask a teacher, what are they buying?
John:
What is this?
John:
Are these human organs?
John:
Are these like, is this illegal drugs?
John:
I don't know what all these people are buying.
John:
Thank you.