Penny Wise, Pound Foolish
Casey:
Someone says Syracuse sounds really nasal.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Welcome to the show.
Casey:
We used a different version of the theme song last week.
Casey:
And so our friend of the show, Jonathan Mann, that's M-A-N-N, who is the guy who wrote the initial theme song and the slightly beloved Bleeps and Bloops version, which is the one that John likes but nobody else does.
Casey:
He took it upon himself to write a new version, and we sprinkled that into the show, or I should say Marco sprinkled that into the show.
Marco:
Did you hear, apparently, on the After Dark for this week's Back to Work, Merlin Mann, our friend Merlin, covered it briefly and said he was working on a full cover.
Marco:
I'm very much looking forward to hearing that because the brief part that he did sounded really good.
Marco:
I didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him relax.
Marco:
d with an added f sharp hey merlin you should finish that up and we will play it um which of course does nothing for you this is like you should work for free for exposure he does this sometimes he does like style parodies like he did a lot of that with the uh what was it the male chimp uh sometimes there's a man
John:
But anyway, if Muriel's listening and he's doing a style parody, I would like to request an REM style parody.
John:
You can do like, you know, murmurs or fables or REM.
John:
It's right in his wheelhouse.
Marco:
speaking of working for exposure well we should get to the penny arcade thing but first we have some follow-up who wants to talk about photo stream not it john follow-up defaults to you all right i mean like we keep talking about photo stream uh and i don't even remember where this link came from but oh yeah uh
John:
Dave, whose last name I won't attempt to pronounce because he can't agree on how he wants people to pronounce his last name, but it starts with a CH.
John:
I think it's Chartier.
John:
I think that's safe.
John:
He changes his mind.
John:
I've heard him change his mind.
John:
Anyway, he posted a link to this Knowledge Base article that looks like it is recent.
John:
It has a recent date on it, and it looks like it's in response to confusion about PhotoStream.
John:
And the relevant passage here, it provides some information that previously was not provided by any of the other documents.
John:
And it's not information about how PhotoStream works.
John:
It's information about motivations.
John:
And that I think is what a lot of people have been missing, because you can explain all these rules and give out all these numbers and, you know, put all these facts about it.
John:
But it's like, but why?
John:
Why?
John:
What are you trying to do with PhotoStream?
John:
So here's the important sentence.
John:
The photos that you upload to my photo stream are stored in iCloud for 30 days to give your devices plenty of time to connect to iCloud and download them.
John:
That's the key piece of missing information that I think is leading to a lot of confusion.
John:
What's the point of photo stream?
John:
It's there to get your photos somewhere.
John:
that's not an individual device for 30 days so all your other devices can pull the stuff down so all those limits and the numbers and everything or whatever don't matter because bottom line is it's supposed to just be a temporary holding pen for your stuff uh and it's supposed to stay there long enough for you to pull it down on your other devices so that nixes photo stream has any sort of solution to any sort of everpix like solution to you know hold all my photos for me
John:
It doesn't matter what the limits are.
John:
It doesn't matter anything else.
John:
The bottom line is it's not going to be there for more than 30 days.
John:
It's just a holding area.
John:
So I think that clarifies for me.
John:
And it's nice to see that from Apple because that was my impression of how it worked, reading all the other things.
John:
But seeing Apple explain, you know, that simple sentence explaining the motivation of the service makes it clear that this is just not an accidental implementation detail and that soon it will hold all your photos or whatever.
John:
The intention of this feature is just a holding bin and Apple is saying it themselves.
John:
So I feel a little bit, I feel like I understand PhotoStream a little bit more now.
John:
And now I know enough to not really pay attention to it, no matter what they do with the limits.
John:
And speaking of PhotoStream, I threw another link in the show notes here that I have almost nothing to say about except for here's another one of these things.
John:
It's called SpaceMonkey.com, triple dub SpaceMonkey.com.
John:
And it looks like some kind of hardware device combined with a software service, kind of like EverPix.
Marco:
The website is... It actually looks just like Transporter, actually.
Marco:
If you look at it, if you read into it a little bit, and we should disclose Transporter is a frequent sponsor of our show, so take this with a grain of salt.
Marco:
However, it basically looks like Transporter, but with worse pricing.
John:
Well, but they have a whole software component, too, where it's more like a media manager.
John:
It's not just like arbitrary file storage.
John:
Transporter is sort of like application agnostic.
John:
It is a place for data, and what data you put there is totally up to you.
John:
And this looks like it's trying to be a hybrid of Transporter and Everpix.
John:
But I looked on this website for a while, and it's totally like a...
John:
web 3.0 e kind of uh bootstrap uh built website with animated stuff i could not for the life of me figure out any like actual technical information about this thing so yeah it's pretty light on the information and and pretty heavy on like the the marketing titles and and graphics but actual information is hard to come by on this site it could be awesome could be terrible i don't know i just wanted to throw it out there as yet another one of these things that is trying to solve the problem of where we put all our junk
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the final thing on this topic is we talked briefly about Box yesterday and how it was kind of like an enterprise-focused version of Dropbox.
John:
And I either said or strongly implied that Box could be self-hosted.
John:
And I got an email from a Box employee saying that Box is not self-hosted.
John:
Also, it's not called Box.net anymore.
John:
That was the old name.
John:
that I said in the past show, it's it's they dropped the dotnet.
John:
Anyway, it's not self hosted, they host it for you.
John:
And the difference is between this and Dropbox, according to this box employee are that they manage their own data centers, they don't put stuff in s3.
John:
So there's a little bit more of
John:
you know, deterministic security about the data.
John:
It's not just putting another bucket through another third party.
John:
It's just one, you know, box stores the data.
John:
They have admin tools and reporting and stuff that gives them more oversight on the data.
John:
So if you need some sort of auditing and reporting, they can provide that to you instead of again, relying on Amazon to do that.
John:
And they're compliant with a bunch of certifications and all the good stuff.
John:
So thanks to the Box employee for the clarification.
John:
And I think if you go to Box.net, it redirects.
John:
But anyway, go to Box.com and you'll find it.
Marco:
It seems like Box is... I almost just said Box.net because that's always how I've thought of it.
Marco:
It's one of the services that has a billion users, effectively, and...
Marco:
Geeks in our circles almost never even considered existing.
Marco:
Almost never think about it.
Marco:
Because it's just not used.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
It's not used by Mac nerds with laptops.
Marco:
It's used in the enterprise a lot.
Marco:
And a lot of PC users use it.
Marco:
And it's like StumbleUpon.
Marco:
When StumbleUpon first became big.
Marco:
Or even more recently when Pinterest started growing like crazy.
Marco:
And the entire tech geek world was basically ignoring it because it was so popular among women.
Marco:
And the tech geek world is so dominated by men, at least the online press part of it, that it was invisible to that world.
Marco:
And all of a sudden we realized, oh my god, this is huge.
Marco:
I think that's how Box is.
Marco:
It's really massive and tons of people use it, but we hardly ever see it.
John:
Yeah, now that I'm using it every day now, and it works similarly to Dropbox, but with an enterprise band.
Marco:
Could they have picked a different name at least?
Marco:
I mean, if they were going to go from Box.net to something else, could they have not made this very similar to Dropbox service named Box?
John:
Yeah, well, maybe that's a strength in the enterprise.
Marco:
You don't want to drop your software.
Marco:
Use Box.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
I thought that Box predated Dropbox.
Casey:
That is completely not fact-checked, but I thought that was the case.
John:
It's been around for a while anyway.
John:
It's not some new thing.
Marco:
Wasn't there something called xDrive before BMW used it?
Marco:
Wasn't it something kind of similar that would give you an xDrive letter on your Windows PC?
Marco:
In case you know about this, obviously John wouldn't.
Casey:
I actually don't know about this, but it sounds like something that would be for the Windows platform.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
The chat is saying that Box.net, because at the time it was called Box.net is 2005, Dropbox 2008.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Obviously, that matters a lot now.
Marco:
So let's move on to our first aid results.
Marco:
Casey, how did you do running disk utility as John assigned us in the last episode?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So Captain Paranoid explained to us that we should be running disk utility on an hourly basis and verifying everything under the sun.
Marco:
No, no, no.
Marco:
Repair.
Marco:
You've got to repair.
Marco:
Verify.
Marco:
Why bother verifying?
Marco:
You've got to repair.
Casey:
My apologies.
Casey:
You are correct, sir.
Casey:
To repair everything under the sun.
Casey:
And this is a real pain in the butt if you...
Casey:
run on a laptop like i do because then you got to reboot into recovery mode blah blah blah well anyway so i as i've mentioned numerous times i have two uh 15 inch high-res anti-glare macbook pros with optical drives they're both day and night yeah exactly that's that that well actually you could say that because one's work one's not but anyway uh the point is the point is
Casey:
I tried it on both of them, and one has an SSD, one does not.
Casey:
And both of them had errors which were able to be fixed by disk utility.
Casey:
So as much as I begrudge Captain Paranoid for making me worry about something that I didn't really feel like worrying about, it ended up it was for the best.
Casey:
So thank you, John.
John:
And by the way, I do recommend running verify on your boot drive because then you don't have to reboot like the common case like of like, oh, everything is fine.
John:
You will be able to just run verifying your boot is you still have to walk away from your computer because it will totally make your computer unusable.
John:
But just going to do it when you're going for lunch or something.
John:
And most of the time when you come back, it will say, oh, verify checked in.
John:
It's fine.
John:
I only recommend repair and externals because if verify finds errors, the very next thing you're going to do is repair.
John:
And it takes a similar amount of time to do both verify and repair.
John:
So on your boot drive, your only choice is verify.
John:
So do that on external drives, you might as well just do repair because that's what that's what the next move is going to be anyway.
John:
if there are any errors.
John:
And if there's not any errors, they're equivalent.
Marco:
Here's a question.
Marco:
Is there much of a reason or even is it possible to do this on a network time machine?
Marco:
So we have it with the Synology setup where Synology is using open source whatever component to host time machine shares, which I think are stored as giant sparse images or something like that.
Marco:
Does any part of this apply to those?
John:
Yeah, no, any volume you can mount, any HFS plus volume you can mount, you can do this to.
Marco:
Are sparse images HFS Plus internally?
John:
Yeah, underneath there is an HFS Plus volume.
Marco:
Okay.
John:
Like, that's what mounts when it does its thing.
Casey:
All right, then.
Casey:
Yeah, but I didn't see it in disk utility.
Casey:
I don't believe.
John:
Well, you have to make it mount.
John:
Like, Time Machine does this sneaky thing where it'll connect to the synology and mount the volume.
John:
If you look at your desktop, you can see it appear sometimes, but it's not...
John:
It makes it all go away when the backup is done.
John:
Sometimes you don't see it at all.
Marco:
And you can manually mount the share just in Finder.
John:
Yeah, just double-click the sparse bundle that's there.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Moving right along.
John:
Well, hold on, hold on.
John:
What about you?
John:
We've got way more to do.
Marco:
I might not have done my homework.
Marco:
There's a surprise.
Marco:
Well, John told me not to run it while you're using it, and so I've been using it.
John:
Well, you could have run it on your external drives.
John:
You have more than one drive, right?
John:
All right.
John:
Well, if you didn't do your homework, it's okay.
John:
Lots of other people did who filled out the survey.
John:
I should have mentioned that after the show, I should have done this during the show, but after the show last week, I said, you know what?
John:
We should get some information on this.
John:
I wonder how many people listened to the last episode and decided I'm going to run disk utility on my disks just like they talked about on the show.
John:
And I wanted to know how they did.
John:
So I tweeted out a link that said, hey, if you listened to the show last week and decided to run disk utility, tell me how it turned out.
John:
It was a two-question survey.
John:
Uh, and I tweeted, I think I did it on app.net and, uh, and Marco put it in the show notes, but it wasn't mentioned on the show.
John:
Uh, and we got a lot of people replying both before and after the survey replying like, Hey, I listened to your show and I did stuff.
John:
And I put a couple of, I grabbed a couple of tweets here.
John:
One of them, one person said this from D Shep ran disc utility last week and it reported errors rebooted and repair was not possible.
John:
So it did verify it and it reported it was okay.
John:
Lots of things like where they'll run it and it will say there's a problem.
John:
They'll try to repair it.
John:
It will say, sorry, couldn't repair it.
John:
And then it's okay.
John:
Or there'll be errors and there won't be errors.
John:
There'll be errors and there won't be errors.
John:
And that's not reassuring to anybody involved.
John:
Like, oh, no, I said there was errors, but now there's not.
John:
I guess everything's fine.
John:
But instead you get this feeling of unease about, hmm, you know, I don't know about that.
John:
Here's another one.
John:
Ran disk utility in my startup disk.
John:
This is by RYB.
John:
On my MacBook Air for the first time in over a year.
John:
It fixed a free block count error, which freed up 70 gigabytes.
John:
Crazy.
John:
So that person got 70 gigabytes of disk space back because apparently HFS Plus had lost track of the free block count.
John:
Wow.
John:
And, you know, it's like they're trees, right?
John:
So if you have a missing, if the whole subtree goes missing in the metadata, it could potentially be pointing to lots of information.
John:
So he got 70 gigs back.
John:
This is from EVQ, ran disk utility, got an error, followed the instructions, then disk utility recovery found no errors.
John:
Again, spooky.
John:
And lots of reports of what happened to me with my time machine volume, which is it had errors that I went to repair and it said, sorry, can't repair.
John:
And then after that, the disk was unmountable.
John:
Uh, and that leads to something else I should have talked about last week.
John:
Verify disk is in theory, a read-only operation.
John:
Repair disk is going to make changes to your disk.
John:
Those changes may be harmful to your disk, but if it's got errors anyway, you can say, well, it had errors, but it seemed to be working fine.
John:
Uh,
John:
You can take that into account and say, look, this thing has errors.
John:
But before I even try to repair, let me make sure that I have like this gets back to the multiple backups thing.
John:
You know, be aware that attempting to repair an error, as I described in the last week's show, could make the disk even worse off than it was.
John:
It doesn't mean that it was you should have really used that backup before, but it could make things worse.
John:
So always have multiple backups before you start messing with anything, before you start writing data to any disk, make sure that is not your only backup.
John:
and I don't know what else to do.
John:
People are like, if found errors, what should I do?
John:
If that's your only backup and it has errors, it's like, well, is your source disk okay?
John:
Because if your source disk is okay, make a second backup from it now before you start screwing with the other one, right?
John:
Don't just rush into it.
John:
More than one backup, good.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
Yeah, I would say that your story last week about how both your primary volume and your time machine backup were both corrupted, that is as big an ad as any for...
John:
for super duper clones and cloud backup store services like that that's that just shows you right there like you know just one volume and it's time machine backup are not really enough yeah i mean like and the thing is if i had maybe if i checked more frequently i one of them went bad first and then i would have been able to you know fix it from one to the other but like i maybe i waited too long didn't feel paranoid soon enough and hadn't checked it
Casey:
I was going to say we saw a really good tweet from Grady Neely who said, in the Army we had a saying pertaining to critical equipment, two is one, one is none, so it goes for backups.
Casey:
And I think that's absolutely true.
Casey:
If you only have one backup, that's effectively not really having a backup at all, especially if it's co-located with wherever your computer lives most of the time.
Casey:
Which is why the three of us are so excited for CrashPlan or Backblaze or whatever your online cloud backup system of choice is.
Casey:
It's really nice to have that as well as something local or many things local.
John:
Although I dread ever having to restore from – because that really is like my last, last, last resort.
John:
That's why I like to have multiple local backups.
John:
And I really want to have the cloud backup in case the house burns down.
John:
But if it doesn't burn down, I don't want to have to go to that.
John:
Or unless I'm like, you know, away from my computer and I want to grab a file from backup, then it's kind of handy to use whatever the iOS app is for your thing and grab stuff.
Marco:
Yeah, cloud backup is like, you can't really test it without just trying to pull a file off of it.
Marco:
You don't have that same kind of reassurance that you do with a super duper clone.
Marco:
You can just boot from it and just see if everything's okay.
Marco:
Boot from it once a month or something and just test it.
Marco:
You can't really do that with cloud backup.
Marco:
You can try to pull a file off of it, but it's kind of a process.
Marco:
And if you ever do have to restore, do a full restore for when you might be downloading a terabyte of data off the internet, which might take a while.
Marco:
So it is always good.
Marco:
The cloud backup really is your last resort.
Marco:
That said, though, I think...
Marco:
Regular volume plus time machine plus backblaze.
Marco:
I think that's a very good setup for most people.
Marco:
Geeks like us, you know, if you have extra hard drives lying around, yeah, make a super duper clone also.
Marco:
But regular plus time machine plus a backblaze, I think is fine.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And or the other alternative is, like I said, run disk utility more often so that you don't end up a situation because they probably don't both go bad at exactly the same time.
John:
Right.
John:
One of them goes first.
John:
And if you're running it off enough,
John:
you'll get in a situation where one went bad but one is good and you can quickly you know dupe out a second backup uh and don't by the way if you have if you only have two things your computer and a time machine disk and the time machine and the time machine disk goes bad don't erase the time machine disk and then try to copy the backup because as soon as you erase the time machine disk now your data is in one place and that is somewhere you never ever ever want to be
John:
Like it's you just don't ever be in that situation.
John:
Two places is bad enough.
John:
If you have two places and one is bad, a bad backup is better than no backup.
John:
Do not erase that disc.
John:
Just don't touch it.
John:
Put it aside.
John:
Get a new disc back up to that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
This is why we want companies to take care of this stuff for us, because this is way too much for a regular person to handle.
John:
Anyone listening to this is like, I don't even want to think about backups.
John:
I agree.
John:
I don't want to think about it either.
John:
And I also don't want to think about BitRod and the fact that none of these things, all these HFS plus checks are just checking the metadata.
John:
They're not checking the data.
John:
The data could be totally hosed.
John:
We have no idea what state the data is in.
John:
I don't want to think about it.
John:
All right.
John:
So the survey, the survey that I sent out there...
John:
I think maybe the sample group may be slightly biased because it's I guess it's people who listen to a nerdy podcast or who follow a nerdy person on Twitter.
John:
And maybe those people are more likely to do complicated things with their discs that in turn could cause more errors or something.
John:
The one thing the survey has going for it is
John:
people didn't know whether they were going to find errors or not before they ran disk utility, right?
John:
So it's not like only the people who found errors filled this out.
John:
The survey was, if you listened to the episode and ran disk utility, what did you find?
John:
And none of those people I would imagine knew beforehand what they were going to find.
John:
So despite the sampling, the self-selection of the people who take the survey, I'm hoping it's not like only the people who found errors filled out the survey and the people who didn't find errors didn't bother to fill out the survey.
John:
Because I guess, I don't know.
John:
I mean...
John:
I don't know how statistically valid this is, let's just say.
John:
But anyway, you guys want to guess at the results.
John:
I'll tell you that at the time I pulled this data from it, 758 people had responded to the survey.
John:
Wow.
John:
The first question was, this was how it was word.
John:
If you listened to episode 40 of Accidental Tech Podcast, subsequently ran Disk Utility's first aid function on one or more of your HFS Plus volumes.
John:
So this encompasses all their disks.
John:
I didn't want to ask them individually or whatever.
John:
Did it find any errors?
John:
So if you have five disks and you find errors on one of them, you would say yes to this.
John:
It's just basically saying you ran disk utility on all your stuff.
John:
Did your stuff have any errors?
John:
And I didn't ask them how many disks you have or how many volumes you have because I didn't want this to be too complicated.
Marco:
Do you want to do a sponsor read to build suspense in the middle of this?
John:
Oh, and then the second question was if you found errors, was the function able to repair it?
John:
So I want you two to guess.
John:
What you think, you know, did you find errors percentage-wise, not numbers-wise?
John:
You guys to guess, and then after the sponsor break, I'll tell you the answer.
John:
But first, you should guess.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
My guess is the percentage of respondents who had errors found was 30%.
Casey:
I will guess...
Casey:
70%.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Which is aggressive.
Casey:
But I'm hoping that you're right, Marco, because then maybe John will stop whining about HFS+.
John:
Never.
John:
It's like the price is right.
John:
One dollar, one dollar.
Marco:
Are we doing price is right rules or closest wins?
Marco:
This is important.
John:
We're going to do closest wins.
Marco:
This episode is brought to you in part by our friends at Warby Parker.
Marco:
They sponsored us a couple months ago.
Marco:
They're awesome.
Marco:
Warby Parker believes that prescription glasses simply should not cost $300 or more.
Marco:
They should even be affordable enough for people to accessorize and have multiple pairs if they want to.
Marco:
Warby Parker bypasses traditional channels and sells higher quality, better looking prescription eyewear online at a fraction of the price, starting at just $95 at warbyparker.com.
Marco:
Their designs are vintage inspired with a contemporary twist.
Marco:
Translation, you look cool.
Marco:
Every pair is custom fit with anti-reflective, anti-glare, polycarbonate prescription lenses.
Marco:
And every pair comes with a hard case and cleaning cloth, so you don't need to buy any overpriced accessories with them.
Marco:
Buying glasses online sounds like it would be risky.
Marco:
How would you know whether they would fit or whether they'll look good on you?
Marco:
Warby has you covered, and actually quite impressively, if I may say so.
Marco:
First, their website has a really helpful tool that uses your computer's webcam to give you a preview of how the glasses will look on your face.
Marco:
They can even help you measure your eyes and your face in this little tool to get your fit exactly right when you order.
Marco:
The best part of this is their home try-on program.
Marco:
You can borrow up to five pairs of glasses risk-free.
Marco:
They will ship them to you for free.
Marco:
You can try them on in the comfort of your own home for five days.
Marco:
Then you can send them back with a prepaid free return label.
Marco:
You don't pay anything this whole process, and there's no obligation to buy.
Marco:
They also offer prescription and non-prescription polarized sunglasses.
Marco:
I love polarized sunglasses personally.
Marco:
If you ever had non-polarized, you really don't know what you're missing.
Marco:
And this really, you know, $95 as the base cost is really a great price even for non-prescription sunglasses.
Marco:
That's really good for polarized sunglasses.
Marco:
So we did the spot a few months ago, and I had my wife, Tiff, come in because she had ordered two pairs from them to talk about it on the ad.
Marco:
And I asked her for an update tonight, see how she's liking them.
Marco:
And she still uses them almost every day, and she still really likes them.
Marco:
She has one pair of sunglasses, one pair of prescription.
Marco:
And she said the hard case that they come with is really nice and high quality, so she loves that too.
Marco:
And so, yeah, I went back and looked at them tonight.
Marco:
I could actually use some sunglasses myself for driving because my current pair has kind of fallen apart.
Marco:
Because I bought it from some shady shop in New Zealand for no money, and it has no brand name.
Marco:
God knows what it is.
Marco:
But yeah, so I'm looking forward to these myself because they're really good.
Marco:
So what's also great about Warby Parker is that they believe in giving back to the world.
Marco:
Almost a billion people worldwide lack access to glasses, and they can't effectively learn or work.
Marco:
So for every pair of glasses that Warby Parker sells, they give another pair to someone in need through nonprofits such as VisionSpring.
Marco:
This is a really great company, a really great message with really great people working behind it.
Marco:
So go to WarbyParker.com, that's W-A-R-B-Y Parker.com, and check out their great selection of premium quality affordable eyewear.
Marco:
Browse around, get yourself a home try-on kit risk-free.
Marco:
And if you decide to order your own pair, use coupon code ATP for free three-day shipping.
Marco:
So thanks a lot to Warby Parker for sponsoring the show.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I told this story when they sponsored in episode 26.
Casey:
And when I did the free try-on thing...
Casey:
I ordered like two or three pairs that I was pretty confident were my style and then two pairs that I didn't think were me at all.
Casey:
And it ended up that because I was able to try those, I actually ended up going with one of the pairs of sunglasses that I didn't expect to like at all.
Casey:
And I just thought, eh, let me see what happens.
Casey:
And I love those sunglasses.
Casey:
And inevitably, I will break them because I'm a klutz and I always destroy my sunglasses.
Casey:
But I will be devastated when I do because I really, really do like them.
John:
You mentioned the case that they come in.
John:
I've been wearing glasses since I was in third grade or whatever.
John:
This is the most impressive glasses case, the one that came with my prescription sunglasses, that I've ever seen in my life.
John:
It is gigantic, and it looks like you could run it over with a car and your glasses would be fine.
John:
The little box that they ship you with the glasses in it was impressive, but the case, I was also impressed by that.
John:
And it's nice having prescription sunglasses for the first time.
John:
I feel all fancy.
Ha ha ha!
Casey:
All right, so... So what were the results of your survey, John?
Casey:
So, Marco, you said 30%?
Marco:
I said 30%, and you said 70%.
John:
Now, what do you think is reasonable for, like, the job of the file system is basically to keep track of where your crap is, and...
John:
Marco's number at 30% is that you're saying it's okay that on 30% of the Macs out there, assuming our sampling is significant, is representative of the mass of Mac users, it's okay for about 30% of the time for HFS Plus to screw up and for there to be potentially data-destroying errors.
John:
And Casey's saying 70% to try to be dramatic, but can we all agree that 70% would be...
John:
that if 70% of the Macs out there had errors on their, you know, the HFS Plus errors on the disks, again, not hardware problems, but just software problems like not keeping track.
John:
So that would be unreasonable, I think.
Casey:
Well, sure, anything more than zero in theory is unreasonable.
John:
Well, no, it's like you have to expect that one or 2% are going to have problems.
John:
Some person kicked the plug out or there was some crazy, like there's always going to be a little bit of bugs or whatever.
John:
But I think once you start to get into double-digit percentages,
John:
That's not like an aberration like there was a power outage in the middle of a thing and I didn't notice and it just built up or, you know, cosmic rays or whatever.
Marco:
Yeah, I would say like 10% should be cause for concern.
John:
Yeah, because then that I would say anything over, you know, double digit percent is like that's come some kind of
John:
systemic issue like bugs in the software that are not just cosmic rays or one-off occurrences or, or hardware related, or maybe they could be hardware related, but it's, it seems like a lot.
John:
So I don't know what I expected these numbers to be, but I've kind of felt like they were going to be like, my guess would have been like 15, 18%.
John:
That would have been my guess for, cause like 10% seemed low to me.
John:
Uh, but surely it's not on like more than maybe 20% because I, I,
John:
I know I find the errors and I know if I go up to someone's computer and they've never run disk utility, they find errors.
John:
But I figure, again, people who listen to this podcast are probably nerds and they know about disk utility.
John:
I didn't have to explain to anybody where it was.
John:
Like all these people found it themselves and ran it and did all this stuff themselves.
John:
So maybe they'd run it before or whatever.
John:
But here are the results.
John:
The results were, you know, did you find any errors?
John:
Again, this is across all the disks that you tried and I didn't ask them how many.
John:
44.3% found errors on their disks.
Casey:
Oh, nicely done, Marco.
John:
Marco is closer, but that is shockingly close to half.
John:
That's really bad.
John:
Yeah, and that is much higher than I thought it would be.
John:
I was thinking 18%, 20%, maybe 25%.
John:
But 44%, that's grim, I think.
John:
Second question was, if the errors were found, was the repair function able to repair the errors?
Yeah.
John:
So of the people who found errors, eight people didn't attempt to repair or didn't answer that question, right?
John:
So I'm giving you percentages of, like, out of all the people who attempted to fix the error, what percentage of those people with disk utility, not with a third-party tool, not with anything else, how successful was disk utility repairing the errors?
John:
Care to guess what the percentage is there?
Marco:
I would say probably 75%.
Casey:
Oh, see, I think it would be more than that.
Casey:
I would think it would be closer to 90%.
John:
Marco gets it again, 73.17%.
John:
So you basically have a one in four shot, a little bit worse than a one in four shot of Disk Utility being able to fix your errors.
John:
Again, I don't know how representative these results are, but they are worse than I expected because I would have expected errors to be on far fewer than 44%.
John:
And I would have expected Disk Utility's fix rate to be like, it seems like to me, I just expect it to always fix it.
John:
I would say, oh, 95%, something like that.
John:
73% is not good.
John:
So that shows those errors weren't just one tiny little error that's easy to fix, but the type of errors Disk Utility couldn't fix.
John:
Now, some people reported to me that if you boot into single user mode and you do FSCK manually, which is more or less the same thing as Disk Utility does under the covers, but in single user mode, you don't have any contention for the catalog file.
John:
You're the only process running and stuff.
John:
And some people were saying that it actually does repairs that Disk Utility can't do.
John:
I'm not sure how much truth there is to that, but...
John:
That is one more tool in your toolkit.
John:
If you get a disk utility, it says it can't repair, you can reboot into single user mode if you're comfortable with that.
John:
And I feel like I shouldn't explain it because if you don't know what it is, then you're not comfortable with it.
John:
And run FSCK with a couple of options and have it attempt to repair your volume.
John:
Again, if you're not comfortable with this, don't try to do it.
John:
It's very easy to do the wrong thing from the command line in single user mode.
John:
But if you are comfortable with it, it's worth a try.
Casey:
That's pretty bad.
Casey:
And I don't want to encourage you to go on another file system rant.
Casey:
Why not?
Casey:
Well, we haven't beaten this horse.
Casey:
John has beaten this horse.
Casey:
But anyway, the file system is one job, which is not to screw up your data.
Casey:
And HFS Plus is just not cutting the mustard apparently.
John:
And that's not even your data.
John:
Forget it.
John:
Who knows what state your data is?
John:
This is just keeping track of where stuff is.
John:
Is that stuff the same as your data?
John:
Is it the same as when you wrote it?
John:
Who the hell knows?
John:
HFS Plus doesn't care.
John:
All it's saying is, I put something on disk, and I'm supposed to keep track of where it is.
John:
And this file name has this data associated with it.
John:
I don't know what that data is.
John:
It could all be zeros.
John:
It could be just random garbage by now.
John:
But I just want to keep track of that bucket of random garbage that is a certain length.
John:
And that's the job of the file system.
John:
Keep track of the information about where the files are.
John:
We wish that it would also say, oh, and by the way, that data is the same as when you wrote it.
John:
But HFS Plus says nothing.
John:
It's totally silent.
John:
Just trusts the hardware and says, yeah, it's probably what you wrote.
John:
If it isn't, there's nothing we can do about it now, and you have no way of knowing.
John:
A lot of people have talked about the, what is it called?
John:
There's some tool that I can never remember the name of that I've actually, I think I bought it way back in the day.
John:
I think I tried it once.
John:
They will crawl your disk and put little checksums, like in each directory checksums of all the files.
John:
And so in theory, down the road,
John:
you can then rechecks on them and compare it against the contents of the file.
John:
And at least then you'll know if, okay, well, at one point I made checksums of all the files in these directories and it said X, and now I'm running checksums and it says Y. So something must've changed and I can't tell you what it was and I can't fix it.
John:
And I can't even tell you if the state of your disk when I ran the checksums was in a known good state, it was just merely the state it was when I ran the original checksums, but at least it's something but it does have to crawl your whole disk, it does have to read every single byte of data off your disk to make the checksums.
John:
The first time anyway, and the second time are probably
John:
trust file dates or something like that to be more efficient about it but this is i don't really recommend this tool because it's it really beats up on your discs the first time you run it and it's really not the correct solution the correct solution is a file system that does this when the data is on its way in and out and we don't have that yet so we just you know cross our fingers and pray
Casey:
So what you're recommending is FAT32 for macOS.
John:
No, I'm recommending just – I can recommend the episode of the debug podcast I was on recently where me and several other people talked about file systems and Mavericks, among other things.
John:
And part one of two was posted because we talked for like three and a half hours.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, it was really good.
Marco:
I'll link to that in the show notes.
Marco:
That was definitely worth listening to.
John:
My favorite thing about it was that two of the people there are ex-Apple employees.
John:
And it's a lot better than just people who have seen Apple from afar talking about stuff.
John:
On that show, the rest of us could offer opinions on what we think Apple might or might not be like inside or might or might not be doing and then have actual ex-Apple people give thumbs up or thumbs down on whether that sounds reasonable.
John:
And that was exciting.
John:
The two Apple people were...
John:
Who was it?
John:
Ryan Nielsen and Daniel Jalkit.
John:
I think I got the names right.
John:
If I didn't, Marco will fix it in post.
Casey:
Yeah, that's right.
John:
And then Guy English was on it too.
John:
Rene Ritchie.
John:
You know, those guys.
Casey:
Well, it was only one guy.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So do we want to talk about Xbox One?
Marco:
Yeah, I think we should.
Marco:
I think it's important.
Marco:
John?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Xbox One launched very close to the PlayStation 4.
John:
PlayStation 4 was making a big deal because they sold a million units in North America in 24 hours.
John:
Xbox One launched and had its own little press release.
John:
They said it sold more than one million consoles worldwide in less than 24 hours.
John:
It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but the bottom line is I think both are more or less supply-constrained on launch.
John:
I talked about it last week that just because the early adopters are rabid for a new console, as I imagine they would be, doesn't necessarily mean that this console generation is going to do as well as the previous or the one before that.
John:
But it definitely means that if they had both tanked on launch, it would be a very, very bad sign.
John:
So they're not both tanking on launch.
John:
So far, so good for the new console generation.
John:
They're selling out.
John:
And this is a little bit more impressive than the Xbox One because it's $100 more than the PlayStation 3, and people did not appear to be price sensitive or the supply was not enough to reveal the price sensitivity of consumers because everyone who wanted a PS4 on lunch day bought them all, and same thing with the Xbox One.
John:
So we'll revisit this in a couple months to see how the consoles are doing, but so far, so good.
Marco:
Yeah, I do wonder how many of the buyers were scalpers.
Marco:
Because with any new electronics launch that's high profile, which is pretty much every new game console and every new iPhone and most new tablets and stuff, there's always a pretty large contingent of scalpers who are just buying it to put it on eBay or to bring it to countries where it isn't available yet to charge a premium device.
Marco:
So opening day numbers or opening weekend numbers, you should always go into it with some skepticism because some of it is going to be that.
Marco:
And for different products, it's a different portion of it.
Marco:
But it's certainly always substantial.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I think it would be more interesting to see what happens in two months, five months, just over the next year, we'll see.
Marco:
And I also still want to see what happens when any of these consoles gets a really good hit game that's exclusive to that console.
Marco:
Because that's really what makes the console market is must-have killer games.
Marco:
And so far, there's none on the new systems, on any of the three of them.
John:
I'm not sure the Xbox One, when I've been thinking about it more, I'm not sure the Xbox One needs a killer app beyond Xbox Live.
John:
Because if it just gets good versions of all the multi-platform games, its killer app is sort of, that's where your friends list is.
John:
You are on Xbox Live.
John:
You've been on Xbox Live with your 360.
John:
You'll be on Xbox Live with this.
John:
If a multi-platform title comes out and you are not a PC gamer, you have a choice of should you get the PS4 version, the Xbox One version.
John:
And in the past generation, a lot of people got the 360 version just because that's where their friends were on Xbox Live.
John:
And sometimes it looks a little bit better than the PS4 version.
John:
In this generation, Xbox One version may look slightly worse than the PS4 version in ways that only gaming forum nerds care about most likely.
John:
But people may still opt to buy the Xbox One version because that's where their friends are.
John:
So the online social networking kind of network effect, social lock-in thing may be more of a factor than any killer game because it's really hard for any platform to get a killer game that's exclusive to it these days because the big titles are so big that Microsoft or Sony would have to pay.
John:
Can you imagine Microsoft or Sony ever paying enough money to Rockstar to make the next GTA exclusively on their console?
John:
I don't think they have enough money to do that.
John:
Because they make so much more money by putting it out everywhere that Rockstar says, well, if we're going to forego PC and PS4 or Microsoft, you're going to have to pay us so much money.
John:
Are you ready for that?
John:
And the answer is no, they're not.
John:
So, I don't know.
John:
It's kind of like big movie studios making a movie with $200 million and then only showing in a certain brand of movie theaters.
John:
No chain of movie theaters can afford to do that.
John:
It's not quite the same, but I would love to see that.
John:
And, of course, there's first-party games like Halo and stuff like that, but
John:
Historically, it has been difficult for those games to match up with the cumulative massive sales machine that is the popular franchises that are multi-platform like Call of Duty and Destiny's coming out soon and Grand Theft Auto and all those things.
John:
Sports.
John:
Yeah, all the EA games.
John:
Yeah, the Madden franchise, stuff like that.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, so I'm not a gamer anymore.
Casey:
I rarely play games on my iPhone.
Casey:
I have a Wii, or Aaron and I have a Wii, that hasn't been plugged in for...
Casey:
months now and i was at my for we were at my our friend uh phil's house over the weekend and he has an xbox one and i didn't play any games although i saw him play need for speed which looked extraordinarily boring but it was pretty um but we did use it because he has his tv going through it and i forget the technical term for that but basically the xbox is eating the tv signal and ir blasting to his direct tv receiver in order to change channels and so on and so forth
Marco:
I believe it's called Web TV.
Casey:
For a second there, I thought you were serious.
Casey:
Anyway, so the point being that the audio controls, you know, Xbox, play or turn to tune to Comedy Central or whatever it is.
Casey:
I'm probably getting that wrong.
Casey:
That was just like Siri in that when it worked, it was the work of magic.
Casey:
But when it didn't work, which was, I would say, two thirds of the time, it was infuriating.
Casey:
But I can see where the Xbox One is a very nifty and different take on what the next iteration of television might be, in that it's all voice-controlled.
Casey:
I never saw anything gesture-based.
Casey:
I don't even know if there's a gesture-based system.
Casey:
But it's all voice-controlled.
Casey:
You can put the TV on one side of the screen and put something else on the other side of the screen, like a video game or whatever.
Casey:
It was very, very cool.
Casey:
Nothing about it made me want to get one, but I could see why it would be appealing.
Casey:
And I can see if...
Casey:
A person who liked to play games wanted something more than just a game console.
Casey:
I could absolutely see how this would be very, very appealing.
Marco:
I wonder how much of it is, you know, Microsoft is really making a very clear bet here.
Marco:
They're betting on convergence.
Marco:
And of course, historically in our industry, we've had things like Web TV and various attempts at convergence around the TV set and trying to, you know, mush two distinct devices that connect the TVs together into one.
Marco:
And usually those have failed or at least been mediocre at best.
Marco:
Microsoft's bet here is they think that having your TV controlled through your game console is a really big deal.
Marco:
And that the game console is more than just a gaming console.
Marco:
It's like a home media TV activity console.
Marco:
Whereas, you know, Sony's gone for more the pure gaming.
Marco:
So is Nintendo, you know, really the pure gaming system that's separate and dedicated as John has discussed a lot.
Marco:
The question is, I think, whether Microsoft is right.
Marco:
How many people want to merge those two experiences?
Marco:
I would actually guess it's a low number.
Marco:
Relative to everyone who buys Xboxes, I would say the portion of them that want to also control their TV through it and have those experiences be very merged together, I wouldn't guess it's very high, but I could be very wrong about that.
John:
I think there's a little bit of a potential Wii effect here in that one of the reasons that when we look at those graphs of console sales that the Wii's line shot up like a rocket with such an incredible slope is because we had a – I don't want to call it a novelty factor, but it's more or less what it is in that –
John:
People were curious, what would it be like to play games while waggling a little remote around?
John:
Because it was an experience that people hadn't done.
John:
And people bought it just because, like, they didn't necessarily even think it was going to be good, but they just said, well, this is a new thing.
John:
And I know some people have tried it, and I'm not one of those people.
John:
I need to get one of those so I can try to see what this is like, good or bad.
John:
And the Xbox One, like, 360 had Kinect, right?
John:
But it was an add-on, and add-ons have notoriously bad sell-through rates for consoles.
John:
Like, of all the Xbox 360s sold, what percentage those people bought Kinects?
John:
It's very low.
John:
All of the Xbox Ones come with the Kinect, too.
John:
And Microsoft was adamant about that, and it's one of the many reasons that their console is $100 more than Sony's.
John:
And they're taking the hit.
John:
They said, look, we're going to make them all come with that.
John:
And that means every single Xbox One has the sort of Wii effect of people wondering...
John:
I wonder what it would be like to talk to my TV or to wave my hands around like a maniac and try to make menus go.
John:
Maybe those same people think it's going to be stupid and bad, or maybe they tried their friends connect one and didn't like it, but they're like, but this one is better.
John:
And like, there's just that curiosity about it.
John:
Uh, and so that, that factor alone, no matter how it ends up being, even if it ends up being a total disaster, no one ever uses it anymore.
John:
They just use it to play games like they did with a 360.
John:
Just the fact that it gets people in the door or curious about it, I think is a really big strength, uh,
John:
for Microsoft in this generation because they all come with Kinect.
John:
And as for actually using it, I've heard mostly reports that trying to use the Xbox One to watch television, like to control your television, is not a good experience for the same reason that the television market is littered with the bodies of companies that have tried to put a box in front of your TV and let you control your TV with it.
John:
It is just really hard and complicated because of our terrible, at least in the U.S.,
John:
our terrible cable television system.
John:
It's non-standardized and all this other stuff.
John:
And people were saying like, it's better to use my, my cable boxes guide than to use the Xbox guide.
John:
And that's pretty damning when you have a $500 box that you attach to your TV and it's better to just use your cable box.
Marco:
Also, everyone hates their cable box guide because they're all terrible.
John:
Right, and they're saying the Xbox One was worse.
John:
But I think even if the Xbox One, if it gets people to buy it for the novelty factor and then they just use it like a 360, that's still a win for Microsoft.
John:
Because using it like a 360 means using Xbox Live.
John:
When you're watching TV, you're able to quickly switch over to a game and play it or switch back to TV when people are in the lobby and stuff like that.
John:
Even that functionality, which is not that big a deal, that's something that Sony can't match because they don't have HDMI in, right?
John:
So...
John:
I don't think the Xbox One has to fulfill all the magical minority report, voice recognition, Siri AI dreams.
John:
It just has to do one or two things that the PS4 can't and basically be an updated 360 with Kinect built in.
John:
And maybe there will still not be any decent games that any gamer really cares about that use Kinect, but we'll see.
Marco:
Transcription by CastingWords
Marco:
They have a true pay-for-what-you-use pricing model.
Marco:
You just pay a base price of $6 per month per device, and then you're just automatically billed for the actual amount of minutes, messages, and megabytes that you use each month.
Marco:
So if you use 100 megs of data this month and 1 gig next month, that's fine.
Marco:
You don't need to guess what you're going to need in advance or remember to upgrade and downgrade each month.
Marco:
You just pay for what you use.
Marco:
You can see how much you can save with Ting by going to atp.ting.com and checking out the savings calculator.
Marco:
You can enter your last few bills from your existing carrier, and it'll show you how much Ting will save over time.
Marco:
If you have Verizon, you can even have them log into your account automatically and scrape the stats, so it's pretty cool.
Marco:
So if you're stuck in a contract with someone else and you need to pay an early termination fee to get yourself to Ting, they will even give you a 25% credit of it back in service credit, up to $75.
Marco:
So, like Hover, Ting has great customer support with a no-hold, no-wait phone number.
Marco:
You just call them anytime between 8 a.m.
Marco:
and 8 p.m.
Marco:
Eastern, and a human being will pick up the phone who's able to help you.
Marco:
And quite nice, too.
Marco:
So you can add as many devices to your account as you'd like, and their usage and billing are pooled each month.
Marco:
So this is actually really cool if you need to manage a fleet of devices.
Marco:
You get the pooled usage, and you get a robust multi-device management panel.
Marco:
Really cool stuff.
Marco:
Last week, I mentioned how they would be great for developers who wanted Android test phones with inexpensive data plans and no contracts.
Marco:
Not only can you pick from their wide array of Android devices, you can even buy the new Nexus 5 from the Google Play Store and bring it to Ting.
Marco:
Since Ting includes tethering with their data at no additional charge, that's pretty cool, you can also use a Ting device as a primary or backup tethering hotspot while traveling.
Marco:
I've always recommended having multiple carrier devices for that, and it's pretty great when you do.
Marco:
So how do you get there?
Marco:
You can buy a new or used device from Ting, or you can bring any of your own compatible Sprint devices.
Marco:
You can go to atp.ting.com to see if your particular Sprint device is compatible.
Marco:
Now, it's time to address the elephant in the room with Ting.
Marco:
Everyone has always asked, what about the iPhone?
Marco:
Well, big news.
Marco:
As of very recently, you can now bring your Sprint iPhone 4 or 4S to Ting.
Marco:
So go check them out, atp.ting.com, now compatible with the iPhone.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Ting for sponsoring the show.
John:
There's an item lower down in the notes here that we might want to hoist up.
Marco:
Your car complaints?
John:
No, Apple buys PrimeSense.
John:
Did you read that story?
John:
I didn't.
John:
What's this about?
John:
PrimeSense is the company that originally made these sensors for the Kinect, the original Kinect.
Marco:
Oh, that's interesting.
John:
So click through the link.
John:
I might have gotten that slightly wrong.
Marco:
But basically, it looks like Kinect.
John:
Yeah, well, you know, there's a reason for it.
John:
This is what this company does.
John:
Makes Kinect-like sensors, and I think they were involved in the development of the original Kinect, if not the Kinect 2.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And that is interesting because Apple tends not to buy companies frivolously unless they're color.
Marco:
Uh, and that was a great domain name.
John:
Oh, geez.
John:
Uh, they buy color, but they don't buy Everpex.
John:
Fine.
Uh,
John:
You would imagine, though, like it's like when they bought PA Semi, that they bought this company because they have an interest in some kind of sensor stuff.
John:
And I think everyone was thinking, OK, well, Microsoft's doing the Xbox One and this TV integration and Apple still has yet to make whatever we think their crazy move is going to be in the TV world other than their little black puck.
John:
Because Steve Jobs said in his book that, oh, we've cracked the problem and we haven't seen anything that seems to match up with that.
John:
So we're still waiting for the other shoe to drop on TV.
John:
And then they buy the sensor maker.
John:
And on the one hand, it's like way too late for them to be buying the sensor maker if we're expecting them to have a product next year that involves the sensor at all.
John:
If you think of how long it took for us to see clear fruits of the PSME acquisition.
John:
But on the other hand, it also implies that they think that sensor-related things are important enough for them to buy a company...
John:
that probably has patents but also expertise in that technology so it's beyond the phase where they're like let's just get a connect and hook it up to some you know big box of wires and see if it's a useful thing to have it seems like they're into the phase where they're getting serious about this and the question is what do they do with this technology and like i said i think everyone assumes that it's tv related but i think it could just as easily be ios device related as in ipads and iphones
John:
Because I think about all the crazy stuff that Samsung does with their Galaxy phones with the stupid things that tracks your eyes and like you don't have to touch the screen and how terrible that works.
John:
And I think, all right, that's terrible.
John:
But what if there was a way to do some tiny subset of that better?
John:
to an Apple level of quality where they're happy with making this part of the iOS device experience.
John:
What can you do with the ability for your iPad or iPhone to sense more about you than just where your finger is touching in the orientation and acceleration?
John:
So I think I would give it a 50-50 chance that the technology involved, the expertise in technology and everything coming from this company will show up in an iOS device just as likely, I think, as it's showing up in a TV-like device.
John:
And when I think about it in a TV-like device, I don't know what they would do with it.
John:
I would imagine they could do something small and simple and like the proximity sensor, but more sophisticated using the camera and more proximity sensors to be more intelligent about something using an iOS device.
John:
I don't know.
John:
What, are we going to be standing up in front of it waving our hands like we are in front of an Xbox One?
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
I wonder if it could even be used in any way to support the back camera.
Marco:
Maybe for looking at the scene in a way similar to how phase detect systems work in SLRs, maybe providing better focus performance or a more accurate depth map of what's going on in the scene.
Marco:
Maybe something like that.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
The Kinect 2 is impressive technology.
John:
I don't know if it doubled the resolution of the Kinect 1 or quadrupled it, but it is way better.
John:
I'm thinking it can sense fingers now, whereas the Kinect 1 can barely sense hands.
John:
The technology has come a long way, and obviously you can't fit something like Kinect size into an iOS device, although you could in a little TV bar type thing, but
John:
There's surely something you can do if you can get IR, color image, edge detection, and depth map from these multi-sensor things.
John:
Surely there's something interesting you can do about that.
John:
Even if it's only just like kind of having the phone have more awareness of what the person who's using it is doing.
John:
Even if you never use it to control the phone or whatever, just so the phone kind of knows, they're staring at me.
John:
They're not.
John:
I'm in a pocket.
John:
I'm not.
John:
I'm being held up to a head.
John:
I'm not.
John:
Like...
John:
Just those simple things could make the phone experience better without ever actually exposing a feature to the user.
John:
And for the TV thing, again, I have no idea because no one has any idea what the hell they're doing on TV, but it is intriguing to say the least.
Marco:
Am I the only one who doesn't really care what they're doing on TV?
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, I think you are the only one.
Marco:
I just think, like, I don't... Like, the Apple TV, I would love for the software on it to be more reliable and for the service that backs it, the entire iTunes store, for that to be more reliable and work more.
Marco:
But the actual, like, Apple TV...
Marco:
box and software experience, I think, satisfies my needs for what I want out of a TV-connected box.
Marco:
And I know everyone wants more channels and more availability and live shows and everything else, and that's more an issue of content deals than anything else, and that's probably going to be held up no matter what they do with the hardware.
Marco:
But I just...
Marco:
I'm fine with the TV as it is.
Marco:
I have Netflix and everything has Netflix.
Marco:
But, you know, I have Netflix on there and I have iTunes bought stuff.
Marco:
And that's about all I really need.
Marco:
Like, what else are they going to do?
John:
You have minimal TV needs because if you're if you are more like the average American who consumes some portion of sports programming, some portion of local television and also some portion of network and cable.
John:
the experience is terrible because all those things are spread out in 10 different places.
John:
I mean, even you were just with the two places like, Oh, is it on Netflix?
John:
Let me check.
John:
Oh, is that an Apple TV?
John:
Let me check.
John:
Even just that is bad.
John:
But imagine if you multiply that out by like three or four or five places to check.
John:
And then you had way more content, some of which is not available online.
John:
And some of which, uh, you had to see, like you, the only way you could get it was it was broadcast to you and it would be on iTunes later.
John:
And maybe you don't want to wait a week because then the things will be spoiled for you.
John:
Like, uh,
John:
If you consume more television from more sources, it gets worse and worse and worse.
John:
And everyone's just waiting for something to clarify this in the same way that, that, you know, Apple clarified music, music, granted, it's a lot easier to do that with music, but Hey, there was file labels at five big labels or whatever in the U S. Uh,
John:
You could just go to iTunes to buy music.
John:
You don't have to go to seven different places and synthesize some sort of system that I have a DVR to catch this, and then I have Netflix, and then I have Apple TV, and then I have Amazon Instant Video, and then I have these devices, and I can watch my TiVo on my iPad, but I also watch Netflix on my iPad, but I can't watch Apple TV on the iPad, but I can watch it directly from the iTunes store, and it's...
John:
Television continues to be a giant mess.
John:
Again, I'm speaking only about the US.
John:
I don't know what it's like in the rest of the world.
John:
So the more TV you consume and the more you use it, the worse it is.
John:
Maybe you're still limping along with just Apple TV and Netflix and that satisfies you.
John:
But I think you're in the minority in terms of your television consumption habits.
Marco:
Well, sure, but how many of those problems are really software and content deal problems?
Marco:
Or not even like a software limitation, but more of a software choice that Apple has made.
Marco:
So software choices and content deals versus hardware and interface problems.
Marco:
If they did some kind of big connect-like thing to the Apple TV, then we could wave our arms around to navigate the same small menu full of limited choices and expensive options.
Marco:
That's...
John:
it's that's not going to that's not going to change anything we're not just looking for a hardware software solution we're assuming i mean was itunes a hardware software solution the ipod itunes in the store was everything was hardware it was software and it was content deals that's what we're looking for is something to save us all from everything and if you just want to look on the hardware and software side you can look at the iphone as an example where all they had in the beginning was hardware and software but the hardware and software was so amazing that it was used as a lever
John:
to try to, I mean, it didn't revolutionize the carrier industry, but it gave the handset maker more leverage than they ever had before.
John:
And it allowed us to have cell phones not crapped up with the stupid carrier adware and crap like that on it.
John:
That wasn't a big change, but it was an improvement.
John:
And so I think even just alone with totally adversarial evil things like carriers, Apple was still just through the power of its amazing hardware and software and the power of the consumers that wanted it,
John:
affect some small change in the industry, at least again, at least in the US for the better.
John:
So I would take that in the television world.
John:
If the Apple can't do any content deals and everyone hates them, just make some amazing device that everybody wants to make television better for the people who are using it and use that as a lever to say, oh, well, if you're, if you know, Time Warner cable doesn't want to be part of our thing, then all the people who want our magic dance in front of the TV device are going to be pissed at Time Warner and are going to change carriers like like people were going to AT&T from Verizon or whatever, because
John:
It was the only place that had the iPhone.
John:
Again, these are long shots.
John:
I'm not saying this is going to happen, but it's something.
Marco:
You can see part of that today, though.
Marco:
Whenever there's some kind of dispute between one of the networks and one of the big cable companies, and the network pulls themselves off the cable channel for like two weeks, and the idea is that the network's hoping the cable company will say, oh, come back to us because all of our customers are angry at us.
Marco:
And usually they just kind of quietly figure something out and nothing really changes in the end.
Marco:
And, you know, people often look at, I think we're seeing this a lot more recently from smart analyst type people.
Marco:
You can look at the PC market in the 90s.
Marco:
And so many things that we consider like common behavior or the way things work is based on the Windows and Mac divide in the 90s.
Marco:
And as time is going on, the smart analysts are starting to look at this and say, actually, that seems more like a complicated fluke than the way things actually work.
Marco:
Open doesn't always win, whatever that means.
Marco:
Hardware being multi-vendors and software running on all of it versus the unified vertical integration doesn't always work or not work.
Marco:
There's all this wisdom that's been based on how this one instance of something worked one time in the industry, when in fact it's much more complicated than that and it doesn't always work that way.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
The way iTunes came about and the iTunes Music Store, I think that's one of those things too, where that was a very special time in history that we're not in a time like that anymore with any other medium or any other situation or industry.
Marco:
That was a one-time thing, and I don't think that anybody, Apple or otherwise, is going to be able to reproduce that in a new medium.
John:
Not the severity, but I think the same thing could happen over a much longer timeline because there was like a big boom with iTunes.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
I would say the breadth, though.
Marco:
The breadth is where it's going to really suffer.
John:
Well, that's what I'm saying.
John:
It'll start off small.
John:
And what I'm thinking about there is not so much Apple doing it, but Netflix funding its own shows.
John:
Did they overnight obviate the need for the networks and HBO?
John:
No, they didn't.
John:
But you get one or two shows that people like, and it's like, okay, you didn't do a Big Bang, you didn't wipe that, but suddenly a tiny, tiny sliver of the power in the content distribution world went over to Netflix, this thing that has no allegiance to any kind of carrier or anything like that.
John:
They got like two shows, so what?
John:
But if they did that every year for the next 15, 20 years, you can foresee a scenario where either Netflix or a similar player pulls power away from the cable companies and the carriers and all the other stuff.
John:
until most or a majority of the shows that people want to watch are being funded in a way that has no connection to any cable provider or any television network.
John:
That would be an example of an iTunes-like change instead of happening in three years, happening in 15 or 20.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I was thinking about it while you guys were talking, and I'm not so sure that you're right, Marco, that the iTunes kind of phenomenon couldn't be repeated.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
What I was thinking about was, if you think about what made iTunes as paired with the iPod so magical, is to me it's a couple of things.
Casey:
It's acquiring something, it's acquiring media, and then consuming it.
Casey:
And so iTunes allowed you to acquire...
Casey:
Individual songs, which was very rare at the time.
Casey:
I mean, yeah, there were singles, but it was weird and clunky.
Casey:
And you could acquire these songs without leaving your house, which was really awesome and new.
Casey:
And then you could, when you decided to leave your house, you could consume them on this magical new hardware device.
Casey:
And you guys made allusions to this earlier, but a theoretical Apple TV where you can acquire content very easily, and the content I'm thinking of is sports content.
Casey:
And I know that Marco's eyes just glazed over, but for most Americans, and I would argue most of the world,
Casey:
Sports are a big deal.
Casey:
And a lot of people pointed out in the chat that the NFL has – that's the National American Football League.
Marco:
That's not the NAFL.
Casey:
Well, you know what I mean.
Casey:
So they have an exclusive deal with DirecTV, which is a satellite provider here in the United States.
Casey:
And that runs out I think at the end of the season or if not the end of the season, very, very soon.
Casey:
And a lot of people are calling on Apple to just throw money at this problem and get that exclusive deal.
Casey:
And what that exclusive deal brings is if you're a DirecTV customer,
Casey:
You can get what's called NFL Sunday ticket because all the games are played on Sundays, most of them anyway.
Casey:
And you can watch any game you want when it's aired live.
Casey:
And so for me, as an example, I happen to be a fan of the New York Giants.
Casey:
I live nowhere near New York.
Casey:
I actually live near one of their rivals, the Washington Redskins.
Casey:
And as such, I only ever get Giants games if it just so happens that Redskins or any of the other local franchises aren't playing at that time.
Casey:
So imagine a situation where the NFL and Apple reach an exclusive deal.
Casey:
So now you can get the content you want, which is the acquire piece, because you can watch any game you want.
Casey:
And the MLB already does this.
Casey:
Major League Baseball does this.
Casey:
The NBA, I believe, already does this.
Casey:
And I think the NHL does.
Casey:
I'm probably getting some of that wrong, but whatever.
Casey:
You get the idea.
Casey:
Well, imagine a combination of NFL, NASCAR, and F1.
Casey:
All of them easily available on the Apple TV, both live and replay.
Casey:
And all you need to do is either pay Apple a little bit or just buy the darn device transporter style.
Casey:
And then on top of that, Apple has this really slick UI.
Casey:
Well, I like the UI in the Apple TV.
Casey:
Maybe you don't, but it's certainly a lot better than most set-top boxes.
Casey:
Like my Verizon box looks like crap compared to the Apple TV.
Casey:
So now you've got the content or you can acquire the content and now you can consume the content in a nice and easy way.
Casey:
And I see some not direct parallels with iTunes and the iPod, but certainly some parallels nevertheless.
Casey:
I don't know that sports is enough to really get them over the proverbial hump, but I think it could be a really, really interesting way to attack traditional TV without having to go after movies and TV shows in the traditional sense.
John:
To reinforce Marco's point, the big difference here is that the players know, the players saw what happened to music.
John:
And so everybody is super paranoid about putting too many eggs in one basket.
John:
So if Apple, by some miracle, decided to spend the billions of dollars it would take to get the NFL to that degree...
John:
any other sports franchise would be like, we sure as hell can't go with Apple because then they would have two sports franchises and look what happened in music.
John:
It's not collusion, but they all kind of see what each other are doing and they're all kind of trying to protect their turf and spread their bets.
John:
Just like the music labels, as soon as Amazon became viable, all the music labels were like, we got to go over there and just give Amazon everything because we cannot have Apple have all this power as the sole one and only awesome digital music distribution network.
John:
So all of the non-music guys saw what happened in music.
John:
And that's why it's so hard to do anything with TV because they're not going to make that same mistake.
John:
And that's why I think it has to be a much longer period.
John:
And probably like the way it's going to happen is the power that's in the hands of the network's
John:
And the cable companies now will shift to a set of companies that look more like Netflix if they're not necessarily Netflix.
John:
I don't think Apple is going to be in the business of generating content.
John:
So far, they haven't shown that they're willing to, for example, put up a couple hundred million dollars to make a new TV show.
John:
So all Apple can do is make deals with somebody.
John:
And I would imagine dealing with Netflix is way easier than dealing with NBC or the NFL.
John:
And so maybe there's some synergy there.
Marco:
That being said, though, I think you're right that once one sports franchise gave exclusivity to the Apple TV or to Apple in general, I think that would give pause to the others.
Marco:
However, if that one was the NFL, I think that's enough.
Marco:
I think enough people... Obviously, the rest of the world couldn't possibly care less.
Marco:
But in the US... And this is one of the problems with TV is that it's very regional.
Marco:
In the US, if you get the NFL...
Marco:
you're going to get a crap ton of people buying Apple TVs.
Marco:
And that's really what they want.
Marco:
What they would want out of this kind of effort would be tons and tons and tons of people buying the Apple TV and having a really good reason to use it frequently.
Marco:
And if you get the NFL exclusive on there, you're going to get that.
Marco:
You're going to get a lot of that.
Marco:
And, you know, people are not going to give up their cable subscription.
Marco:
They're still going to have cable.
Marco:
So not getting the other sports networks wouldn't matter as much.
Marco:
This would basically be like an exclusive console game.
Marco:
Like this would be a killer app for the Apple TV for a very large number of people in this country.
John:
Every time we talk about TV, it's just depressing because there are so many entrenched interests.
John:
And then we always have to keep coming back to the realization, and this is just the US we're talking about.
John:
And Apple is a global company, and it cares about worldwide stuff.
John:
And you can kind of see how Apple, in their own meetings, would be like,
John:
Look at all this crap, and we're only still talking about the U.S.
John:
Forget about it.
John:
Let's just, you know, whatever.
John:
Well, like, that's why I think they, like, delegate that to, like, let's let Netflix fight it out and either die trying or figure out something to do.
John:
And even Netflix is, I think, mostly U.S.-centric as well.
John:
Like, I think the other countries have better ways to get the content they want over more modern digital systems than we do.
John:
Maybe they still have the same monopoly problems that we do, but, like...
John:
I think people can see the soccer games that they want to see through some interesting digital thing that's near them.
John:
Whereas in the U S like the local television franchises still have such a stranglehold and like with the blackout, the local blackouts and stuff like that.
John:
It's just, it's just perverse.
John:
So it's depressing, but I would still like to see Apple do something, even if they do something and it flops, like you, you know,
John:
First thing you know is to succeed, keep trying.
John:
Like, look at the Apple TV.
John:
The first couple weren't that great, but the little black pluck is pretty darn good.
John:
So if there's more to come in that vein and they're buying this Kinect-like sensor company, well, let's see what you got, right?
Marco:
I do think you're right, though, that I can't really see Apple devoting a massive chunk of money and a massive division of their product line and therefore their attention to
Marco:
to something that only works in the US or will only succeed in the US.
Marco:
That's not like Tim Cook, that's for sure.
Casey:
Well, but what if you did something like the NFL, but it's applicable to the rest of the world, like F1, for example, or soccer, perhaps?
John:
Well, the Apple-style move is, oh, hey, now our television is also an app platform, and you crazy app developers in every region of the country, you sort out how the hell to get
John:
your stuff like kind of like the mlb app you know they made an app platform on ios devices they didn't do a deal with major league baseball they made an app platform and then mlb made the app and then figured out it's crazy way that you're going to pay for it or whatever but like that's that's an opportunity for people that is an apple move because a platform is global and then individual applications are local that is true
Casey:
Do we want to move on to the sweet jobs that are available at Penny Arcade?
Marco:
I don't know that there's that much more to say about this.
Marco:
I kind of vomited all over Twitter all morning about it and wrote that big post.
John:
But people haven't read your blog or read your Twitter, so you have to reiterate and summarize here.
Casey:
And as someone who works for the man, Marco, you know quite a bit about these sorts of issues.
Marco:
Shut up.
Marco:
I used to work for various men.
Marco:
Do you remember that?
Marco:
It was a long time ago.
Marco:
No, I think... So Penny Arcade put up his job listing for one person who's responsible for basically...
Marco:
developing and running all their websites and servers and all their in-house tools, like various inventory trackers when they sell goods and stuff like that, managing their conference sites, stuff like that, and also doing all of their local IT for their workers in their office.
Marco:
And in exchange for all of this, they will force you to be a workaholic.
Marco:
They kind of flippantly glorify how you won't have any kind of free time.
Marco:
They'll work you to the bone, and you'll like it, and they'll make up for it by...
Marco:
paying you a subpar salary and giving you some kind of nice perks in the office, like, I don't know, like nice chairs and snacks, whatever, you know, something that would cost a lot less than a good salary would cost.
Marco:
And the whole posting has this arrogant attitude of like, this is really a terrible job and you're going to love it and we're going to get tons of applicants.
Casey:
Now, really quickly, genuine question.
Casey:
You're assuming that the salary is crummy, right?
John:
No, they say it in the ad.
John:
They say we recognize that we're going to play – I don't know the exact words.
John:
But they say that we're going to pay maybe below market because we're not a money-oriented company or something like that and we run lean.
John:
I mean, the ad is honest in the Penny Arcade style of honesty.
John:
Have you ever seen a job ad before where they say, work-life balance?
John:
Forget it.
John:
That's basically what this says.
John:
Every place always says, oh, we have great work.
John:
They lie.
John:
The places that don't have great work-life balance, they still say in the job ad, oh, we're great about work-life balance.
John:
In fact, if they talk a lot about work-life balance too much in the ad, that's also a warning sign.
John:
But this one, they come right out and say...
John:
No, you're not really going to have a good work-life balance.
John:
Work will be your life.
John:
That's the type of person we're looking for.
John:
That's the type of job this is.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
The whole thing just kind of rubbed me the wrong way.
Marco:
My problem with it, there's a lot of terrible employers out there, and the tech industry is no exception.
Marco:
My problem with it is that Penny Arcade is very high profile, and it's damaging to people when they expect that this is the norm, that they should totally give themselves up to their job and have no personal life, and that this is what's normally expected of them in this industry.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
Yeah, that's true for a lot of employers.
Marco:
That doesn't make it good, and that doesn't mean there's not also a lot of great places to work that actually respect people and respect people's health and respect people's lives and want people to stay there for more than a couple years.
Marco:
You know, like I –
Marco:
Reading the forum posting from the guy who has this job now, and he kind of said, I chose this and therefore get out of my life kind of thing.
Marco:
But it just kind of confirms what we think they mean by the job posting.
Marco:
It just kind of confirms that.
Marco:
It's constant work.
Marco:
You're on call 24-7.
Marco:
He says he can't go on vacation anywhere where he's not reachable by cell phone and can't get a data connection to log in and fix a server if it's down.
Marco:
He sleeps with his laptop next to the bed.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I did a lot of this for Tumblr, which is why I'm sensitive to it.
Marco:
This was my job at Tumblr for the first four years.
Marco:
The difference was I was paid very well, and I got a lot of stock.
Marco:
And that, I think, was fair.
Marco:
I was doing the work of a co-founder, and I was paid like a co-founder.
Marco:
And that's very, very different than something like this, which is they already have something like 20 employees, somebody said.
Marco:
They already have a lot of employees.
Marco:
They run a very popular website that gets a lot of traffic.
Marco:
They actually run multiple websites that get lots of traffic.
Marco:
There's obviously...
Marco:
you know they could have two people doing this they don't need to have one person doing all this that's paid very badly or they could have one well-paid person and they're choosing not to because they simply don't need to because they're they're so popular that enough people will apply that they can get somebody who will do it for almost nothing and that's well the the other thing they're offering is you get to be an employee of penny arcade and like they the work-life balance that they say doesn't exist it's because they kind of have this big work family thing going where it
John:
The people who work there seem to be happy about the idea that the people you work with are like your family, and the stuff that you would get in a normal home life, you can get more of at work.
John:
And I think some of the things in this forum said, like, oh, some people do leave at 5 or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But that's the trade-off, though, is that you may not be getting high pay or something, but you get, presumably, to work in an environment that's much more fun than just working for some faceless corporation because you really like Penny Arcade, because you think you'll have fun with the people there.
John:
And a lot of their interview process, if you look at their past interviews, is about trying to find someone who not only can do the job, but also...
John:
fits in with all the other people because they're they're almost kind of like interviewing a new friend we're like okay so this person can do the job but we're only going to hire them if we would like to hang out with this person because we know that's kind of our work environment we're all going to be hanging out together and doing stuff and that sounds a lot like kind of a startup type environment with a bunch of friends who start a company and like marco said that's all well and good but
John:
uh i know i personally would never in a million years want to do this job if i was not also going to benefit from the fruits of my labor like if you are in a startup and you are an early employee and you work like this because that's how everybody in startups works they all do this they all do 50 jobs they all work ridiculous hours they all don't get paid a lot because it's not a lot of money and you got to spend the venture capital on like servers and acquiring new customers and stuff but
John:
But the upside is that if you make it, you share in the victory, like Marco shared in Tumblr.
John:
He got Tumblr stock, and when they sold to Yahoo, he shared in that, right?
John:
He didn't do all that work, and then just quit and leave with nothing, right?
John:
So if you're in this job, basically, no one should work this hard, no matter how young you are, no matter how awesome the job is, no one should sacrifice the other parts of their lives to this degree if they don't share in it.
John:
And that, I think, to me personally, the reason I wouldn't take this job and the reason I would recommend would not recommend anyone else take this job is
John:
That it seems to me, it's so hard to tell because it's a proudly held company, but it seems to me that some people are benefiting greatly from what appears to be the success of Penny Arcade.
John:
And those people are the founders of the company, like the two, you know, Mike and Jerry and Robert are benefiting greatly from it financially.
John:
It seems like, again, we don't know.
John:
We can't tell.
John:
They've talked a little bit about it, but it seems like they're making a lot.
John:
The rest of the people in the company, it doesn't seem like are benefiting as greatly.
John:
And if you're going to have a startup type environment where you're asking this of all the people involved, and the people are willing to do it and they're happy, I feel like they should be sharing in the success of the company.
John:
Because this is not like a new startup.
John:
They've been around for years.
John:
And this team of people has made a very successful enterprise.
John:
I feel like maybe they don't all share equally.
John:
But that whole idea that seven people work their butts off and three people get rich drives me insane.
John:
right because i mean most of the time nobody gets rich i mean seven people work their butts off and everyone goes home sad right but in the cases where seven people work their butts off three people shouldn't get rich seven people should get rich maybe three people get richer but that's what i feel like should happen and i can't from what i can tell on the outside doesn't seem like that's happening and again i'm i'm framing this all as why i would not take the job and why i would recommend someone didn't take it but i think the much more interesting question is
John:
is this a bad thing to do if everybody who works at Penny Arcade is happy with their job?
Casey:
So I think you guys are judging this from a very similar angle to the way I judge it.
Casey:
However, it is not the only angle.
Casey:
And the reason I say that is because my first job straight out of school was at this company that made slot machines.
Casey:
And the group of
Casey:
It was all guys at the time.
Casey:
The group of guys that worked there were all expats from EA who had bought up the company that they had all sort of kind of co-founded.
Casey:
It was a game company called Kesmai based out of Charlottesville, Virginia.
Casey:
And by pure happenstance, a large majority of these guys either didn't have children or didn't have anything.
Casey:
any immediate family.
Casey:
So no wives and no kids.
Casey:
And so, especially a couple of the guys there, like my boss, when I first got there, who, who I adore, um, he, he didn't happen to have a wife and didn't happen to have any kids.
Casey:
And so because of that, he just ended up working a lot and, um,
Casey:
He put on this exterior shell of, oh, I don't – this job is a pain in the butt, but it's a job and this is what I do.
Casey:
But I think if you'll allow me to armchair – be an armchair psychiatrist, I think he worked a lot partially because it was the most interesting – maybe not interesting, but it was a really good way to occupy his time.
Casey:
And so –
Casey:
I envision Penny Arcade in a similar way.
Casey:
Not to say that these people don't have kids or they don't have families, but there are people that really do just love working a lot.
Casey:
And my boss at this place worked absurd hours, like 80 or 100 hours a week.
Casey:
But nobody was really telling him to, or at least I didn't think so anyway.
Casey:
He just enjoyed doing work.
Casey:
And he worked six days a week.
Casey:
Nobody else did, but he always did.
Casey:
And I'm not trying to say that he didn't have other things in his life.
Casey:
I'm not trying to say that he necessarily enjoyed every moment of it.
Casey:
But in certain circumstances, there are people that really do, like you guys were saying, want to have a work experience that kind of is their lives.
Casey:
Is that me?
Casey:
Heck no.
Casey:
I think I speak for you guys in saying that it's certainly not you guys either.
Casey:
But for some people, that is.
Casey:
And if you put yourself in that mindset, how would you write a job posting?
Casey:
To be honest, I'd write it kind of like this.
John:
But see, the thing is, like, Robert Koo is that person.
John:
He, by his own admission, has sacrificed many other parts of his life to be successful in business.
John:
He is the reason Penny Arcade exists in the form it does now.
John:
He sacrificed his life to make this amazing company.
John:
He deserves, you know, all the credit for that.
John:
The two artists, of course, are the spark of this entire thing.
John:
Nothing exists without them.
John:
So clearly those three, you know, deserve more than anybody else.
John:
But, like, for Robert, that was his choice.
John:
He came up, he said, this is the life I'm going to leave.
John:
I'm going to make this great thing.
John:
And I understand the sacrifices involved for it.
John:
For the two other guys, they have wives and kids.
John:
And my impression is, yes, they work hard and everything.
John:
And yes, there are many demands on their time and so on and so forth.
John:
But it seems like their work-life balance isn't all that bad.
John:
I mean, again, it's so hard to tell with happenstance.
John:
And that's why I was getting back to, like...
John:
What if all their employees are happy?
John:
And the people talk about like this job burns people out.
John:
Penny Arcade has been around 15 years and this job has had two people in it.
John:
So like, you know, seven and a half years each.
John:
It's obviously not a machine that burns through people or whatever.
John:
Not seven and a half years each.
Marco:
The first one was there for like eight years or longer even.
Marco:
The guy who's quitting now has only been there for like two years.
John:
Well, either way, it's like two people in the position for over the 15-year life of the company.
John:
It is not a mill where they bring in people and they burn them out and bring in people and burn them out.
Marco:
But it has scaled up over that time as Penny Arcade has scaled up.
Marco:
The job has scaled up.
Marco:
So I think it says something that they had a guy there for a long time.
Marco:
He left.
Marco:
It got really big.
Marco:
He left.
Marco:
A new guy came in.
Marco:
He did the job and is quitting after only two years because he needs more money.
John:
But I'm getting back to the same point, and I'm not implying an answer here.
John:
My real question is if all their employees are happy, is the company still mean for making a job like this?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
I'm saying the same thing.
Casey:
If all the employees enjoy hanging out with the other employees a lot and enjoy working a lot, which is a big assumption, but –
Casey:
If that's the case, like if I was one of those people, like my boss at my first job, and I wanted to write a very forthcoming and honest job posting, it would probably look a lot like this.
Casey:
Does it make it right?
Casey:
Not necessarily.
Casey:
And would I ever apply for it?
Casey:
Heck no.
Casey:
But it would look a lot like this.
John:
So, like, I think my opinion on whether this is inherently a bad job posting is there are some inherently bad aspects of it that a lot of people point out.
John:
The inherently bad aspect of it is not so much for the people taking the job and not so much for Penny Arcade, but for the industry for the position that they're hiring for.
John:
Because...
John:
the availability of positions like this devalues the work that those people do.
John:
Having a company that is attractive enough in the intangibles that they're able to ask for people to sacrifice their entire lives and take below market pay
John:
it's not so much that they're able to do that it's so much that the existence of companies that are able to do that makes the rest of the industry feel like they can turn down the dials on their hiring it sort of it makes it seem like well you're expected to work like a dog and well you're expected not to make too much money and if too many companies do that it sort of makes it seem like oh everybody who works in it can never go on vacation and it's like no you're not penny arcade you can't do that because what what are you giving me like it's it
John:
What makes me sad is that this position is this job description is like an honest description of many things like, you know, insurance companies or big Fortune 500 companies that are just as terrible as the description sounds.
John:
But they lie on their applications and they're not fun places to work and they don't give you anything to balance off of this.
John:
But still, the existence of Penny Arcade and the Bill, it's kind of like Marco has talked about this on past shows and like life isn't fair, right?
John:
The idea of developers and designers doing work for free devalues the work of developers and designers.
John:
And it's like, well, why are they doing the work for free?
John:
Sometimes they're doing the work for free because it's fun.
John:
Because they're a college student and it's fun to make apps and it's fun to do designs.
John:
And you're trying to make a living doing it and you're like, God damn, these people doing work for free, they're devaluing the work of everybody who does.
John:
They are.
John:
They are devaluing it.
John:
But they're doing it because it's fun and because they're intangibles.
John:
And that's a rough situation to be in.
John:
And you could say Penny Arcade should have a broader view and say,
John:
We don't want to devalue the work of IT workers.
John:
And so we're going to try to we have a more of sort of I guess we would call it like environmental awareness, but in a job market sense instead of like actual environment.
John:
That would be a reason not to do this.
John:
That would be a reason that this job posting is a bad idea.
John:
regardless of how happy the employees and not because of the person who gets a job is going to be sad and not because penny arcade is an evil company but just because of sort of environmental factors and the second reason this job posting is bad is different and i think is much much more concrete and that this this would make me appeal to robert ku never have one it person like we just talked about backups for a million years just as a person who runs a business this is a bad move business wise it's it seems like penny arcade does not correctly value
John:
the the role of web applications and uh you know technology infrastructure in their company because there's a big company there's a lot at stake here never trust that to one person not because you're exploiting them not because no one person can do this not because you should pay them more don't pay one guy 10 times his salary you need redundancy you absolutely positively need redundancy and i think
John:
Web stuff and online services is such an important part of the penny arcade empire as it exists today that there's no way that I think there's any justification to have a single person that does this for the sake of the company, for the sake of the founders, for the sake of the other employees.
John:
Nothing to do with what the job is like.
John:
You just cannot have one person.
John:
You cannot.
John:
It has the side effect that if you have two people, then one guy can actually go on vacation.
John:
There's many upsides to that.
John:
But ignoring all that, pretend he's just like an evil turn of the century industrial revolution, you know, robber baron.
Marco:
don't have one guy you gotta have redundancy so that would be my appeal to the penny arcade guys that it's insane that a company this big and successful is going to have one it guy especially because their website being up or websites being up is such an important part of the business you know they i would imagine i know they run packs and that's probably a pretty big business but i would imagine the majority of their income uh probably still comes from ad views on the site do you think that's fair to say
John:
I would say it's an even split between packs, merchandise, and advertising on a site.
John:
But again, it's a privately held company.
John:
It's hard to tell.
John:
But they have multiple lines of business, and they're big.
John:
But the thing is all of them have some aspect of it that involves websites and services and electronic transfers of money.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Obviously, they're going to lose a lot.
Marco:
for any moment that the site is down.
Marco:
And the longer it's down, the more they're going to lose.
Marco:
It's not like if some restaurant has their website go down, who cares?
Marco:
They might lose two customers in a weekend if they can't see the website and figure out their hours.
Marco:
But for something like this, yeah, you're right.
Marco:
That is very important.
Marco:
And part of it, I should even point out now, now that I'm thinking about this...
Marco:
My job at Tumblr wasn't quite this extreme because David could log in and fix things.
Marco:
He wasn't as good at it as I was.
Marco:
Yeah, you weren't the only one.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
That was like his secondary ability.
Marco:
His primary ability was coding all the front end and the middle layer.
Marco:
But he could log in and fix servers to some degree when I was not available, which wasn't that often.
Marco:
But he could do it, and he did do it.
Marco:
And sometimes he could only like, you know, slightly manage things until I got back.
Marco:
Sometimes he could fix the problem completely.
Marco:
So and the and the only reason that it was acceptable to have all of that even resting on me was because there were only two employees.
Marco:
Like that was it.
Marco:
It was just two of us for so long.
Marco:
That's why it was OK, because there was nobody else available and we couldn't afford anybody else for such for a very long time at the beginning.
John:
The thing is, you can get away with they get away with having one person 15 years.
John:
It's not like I'm saying that you're doomed, you can't have one person.
John:
The fact that they can get away with it, it's I think it's just penny wise pound foolish, like ignoring whether that person shares in the success of the company to the degree I think they should and none of us can know because we don't know how big their bonuses are or whatever.
John:
But although they didn't mention any equity, but whatever.
John:
ignoring all of that and i'm willing to give them all the benefit of the doubt on that as a matter of fact because the few things they have said publicly one of them is that they're constantly getting buyout offers because who wouldn't want to buy them because they are just a you know a money-making machine uh when they entertain buyout offers what they what the guys in charge did said if we take this buyout offer we're going to dole out the money to all the people in the company and that would be correctly sharing
John:
the income like it was like we're not going to take a buyout and the three founders leave and you guys just are out of a job or whatever it was we're if we take this money we're going to divide it probably not evenly but you know we're going to divide it amongst all employees as if all the employees had equity in the company which as far as i know they don't legally have equity in the company but that was what the founders did they're nice guys they're looking out for their people again this is like a family and when they took a vote they let the whole company vote on this and not a single person voted to take the buyout
John:
Even though they knew, like, if we do this, you can get some presumably large amount of money.
John:
Not a single person in the company voted because all the people in the company wanted to... Yeah, I mean, Marco can, you know, identify with this.
John:
They wanted to continue to be masters of their own destinies.
John:
They wanted to continue to be the family that decides, we decide what Penny Arcade does.
John:
We collectively, we 12 or 20 people in this room, we are Penny Arcade.
John:
We don't want to sell out.
John:
It's more important to us than the money to continue to be able to steer our own ship.
John:
And I think that speaks to the kind of company it is.
John:
I just think one IT person, I mean, just as they don't have a single artist in the company, they have multiple artists doing multiple things and multiple comic strips, and one person is not enough.
Marco:
It also, it looked like from the current job occupant's post in the forum, from his description of his work and his skills, it really does also look like he's not a very knowledgeable assist admin.
Marco:
and that his main focus is development, not server administration or infrastructure management, running load balancers and stuff.
Marco:
And most of that he just pays Rackspace to do.
Marco:
And that's actually very expensive, by the way, but most of that he pays Rackspace to do.
Marco:
And so it actually sounds like they don't really have...
Marco:
a dedicated system admin at all.
Marco:
It isn't even that this person's doing all four of those jobs with equal weight.
Marco:
It's that he's mostly a developer, and he happens to do a little bit of system administration, but for the most part, most system admin tasks seem to be going undone, or at least inadequately covered.
John:
It's kind of like when a company that's not a software company tries to write software internally.
John:
They don't quite know what's involved with doing software.
John:
Penny Arcade seems like a company that...
John:
it's not if you if your company was like dropbox where your whole company is this like is this software and web service that you provide like the whole company is focused around that and penny arcade is a creative company their whole company is focused on creative endeavors and they do the creative stuff great right they don't think of themselves as a company as like oh we we run a website the website is like just how we get our creative outlet to people and it seems like they don't
John:
either don't know how to manage or don't know how to value it correctly because yeah you're right paying all that money to rack space again penny wise pound foolish and like for the for the penny arcade uh for the penny arcade expo ticket sales i think they outsourced that this year to some other company that does like ticket sales things and it did not go well like it went the same when everyone used to use like cover it live or whatever those live blogging platforms that were out there buying i tried to buy tickets for pax this year
John:
And it was the same situation as like cover it live where the site was down and you were in a queue and you couldn't get pages to load and then it would like load without the CSS and you couldn't tell if you've purchased anything.
John:
You know, that was the outsource that and that didn't work well either.
John:
Like that is a core part of their business.
John:
They should be investing in it way more than they are.
Marco:
Yeah, it's almost as if in the Tumblr early example, it's almost as if they already have hired a David, but they haven't hired a me.
Marco:
I mean that in the least arrogant way that I can say it.
Marco:
They have the front-end developer and the middleware developer, and this is the job of two people at least, and they've only hired for the front half of it and not for the back-end half.
Marco:
And, of course, they're not going to pay somebody enough to do both if they can even find one.
John:
The pay thing, though, the ad is honest to a fault, but we don't have numbers.
John:
So you don't know.
John:
Maybe they think they're paying below market, but they're still actually offering a reasonably good salary.
John:
Or maybe they're offering a ridiculously low salary.
John:
We can't tell from the ad.
John:
All we can tell is from the people who work there and –
John:
This one person who's leaving, it's hard to tell from them.
John:
The guy who was there for eight years obviously enjoyed it and probably just moved on to something else in his life.
John:
They don't have a lot of turnover in their company.
John:
They do run it more like a family.
John:
It seems like all the people who work there are happy with it.
John:
Otherwise, why would they stay?
John:
It's not like a place where people are making a big deal about it's an offensive work environment or whatever.
John:
Someone was saying that's like legally as boilerplate.
John:
And that sounds vaguely plausible to me because at least one job that I worked at, I had to sign a thing that said, you know, as the chorus in a matter of course, doing this job and doing competitive research, you may come across websites.
John:
So the people find offensive and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Basically it was just saying you may see porn sites as part of your work and you promise you won't sue us because of it.
John:
Right.
John:
And because they're out there on the web and you may be going in that, that,
John:
if you work at penny arcade and it's a comic strip that it you know has adult themes and doing competitive research you may run across other things or whatever that seems like actually kind of a reasonable thing to say up front to people that like presumably you're familiar with penny arcade but just so you know this is what it's about this is what you may come in contact with it is not i think trying to have people sign away their rights to be sexually harassed or something because i have to believe that if anything like that was going on inside penny arcade we would hear about it
John:
They're not the NSA.
John:
They're not CIA.
John:
They're not silencing people as they go out the door.
John:
Everyone who works there seems to like working there.
John:
They all seem to like each other.
John:
The people who leave do not leave disgruntled and hating it.
John:
Maybe it's like a cult and they're brainwashing everybody, but I have a really hard time believing that.
John:
I still think this is an ill-advised hiring decision, and I sure as hell wouldn't take that job myself, but I definitely have mixed feelings about is this good or bad for...
John:
The person who ends up taking that job and being happy with it.
John:
How can you say if someone takes that job and they're super happy with it for, you know, even if they're only happy with two years, like people are sometimes are in jobs for less than two years.
John:
Who are you to say to that person?
John:
They shouldn't have taken that job.
John:
Maybe in retrospect, they will feel like they shouldn't.
John:
I know if I took that job and then grew to my current ripe old age, I would regret having taken that job.
John:
But that's me.
John:
Everyone's different.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
I don't know what to think.
Marco:
I mean, to wrap this up, because I think we're running a little long here, I think that it's a complicated issue because it divides people along the same lines as how much the government should mandate about how things are done or how you live your own life.
Marco:
And people are so split on issues like this.
Marco:
Labor laws almost always have this kind of problem where it's like, well, if the government
Marco:
The government or the society's expectations or from critics like us, we might say, oh, well, having workaholism be the norm is really bad.
Marco:
And you need to have codified vacation schedules and limited hours or paid overtime to discourage constant overworking and stuff like that.
Marco:
You have issues where a lot of people think that that should be regulated, that the government should step in and be like, well, it's really better for people overall if you live by these rules or follow these guidelines or restrictions or limits.
Marco:
It's kind of like a parent role.
Marco:
We know better for you than what you're claiming.
Marco:
So even if the employer wants you to do something, and you agree, and you will do it, and you're happy doing it, the government might say, that's actually worse for people in general, so we're not going to allow that.
Marco:
And that's a very controversial thing.
Marco:
Similar to that, all of our opinions on this, like you said earlier, Casey and John both, if the employees there are happy in that environment, is it really that bad?
Marco:
And so I think we can't really...
Marco:
We can say this is bad in general, and generally you shouldn't take this job.
Marco:
But if they happen to find somebody who will take that job, which they almost certainly will very easily because they have such a big following, we can't really say that person's an idiot.
Marco:
They're making that choice.
Marco:
But I think we can say in general, you shouldn't do things like this.
Marco:
But even that's controversial.
Yeah.
John:
Even for the person taking that job, you can't be sure that you're going to like it as much as you do.
John:
And talk about labor laws and stuff like that.
John:
In general, this is all sort of... Talk about first world problems here.
John:
Labor laws...
John:
There's so much low-hanging fruit in terms of stopping the Walmarts of the world not paying their employees enough.
John:
This person is going to be paid enough to get food on the table, right?
John:
So in the grand scheme of things, it pales in comparison to the worker exploitation that happens lower down in the scale of things.
John:
But for our little enlightened world of developers and stuff, this is like the crazy equivalent of that among developers is that –
John:
we've probably all been in jobs where we felt like we were overworked and we felt like we weren't appreciated and didn't share in the success of the company and we see this is a place where that could happen so be aware don't go in thinking it's all going to be roses and sunshine because it's really really tough and especially when we see a young person doing it where they don't know they don't know they're going to like it they don't know if they're going to be happy because they don't have any experience with anything and maybe they'll think they'll like it and maybe you know the burnout is definitely a possibility maybe they'll be happy for the first year and realize i can never go anywhere and i'm miserable and i've
John:
sacrifice my entire life and I didn't realize I was doing it it's mostly like you're trying to help people go in with their eyes open and I think the brutal and honest ad kind of helps in that but it also kind of makes it seem more exciting and daring to young people with less experience of like oh I'm going to do this thing because it's super hard and everything
John:
In general, even if they were fixed on this stupid plan of hiring a single person to do all these jobs, there were better ways to go about presenting that position to have a better chance of finding a successful match with someone who really will be happy in that position.
John:
I don't know.
John:
With private companies, it's difficult, but we should all just wait outside the company for that person to leave 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10 years from now and say, how was it?
John:
Was it what you thought it was?
John:
Were you happy?
John:
We told you so.
John:
Get off my lawn.
John:
I mean, maybe.
John:
We didn't tell you.
John:
Maybe they're going to love it.
John:
Maybe they're going to think it's awesome.
John:
I have to say, having consumed tons and tons of Penny Arcade content,
John:
over the years and seeing all of like what their work life is in there.
John:
And many times I've said, boy, I wish my work was like that boy.
John:
I wish I cared about my coworkers the way they apparently care about theirs.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's why they get all these employees.
John:
And we just, we just want them not to take advantage of that and like exploit somebody.
John:
It's like,
John:
We know we have this environment that looks awesome on camera, and secretly inside we're evil, and we're going to abuse this person, and we're going to get some sucker in.
John:
That's what we fear, but we don't know what's going on.
John:
So that's a fear, but you can't say that's definitely what it's like inside Penny Arcade.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I definitely have mixed feelings.
John:
And this is not even touching Mike's many foot-and-mouth disease problems and his major problems understanding.
John:
I'm not even going to get into these topics.
John:
I don't think you guys know about them, but it's probably not appropriate for a tech show.
John:
But this job listing is.
Casey:
All right, then.
Marco:
Let's wrap it up.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, Ting and Warby Parker, and we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean to.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
John:
Penny Arcade is a divisive issue, a company that engenders strong feelings.
John:
So we'll see if we get tons of feedback from the people who hate Penny Arcade and say that we were defending it too much and from the people who love Penny Arcade and say we were saying bad things about it.
John:
Or maybe we'll get almost no feedback at all, which means that there's no overlap in our audiences.
Okay.
Marco:
I wonder, what do you think will be more hated?
Marco:
Our collective opinion on the Penny Arcade job posting or me or Casey?
John:
why can't it be both that's probably the right i really hated marco and casey's opinion of the bit now i think i'll get the worst of it because the problem with problem with trying to be like to have a position that's nuanced where like you you uh acknowledge the unknowns in the situation they're like all we have to go on is this job posting at a bunch of videos and none of us really know and you know like that uncertainty and that hedging seems like well you're defending them you're saying they're better i'm just acknowledging the unknowns and people hate that because
John:
It's not they just want to see you decisively come down for or against.
John:
And that sort of wishy washy, they interpret it as wishy washy.
John:
But I feel like it's it's accuracy.
John:
It's acknowledging the unknowns.
John:
You can't make definitive statements without more information.
John:
And that comes off as not as certainty is much more attractive and interesting.
John:
And so they want you to be certain about something.
John:
And I can't.
John:
Oh, am I pronouncing divisive wrong?
John:
Probably.
John:
I've always heard divisive.
John:
I bet if I looked it up in the dictionary now, it would tell me there's two pronunciations.
John:
Anyway.
Casey:
You know, I almost called you out on it, but since I've gotten burned, I've burned myself so bad on these things.
Casey:
I feel like Richard Pryor.
Casey:
You know, I've lit myself up trying to smoke, if you will.
Casey:
Not literally, but figuratively.
Casey:
And so I refuse to make any sort of commentary on grammar or pronunciation issues.
John:
It says one pronunciation, divisive.
John:
Oh, well.
John:
It's a divisive issue.
John:
I'm still way ahead of Groover on mispronunciations.
Marco:
See, your problem, John, is that you're a fan of Penny Arcade.
Marco:
You actually know them.
Marco:
You're closer to them than me and Casey.
John:
I don't know them.
John:
I read the comic, though, yeah.
Marco:
Well, yeah.
Marco:
Casey and I, as far as I know, Casey, we don't give a shit about Penny Arcade.
Marco:
I never got into the comic.
Marco:
I've known of it for, I don't know, years, a decade.
Marco:
But I've never read it regularly.
Marco:
I've never really cared.
Marco:
And honestly, when people link me to it, I don't even find it that funny.
Marco:
It's just not my kind of thing.
John:
Yeah, you have to be a gamer.
John:
It's a gamer's comic.
Marco:
But you're actually close enough that any opinion you make, and as you said, by having a nuanced hedged opinion, anything you say is going to actually anger both sides.
Marco:
The people who don't like them from this job posting are going to be like, you didn't come down hard enough.
Marco:
And the people who are fans of them are like, you traitor, you're one of us.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But the thing is, it's like the cult of personality where you think you know people because you listen to their podcasts and everything.
John:
And at a certain point, reading Penny Arcade for 15 years and going to all the conventions, you start to feel like you know the people.
John:
And when they do terrible, stupid things...
John:
if you don't know them you just simply condemn them and say you have done a terrible stupid thing if you do know them you're like oh damn you did a terrible stupid thing like if your friend does it don't you want to like talk to your friend and say what are you doing man like because they've done lots of terrible stupid things and i even though i don't know these people at all the feeling i get is not like hey there's this thing i never heard of like you know when someone links you to something where someone said something dumb
John:
and you have no idea who it is, all you know is, like, oh, man, this person is a terrible person, right?
John:
Like some YouTube video of some person saying something terrible or some politician you never heard of saying something terrible, you just instantly go, well, that guy's a bozo, right?
John:
But if someone links you to, like, your brother saying something terrible, you want to talk to your brother and say, what are you doing, man?
John:
You'd hopefully say, I know you're not as terrible as that is, or maybe you are as terrible and we need to talk about it or whatever.
John:
And that's how I feel about the Penny Arcade stuff.
John:
Like, there was a good post from MC Front a lot, which is...
John:
a musician and also a friend of the guys with a similar conflict going, you're doing a terrible thing.
John:
But I know you guys have it in you to A, realize that it's terrible and B, fix it.
John:
And seeing them not take those two steps, not seem to realize what was wrong, what they did, and not seeming to fix it is just so frustrating.
John:
And a lot of people are just sort of cutting ties or like...
John:
You've had three strikes, you're out.
John:
You keep doing these dumb things, and maybe they just don't have people around them explaining to them what the problem is, or maybe they can't internalize it.
John:
And it's a tough situation.
John:
And again, I feel like I have this unspoken relationship with these people where I totally don't, the same way that people feel like they know us because they listen to our podcast.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so, yeah, I definitely am closer to it, but I don't, what I don't want people to think is because I'm close to it, I defend these terrible things they do, which again, I don't want to get into it, but it's simply the job posting itself.
John:
I don't think that was the right way to go about that on so many different levels, despite the fact that I, I acknowledge that it is very possible that the person who takes that job will be happy with it and will come out of the company saying, I was glad I took that job.
Casey:
It's funny hearing you talk about knowing someone who does something stupid or seeing a stranger do something stupid.
Casey:
And I feel like, Marco, that's why you get burned a lot because you're very passionate and very opinionated, which in and of itself is not bad.
Casey:
But I think that a lot of times you come across as arrogant and because I know you – well, both of us know you as well as we do.
Casey:
I don't think a thing of it.
Casey:
And then I'll see – and I can't think of a great example, but I'll see the internet go freaking nuts because Marco said this ridiculously arrogant thing.
Casey:
And to me, I'm just like, wait, what?
Casey:
Because I know you and I know enough about where you're coming from to know that's probably not how you meant it.
Casey:
Or even if it is, you meant it at, you know, level 2 out of 10 and the internet's taking it as level 10 out of 10.
Casey:
And it's a very similar thing.
Casey:
And so it's often funny for me to watch some of the skirmishes you either get yourself into or put yourself into.
Casey:
Because not always, but most times, I'm like, oh, well, yeah, it's just Marco being Marco, whatever.
John:
You get graded on a curve.
John:
Once you have any amount of fame, the scrutiny is much higher.
John:
And Penny Arcade, like, that's not excusing them at all.
John:
Penny Arcade has tons of fame.
John:
Yeah.
John:
guess what you get the good and the bad that comes with it i mean same with the market would you rather have people not care what you say or overreact about what you're saying say i mean like that's the price of depends on the day i know but that but that's the price of being well known that's the price of being successful in your endeavors is that things you say are going to be scrutinized i mean the obvious the biggest example is any kind of politician or the president or wherever they say anything like they fart the wrong way they say they don't like broccoli and it's an international incident remember that but
John:
maybe you don't george bush anyway yeah we were alive for that that's that comes to the territory and the poor penny arcade guys a end up doing legitimately bad things and b rail against the the unfairness of being being held to the standard that they didn't want to sign up for and like that's i understand the emotion but you have to realize that
John:
That comes with the territory.
John:
There's no ninja move where you're like, haha, but I don't accept that you're going to scrutinize me.
John:
Therefore, my actions shouldn't be taken as seriously as they are.
John:
You don't get to decide that.
John:
You do speak for a large media conglomerate empire.
John:
Your words do have more effect than they would if you were a regular person.
John:
You can't go back to being a regular Joe anymore.
John:
Uh, yeah, it's, that's the way it is.
John:
I, I feel like I should just, if I just sit down with them for like, okay, maybe, maybe I'd have to be on an island for a month.
John:
Cause sometimes I feel like, I felt like it was Steve Jobs.
John:
If I could just get Steve Jobs in a room, I could convince him of X, Y. I'm like, no, realistically he would walk out of the room.
John:
I need to have him prisoner.
John:
in a nice way so that they can't run away and eventually they'll it's like in that movie where like some you know there's a prisoner or even just like a student who like in the beginning they hate the teacher and they teach it for the first six months but then they finally come around and then the real work gets going that's what you need i feel like someone should be able to talk to these guys and explain to them what it is they're missing because i really believe they can be turned around i just haven't done it yet
Marco:
Well, I don't think they think there's anything wrong with this.
John:
I know.
John:
That's problem zero.
John:
There it is.
John:
Maybe someone could explain it to you.
John:
Maybe no one's explaining it the right way.
John:
Let me explain it again.
Marco:
Here's what's wrong.
Marco:
It's hard when you get as much crap as they get, which I can only begin to imagine.
Marco:
I get some small fraction of that amount of crap.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I am – I'm always surprised in the new ways that I've accidentally offended people.
Marco:
Like it's a new – it's like every week I accidentally stumble upon a new way that I've offended somebody.
Marco:
And it gets to me.
Marco:
It really does because I want to be a nice guy.
Marco:
I don't want to be a dick.
Marco:
I don't want people to think I'm a dick.
Marco:
But you're just so good at it.
Marco:
But I really don't mean to be.
Marco:
That's totally unintentional.
John:
But you would learn from your mistakes.
John:
Again, I don't want to get into the specific instances, but they'll say something that is unintentionally sexist or transphobic or something, and they literally don't know what they just did wrong.
John:
And that's the problem, right?
John:
And the worst reaction is to get defensive and double down on it, and that's what they do.
John:
They get defensive and double down on the wrong thing they did.
John:
And it's like...
John:
That's the whole thing of like trying to educate someone.
John:
Like if you do something that is legitimately, you know, if you said something that actually is arrogant, you know, the way you said it is dismissive of other people and whatever.
John:
I feel like that you learn from that experience and learn to say the same thing in a different way or be more clear about what you're saying, right?
John:
Or, you know, express your sentiment more accurately so it's less likely to be misinterpreted the wrong way.
John:
But I don't think you've ever been in a situation where you said something that is like,
John:
totally wrong and terrible and doubled down on it.
John:
And we were like, no, actually screw you.
John:
And let me tell you why I'm going to say that even more like that total, you know, emotional reaction, your reaction always is, you know, introspective.
John:
And well, not always something that you have moments, but, but like,
Marco:
No, that's the problem.
Marco:
My instinct, I think, which is a natural instinct, is to be defensive.
Marco:
I look back on things that blow up that I didn't mean to blow up, and I look back on what I actually said and did after it's all over, and I can see, wow, I did completely the wrong thing.
Marco:
I got defensive.
Marco:
I was being immature or angry or impulsive.
Marco:
I
Marco:
I look back and I'm ashamed of it, but it's easy to say... But you learn from it, though, don't you?
John:
You don't make that exact specific mistake again, right?
Marco:
Yeah, but I find new ones.
Marco:
It's easy to say, oh, if I was in this situation like this, I would do X, Y, and Z. I would react this way.
Marco:
But then when you're actually in that situation, a lot of times it doesn't turn out that way.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
It's so hard when you – when your instinct is to be defensive or to say things off the cuff as if you're talking to a smaller group of people who likes you more than the actual group of people you're talking to that's much bigger –
Marco:
And it's really hard to get used to that, and it's really hard to fundamentally change your behavior and your personality to sand off those rough edges.
Marco:
I mean, I'm 31, and I still haven't figured out how to do that quite well yet.
Marco:
Like, I'm trying, but I really have not figured it out yet.
John:
They're similar ages.
John:
I think they're between you and I. I think they're in their 30s.
John:
They have kids similar age.
John:
Like, they're trying to figure it out as well.
John:
And yeah, that instinct to lash out, like...
John:
It's not just the instincts to lash out.
John:
It's like the things that you get called on are just so minor compared to the things they do wrong.
Marco:
Well, I think it's mostly because I have a much smaller audience, though.
Marco:
Like if I had an audience the size of theirs, I think I would get as much as they do, if not more, because I'm even less experienced at talking to an audience as large as theirs as they are.
John:
Well, I mean, here's – I don't know.
John:
I'm not going to name names.
John:
But, like, say you said something like, you know, well, everyone knows that girls can't climb trees.
John:
Like, you said something sexist like that, right?
John:
And you didn't understand that that statement was sexist.
John:
All you can see is about the tree climbing business.
John:
And, like, you didn't understand – conceptually, like, you're like, what's sexist about that?
John:
It's just a statement of fact.
John:
Everyone knows girls can't climb trees.
John:
Like, you don't understand the broader context in which that statement – and, like –
John:
Then you double down on it, you could argue about it, and you get lost in the details, and it's like there is a base understanding of what is at stake here that does not exist in your head.
John:
And so even if you get to the point, as they frequently do, where they're in apology mode, and they're like, we're sorry, the last thing we want to do is offend people, we care about all these people, like honest statements of apology, but they don't understand what they're apologizing for.
John:
They don't understand the historical and cultural context of sexism.
John:
versus just i said something wrong kind of at some point and now i have to apologize for it but i don't really understand what i'm apologizing for that's that's their problem and they keep doing that over and over again and nothing you have done has ever reached that that level of like you not because you understand why someone is like if you say something that's dismissive of like some programming language and people get you understand it's because you were dismissive of program there's not like a a millennia long oppression of php program
John:
Remember, it's like the context that you are completely unaware of or not able to internalize.
John:
And it's hard.
John:
A lot of people are not able to internalize those things.
John:
And one way is to just, you know, shun.
John:
And the other way is to try to explain to, you know, they call them allies, like someone who wants to do the right thing, but doesn't understand what they did wrong to try to bring them onto your side by explaining what they did wrong.
Yeah.
John:
Like those blowups, I think serve a purpose because I feel like I have in seeing not just them, but every other internet blowup where someone says something and then some interest group jumps on them and shreds them to bits has made me more aware.
John:
Not that like that interest group is a totally right.
John:
And that guy is totally wrong, but just more aware of issues that I wasn't aware of before in a way that gives me a bigger picture of like humanity, like makes you question your assumptions about things that you hadn't thought about before.
John:
Uh,
John:
So I think – I hope some portion of the audience seeing these train wrecks is coming out of it like maybe those people, those allies are being educated even if the people involved in the conflict are not.
John:
We should have a – it's too bad I'm only on tech podcasts because I would love to be on a podcast to talk specifically about the issues involved in here, but it is not appropriate for tech podcasts.
Marco:
You just make a new one.
Marco:
I mean what's another podcast?
Marco:
Oh, please.
John:
No more podcasts.
Casey:
I mean if us three idiots can do it, then anyone can.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, it's funny.
Casey:
I was just complaining tomorrow, maybe not complaining, but lamenting is probably a better word to Marco.
Casey:
I think it was earlier today that as part of my newfound notoriety is like an F triple minus list celebrity is I feel like I'm getting to the point and maybe it's just because I'm an idiot, but I feel like I'm getting to the point that everything I post anywhere in any capacity is met with a million like silly critiques and
Casey:
And it just gets annoying and it gets frustrating.
Casey:
And a lot of times I want to engage.
Casey:
And where I think Marco and I are both learning is I'm trying to get better about not engaging.
Casey:
But my initial reaction is – somebody posted on Twitter.
Casey:
I forget what exactly they said, but something –
Casey:
Something along the lines of, oh, you know, or that's what it was.
Casey:
It was, you know, I, uh, Sean Blanc had, had asked me to do something for his new website and, um, and somebody had posted, you know, why the hell do I care what this, this other guy has to say?
Casey:
And I, and so because I'm an idiot, I engaged and I said something along the lines of, well, you know,
Casey:
Even the other guy has an opinion every once in a while.
Casey:
And the response, which I should have expected, was something along the lines of, you know, honestly, I don't like you or Marco.
Casey:
I just listen for John, which is pretty much everyone that listens to this show.
John:
I think I remember this.
John:
Did you see what I responded to that person?
Casey:
No, I don't think I did.
John:
That's because I didn't CC you.
John:
But if you could look at the thread, you'll see.
John:
Like I rarely engage as well, but sometimes it's worth doing.
John:
Maybe it wasn't appropriate for you to engage in that thing, and there's certainly times when I don't.
John:
Here's the thing about it.
John:
A lot of times people will say that they don't like your whatever thing.
John:
They don't like listening to your podcast.
John:
They don't care about your opinion.
John:
They will be expressing in not so many words that they have different priorities than you do.
John:
uh the fact that they're throwing that in your face may bother you but you you have to also say like it's okay for people to have a different opinion it's not like what you do like all right like there's nothing there's there's not an argument to be had you're not going to turn them around you're not going to it's not my job and not my desire to find everyone who doesn't like me and convince them they should like me right the only thing i will engage on is
John:
people being mean for no good reason and people getting facts wrong.
John:
And even those I will selectively engage on.
John:
So if people get facts wrong, I will correct them because that is something where there is an argument to be had.
John:
And I'll only do that if I'm feeling energetic.
John:
And people being mean, most of the time I will let that slide.
John:
But today when I saw that tweet that you were talking about, I didn't want to let that slide.
John:
And I think my response was, don't be a jerk.
John:
Because seriously, don't be a jerk.
John:
you wouldn't like that's being that's just being a jerk you don't like them fine you don't like what he had to say fine don't keep throwing in their face and saying you're we don't like you you're don't like anything you say but okay fine don't listen to the show the end period don't don't be a jerk about it and so that's you know that's like it's okay not to like them it's not it's nothing wrong with them maybe you don't like to listen to that there's plenty of things that i don't like to listen to or watch either but i don't seek the people out and tell them how much i don't like them repeatedly that's just being a jerk
Marco:
Yeah, I think people who don't get a lot of random strangers giving them feedback would probably be shocked at how much crap you get when you have a lot of random strangers giving you feedback on the internet.
Marco:
Just for an extreme version of this...
Marco:
Look on Twitter.
Marco:
Look at the at reply stream of a celebrity or somebody who has hundreds of thousands of followers or more.
Marco:
Look at Gruber's celebrity.
Marco:
Look at Gruber's stream.
Marco:
Look at his at replies.
Marco:
Look at anybody who has a large following who says anything of any value ever.
Marco:
And you're going to see hundreds and hundreds of people calling them an asshole and telling them they're an idiot.
Marco:
And when you put yourself out there, once you get any size audience at all, you're going to get a lot of really good feedback from people.
Marco:
And you could get...
Marco:
You could get 100 positive emails and tweets a day saying that they liked what you wrote and that was great.
Marco:
And then you get four idiots who tell you that you're just a moron and they hate everything you do.
Marco:
For some people...
Marco:
Who have a thick skin, you know, it's easy to let that, you know, just roll off your back and okay, that's fine.
Marco:
Some people, it bothers them.
Marco:
And I think that is the natural reaction is for that to bother you.
Marco:
And I'm one of those people.
Marco:
It bothers me.
Marco:
And every nasty thing that I get bothers me.
Marco:
So my recommended thing to Casey, I told him earlier where I am, my strategy for this is if somebody says something uncivil or, by my definition, unreasonable in some way,
Marco:
over Twitter.
Marco:
I just block them.
Marco:
First time, first offense, don't care, block.
Marco:
And then it's gone because modern Twitter clients, when you block somebody, actually remove the tweet from your timeline.
Marco:
You stop seeing it.
Marco:
And generally speaking...
Marco:
a lot more hate comes from a lot fewer people than you think.
Marco:
And so you might have four guys who troll you with everything you write or say.
Marco:
And the same four guys every time.
Marco:
So if you just hand out four blocks, you're eliminating 80% of your trolling that you see.
Marco:
And I know that a lot of people, and John, even you just said, a lot of people would engage with that or try to comment or fight back.
Marco:
And I found that...
Marco:
Almost universally never to be worthwhile and almost universally always makes everything worse and makes me get more angry or annoyed or feeling bad about it.
Marco:
Like it just builds the negativity and the best way for me to handle it is just to remove it because I can't deal with that.
Marco:
Like Joel Spolsky left blogging because of this.
Marco:
Like Joel on software, there's so much good stuff on there.
Marco:
But because he wrote things with strong opinions to an audience of programmers, he got the worst crap from people ever in addition to all the positives.
Marco:
And he wrote in one of his last like main posts when his blog was still active, but he was basically saying he's quitting.
Marco:
One of the things he wrote was like he could get 100 positive comments and one negative one and that negative one would bother him all day.
Marco:
And I totally get that because I'm the exact same way.
John:
If you can learn to... That's the thing that you should, because I think you should do whatever it takes to have an even keel.
John:
And if it's blocking, that's what it is.
John:
But as someone who usually... I very rarely block.
John:
I block spammers, obviously.
John:
But I very rarely block people who are being jerks to me.
John:
Because if you can learn to absorb that...
John:
There is very often some kernel of truth in the negative feedback that you get, particularly in the negative feedback that you hate the most.
John:
Because if someone says something to you, like if they said to me that I'm tremendously overweight, that would not bother me because I'm not tremendously overweight, right?
John:
But if they say something that's close to home, right –
John:
then that bothers you more and the closer they get to the truth even if they're super mean about it and don't really aren't you know this if they're saying it much worse than it is if there is some kernel of truth you tend to have the most visceral negative reaction to that and if you can learn to absorb that what you can do is come away from it and learn from whatever that kernel of truth it is figure it out examine it and try to improve on that axis going for if you think it's an important thing to improve on maybe that person saying you're doing something that they think is bad that you think is good then fine whatever ignore them but
John:
If it really bothers you because you also kind of deep down agree that that's a bad thing, you work on it and try to make it better.
John:
It doesn't mean you have to absorb tons of abuse to make this happen.
John:
You could still block the person or whatever.
John:
But the anti-pattern is totally blocking out all negative feedback and just sort of
John:
becoming a hollywood rock star where you don't let anything negative you become tom cruise where you don't i don't this means tom cruise but anyway you know where you where you don't let anything negative in and you start living in your own bubble and that's your way to deal with things and that's you don't want that to happen you don't want to isolate yourself so much from feedback that you are inside a bubble and i found that most people if you call them on their bs most people will be you know
John:
They'll do a little bit of introspection if you do it in the right way.
John:
It's very difficult to do.
John:
You have to disengage yourself from the process.
John:
But one example is remember the Iowa 7 kid video?
John:
The kid who was crying about Iowa 7 we talked about on the show, right?
John:
So I tweeted that.
John:
I think it was before the show I tweeted that.
John:
And some person responded to me and said, boy, that kid, your kid is a big brat or something like that.
John:
Right.
John:
And so there's two things.
John:
One, one, that's not my kid.
John:
And two, like it's a seven year old like crying about or five year old, whatever is crying about things that five year olds cry about.
John:
Right.
John:
And so I could have just ignored that.
John:
I'm not going to convince them that that kid is not a brat.
John:
That's not my goal.
John:
But they got a fact wrong.
John:
So I said, that's not my kid, which is true.
John:
And, you know, I didn't try to say and you would know that if you listen to the bluff.
John:
No, I just said, that's not my kid.
John:
I want to correct the fact.
John:
And the second thing is, I said, that's not my kid.
John:
And that's an unkind thing to say.
John:
Because it's an unkind thing to say.
John:
You're going to say a kid you see on a video who's just a little kid who's crying at some point is a brat.
John:
That is an unkind thing to say.
John:
And that's it.
John:
That's all I said.
John:
And this was an older woman who said this or whatever.
John:
And right or wrong, you know, you think like this older woman should be saying people are also people are mean.
John:
This person was not convinced by my... They agreed that it was a mean thing to say, but then also tried to justify why they said it.
John:
Okay, well, I'm glad that's not your kid, but I still think they're kind of bratty.
John:
And that was it.
John:
I'm not going to pursue that further.
John:
But I think that tiny piece of feedback I gave them, correcting the fact and saying that they were being unkind, hopefully...
John:
they gave them a moment's notice of saying yes i was saying an unkind thing about a five-year-old on the internet just now and maybe they dismiss it move on with their life but i hope that's planting a little seed in there reminding them that you know that's not a nice thing to say and if that was my kid maybe my reaction would be much more violent i would block them and i would argue with them but like that you know the correct reaction if you're going to engage at all is to try to help that person realize what a jerk they're being more
Marco:
Well, right.
Marco:
And what you said is exactly correct, which is when the criticism is a little bit true, that's what hurts the most.
Marco:
And I think, John, you're exactly right that blocking out sources of negative criticism completely is not good.
Marco:
That's really bad.
Marco:
I mean one thing I love about putting myself out there online –
Marco:
is that I get challenged on so many things that it forces me to become a better person.
Marco:
It makes me a better writer.
Marco:
It makes me a better thinker.
Marco:
It makes me a better person to have so much constant feedback, good and bad.
Marco:
The problem is you have to draw a line somewhere.
Marco:
You have to be able to distinguish between good feedback and people just being unreasonable or being trolls.
Marco:
And when you have a large audience, you're going to get a lot of both.
Marco:
And you also have to make sure that you're not going to get such a massive deluge of negative feedback constantly that it will discourage you from continuing to be present there and make you leave the internet or stop doing something.
Marco:
I have so many horrible vocal traits.
Marco:
Somehow, not a lot of people have called me out on it in public because people aren't that mean, I guess.
Marco:
And so I'm able to have a career as a podcaster.
Marco:
I would never have thought five years ago that I would be making a good chunk of my living from podcasts because I'm not a good speaker at all.
Marco:
I have so many problems.
Marco:
I've thought about going to a speech therapist as an adult to fix weird things I do when I talk.
Marco:
But I haven't had a pressing reason to yet because no one's called me out on it.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It's important to distinguish between people being mean for invalid reasons or just being mean because they're mean.
Casey:
Can I jump in here because I think I have a great example.
Casey:
So this person we were talking about earlier that was being a troll was just saying – literally this person said, I wish there was a way to mute out Marco and me.
Casey:
And that's just really not necessary.
Casey:
And like John said, John replied and said, don't be a jerk.
Casey:
However, I've seen a lot of feedback for myself, things like, why do you hedge so much?
Casey:
You don't need to do that.
Casey:
When I say, well, here's this big long opinion, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but that's just what I think.
Casey:
I don't need to do that.
Casey:
That's not necessary.
Casey:
That is sometimes hurtful feedback because –
Casey:
It strikes close to home, just like you were saying.
Casey:
But it's good and positive and constructive feedback as opposed to, I wish I could mute you two idiots.
Casey:
That's just not helpful.
Casey:
And there is a big difference between the two.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And if hundreds of listeners told you after the very first show you hedged too much, or if hundreds of listeners told me after my very first podcast that they don't like the way I talk,
Marco:
we almost would have certainly stopped and left.
Marco:
Then everyone loses.
Marco:
We lose.
Marco:
People who like the show lose.
Marco:
That's bad for everyone.
Marco:
It really is important to have some kind of balance.
Marco:
You can't control what people are going to say to you.
Marco:
So it's really important to just be able to manage that somehow.
Marco:
And that's why I hand out Twitter blocks aggressively.
Marco:
It's just to manage that incoming stream just so that – I'm not trying to block out all criticism.
Marco:
I do want to hear valid criticism.
Marco:
I just want to try to filter out a lot of invalid criticism and a lot of unnecessary nastiness.
Marco:
And if I don't filter all that out, I'm afraid I would just get tired of it and leave.
John:
One of the reasons I'm lighter on the blocking is because it's like I will never unblock a person.
John:
I don't even know how to – because you go to Twitter website, like an animal as they say, and unblock them.
John:
But you're never going to do that.
John:
And everyone has a bad day.
John:
Everyone is cranky about something.
John:
They didn't like something.
John:
You say they'll say some mean thing.
John:
I'm willing to give people the benefit of the doubt if they say some jerky thing.
John:
until it becomes like oh here's the person all they ever say is that jerky thing they're clearly not even a fan of the show or anything that i do they're just here to harass me and then they just become it just becomes harassment and then yeah you pull out the block i don't have people like that but for example getting back to the sexism thing many women online do have that tons and tons of people who are just there to be evil harassers in dangerous kinds of ways and i
John:
strongly encourage them to hand out the blocks like crazy in that instance all of us i think are lucky enough not to deal with that at all and i can't even imagine what that would be like because we're whining about people saying that we don't have a good podcast which is nothing compared to the crap they get but yeah there's there's different categories and the cat the category of negative feedback i get is of a kind where i do not find myself having to hand out the blocks spammers on the other hand get immediate block but
Marco:
Well, John, you've managed to develop your way of arguing and presenting points so well.
Marco:
And this is probably because you're so ancient compared to us.
John:
It's the power of Usenet.
John:
If you want to see me making terrible arguments, go search for the Usenet archives.
John:
Burned in the crucible of flame wars on Usenet.
Marco:
Now surrounded by tons of Google ads.
Marco:
But you've developed this for, what, a decade longer than we have or close to it?
Marco:
You're a lot better at it.
Marco:
You're like this large chunk of time ahead of us in having all those rough edges worn down off of your argument style so that now you're really good at it.
Marco:
So I think you get a lot less of the crap than Casey and I do.
John:
I don't think it's necessarily age because you can find 50 year olds who are just as babyish as like, I think it just comes from, you know, like this one, when I found the internet, the thing I wanted to do with it was argue about computers with it.
John:
Like so many, like so many other people and argue about computers.
John:
I did and arguing about computers with smart people eventually teaches you,
John:
like what you're wrong about and how to construct an argument and how to be able, either it makes you flee or like you double down and become even a bigger jerk.
John:
Or if you, if this is really something you want to pursue, which it was for me, I became better at it.
John:
I like, like any kind of skill that you build up, you know, it's like if you start playing tennis and you keep getting your butt kicked and your reaction is to just hit the ball as hard as you can into the air,
John:
that is not getting better at that is that is doubling down on your idiocy.
John:
Or you can say, why do I keep getting beat?
John:
What techniques can I learn to make myself better?
John:
Let me practice, you know, and different people have different reactions.
John:
I think it's, it's not so much the years of experience, although that helps, but it's like what you did with those years.
John:
Because again, I know plenty of people on, you know, on usenet and forums or whatever, who are just as abrasive and terrible and illogical and irrational and emotional as they were 1015 years ago,
John:
And have learned nothing.
John:
But there are lots of other people who left that environment entirely.
John:
And there are other people who are slowly getting better and who eventually like because if you pursue that as like, this is something I'm interested in.
John:
I'm interested in arguing sounds crazy, but it's, you know, some people are into it.
Marco:
I think to our audience, that does not sound crazy at all that especially coming from you, that you would be interested in arguing.
John:
Right.
John:
And I think to some degree, all of us are because like that Marco, why do you why do you bother putting your opinions on blogs?
John:
Like, why do you, you know, like you want you want to say, here's what I have to say, what do you have to say?
John:
And you want to hear like, good feedback from smart people.
John:
And so you can go back and forth.
John:
If you didn't care, if you weren't interested in that, you wouldn't be putting your opinions out there.
John:
Like you wouldn't crave that back and forth.
John:
So that's something you're doing with your life.
Marco:
When I publish a blog post, the very first thing I do is basically spend the next 45 minutes monitoring Twitter and email and hoping that I get some feedback and reading it all and possibly addressing it.
Marco:
That's the very first thing I do.
Marco:
If I couldn't do that, it would feel very lonely.
Marco:
And it wouldn't give me as much of a return of satisfaction, which is probably saying a lot about me and my egotism and our modern culture as a whole.
Marco:
But getting that feedback is of utmost importance, and it would feel very strange now if I didn't get that kind of feedback.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, and a very close friend of the show, underscore David Smith, said in the chat a moment ago, I find it really important to have a group of trusted friends who can tell you honest criticism.
Casey:
Unsolicited feedback is where things get really rough.
Casey:
And I completely agree with him.
Casey:
I think it's nice to have a little bit of unsolicited feedback as long as it's constructive.
Casey:
Because sometimes, like I was saying earlier, you know, I might not think Marco's being an asshole because I know Marco and I know that more often than not, he's not intending to be an asshole.
Casey:
but maybe somebody who doesn't know Marco thinks he is being an asshole.
Casey:
And so it might be useful for Marco to hear some random person say, hey, you know what?
Casey:
You really came off like an asshole on that.
Casey:
But generally speaking, I think it's extremely important, just like Dave said, to have a group that can call you out and say, you know what?
Casey:
You really need to work on whatever this is.
Casey:
And it can be about what you're working on.
Casey:
It could be about
Casey:
Something called, you know, just how you treat people could be about any number of things.
Casey:
But having that, I think, is very important.
John:
I can just hear all the handbrakes that are going to cover that section if it actually ends up in the podcast.
Marco:
Yeah, my bad.
Marco:
I think this is better than the show.
John:
It's definitely not a tech podcast.
John:
Oh, and by the way, speaking of things that people get wrong, no one has called me on that.
John:
Where are my friends calling me on these things?
John:
Did the chat room call me on this?
John:
They called me on divisive, but did not call me on this.
John:
I believe when I petitioned Merlin for...
John:
An REM-style song parody for our – style parody for our song.
John:
I erroneously misspoke the name of the REM album, and I think I said Plural Murmurs, and that's crazy talking.
John:
I knew it was bad as soon as I said it.
John:
I just wanted everyone to know I know what the title of the album is.
John:
It's singular.
John:
This has been eating it.
John:
Speaking of things, they're eating away at you.
John:
And it's like if someone calls me on that.
John:
Oh, this is the other one that happens constantly.
John:
It's like my mispronunciation of nuclear.
John:
Like I mispronounce it all the time.
John:
I know it's wrong.
John:
I'm not doing it on purpose.
John:
I'm not like, oh, I'm taking a stand.
John:
I'm going to say it the wrong way.
John:
Nope.
John:
I totally want to say it the right way.
John:
Every time it just comes out nuclear.
John:
So many times, and as I said in the many tweets, I blame the 80s.
John:
Like, I do not want to say that.
John:
It just happens.
John:
I don't want it to happen.
John:
I know it's wrong.
John:
Thank you for all the feedback, people.
John:
I'm trying.
Casey:
Well, so I didn't really intend for this to become group therapy, but I'm kind of glad it did.
Casey:
This was pretty good.
John:
yeah it's like back to work yeah yeah i was just thinking to myself this feels a little back to work next week ocd and comics lots of comics lots and lots and lots of comics oh man i actually i would love for merlin to address this kind of topic at some point i mean it doesn't really fit into his show he has i think i think he's talked about this about uh
John:
how to handle negative feedback and i think he talks a lot about like negative self-talk like you being your own worst enemy oh yeah negatively about the but it's very it's a similar type of thing where sometimes the things you're saying to yourself are just mean and sometimes the things you're saying to yourself are like there's a there's a kernel of truth that you need to address and like i i feel like he has talked about this i felt like we just kind of did a miniature middle of some weird back to the work thing oh
John:
back to the work i did not mean to say the there as your friend yes this is one of the things the problem with being on a podcast is you would think the connection between your brain and your mouth is fairly solid and i listen to myself in these podcasts and i'm like what in the hell did you just like i had no idea during the podcast that i said i words come out that just aren't should not be there
Marco:
it's called misspeaking and i i'm i am baffled as anyone else when i hear myself say it i if you had told me what i had just said i heard that though but anyway it's terrible i love how many people tweeted me over the last week thinking that when i said x bone repeatedly last week that was serious like how long have you listened to me you don't get that i joke about stuff like that sometimes come on
John:
What I like about Xbone is that I don't think the gamer community and internet fan base at large has decided whether Xbone is derogatory or a pet name, a term of endearment.
John:
Will that just become the way everyone says it?
John:
So far, I think it's both.
John:
Some people say it to try to put down the Xbox.
John:
And I think a lot of fans say it as a term of endearment, and I just want to see how it comes out in the end.
John:
I think it'll end up mostly being a term of endearment.
Marco:
It is a lot easier and faster and unambiguous to say that than to say anything else.
John:
And less stupid than the third Xbox being Xbox One.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Microsoft gave it such a stupid real name that we have to come up with stupid alternatives.
John:
Yeah, good old Sony.
John:
They put a number after it.
John:
They make the number bigger.
Casey:
You want to do titles before I pass out?
John:
Yeah, let's wrap it up.
John:
Why are you always so tired?
John:
Are you one of those jobs where they work you like a dog, Casey?
John:
Are you doing hard manual labor, breaking rocks all day?
John:
You're in the same time zone as us, right?
Casey:
Yes, yes.
Casey:
I'm old.
Casey:
I go to bed early.
Casey:
You people with your children, you know, oh, we can't get on the mic until 9 o'clock.
Casey:
I'm usually crawling in bed at 10.
Casey:
I'm old.
John:
yeah i think casey should take over as the new old man crawling at the bed at 10. yeah no i'm not arguing i didn't think it was ever really i didn't think that was ever up for grabs uh pennywise pound fool is just pretty good uh i think that's it that's so good that's such a that's such an oh speaking of old man that's such an old man phrase i'm gonna go out and play with my hoop and stick later but it has but i can't ever a real thing like do people actually do that
John:
The hoop and stick was a real thing, but Simpsons have done a lot.
John:
I was referencing the Simpsons joke.
John:
The first time I remember hoop and stick on Simpsons, Monty Burns was like a kid and he was playing with it.
John:
Anyway, this is a really old phrase.
Casey:
I'm fine with that.
Marco:
It's good because not only, I think, John, I think you actually said that exact phrase during the Penny Arcade discussion.
Marco:
I did.
Marco:
But, you know, it's so much about Penny Arcade.
Marco:
That's so good.
John:
Ah, look at that.
John:
I didn't even think of that.
John:
There you go.
John:
That's terrible.
Wow.