Always On Vacation In California
Casey:
Can I go on a completely unrelated rant?
Casey:
That'll be less expletive-filled.
Casey:
Are you even still here, you jerks?
John:
I thought it was a rhetorical question.
Casey:
Oh, I'm telling you.
Casey:
So I'll tell you right now that I'm using headphones instead of canal phones, earbuds, whatever you call them, for this week's show, and you're going to hear this.
Casey:
You're going to hear that all damn night.
Marco:
Is that your head hitting the microphone?
John:
Yes.
John:
Nice.
Casey:
Like an amateur.
John:
It's going to alter your microphone technique if your head hitting it is a problem.
Casey:
Because I turn to one side.
Casey:
So, for example, the mic is kind of coming in from my left-hand side, and I have an external monitor on the right-hand side, and so I'm turning and smashing into things.
John:
You're all messed up.
John:
I'm a disaster.
John:
Put the mic in front of you.
John:
Put the screen in front of you.
Casey:
I have two screens.
Casey:
There's one screen in front of me, one screen to my right.
Casey:
You heathens that use only one screen, I don't get it.
Casey:
So really quickly, Aaron and I went to Target today, and there was a woman who was getting into her car in front of us.
Casey:
Her car, if I'm not mistaken, was a Taurus wagon, and it had eyelashes on the headlights.
Yeah.
Marco:
This is a number of problems already.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So she goes and she unloads her car in such a way that she's blocking the spot that we were going to try to pull through into, which, you know what?
Casey:
She has a right to take her time and do her thing.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
No big deal.
Casey:
She loads her car.
Casey:
She wheels the shopping cart to the back of her car because she had either done a pull through or backed in and then ditches it, goes to get in her car.
Okay.
Casey:
This is one of my biggest pet peeves in the entire world.
Casey:
It is almost as bad as not using a turn signal.
Casey:
So she goes to get back in her car, and because it's a Taurus wagon, it's about 1,000 feet long.
Casey:
So as she's going to get back in her car, I jump out of Aaron's car.
Casey:
I say, don't worry.
Casey:
I'll get that for you.
Marco:
Did you give her a thumbs down?
Casey:
No, I should have.
Casey:
God, I should have.
Casey:
Oh, I didn't even think about it.
Casey:
Man, I'm so upset.
Casey:
Anyway, so she says all, you know, synthetically happy.
Casey:
Thanks.
Casey:
So as she's pulling out, she gives me this obviously condescending wave of the hand.
Casey:
And then as she's turning and about to become out of eye and earshot, flicks me off.
Casey:
I mean, admittedly, it was mildly obnoxious of me to say, don't worry, I'll get that for you.
Casey:
But here it is.
Casey:
This woman is so close to the front of the store that I think it took us less than 30 seconds to walk there.
Casey:
And she ditches her car in the middle of the parking lot where it was going to hit somebody else's car.
Casey:
It was only a matter of time.
Casey:
Is this acceptable behavior?
Casey:
Or am I just am I that old that I'm getting upset over something?
Casey:
Well, I know I'm getting upset over something I shouldn't.
Casey:
But is that acceptable behavior?
Casey:
Do you guys see this where you live?
Marco:
Yes, that is acceptable behavior, and I'll tell you why.
Casey:
I'm going to kill you, so you better redeem yourself quickly.
Marco:
The reason why is because she has to drive a Ford Taurus wagon every single day.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
With eyelashes on it.
Marco:
If I had to drive a Ford Taurus wagon every single day, I would probably be that much of an asshole as well.
Marco:
And I bet you would too.
Casey:
You know, you do make an excellent point as much as I want to be embittered about it.
Casey:
So why did she flip you off, Casey?
Casey:
Because I called her out on being an asshole.
John:
Why would that make her flip you off?
Casey:
Because I called her out on the fact that she was being ridiculous and obnoxious.
Casey:
So apparently that's enough to warrant the middle finger.
Marco:
Well, that's standard defensiveness.
Marco:
If you are being an asshole and somebody tells you that you are being an asshole and you know you're being an asshole, standard defensiveness response is to tell them, no, you're the asshole, even though you know you were wrong.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
But Aaron and I got to talking about this.
Casey:
And so I was like, you know, I can understand the sentiment just like you said, Marco.
Casey:
But in the end of the day, like you're just making it worse.
Casey:
You're just further confirming that you're an asshole.
Marco:
Well, you were both assholes in that situation.
Marco:
Just she was the greater asshole.
Casey:
That's probably fair.
Casey:
I mean, does that make me a jerk to say, don't worry, I'll get that for you?
Casey:
I didn't say, don't worry, I'll get that for you, you lazy punk.
Marco:
I mean, you did a snide response to someone's worst move.
Marco:
So your hands are not clean there.
Marco:
So be careful when you touch your white car.
LAUGHTER
John:
Can't we all just get along, Casey?
John:
Couldn't you have just moved the cart without making a comment?
John:
You should have just silently moved the cart directly in front of her car.
Casey:
Seriously, like all the time at grocery stores, I see people just, you know, put two wheels onto the nearest grassy knoll.
Casey:
and then ditch the cart.
Marco:
Oh, you're lucky your shopping centers even have the grassy knolls.
Marco:
In New York, we don't have space for those, and so they just park the shopping carts in the middle of flat pavement where the wind can very easily blow them directly into other cars.
John:
They're a self-organizing collective, so gravity and wind causes them to bundle together into kind of like a rat king of shopping carts.
Marco:
You end up getting the giant floating circle of garbage in the ocean.
Marco:
It's like that in the parking lot of shopping carts.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's so ridiculous.
Casey:
Like, why can't you just walk it the 10 paces?
Casey:
Or what is so important in your life that you can't walk this thing 10 paces away?
Marco:
Well, so I've never been a smoker, and so maybe I'm missing something here.
Marco:
But why is it necessary for smokers to flick their cigarettes on the ground or out their car windows?
Marco:
You know, it's the same kind of thing.
Marco:
It's like just...
Marco:
So nothing really happened this week, huh?
John:
We don't go into topics first.
John:
You don't jump to the events of the week.
John:
We have a format.
John:
Are you new to this show?
Oh, man.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So let's follow up on some sexism talk.
John:
The first item of follow-up is actually not about that.
John:
It's two shows back, or maybe it was the last show.
John:
I don't remember.
John:
But anyway, but it's not about sexism.
John:
Someone named Michael wrote in to tell us that we all – I don't know why we all didn't mention this when we were discussing it – on the topic of sapphire.
John:
He said, hey, the tops of watches are made of sapphire.
John:
And that's true.
John:
We didn't think about that because we weren't thinking about iWatches or whatever.
John:
Not to say that Apple is making a watch or that the watch will be covered in sapphire, but it's worth considering that the sapphire plant they're building, probably not for entire iPhone screens of sapphire, although maybe...
John:
you know because the people have been saying they've making advances in sapphire that makes it more comparable to gorilla glass but maybe not just for uh cell phone camera covers or touch id sensors maybe for a tiny little screen on a tiny little wearable thing because that would also work for something at sapphire so i thought that was worth bringing up
Marco:
Yeah, there was a really good discussion on the talk show this week with John Gruber and Craig Hockenberry about the potential of Apple making an iWatch or other wearable devices.
Marco:
And I highly recommend everyone go listen to that.
Marco:
And I think...
Marco:
This is very good feedback that, yes, it is a very good point that watches do use Sapphire.
Marco:
And even if Apple is not making a watch, if they're making some kind of small wearable anything with a display, it would make sense that might be the cover material.
Marco:
So all these possibilities make a lot of sense and are all...
Marco:
I think probably more plausible than the idea of them doing the whole iPhone screen in Sapphire.
Marco:
Just because, you know, not only as we discussed, not only is that just a lot of Sapphire that they would need, but also, you know, we already know they're using it for Touch ID sensors, and they need a lot of those.
Marco:
And, you know, if they use it in a wearable, they need a lot of that.
Marco:
And it makes sense in those things, whereas the iPhone screen, like, there's not that...
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Do you think it's really necessary for the iPhone's screen to switch to Sapphire?
John:
Well, the things I was reading about was not that they would make the whole screen glass out of Sapphire, but that you'd make a laminate where they have a super thin layer of Sapphire over it for scratch resistance, but then underneath that, essentially, Gorilla Glass type of stuff.
John:
So you try to get the benefits of all of them.
John:
It's like a knife edge where you get a really hard...
John:
towards the sort of the blade edge and then sort of more flexible in the middle.
John:
This is all just speculative and people investigating manufacturing.
John:
So down the road, I can imagine some kind of sandwich like that, giving you the best of all the materials, like a flexible center with a very, very hard surface.
John:
That makes sense for a phone or something where you don't want the screen to be scratched.
John:
You get the hardest material possible just on the very, you know, the scratch surface.
Casey:
But are we really scratching the screens on our phones?
Casey:
Because the damage I see is shattering because of impact, not scratching.
John:
Well, I see a lot of scratched iPhones.
John:
I mean, think of people who take their iPhones without a case and put it in their purse with their keys.
John:
People do that, and then they get scratched up.
Casey:
Do they?
Casey:
Maybe I've just never seen them, but I see tons and tons of iPhones and Android phones and every kind of phone with a shattered or slightly scattered screen.
John:
That's when you drop it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, like, there's nothing.
John:
Obviously, they would like that not to happen, too.
John:
But at a certain point, you drop it onto concrete the wrong way.
John:
Sorry.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I just I don't know if if scratch prevention is what we really need on the screen.
Casey:
What we really need on the screen, in my opinion, is shatter prevention.
Casey:
And I'm not sure how you would get there.
John:
Make it out of plastic, but then it would be gross.
Marco:
Well, you get there by having these tacky, giant, bouncy cases that a lot of people like and use for that exact reason.
Casey:
They're so bad.
Casey:
The Otterboxes, I mean, they protect the phone, but God, they're enormous.
Marco:
Well, but that actually helps.
Marco:
If you want to protect this tiny little brick of glass and electronics in the middle of something, the bigger you can make that something and the squisher you can make it, the more likely it is that you will protect it.
John:
yeah but god it makes it so ugly i put apple wearable stuff way down like three topics down in the topic section who knows if we'll get to it today uh but i put it there because of inspired by craig's article and the recent talk show so we'll see if we don't get to it it'll be on the next show let's move it up who cares about facebook and oculus oh that would have been a perfect time to to lop it john but that's okay no john doesn't lop it he sticks around and waits
John:
He will wait for his turn.
John:
Do you have some actual sexism follow-up?
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
It is that time now.
John:
Well, first, before I get to the few items I put in the follow-up section here, how would you guys characterize the feedback that we got on that topic?
Casey:
I would say almost universally praise in the sense that people were very glad we spoke of it.
Casey:
And in many cases, people were very pleased with the way you spoke of it, especially.
Casey:
And I'll lot myself into that category.
Casey:
I thought we did okay.
Casey:
I thought I did okay.
Casey:
I thought you did extremely well.
Marco:
Yeah, I completely agree.
Marco:
I think everyone loves John, and it made a lot of sense based on last week's episode.
Marco:
And the feedback was overall very positive that people who were very happy that we talked about the problems of sexism in tech.
Marco:
And we didn't talk even that much about it.
Marco:
I mean, it's a massive topic that you couldn't even fit in one entire show, let alone the last quarter of one of our shows.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
But I'm glad we talked about it.
Marco:
I was very scared, as I said during the show last week, I was very scared to talk about it because it's so hard to talk about sexism without offending somebody on the side that you're fighting for.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
And that's why I pumped the brakes real hard in the beginning.
Casey:
And I'm really, really glad and thankful that I think it was mostly John basically said tough noogies.
Casey:
We're going to talk about it.
Casey:
And I'm glad that we did.
Casey:
But oh, man, I was so scared.
Casey:
I was so scared of the beginning.
John:
I think Marco said, did you tweet Marco or something that like you had been afraid to touch on this topic, but we're pleasantly surprised that the backlash was not that bad.
John:
And that basically you had been you'd been too afraid of this topic for too long.
John:
And if you had known that it wasn't, you know.
John:
The minefield you thought it was going to be that you wouldn't have been as hesitant.
Marco:
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Marco:
I mean, you know, I, I, I try to fight for social causes that I care about.
Marco:
And this is one of those.
Marco:
But as I said, it's just it's so I've been really scared off by the public discourse around sexism, because it is it just seems like everyone's being attacked, even people who are trying to make progress in eliminating or reducing sexism, then they get attacked for something they didn't include or accidentally omitted or didn't say the right way.
Marco:
It's really, really, it's just, it seems like it's so cutthroat, the discussions out there that I see so often, at least in print and on Twitter and stuff.
Marco:
It's so, it's so like, no one, no one's given any leeway.
Marco:
No one's given any slack.
Marco:
Everyone assumes the worst and everyone else in the discussion.
Marco:
And, and that's what, frankly, that's, that's why I try to stay out of it because I'm so afraid of something blowing up in my face when I was just trying to help.
Marco:
but I did it in not quite the right way or I forgot about some condition or something that I'm not thinking about or some side effect of a word I'm thinking about.
Marco:
It's so hard to talk about it in a way that won't get you attacked as well.
Marco:
from your side like like you know it's one thing if you say sexism is a problem and then you got a bunch of idiot men saying no it's not like that that's one thing i don't care about that kind of attack obviously but but like if i'm if i'm trying to argue for the progress of this issue and for less sexism and then i get attacked by anti-sexism advocates because i didn't do it correctly like that's that discourages me from participating in the discussion at all
Marco:
And it's very intimidating to even enter it.
John:
Yeah, I think the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
John:
There were a few negative ones thrown in there.
John:
There was the typical people, like Marco just mentioned, who either thought it wasn't a problem or were just blatantly and unapologetically sexist.
John:
So, you know, whatever.
Marco:
I think we only got one, actually, that was comically off-base.
John:
Yeah, there was one that was ridiculous.
John:
There's other ones that have...
John:
Or borderline.
John:
I got a lot of private email, like not a lot, but like four or five private emails, most of which were entirely negative.
John:
So like, I mean, it's kind of really it's kind of like the the the Joel Spolsky thing where he the reason he explained why he wasn't blogging as much as it'll get, you know, tons and tons of positive feedback.
John:
But all he'll do is sit there and think about the bad ones.
John:
And it's just my general nature, inability to take a compliment or to dwell on the positive things.
John:
So anyway, the negative things were like people who took this opportunity, sort of like a preemptive backlash, took this opportunity to say, I know people are going to listen to the show and say nice things to you, so let me preemptively tell you about all the times in the past where you have said or done things that are sexist or racist or whatever.
John:
in your podcast or writing.
John:
And so I got a laundry list of all sorts of things that I've done wrong from various people.
John:
Most of which, by the way, were right, which is why it bothers me as much as it does.
John:
Because it's like, yeah, no, I remember that.
John:
It was terrible.
John:
And in fact, in the particular show, there were cases, you know, I mean, I brought up the one with Casey saying Young Lee, but I did things too, and I heard it myself when I listened to it.
John:
And then two days later, I get the person emailing me about it.
John:
And it's like, yeah, that's part of what's difficult about this topic is, like I said, we're all...
John:
We all do these things to some degree or another.
John:
We've just been steeped in this.
John:
We are a product of our society.
John:
And so despite the best intentions, you will find yourself doing things wrong and people will call you on it.
John:
And sometimes people will call you on it in a nasty way.
John:
Them being nasty doesn't mean you didn't do something wrong.
John:
Just like Casey called that woman.
John:
Hey, look at this.
John:
Time it together.
John:
Called that woman on not putting away her shopping cart in a nasty way.
John:
She still did something wrong.
John:
And so like...
John:
Because her defensiveness is like, well, I may have done something wrong, but you were a jerk about it.
John:
Therefore, I didn't do anything wrong.
John:
So when I get these mean emails telling me about the things that I did wrong, your instinct is to want to reply and say, but I didn't mean it that way.
John:
But, you know, but they're right.
John:
They're jerks, but they're right.
John:
You know, so.
John:
that was that that part of the experience like i expected it it came uh i'm fine with it it's just you know that's that's part of the whole deal you just have to learn how to properly deal with that kind of feedback even if it's delivered in an insensitive way look at it for the content and don't and don't engage with the jerkiness i guess
Casey:
So how do you feel about it after the fact in overall?
John:
Well, we did what we could.
John:
I mean, let me get through these two feedback items.
John:
I think I'll have a better overall view of the thing.
John:
Actually, this first one is barely about sexism, but it starts out that way.
John:
So I'll read this.
John:
This is from Mike.
John:
This is just an excerpt from email.
John:
So there's two parts of this.
John:
One is...
John:
us you know slamming the whatever time magazine or the times or whatever sending some reporter to talk to johnny i who didn't seem to know what he was talking about and then saying then we talked about a topic that this listener knew a lot about you know gender or whatever and then he had to roll his eyes like you know oh these tech guys they complain when someone who's not a tech nerd talks about tech but then they just feel like they can talk about gender issues and they don't know what they're talking about so there's two two things that i object to in this feedback
John:
The first is the idea that we are objecting to someone who doesn't know a lot about technology talking to someone in the technology sector.
John:
It's kind of like the Walter Isaacson thing where people would say, well, it's better for someone who's not kind of steeped in technology to do this because it's supposed to bring the message to the masses.
John:
We want someone who isn't a tech nerd.
John:
We want someone...
John:
who can, you know, relate to these people at the level of normal people.
John:
We don't just want a nerd going.
John:
And that and the idea of sending someone who's not knowledgeable about Apple or tech to talk to Johnny Ive, it's the same thing.
John:
Like, you don't have to be knowledgeable about this topic to report on or to write a book about it.
John:
But the job of a reporter or an author is to, during the course of...
John:
doing this interview preparing for the interview preparing for the book whatever you learn about the topic because the only way you can bring something to the masses is to first learn it yourself either learn it by through research or learn it through talking to the person and then bring the understanding that you gained everyone else that's your job your job is not to just transcribe words or just say the first thing that comes to your to mind and then transcribe the answers your job is to learn something about a topic summarize what you've learned
John:
enter and you know get first-hand information from whoever it is you're talking to based on what you've learned and then bring that back to them so i don't mind if someone who doesn't know anything about a tech interview someone but they better be a good interviewer and a good interviewer learns about the topic at hand before they do the interview that's it i mean you could say well maybe you didn't have time maybe it was last minute or whatever there's all sorts of excuses you can make and that would be a shame if this is the case but as i said in the last show it's hard to believe that they couldn't find somebody like oh we don't have enough time for you to do research we need somebody who already knows something about apple can we find somebody anybody
John:
who's been following Apple at all, maybe send them to interview Johnny Ive.
John:
So that's my first objection.
John:
The second is this other sentiment that like people, it's not just for this topic, but all topics, people who are expert in the field, actually, specifically with sexism, if you're like a gender studies major or something or whatever, all those people wrote in to us or to me to tell me that we shouldn't be talking about this topic because we don't know what we're talking about.
John:
That, I think, is poison because if everyone thinks that, it's just like the same thing that Marco was getting at with the fear of, like, you don't want to talk about this topic because you're afraid you're going to say something wrong.
John:
It's too high of a bar to require everyone who wants to discuss this topic to be a women's studies major or a history major or anything.
John:
That's too high of a bar.
John:
We all have to talk about this.
John:
We all have to talk about it and get things wrong and fumble and screw things up and occasionally yell at each other.
John:
You can't be like, well, I shouldn't say anything about this because I'm not an expert.
John:
This applies to anything.
John:
Anytime we talk about something where some listener knows more about it than we do, whether it be like...
John:
speakers or cars or gender studies someone needs to come in to say i was listening to your show and you were talking about something that i knew more about than you and let me tell you why you should never talk about that again that's that's all well and good right up to the point where you tell us we're not allowed to talk about that ever again because that i mean for for an important issue like sexism that's terrible and for less important issues i think it's just silly so sorry mike i disagree with most of your feedback here i'm sorry we made you roll your eyes
Marco:
I love you, John.
Marco:
Yeah, I mostly agree with that.
Marco:
I mean, it's important when there's a social issue like this where it's an important human rights and social issue.
Marco:
I think not talking about it is generally more harmful than talking about it and kind of stumbling through and making some mistakes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That's not to say, I mean, based on what I said before, that's not to say that I have the guts to actually do it.
Marco:
But I think generally speaking, I agree.
Marco:
One of the most common feedback themes that we got was, thank you for talking about this.
Marco:
We need more people with audiences to talk about this, which is, I guess, the next feedback, which I want you to get to that.
Yeah.
John:
You can read that one, Marco, because I think it's right up your alley.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
This one is from Jack Ban.
Marco:
And it says, Marco said several times that he didn't know how to better serve this issue.
Marco:
I think the biggest thing he can do is use his audience and look for voices to amplify whether it's simply retweeting tech opinions by women or by linking to articles that directly deal with sexism in tech.
Marco:
Do you know the thing he's talking about that Aneel Dash did?
Casey:
you think i follow neil dash yeah he's your best friend what are you talking about yeah no i actually knew and there's a convenient link in the show notes that you didn't do or didn't look at because you don't do your homework but um but what neil had apparently done was uh exclusively retweeted only women for what was it a year is that right
John:
Yeah, I think it was a whole year.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So he had only retweeted women for a whole year.
Casey:
Now, I don't follow Anil.
Casey:
I never have.
Casey:
But apparently, according to him, it didn't really change his own personal – workflow isn't the right word – but his own, like –
Casey:
Twitter experience very much.
Casey:
And whether or not you think that that particular course of action is a good idea, I did read this Medium post, which I believe he had written and will put in the show notes.
Casey:
But it came from what I thought was a good place, which is, let me try to make my own follow list and what I'm putting into the world a little less single-minded and
Casey:
And I understand where he's coming from.
Casey:
I don't know that forcing yourself to only retweet women for a year is necessarily the right answer, but I think it came from a good place.
Marco:
It's easy to make a political statement on Twitter by favoriting something or changing your avatar or retweeting something.
Marco:
Those are all easy things.
Marco:
I don't mean to cut on a nail here.
Marco:
I think the value is commensurate with the effort in this case.
Marco:
If you want to really make a meaningful difference...
Marco:
Choosing who you retweet on Twitter is not a way to do that.
Marco:
It's a way to do a small difference, possibly a very small difference.
Marco:
But I think making a meaningful difference requires putting yourself out there a little more than that and doing something a little more risky and bold than that.
Marco:
And so I don't really put a lot of weight on things like putting a star on your avatar, changing it to be the certain color for the certain political cause, or stuff like that, or online petitions, favoriting a certain tweet a million times.
Marco:
Those things don't really make much of a difference.
John:
But what Anil did, I think, was interesting because it ties into what this feedback is that basically we weren't sure what we could do.
John:
And the fact that we have an audience like talking about it in our podcast is something we can do.
John:
And what he did, I'm assuming he has a lot of followers.
John:
I didn't look, but I'm assuming he has way more than I do.
John:
And does he have more than you?
John:
Maybe.
John:
And anyway.
Casey:
Yeah, he said he had, I think, about a half a million because I guess early on in Twitter.
John:
I was a recommended user list.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, he was he was on the recommended user list.
Casey:
And so people would sign into Twitter for the very first time ever, and they would see this recommended user.
Casey:
So sure, I'll follow that guy.
Casey:
And by his own admission, he said he got a gazillion followers.
Casey:
I think it's like, you know, many of the half million followers he had from that.
John:
yeah so that like what what he's doing basically is using his twitter fame as a force multiplier and that like what can one person do well the few of us who happen to have you know uh four or five digit numbers of followers or have a podcast that a lot of people listen to one little thing that we do could make a big difference and so he was being very strict like only retreating women or whatever for an entire year but i find myself doing it even with my small number of followers on twitter uh
John:
It's the conflict that Marco was mentioning where I'll see some tweet.
John:
First, I'll be following certain people who tend to either tweet or retweet things related to these topics that I care about.
John:
And then I'll see a tweet and I'll want to retweet it.
John:
And you'll have that moment of hesitation where you're like, I know if I retweet this because it's, you know, political or has to do with sexism or whatever, I know I have followers who disagree with me and are going to like yell at me about it or like you're going to get negative feedback about doing this.
John:
So the more followers you have, the more important it is for you to say, well, is this my Twitter account or isn't it?
John:
If this is what I believe, then do I believe it or do I not believe it?
John:
And so for the individual person to retweet something that they agree with or giving voices to people who may not have many followers is not a big deal.
John:
But the more followers you have, the more you're amplifying them by either...
John:
linking to them in a tweet of your own or retweeting something that they said and that's i still find myself having that hesitation and then having to sort of force myself to say no go through this is exactly what you're supposed to be doing now i don't know what it kind of a difference it's making but like in general there's not that much individuals can do unless we're in very powerful positions but
John:
through the magic of social media, with the multiplying effect, especially if you have a large number of followers or whatever, I think it is important to consciously say, maybe normally, if all the things were equal, I wouldn't retweet this or mention this.
John:
But because I know it's an important issue, and because I know this person, like, I may be doubling the reach of this person's tweet by retweeting it, then yes, I will retweet it, no matter how much it annoys my followers.
John:
I think it's more effective.
Marco:
Rather than...
Marco:
say what you're doing and make a big deal out of what you're doing and tell everybody what you're doing to just do it like to to just like try to try to try to retweet a lot of women you don't have to say you're only recruiting women women for a year and you don't have to announce that to everyone like oh well yeah that's that's obviously like a gimmick like he's got the article in mind before he begins the you know like whatever like that's
John:
That's fine, but I'm not saying you have to do what he did, because I think exclusively retweeting women, that's maybe missing the point of the entire thing.
John:
But in general, we all see tweets in our timeline that we agree with, but know that if we were to engage with or retweet or say something about, we know we're going to be basically asking for an argument and people are going to say negative things back.
John:
And that can dissuade us from doing that.
John:
And like Marco said last time, you know, our hesitance to talk about this topic, like, oh, no, people might say mean things.
John:
There's nothing compared to the hesitance people have to deal with the actual issue.
John:
So, like, we're so wimpy we don't even want to, like, bring the smallest amount of criticism or fire down on us for even engaging the topic.
John:
And that's, like, that's the weapon of the, you know, the bad guys in this scenario is that if it becomes so toxic no one wants to touch it, they win by default.
Marco:
Right, because they're going to touch it as much as they want on their side.
Marco:
I mean, the amount of rampant sexism is crazy, and the people, the rampant sexists are not going to stop talking about it because they're afraid of the feedback.
Marco:
They're going to just keep doing it.
John:
That's another reason, by the way, not to engage with those people, because every time someone's, you know, I do something like that and then I get negative feedback.
John:
If I need something to remind myself not to engage with those people, I mean, this may sound terrible, but I look at their follower counts and I say, if I was to engage with this person and start arguing with them, there's the potential that more people would see this argument than would ever see this person to begin with.
John:
Like right now, his evil is confined to me.
John:
But if I engage and go back and forth or like hate retweet him or anything like that, that actually increases the exposure of his toxic ideas.
John:
right and so it's better to just not engage and leave them confined to their four followers and and their hate-filled timeline like you look at their timeline of tweets and it's just one hate-filled statement after another and these people must not have very nice lives but you engaging with them that's like a that's like a lot a jackpot for them
Casey:
And that's something that I think I'm still learning in general, not specifically to sexism is, you know, how do I choose when it's worth engaging?
Casey:
Like, for example, in a parking lot at Target and when it's not, it's something I will always struggle with.
Casey:
And it's something I think we all struggle with.
Casey:
We are not done with the sexism follow up, but we've been going a while.
Casey:
Can we talk about something cool?
Marco:
We can.
Marco:
It is our wonderful friends.
Marco:
Once again, they're back.
Marco:
Our friends at Warby Parker.
Marco:
Warby Parker believes that prescription eyeglasses simply should not cost $300 and up.
Marco:
They should be affordable, even affordable enough for people to accessorize and have multiple pairs if they want to.
Marco:
So Warby Parker is really a new way of making and selling eyewear.
Marco:
They bypass all the traditional channels.
Marco:
They sell higher quality, better looking prescription eyewear online at a fraction of the price of brick and mortar places in your opticians and everything else, starting at just $95.
Marco:
Go to Warby Parker, W-A-R-B-Y-P-A-R-K-E-R dot com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's Warby Parker dot com slash ATP to see and learn more.
Marco:
They have these great designs.
Marco:
They're vintage-inspired with a contemporary twist.
Marco:
Every pair is custom-fit.
Marco:
They have anti-reflective, anti-glare, polycarbonate prescription lenses.
Marco:
And every pair comes with a hard case and cleaning cloth, which is a really nice hard case, by the way.
Marco:
So you don't need to buy any overpriced accessories on top of your glasses.
Marco:
Now, buying glasses online, you would think this would be risky.
Marco:
Like, how do you try them on?
Marco:
How do you see how they look?
Marco:
They know this, and they have built pretty incredible tools.
Marco:
So first of all, you can go, and they have a thing where you can use your webcam to take a picture of you, and they will overlay the glasses on your head so you can see how they will look.
Marco:
And they also have webcam tools to do things like help you measure in case your prescription doesn't have the right distance number on it, or if you want to just double-check it, whatever else.
Marco:
You can see that.
Marco:
You can measure it right there, right online.
Marco:
And then the cool thing, the best thing about Warby Parker, I think,
Marco:
besides their awesome prices and everything else about them uh the best the best thing besides all the other all the other stuff is this home try on program so they have this great thing you can pick out up to five pairs of glasses and let's say you only pick two or three because you can't decide they'll they'll fill the box so there's five so anyway great company so you you get these you get these glasses to try on at home for free this is all you haven't paid anything yet
Marco:
You get them.
Marco:
You can try them on.
Marco:
And then they send it to you for free.
Marco:
You send it back.
Marco:
It's all prepaid shipping.
Marco:
You don't pay anything.
Marco:
And then you can make a choice.
Marco:
And you can choose to buy none of them if you really want to.
Marco:
But I bet you won't because they're really great quality.
Marco:
You'll see for yourself when you do the home try-on.
Marco:
And then you just pick whichever one you want or whichever ones you want.
Marco:
You can get more than one if you'd like.
Marco:
They're not stopping you.
Marco:
And you get those glasses delivered to you pretty quickly, actually.
Marco:
So they...
Marco:
And when they make the prescription lenses, they usually get started on them right away, and they're usually in your hands within 10 business days, or usually even faster than that.
Marco:
That's just kind of like a rough end ballpark, but usually it's even faster than that.
Marco:
So prescription glasses starting at just $95, including the lenses, obviously.
Marco:
I don't know why they even sell glasses without lenses.
Marco:
It's like selling a car without brakes.
Marco:
So $95 includes the lenses.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
They also have a titanium collection.
Marco:
It's even better.
Marco:
Higher quality stuff in certain places, but really, they're all pretty great.
Marco:
Titanium collection starts at just $145, including the lenses.
Marco:
That includes premium Japanese titanium and French non-rocking screws.
Marco:
All their glasses at all price points include anti-reflective, anti-glare coatings, cleaning cloth, everything like that.
Marco:
Really great.
Marco:
So check it out.
Marco:
And one of the cool things about this, I'll go a little long here, but...
Marco:
One of the many cool things they do is they have a program where for every pair of glasses they sell, they distribute a second pair to someone in need somewhere in the world.
Marco:
There's a few charities they work with to do this where –
Marco:
prescription eyewear is very expensive for many parts of the lesser developed world.
Marco:
And it's pretty important to be able to see for things like learning and getting through everyday life.
Marco:
It's really important.
Marco:
And so they have this great program where every pair they sell, they give another pair to somebody in need.
Marco:
So check them out, warbyparker.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Warby Parker for sponsoring our show once again.
John:
Speaking of using your social following to amplify the effect, and speaking of Warby Parker giving free glasses to someone who needs them, Mike Montero, who generally is a jerk on Twitter in a funny way, also occasionally does a thing where he tries to raise money for a family that needs money for something like, oh, hey, this could be a pair of glasses or something like that, or this thing.
John:
This family is about to get evicted.
John:
Let's all raise $2,000 to keep them from getting evicted.
John:
And he will use his Twitter following, which is not that big.
John:
It's bigger than mine, but not much bigger.
John:
And he'll use that to get a bunch of people to raise money.
John:
Not a lot of money, but a small amount of money for charity.
John:
And he'll do that over the course of an hour and a half on a Saturday.
John:
That's something that you couldn't do before the Internet and Twitter and Twitter seems like just a silly thing.
John:
Oh, I've got 50,000, 60,000 followers or maybe he's got like 100,000.
John:
I don't know.
John:
What can I do with that?
John:
You can do surprisingly, you know, if there's a cause that's important to you, you know, spend spend a little time tweeting a few things or get a bunch of people who follow you to raise some money for a cause that you care about.
John:
It's not a big thing, but it's not a little thing either.
John:
And it's something that wouldn't happen if it's like, oh, I've got to go door to door, knocking on people's doors, asking for money or whatever.
John:
Twitter brings together sort of like-minded people who might be inclined to do these types of things.
John:
And if it's all electronic where you just tweet a URL, everyone goes to the URL to click a couple of buttons, they PayPal 10 bucks in there.
John:
Everyone feels good about it and someone gets helped.
John:
And Warby Parker, the same type of thing.
John:
It's just an extra bonus for like, why might I buy Warby Parker sunglasses?
John:
Well, because they do this extra thing too.
John:
And you'll feel good about getting your glasses when you do that.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So what else do we have on the sexism topic?
John:
I put a bunch of other things here, but I think I wouldn't skip over most of them.
John:
The only one I think I want to touch on for now is we didn't talk about in the last show, but.
John:
Things that help with empathy.
John:
And I was thinking of the—I'm surprised it didn't come up.
John:
Maybe it didn't come up because I'm the only one in this camp.
John:
But a lot of times when you talk about this topic, someone will bring up either casually or as a weapon, more likely, the idea that—
John:
uh you don't understand this topic because you're a man and you know only women understand it or uh i used to not understand this topic but then i had a daughter and now you know if you don't have a daughter you can't understand what this is like or just wait until you have a daughter and you'll understand and the daughter one is the one that gets me because i can't control my gender but people could conceivably not have a daughter at one point and then have a daughter at another point in their life and i i never liked calling people out to say
John:
your ability to empathize with this is stopped by the fact that you don't have a daughter i agree that having a daughter definitely helps can help uh because it gives you it forces you to take a perspective that previously you couldn't but intellectually i don't like the idea that it's impossible for someone to understand this issue until they have a daughter i happen to have a daughter and like and and it has helped me identify with this issue more but i
John:
I don't think it is neither necessary nor sufficient to have a daughter to understand this issue because plenty of people have daughters and still don't see the forest or the trees.
John:
Some people are helped by having a daughter and some people like what I'm saying is that you shouldn't have to be pre-qualified by something to say that you can your ability to empathize with this issue is not dependent on you having sisters or daughters or being a woman or anything.
John:
Everyone else can do it.
John:
Those things may help.
John:
but i i just didn't like the exclusion like that just it bothers me even if like even if in general it may be true that like people don't get it until they have a daughter i don't like people people trying to exclude people from the conversation to say well you well you can't understand this uh because you're a man don't even have a daughter or a sister or whatever uh
John:
Yeah, the other ones I think we probably don't have time for today, but there's more bits in there.
John:
I won't delete them out from the notes.
John:
Maybe we can touch on them on another show.
Marco:
Really quickly, I do want to also add that I think part of the problem here – I mean, obviously, I'm American, and I take the very U.S.-centric view because simply that's where I am and what I know most about.
Marco:
But certainly it seems like in American culture we –
Marco:
and of course not all of us, but the majority, the dominant culture in America is to hold on very tightly to the past and to the way we've always done things.
Marco:
And the way we've always done things is like the Bible.
Marco:
It's always correct.
Marco:
It's how it always was and how it always will be.
Marco:
And we are the best, damn it, and we are never going to listen to anybody else or anything else that suggests otherwise because we are the best USA, USA, rah, rah, rah.
Marco:
And the problem with that kind of viewpoint, one of the many problems with that kind of viewpoint, is that when some part of what you think is your culture that you've always had and you must always have is challenged, like something that you do or think or say that is sexist or has some other social problem—
Marco:
your instinct, if you're in this mindset, is to hold on tightly and tighten your grip even more and get even angrier and more defensive and reclusive even around that.
Marco:
And that really hinders a lot of social progress.
Marco:
And it's hard to convince people that their history and their culture and the way they think is wrong and bad.
Marco:
That's really, really hard to do.
Marco:
And that's probably true everywhere for everybody.
Marco:
But
Marco:
That's one of the problems with moving an issue like this forward.
Marco:
One of the challenges is, as we said last episode, things that we've always said, words we've always used, assumptions we've always made, these things have problems.
Marco:
They are sexist.
Marco:
They are discriminatory.
Marco:
They are insulting.
Marco:
They have problems.
Marco:
But if we hold on too tightly to this is the way we've always done things, this is who we are, this is who I am, and use that as a big excuse, it's very hard to make meaningful progress.
Casey:
Yeah, and this is applicable in America anyway across many, many, many different subjects like gun control and the legalization of marijuana.
Casey:
And I'm not trying to get political.
Casey:
I'm not saying one way or the other where I stand on these issues.
Marco:
However – Two yeses for me.
Casey:
You're a braver man than I. But it's hard to have intelligent conversation about it for exactly the reasons that you said, because those of us who cling to the way things are today tend to just tighten that grip, just like you said, even more.
Casey:
And it prevents an intelligent conversation, and it quickly becomes an emotional conversation.
Marco:
Right, and that's a very quick way to not get anything done.
Yep.
John:
Yeah, like, well, any kind of change like that, usually you just have to wait for people to die.
John:
And the worst thing about that is like, well, you just wait for people to die.
John:
We'll be fine.
John:
But like they teach their children these regressive ideas, too.
John:
And like they propagate it.
John:
And it's like so difficult to sort of stem that propagation, you know, like that.
John:
One of my the most effective means that I've seen during my lifetime of fostering change in society has been the sort of.
John:
ambient exposure to ideas, not shoving them in people's faces, but just kind of like...
John:
And not really bombarding, but just like you're in contact with it all the time.
John:
So sort of, you know, the MTV generation constantly seeing different kinds of people, you know, just like exposure to just different people, different races, different sexuality.
John:
Not as like it's a message or an after-school special, but just like they're just there.
John:
And like you're just exposed to them.
John:
Like, you know, everyone cites like Will & Grace and sitcoms, stuff like that.
John:
And, you know, some of those are more highlighting the other.
John:
But just...
John:
Just generally that exposure, it makes it more difficult for the adult generation that is never going to learn any better to pass on their regressive ideas to their children because their children are just sort of like soaking in a society that accepts these certain things as just like, well, it's just the way it is.
Yeah.
John:
And that's, of course, why the parents hate it and, you know, don't want their kids to watch MTV and blah, blah, blah, you know, all that stuff.
John:
But, like, that kind of thing seems to me is even more effective than...
John:
proselytizing or trying to teach kids the right way.
John:
No one wants you to teach it.
John:
You just have to be exposed to it.
John:
That's, again, us talking about it.
John:
This being out in the open, even if it's in the form of a bunch of people yelling at each other in blog comments, even that is just so much better than just not talking about it.
John:
Because
John:
kids will grow up just exposed to this like oh this is a thing or i've seen people yelling about that and even if kids are like on the on one side of the debate for most of their life they'll know that this debate exists they'll know that there is another side and it'll be in their mind and maybe they'll come around eventually right but just being exposed to it uh it doesn't seem alien or taboo or ridiculous it's like oh yeah that's been going on my whole life that's definitely a thing you know
Casey:
All right, so anything else on the follow-up category?
Casey:
Forever follow-up.
Casey:
Forever follow-up.
Casey:
We're only an hour in, so maybe we should start the show.
John:
I skipped a lot of stuff.
John:
I skipped it.
Casey:
You didn't have to.
Casey:
All kidding aside, it is a really, really, really good conversation.
Casey:
And like I said before, as much as I pumped the brakes in the beginning, I am glad we're having it.
Casey:
And I'm glad that we got, well, most of us got so much good.
Casey:
I can't believe we got bad feedback.
Casey:
I'm glad we got feedback saying, hey, you know, you didn't always say the right thing, but at least you're talking about it.
John:
it wasn't like i said it wasn't bad feedback that makes me feel bad which is right right right different you know like either you know it's no fun for people to point out all the places you've done bad things in the past but like anytime you talk about something someone's gonna want to say oh yeah but you uh whatever it's a it's one of those latin logical fallacies whose name i can never remember and always have to look up in wikipedia but like hominem no uh it's the to to croak you or something where it's like uh
John:
Because you did something that's counter to what you're saying, what you're saying is wrong.
John:
Ah.
John:
So the fallacy is that if you have not lived your life in 100% consistency with the position you are espousing, therefore the position you're espousing is wrong.
John:
And I have not lived my life in 100% consistency, but my position is not wrong because of that.
John:
And so people want to write in and tell you that what you've done in the past has not lived up to the ideals you've presented, and then you feel bad about it.
John:
Or at least you should feel bad about it, and I do feel bad about it.
John:
And a couple of them are also jerks.
John:
Yeah, someone got it in the chat room.
John:
You want to pronounce that?
John:
I tried.
Marco:
Well, the great thing is because it's Latin, there is no authoritative pronunciation.
Marco:
Nobody actually knows how Latin words are pronounced.
Marco:
There you go.
Marco:
Oh, goodness.
Marco:
Please send your corrections to Marco.
Casey:
So this week, Facebook bought Oculus.
Casey:
which i didn't see coming not to say that i follow this stuff closely but i didn't see this coming had you did you know this company existed before the last show where we discussed vr stuff yes you big jerk speaking of jerks all right yes i knew it existed
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
So Oculus Rift is the device.
Casey:
Is that correct?
Casey:
I'm going to get my terminology wrong here, but they're making a VR headset and it's like a virtual boy, but it actually works from what I gather.
Casey:
And they were bought by Facebook and a lot of people aren't happy about that.
Casey:
So, John, you didn't back this Kickstarter, right?
John:
I did not.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So there's a lot of different things in flight here, a lot of different viewpoints and a lot of different, I don't know, conversations happening.
Casey:
One of them is, hey, I backed this thing on Kickstarter, and I did that so they could stay independent.
Casey:
And now they're not independent.
Casey:
So this sucks.
Casey:
And OPS, I want my backer money back.
Casey:
Does that make any sense to you two at all?
Casey:
Because it does not to me.
Casey:
Well, it makes sense in the regard that I can understand the feeling, but the feeling is without merit.
Marco:
I think part of it stems from the same kind of thing where, like, if a paid app or service is bought, then the people who paid for it before the acquisition are mad.
Marco:
Like, I paid for this so you'd stay independent, or I paid for this so you wouldn't be bought and be absorbed and shut down and all that other stuff.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So it's similar to that.
Marco:
I think the difference is with a Kickstarter, the message that Kickstarter sends, and maybe not explicitly, and maybe they try to disclaim it, but the message that it sends, the feeling it gives people is a feeling of co-ownership.
Marco:
It's you're being a part of starting this thing, even though it confers no actual ownership to you.
Marco:
In fact, it's really a terrible deal for all those reasons in most cases.
Marco:
However, you support these things because you want them to exist, and then you feel some token of ownership.
Marco:
Even if it's not direct financial ownership, you feel like you helped the band get started, that kind of thing.
Marco:
You feel like one of the backers, as they call it.
Marco:
You're a backer, even though you're more of a donor.
Marco:
But it's...
Marco:
So I totally get the feeling, and I think it is – excuse my words carefully here.
Marco:
I think the feeling is not academically correct of something you should think, but completely understandable why Kickstarter backers would think and feel that.
Casey:
Yeah, that's a good way of phrasing it.
Casey:
Because I would have felt the same way for Flash, but then I would have realized, well, that's not really fair because that wasn't the deal.
Casey:
That wasn't the deal I made with Oculus.
Casey:
But I don't know.
John:
Kickstarter is kind of weird in that...
John:
If you pull back far enough and are sufficiently cynical, as many people on Twitter are, it starts to look like a zero risk way for the real VCs to sort out a bunch of stuff with angel investing being done, being distributed over a huge group of nerds.
John:
right so it's like we don't want to we would we don't want to do the angel investment where we just give enough some people enough money to get off the ground we want to wait to see where the winners are uh but we don't want and even angel investors like well it like i mean that's part of the beauty of kickstarter it's like it's not worth anyone's time to invest in some dinky little thing that no one's going to care about but sometimes there are big things and it's like well we could go to real investors or we could just get that same amount of money from thousands of regular people but we don't have to give them anything
John:
An angel investor would want some part of the company in exchange for their investment.
John:
But since each individual person gave $5, $10, we don't have to divide the company up and give each person 0.001% of the company.
John:
They get nothing, since it's so close to zero anyway.
John:
And that's kind of where people feel burned.
John:
First of all, they do feel like they're investing, which they're not.
John:
They're not investing.
John:
They're giving people money in exchange for usually a product or some kind of... Sometimes they get nothing, but...
John:
There are backer rewards or whatever, like because you want this thing to be in the world.
John:
But it's not an investment because you don't get any ownership over the thing, over the profits, over the company, over anything.
John:
And even if you did, it would be a tiny little sliver.
John:
But you get zero.
John:
You get nothing.
John:
And so it's like, hey, we got all this money.
John:
In this case, it was like $2.5 million or something for the Kickstarter.
John:
That's a reasonable amount of money for an angel investment, but it was distributed over such a large number of people and all of them got zero equity.
John:
So like from the company's perspective, this, you know, Hey, this is great.
John:
Like when we get money and in exchange, we don't have to do anything except make the thing because people just want this to be in the world.
John:
And that's about the beauty and the curse of Kickstarter.
John:
And what's in these people's heads when they're giving the money is like, well, I was giving the money so you could remain independent.
John:
Like, that's not what the Kickstarter said.
John:
The Kickstarter said, give us money so we can remain independent.
John:
I mean, like, there's no promise about what's going to happen to the company in the future.
John:
But in their head, they're like, I'm giving you money so you won't have to get bought up by some big company or whatever.
Yeah.
John:
that's not what you're buying you're not buying equity you're not you're not buying the right to determine the future course of the company you are just giving them money because you want to see this thing in the world and the thing did go into the world and the rift dev kit version one two came out and i'm assuming people got what they were promised for their kickstarter thing but time moves on and eventually facebook comes and buys them and i guess these people could kind of feel burned but
John:
like i hope it doesn't sour people on kickstarter because i like the idea of someone who's like i've got an idea for a board game and it's going to cost 700 to manufacture 10 copies of this board game for me and the 10 people in the world who want it no one's ever going to invest in me everybody let's all chip pull our money together and we'll all get a copy of this cool board game that i think sums up right all the way up to raising a million dollars for something bigger but like in none of those scenarios should you expect anything past whatever it is you were promised as part of the kickstarter
Marco:
I think it's important to, as a Kickstarter backer of things, to be extremely skeptical as to what you're going to get.
Marco:
The promises that they make, it all has an 80% chance of actually working out for you.
Marco:
Whatever the number is, it's not 100%.
Marco:
Certainly, I've bought Kickstarter products that I have never received, that fizzled out, that they made promises they just didn't keep.
Marco:
I've bought products that...
Marco:
did eventually arrive very, very late, or that arrived finally and were not as good as they said they were going to be, or it didn't work at all.
Marco:
You know, it's easy to get caught up in the mentality of, oh, I'm helping these people out.
Marco:
I'm really going to be one of the, you know, founding backers or whatever.
Marco:
Like, it's a good feeling before you do it.
Marco:
And then...
Marco:
Eight months later when you haven't gotten the thing yet that you paid too much for, like you wouldn't have paid $200 for it in a store if it was available right now, but you paid $200 to back it because you really, really wanted it two years ago.
Marco:
It's a different emotional scenario that you're in, a different type of buying, a different type of messaging and rhetoric around it.
Marco:
That...
Marco:
I think it distorts a lot of these expectations and values and market effects.
Marco:
I think the most sensible way to use Kickstarter is basically as a speculative pre-order with the assumption that of every 10 things you pre-order, you're not going to get one of them.
John:
I mean, or you could do it as, like, I mean, one of the things that I backed recently was some person who's trying to make a website including high-quality photos of game consoles.
John:
I'm not getting anything for that.
John:
Of course you backed that.
John:
I'm not getting anything for that.
John:
Like, it's not like the website's going to be public.
John:
All I'm doing by giving any money to this at all is trying to make it so that this website exists.
John:
Because the guy, he's going to use the money to buy games.
John:
you know, vintage hardware to clean it up, to have it professionally photographed and to put it up on a website.
John:
And I'm basically paying for the entire internet to have access to this thing, paying for him to do it.
John:
You know, it was, it's not his job.
John:
He's just doing it as like a hobby project and he doesn't have a lot of money to spend on the hardware.
John:
So here's some money to put towards your project.
John:
Cause I think it's a fun project and I want it to exist in the world.
John:
People are usually okay with that type of Kickstarter.
John:
It's where it gets fuzzy is where you think you're like, where it feels like you're part of something.
John:
And if you're part of something and it fizzles and you lose that and it doesn't ever ship, people feel bad in one way.
John:
But it's almost like people feel worse if you back the Oculus Kickstarter and the people at Oculus get fabulously rich, you get no money, and the company's in the hands of another company that you didn't like.
John:
So it's like a triple whammy there.
John:
I bet these people feel worse than if the company went out of business.
John:
which doesn't make any sense, but I think it's just human nature.
John:
You thought you had a lottery ticket, but you didn't.
John:
I mean, I don't think people really thought they had a lottery ticket, but it's just like the same people feel like, you know, well, we'll get to the opinions of the people who backed the Kickstarter a bit specifically.
John:
I have some quotes here from Notch, the guy who made Minecraft, but it's just human nature to not so much to feel that you're left out financially, but that you've been betrayed somehow.
Casey:
Yeah, I guess that's true.
Casey:
What what is it about Facebook that makes it sting so much?
Casey:
And what I mean is Facebook is very clearly very similar to Google in that they're an advertising company without question.
Casey:
But nevertheless, somebody tweeted earlier today.
Casey:
I don't recall who it was.
Casey:
You know, they haven't yet ruined Instagram.
Casey:
All logic says they're going to, but are we sure that they're going to ruin Oculus?
Casey:
I mean, what proof do we have that they're going to ruin it?
Marco:
I'm not entirely sure it matters that it was Facebook that bought it.
Marco:
I mean, there's only so many companies out there in the tech business that could spend $2 billion on something.
Marco:
And it's a relatively small number, I think.
Marco:
So it wouldn't have been that much different.
Marco:
Obviously, if Google bought it, I bet nerds would all be a lot happier about it because nerds love Google for no reason.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
If Microsoft bought it, that would be kind of interesting because they're a big tech company.
Marco:
They need some new stuff to do, and they have this gaming business on the sides.
Marco:
Maybe that's kind of it.
Marco:
If Sony bought it, Sony's developing a competing product.
Marco:
If Sony bought it, that would be, I think, met with certainly some resistance as well, but it would be a little bit more clear, oh, well, that's more likely that this thing will actually come out and exist and be for games.
Okay.
Marco:
But with Facebook buying it, the big question is, what the heck is Facebook going to do with this?
Marco:
Why did Facebook buy this?
Marco:
That's the big question.
Marco:
And, I mean, your guess is as good as mine.
Marco:
I think there's certainly a contingent within Facebook, however paper it got produced and shipped, and Facebook Home, whatever contingent made these products happen and made them come out and got them out, whether it includes the top or not...
Marco:
These people believe that Facebook is about these really high-quality pictures and following great designers who post great photos and have really interesting lives and are somehow always on vacation in California.
Marco:
But the Facebook that most people see is not that at all, not even close.
Marco:
And so it's hard to look at Facebook's core product.
Marco:
and see where this would fit in in a way that wouldn't be just awful.
Marco:
But maybe that's not their plan.
Marco:
I mean, Instagram, as you said, Instagram has not been integrated into Facebook's core product.
Marco:
I'm sure they're using the data for all sorts of creepy things, but the core product of Instagram has remained a separate thing.
Marco:
So maybe Oculus will also remain a separate thing.
Marco:
Why they wanted it is still anyone's guess, but they're...
Marco:
I think part of the rage and anger about this is, what the heck does Facebook need this for?
Casey:
Right, but why did we all kind of give Jeff Bezos, Bezos, whatever his name is, a buy on the Washington Post?
Casey:
How does that make any more or less sense than this?
Marco:
Because who cares about the Washington Post?
Marco:
Not a bunch of nerds.
Marco:
That was like $150 million, though, wasn't it?
John:
It was like $2 billion.
Casey:
And that's also fair.
Casey:
But to me, it seems like a very parallel example.
Casey:
If you look at Amazon's Corp—and I know Amazon didn't buy the Washington Post.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it's not—
Casey:
amazon's core business and it's not what jeff bezos is used to doing and everyone kind of scratched their heads when he bought the post but it seems like nobody gave him a buy and or i'm sorry everyone gave him a buy and nobody seemed to care whereas when it's a nerdy tech thing all of a sudden the internet is furious
John:
Well, we travel in nerdy tech circles, but like, uh, I, I put a link in the show notes from, uh, what's his name?
John:
His actual name, uh, Marcus person notch, the guy who created Minecraft.
John:
Uh, he was, uh, a backer for, he gave like $10,000 or something because he's got tons of money for Minecraft, uh, for the original Oculus Rift.
John:
And he was looking forward to developing for it.
John:
And he is very angry that, uh, that Facebook bought them.
John:
And he lays out his reasons in a post that we'll put in the show notes.
Uh,
John:
The main reason I think that he's angry and that a lot of people are angry is that Oculus' main audience prior to this acquisition was game developers.
John:
Like, it was, you know, I guess gamers, too, like, who wanted this to come.
John:
But basically, it's game developers.
John:
Because what good is a headset if you have no games to play on it?
John:
And you can't just take an existing game and slap it in there and expect it to work.
John:
They wanted developers to make games, you know, for VR.
John:
And...
John:
He was thinking of making a version of Minecraft custom tailored to VR.
John:
And that was their audience.
John:
And that audience is like, and I think rightly so, their objection crystallized by this blog post here is that Facebook is not a game tech company.
John:
They're just not a game company.
John:
And anytime anything having to do with gaming is owned, controlled, or influenced in a big way by a company that isn't a gaming company, gamers distrust it.
John:
Like, it's part of the reason that there's this, you know, distrust in the gaming industry of Apple, despite the fact that tons of games sell really well on iOS.
John:
Apple still seems not particularly not enthusiastic about games like they don't.
John:
they don't act like a gaming company like they'll say oh look at these great you know these games are selling very well and they'll highlight games and their keynotes and stuff but they're not like a gaming company that's you know sony was a great point if sony had bought them people would feel a lot better i mean they'd still whine and complain because you know what else they're always going to whine and complain but sony thus far has shown itself to be a very dedicated gaming company and that's what people want they don't want this tech to go off
John:
and be used for social things or video conferencing or like all those things that you could use it for that notch writes about here it's like it could be very good for those things it could be very good for lots of different applications but he's a game developer he wanted it to be all about games and
John:
And he's afraid that a non-gaming company buying this is going to make it not be about games.
John:
Now, this is just what his fears are, not necessarily what's always going to happen.
John:
But he did put another bit here.
John:
Speaking of Kickstarter, he says, I did not chip in $10,000 to see the first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition.
John:
and he's not bitter because he missed out on money because he's got tons of money already it's just like it's just human nature to feel like i invested in this thing and it seems like my ten thousand dollars was just uh you know it was like a little booster to facebook and why the heck does facebook need my ten thousand dollars like they it's like here you go i'll set this up for you and you can scoop it up when it's ready and take it away from us take it away from us game developers and he's saying now he's not going to make minecraft for it and we'll see if that happens but obviously he's very angry
John:
um but from facebook's perspective i totally see why they bought this why facebook has a business where they you know get everyone's information and they get them to be social and try to get them to do things on the web and everything uh but i think they see not so much the writing on the wall but just like the evolution of their product where more people are doing more things in mobile and that's why they're trying to do the paper stuff and
John:
They're trying.
John:
Mark Zuckerberg is nothing if not a student of tech industry history, and he's trying not to find himself in the same situation lots of other successful tech companies have been in.
John:
He wants to find whatever the next big thing is and get there before everyone else does.
John:
And when you've got a lot of money, when you're in sort of this fat part of the growth curve and doing very well, that is the time to try to find out whatever the next big thing is going to be.
John:
Maybe it's not this VR thing, but what if it is?
John:
It's a good idea.
John:
It's a safe bet to go find the best VR company, buy them, just in case that turns out to be the next big thing.
John:
Because, I mean, they kind of missed out a little bit of that on mobile.
John:
Actually, they made some bad bets about doing HTML-style mobile apps or whatever.
John:
I think he sees himself... It's kind of a shame that the name of the company is Facebook.
John:
It would be better if it was called ZuckerCo or something.
John:
The fact that it's so identified with that one product, I think he sees a future where... I mean, some people are making tweets like, oh, Facebook is now just a glorified holding company.
John:
But I think he sees a future where Facebook is no longer defined by the product that we currently know as Facebook, but is merely a big technology company right up there with Amazon, Apple, Google, and all these other companies that...
John:
And he's trying to make sure that he's not blindsided by something.
John:
He's trying to, you know, sort of not be surprised by the future because he'll be inventing it.
John:
And it's something you can afford to do when you have a lot of money.
John:
And I think it's a reasonable bet because if this tech works and shrinks and becomes really good, it has attractive...
John:
It is attractive in ways to regular people.
John:
People are like, oh, no regular person is going to put on the big giant headset even to play a game, let alone regular people who are going to talk to their grandma.
John:
But accelerate this forward 25 years.
John:
Who knows how big that headset will be?
John:
Who knows how attractive it will be for people?
John:
If he is in control of that technology evolution because he's got the best people in the world doing VR and he very well may have them now, that sets Facebook up to not be irrelevant once Facebook itself, as we currently know, starts to become irrelevant.
Marco:
Maybe Facebook really just wants to own any way to to simulate interacting with people without actually having to interact with people.
Casey:
It very well could be.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I have some thoughts on this.
Casey:
But before I get to the do you want to tell us about something else that's really fun?
Marco:
Igloo is an intranet you will actually like.
Marco:
Now, most people think of intranets as old, stale, terrible places that the corporate overlords make you go to when you just want to use Dropbox or WordPress or something that actually works from the real world out here that helps you get your work done.
Marco:
Igloo brings the ease of use and familiarity from consumer software into your corporate environment by using familiar apps like shared calendars, Twitter-like microblogs, file sharing, and more.
Marco:
Every piece of content can be social, with comments and like buttons, and each team in your company can configure their own workspace within your Igloo.
Marco:
That's all great for users.
Marco:
But what if you're in charge of IT?
Marco:
Well, Igloo is very IT friendly.
Marco:
They handle the security, the hosting, and the management for you.
Marco:
They are SOC2.
Marco:
That's SOC2.
Marco:
That's probably a business thing.
Marco:
Do you guys know about business?
Marco:
Is that a business thing?
Marco:
No idea.
Marco:
Anyway, they're SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, and they host data securely in SOC 2 Type 1 enterprise facilities in Canada on their own servers.
Marco:
They offer 256-bit SSL.
Marco:
See, now I actually know about this.
Marco:
All right, back to English.
Marco:
256-bit SSL, backups, disaster recovery, single-tenant and shared environments, integration with many authentication and sync systems, including SAML services and LDAP and more.
Marco:
Igloo can even work with HIPAA-compliant organizations, John.
Marco:
HIPAA.
Marco:
You don't have to say HIPAA.
Marco:
Just say HIPAA.
Marco:
I feel like I should spend more time on a AA.
Marco:
You can customize everything inside your Igloo with the ability to add CSS and JavaScript globally across one team or even on a single page.
Marco:
Very customizable.
Marco:
You can see all this on the Igloo website.
Marco:
It's actually built on their platform.
Marco:
Go to igloosoftware.com slash... Ready for this?
Marco:
Casey.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
igloosoftware.com slash Casey.
Marco:
They made a funny landing page about why SharePoint sucks and why Igloo is so much better.
Marco:
They've been a longtime friend of us, me, my site, this show, everything.
Marco:
So check them out.
Marco:
igloosoftware.com slash Casey.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Igloo for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
This is all about – the very top headline is challenged by SharePoint.
Casey:
And as someone who has been paid or was – I haven't done it in a while now – who has paid for a long time to make SharePoint intranets for companies, and I did a build actually –
Casey:
It was either earlier this year or last year that I did think went well because it was a very, very straightforward build.
Casey:
But my prior job, I did a lot of SharePoint builds that worked terrible.
Casey:
And Igloo certainly looks a lot better for almost every particular – for almost every use you can think of.
Casey:
So thank you very much, guys.
Casey:
And for the special KC landing page, I feel so honored.
Marco:
You should.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I said right before the break that I had a couple of thoughts on this.
Casey:
And really, I think – I have a thought about Kickstarter, which maybe we'll get to, maybe we won't.
Casey:
But about Oculus and Facebook, I almost feel like –
Casey:
Facebook, the business, the website and the ad sales are really just subsidizing doing all the crap Mark wants to do.
Casey:
And I think you were kind of getting to that, John, in that Facebook is getting Mark Zuckerberg all this money and in the company all this money so that they can go out and just goof off and try different things.
Casey:
And so if that really is the case,
Casey:
That doesn't in and of itself lead me to believe that they're going to ruin it with ads and just generally make it suck.
Casey:
With that said, remind me of this in five years or whatever when Oculus is full of ads and terrible.
Casey:
But I don't know that there is a straight line from today directly into ads or I don't think that it's guaranteed anyway.
John:
Well, they're not goofing off because there is a theme to what they're doing.
John:
Like they're trying to do like social, like interactions, like, like Marco sarcastically said before, like interactions when you're not actually there with the people, because that's what Facebook, the product, the website is more or less about.
John:
And VR, if it becomes a viable technology, is well suited to that application to sort of, you know, telepresence or whatever you want to call it, where you are not with somebody, but make it seem as close to actually being with them as possible.
John:
Uh, and this could be the beginning of a technology that has applications.
John:
So, so there is a theme to what they're doing, like Instagram, WhatsApp, those are all social things.
John:
It's how people communicate and share things with each other across great distances.
John:
So I think there definitely is a theme and I think it's not kind of like Google self-driving cars, kind of like pie in the sky nerd stuff.
John:
You could draw a dotted line around this all and say potentially transformative social technologies, either current transformative ones like WhatsApp with a bazillion users and everything, or Facebook, which, of course, people share pictures of their kids and talk to each other, and then future things as well.
John:
So I think it makes some sense in that respect, and I don't think they're just goofing off, but...
John:
yeah that's that's the question is like the the doomsday scenario is lots of people have had lots of graphics of this i think it was a simpsons uh episode where they showed uh facebook of the future where no it was farmville it was like farmville vr where a bunch of people with vr headsets and hedge clippers in their hands and then there was the oatmeal comic showing uh facebook vr from a couple years ago as well and
John:
i don't think that that's what they're going to do immediately either it's like a vr way to go through your facebook timeline and post things to your wall no i don't see that at all uh and that's i think that wasn't their pitch like here's the uh a couple quotes i grabbed from palmer lucky which i think is his real name and a pretty good name for someone whose company just got bought for two billion dollars
John:
Here's what they think they're getting out of this deal with Facebook.
John:
He listed three items.
John:
This is on his Reddit thing, responding to people on Reddit.
John:
He says, one, we can make custom hardware and not rely on the scraps of the mobile phone industry.
John:
So basically their Oculus Rift that they currently made was like they would buy some screens that were intended for cell phones and they would put them in a case that they designed and put some chips in there and try to wire it together.
John:
But they couldn't do what Apple does, which is like actually make custom hardware because it's just so expensive they didn't have the money, right?
John:
Right.
John:
$2.5 billion is how much Apple probably spends figuring out how to make the, I was going to say lightning connector, but lightning connector probably costs way more than $2.5 million to develop.
John:
So anyway, custom hardware is really expensive.
John:
And now through Facebook promising them, hey, we've got tons of money.
John:
Now you can do real hardware development.
John:
Number two, we can afford to hire everyone we need, the best people that fit into our culture of excellence in all aspects.
John:
Anyway, they can afford to hire.
John:
Previously, their big hire was John Carmack.
John:
I assumed he was hired with the knowledge that they were going to sell the company, and I'm assuming he got a big piece of that because that's how you get John Carmack to come work for your no-name company.
John:
You tell them.
John:
we may be a no-name company but what we're doing is really cool and we're going to be bought by facebook soon and it's going to be a lot of money and again not that jerk comrade needs the money i think he was attracted by the technology but i'm sure that didn't hurt and i'm sure he got a piece of it uh and number three is we can make huge investments in content more news soon what that translates to me is they're trying to get big game developers on there so like is half-life 3 going to come to the
John:
oculus rift or whatever and they throw a bunch of money at valve who by the way is also working on vr stuff so maybe there's some partnership there but basically if you want to make this a viable gaming platform you got to have the games how do you get the games you throw money at game developers more or less so i'm assuming that's that's what they mean
John:
Uh, and he also had a comments of like someone asking about, you know, what about selling to like Microsoft and Apple?
John:
And he says, why we want to sell to someone like Microsoft or Apple so they can tear our company apart and use the pieces to build their own vision of virtual reality.
John:
One that fits whatever current strategy they have, not a chance.
John:
So he's saying that if Apple had bought them, all they'd be doing is say, we just want your tech or your patents and forget about this product you were making.
John:
We're going to use it to do like the next, whatever the hell we're going to do.
John:
Like,
John:
We're not interested in your product.
John:
We just want your tech.
John:
Or Microsoft.
John:
Like, oh, we're just going to make this an Xbox accessory and forget about what you've made.
John:
And the impression of the company is that Facebook is going to let them essentially do exactly what they were planning to do along exactly the same schedule.
John:
Just now the timeline is accelerated.
John:
Now the price of the product is lower because they can subsidize it with Facebook's big bankroll.
John:
They can do custom hardware.
John:
They think it's basically...
John:
We're going to do exactly what we were going to do before, but better.
John:
And that may actually be the case for the first few years anyway, until Facebook sees where this goes.
John:
Like, that's the whole thing with these acquisitions.
John:
People agree to acquisitions and they say all these things like, oh, don't worry, nothing will change.
John:
They told us everything's going to be the same.
John:
And I think they really believe it, and I think they really were told those things.
John:
But, like, what no one wants to dwell on is, like, once you are no longer in control of your own company, once the buck no longer stops with you, eventually, several years down the line, there's going to be a difference of opinion, and you're going to get overruled, and you're going to... I mean, I know you know this intellectually, that you're not in charge anymore, but at a certain point, it's going to come home.
John:
Oh...
John:
I'm not in charge of, quote, unquote, my company anymore.
John:
Someone else is.
John:
And they want us to do whatever.
John:
And then, you know, that's when founders leave.
John:
Their shares are vested.
John:
They're disgruntled.
John:
They leave on so-so terms.
John:
And, like, maybe they're fine with it.
John:
But, like, this is the honeymoon period where everybody thinks it's going to be a win-win-win.
John:
They think we're going to get to do exactly what we always wanted to do.
John:
And we'll get to do it better.
John:
And maybe they really will.
John:
But at some point down the line, there's going to be a difference of opinion, and that's probably where they're going to partway.
John:
So I don't want to be pessimistic about it, but I'm actually more optimistic than I think most nerds about the situation in that I think this does give Oculus some breathing room to try to do a good job with this tech.
John:
I just wonder, after a couple years of this, if they have not hit it off in the gaming space and not hit it off in the world of social, how long will Facebook keep funneling money into this in the hopes that it will turn into something big for them?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Did it take a long time for AOL to ruin Winamp?
Casey:
Because they bought all of Nullsoft, is that right?
Marco:
I mean, that was a special case, I think, because Justin – what's his name?
Casey:
Frankel?
Casey:
Something like that?
Marco:
Yeah, right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
He – I mean, AOL was just dumb to even buy him because he very much could not possibly work for some dumb big corporation.
Marco:
He does not have the personality for that at all.
Marco:
With quite comical results.
Marco:
Gotta give the guy credit.
Marco:
He actually got an impressive amount of subterfuge done while he was there.
Marco:
But, you know, I don't think that's a great example.
Marco:
But I think...
Marco:
Oculus is too young for Facebook to necessarily ruin it.
Marco:
I think the big question is what will they do with it?
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
Here's another quote from Palmer Luckey from an article.
John:
This was posted as an image with no attribution by Jeff Atwood.
John:
So I don't know where this came from, but this is a quote when he was asked about selling Oculus.
John:
I'm assuming this was, you know, many months ago, perhaps more than a year ago.
John:
He says, we want to do things our way.
John:
There are certainly people who are interested, but we have a vision for our consumer product and we know that we're going to be able to pull it off.
John:
We don't want to be assimilated into someone who's going to have us working on their own product or their own vision for VR.
John:
We want to be able to deliver our own vision of what VR is.
John:
And so the interviewer says, so even a company like Amazon made a huge offer, it wouldn't matter.
John:
And I hear quoting Palmer again, nobody can say it doesn't matter.
John:
Everybody has a number, but I don't think there's a reasonable number that would make me say, you know, I was going to change the world with VR and try to change humanity forever, but here's a number.
John:
Well, apparently there was a number and that number was 2 billion.
John:
That's kind of unfair.
John:
These are quotes from him.
John:
I don't slam him for this because I think everybody does have a number.
John:
But really, this is consistent with what he's currently saying now, which is that he didn't want to do someone else's vision of VR.
John:
He wanted to do his vision.
John:
And Facebook came to him with a big number and said...
John:
With this big number, you get to do your vision of VR.
John:
We don't want to take it and make it into some other product or just assume your tech into some existing thing.
John:
Even like, you know, absorbing your tech into like the next Xbox thing.
John:
They have their vision of VR and they want to pull it off.
John:
And Facebook came to them apparently and said, you can do your vision.
John:
We will help you do it.
John:
We believe in it too.
John:
And so I think...
John:
like people pulling this out is like to show that he was hypocritical or whatever but i don't first of all i don't begrudge people selling out i don't feel bad about that at all because i know i would sell it in a second but but like he's getting he he's getting to do his vision of er and that's what i think is important like if you look at john carmex tweets as whatever like what is their vision of er is it just that you play cool games on it
John:
both this guy both palmer and carmack both seem to have what i'm you know reading between the lines is that their vision of vr is like you know casey's favorite book ready player one you know or snow crash or anything like all the futuristic scenarios like you just jack into the matrix you know whatever like any sort of 90s bad like the original dream of vr that you're going to be in this virtual world and it'll be like you were really there and there'll be this other world it's like second life but you know like i
John:
How many times have we taken runs of this?
John:
I think the closest we've come is probably something like World of Warcraft, which is not like VR at all, but is very absorbing.
John:
I think that's their vision of VR, like the potential, the future potential of VR.
John:
And Carmack had said Facebook is good at scaling, and if we're going to do VR right, it's going to require scaling.
John:
he's not talking about oh if we're going to do vr right meaning if we're going to make a really cool first person shooter in vr scaling he means like the entire world in like a virtual world all wearing our headsets all interacting or whatever that appears to be their vision and i'm not sure if that's a good vision or if that's a feasible vision or if that or if they're just all kidding themselves and i it's clear that right now they're concentrating on just making good games which i think is a good idea
John:
But if you look at it from that perspective, it kind of starts to make a little bit of sense.
John:
Like that tweet that Casey actually got the reference in.
John:
If you're going to make the actual real-world equivalent of Oasis from Ready Player One, Facebook plus Oculus makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
Casey:
Yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
I'm not sure that's the future, and I'm not sure that...
Casey:
I really like the idea of a Ready Player One-style future, but it does make sense.
Casey:
You're absolutely right.
Casey:
And I think you hit the nail on the head a moment ago when you said it's not really mutually exclusive for Palmer to say –
Casey:
hey, we have a number and then to sell to Facebook.
Casey:
I think what he was referring to, we have a number of like $100 billion or whatever if Apple were to buy us.
Casey:
But he genuinely seems to believe that his company being bought for $2 billion is just a bonus.
Casey:
It's icing on the cake for the fact that he can still do exactly what he's always planned to do.
Casey:
So they're not mutually exclusive in his mind.
Casey:
So I think you got that exactly right.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
As much as I loved Ready Player One and as much as I know you didn't, I don't think I want that for our future.
Casey:
But maybe I'm just being an old man.
Marco:
I would also, going back a step, John, you used the word vision a lot in the last few minutes and talking about the vision they have for this product.
Marco:
And vision, I think, is overrated and overestimated.
Marco:
In that I think the public thinks that people have a lot more of a vision in place, like a predetermined vision in place, than they really do.
Marco:
And for a product like this, it's pretty much paving new ground.
Marco:
It's going off in this direction that has never worked before and doing it with much newer technology and much more advanced stuff than has ever been tried before.
Marco:
This is the kind of thing, like most products and services where there's somebody at the top who appears to have a vision, this is the kind of thing where the vision probably stretches out for the next six months or maybe 12 months at the most.
Marco:
And the person might have this dream of future things where somehow in five years or in 10 years, this is where it's going to be.
Marco:
But in reality, as a product goes on, you're never going to get there.
Marco:
They're going to change the version.
Marco:
They're going to edit.
Marco:
They're going to adapt over time.
Marco:
They're going to adapt to shifting market forces.
Marco:
As they try things, they're going to realize, oh, this actually doesn't work well, but this other thing does, so let's do this other thing instead.
Marco:
Everything is going to be edited and shifted over time and adjusted based on where things are going and how things have gone for them so far.
Marco:
And so you might think in theory...
Marco:
that they have this vision and Facebook's not going to interfere with it.
Marco:
But the reality is being owned by Facebook will inherently interfere with it because their vision is going to be adjusted over time.
Marco:
So in a year, when they have to make some little decision, the fact that they are owned by Facebook will on some level inform that decision.
Marco:
And so the vision, whatever visions was set out, you know, by some guy having visions, whatever was set out ahead of time is malleable and not guaranteed.
Marco:
the acquisition will definitely change that.
Marco:
And so what Oculus will become and what they will do and the products they will make and all the decisions they will make will definitely be influenced by this.
Marco:
And some of those will be for the better and some of them won't be.
Marco:
But, you know, there is no...
Marco:
People say Steve Jobs was this great visionary, and the fact is Steve Jobs was a really great editor, and he had very good sensibilities of where things were going soon.
Marco:
But even his ideas for where things would be like in 10 years were not...
Marco:
Not that frequently expressed, first of all, but not usually that spot on, I bet.
Marco:
He adjusted as he went.
Marco:
He saw opportunities and took them.
Marco:
He didn't have all of his products planned out 10 years ahead of time.
John:
You know, that's part of the seduction of acquiring a company is that the acquirer always has to convince the founder of the small startup that they share their vision.
John:
And I think the difficulty comes in that Facebook will convince them that they share the vision, but Facebook shares the vision on a much shorter time scale.
Yeah.
John:
Well, let's see if this works out.
John:
Whereas the founders of Oculus believe in this vision, like as in like a lifetime, they are never going to give it up.
John:
So if Facebook decides to sort of pivot, as they say in current parlance or, you know, edit the vision, then they're going to come in conflict with the founders who believe,
John:
like no no we still have the original vision what do you mean it's like yeah well but we're your bosses now so tough luck so that's what i was getting at before that it's going to come through ahead in a few years if things don't work out but and and in the small picture it is important to like it's great to have a vision but like what are you making now are you making are you going to make a product that people like and do you have a way to make money from it or to make money from something else until it can come into something that makes money uh so you need to concentrate on that because if you just have this vision you
John:
you're not going to get there.
John:
But the case of Steve Jobs, I think he's a great example because he had a vision from the time he was, you know, like 20 years old of how computing should be.
John:
And it would not be, you know, it took him like 30 years to get to that vision.
John:
And along the way, he tried all sorts of different directions.
John:
He tried the Mac, he tried Next, he did, you know, the...
John:
The laptops and the iPods and the iPhones and like I would say that the iPad is essentially the culmination of his vision of what computing should be like.
John:
If you go back to like I think he gave a speech to some computer user group in like 1983 that you can find the audio version of.
John:
And just go and listen to it.
John:
And you're like, he's describing the iPad, like in vague terms, not specifically, oh, it's going to be this, that, the other thing.
John:
But the vision that computing should be simple and not have lots of fidgety bits and not have a lot of indirection.
John:
and you know be portable and wireless and all kind of like sci-fi fantasy things but like that vision sounds all wishy-washy it's like how does that help you make the mac well it doesn't how does that help you make the next well it doesn't really right but maintaining that vision over his entire life was like kind of his guiding force led him in the direction of i if i'm not sure where i want to go like you if you zoom back on his entire life and career you can see it as like
John:
a an entire lifetime spent trying to get to this ideal and finding lots of dead ends along the way and lots of fruitful things and lots of distractions but just never letting go of that idea that this you know that essentially the ipad is what computing should be like you know actually he probably thought it should be even simpler and even cheaper cheaper and even lighter but you know he didn't live long enough to see it happening but that being your guiding principle not being married to some specific idea like it's got to be an earpiece or it's got to be hell even a vr headset or something but
John:
a broad vision of where you want to go really helps you guide you as you're going along these steps of like oh we have to adjust oh the situation has changed and the realities have changed like that's all well and good and you have to do that but if you don't have like an overall vision you will find yourself going off into one of those tangents and then continuing that direction like plowing forward in that direction forgetting about what your original vision of and you will find out find yourself very far away from where you were uh where you intended to go because you just found a fruitful avenue another direction and i think
John:
i'm not sure what marcus zuckerberg's vision of the future is but i'm pretty sure it doesn't agree with the the oculus guys and yeah that that will probably come to a head but i do think that the oculus that their vision like having vision and having a clear one is an important thing if you ever want to get there like over the course of a 30-year career despite all the different twists and turns you take
Marco:
Do you think Zuckerberg has a vision beyond today?
Marco:
If you look at what Facebook is doing, Zuckerberg is a really, really sharp guy.
Marco:
Even though I don't use Facebook and I don't really care for what it is, I can't deny that Zuckerberg is a genius in so many ways and especially astute with the business of technology and being the business that he's in.
Yeah.
Marco:
Do you think he knows what's next?
Marco:
Because it seems like Facebook has maybe plateaued in a way that... And again, because I don't use it regularly, it's hard for me to really say this authoritatively, but it seems like...
Marco:
he had a vision for where it was roughly two or three years ago.
Marco:
He got there.
Marco:
And then it's been... Ever since then, it's been like, well, now what?
Marco:
And kind of looking around like, well, I guess I could try this or this or this.
Marco:
But it seems like he...
Marco:
He was really focused and driven to achieve what it was two years ago and has not had a clear idea of what to do since then.
Marco:
And that's why we've seen some weird experiments and weird moves from them since then.
Marco:
And maybe that's what some of these recent acquisitions are about because he is trying to find out what's going to be next because what Facebook is right now seems like it's kind of done.
Yeah.
John:
I think he's a perfect example of a second-generation tech mogul, like not living generation, but second-crop tech mogul.
John:
And again, another Ready Player One analogy is the protagonist in Ready Player One didn't live through the 80s, but he's a student of 80s culture, and so he's able to interact with that.
John:
But anyway, Zuckerberg, I think, looks at gates and jobs and even in some respects the founders of Google, they're a little bit in the second generation as well, like IBM and Apple and all those things as like
John:
That's his version of history.
John:
I want to be like those guys, but smarter.
John:
So let me look at all the things that they did.
John:
And when I start my company, I'm not going to make the same mistakes.
John:
And so we started out very early not making the mistake, arguably, that Oculus has made or whatever of not selling your company.
John:
Yahoo offered him billions.
John:
I think Microsoft offered him billions.
John:
He had billions of dollars thrown in his face.
John:
So many times, and every time he turned it down, the number was bigger, and people would say, I can't believe this kid is turning down all this money.
John:
What a fool.
John:
He's going to be screwed.
John:
But he knew that step one, if you want to be a big boy in the tech industry, don't sell your company to somebody.
John:
Or even in Steve Jobs' case, don't bring in a CEO who is going to run the company for you or whatever.
John:
Keep control.
John:
Don't sell out.
John:
Because that's a prerequisite.
John:
Because if you sell out, you're just going to be a footnote.
John:
You're never going to be the big guy.
John:
Yeah.
John:
uh he did that early on and then now you know make a great product uh make it something that people want become worldwide like that's the facebook that we know of and now he's at the phase of like okay now i don't want to make the other mistake people make which is like microsoft once you get a you know personal computer on every desk running microsoft software then what do you do you like the dog who caught the car don't paralyze yourself don't put all your eggs behind in one basket you
John:
Branch out, figure out what's next and get there before everybody else.
John:
And if you make mistakes, correct them quickly.
John:
And so he's going off the playbook, the failed playbook of everyone who's come before him that he, I assume, looks up to and admires and trying to be smarter about, which is total a total nerd move, you know, like.
John:
use use your brain power to try to not make the mistakes of the people you admire had made and in some ways it reminds me of pixar the whole idea that like the creative process we can figure out what works and what doesn't and come up with a system as unorthodox as it might be which is truly a nerd's way to foster creativity like but you know not relying on tradition and convention and and egos and uh
John:
not worrying about who has power or whatever, just concentrating on what works, what can we measure, what can we do that actually makes good products, and if something doesn't work, change it.
John:
That, I think, is his MO.
John:
I think his lack of vision, as far as I can tell, I don't know what his personal vision is, other than to, like, it's a little bit like Bill Gates, like, be the victor in the technology world, like, to be the biggest one.
John:
That is not a... Some people wouldn't call that an admirable vision, but it's like a...
John:
i don't know it's not it's not steve jobs's vision where he wanted to like do something for humanity and change the world i don't know what zuckerberg's vision is i think it would help if he had one but right now he's doing better than a lot of the people who came in the generations before him merely because he gets to learn from all their mistakes yeah what's uh what else is cool these days other than oculus help spot casey are you still using email clients for customer support
Marco:
Uh, sure.
Marco:
Well, as you know, you are probably losing track of important tickets.
Marco:
Or you're trying to use Mark is Unread as an organizational tool or the flags, you know.
Marco:
You're probably still IMing your coworkers to see who's working on what.
Marco:
This is a mess.
Marco:
It's time to get organized.
Marco:
Most help desk apps try to be all things to all people.
Marco:
Help Spot, on the other hand, is focused.
Marco:
It deals only with customer inquiries and self-service knowledge bases.
Marco:
So there's no asset management, no password resetting, no unnecessary features to get in your way or require any kind of complex integration work with your systems.
Marco:
Helpdesk software is usually really expensive.
Marco:
Some of them are around $600 per user per year, for instance.
Marco:
HelpSpot is just $299 per user one time, and you own it for life.
Marco:
That's not per month.
Marco:
That's not per year.
Marco:
$2.99 per user, one time.
Marco:
There's no locking with HelpSpot.
Marco:
You can download it and host it yourself, or you can have it hosted for you.
Marco:
Either way, you always have access to the database to directly query or take elsewhere.
Marco:
And HelpSpot has been around for a long time.
Marco:
This isn't just some new startup that's going to be bought by Facebook for $2 billion next year and leave you stranded.
Marco:
It's been available for nearly a decade.
Marco:
It's been adopted by thousands of companies and organizations.
Marco:
Customers from single-person startups to Fortune 500 companies use HelpSpot to manage their support teams.
Marco:
So you can start a free trial today at helpspot.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's helpspot.com slash ATP.
Marco:
And if you do that, you'll get $100 off your purchase when you use the coupon code ATP14.
Marco:
So once again, HelpSpot, great help desk software.
Marco:
Check it out, helpspot.com slash ATP and use coupon code ATP14 for $100 off.
Marco:
Thank you very much to HelpSpot for sponsoring our show.
John:
I got one more thing for the chat room on Oculus.
John:
Someone posted a while back in the chat room a quote that John Carmack made on Slashdot in 1999 that I actually remember reading in 1999 and not because, I'm assuming, where this person saw that a lot of people are retweeting it or digging it up today.
John:
And the quote was, I think it was in one of his interviews on Slashdot, making snow crash into a reality feels like a sort of moral imperative to a lot of programmers, but the efforts that have been made so far leave a lot to be desired.
John:
Obviously, this was in 1999, but his description of that making Snow Crash real is a moral imperative to a lot of programmers, I'm assuming meaning himself, says all you need to know about, like, why is John Carmack joining this company?
John:
I mean, if you think back to, like, what Quake was supposed to be before it actually became a product, like, the idea that it was going to be, like, this virtual world and more like an RPG and...
John:
trading items with people until it just became a first person shooter but then quake world where you could connect to people over the internet like his entire career has been making steps in that direction like we wouldn't have this vr stuff if we didn't have all the 3d stuff that he pioneered so it makes perfect sense to me i i think i can see what carmax vision is he lays it out more or less it's like he he read snow crash he said yes i want to go to there and uh he's been working towards that ever since
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
A lot of people have asked about this, speaking of Facebook, this Facebook hack language, language extension thing.
Casey:
And Marco, you wrote a post about it, but I didn't know if you had any other commentary you may want to share, if you could summarize what your thoughts are on all this.
Marco:
Well, I don't have a lot more to say.
Marco:
I think it's really interesting.
Marco:
So as a quick overview, Hack is Facebook's... Basically, it's a modification in addition to the PHP language.
Marco:
So they've taken PHP, and a couple of years ago, they made this hip-hop compiler that would compile PHP to C++.
Marco:
That way, it can be compiled to binary and be way faster.
Marco:
And they've actually replaced that with something called HHVM for HipHopVM.
Marco:
And that was about a year ago that they released that.
Marco:
And it's basically a super high-performance PHP JIT compiler runtime.
Marco:
And PHP has had optimizing caching bytecode compilers before.
Marco:
And it actually comes with one.
Marco:
But HipHop is way faster.
Marco:
It's like 2 to 10 times faster and uses less memory and everything else.
Marco:
So it's pretty substantial.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
What they've done now is they've taken this HHVM project and they've said, well, now that we've re-implemented all of PHP in a faster way, let's start customizing it more to our tastes.
Marco:
So they've added things to the language.
Marco:
Most substantially, they added optional static typing and type hinting, which is really, really great.
Marco:
That's one thing that I would love to have that.
Marco:
So hack is basically PHP plus some stuff, including most significantly static typing optionally.
Marco:
So it's very, very interesting.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
PHP has always been a language where, as I said in my post, it has not been stewarded well.
Marco:
It never was.
Marco:
It's famously with that awesome article about PHP being a fractal of bad design.
Marco:
We'll link to that in the shot.
Marco:
I love that article so much.
Marco:
It is not a well-designed language.
Marco:
The people who make the decisions about what should go into it and the syntax and what it should be called, what method should be called and everything, have made a lot of bad decisions over the years.
Marco:
But it is an eminently practical language.
Marco:
And that's why I use it.
Marco:
I like it a lot.
Marco:
And I don't love it.
Marco:
And I think...
Marco:
You know, I got a lot of crap for saying in the article, PHP is not a great language, but it is a good language.
Marco:
And I didn't get a lot of crap from people who I know to be experienced programmers.
Marco:
And I'm not saying that everyone who said crap to me about that is a noob or anything.
Marco:
But I think if you can look at the language you're using, like, this is actually a good way to bring you guys into this discussion so it's not just me talking to nobody for a while.
Marco:
Um...
Marco:
So are there any programming languages that you know well enough to say are great?
Casey:
I don't know if I'd say C Sharp is great.
Casey:
I'd say I have very similar opinions as you do of PHP in that I think it's really, really good.
Casey:
I think it's been used to write some real, real crap, but I think it's extremely powerful and can be bent to do almost anything.
Casey:
But, you know, that flexibility comes with some costs.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
What do you think, John?
John:
C probably qualifies as a great language.
John:
Not to do anything in particular with it, just because now we're so far away from its time of usefulness that...
John:
It has only a few warts on it, and what it was designed to do, it does really well without getting in your way.
John:
I guess it's probably as close as I can find to a language that's great.
John:
Because if you think, what's awkward and weird about C?
John:
You're not going to say, oh, it's got pointers.
John:
Well, yes, that's the whole point.
John:
The love of language exists that.
John:
And maybe you don't want to use it to make a modern program.
John:
But for what it does...
John:
It's pretty good.
John:
Go, maybe.
John:
I'm hesitant to say go, because go is kind of like C done right, but now we're in a different age, and maybe go is a little bit too low-level to be a great language.
John:
I haven't used it enough to say, but it's kind of like C with the bad things shaved off, and then I added a bunch of other stuff, too.
John:
maybe something in that thing any any of the more modern languages like it's true of any programming language the more you know about it the more you you see all the warts and all the horrible things about it except for php where you don't have to know it that well to see all the warts because it's covered in warts it is all wart uh but yeah well you know like just think think of anybody like the more you know a language the more you just are disgusted by it because you just use if you use it for real and become an expert in it you'll know where all the bodies are buried and you'll just
John:
feel bad about it but you know it's it's difficult anything anything that's that is in widespread use and grows quickly and uh you know even in the best case scenario is going to eventually accumulate cruft and you know php and c++ for example started out with a hell of a lot of cruft from the beginning and just got worse
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I mean, PHP started out as a pretty terrible language and became a good language over time.
Marco:
But I think you're exactly right, John.
Marco:
My point in saying this is that I feel like when you learn a new language, you go through these stages.
Marco:
First, it's unfamiliar to you.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
Generally, your opinion of the language at that point tends to be extreme.
Marco:
Either this is terrible because you're being forced to use it for something, either through work or you have to use a certain language to be on a certain platform or whatever else.
Marco:
When I first looked at Objective-C, I thought, well, this is a ridiculous language.
Marco:
There's brackets all over the place.
Marco:
What the hell are they doing with these method names?
Marco:
Why are there parentheses there?
Marco:
And what's the plus do?
Marco:
And all this other crap.
Marco:
Why can't they just use words like everyone else?
Marco:
It was...
Marco:
You look at this and it's unfamiliar to you.
Marco:
And so if you're being forced or coerced to use it for some other reason, that's usually you look at it and say, this is terrible.
Marco:
If you're learning it because it's the new cool thing and you really want to learn it...
Marco:
you might have the opposite extreme reaction of, everything is awesome, oh my god, this is great, this is totally the way forward, this is going to be amazing.
Marco:
And then as you learn more of the language, as you have more experience with it, your opinion tends to move towards the middle in some way.
Marco:
You start to go, okay...
Marco:
now you know i'm getting more familiar with it um it's not as bad as i thought or it's not as good as i thought and you start seeing okay well here are the things that are decent with this and i think i'm getting the hang of it and a lot of times your opinions of the language shortcomings at that point are actually your shortcomings and knowing it because you like you might not think it has a good way to do x because you don't know that you don't know a better way to do it but there is a better way to do it you just haven't learned it yet and
Marco:
And then as you tend to get more expertise in a language, as you become an expert in it and really get a lot of experience, that I think – the wisdom that you reach at that point usually is –
Marco:
okay, this is actually a pretty good language.
Marco:
I can see what they were going for.
Marco:
I see why things are done the way they're done.
Marco:
I see, oh, well, here's this cool new way to do this thing that I didn't know about before.
Marco:
And all the code I wrote before this point was crap.
Marco:
Now I'm going to rewrite all that stuff the right way because now I know this language much better.
Marco:
This is great.
Marco:
And then a year after that, you're still writing this language, and then you start seeing, okay, actually, these parts of the language are really getting in my way.
Marco:
Now I know that this is just a wall here.
Marco:
There is no way past this with this language, or there is no better way to do this.
Marco:
This is just a stupid wall because the language is stupid.
Marco:
And so as you get further in knowing a language, you eventually realize that every language sucks in some ways.
Marco:
I've never learned a programming language well.
Marco:
that I thought didn't suck in some way.
Marco:
Although I will say, John, I think I might give C the highest overall rating, maybe.
Marco:
But regardless, you know, I think...
Marco:
Every language sucks in some ways.
Marco:
And if you can't see why the language you're using sucks in certain ways, you're probably in that early stage of it where it's still very new and novel and maybe you haven't used it enough to really run into some of the walls.
Marco:
Or maybe just the way you've used it just hasn't been expansive enough in the grand scheme of things to really run into certain types of problems that everyone else is running into.
Marco:
So I think, similarly, it's hard to say any language is bad.
Marco:
In the same way that it's hard to say any language is particularly great, it's hard to say any language is particularly bad.
Marco:
Because usually the reason why people say a language is bad is because of faults that are not the language's.
Marco:
It's because of bad code they've seen, bad programmers they've interacted with, or bad code they've found online, or a bad situation that they had to write that language in, or a bad code base they had to work on written in that language.
Marco:
None of those things necessarily are because of the language.
Marco:
Often they're because of the people you were working with, or the way the language was used by a novice.
Marco:
And there's people writing bad code in every language.
Marco:
And so I feel like a lot of the criticism about PHP or about any, you know, you could tell the same things about Visual Basic.
Marco:
Visual Basic back in the day, yet another language I knew pretty well.
Marco:
I know how to pick them.
Marco:
Visual Basic back in the day, I mean, you could say it was a weird language.
Marco:
There were a lot of weird things about it.
Marco:
But a lot of people got a lot done in that language because it worked pretty well.
Marco:
And it wasn't cool ever.
Marco:
It was, you know, it was never respected by programmers.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It worked, and it wasn't as bad as most programmers think because they never bothered to learn how to write well in it, and they probably saw a lot of bad VB code.
Marco:
So it's a very similar thing with PHP and with any language.
Marco:
You can look at the language and you can say, well, it works.
Marco:
There are some weird edge cases, but for the most part, the language works.
Marco:
You know, people build large apps in it all the time.
Marco:
If you look, I found some page on Wikipedia that was like what the biggest websites in the world are built on.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I think a good quarter of the top 10 or 20 were written in PHP, including Facebook, Wikipedia, WordPress.com, Tumblr, I think, as far as I still know.
Marco:
So things like that.
Marco:
There's a lot of PHP out there being used, and Yahoo uses it pretty heavily.
Marco:
um it's you know it's fine it's it's down to what you write and how you write it and there are certain things like the libraries can help or hurt in certain ways although there's nothing stopping you from writing your own libraries or modifying the ones that are there um so anyway all this is to say back to facebook's hack uh
Marco:
the concept of Facebook taking control of this branch of PHP, first with HHVM and now with their own language modifications that they're calling their own language, that I think is an interesting thing.
Marco:
Here was this language that was managed with mediocrity taken by this other company.
Marco:
They just took it over.
Marco:
They literally just took it over and
Marco:
PHP is going to continue.
Marco:
So what they did was re-implement PHP 5.4.
Marco:
Now, if the real PHP people make PHP 5.6 or PHP 6.0 in ways that Facebook really doesn't like or in ways that Facebook thinks are worse...
Marco:
What if Facebook says, you know what?
Marco:
HHVM is not going to support that.
Marco:
We're going to actually just fork the language and just say, all right, we're not going to maintain parity anymore because that's stupid.
Marco:
We're going to differ in these ways.
Marco:
It really is kind of a... They really are taking control.
Marco:
They're not just adding to the world of PHP necessarily forever.
Marco:
They have taken some control and they might then diverge with that control.
Marco:
I think that actually might be better, though, in all ways except one.
Marco:
So Facebook technically has way better skill than the PHP authors.
Marco:
There's no question about that.
Marco:
They're way better at it.
Marco:
Their runtime is way better.
Marco:
Their ideas of where the language should go.
Marco:
By looking at a hack, you can see what they thought the language needed.
Marco:
And I think I disagree with some of their changes, and I think some of their changes look really weird.
Marco:
But ultimately, the things they chose to add are mostly pretty good things.
Marco:
So if Facebook really does kind of take the language over and become the dominant implementation and the dominant spec of the language, that's great until Facebook decides it no longer is interested.
Marco:
And then it would reach a weird point where let's say you write a bunch of hack code.
Marco:
Let's say you decide, okay, you know what?
Marco:
This hack thing is pretty cool.
Marco:
I want to start using it in my PHP code.
Marco:
Let's do it.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
The thing's open source in theory.
Marco:
That should work.
Marco:
But if Facebook decides in a year or two years or three years, yeah, we're actually done with this.
Marco:
We're going to do something else and it's not going to be open source.
Marco:
So never mind.
Marco:
That kind of screws people.
Marco:
So that's my only caution that that could happen here.
Marco:
Besides that, I think overall this is a good thing, although there's no question it will definitely fragment the PHP community.
Marco:
That being said, the PHP community largely sucks, so the fact that it gets fragmented I don't think is a bad thing.
John:
Didn't you also point out in your blog post that this is...
John:
They're using this to write stuff on the server side.
John:
So it's not like they have a developer community out there who's like, for example, Apple Objective-C.
John:
They want people to write apps for the App Store in Objective-C.
John:
So they're sort of maintaining and improving this language on behalf of all these developers, whereas Facebook is maintaining and improving PHP on behalf of Facebook employees who write the Facebook back end.
John:
As far as I know, they don't have any kind of like, here you go, right?
John:
You know, like a development platform for people to write code in hack that either runs on top of Facebook or runs elsewhere.
John:
Is that correct?
John:
I know Facebook has lots of APIs, but as far as I know, they're like kind of web service type of APIs that you write on top of Facebook and not like...
John:
Write something and hack it, it will run inside Facebook.
John:
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
John:
But even if even if that was the case, I think people who have built like built code on top of Facebook's platform have been burned in the past because Facebook basically just wants something to run their their server side web.
John:
application what they want to be able to write and maintain it uh efficiently and that is their sole focus and so if they change their mind as they had already like they used to have hip-hop which was a thing that took php turned into c++ and then compiled with c++ into this big monster executable that was their previous approach this is their current approach in a few more years maybe they'll have another approach and at that point it's not so much that they will have forked hack so far it's just that they will lose interest in it like i think
John:
Another project that I think it is like Scribe or Thrift, this logging infrastructure thing, which is originally a Facebook product, and they kind of lost interest with it.
John:
And it languished for a long time.
John:
And I think like the open source community like picked it up and made a alternative or a port or a fork of it or whatever.
John:
So it could be that Hack ends up...
John:
you know facebook decides on whatever the next approach is in four or five years hack is left to sort of die on the vine and since it's open source the open source community grabs it and that is like php 7 or something and hopefully continues to run with it but you hope there's still a php community around to do that in several years like you hope this doesn't just like starve everybody out and all there is is hack and then facebook loses interest in hack and replaces it with something better and there's no one left to maintain hack what a terrible name that is by the way oh yeah definitely
Marco:
I think if Facebook loses interest in this, if they abandon it, I don't think there's enough people in the PhD community who would like it enough and who would have the time and the skill to maintain it properly.
Marco:
I think if Facebook abandons it, it's done.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
because the official PHP maintainers probably want nothing to do with it.
Marco:
They probably are not happy about its existence, because it really is like a big middle finger to them, saying, well, your language was bad, so we made our own version of it that's better.
John:
Well, as you pointed out, they probably deserve that middle finger.
John:
What was their namespacing character for the backslash alone, right?
John:
The backslash?
John:
What the heck was that?
John:
If anything deserves a middle finger.
Marco:
I still don't use namespaces for that reason.
John:
It's just insane.
John:
If you had to pick a worse character, could you think of one without using Unicode smileys?
John:
Like pile of poos.
John:
A worse ASCII character, right?
John:
I don't think there is one.
John:
Maybe a non-printing character, I guess.
John:
Vertical tab.
Marco:
exactly so anyway yeah i i don't think uh i i don't think the official php maintainers even if they chose to take it over which i think is very very unlikely um i don't think that would be a good thing so so yeah basically if facebook gives up on hack hack is over
Marco:
And, like, you know, I'm choosing to write my Overcast codebase now, and I'm writing it in PHP.
Marco:
And I'm writing it on an HHVM as of a few days ago, and it's great.
Marco:
But I'm hesitant to adopt Hack because, like, when I wrote Instapaper's codebase, it was late 2007 when I first wrote the beginnings of that.
Marco:
And it was still running that code base, to the best of my knowledge, until mid-2013.
Marco:
And, you know, it would have been added on to, but it had not been rewritten in a new language until mid-2013.
Marco:
And so, you know, that's a long time.
Marco:
And so to have six years, so to start something now, I do things for not the long haul.
Marco:
These aren't going to last 20 years.
Marco:
But I do things with the expectation that they're going to last a couple of years at least.
Marco:
Three to five years sounds reasonable to me.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so do I think this language is going to still be healthy and around and maintained in three to five years?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think it's way too soon to say.
Marco:
Because Facebook is using it now, but they're not...
Marco:
I think somebody looked at it, and I think it's not being developed in the open.
Marco:
It's like they're having just code dumps every once in a while.
Marco:
It's where they're developing it internally, and then they're just dumping back to the public code base occasionally, like every couple of weeks or whatever.
Marco:
So like WebKit?
Marco:
Yeah, I think so.
Marco:
So if Facebook starts losing interest in this...
Marco:
We'll just start to see, like, oh, they'll just kind of start slowing down those code dumps, and then eventually the version they're going to use internally is going to be so divergent from the public version, they'll just kind of stop – they'll stop thinking it's worth maintaining the public version.
Marco:
And, you know, like, there's so many –
Marco:
There are so many plausible, realistic ways where this language could get just kind of withered and killed or abandoned over the next few years as Facebook's interests and needs changed themselves that I would hesitate to build anything big on it today.
Marco:
What I am interested in
Marco:
is one of the greatest advantages of hack and of hip hop is the static type checker.
Marco:
So I would like to write my code in hack, but have it compiled down to PHP optionally.
Marco:
And that should be pretty easy to do because they have an open source compiler right there in the world.
Marco:
So in fact, there's even some command line options that are not yet implemented on HHVM that make it possibly even easier than that.
Marco:
But if there was an option for the HHVM runtime to compile hack to PHP seamlessly, that would be more interesting.
Marco:
Because then you could write your code in hack, and you could either run it in hack on the server, or if Facebook decided to be dicks and kill it, you could compile it down to PHP and keep working.
Marco:
Or you could keep it as hack...
Marco:
Compile it to PHP for deployment, but before you deploy, run the static analyzer on your entire code base and have that be like a pre-commit hook.
Marco:
So you could say, all right, I'm going to use all the static type checking, and I'm not going to be checking it at runtime all the time, but I will check it at compile time or commit time.
Marco:
And so then you will still get a lot of the benefits of those add-ons.
Marco:
Not some of the other add-ons in the language, but there is...
Marco:
There are some add-ons to the language that could be very easily removed and stripped out for a PHP compile.
Marco:
Not all of them, but some.
Marco:
So that I'm interested in.
Marco:
Otherwise, I think I'm going to wait and see.
Casey:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Help Spot, Igloo, and Warby Parker.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
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:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Accidental.
Casey:
Check my cast so long.
John:
Titles?
John:
Always on vacation in California.
John:
I like that.
John:
I kind of like that one.
John:
Now Marco gets to experience the bitterness of parents.
John:
you see like we just see mike mattis's photos and yes it does look like he's always on vacation in a national park he's not carrying like a bouncy seat and a bunch of toys in a diaper bag no he's not he's carefree he's going wherever he wants he's an adult he doesn't have to worry about nap time or feeding people or people being cranky or changing poopy diapers he's always on vacation in yosemite national park
Marco:
i don't know when he goes to work there's this like cult of california and maybe it's just me like generalizing because i see these tech people doing all this stuff but it just seems like california people have have such like such beautiful climates and such beautiful landscapes and everything's great especially like with tech people who are young and again like you know as you said that they don't have they don't have kids yet maybe or they're and they're rich let's throw that in there too yeah
Marco:
And I feel like being on the East Coast keeps me a little bit closer to reality, even though I live in a suburb of New York City.
Marco:
So, of course, it's nothing like reality.
Marco:
But I think being here has a very different perspective and that part of the problem in the valley is a pretty severe lack of perspective.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think it's the same as anything else.
John:
They're just better at Instagram than we are.
John:
They obviously can't always be on vacation in Belize or whatever, but they make it seem like they do, because they take a lot of pictures when they go, and I think they dole them out over time.
John:
So as far as you're concerned, they're always in Japan at some noodle place, or they're always in South America somewhere in a jungle, or they're always in Yosemite, but they're not.
John:
They go on vacations, they take a thousand pictures, and they spread them out over the year.
John:
You don't see pictures of them sitting in front of their MacBook Pro for...
John:
50 hours a week for most of the year, which I assume is how they spend most of their time.
Casey:
But yeah, I do like Always on Vacation in California.
Casey:
And I might have mentioned this on the show, but both my younger brothers live in California now, one outside or in San Diego, one outside L.A.
Casey:
And now when I talk to them on the phone, generally speaking, every single time I talk to either of my brothers on the phone, one of them makes a reference to how the West Coast is the best coast.
Casey:
And I just want to kill him.
John:
Just wait until the earthquakes and the fires come, Casey.
John:
And the drought.
John:
And the hyenas.
John:
And the locusts.
John:
Whatever else they have over there.
Marco:
All the Google buses.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Bye, everyone, live listeners.
Marco:
You've been an amazing audience.
Marco:
Thank you so much for coming out here tonight.
Marco:
Woo!
Marco:
Go city name.
John:
Hello, Cleveland!
Casey:
You don't ever go see movies in the theater, do you, Marco?
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
What, are you kidding?
Casey:
That's what I thought.
Casey:
One of us, I don't remember who it was.
Casey:
I don't think it was me, said everything is awesome, and that begs for you to cut in.
John:
I know.
John:
I almost made the comment, but I figured you guys wouldn't get that reference, and I guess Casey would have.
John:
Casey's the new Mr. Reference Getter.
Casey:
Yeah, how about that?
Casey:
Two for two today.
Casey:
Well, maybe.
Casey:
Actually, the books that were not Ready Player One that you were talking about?
Casey:
No idea.
John:
You've never heard of Snow Crash?
John:
Oh, man.
John:
I assumed.
John:
I didn't even make the joke about you guys.
John:
I'm like, Marco, Snow Crash?
John:
Nothing?
John:
No.
No.
Casey:
you cannot put this in the show you'll get so much crazy anyway the point is there's a song marco called everything is awesome and it's in the lego movie and it's like ridiculously over the top wait wait there's actually a lego movie that wasn't a joke