57: Smorgasbord of Pronunciation
21 Mar 2014Flexible phones, interviews and books by hacks, VR headsets, and sexism.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up on the complexity of computer science versus other fields: quotes and videos from MIT's SICP class (9:00–10:45).
- The death of the iPad 2, the use of sapphire in Apple devices, sapphire versus Gorilla Glass, and the flexible LG phone.
- Haunted Empire, the Jony Ive book, the Jony Ive interview, access to Apple, and hiring hacks for tech stories.
- Sony's Project Morpheus VR headset and initial impressions
- The Oculus Rift
- Michael Abrash's blog posts:
- Two Possible Paths into the Future of Wearable Computing Part 1
- When it comes to resolution, it's all relative
- Latency – the sine qua non of AR and VR
- Raster-Scan Displays: More Than Meets the Eye
- Game Developers Conference and space-time diagrams
- Why virtual isn't real to your brain
- Down the VR rabbit hole: Fixing judder
- John Carmack and his latency mitigation strategies
- Casey's birthday party as a child
- Why Oculus hopes Project Morpheus is good
- The GitHub hubbub, sexism, and how to get better (such as App Camp for Girls).
Sponsored by:
- RemObjects C#: Write native iOS and Android apps using the C# language that you already know.
- TextExpander: Stop wasting time typing the same things over and over again.
- Squarespace: Everything you need to create an exceptional website. Use promo code CRITICAL for 10% off.
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So do we have any topics tonight?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not really. We have a little bit of follow-up and then honestly, I have no clue what the rest of the show is going to bring So it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be a little wild
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wacky wild casey. Let’s see what happens now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, so we should probably do some follow-up starting with computer science john
⏹️ ▶️ John well, yeah, this is a little bit of follow-up on the software The complexity of software
⏹️ ▶️ John and computing and all that other stuff Lots of follow-up on that and all sorts of different directions. A few themes
⏹️ ▶️ John I noticed in the feedback. One theme was a lot of people who either are involved
⏹️ ▶️ John in academia or feel some connection to it. And what they wanted to talk about was sort of field
⏹️ ▶️ John versus field. Their field versus someone else’s field. Whatever their field may be. Physics, chemistry,
⏹️ ▶️ John engineering, computer science, math. I don’t know if they misunderstood
⏹️ ▶️ John the discussion as if it was computer science versus other fields. But that sure is the discussion they wanted to have.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it reminded me of this quote, again, from, you know, as the original place I see all quotes, apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ John is used at SIGS. And this one is, computer science is no more about computers than astronomy
⏹️ ▶️ John is about telescopes. I have a link to it we can put in the show notes. I forget where the origin is. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John little hash on the URL is disputed. So maybe it’s disputed where that quote comes from. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that, I think, gets to the heart of why we weren’t talking about fields, computer science versus any other field
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not computer science is not about computers it’s you know like we were talking about software
⏹️ ▶️ John and computer science is tangentially about software but not really but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s those are difficult different discussions to have about which field
⏹️ ▶️ John is superior to our subset of some other field that’s definitely not what we’re talking about the other one is people still want to
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about job difficulty like my job is harder than your job you’re saying your job
⏹️ ▶️ John is the hardest job in the world so on and so forth I I thought I made that clear in the last show, but apparently not clear enough to not have
⏹️ ▶️ John people come in and say, whatever I do for a living is harder than what you do for a living, or you think what you do for a living
⏹️ ▶️ John is hard because you do it, but blah, and so on and so forth. That’s also definitely not what we’re talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ John One person sent in something about programming and complexity and the things we were talking about in the last show,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is from one of MIT’s courses on the structure and interpretation of computer
⏹️ ▶️ John programs. What is it, SICP? that’s the one
⏹️ ▶️ John i think it’s the end of the book the book that they uh… teach off anyway that mary has lots of video lectures they
⏹️ ▶️ John said for a minute nine to about ten minutes and forty five seconds in this recording
⏹️ ▶️ John the professor talks about a lot of the same things as make the same argument i was making but touches on a lot of the same points that
⏹️ ▶️ John i was using to support my argument and it’s a fun you know video to watch if you just want to watch them i keep a prestige
⏹️ ▶️ John for a while so we’ll have that link in the show notes as well and it’s only a minute forty five seconds you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John watch the whole thing just scrub forward to minute nine
⏹️ ▶️ John And then Casey you put something in here from a Listener email.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I think that was Marco actually you talk about software complexity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so this wonderful feedback we got From a guy named John purple pilot on Twitter. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Love his name is John by the way So he says the fundamental mistake here of course is that woodpeckers do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not pick wooden houses They peck trees trees are arguably the most complex things in existence by the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get food store food and to nest Dead wood ie that which has been felled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and chemically treated is of no use or interest to woodpeckers So a wooden civilization would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be secure from woodpeckers, but probably vulnerable to woodworm or death watch beetles or termites
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m pretty sure John if you ever get tired of doing the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can replace you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with another guy named John who made that comment
⏹️ ▶️ John it would have been much better if he pretended he was serious because towards the end it’s clear that he was joking that kind of ruins the joke
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure he was you honestly think he was joking I assumed
⏹️ ▶️ John woodworm death watch Beatles and termites puts it over the top
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are you joking when you criticize things
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not criticizing it’s I mean I that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco person that person
⏹️ ▶️ John knows that was a annoying email I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway so we have a backup John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and thank goodness he is named John cuz otherwise I would have been totally confused totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so what’s awesome these days Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week we’re sponsored once again by a return sponsor from a while ago REM objects so you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remember a long time ago we told you about REM objects oxygen which is a cross-platform language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it was based on Pascal and it would let you compile for Mac, iOS, Android,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows or even Windows Phone. RemObjects has a new language now. It’s a similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of kind of deal. It’s but it’s actually based on the C sharp language. Is it C pound Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hashtag? You know that’s it. That’s it. It’s C tic-tac-toe board. No it is C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you big jerk. Okay so they there’s a RemObject C sharp and it has a lot of the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advantages. In fact probably all the same advantages as oxygen. So this is really cool. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it brings C sharp as a native language to Cocoa. So it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hundred percent C sharp that you’re writing and you’re writing it against a hundred percent Cocoa. It’s very very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool. So Casey they asked you to take a look at it. What do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right so I took a look at it very very briefly but I did take a look at it and I did try it and I built the world’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simplest hello world style iOS app by writing C sharp using REM objects.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was really weird, but I definitely liked it. Basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what they do is they let you write in C Sharp, but just like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you’re writing against the Cocoa Touch framework. And so, rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using the.NET framework, which is, I believe, Xamarin’s approach, which is more, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to abstract away Cocoa behind the.NET framework that you’re probably familiar with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a little closer to the metal, so to speak, in that you’re writing C sharp, but you’re writing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it against straight up UI kit, for example. And they even went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the point of extending the C sharp language such that you can use the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey objective C style method names or message names. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote code where I made an alert view. And so my code for those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of you who write C-sharp is var view equals new UI alert view space with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey title, paren quote, high, paren space, message, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s really kind of weird, but very cool that they’ve extended C-sharp in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order to allow you to write directly against Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. The advantage there being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you’re really just putting a thin veneer on top of it, and you’re not relying on a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different framework. sitting between you and Apple’s framework.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s very cool, very clever, and very interesting. And the way they have you write code is by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writing it in Visual Studio, which I would argue is the best IDE in the world. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you run an application on either your Mac, or a Mac in the office,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a Mac in the cloud. And it basically compiles the binary, dumps it onto that Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and lets you run your app either in the simulator or on a device or whatever. It’s actually very straightforward,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very easy set up it works really well and I liked it I I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely see how this could make some really cool stuff without having to rely on somebody else’s glue in between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really I mean you are but it’s the thinnest lightest glue in the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if you are interested in getting your own thin layer of light glue and writing native Cocoa
⏹️ ▶️ Marco applications with the C sharp language go to REMobjects.com, R-E-M-Objects.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash C-S, and you can see REM Objects C Sharp for yourself. They have a bunch of cool videos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. You can get more information than my mediocre performance in this ad read here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can actually get more information. You can see the kind of code Casey was writing. All right here, these great videos, REMobjects.com,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash C-S. Thank you so much to REM Objects for sponsoring my show. I got to give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them This is a really cool thing to even attempt to do and from everything I’ve heard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do a really good job of it. So thanks a lot, RamObjects.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I should also point out that one of the things they say in their FAQ
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, you know, hey, what with the.NET framework being gone, what about cool stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Link? And so what they’ve done is they’ve taken a lot of the Link extension methods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought it was pronounced Link-w. Yes, maybe if your surname is Armon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, they basically ported some of the more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frequently used parts of Lync into their platform. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a really smart call and really, really awesome to have that tool in your tool chest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool. Thanks a lot. They can the iPad too. Finally. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How long was that on sale? Forever. released in what 2011 what like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco February 2011 so it made it three years three full years of being on sale
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that is crazy talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amazing thing is it only had one price drop
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah like I wonder if they if they had inventory they were trying to clear they just like made way too many of
⏹️ ▶️ John them because you could see how Apple wanted to get away from 30-pin everywhere they just
⏹️ ▶️ John there was this loan I guess the iPad classic still too but like lone real product Lurching along
⏹️ ▶️ John with 30-pin and we talked in past shows about why they would still want to be selling it to and how it made sense for
⏹️ ▶️ John Education and all these other things that just want the lowest price possible but also might want the big screen and don’t care about retina and so
⏹️ ▶️ John on and so forth, but it just seemed like it but it just went on for just so long and
⏹️ ▶️ John and The thing is they’re replacing the iPad to not with like the next model up but with two models up
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how old it is that it’s like they can’t even can’t even bring themselves to Replace the iPad 2 with the 3 or
⏹️ ▶️ John discontinue with it replacing it with the 4.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well they probably don’t want to admit that the 3 existed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the 3 I like the 3.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not that bad I agree I have well actually Aaron’s using it now and it’s really not that bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s great I mean I really like the 3. 3 is the one brief moment where Apple decided
⏹️ ▶️ John to the thing they wouldn’t move the thing they wouldn’t budge on was battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life and so they made the thing thicker and And I like I wish they would do that with you know phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, we’ll see laptops. I wouldn’t I wouldn’t hold my breath on phones I I still hold out hope that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there is a bigger iphone this year and I think there will be um that that might also come with a uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I I mean I was on the talk show a while back and I mentioned this to gruber that like Like if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a big phone That might give them permission if they keep a small one in the lineup But the small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one can be the one that keeps getting smaller and thinner, and the bigger one can have a little bit more permission
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a little bit thicker, and therefore have not only a bigger battery, but a nicer camera sensor. Because the camera sensor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really limited very hard by thickness. There’s so much more you could do with quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and image quality and things like optical image stabilization and better focus, possibly even a slight zoom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capability, if you could get a little more depth on the phone. So I would love if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, you know, like obviously Apple’s never going to make that their only model, but if they have like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bigger iPhone that, you know, they’ll keep the small one around for the nice marketing shots and people who want super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thin, super small, but then they can have this bigger one for people who want the better camera and bigger battery.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I was listening to that episode, I want to, I felt like reminding you and reaching the podcast that the iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John touch, my thing has a camera that is not flush with the back. It sticks out. So they just like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s kind of what happens if they just keep going thinner. Like well, you can’t go too thin because we got out of the camera. It’s like screw the camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re going thinner It’s the camera will poke out deal with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m kind of surprised that they’re still selling the iPod touch Tell me about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like it’s it doesn’t sell that well and they don’t care that much about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a kid’s device though It’s like a my first iOS device because you can buy it for your kid You don’t have to worry about cell phone stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can still play their iOS games I think kids want them like based on talking to my like my
⏹️ ▶️ John children’s friends and my little cousins and stuff if they can have an iPhone which is of course what they really want but If
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re too young for an iPhone and iPod touch is the thing that they want That’s like I you know They aspired
⏹️ ▶️ John to have an iPhone when they’re a cool teenager in high school or whatever But if they can’t have that now an iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John touch is the next best thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t think the iPad mini has filled that role
⏹️ ▶️ John Not among the kids that I’ve seen. I don’t think, I haven’t even seen an iPad mini in the wild amongst
⏹️ ▶️ John young kids yet. Maybe, I think it might be too big to give a kid or maybe, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John too expensive, too breakable. iPod touches are much cheaper. It would be nice if they
⏹️ ▶️ John revised it every once in a while, but what can you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree with you, though, John. My sister-in-law, who is in high school,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the longest time until she somewhat recently gotten Android phone when I wasn’t paying attention.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey She was using an iPod Touch in addition to like a either a flip phone or one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those phones with like the slide out so you can type on a full QWERTY keyboard. But anyway, so she was using her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPod Touch as her kind of sort of smartphone bit. Let me rephrase. Let me start this over. She
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was John Syracuse and had an ancient non-smartphone and then used her iPod Touch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for doing smart things. And she loved it. And the way she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spoke about it, it struck me as though that was a normal thing amongst her peer group if they didn’t already have iPhones or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Android phones or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and for the big phone that we think is coming this year,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure that they’re going to be like, we don’t need to make it thicker. We get all this extra area because
⏹️ ▶️ John they will. They’ll get a bigger battery because the phone is bigger length and width wise, and they won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make it thicker or higher. So I would imagine it’ll be the same thickness
⏹️ ▶️ John as the 5 and I think they’re not above having the camera stick out a little bit like
⏹️ ▶️ John it does in the iPod touch or perhaps even more because I think unless they change the whole design
⏹️ ▶️ John to be designed around this I think that Apple absolutely does not want to bulge all of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Android phones that you see out there and like that when they would need or even the Nokia
⏹️ ▶️ John ones when they want a bigger camera they’re like we will smoothly kind of raise up some kind of lump or it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be be like a lump with little ramps on the side or some kind of organic bulge type shape.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you could Apple could come up with a rounded bulging kind of like design kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like the image of people remember what that look like, or even the toilet book, total iMacs or
⏹️ ▶️ John any of those things like it’s not it’s not out of the realm of possibility, they could go with something curved. In fact, every time I think of an iPhone six,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think of something that’s curved and tapered on the edges. But that’s just you know, yes, I actually have dreams about
⏹️ ▶️ John the shape of the iPhone 6 and that is not a prediction that’s just when I when I wake
⏹️ ▶️ John up having a dream where I saw the iPhone 6 it was curved in the anyway whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t even buy iPhones though why are you dreaming about it? I have dreams about it who knows you can’t control what you dream
⏹️ ▶️ John about dream about industrial design.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey wait so is this the year for an iPhone for you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh I don’t know but can I can I take a bet on no?
⏹️ ▶️ John Stranger things have happened but if they stick with the current design trends that means flat and if they’re going to have the
⏹️ ▶️ John camera stick out it will be a completely flat surface with a cylinder that sticks out from it and really that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John that bad i mean i guess if it sticks out too much you can get hung up on stuff but especially since so many people put cases
⏹️ ▶️ John on them anyway all that does is make the camera flush with the case or close to being flush with the case and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s actually not that bad and maybe it would help hold the case in place to keep from sliding i don’t know um
⏹️ ▶️ John i think apple has options there i think the i hope the the bigger one has
⏹️ ▶️ John better battery life just because the battery is bigger. But then, of course, also have a bigger screen, all that stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, what you’re thinking of, Marco, if like, and you can actually make the big one thicker because we have a small one to fill it
⏹️ ▶️ John that they all gets back to what you’re talking about with John on the talk show. They can have two phones, they can
⏹️ ▶️ John have one, they can. There’s every possibility has a good argument for it would be something that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John do. You know, none of them. Can you just rule out and say, well, Apple would never do that because all of them have really good reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John behind them. So it’s just we just have to wait and see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have a somewhat related question. One of the things that bothers me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about a caseless iPhone is a probably all in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey head fear that I’m going to scratch the lens of the camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I wonder if the the current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey research or I guess they’re actually not even research, They’re building a plant to handle Sapphire. Is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s already Sapphire on the current phone. And that’s not the lens of the phone. That’s just the clear
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that covers the lens of the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’ve got a scratch in that, I’m not even sure optically whether that would
⏹️ ▶️ John show up in your pictures. But even if it would, that’s not like… that part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the phone assembly does not bend the light as far as I know. It is purely there to protect the lens that does bend the light. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d imagine they could replace it for you reasonably inexpensively.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well and also optically because of where it is in the optical path it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to be a really bad scratch to show any kind of flaws in your photos because if you think about it like if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you hold something very close to your eye and you’re focusing on something very far away you know it’s like holding up a fishing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line an inch in front of your eye and focusing on something ten feet away like you’re not gonna see that fishing line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you’re gonna barely see it so like it has to be it has to be a pretty large problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that surface to be visible in the photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what I’m driving at though, so whatever it is, be it a lens or otherwise, that’s the outermost piece
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the camera assembly. Would it make sense, and I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything about photography, but would it make sense for that to be like Sapphire or something very, very hard so that if they hypothetically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a bulge for this camera assembly, that maybe some of the marketing spiel could be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, don’t worry, Casey List, this won’t scratch because it’s Sapphire and so don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worry your pretty little face, you’re gonna be alright. But it already is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it is Sapphire now?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought that… So wait, I thought the Sapphire was for the Touch ID.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it both? It’s definitely for the camera. The Touch ID home buttons, I think it might also be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assume with the Sapphire plant they’re building, a lot of people are speculating that they might be going for an entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sapphire covered screen to replace that glass. I have doubts about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether they can make enough of it to make that happen this year. I’m guessing probably not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s like if you think about the amount of iPhones that are made every year that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of Sapphire. And as what we heard when the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5s first came out when it was pretty supply constrained I believe the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prevailing wisdom on that was that it was related to touch ID supplies. And if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the case, then you can, you can bet that you know, there’s only so much involved in touch ID.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Sapphire might have been the limitation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And real time follow up for me from me. It is indeed on both the home button and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eyesight camera as per their website.
⏹️ ▶️ John If touch ID is going to go on all their devices, then they’re going to need way more Sapphire. And so you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need to something like oh, they’re going to cover the screens with Sapphire. You just need to say oh well touch ID will spread from
⏹️ ▶️ John it won’t just be on the high-end phone anymore it’ll be on all sorts of thing iPads yeah you know the mid-range phones
⏹️ ▶️ John and so they’re gonna need a lot more stuff error just for that so that makes sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right and there’s definitely you know you can you can look at what they did this you know last fall with it with the product line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between iPhone and iPad and and the you know the a7 and pretty much every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco benefit of the iPhone 5s went into both iPads as well except touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ID and I think I don’t know if the m7 made it in but that was that’s less relevant than an iPad but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco touch ID was an obvious thing they left out there and it was kind of questionable why they left it out and and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think supply constraints make a lot of sense for that and yes certainly John I agree that you know if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they’re bulking up Sapphire production it really could just be for more touch ID sensors
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think Sapphire would make that great of a screen covering either because it’s not just hardness
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re after like scratch resistance like Gorilla Glass has you see the little demos where they like bend it and show
⏹️ ▶️ John that it withstands bending and strong in other ways besides just being scratch resistant and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure sapphire has the same durability characteristics
⏹️ ▶️ John as gorilla glass and you know might might be more fragile I don’t know it’s someone
⏹️ ▶️ John someone who knows better about the relative material abilities of a
⏹️ ▶️ John sapphire and gorilla glass can say but it’s definitely a different thing so I wouldn’t just say well they say it’s better and they say it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John harder therefore we should cover the whole screen in it maybe not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe this will finally be the year of the rollable flexible phone
⏹️ ▶️ John who could the flexible phone did LG have the flexible phone did you see that one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone actually made one we’ve had curved phones
⏹️ ▶️ John no yeah all right so it’s curved and they show it like in the little demo video they show it sitting on a table and it curves up like
⏹️ ▶️ John a little you know it’s like concave and a finger comes down and presses it and so it goes from curve to be flat against the table
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s a more or less how much flex it has I think it was LG I don’t remember which but anyway that amount of
⏹️ ▶️ John flex Makes me wonder what the point is and also makes you wonder how much can
⏹️ ▶️ John you flex? You just want to grab it and go if I keep flexing what happens? It’s like those glass you remember when those indestructible
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah indestructible glasses came out in the 80 where you in the 80s where you like take that take the thing and wrap them around your Fingers and they would
⏹️ ▶️ John come back to shape right Flexible phone just invites some idiot to try to see how far it’s gonna flex and I
⏹️ ▶️ John guarantee you at a certain point it will Stop flexing and you’ll be sad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to like this is one of those things that people always fantasize about and there’s always some like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Prototype flexible something or other a CES that no one ever makes after that and I wonder like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is The use case for that like what what use is a slightly flexible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone? But that you can’t like fold in half and make a lot smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s not it’s I mean It’s it’s the incremental step like the idea of things that are flexible is like there
⏹️ ▶️ John is durable as things that are flexible as durable as you know like you can’t break it
⏹️ ▶️ John all you can do is bend it and it springs back to its original shape so it’s a durability type thing and like a little bit of flex
⏹️ ▶️ John is that maybe a step along the way to extremely flexible yeah the thing is called the lg flex
⏹️ ▶️ John if you google for it you find pictures of it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh what a clever name
⏹️ ▶️ John well there’s lg what do you expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right we are also sponsored this week uh by a new sponsor to us as far as i know um
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but a very very old sponsor to podcasts. It’s our friends at Smile. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve probably heard of at least one Smile, formerly Smile Software,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least one Smile product. And I use a lot myself, actually. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week, we’re going to talk to you about TextExpander. If you’ve ever heard a podcast, you already know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this does. But just in case, we’re going to tell you anyway. So it’s really cool. TextExpander saves you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time and effort by expanding short abbreviations into frequently used text and pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they tell you all sorts of stuff it can do. So they say, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do your email signature, you can automatically type a couple characters, say like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco EMS or something, and that’ll expand into your entire email signature. You can have standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco responses to emails or whatever. And you can even define form fields within the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco responses. So you can say, all right, when I type in XYZ or whatever, fill up my default response but then there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like these form fields and you can you can like tab into them and type someone’s name or type like a reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something like that like you can you can customize each one um based on how you define these things so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very very powerful tool to take tech shortcuts and expand them into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the heck you want this is one of those tools that like our friends merlin and brett terpstra they love these kind of tools because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can customize the crap out of this like you can do so much with this kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can create snippets from Apple scripts and Shell scripts. You can sync your snippets via
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dropbox. You can use them on multiple devices. There’s even TextExpander Touch on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So normally, you know, TextExpander is a Mac product. There’s even the iOS version. And it works as an API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that other apps can integrate. And over 45 apps on iOS 7 so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have integrated TextExpander support. So when you’re typing into one of their text fields, you can use your shared snippets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it all works. Really, really great. Dropbox sync, awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So go to smilesoftware.com slash ATP to learn more about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. It really, it’s hard to cram, it’s hard to really cram into this ad read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything TextExpander can do. Think of it as expand keyboard shortcuts into predefined
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, but with so much power behind that and so many options and so many ways you can do that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really quite incredible. And this is one of the reasons why I’ve never heard a Techspender ad read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on anyone else’s show that was shorter than like 15 minutes long. But go check it out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smilesoftware.com slash ATP. Also, if it helps, Smile is just run by really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good people. They’ve been around forever, making Mac and iOS software. Really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they make good stuff and they’re good people. So check them out, smilesoftware.com slash ATP. Thanks a lot for sponsoring
⏹️ ▶️ John The tireless chat room has done our research for us found a link that has information about sapphire
⏹️ ▶️ John versus gorilla glass. apparently sapphire is 1.6 times heavier and gorilla glass can
⏹️ ▶️ John take 2.5 times more pressure than sapphire can. and there’s other things as well about
⏹️ ▶️ John light transmission and how much energy it takes to manufacture it and other things. so anyway it’s a different material.
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the stats given in this, this is an interview with someone from gorilla glass so obviously they’re going to tell you all
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that are horrible about sapphire. right. like you know for how much energy it takes to manufacture it and how much it costs,
⏹️ ▶️ John all those things you could change, but the materials attributes of it might be more difficult to change. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, maybe don’t look for a Sapphire screen on the iPhone 6, but definitely look for Sapphire
⏹️ ▶️ John camera covers and Touch ID thingies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Touch ID thingies. Is that a technical term?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just closed the tab. There is, I think, an official term for it, but that’s all right. What else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going on? Do we want to talk about this book that came out about how Apple is haunted by the ghost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Steve Jobs. I really don’t have much to say about it, but I felt like we should at least briefly recognize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And it sounds like everyone that I know that’s read it says it’s pretty bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, that’s the problem. Everyone thinks they should recognize it. Everyone thinks they have to comment on it. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recognize by going on this rant, I’m commenting on it and therefore being a hypocrite, but let me get through this. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact is, you can say anything you want about anything. Like, the whole point of this book
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to get mentioned and become a controversy and get discussed so that everyone goes out and reads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. That’s the whole point. And by lending credence to what is clearly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from almost all the reviews, what is clearly a pretty terrible book based upon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a presupposed argument that really is not supported at all in the book and by the facts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just seems like this is a a cheap trick to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attention and to get book sales, and we’re all falling into it by talking about it and by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco linking to the book and by even taking it as credible, by even the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suggestion that we need to defend ourselves or defend our position, or that Apple needed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to respond to it, or anything like that. Why does anyone even need to be talking about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, in the circles we travel in, there are a couple of different strains that are working against this. One is that
⏹️ ▶️ John any book that ends up being critical of Apple, if you read mostly Apple-centric excites people who are Apple fans
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to say, this book that says bad things about Apple is wrong because, let me tell you why all the things they say are wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I like Apple, and I think Apple is good, and they’re saying Apple’s bad, and they’re going to fight. So you expect
⏹️ ▶️ John to see that type of feedback. The other thing is that so few people have any access at all to Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John so the content of the book is sure to be filled with like, you know, the example I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to make fun of is like, we found Tim Cook’s childhood typing teacher, because that’s the only person
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get access to. You can’t talk to the people who know anything. You have to talk to people who left Apple years and years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago, or who were fired and are disgruntled. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John you just don’t have access to the real things. You have second and third hand information, and the first hand stuff you have is just
⏹️ ▶️ John barely relevant. So it could be argued that even if there was a case to be made that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is a haunted empire, and there’s all these problems or whatever, you wouldn’t have access
⏹️ ▶️ John to enough people or facts to actually support your case. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why when people read this, they say, OK, the whole story is that Apple has big problems. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John story, people assume like this author, Yukari
⏹️ ▶️ John Cain, went in with that premise ahead of time. Like, I’m going to write a book about why Apple’s doomed and started from that premise and just found
⏹️ ▶️ John supporting stuff for it, but couldn’t find enough supporting facts.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could be that she went in just trying to write a story about it. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John few supporting facts she found, so that’s the only theme I can sort of tease out of all this information, mostly from
⏹️ ▶️ John second and third hand information. And I need something that’s like dramatic. And the two things you can have a dramatic
⏹️ ▶️ John are like, you know, the Steve Jobs to error story, which is apple rising from the ashes. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one kind of dramatic. And once they’ve risen from the ashes, the only other dramatic story left is watching them fall.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know, like, everyone who says who is familiar with the author before reading the book says that
⏹️ ▶️ John she was a good reporter and did a lot of good stories. So I’m not entirely willing to go
⏹️ ▶️ John full cynical and say she was writing like a hatchet job and just trying to gin up
⏹️ ▶️ John controversy. It could be that this is where the scant facts that she had led her,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it just doesn’t sound like it’s a very… I didn’t read it so I can’t say it, but it just doesn’t sound like it’s a very well-supported argument
⏹️ ▶️ John within the book. And also every single time I see her name, Which is you car he came which I have to stare
⏹️ ▶️ John at every time I said what I read in my head is Weyland-Yutani, but neither one of you knows what that is and Weyland-Yutani
⏹️ ▶️ John is not spelled in any way like you car he came But my eyes like transpose the Y and the K and I get
⏹️ ▶️ John Weyland-Yutani anyway That’s all I have to say about that book. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well I feel like you know that there’s two things that I want to pick on here one is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you say well She’s a reporter that doesn’t mean anything reporters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco span the spectrum from for and even if she I don’t know anything about it, but even if she’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a reporter for a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ John but but people said her reporting was good like her stories were good like they weren’t trashy stories. They look like they’re well research
⏹️ ▶️ John stories and insightful and so on. I again, this is I’m going from other people say because I haven’t I don’t remember seeing her byline
⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere. So I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean if you’ve ever and this comes up frequently in the tech domain, I would imagine if you ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read a story like in the New York Times about technology and you see like these are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like these are legitimate journalists supposedly writing about this and then you see like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 60% of it is wrong or bad or misleading or you know somehow poorly done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know with this like the fact that she’s a reporter doesn’t really mean anything to me reporters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco While there are good ones the average is pretty bad Especially these days the average is I’d say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really bad bad. And so just being a reporter alone, even if you’ve done it for a long time, and even if some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people think you’re a good reporter, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re qualified to write a book about a tech company, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one as secretive and controversial as this. Second of all, who cares if it’s a book?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If this was published as a series of blog posts that all ended with, well, by the way, Steve Jobs’ ghost was looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over them and they’re doomed. Like if this was a blog and every post was trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to cram badly supported facts into a predefined narrative and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not doing a very good job of even doing that, would we give any credibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it? Would we even be talking about it? And the answer is probably no. Now, we are talking about this because it’s a book,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because culturally we like put value on books. Oh, well, a book is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big deal because, you know, they had to spend months on it and some reporter or some publisher had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pick it up and everything, but the fact is books Books are just as bad as everything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s there’s tons of horrible books being published all the time The publisher published this book because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knew it would sell they did their job properly in this case They knew this book would sell they didn’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s gonna be good or accurate they don’t need to care about that all they need to care about is will this book
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell and Pretty clearly that they bet correctly on that that doesn’t mean it’s good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that doesn’t mean that anybody needs to talk about it It certainly doesn’t mean that the burden is on us to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know somehow somehow somehow prove to the world that you know this book is stupid or that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we need to you know ignore it the fact is books are just as fallible as everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else and have roughly the same quality average as everything else
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the jury’s still out though on the on the theme of the book like ignoring that the content of the book and how well the
⏹️ ▶️ John theme is supported this is the right time for a book about how Apple may be in decline right because we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if it’s in decline yet it’s too soon to say everyone’s still waiting on you know whatever Apple’s going to do next
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So if you’re going to write a book about how Apple’s decline, you better do it before they come out
⏹️ ▶️ John with whatever big whiz-bang thing that could go gangbusters. And you also say, say Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John never comes out with something or they come out with a brand new product and bet the whole company on it, it’s a flop. If you read then write a book about Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John decline, you have to wait longer, you have to wait for the postmortem because you don’t seem you don’t seem like you’re insightful, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So a book about how you just based on the title, if you just pitch haunted empire, Apple after Steve
⏹️ ▶️ John Jobs, you could pitch that to a publisher. This is the right time for that book. It’s just that this doesn’t appear to be a good book
⏹️ ▶️ John based around that title, right? But that is, like you said, the publisher is gonna say, yes, we would love a book like that. We would
⏹️ ▶️ John love a good book like that, but if we can’t get a good book like that, we’ll take whatever book we can get. Because now is the time for that book.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if Apple does go down the tubes, like people are gonna be citing this book, it’s like, see,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, everyone said that book was terrible, but she saw it coming, and maybe she didn’t see it coming. Like, it just doesn’t seem like…
⏹️ ▶️ John if you make an argument and you don’t support it well, and you’re sort of self-contradictory and get a bunch of things wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t have good access. Even if your theme turns out to be right later, I don’t think you get credit for correctly predicting
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. But I think the jury is out and we are all waiting to see what Apple does next. So this
⏹️ ▶️ John is definitely the time for this apparently very bad book.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the things that I’ve wondered about myself after hearing all the hubbub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this book is, am I capable and actually are we capable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of being critical of Apple? And perhaps I’m just filling in the blanks to make my argument
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with myself sound okay and end the way I want it to. But I feel like the three of us have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been fairly critical of Apple. You know, we’ve lamented their services division pretty much since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show started. We’ve been complaining, or I believe we complained, about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how little storage is in the devices, how little storage you get in their services. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that any of us are incapable of being upset with Apple or disagreeing with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know It’s it’s something I I worry about that I don’t I don’t want to be just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a shill or if I am a shill for Apple I want to at least know it admit it to myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then admit it to everyone that listens and I don’t think we’re there yet
⏹️ ▶️ John Worrying about whether I’m capable of being critical something. It’s not something that
⏹️ ▶️ John that Marco before mentioned about journalists and how, you know, the average is pretty low
⏹️ ▶️ John and they get things wrong. I was reminded of that. It wasn’t time was the Time magazine. There
⏹️ ▶️ John was something like the Times of London or something. And then the story was reprinted in time. But anyway, the whole big deal was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we got the Johnny Ive thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we finally we have we have access to an interview with with
⏹️ ▶️ John Johnny Ive, which he so it’s true. So rarely does interviews and he decides to do an interview not because it
⏹️ ▶️ John was a product introduction or anything But it’s like hey, here’s Johnny I have you want to talk to him? And then you read the
⏹️ ▶️ John interview and a it’s clear that the person doing the interview doesn’t really understand Apple Johnny I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John or technology which is a shame because it’s kind of like the Walter Isaacson situation, but writ small Do you have any
⏹️ ▶️ John opinions on that John? Yeah, I mean that’s speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John of this haunted Empire book Like I’ve just been ignoring it because I knew it was gonna be no good and like I don’t I’m unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John the Walter Isaacson book I don’t have to read it because it’s not like this is the one person who had a special exclusive
⏹️ ▶️ John access to someone who’s now Dead that is not the case. We wanted in a bar But anyway, this Johnny I’ve interview is like the
⏹️ ▶️ John person who did the interview read the but Leander was his last name Kanie
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, his Johnny I’ve book also suffers from not having a
⏹️ ▶️ John ton of access But he did the legwork and he got as much access as he could to his people as close as Johnny I was he
⏹️ ▶️ John could and it was a lot of new and good information in there Even if you could tell it’s like boy He really
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t get as much time as I’m sure he would have wanted with Johnny Ive himself and with Apple But like what can you do? But
⏹️ ▶️ John the Johnny Ive book I would recommend reading even if you can totally tell that it suffers from a lack of access But that’s not the author’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fault But the interviewer read that book Summarized it third grade book report style and
⏹️ ▶️ John then asked Johnny Ive three dumb questions and wrote his answers And that’s their super exclusive interview.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like seriously I mean, maybe if you haven’t read that book that you you might think oh, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John some new information here It’s all just from the book. Like, I don’t know if he got it from Johnny Ive himself, but he’s just summarizing
⏹️ ▶️ John the book. And then the questions he asked Johnny Ive were just like the same questions he’s answered a million times. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it just wasn’t interesting. It was such a squandered opportunity. Not squandered, again, in the same way that Walter Isaacson squandered
⏹️ ▶️ John it, because Johnny Ive isn’t dead, and because he’s done other interviews, and so on and so forth. And he was not designated
⏹️ ▶️ John as the one, you know, person who’s gonna write the definitive autobiography of Johnny Ive.
⏹️ ▶️ John But boy, that was a bummer of an interview.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I love that to the one thing that that they grilled Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ivon was what do you do with your old iPhones? What who care what do you think is gonna happen
⏹️ ▶️ John her medically sealed operating system? Whatever the hell that means I think he was trying to get it like that You can’t change the batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John or they’re built in obsolescence the thing. Oh, they actually said planned obsolescence Yeah, like you
⏹️ ▶️ John know the the the connectors that are always changing. I made a tweet about it I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just bought this 30 pin connector barely a decade ago. Now you’re going to change it on me. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got to be kidding me. Of all like, it’s clear that he just didn’t understand the market. He’s like Googled for people angry at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John and found like non replaceable batteries, people complained about lightning connector. And it’s like those are not
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing. Seriously, of all the things that Apple has done that are very Apple like that piss people off, changing
⏹️ ▶️ John from a 30 pin connector to lightning after like a decade and a half or however long the 30 pin connector was around.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is not one of the Apple things to do. Like, that’s not one of the, they do lots of things like that, soldering
⏹️ ▶️ John the RAM, sealing the batteries, but they’ve had two connectors in the entire lifetime, this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Seriously, I don’t know. That article was super disappointing. And that’s an example of, someone wrote
⏹️ ▶️ John a good post about this, I wish I could find it, where they were like, trying to be nice. They’re like, look, publications
⏹️ ▶️ John out there, when Apple gives you exclusive access to one of their employees, don’t send dunces to
⏹️ ▶️ John it so hard to find somebody who knows something about Apple to send them to like how do these people get picked and
⏹️ ▶️ John the person the articles like trying to take pain to say I’m not saying you should have sent me or like my friends
⏹️ ▶️ John but like seriously You have these opportunities It can’t be that hard to find somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John who knew something who is also a competent interview and send them Why is it always why is those people have
⏹️ ▶️ John no idea what they’re talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, you know, maybe the answer is because was like, maybe Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agrees to do these kinds of interviews, knowing that the questions are not going to really be anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real or difficult, like knowing there’s going to be like a complete BS interview.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like maybe Apple wouldn’t agree to a published interview from you, because they would know that you’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually ask good questions that would be, you know, difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John But also Apple PR would try to pick the person but these days, they seem to pick the publication. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they picked this guy to interview. I think they offered up Johnny Ive to the publication and the publication picked
⏹️ ▶️ John the reporter. And these people who they send the dunces, they’re worse because they’re like trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to press Johnny Ive on things that are either no longer controversies or never really were about like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John replaceable batteries is not hot in the news now. Like that’s not what you want to lean on Johnny Ive about is your tough questions or like
⏹️ ▶️ John hermetically sealed operating system. Like he doesn’t even know what he’s getting at. Like past controversies
⏹️ ▶️ John are things that like those aren’t relevant. That’s not, you know, and having Johnny,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve have to try to parse those questions and deflect, like that’s a waste of his time. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think Apple would choose that either. It’s not like they’re just getting softballs. These guys are coming in and like, oh, I’m going to be tough and asking the tough
⏹️ ▶️ John questions, but the tough questions are nonsensical. And Johnny’s like, I think I understand what you’re getting at, but like, didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John we like that controversy? You know, you want to talk to me about an antenna gate? Like, what are we talking about here? It’s he didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John ask about an antenna gate, but. It’s the same type of thing. It’s as if they sent some cub reporter to
⏹️ ▶️ John lean on Johnny Ivovite and Tentagate. That would be about as useful and insightful as the interview
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JS Yeah, the interview was not that impressive to me at all. I was disappointed. But let it be known,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey news publications of the world, that if you need someone to interview an Apple employee, John Syracuse is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available. You just have to pay for his flight.
⏹️ ▶️ John JB I’m a terrible interviewer, but I’ll at least know what I’m talking about. JS Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goodness. Oh goodness.
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⏹️ ▶️ John You gave me time to find the article was Jeff Carlson who and the title of his post was why do big magazines hire hacks
⏹️ ▶️ John for big tech stories So I put that we’ll put that in the show notes and the link to the actual interview and a link
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Andrew Kenney’s Johnny Ive book which like I said suffers from a lack of access But I would still
⏹️ ▶️ John recommend people reading because there are there is information that was new to me in that book
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Sony released some virtual reality Reality headset thing
⏹️ ▶️ John incorrect. They didn’t release anything they announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can tell how much I care about video games and know about this topic
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, did you see this? Did you see this at all in your isolation bubble Marco your jury duty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isolation bubble? No, I I saw I think I saw one tweet talking about it But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like at lunch during my very quick time, but unfortunately during my quick time at lunch I have to actually eat lunch. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there’s actually not a lot of time to browse the internet that much So yeah, I always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saw was they are apparently making one or working on one and I thought it was funny because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like VR headsets are are being worked on roughly every three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to five years by somebody new and they never seem to really get anywhere I know there’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the oculus rift that the yeah one I know that one that was getting some traction But
⏹️ ▶️ John this is coming to a head though because like it’s not this is not a regular cycle type thing This is more like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s some people who have dabbled before and there was like the first brief faints in this direction in the 90s With
⏹️ ▶️ John these terrible things that you’d see it like video arcades and parties but it went away for a long time
⏹️ ▶️ John because we just learned now we’re not that does stuff doesn’t work and Oculus has been
⏹️ ▶️ John bringing it back in a big way and the rumors of Sony doing it We’re also bringing it back
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s like well Oculus is this you know, they were I think they were Kickstarter originally It’s like they’re doing this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and it seems really cool, but you know, who knows what’s really there. And then John Carmack went to work for Oculus and
⏹️ ▶️ John left it software. And that was a big deal. It’s like, Oh my God, well, if he’s going there, he’s no dummy. He’s not going to be like
⏹️ ▶️ John joining up in this company that really has no, they must have something and people have tried it. They’ve tried the dev kits. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John said it’s interesting and impressive. They have the second version of the dev kit, which is way better than the first. And when, when
⏹️ ▶️ John a technology actually looks like it’s getting going, that’s what you get. Like the first one is like, there’s something there, but this isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John great. And the second one is way better. And then the rumors of Sony doing it, it’s like, okay, well, if Sony’s looking at it, this isn’t just a crazy
⏹️ ▶️ John research product. Because Sony wants to, you know, sell things to use with your PlayStation. They don’t want, like, some weird,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, thing that’s not practical in the real world. So GDC, I haven’t read a lot about the story, I’ve mostly only
⏹️ ▶️ John read the headlines, but I know the highlights. At GDC, the Game Developers Conference, Sony announced that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to have some kind of headset thing, and they showed, like, their history. They’ve been working on this thing for years
⏹️ ▶️ John and years, and they show all the various old prototypes. And this is not a shipping product yet. no pricing or availability,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think, but they have announced their intention to have a shipping product. So now I think that’s now
⏹️ ▶️ John you kind of have a quorum. It’s like Oculus was going to ship their thing anyway. And like, it’s the real deal. As far as people are concerned, people
⏹️ ▶️ John are actually playing games in it, whether it would be amazing or fun or a
⏹️ ▶️ John revolution in gaming or not, it was going to be a real product. But once Sony does it, it’s like, okay, this is real, real. Like, I mean, the
⏹️ ▶️ John connect you for all you may say that’s like useless for games or silly or only fun for certain
⏹️ ▶️ John things. Microsoft shipped it. They ship the connect, they revise it, they made it better, they ship the connect to it’s part of
⏹️ ▶️ John Xbox one. It is a real thing that’s out there in the mass market. And it seems like VR is very soon going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a real thing that’s out there in the mass market. And we’ll see if it’s more successful than the
⏹️ ▶️ John connect has been. But I think this topic is fascinating, mostly because of the
⏹️ ▶️ John technology problems that are involved in doing VR. And I’ve been reading about it for
⏹️ ▶️ John several years with a Michael Aber actually now works at a valve, who has Also been
⏹️ ▶️ John working on the same problem and he is a previous development partner of John Carmack they work together
⏹️ ▶️ John on quake I believe and maybe something before that as well And there are tons of problems with
⏹️ ▶️ John VR Because you think of it as like you put this thing on your head And it’s like a screen close to your face
⏹️ ▶️ John And it shows like what you would see in a first-person shooter And you’re done right and that is so far from
⏹️ ▶️ John from the truth because if that’s what it was we would have had it years ago that that doesn’t work for tons and tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of reasons so I put a huge number of of links here in the show notes, we’ll try to put them up in roughly chronological
⏹️ ▶️ John order. Marco, if you don’t have anything to read during jury duty, I challenge you to get through even just the links in this
⏹️ ▶️ John article that I put here, because they’re extremely tactical and in-depth. And by the time you’re done reading it, you’ll be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John man, I don’t want to implement the VR headset, because that sounds really hard. Like, the problems are just
⏹️ ▶️ John so different when you have screens right up close to your face and when they have to and when the movement of your head
⏹️ ▶️ John has to affect the changes in view, because any sort Disconnect there
⏹️ ▶️ John is it just totally breaks the illusion because when you turn your head you you better be looking to your side
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can’t Have it like catch up later. I mean talk about motion sickness. It’s that it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to even do simple things With screens that are shoved in your head of course has to be two different
⏹️ ▶️ John screens because you’re right I see something different than your left eye So I think this is a real thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I would really love to try something like this, but I have not had an opportunity to try it But if Sony comes out
⏹️ ▶️ John with one I will probably buy a PlayStation 4 and buy one of these crazy things and
⏹️ ▶️ John sit in my living Room looking like a crazy person with something on my head just to see what this is like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have to take a picture of that. Please. We’ll get in touch with Tina. I’m not worried about it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you have a virtual boy when those were a thing? I’m genuinely asking
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not the same as VR That was stationary, but no I didn’t did anybody have a virtual boy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I didn’t know if that was during the era in which you could have have bought it for yourself or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget if you’re just a little old or very old.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I wouldn’t have bought that for myself either. You could always tell that one was a dud.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just remember – and this is a true story. When I was a kid, I want to say this was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, my 10th birthday or something like that. So this was early 90s. We were living – gosh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were either living in Illinois or in Austin, Texas. And I somehow convinced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my parents to go to this like virtual reality arcade and I put link in the chat and we’ll put in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was like this god-awful early 90s VR where you would like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hold something I think it was like a first-person shooter sort of thing where you hold something and you had this like…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Was there a pterodactyl? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remember but um… There couldn’t have been that many of these things because it was like it was like the same like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco VR demo that was in all like the little science centers and everything in like 1993. Yep and uh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I had a birthday party there where we basically played like a not bloody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey death match game against each other. And I remember, you know, I’m not a big guy, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember trying to put this massive helmet on my head and barely being able to lift my damn neck because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing weighed like 20 pounds. And oh, my gosh, it was so rudimentary and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so awful. But at the time, I thought it was amazing. I couldn’t believe my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eyes and I couldn’t believe what I was doing. It was incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ John What those things always felt like, and the reason they sucked and went away very quickly, is they felt like you were using your
⏹️ ▶️ John head. It felt like, you know when you have someone who’s disabled in a wheelchair in some way and
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t use their limbs so they have lots of controls for their head because they do have neck control, or you can hit a button with the side
⏹️ ▶️ John of your head? It feels like you’re using your head to operate the controls of a first-person shooter.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does not feel like you are looking around in a virtual world, because the lag was so horrendous that it would
⏹️ ▶️ John just be like, you know, you’d be sending instructions via telegram to
⏹️ ▶️ John someone in another room who would then move the mouse on your first person shooter. And of course, the resolution was low and the frame
⏹️ ▶️ John rate was terrible. But if you read all these articles or the technical challenges, some of them are
⏹️ ▶️ John actually interesting because they’re related to television challenges as well. They’re using, obviously, LCD screens in front of your eyeballs
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re not going to put CRTs there, although it would be really cool in a steampunk kind of way. And LCDs,
⏹️ ▶️ John what we mostly do with them on our displays on our desks is they they display an image and it’s they’re lit up all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time essentially and you change the image and the pixels change from one thing to another but they’re you know
⏹️ ▶️ John during the time in between the image is changing the old image is there the whole time and then it switches to the new image
⏹️ ▶️ John and that turns out to be very terrible for things where you’re turning your head because you start turning your head and say that
⏹️ ▶️ John the refresh rate is like 60 frames a second for 1 60th of a second the picture hasn’t changed
⏹️ ▶️ John yet you’ve started moving your head your head is moving but the picture is not changing and that’s not the way it works in the real world, as soon as
⏹️ ▶️ John you start moving your head, what you see in front of you changes. And it’s actually bad for the image to sort of be
⏹️ ▶️ John there all the time. And so one of the ways they’ve been combating this is with low persistence images,
⏹️ ▶️ John where they will blink the image onto the screen for the smallest time possible, then have the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John be black for most of that 60th of a second, and then blink the next image, and blink the next image. And you would say, wouldn’t that be
⏹️ ▶️ John worse? Wouldn’t that be like flashing and blinking and gross? But that’s how CRTs work.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’d have an electron beam scanning up and down and it does it so fast you can’t see the scanning but it turns out that makes a big difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re doing that in LCD televisions now as well trying to get rid of like the soap opera effect and not have that motion
⏹️ ▶️ John blur and everything to say let’s strobe the backlight really fast so it’s black in between frames like
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not that it’s on people say it’s unnatural if the image is there it’s just different technologies we’re just used to like CRTs
⏹️ ▶️ John and movie projectors where it shows one image and then there’s a blanking interval and then it shows another one.
⏹️ ▶️ John With LCDs, televisions and with these VR headsets, it turns out to be better for perception to show
⏹️ ▶️ John an image, really bright image, one frame of it, really quickly for a tiny amount of time, make the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen black until the next image is ready and show the next image. And that turns out to be better because the way our visual system
⏹️ ▶️ John works is not like you read all these articles. It is not like, oh, it’s like a camera that records what’s in front
⏹️ ▶️ John of us and sends the picture to our brain. Our visual system is all screwed up and lots of stuff happens in the brain.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it is not as straightforward as you think it is. So you have to do all these hacks and tricks to work with
⏹️ ▶️ John the quirks of our visual system to make something that doesn’t make people sick, that feels realistic, and that feels immersive.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what Oculus is doing. That’s what people are excited about. It’s like they’re actually starting to get those
⏹️ ▶️ John hacks right. I mean, once they’re figured out, people in hindsight will be like, oh, well, you just got to do X, Y, and Z. But we’re figuring it out
⏹️ ▶️ John now. When I think about this, I worry a little bit about Sony.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Oculus guys have great, you know, John Carmarck working on Fragile. They’re doing it right. And Sony, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe Sony just wants to be kind of in the Me Too Club and they’re just going to take two screens and slap them in front of our eyeballs and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to take advantage of all the stuff that Oculus knows. And that would be a bummer. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Oculus is scared of that too. You would think Oculus would be scared that Sony thing is going to be great. But one of the stories on Polygon
⏹️ ▶️ John I read today, I agreed with, I think it was by Ben Kutcher, was saying that Oculus wants the Sony VR thing to
⏹️ ▶️ John be awesome too, because they don’t want the Sony VR thing to come out, everyone to try it, it to suck,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then everyone to go, oh, VR sucks. Comes out and they’re like now we’re ignoring you because we all know the VR sucks now
⏹️ ▶️ John like oculus wants VR to be a real Thing and so Sony’s thinking it up would be bad, but so far.
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems like Sony They’ve been you know researching for a real long time That they
⏹️ ▶️ John are not dummies They’re not just thinking to you know to PSP or to PlayStation V
⏹️ ▶️ John to screens shoving in front of our eyeballs and calling it a day They’re they look like they’re doing the hard work as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No no they’re putting trinitrons in front of your eyeballs I’m calling it a day.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be cool It would also solve the persistence problems, low persistence
⏹️ ▶️ John images. Yeah, nice and easy. See, problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solved. You’re welcome. Might cause a few other problems though, like, you know, neck pain.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was one of the points they made at the Sony one is Sony highlighted the fact that their headset does not rest on your
⏹️ ▶️ John nose or like doesn’t rest on your nose. Or maybe they even said also on your forehead, like, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s one of the fatiguing things if you want to put this, I mean, they’re not that heavy, but they’re heavy enough. They’re heavier than glasses
⏹️ ▶️ John for, you know, and if they rest on your nose and you use them for a while, it’ll make like your neck and your the bridge of your nose
⏹️ ▶️ John hurt after a while. And so the Sony one uses kind of like a sort of a ring around your head,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like a visor type cap, and it hangs the picture, the screens down in front of your eyes. So it shows
⏹️ ▶️ John that they are thinking about the practical real world problems. Oh, and also they’re open on the bottom. So they don’t like fog up inside
⏹️ ▶️ John if you get all sweaty.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is probably the opposite of cool. But I’m really excited to try to answer the question of chirom. Like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, I have not tried the the Oculus Rift, any version. I haven’t tried the Sony one either. I would be willing to try either one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John things when I get a chance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything else going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish there was other stuff going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was actually a slow week.
⏹️ ▶️ John I put GitHub Hubbub in there. That’s a valid title too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do not know enough about that to comment on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, see that’s the thing. I’ve tried to read up as much as I can on it, but I just feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like there’s no facts in the in the press at the moment if you could go to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blogosphere or whatever and so I don’t think it would be appropriate to comment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the particular situation and speaking of things that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey controversial things we could go down or maybe not controversial it’s a poor choice of words but speaking of things I’m not sure I want to touch because it’s gonna piss
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the world no matter how eloquently we handle it it’s you know whether or not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey men in our field treat women poorly. I think the answer is yes, and I think it’s terrible, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I really want to go down that that path.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there’s anything about the specific case that, it’s not like we need to go in depth about the details of it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like the larger issue I think is worth discussing. And like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if we don’t take the opportunity to discuss this issue when something happens related to it, and you know, basically in our
⏹️ ▶️ John little circles of the blogs and Twitter feeds that we read, Then, you know, like then we’re just never
⏹️ ▶️ John going to talk about it. And so if it’s if it remains one of those things that everyone’s uncomfortable with and we just never say anything about and we just feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John want to ignore it until it goes away or blows over or don’t want to follow it, then I just don’t feel I feel like things
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t get better. And so I think it’s worth us discussing in general, if not in this
⏹️ ▶️ John specific case. And I’ll say one thing about this specific case, and then we
⏹️ ▶️ John can talk about the general issue if you guys aren’t still too afraid.
⏹️ ▶️ John In this specific case, when something like this comes up, there’s always the,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, all we’ve got is one person’s side, or we’ve got the other person’s side, or it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one person’s word against another. People pick sides and websites, and
⏹️ ▶️ John one website is on this side, and one website is on that side, and the whole website starts fighting with each other, and people fight in the comments,
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that. Even without knowing any of the details, though,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things that comes up in a lot of cases, including one that I’m not going to bring up that everyone should know what I’m referring to
⏹️ ▶️ John that people like to take the rules that apply in Marcos jury duty and apply
⏹️ ▶️ John them to life and say, well, if there’s any reasonable doubt, we can’t convict, you know what I mean? Like it beyond
⏹️ ▶️ John it has to be beyond a reasonable doubt. So innocent until proven guilty. That’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how we we must think about these things always. And that’s true in the law, because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John consequences in law, like you go to jail. So you know, the for criminal court cases, the bar is high,
⏹️ ▶️ John because we don’t want to send people to jail when they didn’t do it, like we’re trying to avoid. But
⏹️ ▶️ John just having an opinion, your opinion doesn’t send anyone to jail. And so I think we should be more
⏹️ ▶️ John free to have an opinion based on, you know, just
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever other criteria we think are reasonable, because we’re not saying we’re sure, we’re not saying this person should go to jail
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, we’re just saying like, if I had to put money on it, like, if you think about that, we put the vaguest odds
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, what this is. And When I see a story like this, and I see all the hate going back and forth,
⏹️ ▶️ John the vaguest odds on, in this type of situation where a woman
⏹️ ▶️ John feels wronged by an employer, the vaguest odds are she was wronged by an employer, because it happens
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. Like, if I had to put money on it, I would say the money is on that
⏹️ ▶️ John the woman telling her first person account of having a bad experience of work is telling the truth, because that’s almost always how
⏹️ ▶️ John it is. And it doesn’t mean like, oh, that’s what you should just convict them all. Like, that’s not the criteria you can used to actually convict
⏹️ ▶️ John someone or to say with certain someone, GitHub is bad or good or whatever. But if I had to put money
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, that’s what I would put money on. And people are even afraid to make that assertion because they’re like, well, you don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John and you just got one side. All that is true, but I think it’s fine to kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John get a feel for how you think things are going to turn out because you’re not saying for sure. You’re not condemning anybody. You’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John pointing a finger at some specific person at GitHub and saying they’re a bad person. You’re just saying from a distance,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like when this thing comes out and all the laundry is finally aired and if it does go
⏹️ ▶️ John to court or whatever, that when the truth finally comes out and everyone kind of agrees by consensus of what the truth is,
⏹️ ▶️ John what will come out is that the woman was wronged. Because it just happens so often that that’s the safe
⏹️ ▶️ John bet. And the fact that we can’t even say that without saying, well, you’re just you’re prejudiced
⏹️ ▶️ John against GitHub now and you’re condemning them without a fair trial, blah, blah, blah. It’s It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t seem like, that’s just like another stopgap against, you know, if you say anything you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John have 100% proof, otherwise you’re a bad person and it’s just he said versus she said and we shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John discuss it at all. So that bothers me about all these types of cases. Because I think it’s okay to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a reasonable expectation of how it might turn out, because you’re not, you know, you’re not making any
⏹️ ▶️ John decisions and you’re not saying anything with certainty. But anyway, that’s how I feel about
⏹️ ▶️ John this specific issue in this specific case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s, you’re right in saying that we should talk about it. I think the thing that scares me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is I want to handle it delicately. And given that our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audience, all of who slash whom I love very dearly, tends to be a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of pedants. And God forbid, I make one miss. God forbid, I say one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t it pennant didn’t we figure that out that there
⏹️ ▶️ John you go. Who do you mean figured it out? Who started the pedant thing it sounds like a grouper ism. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it is we’re gonna stop it It’s everyone knows it’s pedant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well either way. There is no better word to mispronounce in the English language than that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep So perfect anyway, so I’m not saying we shouldn’t talk about it I just I want to make sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that I if not all of us handle it Delicately and I’m a little scared that
⏹️ ▶️ John but you should you shouldn’t be because people who condemn people who misspeaking like Everyone misspeaks we do it
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. And if you misspeak on a sensitive subject It’s no more intentional than when you misspeak
⏹️ ▶️ John saying someone’s name or saying the name of a product or technology just because like the topic becomes so
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly charged that you’re worried if you Accidentally say the wrong word that you’re gonna people from one side of the
⏹️ ▶️ John other are gonna condemn you and they shouldn’t we all make honest mistakes, we all misspeak, it happens, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s how you react to that, like, because it is a charge issue, you may suddenly get all defensive or whatever. And that’s, you know, where you
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t get all defensive if you misspoke about like the price of a product or something on a, you know, on a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure. But no, it’s interesting, because I, so take my company,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example, we have, I don’t know, maybe 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developers, I I would say, roughly. And of all of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have one young lady that is a tester and is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of our same group in the org chart. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t believe we have any developers. And that’s really not a good thing. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really bums me out. And I don’t think it’s deliberate on any of our parts. We’re a fairly progressive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company. I think we would certainly love to have more women developers. I mean, being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 50-50 or whatever the planetary ratio is, 60-40 or whatever, would be awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But as it turns out, our particular group is almost exclusively a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bunch of dudes. And I wish that wasn’t the case. And I have not worked with very many women developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my entire career, which is around about ten years now. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t like it. It’s no good. But it’s – I mean even in school,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I barely saw any women engineers and I don’t know why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is. I don’t know if it’s a social or societal thing or at least in America,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I wish that wasn’t the case. And so the things that –
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it, Jean McDonald that is doing App Camp? I totally got that wrong. Do you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’m talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ John App Camp for girls, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. Okay. I did get that right. I think that’s awesome. really stoked and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hopeful that that really makes a difference, and I think it will. I don’t know, like, Marco, have you worked with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As developers, I think the number might be zero. I went to school with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few, although the ratio there was pretty terrible as well. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m thinking back, I’m pretty sure I’ve never worked with a female developer. And that’s, I mean, that’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is one of the reasons why I don’t usually talk about controversies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this that always seem to come up in our tech world recently is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I completely agree that it is a problem, but I really don’t know how to fix it. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to just try to do my best to be conscientious in the decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I make as, you know, in a limited capacity I can. I mean, I’ve never even been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a position where I was able to hire somebody. I’ve never made a hiring decision before. Even at Tumblr,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wasn’t allowed to make hiring decisions. So I think that’s one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas obviously where you could focus a lot on that is hiring and then if you’re a boss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over any people, if you’re a supervisor then that’s relevant there as well. I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been in this position so I really don’t know the issue that well or I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really what it would take to fix it. I do agree, Casey, that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been in a position where I was at least able to look over and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help interview applicants for jobs before. And thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back, I don’t think there was even ever a case where a woman even applied
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the point where I was even able to see her resume or interview her to a position. But my sample size there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very, very small. I was only involved in a handful of those kind of things. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s definitely problems in our industry with both the hiring of women
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the treatment of them once they get hired, and the treatment of women in—I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, and this is not limited to the tech industry, this is a problem culturally worldwide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in most places, which is really terrible. But I don’t know how to solve that problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides the limited bit I can do from where I am as far as I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is, you know, when things like AppCamp for Girls come around, I can try to support those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if I’m ever given a chance to make a hiring decision, then, you know, to ignore gender
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I make that decision. Besides that, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really know what else I can do. And if there are, you know, major things I could do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d love to hear about that. You know, like when AppCamp for Girls came out, it got a lot of support because I think a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t know what to do. And that was something that was very clear, like, this could help. In a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small way, this could help. So let’s support that. And supporting that could help. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like to have more opportunities from people who know more about this and who are better suited to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even know how to address these kind of things, which I’m admittedly not. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love to know what else men who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are programmers like us, what else we can do to address this. How else can we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help? Here’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve heard from people who have worked with a lot of women and don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, have been like, well, I work with women and everything seems to be fine here and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I don’t see any problems. And the idea there is if you are a nice person
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you hang out with other nice people, if someone is being a jerk somewhere, you might not
⏹️ ▶️ John see that because there’s the whole, the whole culture of the women trying to keep their heads down and
⏹️ ▶️ John not make a big fuss about these things. And so it could very well be that you are working in a company with a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of women who you treat perfectly fine, but who nevertheless get terrible treatment from others and just don’t say anything about it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not aware of that, because they don’t say anything about it. It doesn’t apply to any of us. Well, I mean, I suppose it could apply
⏹️ ▶️ John to me, but for you to who are not working with a lot of women, that’s not going to come up. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I think about things we can do, it’s like, even if you’re not in this situation, if you just read
⏹️ ▶️ John enough about to know to know what the pathologies are to know like yes it is possible for you a nice person
⏹️ ▶️ John to be working alongside women who are being terribly treated and you not know it because they don’t feel confident in confiding
⏹️ ▶️ John in you because they don’t complain about it and so like you don’t even at least is like oh well you could support women who have these
⏹️ ▶️ John problems or whatever it’s like you can’t support them if you don’t know what’s happening so that’s like step one I’d be aware of what you might
⏹️ ▶️ John not even know like you might not even know that these things are happening and this is not by the way when I think about the github thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a specific case with a possible gender slant, but jerky bosses
⏹️ ▶️ John are everywhere and those I have experienced and jerky bosses can be jerks, they tend to be jerks to
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody. And it’s a similar type of situation where maybe someone is getting sort of, you know, harassed
⏹️ ▶️ John or emotionally abused by their boss, by their boss’s spouse, by anybody else, regardless of what gender they are,
⏹️ ▶️ John people have terrible bosses and terrible work relationships. And some people hide it because they feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, men and women who like if someone is, you know, treating them very badly at a job and they don’t want to say
⏹️ ▶️ John anything because it looks like they’re weak or they don’t feel like they don’t have a way out and you may be working alongside them and not
⏹️ ▶️ John even know it. That’s another reason I believe these things because toxic work relationships between, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John superior and subordinate work relationships that are toxic are just everywhere. And I have experienced
⏹️ ▶️ John those and I’ve seen them firsthand, secondhand, and heard about them from others. uh… they’re worse when gender
⏹️ ▶️ John is involved but even if gender is not involved like it happens so much like just you know if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a uh… the the anti-pattern of the you give somebody a little bit of power and have them
⏹️ ▶️ John have any sort of imbalance and they start abusing that power and taking it out of the people below them and just
⏹️ ▶️ John so many bad things happen in companies because of that uh… and if you’re not aware of it because
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s not happening to you you might not see it and so that i think would be like the first step that any of us
⏹️ ▶️ John could take is be aware that this could be a thing that’s happening even if you’re not part of it. And I don’t know what you do about
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But I guess I guess being aware is the first step. And the second one is, you know, supporting people or any situations
⏹️ ▶️ John again, regardless of gender or whatever. And I guess the third is, don’t don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work for companies like that. Like don’t start a company like that. Don’t be a company like that. Don’t be a boss like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John also don’t work for companies like that. Because the problem is when like, you know, even if all these things are true about
⏹️ ▶️ John GitHub, I’m sure there’s lots of good people who work there. And they like working at GitHub. And And maybe some of them are
⏹️ ▶️ John even tangentially aware of this thing, but it’s like, but I like my job and I don’t want to realize that I work for a bunch of jerks.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I quit, would that change it? Do we collectively all go up and say we know somebody’s being a
⏹️ ▶️ John jerk to somebody else and they should fix it? Like, silence is like the worst thing that could happen here. But people will just kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John keep their head down and try not to think about it and it doesn’t really affect them. And maybe it’s not as bad as it seems to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s the worst thing that can happen. That just, you know, maintains the status quo and the status quo is crappy for a lot of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you work with a lot of women developers currently?
⏹️ ▶️ John I do surprisingly. Most of my past jobs have well, I mean, the first startup I worked at, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I was the only programmer and I was male. So there you go there. But there was like the graphic designers were female and then we hired
⏹️ ▶️ John another programmer who was female. So like, I guess, pretty good ratio is there. A couple of other jobs have been more
⏹️ ▶️ John like lopsided where you expect with zero women programmers like one. My current job,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s 50-50, but there’s a lot of female programmers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason I brought this up about not knowing it is, as far as I’m aware,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re treated well. But that doesn’t mean there’s something bad not happening that I don’t know about, and I’m constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John aware of that. And even, we can all, we all find ourselves, anyone who’s our age, we’ll find ourselves
⏹️ ▶️ John accidentally doing or saying something sexist because essentially that’s how we were raised, the culture
⏹️ ▶️ John that we were raised in. And it’s a struggle every day to try to untrain yourself from these terrible things that were,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, these expectations and biases that we have. But no, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John our hiring definitely seems to not discriminate based on anything. And female
⏹️ ▶️ John developers, as far as I’m concerned, as far as it seems to be all my coworkers concerned, are not treated any differently than any other
⏹️ ▶️ John developer. But there could be bad things happening somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t know about. I really hope not. I haven’t seen any of it, but I worry about it sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I read all—I mean, maybe it’s like, you know, going to WebMD and finding out everything’s cancer. You read all these stories, you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe that’s happening in my company. And like I said, I have been at companies where bosses have been jerks. Like, all, you know, gender
⏹️ ▶️ John not involved at all, but just terrible, terrible situations between people and groups of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I also don’t see that in my current job, but I’m always looking for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s a very tough thing. And I’m sitting here thinking to myself, you know, let’s suppose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I start working with a female developer and let’s suppose she gets crapped on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by either a peer or a boss and I don’t think that that’s technically justified. And when I say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey technically, like her code isn’t good enough or something like that. And I think that that’s incorrect, that her code is fine. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do I have the cajones to say dude or…
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, this is just some smorgasbord of pronunciation to that. Go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ahead. That was intentional that time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m sure. The pedantic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco whatever before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was— I’ll allow it. No, that one was intentional. The other one was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love also that we’re using a word for testicles while talking about sexist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey problems. That’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John so true. Well, he was saying if he had the—yes, I know. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s a fair point. But yeah, you know what I mean? Like, would I have the gumption to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dude or lady or whoever boss person is, you know, that’s not cool. That’s not right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know that I would and I’m not proud of that. I’m not I’m not saying that because I’m excited about it. I just, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. I’m very non confrontational.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s another thing to keep people from saying anything because they’re like, but like by doing that, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, am I infantilizing them by making
⏹️ ▶️ John it sound like they can’t defend themselves and coming to their rescue, which is also a sexist thing. And so like people, you know, well-meaning
⏹️ ▶️ John people are paralyzed by the fear that they’re going to do something wrong. And sometimes they would have done something or had
⏹️ ▶️ John they not done it, but like doing nothing is almost worse. So like you need leeway on all sides. Like everyone involved has to give everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John leeway. You have to understand that if you did something like that, and really what you did was insulting and the person
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t like it, I mean, it’s, you know, to get back to the old thing, judging people by their, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John judging yourself by your motivations by other people by their actions. Well, they would see your action and condemn
⏹️ ▶️ John you for it, but you would judge yourself much better because your motivations were pure. And so you need understanding all
⏹️ ▶️ John around to make the situation go better, like not to condemn people who are trying to do the right
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but merely to explain to them how, they could have done differently or whatever, but not
⏹️ ▶️ John say like that person is Casey’s now my enemy because he, you know, he spoke up and made it
⏹️ ▶️ John seem like I can’t speak for myself and made the problem worse. They should explain that to you that you know what you did made me feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t stand up for myself and diminished me in the eyes of my peers, but not say Casey is now my enemy and I’m going to hate him because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s clear that what you’re trying to do is helping like that’s that goes around in circles like
⏹️ ▶️ John just look at some of the comments threads and these things that just goes around and around and around and like a lot of times it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s people who are on the same side fighting with each other about how best to help each other.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Matt Stauffer And that’s one of the reasons why I don’t usually join these discussions, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have enough people sniping me from every possible angle with everything I write. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last thing I need is to enter a discussion on a topic where it is so hot button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re you’re right, like, if you—even in a discussion trying to defend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco women or, you know, or, you know, condemn sexism,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even in a discussion like that, it’s so easy to find—exactly what you said—to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find flaws in that that themselves are sexist, or have some other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. And if you, you know, like, if you enter this extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco contentious discussion you are taking a big risk especially if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody like me who a lot of people you know love to hate and so it’s to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me it’s not worth the risk of of entering a discussion where I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so intimidated to add anything to the discussion and I also don’t really think I have much constructive to add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so there’s not a whole lot of upside there for me and there’s a whole lot of downside because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only do not only am I probably not really going to help anybody, but I’m also probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to make myself look unintentionally terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I’m not saying you have to write about anything you don’t want to write about, but one of the reasons you’re probably going to unintentionally
⏹️ ▶️ John look terrible is because, like I said, we all have these gender biases that are in us, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they are going to come out unintentionally in what you write, and people are going to call you on it, and that’s not going to feel
⏹️ ▶️ John good, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong. It’s difficult to react to it in the right way, which again
⏹️ ▶️ John may be a reason you just choose not to write about it, which is a perfectly valid choice. But sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like at a certain point, if everybody does that, if everybody’s like, well, I know I have many internal biases,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if I try to speak about it in any way, those biases will come out and people will call me on it and I’ll feel bad, and I’ll have difficulty reacting
⏹️ ▶️ John in a nice way, therefore I’ll say nothing. If everybody did that, that just continues the status quo and nothing gets better
⏹️ ▶️ John ever. And so some people kind of have to, A, fall on your sword to just
⏹️ ▶️ John be willing to, if that’s something you feel like you want to do. The second thing is, by doing that, by trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to say anything like we’re trying to now, and inevitably getting things wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John and revealing our own biases, part of the process of people yelling at you
⏹️ ▶️ John about that is making you more aware of them and working on them so that the next time you don’t make the same mistakes.
⏹️ ▶️ John You would hope that you’d be improving yourself, you would be beating down your biases. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think, even though I tend not to participate in these things, I don’t tweet about them I don’t participate in the comment sections, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John read a ton of them And I think just even just reading them May has made me much more aware
⏹️ ▶️ John of the things that I do or think or say Or don’t do or think or say there that are
⏹️ ▶️ John making the situation worse or there are upholding a corrupt system You know consciously
⏹️ ▶️ John or otherwise like just by reading about them like reading basically reading other people getting getting attacked for the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that they say Like I’m not a participant, but I’m seeing it happen And what I’m coming away with is I? I might have
⏹️ ▶️ John said that same thing and I would have been just as wrong and I agree with this person and I have to think about why that’s the case and like
⏹️ ▶️ John I that’s I think that’s a growing experience. I think that’s one thing I get out of this that might be good is like exposure
⏹️ ▶️ John to this. The masses being exposed to this, even though the masses are not participating, just like the few people who
⏹️ ▶️ John are yelling each other participating being exposed to this, this debate online, even
⏹️ ▶️ John in the terrible form that it exists online will hopefully help everyone who reads it. to
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of move along the path towards whatever they think their goal is. I guess it may be able to make the terrible people more terrible too,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I feel like in general it’s going to help matters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, something that Marco said a minute ago kind of struck me. You said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re intimidated to join the discussion, and I think that was a verbatim quote, but if not, it was the spirit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spirit and I feel the same way completely but I can’t help but sit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here and think well what kind of a wuss am I where I’m intimidated to join the discussion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t imagine how intimidated I would be to be the recipient of this kind of BS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey treatment you know and I’m I’m be I completely agree like I’m a little uncomfortable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about talking about this because I don’t want to come across as a sex a sexist pig and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fear that I may and Yet at the same time I’m getting so worked up over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is really an innocuous conversation in the grand scheme of things I cannot fathom how uncomfortable I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be if my boss treated me like crap simply because I’m a dude I It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I I don’t even want to think about it it it must be terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, good talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week Can we end this at all in any better way than that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess not. Alright, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week. Ram Objects C Sharp, Smile,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Squarespace. And we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, accidental, it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. It was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm. And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidental. They didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tech podcasts so long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, John, we can dodge this question if you want, but you had said, you know, you saw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of your own wrongs in some of the things you read. Are there any examples you’re willing to share?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I’m trying to think of, I know I think of things wrongly in many ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I can’t think of a specific example of where I know I’m wrong about something or where I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read something lately and been like, ooh, yeah, I’ve probably done that too. Are there any examples you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think of where you’ve had that kind of reaction that you’re willing to share?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the easy one is like terminology, all the words that we grew up using that are, it’s like, oh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John political correctness. No, they’re insulting. Like they’re insulting to use those like, I’m not going to, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the anti-homosexual slurs that we all said when we were kids when we didn’t even know what that meant.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you will see people defending their their ability to say that was like, but but I don’t mean it that way
⏹️ ▶️ John and because they grew up saying it right. But like that’s one of those things that once you learn how offensive it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you your reaction shouldn’t be like to double down and be like, nope. I’m gonna keep saying it because I know I’m not homophobic and
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t mean it that way therefore I’m gonna keep saying it that’s not that’s not a mature and appropriate response
⏹️ ▶️ John and the same applies to women Oh, you know I mean I wonder if anyone will call you out for referring to
⏹️ ▶️ John the woman who you work with as young lady because that’s insulting because it’s Implying she’s you know Inferior
⏹️ ▶️ John or like whatever, you know, I mean like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh god, I didn’t even think of it That’s the in here it is That’s a perfect example because I’m trying to think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what what in my screwed-up brain is the least offensive and most innocent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Terminology possible,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And it’s and like and it’s because it’s just because what we were conditioned to do growing up and that’s not an excuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just it’s just an explanation and so the idea is to become aware of these things that we do just out of habit
⏹️ ▶️ John and how how they position the people who are on the receiving end of them and
⏹️ ▶️ John Seeing other people called on it may make you think I say that a lot too don’t I? And I should think
⏹️ ▶️ John of something else that I could substitute for that.” And a lot of this you’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ John online is people like, oh, that’s a political correctness police and there’s certain words that you can’t say or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, you can take anything too extreme and become ridiculous and call everybody gyno-Americans instead of women
⏹️ ▶️ John because women is insulting because it has men in the name. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can go crazy with that. But the thing is, whatever people say automatically because
⏹️ ▶️ John their parents said it, because they said it when they were saying kids, some people will just defend that to the death and they’ll be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope, I got to be able to say that forever. I’m not. I know how I mean it. I’m nice person.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not mean to women, whatever. Therefore you trying to make me not say that is impairing
⏹️ ▶️ John my freedom and it’s political correctness gone awry. And it’s like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s that’s not a fight worth having. That is you’re on the wrong side of that. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t it doesn’t matter how you mean it, you’re working in a larger context here.
⏹️ ▶️ John If everybody calls the women at the office girls, and you just do that instinctively, and you don’t mean it in a bad way,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you really like them, the thing is, it has an unconscious effect on you. Because if you constantly refer to them as girls,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though if you think you don’t mean it, it will shape the way you think about them. They are
⏹️ ▶️ John younger, they are children, but the men of the office run things, and the girls in the office are just…
⏹️ ▶️ John It will shape your thinking just by saying the words, right? And so it’s worth actually making a concerted
⏹️ ▶️ John effort to change the way you speak about it, because it will change the way you think about it. Not because someone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John making you, not because they’re taking away your freedom or because of political correctness, like it’s just basic self-improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I mean, I could think of many more examples, but like, and you can keep going out into farther and farther
⏹️ ▶️ John reaches with not just not just gender issues, but homosexuality and race and everything else, everything
⏹️ ▶️ John that is some difference between us, like you can chase all these things down. And inevitably,
⏹️ ▶️ John in all of us, there’s something we’re doing that we could do better, that is hurting these marginalized groups.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JS So what was the, what would you say was the proper term that I should have used? JS Women?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JS Fair enough. No, it’s a fair answer. I don’t know, I, for some reason, I feel like, JS
⏹️ ▶️ John But you shouldn’t feel bad, like you shouldn’t, it’s not, we know you didn’t mean anything by it. But like, this is one of those cases where it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, the macro just comes out of your head. And like, it’s and the fact that you were second
⏹️ ▶️ John guessing yourself, like, that’s you get into the panic, like, Oh, what am I supposed to say? Because you’re just, you know, the pet, you’re ingrained, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John used to saying something else. So it takes actual concerted effort to stop saying one thing and say something different,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re going to slip up. And like, you just but it’s like, that’s not a reason just to double down and say, Well, I’m never
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna try to change myself at all, I’m just gonna always do the same thing forever. And if you try to stop me, you’re bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean that’s that’s I think what makes it so hard is because people who mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perfectly well can so easily say something or think of something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that really isn’t you know perfectly fine or neutral
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as as you intend it to be you know like like when I wrote my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my review of Vesper I used the word balls all over the place. It takes balls to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do blah blah blah. And I got a few comments from people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of the comments that got on the article were about, you know, of course
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would write this because this is John Gruber’s app and, you know, of course Apple people all look out for each other. All you got to do is write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app and you charge five dollars and if you’re John Gruber, that’s fine for him. You know, that was most of my feedback,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which of course is easy to disregard. But I got I got I think one or two comments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about how the word balls was kind of unintentionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sexist because like that’s only men have balls you know and it and it that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made me think and it I didn’t at the time think that was worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rewriting the whole article and let’s not use the word balls but it definitely made me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stop using it like that in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well see it like when you say unintentionally sexist unintentional in that sexism and Gender relations
⏹️ ▶️ John were not in your mind when you wrote it and of course It’s a common saying that we all know that we’ve probably been using all our lives, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But that that term you’re not responsible for the sexism that term But the person who first
⏹️ ▶️ John came up with that term you could be damn sure that sexism was a hundred percent part of that They’re trying to say men are
⏹️ ▶️ John tough men are brave men do things that are brave. So it takes balls It takes this
⏹️ ▶️ John organ in males’ bodies that women don’t have, that really has nothing to do with toughness at all, but nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, you know, well, men have it and women don’t, and women are wimpy. Like, it is 100% a sexist term,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s so ingrained in the culture that at a certain point, it just loses all that sexism. It just becomes part of the background
⏹️ ▶️ John noise. But part of that background noise is, yes, it takes balls to whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you see women co-opting it and saying that they have balls, and it just becomes a generic term or whatever. term or whatever. But what I always think about
⏹️ ▶️ John that is like, all right, so I didn’t mean it that way. But it totally does mean that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And does it hurt me to use a different term? And, you know, the same analysis you went through, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, maybe I’m not going to go back and rewrite the thing, because I don’t, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the future, now, maybe you’ll think twice about it. Like, that’s, again, you know, just participating these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John If your thing had comments on it, I’d saw people those comments that would have gone into my head, when I find myself having to say that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, it will make you think, well, it’s no skin off my back to use a different term.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s plenty of other cliches and analogies and words that I could use that mean the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t I not use the one that is demeaning to women or, you know, excludes
⏹️ ▶️ John them from the realm of having bravery? You know what I mean? Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, I think going back to my earlier question of, like, not really knowing what I really could do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that kind of stuff is a big part of it. That’s the kind thing everybody can do is just the everyday basics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of vocabulary and perception and assumptions that we can, you know, get called out on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasionally and then question and then, you know, edit ourselves to, you know, think about that in the future. To be like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, you know, that that is unnecessarily exclusive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or has unnecessary baggage and I could use this alternative instead. It’s better. Like, that, I think, is something that everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do. And unfortunately, you know, these are the kind of things that usually, day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people won’t get called out on things like this Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing is like you’re not gonna call the people out on it now but your grandchildren will call those same
⏹️ ▶️ John people out on it because it’s like now when we look back at like TV shows from the 50s and They just are like even
⏹️ ▶️ John mad men like you just look at it like oh, look how sexist they were Like that’s exactly how we’re gonna look to people 50 years from
⏹️ ▶️ John now Like it doesn’t change, you know The the amount of sexism that we have to come back from is so massive that
⏹️ ▶️ John for millennia People are gonna look back three or four or five generations ago Oh, look how sexist they were. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can make a show about it. You know, Mad Men is part of Mad Men is seeing, boy, can you believe we were ever like
⏹️ ▶️ John that? That was so long ago. Well, they’re going to say exactly the same things about us. And since we can’t do that, since
⏹️ ▶️ John from our perspective, you saying it takes balls. It’s like that’s not in the front of your mind when you’re doing it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John no one else, almost no one else reading it had a thought in their head about like, oh, that’s a sexist thing to say. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in reality, it is and 60, 70 years from now, if someone goes back and read that blog post, look
⏹️ ▶️ John how casually sexist guy was. And optimistically speaking, they’ll say that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not like, it’s just a difference of perspective. Like, it takes time for that to be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, sort of, you know, conditioned out of people. Like, we need to stop saying it, stop saying these things, make it
⏹️ ▶️ John unacceptable to say them amongst our friends. Like, all the terrible things that I and my friends said when we were little boys,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we are stuck living with that. Like, we have to work to get that out of our brains. But hopefully, our children
⏹️ ▶️ John will not do those things. They’ll do different things that are bad and you know we hope that we’re making progress and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John we are because if you always look back 50 100 200 years like people seem to get
⏹️ ▶️ John more terrible more sort of like just unevolved and
⏹️ ▶️ John Sexist and racist like that’s how it should be as we go back in time people should look more and more terrible in terms of their practices
⏹️ ▶️ John and The Enlightenment is realizing we are exactly gonna look exactly the same
⏹️ ▶️ John to people multiple generations from now And so, you know, just try to do the
⏹️ ▶️ John best you can try to go as far forward as you possibly can In fact, if you’re not farther forward than most people that you’re living with you’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ John doing something wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re you’re bordering right on the fine line of politics and that That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right that we won’t talk about this is fine
⏹️ ▶️ John I think politics there’s plenty of people on both sides of that whereas Sexism like
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason we see this coming up on the web and everything is like historically there’s just been so little voice to
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Like, it’s just been in the background, and no one talks about it. And it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything’s sexist, so what? You can do about it. Now I think more people speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John up and getting support from other people, this is becoming more. It still amazes me when some
⏹️ ▶️ John company will, like someone in their PR department will issue some terrible sexist statement. It’s like, don’t you read the
⏹️ ▶️ John internet? Even if you are a terrible sexist person, if your job is PR, don’t you understand that this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing? there’s so little self-awareness, like the worst, the worst offenders are the least self-aware.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I hope that increased communication of the internet and everything is making is spreading
⏹️ ▶️ John awareness of this and improving matters across the board at an accelerated rate because
⏹️ ▶️ John it just seemed like I mean, you guys weren’t watching movies in the 80s and stuff like do you remember the movie Working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Girl? I know that it exists. I’ve never seen it.
⏹️ ▶️ John was like Melanie Griffith and maybe Harrison Ford. I’m getting this all wrong. But anyway, like they’d have these female empowerment movies in
⏹️ ▶️ John the 80s. But if you go back and watch them now, it’s like this was the female empowerment movie. This is terrible. This is terribly
⏹️ ▶️ John sexist. And it’s just like insulting to women. But it was like, you go, girl, do some aerobics,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can have a job and wear a suit too. And like, and that was progress back then. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s not even that long ago. And you look at it now, it’s like, you know, and I have a feeling that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John because those type of movies were not subject to sort of the
⏹️ ▶️ John feedback from the masses in real time in large volume, like it was movie studios and they’d send it out to the, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it just, we weren’t all there to participate. So it seems like we couldn’t do sort of like the
⏹️ ▶️ John write, compile, run, debug, iterate, whatever cycle, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that cycle is so much faster now with us yelling at each other in real time about every
⏹️ ▶️ John little thing. whole cycle seems silly and annoying and just like people want to ignore it or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that cycle, the fact that the iteration is faster, is increasing the rate of improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a good talk. You know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of, I know you meant that genuinely, and I kind of regret hitting the brakes a little bit earlier. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just, it’s a a just a field of landmines. And
⏹️ ▶️ John just you should you should feel happy that not happy, but you should be both disappointed and relieved that I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. When I look at my Twitter followers, like the thing where you can look at your analytics at what percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John of your Twitter followers are female. And like, almost none of my Twitter followers are female.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, mine’s like 96% men or something like that. I’m actually looking right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I wonder about the listeners to this show, like, what their ratio, are their ratios
⏹️ ▶️ John similar to our follower counts? What kind of feedback email do we get?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are 50% of the people listening to this show women, but 90% of the feedback we get is from men? That seems unlikely
⏹️ ▶️ John too. So yeah, that’s another, that’s a symptom, a
⏹️ ▶️ John symptom of all the problems we just described.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, hopefully, hopefully we won’t get too much flack, but I would love to get