58: Always On Vacation In California
28 Mar 2014How and when to discuss sexism in technology, Facebook buying Oculus and having visions, and the Hack extension to PHP.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up on discussing sexism in technology, Anil's experiment, empathy, ad hominem tu quoque, and cultural rigidity.
- Facebook buying Oculus:
- Outrage from Oculus' Kickstarter backers, including from Minecraft creator Notch, and the expectations that Kickstarter creates in "backers".
- Why did Oculus sell? How far into the future did Oculus' "vision" extend, and what will happen to its vision now?
- Why did Facebook buy? Does Mark Zuckerberg have a clear vision for Facebook's future?
- Facebook's Hack language extension to PHP:
- PHP is poorly designed but very practical.
- The risks of using Hack (Marco's two posts).
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- Warby Parker: Boutique-quality, vintage-inspired eyewear at a revolutionary price.
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can I go on a completely unrelated rant that’ll be less expletive-filled?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you even still here, you jerks?
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it was a rhetorical question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I’m telling you. So I’ll tell you right now that I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey headphones instead of canal phones, earbuds, whatever you call them, for this week’s show, and you’re gonna hear this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re gonna hear that all damn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that your head hitting the microphone? Yes. Nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re gonna alter your microphone technique if your head hitting it is a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I turned to one side Because so for example like the mic is kind of coming in from my left hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey side and I have an external monitor on the Right hand side and so I’m turning and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smashing into things.
⏹️ ▶️ John all messed up I’m a disaster the mic in front of you, but the screen in front of you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Have two screens. There’s one screen in front of me one screen to my right you heathens that use only one screen I don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it So really quickly I was at or Aaron and I went to Target
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today and there was a woman who was Getting into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her car in front of us her car if I’m not mistaken was a Taurus wagon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it had eyelashes on the on the headlights
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a number of problems already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indeed So she goes and she unloads her car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in such a way that she’s blocking the spot that we were going to try to pull through into, which, you know what, she has a right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take her time and do her thing. That’s fine. No big deal. She loads her car. She
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wheels the shopping cart to the back of her car because she had either done a pull through or backed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and then ditches it. Goes to get in her car. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is one of my biggest pet peeves in the entire world. It is almost as bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as not using a turn signal. So she goes to get back in her car, and because it’s a Taurus wagon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s about 1,000 feet long. So as she’s going to get back in her car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I jump out of Aaron’s car. I say, don’t worry. I’ll get that for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you give her a thumbs down?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I should have. God, I should have. I didn’t even think about it. Man, I’m so upset. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so she says all, you know, synthetically happy, thanks. So as she’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pulling out, she gives me this obviously condescending wave of the hand,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then as she’s turning and about to become out of eye and ear shot, flicks me off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, admittedly, it was mildly obnoxious of me to say, don’t worry, I’ll get that for you. But here it is, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey woman is so close to the front of the store that I think it took
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us less than 30 seconds to walk there. And she ditches her car in the middle of the parking lot, where it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to hit somebody else’s car, it was only a matter of time. Is this acceptable behavior, or am I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am I that old that I’m getting upset over something? Well, I know I’m getting upset over something, I shouldn’t, but is that acceptable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behavior? Do you guys see this where you live?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, that is acceptable behavior. And I’ll tell you why.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to kill you, so you better redeem yourself quickly. The reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why is because she has to drive a Ford Taurus wagon every single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. With eyelashes on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? If I had to drive a Ford Taurus wagon every single day, I would probably be that much of an asshole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well. And I bet you would too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, you do make an excellent point, as much as I want to be embittered about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So why did she flip you off, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I called her out on being an asshole.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why would that make her flip you off?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I called her out on the fact that she was being ridiculous and obnoxious.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So apparently that’s enough to warrant the middle finger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well that’s standard defensiveness. If you are being an asshole and somebody tells
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you that you are being an asshole and you know you’re being an asshole, standard defensiveness response is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell them, no, you’re the asshole. Even though you know you were wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly! But it made it- we- I got to talking about this and so I was like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I- I can understand the sentiment just like you said, Marco, but in the end of the day, like, you’re just making it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse! You’re just further confirming that you’re an asshole.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you were both assholes in that situation. Just she was the greater asshole.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s probably fair. I mean, does that make me a jerk to say, don’t worry, I’ll get that for you? I didn’t say, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worry, I’ll get that for you, you lazy punk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean you you did a snide response to someone’s worst move, so you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your hands are not clean there So do you know be careful when he tucks your white car?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can’t we all just get along Casey couldn’t you just move the cart without making a comment You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should have just silently moved the cart directly in front of her car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Seriously like all the time at grocery stores I see people just you know put two wheels on to the nearest grassy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knoll and then ditch the cart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you’re lucky your shopping centers even have the grassy knolls in New York We don’t have space for those and so they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just Park the shopping carts like in the middle of flat pavement where the wind can very easily blow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them directly into other
⏹️ ▶️ John cars There are self-organizing collectives. See you got gravity and wind causes them to Bundle
⏹️ ▶️ John together into a kind of like a rat king
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You end up getting like the the giant floating circle of garbage in the ocean. It’s like that in the parking lot of shopping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know, it’s just so ridiculous. Like, why can’t you just walk it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ten paces? What is so important in your life that you can’t walk this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so I’ve never been a smoker, and so maybe I’m missing something here, but why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it necessary for smokers to flick their cigarettes on the ground or out their car windows? You know, it’s the same kind of thing. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like just slight reckless disregard for the rest of society
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that makes you an apple in a subtle enough way that you might forget how much of an apple you’re being, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not realize it in the first place.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So nothing really happened this week, huh?
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t go into topics first, we don’t jump to the events of the week. We have a format. Are you new to this show?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alright, so let’s follow up on some sexism talk.
⏹️ ▶️ John The first item of follow-up is actually not about that, it’s two shows back, or maybe it was the last show, I don’t remember, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not about sexism. Michael wrote in to tell us that we I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know why we all didn’t mention this when we were discussing it on a topic of sapphire he said hey
⏹️ ▶️ John the tops of watches are made of sapphire and That’s true We didn’t think about that because
⏹️ ▶️ John we were guys we weren’t thinking about I watches or whatever and not to say that Apple is making a watch or that they watch
⏹️ ▶️ John will be covered in sapphire but It’s worth considering that the sapphire
⏹️ ▶️ John plant. They’re building Probably not for entire iPhone screens of Sapphire, although maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because the people have been saying they’ve been making advances in Sapphire that makes it more comparable to Gorilla
⏹️ ▶️ John Glass. But maybe not just for cell phone
⏹️ ▶️ John camera covers or touch ID sensors, maybe for a tiny little screen on a tiny little
⏹️ ▶️ John wearable thing, because that would also work for something that’s Sapphire. So I thought that was worth bringing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there was a really good discussion on the talk show this week with John Gruber and Craig Hockenberry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the potential of Apple making an iWatch or other wearable devices, and I highly recommend everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go listen to that. And I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is very good feedback, that yes, it is a very good point that watches do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use half IR, and even if Apple is not making a watch, if they’re making some kind of small wearable anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a display, it would make sense that might be, you know, the cover material. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these possibilities make a lot of sense and are all, I think, probably more plausible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the idea of them doing the whole iPhone screen in Sapphire. Just because, you know, not only as we discussed, not only is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a lot of Sapphire that they would need, but also, you know, they’re using, we already know they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it for Touch ID sensors and they need a lot of those. And, you know, if they use it in a wearable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need a lot of that and it makes sense in those things whereas the iPhone screen like there’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t know do you think do you think it’s really necessary for the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen to switch to Sapphire
⏹️ ▶️ John well the things I was reading about was not that they would make the whole screen glass out of Sapphire but that you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John make a laminate where they have a super thin layer of Sapphire over it for scratch resistance but then underneath that
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially gorilla glass type of stuff so you try to get the benefits of all them really hard that’s like you know a knife
⏹️ ▶️ John edge we got a really hard towards the sort of the blade edge and then sort of more flexible in the middle.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is all just speculative and people investigating manufacturing. So down the road, I can imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of sandwich like that giving you the best of all the materials, like a flexible center with a very,
⏹️ ▶️ John very hard surface. That makes sense for for a phone or something where you don’t want the screen to be
⏹️ ▶️ John scratched, get the hardest material possible just on the very, you know, the scratch surface.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But are we really scratching the screens on our phones? because the damage I see is shattering because of impact,
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I see a lot of scratched iPhones. I mean, think of people who take their iPhones without a case and put it in like
⏹️ ▶️ John their purse with their keys. People do that and then they get scratched up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do they? I mean, maybe I’ve just never seen them, but I see tons and tons of iPhones and Android
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phones and every kind of phone with a shattered or slightly scattered screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s when you drop it. Yeah, I mean, like there’s nothing. Yeah, obviously they would like that not to happen, too. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you know the certain point you drop it onto concrete the wrong way. Sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t know it’s just it’s I don’t know if if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Scratch prevention is what we really need on the screen what we really need on the screen in my opinion is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shatter Prevention and I’m not sure how it’s how you would get there
⏹️ ▶️ John Make it out of plastic, but then it would be gross
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well you get there by having these tacky giant bouncy cases that a lot of people like and use for that exact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They’re so bad the otter boxes. I mean they protect the phone, but God they’re enormous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but that actually helps You know like if if you want to protect this tiny little brick of glass and electronics in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of something The bigger you can make that something in the squisher you can make it the more likely it is that you will protect it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but God it makes it so ugly
⏹️ ▶️ John I put Apple wearable stuff way down like three topics down in the topic section who knows if we’ll get to it today
⏹️ ▶️ John But I put it there because of inspired by Craig’s article and the recent talk show So we’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ John if we don’t get to it’ll be on the next show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let’s move it up who cares about Facebook and Oculus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That would have been a perfect time to lop it John, but that’s okay. No
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John doesn’t lop it. He sticks around and waits He will wait for his
⏹️ ▶️ John turn do have some actual sexism follow-up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, okay. It is that time now
⏹️ ▶️ John well first before I get to The few items I put in the follow-up section here How would you guys characterize
⏹️ ▶️ John the feedback that we got on that topic?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would say almost universally praise in the sense that people were very glad we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spoke of it. And in many cases, people were very pleased with the way you spoke of it, especially.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ll lock myself into that category. I thought we did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. I thought I did okay. I thought you did extremely well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I completely agree. I think everyone loves John and it made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of sense based on last week’s episode and the feedback was overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very positive that people who were very happy that we talked about the problems of sexism in tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even when we didn’t talk even that much about it I mean it’s it’s a massive topic that you couldn’t even fit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in one entire show let alone the last quarter of one of our shows but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m glad we talked I was very scared as I said during the show I was very scared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to talk about it because it’s so hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk about sexism without offending somebody on the side that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re fighting for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. And that’s why I pumped the brakes real hard in the beginning. And I’m really, really glad and thankful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that—I think it was mostly John basically said, tough noogies, we’re going to talk about it. And I’m glad that we did, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh man, I was so scared. I was so scared in the
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Marco said did you tweet Marco or something that like you had been afraid to touch on this topic? But we’re pleasantly
⏹️ ▶️ John surprised that the backlash was not that bad and that basically you had been You’d been too afraid of this
⏹️ ▶️ John topic for too long. And if you had known that it wasn’t, you know The minefield that you thought it was gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John that you wouldn’t have been as hesitant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s exactly right I mean, you know, I I I try to fight for social causes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I care about and this is one of those but as I said, it’s just it’s so I’ve been really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scared off by the public discourse around sexism because it just seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone’s being attacked, even people who are trying to make progress in eliminating or reducing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sexism, then they get attacked for something they didn’t include or accidentally omitted or didn’t say the right way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really, really… it just it seems like it’s so cutthroat, the discussion out there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I see so often, at least in print and on Twitter and stuff. It’s so like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one’s given any leeway, no one’s given any slack. Everyone assumes the worst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everyone else in the discussion. And that’s what frankly that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I try to stay out of it because I’m so afraid of something blowing up in my face when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was just trying to help but I did it in not quite the right way or I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forgot about some condition or something that I’m not thinking about or some side effect of a word
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m thinking about, like, it’s so hard to talk about it in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t get you attacked as well. From your side, like, you know, it’s one thing if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say sexism is a problem and then you got a bunch of idiot men saying, no it’s not, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s one thing. I don’t care about that kind of attack, obviously, but like, if I’m trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco argue for the progress of this issue and for less sexism, and then I get attacked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by anti-sexism advocates because I didn’t do it correctly. That discourages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me from participating in the discussion at all. And it’s very intimidating to
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. There were a few negative ones thrown in there. There was the
⏹️ ▶️ John typical people like Marco just mentioned who either thought it wasn’t a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John Or we’re just blatantly and unapologetically sexist, so, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. I think we only got one, actually, that was, like, comically off-base. Like it was…
⏹️ ▶️ John there was one that was ridiculous, but there was other ones that, you know, were borderline.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got a lot of private email, like, I mean, not a lot, but like four or five private emails,
⏹️ ▶️ John most of which were entirely negative. So, like, I mean, it’s kind of like the… Really? It’s kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Joel Spolsky thing, where the reason he explained why he wasn’t blogging as much as it’ll get tons and
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of positive feedback, but all he’ll do is sit there and think about the bad ones. And that’s just my general
⏹️ ▶️ John nature, the inability to take a compliment or dwell on the positive
⏹️ ▶️ John things. So anyway, the negative things were like people who took this opportunity,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s sort of like a preemptive backlash, took this opportunity to say, I know people are going to listen to the show and say nice
⏹️ ▶️ John things to you, so let me preemptively tell you about all the times in the past where you have said or done things that are sexist or racist
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever in your podcast or writing. And so I got a laundry list of all sorts of things that I’ve done wrong from various
⏹️ ▶️ John people. Most of which, by the way, were right, which is why it bothers me as much as it does. Because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, yeah, no, I remember that. It was terrible. And in fact, in the particular show, there were cases, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I brought up the one with Casey saying, young lady, but I did things too. And I heard it myself when I listened to it. And then two days later, I
⏹️ ▶️ John get a person emailing me about it. And it’s like, yeah, that’s part of what’s difficult about this topic is,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, we all do these things to some degree or another. We’ve just
⏹️ ▶️ John been steeped in this. We are a product of our society. And so despite
⏹️ ▶️ John the best intentions, you will find yourself doing things wrong, and people will call you on it. And sometimes people will call you on
⏹️ ▶️ John it in a nasty way. Them being nasty doesn’t mean you didn’t do something wrong. Just like Casey called that woman,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, look at this, tying it together, called that woman on not putting away her shopping cart in a nasty way.
⏹️ ▶️ John She still did something wrong. And so her
⏹️ ▶️ John defensiveness is like, well, I may have done something wrong, but you were a jerk about it. Therefore, I didn’t do anything wrong. So when I
⏹️ ▶️ John get these mean emails telling me about the things that I did wrong, your instinct is to want to reply and say, but I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean it that way and blah blah blah. But you know, but they’re right. They’re jerks, but they’re right, you know. So there was
⏹️ ▶️ John that part of the experience. Like I expected it. It came. I’m fine with it. It’s just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s part of the whole deal. You just have to learn how to properly
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with that kind of feedback, even if it’s delivered in an insensitive way. at it
⏹️ ▶️ John for the content and don’t engage with the jerkiness, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So how do you feel about it after the fact, in overall?
⏹️ ▶️ John We did what we could. I mean, let me get through these two feedback items. I think I’ll have a better overall
⏹️ ▶️ John view of the thing. Actually, this first one is barely about sexism, but it starts out that way. So I’ll read this. This is from
⏹️ ▶️ John Mike. This is just an excerpt from the email. I just wanted to lightheartedly point out that earlier
⏹️ ▶️ John in the show, you were talking about sending people unknowledgeable about tech and Apple to interview Johnny Ive, and then proceeded to thoroughly
⏹️ ▶️ John discuss gender dynamics and technology for 40 minutes. As someone who has an academic background and a lot of personal interest
⏹️ ▶️ John in studying gender issues, I had to roll my eyes ever so slightly. Many tech
⏹️ ▶️ John folks seem to be so quick to put down the layman who speaks about technology issues for lack of research
⏹️ ▶️ John or knowledge, but they often feel completely informed about gender and race and class issues that, in their opinion, is automatically
⏹️ ▶️ John well-researched valid and worth espousing. So there’s two parts to this. One is us slamming the whatever, Time magazine
⏹️ ▶️ John or the Times or whatever, sending some reporter to
⏹️ ▶️ John talk to Johnny Ive, who didn’t seem to know what he was talking about, and then saying, then we talked about a topic that this listener knew
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot about, gender, whatever. And then he had to roll his eyes, like, oh, these tech guys, they complain
⏹️ ▶️ John when someone who’s not a tech nerd talks about tech, but then they just feel like they can talk about gender issues and they don’t know what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about. So there’s two things that I object to in this feedback. The first is the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John we are objecting to someone who doesn’t know a lot about technology
⏹️ ▶️ John talking to someone in the technology sector. It’s kind of like the Walter Isaacson thing where people would say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s better for someone who’s not kind of steeped in technology to do this because it’s supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John bring the message to the masses. We want someone who isn’t a tech nerd. We want someone who can,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, relate to these people at the level of normal people. We don’t just want a nerd going. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that and the idea of sending someone who’s not knowledgeable at Apple or tech to talk to Johnny Ive, it’s the same thing. Like you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be knowledgeable about this topic to report on or to write a book about it. But the job of a reporter
⏹️ ▶️ John or an author is to, during the course of doing this interview, preparing for the interview,
⏹️ ▶️ John preparing for the book, whatever, you learn about the topic. Because the only way you can bring something to the masses is to first
⏹️ ▶️ John learn it yourself. Either learn it by through research or learn it through talking to the person, and then bring the understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John that you gained to everyone else. That’s your job. to just transcribe words or just
⏹️ ▶️ John say the first thing that comes to your mind and then transcribe the answers. Your job is to learn something about
⏹️ ▶️ John a topic, summarize what you’ve learned, and you know, get first-hand information from whoever it is you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John to based on what you’ve learned and then bring that back to them. So I don’t mind if someone who doesn’t know anything about a tech interview someone,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they better be a good interviewer and a good interviewer learns about the topic at hand before they
⏹️ ▶️ John do the interview. That’s it. I mean, you could say, well, maybe he didn’t have time, maybe it was last minute or whatever. There’s all sorts of excuses
⏹️ ▶️ John you can make and that would be a shame if this is the case but as I said in the last show it’s hard to believe that they couldn’t find somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John like oh we don’t have enough time for you to do research we need somebody who already knows something about Apple can we find somebody anybody who’s been
⏹️ ▶️ John following Apple at all maybe send them to interview Johnny Ive so that’s my first objection the second
⏹️ ▶️ John is this other sentiment that like people it’s not just for this topic but all topics
⏹️ ▶️ John people who are expert in the field actually it’s specifically with sexism if you’re like a gender
⏹️ ▶️ John studies major or something or whatever all those people wrote in to us or to me to tell me
⏹️ ▶️ John that we shouldn’t be talking about this topic because we don’t know what we’re talking about. That I think is
⏹️ ▶️ John poison because if everyone thinks that, it’s just like the same thing that Marco was getting at with the fear of like you don’t want to talk about this topic
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re afraid you’re going to say something wrong. It’s too high of a bar to require everyone who
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to discuss this topic to be like a women’s studies major or a history major
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything. Like that’s too high of a bar. We all have to talk about this. to talk about it and get things wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John and fumble and screw things up and occasionally yell at each other. You can’t be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I shouldn’t say anything about this because I’m not an expert. This applies to anything. Anytime we talk about something where some listener knows more
⏹️ ▶️ John about it than we do, whether it be like speakers or cars or gender studies, someone
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to come in to say, I will listen to your show and you were talking about something that I knew more about than you and let me tell you why you should never
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about that again. That’s all well and good right up to the point where you tell us we’re not allowed to talk about that ever again.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that, I mean, for an important issue like sexism, that’s terrible. And for less important issues,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s just silly. So sorry, Mike, I disagree with most of your feedback here. I’m sorry we made you roll your eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mostly agree with that. I mean, it’s important, you know, when there’s a social issue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this, where it’s an important like, human rights and social
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issue, I think not talking about it is generally more harmful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than, you know, talking about it and kind of stumbling through and making some mistakes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not to say, I mean, you know, based on what I said before, that’s not to say that I have the guts to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it, but I think, generally speaking, I agree. Like, we need, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the most common feedback themes that we got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, thank you for talking about this. Like, we need more people with audiences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to talk about this. Which is, I guess, the next feedback, which I want you to get to that. You can read that one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco, because I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John right up your alley.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. This one is from Jack Banha, and it says, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said several times that he didn’t know how to better serve this issue. I think the biggest thing he can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is use his audience and look for voices to amplify whether it’s simply retweeting tech opinions by women
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or by linking to articles that directly deal with sexism in tech. Anil, I guess I’m assuming that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my favorite person, Anil Dash, Anil tried a similar experiment over the past year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the surface it sounds patronizing, patronizing? patronizing? to deliberately seek this out but clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are issues and conversations lurking under the surface that most men in tech aren’t aware of.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you know the thing he’s talking about that Anil Dash did?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You think I follow Anil Dash? Dash. Yeah, he’s your best friend. What are you talking about? Yeah. No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually knew, and there’s a convenient link in the show notes that you didn’t do or didn’t look at because you don’t do your homework.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what Anil had apparently done was exclusively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey retweeted only women for what was it a year? Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think it was a whole year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So he had only retweeted women for a whole year. Now, I don’t follow Anil. I never have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But But apparently, according to him, it didn’t really change his own personal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey workflow, isn’t the right word, but his own Twitter experience very much. But –
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whether or not you think that that particular course of action is a good idea, it was –
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did read this Medium post which I believe he had written and we’ll put in the show notes. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it came from what I thought was a good place, which is let me try to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make my own follow list and my own what I’m putting into the world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Little a little less single-minded and and I understand where he’s coming from.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know that Forcing yourself to only retweet women for a year is necessarily the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer, but I think it came from a good place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s easy to Make a political statement on Twitter by changing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your by favoriting something or changing your avatar or retweeting something those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are all easy things and the value and this I don’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know cut on a nail here I think the value is commensurate with the effort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this case you know if you want to really make a meaningful difference choosing who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you retweet on Twitter is not a way to do it it’s it’s a way to do a small difference possibly a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very small difference but I think making a meaningful difference requires putting yourself out there a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than that and and doing something a little more risky and bold than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I don’t really put a lot of weight on things like putting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a star on your avatar, changing it to be a certain color for a certain political cause, or stuff like that, like online
⏹️ ▶️ Marco petitions, favoriting a certain tweet a million times. That just doesn’t – those things don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really make much of a difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what Anil did, I think, was interesting because it ties into what this feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John is That basically we weren’t sure what we could do and the fact that we have an audience like talking about in our podcast is something We can do
⏹️ ▶️ John and what he did I’m assuming he has a lot of followers I didn’t look but I’m assuming he has way more than I do and do they have
⏹️ ▶️ John more than you up? Maybe and anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he said he had I think about a half a million because I guess early on in Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John I was a recommended user list.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah Yeah He was he was on the recommended user list and so people would sign into Twitter for the very first time ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they would see This recommended users. So sure. I’ll follow that guy and by his own admission. He said he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got a gazillion followers I think it’s like you know many of the half million followers. He had
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah So that like what what he’s doing basically is using his Twitter fame as a force Multiplier and that like
⏹️ ▶️ John what can one person do well the few of us who happen to have you know? Four or five
⏹️ ▶️ John digit numbers of followers or have a podcast that a lot of people listen to One little thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John we do could make a big difference And so he was being very strict or like only retreating women or whatever for
⏹️ ▶️ John an entire year But I find myself doing it, even with my small number of followers on Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the conflict that Marco was mentioning, where I’ll see some tweet. First, I’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John following certain people who tend to either tweet or retweet things related to these topics that I care about.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I’ll see a tweet, and I’ll want to retweet it. And you’ll have that moment of hesitation where you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know if I retweet this because it’s, you know, political or has to do with sexism
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, whatever, I know I have followers who disagree with me and are going to like, yell at me about it, or
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you’re going to get negative feedback about doing this. And the more followers
⏹️ ▶️ John you have, the more important for you is for you to say, Well, is this my Twitter account? Or isn’t it if
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what I believe, then do I believe it? Or do I not believe it. And so for the individual persons, like retweet something
⏹️ ▶️ John that they agree with, or, you know, giving voices to people who may not have many followers is not a big deal. But the more
⏹️ ▶️ John followers you have, the more you’re amplifying them by either
⏹️ ▶️ John linking to them in a tweet of your own or retweeting something that they said.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still find myself having that hesitation and then having to sort of force myself to say, no, go through
⏹️ ▶️ John it. This is exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. Now, I don’t know what kind of a difference it’s making, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, there’s not that much individuals can do unless we’re in very powerful positions.
⏹️ ▶️ John But through the magic of social media, with the multiplying effect, especially if you have a large number of followers or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, I think it is important to consciously say, maybe normally, if all
⏹️ ▶️ John the things were equal, I wouldn’t retweet this or mention this. But because I know it’s an important issue, and because I know
⏹️ ▶️ John this person, like, I may be doubling the reach of this person’s tweet by retweeting it, then yes, I
⏹️ ▶️ John will retweet it, no matter how much it annoys my followers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s more effective, rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say what you’re doing and make a big deal out of what you’re doing and tell everybody what you’re doing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just do it. To just try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to retweet a lot of women. You don’t have to say you’re only retweeting women for a year, you don’t have to announce that
⏹️ ▶️ John well, yeah, that’s obviously a gimmick. He’s got the article in mind before he begins the…
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s fine, but I’m not saying you have to do what he did, because I think exclusively retweeting
⏹️ ▶️ John women is like, you know, that’s maybe missing the point of the entire thing. But in general, we all see
⏹️ ▶️ John tweets in our timeline that we agree with, but know that if we were
⏹️ ▶️ John to engage with or retweet or say something about, we know we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be basically asking for an argument and people are going to say negative things back. And that can dissuade
⏹️ ▶️ John us from doing that. Like Marco said last time you know our hesitance to talk about this topic like
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, no people might say mean things There’s nothing compared to the hesitance people have to deal with the actual issue so like we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John so wimpy We don’t even we don’t even want to like like bring The smallest amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of criticism or fire down on us for even engaging the topic and that’s like that’s the that’s the weapon
⏹️ ▶️ John of the you Know the bad guys in this scenario is that if it becomes so toxic no one wants to touch
⏹️ ▶️ John it They win by default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know right cuz cuz they’re gonna touch it as much as they want and on their side like Like, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount of rampant sexism is crazy, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rampant sexists are not going to stop talking about it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re afraid of the feedback. They’re gonna just keep doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s another reason, by the way, not to engage with those people, because every time someone’s, you know, I do something like that, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then I get negative feedback. If I need something to remind myself not to engage with those people,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this may sound terrible, but I look at their follower counts and I say, if I was to engage with this person and
⏹️ ▶️ John start arguing with them, there’s the potential that more people would see this argument than would ever
⏹️ ▶️ John see this person to begin with. Like, right now his evil is confined to me, but if I engage and go back and forth or
⏹️ ▶️ John like hate retweet him or anything like that, that actually increases the exposure of his toxic ideas, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s better to just not engage and leave them confined to their four followers and
⏹️ ▶️ John their hate-filled timeline. Like, you look at their timeline of tweets and it’s just one hate-filled statement after another and these people must not have
⏹️ ▶️ John very nice lives, but you engaging with them, that’s like a jackpot for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s something that I think I’m still learning in general, not specifically to sexism is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, how do I choose when it’s worth engaging, like, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a parking lot at Target and when it’s not, it’s something I will always struggle with. And it’s something I think we all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey struggle with. We are not done with the sexism follow up, but we’ve been going a while. Can we talk about something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can. It is our wonderful friends, once again, they’re back, our friends
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco should not cost $300 and up. They should be affordable, even affordable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough for people to accessorize and have multiple pairs if they want to. So Warby Parker is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really a new way of making and selling eyewear. They bypass all the traditional channels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They sell higher quality, better looking prescription eyewear online at a fraction of the price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of brick and mortar places and your opticians and everything else, starting at just $95. Go to warbyparker.com
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every pair is custom fit, they have anti-reflective, anti-glare, polycarbonate prescription lenses, And every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pair comes with a hard case and cleaning cloth, which is a really nice hard case by the way. So you don’t need to buy any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overpriced accessories on top of your glasses. Now buying glasses online, you would think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be risky. Like how do you try them on? How do you see how they look? They know this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they have built pretty incredible tools. So first of all, you can go and they have a thing where you can use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your webcam to take a picture of you and they will overlay the glasses on your head so you can see how they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will look. And they also have webcam tools to do things like help you measure in case your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prescription doesn’t have the right distance number on it or if you want to just double check it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever else, you can see that, you can measure it right there, right online. And then the cool thing, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best thing about Warby Parker, I think, besides their awesome prices and everything else about them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best thing besides all the other stuff is this Home Try-On program. So they have this great thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can pick out up to five pairs of glasses, and let’s say you only pick two or three because you can’t decide. They’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fill the box and there’s five. So anyway, great company. So you get these glasses to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try on at home for free. This is all, you haven’t paid anything yet. You get them, you can try them on. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then they send it to you for free, you send it back. It’s all prepaid shipping, you don’t pay anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you can make a choice. And you can choose to buy none of them if you really want to. But I bet you won’t, because they’re really great quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ll see for yourself when you do the home try on. And then you just pick whichever one you want or whichever ones you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can get more than one if you’d like, they’re not stopping you. and you get those glasses delivered to you pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly actually. So they, when they make the prescription lenses, they usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get started on them right away and they’re usually in your hands within 10 business days or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually even faster than that. That’s just kind of like a rough end ballpark, but usually it’s even faster than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. So prescription glasses starting at just $95 including the lenses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously, I don’t know why they even sell glasses without lenses. It’s like selling a car without brakes. but so $95 includes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the lenses. They also have a titanium collection, it’s even better, higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality stuff in certain places, but really they’re all pretty great. Titanium collection starts at just $145, including the lenses. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco includes premium Japanese titanium and French non-rocking screws. All their glasses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all price points include anti-reflective, anti-glare coatings, cleaning cloth, everything like that, really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. So check it out. And one of the cool things about this, I’ll go a little long here, but one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the many cool things they do is they have a program where for every pair of glasses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they sell, they distribute a second pair to someone in need somewhere in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a few charities they work with to do this where, you know, there’s prescription eyewear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very expensive for many parts of the, you know, lesser developed world and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s pretty important to be able to see for things like learning and getting through everyday life. It’s really important.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so they have this great program where every pair they sell, they give another pair to somebody in need. So check them out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WarbyParker.com slash ATP. Thanks a lot to Warby Parker for sponsoring our show once
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of using your social following to amplify the effect and speaking of Warby Parker
⏹️ ▶️ John giving a free glasses to someone who needs them, Mike Montero, who generally is a jerk on Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John in a funny way, also occasionally does a thing where he tries to raise money for a family that that needs money
⏹️ ▶️ John for something like, oh, hey, this could be a pair of glasses or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John or this family is about to get evicted, let’s all raise $2,000 to keep them from getting evicted. And he will
⏹️ ▶️ John use his Twitter following, which is not that big, it’s bigger than mine, but not much bigger,
⏹️ ▶️ John and he’ll use that to get a bunch of people to raise money, not a lot of money, but a
⏹️ ▶️ John small amount of money for charity, and he’ll do that over the course of an hour and a half on like a Saturday. That’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John that you couldn’t do before the internet and Twitter, and Twitter seems like just a silly thing, oh I’ve got 50, 60,000
⏹️ ▶️ John followers, or maybe he’s got like 100,000, I don’t know, what can I do with that? You can do surprisingly,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if there’s a cause that’s important to you, you know, spend a little time
⏹️ ▶️ John tweeting a few things, get a bunch of people who follow you to raise some money for
⏹️ ▶️ John a cause that you care about. It’s not a big thing, but it’s not a little thing either, and it’s something that wouldn’t happen if it’s like, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got to go door to door knocking on people’s doors asking for money or whatever. like brings together sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John like-minded people who might be inclined to do these types of things. And if it’s all electronic, where you just tweet a URL, everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John goes to the URL to click a couple buttons, they PayPal 10 bucks in there, everyone feels good about it, and someone gets helped.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Warby Parker, the same type of thing, you know, it’s just an extra bonus for like, why might I buy Warby Parker sunglasses?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, because they do this extra thing, too. And you’ll feel good about getting your glasses when you do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so what else do we have on the sexism topic?
⏹️ ▶️ John I put a bunch of other things here, but I think I would skip over most of the only one I think I want to touch on for now is
⏹️ ▶️ John we didn’t talk about in the last show, but Things that have things that help with empathy
⏹️ ▶️ John and I was thinking of the I’m surprised it didn’t come up Maybe it didn’t come up because I’m the only one in this camp, but a lot of times
⏹️ ▶️ John when you talk about this topic Someone will bring up either casually
⏹️ ▶️ John or as a weapon more likely the idea that that
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t understand this topic because you’re a man and only
⏹️ ▶️ John women understand it. Or I used to not understand this topic, but then I had a daughter.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now if you don’t have a daughter, you can’t understand what this is like. Or just wait until you have a daughter and you’ll understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the daughter one is the one that gets me because I can’t control my gender, but people could conceivably not have a daughter at one point and then
⏹️ ▶️ John have a daughter at another point in their life. And I never liked calling
⏹️ ▶️ John people out to say, your ability to empathize with this
⏹️ ▶️ John is stopped by the fact that you don’t have a daughter. I agree that having
⏹️ ▶️ John a daughter definitely helps, can help, because it gives you, it forces
⏹️ ▶️ John you to take a perspective that previously you couldn’t. But intellectually, I don’t like the idea that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John impossible for someone to understand the issue until they have a daughter. I happen to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a daughter and like and and it has helped me identify with this issue more, but I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John I heard from the notes here is it is neither necessary nor sufficient To have a daughter to understand this
⏹️ ▶️ John because plenty of people have daughters and still don’t see the forest of the trees
⏹️ ▶️ John some people are helped by having a daughter and some people like what I’m saying is that You shouldn’t have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John pre qualified by something to say that you can that your ability to empathize with this issue
⏹️ ▶️ John is not dependent on you having sisters or daughters or being a woman or anything. Everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John else can do it. Those things may help, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I just didn’t like the exclusion. Like, it just bothers me. Even if, like, even if in general
⏹️ ▶️ John it may be true that, like, people don’t get it until they have a daughter, I don’t like people people trying to exclude people
⏹️ ▶️ John from the conversation to say, well, you can’t understand this because you’re a man and don’t even have a daughter
⏹️ ▶️ John or a sister or whatever. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the other ones I think we probably don’t have time for today, but there’s more, more bits in there. I won’t delete them out from the
⏹️ ▶️ John notes. Maybe we can touch on them on another show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Really quickly, I do want to also add that I think part of the problem here, I mean, obviously, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco American, and I take the very US centric view, because simply that’s where I am and what I know most about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But certainly, it seems like an American culture, we and And of course
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not all of us, but the majority, the dominant culture in America is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hold on very tightly to the past and to the way we’ve always done things. And the way we’ve always done things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like the Bible. It’s always correct. It’s how it always was and how it always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be. And we are the best, damn it, and we are never going to listen to anybody else or anything else that suggests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise, because we are the best, USA, USA, rah, rah, rah. And the problem with that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of viewpoint, one of the many problems with that kind of viewpoint, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that when some part of what you think is your culture that you’ve always had and you must always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have is challenged, like something that you do or think or say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is sexist or has some other social problem, your instinct,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re in this mindset, is to hold on tightly and tighten your grip even more and get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even angrier and more defensive reclusive even, around that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that really hinders a lot of social progress. And, you know, it’s hard to convince people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that their history and their culture and the way they think is wrong and bad. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really hard to do. And that’s probably true everywhere for everybody. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s one of the problems with moving an issue like this forward. One of the challenges is, you know, as we said last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode, things that we’ve, things that we’ve always said, words we’ve always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used, assumptions we’ve always made. These things have problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are sexist, they are discriminatory, they are insulting, they have problems. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we hold on too tightly to this is the way we’ve always done things, this is who we are, this is who I am, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use that as a big excuse, it’s very hard to make meaningful progress.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and this is applicable in America anyway, across many, many, many different subjects, like gun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control and the legalization of marijuana. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not trying to get political. I’m not saying one way or the other where I stand on these issues. However— Two yeses for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. You’re a braver man than I. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard to have intelligent conversation about it for exactly the reasons that you said, because those of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who cling to the way things are today tend to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just tighten that grip just like you said even more and it prevents an intelligent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conversation and it quickly becomes an emotional conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right and that’s a very quick way to not get anything done. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah like well any kind of change like that usually you just have to wait for people to die and the worst thing about
⏹️ ▶️ John that is like well you just wait for people to die we’ll be fine but like they teach their children these
⏹️ ▶️ John regressive ideas too and like they propagate it and it’s like It’s so difficult to stem that propagation.
⏹️ ▶️ John The most effective means that I’ve seen during my lifetime of
⏹️ ▶️ John fostering change in society has been the ambient
⏹️ ▶️ John exposure to ideas, not shoving them in people’s faces,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just kind of like—not really bombarding, but just like you’re in contact
⏹️ ▶️ John with it all the time. the MTV generation constantly seeing different
⏹️ ▶️ John kinds of people, you know, just like exposure to to to just different people,
⏹️ ▶️ John different races, different sexuality, not as like it’s a message or an after school special, but just like they’re just there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like you just exposed to them, like, you know, everyone’s like Will and Grace and sitcoms, stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And that, you know, some of those are more highlighting, but just just generally that exposure and
⏹️ ▶️ John makes it more difficult for the adult generation that is never going to learn any better
⏹️ ▶️ John to pass on their regressive ideas to their children because their children
⏹️ ▶️ John are just sort of like soaking in a society that accepts these certain
⏹️ ▶️ John things as just like, well, it’s just the way it is. And that’s, of course, why the parents hate it
⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, don’t want their kids to watch MTV and blah, blah, blah, you know, all that stuff. But like, that kind of thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems to me, is even more effective than
⏹️ ▶️ John proselytizing or trying to teach kids the right way. Because no one wants you to teach it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just have to be exposed to it. That’s us talking about it. This being
⏹️ ▶️ John out in the open, even if it’s in the form of a bunch of people yelling at each other in blog comments, even that
⏹️ ▶️ John is so much better than just not talking about it. Because kids will grow up just exposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to this, like, oh, this is a thing, or I’ve seen people yelling about that. And even if kids are like on the on
⏹️ ▶️ John one side of the debate for most of their life They’ll know that this debate exists They’ll know that there is another side
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll be in their mind and maybe they’ll come around eventually, right? But just being exposed to it
⏹️ ▶️ John uh It doesn’t seem alien or taboo or ridiculous. It’s like oh, yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been going on my whole life That’s definitely a thing, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So anything else on the follow-up category?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forever follow-up we’re only an hour in so maybe we should start the
⏹️ ▶️ John show I skipped a lot of stuff I skipped it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now you didn’t have to it’s all kidding aside it is really really really good conversation in and like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said before as much as I were as I pumped the brakes in the beginning I am glad we’re having it and I’m glad that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we got well most of us so much good I can’t believe you got bad feedback I’m glad we got feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying hey you know you didn’t always say the right thing but at least you’re talking about it
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t like I said it wasn’t bad for us to be back feedback that makes me feel bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey which is different. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John different, you know, like, it’s no fun for people to point at all the places you’ve done bad things in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, anytime you talk about something someone’s going to want to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh yeah, but you, whatever. It’s one of those Latin logical fallacies whose name I can never remember
⏹️ ▶️ John and always have to look up in Wikipedia. Ad hominem? No. It’s the to quote you
⏹️ ▶️ John or something where it’s like, because you did something that’s counter to what you’re saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re saying is wrong. Ah. So the fallacy is that if you have not lived
⏹️ ▶️ John your life in 100% consistency with the position you are espousing, therefore the position you’re espousing is wrong. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I have not lived my life in 100% consistency, but my position is not wrong because of that. And so people want
⏹️ ▶️ John to write in and tell you that what you’ve done in the past has not lived up to the ideals you’ve presented, and then you feel bad about it. Or at least you
⏹️ ▶️ John should feel bad about it, and I do feel bad about it. And a couple of them are also jerks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone got it in the chat room. You want to pronounce that? I tried.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the great thing is because it’s Latin, there is no authoritative pronunciation. Nobody actually knows how Latin words are pronounced.
⏹️ ▶️ John you go. Please send your corrections to Mark.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this week, Facebook bought Oculus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I didn’t see coming. Not to say that I follow this stuff closely, but
⏹️ ▶️ John see this coming. Did you know this company existed before the last show where we discussed VR stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, you big jerk. of jerks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yes, I knew it existed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so Oculus is an Oculus Rift is the device, is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m gonna get my terminology wrong here, but they’re making a VR headset. And it’s like a Virtual Boy, but it actually works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from what I gather. And they were bought by Facebook and a lot of people aren’t happy about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, did you didn’t back this Kickstarter right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So there’s a lot of different things in flight here, a lot of different viewpoints
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a lot of different, I don’t know, conversations happening. One of them is, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I backed this thing on Kickstarter, and I did that so they could stay independent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and now they’re not independent, so this sucks, and oh, P.S., I want my backer money back. Does that make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any sense to you two at all? Because it does not to me. Like, I, well, it makes sense in the regard that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can understand the feeling, but the feeling is without merit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think part of it stems from the same kind of thing where like if a paid app or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service is bought then the people who paid for it before the acquisition are mad like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I paid for this so you’d stay independent or I’d pay I paid for this so you wouldn’t be bought and be absorbed and shut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down and all that other stuff and so it’s similar that I think the difference is with a Kickstarter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the the message that Kickstarter sends the and you know maybe not explicitly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe they try to disclaim it, but the message that it sends, the feeling it gives people is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a feeling of co-ownership. It’s, you’re being a part of starting this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though it confers no actual ownership to you. In fact, it’s really a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal for all those reasons in most cases. However, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support these things because you want them to exist, and then you feel some token of ownership,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it’s not direct financial you feel like you know you helped the band get started you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that kind of thing like you you feel like one one of the backers as they call it you’re a backer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though you’re more of a donor but it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know I totally get the feeling and I think it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hmm shoot my words carefully here I think the feeling is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not academically correct of something you should think but completely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco understandable why Kickstarter backers would think and feel that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s a good way of phrasing it. Because I would have felt the same way for Flash, but then I would have realized, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not really fair, because that wasn’t the deal. That wasn’t the deal I made with Oculus.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kickstarter is kind of weird in that if you pull back far enough and are sufficiently cynical
⏹️ ▶️ John as many people on Twitter are, it starts to look like a zero-risk
⏹️ ▶️ John way for the the real VCs to sort out a bunch of stuff with angel investing being done,
⏹️ ▶️ John being distributed over a huge group of nerds, right? So it’s like, we don’t wanna do the angel
⏹️ ▶️ John investment where we just give enough, some people enough money to get off the ground. We wanna wait to
⏹️ ▶️ John see where the winners are, but we don’t want, and even angel investors are like, well, I mean, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the beauty of Kickstarter. It’s like, it’s not worth anyone’s time to invest in some dinky little thing that no one’s gonna care about. But sometimes there are big
⏹️ ▶️ John things and it’s like, well, we could go to real investors Or we could just get that same amount of money
⏹️ ▶️ John from thousands of regular people, but we don’t have to give them anything. An angel investor would want
⏹️ ▶️ John some part of the company in exchange for their investment. But since each individual person gave five, 10
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks, we don’t have to divide the company up and give each person 0.001% of the company. They
⏹️ ▶️ John get nothing since it’s so close to zero anyway. And that’s kind of where
⏹️ ▶️ John people feel burned in that they, first of all, they do feel like they’re investing, which they’re not, they’re not investing. giving people money
⏹️ ▶️ John in exchange for usually like a product or some kind of or you know sometimes they get nothing but there are backer
⏹️ ▶️ John rewards or whatever like because you want this thing to be in the world but it’s not an investment because you don’t get any ownership
⏹️ ▶️ John over the thing over the profits over the company over anything and even if you did it would be a tiny little sliver but but
⏹️ ▶️ John you get zero you get nothing and so it’s like hey we got all this money this in this case it was like 2.5 million or something
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Kickstarter that’s a reasonable amount of money for an angel investment but it was distributed
⏹️ ▶️ John over a such a large number of people and all of them got zero equity. So like from the company’s perspective, this, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, this is great. Like, we get money and in exchange, we don’t have to do anything except make the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John because people just want this to be in the world. And that’s what the beauty and the curse of Kickstarter. And
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s in these people’s heads when they’re giving the money? It’s like, well, I was giving the money so you could remain independent. Like, that’s not what
⏹️ ▶️ John the Kickstarter said. Kickstarter said, give us money so we can remain independent. I mean, like, there’s no promise
⏹️ ▶️ John about what’s going to happen to the company in the future. But in their head, they’re like, I’m giving you money. So so you won’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to get bought up by some big company or whatever, but that’s not what you’re buying. You’re not buying equity
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not you’re not buying the right to determine the future course of the company You are just giving them money
⏹️ ▶️ John because you want to see this thing in the world and the thing did go into the world and the rift dev kit version 1 & 2 came out and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming people got what they were promised for their Kickstarter thing, but time moves on
⏹️ ▶️ John and eventually Facebook comes and buys them and I guess these people could kind of feel burned
⏹️ ▶️ John but But I hope it doesn’t sour people on Kickstarter, because I like the idea of someone who’s like, I’ve got an idea
⏹️ ▶️ John for a board game, and it’s going to cost $700 to manufacture 10 copies of this board game for me and the 10
⏹️ ▶️ John people in the world who want it. No one’s ever going to invest in me. Everybody let’s all chip, pool our money together, and we’ll all
⏹️ ▶️ John get a copy of this cool board game. That, I think, sums up, right? All the way up
⏹️ ▶️ John to raising a million dollars for something bigger. But in none of those scenarios should you expect
⏹️ ▶️ John anything past whatever it is you were a promise as part of the Kickstarter?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s important to, as a Kickstarter backer of things, to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely skeptical as to what you’re going to get. And you know the promises that they make that you know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all it all has like you know an 80% chance of actually working out for you. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever the number is like it’s not a hundred percent. Like certainly I’ve bought Kickstarter products that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have never received that fizzled out that you know they made promises they just didn’t keep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bought products that did eventually arrive very very late or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that arrived finally and were not as good as they said they were gonna be or didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work at all. You know it’s it’s easy to get caught up in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mentality of oh I’m helping these people out I’m really gonna be one of the you know founding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backers or whatever like it’s a good feeling before you do it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then eight months later when you haven’t gotten the thing yet that you paid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too much for like like you wouldn’t have paid $200 for it in a store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it was available right now but you pay $200 to back it because you really really wanted it two years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago that’s you know it’s it’s a different it’s a different emotional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scenario that you’re in a different type of buying a different type of messaging and rhetoric
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around it that I think distorts a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of these expectations and values and market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effects. I think the most sensible way to use Kickstarter is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a speculative pre-order with the assumption that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of every ten things you pre-order, you’re not going to get one of
⏹️ ▶️ John them. I mean, or you could do it as like, I mean, one of the things that I backed recently was some person who’s trying to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a a website including high quality photos of game consoles Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John i’m not getting anything. Of course you backed that. All right I’m not getting anything for that. Like it’s not like the
⏹️ ▶️ John website’s going to be public all i’m doing by giving any money to this at all is Trying to make it
⏹️ ▶️ John so that this website exists because the guy he’s going to use the money to buy You know vintage
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware to clean it up to have it professionally photographed and to put it up on a website. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m basically paying for the entire internet to have access to this thing, paying for him to do it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s not his job, he’s just doing it as like a hobby project and he doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on the hardware. So here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some money to put towards your project because I think it’s a fun project and I want it to exist in the world. People are
⏹️ ▶️ John usually okay with that type of Kickstarter. It’s where it gets fuzzy is where you think you’re like, where it feels like you’re part of
⏹️ ▶️ John something. And like if you’re part of something
⏹️ ▶️ John and it fizzles and you lose that and it doesn’t ever ship people feel bad in one way but it’s almost like
⏹️ ▶️ John people feel worse if you are you know if you back the the oculus kickstarter and
⏹️ ▶️ John the people at oculus get fabulously rich you get no money and the company’s in the hands
⏹️ ▶️ John of another company that you didn’t like so it’s like a triple whammy there you know I bet these people feel worse than if
⏹️ ▶️ John the company went out of business which doesn’t make any sense but I think it’s just human nature that like
⏹️ ▶️ John you had you thought you had a lottery ticket well but you didn’t I I mean, I don’t think people really thought they had a lottery
⏹️ ▶️ John ticket, but it’s just like the same people feel like You know Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll get to the the opinions of the people who backed the Kickstarter and a bit specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John I have some quotes here from notch the guy who made a minecraft, but it’s just human nature
⏹️ ▶️ John to to Not so much to feel that you’re left out financially, but that you’ve been betrayed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I guess that’s true What is it about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Facebook that makes it sting so much? What I mean is Facebook is very clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very similar to Google in that they’re an advertising company without question. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless, somebody tweeted earlier today, I don’t recall who it was, they haven’t yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ruined Instagram. I mean, all logic says they’re going to, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are we sure that we’re going to, that they’re going to ruin Oculus? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what proof do we have that they’re going to ruin it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not entirely sure it matters that it was Facebook that bought it. I think, I mean, there’s only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many companies out there in the tech business that could spend $2 billion on something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, it’s a relatively small number, I think. So you know, it wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been that much different. like, you know, if Google bought it, I bet nerds would all be a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happier about it, because nerds love Google for no reason. If Microsoft bought it, that would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of interesting, because they’re a big tech company, they need some new stuff to do, and they have this gaming business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the sides, maybe that’s kind of it. If Sony bought it, Sony’s developing a competing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product. If Sony bought it, that would be, I think, met with certainly some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resistance as well, but it would be a little bit more clear, oh, well, that’s more likely that this thing will actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come out and exist and be for games. But with Facebook buying it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big question is what the heck is Facebook gonna do with this? Why did the Facebook buy this? That’s the big question. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean your guess is as good as mine. I think there’s certainly a contingent within Facebook,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however paper got produced and shipped, and Facebook Home, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco contingent made these products happen and made them come out and got them out, whether that includes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the top or not, these people believe that Facebook is about these really high quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pictures and following great designers who post great photos and have really interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lives and are somehow always on vacation in California. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook that most people see is not that at all, not even close. And so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to look at Facebook’s core product and see where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this would fit in in a way that wouldn’t be just awful. But maybe that’s not their plan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, Instagram, as you said, Instagram has not been integrated into Facebook’s core product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure they’re using the data for all sorts of creepy things, but the core product of Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has remained a separate thing. So maybe Oculus will also remain a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco separate thing. Why they wanted it is still anyone’s guess, but, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, there, I think part of the rage and anger about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is what the heck does Facebook need this for?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. But why did we all kind of give Jeff Bezos, Bezos, whatever his name is, a buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Washington Post? Like, how does that make any more or less sense than this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because who cares about the Washington Post? Not a bunch of nerds.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was like 150 million, though, wasn’t it? It’s like 2 billion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s also fair. But to me, it seems like a very parallel example. If you look at Amazon’s core,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I know Amazon didn’t buy the Washington Post, but nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not Amazon’s core business and it’s not what Jeff Bezos is used to doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everyone kind of scratched their heads when he bought the Post, but it seems like nobody gave him a buy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, everyone gave him a buy and nobody seemed to care, whereas when it’s a nerdy tech thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of a sudden the internet is furious.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we travel in nerdy tech circles, but like I put a link in the show notes from What’s
⏹️ ▶️ John his name his actual name? Marcus person notch the guy who created Minecraft
⏹️ ▶️ John He was a backer for he gave like $10,000 something because he’s got tons of money
⏹️ ▶️ John for Minecraft for the original oculus rift and He was looking forward to developing for it
⏹️ ▶️ John and he’s very angry That that Facebook bought them and he lays out his reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John in a post that will put in the show notes The main reason I think that he’s angry and that a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John are angry is that Oculus’ main audience prior to this acquisition was game developers. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it was, you know, I guess gamers too, like who wanted this to come, but basically it’s game developers. What good is a headset if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have no games to play on it? And you can’t just take an existing game and slap it in there and expect it to work. They
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted developers to make games, you know, for VR. And
⏹️ ▶️ John he was thinking of making a version of Minecraft custom tailored to VR. are. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that was their audience. And that audience is like, and I think rightly so, their objection
⏹️ ▶️ John crystallized by this blog post here is that Facebook is not a game tech company. They’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John not a game company. And anytime anything having to do with gaming is
⏹️ ▶️ John owned, controlled, or, you know, influenced in a big way by a company that isn’t a gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John gamers distrust it. Like it’s part of the reason that there’s this you know
⏹️ ▶️ John distrust in the gaming industry of Apple despite the fact that tons of games sell really well on
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS. Apple still seems not particularly and not enthusiastic about games
⏹️ ▶️ John like they don’t they don’t act like a gaming company like they’ll say oh look at these great you know these games are selling
⏹️ ▶️ John very well and they’ll highlight games in their keynotes and stuff but they’re not like a gaming company. That’s you know Sony was a great point
⏹️ ▶️ John if Sony had bought them people would feel a lot better. I mean, they’d still whine and complain because you know what else they’re always gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John whine and complain. But Sony thus far has shown itself to be a very dedicated gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John company and that’s what people want. They don’t want this tech to go off and be used for
⏹️ ▶️ John social things or video conferencing or like all those things that you could use it for that
⏹️ ▶️ John Notch writes about here. It’s like it could be very good for those things. It could be very good for lots of different applications but
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s a game developer he wanted it to be all about games and he’s afraid that a non-gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John company buying this is going to make it not be about games. Now this is just what his fears are not necessarily what’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John going to happen but he did put another bit here speaking of Kickstarter. He says I did not chip in 10
⏹️ ▶️ John grand to see if to see the first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition
⏹️ ▶️ John and he’s not bitter because he missed out on money because he’s got tons of money already it’s just like it’s just human
⏹️ ▶️ John nature to feel like I invested in this thing and it seems like my $10,000
⏹️ ▶️ John was just, you know, it was like a little booster to Facebook and why the heck does Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John need my $10,000? Like it’s like, here you go, I’ll set this up for you and you can scoop it up when it’s ready and take it away from
⏹️ ▶️ John us, take it away from us game developers. And he’s saying now he’s not going to make Minecraft for it and we’ll see if that happens. But
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously he’s very angry. But from Facebook’s perspective, I totally see why they bought
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Why? Facebook has a business where they,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, get everyone’s information and they get them to be social and try to get them to do things on the web and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think they see not so much the writing on the wall, but just like the evolution of their product where more people
⏹️ ▶️ John are doing more things in mobile. And that’s why they’re trying to do the paper stuff. And they’re trying.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mark Zuckerberg is nothing if not a student of tech industry history, and he’s trying not to find himself in
⏹️ ▶️ John the same situation. Lots of other successful tech companies have been in. He wants to find whatever the next big thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is and get there before everyone else does. And when you’ve got a lot of money,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re in sort of this fat part of the growth curve and doing very well, that is the time to try to find out whatever the next
⏹️ ▶️ John big thing is going to be. Maybe it’s not this VR thing, but what if it is? It’s a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a safe bet to go find the best VR company, buy them, just in case that turns out to be the next
⏹️ ▶️ John big thing. Because, I mean, they kind of missed out a little bit of that on mobile, like, or actually
⏹️ ▶️ John They made some bad bets about doing HTML style mobile apps or whatever. I think he sees himself
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s kind of a shame that the name of the company is Facebook. It better if it was called like Zucker Co or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like where the fact that it’s so identified with that one product, I think he sees
⏹️ ▶️ John a future where I mean, some people make tweets like, oh, Facebook is now just a glorified holding company. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think he sees a future where Facebook is no longer defined by the product that we currently know as Facebook,
⏹️ ▶️ John but is merely like a big technology company right up there with Amazon, Apple, Google, and all these other companies
⏹️ ▶️ John that like he’s trying to make sure that he’s not blindsided by
⏹️ ▶️ John something. He’s trying to, you know, sort of not be surprised by the future because he’ll be inventing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s something you can afford to do when you have a lot of money. And I think it’s a reasonable bet because
⏹️ ▶️ John if this tech works and shrinks and becomes really good, it like it has attractive, it
⏹️ ▶️ John is attractive in ways to regular people. People are like, oh, no one’s gonna, no regular person is going to put on the big giant headset even to play
⏹️ ▶️ John a game, let alone regular people who are going to like, you know, talk to their grandma. But, you know, accelerate this
⏹️ ▶️ John forward 25 years. Who knows how big that headset will be? Who knows, like, how attractive it will be for
⏹️ ▶️ John people? If he is in control of that technology
⏹️ ▶️ John evolution because he’s got the best people in the world doing VR, and he very well may have
⏹️ ▶️ John them now, that sets Facebook up to not be irrelevant Once Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John itself, as we currently know, it starts to become irrelevant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe Facebook really just wants to own any way to, to simulate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interacting with people without actually having to interact with people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very well could be. I don’t know. I have some thoughts on this, but, uh, before I get to the, do you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell us about something else that’s really fun?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Igloo is an intranet you will actually like. Now, most people think of intranets as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old, stale, terrible places that the corporate overlords make you go to when you just want to use Dropbox or WordPress
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something that actually works for me from, you know, the real world out here that helps you get your work done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Igloo brings the ease of use and familiarity from consumer software into your corporate environment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by using familiar apps like shared calendars, Twitter like microblogs, file sharing, and more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every piece of content can be social with comments and like buttons, and each team in your company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can configure their own workspace within your Igloo. all great for users. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if you’re in charge of it? Well, igloo is very it friendly. They handle the security, the hosting and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco management for you. They are sock to its SoC to it. It’s probably a business thing you guys know about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business. Is that a business thing? No idea. Well, anyway, they’re sock to type two compliant. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they host data securely in sock to type one enterprise facilities in Canada on their own servers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have for 256 bit SSL. This is see now I actually know about this. All right, back to English. 256 bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSL backups disaster recovery, single tenant and shared environments integration with many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco authentication and sync systems including SAML, back to you, SAML services and LDAP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more. Igloo can even work with HIPAA compliant organizations, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John HIPAA, you don’t have to say HIPAA, just say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HIPAA. I feel like I should spend more time on a double A. You can customize everything inside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your Igloo with the ability to add CSS and JavaScript globally across one team or even on a single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco page. Very customizable. You can see all this on the Igloo website. It’s actually built
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their platform. Go to igloosoftware.com slash, ready for this, Casey!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright! igloosoftware.com slash Casey. They made a funny landing page about why SharePoint
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks and why Igloo is so much better. They’ve been a long-time friend of us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, my site, this show, everything, so check them out. igloosoftware.com slash Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to Igloo for sponsoring our show once again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is all about, the very top headline is challenged by SharePoint. And as someone who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been paid or was, I haven’t done it in a while now, who has paid for a long time to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make SharePoint intranets for companies. And I did a build actually, it was either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier this year or last year that I did think went well because it was a very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey straightforward build. But my prior job, I did a lot of SharePoint builds that were terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Igloo certainly looks a lot better for almost every particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use you can think of. So thank you very much guys. And for the special Casey landing page, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So I said right before the break that I had a couple of thoughts on this. And really I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I have a thought about Kickstarter, which maybe we’ll get to, maybe we won’t, but about Oculus and Facebook.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I almost feel like Facebook, the business, the website
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the ad sales are really just subsidizing doing all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crap Mark wants to do. And I think you were kind of getting to that, John, in that Facebook is getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark Zuckerberg all this money and the company all this money so that they can go out and just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goof off and try different things. And so if that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really is the case, that doesn’t in and of itself lead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to believe that they’re going to ruin it with ads and just generally make it suck.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With that said, remind me of this in five years or whatever when Oculus is full of ads and terrible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t know that there is a straight line from today directly into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ads or I don’t think that it’s guaranteed anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they’re not goofing off. There is a theme to what they’re doing. They’re trying to do social
⏹️ ▶️ John interactions like Marco sarcastically said before, interactions when you’re not actually there with the
⏹️ ▶️ John people. Because that’s what Facebook, the product, the website is more or less about. And VR,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it becomes a viable technology, is well suited to that application, to
⏹️ ▶️ John telepresence or whatever you want to call it, where you are not with somebody, but make it seem as as close
⏹️ ▶️ John to actually being with them as possible. And this could be the beginning of a technology that has applications.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there is a theme to what they’re doing. Like Instagram, WhatsApp, those are all social things. It’s how people communicate and share
⏹️ ▶️ John things with each other across great distances. So I think there definitely is a theme. And I think it’s not kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like Google self-driving cars, kind of like pie in the sky nerd stuff. You could
⏹️ ▶️ John draw a dotted line around this all and say potentially transformative social technologies, either
⏹️ ▶️ John current transformative ones, like WhatsApp with a bazillion users and everything, or Facebook, which of course, where people use to
⏹️ ▶️ John share pictures of their kids and talk to each other, and then future things as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think it makes some sense in that respect, and I don’t think they’re just goofing off, but
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that’s the question, is like the doomsday scenario is lots of people have had
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of graphics of this. I think it was a Simpsons episode where they showed Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John of the future, where, no, it was Farmville. It was like Farmville VR, where a bunch of people with VR headsets and hedge
⏹️ ▶️ John clippers in their hands. And then there was the Oatmeal comic showing Facebook VR from a
⏹️ ▶️ John couple of years ago as well. And I don’t think that that’s what they’re going to do immediately either. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John a VR way to go through your Facebook timeline and post things to your wall. No, I don’t see that at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s, I think that wasn’t their pitch. Like here’s a couple of quotes I grabbed from Palmer Lucky, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I think is his real name and a pretty good name for someone whose company just got bought for $2 billion.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s what they think they’re getting out of this deal with Facebook. He listed three items. This
⏹️ ▶️ John was on his Reddit thing, responding to people on Reddit. He says, one, we can make custom hardware and not rely
⏹️ ▶️ John on the scraps of the mobile phone industry. So, basically, their Oculus Rift that they currently made was like
⏹️ ▶️ John they would buy some screens that were intended for cell phones, and they would put them in a case that they designed and put
⏹️ ▶️ John some chips in there and try to wire it together. They couldn’t do what Apple does, which is actually make custom hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s just so expensive they didn’t have the money. 2.5 billion dollars is how much Apple probably spends
⏹️ ▶️ John figuring out how to make the I’m not gonna say lightning connector were lightning here probably costs
⏹️ ▶️ John way more than 2.5 million and develop. So anyway, custom hardware is really expensive. And now through
⏹️ ▶️ John his Facebook promising them. Hey, we’ve got tons of money now, you can do real hardware development number two. We
⏹️ ▶️ John can afford to hire everyone, or need the best people that fit into our culture of excellence in all aspects. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can afford to hire previously. Their big higher was John Carmack. I assumed
⏹️ ▶️ John he was hired with the knowledge that they were going to sell the company and I’m assuming he got a big piece of That because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how you get John Carmack to come work for you. No name company you tell them We may be a no-name company But what we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing is really cool and we’re gonna be bought by Facebook soon and it’s gonna be a lot of money and
⏹️ ▶️ John again Not the jerk Carmack needs the money. I think he was attracted by the technology But I’m sure that didn’t hurt and I’m sure he got a piece of it
⏹️ ▶️ John And number three is we can make huge investments in content more news soon What that translates
⏹️ ▶️ John to me is they’re trying to get big game developers on there So like it’s half-life 3 gonna come to the
⏹️ ▶️ John Oculus rift or whatever and they throw a bunch of money at valve who by the way is also working on VR stuff So maybe there’s some partnership
⏹️ ▶️ John there But basically if you want to make this a viable gaming platform, you got to have the games How do you get the games
⏹️ ▶️ John you throw money at game developers more or less? So I’m assuming that’s that’s what they mean
⏹️ ▶️ John And he also added comments of like someone asking about you know What about selling to like Microsoft and Apple and he says
⏹️ ▶️ John why we want to sell to someone like Microsoft or Apple so they can Tear our company apart and use the pieces to build their own vision of virtual
⏹️ ▶️ John reality one that fits whatever current strategy They have not a chance So he’s saying that if Apple had bought them all they’d
⏹️ ▶️ John be doing is say we just want your tech or your patents and forget About this product you were making we’re gonna use it to do like the next
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the hell we’re gonna do Like we don’t we’re not interested in your product We just want your tech or Microsoft like
⏹️ ▶️ John oh we’re just gonna make this an Xbox accessory and forget about what you’ve made and And the impression
⏹️ ▶️ John of the company is that Facebook is going to let them essentially do exactly what they were planning to do along exactly the
⏹️ ▶️ John same schedule, just now the timeline is accelerated, now the price of the product is lower because they
⏹️ ▶️ John can subsidize it with Facebook’s big bank role, they can do custom hardware. They think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John basically, we’re going to do exactly what we were going to do before but better. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John may actually be the case for the first few years anyway, until Facebook sees where this goes. That’s the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with these acquisitions. agreed acquisitions and they say all these things like, oh, don’t worry,
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing will change. They told us everything’s going to be the same. And I think they really believe it. And I think they really were
⏹️ ▶️ John told those things. But like what no one wants to dwell on is like once you are no longer in control of your own company,
⏹️ ▶️ John once the buck no longer stops with you, eventually several years down the line, there’s going to be a difference of opinion and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to get overruled and you’re going to, I mean, I know you know this intellectually that you’re not in charge anymore, but at a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John point it’s going to come home. Oh, I’m not in charge of quote unquote my company anymore. Someone else is.
⏹️ ▶️ John They want us to do whatever. And then, you know, that’s when founders leave. Their shares have vested. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John disgruntled. They leave on so-so terms. And like, maybe they’re fine with it. But like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the honeymoon period where everybody thinks it’s going to be a win-win-win. They think we’re going to get to do exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ John we always wanted to do, and we’ll get to do it better. And maybe they really will. But at some point down the line,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s going to be a difference of opinion. And that’s probably where they’re going to part ways. So I don’t want to be pessimistic
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. But I’m actually more optimistic than I think most nerds about the situation and that
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this does give Oculus some breathing room to try to do a good job with this
⏹️ ▶️ John tech. I just wonder, after a couple years of this, if they have not hit it
⏹️ ▶️ John off in the gaming space and not hit it off in like the world of social, how long will
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook keep funneling money into this in the hopes that it will turn into something big for them?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Did it take a long time for AOL to ruin Winamp when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they bought because they bought all of Nullsoft is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean that was a special case I think because Justin what’s his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name? Frankel something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, right yeah He I mean AOL was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just dumb to even buy him because he very much like could not possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work for some dumb big corporation like he does not have the personality for that at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with quite comical results. Gotta give the guy credit. He
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually got an impressive amount of subterfuge done while he was there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know I think that I don’t think that’s a great example but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean Oculus is too young for Facebook to necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ruin it. I think the big question is what will they do with it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, here’s another quote from Palmer Luckey from an article. This was posted as an image with no attribution
⏹️ ▶️ John by Jeff Atwood. So I don’t know where this came from, but this is a quote when he was asked about selling Oculus. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming this was, you know, many months ago, perhaps more than a year ago. He says, we want to do things our
⏹️ ▶️ John way. There are certainly people who are interested, but we have a vision for our consumer product and we We know that we’re going to be able to pull it off.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t want to be assimilated into someone who’s going to have us working on their own product or their own vision for VR.
⏹️ ▶️ John We want to be able to deliver our own vision of what VR is.” And so the interviewer says, so even a company
⏹️ ▶️ John like Amazon made a huge offer, it wouldn’t matter? And I hear quoting Palmer again, nobody can say it doesn’t matter. Everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John has a number. But I don’t think there’s a reasonable number that would make me say, you know, I was going to change the world with VR
⏹️ ▶️ John and try to change humanity forever, but here’s a number. Well, apparently there was a number, and
⏹️ ▶️ John number was two billion. I mean, that’s kind of unfair. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John these are quotes from him. I don’t slam him for this, because I think everybody does have numbers, but really,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is consistent with what he’s currently saying now, which is that he didn’t want to do someone else’s
⏹️ ▶️ John vision of VR. He wanted to do his vision, and Facebook came to him with a big number and
⏹️ ▶️ John said, with this big number, you get to do your vision of VR. We don’t want to take it and make it
⏹️ ▶️ John into some other product or just subsume your tech into some existing thing. thing even like you know absorbing your tech
⏹️ ▶️ John into like the next Xbox thing they have their vision of VR they want to pull off and Facebook came to them apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John and said you can do your vision we will help you do it we believe in it too and
⏹️ ▶️ John so I think like people pulling us out it’s like to show that he was hypocritical or whatever but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all I don’t begrudge people selling out I don’t feel bad about that at all because I know I would sell it in a second but
⏹️ ▶️ John like he’s getting he’s getting to do his vision of VR and That’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ John think is important like if you look at John Carmack tweets as well We’re like what is their vision of VR is it just that you play cool games on it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Both this guy both Palmer and Carmack both seem to have What I’m you know
⏹️ ▶️ John reading between the lines is that their vision of VR is like you know Casey’s favorite book ready player one
⏹️ ▶️ John You know or snow crash or anything like all the futuristic scenarios like you just jack into the matrix
⏹️ ▶️ John You know whatever like any sort of 90s bad like the original dream of VR that you’re gonna be in this
⏹️ ▶️ John virtual world And it would be like you were really there and there will be this other world It’s like second life, but you know
⏹️ ▶️ John How many times have we taken runs at this like I think the closest we’ve come is probably something like World of Warcraft Which is not like VR
⏹️ ▶️ John at all, but is very absorbing I think that’s their vision of VR like the potential
⏹️ ▶️ John the future potential of VR and Carmack had said like Facebook is good at scaling and if we’re gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ John VR right it’s gonna require scaling He’s not talking about oh if we’re gonna do VR right meaning if we’re gonna make a
⏹️ ▶️ John really cool first-person shooter in VR Scaling, he means like the entire world in like a
⏹️ ▶️ John virtual world all wearing a headset, so interacting or whatever. That appears to be their vision, and I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure if that’s a good vision or if that’s feasible vision or if that
⏹️ ▶️ John or if they’re just all kidding themselves. And it’s clear that right now they’re concentrating on just making good games, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I think is a good idea. But if you look at it from that perspective, it kind of starts to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit of sense, like if you like like that tweet that Casey actually got the reference in. If you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to make the actual real world equivalent of Oasis from Ready Player One,
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook plus Oculus makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking. I don’t know. I’m not sure that’s the future,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m not sure that I really like the idea of a Ready Player One
⏹️ ▶️ Casey style future, but it does make sense. You’re absolutely right. I think you hit the nail on the head a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moment ago when you said it’s not really mutually exclusive to think for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Palmer to say, hey, we have a number and then to sell to Facebook. I think what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he was referring to, we have a number of like, a, you know, $100 billion or whatever, if Apple were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to buy us, but he genuinely seems to believe that him being his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company being bought for 2 billion is just a bonus. It’s icing on the cake for the fact that he can still do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what he’s always planned to do. So they’re not mutually exclusive in his mind. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you got that exactly right. I don’t know. I don’t, As much as I loved Ready Player One, and as much as I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you didn’t, I don’t think I want that for our future. But maybe I’m just being an old man.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also, going back a step, John, you used the word vision a lot in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few minutes, and talking about the vision they have for this product. Vision,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, is overrated and overestimated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that I think the public thinks that people have a lot more of a vision in place,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a predetermined vision in place, than they really do. And, you know, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a product like this, it’s pretty much paving new ground.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s going off in this direction that has never worked before and doing it with much newer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technology and you know much more advanced stuff than has ever been tried before. This is the kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing like most like most products and services where there’s somebody at the top who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appears to have a vision. This is the kind of thing where the vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably stretches out for the next six months or you know maybe 12 months at the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the person might might have this dream of future things where somehow in five years or in ten years this is where it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be but in reality as a product goes on you’re never going to to get there, they’re going to change their vision, they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to edit, they’re going to adapt over time, you know, they’re going to adapt to shifting market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forces, you know, as they try things they’re going to realize, oh, this actually doesn’t work well, but this other thing does,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so let’s do this other thing instead. Like, everything is going to be edited and shifted over time and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adjusted based on where things are going and how things have gone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them so far. And so you might think in theory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they have this vision and Facebook’s not going interfere with it, but the reality is being owned by Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will inherently interfere with it because their vision is going to be adjusted over time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a year, when they have to make some little decision, the fact that they are owned by Facebook will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on some level inform that decision. And so the vision, whatever visions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was set out, you know, by some guy having visions, whatever was set out ahead of time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is malleable and not guaranteed, and the acquisition will definitely change that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so what Oculus will become and what they will do and the products they will make and all the decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will make will definitely be influenced by this and some of those will be for the better and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of them won’t be but you know that there isn’t like people say Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jobs is this great visionary and the fact is Steve Jobs was a really great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco editor and a really and he had very good sensibilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of where things were going soon. But even his ideas for where things would be like in 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years were not that frequently expressed, first of all, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not usually that spot on, I bet. He adjusted as he went.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He saw opportunities and took them. He didn’t have all of his products planned out 10 years ahead
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s part of the seduction of acquiring a company, is that the acquirer always has to convince the founder
⏹️ ▶️ John of the small startup that they share their vision. And I think it’s, the difficulty
⏹️ ▶️ John comes in that Facebook will convince them that they share the vision, but Facebook shares the vision on
⏹️ ▶️ John a much shorter time scale. Like, well, let’s see if this works out. Whereas the founders of Oculus
⏹️ ▶️ John believe in this vision, like as in like a lifetime, they are never going to give it up. So if Facebook decides
⏹️ ▶️ John to sort of pivot, as they say in current parlance, or, you know, edit the vision,
⏹️ ▶️ John then they’re going to come in conflict with the founders. to be like, no, no, we still have the original vision. What do you mean? And it’s like, yeah, well, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re your bosses now. So tough luck. So that’s what I was getting at before that it’s gonna come through ahead in a few years if things don’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John out. But, and in the small picture, it is important to like, it’s great to have a vision, but like, what are you making
⏹️ ▶️ John now? Are you making, are you gonna make a product that people like? And do you have a way to make money from it
⏹️ ▶️ John or to make money from something else until it can come into something that makes money? So you need to concentrate on that because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just have this vision, you’re not gonna get there. But the case of Steve Jobs,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think he’s a great example because he had a vision from the time he was,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like 20 years old, uh, how computing
⏹️ ▶️ John should be. And it would not be, uh, you know, it took him
⏹️ ▶️ John like 30 years to get to that vision. Uh, and along the way he tried
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of different directions. He tried the Mac, he tried Next. did, you know, the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the, the laptops and the iPods and the iPhones. And like, I would say
⏹️ ▶️ John that the iPad is essentially the culmination of his vision of what computing should be like. If you go back to like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think he gave a speech to some computer user group in like 1983 that you can find an audio version
⏹️ ▶️ John of and just go and listen to it. And you’re like, he’s describing the iPad, like in vague terms,
⏹️ ▶️ John not specifically, Oh, it’s going to be this, that, the other thing, like, you know, but the, the The vision that computing should be
⏹️ ▶️ John simple and not have lots of fidgety bits and not have a lot of indirection
⏹️ ▶️ John and be portable and wireless and all kind of sci-fi fantasy things but that vision sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John all wishy-washy and it’s like, how does that help you make the Mac? Well, it doesn’t. How does that help you make the next? Well, it doesn’t really, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But maintaining that vision over his entire life was kind of his guiding force,
⏹️ ▶️ John led him in the direction of, if I’m not sure where I want to go, if you zoom back
⏹️ ▶️ John on his entire life and career, you can see it as like
⏹️ ▶️ John an entire lifetime spent trying to get to this ideal and finding lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John dead ends along the way and lots of fruitful things and lots of distractions, but just never letting go of that
⏹️ ▶️ John idea that this, you know, that essentially the iPad is what computing should be like, you know, actually, he probably thought
⏹️ ▶️ John it should be even simpler and even cheaper, cheaper and even lighter, but you know, he didn’t live long enough to see it happening. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that being your guiding principle, not being married to some specific idea, like it’s got to be an earpiece or it’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John to be hell even a VR headset or something but a broad vision of where you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to go really helps you guide you as you’re going along these steps
⏹️ ▶️ John of like oh we have to adjust oh the situation has changed and the realities have changed like that’s all well and good and you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that but if you don’t have like an overall vision you will find yourself going off into one of those tangents and then
⏹️ ▶️ John continuing that direction like plowing forward in that direction forgetting about what your original vision of and you will find
⏹️ ▶️ John out find yourself very far away from where you were where you intended to go because you
⏹️ ▶️ John just found a fruitful Avenue another direction and I think I’m not sure what Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the future
⏹️ ▶️ John is but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t agree with the the oculus guys and yeah that
⏹️ ▶️ John that will probably come to a head but I do think that the oculus that their vision like having vision
⏹️ ▶️ John and having a clear one is an important thing if you ever want to get there like
⏹️ ▶️ John over the course of a 30-year career despite all the different twists and turns you take.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think Zuckerberg has a vision beyond today? If you look at what Facebook is doing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I mean, Zuckerberg’s a really, really sharp guy. Even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t use Facebook and I don’t really care for what it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t deny that Zuckerberg is a genius in so many ways, and especially astute
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the business of technology and being, you know, the business that he’s in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think he knows what’s next? Because it seems like Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has maybe plateaued in a way that, and again because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t use it regularly, it’s hard for me to really say this authoritatively, but it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like he had a vision for where it was roughly two or three years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He got there and then it’s been ever since then it’s been like well now what and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of looking around like well I guess I could try this or this or this but it seems it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he he was really focused and driven to achieve what it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two years ago and has not had a clear idea of what to do since then and that’s why we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some weird experiments and weird moves from them since then and maybe that’s what some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these recent acquisitions are about because he is you know as trying to find out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s gonna to be next because what Facebook is right now seems like it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John I think he’s a perfect example of a second generation tech mogul, like not
⏹️ ▶️ John living generation, but second crop tech mogul. And again, another Ready Player One analogy is the character,
⏹️ ▶️ John the protagonist in Ready Player One didn’t live through the 80s, but he’s a student of 80s culture. And so he’s able to interact
⏹️ ▶️ John with that. But anyway, Zuckerberg, I think, looks at gates and jobs. And
⏹️ ▶️ John even in some respects, the founders of Google, they’re a little bit in the second generation as well. Like the IBM
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple and all those things as like kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s his version of history. Like I want to be like those guys, but smarter. So let me look at what all the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John they did. And when I start my company, I’m not going to make the same mistakes. And so we started out very early, not making the
⏹️ ▶️ John mistake, arguably, that Oculus has made or whatever, of not selling your company. Yahoo offered him billions. I think Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John offered him billions. He had billions of dollars thrown in his face so many times, and every
⏹️ ▶️ John time he turned it down, the number was bigger. People would say, I can’t believe this kid has turned down all this money. What a fool.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s going to be screwed. But he knew that step one, if you want to be a big boy in the tech industry,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t sell your company to somebody. Even in Steve Jobs’ case, don’t bring in a CEO who
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to run the company for you or whatever. Keep control. Don’t sell out. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like a prerequisite. If you sell out, you’re never going to be a footnote. You’re never going to be the big guy.
⏹️ ▶️ John He did that early on. And then now, make a great product. Make something that people want. Become
⏹️ ▶️ John worldwide. That’s the Facebook that we know of. And now he’s at the phase of, OK, now
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to make the other mistake people make, which is Microsoft. Once you get a personal computer on every desk
⏹️ ▶️ John running a Microsoft software, then what do you do? You’re like the dog who caught the car. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John paralyze yourself. put all your eggs behind in one basket,
⏹️ ▶️ John branch out, figure out what’s next and get there before everybody else. Uh, and if you make mistakes, correct them quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so he’s going off the playbook, the failed playbook of everyone who’s come before him that he, I assume looks up to and admires
⏹️ ▶️ John and trying to be smarter about it, which is total, a total nerd move, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John use, use your brain power to try to not make the mistakes that the people you admire had made. And in some ways it reminds
⏹️ ▶️ John me of Pixar, the whole idea that like the creative process, we can figure out what works and what doesn’t and come
⏹️ ▶️ John up with a system as unorthodox as it might be, which is truly a nerd’s way to foster creativity,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, but you know, not relying on tradition and convention and, and
⏹️ ▶️ John egos and not worrying about who has power, whatever, just concentrating on like, what works?
⏹️ ▶️ John What kind of what can we measure? What can we do that that actually makes good products? And
⏹️ ▶️ John if something doesn’t work, change it. That I think is his mo, I think his lack of vision, as far
⏹️ ▶️ John as I can tell, I don’t know what his personal vision is other than to like it’s a little bit like Bill Gates like
⏹️ ▶️ John be the victor in the technology world like to be the biggest one that is not a some
⏹️ ▶️ John people wouldn’t call that an admirable vision but it’s like a I don’t know it’s not it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not Steve Jobs’s vision where he wanted to like do something for humanity and change the world I don’t know what Zuckerberg’s vision
⏹️ ▶️ John is I think it would help if he had one but right now he’s doing better than a lot of the people who came in the generations before him merely
⏹️ ▶️ John because he gets to learn from all their mistakes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. What’s, uh, what else is cool these days? Other than Oculus?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Help Spot. Casey, are you still using email clients for customer support?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, sure. Well, did you know you are probably losing track of important tickets,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you’re trying to use Mark is Unread as an organizational tool or the flags, you know, and you’re probably still IMing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your coworkers to see who’s working on what? This is a mess. It’s time to get organized.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help desk apps try to be all things to all people. Help spot on the other hand is focused. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deals only with customer inquiries and self service knowledge bases. So there’s no asset management,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no password resetting, no unnecessary features to get in your way or require any kind of complex integration work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your systems. Now help desk software is usually really expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of them are around $600 per user per year, for instance, help spot is just 299
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per user one time, and you own it for life. That’s not per month. not per year. $2.99
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per user, one time. There’s no locking with HelpSpot. You can download it and host it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yourself, or you can have it hosted for you. Either way, you always have access to the database to directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco query or take elsewhere. And HelpSpot has been around for a long time. This isn’t just some new startup that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be bought by Facebook for $2 billion next year and leave you stranded. It’s been available for nearly a decade.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been adopted by thousands of companies and organizations. Customers from single-person startups to Fortune 500
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies, use HelpSpot to manage your support teams. So you can start a free trial today at helpspot.com.atp.
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⏹️ ▶️ John I got one more thing from the chat room on Oculus. Someone posted a while back in the chat room a quote
⏹️ ▶️ John that John Carmack made on Slashdot in 1999 that I actually remember reading in 1999 and not because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming of where this person saw it that a lot of people are retweeting it or digging it up today. And the quote was,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was in one of his interviews on Slashdot, making snow crash into a reality feels like a sort of moral
⏹️ ▶️ John imperative to a lot of programmers, but the efforts that have been made so far leave a lot to be desired. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John this was in 1999, but his description of that making Snow Crash real is a moral
⏹️ ▶️ John imperative to a lot of programmers, I’m assuming meaning himself, says all you need to know about like why is John Cromack joining
⏹️ ▶️ John this company. I mean, if you think back to like what Quake was supposed to be before it actually became a product, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that it was going to be like this virtual world and more like an RPG and trading items with people
⏹️ ▶️ John until it just became a first-person shooter, but then Quake World where you could connect to people over the internet. His
⏹️ ▶️ John entire career has been making steps in that direction like that We wouldn’t have this VR stuff if we didn’t have all
⏹️ ▶️ John the 3d stuff that he pioneered So it makes perfect sense to me. I think I can see what CarMax
⏹️ ▶️ John vision is. He lays it out more or less It’s like he he read snow crash. He said yes, I want to go to there
⏹️ ▶️ John and he’s been working towards that ever since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll see what happens A lot of people have asked about this speaking of Facebook this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Facebook hack language language extension thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, Marco, you wrote a post about it, but I didn’t know if you had any other commentary you may want to share,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you could summarize, you know, what your thoughts are on all this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I don’t have a lot more to say. I think it’s really interesting. So as a quick overview,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hack is Facebook’s, basically, it’s a modification, an addition to the PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco language. So they’ve taken PHP and they, a couple years ago, they made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this hip-hop compiler that would compile PHP to C++
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way it can be compiled to binary and be way faster and they’ve actually replaced that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with something called HHVM for hip-hop VM and that was about a year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago they released that and it’s it’s basically a super high performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PHP JIT compiler runtime so it’s and PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has had like optimizing caching bytecode compilers before and it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes with one but HipHop is way faster it’s like two to ten times faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and useless memory and everything else so it’s it’s pretty substantial so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’ve done now is they’ve taken this HHVM project and they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they said well now that we’ve re-implemented all of PHP in a faster way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s start customizing it more to our tastes so So they’ve added things to the language.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most substantially they added optional static typing and type hinting, which is really, really great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s one thing that I would love to have that. So hack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically PHP plus some stuff, including most significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco static typing optionally. So it’s very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting. I think, you know, PHP has always been a language where,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I said in my post, it has not been stewarded well. It never was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it’s famously with that awesome article about PHP being a fractal of bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design, we’ll link to that in the show notes, I love that article so much. It is not a well-designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco language. The people who make the decisions about what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should go into it and the syntax and what it should be called, what method should be called, and everything. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have made a lot of bad decisions over the years. But it is an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eminently practical language, and that’s why I use it. I like it a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t love it. And I think, you know, I got a lot of crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for saying in the article, PHP is not a great language, but it is a good language.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I didn’t get a lot of crap from people who I know to be experienced programmers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m not saying that everyone who said crap to me about that is a noob
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything, but I think if you can look at the language you’re using, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is actually a good way to bring you guys into this discussion so it’s not just me talking to nobody for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are there any programming languages that you know well enough to say are great?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I’d say C sharp is great. I’d say I have very similar opinions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you do of PHP and that I think it’s really, really good. I think it’s been used to write some real,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real crap, but I think it’s extremely powerful and can be bent to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost anything. But you know, that that flexibility comes with some costs. I don’t know. What do you think, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Svazic C probably qualifies as a great language, to do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John in particular. So just because now we’re so far away from it’s like, it’s time of usefulness that
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it has only a few warts on it and
⏹️ ▶️ John what it was designed to do, it does really well without getting in your way.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it’s probably as close as I could find to a language that’s great. Because like, if you think of like, what’s awkward and weird about C? You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna say, oh, it’s got pointers. Well, yes, like that’s the whole point. Like, yeah, the level of language exists that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s right. But like, and maybe you don’t wanna use it to make like a modern program, but for what it
⏹️ ▶️ John does, it’s pretty good. Like Go maybe, I haven’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m hesitant to say Go because Go is kind of like C done right, but now we’re in a different age and maybe Go is
⏹️ ▶️ John like a little bit too low level to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a great language. I haven’t used it enough to say, but it’s kind of like C with the bad thing shaved off, but then they added a bunch of other stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John too. But maybe something in that thing. the more modern languages, like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John true of any programming language, the more you know about it, the more you see all the warts and all the horrible things about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Except for PHP, where you don’t have to know it that well to see all the warts, because it’s covered in warts. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is all wart. But yeah, but, you know, like, just think of anybody, like, the more
⏹️ ▶️ John you know a language, the more you just are disgusted by it. Because you just, if you use it for real and become an expert
⏹️ ▶️ John in it, you’ll know where all the bodies are buried and you’ll just feel bad about it. But, you know, it’s difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John anything that’s that is in widespread use and grows quickly and
⏹️ ▶️ John You know even in the best case scenario is going to eventually accumulate cruft and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know PHP and c++ for example start out with a hell of a lot of cruft from the beginning and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right I mean you know PHP started out as a pretty terrible language and and became a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco language over time But but I think you’re exactly right John like that my point in saying this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that I feel like when you learn a new language you go through these stages. First, it’s unfamiliar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you and generally the the your opinion of the language at that point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tends to be extreme. Either this is terrible because you’re being forced to use it for something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either you know through work or you have to you know use a certain language to be on a certain platform or whatever else. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know we’ve had you know when I when I first looked at Objective-C I thought well this is a ridiculous language. There’s brackets all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the place. What the hell are they doing with these method names? What is that why are those parentheses there and what’s the plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do and all the sort of crap of like why can’t they just use words like everyone else like there you know it was you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this and it’s unfamiliar to you and so if you’re being forced or coerced to use it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some other reason that’s usually you look at it and say this is terrible if you’re learning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it because it’s it’s the new cool thing and you really want to learn it you might have the opposite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extreme reaction of everything is awesome oh my god this is great this is the totally way forward this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be amazing and then as you learn more of the language, as you have more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience with it, your opinion tends to, you know, move towards the middle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some way. Like you start to go, okay, now, you know, I’m getting more familiar with it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not as bad as I thought or it’s not as good as I thought and you start seeing, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here are the things that are decent with this and I think I’m getting the hang of it and a lot of times your opinions of the language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shortcomings at that point are actually your shortcomings and knowing it because you like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might not think it has a good way to do X because you don’t know that you don’t know a better way to do it but there is a better way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it you just haven’t learned it yet and then as you tend to get more expertise in a language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you become an expert in it and really get a lot of experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think the the wisdom that you reach at that point usually is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay this is actually a pretty good language, like I can see what they were going for. I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why things are done the way they’re done. I see, oh, well, you know, here’s this cool new way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this thing that I didn’t know about before. And all the code I wrote before this point was crap. Now I’m going to rewrite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that stuff the right way. Because now I know this language much better. This is great. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year after that, you’re still writing this language. And then you start seeing, okay, actually, these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts of the language are really getting in my way. Now. Now I know that this is just a wall here. Like there’s, there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no way past this with this language or there is no better way to do this. This is just a stupid wall because the language is stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so as you get further in knowing a language, you eventually realize that every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco language sucks in some ways. Like I’ve never, I’ve never learned a programming language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well that I thought didn’t suck in some way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although I will say, John, I think I might give C the highest overall rating,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe. But regardless, you know, I think every language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks in some ways. And if you can’t see why the language you’re using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks in certain ways, you’re probably in that early stage of it, where it’s still very new and novel,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe you haven’t used it enough to really run into some of the walls. Or maybe just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the way you’ve used it just hasn’t been expansive enough in the grand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scheme of things to really run into certain types of problems that everyone else is running into. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similarly, it’s hard to say any language is bad. In the same way that it’s hard to say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any language is particularly great, it’s hard to say any language is particularly bad. Because usually the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason why people say a language is bad is because of faults that are not the languages.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s because of bad code they’ve seen, bad programmers they’ve interacted with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or bad code they’ve found online, or a bad situation that they had to write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that language in, or bad code base they had to work on written in that language.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco None of those things necessarily are because of the language. They’re, you know, often they’re because of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people you were working with or the way the language was used by a novice and there’s people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco writing bad code in every language. And so I feel like a lot of the criticism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about PHP or about any, you know, you could tell the same things about Visual Basic. Visual Basic back in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the day, you had another language I knew pretty well I know how to pick them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco visual basic back in the day I mean you could say it was a weird language there were a lot of weird things about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but a lot of people got a lot done in that language because it worked pretty well and it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool ever it was you know it was never respected by programmers but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it worked and it wasn’t as bad as most programmers think because they never bothered to to learn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to write well in it and they probably saw a lot of bad VB code. So you know it’s very similar thing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PHP and with any language like you can look at the language and you can say well it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there are some weird edge cases but for the most part the language works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know people build large apps in it all the time if you look there I found some page on Wikipedia that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like the the like what what the biggest websites in the world are built on and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a good quarter of the top 10 or 20 were written in PHP, including Facebook, Wikipedia,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WordPress.com, Tumblr, I think, as far as I still know. So things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of PHP out there being used and Yahoo uses it pretty heavily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s, you know, it’s fine. It’s down to what you write and how you write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And there are certain things like the libraries can help or hurt in certain ways, although there’s nothing stopping you from writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your own libraries or modifying the ones that are there. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this is to say back to Facebook’s hack. The concept of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook taking, like kind of taking control of this branch of PHP, first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with HHVM and now with their own language modifications that they’re calling their own language,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think is an interesting thing. That here was this language that was kind of, you know, managed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with mediocrity taken by this other company they just took it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over like they literally just took it over and PHP is gonna continue but so what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did was reimplement PHP 5.4 now if PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if the real PHP people make PHP 5.6 or PHP 6.0
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in ways that Facebook really doesn’t like or in ways that Facebook thinks are worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if Facebook says you know what HHVM is not going to support that. We’re gonna actually just fork
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the language and just say, alright, we’re not going to maintain parity anymore because that’s stupid. We’re going to differ in these ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It really is kind of a, like, they really are taking control. They’re not just adding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the role of PHP necessarily forever. They have taken some control and they might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then diverge with that control. I think that actually might be better, though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always accept one. So Facebook technically has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better skill than the PHP authors. There’s no question about that. They’re way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at it. Their runtime is way better. Their ideas of where the language should go with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by looking at a hack you can see what they thought the language needed. I think I disagree with some of their changes and I think some of their changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look really weird but ultimately the things they chose to add are mostly pretty good things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if Facebook really does kind of take the language over and and become the dominant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco implementation and the dominant spec of the language that’s great until
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook decides it no longer is interested and then there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it could be it would reach a weird point where let’s say you write a bunch of hack code let’s say you decide okay you know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this hack thing is pretty cool I want to start using it in my PHP code. Let’s do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s great. The thing’s open source in theory That should work But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Facebook decides in a year or two years or three years Yeah, we’re actually done with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. We’re gonna do something else and it’s not gonna be open source. So never mind That kind of screws people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s that’s my only caution that you know that that could happen here That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides that I think overall this is a good thing Although, there’s no question it will definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fragment the PHP community. That being said, the PHP community largely sucks, so the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fact that it gets fragmented I don’t think is a bad thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you also point out in your blog post that like this is, they’re using this to write stuff on
⏹️ ▶️ John the server side. So it’s not like they have a developer community out there who’s like, for example, Apple, Objective-C,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re, they want people to write apps for the App Store in Objective-C. So they’re sort of maintaining and improving
⏹️ ▶️ John its language on behalf of all these developers. Whereas Facebook is maintaining and improving PHP on behalf of
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook employees who write the Facebook back end. As far as I know, they don’t have any kind of like, here you go, write,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like a development platform for people to write code in Hack that
⏹️ ▶️ John either runs on top of Facebook or runs elsewhere. Is that correct? I know that Facebook has lots of APIs,
⏹️ ▶️ John but as far as I know, they’re like kind of web service type of APIs that you write on top of Facebook and not like
⏹️ ▶️ John write something in Hack and it will run inside Facebook. Maybe I’m wrong about that. But even if that was
⏹️ ▶️ John the case, I think people who have built code on top of Facebook’s platform have been burned in
⏹️ ▶️ John the past because Facebook basically just wants something to run their server-side web
⏹️ ▶️ John application. What they want to be able to write and maintain it efficiently, and that is their
⏹️ ▶️ John sole focus. And so if they change their mind, as they had already, like they used to have HipHop, which was a thing that took PHP, turned
⏹️ ▶️ John it into C++, and then compiled the C++ into this big monster executable. That was their
⏹️ ▶️ John previous approach. this is their current approach. In a few more years, maybe they’ll have another approach. And at that point, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not so much that they will have forked Hack so far, it’s just that they will lose interest in it. Like I think
⏹️ ▶️ John another project that I think it is like Scribe or Thrift, these logging infrastructure thing, which is originally a Facebook product, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they kind of lost interest with it and it languished for a long time. And I think like the open
⏹️ ▶️ John source community, like picked it up and made a alternative or a port or a fork of it or whatever. So it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be that Hack ends up, you know, Facebook decides on whatever the next approach is
⏹️ ▶️ John four or five years, hack is left to sort of die on the vine. And since it’s open source, the open source community
⏹️ ▶️ John grabs it. And that is like PHP seven or something, and hopefully continues to run with it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you hope there’s still a PHP community around to do that in several years, like you hope this doesn’t just like starve everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John out and all there is is hack. And then Facebook loses interest in hack and replaces it with something better. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no one left to maintain hack. What a terrible name that is, by the way. Yo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, definitely. I think if Facebook loses interest in this, if they abandon it, it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think there’s enough people in the PHP community who would like it enough and who would have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time and the skill to maintain it properly. I think if Facebook abandons it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s done. That’s it. Because the official PHP maintainers probably want nothing to do with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They probably are not happy about its existence, because it really is like a big middle finger to them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying, well, your language was bad, so we made our own version of it that’s better.
⏹️ ▶️ John as you pointed out, they probably deserve that middle finger.
⏹️ ▶️ John was their namespace in character for the backslash alone, right? The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backslash? What the heck was that? If anything, deserves a middle finger. I still don’t use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco namespaces for that reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just insane. If you had to pick a worse character, could you think of one without using Unicode? Smiley’s.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, pile of poos. A worse ASCII character. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John there is one. Maybe a non-printing character, I guess. A vertical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, yeah, I don’t think the official PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maintainers, even if they chose to take it over, which I think is very, very unlikely,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that would be a good thing. So yeah, basically, if Facebook gives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up on hack, hack is over. And like you know like I’m choosing to write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my overcast code base now and I’m writing it in PHP and I’m running on an HHVM as of a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days ago and it’s great but I’m hesitant to adopt hack because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when I wrote Instapapers code base it was 2000 it was late 2007 when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I first wrote the beginnings of that and it was still running that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code base to the best of my knowledge until mid 2013 and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know it would have been added on to but it like it had not been rewritten in a new language until mid 2013 and so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that’s that’s a long time and so to have what six years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so to start something now like I do things for not not the long haul you know these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t gonna last 20 years but I do things with the expectation that they’re gonna last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of years at least like you know three to five years sounds reasonable to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so do I think this language is gonna still be healthy and around and maintained
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in three to five years I don’t know I think it’s way too soon to say because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook is using it now but what you know like they’re they’re not I think somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked at it and I think it’s like it’s not being developed in the open it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re having just like code dumps every once in a while So where like they’re developing it internally and they’re just dumping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to the back to the public code base occasionally like every every couple of weeks or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like WebKit? Yeah I think so. So like you know like if Facebook starts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco losing interest in this we’ll just start see like oh they’ll just kind of start slowing down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those code dumps and eventually the version they’re gonna use internally is gonna be so divergent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the from the public version they’ll just kind of stop it’ll stop thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s worth maintaining the public version. And you know, there’s so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plausible, realistic ways where this language could get just kind of withered and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco killed or abandoned over the next few years as Facebook’s interests and needs changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves that I would hesitate to build anything big on it today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What I am interested in is one of the greatest advantages of of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hack and of HipHop is the static type checker. So I would like to write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my code in Hack, but have it compiled down to PHP optionally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that should be pretty easy to do. Because they have an open source compiler
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right there in the world. So in fact, there’s even some command line options that are not yet implemented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on HHVM that make it possibly even easier than that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there was an option for the HHVM runtime to compile hack to PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seamlessly, that would be more interesting, because then you could write your code in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hack and you could either run it in hack on the server or if Facebook decided to be, you know, dicks and kill it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could compile it down to PHP and keep working. Or you could keep it as hack, compile it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to PHP for deployment, but before you deploy, run the static analyzer on your entire code base and have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like a precommit hook. So you could say, all right, I’m going to use all the static type checking and I’m not going to be checking it at run time all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time, but I will check it at compile time or commit time. And so then you will still get a lot of the benefits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those add-ons. Not some of the other add-ons in the language, but, you know, there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are some languages or I mean, sorry, there are some add-ons to the language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that could be very easily removed and stripped out for a PHP compile.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not all of them, but some. that I’m interested in otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m gonna wait and see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week help spot igloo and Warby Parker and we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will see you next week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now the show is over they didn’t even mean to begin because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. It was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into Twitter, And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Syracuse. It’s accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They didn’t mean to. Accidental. Tech
⏹️ ▶️ John Titles? Always on vacation in California. I like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of like that one.
⏹️ ▶️ John See, now Marco gets to experience the bitterness of parents. where
⏹️ ▶️ John you see like we just see mike madison’s photos and yes it does look like he’s always on vacation in national park
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s not carrying like a bouncy seat and a bunch of toys in a diaper bag
⏹️ ▶️ John no he’s not he’s carefree he’s going wherever he wants he’s an adult he doesn’t have to worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about nap time or feeding people or people being cranky or changing poopy diapers
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s always on vacation in Yosemite National Park? I don’t know when he goes to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s this like cult of California and maybe it’s just me like generalizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I see these tech people doing all this stuff but it just seems like California people have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have such like such beautiful climates and such beautiful landscapes and everything’s great especially like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with tech people who are young and again like you know as you said that they don’t have they don’t have kids yet maybe or they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and they’re rich Let’s throw in there. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like it’s like I feel like being on the east coast keeps me a little bit closer to reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even though I live in a suburb of New York City, so of course it’s it’s nothing like reality but it I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think being here has a very different perspective and That part of the problem in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the valley Is is a pretty severe lack of perspective?
⏹️ ▶️ John I? Don’t know. I think it’s the same as anything else They’re just better at Instagram than we are like it make it seem like They
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t always be on vacation and believes or whatever But they make it seem like it was they take a lot of pictures when they go and
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they dole them out over Time so as far as you’re concerned like they’re always in Japan at some noodle place So they’re always
⏹️ ▶️ John in South America somewhere in a jungle or they’re always in Yosemite, but they’re not they go on Vacations
⏹️ ▶️ John they take a thousand pictures and they spread them out over the year I don’t see pictures of them sitting in front of their
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Pro for 50 hours a week for most of the year, which I assume is how they spend
⏹️ ▶️ John most of their time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, I do like always on vacation in California. And I might have mentioned this on the show, but both my younger brothers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey live in California now, one outside or in San Diego, one outside LA.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now when I talk to them on the phone, generally speaking, every single time I talk to either of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my brothers on the phone, one of them makes a reference to how the West Coast is the best coast and I just want to kill
⏹️ ▶️ John Just wait until the earthquakes and the fires come Casey and the drought and the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco else they have over there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All the Google buses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Bye everyone live listeners. You’ve been an amazing audience. Thank you so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for coming out here tonight. Woo. Go city name.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t ever go see movies in the theater do you Marco? Marco, oh, come on. What are you kidding? That’s what I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, one of us, I don’t remember who it was I don’t think it was me said everything is awesome and that begs for you to cut
⏹️ ▶️ John I know I almost made the comment, but I figured you guys wouldn’t get that reference I guess casey would have casey’s the new
⏹️ ▶️ John mr. Reference getter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah about that two for two today Well, maybe actually the books that were not ready player one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you were talking about. No
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve never heard of snow. Oh, man Just I assumed I didn’t even I didn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John the joke about you guys that i’m like Like, Marco, Snow Crash? Nothing?
⏹️ ▶️ John You cannot put this in the show. You’ll get so much crazy hate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, the point is, there’s this song Marco called Everything is Awesome, and it’s in the Lego movie,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s like ridiculously over the top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco deliberately.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, wait, wait, wait. There’s actually a Lego movie? What a joke.