81: You Left Your Money in a Bank
05 Sep 2014Anand goes to Apple, celebrity photo theft and iCloud security, event predictions, women in gaming, Atwood Markdown, and the button-fly agenda.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- TiVo service charges and OTA channels
- Frayed Lightning Cables on Tumblr
- Google allegedly dropped out of buying Twitch
- Anand Shimpi retires from AnandTech to work for Apple
- Hackers steal photos from celebrities, apparently by phishing their iCloud accounts or answering security questions
- Next week's Apple event
- Recent attacks of women in gaming
- "Common Markdown", née "Standard Markdown"
- That word for when "I know that you know that I know…" and so on that John couldn't remember: Yomi
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t don’t don’t ask the question if you’re not looking at the file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s start with some follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To begin we have some follow-up about the Tevo OTA or OTA if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco It’s OTA my apologies
⏹️ ▶️ John the OTA. Yes feedback was from Joseph Last week we talked about who
⏹️ ▶️ John the OTA might be good for I said, you know get it try it out if you don’t like it, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John stop paying your $15 a month. Joseph points out that TVOs require a one-year commitment
⏹️ ▶️ John of service and there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee in which you can cancel and return it, but you can’t keep
⏹️ ▶️ John it for a couple months to see if you like it. I didn’t actually check
⏹️ ▶️ John whether this is true, but I trust Joseph. He seems like a trustworthy guy with a low and first name with no
⏹️ ▶️ John last name. So there you go. He also says that over the air is not a wasteland
⏹️ ▶️ John of just four networks as in San Francisco. Insert Dan Benjamin, San Francisco rant here. There is
⏹️ ▶️ John over 90 distinct channels of content available over the air. He says some of it’s like religious
⏹️ ▶️ John or shopping, but there’s tons of that stuff on cable, too. So apparently, some places actually have lots of channels coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but like what kind of channels like is there anything you’d actually want to watch?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, that’s the thing. So Aaron and I have season tickets to the University
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Virginia football team. And we’ve gotten pretty serious about the tailgates with a mutual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friend of ours, Brian. And he brings a generator and we bring a TV and we bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an over-the-air HD antenna. And in Charlottesville, Virginia, which we’ve all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey established that you two think is basically the middle of nowhere, actually it’s past the middle of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nowhere into straight up nothingness. And here in Richmond as well, because I’ve tried the antenna here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We get, I think, Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do know we get the CW, which I was a little surprised to see, but that’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And then all the standard channels like Fox and ABC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatnot, they have two or three sub-channels like weather, which just shows the weather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nonstop. It’s like a dashboard, if you you will. And, and that’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much all we get. So I’m sure there are places that get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plenty of channels, but I tell you what, this is where I live is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not one of those places.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. Do we have any other follow up? Yes. Don’t don’t don’t ask the question if you’re not looking at the file.
⏹️ ▶️ John So next bit is from Nate boating. I hope I’m doing well. He sent us
⏹️ ▶️ John a link to a Tumblr dedicated to frayed lightning cables. It is appropriately
⏹️ ▶️ John named frayedlightningcables.tumblr.com. In fact, it has more than just frayed lightning
⏹️ ▶️ John cables on it. But a lot of these things look like they were chewed by animals. There’s no promise about what
⏹️ ▶️ John made these things fray. I think it’s just a Tumblr of frayed lightning cables. But if you wanted to see a bunch of frayed lightning cables,
⏹️ ▶️ John rule 34 and all, go for it. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, next bit of follow up is about Amazon buying Twitch
⏹️ ▶️ John and how Google looked like they were interested, but then bailed out and people didn’t quite know why. Here is
⏹️ ▶️ John a rumor sent to us by Hunter on Twitter saying the rumor is that the
⏹️ ▶️ John breakup fee was too high relative to the risk of regulators killing it. So if Google was
⏹️ ▶️ John going to buy them, normally as part of the deal, they say, OK, well, we agreed to buy you. And it turns out that the
⏹️ ▶️ John US government doesn’t let us buy you for antitrust reasons or whatever. there’s some fee that
⏹️ ▶️ John will still pay you as part of this deal. And apparently Twitch wanted a breakup fee that
⏹️ ▶️ John was too high. And according to this rumor, this is not confirmed or anything. But anyway, that explains why Twitch might
⏹️ ▶️ John have accepted an offer from Amazon that is reportedly lower than what Google was willing to offer
⏹️ ▶️ John for them, because there’s more to the deal than just the number. It’s also what you’re paying in cash
⏹️ ▶️ John for stock and also things like breakup fees. So this is a plausible rumor about why
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitch might have gone with Amazon instead of Google. All right. Look at that. We breezed through follow. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know a short show. Forget it. I’m impressed. All right. Let’s start with something cool and then we’ll get into the real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey meat of the episode.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco, when you were big into PCs, did you read Tom’s hardware very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course, yeah. I remember back when they made Intel, recall the 1.1 gigahertz Pentium.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And John, I assume you were at least tangentially aware, if not a reader yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I knew about it, but I didn’t read it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So Tom’s hardware for Marco and myself was a really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey important resource and website, I I don’t know, 10 years ago-ish, maybe even 15 now, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about the real nitty gritty about hardware for the PC world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And to me, is it Anandtech or Anandtech? I’m probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pronouncing it wrong both ways. Do we know which one it is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, you are in charge of pronunciation on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got nothing on this one. I have met the man in person, still don’t know how to pronounce it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Anandtech seemed to me, anyway, to be very much the Tom’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware of the Apple world in 2014. And if that doesn’t sound like a compliment,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it should, because that is a huge compliment. And apparently, now I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say Anand, so I’m totally inconsistent, but Anand has left. And as it turns out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he’s going somewhere very interesting. He’s off to Apple. So, Marco, what do you think about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, I mean, I’m honestly, I’m disappointed that we’re not going to get to read any more of his awesome reviews because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what he you know like I compared him to John like what what John does for software and would do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for hardware and his insights on things like CPU design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and like where where PC hardware was going and what was becoming important and what wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he was really just incredibly good at at both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco writing about this stuff at seeing what’s what’s here seeing what’s coming, and explaining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very complex things about, you know, things like chip design, you know, explaining that in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a way that makes it relevant to the readers of these reviews. And so we don’t know what he’s doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Apple. We also know like they hired… Is it Brian Klug? Is that right? I believe that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. They hired Brian Klug, who was also a writer at Anandtech. So they hired…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple apparently hired him very quietly a few months back. And so anyway, so now they got both of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be interesting to know what what department they’re even working for. I don’t know what their qualifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are exactly. I would I would venture a guess that I don’t know much about Brian, but I would venture a guess that an end probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knows probably has has enough background to work on the chip design department, but I really don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the question. Like when he posted on the site that he was just retiring, he didn’t say
⏹️ ▶️ John where he was going. He just said like, I’m retiring from tech journalism, which is different than I’m leaving the website that
⏹️ ▶️ John bears my name. Like he didn’t just say that. So it’s not like some power struggle or something with anything. He wasn’t just leaving the website
⏹️ ▶️ John to go for something else. So I am retiring from tech journalism. And my initial interpretation of that
⏹️ ▶️ John was he wanted to do something else. Right. Because he’s he says retiring from tech journalism. It means he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to show up writing reviews of hardware and some other website. He’s not going to start his own website with a different name. You know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John he was done with that and he wanted to do something else, which is fine. And then I
⏹️ ▶️ John tweeted that day, like, here are the list of companies that should be trying to hire him. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when I was doing that, I was trying to think like, what value could he bring to a company
⏹️ ▶️ John and to what company is he the most valuable? And the top of my list
⏹️ ▶️ John was Intel, because aside from all of his reviews and everything, and all of his contact with these various
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware vendors, he definitely has some frustration with Intel, like
⏹️ ▶️ John we all do, like trying to figure out, like, are they going to be, you know, when they sold all their
⏹️ ▶️ John arm holdings to get rid of, You know, they stopped trying to make ARM chips to do their own
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. The whole x86 on mobile and how that’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John and the various software initiatives they occasionally have. Are they just going to be a fab? Are they continue? Are they
⏹️ ▶️ John going to continue to sell chips? He had interesting things to say about what he thought Intel should be doing
⏹️ ▶️ John with their business and how competitive their products actually are and could potentially be in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m sure he told Intel all these things. And he told the same things to Nvidia, which is another company I listed.
⏹️ ▶️ John and a bunch of other people, you know, it’s kind of like an outsider’s perspective of like, look, inside the
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel bubble, you maybe think you’re doing the right thing. But from my perspective, you are, you know, you should be doing
⏹️ ▶️ John X, Y, and Z, and you’re not, or you should do this sooner, or that later, or you should acquire this company, or start doing that, or stop doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it seems like he had a lot of insight into their business, and that would be valuable to them. And same thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John the other companies, because that’s what he would be in contact with these hardware vendors, and he would meet with them, and they would explain what their
⏹️ ▶️ John upcoming line of things are and then he would write about it and presumably he would tell them to
⏹️ ▶️ John their faces like you know I think you should do this and this other company is doing that and you know like just
⏹️ ▶️ John giving his opinion like what he wrote on his website about all these issues big picture things not just like let me
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you how many adders should be in your next CPU but just like you know a grand
⏹️ ▶️ John scheme of things strategy. So then when he said when it came out that he was going to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t put Apple on the list because I thought that of all the things he could offer,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, Apple probably had existing people doing those same things and didn’t seem
⏹️ ▶️ John as like sort of rudderless, you know, or as sort of flailing as some of these other companies
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple seems to have it stuffed together, right? But Apple did hire him, which again shows they probably have their stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John together more than the other companies. We see the companies probably don’t even know they need someone like him, but Apple does know that having someone like him is valuable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and I was trying to think what he could do for Apple. A lot of people guessed that he would have something to do with press relations
⏹️ ▶️ John and he certainly does have a heck of a lot of experience at the interface between technology companies and press
⏹️ ▶️ John but he’s always been on the other side of it so I don’t quite see what he would do for Apple on the
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know I mean maybe I think he has expertise in that area that could be used
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t know if that would interest him I don’t know enough about his interest. Chip stuff I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if he’s ever designed a chip he’s got opinions and Chippy knows a lot about about architecture on the broad level, but down to the nitty gritty,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if he has that depth of knowledge about
⏹️ ▶️ John laying out circuits or deciding like, and maybe you don’t have to. Maybe you can be a more
⏹️ ▶️ John advisory, supervisory role there. I really don’t know enough about his skill set to even guess what
⏹️ ▶️ John department he could be in. He’s kind of in the same situation that I always imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John myself to be in, which is why Apple will never hire me, is like the only job I’m qualified to do at
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is to tell everyone what to do. And those jobs are already filled by people who
⏹️ ▶️ John have earned the right to do that, and not just by saying, well, I have an opinion. Yeah, well, that’s why you don’t get that job, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But he has more than just an opinion. I think he has actual insights and has much more.
⏹️ ▶️ John He has close contact with so many vendors in the hardware industry and such in-depth knowledge
⏹️ ▶️ John of all their products that that is valuable to them. And so it seems like he would have be in a position
⏹️ ▶️ John of some considerable authority, like you’re not going to just make him be some just another
⏹️ ▶️ John cog in a machine like he left the website that he found when he was 14 that has his name on it. So I think he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in a position where he’s going to be able to make big moves
⏹️ ▶️ John and be an important part of Apple’s organization. And I find that exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I hope so. You know, like, so in the chat room, Pavan or Pavan,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco linked to this thing we’ll put in the show notes, this Apple jobs entry on their job site,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it’s… The job title is Performance Marketing Analyst. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it says, blah, blah, blah. In this role, you will develop test methodologies, test Apple devices and competitive products,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analyze test results, and help prepare performance data to support product managers in creating compelling performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stories for product launch materials. Okay. So, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that all basically means is he would be doing, like, reviews and comparisons for internal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use to put in marketing materials. I, I cannot see him leaving his own site
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this like this. This doesn’t seem like it’s a big enough cog in an important enough part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the machine like this. A little
⏹️ ▶️ John overqualified. Yeah. Don’t you feel like? But but on the other hand, Apple is the kind of company that’s smart
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to get someone who’s overqualified to fill it. Because like that position doesn’t necessarily have to be as
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of grunt work as it seems, because you it could influence the design of future products
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s, you know, from the outside and I can say like, oh, well, here’s what they did with this CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and this GPU combination. And really, they would have ended up with a better platform if they’d done X, Y, and Z, but he can’t actually make that
⏹️ ▶️ John happen. Whereas if he’s doing comparison tests of like prototype hardware inside the company, and can say, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, for this one, you should tweak this, that, the other thing. And for the next chip, I think these guys are going to do X, Y, and Z
⏹️ ▶️ John that like, he can actually influence the roadmap as opposed to just commenting on it from the outside. So that is potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John not this exact position, but like, the head of all the people doing that is potentially a powerful position
⏹️ ▶️ John within the organization because you can influence the hardware road map of Apple’s products. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you know, that that’s could be beneficial to Apple. And I think it might be interesting to him.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I definitely think, you know, like if if there is a chance that he’s actually going to be involved in, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco component selection, maybe like, you know what you’re saying, like trying to influence, you know, not necessarily designing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the chips, but like helping Apple figure out, you know, what kind of GPU should they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be? should they be looking for from power VR or whatever for the next device or whatever, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, he could definitely be on that team. I would imagine he’s he’s very much qualified to do that sort of thing. So but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who knows, I, this is very much a mystery. And I have a feeling it might be a while before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we even figure out, you know, what exactly he’s doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And the thing that’s interesting to me about it is, he was kind of the big cheese in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple bubble or when it comes to hardware related things. I mean, I think he was certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an extremely important person in the community and if I mean, maybe I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just an egotistic jerk, but if I were to, if I were Anand and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was thinking whether or not I should go to Apple, it would, it would take a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me to say, you know what, I’m going to, you know, hang up my boots or whatever the phrase is I’m thinking of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, and I’m going to go work in a place that usually doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smile upon being forthcoming and being very public with what you do.”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And his whole existence up until this point was being forthcoming and being public about what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he did. And so whatever it is, it’s got to have scratched an itch that an antec
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and on-tech couldn’t scratch before. So like you guys said, I’m extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interested in seeing where he ends up. And especially if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he does end up in engineering, what is that going to mean? I’m not sure what his background is. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly sounds the way he writes. It sounds like he’s either got a formal or an extensive informal education
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in engineering. Like I said, I don’t know his particular background, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever it is, it’s certainly an interesting move.
⏹️ ▶️ John Chat room says that Brian Klug is an optical engineer, which you might have picked up by listening to the podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John where he talks about cameras. So I also don’t know where he’s working, but if he is actually in
⏹️ ▶️ John a trained optical engineer, it makes sense that he might have something to do with cameras and Apple’s devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, all very important areas. So I think it’s, you know, if these guys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted to keep doing press or review type stuff, they would have kept doing that on an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on an antech. Like they had a great setup there. They don’t need to go to Apple to do that. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Casey, you’re right. Like they would need to go to Apple to do something else, to do something more engineering focus, maybe like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. There’s no way they’re going to Apple to go make graphs for the marketing department. Not a chance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. And since it’s Apple, it’s not like we’re ever going to know. It’s not like that. It’s like, oh, well, we don’t know now,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m sure Apple will tell us exactly. But no, they’re never going to tell us. Like it’s it’s you know, we see him next
⏹️ ▶️ John year, WRC. We can talk to him about it and maybe, you know, but like how many people that we know at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John and we know like what department they work in and like that’s it. You know what? What specifically do you
⏹️ ▶️ John work in? I can’t tell you. You know, it’s like, well, you just accept it like you’re lucky if you can get, you know, hardware or
⏹️ ▶️ John software, which hardware group, which software group, but that’s as close as you can get. Usually we don’t even know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Phil Schiller does. We just know he does like everything and his title is like
⏹️ ▶️ John goes, he goes to Red Sox games, right? And he mountain bikes, bike sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his team. All we know is that he does pretty much everything and his title
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t mean anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so real real time follow up the chat room is telling us that Anand has a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer engineering degree, which would sound similar to myself in Syracuse, from North Carolina State University,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I actually very nearly went to. It was between that and Virginia Tech and I chose Virginia Tech.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But so he certainly has an engineering background. Now, you could argue whether or not he’s practiced that in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the traditional sense of the word in the last, I don’t know, 10 years or whatever. But he certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has the education to support him being in the engineering department. It’s a question as to whether or not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he actually is in the engineering department.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, like they wouldn’t be hiring him for the stuff he learned in college or the hiring for all this stuff he did as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s it can’t it can’t be underestimated. Like who, who in the entire industry
⏹️ ▶️ John has had more contact with the vendors that Apple feels competitive with hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John wise, It’s basically, what kind of press goes to the Intel’s IDF
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, and goes to Samsung in Korea, and goes to all the manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Far East, and just is these incredibly detailed technical briefings on hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John and gets the sample hardware, and tests it, and benchmark? Who else has done that? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a couple other websites that are maybe competitive, like Real World Tech, or Extreme Tech, and if Tom Hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John is still around, or whatever. But what kind of person is going on that circuit in being in contact with
⏹️ ▶️ John these companies over the course of years and years. Like that is the experience that you can’t buy from someone who,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, comes out of college with an education that that’s what they’re hiring him for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I should also note more real time follow up from a dear friend of the show, Ben Thompson.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anand was more than just Apple. And he was I didn’t realize this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but apparently he and his site were more of a general hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John You never read that site? You read Tom’s Hardware but not an on tech? I did
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey occasionally.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re reading the wrong sites. He just got into Apple stuff like, you know, sort of a late comer like you and Marco. You
⏹️ ▶️ John and Marco more or less where it’s like he reviewed, you know, all the PC hardware type stuff. I was like, well, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has some interesting stuff and he got sucked in because Apple stuff is really cool just like you two did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, wasn’t the Retina MacBook Pro his
⏹️ ▶️ John first Mac? No, it was before that. Maybe it’s for his first personal Mac, but like, I mean, the Apple stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John leaked into his site sort of slowly and then they just all got hooked. Like, Like that’s, I mean, it happened in Ars Technica
⏹️ ▶️ John too. I may have had something to do with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a lot like the way I read Ars Technica. Like I always read your reviews and I’ll read occasional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things here and there. I read occasional things that are non-tech. I can’t say I read every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey single post by any stretch of the imagination.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, like Marco said, in recent years, it’s been like, if you want a review of the iPhone that
⏹️ ▶️ John is different than like, you know, not just a product review, but the guy who’s gonna rip open the CPU and talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John all the, you know, that’s the site I would always go to. That was my go-to site for that kind of review.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. And those are the reviews that I read. But I presume that there’s quite a bit more to a non-tech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than just that, and those I did not see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I go there for, I mean, they have storage reviews. I mean, there’s lots of people writing there. I mean, the site, I think, is in good hands. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John he doesn’t write every single thing on the site, obviously. But I go there for reviews about what’s next in SSDs and
⏹️ ▶️ John graphic card stuff. And that site is, like a lot of the PC-originated sites, very big on benchmarks,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of graphs. if I want to know what video how does one view hard compared to another,
⏹️ ▶️ John I do some kind of search, and I think they have a big searchable benchmark database for that. Like, they’re very thorough in
⏹️ ▶️ John that same vein. They’re, they’re great. So I’ll still go to it, even though he’s not there anymore. And I hope he
⏹️ ▶️ John does great things for Apple. So thumbs up for this move.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. Okay. So also this week, this week has been a rough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week, but this week it’s been even more rough for a bunch of celebrities. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe all of them or nearly all of them are women. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they seem to have been targeted in order to get access to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pictures that really the internet should not have access to. And what has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happened is there’s a ton of celebrities. I heard, and I honestly don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how long the list is, but I heard it was like 50 or a hundred names long, a ton of celebrities that have had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey private photographs stolen from them and posted around the internet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when this first happened, everyone seemed to blame iCloud. And the going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey theory was that, I believe it was Find My iPhone specifically, did not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have rate limiting when you attempted to log into it. So some enterprising,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you could call it that, individuals started firing away brute force
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dictionary attacks against the Find My iPhone service, trying to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the iCloud password is for all these celebrities. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eventually, by some mechanism, be it social engineering or this Find My iPhone thing or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they seem to have gotten access to a bunch of celebrities’ private photographs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which have been leaked. And so since this happened a few days ago, there’s been a lot of debate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whether or not this is really the fault of Apple and iCloud. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of thoughts I have on this. But let me start with you, John. What? How do you do you think this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple? Or do you think this is something else? How do you where do you land on all this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, here’s the thing with the story. The facts are thin on the ground. It’s there’s very,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not clear at all about any anything about this. Do the pictures come from Apple or from
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple places? Are they old pictures? Are they new pictures? Like, was it an actual security
⏹️ ▶️ John flaw? Was it a social engineering hack? We know nothing. All we know is these pictures are out there in the internet. That’s the nature of these
⏹️ ▶️ John type of things. Like, someone stole a bunch of stuff. Someone leaked it out onto the internet. We have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it brings up all the same issues as we’ve talked about in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple thus far has said they have not been able to determine that there’s some kind of security
⏹️ ▶️ John flaw. Like the rate limiting thing has been fixed, so that’s not an issue. And they investigated,
⏹️ ▶️ John and basically their statement was something to the effect that there is no inherent
⏹️ ▶️ John exploit or security flaw in, software-wise, they seem to be saying, in our system that
⏹️ ▶️ John caused leaking of these pictures. My guess would be that
⏹️ ▶️ John these pictures did not all come from Apple and did not all come from wherever they came
⏹️ ▶️ John from recently. the theory that I’ve read, and again, this is just a theory, it’s not a fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John that sounds plausible to me, is that there is sort of an underground trading ring of
⏹️ ▶️ John illegally stolen digital data that is fetched from servers
⏹️ ▶️ John where people have backups or whatever, and this was just a leak out of that sort of little circle of people trading
⏹️ ▶️ John this illegally acquired data. So it’s, you know, people say, oh, these are leaked
⏹️ ▶️ John cell phones. They’re not leaked from the people who took the photos. they were stolen from the people who took the photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the people who stole them kept them to themselves in a little ring, and then they were leaked out of that ring. That is the theory.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it seems like a plausible theory to me, because that type of sort of illegal software or illegally acquired digital
⏹️ ▶️ John goods being sort of a secret inner circle and then being pierced by somebody who lets something out and then the inner circle
⏹️ ▶️ John is revealed, that sounds like a thing that, you know, I’ve seen before on the internet.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that sounds plausible. This is definitely something people would want to do. The question is, how did all these pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John get from the people’s phones to the possession of the people who stole them. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John where we get into talking about Apple, talking about security flaws. Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John so big. Surely some of these things came from Apple. We’ve been through this before with the Matt, what’s his last name, Matt
⏹️ ▶️ John Honan? Yep. Yeah. The security flaws that
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve been talking about, and the very worst ones, are not technical flaws. It’s like, read Kevin Mitnick’s
⏹️ ▶️ John book. It’s social engineering. The fact that you can call someone on the phone, to be someone else,
⏹️ ▶️ John answer their supposed security questions that you can just look up on the internet about them, like where they grew
⏹️ ▶️ John up or where they went to school or what their mother’s maiden name is or whatever, and get their password.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so no matter how strong your password is, no matter how bug-free Apple security software is, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the rate-limiting thing is a software bug too, but even if all of that was perfect, if you can just call
⏹️ ▶️ John someone on the phone and tell a sob story and get into their account, what the hell’s the point of the rest of that software?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s the most difficult thing here. You’d like to tell everybody, hey everybody, make sure you have good passwords, don’t reuse
⏹️ ▶️ John your passwords, blah, blah, blah, but it doesn’t matter if someone just call up Apple and get all your crap anyway. And what they’re getting is usually like the
⏹️ ▶️ John backup of your phone, like the iCloud backup of your phone. And so, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John even that is encrypted, but then once they have it in their possession, they can decrypt it. And you know, once they get your password, they can do everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s in the interest of, if there is a group like this, that’s stealing pictures of celebrities and stuff like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in their interest not to like go into those accounts and blackmail them or erase all their stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just want to get in, get out, steal their pictures. And this could have been going on, for sure has been going on for years and
⏹️ ▶️ John years. And it’s not just celebrities. It’s like everybody with an axe to grind and get somebody to go to one of these little rings and say, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you get me a backup of my ex-girlfriend’s phone? I want to see all her naked pictures or whatever. It’s just a
⏹️ ▶️ John criminal enterprise that’s exploiting weaknesses in our systems. And their weakness is unfortunately
⏹️ ▶️ John that most customers can’t do much about except I guess complain. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that was most ridiculous and surprising to me was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that my understanding was a lot of people were blaming the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey celebrities for using. Like iCloud and Dropbox and things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, as though it was somehow their fault that somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went in and to your point, illegally stole their pictures. Like, Oh, you shouldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taken naked pictures and put them on. I like, like, are you kidding me? That’s like saying well you left
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your house unlocked. So it’s your own fault that everything got stolen.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not even unlock It’s like well, you left your money in a bank. What do you expect?
⏹️ ▶️ John Your money in a bank, maybe you think twice about using a credit card, you know, well you have you got your car
⏹️ ▶️ John stolen That’s what you get for having a car. I mean, this is not right leaving your house unlocked This is like having a car having
⏹️ ▶️ John a bank account. Everybody has a smartphone phone. It’s not an unfortunate bad thing to have. Everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John takes pictures with their smartphone. It’s ridiculous. It’s completely off the wall.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s really, this is not really the issue we’re getting at here with this iCloud hack, but what
⏹️ ▶️ John it really comes down to is if you want to go, keep cranking up the meta levels,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the weird attitude we have. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John weird as a species if you look at it really broad view, go out to Mars or But certainly in the US, this weird
⏹️ ▶️ John puritanical view of nudity and sex that we have, that it’s like taboo and
⏹️ ▶️ John evil and like that, the idea that like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing something wrong by taking naked pictures of themselves. Because if you were a good person, you would not do that. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so and that that’s how it’s different in people’s minds than keeping your money in the bank. Well, keeping your money in the bank is one thing, but taking
⏹️ ▶️ John naked pictures, no, it’s exactly the same thing. Two things, they’re private, they’re your possession that you’re allowed to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s your money. Other people shouldn’t have access. They’re your photos. So there’s a photo of your plants,
⏹️ ▶️ John your house, your kids, you with clothes on or without clothes on. Suddenly, when you take clothes on, it becomes this other category
⏹️ ▶️ John of craziness. Anyway, we’re not going to fix the problem of the
⏹️ ▶️ John United States and their screwed up attitude towards sex. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that is why you get all this craziness coming in and where people lose their minds about it. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not even worth discussing that stupidity. But I think the thing that’s worth discussing is,
⏹️ ▶️ John forget about what they stole. I don’t want anybody stealing backups of my phones. I don’t care what’s on them.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what we have to address here. And I wish Apple would
⏹️ ▶️ John work harder to, I mean, like, so Gruber did a post about how
⏹️ ▶️ John the backups, the iCloud backups are a
⏹️ ▶️ John good thing because people are much more likely to lose all their photos of their kids because their phone fell in a lake. than
⏹️ ▶️ John they are to get hacked. And so it’s a trade-off between, well, if you just never do iCloud backups, you’re safe from
⏹️ ▶️ John hacking, but you could lose all your pictures, and you’re much more likely to lose all your pictures of your kids than you are to
⏹️ ▶️ John get hacked. And the other trade-off is, in any security thing, it’s convenience versus security. If they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have the stupid, tell me your mother’s maiden name in the high school you went to, people
⏹️ ▶️ John would get locked out of their accounts. And they’d be like, Apple would be like, well, sorry, you lost your password. We never knew what your password is. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get it. You just have to erase your phone. And they would be like, are you kidding me? Like, they need… people
⏹️ ▶️ John forget their passwords like crazy. And so Apple is trying, in the same terrible way that everyone else is doing,
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it so that people aren’t locked out of their phones when they inevitably forget their password.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what is it that you can replace a password with that is as secure as a password, or more secure, that people
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t forget? Like, there’s no good solution for that, except for maybe, like, Touch ID, or…
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that, like, if I had to advise Apple on how to address this, I would go more towards,
⏹️ ▶️ John like… the other systems that we have for identity, like, I don’t know, do a
⏹️ ▶️ John video call with somebody and record a video of them, get in touch with them, make them prove through a trusted third
⏹️ ▶️ John party that they are who they are. Some sort of really annoying process that if you were concerned about security,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could prove to them in a way in many different factors that you were who you were. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John if someone wanted to reset their password, they would have to reproduce that extremely annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John proof that you are who you are. But most people don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. And so Apple is kind of trying to aim for the correct balance between
⏹️ ▶️ John security and convenience that inconveniences the fewest number of people. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a trade-off, and it is an imperfect trade-off, and it’s an increasingly imperfect trade-off when now
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so easy to find out the answers to people’s security questions by just trolling their Facebook and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I’m glad you jumped on me a few minutes ago and saying that it’s like leaving your house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlocked. That was an unfair analogy. And you’re absolutely right. These people did nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong either by means of a flaw in Apple systems or perhaps some social
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engineering. They have something, they had something stole from them and stolen from them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s just not fair. And the one interesting thing to me is that when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the internet decided that this was all Apple and iCloud’s fault,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody seemed to think that was surprising. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a problem. Like if everyone, if there’s this great, huge security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leak, and everyone says, oh, well, you know, that’s iCloud, like that’s a big
⏹️ ▶️ John And the branding problem, you mean, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And that’s exactly right. And here it is, presumably with iOS 8
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coming on Tuesday, or well, you know, being talked about on Tuesday. And presumably,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re going to talk about a lot of this photos in the cloud stuff that they talked about at WWDC, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a this is not a good time for this to be happening. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just feel like at some point, and I know we’ve said this 1000 times at some point, Apple’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to get really serious about their, their cloud services.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in this regard, it’s not like the parts where they’re not good, not good online services. This is the thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John seriousness will not, like, won’t save them. It’s not like there’s is something that other companies
⏹️ ▶️ John know how to do that Apple is refusing to do or is bad at, there is no good solution to this. Like two-factor
⏹️ ▶️ John authentication where you have to authenticate not just with the password but also with something else that you possess. Either they text
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone or, which someone pointed out today, it’s kind of ridiculous with the SMS gateway on the Mac thing, that
⏹️ ▶️ John text will also appear on your Mac. So if someone has access to your Mac and your Apple ID, they can get that text too. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John two-factor authentication helps, but the reason it’s like, well why doesn’t everybody do two-factor? You
⏹️ ▶️ John kidding? People can’t even remember their passwords. Two-factor is still too complicated. It’s the balance between security and convenience.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the current balance between security and convenience is already, from most people’s perspectives, pushed too far into the
⏹️ ▶️ John side of security. All these passwords they have to remember. It’s a crappy system. Touch ID, I think, helps
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s a security convenience thing where they can give you additional security and also a little bit additional convenience.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not the usual trade-off that you can do there. But there is not some obvious thing that Apple can do. Like, boy,
⏹️ ▶️ John if only Apple was more serious. The reason it’s so easy to hack your accounts is because it has to be that easy
⏹️ ▶️ John for all the people who their passwords. And there’s just probably like thousands and thousands of them every day who forget their passwords and
⏹️ ▶️ John use that system for its legitimate purposes, who would be pissed off if they couldn’t? Like, you can’t tell somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, all your stuff is dead. You know, you forgot your password. You don’t remember what it is. Your backup is encrypted.
⏹️ ▶️ John No one else can encrypt it but decrypt it but you. Then you’ve lost all the pictures of your kids again. Like, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ John can prove that I’m me. Like, we don’t know who you are. We have nothing, you know? And so that’s why I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you have to, it just has to be a social sort of a change in society to realize
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you care about your stuff online, you have to protect it in a way that is inconvenient for you
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of proving who you really are. And at the very least, start with having a system. The two-factor is
⏹️ ▶️ John one example of that. If you care about it, you can go through with two-factor and go through the hassle for
⏹️ ▶️ John the increased security. They should have a step up from that that involves like authenticating who you are
⏹️ ▶️ John in every possible way, using all technology at our disposal and the legal system and everything else to really, really prove
⏹️ ▶️ John you are who you are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and to also quote Ben Thompson,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he wrote a piece today, which is in the chat room, we’ll put in the show notes about how,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I think the way he phrased it is really good. The problem is that they, that Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no reservoir of goodwill when it comes to iCloud. And in this case, it may or may not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even be that iCloud was the issue. It may be to your point, John, a bunch of really, really great social
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s still, that’s still iCloud. I mean, social engineering of apples.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair service. Yeah, I guess what I’m saying is it could be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that iCloud was reasonably proficient at blocking these sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of attacks. I’m not saying it is or it isn’t, but it could be that it was. Yet, because we all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know and assume that iCloud is a steaming pile of crap, as soon as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody theorized that iCloud was the problem, the entire internet decided, oh, well, it must be
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because people can’t differentiate between, well, their services aren’t responsive and their uptime
⏹️ ▶️ John is bad versus security flaws versus social engineering. Yeah, you’re right. It just goes all into the same bin. And the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that just iPhones are popular, iPhones are popular with celebrities, celebrities are, like I said, who knows
⏹️ ▶️ John where these pictures came from. Some of them surely came from iCloud. Some of them surely came from other places. It doesn’t matter. It just really matters what’s the headline
⏹️ ▶️ John and the story. But I mean, Apple can, I’m sure Apple won’t make reference to
⏹️ ▶️ John this. I’m assuming they won’t. But we’ll talk about this in a bit. on the September 9 event when they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably going to introduce new iPhones, Touch ID is a
⏹️ ▶️ John step in the right direction with this. Granted, you can fool it, and it’s not as secure as whatever, and blah, blah, blah. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an additional factor, right? And they have existing two-factor authentication.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is clearly trying to find ways to make things more secure and more convenient
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of just saying, OK, we’ll give you what I was suggesting, which is make it more secure and less convenient for the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who need that security, give them the option. And another thing, in response
⏹️ ▶️ John to this, as I usually do, I’m like, well, time to change my password again. Why not? Make
⏹️ ▶️ John it even more ridiculous. Anyway, when I was doing that, when I tried to log
⏹️ ▶️ John into my Apple ID, like appleid.apple.com or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually, what I was originally going in was to see what my security questions were to make sure they weren’t like, make
⏹️ ▶️ John sure they were nonsense, basically, and not the truth or something someone could look up because they only give you a choice of like
⏹️ ▶️ John questions that anybody could look up. And it wouldn’t even let me into my account, like let me see my security
⏹️ ▶️ John questions or anything about my account, because as soon as I logged in it said, uh, your password is too insecure, please set
⏹️ ▶️ John a new one. Again, I couldn’t get to any of my other resources, couldn’t see my email address, couldn’t see my mailing address,
⏹️ ▶️ John my payment info, like you couldn’t get to the interface on the Apple ID side. Everything worked fine, I could still log in and use all my stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John but trying to man, you know, manage your Apple ID, they are apparently trying to enforce
⏹️ ▶️ John better or passwords by deciding whose password is is or isn’t secure. So you know, I changed
⏹️ ▶️ John my password to make it more secure. I also looked at my security questions and you know, I you know, did it did a
⏹️ ▶️ John security pass, you can do that. I don’t know how much that protects me. If someone is really smooth and gets a bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, telephone rep, they could probably still social engineer their way in. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, and two factor helps, but you know, security is a constant battle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, we can we can all keep talking about how you Apple could add all these things in to make things more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco secure, give us options to lock things down more tightly and everything. But one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco biggest problems is if these things are not the defaults or the only way to do things, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not really going to protect most people. And most of the celebrities who were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco targeted for this mass theft over whatever amount of time it was, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good portion of them probably would have all their phones on whatever the default settings were. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you make the defaults crazy complicated, or make that the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco option, having the options is not going to really help most people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, celebrities might be motivated to, like, a word could get around amongst celebrities. Like when
⏹️ ▶️ John you get an iPhone and it asks you if you want to use your fingerprint as a second factor, say yes. Like, you know, this type
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing is something for people who are like targeted by, likely
⏹️ ▶️ John to be targeted by these attacks, even if they’re not tech savvy, because I think Apple does a pretty good job of like, during your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John set up, it’s like, you should set a passcode. And if you try to say no, it’s like, are you sure you don’t want to have a passcode?
⏹️ ▶️ John And same thing with Touch ID. Like, they are trying to encourage people to be more secure. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John socially, within groups of people who feel they are targeted for potential hacks, have some motivation to
⏹️ ▶️ John talk amongst themselves and say, yes, you know, oh, your phone doesn’t have a, like, like lock codes. Your phone doesn’t have a lock code. You should
⏹️ ▶️ John totally have a lock code. Oh, your phone doesn’t also use Touch ID. You should totally use that, you know? So there’s hope there, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So, breaking news, as we’re recording on this Thursday night,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently Tim Cook has given a statement or interview of some sort to the Wall Street Journal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the Wall Street Journal is a bunch of idiots who thinks that they have to block all their content.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All I can read to you is the following. In his first interview on the subject, Apple chief
⏹️ ▶️ Casey executive Tim Cook said, now it’s getting really, really hard to read. iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accounts were compromised when the hackers correctly answered security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco questions to obtain their passwords or when they were victimized by a Oh, thank you. I deleted the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the DOM inspector.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the first thing I tried in their paywall, but they actually don’t put the whole text there, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Google trick still works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tried that and it didn’t work for me. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe it’s user error. If I paste this into our Skype chat, is that copyright infringement?
⏹️ ▶️ John Go ahead. But I don’t think we need to read it. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John can put you can put a a link to it and do whatever everyone who has a website usually does. You just put a link to the Google results so
⏹️ ▶️ John people can… Anyway, they said there’s no flaw in our software other than the rate limiting, which obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John they fixed. I’m not surprised that they found this. They can find, OK, pick
⏹️ ▶️ John some celebrity’s account with their permission, say, we’d like to investigate how you got hacked, find out how they got hacked with someone
⏹️ ▶️ John called Apple’s support line, answer their security questions, got their stuff. And that’s exactly what I was talking about,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the security questions are less secure than a password. And intentionally so, because
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’ve forgotten your password, they want you to have some way to get your stuff back. And if you’ve forgotten your password,
⏹️ ▶️ John we need to have something that you are less likely to forget. You are less likely to forget who your second grade teacher was, right,
⏹️ ▶️ John than you are to have your password. But it’s also easier to get. Like it’s, you know, it’s a trade-off,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it is a very bad trade-off for people who could potentially be targeted. So I think Apple is working
⏹️ ▶️ John in the right direction with the biometric stuff, and I think they should continue to go even farther. Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures, video, voice print. We can prove to each other more or less.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t have to worry about for a couple generations having difficulty proving to each other that we are who we are, because
⏹️ ▶️ John we have a distinctive look, people recognize us, eventually there’s enough social proof that you are Mark
⏹️ ▶️ John Armand, and people see you and say, that’s him, you don’t have a twin brother as far as we know, you know, plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John surgery is not good enough to match you exactly, we don’t have holograms. We are in a place where we can
⏹️ ▶️ John prove you are who you are, we just need to convey more of that. And we have the thing is we have the technology
⏹️ ▶️ John to convey more of that information about proving who you are. We have video, we have audio, we have
⏹️ ▶️ John touch sensors, we can make this happen.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we are recording this on Thursday the fourth. It will hopefully be out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Friday the 5th, maybe Saturday the 6th. And on the 9th,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is releasing something new. So it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong of us not to at least spend a few moments discussing what do we expect to see?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco, what do you expect to see?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, there’s the obvious stuff, the stuff that like the rumor sites have basically, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s been enough smoke and enough parts leaks to stuff. we’ve seen videos
⏹️ ▶️ John of assembled purported iPhone sixes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one even powered on and showed the firmware update screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think if you can boot a new iPhone into DFU mode I think it’s probably confirmation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it exists so I think it’s pretty clear we’re getting a 4.7 inch iPhone 6
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the bare minimum now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hold on was I’m not trying to be funny the thing in that video that was the 4.7 inch because that thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looked huge to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, we haven’t seen, we’ve seen almost nothing from a 5.5 inch. I believe somebody got a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back panel like a couple days ago or something that might be from it, but we’ve seen in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve seen effectively nothing about the 5.5. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saw this device, this new purported new iPhone in this person’s hand and I thought it looked enormous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and if that’s the 4.5, 4.7, whatever it is, man, I don’t know if I can handle that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re close enough to the event now that if the 5.5 wasn’t a real thing, you would
⏹️ ▶️ John have, you would think that Apple would do that thing it does where it gets the message out that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John a 5.5 is not a real thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like so there would be a leak report on Bloomberg or WSJ saying like, oh, well, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John even even not like they can make they can make either official statements or statements through people that like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John like remember in the WC when they weren’t going to have hardware, they made it clear they weren’t going to have hardware without
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco saying We’re gonna have hardware. Yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t care in the months leading up to it. But right before the event, I feel like if there wasn’t going to be two sizes
⏹️ ▶️ John of iPhones, big and even bigger, they would have been saying something by now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Like, or getting the word out. So I’m with Marco, 4.7, 5.5 iPhones. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John also totally in agreement that everyone has said that the 5.5 is going to be more expensive, not just
⏹️ ▶️ John because they want to differentiate, but because the bigger screen costs more money, bigger batteries cost more money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s a lot of the cost of the phone is in the screen and the battery. So, so yeah, those are the easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s been a couple of very recent rumors like in the last couple days saying that both the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the iPad Air 2 would be unveiled. So a new iPad Air with like an anti
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glare screen, which sounds interesting and better touch ID sensor like so apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s gonna be like a second generation touch ID sensor that then the iPad will get and then the phone of course, we’ll get it as well. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another recent rumor is that the wearable device will be announced but won’t ship until next year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s a whole bunch of recent craziness surrounding this event. They’re also building that giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco white structure that I think the most plausible speculation people have had is that it’s actually a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concert venue for U2 to perform. Who knows? What we do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know is that anything we say in this show predicting what’s going to be there beyond
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new iPhone, we’re probably going to look back at next week and laugh at because
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you think we can all be safe in saying that there’s a better than 5050 chance
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re going to announce a wearable? I think so. I feel safe
⏹️ ▶️ John in saying that just because if this was going to be only an iPhone event, the invitation would have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you see they have that that countdown page for the live stream? And it’s saying like, there’s so much more like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re they’re they’re hyping this up a lot. Apple is hyping this up more than usual,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s a giant venue that the Flint Center is way bigger than the normal venues. They invited
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of press to this thing. It is not like in the little town hall. It’s not in the,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a huge venue. They’re building this big structure, which, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John assume is going to be either be like, it’s not the event’s not going to be there. So it’s like either a hands-on area or a YouTube concert
⏹️ ▶️ John area, or like, you know, who knows? Like, it seems like a much bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John deal. And you wouldn’t do this if it was just a bunch of iPhones or even if it was iPhones and iPads. And so what are we expecting from
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple? Wearables or a TV thing? TV thing doesn’t seem like it’s in the cards. I haven’t heard much smoke about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’ve got to say it’s a wearable thing. And I also agree with the rumors that say it probably won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John ship because if it was shipping, we’d be seeing the leaks. Like they get to do the same thing they did with the original iPhone. Way
⏹️ ▶️ John pre-announce it because it’s not like you’re killing sales of an existing product. And you have to do all this government
⏹️ ▶️ John FCC stuff and other things that will cause it to leak, and plus manufacturing and bazillion other things. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, announce it first. Problem solved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and also, I think this like so far, we you know, if Apple makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any new product, we see parts leaks. Like if they make anything that’s about that’s going to ship imminently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we see parts leaks in advance because they’re making things at such big
⏹️ ▶️ John that people that people care about, things that people care about, because not enough people cared about the Mac Pro. And that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they also weren’t making that in massive volumes. And like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly, you know, but you don’t see like leaks of new iMacs or for even for the matter of laptops, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John best selling laptops. It’s like, no one really cares.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but again, the volume that they’re producing there, like they sell so many iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they can’t keep an iPhone under wraps during the massive ramp up of getting the manufacturing going before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch. And so they definitely run the same risk with a wearable thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if they release a compelling wearable device, they’re probably gonna sell a butt ton of them very, very shortly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after launch. And so they, especially, well, it’s probably gonna miss the holiday season, but regardless, they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell a ton of them. And so, they’re probably announcing it very far in advance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that is indeed what they’re doing, just so they can control the reveal of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It crushes them when they have this cool big secret thing and then the internet ruins it with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts leaks months ahead of time or weeks ahead of time. I’m sure Apple wants to control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every bit of the narrative of how this new device, if it exists, and it sounds likely to exist,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of how this device is unveiled to the world. And, you know, because if suppose we just got a parsley,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suppose some rumor site had some picture of some like, you know, wrist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cuff with the, with the screen on the top and an Apple logo on the back. And, and that’s all we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knew about it. You know, that, that would be, you know, anticlimactic at least. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, and, you know, possibly a underwhelming, it’s like, Oh, well, they’re just making something that looks like a nice smartwatch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s all we would know. And like that, the whole narrative would be controlled by the rumor cycle and, and, and the, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the speculative press. Whereas if they have this event to show it off to us for the first time, they control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything about how it’s perceived. They set the tone, they set the talking points, they tell us why it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool. And then we get to go around telling everyone else they’re talking points about why it’s so cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s so much better than trying to fight with the leaks and trying to stay ahead of the PR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on those. So I think it’s very clear why they would do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this very far in advance for a brand new kind of device like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to think of when they did it again obviously if there’s no existing product you get to do it because you get to pre-announce because you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John killing sales of your existing product but then if it’s an existing one like the phones like the things leak
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the last one I can remember well this is still an original type thing I was gonna say like the original
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad didn’t leak people cared about the iPad people cared a lot about the tablet
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think they announced that not too long before I went on sale but we had no leak in that not that there was that much
⏹️ ▶️ John to leak like It’s a you know, it’s a tablet. It’s a bit the whole issue was like what’s gonna be on the screen, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like when they’ve had to combat leaks like I think about the 5s like there was gonna be gold one We already knew it
⏹️ ▶️ John was gonna be gold when we saw all the parts They had in their presentation They had to
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of work their magic to say I know you’ve seen lots of pictures of this gold backplate and you’ve seen it Compared in different things you
⏹️ ▶️ John see the darker gold one And you’ve seen the lighter gold one and you’ve seen it next to the gray one and you’ve seen different color blacks But we’re gonna show
⏹️ ▶️ John you a nice highly produced video with this liquid gold melting stuff and tell you why it’s great and put
⏹️ ▶️ John Johnny Ive up there to tilt his head and tell you about the diamond cut chamfer and all this other stuff. He’ll say chamfer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’ll be great, and you will forget all about the other stuff. And you kind of do forget, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re right, Marco. It’s so much better to not have any of that to compete with and just say,
⏹️ ▶️ John your first picture, your first introduction to this thing will be through marketing materials
⏹️ ▶️ John that we have vetted. You’ll see it in the best light, in the context we want you to see it, and the purposes that
⏹️ ▶️ John we think this thing is going to do. And by the way, speaking of purposes, a lot of people in chat room have been talking about, oh, you wanted better
⏹️ ▶️ John authentication for iCloud security. Well, this wristwatch might help. Yeah, it might. If it has touch ID sensor,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure something that’s strapped onto your wrist or on any other part of your body has any better access to proving
⏹️ ▶️ John you are who you are other than the same ways that a phone or a video or some other thing can, but
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, that’s, that’s an angle we can look for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s interesting to me that Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so enthusiastic to have put up a countdown.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It seems so not Apple-y to me to put up this countdown like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Generally speaking, my impression of Apple is they come out of nowhere and just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drop this bomb and say, hey, this thing that you never knew you wanted,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not only is it a thing but guess what? You want it. And it’s surprising to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see this countdown basically saying this thing that we all know we’re probably going to talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. We’re going to talk about it in four days, 14 hours, 49 minutes and four seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s done countdowns before. Keep in mind, this is a countdown on a page where the only line is wish we could say
⏹️ ▶️ John more. They don’t even give you a bad pun or a hint or they’ve gone so far as
⏹️ ▶️ John to make the little twisting apple thing to show a a little lion behind it with the back to the Mac thing. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they always give you some kind of vague, even if the hint only makes sense in retrospect. And this one, they’re like, you get nothing. You get a
⏹️ ▶️ John white Apple logo, and you get a statement that could only be construed if it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish we could make Siri say more things, or some BS stuff like that. Like, people are just desperate to mine any
⏹️ ▶️ John negative information. But they’re essentially saying, I know that you know that I know that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know that I have a wearable device that I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John to. And really, like, there’s the stakes in this could not
⏹️ ▶️ John be higher. Now, first of all, putting aside like the poor CEO Fitbit, who’s going to be watching this thing, chewing
⏹️ ▶️ John on his fingernails the whole time. Right. Right. Putting aside that this is kind of, you know, this is Tim Cook’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like not going to say make it or break it moment, but this is an important moment for Tim Cook’s Apple, because previously
⏹️ ▶️ John the big complaint was, yeah, fine, Jim, you’re doing well with the company and stock prices like doubled or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John since you took over and selling more than ever or whatever. But how come you haven’t revolutionized the whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John world? and you know, where’s the iWatch? Where’s the, right? So well, so here’s gonna be a new product category.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s talked about it for a long time. He’s been talking about it probably too long. If it happens,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems very likely to happen now or sometime this year. And so this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, people are gonna look at this and say, okay, well, finally Apple enters a new product category under
⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Cook. Does it look like it’s good? Does it look like it’s gonna be popular? Does it look like a stinker?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are people, and even then, like, you know, People thought the iPad was a stinker too, and that sold pretty well.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is an important moment for Apple and for Tim Cook, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it will be an important rest of the year, especially if the thing doesn’t ship until next year, because we won’t really know until
⏹️ ▶️ John the first big burst of people who are desperate to have this thing get it, and then the reviews come in, and the whole nine yards. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an interesting time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other interesting thing to me, and we alluded to this earlier, was a dear friend of the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey underscore David Smith pointed out the relative seating capacity of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey event venues. The campus town hall, 301. Your Bobwana Center, 757.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Flint Center, where Tuesday’s event is happening, 2,405.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, obviously, and like you both said earlier, this is, they, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is of the opinion that this is going to be big.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you look at the things that were released in the Flint Center, someone tweeted that as well. the original Mac, the iMac,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then some product that was totally forgettable. You know, it’s a bigger venue. That’s all you need to know.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s way bigger. It’s not even close. It’s obvious. I mean, they built a whole temporary building. Like, something
⏹️ ▶️ John is going down here. And if they do this just for iPhones, it would be a terrible strategic blunder. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not just going to be iPhones. Although, the iPhones will be great. I’m sure they will and very interesting. And by the way, we didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John mention NFC, or near-field communications, the wireless thing that lets you
⏹️ ▶️ John not touch your phone to something, sort of bring it nearby to sort of swipe over Apple’s payment system that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re working on is more and more rumors about that of, you know, the deals they’re making with Gruber Disposa, the deals
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re making with the banks to lower the fees to make, you know, like, it’s all like all
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that we’ve we’ve been talking about NFC and iPhones for years now. And now it looks like it might actually
⏹️ ▶️ John come to pass. And that could be integrated with some sort of thing that you wear as well. So there’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John long rumored things coming to a head in this September 9 event.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it’s going to be as big as they’re hyping it up to be because I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Apple is smart enough to know not to hype up something that ends up being another iPod hi-fi.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And and by the way, so I said they invite a lot of people. I got invited to the event as well. And much to the chagrin
⏹️ ▶️ John of everybody who knows me, I will not be at the event.
⏹️ ▶️ John Really? You are the worst. Yeah, I know you all hate it. I hate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you so much right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, so that’s that’s that’s the idea there. Trust me, there’ll be plenty of people there to cover it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I went, I wouldn’t be covering it. It would just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are they transferable tickets? Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John if so, I mean, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing transferable. Believe me, this will be a well covered event. It will be live streamed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s if this ends up being something really major and like of historic value, you’re you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could have gone and you and you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I if I could go back in time to the original Mac intro, maybe I would go. I’ve seen a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, it’s like maybe I’ll regret it. You’re right. But like I’m as exciting and important as the wearable is
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple thus far. I am NOT particularly personally Excited about a wearable
⏹️ ▶️ John I could I could end up getting this iPhone. Am I going to get a watch?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look Casey and I will watch your kids. We will go to your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John house and watch your kids So you can go to this
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s expense and I have to take time off work and we will buy your ticket
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, honestly, I am. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I would. Still
⏹️ ▶️ John it still it. I already told that I’m not going. I’m not going.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, I would go have these with Marco on your ticket just to send your curmudgeonly butt out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. Oh, you are the worst.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I will be watching it live with the rest of the world and I will get the experience the same way.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t need to. I don’t need to be with the people who are actually covered because I wouldn’t be covering the event. Like when I go to WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ John I am doing something functional there. I’m not just there for you know for my own
⏹️ ▶️ John Edification I’m there to do research for a review that I then do so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you do anything for fun? I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway. No, you’re not off the hook yet, sir
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You have to give us one
⏹️ ▶️ John thing both answer this question for me. I am confident What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you do anything for fun?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no names and things I do for fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess you might play a video game.
⏹️ ▶️ John one. Do you have to think a long time on that one? Oh, what could he possibly do? But what else? Okay, see, do I
⏹️ ▶️ John do for fun that you can think of? You watch a lot of TV and movies that I quote that you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you get angry with me, sir?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just saying, like, what do you do for fun? Like, I pass the things you told me for things that I do for fun. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I can’t think of anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God, all I know is, so my dad has used to have, I guess they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were like season tickets to the Fillmore East, which I think was somewhere in either in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey New York City or suburb of New York City years ago. And he had like tickets to freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every concert that was going on there. And I think it was a New Year’s Eve show or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Jimi Hendrix was playing and he thought, well, I’ll see him another time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me tell you, my dad, I think this was like when he was roughly 20, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was an option for him, he is just barely over 60 now and is still complaining
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the fact that he didn’t go to that Jimi Hendrix concert. But no, John, you do what you think. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, I did see Steve Jobs’s last keynote in person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was sitting next to you and Marco, so I feel like I didn’t miss out on that. And if this is Tim Cook’s
⏹️ ▶️ John last keynote that I and I missed it in person, I’ll be okay with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You are the worst.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had a chance to go to the fish concert with the giant meat stick a few years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John year’s eve concert somebody offered me a free… I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what that is. No one knows what that is Fargo. Time for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stick, bury the meat stick, take out the meat stick time. Whoa, shocks my brain,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whoa, shocks my brain. This is terrible and now Ben Thompson’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the chat taunting Marco and I saying, oh well I got an invite too but I don’t think it’s worth flying 26.
⏹️ ▶️ John people are terrible. See another person is not going. It’s like you know we’re gonna, I’m gonna see the announcement
⏹️ ▶️ John in real time. It’s not like I’m not going to know about it. It’s not a secret thing that’s happening everywhere. We’re all going to see it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll probably have a better view here than I would in that giant auditorium. It’s not like I’m going to get
⏹️ ▶️ John a review unit. It’s not like I’m going to write a review. I’m not even going to cover the event. There’s no reason for me to be there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you could you would probably be invited to the hands on area at least.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so you spend five seconds with it until Walt Mossberg slaps your hands away and sits at the table.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that how that usually goes? I don’t know. I’ve never been in one of those hands-on rooms. Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I, I don’t even know
⏹️ ▶️ John what to say. It’ll be fine. Trust me. It’ll be OK.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So angry at you. Are we done? I’m so angry right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, my God. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John the worst. We have a big after show to get to, so I say we’re done. Unless unless you can think of anything else to say about the September 9th event. Last
⏹️ ▶️ John chance to get in predictions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have nothing bright to say. I’m so angry at you right now. It’s clouding my ability to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our three sponsors this week. Harry’s, Squarespace, and Lynda.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’ll see you next week when John is not going to this event.
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Armin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental They didn’t mean to accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tech podcasts so long. I’m so glad
⏹️ ▶️ John you didn’t know this. Casey, I’ve been yelling at me all week about it. I didn’t realize you hadn’t even known this was
⏹️ ▶️ John on. Oh, you didn’t know this, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like you didn’t. No, I knew. I was just saving my rage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, you did a good job saving it. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All I know is, I see, this is not a joke. When you told me originally, which was around a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week ago, I seriously had a mental argument with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself debating whether or not to go telling your wife that you got an invite
⏹️ ▶️ John I told her as soon as I got there. What do you think, I’m keeping secrets from her? I told her, she knows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t tell your wife because I didn’t think that was an appropriate course of action
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I didn’t want to get involved in your marital stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, good call, but it’s silly to think that I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell her. Well, I told my wife and she thinks you’re crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. I get that a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, I’m so angry right now. All right. Now that I’m all fired up and angry, let’s talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s going on with women in gaming.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, man. What a disaster that is, huh?
⏹️ ▶️ John I read all these things all the time. Like I follow a lot of people who are involved in the gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John industry. I follow a lot of people who are women related to the gaming industry. They post
⏹️ ▶️ John links to articles. Follows links I read them. I read all the blog posts I read out like I mean I
⏹️ ▶️ John I read a lot of gaming sites to read all these stories on them in this petition I read a lot about so I feel like I’m just soaking in and I you
⏹️ ▶️ John just assume that everyone else knows all the things That are happening, but they don’t so that’s why it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s worth talking about Because not everyone is has has read 9,000 articles
⏹️ ▶️ John so The difficult thing to talk about this is there’s no actual like the difficulty of YouTube getting
⏹️ ▶️ John up to speed is like there’s no actual like news there. There’s nothing,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing substantive for you. It’s all like a meta story. It’s all, it’s all a story about
⏹️ ▶️ John a story. The substantive parts like that you would think it’s like a controversy where there’s like one side
⏹️ ▶️ John and another and they’re against each other, but it’s almost entirely one side. It’s essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of women the industry who are fighting for more equality
⏹️ ▶️ John in the most like tame, non-controversial way you could possibly imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ John The best example of this is Anita Sarkeesian’s Femis Frequency videos. She had a Kickstarter for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Go watch these videos that she puts up. It’s a critique of the treatment of women in gaming.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is the most calm, like gentle, hand-holding,
⏹️ ▶️ John like non-controversial, like in some ways, almost boring, like just
⏹️ ▶️ John eminently reasonable example after example. She is not yelling at you.
⏹️ ▶️ John She does not have unreasonable demands. She explains things slowly and carefully in a way
⏹️ ▶️ John that people will understand with clear language, right? This is one example of
⏹️ ▶️ John the type of thing that drives you nuts. And that’s why there’s not a controversy because it’s like, what is it that you are opposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to in these things? All right. So anyway, there’s stuff like that out there. There’s articles about her. It’s articles about related issues. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, just the general treatment of women in video games and actual women who work in the gaming industry.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the other side of this are people who are terrible doing terrible things to other people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Harassing them, posting their personal information, sending them death threats, sending them terrible pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ John This goes on all the time. This is not new. This is just a flare-up of something that happens all the time to
⏹️ ▶️ John women everywhere, not just in the gaming industry, but in particular these women who are doing this terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in the gaming industry by merely talking about these issues. And in
⏹️ ▶️ John recent weeks it’s been getting worse because the terrible people are trying to organize and trying to be even
⏹️ ▶️ John more super terrible and women are leaving the industry because they can’t take the harassment and I don’t blame
⏹️ ▶️ John them for doing it and that’s like a victory for them. And so it’s not like you’d say well there’s there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a debate here there’s these people who did these bad thing and these people got angry it’s mostly just people doing bad things there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no other side to that and that’s why it’s I’ve been hesitant to discuss it because I’m like well there’s no story it’s not like we
⏹️ ▶️ John can talk about this bad thing people did and people’s over reaction to it. No, we can talk about this completely tame, totally
⏹️ ▶️ John rational, calm, normal, everyday thing that happens all the time, that is not bad in any
⏹️ ▶️ John way, and then these terrible people. And so now this has just become a story about the terrible people of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t matter what anyone, even if they had done something like a written a really mean blog post, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John matter like they haven’t, it doesn’t justify the crazy behavior that’s going on. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what more there really is to say about this other than whenever people ask me about it on Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John my position is that the people who are angry have no idea what they are angry about.
⏹️ ▶️ John They think they know what they’re angry about. They think they’re angry about ethics. They think they’re angry about
⏹️ ▶️ John people taking away their games. They think they’re angry about people lying. They have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ John what they are angry about. It is the biggest case of self-delusion, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they will never be convinced that they don’t know what they’re angry about. What they are doing is trying, in their mind, They’re gonna be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually what I really care about is journalistic integrity in video games. What I really care about
⏹️ ▶️ John is that someone is lying or something like that. They make up all these crazy conspiracy theories and decide
⏹️ ▶️ John that they are really, that they have a righteous cause. They do not have a righteous cause. What they are actually angry about has
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing to do with the things they claim they’re angry about, which is so easy for everyone on the outside of the bubble to see, but inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the bubble that’s what they really think. And they’re like, oh well, you know, they have a million issues.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can just look at any of these reply streams of any of these people and just see all the things they think they’re angry
⏹️ ▶️ John about. These people are not angry about that. They don’t know the definition
⏹️ ▶️ John of intellectual honesty. They’re intellectually dishonest, both with themselves and other people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just terrible. And by the way, gaming is where we’re talking about this. This happens
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere. Women are treated badly everywhere to varying degrees. if you don’t believe it, talk to
⏹️ ▶️ John a woman in your life and ask them for stories. And if they actually trust you enough, they will tell you these stories
⏹️ ▶️ John and it will sound insane to you. And my advice to everyone listening to this thinking I’m crazy person
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, how do you what do you do about this? Do you just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, what can you possibly do about it? And I think that the thing that you can do about it, But if you are,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the odds are high, a plain old American white male person listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to our tech nerd podcast, just try reading these blog posts
⏹️ ▶️ John and watching these videos. Just like, just do sort of like immersion therapy or whatever it is when you just have like
⏹️ ▶️ John just just immerse yourself in it. Not the ones you agree with. The other side,
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who are saying it would be nice if women were treated better in video games. Just read those for like a year without
⏹️ ▶️ John saying anything. That’s the only way I feel like you can get through to people. Like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John is the reality of the situation on the other side there? If you just read things that you agree with, or try to find things that
⏹️ ▶️ John reinforce your own prejudices and make you feel better about the things that you feel, we’re all brought up. We brought
⏹️ ▶️ John this up in the women’s show. We’re all brought up in a culture that embeds in us
⏹️ ▶️ John biases against all sorts of things, race,
⏹️ ▶️ John religion, gender, everything. We’re all brought up in that environment. want to think of ourselves as bad
⏹️ ▶️ John people. There’s a cognitive distance thing going on there. The best thing you can do is just to immerse yourself in
⏹️ ▶️ John the equality debate. And that’s the only way I think people can get turned around. Because there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John way me arguing with someone on Twitter is going to convince them they’re not mad about journalistic ethics and they don’t know what intellectual honesty
⏹️ ▶️ John is and they really have no legitimate complaints. There’s no way I can convince
⏹️ ▶️ John them of that. Like, it’s so clear that they’re so far gone, there’s no point in arguing with them. And the only thing I think can turn people around, including
⏹️ ▶️ John people like us who are just like, sort of, well, I’m not really involved in this. I’m not a terrible person. I’m not sending death threats.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there should be more quality in games too, but I don’t want to get involved because it’s a fight. To
⏹️ ▶️ John get out of that mindset, I think you have to really understand what’s going on and the way to really understand
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s going on in a way that you might feel comfortable with is just to, if you care about this issue,
⏹️ ▶️ John just to immerse yourself in it and read, read everything everybody has to say. It doesn’t mean you have to take it
⏹️ ▶️ John all at face value, but just feel like you can get, get a picture of it. That’s beyond a a picture that just reinforces
⏹️ ▶️ John the things you make you feel good about yourself. Read some things that actually make you feel bad about yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So earlier today, and I’m not sure if this is wise bringing this up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m gonna bring it up and we’ll see where it goes. Earlier today, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made a perhaps dubious choice of saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody said, we should talk about this tonight. And I had said, you know, I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how to talk about it. and I’m not sure what to do because I feel like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, the people who are ostracizing women
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and threatening women unequivocally, like John said, unequivocally are wrong, and that’s a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. And how these people look at themselves in the mirror, I don’t understand. How they sleep at night, I don’t understand. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible. But I don’t want to just shout into the echo chamber.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to try to do something to move things forward. And whether or not I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did a good job of portraying that viewpoint on Twitter in 140 characters minus like probably 20
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 30 characters worth of mentions, I may not have done a good job.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But one way or another, I said, you know, the way in which I approach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this I think is nuanced and I don’t think that the discussion is nuanced. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that it’s unequivocally these people are jerks and that’s the end of it. Women should be treated better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the end of it. But the way I approach it is a little nuanced. And I got what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I felt was a considerable amount of hate and a considerable amount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of yelling directed at me on Twitter because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had said that I wanted to think for a minute before I spoke. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it really upset me a lot. And it really bothered me. And I felt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit like I think Marco felt, I think a week or two ago, with regard to the wire cutter thing because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here it was, I felt like I was trying to just be intelligent about it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather than screaming about it. And I was getting yelled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at for that. And the thing that was really upsetting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about all this, the thing that really bothered me and continues to bother me about all this, now that I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got a few hours to separate myself and relax is I dealt with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three hours of a handful of people being meaner than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think was necessary. And it kind of messed me up for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was three hours. Nobody threatened to rape me. Nobody threatened to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey murder me. Nobody sent me disgusting pornography.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nobody like came to your house. Nobody said they knew your address and your family’s address and we’re going to go
⏹️ ▶️ John and kill them and it sort of showed you pictures of your family that they had taken secretly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, and I felt like a piece of crap after this three hours, which had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey none of those things. And it occurred to me, if I feel like a piece
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of just utter crap after three hours of people saying, oh, you’re not doing enough,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you shouldn’t think about that nuanced. Are you kidding me? Three hours of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I felt like I wanted to crawl in a hole and just go away for a week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that was three hours. I cannot freaking fathom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it’s like to be a woman in the tech, well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really hit hole, but in technology and especially in gaming where there’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many just absolute jerks. I cannot fathom what it’s like. And as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much as I didn’t want to go through what I went through today, which I’m not trying to play the victim, it really in the grand scheme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things was not a big deal. But as much as it hurt and as much as I didn’t want to go through it today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m kind of glad that that happened because it made what women
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go through that littlest bit more real. Because I just got the tiniest,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tiniest little taste and I hated it. I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fathom what it’s like to actually deal with this.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s probably one of the only other ways that you could convince somebody. Now that you don’t have this kind of control, but if you did,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, if you could, you know, do the freaky Friday body swap, another movie case he hasn’t seen. And people,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have seen it. Let a bunch of the original Casey. I’ve seen both your big,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right. All right. Let a bunch of men see what it’s like to actually be a woman. Because I, because again, like
⏹️ ▶️ John so many things are just in our culture that like we don’t see them as bad
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s like, well, it’s just the way things are. And there’s always something like that in every era. There’s stuff like that now,
⏹️ ▶️ John a hundred years from now, people are gonna look back on us and things that we accept is just the way things are. Like, one
⏹️ ▶️ John way you can see them is if you suddenly became a woman and spent like a few years as a woman and you had spent
⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of your life as a man, you would be super pissed about how terribly you were treated. You would be the
⏹️ ▶️ John most angry, obnoxious, you know, You would just
⏹️ ▶️ John like be livid that people don’t respect you, treat you like a piece of meat, look down
⏹️ ▶️ John on you, talk to you condescendingly, like just are, you know, all the terrible things that happen to women all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John or even are just like, you know, overly protective of you or assume that you can or can’t do certain things or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s it’s difficult to understand what that’s like if you have an experience that you know, and you know, Casey, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have the experience you had of like people being mean to you and stuff. Imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John if that happened to you all the time, and then you were looking, you would feel like an injustice.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’d be like, hey, everybody knows this is happening to me, right? What are you guys going to do about it? Because it’s not just me, it’s like everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John whose name is Casey is getting this kind of abuse. And it’s not fair to people, just because my name is Casey, I get this kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of abuse. And me and the rest of the Casey are like, what the hell, guys? And everyone else is like, oh, I don’t want to get involved. Looks like it’s a big mess.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or they don’t want to get comments like this person. The chat room said, John isn’t an expert on feminism. He shouldn’t talk about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And MTW in the chat room says, calling them out on it won’t change anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not an expert in feminism. That’s not a reason I shouldn’t talk about it. But I’m calling them out on it. Like this
⏹️ ▶️ John is like negative feedback. Because I got involved, now I got to deal with negative feedback, right? Well, yeah, I do. Calling
⏹️ ▶️ John them out on it won’t change anything. That’s why I say, like, arguing with people, trying to convince them that they’re wrong, is not a fruitful
⏹️ ▶️ John endeavor. The people who need to be changed are the people who are good people who just feel like they need to stay out of
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Because they’re afraid of getting the kind of feedback we are getting in the chat room. afraid of getting the kind of feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey got, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to decide what you think is important. And if this is actually something that’s important to you, you have to be willing to
⏹️ ▶️ John do something about it. And it’s people like us who all agree, like, oh, I totally agree
⏹️ ▶️ John with all these people. It’s just that I don’t want to get involved. Well, then you’re not really helping.
⏹️ ▶️ John So just do something to help. You shouldn’t be afraid that you’re going to do something
⏹️ ▶️ John that is going to turn you into a bad person, right? You may do things that cause people
⏹️ ▶️ John to give you negative attention and complain about what you’re doing. You may find out
⏹️ ▶️ John that there are beliefs that you have. Like, this is part of my experience of being, you know, steeped in this
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff for the past several years. You may find yourself having to re-examine
⏹️ ▶️ John beliefs that you hadn’t even thought were, like, beliefs at all. They’re just like, well, it’s just the way things are. You will find your own biases.
⏹️ ▶️ John They will not feel good for you to find these things. you will realize that you have said things and done things in the past
⏹️ ▶️ John that do not live up to the standards that you supposedly hold for yourself. That is part of the experience. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that is where the fruitful effort can be put towards. Not towards
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to save these terrible people from whatever is pain in their life is causing them to lash out in this way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not by trying to convince them that they’re really not mad about journalistic ethics because they’ll never be convinced because they think that it’s like self-delusion.
⏹️ ▶️ John But by talking to the people who are already on your side and just getting them
⏹️ ▶️ John to to better understand the issue and to be more willing to do something about it. I’m not saying everybody has to
⏹️ ▶️ John jump in. I’m not demanding that everyone take action or whatever. But like, think of it, if you were if everyone in Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John was constantly being harassed and the whole rest of the country was like sitting there with arms folded, you’d be going, well, I just don’t want to get involved
⏹️ ▶️ John in that. And all the cases are like, are you kidding me? Like every day this happens, you know, and all the cases are getting harassed
⏹️ ▶️ John and everyone is like, this is OK. Don’t you feel like it’s not, you know, it’s it’s, you know, you know, bring up the J word,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s justice. It’s like, should this be happening? Well, no, it shouldn’t be happening. I totally disagree with it, but it’s not I can do about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. There actually is like we need to make it as socially unacceptable
⏹️ ▶️ John to have these attitudes towards women. It’s already socially unacceptable to harass people, but it’s not socially unacceptable
⏹️ ▶️ John to have all these attitudes towards women that that create these these terrible situations
⏹️ ▶️ John where people have problems in their life and pain that they redirect in this direction. And why does
⏹️ ▶️ John it go in this direction? It’s not random. It’s because of the media and culture that we’re saturated in from the day were born
⏹️ ▶️ John that leads in these directions. And it’s not just video games, it’s movies, it’s televisions, everything’s equally bad. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John equally bad, but it’s bad everywhere. It may be particularly bad in games. Again, if you think this
⏹️ ▶️ John is all crazy talk, I encourage you to just watch the feminist frequency videos, we’ll link them. They are
⏹️ ▶️ John not super entertaining. You will not be blown away by witty jokes and everything like that, right? Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re depressing, sometimes they’re just plain boring. Just watch them. Don’t like watch them and think you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John agree or disagree. Don’t watch them and think you have to go out and change the world or you have to send her angry email,
⏹️ ▶️ John just watch them. That’s a start. Read articles about them. Read things that you disagree
⏹️ ▶️ John with and just try to try to understand the issue. This is all the good people. Terrible people just
⏹️ ▶️ John go away. Stop being terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s important to you know, like what you said, like this has to become socially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unacceptable to to a much more severe level than it is right now. Like there are certain lines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are considered so offensive and so socially unacceptable that like for instance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if somebody tells suppose you’re in a small group of people you know hanging out at a bar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and somebody tells a really racist joke like horrible racist joke
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in most groups of people now that is considered so offensive that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we have a long way to go on racism as well. But in most groups of people now, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is considered so offensive that somebody would be like somebody would say something like, hey, that’s that’s not cool. Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, like you’d be called out on that for doing that in a lot of groups. Not enough, but
⏹️ ▶️ John groups. And I think and I think you’d be called out in a constructive manner at this point, especially in the circles we travel in of our
⏹️ ▶️ John little privileged tech nerds, right? You’d be called out in a way that you would not immediately be ostracized from the group,
⏹️ ▶️ John you would be you’d be told that that’s not cool. And if you argued about it, then you would be on
⏹️ ▶️ John the outs, right? But if you’re like, oh, you’re right, that’s not cool, like, we’re trying to enforce
⏹️ ▶️ John social norms in a way that doesn’t like, you’re not immediately ejected from the group if you tell a racist joke, but if you tell a racist joke, someone tells you
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s racist, and you argue with them, that shows something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, or if you argue that it doesn’t matter that’s racist. And so, like, we need to get to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that point with sexism issues, and we’re not there yet. And, and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, like, even racism, we haven’t gotten to a good enough point yet, but we’re, I think we’re further ahead on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we need people like me and Casey, you know, like people like us who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wondering, like, what can we do? I think that’s a big thing that everybody can do. That, you know, everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can start holding the people around them and themselves to a higher standard and to say, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, call people out if they say something. And again, you don’t have to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a dick about it. You can do it constructively if you could tell they didn’t really mean it badly, you know, like, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, like, as I translate this stuff is subtle, it’s baked into our culture. It’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to even realize.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you won’t notice it unless you’ve read 8,000 blog posts about stuff with crazy stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that you don’t agree with. Unless you just steep yourself in it, you have to reexamine things that you just assume
⏹️ ▶️ John that are just okay, that’s just the way they are. Like, everybody has these beliefs, everybody. There is no person
⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere in the world who does not have what are essentially regressive non-rational beliefs because of
⏹️ ▶️ John the way they were brought up. And you will never examine them if you just like stay within the group
⏹️ ▶️ John of people that you’re in, right? You have to, you have to extend yourself, you have to become uncomfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s just, it’s so tough, because, you know, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the things that bothered me that happened with me today, I think it was people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that were that that that were trying to defend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feminism and trying to say, oh, this isn’t nuanced, it’s just plain wrong. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, your opinions aren’t nuanced. It’s either you agree that it’s wrong or you don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And what I left those conversations with,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though it was conversations with people who I think by and large I agree with, that this is BS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that it is wrong, I left with this feeling like, oh my god, I’m never going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about this again. And that doesn’t help.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And just a few minutes later, some person on Twitter started saying that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, the tech industry is a meritocracy and oh, there’s no sexism there and blah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blah, blah. And for a minute, I thought- RG1 Wait, somebody said that? ACKERMAN Yeah, you should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at my- RG1 Oh my god. ACKERMAN That replies. Oh, it was absolutely- RG1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the thing. And again, here it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s worse than John not going to the Apple event.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Only barely. But yeah, no, just kidding. But no, that’s the thing is that to me, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so absurd and ridiculous. And this person was vehemently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey arguing that, oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Oh, and nursing is 92% feminine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or female or what have you. So clearly that’s sexist. Oh my God, it was so ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for a minute there, I thought, what, I’m just going to ignore this just completely backwards individual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m just going to let this go away because I was just right off of being lectured
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about not wanting to shoot from the hip and how wrong that was. And then I thought, you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screw that. This person’s being an idiot and I’m going to tell them they’re being an idiot. And this kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of gets into the conversation of should you or should you not feed the trolls? And if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m not good at drawing that line and I’m not good at deciding when to feed the trolls and when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not to. But it felt more wrong to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to not do anything and not say anything than to take the easy way out and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just thinking to myself, well, this person is just completely backwards and there’s nothing I can do about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a lot of like tropes, if you want to call them that, in this debate.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like I said in the past show, when we talked about, about women in the tech industry and everything, I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ John not to use all the vocabulary. Because A, people who don’t know what this is don’t know the vocabulary. And B, people
⏹️ ▶️ John who do know the vocabulary find it to be charged. But one of the things that you’ve said in that thing which caused people to flare up,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, is the sort of not feeding the trolls thing. That is a nugget of net wisdom
⏹️ ▶️ John from ages ago, which is basically like if someone is engaging
⏹️ ▶️ John in bad behavior online, don’t engage with them. and they’ll go away because all they want is attention.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is an anti-pattern when it comes to the women in tech and harassment issue because that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone used to say. Like, these people would come in, they would start harassing things, and everyone else would say nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John because they weren’t being the ones harassed. And they would defend this inaction by saying, oh, don’t feed the trolls.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, don’t engage with them. Not engaging is fine when you’re not the target of the harassment. You have the luxury
⏹️ ▶️ John of not engaging and saying, oh, don’t feed the trolls. Not feeding them does not stop them from doing the terrible thing they’re of doing
⏹️ ▶️ John to their targets, right? And that’s why Don’t Feed the Trolls is such a sort of, you know, when
⏹️ ▶️ John people hear that, they who are steeped in this debate, they’re like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve fallen victim for one of the classic plunders. They just know this is one of those things like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t you know, like, I mean, everyone thinks like, oh, you should know everything about this debate already. Don’t you know that Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Feed the Trolls is exactly the wrong thing to say? But anyone who is new to this debate is gonna come in and make all the same mistakes,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the sort of beginner mistakes that everybody does. And then you’re gonna get jumped on by people like, Oh, my God, don’t you know, don’t feed the trolls
⏹️ ▶️ John is the worst thing ever. You really have to stand up for these people because they they feed on your silence and they you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that allows them like and you know, you don’t know because like you’re not steeped in this debate and so like you are coming and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s going to happen, right? That’s not, you know, even within the debate, there’s like there’s arguments over tactics
⏹️ ▶️ John like how should we achieve our radical goals of not being beat on constantly? Should we
⏹️ ▶️ John achieve them in this way by being angry at people yelling? Should we achieve them in that way by engaging and trying to work with
⏹️ ▶️ John people? Or is that too much compromise? And like, and, you know, Marco brought up racism before, like, this is not just an individual
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. There’s institutional levels of all this. It’s all down the chain of like, well, even if at a personal level, everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John feels a certain way and espouses certain beliefs. If as an institution, as a group, we behave
⏹️ ▶️ John in a different way, then that perpetuates all the other things. If the media we create is only created
⏹️ ▶️ John by people who unconsciously put their biases into it and that feeds our children and it’s loop like this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John big, you know, look at how long we’ve been fighting against racism and, you know, making progress.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s very slow. And sexism is probably even going to be harder to knock
⏹️ ▶️ John down because in some ways, you might say it’s better than racism in the US anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in other ways, it’s worse. They’re both really bad. And they’re both not going to bow easily. Someone in the
⏹️ ▶️ John chat room was asking what we can do about it at an individual level. My
⏹️ ▶️ John suggestion is at an individual level is a combination of what Margo said before, which is basically
⏹️ ▶️ John if someone does something that you think that you know is bad based on your current worldview
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, like if you see someone doing something that’s sexist, that’s unkind to women or unkind to anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John for crying out loud, don’t be like, oh, don’t feed the trolls. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you know it’s wrong, do something about it even if you’re not the target, right? Even though you know there are going to be consequences
⏹️ ▶️ John for you. That’s just like, that’s something you can do. Because not doing anything is not an option. Not doing anything
⏹️ ▶️ John leads to the current situation. Because, you know, like whatever, you know, All it takes for evil to triumph is for good
⏹️ ▶️ John men to do nothing. All it takes for evil to triumph is for completely neutral, non-interested people to do nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just like, don’t do nothing. And the second thing you should do is try to
⏹️ ▶️ John learn about the things that will reveal your own biases and so you can re-examine them. Like, all the good people who
⏹️ ▶️ John already agree with everything, who already agree that these people are terrible, those are the people who we need to see. Not only the,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know you’re not terrible like that, but there are things that you are not seeing as well. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John once you see them, it’s kind of like, you know, seeing the matrix or once you see them, you’re like, how did I ever not see this before? Many
⏹️ ▶️ John things can make you see them. It could be reading blog posts. It could be as I’ve discussed in the past show, having a daughter and finally seeing the world
⏹️ ▶️ John through her eyes. It could be just getting married or dating someone and asking the significant other
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s a woman in your life what it was like for them if you don’t know what that’s like. I mean, all of these things can change
⏹️ ▶️ John your worldview. And once your worldview is changed, you can’t see things that you thought were like normal and okay as being okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John You will watch TV shows that you’ve watched and enjoyed realize how insanely sexist they are. Just like we watch like Mad Men now. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, God, the 60s were so sexist, right? Everything we see on our current television and movies and entertainment
⏹️ ▶️ John is exactly like that now. And you can fast forward your brain so that
⏹️ ▶️ John our current world looks like Mad Men to you. And it’s not an illusion. That is the reality that’s behind everything else. And once you
⏹️ ▶️ John can see that, it will change how you act, change how you raise your children, change how you run your company, change how you do everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what individuals can do. The individuals who already are good people can do things to
⏹️ ▶️ John affect change. And that’s what I would suggest for individuals, what you can do. Obviously, there’s much more
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do. The people we’re talking about are doing way more. They’re putting their careers, their
⏹️ ▶️ John lives, their sanity on the line by trying to make changes that are much larger than one person.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve got Anita Sarkeesian doing that, Brianna Wu doing that. All these people who could just be quietly
⏹️ ▶️ John doing their job somewhere have chosen not to. Have chosen to speak out and be very loud
⏹️ ▶️ John and expose themselves to harassment and criticism and abuse because they
⏹️ ▶️ John think the change is important enough to do that. Those people are heroes. Not everyone can be a hero, but everybody can make
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves better. Everyone can lend a hand, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And don’t be so be open to the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might be part of the problem because in some subtle way you probably are without realizing it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, there’s there’s no shame in realizing you’ve been wrong about something in the past
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and fixing it. Like the like it’s very hard for people to do that but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s so much better than continuing to to be a part of the problem and just you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plug your ears and yell or or deny that you’re part of the problem or become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even more part of the problem and and for any if any of our listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are being part of this problem for God’s sakes cut that out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty proud of my Twitter followers for the most part, because a lot of people, when they tweet about anything like this, get
⏹️ ▶️ John like tons of crazy people yelling at them. And for the most part, when I tweet about this or retweet
⏹️ ▶️ John about this, most of the people who follow me, I think, are either not interested
⏹️ ▶️ John at all and say nothing or are good people who say supportive things. But I know that is not true of
⏹️ ▶️ John other people. Lots of other people say, I accidentally retweeted something from feminist frequency and got a million crazy people
⏹️ ▶️ John yelling at me. And I just want to say thank you to all my followers not being like those people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s the thing. Something that struck me, especially today, having seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of the vitriol in this individual who was trying to explain to me that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the technology industry is a meritocracy. I travel with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both in my online circles and in Meetspace, I travel with people that are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of at least enough intelligence to realize that diversity is a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing for everybody. It is a good freaking thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it just blows my mind that so much of both America and the world at large
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems to think that the only people that can do anything intelligent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are white men. How does that make any freaking sense? It just, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stupefies me what these people genuinely believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m not going to get into politics, but there’s a political side to this as well. I just don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how people can think that. It is so eminently obvious to me that diversity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the way it should be, being diverse is the way it should be. It’s the best possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way. If I just lived in a world where everyone agreed with me, I would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey furious. I love my wife to death and sometimes she drives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me crazy because we don’t see eye to eye and that’s part of the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why I love her so much is because we don’t see eye to eye all the time. Just having like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a yes woman or yes man around that just sounds so mind numbingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible to me. It’s it’s I I’m so glad John that you have and I think I do too generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the followers that realize that diversity is good. But what all of us, myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very much included, don’t realize is there are so many people out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there that are backwards, that do live in 50, 100, 200 years ago and think that women are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey evil and black people are stupid. And it’s just how can you think that? How is that a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey course of action in 2014? Yeah. For
⏹️ ▶️ John the gaming industry in particular, it’s like, again, I don’t think this is the approach. I don’t think you should try to convince
⏹️ ▶️ John people, like the terrible people, that they’re not terrible. But like, it’s easier to convince the people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of neutral or like don’t want to get involved or think they’re just fine because they’re not terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you just like look at it from a business perspective, like there’s enough evidence, people have done this with the
⏹️ ▶️ John movies too, to show like there is a, you know, we just went through a demo over the demographics a couple of shows ago
⏹️ ▶️ John that like, you know, 48% of gamers are There’s more adult women who play games than males under 18, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is an unserved market, like just from economic business point of view.
⏹️ ▶️ John Replace women and men with some other demographic that is less politically charged, from your perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is an underserved market. These people are buying things, they’re buying games that were not made with them
⏹️ ▶️ John in mind at all. They’re buying games that are terrible to them, that objectify women, that don’t have their interests in mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not just women. There are huge underserved markets in the gaming world. And
⏹️ ▶️ John how are you going to make products to serve these markets? You can’t just take the existing teams of people who know how to make
⏹️ ▶️ John games for straight male gamers. You can’t you’ll never serve those markets with these people, or at least
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be a hell of a lot harder. Hire some people with different points of view who want to make different kinds of games.
⏹️ ▶️ John They will, you know, like it’s just like, you know, movies in the movie in the theaters recently with female leads
⏹️ ▶️ John have been doing better than those with male leads. And there’s like action movies and stuff like that. And and yet
⏹️ ▶️ John still like I mean, movies are more progressive than games in this regard. Like just look at like the isometric
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast, a gaming podcast with a bunch of women that came out of nowhere and became very popular. Why?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s an underserved market gaming podcast mostly hosted by women. There’s not enough of those. There’s not enough good ones
⏹️ ▶️ John of those. There’s lots of good podcasts by men. Those are good. Those are fine. You want to listen to a fine. There’s an underserved market
⏹️ ▶️ John for things like there are people out there who are not having games made for them by people who
⏹️ ▶️ John understand what they might like. Ignore everything else. It’s just a stupid business sense. And same thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John Hollywood, making the same stupid movies all the time. You know, figure it out, people like
⏹️ ▶️ John you can make more money and sell more games and more products. I mean, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John to its credit, does a little bit better at figuring out like Apple does not make things just for straight white males. They try to make
⏹️ ▶️ John things that appeal to lots of people. Right. Every possible thing. Do you like do you like high
⏹️ ▶️ John technology? Do you like I mean, they’re going to go into the fashion world. they have to make things that are interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John to people who care about a Diversity of issues. Did they just feature men in their commercials? Did
⏹️ ▶️ John they just feature old people? Do they just feature children? Do they just like no they show everybody they’re trying to make products for
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody You make more money that way people So that’s that’s my gaming industry talk if you are making
⏹️ ▶️ John games if you are selling games if you are thinking of what games you’re Going to sell if you’re making a gaming product
⏹️ ▶️ John Half of your buyers are women don’t have your product made entirely by men for men Because and you
⏹️ ▶️ John say, oh, my products are made entirely by men, but they’re not entirely for men. It is almost impossible to have a product
⏹️ ▶️ John made entirely by men and not have that product end up being a little bit more for men than otherwise.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because again, everyone’s got all our unconscious biases, and we’re really familiar with what we like, not so familiar with
⏹️ ▶️ John what different type of people like. And replace gender with any other axes along which people can vary.
⏹️ ▶️ John Economic background, age, race, everything. That’s like you said, Casey, diversity.
⏹️ ▶️ John People think it’s a dirty word. It’s like, it’s just good business sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John makes sense. You’re leaving money on the table.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also just makes you a better person. You know, like it broadens your worldview to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bring more diversity into your life, into your work. And it makes you a better person to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be aggravating these tensions, to not to not be attacking people over trivial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matters. And it, you know, some people are just miserable and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to do this regardless. And I don’t know how to solve that problem. I don’t think anybody really does know how to solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that problem. It’s a terrible problem, but I don’t know how to solve it. But even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you’re the kind of miserable person who likes being very argumentative, you can win more arguments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you take the high road and don’t leave people these areas to attack what you’re saying. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re some kind of awful sexist person making awful sexist comments,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time you try to win an argument about anything else, you’re going to lose because of that. And like it’s there’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many reasons why it You know, even if you can’t be motivated by being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a better person, which is unfortunate Uh, there are so many other reasons why you should do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But but ultimately I I think the best thing we can really do is You know what we said earlier just you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco encourage the people who who actively are trying Or actively are intending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make things better and actively would would like to help help, to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help. Give them the tools and the social
⏹️ ▶️ Marco permission to actually help. It’s important to realize, like I saw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Brianna Wu talking, I think earlier today or yesterday, about how she’s never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talked to a man who thought he was part of the problem or something like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of us listening, we all probably think, oh, well, we aren’t part of the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the other people, the other guys are the part of the problem. But that’s probably not true. We probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are part of the problem in ways you don’t realize. And so it’s just so important to keep an open mind about that and to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add people to our social circles like Brianna and like anyone who will help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point these things out to us when we do things or say things that are unintentionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harmful to somebody. I would like to know that. It’s like having my fly open like I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like somebody to tell me that you know because that’s a problem that I would I would like to fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather than denying that it
⏹️ ▶️ John exists the invisible fly that you can’t see until someone points out did you know you have a fly and by the way it’s open yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s I mean and by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way it’s archive forever and we’ll see it forever
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re on these social networks that’s another thing you’ve done and it takes a conscious effort that you know I’ve been trying to do this over the
⏹️ ▶️ John past few years with mixed results but like I keep trying, follow people who you wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John normally follow, right? And so you can see what they have to say. Read their blogs. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John go outside of your comfort zone or your normal thing. Make a conscious effort to
⏹️ ▶️ John expose yourself to these viewpoints. If there is some kind of standard bearer for a particular movement that you
⏹️ ▶️ John agree with in principle, but don’t really know what you can do about, just follow that person. And again, every movement
⏹️ ▶️ John has different people. There’s always your Malcolm X, there’s your Martin Luther King Jr. Like, There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole spectrum of people. Maybe you don’t like one person’s approach. Maybe you like another person’s approach. Whoever may rather see a video
⏹️ ▶️ John or a blog or read a Twitter feed. But just open yourself up to them and you don’t have to do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. Like in the beginning, just let yourself see what they have to say. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John you follow them, maybe you’ll find it. You need to reply. Maybe they’ll reply back to you. And maybe that one time you say something that you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John get called out on. Maybe they’ll be there to call call you out on that. If you happen to have a lot of Twitter followers like
⏹️ ▶️ John we do, make it a point to amplify the voices of people who normally don’t get heard,
⏹️ ▶️ John or you know, or who are, you know, if they’re, if you’re an individual Casey in your house being harassed by the Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John haters, you would really like it if someone with large audience would amplify your message that, hey, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John did you know someone keeps putting a flaming C on my lawn every morning because the anti-Casey people hate all Casey’s and this has
⏹️ ▶️ John been going on for years and it seems like you guys don’t care. Just so you know, I’m out here, I’m getting harassed.
⏹️ ▶️ John amplify those signals to to your audience of people. And if you find yourself saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I would do that, I agree with them in principle, but I don’t want to be like that guy and
⏹️ ▶️ John have all the people who are following me be like angry and be like, we just want to hear you talk about technology. Don’t talk about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, well, decide, do you care about this or do you not care about it? Do you think all your followers are
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible anti Casey people? Or are they, you know, like, do you really want the people following you? Like, what do you actually
⏹️ ▶️ John care about? You can’t say, well, I agree in principle, but I don’t want to do anything that inconveniences me in any way. Like at some
⏹️ ▶️ John point you have to at some point you have to put your aura
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. No, it’s so true. And one of the best things I’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in regard to this is following Brianna Wu, who is Space Cat Gal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Twitter and seeing things through her eyes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the best as one can through Twitter is so fascinating and so enlightening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you follow her and you get tired of all the things that she’s saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about women in tech and whatnot, because she says it a lot, then you know what? Imagine what it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to deal with that. You’re getting one hundredth of what she has to deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with. And you can turn yours off whenever you want to. It’s like women have to live with this every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. And there are times I’m like, holy crap, Rihanna, relax for a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then I’m like, what are you talking about? No, No, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John relax. This is terrible. But I would say, like, you know, it’s not like you have to follow any specific person, because
⏹️ ▶️ John if Brianna’s approach to this problem is off-putting to you, that’s fine. You can still not agree with her approach to solving
⏹️ ▶️ John this problem. Find someone else to read, to follow or whatever. Like there’s a lot like just because you don’t agree with
⏹️ ▶️ John someone’s tactics does not mean you like. I don’t feel like you need to expose yourself to some tactics
⏹️ ▶️ John that you find are off-putting. Right. But you should expose yourself to the viewpoint. There are plenty of viewpoints
⏹️ ▶️ John out there. there is a viewpoint that you will feel comfortable with. They can expose you to things you haven’t thought of. They
⏹️ ▶️ John can show you the experiences of other people. And it’s going to make you a little bit uncomfortable. I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John like, don’t make your Twitter stream filled with like find the angriest person you can. And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John as I said before, I feel like if I was forced to switch genders right now, I would be the angriest feminist the world has ever
⏹️ ▶️ John seen. And so would most men, because we would just be incensed at the injustice of being treated
⏹️ ▶️ John the way women are treated all the time, because we know what it’s like on the other side. or changing to be black
⏹️ ▶️ John in the US, or any other type of thing, or changing to be super short, or any
⏹️ ▶️ John that is bad. Not you, Mark. I mean, you know. Yeah. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John All of us would be just totally enraged to have to deal with any
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of prejudice that we didn’t grow up with. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re just trying to do is be aware of those things somehow by exposing yourself to different viewpoints.
⏹️ ▶️ John We can put a list of people in the show notes. Everyone isometric would be great to follow this. But even just like right, like
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s your last name? I was mispronounced. It’s I’ll put in the show that Susan aren’t is that
⏹️ ▶️ John her name? I’m asking you guys. You don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Remember you are the pronunciation agent for our show.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, female journalists in the game industry. If they have been there for a while, they have
⏹️ ▶️ John a valuable viewpoint. They probably have something interesting to say in this topic. And increasingly like you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John that the crazy terrible people are making this big like list of people who you should hate because they support
⏹️ ▶️ John equality. and list of websites you shouldn’t visit. Go find that list, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, from these terrible websites and like follow those people and read what they have to say, like use it for the opposite
⏹️ ▶️ John purpose. Yeah, Susan, it’s A-R-E-N-D-T,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I guess it’s just aren’t. Anyway, she’s great, I enjoy her. Samus
⏹️ ▶️ John Clone on Twitter, Maddie Myers from Isometric as well is another good person
⏹️ ▶️ John to follow. But the point is there are things out there for you to
⏹️ ▶️ John follow and to read. Something will suit your needs. The worst thing you can do is nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also I highly recommend wearing button fly pants because then your fly will never be open accidentally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Among other benefits.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They really are better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So much work though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, see, you get past it. Like it’s, you know, you have to convert all your pants at once.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t just have like one button fly pair because then you’ll hate them. But once you have once you’ve converted to button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fly, you’ll realize how superior they really are. And they loosen up after like the first couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the thing is unbroken in button fly pants are the worst.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but that’s like literally it’s like a couple of days and then then they’re fine and they’re nice. You know, then this is the worst,
⏹️ ▶️ John inappropriate segue of topics ever going from
⏹️ ▶️ John pervasive systemic sexism to flies on pants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know both both genders can wear button fly pants and often do This is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not a gender issue. I mean there there is a benefit to men. There’s a there’s an extra safety involved there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but But most of the benefits apply to both genders.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we should stop. Does that mean we’re done with this topic now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re never gonna be done with this topic This topic is not going to go away in our lifetimes, and I think we should keep talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it regularly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it will come up again on the show. I’m sure it’s sad that it only comes up when like
⏹️ ▶️ John things get super bad. But you know, that’s just the nature of it’s just the nature of
⏹️ ▶️ John a topical show. Yeah, it’s homework for everybody who listens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, seriously, do do something nice for for a woman in your life and you’ll be better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep an open mind about pants as well except for the people in the chat who are saying a velcro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fly what you got to be kidding that’s the worst of everything skip that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we’re done I got more fired up about that than I expected makes me so angry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no I think this is I think I think we were not going to regret having talked about this for this long
⏹️ ▶️ John you should if you guys like bionic which I still have never listened to but it
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds like a type of show like you like bionic, you should try a symmetric because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, I’m not interested in games. It’s barely a game about games. You should just try
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Throw a couple episodes in your podcast feeds and see what you think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I actually I did. I did listen to a few, but they were pretty gaming heavy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I guess. I mean, I guess it is like I guess. I mean, it depends if they spending a long time talking about hand turkeys,
⏹️ ▶️ John then that’s not gaming related. But I guess they do spend some time on stuff. But anyway, I find the show amusing in the same way. It sounds seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like you guys found bionic amusing and it’s like what is the show really about? It’s a lot of nonsense, a lot of fun. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, it’s it’s it’s a viewpoint that usually don’t hear like I don’t. There’s a couple of gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John podcasts I’ve listened to, but none really regularly. And I find myself listening to this one because it’s like it’s it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John viewpoints I don’t get elsewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ll give it another shot. Because I want to hear that cast talk. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I follow most of them on Twitter. Like I want to hear them talk. But I just I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not in I’m so not a gamer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I feel I feel the same way.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a lot of references and vocabulary and, you know, like, they just assume
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone knows what these things are and have a whole discussion about it. And it’s like, I don’t have the context to even know what it is that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about. But I mean, I don’t know, maybe Casey will know if he’s a lapsed gamer or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Casey and I are probably equally lapsed or similarly lapsed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I was actually about to say that you’re the bigger ex gamer than I, I think so you and I can fight over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who’s the the who used to be a bigger gamer and is it is the worst gamer now.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think it’s good actually to listen to the show, because if you only follow like like Brianna
⏹️ ▶️ John or Maddie on Twitter and you only see them as like the person who is, you know, fighting for equality
⏹️ ▶️ John and being the victim of harassment and everything like that, you might start to forget that they’re actual people. You
⏹️ ▶️ John listen to an episode of the Isometric, you will realize they’re actual normal people who just like they don’t spend
⏹️ ▶️ John their entire time just being angry about feminism, Like, which is the crazy viewpoint people might get if they
⏹️ ▶️ John just like, well, they only ever see them when they’re retweeted by somebody a million times or whatever. Like these are people,
⏹️ ▶️ John these are actual people with who have actual interests and lives and jobs and families
⏹️ ▶️ John and feelings and all this stuff. That is a that is a side benefit of
⏹️ ▶️ John happening to listen to a podcast of these type of people who are active on these issues to realize just because you’re active on this issue.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, oh, my God, they’re regular people to imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, the reason I haven’t listened to it yet is because not not at all because of the host. In fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything I’ve heard is that the hosts have an incredible amount of chemistry. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I am completely ignorant and clueless about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about anything video game related, I just kind of assumed that I would be completely lost.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you should listen to the episode where Steve admits that he’s never seen Terminator And then he watches it and didn’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John it. He’s the Casey List of that show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thanks? I think? Wow, how do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really feel John? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think I’ve seen it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perfect. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it many
⏹️ ▶️ John times. Ding. Brianna’s only said this on Twitter, but I can’t wait for the episode where she talks about how much
⏹️ ▶️ John she likes the prequels, the Star Wars prequels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god, that’s…
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s gonna be amazing. I told you this is a diversity of opinions. Some of them are terribly wrong, but they’re diverse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, for what it’s worth, Terminator two and Top Gun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were the two movies that we had on laser disc that we had many movies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but no, no, but the thing of it is, these two movies in particular, were amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for using the scroll wheel that was on the remote control. Do you know what I’m talking about? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was kind of like, what do you call the thing on the iPod, the click wheel or whatever you call it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it was there was no clicking to it, but you could go frame by frame because it was digital.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well it kind of wasn’t. You’re right. It was weird, like it represented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analog video signals on a digital medium. It was it was very strange. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not too familiar with the details, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the things was digital. Was it the audio that was digital?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Audio I believe was digital, but the video was not, but it was weird, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was digital-ish.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, it was very strange.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So the point I’m driving at though is when T2, the Terminator thing would come out of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrecked 18-wheeler, spoiler alert, and go from like liquid to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person. I remember just sitting there with the remote control spinning backwards and forwards and backwards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and forwards, watching the special effect go frame by frame. And it was amazing. And then Top Gun was awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it was a perfect example of surround sound, which back in whatever the hell year this was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like a really new thing to have at home. And oh my goodness, it was amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is something ologist in the chat is shitologist
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says the controller in the remote was a jog shuttle controller. Some of the higher end VCRs have them too. That’s what I’m talking about. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, it was it was amazing. laser discs was better than laser discs were better than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think they got credit for.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, we just I forgot we had this that you want to throw in a mark down because we’re never gonna get there once the September 9 event
⏹️ ▶️ John comes in. It’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John do it. Let’s do it. What the
⏹️ ▶️ John hell cut out all the stuff by laser just in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, tag the stuff on with it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we can dispense with this quickly because we all agree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m keeping in the pants stuff though. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey button fly agenda Let’s talk about markdown standard markdown complex markdown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conventional markdown. Whatever the current flavor is strict markdown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whoa, can one of you give me a quick summary about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, so the summary is John Gruber made Markdown a long time ago. He likes it. Other people think
⏹️ ▶️ John there are problems with it, but they want to use variants of Markdown. There are many variants of Markdown that
⏹️ ▶️ John exist. There’s multi-Markdown. There’s GitHub-flavored Markdown. There’s all sorts of different kinds of Markdown.
⏹️ ▶️ John One particular person has been upset with the way John Gruber’s Markdown works for a long time. That’s Jeff
⏹️ ▶️ John Atwood of Coding Horror. He made a blog post two years ago that said, I really wish that Markdown could be
⏹️ ▶️ John better maintained and better defined and the spec could reduce ambiguities and bugs could be fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John because we all want to use Markdown but everybody uses a different implementation of Markdown, it’s just a giant mess.
⏹️ ▶️ John So recently he came out with something that he was calling standard Markdown which was a
⏹️ ▶️ John much more highly specified variant of Markdown where they
⏹️ ▶️ John removed or vastly reduced the ambiguities in the language to say this is how
⏹️ ▶️ John we want it to work, here’s Here’s a test suite, here’s sample implementations, here’s a specification. There,
⏹️ ▶️ John if everyone complies with this, we will all have Markdown that agrees with each other and everything will be fine. That was
⏹️ ▶️ John all well and good, except for the fact that he called it standard Markdown, which was a slap in the face
⏹️ ▶️ John to Gruber, because how can? He might as well have called it the official real Markdown.
⏹️ ▶️ John That might as well have been the name. The one and only genuine official real Markdown.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was a bad choice of name for many, many reasons. it makes it seem like that this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the one and only official markdown when that is clearly not the case there’s a million different kinds of markdown it makes it seem like
⏹️ ▶️ John they are the people who sort of own and control markdown which is not the case they don’t own and control markdown
⏹️ ▶️ John uh and so that was dumb and it’s a shame because i agree with the goals of
⏹️ ▶️ John a better markdown specification even though i don’t like markdown uh but i don’t agree
⏹️ ▶️ John with the idea of calling your thing the one and only super official totally the main forget about all other
⏹️ ▶️ John ones markdown Uh, they should have, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John used a different name, like just and here’s the thing about the name. If they had picked a different name, like
⏹️ ▶️ John football, like that was the name, just football, that would have been fine, too. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it would have hurt their cause at all. Anyway, they since renamed it to come and mark down. I don’t see how that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John any real. Well, no, here’s the best thing about that. I don’t know if you read this. I read. I think it’s slightly less terrible. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, but here’s the best thing about the post. Like I read it it beforehand. It starts off good. It’s like we’re sorry we made a
⏹️ ▶️ John mistake. John Gruber made demands. He wants us to take down our domain standard markdown.com
⏹️ ▶️ John not have it redirected. He wants us to rename our thing and he wants us to apologize and he did all those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what they renamed it to was like we we gave we sent a bunch of these names and we said what about this name that name
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other name and we didn’t get a reply. So we’re using common markdown. What are you doing? You can’t change the name
⏹️ ▶️ John with like the whole point is yeah call it something that doesn’t have Markdown in the name, you’re fine with that. Call it
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever you want. Call it, you know, called hand turkey, call it whatever you want. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s fine. Right. Or call it something with Markdown, the name that Gruber approves
⏹️ ▶️ John of. You can’t say we’re going to do everything you say. We’re going to rename it and we’ll send you a suggestion of a name. But we got tired of waiting.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we just picked one that we felt like it. And common is not really much better. It sounds like it’s like common lisp.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it sounds like the official one and only like they’re sabotaging their own cause, their own cause
⏹️ ▶️ John is good. I think it is good to have what they’re doing technically is good. What they’re doing socially is bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s very bad. And they seem to just like it’s like shoot themselves in the foot. Reload the gun, point
⏹️ ▶️ John at the other foot and then shoot again.
⏹️ ▶️ John like you’re just grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, and that’s the thing with this, like, you know, following Jeff, I follow Jeff Atwood loosely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and even following him loosely. I’ve seen ever since they started Stack Overflow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, how many years ago was that? Eight years ago? It’s been a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ever since they started Stack Overflow, which included Markdown,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jeff Atwood has been very hostile, dismissive, and condescending towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John Gruber and his ownership of Markdown. And the hostility has been so clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire time. It’s very, very clear that Jeff does not respect John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Jeff feels that he is entitled and and now there’s other people involved but but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Jeff was pretty much running it for a while and probably is still very important in this process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this group of people very much obviously feels that they have the right to co-opt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco markdown because Gruber has not done that much with it recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the fact that it has not changed in you know the better part of a decade.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That like there’s so many I got a little bit on Twitter earlier like there are so many bad counter arguments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people keep making to try to support what they’re doing here. One you know one of those bad counter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arguments is well Gruber hasn’t touched it in like a decade. Well yeah the MP3 file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco format hasn’t changed in a few decades neither has the JPEG file format like there’s there are things that don’t change that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean there that doesn’t mean they’re neglected or abandoned.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that doesn’t matter like I mean, it doesn’t matter whether it’s changed. And it doesn’t none of that really
⏹️ ▶️ John matters. That’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John explaining why Jeff is frustrated. That’s what it explains. Why are people frustrated? Why are people doing this
⏹️ ▶️ John all? John Gruber stewardship of Markdown explains why people have the feelings they feel, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I think that is, you know, and I share those feelings, frankly, like I don’t even use Markdown, so I don’t care,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I share it like, but then what do you do with those feelings? That’s where the rubber hits the road. Like, hey, I feel frustrated.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then what? Then do you demand that something happens? No, because you have no right to the demand. Would you like to fork
⏹️ ▶️ John it? By all means, to call it whatever you want. You know, make your own thing. Like, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John so much freedom available to you to do these things. And Grubber is even okay with things like multi-markdown and
⏹️ ▶️ John GitHub markdown. They ask him, hey, we’re GitHub, we’re gonna make, I assume that, I think GitHub markdown has permission, right? We’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John make some variant of markdown. We’d like to call it X, Y, and Z. Thumbs up or thumbs down. Why does he have
⏹️ ▶️ John the quote unquote right to give that? Because he made markdown. It’s a name that he made up for a thing that he made.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s just common courtesy. Like, it’s just ignore all legalities entirely. It’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just common courtesy. Like, you’re going to say, like, well, if Markdown didn’t exist, I would have made my own thing. Maybe you would have,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it wouldn’t be called Markdown, would it? It would be called whatever the hell name you made up. So make up your own name. And so, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the technical issues are just all and like, you know, the entitlement or whatever, like that is all
⏹️ ▶️ John just an explanation of why people feel the way they feel. But none of it justifies the actions that are going on. And the actions,
⏹️ ▶️ John and justified in terms of just not even morally or ethically or legally, but just
⏹️ ▶️ John being a nice person-ly, whatever word that is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even practically speaking, forget about being a nice person. Practically speaking, if you want your project to be successful,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t shoot it, don’t get it off, start off on the wrong foot. There’s no reason,
⏹️ ▶️ John I totally applaud this effort, the technical effort they’ve gone through to try to standardize what is an ill specified
⏹️ ▶️ John just probably untenable markup system to be everything in spite of it
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’ve made a heroic effort and then they just destroy it all by doing something jerky like why why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would you do that it’s so unnecessary like they you know no one is objecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to them making a standardized markdown syntax no one is objecting to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the only thing people are objecting to legitimately is the name
⏹️ ▶️ John And what the name represents co-opting trying to co-op something that’s what it’s like the name
⏹️ ▶️ John is the embodiment of that attempt to co-op but the name is is like we are trying to co-op this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John because we feel like it has not been maintained.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even the attitude in in Jeff’s post tonight that they that after the after the public
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outcry from from a lot of people about standard markdown which is an incredibly arrogant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name to to co-opt someone else’s project and call yours the standard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco After that, this post saying that they renamed it calm markdown. It’s like we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what he basically says is, so we replied to john Gruber with these list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of names that all still contain the word markdown and are all compatible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco markdown, regular markdown
⏹️ ▶️ John commute like I mean, Gruber said he’s okay, he’s okay with like some variant of markdown like but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s like he gave like pedant pedantic markdown was the only thing he thought he might have, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the whole point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he said he said strict markdown, which I think that I think that would be descriptive. I
⏹️ ▶️ John would not be OK with strict markdown either, because that still sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they should do is don’t use the word markdown at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that would leave them completely in the clear, you know, morally, argumentatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and let their project proceed into something productive. Right now, it’s always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to have this this asterisk. it’s always going to be controversial. And and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worst thing is, so if you read this post, so like so Jeff said so so you know, Gruber
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then he Gruber apparently sent him an email. They reply back with this list of suggestions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last night and tonight since they hadn’t received a response in 24 hours,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just picked one of their suggestions and assume Gruber is OK with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You were reading the post while I said that before, yes like i can’t like why
⏹️ ▶️ John go forward you you know you haven’t gotten permission that is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so rash and and unnecessarily inflammatory like seriously just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call it something else you will avoid all of these problems just call it anything else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that your project can have 100 credibility without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this controversy there is no reason and and even this post the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they went about this and the way they just assumed they had permission after 24 hours of no objection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s the hurry that’s so arrogant that is so that is so just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a terrible move it’s such a huge dick
⏹️ ▶️ John move it’s a tempting is attempting to force someone’s hand by like well we didn’t hear from you for a day so we’re just going to go forward with
⏹️ ▶️ John this that’s going to force you to react and he’s not playing that game and it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah it’s this is awful i mean i don’t think i don’t think jeff atwood’s a bad guy i’ve met
⏹️ ▶️ Marco him a couple times i’ve talked to him a couple times. I don’t think he’s a bad guy, but this is just so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tone deaf. And it really does. It just it’s and it’s so easily avoidable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This project is brand new. Jeff Atwood has a hell of a microphone. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call it anything you want and it will get off the ground just as well as if you called it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything marked down. You can call it anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’ll survive on its own merits like and the merits are substantial because they’re fulfilling
⏹️ ▶️ John a market need for these three big very popular websites that want to stand on this thing go ahead standardize it pick
⏹️ ▶️ John a name out of a hat you know like have a little contest for a name like it did for the stack overflow logo like you know you have
⏹️ ▶️ John the tools to do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah like you can you can really you can call it anything and this is the time to do that when the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco project has just gotten off the ground it’s just starting it’s brand new you know your version of it is brand brand new.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s the only thing that’s a problem is the name. Just fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s a couple people in the chat room and elsewhere on the web are like, well, the BSD license on markdown.pl,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the Perl file that implements markdown a groomed says that you can’t use the name markdown and blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John All that is irrelevant because that applies to the source code. And nobody’s
⏹️ ▶️ John using that source code because they’re all trying to do their own independent implementations. Anyway, this has nothing to do with legality
⏹️ ▶️ John has everything to do with like not sabotaging yourself and not being a jerk. Like, that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, and I don’t think we would ever pursue it legally because that would be kind of pointless. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s just all about being nice to people. And the reason they don’t get replies is because they’ve been,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, obnoxious to him so many times. Would you keep replying to them? It’s like, what do you expect? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, if you’re not going to reply, we’re just going to co-opt your thing and be jerks about it. And it’s like, well, if you’re gonna be jerks about it, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to respond to your email. Well, if you’re not to respond to my email, I’m just going to pick another name anyway. It’s like this needless
⏹️ ▶️ John drama that just, yeah. I mean, I knew as soon as it said standard markdown that
⏹️ ▶️ John there was a start your timer. That’s not going to last very long. And sure enough, it didn’t. But I have to admit that
⏹️ ▶️ John I was surprised when the rename post came. And the new name was, with no permission and no blessing,
⏹️ ▶️ John common markdown. And it was like, oh, god. I was so hopeful. I’m like, oh, this is speedy.
⏹️ ▶️ John They realized their mistake soon. And they’re correcting it. They’re doing everything they’re supposed to. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, and again, it’s you can you can tell in the attitude of this post and of how they’ve gone about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. It’s more of the same that they they not only do they feel entitled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to own markdown themselves, but they really do not respect john gruber at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. And they don’t respect him as a person even. And that’s that’s what’s become very clear here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They really, really look down upon him.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they don’t respect him as an open source project maintainer. I think he’s a terrible open source program maintainer. But that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t give you the right to be a jerk about it. Like you can you can have whatever opinion you want about that. You can be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I don’t like the way he’s handled. Fine. Great. You don’t like the way he’s handled it. But he doesn’t like the way you handle a lot of your projects, too.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that doesn’t. Therefore, I get to do this. No, not therefore you get to do that. That’s no,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t follow. So it’s like they’re giving in to their their frustrations on technical and sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, issues of stewardship and stuff. It’s like, feel free to have those feelings. But like you cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John parlay those feelings into being a jerk and say, Well, it’s justified because this guy’s not good. He wouldn’t, he isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John running this project the way I would run it. Yeah. Well, get your own project, run it the way you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I try because I’m an idiot to respond to most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey email I get. And occasionally I’ll get just extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind, generous, wonderful emails. You know how long it takes me to reply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to most of those? Somewhere between one and three weeks because I get so much freaking email. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am nowhere near the level of celebrity that John Gruber.
⏹️ ▶️ John He did not respond because he’s overwhelmed an email He didn’t respond because he didn’t want to respond and like honestly, even if he
⏹️ ▶️ John totally planned to respond What’s wrong with him taking a day or two to think about it? Like it’s the what’s the big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s here’s the big thing about this like like somebody in the chat just said here. Let me see Tangible ghost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the chat just said yeah I think all the disrespect comes from the fact that Gruber doesn’t want to Blank or get off the pot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it comes to markdown like What people I think are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not understanding well in this argument is that John Gruber has no obligation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do anything with Markdown He has no obligation at all to respond
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Jeff Atwood’s emails He has no obligation at all to make changes that people want or to fix perceived
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or actual bugs or problems with Markdown It’s his project. He he owns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like and and again leaving aside the legalities of things like trademarks you know, that’s those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are all arguable. I think just common sense looking at this, he owns this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to to think that you can just go up and and take it as yours and say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he doesn’t seem to be using it. So we’re going to take the project over. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, there’s a way to do that respectfully. And the way to do that respectfully is to fork it and use your own branding,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco period, and not try to commandeer his because it does not matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what what he is doing or not doing with it. It is still his.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there is nothing wrong with you doing your own take on it with your
⏹️ ▶️ John and see in the normal open source world people get super pissed about forks and stuff and grubber is like fine for
⏹️ ▶️ John it like he is being much nicer than most maintainers of open source projects who are like who view
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of fork as a hostile attempt to take over, especially if you give it a new name. And it’s like, you want to be the new
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. It’s like, no way we’re like, they hate that groupers like, go ahead, like, do whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John you want. Like markdown is not hard to invite yourself, you don’t need a source code at all. It’s bsd license if you want it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John then you can’t use it. But he’s even willing to give you the source code as long as you don’t use the name markdown. But like, he’s like, go ahead, call
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the hell you want. Make your own thing. Do like I don’t care. This is my thing. Feel free to have your thing. He is
⏹️ ▶️ John in the grand scheme of maintainers open source, he is incredibly generous of what he’s willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to let you do with his idea and his source code. It’s not even like GPL. It’s like a BSD
⏹️ ▶️ John variant. He’s willing to let people make things called insert modifier here markdown, which is way
⏹️ ▶️ John more than most other open source people to let you do. Try doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that with Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Try to make you know, I don’t know, maybe Postgres is good, but I try to make like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a standard my sequence, you know, much the myself. Like, you know, like, what,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and It’s just it’s all just comes from frustration. Like he’s not running the project the right way. He’s not running the project
⏹️ ▶️ John the way I would want. I agree with all those things. I do not think he’s running the project the right way. I don’t think he’s running the way I would want it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t then just, it doesn’t follow. There’s this huge gap between disagreeing with
⏹️ ▶️ John what someone’s doing with their project and you deciding that you are now, you are now
⏹️ ▶️ John the standard bearer for that project that you did not start. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco We got through that pretty easily.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I think it’s pretty open and close. I think Common Markdown will not last as a name we will see more of this but
⏹️ ▶️ John the September 9th event will come and erase all this and so maybe we’ll talk about it five shows from now when it is called something that does
⏹️ ▶️ John not have markdown in the name and we could finally get this all behind us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you really think he’s going to change the name again? I don’t think he
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s got to change, he can’t leave it as common, it’s ridiculous. There’s too much, too many people think he’s a jerk for doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it and they’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the attitude he has in this post does not fill me with hope that he’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco admit that this was not good and change it again.
⏹️ ▶️ John He admitted it once, he could, I think he he He admitted that he screwed up the first time and then screwed up a second
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just admitted he screwed up a second time and get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco third time, right? I think it’s interesting, like not one of the names that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he suggested to Gruber didn’t contain markdown.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Gruber had said he’s okay with like pedantic markdown or maybe even strict markdown. Like there is a precedent for modifier
⏹️ ▶️ John markdown that Gruber is okay with. All you gotta do is get permission. If he says fine, use it. But if he doesn’t, if he says, if he doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John say fine to any of your names, then just pick a new one. It’s really easy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, again, it’s just, it’s, you know, getting back to your discussion about good and bad business, like, which I admittedly was on a much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more important topic, but still, like, this is just bad business. Like, if you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your standard to actually have power, to have a chance of becoming,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote, a standard, instead of just you saying it’s a standard, you know, insert XKCD comic here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of just you saying that, for it to actually be adopted, to be widely out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be powerful, to be the standard. It can’t have stupid crap like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this tying it down, like stupid crap, like stupid arguments about the name.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a sideshow. It’s a distraction. And people say, well, this sideshow is good for publicity. Jeff Atwood does not need this sideshow
⏹️ ▶️ John to make publicity. Like some people may need this kind of because otherwise no one would know it existed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Jeff Atwood does not need this. It is all downside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for him. Exactly. And it’s angering a lot of people in the community
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people he needs to attract People who
⏹️ ▶️ John like Markdown, those people. Yeah. There’s a lot of those, like, those are the people you don’t want to piss off. People like me, who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t use Markdown, and I don’t care, and even I’m against them. And so it’s like, the people who love Markdown
⏹️ ▶️ John really hate you for doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, because like, and Markdown has spread. It has become so widespread because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people like Jeff Atwood. And like, Markdown is on Tumblr because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I put it there. Because David didn’t really know what it was or care, and I wanted it there. so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one day when Tumblr was still really small, I just put it there. Markdown is on Stack Overflow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Jeff Atwood was the co-founder of Stack Overflow, and one day he wanted it there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so he put it there. It’s this kind of community of people. It’s people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who read John Gruber’s site, who follow stuff like this, who are a part of this community, who are programmers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are into this sort of stuff, who follow the stuff online. It’s people like us who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco responsible for the spread of this kind of technology and the spread of these kind of standards or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-standards. It’s this community that he is polarizing by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being a dick about the name. And that will really harm this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He has to not let people object to it on such a trivial ground as he stole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the name in a kind of dickish way. Let people object to it over its merits,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or let it win on its merits. Don’t give people stupid ammo like this that is so easily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco avoided, it’s so easily changed, because that ultimately is harming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the goal he’s trying to achieve in what I think is a bigger way than he realizes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, but it’s only been, what, 12 hours and 24 hours now? So,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, we’ll revisit after the September 9th event, see if anything came of it. In the meantime, just
⏹️ ▶️ John keep doing what you were doing. If you’re using if you see a tiny American flags for some markdown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So apparently there’s personally I don’t understand that reference second.
⏹️ ▶️ John I screwed up the quote so you’re forgetting it’s also the second time you’ve used that reference
⏹️ ▶️ John I use it. I’ve used it way more than two times in my life. Believe me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do titles. Accidental markdown. No. Do you do anything for fun?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like that’s worth it just to shame John but it’s probably not the best.
⏹️ ▶️ John me for what? It’s a shame you two for not being able to think of things I do for fun, despite the fact that we talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about them constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you do nothing for fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nothing other than those things that we constantly talk about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You do nothing outside the house for fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not true. Ooh, stumped it. You got him there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Waiting for you guys to come up with the things I do for fun outside the house. I bet you can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess you can play games outside of your house on portable devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, that’s true. Go to the movies? Yeah, where are the movies? They’re at the movie theater
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes. Where is the movie theater outside the house. What about restaurants? Do I ever go to restaurants? Are they in the house?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you enjoy restaurants? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John enjoy them in New York
⏹️ ▶️ John more than I enjoy them here, but I do enjoy them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I don’t enjoy restaurants. I do. I, House of Prime Rib, who doesn’t enjoy that? That’s good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once a year for God’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey sakes. I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the middle of a trip that makes you miserable.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t enjoy the
⏹️ ▶️ John traveling, but I enjoy being there. Although the night after the House of apartment. I always feel like someone should wheel me back to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s part of the experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How tall are you, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Six, two ish, three ish, something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. So all 150 pounds and six foot two inches of you. Yeah, you really.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, I clean my plate. There’s nothing left. I’m not doing a whole Brent Simmons thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He gets the dessert slice.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s hardcore. Forget it. I can’t do that. Two years in a row I have eaten the entire thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone likes the Markdown titles. The real official Markdown would be a good title for
⏹️ ▶️ John the Markdown part of the thing, but that’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two and a half hours in.
⏹️ ▶️ John right. Someone’s going to see the title and be like, what are they going to get to the fireworks factory? Another reference I’ve made a million times and I will keep
⏹️ ▶️ John making. You cannot stop me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t have to make me give a shit about it either.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you should. And what you can have your own references, you can reference things that I haven’t seen, like, say, by the bell
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. You know, I don’t know what you kids are into.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I made a hunt for October reference on Twitter earlier and I’ve seen a handful of people got it and I was very happy
⏹️ ▶️ John So you do have common ground for references. I’m just saying you can feel free to make references that I don’t get if you think there are any.
⏹️ ▶️ John I said there should be plenty of fish saved by the bell. Dave Matthews band. I don’t know anything about that crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s that thing? Something tycoon train tycoon rail type railroad tycoon
⏹️ ▶️ John Not just railroads. It’s all transport.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Railroad tycoon was was worse. email Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot believe you’re not going to this event John
⏹️ ▶️ John I seriously thought about it I had a plan but in the end I could not justify the time
⏹️ ▶️ John and expense and yes the the discomfort of the travel
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a factor cannot discount it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the spreadsheet said no I cannot go
⏹️ ▶️ John no it’s not a spreadsheet it’s just called weighing the reasons for and against everybody does in their head
⏹️ ▶️ John whether they know it or not. Unfortunately, a lot of people when they make decisions have invisible columns
⏹️ ▶️ John weighing down their invisible spreadsheet. They don’t know there’s a spreadsheet and they don’t know what’s in any of the columns and they just make decisions
⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t understand what they’re made by. Just because I understand what factors into my decision does not mean I’m making decisions in a different
⏹️ ▶️ John way than other people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All your columns are labeled.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re at least visible. Most of them I think. and then we’re visible.