157: As Many People in the Sandbox as Possible
17 Feb 2016Federighi and Cue on The Talk Show, Adobe deleting the .functionalhighground, and Microsoft Bob.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Potential Apple Car ECU
- Adobe bug deletes Backblaze folder
- Sandboxing on the Mac
- Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi on The Talk Show
- Figma's Vector Networks
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
Sponsored by:
- Backblaze: Online backup for $5/month. Native. Unlimited. Unthrottled. Uncomplicated.
- Hover: The best way to buy and manage domain names. Use coupon code BRIDGESTOBURN for 10% off your first purchase.
- Harry's: An exceptional shave at a fraction of the price. Use code ATP for $5 off your first purchase.
Chapters
- Pre-show: Sane states
- Bob’s Briefcase
- Bluetooth audio latency
- Sponsor: Backblaze
- Adobe deleted the .functionalhighground
- Sandboxing Mac apps
- Sponsor: Hover (code BRIDGESTOBURN)
- C-Fed and EQ on The Talk Show
- Sponsor: Harry’s (code ATP)
- Figma’s vector networks
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Nothing that is so perfect
Pre-show: Sane states
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The following is the complete list of sane states
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in these United States of America that require only a real license plate Alabama, Arizona,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee in West Virginia You’ll notice that very nearby states North Carolina,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pennsylvania, West Virginia all No front license plate friggin, Virginia
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now out of curiosity Can you think of any other criterion for which those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be listed as the sane states?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not off the top of my head.
Bob’s Briefcase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we should do some follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Juju ice God, I can’t believe I just did that. I swore I’d never do that on a podcast I mean, you just you just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey baited me into it. I hate everything. All right, I quit anyway Um, so we had some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedback about my iPad tale of woe We had a lot of private feedback from Mike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hurley the once iPad hater now King iPad evangelizer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would never say I would never classify him as a hater. He was more of an iPad in different here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s a word that I just made up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know maybe he was fairly anti iPad for a while there but anyways
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he gave me some feedback that basically said I didn’t know what I was doing and that’s the problem which I believe I admitted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of people basically said the same thing and the point you know I was trying to make was hey you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of this stuff comes right out of the box on OS X and it does not on the iPad, except
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of people wrote in to say that you can in fact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do a signature on a PDF on an iOS device. And apparently there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a toolbox, which to me looked like a briefcase icon. And within there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the annotations and markup and whatnot. And within there, you can do a signature. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have not had the chance to try this myself, but I had plenty of people tell me about this. So I’m taking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it as fact that that is the case. So that is just a little bit of follow-up. You can indeed do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the signature on an iOS device.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you mistake the briefcase icon for the Windows 95 My Briefcase?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You say that jokingly, but I was a heavy briefcase user way back in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the day because that was about the best way in the Windows world to do kind of like a poor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man’s R-Sync between your laptop and your desktop, which is what I was doing toward the end of college.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was kind of like the, it was like the floppy disk stage of evolution towards Dropbox, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That was also kind of the hangover of the desktop metaphor.
⏹️ ▶️ John The drunken orgy that was the desktop metaphor. Like, oh, folders, they’re just like folders that
⏹️ ▶️ John go in file cabinets, and there’s a little trash can, and so on and so forth, and people would latch onto that
⏹️ ▶️ John idea. That’s why the Macintosh is easier to use, because it has all these analogies to the real world.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so people are like, what else is in an office? It’s like carpeting and it’s like, it’s like this windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we already got those my carpeting exactly, you know and and The recycle
⏹️ ▶️ John a recycle bin because it’s not like trash because we’re more trendy than that and I guess it’s like a blotter Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean magic cap one on whole hog. They have like living rooms and dens and stuff But I was like briefcase briefcase. I know briefcase
⏹️ ▶️ John and so you got briefcase and windows and but what about Bob? Bob
⏹️ ▶️ John is after you go nuts and and this is the vision divisions you see in your head
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bob was like the the jumping over the shark and nuking the fridge of that metaphor
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s magic cap you should look at what magic cap look like it was very similar in terms of like making rooms of a house It became like
⏹️ ▶️ John maniac mansion It was like a you know Sierra Adventure where you’re going from room to room when you have these little
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway briefcase was one of the an apple itself did the same type of thing where they got
⏹️ ▶️ John distracted for a bit and thought that what made computers easy to use was specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John the connections with real-world things and not all the other stuff that goes along with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now we have everything flat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Never would have happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if Scott Forstall was still alive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ain’t that the truth. We still don’t have a good alternative save icon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually can I tell you guys a big secret? I’ve been holding this in all these years. My computer at the time was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not good enough to run it but there was one because I basically in my PC growing up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era I spent a lot more time than everybody else did on Windows 3.1. I did not go to 95. I was using 3.1 until 1998, and I went straight to 98.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was a brief time where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went to a friend’s house and I saw Microsoft Bob on their Pentium computer because it wouldn’t run on mine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Steven McLaughlin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a bold, bold confession. I don’t really remember it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was all over Windows during this time, but I don’t really remember Bob very well at all. I don’t know if I ever saw it, or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just blocked it from my memory, I don’t remember it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean it was just like a shell that you would launch from Windows. It didn’t replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the shell. It was just like a giant app. And you would do things inside of Bob and it was so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly slow. And this was during the super dark era of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computing where the hard drives were all super slow and grinding constantly because there was not enough RAM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do anything. And so this was like the dark mid to late 90s in computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computing where just everything, just the entire sound of computing for that entire era was hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive grinding noises.
⏹️ ▶️ John You guys both missed the floppy disk grinding era of computers where you could tell what your computer was doing by
⏹️ ▶️ John the particular tones your floppy drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made. Oh you say that but I was definitely rocking both the actual floppy floppy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is that five and a quarter I always get this backwards. Yeah five and a quarter. Five and a quarter three and a half so yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I had a five and a quarter floppy drive in an 8088
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that my dad had used years prior and was that I’d set up in my room.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I remember I thought I was awesome because it had a 10 meg hard drive in it. And at the time, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was effectively infinite space. Like you, you couldn’t fill it if you wanted to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, I’ve definitely heard that constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now all these kids these days that with their Windows PCs, they have the drive letters that start with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C and they have no idea why they don’t have an A and B drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John They should really be is weeping over the fact that they still have drive letters. There’s that which is hilarious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You got a great on a curve with Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s also true. I believe this same 10-meg hard drive 8088 had a the a drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe was the five and a Quarter almost got that wrong five and a quarter inch drive and I believe the B drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a three and a half inch low Density floppy. So that was what like 750 K or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that some like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and that was external I should add which was really cool probably scuzzy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, the only other thing I wanted to bring this back around to say about the iPad is a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote to say, hey, you idiot, the iPad has a camera and yes, that’s weird, but why didn’t you just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the camera to take a picture of the documents and use any one of these 350 different apps that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people recommended in order to scan, and I’m doing mega air quotes here, scan the PDF.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that is a perfectly valid answer. And I have one of those apps on my phone and on my iPad. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does work surprisingly well, but why on earth would I do that when I had a full-on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably multi-thousand dollar scanning machine, you know, one of those multifunction printers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the office right there, ready and waiting? The fidelity of that scan was going to be far superior to any,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, software flattened picture of a piece of paper. Plus there was quite a bit that I was scanning and I didn’t want to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spend all that time doing all that. Instead, I spent all that time trying to get it all into Dropbox, but that’s neither here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John nor there. That’s better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s totally better. So anyway, so I just wanted to follow up on that.
Bluetooth audio latency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other thing I wanted to note is we were talking last week about Bluetooth headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Bluetooth latency and some other miscellaneous things. And by accident
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today, I noticed something completely striking. And to back up just a half step,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve talked, Marco, and we’ve talked, and I’ve talked in the past about how I don’t really understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why everyone gets their all up in arms about Bluetooth latency,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially when watching video because I never see this. And as we discussed last episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I use these like fairly, well, really cheap and fairly crappy Bluetooth headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I love, don’t get me wrong, but they’re unremarkable in every measurable way. And I never get this video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey latency that everyone else seems to get. Well, today, John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had tweeted a link to a video with one of the dudes from The Wire. Bunk? Wendell Pierce.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So he tweeted a link, John had tweeted a link, where it was It was Wendell Pierce, I believe you’re right, Marco, talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, it was actually very interesting talking about being stopped in real life by a police officer and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was on my work computer and I had clicked the link and on my work computer, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re all in on Google apps, Chrome is my default browser. And this is the first time that’s ever been the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, and so I started watching this video on Chrome and I was like, oh my goodness, this latency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is ridiculous. It’s terrible. Wait a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s never ever happened to me before, ever. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey copied the link, dropped it in Safari. Perfect. No problems whatsoever. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a YouTube video. I don’t know what it is, but Miles M wrote in when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweeted about this and said, Safari uses system APIs to play video, but Chrome re-implements
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything itself down to the media decoders. I have no idea if that’s true or not, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can tell you that anecdotally, based on one video I watched during the day today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It certainly seemed like that very well may be the case. And I was stunned by A, the fact that it happened, and B, how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad it was. And so I wonder if all these people that are whining and moaning about this Bluetooth latency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are just Chrome users, and because of that, they see this terrible latency,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so they’re all thinking, man, I’m crazy, how could I not see this? As at the same time, I’m thinking, man, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are crazy, why are they seeing this? And it turns out it’s just another reason why you shouldn’t be using Chrome. turns out everybody’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey No, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you’re exactly right that basically that there is Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco latency on any Bluetooth device. There is latency, not as bad as Airplay. Airplay is fixed at two seconds regardless, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that seems like forever when you’re trying to get something to happen. Bluetooth is way shorter than that. It can be substantially less than a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there is still noticeable latency. And humans can detect latency in video where the audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t synced up properly to like watching people’s mouths move when they talk. We can detect very, very small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amounts of latency and it just looks wrong to us. So it has to be perfect. Like when you’re watching people speak,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there can’t be any weird latency between the audio and the video. Apple knows this. So they’re in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their system frameworks for iOS and OS 10. Most Bluetooth headphones, they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some way, and I don’t know the details of how it works, but they have some way of establishing with the headset what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the latency is and then compensating for it. The downside of this, first of all, you just found one, which is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it only works in things that use the AV frameworks. The other downside is that not every headphone supports this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve tested probably five or six sets of Bluetooth headphones now and only I think two of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually properly didn’t have any latency and the rest all had unacceptable latency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even when using the system video player even on iOS where you would think that would be most commonly tested.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other problem is games. Video can account for this. Games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost always can’t and don’t. And so it works fine if you are using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your headphones to watch a video in the built-in system API player in something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That works fine. And that’s probably all you’ve ever done, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I think so. I can’t imagine a time other than when I was in Chrome that I wasn’t using just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the system frameworks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. But it’s especially a problem if you’re trying to play games with Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones. It’s basically impossible. You basically can’t, unless you are just not listening to the game audio and only listening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to music or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I just thought it was crazy. I don’t know. John, do you have any thoughts on this?
⏹️ ▶️ John I just think that I hope that in the future, they will keep improving these wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John audio APIs to eliminate these problems, because it’s kind of a shame that it requires the
⏹️ ▶️ John deep integration of the system APIs with all this compensation and getting every, like Chrome should be able to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it correctly, in other words. It shouldn’t be such a problem. So I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John what the limitations are that are requiring this, but I know Bluetooth continues to evolve and I think it needs to continue to evolve
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s obviously not quite good enough yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and you know, there’s to some degree, there’s always going to be some latency inherent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a digital signal being transmitted, being accepted over wireless network, being decoded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from digital to analog in certain chunks of blocks. And there’s always, you know, with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio latency, you’re always having this trade-off. if you make the latency really short, that means you have really short
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buffers on all the sides, which means that it becomes extremely sensitive to cutting out with any kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of reception drop or flaky signal or anything. So if you have very, very low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco latency, it is very fragile. Where if you increase the latency, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will have more tolerance for weirdness in the signal. You can back off a little bit and then burst the data that you missed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before the latency has caught up. Just like the old anti-skip things in Discman. Have you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever had one of those? Same thing. There’s all these trade-offs and it just might not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be worth it if most people are fine most of the time or if they or you know if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as which often happens in the case with technological progress if the if the new way of doing things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does have shortcomings and downsides that people are just okay with because the upsides make it worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Like everyone might just decide you know what I’m fine with just not having synced up audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I’m playing games while wearing headphones. Like people might just decide that because it’s worth it to have all the other benefits of wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones. So I wouldn’t necessarily consider this problem something that will be solved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and will be solved anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, don’t have to worry, because Apple’s hard real-time operating system they’re working on for the car will solve all these problems. Because then you
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t have any underflow problems on your buffers, because you’ve got time slice guarantees, and that’ll solve all these problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John People always talk about it. I’m saying this as a joke, by the way. But people do talk a lot about the
⏹️ ▶️ John theoretical, the real-time requirements of any sort of software Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John might be doing in the car and I have a hard time believing that
⏹️ ▶️ John any software part of the car system like
⏹️ ▶️ John in other words I imagine that Apple is going to do the part of the car that you would you know the software that you see on the
⏹️ ▶️ John screens in the car that you interact with but I always imagine that the internal things that deal with like
⏹️ ▶️ John engine control computers will have absolutely no lineage or connection to any existing Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John software code base like that it’ll just be an embedded system that it won’t be related
⏹️ ▶️ John to iOS that none of that stuff will come to iOS and other stuff from iOS will go to it there’ll be an iOS like thing
⏹️ ▶️ John for a front-end assuming they ever make car you know the thing that runs all the dashboard and all the other stuff but the part that
⏹️ ▶️ John runs the engine computer and any other stuff I can’t imagine that having any connection
⏹️ ▶️ John with the existing basically with Darwin with the existing code base right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well and and we’ve we’ve heard very early and very you know Unreliable but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still rumblings that indicate that that’s exactly what they’re doing that that they are working on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new kernel and a new OS that might possibly Use Swift for everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s you know That’s kind of one of the reasons why Swift is so safe and everything like
⏹️ ▶️ John well But that could still be for the dashboard control like I’m saying for you know for the other for the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be Real time. Oh, yeah, right because they don’t you know, the the Darwin kernel is not a real-time kernel where you can
⏹️ ▶️ John guarantee I mean they know they have the stuff for trying to guarantee time slices for audio and video or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not like hard real-time like things you put on like spacecraft that go to Mars where?
⏹️ ▶️ John This absolutely positively has to happen. It’s just it’s very tightly constrained. You know embedded operating system environment
⏹️ ▶️ John What is that the one really popular one wind river systems or something? I don’t know the ones on all the spacecrafts and satellites
⏹️ ▶️ John and other stuff like that That is a different problem domain And I see no reason that Apple would need to make a
⏹️ ▶️ John single OS that spans it because you never see the real-time operating system It just runs the machinery under the covers and then Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is free to make a Swift from top to bottom cool UI thing for all of the
⏹️ ▶️ John you know climate control dashboard applications audio system all that other stuff which could still also be
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely new code base, but I still feel like That doesn’t even need to be real time because
⏹️ ▶️ John it just controls these sort of inessential functions if it’s self-driving then I don’t really know what the hell is
Sponsor: Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our first sponsor this week is Backblaze. Go to backblaze.com.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, three or four years now. It’s been a while since before they sponsored our shows. Because I just
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco my favorite by far. Simple as that. So they have over 150 petabytes of
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anybody can do this. They have over 10 billion files that have been restored to
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Backblaze still has your data and you can get it back. It’s a level of peace of mind. Backblaze
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your Mac and PC. So, they have a Windows app, too, if you run that way. You can put it on your C drive,
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Adobe deleted the .functionalhighground
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to backblaze for sponsoring our show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So backblaze has been in the news lately and not just because they sponsor this awesome program, but because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they had a run-in with Adobe Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John we all had a run-in with Adobe sometimes that happens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whoops, so I do not have creative cloud. So does one of you want to fill fill me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and fill everyone in on what happened?
⏹️ ▶️ John This didn’t happen to me either. Thankfully, but I do have well, here’s the thing I have Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John CS6, which is the last pre-creative cloud version,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for reasons, oh I know why, I was saying why does this not on all my systems? Anyway, even though I
⏹️ ▶️ John have CS6, I still have the creative cloud icon in the menu bar because I think I downloaded like a trial
⏹️ ▶️ John of Illustrator, I might have paid for Illustrator for a month, like Illustrator CC, like the first version. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John once Adobe gets on your system, it has this creative cloud menu thing which like tries to update your applications for you and
⏹️ ▶️ John do other crap like that. It’s the worst. Yeah, and it launches on login, and you try to get rid of it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it comes back, and you just want to quit it. Like Steam. Yeah, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it through the system login items. And when you turn it off, it stays off. Creative Cloud just keeps coming back like an undead
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Anyway, Adobe
⏹️ ▶️ John has a history of having, let’s say, challenges related to
⏹️ ▶️ John software installation and management of installations on the Mac. I have at various
⏹️ ▶️ John times searched for solutions to seemingly intractable Adobe application installation problems and found instructions
⏹️ ▶️ John on Adobe’s own website not in the forums but like literal official Adobe instructions that contain
⏹️ ▶️ John terrifying like sets of steps that you have to follow to get yourself out of a situation
⏹️ ▶️ John in which you’re legitimately purchased Adobe application won’t update or something and they have you running commands from the
⏹️ ▶️ John shell prompt you know sudo rm blah blah blah and it’s like seriously this is anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John they have serious challenges and this is another one of their challenges apparently they release some software and
⏹️ ▶️ John this is all kind of experimentally determined by Backblaze and you’ll understand why Backblaze is involved at all in this in a moment
⏹️ ▶️ John some piece of software that would effectively list the folders the directories
⏹️ ▶️ John at the top level of your volume and sort them I’m assuming asciiabetically
⏹️ ▶️ John as in like capital letters first or whatever but at any rate periods and spaces and stuff first pick
⏹️ ▶️ John the first one and delete its contents and it was hoping that first one would be like a dot
⏹️ ▶️ John Adobe something But depending on whether you had a previous installation,
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be something other than.adobe or spaceadobe, whatever the hell it was. It could in fact be something
⏹️ ▶️ John called.bzvol, which is a Backblaze hidden directory where it stores a bunch of crap
⏹️ ▶️ John that has to do with the operation of Backblaze. So people were messing with this Adobe Creative Cloud update, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure they were all prompted to install by the little menu item that always runs in people’s systems, people’s systems and they would install it
⏹️ ▶️ John and that installer would delete the contents of backblaze’s little directory where it stores information
⏹️ ▶️ John about your backups and that’s pretty anti-social behavior when
⏹️ ▶️ John an application not made by you goes and deletes all your crap out from under it now to backblaze’s
⏹️ ▶️ John credit they figured out this problem pretty quickly they posted a thing on their site that explains how to solve the situation
⏹️ ▶️ John they reported it to Adobe and then to Adobe’s credit Adobe fixed it and pulled the update and did all that of this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ll link to a blog post in the show notes from back ways exploiting the situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, we don’t have the particular details back plays just has like experimentally we experimentally determined
⏹️ ▶️ John this that and the other thing what people were doing in the meantime before these updates was they would make a bunch of a series of sacrificial folders
⏹️ ▶️ John at the top level of their directory like called dot a to make the the Adobe thing nuke
⏹️ ▶️ John that one and not the busy vol one. But as back place points out, even if you had this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing happen to you at no time where your actual backups in jeopardy,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the backups are all server-side. At Backblaze, this was merely setting back the client-side installation
⏹️ ▶️ John of your backup thing by deleting all of the information needs to keep track of stuff. So Backblaze would automatically
⏹️ ▶️ John recreate it, and I’m assuming you would have to grind your disk for a while to figure out what the hell is what and recreate that directory.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s good to know that despite another application coming and recursively deleting the contents of one of its directories,
⏹️ ▶️ John your actual backups, meaning like the data that to start and backblaze the server, or are we safe during this time?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We give Apple a hard time for software quality issues that we think they have, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had a couple of people write in to say, why don’t you complain about Adobe just as much?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the truth is that Adobe software is typically far worse than Apple software, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the non-core things. So you think about like Photoshop, Illustrator, these are like the core Adobe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. Like they’re core apps, as much as they can be weird and flaky and as much as people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can love and hate them so much at the same time, they don’t usually have stability issues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or data loss issues. They have many other issues, but those are not usually among them. So it’s not like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the main core apps tend to work decently well most of the time. Although I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say the same thing about Apple. But the problem that Adobe has is all the other like supporting crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around them. Also anything related to Acrobat. But you know, all the supporting crap around them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the installers, the cloud services that they use, like the Behance plugins
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all this crazy stuff, those things tend to work very poorly and be very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inconsistent. The reason why we don’t usually criticize Adobe on this show is simply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Adobe has been making mediocre software for so long that we have no expectations of quality from Adobe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as sad as that is. I say this as a longtime Adobe customer and user of multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products by them, But the fact is that Adobe just has a really, really bad reputation for this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and has for years. So yeah, we just don’t expect much from them. And when things like this happen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s barely even worth mentioning because it just happened. Like crap with Adobe happens all the time. Usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not this bad. But it’s just one more day of using Adobe stuff where the software is doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird stuff and not quite installing right, or Creative Cloud is doing weird things in the menu bar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s just typical Adobe behavior.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as big as Adobe is obviously like most people don’t use Adobe software like especially now that you know OS 10
⏹️ ▶️ John PDF rendering built in everything people have no longer have a reason to download Acrobat just to look at PDFs
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re not a designer or not using one of you know you don’t use it Adobe products so much whereas everybody’s using
⏹️ ▶️ John You know the operating system and a lot of the built-in apps that ship with Apple things So it’s just a much bigger surface area
⏹️ ▶️ John for people to encounter problems with with Apple stuff. The reason I’m here is because…
Sandboxing Mac apps
⏹️ ▶️ John and I wanted to talk about this aside from the backblaze angle. And it’s just coincidence that we happen to have backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ John sponsoring this episode is the sandboxing angle, because a lot of the discussion I saw
⏹️ ▶️ John about this issue was see, this is why Apple wants Mac applications to be
⏹️ ▶️ John sandboxed and quick sandboxing refresher. Sandboxing is basically a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to limit the ability of applications to do things. So
⏹️ ▶️ John a typical general-purpose PC or Mac when you’re running an application that application can do
⏹️ ▶️ John anything that you could do as As a user as an you could delete all the files in your home directory
⏹️ ▶️ John and so can any program that you run you could you know rename things remove
⏹️ ▶️ John things like just You know transmit data over the network pull data
⏹️ ▶️ John down from somewhere Anything that basically you could do as a user or in a program that you wrote any program
⏹️ ▶️ John that you run can do and what? Sandboxing does is it says that each individual application
⏹️ ▶️ John has to declare what kinds of things it wants to do So an application might say
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to access the network or maybe I need to access network Just go to certain sites. I need to access
⏹️ ▶️ John the camera or the microphone. I need access to the file system I need access to just these two
⏹️ ▶️ John folders in the file system You know like that and you can have these sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John permissions all the way up to the level of like hey I need access to the complete file system and historically Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has been trying to Slowly close that door to say you know what no application should really have access to the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire file system And if you do there should be a good reason and that’s the whole negotiation with
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac App Store and sandboxing Mac applications to try to this negotiation back where it’s being
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple and the applications of What they call entitled ones what entitlements is your application actually need
⏹️ ▶️ John to do its job versus which ones do you just want to have? so why is your Application that you
⏹️ ▶️ John use for email accessing the camera and you maybe you have a good reason about oh If you don’t have an avatar,
⏹️ ▶️ John we will take a picture of you And then use that as your avatar. Okay. Well, that’s an okay reason
⏹️ ▶️ John Why is your email application need access the entire file system? Well, we don’t really know where we’re gonna edit files.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we just want access to the whole file system and no, sorry We really want you to pick where you’re gonna put the files You can put a dialog
⏹️ ▶️ John box up and the user can pick and then you get permission for that directory or that directory tree But you don’t have access everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John And as we just discussed with Adobe stuff as you might imagine Adobe is not in the Mac App Store Adobe
⏹️ ▶️ John sells its own software has its own subscription service to create a cloud thing where you can sort of rent your software
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’ll give you updates for a certain amount of time And they’re not in the Mac App Store not just because they don’t want to share 30%
⏹️ ▶️ John of the money of Apple but also because none of their applications would function if sandboxed
⏹️ ▶️ John and So that that’s why sandboxing is related to this because if their application was sandboxed surely
⏹️ ▶️ John their updater wouldn’t have the entitlement that allows it gives it access to the entire file system the
⏹️ ▶️ John updater would instead like maybe prompt you to find your application or something and then the user would give a permission to update
⏹️ ▶️ John all right you know if it was in the Mac App Store updates would work entirely differently anyway because it would just be able to update the individual apps and their bundles
⏹️ ▶️ John but the real issue is all right so sandboxing would have saved this but it’s not sandboxed so
⏹️ ▶️ John what is sandboxing actually buying us because if if you can have non sandboxed
⏹️ ▶️ John non Mac App Store applications, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of sandboxing? In
⏹️ ▶️ John other words, if you can’t get everybody to be sandboxed, it doesn’t matter how great sandboxing is, because it just takes one unsandboxed application
⏹️ ▶️ John to ruin your day. So what do you guys think about the sandboxing, yay or nay,
⏹️ ▶️ John angle on this whole disaster?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s a reasonable angle, but part of the reason that the Mac is so great,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and part of the reason I’ve been talking the last couple of episodes about things that bother me about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS, is that you can take things into your own hands in a way that you can’t with iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s very freeing. And so I wouldn’t, I would be very upset
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if all software had to go through the Mac app store or, or somehow in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another way, all software was sandboxed. I don’t see that as feasible. I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think though that, uh, software developers should be better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey systems of the ecosystem and allow their software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be sandboxed wherever possible. Now I’m not clear, can you sandbox without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being in the app store? So like could Creative Cloud still be a third party, or not a third party,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an outside of the app store thing and also be sandboxed?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, definitely. You can do that. And some people do do that. That was one of the discussions. Why would anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John voluntarily subject their application to the sandbox if you’re not in the Mac app store? selling an application directly,
⏹️ ▶️ John why would you go through the trouble of sandboxing? And part of the reason is to protect yourself from
⏹️ ▶️ John your own bug. Say you have some sort of silly bug, or not so silly bug. I see this, this was
⏹️ ▶️ John an iTunes bug way back in the day. This is a very common bug for the mindset
⏹️ ▶️ John of the people that tend to write things like installers and uninstallers. This mindset is the assumption
⏹️ ▶️ John that no Mac user, no really old school Mac user would ever make, but that basically everyone else in the entire computing universe
⏹️ ▶️ John except old school Mac user makes. assumption is for example file names do not contain
⏹️ ▶️ John spaces because who would put a space in their file name that’s madness you can’t have spaces and file names
⏹️ ▶️ John that the iTunes bug was if you had a space in your file name there was like a shell script that was just blindly taking
⏹️ ▶️ John a string building a path out of that string and then running a command on it without quoting the string because hey what
⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s a quote in the string who would put a quote in their file names Mac users would that suit right
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey okay well I’ll use single
⏹️ ▶️ John quotes who would put a single quote in their file names Mac users that suit you know Mac users were trained for
⏹️ ▶️ John a decade and a half that the file name is the user’s domain And you can type whatever the hell you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well except What is it a colon or a comma which one was the one that you can’t use you
⏹️ ▶️ John can get a colon into you can? Get something that appears as a colon
⏹️ ▶️ John Colon a slash there there are limitations So basically if I can type it like you’re prevented from typing those
⏹️ ▶️ John things essentially or you’re prevented from really getting those into the phone Name, but the bottom line is you would never think that because I put
⏹️ ▶️ John a space in my file name this would mean like the iTunes one I think was if you had a volume called foo bar
⏹️ ▶️ John and you had another you had a volume called foo and then you had a volume called foo
⏹️ ▶️ John bar the thing would try to delete foo bar but after the first space the you know the RM
⏹️ ▶️ John command would say oh you want me to delete volumes foo okay I’ll go that I’ll do delete that okay and you also wanted me to delete
⏹️ ▶️ John bar oh no no such file and you were sad because it just nuked your entire directory anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John dealing with paths as strings and dealing with paths as strings in a sloppy way
⏹️ ▶️ John is an epidemic in the computing world. Um, so it’s very,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s actually very difficult to get that part of the system. Right. And so you’d sandbox yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, what if I make one of those mistakes? What if I’m deep in objective C code and I’m, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John building, you know, anytime you’re shelling out or doing something that you think like, Oh, I’ve built a string and this
⏹️ ▶️ John is some NS string that has a file path. And I’m, and then instead of feeding it to an objective C framework that
⏹️ ▶️ John would presumably do the right thing. Instead, you say, I’m just going to run this external command, even if it’s like, oh, I’m just going
⏹️ ▶️ John to run this external command that converts Markdown into HTML and I’ll just feed it this path and everything will be fine. In that case,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re probably not going to nuke the world. It’ll probably just break when someone puts a space or, you know, an exclamation
⏹️ ▶️ John point or a single quote or a double quote, depending on how silly you’re being about going through the shell to do these type of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I can tell you, as someone who writes in a language that’s actually very close to shell scripting,
⏹️ ▶️ John even Even in languages like that, where, you know, isn’t it the whole purpose of the language
⏹️ ▶️ John just to make it easy to run shell commands, right? To run things that you would type in the terminal? Don’t those languages have facilities
⏹️ ▶️ John for doing all this? Even in those languages, people just ignore the facilities that allow you to essentially pass a list,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it’ll be passed directly to the execcvpe function or whatever, where you bypass the shell entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what the components of the command are. You know this is the command, you know this is the path, you know this is the whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Never go through the shell and let it try to figure out where the boundaries are, because you will just, you’ll be sad and it will end in
⏹️ ▶️ John tears. So if you can sandbox your application and say, I’m only gonna ever edit, my application will only
⏹️ ▶️ John ever modify files in these two directories, plus ones that the user picks themselves with the open save dialog box.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then when you have this bug, your application won’t function directly, but you will not accidentally recursively delete
⏹️ ▶️ John their home directory, their volume, their entire documents folder or whatever else. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco would sandbox his own application and I think I would too, even though it would probably be a giant pain because I think
⏹️ ▶️ John there are a lot of entitlements that just don’t exist anymore because they think nobody in the Mac App Store should have them. Therefore, people on the outside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. I mean, that’s the main problem with sandboxing is really not the concept. There’s two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main problems with sandboxing on the Mac. Number one is that it wasn’t always there. So we have this entire ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of software that’s been built up over decades that it was originally built without the concept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of sandboxing. And then now it has to be bolted on and for a lot of apps that is either impossible or very difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then secondly, the The other problem is that Apple just hasn’t really been a very good steward of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking sandboxing and moving it forward and adding entitlements for things that really are necessary in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the real world. As a result, the kind of policy by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco action, at least, that Apple’s been doing so far is, well, if you don’t want to fit into what we want for the Mac App
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store, we don’t want you there at all. We don’t even want you to use any of this technology.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure that’s not what Craig Federighi wants to be the case, but that’s what’s happening so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They remember that the Mac exists just long enough to update sandboxing and make it more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful because I, as both a developer and a user—I mean, I’m not a Mac developer, at least not yet—but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a user, I would love for more of my apps to be sandboxed. If Apple wants to advance this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system and this practice of sandboxing apps, which I think they should, they need to make more apps able to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sandboxed in a reasonable way. So I hope there’s enough people at Apple who agree with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, that that gets done at some point. But as a developer, not only for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protecting all of your data from my accidental bugs and stuff that go into it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suppose I was making a Mac version of Overcast. I’m not, but suppose I was. Please
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t get excited, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not. You should. Sorry, Casey, I know. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should. I had forever ago, I had a branch that I could compile the data layer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Mac, but not a UI or anything. That’s the kind of app that doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need deep system access to really anything. I mean, I would need access to play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio and download stuff from the network. Like, that’s about it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would totally accept sandboxing. I wouldn’t want the responsibility of messing with your system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or messing with other apps accidentally or having my app be able to be hacked and have some kind of remote injection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you view a web page. You know, weird stuff like that. I know we’re beyond most of that with web stuff these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but still, it would be nice to just eliminate sources of bugs. To me, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a developer, would I opt into memory protection? Of course I would. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those things where if what you’re doing can fit within those restrictions, you should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adopt them, just because it will help you not only make better software, but ensure more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco secure software as time goes on, as people try to hack it, or as you make mistakes. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course I would opt into that. on iOS I’m very glad it’s there because there’s you know these whole classes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things where like if I get a support thing that says oh whenever I launch overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook crashes that’s not my problem I can’t do anything about that you know and in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a way that’s kind of frustrating for me to have to tell people sorry I can’t really help but also I can say well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I sorry it’s out of my control and it’s probably not anything I’m doing you know so there are lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of advantages to sandboxing for developers and users as long as the system either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the case of iOS that it’s always been there or in the case of the Mac, hopefully it gets better enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people that more more apps can adopt it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that leads me to question like this whole sandboxing and Adobe bug thing
⏹️ ▶️ John of like Apple’s responsibility as the platform or not responsibility Apple’s Apple’s goals as the platform owner
⏹️ ▶️ John is to I think it should be to try to get as many people into the
⏹️ ▶️ John sandbox on the Mac as possible and they’ve been trying to do that like they did the important first step was
⏹️ ▶️ John they themselves sandbox a ton of the background demons that run on your Mac so that like the thing that does like
⏹️ ▶️ John name lookups and stuff can’t doesn’t have complete access to the file system just to make them less
⏹️ ▶️ John of a vector for exploitation in terms of if malware can do a buffer overflow and like
⏹️ ▶️ John the name lookup system it can’t write an arbitrary file to anywhere in the file system because that thing is still in
⏹️ ▶️ John a sandbox so they sandbox a lot of their own things I sandbox a lot of the OS they tried to sandbox some of applications
⏹️ ▶️ John and of course they eventually restricted the Mac App Store to it which hurt a lot of applications but at this
⏹️ ▶️ John point the the other area of trying to get more things in the sandbox is saying
⏹️ ▶️ John are you an important popular application that a lot of people use and you’re not using
⏹️ ▶️ John the sandbox and they’re like that should be the focus of all their efforts now why are you not using the sandbox what can
⏹️ ▶️ John we do to help you get in the sandbox yes even for companies like Adobe that will probably never be in the Mac App Store for
⏹️ ▶️ John financial reasons in terms of profit sharing with Apple, they should still be saying, Adobe, we understand you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John never going to give us 30%. We understand you have your own subscription service and your own weird thing going on there. That’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we would still like all of your applications, including your installers and everything, to
⏹️ ▶️ John be in the sandbox. What do we have to do to get you into the sandbox today? Like car dealerships,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they need to be out there trying to get butts
⏹️ ▶️ John in the seats. I’m just mixing my analogies now on the sandbox. And if that means making
⏹️ ▶️ John variants of the sandbox that are entirely different than whatever be allowed in the Mac App
⏹️ ▶️ John Store, that would still be a benefit to both Apple and users, right? So that, you know, trying to be ideologically
⏹️ ▶️ John pure and say, if you can’t fit within the sandbox as we define it, define it like ideally
⏹️ ▶️ John for these isolated applications like they are on iOS, then tough luck, you can’t use it at all, you know? Or if
⏹️ ▶️ John we say, you know, Adobe could be, maybe Apple’s telling Adobe, you could be in the sandbox now, but you’re not. And nobody’s like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John we see kind of what the upside might be for you, Apple and for users, but it just seems like a lot of work. And
⏹️ ▶️ John even there’s no real technical limitations, we could do it today. We don’t want to. And that’s kind of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, what Apple’s job is to try to convince Adobe to essentially spend money,
⏹️ ▶️ John time and effort to get into the sandbox. And so if I was Apple, I would,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have had these efforts ongoing and be when this bug hit, I would be like trying to nicely say to Adobe,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, depending on what the current situation is, I don’t know, it could be that Adobe can’t get in the sandbox right now at all. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if they can be and they just refuse to because it takes too much effort, I will be gently pressing them to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John see if you would if you had sandboxed your applications, you could have avoided this bug that was embarrassing
⏹️ ▶️ John for you and bad for our users. What can we do to help? Can we send engineers out there? Can we help you like
⏹️ ▶️ John and not everyone gets this treatment, but Adobe even though a lot of people don’t use it enough people use it And if Apple still thinks creative
⏹️ ▶️ John professionals are an important market for them, you know, anyway, that’s my hope for the future for sandboxing,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, that it actually becomes more broadly useful because it’s unrealistic, like Casey pointed out
⏹️ ▶️ John to, uh, you know, and counterproductive to try to get every single application to the narrow sandbox
⏹️ ▶️ John as defined in the Mac app store. But it is good for everybody involved if the sandbox can expand
⏹️ ▶️ John and get more participants in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just as I become an older and older developer and person,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like. I’ve learned more and more usually the hard way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to protect against myself. And this is the same thing you guys were saying earlier. And so as you get older,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, you go even further than you think necessary to prevent yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from being an idiot, or at least that’s the way I am. And I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems the responsible thing to do, App Store or not, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sandbox your app if at all possible. And yeah, sometimes it’s a frigging nightmare, I am quite sure,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s the responsible thing to do. And it’s really unfortunate that Adobe didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and hasn’t done that yet.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so there was a very interesting episode of the talk show this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey past week. Eddie Cue and Craig Federighi were on the talk show. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the third incarnation of an Apple executive on the talk show, is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Federighi’s second appearance. He’s already had, group is already getting multiple appearances of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple execs on his shows. You see the new molts, you
⏹️ ▶️ John never know. Yeah, when he can’t get anybody else, he calls CFED and EQ to come down.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, yeah, that’s easy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Totally. So anyway, so they got on the talk show. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a great episode, which is unsurprising. Why?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why do it? Yeah, that’s my first question, is why are, because, you know, as
⏹️ ▶️ John we made a joke that Gru calls them off and brings them on, sometimes that happens. Like, I don’t, you know, I’m not privy any
⏹️ ▶️ John inside information about who calls who. But the question is, regardless of who asks who to
⏹️ ▶️ John be on when, why do Apple executives agree
⏹️ ▶️ John to come on a podcast at this particular time? When Craig Federighi
⏹️ ▶️ John came on an episode that I was actually on, the sort of commentary portion afterwards,
⏹️ ▶️ John clearly he was there to talk about Swift open source projects, because that’s what he came on the show to do. That’s what he talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John that had just happened. When Swift went open source, we talked about it in this show. they talked about on the talk show.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that was clear. And in this case, there’s no, as far as I’m aware, there’s not really any big
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple announcement. I mean, I guess there’s a 9.3 beta, but that is not particularly fresh news.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so my assumption going in when I saw that these were the guests was that they were going to talk about the Walt Mossberg
⏹️ ▶️ John article, because that’s, I guess, big news. But I mean, that’s the real question.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not why is Apple having executives talk to websites as they did about the Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John open source thing or go on podcasts and stuff like that because that’s all about the whole new open Apple thing but it still seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John there has to be a reason and having listened to the show it’s still not entirely clear
⏹️ ▶️ John to me like what what they were there to do
⏹️ ▶️ John like when you know when a celebrity is on a talk show a television talk show that they’re to promote the movie that’s that’s opening this weekend
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re in right or whatever you know and the same thing with the Swift open source like if you’re there to promote something your company’s doing and
⏹️ ▶️ John then at the same time you know a good host will of course ask them other questions as well. But I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John even after listening to the episode that probably the reason they were there was to talk about the Walt Mossberg article, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not entirely sure. What was your sense from listening to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the episode? Basically that same thing. I mean, it was, you know, I also assumed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there would be more kind of like direct addressing of that. But, you know, you have like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, as we know, you have three people talking and, you know, it’s only a 45
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minute interview. once you rule out the formalities, like there’s not a whole lot of time for like actual in-depth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discussion when you have three people who wanna talk, as we know, because that’s why our show is never 45 minutes long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re lucky to have one segment be 45 minutes long on one topic. That’s our show’s logo, is it never 45 minutes? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so let’s get started. So, you know, I think a lot of it was just time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I also think, you know, this is Apple PR we’re talking about, and even though these are executives coming on a talk show with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our friend John, and you know, in a more casual environment, is still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-power executives from the biggest technology company in the universe, etc., with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very strong PR strategy and PR control. You know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these aren’t people who are gonna, like, go off, just go off the deep end and, like, have a couple drinks on the show and then tell us all the secrets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that’s not… that isn’t what this is, you know. This is, in part, it’s probably to help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco humanize that there are people at this company, not just robots and a brick wall. Like, it’s actually humans doing the best they can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s to humanize them and And also, I think it was really about this discussion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of software and service quality. It was very obvious that they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prepared with stats and various authorized figures they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to give out about how well they’re doing, how well their quality is going, the crash rates,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the number of Apple Music subscribers, how well the websites and the web services hold up under all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these loads. They were very clearly prepared with PR-approved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stats they could share to demonstrate that we don’t really have these big quality problems,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash, we have good reasons to have quality problems. It was kind of like this slightly defensive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not in a really aggressive way. And it was basically…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It read to me, or it listened to me, it doesn’t just read to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it listened a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John defensive. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can use red. Look it up. It’s an alternate
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco definition. I know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. But yeah, it seemed slightly defensive, but mostly just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost in denial that there are any real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downward slopes going on here. And that might be true from a lot of things they talked about. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their web services are at ridiculous scale, and they are mostly working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time. And they do have tons of people using it. But the only nitpicks I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had with it, really, besides that I wish it could be longer, but I understand why it probably couldn’t be. Because, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I don’t think you can get two high-power Apple executives to give you like three hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a podcast, as much as we would like them to. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my main nitpicks with it were basically that there really wasn’t enough time to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of fight back a little bit or to ask a lot of the things, a lot of their defenses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were using excuses that are totally within Apple’s control to change. For instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the biggest one that stuck out to me was when Craig Federighi was…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overall, I thought both Craig and Eddie came off very well. But Craig, during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one part, he was saying how people liked Snow Leopard back in the day, but nobody ever really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco installed Snow Leopard 10.6.0, and most of the time people were spending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on 10.6.4, 10.6.5, etc. And so he was basically saying like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, back then they had way fewer total users and also people would wait longer before upgrading to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco newest stuff. Well, very heavily promoted, very heavily pushed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often automatic software updates are within Apple’s control. Apple has themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very aggressively pushed OS updates every release since then. And they used to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even be paid. That was, I think, the first one that was… was it 30 bucks? Something like that. and they might have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been free after that. But back then, they were paid and they were a bigger deal. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most critically, they didn’t come out every year. Back then, the release cycle was more like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every two years. I don’t know, John, if you have the exact average, because you had to write reviews of all of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Back then, we had these longer cycles. And of course, the products were simpler
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they were doing less. And there is a valid point to be made that we now live in a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more complicated computing environment because we have so many more devices that are doing so many more things interacting with so many more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services but the argument that that Apple is somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the argument that you that you can excuse more flaws today because everyone upgrades
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really fast to the latest OS today I don’t think is a valid defense because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is the one pushing the updates that frequently and also Apple is the one who nowadays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the OSs never even get to like a 0.5 or 0.6 release anymore. Like the OSs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, they’re changed every year with major releases and a major release is kind of allowed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a little bit less stable. And so you now it feels like we are not reaching the states that we used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to reach for half the release cycle, where things were pretty stable. And you could update from like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Leopard to 10.6.4 and be relatively assured that, oh, they worked it all out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by now. Now it seems like they don’t have time to work it all out anymore. And that is entirely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an Apple-created construct. Apple has created these conditions. Apple is the one pushing these conditions. It’s totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within Apple’s control to not heavily push the updates when it’s still at a 0.0,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not do updates every year if they don’t want to for something like the Mac, which is not even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-profile. This is totally with an Apple’s control to fix or to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make better, to improve. And so that is not a valid defense.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to pick up some of the things they said as well and the format, but I also want to hear, I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere with this, why were they on the show thing? And I want to hear if Casey has the same impression that they were on to talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about software quality, or if you thought they were on for some other reason, or if they were on for no reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think most simply it was about software quality, but I agree that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a more meandering, less focused appearance than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would have expected if they were doing damage control. And I’m not sure if that’s deliberate,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if this meandering and this kind of casual conversation was to lead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us to believe that it wasn’t damage control, that it was just because, and they just felt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like talking to Gruber. But I would say that were it not for Walt’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey article and clearly this podcast, I don’t think that, I don’t see why they would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have felt the need to go on John’s show. And I don’t mean that as a slight to Gruber at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, it’s not a normal thing for one, let alone two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey executives to just decide to go on a podcast. So I think it was about damage control,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think whether or not it was deliberate, It was loose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to so that you couldn’t say it was explicitly about damage control.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I am leading up to Marcos points here. So bear with me. But by by related question to this is
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the job of insert whatever Craig’s title is or insert whatever it is title is like
⏹️ ▶️ John senior vice president software or whatever like what is their job? What if you were to look at their job description if they were hiring
⏹️ ▶️ John a new one if you know Craig retires and they want to hire a replacement and they don’t want to promote from within and whatever, like
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the job description of those executives? And I can tell you in the Steve Jobs era, the
⏹️ ▶️ John job description for all those super important guys, you know, head of all of OSX, Bertrand
⏹️ ▶️ John Sirle or whatever, or like spearhead of the iOS team or whatever, that nowhere
⏹️ ▶️ John in that job description was, be the mouthpiece for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Talk to the public in a way that moves public opinion in the direction
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple wants to move. Absolutely not in any of their job descriptions because they never talked
⏹️ ▶️ John to the press they weren’t allowed to talk to the press they barely Talked to developers like that. There was
⏹️ ▶️ John not and it’s different than many other companies lots of other companies You could say oh well once you read a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John level on the executive ladder Part of your job is to talk to the public in some way
⏹️ ▶️ John right now mediated by the PR department so on and so forth But that become you become a public figure
⏹️ ▶️ John that occasionally says things things with the blessing of the corporation in an effort
⏹️ ▶️ John to change public opinion or to get
⏹️ ▶️ John your message out there or whatever. There’s not a lot of those people. It’s not like everybody in the company is the voice of the company.
⏹️ ▶️ John But now in the post-jobs era and the more open Apple, which we all like, clearly some
⏹️ ▶️ John of these people at a high enough level are now tasked with essentially or tasking
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves with that. We don’t know how it’s motivating or whatever, but they are being allowed. company, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John as a company, has decided we’re going to send Craig Federighi to 17 different
⏹️ ▶️ John websites and the talk show to tell them about the Swift open source project. We’re not just gonna have a press release,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not just gonna have someone say something in a keynote, we’re not just gonna issue official statements through PR
⏹️ ▶️ John channels, we’re going to send this person whose job up to this point did not really involve
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of public statements about things, he’s gonna go out there and promote
⏹️ ▶️ John the Swift open source project and try to hit the points that we’ve all agreed to that are the bullet points and like Margo said the little
⏹️ ▶️ John sheet of whatever stats you want to say whatever facts you want to get out there like basically doing the job of PR
⏹️ ▶️ John but now there’s a human doing it and so now you have these two guys Eddie and Craig coming
⏹️ ▶️ John on a very casual type of situation where they are talking unfiltered
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not real time it’s not live but it’s very you know it’s just kind of like we’re going to talk
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re going to discuss things and the reason I ask about this is
⏹️ ▶️ John as in what their job is it’s like that skill being able to being able to
⏹️ ▶️ John go somewhere in an atmosphere like that and hit the points that you want to hit and
⏹️ ▶️ John not sound defensive and move public opinion and not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John it not make any missteps that’s not easy thing to do not that I’m saying either one of them are bad at it
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re much better than you know I would ever be like they’re very skilled at their jobs, but their job historically has not included this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when I listened to that episode, I’m thinking, some of these things, as Marco pointed out, were clearly written down.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that they, you know, that these are the points that we’re going to hit about reliability and blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John You might think that Apple is like, oh, Apple knows all and controls all. So every single thing that was said in that program
⏹️ ▶️ John was clearly planned ahead of time. When Eddie Q said that there’s going to be a new version of the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John remote app for the iPhone that includes all the functionality of the remote, and you’ll be able to play games with either that information was
⏹️ ▶️ John already out there and Gruber just didn’t happen to know about it or it was intentionally broken on the talk show that they said you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed to discuss this. But I think there’s also a possibility that any queue had just forgotten
⏹️ ▶️ John what which things were public and which things were not and had accidentally officially confirmed
⏹️ ▶️ John the updated version of the Apple remote application that maybe every developer now I mean I don’t keep up this year it’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a story or whatever that was public by the way all All right, well anyway, that type of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Where is, are all Apple executives so well trained
⏹️ ▶️ John at PR despite having never done it as part of their job description that it is impossible for them to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a mistake? And I think it is possible for them to make a mistake. And I think every time
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple executives go into an atmosphere like this, it is a risk from the old world perspective of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, but what if they accidentally say something you’re not supposed to say? I mean, again, a PR person is probably involved,
⏹️ ▶️ John The show could be edited, it’s not live, so on and so forth. It’s not that big of a risk. But it is entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John different. If I was in these jobs, I’d be like, I’ve been working here for X number of years and I never had to do this as part of my job.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now it’s like a high pressure situation where you are supposed to speak
⏹️ ▶️ John for the company, don’t make any mistakes, and by the way, this is part of your job now. And anytime something goes wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ John we send you out to do it. And even if they technically don’t say anything they’re not supposed to say or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John as As Marco pointed out, it doesn’t mean that they are going to be able to present the information in a way that moves
⏹️ ▶️ John public opinion in the direction that they want. So for example, if they sound very defensive and don’t give
⏹️ ▶️ John convincing reasons, that may make things worse instead of better, reinforcing our worst notions or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John about what’s going on inside Apple. Or if they pointedly don’t address
⏹️ ▶️ John particular points. So say it had been an aggressive interview and they were being pressed, they could have looked bad or, you know, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s so many dangers and it just, it’s weird for me to think about it’s weird for me to think about this ever being
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the job of someone who started their career as a programmer and who is a very technical person and is now
⏹️ ▶️ John asked to do this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, and I think part of the part of the risk evaluation here is that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t sending pretty much anybody ever. And if they do send somebody, it’s like Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to general purpose interviewers out in like the regular media.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, they’re sending these people to John Gruber. They know that he’s a respectable guy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who gets Apple very well and who has a good relationship with Apple. That’s not an accident that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re giving him this access that nobody else really gets or that very few people get,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they know that he’s not going to be all sensational on them and be super aggressive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or just spend the whole 45 minutes asking them about future iPhones, which they will never talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about. it is still a risk to go at least mostly unscripted. I mean, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, when he had Phil at WWDC live, like that was even more risk, because that was live. That was live in front of a few hundred people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and broadcast to the internet to a few more, a few thousand more at least, you know? So I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like Phil is actually good at that. Like, I think it’s always he’s been in marketing. So like, I feel like that has been part of his job.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even if he’s not speaking for the company, he essentially was telling people what to say on behalf of the
⏹️ ▶️ John company as part of his role as the chief of marketing. So yeah, you’re You’re right, it’s much harder in
⏹️ ▶️ John front of a live audience where you can’t take back anything and there’s no editing or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Phil, I feel like, is an old hand at this and has no problem. Whereas particularly Craig
⏹️ ▶️ John always strikes me as a technical person who has had this role thrust upon him. He’s been thrust
⏹️ ▶️ John onto the stage at keynotes and he’s gotten really good at that, and now he’s just going off the cuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of the same thing with Eddie, where you didn’t see a lot of him on stage until recent years,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And maybe that’s just part of his ascent in the organization. And having that be part of your job. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John saying that not as if I think it’s a bad thing, that like, oh, well, this is like a
⏹️ ▶️ John danger and Apple should cut it out. Merely that this new open Apple that we all
⏹️ ▶️ John like, this is part of what comes with it. Part of what comes with it is understanding on both sides of the fence that being more open
⏹️ ▶️ John means that human beings are going to come out and be open. And if they say things wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, you can’t hold them to the same standards is we held the carefully controlled manicured
⏹️ ▶️ John PR presence of the old Apple. Because you can’t have it both ways. We’re like, we want you to be more
⏹️ ▶️ John open, but we want every single thing out of every person’s mouth to be perfect all the time. You have to, the
⏹️ ▶️ John more you are open, the more we all, in this sort of dialogue as customer and company,
⏹️ ▶️ John have to become comfortable with the idea that in an open dialogue, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John as clean and shiny and perfect. And so if they sound a little bit defensive, it’s because they’re human beings and they’re being asked
⏹️ ▶️ John questions they might feel defensive about, and you can’t excoriate them for being the humans
⏹️ ▶️ John that we always wish they were. So I want to be clear that what I’m trying to do is I want to encourage more of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m almost kind of sad that they didn’t make any big blunders, because I think if they did,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it would be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I think you’re right that it would be fine. However, Apple wouldn’t think it would be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if they had made any big blunders, it would greatly reduce the chances of us getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more access to them in the future like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to say to encourage Apple to basically say, at least I am, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John we all should be just more forgiving so that they can they can feel safe doing this because we want
⏹️ ▶️ John a more open dialogue. And I think if anyone in sort of the Apple tech
⏹️ ▶️ John press decides to jump on these type, it’s just gonna scare them back into their hole. So let’s let’s let’s be nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but but you know, we can be nice and we can be civil and we can still disagree with things they say, or we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can criticize, you know, things they say in normal civil ways, you know? And so, like, I don’t think—I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not saying, like—and I don’t think you’re saying that we should take it easy on them, necessarily,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just that we should, you know, be civil and reasonable and not—not, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, kind of give them the benefit of the doubt if they, like, misspeak slightly or something. Is that—is that roughly what
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and as for, like, your specific points about—I mean, you’re right, it was a short interview, there wasn’t a lot of time to get into
⏹️ ▶️ John things, and as I said when Craig was on, they’re not going to go into the level of detail that
⏹️ ▶️ John we go into about these these things. That’s not the forum for it. It’s not as if like that’s part of
⏹️ ▶️ John all you know what is their job and also what is the purpose of a podcast like this when you have these executives
⏹️ ▶️ John there that is not the time to harangue them about whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John your pet problem is. You are not going to affect the you know
⏹️ ▶️ John the design apples Macintosh application design philosophy that leaves big empty toolbars right
⏹️ ▶️ John you are not going to change that philosophy by arguing with Greg Federighi about it on a podcast, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you’re not going to get him to say, Yeah, you’re right. It sucks. Like, like, like, you aren’t going to get a DQ to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, iTunes is horrible. And the iTunes store infrastructure is just the worst.
⏹️ ▶️ John But hold on. I mean, he did admit that, like, iTunes has challenges or whatever. But the whole point is, like, you’re not going to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, there’s a time and place for that in this writ small that I think we’re all at this point familiar with,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that if you go to WWDC, and you find the one guy who writes the obscure framework that your application is using
⏹️ ▶️ John you could possibly convince him one-on-one to change this parameter in this API to do this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in the next major version that can actually happen right that is the level of
⏹️ ▶️ John individuals ability to talk to other individuals as humans but it’s not in public
⏹️ ▶️ John that person who you convince will never admit that they talk to you and it’s like a parameter on an API call right
⏹️ ▶️ John you know it’s very different than you know trying to convince the you know
⏹️ ▶️ John flying out to to Cupertino and sitting down at a giant table with the entire executive
⏹️ ▶️ John team at Apple and say, in this 10 minute presentation, I’m going to convince you that you need to redesign
⏹️ ▶️ John photos in this particular way. And then they will dismiss you. And you know, then they will realize they’ve been working on a new version
⏹️ ▶️ John of photos for like three years, a new version of iTunes for 12 years or a new file system for X number of years. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have enough information put another way, you don’t have enough information to be compelling to them. So I think all we can
⏹️ ▶️ John do as the sort of the public out here is merely explain
⏹️ ▶️ John things from our perspective. Because we just simply don’t have enough information to
⏹️ ▶️ John convince Apple to do anything. Because you have no idea. We still have no idea what they’re actually doing. All we can do is
⏹️ ▶️ John say, here’s how we feel as users, and hope that gets through to them. And if we feel like there’s a communication barrier,
⏹️ ▶️ John then that’s what them coming on podcasts is about, is saying, we hear you. We understand your concerns.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can go back and forth on them and try to clarify them or whatever. And when it feels like there’s a gap, Like in this case where
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco was saying, they’re like, well, you don’t understand. Here’s all the things we have to deal with. Where
⏹️ ▶️ John you start sounding defensive, and you could come back with snappy answers like, well, Google has to deal with this kind of volume, too,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they do it better. So what’s the deal there? Or, well, iTunes has been big and bloated for years, and everybody agrees on this. So where’s the new version?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you say you agree, but where is it? Like, they’re not going to tell you, oh, well, the new version, we’ve been working on that for a while now. It’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to come out, and it’s going to be split into this number of applications, and blah, blah, blah, and it didn’t make this really. They’re not going to tell you that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John all they can do is give their perspective in a sanitized way. So it’s a little bit like
⏹️ ▶️ John boys and girls of the dance at opposite sides of the gym and no one going into the middle to dance.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it has to be that way because at the very least Apple is not going to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, to reveal itself in the public forum. We have the advantage of being able to reveal
⏹️ ▶️ John all of our frustrations and put them out there and then have Apple hear them in whatever way they want to hear them. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is not going to be that forthcoming. So it is still a strange relationship. But I like the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that there is any kind of communication going in both directions these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’ve been really impressed by Apple’s willingness to communicate. And I agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you. I would really hate to see that stop. I’ve really enjoyed these episodes of the talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show. And you know, if they ever decided to branch out into into other podcasts, I’m sure that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it could be accommodated. But with that said, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reflecting on my memory of the episode. I listened to it pretty much immediately once it was out. This was almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a week ago now. But there was a bit of a theme. You keep saying, John, being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey defensive, and I think that’s a fair characterization. But reflecting on it, the pieces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that struck me the most was a little bit of playing the victim.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iTunes is really old and we have to support devices that go back to the beginning of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, what do you expect us to do? We have a lot of users, guys. You don’t get it. We have a
⏹️ ▶️ John Let me tell you all the things we do well. We look at all these transactions we process. You know, Etiquette
⏹️ ▶️ John is ready with big numbers for presentations. We do a lot of these things. And like, you have to acknowledge, like, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John they do do those things. But like, the communication barrier is like, we understand what you’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like playing the victim is one way to say it. But the other way is like, it’s like being in
⏹️ ▶️ John in operations or whatever you want to call it at any big company where you’re the one responsible for service and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John working. Nobody cares about your job when everything goes well, right? They only care about it when something
⏹️ ▶️ John breaks, right? You get no credit, practically for Hey, did you guys realize that for the past,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, X number of hours or days or whatever, this service was perfectly fine. No, they like they just expected it. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the power company that Marco’s was talking about. Nobody cares about the power company when the power is on. You only care about the power company
⏹️ ▶️ John and the one day a year it’s off and then you’re super pissed off at them.
⏹️ ▶️ John in some ways it’s a thankless job, but that is the job. If you work at the power company, you understand that’s the job.
⏹️ ▶️ John When the power goes out because of something, you don’t say, look, you don’t understand how many miles of lines we have
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s ice all over them and tree branches leaning on them and birds pecking at them and we don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John enough tax money to fund it. The power company can make all those same exact complaints and they should to the parties that can
⏹️ ▶️ John change things, but when your power goes out, you don’t want to hear it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. And, you know, this victim sort of card got played a couple more times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you know, yes, we have a lot of users and yes, we are decent at serving a lot of users, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say with iMessage, but you have to understand that we scale exponentially, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of these things, to be clear, are fair observations. But still, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, you guys don’t get it. You don’t get it. But the one that we haven’t talked about that I thought was most fascinating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a pretty clear, I’m gonna use the word admission, but that’s not really what I’m looking for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But acknowledgement, maybe a pretty clear acknowledgement from Craig,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that radar is kind of fundamentally broken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey serving for serving the public.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s like acknowledging that it’s dark at night. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there’s some things you just
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t like, yeah, some things are undeniable. Even Eddie admitted iTunes was bloated. But radar?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no one is going to be I don’t think it’s possible to send anyone from Apple to come out to defend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think you’re right, but nevertheless, I thought it was an important step
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it to be said in public that, hey, this is broken. And there was a little bit of victim playing here, too. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t understand that’s super important for us internally. This is this serves a really, really big purpose for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us. We can’t just throw out the baby with the bathwater. You know, we we really need it internally. But, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we probably have some room to grow externally. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought that victim playing, all of which to some degree was fair,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was interesting. It was very subtle. But most of all, I just thought it was fascinating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see some admissions of infallibility coming from the two of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think someone with more PR training, more formal PR training, would know that those are not winning angles. As Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John pointed out in the episode that we almost titled, E for Effort, that if you work really
⏹️ ▶️ John hard on something you can’t come to the public with that like that’s what you tell yourself internally right you can have
⏹️ ▶️ John these discussions internally about here’s why it’s really hard to do whatever to deal with iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s really popular to deal with updates like these are everything they’re saying is true but when you go
⏹️ ▶️ John to the public part of PR training is to know what can we say to the public of their that that is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to move their opinion in the way that we want to move it you have to that’s the problem with having engineers talk to anybody they
⏹️ ▶️ John will just tell you the truth and they will explain the real situations and if you’re explaining, you know, and if your
⏹️ ▶️ John job is PR, it’s not to simply tell the truth about the situation and not even
⏹️ ▶️ John to tell a limited version of the truth. It’s to figure out what can I say that will make people
⏹️ ▶️ John change their mind slightly about issue X or Y. And it doesn’t mean you have to lie or be manipulative or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is a skill. Being, you know, there’s a reason PR is a profession and not like, oh, the engineers want
⏹️ ▶️ John us to do PR on the side. It is an actual real skill and it takes a while same thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with presenting on stage It takes a while to get good at and there is training involved and everything like that I think
⏹️ ▶️ John both of those guys in the show showed a Slight lack of
⏹️ ▶️ John PR training in in terms of There are things that they said that the either shouldn’t have said or
⏹️ ▶️ John should have said in a different way to To move the needle in the direction that seemed to me that they wanted to move it
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, I like them more for it, like in terms of it seems more human. And I do want to hear
⏹️ ▶️ John the inside scoop, and I do want to hear what they’re thinking about these things. But PR wise, it
⏹️ ▶️ John may not have been effective as another angle on the same information.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if they had if they were more strictly PR trained or were adhering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more strictly to PR styles of speaking and responding, I think it would have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far less interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s my perfect example of the opposite of that. Steve Jobs was as far as I know not
⏹️ ▶️ John PR trained, super interesting, but he knew what to say to move things in the direction he wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh sure, yeah, but I would say like, like I don’t like when Tim Cook gives interviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like, you know, 60 minutes or whatever, I’ve stopped even watching them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, those are boring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He’s so controlled and so trained and and just his personality is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he keeps things so close to the vest like I get nothing out of them. Also he’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ John genuinely nice guy, it seems like.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you mean he’s nice, whereas Steve Jobs always had an edge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like Steve Jobs, you knew if Steve Jobs was gonna give some dig at AT&T, you knew he’d do it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco public. Stuff like that. I feel like Tim Cook speaks the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would expect most CEOs to speak. I mean, he’s better than the average, certainly, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the way that it’s a major event when he talks to a network news show for 20 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about what they’re doing. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean we’re taking Tim Cook for granted though because like when I feel like when Tim Cook talks about the environment
⏹️ ▶️ John or labor practices just like that I genuine or human rights and so I genuinely believe that Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ John really believes those things like it’s not some smarmy kind of I’m saying this to make our company
⏹️ ▶️ John I he seems genuine and he seems like a genuine friendly
⏹️ ▶️ John person who cares about the world and wants to make it better and so on and so forth and that can be
⏹️ ▶️ John boring when you’re when you’re looking for like blood in the water or something like that. Steve Jobs is the example
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, I think he was just instinctive, like instinctively he was a natural at
⏹️ ▶️ John knowing how to talk. Eventually was a natural when he was young, he wasn’t great at it. But the latter day Steve
⏹️ ▶️ John Job, knowing how to talk to the press, to move the
⏹️ ▶️ John discussion or the issue or public opinion or whatever, in the direction he wanted to use,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to go in while still sounding entirely genuine, human, and interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John because he was willing to say the thing that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John take a dig at some other vendor or say something is crap or something is great or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John or have make blanket denials that he goes back on later or whatever. He was able to do that just instinctively
⏹️ ▶️ John and that is, I think, a rare skill that, again, even Steve Jobs didn’t have in his early days when he was young
⏹️ ▶️ John and would say terrible things to the press and and regret them later. Um, and I don’t think Craig
⏹️ ▶️ John and Eddie quite have that yet. Uh, but but what I’m saying is I think you can be,
⏹️ ▶️ John if not PR trained or good at, you know, better at moving the discussion while still being
⏹️ ▶️ John both seeming and being entirely human. You know what I mean? I think that the the Swift open source thing was a better example
⏹️ ▶️ John of that because there was no real like, it wasn’t like defensive or trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to change public opinion. It was merely promoting something that Craig really believed in that actually was a really good thing. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John he could be very detailed and human and funny and interesting and also promote the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that Swift is awesome, that open source is awesome, that Apple is awesome for doing Swift open source and all that stuff, all
⏹️ ▶️ John of which he agreed with and was able to promote in a way that was interesting and engaging. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in this situation, it seems kind of like these two were thrown to the wolves.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, I don’t, you know, this is based on no information. I don’t know, did they volunteer for this? Were they told they should do this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Did John ask them to be on? You know, who knows what the situation was, but it almost seemed like
⏹️ ▶️ John they found themselves in a situation where, you know, it’s up to you to
⏹️ ▶️ John try to move the needle on this issue of public opinion about this Walt Bosberg thing. So here you
⏹️ ▶️ John go. Good luck guys.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, what else are we talking about tonight, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John This item’s been in the notes for a little bit. I think I’ve seen some links to it because it went around the web a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John weeks ago. And I thought it was worth keeping because, well anyway, have you seen this, the thing I’m about to link to
⏹️ ▶️ John here, the thing about vector networks from this company Figma? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I saw it, but I don’t understand it, it sounds cool. Because as somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who… So the idea of this is a new way to draw vector art, basically. And basically a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data structure for vector art. And I have always been baffled by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the few attempts I’ve made doing vector art, from my very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very light and very occasional needs to do it. These programs have always been very hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to understand. And it’s been very hard for for me to achieve the result I want that seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very obvious. Like, oh, I just want this line to go from here to here and be perfectly smooth. And it’s so hard to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of those things if you aren’t familiar with the tools of Bezier curves, basically, and weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. So do I understand correctly that this is kind of like an alternative to that whole system that makes more sense?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so since this, as far as I can tell, is not a piece of software you can download to try at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just going by the various animations and then the description on their website.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t know if it’ll be any good or will do what they say it will do, but I’m most interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in it because very often I see in discussions about software for any
⏹️ ▶️ John platform, iOS or the Mac or whatever, a lot of people, myself included, fall into
⏹️ ▶️ John the fatalistic notion sometimes that there’s no point
⏹️ ▶️ John in making an application that does X because that’s a solved problem and you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need another one and the market’s all tied up and You don’t want to go red ocean, you want to go blue ocean. Go where
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody else is and find a market that is unserved and serve that one. Aren’t most oceans
⏹️ ▶️ John blue? Analogy, it’s the Nintendo Wii thing. You know about this. Just seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John a poor color choice. Red ocean is because there’s blood in the water from the competitors eating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other. But doesn’t blue ocean mean there’s no customers because it’s just empty?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, that’s right. You want to go where no one is serving the customers. There are no competitors. The
⏹️ ▶️ John other competitors are the things that keep changing the color of the water. are there eating each other. You’ll just be the
⏹️ ▶️ John only one there and no one is eating you so there’s no blood in the ocean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you have no better to eat either because there’s no customers. The water or your customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a perfect analogy.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I didn’t make it up. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Japanese. I think. Um, anyway, I first started for the Wii. Go reference old hypercritical
⏹️ ▶️ John episodes as always. I’ll be the answer key is there. It’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rosetta Stone. Just go back. We should totally review business books in this show. Oh God. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought you were escaped Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, seriously. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, so anyway, with the vector drawing apps I have the same experience like I used illustrator 88 and learned how to use
⏹️ ▶️ John vector tools and the various applications seemed to be more variety back then like mac draw and all those all the other applications
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys have never heard of or used but these days it has settled down in most vector drawing
⏹️ ▶️ John applications now that illustrator has like wiped them all from the face of the planet freehand isn’t even around anymore or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John follow a similar uh theme in terms of the controls a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John it is just because of historically speaking that once you establish of keyboard modifiers that everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John is used to and everything that is like, oh, we’re drawing vectors in this particular way. And at this point, if you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John someone who uses a vector drawing app all the time, you will find it weird. And you, like Marco, will not
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to do what you want to do, because it will seem like I just want to connect this line to that line to that line. And why
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t it let me connect here? And oh, this is actually connected to that line, it’s actually disconnected, and there’s a little end cap
⏹️ ▶️ John sticking out. And why can’t this curve go the way I want? And what is the winding number? And why, when I try to
⏹️ ▶️ John fill this region, does it Does it leak out because it looks like there’s an entirely closed circle and all this other crap? and
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time a Software developer would say well, I’m not gonna do a vector drawing application
⏹️ ▶️ John that market is sewn up Like there are so many strong competitors in there. There’s great applications. What?
⏹️ ▶️ John Who am I even serving with like say I make a vector drawing application that that’s really good I
⏹️ ▶️ John say it’s just you know, just as good as one of the the Strong market leaders. So what who’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John buy mine? There’s already an application that does that by an app by a vendor that’s been around longer that has more support that has you? know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have such a head start on me, it’s no point. And I like the idea of this vector networks thing
⏹️ ▶️ John of, I think, in every application domain, there is the possibility of saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, if there’s a market that is, you know, heavily saturated with lots of very strong competitors,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s probably hard to break into. But if you look at the market and say, but you know what, they all suck in this one particular
⏹️ ▶️ John way. And their users either don’t realize it sucks in that way, or don’t care because they’ve learned the old
⏹️ ▶️ John system. And there could be people out there who are not buying vector drawing applications, but the existing ones, they can’t figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John how to use them. So if I can make a better way to draw vectors, I can A. get customers
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t buy these other applications or aren’t satisfied with them and B. possibly become the
⏹️ ▶️ John new great vector application because maybe even designers want to do it this way and not deal with those frustrations
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Or you just fail miserably and realize that there’s no competing with Illustrator and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know too bad. But I’m I’m heartened by efforts like this because
⏹️ ▶️ John it reminds me that there is no problem that is so well solved that it can’t be solved better by
⏹️ ▶️ John someone else with a better idea. And so I am looking forward to trying this application
⏹️ ▶️ John and if it doesn’t work out or is actually worse than the old one, oh well, but I really like seeing stories
⏹️ ▶️ John like this and I really want people to do more things like this because as you can imagine, there is not a single application
⏹️ ▶️ John I use every day that I don’t think could be better in some fundamental way. Nothing is so
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s right. Hey, you did listen to that show. Good job.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Once or twice. Yeah, yeah. That is just glancing at these graphics. I haven’t read the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey article. It looks very cool. My only foray into vector drawing was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world’s best app icon with feet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I am not the one to talk about this. But it looks neat for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John I miss, what I miss, because I’m not good at using the current crop of vector tools. But
⏹️ ▶️ John what I miss a lot is briefly, I believe in college got it so long ago that I can’t remember what it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure it was AutoCAD. Everyone will email and tell me what application it was, but it’s the one where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can draw things with the command line in addition to using the mouse and stuff. It’s probably AutoCAD.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for a brief moment, I got pretty good at doing that and I could do things
⏹️ ▶️ John with that command line in what I think was AutoCAD that I still can’t do with Illustrator
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of connect this line to their perpendicular to that intersect that with this like i always
⏹️ ▶️ John have such difficulty of like i just want this point to be on that line and i want the angle between the two to be
⏹️ ▶️ John this and i don’t care if it’s not on a grid line and i don’t care like just i can describe to you what i want
⏹️ ▶️ John like in in you know in this command line parlance why stupid pen tool will you refuse to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that why do i have to click option click shift click no don’t start making a curve no don’t connect to that line no
⏹️ ▶️ John in autocad i could always get what i wanted and in form z the only other thing i’ve come to close to that
⏹️ ▶️ John form z is an old 3d program maybe it’s still out there whatever um i remember the
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing remember eventually being able to do pretty much everything that i wanted in that program despite it being incredibly complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John and yet to this day uh vector drawing tools defeat me because they follow a set of rules that i guess i just
⏹️ ▶️ John so and refuse to internalize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair enough all right thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week backblaze hover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Harry’s and we will see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John ♪ So accidental, check the podcast so long ♪
Post-show: Nothing that is so perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John So my sandbox title here, I’m thinking of jumping the possible over
⏹️ ▶️ John as many people as possible in the sandbox or as many people in the sandbox as
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey possible. Leave it as is. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already in Squarespace. It’s done.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t know if the title is an accurate representation of what we said. I’m just saying which one sounds which one sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure that was the accurate representation of what you said. And I think it’s kind of better as is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, agreed. I think it’s if I was writing it, I would put the possible first. But this is a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s how people speak. I know, I’m just looking at it and thinking about it. It’s a long title, it’s got things you can move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s nothing that is so perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ John you mangled that too, good job.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, oh yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another meta troll.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nothing that is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey imperfect. You get the idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Wee! How am I this tired? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco not even that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco late. We’ve discovered a new trolling method, slightly misquoting John back to himself. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John not new. I do it to myself. What
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey are you talking about? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John funny, every time I listen to myself on a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John it happens. Wait, can you explain that?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco When I listen to myself, I hear
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things I say wrong and I’m effectively trolling myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, okay, so but it’s not like, you’re not like, you’re not like saying as you listen along, saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your head what you said differently. You’re just, you’re mad that you said something that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not what you think then is accurate.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can always hear it. When I’m the listener, I hear all my mistakes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, you should try editing the show. It’s rough. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John brutal. Well, at
⏹️ ▶️ John least you get to fix them. I have no control. Well, I can fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean, like…
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah, but you fix yours way better than you fix mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, because I’m more critical of myself. Would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you say you’re hypercritical?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you edited the show, we would never publish a show. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know that. I’ve never edited anything. I have no idea what kind of editor I would be.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would probably do the same thing. I would fix everything that I said and and leave everyone else to sound dumb.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, for me, your part of the show is the easiest to edit, because you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk for long spans, mostly uninterrupted, and they very rarely require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any alterations. So, most of what you say, I just skip over. Like, I just skim it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wider than usual gaps and shrink those, but for the most part, I don’t even listen to what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you say on the edit, because I heard it during the show and I know it was fine. I
⏹️ ▶️ John listen to it and I make mistakes anyway it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the process you getting you getting the real John and the edit the raw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco raw uncut Syracuse sorry sir
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you’re fine you managed to be fine and now you’re just getting inside your own head about it. Syracuse?
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse? You’re fine yeah it’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I know who you’re talking about refer back to
⏹️ ▶️ John the hypercritical episode where I discuss the primary purpose of speech or writing
⏹️ ▶️ John is to communicate an idea and if I, basically if I know who you’re talking about, you’ve successfully communicated