178: Mama Needs That Pokémon
14 Jul 2016Planet of the Apps, Pokémon Go, and why you’re all going to email Casey.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Hackintoshes work sometimes
- Charles Perry's Mac Mini Story
- Contour Design RollerMouse Pro2
- Casey's 5K iMac (Late 2015, 4GHz i7) Woes
WindowServer: GPU Driver appears to be hung (over 5 continous seconds of unreadiness)- Later RTFU tweet
- Planet of the Apps
- Pokémon Go
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show:
Sponsored by:
- Betterment: Investing made better.
- Hover: The best way to buy and manage domain names. Use coupon code ITSNOTTHERAM for 10% off your first purchase.
- Pingdom: Uptime and performance monitoring made easy. Use code ATP for 20% off.
Chapters
- Follow-up: Hackintoshes can work*†‡**
- Follow-up: Mac Mini obscurity
- Follow-up: Trackbars 🖼️
- YouTube product reviews
- Sponsor: Pingdom (code ATP)
- Casey’s iMac woes
- Sponsor: Hover (ITSNOTTHERAM)
- Planet of the Apps
- Sponsor: Betterment
- Pokémon Go
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Tesla Autopilot
Follow-up: Hackintoshes can work*†‡**
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To go back to your car analogy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s terrible. I’m gonna cut it.
⏹️ ▶️ John was gonna say bad things about your analogy. Now you’re just gonna edit it out of existence.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always edit out jokes that don’t land. That’s the privilege of being the editor. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so we should start with some follow up as always. There are approximately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seven Hackintosh users on the planet, and every single one of them has written us to tell us how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s possible to get everything to work, asterisk, dagger, Double dagger double asterisk.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got some people also writing and saying, Oh, I’ve had, you know, all your. Worries
⏹️ ▶️ John are founded. I have a Hackintosh and I ran into all the problems you described and it’s kind of a pain, but other people are like, not
⏹️ ▶️ John a pain at all. I got everything to work. You just got to follow the right guides and do the right things and flash the right stuff and wait
⏹️ ▶️ John for the drivers to be updated with each update. And it’s not a problem. I mean, these are two sets of people
⏹️ ▶️ John describing the exact same situation. It’s just that from one person’s perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you just do this series of steps and everything is fine. and the other person’s perspective, oh, you got to do these series of steps before
⏹️ ▶️ John everything’s fine. Like it’s the same situation, right? It just all depends on how you look at it and
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s something you would enjoy doing or something that you would find a hassle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If we could kind of pick a theme of what we heard, we were pretty much correct about the trade-offs about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a pain sometimes for most people. How much of a pain it ends up being for you depends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot on your component choices and that if you follow these guides and if you choose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like exactly the components they say and if you don’t have like special needs or requirements,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh I have to make this other Wi-Fi card work because that’s the one I have or whatever else. If you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco willing to buy exactly the right components, if you’re willing to buy all new components to do this, it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot easier and you’ll have an easier time with it. But if you’re trying to get it running on components you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already had for other reasons, you might might have a harder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. Yeah, I think that’s a pretty good summary actually.
Follow-up: Mac Mini obscurity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Charles Perry wrote in and he had said, hey, you know, you guys joked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about Apple Store employees not knowing about the Mac mini. That actually happened to me. In September
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 2015, I was at the Apple Store and I told the salesperson that I wanted to buy a Mac mini and I got a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blank stare and reply. The salesperson had never heard of it for real. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is a thing that has actually happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I always wonder about like the kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John training they get. Like I thought every Apple, that it used to do it like they would fly you off to Cupertino
⏹️ ▶️ John and give you this whole training course and like you’d be briefed on Apple’s entire line and it’s the type of thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not going to remember everything they tell you. They’re going to fill your head with a bunch of information and especially if you’re new to Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t remember all the details, but I would think that forgetting an entire line of computers exists,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially when Apple’s Mac product line doesn’t contain that many products in the grand scheme of things would be
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that wouldn’t happen. So I think they must have dropped their training a little bit for the floor staff
⏹️ ▶️ John or the salespeople.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, this is what happens with every retail place. The Apple stores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are really big. There’s lots of them and they have to hire lots of staff. From what we’ve heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumblings of here and there, it seems like maybe they don’t pay as well as they used to or whatever reason they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a hard time attracting and or training high quality staff consistently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you end up getting like, yes, there are some people there who really know their stuff, but a lot of them don’t because that’s just the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hiring a massive retail staff these days. Indeed.
Follow-up: Trackbars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we should also talk about the crazy weird mouse that I believe John had brought
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think it was called the isopoint track bar from outbound back from the 80s Well this design apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John lives on probably because they either bought the patents for it or the patents expired because it was so long ago
⏹️ ▶️ John in contour designs Roller mouse, which is a thing that you can buy for your computer today,
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently and it looks like kind of one of those this
⏹️ ▶️ John slides or if it’s just like touch sensitive or whatever.
YouTube product reviews
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever there’s a YouTube video of someone messing with it and doesn’t still doesn’t quite make it clear because
⏹️ ▶️ John the YouTube videos not very illuminating but anyway this still exists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco YouTube’s very good at that YouTube is very good at having lots of videos that purport to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco review a product but don’t actually tell you the useful information about that product they just kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hold it up and spin it around or unbox it and they don’t actually try it or show you or do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything useful not that I’m complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John well you need to you need to have different camera angles like what you need to do is like if you don’t understand how this product works which I
⏹️ ▶️ John you know I have some questions like oh does the bar slide back and what you need like close-ups and like macro photography and
⏹️ ▶️ John cutaways and if you can’t just have one continuous shot of a person sitting on a desk you
⏹️ ▶️ John know connecting it to their keyboard and showing it’s got little feet and it’s got little connectors got a little this but it’s just like you’re too far away
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t see what you’re doing with your fingers you need to need a multi camera multi shot edited
⏹️ ▶️ John sequence instead of just one big long take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually when I’m review when I’m looking for product reviews on YouTube for a product I’m considering buying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At least half the videos I find, I suspect I’m the first person to ever have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watched them. Regardless of what the view count says, those must all be bots. I think I’m the only person who’s ever watched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, including the creator. I don’t think they’ve even watched it, because if they watched it, they would notice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the problems, or at least some of the problems. Like, hey, you can barely hear what they’re saying, or you know you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could have cut out like this entire segment, or unfortunately, most commonly, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire video serves no purpose and adds nothing to the world, I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, some of them have really high production values where I can tell they’ve really nailed the lighting and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s crisp and the audio is really good, but they didn’t actually provide good product
⏹️ ▶️ John review because they didn’t have the close-ups and the other details. None of those people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco review microphones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the most fun thing is when I’m looking for, not specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John videos, but usually it’s what I find for like questions I have about household stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John like how to repair a self-raising, like how to repair a cordless
⏹️ ▶️ John blind raising mechanism thing or something, or how to fix a flapper on your toilet or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re looking for like this specific make and model and seeing how some, or even when I was doing the, replacing the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John in my key fob or whatever, right? Those are the best videos, because these are not professional
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTubers. This is just a person who just says, look I’ve decided to film myself doing this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and like they’re holding their camera under their chin against their chest to film their two
⏹️ ▶️ John hands doing something the camera is a candy bar phone from 1997 and and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John talking really weird because their chin is holding the camera while their fingers fumble and I love
⏹️ ▶️ John these people you know why because if they didn’t do that terrible video there would be zero videos on the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire Internet I’m like I just want to see one other living human do this and they do it like oh that explains
⏹️ ▶️ John it like it’s so much better to have a video than no video so I would encourage everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you’re even remotely thinking of putting a video about how you repaired the specific toilet seat that you have
⏹️ ▶️ John for some specific 80s toilet do it put it up online nobody if it has five views
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t matter if I’m one of those five I’m like thank you thank you for putting this online because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so hard to find any information about certain things and I love the fact that people are doing especially about home
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff are doing home repairs and filming themselves doing it and filming their mistakes and
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t care that the audio is horrible I don’t care that it’s all blurry I don’t care that the camera is shaking I wish there were more of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them no I mean I’m just saying like if you’re gonna review a microphone what is the one thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that somebody watching that review might be interested in that video containing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an audio sample from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco microphone go look at like pick a microphone go to YouTube and search for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video reviewing that that microphone and see how many you can find that actually contain an audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sample of the person talking into that microphone. Let alone what would be more useful is maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comparing it back to back to like one other microphone maybe. The one built into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the camera or the phone would be good enough. Just compare it to something else like you can’t even find samples
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people talking into the mic. I cannot believe like oh man I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the wrong business. I’m gonna take
⏹️ ▶️ John over YouTube. Well I bet they show you the microphone coming out of the box. They show you all the different outfits you can put on the microphone.
⏹️ ▶️ John you all the articulations and the different points on it. It’s like the toy unwrapping videos
⏹️ ▶️ John or the template upon which all product reviews on YouTube are based. And it’s probably okay
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re unwrapping toys, but probably not good for a product that actually is supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to do something. It’s difficult, especially for something like an input device or a chair or
⏹️ ▶️ John something like that. It’s not actually easy to illustrate in video all the different
⏹️ ▶️ John features because you do need lots of weird camera angles and camera rigs to get lighting in the right place to sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John convey the… and you probably need diagrams at a certain point like with like overlayed on top of the video it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not an easy gig.
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Casey’s iMac woes
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, there is another item in the follow-up, which I told myself it wouldn’t bring up But I don’t want to get yelled at later
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a bullet that says Casey’s ongoing iMac woes Which I don’t want to talk about because I don’t want the internet telling me about how wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am about everything so we can Move along.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, we already talked to you about it in slack But I think we need to talk about it again.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. You need to bring in your iMac for repair and you won’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, that’s actually, yes, that’s the summary. Is that, so, how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can I briefly recap this? Let me put on my summarize, chief summarizer and chief hat. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple episodes ago, I sounded like garbage because my iMac croaked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the middle of recording. No, it did not involve water or any other liquid. Thank you the entire internet for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey making that joke. that joke. Anyway, so it croaked in the middle of recording, it hard froze, rebooted itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This had happened, I had noticed, from time to time, but it had never been during a recording, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it didn’t really make that big of a difference. The only thing I lost out on was Plex couldn’t see my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey media files because it wouldn’t auto-reconnect to the Synology. So anyway, so this happened. Suddenly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually need to take action on things because it affected the show, and that’s no bueno. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tried to figure out what to do. I did a hardware test and after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much cajoling from Mr. Syracuse, it showed no problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I might have tried one or two other things, but what I ended up doing was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I swapped out my Mac sales RAM. I had gotten 32 gigs of RAM for this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the moment I bought it, and I put in the eight gigs of OEM RAM, and that’s what’s running in it right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it seemed to me empirically that it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go about a week before it has one of these locks and reboots itself. And up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until this morning, it had been eight days since I had any such problem. This morning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went to not unsleep it, but the screen had slept, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey machine was still on. So I hit the spacebar on my keyboard in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wake the thing up, and the backlight on the screen came on, but I could see nothing. I ended up forcing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a reboot. I did a hard reboot. I looked at the console when it came back up, and it had a bazillion messages.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have it handy in front of me, but something along the lines of, I can tell that the GPU driver is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey responding, and that’s probably not good. So my hopeful and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I stand by my going theory is that it’s the non-OEM RAM that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pissing it off and causing problems. But I have nothing but anecdotal evidence to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. And John and Marco both are insistent that I take this thing to the genius bar, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really, really, really don’t want to because it is a Royal pain to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring it there, let alone be gone, but you have it be gone for like a week or more only for genius to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey geez, it never happened to me. Everything looks good here. Here you go. Come back if it happens again. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to bother with it. and I would rather just deal with the 8 gigs of RAM and then maybe start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whining at Mac sales or Otherworld Computing or whatever they call themselves. Whine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at them and see if I can get replacement sticks if that really does seem to be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hold on, if you’re gonna keep the OWC RAM out of the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s going to have this problem occasionally. You know it’s not the RAM. What exactly do you expect OWC
⏹️ ▶️ John But like you just said, you said I still think It’s the RAM, but it just froze when the RAM wasn’t in it. How does that even how does that even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it was a different kind of freeze. It was a very different kind of free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Serious I’m not trying to be funny. Oh god. I’m gonna get so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John many you are being
⏹️ ▶️ John I understand it’s a different kind of freeze for the problem It’s another thing that your Mac shouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John doing right like especially since you’re not doing anything with it You don’t have any weird programs that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John running or you’re not stressing It’s just sitting there idle essentially and you come back to it and you can’t get it to wake up and
⏹️ ▶️ John you see a bunch GPU messages and the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but that was the first time I’d ever seen anything in the console. Any of the other times it locked up, it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was running and churning and chugging along fine, and then next thing you know I see, oh, boot time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re grossly overblowing the effect this problem has on me, with the exception of that one episode, which I do genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel deeply sorry about. With the exception of that one episode, it has never really caused any problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me. And I think that today’s freeze was just a fluke of modern computing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t happen that that is not that is not the behavior of healthy hardware that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not normal that is not something you should just consider you know what that’s acceptable I’m going to live with that forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no and especially because like you know this is gonna run on a warranty at some point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you didn’t get Apple care it’s gonna be in what six months like it this is not normal this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this is not supposed to happen this is not acceptable something in there is broken and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is most likely not the RAM that is not currently in the computer when this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem is still happening. It was a different problem though. Well, it might have reacted worse with that RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe it sounds like there’s something wrong with the GPU or the logic board. Whether or not it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is worse with the OWC RAM in it, the fact is this problem exists without the OWC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM in it. So therefore, that RAM is not the problem. That RAM might be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem, but it is not the problem here.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming you googled the error message because like to rule out software type of bugs where it’s like oh
⏹️ ▶️ John Unbeknownst to you this version of OS 10 ships or Mac OS 10 right? Oh god, this
⏹️ ▶️ John transition is gonna be rough ships with a Driver for your particular
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU that is flaky in this way I mean usually googling for the console message will land you
⏹️ ▶️ John a hundred people asking the same question on Apple’s discussion forums None of which are actually getting an answer, but then you
⏹️ ▶️ John can kind of like ballpark like look this is a thing that’s happening to a lot of people,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, as judged by like, whatever ratio, you know, commands people to go on to
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple discussion forums and talk about like for every one person you see there, there’s probably like hundreds more who don’t know where the discussions forums
⏹️ ▶️ John are. But I’ve had situations like this. And it doesn’t mean that the software problem, you see other people
⏹️ ▶️ John having it, but occasionally you’ll get lucky and you’ll see that, oh, actually, I’m someone who knows whether
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m an Apple employee or not. And there’s a bug in this driver for this Nvidia GPU or whatever is
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not what you have in yours but anyway and that’s what the problem is and this software
⏹️ ▶️ John update either has fixed it or will fix it or whatever like so it’s still conceivable that that
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU like that freeze thing could be a software issue right the hard rebooting
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with no messages in the console definitely looks like a hardware thing and like you said you haven’t had that with our I’m out so who knows
⏹️ ▶️ John but either way either of these things I think are a problem so
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe maybe you’ve kind of convinced me with your reticence to bring this thing and Maybe you wait for the next one,
⏹️ ▶️ John the next freeze, and see, with the RAM still out, do you get a repeat of the GPU thing, or do you get
⏹️ ▶️ John the hard, reset-y type thing? I still think it’s weird that the RAM test would pass. Maybe the RAM tests are not
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly thorough. Maybe you need to run those tests that go through every byte of RAM hundreds of times and runs for days at
⏹️ ▶️ John a time to really test it. I’m not entirely sure. But anyway, all this is to say that both Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ John I have 5K iMacs, and ours just don’t do this. So you shouldn’t accept this as a state of being.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you should resign yourself taking this big heavy computer in three times, not once, because the first time you take it in,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re lucky, they’ll find something wrong, but they’ll probably send it back to you and say, it’s fine. Then you have to wait for it to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John again. Then you have to bring it again. Then they say, it’s fine. Then you have to wait for it to happen again. Then you bring it again. And then after
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve denied you three times, then you get a satisfaction of some kind
⏹️ ▶️ John or you get to be a more indignant about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, well, let me just make a couple things very plain because apparently nobody’s listening to me. I did the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware diagnostic test or whatever it is called when you start the computer and mash down on the D key.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It I did this with the OWC RAM in and it said everything was peachy keen. Every everything
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I was saying. Like maybe it runs like a wimpy RAM test because a full RAM test takes a really, really long time. So
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t you know, because I’m suspicious of the RAM too, right? So maybe the Apple hardware test didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John test it thoroughly, or maybe it didn’t trigger the problem or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. Well, like with this kind of intermittent problem that happened you know you get like a weird crash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it used to be every few days now it’s like once a week right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah used to be about once of we once a week it has happened once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which it to be in to be fair was about eight days after I put the old the stock RAM in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it has happened once and on the surface that looks like it’s probably the same crash but like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said earlier I’d never ever ever seen any console messages previously and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should add that it always just reboot itself and this time it did not, it seemed like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was fine until it powered on the backlight and then it just wouldn’t show anything on screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t think this is the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Either way, these are two different symptoms of some kind of underlying problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is probably the same problem with or without that OWC RAM in it. So it probably is not the RAM, it’s probably a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Apple’s hardware in here. And normally functioning computers don’t behave this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco functioning Macs don’t behave this way. Even Macs running betas don’t behave this way. Tipster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the chatroom says his beta hardware doesn’t behave this way. Something is wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whether or not the hardware test passes or fails does not say there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is or isn’t a problem. It just says whatever that is testing for is or isn’t failing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that moment. What that means to you is that this will be annoying to get fixed, but that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean there isn’t a problem. It just means the problem didn’t happen during that test.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the synology. I am not taking my car to the shop for them to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, we can’t reproduce it four different times just so they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can say, Oh, we can’t reproduce it. I do not have the confidence.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s no reasonable hope that the BMW dealer would ever fix a problem like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s no reasonable hope in Apple. Oh, God.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. No, there is a reasonable hope that you will get some kind of satisfaction from Apple about it. I know I’ve dealt with these problems
⏹️ ▶️ John before. Car dealer, forget it. If you have some electronic gremlin in your car, there’s no hope. Like, don’t even bother. Like, maybe try the dealer
⏹️ ▶️ John once. try the dealer once but it’s not like they have they don’t deal with electronics like they can fix your mechanical parts but in general unless there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some sort of well we flashed it with the manufacturers latest blah blah they have no idea about the electronics in your car and half that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t work right even when it’s working entirely according to you know like it’s working perfectly this is exactly how it’s designed it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just filled with bugs that are never gonna get fixed but for hardware like I
⏹️ ▶️ John had the same thing go Thunderbolt display which is really weird and flaky and I had to keep bringing in and bringing in but eventually I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like eventually you They will give you an entirely new insides or an entirely new refurbished thing
⏹️ ▶️ John or you know like you will especially when it’s under warranty It’s relatively new now is the time to
⏹️ ▶️ John start going through the annoying sequence because it will be worse if you just let the slide and the warranty
⏹️ ▶️ John runs out and you’re just annoyed for years at a time by this thing and then Your only recourse
⏹️ ▶️ John is then at that point is to pay out some of your own money do it while it’s still under warranty With Apple you will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John something eventually will happen and it’s not 100% chance It’s gonna get fixed, but it’s nonzero and it’s way higher
⏹️ ▶️ John than the car dealer fixing something about electronic in your car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let me just plainly state it’ll be in the show notes But the actual error on the most recent time when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the backlight came on and nothing was on screen was Windows Server Colon GPU driver appears to be hung
⏹️ ▶️ Casey parenthesis over five continuous seconds of unreadiness That was the actual error The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only thing I could come up with on a quick Google search as I’m recording is the stupid Mac Pro So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Mac Pro is haunting me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, what’s really common on the Mac Pro GPU failures. Yeah, go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey figure. I also consider that this is my second, or remember, that this is my second Retina
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K iMac, and I’m already kind of not wanting to deal with going back to the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store. And it is not that far from my house, don’t be creepy, but I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want to deal with it. And there are people that are in the chat, and I’m sure there are people listening to this that are furious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with me that I’m not leaping into my car to get this fixed. I guarantee you everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really mad at you for listening.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Everyone’s probably yelling at their podcasts, come on!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whatever. I just, I have, these things have a year warranty, do they not?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. Generally speaking, how this works. Okay, I bought this thing in like late January,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe mid January at the earliest. I can look it up. I have plenty of time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make myself happy and let this run with my piddly eight gigs of RAM for another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey month and see if it crashes and how often it crashes and what the story is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because if it is as simple as it doesn’t crash with the stock RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then okay, I get different RAM. I either buy different RAM, I live with it with eight gigs of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RAM, it actually is working just fine to be honest with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Except that it rebooted this morning.
⏹️ ▶️ John OWC will replace the RAM. OWC replaced RAM after like eight years with me. Like they have
⏹️ ▶️ John a ridiculously good warranty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. No, it’s not the RAM. It’s not. Well, the RAM’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not even in the computer. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anyway, like, if
⏹️ ▶️ John, Tiff Arment you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to let it stew for another month, just like, it’s going to be kind of a pain to find this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in console later, especially if it like gzips up the logs and everything and you have to go hunting through it. Make
⏹️ ▶️ John a note of, copy and paste all the surrounding log lines for each reboot, make a note of the date and the time, because if you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t do this while it’s happening, it’ll be a pain to go back and research it later. And then you can come to the Genius Bar eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, look, here’s a record of all the stuff that’s happened. or the console log surrounding the events. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John can plot them out and say how many days there were between them and all that other stuff. That’ll be very useful for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree. And I would suspect that there will come a time that I will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to bring this in because it’s just something happens that makes me think, okay, it’s not the RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yes, I understand Marco, that you can do a hashtag Marco is right. That’s fine, whatever, I don’t care. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am so not wanting to deal with the hassle of making this dance happen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four or five times to get a genius that actually understands that something’s broken. It’s just not worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. To me, it’s not worth it. If it’s worth it to you, be that Marco, be that John or random listener that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey furious with me and thinks I’m an idiot. Fine. It’s worth it to you. At this very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moment, tonight, it’s not worth it to me yet. And I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh so overjoyed to read all the emails about how much of a moron I am. So just please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey send them to Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s it going to take? What’s going to be your threshold? Like at what point will, you know, hypothetically,
⏹️ ▶️ John if X happened, that would be like, that’s it, this thing is going in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think if I see a similar crash with nothing in the console, literally there was nothing in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey console. Everything was going as happy as a clam. And then next thing you know, boot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. If that happens again, and it happens on the stock RAM, which is what’s in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That will probably in and of itself be enough for me to say, okay, fine. I’ll, I probably have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take this in. And certainly if these crashes, random crashes, for whatever reason, even the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that I saw today, if that happens consistently, some consistently enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between today, the 13th of July, 2016, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around Christmas time, which is around the time that the warranty expires, I will bring it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. I just think it’s really aggressive and premature to go through that entire frigging hassle today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s all I’m saying. Does that answer your question?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, there’ll be more follow-up, I’m sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John looking forward to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John We just want your computer to be happy.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco We want you to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we don’t want to lose any more audio. He’s got that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ve taken alternate arrangements. Oh, God. I’m so looking forward to this
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Planet of the Apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to Hover for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to join up and film. And apparently there’s going to be events, and I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entirely clear what that means. I don’t know if it’s like American Idol style casting or if it means they’re just going to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to these places, but they’re going to New York, Austin, LA, and San Francisco sometime over the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few months, I guess. So anyway, what do we think about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about Apple dipping into the TV world?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s weird that Apple’s first original content that it is like overtly funding
⏹️ ▶️ John is about like its own stuff. It’s not a fiction show that it’s about apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s weird for two reasons. One when you think of a company funding original TV content,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess just because historically we think of like fiction like, oh, we’re going to pay a bunch of people money and they’re going to write a
⏹️ ▶️ John story and have a bunch of actors in a script. Because that’s what all the other services have done to promote their
⏹️ ▶️ John you know their their headlining Original content is all fiction stuff There’s not I mean they have
⏹️ ▶️ John reality shows But that’s not the stuff that we hear in a house of cards being the big first one and then you know Orange is the new black and all
⏹️ ▶️ John sorts of other things so that’s weird and the second thing is that it is a reality
⏹️ ▶️ John show about things that Apple does and Reason I think that’s weird is because
⏹️ ▶️ John in general when there’s a reality show about a topic whatever it is if it’s fishing or baking
⏹️ ▶️ John cupcakes or like whatever it may be. I tend
⏹️ ▶️ John to view the reality show about that thing as not reflective of
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing. It doesn’t have to be, it’s just entertainment right? But I would imagine that someone who is really
⏹️ ▶️ John you know a professional woodworker seeing a reality show about woodworking and being like well
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not what woodworking is actually like. This is a reality show but which again which is fine but it’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John a distorted view because like in reality I don’t have to make a chair with one hand tied behind my back
⏹️ ▶️ John or I don’t have to incorporate pine cones into the next project like that’s not what actual
⏹️ ▶️ John woodworking is like and in reality like these people you know they’re cutting away and they’re not showing the amount of time and I would use a different
⏹️ ▶️ John tool for that and you know like I can just imagine anyone watching reality show thinking that this is
⏹️ ▶️ John not reflective of my profession they may think it’s entertaining and it’s fun or whatever but I
⏹️ ▶️ John think if you were Apple and you decided your first original content is is going to be about developing
⏹️ ▶️ John for your platforms, you would want it to be either reflective of
⏹️ ▶️ John what it’s like to develop your platform or make it look better. Whereas most reality shows make it look
⏹️ ▶️ John more difficult and more fraught and just weird. Like I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine the view you get of app development from watching this program being something that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple would be like, yeah, we want people to think that’s what it’s like to develop apps for our platform. And I know they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John try to spin it to make it like, look, it’s great. and these people are gonna get rich and they’re all wonderful and developing it for our platform
⏹️ ▶️ John is really fun, but that’s an infomercial and no one wants to watch that either. There has to be like reality show drama and
⏹️ ▶️ John silly events and stuff like that. And it just doesn’t seem
⏹️ ▶️ John like a good idea to me. I don’t see, even if it’s the best show ever and people enjoy it and it’s super entertaining
⏹️ ▶️ John and we come to love the contestants and it’s a bonding experience and everything, I don’t see how it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a net positive for Apple and that like before this show, X number
⏹️ ▶️ John of people were into app development, and now even more are, and it looks even better. I think it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John make it into more of a circus, or just, I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem like a good idea to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We actually spoke about this on today’s Clockwise, which I guested on, Clockwise number 145,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and basically, I forget who was it that brought it up, but somebody asked, hey, are you gonna watch this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and are you interested in it? And the four of us all basically said, yeah, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least gonna give it a shot. I’m curious to see it. I agree with you, John, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote unquote reality TV is never that real or is very rarely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that real. I’m also curious to see how they make developing apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exciting because the actual act of development is boring as crap, or at least watching it is boring as crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the social network, you know, the movie, The Social Network did a pretty good job of making it dramatic and exciting. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you think about it, there was very little actual programming going on. Generally speaking, it was more drinking that was adjacent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to programming. But I don’t know. I’m not entirely clear what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the motivation is. I think you’re right that it’s fraught with peril and it could go wrong in a lot of ways. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am very intrigued to see how they handle it and intrigued to see how they present
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Is it going to be a bunch of tech bros from Silicon Valley that are programming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and being idiots? I would assume not, but you never know. Or is it going to be like an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and genuine struggle of someone trying to be an independent developer and trying to release this app. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was that indie game, The Movie, and like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Tiff Arment chronicle?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What was that one guy who did Fez? Phil Fish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey riveted by his story.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that wasn’t about game development. Like, to get back to what you were saying about like how are they going to make a game, you know, application
⏹️ ▶️ John development interesting? Like when saddled with an activity that generally isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting to watch, like sitting in front of a keyboard, you fall entirely back on what normally reality shows only lean
⏹️ ▶️ John on 90% which is it’s all about the people, the characters, the stories, and only
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have an activity that is photogenic, for example like cooking because people get hungry when they see
⏹️ ▶️ John yummy food or whatever, like but even in cooking reality shows, mostly it’s about the people, the characters,
⏹️ ▶️ John the interpersonal relationships, the story behind them, where do they come from, what do they hope to achieve, it’s why they’re always
⏹️ ▶️ John asking people what their hopes and dreams are. Very very little about the cooking, and cooking is really photogenic,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? When you have something that’s not photogenic at all, like sitting in front of a computer on a keyboard typing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to be entirely concentrated on the people’s stories, and maybe the app idea
⏹️ ▶️ John because the audience can say I use apps, I know what apps are like, tell me your app idea kind of like in the
⏹️ ▶️ John shark tank type things, tell me your business idea, I don’t want to the details of how you incorporate and how you do accounting in your
⏹️ ▶️ John business and how you run your business from day to day, I don’t want but the things that I can relate to. So that that is
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how reality shows work. It’s about people, it’s about relationships, but it’s about interpersonal conflict.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re probably not going to show a lot of programming, but they probably will show here’s my app idea. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John programming happens off camera. Here’s a phase of development programming happens off camera. Here’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John idea, judges look at the idea, you know, like, which is kind of a shame, because I think a lot of the people, a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of the nerds are like, I would like to see the program part of people making jokes, like, are they gonna have activities, we have to like
⏹️ ▶️ John refactor, you know, a controller or something and change your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Tiff Arment your model layer. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, they’re not going to have that we would like to to see that but we have a very small audience you know they can’t do anything that’s real
⏹️ ▶️ John programming type stuff that has to be about all about the personal drama which I think Apple thinks maybe is gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John like oh it shows these people and they’re there you know pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna become bazillionaires and they have these great app ideas and app is empower the world or whatever but
⏹️ ▶️ John then again you have to have the the drama and the drama may be
⏹️ ▶️ John really entertaining and people will like the program but I don’t think it’s gonna make people want to become a developer on Apple’s platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, Marco, you’ve been pretty quiet. What do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mostly don’t know what I think about this yet. I agree with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what both of you said that, you know, like Casey, I agree that it is a little weird sounding.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m willing to reserve judgment until I see it. It’s a little unclear as to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what kind of show it is. It sounds a little bit like it is kind of like a Shark Tank or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a competition show. And it sounds like the prize
⏹️ ▶️ John Surprise! Yeah, I mean. It’s not much of a prize. I mean, it’s one of those prizes that sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s a prize, like make it big. It’s like you landed a record contract like for the American Idol or
⏹️ ▶️ John the original was like, congratulations, you are signed to a major label with a terrible deal. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you are chained into that deal and you think it’s a big deal when you’re a nobody but once you realize you’re in it, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really not a great thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re right, John, that this is mostly just gonna be about interpersonal stories and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depending on how well they do it, hopefully they’re low on artificial drama.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think it’s mostly gonna be a long version of the feel-good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco videos they show before their keynotes, especially WBDC keynotes, where it’s like you’re showing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these developers all over the world doing all sorts of cool things to empower themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the people around them and showing all this cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff with accessibility and diversity and everything. If that’s going to be what it is, that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how many people…
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s an infomercial. That’s not entertaining. That’s great for an ad and it makes us feel good,
⏹️ ▶️ John but people aren’t going to tune in week after week to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch that show. Right. And so if it’s going to be some kind of…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it’s going to try to be a mass appeal show, like a mainstream show, they’re going to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have almost none of the development side and they’re gonna have to just make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it basically American Idol for apps and and I or you know basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Shark Tank and I don’t expect that to be good just you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instinctively my gut reaction is I probably won’t like this and I probably won’t know a single person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it but that’s not to say that it won’t be good for other people I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean like a lot of people have asked me today whether I’m going to apply to be on it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t think I will because it like again it’s like the the endgame here like what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the endgame I go through all this I I get represented somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that their producers edit it and it’s not gonna be like Tim Cook editing this you know it’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some other you know reality TV producer editing this I’m so you know if you apply to this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna be handing over control of how you are represented to the world to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody who is probably an expert in making TV drama and in creating drama
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where there wasn’t drawn before to make him or to watch because that’s probably what they did before this
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I don’t think any one of us wants to see the reality show character that we would become everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John, Tiff Arment has like
⏹️ ▶️ John you have the input is this person and then the reality show editors thing is like all right I got a slot you in here what kind of character
⏹️ ▶️ John are you so they’re it’s like a kid getting a caricature at like the fair right or they’re gonna take whatever aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John of you that they think is the most entertaining or makes in those drama and and they’re going to design a character with you as
⏹️ ▶️ John the input. And if there’s anything remotely weird about you, and there’s plenty weird about all three of us,
⏹️ ▶️ John we probably would not want to see the reality show character that we would become. Because we probably wouldn’t be the one
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the typical hero that everybody relates to and thinks is awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to say maybe Casey would be. Because everyone seems to love him. He’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the everyman. So maybe he would be turned into like the underdog everyman. refuses to take his Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John in when he has problems and then it’s like, no, he’s got his hangups doing us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Tiff Arment Oh, God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So honest question, Marco and John, you as well, actually. So it says here, crap,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just lost it. Who will be the tech experts and mentors? And it just says this is in the FAQ.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are excited to announce our tech experts and talent in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more info. Would you be willing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be a tech expert like someone on the judging side of of the table as opposed to the more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey participatory side of the table, if that makes sense?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I would certainly be more likely to consider that, but honestly, the reality is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would never ask me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. I’m not even close to famous enough for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not even in the ballpark. I wouldn’t even be on the like WB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of this show. Like not even close and so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not even it’s that’s like saying like would you accept it if they if they offered you to be the new head of the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like well yeah I’d probably consider that but they won’t so you know there’s no reason to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really give much thought to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Head of the App Store would be a better gig though because even though being a judge is slightly better than being a
⏹️ ▶️ John participant it’s not much better because you don’t you’re not the showrunner you don’t just make editorial decisions. You are
⏹️ ▶️ John just another character on the show and you have more free reign to define your own character if you’re a judge, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John will play a character in that role and you won’t have control over the final edit. You won’t even have control
⏹️ ▶️ John over all the decisions that are made on the show. So it is entirely like you would be a cog in someone else’s
⏹️ ▶️ John machine in that situation. Marco was really bad at being a cog in someone else’s machine, so I think he should not take
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that even if
⏹️ ▶️ John they offered it to him. I wouldn’t take it just because I wouldn’t want to be on TV. I mean, I don’t even do public speaking for
⏹️ ▶️ John crying a lot. You think I want to be in a TV show, but I thought I could think of a lot of other people who I think
⏹️ ▶️ John would be good celebrity judges, like people who are, you know, would fill
⏹️ ▶️ John that role well, but not because they’re the best, you know, tech expert or the best mentor, but that’s not what
⏹️ ▶️ John these things are about. A reality show is about you have to have an entertaining cast of characters. Hopefully they have some skills
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, you like and have some stake in it and are genuine or interesting people. Not to saying they’re all like
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of phonies, but that’s what makes for good television. So you need different types
⏹️ ▶️ John to mix together. Like I would say that, for example, Larry Ellison would be an interesting judge
⏹️ ▶️ John in this just because he’s so like cartoonishly evil, like the persona that is the public persona that
⏹️ ▶️ John has. And usually there’s a spot in a reality show for someone to be like the cartoonishly evil mustache
⏹️ ▶️ John twisting villain, right? So he could slot right into that, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the various messages that have been going around in Slack and stuff, I’ve seen a few developed people that we know
⏹️ ▶️ John consider applying as participants just as a lark type of thing. Haven’t seen
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone interested in applying for judge things, but I think that’s the type of thing where they have to call you.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I have a feeling that the people who would be good
⏹️ ▶️ John would also say no. So I think their judging panel is not going to have the brightest
⏹️ ▶️ John lights ever industry in it. And it’s gonna be difficult to find,
⏹️ ▶️ John to make interesting characters out of well-known celebrities. I think the best bet is to have three or four people who
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve never heard of, but who turn out to be really good as judges on a reality show?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s probably gonna be like people who want or need to be in Apple’s Good Graces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple Music promotion and VCs. It’s gonna be that combination. You’re gonna have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of probably B-list celebrities or musicians who were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco popular five years ago. Something like that. You’re gonna have a couple of celebrities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and VCs. And that’s the story. The judges, with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these kind of reality shows, the judges are often used to attract the audience. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why they try to get celebrity judges, because they know that people will tune in to watch those judges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco judge the apps, right? And then you’re gonna have VCs, because they’re gonna be the ones who actually know a little bit more about the business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like I kind of have to point out, the world that Apple is going to promote here is most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely not the world that we and our friends and the apps that we talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about on our podcast, It’s not the world that we all live in. It’s the entire rest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the App Store where it’s, well, not the rest of the App Store, but it’s the rest of the big money side of the App Store at least,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it is VC funded, it is driven by these hit driven, usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IAP games or things like that. It’s gonna be that kind of stuff in all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likelihood. It’s not going to be one person toiling away to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really polish the crap out of one amazing productivity app and try to sell it for 10 bucks a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. That’s not going to be what this show is about in all likelihood. It’s way more likely that it’s going to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re making a startup that’s going to help connect people to do this amazing task together, and we’re going to get 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco million users in the first year and then figure out monetization later. It’s going to be that kind of app. It’s not going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like I have more faith in, for example, a music executive’s ability to judge
⏹️ ▶️ John musical talent to say can I take this person and make an album with them that will sell a lot of copies
⏹️ ▶️ John that I would say is a more refined and more predictable art even though it’s still difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to pick but like the people who are good at that I feel like are much better than VC which is just a bunch of people who all know nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John in fact almost all have exactly the wrong idea about everything like VC is like two orders of magnitude
⏹️ ▶️ John uh more unpredictable more difficult to figure out what is going to be a hit you know and that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John VCs throw money everywhere you’re you know throw the money at a thousand companies just hoping one of them will be your
⏹️ ▶️ John magical unicorn that makes you billions of dollars. But that means you’re wrong, you know, 999 times. And if you,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I think you’re right that it’s going to be a bunch of VCs and it’s nothing worse than hearing VCs be like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I can tell I’m going to tell you, you know, why your business is going to like, they’d have no idea what’s going to succeed and what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to fail, especially just a small handful of VCs. Forget it. Like, it’s gonna be hard
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to take them, any of them seriously. Every time they make a judgment it would be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what current unicorns did you pass on and tell me the 999
⏹️ ▶️ John things that you funded that thought were going to be the next big thing that were all dumb ideas that fizzled out, right? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot easier to go to a record executive and say, tell me all of the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John turned out hits for you and how many people did you take under your wing that turned out to do nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John good. The ratios are just so hard in in venture capital for technology companies that
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be comical. I think it’s easier on like on Shark Tank to come up like business ideas for concrete things
⏹️ ▶️ John because in the world of apps and, you know, digital stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and software and all that it’s just it’s so unpredictable and pretty much every
⏹️ ▶️ John idea that turns out to be really big is the idea that most people hate when they first hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I am not looking forward to the unbelievable complaining
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and moaning that will happen from our community when we realize, as both of you have said, that this show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not made for us. One other interesting point that’s on their FAQ, will I be required
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to give up a percentage of equity? Answer, those that appear on the show will not be required to give up equity unless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they choose to accept an offer from one of the angel advisors or investors, which is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey further reason to make me believe this is basically shark tank but for apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well that’s good to know though because that means that the VC component is optional,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice. You know, that would make it a little more interesting. But then what do you win? I guess you win like
⏹️ ▶️ John and promotion. Like bragging rights and now your name is out there and it’s easier for you to find funding because you’re the guy that
⏹️ ▶️ John won on the show or whatever. It would be better if it was just a plain old cash prize.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, those accepted will have a chance to receive. This is from the About page. One, mentorship, hands-on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guidance from some of the world’s best experts in tech and entertainment. Two, funding. Those who make it to the final round will meet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with top-tier VCs, investing up to $10 million over the course of the season. Three,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey marketing and promotion, featured placement on the App Store at the end of the show. Also the potential to reach millions of viewers around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the world on Apple platforms. So that is what you’re potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to receive. Participation in the show is limited to 100 of the world’s most talented app creators. If that’s you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please join us. And that’s the link. So that’s the playing field that we’re dealing with.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they get nothing. They get featured, which happens to people for free all the time. Granted, you don’t have control of it, and this is a guarantee
⏹️ ▶️ John of being featured. But so what? Being featured is not going to guarantee to make you a bazillionaire. You got the VC,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like a monkey’s paw if ever there was one. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John really do have a good app idea, you probably don’t need the VC unless your business model demands a huge amount of upfront costs,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re making a deal with the devil, most likely. imagine the best friendliest VCs are going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John part of this thing and it’s only ten million dollars anyway. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s up to ten million total so each app you’re looking at you know if you actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have these people invest in your app how many apps are you know you might get a few hundred thousand dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is that sounds like a lot of money but for VC money funding an app that’s not that much money
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah and then like but there’s no there is no like guaranteed
⏹️ ▶️ John big like you’re gonna get ten million dollars in cash like guaranteed, you know, here you go,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s your prize on the show, like getting to the end of, you know, a game show or whatever, the winner will get whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, even if it’s just $1 million in cash. I think that is would be more attractive
⏹️ ▶️ John to more people because who is going to read this and say, I really want to
⏹️ ▶️ John go on the show and I really want to win only somebody who doesn’t have like,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I think the reason Margo shouldn’t do is if he had a good idea for an app, he wouldn’t spend his time trying to convince a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of doofus VCs that it’s a great idea, he would just make the app and he doesn’t need other people to help him make the
⏹️ ▶️ John app unless his ideas again, one of those ideas where it’s like I can’t even get this app off the ground until I have millions of dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s kind of one of those things where you need a critical mass before it becomes like Uber or something. If you had the idea for
⏹️ ▶️ John Uber, like, you can’t really make that up yourself because you need drivers and people to manage them. And like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s much more to it to even just get off the ground to get a critical massive like in one city, can someone actually use
⏹️ ▶️ John my app to actually get a car? That’s like takes a lot of money just to get to that point. Right. So the Uber
⏹️ ▶️ John is an example idea that you would need VC for. But for this for an app that you’re going to make on a show by
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself, just make it yourself. So the only people I think would be attracted to this are like, I’ve never done this before. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like a way that I can become successful faster if I happen to win. And who knows,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it is. But I just like this. I think it’s going to attract new people and not
⏹️ ▶️ John people who already know how to make apps. Because why don’t they just make the app then? Like why spend
⏹️ ▶️ John your time arguing to the Shark Tank people that you have a great idea? Just do it. If it’s a great idea, it’ll be a great
⏹️ ▶️ John idea. If it isn’t a great idea, it won’t be a great idea. Their mentorship and their advice is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to mean that much because every successful app has had tons of people tell them it’s a terrible idea
⏹️ ▶️ John and every app that is a dud has had tons of people tell them it’s awesome. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would also point out for anybody who has never dealt with the role of VC before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that when you get VC investment money, this is not a gift, this is not a prize,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a massive obligation. You basically hire yourselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole bunch of bosses who really want a certain way of doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things because you’re taking a lot of their money. Again, not a gift, you are taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of their money and investing it in your company and you are responsible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from that point forward for providing them a large return at some point in the future and they’re a little bit impatient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about when that is. Understandably, because you’re taking a lot of their money. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you take VC money, you basically get put on a track where, okay, now the next step is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, you have to spend a slice of this money setting up the company exactly the way they want you to. Legal fees,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco corporate, all this stuff. Then you have to hire a staff on their time scale. They are going to tell you, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want you to do this, this, and this. want you to hit these growth targets, and you better have a plan on how you’re going to do that, and you better show us that plan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before we even consider it.” It’s a very high-pressure track
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re put on. They aren’t interested in investing in something that is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bring you $100,000 a year for the next 10 years as a personal income. They don’t care about that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. They don’t want to give you money out of their pocket to get that kind of return.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re investing in you, and they want you to grow as big and as quickly as possible because there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a chance, as John mentioned, a small chance, but there is a chance that if you do that, you will get them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco millions of dollars in return. That’s how their business works. That’s how it operates. That is what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco funds it is those big hits that come along. So they aren’t interested in your lifestyle business. To them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lifestyle business is a derogatory term, even though that describes everything I’ve ever done besides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tumblr, But they don’t want that because that’s not what their money is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re too risky taking their money to just try to do that. They need big things out of you. And so the pressure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be on you from that moment forward to make your thing big and huge and grow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very quickly and take over the world, or at least try to. Their goal is to make you burn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through that money really quickly because they want you to be spending it on growth, on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hiring people, on scaling, on acquiring new users, or whatever the case may be. They want you to be burning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that money quickly and unsustainably, because they know if you hit that growth, you can always get more VC money. You can raise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco additional rounds if you’re growing. If you’re not growing, you’ll crash and burn. They don’t care. They move on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are advantages to the system. There’s lots of things that require this kind of funding to really get off the ground, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is what they’re awarding you with this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show. That is the path that they’re trying to put you on here. And it might work for you, and it might not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you’re the kind of person like me who prefers to do things like independently as quote lifestyle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco businesses and just have things that are sustainable over long periods, this is not for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the one upside potentially is that the only reason VCs are on this program is not
⏹️ ▶️ John that they have any expectation that the winner is going to return an investment. Like in fact, I think there’ll be less pressure
⏹️ ▶️ John on the winner because I think the main reason VCs are on the show is to increase their stature in the VC community.
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, you were the judge on that show. And like, during the course of the judging, they’re going to try to demonstrate
⏹️ ▶️ John how wise they are and how, how knowledgeable they are about the market and how they can judge good ideas from bad
⏹️ ▶️ John in an effort to get more people to come to them. And, you know, like they’re, they’re basically doing it as a giant
⏹️ ▶️ John advertiser advertisement for themselves to become more prominent, more powerful VCs,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And the fact that they’re going to give some winner some amount of money, I think there’s less pressure on them
⏹️ ▶️ John because they feel like even when this thing does not give me any return on investment me starring
⏹️ ▶️ John on this show will be that’s the that’s the real return on investment i’m getting that i get to do this fun
⏹️ ▶️ John thing for a short period of time and it will raise my profile in the vc community uh
⏹️ ▶️ John provided i you know i play my cards right and end up not being the doofus judge that everybody hates or whatever or
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like they don’t know what they’re doing right so that little bit of return takes a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit of pressure off the person who wins to say oh Oh yeah, no, whatever. Do whatever you’re going to do with your business. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like I already got my money’s worth by getting my name out there on this TV show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing I’m also really curious to see just creatively about this show is a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the challenges of app development and a lot of what makes it a really tough grind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is things about Apple that are bad. And how are they going to frame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this exactly? How are they going to, you know, are they are they even going to try to accurately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco portray what it is like being an app developer, the good and the bad, including the bad that is that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a result of Apple shortcomings or Apple’s policies or Apple’s attitude? They’re going to paper over that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, how do they paper over that in a way that is at all genuine? And then what’s what how valuable is the resulting
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I don’t think they’re going to show them submitting their apps to the app store, but they’re just going to say whoever wins, whoever wins
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing, Apple will make sure that their app gets through the app store. They will work privately,
⏹️ ▶️ John individually with the winner to do whatever it takes to fix their sandboxing bugs and that will all happen off camera
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just like, don’t worry, when you’re done, your app will be up on the app store. They’re never going to show the process
⏹️ ▶️ John of submitting and getting your app rejected and then getting like these form letters back and trying to explain, no, you don’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not opening that file. It’s something in your framework. Here’s a demo program. Sorry. You’re like, they’re never going to
⏹️ ▶️ John show that, right? Because A, it’s too esoteric and B, that entire part of the process is
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be just like hand waved away because like, it’ll just be like a sentence at the end of the thing and your app
⏹️ ▶️ John will be in the App Store. Eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Tiff Arment because you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Tiff Arment need to be in the
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store until you’re essentially the winner, right? So it’s not as if they need to be constantly submitting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It says here in the FAQ, how far along in the development process does my app have to be the app must be in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a beta or functional state by October 21. So that does not by necessity means need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean it needs to be in the App Store. So I was wrong about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, anyway, that part of the process will be like, it will be if you don’t know what submitting the app store is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it will seem like it’s just as simple as sending something in the mail to somebody, oh, you just submit to the app store.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I can’t imagine they would focus on rejection, right? And I mean, unless they want to make that dramatic
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the program to show your app was rejected because it crashed, and it’s like, it’s your fault, like none of it is if they
⏹️ ▶️ John do that at all, it’s not going to be shown to be Apple’s fault. Any of the rejections will not be a misunderstanding. Apple’s also just be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, your app got rejected from the store because it crashed. every viewer can understand that. Oh, you did that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was your mistake. Apple is perfect and nice and they would never reject your app for any reason except for because
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t work right or it’s malicious or it crashes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean this is the kind of thing where just creatively it seems like it would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have way better chances of being a good show if Apple wasn’t involved in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But unfortunately, this is an Apple produced show. You can look at some companies and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to like be producers of things but still have jokes made at their expense or have themselves made look bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is not one of these companies. Apple does not have any flex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on like the sense of humor about itself and its own flaws. Like they would never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a million years produce something like this that would show any part of them in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bad light. So is this really gonna be watchable or is it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna of just seem like an overly long WWDC promotion video. Steve McLaughlin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll see. So that actually is a nice segue to what I was going to bring up. I noticed at the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of at least a couple of the pages on PlanetOfTheApps.com, it says something about prospect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey productions. And so I did a smidge of digging, and I believe I’ve come up with the right prospect productions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is prospectproduction.com. And if you go to prospectproduction.com slash works, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see some of the stuff they’ve done in the past. And much to my surprise, a large
⏹️ ▶️ Casey majority of what they’ve worked on is sports-related. So just looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sections they have, there’s a music video by James Taylor, but it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Angels of Fenway, which is a baseball stadium. There’s an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Tiff Arment on-the-trail section, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I figured you’d be confused.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Tiff Arment There’s an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on-the-trail section that is not sports-related, but then there’s legendary, which is about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sports, 30 for 30 shorts, which is sports, a victory journal slash powerade sports, major league soccer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey major league soccer insider, uh, something unrelated ESPN Sunday night baseball.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so there’s all sorts of sports related stuff and then some stuff for the Huffington post as well. So it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not excluded or their history is not exclusively sports, but seems overwhelmingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be sport related, which I think is a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing because That’ll probably I’m hoping that that’ll they’ll understand how to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that sometimes is inherently boring like baseball Into something exciting. So maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can make something else. It’s inherently boring like development into something exciting, which would be neat
⏹️ ▶️ John Sports is way easier to make exciting because it’s a competition and there’s winners and losers and points scored and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but there is
⏹️ ▶️ John here Sort of yeah, but it’s artificially a competition It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a zero-sum game where there’s a winner and loser in the app store like a baseball game is where there’s two teams face off and
⏹️ ▶️ John one is going to win and one is going to lose or it’s going to get rained out. Sports
⏹️ ▶️ John are so much easier to make dramatic. All those sort of long segments that
⏹️ ▶️ John run in the Olympics where they tell you the backstory and what hometown the person came from and how long she trained
⏹️ ▶️ John and she woke up at 5am for years and she overcame this and one of her parents died and then she’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s so easy to do in terms of personal drama and because like all of it at at the end is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John will they get the gold medal will they win will they vanquish their rivals every one of these sports has a clear
⏹️ ▶️ John like first second third fourth place you know gold silver bronze app development is not like that
⏹️ ▶️ John like you know it’s steve jobs said it for apples to seed microsoft doesn’t have to lose and for you to
⏹️ ▶️ John win only in this artificial reality show do your other app developers have to lose in reality for you to
⏹️ ▶️ John win you don’t have to uh sabotage your other app developers by adding
⏹️ ▶️ John stray semicolons their Swift code or whatever.
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Pokémon Go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Betterment. Investing made better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, let’s move on before you yell at me. Let’s talk about poke poke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a mon go. It’s not Pokemon red It’s Pokemon. I think something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have no idea. Are you trying to make us forget about the GPU freeze? Is that what’s happening now?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, pretty much moving on so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it could be multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Tiff Arment Damn it you two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so Pokemon go is a new kind of augmented reality kind of not game
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that came out I guess in the last week and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not really sure what to make of it. Have either of you guys installed and or played it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good talk. So is this all on me?
⏹️ ▶️ John Three of us I would imagine that none of us have installed them or played this game So the only thing we can talk about is the
⏹️ ▶️ John phenomenon that we observe from the outside of other people Installing and playing this game.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve played it. Oh you have you haven’t installed.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Mm-hmm surprises
⏹️ ▶️ John me Have you did you play any other Pokemon games?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not and in fact also also plugging my appearance on Clockwise 145, because we talked about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey today as well. When I was in high school and early on in college, I worked at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Babbage’s, which was kind of like an electronics boutique. It was basically a video game and software store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this was around the time that Pokemon cards were popular. And this was a collectible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey card game, much like Magic the Gathering, which was popular, well, more popular a couple years prior.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so every day when I was working, at least every weekday when I was working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the evenings, or afternoons rather, the phones would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Tiff Arment light up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as soon as the elementary and middle schools were let out. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would go approximately like this. Brring. Hi, thank you for calling Babbage’s. This is Casey. How can I help you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you have any Pokemon cards? Nope. Sorry, we’re sold out. Try again in a week. Brring.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you have any Pokemon cards? Nope. I’m sorry, that was like three hours of work was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just answering the non-stop phone for people looking for Pokemon cards. I don’t like it when people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that they had PTSD about things that are not stressful and so I won’t say that but let’s just say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am predisposed to not like Pokemon. That being said, I’ve installed the game and I can see why it would be fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you ever play the card game when you were working there?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not and I’ve never played the video game either.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is your very first Pokemon game and I’m assuming the only reason you downloaded it is because it’s so popular
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re seeing everything about other people talking to it. And because you have a phone and you’re like, hey, I can run that game.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Precisely. And I was vaguely familiar with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the premise of the game, very, very vaguely. I know you have to collect these little monstery things and like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you fight the monstery things, I think. It doesn’t matter if I’m wrong. You don’t have to write in and correct
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. I’m just telling you what I thought at the time. And so I’ve installed the game and it doesn’t tell me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a whole lot more about what the purpose of everything is.
⏹️ ▶️ John like the cat game. You need Tiffer to explain it to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Tiff Arment Hi. That was random and unexpected.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment John said my name, so I
⏹️ ▶️ John appeared. Perfect. I summoned her. If you say her name once, she appears.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment No, no. You say it into the mirror at night.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it was three, but it would be wrong of me to compare you to Beetlejuice. Apologies for being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so confused. That was like eerily great timing. I was not prepared for that, and we were not warned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I figured I’d replace myself with Tiff because I haven’t installed the game but she has so I quit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So to set you up Tiff since I presume you haven’t heard much of what we were just talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Tiff Arment basically I just
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment heard you talking that you you worked in a store and there were cards and yeah. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, Casey Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay So tell tell me what is the purpose of Pokemon go cuz I played enough that I think I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it But I probably do not understand it as well as you do
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment From what I understand is that you walk around around.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, Casey You gather
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment Pokemon and they have different points and then there are gyms at
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment public places that you can go to and you form teams with people and once you
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment are a certain level you’re able to train at the gym and you can train your Pokemon to get
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment more hit points and then you can fight other Pokemon and it’s your kind of goal is to
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment take control of the gym from other teams. So you can like at different types of
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment times of day, one team can show up, take control of the gym with like a really high
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment level Pokemon. If then they leave it because you can’t stick around, you have to be at the location
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment in order to play at the gym. And then so they leave and another team can come in and take
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment control of the gym also. So it’s kind of like a locational strategy kind
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment of thing. I don’t know. My experience from Pokemon before was the card game. My brother played it when
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment he was young because I was just a little bit too old for it. I just missed it. And then I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment he used to watch the TV show. So I do remember that. So I think it’s kind of like the TV
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, Casey show. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. I forgot there was a TV show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Tiff Arment Yeah. It was like a cartoon,
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, Casey right? So. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, right. I forgot about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment Yeah. I mean, I was playing it. Marco got pretty pissed with me on the walk the other day because
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment I kept stopping to catch Pokemon and he is like, this is the worst walk. He was getting so mad. I’m like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment need to chill.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, Marco It’s Pokemon. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing is worse than if you are trying to walk somewhere with somebody else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who is playing Pokemon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Tiff Arment Go. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment just once. I mean, come on. It’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, Marco every walk
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment I’m running around playing Pokemon. But I was driving today seeing this kid kind of wandering on the side
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment of the road. It says right in the beginning of the game, please be aware of your surroundings because people
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment walk into poles and stuff apparently while playing this. And so I’m driving and I’m watching
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment this kid kind of like swervy walking next to the road. I’m like, oh, this kid’s totally playing
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, Casey And I
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment drive past really slow. He’s reading a book, like a real book. I thought that was even more strange than
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment Pokemon Go. Like, who’s
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, Casey walking around
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment reading a real book? But anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, Casey Oh, goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment Pokemon. All right. So have you any? So have you dudes played yet?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I have. And apparently, John and Marco have not. And it’s funny you talk about Marco getting frustrated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey during the walk, because in the evenings for the last few weeks, I’ve been taking Declan on a walk and giving Erin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little time to herself, because she’s been with him all day. And today I had my phone out, just kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of periodically glancing to see if there were any Pokemon nearby, and at one point there was, and so I stopped long enough to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey catch it, and I hear this little voice from the stroller in front of me, push, push, push,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey telling me basically, would you get the show on the road? I’m tired of standing still. So even Declan
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment So what level are you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, shoot, I don’t know. Let me keep running my mouth while I look.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Tiff Arment Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment see, I just got to level five, so that means I get to go to the gym. So I’m pretty psyched.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you are ahead of me. So what’s fascinating, and all kidding aside, whether or not you find the game
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be interesting or worthwhile, this is a collective view. What’s fascinating to me about this game is that it’s got several
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different very interesting components all in one. I am level three, by the way. It’s got several different components
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are all rolled into one. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s the location awareness sort of thing. And this is what Tiff was talking about earlier. There are gyms and there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, what are they, poke-
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment Poke-stops? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, Casey where you can
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment pick up pokeballs or you can get eggs there and eggs you have to do you know about the eggs
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment yet? Like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been told about them. What language is this? This is nowhere near destiny So don’t even start your
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment but what I find great about it is that you have to Actually walk to physical locations
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment to do these things and you have to be at the location for a certain amount of time So just driving around
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment you can’t hit up all of these things Because by the time you’re driving past it in kind of the flow of traffic
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment you can’t You have to spin the PokéStops in order to collect
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment the PokéBalls to catch your Pokémon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, just to clarify, when you were out driving today, were you trying to play Pokémon to test all this out?
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment Not while I was driving, but while other people were driving, like when I went to
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, Casey Target with Tanya the other
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment day, I was like, I’m totally going to try and play Pokémon while we’re driving and pretend I was listening to what
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment we were talking about. Oh my goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment no, I tried it and it didn’t work, and so I put my phone away like a gentleman. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So to build on what Tiff was saying, so there’s these PokéStops where you can, like Tiff said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can collect items and whatnot. And then there’s the gyms where you can get into, I guess, like Royal Rumbles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with other people. And then as you’re walking around, you can just stumble upon the Pokémon, these pocket monsters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever they are. But what’s fascinating to me about this is that there’s this real world component to it that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can’t—well, okay, yes, I’m sure there’s a way to cheat. But if you play the game the way it’s intended to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be played, you can’t just sit there in your house and collect a bunch of Pokémon. And, and part of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun of the game, besides this whole gym and team versus team competition, if I understand it right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of the, part of the fun of the game is collecting all these different Pokemon. Got to catch them all. You got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to catch them all. That’s right. So you, so you have to get off your butt and walk around in order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to catch them all. And apparently the ones that are water oriented, I guess there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like fish-esque ones or something like that. There’s some that you can tell are designed to, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re animated in such a way that they look like they belong around water. Well, apparently you have to go to a small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey body of water generally speaking to find these Pokemon Not to say you have to go to the ocean Just you have to go to like a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pond or a lake or a river or what have you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff might have diverted our walk to go past a pool to see if that counted.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment Yeah, I might have done that exactly They also tell you please don’t look for Pokemon in volcanoes because there
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, Casey are fire Pokemon Please
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment do not try and go into volcanoes to find Pokemon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the thing of it the thing that I find fascinating whether or not you think this is a complete like waste of time like candidly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never tried the cat game. Everything I saw of it, it just looks stupid to me. Cat games are amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Shut your face. And hey, other people enjoy it. That’s fine. You like what you like. That’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whether or not you, collective you, thinks that Pokémon is interesting or fun or what have you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still think it’s fascinating that it has these different aspects, right? So it has the collectible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aspect where you want to try to catch them all. It has the real-world tie-in that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have to go places in order to play. It has the team versus team,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s us against them aspect at the gyms. And it’s all of these different things all rolled together, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, what makes it so fascinating and so interesting. And, and the tipster in the chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is joking, Hey, Casey’s learning what a video game is. But I used to be a pretty, pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frequent video gamer way long ago. And I personally have not witnessed a game that got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of these different pieces connected together, even vaguely similar to the way this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, except apparently, what was the name of the game that, that was the predecessor for this? Like Infuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or no, not Infuse. Ingress. Thank you. Ingress. And another one of the things that I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I find so fascinating about this game is that it knew in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey areas in which I work, for example, it knew of some landmarks that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are relevant to people who know the area really well, but are completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unremarkable and irrelevant to anyone that isn’t that doesn’t live or work in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey area in which I live and work. And I was wondering earlier on Twitter, like, how did they come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up with these different spots for the gyms and for the PokéStops and whatnot?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And apparently the same company that did pretty much all of the work for this game,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whose name I’m also forgetting, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think that’s right. Niantic. Thank you. Apparently Ingress was a very, very, very similar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey game that they had done in the past. And involved in that, from what I’m told,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and again, the actual particulars don’t really matter. The gist of it though, is that you could, as a player
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the game, submit like locations and whatnot. And, and from what I’ve understood, they took
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of that data and turned all of those points of interest that were, that were made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by people playing this game, local players playing this game and turn those into the gyms and the PokéStops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatnot. And again, the game, I don’t know if I’ll stick with it. It’s certainly one of those like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone’s talking about it. So I feel like I’m missing out if I don’t also participate lightly I mean you should hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the conversations at work about it But I just find this combination of all these different pieces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey utterly fascinating. So I’ve been talking a long time Marco Tiff John questions
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment I don’t know. I want to bring up something Marco Brought up in the car today when we were talking was about
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment how perfect of a time for this game to be released, right? It’s summer, kids
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment are off. It’s beautiful weather. Like you can be outside. It’s just, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment fantastic. We see a whole bunch of people gathered at different locations all over town
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment playing this game. The release timing for this couldn’t have been better. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, Marco Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like nothing else is going on. There’s no other major releases. There’s no major news happening. No one else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really has anything to do. Lots of people are taking vacation anyway. It really is an amazing time release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. And like, I just want to say, I would say, in general, my thoughts on this, having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only seen screenshots of it for a second here and there, like Tiff tried to show me how she
⏹️ ▶️ Marco threw Pokeballs at a Pokemon to try to Poke it into her phone, I don’t know how this works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Tiff Arment It doesn’t really matter. You punched them in the balls.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sorry. However it works, this game, just seeing what it’s doing to people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the world, just makes me happy. It’s just a very delightful feeling, because seeing that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting these people outside, walking around, gathering together, oftentimes with strangers, and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like sitting and having a peaceful, fun time. That, in real life, in person,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is very rare, to have that kind of effect. And the fact that it just took off so quickly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like over the weekend, it just boom, all of a sudden everyone’s doing this. That’s just really delightful. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like a nice, happy, human interest story. And I really like seeing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment I mean, there are moms walking up and down the street with strollers just like you, Casey, who are
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, Casey playing Pokemon Go. You
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment know what I mean? Like everyone is playing it and people start talking to each other about it and you notice someone else
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment playing it and you talk to them and you’re like, ooh, I just caught a Pokemon over here. Did you see that one? La la la
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment la la. And you know, I don’t really care what I’m catching or catching them all. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment really, but I don’t know. I just kind of want to play it because everyone else is doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment put any money into the game? Not yet. I haven’t, no, no. You get a lot of stuff just by walking around
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment and hanging out at spots and spinning the little doodad. And plus, like, you have to incubate the
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment eggs. There’s a lot to do before you have to put money into it. And you had to walk in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment incubate the egg. So it gives you a distance that you have to move. So it kind of keeps you
⏹️ ▶️ John I keep wondering, like, I really ask about the money as I wonder what the total like the net new
⏹️ ▶️ John trainers will be to use a business stat. Yes, a lot of people are into this game now. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you are already into Pokemon, you don’t count because you are going to buy new Pokemon games wherever they come out anyway. So
⏹️ ▶️ John those people are already already, you know, this is just invested in the franchise,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? If you’re not invested in it, tons of people who have never played it. And we
⏹️ ▶️ John have people who’ve never been into Pokemon before. Try this out, because it’s the thing that people are doing. It’s a fun thing to do. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m wondering if those people are going to be the type of people who put money into the game. Like, I don’t know how the game is structured. Is it structured
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that you can if you’re just like, I’ve never played a Pokemon game and I’m not like too seriously into it, but it’s kind of a fun thing to do
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ll just keep doing it. it, can you just keep doing it at that pace without ever giving any money and you’ll just be perfectly happy with
⏹️ ▶️ John the experience? Because that doesn’t really benefit the game maker or Nintendo or anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John else, particularly.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment It seems like you can though, like just go on if you’re playing it really casually. I think what
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment I’m seeing probably I might be totally wrong here, but the people who are very much
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment in competition for the gyms, and they are into forming their teams, I’m feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment a lot of clash of clans kind of situation happening here for the people that get very
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment serious about it. If you don’t put in the money, then you’re not going to find the rare Pokemon
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment or you’re not going to be able to train them to a high level. That’s kind of what I’m seeing. So if you’re really
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment invested in a team, then you’re going to feel that pressure to contribute money in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment be better for your team and then take control of these gyms. But I think that the casual person
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment just walking around gonna catch them mall kind of situation might not feel that kind of pressure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like all these games. I mean, there’s a balance you can strike with how much you want people to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John play before they put money in how, like, how much of a timer do you want to put on whatever energy mechanic
⏹️ ▶️ John to frustrate people, you can tune a game so that even the most casual player is so frustrated, they have to give up or give money,
⏹️ ▶️ John or you can tune a game that almost no one feels like they need to give money. But in the grand scheme of things, historically, these type of
⏹️ ▶️ John free to play massively multiplayer games like Clash of Clans or whatever, make all their money from
⏹️ ▶️ John what everyone calls whales. Like that most of the money comes from a small group of people who put a tremendous amount of money
⏹️ ▶️ John into them, sometimes in like an unethical amount of money and that you feel bad that you’re taking this much money from these people,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And most people put in a piddling amount of money and that piddling amount could still be more than the dollar 99
⏹️ ▶️ John that people might have paid for it up front. Like the pilling amount might be $5 a year, but $5 these days
⏹️ ▶️ John in the app store is a pretty good price when games are going for $1.99 or 99 cents or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not, like, what I’m trying to gauge out of this phenomenon is long term, uh, how,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, how much money is this going to make and how many new customers is it going to make? How many new Pokemon players is it going to make?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this going to build so that when next year comes out with a new augmented reality Pokemon game with a different name,
⏹️ ▶️ John will all those same people come back? Like, are there people out there who have never been into the
⏹️ ▶️ John Pokemon franchise that this is going to bring them on board? And I think there are, because I think there’s a lot of people who have
⏹️ ▶️ John never been into the Pokemon franchise because historically the only place you could play Pokemon was on platforms that these people have never owned.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like young people and old people alike, if you’ve never owned a Nintendo gaming system at all, which then there’s plenty of people
⏹️ ▶️ John who haven’t, especially in a handheld system where most of the Pokemon games have come out,
⏹️ ▶️ John you may have never had an occasion to be exposed to this. And by releasing it on smartphone platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ John vastly larger audience can now be exposed to Pokemon, and now maybe you’re building
⏹️ ▶️ John that audience for the next version.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment Before they worry about their audience, they have to get their servers under control, because man, that game crashes a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment It freezes all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s that’s a lot of it. So Nintendo is very bad at online stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John They were very late to online stuff. They don’t quite get it. They’re not good at it kind of like Apple. Well, Apple is really late, but they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John not good at it anyway. And they’ve been doing a lot of outsourcing to other companies like this Niantic
⏹️ ▶️ John company. Lots of different companies that they partner with are invested in or are working
⏹️ ▶️ John with on their games, who supposedly bring the expertise that Nintendo doesn’t have. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys have already run a game exactly like this called Ingress. We want you to do that, but replace all the
⏹️ ▶️ John BS you had before with Pokemon, right? And you’ve got the servers and you know how it works and you’ve done it before and that seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like a good idea for a small company, a relatively small company like Nintendo as compared to Microsoft or Sony,
⏹️ ▶️ John to get this game out the door. But these companies that they’re outsourcing to
⏹️ ▶️ John have also never been exposed to the combination of the game they knew how to run plus
⏹️ ▶️ John the Pokemon IP that makes millions of people want to play it. They weren’t ready for that either. So it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John really a clean win. And as you’ve noted, the servers are often down. I’ve seen a lot of people tweeting it, that the, the
⏹️ ▶️ John app itself has a lot of, uh, difficulties with concurrency. It’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to confuse when the server is slow. You can induce race conditions where the app is just hung because it wants you to click on
⏹️ ▶️ John a button that you can no longer see, or, you know, all sorts of simple programming mistakes
⏹️ ▶️ John exacerbated by slow server response times overall not making for a particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John convincing or has to be said not a particularly Nintendo like experience for you for all you could say about Nintendo
⏹️ ▶️ John in general their console games are not horribly buggy and broken their online stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John is always horribly buggy and broken in this case the online stuff is slow and bad and also the app that
⏹️ ▶️ John talks to the online stuff is not particularly robust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and yet it makes 1.6 million dollars a day so it kind of calls into question whether any of that really matters.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, it matters in that, like, it’s it’s not a particularly good showing for the company, you know, like people.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a good idea and people are going to copy it. Right. And there are other IPs that can do similar things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. I mean, Clash of Clans also makes a lot of money and came before this. And that wasn’t an AR type thing. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John however much money they’re making, they could potentially be making more if they weren’t crashing and not letting
⏹️ ▶️ John people on, you know, like or not or having that bad reputation or having people leave the game because they’re frustrated
⏹️ ▶️ John by a crashing or whatever. Like you can always be making more money. So it is a downside. Just success
⏹️ ▶️ John hides problems and your big success of like, oh, look at all this money we’re making.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are still problems to be had there, especially if this is the future of gaming. Nintendo better get a lot better at it pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John quickly. The same the same way that Sony had to try to catch up with Xbox Live when they realized that the way people deal with consoles
⏹️ ▶️ John now is not just you plug it into your TV and you sit on your couch and the world outside your house doesn’t exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John that wasn’t the case and Sony was later to that than Microsoft was and Nintendo was later than all three of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, I think Nintendo has a lot of work to do. These partnering
⏹️ ▶️ John deals are a fast way for them to get a game out that they couldn’t develop on their own because they don’t have the expertise, but it also
⏹️ ▶️ John means that these other companies get a lot of the money. Some people have been tweeting the various breakdowns of like, well, 30%
⏹️ ▶️ John goes to Apple and X% goes to the developer and then the leftover 10% goes to Nintendo. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if that was a legit figure just someone trying to do like, you know guestimations but Like the
⏹️ ▶️ John upshot of the of the tweet was that Apple’s making more money from this game than Nintendo is which is also not a Great situation for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m happy to report. I’ve just caught an Eevee and a Pidgey as I was sitting here They were on my
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, Casey Everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment at these Pokemon at their house. We have like a dead zone. There is nothing around here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Generally speaking. I have not seen one at the house, but apparently they were sitting on my desk who knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait Maybe they’re the ones breaking your iMac. They very well could be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d also like to publicly complain that after all the time I spent on Ramp Champ, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be way better at catching these stupid Pokemon with my stupid Pokeballs than I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am. Is it possible that maybe, because we have a dog and you don’t, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a reason why we don’t have any Pokemon left around the house?
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment have deer and weird animals all over the place. Come on, we should have some Pokemon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just saying maybe we did have Pokemon and then Hopps found them and now we don’t have Pokemon.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment It’s all the people that live in the cities. All they had to do is sit on their couch and there’s just like Pokestops and everything you can
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment reach virtually anywhere and it’s so frustrating. We had to go places. Everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, Casey in yonkers.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment I don’t know what the heck’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man, that’s awesome. So I don’t know, I just think it’s really cool the bits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and pieces they put together and the timing, to your guys’ point earlier, the timing of all this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ve heard plenty of stories of people from all different walks of life coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together and bonding over this really kind of silly game. And like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, certainly at work it’s made quite the splash. And, and I know that people were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to lunch and, and the driver of the car would like handed her phone to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the passengers. So the passenger was like spinning the little disc thing on the, on the pokey stops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for both himself and the driver. And then there’s a little lake right by where I work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t be creepy. And people are going on long walks around the lake to catch Pokemon over lunch break. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s surprising how much effect this silly little game has had so quickly. And I’m also a little surprised, John, that you haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least tried it yet. But I don’t know, do you plan to, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m not into Pokemon games. They’re not my thing, like so. And the AR aspect of it
⏹️ ▶️ John is not enough to make me get into Pokemon. It’s not like I dislike the AR part. I would be more likely
⏹️ ▶️ John to play an AR game with a different property attached to it, different type of game. I’m just not into Pokemon. So no, I doubt I’ll ever
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment But you have so many nice places to walk where you live, John. Like, it’s so easy. You could just kind of go on a
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment little family trot and you could all catch some Pokemon together. It’d be great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I considered having my kids play it and like seeing if they get into it because, you know, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be playing it. I can just be with them on the walk. Although Marco tells me that’s not a fun thing to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Tiff Arment do. No, don’t do that. I did hand my, I
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment did hand my phone to Adam when Marco was getting mad while he was sitting in the stroller. I’m like, all right, you need to look at
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment this and tell me if you see see any little animals popping up and then you need to tell mommy.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment I tried to put him to work, but you know, what you gonna do, he’s four.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in the olden days, people would put their kids to work like plowing a field or something, and this is what we did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Tiff Arment Get to
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment work, catch some Pokemon from mama. Mama needs that Pokemon.
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment, John Making your kids
⏹️ ▶️ John gold farm and free to play massively multiplayer games, that’s next.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I think we’re probably good here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, so thank you very much to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Hover, and Pingdom,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and thank you very much to Tiff for joining us. Thanks guys,
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment it’s always a pleasure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, alright, thanks everyone, and we’ll talk to you next.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment oh it was accidental. John didn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment Anti-Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment Syracuse, oh it’s accidental They didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Tiff Arment to, accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John tech podcasts so long.
Post-show: Tesla Autopilot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is there anything fun in the neutral world?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Has there been any scandals? Volkswagen? Tesla?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There have been autopilot or whatever they call it issues. I don’t know the details
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of any of these other crashes, but it’s pretty clear to me that this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not intended to be a don’t pay attention to what’s going on in front of you sort of autopilot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You had a really great post about this a little while ago, Marco. I don’t see why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these are happening all the time, unless these are human failings on top of computer failings.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I feel like this is kind of a non-story.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a—I mean, we—the main conclusion here so far is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t really know enough yet about any of these accidents to really know, like, whether the system was at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fault or whether the person was at fault. Like, the big one that came out, like, two weeks ago, whenever that was, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the guy hit the truck, like, went under the truck. one allegedly he was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watching Harry Potter like the movie instead of watching the road so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could argue that the system should have seen the truck and stopped but the fact that the driver might not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been even looking at the road at all I think kind of excuses the system to some degree from from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fault of that particular accident but the main the main problem here is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the system is not fully autonomous driving it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a self-driving car and people keep kind of trying to treat it like one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s just irresponsible. You know that’s it is basically advanced cruise control.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You wouldn’t like if people did the same thing with cruise control or if they just stop paying attention started watching a movie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with cruise control which I’m sure people have done and have gotten accidents as a result of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not a problem with the cruise control. You know that’s a problem with the people and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the auto pilot is not a direct comparison there, because first of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, I do think that it has been named and marketed in such a way to imply that it’s smarter, more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capable than it really is, but the fact is it still requires you to pay attention and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you that you know when you turn it on it activate tells you that in the dash it measures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much I think it’s measuring resistance on the steering wheel because like when it’s on its years for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and And if you steer in a way that it wouldn’t have by more than like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain amount of degrees of turning the wheel, it deactivates itself. And it beeps to tell you it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off. So it has a way to measure the turning of the wheel and the resistance that you’re putting on the wheel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as far as I can tell, it’s using that to determine whether your hands are on the wheel or not. So if you don’t provide any resistance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while, it will yell at you and gradually slow down and stop if you don’t intervene.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, the system is in a really weird kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uncanny valley kind of thing. Not the uncanny valley technically, but that kind of concept where like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so good, it’s so autonomous, that it kind of encourages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, not directly, not verbally, it doesn’t come out and say it, but like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are kind of encouraged to stop paying attention because you just kind of see like, you know what, my input’s not really needed here for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while. But it’s not good enough that you actually can stop paying attention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco responsibly and safely for very long, if any time at all. And some people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are being complete idiots with it and like getting in the backseat with it on something. I don’t know, those people are crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean that’s, that is not at all safe and nobody should do that because you’re gonna kill somebody. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the design of the system is such that the system is not really helping because like it is a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit too smart for a system that people are supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be still paying attention to the road while using it but again it’s not smart enough that you actually can’t stop so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this weird kind of gray area and I also as I said on my post I think it should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be allowed on side roads I think it should only be allowed on interstates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe on other divided highways if right now you can enable it on any road and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only thing is that when it is not on what it detects as being a highway or as being a divided highway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or interstate it limits itself to five miles per hour over the posted speed limit signs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you can still use it you just can’t speed by more than five so that’s not really that much of a limit really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it prevents what people were initially doing when it first came out and people were being all crazy trying to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like going really fast on twisty side roads that was also really dumb and dangerous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think it needs more restrictions because because like you know as I said I was like it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t read like red lights or stop signs or anything like that so like the usefulness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it on side roads is pretty limited anyway it really should only be allowed on interstates
⏹️ ▶️ John I take the certain kind of person to like to know all that I presume all these people know about the system
⏹️ ▶️ John and yet still like to be so I don’t know to wish a technology
⏹️ ▶️ John into existence doesn’t that doesn’t actually exist or to like because from my
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective if you know that you may be asked to take over control if the car loses track of the road.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? You know that like intellectually, I bet all these people understand that about the autopilot thing because it tells
⏹️ ▶️ John you on the screen and like they these are probably you know Tesla owners who know all about it like most Tesla owners are
⏹️ ▶️ John into their cars because it’s a very rare car it’s an expensive car you’re not just find yourself owning a Tesla right
⏹️ ▶️ John everything makes me think that these people know that they will be asked to take over control if
⏹️ ▶️ John you know something goes wrong and I know because of my personality type if I was driving in
⏹️ ▶️ John a car where I knew that I would have to be ask to take over if something went wrong. You don’t know when that’s going to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the nature of the event. You don’t know, okay, in five minutes you’re gonna be asked to take over. It could be at any
⏹️ ▶️ John second. How do you know when it is that you will be asked to take over? How do you know when you
⏹️ ▶️ John will decide that you need to take over because a kid ran out into the road and the system didn’t see him or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever thing, like the truck that the guy went under? The only way you will know
⏹️ ▶️ John is if you are always continually paying attention. You can’t stop paying attention for a second just
⏹️ ▶️ John like regular driving because you don’t know when that event will come. So it seems to me that there
⏹️ ▶️ John should be zero change in behavior when driving with the system. But as Margot said, that’s not how people
⏹️ ▶️ John act. And somehow they’re able to square the idea that they may be asked to take over at any second with the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that they don’t have to pay attention because it seems like they’ll never be asked. But you know you might be asked, but it seems like you won’t be.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I haven’t been asked for a long time. So your brain decides, you know what? I’m never gonna be asked to take over. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ John will be fine. And then you get your head chopped off by a semi, right? and then you think you can watch a movie,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And maybe that’s just a trap for people’s brains where they’re like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John know intellectually that I may be asked to take over control at any moment, but my lizard brain is telling
⏹️ ▶️ John me that I haven’t been asked to do anything with this car for the last hour, and I just cannot sustain
⏹️ ▶️ John the attention, right? Whereas if you’re a paranoid person like me, and you’d be like, it’s been an hour
⏹️ ▶️ John since I’ve been asked to take over,
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna happen at any second, right? You’re just becoming more and more paranoid, regular people I think are just
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a signal for you to stop paying attention and for you to think you know what I can probably play a card game I can watch
⏹️ ▶️ John a movie like they tell me I’m gonna be asked to take over but you know what maybe they’re just low-balling it because of lawyers
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably better than I think it is I’ll probably be fine now I’m decapitated like it’s not you know
⏹️ ▶️ John so I agree with Marco that like until you like
⏹️ ▶️ John this may be a trap for human nature. This may be a set of rules that is
⏹️ ▶️ John not compatible with the way humans work, right? So you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, look, you’ve got to steer and everything else is like radar control, cruise control,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then there’s a gap, and then we do full autonomous, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Tiff Arment Because I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t understand, I’m not sure that maybe habits will change if this becomes
⏹️ ▶️ John widespread, But I’m not sure that this particular set of features will survive both the lawyers
⏹️ ▶️ John and the public perception Long enough for people to change their habits and it could be that
⏹️ ▶️ John changing habits is not sufficient And this is just it’s human nature You’re gonna stop paying attention if you haven’t been asked to do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John in the car for an hour and that’s when you’re gonna die I Would never enable this feature by the way I would do
⏹️ ▶️ John rate a radar cruise control because it was called like you think oh well cruise control the same thing You know how to do anything for hours?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you still have to steer even on the road you still have to steer a little bit. And if you’re going 70 miles
⏹️ ▶️ John an hour and you don’t make that tiny steering input, very shortly you will be in a ditch, right? You have
⏹️ ▶️ John to be paying attention, right? And just that little bit of realizing this huge hurdling hunk of metal
⏹️ ▶️ John is under my control. And even though I don’t have to do much, I have to do something that is enough to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John the tiny sort of subconscious, even if it’s not like fully conscious, like I’m really paying attention, the sort of subconscious
⏹️ ▶️ John driving. And that subconscious driving, if a semi pulls in front of you, you will notice. like because your eyes are out
⏹️ ▶️ John going out the windshield looking at the road not looking at Harry Potter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s the thing like that I guess I said in my post like the difference between the difference in usefulness to the driver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the radar cruise control that you get also and the auto steer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco autopilot mode is like the auto steer doesn’t really make it that much nicer for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driver like you get the vast majority of the value of these features with just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cruise control part of it the radar cruise control because it will stop and go. It’ll maintain proper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco distance. It uses all the same hardware as far as I know, like to do this. It is a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advanced system. And like I’ve tried the one in Tiff’s car, it’s a 3 Series. I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the adaptive cruise in that a few times in a few trips and it’s almost as good, but not as good. The Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adaptive cruise is really good. It is amazing. And the BMW one, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of a little unsettling incidents where like the car would start accelerating hard in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco traffic and there was still a car in front of us and I had to like overwrite it. Wait, wait, stop and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brake. That has not happened once in the Tesla and I’ve used it way more in the Tesla. It is a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing system for the adaptive cruise control. The autopilot on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other hand is, you know, the auto steer part of it is scary and I use that a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot too. I’ve been using it more even since I published that post. You just kind of get an idea of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, did I have the wrong impression? Do I just need more time with it to really get to know it better. And so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, I don’t need more time to get to know it better. I still do use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on the highway here and there, but I still can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trust it because sometimes it does things that I consider dangerous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And whether academically it is dangerous or not, I don’t know. But just things like getting too close to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge of the lane when there’s a car right on the other side or a barrier on the other side, it does not keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you centered perfectly. It tries to it’s doing some kind of smoothing. I think where it tries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like not jerk you too hard and you know to keep you centered. So like kind of smooth you over and you know and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you kind of like drift toward the lines and then drift back from the line like it’s it’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unsettling a lot a lot of times where I will get a little too close to things and especially like if there’s a car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next to you in the lane next to you that is too close to the line on their side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t it’ll still drift near that line like I don’t know how it’s touching that if it’s if it’s just the ultrasonic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensors on the side it might not be that might be too far to detect it which should be a little unsettling it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not it’s a it’s a system that makes me nervous whenever it’s on it also does things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know like when I’m driving on a multi-lane highway eat no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matter no matter what speeds we are going I will not hang out in somebody’s blind spot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I will speed up or slow down so that I am not like right next to another car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the next lane over or like right you know slightly behind them in their blinds but I will not hang out there because I know like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you you know you develop these skills as a responsible driver over time you start realizing like okay well I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should minimize the chances that I’m going to get hit you know so like that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if I can legally stay right here this person’s blind spot for a while I shouldn’t do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they could merge and not see me if I if I hang out here for a while that’s not good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I won’t do it the auto steer and auto drive they don’t have that kind of intelligence they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will not do things like that to to avoid possible accidents you know that that haven’t started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to happen yet like they won’t minimize the chance of danger they’ll just happily go and you might be hanging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out in somebody’s blind spot for 10 minutes and not even know it it does kind of create this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this expectation that it’s gonna be super safe and awesome and and is is the best thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to to use and you don’t have to pay attention but I don’t know how many of those things are true and I suspect
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re wise to get nervous too because like again when you’re surrendering control to the car and it’s getting close
⏹️ ▶️ John to the edge of the lane what you know and that the car is not currently designed to
⏹️ ▶️ John have any awareness of is that you have just come fractions of a second closer
⏹️ ▶️ John to you getting into an accident right because so if there is some erroneous
⏹️ ▶️ John steering input or the car gets confused for a moment. Fractions of a second matter and like you being in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John of the lane and the car suddenly lurches a foot to the left, if you’re paying attention as you should be, your
⏹️ ▶️ John reaction time is probably enough to keep you in the lane. You riding the line and you’re paying attention
⏹️ ▶️ John and the car lurches to the left, it could be that your reaction time even if you’re paying a hundred percent attention,
⏹️ ▶️ John your reaction time is not sufficient to get your car before it hits the guardrail or runs into a
⏹️ ▶️ John bridge abutment or who knows what else. Like as you get closer to the edge at high speed Things happen really fast human
⏹️ ▶️ John reaction time is only so fast There’s a reason we don’t ride the edges of the lanes because we know
⏹️ ▶️ John that our own reaction time is not sufficient It’s reason we don’t you know ride unless we’re real jerks Within
⏹️ ▶️ John a foot of someone else’s bumper because we know our reaction time is not fast enough at 80 miles an hour To make
⏹️ ▶️ John that stop no matter how slowly the person in front of us stops It’s just you know You can do the little timings how long does
⏹️ ▶️ John it take for you to move your foot over to the brake pedal start pressing it? down like
⏹️ ▶️ John You distances get covered very quickly at high speed so the highway is exactly the spot where you wouldn’t want that
⏹️ ▶️ John That but you keep saying like I think it’s safer to have it on this highway than the side roads at least the side roads You’re going at slower speeds,
⏹️ ▶️ John so it does make a mistake you can correct it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relative speeds though like the person hitting you on the highway Is probably gonna hit you at a relative speed of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like five miles an hour
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s not that it’s not they’re hitting you. It’s you hitting bridge abutments you going off to ditch
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the type of thing are you going under a semi or whatever? It’s all moving vehicle versus stationary hazard
⏹️ ▶️ John whether that stationary hazard is a truck crossing over or whatever Whereas everything being at slower speed,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Tiff Arment anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I I would never Enable do it because like as it starts to bring you towards the edge of the lane
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re like wait a second I would never do this if I was driving the car because I know that my reaction
⏹️ ▶️ John time is not fast enough like why would I be riding the edge even if it’s just like debris that’s gonna pop a tire and like
⏹️ ▶️ John pulled me off the side and that’s taking out of the equation the idea that the car might suddenly get confused
⏹️ ▶️ John and turn in a weird direction or start accelerating or decelerating like that’s just just me driving the car
⏹️ ▶️ John into my complete control I wouldn’t ride the edge of the line because I know that’s dumb and you know we’re coming
⏹️ ▶️ John up on a bridge now and I’m gonna take off my side mirror like I wouldn’t do that and to let a car do
⏹️ ▶️ John it and to know that during that time the car is still in control and can do something weird
⏹️ ▶️ John just It’s just a terrible idea to deal with the system at all. Like drive your car or don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John drive your car. And currently we don’t have the option of not driving your car, so just drive your car.