catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

313: The Residue of Seven People

Amazon and Eero, Spotify and Anchor, Marco and ear discharge, and have you heard that Casey has Gigabit internet?

Episode Description:

Sponsored by:

  • Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. Get a $20 credit with code atp2019.
  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. Casey has Gigabit internet
  2. Marco’s ear sponsor: Dash
  3. Apple bug bounties
  4. Deirdre O’Brien
  5. Joint Venture
  6. Genius training decline
  7. Sponsor: Casper (code ATP)
  8. Spotify buying Anchor
  9. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  10. Amazon buying Eero
  11. Sponsor: Linode (code atp2019)
  12. #askatp: Refurbished tech
  13. #askatp: Code structure
  14. #askatp: Wheel size
  15. Ending theme
  16. Misdirected email

Casey has Gigabit internet

⏹️ ▶️ John Can you hear us?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, very you need me to speak up Maury

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh god, you have no idea how unpleasant it is to have stuff constantly coming out of your ears Like ears are supposed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be input devices

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a title

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Am sorry for you. I feel bad. Thanks. You know Marco. I know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve had a rough I don’t know 48 hours or so, but I got to tell you you, things

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are not good at the List household. Oh yeah? My Fast.com speed test reported

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a mere 770 megabits per second. Oh, poor baby. I know, the struggle

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is real. I just wanted to tell everyone, and hopefully this won’t make the show so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t sound like a big jerk, but I needed to tell you two one more time that I have gigabit internet now and it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well you know, as the old joke goes, do you know how to identify somebody at a party who who has gigabit internet?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just wait a few minutes, they’ll tell you. you

Marco’s ear sponsor: Dash

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, what’s going on with your ears, man? We should probably, even though you sound normal to me, we should probably disclose

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in case there’s any weird snorts or anything that somehow make it through the edit, or if the edit just sounds really, really funny.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’s going on,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco man? I have clogged E-station tubes in both ears and can’t hear anything,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really. Yeah, I have significantly reduced hearing in both ears and lots of gross problems with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things coming out of them and stuff. I developed a severe ear problem that’s just some kind of, you know side effect of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kid virus. It’s winter, I have a child who goes to school. So therefore we get sick on a regular basis,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not much we can do about that. And so anyway, so this manifested itself in me. Fortunately this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t affect him this way, but it manifests itself in me as just this like massive ear congestion all of a sudden.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had had this once before and so I kind of knew what I was dealing with with you know it’s a blockage station tube, it’s you know most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely a middle ear infection, all this you know pressure and really painful and everything. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this all happened on a Saturday night into a Sunday. And I knew that the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco correct way to go about fixing this was to go to an ear nose and throat or ENT doctor to you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have them look at it, evaluate it, make sure I’m being safe and it’s gonna heal itself without damaging my hearing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But because it was a Sunday I couldn’t get into an ENT until at least Monday. So my solution

⏹️ ▶️ Marco naturally was to go to Twitter to complain in the meantime. So a person name scott o’reilly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco replied to me on twitter to give me free advice from his wife who happens

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be an ear nose throat doctor and even offered to have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a face time consultation with her. Oh that’s tremendous! Yeah and I didn’t do I didn’t take him up on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that but but that was incredibly generous and her advice was extremely helpful to bridge the gap

⏹️ ▶️ Marco until I could see a local ENT doctor and the local guy that I saw earlier today gave

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the exact same diagnosis and recommendations. You don’t say. So a huge thank

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to Scott O’Reilly and his wife. And he didn’t ask for anything in return, but I wanted to promote his stuff. Scott

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is scttor on Twitter. He runs spider strategies, spider strategies.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and has a product that’s actually sponsored us before. It’s called Dash. It’s the dash.com, not the documentation viewer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dash.com. This lets you make wonderful real time web dashboards for metrics

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your business or home life. You can set it up to do whatever you want. First dashboard is free. go to the dash.com. It’s really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome. And this actually is not even the first time Scott has saved

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my butt in some kind of significant way. So this is the same guy. In 2013, I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a WBDC ticket and Scott emailed in and sold me his at cost.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In 2014, he sponsored market.org for the dash. Later that year, he sponsored ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I ran to him at a conference that year. I misheard his introduction when he said he’s the guy who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ran Dash. Oh, I remember this. I thought he meant the Dash Programmer Documentation App,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which we now know is written by a book Don Papasu and not Scott O’Reilly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I carried on a conversation for a few minutes under that assumption that probably made no sense.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And at no point in that conversation did Scott let on that I was making no sense or make me feel like a jerk for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting it wrong. So that was amazing by itself. And then my personal favorite.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In 2017, when I had a blocked ear tube going into a WBC

⏹️ ▶️ Marco flight that I was tweeting about, Scott gave me solid advice from his wife, an ENT

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doctor, to get through the flight from a blocked E-station tube.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, thank you again to Scott O’Reilly and his wife.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And really, you know, the world would be a better place if there were more people like them. So, thank you very much.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it turns out not all angels are in heaven, Marco. That’s what we’ve learned today.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s your ear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey angel. So, what’s the prognosis, all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kidding aside? Like, you just got to wait it out, basically?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I basically have a few more days of misery, but I should be all right after that. Fair enough.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. What’s going on in your world, John? We all have stories of varying degrees of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interestingness and various degrees of being dramatic. What’s going on in John’s world?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Same old

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. I have a leak under my sink. That’s the excitement over here. Oh, that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John fun. Hey

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Scott, if you know anybody…

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I’ve got a plumber coming tomorrow.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just watch, like Scott’s actually a certified plumber. He just never mentioned it before. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John right. We’re going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John diagnose

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it over FaceTime.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ay yi yi yi yi yi. That’s hilarious. Let’s dive into the meat of the show.

Apple bug bounties

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with some follow-up. Even though we recorded Wednesday and it is currently Monday, we have a surprising amount of follow-ups.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s begin with Apple and the FaceTime security bug. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we mentioned this on the show. I don’t recall if we did or not, but one way or another, a lot of people got

⏹️ ▶️ Casey their feathers ruffled and justifiably because Apple has this bug bounty program, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the purpose of which is if you report something that’s a legitimate security problem to Apple, then they should

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hypothetically, or they have stated that they would compensate you for that and give you some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pile of money from not too big to actually surprisingly big. What we’d understood was that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had not offered this 14-year-old nor his parents any of the bug bounty money

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they really should have earned from reporting the space-time bug. And after we recorded,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was some information that came out that said not only are they going to provide some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of money to this individual, Grant Thompson, I believe his name is,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the 14-year-old kid. But apparently they’re also setting up some sort of thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for his college tuition as well, which is really cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there was the other story that didn’t quite make it in last week was like somebody found a bug, like a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John keychain bug that lets you pull secrets out of the keychain, but it was on the Mac and there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ John bug bounty program for the Mac apparently. And this person hey here’s this bug I found but I’m not going to tell you what

⏹️ ▶️ John it is because you don’t have bug bounties for the Mac as a sort of form of protest. Like he didn’t release the bug

⏹️ ▶️ John to the public but also didn’t tell Apple about it so they’re in that kind of standoff and I mean

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not quite sure why there’s no bug bounty for the Mac maybe it’s not you know the budgets

⏹️ ▶️ John are different does the money come from a different place who the heck knows but they really should be because if they want people

⏹️ ▶️ John to report bugs and they’re going to have a bug bounty on iOS but not on the Mac they’re just going to get iOS bugs and not Mac bugs

⏹️ ▶️ John or not as many Mac bugs. So there’s that standoff thing going? The main reason I put this story

⏹️ ▶️ John about getting money for the kid who found the bug is partly because it just shows how overboard Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John going with the PR. Not only are they giving them money, but they’re also going to pay for some of his college, which is nice and all, but

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not a scalable system. Maybe just do the right thing to begin with instead of having these giant gestures.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the second is that it is a story that includes bounty hunter and the word compensating,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it makes me think of that scene from Empire Strikes Back. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco why. Yeah, the thing with a few people regarding the new bug about the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keychain thing, a lot of people have said, oh, he should tell them the bug. It’s the right thing to do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bug bounties are not an Apple thing. This is an industry-wide thing that has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco started over the last few years, I think. And Apple was the last major player to start offering them. It just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes a lot of sense. You might think in theory, you should report

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs. It’s the right thing to do, like report security problems privately to the company and then only go public if they don’t do anything, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. But the reality is the world out there is complicated and there’s a whole

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of incentives if you discover a vulnerability to sell it to someone else instead of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the company. So to sell it to maybe a government or a hacker group that wants

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to exploit it, like, you know, there’s lots of other bidders for bugs. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bug bounty is kind of a, it’s a response to that to say, like, hey, you know what? Maybe we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t give you the money that the government of some country might give you, but we’ll give you some money

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to come to us instead of going to somebody like that. Apple again was very, very late to this program on iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They, for some reason, didn’t bring it to all their platforms. Like, what if I discover a watchOS bug? Does that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a bounty program? It should just be all Apple products. They shouldn’t limit it to just iOS. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I think Apple, historically, has been very stingy with a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things. You don’t get to be the richest company in the world by not being stingy at some point. And Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all the wonderful products they make, they are a very stingy company in a lot of ways. And I think this just kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of smells like that. This kind of smells like Apple just really, they did the bug bounty program only very reluctantly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco after the whole rest of the industry did. And they only limited it to iOS and probably haven’t paid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out a whole lot from it because they probably really try not to. So it’s just like, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just requires, I think, a change of attitude from Apple on this, and to make it easier

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people to file security bugs, easier to get them seen by the right people at the right time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to actually cover all their products with a bug bounty program that actually pays out on a regular basis. Paul

⏹️ ▶️ John Bateman Here’s the thing about the payoff of this thing. The mother asked, like, oh, and I heard,

⏹️ ▶️ John get money for this thing. Like, it’s not like it didn’t come up

⏹️ ▶️ John or they didn’t think about it because it came through different channels. The topic of being paid

⏹️ ▶️ John a bounty for this bug was there from the very beginning. And Apple only did something after the whole big PR

⏹️ ▶️ John disaster. So again, not a great look, even though they’re making it right for sure. It’s much better to

⏹️ ▶️ John do the reasonable, correct thing when prompted by the people asking about, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it actually is stinginess, but it certainly looks that way from the outside. It’s like, well, why would we do something we don’t have to?

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, now it’s a press story. Here you go.

Deirdre O’Brien

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So we have more information about Deirdre O’Brien, who is stepping up to be head

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of retail in addition to being head of people, I think is the term that Apple uses. Ryan

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jones had tweeted some information about this, and he is an ex-Apple employee and apparently worked in her

⏹️ ▶️ Casey org, if I’m not mistaken. But Ryan says that she’s been at Apple 30 years, which we knew.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey According to Ryan, she launched the original Apple store, she launched the original online store.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey She has 20 years of product launches and was vice president of operations

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then moved to vice president of people about 18 months ago. And there’s also some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey business insider article about this as well. Just some information about her because she was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an unknown quantity to me until I read some of this stuff. So sounds like she’s the real deal, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is good. I’m excited for that.

⏹️ ▶️ John One piece that I was much interested in is that she was the VP of people but she’s only been there for 18 months

⏹️ ▶️ John and she was an operations. So now with this piece of information like, Oh, we knew her as the

⏹️ ▶️ John HR person or whatever, but she’s only been in that job for a little over a year. Right? So now I think rather

⏹️ ▶️ John than her just keeping the seat warm while they try to hire someone for retail, since she was

⏹️ ▶️ John in operations, I think going from operations to retail makes a little bit more sense than going from

⏹️ ▶️ John HR to retail. So maybe what’s actually happening is she’s keeping the VP of people

⏹️ ▶️ John seat warm while they look for a new VP of people and she’s going to the new retail head. I don’t know. We’ll find out when another

⏹️ ▶️ John face appears on the leadership page. Edith

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Warren Yeah, that’s interesting. Or maybe Angela Aron’s departure was not so sudden

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and unexpected. Maybe she was brought to that VP level to be maybe more visible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as we mentioned last week, a lot of retail is really just a giant HR

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem, because they have such a massive retail staff. So maybe they elevated D’Adre

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the people position to have better optics

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for when she was moved to retail. Steve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Yeah. I don’t know. I assume we’ll see more of this over the next few months and maybe we’ll be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to piece it together.

Joint Venture

⏹️ ▶️ Casey One way or another, George Spencer writes to say, hey, you know, Apple has a very well-hidden product

⏹️ ▶️ Casey called Joint Venture. Here in the UK, we pay a few hundred bucks, I think it’s about $500 a year in the US, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you get two awesome things. Firstly, if you check in your machine for a Genius Bar replacement, they’ll give you a loaner machine and data

⏹️ ▶️ Casey transfer to it. Secondly, and most awesomely, you can get an immediate appointment even at the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey busiest stores. You can also do other things like adding up to five iPhones for cheap or free,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps screen repairs and other things. But George says, I pay every year for the convenience of an immediate Genius Bar appointment

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whenever I need it. Now, this appears to be, at least in the US, aimed at a business

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to business sort of thing. Like, I think it requires a business account in order to do it. But if you’re the kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey person that really wants to have all of your computers, or perhaps your only computer working

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much all the time, it’s not a terrible idea. I was not aware of this at all. I think I’d heard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it, but knew nothing about it. Did either of you guys know what this was?

⏹️ ▶️ John Nope. Nope. I’d like it $500. That’s a heck of a price. Although now that I mention loaners, Casey’s all into it because

⏹️ ▶️ John he needs to have a loaner every time his car is brought in. But like

⏹️ ▶️ John the owner and data transfer, I just have to think, how long would it take them to do the data transfer?

⏹️ ▶️ John Would I trust them to do the data transfer? I wouldn’t pay for this. I’d rather just wait in line to the, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you have this problem, it’s probably more economical to just not throw out your old Mac when you get a new one

⏹️ ▶️ John and just keep at least two in rotation so that if one dies, you’re not out of machine and try to keep the data either

⏹️ ▶️ John in a cloud or in sync in some way. Like, I don’t want to pay $500 on the off chance that I might have to go to the Genius Bar. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the main advantage that I get is I can get a loaner, which I would be worried about, first of all.

⏹️ ▶️ John And second of all, I don’t have to wait for an appointment. That’s not worth $500 to me. But it’s good to know that exists for people

⏹️ ▶️ John with more money than time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so let it be shown that john syracuse is always on offense

Genius training decline

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you got a letter from Mike, who apparently was a genius at one point.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Mike writes us, this is a little bit long, but I think it’s really, really interesting. No longer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do geniuses train at Apple’s secret genius room classrooms in Cupertino and later Austin and Atlanta.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, now they train geniuses in the crazy Apple Store’s break room through pre-taped videos and PDFs,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same material that’s available to independent third-party authorized techs. An experience that this individual treasured

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the mid-aughts, going to Cupertino for a month, getting to meet Waz one night, and waiting behind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve Jobs to buy a blueberry muffin at Cafe Max with Johnny Ive right by his side. That’s all gone for anyone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey new, and Angela proved it. Geniuses today learn how to fix your Mac or iPhone by

⏹️ ▶️ Casey watching videos and PDFs, if they even get to fix it in the first place. Most of the laptops get shipped

⏹️ ▶️ Casey off to Flextronics, which I’ve heard of, or CTS Depot. I don’t know if that’s Apple terminology or what that is,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it doesn’t really matter. The experience of having a veteran Apple trainer who was there in the 1980s showing you exactly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how a blackstick spudgers should feel as it removes a connector and the tension of said move

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are all gone now. The insider knowledge that you need to feel the edge of the display clamshell with your finger, not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your eyes, as you tighten down the T6 screws, that’s gone too. Oh, and yeah, they pay geniuses a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than they used to. So I guess you could summarize that as saying, being a genius

⏹️ ▶️ Casey used to have some amount of cachet and specialness to it that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sounds like has mostly gone away, which is understandable as there needs to be more and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more and more and more of these people. And, you know, Apple has more and more devices out in rotation in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey world, especially for John, who’s keeping his day Mac and night Mac, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it stinks. And I feel like I can definitely tell the difference. I don’t know if quality is the right

⏹️ ▶️ Casey word, but I can tell the difference in maybe enthusiasm between the geniuses I occasionally saw,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, 10 years ago and the geniuses I occasionally see around now.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but the same because it’s just a concrete example of the trend I was talking about in the last episode about just

⏹️ ▶️ John starting on such a pinnacle of, you know, excess of everyone being overqualified

⏹️ ▶️ John and overcared for and overpaid as compared to, using the word over as compared to other retail and then

⏹️ ▶️ John the slow, slow, gradual slide down to be much more like a regular

⏹️ ▶️ John retail. It always boggled my mind that, you know, they have these Apple stores all over the country and if you wanted to be an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John genius, no matter what Apple store you worked in, They would fly you to Cupertino and train you there

⏹️ ▶️ John to be a genius and then fly you back. So they’d have to pay for your flights, pay for your stay, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John have facilities to teach you there. It’s not really a scalable solution. Can you imagine if you had

⏹️ ▶️ John to train everybody who worked as a Walmart cashier to a central location and train them and

⏹️ ▶️ John send them back? It’s incredibly expensive. And obviously, this type of experience in the early

⏹️ ▶️ John days where you get to fly them out, you get to meet like an Apple celebrity, and you

⏹️ ▶️ John get to go to Cafe Max where Jobs and Johnny are running around, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not a thing that can happen. It’s too beautiful to stay, or whatever the poetic phrase is.

⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t surprise me that it’s gone, so that doesn’t bother me that much. It’s like, well, you got in early, you got the really cool thing, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John But switching to learning from videos and

⏹️ ▶️ John PDFs as opposed to being trained by an expert in person in sort of a hands-on

⏹️ ▶️ John way, that’s bad. That’s the part of this that I think is, you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John gone from like, okay, get rid of the ridiculous luxurious frills and try to get more real to now,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the training is not as good as it used to be. I feel like you get more in person, even if it’s in person in the store, send

⏹️ ▶️ John people out to train them, train the trainers. Like you don’t have to fly everyone to California to do it. But

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to think that like someone watched a video of someone doing this incredibly delicate repair. It’s like, okay,

⏹️ ▶️ John next step is you hack on a customer’s piece of hardware. Maybe it’s not as dire as this

⏹️ ▶️ John thing sounds. Maybe yes, there are videos and PDFs to read, but there’s also like hands-on training. I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, at a certain point, the people who work as geniuses

⏹️ ▶️ John do have to have more experience, more expertise, be better paid and better trained

⏹️ ▶️ John than your average retail employee because they are asked to do so much more. They’re asked to know much

⏹️ ▶️ John more there has to do much more.

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey One thing we forgot to mention possibly last episode is that in addition to,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or amongst all the things that Spotify is buying up these days. They also bought up Anchor, which is,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess, to some degree, like a square space for podcasting in the sense that it’s kind of a turnkey

⏹️ ▶️ Casey solution to get your podcast up and running very, very, very quickly. And I don’t know if we brought that up last

⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode. I don’t really have a whole lot to add about that other than to mention that we forgot to mention it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m assuming one of you guys who put this in the show notes have some thoughts.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the angle that Anker is like a tool for making podcasts. I remember them back when they were like voice blogging.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’d like launch the app and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you can follow

⏹️ ▶️ John people. And then you just like start recording and speaking to the microphone of your phone for 30 seconds. And it would just go

⏹️ ▶️ John out and people could hear it. And you can find someone else’s channel and hear what they’re doing. Like they were, it’s kind of like a micro

⏹️ ▶️ John blogging for audio type network, but it has morphed. And it morphed many years ago into like

⏹️ ▶️ John a podcast type thing. And that’s, that’s part of Spotify’s play. Like, so they bought content with Gimlet and the ability to produce

⏹️ ▶️ John content with Gimlet. But then Anchor buys them the ability to

⏹️ ▶️ John attract people who don’t yet have a podcast but would like to make a podcast. And it’s pretty easy to make

⏹️ ▶️ John a podcast. Like you can just go to Squarespace or whatever and record some audio and upload it and Squarespace will make a feed

⏹️ ▶️ John for you. Like it’s not that complicated, but Anchor is purpose-built to remove, you know, like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not just a generic website builder, it’s for making podcasts. And I think they had some stat

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like, 36% of all new podcasts are created in anchor. I don’t know how they come up with those numbers, but

⏹️ ▶️ John the point is this is another aspect of their attempt to reach critical mass and podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ John where when someone mentions a podcast, it’s just assumed that it’s on Spotify and that if you want to go

⏹️ ▶️ John where the podcasts are, you have to go to Spotify. If over time they can get the defaults for like, Hey,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m thinking of starting a podcast. What should I use? And everyone says, uh, just go use anchor. It’s easiest to make a podcast

⏹️ ▶️ John and anchor only puts things on Spotify. that’s part of their play. So it’s the tool angle.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how good Anchor is. I’ve never used it in its capacity as a podcast creation tool. Last time I used it, it was this little

⏹️ ▶️ John voice blogging thing. But it makes sense to have a tool like that

⏹️ ▶️ John and to have what I assume is a pretty good one because it’s been around for a while. I don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna tell people like, don’t use Anchor if you think it’s the easiest way to get a podcast up, but I am gonna tell

⏹️ ▶️ John people that you are not just getting a simpler, at this point you’re not just getting a simple way to

⏹️ ▶️ John publish a podcast, you’re now slightly, putting another pebble on the pile

⏹️ ▶️ John of Spotify gaining critical mass and becoming the de facto place for podcasts, which is a thing that I do not

⏹️ ▶️ John want to happen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I actually, I focused my thoughts last week on the Gimlet thing, that’s what everybody was asking me about,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and again a disclaimer that I was an investor in Gimlet, so I’m making money from that part of this deal,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I have nothing to do with Anchor, at least, so I guess I can talk neutrally about this. I’m actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more worried about what Spotify’s plans are with Anchor than I am about what their plans are with Gimlet,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Gimlet is obvious. It seems like what their plans are, and again, I don’t have any inside information regarding this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m talking about what’s known publicly, it seems like Spotify’s plans with Gimlet

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are to get content that can be made exclusive to them, and even if Gimlet

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not gonna make their existing shows exclusive, which they said they weren’t, to get a production house that could make new exclusive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows to Spotify. That makes total sense. And there have been great discussions, by the way, from our friend Ben Thompson

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on both his site at Stratechery and his podcast called Exponent about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this could mean, why Spotify wants this. You know, it makes a ton of sense for Spotify to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco push podcasts heavily because every minute someone’s listening to Spotify and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they listen to music, every minute costs Spotify money, every minute somebody listening to Spotify

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is listening to a podcast, they don’t pay a dime. So they have a huge financial incentive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not only attract new subscribers in general, but to make as many of their subscribers as possible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco spend their listening time with podcasts instead of music. So anyway, for Spotify

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have exclusive content, that isn’t a huge deal because lots of podcast like platforms

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or podcastification platforms have exclusive content, including Spotify before this deal. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t think is a major change that’s going to really meaningfully affect things. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what worries me with Anchor is Anchor, as you said John, Anchor is kind of like an all-in-one way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make a podcast. And so far, you know, I don’t think there’s been that many huge podcasts on Anchor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s mostly like small hobbyist stuff. But you know, it’s only a matter of time before there’s big stuff on there, if there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t already. And so there will be, or already is, significant

⏹️ ▶️ Marco content on Anchor that is worth paying attention to. What concerns me is that Anchor recently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco launched a big centralized monetization program for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who host their podcasts on Anchor, which is super easy and everything, to join their ad network

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get some money for their podcasts. Now again, it’s mostly small shows,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not all small shows. YouTube is mostly channels that get very few views,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not all of them. Yeah, me too. But not all of them. Some of them make significant money.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, as a video creator, you know that you can go to YouTube and sign up for their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad thing after a little while and start making like a dollar a month. But you know, someday, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can make real money from that. And so Anchor is building that same thing for podcasts, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t really exist. Like there is no centralized podcast ad network that any show can join at any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco size. Like there’s things like the mid-roll where they can have a whole bunch of shows that they sell all at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once, but you have to be a certain size before they can really sell your show. And so it’s kind of like, you know, invite

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only and not everybody has access to that kind of thing. So by Anchor doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, it’s kind of like AdSense for podcasts. Like we know Google’s AdSense thing is the thing that lets you put a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rectangle of terrible ads on any web page about anything for the most part, and they’ll send you 25

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cents a month. Like, that’s what Anchor has made for podcasts. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they’re going to compete for effectiveness or quality of ads or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco total income potential for shows that have enough audience to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have their own sponsorships. Like we’re not going to switch to Anchor’s ad network because we would have worse ads and we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t make as much. So it makes no sense for us to switch. It makes no sense for any show that you currently hear paid sponsors on.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It makes no sense for them to switch. But there’s a whole bunch of smaller shows that can all of a sudden join that when they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t before. And so I worry that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what might happen in the future is everyone might start their podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Anchor and therefore Spotify by default, because that’s the place you can start a podcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and make a little bit of money, and never really bother putting it anywhere else.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And eventually those shows will become substantial, like the long tail of shows eventually like that will become

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a substantial block of podcasts. And those podcasts by default might

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be set not to work anywhere else. Those might by default be Spotify

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only. And then you have a whole bunch of quote podcasts that aren’t really podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the technical sense because they’re not accessible via public feeds, but that people go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeking out a podcast, you know, they go seek out one of these podcasts by name, they search an Apple podcast or Overcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they don’t see it because it isn’t really out there. And so Spotify could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time leverage the Anchor platform to become

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a much larger amount of exclusive shows. And that could become a big problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It could also be a problem if they get to a point where their ad network is really successful, which honestly I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it will ever be as profitable and high quality as what you can do on your own once you’re big. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it could reach a point where even big shows, it’s like stupid not to go there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so then you have all the big shows go there. So that’s what I worry about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the future of podcasting and the health of the ecosystem. I worry about that far more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than buying a few big-name shows and making those exclusive to them. Because that, honestly, is not going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make a dent. But when you have an entire creation platform

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with hundreds of thousands of podcasts being made on it and put up there, if those become

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exclusive, if that becomes exclusive to them, And everyone pretty much participates because there’s a huge financial

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason for them to do it. That’s a big problem. Steve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin So if you’re looking to start a podcast today, what would you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey recommend doing then rather than going directly to Anchor? I mean, it seems to me the better

⏹️ ▶️ Casey option is to use something like Libsyn, which we use. And from there, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can push to any number of places, including but not limited to Spotify. But Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what would you say, what would you recommend if I wanted to start my own podcast today?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I would just put up a Squarespace site and host the files either there or on Libsyn. That’s what I would do. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace is a sponsor this week, and I even mentioned you could do this. But like, it really, there’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ways to put up websites these days. And they’re all pretty affordable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and or free. And you can put up a podcast for very little money. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hosting side of a podcast is really not the hard part. There’s lots of options out there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it without too much work. I think the hard part is actually the creation side. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is, I mean, there’s some inherent complexity in making audio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that isn’t present for writing text. So like, you know, there’s like a lot of calls for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody to be like the Tumblr of podcasts. And I think they’re really,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Anchor is the closest anyone has come to that. at the end of the day, you still have to make audio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is relatively easy to listen to. So it has like, you know, decent levels, not a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise, etc. And has interesting content and interesting personalities to get people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And that’s way harder to sustain and create over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time than setting up a website and a feed with RSS audio things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it. Like what people are focusing on here is the platform area. And that’s reasonable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to to worry about because that’s what people think of first. When people think, I want to start a podcast, how do I do that?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re not thinking, how do I come up with interesting things to say with good personalities, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, on a consistent schedule for the next year? Like, they don’t think that. They think, what kind of microphone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I need and how do I set it up? Like, what do I do with the site? How do I publish this?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a little worried about Anchor’s role here, again, because at scale,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this could become a problem. But the podcast, again, the podcast ecosystem as I said last

⏹️ ▶️ Marco week, is so strong and has been so resilient over time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at attempts to mess it up and lock it up, I don’t think this is going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have bad things happen. I do, however, think that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Spotify has reached the point and will continue extending further. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do think they’re at the point now where you basically need to be on it. Like if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you care about your audience size, this is something I always dreaded with Stitcher back in the day when they were bigger.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was afraid that you would have to comply with Stitcher’s terms and put yourself on Stitcher because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their market share was too big to give up. And at the time, their market share was something like 5 or 10%.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now, Spotify’s market share is between 5 and 10%. And they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotten that really quickly. And so it’s going to go up. So Spotify, I think, is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco already at that point now where most podcasters are not going to say,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to give up 5% or 10% of my audience on principle. It’s too big of an amount.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a significant amount. So they’re probably not going to do that. Even we are probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to put our show on Spotify because the risks start to be outweighed by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, well, there’s a lot of people there and we have to go where the people are. We’ve already gotten requests from listeners

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who email us saying, hey, I really would like if you were on Spotify, I’d just switch to them and they don’t have you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. So I think Spotify’s already to that point where most podcasters are going to want to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it no matter what, and I really don’t love that. I got to say, I really don’t love

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that because they’re not part of the open ecosystem and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actively trying to take it over, but they are that big. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard to tell podcasters Ben

⏹️ ▶️ John Thompson had a little bit of follow up on podcast this week. By the way, if you’re wondering where we get all this Ben Thompson stuff from,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can subscribe to his newsletter. He does like what, one free article a week, but then like every single

⏹️ ▶️ John day if you subscribe, you get his things. So I highly recommend it. It’s always good. It amazes me that he can

⏹️ ▶️ John write something that substantive every single day. Maybe he has a time machine and just

⏹️ ▶️ John batches them up on the weekends. I don’t know. Anyway, the follow up on the podcasting stuff was

⏹️ ▶️ John a point that I remember making back in the ebook days where we found ourselves

⏹️ ▶️ John in a situation where Apple has all the pieces to the puzzle of a particular market,

⏹️ ▶️ John and just not interested in picking them up and putting them together. Like in the ebook time, they had devices that you could

⏹️ ▶️ John use for readers, they had a store where people paid money, they had relationships to people who you know, create content,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then they just were just not interested in the ebook business and basically let Amazon have it and only

⏹️ ▶️ John later came in and said, Oh, I guess ebooks are a thing we should do that too. And came with the iBook store. In podcasts,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has been the de facto, as we’ve said, the de facto benevolent dictator king

⏹️ ▶️ John of podcasts for a long time. They still have the biggest player, they have the most important index.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not that they’re not interested in podcasts, but it’s not something

⏹️ ▶️ John where they’ve taken the ball and run with it, which is good for us. We don’t want them to be like Spotify, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But if you wanted someone to save you from Spotify, It’s not going to be individual

⏹️ ▶️ John shows like ours, protesting about not putting their things up on Spotify. The only

⏹️ ▶️ John other player that is bigger than Spotify and can stop them from closing up the podcast ecosystem would be

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, if there’s a thing they wanted to do. Apple could make, you know, continue to keep podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ John open like they are now, where they have an index and they have a place where you can find the podcast, but they do not rehost

⏹️ ▶️ John all your audio. They don’t make you agree to special terms, like blah, blah, blah, like just a hands-off

⏹️ ▶️ John type of attitude. And if they just added on top of that, you know, their app store goodness

⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, having a way to do subscriptions with your Apple ID or, uh, to have

⏹️ ▶️ John like for pay podcast episodes or whatever, you know, whatever. I don’t know not to go so far as to say they should have

⏹️ ▶️ John a centralized ad network. Although Apple has not been beyond making an ad network in the past, but there

⏹️ ▶️ John are ways for Apple to make money from podcasts. Apple is all about service revenue as,

⏹️ ▶️ John as, uh, Ben points out, but they don’t see podcasts and say, Oh, we can

⏹️ ▶️ John make more service revenue. They could, but it’s just it’s just either it’s small potatoes for them, or they’re just not into it.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re too busy with other things. Certainly, it’s nothing like video, at least from their perspective. But the

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s, it’s, it’s not an area they pursued. And for years, it’s been sitting there,

⏹️ ▶️ John they could they could have done these things years and years ago, they have they already have a store and a system of accounts

⏹️ ▶️ John and a way for creators to register and collect like money and most importantly, they have millions and millions

⏹️ ▶️ John of customers with payment information and an ID through which they can do that. And they could do it in a way that preserves

⏹️ ▶️ John privacy like they normally do. Now, while continuing in the ideal scenario, while

⏹️ ▶️ John continuing to be entirely hands off, that if you just want to have a podcast that’s free, it’s just like it is now.

⏹️ ▶️ John But if you decide you want to have a podcast where you pay charge people a dollar per episode or have a yearly subscription

⏹️ ▶️ John for a certain amount or whatever, they could do that. As Spotify grows

⏹️ ▶️ John in power and stature and size, only Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ John as Tim Cook would say,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is in the

⏹️ ▶️ John running to do anything about it other than just hope Spotify fails. Because there’s lots of ways this can go badly

⏹️ ▶️ John for Spotify. They still do have music as their main business and they

⏹️ ▶️ John have to balance those two concerns and figure out if they are going to transition, how to transition, or how much of music to preserve,

⏹️ ▶️ John yada, yada, yada. people unsubscribe if Spotify moves entirely into podcasts and they’ll realize not that many people

⏹️ ▶️ John want to subscribe to anything just for podcasts so I don’t know how it’s gonna turn out but and I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John not particularly asking for Apple to become more engaged because I have mostly like the hands-off attitude but they’re there

⏹️ ▶️ John in the corner they have always had the ability to do something about podcasting and thus far haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ John done anything.

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Amazon buying Eero

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Breaking news. You know, I have to say that the tech industry has been pretty good to ATP over the last few weeks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and scheduling their breaking news the appropriate time. So thank you, tech industry, for thinking of us.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just a few hours before we recorded, Amazon has declared that they are buying Eero, E-E-R-O.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They are a many time prior sponsors. I don’t have the list in front of me, but probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey future sponsors. But I can tell you with an honest heart, and they cannot pay me to say this, that I really love their stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was overjoyed to get rid of the Verizon router that I was compelled to use,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and instead put in an Eero setup. And Eero set up that to be fair, they comped me, but nevertheless,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s really great. I really love it. And Amazon has declared that they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey buying Eero. And I don’t know how I feel about this. Like the doomsday person in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me thinks, oh God, Amazon’s going to know everything I look at on the internet and weaponize

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that to make me even more, or make me spend even more money than I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would already spend at Amazon. And that’s not good and a little creepy. But on the other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey side, you know, I also have a Ring doorbell, which was also a prior sponsor, also got comped. and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they haven’t really gunked that up with creepiness yet, as far as I can tell. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Like, John, what do you think about this? Is this going to be really bad, or am

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I making a mountain out of nothing?

⏹️ ▶️ John John Greenewald Four words, Euro with special offers.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve Loeb Oh, God. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John no, John. John Greenewald

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s what we’re all worried about. So it doesn’t surprise me that Amazon bought, it doesn’t surprise me that someone bought Euro, because they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John got great products and having a small independent company that makes one very focused great product. It’s just something that

⏹️ ▶️ John just seems not to stand in today’s tech industry because someone will see them and scoop them up. And it also doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John surprise me that it’s Amazon because Amazon is all about lately, electronic smart type devices that go

⏹️ ▶️ John in your home. And they have, you know, this budding ecosystem of their

⏹️ ▶️ John Echo brand products with and without screens and microphones and speakers of various sizes.

⏹️ ▶️ John And all those things are on Wi Fi. So them, you know, they bought ring to be clear, what you’re talking talking about before Amazon also

⏹️ ▶️ John bought Ring, which is more home stuff for like cameras and doorbells. And Google’s got Nest, of course, and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John home stuff. So it makes perfect sense for Amazon to buy Europe because unlike Apple, both

⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon and Google have not decided that they are going to expunge everything except for the most profitable core

⏹️ ▶️ John products from their lineups. Instead, they are actually trying to build an ecosystem that covers all bases

⏹️ ▶️ John that people need. And so neither one of them is shying away from, oh, we’re not gonna buy a camera company

⏹️ ▶️ John or a doorbell company or a Wi-Fi company. We just want to sell,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the very most expensive profitable thing. Like, so we’ve talked about this before when Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John getting out of the Wi-Fi business. Lots of people saying, I wish Apple had bought a Euro, but we weren’t having that conversation.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple just doesn’t see it that way. So instead, in the absence of big Apple buying up these companies, someone’s

⏹️ ▶️ John going to buy them up, and it’s either going to be Amazon or Google, or I don’t know who the third choice would be,

⏹️ ▶️ John but maybe some slightly larger fish would eat the very small fish. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not surprised they’re purchased. I hope in the short to medium term they continue to sell

⏹️ ▶️ John wifi routers that just do wifi things and don’t report every single website you go

⏹️ ▶️ John to back to Amazon for the purposes of marketing. But, and

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t necessarily think they’re gonna combine it with an Echo. Like I’m not sure that Frankentoaster needs to exist.

⏹️ ▶️ John They

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey might make

⏹️ ▶️ John one because they’re Amazon. Like why the heck wouldn’t they try it? But I think even if they just stay independent

⏹️ ▶️ John Wi Fi things, resisting the urge as Amazon is somebody, a company that

⏹️ ▶️ John gets tremendous benefit about knowing what you do, resisting the urge

⏹️ ▶️ John of that Wi Fi router to tell Amazon everything you do on the internet.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how I don’t know how Amazon resists that. I don’t know how someone goes into a meeting and says, Okay, we own a Wi Fi router now,

⏹️ ▶️ John but we’re not going to have a report back to Amazon everything all our customers do just the data is just too valuable.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I hope Amazon holds the whoever is in charge of that decision. I hope they hold the line for as long as they possibly

⏹️ ▶️ John can, but it almost seems inevitable to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, on some level, like Amazon already has the potential with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AWS, they host a good portion of the Internet. And they don’t do that as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco far as I know there, because I think the cost to their to the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AWS customers, which are businesses, I think they wouldn’t put up with that. Like, that would be too much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John for them.

⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s the difference. In a business-to-business range, there are contracts that set down what they’re going to do. And a business

⏹️ ▶️ John has lawyers that looks over the contract. No way a business is going to sign that. But customers will click through any garbage

⏹️ ▶️ John TOS that pops up in front of them when they buy a product. So that’s why they’re going to do it on the consumer side. No way they’d

⏹️ ▶️ John pull it off on AWS. And actually, it would be difficult on AWS just because of how opaque the

⏹️ ▶️ John infrastructure is from their perspective. And most businesses are good about having stuff encrypted in transit

⏹️ ▶️ John and arrest and yada yada yada. But the bottom line is lawyers. Lawyers will not stop. It will stop that from happening. But consumers

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t each have lawyers when they go by their Wi-Fi router. And even if it’s just as simple as it reporting

⏹️ ▶️ John what your DNS queries are, even that alone is enough sort of intelligence that Amazon would not be able

⏹️ ▶️ John to resist it. Forget about the men and men like near SSL or whatever. Like I’m not saying they’re going to go that far on day one,

⏹️ ▶️ John but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John such a treasure trove of information that I just think they can’t stay away.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe. I mean, on some level also like Eero has this Eero Plus service, which is optional.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the things it provides is a service where it’ll check the sites you visit against a database of known

⏹️ ▶️ Marco malicious sites. So therefore, Eero already has a service that people voluntarily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco opt in to have their site history checked against

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a database or something else. So Eero already has that information from some portion of its customers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So is it that different for Amazon to have that? And if that’s as far as it ever goes?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s different because Amazon has a immediate use for that information. The euro use for it

⏹️ ▶️ John is, this would be useful, we could sell this to somebody, or it’s useful for an acquirer to show

⏹️ ▶️ John why you should buy us. Like, hey Amazon, look how we can collect this information, you should buy us because you would like this information.

⏹️ ▶️ John But Amazon, there’s no speculative purpose for this information. We know exactly what we use it for. We

⏹️ ▶️ John use it to figure out how to sell you more stuff on Amazon. And the fact that it’s opt-in,

⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon just has to make it like, you get $5 off Prime or whatever. Like they

⏹️ ▶️ John have so many knobs to turn to make 100% of the customers use that, even if it’s just like

⏹️ ▶️ John the Kindle with special offers. Hey, you can get a Kindle cheaper if you let us show you ads. Hey, you can get a Nero router cheaper

⏹️ ▶️ John if you let us see your websites. And everyone will just do it because it’s cheaper. Why wouldn’t you?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, now that you say it, yeah, they probably will at least

⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer something. Maybe they won’t have it always on that way, but I bet they will down the road, I bet

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will offer something that really gives them this info.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m not worried about it for like this year or even next year or whatever. Like, and I’m sure my existing Euro

⏹️ ▶️ John products will continue to work and I’ll continue to buy them mostly because they work really well and they’re problem-free

⏹️ ▶️ John and they give me everything I want out of it. As long as it’s optional, I will continue to get them.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it just makes me super duper extra angry that Apple has just abandoned this in many

⏹️ ▶️ John other markets because they want to let someone else have it. And in this day and age with these big players and all the consolidation,

⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple doesn’t offer it, No one else in the industry is incentivized to give the kind of privacy guarantees

⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple is incentivized to give. And so it’s bad for consumers if there is no Apple option.

⏹️ ▶️ John Bad for well-heeled consumers, let’s say, if there is no Apple option for that type of thing. And other,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we don’t have to start something that should, like, there’s tons and tons of third-party Wi-Fi routers from companies

⏹️ ▶️ John that have absolutely no interest or incentive in, you know, gathering information. But that used to be true of television

⏹️ ▶️ John makers, too. Like, television makers just not care about what you watch. For decades and decades, they didn’t care would you watch until

⏹️ ▶️ John they did. So I don’t say, oh, well, don’t worry. You can get a Linksys or Netgear or whatever or Ubiquiti.

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess Ubiquiti’s probably the last holdout, again, because they’re a business-to-business type of seller for the most part.

⏹️ ▶️ John But eventually, nothing is safe, because once Netgear and Linksys figure out that they can sell all your

⏹️ ▶️ John data to someone else, if they haven’t already figured this out, they’ll start doing it too. And then you’re just left with

⏹️ ▶️ John buying ugly, complicated Ubiquiti stuff like Marco has, or just pining

⏹️ ▶️ John for the days when you could buy a Wi-Fi router from Apple?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I haven’t seen anybody who was happy with this news so far.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that really says a lot about how much people love Eero and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much people don’t trust Amazon to do the right thing long-term here. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t fault them. I mean, I’m a huge Amazon customer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s hard to think of another company on the web that has more data on me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than Amazon does. Already, just from my activity on Amazon.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But certainly, if you’re trying to not have a lot of the web

⏹️ ▶️ Marco giants have info on you like this, Amazon is getting harder and harder to avoid.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it says a lot about what people are thinking about and worried about these days, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reaction to this acquisition from customers has been seemingly almost 100% negative.

⏹️ ▶️ John obviously. And the thing about it is like, we all have, you know, these devices in our house that we can talk to.

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, like, you know, I, I’ve have a, an echo thing. I have the Google thing, all those

⏹️ ▶️ John things send my queries back to their respective companies and tell them what I’m doing. Like I’m voluntarily,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I’m an Amazon prime subscriber. I buy things from Amazon. Like I hate these companies and don’t want them to have any information

⏹️ ▶️ John about me. Um, and I’m not even like, even if the wifi router, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, has this opt in report back to Amazon thing, like I said, I would still buy it because I value a

⏹️ ▶️ John reliable, nice to use wifi router. Like I’m not protesting, like I’m never gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John buy the Euro again, far from it. It’s just that it’s encroachment, right? So I buy

⏹️ ▶️ John these products and voluntarily use them knowing that they transfer their information back because I accept

⏹️ ▶️ John the trade off. I accept in exchange for you getting this information about me, you provide this

⏹️ ▶️ John service. And I feel like I know what I’m providing. but like the

⏹️ ▶️ John wifi in your house, like the basic internet in your house, it’s like the last backstop

⏹️ ▶️ John against, you know, devices that are owned by a company that like, it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John individual products. If I buy an Echo thing and put it on my network, I understand

⏹️ ▶️ John that when I talk to that thing, here’s this thing that’s happening. But if one

⏹️ ▶️ John company can see everything that’s happening on my network, and you know, like it owns the actual internet

⏹️ ▶️ John connection end of things, like Verizon does with that whole thing. And that’s the most scary about Verizon adding like

⏹️ ▶️ John HTTP headers every time you visited a website that feels like to me anyway, personally, a bridge

⏹️ ▶️ John too far. I don’t want, I want there to be some backstop where

⏹️ ▶️ John this is the infrastructure that I own and then I choose which products I put on it. Not like, you know, it’s coming

⏹️ ▶️ John from inside the house. You own the entire infrastructure, you see everything. Uh, and that’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not entirely comfortable with that relationship. Maybe it’s unavoidable. Maybe there’s no keeping them out. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John soon every single aspect of our internet connection in our life will be owned by some company. But I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John I think getting back to the Verizon thing, I forget when this was, but like and I forgot the particular details. I think it was like

⏹️ ▶️ John since Verizon is an Internet service provider and they could see all your traffic coming and going, they would see when you’re making

⏹️ ▶️ John HTTP requests and they were either shoving a header that identifies you or read

⏹️ ▶️ John headers or they would do something with the headers going through. And they would see every single one of your your

⏹️ ▶️ John web requests that wasn’t SSL, which back in those days was a lot more than it is today.

⏹️ ▶️ John And when people found out about it, there was a little bit of an uproar, and I think they stopped doing it. So I think that

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not just me, that there is a line over which companies will not be allowed to to

⏹️ ▶️ John walk without at least some form of protest. So I’m not saying having your Wi-Fi router

⏹️ ▶️ John report back to Amazon is that line. It’s just that I think I’m not I think I’m not alone in

⏹️ ▶️ John drawing some kind of distinction between the products that I put on my network and the entirety of the network itself.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin I completely agree. I mean, for now, I don’t plan on doing anything about my in-home network in no small

⏹️ ▶️ Casey part because I just spent hours doing everything. But I don’t know. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’s one of those things where I’m going to keep a watchful eye on it. And I think, Marco, your point

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about everyone’s reaction says a lot about Eero. I think that’s spot on. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love my Eero devices. And again, they’ve sponsored before, they’re sponsoring again. But they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot pay us to say that we really, really, really friggin’ love this stuff. And I think I speak for all three of us in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying that we do. And when I recommend something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to friends or family, stuff that I will have to support if it goes bad, I’ll recommend

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eero. And of course, I’ll recommend it with the coupon code ATP. But nevertheless, I will recommend Eero. And I do that because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it really is good stuff. It really does walk the fine line between something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is configurable enough for for a nerd like me, but also approachable enough for a regular human being.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for everyone to be like, ugh, Amazon, really? I think that’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you said, Marco, I think that that’s really indicative of kind of how we feel about both companies.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So the thing is though, like recommending it to people, I think we fast forward five years and

⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon starts offering Eero products that do this kind of like, you know, the Eero with special offers thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I would still be in the position where if I had some relative who

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have a lot of money and there’s no way in hell they were gonna pay for a wifi router to replace

⏹️ ▶️ John the one they quote unquote get for free from Comcast, right? Like if you can’t convince them that they should buy their own thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John But there was an option to get an euro with special offers or whatever that is

⏹️ ▶️ John free or cheap, but reports everything you do back to Amazon. And I described this arrangement,

⏹️ ▶️ John they would jump on it. Right, that they would say, oh, well, that’s great. Like, yeah, totally. Like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John because honestly, like people, not everyone cares as much about that.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you told them you can get a $500 multi-node router set up for free,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the catch is that it tells Amazon every website you go to, they’d be like, fine, good, do that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Sold.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and so that’s why, I mean, that’s why stuff like this is out, that’s why we all buy everything from Amazon. Like, everyone has their own

⏹️ ▶️ John line. Like, I’m not saying that it’s even the wrong thing to do from a business perspective, and I think I

⏹️ ▶️ John would be in a position I would bring that up to somebody to say it’s an option because you can get

⏹️ ▶️ John better coverage across your house. You wouldn’t have the wifi dead spots. Like all the things that the ads say are absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ John true. I’ve basically done this with one of my relatives.

⏹️ ▶️ John They didn’t wanna pay lots of money for the wifi thing, so I just bought it for them and sent it to them because I wanted

⏹️ ▶️ John them to have wifi in their house, but there’s no way they would have paid it if they had to buy it themselves.

⏹️ ▶️ John If I had told them about special offers things, they definitely would have jumped on it. And a lot of people are like that. And I’m not even saying that’s the wrong

⏹️ ▶️ John choice. If you can get good technology for less money

⏹️ ▶️ John and you understand what you’re trading, go into it with your eyes open, have someone

⏹️ ▶️ John explain it to you and the consequences of it. It’s approaching, I think, I forget

⏹️ ▶️ John where I read this. It’s approaching the type of deal that, come back

⏹️ ▶️ John to me brain, where did they hit us? That regular people can’t actually consent to because it’s so pervasive.

⏹️ ▶️ John What was that from? Facebook story or something like that. Like that. Yeah, from the, uh, Oh, yeah, that it’s impossible

⏹️ ▶️ John for anyone to, uh, to actually consent to because it’s, they don’t grasp the full, the entirety

⏹️ ▶️ John of what’s going on. And,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, assume again, assuming Euro is not going to man in the middle of you and decode all your encrypted traffic, you know, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is not that. Like if you describe to them, if you go to a website, they can see it. But when you go

⏹️ ▶️ John to your bank, they can’t because it’s SSL. People would accept that trade-off. And honestly, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable,

⏹️ ▶️ John unreasonable of them to accept it. But I just got done saying that we all accept the trade off of, uh, you know, when we shout

⏹️ ▶️ John to our cylinders, that it sends that back to a server in two out of three cases. Uh, so, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, we’re, we’re sad that it stopped being the independent beautiful snowflake that it was. And we’re all sad that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t buy them or that Apple doesn’t do wifi networks. But in the grand scheme of things, five years from now, we might still

⏹️ ▶️ John be recommending to our friends and relatives to get a hero.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. You know, as you were talking, I got thinking to myself, you know, is,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the individual data what’s valuable, or is there something else that could be valuable? And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of course the individual data is valuable, but I’m looking at my Eero app on my iPad, and among

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the things that Eero does, and does a really good job of, is it will take a guess

⏹️ ▶️ Casey using, I think, the Mac address, and some lookup table, that server side, I guess. You know, what are all these

⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices on your network? So, as an example, my thermostat, which happens to be a Honeywell,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I’m sorry, a train thermostat, It apparently the network connection

⏹️ ▶️ Casey within it is made by Murata Manufacturing Company Limited. And that isn’t very helpful to me,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but a lot of things it’ll say like, oh, this is an Apple device and we’re pretty darn sure it’s an iPhone. This is an Apple device.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re pretty sure it’s an iMac. This is a printer. And you know, they’ll, they’ll at least be able to show you like a little icon that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey indicates it’s a printer. And it got me thinking, you know, maybe there’s something to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be said about knowing of all of the Eero

⏹️ ▶️ Casey installations in the world, 80% of them have one Nintendo Switch hanging off

⏹️ ▶️ Casey their network and 50% of them have Apple devices. You know what I mean? And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps even in aggregate, in a way that is not across my personal threshold

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of just having aggregated information about what kinds of people are, what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kinds of things people are buying and in what quantity. And also, like, you know, most Switch owners

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tend to be Mac users, and most PS4 owners tend to be PC users. I probably have that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey backwards. It doesn’t matter. But you get my point that perhaps even just the aggregate information

⏹️ ▶️ Casey might be useful to Amazon in some way, shape, or form as well.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. They would love it all. I mean, cause they, they sell competitors to a lot of the products. They would love to know what’s on everyone’s wifi networks

⏹️ ▶️ John and everything they go to, every website they go to, like, why wouldn’t they, any, any, this This type of information has value

⏹️ ▶️ John to almost anybody that sells anything. It’s so broad-reaching. The internet is such an integral part

⏹️ ▶️ John of all aspects of life that this is incredibly valuable information. It’s just a question of who

⏹️ ▶️ John has the ability to convince customers to trade that privacy

⏹️ ▶️ John for something. And Amazon has shown they have the ability to get customers to trade

⏹️ ▶️ John their privacy for the value they provide, the convenience of buying things on Amazon, to get a Kindle for

⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit cheaper, you know, using using all those things to bootstrap a video service by saying it comes

⏹️ ▶️ John free with your shopping, whether you like it or not. We talked about this before, like they’re they’re able to

⏹️ ▶️ John honestly get customers to trade something that Amazon wants for something that

⏹️ ▶️ John the customers want. And it just so happens that thing is not always money.

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#askatp: Refurbished tech

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so let’s do some Ask ATP. And we’re starting tonight with David Hadley,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey who writes, hey, what are your feelings about saving money by buying refurbished technology products? I want a Nintendo

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Switch, but since there’s only one Nintendo-exclusive game right now that I really want, which happens to be Zelda Breath of the Wild,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t bring myself to pay the full price for the console. Some retailers sell refurbished consoles that bring the price low enough that I’m willing to buy,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m worried that these have a high chance of being lemons. I personally don’t do this terribly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey often. There are definitely times that I have and or would do this. Apple stuff is a great

⏹️ ▶️ Casey example. If I wasn’t so needy about having the new hotness immediately, I absolutely would buy, and I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty sure I’ve bought at least one refurbished Apple product in the past, and it’s been fine. I had heard somewhere,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this may be a complete boldface lie, but I had heard somewhere that with Apple refurb stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any surface the user touches is brand new. It’s just the insides that are gross, or I shouldn’t say gross, but recycled.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you guys know if that’s BS or do you know if that’s true?

⏹️ ▶️ John I read the same feedback you did, but I don’t know if it was just specifically talking about phones or if it was all products. I’m not sure.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Fair

⏹️ ▶️ John enough. I bet it might’ve just been phones or something, because I can’t imagine they’re doing it with giant iMacs or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey also true. It’s a good point. In any case, I would definitely do it with Apple stuff. For something like a Nintendo,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I probably, like I don’t, I don’t have any particular problem with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey buying refurbished stuff. I can’t say I do it terribly often, but I mean, I bought

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of used cars in the past and I didn’t really, I, even though my BMW was a piece of garbage,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was, it was not because it was used. I don’t think, I think it’s just because it was a BMW. Um, but you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I don’t have any personal problem with this. Marco, Marco, how do you feel about it?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have bought refurb stuff in the past. I’ve had mixed luck with it. Sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve bought them and they’ve been totally fine. Other times, they were a little bit flaky,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but so have some of my new things. So I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if that’s enough data to really say for sure whether it’s worth it or not. I would caution you, if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re going to go a refurb route, it’s way better. I don’t know what the options are for the Switch, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in general with tech products, it’s way better to get the refurbs directly from the manufacturer because they will almost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco always have a regular warranty applied to them. And then you can always go to the manufacturer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have a problem during that period and say, all right, hey, this thing’s broken, fix it. As

⏹️ ▶️ Marco opposed to if you get it through a third party refurbisher, oftentimes the warranty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will then only be through the refurbisher, not through the original company, and it might be a pain to ever get anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco serviced that way. So, refurbs are a very good way to save like a few hundred dollars

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off of a new Mac or something. And that, you know, for a lot of people, that’s a fine deal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to take. But just make sure you’re covered by a warranty from the actual manufacturer.

⏹️ ▶️ John I usually avoid refurbs just because I want to have the shiny new thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is a privilege I have being able to buy the shiny new thing most of the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John In this specific case, Breath of the Wild, I would personally probably go without meals.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Skip a meal

⏹️ ▶️ John for a week to save the extra money because Breath of the Wild is such an amazing game. But all that

⏹️ ▶️ John said, if I was in a position where I wanted something, I just didn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John the cash, I would be willing to buy refurbs. And again, like Marco said, buying it through the manufacturer,

⏹️ ▶️ John chances are probably about the same, maybe even slightly better

⏹️ ▶️ John than buying new things. And you know, if the outside of it shows any kind of wear and tear, or if

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a damaged box type of thing or whatever, you’re kind of rolling the dice. It really depends how much money

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re saving. If you’re saving ten bucks, forget it. But if you’re saving 50 or 100 dollars,

⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely. Get it with a manufacturer warranty to get it. And, you know, if you buy a new product and it flakes out

⏹️ ▶️ John and they give you a replacement, you’re probably getting a refurb then anyway, almost certainly getting a refurb then.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I wouldn’t be too scared of it. Just be sure that you

⏹️ ▶️ John get a warranty as if it was new, because if you don’t, then I would think twice about it,

⏹️ ▶️ John and increasingly as the price of the thing goes up. And yeah, and

⏹️ ▶️ John just don’t be superstitious about the fact that it’s refurbished, because it’ll probably be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, apparently Nintendo does have a refurb store, which we will put a link in the show notes. Thanks to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ryber for getting that link. And also real-time feedback from John Alper

⏹️ ▶️ Casey via Twitter. John writes that he’s bought a ton of Apple stuff, and the only thing that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t look as untouched as something brand new was the packaging, because I guess they don’t necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the super fancy packaging for the refurb stuff. You might just get like a basic brown box, according to John. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, like I said, I have no problem with it.

#askatp: Code structure

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, Ryan Bible writes, I’ve been teaching myself programming on and off for about a year and I’ve run into a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit of a roadblock. I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of the fundamentals and I’m very unsure of where to go to continue learning.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve built a simple timer app to learn iOS programming, but I know I’ve made a ton of neophyte mistakes. For

⏹️ ▶️ Casey example, all the logic in the app lives in the main view controller. I know that I should break things up, but I’ve struggled to find answers on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how an app should be structured and the best practices for creating and implementing my own classes. To summarize, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey found tons of resources for beginners just starting out, but I’m really struggling to find intermediate resources.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was hoping that you guys could point me in the right direction. I don’t have a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey terribly great ideas here. If there happens to be, especially when it comes to iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS, there seem to be about 8 billion ways to skin that cat. And there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the one true way, which is the MVC way that Apple kind of recommends.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And even Apple’s own documentation talks about that some. And certainly WWDC sessions actually are useful

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that. But in general, I like to find publications that seem

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be pretty well respected on the particular field that you’re dealing with. So as an example for iOS stuff, NS Hipster

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very good in my personal opinion. And just follow those and see what sorts of things they’re talking about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s less about app architecture, or really architecture in general, which is what Ryan is talking about,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but more how to write decent and good code. The easiest

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and best way I’ve ever found to solve this problem is to work with somebody who is better at what you do than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are, and you will by force or by will end up learning a lot from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. But I don’t know, do you guys have maybe, we can start with Marco, do you have any tips for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of bridging the gap from being a beginner to being intermediate?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, certainly, if you have any ability to work with other people who maybe have more experience

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than you, that is by far the best way to advance yourself quickly in this area. Of course,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not everybody has that option available to them. So, assuming that Ryan here doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that option available, I would say, basically, do what Casey did. Read up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on what patterns and things people have been using. The only problem there is everyone has a different way of doing it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Ryan Reilly Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You probably aren’t going to find two sites that tell you to do the exact same thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re going to look at 10 sites and they’re going to tell you to do 10 very different and totally incompatible things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s it’s a little hard to get good that way you can to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some degree you can look at Apple’s example code They don’t usually Ship as example

⏹️ ▶️ Marco code apps that are complex enough to really have a lot of like code structure management

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to them But there’s probably something out there You could also potentially look at open source apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There aren’t a ton of open source iOS apps out there But there are some and some of them are big enough to have to deal with problems like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this You can see how they did it But for the most part this is gonna be the kind of thing that you’re gonna learn Mostly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from experience and whether you’re on your own or whether you can learn from other people on the way You know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might affect how quickly you learn that but this is mostly an experience thing and yet the other thing I’ll add here

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it probably doesn’t matter as much as you might think you can have a career

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an iOS programmer and Put everything in your main view controller

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s fine. Like it’s you know, if you have like a really complex app that’s going to start getting difficult to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco manage. But like, for the most part, most apps don’t need advanced

⏹️ ▶️ Marco structures, and they don’t need to be perfect. They need to work. And if it works, and it works for you,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it works for the people, it’s fine. So don’t overthink this too much, especially this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco early in your career.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, that’s a really great point. So I’ve written and I’m and I’m working on this, this potter

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, which is to help me do my side of the edit for analog. And I also was playing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with, and actually this is a very quick side thing that might be interesting. It occurred

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me that a lot of my contacts in my, in my address book on my phone and thus on my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac don’t have images and or the images are really, really old. And so it occurred to me, well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could just use like Gravatar to slurp up all the images

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for people that keep that sort of thing updated, which given that I am friends with a lot of nerds. That’s a lot of us.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And update my contacts with all of those images that I grabbed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Gravatar. And I wrote a little iOS app to do it, or I’m mostly done with it. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I bring all this up to say in both of those apps, 80 to 90% of the logic is just in the view controller.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there is only one view controller and it is called view controller, because it doesn’t matter to Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco point, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because when you do file a new project, it calls it view controller.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And ultimately, it really doesn’t matter, at least not today.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey To your point, Marco, if this becomes like if I end up shipping either of these, which I strongly doubt, but if it happens,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then that becomes a little bit different. Even if I open source it, I would probably rework a lot because this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not a particularly strong example of the way I generally like to write code. But if I’m just goofing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey off and, and doing my own thing, if I’m an independent person doing my, you know, living my own life

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way I want, then there’s no reason to worry about these sorts of problems, at least at the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stage that I’m at, and I suspect that Ryan is that. But that being said,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that where you would come into problems with this is if you go to interview to get a regular

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS development job, at which point, if I was interviewing someone, I would want to know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they know one of the 805 ways that you can write, quote unquote, correct code

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for iOS. So I echo what Marco’s saying, as long as you’re living the blissful indie life that we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, but if you’re trying to be a real person with a real job then it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is worth digging into this a little deeper. And speaking of real people with real jobs, John, tell us as the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey elder statesman, what is the right answer here?

⏹️ ▶️ John John Greenewald, Ph.D., Executive Director, The New York Times This question reminds me of back like 15, 20 years ago when I was writing my first

⏹️ ▶️ John e-commerce site as we called them back then.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It

⏹️ ▶️ John was like a website that you go to that has products, you put them in a shopping cart, you go through a checkout

⏹️ ▶️ John process. I mean, this hasn’t actually changed that much in the modern era, but back then on the web,

⏹️ ▶️ John that was basically the main and the only kind of thing that was not a static website.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was like there was e-commerce and then there was just pages full of text and that was

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it. It was the idea of a

⏹️ ▶️ John web app didn’t quite exist yet. We had not yet reached web 2.0 or maybe it was just coming out. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John so here I am. I’m like, I’ve got to write an e-commerce site.

⏹️ ▶️ John This has been done even at that point hundreds of times before. I’m not the first person to make a website with a shopping

⏹️ ▶️ John cart. And what I wanted to know was basically, okay, I’m writing one of these things. What’s the

⏹️ ▶️ John right way to structure it behind the scenes in terms of how do you model the cart and the orders

⏹️ ▶️ John and how the inventory tracking and the transactions and the credit card

⏹️ ▶️ John processing and tracking payments. And just if you’re gonna implement this, I know how it looks on the outside,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s easy enough, but how does it look on the inside? How do you correctly structure an e-commerce site? I’m like, well, this is totally a

⏹️ ▶️ John solved problem. so many people have done this so many times, it’s got to be a library full of books about how to implement an e commerce site. And

⏹️ ▶️ John guess what, there was not there still isn’t I don’t think there is no

⏹️ ▶️ John book or you know, keep saying books, but like, there was no websites to talk to

⏹️ ▶️ John this thing. I don’t think YouTube existed yet. There’s no one out there who’s going to explain to you here’s how you implement

⏹️ ▶️ John an e commerce site. All there were were a bunch of engineers who worked at companies with e commerce sites, they could say,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, here’s how we did it. And if you were to hear those stories, mostly, you’d probably be horrified because it’s all a bunch of people

⏹️ ▶️ John who are learning their thing on the job because maybe they’re the first people to make an e commerce site and there you know it was it was their early

⏹️ ▶️ John days but even if you know it seems like it was early in the grand scheme of things but when I was coming in I’m like

⏹️ ▶️ John this is the thing that everybody does surely there is a well known state of the art of here’s the right way

⏹️ ▶️ John to build an e commerce site and there absolutely wasn’t and today with iOS apps or Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John apps or choose whatever your platform is you might think there’s a way that everybody builds their apps but

⏹️ ▶️ John as Markham Casey just pointed out That’s not true. People do it all sorts of crazy ways. You have no idea what people do.

⏹️ ▶️ John Especially small developers, but even big companies, if you were to look at their code bases, you’d be like, what is

⏹️ ▶️ John this? It’s like, well, it’s a thing that we have and it works, and it’s the residue of seven people who worked on

⏹️ ▶️ John it, plus the original person, and they all had different opinions about how things were done. And you’re like, isn’t there one agreed upon

⏹️ ▶️ John way to structure things? And the answer is no. So there’s no place you can go to tell you

⏹️ ▶️ John at this level to say, what is the right way to break down a problem and structure this complicated thing?

⏹️ ▶️ John A, because it’s really complicated, and B, because all the real successful examples look like gardens that are just

⏹️ ▶️ John grown over time for the most part. That said, I do have some advice on how to get out of this.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s not the advice to helping with my e-commerce site, but I basically say, well, I’ve just got to do it myself, and I just

⏹️ ▶️ John figured it out, and did my own weird ass things like everyone else. But in

⏹️ ▶️ John the case of iOS specifically, and I guess in the case of the modern web as well,

⏹️ ▶️ John this applies to, but didn’t way back then, There is a framework. iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John has frameworks. Apple provides these libraries, these APIs, this structure

⏹️ ▶️ John for you to build stuff. The best thing that you can do is to understand philosophically

⏹️ ▶️ John how the framework sees things. How, if possible, how the individual people who made

⏹️ ▶️ John these frameworks, how the people who design the overall system understand the philosophy that underpins the API.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not going to tell you exactly how to structure things, but it will make sure that whatever you decide to do is not fighting

⏹️ ▶️ John against that understand how the pieces are meant to fit together. And

⏹️ ▶️ John so this framework is meant to be used in this way, we expect your state to be here, we expect this to be called back and

⏹️ ▶️ John forth like this, like you, you can get the feel for not just watching a WC sessions where someone explains

⏹️ ▶️ John their framework, they will, they will present it in a way of say, here’s how we expect you to use this, here’s how

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s designed to be used. And you can use it in all sorts of ways, especially with all these delegates in places where you can override things,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can put arbitrary code there, right. But the expectation is that you won’t put completely arbitrary code

⏹️ ▶️ John that manipulates your model, like in some background thread, right? Or you won’t, you know, UI only has

⏹️ ▶️ John to be from the main thread. I forget if that’s enforced now or, but like there’s lots of things that the framework is designed

⏹️ ▶️ John with this kind of practice in mind. You have to know those. And once you know those, it will guide you towards sane

⏹️ ▶️ John ideas. And then you can go up, build on top of that and come up with your own philosophy of how you want to divide things up. So you may decide if you want to do

⏹️ ▶️ John RxSwift or any other sort of weird things, but you’re not starting from zero, like we were back in the web 1.0

⏹️ ▶️ John days where there were no frameworks, there was no anything, it’s just like you and a blank page, go.

⏹️ ▶️ John You have a framework and there is absolutely a philosophy behind the framework. Sometimes the philosophy changes from library

⏹️ ▶️ John to library, by the way. Like the VDSP philosophy is very different from like the UI

⏹️ ▶️ John window philosophy is very different from the NS table view philosophy. So there is a lot to know, but

⏹️ ▶️ John once you know that, you can write a reasonable program and you will be able to answer intelligently

⏹️ ▶️ John the questions at an interview or whatever. So that’s my suggestion.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I completely agree with you there. One of the wisest things I’ve ever been told, which was in the context

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of iOS development, but I think it’s applicable basically everywhere, is my friend Jamie once told me,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t fight the frameworks. And that probably wasn’t an original invention of his, but it was the first time I’d heard it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think that’s absolutely true. And that’s what you’re saying, John. And the other thing I would say to build upon that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, even if you end up coming up with some bananas weird way to write your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, let’s say RxSwift or something like that, then what I would recommend

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is knowing what the trade-offs are. Because even if you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand every possible way of architecting an app, if you understand

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the quote-unquote normal way of doing it, the MVC way of doing it, and even if you have your own pet way

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of doing it, as long as you can articulate what the reasons are,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the advantages and disadvantages are of that particular way of writing an app, then that will

⏹️ ▶️ Casey go quite far, or at least in my eyes, that would go quite far in an interview. You can come in and show me some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sample code and I can look at it and be really and truly disgusted. But if you tell me, well, this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is why I did what I did and do so intelligently, then that’s okay.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then I can work with this. this, you know?

#askatp: Wheel size

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, Nathan Miller asks, hey, I’m shopping for a new car, which happens to be an Audi A6, and I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the choice of 1920 or 21-inch wheels. What’s the consideration? Why does it matter?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it matters because it can dramatically change a couple of things.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey One, how the car handles, and two, perhaps even more so, how it behaves

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in terms of compliance and how cushy it is. And typically, the bigger the wheel, the less sidewall

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the less cushy it is. And additionally, to some degree,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bigger the wheel, the better it handles. It’s not exactly one-to-one, but that’s often the case

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from what I’ve understood. But if it were me, if I was looking between 1920 or 21-inch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wheels, I would just look at whatever I thought was prettiest and go with that because I’m super vain. Marco, what’s your thoughts?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you covered it well. My decision is a little bit different. So for me, I live in the Northeast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we have winter, which means our roads are filled with potholes. And so we have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge risk here of rim damage and an unpleasant ride quality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t have a lot of tire to protect you. So the best option when you live somewhere with weather

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to get the smallest wheel they offer because that means they’re going to fill the rest of the space with tire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you will have a nice cushy ride and anything else you’re asking for trouble. Now Nathan, according

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to his Twitter bio, lives in North Carolina. That’s a lot more temperate. they still have weather, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it’s more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the hurricane

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey sort. Yeah, that’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not so much the pothole sort. So it might not matter as much there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know what the road conditions are like, but when you don’t have winter, it matters a lot less. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe go somewhere in the middle there. But I usually find the absolute biggest ones with the skinniest tires,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually don’t care for that look a lot of the time. It’s a little too in your face.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So even if I lived somewhere pleasant that didn’t have winter. I would probably, if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my choices were 19, 20, 21, I’d probably go 20 and not 21. But definitely if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you live somewhere with winter, go to the smallest.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, and I should also add that generally speaking, replacing a smaller

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tire, which implies a smaller wheel is also going to be cheaper. So replacing a 21 inch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tire is probably going to be a lot more expensive than replacing a 19 inch tire. But anyway, John, what are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your thoughts?

⏹️ ▶️ John So on my Accords that I’ve been buying for many years now, they’ve been making the wheels bigger slowly too. Of

⏹️ ▶️ John course, all car lines, like big wheels or bigger wheels have always trickled down from

⏹️ ▶️ John the expensive brands to the regular ones. So I forget what size my current ones are. Maybe 17 or 18 inches,

⏹️ ▶️ John whereas my first Accords are like 15 inch. So they’re getting bigger. And

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re at the point now where, I mean, I think my wheels, if they’re 18s, are smaller than

⏹️ ▶️ John any of these choices. But still, because I live in Massachusetts and live in New England and just the roads

⏹️ ▶️ John are destroyed here. I dented a rim on a pothole like two weeks after I got my car.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it was expensive to replace because it’s a big wheel. So I would

⏹️ ▶️ John strongly urge you, if you live anywhere with lots of potholes, to

⏹️ ▶️ John not get the low profile wheels. Now, my North Carolina advice is still not

⏹️ ▶️ John to get the 21 inch for sure and to think twice about the 20. Because this is where we get into the one where absolute

⏹️ ▶️ John values matter. not three sizes, right? 19 is already a big wheel. 20

⏹️ ▶️ John is huge and 21 is ridiculous. And unless the wheel archers are gigantic, there’s not much room for tire

⏹️ ▶️ John in there. The ride quality over even reasonably okay roads

⏹️ ▶️ John is not going to be that great if the sidewall, if the rubber part of your tire looked at from the sides of them, they say the sidewall

⏹️ ▶️ John is what we’re talking about. If that’s like an inch and a half at high speed, it’s you might as well be

⏹️ ▶️ John running on your rims. Like if you hit the smallest bump, unless your suspension is really, really good at

⏹️ ▶️ John quickly accounting for small motions, you’re going to feel that up through the car and you don’t want to. And you’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John racing. It’s an A6. It’s not a race car. It comes with an automatic. It’s not even an automated

⏹️ ▶️ John manual. Get the 19s. Unless they’re super ugly, to Casey’s point about being

⏹️ ▶️ John vain, there’s no advantage of 20 or 21 that you’re going to get

⏹️ ▶️ John that makes up for the ride quality difference. Now, that said, there are some car models that

⏹️ ▶️ John I read reviews of and people were like, we tried the big wheels and we were shocked at how not awful

⏹️ ▶️ John they were. So depending on the suspension technology, there are a lot of fancy suspension technologies that

⏹️ ▶️ John actually are very good for that first inch or so of travel of being very compliant

⏹️ ▶️ John and absorbing that quickly before firming up a little bit, either with a two-stage damper or with those magnetic things

⏹️ ▶️ John where they get stiffer according to electrical impulses. There’s all sorts of technology you can use to give a car

⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t wallow in turns but is also very good at absorbing small bumps. And in those cars, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John you can get away with a slightly bigger wheel if you think it looks really good. So, you know, my

⏹️ ▶️ John advice is to test drive, like decide how much you care about the different wheel choices and how much you care about how it looks. And if you

⏹️ ▶️ John really do think the 20 or the 21 inch looks so much better than the 19 that you really want to try them out, test

⏹️ ▶️ John drive them on real roads at reasonable speeds and compare it to the 19.

⏹️ ▶️ John Most people’s butts will prefer the 19 in those cases, but, you know, try it and find out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Lidode, and Casper. and we’ll talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Marco week.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cause it was accidental, oh it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. John didn’t do any research, Margo and

⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-a-r-c-o-a-r-m The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anti-Marco Armen S-i-r-a-c-u-s-a-c-ra-cusa

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental They

⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t mean to accidentally

⏹️ ▶️ John Tech Podcasts, so long

Misdirected email

⏹️ ▶️ John Can I talk about people who don’t know their email address? Because I have to show material. Sure. All right.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is a concern that has plagued me for many, many years, and we had some

⏹️ ▶️ John feedback about it too. And it’s, this wasn’t really a question. There’s no question

⏹️ ▶️ John here. It’s just another person complaining about a thing. I don’t understand how

⏹️ ▶️ John this will ever be resolved. Mike McGuigan, we’re going

⏹️ ▶️ John to go with that pronunciation? McGuigan. McGuigan. writes in

⏹️ ▶️ John because he has most recently discovered that dots are ignored in Gmail email

⏹️ ▶️ John addresses. The thing that most people, tech nerds know, but it has consequences that are surprisingly

⏹️ ▶️ John far reaching. So if you do john.smith at gmail.com is exactly the same as johnsmith at gmail.com.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s exactly the same as j.o.h.n.s. You know, like the dots are ignored.

⏹️ ▶️ John Those all look like different email addresses to people, but to Google they do not look

⏹️ ▶️ John different. And this is relevant because it’s kind of like a hash bucket problem

⏹️ ▶️ John where there are many many many email addresses that all land in the same hash bucket and all land in the same like

⏹️ ▶️ John gmail inbox. And the problem with people not knowing their

⏹️ ▶️ John email address is if someone thinks that their email address is john.smith but your

⏹️ ▶️ John email address you think is johnsmith, you’re going to get all their email because they’re going to type john.smith

⏹️ ▶️ John at gmail.com and the email is going to go to you. And this happens

⏹️ ▶️ John very frequently with people who have common names for email addresses. It also happens frequently, I can tell you this from experience, with people

⏹️ ▶️ John who have short email addresses. One of my email addresses is only three characters long. And

⏹️ ▶️ John if you make one typo, it’s easy to go from your three letter email address to my three letter email address,

⏹️ ▶️ John and now I’m getting all your mail. I do a thing in one of the slacks that we’re all in, where

⏹️ ▶️ John I post my misdirected email of the day. Because every day I get someone else’s email. Occasionally they’re funny

⏹️ ▶️ John or interesting or whatever. I don’t want to post them for the world to see, but to a small slack, I want to show people the funny emails that I’m getting. But

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an epidemic. And the reason it’s unresolvable is because you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John tell the poor person whose email you’re getting about it. You can’t tell them, I just got your tax return. You can’t tell them,

⏹️ ▶️ John I just got an eviction notice. You can’t tell them, I just got sexy pictures from your girlfriend. You can’t tell

⏹️ ▶️ John them, your bill is overdue. You can’t tell them anything, because who do you tell? You don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey their email

⏹️ ▶️ John address, because they think their email address is your email address. They open accounts under your email address. They

⏹️ ▶️ John like to register, in my experience, lots of people like to register for dating sites. It’s surprising the number of people like to register

⏹️ ▶️ John for dating sites. Job things, like sign up here and we’ll tell you when there’s like temp work available. People obviously

⏹️ ▶️ John looking for jobs repeatedly sign up to job sites. This is a case where you can do something.

⏹️ ▶️ John I used to feel bad about it, but I don’t anymore. When you sign up for an account on a legit site

⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re trying to do something, you’re trying to make a hotel reservation, get a job,

⏹️ ▶️ John go on a dating website, sign up for some service or whatever. I can’t contact you because

⏹️ ▶️ John again I have no idea what your email address is because you think your email address is mine. But what I can do is log into

⏹️ ▶️ John your account. How can I log into your account? How do I know your password? I just say forgot password and it emails

⏹️ ▶️ John me a link so I can log in. And I go into that account and I either change

⏹️ ▶️ John the password to this person does not know their email address, this person does not know their email address dot com

⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that. Or I just close the account. I close it up, right? Then the person will register it

⏹️ ▶️ John again, and I’ll close it again, and eventually they’ll get the picture. Like, huh, every time I register for an account,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t get any email, but then in a second I can’t log in because I changed their email, changed their

⏹️ ▶️ John password to something else, and then I close down their account. Some sites, this is where I learned the whole

⏹️ ▶️ John menagerie, the zoo of websites out there. Some sites will not let you change the email address associated with a website.

⏹️ ▶️ John Did you know that? I know that, because I’ll go to there, and I’ll say, change this email address, and it’s like, nope, sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll send a confirmation email. So then I try to use like Mailinator or whatever, like that service that lets you have like a spam

⏹️ ▶️ John email address, and they’ll reject Mailinator, because they’re like, oh, we won’t let you do that. I haven’t gone so far

⏹️ ▶️ John as to open new Gmail accounts so I can switch my email address to it, but I’ve come very close to it a few times.

⏹️ ▶️ John Many websites won’t let you close your account or delete it in any way, unless you call them on this phone or send them like a registered letter

⏹️ ▶️ John by Pony Express, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco screw

⏹️ ▶️ John that. It is an epidemic. And sometimes I’ve even gone so far as trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to discern what they think their name is, because I can see in their tax returns or in their eviction notice or whatever the hell email

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m getting and try to find who they are. But there’s just too much overlap. Like I’m not gonna email everybody

⏹️ ▶️ John who, you know, named John Smith and say, is this your email account? Is this your landlord?

⏹️ ▶️ John Is this your bill in Italian for party goods that you bought for a catered event

⏹️ ▶️ John six months ago? Is your daughter getting married? Is this your wedding registry? Do you pronounce it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Syracusa?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I get a lot of stuff in Italian, as you might imagine. Half of it I can’t read. I get attachments,

⏹️ ▶️ John I get spreadsheets, I get Word documents, I get PDFs, I get scans, I get photos,

⏹️ ▶️ John you name it, I get it. And it’s not just that my short email address is at all of them.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so having something where the dots don’t mean anything or the plus thing where you can add plus to the end,

⏹️ ▶️ John it just increases the service area of people getting other people’s email. So this is

⏹️ ▶️ John an idea for like a single serving site. could be like some way to

⏹️ ▶️ John put up information and say, I got someone else’s email. If you think this is your email, contact

⏹️ ▶️ John me. Like some sort of secure way to do that. I don’t know, no one would ever go to the website. The problem is these people don’t know their own email addresses,

⏹️ ▶️ John so they’re never gonna come there. Like the people who make legit typos you hear from once, the people who just do not know

⏹️ ▶️ John their email address, that’s where you get the bad one. And the final thing that factors into this besides the dots

⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple, in their infinite wisdom, has had many domains for their

⏹️ ▶️ John email addresses. They’ve had, let’s go, mac.com, me.com, icloud.com,

⏹️ ▶️ John and of course the employees have apple.com. Am I missing one in there?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think there’s others, but I

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t think of them. Yeah, anyway, all of those tend to lead to the same email address.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I always use the domain that I registered with, but other people use newer ones, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the same email address. If it’s johnsmith at mac.com is the same as johnsmith at me.com is the same is

⏹️ ▶️ John johnsmith at iCloud.com, which is not the same as johnsmith at Apple.com. So it just

⏹️ ▶️ John makes it worse. And I’m tired of getting other people’s email. And so is Mike, he’s tired of it too.

⏹️ ▶️ John I have no solution. Oh, he actually ran into someone trying to create an Apple ID

⏹️ ▶️ John with with his email address. And apparently the Apple ID registration will let you register the Apple ID, but then you get the other person’s

⏹️ ▶️ John email and they had to sort it out with Apple. And it’s just, it was a case where the account

⏹️ ▶️ John accounts cared about the difference, but the mail servers didn’t care about the difference. That’s how he describes

⏹️ ▶️ John it. Anyways, it just sounds like an incredible nightmare. And I don’t know anything that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John ever going to fix this. All I hope every day is that my misdirected email is at least entertaining and that I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John feel bad if it’s not like someone’s notice about like. They’re lost child in the mall and now they can’t find

⏹️ ▶️ John them because I’m the only one who got the email about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you know, it’s also interesting that last I looked and this may not be true anymore,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m pretty sure it’s true. With Gmail, you can put a plus sign and put whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey garbage you want after that and it’ll be ignored. So one of my favorite pastimes, which I haven’t done in a long time,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but one of my favorite pastimes used to be to sign up for a new service where I was fairly confident

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I was probably going to get my email address sold. And so, you know, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would use like KC List plus, I don’t know, spam, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, just name of spam company here at gmail.com. And so then as I see

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the spam coming in, not to Casey lists at gmail.com or whatever my email address was back

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then, but it would be, you know, Casey lists plus some spam service at gmail.com. And I would be like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I see you some spam service. I know you’re selling my information. I know it’s you. I know.

⏹️ ▶️ John And uh, you can’t do anything about information anyway. Yeah. That was the plus thing I was talking about, which, which long predates gmail. The plus

⏹️ ▶️ John thing is I forgot who did it first, but it

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It was like, oh, is that right?

⏹️ ▶️ John It might’ve been a feature of like the send mail back in the day, or like, it’s a very

⏹️ ▶️ John old thing. And I’ve never had the energy to try to do that because honestly, I just assume everyone’s giving out

⏹️ ▶️ John my email address everywhere. And even if I did find out a specific site gave away my email, it’s like, what am I

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do about it? Am I gonna not use that site or am I gonna complain to them?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just- I just wanna know,

⏹️ ▶️ John John. I just wanna know. Anyway, just all that means is that there’s more ways for you to get misdirected

⏹️ ▶️ John email. Do you too get misdirected email to the degree I do? Or do you like magically spam filtered it as just

⏹️ ▶️ John not bother you?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, I don’t get very much misdirected email for my actual email address.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, I have held Casey at VT dot edu

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for like 15 years and there is a Casey Johnson somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the world. I believe that’s their name. And they love to sign up for all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorts of stuff with my old Virginia tech email. and that happens constantly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I almost never take any action on it whatsoever.

⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t log in as them and see what’s going on, close their account, change their email address?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I just ignore it and delete it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I love it when there’s like a notes field and I can put in, hello, this person does not know their email address. Is this you?

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t change it back to, and I put my actual email address in there, because that’s not your email address, it’s mine.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like I like when I can send them messages if I have lots of room in the box, I will say, do not change this back to what it was because it’s not your

⏹️ ▶️ John email address at gmail.com.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What about you, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, never.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In that instance. I just, yeah, sorry, I don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John fine. Is Marco really that rare of a name? That’s pretty surprising.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, like marco.org is the domain. First, I don’t use Gmail, so I think that takes care of a lot of it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I suppose. Yeah, I’m thinking you’d get lots of fake mail, like people saying Marco at marco.org,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is a real email address, but they might put in, it’s just like, oh, I got to put a fake thing and my name is Marco. Marco.org.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I occasionally will get something like that, but it’s very rare. Usually people who email that address, which is not really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my address, but it’ll sometimes get through. There are usually people who are trying to reach me and just are guessing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s my email address and it’s never anything

⏹️ ▶️ John good. Yeah, the thing that shocks me the most about the misdirected email is every time I get a misdirected

⏹️ ▶️ John email in Italian, I market a spam and this is one thing that Gmail can’t learn is that I don’t speak

⏹️ ▶️ John any language except for English. Like every time I get any email that the entire body of the text

⏹️ ▶️ John is in a non-English language, Google knows, Google offers to translate it. I mark it as spam and yet the

⏹️ ▶️ John Italian ones come in and it’s like this is an important email that you probably want to see. Really, is it? Do you think someone’s writing to me in

⏹️ ▶️ John Italian? Because I can’t speak Italian,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t read it. I mean maybe they’re thinking if you get enough emails in Italian, eventually you’ll learn Italian.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna learn

⏹️ ▶️ John Italian, yeah. I mostly learn, I think mostly what I get in Italian emails is

⏹️ ▶️ John invoices. Like things that people have purchased and I go through the item. Sometimes I want to ask the teacher,

⏹️ ▶️ John what are they buying? What is this? Are these human organs? Are these like, is this illegal drugs?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what all these people are buying.