668: So Happy for All Parties Involved
04 Dec 2025Christmas came early this year.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco has a new toy
- Follow-up:
- Everybody is leaving Apple
- Cloudflare’s 18 November Outage
- Ask ATP:
- Why can’t Siri pronounce names correctly? (via Tony West)
serra queue sah- Siri, what’s my full name
- Why can’t Siri pronounce names correctly? (via Tony West)
- Post-show:
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Apple 🤝 Intel?
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- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code atp.
- Aura Frames: Frames for every memory, gifts for every occasion.
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Chapters
- New TV
- Decoding Vision Pro seal sizes
- JPEG-XL in Chrome
- Apple Podcasts chapter links
- Sponsor: Aura Frames (code ATP)
- John Giannandrea’s out
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Alan Dye’s out
- Cloudflare [was] out
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- #askatp: Siri name pronunciation
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Cases and bagels
New TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, I had to get a new TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh Why did you have to get a new TV?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What did the other one break my family forced me to get a new TV on account of what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so You know this this is my my old LG C7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OLED that we’ve had for you know since 2017 when it came out Throughout kovat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we played a lot of Minecraft on this TV And so it has for five years had the Minecraft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hearts HUD burned into the bottom The bottom corner quarter of it or so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so you know every time there’s like a gray scene you see like this outline of this row of hearts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a few other things anyway so you know that that burn in area has shifted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into greater intensity I would say over time and then what ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has during my family crazy recently is that in the middle of the screen now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it starts to develop what appears to be a large green splotch. which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, is that just like, like maybe like the blue sub pixels wearing out or something
⏹️ ▶️ John that just might be something breaking. Like you’re not watching something that has a big splotch there, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it isn’t pure green pixels. It’s like, like the hue is shifting green for the content being displayed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the middle of the TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that sounds like something different than regular. But all of us like the green, the green sub pixels tend to wear
⏹️ ▶️ John out and become apparent that they’re wearing out faster, but I don’t understand the blotch. That doesn’t make any sense to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like, and so it had grown into about the middle 30%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the TV where like everything that was being watched on it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, just slowly turning green and yellow and it was just getting really ugly and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John very distracting. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it’s time for new TV. Yeah, so it’s like, all right, so my family was finally like, just please, can we please get a new TV?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Black Friday took advantage, got the LG G5 to replace it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you get it yet? I did. So it came, came last night. I got it. I set it up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today and immediately ran into a solvable problem, but a problem nonetheless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look at the box. Where’s the feet?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I should have told you. Yeah. They want you to wall mount a G5. Yeah. They don’t come with feet. Oh, interesting. The
⏹️ ▶️ John G, the G whatever series is always like, you’re going to wall mount this, right? Occasionally they have had an option
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can get a stand during some years, but I think this is not a stand year and it doesn’t matter because their stands usually suck. anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so anyway, it turns out my preview, my outgoing TV, I had mounted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on VESA feet. At some point we had a sound bar that was too tall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was, and when using the TV’s regular feet, the sound bar would intrude into the TV. Because John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know you love when people do that. And so, at some point a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple years back I had bought VESA feet to lift it up a little bit higher and so I just took
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those off, put them on the back of the LG, oh, gotta go buy some screws because different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size screws on the… Different size, like different depth you mean? No, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the VESA compatible screws on the LG are like only like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like the high up section, like the high up in the middle section, but down low where the feet have to attach,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they actually use smaller screws. But fortunately, Chad GPT came to my rescue. I did not verify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything it said. I took exactly what it said and I went right to the hardware and I said, can I have some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M4 screws, please? Got some screws, came back, screwed it in, totally fine. So thank you, ChachiPT.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No thank you to LG for not including feet, but problem solved. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a new TV and now I have all sorts of settings to investigate and tweak over the next few weeks.
Decoding Vision Pro seal sizes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow up. And I am loving that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suddenly I am not the only person putting Vision Pro related things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the show notes. And instead, it’s John or maybe it’s Marco and I will fall over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco definitely not me. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s john who put something in the show notes. john apparently you have been pontificating and thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because like I said, in my briefing with Apple, I talking about light seal fitting things or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John and they mentioned that the sizing, like the letter
⏹️ ▶️ John number codes for the various light shields are intentionally obscured to not make people feel self-conscious
⏹️ ▶️ John about the shape of their face or head. And I thought that was interesting. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently someone on Reddit has, of course, decoded what those letters and numbers mean. Again, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John basically just a lookup table, but someone has basically brute-forested and figured out what it means.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so with that in mind avalanche on reddit says after a lot of reading and experimenting especially with Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vision Pro size help tool I realize that most people have it slightly wrong and then John has taken the liberty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of summarizing what avalanche said Which I will read thusly The first digit refers to how far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forward your forehead in cheeks protrude relative to one another The second digit refers to how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deep the light seal is likely relative to your cheek position not your forehead If so, this is causing a lot of confusion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since most photos are taken from above W slash N refers to wide or narrow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey faces. W adds a couple of millimeters of width at the temples. W plus and N plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey light seal cushions don’t actually add any extra cushioning, only extra depth.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there you have it. Like I said, the wide and narrow is the only one that makes any sense. The other number, it looks like a single number, like 23,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s actually a two and a three. And yeah, you can kind of understand why they didn’t want to like say, you’re a big
⏹️ ▶️ John forehead person or something, right? They just find the one that fits you. And I still continue to think
⏹️ ▶️ John that maybe a narrow to work better on me. And again, I recommend if anyone ever actually buys one of these things, as opposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to just borrowing from Casey, go to the Apple store, try on a bunch, like try on jeans, like go to the fitting room,
⏹️ ▶️ John try them on. It’s expensive. You should figure out which size actually fits you well
JPEG-XL in Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so there’s also news that JPEG XL lives. Colin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Allen writes us, because of the PDF standard is adopting JPEG XL to support HDR images, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chromium maintainers have changed course and now are going to implement JPEG XL in the browser. And they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it by integrating JXL-RS. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John we were all excited about JPEG XL and Apple support for it, but then kind of cold water got poured on it by
⏹️ ▶️ John Google saying, eh, we looked at it and we kind of liked the format that we’re using. What were they using, AVI-F or something? I forget.
⏹️ ▶️ John they had another image format that they liked better. And they’re like, well, we’re not gonna support it in Chrome. And that’s basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the kiss of death for a new image format of Chrome decides not to support it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thankfully, the PDF standard is dragging. Google kicking and screaming to support JPEG XL.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I look forward to the day when we can use this format because as we discussed on a past episode, has lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of advantages over today’s JPEG or today’s PNG or other formats that we use for images these days.
Apple Podcasts chapter links
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then digging back a little deeper with regard to chapter links within Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast app. Stephen Robles was on the talk show recently. I haven’t had the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to listen yet, but it is almost next on my queue. And Stephen mentioned that Apple podcast shows links for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chapters that link to some external URL only if those links are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Apple services such as Apple books, Apple music, classical, Apple maps, Apple music, Apple news, Apple podcast, Apple sports stocks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple TV, and Shazam. Stephen says that this is true of chapters embedded in the MP3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or using the podcast colon chapters tag in the RSS feed. And we will link to some documentation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is not great. I don’t love that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was trying to figure this out. So first of all, there’s some nuance to what he’s saying. When you add a chapter marker to
⏹️ ▶️ John a podcast, you know, obviously it exists at a timestamp and you give the chapter a text name,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can also make that text name be a link to somewhere. Like if you look
⏹️ ▶️ John in overcast, we frequently do this with sponsors. If you look in overcast at the the chapters in ATP, you’ll see like, you know, sponsored
⏹️ ▶️ John by blah, blah, blah. And that will be a link that you can tap that will take you to, you know, the sponsor webpage
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. But you can make any chapter title also be a link that you can tap. That’s what he’s talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about here. Not like links to a part in the podcast. You can always jump to the chapters or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s podcast app does support that. Although I had a hell of a time finding where the chapters are hidden in the Apple podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John app because again, I don’t use it normally. So I just launched it to confirm all this. And I’m like, where are the chapters buried?
⏹️ ▶️ John I could see them in like the timeline where it puts little segments in, but like, where are these chapters list? It’s there, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John at the top of the screen, there’s like a downward facing chevron and it exposes the chapters. Anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ John loaded up one of our episodes that I know has links in some of the chapter names because
⏹️ ▶️ John I can see them in Overcast. And sure enough, those links were entirely invisible, not shown at all in Apple Podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now I haven’t confirmed the other side of this, although I trust Steven Robles to get this right. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ John we ever have linked to an Apple property, would it then show the link? I
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t seen that myself, but Steven says he has seen it. And this seems just terrible. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey why do this?
⏹️ ▶️ John But whose terrible idea is this? Like, if you’re gonna support chapters, support
⏹️ ▶️ John all the features that chapters support. And don’t, and if so, like, maybe they didn’t support links at all. That would be bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John but at least it would be consistent and uniform. But to say, we’re gonna support links in chapter titles,
⏹️ ▶️ John but only if they link to some Apple stuff, and that is some terrible, like, Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John or modern day Apple App Store BS. And you may be thinking, well, they’re just looking
⏹️ ▶️ John out for our security, which is the thing that Apple always says when they don’t want to provide third parties the ability to do
⏹️ ▶️ John something they can do. Because you know, you could put malicious links in podcast chapter links,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we don’t want people tapping on those and going somewhere. And it’s just a fun coincidence that there was a
⏹️ ▶️ John story in the news recently about the Apple podcast app could be enabling malicious content delivery
⏹️ ▶️ John and how by weird links inside the title. I don’t know, okay, you got to read this because it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John confusing. I didn’t actually confirm this one manually for what I hope are obvious reasons, but it’s really weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So reading from Mac Rumors, which I think most of their information is based on 404 Media,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey security researchers have identified suspicious activity in Apple’s podcast app that could be used to deliver malicious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey content to users based on a report by 404 Media’s Joseph Cox. Cox’s report describes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some odd experiences with the podcast app that certainly suggests something untoward is going on across both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS and macOS versions. He says that over recent months, the app has automatically launched and displayed unusual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcasts without his input. On Mac and iPhone, the app has opened religion, spirituality, and education
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcasts for no apparent reason, in some cases even launching themselves to the moment Cox unlocked his device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The podcasts in question often feature strange titles containing code fragments, URLs, and in some cases, attempts at cross-site
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scripting attacks.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the idea that it’s like, okay, we don’t want to show arbitrary links, we only want to show links to Apple properties because
⏹️ ▶️ John there would never be any problems with Apple podcasts and links, and lo and behold, these stories specifically about
⏹️ ▶️ John weird links. Now maybe you could say this is confirming, say this is what Apple’s trying to protect you from. Well, it’s clear that Apple is not
⏹️ ▶️ John doing a good job of protecting us from this already. I don’t think the biggest danger
⏹️ ▶️ John to, again, like what are they gonna do, change Safari so you can only link to Apple properties? So we don’t want people
⏹️ ▶️ John going to a webpage, there could be links to anywhere on that webpage. We can’t allow that. Apple, please,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re going to support chapter links, just support them all. Don’t do like URL
⏹️ ▶️ John detection and say, we would show this link, but it’s not a link to Apple Books or Apple Music Classical or Maps or Music
⏹️ ▶️ John or News or Apple Podcasts or Shazam or Apple TV or stuff. Like the amount of work it requires
⏹️ ▶️ John to implement that is just, what a terrible policy. I mean, again, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all mostly isolated from the Apple Podcasts as in the app world here because we’re Overcast users
⏹️ ▶️ John and most of our listeners are as well. Apple Podcasts has improved tremendously in recent years due to what we presume to be competition
⏹️ ▶️ John from Spotify and other companies, but this chapter’s implementation is not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, Overcast has supported links since day one, and chapter links since day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, that it supported chapters, which was pretty early. I think it was a first year feature. And I’ve never heard of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being used in a way that would suggest that there is that, like these are somehow any more dangerous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the web, which we know how to deal with that. And what these links
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, are links to web pages. Like they open up in the browser or in the in-app browser.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, I’m not entirely sure why there be any kind of like meaningful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco security angle to restricting the links in the podcast app. I do see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, like, I think what they’re trying to do with the like, you know, linking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Apple properties thing, that seems like they’re working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, you know, they mentioned this in the automatic chapterization thing from about a month ago. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned that like, they will start detecting when people are talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another podcast, and they will automatically put in a chapter link to Apple Podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that podcast. So it sounds like maybe something that’s made for cross-promotion,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which again, actually, I had this idea for Overcast at the very beginning. And ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since the very beginning, Overcast has maintained a database index
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on certain variations and normalizations of podcast page and episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco URLs, figuring that at some point maybe I would add this feature, but it just honestly never came up. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one ever has asked for this and there’s been a million things that have been more important than that, so I’ve never really gotten to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it seems like it’s part of the same effort by Apple of like they’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add cross promotion, you know, abilities to both transcripts and to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, chapter links. I assume that there is some kind of big publishers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like pushing them to do this, but I haven’t heard of anybody actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like trying to support this on the publishing side. So I don’t know, we’ll see how it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turns out. It also seems like if Apple is hoping for people to put in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like manually put in links to Apple properties only as their only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chapter link, that seems optimistic in the current environment. Not just tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts that are heavily into other apps like mine, but like if you’re a mass market podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you wanna do a chapter link to some other podcast, you gotta consider all your people on Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe on YouTube and like all these different platforms. Like if you’re gonna only publish one link, it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be to like your own site where you would redirect people to whatever client they wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use, not linking directly to like the Apple podcast page for your show. So I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, we’ll see where this goes, but it is interesting, like they’re doing a lot around this area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of a sudden. And so I’m curious to see how it goes. And I’m kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hoping that small apps like mine don’t get stomped out in the process of Apple fighting with everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else, you know, all the big players. We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was talking to Stephen about this and I’m asked to try to confirm it because I was like, do you have documentation on this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this just something you experienced? We’ll link to the Apple docs, the link that he gave me. If you read it,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it doesn’t really take great pains to point out. It’s like, here’s where you can put, you know, links to,
⏹️ ▶️ John timed links, they called them or whatever. And you can do them in the RSS feed with the podcast chapter tag. You can embed them in the ID3 tag,
⏹️ ▶️ John although they don’t mention that, but Steven confirmed this also happens to the ones embedded in the MP3. You can put them in the
⏹️ ▶️ John episode description with timestamps and all this stuff, right? And they do say when you provide links
⏹️ ▶️ John in your episodes to Apple services, we’ll link them, right? But it doesn’t say if you provide links that are not to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John services, we won’t link them. Like it’s all very sunny and like, look at this great stuff you can do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it just seems bizarre to me that they would do this sort of self-serving
⏹️ ▶️ John only links to Apple properties thing and sort of weasely hide from it by not
⏹️ ▶️ John straight out saying that’s what they’re doing. And I would imagine that most of the links that people want to put on
⏹️ ▶️ John chapter things are links to the thing they’re talking about in that chapter, whatever that is,
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably it’s like some web, you know, that you’re talking about a story in the New York times, you’re talking about a website, you’re talking like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing, you know, and then also on any chapter that is a sponsor for people who do chapters for sponsors,
⏹️ ▶️ John surely you want your like link to that sponsor that lets the people know you you heard about it
⏹️ ▶️ John on whatever, like very often you have those links. How many times is someone
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna make a chapter link and link to an Apple property? Unless you’re a podcast that talks about shows
⏹️ ▶️ John on Apple TV. Like, you mentioned, linking to Apple things when they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John another podcast. Would you link to Apple podcast? I actually think that’s maybe something you would do because the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple podcast app is actually pretty popular. And maybe it’s a toss up if you link to there or Spotify, YouTube or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like Apple music, I don’t think people’s first instinct would be, I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John link to a song in the streaming service, and of course it’s gonna be an Apple Music link. Unless you’re an Apple-focused podcast, you’re probably gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John go with Spotify, or at least something that’s cross, well, Apple uses cross platform too, but I don’t know how many people
⏹️ ▶️ John outside the Apple ecosystem actually use it. Anyway, it’s just bizarre. It’s just like a wrong-headed,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s like, I say it’s wrong-headed, but companies have shown that if you are successful in other ways, you can afford
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this. For example, Instagram not allowing you to link anywhere ever, and just people becoming accustomed
⏹️ ▶️ John to, you know, That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the surprising. That’s actually the topic. And probably it’s not surprisingly, I think this is how the topic came up.
⏹️ ▶️ John The topic that lends the title to the episode of the talk show that Stephen Robles was on is Lincoln
⏹️ ▶️ John bio. That, that phrase that young children know, but that old people think is like the worst thing
⏹️ ▶️ John ever. The idea that someone would, you know, have an online service that essentially forbids
⏹️ ▶️ John links anywhere. And all these insane workarounds of having like a landing page and these companies that will bank
⏹️ ▶️ John your landing page for you. So if they want to see the thing you’re talking about in Instagram, link
⏹️ ▶️ John in bio, which means go to the bio for the account that put this thing in. And then we have a link to a page that shows
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual links to our last 27 posts. And it’s just insanity. Like, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re worried about security, if they’re worried about like, if this bug seems like maybe people are putting like a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John URL schemes in there that launch apps and stuff like that, just only allow HTTP and HTTPS, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not, this is a solvable problem. I’m surprisingly upset by this. It’s the thing that doesn’t affect me at all
⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t use Apple Podcasts, but it’s like one of these cases where Apple is being sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John cartoonishly stupid or evil in such an obscure little corner. It’s like, why are you bothering? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John this, how many podcasts even have chapters and yet they’re doing this? Maybe it’s a mistake, maybe it’s a bug,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the fact that it’s sort of kind of documented makes me think it’s intended behavior and it’s a bad idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think it’s them trying to like being evil or I think it’s them being a little naive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe optimistic. I just, I don’t see like, you know, I just like publishers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are like, don’t use chapters at all. And they never have like in large quantities.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in the world right now of DAI with injecting podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with ads at download time by all these ad providers that everyone’s using and you know, like in this world,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea of of adding more metadata into the podcast that is timestamp specific
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just doesn’t happen. Because again, whenever publishers insert ads of different lengths, the timestamps all shift around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the software that they’re doing that with has to be made to support chapters and to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shift the timestamps accordingly when they insert and remove ads. And none of the software does that because none of them care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all about that kind of experience. I mean, these publishers, they don’t even really, they hardly even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use meaningful show notes. Like to give you some idea, the metadata
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side of big podcasts has always been pretty weak and pretty neglected.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we have lots of capabilities that most shows just never use. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know why Apple is putting all this effort into this now. Again, maybe there’s some other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco piece that has yet to drop
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it doesn’t make any sense. It’s not some massive PowerPoint. Now we have this lever, let’s use it. The lever of messing
⏹️ ▶️ John with chapters that are on 0.001% of all podcasts. Like great, good job. Like what do you think that’s buying you? You’re angering a small, tiny, tiny group
⏹️ ▶️ John of people who are super into podcasts and everyone else doesn’t care and will never notice this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and if they wanted to do it as more of like an Apple enhancement, kind of lock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, like, you know, yes, keep it all in our ecosystem. The time to do that would have been like six years ago, like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, back before Spotify really got big into podcasts. And, you know, when Apple really was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number one by a much wider margin. And that is not the case recently though.
⏹️ ▶️ John They do have a little bit of mind sharing this. I recently ran into, I was messing with stuff on threads and someone pointed out to me, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John Threads allows you to, if you have a Threads account for a podcast and we have a Threads ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John account, you can link to your podcast. And this feature is rolling out and I had it, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, put the URL of your podcast in here. And I could not tell what it wanted. I’m like, does it want
⏹️ ▶️ John the URL of the RSS feed for the podcast? Does it want the URL of the website for the podcast?
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you put any of those things in, it gave like an obscure error message or just did nothing and said invalid.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or I forget what it said, but it wasn’t, eventually I figured it out. You know what I wanted me to put there? The Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast URL. That’s the world that Apple thinks is living in. That the default way to link to a podcast is to give an
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple podcast URL as in, I forget what the domain name is, but it’s like the URL
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple hosts for a podcast. Which I guess brings up a webpage and will launch the Apple podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John app, but it is not the URL of the RSS feed. And it is not the URL of the website for the podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a link to Apple’s representation of its info that it has on that podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John in its podcast index, but you can’t put that URL into a podcast reader. Anyway, that’s what Threads
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted you to put in. And I think Apple believes that that’s what the world is like. When everyone links to music,
⏹️ ▶️ John of course they link to Apple Music. And if anyone links to a news story, they don’t link to the NewYorkTimes.com, they link to Apple News, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And podcasts are always Apple Podcast Links and so on and so forth. And that is not the real world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and there was a time when that was closer to the real world, but that time has passed
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John Giannandrea’s out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, there’s been some news over the last week, as there tends to be, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a departure from Apple that we need to talk about. Oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my God, oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that departure happened two days ago as we record
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco this. John G.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Andrea is retiring from Apple. I know, Marco, you’re super excited about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco This was the one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was not the surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reading from Apple Newsroom, John G. and Andrea, Apple Senior Vice President for Machine Learning AI strategy is stepping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down from his position will serve as an advisor to the company before retiring in the spring of 2026.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple also announced that renowned AI researcher Amar Subramanya has joined Apple as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vice president of AI reporting to Craig Federighi. Subramanya will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leading critical areas including Apple Foundation models, ML research and AI safety and evaluation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The balance of Gianandrea’s organization will shift to Sabir Khan and at EQ
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to, to, to align closer with similar organizations. The balance of his organization.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t like that phrasing at all. Anyway. Um, so yeah, this is news and apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this Amar person, uh, was at, uh, was, excuse me. He was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Google and then spent like a minute at Microsoft and is now going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple. So all sorts of musical chairs happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the story. Uh, It’s from the Times of India being excited about
⏹️ ▶️ John this new person who just joined Microsoft in July Of 2025 and here’s what he has to say about
⏹️ ▶️ John his first weeks, uh after joining Microsoft And yeah, he wasn’t there very long. I think he spent like 18 years at Google
⏹️ ▶️ John before that um so I just it’s difficult to get a read on what’s going on here, but it’s important to note
⏹️ ▶️ John that uh, Jg’s like portfolio of stuff. First of all was already cut down
⏹️ ▶️ John after the reorg after the whole, you know, siri apple intelligence disaster
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it’s now being split up even further amongst the people replacing him. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, this is when we talked about, you know, the reorg and or even just after W3C and things
⏹️ ▶️ John going badly, it’s like, well, when you are the person in charge of this,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, long suffering project that essentially fails to launch, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not good for your career. And sure enough, he got reorg out of that responsibility and the responsibility was given
⏹️ ▶️ John other people, but he was still at the company doing stuff. Um, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the, in the world we live in, if you are high
⏹️ ▶️ John enough up in a company, an important enough person, maybe you appear on stage, maybe you’re on like a, a leadership
⏹️ ▶️ John page, maybe you’re a vice president or a senior vice president, if you’re an important person at a company and you get all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of fancy stock options and a huge salary and a signing bonus, and they poach you from
⏹️ ▶️ John Google and you’re like, you’re a big, important person when you do not do do well at
⏹️ ▶️ John your job, you essentially get rewarded.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you, you get to leave
⏹️ ▶️ John dignity. Tim Cook says great things about you. We love what you did for the company.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thank you for all your service. If you’re lucky enough to be a CEO, maybe you get a golden parachute on your
⏹️ ▶️ John way out the door. You get a couple million bucks just for whatever. And it’s like, well, wait a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you succeeded, okay, maybe the higher ups get, you know, the, the, their success, they get the spoils. but if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do well, not that I’m saying he failed entirely, but if you have a high profile
⏹️ ▶️ John failure to do, essentially, the thing you were hired to do, if you were a lower level
⏹️ ▶️ John employee, you would not expect the CEO to put out a press release that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John we loved everything you did, thanks for all the help you gave. That’s just mind boggling.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s an unhealthy part of the corporate world, is that when you reach a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John level, you’re too big to fail. Uh, no matter what happens, they always
⏹️ ▶️ John say nice things about you and you always get money and you get a cushy landing and it should be
⏹️ ▶️ John the opposite. Like when you have all that money and all those stock options and you’re a bazillionaire and you
⏹️ ▶️ John get all this money to come to Apple and you fail at your job, your,
⏹️ ▶️ John the consequences should be more severe, not less because you were given, you were given
⏹️ ▶️ John much and much was expected of you and you still have all the stuff that was given, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think you also need, uh, uh, you know, a glowing kissy kissy review from
⏹️ ▶️ John the CEO on your way out the door, but that’s the way they do it. But it’s just like, well, of course we here in the upper
⏹️ ▶️ John echelon, uh, we’ll always preserve each other’s dignity. And we’ll, and I’m saying that you would need to trash
⏹️ ▶️ John them or anything like that, but it’s like, if you’re a medium to low level employee and you get bad performance reviews,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gone with no ceremony. And it’s like, it’s not, there’s no cushy,
⏹️ ▶️ John cushy landing. There’s no agreement amongst all the other people as your peers in the org charter of like, well, of course
⏹️ ▶️ John we want to make sure that no one ever thinks that he did a bad job in anything and everybody loves him. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m bitter from being in corporate America, but it’s like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John to give an AI analogy. If you’re, if you’re training AI models to try to figure out what’s, what’s a picture of a hot dog
⏹️ ▶️ John and one model, uh, keeps getting it wrong. But, uh, the model
⏹️ ▶️ John had rich parents and you’re like, well, but we’re going to add a a modifier to that model and we’re going to multiply its success
⏹️ ▶️ John by like, you know, uh, 50% higher. And so then when we figure out here are the top five models
⏹️ ▶️ John and all of our different training, the one that has rich parents is up there and it’s like, well, it didn’t do well, but it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s one of us, right? It’s one, it’s one of us. So like we gave it a little bump and it should be there anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t want to make it feel bad. It would be, it would be cruel, you know, to, if we said
⏹️ ▶️ John anything mean about that, like, that’s not how you find the best model for identifying hotdogs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this is essentially anti-competitive behavior at the top of organizations. I’m trying to be mean to JG. He
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like a nice person. His retirement, I’m sure, is well-deserved. And he was
⏹️ ▶️ John just not able to be successful in Apple. Doesn’t mean he’s a bad person or a bad employee. Just means it wasn’t a bad fit. What I’m complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John about is the culture of gentle landings and gentle talk
⏹️ ▶️ John and babying of people who have every advantage in the entire world. They don’t need the
⏹️ ▶️ John boosting from the CEO to go along with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, there is more to it than that, though. Like, first of all, a lot of times,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of golden parachute or contract is negotiated as part of the person’s hiring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the first place.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure the press release where they say you’re wonderful is part of that contract. But yeah, I know. That’s another
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco part of the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it could be. And then the other part of it is it is PR, too. Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the company, you don’t want the world to think you screwed up and made the wrong hire.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So and you don’t want the world to think that you cause this person to fail or this person couldn’t succeed in your company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is in everyone’s best interest that when you have somebody who’s high up enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s like press worthy when they leave or get fired, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s in all their best interests for the company to be like, we’re going to make this. We’re going to smooth out this PR.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re going to make this seem like this amicable transition. And we thank this person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much for their service. And here’s part of their part of their very soft, slow exit out of the company. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s all about softening the PR as well, because, you know, because you wouldn’t want the story to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple fires this bit, this AI guy, and we don’t know if he was fired, but, you know, you wouldn’t want the story to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Apple fires, an executive that they hired away from Google for a while because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his division wasn’t doing what they wanted or whatever. Like, that’s a bad story, not only on him, but on Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, maybe like at this level, maybe the person could even like sue the company for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disparagement or something. There’s all these like, when you get to that level.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m not saying you have to trash them. I just don’t think it needs to be that soft. And the idea that like, it’s a PR,
⏹️ ▶️ John like everybody knew as soon as the reorg was done. Like even when the way they phrased the reorg,
⏹️ ▶️ John no one’s fooled by this, especially people in the business world. They’re like, well, this guy didn’t perform what he
⏹️ ▶️ John was supposed to be doing. And so he got reorg-ed out of that responsibility. And then we all just started our stopwatches, right? because
⏹️ ▶️ John when an important person is re-argued out of their responsibility, it’s like, I guess they’re gonna be looking for a new job
⏹️ ▶️ John because of the indignity. The indignity of like, they’re so proud and they have so much dignity, it’s like, well, you hired me to
⏹️ ▶️ John do this thing and now you’ve decided I’m not gonna do it and you re-argue me away from my responsibility. Yeah, I’m still at the company, I’m still in charge
⏹️ ▶️ John of X, Y, and Z, but that’s it, I’m going elsewhere, right? Or I’m gonna retire or whatever, because they can’t. But
⏹️ ▶️ John during that time when their dignity’s injured and they’re either looking for a new job or organizing their retirement, they’re still
⏹️ ▶️ John getting their big salary, they’re still at the company, they’re still playing the game, And Apple says, you know, we’re just reorganizing
⏹️ ▶️ John things. Like we’re shuffling stuff around. Nothing bad about JG. Everything he did was great. But no one’s fooled by that. We
⏹️ ▶️ John know you had a high profile. And especially in this case, it was like one of the highest profile failures
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was public. Lots of times, you know, something’s assigned to some group and doesn’t work out well and they shuffle people around,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, nothing’s public. But like at WWDC 2024, they announced this thing. There was,
⏹️ ▶️ John we hired this guy from Google many years later, Apple intelligence, here it comes. And no, so it
⏹️ ▶️ John was very public failure. The reorg was a sort of very public egg on JG’s face. And yes, they do try
⏹️ ▶️ John to smooth it over, but like that whole dance, like just, and people are saying in the chat room that I’m surprised,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not surprised by this. I lived it. That’s why it annoys me so much. Like I’ve seen it too many times up close and personal.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you go back to a few times when Apple hasn’t done this, I think Paper Master got booted out
⏹️ ▶️ John unceremoniously. I think a couple of Apple retail chiefs under Tim Cook’s era also kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John got the boot without too much wonderful messages from Tim Cook, although he probably still said
⏹️ ▶️ John nice things about them. The I versus Forrestal thing was not
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly friendly. I mean, there was some, anyway. I just
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think it’s, like it’s not fooling anybody and it is bothersome to me. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that whole, like, I’m not saying it should have kicked him out sooner because I also agree that like, if you hire someone to do
⏹️ ▶️ John something, give them a chance. JG had a chance. I feel like he wasn’t, they didn’t just like say, Oh, you haven’t done it within
⏹️ ▶️ John two years and you’re out of there. They gave him a long, long time. And I still would love to hear the story
⏹️ ▶️ John of like how they decided to announce what they did at WRC 2024. But whatever that whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John whoever was involved in that decision made some terrible mistakes. And maybe JG was saying, no, we can’t announce
⏹️ ▶️ John this. It’s not ready. And they and they did it anyway to essentially force the, you know, force
⏹️ ▶️ John the force, the issue and say, well, you know, you sink or swim. And then he sunk and got reorged out. Anyway, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John let me mean to JG. hope he enjoys his retirement if in fact he does retired and hired somewhere else.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, this is sort of the end of that story because that you know, but
⏹️ ▶️ John when the dignity of an important executive is injured start your timers because that
⏹️ ▶️ John executive is probably going elsewhere or retiring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And again, and you know, as we discussed when he was, you know, relieved of all these duties months ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t know what the story there was like. We don’t know if, you know, was he, was he not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, good enough for this or is the story something else like, like he, like the system around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco him wouldn’t let him do what he needed to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John have, it was impossible for him to succeed inside Apple. Like there has to be a fit between the people and the company culture.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think there was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. And, you know, and you know, ultimately what you have to do is look at results and the results were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like his division when he was leading it didn’t produce good output.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s it. when they announced like that is the, that is the makes me think that he had like enemies within the company said, we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to announce this anyway. Cause this is the only way we’re ever going to force them out. Cause otherwise Tim just lets them keep going and going and going. So we’re going to announce
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple intelligence and then when it, when it inevitably sinks, we’ll point the finger at him. I, I’m not saying that’s what happened, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John that is one plausible theory from the outside because it’s like, why, why announce what you don’t have? And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know how that turned out over the subsequent years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, I don’t know. What I don’t understand is like, who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like you are, You, this man surely has more money than God. Just fade into the, fade into the night,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fade into the night.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s not a, no. And when you’re, when you’re like, you know, a successful person in your career, like that, yeah, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might have enough money, but like you want to do the work, like, you know, somebody like, like, like John G
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Andrea, like he’s a, he’s a very accomplished, you know, expert in his field. Like he, I’m sure he wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep doing the work. It’s, you know, it’s, it isn’t about, you know, it isn’t about like, oh, I want to keep working just to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another couple million bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe he’ll end up at a university or something. Like the vague things that I’ve heard about his rep is that he’s very into like research
⏹️ ▶️ John and that type of environment. And Apple wants to ship products, right? So I could see him at a university
⏹️ ▶️ John or he could just retire. You know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco enjoy your work. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or open AI. Like, you know, you could see a lot of the new AI companies would, you know, if he has
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Alan Dye’s out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, G and Andrea was not the only person who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco has announced that they’re leaving.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Breaking news as we record, it was a few hours ago as we sit here and record.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bloomberg has announced that, was this German?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, German.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. German, Mark German got the scoop and I will read from Mark
⏹️ ▶️ Casey German. has poached Apple’s most prominent design executive, Alan Dye, who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has served as the head of Apple’s user interface design team since 2015. Apple’s replacing Dye with longtime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey senior designer, Stephen LeMay. Apple confirmed the move in a statement provided to Bloomberg News. Quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve LeMay has played a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999, Chief
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Executive Officer Tim Cook said in a statement. He has always set an extraordinarily high bar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for excellence and embodies Apple’s culture of collaboration Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God. Oh my God. Reading from Berman, Dye informed Apple this week that he’s decided to leave, though top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey management had already been bracing for his departure, the People said. Dye will join Meta as chief design officer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on December 31st. Meta is creating a new design studio and putting Dye in charge of design for hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software, and AI integration for its interfaces. Joining Dye at Meta is Billy Sorrentino,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a prominent deputy who has served as a senior director in Apple’s design team since 2016. Dye will be reporting to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth who oversees Reality Labs. That group is tasked with developing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wearable devices such as smart glasses and virtual reality headsets. Dai’s major focus will be revamping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Meta’s customer devices with artificial intelligence features. At Apple, Dai most recently oversaw the interface
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Vision Pro headset and a sweeping redesign of Apple’s operating systems. He was also central to designing the company’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps, the Apple Watch, and the iPhone X. His team has been helping develop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a slate of new smart home devices as well. Bloomberg News has reported. The turnover
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is expected to continue with many of the remaining top leaders, including Cook, nearing typical retirement ages. Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sruji, Apple’s Silicon Chief, and Lisa Jackson’s Apple’s Head of Government and Environmental Initiatives have both been evaluating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their features at the company, Bloomberg has reported. Marco, I know you don’t have too much to say about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so John, any thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, I see you got a quote from Jason Isik’s scholars here, and I did read what he wrote earlier, and he’s saying exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’ve been thinking and have said on past episodes when when talking about stuff like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Perhaps more so than Marco, I’ve always been predestined to assign blame
⏹️ ▶️ John to the particular individuals for Apple decisions that I don’t agree with, because who knows what
⏹️ ▶️ John goes on inside the company. There are two angles in this, both of which Jason mentioned in his article that we’ll link.
⏹️ ▶️ John One is, well, okay, so you don’t know what’s happening inside the company, but you do know who’s responsible
⏹️ ▶️ John for it according to Apple’s org chart. And so even if it’s not Johnny Ive or Alan Dye or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, personally doing the thing you disagree with, if they’re in charge of all
⏹️ ▶️ John user interface design and you see a bunch of user interface design from Apple that you don’t like, it’s fair
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, even though you didn’t do this personally, like the coach doesn’t play on the team, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John in the end responsible for the performance of the team. And the second thing is, when Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John brings out Alan Dye and has him stand in front of a table of little clear pieces of plastic and try to explain why his terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John interface is good, yeah, I’m gonna blame Alan Dye. because I like did they force him
⏹️ ▶️ John out there to explain or try to explain or fail to like he is literally the face
⏹️ ▶️ John of the specific thing that I don’t like. And so although Marco has been anti-Allen
⏹️ ▶️ John Dye for a long, long time, I gave Apple and Allen the benefit of the doubt
⏹️ ▶️ John until there was no way to, There was no way to deny the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s in charge. He’s he in the end, it’s all his responsibility. And he
⏹️ ▶️ John is literally in the video describing the thing. Again, it doesn’t mean he
⏹️ ▶️ John did any or all of it himself, but he is clearly the face of this thing because he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in charge of it. Whether he did it or not, he obviously approves of it. He’s not out there being
⏹️ ▶️ John forced at gunpoint to promote something that he hates. Why would he hate it? He’s literally in charge of the design
⏹️ ▶️ John team. So I’m glad to see him go. Marco, how do you feel?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, hold on. Let me, let me just read this from Jason real quick. And then I promised I would get out of Marco’s way and I know everyone’s going to be mad at me, but let me just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clear the decks and then we’ll let, we’ll set Marco loose. Uh, Jason Snell over at six colors wrote. So this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is this a major loss for Apple and a major coup for Meta as Mark Herman
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John editorializes.
⏹️ ▶️ John To pause there, like you didn’t read the headline, but like, I believe the Bloomberg headline is, what is it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, Apple design executive, Alan Dye poached by Meta in major coup.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, unless the coup is planting a bad designer at meta to hurt them.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s like, very often we disagree with German’s take on things. And obviously we’re very
⏹️ ▶️ John inside baseball and developers are more mad about Apple’s interface than most people are. It’s like maybe to the outside
⏹️ ▶️ John world and an average Bloomberg reader like, oh, they’d hired a big designer from Apple and everyone knows Apple is good at design. So there must
⏹️ ▶️ John be a coup and they’ve poached him. Like the more you know about Allen Dye and Apple, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the more you care about interface design, the less you think that headline makes any sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So with that in mind, and again, let me just clear the decks before I let Marco go. So is this a major loss for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple and a major coup for Meta as Mark Garman editorializes? I don’t see it. Maybe those top executives who were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bracing for his departure feel that way. Though my gut feeling is that if Apple really wanted Allen Dye to stay at Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they would have kept him. I think it’s more likely that in the wake of Jeff Williams retiring as COO, other Other changes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are afoot at Apple, and perhaps Dye felt it was the right time to leave. Certainly being offered what must have been a truckload of money by Mark
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Zuckerberg couldn’t hurt things. What I’m saying is sometimes when you’re bracing for a departure of a senior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey employee, you’re doing it because they think they’re more valuable than you think they are. Sick burn.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if that happened in this case. Change is hard, and it’s natural for people, including Apple executives, to want to keep the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey band together as long as possible. But in the end, I think Alan Dye’s departure is a major coup for Apple. And let me tell you, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know Alan Dye for nothing. I think it’s probably a good thing that he’s leaving,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I was looking at Instagram shortly before we started recording, and let me tell you, this man sniffs his own farts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and loves it, because sure enough, on his Insta stories is the following, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should do something else wonderful. Not dwell on it for too long. Just figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out what’s next. Steve Jobs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, he does not deserve to use that quote.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is on his Insta stories.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s the thing about Ondine. It was an interview with him that I didn’t want to pull out one after the liquid glass thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where he was quite I forgot who he’s interviewed maybe was the verge or something But he was basically saying like that
⏹️ ▶️ John he feels like he has imposter syndrome And he’s afraid everyone’s just gonna find out that he has no idea what he’s doing Which seemed just
⏹️ ▶️ John so on the nose and I didn’t Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I saw that that was what from a couple years ago, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think it was more recent than that, but it’s like Like look humans are human like maybe he feels that
⏹️ ▶️ John way But maybe he’s also trying to put a brave face on him leaving Apple and we don’t know all the details or whatever But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John people are complex and it’s difficult, but like, in the end, like, I try not to put it on the person
⏹️ ▶️ John in the end. I don’t like the user interface things that Apple did when
⏹️ ▶️ John he was in charge of those things. That’s what it comes down to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Marco, thank you for being patient. How do you feel?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so happy for all parties involved. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. So we, we just said for John, Jean, Andrea’s departure, we were just saying how like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t know all of the effects that go into somebody not succeeding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a company. You know it could be the person, it could be their team, it could be the company around them, it could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many things. It could be the leaders above them, not letting them do what they want to do. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be you know too aggressive timelines or too much scope or like there’s there’s so many ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the work of a you know a division under a person can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be bad or non-ideal that aren’t necessarily the person’s fault. I don’t know Alan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dye. He, you know, in the very little bit I’ve read from him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or seen from him, I don’t think we would necessarily get along, but I’m sure he’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine person. And I’m not gonna like, you know, dance on the grave of his career at Apple, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, because, like in a way that would feel too deeply personal. But here’s the thing, again, just like JG,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you gotta look at results. The results of software design,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since he’s been in charge, have been all over the place. You can look back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at like, how did Alan Dye get to this position? Well that was back when,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in the early Tim Cook era after Steve Jobs had passed away, Tim kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t know how to assign talent to things like software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, beyond industrial design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so Tim had put Johnny in charge of all design and Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brought in Alan Dye who I believe was in like the print marketing team or something at the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and put him in charge of software design and that was you know look you put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone in charge of software design that was not really a software designer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then or now and it does seem like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fart sniffing has grown over time. You know, just because somebody mentions imposter syndrome in an interview
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple years ago doesn’t necessarily mean that they are modest or have an honest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view of their work. And the designs that we’ve seen from Dai, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in recent years, have not shown modesty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe humility or even necessarily interest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in making the best work at it, you know, even if it’s not your, like your ideal. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the opposite. Well, what we know, the work we’ve seen coming out of Apple software design in recent years, especially this past year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been, we know what’s best, screw you. By the way, it’s actually not especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good in certain ways, especially ways that are traditional, you know, software usability, you know, hallmarks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like control sizing, you know, button tap areas, contrast, text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco legibility. Like there’s so many issues, you know, with the new designs that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are like directly against decades of well-established you know human
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface and computer design. So I look at the Dye era and whether it was Dye’s fault
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not this is a pretty significant sign that that era has just ended.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because if you look at like the bigger picture here he just shipped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the 26 series OS redesigns. It’s been only a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months since the public has had access to these and he’s all of a sudden changing jobs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now there is you know there are other other dynamics here meta is on a hiring spree they have been for some time like since the AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing also meta is known to pay really well one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much talent goes to meta is not because everyone loves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Zuckerberg and Facebook and Instagram like that that’s not why a lot of people go to work there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people go to work there because they pay really well souls cost money. Right. And when Zuck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants to hire, you know, somebody, some talent, he pays whatever it takes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s it can be really high. And Apple has traditionally been regarded as the opposite.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is historically not thought of as a place that you get paid particularly well compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to other Silicon Valley competitors. Apple’s kind of like, you want to work for us because we’re the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and screw you if you want more money, basically. Like that’s the that’s the the impression I’ve gotten from a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of reports about Apple’s salary negotiation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, to be clear, just to jump in here, from what I understand, people who work at Apple still make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hilarious amount of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, it’s great money. But compared to what Meta would pay. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or even Google or Netflix or any of the other local people. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ John before we even start talking about the athlete salaries that we discussed on a past episode. Just regular person salaries.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is always trying to kind of be like average or in the middle and met as a little bit higher. But for,
⏹️ ▶️ John for people at this level, it dies level. Then I feel like we’re getting into the whole, you know, athlete salary,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, tens, hundreds of millions of dollars, ridiculous stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yep. Yep. And so, you know, for, for the dye era to end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemingly at an, at an odd time, uh, and maybe suddenly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this doesn’t sound like executives were bracing just about to hear that he’s going gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leave us? Oh no, what are we gonna do? It kind of sounds to me like they let him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go. Like not that they fired him, but they literally like let, they let Meta kind of take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco him without putting up a huge fight. That’s kind of what it sounds like. Yeah, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smells to me like, you know, if he went into Tim’s or whoever’s office
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and said, hey, guess what? I’m out. Expecting Tim or whoever to be like, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How much are they offering you? Let’s talk. And instead of that conversation, just said, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I didn’t see the whole, I don’t know what the whole statement was from Tim Cook to Bloomberg, but the part that was
⏹️ ▶️ John quoted talks about Steve LeMay, not Alan Dye. It talks about the great
⏹️ ▶️ John guy that we have replacing Alan. It’s not, you don’t, I don’t see, maybe there’ll be in the press week, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t see the like, thank you, Alan, for all your years of work and blah, blah, blah. And it’s been wonderful. Like, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a difference between like retiring or like bowing out versus
⏹️ ▶️ John being disloyal and going to Facebook, which I think Tim Cook likes a lot less than the way JG left
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And I haven’t seen the whole statement. Maybe there is that in the statement, but the quoted part is not about Alan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so let’s talk about Steve LeMay. So Steve LeMay is the person who has been appointed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically Dye’s replacement. Like I don’t know if the titles are exactly the same, but it sounds like direct Dye replacement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Tim Cook gave a statement at Bloomberg that says, Steve LeMay has played a key role in the design of every major Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface since 1999. you know, just some there’s not much about him on the internet, but you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do some quick like, you know, LinkedIn searches and stuff and you see yeah, that’s he’s been at Apple since 1999 and he’s a UI designer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, a UI designer who’s in charge of UI design at Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Imagine that this has not been the case for the last 10 years. We didn’t know if there are any left in the company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I you know, we don’t know. We don’t know really from the public’s perspective. We don’t know anything about Steve LeMay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this to me is a promising new direction. You’re taking somebody who seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he has worked on the Mac on UI You know for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very long time and has been there for a very long time Maybe this is just me being sensitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in these areas the one of the things that that kind of rubs me the wrong way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is That I love Two things that historically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people have not loved podcasts and computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And actually and and even you know we saw this like early on in podcasts we saw. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were and still you know to this day that this kind of thing remains but you know there were a lot more in the past of like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Startups or products general comments from the industry of like well you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanna listen to podcast right so here’s some products you don’t have to. And there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of this assumption big into a lot of discourse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there from the general public for a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, but for a long time of like, podcasts, God, those are terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why do you wanna listen to podcasts? And kind of assuming, of course, everyone agrees with that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that same common attitude has been levied at computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all of computing. And some of that, for a lot of people, as deserve.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For a lot of people, computers are kind of their enemy. They’ve been hard to use or they fight them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they represent their work or whatever it is. Lots of reasons for that. But what started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being really scary and discomforting and discouraging to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me over the years has been that it seems like Apple was taken over by people who didn’t like computers either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like, you know, Steve Jobs loved computers. Clearly, for his entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life it was very very obvious he freaking loved computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and understood how to make great computers didn’t succeed a hundred percent of the time but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loved computers nonetheless and had a really good track record and then Tim Cook took over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Tim Cook does not care about computers you could tell like it’s been very obvious like Tim Cook could not give less of a crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about computers and it showed and Johnny Ive always seemed like he was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of in that in that ballpark to have like he He was he loves design like industrial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco physical design Johnny. I was very good at physical design But it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of Johnny’s products especially the unedited late Johnny era Seem like computers designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by people who hate computers and who assume everyone else hates computers, too And you want a little computer as possible. Why do you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capabilities and ports and stuff? why do you want battery life you want you want to just have this computer that’s like nothing because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you hate computers and And Alan Dye, his era
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of software design leadership, has seemed like that bringing that same attitude
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to software. Like especially on the Mac where he really seemed like he never even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bothered to try to understand the Mac. The design of computer interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under Alan Dye was, don’t you hate all the things your computer can do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t you want to just get rid of them? Just hide them. Just get all this clutter out of the way. Get all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these tools and operations you can do on things, all the things that you can use your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer for besides just idly looking at content. Just get it all out of there. Just get rid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, clean this up. All these dirty features and functions and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things you can do to produce or edit or enjoy something, get all that out of the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instead, look at me with my shiny glass over top of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content fading and blurring and warping and blurring. Look at me! We’re getting out of the way of your content,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but look at the interface! Like, we don’t like what computers have done. We don’t like the way things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are done. We don’t like making good interfaces. We like making no interface. Except,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t have the self-control to make no interface. So instead, we’re gonna show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off with a really flashy interface how little of an interface we can make.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, it was all principles of… Again, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read it as that same attitude of like, don’t you hate computers? No, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t hate computers. I fricking love computers. So does the guy who wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that quote in your Instagram story. And to love computers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to watch the company that makes the best computers be taken over by people who didn’t seem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they loved computers as much as you is a really hard thing to go to like to get through without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting cynical and discouraged and kind of thinking like, God, I guess I guess we’re not going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like at some point this is going to stop being the best computer company and then there won’t be one left.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so maybe I’m reading way too much into all of this. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t be the first time in my life, but I find this encouraging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. In a relatively short span, it seems like we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are surprisingly close, maybe to the end of the Tim Cook era at Apple, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big deal. Johnny Ive left a few years back and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the products got a lot better after he left I think because they got a lot more balanced in terms of functionality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus nice design. And now Alan Dye is leaving and being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replaced by somebody who’s been there back when Apple was a computer company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that made really great computers led by people who loved really great computers. So again we don’t know anything about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steve LeMay from the public yet but I think this is a promising sign. Maybe things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are turning in a better direction now. And you know maybe in a year or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two we’ll have interfaces heading more towards usability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and functionality. Maybe we’ll have a different CEO kind of slowly starting to turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. You know and if it’s John Ternus, you know, that’s you know, he comes from products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the the product part of the company which is promising if Ternus is indeed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also being considered as a CEO to happen imminently. Maybe he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was part of the choice of who to replace Dai with, maybe he was involved in that decision or consulted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that decision, who knows? But this this all sounds like like really promising
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turns for a company that you know I’ve made no secret that I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been pretty pretty stale on the leadership recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again maybe this is too optimistic maybe I’m reading too much into this I think this is a very good sign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know what good for Alan Dye he’s probably making a lot more money at meta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m super glad for Zuckerberg and that wonderful group of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to lose some more money Um, that’s great. And die gets paid more money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably to leave and that makes Apple better. And so, however, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happened. Thank you world. Thank you for doing this. Uh, we’ll see where it goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from here, but I, I have, I have pretty high hopes it’s, it’s probably going to go up.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of a shame that he did release all the, that Apple did release all the 26 OS’s right before he
⏹️ ▶️ John leaves. Like we can just push that back and have him leave and then not release it. That was never going to happen though. because they needed something to announce
⏹️ ▶️ John the WNBC. Anyway, like as I said, when the 26 OSs were out and we’re talking about them,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re on a multiyear slope with these 26 OSs, but it will become the 27 and 28 blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like next year they’re all going to be changed. Like, I’m sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, no, it wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be that fast. Liquid glass. Sorry. And so sure, liquid glass will continue to be refined. But fundamentally,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, again, there are there are fundamental problems with liquid glass that are not going away anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s going to take a while before we see any positive change. You’re just like it took a little while after Johnny Ive left to
⏹️ ▶️ John get like, you know, I was going to say Powerbooks, Macbook Pros with ports on them and everything in a new design.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t think you’re being too optimistic because he was at the top of an organization that was doing things we didn’t like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Getting rid of the person at the top is your only chance to see any kind of change. Now, it doesn’t mean that change could
⏹️ ▶️ John be worse. The change could be, you know, things could still get worse. But it’s the time to be optimistic is
⏹️ ▶️ John finally there. there is a hope of change here because things were not going in a direction
⏹️ ▶️ John we liked for a long time and that was obviously not going to change by someone just presenting Alan
⏹️ ▶️ John Dye with a strong argument because he was not convincible if anyone ever was presenting that argument.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then so he drops the 26 OS’s and then he’s out the door. Now we’re stuck with them for the next several years
⏹️ ▶️ John even as they may be like repaired and touched up before the next redesign. So that’s kind of a a shame.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I haven’t thinking about like, the 26 was how do they, how do they,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the impression of them inside Apple, we talked about like, obviously, things we didn’t like about them and
⏹️ ▶️ John things UI nerds don’t like about them or whatever, but who cares what is the general public gonna think? And Apple probably
⏹️ ▶️ John cares much more about what the general public thinks. But a few things to note in this one,
⏹️ ▶️ John underscore, David Smith’s little chart of like, again, maybe not representative, but he has very popular
⏹️ ▶️ John apps of like adoption of the new iOS version. He said for the past few years, they’ve been doing a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where it sort of trickles out and then they pushed everybody real hard around the point one or point two update. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John far, he hasn’t seen that with the 26 with iOS 26. Like it’s just been a steady climb.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple people still saying they’re just about Apple just about to push it and by push it I mean like, really
⏹️ ▶️ John strongly suggest to people that you update it or update it automatically overnight if they have the setting that way or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. Or Apple tends to be cautious with new iOS releases in particular where the early adopters updated
⏹️ ▶️ John to it immediately manually, but they just let people sort of grow organically until they say, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John now it’s really ready with the point one or point two, and they push it out hard and the graph takes a big bend upwards and the adoption
⏹️ ▶️ John rate goes up. We haven’t seen that yet with 26. Maybe that means Apple is still being a little cautious about this. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s just a policy change. Who knows? The other thing is, no, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not public outcry about 26 being bad. You know, comedians are not making fun of it. It’s like it hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John been terrible. It’s been fine. People, you know, some people like it, some people don’t. But I can tell you one thing
⏹️ ▶️ John in the public consciousness. I don’t think the the feeling
⏹️ ▶️ John about the 26 OS is this is amazing. You got to get this. Everybody loves it. And they’re super jazzed about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s happening at all. And when you have a big reason, that’s what you hope for. We did a big redesign and the
⏹️ ▶️ John public loves it. People can’t stop talking. I would say, have you updated your phone? The new one is much better. You got like
⏹️ ▶️ John that is not a public. Forget about whether it’s justified or not. Sometimes that happens because they put new emoji
⏹️ ▶️ John in or they change one thing or whatever. But for whatever reason, iOS 26 is not doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Certainly, Tahoe is not doing that either. And I think that’s what Apple cares about. We with
⏹️ ▶️ John much fanfare, we redesigned all our OS’s and what they want to see happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t forget about the nerds or whatever. What they want to see happen is I want there to be
⏹️ ▶️ John stories and publications or whatever. I want to hear word on the street is that everybody loves
⏹️ ▶️ John the comprehensive new OS design. And that has not been the story about the 26. The story is also
⏹️ ▶️ John not that it’s a disaster, even though some people think it is, but like it’s just kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John in the middle, like it’s fine. Right. And that’s not, you know, if that’s that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t sort of make Alan Dye’s reputation become bigger with an Apple, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John great job, Alan, you knocked it out of the park. We did this rig redesign and everybody loves it. No, everybody doesn’t love it. They don’t hate it either.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like a JG thing where it’s like a total failure. You didn’t do the thing we asked you. You did the thing, you launch it, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. But it’s not great. And then the final factor, which I’m just speculating about is,
⏹️ ▶️ John surely somewhere within Apple, there are lots of people who are computer
⏹️ ▶️ John nerds who care about user interface design, who hate everything that we hate about it, right? Absolutely.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because that’s where those people land. I’m not saying we’re like, you know, we are a tiny minority, but where
⏹️ ▶️ John is this tiny minority likely to work? At Apple. because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco those are the people who love
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and care about user interface. No, not all employees and probably not even most, but just like the old cranky ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe like Steve LeMay. There is always pressure inside
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. Anything you hear someone complain about Apple in the outside world, there are people inside Apple also having that complaint.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, maybe they’re not empowered to do anything about it, but that exists. And I feel like the people inside Apple who are cranky
⏹️ ▶️ John about things that Apple are doing, they can just be cranky for years and people can just ignore them. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s impossible to not know that that sentiment exists inside Apple. So the 26 OS
⏹️ ▶️ John has come out, they’re not a disaster, but they’re not a home run, and there are cranky
⏹️ ▶️ John old people inside Apple grumbly about it and they’ve been grumbling probably the whole time about it, the whole time anyone has known about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is not a formula for great job, Alan, from
⏹️ ▶️ John looking forward to what you do next. It’s kind of a situation where, granted, meta
⏹️ ▶️ John drops the bucket of money, I said, but Alan must be thinking, I did this great thing, Why isn’t everybody, why aren’t I getting
⏹️ ▶️ John an attaboy from Tim Cook? Why isn’t everyone saying they love me? And why do I hear whispers in the hallways
⏹️ ▶️ John about these cranky old people who don’t like what I’m doing? That makes you maybe want to look for a new
⏹️ ▶️ John job. Right, again, the money and Facebook going to get, I don’t doubt that
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook went to get him because Facebook has many wrongheaded notions about things, including let me grab the
⏹️ ▶️ John designer that everybody loves from Apple, right? Who is that? No, it’s not Alan Dye. We want him to do
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apple what he did for us. Do you? I don’t know if you know what he did for Apple. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like a situation where, maybe his dignity
⏹️ ▶️ John is not hurt, but like, I don’t think things are going as well as he
⏹️ ▶️ John hoped. When Johnny Ive was in his job doing his great products, everybody freaking loved
⏹️ ▶️ John him. There were stories about him. There were stories about the products. Every single piece of media you ever saw about
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPod or the iPhone or the AirPods or anything that’s just, Let me just have this long
⏹️ ▶️ John biography of Johnny Ive. Let me tell you about his childhood. Can you believe he made these amazing products? Everybody loves
⏹️ ▶️ John them. They’re so beautiful. That has not happened with the 26 OS’s. And maybe Alan wishes
⏹️ ▶️ John it did. And so that’s a perfect formula for,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I should do something else. So bye Alan, glad to see you go. Why when someone behind the
Cloudflare [was] out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so we’ve had this in the show notes for a couple of weeks, hasn’t quite been long enough to bump it to overtime.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But on the 18th of November, there was a big, big, big outage, not the AWS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outage, the other one. So reading from the CloudFlare blog on 18 November 2025
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at 1120 UTC, CloudFlare’s network began experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This showed up to internet users trying to access our customer sites as an error page indicating a failure within CloudFlare’s network.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by a change to one of our database system’s permissions, which caused the database to output multiple entries into a feature file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used by our bot management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network. Whoops. The software running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our bot management system up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to date with ever-changing threats. the software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doubled size. That caused the software to fail.
⏹️ ▶️ John A couple of angles in the story. First, as someone who’s worked in, you know, online server side
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff for 25 years, this failure is so textbook. Like if you read the details
⏹️ ▶️ John of it, you’re like, if you’ve been in this industry, you’re like, oh, I’ve had that happen. Oh, I’ve done that. Oh, I could totally see that. Oh, I forget what it
⏹️ ▶️ John was in this one. It was like an assumption, a missing filter on a query resulting in double
⏹️ ▶️ John the limits, you know, the limits on the size seems like a good idea at the time, but like, and then the other thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like is depressing because I complain about this at every company I was ever at, and you’re always hope like, but surely
⏹️ ▶️ John like the big competent companies don’t do this, which is the lack of a staging environment
⏹️ ▶️ John that reflects production, where you can test changes in production. Every company
⏹️ ▶️ John has this problem, right? Like what you want is, and by staging, I mean production
⏹️ ▶️ John is the thing that customers use, and development is the thing that developers use that’s broken or whatever. And there are levels between there, and
⏹️ ▶️ John like the final one before production, we always used to call it staging and the companies I worked at, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s supposed to be like production, but it’s not actually production. So however production is
⏹️ ▶️ John set up, whatever hardware it’s got, whatever software, it’s like a miniature version of production. It has to be configured the
⏹️ ▶️ John same way, deployed to the same way, it’s just tiny. It doesn’t have millions of servers or whatever. And it’s not accessed by
⏹️ ▶️ John millions of people, but it has to work the same. So if they had a representative staging
⏹️ ▶️ John environment and they had deployed this change into that staging environment, all the machines would have, you know, the query
⏹️ ▶️ John would have gone afoul, run out a double-sized thing. It would have been pushed out to everyone else. They would have tried to load the double-sized file and we all
⏹️ ▶️ John would have failed. And it’d be like, oh, that change you just put out, we just pushed it to staging and it broke everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it wouldn’t get to production. But you’d say like, if we push it to production, it would break everything in production. It’s clear that there
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a staging environment that is sufficiently similar to production. That is always the problem. It’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John of course we have a staging environment. Is it the same as production? Mostly, there is some minor
⏹️ ▶️ John differences, but surely those minor differences won’t make a difference. Like, oh, there’s a different kernel version here or
⏹️ ▶️ John in, in, uh, you know, we have hardware versions of this load balancer in production, but we have a software simulated
⏹️ ▶️ John version and staging. You have to make it actually the same because you never know where the
⏹️ ▶️ John problem is going to come up. Maybe the problem will be, oh, this specific kernel version has a specific bug
⏹️ ▶️ John that triggers this thing. And that that specific kernel version is only in production and staging is like one patched
⏹️ ▶️ John revision different. And that was the part that you trip across. So, you know, no, but this
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, it’s part of growing up is learning that no company has a competent staging environment,
⏹️ ▶️ John even someone as big and powerful as Cloudflare. Anyway, that’s not mainly what I want to talk about here. What I’m talking about here was
⏹️ ▶️ John this outage going by and my strange reaction to it, which was,
⏹️ ▶️ John I should get on Cloudflare.
⏹️ ▶️ John to you, like this, my first thought was like, you know, reminiscing about all the problems
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve had in production, how, how this is so typical and down to this particular details and the staging problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John My second was, I’ve been meaning to do stuff with Cloudflare and you
⏹️ ▶️ John would think this is not, like why would you, a big company has an outage that attracts you to it as a customer?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, that’s where I wanna be. The big company that had an outage due to incompetence that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m familiar with from my working world, like why would you wanna do that? Part of it is
⏹️ ▶️ John I had the meaning to look into Cloudflare for stuff and this is like a reminder, like them just being in the news, like, oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I meant to do that. Part of it is the entirely wrongheaded notion that it’s like, well, they just had a failure.
⏹️ ▶️ John So surely they’re not going to have another one right after it, which is not logical or true in any way. Not how things work. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not how things work. In fact, it may be more likely they’re going to have another failure. But anyway, that did pop into my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John And why am I interested in Cloudflare at all? I think also because like Marco mentioned it recently
⏹️ ▶️ John in the context of ATP stuff, or when you’re talking about the episode artwork. So it was like doubly in my mind from like a recent ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John and this giant outage. And the reason I wanted to use it is I have, you know, my personal
⏹️ ▶️ John website on an incredibly, incredibly inexpensive, crappy shared hosting service
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s ancient that I really should move off of, but I never want to get around to it because it’s just like
⏹️ ▶️ John such a hassle. It’s like, oh, it works fine. I have a static website. There’s nothing on it. It’s just a bunch of texts and images. Like it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not exciting in any way, but there are some things that are annoying about it. First, occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John my shared hosting and my virtual servers and whatever, like, I don’t know, they get like swapped out or whatever. And like the first
⏹️ ▶️ John hit to my website will take a couple of seconds to load. And you’re like, what the hell? I also have like an uptime monitoring
⏹️ ▶️ John service that I can see that my uptime is, has like three nines. Cause occasionally it goes down for reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, ugh, it’s all right. But it’s, it’s so cheap. My hosting is so cheap. It’s just a static website.
⏹️ ▶️ John No one goes to my website anyway. I don’t get any traffic. So who cares? But it, but it bothered me. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, well, I could solve that by either moving everything to a different platform
⏹️ ▶️ John or putting something in front of it. And the second thing is all my websites have like SSL certificates, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John like I have.app websites like switchclass.app and front and center.app that just redirect somewhere. But.app
⏹️ ▶️ John in particular has to be SSL. So you need a certificate for it, even if all you’re doing is it redirecting.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, my main website has SSL. And I bought certificates for those years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago. And I used to buy like the five year certificates or whatever they were by you. but more recently with the upgrades to
⏹️ ▶️ John TLS, you can buy a quote five year certificate, but you have to reissue it every year.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you paid for five years, but you have to reissue it every year. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how long, but for many years, there’s been a free service called Let’s Encrypt at letsencrypt.org
⏹️ ▶️ John that will give you free SSL certificates, including a script to manage it for you. You don’t have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John anything simple. You set it and forget it, and it doesn’t cost you any money. It’s great. My crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John shared hosting service probably intentionally does not support Let’s Encrypt. And trying to do it manually
⏹️ ▶️ John would be difficult because of the way share hosting works. So I don’t have my own web server. It’s a shared, but it’s, it’s a mess
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So whenever I have to reissue my certificates, which now is like six
⏹️ ▶️ John certificates that I have to do every single year, I have to create the certificate, try it, signing requests with open SSL
⏹️ ▶️ John send it in and put, get the, like, you know, and I started making scripts to do it. I’m like, I’m slowly, badly
⏹️ ▶️ John reinventing Let’s Encrypt.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, don’t do this. I mean, Shell’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got the call up and SSL’s, and it’s like, but it was still annoying because you had to like copy and paste it into their little C
⏹️ ▶️ John panel interface. And it was just like, shared hosting. I don’t, I’m not running the server myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have access to it. I have to use their stupid interface. And it annoyed me so much. So Cloudflare,
⏹️ ▶️ John Cloudflare to the rescue. Because Cloudflare, one of the things they provide is
⏹️ ▶️ John SSL certificates. They probably use Let’s Encrypt or something similar with their own thing for free. That they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John update. They don’t have to worry about reassuring it. They’ll just do all that for you. They also offer caching,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I’m like, well, if my site is down or slow, if I could just serve it from the CloudFlare’s edge
⏹️ ▶️ John cache for the thing, that’ll be great. And that’s also free.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I figured, you know, why not try this?
⏹️ ▶️ John I had questions about it, particularly like, how do you do this? What does the CloudFlare interface look like? What does
⏹️ ▶️ John the website, whatever? So I did my usual thing, which is open up a couple of browser windows,
⏹️ ▶️ John pull up my favorite LLM chat bot things and ask them exactly the same question, have
⏹️ ▶️ John them compete and see what they think. Describe the situation, here’s my current hosting, I’m thinking of going
⏹️ ▶️ John to CloudFlare, what do I have to do? And then I look at all their answers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I do that out of academic curiosity, but also because like, when they say contradictory things, such that
⏹️ ▶️ John only one of them can be right, it clues you in. It first of all, helps you not trust everything they say, because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, these both can’t be right because they’re contradictory. Maybe they’re both wrong. Maybe one’s wrong, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the other one’s wrong, but it lets you know like, all right, this may be a little bit sketchy.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the good thing is in my third window or fourth window, I have actual Cloudflare open and I can see
⏹️ ▶️ John that menu item doesn’t exist. Maybe it’s from an old version of Cloudflare, but this one does or whatever. So I can follow the instructions how to
⏹️ ▶️ John do this. I also had some questions which was like, how is this gonna work under the covers? As a web developer,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know how many ways it could work, but how does it actually work with CloudFlare? Like how does CloudFlare talk
⏹️ ▶️ John to your backend? How do you deal with situations like.app domains? Or
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you wanted to talk SSL to what they call your origin server, don’t you still need a certificate on your origin
⏹️ ▶️ John server? They can use self-signed certificates, blah, blah, blah. And the various, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the two I narrowed down to is Gemini and ChatGPT. They both had similar answers here. I still don’t know if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John actually right because they’re describing what CloudFlare is doing internally and I’m not privy to that. but
⏹️ ▶️ John the explanation was sufficient for me to at least know what I’m looking out for. They were trying to claim that it communicates over IP
⏹️ ▶️ John address to the thing and they’ll generate a self-signed certificate for you or whatever, I don’t know if that’s actually true, but
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, all this is to say, it was like an afternoon, an afternoon of just going
⏹️ ▶️ John through the interface, an afternoon on my live side, I’m like, I’ll do it live. No one goes to my side anyway, it doesn’t matter. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John fine, especially since the DNS propagation takes a while anyway, there’s like a window in the middle there where I can screw things up
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I tweak the caching for a little bit. And it worked. And I moved every one
⏹️ ▶️ John of my sites that had an SSL certificate to CloudFlare. And the CloudFlare is now managed all
⏹️ ▶️ John for me and I enabled caching and tweaked. All those rules for the vast, vast majority of my traffic is now being
⏹️ ▶️ John cached at their CDN that’s closer to the edge. Is my site faster? I don’t know, it was already
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty fast. It’s just text and images. It’s not really a complicated website, but it makes me happier. And for the
⏹️ ▶️ John first time this year, I guess starting now for the 12 months starting now, I will not have
⏹️ ▶️ John to manually renew or reissue any SSL certificates.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything that I’ve done in CloudFlare, 100% free because their free plan offers all of this,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I think is a mistake, but whatever. I’ll take it. I was tempted to do that. The next thing up
⏹️ ▶️ John is like $20 a month. And I’m tempted to do that just to see what the features are, but this is all for free. And I know this
⏹️ ▶️ John is, this is ridiculous for people like, dude, let’s encrypt has existed for like 15 years. Like, what are you even doing?
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but I had, this is what happens when you have a website that’s been around for a long time, or it’s on a service
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s been around for a long time, you’re behind the times. I’m bit like, who uses shared hosting?
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you know that you can get a free dedicated server that you can control yourself for same or
⏹️ ▶️ John less money with better. But yeah, I do know that, but it would require a lot more moving this, this required me to do
⏹️ ▶️ John almost nothing. It required me to click a bunch of things on cloudflare and it required me to click a smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John number of things on my shared hosting thing. And that was it. and just the relief I feel from having,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, six or seven websites all now being managed on Cloudflare with bits SSL and not having to worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about any of that stuff on my shared hosting, just makes me feel good. So, and I know Cloudflare, the company,
⏹️ ▶️ John has some questionable practices and some questionable things and we’ve talked about them in the past or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but right now I’m just feeling relief about finally doing something to my website that I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to do for a long time and eliminating one source of things that I have to worry about. Now all I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to worry about is the next Cloudflare outage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For what it’s worth, we talked about this, I’m pretty sure, fairly briefly. Callsheetapp.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is my marketing website for Callsheet. It’s also where if you share a link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Callsheet, it will share to a path within callsheetapp.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is all on Cloudflare, that is all running 100% free. I don’t think it’s using Let’s Encrypt from what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can tell from the certs on my website, But either way, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is definitely complicated. Their web interface, I wouldn’t say it’s bad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s complicated. I’ve never really used AWS, but the way people describe AWS is that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John CloudFlare is so much less complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey than that. Oh my God. I agree, I agree. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, CloudFlare is much nicer than cPanel if you’re familiar with that. I feel like CloudFlare is a fairly straight
⏹️ ▶️ John forward interface. cPanel is like you’re back in the 90s somehow, and AWS is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world. AWS is putative. Like I had to log in the other day, like for some reason, like you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast uses it for all the uploads hosting for premium, and for some reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my credit card started being declined on AWS. It’s been the same credit card for years, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been, I don’t know why, but it, so I’m, you know, I have, getting the message was like, oh your payment failed, go log in and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a payment. So I log in, and like, because I hardly ever log into AWS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to figure out how to pay them, Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my, even that. It’s like, all right, first of all, do you log in as the root user or the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IM user? I don’t know. And they log in as root and they yell at you, well, you shouldn’t be doing anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, oh my God, just, I’m trying to pay you the money that you say I owe you. And then you finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get in and it’s like, okay, well, you know, here’s your credit card form. Okay, great. Hit submit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s like, all right, your payment’s been accepted. Cool, all right. And then, you know, five minutes later, you get an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco email. Your payment wasn’t accepted. Oh my God. Oh fun. Go back in and then you change. Doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything for AWS is an exercise in massive frustration.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like yeah, Cloudflare, I mean granted, Cloudflare does a lot less.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that’s part of why they can be so much simpler on their control panel. But like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not, like they’re still a pretty mature product and they still have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of features. And so like, I think they just manage a substantially better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usability design. And AWS is just enterprise software.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so every single thing there is cluttered up with a billion enterprise features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, yeah, two customers wanted that, so they added it. And there’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complexity there to do what should be very simple things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Cloudflare sees it. You use a Merlin word,
⏹️ ▶️ John only snorks use the AWS web interface, you realize that? That’s kind of, yes, the AWS web interface is a
⏹️ ▶️ John mess, that’s not what you’re supposed to be using. Serious people all interface with it through the API.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And I know that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John help you with your credit card thing, but again, serious people, I don’t know how pay with purchase orders for millions of dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like AWS and the web interface is like, that’s not how it’s meant
⏹️ ▶️ John to be used kind of. Like there’s this whole third-party companies like CloudFormation also like that
⏹️ ▶️ John exist to be a middleware layer between your programs
⏹️ ▶️ John and the AWS API and nowhere in there should humans be clicking around at a web interface because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not repeatable. It’s not like it’s, you want it to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automated. I’m not sure humans ever have glitched around this interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t think we can figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it, I barely figured it out and only to do a very, very basic thing. Oh man,
⏹️ ▶️ John a mess. Yeah, Cloudflare is much nicer. Cloudflare is like a more modern version of cPanel, like with knowledge of
⏹️ ▶️ John the web past 1996. And not to trash cPanel, cPanel is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of amazing for the amount of functionality it provides, but it is a time capsule to a different time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Cloudflare is just a modern web interface to the functionality they provide. And they do a good job of like
⏹️ ▶️ John having lots of help links and explaining to you what they mean. Like when they use jargon to explain their features, it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what we mean when we say this, this is what we mean when we say that, you have to learn the vocabulary. I was fairly impressed
⏹️ ▶️ John with how well it worked. And on the chat GPT and Gemini front,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, you mentioned before, like asking it for screw sizes or whatever and saying like, I didn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John check. Well, you did because that’s the thing. That’s the reason I think this is a perfect application for
⏹️ ▶️ John LLMs. I’m gonna immediately find out if the thing it’s telling me to do works because I’m literally
⏹️ ▶️ John clicking on a web interface and then loading my web, you know, like it either works or it doesn’t and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John testing it immediately. You bought those screws without trying to verify the information. The way you verified it is if you
⏹️ ▶️ John got those screws home and tried to put them in back of the TV and they didn’t fit, you would know immediately, wrong screw.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no like condition where you would like have no idea that it was the wrong screw and put it in and two days later,
⏹️ ▶️ John your TV would explode. That would never happen. You can tell when a screw is the wrong size, it either fits or it doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is the ideal use case for LLMs. Something that can be verified
⏹️ ▶️ John very quickly and unambiguously. I was trying to think of this analogy on a recent
⏹️ ▶️ John Rectives episode, but it’s like, with encryption, like I’m sure there’s a word
⏹️ ▶️ John for this or a term of arbor, like you want something that, When you get the right
⏹️ ▶️ John answer, it’s trivial to confirm that the answer is right, but it’s really hard to get the right answer. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re doing prime factors and numbers or whatever, you can tell the number is right, the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John is right instantly. But how do you find the right answer? That takes computational
⏹️ ▶️ John millennia or whatever. That’s what the ideal is. And the ideal for LLMs is
⏹️ ▶️ John anything that you will immediately be able to check whether it’s right. That’s what you do, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that kind of excludes things like health information where it’s like, well, maybe, you know, if it’s telling me to, you know, eat donuts
⏹️ ▶️ John every day, I won’t find out until I have a heart attack 20 years from now or whatever. But like, if it tells you a screw size and the
⏹️ ▶️ John screw size is wrong, you’re gonna find out real quick. If it tells me to do this on the website and then
⏹️ ▶️ John this will happen and I do it and it doesn’t happen, guess what? I just found out whether it’s right or wrong. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the only reason I’m doing the competition with the two of them is just, you know, cause it’s kind of fun to see the different approaches and so I can compare them
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe give me a slightly better chance of not doing something dumb where I see there’s differences between them. it makes me
⏹️ ▶️ John put up my antenna or whatever. But in the end, as I started to progress through the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, I no longer looked at the LLMs instructions and just started doing it myself because you sort of figure out the interface. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I suggest to people. Use LLMs for what they’re good for, and they’re good for basically anything that you can immediately check.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that the consequences of it are not a big deal. That Marko would have to make a second trip to the hardware store.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh no, I’m sure he’s familiar with that. But if you get lucky and you don’t, there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The guy at the hardware store checkout was like, see you later. And I said, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe not for this, but for something else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m glad it worked out, John. Again, my experience with Cloudflare has been extremely positive. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very impressed with what I was able to get away with for free, like you had said. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at some point, I will probably follow in your footsteps and look at, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what would it take to move my website over there? Now, mine is not static as it stands. It’s a little bit more complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But nevertheless, I bet you I could find a way to put it in in there without too much work.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to be clear, I didn’t move my website anywhere. All I’m doing is sending the traffic through
⏹️ ▶️ John CloudFlare. I moved my DNS to CloudFlare, sort of. I mean, I still have all the DNS on hover.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s complicated. But anyway, the point is, network, when you make a request to hypercritical.co or switchglass.app
⏹️ ▶️ John or front and center.app or front-end-center-app,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey anyway, all of you make a request
⏹️ ▶️ John to any of these things, you are hitting an IP address controlled by CloudFlare,
⏹️ ▶️ John which goes through their network and then it makes it proxies a backend request to my quote unquote origin server
⏹️ ▶️ John in Cloudflare parlance, which is called a million other things and a million other services. And that hits my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The actual server is still
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly where it has always been on my crappy shared hosting, but there is now a CDN in
⏹️ ▶️ John front of it and the Cloudflare network, and they manage all this
⏹️ ▶️ John SSL termination between the client and you. It’s still SSL between Cloudflare and my server, but it’s using a self-signed 15
⏹️ ▶️ John year certificate that only Cloudflare trusts. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about it. But the point is I didn’t have to move
⏹️ ▶️ John my website. I didn’t have to change anything about it. Gotcha. Still,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m glad you got that covered.
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#askatp: Siri name pronunciation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP and Tony West writes, my wife’s name is Paula. Since 18.4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Siri has been pronouncing her name as Paola. I put the phonetic pronunciation in her contact card. It’s sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of worked, but it’s gotten worse again. What is going on here? How did this person in the phone just forget the pronunciation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and how do I fix it? Coincidentally, earlier today, I was talking to my friend, John, who writes channels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he was complaining justifiably that for some reason, Siri always auto
⏹️ ▶️ Casey corrects CHRIS to KRIS. And I theorized, oh, well, I bet you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a contact, you know, that’s called, that’s named Chris, KRIS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your phone. He said, nope, definitely don’t. I don’t have a good answer for this. So one of you are going to have to
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, I saw this fly by and I thought this was a fun thing because I’ve dealt with this before.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, we probably talked about it on ATP before. The wonderful voice assistant in your phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have an Apple phone, has had a feature for many years where if it said your name
⏹️ ▶️ John and you didn’t like how it pronounced it, you could say, that’s not how you pronounce my name. And it would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, how should I pronounce your name? And you would say your name the way you want it to be pronounced.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it would say, okay, from now on, I’ll call you whatever you said.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have any of you used that feature? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey been around for years. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used it. Well, it has been used in my household to great comic effect, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back in the day, Tiff would say, call me Tiff, and it would say, okay, from now on I will call you Test.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cool. And she’s like, no, call me Tiff. Okay, Test, from now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on I will call you Test. Like, it’s just, now I actually have a different problem, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, at some point in the last maybe two years or so, again, nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my contacts has changed about my wife in the last two years, but at some point in the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two years, my phone has started frequently auto-correcting Tiff to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John capital. The
⏹️ ▶️ John tagged image file format.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, the file format name. So I assume there is a database
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the phone of known terms and proper nouns and things like that, trademarks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and at some point, the tagged image file format got in there in the last few years. And so now, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though she is the contact I have the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequent contact with on my phone, and her name is not Tiffany on the phone, it’s Tiff. So I’m like, it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first name of my wife. How could you possibly downrank that from anything else? But nope,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nevertheless, in many contexts in the phone when typing Tiff, it comes out as all capitals.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so when I saw this, I figured, let me just do it on my phone just to refresh my memory before we answer
⏹️ ▶️ John this on the show. And like so many things involving Apple’s voice
⏹️ ▶️ John assistant, just because a thing used to exist and you’ve used it for maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John years, doesn’t mean it still exists or works right. And it was just a comedy
⏹️ ▶️ John of errors. I’m sitting at my desk, my computer desk with my phone. I
⏹️ ▶️ John hold the side button to activate Siri. And I say,
⏹️ ▶️ John first I just wanna hear how it pronounces my name. I say, how do you pronounce my name? It puts up a text
⏹️ ▶️ John bubble and says, Well, you’re John, you asking me?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I say, pronounce my last name.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, well, no one can do that. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to hit the side button to make it do it. By the way, it just showed text. It didn’t say anything. I’m like, is the volume
⏹️ ▶️ John down on my phone? I start hitting the volume button. I’m like, no, the volume’s not down. I’m, it’s comical.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to get it to say my name. I’m saying, Siri, say my name. It will, not only will
⏹️ ▶️ John it not say my name and give me snarky replies of like, you’re John, that’s what you told me.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s never speaking audibly. It is only showing text bubbles. Like, am I going
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy? Have I gone deaf? Again, I’m hitting the volume buttons. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why is it not speaking to me? I do this for a little while, arguing with the thing, trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to literally ever get it to say my last name or say anything. It’s not even saying John. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John making any audible noise. It is just putting text boxes. I’m like, did I accidentally hit tap to Siri? No, I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. Eventually, I hear my HomePod And the other room
⏹️ ▶️ John say something audibly to me that says, you know, you’re John, you’re asking me what your name is? I think you’re John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like HomePod, you’re a room away. I can’t even believe you could hear me. I’m in
⏹️ ▶️ John a, meanwhile, my phone is still dead silent. So my new theory is turn off the screen on the phone. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s because the screen is on and I’m holding the phone and I’m looking at it. It doesn’t want to talk to me. And that finally
⏹️ ▶️ John gets my phone to start saying things but I still cannot get it to say my last name. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t get the opportunity to do what I had done in the past, which was, that’s not how you say my name.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I always said to it in the past. When it would say my last name and I would say, that’s not how you say my name, it would reply,
⏹️ ▶️ John please say your name how you wanna say it, and I would say it, blah, blah, blah. Instead, I was just getting text bubbles and
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually audio that was telling me, you can change this in the contacts app. Like it did like
⏹️ ▶️ John their product knowledge thing, like go to the contacts app and find, you know, hit the edit field and it’s telling you
⏹️ ▶️ John to add a custom field to your contact where you can fit, oh, what is it called? Find the name of the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thing. phonetic pronunciation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did I just lose it or am I not on the edit screen here? Yeah, some phonetic pronunciation. I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John called. Let me maybe have to X out of that. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have a noise. How it doesn’t show all the fields. Yeah, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John tell what it’s I can’t tell what’s called because Allen die has been on the screen and has made it so that you can only see the label is dim gray text.
⏹️ ▶️ John If there’s nothing in the field, but once there’s something in the field, like it says on the edit screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John the first line says John second one says Syracuse and the third line says my of pronunciation,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I only know that because what looks like a pronunciation there. And then the fourth line says in dim gray text company and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John blank. Anyway, labels, you don’t need to see them when there’s something already in the field, right? You’ll always know what it is, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s telling me to do that. But again, it’s now it’s not talking to me anymore. Now it’s just showing me text.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m like, okay, like, but when I put something there I don’t know how you’re gonna pronounce it. Like, what do I put
⏹️ ▶️ John in the pronunciation field? Do I put like, do I use the whatever, like the phonetic alphabet that you see in a
⏹️ ▶️ John dictionary? Do I just try to like, sound it out? Do I put a bunch of other words that sound like the
⏹️ ▶️ John words I want you to put in there? Do I have to, you know, I need you to say my name.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just could not get it to do it. And it was maddening. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no normal person would ever tolerate what I tolerated trying to get this to happen for the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco show. But of course
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pig-headed, I’m gonna make it happen. Eventually, so I did type something in that
⏹️ ▶️ John phonetic pronunciation. I tried a couple of things. Eventually I did get it to start saying my name. I’ve actually already forgotten how
⏹️ ▶️ John I got it to say my name, but eventually it did start saying my name and I got it into a loop where I could change the contents
⏹️ ▶️ John of that text field and then say whatever I said successfully. Again, turning off the screen and putting it down
⏹️ ▶️ John so my HomePod won’t do it in, just, it was ridiculous. Here’s what I wrote in the field.
⏹️ ▶️ John S-E-R-R-A, space, the word Q, like Q-U-E-U-E,
⏹️ ▶️ John not like C-U-E, but like a line, Q, Q-U-E-U-E, space,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-A-H. I was afraid it was gonna space that out as three words, but it turns out that if you
⏹️ ▶️ John type that in the field, Siri says Syracusa. Wait, so tell me again what
⏹️ ▶️ John you wrote? It’s S-E-R-R-A space Q-U-E-U-E
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never in a million years would
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of experimentation led to this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because I type all sorts of other things
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would say things that were ridiculous, but this, for whatever reason, this madness,
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, the only the middle thing is a word. I don’t think S-E-R-A is a word. I don’t think S-A-H
⏹️ ▶️ John is a word, but some scrabble person probably telling me they’re both words. But anyway, Q-U-E-U-E is a word. Cause I was trying to get, how
⏹️ ▶️ John do I get it to say the letter Q? If I just put the letter Q there like, so Tony,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m here to tell you, it is possible to use the phonetic pronunciation
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and get it to pronounce your name right once.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Will it stay that way?
⏹️ ▶️ John Will it be that way tomorrow? Why did it even work now? Why did I have to argue with my phone across
⏹️ ▶️ John and my HomePod to get this to work? All this is say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would, is this JJ’s fault? I mean, all I gotta say is that Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John has not gotten better and there seems to be a technology that exists in the world that could at the
⏹️ ▶️ John very least allow me to say, hey, dingus, here’s how you pronounce my name and
⏹️ ▶️ John have it say, okay, please pronounce your name. And I would pronounce it and then I would say, please say my name back and then you would do it. I feel like that
⏹️ ▶️ John is attainable with today’s technology, not attainable with Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John without a huge fight. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Today I learned.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you, you should both try it now. Try to get your phone to say your name.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Last name, first name. First name and last name. We’re really doing this live?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you can cut it out of the show. I just want to see you both try to do it. Say my name.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just says, you’re asking me, Marco? Say, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t know. Siri, say
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey my name. The
⏹️ ▶️ John snark is not as funny when it doesn’t work. Did it say anything audibly or is it just text? No, it’s just text.
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Why is it not speaking to you? I don’t know. Ask it the weather and see if it speaks to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s the weather? It talks to you, but
⏹️ ▶️ John when you want it to say your name, no speech.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Huh. Siri, speak my name. In text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only. You’re Casey. That’s what you told me anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Speak Casey’s name.
⏹️ ▶️ John Say no, my last name, my family name, my surname. I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell you, Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s wild. It’s not so easy. And the little tiny bit of personality and snark just makes you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, Aura Frames,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Delete.me. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the perks of membership, one of the many perks of membership, is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco topic. This week on Overtime, we are going to be talking about a rumor of an Apple and Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip partnership to possibly make Mac chips again, which is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting. So we’ll talk about that in overtime. You can join to listen at ATB.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks everybody for listening. We’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental John
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John mastodon, you can follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental,
Post-show: Cases and bagels
⏹️ ▶️ John Real time follow up chat room says, say, what’s my full name? All
⏹️ ▶️ John right. What’s my full name?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s Casey. Liss. Look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that. You have British series.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You have the British one. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s doing the list pun because it doesn’t do it as Casey list. It’s like Casey list. You lack Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you are Casey list.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am. I’m without a case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s my full name? It’s Marco Arment. Yeah, mine was fine. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. Marco has
⏹️ ▶️ John a straightforward pronunciation of his name and list is also pretty, anyway, I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ John we found a way to say the full name. And if I had known that specific phrasing, I would have used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Uh, so I got news recently that there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, let me get this right. Let me open this link. Um, there is a New York bagel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fest. And apparently this is a thing where you don’t call them, they call you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s a bunch of people or a bunch of different bagel shops from around the country, as far as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Wait, not from New York?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, including, but not exclusively New York. Many are from New York.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s apparently the 25 best bagel places in the world. And over 2000 people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cast votes. And I am extremely happy to tell you that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the local shop Baltics Bagels here in Richmond earned the People’s Choice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Award in New York City for People’s Choice Best Bagel in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 2025 New York Bagel Fest. What now, John Siracusa? Good bagels exist outside of New
⏹️ ▶️ Casey York. How do you like them apples?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, we get those emails to the ATP address that’s like, uh, get your podcast listed
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey top 100 podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sorts of things like that. And your
⏹️ ▶️ John app included in this, in this contest. And we ignore it because we just assume it’s spam and a scam. And mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s like, well, it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco usually is. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to pay money to enter, right? And it’s just like, who’s judging this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, is this, why would I want to participate in this type of thing? It just seems like the type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that we should just ignore, and so we do. And I have to imagine this Bagel Fest contest
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, including bagels from all over the world, is the type of thing that the good bagel shops in New York
⏹️ ▶️ John ignore, the way we ignore those emails about podcasts, sponsorships. Now, I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John the bagels that won this or bad bagels or whatever. It kind of goes back to, I thought, this is not actually something that’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John in a rectif. I think it’s an upcoming episode of Robot or Not, where I talked about the idea of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like a bagel company in Colorado for people who are from Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it was rectifs, I don’t remember. All these podcasts blend together. But when you go
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere else in the country, or when you present other people with like your hometown
⏹️ ▶️ John food or whatever, and you expect, surely they’ll love this, because this is the best Philly
⏹️ ▶️ John cheesesteak or this is the best New York bagel or whatever. Those people have no
⏹️ ▶️ John affection for or knowledge of the regional food product you’re presenting them with. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John take great pains to faithfully reproduce the exact thing that you want. Like this is an authentic Philly cheesesteak.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s exactly how it is in Philly, but here I am in California. And you give it to Californians and they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t know what a Philly cheesesteak is supposed to taste like. They have no fondness for it. They have
⏹️ ▶️ John no nostalgia for it, nor can they judge whether you’ve successfully reproduced the thing that you love from Philadelphia.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you’re sad when you present it to them, they’re like, shrug and they go next door and get, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John something with avocado on it or whatever. Right. Sorry, Californians, I don’t know which stereotype to use for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a big state, lots of diversity. I feel like that’s the same situation with these bagels here.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure the people who live near these bagel places like them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re New Yorkers voting John Jesus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Christ. So which New
⏹️ ▶️ John Yorkers do you think we’re participating in Bagel Fest? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John know. Is it Citi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Field? How is it so inconceivable to you that there exists a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bagel outside of New York?
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s inconceivable to me was that the best one is in Virginia. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what’s no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no, no, no, I didn’t say the best. I said people’s choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Well, whatever. The best bagel is apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Dallas of all places.
⏹️ ▶️ John See, that’s what I’m saying, right? Like, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John have a good food product that people enjoy, but it doesn’t mean it is an authentic reproduction. Like that person who’s in Colorado,
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s making authentic New York bagels in Colorado, maybe he is making authentic New York bagels in Colorado, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But the Colorado people don’t know or care about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The people voting are voting in Citi Field in New York City.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yes, okay. People who want
⏹️ ▶️ John free bagels? Is that who’s voting?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jesus Christ, John. You are so fucking insufferable, it blows my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John For the record, the- I’m supporting your idea here, because what I’m saying is that there’s nothing inherently
⏹️ ▶️ John superior about New York bagels, it’s just what New Yorkers want. That’s what I’m getting at. It’s not like they’re any better
⏹️ ▶️ John or worse, but New Yorkers want New York bagels. And to the degree that you can simulate that elsewhere, fine, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t make you successful in those other regions. And if you want New York bagels, just get them in New York. And I’ll also add that
⏹️ ▶️ John the bagel seed of my use, as we’ve discussed, has changed significantly. We’ve talked about rainbow bagels and
⏹️ ▶️ John all the other madness that goes on. So people put in caraway seeds and everything bagels. It’s really just, you know, things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the record, the third runner up for people’s choice is town bagel, which is listed on this website,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is going to make you so happy as Long Island.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, that’s all I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got. Long Island. But best of the boroughs. The winner was Esa Bagel, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went to when we were in Manhattan over the summer and is freaking great. And you know what they also have? Rainbow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bagels. What now? Everybody has rainbow bagels. So, so anyway, so Baltics Bagels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here in Richmond, they won the People’s Choice Award. By coincidence, they’re, they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that close to where I live. Richmond admittedly is not a very big town, but not that close to where I live. However, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had to run an errand very near to where they are. And so I thought, you know what, I’m going to go in and I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get a dozen Baltics Bagels. And I got a dozen plain bagels. I’m of the opinion that plain is the baseline
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by which you can measure everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plain… Oh no. I like other bagels, don’t get me wrong. But I personally believe that if you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do a plain bagel right, you’re screwed. And the texture of this bagel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was just chef’s kiss spot on perfect. However, they were the saltiest f***ing plain bagels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve ever had in my life. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John don’t know if it was… It’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like the people in TV shops picking out the TV that’s the brightest and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey has the most exaggerated colors. So they put the most salt in the bagel
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey whatever this is. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, this is the only time I’ve ever been. So maybe it was an off batch. I don’t know, but they were astonishingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey salty for a plain bagel. I kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of agree with Marco that like if you want to judge a bagel place, I know what you’re saying with the plain. It’s like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John you got to get the basics right too. But one of the essential skills
⏹️ ▶️ John or attributes of a bagel place is how they deal with stuff on the bagel. So I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John my go to for like the equivalent of just try the plain cheese pizza would be like sesame or poppy because
⏹️ ▶️ John then you get to see what is their philosophy on putting stuff on the bagel because
⏹️ ▶️ John some places cover every square inch of the bagel with sesame seeds and sometimes they’re double layered and some places put
⏹️ ▶️ John three sesame seeds in the bagel and that lets you know what kind of place this is. You really have, you can’t get a plane
⏹️ ▶️ John and learn that. So you have to get something on the bagel and sesame and poppy are pretty neutral.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, you, you gotta go everything. You gotta get an everything bagel. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean everything teaches
⏹️ ▶️ John you like whether they use caraway seeds, whether they put salt on the everything and all sorts of other crap
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like that. Yeah, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does. It’s a, it’s a very broad test.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, I agree. If I wasn’t going to do plain everything is it
⏹️ ▶️ John it does teach you how they deal with toppings but I feel like Some places even if they put three sesame seeds
⏹️ ▶️ John on tend to overdo it on the everything So everything can be a false signal in it Well, this place puts lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of toppings on then you get a poppy and there’s two poppy seeds on it But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why why would you ever order anything else besides an everything bagel if the everything bagel was good?
⏹️ ▶️ John There are other bagels in the world I know you like everything but there are other but you know when I just got bagels that a new
⏹️ ▶️ John not a new big place But a big place at the request of someone that my daughter goes to school that she wanted from a particular place that I don’t particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John enjoy, but it’s not terrible. But anyway, two things, one, and this is this is
⏹️ ▶️ John me. Another being me being an old man thing. I went to this bagel place. I’ve been there before, but I don’t remember. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago because I decided they weren’t for me. I go in there and I’m giving bagel counts, and it
⏹️ ▶️ John occurs to me I’ve never been to this place before, and the person is like, I said a dozen bagel and they were like
⏹️ ▶️ John counting down. And I was like. I mean, I sounded dumb when I said this, but I knew what I was. I
⏹️ ▶️ John hope that in the context of bagel shop that would notice it would say how many bagels are in a dozen anybody who’s from New York.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco ask that question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s never twelve and it’s but it’s not always the same number could be thirteen eight.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes it’s fourteen right. You know what this person said to me twelve.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey This is a bagel player day that sells
⏹️ ▶️ John you a dozen bagels and they give you twelve bagels. Now. I know this isn’t this is pointless. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John well, they just change the price who cares whatever it’s a cultural thing. If you’re a bagel place,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should not ever sell a dozen, 12 bagels in a dozen. So I was like, I cannot believe this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I am offended. I’m offended as a New Yorker, as a Long Islander, that you would have the audacity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, there are like, there’s like 500 German listeners who are just like, they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is he complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John about? It’s a baker’s dozen is 13 and a Long Island dozen, I guess, is 14. But either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, it’s never 12. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway, I had to ask them to put the everything bagels in a separate bag, which I should never have to ask them because they must be segregated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, if you have to, I am of the belief that if you have to ask them to separate the everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bagel, that 100% brings them down a notch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Or onion bagels. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because again, what that tells you is maybe they don’t serve a lot of those bagels,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe the people here don’t feel that strongly about their bagel flavors, and neither one of those is
⏹️ ▶️ John just bad bagel service. I mean, the default is everything in a separate, If they say don’t bother with the separate bag, fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I shouldn’t have to say anything, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, there is, in my personal opinion, and we’ve talked about this many times, there is a pretty good bagel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shop by me. I’m not saying it’s equivalent to New York, but given how far we are from New York, it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. However, they have two critical flaws. Number one, there’s something about the Everything Bagel that just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t quite right. I don’t think it’s Carraway. I personally am not offended by salt on an Everything Bagel, but there’s something about it that just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t, it’s just not quite there. So I agree with you, Marco, if I wasn’t going to do a plain bagel as my litmus test,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything is absolutely the next thing on my list. But the other problem this local shop has is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it doesn’t separate everything into its own bag and it drives me freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John crazy. Oh, no. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John ask them to do it, but you shouldn’t have to. Oh, sure, sure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure. But you shouldn’t have to. But the correct behavior for a bagelologist in this situation is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to ask, do you want those in a separate bag? That’s standard procedure. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. Anyway, I just thought it was funny. I should have known that I was going to get enraged by this, but that’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it was funny that the Richmond, the Podunk Richmond, Virginia bagel shop won People’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Choice. Not the best, mind you, but People’s Choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you had their bagels and didn’t like them, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, they were good, but they were way too salty. And I would like to try again at some point. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this errand I was running does happen a couple of times a year, so I’ll probably go and try them again. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll try everything this time as well. But yeah, that was disappointing. Again, but the texture was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so perfect. It was a nice solid outside, super chewy inside. God, the texture was so good, but the plain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bagels were just too salty. I have another very brief thing I wanted to talk to you about. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after this absolute badgering you’re giving me, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I want to talk to you about this anymore, but because we need a little bit more for an after show, I’m going to say this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think to a degree, to a degree, John was right. Let me explain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A few days ago, maybe a week or two ago, Bullstrap reached out and said, Hey, we heard you really like our cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’d love to send you one. And I said, well, it wasn’t me that you heard that liked your cases,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but hey, sure, if you want to send me a case, I’m not going to say no. And they said, okay, we’ll send you a case. What would you like?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I chose, I don’t, forgive me, I don’t have the model number or name in front of me or whatever, but I chose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their leather, but bare bottom case, you know, the, the, the way that John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey likes it. It’s called the minimalist. I think that’s right. I’ll put the link in the show notes. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have it handy while I’m speaking to you, but I think you’re right. Um, and so I got it maybe a week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago and had it on for most of the last week. I’ve since gone back to caseless Casey list. I was going to say, you already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey broken your phone. Well, I mean, no, no, no more than I did within the first 48 hours as we already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nicked it here and there. Um, but anyways, I personally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do not believe that it is absolutely compulsory to have a bottomless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone case. I’ve had many, many complete bottom phone cases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. But the place where this gets unfortunate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for your boy Casey is that I think the bottomless is better. Not compulsory mind you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I do think you’re right and I do think it’s better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. He unfortunately is right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Once you get used to not banging your finger against the lip of the case, it just to go back seems barbaric.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, but with you, I’d be worried about you dropping it and somehow hitting that bottom edge, which I’ve never done, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you might find a way. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John you managed to shatter your car window with an iPad, so you’re pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s talent right there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. But no, it is the, now that I’ve had a chance to look, it is the ball strap minimalist case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think they’ve ever sponsored, and they certainly didn’t ask for me to say anything, but I thought it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny to concede publicly that even though I maintain, like I just said a moment ago, you do not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to have a bottomless case, and God knows I probably shouldn’t, to your point, but it is a little bit better.