ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► So much easier when everything was monochrome.

00:00:02 ◼   ► Those were the days, right John?

00:00:04 ◼   ► Those were the days.

00:00:06 ◼   ► You kids these days and your multi-bit displays.

00:00:08 ◼   ► Pixels could be on or they could be off.

00:00:10 ◼   ► What more did you need?

00:00:12 ◼   ► [

00:00:12 ◼   ► (electronic beeping)

00:00:13 ◼   ► So I'm sick.

00:00:15 ◼   ► You know, I should actually save that

00:00:16 ◼   ► for right before followup,

00:00:17 ◼   ► because if you don't leave in that I'm sick,

00:00:19 ◼   ► then everyone's gonna branch at you

00:00:20 ◼   ► about how the sound's all wrong for me.

00:00:22 ◼   ► - Marco would never edit something out of a podcast

00:00:24 ◼   ► that causes a stream of feedback for an entire week,

00:00:26 ◼   ► even though we discussed it on the show.

00:00:28 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:00:30 ◼   ► - Normally I try to edit,

00:00:34 ◼   ► I try to remove things that we say,

00:00:37 ◼   ► kind of like, "I wonder if it's this way,"

00:00:39 ◼   ► that we find out two seconds later are wrong,

00:00:42 ◼   ► because that way, if I don't do that,

00:00:45 ◼   ► then we will get tons of email from people

00:00:47 ◼   ► who pause at that point before we realize that we are wrong

00:00:51 ◼   ► and write it and tell us that we were wrong.

00:00:53 ◼   ► So normally I will edit out the first half

00:00:55 ◼   ► of something like that, just because it doesn't do anybody

00:00:57 ◼   ► any good to hear us speculate being wrong

00:01:00 ◼   ► that we're gonna learn is wrong shortly after.

00:01:03 ◼   ► But sometimes I get it wrong.

00:01:05 ◼   ► - So with that in mind, before anyone writes in,

00:01:08 ◼   ► I am a little sick.

00:01:09 ◼   ► I actually feel fine, but I don't know,

00:01:11 ◼   ► maybe my sinuses are all clogged up

00:01:13 ◼   ► because I sound weird as hell.

00:01:14 ◼   ► - You sound like hell.

00:01:15 ◼   ► - I know, but I really do feel okay.

00:01:17 ◼   ► I haven't been snotting that much.

00:01:18 ◼   ► I mean, everything seems okay, but I can feel it coming.

00:01:21 ◼   ► - Can we hear more detail about your nasal situation?

00:01:24 ◼   ► - I would love to, I would love to.

00:01:25 ◼   ► Actually, it's funny because I--

00:01:27 ◼   ► - How's your butt?

00:01:28 ◼   ► Let's hear more, yeah.

00:01:29 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:01:31 ◼   ► - God, I wish I remembered that Scrubs song about,

00:01:34 ◼   ► I think it all comes down to poo, something like that.

00:01:36 ◼   ► Anyway. - That's life.

00:01:38 ◼   ► But yeah, I listened to Dubai Friday,

00:01:41 ◼   ► which I resisted listening to for a while

00:01:44 ◼   ► for no particular reason,

00:01:46 ◼   ► I guess just because I don't feel like

00:01:47 ◼   ► I have a lot of availability in my schedule

00:01:51 ◼   ► for new podcasts.

00:01:53 ◼   ► - Don't do that.

00:01:54 ◼   ► - Well, and as it turns out, I'm glad I folded

00:01:57 ◼   ► because Dubai Friday is excellent.

00:02:00 ◼   ► And on Dubai Friday, they were talking about

00:02:03 ◼   ► some sort of sinus cleansing device

00:02:05 ◼   ► that I think came from Walgreens.

00:02:07 ◼   ► - Don't do that either.

00:02:08 ◼   ► - It was a neti pot, right?

00:02:09 ◼   ► - Well, yeah, neti pot or something along those lines.

00:02:11 ◼   ► I forget the details.

00:02:12 ◼   ► - Brain amoebas.

00:02:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, that's the thing.

00:02:13 ◼   ► And so on the one side, I feel like,

00:02:15 ◼   ► I think my sinuses are like clogged as hell

00:02:18 ◼   ► and one of these neti pot-like things

00:02:21 ◼   ► would theoretically clear it.

00:02:23 ◼   ► But that being said, I really do not want a brain amoeba

00:02:27 ◼   ► and so I will just pass and sound like a moron

00:02:29 ◼   ► for the rest of the episode and not die from a brain amoeba

00:02:33 ◼   ► and I'll be okay with that.

00:02:34 ◼   ► - Now, in fairness for the "Dubai Friday"

00:02:36 ◼   ► brain squirting device, that one did have a microfilter of some kind that purported

00:02:43 ◼   ► to block the brain amoebas from entering your brain.

00:02:45 ◼   ► And if there's anybody you want to trust with keeping microbes out of your body through

00:02:49 ◼   ► use of a paper-thin filter, it's CVS.

00:02:52 ◼   ► It's a $14 thing at Walgreens.

00:02:54 ◼   ► Oh, Walgreens.

00:02:55 ◼   ► Sorry, not CVS.

00:02:56 ◼   ► Sorry.

00:02:57 ◼   ► That's a whole different story.

00:02:58 ◼   ► Yeah, if it's Walgreens, then you're okay.

00:03:00 ◼   ► Oh, my goodness.

00:03:01 ◼   ► So, yeah, so don't yell at Marco.

00:03:03 ◼   ► His levels aren't wrong.

00:03:04 ◼   ► My levels aren't wrong.

00:03:05 ◼   ► sound weird. So, um, so yeah, apologies for that. We should start with some follow up.

00:03:12 ◼   ► We are aware that you can use Control Center to switch to AirPods on iOS devices. The whole

00:03:18 ◼   ► of the internet wrote in to tell us this, and this was very confusing for Jon and I

00:03:22 ◼   ► because we spoke about this on the show and I didn't understand why nobody spent the time

00:03:28 ◼   ► to figure that out. And as it turns out, we later discovered that this was one of those

00:03:34 ◼   ► instances where Marco got a little aggressive with the edits, which truth be told, happens

00:03:39 ◼   ► extremely rarely. But every great once in a while, something slips through the cracks.

00:03:43 ◼   ► And this was one of those instances where John and I discussed this, and it was in the

00:03:49 ◼   ► midst of other things that should have been cut, and apparently the slicing and dicing

00:03:53 ◼   ► was not quite surgical enough. So we are aware that you can use Control Center to switch

00:03:59 ◼   ► to AirPods on iOS devices. So thank you the entirety of the internet for writing it.

00:04:03 ◼   ► But more importantly for the people who listen to the show the vast vast majority of people that information was cut and they

00:04:09 ◼   ► Didn't get the benefit of knowing that yes, obviously the people who wrote in to tell us

00:04:13 ◼   ► That we can use a control center

00:04:16 ◼   ► You know like that I was surprised by them writing in because I said oh

00:04:20 ◼   ► Like Marco said sometimes people pause the show to send feedback

00:04:24 ◼   ► And then they resume playing it and there's some standard amount of feedback you get of someone saying

00:04:30 ◼   ► something that you know will be addressed maybe 20 or 30 seconds later in the show.

00:04:33 ◼   ► And that's fine. That happens all the time. I do it myself. Everybody does it, right?

00:04:37 ◼   ► >> JOSHUA YAMISCH: Yep. Me too.

00:04:37 ◼   ► >> BRIAN KARDELL: I usually expect to see one or two pieces of feedback after that saying,

00:04:43 ◼   ► "Oh, ha ha. I should have waited 20 seconds, then you mentioned it." But I didn't see any of those.

00:04:47 ◼   ► I was like, "This is weird." Large volume of people apparently pausing the podcast to get feedback,

00:04:52 ◼   ► but nobody saying, "Oh, sorry. I should have kept listening." So that was my clue that this was

00:04:59 ◼   ► was going on. But anyway, the important piece of information denied to all the other listeners

00:05:03 ◼   ► who didn't know, like me, that you can do this. If you have AirPods and multiple iOS

00:05:11 ◼   ► devices, you don't have to go to settings and Bluetooth and switch it. You can do it

00:05:16 ◼   ► in Control Center, and it is more convenient, so try it.

00:05:19 ◼   ► Yeah, and to be clear, just in case it wasn't obvious, there are two panes in Control Center,

00:05:24 ◼   ► And it is the right most pain.

00:05:27 ◼   ► There's a kind of a dropdown list-ish thing on the bottom where you can select your output

00:05:32 ◼   ► device and that's what you want.

00:05:34 ◼   ► And actually speaking of Control Center, one of the reasons that it is not actually as

00:05:39 ◼   ► convenient for me to use Control Center is because as of right now I have Control Center

00:05:44 ◼   ► disabled on my iPad every place except for Springboard.

00:05:48 ◼   ► You know there's that setting if you whether you want to be able to swipe up and get Control

00:05:51 ◼   ► Center either just in Springboard or in all apps.

00:05:53 ◼   ► I forget how it's phrased, but anyway, I had to disable Control Center in applications

00:05:59 ◼   ► on my iPad, which is the main device I would be switching to, because of Stagehand, which

00:06:04 ◼   ► is an excellent game that you should try, but it involves a lot of swiping rapidly upward

00:06:07 ◼   ► from the bottom of your iPad, and I really don't want Control Center to appear.

00:06:11 ◼   ► I don't even want the little tabby thing to appear, because you know what makes you do

00:06:14 ◼   ► it twice to show that you really mean it?

00:06:16 ◼   ► That little tabby thing appears, and I'm instantly dead, so that's a great game.

00:06:21 ◼   ► Everyone should buy it and try it and you should disable Control Center first.

00:06:26 ◼   ► I love the style of that game, I love the music of that game, I love the idea of that

00:06:32 ◼   ► game, but my brain just can't do it.

00:06:34 ◼   ► Like I know there's some kind of learning curve maybe, and I tried playing it for like

00:06:38 ◼   ► a good 15 minutes, I could not get my brain to do it right.

00:06:43 ◼   ► It's not a learning curve, it's a two-state machine.

00:06:46 ◼   ► There is "I don't get the game" and then you will cross a humongous gap somehow magically

00:06:51 ◼   ► and then all of a sudden you get the game. That was my experiences. I was in the beta

00:06:55 ◼   ► for that game and I played it a lot during the beta, right? And my high score was like

00:07:01 ◼   ► one or two hundred for several weeks. And then as the beta went on, I got close to four hundred.

00:07:10 ◼   ► And I was asking, I was asking, "Nevin, what did normal people get for high scores? I know

00:07:15 ◼   ► it's just the beta testers, but am I just terrible at this game or am I average?"

00:07:20 ◼   ► And he was saying there's a lot of variability and so on and so forth

00:07:23 ◼   ► It's trying to make me feel better about my thought my terrible high score

00:07:27 ◼   ► But once the game got closer to release it. I think it was actually around the time of release I

00:07:32 ◼   ► my brain figured it out like figure it out how to play the game and instantly went up into the thousands and

00:07:38 ◼   ► You know and have him look back, so I I wouldn't you know it. It's a fun game

00:07:44 ◼   ► It's a cute little trifle you can play with it, but unfortunately unlike alto's adventure unfortunately slash fortunately

00:07:50 ◼   ► once you figure the game out it becomes surprisingly time consuming as you spend

00:07:57 ◼   ► your days plunking away at this thing but there is there is a big leap so if

00:08:01 ◼   ► you don't you know if you don't want to ever make that leap that's fine

00:08:03 ◼   ► I still think it's worth the three bucks or whatever the game costs just to play

00:08:06 ◼   ► with it because it is a really novel interesting idea very well executed but

00:08:10 ◼   ► there is another game on the other side of it once you once you cross the hurdle

00:08:14 ◼   ► once your brain gets the game and then you can like me spend most of your time

00:08:18 ◼   ► being incredibly frustrated that you made some tiny minute mistake after

00:08:22 ◼   ► playing for literally 20 minutes and just missed your high score. This sounds

00:08:26 ◼   ► vaguely like the smarter everyday video with the backwards bike. Have you seen

00:08:31 ◼   ► this? It's you know with where they they had it's like a gear or something like

00:08:35 ◼   ► that such that when you turned the handlebars right the bike went left and

00:08:40 ◼   ► and if you watch the video, spoiler alert, basically eventually you just flip this

00:08:45 ◼   ► switch or your brain just flips the switch where it understands and then you

00:08:50 ◼   ► can actually ride the bike. Also real-time follow-up this is an example

00:08:53 ◼   ► of us saying something that we don't realize is wrong. People will have

00:08:57 ◼   ► already paused the show and written in and now I will correct it. For the three

00:09:02 ◼   ► of you that actually use HomeKit, HomeKit is the right most pain on a

00:09:06 ◼   ► control center. It is not the audio stuff but there's only three of

00:09:11 ◼   ► you that use HomeKit so I appreciate all three of you writing in.

00:09:14 ◼   ► that out don't worry. Yeah. Do you think they're also the opera users? Ah, you know,

00:09:19 ◼   ► that's an interesting point. Very well could be. Hmm, I don't know. So write in if

00:09:23 ◼   ► you, no actually not really. There are long waits when you use the chat

00:09:28 ◼   ► feature for most customer support tools. This is when you use the online

00:09:32 ◼   ► web chat because like me you hate the telephone and don't want to spend any

00:09:36 ◼   ► time on the telephone if you can avoid it. Tom W. writes in to point out, "Web chat

00:09:40 ◼   ► works on the premise that one person speaks to a few people at once, many up

00:09:44 ◼   ► to 10. And perhaps that's why the latency is so atrociously bad when you're having these

00:09:52 ◼   ► online chat experiences.

00:09:53 ◼   ► Yeah, a lot of people wrote in with that feedback and that makes perfect sense. And it should

00:09:57 ◼   ► have occurred to me, but didn't. I was using it because the phone lines were closed. But

00:10:01 ◼   ► I mean, it just falls out of like, "Okay, so the phone lines are closed. Why is the

00:10:05 ◼   ► text chat open?" Because in text chat, you get a 10 to one multiplier on your people.

00:10:10 ◼   ► And that's why I gotta wait 10 minutes for a reply, because someone is replying to 10

00:10:15 ◼   ► other people.

00:10:16 ◼   ► And that's actually kind of an amazing/terrible job, because who wants to – have you ever

00:10:21 ◼   ► tried to conduct 10 simultaneous text conversations that are productive in any way with anybody?

00:10:28 ◼   ► You can't even joke around with three friends at once.

00:10:31 ◼   ► I feel like I'm frazzled doing that.

00:10:32 ◼   ► It's like, all right.

00:10:33 ◼   ► I mean, you can have multiple things going in a non-time-critical nature, like just,

00:10:39 ◼   ► you know, whatever, like someone says something funny

00:10:41 ◼   ► and then you say something funny backward,

00:10:42 ◼   ► like that's fine, and multiple Slack channels,

00:10:44 ◼   ► all that stuff, but 10 customer service conversations

00:10:47 ◼   ► where the person on the other end is potentially angry

00:10:50 ◼   ► and wants to just complete a transaction,

00:10:52 ◼   ► now I feel really bad for these people.

00:10:53 ◼   ► - I mean, I'm guessing that there's, you know,

00:10:56 ◼   ► software assistants here, that they're probably using

00:10:58 ◼   ► special tools that have like a checklist script

00:11:01 ◼   ► that they're going through with each person.

00:11:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's macros, yeah.

00:11:03 ◼   ► - Well, but even just like, I'm sure there's like a script

00:11:06 ◼   ► or like a checklist that each one can probably keep a state

00:11:09 ◼   ► of like, here's what I've done with this customer so far.

00:11:11 ◼   ► So there's probably some kind of special software design

00:11:14 ◼   ► to help them out here.

00:11:16 ◼   ► - Well, I mean, this is a perfect application

00:11:17 ◼   ► for everyone's favorite '80s AI technology, expert systems,

00:11:21 ◼   ► where you can't make a general purpose AI

00:11:23 ◼   ► because it's really hard,

00:11:24 ◼   ► but what you can do is make a text-only chat thing

00:11:28 ◼   ► that knows how to handle customer service,

00:11:31 ◼   ► the top five customer service concerns,

00:11:33 ◼   ► and punts to a user if it can't figure it out.

00:11:37 ◼   ► And those can work fine too,

00:11:38 ◼   ► and I think I would probably be mostly okay with those.

00:11:41 ◼   ► If it just, you know, I would type in something

00:11:45 ◼   ► and it would repeat back to me

00:11:46 ◼   ► its understanding of the thing, asking for confirmation.

00:11:50 ◼   ► And that can get frustrating if you go around in circles,

00:11:52 ◼   ► but if it just punts you to a person,

00:11:53 ◼   ► I can imagine it would probably be good for, you know,

00:11:55 ◼   ► covering at least half of the cases of,

00:11:58 ◼   ► I have a product, there's a problem, I want to return,

00:12:00 ◼   ► and it would ask me for the order number

00:12:02 ◼   ► and give me the RMA, but like, machine could do that.

00:12:05 ◼   ► Not that I'm trying to put more people out of work

00:12:06 ◼   ► the AIs, but, you know, efficiencies.

00:12:10 ◼   ► All right, so let's get to the John Syracuse, a portion of follow-up, as if all the follow-up

00:12:16 ◼   ► isn't John's already.

00:12:17 ◼   ► Why don't you tell us about APFS?

00:12:22 ◼   ► Somebody on the internet named Tyler Locke, or "Loke," successfully booted macOS Sierra

00:12:28 ◼   ► from an APFS file system.

00:12:30 ◼   ► As we all know, APFS was introduced in Sierra as a developer preview, and presumably sometime

00:12:35 ◼   ► this year will be the official supported bootable file system for what I suppose is the next

00:12:42 ◼   ► major version of Mac OS, but who knows, they could do it in a point release too, whatever,

00:12:46 ◼   ► it's already coming to iOS in 10.3 and that's not even the next major release.

00:12:51 ◼   ► And up till now you haven't been able to boot from it, but many many parts of it are getting

00:12:55 ◼   ► more and more mature and obviously if it's going to be the, it's going to convert all

00:12:59 ◼   ► your iOS devices to APFS in 10.3, I bet the file system is pretty much ready for prime

00:13:04 ◼   ► The only reason it's not on the Mac is because the Mac is obviously a lower priority.

00:13:08 ◼   ► And he tweeted about this.

00:13:09 ◼   ► We'll put some links in the show notes to these tweets just so you can get in touch

00:13:12 ◼   ► with him and tell him to write a blog post about it if he hasn't already.

00:13:16 ◼   ► He did it by taking a 10.12.4 drive, cloning it, running the APFS/HFS convert command line

00:13:25 ◼   ► utility which exists to convert it in place just like it does in the iOS devices, right?

00:13:29 ◼   ► That's why that utility exists.

00:13:31 ◼   ► And then manually edited the global partition table UUID to some big hex string that apparently

00:13:37 ◼   ► is the right one.

00:13:40 ◼   ► And then did some other stuff that I can't understand because he tried to compress it

00:13:43 ◼   ► all into a tweet.

00:13:45 ◼   ► And changed some kernel flags and rebooted.

00:13:47 ◼   ► And he was booted into APFS.

00:13:48 ◼   ► And the other thing to note is his little screenshot showing, "Hey, look, I'm booted

00:13:52 ◼   ► into APFS," showed as the volume type APFS and in parentheses case insensitive.

00:13:59 ◼   ► So in case you're wondering, I don't know if this is just a choice you made or if it's

00:14:02 ◼   ► going to be the official one, but APFS case insensitive is certainly a thing.

00:14:07 ◼   ► So maybe if you're having problems with case sensitive HFS+, you won't have to worry about

00:14:12 ◼   ► that with APFS because you won't be forced to make your Mac case sensitive if this screenshot

00:14:16 ◼   ► is any indication.

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00:16:03 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:16:06 ◼   ► - So, big week for Marco, as they say.

00:16:09 ◼   ► You have released Overcast 3, so congratulations.

00:16:12 ◼   ► - Thank you, there's only one massive bug.

00:16:14 ◼   ► - What's the massive bug?

00:16:15 ◼   ► - Well, there were 15 minor bugs that I fixed

00:16:17 ◼   ► in a point release yesterday,

00:16:20 ◼   ► but created one less minor bug

00:16:22 ◼   ► where now you just can't create playlists anymore.

00:16:25 ◼   ► Oh, that's no big deal.

00:16:26 ◼   ► - I've heard from surprisingly few people about it

00:16:29 ◼   ► because creating playlists is not a very common action.

00:16:32 ◼   ► You get the all episodes list for free

00:16:34 ◼   ► and if you queue things, that's created automatically,

00:16:37 ◼   ► so that's fine.

00:16:38 ◼   ► I have the fix ready.

00:16:39 ◼   ► iTunes Connect has been undergoing maintenance stuff

00:16:42 ◼   ► all day, so I haven't actually been able to submit it.

00:16:45 ◼   ► But that should be fixed in a couple days,

00:16:47 ◼   ► probably by the time this podcast goes live.

00:16:49 ◼   ► - You found this bug, the playlist bug,

00:16:51 ◼   ► after you released, laughed you uploaded 301?

00:16:54 ◼   ► - 301 caused the bug.

00:16:56 ◼   ► - Oh, there you go.

00:16:57 ◼   ► There you go.

00:16:59 ◼   ► Now that's a point release.

00:17:00 ◼   ► 'Cause it was a rapid turnaround.

00:17:02 ◼   ► You had 3.0.1 which had a bunch of little minor fixes

00:17:05 ◼   ► and it got approved really quickly

00:17:06 ◼   ► and it went up on the store.

00:17:07 ◼   ► It's like, wow, everything's working as is on.

00:17:09 ◼   ► But then you added a bug.

00:17:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, well 'cause 3.0 had a pretty serious bug

00:17:13 ◼   ► where the gesture for dismissing the now playing sheet,

00:17:18 ◼   ► it would interfere with the speed slider's little thumb

00:17:21 ◼   ► if you would set the speed to the very bottom setting,

00:17:24 ◼   ► the minus which is like .7x or .8x, something like that.

00:17:27 ◼   ► So basically if you set the speed all the way down,

00:17:30 ◼   ► you could never change it.

00:17:31 ◼   ► Unless you had like an iPad or something

00:17:32 ◼   ► that you could like sync it back from.

00:17:34 ◼   ► And so that was a pretty serious bug.

00:17:36 ◼   ► So I had to get 301 out quickly

00:17:40 ◼   ► and there were a couple of other like minor things.

00:17:41 ◼   ► I'm like, you know, let me throw in, you know,

00:17:43 ◼   ► whatever I could do quickly that's not gonna require

00:17:45 ◼   ► lots of testing to validate and everything.

00:17:47 ◼   ► Let me just do that quickly.

00:17:48 ◼   ► And I slipped up when fixing a playlist reordering bug.

00:17:52 ◼   ► basically I pulled the playlist editor out of the card

00:17:55 ◼   ► environment because for various implementation details

00:17:59 ◼   ► that are too boring to get into here,

00:18:01 ◼   ► UI table view reorder controls break if they're in a card

00:18:06 ◼   ► that isn't my now playing card.

00:18:08 ◼   ► So I had to revert the playlist editor back to the regular

00:18:13 ◼   ► environment which is not in a card

00:18:14 ◼   ► because it's a regular full screen sheet

00:18:16 ◼   ► and in doing that I mistakenly forgot to re-add

00:18:20 ◼   ► the done button back to it,

00:18:23 ◼   ► so now you can cancel your creation of the playlist,

00:18:25 ◼   ► but you cannot finish it.

00:18:26 ◼   ► - I was surprised to hear your comprehensive suite

00:18:28 ◼   ► of automated tests didn't catch this.

00:18:30 ◼   ► - I was waiting for it, thank you John Syracuse,

00:18:32 ◼   ► I love you so much. - No problem,

00:18:32 ◼   ► I wanted to save your voice.

00:18:34 ◼   ► - Thank you.

00:18:34 ◼   ► All right, so you've gone on a justifiable media blitz.

00:18:39 ◼   ► I listened to Under the Radar already,

00:18:41 ◼   ► moments before we started recording,

00:18:43 ◼   ► it turns out as per tradition, you are on the talk show.

00:18:45 ◼   ► What do you want to talk about here,

00:18:49 ◼   ► either that you've touched on previously

00:18:51 ◼   ► or that you'd like to elaborate upon.

00:18:54 ◼   ► I mean, this is your show, so now's the time to really,

00:18:56 ◼   ► well, not that Under the Radar isn't, you know what I mean.

00:18:59 ◼   ► Now's the time to really go deep on any of this stuff

00:19:01 ◼   ► or do what I expect you to do and say, hey, whatever.

00:19:04 ◼   ► - Well, I don't, I mean, what do you guys wanna know?

00:19:07 ◼   ► Like, I mean, what do you think would be interesting?

00:19:09 ◼   ► 'Cause like, you know, so I'll tell you, you know,

00:19:11 ◼   ► on Under the Radar, I talked about kind of the idea of,

00:19:15 ◼   ► basically 3.0 was a big release in terms of

00:19:20 ◼   ► how much stuff changed, but it was actually

00:19:23 ◼   ► not a big release in terms of here's a list

00:19:25 ◼   ► of features that are new.

00:19:27 ◼   ► Like there are very few new features.

00:19:29 ◼   ► And it's kind of an interesting thing to do

00:19:33 ◼   ► of like here's a new version of this app.

00:19:36 ◼   ► There's been tons of work to it, it's a lot better,

00:19:39 ◼   ► but I can't tell you everything new in it

00:19:41 ◼   ► because it's not that kind of better.

00:19:43 ◼   ► Like I basically, most of the work was in revamping the UI

00:19:48 ◼   ► and it doesn't even look incredibly different

00:19:52 ◼   ► than how it did before.

00:19:53 ◼   ► It just works differently in certain places.

00:19:56 ◼   ► So like you have the whole card UI

00:19:57 ◼   ► with the now playing screen,

00:19:59 ◼   ► the two stage episode selection now

00:20:01 ◼   ► with the action row on the bottom of it.

00:20:03 ◼   ► Those are the big things and then the queuing system

00:20:06 ◼   ► that goes around that whole thing

00:20:07 ◼   ► and kind of like moving all the actions into visible places.

00:20:11 ◼   ► but in a similar way that it's hard for me

00:20:14 ◼   ► to come up with a feature change list

00:20:17 ◼   ► of here's the big new headlining features,

00:20:19 ◼   ► it's also hard for me to come up with

00:20:21 ◼   ► what should I talk about?

00:20:22 ◼   ► Like what do you wanna know?

00:20:23 ◼   ► I don't know, Chatroom, what do you want?

00:20:25 ◼   ► I mean, what do you think I should be covering here?

00:20:28 ◼   ► - Chatroom wants to know why swipe to delete has gone on,

00:20:30 ◼   ► and having been on the Overcast 3 Beta for how many months,

00:20:33 ◼   ► I thought I'll eventually get used to it

00:20:34 ◼   ► and it will go away, I'm still swiping them to delete.

00:20:36 ◼   ► So just FYI.

00:20:38 ◼   ► I mean, not that I don't mind it,

00:20:39 ◼   ► 'cause I don't delete them that often,

00:20:40 ◼   ► like they go away when I still have the setting

00:20:42 ◼   ► that deletes them when you finish listening.

00:20:44 ◼   ► So it's not a thing that comes up often,

00:20:46 ◼   ► but I've done it in the past week.

00:20:48 ◼   ► - The short version of why this is the way it is,

00:20:51 ◼   ► and then you can yell at me for an hour, is the old way of,

00:20:56 ◼   ► you have your list of episodes,

00:20:58 ◼   ► you could swipe one of the cells

00:20:59 ◼   ► and it would reveal the iOS standard table view,

00:21:02 ◼   ► delete button along with a couple other actions.

00:21:04 ◼   ► Like there was a star for recommending

00:21:06 ◼   ► and there was a download button there

00:21:07 ◼   ► if it wasn't downloaded.

00:21:09 ◼   ► this has always been the way to delete episodes in Overcast.

00:21:12 ◼   ► You could also just listen to them all the way through,

00:21:14 ◼   ► and the default setting was to delete after listening.

00:21:18 ◼   ► I got so many emails and tweets

00:21:21 ◼   ► over the last two and a half years since 1.0,

00:21:23 ◼   ► with people asking, "How can I delete episodes?"

00:21:26 ◼   ► Or, "How do I delete episodes

00:21:28 ◼   ► "without listening to them all the way through?"

00:21:30 ◼   ► Which is kind of funny, if you think about it,

00:21:31 ◼   ► like that means people were actually

00:21:32 ◼   ► trying to play episodes all the way through

00:21:34 ◼   ► just to delete them.

00:21:35 ◼   ► And the reason why is because I thought,

00:21:37 ◼   ► when I was designing this app,

00:21:38 ◼   ► that of course everyone using an iPhone knows

00:21:42 ◼   ► that you swipe table views to delete.

00:21:44 ◼   ► You know, that's obvious, everyone knows that, right?

00:21:46 ◼   ► Or you tap the edit button in the corner

00:21:47 ◼   ► and it shows the delete controls

00:21:49 ◼   ► and then you delete from there.

00:21:50 ◼   ► People don't know this.

00:21:52 ◼   ► A lot of people don't know this.

00:21:54 ◼   ► And you can kind of understand why

00:21:55 ◼   ► because if you just get an iPhone

00:21:57 ◼   ► and you just start using it,

00:21:59 ◼   ► at no point do you really need that.

00:22:02 ◼   ► Like in the rest of the iPhone interface,

00:22:04 ◼   ► that doesn't really, like there's always also

00:22:07 ◼   ► delete button somewhere or something else,

00:22:09 ◼   ► or it's in some context like messages

00:22:11 ◼   ► where it doesn't really matter,

00:22:13 ◼   ► where you don't often delete entire conversations.

00:22:15 ◼   ► So a lot of people who use iPhones don't know

00:22:19 ◼   ► the quote standards for some of the standard controls

00:22:22 ◼   ► for things like swiping table cells

00:22:24 ◼   ► to show a delete control or hitting the edit button

00:22:26 ◼   ► to show other controls, whatever else.

00:22:27 ◼   ► - Does Apple Mail have a way to delete?

00:22:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, there's delete buttons right on the toolbar.

00:22:32 ◼   ► A huge design goal of Overcast 3,

00:22:34 ◼   ► and I wrote this in my post,

00:22:35 ◼   ► but a huge design goal of Overcast 3

00:22:36 ◼   ► was basically to, 'cause you know, every feature that I had

00:22:40 ◼   ► that was hidden behind some kind of gesture,

00:22:41 ◼   ► people wouldn't find.

00:22:42 ◼   ► And they would write in confused or mad

00:22:45 ◼   ► that I didn't have this feature or disappointed.

00:22:47 ◼   ► And so my main goal with Overcast 3 was to take

00:22:51 ◼   ► all the things I've learned with two and a half years

00:22:54 ◼   ► of basically feedback and user testing

00:22:56 ◼   ► and try to address as many design flaws as possible.

00:23:01 ◼   ► I mean, there's so many features, so much functionality,

00:23:05 ◼   ► that I've had since 1.0 that a good portion of my users

00:23:08 ◼   ► either can't find or just assume I don't have

00:23:11 ◼   ► or they misunderstand.

00:23:12 ◼   ► So it was very much like a clarifying release,

00:23:16 ◼   ► like to clarify how things work and et cetera.

00:23:20 ◼   ► And I knew going into it, I knew that the now playing

00:23:25 ◼   ► being this card that's coming from the bottom

00:23:26 ◼   ► instead of a navigation pane that slides from the right,

00:23:28 ◼   ► I knew that would be like a minor thing

00:23:30 ◼   ► people get used to quickly.

00:23:31 ◼   ► But I also knew, and I even said on the post,

00:23:33 ◼   ► that the new two stage where now you tap the cell

00:23:38 ◼   ► and rather than immediately playing the episode,

00:23:41 ◼   ► it shows a little action menu kind of like

00:23:44 ◼   ► when you select a tweet in Tweetbot

00:23:46 ◼   ► and there's buttons and the middle button there is play

00:23:49 ◼   ► and the one to the far right is delete.

00:23:52 ◼   ► I'm a little curious from people like you guys

00:23:55 ◼   ► and the entire chat room and many people on Twitter.

00:23:58 ◼   ► By the way, I should say before I make jokes like that,

00:24:01 ◼   ► The response to this update has been massively positive.

00:24:05 ◼   ► I am very, very happy with the response.

00:24:08 ◼   ► It has been very, very positive.

00:24:11 ◼   ► And for something that changes so many things,

00:24:13 ◼   ► that's a more positive reaction than I would have guessed.

00:24:18 ◼   ► So anyway, that aside, for the people who are not

00:24:20 ◼   ► so positive about it because of this new,

00:24:22 ◼   ► like, now it takes two taps to delete something thing,

00:24:26 ◼   ► it always took two taps to delete something.

00:24:27 ◼   ► But before it was swipe, tap, now it's tap, tap.

00:24:31 ◼   ► So I'm kind of curious like why, I mean it's different,

00:24:35 ◼   ► but is it actually worse?

00:24:37 ◼   ► - You know why, Casey and I shouldn't,

00:24:39 ◼   ► don't give him the answer, chat room don't tell him,

00:24:41 ◼   ► Marco will now explain to us why there is feedback

00:24:45 ◼   ► about the swipe.

00:24:46 ◼   ► - I understand the people who don't like

00:24:49 ◼   ► that there's two taps to play something,

00:24:51 ◼   ► I understand that because it was one tap before

00:24:54 ◼   ► and now it's two, even though it's much less error prone now

00:24:56 ◼   ► and the interface is way clearer for everybody,

00:24:58 ◼   ► But why is it worse to have delete be two taps

00:25:02 ◼   ► instead of a swipe and then a tap?

00:25:04 ◼   ► - And now the other part of Marco's brain,

00:25:06 ◼   ► well answer that question, go ahead.

00:25:08 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:25:09 ◼   ► - I know, I honestly like, I--

00:25:10 ◼   ► - Oh, I know you can do it Casey, and I know you can do it.

00:25:13 ◼   ► - It's just different, but is it worse?

00:25:16 ◼   ► - Nice.

00:25:17 ◼   ► - It's actually easier to do, it's more precise.

00:25:19 ◼   ► Because that's, one of the reasons I did this

00:25:21 ◼   ► was that the swipe to delete, I would often

00:25:24 ◼   ► accidentally start playing the episode.

00:25:26 ◼   ► - So, well let me give you my answer,

00:25:28 ◼   ► which I think is the same as John's, but who knows?

00:25:30 ◼   ► My answer is you should never, ever, ever deviate

00:25:34 ◼   ► from what is the norm on the platform.

00:25:36 ◼   ► And so the norm on the platform is if you wanna do

00:25:39 ◼   ► some sort of destructive change like that

00:25:40 ◼   ► in a quick gestural way, you swipe from right to left

00:25:45 ◼   ► and there will be some sort of destructive action

00:25:47 ◼   ► that you can take right then and there.

00:25:48 ◼   ► And like you've said previously, Marco,

00:25:50 ◼   ► that's on pretty much every table view in the system

00:25:53 ◼   ► that allows you to remove a table view row.

00:25:56 ◼   ► And so, and I don't think this is exclusively

00:26:00 ◼   ► a power user thing, although it certainly, in my mind,

00:26:03 ◼   ► skews towards power users.

00:26:05 ◼   ► But you should never fight the frameworks,

00:26:08 ◼   ► which you've done with this table view,

00:26:10 ◼   ► actually, in many ways.

00:26:11 ◼   ► - Oh, yeah.

00:26:12 ◼   ► - And you should never fight the HIG,

00:26:14 ◼   ► the Human Interface Guidelines.

00:26:15 ◼   ► And I feel like you're fighting the HIG.

00:26:17 ◼   ► Now, I haven't beaten you up about this too bad previously

00:26:20 ◼   ► because I understand where your head's at.

00:26:21 ◼   ► And it makes sense to me that,

00:26:23 ◼   ► for the overwhelming majority of users,

00:26:25 ◼   ► I bet you anything this was a positive change.

00:26:27 ◼   ► But for someone like me and thinking completely myopically,

00:26:30 ◼   ► you're behaving differently than the rest of the platform

00:26:33 ◼   ► and that feels gross in the same way

00:26:35 ◼   ► that you get that grossed out feeling

00:26:36 ◼   ► when you look at a material design Google app on an iPhone.

00:26:40 ◼   ► - I don't use any Google apps on my phone.

00:26:42 ◼   ► - Well, you know what I mean though.

00:26:44 ◼   ► And that's a bit of an unfair comparison

00:26:46 ◼   ► and a bit slanderous to be fair

00:26:48 ◼   ► because you are nowhere near that out of left field.

00:26:51 ◼   ► But it's a similar scenario, right?

00:26:53 ◼   ► you have something that doesn't quite feel right, but it doesn't quite feel right to a power user

00:27:00 ◼   ► or even a moderate power user. I think to most people, I think you made the right change,

00:27:07 ◼   ► even though it drives me batty. Well, let me just boil that down to a simpler, more visceral answer.

00:27:14 ◼   ► Everything you said is right, but the result of that is that bottom line, I keep swiping things.

00:27:22 ◼   ► That's that's the bottom line after many many weeks. I keep swiping and it's not a big deal and the

00:27:25 ◼   ► Discoverability is a hundred percent like I'm even though it is non-standard in the same way that tweetbot is non-standard

00:27:31 ◼   ► I like it like it is good because you have a complicated application and I think this is better and discoverability

00:27:36 ◼   ► There's no arguing against that you were getting tons of feedback about discoverability

00:27:39 ◼   ► People will find the trash can I come when they couldn't 100% on that but why why do people complain?

00:27:44 ◼   ► It's not about speed. It's not about efficiency. Why do I keep swiping? It's like Casey said because I swipe everywhere else

00:27:50 ◼   ► I can't convince my stupid thumbs not to swipe

00:27:52 ◼   ► and

00:27:54 ◼   ► And everything you said about why you why you you know added the bar and the discoverability all that's 100% true

00:28:00 ◼   ► but exactly in the same way that that uh

00:28:03 ◼   ► Underscore convinced you to make a sideways swipe and explicably do a thing that should totally not do this because that's the way the old

00:28:09 ◼   ► One worked you keep the same controls exactly where they are

00:28:12 ◼   ► But if my finger stupidly swipes for the umpteenth time just let it delete

00:28:18 ◼   ► But that's all I'm asking for like keep exactly the same stuff that's in there now make a discoverable so and so forth

00:28:23 ◼   ► But for the admittedly very small handful of people and that's why this is not a big deal

00:28:28 ◼   ► That's why 3.0 is in that win no matter what even if you never had this feature back

00:28:31 ◼   ► But for the small handful of people who are either on this podcast with you or in the chat room

00:28:35 ◼   ► Whose stupid thumbs keep swiping this is another case to do one of those features

00:28:42 ◼   ► Just like the the one was referring to the underscore talked you into which was the old gesture was to get rid of now

00:28:47 ◼   ► playing you could swipe to the side even though the new one comes up from the bottom, you

00:28:50 ◼   ► still made swipe to the side work because it's no skin off anyone else's back, no one

00:28:54 ◼   ► else is going to discover it except for people who have muscle memory from the old overcast,

00:28:57 ◼   ► guess what?

00:28:58 ◼   ► I can make that work for you too.

00:28:59 ◼   ► Now it may be a pain in the butt to make swipe to delete work in the context of whatever

00:29:03 ◼   ► unholy things that you've done to this table view to make it so super custom, and by the

00:29:07 ◼   ► way I love the fact that you can reorder now with the little grippy tabs everywhere, so

00:29:10 ◼   ► you know again it's totally a net win, but for this tiny little minor feature, you know,

00:29:16 ◼   ► would be neat if the old muscle memory still worked. And I guess I'll probably eventually

00:29:20 ◼   ► get used to it, but I thought I would have gotten used to it by now. And I think it's

00:29:23 ◼   ► exactly what Casey said. If the whole rest of the system is training me again and again

00:29:28 ◼   ► to swipe to delete, it's very difficult to sort of contextually untrain myself from that

00:29:32 ◼   ► gesture on something that looks for all the world like a table view.

00:29:36 ◼   ► As a general rule, use standard gestures. People are familiar with the standard gestures

00:29:39 ◼   ► and don't appreciate being forced to learn different ways to do the same thing. In games

00:29:43 ◼   ► and other immersive apps, custom gestures can be a fun part of the experience. In other

00:29:46 ◼   ► apps it's best to use the standard gestures so extra effort isn't needed to discover or

00:29:49 ◼   ► remember them. Straight out of the Hague.

00:29:52 ◼   ► All right, so you guys make good points. I don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying.

00:29:57 ◼   ► I actually, the idea of doing both, of adding the swipes back, actually never occurred to

00:30:04 ◼   ► me until this moment. There is probably something I'm doing to that table view that would make

00:30:10 ◼   ► that probably not work well.

00:30:13 ◼   ► You don't like drawing glitches?

00:30:14 ◼   ► Come on, that's all part of the fun.

00:30:17 ◼   ► - I will try it, 'cause I admit,

00:30:19 ◼   ► if I can do that with no horrible side effects,

00:30:22 ◼   ► then it is kind of a no-brainer

00:30:24 ◼   ► to offer that affordance to have both.

00:30:26 ◼   ► - I like to see the little orange bar appear

00:30:27 ◼   ► as the thing above it swipes sideways,

00:30:29 ◼   ► and the orange bar starts to get clipped and filled,

00:30:31 ◼   ► it will be so awesome.

00:30:32 ◼   ► - Oh, you have no idea what I've done

00:30:34 ◼   ► to poor UITableView.

00:30:35 ◼   ► - I know, I mean, whatever Tweetbot did,

00:30:37 ◼   ► same type of thing.

00:30:38 ◼   ► Like this, and to be fair,

00:30:40 ◼   ► I don't know if Tweetbot was the originator of this thing,

00:30:42 ◼   ► But a lot of applications do this, where they want to have more stuff for you to do in a

00:30:48 ◼   ► table view.

00:30:49 ◼   ► They can't all fit under a magic edit button where you go into a mode, right?

00:30:53 ◼   ► And so they do this thing where it reveals more controls when you tap the thing.

00:30:57 ◼   ► I think that itself, even though it's not in the HIG or whatever, is kind of standard

00:31:00 ◼   ► and tried and true.

00:31:01 ◼   ► But since you can't delete a tweet, the tweet bot never had to deal with – well, I guess

00:31:04 ◼   ► you can.

00:31:05 ◼   ► Speaking of what, you can delete a tweet.

00:31:06 ◼   ► What the hell does tweet bot do when you swipe?

00:31:08 ◼   ► I guess I don't delete tweets as often as I –

00:31:10 ◼   ► - Swipe I think is view conversation.

00:31:12 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:31:12 ◼   ► - There's two different directions.

00:31:13 ◼   ► One of them is view conversation,

00:31:14 ◼   ► the other one I think is favorite.

00:31:15 ◼   ► - Oh that's right, they used both directions for the, yeah.

00:31:18 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:31:19 ◼   ► No I mean, so, okay, so there's a number of things

00:31:22 ◼   ► to respond to here.

00:31:23 ◼   ► One of them is when you're thinking about

00:31:27 ◼   ► how this app should be or how this thing should be,

00:31:30 ◼   ► actually work through the entire thing in your head

00:31:33 ◼   ► to see, maybe think maybe there's a reason

00:31:37 ◼   ► why it isn't that way, right?

00:31:38 ◼   ► or maybe that would present more challenges.

00:31:40 ◼   ► And we often do this with trying to,

00:31:43 ◼   ► as our armchair people, trying to tell Apple what to do.

00:31:46 ◼   ► Like, well what if they did that?

00:31:48 ◼   ► What are the other ramifications of that?

00:31:49 ◼   ► So, if I didn't do the button bar thing,

00:31:53 ◼   ► if I kept the delete in there,

00:31:55 ◼   ► what other way, how else could I make it

00:31:57 ◼   ► actually discoverable to people?

00:31:59 ◼   ► And so, the way that the Apple apps do it,

00:32:01 ◼   ► that you're reading from The Hic as if this is a gospel,

00:32:04 ◼   ► well I'll get to that next,

00:32:05 ◼   ► but the way they do it is on the resulting screen,

00:32:09 ◼   ► so like look at Mail, Mail is always a good example

00:32:11 ◼   ► of like standard UI kit stuff,

00:32:14 ◼   ► it's always a good inspiration or reference point for that.

00:32:16 ◼   ► So look at Mail, with Mail, you open the message,

00:32:20 ◼   ► if you assume that you don't know how to swipe

00:32:22 ◼   ► on table cells to delete things, which most people don't,

00:32:26 ◼   ► if you open the message, in the message window,

00:32:28 ◼   ► there's a delete button.

00:32:29 ◼   ► So if you don't know how to swipe on the table view,

00:32:31 ◼   ► you're still seeing delete buttons all the time.

00:32:34 ◼   ► So if I were to go down this path with Overcast

00:32:38 ◼   ► to have single tap to open the message

00:32:43 ◼   ► and to have a swipe offer the delete,

00:32:46 ◼   ► or single tap to begin play the way I had it before,

00:32:49 ◼   ► how else could I make delete more discoverable?

00:32:53 ◼   ► So one way to do it would be if I put delete

00:32:56 ◼   ► in the info pane, which I could do,

00:32:58 ◼   ► I forget whether I did it or not, but I could do that,

00:33:00 ◼   ► have delete be one of the buttons in the info pane.

00:33:03 ◼   ► But in typical playback, you're not using the info pane.

00:33:06 ◼   ► In typical playback, you're hitting the episode

00:33:09 ◼   ► and then it begins playing in the screen, if it's this way.

00:33:11 ◼   ► And so it would have to be in the now playing screen.

00:33:15 ◼   ► So now look at the now playing screen

00:33:16 ◼   ► and where would I put it?

00:33:17 ◼   ► - No one's arguing that you should get rid of the bar.

00:33:22 ◼   ► Well at least I certainly wasn't.

00:33:23 ◼   ► I totally, you have to keep the bar.

00:33:24 ◼   ► - Oh, people are. - You have to.

00:33:25 ◼   ► It's an improvement.

00:33:26 ◼   ► I'm saying like adding swipe to delete

00:33:28 ◼   ► as a shortcut for the people who happen to know it.

00:33:30 ◼   ► which is definitely a tiny detail, nice to have thing

00:33:33 ◼   ► that is not essential for 3.0.

00:33:35 ◼   ► That's why I said the bar is obviously an improvement,

00:33:37 ◼   ► like just, you know, 100%.

00:33:39 ◼   ► And in fact, I think you can--

00:33:41 ◼   ► - It's not obvious to a lot of people on Twitter.

00:33:43 ◼   ► - Well, I think the other thing the bar gives you

00:33:48 ◼   ► looking at it is, I don't know how much metrics

00:33:52 ◼   ► you're collecting in terms of usage,

00:33:53 ◼   ► but you have a lot of room.

00:33:54 ◼   ► - Not a lot.

00:33:55 ◼   ► - And I don't know what, how common the, you know,

00:34:00 ◼   ► you know, add to playlist, you know, the plus hamburger thing and the star thing are or

00:34:06 ◼   ► even the share, like you have enough room to actually use that bar as a place to highlight

00:34:11 ◼   ► new features in 4.0 or whatever as they come. And I think it's important to have an element

00:34:17 ◼   ► like that and burying it under info or putting it on the now playing screen are all much

00:34:20 ◼   ► worse. This was merely a question of, and I don't understand how this is spun out into

00:34:24 ◼   ► this giant big thing because this is such a minor thing. Like this is not a problem

00:34:28 ◼   ► with the application at all, it's just like it's a problem with my thumb still doing a

00:34:32 ◼   ► thing, and I'm just exploring why it might do that, is to continue to provide affordances

00:34:37 ◼   ► for the tiny amount of people who are used to, or their thumbs are used to doing a certain

00:34:43 ◼   ► thing in a way that doesn't detract at all from the increased discoverability provided

00:34:48 ◼   ► by the little bar.

00:34:49 ◼   ► If people are arguing against the bar entirely to go back to the old way, I think they probably

00:34:53 ◼   ► just haven't been using the app long enough.

00:34:54 ◼   ► Because when I first started using it with the little bar too, it feels weird.

00:34:57 ◼   ► You're used to using overcast for, at this point, like, years, right?

00:35:00 ◼   ► Used to tapping to play a thing, and you tap to play a thing and the podcast doesn't start

00:35:04 ◼   ► playing.

00:35:06 ◼   ► That's something I got used to, and it's not as if the first tap doesn't do anything.

00:35:11 ◼   ► The first tap reveals the bar.

00:35:12 ◼   ► So it's not like with swiping, where the swiping just literally does nothing, does not give

00:35:15 ◼   ► you any progress towards your delete action that you were trying to perform.

00:35:19 ◼   ► Tapping reveals the bar.

00:35:20 ◼   ► You have a visual cue that there's something else that you have to do, and usually I'm

00:35:24 ◼   ► I'm doing playlists anyway,

00:35:25 ◼   ► so it's just playing one after the other,

00:35:26 ◼   ► so it's not a big deal.

00:35:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, again, until this podcast,

00:35:30 ◼   ► did not even consider the idea

00:35:31 ◼   ► of leaving the swipe buttons in

00:35:33 ◼   ► and also leaving the bar in.

00:35:35 ◼   ► So I actually am gonna see if I can do that easily

00:35:38 ◼   ► without massive horrible side effects

00:35:40 ◼   ► because of my table view abuse.

00:35:42 ◼   ► - Did you have it in the old one?

00:35:43 ◼   ► I don't even know if you had this.

00:35:44 ◼   ► Did you have the male style super duper swipe?

00:35:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, where there's like three buttons over there?

00:35:48 ◼   ► Yeah, I had that.

00:35:49 ◼   ► - But like where you go all the way to the end

00:35:50 ◼   ► and it just deletes it?

00:35:51 ◼   ► - Oh, no, that was never made available.

00:35:53 ◼   ► Mail always, whatever TableView Mail uses,

00:35:57 ◼   ► always gets cool features like that

00:35:59 ◼   ► before they're available in the public API.

00:36:01 ◼   ► So they had the first action buttons there

00:36:04 ◼   ► for I think an entire iOS version

00:36:05 ◼   ► before it was easy to do that with other ways.

00:36:08 ◼   ► And then they later, once they gave us the API

00:36:12 ◼   ► to make those action buttons,

00:36:13 ◼   ► then Mail got the ability to have the full drag

00:36:15 ◼   ► all the way across for delete,

00:36:16 ◼   ► and I don't think they ever made that available to anybody.

00:36:19 ◼   ► - That's a cool feature.

00:36:20 ◼   ► I hope that does come to TableViews,

00:36:21 ◼   ► because it's definitely like,

00:36:23 ◼   ► we're getting into the realm of like,

00:36:25 ◼   ► not expert features, but features that hopefully

00:36:28 ◼   ► never bother anybody if you don't know they exist,

00:36:31 ◼   ► but once you know they exist, it becomes addictive

00:36:33 ◼   ► to be able to go (whooshing)

00:36:35 ◼   ► and just knock out things.

00:36:36 ◼   ► - The only thing I don't like about that feature

00:36:37 ◼   ► is that if you swipe mail messages left,

00:36:41 ◼   ► there's an unread option on the side,

00:36:43 ◼   ► which doesn't say anything, like you swipe hard enough

00:36:45 ◼   ► and it just marks it unread and that's cool.

00:36:47 ◼   ► If you swipe it right, you have that super mode

00:36:50 ◼   ► where if you swipe it far enough, it just deletes it,

00:36:52 ◼   ► and the far most button is trash,

00:36:54 ◼   ► but the other two buttons it offers are more and flag.

00:36:58 ◼   ► And so if you're opening that menu

00:37:01 ◼   ► in order to flag the message,

00:37:02 ◼   ► that's kind of the opposite of putting it in the trash,

00:37:05 ◼   ► but if you drag just very slightly too far

00:37:07 ◼   ► when you open that message up, it deletes it.

00:37:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, it's a fine line with the swiping.

00:37:12 ◼   ► - Well, it's a bad decision.

00:37:13 ◼   ► Like to me, I think that everything that's not trash

00:37:17 ◼   ► should be on the other direction swipe menu

00:37:19 ◼   ► if they're gonna do that,

00:37:20 ◼   ► if you're gonna have this all the way swipe gesture,

00:37:23 ◼   ► because it's too easy to do this destructive action

00:37:26 ◼   ► when you're trying to do flag or more.

00:37:29 ◼   ► - I have the opposite problem where I guess

00:37:31 ◼   ► I'm too lazy with the swipe and I wanted to delete it,

00:37:34 ◼   ► but I didn't quite go far enough

00:37:36 ◼   ► and I have to give a second attempt on it,

00:37:37 ◼   ► but I can see the opposite being true to it.

00:37:38 ◼   ► Definitely with anything gestural, that's the problem.

00:37:41 ◼   ► That's the good thing about the bad thing about gestures.

00:37:43 ◼   ► They feel so good when they're right,

00:37:44 ◼   ► but you get it, it's like controlling a video game.

00:37:46 ◼   ► You get it a little bit wrong,

00:37:48 ◼   ► and because it's not a precise thing,

00:37:49 ◼   ► because it is inherently a fuzzy thing, it's really difficult to get sort of the control

00:37:54 ◼   ► scheme just right for everybody, and everybody is a little bit different.

00:37:57 ◼   ► As opposed to the much more analytical world of pointers and mouse control and how big

00:38:03 ◼   ► targets have to be, it's easier to measure that and it's generally a more precise thing.

00:38:09 ◼   ► Although you did the basics here for the little bar.

00:38:11 ◼   ► Trash is far away from the play button.

00:38:14 ◼   ► Play is not all the way on the left and trash is not all the way on the right because the

00:38:17 ◼   ► the middle is easier to hit than the edges of the screen.

00:38:19 ◼   ► Like it's, you know, everything you've just described

00:38:21 ◼   ► about the ergonomics of where items are

00:38:24 ◼   ► in relation to each other

00:38:25 ◼   ► and how easy it is to accidentally is revealed in the bar.

00:38:27 ◼   ► The only thing you can maybe argue about is

00:38:30 ◼   ► whether the center is appropriate for play,

00:38:32 ◼   ► but I think it is.

00:38:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, oh yeah, I don't think I would hear

00:38:37 ◼   ► any other arguments about that.

00:38:39 ◼   ► Again, it's like, if you think about

00:38:40 ◼   ► where else would you put these things?

00:38:42 ◼   ► Like you come to pretty similar conclusions,

00:38:45 ◼   ► I think with a lot of this stuff.

00:38:46 ◼   ► Anyway, so yeah, I'll look into the double gesture thing

00:38:49 ◼   ► 'cause that does make some sense.

00:38:50 ◼   ► I do want to address though the whole like, you know,

00:38:54 ◼   ► HIG, adherence to standards, everything else as gospel.

00:38:58 ◼   ► Apple, and for those of you who don't know,

00:39:01 ◼   ► HIG is the Human Interface Guidelines.

00:39:03 ◼   ► It's been a document Apple has published forever

00:39:06 ◼   ► and they revised it over time with new OSs

00:39:09 ◼   ► and new, you know, new knowledge,

00:39:11 ◼   ► but basically it's like how, it's like the standards

00:39:13 ◼   ► for how your interface should look and work

00:39:15 ◼   ► and be laid out for Apple's platforms.

00:39:19 ◼   ► Over the years, there's always been tons of debate

00:39:21 ◼   ► over the HIG and whether it's okay to violate it,

00:39:23 ◼   ► when it's okay to violate it.

00:39:25 ◼   ► And I think it's similar to rules of grammar for poetry.

00:39:30 ◼   ► You know, I think it's like you're allowed to violate

00:39:33 ◼   ► the HIG if you know what you're doing

00:39:35 ◼   ► and you have good reason, basically.

00:39:37 ◼   ► Or, you know, it's not like this set in stone thing.

00:39:40 ◼   ► And Apple violates the HIG all the time with their own apps.

00:39:44 ◼   ► they blatantly violate it and they don't care

00:39:48 ◼   ► because they think they know better

00:39:50 ◼   ► and in many cases that's true.

00:39:52 ◼   ► I am a developer.

00:39:54 ◼   ► For years I said I am not a designer

00:39:58 ◼   ► and when it became clear to me

00:40:01 ◼   ► that I was doing the vast majority of the design in my apps,

00:40:04 ◼   ► I stopped saying that.

00:40:06 ◼   ► I think now, no matter what anyone else says,

00:40:09 ◼   ► I think of myself as an app developer and app designer,

00:40:13 ◼   ► combo in one, even though I'm not as good at the design part

00:40:16 ◼   ► as I am at the development part,

00:40:17 ◼   ► I now do both of those rules.

00:40:19 ◼   ► I think that I now have a good enough design sense

00:40:23 ◼   ► that I can judge or I can kind of have some leeway

00:40:28 ◼   ► in deciding when to break a standard rule.

00:40:32 ◼   ► And it doesn't always work, sometimes I have to roll it back

00:40:34 ◼   ► I have lots of crazy ideas and many of them are awful.

00:40:37 ◼   ► But I think I now have earned myself the right to break

00:40:42 ◼   ► sometimes because the fact is, in order to do good design

00:40:47 ◼   ► and especially in order to move things forward,

00:40:49 ◼   ► you have to break the rules.

00:40:51 ◼   ► The rules were never written to be gospel,

00:40:53 ◼   ► they were never written to be here to 100%.

00:40:56 ◼   ► As soon as any version of the HIG is published,

00:40:59 ◼   ► Apple already has apps out there that violate it

00:41:01 ◼   ► all over the place because the HIG is,

00:41:04 ◼   ► it's kind of like using stock UI kit controls

00:41:07 ◼   ► with stock themes on them.

00:41:09 ◼   ► It's like, you can do that.

00:41:11 ◼   ► For most people, that's a reasonable default,

00:41:13 ◼   ► that's a good starting place.

00:41:15 ◼   ► If you aren't confident whether you can break the rules,

00:41:17 ◼   ► you should just do that.

00:41:18 ◼   ► Like that's fine.

00:41:20 ◼   ► But it's also nice to have apps

00:41:23 ◼   ► that don't follow all the rules,

00:41:24 ◼   ► they push things forward or they do things differently.

00:41:27 ◼   ► And that is how progress gets made

00:41:29 ◼   ► and that is often, that often is necessary

00:41:32 ◼   ► to result in an overall better designed

00:41:34 ◼   ► or more usable app.

00:41:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, you know, the thing of it is is that

00:41:40 ◼   ► To me, the best user interface is one you don't have to think about, right?

00:41:44 ◼   ► And it just feels frictionless that things are where you expect them to be.

00:41:49 ◼   ► As an example, as an unrelated example, in my car, I feel like everything is where I expect it to be.

00:41:58 ◼   ► Even within iDrive, which a lot of people hate, it makes sense to my brain.

00:42:03 ◼   ► Maybe it doesn't to yours or to whomever's, but it makes sense to me.

00:42:07 ◼   ► And so the best, like I said, the best user interface is one you don't have to think about.

00:42:11 ◼   ► And the moment I have to think about that user interface, about how I accomplish a task,

00:42:17 ◼   ► then I'm experiencing friction and I'm taken out of the moment of what I'm trying to do.

00:42:23 ◼   ► And we were beating up a lot about this swipe to delete thing because I think I speak for

00:42:29 ◼   ► Jon in saying my natural gut reaction is to just immediately swipe and then I have to

00:42:34 ◼   ► think, "Wait, no. No, this is that place that doesn't work. Oh, what do I do? Oh, yeah, I tap,

00:42:40 ◼   ► and then I tap again. Well, that's fine. It's just, ugh, why can't it work the way I expect it to?"

00:42:46 ◼   ► And that doesn't really negate anything you said about how the HIG isn't...

00:42:51 ◼   ► it's not laws, it's guidelines. What was that stupid movie? Pirates of the Caribbean style.

00:43:00 ◼   ► But I don't know, it takes someone who is very confident

00:43:04 ◼   ► and with a lot of skill, like you had said,

00:43:06 ◼   ► to violate it in ways that make sense.

00:43:08 ◼   ► Like somebody in the chat room, I already lost who it was,

00:43:10 ◼   ► noted that pull to refresh wasn't in the HIG.

00:43:14 ◼   ► And that's a perfect example of something

00:43:17 ◼   ► that wasn't in the Human Interface Guidelines

00:43:18 ◼   ► but just made freaking sense.

00:43:20 ◼   ► And that was a great choice.

00:43:23 ◼   ► But other times, I think you have to be very confident

00:43:27 ◼   ► and very, very sure you're right

00:43:29 ◼   ► in order to get away with violating it.

00:43:32 ◼   ► I think that the HIG has changed over the years.

00:43:34 ◼   ► It's time for me to do a more old man stuff here.

00:43:37 ◼   ► When you guys talk about the HIG, you're talking about like the umpteenth iteration in the

00:43:42 ◼   ► modern era.

00:43:43 ◼   ► I know you guys started with Apple before iOS, but not much before like three years

00:43:46 ◼   ► before or something, right?

00:43:48 ◼   ► The human interface guidelines used to be very, very different than they are now.

00:43:53 ◼   ► One thing that they shared is the thing that you were talking about, Casey.

00:43:56 ◼   ► In the beginning, part of what was revolutionary about both the Mac and the human interface

00:44:01 ◼   ► guidelines that came along with it is the selling point of the Mac and the selling point

00:44:06 ◼   ► of the graphical user interface was there would be a standard set of controls and a

00:44:10 ◼   ► standard guideline for how to use them so that if you learned how to use one program

00:44:15 ◼   ► on a Mac, you could go to another program and reuse a lot of those skills because it

00:44:19 ◼   ► would also have a menu bar with pull-down menus.

00:44:21 ◼   ► It would also use the same command keys for things.

00:44:24 ◼   ► So it also have windows with the button the confirmation button on the right and the cancel button on the left and all you know

00:44:29 ◼   ► the whole nine yards interface consistency, which was a

00:44:32 ◼   ► revolutionary and novel thing in an age when on DOS you use word star and it had

00:44:37 ◼   ► Absolutely nothing in its interface in common with word perfect or whatever some other contemporary even though they were both word processors

00:44:44 ◼   ► They didn't copy and paste text the same way. They didn't format the same way

00:44:47 ◼   ► They didn't have the same menu structure didn't use the same keys. It was like oh, I know word star

00:44:50 ◼   ► Can I transfer those skills over to it?

00:44:53 ◼   ► You could transfer your basic skills of knowing where the keys are in the keyboard.

00:44:56 ◼   ► And maybe if you're lucky, they shared something about how their interface worked, but they

00:45:01 ◼   ► rapidly diverged.

00:45:02 ◼   ► Whereas if you use Microsoft Word or MacWrite, you know, some of the menus were the same.

00:45:08 ◼   ► There was a font menu, there was font sizing, the fact that there was a menu bar at all,

00:45:13 ◼   ► like that.

00:45:14 ◼   ► And just in general, using anything on the Mac, you were able to take the skills that

00:45:19 ◼   ► you learned and build on them to more rapidly get up to speed in another application. That's

00:45:23 ◼   ► the whole point of the interface guidelines. And the way the document was different is

00:45:27 ◼   ► that especially in the beginning, it did way, way less of explaining to you how things should

00:45:34 ◼   ► look or what you should do and way, way more of explaining the reasoning behind it. Do

00:45:40 ◼   ► this with your whatevers because and then explain the philosophy behind it. And very

00:45:45 ◼   ► often that philosophy had more of a foundation on, you know, user testing and stuff. If I

00:45:51 ◼   ► look at the HIG today, even just the first like Aqua HIG for Mac OS X, so much of it

00:45:58 ◼   ► is about how big the borders should be between items. Like, I mean, this isn't even talking

00:46:02 ◼   ► about like size of minimum, size of touch targets, we're just like, this is how you

00:46:05 ◼   ► should lay out your dialogues, this is how far away buttons, labels should be from their

00:46:08 ◼   ► fields and buttons should be from their whatever, and this is how tall this should be, and this

00:46:11 ◼   ► is how much padding there should be on all the things, it's like, that's all great, and

00:46:14 ◼   ► should totally have that, and interface builder should do it for you automatically, which

00:46:17 ◼   ► they added, you know, like, that's all fine. But that does not tell me why. And that is

00:46:23 ◼   ► how things should look, which is related to how they work very often in terms of the size

00:46:28 ◼   ► of touch targets and readability and why labels that are aligned this way are easier to scan

00:46:32 ◼   ► and all that other stuff. But there's less of the, less of the philosophy, less of like,

00:46:38 ◼   ► look, let me just explain to you the concepts. And here are some guidelines. But now you

00:46:43 ◼   ► you see these guidelines, you see here's the concepts that they flow out of. And when you're

00:46:46 ◼   ► provided with the concepts, and actually I feel like I've given more free reign in the

00:46:50 ◼   ► old days to say, follow these concepts in your custom interfaces and yours will feel

00:46:56 ◼   ► like ours rather than saying, "Just use our controls because that's the only way you could

00:47:00 ◼   ► possibly do this." The new ones feel more like, "Make your applications look like ours

00:47:05 ◼   ► down to the pixel, use our standard controls, and we won't really explain to you the reasons.

00:47:12 ◼   ► is this alignment or the spacing beneficial? Why should you phrase words in the dialogue

00:47:17 ◼   ► in this manner, whether it's imperative? Why should you use verbs or buttons or why should

00:47:21 ◼   ► you, you know, like the whole not why should you not use differently styled text and, you

00:47:25 ◼   ► know, they used to have reasons for it. They would say, "When in our testing we found out

00:47:28 ◼   ► if you put a bunch of bold words in dialogues, that's all people read, so don't make bold

00:47:31 ◼   ► words, make everything in the same consistent font." I'm just making this up, this is not

00:47:34 ◼   ► a real thing. But like, to explain the reasoning behind things. And that I feel like has been

00:47:39 ◼   ► lacking and because that's lacking I feel like the human interface guidelines

00:47:44 ◼   ► for iOS and even for the Mac are way less authoritative now in terms of how

00:47:50 ◼   ► how developers should take them like just because it's in the Hague that's

00:47:55 ◼   ► just one other person's or a couple other people's ideas and it's important

00:47:58 ◼   ► for you to know what they expect from you from consistent for the sake of

00:48:02 ◼   ► consistency with the other applications but if they're not going to explain

00:48:05 ◼   ► their reasoning and you suspect that you might have a better way I think you are

00:48:08 ◼   ► much more likely today to actually have a better way than you were back in the old days

00:48:13 ◼   ► where A, nobody knew anything and B, Apple knew so much more than everybody else because

00:48:19 ◼   ► developers were coming upon this for the first time and Apple at least had put many, many

00:48:23 ◼   ► years into it and they were the world's leading experts on making consumer-facing personal

00:48:27 ◼   ► computer gooeys for a very long time and they would show their work. They would say, "Here's

00:48:32 ◼   ► why. Here's why we're doing all this stuff." And you'd read it and you go, "Oh, that makes

00:48:36 ◼   ► And if they said they did a bunch of user testing, you don't have a user experience

00:48:39 ◼   ► lab for you to test this stuff.

00:48:41 ◼   ► I have you.

00:48:42 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:48:43 ◼   ► Part of the transition from the jobs era was it seemed like he was much less of a fan of

00:48:49 ◼   ► the scientific method and user testing and much more of a fan of using his gut.

00:48:53 ◼   ► And his gut was pretty good, but sometimes he got like stitched leather and stuff.

00:48:57 ◼   ► So yeah.

00:48:58 ◼   ► Yeah. Anyway, all this is to say that I put much less stake in Apple's human interface guidelines

00:49:07 ◼   ► now than I did many decades ago. But the guiding principle that I think every developer uses,

00:49:15 ◼   ► who's making their applications, is to try to make it fit in with what the user expects. Again,

00:49:22 ◼   ► if you made a Mac application and you didn't have a menu bar or the file and edit menus were

00:49:26 ◼   ► in the opposite order. Even if you think you have a really good reason for that, it's probably

00:49:31 ◼   ► not a good idea. But if you want to put different items in your file menu, as long as "Quit"

00:49:35 ◼   ► is at the bottom, if you're really old, that's where it used to be everybody. As long as

00:49:38 ◼   ► "Quit" is at the bottom, people are okay with you shoving in a few other items. And third

00:49:42 ◼   ► party applications, like Marco said, push the interface forward because the Apple can't

00:49:47 ◼   ► cover all your possible scenarios. So if Photoshop starts doing something and Photoshop does

00:49:51 ◼   ► it for 25 years, eventually, whether that's in the Human Interface Guidelines or not,

00:49:55 ◼   ► if you're making a graphics application, it would be a good idea for you to perhaps take

00:50:00 ◼   ► a few conventions from Photoshop because it's so important in its field. And I think that's

00:50:05 ◼   ► the same way a lot of Twitter clients can get away with the side swipes, which I don't

00:50:08 ◼   ► know who invented that, but it's all over the place in Twitter clients. Because if you

00:50:12 ◼   ► use a lot of Twitter clients, eventually that's what you get used to. And in the realm of

00:50:16 ◼   ► podcast apps, I feel like if you use a lot of podcast apps, I don't use a lot of them,

00:50:20 ◼   ► but I imagine there's some conventions for controlling things that would have some commonality

00:50:24 ◼   ► between them that you would begin to read the landscape and get used to using.

00:50:28 ◼   ► Not that you want every genre of application to be different, but where you start falling

00:50:34 ◼   ► back to the bedrock of expectation is for things like muscle memory and the fact that

00:50:39 ◼   ► you're using a table view at all and the fact that the transitions between things are sort

00:50:42 ◼   ► of mental and spatial model of how the application flows from left to right and coming up from

00:50:47 ◼   ► the bottom.

00:50:48 ◼   ► Lots of judgment calls to make there, but in general you try to keep it consistent.

00:50:53 ◼   ► And if you miss one little tiny corner where now delete works a little bit differently,

00:50:58 ◼   ► it's probably not a big deal, especially since delete is probably not a common operation.

00:51:02 ◼   ► But if it's a place where you can return that, where you can fulfill that expectation in

00:51:12 ◼   ► a way that lets you retain all the other benefits, it's a pretty clean one.

00:51:17 ◼   ► I would question even more the feature you did have there, which I mentioned before,

00:51:19 ◼   ► where it's like being able to dismiss a thing

00:51:21 ◼   ► that comes up from the bottom by swiping sideways.

00:51:24 ◼   ► Makes not much sense, spatially speaking,

00:51:27 ◼   ► and it's probably a misfeatured.

00:51:28 ◼   ► The only reason it's there is to honor the muscle memory

00:51:31 ◼   ► of users of your specific application,

00:51:34 ◼   ► because if you did never use the previous version

00:51:36 ◼   ► of Overcast, you would never expect that to work

00:51:38 ◼   ► and you would never even try it, right?

00:51:40 ◼   ► But you're just doing that to just give a little help

00:51:41 ◼   ► to those people, and I think this is the same category

00:51:43 ◼   ► of things, in fact, I would trade these in terms of

00:51:47 ◼   ► what is more beneficial in the long run.

00:51:49 ◼   ► I would say, if I had to sacrifice one,

00:51:51 ◼   ► which you don't, you should just keep both of them,

00:51:52 ◼   ► but if I had to sacrifice one, I would say,

00:51:54 ◼   ► the side swipe people will get used to the card coming

00:51:56 ◼   ► from the bottom pretty quick,

00:51:58 ◼   ► and it's just a gesture in a different direction,

00:52:00 ◼   ► whereas the swipe to deleteers are still being trained

00:52:03 ◼   ► by the whole rest of their entire iOS device

00:52:05 ◼   ► to keep doing that.

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00:54:04 ◼   ► (jazzy music)

00:54:07 ◼   ► - Before we move on from Overcast,

00:54:09 ◼   ► I did want to briefly ask you about this new ad model.

00:54:15 ◼   ► and I'm not entirely sure I understand the nuances of it.

00:54:20 ◼   ► And so I'm going to defer my chief summarizer

00:54:24 ◼   ► and chief role to you, Marco,

00:54:25 ◼   ► if you could summarize what this new setup is

00:54:29 ◼   ► and kinda how it works in broad strokes.

00:54:32 ◼   ► - Sure, so basically before,

00:54:34 ◼   ► I have, as John likes to remind me,

00:54:38 ◼   ► I change my business model on Overcast

00:54:39 ◼   ► roughly every nine to 18 months.

00:54:43 ◼   ► I've gone through many of them now.

00:54:44 ◼   ► The one I've settled on since this past September,

00:54:47 ◼   ► which was just kind of a tweak to the one before it,

00:54:49 ◼   ► is basically ads as like the main source of income

00:54:53 ◼   ► and then paid subscriptions to remove the ads

00:54:56 ◼   ► if you want to.

00:54:58 ◼   ► And the way this has worked out over time

00:55:00 ◼   ► is actually not that way.

00:55:02 ◼   ► The way it has worked out since September

00:55:03 ◼   ► when I added these Google AdMob ads,

00:55:07 ◼   ► and by the way, just as a quick clarification,

00:55:09 ◼   ► I know there are other ad networks,

00:55:12 ◼   ► but they're all worse in some major way.

00:55:14 ◼   ► Like either they have creepier code

00:55:17 ◼   ► or they require more SDK integration,

00:55:19 ◼   ► they're kind of like meta networks

00:55:22 ◼   ► where they have to add lots of SDKs to your app

00:55:24 ◼   ► for all these different companies.

00:55:25 ◼   ► Or they just don't sell enough inventory.

00:55:28 ◼   ► You end up getting very little money from your ads

00:55:30 ◼   ► and a lot of like unsold inventory

00:55:32 ◼   ► that you have to just like show nothing for

00:55:34 ◼   ► or show your own, you know, splash thing for, whatever else.

00:55:37 ◼   ► So I think if you're gonna do third party ads,

00:55:40 ◼   ► I think AdMob is the way to do it.

00:55:43 ◼   ► But what I found with AdMob ultimately is that

00:55:46 ◼   ► the ads were of lower quality than I wanted

00:55:48 ◼   ► and they made very little money.

00:55:51 ◼   ► And as I kept going through and going in their control panel

00:55:55 ◼   ► and turning off various categories of crappy ads

00:55:58 ◼   ► that I didn't wanna see, things like casino stuff

00:56:02 ◼   ► and weird sexy dating services,

00:56:05 ◼   ► I would find those and I'd turn them off

00:56:07 ◼   ► and that'd make even less money

00:56:08 ◼   ► it turns out all the crap ads make a lot of money,

00:56:10 ◼   ► which is why they run them.

00:56:12 ◼   ► So basically it was making very little money.

00:56:15 ◼   ► It ended up like, I thought I was gonna make

00:56:17 ◼   ► most money from the ads,

00:56:18 ◼   ► and then some money from subscriptions,

00:56:21 ◼   ► and it ended up that I was making 90% of the money

00:56:23 ◼   ► from subscriptions.

00:56:24 ◼   ► Totally flipped, and that's actually fine.

00:56:27 ◼   ► I like it that way.

00:56:28 ◼   ► I'd rather have people paying me

00:56:29 ◼   ► than have to deal with ads.

00:56:31 ◼   ► And the ads, the presence of the ads

00:56:34 ◼   ► increased subscriptions dramatically

00:56:35 ◼   ► from the previous system,

00:56:36 ◼   ► which is basically pay if you feel like it.

00:56:38 ◼   ► like patronage, you know, just pay if you like me.

00:56:40 ◼   ► And that worked a little bit,

00:56:42 ◼   ► but it wasn't working enough.

00:56:44 ◼   ► So it succeeded as a business model,

00:56:48 ◼   ► but not because of the ads.

00:56:50 ◼   ► It succeeded because there were ads there,

00:56:53 ◼   ► but the ads could be anything.

00:56:54 ◼   ► Honestly, I'm sure I might actually see

00:56:56 ◼   ► a slightly lower subscription rate

00:56:58 ◼   ► because the ads are no longer crappy,

00:57:01 ◼   ► but they're also now on the Now Playing screen,

00:57:04 ◼   ► so you see them more.

00:57:05 ◼   ► So I don't know, that'll probably balance itself out.

00:57:07 ◼   ► Anyway, so I decided that I was no longer interested

00:57:09 ◼   ► in running Google AdMob ads for lots of different reasons.

00:57:12 ◼   ► Quality of the ads, low revenue, those are major factors,

00:57:17 ◼   ► but also as I talked about in the blog post

00:57:18 ◼   ► and a little bit here, I think I'm no longer

00:57:21 ◼   ► very comfortable embedding closed source ad libraries

00:57:25 ◼   ► into my app from ad companies.

00:57:28 ◼   ► I think as a developer, you have to be conscious of that.

00:57:31 ◼   ► There has to be a really good reason for you to embed

00:57:33 ◼   ► someone else's closed source code in your app

00:57:35 ◼   ► because that can do anything and it's on you.

00:57:38 ◼   ► Like that can access all of your user data,

00:57:41 ◼   ► whatever users are doing with the app,

00:57:43 ◼   ► whatever they are entering into the app,

00:57:45 ◼   ► that code has complete access to it.

00:57:48 ◼   ► That code can get you in trouble with Apple,

00:57:50 ◼   ► that code can do things that are prohibited,

00:57:51 ◼   ► that code can require you to have all these

00:57:54 ◼   ► advertising disclaimers that your users see

00:57:57 ◼   ► or that app review sees that can get you

00:57:59 ◼   ► in trouble with app review.

00:58:00 ◼   ► There's all sorts of like baggage that you sign up for.

00:58:05 ◼   ► when you are adding someone else's closed source code

00:58:08 ◼   ► to your app.

00:58:10 ◼   ► And so I thought there had to be a really, really good

00:58:11 ◼   ► reason for that to be in there,

00:58:13 ◼   ► and I no longer had a good reason.

00:58:15 ◼   ► The only reason I did it in September was

00:58:16 ◼   ► I thought it was the only option.

00:58:18 ◼   ► The option between that and going out of business, basically.

00:58:21 ◼   ► And so I took that option,

00:58:23 ◼   ► but then the business model changed

00:58:25 ◼   ► and the environment changed.

00:58:26 ◼   ► You know, that all happened in September.

00:58:29 ◼   ► Then November happened.

00:58:30 ◼   ► Then January happened.

00:58:32 ◼   ► It's a different world now.

00:58:33 ◼   ► And so now I basically went to this saying like,

00:58:37 ◼   ► "All right, well now let me see what can I do myself?"

00:58:41 ◼   ► And because the Google Ads made so little money for me,

00:58:47 ◼   ► and other people have more success with Google Ads

00:58:50 ◼   ► than I have, I don't wanna say that they don't work

00:58:54 ◼   ► for anybody 'cause they obviously work for lots of people.

00:58:57 ◼   ► But my tap-through rate was awful.

00:59:02 ◼   ► And most of, basically how much money you make

00:59:05 ◼   ► depends extremely heavily on your tap through rate.

00:59:08 ◼   ► And there's lots of reasons for that,

00:59:10 ◼   ► none of which I was willing to fix.

00:59:11 ◼   ► Like so, there's like, for example,

00:59:13 ◼   ► if you want a, if you want to make more money,

00:59:16 ◼   ► you should put the ad somewhere where people

00:59:19 ◼   ► are more likely to accidentally tap them.

00:59:21 ◼   ► I'm not gonna do that.

00:59:23 ◼   ► You should have the ads on every screen of your app,

00:59:25 ◼   ► or more screens of your app, but I wasn't doing that.

00:59:27 ◼   ► I had them only in the list screens before

00:59:28 ◼   ► 'cause they were too big to fit, I'm now playing.

00:59:31 ◼   ► you should enable things like animated banners.

00:59:33 ◼   ► I didn't wanna do that, 'cause those pay better.

00:59:36 ◼   ► There's all sorts of things that you can do

00:59:38 ◼   ► to make ads work better that I was unwilling to do.

00:59:41 ◼   ► So it's not entirely AdMob's fault

00:59:44 ◼   ► that I had such a bad experience.

00:59:45 ◼   ► It was just my app and my strict requirements for it,

00:59:49 ◼   ► just what I could stomach and what I was willing to do.

00:59:51 ◼   ► Anyway, I decided since AdMob ads

00:59:54 ◼   ► were making so little for me,

00:59:55 ◼   ► I could replace them with pretty much anything,

00:59:58 ◼   ► and it probably wouldn't negatively affect my business.

01:00:01 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:00:02 ◼   ► So, because like, the main risk with running my own ads

01:00:06 ◼   ► is what if no one buys them?

01:00:08 ◼   ► What if it turns out they're really hard to sell?

01:00:10 ◼   ► Which they might be, you know?

01:00:11 ◼   ► These aren't podcast ads, they're display ads.

01:00:13 ◼   ► And display ads are hard to sell right now.

01:00:16 ◼   ► I only have very, very limited data right now

01:00:19 ◼   ► with these trial partners that I have now in there,

01:00:23 ◼   ► but I have no idea even what kind of views

01:00:28 ◼   ► or tap through rates or subscription rates

01:00:30 ◼   ► that they're gonna get in like three months.

01:00:32 ◼   ► You know, right now it's all, everyone's looking at them

01:00:34 ◼   ► and poking them and seeing what they're like,

01:00:36 ◼   ► so the data right now is nice,

01:00:37 ◼   ► but it's not really representative probably.

01:00:39 ◼   ► So I have no idea how they're gonna perform,

01:00:42 ◼   ► but the fact is I am way happier with them.

01:00:45 ◼   ► They are totally under my control.

01:00:48 ◼   ► There is no weird closed source code

01:00:50 ◼   ► going to the world's biggest advertising company.

01:00:52 ◼   ► It is just completely my app doing my thing,

01:00:55 ◼   ► the way I designed it, under my control.

01:00:58 ◼   ► The privacy of them is great because I don't collect

01:01:01 ◼   ► anything 'cause I don't want any of your data.

01:01:04 ◼   ► I want the least data I can possibly get from you

01:01:06 ◼   ► to make my app work.

01:01:07 ◼   ► If you ever are curious what I call it,

01:01:10 ◼   ► read the privacy policy in Overcast.

01:01:12 ◼   ► It's very short, human readable, I wrote it all.

01:01:14 ◼   ► It's very, very clear.

01:01:16 ◼   ► And so I'm much happier with this setup now.

01:01:21 ◼   ► And so what the setup is is my own ads.

01:01:25 ◼   ► They show in the Now Playing screen

01:01:26 ◼   ► and in the ad podcast screen,

01:01:29 ◼   ► the ad unit can show either ads for websites,

01:01:33 ◼   ► apps in the app store, or podcasts in Overcast.

01:01:36 ◼   ► And so you can actually advertise for a podcast

01:01:40 ◼   ► in the podcast app, and when you tap these ads,

01:01:42 ◼   ► it brings up the sheet that is just

01:01:44 ◼   ► the Overcast ad podcast screen, the standard screen.

01:01:47 ◼   ► And so it has all the episodes in it,

01:01:49 ◼   ► they all have all the buttons that Casey and Jon hate,

01:01:51 ◼   ► with you can add to queue, you can subscribe there,

01:01:54 ◼   ► you can download whatever else.

01:01:55 ◼   ► And so it's all this, the standard native interface.

01:01:59 ◼   ► I don't know how many podcasters are going to be willing

01:02:02 ◼   ► to pay for ads long term.

01:02:04 ◼   ► I can tell you I have an inbox full of emails

01:02:06 ◼   ► from podcasters who are interested right now

01:02:08 ◼   ► that I am having a very hard time answering all at once.

01:02:11 ◼   ► However, there's tons of interest right now,

01:02:15 ◼   ► but once you get into nitty gritty of getting people

01:02:18 ◼   ► to actually commit and to pay, everything changes.

01:02:22 ◼   ► So I have no idea what it's going to be like long term.

01:02:25 ◼   ► But the fact is, I don't need to sell very many ads

01:02:29 ◼   ► to make more than I was making before.

01:02:32 ◼   ► And even if I make less than what I was making before,

01:02:34 ◼   ► as long as people keep subscribing, I'm still fine.

01:02:37 ◼   ► So I think I made the right move.

01:02:40 ◼   ► Also, by the same logic and for all the same reasons,

01:02:44 ◼   ► I also in this update removed the fabric analytics

01:02:47 ◼   ► from the app, so there's no more third-party

01:02:49 ◼   ► analytics services either.

01:02:51 ◼   ► All I do now is I have a very, very basic analytics

01:02:55 ◼   ► class that I wrote myself that just logs

01:02:58 ◼   ► some very basic information and it can be used

01:03:00 ◼   ► to do things like what you were describing earlier,

01:03:02 ◼   ► John, about like, you know, measuring how many people

01:03:04 ◼   ► use the delete button or whatever you were asking about.

01:03:07 ◼   ► I can do stuff like that.

01:03:08 ◼   ► Right now, I'm measuring almost nothing in the app.

01:03:10 ◼   ► I talked a little bit about this on the radar this week.

01:03:12 ◼   ► The short version there is I've done analytics

01:03:15 ◼   ► for a while now with Fabric and I found some actionable

01:03:19 ◼   ► things from it but most of the data I was collecting

01:03:21 ◼   ► was neither useful nor actionable.

01:03:24 ◼   ► I find analytics are great to,

01:03:27 ◼   ► like when you have a specific question

01:03:28 ◼   ► you're trying to answer.

01:03:29 ◼   ► So like when I was developing,

01:03:31 ◼   ► I was curious a while back, maybe a year ago now,

01:03:36 ◼   ► so I added analytics for what type of output device

01:03:41 ◼   ► people were listening on.

01:03:42 ◼   ► And I learned from that that a lot of people

01:03:44 ◼   ► use the built-in speaker, way more than I thought.

01:03:47 ◼   ► And so that's why I did the voice boost

01:03:49 ◼   ► optimized speaker profile for the iPhone speaker.

01:03:52 ◼   ► because I realized like wow, a lot of people do this,

01:03:55 ◼   ► this is worth focusing attention on.

01:03:57 ◼   ► I also learned during times like that,

01:03:59 ◼   ► I measured parts of the watch app,

01:04:01 ◼   ► like does anybody even use the watch app?

01:04:03 ◼   ► What features of the watch app do they use?

01:04:05 ◼   ► Like do they actually go to the force touch menu,

01:04:07 ◼   ► by the way, no.

01:04:09 ◼   ► Do they actually like ever use the buttons on it

01:04:13 ◼   ► or are they mostly using it to read information

01:04:15 ◼   ► as like a glance, answer yes.

01:04:19 ◼   ► So I learned stuff like that,

01:04:20 ◼   ► But I can do that myself with very basic analytics.

01:04:23 ◼   ► Like I don't need everything that a full blown

01:04:26 ◼   ► analytics package offers today,

01:04:27 ◼   ► like various conversion tracking different things

01:04:30 ◼   ► and funnels all over the place and all these retention.

01:04:34 ◼   ► That's the kind of stuff that venture funded companies need.

01:04:37 ◼   ► I don't need that.

01:04:38 ◼   ► I don't have anybody asking for that information.

01:04:41 ◼   ► I don't care about that information,

01:04:42 ◼   ► so I don't need to collect it.

01:04:43 ◼   ► So basically, I'm getting away now

01:04:45 ◼   ► with incredibly simple analytics of just my own

01:04:48 ◼   ► hand rolled thing.

01:04:50 ◼   ► oh god, I'm a hipster.

01:04:52 ◼   ► My own art is anal analytics,

01:04:55 ◼   ► and now it's just a lot simpler and lower tech,

01:04:58 ◼   ► but now I can tell things like,

01:05:01 ◼   ► how many people are using different devices?

01:05:03 ◼   ► Like how many iPhone 7s versus 7+s do I have?

01:05:05 ◼   ► And that helps me decide things like,

01:05:07 ◼   ► what should I optimize this interface for?

01:05:10 ◼   ► Should I optimize it for 5.5 inch screens,

01:05:12 ◼   ► or for 4.7, or for 4.0?

01:05:15 ◼   ► Stuff like that.

01:05:15 ◼   ► That stuff I need to know.

01:05:17 ◼   ► I don't need to know the level of detail

01:05:19 ◼   ► that all these commercial analytics packages provide,

01:05:22 ◼   ► and especially at the cost of having their own

01:05:24 ◼   ► closed source code in my app,

01:05:26 ◼   ► and exposing all my user data to them.

01:05:28 ◼   ► - The thing I like best about these new ads

01:05:31 ◼   ► is the fact that they are podcast ads and a podcast player,

01:05:34 ◼   ► so they have built-in relevance.

01:05:35 ◼   ► And if you ever run out of inventory,

01:05:37 ◼   ► which you wouldn't, 'cause you could just lower the price

01:05:38 ◼   ► and get any inventory you wanted,

01:05:39 ◼   ► but if you ever did run out,

01:05:41 ◼   ► I would be happy to see that slot spilled

01:05:43 ◼   ► was just pulled from your own most recommended section,

01:05:45 ◼   ► 'cause you have ready-made inventory of,

01:05:48 ◼   ► you know, I don't know how relevant, but like, hey, here are some popular, here are

01:05:53 ◼   ► some podcasts with some episodes that are being recommended a lot in Insert

01:05:56 ◼   ► Time Window, and then just throw them in the most recommended thing, you tap them

01:06:00 ◼   ► and you go right to the episode. It's like a no-brainer. I also echo your

01:06:06 ◼   ► fear that they will not be offensive enough to make people pay because

01:06:10 ◼   ► they're not, they're pleasant, like they're podcast ads and they're not, you

01:06:14 ◼   ► It's not be like, what was that, a mesothelioma

01:06:19 ◼   ► or whatever.

01:06:20 ◼   ► - Yep, yep.

01:06:20 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:06:21 ◼   ► By the way, I do wanna clarify, they're not all

01:06:24 ◼   ► podcast ads, there's an ad for Hover,

01:06:25 ◼   ► there's an ad for Linode.

01:06:27 ◼   ► There are a couple of website ads in there.

01:06:28 ◼   ► - Well, now that you mention that,

01:06:30 ◼   ► when I saw the Hover ad, I was like,

01:06:32 ◼   ► 'cause I see Hover and I think, oh, that's a podcast ad too,

01:06:35 ◼   ► because obviously they advertise on a lot of podcasts

01:06:37 ◼   ► that I listen to.

01:06:38 ◼   ► Imagine if it was synchronized,

01:06:41 ◼   ► like when the Hover ad is playing on the show,

01:06:42 ◼   ► that the hover ad got, the hover banner got to display down in the thing and included

01:06:47 ◼   ► the people's codes.

01:06:48 ◼   ► There's all sorts of crazy business ideas that you could do here.

01:06:51 ◼   ► Or competitive advertising where people could buy podcast advertising against, that would

01:06:55 ◼   ► run against other podcasts in the same genre.

01:06:59 ◼   ► This is all getting way too complicated and I agree that if, you know, if this is simply

01:07:03 ◼   ► a way to replace that 10% of money with a more pleasant experience, then it's a win

01:07:08 ◼   ► no matter what.

01:07:09 ◼   ► I think that kind of like the, what was this, I think it was on Rectifs, I was talking about

01:07:15 ◼   ► the fantasy Google ad that, you know, it's far fewer ads but far more valuable because

01:07:19 ◼   ► they're better targeted by some magic AI thing.

01:07:22 ◼   ► I think even just basic better targeting of the fact that, hey, I know you're interested

01:07:26 ◼   ► in podcasts because you're listening to one.

01:07:28 ◼   ► You are a great audience for me to advertise other podcasts to because you are a proven

01:07:32 ◼   ► podcast listener and you're using a podcast client and guess what?

01:07:35 ◼   ► here's another podcast, and that's why you can charge

01:07:38 ◼   ► more money for that than you can for an ad,

01:07:40 ◼   ► for even something like Hover or something,

01:07:42 ◼   ► because although they advertise on lots of podcasts,

01:07:45 ◼   ► Hover is not technically podcast related,

01:07:47 ◼   ► but another podcast is, and then a podcast

01:07:50 ◼   ► can spend money advertising to each other

01:07:51 ◼   ► and it can do just like the App Store ads.

01:07:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, cool, 'cause that's one of the reasons

01:07:56 ◼   ► I made this for Podcast X, 'cause I was like,

01:07:58 ◼   ► and I've had all sorts of crazy ideas

01:08:00 ◼   ► on how to possibly sell these things and things like that,

01:08:04 ◼   ► but ultimately it came down to like,

01:08:06 ◼   ► of course this is the perfect place for an ad for a podcast.

01:08:10 ◼   ► The only question is, the only doubt in my mind is

01:08:13 ◼   ► whether enough podcasters will be willing and able to pay

01:08:18 ◼   ► for an ad for their shows, 'cause most podcasters

01:08:20 ◼   ► don't make a lot of money from sponsorships.

01:08:22 ◼   ► Most podcasts don't even have sponsorships.

01:08:24 ◼   ► Most podcasts don't have audiences

01:08:26 ◼   ► big enough to get sponsors.

01:08:28 ◼   ► So how many podcasts are gonna be willing to pay for ads?

01:08:32 ◼   ► Like, I have no idea.

01:08:34 ◼   ► It doesn't take a lot to make this work.

01:08:37 ◼   ► You don't need thousands of advertisers,

01:08:41 ◼   ► you need tens of advertisers to make this work really well.

01:08:45 ◼   ► So I think it will probably be okay.

01:08:49 ◼   ► I think one of the big challenges is gonna be,

01:08:52 ◼   ► I don't think podcasters have ever had a way,

01:08:57 ◼   ► have ever even thought about buying ads,

01:08:58 ◼   ► because there's never really been a place

01:09:00 ◼   ► where you could buy an ad for a podcast that made sense.

01:09:03 ◼   ► 'cause as you were just saying,

01:09:04 ◼   ► you can't just buy a Google search ad

01:09:06 ◼   ► or a Facebook ad for your podcast

01:09:08 ◼   ► and get anybody to click through

01:09:09 ◼   ► because you start targeting really fast there.

01:09:14 ◼   ► The chances that they are a podcast listener

01:09:16 ◼   ► and who wanna listen to your show,

01:09:18 ◼   ► that combination gets multiplied

01:09:19 ◼   ► and that's gonna be a pretty low number.

01:09:22 ◼   ► - There's too much friction in other venues

01:09:24 ◼   ► of doing it on the web.

01:09:25 ◼   ► If you're not already in a podcast player,

01:09:28 ◼   ► getting successfully subscribed to a podcast

01:09:30 ◼   ► in your player of choice is difficult

01:09:33 ◼   ► I encounter that when I'm on the web and I find a podcast that I like and I'm disappointed

01:09:37 ◼   ► when I don't see either a link to the overcast URL or I can just save an overcast.

01:09:40 ◼   ► If they just give me an iTunes link or something like that, that's not no good to me.

01:09:43 ◼   ► I don't use that player, right?

01:09:45 ◼   ► Because the website can't know what player I use.

01:09:47 ◼   ► But if I'm already in the player that I use and there's a one-tab way to get an episode,

01:09:52 ◼   ► that's way less friction.

01:09:53 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

01:09:55 ◼   ► So I am really curious to see how this plays out and to see who buys these ads.

01:10:01 ◼   ► Once people can actually start seeing my prices publicly,

01:10:05 ◼   ► like a few emails, once people have data

01:10:08 ◼   ► of what a month worth of clicks

01:10:11 ◼   ► and new subscriptions look like,

01:10:12 ◼   ► and for how much money, that could change things.

01:10:16 ◼   ► 'Cause right now, none of us, me, the advertisers,

01:10:18 ◼   ► none of us know whether these are gonna be a good deal

01:10:21 ◼   ► or not, 'cause we don't have enough data yet.

01:10:23 ◼   ► So we're gonna find out.

01:10:25 ◼   ► And it might be an incredibly good deal.

01:10:26 ◼   ► It might end up being by far the best way

01:10:28 ◼   ► to get new listeners to a podcast.

01:10:31 ◼   ► Or it might be that there's just too few people

01:10:34 ◼   ► for it to make any financial sense.

01:10:36 ◼   ► I don't know, we're gonna find out.

01:10:38 ◼   ► And if that's the case,

01:10:39 ◼   ► then I'll just fill it up with hover ads, I don't care.

01:10:42 ◼   ► - So, a few quick hits regarding that.

01:10:45 ◼   ► Do you want to disclose even an order of magnitude

01:10:48 ◼   ► of pricing, like we talking tens of dollars

01:10:50 ◼   ► or ten thousands of dollars, or can you narrow it down?

01:10:54 ◼   ► Because I assume that you're gonna get a thousand emails

01:10:56 ◼   ► about, you know, I don't even know how much this costs,

01:10:58 ◼   ► can I afford this?

01:11:00 ◼   ► So is there like a rough order of magnitude you can say for pricing as we record tonight,

01:11:04 ◼   ► which obviously could change?

01:11:05 ◼   ► - No.

01:11:06 ◼   ► - Okay, that's fair.

01:11:07 ◼   ► - Ask me in a few weeks.

01:11:10 ◼   ► That's when I will have a much better idea of what these things will actually be charged

01:11:13 ◼   ► for long term.

01:11:18 ◼   ► - Marco is currently trying to talk himself off the ledge of making this an auction system,

01:11:21 ◼   ► so let's all root for him in this endeavor.

01:11:24 ◼   ► One system that I thought was,

01:11:26 ◼   ► there should be some way to

01:11:30 ◼   ► kind of automatically scale with demand.

01:11:31 ◼   ► And so one thing I thought was just like,

01:11:34 ◼   ► just sell them for 30 days and just say,

01:11:37 ◼   ► here's how many ads there are in the system right now.

01:11:40 ◼   ► And keep the price fixed.

01:11:41 ◼   ► And just, you know, the market kind of works that out.

01:11:44 ◼   ► 'Cause if the price is really low,

01:11:46 ◼   ► then a bunch of people will buy it

01:11:48 ◼   ► and then every ad will just get fewer impressions.

01:11:50 ◼   ► So it kind of is self-regulating, I think.

01:11:54 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:11:55 ◼   ► I'm throwing around all these different ideas in my head

01:11:57 ◼   ► of how this should be billed, how this should be sold.

01:12:00 ◼   ► And there's a reason why there are so few

01:12:02 ◼   ► initial partners on board,

01:12:03 ◼   ► because everyone who's advertising it right now,

01:12:06 ◼   ► I've worked out, I've gone to them in advance and said,

01:12:10 ◼   ► like, "Hey, here's what's going on.

01:12:11 ◼   ► "I don't know what this is gonna be yet.

01:12:14 ◼   ► "And so we're gonna go into this kind of like trial mode,

01:12:18 ◼   ► "and we're gonna share data.

01:12:20 ◼   ► I'm gonna tell you what this gets you,

01:12:22 ◼   ► and you're gonna tell me if you get click-throughs

01:12:24 ◼   ► on your website and everything else,

01:12:25 ◼   ► and we're gonna figure out how this actually works.

01:12:27 ◼   ► Because right now I have no idea.

01:12:29 ◼   ► So it's way too early.

01:12:30 ◼   ► I mean, this has been in the store for like a day and a half,

01:12:33 ◼   ► so it's just way too early for me to have useful data yet.

01:12:37 ◼   ► - So what is the appropriate mechanism

01:12:40 ◼   ► by which you could be contacted

01:12:42 ◼   ► if somebody wants to buy an ad?

01:12:44 ◼   ► - If you go to the site, go to the contact page,

01:12:46 ◼   ► and it says there, it says,

01:12:48 ◼   ► for ad inquiries, email here.

01:12:50 ◼   ► So do that, but it might be--

01:12:52 ◼   ► - What side is that, overcast.fm?

01:12:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it might be a week or two

01:12:56 ◼   ► before I can actually get back to you with something useful.

01:12:59 ◼   ► - All right, and then finally,

01:13:02 ◼   ► and this is more out of my own curiosity,

01:13:03 ◼   ► how are you, are you providing,

01:13:06 ◼   ► I mean, you just hinted at it a second ago,

01:13:08 ◼   ► are you providing any sort of analytics,

01:13:10 ◼   ► and is there a portal for that,

01:13:11 ◼   ► or is this just you ripping off emails when the time comes?

01:13:13 ◼   ► Like, what's your intention with that?

01:13:15 ◼   ► - My intention is that people who buy the ads

01:13:19 ◼   ► will be able to log into a portal

01:13:22 ◼   ► and see the performance of the ads they bought.

01:13:24 ◼   ► I haven't actually built that yet.

01:13:26 ◼   ► I just have one giant dashboard

01:13:28 ◼   ► that I can see in my admin panel.

01:13:30 ◼   ► I can see how they're doing.

01:13:31 ◼   ► And I'm only tracking,

01:13:33 ◼   ► I say all this in the privacy policy,

01:13:34 ◼   ► the only thing I'm tracking is three things.

01:13:36 ◼   ► Clicks, views, and subscriptions if they're podcast ads.

01:13:40 ◼   ► That's it.

01:13:41 ◼   ► For websites, it's just clicks and views.

01:13:43 ◼   ► And they can be targeted by podcast category.

01:13:45 ◼   ► So you can say show this to everybody,

01:13:47 ◼   ► or you can say show this to people who listen

01:13:49 ◼   ► to shows that are in the iTunes technology category.

01:13:52 ◼   ► I have targeting by top level podcast category

01:13:55 ◼   ► in the directory optionally.

01:13:57 ◼   ► And so that helps a little bit.

01:13:59 ◼   ► But that's it.

01:14:00 ◼   ► So it's a very, very simple system.

01:14:03 ◼   ► It's very low on data because A, I find too much data

01:14:08 ◼   ► in that situation kind of gross,

01:14:10 ◼   ► and B, I don't believe is necessary for this.

01:14:12 ◼   ► So we'll find out.

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01:15:38 ◼   ► So I feel like we should spend a few minutes talking about how much of a cesspool Uber

01:15:43 ◼   ► Uber is, because woof.

01:15:45 ◼   ► - Ugh, what a disaster that can--

01:15:46 ◼   ► - What a frickin' disaster.

01:15:48 ◼   ► - And this latest horrible thing that they did,

01:15:51 ◼   ► it's just the latest in a string of horrible things

01:15:53 ◼   ► they have done over the relatively short time

01:15:56 ◼   ► they've been in existence.

01:15:57 ◼   ► Like, they're a horrible company, run by horrible people.

01:16:01 ◼   ► - Yeah, so if you're not aware,

01:16:03 ◼   ► a woman who goes by Susan J. Fowler has written,

01:16:06 ◼   ► reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber.

01:16:09 ◼   ► It is not a terribly long post,

01:16:12 ◼   ► But it's long enough that you're going to want to leave yourself a few minutes to read

01:16:15 ◼   ► it.

01:16:16 ◼   ► And you absolutely should read it.

01:16:19 ◼   ► And it is worth reading in its entirety.

01:16:20 ◼   ► Don't skip around.

01:16:22 ◼   ► It's worth it.

01:16:23 ◼   ► Because it is flabbergasting how unbelievable it was, the behavior of Susan's superiors

01:16:33 ◼   ► and in some cases peers, and the HR department at Uber.

01:16:37 ◼   ► Suffice to say, I don't know if I should really pull a summarizer in chief on this one because

01:16:43 ◼   ► there's so much to this post.

01:16:45 ◼   ► But the short version, and again, please read it, please, please read it, but the short

01:16:50 ◼   ► version is she was sexually harassed in various ways and in various magnitude, pretty much

01:16:57 ◼   ► from the moment she got there until the moment she left.

01:16:59 ◼   ► And to me, the most despicable thing that I found about this whole story was that she

01:17:06 ◼   ► She was told when she bubbled up these complaints to HR at Uber that she was the only one complaining

01:17:12 ◼   ► about this one particular individual.

01:17:14 ◼   ► Yeah, it was a first time offense.

01:17:17 ◼   ► Right, I'm sorry, that's an important distinction.

01:17:20 ◼   ► That's absolutely correct.

01:17:21 ◼   ► It was a first time offense.

01:17:22 ◼   ► We'll call this person Bob.

01:17:23 ◼   ► Bob has never done this before.

01:17:24 ◼   ► It's Bob's first time being a complete turd.

01:17:28 ◼   ► It's first time, "Yeah, I'm sure he didn't mean it.

01:17:30 ◼   ► Don't worry about it."

01:17:31 ◼   ► Which is such a terrible way to approach this kind of a situation.

01:17:35 ◼   ► I don't understand why.

01:17:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, like why is the first offense even considered free?

01:17:39 ◼   ► Even if it was true, which it wasn't,

01:17:42 ◼   ► but why is that even an okay response, even if it was true?

01:17:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, an ATP tips during the chat

01:17:48 ◼   ► is phrasing it well, and this is all caps,

01:17:50 ◼   ► but my voice is shot, so I'm not gonna scream.

01:17:52 ◼   ► Is this first grade?

01:17:53 ◼   ► Why the F is sexual harassment a strike-based system?

01:17:56 ◼   ► Like, truth. - Right, exactly.

01:17:58 ◼   ► - Why is this the way this works?

01:17:59 ◼   ► - You don't get free strikes on that.

01:18:01 ◼   ► No, immediately fired, maybe arrested.

01:18:05 ◼   ► - Oh, God.

01:18:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, I completely agree.

01:18:07 ◼   ► So anyway, so Susan ends up talking to some of her peers

01:18:11 ◼   ► and her peers are like, "Oh, that's weird.

01:18:12 ◼   ► "I was talking to HR about Bob and they told me

01:18:16 ◼   ► "that it was a first time offense.

01:18:18 ◼   ► "And we are not the same person.

01:18:20 ◼   ► "We are not reporting the same incident.

01:18:22 ◼   ► "Looks to us like HR is full of crap."

01:18:25 ◼   ► And so, you know, there's always a chance

01:18:29 ◼   ► that this is all fabricated, but man,

01:18:32 ◼   ► I don't believe that for a second.

01:18:34 ◼   ► Like this is not one of those rage quit kind of posts where,

01:18:38 ◼   ► "Oh, you know, I didn't fit in well

01:18:40 ◼   ► and I'm just gonna make up stuff about..."

01:18:42 ◼   ► No, that's not how this reads at all.

01:18:44 ◼   ► And this reads like a intelligent, mature person

01:18:48 ◼   ► just stating the facts of what they went through

01:18:51 ◼   ► and God, is it terrible.

01:18:52 ◼   ► And there was another, there was a report that came out,

01:18:55 ◼   ► I don't have a link handy,

01:18:56 ◼   ► but we'll find it for the show notes about how,

01:18:58 ◼   ► and I'm butchering the details,

01:19:00 ◼   ► but it was something like,

01:19:01 ◼   ► If you don't make men use their real names or anything like that, about 5% of them think

01:19:09 ◼   ► that they have any room to grow with regard to relations to women or other minority groups.

01:19:15 ◼   ► And guess what?

01:19:16 ◼   ► All of us are a problem.

01:19:17 ◼   ► I like to think of myself as relatively woke in this department, and I'm a damn problem.

01:19:21 ◼   ► I don't get this right all the time.

01:19:23 ◼   ► And oh god, the utter overwhelming self-confidence that these Uber employees have shown, not

01:19:34 ◼   ► the women, the men in HR, is just preposterous.

01:19:38 ◼   ► Like oh my god, I just, I can't believe that this is a thing and that it's continued going

01:19:44 ◼   ► on.

01:19:45 ◼   ► Now since this blog post, Travis Kalanick, Kalanick, is that his name?

01:19:49 ◼   ► The CEO, whoever he is.

01:19:52 ◼   ► Because to his credit, I guess, taken a pretty strong stance on this in that he's taking

01:19:59 ◼   ► it as true, he's taking it as evidence that there is a real problem, but I don't know,

01:20:05 ◼   ► man.

01:20:06 ◼   ► It's pretty late.

01:20:07 ◼   ► Like, everyone has known that Uber is really frickin' slimy in a lot of frickin' ways,

01:20:11 ◼   ► and now is when you're finally jumping on board and being like, "Oh, you know, maybe

01:20:13 ◼   ► we have something to change."

01:20:14 ◼   ► It's just this whole situation is just so freakin' gross.

01:20:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, that's like, the CEOs in these situations

01:20:21 ◼   ► always act so surprised, I had no idea this was going on.

01:20:25 ◼   ► Okay, like, that's either a complete BS,

01:20:28 ◼   ► or you were really doing a bad job at looking

01:20:31 ◼   ► at your own company for things that should be

01:20:34 ◼   ► really common sense, like something is seriously wrong here.

01:20:38 ◼   ► It's not like the evil HR department is the cause of this.

01:20:43 ◼   ► No, like, the HR department is in service to the company.

01:20:47 ◼   ► to the company.

01:20:49 ◼   ► The HR department, it's not anybody's friend,

01:20:51 ◼   ► it's not like a third party judge system.

01:20:55 ◼   ► HR, their main role is to prevent the company

01:20:59 ◼   ► from getting sued and to mitigate risks

01:21:01 ◼   ► that might cause that.

01:21:02 ◼   ► - This HR department isn't even doing that job well,

01:21:04 ◼   ► by the way. - That's true.

01:21:05 ◼   ► - Like so many parts of this company,

01:21:07 ◼   ► this HR department is terrible,

01:21:09 ◼   ► even at its ostensible job,

01:21:12 ◼   ► not even at its theoretical job in the ideal world.

01:21:14 ◼   ► - Right, but the point, the HR department's job

01:21:17 ◼   ► is to protect the company from its employees.

01:21:20 ◼   ► That is literally their job.

01:21:22 ◼   ► If the HR department is being directed

01:21:26 ◼   ► or being incentivized to do horrible things

01:21:28 ◼   ► by the people who run the company,

01:21:30 ◼   ► they're going to do horrible things.

01:21:32 ◼   ► And it should come as no surprise,

01:21:35 ◼   ► and I'm pretty sure it's BS that it did come as a surprise,

01:21:38 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure this was no surprise,

01:21:40 ◼   ► it should come as no surprise to the CEO of a company

01:21:43 ◼   ► that horrible stuff goes on in HR

01:21:46 ◼   ► when he himself seems to be a pretty horrible person

01:21:51 ◼   ► from the little bit that I know,

01:21:53 ◼   ► and the company does lots of horrible things

01:21:55 ◼   ► and has a complete culture of being horrible and toxic

01:21:59 ◼   ► and disrespectful of everyone, especially women.

01:22:03 ◼   ► This is not the first time they've had problems

01:22:05 ◼   ► with women in particular.

01:22:08 ◼   ► This is not their first one, not by a long shot.

01:22:10 ◼   ► And so, his whole thing about, I'm shocked,

01:22:14 ◼   ► I'm gonna investigate this immediately, that's BS.

01:22:17 ◼   ► That's complete BS.

01:22:19 ◼   ► Yeah, so I don't believe that for a second.

01:22:22 ◼   ► None of this should be forgiven,

01:22:23 ◼   ► and none of it should be isolated to a couple bad apples

01:22:27 ◼   ► in the HR department, 'cause it's not that.

01:22:28 ◼   ► It's a deep-rooted cultural problem.

01:22:31 ◼   ► - Oh, it's a systemic failure.

01:22:32 ◼   ► It is absolutely a systemic failure.

01:22:34 ◼   ► - And it comes right from the top.

01:22:36 ◼   ► It comes right from the top.

01:22:37 ◼   ► - That's why this is such a great example

01:22:39 ◼   ► Like very often people who are not steeped in these issues don't spend all the time,

01:22:43 ◼   ► you know, reading about them or whatever, hear the phrase "institutional_," "institutional

01:22:48 ◼   ► sexism," "institutional bias," or whatever, and it seems like a buzzwordy thing that doesn't

01:22:52 ◼   ► make any sense, but a reasonable working definition is based on examples like this where you find

01:22:59 ◼   ► yourself in a situation where there is some kind of institution or authority.

01:23:04 ◼   ► That structure could be the government, but it could also be the company that you work

01:23:07 ◼   ► which even though it is not the government, it is an organizational structure with authority

01:23:13 ◼   ► over your life that you work within for as long as you decide you want to work there.

01:23:17 ◼   ► And in this case, as in so many other cases in many other companies, forever and ever,

01:23:23 ◼   ► the institution has certain attitudes towards whatever you want to be, whether it be minorities

01:23:32 ◼   ► or older people or women or whatever and those policies and biases and views come through

01:23:41 ◼   ► in the rules that govern everybody else.

01:23:43 ◼   ► So you have an HR department that if it was functioning well in its role as Marco described

01:23:49 ◼   ► it to protect the company from its people, you know, part of it is HR like any other

01:23:54 ◼   ► part of the company is supposed to make the company more successful.

01:23:58 ◼   ► So if there is a problematic employee, HR has to deal with that.

01:24:02 ◼   ► If that employee is doing things that could get the company sued, it is in the company

01:24:06 ◼   ► and HR's best interest to solve that problem, and the most reasonable way to solve it is

01:24:13 ◼   ► to try to make the company a place where people will want to work, and that usually means

01:24:17 ◼   ► taking the toxic person and, you know, disciplining them or getting rid of them, right?

01:24:23 ◼   ► It becomes much more difficult when that person is high up in the organization, or as they

01:24:26 ◼   ► say on this thing was a high performer.

01:24:28 ◼   ► Yeah, where that person's valuable to the company.

01:24:32 ◼   ► Right, right, right.

01:24:33 ◼   ► But you know, there is the larger value to the company.

01:24:35 ◼   ► But anyway, these institutions have control over many of these employees' lives for

01:24:40 ◼   ► as long as they work at the company.

01:24:42 ◼   ► And yes, it is always obvious that they just get another job someplace else.

01:24:45 ◼   ► But the thing about institutional sexism or any other sort of institutional bias is it's

01:24:50 ◼   ► not always clear, and it very often is not the case, and it's very difficult to tell,

01:24:54 ◼   ► if I were to leave this tech job and go to a different tech job, will that company have

01:24:59 ◼   ► better attitudes towards, you know, whatever my thing is, whether it's minorities or women

01:25:04 ◼   ► or maybe, maybe not, like that's, that's a selling point of a company. But if you're

01:25:08 ◼   ► in this control, it's a it's not that easy to change jobs. And B, if you're within this

01:25:12 ◼   ► control structure, these, these policies and attitudes, and the things that will happen

01:25:17 ◼   ► to you seem like an injustice, because they are an injustice, because you view the authority

01:25:26 ◼   ► of the company as the arbiter of the rules of play within the company. It's not as if

01:25:33 ◼   ► people are getting murdered, right? So it's not, for the most part, it's usually not a

01:25:36 ◼   ► criminal type of thing. It is, here are the rules as set out, and if there are any violation

01:25:41 ◼   ► of the rules, or violation of what I think should be the norms, there is an authority

01:25:46 ◼   ► that I appeal to, whether it be my manager, my manager's manager, the HR department,

01:25:50 ◼   ► whatever it may be. For example, if you found an error in your payroll, like you know, you

01:25:54 ◼   ► got paid the wrong amount, you go to the payroll department, and in a functioning company,

01:25:59 ◼   ► the payroll department's job is to make sure that everybody gets paid the amount they're

01:26:02 ◼   ► supposed to be paid. And if there's an error and you brought it to the payroll department,

01:26:06 ◼   ► if the institution is functioning correctly, they would correct the error or tell you that

01:26:11 ◼   ► it's not an error because they did some weird thing with taxes that they would then explain

01:26:14 ◼   ► to you. That's the function of the payroll department. I don't think anybody would argue

01:26:18 ◼   ► with like a, you know, like it would seem like an injustice if you found you're missing 100 bucks

01:26:22 ◼   ► on your paycheck and you brought it to the payroll department of the institution that you are in

01:26:26 ◼   ► and they didn't correct that error or tried to tell you that you did your math wrong or said,

01:26:30 ◼   ► well, it's only the first time we made this mistake, so don't worry about it. Like that

01:26:34 ◼   ► would feel like an injustice, even though, you know, it's just the payroll department of the

01:26:39 ◼   ► company you work in. If you don't like it, get another job, right? That's the whole attitude

01:26:42 ◼   ► showed you here, but it is an injustice because that's what the thing is supposed to do.

01:26:46 ◼   ► So if the company says, "Oh, we are an inclusive employer and we love everybody and we certainly

01:26:52 ◼   ► don't condone sexual harassment," which any company will say if you ask them, "Hey, company

01:26:56 ◼   ► X, do you condone sexual harassment?" They'll all say they don't, right? So it's their stated

01:26:59 ◼   ► policy not to. So if this happens to you in a company, in any company that in this day

01:27:04 ◼   ► and age is going to say that, and you take this thing to the authority of the institution

01:27:09 ◼   ► that you are working within and you say, "Hey, HR department, we're supposed to be a company

01:27:14 ◼   ► in which people don't get sexually harassed. It's my first day at my job and my boss is

01:27:18 ◼   ► propositioning me for sex." Here you go. It's on a silver platter. Now, HR, do your job

01:27:24 ◼   ► as stated. And again, it's not as if like, "Oh, I'm expecting HR to protect me." They

01:27:30 ◼   ► should be protecting the company by having someone like this in it because it's against

01:27:34 ◼   ► their state of policy and it's bad for business, period. The only reason you wouldn't do that

01:27:39 ◼   ► is if there is institutional bias and sexism

01:27:43 ◼   ► from the highest levels to say,

01:27:45 ◼   ► actually the strategy we want to take here

01:27:47 ◼   ► is to sweep that under the carpet,

01:27:49 ◼   ► to shuffle the victim off someplace else,

01:27:52 ◼   ► to put the blame on them, to give them an option like,

01:27:54 ◼   ► well, you can either stay under this manager,

01:27:56 ◼   ► but he's gonna give you a bad performance review

01:27:57 ◼   ► because we're gonna totally tell him

01:27:58 ◼   ► that you reported him,

01:27:59 ◼   ► and if he does give you a bad performance review,

01:28:01 ◼   ► you really only have yourself to blame for report.

01:28:03 ◼   ► I'm not making this up, read the thing.

01:28:05 ◼   ► This is what's happening in the company.

01:28:07 ◼   ► You really only have yourself to blame

01:28:08 ◼   ► and because we did give you the option

01:28:10 ◼   ► to transfer someplace else.

01:28:11 ◼   ► And the employer's like,

01:28:12 ◼   ► "But this is the department I wanna be in,

01:28:14 ◼   ► "this is where my skillset lies,

01:28:15 ◼   ► "and if I transfer, I'll have to learn a new thing."

01:28:16 ◼   ► I'm like, "Well, we gave you a choice."

01:28:19 ◼   ► Or you could just quit your job.

01:28:20 ◼   ► They don't mention that, but it's always an option.

01:28:22 ◼   ► You'd always just quit your job.

01:28:23 ◼   ► But she had skills that were a perfect fit

01:28:26 ◼   ► for the job that she was in.

01:28:27 ◼   ► She enjoyed doing it technically.

01:28:29 ◼   ► She liked some of the people she was working with.

01:28:31 ◼   ► There's just this one niggling problem

01:28:33 ◼   ► about being sexually harassed at work.

01:28:35 ◼   ► So she ended up transferring to a different department,

01:28:36 ◼   ► which was painful and did well. It's such a terrible story of, and then she had problems

01:28:42 ◼   ► there as well and other issues and she would bring them to HR and they would do the same

01:28:45 ◼   ► thing and fighting about all the other people. This is institutional sexism where the institution

01:28:51 ◼   ► is working against her. She has a reasonable expectation according to the state of policies

01:28:54 ◼   ► of the company that the people whose job it is to be the referees for this area, just

01:28:59 ◼   ► like the payroll department is the referee for how much you get paid, are failing to

01:29:04 ◼   ► act. And that is like the definition of injustice, and when it's an institution, it's the definition

01:29:08 ◼   ► of institutional sexism. And you can expand that out to any institution you want, whether

01:29:12 ◼   ► it be your family unit at the smallest institution where maybe everyone in your family thinks

01:29:17 ◼   ► all the wives should stay at home with their kids, all the way up to the government with

01:29:20 ◼   ► policies that are biased in one direction or another against people who are minorities

01:29:26 ◼   ► or people who are women, which is the opposite of a minority. And so that's what's maddening

01:29:32 ◼   ► to—that's the reason the whole social justice movement and the pejorative SJW that's

01:29:40 ◼   ► used—the reason they have the word "justice" in them is because all of them derive from

01:29:44 ◼   ► a recognition that every large grouping or organizational structure has a behavior as

01:29:53 ◼   ► an overall organism that emerges from the attitudes of the people running it.

01:30:00 ◼   ► And despite what people may say, it's pretty easy to find out if you're in a situation

01:30:05 ◼   ► where the institution is working against you and where the supposed places you go to resolve

01:30:14 ◼   ► whatever issue you have, whether it's a discrepancy in your paycheck or someone violating what

01:30:18 ◼   ► you think is an HR policy, if those institutions fail to act or actively work against you,

01:30:25 ◼   ► that feels like and is an injustice.

01:30:27 ◼   ► And that's what people are fighting against.

01:30:30 ◼   ► And I think that the payroll analogy is the one that probably works because most people

01:30:34 ◼   ► think that's a no brainer.

01:30:36 ◼   ► Like they understand the role of the payroll department.

01:30:38 ◼   ► And if they don't get paid the money they were promised, that is an injustice.

01:30:41 ◼   ► But you apply the exact same thing to other things like, "Well, he's a really nice guy

01:30:46 ◼   ► and he's really important in the company.

01:30:49 ◼   ► And can't you just change to a different place?"

01:30:50 ◼   ► Because it just it boggles my mind that any modern company like these things would ever

01:30:56 ◼   ► happen.

01:30:57 ◼   ► but then you'll hear the same story from tons like talk to women that you know who have worked in large companies for any part of

01:31:04 ◼   ► their career

01:31:04 ◼   ► You'll hear these same stories everywhere and that's another clue to you that this is an institutional thing

01:31:08 ◼   ► It's not just uber that uber is a bad company over is the one bad apple. Everybody else is fine. It is everywhere

01:31:14 ◼   ► It is systemic. It is societal. It is cultural. It is institutional. That's that's the definition and

01:31:20 ◼   ► That's why the stories like this are depressing because no matter what uber does a is probably not gonna change uber

01:31:27 ◼   ► because if they haven't changed by now they probably never will. And B, it's not

01:31:32 ◼   ► going to solve the problem in all the other places. The only way you can fix it

01:31:35 ◼   ► systemically is with systemic solutions and cultural change and all the other

01:31:39 ◼   ► stuff and that takes a really long time and it's very difficult to do and that's

01:31:42 ◼   ► why stories like this are very depressing. And since this original

01:31:47 ◼   ► blog post was written and in just the last few hours as we record somebody's

01:31:51 ◼   ► tweeted, we'll put a link to it, that 118 people have resigned or given their

01:31:56 ◼   ► notice since yesterday, which I guess is Tuesday. It was in the last couple days is really what

01:32:01 ◼   ► it amounts to. And that was only in San Francisco. This is at Uber in San Francisco. Like that's

01:32:06 ◼   ► a lot of people, 120 people. And, you know, power to you, man. If you are willing to stand

01:32:15 ◼   ► up for this and say, "I cannot be a part of this anymore." Like, here again, like I like

01:32:21 ◼   ► to think of myself as reasonably woke. But if I mean, I don't know if I would have the

01:32:25 ◼   ► gumption to just walk away from my job that's putting food on my table. That's awesome.

01:32:31 ◼   ► And men or women, it doesn't matter, whoever these 118 people are, good for you. That's

01:32:36 ◼   ► tremendous that you have put your money where your mouth is. And yeah, I can't emphasize

01:32:41 ◼   ► enough. I see it from time to time at my work and I'm not even necessarily like, I don't

01:32:49 ◼   ► have my antennae up, if you will, to search for it. I just see it from time to time and

01:32:53 ◼   ► I try to do my best to correct it when it happens, but this stuff happens everywhere.

01:32:59 ◼   ► It's not unique to San Francisco, it's not unique to Uber, although Uber seems to be

01:33:02 ◼   ► excelling in this department.

01:33:04 ◼   ► It's everywhere, and it's up to everyone, but particularly those of us who are not oppressed,

01:33:13 ◼   ► like the three of us, to give credence to the stories of those who are, to pay attention

01:33:21 ◼   ► into the stories of those who are,

01:33:23 ◼   ► and to try to fix or speak for, or really even better,

01:33:27 ◼   ► give the microphone to, which is comical

01:33:30 ◼   ► since I'm talking into a mic right now and not doing this,

01:33:33 ◼   ► but anyway, give the microphone to someone who is oppressed

01:33:36 ◼   ► and who allow them to speak for themselves.

01:33:39 ◼   ► - The other thing I like about this post is,

01:33:41 ◼   ► I think it does a good job of explaining

01:33:44 ◼   ► why someone might stay in a job where this happens,

01:33:47 ◼   ► because it's always the reaction's like,

01:33:48 ◼   ► "Well, just quit.

01:33:49 ◼   ► "If you don't like it, just quit," right?

01:33:50 ◼   ► there are mitigating factors, one of which may be you really like the work you're doing

01:33:56 ◼   ► and it's technically interesting and you are growing your skills and maybe you even like

01:34:01 ◼   ► the people you work with, right?

01:34:03 ◼   ► It's very possible to be in a company whose institutions are failing you, but nevertheless

01:34:07 ◼   ► you enjoy your peers and employees and maybe you enjoy your direct manager but you know

01:34:13 ◼   ► that it only takes one bad person and then one non-functioning institution to fail to

01:34:21 ◼   ► do its job to protect the company from toxic employees like this to, you know, like, you

01:34:26 ◼   ► know, retention is part of the job of HR. When 100 people quit because of something

01:34:30 ◼   ► like this, that's HR not doing its job, right? But it's like, why did she stay in this job?

01:34:34 ◼   ► I think this article has a good description of why someone, why it's not just like, oh,

01:34:40 ◼   ► Someone you know

01:34:41 ◼   ► Said something you know lewd to me and therefore I got to quit the next day

01:34:45 ◼   ► And if you don't quit the next day, it's your own fault right that's a ridiculous thing like

01:34:48 ◼   ► People are more complicated than just they're not you know it's not just one thing right and so that's why this thing is like

01:34:55 ◼   ► Reflecting on a very strange year like it is very even-handed

01:35:00 ◼   ► And I think when you read it you can see

01:35:02 ◼   ► The excitement of working for a company with a lot with a lot of VC money doing interesting technical stuff with people that you enjoy

01:35:07 ◼   ► and expanding your skills and generally having a career, a thing that most people get to have.

01:35:12 ◼   ► And that is the tension. Do you want to have a career or is your entire career going to be

01:35:15 ◼   ► sending reports to HR every time someone does something bad to you? And it's like,

01:35:20 ◼   ► I shouldn't have to choose between those two things. Can't I have a career and not be sexually

01:35:25 ◼   ► harassed? Is that even an option on the table? And so it makes people have these ridiculous choices

01:35:32 ◼   ► like, "Well, it's not really that bad, is it? And I guess I'll just tolerate it and

01:35:37 ◼   ► I would just keep reporting it to HR, maybe it'll do something eventually." And it's

01:35:41 ◼   ► just, it's not a healthy situation, but like, the expectation that everything is

01:35:49 ◼   ► your fault if you don't immediately storm out and quit at the first time

01:35:53 ◼   ► someone does something you don't like, otherwise, like, as the HR department

01:35:57 ◼   ► told, "Well, it's really your own fault at that point. He's gonna give you a negative

01:36:00 ◼   ► performance review, but you can't really blame the guy, right? And I mean, like, that might

01:36:04 ◼   ► have been over a lot of people's lines. But it really depends on what state you are in

01:36:08 ◼   ► your career and how much you know of the world and, you know, what capacity you have to leave

01:36:13 ◼   ► you a job at that moment. And how excited you are to be able to work in this thing.

01:36:17 ◼   ► It's like, well, it's just that one bad person. And if I work in a different department, I

01:36:21 ◼   ► want to deal with them. Because there's always people at work you don't know how to deal

01:36:23 ◼   ► with. And if you've lived your entire life as a woman in virtually any culture in the

01:36:26 ◼   ► entire history of the universe, you are, sadly, very used to dealing with people crapping

01:36:32 ◼   ► on you and treating you badly, and so have probably internalized some notion that this

01:36:37 ◼   ► is a thing that you have to tolerate to get ahead in the world, and sadly you're also

01:36:41 ◼   ► probably kind of right about it.

01:36:43 ◼   ► So that's, like, I think will give people—reading this, I think will give people a better idea

01:36:50 ◼   ► of what it might be like to be in this situation and why you might not do all the things that

01:36:55 ◼   ► I'm assuming people down in the comments are screaming that this person was supposed to do,

01:36:58 ◼   ► which is, you know, run out with your hair on fire at the first sign of anything going wrong,

01:37:03 ◼   ► which honestly might have actually been the better choice in the case of Uber, but

01:37:08 ◼   ► is not a realistic thing to demand of people. Otherwise they somehow lose their right to

01:37:14 ◼   ► justice and somehow lose their expectation of being in a functioning institution that

01:37:18 ◼   ► doesn't hate them. Yeah, it's just ridiculous. And again, I know I said it before, but truly,

01:37:24 ◼   ► it is worth your time to read this entire post. It is extremely well thought out and extremely mature,

01:37:30 ◼   ► and it just spells out the facts the way Susan saw them, and I believe every word of it.

01:37:35 ◼   ► I mean, even if, even hypothetically, if this was, you know, laced with BS, which again, I truly do

01:37:44 ◼   ► not believe, this to me sounds like something that absolutely could have happened. And maybe if it

01:37:50 ◼   ► If it didn't happen, it may not have been an Uber,

01:37:52 ◼   ► but this is stuff that happens every day,

01:37:54 ◼   ► and I don't see it.

01:37:56 ◼   ► I'm trying to, in part, by talking to the three of you

01:38:00 ◼   ► and anyone else that's listening, or two of you,