ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► You've been led astray. I gave you a good YouTube starting point and you quickly found

00:00:04 ◼   ► -- you quickly found a that. How many clicks did it take you to get to that?

00:00:10 ◼   ► Actually this is Facebook, but --

00:00:11 ◼   ► Oh, you started off at the bottom.

00:00:16 ◼   ► Do we have follow-up this week?

00:00:18 ◼   ► I put in the link here and I had to pronounce this person's name and I realize I haven't

00:00:21 ◼   ► followed the link.

00:00:22 ◼   ► Would you like a moment? Would you like me to stall for you for a moment?

00:00:27 ◼   ► Yeah, hang on a second.

00:00:29 ◼   ► So John, you didn't do your homework?

00:00:31 ◼   ► No, I did.

00:00:32 ◼   ► It's open in a tab right there.

00:00:34 ◼   ► I listened to it and it didn't help.

00:00:35 ◼   ► Oh, so it was lost.

00:00:36 ◼   ► It was lost amongst your tabs, was it?

00:00:38 ◼   ► It was lost.

00:00:39 ◼   ► It was right next to the ATP tab.

00:00:41 ◼   ► He knew exactly where it was the whole time.

00:00:43 ◼   ► Yep, totally.

00:00:44 ◼   ► That's right.

00:00:45 ◼   ► I just didn't actually click on it.

00:00:46 ◼   ► The keyboard, if you can't just open the tab, you have to actually go to the thing and play

00:00:48 ◼   ► it.

00:00:49 ◼   ► Anyway, this feedback is from Urka according to Google Translate, which I'm assured is

00:00:54 ◼   ► accurate in this case.

00:00:57 ◼   ► the eyesight replacement for the iPhone 6 Plus, like the problems that are having, you

00:01:02 ◼   ► can get it replaced under warranty or whatever.

00:01:05 ◼   ► This question is, "Is there a reason Apple can't just send a notification to the affected

00:01:08 ◼   ► devices?

00:01:09 ◼   ► Why do we have to go to like a web forum and enter your serial number to find out if your

00:01:12 ◼   ► device is the one that has the type of problem?"

00:01:16 ◼   ► And I thought that was an interesting question because there are two aspects of it.

00:01:20 ◼   ► One is the technical, could Apple even do that?

00:01:23 ◼   ► And second is the privacy related one.

00:01:26 ◼   ► Would Apple actually want to do that?

00:01:29 ◼   ► Technically speaking, I think Apple could do that.

00:01:34 ◼   ► Surely there is software running on iPhones that has access to the serial number information

00:01:40 ◼   ► like Apple software, even if third party apps don't.

00:01:42 ◼   ► Apple makes the OS so they can get that information.

00:01:47 ◼   ► But they would have to build that into the OS where periodically it phones home and says,

00:01:51 ◼   ► Are there any relevant recalls or updates for this thing?

00:01:55 ◼   ► If so, blah, blah, blah.

00:01:57 ◼   ► And the privacy aspect one is, does Apple

00:01:59 ◼   ► know that phone serial number XYZ

00:02:03 ◼   ► belongs to an individual person?

00:02:06 ◼   ► I suppose they do, because you've got the--

00:02:08 ◼   ► what do you call it-- find my iPhone type thing.

00:02:10 ◼   ► But I'm not sure what Apple does with that information.

00:02:13 ◼   ► So my answer to this feedback is, they probably could.

00:02:18 ◼   ► And I would imagine the reason they don't

00:02:21 ◼   ► is that they don't have the code for that built in.

00:02:24 ◼   ► And it's probably a low priority, since these recalls

00:02:26 ◼   ► don't happen that often.

00:02:28 ◼   ► And building it in is just--

00:02:30 ◼   ► that whole mechanism seems like it has the potential

00:02:33 ◼   ► to be difficult to implement in a way that doesn't expose more

00:02:39 ◼   ► information about a person to Apple,

00:02:42 ◼   ► because Apple generally doesn't want to know--

00:02:44 ◼   ► wants to know as little about you as possible,

00:02:46 ◼   ► and potentially to other things that are going to exploit

00:02:49 ◼   ► whatever hole this pokes in a thing that periodically

00:02:52 ◼   ► pulls some location and uploads information

00:02:56 ◼   ► about your phone to it.

00:02:56 ◼   ► So, I don't know, you guys have thoughts on that?

00:02:59 ◼   ► - Well, you know, I think they almost certainly

00:03:03 ◼   ► could do this kind of thing if they wanted to.

00:03:05 ◼   ► And there is one thing to consider also

00:03:09 ◼   ► that the quote recall or whatever it is,

00:03:12 ◼   ► the service extension, whatever technically it is,

00:03:15 ◼   ► they say multiple times on that page

00:03:19 ◼   ► that it only applies to iPhone 6 Plus's

00:03:22 ◼   ► with the serial number range that are in working order.

00:03:26 ◼   ► And so that probably gives them the ability to say,

00:03:28 ◼   ► well, this phone that you're handing us is all beat up

00:03:31 ◼   ► and we're not gonna repair this horribly beat up phone

00:03:34 ◼   ► with the broken screen and the dent all over it

00:03:36 ◼   ► for this camera thing 'cause you've obviously abused

00:03:39 ◼   ► this phone or it isn't in good working order.

00:03:40 ◼   ► So it gives them an out and there's no way for them

00:03:43 ◼   ► to know on the server side what kind of condition

00:03:47 ◼   ► your phone is in physically really

00:03:49 ◼   ► And so they probably don't want to send this

00:03:52 ◼   ► to people whose devices are ineligible.

00:03:54 ◼   ► Secondly--

00:03:55 ◼   ► - Oh, you think they're doing it to save money?

00:03:58 ◼   ► - Well, at least to save a lot of requests

00:04:03 ◼   ► from people who won't be satisfied.

00:04:04 ◼   ► But also, they might be doing it to save money.

00:04:07 ◼   ► They might actually say, you know,

00:04:10 ◼   ► this is really only affecting some of these phones.

00:04:12 ◼   ► And it says, it makes it kind of clear

00:04:16 ◼   ► in the language on the page that

00:04:18 ◼   ► In one place where it states the condition,

00:04:20 ◼   ► I believe the first time it states the conditions,

00:04:22 ◼   ► it says phones that are in good working order

00:04:24 ◼   ► and are exhibiting this problem.

00:04:27 ◼   ► And then the second time it mentions it,

00:04:28 ◼   ► it doesn't mention whether the phone

00:04:30 ◼   ► has to be exhibiting the problem to have the repair done.

00:04:33 ◼   ► But it looks like they're trying not to replace,

00:04:37 ◼   ► or not to service phones that don't necessarily need,

00:04:40 ◼   ► quote, need it, and that could be something like,

00:04:44 ◼   ► well, we're only gonna service the ones

00:04:46 ◼   ► whose cameras are actually showing this problem

00:04:47 ◼   ► according to a genius who looks at it,

00:04:49 ◼   ► or also it could mean we're only gonna service this problem

00:04:54 ◼   ► for people who notice the problem

00:04:56 ◼   ► and who care about the problem.

00:04:58 ◼   ► So it probably is, to some degree,

00:05:01 ◼   ► trying to minimize the number of people

00:05:02 ◼   ► who even know about this problem

00:05:04 ◼   ► and who go in to get things fixed

00:05:05 ◼   ► and who go in and load the Apple stores and the repairs,

00:05:09 ◼   ► the repair centers with even more people and money.

00:05:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, I was just about to say that it seems like

00:05:16 ◼   ► would be a tough thing to figure out. Let's assume they want to notify everyone. How do

00:05:21 ◼   ► you do that exactly? By that I mean, do you just send one massive notification to everyone

00:05:27 ◼   ► that has an affected device? That's probably unwise, because the Apple Store is going to

00:05:31 ◼   ► have a pretty crummy day the next few days. Do you do it in batches? Well, then the internet

00:05:35 ◼   ► eventually finds out that they're doing this in batches, and then the internet is enraged

00:05:40 ◼   ► because this iPhone issue you didn't even know you had isn't getting fixed at the schedule

00:05:44 ◼   ► you would like it to be fixed. And so how does that even work? It just seems like a

00:05:50 ◼   ► nightmare. There's no good reason for Apple to do this. I do agree with Urka, but I just,

00:05:58 ◼   ► I don't think that there's anything in it for Apple, and all it does is make things

00:06:02 ◼   ► more challenging for them. Yeah, it doesn't seem like an urgent issue.

00:06:06 ◼   ► As the chat room pointed out, they don't need to have the phones polling or anything. They

00:06:09 ◼   ► can just do a push notification. And the serial number, when you do "Find my iPhone" and list

00:06:13 ◼   ► all your devices, they know your devices, they have this information available to them.

00:06:17 ◼   ► And the OS wouldn't need the poll, they would just need to send out a push notification

00:06:21 ◼   ► to all the things.

00:06:22 ◼   ► But it's not like batteries may explode, you need to know right now now now.

00:06:28 ◼   ► It's more like the kind of thing that they would probably email you, and as long as you

00:06:31 ◼   ► used an Apple ID, they have at least one email with your phone, set it up with an Apple ID,

00:06:37 ◼   ► they have one email address, and it's the type of thing they could send out the emails.

00:06:40 ◼   ► I don't think it matters if you send all the emails at once or in batches because people aren't immediately going to run out again

00:06:45 ◼   ► It's not urgent people are merely aren't gonna run out to the store

00:06:48 ◼   ► Read their email whenever they read it and they look at the like oh

00:06:52 ◼   ► Half the people forget that they read it other people may be put a reminder in their calendar

00:06:56 ◼   ► I think the there won't be a big rush on Apple stores

00:06:59 ◼   ► No matter how you notify about it, and it just doesn't seem that urgent like for this particular thing

00:07:04 ◼   ► And the money-saving aspect definitely has something to it, but yeah a lot of those

00:07:09 ◼   ► Lot of these type of things things that don't happen very often that aren't an essential expected part of the product experience

00:07:15 ◼   ► Tend to be done in not just an apple, but in every company tend to be done in sort of

00:07:20 ◼   ► Ways that seem inefficient or not high-tech because it's not you know, that's the stuff that happens all the time

00:07:26 ◼   ► You know software updates for example, like expected parts of the lifecycle of a product are

00:07:31 ◼   ► iterated on and improved and made more streamlined and made efficient and so on and so forth and these things that happen rarely are

00:07:38 ◼   ► Supposed to happen rarely. It's like well, we'll just slap something together even something like now that I'm excusing this

00:07:43 ◼   ► But you can think about the whole pushing the u2 album onto everyone's things

00:07:46 ◼   ► That's not a thing that happens all the time like that was as far as I know that's the only time they ever did that

00:07:51 ◼   ► It's not as if there's an established system for doing this in a way that

00:07:55 ◼   ► Has been proven to be efficient and not annoying they just like probably went to them and just said well

00:08:01 ◼   ► Can we you know because you they couldn't probably couldn't give everyone promo codes because their promo code system probably couldn't handle that

00:08:08 ◼   ► This is just too many people and they don't want to let you know

00:08:10 ◼   ► So they probably went to the people say what's the best way we can give everyone this for free?

00:08:13 ◼   ► Can we make it free for a day on the store?

00:08:15 ◼   ► Well, then people might not redeem it and you know

00:08:18 ◼   ► Like part of it was they really wanted this music to actually be on people's things without them having to do anything like that

00:08:22 ◼   ► In other words you had to opt out instead of opt-in

00:08:24 ◼   ► But the way that they did it was just so clumsy and ham-fisted

00:08:28 ◼   ► And at least part of that has to be part of it is just wrong-headed thinking

00:08:32 ◼   ► The other part is that it's not something they do every day. So you just got to say with the

00:08:36 ◼   ► the mechanisms and tools and services we have at our disposal, what can we do to make this happen?

00:08:42 ◼   ► Considering they do have push notifications, that was one of the things it seems like they could have done,

00:08:47 ◼   ► but then someone in the meeting will raise their hand and say, "Yeah, but is this really

00:08:50 ◼   ► so important?" And then like the Bean Counter guy, like Marco says, says, "Won't that make more people come in, try to get this service

00:08:57 ◼   ► whether they need it or not?"

00:08:59 ◼   ► So going to a web forum and entering your serial number starts to look pretty good in that regard.

00:09:04 ◼   ► Can we make a web form?

00:09:05 ◼   ► Can we do that?

00:09:06 ◼   ► I think so.

00:09:07 ◼   ► Get that guy who knows what web object's in here.

00:09:09 ◼   ► - Well, and also, you know, so this isn't a problem

00:09:12 ◼   ► that is so urgent that it will cause like data loss

00:09:15 ◼   ► or a physical hazard.

00:09:16 ◼   ► As you said, you know, the battery isn't exploding.

00:09:18 ◼   ► You know, like somebody in the chat was saying

00:09:20 ◼   ► how the iMac three terabyte drive recall,

00:09:24 ◼   ► 'cause I think it was Seagate,

00:09:26 ◼   ► whoever made those three terabyte drives,

00:09:27 ◼   ► like they basically all failed everywhere.

00:09:29 ◼   ► It wasn't just in iMacs.

00:09:30 ◼   ► Like that whole drive generation was terrible.

00:09:33 ◼   ► but so they emailed people for that.

00:09:35 ◼   ► But that makes sense, like this is your data

00:09:37 ◼   ► that you could be losing if this drive dies.

00:09:40 ◼   ► In this case, like your photos might be blurry

00:09:42 ◼   ► on your six plus if it was made in this range.

00:09:45 ◼   ► By the way, mine was.

00:09:46 ◼   ► My test six plus, the serial number qualifies,

00:09:48 ◼   ► but I, you know, that's not gonna qualify

00:09:50 ◼   ► if they actually checked to have it pass,

00:09:52 ◼   ► so I figure, eh, I'll worry about it later.

00:09:54 ◼   ► But another thing is, some people might say,

00:09:58 ◼   ► well, how do you send a push notification,

00:09:59 ◼   ► and will they worry about annoying people?

00:10:02 ◼   ► And the answer there is they don't worry about that at all,

00:10:06 ◼   ► because they already spam us with push notifications

00:10:09 ◼   ► for stupid things.

00:10:09 ◼   ► - There are three words for that one.

00:10:11 ◼   ► Flash flood warning.

00:10:12 ◼   ► You ever been in an office,

00:10:15 ◼   ► well I don't know if you have them down,

00:10:16 ◼   ► or you're in the office and there's a flash flood warning,

00:10:18 ◼   ► it sounds like the world is coming to an end

00:10:20 ◼   ► as everyone's iPhones go off with this terrible

00:10:23 ◼   ► clacks on sound.

00:10:24 ◼   ► So I feel like they have,

00:10:26 ◼   ► I mean that's not them and you can opt out of that,

00:10:27 ◼   ► you can turn that stuff off, you know.

00:10:29 ◼   ► - Well and a few people in the chat are saying

00:10:30 ◼   ► that's a legal requirement, they had to do that.

00:10:32 ◼   ► Anyway, that's separate though.

00:10:33 ◼   ► What I'm talking about is those BS push notifications

00:10:36 ◼   ► from the tips app and from the app store

00:10:39 ◼   ► and from the news app in iOS 9.

00:10:42 ◼   ► You know, I've complained for a long time now

00:10:44 ◼   ► that there has always been a rule.

00:10:46 ◼   ► Ever since push notifications were launched,

00:10:48 ◼   ► there was always a rule in the app store review rules

00:10:51 ◼   ► that said that you could not use push notifications

00:10:53 ◼   ► for marketing or promotion of any kind.

00:10:56 ◼   ► And not only has that rule never been enforced, ever.

00:11:00 ◼   ► Like there's been spam push notifications

00:11:03 ◼   ► or push notifications that are for marketing

00:11:05 ◼   ► or promotion only.

00:11:07 ◼   ► Those have existed since the beginning of time

00:11:10 ◼   ► and very popular apps have always used them.

00:11:14 ◼   ► Like it isn't like it's only a few bad actors who do it.

00:11:16 ◼   ► And like it's common practice, everybody does it now.

00:11:19 ◼   ► And Apple has never seemed to care,

00:11:22 ◼   ► even though they have this rule,

00:11:23 ◼   ► they've never seemed to even bother trying to enforce it.

00:11:27 ◼   ► And now Apple has started breaking that rule themselves.

00:11:31 ◼   ► And that, like, they don't seem to care,

00:11:33 ◼   ► or you know, obviously, you know, Apple is not one person,

00:11:36 ◼   ► so certain teams obviously don't seem to care,

00:11:38 ◼   ► but like, to me, that's extremely inappropriate.

00:11:42 ◼   ► Like, and maybe, it just seems like this is one

00:11:44 ◼   ► of those things that I care a lot more about

00:11:46 ◼   ► than everybody else in the world,

00:11:47 ◼   ► and so maybe I'm just nuts.

00:11:49 ◼   ► But to me, a spam notification is never okay,

00:11:54 ◼   ► and it's especially not okay from the platform vendor

00:11:58 ◼   ► for a notification that I was opted into by default.

00:12:01 ◼   ► That is not cool at all.

00:12:04 ◼   ► - No, I couldn't agree more.

00:12:05 ◼   ► And the tips app, I think I'd had it on my phone

00:12:09 ◼   ► because it got pushed onto my phone

00:12:11 ◼   ► during a software update or whatever.

00:12:13 ◼   ► I think I saw one of the tips come through

00:12:17 ◼   ► on Notification Center and the very next thing I did

00:12:20 ◼   ► was grab my phone and turn off all notifications from tips

00:12:23 ◼   ► and bury it in the most deep folder

00:12:25 ◼   ► in the middle of nowhere on my home screens

00:12:27 ◼   ► because I don't want anything to do with it.

00:12:29 ◼   ► I don't want it.

00:12:30 ◼   ► I don't want to be opted into it.

00:12:32 ◼   ► I wish it was opt in by me rather than opt in by them.

00:12:37 ◼   ► Just no, go away, don't do it.

00:12:40 ◼   ► And again, like you said, Marco,

00:12:42 ◼   ► it doesn't encourage an app developer

00:12:44 ◼   ► to be a good citizen of the platform

00:12:49 ◼   ► if the platform vendor's doing the same BS crap

00:12:51 ◼   ► that I would want to do as a developer, hypothetically.

00:12:54 ◼   ► It's just gross.

00:12:56 ◼   ► - This is kind of a larger theme

00:12:58 ◼   ► that I keep seeing cracks in the foundation here

00:13:01 ◼   ► that I'm really fearing for this.

00:13:03 ◼   ► John mentioned the U2 album Songs of Innocence,

00:13:06 ◼   ► Sounds of Innocence, whatever it was, Spam of Innocence.

00:13:09 ◼   ► And there's been things like that.

00:13:13 ◼   ► Now these certain apps showing us notifications from Apple.

00:13:17 ◼   ► And it kind of seems like Apple is a big company. They are the man. Like, you know, talking

00:13:26 ◼   ► about rebelling against IBM, rebelling against the big company, rebelling against the man.

00:13:30 ◼   ► Apple is the man now. And Apple is big corporate America now. And most of the time, we're

00:13:37 ◼   ► able to ignore that. Most of the time, that is not a problem in the way that big, you

00:13:43 ◼   ► know, self-interested only and sometimes tasteless companies, you know, the way they usually

00:13:48 ◼   ► act, the way they usually annoy people like us, usually Apple does not display those qualities.

00:13:56 ◼   ► But there have been a few instances recently where it seems like they're slipping. It

00:14:00 ◼   ► seems like, and I don't know if this is like a Steve versus Tim thing, probably not,

00:14:06 ◼   ► But it seems like Apple is starting to behave more like the giant corporation that they

00:14:13 ◼   ► have been for quite some time, and it's starting to negatively affect some of the things they

00:14:17 ◼   ► do in ways that annoy people like us who in the past have, you know, Apple's never been

00:14:23 ◼   ► perfect but it sure seems like they're making little bad judgment calls more frequently

00:14:29 ◼   ► now than they used to in ways like spamming us and promoting their own stuff and, you

00:14:35 ◼   ► promoting Apple Music so heavily and iTunes and the music app that they've just ruined

00:14:39 ◼   ► the entire music app and they ruined iTunes to a great degree. Stuff like that. Like,

00:14:44 ◼   ► they're making bad calls and they're doing things that are only self-interested rather

00:14:51 ◼   ► than being self-interested that also benefit us.

00:14:54 ◼   ► They ruin iTunes every few years though. Like, I don't think this ruining of iTunes is much

00:14:59 ◼   ► different than all the other times they ruined iTunes. We've talked about iTunes in past

00:15:02 ◼   ► I think of all those things the only one I can kind of defend is the tips app because if there's gonna be a tips

00:15:08 ◼   ► App it kind of has to be opt-out

00:15:10 ◼   ► No one is going to make the whole point is you need the people who need these tips the most have no idea how to

00:15:15 ◼   ► Opt into it so

00:15:16 ◼   ► Which which OS added the thing where you can turn off notifications from the notification is that iOS 9 you can do that?

00:15:22 ◼   ► Yeah, I thought that was in one. I'm keeping up with iOS stuff

00:15:26 ◼   ► But yeah, I thought that was in one of the things that like from the notification you could say

00:15:29 ◼   ► I don't want to see this these notifications anymore because that's part of the hassle is like oh, that's interesting

00:15:32 ◼   ► You get the notification.

00:15:34 ◼   ► Maybe I'm just misremembering chat room.

00:15:35 ◼   ► We'll correct me in a second if I'm wrong.

00:15:36 ◼   ► But if not, Apple should do this.

00:15:38 ◼   ► You get the notification.

00:15:40 ◼   ► And even when you know how to do it,

00:15:41 ◼   ► like oh, I gotta go back to settings,

00:15:43 ◼   ► then notifications, and then scroll until I find the thing.

00:15:47 ◼   ► 'Cause there's no search.

00:15:48 ◼   ► Maybe there is a search on that page.

00:15:49 ◼   ► That's another idea.

00:15:50 ◼   ► Did they add a search to settings in iOS?

00:15:52 ◼   ► - Yes, yes they did.

00:15:53 ◼   ► It almost works.

00:15:54 ◼   ► - All right.

00:15:55 ◼   ► People in chat rooms say I'm thinking of Android.

00:15:57 ◼   ► But anyway, yeah.

00:15:59 ◼   ► That's a feature that would be handy.

00:16:02 ◼   ► But for tips that has to be opt-out because the whole point of the tips is the people who need the most need to be

00:16:07 ◼   ► And it can be annoying even those tips can be annoying

00:16:09 ◼   ► It's one of the tips one of the first tips should remove the second tip should be

00:16:13 ◼   ► Don't want to see any more of these tips. Here's how you turn them off

00:16:17 ◼   ► Now someone on the chat room is saying that I'm correct that you can't turn them off from the notification

00:16:21 ◼   ► Anyway, I haven't installed iOS 9 yet in case you haven't noticed

00:16:23 ◼   ► But yeah all the other stuff I don't know it's hard for me to discern trends here

00:16:30 ◼   ► The only trend I can maybe pick out is that when Jobs was still around, you could...

00:16:40 ◼   ► They seemed much more limited in the things they were willing to try.

00:16:42 ◼   ► Like they didn't try a lot of stuff.

00:16:44 ◼   ► That's true.

00:16:45 ◼   ► They were very limited and you could kind of, I don't know if this is actually true,

00:16:49 ◼   ► but you can kind of get a feel for like things that you would imagine Steve Jobs would find

00:16:54 ◼   ► distasteful didn't get out the door.

00:16:56 ◼   ► Is that because he was micromanaging everything or is that because everyone around him thought

00:16:59 ◼   ► to themselves, "If I sell this to Steve, he'll tell me it's crappy and we shouldn't put it

00:17:03 ◼   ► out or whatever."

00:17:04 ◼   ► Whereas the Tim Cooks apple is trying much more things and overall I think that's a benefit

00:17:09 ◼   ► because we just get so many things that we've wanted for so long that, you know, I mean

00:17:13 ◼   ► just look at iOS 8 and all the other stuff, but on the other side you have like that,

00:17:16 ◼   ► we never talked about it, but that promotional site about what's so amazing about the iPhone

00:17:19 ◼   ► and how app reviewers have great ideas and stuff like that, like that would never have

00:17:24 ◼   ► come out of, you know, if that had passed under the nose of Steve Jobs.

00:17:28 ◼   ► But you know, that's not the kind of BS that you he has different brand of BS

00:17:33 ◼   ► He would not like that and that and that is not the correct brand of BS. So

00:17:37 ◼   ► I'm mostly I don't think I think it's still a

00:17:40 ◼   ► Net positive. I'm willing to deal with the bumps in the road here

00:17:45 ◼   ► But you know a lot of these things is revealed like I said for the ability to turn off the notification

00:17:49 ◼   ► from the notification that's just a feature they should have and

00:17:54 ◼   ► You could say the problem is they keep sending too many notifications

00:17:56 ◼   ► Or the tips app annoys me or even stuff like I can't delete these apps off the phone

00:18:01 ◼   ► I should be able to hide them or whatever

00:18:03 ◼   ► Those are exactly the type of things that Tim Cook's Apple

00:18:05 ◼   ► Seems more receptive to hearing the cries about and they'll get to them eventually obviously the ability to actually hide

00:18:11 ◼   ► Like the stocks app or whatever

00:18:13 ◼   ► It's probably really low on the list of thing of long-standing complaints about iOS in terms of impact

00:18:18 ◼   ► That's like well just put them in a folder. That's what everyone else does, but I think they will eventually get to it unlike the

00:18:24 ◼   ► Tim Cook Apple where you're like, "You know what? They're never going to let me hide the

00:18:27 ◼   ► stocks app. Just put it in a folder. No big deal."

00:18:29 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:18:30 ◼   ► Yeah. I don't know. It seems like... What you said is correct that it does seem like we have now

00:18:37 ◼   ► a different brand of BS. And Steve's BS, whether it was better aligned with us or whether we were

00:18:43 ◼   ► just used to it or whether we just liked Steve as a character and kind of rolled it in, who knows?

00:18:48 ◼   ► Well, it was a personification. We're pretending it's Steve's BS. All it was was Apple's BS when

00:18:53 ◼   ► Steve was the CEO and so everything was like it mapped onto him it's like well I

00:18:57 ◼   ► don't know what actually went on inside the company so I'll pretend this was

00:19:00 ◼   ► Steve Jobs idea like that was just the simple the the external simplification

00:19:03 ◼   ► of the black box that was Apple and same thing we're doing with like Tim Cook's

00:19:06 ◼   ► Apple or whatever we have no real way of knowing what's going on internally all

00:19:10 ◼   ► we're doing is trying to you know you just said you know Apple's not one per

00:19:13 ◼   ► person but we you know we're modeling it pretend it's a person what is the

00:19:16 ◼   ► personality of that person what kind of person is this Apple you know well and

00:19:20 ◼   ► And you know, so many big corporations behave like the out of touch men in their 50s who

00:19:29 ◼   ► run them.

00:19:31 ◼   ► And it shows.

00:19:33 ◼   ► And Apple has been run by men in their 50s for a while now, but it really didn't behave

00:19:39 ◼   ► that way.

00:19:40 ◼   ► It didn't seem that way.

00:19:41 ◼   ► They didn't seem as out of touch as that kind of group usually does to people like us.

00:19:48 ◼   ► But for some reason now I'm not feeling that confident in that anymore.

00:19:53 ◼   ► It does seem like that has changed without Steve or at least in the same time that Steve

00:19:58 ◼   ► unfortunately passed away and the leadership changed and everything.

00:20:03 ◼   ► It now seems more like what it is, which is a group of old guys trying to figure out what's

00:20:10 ◼   ► cool and trying to yell at us now to tell us what's cool.

00:20:14 ◼   ► - Just hang in there Marco.

00:20:15 ◼   ► you'll be an old guy in his 50s and then everything will match up again and you'll be happy.

00:20:19 ◼   ► Right, well I mean I'm already not cool and I'm only 34? 33? 33. I'm only 30- I never

00:20:24 ◼   ► know I got I got to figure it every time. I'm already not cool I know that but I would

00:20:28 ◼   ► I would not be running something where I have to decide important things that other people

00:20:33 ◼   ► should think are cool.

00:20:34 ◼   ► It's not coolness it's just about taste that's what it always comes down to is like what

00:20:39 ◼   ► seems a tasteful appropriate thing to do. What's too flashy, what's too flamboyant, what's

00:20:44 ◼   ► to obviously BS, like make your BS at least be clever,

00:20:47 ◼   ► what is actually inspiring versus what is cloying.

00:20:49 ◼   ► Like it's difficult to do,

00:20:51 ◼   ► it's difficult to do as an individual,

00:20:53 ◼   ► let alone trying to herd a giant multi-billion dollar

00:20:55 ◼   ► organization to present a face to the world

00:20:58 ◼   ► that most people who look on it decide that it is tasteful,

00:21:01 ◼   ► the things they do are tasteful.

00:21:02 ◼   ► Like that's a tall order, so.

00:21:04 ◼   ► - It is, but like the things that we've seen from Apple

00:21:08 ◼   ► in recent time that have seemed distasteful to us,

00:21:11 ◼   ► things like, you know, the spam of innocence,

00:21:13 ◼   ► things like the weird presentations they keep giving and the weird EdiQ segment and the

00:21:18 ◼   ► Apple Music segment and everything. Like, all this stuff, you know, it's, this is, this

00:21:22 ◼   ► seems like they're, they're letting a lot of things out that, you know, Steve's brand

00:21:29 ◼   ► of BS and the thing, and the flaws Steve will let out would be things like, oh yeah, the

00:21:34 ◼   ► iPod Hi-Fi, that's totally gonna be an awesome deal and people are gonna buy it. You know,

00:21:38 ◼   ► like that, that was like Steve's kind of BS. Like--

00:21:40 ◼   ► Other than the game was figuring out, does he really like the iPod and the Hi-Fi?

00:21:45 ◼   ► Probably he does, because if he didn't like it, why would he even be introducing it?

00:21:48 ◼   ► He didn't like the Motorola Rocker, and we could tell.

00:21:50 ◼   ► It kind of seemed like he really liked the iPod and Hi-Fi, and I guess it was okay, but

00:21:56 ◼   ► the rest of the world did not like the iPod and Hi-Fi, except for Jason Snow, who loves

00:22:00 ◼   ► it.

00:22:01 ◼   ► But everyone else was.

00:22:02 ◼   ► But yeah, sometimes people, sometimes Steve thought something would, at least seemed to

00:22:06 ◼   ► something would be a great success and that people would have no problem with its price

00:22:12 ◼   ► or limitations. And then the market said very clearly otherwise. That was Steve's, I think

00:22:17 ◼   ► that was Steve's biggest or most common flaw in judgment. Whereas now, McKern Apple, we

00:22:24 ◼   ► have other flaws in judgment that are very different and to me a little more worrisome.

00:22:28 ◼   ► And maybe it's no big deal, you know, maybe I'm overthinking it. That's very possible.

00:22:32 ◼   ► - But I do think it's offset by the other changes

00:22:35 ◼   ► in judgment of like, is it a good idea for apps

00:22:38 ◼   ► to have extensions or to have third party keyboards,

00:22:42 ◼   ► setting aside the really buggy implementation.

00:22:44 ◼   ► The new Apple says yes, the old Apple says no.

00:22:46 ◼   ► I like the new Apple decision better.

00:22:48 ◼   ► I think that outweighs all of this stuff.

00:22:50 ◼   ► - I think you're right and that's why overall,

00:22:54 ◼   ► I think Apple is in a better position now

00:22:56 ◼   ► than they were say five years ago.

00:22:58 ◼   ► Overall, things are better.

00:23:00 ◼   ► Not everything is better, but overall I think you're right,

00:23:03 ◼   ► the things are better.

00:23:04 ◼   ► It's still, it seems like, you know,

00:23:07 ◼   ► we all thought that after Steve, Apple,

00:23:11 ◼   ► you know, we were all telling ourselves back then,

00:23:14 ◼   ► you know, Apple will be okay, you know,

00:23:16 ◼   ► maybe it won't change very much.

00:23:19 ◼   ► But I think what we're seeing is how it has changed,

00:23:22 ◼   ► and it is an all for the better.

00:23:23 ◼   ► And there are a lot of things that are better,

00:23:25 ◼   ► but obviously like you can't have

00:23:27 ◼   ► such an incredibly strong personality

00:23:30 ◼   ► who had tons of power, you can't have that kind of person

00:23:34 ◼   ► at the top of the company who then leaves

00:23:38 ◼   ► and nothing changes.

00:23:40 ◼   ► It was never gonna be nothing will change.

00:23:43 ◼   ► And it was never realistic to think that the things

00:23:48 ◼   ► that we loved about Apple would all survive this transition.

00:23:51 ◼   ► Some of them haven't.

00:23:52 ◼   ► And I think that's a little sad.

00:23:55 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:23:56 ◼   ► We really need to talk about something that's awesome,

00:23:58 ◼   ► but very, very quickly, I just wanted

00:23:59 ◼   ► to apologize for all the people who've been writing me saying, "Oh my god, now I see a

00:24:03 ◼   ► crescent on my iPhone. What have you done?" Sorry guys, but welcome to the club. Anyway,

00:24:07 ◼   ► why don't you tell us about something that's cool, Marco?

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00:26:19 ◼   ► - All right.

00:26:21 ◼   ► I wanted to quickly talk about something

00:26:26 ◼   ► I've been thinking about on and off all day today.

00:26:29 ◼   ► And we've been talking a lot about Force Touch

00:26:31 ◼   ► and kind of tangentially the haptic engine

00:26:34 ◼   ► and how it would be used on the iPhone.

00:26:37 ◼   ► And something that had occurred to me,

00:26:40 ◼   ► and I don't recall us talking about this,

00:26:42 ◼   ► What if it was opt-in, kind of like iPad multitasking gestures, you know, the five-finger pinch

00:26:47 ◼   ► and the four-finger swipes?

00:26:50 ◼   ► What if it was opt-in and so all the confusion that we were worried about from normal users

00:26:57 ◼   ► that had never experienced Force Touch before and don't really know what it's all about,

00:27:01 ◼   ► what if it was optional?

00:27:02 ◼   ► Like, would that be a reasonable solution to the problem?

00:27:05 ◼   ► I'm still not sure what it would do necessarily, but maybe it's an optional long press.

00:27:10 ◼   ► like you were saying before Marco on a prior episode,

00:27:14 ◼   ► but the key is that it's opt-in,

00:27:16 ◼   ► and by default it doesn't do anything.

00:27:17 ◼   ► - You can't market it that way though.

00:27:19 ◼   ► If they're gonna put a force touch on the screen,

00:27:20 ◼   ► you can be pretty darn sure that it's gonna be

00:27:22 ◼   ► one of the very high up bullet point features

00:27:26 ◼   ► of the iPhone 6s or whatever they end up calling it.

00:27:30 ◼   ► And if it's opt-in, people are gonna get it and say,

00:27:32 ◼   ► "I saw the TV ad where they did this thing.

00:27:34 ◼   ► "How do I do that thing?"

00:27:35 ◼   ► Oh, you gotta go to settings, you gotta,

00:27:37 ◼   ► I feel like it can't possibly be opt-in

00:27:39 ◼   ► just for marketing reasons.

00:27:41 ◼   ► That is assuming they even tell you that it's there.

00:27:43 ◼   ► If they don't mention it and decide

00:27:45 ◼   ► this is not gonna be a marketing feature,

00:27:47 ◼   ► that would seem weird to me.

00:27:48 ◼   ► Like why build the sensors in and not,

00:27:51 ◼   ► like usually there aren't that many marketing features

00:27:54 ◼   ► for the S revision phones,

00:27:55 ◼   ► 'cause it's gonna look the same as the other one

00:27:57 ◼   ► and they maybe change the materials

00:27:58 ◼   ► and tweak this and tweak that.

00:28:00 ◼   ► But it's not like, oh, this one has, you know, touch ID.

00:28:03 ◼   ► That's the type of feature that you get

00:28:07 ◼   ► when the whole phone changes shape

00:28:08 ◼   ► in the sort of two-year cadence that Apple's on right now.

00:28:11 ◼   ► So any kind of feature that you can say,

00:28:14 ◼   ► that you added an S revision here,

00:28:17 ◼   ► I think I feel like they really wanna tout it.

00:28:18 ◼   ► So I cannot imagine it being opt-in

00:28:21 ◼   ► unless they really, really, really couldn't figure out

00:28:24 ◼   ► what the hell to do with Force Touch on the phone.

00:28:25 ◼   ► And they're like, eh, if we can't figure out what to do with it,

00:28:28 ◼   ► we should just leave it in kind of experimental mode for now.

00:28:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, I guess that makes sense.

00:28:34 ◼   ► The other thing I was thinking about

00:28:36 ◼   ► is what if they don't do force touch, but still have the haptic engine? So what if it's

00:28:47 ◼   ► not about pushing "through the display," it's not about having different interaction paradigms

00:28:53 ◼   ► from user to phone, but it's about having a different interaction paradigm phone to

00:28:59 ◼   ► user. So maybe it's like the Rumble Pak was to us back when we were playing Nintendo games.

00:29:06 ◼   ► for you John. When the Rumble Pak was new, it's sort of like that where it's a different

00:29:12 ◼   ► response mechanism, but maybe there isn't a force touch on the phone.

00:29:16 ◼   ► Well they already have that, like the vibration motor is already in there. I saw a couple

00:29:20 ◼   ► people tweeting about this, they're like "Oh they can make it so you can feel when

00:29:23 ◼   ► you rub over a certain thing." I don't think they're going to put a different physical

00:29:26 ◼   ► thing that shakes your phone inside the phone. I think there's going to be one thing that

00:29:29 ◼   ► shakes your phone. Maybe that thing will be changed slightly to give different kinds of

00:29:33 ◼   ► of feedback but it's still just gonna be one thing. It's the thing that makes your

00:29:36 ◼   ► phone vibrate when you put it on silent. It's the thing that, you know, that's

00:29:39 ◼   ► gonna do any kind of haptic feedback. That doesn't require any, you know,

00:29:44 ◼   ► anything more than just a plain old touch sensor. The force sensor, the whole

00:29:48 ◼   ► point of that is to give a more accurate reading of how hard you're pressing on

00:29:52 ◼   ► the screen, more accurate than seeing how much your finger squishes, which I think

00:29:55 ◼   ► is not the best way to do that. So if they're gonna build that in, they're

00:29:58 ◼   ► gonna put those little sensors in there, I feel like it has to be a combination

00:30:03 ◼   ► of, now we can tell how hard you're pressing, and now we can press you back by wiggling

00:30:08 ◼   ► the little, whatever little thing they have in there that vibrates the phone.

00:30:13 ◼   ► And yeah, we'll just have to see what they decide to do with it.

00:30:17 ◼   ► It's the type of thing they have to be careful with because you usually don't get a chance

00:30:21 ◼   ► to totally take a mulligan on a major input device or whatever, like double clicking,

00:30:30 ◼   ► whether that was a smart move or not.

00:30:32 ◼   ► It's really difficult, you can't go like three years into the Mac and say, "You know what?

00:30:36 ◼   ► Double-click doesn't mean open anymore.

00:30:37 ◼   ► We changed our mind."

00:30:38 ◼   ► In fact, there's no more double-click, or double-click means something entirely different.

00:30:42 ◼   ► In the world of touch, maybe you get a little bit of a chance, like you mentioned that the

00:30:45 ◼   ► gestures that are opted in on the iPad, but those are...

00:30:48 ◼   ► Like someone thought that was a good idea.

00:30:49 ◼   ► That's another one that kind of leaked out.

00:30:50 ◼   ► Someone thought that was a good idea, but then other people immediately realized if

00:30:53 ◼   ► you try to play Fruit Ninja with it, you'll end up going back to the home screen all the

00:30:56 ◼   ► time.

00:30:57 ◼   ► So their solution was not, "Let's not ship that feature until we figure out how to make

00:31:00 ◼   ► it work."

00:31:01 ◼   ► "Alright, off by default, people can turn on if they want."

00:31:04 ◼   ► And it's a shame because that gesture is so addictive on the iPad, but you really can't

00:31:08 ◼   ► play Fruit Ninja with it.

00:31:10 ◼   ► So I don't know what they do then.

00:31:11 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know.

00:31:13 ◼   ► I mean, I'm thinking, you know, the story here is probably very boring.

00:31:18 ◼   ► It is probably not anything super clever.

00:31:21 ◼   ► It is probably Force Touch is Force Touch.

00:31:25 ◼   ► It's advertised as Force Touch.

00:31:26 ◼   ► It is some kind of tertiary, secondary click that will bring up some kind of secondary,

00:31:33 ◼   ► tertiary function and there will be some kind of API to access this gesture. I think we're

00:31:41 ◼   ► overthinking it. I really think this is just going to be a feature added because they can.

00:31:48 ◼   ► Somebody at Apple clearly really loves Force Touch. Somebody who matters a lot clearly

00:31:54 ◼   ► loves it. Maybe it's multiple people who matter a lot.

00:31:56 ◼   ► - Well, you can see on the watch

00:31:57 ◼   ► why they kinda had to do it,

00:31:58 ◼   ► because they needed more input methods.

00:32:01 ◼   ► - On the watch it makes sense.

00:32:03 ◼   ► I don't, you know, I've obviously said this a lot,

00:32:06 ◼   ► I don't think it makes a lot of sense in the trackpads,

00:32:09 ◼   ► and if it makes sense in just the MacBook One trackpad,

00:32:13 ◼   ► for thinness reasons, okay.

00:32:14 ◼   ► Although, is it really?

00:32:16 ◼   ► Like, I've never listened to it,

00:32:18 ◼   ► but like I was thinking on my dog walk today,

00:32:20 ◼   ► 'cause that's where I do all my thinking,

00:32:22 ◼   ► is it really thinner to have the whole linear actuator

00:32:25 ◼   ► everything down there, that's thinner than a button?

00:32:27 ◼   ► I don't know, anyway, it doesn't matter.

00:32:29 ◼   ► You know, putting it in all of the laptops, I think,

00:32:33 ◼   ► is, it was maybe premature or unwarranted, but.

00:32:38 ◼   ► - So far, most of the feedback from the youngsters

00:32:41 ◼   ► is like, Marco is an old man and we all love this better.

00:32:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, I guess this is my old man phase now,

00:32:47 ◼   ► beginning of my life that--

00:32:48 ◼   ► - But I think it's not really, because I think

00:32:50 ◼   ► several years from now, you'll be okay with it

00:32:53 ◼   ► and you'll go back and use one of the ones

00:32:54 ◼   ► to have the button then move,

00:32:55 ◼   ► then it will feel broken to you.

00:32:57 ◼   ► Like, oh, the whole thing tilts down.

00:32:59 ◼   ► - It's very possible.

00:33:00 ◼   ► And I said before, like,

00:33:01 ◼   ► I don't hate the ForceTux trackpad.

00:33:03 ◼   ► I just think it's worse than the current, than the old one.

00:33:05 ◼   ► And, you know, I'm not gonna not buy a new laptop ever again

00:33:09 ◼   ► to avoid it, but I'm certainly,

00:33:11 ◼   ► I don't think I'm gonna love it

00:33:12 ◼   ► when I have to make the transition.

00:33:13 ◼   ► - You should circle back to bagging on the keyboard,

00:33:15 ◼   ► because I think that is a more safe,

00:33:17 ◼   ► a more safe redoubt for you to build your argument.

00:33:22 ◼   ► - Right, well, it doesn't matter.

00:33:23 ◼   ► Anyway, so the addition of Force Touch,

00:33:27 ◼   ► obviously they're putting this across the whole product line.

00:33:29 ◼   ► I think this is maybe yet another thing

00:33:31 ◼   ► that kinda ties into what I was saying earlier,

00:33:33 ◼   ► which is I think that this is really gonna be lost

00:33:38 ◼   ► on so many people.

00:33:39 ◼   ► I mean, it's already,

00:33:40 ◼   ► I already think that they've blown the execution

00:33:43 ◼   ► on the Mac side, where making it a tertiary click is weird.

00:33:48 ◼   ► Designing it in such a way that the click feedback

00:33:53 ◼   ► that you get feels noticeably worse than the old button

00:33:56 ◼   ► I think was a poor choice.

00:33:57 ◼   ► If they had a choice, they might not have, who knows.

00:34:00 ◼   ► And on the phone, if everything we're hearing

00:34:04 ◼   ► from various tip sources is correct,

00:34:08 ◼   ► that it is just like a right click

00:34:09 ◼   ► and it's another level of interaction of,

00:34:12 ◼   ► oh well, you gotta go around shoving everything

00:34:15 ◼   ► on the screen to see what it can do.

00:34:17 ◼   ► Like that kinda sucks.

00:34:18 ◼   ► It'll be useful I think for games and for,

00:34:22 ◼   ► Like there was a good discussion on this,

00:34:24 ◼   ► on upgrade this week, we'll link to that.

00:34:26 ◼   ► Well, by the time you guys hear this, upgrade last week,

00:34:29 ◼   ► and it was very good.

00:34:30 ◼   ► And they were pointing out, you know,

00:34:31 ◼   ► this could really be useful for games

00:34:33 ◼   ► of having like a different--

00:34:34 ◼   ► - Wait for the first person to have the test your strength

00:34:37 ◼   ► game to try to see if they can get people to punch their

00:34:38 ◼   ► thumbs through their phone screens, you know?

00:34:41 ◼   ► Press harder, oh, you haven't done it yet, keep going.

00:34:43 ◼   ► Yeah, it's probably really easy to max out the sensors,

00:34:45 ◼   ► so I guess you can't do that, but that would be fun.

00:34:47 ◼   ► - Well, and also if Apple enforces their app store rules

00:34:51 ◼   ► anymore, which is a big if for these push notifications, there is a rule against apps

00:34:56 ◼   ► that encourage people to damage their devices.

00:34:59 ◼   ► I think it'll be pretty easy to max out the four sensors, so I don't think you can make

00:35:02 ◼   ► a game like that anyway.

00:35:03 ◼   ► Well, people will try.

00:35:06 ◼   ► But yeah, so, you know, I think it's going to be a really kind of boring new feature

00:35:11 ◼   ► that's not going to set the world on fire in the same way that the Mac ForceTux track

00:35:16 ◼   ► pads have been.

00:35:18 ◼   ► I still think like if it's easy to do, even if they can't figure out a use for it yet,

00:35:23 ◼   ► I think there is a potential use for it.

00:35:26 ◼   ► And as long as they don't go hog wild with it, making like every screen that's part of

00:35:30 ◼   ► the OS has every control has something that you can force touch.

00:35:33 ◼   ► It can't be like a mystery meet navigation.

00:35:35 ◼   ► It can't be like playing mist where you have to be like, do I tap this?

00:35:38 ◼   ► Do I double tap this?

00:35:39 ◼   ► Do I long press it?

00:35:40 ◼   ► Do I force touch it?

00:35:41 ◼   ► It's really, they really need to figure out what they're going to do with it in their

00:35:46 ◼   ► apps anyway.

00:35:47 ◼   ► And then like third parties can dig their own graves.

00:35:48 ◼   ► Like if they want to have, you know,

00:35:50 ◼   ► if Marker wants to have like, oh, you don't know,

00:35:51 ◼   ► you have to go into settings and don't tap the switch,

00:35:55 ◼   ► but force touch it.

00:35:56 ◼   ► Like no one's going to do that.

00:35:57 ◼   ► And if they do, that's their own stupid fault.

00:35:59 ◼   ► So if they make the API open enough,

00:36:01 ◼   ► then you can do that now with like, oh,

00:36:02 ◼   ► you got a long press that control.

00:36:03 ◼   ► You can't just tap it.

00:36:04 ◼   ► What do you mean long press?

00:36:05 ◼   ► I don't know what a long press is, but you know,

00:36:07 ◼   ► they can do that.

00:36:08 ◼   ► But Apple needs to set the example by just using it.

00:36:11 ◼   ► And I think they did okay on the map, like on the Mac,

00:36:13 ◼   ► like fast forward and rewind for the video thing

00:36:15 ◼   ► QuickTime player, that is a very specific, very focused use of Force Touch that is not

00:36:21 ◼   ► like, "We're defining a new language that you can use in every app.

00:36:24 ◼   ► Go into a Finder window and press down and it will zoom in on the window or your icons

00:36:27 ◼   ► will slide to the left or the right."

00:36:29 ◼   ► They didn't do that there.

00:36:30 ◼   ► So I think it's just finding the one or two places where you can use it and it actually

00:36:35 ◼   ► is kind of cool and then not looking in other apps and saying, "We're going to use Force

00:36:39 ◼   ► Touch."

00:36:40 ◼   ► If you find yourself doing that, you're probably doing it wrong.

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00:39:00 ◼   ► Okay, so by the time most people have heard this, this news is going to be a week or two

00:39:05 ◼   ► old.

00:39:06 ◼   ► But a little while ago, there was a really kind of ugly article posted by the New York

00:39:15 ◼   ► Times about Amazon and their—what it's like to work there, and their company culture,

00:39:21 ◼   ► and their hiring practices.

00:39:23 ◼   ► And it made a pretty big splash.

00:39:25 ◼   ► And the short, short version of the article was, "It's terrible to work there."

00:39:28 ◼   ► I don't know. I only had a chance to read about the first half of it and even after having read that much

00:39:34 ◼   ► I thought my goodness

00:39:36 ◼   ► I would never ever want to work at this place because among many other things I like to see my family once every 16 years

00:39:41 ◼   ► I don't know John

00:39:44 ◼   ► How would you summarize this and what did I leave out because I know that there was a lot in this article

00:39:49 ◼   ► It was long

00:39:50 ◼   ► So the badness about Amazon is basically that they expect you to

00:39:54 ◼   ► dedicate yourself mind body and soul to the company to work a very long hours to put your job before your

00:40:01 ◼   ► Family and your health and the rest of your life to just really, you know be sort of in

00:40:06 ◼   ► full throttle mode all the time

00:40:09 ◼   ► for the company and if you can't do that and if you're not super smart and not able to do a million things at once

00:40:15 ◼   ► And have lots of work keep done you then you're not you know

00:40:18 ◼   ► The idea is like that Amazon is a demanding place to work

00:40:21 ◼   ► They want the only want the smartest people who get the most done and the best hardest workers and they're very

00:40:28 ◼   ► you know trying to make it they were probably like a culture of excellence where they do the thing where they try to rank everybody

00:40:34 ◼   ► And push out the low performers to make room for supposedly the new people

00:40:38 ◼   ► and

00:40:40 ◼   ► The New York Times story was just horror story after horror story of how

00:40:43 ◼   ► That you know what people think I was a work-life balance

00:40:46 ◼   ► balance is just so far out of kilter at Amazon, all sorts of stories about people being asked

00:40:52 ◼   ► to do things that are just, you know, beyond the pale for the purposes of the work, being

00:40:56 ◼   ► told explicitly that work has to be more important than their family, working really long hours,

00:41:00 ◼   ► and just all sorts of stuff like that.

00:41:03 ◼   ► And you know, the flip side of it, I think that this New York Times story was, according

00:41:08 ◼   ► to someone from New York Times I think tweeted, it was the story that got the highest number

00:41:12 ◼   ► of comments ever on a New York Times story, because everyone who either currently works

00:41:15 ◼   ► on Amazon or had previously worked on Amazon wanted to say,

00:41:18 ◼   ► "Here's my story working on Amazon.

00:41:20 ◼   ► Either I have my own horror stories or I worked there

00:41:24 ◼   ► and it wasn't like that at all, or I worked there

00:41:26 ◼   ► and my group was good, but I know other groups

00:41:28 ◼   ► that were like this."

00:41:29 ◼   ► Lots of people, not just on the New York Times,

00:41:30 ◼   ► but everywhere around the web are throwing in their own

00:41:34 ◼   ► stories about Amazon.

00:41:37 ◼   ► But Amazon's a big company,

00:41:37 ◼   ► a lot of different people have worked there.

00:41:40 ◼   ► And I think the most interesting part of this,

00:41:43 ◼   ► well, I guess if you didn't know this is what it was like

00:41:45 ◼   ► in Amazon.

00:41:46 ◼   ► And by the way, this is what it's like in a lot of companies, also particularly startups,

00:41:51 ◼   ► although it's a little bit more appropriate for it to be that way in startups, because

00:41:54 ◼   ► in a startup it's like lots of hard work, but also potentially lots of reward, whereas

00:41:58 ◼   ► Amazon's so big that at this point you could work yourself to death and it's not like you're

00:42:02 ◼   ► going to be a multimillionaire off your stock options in a few years, whereas in a startup

00:42:07 ◼   ► you have a vanishingly small chance of doing that, but at least it's a chance.

00:42:12 ◼   ► Yeah, that's often overstated.

00:42:15 ◼   ► I know, but it's non-zero.

00:42:16 ◼   ► The whole thing, Amazon is still operating as if it's like,

00:42:18 ◼   ► "Oh, you're gonna get all these options,

00:42:20 ◼   ► "the stock and blah, blah, blah."

00:42:21 ◼   ► But that's like, if you're gonna work yourself to death

00:42:24 ◼   ► for a company, make it be your startup.

00:42:26 ◼   ► The startup that you founded, that you have equity in,

00:42:30 ◼   ► that you're gonna get rich off of if it succeeds,

00:42:32 ◼   ► you're gonna be ruined if it fails.

00:42:33 ◼   ► That I think is the only sort of reasonable way,

00:42:37 ◼   ► and even that is probably not a great idea

00:42:39 ◼   ► because almost all startups fail.

00:42:41 ◼   ► But if you wanna give it a run, that is the thing to do.

00:42:43 ◼   ► Your company, your thing.

00:42:44 ◼   ► Amazon is not going to be your company.

00:42:46 ◼   ► You are probably not going to get rich off Amazon stock.

00:42:48 ◼   ► Probably don't want to work yourself to death.

00:42:50 ◼   ► But anyway, some people are workaholics.

00:42:51 ◼   ► Some people like that.

00:42:52 ◼   ► Some people thrive in that atmosphere.

00:42:53 ◼   ► Some people don't have families.

00:42:54 ◼   ► Some people do want to dedicate themselves to their job.

00:42:57 ◼   ► So there's two sides to this story here,

00:43:00 ◼   ► depending on how you look on it.

00:43:00 ◼   ► But the most interesting part was the reaction of--

00:43:03 ◼   ► because Amazon's got to do damage control,

00:43:05 ◼   ► because they're going to have lots of difficulty recruiting,

00:43:07 ◼   ► because now everyone thinks Amazon is a terrible sweatshop.

00:43:10 ◼   ► Which, by the way, it is probably, and especially

00:43:12 ◼   ► much more so for blue collar workers

00:43:13 ◼   ► rather than the white collar people who are writing their code or running their websites

00:43:16 ◼   ► or whatever and no one seems to care about that. But anyway, setting that aside, how

00:43:22 ◼   ► do you pronounce his last name? Bezos? Bezos? I can never get it right. Bezos. Anyway, Jeff

00:43:27 ◼   ► Bezos, CEO of Amazon, put out this statement and the little things I pulled from it is

00:43:33 ◼   ► these two little passages. "I don't recognize this Amazon." He's talking about the Amazon

00:43:36 ◼   ► as described in the New York Times. This article doesn't describe the Amazon I know. And I

00:43:41 ◼   ► I love that aspect of this thing that he's writing,

00:43:44 ◼   ► because all he's doing is restating the problem.

00:43:46 ◼   ► I'm totally sure that he doesn't recognize that Amazon,

00:43:49 ◼   ► because the experience of Amazon for the CEO

00:43:51 ◼   ► is not like this at all.

00:43:52 ◼   ► He's probably a workaholic,

00:43:54 ◼   ► and he probably works himself to death, but he's the CEO.

00:43:57 ◼   ► He stands to gain the most from it,

00:43:58 ◼   ► and he's working like crazy because he's a workaholic,

00:44:00 ◼   ► and that's what he likes to do.

00:44:02 ◼   ► His work-life balance is exactly the way he wants it.

00:44:04 ◼   ► Like, this is what he made for himself.

00:44:06 ◼   ► Of course he doesn't recognize this Amazon.

00:44:08 ◼   ► You don't recognize this Amazon

00:44:09 ◼   ► because you're not a lowly Amazon employee

00:44:11 ◼   ► being told to work yourself to death for no payoff.

00:44:14 ◼   ► You're a multi-bazillionaire who is a workaholic

00:44:17 ◼   ► like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or any of these other people

00:44:19 ◼   ► because that's what's in them and they're driven to do that.

00:44:21 ◼   ► And I'm sure there are employees of Amazon

00:44:23 ◼   ► who are like that as well.

00:44:24 ◼   ► They're not gonna get their rewards from it,

00:44:25 ◼   ► but again, some people just thrive

00:44:27 ◼   ► in that type of atmosphere.

00:44:28 ◼   ► But the reason this works as a New York Times story

00:44:30 ◼   ► is most people do not thrive in that atmosphere

00:44:32 ◼   ► and to most people it reads like a horror story.

00:44:34 ◼   ► And so you read it and go,

00:44:36 ◼   ► oh my gosh, I can't believe what it's like.

00:44:38 ◼   ► Now, if I ever had an idea that I was gonna work

00:44:40 ◼   ► Amazon, I'm definitely not going to work there now because I read this article and the things

00:44:43 ◼   ► that I hear happening, that's like my nightmare of the worst possible job I could ever have.

00:44:48 ◼   ► Most people are going to have that attitude.

00:44:50 ◼   ► And that's why I would try, if I had to sit down with Jeff Bezos, I would try to sit down

00:44:54 ◼   ► and say, look, I don't know a lot about a lot of people, but I think I know a little

00:44:56 ◼   ► bit at this point about professional programmers.

00:45:00 ◼   ► And if ever there was an employee less inclined to be into the sort of gung ho, just work,

00:45:09 ◼   ► work, stay in the office at late hours grinding, grinding, grinding. It is the

00:45:15 ◼   ► programmer for a giant fortune 500 company because programming I think is

00:45:20 ◼   ► one of those type of things where the Ballmer Curve aside, we'll put a

00:45:25 ◼   ► link in that, is one of those things where you can't like

00:45:30 ◼   ► the harder you work and the more you grind the worse you program. Like you

00:45:34 ◼   ► have to have times of rest to think about things. You have to walk the dog

00:45:37 ◼   ► like Marco said, you have to take a shower.

00:45:39 ◼   ► Like that's where you actually solve

00:45:40 ◼   ► all your programming powers.

00:45:41 ◼   ► It's in the shower while you're walking the dog,

00:45:43 ◼   ► while you're sleeping,

00:45:44 ◼   ► sometimes you wake up in the morning, it's in your head.

00:45:46 ◼   ► If you stay late one night and try to work on this thing

00:45:49 ◼   ► and work, work, work, work, work for like five extra hours,

00:45:52 ◼   ► there's no point in it, specifically for programming.

00:45:55 ◼   ► And not that everyone they hire is a programmer,

00:45:58 ◼   ► but if you're gonna say, we only want you to work here

00:46:01 ◼   ► if you thrive in this type of atmosphere,

00:46:03 ◼   ► you're gonna be missing out on a lot of really,

00:46:05 ◼   ► really great programmers because in my experience great programmers tend to be

00:46:11 ◼   ► less receptive to that type of work environment mostly because I think it's not

00:46:15 ◼   ► conducive to good programming than for example salespeople. If you want to

00:46:19 ◼   ► find the world's best salesperson I bet they do thrive in this type of

00:46:21 ◼   ► environment because sales is all about go go go right and they're

00:46:25 ◼   ► you know they're go-getters, they're gonna get the job done, they're gonna put

00:46:28 ◼   ► in long hours, they're gonna do the business travel and all that stuff.

00:46:30 ◼   ► That's not how programming works so I don't know about all the other positions

00:46:33 ◼   ► that they're filling and marketing and other things that are outside engineering.

00:46:37 ◼   ► And again, setting aside the blue collar workers that are being exploited in the factories

00:46:40 ◼   ► packing packages.

00:46:42 ◼   ► In 100 degree heat in a building where the air conditioner doesn't work, where Amazon

00:46:45 ◼   ► thoughtfully provides ambulances outside so when the workers drop dead, or not drop dead,

00:46:49 ◼   ► but collapse on the line, that they're whisked outside to the ambulance, that is a whole

00:46:54 ◼   ► separate issue and that is terrible.

00:46:55 ◼   ► So really just to put this in perspective, what we're talking about is like highly paid

00:46:59 ◼   ► programmers being asked not to see their kids, not people being asked to work in 100 degree

00:47:03 ◼   ► heat in a factory and collapsing from the heat and being taken to company-sponsored

00:47:07 ◼   ► ambulances outside.

00:47:08 ◼   ► But anyway, I think this is just a bad business decision.

00:47:12 ◼   ► This is not the way that you should run a company of Amazon size.

00:47:16 ◼   ► This is not the way you should manage an organization that is focused on engineering.

00:47:21 ◼   ► And they would say back to me, "Our company is incredibly successful.

00:47:25 ◼   ► Look at the amazing things that we've done.

00:47:26 ◼   ► We're a giant retailer.

00:47:28 ◼   ► do all these things like S3 and EC2 and you think we're great at services and the reason

00:47:31 ◼   ► we're like that is because we have this attitude.

00:47:34 ◼   ► And I would say, "No, you do that despite that attitude," and then I would make him

00:47:37 ◼   ► read Creativity Inc. and learn that success hides problems, then we would go back and

00:47:40 ◼   ► forth and in the end he would do what he wants because he owns the company and I have a podcast.

00:47:44 ◼   ► But anyway, now that we've played out that little thing...

00:47:47 ◼   ► You have many podcasts.

00:47:48 ◼   ► Well, that's right.

00:47:49 ◼   ► I have multiple podcasts.

00:47:51 ◼   ► Thank you, Jeff.

00:47:52 ◼   ► Don't undersell yourself.

00:47:53 ◼   ► Right.

00:47:54 ◼   ► Wow.

00:47:55 ◼   ► my thoughts coming out of this.

00:47:57 ◼   ► And so I think it's good for stories like this

00:47:59 ◼   ► to be in the media to sort of raise awareness of this.

00:48:02 ◼   ► I don't know if Marco's ever been in a job like this,

00:48:04 ◼   ► but I don't think I've ever been in a job like this either.

00:48:06 ◼   ► But I've been adjacent to jobs like this.

00:48:09 ◼   ► I've known people in jobs like this.

00:48:11 ◼   ► I've seen parts of organizations that I've been in

00:48:13 ◼   ► that are like this.

00:48:14 ◼   ► And it really is my worst nightmare.

00:48:15 ◼   ► Like I would never want a job like this.

00:48:18 ◼   ► And I know a lot of people who wouldn't,

00:48:21 ◼   ► if they could possibly help.

00:48:22 ◼   ► And that's the thing about hiring engineers and programmers.

00:48:25 ◼   ► they can get work elsewhere. So if you don't have a stock that is going to have the potential

00:48:32 ◼   ► to skyrocket in the near future, it's going to be difficult to attract those people if

00:48:35 ◼   ► you're going to work them like this.

00:48:37 ◼   ► My first job out of school was working for a company that actually made slot machines

00:48:44 ◼   ► for Native American casinos in Oklahoma. And the company at the time was, I don't know,

00:48:51 ◼   ► maybe 10 or 15 developers, and they were all ex-EA folks.

00:48:56 ◼   ► Like, well, they were part of a company

00:49:00 ◼   ► that was bought by EA, and then EA ruined it

00:49:02 ◼   ► as EA is off to do.

00:49:03 ◼   ► And so these were guys, generally,

00:49:06 ◼   ► actually there were no women there at the time

00:49:09 ◼   ► that were developers, so they were all guys.

00:49:11 ◼   ► They were typically in their late 30s, early 40s,

00:49:13 ◼   ► generally speaking, completely single,

00:49:15 ◼   ► and generally speaking, didn't really have

00:49:19 ◼   ► a whole lot else to do other than work.

00:49:21 ◼   ► And not that they weren't great, great, great guys, and I don't mean that disparagingly,

00:49:25 ◼   ► it's just the fact of the matter was they didn't have spouses or children, and many

00:49:30 ◼   ► of them didn't seem to have a whole lot of hobbies other than work.

00:49:33 ◼   ► And so they worked constantly, just constantly.

00:49:38 ◼   ► And here it was, I came in fresh-faced and, you know, right out of school, and I didn't

00:49:43 ◼   ► want to work constantly.

00:49:45 ◼   ► I didn't want to work non-stop, and I left the company mostly because I had been asked

00:49:52 ◼   ► to do this really kind of impossible project before a trade show.

00:49:56 ◼   ► And I worked—I don't remember now, but I want to say it was 11 or 12 hours a day for

00:50:01 ◼   ► like a month or two, including most weekend days, trying to get this thing to work.

00:50:06 ◼   ► And I eventually did get it to work, and then the trade show came and they were preparing

00:50:12 ◼   ► everything they were going to show, and then just decided, "You know what?

00:50:14 ◼   ► we're not going to show that after all." And I was furious. I was beyond furious.

00:50:20 ◼   ► Because here it was, I busted my butt for all that time, and it was like, "Eh, well,

00:50:24 ◼   ► we don't need it after all. Thanks though." And I don't know, maybe that makes me a

00:50:29 ◼   ► millennial in the disparaging way. Maybe that makes me not a team player. But I

00:50:33 ◼   ► just thought it was ridiculous that here it was, I couldn't do any of the things I

00:50:38 ◼   ► wanted to do for a month. And then they just up and decided, "Oh yeah, we don't

00:50:42 ◼   ► that after all. And I left the company. You should not get a job in the games industry.

00:50:46 ◼   ► Oh totally. No you're absolutely right. You are absolutely right. But I didn't know any better

00:50:50 ◼   ► at the time. Yeah well that's part of that I think is again speaking to programming which is

00:50:55 ◼   ► the profession that I think we're all the most familiar with, even Marco, in large companies

00:51:01 ◼   ► is that that experience of having like a miniature version of what the game developers call crunch

00:51:07 ◼   ► time where something needs to ship and people, everyone puts in long hours and it's all hands

00:51:13 ◼   ► on deck.

00:51:14 ◼   ► I think every programmer goes through that, even if only on their own projects for like

00:51:18 ◼   ► fake artificial deadlines that they made for themselves, but certainly in other companies

00:51:22 ◼   ► where you have a software product or a release or a trade show or something and everyone

00:51:25 ◼   ► is killing themselves to make a deadline.

00:51:30 ◼   ► That experience I think is formative for programmers because it teaches you, like it makes you,

00:51:36 ◼   ► It's difficult, it's probably the most grueling physical thing that programmers have to do

00:51:41 ◼   ► because programming is not a grueling physical job.

00:51:43 ◼   ► You're not cracking rocks with a hammer all day, you're pressing keys on a keyboard and

00:51:47 ◼   ► sitting in a chair, right?

00:51:48 ◼   ► But it does take its toll on you in terms of lack of sleep or even just sitting in a

00:51:51 ◼   ► chair all day or not eating well and never mind seeing your family or whatever, like

00:51:55 ◼   ► say you don't have that, you're just a single person right out of college.

00:52:01 ◼   ► What I think you learn from that is you reflect on it after the experience, which hopefully

00:52:05 ◼   ► ends in whatever trade show whatever you say. What is it about the piece of

00:52:10 ◼   ► software that we were creating together that made it so difficult to do the

00:52:15 ◼   ► thing we wanted to do? Like how you know it's the stupid cliche that you see on

00:52:22 ◼   ► all the posters work smarter not harder but in programming like there's actually

00:52:27 ◼   ► a something behind that which is if you had done your earlier work differently

00:52:33 ◼   ► How would it have made your later work easier if you you know and that's that's basically all programming is like you write the program

00:52:39 ◼   ► Then you realize how you should have written it the next time if you're lucky enough to write a similar program you write it in

00:52:43 ◼   ► the better way and then you realize how you shouldn't have run it differently and the next time you realize you have

00:52:47 ◼   ► Have made it easy to change along these axes

00:52:50 ◼   ► But did not realize that this other axis was the one that it's gonna change along us now

00:52:54 ◼   ► It's really hard to change in that way

00:52:55 ◼   ► like

00:52:55 ◼   ► That's all programming is is doing something than realizing how you could have done it differently to make the future changes that you have to

00:53:01 ◼   ► make for whatever reason easier to make. Yep. And so crunch time and that you

00:53:05 ◼   ► know that hellish experience of just having to sit there and just grind

00:53:09 ◼   ► yourself into dust to try to get work done teaches you how to do your job

00:53:14 ◼   ► better a little bit but I think it also teaches you how incredibly inefficient

00:53:18 ◼   ► it is to bang your head against that wall that how if you had merely gone

00:53:21 ◼   ► home at a reasonable hour and had a full night's sleep and come in the next

00:53:23 ◼   ► morning you would have solved this problem faster and better. I think that's

00:53:26 ◼   ► another thing you learned during crunch and that gets back to the this article

00:53:30 ◼   ► that I think, I don't even know if it's related

00:53:31 ◼   ► to the Amazon thing, I don't remember,

00:53:33 ◼   ► it was so long ago I put these links in here.

00:53:34 ◼   ► But it's from Dustin Moskovitz talking about

00:53:37 ◼   ► how the 40 hour work week is not a,

00:53:41 ◼   ► he says it's not a great compromise

00:53:44 ◼   ► between capitalism and hedonism.

00:53:46 ◼   ► It's actually a carefully considered outcome,

00:53:49 ◼   ► I'm quoting from this thing,

00:53:50 ◼   ► of profit maximizing research by Henry Ford

00:53:53 ◼   ► in the early probably 20th century.

00:53:54 ◼   ► Basically, if you're running this experiment

00:53:57 ◼   ► and say, "Hey, if we work people 80 hours a week

00:54:00 ◼   ► versus 10 hours a week versus 20,"

00:54:02 ◼   ► there is a maximum where you get the most productivity

00:54:04 ◼   ► out of people.

00:54:05 ◼   ► If you work them like crazy, they get tired,

00:54:07 ◼   ► they get sloppy, they get angry, they do worse work,

00:54:09 ◼   ► they are less productive.

00:54:10 ◼   ► And of course, if you have them work one hour a week,

00:54:12 ◼   ► your output is not good.

00:54:13 ◼   ► So that you're trying to find,

00:54:14 ◼   ► not that 40 hours is some magic number or whatever,

00:54:16 ◼   ► but you're trying to find that the maximum

00:54:19 ◼   ► where you get the most productivity out of people

00:54:22 ◼   ► on a sustained basis.

00:54:23 ◼   ► If you drive people like dogs,

00:54:25 ◼   ► Maybe you'll get extra productivity out of them,

00:54:28 ◼   ► but you'll pay for it later.

00:54:29 ◼   ► And if you want to have a sustained business,

00:54:31 ◼   ► maybe that's why you need start ups.

00:54:32 ◼   ► Like there will be no sustained business

00:54:33 ◼   ► if we don't kill ourselves for these two weeks

00:54:35 ◼   ► leading up to this trade show.

00:54:36 ◼   ► So you kill yourself leading up to the trade show.

00:54:37 ◼   ► Again, I would say make sure you're killing yourself

00:54:39 ◼   ► for a potential payoff that's gonna benefit you,

00:54:41 ◼   ► not somebody else,

00:54:42 ◼   ► because it's not worth killing yourself

00:54:44 ◼   ► for somebody else to get rich.

00:54:45 ◼   ► But you wanna find a way to get the most out of people

00:54:53 ◼   ► on a sustained basis, and usually that ends up

00:54:57 ◼   ► being a work week in a work environment,

00:54:59 ◼   ► especially for programming,

00:55:01 ◼   ► that does not look scary from the outside.

00:55:03 ◼   ► That you work reasonable hours,

00:55:04 ◼   ► that you get a good night's sleep,

00:55:05 ◼   ► that you get exercise, that you eat right.

00:55:07 ◼   ► That is the only way in any human endeavor

00:55:09 ◼   ► to have sustained productivity out of people.

00:55:11 ◼   ► And programmers are not like people

00:55:13 ◼   ► breaking rocks with hammers,

00:55:14 ◼   ► in that if you grind one of them into dust

00:55:18 ◼   ► and they leave the company with RSI,

00:55:20 ◼   ► or have a nervous breakdown,

00:55:21 ◼   ► or do something else terrible, it's not so easy to just find another one. It's not just

00:55:26 ◼   ► like a warm body in a chair where you just need ballast for your giant barge, right?

00:55:30 ◼   ► It's supposedly a highly skilled job, and so if you're grinding up those workers and

00:55:35 ◼   ► spitting them out, that's even worse than if you're doing the same thing. It's worse

00:55:39 ◼   ► economically, if not morally speaking, than doing the same thing for a position where

00:55:43 ◼   ► if people get disgruntled and leave, you can easily find new applicants for it.

00:55:47 ◼   ► - Well, so that's something that I think you,

00:55:52 ◼   ► I think that actually is probably the case

00:55:54 ◼   ► that the industry does have so many,

00:55:58 ◼   ► like, you know, the right thing to do from our perspective,

00:56:02 ◼   ► because the three of us are all pretty experienced

00:56:05 ◼   ► programmers who are approaching middle age,

00:56:08 ◼   ► who we'd like to think are wise and care about

00:56:11 ◼   ► spending time with our families, right?

00:56:13 ◼   ► And so we are the ones saying, you know,

00:56:17 ◼   ► To do things with higher quality,

00:56:19 ◼   ► you should really have wiser, older programmers

00:56:23 ◼   ► who are more experienced,

00:56:24 ◼   ► who will therefore work way more efficiently

00:56:26 ◼   ► than young, crappy programmers

00:56:28 ◼   ► who are being worked 80 hours a week.

00:56:31 ◼   ► But there are so many of those young programmers

00:56:34 ◼   ► willing to go work for companies like Amazon,

00:56:36 ◼   ► which by the way, I mean, this story to me was nothing new

00:56:40 ◼   ► because I've heard horror stories

00:56:41 ◼   ► about how horrible working for Amazon is for years.

00:56:43 ◼   ► I don't think this is a surprise

00:56:46 ◼   ► to anybody who's ever paid attention to Amazon

00:56:48 ◼   ► and people who work there.

00:56:50 ◼   ► But I think there's enough people

00:56:53 ◼   ► willing to go into this business

00:56:55 ◼   ► to go work for a big company or a startup.

00:56:58 ◼   ► There's enough input of new computer science graduates

00:57:02 ◼   ► or new people who are teaching themselves programming

00:57:04 ◼   ► who want a job all over the world.

00:57:07 ◼   ► There's enough of these people coming in.

00:57:09 ◼   ► It's kind of like the entertainment business

00:57:10 ◼   ► where the employers are able to abuse

00:57:14 ◼   ► and burn people out.

00:57:16 ◼   ► And they're able to do this because there are still

00:57:19 ◼   ► a huge supply.

00:57:20 ◼   ► The way they always complain and make a bunch of noise

00:57:23 ◼   ► about how there's a shortage of good programmers

00:57:25 ◼   ► in this country is, I think, mostly BS.

00:57:27 ◼   ► - I think it's totally true.

00:57:29 ◼   ► There is a shortage of good programmers.

00:57:31 ◼   ► You didn't say a shortage of programmers.

00:57:32 ◼   ► You said a shortage of good, like,

00:57:34 ◼   ► your analogy with the entertainment industry

00:57:36 ◼   ► is exactly right, because that's why games development

00:57:39 ◼   ► is so bad, because everybody wants to be a games developer.

00:57:41 ◼   ► Hey, doesn't that sound fun?

00:57:43 ◼   ► and companies take advantage of that enthusiasm.

00:57:45 ◼   ► Oh, you know, there's a million applicants for this thing

00:57:47 ◼   ► because you get to be a game developer.

00:57:49 ◼   ► You get to make games.

00:57:50 ◼   ► Isn't that awesome?

00:57:50 ◼   ► Now they grind you into dust and when you burn out,

00:57:53 ◼   ► there's another enthusiastic person knocking at the door.

00:57:55 ◼   ► I want to be a games developer.

00:57:56 ◼   ► Games are awesome.

00:57:57 ◼   ► Let's grind you up.

00:57:57 ◼   ► But Amazon is not an entertainment company.

00:58:00 ◼   ► Amazon, I don't think has that kind of draw.

00:58:03 ◼   ► So then you're just left with the generic draw

00:58:05 ◼   ► of I want to be in the tech industry,

00:58:06 ◼   ► which is better than, you know,

00:58:10 ◼   ► working in the mail room at a fortune 500 company

00:58:13 ◼   ► and certainly pays better, but it's nothing compared to the games industry.

00:58:16 ◼   ► Like you said, the entertainment industry, I want to be in TV.

00:58:18 ◼   ► I want to be in movies.

00:58:19 ◼   ► Like that is a perfect opportunity to grind up enthusiastic, naive people.

00:58:23 ◼   ► But I just think the supply of programmers is it's more difficult to find,

00:58:28 ◼   ► you know, like I said, good programmers.

00:58:30 ◼   ► Now, maybe Amazon has the right strategy.

00:58:31 ◼   ► We would rather grind into dust tons of programmers and not even

00:58:36 ◼   ► use them the most efficiently.

00:58:37 ◼   ► And the ones that survive will learn really hard lessons and become amazing.

00:58:42 ◼   ► you know, efficient people and the ones that don't, oh, well, they'll leave and get a job someplace else, but we'll just scoop up a set of new graduates. Maybe that, in aggregate, gives them better throughput than trying to find programmers and give them a nice environment to work or whatever.

00:58:57 ◼   ► I don't know because Google seems to me takes the other attitude where they try to give you know

00:59:02 ◼   ► They try not to work people to death. They try to give people

00:59:05 ◼   ► You know room to figure out what it is

00:59:08 ◼   ► They're gonna do and it's like a nice work environment and Apple kind of seems in the middle where they don't tell you what they're

00:59:12 ◼   ► Doing but from my understanding is that people at Apple work super duper hard and I worry that Apple is grinding them up

00:59:17 ◼   ► But you can't really tell because I think the screams are muffled by whatever

00:59:23 ◼   ► And the reason Apple gets away with it is because they're more like the entertainment

00:59:27 ◼   ► industry.

00:59:28 ◼   ► I don't just work in the tech industry.

00:59:29 ◼   ► I work for Apple.

00:59:30 ◼   ► I make iPhones.

00:59:31 ◼   ► Well, I think that used to be the case for a long time, but I think now they're having

00:59:37 ◼   ► a really big problem attracting and retaining good talent.

00:59:40 ◼   ► And there's lots of reasons for this.

00:59:42 ◼   ► And one of them, I think, is this problem of they do work people really hard.

00:59:46 ◼   ► From what we've heard, it sounds like they really do work people harder than what I would

00:59:52 ◼   ► consider healthy. And they consider that okay from levels all the way to the top. And so,

00:59:59 ◼   ► and this is the kind of thing like, once workaholism sets into a company's culture, it never leaves.

01:00:06 ◼   ► That is something that is so incredibly difficult or impossible to ever roll back. It only ever

01:00:11 ◼   ► gets tight, it's like being tough on crime. You know, it's like politicians, it can

01:00:15 ◼   ► ever be less tough on crime. Like it's the same thing, like there's so many factors

01:00:20 ◼   ► that just encourage it to build upon itself and to increase the workaholism rather than

01:00:25 ◼   ► ever tone it back.

01:00:27 ◼   ► So, in Apple's case, it's pretty clear from anecdotes from the executives all the way

01:00:35 ◼   ► down to the employees that this is just how the company works. And I don't think that's

01:00:40 ◼   ► ever going to go away. And that is one of the problems that is going to make it hard

01:00:44 ◼   ► for Apple to attract and retain good talent over time.

01:00:49 ◼   ► And you've mentioned a few times so far, Jon, you mentioned that startups are kind of exempt

01:00:54 ◼   ► from this.

01:00:55 ◼   ► And I don't necessarily think that's true.

01:00:58 ◼   ► Now--

01:00:59 ◼   ► Not exempt, but it's a better fit.

01:01:00 ◼   ► Like to get a startup off the ground is one of those activities that you're going to have

01:01:05 ◼   ► to work yourself to death.

01:01:06 ◼   ► But you know it's not sustained.

01:01:08 ◼   ► That's the type of thing where it's like, this is not sustainable.

01:01:10 ◼   ► We can't run a company this way.

01:01:12 ◼   ► If we really want to have sustained productivity, we need to do X.

01:01:14 ◼   ► But in a startup, it's like, sustained productivity of what?

01:01:17 ◼   ► we're gonna be out of business in two weeks

01:01:19 ◼   ► if we don't do this thing or get this feature ready

01:01:21 ◼   ► for the trade show, which again is why most startups fail

01:01:23 ◼   ► because you try really hard to do this thing.

01:01:25 ◼   ► It's a young man's game, it's for a short period of time,

01:01:29 ◼   ► there's a clear thing, we're gonna try to do this thing,

01:01:31 ◼   ► and there's a time cap on it, you have exit strategies.

01:01:34 ◼   ► It is not like I'm going to work at this company

01:01:37 ◼   ► for 30 years and this is how I'm gonna,

01:01:39 ◼   ► for 30 years I'm gonna act as if I'm in the first

01:01:41 ◼   ► six months of a startup.

01:01:43 ◼   ► That's why I think you have to match the sort of

01:01:45 ◼   ► culture and work ethic and amount of effort

01:01:48 ◼   ► to the potential reward and to the expected time horizon.

01:01:51 ◼   ► So I'm not saying it's like good in startups,

01:01:53 ◼   ► 'cause you know, startups grind people up

01:01:56 ◼   ► and spit them out as well, but that's what startups are.

01:01:58 ◼   ► It is totally inappropriate for a company

01:02:00 ◼   ► the size of Amazon, I think.

01:02:02 ◼   ► - Well, but you have to nip that on the butt early

01:02:05 ◼   ► because it builds over time, because like,

01:02:07 ◼   ► startups typically take on the work culture

01:02:12 ◼   ► of their founders, like that is just,

01:02:14 ◼   ► It starts off as the founders, as they grow, the company still works the way the founders

01:02:20 ◼   ► set it in motion to work, either intentionally or not.

01:02:23 ◼   ► And so, like I've been fortunate that my jobs have, you know, I've had crunch times here

01:02:29 ◼   ► and there, but it's never been the kind of thing that I hear about from other people,

01:02:34 ◼   ► like from some of these really horrible game companies or companies like Amazon.

01:02:37 ◼   ► It's never been that bad.

01:02:40 ◼   ► And part of that is because I've always stood up for myself.

01:02:44 ◼   ► I've always been at companies early enough

01:02:49 ◼   ► to have the ability to push back a little bit

01:02:52 ◼   ► and to stand up for myself a little bit.

01:02:53 ◼   ► And it didn't always work, but most of the time

01:02:55 ◼   ► I was able to do it.

01:02:56 ◼   ► And this is the kind of thing that you can't just say,

01:03:00 ◼   ► "Well, this one time we gotta push really hard,

01:03:04 ◼   ► "but then we're gonna be healthy again,

01:03:06 ◼   ► "then we'll hire more help," or whatever.

01:03:08 ◼   ► Because in reality, the later time when,

01:03:12 ◼   ► oh, we're gonna do this temporarily,

01:03:14 ◼   ► but then we're gonna fix it, that time never comes.

01:03:16 ◼   ► Because after you finish with this horrible death race,

01:03:20 ◼   ► there's another one that comes up right afterwards.

01:03:22 ◼   ► - But it does come.

01:03:23 ◼   ► Like I think in the natural life cycle a company is,

01:03:26 ◼   ► the founders that get the startup off the ground

01:03:27 ◼   ► have to be worker-holics, otherwise you don't succeed,

01:03:29 ◼   ► 'cause that's the nature of the beast there.

01:03:31 ◼   ► But then I think most companies settle into

01:03:34 ◼   ► sort of fat, happy middle age,

01:03:37 ◼   ► where the company carves out places for people who just want to show up and punch the clock

01:03:42 ◼   ► and do a boring job and not be too stressed about it or whatever.

01:03:47 ◼   ► That's what happens when companies get big.

01:03:48 ◼   ► That's what happens when most companies get big.

01:03:49 ◼   ► This phenomenon of gigantic companies that are still run "like startups" where they're

01:03:56 ◼   ► hungry and working their employees to death is I think a fairly modern phenomenon.

01:04:01 ◼   ► I guess not modern.

01:04:02 ◼   ► I guess you saw sweatshops is the oldest.

01:04:04 ◼   ► Slavery and sweatshops.

01:04:05 ◼   ► oldest form of like we're just gonna grind people up but in the sort of in

01:04:09 ◼   ► our lifetimes the trajectory was if you were a startup at all you got out of

01:04:14 ◼   ► phase quickly and became a serious business where everything was much more

01:04:18 ◼   ► relaxed and that's why smaller companies came and ate your lunch in the late 90s

01:04:22 ◼   ► 2000s with disruption and all that stuff and now I think the new normal is what

01:04:28 ◼   ► you're reacting to is like isn't that what always happens a disruptive startup

01:04:32 ◼   ► It started by some workaholic become successful because those guys work themselves to death and that workaholic retains control the company another phenomenon

01:04:39 ◼   ► that is much more common now than used to be retains control of the company and

01:04:43 ◼   ► Pushes that culture down and all the employees and never lets it go because they're paranoid that they're gonna get their lunch eaten by the next

01:04:50 ◼   ► Little disruptive startup Apple is weird in that it started as a small hungry thing

01:04:55 ◼   ► It got fat and happy and then went from fat and happy with a giant, you know, Apple advanced research

01:05:01 ◼   ► What the hell was that thing called?

01:05:02 ◼   ► Apple, Apple technology, ATG, Apple technology group.

01:05:06 ◼   ► They were at the point where they had people doing like,

01:05:09 ◼   ► you know, architecture astronaut stuff,

01:05:12 ◼   ► making up these grand plans like OpenDoc

01:05:15 ◼   ► and Apple technology group, ATG.

01:05:17 ◼   ► Thank you, Tipster.

01:05:18 ◼   ► Making these pie in the sky things

01:05:20 ◼   ► and people who had jobs,

01:05:21 ◼   ► they're just gonna be like an Apple lifer

01:05:23 ◼   ► and just hang around and think grand ideas

01:05:26 ◼   ► and maybe noodle on a product

01:05:27 ◼   ► or something that might become a product someday.

01:05:29 ◼   ► And Steve Jobs came back and said,

01:05:31 ◼   ► We can't afford that we're going out of business cut down to the bone and turned it back into a workaholic culture

01:05:37 ◼   ► So that is a weird, you know, Apple has a weird history. Anyway, that is a weird phenomena, but I think it's

01:05:41 ◼   ► What you're reacting to Marco is the the Amazon even like Elon Musk PayPal Tesla

01:05:48 ◼   ► that kind of model where you never you never let the company get out of startup phase because

01:05:54 ◼   ► That's how you get disrupted and you just no matter how big you get even if you're as big as Amazon or Apple the way

01:05:59 ◼   ► you survive is by continuing to act as if you're in a startup but the but it's

01:06:04 ◼   ► not you're not anymore it is an inappropriate environment to to grind

01:06:08 ◼   ► people up like that because you can't have a company with 30,000 employees all

01:06:12 ◼   ► of whom stand to become multi-millionaires by the next quarter

01:06:14 ◼   ► if you just hit these these numbers that's not going to happen right that

01:06:17 ◼   ► time in the company's life has passed it's weird that when Apple had the

01:06:20 ◼   ► second phase they made a whole bunch of millionaires out of stock options or

01:06:23 ◼   ► whatever but again if you're using Apple as your model okay start a company in the

01:06:27 ◼   ► the 70s, be phenomenally successful, almost go out of business but not quite, and then

01:06:31 ◼   ► come rain--you know, that's a tough plan to pull off.

01:06:33 ◼   ► So yeah, if you can almost go out of business and then become the biggest company in the

01:06:35 ◼   ► world, you'll make a whole bunch of new millionaires, and Apple did.

01:06:38 ◼   ► And so those people probably don't regret working their fingers to the bone during that

01:06:42 ◼   ► phase, but that I think is an aberration.

01:06:44 ◼   ► I think the people working their fingers to the bone on Amazon are not going to get the

01:06:48 ◼   ► same payoff for their effort of investment.

01:06:50 ◼   ► - Right, and this is actually, I mean,

01:06:53 ◼   ► most startups that come out of our industry,

01:06:58 ◼   ► you have to be one of the first, I don't know,

01:07:01 ◼   ► five people who work there to really see

01:07:04 ◼   ► a massive payoff in all likelihood.

01:07:07 ◼   ► You know, I've had so many friends in so many companies,

01:07:09 ◼   ► so many startups, I know very few of them

01:07:11 ◼   ► who have actually had a meaningful payout

01:07:13 ◼   ► from those stock options.

01:07:15 ◼   ► Like, it just doesn't, the numbers are so far against you.

01:07:19 ◼   ► It's not even close.

01:07:21 ◼   ► Chances are you probably won't make anything

01:07:25 ◼   ► from your stock options,

01:07:26 ◼   ► and if you do make something from them,

01:07:29 ◼   ► you might make maybe an extra,

01:07:32 ◼   ► in the tens of thousands of dollars, which is nice,

01:07:35 ◼   ► but not necessarily worth working yourself

01:07:37 ◼   ► to the bone for four years.

01:07:38 ◼   ► It doesn't usually work out the way that they promised,

01:07:43 ◼   ► but it is like the entertainment business.

01:07:44 ◼   ► They know, the people who start startups,

01:07:47 ◼   ► the people who fund startups,

01:07:48 ◼   ► people who advise startups, they all know that this promise is there and they sell people

01:07:55 ◼   ► on this promise and people come in thinking, "Man, I'm going to get stock options. I'm

01:07:59 ◼   ► going to make a ton of money." And the fact is it doesn't usually work out that way unless

01:08:04 ◼   ► you are one of the founders. If you're one of the founders, you'll own enough stock to

01:08:09 ◼   ► make it work pretty well. But if you come in as employee number 40 or whatever, the

01:08:15 ◼   ► chances are you're not gonna make a ton of money on that,

01:08:18 ◼   ► but you're still gonna be in this environment

01:08:20 ◼   ► where it is insane workaholism,

01:08:23 ◼   ► and everyone is pressuring you to dedicate your life

01:08:27 ◼   ► to the company at every waking hour.

01:08:28 ◼   ► And by the way, I don't think I've ever seen a startup fail

01:08:32 ◼   ► because it didn't execute quickly enough.

01:08:35 ◼   ► Have you ever seen that?

01:08:37 ◼   ► - I'm sorry, a lot of them fail for that reason,

01:08:39 ◼   ► but I don't know if that means you should've gone faster.

01:08:43 ◼   ► Well, could you have gone faster?

01:08:44 ◼   ► gets back to what I was talking about with like is it actually more productive past a certain point

01:08:50 ◼   ► because yeah you can do crunch and you can for a certain period of time but and you know you can

01:08:56 ◼   ► go longer if you're younger or whatever let's not make any more analogies here but uh at a certain

01:09:02 ◼   ► point you get massively diminishing returns and then negative returns you're hoping that the life

01:09:08 ◼   ► of a startup is short enough that you don't reach that point but for big companies on a sustained

01:09:13 ◼   ► basis like you know what you're getting is like this startup fail this start was

01:09:19 ◼   ► gonna fail anyway because I can tell you the 17 reasons the start was gonna fail

01:09:22 ◼   ► even if they have executed it more quickly it's always easy to find lots of

01:09:26 ◼   ► reasons why a startup could fail but startup is the one type of business

01:09:30 ◼   ► where sometimes it really does matter oh if you had actually been in that trade

01:09:33 ◼   ► show and this other company hadn't it could have really changed you know the

01:09:36 ◼   ► the history of your company or if this demo to an important investor had gone

01:09:40 ◼   ► better you would have got that round of funding and instead you didn't. Like that's the life

01:09:44 ◼   ► of a startup. It's always balancing on a razor's edge of something or another. So I think that

01:09:49 ◼   ► is a real thing happening then. It's just that no one really knows. A lot of it is just

01:09:54 ◼   ► serendipity, a lot of it is luck, a lot of it is right place, right time. A lot of it

01:09:59 ◼   ► is things you can't control. But as far as I've been able to determine the successful

01:10:03 ◼   ► strategy of startups it's really really difficult to succeed as a startup with a super laid

01:10:09 ◼   ► back attitude unless you start off with basically unlimited funds or a really long runway and

01:10:14 ◼   ► a lot of money or whatever.

01:10:16 ◼   ► But for most of the startups starting from zero, you really do have to work hard for

01:10:20 ◼   ► a short period of time.

01:10:21 ◼   ► And I think that the whole startup phenomenon, viewed broadly, is lots of small companies

01:10:27 ◼   ► trying a bunch of ideas and finding out as fast as possible whether they work or not.

01:10:31 ◼   ► Like that's the whole thing.

01:10:32 ◼   ► And so try this, didn't work, okay, let's try another startup.

01:10:35 ◼   ► Try this, didn't work, or try to do the pivot where you're trying to pretend you're the

01:10:38 ◼   ► the same company where really you're basically just doing multiple startups at the same time.

01:10:42 ◼   ► Because you don't want to find out three years later that your idea doesn't work. You want

01:10:45 ◼   ► to find out ASAP because you can't crunch for three years.

01:10:48 ◼   ► Yeah. You know, the thing to me is, in my personal opinion, the best approach is whatever

01:10:55 ◼   ► your job may be, just work really, really hard coming out of school or in early on in

01:11:03 ◼   ► your career, work really hard and establish yourself and get yourself to the position

01:11:07 ◼   ► that you are making enough money that you are comfortable.

01:11:11 ◼   ► That could mean $30,000.

01:11:13 ◼   ► It could be $100,000.

01:11:15 ◼   ► It could be $300,000.

01:11:16 ◼   ► It could be $3 million.

01:11:18 ◼   ► However you define comfortable, get to comfortable.

01:11:22 ◼   ► And once you're there, then you really shouldn't have to do a death march ever again.

01:11:29 ◼   ► Very rarely.

01:11:30 ◼   ► I worked very hard for a very, well, to me, a very long time, given how old I am.

01:11:36 ◼   ► And I'm now at a company that I rarely have to do a death march.

01:11:40 ◼   ► I could probably work harder.

01:11:43 ◼   ► I could probably make more money.

01:11:44 ◼   ► I could probably even find a different job where I could work harder still and make more

01:11:49 ◼   ► money still.

01:11:50 ◼   ► But in the end of the day, we are comfortable.

01:11:52 ◼   ► And I am able to pretty reliably put in about 45 hours a week and then come home to my family.

01:11:57 ◼   ► And to me anyway, that's more important.

01:12:00 ◼   ► I work so that I can live.

01:12:04 ◼   ► I do not live to work.

01:12:07 ◼   ► - Well, and also, you're working

01:12:09 ◼   ► so that you can crunch at home now,

01:12:11 ◼   ► because I think-- - Also true.

01:12:12 ◼   ► - The best analogy for, the best,

01:12:15 ◼   ► the sort of second crunch,

01:12:16 ◼   ► like if you're just out of school

01:12:17 ◼   ► and you really, you wanna get your career established

01:12:19 ◼   ► and you're working hard at your job, whatever it is,

01:12:20 ◼   ► make sure you're not working too hard,

01:12:21 ◼   ► make sure you're not being exploited,

01:12:23 ◼   ► then you have a kid and you realize,

01:12:24 ◼   ► oh, you can have crunch time at home too,

01:12:26 ◼   ► and it's called an infant.

01:12:27 ◼   ► Or like, you know, twins, or even more, like,

01:12:30 ◼   ► that's the type of thing where you feel,

01:12:33 ◼   ► Again, your child is basically your startup times a million.

01:12:38 ◼   ► You are willing to crunch for that, the whole point.

01:12:40 ◼   ► If you decide to have children,

01:12:42 ◼   ► and this is what you're gonna do with your life,

01:12:43 ◼   ► it's super hard and it's gonna be a lot of work,

01:12:44 ◼   ► and there's crunch time in kids.

01:12:46 ◼   ► And it's not when the kid is 15 years old,

01:12:48 ◼   ► although depending on the kid, whatever.

01:12:49 ◼   ► But yeah, infants are hard and you will put in long hours

01:12:53 ◼   ► and you will be at the end of the rope at your rope

01:12:56 ◼   ► and going out of your mind,

01:12:58 ◼   ► but that's what you're signing up for

01:12:59 ◼   ► when you have a startup or have a kid or whatever.

01:13:02 ◼   ► But I think for most people, that is a choice

01:13:04 ◼   ► that they're making and they feel like it is well worth it

01:13:06 ◼   ► to do for their kids.

01:13:07 ◼   ► Not so much worth it to do it for Amazon

01:13:10 ◼   ► that doesn't care about them

01:13:11 ◼   ► and will never visit them when they're old.

01:13:14 ◼   ► - So in summary, the best startup is a child.

01:13:17 ◼   ► - Or the worst startup, depending on the point of view.

01:13:20 ◼   ► - And also, I'd just like to point out too that,

01:13:22 ◼   ► and Jon, I still disagree with you on a lot of this.

01:13:26 ◼   ► I don't agree with the assumption in our industry

01:13:30 ◼   ► that crunch time is required for a startup's success.

01:13:35 ◼   ► Because I have seen many counter examples

01:13:37 ◼   ► to startups that have succeeded that do very well,

01:13:40 ◼   ► that don't do crazy crunch time burnout workaholism.

01:13:44 ◼   ► - Well, let's put it this way.

01:13:46 ◼   ► It is a common characteristic of startups that succeed.

01:13:48 ◼   ► Whether it's necessary or not,

01:13:50 ◼   ► you could say it's not really necessary,

01:13:51 ◼   ► it just so happens that a lot of,

01:13:53 ◼   ► it's just a correlation, not a causation.

01:13:55 ◼   ► In fact, those ones are succeeding despite the crunch.

01:13:57 ◼   ► I'm willing to believe that.

01:13:58 ◼   ► But you have to say it's highly correlated.

01:14:00 ◼   ► Like successful startups, they all

01:14:02 ◼   ► have stories about crunch, right?

01:14:04 ◼   ► So would you say it's sufficient but not necessary?

01:14:07 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:14:08 ◼   ► The correlation is pretty darn strong.

01:14:11 ◼   ► I totally think it's possible to succeed without it.

01:14:13 ◼   ► Because again, I think even more important

01:14:15 ◼   ► than how much you crunch is right idea, right place,

01:14:18 ◼   ► right time, right talents.

01:14:19 ◼   ► Some things you can control, some things you can't control.

01:14:22 ◼   ► Those are much more important than how hard did you work.

01:14:25 ◼   ► Because the common theme, and I think in all startups,

01:14:28 ◼   ► is, including the ones that fail is a bunch of people working really hard. So it's not

01:14:32 ◼   ► correlated with success. It's just like, if you're in a startup, this is the way they're

01:14:36 ◼   ► done. I think what you're saying is like, if all the startups got like a big startup

01:14:39 ◼   ► convention, they said, let's just all agree that all startups in the entire world, we're

01:14:43 ◼   ► not going to drive ourselves into the ground. Would they have the same ratio? I think they

01:14:47 ◼   ► probably end up having exactly the same ratio of successes. And who the successes are may

01:14:52 ◼   ► shift around a little bit, but not in any significant way. And it just it's just that

01:14:56 ◼   ► It's like a race.

01:14:58 ◼   ► Like if everyone is, when the race decided

01:14:59 ◼   ► they were gonna walk instead of run,

01:15:00 ◼   ► the race would be slower,

01:15:02 ◼   ► but everyone wants to get the finish on it

01:15:03 ◼   ► as soon as possible, so they all run.

01:15:05 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:15:06 ◼   ► Like you'd say, I don't think it's necessary

01:15:07 ◼   ► to run to have a race.

01:15:08 ◼   ► If we all just walked and were calm,

01:15:11 ◼   ► and we just said you can't have both feet

01:15:13 ◼   ► off the ground at the same time,

01:15:14 ◼   ► the results of the race would be the same,

01:15:16 ◼   ► but it's human nature, you just wanna run,

01:15:18 ◼   ► even if you're gonna get tired faster.

01:15:21 ◼   ► I don't know, this is a terrible analogy.

01:15:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, it doesn't match what I've seen.

01:15:25 ◼   ► Like, I have seen, like, to me, the big crunch time

01:15:29 ◼   ► is kind of like people who always talk about

01:15:32 ◼   ► how busy and stressed out they are.

01:15:34 ◼   ► It's like a voluntary take-on of stress.

01:15:39 ◼   ► And it is almost always self-imposed and optional.

01:15:44 ◼   ► - Well, but you see everyone else running.

01:15:47 ◼   ► Don't you see everyone else running

01:15:49 ◼   ► and you feel like you have to run too?

01:15:50 ◼   ► And again, if you feel like, well, if they weren't running,

01:15:52 ◼   ► I wouldn't be running, but they are running,

01:15:54 ◼   ► So I feel like I have to run, the root question is,

01:15:57 ◼   ► would you actually be, like if you could run the experiment,

01:16:00 ◼   ► if you got identical groups of people or something,

01:16:02 ◼   ► and like you said, you guys aren't allowed to crunch

01:16:04 ◼   ► and you guys are, this gets back to the productivity thing.

01:16:06 ◼   ► Wouldn't they be more productive

01:16:07 ◼   ► if they had a good night's sleep?

01:16:08 ◼   ► But I think for a young company,

01:16:12 ◼   ► there are events and deadlines,

01:16:15 ◼   ► whether they're self-imposed or not,

01:16:17 ◼   ► that are significant enough

01:16:18 ◼   ► that can make or break the company.

01:16:19 ◼   ► That's just not true for a larger company.

01:16:21 ◼   ► And so by crunching, you can temporarily increase

01:16:24 ◼   ► your productivity.

01:16:25 ◼   ► So you are, it's like juicing or taking steroids

01:16:29 ◼   ► or whatever, you are temporarily increasing

01:16:30 ◼   ► your productivity knowing full well, or maybe not knowing,

01:16:33 ◼   ► but you're gonna find out that your productivity

01:16:35 ◼   ► is gonna fall off a cliff after a short period of time

01:16:37 ◼   ► because the most important thing right now

01:16:38 ◼   ► is who is ready in time for this trade show?

01:16:41 ◼   ► - You know what, honestly, I've never seen that.

01:16:45 ◼   ► I've never seen a company that had to rush

01:16:48 ◼   ► to make a trade show or an investor meeting or anything

01:16:51 ◼   ► where that was actually really gonna be the decision.

01:16:54 ◼   ► Like usually either you have traction or you don't.

01:16:57 ◼   ► Either your product is rooted in a good idea

01:17:00 ◼   ► and is finding an audience or it isn't.

01:17:03 ◼   ► And usually it doesn't come down to one date,

01:17:06 ◼   ► one deadline, one meeting, one presentation.

01:17:09 ◼   ► - Not just one deadline, but like use your career

01:17:11 ◼   ► at Tumblr as an example.

01:17:12 ◼   ► Like it may not have been the crunchiest of crunches,

01:17:15 ◼   ► but there was a time early on when you were worried

01:17:17 ◼   ► about servers going down and you would get paged

01:17:21 ◼   ► in the middle of the night or whatever,

01:17:22 ◼   ► that's basically, that's a work-life balance

01:17:24 ◼   ► that you would never accept now.

01:17:25 ◼   ► But had you not been there to fix some MySQL problem

01:17:28 ◼   ► in the middle of the night or whatever,

01:17:30 ◼   ► and Tumblr got the reputation for the site

01:17:31 ◼   ► that was always down, that could have really affected,

01:17:35 ◼   ► Tumblr might not have taken off,

01:17:37 ◼   ► as there's lots of other sites that were similar to Tumblr,

01:17:38 ◼   ► and the type of thing of like, oh, it has bugs

01:17:43 ◼   ► or it's always down or it doesn't work right,

01:17:45 ◼   ► or the signup, not that you were killing yourself

01:17:47 ◼   ► to do it, but certainly you were working really hard during that time because there was only

01:17:51 ◼   ► a few people, and it's not like you had this giant staff of people to watch all the servers,

01:17:54 ◼   ► it was you, right? That is what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about like that you

01:17:58 ◼   ► didn't sleep for seven days straight to make some trade show. Everyone's crunch is different.

01:18:02 ◼   ► But during that time when it was a small group of people trying to keep this site that is

01:18:06 ◼   ► growing incredibly fast up and running so that you could take advantage of the traction

01:18:10 ◼   ► that you had, that was an important thing to do. And if you had not done that and said,

01:18:15 ◼   ► know what I'm going to ignore that page and I'm only going to work from 9 to 5

01:18:18 ◼   ► and I'll bring the service back up in the morning that would have materially

01:18:22 ◼   ► affected the prospects of Tumblr success and probably would have gotten you

01:18:27 ◼   ► booted out of the company because that's like it's like look there's only a

01:18:30 ◼   ► couple of us here you can't just say I'll fix the server in the morning

01:18:33 ◼   ► because your work-life balance is important you have to do it and you

01:18:36 ◼   ► felt responsible for do it and you wanted to do it and you were invested in

01:18:39 ◼   ► doing it and you did it and Tumblr is successful but don't you think there's a

01:18:42 ◼   ► connection between that? There is a connection but I think it's a relatively

01:18:46 ◼   ► loose one. Like Tumblr was taking off whether you know whether I had the site

01:18:51 ◼   ► up or not and if I took an hour to fix the site or five minutes to fix the site

01:18:57 ◼   ► didn't really matter. But you couldn't come in you couldn't come in the next

01:19:00 ◼   ► morning and do it you couldn't say you know what I'll look at that tomorrow.

01:19:02 ◼   ► Sometimes we sometimes problems around that we didn't even know about sometimes

01:19:06 ◼   ► our monitoring system failed us and we weren't alerted to problems and things

01:19:09 ◼   ► were down for hours and it was fine.

01:19:13 ◼   ► I mean, I always point to this example back then,

01:19:16 ◼   ► Flickr was down for a whole four day weekend one time,

01:19:19 ◼   ► like in 2008-ish.

01:19:21 ◼   ► A week later, everyone forgot.

01:19:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, Twitter is a good example too,

01:19:26 ◼   ► where they were down all the time,

01:19:27 ◼   ► but I think that's after they crossed the hump.

01:19:29 ◼   ► Like, you know what I mean?

01:19:29 ◼   ► You don't know, once you're on the other side of the hump,

01:19:31 ◼   ► there's certain inevitability that takes on.

01:19:33 ◼   ► It's just that when you're on the near side of the hump,

01:19:36 ◼   ► not the far side of the hump, you're never gonna get over,

01:19:38 ◼   ► You're never going to become the thing that that people talk about being down for four days unless you in the beginning

01:19:44 ◼   ► Have some minimum level of dealing with growth in a way that lets you just start, you know

01:19:50 ◼   ► Taking off like I mean again just think about how you worked

01:19:53 ◼   ► It was it all just a mistake that you were putting in those long hours and worrying about things

01:19:58 ◼   ► And if you had just known if you had known more than you would have just been like just chill don't worry about it

01:20:02 ◼   ► Don't work such long hours and the company would have been equally successful

01:20:05 ◼   ► Were you just running because you saw everyone else running?

01:20:08 ◼   ► You're saying that you should have just been working from nine to five and in the end

01:20:11 ◼   ► Your sort of hard work and dedication to making sure things were up all the time was a foolish expenditure of energy

01:20:17 ◼   ► You should just like if you had known then when you know now you would have just worked from nine to five

01:20:21 ◼   ► Confident in the fact that the success of the company would have been equal

01:20:25 ◼   ► You could be right but the bottom line is you ran because you saw everyone else running and I think that will continue to happen

01:20:30 ◼   ► Most of the time I did just work, you know,

01:20:34 ◼   ► nine to five or whatever, it might have been like

01:20:35 ◼   ► 10 to seven or whatever, 10 to six,

01:20:37 ◼   ► but like, you know, most of the time, that's all I did.

01:20:39 ◼   ► I was not programming at home for Tumblr, ever.

01:20:42 ◼   ► Like that hardly, that happened maybe twice, like ever,

01:20:44 ◼   ► just 'cause I had to quickly fix a bug or something,

01:20:46 ◼   ► but like, that hardly ever happened.

01:20:48 ◼   ► That was not at all normal.

01:20:49 ◼   ► Most of, for the most part, I maintained a very healthy

01:20:54 ◼   ► work-life balance with Tumblr, I was--

01:20:55 ◼   ► - So you were sleeping next to your phone, weren't you?

01:20:57 ◼   ► - Yes, but that was, a lot of that, honestly,

01:21:00 ◼   ► self-imposed stress. And that was mostly because we took too long to hire a sysadmin, which

01:21:07 ◼   ► was partly my fault because I kept saying, "You know what? I still got this." You know,

01:21:10 ◼   ► I mean, it was certainly partly my fault.

01:21:12 ◼   ► Jared: But if you didn't have that drive, that self-imposed stress, don't you think

01:21:17 ◼   ► that someone, be it David or someone else, would eventually get to the point of, "You

01:21:21 ◼   ► know what? You either need to start sleeping with your phone or you need to hire someone

01:21:26 ◼   ► to sleep with their phone. Like, if you didn't have that, if you weren't as proud of your

01:21:32 ◼   ► work as you are, then I think it would have caused problems.

01:21:38 ◼   ► It's possible. I mean, you know, it's hard to know retrospectively, you know, what would

01:21:41 ◼   ► have been different, you know, but we at Tumblr in those early days when it was just me and

01:21:47 ◼   ► David, we did not have a culture of workaholism, really. David pushed himself a lot harder

01:21:52 ◼   ► than I pushed myself, but I wasn't really penalized for that for the most part. You

01:21:56 ◼   ► know, he would be thinking about it constantly because that's just David. You know, he would

01:22:01 ◼   ► be thinking about anything constantly, like whatever his work is the rest of his life,

01:22:05 ◼   ► he'll be thinking about it constantly. He's just that kind of person. But I try to have

01:22:09 ◼   ► a more separated balance between home and work and my side projects or my family versus

01:22:17 ◼   ► my job or whatever.

01:22:18 ◼   ► I think your scale may be calibrated strangely because the amount of time and effort you

01:22:23 ◼   ► put into your work now is probably still higher than most people who are in those fat and

01:22:28 ◼   ► happy jobs.

01:22:29 ◼   ► Not even close.

01:22:31 ◼   ► Again, maybe you haven't spent enough time in the fat and happy companies to see exactly

01:22:36 ◼   ► how that'll work some...

01:22:40 ◼   ► Maybe you're not as big a workaholic as David, but you have a higher than average drive to

01:22:46 ◼   ► do things.

01:22:47 ◼   ► I think Casey would agree on that.

01:22:49 ◼   ► Like, the amount of stuff that you have to do

01:22:52 ◼   ► and the amount of stuff that you actually do,

01:22:54 ◼   ► you need to be doing stuff.

01:22:56 ◼   ► You need to have lots of things that you're doing

01:22:57 ◼   ► and you work hard at them,

01:22:58 ◼   ► harder than you actually need to work at them.

01:23:00 ◼   ► So I think your scale may be off a little bit.

01:23:02 ◼   ► And I'm willing to believe that you don't work

01:23:03 ◼   ► as hard as David because Tumblr is his thing

01:23:06 ◼   ► and you were brought on, right?

01:23:08 ◼   ► And so, again, the successful companies

01:23:11 ◼   ► that are founded by workaholics or whatever,

01:23:14 ◼   ► but in the grand scheme of things, like,

01:23:16 ◼   ► I mean, and again, it still gets back to your question, like, does that mean you had to?

01:23:21 ◼   ► Maybe, maybe not.

01:23:22 ◼   ► Like you can't run the experiment, you can't go back in time and say, I'm going to do tumblr

01:23:26 ◼   ► again, but I'm going to do it differently.

01:23:28 ◼   ► I'm going to hire that system in earlier.

01:23:30 ◼   ► I'm going to just have a laid back attitude and everything will be fine because really

01:23:34 ◼   ► that's not what matters in the end.

01:23:36 ◼   ► What matters is we have the right idea.

01:23:38 ◼   ► We have the right design.

01:23:39 ◼   ► We have the right, you know, so many other things.

01:23:42 ◼   ► Our timing was right.

01:23:43 ◼   ► You know, the choices we made about what the product was going to be.

01:23:45 ◼   ► We made the right choices about product design.

01:23:48 ◼   ► There are so many things.

01:23:49 ◼   ► We made the right choices about when to take funding, when not to take funding.

01:23:52 ◼   ► You could ask the same thing of Mark Zuckerberg for the whole tortured history of Facebook

01:23:58 ◼   ► and how so many companies tried to acquire it and how he said no and how that could have

01:24:02 ◼   ► been a terrible mistake and how hard did he work and how hard did he work with people

01:24:05 ◼   ► under him and all that other stuff.

01:24:07 ◼   ► It's difficult to say, but whether it's necessary or not, it seems to be a characteristic of

01:24:13 ◼   ► the startup that, kind of in the same way that it's a characteristic of the games industry,

01:24:18 ◼   ► and the same way you could say that it's not necessary and it shouldn't be done, but it

01:24:22 ◼   ► is what we have now.

01:24:23 ◼   ► And to change it, I think you have to change, I don't know how you change it for startups.

01:24:27 ◼   ► For games industry, you have to change the incentives, or maybe you have to have workers

01:24:31 ◼   ► that unionize, or maybe you have to have that backlash that happened a little while ago

01:24:34 ◼   ► with EA.

01:24:36 ◼   ► You know, the EA spouses and all the EA employees getting, complaining about getting ground

01:24:40 ◼   ► up by the machine. And I think this New York Times story about Amazon is part of that phenomenon,

01:24:46 ◼   ► raising awareness about this issue among the pampered white collar workers so the pampered

01:24:50 ◼   ► white collar workers can have angry blog posts and write a Medium post about it just hiding

01:24:55 ◼   ► Henry Ford. I don't know, maybe that's the system working.

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01:27:37 ◼   ► One more bit on workerholism before I move on because I don't want people to think that

01:27:41 ◼   ► workerholism is all bad.

01:27:42 ◼   ► I was thinking of the times that I've, the various places that I've worked where I've

01:27:46 ◼   ► – I was thinking of one particular instance where I came home on a weekend and it was

01:27:51 ◼   ► a programming problem, database sign programming combo problem that I had been working on all

01:27:56 ◼   ► all week and had come up with a solution that kind of worked, but I wasn't satisfied with

01:28:00 ◼   ► it.

01:28:01 ◼   ► And I think I woke up like on Saturday morning and I had a good idea for how to do it.

01:28:04 ◼   ► I think I'd finally figured it out and I just rewrote it all on a weekend.

01:28:09 ◼   ► Why does that happen?

01:28:10 ◼   ► Like part of workaholism among the founders and among everybody else is that if you have

01:28:14 ◼   ► a job that you love doing, if you love programming, you will find yourself thinking about during

01:28:19 ◼   ► your idle time, again, walking the dog, taking a shower.

01:28:21 ◼   ► Sometimes you know, this is all pre kids if you you know, if you don't have kids again

01:28:26 ◼   ► If you don't have kids, you don't realize how much free time you have

01:28:28 ◼   ► so

01:28:30 ◼   ► Enjoy, you know youth is wasted on the young and free time is wasted on people with no kids

01:28:34 ◼   ► You actually have a lot of time even if you're married I was married at the time

01:28:39 ◼   ► But there is enough time for you to like to spend one weekend, you know

01:28:45 ◼   ► Reasonable hours stopping for meals not staying up late or anything. We're just like, you know what this weekend

01:28:49 ◼   ► I'm not going to do this thing.

01:28:50 ◼   ► And why did I do it?

01:28:51 ◼   ► I guess I was invested in the company.

01:28:53 ◼   ► It was a smallish company that had been bought by a larger company, but it was a bunch of

01:28:56 ◼   ► people who were all friends, who were all working on a product and a thing that we really

01:29:00 ◼   ► believed in.

01:29:01 ◼   ► This is when I worked in the place that did ebooks and everything.

01:29:03 ◼   ► You know, it was something that we all believed in and it was important to get this done.

01:29:07 ◼   ► And there wasn't any sort of external deadline.

01:29:10 ◼   ► There wasn't any reason this had to be done.

01:29:11 ◼   ► I had already done it at work.

01:29:13 ◼   ► I just had a better idea for it.

01:29:14 ◼   ► And I enjoy programming.

01:29:15 ◼   ► So what I bet, you know, getting back to the Marco lifestyle, what I did that weekend for

01:29:18 ◼   ► fun was I programmed. Programming is fun if you're a programmer and you like programming.

01:29:23 ◼   ► Was I a sucker for doing work on the weekend? No, but it really has to be on your own terms.

01:29:30 ◼   ► I think that's the difference where if you feel like you have to do this to keep your job,

01:29:36 ◼   ► or you're being pressured to do it, or the culture at work is making you put in hours that you don't

01:29:41 ◼   ► want to work, or there's an expectation that you're gonna do it on the weekend, no one had

01:29:44 ◼   ► any expectation I was gonna rewrite this perfectly good working thing that I had written during the

01:29:48 ◼   ► the week that I'm gonna rewrite it all on a weekend because I had a better idea, I wanted

01:29:51 ◼   ► to do it and it was fun.

01:29:53 ◼   ► And so that's like the light side of this where if you are lucky enough to have a job

01:29:57 ◼   ► that you enjoy and your "leisure time activity" on the weekend is to do more programming even

01:30:03 ◼   ► for your job that no one asks you to do because it will make you feel better and you'll come

01:30:07 ◼   ► in the next week and be like finally I can delete that crap that I wrote last week and

01:30:10 ◼   ► replace it with this thing that I rewrote entirely in a weekend and it's so much cleaner

01:30:13 ◼   ► and so much nicer and I have so much more confidence that it's bug free and it's easier

01:30:18 ◼   ► to expand in these ways, like that's a fun thing to do if you're a programmer.

01:30:21 ◼   ► Again, we should all be lucky enough to have the type of job that we actually enjoy doing.

01:30:25 ◼   ► It's, I guess, probably rare because how often do you work in a company that you feel that

01:30:30 ◼   ► personally invested in? How often do you want to do that? The farthest I get from it these

01:30:34 ◼   ► days is probably, I mean, I will find myself thinking about work problems during the weekend,

01:30:39 ◼   ► in the shower, drifting off to sleep. I just usually save those ideas until I go back into

01:30:43 ◼   ► the office on Monday to work in them because I feel like, you know what, they get enough of my

01:30:46 ◼   ► time and really when you have kids you can't like if you know it's a it's a phase in life like uh

01:30:53 ◼   ► what would you rather be doing this again i i can't imagine i guess the closest i was doing

01:30:57 ◼   ► my reviews where i would carve out time to do reviews but even that i felt like boy if i wasn't

01:31:02 ◼   ► getting paid for these reviews i wouldn't i would have stopped doing them a long time ago right so

01:31:06 ◼   ► there always has to be a balance so anyway i just didn't want to like make it seem like if you are

01:31:10 ◼   ► working really hard at your job and bringing your work home with you it's not always bad sometimes

01:31:15 ◼   ► you're choosing to do it and then it feels better even though in effect it's the same

01:31:21 ◼   ► thing.

01:31:22 ◼   ► Oh, you're basically doing unpaid work for the man on your own time.

01:31:27 ◼   ► You're a sucker.

01:31:28 ◼   ► Sometimes it's fun.

01:31:29 ◼   ► Yeah, I agree.

01:31:30 ◼   ► There have definitely been times that I've not been able to get a work problem out of

01:31:33 ◼   ► my head and the best way to get it out of my head is to get it out of my head and put

01:31:37 ◼   ► it on paper, so to speak, and just do it.

01:31:40 ◼   ► Well, one way to say it, Marco cheats on, and Marco's version of this is that when his

01:31:44 ◼   ► His boss lets him off for the weekend.

01:31:45 ◼   ► Sometimes he rewrites things in Go, just because it's fun.

01:31:48 ◼   ► Of course, his boss is also him, but it's a different him.

01:31:50 ◼   ► It's like the working during the weekend.

01:31:52 ◼   ► And then it's like, you know what?

01:31:53 ◼   ► I can rewrite this all in Go.

01:31:54 ◼   ► And then he comes in and he's like,

01:31:56 ◼   ► you can tell your boss later.

01:31:57 ◼   ► I rewrote it all in Go for the weekend.

01:31:58 ◼   ► It's awesome.

01:31:59 ◼   ► It's like, oh, that was nice.

01:32:00 ◼   ► You didn't have to do that.

01:32:01 ◼   ► - Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week,

01:32:06 ◼   ► Harry's, Warby Parker, and Hover.

01:32:09 ◼   ► And we will see you next week.

01:32:10 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

01:32:13 ◼   ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin

01:32:18 ◼   ► 'Cause it was accidental (accidental)

01:32:20 ◼   ► Oh, it was accidental (accidental)

01:32:23 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:32:28 ◼   ► 'Cause it was accidental (accidental)

01:32:31 ◼   ► Oh, it was accidental (accidental)

01:32:34 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:32:39 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:32:48 ◼   ► So that's Kasey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:32:52 ◼   ► Auntie Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A

01:33:00 ◼   ► It's accidental (it's accidental)

01:33:03 ◼   ► They didn't mean to, accidental (accidental)

01:33:08 ◼   ► ♪ Tech podcast so long ♪

01:33:11 ◼   ► - I don't even know if you did that on a weekend,

01:33:15 ◼   ► but of course time has no meaning in your world anyway.

01:33:16 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Weekend weekday,

01:33:18 ◼   ► until Adam enters school, then weekend to weekdays,

01:33:22 ◼   ► we'll suddenly have meaning again.

01:33:23 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, no, I can't wait for that to begin,

01:33:24 ◼   ► 'cause we had a nice routine going.

01:33:26 ◼   ► By the way, I think that you are probably overestimating

01:33:30 ◼   ► how much I actually work, like time-wise.

01:33:33 ◼   ► - Well, nowadays I know, but I'm just saying,

01:33:35 ◼   ► like you, let's put it this way,

01:33:37 ◼   ► You put in more effort than I think I would put in if I was in your position.

01:33:40 ◼   ► And I don't know, Casey, can you think if you were in Marco's position in life,

01:33:45 ◼   ► would you put in as much effort as he does on the various projects that he does or would you slack off more?

01:33:50 ◼   ► I don't know. I honestly don't know. Half of me wants to say I would slack off 10 times more.

01:33:54 ◼   ► And the other half of me says, I think you might be overestimating how much time Marco's been sitting in front of the computer.

01:34:00 ◼   ► I mean, you guys, you are both smart, curious programmers.

01:34:04 ◼   ► you would get bored senseless if you weren't using your brain.

01:34:07 ◼   ► Oh yeah. I'm not saying you're doing it like to be a magnanimous. It's just,

01:34:11 ◼   ► you know, it's the same with all of us.

01:34:12 ◼   ► Like your brain will eat itself if you don't give it something to do. Right.

01:34:15 ◼   ► And it's like, that's what the, how workaholics feel too.

01:34:17 ◼   ► Like Elon Musk goes exactly the same way. He's like, look, if I not,

01:34:20 ◼   ► if I don't do, if I don't do spaceships and electric cars,

01:34:22 ◼   ► my brain will eat itself. I have to do this.

01:34:24 ◼   ► It's not like it's barely even a choice.

01:34:26 ◼   ► Like that is the type of person they are. I just feel like the,

01:34:29 ◼   ► that you have more, I have a higher capacity for doing nothing than you do.

01:34:34 ◼   ► I think.

01:34:35 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:34:36 ◼   ► Honed over many, many years.

01:34:38 ◼   ► Like the idea, like you said,

01:34:38 ◼   ► like you're gonna go off on a vacation

01:34:40 ◼   ► and sit on the beach and do nothing.

01:34:42 ◼   ► I'm pretty darn good at that at this point.

01:34:44 ◼   ► - Right, see, I can't do that.

01:34:45 ◼   ► I mean, I'm going to the beach next week.

01:34:48 ◼   ► I'm planning, like I'm bringing my laptop.

01:34:49 ◼   ► Like the idea of going to the beach and doing nothing,

01:34:53 ◼   ► that sounds awful.

01:34:54 ◼   ► Like I would enjoy about maybe two days of that.

01:34:57 ◼   ► And then be like, all right, let me,

01:34:58 ◼   ► I gotta turn my brain back on now.

01:35:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, I have a much higher tolerance for it.

01:35:02 ◼   ► I can go much longer.

01:35:02 ◼   ► I agree that I couldn't do it year round

01:35:05 ◼   ► 'cause my brain would eat itself too.

01:35:07 ◼   ► I would be building tiny machines out of sand.

01:35:10 ◼   ► You know, I would just have to be doing something, right?

01:35:12 ◼   ► So we're all like that to some degree.

01:35:14 ◼   ► It's just a question of what kind of tolerance

01:35:16 ◼   ► you have for it.

01:35:17 ◼   ► I feel like part of it is being old,

01:35:20 ◼   ► where you're like, I did all the working hard stuff

01:35:23 ◼   ► and I still do it and just a plain old boring

01:35:26 ◼   ► 40 hour program or work week leaves me

01:35:30 ◼   ► more like mentally tired and like the beautiful thing about vacations is you can get away

01:35:36 ◼   ► from all your responsibilities except keeping your children alive and feeding yourself,

01:35:40 ◼   ► right?

01:35:41 ◼   ► And just have 20 minutes to sit on a beach and just like just look at the clouds go by,

01:35:47 ◼   ► right?

01:35:48 ◼   ► And that I feel like recharges me so that I can go back to my regular life.

01:35:53 ◼   ► I don't think I could do it year round, but as I get older, my tolerance for doing nothing

01:35:57 ◼   ► gets greater.

01:35:58 ◼   ► Yeah, I, um, I, we've talked about this on the show, I used to hate going to the beach,

01:36:06 ◼   ► which I only ever did a handful of times in my life. And as I've gotten slightly older,

01:36:12 ◼   ► and Marco and I are the same age, I found that if you put some sort of tent-like object

01:36:17 ◼   ► on the beach so I'm not sitting in direct sunlight, and put a good book in my hands,

01:36:21 ◼   ► I could do that easily a week. That being said, when I was at the beach, what, last

01:36:26 ◼   ► I definitely spent a few hours programming towards the end of the trip because I had an itch

01:36:32 ◼   ► I decided I wanted to scratch and it couldn't get out of my head.

01:36:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't think I've ever programmed on vacation,

01:36:37 ◼   ► but I think part of that has to do with like the environment is not good for that.

01:36:41 ◼   ► Right, you don't have your big monitor, you could spread out like you talked about last week, you're programming in a phone booth.

01:36:46 ◼   ► No, there's a bunch of other people there.

01:36:47 ◼   ► There's a bunch of other people there and they want to go places and do things and kids are running around.

01:36:51 ◼   ► Yeah, that's it.

01:36:52 ◼   ► No, I mean like for me, like if I'm going to be doing something with my brain on vacation,

01:36:57 ◼   ► usually that's when I will write. Or you know, like I'll do other things. I won't program

01:37:03 ◼   ► necessarily or I'll program very little or I'll do some kind of satellite project like

01:37:07 ◼   ► the website. But usually that's when I will write blog posts best is when I'm awake. Then

01:37:13 ◼   ► I want to use my brain but I don't want to do any programming because I would prefer

01:37:17 ◼   ► to just do it on my big, nice home computer.

01:37:20 ◼   ► Yep. See, this is why I refuse to learn how to drink coffee and why I'm kind of glad I

01:37:25 ◼   ► don't have a 90-inch monitor at home.

01:37:27 ◼   ► Goes in your mouth, Casey.

01:37:28 ◼   ► Oh, that's the trick. Damn it. I don't want to get to the point where I can't function

01:37:34 ◼   ► until I've had a cup of coffee or I get a headache or I get cranky or I just don't think

01:37:40 ◼   ► that things feel right. I don't want that. So I'm glad that I don't like coffee. And

01:37:46 ◼   ► And additionally, I'm glad that I'm used to a 15 inch laptop.

01:37:49 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know.

01:37:51 ◼   ► Right.

01:37:52 ◼   ► You've just broken that analogy that the coffee thing addiction to substances.

01:37:56 ◼   ► I can see something, but I believe there is no physical addiction component to large screens.

01:38:02 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure that it's not.

01:38:04 ◼   ► It's just merely a preference and a convenience.

01:38:08 ◼   ► It's like, you know, like if I get too used to not being half immersed in water all day,

01:38:13 ◼   ► I'll want to be dry every time I go to sleep.

01:38:15 ◼   ► So that's why I sleep outside on the lawn.

01:38:17 ◼   ► It's like, come on, what are you doing?

01:38:20 ◼   ► My point is, I don't feel, I feel only ever so slightly handcuffed by not having a second

01:38:27 ◼   ► monitor when I'm developing.

01:38:29 ◼   ► Whereas you feel completely neutered if you don't have a 25+ inch display as you're developing.

01:38:36 ◼   ► It's really convenient.

01:38:38 ◼   ► It's like, you know, it's convenient to have a room that fits your bed with more than 6

01:38:42 ◼   ► inches around all sides of the walls because then you can walk around the bed to get on

01:38:45 ◼   ► to it. Yeah, you know, like, I don't want to get used to that. I want to make sure my bedroom,

01:38:50 ◼   ► it just has one foot alleys around the bed and I'll shimmy through it because if I get used to

01:38:55 ◼   ► a bigger room, then when I go someplace else, I won't be used to it. Like, I think your analogy

01:38:59 ◼   ► is breaking down there. Anyway, you should be leaning on the fact that I don't want to get,

01:39:03 ◼   ► I don't want to be tethered to a desk. I want to do my computing, like you said,

01:39:07 ◼   ► sitting next to Aaron on the couch or whatever. Those are the advantages you should be playing

01:39:10 ◼   ► up with laptops, not saying that really you want to force yourself to use a 15 inch monitor,

01:39:15 ◼   ► even though it's less convenient. So I think you're barking up the wrong tree with me,

01:39:18 ◼   ► explaining why you like laptops. I think there are reasons, but these are not them.

01:39:21 ◼   ► Fair enough, fair enough. Speaking of, Casey, do you have, have you

01:39:25 ◼   ► thought any more about your computer decision that we talked about last week? Have you thought

01:39:29 ◼   ► any more about that since then? Well, to be fair, that was all of three days

01:39:33 ◼   ► ago as we record this. Preserve the illusion. It was last week. Go

01:39:37 ◼   ► ahead. Oh, right, right, right, right. It was easily

01:39:38 ◼   ► a week ago, and I've thought long and hard. No, not really. I don't know. I've, the problem

01:39:44 ◼   ► I've come to is I think all three potential machines, a Mac mini, a 5K, and a MacBook

01:39:51 ◼   ► Pro, all three of them—

01:39:52 ◼   ► And a Mac Pro.

01:39:53 ◼   ► No.

01:39:54 ◼   ► All three of them, not four of them, all three of them have definite advantages.

01:40:00 ◼   ► They really honestly do.

01:40:02 ◼   ► And I can't figure out which criterion I think is the most important.

01:40:08 ◼   ► Is it having something that can move?

01:40:11 ◼   ► Is it having something beautiful to look at?

01:40:13 ◼   ► Is it having something that I can barely see that's stuffed in the corner that I only really

01:40:17 ◼   ► use remotely or very rarely, you know, physically?

01:40:22 ◼   ► And I just, I can't figure out which one I want.

01:40:25 ◼   ► And I think a couple people have said this on Twitter via feedback, but I think really

01:40:30 ◼   ► what I'm going to do is, which is what I had planned last week, is I'm just going to sit

01:40:34 ◼   ► around and see what comes in the fall with regard to MacBook Pro updates and potentially

01:40:40 ◼   ► any other kind of update.

01:40:42 ◼   ► And just see if that sways me one way.

01:40:46 ◼   ► Let's say for the sake of discussion that I decided I really wanted a 12-inch Retina

01:40:51 ◼   ► Mac and the MacBook One wasn't out yet.

01:40:55 ◼   ► Well, then fast forward to the MacBook One and all my problems are solved.

01:40:59 ◼   ► Maybe there'll be some other thing, some feature that I'll really, really love in the new MacBook

01:41:04 ◼   ► Pro or maybe even a new Mac Mini or the new 5K iMac.

01:41:08 ◼   ► And I'll say, "You know what?

01:41:09 ◼   ► Darn it.

01:41:10 ◼   ► That's it.

01:41:11 ◼   ► But sitting here now, I just, I really don't know.

01:41:14 ◼   ► - Well, first of all, as I said,

01:41:16 ◼   ► like, suppose a new Mac Mini comes.

01:41:19 ◼   ► It'll still suck.

01:41:20 ◼   ► Like, it'll still be a bad deal.

01:41:22 ◼   ► It still won't-- - It'll still be $1,000.

01:41:23 ◼   ► - It'll still be at least $1,000 for a good spec.

01:41:26 ◼   ► It'll still not have very good options.

01:41:29 ◼   ► You know, like, if you look at the ones that we have today,

01:41:33 ◼   ► it's, you know, you got, you max out at two cores.

01:41:38 ◼   ► You can barely get an i7.

01:41:40 ◼   ► max out at one terabyte built in,

01:41:42 ◼   ► only then if you do the fusion.

01:41:44 ◼   ► Like the options, you can't even spec out higher

01:41:47 ◼   ► if you wanted to, unless you get into the iFixit territory

01:41:50 ◼   ► of opening it up and putting your own crap in there,

01:41:52 ◼   ► and even that's becoming harder and harder.

01:41:54 ◼   ► It's, ugh, the Mac Mini is so, and I say this,

01:41:57 ◼   ► having one here and being very happy with it,