ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Someone says, Syracuse sounds really nasal.

00:00:02 ◼   ► Yeah, welcome to the show.

00:00:08 ◼   ► We used a different version of the theme song last week.

00:00:12 ◼   ► And so our friend of the show, Jonathan Mann, that's M-A-double-N, who's the guy who

00:00:17 ◼   ► wrote the initial theme song and the slightly beloved bleeps and bloops version, which is

00:00:23 ◼   ► the one that Jon likes but nobody else does.

00:00:26 ◼   ► He took it upon himself to write a new version and we sprinkled that into the show, or I

00:00:29 ◼   ► I should say Marco sprinkled that into the show.

00:00:31 ◼   ► Did you hear apparently on the After Dark for this week's Back to Work,

00:00:35 ◼   ► Merlin Mann, our friend Merlin, covered it briefly and said he was working on a full cover.

00:00:40 ◼   ► I'm very much looking forward to hearing that, because the brief part that he did sounded really good.

00:00:45 ◼   ► [MUSIC]

00:00:54 ◼   ► Hey Merlin, you should finish that up and we will play it.

00:00:57 ◼   ► Which of course does nothing for you.

00:01:00 ◼   ► This is like, you should work for free for exposure.

00:01:04 ◼   ► He does this, sometimes he does style parodies, like he did a lot of that with the Male Chimp

00:01:08 ◼   ► [music]

00:01:10 ◼   ► But anyway, if Marilla's listening and he's doing a style parody, I would like to request

00:01:19 ◼   ► an REM style parody.

00:01:21 ◼   ► You can do like, you know, Murmurs or Fables or REM.

00:01:25 ◼   ► [Music]

00:01:28 ◼   ► It's right in his wheelhouse.

00:01:29 ◼   ► Speaking of working for exposure, well, we should get to the penny arcade thing, but first we have some follow-up.

00:01:34 ◼   ► Who wants to talk about PhotoStream?

00:01:36 ◼   ► Not it.

00:01:37 ◼   ► Jon, follow-up defaults to you.

00:01:39 ◼   ► Alright, I mean, like, we keep talking about PhotoStream, and I don't even remember where this link came from, but...

00:01:45 ◼   ► Oh yeah, Dave, whose last name I won't attempt to pronounce because he can't agree on how he wants people to pronounce his last name, but it starts with a "CH".

00:01:52 ◼   ► I think it's "Chardier". I think that's safe.

00:01:54 ◼   ► I think that's safe.

00:01:55 ◼   ► He changes his mind.

00:01:56 ◼   ► I've heard him change his mind.

00:01:57 ◼   ► Anyway, he posted a link to this Knowledge Base article

00:02:00 ◼   ► that looks like-- that is recent.

00:02:02 ◼   ► It has a recent date on it.

00:02:03 ◼   ► And it looks like it's in response

00:02:05 ◼   ► to confusion about PhotoStream.

00:02:08 ◼   ► And the relevant passage here, it

00:02:11 ◼   ► provides some information that previously was not provided

00:02:14 ◼   ► by any of the other documents.

00:02:15 ◼   ► And it's not information about how PhotoStream works.

00:02:18 ◼   ► It's information about motivations.

00:02:21 ◼   ► And that, I think, is what a lot of people are missing.

00:02:23 ◼   ► because you can explain all these rules

00:02:25 ◼   ► and give out all these numbers

00:02:26 ◼   ► and put all these facts about it,

00:02:28 ◼   ► but it's like, but why, why?

00:02:29 ◼   ► What are you trying to do with PhotoStream?

00:02:30 ◼   ► So here's the important sentence.

00:02:32 ◼   ► The photos that you upload to my PhotoStream

00:02:34 ◼   ► are stored in iCloud for 30 days

00:02:36 ◼   ► to give your devices plenty of time

00:02:37 ◼   ► to connect to iCloud and download them.

00:02:40 ◼   ► That's the key piece of missing information

00:02:41 ◼   ► that I think is leading to a lot of confusion.

00:02:43 ◼   ► What's the point of PhotoStream?

00:02:45 ◼   ► It's there to get your photos somewhere

00:02:48 ◼   ► that's not an individual device for 30 days

00:02:50 ◼   ► so all your other devices can pull the stuff down.

00:02:53 ◼   ► So all those limits and the numbers and everything

00:02:55 ◼   ► or whatever don't matter because bottom line is

00:02:57 ◼   ► it's supposed to just be a temporary holding pen

00:02:59 ◼   ► for your stuff and it's supposed to stay there long enough

00:03:02 ◼   ► for you to pull it down on your other devices.

00:03:05 ◼   ► So that nixes PhotoStream as any sort of solution to,

00:03:09 ◼   ► any sort of Everpix-like solution to hold all my photos

00:03:12 ◼   ► for me.

00:03:13 ◼   ► Doesn't matter what the limits are,

00:03:14 ◼   ► doesn't matter anything else, bottom line is

00:03:16 ◼   ► it's not gonna be there for more than 30 days,

00:03:18 ◼   ► it's just a holding area.

00:03:19 ◼   ► So I think that clarifies for me.

00:03:21 ◼   ► And it's nice to see that from Apple

00:03:23 ◼   ► because that was my impression of how it worked,

00:03:25 ◼   ► reading all the other things,

00:03:26 ◼   ► but seeing Apple explain,

00:03:28 ◼   ► that simple sentence explaining the motivation

00:03:30 ◼   ► of the service makes it clear

00:03:31 ◼   ► that this is just not an accidental implementation detail

00:03:34 ◼   ► and that soon it will hold all your photos or whatever.

00:03:36 ◼   ► The intention of this feature is just a holding bin

00:03:38 ◼   ► and Apple is saying it themselves.

00:03:39 ◼   ► So I feel a little bit,

00:03:41 ◼   ► I feel like I understand photo streaming

00:03:42 ◼   ► a little bit more now.

00:03:43 ◼   ► And now I know enough to not really pay attention to it

00:03:46 ◼   ► no matter what they do with the limits.

00:03:48 ◼   ► And speaking of photo streaming,

00:03:49 ◼   ► I threw another link in the show notes here

00:03:51 ◼   ► that have almost nothing to say about it except for here's another one of these things. It's

00:03:55 ◼   ► called SpaceMonkey.com, triple dub SpaceMonkey.com, and it looks like some kind of hardware device

00:04:00 ◼   ► combined with a software service, kind of like Everpix. The website is...

00:04:04 ◼   ► It actually looks just like Transporter, actually. Like, if you look at it, if you read into

00:04:09 ◼   ► it a little bit, it basically—and we should disclose Transporter as a frequent sponsor

00:04:13 ◼   ► of our show, so take this with a grain of salt, however—it basically looks like Transporter

00:04:17 ◼   ► but with worse pricing.

00:04:19 ◼   ► Well, but they have a whole software component too, where it's like, it's more like a media

00:04:24 ◼   ► manager.

00:04:25 ◼   ► It's not just like arbitrary file storage.

00:04:26 ◼   ► Transporter is sort of like application agnostic.

00:04:28 ◼   ► It is a place for data, and what data you put there is totally up to you.

00:04:32 ◼   ► And this looks like it's trying to be a hybrid of Transporter and Everpix.

00:04:36 ◼   ► But I looked at his website for a while, and it's totally like a Web 3.0-y kind of bootstrap-built

00:04:44 ◼   ► website with animated stuff.

00:04:45 ◼   ► I could not for life figure out any actual technical information about this thing.

00:04:50 ◼   ► It's pretty light on the information and pretty heavy on the marketing titles and graphics,

00:04:56 ◼   ► but actual information is hard to come by on this site.

00:04:59 ◼   ► It could be awesome, it could be terrible, I don't know, I just wanted to throw it out

00:05:01 ◼   ► there as yet another one of these things that is trying to solve the problem of where we

00:05:06 ◼   ► put all our junk.

00:05:08 ◼   ► And the final thing on this topic is we talked briefly about Box yesterday and how it was

00:05:11 ◼   ► kind of like an enterprise-focused version of Dropbox.

00:05:15 ◼   ► And I either said or strongly implied that Box could be self-hosted, and I got an email

00:05:20 ◼   ► from a Box employee saying that Box is not self-hosted.

00:05:23 ◼   ► Also it's not called Box.net anymore.

00:05:25 ◼   ► That was the old name that I said on the past show.

00:05:27 ◼   ► They dropped the .net.

00:05:28 ◼   ► Anyway, it's not self-hosted.

00:05:30 ◼   ► They host it for you, and the difference is between this and Dropbox, according to this

00:05:33 ◼   ► Box employee, are that they manage their own data centers.

00:05:36 ◼   ► They don't put stuff in S3, so there's a little bit more deterministic security about the

00:05:42 ◼   ► data.

00:05:43 ◼   ► It's not just putting in another bucket through another third party.

00:05:45 ◼   ► It's just one box stores the data.

00:05:47 ◼   ► They have admin tools and reporting and stuff that gives them more oversight on the data,

00:05:52 ◼   ► so if you need some sort of auditing and reporting, they can provide that to you instead of, again,

00:05:55 ◼   ► relying on Amazon to do that.

00:05:58 ◼   ► And they're compliant with a bunch of certifications and all the good stuff.

00:06:00 ◼   ► So thanks to the Box employee for the clarification.

00:06:04 ◼   ► And I think if you go to Box.net it redirects, but anyway, go to Box.com and you'll find

00:06:08 ◼   ► it.

00:06:09 ◼   ► It seems like Box is, I almost just said Box.net because that's always how I thought of it.

00:06:14 ◼   ► It's one of the services that has a billion users effectively and geeks in our circles

00:06:20 ◼   ► almost never even considered existing, almost never think about it.

00:06:23 ◼   ► Yeah, because it's the same to Pandapro.

00:06:25 ◼   ► Right, it's not used by Mac nerds with laptops.

00:06:28 ◼   ► It's used in the enterprise a lot and a lot of PC users use it.

00:06:32 ◼   ► And it's like StumbleUpon, when StumbleUpon first became big.

00:06:36 ◼   ► Or even more recently, when Pinterest started growing like crazy.

00:06:39 ◼   ► And the entire tech geek world was basically ignoring it because it was so popular among

00:06:47 ◼   ► women and the tech geek world is so dominated by men, at least the online press part of

00:06:52 ◼   ► it, that it was invisible to that world.

00:06:56 ◼   ► And all of a sudden we realized, "Oh my god, this is huge."

00:06:58 ◼   ► I think that's how Box is.

00:07:01 ◼   ► It's really massive, and tons of people use it, but we hardly ever see it.

00:07:05 ◼   ► Now that I'm using it every day now, it works similarly to Dropbox, but with an enterprise

00:07:10 ◼   ► event.

00:07:11 ◼   ► Could they have picked a different name, at least?

00:07:13 ◼   ► If they were going to go from box.net to something else, could they have not made this very similar

00:07:18 ◼   ► to Dropbox service named Box?

00:07:20 ◼   ► Yeah, well, maybe that's a strength in the enterprise.

00:07:24 ◼   ► You don't want to drop your software.

00:07:26 ◼   ► Use Box.

00:07:27 ◼   ► Wow.

00:07:28 ◼   ► I thought that Box predated Dropbox. That is completely not fact-checked, but I thought that was the case.

00:07:34 ◼   ► It's been around for a while anyway. It's not some new thing.

00:07:36 ◼   ► Wasn't there something called xDrive before BMW used it? Wasn't it like a

00:07:40 ◼   ► something kind of similar that would give you like an xDrive letter on your Windows PC?

00:07:44 ◼   ► In case you know about this, obviously John wouldn't. I actually don't know about this, but it sounds like something that a Windows

00:07:50 ◼   ► or something that would be for the Windows platform. Yeah.

00:07:54 ◼   ► Anyway.

00:07:57 ◼   ► The chat is saying that box.net because at the time it was called box.net is 2005 Dropbox 2008

00:08:03 ◼   ► All right, obviously that matters a lot now so

00:08:09 ◼   ► Let's move on to our first aid results Casey

00:08:13 ◼   ► How did you do running disk utility as John assigned us in the last episode? Right? So captain paranoid

00:08:19 ◼   ► explained to us that we should be running disk utility on an hourly basis and

00:08:24 ◼   ► Verifying everything under the Sun no no repair you got to repair verify why bother verifying you got a repair my apologies

00:08:31 ◼   ► You are correct sir to repair everything under the Sun and this is a real pain in the butt if you

00:08:36 ◼   ► Run on a laptop like I do because you got a reboot and see recovery mode blah blah blah well anyway

00:08:41 ◼   ► So I as I've mentioned numerous times. I have two 15 inch high-res anti glare MacBook Pros with optical drives. They're both day and night

00:08:50 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:08:51 ◼   ► That's-- well, actually, you could say that,

00:08:53 ◼   ► because one's work, one's not.

00:08:54 ◼   ► But anyway, the point is I tried it on both of them.

00:08:59 ◼   ► And one has an SSD, one does not.

00:09:02 ◼   ► And both of them had errors which were

00:09:05 ◼   ► able to be fixed by disk utility.

00:09:07 ◼   ► So as much as I begrudge Captain Paranoid for making

00:09:10 ◼   ► me worry about something that I didn't really

00:09:12 ◼   ► feel like worrying about, it ended up it was for the best.

00:09:14 ◼   ► So thank you, John.

00:09:15 ◼   ► And by the way, I do recommend running

00:09:16 ◼   ► verify on your boot drive.

00:09:17 ◼   ► Because then you don't have to reboot.

00:09:19 ◼   ► the common case like a like out everything is fine

00:09:22 ◼   ► you will be able to just run verify your boot is used on the walk away from

00:09:25 ◼   ► computer because it will totally make your computer unusable

00:09:28 ◼   ► uh... but just in a do it when you go on for lunch or something and most of the

00:09:31 ◼   ► time when you come back to say i'll verify checked and it's fine

00:09:34 ◼   ► i only recommend repair external because

00:09:36 ◼   ► if verify finds errors the very next thing you're going to do is repair and

00:09:39 ◼   ► it takes a similar amount of time to do both verify and repair

00:09:42 ◼   ► uh... so on your boot drive your only choice is verify so do that on external

00:09:45 ◼   ► drives you might as well just to repair because that's what that's what that

00:09:48 ◼   ► move is going to be anyway, if there are any errors. And if there's not any errors, they're

00:09:52 ◼   ► equivalent. Here's a question. Is there much of a reason, or even is it possible, to do this

00:09:56 ◼   ► on a network time machine? So like we have it with the Synology setup, where Synology is using,

00:10:03 ◼   ► you know, open source whatever component to host time machine shares, which I think are stored as

00:10:09 ◼   ► giant sparse images or something like that. Does any part of this apply to those? Yeah,

00:10:14 ◼   ► no, any volume you can mount, any HFS+ volume you can mount, you can do this to.

00:10:17 ◼   ► Are sparse images HFS+ internal? Yeah, underneath there is an HFS+ volume.

00:10:22 ◼   ► Okay. Like, that's what mounts when it does its thing.

00:10:25 ◼   ► Alright then. Yeah, but I didn't see it in disk utility. I don't believe.

00:10:29 ◼   ► Well, you have to make it mount. Like, Time Machine does this sneaky thing where it'll connect to this analogy and mount the volume.

00:10:34 ◼   ► If you look at your desktop, you can see it appear sometimes, but it's not, you know, it makes it all go away when the backup is done.

00:10:39 ◼   ► You know, sometimes you don't see it at all. And you can manually mount the share just like, you know, just in Finder.

00:10:44 ◼   ► just like, you know, just in finder.

00:10:45 ◼   ► Yeah, just double click the sparse bundle that's there.

00:10:47 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:10:48 ◼   ► Okay.

00:10:49 ◼   ► All right, moving right along.

00:10:52 ◼   ► Well, hold on, hold on.

00:10:53 ◼   ► What about you?

00:10:54 ◼   ► We've got way more to do.

00:10:55 ◼   ► Yeah, I might not have done my homework.

00:10:58 ◼   ► There's a surprise.

00:10:59 ◼   ► Well, John told me not to run it while you're using it, and so I've been using it.

00:11:03 ◼   ► Well, you could have run it on your external drives.

00:11:05 ◼   ► You don't have more than one drive, right?

00:11:07 ◼   ► All right, well, if you didn't do your homework, it's okay.

00:11:10 ◼   ► Lots of other people did who filled out the survey.

00:11:11 ◼   ► I should have mentioned that after the show, I should have thought of this during the show,

00:11:14 ◼   ► After the show last week, I said,

00:11:15 ◼   ► you know what, we should get some information on this.

00:11:18 ◼   ► I wonder how many people listened to the last episode

00:11:20 ◼   ► and decided I'm going to run Disk Utility on my disks,

00:11:23 ◼   ► just like they talked about on the show.

00:11:25 ◼   ► And I wanted to know how they did.

00:11:26 ◼   ► So I tweeted out a link that said,

00:11:27 ◼   ► hey, if you listened to the show last week

00:11:31 ◼   ► and decided to run Disk Utility, tell me how it turned out.

00:11:33 ◼   ► It's just a two-question survey.

00:11:35 ◼   ► And I tweeted it, I think I did it on app.net,

00:11:38 ◼   ► and Marco put it in the show notes,

00:11:40 ◼   ► but it wasn't mentioned on the show.

00:11:42 ◼   ► And we got a lot of people replying,

00:11:43 ◼   ► both before and after the survey were popping like, "Hey, I listened to your show and I did stuff."

00:11:47 ◼   ► And I put a couple of... I grabbed a couple of tweets here. One person said, this is from

00:11:51 ◼   ► D. Shep, "Ran disk utility last week and it reported errors. Rebooted and repair was not

00:11:55 ◼   ► possible. So it did verify it and it reported it was okay." Lots of things like where they'll

00:12:00 ◼   ► run it and it will say there's a problem, they'll try to repair it. It will say, "Sorry,

00:12:03 ◼   ► couldn't repair it," and then it's okay. Or there'll be errors and there won't be errors.

00:12:06 ◼   ► There'll be errors and there won't be... And that's not reassuring to anybody involved.

00:12:09 ◼   ► "Oh, no, it said there was errors, but now there's not. I guess everything's fine." But

00:12:13 ◼   ► but instead you get this feeling of unease about,

00:12:15 ◼   ► hmm, I don't know about that.

00:12:17 ◼   ► Here's another one.

00:12:18 ◼   ► Ran Disk Utilium on my startup disk, this is by RYB.

00:12:21 ◼   ► On my MacBook Air for the first time in over a year,

00:12:23 ◼   ► it fixed a free block count error

00:12:25 ◼   ► which freed up 70 gigabytes, crazy.

00:12:28 ◼   ► So that person got 70 gigabytes of disk space back

00:12:30 ◼   ► because apparently HFS+ had lost track

00:12:33 ◼   ► of the free block count.

00:12:34 ◼   ► - Wow.

00:12:35 ◼   ► - And it's like, they're trees, right?

00:12:38 ◼   ► So if you have a missing,

00:12:39 ◼   ► if the whole sub-tree goes missing in the metadata,

00:12:42 ◼   ► it could potentially be pointing to lots of information.

00:12:44 ◼   ► So he got 70 gigs back.

00:12:46 ◼   ► This is from EVQ, ran disk utility, got an error,

00:12:51 ◼   ► followed the instructions,

00:12:52 ◼   ► then disk utility recovery found no errors.

00:12:54 ◼   ► Again, spooky.

00:12:55 ◼   ► And lots of reports of what happened to me

00:13:00 ◼   ► with my time machine volume,

00:13:00 ◼   ► which is it had errors that I went to repair

00:13:03 ◼   ► and it said, sorry, can't repair.

00:13:04 ◼   ► And then after that, the disk was unmountable.

00:13:06 ◼   ► And that leads to something else

00:13:08 ◼   ► I should have talked about last week.

00:13:10 ◼   ► Verified disk is in theory,

00:13:11 ◼   ► read-only operation. repair disk is going to make changes to your disk. those

00:13:15 ◼   ► changes may be harmful to your disk but if it's got errors anyway you say well

00:13:19 ◼   ► it had errors but it seemed to be working fine. you can take that into

00:13:23 ◼   ► account and say look this thing has errors but before I even try to repair

00:13:26 ◼   ► let me make sure that I have like this gets back to the multiple backups thing

00:13:29 ◼   ► you know be aware that attempting to repair an error as I described in last

00:13:34 ◼   ► week's show could make the disk even worse off than it was. it doesn't mean

00:13:38 ◼   ► that you should have really used that backup before, but it could make things worse.

00:13:42 ◼   ► So always have multiple backups.

00:13:43 ◼   ► Before you start messing with anything, before you start writing data to any disk, make sure

00:13:47 ◼   ► that is not your only backup.

00:13:50 ◼   ► And I don't know what else to do.

00:13:51 ◼   ► People like, "If I found errors, what should I do?"

00:13:52 ◼   ► If that's your only backup and it has errors, it's like, "Well, is your source disk okay?"

00:13:57 ◼   ► Because if your source disk is okay, make a second backup from it now before you start

00:14:00 ◼   ► screwing with the other one.

00:14:01 ◼   ► Don't just rush into it.

00:14:02 ◼   ► More than one backup good.

00:14:04 ◼   ► Anyway.

00:14:05 ◼   ► I would say that your story last week about how both your primary volume and your time

00:14:10 ◼   ► machine backup were both corrupted, that is as big an ad as any for super-duper clones

00:14:18 ◼   ► and cloud backup services.

00:14:22 ◼   ► That just shows you right there, just one volume and its time machine backup are not

00:14:25 ◼   ► really enough.

00:14:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:27 ◼   ► I mean, and the thing is, maybe if I checked more frequently, one of them went bad first,

00:14:32 ◼   ► then I would have been able to fix it from one to the other.

00:14:35 ◼   ► But maybe I waited too long, didn't feel paranoid soon enough, and hadn't checked

00:14:39 ◼   ► it.

00:14:40 ◼   ► I was going to say, we saw a really good tweet from Grady Nealey who said, "In the Army,

00:14:46 ◼   ► we had a saying pertaining to critical equipment, 'Two is one, one is none, so it goes for backups.'"

00:14:53 ◼   ► And I think that's absolutely true.

00:14:54 ◼   ► If you only have one backup, that's effectively not really having a backup at all, especially

00:14:58 ◼   ► if it's co-located with wherever your computer lives most of the time.

00:15:02 ◼   ► Which is why the three of us are so excited for Crash Plan or Backblaze or whatever your

00:15:07 ◼   ► online cloud backup system of choice is.

00:15:10 ◼   ► It's really nice to have that as well as something local.

00:15:13 ◼   ► Or many things local.

00:15:14 ◼   ► Although I dread ever having to restore from, that really is like my last, last, last resort.

00:15:19 ◼   ► That's why I like to have multiple local backups.

00:15:21 ◼   ► And I really want to have the cloud backup in case the house burns down, but if it doesn't

00:15:25 ◼   ► burn down, I don't want to have to go to that.

00:15:27 ◼   ► Or unless I'm like away from my computer and I want to grab a file from a backup, then

00:15:31 ◼   ► it's kind of handy to use whatever the iOS app is for your thing and grab stuff.

00:15:35 ◼   ► Yeah, Cloud Backup is like, you can't really test it without just trying to pull a file

00:15:39 ◼   ► off of it. You can't really, you don't have that same kind of reassurance that you

00:15:44 ◼   ► do with a super duper clone. You can just boot from it and just see if everything's

00:15:49 ◼   ► okay. Boot from it once a month or something and just test it. You can't really do that

00:15:53 ◼   ► with Cloud Backup. You can try to pull a file off of it, but it's kind of a process. And

00:15:57 ◼   ► If you ever do have to restore, do a full restore for one, you might be downloading

00:16:02 ◼   ► a terabyte of data off the internet, which might take a while.

00:16:05 ◼   ► So it is always good to, you know, if the cloud backup really is your last resort.

00:16:10 ◼   ► That said, though, I think regular volume plus time machine plus backblaze, I think

00:16:15 ◼   ► that's a very good setup for most people.

00:16:17 ◼   ► Geeks like us, you know, if you have extra hard drives lying around, yeah, make a super

00:16:20 ◼   ► duper clone also.

00:16:22 ◼   ► But regular plus time machine plus backblaze I think is fine.

00:16:25 ◼   ► Yeah, or the other alternative is, like I said,

00:16:28 ◼   ► run disk utility more often

00:16:30 ◼   ► so that you don't end up in a situation,

00:16:32 ◼   ► because they probably don't both go bad

00:16:33 ◼   ► at exactly the same time, right?

00:16:35 ◼   ► One of them goes first,

00:16:36 ◼   ► and if you're running it off enough,

00:16:37 ◼   ► you'll get in a situation where one went bad

00:16:39 ◼   ► but one is good, and you can quickly,

00:16:41 ◼   ► you know, dupe out a second backup.

00:16:43 ◼   ► And don't, by the way, if you only have two things,

00:16:46 ◼   ► your computer and a time machine disk,

00:16:48 ◼   ► and the time machine disk goes bad,

00:16:51 ◼   ► don't erase the time machine disk

00:16:53 ◼   ► and then try to copy the backup,

00:16:54 ◼   ► Because as soon as you erase a time machine disk,

00:16:56 ◼   ► now your data is in one place,

00:16:57 ◼   ► and that is somewhere you never ever ever wanna be.

00:16:59 ◼   ► Like it's, you just don't ever be in that situation.

00:17:02 ◼   ► Two places is bad enough.

00:17:04 ◼   ► If you have two places and one is bad,

00:17:06 ◼   ► a bad backup is better than no backup.

00:17:08 ◼   ► Do not erase that disk, just don't touch it,

00:17:10 ◼   ► put it aside, get a new disk, backup to that, yeah.

00:17:14 ◼   ► This is why we want companies to take care

00:17:15 ◼   ► of this stuff for us, 'cause this is way too much

00:17:17 ◼   ► for a regular person to handle.

00:17:18 ◼   ► Anyone listening to this is like,

00:17:19 ◼   ► I don't even wanna think about backups.

00:17:20 ◼   ► I agree, I don't wanna think about it either.

00:17:22 ◼   ► And I also don't want to think about bitrod and the fact

00:17:25 ◼   ► that none of these things-- all these HFS plus checks

00:17:28 ◼   ► are just checking the metadata.

00:17:30 ◼   ► They're not checking the data.

00:17:31 ◼   ► The data could be totally hosed.

00:17:32 ◼   ► We have no idea what state the data is in.

00:17:35 ◼   ► I don't want to think about it.

00:17:37 ◼   ► So the survey that I sent out there,

00:17:42 ◼   ► I think maybe the sample group may be slightly biased

00:17:45 ◼   ► because it's people who listen to a nerdy podcast

00:17:48 ◼   ► or who follow a nerdy person on Twitter.

00:17:50 ◼   ► And maybe those people are more likely to do

00:17:52 ◼   ► complicated things with their disks that in turn could cause more errors or something.

00:17:56 ◼   ► The one thing the survey has going for it is

00:17:58 ◼   ► people didn't know whether they were going to find errors or not before they ran Disk Utility, right?

00:18:06 ◼   ► So it's not like only the people who found errors filled this out. The survey was if you listen to the episode and ran Disk Utility

00:18:12 ◼   ► what did you find? And none of those people I would imagine knew beforehand what they were going to find.

00:18:16 ◼   ► So despite the sampling,

00:18:19 ◼   ► the self-selection of the people who take the survey.

00:18:22 ◼   ► I'm hoping it's not like only the people who found errors filled out the survey and the people who didn't find errors

00:18:28 ◼   ► didn't bother to fill out the survey because I guess, I don't know, I mean,

00:18:31 ◼   ► I don't know how statistically valid this is, let's just say. But anyway, you guys want to guess at the results?

00:18:37 ◼   ► I'll tell you that at the time I pulled this data from it, 758 people had responded to the survey.

00:18:43 ◼   ► Wow, the first the first question was this was how it's word if you listen to episode 40 of accidental tech podcast

00:18:49 ◼   ► Subsequently ran disc utilities first aid function on one or more of your hfs plus volume. So this encompasses all their discs

00:18:54 ◼   ► I didn't want to ask them individually or whatever. Did it find any errors?

00:18:57 ◼   ► So if you have five discs and you find errors on one of them

00:18:59 ◼   ► You would say yes to this is just basically saying you ran disc utility on all your stuff

00:19:03 ◼   ► Did your stuff have any errors?

00:19:05 ◼   ► And I didn't ask them how many discs you have around any volumes ago because I didn't want this to be too complicated

00:19:09 ◼   ► You want to do a sponsor read to build suspense in the middle of this?

00:19:12 ◼   ► Oh, and then the second question was, if you found errors, was the repair function able

00:19:17 ◼   ► to repair?

00:19:18 ◼   ► So I want you two to guess what you think, you know, did you find errors percentage wise,

00:19:23 ◼   ► not numbers wise.

00:19:24 ◼   ► You guys to guess, and then after the sponsor break, I'll tell you the answer.

00:19:27 ◼   ► But first, you should guess.

00:19:28 ◼   ► All right.

00:19:29 ◼   ► My guess is the percentage of respondents who had errors found was 30%.

00:19:36 ◼   ► I will guess 70%, which is aggressive.

00:19:43 ◼   ► But I'm hoping that you're right, Marco, because then maybe John will stop whining about HFS+.

00:19:48 ◼   ► Never.

00:19:49 ◼   ► It's like the price is right.

00:19:50 ◼   ► One dollar, one dollar.

00:19:53 ◼   ► Are we doing price is right rules or closest wins?

00:19:57 ◼   ► This is important.

00:19:58 ◼   ► We're going to do closest wins.

00:20:00 ◼   ► This episode is brought to you in part by our friends at Warby Parker.

00:20:05 ◼   ► They sponsored us a couple months ago.

00:20:06 ◼   ► They're awesome.

00:20:07 ◼   ► So Warby Parker believes that prescription glasses

00:20:10 ◼   ► simply should not cost $300 or more.

00:20:13 ◼   ► They should even be affordable enough for people

00:20:14 ◼   ► to accessorize and have multiple pairs if they want to.

00:20:17 ◼   ► Warby Parker bypasses traditional channels

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00:20:37 ◼   ► polycarbonate prescription lenses.

00:20:40 ◼   ► And every pair comes with a hard case and cleaning cloth,

00:20:42 ◼   ► so you don't need to buy any overpriced accessories

00:20:44 ◼   ► with them.

00:20:45 ◼   ► Buying glasses online sounds like it would be risky.

00:20:48 ◼   ► How would you know whether they would fit

00:20:49 ◼   ► or whether they'll look good on you?

00:20:51 ◼   ► Well, Warby had you covered, and actually quite impressively,

00:20:53 ◼   ► if I may say so.

00:20:54 ◼   ► So first, the website has a really helpful tool

00:20:57 ◼   ► that uses your computer's webcam to give you

00:21:00 ◼   ► a preview of how the glasses will look on your face.

00:21:02 ◼   ► and they can even help you measure your eyes and your face in this little tool

00:21:06 ◼   ► to get your fit exactly right when you order.

00:21:09 ◼   ► But the best part of this is their home try-on program.

00:21:12 ◼   ► You can borrow up to five pairs of glasses risk-free,

00:21:15 ◼   ► they will ship them to you for free,

00:21:17 ◼   ► you can try them on in the comfort of your own home for five days,

00:21:20 ◼   ► then you can send them back with a prepaid free return label,

00:21:23 ◼   ► you don't pay anything this whole process,

00:21:25 ◼   ► and there's no obligation to buy.

00:21:28 ◼   ► They also offer prescription and non-prescription polarized sunglasses.

00:21:31 ◼   ► I love polarized sunglasses personally.

00:21:34 ◼   ► If you ever had non-polarized, you really

00:21:36 ◼   ► don't know what you're missing.

00:21:38 ◼   ► And this really, $95 as the base cost,

00:21:40 ◼   ► is really a great price even for non-prescription sunglasses.

00:21:43 ◼   ► That's really good for polarized sunglasses.

00:21:45 ◼   ► So we did the spot a few months ago,

00:21:47 ◼   ► and I had my wife, Tiff, come in,

00:21:49 ◼   ► because she had ordered two pairs from them

00:21:51 ◼   ► to talk about it on the ad.

00:21:53 ◼   ► And I asked her for an update tonight,

00:21:54 ◼   ► see how she's liking them.

00:21:56 ◼   ► And she still uses them almost every day,

00:21:59 ◼   ► and she still really likes them.

00:22:00 ◼   ► She has one pair of sunglasses, one pair of prescription.

00:22:03 ◼   ► And she loves-- she said the hard case

00:22:05 ◼   ► that they come with is really nice and high quality,

00:22:07 ◼   ► so she loves that too.

00:22:08 ◼   ► And so yeah, so I went back and looked at them tonight.

00:22:10 ◼   ► I could actually use some sunglasses myself for driving,

00:22:13 ◼   ► because my current pair is kind of falling apart,

00:22:15 ◼   ► because I bought it from some shady shop in New Zealand

00:22:17 ◼   ► for no money.

00:22:19 ◼   ► And I don't-- it has a no-brand name.

00:22:21 ◼   ► God knows what it is.

00:22:23 ◼   ► But yeah, so I'm looking forward to these myself,

00:22:25 ◼   ► because they're really good.

00:22:28 ◼   ► So, what's also great about Warby Parker is that they believe in giving back to the world.

00:22:33 ◼   ► Almost a billion people worldwide lack access to glasses, and they can't effectively learn

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00:22:43 ◼   ► need through nonprofits such as VisionSpring.

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00:22:57 ◼   ► eyewear. Browse around, get yourself a home try-on kit risk-free. And if you decide to

00:23:02 ◼   ► order your own pair, use coupon code ATP for free three-day shipping. So thanks a lot to

00:23:07 ◼   ► Warby Parker for sponsoring the show.

00:23:09 ◼   ► Yeah, you know, I told this story when they sponsored in episode 26. And when I did the

00:23:16 ◼   ► free try-on thing, I ordered like two or three pairs that I was pretty confident were my

00:23:20 ◼   ► style and then two pairs that I didn't think were me at all. And it ended up that because

00:23:26 ◼   ► Because I was able to try those, I actually ended up going with one of the pairs of sunglasses

00:23:31 ◼   ► that I didn't expect to like at all, and I just thought, "Eh, let me see what happens."

00:23:35 ◼   ► And I love those sunglasses.

00:23:37 ◼   ► And inevitably I will break them because I'm a klutz and I always destroy my sunglasses,

00:23:42 ◼   ► but I will be devastated when I do because I really, really do like them.

00:23:46 ◼   ► You mentioned the case that they come in.

00:23:48 ◼   ► That's the—I've been wearing glasses, you know, since I was in like third grade or whatever.

00:23:53 ◼   ► This is the most impressive glasses case, the one that came with my prescription sunglasses

00:23:56 ◼   ► that I've ever seen in my life.

00:23:57 ◼   ► It is gigantic and like, it looks like you could run it over with a car and your glasses

00:24:02 ◼   ► would be fine.

00:24:04 ◼   ► The little box that they ship you with the glasses in it was impressive, but the case

00:24:07 ◼   ► was, I was also impressed by that.

00:24:09 ◼   ► And it's nice having prescription sunglasses for the first time.

00:24:12 ◼   ► I feel all fancy.

00:24:14 ◼   ► All right, so.

00:24:17 ◼   ► So what were the results of your survey, Jon?

00:24:19 ◼   ► So Marco, you said 30%?

00:24:21 ◼   ► I said 30%, and you said 70%.

00:24:23 ◼   ► Now, what do you think is reasonable for--

00:24:26 ◼   ► the job of the file system is basically

00:24:28 ◼   ► to keep track of where your crap is.

00:24:29 ◼   ► And Marco's number at 30% is that you're saying,

00:24:33 ◼   ► it's OK that on 30% of the Macs out there,

00:24:36 ◼   ► assuming our sampling is significant,

00:24:39 ◼   ► is representative of the mass of Mac users.

00:24:42 ◼   ► It's OK for about 30% of the time for HFS+ to screw up

00:24:46 ◼   ► and for there to be potentially data destroying errors.

00:24:48 ◼   ► And Casey's saying 70% to try to be dramatic,

00:24:51 ◼   ► But like that, I mean, can we all agree that 70 would be unreasonable?

00:24:56 ◼   ► That if 70% of the Macs out there had errors on their, you know, the HFS+ errors on the

00:25:01 ◼   ► disks?

00:25:02 ◼   ► Yeah, not hardware problems, but just software problems, like not keeping track.

00:25:04 ◼   ► So that would be unreasonable, I think.

00:25:05 ◼   ► Well, sure, anything more than zero in theory is unreasonable.

00:25:08 ◼   ► Well, no, because like you have to expect that one or 2% are going to have problems.

00:25:11 ◼   ► Some person kicked the plug out or there was some crazy, like there's always going to be

00:25:14 ◼   ► a little bit of bugs or whatever.

00:25:15 ◼   ► But I think once you start to get into double digit percentages, that's not like an aberration,

00:25:20 ◼   ► there was a power outage in the middle of the thing that I didn't notice and it just

00:25:24 ◼   ► built up, or cosmic rays or whatever.

00:25:28 ◼   ► Yeah, I would say 10% should be cause for concern.

00:25:30 ◼   ► Yeah, because then that's, I would say anything over double digit percent is like, that's

00:25:36 ◼   ► some kind of systemic issue, like bugs in the software that are not just cosmic rays

00:25:42 ◼   ► or one-off occurrences or hardware related, or maybe they could be hardware related, but

00:25:47 ◼   ► it seems like a lot.

00:25:49 ◼   ► So I don't know what I expected these numbers to be, but I kind of felt like they were going

00:25:53 ◼   ► to be like, my guess would have been like 15, 18 percent.

00:25:57 ◼   ► That would have been my guess for, because like 10 percent seemed low to me.

00:26:02 ◼   ► But surely it's not on like more than maybe 20 percent because I know I find the errors

00:26:06 ◼   ► and I know if I go up to someone's computer and they've never run disc utility, they find

00:26:09 ◼   ► errors.

00:26:10 ◼   ► But I figure again, people who listen to this podcast are probably nerds and they know about

00:26:13 ◼   ► disc utility.

00:26:14 ◼   ► I didn't have to explain to anybody where it was.

00:26:16 ◼   ► Like all these people found it themselves and ran it and did all this stuff themselves.

00:26:19 ◼   ► So maybe they'd run it before or whatever.

00:26:22 ◼   ► But here are the results.

00:26:23 ◼   ► The results were, you know, did you find any errors?

00:26:26 ◼   ► Again, this is across all the disks that you tried, and I didn't ask them how many.

00:26:29 ◼   ► Forty-four point three percent found errors on their disks.

00:26:32 ◼   ► Oh, nicely done, Marco.

00:26:33 ◼   ► Marco is closer, but that is shockingly close to half.

00:26:36 ◼   ► That's really bad.

00:26:37 ◼   ► Yeah, and that is much higher than I thought it would be.

00:26:40 ◼   ► I was thinking 18, 20 percent.

00:26:42 ◼   ► Maybe 25, but 44, that's grim, I think.

00:26:46 ◼   ► question was, if the errors were found, and was the repair function able to repair the

00:26:51 ◼   ► errors? So of the people who found errors, eight people didn't attempt to repair or didn't

00:26:57 ◼   ► answer that question, right? So I'm giving you percentages of, like, out of all the people

00:27:01 ◼   ► who attempted to fix the error, what percentage of those people, with disk utility, not with

00:27:06 ◼   ► a third-party tool, not with anything else, how successful was disk utility repairing

00:27:10 ◼   ► the errors? Care to guess what the percentage is there?

00:27:12 ◼   ► Hmm, I would say probably 75%.

00:27:16 ◼   ► Oh, see, I think it would be more than that.

00:27:19 ◼   ► I would think it would be closer to 90.

00:27:21 ◼   ► Marco gets it again.

00:27:23 ◼   ► 73.17%.

00:27:24 ◼   ► So, you basically have a one in four shot, a little bit worse than a one in four shot

00:27:30 ◼   ► of Disk Utility being able to fix your errors.

00:27:33 ◼   ► Again, I don't know how representative these results are, but they are worse than I expected,

00:27:37 ◼   ► because I would have expected errors to be on far fewer than 44%.

00:27:41 ◼   ► And I would have expected Disk Utility's fix rate to be like,

00:27:44 ◼   ► it seems like to me, I just expected that we'd fix it.

00:27:47 ◼   ► I would say, oh, 95%, something like that.

00:27:49 ◼   ► 73% is not good.

00:27:51 ◼   ► So that shows those errors weren't just one tiny little error

00:27:54 ◼   ► that's easy to fix, but they were the type of errors

00:27:55 ◼   ► Disk Utility couldn't fix.

00:27:56 ◼   ► Now, some people reported to me that if you boot

00:27:58 ◼   ► into single user mode and you do FSCK manually,

00:28:01 ◼   ► which is more or less the same thing

00:28:02 ◼   ► as Disk Utility does under the covers,

00:28:04 ◼   ► but in single user mode, you don't have any contention

00:28:06 ◼   ► for the catalog file, you're the only process running

00:28:08 ◼   ► and stuff, and some people were saying

00:28:10 ◼   ► actually does repairs, the Disk Utility can't do. I'm not sure how much truth there is to that, but

00:28:13 ◼   ► that is one more tool in your toolkit. If you get a Disk Utility that says it can't repair,

00:28:18 ◼   ► you can reboot into single user mode if you're comfortable with that. And I feel like I shouldn't

00:28:23 ◼   ► explain it, because if you don't know what it is, then you're not comfortable with it. And run

00:28:27 ◼   ► FSCK with a couple of options and have it attempt to repair your volume. Again, if you're not

00:28:32 ◼   ► comfortable with this, don't try to do it. It's very easy to do the wrong thing from the command

00:28:36 ◼   ► in single user mode.

00:28:38 ◼   ► But if you are comfortable with it, it's worth a try.

00:28:40 ◼   ► That's pretty bad.

00:28:42 ◼   ► And I don't want to encourage you to go on another file system rant.

00:28:46 ◼   ► Why not?

00:28:48 ◼   ► Well, we haven't beaten this horse. John has beaten this horse.

00:28:52 ◼   ► But anyway, the file system is one job, which is not to screw up your data.

00:28:58 ◼   ► And HFS+ is just not cutting the mustard, apparently.

00:29:00 ◼   ► And that's not even your data. Forget it. Who knows what state your data is?

00:29:04 ◼   ► This is just keeping track of where stuff is.

00:29:07 ◼   ► Is that stuff the same as your data?

00:29:09 ◼   ► Is it the same as when you wrote it?

00:29:10 ◼   ► Who the hell knows?

00:29:11 ◼   ► HFS+ doesn't know, it doesn't care.

00:29:13 ◼   ► All it's saying is, "I put something on disk, and I'm supposed to keep track of where it

00:29:17 ◼   ► is, and this file name has this data associated with it.

00:29:20 ◼   ► I don't know what that data is.

00:29:21 ◼   ► It could all be zeros.

00:29:22 ◼   ► It could be just random garbage by now, but I just want to keep track of that bucket of

00:29:24 ◼   ► random garbage that's a certain length."

00:29:27 ◼   ► And that's the job of the file system.

00:29:29 ◼   ► Keep track of the information about where the files are.

00:29:32 ◼   ► wish that it would also say, "Oh, and by the way, that data is the same as when you wrote

00:29:35 ◼   ► it," but HFS+ says nothing, totally silent. Just trusts the hardware and says, "Yeah,

00:29:40 ◼   ► it's probably what you wrote. If it isn't, there's nothing we can do about it now, and

00:29:45 ◼   ► you have no way of knowing." A lot of people have talked about the... what is it called?

00:29:49 ◼   ► There's some tool that I can never remember the name of that I've actually... I think

00:29:53 ◼   ► I bought it way back in the day. I think I tried it once. They will crawl your disk and

00:29:58 ◼   ► put little checksums, like in each directory,

00:30:01 ◼   ► checksums of all the files.

00:30:02 ◼   ► And so in theory down the road,

00:30:04 ◼   ► you can then rechecksum them and compare it

00:30:07 ◼   ► against the contents of the file.

00:30:08 ◼   ► And at least then you'll know if, okay, well,

00:30:10 ◼   ► at one point I made checksums with all the files

00:30:12 ◼   ► in these directories and it said X,

00:30:14 ◼   ► and now I'm running checksums and it says Y,

00:30:16 ◼   ► so something must have changed.

00:30:17 ◼   ► I can't tell you what it was and I can't fix it.

00:30:20 ◼   ► And I can't even tell you if the state of your disk

00:30:23 ◼   ► when I ran the checksums was in a known good state.

00:30:25 ◼   ► It was just merely the state it was

00:30:26 ◼   ► when I ran the original checksums.

00:30:27 ◼   ► But at least it's something.

00:30:28 ◼   ► But it does have to crawl your whole disk.

00:30:30 ◼   ► It does have to read every single byte of data

00:30:32 ◼   ► off your disk to make the checksums the first time anyway.

00:30:35 ◼   ► And the second time, it probably trusts file dates

00:30:37 ◼   ► or something like that to be more efficient about it.

00:30:39 ◼   ► But I don't really recommend this tool

00:30:42 ◼   ► because it really beats up on your disks

00:30:44 ◼   ► the first time you run it.

00:30:45 ◼   ► And it's really not the correct solution.

00:30:47 ◼   ► The correct solution is a file system

00:30:48 ◼   ► that does this when the data is on its way in and out.

00:30:51 ◼   ► And we don't have that yet.

00:30:52 ◼   ► So we just cross our fingers and pray.

00:30:56 ◼   ► Wow.

00:30:56 ◼   ► So what you're recommending is FAT32 for Mac OS?

00:31:01 ◼   ► No, I'm recommending just--

00:31:03 ◼   ► I can recommend the episode of the debug podcast

00:31:07 ◼   ► I was on recently where me and several other people

00:31:10 ◼   ► talked about file systems and Mavericks, among other things.

00:31:13 ◼   ► And part one of two was posted because we talked for like 3

00:31:15 ◼   ► and 1/2 hours.

00:31:16 ◼   ► So--

00:31:17 ◼   ► Yeah, it was really good.

00:31:17 ◼   ► I'll link to that in the show notes.

00:31:18 ◼   ► That was definitely worth listening to.

00:31:20 ◼   ► My favorite thing about it was that two of the people there

00:31:23 ◼   ► are ex-Apple employees.

00:31:24 ◼   ► And it's a lot better than just people

00:31:25 ◼   ► you know have seen apple from afar talking about stuff

00:31:28 ◼   ► and on that show the rest of us could

00:31:31 ◼   ► offer opinions of what we think apple might or might not be like inside or

00:31:34 ◼   ► might or might not be doing and have

00:31:36 ◼   ► actual ex-apple people

00:31:38 ◼   ► you know give thumbs up or thumbs down on whether that sounds reasonable and

00:31:42 ◼   ► that was that was exciting the two apple people were

00:31:44 ◼   ► who was it Ryan Nielsen and Daniel Jowkut

00:31:47 ◼   ► uh... I think I got the names right if I didn't Marco will fix it in post

00:31:52 ◼   ► and then Guy English was on it too, Rene Ritchie, you know, those guys

00:31:55 ◼   ► Well, it was only one guy.

00:31:56 ◼   ► [LAUGHS]

00:31:57 ◼   ► Wow.

00:31:58 ◼   ► [LAUGHS]

00:31:59 ◼   ► Moving on.

00:32:00 ◼   ► [LAUGHS]

00:32:01 ◼   ► All right, so do we want to talk about Xbox One?

00:32:04 ◼   ► Yeah, I think we should.

00:32:05 ◼   ► I think it's important, Jon.

00:32:07 ◼   ► [LAUGHS]

00:32:08 ◼   ► Yeah, Xbox One launched very close to the PlayStation 4.

00:32:12 ◼   ► PlayStation 4 was making a big deal because they sold a million units in North America

00:32:15 ◼   ► in 24 hours.

00:32:16 ◼   ► Xbox One launched and had its own little press release.

00:32:18 ◼   ► They said it sold more than one million consoles worldwide in less than 24 hours.

00:32:23 ◼   ► It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but the bottom line is I think both are more or less supply constrained on launch

00:32:28 ◼   ► I think this is I talked about it last week that just because the early adopters are

00:32:34 ◼   ► Rabid for a new console as I imagine they would be doesn't necessarily mean that this console generation is going to do as well as

00:32:40 ◼   ► The previous or the one before that but it it definitely means that they're not

00:32:44 ◼   ► It's not you know if they had both tanked on launch. It would be a very very bad sign

00:32:48 ◼   ► So they're not both tanking on launch so far so good for the new console generation

00:32:53 ◼   ► they're selling out. And this is a little bit more impressive than the Xbox One because

00:32:57 ◼   ► it's $100 more than the PlayStation 3 and people did not appear to be price sensitive

00:33:02 ◼   ► or the supply was not enough to reveal the price sensitivity of consumers because everyone

00:33:06 ◼   ► who wanted a PS4 on lunch day, you know, bought them all and same thing with the Xbox One.

00:33:12 ◼   ► So we'll revisit this in a couple months to see how the consoles are doing but so far

00:33:16 ◼   ► so good.

00:33:17 ◼   ► I do wonder how many of the buyers were scalpers.

00:33:21 ◼   ► Because with any new electronics launch that's high-profile, which is pretty much

00:33:25 ◼   ► every new game console and every new iPhone and most new

00:33:29 ◼   ► tablets and stuff, there's always a pretty large contingent of scalpers

00:33:33 ◼   ► who are just buying it to put it on eBay or to bring it to countries where it isn't available yet to charge a premium.

00:33:37 ◼   ► So opening day numbers

00:33:41 ◼   ► or opening weekend numbers, you should always go into it with some skepticism because

00:33:45 ◼   ► some of it is going to be that. And for different products, it's a different portion of it,

00:33:49 ◼   ► but it's certainly always substantial. So I think it would be more interesting to see

00:33:55 ◼   ► what happens in two months, five months, just over the next year we'll see. And I also

00:34:01 ◼   ► still want to see what happens when any of these consoles gets a really good hit game

00:34:06 ◼   ► that's exclusive to that console. Because that's really what makes the console market

00:34:10 ◼   ► is, you know, must have killer games. And so far there's none on the new systems, on

00:34:16 ◼   ► any of three of them.

00:34:17 ◼   ► I'm not sure the Xbox One, when I've been thinking about it more, I'm not sure the Xbox

00:34:21 ◼   ► One needs a killer app beyond Xbox Live. Because if it just gets good versions of all the multi-format,

00:34:27 ◼   ► multi-platform games, its killer app is sort of, that's where your friends list is, you

00:34:32 ◼   ► are on Xbox Live, you've been on Xbox Live with 360, you'll be on Xbox Live with this.

00:34:37 ◼   ► If a multiplatform title comes out and you are not a PC gamer, you have a choice of should

00:34:42 ◼   ► you get the PS4 version, the Xbox One version.

00:34:44 ◼   ► And in the past generation, a lot of people got the 360 version just because that's where

00:34:48 ◼   ► their friends were on Xbox Live.

00:34:50 ◼   ► And sometimes it looked a little better than the PS4 version.

00:34:52 ◼   ► In this generation, Xbox One version may look slightly worse than the PS4 version in ways

00:34:58 ◼   ► that only gaming forum nerds care about most likely.

00:35:03 ◼   ► But people may still opt to buy the Xbox One version because that's where their friends

00:35:07 ◼   ► are.

00:35:08 ◼   ► So the online social networking kind of network effect, social lock-in thing may be more of

00:35:13 ◼   ► a factor than any killer game.

00:35:14 ◼   ► Because it's really hard for any platform to get a killer game that's exclusive to it

00:35:18 ◼   ► these days because the big titles are so big that Microsoft or Sony would have to pay.

00:35:24 ◼   ► Can you imagine Microsoft or Sony ever paying enough money to Rockstar to make the next

00:35:27 ◼   ► GTA exclusively on their console?

00:35:29 ◼   ► I don't think they have enough money to do that.

00:35:32 ◼   ► because they make so much more money by putting it out everywhere that Rockstar says, "Well,

00:35:36 ◼   ► if we're going to forego PC and PS4 or Microsoft, you're going to have to pay us so much money. Are

00:35:41 ◼   ► you ready for that?" And the answer is no, they're not. So I don't know. It's kind of like big movie

00:35:46 ◼   ► studios making a movie with $200 million and then only showing in a certain brand of movie theaters.

00:35:51 ◼   ► No chain of movie theaters can afford to do that. It's not quite the same, but I would love to see

00:35:56 ◼   ► that. And of course, there's first-party games like Halo and stuff like that, but

00:35:59 ◼   ► historically it has been difficult for those games to match up with the cumulative massive

00:36:05 ◼   ► sales machine that is the popular franchises that are multi-platform like Call of Duty and

00:36:10 ◼   ► what do you call it? Destiny is coming out soon and NTF Auto and all those things.

00:36:16 ◼   ► Sports?

00:36:18 ◼   ► Yeah, all the EA games. Yeah, the Madden franchise, stuff like that.

00:36:23 ◼   ► You know, so I'm not a gamer anymore. I

00:36:25 ◼   ► Excuse me. I rarely play games on my iPhone

00:36:29 ◼   ► I have a Wii or Aaron and I have a Wii that hasn't been plugged in for months now and

00:36:35 ◼   ► I was at my fur we were at my friend Phil's house over the weekend and he has an Xbox one and I

00:36:42 ◼   ► Didn't play any games. Although I saw him play need for speed which looked extraordinarily boring, but it was pretty

00:36:50 ◼   ► But we did use it because he has his TV going through it, and I forget the technical term for that,

00:36:55 ◼   ► but basically the Xbox is eating the TV signal and

00:36:58 ◼   ► IR blasting to his direct TV receiver in order to change channels and so on and so forth.

00:37:03 ◼   ► I believe it's called Web TV.

00:37:05 ◼   ► For a second there, I thought you're serious.

00:37:07 ◼   ► Anyway, so the point being that the audio controls, you know, Xbox, Play or turn to, Tune to Comedy Central or whatever it is,

00:37:16 ◼   ► I'm probably getting that wrong. That was just like Siri in that when it worked it was the work of magic

00:37:22 ◼   ► But when it didn't work, which was I would say two-thirds of the time it was infuriating

00:37:28 ◼   ► But I can see where the Xbox one is a very nifty and different take on

00:37:33 ◼   ► What the next iteration of television might be in that it's all voice controlled. I never saw anything gesture-based

00:37:41 ◼   ► I don't even know if there's a gesture based system, but

00:37:44 ◼   ► It's all voice controlled. You can put the TV on one side of the screen and put something else on the other side of

00:37:49 ◼   ► the screen like a video game or whatever. It was very very cool.

00:37:51 ◼   ► Nothing about it made me want to get one, but I could see why it would be appealing and I can see if a

00:37:58 ◼   ► person who liked to play games wanted something more than just a game console, I could absolutely see how this would be very very appealing.

00:38:05 ◼   ► I wonder how much of it is, you know, Microsoft is really making a very clear bet here.

00:38:11 ◼   ► here, they're betting on convergence. And of course, historically in our industry we've

00:38:15 ◼   ► had things like Web TV and various attempts at convergence around the TV set and trying

00:38:20 ◼   ► to mush two distinct devices that connect the TVs together into one. And usually those

00:38:26 ◼   ► have failed, or at least been mediocre at best. Microsoft's bet here is they think

00:38:33 ◼   ► that having your TV controlled through your game console is a really big deal, and that

00:38:37 ◼   ► The game console is more than just a gaming console.

00:38:39 ◼   ► It's like a home media TV activity console.

00:38:43 ◼   ► Whereas Sony's gone for more the pure gaming,

00:38:46 ◼   ► so is Nintendo, the pure gaming system

00:38:48 ◼   ► that's separate and dedicated, as Jon has discussed a lot.

00:38:52 ◼   ► The question is, I think, whether Microsoft is right.

00:38:55 ◼   ► How many people want to merge those two experiences?

00:38:59 ◼   ► I would actually guess it's a low number.

00:39:02 ◼   ► Relative to everyone who buys Xboxes,

00:39:03 ◼   ► I would say the portion of them that want to also

00:39:06 ◼   ► control their TV through it and have those experiences be very merged together.

00:39:10 ◼   ► I wouldn't guess it's very high, but I could be very wrong about that.

00:39:14 ◼   ► I think there's a little bit of a potential Wii effect here in that one of the reasons

00:39:19 ◼   ► when we look at those graphs of console sales that the Wii's line shot up like a rocket

00:39:23 ◼   ► with such an incredible slope is because Wii had a, I don't want to call it a novelty factor,

00:39:29 ◼   ► but it's more or less what it is, in that people were curious, what would it be like

00:39:34 ◼   ► to play games while waggling a little remote around.

00:39:36 ◼   ► Because it was an experience that people hadn't done.

00:39:38 ◼   ► And people bought it just because, like, they didn't necessarily even think it was going

00:39:42 ◼   ► to be good, but they just said, "Well, this is a new thing, and I know some people have

00:39:46 ◼   ► tried it, and I'm not one of those people.

00:39:48 ◼   ► I need to get one of those so I can try to see what this is like, good or bad."

00:39:53 ◼   ► And the Xbox One, like, 360 had Kinect, right?

00:39:55 ◼   ► But it was an add-on, and add-ons have notoriously bad sell-through rates for consoles.

00:39:59 ◼   ► Like, of all the Xbox 360s sold, what percentage of those people bought Kinect?

00:40:03 ◼   ► very low. All of the Xbox Ones come with the Kinect 2, and Microsoft was adamant about

00:40:08 ◼   ► that and it's one of the many reasons that their console is $100 more than Sony's, and

00:40:12 ◼   ► they're taking the hit. They said, "Look, we're going to make them all come with that."

00:40:15 ◼   ► That means every single Xbox One has the sort of Wii effect of people wondering, "I wonder

00:40:20 ◼   ► what it would be like to talk to my TV or to wave my hands around like a maniac and

00:40:24 ◼   ► try to make menus go." Maybe those same people think it's going to be stupid and bad, or

00:40:28 ◼   ► maybe they tried their friends' Kinect 1 and didn't like it, but they're like, "But this

00:40:31 ◼   ► one is better and like there's just that curiosity about it and so that that

00:40:37 ◼   ► factor alone no matter how it ends up being even if it ends up being a total

00:40:40 ◼   ► disaster no one ever uses it anymore they just use it to play games like they

00:40:43 ◼   ► did with a 360 just the fact that it gets people in the door or curious about

00:40:47 ◼   ► it I think is a really big strength for Microsoft in this generation because

00:40:51 ◼   ► they all come with Kinect and as for actually using it I've heard mostly

00:40:56 ◼   ► reports that trying to use the Xbox one to watch television like to control your

00:40:59 ◼   ► television is not a good experience for the same reason that the television market is

00:41:04 ◼   ► littered with the bodies of companies that have tried to put a box in front of your TV

00:41:08 ◼   ► and let you control your TV with it.

00:41:09 ◼   ► It is just really hard and complicated because of our terrible – at least in the U.S. – our

00:41:14 ◼   ► terrible cable television system.

00:41:15 ◼   ► It's non-standardized and all this other stuff.

00:41:17 ◼   ► People were saying, "It's better to use my cable boxes guide than to use the Xbox

00:41:21 ◼   ► guide."

00:41:22 ◼   ► That's pretty damning when you have a $500 box that you attach to your TV, and it's

00:41:26 ◼   ► better to just use your cable box.

00:41:27 ◼   ► Also, everyone hates their cable box guide because they're all terrible.

00:41:30 ◼   ► Right, and they're saying the Xbox One was worse.

00:41:33 ◼   ► But I think even if the Xbox One, if it gets people to buy it for the novelty factor and

00:41:37 ◼   ► then they just use it like a 360, that's still a win for Microsoft.

00:41:41 ◼   ► Because using it like a 360 means using Xbox Live.

00:41:44 ◼   ► When you're watching TV, you're able to quickly switch over to a game and play it, or switch

00:41:47 ◼   ► back to TV when people are in the lobby and stuff like that.

00:41:50 ◼   ► Even that functionality, which is not that big a deal, that's something that Sony can't

00:41:54 ◼   ► match because they don't have HDMI in.

00:41:56 ◼   ► So I don't think the Xbox One has to fulfill all the magical minority report voice recognition

00:42:02 ◼   ► Siri AI dreams.

00:42:03 ◼   ► It just has to do one or two things that the PS4 can't and basically be an updated 360

00:42:10 ◼   ► with Kinect built in.

00:42:11 ◼   ► And maybe there will still not be any decent games that any gamer really cares about that

00:42:15 ◼   ► use Kinect, but we'll see.

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00:44:55 ◼   ► There's an item lower down in the notes here that we might want to hoist up.

00:44:59 ◼   ► Your car complaints?

00:45:01 ◼   ► No.

00:45:02 ◼   ► Apple buys PrimeSense.

00:45:05 ◼   ► Did you read that story?

00:45:06 ◼   ► I didn't.

00:45:07 ◼   ► What's this about?

00:45:08 ◼   ► TimeSense is the company that originally made these sensors for the original Kinect.

00:45:13 ◼   ► Oh, that's interesting.

00:45:14 ◼   ► So, click through to the link.

00:45:16 ◼   ► I might have gotten that slightly wrong.

00:45:17 ◼   ► But basically...

00:45:18 ◼   ► It looks like the Kinect.

00:45:19 ◼   ► Yeah, well, you know, there's a reason for it.

00:45:22 ◼   ► This is what this company does.

00:45:23 ◼   ► Makes Kinect-like sensors, and I think they were involved in the development of the original

00:45:27 ◼   ► Kinect, if not the Kinect 2.

00:45:29 ◼   ► And that is interesting, because Apple tends not to buy companies frivolously, unless they're

00:45:35 ◼   ► color.

00:45:36 ◼   ► That was a great domain name.

00:45:39 ◼   ► Oh, geez.

00:45:41 ◼   ► They buy color, but they don't buy Everpix.

00:45:44 ◼   ► You would imagine, though, like it's like when they bought PA Semi, that they bought

00:45:49 ◼   ► this company because they have an interest in some kind of sensor stuff.

00:45:52 ◼   ► And I think everyone was thinking, "Okay, well, Microsoft's doing the Xbox One and this

00:45:55 ◼   ► TV integration, and Apple still has yet to make whatever we think their crazy move is

00:45:58 ◼   ► going to be in the TV world other than their little black puck, because Steve Jobs said

00:46:02 ◼   ► and has booked that, oh, we've cracked the problem.

00:46:04 ◼   ► We haven't seen anything that seems to match up with that.

00:46:07 ◼   ► So we're still waiting for the other shoe to drop on TV.

00:46:09 ◼   ► And then they buy the sensor maker.

00:46:11 ◼   ► And on the one hand, it's like way too late

00:46:13 ◼   ► for them to be buying the sensor maker

00:46:14 ◼   ► if we're expecting them to have a product next year

00:46:16 ◼   ► that involves the sensor at all,

00:46:17 ◼   ► if you think of how long it took for us to see clear fruits

00:46:19 ◼   ► of the PSME acquisition.

00:46:22 ◼   ► But on the other hand, it also implies that they think

00:46:25 ◼   ► that sensor-related things are important enough

00:46:28 ◼   ► for them to buy a company that probably has patents,

00:46:31 ◼   ► but also expertise in that technology.

00:46:32 ◼   ► So it's beyond the phase where they're like,

00:46:34 ◼   ► let's just get a Kinect and hook it up to some,

00:46:36 ◼   ► you know, big box of wires

00:46:38 ◼   ► and see if it's a useful thing to have.

00:46:40 ◼   ► It seems like they're into the phase

00:46:41 ◼   ► where they're getting serious about this.

00:46:42 ◼   ► And the question is,

00:46:44 ◼   ► what do they do with this technology?

00:46:45 ◼   ► And like I said, I think everyone assumes

00:46:47 ◼   ► that it's TV related,

00:46:48 ◼   ► but I think it could just as easily be iOS device related,

00:46:52 ◼   ► as in iPads and iPhones.

00:46:54 ◼   ► 'Cause I think about all the crazy stuff that Samsung does

00:46:56 ◼   ► with their Galaxy phones,

00:46:58 ◼   ► with the stupid things that tracks your eyes

00:46:59 ◼   ► and like that you don't have to touch the screen

00:47:00 ◼   ► and how terrible that works.

00:47:02 ◼   ► And I think, all right, that's terrible.

00:47:05 ◼   ► But what if there was a way to do some tiny subset of that

00:47:07 ◼   ► better to an Apple level of quality

00:47:11 ◼   ► where they're happy with making this part of the iOS device

00:47:14 ◼   ► experience?

00:47:15 ◼   ► What can you do with the ability for your iPad or iPhone

00:47:19 ◼   ► to sense more about you than just where

00:47:21 ◼   ► your finger is touching in the orientation and acceleration?

00:47:25 ◼   ► So I think I would give it a 50/50 chance

00:47:27 ◼   ► that the technology involved-- the expertise

00:47:30 ◼   ► technology and everything coming from this company will show up in an iOS device just

00:47:35 ◼   ► as likely, I think, as it's showing up in a TV-like device.

00:47:37 ◼   ► And when I think about it in a TV-like device, I don't know what they would do with it.

00:47:41 ◼   ► I would imagine they could do something small and simple and like the proximity sensor,

00:47:46 ◼   ► but more sophisticated using the camera and more proximity sensors to be more intelligent

00:47:51 ◼   ► about something using an iOS device.

00:47:52 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:47:53 ◼   ► Whereas TV, what are we going to be, standing up in front of it waving our hands like we

00:47:56 ◼   ► are in front of an Xbox One?

00:47:57 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:47:58 ◼   ► I wonder if it could even be used in any way to support the back camera, maybe for looking

00:48:06 ◼   ► at the scene in a way similar to how phase-detect systems work in SLRs, maybe providing better

00:48:10 ◼   ► focus performance or a more accurate depth map of what's going on in the scene.

00:48:15 ◼   ► Maybe something like that.

00:48:16 ◼   ► Who knows?

00:48:17 ◼   ► Yeah, because you can do interesting—the Connect 2 is impressive technology.

00:48:21 ◼   ► I don't know if it doubled the resolution of the Connect 1 or quadrupled it, but it

00:48:24 ◼   ► is way better.

00:48:25 ◼   ► it can sense fingers now, whereas the Kinect one can barely sense hands. So the technology

00:48:31 ◼   ► has come a long way, and obviously you can't fit something like Kinect size into an iOS

00:48:36 ◼   ► device, although you could in a little TV bar type thing. But there's surely something

00:48:40 ◼   ► you can do if you can get IR, color image, edge detection, and depth map from these multi-sensor

00:48:47 ◼   ► things. Surely there's something interesting you can do about that, even if it's only just

00:48:52 ◼   ► It's like kind of having the phone have more awareness of what the person who's using it

00:48:56 ◼   ► is doing.

00:48:57 ◼   ► Even if you never use it to control the phone or whatever, just so the phone kind of knows,

00:49:01 ◼   ► they're staring at me, they're not.

00:49:03 ◼   ► I'm in a pocket, I'm not.

00:49:04 ◼   ► I'm being held up to a head, I'm not.

00:49:07 ◼   ► Just those simple things could make the phone experience better without ever actually exposing

00:49:10 ◼   ► a feature to the user.

00:49:12 ◼   ► And for the TV thing, again, I have no idea because no one has any idea what the hell

00:49:15 ◼   ► they're doing on TV, but it is intriguing to say the least.

00:49:18 ◼   ► Am I the only one who doesn't really care what they're doing on TV?

00:49:21 ◼   ► Yeah, I think you are the only one. I just think like I don't like the Apple TV

00:49:26 ◼   ► I would love for the software to be more reliable and for the service that backs at the entire iTunes store

00:49:32 ◼   ► For that to be more reliable and and and work more

00:49:35 ◼   ► but the actual like Apple TV

00:49:38 ◼   ► box and and software experience

00:49:42 ◼   ► I think

00:49:44 ◼   ► satisfies my needs for what I want out of a TV-connected box.

00:49:48 ◼   ► And I know everyone wants more channels and more availability

00:49:52 ◼   ► and live shows and everything else.

00:49:53 ◼   ► And that's more an issue of content deals than anything

00:49:56 ◼   ► else.

00:49:57 ◼   ► And that's probably going to be held up no matter what

00:49:59 ◼   ► they do with the hardware.

00:50:01 ◼   ► But I'm fine with the TV as it is.

00:50:04 ◼   ► I have Netflix, and everything has Netflix.

00:50:07 ◼   ► I have Netflix on there, and I have iTunes-bought stuff.

00:50:11 ◼   ► And that's about all I really need.

00:50:13 ◼   ► What else are they going to do?

00:50:14 ◼   ► You have minimal TV needs because if you are more like the average American who consumes

00:50:18 ◼   ► some portion of sports programming, some portion of local television, and also some portion

00:50:22 ◼   ► of network and cable, the experience is terrible because all those things are spread out in

00:50:26 ◼   ► ten different places.

00:50:27 ◼   ► I mean, even you, just for the two places, like, "Oh, is that on Netflix?

00:50:30 ◼   ► Let me check.

00:50:31 ◼   ► Oh, is that on Apple TV?

00:50:32 ◼   ► Let me check."

00:50:33 ◼   ► Even just that is bad, but imagine if you multiplied that out by like three or four

00:50:35 ◼   ► or five places to check, and then you had way more content, some of which is not available

00:50:40 ◼   ► online, some of which you had to see like, the only way you could get it was it was broadcast

00:50:46 ◼   ► to you and it would be on iTunes later and maybe you don't want to wait a week because

00:50:49 ◼   ► then the things will be spoiled for you.

00:50:52 ◼   ► If you consume more television from more sources it gets worse and worse and worse and everyone's

00:50:56 ◼   ► just waiting for something to clarify this in the same way that Apple clarified music,

00:51:01 ◼   ► granted it's a lot easier to do that with music, but hey there was five big labels or

00:51:05 ◼   ► whatever in the US.

00:51:07 ◼   ► You could just go to iTunes to inspire music, you don't have to go to seven different places

00:51:10 ◼   ► and synthesize some sort of system that I have a DVR to catch this and then I have Netflix

00:51:14 ◼   ► and then I have Apple TV and then I have Amazon Instant Video and then I have these devices

00:51:18 ◼   ► and I can watch my TiVo on my iPad but I also watch Netflix on my iPad but I can't watch

00:51:22 ◼   ► Apple TV on the iPad but I can watch it directly from the iTunes store and it's television

00:51:27 ◼   ► continues to be a giant mess.

00:51:29 ◼   ► Again, I'm speaking only about the US.

00:51:30 ◼   ► I don't know what it's like in the rest of the world.

00:51:32 ◼   ► So the more TV you consume and the more you use it, the worse it is.

00:51:36 ◼   ► Maybe you're still limping along with just Apple TV and Netflix and that satisfies you

00:51:39 ◼   ► but I think you're in the minority in terms of your television consumption habits.

00:51:43 ◼   ► Well sure, but how many of those problems are really software and content deal problems,

00:51:49 ◼   ► or not even like a software limitation, but more of a software choice that Apple has made.

00:51:53 ◼   ► So software choices and content deals versus hardware and interface problems.

00:52:01 ◼   ► Like if they did some kind of big connect like thing to the Apple TV,

00:52:04 ◼   ► then we could wave our arms around to navigate the same small menu

00:52:08 ◼   ► full of limited choices and expensive options. Like that's, it's, that's not going to, that's

00:52:13 ◼   ► not going to change anything.

00:52:14 ◼   ► We're not just looking for a hardware software solution. We're assuming, I mean, was iTunes

00:52:18 ◼   ► a hardware software solution? The iPod, iTunes, and the store was everything. It was hardware,

00:52:22 ◼   ► it was software, and it was content deals. That's what we're looking for is something

00:52:25 ◼   ► to save us all from everything. And if you just want to look on the hardware and software

00:52:28 ◼   ► side, you can look at the iPhone as an example, where all they had in the beginning was hardware

00:52:33 ◼   ► and software. But the hardware and software was so amazing that it was used as a lever

00:52:37 ◼   ► try to, I mean it didn't revolutionize the carrier industry, but it gave the handset

00:52:42 ◼   ► maker more leverage than they ever had before and it allowed us to have cell phones not

00:52:46 ◼   ► crapped up with the stupid carrier edware and crap like that on it.

00:52:50 ◼   ► That wasn't a big change, but it was an improvement.

00:52:53 ◼   ► And so I think even just alone with totally adversarial evil things like carriers, Apple

00:52:59 ◼   ► was still just through the power of its amazing hardware and software and the power of the

00:53:02 ◼   ► consumers that wanted it affect some small change in the industry, at least again, at

00:53:07 ◼   ► least in the US, for the better.

00:53:09 ◼   ► So I would take that in the television world.

00:53:11 ◼   ► If Apple can't do any content deals and everyone hates them, just make some amazing device

00:53:14 ◼   ► that everybody wants that makes television better for the people who are using it and

00:53:18 ◼   ► use that as a lever to say, "Oh, well, if Time Warner Cable doesn't want to be part

00:53:22 ◼   ► of our thing, then all the people who want our magic dance in front of the TV device

00:53:26 ◼   ► are going to be pissed at Time Warner and are going to change carriers."

00:53:29 ◼   ► people were going to AT&T from Verizon or whatever because it was the only place that

00:53:33 ◼   ► had the iPhone. Again, these are long shots. I'm not saying this is going to happen, but

00:53:39 ◼   ► something.

00:53:40 ◼   ► You can see part of that today, though, whenever there's some kind of dispute between one of

00:53:44 ◼   ► the networks and one of the big cable companies, and the networks pulls themselves off the

00:53:48 ◼   ► cable channel for like two weeks, and the idea is that the networks hoping the cable

00:53:54 ◼   ► company will say, "Oh, come back to us. All of our customers are angry at us." Usually

00:54:01 ◼   ► they just kind of quietly figure something out and nothing really changes in the end.

00:54:08 ◼   ► People often look at—I think we're seeing this a lot more recently from smart analyst

00:54:12 ◼   ► type people. You can look at the PC market in the 90s. So many things that we consider

00:54:20 ◼   ► like common behavior or the way things work is based on the Windows and Mac divide in

00:54:27 ◼   ► the 90s. And as time is going on, the smart analysts are starting to look at this and

00:54:33 ◼   ► say, "Actually, that seems more like a complicated fluke than the way things actually work."

00:54:40 ◼   ► Open doesn't always win, whatever that means. Hardware being multi-vendors and software

00:54:47 ◼   ► running on all of it versus the unified vertical integration doesn't always work or not work.

00:54:55 ◼   ► There's all this wisdom that's been based on how this one instance of something worked

00:54:59 ◼   ► — one time in the industry — when in fact it's much more complicated than that and

00:55:03 ◼   ► it doesn't always work that way.

00:55:04 ◼   ► I think the way iTunes came about and the iTunes Music Store, I think that's one of

00:55:10 ◼   ► those things too, where that was a very special time in history that we're not in a time

00:55:15 ◼   ► at that anymore with any other medium or any other situation or industry. That was a one-time

00:55:21 ◼   ► thing, and I don't think that anybody, Apple or otherwise, is going to be able to reproduce

00:55:26 ◼   ► that in a new medium.

00:55:28 ◼   ► Not the severity, but I think the same thing could happen over a much longer timeline,

00:55:32 ◼   ► because there was like a big boom with iTunes.

00:55:34 ◼   ► Maybe. I would say the breadth, though. The breadth is where it's going to really suffer.

00:55:38 ◼   ► Well, that's what I'm saying. It'll start off small. And what I'm thinking about there

00:55:42 ◼   ► is not so much Apple doing it, but Netflix funding its own shows.

00:55:45 ◼   ► Did they overnight obviate the need for the networks and HBO? No, they didn't.

00:55:49 ◼   ► But you get one or two shows that people like, and it's like, okay, you didn't do a big bang,

00:55:54 ◼   ► you didn't wipe them out, but suddenly a tiny, tiny sliver of the power in the content distribution

00:55:59 ◼   ► world went over to Netflix, this thing that has no allegiance to any kind of carrier or anything

00:56:04 ◼   ► like that. They got like two shows, so what? But if they did that every year for the next 15,

00:56:09 ◼   ► 20 years, you can foresee a scenario where either Netflix or a similar player pulls power away from

00:56:14 ◼   ► the cable companies and the carriers and you know all the other stuff until most or a majority of

00:56:22 ◼   ► the shows that people want to watch are being funded in a way that has no connection to any

00:56:26 ◼   ► cable provider or any television network. That would be an example of an iTunes-like change

00:56:31 ◼   ► instead of happening in three years happening in 15 or 20. Yeah, you know, I was thinking about it

00:56:36 ◼   ► while you guys were talking and I'm not so sure that you're right Marco that the iTunes

00:56:40 ◼   ► kind of phenomenon couldn't be repeated. What I was thinking about was if you think about

00:56:46 ◼   ► what made iTunes as paired with the iPod so magical is to me it's a couple of things.

00:56:53 ◼   ► It's acquiring something, it's acquiring media and then consuming it. And so iTunes allowed

00:56:58 ◼   ► you to acquire individual songs which was very rare at the time. I mean yeah there were

00:57:02 ◼   ► They were singles, but it was weird and clunky.

00:57:05 ◼   ► And you could acquire these songs without leaving your house, which was really awesome

00:57:08 ◼   ► and new.

00:57:09 ◼   ► And then you could, when you decided to leave your house, you could consume them on this

00:57:13 ◼   ► magical new hardware device.

00:57:15 ◼   ► And you guys made allusions to this earlier, but a theoretical Apple TV where you can acquire

00:57:22 ◼   ► content very easily, and the content I'm thinking of is sports content.

00:57:26 ◼   ► And I know that Marco's eyes just glazed over, but for most Americans, and I would argue

00:57:31 ◼   ► most of the world, sports are a big deal. And a lot of people pointed out in the chat

00:57:37 ◼   ► that the NFL has—that's the National American Football League.

00:57:40 ◼   ► That's not the NAFL.

00:57:41 ◼   ► Well, you know what I mean. So they have an exclusive deal with DirecTV, which is a satellite

00:57:47 ◼   ► provider here in the United States. And that runs out, I think, at the end of the season,

00:57:52 ◼   ► if not the end of the season, very, very soon. And a lot of people are calling on Apple to

00:57:56 ◼   ► just throw money at this problem and get that exclusive deal. And what that exclusive deal

00:58:00 ◼   ► brings is if you're a DirecTV customer, you can get what's called NFL Sunday Ticket because

00:58:05 ◼   ► all the games are played on Sundays, most of them anyway, and you can watch any game

00:58:08 ◼   ► you want when it's aired live.

00:58:11 ◼   ► And so for me as an example, I happen to be a fan of the New York Giants.

00:58:14 ◼   ► I live nowhere near New York.

00:58:16 ◼   ► I actually live near one of their rivals, the Washington Redskins.

00:58:19 ◼   ► And as such, I only ever get Giants games if it just so happens that Redskins or any

00:58:25 ◼   ► of the other local franchises aren't playing at that time.

00:58:29 ◼   ► So imagine a situation where the NFL and Apple reach an exclusive deal.

00:58:36 ◼   ► So now you can get the content you want, which is the acquire piece, because you can watch

00:58:41 ◼   ► any game you want.

00:58:42 ◼   ► And the MLB already does this, Major League Baseball does this, the NBA, I believe, already

00:58:46 ◼   ► does this, or I think the NHL does.

00:58:48 ◼   ► I'm probably getting some of that wrong, but whatever, you get the idea.

00:58:50 ◼   ► Well, imagine a combination of NFL, NASCAR, and F1, all of them easily available on the

00:58:57 ◼   ► the Apple TV both live and replay and all you need to do is either pay Apple a little

00:59:03 ◼   ► bit or just buy the darn device transporter style.

00:59:06 ◼   ► And then on top of that Apple has this really slick UI.

00:59:09 ◼   ► Well I like the UI in the Apple TV, maybe you don't, but it's certainly a lot better

00:59:13 ◼   ► than most set top boxes like my Verizon box looks like crap compared to the Apple TV.

00:59:18 ◼   ► So now you've got the content or you can acquire the content and now you can consume the content

00:59:22 ◼   ► in a nice and easy way.

00:59:23 ◼   ► I see some, not direct parallels with iTunes and the iPod, but certainly some parallels

00:59:29 ◼   ► nevertheless.

00:59:30 ◼   ► I don't know that sports is enough to really get them over the proverbial hump, but I think

00:59:34 ◼   ► it could be a really, really interesting way to attack traditional TV without having to

00:59:42 ◼   ► go after movies and TV shows in the traditional sense.

00:59:47 ◼   ► To reinforce Marco's point, the big difference here is that the players know, the players

00:59:51 ◼   ► saw what happened to music. And so everybody is super paranoid about putting too many eggs

00:59:55 ◼   ► in one basket. So if Apple, by some miracle, decided to spend the billions of dollars it

01:00:01 ◼   ► would take to get the NFL to that degree, any other sports franchise would be like,

01:00:05 ◼   ► "We sure as hell can't go with Apple," because then they would have two sports franchises.

01:00:08 ◼   ► And look what happened in music. It's not collusion, but they all kind of see what each

01:00:13 ◼   ► other are doing, and they're all kind of trying to protect their turf and spread their bets.

01:00:18 ◼   ► It's like, just like the music labels, as soon as Amazon became viable, all the music

01:00:21 ◼   ► labels were like, "We gotta go over there and just give Amazon everything because we

01:00:24 ◼   ► cannot have Apple have all this power as like the sole one and only awesome digital music

01:00:29 ◼   ► distribution network."

01:00:30 ◼   ► So all of the non-music guys saw what happened in music, and that's why it's so hard to do

01:00:35 ◼   ► anything with TV, because they're not gonna make that same mistake.

01:00:39 ◼   ► And that's why I think it has to be a much longer period.

01:00:42 ◼   ► And probably, like, the way it's going to happen is the power that's in the hands of

01:00:47 ◼   ► the networks and the cable companies now will shift to a set of companies that look more

01:00:52 ◼   ► like Netflix, if they're not necessarily Netflix.

01:00:54 ◼   ► I don't think Apple is going to be in the business of generating content.

01:00:57 ◼   ► So far, they haven't shown that they're willing to, for example, put up a couple hundred million

01:01:01 ◼   ► dollars to make a new TV show.

01:01:02 ◼   ► So all Apple can do is make deals with somebody.

01:01:04 ◼   ► And I would imagine dealing with Netflix is way easier than dealing with NBC or the NFL.

01:01:10 ◼   ► And so maybe there's some synergy there.

01:01:12 ◼   ► That being said though, I think you're right that once one sports franchise gave

01:01:17 ◼   ► exclusivity to the Apple TV or to Apple in general, I think that would give pause to

01:01:22 ◼   ► the others. However, if that one was the NFL, I think that's enough. Like even, I think

01:01:30 ◼   ► enough people, and obviously the rest of the world couldn't possibly care less, but in

01:01:34 ◼   ► the U.S., and this is one of the problems with TV is that it's very regional. In the

01:01:41 ◼   ► U.S., if you get the NFL, you're going to get a crap ton of people buying Apple TVs.

01:01:48 ◼   ► And that's really what they want. What they would want out of this kind of effort would

01:01:52 ◼   ► be tons and tons and tons of people buying the Apple TV and having a really good reason

01:01:58 ◼   ► to use it frequently. And if you get the NFL exclusive on there, you're going to get that.

01:02:03 ◼   ► You're going to get a lot of that. And people are not going to give up their cable subscription.

01:02:10 ◼   ► they're still going to have cable. So not getting the other sports networks wouldn't

01:02:14 ◼   ► matter as much. This would basically be like an exclusive console game. This would be a

01:02:19 ◼   ► killer app for the Apple TV for a very large number of people in this country.

01:02:24 ◼   ► Yeah, every time we talk about TV, it's just depressing because there are so many

01:02:29 ◼   ► entrenched interests, and then we always have to keep coming back to the realization, "And

01:02:33 ◼   ► this is just the US we're talking about, and Apple is a global company, and it cares

01:02:37 ◼   ► about worldwide stuff, and you can kind of see how Apple, in their own meetings, would

01:02:40 ◼   ► be like, "Look at all this crap, and we're only still talking about the US. Forget about

01:02:45 ◼   ► it. Let's just, you know, whatever." Well, that's why I think they delegate that to,

01:02:48 ◼   ► "Let's let Netflix fight it out and either die trying or figure out something to do."

01:02:53 ◼   ► And even Netflix is, I think, mostly US-centric as well. I think the other countries have

01:02:57 ◼   ► better ways to get the content they want over more modern digital systems than we do. Maybe

01:03:02 ◼   ► Maybe they still have the same monopoly problems that we do, but I think people can see the

01:03:08 ◼   ► soccer games that they want to see through some interesting digital thing that's near

01:03:12 ◼   ► them, whereas in the US, the local television franchises still have such a stranglehold,

01:03:17 ◼   ► and with the local blackouts and stuff like that, it's just perverse.

01:03:21 ◼   ► So it's depressing.

01:03:23 ◼   ► But I'd still like to see Apple do something.

01:03:25 ◼   ► Even if they do something and it flops, if the first thing you know is to succeed, keep

01:03:30 ◼   ► trying.

01:03:31 ◼   ► The first couple weren't that great, but the little black pluck is pretty darn good.

01:03:34 ◼   ► So if there's more to come in that vein and they're buying this Kinect-like sensor company,

01:03:38 ◼   ► well, let's see what you got, right?

01:03:40 ◼   ► I do think you're right, though, that I can't really see Apple devoting a massive chunk

01:03:46 ◼   ► of money and a massive division of their product line, and therefore their attention, to something

01:03:52 ◼   ► that only works in the US or will only succeed in the US.

01:03:57 ◼   ► That's not like Tim Cook, that's for sure.

01:03:59 ◼   ► Well, but what if you did something like the NFL, but it's applicable to the rest of the

01:04:04 ◼   ► world, like F1, for example, or soccer, perhaps?

01:04:07 ◼   ► Well, the Apple-style move is, "Oh, hey, now our television is also an app platform, and

01:04:13 ◼   ► you crazy app developers in every region of the country, you sort out how the hell to

01:04:17 ◼   ► get your stuff."

01:04:18 ◼   ► Kind of like the MLB app.

01:04:20 ◼   ► They made an app platform on iOS devices.

01:04:22 ◼   ► They didn't do a deal with Major League Baseball.

01:04:23 ◼   ► They made an app platform, and then MLB made the app, and then figured out its crazy way

01:04:27 ◼   ► that you're going to pay for it or whatever.

01:04:28 ◼   ► But that's an opportunity for people.

01:04:30 ◼   ► And that is an Apple move, because a platform is global.

01:04:33 ◼   ► And then individual applications are local.

01:04:36 ◼   ► That is true.

01:04:38 ◼   ► Do we want to move on to the sweet jobs that

01:04:41 ◼   ► are available at Penny Arcade?

01:04:44 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:04:45 ◼   ► I don't know that there's that much more to say about this.

01:04:46 ◼   ► I kind of vomited all over Twitter all morning about it

01:04:49 ◼   ► and wrote that big post.

01:04:51 ◼   ► But people haven't read your blog or read your Twitter.

01:04:54 ◼   ► So you have to reiterate and summarize here.

01:04:56 ◼   ► And as someone who works for the man, Marco, you know quite a bit about these sorts of

01:05:01 ◼   ► issues.

01:05:02 ◼   ► Shut up.

01:05:03 ◼   ► I used to work for various men.

01:05:07 ◼   ► Do you remember that?

01:05:08 ◼   ► It was a long time ago.

01:05:10 ◼   ► No, I think—so Penny Arcade put up this job listing for one person who's responsible

01:05:19 ◼   ► for basically developing and running all their websites and servers and all their in-house

01:05:26 ◼   ► tools, like various inventory trackers when they sell goods and stuff like that, managing

01:05:31 ◼   ► their conference sites, stuff like that, and also doing all of their local IT for their

01:05:37 ◼   ► workers in their office.

01:05:39 ◼   ► And in exchange for all of this, they will force you to be a workaholic.

01:05:46 ◼   ► They kind of flippantly glorify how you won't have any kind of free time.

01:05:53 ◼   ► they'll work you to the bone and you'll like it

01:05:56 ◼   ► and they'll make up for it by paying you a subpar salary

01:06:01 ◼   ► and giving you some kind of nice perks in the office,

01:06:06 ◼   ► like I don't know, like nice chairs and snacks, whatever,

01:06:09 ◼   ► something that would cost a lot less

01:06:10 ◼   ► than a good salary would cost.

01:06:12 ◼   ► And the whole posting has this arrogant attitude

01:06:19 ◼   ► of like, this is really a terrible job

01:06:21 ◼   ► you're going to love it and we're going to get tons of applicants.

01:06:23 ◼   ► Now, really quickly, genuine question. You're assuming that the salary is crummy, right?

01:06:29 ◼   ► No, they say it in the ad. They say we recognize that we're going to play,

01:06:34 ◼   ► I don't know the exact words, but they say that we're going to pay maybe below market because

01:06:39 ◼   ► we're not a money-oriented company or something like that and we run lean.

01:06:44 ◼   ► I mean, the ad is honest in the Penny Arcade style of honesty. Have you ever seen a job ad

01:06:50 ◼   ► before where they say, "Work-life balance? Forget it." That's basically what this says.

01:06:55 ◼   ► Every place always says, "Oh, we have great work life." They lie. The places that don't

01:06:59 ◼   ► have great work-life balance, they still say in the job ad, "Oh, we're great about work-life

01:07:03 ◼   ► balance." In fact, if they talk a lot about work-life balance too much in the ad, that's

01:07:07 ◼   ► also a warning sign. But this one, they come right out and say, "No, you're not really going to have

01:07:11 ◼   ► a good work-life balance. Work will be your life. That's the type of person we're looking for.

01:07:15 ◼   ► That's the type of job this is." Yeah, I don't know. The whole thing just kind of

01:07:19 ◼   ► of rubbed me the wrong way. It just basically…my problem with it…there's a lot of terrible

01:07:25 ◼   ► employers out there, and the tech industry is no exception. My problem with it is that

01:07:30 ◼   ► Penny Arcade is very high profile, and it's damaging to people when they expect that this

01:07:36 ◼   ► is the norm, that they should totally give themselves up to their job and have no personal

01:07:41 ◼   ► life, and that this is what's normally expected of them in this industry. And yeah, that's

01:07:46 ◼   ► Yeah, that's true for a lot of employers. That doesn't make it good. And that doesn't

01:07:50 ◼   ► mean there's not also a lot of great places to work that actually respect people and respect

01:07:55 ◼   ► people's health and respect people's lives and want people to stay there for more than

01:08:00 ◼   ► a couple of years.

01:08:03 ◼   ► Reading the forum posting from the guy who has this job now, and he kind of said, "I

01:08:10 ◼   ► I chose this and therefore get out of my life kind of thing.

01:08:13 ◼   ► But it just kind of confirms what we think

01:08:17 ◼   ► they mean by the job posting.

01:08:19 ◼   ► It just kind of confirms that, where it's constant work.

01:08:22 ◼   ► You're on call 24/7.

01:08:24 ◼   ► He says he can't go on vacation anywhere where he's not

01:08:28 ◼   ► reachable by cell phone and can't get a data connection

01:08:31 ◼   ► to log in and fix a server if it's down.

01:08:33 ◼   ► He sleeps with his laptop next to the bed.

01:08:35 ◼   ► Right.

01:08:35 ◼   ► And I did a lot of this for Tumblr,

01:08:37 ◼   ► which is why I'm sensitive to it.

01:08:40 ◼   ► This was my job at Tumblr for the first four years.

01:08:44 ◼   ► The difference was I was paid very well

01:08:47 ◼   ► and I got a lot of stock.

01:08:48 ◼   ► And that I think was fair.

01:08:51 ◼   ► I was doing the work of a co-founder

01:08:55 ◼   ► and I was paid like a co-founder.

01:08:58 ◼   ► And that's very, very different than something like this,

01:09:03 ◼   ► which is they already have something like,

01:09:05 ◼   ► what was it, like 20 employees somebody said?

01:09:07 ◼   ► They already have a lot of employees.

01:09:09 ◼   ► They run a very popular website that gets a lot of traffic.

01:09:14 ◼   ► They actually run multiple websites

01:09:16 ◼   ► that get lots of traffic.

01:09:17 ◼   ► There's obviously, they could have two people doing this.

01:09:22 ◼   ► They don't need to have one person doing all this

01:09:23 ◼   ► that's paid very badly,

01:09:24 ◼   ► or they could have one well-paid person,

01:09:27 ◼   ► and they're choosing not to

01:09:28 ◼   ► because they simply don't need to

01:09:31 ◼   ► because they're so popular that enough people will apply

01:09:35 ◼   ► that they can get somebody who will do it

01:09:36 ◼   ► for almost nothing.

01:09:37 ◼   ► And that's-- - Well, the other thing

01:09:38 ◼   ► their offering is you get to be an employee of Penny Arcade.

01:09:41 ◼   ► And the work-life balance that they say doesn't exist, it's because they kind of have this

01:09:45 ◼   ► big work-family thing going, where the people who work there seem to be happy about the

01:09:51 ◼   ► idea that the people you work with are like your family, and the stuff that you would

01:09:58 ◼   ► get in a normal home life, you can get more of at work.

01:10:01 ◼   ► And I think some of the things in this forum said, "Well, some people do leave at five

01:10:04 ◼   ► or whatever."

01:10:05 ◼   ► But that's the trade-off, though, is that you may not be getting high pay or something,

01:10:13 ◼   ► but you get presumably to work in an environment that's much more fun than just working for

01:10:18 ◼   ► some faceless corporation because you really like Penny Arcade because you think you'll

01:10:21 ◼   ► have fun with the people there.

01:10:22 ◼   ► And a lot of their interview process, if you look at their past interviews, is about trying

01:10:27 ◼   ► to find someone who not only can do the job, but also fits in with all the other people

01:10:31 ◼   ► because they're almost kind of like interviewing a new friend.

01:10:34 ◼   ► We're like, okay, so this person can do the job,

01:10:36 ◼   ► but we're only going to hire them

01:10:37 ◼   ► if we would like to hang out with this person,

01:10:39 ◼   ► because we know that's kind of our work environment.

01:10:41 ◼   ► We're all going to be hanging out together and doing stuff.

01:10:44 ◼   ► And that sounds a lot like a startup-type environment

01:10:48 ◼   ► with a bunch of friends who start a company.

01:10:50 ◼   ► And like Marco said, that's all well and good,

01:10:52 ◼   ► but I know I personally would never in a million years

01:10:57 ◼   ► want to do this job if I was not also going to benefit

01:11:01 ◼   ► from the fruits of my labors.

01:11:02 ◼   ► If you are in a startup and you are an early employee

01:11:04 ◼   ► and you work like this,

01:11:05 ◼   ► because that's how everybody in startups works.

01:11:07 ◼   ► They all do this.

01:11:08 ◼   ► They all do 50 jobs, they all work ridiculous hours,

01:11:09 ◼   ► they all don't get paid a lot

01:11:10 ◼   ► 'cause it's not a lot of money,

01:11:11 ◼   ► and you gotta spend the venture capital on servers

01:11:14 ◼   ► and acquiring new customers and stuff.

01:11:16 ◼   ► But the upside is that if you make it,

01:11:18 ◼   ► you share in the victory,

01:11:20 ◼   ► like Marco shared in Tumblr,

01:11:22 ◼   ► he got Tumblr stock and when they sold to Yahoo,

01:11:24 ◼   ► he shared in that.

01:11:26 ◼   ► He didn't do all that work

01:11:27 ◼   ► and then they just quit and leave with nothing, right?

01:11:31 ◼   ► So if you're in this job, basically no one

01:11:34 ◼   ► should work this hard, no matter how young you are,

01:11:36 ◼   ► no matter how awesome the job is,

01:11:37 ◼   ► no one should sacrifice the other parts of their lives

01:11:40 ◼   ► to this degree if they don't share in it.

01:11:41 ◼   ► And that, I think, to me personally,

01:11:43 ◼   ► the reason I wouldn't take this job

01:11:45 ◼   ► and the reason I would not recommend

01:11:47 ◼   ► anyone else take this job is that it seems to me,

01:11:50 ◼   ► it's so hard to tell because this is a privately held company

01:11:52 ◼   ► but it seems to me that some people are benefiting greatly

01:11:56 ◼   ► from what appears to be the success of Penny Arcade

01:11:59 ◼   ► and those people are the founders of the company,

01:12:01 ◼   ► like the two, you know, Mike and Jerry and Robert,

01:12:04 ◼   ► are benefiting greatly from it financially, it seems like.

01:12:07 ◼   ► Again, we don't know, we can't tell,

01:12:09 ◼   ► they've talked a little bit about it,

01:12:10 ◼   ► but it seems like they're making a lot.

01:12:12 ◼   ► The rest of the people in the company,

01:12:13 ◼   ► it doesn't seem like, are benefiting as greatly.

01:12:16 ◼   ► And if you're going to have a startup-type environment

01:12:19 ◼   ► where you're asking this of all the people involved

01:12:21 ◼   ► and the people are willing to do it and they're happy,

01:12:23 ◼   ► I feel like they should be sharing

01:12:25 ◼   ► in the success of the company

01:12:26 ◼   ► because this is not like a new startup.

01:12:27 ◼   ► They've been around for years.

01:12:29 ◼   ► And this team of people has made

01:12:31 ◼   ► a very successful enterprise.

01:12:33 ◼   ► I feel like maybe they don't all share equally,

01:12:35 ◼   ► but that whole idea that seven people work their butts off

01:12:38 ◼   ► and three people get rich drives me insane, right?

01:12:42 ◼   ► Because I mean, most of the time nobody gets rich.

01:12:44 ◼   ► Seven people work their butts off

01:12:45 ◼   ► and everyone goes home sad, right?

01:12:47 ◼   ► But in the cases where seven people work their butts off,

01:12:50 ◼   ► three people shouldn't get rich, seven people should get rich

01:12:52 ◼   ► maybe three people who get richer,

01:12:53 ◼   ► but that's what I feel like should happen.

01:12:55 ◼   ► I can't from what I can tell in the outside doesn't seem like that's happening and again

01:12:59 ◼   ► I'm framing this all as why I would not take the job and why I would recommend someone didn't take it

01:13:03 ◼   ► but I think the much more interesting question is

01:13:05 ◼   ► Is this a bad thing to do if everybody who works at penny arcade is happy with their job?

01:13:11 ◼   ► So I think you guys are judging this from a very similar angle to the way I judge it

01:13:17 ◼   ► However, it is not the only angle and the reason I say that is because my first job straight out of school was

01:13:25 ◼   ► at this company that made slot machines and

01:13:28 ◼   ► The group of, it was all guys at the time, the group of guys that worked there were all

01:13:36 ◼   ► expats from EA

01:13:39 ◼   ► who had bought up the company that they had all sort of kind of co-founded. It was a game company called Kesmai based out of

01:13:46 ◼   ► Charlottesville, Virginia and

01:13:48 ◼   ► by pure happenstance a large majority of these guys

01:13:53 ◼   ► either didn't have children or didn't have any immediate family. So no wives and no kids.

01:14:00 ◼   ► And so,

01:14:02 ◼   ► especially a couple of the guys there, like my boss when I first got there, who I adore,

01:14:06 ◼   ► he didn't happen to have a wife and didn't happen to have any kids. And so because of that,

01:14:11 ◼   ► he just ended up working a lot. And he put on this exterior shell of,

01:14:19 ◼   ► "Oh, I don't, you know, this job is a pain in the butt, but it's a job and this is what I do."

01:14:23 ◼   ► But I think if you allowed me to armchair—be an armchair psychiatrist—

01:14:29 ◼   ► I think he worked a lot partially because it was the most interesting—maybe not interesting,

01:14:34 ◼   ► but it was a really good way to occupy his time.

01:14:37 ◼   ► And so I envisioned Penny Arcade in a similar way.

01:14:41 ◼   ► Not to say that these people don't have kids or they don't have families,

01:14:44 ◼   ► but there are people that really do just love working a lot.

01:14:48 ◼   ► And my boss at this place worked absurd hours, like 80 or 100 hours a week.

01:14:53 ◼   ► But nobody was really telling him to, or at least I didn't think so anyway.

01:14:57 ◼   ► He just enjoyed doing work.

01:15:00 ◼   ► And he worked six days a week.

01:15:02 ◼   ► Nobody else did, but he always did.

01:15:04 ◼   ► And I'm not trying to say that he didn't have other things in his life.

01:15:07 ◼   ► I'm not trying to say that he necessarily enjoyed every moment of it.

01:15:10 ◼   ► But in certain circumstances, there are people that really do, like you guys were saying,

01:15:16 ◼   ► to have a work experience that kind of is their lives. Is that me? Heck no. I think

01:15:22 ◼   ► I speak for you guys in saying that it's certainly not you guys either. But for some people that

01:15:27 ◼   ► is. And if you put yourself in that mindset, how would you write a job posting? To be honest,

01:15:33 ◼   ► I'd write it kind of like this.

01:15:34 ◼   ► But see, the thing is, like, Robert Koo is that person. He, by his own admission, has

01:15:39 ◼   ► sacrificed many other parts of his life to be successful in business. He is the reason

01:15:43 ◼   ► Penny Arcade exists in the form it does now, he sacrificed his life to make this amazing company.

01:15:49 ◼   ► He deserves, you know, all the credit for that. The two artists, of course, were the spark of this

01:15:54 ◼   ► entire thing. Nothing exists without them. So clearly, those three, you know, deserve more

01:16:00 ◼   ► than anybody else. But, like, for Robert, that was his choice. He came up, he said, "This is the life

01:16:06 ◼   ► I'm going to leave. I'm going to make this great thing. And I understand the sacrifices involved

01:16:10 ◼   ► for it. For the two other guys, they have wives and kids, and my impression is yes,

01:16:13 ◼   ► they work hard and everything, and yes, there are many demands on their time and so on and

01:16:16 ◼   ► so forth, but it seems like their work-life balance isn't all that bad. I mean, again,

01:16:21 ◼   ► it's so hard to tell with happenstance, and that's why I was getting back to like, what

01:16:24 ◼   ► if all their employees are happy? And people talk about like this job burns people out.

01:16:28 ◼   ► Penny Arcade's been around for 15 years, and this job has had two people in it. So like,

01:16:32 ◼   ► you know, seven and a half years each. It's obviously not a machine that burns through

01:16:36 ◼   ► people or whatever.

01:16:37 ◼   ► seven and a half years each. The first one was there for like eight years or longer even.

01:16:42 ◼   ► The guy who's quitting now has only been there for like two years.

01:16:45 ◼   ► Well, either way, it's like two people in the position for over the 15-year life of

01:16:50 ◼   ► the company. It is not a mill where they bring in people and they burn them out and bring

01:16:53 ◼   ► in people and burn them out.

01:16:54 ◼   ► Well, but it has scaled up over that time as Penny Arcade has scaled up. The job has

01:16:58 ◼   ► scaled up. So I think it says something that they had a guy there for a long time. He left.

01:17:04 ◼   ► It got really big, he left.

01:17:07 ◼   ► A new guy came in, he did the job, and is quitting after only two years because he needs

01:17:11 ◼   ► more money.

01:17:12 ◼   ► Yeah, but giving back to the same point, and I'm not implying an answer here.

01:17:17 ◼   ► My real question is, if all their employees are happy, is the company still mean for making

01:17:22 ◼   ► a job like this?

01:17:24 ◼   ► Right, I'm saying the same thing.

01:17:25 ◼   ► If all the employees enjoy hanging out with the other employees a lot, and enjoy working

01:17:31 ◼   ► a lot, which is a big assumption. But if that's the case, like if I was one of those people,

01:17:36 ◼   ► like my boss at my first job, and I wanted to write a very forthcoming and honest job

01:17:42 ◼   ► posting, it would probably look a lot like this. Does it make it right? Not necessarily.

01:17:47 ◼   ► But would I ever apply for it? Heck no. But it would look a lot like this.

01:17:52 ◼   ► So I think my opinion on whether this is inherently a bad job posting is there are some inherently

01:17:58 ◼   ► bad aspects of it that a lot of people point out. The inherently bad aspect of it is not

01:18:02 ◼   ► so much for the people taking the job and not so much for Penny Arcade, but for the

01:18:06 ◼   ► industry for the position that they're hiring for. Because the availability of positions

01:18:11 ◼   ► like this devalues the work that those people do. Having a company that is attractive enough

01:18:16 ◼   ► in the intangibles that they're able to ask for people to sacrifice their entire lives

01:18:21 ◼   ► and take below market pay, it's not so much that they're able to do that, it's so much

01:18:26 ◼   ► that the existence of companies that are able to do that makes the rest of the industry feel like

01:18:31 ◼   ► they can turn down the dials on their hiring. It makes it seem like, "Well, you're expected to work

01:18:36 ◼   ► like a dog." And, "Well, you're expected not to make too much money." And if too many companies

01:18:40 ◼   ► do that, it makes it seem like, "Oh, everybody who works in IT can never go on vacation."

01:18:45 ◼   ► And it's like, "No, you're not Penny Arcade. You can't do that because what are you giving me?"

01:18:51 ◼   ► what makes me sad is that this position is this job description is like an honest description of

01:18:57 ◼   ► many things like you know insurance companies or big fortune 500 companies that are just as

01:19:01 ◼   ► terrible as the subscription sounds but they lie in their applications and they're not fun places

01:19:06 ◼   ► to work and they don't give you anything to balance off of this but still the existence of

01:19:09 ◼   ► penny arcade and the bill it's kind of like marco has talked about this on past shows and like life

01:19:14 ◼   ► isn't fair right the idea of developers and designers doing work for free devalues the work

01:19:19 ◼   ► of developers and designers. And it's like, well, why are they doing the work for free? Sometimes

01:19:22 ◼   ► they're doing the work for free because it's fun, because they're a college student and it's fun to

01:19:26 ◼   ► make apps and it's fun to do designs. And you're trying to make a living doing it and you're like,

01:19:30 ◼   ► "God damn, these people doing work for free, they're devaluing the work of everybody who does."

01:19:34 ◼   ► They are, they are devaluing it, but they're doing it because it's fun and because they're

01:19:38 ◼   ► intangibles. And that's a rough situation to be in. And you could say, "Penny Arcade should have

01:19:43 ◼   ► a broader view and say, 'We don't want to devalue the work of IT workers, and so we're going to try

01:19:49 ◼   ► try to – we have a more of – I guess we would call it environmental awareness, but

01:19:53 ◼   ► in a job market sense instead of the actual environment. That would be a reason not to

01:19:59 ◼   ► do this. That would be a reason that this job posting is a bad idea regardless of how

01:20:04 ◼   ► happy the employee is, and not because the person who gets this job is going to be sad,

01:20:08 ◼   ► and not because Penny Arcadia is an evil company, but just because of environmental factors.

01:20:12 ◼   ► The second reason this job posting is bad is different, and I think is much, much more

01:20:16 ◼   ► concrete and that this would be my appeal to Robert Koo, never have one IT person.

01:20:21 ◼   ► We just talked about backups for a million years. Just as a person who runs

01:20:25 ◼   ► a business, this is a bad move business-wise. It seems like Penny Arcade

01:20:30 ◼   ► does not correctly value the role of web applications and you know technology

01:20:38 ◼   ► infrastructure in their company because there's a big company, there's a lot at

01:20:42 ◼   ► stake here. Never trust that torn person, not because you're exploiting them, not

01:20:45 ◼   ► Not because no one person can do this, not because you should pay them more, don't pay

01:20:49 ◼   ► one guy 10 times his salary.

01:20:51 ◼   ► You need redundancy.

01:20:52 ◼   ► You absolutely, positively need redundancy.

01:20:54 ◼   ► And I think web stuff and online services is such an important part of the penny arcade

01:20:58 ◼   ► empire as it exists today that there's no way that I think there's any justification

01:21:03 ◼   ► to have a single person that does this for the sake of the company, for the sake of the

01:21:06 ◼   ► founders, for the sake of the other employees.

01:21:09 ◼   ► Nothing to do with what the job is like.

01:21:11 ◼   ► You just cannot have one person.

01:21:12 ◼   ► You cannot.

01:21:13 ◼   ► side effect that if you have two people then one guy can actually go on vacation. There's

01:21:16 ◼   ► many upsides to that, but ignoring all that. Pretend he's just like an evil turn of the

01:21:20 ◼   ► century industrial revolution, you know, robber baron. Don't have one guy. You gotta have

01:21:26 ◼   ► redundancy. So that would be my appeal to the penny arcade guys, that it's insane that

01:21:30 ◼   ► a company this big and successful is going to have one IT guy.

01:21:33 ◼   ► Especially because their website being up, or websites being up, is such an important

01:21:39 ◼   ► part of their business. I would imagine, I know they run PAX and that's probably a pretty

01:21:44 ◼   ► big business, but I would imagine the majority of their income probably still comes from

01:21:48 ◼   ► ad views on the site. Do you think that's fair to say?

01:21:50 ◼   ► I would say it's an even split between PAX merchandise and advertising on a site. But

01:21:55 ◼   ► again, it's privately held companies, hard to tell. But they have multiple lines of business

01:21:59 ◼   ► and they're big, but the thing is all of them have some aspect of it that involves websites

01:22:02 ◼   ► and services and electronic transfers of money.

01:22:04 ◼   ► Obviously, they're going to lose a lot for any moment that the site is down.

01:22:10 ◼   ► And the longer it's down, the more they're going to lose.

01:22:12 ◼   ► It's not like if some restaurant has their website go down, who cares?

01:22:17 ◼   ► They might lose two customers in a weekend if they can't see the website and figure

01:22:21 ◼   ► out their hours.

01:22:22 ◼   ► But for something like this, yeah, you're right, that is very important.

01:22:26 ◼   ► And part of it, I should even point out now, now that I'm thinking about this, my job

01:22:30 ◼   ► at tumblr wasn't quite this extreme because David could log in and fix things. He wasn't

01:22:35 ◼   ► as good at it as I was.

01:22:37 ◼   ► Yeah, you weren't the only one.

01:22:39 ◼   ► Right. That was like his secondary ability. His primary ability was coding all the front

01:22:44 ◼   ► end and the middle layer, but he could log in and fix servers to some degree when I was

01:22:50 ◼   ► not available. Which wasn't that often, but he could do it, and he did do it. And sometimes

01:22:55 ◼   ► he could only slightly manage things until I got back. Sometimes he could fix the problem

01:22:59 ◼   ► completely. And the only reason that it was acceptable to have all of that even resting

01:23:06 ◼   ► on me was because there were only two employees. That was it. It was just two of us for so

01:23:11 ◼   ► long. That's why it was okay because there was nobody else available and we couldn't

01:23:15 ◼   ► afford anybody else for a very long time at the beginning.

01:23:18 ◼   ► The thing is, you can get away with it. They get away with having one person in 15 years.

01:23:22 ◼   ► It's not like I'm saying that you're doomed you can't have one person. The fact

01:23:24 ◼   ► that they can get away with it, I think it's just penny-wise pound foolish. Ignoring whether

01:23:28 ◼   ► that person shares in the success of the company to the degree I think they should and none

01:23:32 ◼   ► of us can know because we don't know how big their bonuses are or whatever, although they

01:23:34 ◼   ► didn't mention any equity, but whatever.

01:23:36 ◼   ► Ignoring all of that, and I'm willing to give them all the benefit of the doubt on that

01:23:40 ◼   ► as a matter of fact because the few things they have said publicly, one of them is that

01:23:44 ◼   ► they're constantly getting buyout offers because who wouldn't want to buy them because they're

01:23:47 ◼   ► just a money-making machine.

01:23:51 ◼   ► When they entertain buyout offers, what the guys in charge did said, "If we take this

01:23:55 ◼   ► buyout offer, we're going to dole out the money to all of the people in the company."

01:23:58 ◼   ► And that would be correctly sharing the income.

01:24:00 ◼   ► It was like, we're not going to take a buyout

01:24:02 ◼   ► and the three founders leave and you guys just are out

01:24:04 ◼   ► of a job or whatever.

01:24:05 ◼   ► It was, if we take this money, we're going to divide it--

01:24:08 ◼   ► probably not evenly, but we're going

01:24:10 ◼   ► to divide it amongst all employees, as if all

01:24:12 ◼   ► the employees had equity in the company, which as far as I know

01:24:14 ◼   ► they don't legally have equity in the company.

01:24:16 ◼   ► But that was what the founders did.

01:24:17 ◼   ► They're nice guys.

01:24:18 ◼   ► They're looking out for their people.

01:24:19 ◼   ► Again, this is like a family.

01:24:21 ◼   ► And when they took a vote, they let the whole company

01:24:23 ◼   ► vote on this.

01:24:24 ◼   ► And not a single person voted to take the buyout.

01:24:27 ◼   ► Even though they knew, like, if we do this, you can get some large, presumably large amount

01:24:31 ◼   ► of money.

01:24:32 ◼   ► Not a single person in the company voted because all the people in the company wanted to, yeah,

01:24:35 ◼   ► Marco can identify with this, they wanted to continue to be masters of their own destinies.

01:24:41 ◼   ► They wanted to continue to be the family that decides, we decide what Penny Arcade does,

01:24:45 ◼   ► we collectively, we 12 or 20 people in this room, we are Penny Arcade, we don't want to

01:24:49 ◼   ► sell out.

01:24:50 ◼   ► It's more important to us than the money to continue to be able to steer our own ship.

01:24:56 ◼   ► And I think that speaks to the kind of company it is.

01:24:58 ◼   ► I just think one IT person, just as they don't have a single artist in the company, they

01:25:04 ◼   ► have multiple artists doing multiple things and multiple comic strips, and one person

01:25:08 ◼   ► is not enough.

01:25:09 ◼   ► It also looked like from the current job occupants post in the forum, from his description of

01:25:15 ◼   ► his work and his skills, it really does also look like he's not a very knowledgeable

01:25:20 ◼   ► sysadmin and that his main focus is development, not server administration or infrastructure

01:25:27 ◼   ► management, you know, running load balancers and stuff. And most of that he just pays Rackspace

01:25:31 ◼   ► to do. And that's actually very expensive, by the way. But most of that he pays Rackspace

01:25:37 ◼   ► to do. And so it actually sounds like they don't really have a dedicated sysadmin at

01:25:42 ◼   ► all. Like, it isn't even that this person's doing all four of those jobs with equal weight.

01:25:48 ◼   ► He's mostly a developer, and he happens to do a little bit of system administration,

01:25:51 ◼   ► but for the most part, most system tasks seem to be going undone, or at least inadequately

01:25:56 ◼   ► covered.

01:25:57 ◼   ► It's kind of like when a company that's not a software company tries to write software

01:26:00 ◼   ► internally.

01:26:01 ◼   ► They don't quite know what's involved with doing software.

01:26:03 ◼   ► Penny Arcade seems like a company that—if your company was like Dropbox, where your

01:26:09 ◼   ► whole company is this software and web service that you provide, the whole company's focused

01:26:14 ◼   ► around that.

01:26:15 ◼   ► And Penny Arcade is a creative company.

01:26:16 ◼   ► whole company is focused on creative endeavors, and they do the creative stuff great, right?

01:26:21 ◼   ► They don't think of themselves as a company as like, "Oh, we run a website." The website

01:26:25 ◼   ► is like just how we get our creative outlet to people, and it seems like they either don't

01:26:29 ◼   ► know how to manage or don't know how to value it correctly, because yeah, you're right.

01:26:32 ◼   ► Paying all that money to Rackspace, again, penny-wise, pound foolish. And for the Penny

01:26:36 ◼   ► Arcade Expo ticket sales, I think they outsourced that this year to some other company that

01:26:41 ◼   ► does ticket sales things, and it did not go well. It went the same. Everyone used to use

01:26:46 ◼   ► like CoverItLive or whatever, those live blogging platforms that were out there.

01:26:50 ◼   ► I tried to buy tickets for PAX this year, and it was the same situation as like CoverItLive

01:26:55 ◼   ► where the site was down and you were in a queue and you couldn't get pages to load,

01:26:58 ◼   ► and then it would load without the CSS and you couldn't tell if you've purchased anything.

01:27:03 ◼   ► That was -- they outsourced that, and that didn't work well either.

01:27:06 ◼   ► That is a core part of their business.

01:27:07 ◼   ► They should be investing in it way more than they are.

01:27:09 ◼   ► Yeah, it's almost as if, in the Tumblr early example, it's almost as if they already have

01:27:15 ◼   ► hired a David, but they haven't hired a me. Like, they have, like, I mean that in the

01:27:20 ◼   ► least arrogant way that I can say it. Like, they have the front-end developer and, like,

01:27:25 ◼   ► the middleware developer, and they haven't, like, this is the job of two people, at least,

01:27:31 ◼   ► and they've only hired for the front half of it, and not for, like, the back-end half.

01:27:36 ◼   ► And of course, they're not gonna pay somebody enough to do both, if they can even find one.

01:27:39 ◼   ► Yeah, the pay thing though, the ad is honest to a fault, but we don't have numbers.

01:27:47 ◼   ► So you don't know, like maybe they think they're paying below market, but they're still actually

01:27:50 ◼   ► offering a reasonably good salary.

01:27:53 ◼   ► Or maybe they're offering a ridiculously low salary.

01:27:54 ◼   ► We can't tell from the ad.

01:27:56 ◼   ► All we can tell is from the people who work there.

01:27:58 ◼   ► And this one person who's leaving, it's hard to tell from them.

01:28:01 ◼   ► The guy who was there for eight years obviously enjoyed it and probably just moved on to something

01:28:06 ◼   ► else in his life.

01:28:08 ◼   ► don't have a lot of turnover in their company. They do run it more like a family. It seems

01:28:11 ◼   ► like all the people who work there are happy with it. Otherwise, why would they stay? It's

01:28:14 ◼   ► not like a place where, you know, and some people are making a big deal about the, you

01:28:20 ◼   ► know, it's an offensive work environment or whatever. Someone was saying that's like legally

01:28:25 ◼   ► a boilerplate. And that sounds vaguely plausible to me because at least one job that I worked

01:28:30 ◼   ► at, I had to sign a thing that said, you know, as the chorus, in a matter of course of doing

01:28:34 ◼   ► this job and doing competitive research, you may come across websites that other people

01:28:37 ◼   ► find offensive and blah blah blah.

01:28:38 ◼   ► Basically it was just saying you may see porn sites as part of your work and you promise

01:28:41 ◼   ► you won't sue us because of it, right?

01:28:45 ◼   ► Because they're out there on the web and you may be going.

01:28:49 ◼   ► If you work at Penny Arcade and it's a comic strip that has adult themes and doing competitive

01:28:54 ◼   ► research you may run across other things or whatever, that seems like actually kind of

01:28:58 ◼   ► a reasonable thing to say up front to people that like, presumably you're familiar with

01:29:02 ◼   ► Penny Arcade, but just so you know, this is what it's about.

01:29:05 ◼   ► this is what you may come in contact with. It is not, I think, trying to have people

01:29:09 ◼   ► sign away their rights to be sexually harassed or something, because I have to believe that

01:29:13 ◼   ► if anything like that was going on inside Penny Arcade, we would hear about it, right?

01:29:17 ◼   ► Like that they're not the NSA, they're not CIA, they're not silencing people as they

01:29:21 ◼   ► go out the door. Everyone who works there seems to like working there. They all seem

01:29:25 ◼   ► to like each other. The people who leave do not leave disgruntled and hating it. Maybe

01:29:29 ◼   ► it's like a cult and they're brainwashing everybody, but I have a really hard time believing

01:29:32 ◼   ► that. I still think this is an ill-advised hiring decision and I sure as hell wouldn't

01:29:38 ◼   ► take that job myself, but I definitely have mixed feelings about is this good or bad for

01:29:47 ◼   ► the person who ends up taking that job and being happy with it? How can you say if someone

01:29:51 ◼   ► takes that job and they're super happy with it for, you know, even if they're only happy

01:29:56 ◼   ► with it for two years? People sometimes are in jobs for less than two years. Who are you

01:30:00 ◼   ► to say to that person they shouldn't have taken that job. Maybe in retrospect they will

01:30:04 ◼   ► feel like they shouldn't. I know if I took that job and then grew to my current ripe

01:30:07 ◼   ► old age I would regret having taken that job, but that's me. Everyone's different, so I

01:30:12 ◼   ► don't know. I don't know what to think.

01:30:14 ◼   ► I mean, to wrap this up, because I think we're running a little long here, I think that it's

01:30:19 ◼   ► a complicated issue because it divides people along the same lines as like how much the

01:30:26 ◼   ► government should mandate about how things are done or how you live your own life. And

01:30:32 ◼   ► people are so split on issues like this. Labor laws almost always have this kind of problem,

01:30:37 ◼   ► where it's like, well, if the government or the society's expectations are from critics

01:30:44 ◼   ► like us, we might say, oh, well, having workaholism be the norm is really bad. And you need to

01:30:53 ◼   ► to have codified vacation schedules and limited hours or paid overtime to discourage constant

01:30:59 ◼   ► overworking and stuff like that, you have issues where a lot of people think that that

01:31:07 ◼   ► should be regulated. That the government should step in and say, "Well, it's really better

01:31:13 ◼   ► for people overall if you live by these rules or follow these guidelines or restrictions

01:31:19 ◼   ► or limits. It's kind of like a parent role. We know better for you than what you're

01:31:25 ◼   ► claiming. So even if the employer wants you to do something and you agree and you will

01:31:29 ◼   ► do it and you're happy doing it, the government might say, "That's actually worse for

01:31:34 ◼   ► people in general, so we're not going to allow that." And that's a very controversial

01:31:39 ◼   ► thing.

01:31:40 ◼   ► Similar to that, all of our opinions on this, like you said earlier, Casey and John both,

01:31:45 ◼   ► If the employees there are happy in that environment, is it really that bad?

01:31:51 ◼   ► And so I think we can't really—you know, we can say this is bad in general, and generally

01:31:57 ◼   ► you shouldn't take this job.

01:31:59 ◼   ► But if they happen to find somebody who will take that job, which they probably—they

01:32:03 ◼   ► almost certainly will very easily because they have such a big following, we can't

01:32:08 ◼   ► really say like, "That person's an idiot."

01:32:10 ◼   ► Like, they're making that choice.

01:32:12 ◼   ► But I think we can say in general, you shouldn't do things like this.

01:32:17 ◼   ► But even that's controversial.

01:32:21 ◼   ► You should, even for the person taking that job, you can't be sure that you're going to

01:32:25 ◼   ► like it as much as you do.

01:32:27 ◼   ► And talk about labor laws and stuff like that.

01:32:30 ◼   ► In general, this is all sort of, talk about first world problems here.

01:32:35 ◼   ► Labor laws, there's so much low hanging fruit in terms of stopping the Walmarts of the world

01:32:39 ◼   ► not paying their employees enough.

01:32:41 ◼   ► person's going to be paid enough to get food on the table, right?

01:32:45 ◼   ► So in the grand scheme of things, it pales in comparison to the worker exploitation that

01:32:49 ◼   ► happens lower down in the scale of things.

01:32:51 ◼   ► But for our little enlightened world of developers and stuff, this is like the crazy equivalent

01:32:58 ◼   ► of that among developers, is that we've probably all been in jobs where we felt like we were

01:33:03 ◼   ► overworked and we felt like we weren't appreciated and didn't share in the success of the company.

01:33:07 ◼   ► And we see this is the place where that could happen.

01:33:09 ◼   ► So beware, don't go in thinking it's all going to be Rose and Sunshine because it's

01:33:13 ◼   ► really, really tough.

01:33:14 ◼   ► And especially when we see a young person doing it where they don't know, they don't

01:33:16 ◼   ► know they're going to like it.

01:33:17 ◼   ► They don't know if they're going to be happy because they don't have any experience with

01:33:19 ◼   ► anything.

01:33:20 ◼   ► And maybe they'll think they'll like it and maybe, you know, the burnout is definitely

01:33:23 ◼   ► a possibility.

01:33:24 ◼   ► Maybe they'll be happy for the first year and realize, "I can never go anywhere and

01:33:27 ◼   ► I'm miserable and I've sacrificed my entire life and I didn't realize I was doing it."

01:33:30 ◼   ► It's mostly like you're trying to help people go in with their eyes open.

01:33:33 ◼   ► And I think the brutal and honest ad kind of helps in that, but it also kind of makes

01:33:38 ◼   ► it seem more exciting and daring to young people with less experience of like, "Oh,

01:33:41 ◼   ► I'm going to do this thing because it's super hard and everything."

01:33:45 ◼   ► In general, it's not...

01:33:47 ◼   ► Even if they were fixed on this stupid plan of hiring a single person to do all these

01:33:51 ◼   ► jobs, there were better ways to go about presenting that position to have a better chance of finding

01:33:58 ◼   ► a successful match with someone who really will be happy in that position.

01:34:01 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:34:04 ◼   ► private companies is difficult, but we should all just wait outside the company for that

01:34:08 ◼   ► person to leave one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, ten years from now and say, "How

01:34:12 ◼   ► was it? Was it what you thought it was? Were you happy?"

01:34:15 ◼   ► We told you so. Get off my lawn.

01:34:17 ◼   ► I mean, maybe. We didn't tell you. Maybe they're going to love it. Maybe they're going to think

01:34:20 ◼   ► it's awesome. I have to say, having consumed tons and tons of Paneerahic content over the

01:34:25 ◼   ► years and seeing all of what their work life is there, many times I've said, "Boy, I wish

01:34:28 ◼   ► my work was like that. Boy, I wish I cared about my coworkers the way they apparently

01:34:32 ◼   ► care about theirs, right? And that's why they get all these employees and we just

01:34:35 ◼   ► we just want them not to take advantage of that and like exploit somebody. It's like,

01:34:39 ◼   ► we know we have this environment that looks awesome on camera and secretly

01:34:43 ◼   ► inside we're evil and we're going to abuse this person but and we're gonna

01:34:46 ◼   ► get some sucker in like that's that's what we fear but we don't know what's

01:34:49 ◼   ► going on so it's that's a fear but you can't say that's definitely what it's

01:34:52 ◼   ► like inside Penny Arcade. I don't know, I definitely have mixed feelings. And this is even this is not

01:34:56 ◼   ► even touching the Mike's many foot-and-mouth disease problems and his

01:35:01 ◼   ► these major problems, understanding, I'm not even going to get into these topics. I

01:35:05 ◼   ► don't think you guys know about them, but it's probably not appropriate for a tech

01:35:07 ◼   ► show. But this job listing is.

01:35:09 ◼   ► All right, then.

01:35:10 ◼   ► Let's wrap it up. Thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, Ting and Warby Parker,

01:35:16 ◼   ► and we will see you next week.

01:35:17 ◼   ► [Music]

01:35:18 ◼   ► Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin

01:35:25 ◼   ► 'Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental

01:35:31 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:35:36 ◼   ► 'Cause it was accidental (accidental)

01:35:39 ◼   ► It was accidental (accidental)

01:35:41 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:35:47 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:35:51 ◼   ► @c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s

01:35:55 ◼   ► So that's Casey List, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:36:00 ◼   ► Anti-Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C, U-S-A, Syracuse.

01:36:07 ◼   ► It's accidental.

01:36:09 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:36:11 ◼   ► They didn't mean to.

01:36:13 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:36:14 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:36:15 ◼   ► Tech broadcast so long.

01:36:20 ◼   ► Penny Arcade is a divisive issue, a company

01:36:27 ◼   ► that engenders strong feelings.

01:36:28 ◼   ► So we'll see if we get tons of feedback from the people who hate Penny Arcade and

01:36:32 ◼   ► say that we were defending it too much, and from the people who love Penny Arcade and

01:36:35 ◼   ► say we were saying bad things about it.

01:36:37 ◼   ► Or maybe we'll get almost no feedback at all, which means that there's no overlap

01:36:40 ◼   ► in our audiences.

01:36:43 ◼   ► I wonder, what do you think will be more hated?

01:36:47 ◼   ► Our collective opinion on the Penny Arcade job posting, or me or Casey?

01:36:55 ◼   ► Why can't it be both?

01:36:57 ◼   ► That's probably the right answer.

01:36:59 ◼   ► I really hated Margot and Casey's opinion of the bit.

01:37:01 ◼   ► No, I think I'll get the worst of it, because the problem with trying to be like, to have

01:37:05 ◼   ► a position that's nuanced, where like, you acknowledge the unknowns in the situation,

01:37:10 ◼   ► that like, all we have to go on is this job posting at a bunch of videos and none of us

01:37:14 ◼   ► really know.

01:37:15 ◼   ► And you know, like, that uncertainty and that hedging seems like, well, you're defending

01:37:19 ◼   ► them, you're saying they're better.

01:37:20 ◼   ► I'm just acknowledging the unknowns.

01:37:21 ◼   ► And people hate that, because it's not, they just want to see you decisively come down

01:37:25 ◼   ► for or against, and that sort of wishy-washy—they interpret it as wishy-washy, but I feel like

01:37:30 ◼   ► it's accuracy, it's acknowledging the unknowns. You can't make definitive statements without

01:37:34 ◼   ► more information. And that comes off as not as—certainty is much more attractive and

01:37:40 ◼   ► interesting, and so they want you to be certain about something, and I can't.

01:37:43 ◼   ► Oh, I'm pronouncing divisive wrong? Provise of?

01:37:47 ◼   ► I've always heard divisive. I bet if I looked it up in the dictionary

01:37:50 ◼   ► now it would tell me there's two pronunciations. Anyway.

01:37:52 ◼   ► You know, I almost called you out on it, but since I've gotten burned, I've burned

01:37:56 ◼   ► myself so bad on these things, I feel like Richard Pryor.

01:37:59 ◼   ► I've lit myself up trying to smoke, if you will.

01:38:02 ◼   ► Not literally, but figuratively.

01:38:04 ◼   ► And so I refuse to make any sort of commentary on grammar or pronunciation issues.

01:38:08 ◼   ► It says one pronunciation, divisive.

01:38:10 ◼   ► Oh well.

01:38:11 ◼   ► It's a divisive issue.

01:38:13 ◼   ► I'm still way ahead of Groover on mispronunciations.

01:38:18 ◼   ► Your problem, John, is that you're a fan of Penny Arcade.

01:38:22 ◼   ► You actually know them. You're closer to them than me and Casey.

01:38:26 ◼   ► I don't even know them. I read the comic, though.

01:38:28 ◼   ► Well, yeah. Casey and I, as far as I know Casey, we don't give a shit about Penny Arcade.

01:38:32 ◼   ► Nope.

01:38:33 ◼   ► I never got into the comic. I've known of it for, I don't know, years, a decade.

01:38:40 ◼   ► But I've never read it regularly. I've never really cared.

01:38:42 ◼   ► And honestly, when people link me to it, I don't even find it that funny.

01:38:46 ◼   ► It's just not my kind of thing.

01:38:48 ◼   ► Yeah, you have to be a gamer. It's a gamer's comic.

01:38:50 ◼   ► But you're actually close enough that any opinion you make, and as you said, by having

01:38:57 ◼   ► a nuanced hedged opinion, anything you say is going to actually anchor both sides.

01:39:03 ◼   ► The people who don't like them from this job posting are going to be like, "You didn't

01:39:07 ◼   ► come down hard enough."

01:39:08 ◼   ► And the people who are fans of them are like, "You traitor!

01:39:10 ◼   ► You're one of us!"

01:39:11 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:39:12 ◼   ► But the thing is, it's like the cult of personality where you think you know people who listen

01:39:16 ◼   ► into their podcasts and everything,

01:39:18 ◼   ► and at a certain point, reading Penny Arcade for 15 years

01:39:21 ◼   ► and going to all the conventions,

01:39:22 ◼   ► you start to feel like you know the people,

01:39:23 ◼   ► and when they do terrible, stupid things,

01:39:25 ◼   ► if you don't know them, you just simply condemn them

01:39:29 ◼   ► and say, "You have done a terrible, stupid thing."

01:39:31 ◼   ► If you do know them, you're like,

01:39:32 ◼   ► "Oh, damn, you did a terrible, stupid thing."

01:39:34 ◼   ► If your friend does it, don't you wanna talk to your friend

01:39:36 ◼   ► and say, "What are you doing, man?"

01:39:39 ◼   ► 'Cause they've done lots of terrible, stupid things,

01:39:41 ◼   ► and even though I don't know these people at all,

01:39:44 ◼   ► the feeling I get is not like,

01:39:45 ◼   ► "Hey, there's this thing I never heard of."

01:39:47 ◼   ► Like, you know when someone links you to something

01:39:48 ◼   ► where someone said something dumb

01:39:50 ◼   ► and you have no idea who it is,

01:39:51 ◼   ► all you know is like,

01:39:52 ◼   ► "Oh man, this person is a terrible person," right?

01:39:54 ◼   ► Like some YouTube video of some person

01:39:55 ◼   ► saying something terrible,

01:39:56 ◼   ► or some politician you never heard of

01:39:57 ◼   ► saying something terrible.

01:39:58 ◼   ► You just instantly go,

01:39:59 ◼   ► "Well, that guy's a bozo," right?

01:40:01 ◼   ► But if someone links you to like,

01:40:02 ◼   ► your brother saying something terrible,

01:40:04 ◼   ► you wanna talk to your brother and say,

01:40:06 ◼   ► "What are you doing, man?"

01:40:06 ◼   ► I, you know, you'd hopefully say,

01:40:08 ◼   ► "I know you're not as terrible as that is,"

01:40:10 ◼   ► or, "Maybe you are as terrible

01:40:11 ◼   ► and we need to talk about it," or whatever.

01:40:12 ◼   ► And that's how I feel about the Penny Arcade stuff.

01:40:14 ◼   ► There was a good post from MC Frontalot, which is a musician and also a friend of the guys,

01:40:19 ◼   ► with a similar conflict going, "You're doing a terrible thing."

01:40:23 ◼   ► But I know you guys have it in you to, A, realize that it's terrible, and B, fix it.

01:40:30 ◼   ► And seeing them not take those two steps, not seem to realize what was wrong with what

01:40:33 ◼   ► they did, and not seeming to fix it, is just so frustrating.

01:40:36 ◼   ► And a lot of people are just sort of cutting ties.

01:40:38 ◼   ► They were like, "You've had three strikes, you're out.

01:40:41 ◼   ► You keep doing these dumb things and maybe they just don't have people around them explaining

01:40:45 ◼   ► to them what the problem is or maybe they can't internalize it.

01:40:48 ◼   ► And it's a tough situation.

01:40:51 ◼   ► And again, I feel like I have this unspoken relationship with these people where I totally

01:40:56 ◼   ► don't the same way that people feel like they know us because they listen to our podcast.

01:41:00 ◼   ► And so, yeah, I definitely am closer to it.

01:41:01 ◼   ► But what I don't want people to think is because I'm close to it, I defend these terrible things

01:41:06 ◼   ► they do, which again, I don't want to get into.

01:41:08 ◼   ► But it's simply the job posting itself.

01:41:10 ◼   ► I don't think that was the right way to go about that on so many different levels, despite

01:41:14 ◼   ► the fact that I acknowledge that it is very possible that the person who takes that job

01:41:18 ◼   ► will be happy with it and will come out of the company saying, "I was glad I took that

01:41:22 ◼   ► job."

01:41:23 ◼   ► You know, it's funny hearing you talk about knowing someone who does something stupid

01:41:27 ◼   ► and seeing a stranger do something stupid.

01:41:31 ◼   ► And I feel like, Marco, that's why you get burned a lot because you're very passionate

01:41:36 ◼   ► and very opinionated, which in and of itself is not bad.

01:41:39 ◼   ► But I think that a lot of times you come across as arrogant and because I know you, and both

01:41:44 ◼   ► of us know you as well as we do, I don't think a thing of it.

01:41:47 ◼   ► And then I'll see, and I can't think of a great example, but I'll see the internet go freaking

01:41:51 ◼   ► nuts because Marco said this ridiculously arrogant thing.

01:41:54 ◼   ► And to me, I'm just like, "Wait, what?"

01:41:57 ◼   ► Because I know you and I know enough about where you're coming from to know that's probably

01:42:03 ◼   ► not how you meant it.

01:42:04 ◼   ► Or even if it is, you meant it at level two out of 10 and the internet's taking it as

01:42:09 ◼   ► is a level 10 out of 10.

01:42:10 ◼   ► And it's a very similar thing.

01:42:12 ◼   ► And so it's often funny for me to watch

01:42:14 ◼   ► some of the skirmishes you either get yourself into

01:42:17 ◼   ► or put yourself into.

01:42:19 ◼   ► Because not always, but most times, I'm like,

01:42:22 ◼   ► oh, well, yeah, it's just Marker being Marker, whatever.

01:42:24 ◼   ► - But you get graded on a curve.

01:42:26 ◼   ► Once you have any amount of fame,

01:42:28 ◼   ► that scrutiny is much higher.

01:42:29 ◼   ► And Penny Arcade, that's not excusing them at all.

01:42:31 ◼   ► Penny Arcade has tons of fame, and guess what?

01:42:34 ◼   ► You get the good and the bad that comes with it.

01:42:35 ◼   ► I mean, same with the Marker.

01:42:36 ◼   ► Would you rather have people not care what you say,

01:42:38 ◼   ► or overreact about what you're saying.

01:42:41 ◼   ► And that's the price of--

01:42:42 ◼   ► Yeah, depends on the day.

01:42:43 ◼   ► I know, but that's the price of being well-known.

01:42:46 ◼   ► That's the price of being successful in your endeavors,

01:42:48 ◼   ► is that things you say are going to be scrutinized.

01:42:50 ◼   ► I mean, the biggest example is any kind of politician,

01:42:53 ◼   ► or the president, or whatever they say anything.

01:42:54 ◼   ► They fart the wrong way.

01:42:55 ◼   ► They say they don't like broccoli,

01:42:56 ◼   ► and it's an international incident.

01:42:57 ◼   ► Remember that?

01:42:58 ◼   ► But maybe you don't, George Bush.

01:42:59 ◼   ► Anyway--

01:43:00 ◼   ► Yeah, we were alive for that.

01:43:02 ◼   ► That comes with the territory.

01:43:04 ◼   ► And the poor plenty arcade guys, A,

01:43:06 ◼   ► up doing legitimately bad things, and B) rail against the unfairness of being held to the

01:43:14 ◼   ► standard that they didn't want to sign up for. And I understand the emotion, but you have to realize

01:43:19 ◼   ► that comes with the territory. There's no ninja move where you're like, "Haha, but I don't accept

01:43:27 ◼   ► that you're going to scrutinize me, therefore my actions shouldn't be taken as seriously as

01:43:31 ◼   ► as they are, it's like, you don't get to decide that, right? You do speak for a large media

01:43:36 ◼   ► conglomerate empire, your words do have more in effect than they would if you were a regular

01:43:40 ◼   ► person. You can't go back to being a regular Joe. Yeah, that's the way it is. I feel like

01:43:47 ◼   ► I should just, if I just sit down with them for like, okay, maybe it would have to be

01:43:50 ◼   ► on an island for a month. Because sometimes I feel like I was with Steve Jobs. If I could

01:43:54 ◼   ► just get Steve Jobs in a room, I could convince him of X, Y. I'm like, no, realistically,

01:43:57 ◼   ► he would walk out of the room. I need to have him prisoner in a nice way so that they can't

01:44:03 ◼   ► run away. And eventually, it's like in that movie where there's a prisoner or even just

01:44:08 ◼   ► like a student who in the beginning they hate the teacher and they hate the teacher for

01:44:11 ◼   ► the first six months, but then they finally come around and then the real work gets going.

01:44:13 ◼   ► That's what you need. I feel like someone should be able to talk to these guys and explain

01:44:18 ◼   ► to them what it is they're missing because I really believe they can be turned around.

01:44:21 ◼   ► I just haven't done it yet.

01:44:23 ◼   ► Well, I don't think they think there's anything wrong with this.

01:44:27 ◼   ► I know, that's problem zero. There it is. Maybe someone could explain it to you. Maybe

01:44:33 ◼   ► no one's explaining it the right way. Let me explain it again. Here's what's wrong.

01:44:38 ◼   ► It's hard when you get as much crap as they get, which I can only begin to imagine. I

01:44:45 ◼   ► get some small fraction of that amount of crap, and I'm always surprised in the new

01:44:54 ◼   ► ways that I've accidentally offended people. Like, it's like every week I accidentally

01:45:00 ◼   ► stumble upon a new way that I've offended somebody. And it gets to me, it really does,

01:45:06 ◼   ► because I want to be a nice guy. I don't want to be a dick. I don't want people to think

01:45:11 ◼   ► I'm a dick. But you're just so good at it. But I really don't mean to be. That's totally

01:45:16 ◼   ► unintentional. But you would learn from your mistakes. Again, I don't want to get into

01:45:22 ◼   ► specific instances, but they'll say something that is unintentionally sexist or transphobic

01:45:28 ◼   ► or something, and they literally don't know what they just did wrong. And that's the problem, right?

01:45:34 ◼   ► And the worst reaction is to get defensive and double down on it, and that's what they do.

01:45:39 ◼   ► They get defensive and double down on the wrong thing that they did. And it's like,

01:45:42 ◼   ► that's the whole thing of trying to educate someone. If you do something that is legitimately...

01:45:46 ◼   ► If you said something that actually is arrogant, the way you said it is dismissive of other people

01:45:52 ◼   ► and whatever. I feel like that you learn from that experience and learn to say the same thing

01:45:56 ◼   ► in a different way or be more clear about what you're saying, right? Or express your

01:46:01 ◼   ► sentiment more accurately so it's less likely to be misinterpreted the wrong way. But I don't think

01:46:05 ◼   ► you've ever been in a situation where you said something that is like totally wrong and terrible

01:46:10 ◼   ► and doubled down on it and were like, "No, actually, screw you and let me tell you why.

01:46:16 ◼   ► I'm going to say that even more." Like that total emotional reaction. Your reaction always is,

01:46:20 ◼   ► is introspective and, well, not always.

01:46:24 ◼   ► Sometimes you have moments.

01:46:25 ◼   ► - No.

01:46:26 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:46:27 ◼   ► No, that's the problem.

01:46:28 ◼   ► It's like my instinct, I think,

01:46:30 ◼   ► which is a natural instinct, is to be defensive.

01:46:32 ◼   ► And I look back on things that blow up

01:46:37 ◼   ► that I didn't mean to blow up,

01:46:39 ◼   ► and I look back on what I actually said and did

01:46:42 ◼   ► after it's all over, and I can see,

01:46:44 ◼   ► wow, I did completely the wrong thing.

01:46:46 ◼   ► I got defensive, I was being immature,

01:46:49 ◼   ► or angry or impulsive, I look back and I'm ashamed of it.

01:46:53 ◼   ► But it's easy to say--

01:46:55 ◼   ► - But you learn from it though, don't you?

01:46:56 ◼   ► But you don't make that exact specific mistake again, right?

01:47:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, but I find new ones.

01:47:01 ◼   ► Look, it's easy to say, oh, if I was in this situation

01:47:05 ◼   ► like this, I would do X, Y, and Z.

01:47:08 ◼   ► I would react this way.

01:47:09 ◼   ► But then when you're actually in that situation,

01:47:12 ◼   ► a lot of times it doesn't turn out that way.

01:47:14 ◼   ► And it's so hard when your instinct is to be deficient

01:47:19 ◼   ► defensive or to say things off the cuff as if you're talking to a smaller group of

01:47:25 ◼   ► people who likes you more than the actual group of people you're talking to that's

01:47:28 ◼   ► much bigger, it's really hard to get used to that. And it's really hard to fundamentally

01:47:35 ◼   ► change your behavior and your personality to sand off those rough edges. I mean, I'm

01:47:41 ◼   ► 31 and I still haven't figured out how to do that quite well yet. I'm trying, but

01:47:45 ◼   ► I really have not figured it out yet.

01:47:47 ◼   ► They're similar ages.

01:47:48 ◼   ► I think they're between you and I.

01:47:50 ◼   ► I think they're in their thirties.

01:47:51 ◼   ► They have kids a similar age.

01:47:53 ◼   ► They're trying to figure it out as well.

01:47:55 ◼   ► And that instinct to lash out, it's not just the instinct to lash out.

01:48:01 ◼   ► The things that you get called on are just so minor compared to the things they do wrong.

01:48:07 ◼   ► Well I think it's mostly because I have a much smaller audience though.

01:48:09 ◼   ► If I had an audience the size of theirs, I think I would get as much as they do, if not

01:48:15 ◼   ► because I'm even less experienced at talking to an audience as large as theirs as they

01:48:21 ◼   ► are.

01:48:22 ◼   ► Well, I mean, here's, I don't know, I'm not going to name names, but like, say you said

01:48:26 ◼   ► something like, you know, "Well, everyone knows the girls can't climb trees."

01:48:30 ◼   ► Like, you said something sexist like that, right?

01:48:32 ◼   ► And you didn't understand that that statement was sexist.

01:48:36 ◼   ► All you can see is about the tree climbing business, and like, you didn't understand,

01:48:41 ◼   ► conceptually, like, you're like, "What's sexist about that?"

01:48:43 ◼   ► That's just a statement of fact.

01:48:44 ◼   ► Everyone knows girls can't climb a tree.

01:48:46 ◼   ► You don't understand the broader context in which that statement is.

01:48:50 ◼   ► Then you double down on it, you could argue about it, and you get lost in the details.

01:48:55 ◼   ► There is a base understanding of what is at stake here that does not exist in your head.

01:49:01 ◼   ► And so even if you get to the point, as they frequently do, where they're in apology mode

01:49:04 ◼   ► and they're like, "We're sorry.