668: So Happy for All Parties Involved

39:56The turnover is expected to continue with many of the remaining top leaders, including Cook, nearing typical retirement ages. Johnny Sruji, Apple's Silicon chief, and Lisa Jackson's Apple's head of government environmental initiatives have both been evaluating their features of the company, Bloomberg has reported. Marco, I know you don't have too much to say about this, so John, any thoughts? Well, I mean, I see you got a quote from Jason and Six Scholars here, and I did read what he wrote earlier. And he's saying exactly what I've been thinking and have said on past episodes when talking about stuff like this.

40:25Uh, perhaps more so than Marco, I've always been reticent to, uh, assign blame to particular individuals for Apple decisions that I don't agree with. Um, because who knows what goes on inside the company? There are two angles in this, both of which Jason mentioned in his article that we'll link. One is, well, okay, so you don't know what's happening inside the company, but you do know who's responsible for it according to Apple's org chart. And so even if it's not Johnny Ive or Alan Dyer or whatever, personally doing the thing you disagree with if they're in charge of all user interface design and you see a bunch of user interface design from apple that you don't like it's fair to say even though you didn't do this person like the coach doesn't play in the end on the team but they're in the end responsible for the performance of the team and the second thing is when apple brings out alan die and has him stand in front of a table of little clear pieces of plastic and try to explain why his terrible interface is good yeah i'm gonna blame alan die because i like did they force him out there to explain or try to explain or fail to like he is literally the face of the specific thing that i don't like and so although marco has been anti-all and i for a long long time i gave apple and alan the benefit of the doubt until there was no way to there was no way to deny the fact that he's in charge he's he in the end it's all his responsibility and he is literally in the video describing the thing.

41:54Again, it doesn't mean he did any or all of it himself, but he is clearly the face of this thing. And because he's in charge of it, whether he did it or not, he obviously approves of it. He's not out there being forced at gunpoint to promote something that he hates. Why would he hate it? He's literally in charge of the design team. So I'm glad to see him go. Marco, how do you feel? Well, hold on. Let me just read this from Jason real quick, and then I promise I will get out of Marco's way. And I know everyone's going to be mad at me, but let me just clear the decks, and then we'll set Marco loose.

42:21uh jason snell over six colors wrote so this is is this a major loss for apple and a major coup for meta as mark german editorializes to pause there like you didn't read the headline but like i believe the the bloomberg headline is what is it apple design executive alan dye poached by meta in major coup i mean unless the coup is planting a bad designer at meta to hurt them like what like so here's like very often we disagree with german's take on things and obviously we're very inside baseball and developers are more mad about apple's interface than most people are it's like maybe to the outside world and an average bloomberg reader like oh they'd hired a big designer from apple and everyone knows apple is good at design so there must be a coup and they've poached him but like the more you know about allendei and apple and the more you care about interface design, the less you think that headline makes any sense.

43:13Right. So with that in mind, and again, let me just clear the decks before I let Marco go. So is this a major loss for Apple and a major coup for Meta as Mark Gurman editorializes? I don't see it. Maybe those top executives who were bracing for his departure feel that way. Though my gut feeling is that if Apple really wanted Alan Dye to stay at Apple, they would have kept him. I think it's more likely that in the wake of Jeff Williams retiring as COO, other changes are afoot at Apple and perhaps Dye felt it was the right time to leave. Certainly being offered what must have been a truckload of money by Mark Zuckerberg couldn't hurt things.

43:41What I'm saying is sometimes when you're bracing for a departure of a senior employee, you're doing it because they think they're more valuable than you think they are. Sick burn. I don't know if that happened in this case. Change is hard, and it's natural for people, including Apple executives, to want to keep the band together as long as possible. But in the end, I think Alan Dye's departure is a major coup for Apple. And let me tell you, I don't know Alan Dye for nothing. I think it's probably a good thing that he's leaving. but I was looking at Instagram shortly before we started recording.

44:09And let me tell you, this man sniffs his own farts and loves it because sure enough on his Insta stories is the following quote. I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should do something else. Wonderful. Not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next. Steve jobs. Oh, he does not deserve to use that quote. That is on his Insta stories. So here's the thing about on diet. It was interview with him that I didn't want to pull out one after the liquid glass thing where he was, I forget who he was interviewed with maybe it was the verge or something but he was basically saying like that he feels like he has imposter syndrome and he's afraid everyone's just going to find out that he has no idea what he's doing which seemed just so on the nose and I didn't put it on the show it was like yeah I saw that that was because that was what from a couple years ago right no I think it was more recent than that but it's like like look humans are human like maybe he feels that way but maybe he's also trying to put a brave face on him leaving apple and we don't know all the details or whatever but like people are complex and it's difficult but like in the end I try not to put it on the person.

45:05In the end, I don't like the user interface things that Apple did when he was in charge of those things. That's what it comes down to. All right, Marco. Thank you for being patient. How do you feel? I'm so happy for all parties involved. All right, so we just said, for John G. and Andrea's departure, we were just saying how we don't know all of the effects that go into somebody not succeeding in a company. It could be the person. It could be their team. It could be the company around them. It could be so many things. It could be the leaders above them, not letting them do what they want to do.

45:42It could be too aggressive timelines or too much scope. There's so many ways that the work of a division under a person can be bad or non-ideal that aren't necessarily the person's fault. I don't know Alan Dye. he you know in in the very little bit i've read from him or seen from him i don't think we would necessarily get along but i'm sure he's a fine person and i'm not i'm not gonna like you know dance on the grave of his career at apple um you know because you know like in a way that would feel too deeply personal but here's the thing again just like jg you gotta look at results the results of software design since he's been in charge have been all over the place.

46:29You can look back at like, how did Alan Dye get to this position? Well, that was back when, you know, in the early Tim Cook era after Steve Jobs had passed away, Tim kind of didn't know how to assign talent to things like software and, you know, design, you know design beyond you know industrial design and so tim had put johnny in charge of all design and johnny brought in alan die who i believe was in like the print marketing team or something at the time and put him in charge of software design and that was you know look you put someone in charge of software design that was not really a software designer then or now and it does seem like the fart sniffing has grown over time you know just because somebody mentions imposter syndrome in an interview a couple years ago doesn't necessarily mean that they are modest or or have a have an honest view of their work and the designs that we've seen from die especially in recent years have have not shown modesty or maybe you know humility or even necessarily interest in making the best work, even if it's not your ideal.

47:49No, it's the opposite. The work we've seen coming out of Apple software design in recent years, especially this past year, has been, we know what's best. Screw you. By the way, it's actually not especially good in certain ways, especially ways that are traditional software usability hallmarks. Things like control sizing, button tap areas, contrast, text legibility. There's so many issues with the new designs that are directly against decades of well-established human interface and computer design. So I look at the Dai era, and whether it was Dai's fault or not, this is a pretty significant sign that that era has just ended.

48:31because if you look at like the bigger picture here he just shipped all of the 26 series os redesigns it's been only a few months since the public has had access to these and he's all of a sudden changing jobs now there is you know there are other dynamics here meta is on a hiring spree they have been for some time like since the ai thing also meta is known to pay really well one One of the reasons so much talent goes to meta is not because everyone loves Zuckerberg and Facebook and Instagram. That's not why a lot of people go to work there. People go to work there because they pay really well.

49:11Souls cost money. Right. And when Zuck wants to hire some talent, he pays whatever it takes. And it can be really high. And Apple has traditionally been regarded as the opposite. Apple is historically not thought of as a place that you get paid particularly well compared to other Silicon Valley competitors. Apple's kind of like, you want to work for us because we're the best and screw you if you want more money, basically. Like that's the impression I've gotten from a lot of reports about Apple's salary negotiation. Yeah, to be clear, just to jump in here, from what I understand, people who work at Apple still make a hilarious amount of money.

49:51Oh, yeah, it's great money. But compared to like compared to what Meta would pay. Exactly. Yeah. Or even Google or Netflix or any of the other local. And this is before we even start talking about the like athlete salaries that we discussed on a past episode, just regular person salaries. Apple is always trying to kind of be like average or in the middle and Meta is a little bit higher. But for for people at this level, it dies level. Then I feel like we're getting into the whole, you know, athlete salary, you know, tens, hundreds of millions of dollars, ridiculous stuff like that. Yeah. And so, you know, for the Die era to end seemingly at an odd time and maybe suddenly, this doesn't sound like executives were bracing just about to hear that he's going to leave us.

50:38Oh, no, what are we going to do? It kind of sounds to me like they let him go. Like, not that they fired him, but they literally let Meta kind of take him without putting up a huge fight. That's kind of what it sounds like. Yeah, this smells to me like, you know, if he went into Tim's or whoever's office and said, Hey, guess what? I'm out, expecting Tim or whoever to be like, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. How much are they offering you? Let's talk. And instead of that conversation, Tim just said, Oh, okay. Good luck. You know what I mean? I didn't see the whole I don't know what the whole statement was from Tim Cook to Bloomberg.

51:13But the part that was quoted talks about Steve LeMay, not Alan Dye. It talks about the great guy that we have replacing Alan. It's not you don't I don't see maybe they'll be in the press. But I don't see the like, thank you, Alan, for all your years of work and blah, blah, blah. And it's been wonderful. Like it's a difference between like retiring or like bowing out versus being disloyal and going to Facebook, which I think Tim Cook likes a lot less than the way JG left. And again, I haven't seen the whole statement. Maybe there is that in the statement, but the quoted part is not about Alan Dye at all.

51:46And so let's talk about Steve LeMay. So Steve LeMay is the person who has been appointed basically Dye's replacement. Like, I don't know if the titles are exactly the same, but it sounds like direct Dye replacement. And Tim Cook gave a statement in Bloomberg that says, Steve LeMay has played a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999. and you know just some there's not much about him on the internet but you know you do some quick like you know linkedin searches and stuff and you see yeah that's he's been at apple since 1999 and he's a ui designer oh my god a ui designer who's in charge of ui design at apple imagine that this has not been the case for the last 10 years we didn't know if there were any left in the company i you know we don't know we don't know really from the public's perspective we don't know anything about Steve LeMay.

52:31But this to me is a promising new direction. You're taking somebody who seems like he has worked on the Mac on UI, you know, for a very long time and has been there for a very long time. Maybe this is just me being sensitive in these areas. The one of the things that that kind of rubs me the wrong way is that I love two things that historically a lot of people have not loved podcasts and computers um and actually and and even you know we saw this like early on in podcasts we saw that there were and still you know to this day this kind of thing remains but you know there were a lot more in the past of like startups or products general comments from the industry of like well you don't want to listen to podcasts right so here's some products you don't have to um and and there was kind of this like this kind of assumption baked into a lot of discourse out there from like the general public for a long time, less so now, but for a long time of like podcasts, God, that's, those are terrible.

53:38Why do you want to listen to podcasts? And kind of assuming like, of course, everyone agrees with that. And that same common, like, you know, attitude has been levied at computers for all of computing. And some, some of that, you know, for a lot of people that is deserved, you know, for a lot of people, computers are kind of their enemy. They've been, you know, hard to use or they fight them or they represent like their work or, you know, whatever it is. Lots of reasons for that. But what started being really scary and, you know, discomforting and discouraging to me over the years has been that it seems like Apple was taken over by people who didn't like computers either.

54:15It seems like, you know, Steve Jobs loved computers. Clearly for his entire life, It was very, very obvious. He freaking loved computers and understood how to make great computers. Didn't succeed 100 % of the time, but loved computers nonetheless and had a really good track record. And then Tim Cook took over and Tim Cook does not care about computers. You could tell like it's been very obvious, like Tim Cook could not give less of a crap about computers. And it showed. And Johnny Ive always seemed like he was kind of in that in that ballpark, too, of like he was. he loves industrial physical design.

54:53Johnny Ive is very good at physical design, but it seems like a lot of Johnny's products, especially the unedited late Johnny era, seem like computers designed by people who hate computers and who assume everyone else hates computers too. And you want as little computer as possible. Why do you want capabilities and ports and stuff? Why do you want battery life? You want to just have this computer that's like nothing because you hate computers and alan dye his era of software design leadership has seemed like that bringing that same attitude to software like especially on the mac where he really seemed like he never even bothered to try to understand the mac the design of computer interfaces under alan dye was don't you hate all the things your computer can do don't you want to just get rid of them just hide them just get all this clutter out of the way get all these tools and operations you can do on things all the things that you can use your computer for besides just idly looking at content just get it all out of just get rid of all get out clean this up all this dirt all these dirty features and functions and things you can do to produce or edit or enjoy something get all that out of the way.

56:06Instead, look at me with my shiny glass over top of your content fading and blurring and warping and blurring. Look at me. We're getting out of the way of your content, but look at the interface. We don't like what computers have done. We don't like the way things are done. We don't like making good interfaces. We like making no interface, except we don't have the self-control to make no interface. So instead, we're going to show off with a really flashy interface how little of interface we can make and so it was it was all principles of again i i read it as that same attitude of like don't you hate computers no i don't hate computers i freaking love computers so does the guy who wrote that quote in your instagram story and to love computers and to watch the company that makes the best computers be taken over by people who didn't seem like they loved computers as much as you is a really hard thing to go to like to get through without getting cynical and discouraged and kind of thinking like god i guess i guess we're not gonna like at some point this is gonna stop being the best computer company and then there won't be one left um and so maybe i'm reading way too much into all of this it wouldn't be the first time in my life But I find this encouraging that in a relatively short span, it seems like we are surprisingly close maybe to the end of the Tim Cook era at Apple, which is a big deal.

57:41Johnny Ive left a few years back and the products got a lot better after he left, I think, because they got a lot more balanced in terms of functionality versus nice design. And now Alan Dye is leaving and being replaced by somebody who's been there back when Apple was a computer company that made really great computers led by people who loved really great computers. So, again, we don't know anything about Steve LeMay from the public yet, but I think this is a promising sign. Maybe things are turning in a better direction now. and you know maybe in a maybe in a year or two we'll have interfaces heading more towards usability and functionality maybe we'll have a different ceo kind of slowly starting to turn things you know and if it's john turnus you know that's you know he comes from products like the the product part of the company which is promising if turnus is indeed also being considered as a as a CEO to happen imminently.

58:42Maybe he was part of the choice of who to replace Di with. Maybe he was involved in that decision or consulted for that decision. Who knows? But this all sounds like really promising turns for a company that I've made no secret that I've been pretty stale on the leadership recently. Again, maybe this is too optimistic. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, I think this is a very good sign. And you know what? Good for Alan Dye. He's probably making a lot more money at Meta. So I'm super glad for Zuckerberg and that wonderful group of people to lose some more money. That's great. And Dye gets paid more money probably to leave.

59:27And that makes Apple better. And so however this happened, thank you, world. Thank you for doing this uh we'll see where it goes from here but i i have i have pretty high hopes it's it's probably going to go up it's kind of a shame that he did release all the that apple did release all the 26 os's right before he leaves like we could just push that back and have him leave and then not release that was never going to happen though because they needed something to announce to wmc anyway uh like as i said when the 26 os's were out and we're talking about them we're on a multi-year slope with these 26 os's but it will become the 27 and 28 blah blah it's not like next year they're all going to be changed like i'm sure oh no it wouldn't be that fast liquid glass sorry and sorry sure liquid glass will continue to be refined but fundamentally there you know again there are there are fundamental problems with liquid glass that are not going away anytime soon um so it's going to take a while before we see any positive change just like it took a little while after johnny i've left to get like you know i was going to say powerbooks uh macbook rows with ports on them and everything in a new design but i don't think you're being too optimistic because he was at the top of an organization that was doing things we didn't like getting rid of the person at the top is your only chance to see any kind of change now it doesn't mean that change could be worse the change could be you know things could still get worse but it's the time to be optimistic is finally there there is a hope of change here because things were not going in a direction we liked for a long time and that was obviously not going to change by someone just presenting alan die with a strong argument because he was not convincible if anyone ever was presenting that argument and then so he drops the 26 os's and he's out the door now we're stuck with them for the next several years even as they may be like repaired and touched up before the next redesign so that's kind of a shame um but i am i've been thinking about like uh the 26 os how do they how do they what is the impression of them inside apple we talked about like obviously things we didn't like about them and things ui nerds don't like about them or whatever but who cares what is the general public going to think uh and apple probably cares much more about what the general public thinks um but a few things to note on this one underscore david smith's little chart of like again maybe not representative but he has very popular apps of like adoption of of the new ios version he said for the past few years they've been doing a thing where it sort of trickles out and then they pushed everybody real hard around the 0.1 or 0.2 update and so far he hasn't seen that with the 26 with ios 26 like there's just been a steady climb and apple people are still saying they're just about apple's just about to push it and by push it i mean like really strongly suggest to people that you update it or update it automatically overnight if they have the setting that way or whatever or apple tends to be cautious with new ios releases in particular where the early adopters update to immediately manually but they just let people sort of grow organically until they say okay now it's really ready with the point one or point two and they push it out hard and the graph takes a big bend upwards and the adoption rate goes up we haven't seen that yet with 26 maybe that means apple is still being a little cautious with this or maybe it's just a policy change who knows the other thing is no there's not public outcry about 26 being bad you know comedians are not making fun of it it's like it hasn't been terrible it's been fine people you know some people like it some people don't but i can tell you one thing in the public consciousness i don't think the uh the feeling about the 26 os is this is amazing you gotta get this everybody loves it and they're super jazzed about it i don't think that's happening at all and when you have a big redesign that's what you hope for we did a big redesign and the public loves it people can't stop talking about it say have you updated your phone the new one is much better you got like that is not a public forget about whether is justified or not.

1:03:05Sometimes that happens because they put new emoji in or they change one thing or whatever. But for whatever reason, iOS 26 is not doing that. Certainly Tahoe is not doing that either. And I think that's what Apple cares about. We, with much fanfare, we redesigned all our OSs and what they want to see happen. They don't forget about the nerds or whatever. What they want to see happen is I want there to be stories in publications or whatever. I want to hear word on the street is that everybody loves the comprehensive new os design and that has not been the story about the 26th story is also not that it's a disaster even though some people think it is but like it's it's just kind of in the middle like it's fine right and that's not you know if that's that doesn't sort of make alan dye's reputation become bigger within apple like great job alan you knocked it out of the park we did this rig redesign and everybody loves it no everybody doesn't love it they don't hate it either so it's not it's not like a jg thing where it's like a total failure you didn't do the thing we asked you you did the thing you launch it it's fine but it's not great and then the final factor which i'm just speculating about is surely somewhere within apple there are lots of people who are computer nerds who care about user interface design who hate everything that we hate about it right absolutely because that's where that's where those people land i'm not saying we're we're like a you know we are a tiny minority but where is this tiny minority likely to work at apple because those are the people who love apple and care about using their redesign.

1:04:32Not all employees and probably not even most, but just like the old cranky ones. Maybe like Steve LeMay. There is always pressure inside Apple. Anything you hear someone complain about Apple on the outside world, there are people inside Apple also having that complaint. Now, maybe they're not empowered to do anything about it, but that exists. And I feel like the people inside Apple who are cranky about things that Apple are doing, they can just be cranky for years and people can just ignore them. But I think it's impossible to not know that that sentiment exists inside Apple. So the 26th OS has come out.

1:05:03They're not a disaster, but they're not a home run. And there are cranky old people inside Apple grumbly about it. And they've been grumbling probably the whole time about it, the whole time anyone has known about it. That is not a formula for great job, Alan, from, you know, looking forward to what you do next. It's, it's kind of a situation where, you know, grad meta drops a bucket of money, I said, but Alan must be thinking, I did this great thing. Why isn't everybody, why aren't I getting an attaboy from tim cook why isn't everyone saying they love me and why do i hear whispers in the hallways about these cranky old people who don't like what i'm doing that makes you maybe want to look for a new job right again the money and facebook going to get i don't i don't doubt that facebook went to get him because facebook is has many wrong-headed notions about things including let me let me grab the designer that everybody loves from apple right who is that no it's not ellen die like we want him to do for apple what he did for us do you i don't know if you know what he did for Apple.

1:05:58Anyway, it seems like a situation where maybe his dignity is not hurt, but like, I don't think things are going as well as he hoped when Johnny Ive was in his job doing his great products. Everybody freaking loved him. There were stories about him. There were stories about the products, every single piece of media you ever saw about the iPod or the iPhone or the AirPods or anything that it's just, let me just have these long barger. He's a Johnny. I have, Let me tell you about his childhood. Can you believe he made these amazing products? Everybody loves them. They're so beautiful. That has not happened with the 26 OSs.

1:06:34And maybe Alan wishes it did. And so that's a perfect formula for, maybe I should do something else. So bye, Alan. Glad to see you go. Wow. Okay, so we've had this in the show notes for a couple of weeks. Hasn't quite been long enough to bump it to overtime. But on the 18th of November, there was a big, big, big outage. Not the AWS outage, the other one. So reading from the Cloudflare blog, on 18 November 2025 at 1120 UTC, Cloudflare's network began experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic. This showed up to internet users trying to access our customer sites as an error page indicating a failure within Cloudflare's network.

1:07:12The issue was not caused directly or indirectly by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database system's permissions, which caused the database to output multiple entries into a feature file used by our bot management system. That feature file in turn doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network. Whoops. The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our bot management system up to date with ever-changing threats.

1:07:41The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail. A couple angles in the story. first uh as someone who's worked in you know online server side stuff for 25 years this failure is so textbook like if you read the details of it you're like if you've been in this industry like oh i've had that happen oh i've done that oh i could totally see that oh i forget what it was this one was like um an assumption a missing filter on a query resulting in double the limits you know the limits on the size seems like a good idea at the time but like and then the other thing that i feel like is depressing because i complained about this at every company i was ever at and you always hope like but surely like the big competent companies don't do this um which is the lack of a staging environment that reflects production where you can test changes in production every company has this problem right like what you want is and by staging i mean production is the thing the customers use and development is the thing developers use it's broken or whatever and there are levels between there and like the final one before production we always used to call it staging in the companies i worked at which is it's supposed to be like production but it's not actually production so however production is set up whatever hardware it's got whatever software it's like a miniature version of production has to be configured the same way deployed to the same way it's just tiny it doesn't have millions of servers or whatever and it's not accessed by millions of people but it has to work the same so if they had a representative staging environment and they had deployed this change into that staging environment all the machines would have you know the query would have gone afoul run out a double-sized thing it would have been pushed out to everyone else they would have tried to load the double-sized file and they all would have failed and it'll be like oh we that change you just put out we just pushed it to staging and it broke everything and so it wouldn't get to production because you'd say like if we push it to production it would break everything in production it's clear that there's not a staging environment that is sufficiently similar to production that is always the problem it's like well of course we have a staging environment is it the same as production mostly there are some minor differences but surely those minor differences won't make a difference like oh there's a different kernel version here or in in uh you know we have hardware versions of this load balancer in production but we have a software simulated version and staging you have to make it actually the same because you never know where the problem is going to come up maybe the problem will be oh this specific kernel version has a specific bug that triggers this thing and that that specific kernel version is only in production and staging is like one patched revision different and that was the part that you trip across so you know no but this it's part of growing up is learning that no company has a competent staging environment even someone as big and powerful as closer anyway that's not mainly what i want to talk about here what i'm talking about here was this outage uh going by and my strange reaction to it which was i should get on cloud flare i swear to you like this my first thought was like you know reminiscing about all the problems i've had in production how this is so typical and down to this particular details and the staging environment my second was i've been meaning to do stuff with cloud flare and you would think this is not like why would you a big company has an outage that attracts you to it as a customer it's like that's where i want to be the big company that had an outage due to uh incompetence that i'm familiar with from my working world like why why would you want to do that part of it is i had the meaning to look into cloud server stuff and this is like a reminder like them just being in the news like oh yeah i meant to do that part of it is the entirely wrong-headed notion that's like well they just had a failure so surely they're not going to have another one right after it which is not logical or true and not how things work that's not how things in fact it may be more likely they're gonna have another failure of it but anyway that did pop into my mind um and what do i why am i interested in cloudflare at all i think also because like marco mentioned it recently uh in the context of atp stuff or when you're talking about the episode artwork so it was like doubly in my mind from like a recent atp and this giant outage um and the reason i wanted to use it is i have you know my personal website on an incredibly incredibly inexpensive crappy shared hosting service that's ancient um that i really should move off of but i never want to get around to it because it's just like such a hassle it's like oh it works fine i have a static website there's nothing on it just a bunch of text and images like it's not it's not exciting in any way but there are some things that are annoying about it first occasionally my shared hosting and my virtual servers and whatever like i don't know they get like swapped out or whatever like the first hit to my website will take a couple seconds to load and you're like what the hell i also have like an uptime monitoring service that i can see that my uptime is has like three nines because occasionally it goes down for reasons i'm like it's all right but it's it's so cheap my hosting is so cheap it's just a static website no one goes to my website anyway i don't get any traffic so who cares but it but it bothered me so i'm like well i could solve that by either moving everything to a different you know platform or putting something in front of it and the second thing is all my websites have like ssl certificates especially like i have dot app websites like switch class dot app and front and center dot app that just redirect somewhere but dot app in particular has to be ssl so you need a certificate for it even if all you're doing is it redirecting and of course my main website has ssl and i bought certificates for those years ago and i used to buy like the five-year certificates or whatever they were by you but more recently with the upgrades to tls you can buy a quote five-year certificate but you have to reissue it every year like you paid for five years but you have to reissue it every year uh and it i don't know how long but for many years there's been a free service called let's encrypt at lots and let's encrypt.org that will give you free ssl certificates including a script to manage it for you you don't have to do anything simple you set it and forget it and doesn't cost you any money it's great my crappy shared hosting service probably intentionally does not support let's encrypt and trying to do it manually would be difficult because of the way share hosting works so i don't have my own web server it's a shared but it's it's a mess or whatever so whenever i have to reissue my certificates which now is like six certificates that i have to do every single year i have to create the certificate signing request with open ssl oh no send it in and get that like you know and i started making scripts to do it i'm like i'm slowly badly reinventing let's encrypt no don't do this but it was like but it was still annoying because you had to like copy and paste it into their little cpanel interface and it was just like i put it shared hosting i don't i'm not running the server myself i don't have access to it i have to use their stupid interface and it annoyed me so much so cloudflare cloudflare to the rescue because cloudflare one of the things they provide is ssl certificates so they probably use let's encrypt or something similar with their own thing for free that they'll update that you don't have to worry about reassuring it they'll just do all that for you they also offer caching which i'm like well when if my site is down or slow if i could just serve it from the cloud player's edge cache for the thing that'll be great and that's also free and i figured you know why not try this now i had questions about it particularly like how do you do this what does the cloud player interface look like what is the website or whatever so i did my usual thing which is open up a couple browser windows pull up my favorite uh lm chatbot things and ask them exactly the same question have them compete and see and see what they think describe the situation here's my current hosting i'm thinking i'm going to cloudflare uh what do i have to do and then i look at all their answers uh and i do that out of academic curiosity but also because like when they say contradictory things such that only one of them can be right it clues you in it first of all helps you not trust everything they say because you're like well these both can't be right because they're contradictory maybe they're both wrong maybe one's wrong maybe the other one's wrong but it lets you know like all right this may be a little bit sketchy um but the good thing is in my third window or fourth window i have actual cloudflare open and i can see that menu item doesn't exist maybe it's from an old version of cloudflare but this one does or whatever so i can follow the instructions how to do this i also had some questions which was like how is this going to work under the covers as a web developer i know how many ways it could work but how does it actually work with cloudflare like how does cloudflare talk to your back end how do you deal with situations like dot app domains um or like if you wanted to talk ssl to what they call your origin server don't you still need a certificate on your origin server they can use self-signed certificates blah blah and that the various you know i think i think the two i narrowed down to is gemini and chat gpt they both had similar answers here i still don't know if they're actually right because they're describing what cloudflare is doing internally and i'm not privy to that but the explanation was sufficient for me to at least know what i'm looking out for they were trying to claim that it communicates over ip address to the thing and they'll generate a self-signed certificate for you or whatever i don't know if that's actually true but anyway all this is to say it was like an afternoon an afternoon of just going through the internet afternoon on my live site i'm like i'll do it live no one goes to my site anyway it doesn't matter it was fine especially since the dns propagation takes a while anyway there's like a a window in the middle there where i can screw things up and then i tweaked the caching for a little bit uh it worked and i moved every one of my sites that had an ssl certificate to cloudflare and the cloudflare has now managed all of them for me and i enabled caching and tweaked all those rules so the vast vast majority of my traffic is now being cached at their cdn that's closer to the edge is my site faster i don't know it was already pretty fast it's just text and images it's not really a complicated website but it makes me happier and for the first time this year i guess starting now for the 12 months starting now i will not have to manually renew or reissue any ssl certificates and by the way everything that i've done in cloudflare 100 % free because their free plan offers all of this which i think is a mistake but whatever i'll take it i was tempted to do that the next thing up is like 20 a month and i'm tempted to do that just to see what the features are but this is all for free and i know this is this is ridiculous people like dude let's encrypt has existed for like 15 years like what are you even doing i know but i had this is what happens when you have a website that's been around for a long time or it's on a service that's been around for a long time you're behind the times i'm bit like who uses shared hosting don't you know that you can get a free dedicated server that you can control yourself for same or less money with better yeah i do know that but it would require a lot more movingness this required me to do almost nothing it required me to click a bunch of things on cloudflare and it required me to click a smaller number of things on my shared hosting thing and that was it And just the relief I feel from having, I don't know, six or seven websites all now being managed on Cloudflare with its SSL and not having to worry about any of that stuff on my shared hosting just makes me feel good.

1:18:14So I know Cloudflare, the company, has some questionable practices and some questionable things, and we've talked about them in the past or whatever. But right now I'm just feeling relief about finally doing something to my website that I wanted to do for a long time and eliminating one source of things that I have to worry about. Now all I have to worry about is the next Cloudflare outage. for what it's worth we talked about this i'm pretty sure fairly briefly um call sheet app.com is my marketing website for call sheet it's also where um if you share a link from call sheet it will share to um a a path within call sheet app.com that is all on cloudflare that is all running 100 free i don't think it's using let's encrypt from what i can tell from the certs on my website but But either way, it is definitely complicated.

1:19:04Their web interface, I wouldn't say it's bad, but it's complicated. I've never really used AWS, but the way people describe AWS is that it's this but much worse. Cloudflare is so much less complicated. Yeah, no, no, I agree. And also, by the way, Cloudflare is much nicer than cPanel if you're familiar with that. I feel like Cloudflare is a fairly straightforward interface. cPanel is like you're back in the 90s somehow, and AWS is just a whole other world. AWS is punitive. Like I had to log in the other day, like it, for some reason, like, you know, Overcast uses it for all the uploads hosting for premium.

1:19:35And for some reason, my credit card started being declined on AWS. I don't, it's been the same credit card for years. Like it's been, I don't know why, but it, so I'm, you know, I have getting the message like, oh, your payment failed. Go log in to make a payment. So I log in and like, because I hardly ever log into AWS, trying to figure out how to pay them. like oh my even that it's like all right first of all do you log in as the root user or the iam user i don't know and they log in a root and they yell at you well you shouldn't be doing anything it's like oh my god just i'm trying to pay you the money that you say oh you and then you finally get in and it's like okay well um you know here here's your credit card form okay great uh hit submit and it's like all right your payment's been accepted cool all right and then you know five minutes later get an email your payment wasn't accepted oh my god oh fun go back in and then you change like doing anything for aws is an exercise in massive frustration like yeah cloud flare i mean granted cloud flare does a lot less and so that's part of why they can be so much simpler on their control panel um but like not like they're still a pretty you know mature product and they still have a lot of features.

1:20:52And so I think they just manage a substantially better usability design. And AWS is just enterprise software. And so every single thing there is cluttered up with a billion enterprise features that like, yeah, two customers wanted that, so they added it. And there's so much complexity there to do what should be very simple things. Cloudflare seems like - To use a Merlin word, only Snorks use the AWS web interface, you realize that like that's that's kind of like yes the AWS web interface is a mess that's not what you're supposed to be using serious people interface with it through the API and I know it doesn't help you with your credit card thing but again serious people I don't know how pay with purchase orders for millions of dollars like AWS and the web interface is like that's not that's not how it's meant to be used kind of like there's this whole third-party companies like cloud information also like that exist to be a middleware layer between your programs and the aws api and nowhere in there should humans be clicking around at a web interface because that's not repeatable it's not like it's you want it to be automated i'm not sure humans ever have clicked around this interface i don't think you may be the first one figure it out like it i barely figured it out and only to do a very very basic thing oh man what what a mess yeah cloudflare is much nicer cloudflare is like like a more modern version of cpanel like with knowledge of the web past 1996 um and not to be to trash cpanel cpanel is actually kind of amazing for the amount of functionality it provides but it is a time it is a time capsule to to a different time um and cloudflare is just a modern web interface to the functionality they provide and they do a good job of like having lots of help links and explaining to you what they mean like when they use jargon to explain their features it's like well this is what we mean when we say this this is what we mean when say that you have to learn the vocabulary i was i was fairly impressed with how well it worked and on the chat gpt and gemini front um margaret you mentioned before like asking it for uh screw sizes or whatever and saying like i didn't even check well you did because that's the thing that's the reason i think this is a perfect application for um lms i'm gonna immediately find out if the thing is telling me to do works because i'm literally clicking on a web interface and then loading my web, you know, like it either works or it doesn't.

1:23:05And I'm testing it immediately. You bought those screws without trying to verify the information. The way you verified it is if you got those screws home and tried to put them in back to TV and they didn't fit, you would know immediately wrong screw. There's no like condition where you would like have no idea that it was the wrong screw and put it in. And two days later, your TV would explode. That would never happen. You can tell when a screw is the wrong size. It either fits or it doesn't. That is the ideal use case for LLMs. something that can be verified very quickly and unambiguously it kind of i was trying to think of this analogy on a recent rectif episode but it's like um with encryption uh like i this i'm sure there's a word for this or a term of arbor like you want something that um when you get the right answer it's trivial to confirm that the answer is right but it's really hard to get the right answer like you're doing prime factors and numbers or whatever it's you know you can tell the number is right in the answer is right instantly but how do you find the right answer that takes computational you know millennia or whatever right that's what the ideal is and the ideal for lms is anything that you will immediately be able to check whether it's right that's what you do right and so that kind of excludes things like health information where it's like well maybe you know if it's telling me to uh you know eat donuts every day i won't find out until i have a heart attack 20 years from now or whatever but like if it tells you a screw size and the screw size is wrong you're going to find out real quick if it tells me to do this on the website and then this will happen and i do it and it doesn't happen guess what i just found out whether it's right or wrong so um and the only reason i'm doing the competition with the two of them is just you know because it's kind of fun to see the different approaches and so i can compare them and maybe give me a slightly better chance of not doing something dumb where i see there's differences between them it makes me you know put up my antenna or whatever but in the end like as i started to progress through the thing i'm like i'd no longer looked at the lms instructions and just started doing it myself because you sort of figure out the interface.

1:24:54So that's what I suggest to people. Use LLM for what they're good for, and they're good for basically anything that you can immediately check, and that the consequences of it are not a big deal. Mark would have to make a second trip to the hardware store. Oh, no. I'm sure he's familiar with that. But if you get lucky and you don't, there you go. The guy at the hardware store checkout was like, see you later? And I said, probably. Well, I mean, maybe not for this, but for something else. No, I'm glad it worked out, John. Again, my experience with Cloudflare has been extremely positive, and I'm very impressed with what I was able to get away with for free, like you had said.

1:25:26And at some point, I will probably follow in your footsteps and look at, you know, what would it take to move my website over there? Now, mine is not static as it stands. It's a little bit more complicated. But nevertheless, I bet you I could find a way to put it in there without too much work. And to be clear, I didn't move my website anywhere. All I'm doing is sending the traffic through Cloudflare. I moved my DNS to Cloudflare, sort of. i mean i still have all the dns on hover it's complicated but anyway the point is network when you make a request to hypercritical.co or switchglass.app or front and center.app or front hyphen and hyphen center hyphen.app anyway all of you make a request any of these things you are hitting an ip address controlled by cloudflare which goes through their network and then it makes it proxies a back-end request to my quote-unquote origin server in uh cloudflare parlance which is called a million other things and a million other services and that hits my actual server.

1:26:18The actual server is still exactly where it has always been on my crappy shared hosting, but there is now a CDN in front of it and the Cloudflare network and they manage all this SSL's termination between the client and you. It's still SSL between Cloudflare and my server, but it's using a self-signed 15-year certificate that only Cloudflare trusts. Anyway, you don't have to worry about it, but the point is I didn't have to move my website. I didn't have to change anything about it. Gotcha. Well, still, I'm glad you got that covered. We are sponsored this episode by Delete.me. Delete.me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data from hundreds of data brokers online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable.

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1:29:09that for some reason, Siri always auto-corrects C-H-R-I-S to K-R-I-S. And I theorized, oh, well, I bet you have a contact, you know, that's named Chris, K-R-I-S, in your phone. He said, nope, definitely don't. I don't have a good answer for this. So one of you are going to have to take this. Well, I mean, I saw this fly by, and I thought this was a fun thing because I've dealt with this before. In fact, we probably talked about it in ATP before. the wonderful voice assistant in your phone if you have an apple phone has had a feature for many years where if it said your name and you didn't like how it pronounced it you could say that's not how you pronounce my name and it would say okay how should i pronounce your name and you would say your name the way you wanted to pronounce and then it would say okay from now on i'll call you whatever you said i have any of you use that feature it's been no i'm aware of it but i've never used well it has been used in my household um to great comic effect because back in the day tiff would say call me tiff and it would say okay from now on i will call you test cool no and like no call me tiff okay test from now on i will call you test like it's just now i actually have a different problem which is um at some point in the last maybe two years or so again nothing in my contacts has changed about my wife in the last two years um but at some point in the last two years uh my phone has started frequently auto-correcting tiff to tiff the all capital the tagged image file format yes the file format name which i so i assume there is a a database you know in the phone of like you know known terms and you know proper nouns and things like that and you know trademarks and at some point the tag image file format uh got in there in the last few years and so now even though she is like the contact i like you know have the most frequent contact with on my phone and her name is not tiffany on the phone it's tiff like so i'm like it's the first name of my wife how could you possibly downrank that from anything else but nope nevertheless in many contexts in the phone when typing tiff it comes out as all capitals yeah so when i saw this i figured let me just do it on my phone just to fresh my memory before we answer this on the show um and like so many things involving apple's voice assistant just because a thing used to exist and you've used it for maybe years doesn't mean it still exists or works right and it was just a comedy of errors i'm sitting at my desk my computer desk with my phone i hold the side button to activate siri and i say um first i just want to hear how it pronounces my name i say how do you pronounce my name it puts up a text bubble and says uh well you're john you asking me and i say pronounce my last name oh well no one can do that the side button to make it do it by the way it just it just showed text it didn't say anything i'm like is the volume down on my phone i start hitting the volume button like no the volume's not down i'm it's comical i'm trying to get it to say my name i'm saying siri say my name it will not only will it not say my name and give me snarky replies of like you're john that's what you told me it's never speaking audibly it is only showing text bubbles like am i going have i gone deaf again i'm hitting the volume buttons like why is it not i why is it not speaking to me i do this for a little while arguing with the thing, trying to literally ever get it to say my last name or say anything.

1:32:51It's not even saying John. It's not making any audible noise. It is just putting text boxes. I'm like, did I accidentally hit tap to Siri? No, I didn't do that. Eventually I hear my home pod in the other room say something audibly to me that says, you know, you're John. You're asking me what your name is. I think you're John. Like home pod, you're a room away. I can't even believe if you could hear me. I mean, meanwhile, my phone is still dead silent. So my new theory is turn off the screen on the phone, maybe because the screen is on and I'm holding the phone and I'm looking at it. It doesn't want to talk to me.

1:33:23And that finally gets my phone to start saying things, but I still cannot get it to say my last name. I can't, I can't get the opportunity to do what I had done in the past, which was, that's not how you say my name. That's what I always said to it in the past when it would say my last name. And I would say, that's not how you say my name. we would reply please say your name how you want to say it and i would say blah blah instead i was just getting text bubbles and eventually audio that was telling me you can change this in the contacts app like it did like their product knowledge thing like go to the contacts app and find you know hit the edit field and it's telling you to add a custom field to your contact where you can fit oh what is it called um find the name of the phonetic pronunciation uh did i just lose it or am i not on the edit screen here yeah some phonetic pronunciation i think it's called let me maybe i have to x out of that i don't know how it doesn't show all the fields yeah i can't tell what it's i can't tell what it's called because alan die has been on the screen and has made it so that you can only see the label as dim gray text if there's nothing in the field but once but once there's something in the field like it says on the edit screen the first uh line says john second one says syracusa and the third line says my pronunciation but i only know that because i what looks like a pronunciation there and then the fourth line says in dim gray text company and it's blank anyway labels you don't need to see them when there's something already in the field right you'll always know what it is right so it's telling me to do that but again it's and now it's not talking to me anymore now it's just showing me text and i'm like okay like but when i put something there i don't know how you're going to pronounce it like what do i put in the pronunciation field do i put like do i use the whatever like the phonetic alphabet that you see in a dictionary do i just try to like sound it out do i put a bunch of other words that sound like the words i want you to put in there do i have to you know i i need you to say my name i just could not get it to do it and it like it was maddening i'm like no normal person would ever tolerate what i tolerated trying to get this to happen for the show but of course i'm pig-headed i'm gonna i'm gonna make it happen eventually so i did type something in that phonetic pronunciation i tried a couple things eventually i did get it to start saying my name I've actually already forgotten how I got it to say my name, but eventually it did start saying my name and I got it into a loop where I could change the contents of that text field and then say whatever I said successfully.

1:35:37Again, turning off the screen and putting it down so my HomePod won't do it in so it'll just, it was ridiculous. Here's what I wrote in the field. S-E-R-R-A space. The word Q, like Q-U-E-U-E, not like C-U-E, but like a line, Q. Q-U-E-U-E space S-A-H. I was afraid it was going to space it out as three words, but it turns out that if you type that in the field, Siri says Syracusa. Wait, so tell me again what you wrote. It's S-E-R-R-A space Q-U-E-U-E space S-A-H. I never in a million years would have learned that. There's a lot of experimentation led to this. You don't say. And it would say things that were ridiculous.

1:36:21but this for whatever reason this madness you know the only the middle thing is a word i don't think s-e-r-a is a word i don't think s-a-h is a word below some scrabble person probably telling me they're both words but anyway q-u-e-u-e is a word because i was trying to get how do i get it to say the letter q if i just put the letter q they're like so tony i'm here to tell you it is possible to use the phonetic pronunciation thing and get it to pronounce your name right once will it stay that way will it be that way tomorrow why did it even work now why did i have to argue with my phone across and my home pod to get this to work all this is say uh i would is this jg's fault i mean all i'm gonna say is that siri has not gotten better and there seems to be a technology that exists in the world that could at the very least allow me to say hey dingus here's how you pronounce my name and have it say okay please pronounce your name and i would pronounce it and then i would say please say my name back and you do it i feel like that is attainable with today's technology not attainable with siri without a huge fight wow today i learned have you you should both try it now try to get your phone to say your name last name first name we're really doing this live yeah just go you can cut it out of the show i just want to see you both try to do it say my name it just says you're asking me comma marco say yeah it's because the snark is not as funny when it doesn't work did it say anything audibly or is it just text no it's just text yeah i got the same thing why why is it not speaking to you i don't know ask it the weather and see if it speaks to you what's the weather it's currently clear yeah it talks to you but when you want it to say your name.

1:38:05No speech. Siri, speak my name.

1:38:11In text only, you're Casey. That's what you told me anyway. Speak Casey's name. Say no, my last name, my family name, my surname. I don't know what to tell you, Siri. That's wild. It's not so easy. And the little tiny bit of personality and snark just makes you angrier. Alright, thanks to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, Aura frames and delete me and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join one of the perks of membership one of the many perks of membership is atp overtime our weekly bonus topic this week on overtime we are going to be talking about a rumor of an apple and intel chip partnership uh to possibly make mac chips again which is very interesting um so we'll talk about that in overtime you can join to listen atp.fm slash join thanks everybody for listening We'll talk to you next week.

1:39:32And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-G. Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse. It's accidental, accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental, accidental. Tech Podcast so long. Real-time follow-up chat room says, say, what's my full name? What's my full name? It's Casey Liss. Look at that. You have British Siri? Yes, I do. And it's doing the Liss pun because it doesn't do it as Casey Liss. It's like Casey Liss. You lack Casey. You are Casey Liss. I am without a Casey. What's my full name? It's Marco Arment. Yeah, mine was fine.

1:40:32Marco has a straightforward pronunciation of his name, and Liss is also pretty... Anyway, I'm glad we found a way to say the full name. And if I had known that specific phrasing, I would have used it. All right. So I got news recently that there was... Let me get this right. Let me open this link. There is a New York bagel fest. And apparently this is a thing where you don't call them, they call you. and there's a bunch of people or a bunch of different bagel shops from around the country, as far as I recall, that are invited. Wait, not from New York? Well, including, but not exclusively New York.

1:41:11Many are from New York. It's apparently the 25 best bagel places in the world. And over 2 ,000 people cast votes. And I am extremely happy to tell you that the local shop Baltics Bagels here in Richmond earned the People's Choice Award in New York City for People's Choice Best Bagel in the 2025 New York Bagel Fest. What now, John Syracuse? Good bagels exist outside of New York. How do you like them apples? You know, we get those emails to the ATP address that's like, get your podcast listed in the top 100 podcasts. Like all sorts of things like that. Get your app included in this contest. And we ignore it because we just assume it's spam and a scam.

1:41:58And mostly because it's like, well, sometimes you have to pay money to enter, right? And it's just like, who's judging this? Like, is this, why would I want to participate in this type of thing? It just seems like the type of thing that we should just ignore. And so we do. And I have to imagine this bagel fest contest thing, including bagels from all over the world, is the type of thing that the good bagel shops in New York ignore. The way we ignore those emails about podcasts. sponsorship no no i'm not saying the bagels that won this are bad bagels whatever it's kind of back to i thought it's not actually something that's going to rectify i think it's an upcoming episode of robot or not where i talked about the idea of like um it was like a bagel a company a company in colorado and people from who are from long island uh maybe it was rectify i don't remember all these podcasts spun together but when you go somewhere else in the country when you present other people with like your hometown food or whatever and you expect surely they'll love this because this is the best you know philly cheesesteak or this is the best new york bagel or whatever those people have no affection for or knowledge of the regional food product you're presenting them with so you take great pains to faithfully reproduce the exact thing that you want like this is an authentic philly cheesesteak it's exactly how it is in philly but here i am in california and you give it to californians and they're like they don't know what a philly cheesesteak supposed to taste like they have they have no fondness for it they have no nostalgia for it nor can they judge whether you've successfully reproduced the thing that you love from philadelphia and so you're sad when you present it to them they're like yeah shrug and they go next door and get you know something with avocado on it or whatever right um sorry californians i don't know which stereotype to use for you um it's a big state lots of diversity i feel like that's the same situation with these bagels here.

1:43:48I'm sure the people who live near these bagel places like them. They're f***ing New Yorkers voting, John. Jesus Christ. So which New Yorkers do you think are participating in Bagel Fest? I don't know. Is it Citi Field? How is it so f***ing inconceivable to you that there exists a good bagel outside of New York? What's inconceivable to me was that the best one is in Virginia. That's what's inconceivable. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I didn't say the best. I said people's choice. Well, whatever. The best bagel is apparently in Dallas of all places. See, that's what I'm saying, right? You could have a good food product that people enjoy, but it doesn't mean it is an authentic reproduction.

1:44:30Like that person who's in Colorado who's making authentic New York bagels in Colorado. Maybe he is making authentic New York bagels in Colorado, right? But the Colorado people don't know or care about that. The people voting are voting in Citi Field in New York City. right yes okay what people who want free bagels is that his voting jesus christ john you are so insufferable it blows my mind for the record i'm i'm supporting your idea here because what i'm saying is that there's nothing inherently superior about new york bagels it's just what new yorkers want that's what i'm getting at like it's not like they're any better or worse but new yorkers want new york bagels and to the degree that you can simulate that elsewhere fine but that doesn't make you successful in those other regions and if you want new york bagels just get them in new york And I'll also add that the bagel seed of my use, as we've discussed, has changed significantly.

1:45:17We've talked about rainbow bagels and all the other madness that goes on. So people putting caraway seeds on everything bagels. It's really just, you know, things have changed. For the record, the third runner-up for People's Choice is Town Bagel, which is listed on this website, which is going to make you so happy, as Long Island. That's all I got. Long Island. But best of the boroughs, the winner was Essa Bagel, which I went to when we were in Manhattan over the summer. and is freaking great. And you know what they also have? Rainbow bagels. What now? Everybody has rainbow bagels. Mm-hmm. Everybody.

1:45:47So anyway, so Baltics Bagels here in Richmond, they won the People's Choice Award. By coincidence, they're not that close to where I live. Richmond, admittedly, is not a very big town, but not that close to where I live. However, I had to run an errand very near to where they are. And so I thought, you know what? I'm going to go in. I'm going to get a dozen Baltics Bagels. And I got a dozen plain bagels. I'm of the opinion that plain is the baseline by which you can measure everything. Oh, no. I like other bagels, don't get me wrong, but I personally believe that if you can't do a plain bagel right, you're screwed.

1:46:19And the texture of this bagel was just chef's kiss spot on perfect. However, they were the saltiest plain bagels I've ever had in my life. I don't know. It's kind of like the people in TV shops picking out the TV that's the brightest and has the most exaggerated colors. So you put the most salt in the bagel and it wins this. I don't know. I mean, this is the only time I've ever been. So maybe it was an off batch. I don't know. But they were astonishingly salty for a plain bagel. I kind of agree with Marco that like if you want to judge a bagel place, I know what you're saying with the plain. It's like, look, you got to get the basics right too.

1:46:52But one of the essential skills or attributes of a bagel place is how they deal with stuff on the bagel. So I feel like my go-to for like the equivalent of just try the plain cheese pizza would be like sesame or poppy. because then you get to see what is their philosophy on putting stuff on the bagel because some places cover every square inch of the bagel with sesame seeds and sometimes they're double layered and some places put three sesame seeds in the bagel and that lets you know what kind of place this is you really have you can't get a plane and learn that so you have to get something on the bagel and sesame and poppy are pretty neutral no you got to go everything you got to get an everything bagel well i mean everything teaches you like whether they use caraway seeds whether they put salt on the everything and all sorts of other crap like that.

1:47:35Yeah, it's a very broad test. Yeah, no, I agree. If I wasn't going to do plain, everything is it. It does teach you how they deal with toppings, but I feel like some places, even if they put three sesame seeds on, tend to overdo it on the everything, so everything can be a false signal in that, oh, this place puts lots of toppings on, then you get a poppy and there's two poppy seeds on it. But why would you ever order anything else besides an everything bagel if the everything bagel was good? There are other bagels in the world. I know you like everything, but there are other bagels. you know when i just got bagels at a new not a new bagel place but a bagel place at the request of someone that my daughter goes to school that she wanted from a particular place that i don't particularly enjoy but it's not terrible but anyway um two things one and this isn't this is another being me being an old man thing i went to this bagel place i've been there before but i didn't remember it was years ago because i decided they weren't for me i go in there and i'm giving bagel counts and it occurs to me i've never been to this place before and the person was like i i said a dozen bagel and they were like counting down and i was like i i mean i sounded dumb when i said this but i knew what i hope that in the context of bagel shop they would know this i would say how many bagels are in a dozen anybody who's from new york knows why i would ask that question because it's never 12 and it's but it's not always the same number could be 13 sometimes it's 14 right you know what this person said to me 12 this is It's a bagel place that sells you a dozen bagels and they give you 12 bagels.

1:48:59Now, I know this isn't this is pointless. It's like, well, they just change the price. Who cares? Whatever. It's a cultural thing. If you're a bagel place, you should not ever sell 12 bagels in a dozen. So I was like, I cannot believe this. I am offended. I'm offended as a New Yorker, as a Long Islander, that you would have the audacity to sell 12 bagels. you know there are like there's like 500 german listeners who are just like they're like what are what is he complaining about it's a baker's dozen is 13 and a long island doesn't i guess it's 14 but either way it's never 12 yeah but anyway i had to ask them to put the everything bagels in a separate bag which i should never have to ask them because they must be segregated yeah if you have to i am of the belief that if you have to ask them to separate the everything bagel that 100 brings or onion yeah because again like because what that what that tells tells you is like maybe they don't serve a lot of those bagels or maybe the people here you know don't feel that strongly about their bagel flavors and like that neither one of those is a good sign it's just bad bagel service i mean it should the default is everything in a separate if they say don't bother with a separate bag fine but i shouldn't have to say anything so yeah no there is in my personal opinion and we've talked about this many times there is a pretty good bagel bagel shop by me i'm not saying it's equivalent to new york but given how far we are from new york it's pretty good however they have two critical flaws number one i there's something about the everything bagel that just isn't quite right i don't think it's caraway i personally am not offended by salt on an everything bagel but there's something about it that just doesn't this is not quite there so i agree with you marco if i wasn't going to do a plain bagel as my like litmus test everything is absolutely the next thing on my list but the other problem this local shop has is that it doesn't separate everything into its own bag and it drives me freaking oh no You can ask them to do it, but you shouldn't have to.

1:50:43Oh, sure, sure, sure. But you shouldn't have to. But the correct behavior for a bagelologist in the situation is to ask, do you want those in a separate bag? That's standard procedure. Anyway, I just thought it was funny. I should have known that I was going to get enraged by this, but that's okay. I thought it was funny that the Podunk Richmond, Virginia bagel shop won people's choice. Not the best, mind you, but people's choice. And then you had their bagels and didn't like them, so that's an ending to the story. They were good, but they were way too salty. And I would like to try again at some point.

1:51:15And this errand I was running does happen a couple of times a year, so I'll probably go and try them again. And maybe I'll try on everything this time as well. But that was disappointing. Again, but the texture was so perfect. It was a nice, solid outside, super chewy inside. God, the texture was so good, but the plain bagels were just too salty. I have another very brief thing I wanted to talk to you about. and after this absolute badgering you're giving me, I don't know if I want to talk to you about this anymore, but because we need a little bit more for an after show, I'm going to say this.

1:51:47I think to a degree, to a degree, John was right. Uh-oh. Let me explain. A few days ago, maybe a week or two ago, Bullstrap reached out and said, hey, we heard you really like our cases. We'd love to send you one. And I said, well, it wasn't me that you heard that liked your cases. but hey, sure, if you want to send me a case, I'm not going to say no. And they said, okay, we'll send you a case. What would you like? And I chose, forgive me, I don't have the model number or name in front of me or whatever, but I chose their leather but bare bottom case, you know, the way that John likes it. It's called the minimalist?

1:52:23I think that's right. I'll put the link in the show notes. I don't have it handy while I'm speaking to you, but I think you're right. And so I got it maybe a week ago and had it on for most of the last week. I've since gone back to Caseless Casey list. Have you already broken your phone? Well, I mean, no more than I did within the first 48 hours, as we already discussed, when I nicked it here and there. Anyways, I personally do not believe that it is absolutely compulsory to have a bottomless phone case. I've had many, many complete bottom phone cases, and it's fine. There's nothing wrong with it.

1:53:00but the place where this gets unfortunate for your boy Casey is that I think the bottomless is better. Not compulsory mind you, but I do think you're right. And I do think it's better. Yep. He unfortunately is right. Yeah. Once you get used to not banging your finger against the lip of the case, it just, uh, to go back seems barbaric. I mean, but with you, I'd be worried about you like dropping it and somehow hitting that, which I've never done, but you might find a way. I mean, you managed to shatter your car window with an iPad. So you're pretty amazing. Yeah. That's talent right there. Right.

1:53:30Exactly. But no, it is the, now that I've had a chance to look, it is the ball strap minimalist case. I don't think they've ever sponsored and they certainly didn't ask for me to say anything, but I thought it was funny to concede publicly that even though I maintain, like I just said a moment ago, you do not need to have a bottomless case. And God knows I probably shouldn't to your point, but it is a little bit better.