The Difference Between Marketing and BS with Jonathan Cowperthwait

• Jonathan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cowperthwait/
• Jonathan on Bluesky: https://web-cdn.bsky.app/profile/cowp.co
• Email Jonathan: [email protected]
• Email Corey: [email protected]

Transcript

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Our relationship to AWS itself. Is complex, but warm. I think if people see the word horrifying in your email signature, in our tagline, and they think that we're accusing AWS of being an agent of horror, they might assume an adversarial relationship. And instead, we're kind of the Sherpas helping climb

Mount AWS, and you want us there so that you miss the craggy parts and you don't fall down and hurt yourself. But like, it's a great mountain to climb.

Corey Quinn: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Today's guest is a little off the beaten path. I've been here at The Duckbill Group since its founding and doing a lot of, I guess, AWS bill optimization combined with aggressive internet shitposting for a couple of years before that. People often mistake me for being a marketing person.

I'm not. I'm just loud. They look alike from a distance if you don't squint properly. We fixed that. Jonathan Cowperthwait is our recently hired Head of Marketing. Jonathan, how are you doing?

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Nice digs, Corey. I'm liking the mustard.

Sponsor: This episode is sponsored in part by my day job, the Duckbill Group. Do you have a horrifying AWS bill? That can mean a lot of things.

Predicting what it's going to be. Determining what it should be. Negotiating your next long-term contract with AWS. Or just figuring out why it increasingly resembles a phone number, but nobody seems to quite know why that is. To learn more, visit duckbillgroup.com. Remember, you can't duck the duck bill, Bill.

And my CEO informs me that is absolutely not our slogan.

Corey Quinn: Yeah, yeah, it's not exactly as nice an office as we might hope for. I keep wanting to have a better backdrop here, but it's very tricky to get enough depth here given the physical constraints. I could have done this from my home office, but yeah, there are noisy children there, and I'd prefer to avoid that.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: No, I also think that people would be impressed by Duckbill Global World Headquarters if they saw it. It's very ornate and deco. There's a gilded elevator. We have a nice brass plaque. It conveys dignity and professionalism for the first few seconds.

Corey Quinn: Yeah, and then you walk in and it's like, Okay, so where's the rest of the office?

And nope, that's it. You're looking at it. You are in the office, which is sort of a weird thing to be doing after all of these years of working remotely, at least for me. My last in-office job before we started getting the corporate office on this end was, dear Lord, would have been 2016.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: My biggest adaptation challenge is shoes.

Wearing shoes nonstop from eight in the morning until, you know, 5 or 6 p.m. My instinct tells me that I shouldn't take them off in the office, but it's really uncomfortable to be bound all day.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: I wasn't so worried about the pants thing because even during pandemic, I always kept my pants on.

Corey Quinn: No, that's fair.

I had a nanny coming in that we sort of potted up with, and I am a strong believer in not creating a hostile work environment. Yes, I'm using that term correctly in this sense. So I had a very strict pants policy during the pandemic as my hair grew out and my waistline expanded. But, so that was never a concern for me.

I did find that house shoes worked out well. So you could pull a Mr. Rogers and show up and change your shoes every time you come in, preferably while singing. I think we'd all appreciate that.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Do you, when, when the nanny's there, do you feel obligated to to appear more productive. Like, if there's somebody here taking care of the kids, then I'd better be working for it.

I feel that, I don't have kids, but I feel that when the cleaning lady comes, like, I huddle in my office and I type louder because I'm just embarrassed that somebody else has to be there to tidy after me.

Corey Quinn: You know, I did it the first couple of years, but at this point, the nanny has become family. I married her to her husband.

They are the godparents of our kids. We've basically adopted them. So at this point, it's family. I would be comfortable lounging around in a ratty t-shirt and sweatpants, although I don't, and I would feel comfortable at that point. But it's a, but in this case, my productivity comes and it goes, and I try to be as transparent about that as I can.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Are you a universal life minister?

Corey Quinn: Something like that. I forget exactly what the online registration was. It turns out that it might, if you solve enough AWS bills, apparently when you become a Chief Cloud Economist, you also get to marry people. I think if I marry two more, that'll be five weddings I've conducted.

At which point I get to marry people by force, like, Oh, you're too slow in the line in front of me. Boom. You're married to the checkout cashier. Good luck on winding that mess.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: For the past two years, my little volunteer side project has been this sort of unique to California entity called the Civil Grand Jury, and people hear grand jury and they get excited like we can indict presidents, but it's really, kind of pick a youu know, just examining better governance and, procurement is always a topic and administration of nonprofits. It's whatever. It's great. I joined it for the free tour of the airport and we meet in San Francisco City Hall, which if people haven't seen pictures of it, looks shockingly like the Capitol Rotunda in the United States Capitol, but in fact is taller.

It's just gorgeous place. It was redone about 25 years ago, literally gilded, and there's a nonstop daily assembly line of brides and grooms because they get their official marriage, you know, certificate punched at the window, and then they walk down this marble staircase, and there are photographers and bounce lights, and it looks just like, Oh, you happened to catch me in a wedding dress. I wasn't expecting that, candid photos.

Corey Quinn: How silly. I wear this because it's Thursday.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: It's just a favorite dress of mine. It picks up my favorite color. But it's actually really neat. I mean, I don't feel sheepish now about walking through their shot because I'm on my way to a meeting and I'm a grand juror.

Putting the grand in grand juror. That's exactly right, and

photo bombing wedding shots.

Corey Quinn: We all need hobbies. It's important to have those.

Corey Quinn: I will say that you were not shaped like the common theme of marketing candidates that we spoke to. We spoke to a number of very qualified, great people. There was something about you that wound up making us say, yeah, this is the person.

I'm still not sure what it is. Hopefully we'll find out someday.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: As one of these days, it's going to be important to justify my existence.

Corey Quinn: So what is it you say it is you do here exactly?

Jonathan Cowperthwait: You know, I didn't start out to be a marketer. I started out, in college, I watched too much West Wing, and I got really infected with this idea that words could influence the world.

How you describe problems, how you talk about things could change minds. And so I went into comms, and it turns out that comms has nothing to do with that. Comms is about being the human end of a spam machine, and I got very disillusioned very quickly. And the second problem was that you describe, when you do succeed at spamming a reporter into getting a briefing. You describe a company's strategy, and it's all the words that you wrote down that aren't actually necessarily true.

They're not lies. But they're glib. I don't know if you know the distinction between lying and bullshit. Lying is a very intentional act. If I say I've got ten bucks in my pocket, and I don't, then I have changed your view of me inaccurately. In fact, did it twice. One is now you think there's money in my pocket.

Two, now you think I think I have money in my pocket. Bullshit isn't necessarily there. I just, whether or not it's important that I have 10 in my pocket gets drowned out by the topic I want to discuss, and I distract you, and you never learn what you were supposed to learn, which is in this example, I guess, whether or not to rob me.

So I found PR full of bullshit. That we didn't answer important questions for our customers. We were just there to relate our talking points.

Corey Quinn: My engagement with PR historically has not been the best. They tend to ignore me until I've said something that they take issue with, and then they want a correction, and they reach out and our first question is sure.

Were we factually incorrect? And the answer is no, but they can't just say that. Instead, it turns into this whole song and dance, and I started to realize, rather unfortunately, that these are people who are very interested in correcting the record about a technical topic that they don't fully understand themselves.

That they're effectively reading the points someone else has prepared for them, and that really left a bad taste in my mouth. To your credit, you never once went down that path. You're surprisingly technically deep, but you also call out when you're out of your depth without being performative about it. Of, Oh, well, I'm a technical moron, which is not endearing.

It's 2025. If you need to use, if you don't know how to use computers, learn. Ignorance is not becoming. Yeah. So you just, you hit the sweet spot.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Thank you for saying that. It means I'm keeping you fooled. I am absolutely kept up by the imposter complex. The patron saint of tech in the Bay Area, right?

Corey Quinn: Remember, it's not, it's not imposter syndrome if you actually suck at it.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: All right, I'm authentically awful. No, what it, what it did for me, My favorite job, I ran marketing for a pretty big community of JavaScript developers, and we were getting really into the weeds. Package management requires a couple of layers of abstraction.

If you do it from first principles, you're like, all right, imagine a computer. It's going to take you a month to get that story told. So you have to actually get pretty up to speed, but I was marketing to developers and developers hate marketing. Nobody wants to be marketed at.

Corey Quinn: They're also convinced it doesn't work on them.

In fact, a lot of people believe that marketing doesn't work on them. And yet none of these companies doing advertising seem to go out of business. It's great. So marketing doesn't work on you. Great. What brand are your shoes? What brand are your clothes? What kind of computer are using, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Marketing is a much more subtle, pernicious thing than most of us would believe, and I only know this because I got to hang out with some very smart marketers who laughed in my face when I one day said marketing doesn't work on me.

Marketing,

Jonathan Cowperthwait: to be fair, is more than advertising. Advertising is applied marketing. It is, in my experience working with developers, a last resort.

You try very hard to earn your audience before you buy it, and I say this as somebody who later in my day, today, I am buying ads for Duckbill.

Corey Quinn: Oh, we're doing that now. Today, I learned. Honestly, you'd think we would have a one-on-one where we discuss these things, but no, we're just basically doing a one on one with an audience.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: I was told that there was no math in this interview. Yeah, no, we're gonna buy a lookalike audience, but it's after we know with analytics that a particular blog post of yours did really well, and it's worth amplifying, and that's the opposite of what a lot of marketers do, which is like, I have to get the audience for this post. Let's go out and buy one. And then people are like, at best annoyed by, Why are you sending me a message about a product I already bought, or worse, they think you're dumb. Constantly worried about feeling like I was making NPM look dumb. I took the node tutorial in the background. I actually went and did like a private coding bootcamp.

I, just enough to be more than buzzword compliant.

Corey Quinn: I can't wait for the day where we show you an AWS bill and tell you to optimize it and then basically watch your brain run out of your ears, because it sounds super straightforward when you start talking about it until you start looking at the nuances of it, at which point it basically just becomes an abusive workplace.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: You made a really horrible mistake. When hiring me, which is, you didn't ask me a single question about AWS.

Corey Quinn: That's a good question. I, did we? Yeah, I'll take you at face value. I would accept that we didn't simply because that is, as we look through the list of what is it that we want to find in a Head of Marketing role, given that my business partner and I are not natively marketers ourselves, and so many marketers are storytellers, the danger we had was, well, Is someone going to basically get the job because they're terrific and bullshitting? Otherwise we just hire the most confident sounding person we can. So we started looking less at, do you have direct exposure to AWS and more to, do you know how to speak to a particular series of audiences?

Because our, our audiences are deceptively nuanced, and I think that that's something that's not very well understood that it's not just, Oh, people who are engineers or people who are in finance, but there's almost a chain of communication between those folks.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Yeah, and it's really fun when they need to hear different messages.

Corey Quinn: With, and you have to send those messages out to the void, where the other party is going to hear those messages, so it can't be off putting, even if it's not aimed at them. It becomes a very nuanced conversation.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Well, you know, our best performing marketing at NPM was our docs. We just rose to the level of our users.

They wanted to know if we could solve a specific problem for them, and they were qualified enough to ask. We gave them the answer and that did not deter our enterprise buyers. The enterprise buyers, we had landing page campaigns, we sent them beautiful glossy case studies, social proof is a really important part of this, and like, the fact that we also passed a credibility test with their eng department was a feature, not a messaging conflict.

I think the best feature, one of the reasons I love marketing to developers is that they are rewarded for feeling creative. They like solving problems, and if you can solve a problem for you, you genuinely earn their business and their gratitude. Prior to that, the way I got into developer marketing, I left comms, and I was running marketing for an analytics startup.

And I was a marketer selling a tool to other marketers, like how hard can this be? Except that it was a startup, and the first rule of a startup is don't die. So we also had a wholesale play. We licensed our APIs to other marketing tools developers, and since that was the part of the business, I had to very quickly learn what an API was and how to price it and how to package it for developers.

And it felt so much more satisfying. People genuinely thanked us for our marketing emails because we were telling them how to solve a problem. You can get really good behavioral targeting data that says, They keep looking at these docs. I think they might be stuck. Do you want to offer help? And that is in marketing parlance a targeted email campaign, but in their parlance, it's actually you're being helpful. And I never got that with marketing to other marketers. They thought we were a cost center and we were kind of annoying to them. The genuine energy because of what motivates engineering minded people got me there.

Corey Quinn: It feels like sales and marketing share that.

Corey Quinn: In many cases, people's impression of the entire field is formed by some of the least effective practitioners thereof. You ask people to think about sales, I think the last time that the ordeal they went through buying a car. You talk about marketing, they think about all of the incessant spam emails they get.

I wound up shipping some candy to a friend's kid recently because he had surgery, and after I did that, I started getting daily emails from the candy store. It's, I'm sorry, I'm not that into sugar. If that's that's excessive, leave me alone, but doing it on a cadence monthly or near big holidays, that starts to add that starts to add more value.

I say subscribe to those newsletters. I judiciously unsubscribe from the ones that start filling up my inbox every time I turn around.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: You know, I love this is an unpaid plug for Apple, the iCloud disposable email address service makes it so remarkably easier. I don't bother unsubscribing from things. I just turn off the mailbox.

And this is affecting some poor marketer's bounce rate somewhere else, but that is not my problem.

Corey Quinn: Oh, I nominate the really obnoxious ones for inclusion in block lists. Which is just fun. I do something similar with a couple of vanity domains, like my shitposting.monster domain, which people, when I give them that email address, think I'm messing with them.

I'm not. It's real. You can email me, [email protected], because of course you can, but people are surprised to discover that works.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: I? Who? Monster like the old job site?

Corey Quinn: I don't know, but they were for sale for some reasonable price on my registrar, so okay, we're going to run with it and see what explodes.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Do you have any other .monster? I'm kind of excited to get a subdomain out of this.

Corey Quinn: No, I have a few others for fun that I tend to sit on for various projects, which is entertaining.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: I am still trying to unload oldmanstartup.com. I used the email address [email protected], and same thing.

If you give it over the phone, people get kind of peeved at you because they think you're making fun of them. I'm like, No, no, it works. It works.

Corey Quinn: Oh yeah. It's, I found that it is important to have a, an email address somewhere at a domain that people tend to understand because you, otherwise, you have to spell complicated things, and you run into folks who don't understand the entire Internet is not .com, and especially when there's a language barrier, between Spanish and French. E's come across as I's, and it's just a challenge across the board. So something you have to spell as little as possible, sort of the dream email domain.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Oh, you're telling this to a guy with a Welsh last name, and we have the fulllastname.com, and from childhood with members of my family practice how to like sing songily, deliver the proper spelling of it. 13 letters.

Corey Quinn: You must have been one of those very well off Welsh families because you were able to afford several vowels. That's uncommon.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: They have spare consonants for months. We don't need any more. We don't need any more consonants.

Corey Quinn: It's the primary export.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: The other domain I am trying to figure out what to do with, I bought gayorjewish.com, and the plan was to have a really problematic dating site. We would specialize in two types and if you had the magical overlap, you'd get like gold status. This was motivated by my own search. I was looking for, well, ideally a gay partner, but I would settle for somebody whose mother was great.

Corey Quinn: On some level, there's a whole co-branding story there, Rainbows and Stars.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Oh, you're good. That is good.

Corey Quinn: I have my moments. It turns out that naming things isn't that hard.

Isn't that right, AWS listeners?

Jonathan Cowperthwait: You're not making it easier for me to get on boarded when I read every one of these products with the same name.

Corey Quinn: No, what does it do? It runs containers. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Yeah. Years ago, I made a joke, there were 17 ways to run containers on AWS, so I posted a blog post about them, and then a follow up, 17 more ways, and it was really scraped to the bottom of the barrel when I came up with 17 final ways.

But yeah, that meant there were 51 different AWS services, mostly, that could be used to run containers, and I just think that's kind of a lot.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: So I've got questions about Duckbill. First of all, while we're on the topic of naming, are you happy with the Duckbill name? It's like every marketer's bingo card would be checking off a brand, but I don't feel the need to change this one.

Corey Quinn: It's gotten out into the zeitgeist well enough that I don't think we could rebrand it. People know what Duckbill is. I'm honestly consider it a success that people think about Duckbill rather than Corey. That took a few years to shift the perception. It was a very intentional thing.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: I'm here to help.

Corey Quinn: Also, I love the hidden pundit because, You can't duck the Duckbill bill, which my business partner still refuses to let me make our official tagline.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: This is a good introduction for your house ad, but we're going to use that exact tag, aren't we?

Corey Quinn: Oh, absolutely. It is. Audio engineer, take it away.

Sponsor: This episode is sponsored by my own company, The Duckbill Group. Having trouble with your AWS bill? Perhaps it's time to renegotiate a contract with them. Maybe you're just wondering how to predict what's going on in the wide world of AWS. Well, that's where The Duckbill Group comes in to help.

Remember, you can't duck the Duckbill bill, which I am reliably informed by my business partner, is absolutely not our motto.

Corey Quinn: And we're back.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: The other thing I, because it, Duckbill isn't just Cory. And it's very talented people.

Corey Quinn: And I consistently run into folks who don't seem to grasp that, where they think that all the other pictures on the website are people who come into the office to sit there and clap as I do all of it. That is not true.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: One of my worst jobs in college, I was the marketing guy for a small law firm, and this lawyer worked from home most days because she could, but she had a client who wanted to meet in the office. And she panicked, and she rented an office, an empty office above a restaurant in downtown Chicago. And I had experience in the film business, and she was hoping that I would go to my network and fill the office with extras for the day.

And the just myopia that being an attorney, a position of great trust and this level of, not even gimmick, I would characterize this as a lie, just didn't register. We didn't end up pulling it off, and I'm okay with that. It was also one of my shortest runs in a job.

Corey Quinn: One thing I wanted to bring up, because on an intake form you put things, and I don't know if it was things you actually wanted to talk about, or simply shitposting another medium.

You mentioned the Cloud to Butt extension. I have a story on that, too. I want to hear yours.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Okay, so it turned out that buttfront was a real domain, and for, backing up for context, you know, the premise was that you could do edge side includes on your website and have certain parts render directly from the CDN, and the CDN was cloud front, except when a developer needed to do a hot fix and edit some of that code right in the web client for GitHub, where the cloud to bot extension would magically replace every use of the word cloud with the word, butt, and therefore, we had pointers on our website to render content from buttfront. And they were all 404s, but, buttfront's 404s were filthy. It led to this amazing call from a customer who said, you know, I think I have a virus. Like, we're an analytics company. I'm not sure I can help you with it. Like, no, but the virus is on your website.

Like, no, I can't possibly be. Oh. Oh.

Corey Quinn: It's another one of those, like the internet lives in computers now. Great. Okay, sure. And then you look and oh my God, they're right.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Porn on my computer? It's more likely than you think. The moral of that story is also like, don't install browser extensions that change your, your site content.

And it was so much fun for a couple of years until we realized it was a horrible security problem.

Corey Quinn: I used to run that extension until it got me in trouble because it turns out with Outlook Web Access, it would replace anything that you were replying to. So I had a engagement manager when I was a consultant in 2014 or so suddenly freak out and he was like, I didn't say, 'butt' in that email, I don't know why,

and I had to fess up that that was me, and I stopped using it. I told that story on Twitter, rest its soul before a douchebag bought it and killed it, and that was fun. I said, Don't use it. It's not going to end well, but it is amusing. 34 days later, someone discovers that there is a job posting talking about private butt computing on Amazon's website.

The timing was perfect on that. It had to have been someone who saw my nonsense and figured, Oh, I'm going to disregard the warning. What could that jack hole know? It was screamingly funny. Amazon's corporate messaging apparatus was verklempt because they do not have a sense of humor of, which they are aware, and I thought it was great because no one is not going to do business with a cloud provider because something like that sneaks through, but they talked about it like it was the end of days at the time.

That said, don't, don't talk about butts in your job description unless you work for a very specific industry.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: I see work for ButtFront. I'm very disappointed that Google's new AI assistant would not even give me an answer when I asked if there were any sites for private butt computing.

Corey Quinn: One of the challenges I found with a lot of the AI trained stuff on public documentation and examples is it lacks the context.

So when someone says, Oh, here's how you allow star in IAM, don't actually do this. It disregards that don't actually do this and then recommends it with a straight face, similar to how it suggested putting glue into pizza to make it work better based upon a joke someone made on Reddit 12 years ago. It's ridiculous.

I can't wait for it to recommend Route 53 as an actual database to someone someday. At that point, the circle is complete and the Ouroboros will eat in itself.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: We've made our mark on the universe.

Corey Quinn: It was never the one that we thought it was going to be, but damned if it wasn't a funny one.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: No, you don't get your choice.

That's the real gimmick with life is you'll end up known for something, whether you like it or not.

Corey Quinn: So you've been here three weeks now, something like that. Let's fast forward here. In 90 days, what will the world notice is different about the Duckbill Group? Assuming that they're paying attention and assuming I don't get indicted for something.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Let's not get you indicted. My grand jury creds do not assist with that. I think it's going to be a little bit more consistency. you'll we know that the Corey brand is an additive, sort of, feature of what we do, but we don't always pay direct attention to which of those posts did it. And that's like basic analytics instrumentation.

You check your bingo card for another thing marketers will always do. It's like contractors renovating your house. You show up and the first thing you look around and be like, Who did this? This is, oh, we got to tear this out. We got to put in new stuff. But with that, I think the other thing that I want to tell that I've learned since working at Duckbill that I didn't learn when I was doing due diligence on Duckbill is that our relationship to AWS itself, is complex, but warm.

I think if people see the word horrifying in your email signature, in our tagline, and they think that we're accusing AWS of being an agent of horror, they might assume an adversarial relationship, and instead we're kind of the Sherpas helping climb Mount AWS, and you want us there so that you miss the craggy parts and you don't fall down and hurt yourself.

But like, it's a great mountain to climb.

Corey Quinn: It is, and I think that it's not very well understood that there's no one on the other side of the issue. Even AWS doesn't want people wasting money on cloud because then the narrative becomes of how horrifyingly expensive it is, so we're going back to data centers.

They want people to use more cloud, obviously, but they want them to do it in more efficient ways, which is what customers want. We help them get there. That's the benefit of what we do. It's not well understood in some corners, but that's okay. You can't reach everyone.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Well, we're going to try. The way to boil the ocean is one kettle at a time.

Corey Quinn: That's going to take a lot of kettles.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Yeah, but think about it this way, like when we do a, you know, marketers love doing the SWOT, and the weaknesses and opportunities, and the threats, and the threat here are single existential crisis. Duckbill could go out of business. All of us could be selling shoes tomorrow if Amazon just magically stopped sucking.

Corey Quinn: I used to worry about that in the early days. What if they fix their billing system to the point where we no longer are necessary? And now I realized that I don't think that such a thing is possible. The customers are too complex, their needs are too varied, and there are too many dimensions and corner cases that have to be taken into account when you have millions of customers that I think we are stuck with this for generations.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Everything came about for a reason. I'm sounding like my parents. I'm already dressing like them, but now sounding like them too. You know, the explanations are not excuses, but it sure helps to understand why something came about and why a system is complex.

That being said, to step away from it and recognize the ways in which it is Martian and, that we, with recourse to a wonderful microphone can advocate for change. We've had success, right? Like sometimes when you call things to Amazon's attention, change happens. And I think that's proof that we're a force for good, not just shit posting.

Corey Quinn: Fairly often, there's a, what I tend to say, a lot of people are thinking. The difference is I can't be fired, at least not by anyone at Amazon, so I say the things that other folks are somewhat reluctant to say, and I'm never the only person to misunderstand something, or to see things in a particular way, so I'm the voice of some contingent of customer, and AWS believes they genuinely do care about these things.

That is something that is valuable. When I talk to folks about unpleasant sharp edges, they look for ways to fix them. And that's awesome. Now, often there's context. I don't get to see that these things are the way that they are for a very specific reason, and that's fine. But from the outside. I don't get to see that.

And honestly, I don't know that as a customer, I would care all that much just because it's, I want them to solve not just the hard, easy problems, but the hard ones, too, in return for an invoice every month that resembles a telephone number.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Resembles a telephone book. they're voluminous.

Corey Quinn: Yes, it's not just complicated, it's also expensive.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: This is a reference that I gotta stop using. When was the last time telephone books existed.

Corey Quinn: When someone very short had to pass Driver's Ed, presumably. Need something to sit on, but that's the reason I picked the word horrifying in the very early days. It's not just that it's expensive, it's that it's complex, and people on different sides of that persona divide will view that differently by design.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: They can unify, however, around the fact that I think uncertainty is scary. This actually gets to one of the reasons of what, you know, when I think about the Duckbill brand discreet from the Corey brand, I can't fix you. The humor works because it is a form of taking control of something. There's a deep seated human need to I, this is a product of too many years of therapy, but like the more you talk about something, the more control over it you have, because you have taken this terrible first person feeling and turned it into a third person story that you can explain. And so the more control over AWS that is possible, and when it's not possible, the more humor you have to distance yourself from the pain of it, I think that's a very powerful. That's a very powerful tool when describing, this worked for Kafka too. The author, by the way, not the tech. I can't understand the tech. I can't understand the author.

Corey Quinn: We'll meet in the middle.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Cheers.

Corey Quinn: I want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more, where should they go?

Jonathan Cowperthwait: We're gonna do it on LinkedIn. I'm still trying to get Bluesky to stick. If only somebody would make me a threading client for Bluesky, perhaps I would take more advantage of that.

Corey Quinn: Wouldn't that be something? Perfect. We'll throw a link to that in the show notes. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. Not like you're really in a position to say no in week three, but that's okay.

Jonathan Cowperthwait: Yes, sir, Senator. I can't wait to do it again.

Corey Quinn: Jonathan Cowperthwait, Head of Marketing here at the Duckbill Group.

I'm cloud economist, Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you hated this podcast, please leave a five star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry, insulting comment.

And while you're at it, please be a deer and throw a tracking pixel there so that Jonathan can figure out exactly which podcasting platform we should target next.